Samuel Cohn: Global Social Trends

History has a dark underside.

The great accomplishments of the Great Empires were everything the history books tell us. Standards of living were raised to unprecedented heights. Magnificent art, literature and architecture were produced. People were able to live in peace and security because the brigands were taken from the roads and the pirates were taken from the seas. When the Great Empires fell, standards of living collapsed. Violence which had been held in check for centuries returned with a vengeance. Education, literacy and technology retroceded. The arts and sciences became lost arts and lost sciences.

The above story generally applies to most empires. When Rome fell, an empire-wide thriving economy fell into disarray. The centuries after the fall of the Roman Empire were centuries of poverty. Piracy, which had been utterly rampant in the Ancient Mediterranean, had come under control in the first Century B.C., when the Roman Republic reached its height. However, in the fourth century A.D, when the Roman Empire was in marked decline, piracy returned to its original high levels. We normally think that the Barbarians who overran the Roman Empire were land-based hordes. The invading tribes knew how to sail as well – and could rival the Vikings in sea-based predation. The fourth century A.D. saw the rise of three large Gothic pirate fleets – all of which were originally based in the Black Sea. The three Black Sea fleets passed through the Bosporus, and went their separate ways, terrorizing different sections of the Mediterranean. The decline of the Roman Empire in Europe’s Northwest led to the creation of large pirate fleets in what is now northern France and the Low Countries. These pirate armadas raided settlements Viking-style on the coasts of the North Sea and the English Channel.

But life was not as tidy as all that. There was plenty of piracy even during the heyday of the Roman Empire. In some case, it survived through benign neglect. In other cases, it was actively abetted and facilitated by the Imperial forces. In this regard, piracy in the Roman Empire looks remarkably like piracy throughout most of history. The material for the discussion below comes from an amazing book – in French, unfortunately for English-only readers: Histoire des Pirates et des Corsaires de l’Antiquité à Nos Jours (The History of Pirates and Corsairs from Antiquity to the Present Day), edited by Gilbert Buti and Philippe Hrodĕj, two French historians. The essay on classical Greco-Roman piracy is titled La Piraterie dans la Méditerranée Antique (Piracy in the Ancient Mediterranean) and is written by Pascal Arnaud, a historian at the Université Lumière in Lyon. Many of his themes, however, are reflected in other essays in the volume, including those concerning piracy in the Middle Ages, piracy in the Atlantic and Caribbean, and piracy in pre-twentieth century Southeast Asia.

1. Empires had to tolerate pirates because their military forces were committed elsewhere. The history of the Roman Empire is the history of endless wars of conquest, wars of defense against invaders, regional rebellions, and civil wars. The army and the navy were usually doing something.

Michael Mann, in reference to both the Roman Empire and to pre-industrial empires generically, argued that difficulties in transportation kept military forces from being “everywhere at once”. A fully-equipped army with its war machinery, weapons, armor and food supply could march only about ten miles a day. Navies were somewhat more mobile, but were still limited by the traditional obstacles of the Age of Sail. Sea travel was slow under the best of circumstances. Bad weather and unfavorable winds could slow down even the greatest and fastest of armadas.

So if the army or the navy was committed to fighting in Location X, pirates and brigands could do whatever they wanted in any location Y or Z. Mann argues that the Roman Army and Navy had to deal with this by showing up in massive force. WHEN the Imperial Forces appeared, their numerical and weaponry advantages would be so overwhelming that they could deal with whatever local opposition they needed to deal with. But when the cat was away, the mice could play and did play.

Pirate elimination tended to be concentrated into short but serious campaigns uniquely focused on pirates. The primary motivation for the great war against the Etruscans was to eliminate the large fleets of Etruscan pirates who were preying on Roman traders in the Tyrrhenian Sea. Piracy in the Aegean was reduced when Rome and the island of Rhodes collaborated in a joint campaign to wipe out corsairs who had been attacking the ships of both nations. Before the Punic wars, Carthage and Rome were actually military allies with the common goal of reducing piracy in the Ionian Sea. Outside of a handful of campaigns like these, anti-pirate enforcement was lackadaisical. Well-known communities of pirates persisted for centuries.

2. Pirates made themselves useful to the Roman Empire as “Rent-a-Navies”. Because Roman forces were spread thin, the Romans made extensive use of local mercenary forces that were employed on a one-off or more permanent basis. German chieftains were constantly being recruited by the Romans to serve as Roman proxies in wars with other Germans. Pirates were commissioned to attack enemy ships, both military and civilian. In Roman law, pirates attacking non-allied ships in wartime were not even legally defined as pirates, and were therefore exempt from criminal prosecution. Since pirates could be useful in future conflicts, the Roman authorities often tolerated peacetime pirate attacks on shipping or coastal villages.

