Pirate! The word itself, uttered under the right circumstances, was once enough to instill fear in the bravest of mariners. Virtually synonymous with theft, murder, rape, slavery, and mindless pillage, conjuring up all the worst things that humans have been known to visit upon one another throughout our long, troubled existence. Essentially, pirates and piracy have long been considered a plague upon humanity for those living along the world’s littoral. The absolute worst thing that could befall any coastal community.
While Hollywood seems enthralled with the piracy that took place for an extended period of time in the Caribbean, piracy has a long and ugly history on nearly every coast around the world. While the sources are unclear, the Sea Peoples that helped bring down the Bronze Age civilizations of the Eastern Mediterranean seem to have acted more-or-less like pirates. They arrived by boat, disembarked, raided coastal villages, killed local security forces, then embarked and sailed away with their loot. We’re talking 1200 BC here.
During classical antiquity, the 8th to 6th Centuries BC, the Phoenicians, Illyrians, and Tyrrhenians were all known for their piratical activities. The Phoenicians are more famous perhaps for the far-flung colonies they spawned—including the great city of Carthage. Yet as is often the case, when economic times turned hard, skilled mariners resorted to piracy to supplement or even replace lost income. Such appears to have been the case for the Phoenicians, earning themselves a fearsome reputation that continued long after their state had essentially been subsumed into other empires.
Likewise, the Tyrrhenians, inhabiting the coast of Italy and Sicily in the 6th Century BC, maintained a fearsome reputation for piracy that for a long time prevented even the intrepid Greek colonists from stepping foot onto the island of Sicily. Some scholars even believe that there is a link between the Tyrrhenians and at least one band of Sea Peoples from the previous epoch, making them potentially the longest serving pirates in history.
The pirates of Cilicia, along the southern coast of modern Turkey, made quite a name for themselves by kidnapping none other than a young and impetuous Julius Caesar. Apparently their demand for ransom offended the Roman captive, who urged them to more than double it. Caesar then sent his people to gather the ransom, promising the pirates that when he was freed he would hunt them down and kill them all. Which is, of course, exactly what he did. A wonderfully colorful story, it nonetheless indicates the extent to which piracy affected the lives of even Roman elites in the 1st Century BC.
In Asia, especially amongst the many archipelagos of East Asia, piracy was prevalent at different times along most coastlines. The most infamous and potentially far-ranging were the wako operating out of Japan’s extended littoral. The waves of wako that surged toward the Korean Peninsula, RyuKyu, and China ebbed and flowed with the economic conditions back home. When times were good, peaceful trade reigned supreme. When things got tight, however, these mariners seemed to turn to piracy with admirable, if frightening, agility. These pirate raids would lead to a pair of Korean punitive expeditions to the island of Tsushima, a long-time pirate haunt lying half-way between the Korean Peninsula and the Japanese island of Kyushu, an all but forgotten footnote to the military history of the region.
The endemic warfare of Japan’s Warring States Period (1467-1615) created an unparalleled economic crisis for the feudal lords living along the coasts and they lashed out seeking material success elsewhere. The constant raids they inflicted led, ironically, to the development of the potent Joseon Korean Navy innovations that would hamstring Japan’s invasion of Korea in 1592. They also led to the fortification and garrisoning of nearly every Chinese city within a day’s march of the sea.
Yet my favorite pirates, amongst them all, are the Illyrians inhabiting what is now western Croatia and Albania. These people were so committed to their craft—piracy, that is—that they invented not one, but two types of naval vessel to better carry out their raids. One of these, the Liburna, named for an Illyrian tribe inhabiting the area of modern Zadar, would come to be adopted as the primary warship of the Republican Roman Navy. With these tools, purpose-built for raiding, the Illyrians crafted a reputation for piracy and piratical activities along all coasts of the Adriatic Sea. In fact, it was this very activity that led to a total of three Roman invasions of Illyria which finally succeeded in bringing the lawless littoral under control in 168 BC.
Most of these civilizations known for their piratical activities seem to have followed the “trade or raid” model, wherein they traded peacefully when the economic situation allowed, but resorted to piracy when times turned hard. This is the same model often applied to raiding cultures elsewhere in the world, from the Mongols to the Apache, and so shouldn’t be linked only to the peoples living along the coast. Yet the range offered by sea-going vessels seems to have made the threat of pirate raids something special, forever seizing our imagination in a way that is difficult to let go.
A simple search for pirate-related movies gives some indicator of this phenomenon with standouts including “The Pirates of the Caribbean” series, “The Princess Bride”, “The Goonies”, any number of “Peter Pan” versions, and even “Muppet Treasure Island”. In fact, the Google search for “Pirate Movies” returned some 2 billion results! Yet neither Pompey the Great’s anti-piracy campaign of 67-63 BC nor the English crackdown of the early 18th Century ever completely eradicated the scourge of piracy from the world. Evidence for this is highlighted by multi-national anti-piracy operations off the coast of Somalia today, leading to the newest Hollywood contribution to pirate lore with “Captain Phillips”.
Piracy is a human condition, it seems, with us from the earliest of times until the present age. The span of piratical activities and depredations stretches verifiably over the course of 3,000 years of human history, and that threat of seaborne raiders continues today. No more or less a result of hard economic times as was the endemic border raiding of Central Asia or the American Southwest, piracy has nonetheless outlived those other violent phenomena and survived into the modern world.
The pirates of yesterday were armed with swords, muskets and cannon, wreaking untold havoc upon their victims. Today’s pirates carry iPhones, AK-47s, and operate social media platforms. I’ll let you decide which constitutes the greater threat.
M. G. Haynes
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