What was the era of the Barbary corsairs (pirates) in Morocco?

The Barbary corsairs are one of those chapters of history that sounds like a swashbuckling legend but was a very real and consequential business for three hundred years. From the sixteenth into the early nineteenth century, privateers based along the North African coast — the 'Barbary Coast,' from the word Berber — raided shipping across the Mediterranean and out into the Atlantic. They seized cargo and, more lucratively, people: sailors and even coastal villagers from as far away as Iceland and Ireland, taken to be ransomed or sold. It shaped European fear of the southern sea for generations.

In Morocco, the great corsair port was Salé, the old town that sits directly across the river from Rabat, the modern capital. In the seventeenth century Salé became so independent of the sultan's control that it effectively ran itself as a corsair city-state, the so-called 'Republic of Salé,' with its own councils dividing the spoils. Its fleet, crewed in part by Moriscos — Muslims expelled from Spain who carried both navigational skill and a grievance — ranged astonishingly far. These 'Sallee Rovers' even turn up in English literature; Robinson Crusoe, in Defoe's novel, is captured and enslaved by them.

I find it gives real texture to a visit to Rabat and Salé. From the Kasbah of the Udayas, the cliff-top fortress at the mouth of the Bou Regreg river, you look out over the exact water the corsair galleys slipped through to reach the open Atlantic. The walls and the gun positions were built with this maritime threat in mind. Salé itself remains a quieter, more conservative town than Rabat, with a fine medina, and knowing its piratical past makes wandering it far more atmospheric.

The era closed slowly, then suddenly. European navies grew stronger, ransom diplomacy gave way to gunboats, and the young United States fought its first overseas wars — the Barbary Wars of the early 1800s — partly over exactly this. I am careful to keep it factual rather than romantic: this was a system built on raiding and captivity, sometimes called the trade in 'white slaves,' and it cut both ways with the Christian galleys raiding Muslim coasts too. But it is genuine, fascinating Moroccan history, and Salé wears it quietly to this day.