e were by far the worse members of the fraternity
of rovers, as the treaties themselves prove: the increase of commerce
under the stimulus of the Crusades tempted the adventurous, and the
absence of any organized State navies gave them immunity; and there
was generally a war afoot between some nation or other, Christian or
Moslem, and piracy (in the then state of international law) at once
became legitimate privateering. Our buccaneers of the Spanish main had
the same apology to offer. But it is important to observe that all
this was private piracy: the African and the Italian governments
distinctly repudiated the practice, and bound themselves to execute
any Corsair of their own country whom they might arrest, and to
deliver all his goods over to the state which he had robbed.[4] These
early Corsairs were private freebooters, totally distinct from the
authorized pirates of later days. In 1200, in time of peace, two Pisan
vessels attacked three Mohammedan ships in Tunis roads, captured the
crews, outraged the women, and made off, vainly pursued by the
Tunisian fleet: but they received no countenance from Pisa, the
merchants of which might have suffered severely had the Tunisians
exacted reprisals. Sicily was full of Corsairs, and the King of Tunis
paid a sort of tribute to the Normans, partly to induce them to
restrain these excesses. Aragonese and Genoese preyed upon each other
and upon the Moslems; but their doings were entirely private and
unsupported by the state.

Up to the fourteenth century the Christians were the chief pirates of
the Mediterranean, and dealt largely in stolen goods and slaves. Then
the growth of large commercial fleets discouraged the profession, and
very soon we begin to hear much less of European brigandage, and much
more of Moorish Corsairs. The inhabitants of the coast about the Gulf
of Gabes had always shown a bent towards piracy, and the port of
Mahd[=i]ya, or "Africa," now became a regular resort of sea rovers.
El-Bekr[=i], in the twelfth century, had noticed the practice of
sending galleys on the cruise for prey (perhaps during war) from the
harbours of Bona; and Ibn-Khald[=u]n, in the fourteenth, describes an
organized company of pirates at Buj[=e]ya, who made a handsome profit
from goods and the ransom of captives. The evil grew with the increase
of the Turkish power in the Levant, and received a violent impetus
upon the fall of Constantinople; while on the west, the gradual
expulsion