The battle of Trafalgar left the Mediterranean open to British shipping, but Great Britain had not yet gained incontestable mastery over the sea-lanes. The bitter struggle for control of Sicily and southern Italy between Britain, acting in support of King Ferdinand of Naples, and Napoleon’s armies, acting in support of Marshal Murat, who was trying to usurp the Neapolitan throne, reached a high point in July 1806 at the battle of Maida (a British victory, deep in Calabria).1 Maida demonstrated that Napoleon had been foolish in allowing so many troops to be pinned down in miserable conditions far from the areas in northern and central Italy he most wished to control. Earlier dreams of using Taranto as a base for controlling southern Italy and the entrance to the Adriatic and Ionian seas evaporated.2 Yet the British fleet was far more stretched than the story of its victories suggests. The British needed to keep open the channel of communication linking Malta to Trieste, for Trieste had become an important source of supplies from the Austrian empire, now that routes through Germany were blocked by Napoleon’s armies.3 And by 1808 the French seemed to be clawing back their control of the Mediterranean; they had re-established their fleet at Toulon, and there were fears of a naval attack on Naples and Sicily.
The British government wondered whether there was any point pursuing war in the Mediterranean. Other concerns intruded: the French were trying to take control of Spain, and with the outbreak of the Peninsular War attention shifted to formidably tough land campaigns in Iberia. How difficult conditions were can be seen from the size of the British fleet, which had plenty of other duties to perform close to England, in the Caribbean and elsewhere. On 8 March 1808 fifteen ships of the line lay under the control of Admiral Collingwood, Nelson’s capable successor; one at Syracuse, one at Messina and one off Corfu; twelve stood guard at Cádiz. These large warships were supported by thirty-eight frigates, sloops, brigs and bomb-vessels within the Mediterranean, most of which were patrolling and reconnoitring as far afield as Turkey and the Adriatic. In earlier stages of the Napoleonic Wars British naval strength had been even smaller: eleven ships of the line in July 1803, ten in July 1805.4 Compared to the massive war fleets of antiquity, or at Lepanto, the fleets of the competing navies at the start of the nineteenth century seem minute. On the other hand, British ships were demonstrably superior to French and Spanish ones, especially in fire-power.5 The British government constantly had to make choices about where to concentrate naval resources, and yet these decisions were made at a great remove in time and space from the fleets in the Mediterranean: proposals to blockade Tuscany, Naples and Dubrovnik brought its deliberations into the realms of fantasy.6
The British needed allies. Russian ambitions had been useful in providing naval help. By 1809 the British tried to harness the Albanian warlord Ali Pasha, in the hope that he would take the Ionian isles for them. They also tried to win the support of Greek rebels against the Ottomans, who were, though, instinctively hostile to Ali Pasha. And the British government was also afraid that excessive trouble in the western lands of the Ottoman Empire would weaken the Turks so much that their empire would implode. They did not want that to happen just yet, during a war with Napoleon on which the very survival of the United Kingdom depended. In the Mediterranean, the only way out of this conundrum was to occupy the Ionian isles and to place the Septinsular Republic under the protection of Great Britain. Admiral Collingwood landed with 2,000 men, whose mere arrival in the Ionian isles was sufficient to scare the French into abject surrender. Count Stadion, an Austrian minister, believed that Britain had now become ‘master of the Adriatic’.7
Great Britain had gained the prizes by the end of the Napoleonic Wars – Malta, Corfu, Sicily. Sicily became to all intents a British protectorate in the last phases of the Napoleonic Wars, between 1806 and 1815. King Ferdinand resented his dependence on British aid, but the British kept a tight hold on Sicily: they required naval bases there and they needed to obtain essential supplies for their fleet.8 The British presence on the island ensured that Murat did not dare invade in 1810, even though Napoleon had ordered him to do so, and even though he marched as far as the Straits of Messina.9 The British understood the need for a permanent presence in the Mediterranean in order to hold back the French, and especially to keep them out of Egypt and the routes leading to India. Despite a general fall in Mediterranean trade, a commercial mentality was also at work, and the markets of the Mediterranean would be even more attractive if Britain had unimpeded access to them. The Napoleonic Wars brought other dramatic changes. Napoleon’s extinction of the Venetian republic in 1797 was not greatly mourned in the rest of Europe; nor could the Ragusans persuade anybody to restore their privileges once Bonaparte had been defeated. The old Mediterranean commercial powers disappeared off the map.
