The
Sack of Baltimore took place on June 20, 1631, when the village of
Baltimore, West
Cork,
Ireland, was attacked by the
Ottoman Algeria and
Republic of Salé slavers from the
Barbary Coast of North Africa –
Moroccans,
Dutchmen,
Algerians and
Ottoman Turks. The attack was the largest by Barbary pirates on either Ireland or Great Britain.
[1]
The attack was led by a
Dutch captain,
Jan Janszoon van Haarlem, also known as Murad Reis the Younger. Murad's force was led to the village by a man called Hackett, the captain of a fishing boat he had captured earlier, in exchange for his freedom. Hackett was subsequently hanged from the clifftop outside the village for his conspiracy.
[2]
Murad's crew, made up of
Dutchmen,
Moroccans,
Algerians and
Ottoman Turks, launched their covert attack on the remote village on June 20, 1631. They captured 107 villagers, mostly English settlers along with some local Irish people (some reports put the number as high as 237
[3]). The attack was focused on the area of the village known to this day as the Cove. The villagers were put in irons and taken to a life of
slavery in North Africa.
There are
conspiracy theories relating to the raid. It has been suggested that
Sir Walter Coppinger, a prominent Catholic lawyer and member of the leading
Cork family, who had become the dominant power in the area after the death of
Sir Thomas Crooke, 1st Baronet, the founder of the English colony, orchestrated the raid to gain control of the village from the local Gaelic chieftain,
Sir Fineen O'Driscoll. It was
O'Driscoll who had licensed the lucrative
pilchard fishery in Baltimore to the English settlers. Suspicion also points to O'Driscoll's exiled relatives, who had fled to
Spain after the
Battle of Kinsale, and had no hope of inheriting Baltimore by legal means. On the other hand, Murad may have planned the raid without any help; it is known that the authorities had advance intelligence of a planned raid on the Cork coast, although
Kinsale was thought to be a more likely target than Baltimore.
Some prisoners were destined to live out their days as
galley slaves, rowing for decades without ever setting foot on shore
[4] while others would spend long years in
harem or as laborers. At most three of them ever saw Ireland.
[1] One was ransomed almost at once and two others in 1646.
In the aftermath of the raid, the remaining settlers moved to
Skibbereen, and Baltimore was virtually deserted for generations.
Türkiye
Originally Posted by Dr_Maul
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