unlike armies, navies required a sort of "skillset" and training. A soldier you can stuff a sword or a sharpened stick into the hands of a beggar on the street and he'd probably be able to make a "decent" soldier at best, cannon fodder at worse. Navy doesn't really work the same. First there's seamanship, gotta know if your ship can or can't go into water that deep. Then there's reading the weather. On land, you can find a tree/cave/overhang/whatever and wait out a storm, what do you do when you're out on open water? Or misjudge the weather when you depart? Or you're driven aground in a fog?
Were Pirates Really So Much of a Threat That Even a Military Genius Like Julius Caesar Had to Be Sent To Fight Them?
- Thread starter SlamDunkerista
- Start date
kholieken
Banned
British Navy succeed with practice of Impressment. Several other Navy build relatively quickly : Yi-Sun-Shin build navy, Arabs quickly build Navy despite previously had no navy, etc.
Also, Army need good NCO corps, cavalry and pikemen also difficult to train. Roman Centurion is backbone of its army. Switz pikemen, Lansknecht, and Noble Cavalry has to be hired because its expensive to train.
Piracy was a constant problem for the Chinese, particularly during the Ming and Qing dynasties. This was driven in large part by restrictions on overseas trade - pirates on the Chinese coast were smugglers first, shipping goods out of the country and selling them to buyers overseas, with Portugal and Japan being the primary customers. And much like the ancient Mediterranean pirates, they had considerable influence among the coastal gentry and the coastal poor, the latter of whom being their primary pool of recruits. Their second major source of income was from tribute and taxes on coastal communities, after all. And they even enjoyed official protection from both the Chinese state (when they were willing to acknowledge the Emperor's supremacy) and European naval forces in the region, pirates frequently being used as mercenaries in naval clashes between Europeans and the Chinese.
And yes, the pirates could grow very powerful. The interregnum between the Ming and Qing gave the region some of the most powerful pirate fleets the world has ever seen; Zheng Zilong at his peak commanded 400 ships, tens of thousands of men (mostly Chinese, but also Dutch and Portuguese deserters and disaffected Japanese soldiers as well), and bullied the Ming Navy so badly that he got the Ming southern fleet to surrender, controlled the entire South China Sea, and eventually got the Ming begging to bring him into their service. Zheng Yi and his wife Zheng Yi Sao, during the Qing Dynasty, commanded a similarly-sized fleet, and were also undefeated by the Qing - the Qing had to beg local European ships for help and the pirates wound up surrendering in comfort to the Qing.
The Arabs "quickly" got to work by exploiting the fact sailors had lives and could not simply run away with the retreating Byzantine armies. It still took a whole generation for them to fully catch up and win at the Battle of the Masts.
As for Yi-Sun-Shin, he already had a good Navy to work with, he just used it very carefully and efficiently.
Last edited:
That's something I wasn't aware of. It seems the Dutch sponsored their own privateers at that time, one of whom was Jan Janszoon aka Murad Reis. I knew of him from the Sack of Baltimore which my ancestors fled in 1631. He and his son Anthony had quite a story
He was a Ottoman corsair of Dutch origin rather than being a Dutch privateer proper though, no?
A Corsair post-1618, definitely, but a privateer, apparently, in 1600, when he was already 30 years old. For most of the years in between, a regular pirate.