barbarossa2
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For people wondering why it might be hard to conquer the north western coast of Africa, you might find this as interesting as I did:
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From Wikipedia:
The Barbary Coast, or Barbary, was the term used by Europeans from the 16th until the 19th century to refer to the middle and western coastal regions of North Africa—what is now Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya. The name is derived from the Berber people of north Africa. In the West, the name commonly evokes the Barbary pirates and slave traders based on that coast, who attacked ships and coastal settlements in the Mediterranean and North Atlantic and captured and traded slaves from Europe and sub-Saharan Africa.
There were an estimated 3 million Christian slaves in Barbary.[1]
"Barbary" was not always a unified political entity. From the sixteenth-century onwards, it was divided into the familiar political entities of Morocco, Algiers, Tunis, and Tripolitania (Tripoli). Major rulers during the times of the barbary states' plundering parties were the Pasha or Dey of Algiers, the Bey of Tunis and the Bey of Tripoli, all very good subjects who were anxious to get rid of the Ottoman sultan, but were de facto independent rulers.
Before then the territory was usually divided between Ifriqiya, Morocco, and a west-central Algerian state centered on Tlemcen or Tiaret. Powerful Berber dynasties such as the Almohads, and briefly the Hafsids, occasionally unified it for short periods. From a European perspective its "capital" or chief city was often considered to be Tripoli in modern-day Libya, although Marrakesh in Morocco was the largest and most important Berber city at the time. In addition, Algiers in Algeria and Tangiers in Morocco were also sometimes seen as its "capital".
The first United States military action overseas, executed by the U.S. Marines and Navy, was the Battle of Derne, Tripoli, in 1805. It was an effort to destroy all of the Barbary pirates, free the American slaves in captivity, and put an end to piracy acts between these warring tribes on the part of the Barbary states. The opening line of the "Marine's Hymn" refers to this action: "From the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli..."
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Additionally, from a book I am reading called, "Command of the Ocean" by Rodger (5/5 stars for anyone into naval history), the following:
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Barbary States (1650s):The three North African Regencies of Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli—the „Barbary States“ as they were known in Christian Europe—were nominally dependencies of the Ottoman Empire, but in practice semi-independent states which kept a permanent state of war for motives very similar to Cromwell’s. They too had soldiers (their Turkish garrisons) all too apt to intervene in politics if not distracted by a foreign war. The resulting system of warfare, the corso, was not piracy (though the term is still often used by Western writers) but public, declared war waged largely by private interests. Their political situation obliged the Regencies to be always at war against some of the Christian powers, but never against all, for the corso was primarily a system of slave-raiding, in which the profits came chiefly from ransoms and sales, and which therefore depended on commercial relations across the Mediterranean. In practice, the Regencies made and observed treaties of peace with some scrupulousness, and were frequently enraged by breaches of faith on the Chrisitan side. Christian naval powers, obsessed with the misleading idea of „Barbary piracy“, had been mounting naval expeditions against the Regencies for centuries, but it was extremely difficult to make an impression on populous and stongly fortified cities on a dangerous lee shore. The English already had some experience of this in the 1630s, but they still understood very little of the strategic, or indeed the moral, situation. In this case, Tunis had gone to war because an English merchant ship had sold Tunisian passengers into slavery at Malta. This eminently justified retaliation, described by Blake as „the barbarous carriage of these pirates“, was his excuse for attacking them. *Rodger p.20
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For hundreds of years when Christian powers did attempt to penetrate the region, they managed to take a few coastal towns (for instance the seizure of Tangiers for two years by English forces in the 1660s). I can't see taking these provinces being very profitable historically, as the task of assimilation would have been slightly more than complicated. :)
Anyway, these guys were around for hundreds of years and no one could shut them down. They lived in region about as backward as Russia which couldn't support major operations with ease. In spite of raiding Chrisitan shipping and coasts for hundreds of years...taking millions of slaves in the process, Europe couldn't shut them down. I don't think it is something which should be easy. But that is just me. :) Maps of Napoleonic Europe I am sifting through here show Spanish and British control of the region limited to a couple of ports. Namely, Ceuta (British), Penon (Spanish), and Melilla (Spanish)...all in Morocco.
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< Message edited by barbarossa2 -- 6/23/2009 10:06:27 PM >
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That Pesky African Coast... - 
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