Algiers, 1600–1660

Dali Hassan, called Bou-Richa, came as pasha in 1599, after his predecessor was jailed in Constantinople for failing to pacify Kabylia. He favoured the French consul, de Vias, but the reis ignored him and seized merchants from Provence and Languedoc. When de Vias protested on Henri IV's orders, he was insulted and imprisoned.

On complaints to the Porte, Dali Hassan gave way to Süleyman, called the Venetian, who had some of the captured French ships handed back. He led the army into Kabylia himself in 1600 and came back to Algiers almost alone; the next year he was beaten again before Djemaa-Saharidj.

Khidr Pasha returned in 1603 for his third term. He kept 6,000 sequins the sultan had sent to repay French merchants and, in June 1604, sent galleys that sacked the Bastion de France, the French coral-fishing post on the eastern coast, killing or carrying off its people. Henri IV demanded satisfaction from the Porte.

The Porte sent Mehmed Pasha, a eunuch of about eighty, who had Khidr strangled as soon as he landed and seized his goods. When the French envoy came with the sultan's order, Mehmed backed it and refused to sign a false safe-conduct meant to lure the envoy's party ashore. The militia turned its fury on him.

The firman was read aloud in the divan. The janissaries rioted, deposed four aghas one after another for saying they would obey, and twice besieged the pasha in his palace. An old corsair captain calmed them, but the divan would not hear of the Bastion and would free French captives only for the Turks held at Marseille. Within the year Mehmed was dead; one account says he was tortured to death.

Savary de Brèves, Henri IV's ambassador at Constantinople until 1605, had won new capitulations from the sultan in 1604. Sailing home in 1606, he came to Algiers from Tunis with a sultan's officer and a firman ordering the reis to free the French captives, return their prizes and let the Bastion be rebuilt.

Si Amar, sultan of Kuku in the Djurdjura mountains, held the Kabyles who beat the pashas' columns in 1600 and 1601. Kuku looked to Spain: in 1603 two of its notables went to the court of Philip III. That year a Spanish landing from Majorca on the Kabyle coast ended in a massacre when a nephew of the sultan, won over by Süleyman, betrayed it.

Spain tried to strike Algiers itself. A French captain, Roux, proposed taking it by night while its garrison was away collecting taxes; Giovanni Andrea Doria, given the task, turned the raid into an expedition of seventy ships and ten thousand men. Delays brought him off Algiers only on 1 September 1601, and a storm drove him away without landing.

Mustafa Pasha followed the dead eunuch and strengthened the walls against a Spanish attack. In 1606 he marched on Spanish Oran and was routed by a sortie of its garrison; in Kabylia he did better, buying the garrison of Djemaa-Saharidj. He died of plague in 1607.

Rıdvan Pasha took over in 1607, the year Tuscan galleys sacked Bône. His government let the agent of the English Levant merchants open a counter at Stora and Collo, a coast the sultan had reserved for France; Brèves's protest won only a show of satisfaction. Under him the Dutch captain Danser was arming ships at Algiers.

Köse Mustafa, pasha from 1610, thanked Henri IV for helping the Moriscos expelled from Spain, but could not hold back the reis. He drove Kabyle raiders back into their mountains and entered Kuku. In the famine of 1612 the divan gave the Morisco refugees in Algiers three days to leave; many who stayed were massacred.

Hussein Cheikh, pasha from 1613, answered every French complaint by demanding Danser's cannon and the Turks chained in Marseille's galleys. An envoy of the sultan sent in 1616 to make peace got nothing. In 1617 Hussein was replaced, briefly by Köse Mustafa again, then by Süleyman Katania.

Süleyman Katania trembled before the janissaries. When the militia voted another raid on the Bastion, which Castellane had just reoccupied for the Duke of Guise, he did nothing, and its people were killed or carried off. The old consul de Vias went to court, and the French ambassador had Süleyman recalled.

Back for a second term in 1618, Hussein found the reis shaken by Neapolitan and Tuscan galleys and a French armament. Two envoys, Caynan Agha and Rozan Bey, went to France with Castellane, freed through the consul's efforts, and a peace was signed for Louis XIII on 21 March 1619. Its articles left out the cannon.

Simon Danser, a Dutch captain, reached Algiers about 1607 and, with other English and Dutch seamen, taught the reis to sail tall square-rigged ships; he was the first to lead Algerian ships out past Gibraltar. In under three years he took some forty prizes. Pardoned for freeing ten captive Jesuits, he sailed home to Marseille in November 1609.

