Piracy and Law in the Ottoman Mediterranean

376 Pages·2017·4.206 MB·English

by  Joshua M. White

Piracy and Law in the Ottoman Mediterranean
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Piracy and Law
in the Ottoman Mediterranean
Joshua M. White
;
stanford university press
stanford, california
Stanford University Press
Stanford, California
© 2018 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University.
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any
means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission
of Stanford University Press.
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: White, Joshua M., 1981– author.
Title: Piracy and Law in the Ottoman Mediterranean / Joshua M. White.
Description: Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, 2017. |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: lccn 2017005043 | isbn 9781503602526 (cloth : alk. paper) |
isbn 9781503603929 (epub)
Subjects: lcsh: Piracy—Law and legislation—Turkey—History. | Piracy—
Law and legislation—Mediterranean Region—History. | Piracy—
Turkey—History. | Piracy—Mediterranean Region—History. | Piracy
(International law)—Mediterranean Region—History. | Turkey—History—
Ottoman Empire, 1288–1918.
Classification: lcc kkx4395 .w55 2017 | ddc 345.56/0264—dc23
lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017005043
Typeset by Newgen in Sabon-Roman
For my parents
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Contents
Preface ix
Note on Place-Names, Transliteration, and Dates xv
Introduction 1
PART I: Chaos and Captives
1. Ottoman Pirates, Ottoman Victims 23
2. The Kadi of Malta 60
PART II: Piracy, Diplomacy, and International Law
3. Piracy and Treaty Law 103
4. Diplomatic Divergence 140
PART III: Ottoman Mediterranean, Abode of Law
5. Piracy in Ottoman Islamic Jurisprudence 183
6. Piracy in the Courts 221
Conclusion 265
Notes 275
Bibliography 307
Index 339
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Preface
In March 2011, the Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi warned a French
journalist that, if his regime fell, “There will be Islamic jihad in front
of you in the Mediterranean . . . there will be acts of piracy here, at
your doors, 50 km from your borders. [Osama] bin Laden’s people will
come to impose ransoms on land and sea. We will return to the time of
Barbarossa, of pirates, of Ottomans imposing ransoms on ships.”1 As
Qaddafi’s remarks make clear, the legacy of piracy lives on in the his-
torical memory of the Mediterranean. His reference to Tripoli’s past as
a hub of corsairing—effectively state-sponsored piracy—spoke directly
to interpretations of Mediterranean history that view piracy within the
frame of a perpetual holy war between Islam and Christianity, with the
Muslim corsairs of North Africa lined up against those of Catholic Malta
and Livorno. Qaddafi conjured the image of the North African pirate as
scourge of Christendom and, drawing an analogy with al-Qaeda, con-
structed a genealogy of violence that made contemporary terrorism its
latest incarnation.
The subsequent chaos in Libya may have made Qaddafi’s desperate
warning appear prescient, but if he was correct that economically mar-
ginalized, strategically located weak states are ideal breeding grounds
for piracy, his understanding of the history of Mediterranean maritime
violence was fundamentally flawed.2 Although the famous corsair admi-
ral Hayreddin Barbarossa (d. 1543), the “Red Beard” Qaddafi referred
to, and his acolytes were instrumental in the extension of Ottoman sov-
ereignty to Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli over the course of the sixteenth
century, the Ottoman central government exercised little control in those
places during the seventeenth-century halcyon days of Mediterranean
piracy. Nor were religious motivations paramount, although the rheto-
ric of holy war was omnipresent in the early modern Mediterranean. In
the 1620s, as fleets from North Africa were staging raids as far away
as Iceland, they were also sacking Ottoman Mediterranean ports and