Jan Janszoon was born in Haarlem in 1570 and by around 1600 was a Dutch privateer with a letter of marque against Spanish shipping during the Eighty Years’ War. As peace treaties left armed crews without legal targets, the corsair economy of Algiers, Tunis and Tripoli drew men like him south. In 1618 Algerian pirates captured him near the Canary Islands. In Algiers he converted to Islam, took the name Murad, and rose through the Taifa of Reis, a corporation of corsair captains that rewarded seamanship over birth. In 1619 he moved to Salé on Morocco’s Atlantic coast, which broke from the sultan and named him president of its pirate republic.
Salé had a governing council, signed treaties with European states and took a cut of every prize, and its economy rested on capturing and ransoming or selling Europeans. Using square-rigged sailing ships introduced by European renegades, Murad raided Bristol, held Lundy Island for five years, and in 1627 struck Grindavík in Iceland, carrying nearly 400 people to the slave markets of Algiers. In 1635 the Knights of Malta captured him off Tunis and held him five years in a dungeon in Valletta. He escaped in 1640, returned to Morocco, and vanished from the records after 1641.
- Historians estimate Barbary corsairs enslaved between 1 and 1.25 million Europeans between the 16th and 19th centuries.
- Many of Salé’s residents were Andalusian Muslims expelled from Spain.
- Oared galleys could not survive the Atlantic, so the raid on Iceland depended on deep-hulled sailing ships.
- The Knights of Malta treated him as an apostate as well as a pirate.
- After his escape he lived in the castle of Oualidia before disappearing from history.
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