The waning of Venetian and Ragusan commerce provided opportunities for the ships of other, non-Mediterranean, nations. Trade may have declined, but plenty of commercial opportunities remained. Sicily, it is true, had lost its age-old position as a great granary servicing the needs of the entire Mediterranean. The island’s population grew by about half during the eighteenth century, but much of this growth was concentrated in the cities, notably Palermo. Meanwhile, grain production fell, partly through a failure to maximize output and partly because land was going out of cultivation. The Sicilians had been exporting as much as 40,000 tons of grain each year in the seventeenth century, but climatic conditions worsened; the wetter climate of what has been termed a ‘Little Ice Age’ was only one factor, since Mediterranean producers faced competition from the Baltic and other regions.10 In the nineteenth century, British entrepreneurs such as Woodhouse and Whitaker encouraged vine cultivation in western Sicily, for the production of heavy Marsala wines. There were still goods that could most easily be acquired in the Mediterranean – coral from Sardinia and North Africa, dried fruits from Greece and Turkey, coffee exported via the Ottoman lands. The Danes, Norwegians and Swedes, fat from the proceeds of their northern trade, made their appearance off the coasts of North Africa, in the Barbary ‘regencies’ (so called because their rulers, variously known as deys, beys and bashaws, or pashas, were nominally the deputies of the Ottoman sultan). From 1769 the Danes had delivered ‘presents’ to the dey of Algiers, in return for protection of their shipping, though periodically the dey would decide he wanted larger donations, which he obtained by harrying Scandinavian shipping, and around 1800 these demands brought the Algerians and the Danes to the edge of war. Meanwhile, the bey of Tunis felt so insulted at the inferior quality of their presents that he seized some Danish ships in May 1800, and the next month sent some men to chop down the flagpole of the Danish consulate, setting off a brief war in which the Danes, and before long the Swedes, largely found themselves at his mercy.11
These problems were resolved through diplomacy. The beys and deys wanted presents, which kept their finances afloat. Their policy, the United States Congress was informed, was to tempt each nation into Mediterranean waters with new commercial treaties, and then to ‘break friendship with every nation as often as possible’.12 Too many agreements with European powers deprived the Barbary regencies of the chance to seize merchandise and captives from foreign ships. Captives could be ransomed, but they could also be used as diplomatic pawns, to secure presents; and while they lingered in filthy conditions in Barbary jails, they could be used as free labour (though officers were generally treated much better). Ratings were chained to the floor at night and, in Tripoli, received a daily allowance consisting of a biscuit made of barley and beans, full of impurities, some goat’s meat, some oil and water. Put to work building the walls of Tripoli, enslaved captives might be forced to work bare-headed in the hot sun, berated as ‘Christian dogs’ and lashed with whips.13 The North African rulers were aware, of course, that the Christian states would go to great lengths to gain the freedom of these men, and of the women who continued to be picked off the shores of Sardinia, Sicily and the Balearic islands.
There was a new nation whose ships provided novel opportunities for Barbary extortion: the United States of America. The American conflict with Tripoli was the first war fought by the fledgling union against a foreign power, and it led to the creation of an American navy.14 American writers presented the North Africans as uncivilized ‘barbarians’, which was easy to do when the commonly used name for the Maghrib was ‘Barbary’.15 The reports sent by American consuls in Tunis and elsewhere confirmed the belief that the beys, deys and bashaws were uncontrolled tyrants, whose attitude to the art of government could be judged from the beheadings and amputations that American envoys witnessed. George Washington expressed strong views about the Barbary corsairs in a letter sent to Lafayette in 1786:
In such an enlightened, in such a liberal age, how is it possible the great maritime powers of Europe should submit to pay an annual tribute to the little piratical States of Barbary? Would to heaven we had a navy able to reform those enemies to mankind, or crush them into non-existence.16
He failed to foresee that the United States would soon join the powers of Europe in making such payments to the Barbary states.
