Images of Piracy in Ottoman Literature

Images of Piracy in Ottoman Literature, 1550-1750

Marinos Sariyannis

Being one of the dominant phenomena of maritime life in the Mediterranean,

piracy was bound to leave its traces in Ottoman Turkish literature.1 In particular,
one encounters several instances of pirates and corsairs, either as heroes and
protagonists themselves or as opponents and persecutors of the heroes, in the
popular literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but also in many
works of a more learned character. It must be noted that such texts are much fewer
in number than we might desire: one gets the impression that pirates and corsairs
were subjects that seldom attracted the attention of Ottoman writers. On the one
hand, this may be due to the paucity of narrative literature located and published
by Ottomanists (Cinânî’s collection of stories, one of the few texts which contain
references to piracy, remained unpublished and virtually unknown until 2009):
more research in the manuscript libraries and more publishing activity will hopefully
bring more of these narratives to light.2 On the other hand, what has reached our
hands is mostly elite literature written in Istanbul, where piracy was far from being
an everyday occurrence.

1. Ottoman literature properly called would also include Arab, Greek, Armenian and Hebrew
sources. In particular, Arab sources from the Maghreb would be extremely useful in this context;
cf. (for an earlier period) A. Amara, ‘La mer et les milieux mystiques d’après la production
hagiographique du Maghreb occidental (XIIe-XVe siècle)’, Revue des mondes musulmans et de
la Méditerranée 130 (2012), pp. 33-52. Mohamed-Salah Omri, ‘Representing the Early Modern
Mediterranean in Contemporary North Africa’, in Maria Fusaro, Colin Heywood and Mohamed-
Salah Omri (eds), Trade and Cultural Exchange in the Early Modern Mediterranean: Braudel’s
Maritime Legacy, London 2010, pp. 273-291, deals with the modern (twentieth-century) Algerian
literature. See also M. Cherif, ‘La piraterie en Méditerranée d’après les sources hagiographiques
maghrébines’, in N. Jaspert and S. Kolditz (eds), Seeraub im Mittelmeerraum. Piraterie, Korsarentum
und maritime Gewalt von der Antike bis zur Neuzeit, Munich 2013, pp. 83-104.
2. See E. G. Ambros and J. Schmidt, ‘A Cossack Adopted by the Forty Saints: An Original Ottoman
Story in the Leiden University Library’, in E. Kermeli and O. Özel (eds), he Ottoman Empire:
Myths, Realities and ‘Black Holes’: Contributions in Honour of Colin Imber, Istanbul 2006, pp. 297-
324.

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his chapter analyses such texts in order to seek the dominant attitudes against
piracy and corsairs. I propose a tentative sketch of the history of Ottoman piracy in
relation to the state: a course from the use and incorporation of Aegean and North
African corsairs into the Ottoman leet during the sixteenth century, toward a more
standing navy and the establishment of institutionalised international relations
from the seventeenth century onwards, leading to a diferent model of corsair, since
piracy continued until the nineteenth century.
It is well known that piracy and state naval policy were closely intermingled in
the pre-modern era and early modern times and that pirates and corsairs were two
alternative and interchangeable forms of profession in the Mediterranean. In this
study, I will skip descriptions of pirate enterprises of the early Turkish emirates of
the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, which are described, for instance, in the
Düsturname, a late iteenth-century epic – commissioned by no less than Mahmud
Pasha Angelović, the famous grand vizier of Mehmed the Conqueror – relating
the exploits of Umur Beg, the mid-fourteenth-century emir of Aydin.3 Let me only
point out that in this text we see plenty of what was to become ‘the pirate ethos’;
that is, the transgression of religious boundaries to make temporary alliances and
cooperations. Of course, speaking of the fourteenth century, this has more to do
with the famous discussion of the ‘gazi thesis’, and one may see such descriptions as
corroborative either of the ‘non-gazi’ character of the fourteenth-century emirates
or, as Cemal Kafadar did, of the opposite (that is, that the ‘gazi’ character of the early
emirates had no primarily religious overtones).4

