The 1570s marked the beginning of an age of pervasive piracy in the Mediterranean that persisted into the eighteenth century. Nowhere was more inviting to pirat

The stirring story of the seventeenth-century pirates of the Mediterranean-the forerunners of today's bandits of the seas-and how their conquests shaped the cla

In the early modern period, hundreds of thousands of Europeans, both male and female, were abducted by pirates, sold on the slave market, and enslaved in North

At last available in a modern, annotated edition, these tales describe combat at sea, extraordinary escapes, and religious conversion, but they also illustrate

Introduction: Mediterranean Captivities -- Qiṣaṣ al-Asrā, or Stories of the Captives -- Letters -- Divine Intervention: Christian and Islamic -- Conversion