Ivan de Veenboer, a Dutch privateer from Hoorn, served as an officer under Danser and stayed on when Danser left. Turned Muslim as Süleyman Reis, he had his own fleet by 1617 and in 1618 commanded some fifty ships in squadrons. He was killed by a cannonball in a fight off Cartagena in October 1620.

Jan Janszoon of Haarlem, another Dutch privateer, was taken off Lanzarote by Algerian corsairs in 1618, turned Muslim as Murad Reis and sailed with Süleyman Reis. He went on to lead the corsairs of Salé in Morocco but kept Algiers as a base, raiding as far as Iceland in 1627.

Danser gave the Duke of Guise, governor of Provence, two bronze cannon that the pasha's treasury had lent him. The divan demanded the guns and Danser's punishment; the court in Paris paid no attention, and Guise kept them as his own. The reis fell on French shipping, and by 1616 Marseille's losses passed three million livres.

Chérif Khodja, named pasha at the French ambassador's request, landed in July 1619 ready for peace. In March 1620 a Marseille crowd, enraged when an Algerian corsair murdered a Marseille crew, killed the envoys who had made the peace. The pasha and divan wrote for an explanation; when the answer was delayed, a riot dragged the French consul to the divan and the reis sailed for war.

A second Hızır Pasha, not the man strangled in 1605, replaced Chérif in 1621 and refused to treat with the English admiral. Two more pashas followed, Mustafa Koussor and Murad, of whom almost nothing is recorded; the historian Grammont thought they lived in deliberate obscurity.

Hüsrev Pasha, the third, led the janissaries from Constantine to Tlemcen to restore the taxes, beat the Kabyles and entered Kuku. He crushed a revolt at Tlemcen, its leaders flayed alive, and made war on Tunis, which had stirred up the tribes of the Constantine province; the war ended with an Algerian victory in 1628. Hüsrev himself died of plague about 1627.

Sir Robert Mansell, Vice-Admiral of England, sailed in October 1620 against the corsairs who were taking English ships. Off Algiers in December he bought back only some forty English captives. In 1621 he sent fireships into the harbour; they did little damage, the fleet was recalled, and the reis went on taking English ships.

With French trade ruined, Louis XIII sent Sanson Napollon, who landed in June 1626 as the king's envoy and Guise's deputy for the Bastion. Rivals spread word that his firman was forged, and the divan sent twenty officers to Constantinople to check it before talking terms. They came back in spring 1627 with orders to obey, and with a new pasha.

Hussein, son of Ilyas, came back with the officers in 1627 to replace the dead Hüsrev. The great divan demanded first the Turks in Marseille's galleys and Danser's two cannon, then promised to obey the Porte. In September 1628 the pasha and the militia chiefs signed the peace and the contract for the Bastion.

About 1630 Yunus Pasha replaced Hussein. The militia received him badly; an old man, he befriended the French vice-consul Blanchard but did nothing when the chiefs insulted Blanchard in the divan, and he governed, Grammont says, only by the leading men's tolerance. Hussein was soon back in his place.

Restored, the old Hussein was powerless. In 1633 the divan took the treasury out of his hands but still required him to pay the troops; when the money ran out, the janissaries came with their soup kettles overturned, the sign of mutiny, and threw him into prison.

Napollon left the pasha to presents and courted the agha, the janissaries' treasurer and the great reis at his open table. Marseille bought the cannon from Guise. On 17 September 1628 he landed with them and with Turkish galley slaves set free, and two days later the divan voted perpetual peace by acclamation. He was given the Bastion for life.

Napollon rebuilt the Bastion, La Calle, Bône and Cap Rose, and offered Marseille all the wheat it needed. The peace frayed in 1629, when a French royal ship seized an Algerian corsair off Salé and chained its crew; the reis began taking French ships again. In May 1633 he led a night attack on Genoese Tabarka, was betrayed, and was shot dead.

Ali Bitchin, an Italian renegade, had become chief of the reis and admiral of the galleys in 1621, and built his mosque in the lower town in 1622. He was among the captains Napollon fed at his table, with Ali Arabadji and others. Owning galleys and hundreds of captives, he was one of the men the peace depended on.

