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

Christian corsairs. Hence, according to European views, the ‘Turk’ was savage,
ferocious, barbarous, cruel, inhuman, ignorant, fanatical, despotic, a menace for
civilization, a plague, and many more attributes of this kind. 42
No words,
however, could convey the most hideous crusading image of the Muslim
corsair than those of Pierre Dan. Dan was a redemptionist who specialized in
the ransom and exchange of Christian captives in North Africa. To raise funds,
he toured Europe and “appealed to people’s sensibilities by promoting the
picture of a hellish Barbary.” 43 According to him:
The Barbary corsairs are the plague of nature, the pest of the human
race, the tyrants of common liberty, the wholesale executioners of
universal innocence, who incessantly harm by cruelties unknown to the
rest of men and which further surpasses that of tigers and lions born in
their country. 44
Even so, crusading writers, such as Dan, often tend to forget that the “Christian
corsairs displayed a ferocity unexcelled even by the fiercest Turks.” 45
What matters here is the transportability of the image of ‘Turk’ to North
Africa which probably caused its coastal strip to be dubbed ‘Barbary Coast.’
Even though the Turkish element formed a small percentage of the whole
population of Algiers, the Europeans had no problem extending that image to
all the inhabitants of the region as long as they were subjects of the Ottoman
42 For a sample of these images see Thomson, Barbary and Enlightenment, pp. 16-21; also Elizabeth
M. Dillon, “Slaves in Algiers: Race, Republican Genealogies, and the Global Stage,” American
Literary History, 16: 3 (2004), pp. 413-22.
43 Ben Rejeb, “Barbary’s Character,” p. 347.
44 Dan, Histoire de Barbarie, p. 4.
45 Louis B. Wright and Julia H. Macleod, The First Americans in North Africa: William Eaton’s
Struggle for a Vigorous Policy against the Barbary Pirates, 1799-1805 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1945), p. 6.
75