Rome was not the only society to use pirates as naval mercenaries. Britain had a formal system of “letters of marque” that entitled pirates to freely attack any ships that were not flying the flag of Britain or its allies. Malay rajahs typically did not maintain standing armies or navies. Armies were raised on an ad hoc basis for individual conflicts. Pirates were commissioned on an ad hoc basis for naval warfare. Because warfare could be frequent, rajahs typically harbored friendly pirates and offered them formal protection.

3. Reselling pirate booty was a lucrative business for the Romans.  The Roman economy was a slave economy. Slave economies have a constant need for fresh slaves. Slaves have high mortality due to overwork and poor working conditions. The Romans thus needed far more slaves than could be obtained from soldiers and civilians who were captured in war. Pirate slave traders were essential to making up the deficit.

The scale of pirate trafficking in humans was monumental. One particularly large raid on Naxos captured 280 people, all of whom were sold into slavery. Nearly every Roman city had prostitution, with the prostitutes being captured women.

However, not all pirate captives became formally enslaved. Kidnapping for ransom was just as important. Several Roman ports were leading centers of commercial hostage redemption. In Teos, men were typically sold into slavery, while women and children were held for ransom. It is estimated that these ransoms alone made up 10 percent of the Teos economy. There was also a substantial secondary market in captives. Merchants would buy slaves, mixing pirate captives with slaves obtained through other channels, and then sail to another city where the slaves could not easily be identified as pirate captives. This form of “slave laundering” reduced the likelihood of both enforcement of anti-piracy laws and rescue attempts by members of the victims’ families. Hierapytna in Crete was a well-known center of this secondary trade.

Naturally, pirate raids also obtained the cargo that was available on merchant ships, and the portable wealth that could be taken from the coastal villages that were attacked. These too could be traded and resold by Roman merchants either in the pirate harbors themselves or elsewhere after transshipment.

4. The Mediterranean coast provided natural pirate havens. Nowadays, aerial reconnaissance and satellite surveillance allows navies to identify the exact location of enemy fleets. However, before World War II, and certainly in Ancient History, a fundamental feature of naval warfare was that nobody knew the exact location of the enemy. The ocean is huge. Coastlines are vast. Fleets were not that big. A lot of naval history was determined by a small force running into a large force they never imagined was there and being destroyed on the spot. (The Battle of Midway was possibly the last great naval confrontation that was determined by Fleet 1 meeting Fleet 2 at an unexpected time and getting creamed.)

Pirate fleets were easy to hide. This was especially the case if the pirates themselves were local – or if the pirates paid off the local community or the local ruler. In the Roman era, there were two primary methods for concealing a fleet. The first is beaching the fleet in a heavily forested area, and then the pirates themselves would evaporate into the forest. The second was using the Mediterranean’s many caves and sea grottoes. A deep enough sea cave would even allow for the non-beaching of some boats.

For a fictionalized interpretation of cave-bound sea pirates, think about the Cyclops Story in the Odyssey. Cyclopes closely resembled real-life pirates. Cyclops live in caves, as did pirates hiding in grottos. Both groups were absolutely predatory. They attacked any seamen who were foolish enough to come into their territory without permission or protection. Cyclops ate their victims; pirates robbed them, sold them into slavery or killed them. Either way, being caught by either was not good. If one believes the stereotype of pirates having eye patches, while Cyclopes have only one eye too.

In the Odyssey, Ulysses does not get away from the Cyclops scot free. Even though he puts out the eye of the Cyclops with a sharp stick and is able to escape with his men, the Cyclops calls out for assistance to his father. His Father is Neptune, God of the Sea. Neptune curses Ulysses for hurting his boy – and Ulysses has many, many problems thereafter.

For the cave pirates, the protective father would be the local king who works in full collaboration with the pirates. A cave pirate is attacked and killed without permission from the local king – and the attacker is now persona non grata with the local authorities. So long as the attacker stays out of the cave territory forever, he probably gets away with what he did. But if the attacker or his men ever return to the area – or if the attacker ever seeks protection from the local king’s allies, then the attacker could have some real problems.

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So, the Romans both condemned piracy, and depended on piracy. They reduced the extent of piracy during the height of the power of the Republic and the Empire – but they carefully fostered the activities of those pirates of whom they approved. The Romans were the force of law and order; the Romans were also the patrons of organized crime.

Civilization may be the force of Truth and Prosperity, Justice and Light. It also has a crude side that is based on naked coercion and exploitation. Roman society epitomized both the highest ideals and the crudest forms of savagery.

The reader can use his or her own judgement to assess whether the same applies to Modern Western Society.