piracy 179
restock the nobles’ harems and the barracks of the Janissaries. Many Barbary pirate
crews spent as many as 100 days at sea each year in search of victims.
Tactical matters matterIn one of her delightful mystery novels featuring Lord Peter Wimsey, Dorothy Sayers
(a fine medieval scholar in her own right) has her detective hero proclaim that the
secret to figuring out who committed a particular crime is to determine precisely how
the crime was committed. If you know what was necessary to perform a particular
crime, in terms of physical, intellectual, financial, and temporal capabilities, the rea-
soning goes, you have gone most of the way to identifying the culprit.
The Sayers/Wimsey theorem makes for some wonderful sleuthing in the novels
and helps to narrow the field of possible suspects in the case of Mediterranean piracy,
for although piracy was not a particularly sophisticated technical activity it did require
a certain amount of maritime skill. Pirates and privateers seldom confronted their prey
in open water. Instead, they generally used small, swift boats that attacked the mer-
chant ships when they were at rest, whether anchored in harbor or tied up on a dock;
better still was to attack when the ships were slowly approaching the harbor but not
yet within it, for that usually meant that the vessel was not yet under the protective
jurisdiction of the target port. Where there is no law, there is no crime. For this rea-
son, Venetian traders lumbering up and down the relatively narrow Adriatic were
particularly vulnerable. Pirates operating out of Dalmatia or from one of the inlet-
sea’s 1300 islands could strike and disappear with stunning speed, while the region’s
intense localism and political rivalries meant that raiders could always find a nearby
port with an amenable harbormaster who would grant them refuge and protection
in return for a share of the profits.
It was not terribly difficult to halt a plump cargo ship, especially if the pirates
attacked it with several small vessels. Most commercial ships were powered by sail
alone, in order to maximize storage space in the hold for the goods being trans-
ported. By throwing a few well-placed grappling hooks, or dragging an empty skiff
in front of the ship to threaten creating a leak in its hull, or directing a flaming
arrow or two at its sails, any organized group of thieves could bring a commercial
ship to a halt. It required more chutzpah than daring. Viking raiders typically trav-
elled in ships with crews of around two dozen men each; the Uskoks of the six-
teenth century generally used barks manned by crews of 50. The ships that were
attacked were as valuable as their cargo, so pirates seldom inflicted serious damage
when they could avoid it. Grab, ransom, and go—was the formula, the quicker the
better. A company of Hospitaller Knights corsairing out of Valletta in 1636 seized
three Venetian ships and more than 130 Muslim slaves in only six weeks. Gunpowder
weaponry, of course, inspired pirates to ever-bolder actions. Cannon could disable
ships, and muskets dishearten merchants, with considerable ease. Damaging a com-
mercial ship risked losing it, naturally, along with its cargo, but since the crew and
merchants themselves were among the highest-value targets to steal, the possible
loss of the ship and its goods seldom deterred attackers.
Moreover, financial and social mechanisms had developed to insure against loss of
property, which diminished the merchants’ incentive to put up a fight. Instruments of
credit allowed traders to conduct business without carrying large quantities of cash,