The Kouloughlis, sons of Turkish soldiers by local women, were kept from power by janissaries who feared them. Accused of plotting, they were expelled from Algiers in 1629. On 1 July 1633, while the reis were at sea, some slipped back in disguise and attacked; the Casbah's powder store blew up, the rebels were hunted down, and survivors fled to the Kabyles.

Murad, bey of Constantine for the pasha of Algiers, dealt with the tribes of the east through their great chiefs, and meant to be rid of the most powerful of them. In 1637, a few days after a new pasha reached Algiers, he struck.

Muhammad ibn Sakhri ibn Bu Okkaz was Shaykh al-Arab, the chief through whom the bey dealt with the Arab tribes of the south. Murad seized him by treachery and had him beheaded, with his son Ahmad and about ten leading men. Meant to secure the bey's power, the killings raised a revolt.

Ahmad ibn Sakhri, the dead shaykh's brother, raised the southern tribes to avenge him. The razing of the Bastion had cut the eastern tribes off from their trade and the money to pay their tax, and they rose with him; joined by Khaled, he ravaged the country round Constantine.

Khaled es-S'rir led the Kabyles of the Constantine province who refused the tax. In 1638 the rebels met Murad Bey, reinforced by four thousand janissaries from Algiers, at Guedjal and routed them; the beaten army had to go home the long way, for the Djurdjura too was in revolt.

Yusuf Pasha, who had paid heavily for his post, landed in July 1634 just after the French envoy Le Page and got the divan to let him negotiate alone. He blocked an exchange of Turks for Frenchmen, hoping to sell the French himself, and in 1636 used a scare of French attack to levy 500,000 piastres. Replaced in June 1637, he left with the money.

Ali Pasha, who replaced Yusuf in June 1637, was a weak man who never won any authority in Algiers. When a French squadron came that winter to reopen talks, the divan, the agha and the great reis decided, and the pasha could not hold to the peace.

Sanson Le Page, chief herald of France, was named Napollon's successor at the Bastion and sent to Algiers to free the French captives and revise the treaty of 1628. He landed in July 1634 with Father Dan and ransom money, and offered the 68 Turks held at Marseille for 342 Frenchmen. Outplayed by Yusuf, he left in September.

In November 1637 Le Page came back with the commander de Mantin's squadron, bringing the long-demanded Turks. A storm scattered the fleet; Mantin exchanged letters with the pasha, then sailed away, while another French commander, Chasteluz, took two Algerian grain ships with seventy Turks on his way in.

The Kouloughlis' defeat left the reis with no counterweight, and Ali Bitchin led them. He had two great houses, a mosque and bagnios holding over five hundred captives, and had married, it was said, a daughter of the sultan of Kuku. His friend Ali Arabadji, an earlier chief of the reis, had been made pasha of Tripoli.

When Le Page's letter reached the divan, men with kin in French galleys wanted a deal, but the great slave-owners, who would bear its cost, opposed it. Their leaders were Hamza Agha, Cigala and Ali Bitchin. News of Chasteluz's seizures settled it: on 8 December 1637 the divan declared the peace broken.

Ordered to destroy the French posts for ever, Bitchin sailed with the galleys and razed the Bastion and its outposts, meeting no resistance from men who knew nothing of the rupture; he brought back 317 prisoners. With the Bastion went the rent it paid towards the soldiers' wages.

Sultan Murad IV was at odds with Venice. Algiers' galleys went east in 1638, at his call by Algerian and French accounts, though Venetian records show them raiding Italy on their own. After Valona he jailed the Venetian envoy and promised revenge, then took a large Venetian payment, made peace and paid the corsairs nothing for their losses.

Sultan Ibrahim, Murad's brother and successor, gathered an armada given out for Malta and ordered the Barbary fleets to join it; the reis of Algiers refused. He sent officers to bring back the heads of Ali Bitchin and other leading captains. When the city rose for Bitchin, the sultan gave way and sent him a robe of honour and gold for sixteen galleys.

Marino Cappello, commanding Venice's galleys, found sixteen galleys of Algiers and Tunis, back from raiding Calabria, sheltering in the Ottoman harbour of Valona in summer 1638. After a month's blockade, in August he attacked and took or sank them all, freeing some 3,600 Christian rowers. Most of the galleys lost were Ali Bitchin's own.

Bitchin broke through the Venetian line and escaped, but lost most of his galleys, their crews and the friends he had counted on to rise higher. When the sultan paid nothing, the reis agreed among themselves never again to risk their ships for him, and they kept to it when Ibrahim called.

