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Royal Navy. Earlier, the Catalan Consulate of the Sea (Jados, 1975), which in the thirteenth
and fourteenth centuries served as the de facto standard for the conduct of maritime
matters, dictated that every pirate commander
shall carry out every promise he makes to anyone, whether that be a shareholder in
the ship, an outfitter, a navigator, a section-leader, an armed sailor, a servant, or a
merchant—regardless of whether the person involved is a Saracen, a Christian, or a Jew.
(Backman, 1995: 274)This stricture mattered because of the widespread practice of slavers and pirates to
form multi-ethnic and inter-religious corporations (societates) that provided legal
cover for the distribution and marketing of slaves regardless of their identity. In 1304,
for example, a Genoese pirate named Ottobono della Volta formed a societas with
Georgios Grecos, a Greek merchant from Crete, “and a certain Simone Gravata of
Sicily, plus another fellow who used to be a Jew but is now a Christian going by the
name of Marco Cantareno,” in order to bring a number of slaves to market (Backman,
1995: 256–257). For any given slave placed on auction—Jew, Muslim, Catholic or
Orthodox Christian—the appropriate pirate owner could stand as the seller, thereby
sidestepping religious scruples.
ConclusionThe renowned Arab geographer, Muhammad ibn Ahmad al-Muqaddasi, writing
around 985, related a fanciful tale about the creation of the Mediterranean in his most
important work al-Ahsan al-taqasim fi ma’rifat il-aqalim (True Knowledge of the
Regions of the World):
After Allah created the Mediterranean, He spoke to it, saying “I have created you, and I
will fill you with My servants who will cry ‘Glory to Allah! Great and Holy is Allah! There
is no God but Allah!’ How will you treat these, My servants?”
And the Mediterranean replied, “Lord, I will drown them all,”
And Allah replied, “I curse you! Be off! Truly, I will make rugged your whole
appearance and deny you great stocks of fish! (Collins, 1994: 15)The Mediterranean is a headstrong and willful beauty. Since the first peoples settled
her shores, societies have had to adapt to her dictates. The characteristics that make
the sea so naturally a commercial bazaar are the very qualities that made it a natural
zone for piracy. Ease of movement and navigation, and a superabundance of islands
and of coastal crags and inlets made it as easy for pirates to find sanctuary as it did
navigation for the merchants they targeted. With roughly a million square-miles of
surface area, the sea made for a large crime scene. While the economy thrived, so did
its pirate shadow; and when Europe’s economic supremacy passed to the Atlantic
seaborne states in the seventeenth century, so too did the center of piracy (though see
also Greene, this volume). The close connection of piracy and slavery continued even
there, as ships in the Caribbean and those passing too close to England on the trip
home soon discovered; surely it can be no mere chance occurrence in the coinciding
of the end of the slave trade and the end of the Golden Age of piracy in the eighteenth