3. I. Mélikof-Sayar (ed.), Le destân d’Umûr Pacha (Düstûrnâme-i Enverî), Paris 1954; on this text,
see C. Kafadar, Between Two Worlds: he Construction of the Ottoman State, Berkeley 1995, pp. 69
f. On the naval activities of the fourteenth-century emirates, see E. A. Zachariadou, ‘Holy War in
the Aegean during the Fourteenth Century’, Mediterranean Historical Review 4 (1989), pp. 212-
225, and ‘Changing Masters in the Aegean’, in J. Chrysostomides, C. Dendrinos and J. Harris (eds),
he Greek Islands and the Sea: Proceedings of the First International Colloquium held at the Hellenic
Institute, Royal Holloway, University of London, 21-22 September 2001, Camberley 2004, pp. 199-
212 (both of these works are in id., Studies in Pre-Ottoman Turkey and the Ottomans, Aldershot
2007). For some Arabic sources on early Ottoman and other Anatolian corsairs, see A. Fuess,
‘Muslime und Piraterie im Mittelmeer (7.-16. Jahrhundert)’, in Jaspert and Kolditz (eds), Seeraub
im Mittelmeerraum, pp. 193-196.
4. his debate, initiated by Fuad Köprülü (who, in his turn, was answering the claims of Gibbons
on the strong Byzantine character of the early Ottomans) and his face-value acceptance of the
tribal origin of Osman’s people from a branch of the Oğuz tribes, produced Paul Wittek’s famous
‘gazi thesis’. Wittek surmised that Osman’s tribal nucleus gathered together a bunch of warriors of
varied origin, all motivated by the spirit of gaza or ‘the holy war’, i.e. the prospect of war against
their Byzantine neighbours. he ensuing debate might be based on a misunderstanding, as if
Wittek meant a kind of Muslim crusader: most critics focussed on the absence of religious zeal
in the entourage of the irst sultans and maintained instead that the early Ottoman emirate had
mostly tribal (Rudi P. Lindner) or syncretistic (Heath Lowry) connotations. On the other hand,
scholars closer to Wittek’s thesis (Halil İnalcık, Cemal Kafadar) stressed that, for the nomadic or
semi-nomadic warriors that formed the core of Osman and Orhan’s armies, gaza had a meaning
closer to plunder than to ‘holy war’ as the latter was meant in the centuries to come. I believe that
Rudi P. Lindner, for instance, oversimpliied when he claimed that Wittek’s ‘extraordinary solution’
can be reduced to ‘single-minded devotion to the holy war as a powerful engine of Ottoman
history’ (Rudi P. Lindner, Explorations in Ottoman Prehistory, Ann Arbor 2007, p. 10). In a way,

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Gazi Corsairs and Inidel Pirates: he Sixteenth Century

If we now jump to the sixteenth century, when state naval warfare emerged in the
Mediterranean, we will see that the function of piracy as a quasi-state policy was still
valid. he story of Hayreddin Barbaros illustrates this point well, as he managed to
incorporate the notorious pirate leet of the North African ports into the Ottoman
navy, although narratives of his rise contain interesting instances of the frontier
ethos described above.5 he sixteenth-century literary texts are quite eloquent in
their silence: piracy as such is very much absent. We ind descriptions of the dangers
of maritime travel, focussing on the diiculties of the sea, but with no word on
pirates, as if they were not operating outside state campaigns. A description of the
disadvantages of every profession (in the framework of a common Ottoman literary
genre, called Hasbıhal) by an unidentiied late sixteenth-century poet, Sâfî, refers to
the sailor’s life as follows:
here is no way for the life of a sailor to be easy or comfortable [...] He is afraid of the
tempest [...] and once bad weather starts, he cannot ind an easy port [...] If the ship is
old, it may sink [...] If it goes near the rocks, it will sit in the shallows and break into
pieces [...] and those inside will either drown or be saved. In sum, this is an utmost
nuisance; there is no moment of ease [in this profession].6

As for Mustafa Ali, the proliic late sixteenth-century author famous for his
monumental Ottoman history and for various treatises on political advice, his last
work, Mevâ’idü’n-nefâ’is fî kavâ’idi’l-mecâlis [Tables of delicacies concerning the
rules of social gatherings], a treatise on good manners but also on various other

the modern debate on ‘Wittek’s thesis’ has moved the subject from whether the unifying factor of
the early Ottomans was their tribal unity or war opportunities, to whether gaza meant religious
fervour or just plundering the enemy. Wittek, however, never insisted on the religious character of
the early Ottoman gaza (or, at any rate, never made this character his central argument). On the
debate see the recent works of Kafadar, Between Two Worlds; H. Lowry, he Nature of the Early
Ottoman State, Albany, NY, 2003; C. Imber, Warfare, Law and Pseudo-History, Istanbul 2011, pp.
201 f.; Linda T. Darling, ‘Reformulating the Gazi Narrative: When was the Ottoman State a Gazi
State?’, Turcica 43 (2011), pp. 13-53. Albrecht Fuess, ‘Ottoman Gazwah – Mamluk Ğihâd: Two
Arms in the Same Body?’, in S. Conermann (ed.), Everything is on the Move: he Mamluk Empire
as a Node in (Trans-)Regional Networks, Göttingen 2014, pp. 269-282, compares the Ottoman
concept with the holy war as practised by the contemporary Mamluks, based on the distinction
between gaza and cihad; see however Imber, Warfare, Law and Pseudo-History, pp. 59 f., who
maintained that there was no such distinction.
5. See Zachariadou, ‘Changing Masters in the Aegean’, p. 210. On this text, see A. Gallotta, ‘Il
Ġazavāt-ı Hayreddīn Paşa di Seyyid Murād’, Studi Magrebini 13 (1981) [whole issue]; N. Vatin, ‘À
propos de la captivité à Rhodes d’Oruç Re’îs dans les Ġazavât-ı Hayrü-d-dîn Paşa’, in U. Marazzi
(ed.), Turcica et islamica. Studi in memoria di Aldo Gallotta, Naples 2004, Vol. II, pp. 995-1011; id.,
‘Comment êtes-vous apparus, toi et ton frère? Note sur les origines des frères Barberousse’, Studia
Islamica n.s. I (2011), pp. 103-131. On the relationship between corsairs and the state during this
period, see E. S. Gürkan, ‘he Centre and the Frontier: Ottoman Cooperation with the North
African Corsairs in the Sixteenth Century’, Turkish Historical Review 1 (2010), pp. 125-163; L.
Sicking, ‘Islands, Pirates, Privateers and the Ottoman Empire in the Early Modern Mediterranean’,
in D. Couto, F. Günergun and M. P. Pedani (eds), Seapower, Technology and Trade: Studies in
Turkish Maritime History, Istanbul 2014, pp. 239-252.
6. H. D. Batislam (ed.), Hasbıhâl-i Sâfî, Istanbul 2003, pp. 161-163.

