patrick.net

June 20 marks a strange anniversary in Irish history. On that date in 1631, north African corsairs, or pirates, raided the village of Baltimore on the west Cork coast and took at least 107 of the villagers captive to be sold as slaves in Algiers.

Most of those abducted were part of an English settlement which had been established in the middle of a region that was part of the Ó Drisceóil clan territory. It was a part of the violent colonisation of that part of Ireland which had resulted in the victory of the English in the Nine Years War that ended with the Battle of Kinsale in 1601.

The Sack of Baltimore, as it became known, had a significance beyond Ireland as it was one of a centuries-old series of such raids by north African slavers on coastal towns and sea-going vessels. Those abducted were part of an estimated million or more Europeans who became slaves under the Islamic Ottoman Empire and its north African allies mostly between 1550 and 1750.

The Baltimore captives included 33 adult women, 54 boys and girls and 20 adult men. At most three were eventually ransomed years later. The men mostly were consigned to be galley slaves, sometimes never setting foot on land again. The women and female children almost invariably were sold into sexual bondage. Adolescent males were often castrated and sometimes also raped, as is apparently still the fate of males enslaved in Afghanistan and other Islamic countries.