00:00It's dawn. The year is 1627. A small fishing village sleeps on the coast of Iceland.
00:11No one hears the ships arrive. By sunrise, the village is burning.
00:19These raiders are not Vikings. They are not even from Europe.
00:23They have sailed 4,000 miles from North Africa just to steal people from the edge of the Arctic.
00:34History calls them the Barbary Corsairs.
00:38For 300 years, they enslaved over a million Europeans.
00:44And almost no one remembers their side of the story.
00:53Let's go back to the start.
00:55The year is 1516. Spain has just conquered Muslim Granada.
01:00Now, Spanish ships push into North Africa, seizing port after port.
01:06Local rulers panic. They cannot fight Spain alone.
01:09So they turn to two brothers from the island of Lesbos.
01:13The world will come to know them as the Barbarossa, the Red Beards.
01:18The brothers push Spain back.
01:21In return, they take the city of Algiers as their own.
01:24They pledge loyalty to the Ottoman Empire and gain its protection in return.
01:29Overnight, a coastline of raiders becomes something far bigger.
01:33Algiers, Tunis, Tripoli.
01:36The Barbary States.
01:38One of the brothers, Hayreddin, becomes the Ottoman Empire's Grand Admiral.
01:44In 1538, he faces a combined fleet from Spain, Venice, and the Pope at the Battle of Preveza.
01:54He wins. Completely.
01:58For decades after, the Mediterranean is, in the words of European sailors, an Ottoman lake.
02:05And Algiers grows rich.
02:09Its wealth comes from one industry.
02:12Ransom.
02:14Captured Europeans are sorted like cargo.
02:17The wealthy are held for payment.
02:19The poor, with no one to pay for them, are put to work.
02:23Many spend the rest of their lives chained to galley wars.
02:28European governments send negotiators to buy captives back.
02:32Religious orders go door-to-door, begging for ransom money.
02:37Families sell everything they own, just for one chance to bring someone home.
02:43But here is what most documentaries leave out.
02:47Under Ottoman law, this was not simple piracy.
02:51It was privateering, licensed, taxed, legal.
02:56And Europe did the exact same thing.
02:59English and French privateers raided ships under royal charters,
03:04almost identical to the ones used in Algiers.
03:07Here is the harder truth.
03:10Over three centuries, the Corsairs took roughly one million Europeans.
03:15In that same period, the transatlantic slave trade, run by Christian Europe,
03:20took 12 million Africans.
03:23Neither number erases the other.
03:26Both were real.
03:28Both caused real suffering.
03:30But only one became a footnote in pirate stories.
03:34The other became a crime remembered in every history book.
03:40By the late 1700s, the balance of power finally shifts.
03:45A young United States grows tired of paying tribute just for safe passage.
03:52It sends its new navy to fight instead of pay.
03:57Then, in 1816, a British and Dutch fleet bombards Algiers itself,
04:04freeing thousands of captives.
04:07Steam power and modern cannon make the old Corsair ships useless,
04:11almost overnight.
04:13By 1830, France invades outright.
04:18The age of the Corsairs is over.
04:22300 years.
04:24A million captives.
04:26Two civilizations.
04:28Each writing their own version of the truth.
04:31History is rarely as simple as pirates and victims.
04:35If a story like this one surprised you, hit subscribe.
04:43Hades and other stories.
04:43In a continuance, we'll see you next time.
04:44In the meantime, we'll see you next time.
04:46Tune out, see you next time.