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issues of everyday life composed in 1599, includes a lengthy description of the perils
of sea travel. here he claimed that it should be avoided, since humankind ‘is created
from dust and carries in its animal soul the ires of ardour and love’, in contrast
with the open waters, ‘whose master is the gusting wind and the blowing gale’. He
mentioned experiences of turbulent seas and sinking ships, but had no word for
threatening pirates, whereas he talked of ‘lawless Bedouin Arabs’ who surround
ships drawn ashore in order to plunder them.7
One has to note that Ali’s description of the perils of land travel does not forget to
mention robbers and highwaymen. Signiicantly, it is followed by a highly interesting
description of a pirate’s career, which bears no trace of his adamant condemnation
of land robbery:8
Adventurers at sea, the sailors from Tripoli in Libya, Tunis, and Algiers who are fond
of plunder, are mostly Turks from the Kaz Mountain region. Ater laboring to learn the
art of shooting arrows, they become skilled at it [...] First they gather ive or ten men
together. hey attack a little boat owned by haraç-paying inidels, board it, and take it to
the islands [...] hey tie up the non-Muslim sailor subjects of the Ottoman state and put
them to working the oars [...] Still, they do not abandon Islam all at once; they do not
put merchants and sailors to the sword out of spite [...] But over time that boat can carry
them no more, which is to say it becomes apparent that the cargo of sin they have loaded
becomes too ponderous a burden. When this happens they attempt to obtain a small
frigate [...] Incorporating within it a thousand fears and precautions, they construct a
ship. As soon as it is ready they board it, cast of, and meet up with one of the privateer
sea captains wintering in Algiers. hey ofer gits and present themselves for service and
are honored with being recruited into their ranks.
Having reached this stage, they no longer attack Muslims and merchants and haraç-
paying inidels. hey never venture one pace from Algiers except in jihad. hey even
abundantly repent their earlier sins. Not postponing any of their prayers, they make
righteousness and piety their example.
As Sophia Laiou noted:
Mustafa Ali considers the land-based levends and the levends of the sea as a single social
group, with common social origins, while the moral condemnation of their brigandage
activity is also clear. However, there is a diference: according to the writer, the levends of
the sea have the opportunity to repent for their sins and enter the state apparatus, when
they unite their forces with the levends of the Maghreb, while no such option is ofered
to the land-based levends.9

7. D. S. Brookes (transl.), he Ottoman Gentleman of the Sixteenth Century: Mustafa Ali’s

Mevâ’idü’n-nefâ’is fî kavâ’idi’l-mecâlis: Tables of Delicacies Concerning the Rules of Social
Gatherings, Cambridge, MA, 2003, pp. 158-162.
8. Ibid., pp. 32-37 (and the Ottoman text in M. Şeker [ed.], Gelibolulu Mustafa ’Âlî ve Mevâ’idü’n-
nefâis i-kavâ’ıdi’l-mecâlis, Ankara 1997, pp. 287-290); see S. Laiou, ‘he Levends of the Sea in the
Second Half of the 16th Century: Some Considerations’, Archivum Ottomanicum 23 (2005-2006),
pp. 233-247.
9. Laiou, ‘Levends of the Sea’, p. 242.

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In the rest of the chapter, Ali claimed that ‘these evils did not exist in the time of
Sultan Süleyman’; he stressed that the admiral should know when ‘a sailor attached
to one of the leet captains turns to piracy, be he common man or great man’ and
that ‘whoever is not a corsair is not a sea captain worthy of that post’, citing as
examples the proliic careers of the earlier privateers-turned-admirals. As Laiou
also observed, contrary to what Ali claimed, piracy by no means ever ceased to
be a problem throughout the sixteenth century. he fact that we scarcely meet
pirates in Ottoman literature might be attributed to this potential integration of
the independent levend into the state navy. An Anatolian robber of the same period
(and this is also the case for the late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Celali
rebels) also had his chances to be incorporated into a pasha’s retinue or an auxiliary
mercenary force, but he could not be depicted as a literary hero, since his robber
activity was openly disturbing public order and also attacking fellow Muslims.
his is why one of the very few literary depictions of a Celali rebel, the folk epic of
Köroğlu, takes the rebel side against the state oicials, making him something of an
Ottoman Robin Hood (but without the good King Richard).10 Muslim pirates, on
the other hand, acted mostly in cooperation or at least concordance with the state’s
naval forces, so that they could be legitimised and idealised by Ottoman authors
in a much easier way. Here is part of the biography of the poet Nigârî (d c. 1572), a
companion of Selim II, as related by the same Mustafa Ali:
He was one of the Galata captains and of those famous oicers who carried [in their
ship] the lantern of a captain [kapudan] [...] He was also famous as the ‘painter Haydar’,
and he was competent in this art as well. He was an antagonist of Hacezade, a companion
of the sultan known also as ‘Captain Blunderer’ [Pok yidi re’is] [...]11
When narrating the life of the same Nigârî, another biographer, Kınalızade Hasan
Çelebi (d 1604), added that:
[...] since he was from Galata he became related with the swimmers of the sea and
followed the profession of a sailor and became a perfect corsair [korsan] amid the sea
captains [...] But as he was travelling on the sea in his ship, he did not leave from his
hands the ship of fruitful verse either [...] his is how he entered the service of Sultan
Selim II as a boon companion.12