The idea, mooted by several historians, that the American war against the Barbary states was fought as a Christian struggle against Islamic ‘barbarism’ does not match the evidence. As Frank Lambert has written, ‘the Barbary Wars were primarily about trade, not theology’; the treaty of 1797 between the United States and Tripoli stated explicitly that the United States was not constitutionally a Christian country, and President Madison was convinced that this statement had eased relations with Muslim North Africa, by removing religious differences from the issues under contention.17 For, ‘rather than being holy wars, they were an extension of the American War of Independence’.18 On paper, the War of Independence had ended in 1783 with the British recognition that the thirteen colonies had broken loose from the Crown. In reality, there were many unresolved issues, especially the right of American shipping to trade freely across the Atlantic and within the Mediterranean. The principle that citizens of the new nation should be greeted in foreign ports on the same terms as the old European nations was one for which the Americans were willing to fight. Great Britain had seen the American colonies as an integral part of a closed colonial system in which its trans-Atlantic possessions would provide Britain with raw materials and at the same time absorb the growing output of British industry. The whole system was protected by a web of commercial taxation typical of the mercantilist outlook of the eighteenth century. American opposition was expressed in the famous Boston Tea Party of 1773; it proved very difficult for either side to disengage from this relationship. In 1766, ten years before the American Revolution, the Pennsylvania Gazette reported that ‘a Bond for a Mediterranean Pass’ approved by the British authorities was contemptuously set alight in a coffee house in Philadelphia.19
For the Americans, trading towards the Mediterranean posed two sets of problems, though they were intertwined. Even after 1783, British ports such as Gibraltar might be reluctant to host American ships, and British captains might seize any opportunity to arrest American shipping – British captains were especially keen to press American crews into British service, especially while Great Britain was at war with France. British politicians such as Lord Sheffield saw the Americans as potential trade rivals who could undermine Britain’s commercial supremacy, though it was noted that their chances of making a success of Mediterranean trade were limited, thanks to the Barbary corsairs. The second problem was that of relations with the rulers of North Africa: the Americans sought free access to their ports, and they also sought assurances that their ships would not be attacked on the high seas by corsairs from Algiers, Tunis and Tripoli. Jefferson to all intents agreed with Lord Sheffield, observing that the Europeans already had a large presence in the Mediterranean, but the Americans would have to creep in through narrow straits where pirates ‘could very effectually inspect whatever enters it’.20
It was clear, then, that American trade with the Mediterranean could never compete in volume with that of the established European powers, especially France, which played the leading role in Mediterranean commerce at the end of the eighteenth century. Nevertheless, American intervention had very significant consequences for the Barbary states, reshaping their relationship with the non-Muslim naval powers. The Barbary Wars were the first phase in a series of events that culminated in the French conquest of Algeria from 1830 onwards. Among the principal actors was the Bacri family, Jewish financiers who operated out of Algiers; as well as bankrolling the dey, the Bacris traded towards Livorno and maintained close commercial ties with co-religionists in the British bases at Gibraltar and Minorca. Their influence at the court of the dey is all the more surprising because American observers acknowledged that the Jews were ill-treated in Algeria. But the dey realized that he could use the Jewish bankers as intermediaries in his dealings with the Europeans, and that they were totally at his mercy. The dey of Algiers executed David Coen Bacri in 1811, after a rival Jewish leader, David Duran, whose ancestors had arrived from Majorca following the pogroms of 1391, ruthlessly accused him of treason. Duran hoped to lever himself into Bacri’s seat of honour, but soon met a similar fate.
