reigned over the world. The Latin writers named it the soul of the state, the jewel, speciositas totius terræ florentis; and the great men of Rome knew no refinement of luxury and effeminacy equal to that of possessing palaces and country seats along this smiling

shore.

"The climate of Barbary is mild and healthy, though the air, by its sharpness, is unfavourable to weak eyes and delicate lungs. The course of the seasons is generally regular; sometimes, indeed, the heats are excessive, but all the days of summer are refreshed by salutary winds from the north. Diseases are rare; the plague is not endemic; it is always brought from Constantinople. It has not raged there for twenty-four years, and might be excluded from all Barbary, by the use of the same precautions by which Europe is preserved from it. "In Barbary, heat, joined to humidity, gives vigour and magnificence to the productions of the soil. Barley is the principal harvest, and the chief support of man. Wheat, Turkey corn, and a species of large pease called garencas, likewise abound. The Indian fig, which takes root with extreme facility, forms impenetrable hedges, by which the gardens and vineyards are enclosed. The shoots of the vine rise to a great height; they extend from one tree to another, in the form of superb festoons. Plantations of olives are numerous and productive; there occur also certain thorny shrubs, the fruit of which, as to taste and size, resembles the olives of Spain. The wild olive grows without culture; the grenade is three times larger than that of Italy; the melons arrive at an enormous bulk; figs abound, as well as oranges, of exquisite taste; chestnut trees are not numerous, and the chestnuts are small, though good. Oaks rise to a great height; among these may be distinguished the Quercus ballota of naturalists; the natives eat the acorn, which resembles in taste the wild chestnut. It is found also in the south of Spain, and ought to be introduced into Italy. There is also a species of cypress, the branches of which rise, in a pyramid, to a prodigious height. Here is commonly found the almond tree, the silk-worm-mulberry, the Indigofera glauca of dyers, the cineraria of marshes, which is em

ployed against obstructions of the stone; the xenna, of which the Africans extract the juice, to stain the nails of the hands and feet; the Scilla maritima, the bulbosa, the radicata; the dwarf palm tree, the dates of which are very small; the Saccharum cylindricum, the Agrostis pungens, and, in the arid valleys, the Cistus odorata, the Erica arborea, and the superb Cactus, which supply to sheep a salutary pasture, and which embalm the air with the sweetest odours; the laurel rose embellishes and animates the country. When all is scorched by the heats of summer, the hillocks are covered with rosemary, which purify the atmosphere. We meet here and there little groves of those celebrated white roses, whence the purest essence is distilled. The sugar cane succeeds perfectly in this mild climate; the species called soliman is the loftiest and most juicy that is known on earth. After all, no fruit of this fertile land equals, in utility to the human race, those of the lotus and the palm-tree."

This magnificent country, this country so richly gifted by nature, so advantageously situated for the benefit of Europe, so celebrated in the annals of civilization, has been abandoned for three centuries to thirteen or fourteen thousand adventurers, enlisted in another quarter of the globe, strangers to Africa by their manners, their language, and their sentiments, and detested by its inhabitants, over whom they exercise a horrible tyranny. Those pirates who established themselves through the treason of the first Horuc Barbarossa, have kept their ground, to the shame of civilized nations; they have destroyed the arts, the sciences, the agriculture, the commerce, which threw a lustre on the courts of the Moorish sovereigns of Africa, in an equal degree, as on that of Grenada. They take advantage of their usurped sovereignty to arm piratical vessels, with which they threaten the coasts of Europe, plunder its ships, and reduce its inhabitants to slavery; they then employ the treasures, gained by robbery, in rendering the yoke heavier on the head of the unhappy Africans. When the nation which rules over the seas, impelled by the most outrageous provocations, resolved, at last, to crush the pride of the Dey of Algiers, her fleet gave only a barren proof of the na

tional valour; it burned a city which had taken no share in the crimes of the administration; then, instead of dictating laws to Africa, and breaking the yoke of foreign pirates, she acknowledged the Dey and his Turkish janissaries, as if they formed the legitimate government; she confirmed the slavery of the Moors and Berebbers, and she left to the nations which navigate the Mediterranean, no other guarantee but that of a treaty, of which it will be impossible to enforce the execution.