On the other hand, as noted earlier, the relative absence of piracy from literature
as a threat for maritime travels may be attributed simply to the fact that published
literary texts are mostly poetical romances. Recently, Osman Ünlü published and
analysed a collection of entertaining stories, Bedâyiü’l-âsâr [Embellishment of the

10. P. N. Boratav, Köroğlu destanı, Istanbul 1984 (11931); J. M. Wilks, ‘he Persianization of Köroğlu:
Banditry and Royalty in hree Versions of the Köroğlu “destan”’, Asian Folklore Studies 60 (2001),
pp. 305-318. Karen Barkey, Bandits and Bureaucrats: he Ottoman Route to State Centralization,
Ithaca and London 1994, p. 181, dismisses the value of the epic as historical source; at any rate,
its role in shaping popular imagination of the Celalis (and vice versa, its role in expressing this
imagination) is beyond doubt.
11. M. İsen (ed.), Künhü’l-ahbâr’ın tezkire kısmı, Ankara 1994, pp. 328-329.
12. İ. Kutluk (ed.), Kınalızade Hasan Çelebi: Tezkiretü’ş-şuarâ Ankara 1989, pp. 1001-1002; see also
id. (ed.), Beyâni Mustafa bin Carullah: Tezkiretü’ş-şuarâ, Ankara 1997, pp. 299-300.

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histories].13 It was composed by Mustafa Cinânî (d 1595) and contains 99 stories and
vignettes, the subjects of which vary from ghost and jinn stories to farcical pieces on
wicked women, and from war adventures to tales of lost treasures. Now, quite a few
of these stories concern corsair activities from either side of the border: in the eighth
story, for instance, the narrator inds himself in Rhodes and associates himself with
the governor of the island, Cafer Bey. Suddenly a messenger comes:
Your excellency the governor! Glad tidings: we got positive information of the big
galleon of the inidels. Just now it set for Crete, and in its way it attacks the ships of the
Muslims, taking them as prisoners. Raise all your power and let us complete an exalted
gaza [holy war] for the sake of the sultan!
Upon this news, Cafer Bey summons the regular and irregular forces of the castle
and follows the galleon to Crete. he Cretan authorities [Girid beğleri] refuse to
deliver it, citing a treaty with Mehmed II, which permitted them to protect their
ships even if they were wanted by an Ottoman lotilla (‘you will deliver neither
Muslims to inidels, nor inidels to Muslims’). Cafer Bey has no choice but to leave
for Rhodes. On the open sea, ive Maltese ships attack the governor’s ship and in
the course of the battle, which is described in great detail, Cafer Bey dies, as he had
foreseen in a dream. he battle ceases at night:
he inidels started to cry: ‘Hey you tyrants go away, leave the battle; from now on we
have no more power to ight, and we cannot endure the struggle anymore.’ And the
Muslims also cried: ‘Hey you accursed, you have your place ready in Hell; go one hour
earlier and hide yourselves there. Let us also leave the ighting with you and have some
rest.’ And at the end both sides had no choice but to break the chains [holding the two
ships together] and separate from one another.
he battle is supposed to start again in the morning, but the enemy disappears into
the open sea.14
he eleventh story features no less than Turgut Pasha: a merchant sails from
Alexandria to Istanbul, when his ship meets a lotilla of seven ships, carrying a
white Muslim lag [beyaz İslam sancakları] and pretending to belong to Turgut
Pasha’s forces. hey capture the protagonist and the other travellers and put them
into the galleys, warning them not to throw anything into the sea. However, one of
the prisoners lets his shoe fall by mistake, and when this is discovered (because the
scribe of the ship registers all the belongings and clothes of the prisoners) the inidel
pirates cut him into pieces and throw him into the sea. he same night, the pirates
have a drinking party, and their captain throws the peel of an orange into the sea.
Miles away, in the Albanian port of Vlorë [Avlonya], Turgut Pasha has a dream of a
saint, who urges him to save the prisoners. Indeed, he manages to follow the traces
of the pirates by collecting the shoe and the orange peel from the sea: in the ensuing
battle, he captures four out of the seven ships, and, upon the request of the brother
of the prisoner who was cut into pieces, the murderer has the same fate.15

13. O. Ünlü (ed.), Cinânî: Bedâyiü’l-âsâr, Cambridge, MA, 2009, 2 vols.

14. Ibid., Vol. II, pp. 29-39.
15. Ibid., pp. 51-56. Before the pirate attack, the story features a giant ish from the land of the Gog
and Magog.