Thus a small elite of Jewish families remained close to the dey, occasionally attracting hostile comment from figures such as the American consul in Tunis, William Eaton.21 In 1805 Eaton addressed an appeal to the inhabitants of Tripoli, informing them that the Americans had given their support to a rival claimant to the office of bashaw. He begged them to realize that the Americans were ‘people of every nation, every tongue and every faith’, who lived ‘at the uttermost limits of the West’. The present bashaw, Yussuf Karamanli, was, he said, a ‘base and perjured traitor, whose naval commander is a drunken renegade, and whose principal counsellor is a grasping Jew’. The naval commander, Murad Reis, was virulently anti-American; he arrived in Algiers as Peter Lisle, a Scot with a fondness for liquor, converted and married the bashaw’s daughter, without, however, abandoning strong drink.22 ‘Be assured,’ Eaton wrote, ‘that the God of the Americans and of the Mahometans is the same; the one true and omnipotent God.’23 He found Tunis and its neighbours an impenetrable world. In one sense it was an enlightening one, however. He questioned the justice of slavery when he saw the white and black slaves who abounded in Muslim North Africa:
Remorse seizes my whole soul when I reflect that this is indeed but a copy of the very barbarity which my eyes have seen in my own native country. And yet we boast of liberty and natural justice.24
Eaton noted that in Tunis, as in Algiers, there were Jewish merchants who seemed to dominate trade. He described a Jewish trading company, the Giornata, that paid the bey of Tunis 60,000 piastres each year and possessed a ‘factory’, or warehouse, at Livorno. He asserted that 250,000 hides were exported from Tunis each year, as well as vast amounts of wax. In addition, oil, wheat, barley, beans, dates, salt and livestock (including horses) were sent to Europe; while the war between France and England was at its height, the Ragusans acted as carriers, benefiting from the special status of Dubrovnik in its last years as a tributary of the Sublime Porte. Meanwhile, the souks of Tunis were hungry for exactly the goods the Americans could bring to North Africa: ‘muslins, stuffs, fine cloths, iron, coffee, sugar, pepper, and spices of all kinds, bleached wax candles, cochineal, dried fish, and lumber’. He predicted that they would fetch three times the price in Tunis that they would command in the United States.25 His comments show that he had in mind not just direct trade between the United States and North Africa, but a role in the carrying trade of the Mediterranean and the Atlantic. His account confirms the lack of manufacturing industry in Tunis, Algiers and Tripoli; even candles needed to be imported, despite the export of prodigious amounts of wax. However, the lack of good quality wood in North Africa remained a serious problem, especially for states that launched their own pirate fleets. To some extent this was resolved by the purchase or seizure of foreign ships, but the Barbary fleets had been shrinking since the late seventeenth century, under British and Dutch pressure; by 1800, each state was lucky if it could mobilize a dozen corsair ships. To the trade in North Africa could be added trade in other corners of the Mediterranean, only possible while the United States enjoyed peace with the Barbary regencies. Thomas Jefferson recorded substantial exports of American wheat and flour into the Mediterranean, as well as rice and pickled or dried fish, enough to furnish the cargo of up to 100 ships each year; but ‘it was obvious to our merchants, that their adventures into that sea would be exposed to the depredations of the piratical States on the coast of Barbary’.26
From the moment of independence, the United States tried to address the problem of the Barbary corsairs. In May 1784 Congress authorized negotiations with the Barbary states. The Moroccan sultan was the first ruler to recognize the independence of the United States. The Americans signed agreements with Morocco, Algiers, Tripoli and Tunis between 1786 and 1797. In the agreement with Algiers, of December 1794, the United States promised the dey $642,500 at once and naval stores each year worth $21,600, including powder and shot, pine masts and oak planking; they also presented him with a golden tea-set. This was a marked change from the terms originally demanded by the dey: $2,247,000 in cash and two frigates with hulls sheathed in copper. Even so, difficulties continued when the dey complained that the money he was owed had not arrived, so it became necessary to offer him a new gift – ‘a new American ship of 20 guns, which should sail very fast, to be presented to his daughter’ – but the dey successfully demanded a 36-gun ship instead.27 The North African rulers constantly berated the Americans and Europeans for the poor quality and insufficient quantity of the goods they were supposed to receive. The Christian powers did cut corners, for they saw these demands as nothing but bare-faced robbery.
