Ottoman Algeria in Western Diplomatic History with ... - Bibliothèque

manifest perils has for so long been scraping together, and has been so
many thousand leagues to fetch away, either from the east or west, with
inexpressible danger and fatigue. Thus they have crammed most of the
houses, the magazines, and all the shops of this Den of Thieves with
gold, silver, pearls, amber, spices, drugs, silks, cloths, velvets, &c.,
whereby they have rendered this city the most opulent in the world:
insomuch that the Turks call it, not without reason, their India, their
Mexico, their Peru. 28
Definitely, all this makes nonsense: when the European thief kills and
robs innocents in the Americas and India, Haedo moans his “manifest perils,
danger, and fatigue”; but when that same robber is legally robbed by the enemy
he had made, the latter is slandered and his homeland is transformed to a “Den
of Thieves”!
1. 2. Barbary: Misconceptions and Prejudices
Distortions exceed the nature of the practice of corsairing to the region
at large. It is customary in western writing to call ‘Barbary’ the costal region of
Northwest Africa that extends from the Atlantic shore to roughly the
boundaries of nowadays Egypt. Similarity, the Ottoman regencies of North
Africa (Algiers, Tunis, Tripoli) and the kingdom of Morocco are commonly
referred to as the “Barbary States” while the Muslim corsairs are called the
‘Barbary Pirates.’ 29 According to Westerners’ thought, ‘Barbary’ is indicative
of the “notoriety for greed and ferociousness” of the inhabitants of the area. 30
What is common knowledge, however, is although a similarly sounding word
28 As translated by Morgan, Complete History of Algiers, p. 593-94.
29 For a general approach to misconceptions see Godfrey, Barbary Legend, pp. 1-13.
30 Michael B. Oren, Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East 1776 to the Present. New
York: W. W. Norton, 2007), p. 18.
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