The Story of the Barbary Corsairs

The corsairs of Algiers, Tunis and Tripoli from Barbarossa to the bombardment of 1816: the galleys, the slave markets, the tribute paid by Europe and the wars that ended it. Stanley Lane-Poole was an Orientalist who worked from Turkish and Arabic sources as well as the European ones. He is unsentimental about all sides, and the chapters on Christian renegades are the most surprising. Sixty plates of moonlit ships, sea battles and Crimean coastlines by painters including Ivan Aivazovsky and J. M. W. Turner carry the same Mediterranean light the corsairs sailed by.