In 1800 the George Washington, a bulky American man-of-war converted from an East India trading vessel, arrived in Algiers harbour carrying the gifts expected by the local ruler, along with sugar, coffee and herrings. Following the usual complaints that American presents were in arrears, the dey summarily demanded that the captain should sail to Constantinople with an Algerian envoy; the captain felt too intimidated to refuse. His bizarre cargo has been described as a ‘Noah’s ark’: it included not just horses, cattle and 150 sheep but four lions, four tigers, four antelopes and twelve parrots, and he also carried 100 black slaves who were being sent to the Ottoman sultan as tribute, as well as an ambassadorial entourage of as many people. The captain was ordered to fly the Algerian flag, though he soon reverted to that of the United States; it was reported that the sailors, in mockery of Islam, swung the vessel about during Muslim prayers so that the worshippers could no longer tell in which direction Mecca lay.28 The Americans were mortified to learn of their humiliation in their own newspapers, but, precariously, relations with the dey had been preserved. While relations with Algiers remained afloat, even if low in the water, those with Tripoli deteriorated as the bashaw demanded further tribute. On failing to receive any, he sent his men to the American consulate to chop down the flagpole bearing the Stars and Stripes, and then sent out ships to hunt for prizes; as well as a captured Swedish vessel, his flotilla included the Betsy of Boston, seized from the Americans a few years earlier and renamed the Meshuda.29
This was a period, between October 1801 and May 1803, when France and Great Britain were at peace, and the Americans and Scandinavians were seeking to exploit the relative quiet of the Mediterranean for purely commercial reasons. But the Barbary states again and again stood in their way, and the United States, for the first time, felt itself being pushed towards war with a foreign power. In 1802 the Swedes, with grievances of their own, gladly joined the Americans in a blockade of Tripoli. This conflict was already spilling over into something larger, and its range was extended still further when the Moroccan emperor, irate at an American refusal to guarantee free passage for his ships carrying grain to Tripoli, declared war on the United States.30 Then, in October 1803, the frigate USS Philadelphia, which was taking part in the blockade of Tripoli, ran aground while pursuing a Tripolitanian vessel. It was captured by the bashaw’s men, along with its crew of 307. The bashaw thought he could use this opportunity to extract $450,000 in ransom money. The commander of the American fleet, Preble, was still committed to a military solution, and was convinced that possession of the Philadelphia by his foes would give them the advantage they needed at sea: even in peacetime the Philadelphia would be used in corsair raids, or as a bargaining counter to squeeze more money out of the Americans and Europeans. The ship had to be destroyed or, better still, recaptured. A daring plan was drawn up for a night-time attack on the ship, and the ketch Intrepid was sent into Tripoli after nightfall on 16 February, impudently flying the British flag, under the command of Lieutenant Stephen Decatur. The Intrepid argued its way into Tripoli harbour: the harbour pilot was hailed in lingua franca and told that the vessel was bringing in provisions. Meanwhile, the Tripolitanian fleet remained sleepily unaware of what was happening. Decatur fought his way into American legend by leading the attack, rendered easier by the rapid flight of most of the enemy. Realizing that they had no chance of sailing it back to their own lines, the Americans set the Philadelphia alight within a quarter of an hour of taking it. All of Tripoli is said to have been illuminated by the blaze.31 A later attack on Tripoli harbour, in August 1804, brought Decatur still greater fame: he was said to have searched out a vast Turkish Mamluk who had killed his brother earlier that day; he grappled with the giant, not giving way even when his cutlass broke, and finally (after his life was saved by a selfless sailor who parried the mortal blow intended for Decatur) he managed to shoot the Turk at close quarters. The event was celebrated in paint and print throughout the United States. It showed how American courage triumphed over brute force, the small, free and resolute Decatur over the dark and ugly Mamluk slave. This small victory in Tripoli added immeasurably to American self-confidence.32
Even so, they were unable to break the bashaw’s will, and the Americans now adopted a very different plan, long advocated by William Eaton. Eaton sailed to Alexandria in search of Hamet, the claimant to the throne of Tripoli, who had been pushed aside by his younger brother Yusuf. Eaton found himself leading an army of men (mainly Arabs) overland from Egypt to Tripoli, in tough conditions. It took six weeks to march 400 miles, as far as Derne, a coastal city thought likely to accept Hamet as its ruler. In the end, the United States failed to install him in Tripoli, but the mere threat of Hamet’s return forced the bashaw to negotiate. He was willing to agree to modest terms, in no way comparable to the fortune other North African rulers had extorted – a $60,000 ransom payment.33
