That this change took place was thanks largely to two cataclysmic events in the 15th century and two remarkable men, the Barbarossa brothers. In the east, Christian Constantinople, had fallen to the Ottoman Turks, who were now intent on spreading their empire. In the west, meanwhile, Muslim Granada had fallen to the Christians, creating waves of disaffected refugees bent on revenge. Most of them settled on the North African coast between Tangiers and Tunis, then made up of a string of small squabbling Muslim kingdoms and a chain of fortified Spanish posts, such as Oran, which the Spaniards had seized in 1509 after, in cold blood, massacring 4,000 of its inhabitants and sending the rest off to a life of slavery in Spain.

Onto this bloody stage swaggered the Barbarossa brothers, destined to build the ports of North Africa into bases for Barbary privateers and establish the practice of Barbary piracy, an institution that would terrorize Christian Europe for the next 300 years. The Barbarossa brothers, Aruj and Kheir-ed-din, came from a Greco-Turkish family that had converted to Islam. Their father had settled on the isle of Lesbos after its conquest by Sultan Mohammed II in 1462 and their mother, a Christian, was the widow of a priest. Nicknamed Barbarossa because of his red beard, the elder brother Aruj served in the Turkish navy before taking command of a pirate vessel. His voyages took him to the port of Tunis where he struck a deal with the king: in exchange for harbour facilities he was to pay the crown one-fifth of everything he captured.

And the corsairs’ galleys didn’t stop at the Straits of Gibraltar; they raided as far north as Ireland and Iceland. In June 1631 Barbary pirates stormed ashore at the harbour village of Baltimore in Cork, capturing most of the villagers. And Icelanders still thrill to the saga of the maiden Tyrkja-Gudda, who, after being abducted and taken to the Algerian slave market, bought her own freedom and made her way back to her homeland through Tunisia, Italy and Denmark.

Some lucky captives never lost sight of their home shores, however: the pirates were often eager to broker a ransom deal with family members, friends and neighbours within hours of the attack, which was preferable to shipping them back to Algiers. Back in Algiers, unransomed captives were put on the auction block. Those unsold were taken to the bagnios, or slave prisons, where they remained at night, going out early each morning to toil on public works or as domestic servants or craftsmen. Many unfortunates worked as galley slaves–often a fate worse than death. In the slave prisons, missing nightly roll call was punished by 150-200 bastinadoes, or beatings on the soles of the feet.

While toiling all day, many slaves no doubt kept up their strength by entertaining ideas of escape. Some succeeded. William Oakley, for instance, built a boat from scrapwood and, with a gang of English slaves, reached Mallorca in five days, rowing furiously. Another way out, technically, was through conversion to Islam, but this was looked on with suspicion by some masters. Yet another route was to be ransomed by a religious order. The writer Cervantes was rescued after five years’ captivity by the Trinitarians, one of the many religious orders that made the ransoming of Christian slaves a part of their mission. Surprisingly, some slaves actually earned a small salary, and a few enterprising slaves even borrowed money from their masters and set up their own businesses. Eventually, some slaves earned enough money to buy back their own freedom.

By the 1540s the slave markets were working overtime. Thanks to the unholy alliance of Spain’s other great enemy, France, with Turkey in 1538, matters in the Mediterranean had worsened. Now the French king was allowing Barbary pirate fleets to winter in his ports. Sitting halfway between the pirates’ nest in Algiers and their winter base in the French port of Toulon, the Balearic islands were too tempting a target to miss.

Led by redoubtable sea lords such as Drub the Devil and Sinan, who was suspected of dabbling in the black arts, corsairs swept ashore to plunder Menorca, Ibiza, and the Mallorcan towns of Portocolom, Estellencs, Banyalbufar, Santanyí, Alcúdia, Valldemossa and Andratx. Ciutadella in Menorca was besieged by an invasion force of 140 ships and 15,000 fighting men. The outnumbered citizens bravely resisted but after nine days the city fell. Some 3,500 survivors of the ensuing massacre were carried away in chains. But the people of the Balearics were sometimes capable of defending themselves. An early-warning system composed of a chain of watchtowers was built along the coast and in 1550 the inhabitants of Pollença fought back, driving Dragut “the Drawn Sword of Islam” and his army back to their galleys, an event now commemorated every year in a week of festivals at the end of July.

The most celebrated–literally–victory over the corsairs, however, is that of Sóller on the morning of May 11, 1561. Under the leadership of Euldj Ali, an Italian renegade and later ruler of Algiers, 1,700 pirates sneaked ashore with the intention of raiding Sóller. Alerted, the menfolk of Sóller, aided by those of neighboring towns, rushed down to meet them in battle. However, the pirates had split into two groups and while the victorious Mallorcans beat 1,000 corsairs back to their boats, another band numbering 700 found Sóller unprotected.