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he next story also begins with a corsair, ‘one of the gazis’ who ‘sets of with his
ship with the intention of practicing the holy war’ and captures a Maltese ship.
he ship carried the trousseau of a rich governor’s daughter, as well as herself; its
crew tries at irst to conceal this fact, but eventually the corsairs ind out the truth.
When they return to Istanbul, the captain refuses to give the girl back to her family,
no matter what they ofer; similarly, he refuses to sell her to other bidders in the
capital, but has to sell her later upon the instigation of his family, because of a plague
epidemic in Üsküdar (the reasoning is that she might die of the plague, and thus
it would be a pity not to sell her while there are still bidders).16 Another story (the
twenty-second) has a soldier, Ali Çavuş, travelling from Cairo to Istanbul, when
his ship is attacked by two pirate ships (‘inidel galleys’, forsa kâfir gemisi). he
Muslims do not have enough weapons and try to lee, but the corsairs reach them;
only the miraculous intervention of two dervishes (whom Ali Çavuş had beneitted
before) saves the Muslim ship from their hands; eventually, the hero arrives safely in
Rhodes.17 Finally, in the ity-eighth story, pirates capture a judge ‘in the dangerous
place called Şirden Burnı, where the miserable inidels oten catch pilgrims, gazis
and merchants’, while going to Egypt from Istanbul; they bring him to Malta and
sell him to a monk. he monk treats the prisoner very well and eventually proves to
have become a concealed Muslim.18
Cinânî’s stories, rich in information about Ottoman everyday life and attitudes,
somehow ill the lacuna in the literature of the sixteenth century, which as we saw
tends to neglect the presence of Maltese and other pirates roaming the Eastern
Mediterranean. On the other hand, when a pirate is depicted as a protagonist or
at least a positive hero, he is always built upon the gazi model – that is, as a state-
sponsored irregular complementing the standing navy of the kapudan pasha. It is
interesting that Cinânî did not use the word ‘pirate’ or ‘corsair’ [levend, korsan]: the
Muslim corsairs are termed gazi, while the Christian ones are just ‘inidel ships’.

he Return of the Pirate Ethos

A turn in the history of piracy seems to take place during the seventeenth century.
On the one hand, what may be seen as the gradual establishment of international
relations led to a stricter persecution of Ottoman pirates by Ottoman authorities.19
I suspect that sixteenth-century persecutions had to do more with intra-Ottoman
pillages – piracy against Ottoman populations – whereas the incorporation of
pirates into international relations (the Maltese corsair activity used as the pretext

16. Ibid., pp. 56-60.

17. Ibid., pp. 92-95.
18. Ibid., pp. 219-223.
19. On the development of international policies of the Ottoman Empire, see G. Işıksel, ‘II.
Selim’den III. Selim’e Osmanlı diplomasisi. Birkaç saptama’, in S. Kenan (ed.), Nizâm-ı Kâdîm’den
Nizâm-ı Cedîd’e. III. Selim ve dönemi, Istanbul 2010, pp. 315-338; and id., ‘Méandres d’une pratique
peu institutionnalisée. La diplomatie ottomane, XVe-XVIIIe siècle’, Monde(s) (2014), pp. 43-55.

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for the Crete campaign is a good example) meant that in times of peace the Ottoman
state had to suppress those pirates who were pillaging ships of other states as well.20
One gets the impression that in an earlier period the latter were treated less strictly,
although the relevant references of Western observers should not be overestimated.21
At least literary texts depicting pirates and piracy increase in number and a change in
their perspective is evident: now the model type is the swashbuckler, the adventurer
who might occasionally transgress boundaries.
his literary change appears to take place towards the end of the seventeenth
century. In the middle of the century, Kâtip Çelebi simply reiterated the well-known
motto we also saw in Mustafa Ali, namely that ‘an admiral should either be a corsair
himself or consult with corsairs to beneit from their experience’.22 Yet here is how
Evliya Çelebi depicted the irregular levend force of Santa Maura (Lekada), which
he visited in 1670-1671:
his neighbourhood is in a tongue of sandy earth expanding for 250 paces; it has four
fountains, seven churches and seven Rum elders [protoyoroz] [...] It also has many
taverns, where all the levends of the castle eat and drink, day and night, with the
company of music [...] It is true that the authorities keep overlooking what the gazis of
the island do [i.e. their drinking], as this is a wild island: they are a bunch of ighter gazis
and valiant sailors who all behave and get dressed like the Algerians [...] hey do not
have good relations with the rest of the inhabitants, but they are very brave, bold and
competent warriors, a spike in the eye of Frenkistan. heir talk has the Rum accent; they
talk eloquently the language of both Rum and the Frenk. But their manners are not so
nice. Every so oten they take their ships and attack deep into Frenkistan. hey return
with their booty to Santa Maura, and there they spend the spoils of the holy war with
magniicence and have fun till they stay broke; and then they launch another campaign.
his is how they live; but there are also very pious youths [among them].23