Algiers proved more intractable. In 1812, aware that war had broken out between the United States and Great Britain, the dey of Algiers decided to place further pressure on the Americans, who would not now be able to mobilize a fleet in the Mediterranean. He insisted that the presents brought on board the Allegheny were of poor quality: for example, he had asked for twenty-seven large-diameter ropes and was only given four. He demanded $27,000, and, when the Americans refused, he expelled them, subject to payment of that amount, which the consul, Lear, had to borrow at 25 per cent interest from the Bacris.34 The Algerians had meanwhile brought home the captured American brig Edwin, engaged in contraband trade through Gibraltar in support of the British army in Spain (and in ignorance of the severe deterioration in Anglo-American relations). The crew of the Edwin was held in Algiers along with the ship, and the United States government, preoccupied with war on its Atlantic seaboard and in Canada, resolved to send an envoy to the Maghrib, in the hope that negotiations might still succeed. Mordecai Noah was appointed consul at Tunis. He was a remarkable figure, keen to show his fellow-Jews that they had a place in American society, who talked of encouraging the ‘Hebrew nation’ to bring its funds across the Atlantic from the Old World, to the general benefit of all Americans. The American administration knew all about the Bacri family, and Noah might provide a valuable means of access to the dey through his co-religionists. In winter 1814 he passed through the Straits of Gibraltar, cultivating links with the Jewish community of Gibraltar, and obtaining from one of its leaders a letter of introduction to the Bacris. But he was able to secure the release of only a handful of the American captives.35
President Madison was not a warmonger, but the United States had tasted blood in the war against Tripoli, and saw war against Algiers as the second phase in a conflict that would put an end to the importunings of the Barbary rulers. On 17 February 1815 the United States and Great Britain made peace; a week later, Madison requested Congress to declare war on Algiers, and the Americans assembled the largest fleet they had ever put together (numbering only ten warships). The national hero Stephen Decatur was placed in charge of the expedition.36 He amply fulfilled expectations, seizing several Algerian ships well before he reached Algiers. He was thus in an excellent position to dictate terms to the dey, who was quite new to office (the two previous deys having been assassinated). When the dey’s envoy asked Decatur for time to think about the terms of the treaty the Americans wished to impose, Decatur answered: ‘Not a minute!’37 A treaty with Algiers was followed in swift succession by treaties with Tunis and Tripoli. The Algerian treaty provided for the return of American captives, and it regulated the functions of the American consul, but its real importance in the history of the Mediterranean lies in the second article: there were to be no presents or tribute payments ever again. This was the great achievement of Decatur’s expedition. A precedent had been set and its importance was well understood by the European powers; they viewed the United States with far greater respect than ever before. The Americans congratulated themselves – John Quincy Adams wrote: ‘our naval campaign in the Mediterranean has been perhaps as splendid as anything that has occurred in our annals since our existence as a nation’. That was not very long, but this made the victory with a brand-new navy all the more impressive.38 The victories against the men of Barbary were a defining moment in the emergence of an American identity.
A new order was coming into being in the East as well. By 1800, the Ottoman sultan found that his Egyptian and Greek subjects were becoming unmanageable. The warlord Muhammad Ali took advantage of the chaos created in Egypt by Napoleon’s arrival and withdrawal to overthrow the Mamluk functionaries of the Ottoman state and to install himself as ruler in 1805. Although he acknowleged Ottoman suzerainty and officially functioned as viceroy, he was very much his own master. He was an Albanian who spoke Albanian and Turkish, not Arabic, and he looked beyond the Ottoman world, seeking to draw on the learning and technology of western Europe, especially France – he was for Egypt what Peter the Great had been for Russia. He saw economic improvement as the key to the success of his plans, taking the land into state ownership and building a war fleet. These policies recall in almost uncanny detail the policies of the Ptolemies 2,000 years earlier. He encouraged new agricultural schemes, including irrigation projects, for he recognized the strength of demand in western Europe for good-quality cotton, but he was also keen to establish an industrial base, so that Egypt did not simply become an exporter of raw materials to richer nations.39 His ambition was to bring to Egypt the benefits of the economic expansion that was transforming Europe at the start of the nineteenth century. He could see, for instance, to what poverty Alexandria had been reduced: the city had shrunk in size and population so that it was now little more than a village; its long-distance trade was not very significant. Its revival began under Muhammad Ali with the arrival of immigrants from all around the eastern Mediterranean: Turks, Greeks, Jews, Syrians.40
