The Pirates of the Levant Read Online Free PDF

Alatriste at the prow of the ship, next to where the ropes and cables were kept. He was standing utterly still, leaning against the netting stretched over the side of the ship and gazing at the dark sea and sky. Towards the west, a trace of reddish light was still visible. We talked a little about the events of the day, and I asked him if what the men were saying was true — that we were heading for Melilla and not Oran.
'Our Captain doesn't want to remain at sea too long with so many captives on board,' he replied. 'Melilla is closer, which is why he prefers to sell them there. Then we can continue on our way ... less heavily laden.'
'And richer too,' I added, smiling. I had done my calculations, as had everyone else, and had worked out that the day should bring us at least two hundred escudos.
The Captain shifted position slightly. It was growing cool in the darkness and I realised he was fastening his buff coat.
'Don't get your hopes up,' he said at last. 'Slaves don't fetch such a good price in Melilla, but because we're alone, near the coast and forty leagues from Oran, Urdemalas is anxious to avoid any more encounters.'
I was pleased, nonetheless, for I had never visited Melilla. Captain Alatriste was quick to put me straight, though, telling me that the town was little more than a small fortress built on a rock beneath Mount Gurugu: a few fortified houses ready for battle and surrounded, as were all Spanish enclaves on the African coast, by hostile alarbes. Alarbe or alarabe — if I may enlighten the idle reader — was the name we gave to the bellicose, untrustworthy Moors from the countryside, to distinguish them from the city Moors, whom we simply referred to as Moors, in order to differentiate them, in turn — although they were, in fact, Berbers — from the Turks of Turkey, of whom there was never any shortage, for they were always shuttling back and forth from Constantinople. That was where the Great Turk lived, and Moors and Berbers, or whatever you called them, all paid fealty to him in one way or another. And that is why, to simplify matters, we called them all Turks. 'I wonder if the Turks will come this year,' we would say, regardless of whether they actually were from Turkey or not and regardless, too, of whether a Turkish fusta or galliot was from Saleh, Tunis or Anatolia.
And then there was the intense trading that went on between every nation and these populous corsair cities, where, as well as the local Moorish inhabitants, there were innumerable Christian slaves — Cervantes, Jeronimo de Pasamonte and others experienced this at first hand, and I will leave them to describe it in their own words — as well as Moriscos,
Jews, renegades, sailors and traders from every shore. You can imagine, then, what a complicated world it was, that interior sea bordering Spain to the south and east, a sea that belonged to no one and to everyone; an ambiguous, shifting, dangerous place where diverse races mixed and mingled, making alliances or doing battle, depending on how the dice rolled. It must be said, though, that while France, England, Holland and Venice negotiated with the Turk, and even made alliances with him against other Christian nations — especially against Spain when it suited them, which it nearly always did — we, for all our many errors and contradictions, always held firm to the one true religion, never retracting so much as a syllable. And being both arrogant and powerful, we poured swords, money and blood — until there was no more — into a struggle, which, for a century and a half, kept at bay the Lutherans and the Calvinists in Europe, and the Mohammedans in the Mediterranean.
There, where pants the rebel Belgian, And where the Berber, sweating, stands, Working, the one, with his bare hands, The other wielding his bare sword, To fashion for locks a master key, Locks that long have had a ward, Our fleets its shape, its shape our sea.
I hope Don Francisco de Quevedo will forgive me for