The officers sent for his head had to take refuge in Bitchin's own house, and he bought them off. With the pasha hiding in a mosque, the unpaid militia ruled that Bitchin now held power and must pay them, and gave him three days. Still 40,000 piastres short, he slipped out by night with his treasure to his father-in-law at Kuku.

When the sultan's money and gifts came, the crowd that had called for his death carried Bitchin back into Algiers in triumph, though the title of pasha was never his. Soon after a new pasha arrived, he died suddenly, in 1645; Algiers believed he had been poisoned. His brother inherited his wealth.

Ali Pasha's successor in 1640 died of plague within months, and Yusuf Abu Jamal took his place. In 1641 the divan sent him against Ben Ali, the rebel sultan of Kuku. He came back the next year with heavy losses and nothing gained, and the militia seized him and shut him in the Emperor's Fort.

Mehmed Bursalı, the next pasha, set his imprisoned predecessor free. Once the Djurdjura revolt subsided, about 1644, he marched against the tribes of the Hodna. When the sultan's officers came for Bitchin's head, the city blamed Mehmed for the order; he fled into a mosque and dared not come out, and the troops went unpaid.

With Bitchin dead, the sultan's pashas governed again for short terms: Yusuf from 1647, then Mehmed from about 1650. The change freed the French consul, whom the outgoing Yusuf released for 350 piastres instead of the 7,000 he had demanded. In 1654 the great plague began; in three years it killed about a third of Algiers.

Ahmed Pasha, who followed Mehmed, jailed and mistreated the consul when his creditors complained. From 1655 Ahmed and Ibrahim Pasha took the office from each other, apparently each riding a riot of the reis or the militia; the turnover changed the man, not the problem of paying the troops.

Ibrahim Pasha held the office in 1655–56 and again from 1657. In 1659, told he was being replaced, he sent 200,000 piastres to Constantinople and claimed a tenth of the money the sultan had sent the reis to bring them to his fleet against Venice. The reis and janissaries rose, seized him and threw him into prison.

The Duchess of Aiguillon, Richelieu's niece and a patron of Vincent de Paul, pressed the king, as Vincent later wrote, to give his Congregation of the Mission the consulates of Tunis and Algiers, so that their income could feed and ransom the Christian captives.

Vincent de Paul, who said he had himself been a slave in Tunis, bought the Algiers consulate from its absentee holder, Balthazar de Vias, with the king's leave, and sent the first members of the Mission to Algiers in 1646. He chose as consul a lay brother, Jean Barreau.

Jean Barreau, a lay brother still studying at Saint-Lazare, reached Algiers as consul in July 1646. Unable to refuse anyone, he stood surety for others' debts against Vincent's warnings. Pashas jailed him in 1647, from 1650 to 1652 and again under Ahmed; after the merchant Rappiot fled bankrupt, he was beaten and tortured until he signed for 2,500 piastres he did not have.

Vincent rebuked Barreau for running up debts and for spending money captives' families had sent, and by 1655 he was looking for a way to give up the consulates. Still he sent what he could, had Rappiot's ship seized at Livorno and won royal orders against the bankrupts. In Marseille a crowd accused the Mission of squandering the ransom money.

Khalil, a janissary officer, led the revolt against Ibrahim and was proclaimed agha. The grand divan stripped the pashas of all power to govern: the sultan's governor kept his title and some honours, while the divan, presided over by the agha, ruled. It heard the foreign merchants' complaints and lowered the customs duties.

Ali Pasha, appointed in 1659 to succeed Ibrahim, arrived expecting to govern and tried to use all the powers of his office. Khalil put him and his household aboard a galleon and sent them back to Smyrna, carrying the quarrel to Constantinople.

The new order soon turned on its maker. Khalil tried to stay in office beyond his term, and the senior officers of the militia killed him, traditionally in 1660; accounts of the date range from 1659 to 1661.

Ramadan Agha, chosen in Khalil's place, kept peace with the militia, had his term extended and pushed the corsair war harder than ever. He too was killed, in August 1661, said to have taken too large a share of a prize.

In Constantinople the grand vizier, Köprülü Mehmed Pasha, had the returning governor executed and wrote to the agha that no more governors would be sent. Algerian ships could no longer put in on Ottoman coasts, enlist men or buy grain there. Algiers' plea for pardon was refused; only Köprülü's son, grand vizier from 1661, granted an amnesty.