Muhammad Ali’s growing assertiveness was expressed during the 1820s in his attempts to gain recognition of his authority over Crete and Syria. If he wished to make Egypt into a modern naval power, the viceroy would need access to good supplies of timber and, as in past millennia, this meant he would have to gain control of well-forested lands. The difficulty that faced him in the 1820s was that the Ottomans were proving even less successful in managing their European lands than they were in managing their African ones. In 1821 revolts broke out in the Morea, where geography favoured the rebels, who soon controlled the countryside, leaving the Turks in charge of naval bases at Nafplion, Modon and Coron. Even so, the Turks did not maintain command of the seas. Islands such as Hydra and Samos became the new focuses of resistance. The Greek merchant communities, increasingly active since the seventeenth century, cobbled together a war fleet mainly consisting of merchant ships armed with cannon. One Greek fleet possessed thirty-seven vessels, another a dozen, both under commanders from Hydra. By late April these Greek sea-dogs had captured four Turkish warships, including two men-of-war, giving the Greeks the confidence to patrol the Aegean and to confront the Turkish fleet in the approaches to the Dardanelles; although the Greek fleet proved no match for the Turks, the Greeks retreated without serious loss. By 1822 the Turkish government had become exasperated by Greek sea-raids, and mobilized a much larger Turkish fleet mainly brought from the Barbary states. In April the Turks intervened in Chios, where a Greek expeditionary force was trying to capture the citadel. The Greek force was chased away and the Turks went on to massacre much of the population, in a bloodbath that understandably found its way into the heroic history of Greek opposition to the Turks, and provided a powerful theme for a painting by Eugène Delacroix.41 The Greeks riposted in kind: they massacred the Muslims and Jews of Tripoli in the Morea five and a half months later. Over the centuries many Greeks had turned Muslim and many Turks had become Hellenized. The massacres and ethnic cleansing of the Graeco-Turkish wars, which continued for a century and a half, were thus based on a tragic denial of the common heritage of Greeks and Turks in the eastern Mediterranean.
This did not, however, impede observers in Great Britain, France and Germany from celebrating the success of the Greeks, seeing in them the heirs of the classical world whose history, philosophy and literature they studied at school. Governments might be more cautious about giving their support to the rebels: the British government, pragmatically, wondered whether the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire was desirable just yet, a view shared by Muhammad Ali, though few imagined it had very long to last. The problem was that the break-up of the Balkans would alter the whole balance of power in Europe, the delicate mechanism known as ‘the Concert of Europe’ created in the aftermath of Napoleon’s final defeat at Waterloo. One source of concern was Austria, which protected its commercial interests by maintaining a larger fleet of warships (twenty-two) in the eastern Mediterranean than did Great Britain. The Austrians were compromised in the eyes of the Greeks by their willingness to trade with the Turks, though all they were doing was continuing the age-old commerce between Dalmatia and the eastern Mediterranean by way of Dubrovnik and its neighours.42 Only in 1827 did the European powers send substantial aid to the Greeks. Meanwhile, Muhammad Ali saw the Greek rebellion as a chance to pick some ripe plums for himself, and decided to send a fleet towards Greece early in 1825. He intended to win Crete, Cyprus, Syria and the Morea for his personal empire, and imagined that he could hold Greece if he summarily expelled the Greeks and repopulated southern Greece with Egyptian fellahin. His aim, then, was domination over almost the entire eastern Mediterranean. He spared no expense, sending sixty-two vessels to the waters east of Crete, in the hope of knocking out Greek naval forces in the southern Aegean.43
In October 1827, when negotiations between the contending parties were already under way, a fleet of twelve British, eight Russian and seven French ships standing off Navarino became entangled almost by accident with an Ottoman fleet of about sixty vessels drawn from Turkey, Egypt and Tunis, including three large battleships (their opponents possessed ten). Despite an armistice, the Turks refused the allied fleet entry into Navarino Bay. The allies decided that a show of force was needed, and this developed into a full-scale battle within the bay, in which the Turkish fleet was smashed to pieces. Some Turkish boats escaped towards Alexandria; others were scuttled. The allied fleet, especially the British, Russian and French flagships, suffered damage too, and 182 men were killed. The allies did not quite know what to do with their victory – the Ottoman sultan riposted by declaring holy war against the unbelievers, and the British and the French, aware of chaotic infighting among the Greeks, sent their own ships against independent-minded Greek captains who continued to make a nuisance of themselves.44 But the battle of Navarino was a vital step towards securing a treaty in which the independence of southern Greece, under loose Ottoman suzerainty, was recognized in 1828. Muhammad Ali now realized that the best hope for the future lay in the reinvigoration of trade with Britain and France through Alexandria, so in the next few years he improved the shipyards and capitalized on the Mahmudiyya canal linking Alexandria to the Nile Delta. It had been constructed ten years earlier.45 Now it was time to enjoy its benefits.
