free download here - Michael Llewellyn-Smith

The Great Island
hostile, for though there were many who assisted the Turks in the next
century, the formidable pirate inspired only panic and loathing among
the majority. He sailed away. But the expedition, served as an example,
and for months the coasts of Crete were not free of marauding Turkish
or pirate ships.
The only novelty in Barbarossa’s attack was its magnitude; for, as
the reader will have guessed by now, hardly a decade could elapse in
Cretan history without the appearance of raiding ships. Turkish pirates
had ravaged the Sitea area in 1471; destroyed Toplou monastery in
1498. A few years before Khaireddtn came, the Venetian Proveditor
Canale even succeeded in capturing a pirate chief off Canea, with four
of his ships, and in releasing the slaves on board. Khaireddin’s attack
however was unprecedented in scope.
It is hard for us, whose shores have been comparatively secure for so
long, to appreciate the menace of these corsairs. Invasion from the sea
presents peculiar terrors to the mind. Coasts are so long. Not every
village can be near enough to a Martello tower or Frankish castle.
Mothers could terrify their children with the threat that Boney would
come; how much worse were the corsairs, whose nocturnal and unheralded
descents were a present threat for over three hundred years.
The Barbary State, forged by the brothers Barbarossa, had no raison
d’etre other than piracy. Material and human plunder supported the
economy. Algiers, the headquarters, contained more than twenty-five
thousand slaves in the mid-sixteenth century.
The activities of the corsairs extended beyond the Mediterranean.
The Rev. Devereux Spratt, ancestor of the Captain Spratt who
travelled in Crete in the last century, was actually taken prisoner just
off the Irish coast, after the Protestant rebellion of 1640: ‘before wee
were out of sight of land, wee were all taken by an Algire piratt, who
putt the men in chaines and stockes. This thing was so greivious that I
began to question Providence, and accused Him of injustice in His
dealeings with me, untill the Lord made it appear otherwise, by
ensueing mercye; upon my arrivall in Algires I found pious Christians,
which changed my former thoughts of God.’ This story had a happy
ending. Spratt was freed on the paying of a ransom, but elected to stay
with the other English captives in their misfortune; two years later, on
the issue of a proclamation that all free men must be gone, he returned
to England. For the Cretans, who lacked influential friends, such
fortune was rare. There is a church in the Mylopotamos district which
was erected in gratitude by a priest and his wife who came home after
many years’ captivity.
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