With “the northern raid”, three researchers translated, for the first time in French, the stories of the attack by Corsairs of Salé and Algiers on the Icelandic coasts in 1627.
Karl Smári Hresson, an independent university researcher, was an assistant professor of Icelandic language and culture at the University of Maryland, in the United States. Adam Nichols is an associate professor at this same university, while Jade Carameaux-Jurewicz is lecturer at Montmorency college in Montreal, Canada. All three have just published, at the editions of the Croisée des Chemins, an amazing history book, accessible to all.
Stories kept for 400 years
In the summer of 1627, two groups of barbaric corsairs attacked Iceland, one from Salé and the other from Algiers. They two, they killed dozens of people and removed nearly five hundred others, taking their captives in the holds of their ships to North Africa, to be sold there as slaves. “The northern raid” tells the story of these raids and their consequences.
The work presents translations of the main Icelandic texts of the 17th century on the Tyrkjaránið (or “raid of the Turks”, as they are called, since at the time the Europeans called “Turkish” all Muslim). These documents, four hundred years old, provide not only detailed descriptions of the corsair raids themselves, but also what happened to the Icelandic captives after their transport in Salé and Algiers. Until the 19th century, these stories were copied by hand. The authorities of the island reserving the only printing press for religious texts, the Icelanders have a long tradition of handwriting, during the (very) long winter nights. The expression “scholarly peasant” has all its meaning there.
These stories of attacks and, then, the tales of the captives are particularly poignant. Some were released after ransom, others not. The honor of the three historians, by writing their work, is to have managed to treat their sources.
Certain passages, obviously, exaggerate very real sufferings. These are, for example, letters or stories sent to an ambassador or the court of Denmark – who then reigned on Iceland – to implore the payment of a ransom. A captured pastor was thus returned to Copenhagen to negotiate a takeover, since he was literate. But his wife and children stayed in Algiers.
However, the Danish kingdom was going through serious economic difficulties. The unfortunate Reverend ólafur Egilsson therefore crossed Europe, without money, before returning alone to Iceland, without family. His memories are one of the most famous stories. Scientific work therefore consists in crossing and assessing the plausibility of these texts. Thus a historical reality is drawn all the more interesting since it delivers at the same time glimpses on daily life in Salé and Algiers in the 17th century.
Renegades become raïs
The slaves were mistreated, as can be expected. Sometimes their owners were all the more violent since it hoped to motivate the payment of the ransom by some parent of the prisoner. No one had yet spoken of universal human rights. Interetatic relationships therefore took the form of bilateralism where only the law of the strongest prevailed. The ransom was a common practice in European courses as in the south of the Mediterranean, it should be remembered. It was a branch of diplomacy. He appeared, through these accounts with sometimes cruel details, that some captives, among the youngest, converted to Islam to be freed.
One of them will himself become a corsair. It is quite remarkable that the two raids on Iceland were led by Dutch “Muhtadûn”, from converts to Islam that Christians called “renegades”. The chief of the corsairs of Salé, during the attack, was thus Morat Reis, Islamic name of the famous Jan Janzoon Van Harleem. A British report from 1611 estimated that “40 ships and 2,000 men, all English”, wet “in Mamora in barbarism”, the current Mehdia.
During the previous decades, the Netherlands and England, in conflict with Spain, were based on their corsairs to compensate for the shortcomings of their navies. Peace returned between these three states, some makeshift gentlemen, wanting to continue the race, found safe ports in North Africa. They brought new ways to build boats, capable of facing the High Sea Océane, as well as a fine knowledge of the northern coasts, like those of Iceland. So many stories in history that deserves to be adapted to the cinema, although taking place far from the Caribbean.
Murtada Calamy / Eco inspirations