The French invasion of Algeria was also the result of unpredicted events, at the heart of which lay not, as might be expected, the activities of the Barbary corsairs, but the finance house of the Bacri. The French had never taken much interest in the accumulated arrears in payment owed for Algerian grain, which had fed the French army since the start of the Revolutionary War. By 1827, the Bacris were short of money and insisted that the Algerian government should cover their debts until the French paid what was due. The dey was convinced that the Bacris and the French were colluding in an attempt to squeeze money out of him.46 Recent history showed, of course, that the deys were much more enthusiastic about squeezing money out of other people. The dey was also suspicious of the French because they had started to fortify two of their trading stations in Algeria. So on 29 April 1827 an argument between the dey and the consul broke out, during which the dey became so irritated that he hit the French consul in the face with a fly-swatter. The French reaction was to demand a gun salute in honour of the French flag, but the dey was unwilling even to contemplate this symbolic act, and unleashed his privateers against French shipping. By summer 1829 the French were blockading the port of Algiers. Even so, they did not see the conquest of Algeria as the obvious solution to their problems, thinking at first that it might be best to let Muhammad Ali take charge, in view of his pro-French leanings.
The merchant community of Marseilles pressed several commercial arguments in favour of the conquest of Algiers: during the blockade trade with Algeria suffered, while the Greek rebellion against the Turks had interfered with French business in the Levant. The Marseilles businessmen wanted a safe and secure trading partner, lying under French control. It was obvious that Algiers, due south of Marseilles, should be the target. And it proved a very easy conquest. The dey went into exile in Naples in July 1830, though he had to leave most of his money behind. The lesser cities of the Algerian regency, Oran and Constantine, were assigned to friendly Tunisian princes – after nearly 300 years of occupation, the Spaniards had decided that Oran was too expensive to hold, selling it to the Muslims in 1792.47 Still, the French were far from clear in their own minds about what they wanted to do with Algeria. They found themselves attacking targets in western and eastern Algeria: the ruler installed in Constantine had his own ideas about how his town could develop as a centre of trade with the Europeans, and there was trouble in Annaba, east of Algiers. In the 1830s, they were being dragged deeper into Algeria than they had anticipated. The Ottomans were unwilling to offer any comfort to North African rulers who appealed for support, partly through lack of resources and willpower. And yet, despite endemic conflict in several provinces, Algeria attracted colonizers from France and Spain: in 1847 there were nearly 110,000 settlers, and they did not simply hide themselves in the cities, for many hoped to acquire estates carved out of the state lands of the old regime.48 The cities themselves saw massive construction projects throughout the next decades, and Algiers was transformed into a new Marseilles with broad streets and solid, stately buildings. The conquest of Algiers was the first phase in a series of colonial conquests that divided up many of the key strategic positions in the Mediterranean between France, Great Britain, Spain and (though it was still unborn in 1830) Italy.
The history of the Fourth Mediterranean had begun in an era when Venetian, Genoese and Catalan galleys had breasted their way across the sea to reach Alexander’s city. It ended as Egypt became the gateway to the East in ways of which past rulers had only dreamed. By the time the last dredging machines had finished their task and the Suez Canal was opened not just to sailing ships but to steamboats, a new era in the history of the Mediterranean had also opened: the Fifth Mediterranean had come into being.