20. On the inverse procedure, i.e. Ottoman reactions to Christian piracy, cf. S. Faroqhi, ‘Ottoman
Views on Corsairs and Pirates in the Adriatic’, in E. A. Zachariadou (ed.), he Kapudan Pasha: His
Oice and his Domain. Halcyon Days in Crete IV: A Symposium held in Rethymnon, 7-9 January
2000, Rethymnon 2002, pp. 357-370; on the much less studied case of Christian piracy in the Black
Sea, see G. Işıksel, ‘La piraterie abkhaze et la réaction ottomane. Une contribution au débat sur la
fermeture de la mer Noire’, in I. M. Damian et al. (eds), Italy and Europe’s Eastern Border (1204-
1669), Frankfurt am Main 2012, pp. 191-200.
21. For example, see N. Vatin, ‘L’Empire ottoman et la piraterie en 1559-1560’, in Zachariadou
(ed.), he Kapudan Pasha, pp. 381 and 399-401; Gürkan, ‘he Centre and the Frontier’, pp. 151-
155. On eighteenth-century persecutions of Ottoman piracy against Christian nations, see E.
Ginio, ‘Piracy and Redemption in the Aegean Sea during the First Half of the Eighteenth Century’,
Turcica 33 (2001), p. 138.
22. O. Ş. Gökyay (ed.), Kâtip Çelebi: Deniz savaşları hakkında büyüklere armağan (Tuhfetü’l-kibâr
fî esfâri’l-bihâr), Istanbul 2007(11973), p. 191. In his narration of the Battle of Lepanto (ibid., pp.
112-117), Kâtip Çelebi emphasised that the Admiral Müezzinzâde Ali Pasha ‘had not fought in the
sea and did not know the art of corsairs’, in sharp contrast with Uluç Ali Pasha, whose hindsight is
praised by all Ottoman historians; see the references of both Mustafa Ali and Peçevî to the ‘boorish
bravery’ [horyâd bahâdırlığı] of the admiral: F. Çerçi (ed.), Gelibolulu Mustafa Âlî ve Künhü’l-
ahbâr’ında II. Selim, III. Murad ve III. Mehmet devirleri, 3 vols, Kayseri 2000, Vol. II, p. 82; İbrahim
Peçevî (Peçuylu) Efendi, Tarih-i Peçevî, Istanbul H. 1281-1283; repr. 1980, 2 vols, Vol. I, p. 49.
23. S. A. Kahraman, Y. Dağlı and R. Dankof (eds), Evliya Çelebi Seyahatnâmesi: Topkapî Sarayı
Kütüphanesi Bağdat 308 Numaralı Yazmanın Transkripsyonu – Dizini. 8. Kitap, Istanbul 2003, pp.

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Evliya’s description refers to the corsair crews which, as we know from other
sources, were pillaging merchant ships and the neighbouring Venetian territories
of Cephallonia and Zante. His mentioning the knowledge of the Greek and ‘Frenk’
[Italian, probably] languages strengthens the possibility that many of these crews
were renegade Christians, as many Mediterranean pirates were;24 in fact, aside from
the references to gaza, Evliya did not specify the religion of these people, although
other elements of his description, for instance their clothing, brings us nearer to the
pirates of Barbary. At any rate, the re-emergence of what we earlier called ‘the pirate
ethos’ is more evident in folk texts, which seem have to multiplied during the early
eighteenth century.
he most famous of these texts is a fascinating pirate novel, entitled ‘he discourse
on Warden Captain Mahmud, on [his] victories over the damned dwellers of Hell,
the Maltese’, one of the few (until now) known specimens of Ottoman ‘popular
literature’ recorded before the nineteenth century.25 he novel presents itself as a real
story, purportedly copied in 1694-1695 from a manuscript, in which a freed slave
narrated his adventures to his ex-master some two decades before. In the beginning,
the slave leaves Alexandria for Istanbul on a French ship, together with another
50 or 55 Muslims. he ship is hit by a terrible storm and inally crashes into the
shore of an empty island. Ater ive days, a galleon appears; its crew asserts that the
ship is French as well, and the captain promises to leave the passengers in Cyprus.
However, as it turns out, the ship belongs to pirates who put the Muslim passengers
in fetters and set of to plunder. he pirates approach the coast of Cyprus, and most
of them, under the direction of the captain himself, disembark in order to attack a
village. However, the warden [zindancı] of the galleon, who had earlier quarrelled
with the captain, now inds the opportunity to rebel. He frees the prisoners and uses
those among them capable of war (including the narrator, Yusuf), along with some
of the pirates who are faithful to him, in order to take over the ship:

280-283. On this particular passage, see my annotated translation in E. Kolovos (ed.), Οθωμανικές
πηγές για τη νεώτερη ιστορία της Λευκάδας [Ottoman sources for the modern history of Lekada]
Heraklion 2013, pp. 399-412, and my ‘Οθωμανοί κουρσάροι στη Λευκάδα. Με αφορμή ένα χωρίο
του Εβλιγιά Τσελεμπή’ [Ottomans pirates in Lekada: On the occasion of a passage by Evliya
Çelebi], in T. P. Katopodis and T. Sklavenitis (eds), Δρόμοι και παράδρομοι της τοπικής ιστορίας.
Πρακτικά ΙΕ΄ Συμποσίου Εταιρείας Λευκαδικών Μελετών [Routes and sub-routes of local history:
Proceedings of the 15th Symposium of Lekadian Studies], Lekada, 18-20 August 2010, Athens
2011, pp. 49-65.
24. On the proportions of renegades in pirate crews of the Barbary, see B. Bennassar and L.
Bennassar, Les chrétiens d’Allah. L’histoire extraordinaire des renégats, XVIe-XVIIe siècles, Paris
1989, pp. 215-216. It seems that pirates wanted renegades to be a minority, out of fear for mutiny.
A Greek renegade from Tinos was found in such a crew, captured in the mid-sixteenth century on
the Portuguese coast: ibid., p. 42 and cf. p. 191.
25. A. Tietze, ‘Die Geschichte von Kerkermeister-Kapitän, ein türkischer Seeräuberromane aus
dem 17. Jahrhundert’, Acta Orientalia 19 (1942), pp. 152-210 (German translation); F. İz, ‘Makale-i
Zindancı Mahmud Kapudan’, Türkiyat Mecmuası 14 (1964), pp. 111-150 (Ottoman text). What
follows is mostly based on my ‘Images of the Mediterranean in an Ottoman Pirate Novel from
the Late Seventeenth Century’, Osmanlı Araştırmaları / he Journal of Ottoman Studies 39 (2012)
[Other Places: Ottomans Traveling, Seeing, Writing, Drawing the World: Essays in Honor of
homas D. Goodrich], pp. 189-204.

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Marinos Sariyannis

In an appropriate moment, he gathered the prisoners and told them: ‘You poor ones!
I have good tidings for you. If you obey me and with God’s will, not only will you be
freed from slavery but you will also become rich [...] If God wills, we will take over the
ship easily. God be praised, you are 53 Muslims altogether, plus 11 of us, that makes 64.’

Ater a short battle, the mutiny is crowned by success. All the more so, the warden
beats the remaining pirates upon their return and distributes the loot among
his crew, now including the released Muslim prisoners. As the ship is then near
Famagusta, the Ottoman governor of Cyprus invites the warden and his crew to
meet him; however, the latter declines politely (saying that ‘not only have we not any
git worthy of such a powerful oicer like you: we never have been in any viziers’
council, nor even seen again any vizier, so that we might die from joy and ind the
end of our lives!’).
Under its new leadership and crew, the pirate galleon has to decide under which
lag it will enlist. he warden summons a council and rejects various propositions:
Brothers! Now we have to decide to declare allegiance to some king or hearth [ocak,
meaning Janissary corps in the Barbary] and raise their lag, so that we will not move on
our own. Now, if we go to Istanbul and fall into the clutches of the Ottomans [Osmanlı
pençesine düşersek], it is evident that they will take our galleon and wealth from our
hands and make us slaves, and we will not ind safety for our lives.

hen they seek other solutions: if they are to head for Algiers, its Janissary corps,
being greedy, would coniscate the ship; as for the Trablus [Tripoli] corps, it is
destitute and would not treat them with courtesy. he only solution remaining is
Tunis, to which everyone agrees. Meanwhile, the angry Ottoman governor manages
to arrest the warden while he is on shore collecting supplies and tries to get hold
of the galleon as well; ater several adventures, not only do the pirates prevail but
they also catch as prisoner the governor’s son, who decides to enter their ranks,
saying that ‘neither the state of pasha, neither that of bey is for me; I am made
to be a corsair.’ In the atermath, the warden is released and sent to the house of
the French consul, who attempts to persuade him to submit to the sultan, but to
no avail. he two sides exchange their prisoners, but the governor has to let his
son join the pirates, with the remark that corsair life is ‘just the right career for
such a drunkard’. Back in Damietta waters, the pirates encounter a Maltese pirate
ship. In the ierce battle that ensues, the warden, somewhat miraculously, becomes a
Muslim, crying: ‘Hey community of the Muslims! Brothers! My name is Mahmud.’
It goes without saying that in the end his crew triumphs and the pirates capture
the Maltese ship. he adventures continue with battles and other encounters, and
in the end the pirates arrive in Tunis, where they are welcomed but have soon to
quit for Algiers, as the successor of the local magnate is afraid of Warden Mahmud.
And indeed, Mahmud and his followers leave Tunis, give the Tunisian lag back
and arrive in Algiers, stating that they decided to ‘make the [Algerian] ocak their
motherland’ [ocağı vatan edinmeye].26

26. In 1684, two brothers who had led from Tunis to Algiers launched a military expedition
against their homeland, an event that might be echoed in this adventure; Tietze, ‘Die Geschichte
von Kerkermeister-Kapitän’, p. 156.

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 Images of Piracy in Ottoman Literature

