The Stolen Village: Baltimore and the Barbary Pirates by Ekin Des

Author:Ekin, Des [Ekin, Des]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781847174314
Publisher: The O'Brien Press
Published: 2012-10-14T16:00:00+00:00

— the role of a palace concubine, according to Paul Rycault in 1634.

THERE is no mystery about the fate of Joane Broadbrook, Bessie Flood and the other three dozen Baltimore women who ended up in Algiers – their future had been decided the moment they were herded aboard the corsair boat. They were all destined for the harems: the younger and more attractive women as concubines, the older ones as domestic servants. Some would have ended up in the Pasha’s own harem, some at the homes of local merchants, and some would have been sent all the way to the Sultan in Constantinople.

The women who were despatched to the imperial harem in the decade beginning 1631 were both lucky and unlucky in their timing. They were fortunate in that they arrived right in the middle of a period known as ‘The Reign Of Women’ in which the royal palace, and sometimes even the vast empire itself, was effectively ruled by females. However, they were also unfortunate. For most of its existence, the imperial harem was a comparatively sedate place. It was sheer bad luck that anyone sent from Baltimore would have experienced the reigns of the two craziest and most debauched sultans in the empire’s seven hundred-year history. The first was a twisted drunk. The second was a lunatic whose grotesquely inventive sexual orgies shocked even the harem veterans who thought they had seen it all.

In his poem The Sack Of Baltimore, Thomas Davis speculated about the fate of the women captives. In his version, a young man from Bandon – a ‘gallant’ – is due to marry a woman named O’Driscoll. But she is abducted to Algiers, where the governing Dey selects her for his serai, or harem:

The maid that Bandon gallant sought is chosen for the Dey,

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