180 clifford r. backman
while insurance policies protected them against at least part of their losses; compensa-
tion was also potentially available, in cases involving privateers, through the govern-
ment that had granted the attackers’ license. The key point was that victims of piracy
had recourse to an institutional and cultural structure that mitigated the harm of sea
theft. While it would be a mistake to dismiss the violence that Mediterranean pirates
were capable of, the fact remains that piracy was neither so dangerous as a physical
risk, nor its effects so economically deleterious, as to bring commerce to its knees.
Highwaymen and rogue soldiers on land did much more to disrupt trade, and at times
to bring it to a halt, than pirates did on the sea lanes.
Indeed, not discouraging trade entirely was crucial to pirates’ long-term self-
interest. In 1604, when a company of over-zealous English pirates effectively halted
the shipment of wine out of Crete, the pirates themselves landed on the island,
purchased the entire year’s stock, and exported it themselves.
The distinctiveness of Mediterranean piracyThe most distinctive elements of Mediterranean piracy were its ubiquity and its rela-
tive civility, at least in post-Roman times. It was not uncommon for piracy to be an
occasional activity, with grain merchants turning their hand to maritime marauding
during the growing season, or with spice merchants finishing off a successful trade
mission with a quick side raid on a shipment of wine and silks. Naval commanders
commonly replenished their personal coffers by moonlighting as pirates. So long as
the basic decencies of avoiding unnecessary violence were observed, engaging in a bit
of thievery was not regarded as fundamentally disreputable. Bernat de Sarrià contin-
ued to serve as the Crown of Aragon’s admiral and occasional ambassador long after
his outrageous behavior in Messina and Siracusa in 1308; he also continued to moon-
light as a pirate. For a time the Genoese had much the worst reputation for violence,
and as their relative economic and political power waned in the late Middle Ages, their
pirates’ activities became ever more scurrilous. In the sixteenth and early seventeenth
centuries some of the most notorious of pirates sailed out of Malta, but they were
soon eclipsed by the Barbary pirates sailing out of Tunis, Algeria, and Morocco.
Religion mattered to pirates, though perhaps not as much as one might think.
People who rob, enslave, and sometimes kill other people for a living, after all, are not
likely to be fastidious about confessional matters. Religion factored into piratical cal-
culus in either of two ways: first, when acting as a privateering force, pirates often
sought out and engaged religious rivals as a matter of official policy—but even here
religion was secondary to politics as a motivational element; second, religion played a
direct role in the acquisition and sale of captives in Mediterranean slave markets. All
the monotheistic cultures traditionally prohibited the enslavement of religious com-
patriots. Pirates in search of potential slaves therefore targeted members of other
faiths, but what motivated them were market demands rather than religious scruples.
Pirates could not sell Muslim slaves to Muslim purchasers, nor Christian slaves to
Christian purchasers, and so they paid attention to the religion of their captives as
a simple matter of business. Henry Mainwaring (1586–1653), for example, was
(nominally, at least) a Christian, yet he never hesitated to sell the Christian victims of
his pirate raids around Gibraltar to Muslim purchasers. Nor did his years as a pirate
slaver hinder his later career as a British Member of Parliament and vice-admiral in the