he story of the warden captain bears several similarities, both in its narrative
techniques and in its content, with certain of the storytellers’ [meddah] scenarios
or other adventurous, semi-folk tale stories, like the ones presented by Cinânî a
century earlier.27 he meddah tradition formed a common basis of themes and styles
that can be seen in many products of Ottoman literature, both ‘folk’ and ‘high’.28
Indeed, a manuscript collection of such scenarios from the mid-eighteenth century
contains references to Maltese piracy in the Mediterranean. A particular story
bears striking similarities with the story of Warden Captain Mahmud and might
indeed have been inluenced by it; one could also suggest that both narratives used
common stories circulating in Eastern Mediterranean harbours, perhaps about a
real corsair. he protagonist, Yusuf, is a rather despicable character who inally inds
happiness, as transpires in many meddah stories.29 At some point he goes to Egypt,
where a Bektashi dervish gives him instructions to go to Istanbul; Yusuf embarks
from Alexandria and falls prisoner to two Maltese galleons near Cyprus. Ater
nine days, as prophesised by the dervish, the ‘famous Musallî (‘devout’) Kapudan’,
coming from Algiers, captures both galleons, and Yusuf arrives safely in Istanbul.
At the end of the scenario, a note states that Musallî Kapudan was a real person,
famous in Algiers [Musallî Kapudan il-asl Cezayir’de meşhûrdur], while Yusuf was
also famous for his depravity and oppression. In addition, this scenario can be dated
in some detail as taking place before 1727.30 he textual relationships of such stories
with the tales narrated by Cinânî in the late sixteenth century are evident; obviously
there was a narrative background of storytelling which inluenced both folk and
elite literature.
In these early eighteenth-century texts, the pirate ethos is best presented – ater all,
here we have a narrative produced from among the sailors and corsairs themselves
and for a similar audience. Although the Muslim versus inidel dichotomy is always
present, it only constitutes a luid and porous barrier: the eponymous hero of the
novel, the warden captain, remains a Christian until the middle of the story; half
of the crew is Christian, even when ighting against the Maltese; and moreover, as
Cemal Kafadar noted, ‘he author has no qualms about using the word gaza for
the joint undertakings of the Christian and (freed) Muslim shipmates, including
himself, under the chietainship of the warden-captain as gaza even before the
latter’s conversion.’31

27. See Ö. Nutku, Meddahlık ve meddah hikâyeleri Ankara 1976; C. Kırlı, ‘he Struggle over Space:
Cofeehouses of Ottoman Istanbul, 1780-1845’, unpublished PhD thesis, Binghamton University
– SUNY, 2000, pp. 172 f.
28. See the lively dialogues in the work of Aziz Efendi (d 1798), where, notably, no mention of
piracy is to be found: A. Tietze, ‘Azîz Efendi’s Muhayyelat’, Oriens 1 (1948), pp. 248-329.
29. Cf. Nutku, Meddahlık, p. 139; Kırlı, ‘he Struggle over Space’, pp. 175-178.
30. Another note informs us that the story was in the repertoires of Şekerci Sâlih, Edirneli
Külâhî, Meddah Hasan and Mıyancı-zâde (Nutku, Meddahlık, pp. 184-185; see Ginio, ‘Piracy and
Redemption’, p. 136), and, according to another scenario in the same manuscript, Şekerci Sâlih
and Meddah Hasan had told diferent stories in 1727 and 1741 respectively (Nutku, Meddahlık, p.
181; on Şekerci Salih, see also ibid., p. 34).
31. Kafadar, Between Two Worlds, p. 83.

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On the one hand, this attitude relects the linguistic (at least) mixture in the
composition of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century pirate crews.32 Ater all, we
know from other sources how easily a prisoner could switch between religions and
change his luck even from that of a slave to that of a pirate commander.33 Furthermore,
these pirates belonged to a kind of frontier society that was wider than their crews:
to quote Elizabeth Zachariadou, they ‘constituted only its centre, since they had
around them almost all the inhabitants of the littoral and the islands, who were
indispensable collaborators’.34 Let us remember Evliya’s description of Santa Maura
and how the corsairs spent their spoils in the taverns of an essentially Christian
neighbourhood. he authors and audience of stories such as those described clearly
belonged to this enlarged corsair society.
On the other hand, one might speak of a re-emergence of the fourteenth-century
gazi-ethos: all the characteristics above remind us of the Düsturname, referred to
above. he striking attitude of the heroes against the Ottoman state (be it a realistic
rendering of the corsairs’ world view, a condescension to the supposed audience of
sailors and pirates-to-be or a narrative technique in order to exalt the might of the
Ottomans, feared even by the deiant corsairs) illustrates well, one might say, the
end of piracy as a quasi-state operation and the development of a new literary type,
with emphasis on adventurous swashbuckling rather than religious fervour. Again
in the words of Elizabeth Zachariadou, in the world of the Aegean ‘mentalities were
broad and [...] there was a distinction between creed and lifestyle’.35 It is exactly
this lifestyle that emerges in such a lively way in Ottoman literature from the late
seventeenth century onwards.

32. Bennassar and Bennassar, Les chrétiens d’Allah, pp. 215-216 and passim.
33. Ibid.; Zachariadou, ‘Changing Masters in the Aegean’, pp. 209 f.
34. Zachariadou, ‘Changing Masters in the Aegean’, p. 211. On these frontier societies, see E.
Kolovos, ‘Border(is)lands: he Ottoman-Venetian Frontier of the Ionian Islands (Late Fiteenth to
Late Seventeenth Century’, in A. Hadjikyriacou (ed.), Insularity in the Ottoman World, Princeton:
Princeton University Press (forthcoming).
35. Zachariadou, ‘Changing Masters in the Aegean’, p. 212. On eighteenth-century realities in
Ottoman seafaring, see Edhem Eldem, ‘Strangers in their Own Seas? he Ottomans in the Eastern
Mediterranean Basin in the Second Half of the Eighteenth Century’, Studi Settecenteschi 29-30
(2009-2010) [Piero Sanna (ed.), Il Mediterraneo nel Settecento. Identità e scambi], pp. 25-57.

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