Europeans have to reproach themselves, not only with having allowed the Corsair states of Barbary to subsist so long, but also with having formed them to piracy by their own example. The Arabs, indeed, at their first establishment on the coasts of Africa, were urged on at once by fanaticism and love of glory; they appeared, on every occasion, as the aggressors in their wars with the nations of Europe. They wished to extend their conquests in all directions; at the same moment, they crossed into Spain, they founded colonies in Sicily, in Sardinia, in the Balearic islands, and they made frequent descents on the coast of France and Italy. But the Europeans had then no trade, while that of the Arabs was very extensive; the former were poor and barbarous, the latter opulent and civilized. A nation, rich, commercial, and skilful in all the arts, does not carry on piracy against one that is poor and ignorant, and destitute of a marine. The Arabs abused their superiority over the Christians, as the latter, in their turn, abused their su periority over the Negroes; but when they landed on any of the coasts of Europe, it was with the intention of forming a lasting settlement; and wherever they carried their arms, they introduced, at the same time, a superior civilization.

the arts and to protect agriculture; they had daily intercourse with the coasts of Italy and of Spain; Amalfi, Naples, Messina, and lastly, Pisa, Genoa, and Florence, were enriched by their frequent traffic with this fine country. The Venetian trade-fleet made annually the circuit of the Mediterranean; it touched successively at all the cities of Sicily, Africa, and Spain; and its arrival at each of the capitals of Barbary, became the signal of a fair regularly resorted to, not only by the inhabitants of the coast, but by the caravans of the desert. Thus, all the nations which inhabited the coast of the Mediterranean, derived benefit from that superb basin, which connects together so many climates, and facilitates the exchange of so many productions reciprocally useful.

After all, these hostilities were not of long duration; the empire of the Moors became split in Africa, as in Spain, among a great number of independent princes. An illiberal religion, and a despotic government, had hastened their decline, and they had ceased to be formidable before Europeans attempted to become so. Yet the numerous courts of Fez, of Tetuan, of Tremezen, of Garbo, of Constantine, continued to encourage

VOL. I.

Religious fanaticism, in the first years of the sixteenth century, occasioned the loss of all these advantages; the islands had been successively reconquered by the Christians, and the smallest arm of the sea was a sufficient barrier against the Turks, the Moors, and the Sultan of Egypt. The atrocious vengeance which the Christians exercised upon the coasts of the Turkish empire, for the success of the Osmanlis by land,-the ravages of Anatolia and Greece,-the reward of a ducat for every head brought in Christian vessels, promised by the Popes and the Venetian government, without distinction of age or sex, of peasants or soldiers, made the sultans of Constantinople feel the necessity of acquiring a marine. Mahomet II. began laboriously to form one, and was content that it should be rendered formidable by defeats. Yet his vessels, in fighting against the Christians, had constantly the disadvantage. The example of the Knights of St John of Jerusalem taught his successors, that the school of the imperial marine must be piratical warfare.

The religious order of St John of Jerusalem had at first opened an hospital for the pilgrims who went to the Holy Land; they had then been animated with a military zeal to defend the holy sepulch. When they were driven from Jerusalem by the Musulmen, and obliged to take refuge in Rhodes, they exchanged the land for the sea service, and armed gallies to form an escort to the pilgrims of the

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Holy Land, and, at the same time, to give chase to the Turks. In the year 1465, the republic of Venice engaged in a war with the Order, to protect its commerce with the Musulmen against the pillage of the Knights. The capture of Rhodes in 1522 constrained the latter to take refuge at Malta, and once again to change their destination. They converted the rock, which served as a retreat to them, into the centre of Christian piracy;they armed their gallies to chase every Musulman vessel. They would have thought it a breach of their religious vows to have pardoned an infidel. Their new abode removed them from the coasts of the Turkish empire, their ancient enemy, and brought them into the neighbourhood of the Moorish principalities, which had not offended them. But the Moors professed a reprobated religion, and this was a sufficient motive for war and hatred. The knights destroyed their commerce, burned their vessels, pillaged their fields, and fixed to the oars the unfortunate Musulmen sailors and merchants whom they surprised on the sea, or the peasants whom they carried off from the shore. The knights were formed, doubtless, by these expeditions, to the seafaring life; they displayed sometimes the intrepidity that distinguished them, but more frequently celerity of manœuvres, and talents for surprise and stratagem. In ceasing to be blinded by religious fanaticism, we are astonished at the power of prejudice which could hold out as the career of honour for the young nobility, this school of piracy, in which zeal for the faith afforded an excuse for cruelty, cupidity, and injustice.

The example of the Order of Malta was not lost upon the sultans. They found, in the Grecian islands, a numerous population, inured to a seafaring life; despotism had been yet unable to employ it in forming the imperial fleets; but Selim and Soliman encouraged their subjects to arin vessels to attack all the Christians, as the Knights of Malta attacked all the Musulmen. The life of a pirate, like that of a military partizan, presents to bold and enterprising spirits all the charms of independence. Men who would have exerted their very utmost activity to avoid being put on hoard the fleet of the Captain Pacha,

