Sicily by Sandra Benjamin

Sicily by Sandra Benjamin

Author:Sandra Benjamin [Benjamin, Sandra]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-58642-181-6
Publisher: Steerforth Press
Published: 2006-08-14T16:00:00+00:00


THE BARBARY PIRATES

The offensive of Charles’s grandparents Ferdinand and Isabella culminated in Spain’s expulsion of its large Muslim population. Muslims had lived in Spain for seven centuries, and the evicted generations found themselves at sea literally and psychologically. Joining the pirates who had always terrorized the Mediterranean shores, the new Barbary pirates (from “Berber”) were angrier and hungrier than their habituated colleagues. They seized Sicilian ships, raided Sicilian coastal towns, and devastated fields with greater sanguinity.

Of course Sicilians were not passive victims of Muslim raids. Any ship might be manned by Muslims and Christians together, and Sicilian sailors were useful on the ships of North Africans raiding Sicily. Furthermore, Sicilians participated actively in the North African slave trade.

Still, Sicily suffered more than elsewhere from piracy, because of its size, location, and lack of warships. Sicily’s coasts had always been vulnerable, given that the island’s riches were along the coast and that the coastline was too long to be defended in its entirety. New in Spanish times was that the Muslims now marauding had the blessing of their North African rulers, which made them technically not pirates but corsairs. Their raids on Spanish property were therefore legally warfare.

Spain defended Sicily as best it could, turning eastern Sicily into a giant fortress. Notably, to protect from Turkish raids the residents of Lentini, in 1551 the Spanish built Carlentini on higher ground nearby. In contrast to earlier periods when potentates in North Africa wanted Sicily as a stepping stone to the continent, the Spanish used Sicily as a base for fighting North Africans.

When, almost three hundred years previously, it had come under the rule of Iberian princes, Sicily included the island of Malta, 120 kilometers south of Gela. Even further back, since the Norman king Roger, Sicily had held Malta as a dependency, supplying cheap grain and other economic aid. The Spanish saw the tiny island as strategically important, and they long maintained a military base there. But the battles against the Turks had dragged on for decades without result, and King Charles decided that maintaining Malta cost too much. In 1530, for the annual tribute of a falcon, he granted Malta with Tripoli as a Sicilian fief to a military order, the Knights of St. John. The knights preyed upon Muslim ships and succeeded in reducing the damages of Muslims against Sicilians.

Nonetheless, Tripoli fell to the Muslims in 1551. Fourteen years later the Turks tried to take Malta, but, after vicious fighting that cost the lives of almost half the knights, the Maltese defense proved successful. The Muslims suffered a second humiliating defeat in 1571 at Lepanto (in Greece, between Patras and Corinth), where Sicilians were among the Spanish empire’s fighters.

The Muslims’ losses curbed their plundering, at least on most Mediterranean shores. But after the English defeated the Spanish Armada in 1588, Spain could no longer spare ships for the central Mediterranean, with the result that North Africans could act with impunity. They not only blocked Sicily from sailing to markets around the Mediterranean but also inhibited grain buyers from sailing to Sicily.



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