blog History for Fantasy Writers: Pirates

skip.knox submitted a new blog post:

History for Fantasy Writers: Pirates
by E.L. Skip Knox



Everyone knows about the pirates of the Caribbean. Let's talk about other pirates. Since I'm a medieval historian, I'll stay firmly in the European world.

Before we get started, a general comment: the lines between pirate, merchant, and rebel were blurry and ever-shifting. If you had a ship, it was sort of like having a pickup truck—you could use it for any number of enterprises.

Few pirates were exclusively that. The real interest lies in the variations on our standard idea of piracy.

Who were pirates? Given the comment above, pretty much anyone with a ship and a few followers could engage in piracy at one time or another, but there were a few places notorious for the practice of robbing other ships.

Frisian Pirates

Frisians were one. They lived along the coast of northeastern Netherlands; the region is still called Friesland. The Frisians were their own people, with their own language. Their land is made up of a complex of islands and marshlands that were rarely the object of ambition from other peoples, so they rarely were under the foot of invading armies.

The Frisians were constant raiders, not all that dissimilar to the Vikings, save that they did not try to invade and conquer. They were content to loot and go home. It just so happened that they were as content to do their looting at sea as on land....
Continue reading the Original Blog Post.

 

Demesnedenoir, that he does! I'd forgotten about that, I think mainly because that particular volume was such a slog for me.

The Missouri and the Mississippi did indeed have river pirates. Disney even had a movie about them, with Fess Parker.

 

Oh yes! Very much so. I worked with an econ professor named Draayer, who was both aware and proud of his Frisian heritage.

 

Glad you liked the article. Michener was an outstanding writer.

 

A bunch of people would qualify as occasional pirates, including a great many "merchants" -- and the ever-virtuous Knights of Malta. One of my favorites is Henry the Fisherman, who gave the young Frederick Hohenstaufen a lift off of Sicily. He was called the Fisherman as a kind of joke--when not boarding your ship and taking your stuff, he would pose as a fishing vessel. Classic.

 

"Religious" is a term than covers a wide range of human behavior, so I'm not really seeing the "despite" part. Individual pirates were, of course, individual, so this one might be pious, that one might give only lip service to a deity, while another might be blasphemous while still believing in his religion and is filled with guilt. Any generalization about the spiritual condition of pirates is going to be wrong. Also, it's worth remembering that very few pirates were in that trade for their whole life.

 

You're right, Laurence. This was true of all sorts of contract warriors. A notable case is that of the routiers in France during the Hundred Years War. That war had several truces, and the mercenaries took over castles or even whole towns, or simply had a hideout stronghold from which they preyed on merchants, churches, and monasteries, waiting for the war to start up again. Similarly, ship captains might carry goods and do trade in ports, or they might just decide to snatch up a slow ship that looked like good pickings if business was slow. The line between outlaw, solider, and merchant was never a clear one, at least before modern times. Some would say not even then. <wink>