The

were eager to arm vessels themselves for this petty warfare, and excellent mariners were soon formed under the banner of the crescent. The two brothers, Horuc and Ariadeno, who bore each the surname of Barbarossa, distinguished themselves in this career. These brothers, particularly the second, founded the piratical republic of Algiers, in imitation of the Order of Malta. They even sancti fied piracy by religious fanaticism, and they promised to the soldiers who combated for the faith, at once the pillage of the Infidels upon earth, and a happy eternity in heaven. supreme power at Algiers, as at Malta, was reserved to the foreign militia, who came to serve for the honour of religion in both republics; the reigning soldiery was recruited by voluntary enlistinents in countries of the same faith, to the exclusion only of the country in which it reigned. In both, the militia reserved to itself the right of electing its chief; and the Dey, like the Grand Master, was, for the soldiers, the first among his equals; for the inhabitants, an absolute sovereign. Distinctions of birth were not known among the Turks, so that the proofs of nobility demanded at Malta could not be required at Algiers; yet the Ortes of Algiers were composed of freemen, while the Janissaries of Constantinople, and the Mamelukes of Egypt, are enfranchised slaves. As the Islamite religion made no virtue of continence, the Barbarossas could not bind their soldiers by a vow of chastity; nevertheless the government opposes their marriage, and studiously removes their children, the Chiloulis, from all share in the government. The republic of Zaporavian Cossacks, which the Turks say was founded in express imitation of the Order of Malta, went still farther; it absolutely excluded women from the countries which its soldiers inhabited, and whence they spread to ravage Poland, Russia, and all the shores of the Black Sea.

Thus was instituted the religious and military order of Algiers, but upon a far broader basis than that of Malta. A great kingdom was subjected to it; and a numerous population, considerable revenues, fortresses, ports distributed over a long extent of coast, rendered it much more formidable; besides, its rise was precisely

sea

at the era when the mercantile marine of the Christians had been greatly extended, while that of the Musulmen sunk along with their commerce; the prizes of the Algerines became every day richer, those of the Knights every day poorer and less numerous. The two rival military orders fought sometimes for the honour of religion; both, however, preferred an encounter with merchant ships, and we have met with a person who was in more than sixty engagements in a Christian galley, without recollecting to have once seen a man wounded on board.

We must not look for these details in M. Pananti's book. He gaily apologises for not having made the researches which his readers might perhaps expect, on the ground that nothing was less voluntary than his voyage to Algiers. The truth is, that in the pages which he has entitled, History and Revolutions of Barbary, he accumulates a great number of errors. But he has seen facts; he is instructive when he relates them, and we recognise, even in his narrative, features of resemblance between Algiers and Malta, which he never thought of, features which must always be modified by the difference between the religious fanaticism of the Turks and that of the Christians, and which seem sometimes to make one the caricature of the other.

"The Turks of Algiers," says he, are a foreign militia, come from Constantinople to defend the country, and to preserve it under the patronage and allegiance of the Grand Seignior of the Osmanlis. But this daring militia has found the power in its hands, it has refused to obey, and has become sovereign. These soldiers make and unmake the heads of the government; they occupy all the offices of state, they keep the Africans in slavery, they oppress them, and their daring character renders Algiers a theatre of revolutions, where blood never ceases to flow.

"Every two years the regency of Algiers sends vessels and commissioners to the Levant to obtain recruits, and thus fill the blanks which war, disease, and punishments, leave in the militia. They are drawn from the vilest of the populace of Constantinople, and from the greatest malefactors. They are so despised in the Levant, that no Turkish woman will

follow them into Barbary. But scarcely are they arrived in Africa, and attached to an insolent and domineering militia, when they assume an important air, take the title of Essendi, and have all the pride and arrogance of soldiers of fortune. However vain they may be of their power, they feel no shame of their humble origin; on the contrary, they seem proud of having risen so high from so low a station. A Dey said one day to a consul, 'My father salted tongues at Pera, my mother sold them at Constantinople; I ought then to know tongues; but I never met a worse than thine. Although these troops do not amount to more than twelve or thirteen thousand men, they hold in subjection five millions of people who abhor, but obey them. They deal, indeed, with a degraded race, who place their glory in humbling themselves, and who believe a man to be more honourable, the more he is a slave.

"The government of Algiers is a military republic, with a despotic chief. The administration is composed of the Dey, and of a council or assembly of the principal officers, called dowane, which we have turned into divan. But the constitution is now only a name; the whole authority rests with the Dey. It is a mixed government, and the worst of all mixtures. You see a turbulent election with all the symptoms of the most restless democracy, a prince invested with the most despotic power, an insolent aristocracy, composed of the principal officers of state; in short, a military government, with all its abuses, its violence, and its brutal ferocity.

"The chief of the Algerine government, named Dey, is always drawn from the body of Turkish soldiers; he obtains his post by election without a shadow of hereditary succession. Each soldier, at the death of the Dey, goes to the palace and gives his vote. Whoever is proposed, if he is not unanimously chosen, is excluded, and the operation is continued, till they come to a personage who obtains an unanimous vote. The elected person must be Dey, whether he will or will not, because all that happens on earth has been previously decreed in heaven, and no mortal is permitted to resist this supreme command. But a seditious fellow may raise his sword