Pirate lore is so expansive, we lose some of the common factors that link ancient societies and actions to a thing that we mostly associate with people like Jack Sparrow. What is the history of piracy? How far back does it go and how did it shape the world we live in now? These questions will be answered in this two-part episode on that very subject. Join Levi as he dives into the oldest instances of piracy, following as it evolved as our society changed. Facing familiar faces and interesting places, it's pirates all the way down.

As the hanging is no great hardship for were it not for that every cowardly fellow

would turn pirate and so unfit to see that men of courage must starve and body.

There are few subjects more covered in the world of media than pirates.

Why do they swashbuckling antiheroes

have such a major hold on our imaginations and or media?

Or is it that the general public

has always been interested in the Robin Hood style narrative?

Is it that simple?

Where pirates always only the scourge of the powers that be?

Or did they cause trouble for everyone involved?

Today we will be digging into the past of the adventurers who explored the far

reaches of the globe for the money, for the fame, mostly for the money.

Looking back on

the ancient forms of piracy and on to the things that a typical person

would not immediately think of in pirate lore.

So grab a pirate, trim that sail and get ready

for another episode of The Remedial Scholar.

Hello, everyone.

I am Levi and welcome to the remedial scholar.

Before we get too far along, I'd like to thank everyone for the reviews.

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All of your support means a lot to me.

And that's it for the begging on to the stealing of

AC matey a pirates life for me, Right?

I'm Ron Burgundy.

This is going to be a fun one.

There's there's so many good stories out there, interesting facts

that connect pirates to different things.

And there are quite a bit of links that I think that can be made

that I think people miss when talking about pirates in general.

So today is going to be a lot of fun and a lot of information,

so much so that this is actually going to be a two parter episode.

We're going to start with the broad scope of what it means to be a pirate,

where the earliest accounts

come from similar to similar to how we did the War Dogs episode,

moving through different time periods, discussing techniques and locations

of various things, things that will get really interesting in the Middle Ages.

You know, some northern invaders hint, hint, hint, a second pirate will be great.

Also featuring some really interesting stories

that I found from Eastern Asia

that I don't feel like it's talked about with pirates.

And then also going into the golden age

and colonization and how pirates enter tangled with that.

That includes the big name pirates, the big hitters.

So there's that.

And then after that, moving into modern pirates.

Captain Crunch. No, no, no, no.

Captain Phillips type pirates.

So there's a lot to cover. Let's get into it.

When you think of pirates, I'm betting Jacks, Barrow, Blackbeard.

Guys like them probably come to mind.

Maybe your gamer and Edward can way of Assassin's Creed fame is.

You're damn right big fan of that.

But in a way, there's so much more to it than that.

There always is. Right? Then that's good.

It means there's plenty of fun facts to learn.

Of course, piracy is really as old

as the human use of boats and water, essentially.

But what is piracy?

What does it mean to be a pirate?

A pirate is a person who attacks and robs at sea.

According to the Oxford Dictionary.

What do they know now that that seems fair?

And it also certainly describes a lot of like Pirates of the Caribbean

and those kinds of things. Right.

But the etymology of the word

tells us that the history starts much further back than just that.

Right.

And the word pirate comes from Latin pirata, which means robbing at sea.

And that word stems from an ancient Greek word pirates,

which was essentially a robber or brigand who

which is somebody who robbed people in the mountains or for us.

So it definitely shows a baseline for pirates existed pretty far back.

But how far back exactly?

Like I mentioned before, the idea of robbing

someone with a bow over water is not a new concept.

I imagine it's barely newer than the concept of robbing somebody normally is.

As far back as time goes,

people have been taking things from others for their own benefit.

In the early years of civilization, with the Sumerians and other early, early

Fertile Crescent adjacent societies, people use the word pirate very liberally.

Well, not at all.

But the translations point to a general feeling of piracy

was also, according to one author, due to the fact that many of these accounts

were transcribed long after they occurred.

One of the oldest known transcriptions of pirate activity

comes from a clay tablet dating to 1350 BCE.

She mentions ships attacking in the north Africa area

and these ships were freelance, so there's no real master to them.

They're not like an enemy force,

but it seems that the coin was their only driving factor.

And since major cross since major cross sea ships were not really a thing yet,

many of the pirating type of attacks would take place in shallow waters,

with the pirates holding around

some cut in the beach or behind some rocks or vegetarian vegetation.

They they hid behind vegetarians and that's how they

that's how they snuck up on a lot of people.

People don't really know that

vegetation of some kind.

This tablet mentions taking precautions against these water raiders

which tells more to their nefarious nature.

Right.

Is said that these pirates did not spare anybody and their targets were broadened,

that they were not working for anyone but themselves.

Later on, there are some clay tablets that describe discourse

between Pharaoh Akhenaten and a vassal state,

a diplomat and a vassal state, which ranged between

1360 and 1332 BCE.

I'm sure there's some great old school email, but email behavior going on there,

like the emails between a garage worker and they're out of touch base.

As per my last email, please do something about the pirates.

Thank you.

But they did write about the troubles of piracy

in these tablets, discussing some pirates were causing,

quote, substantial disruption to regional commerce.

No, I have no clue if that's what it really says,

but I highly doubt it because they did not speak English.

Most of those words were not around back then.

Seriously, though, they talked about pirates

wrecking their trade flow and the pharaoh took it very seriously,

stated that the Pharaoh would introduce countermeasures and claim any of that

and claimed that any of his subjects that are involved in piracy would be punished.

Now, their accounts from the time of Ramses,

where marauders known as sea people, started causing some trouble.

Ramses the third, according to some people, was the pharaoh

of the time of Exodus.

But that measure is also one of the few

people mentioned in the Bible that we have physical evidence for.

As in we have his body not me.

I don't have it.

But some people somewhere have his mummified body.

And actually, like a lot of the pharaohs that they think could be

the pharaoh from the time of Exodus, we have all of their bodies too,

which is kind of odd, but also not super relevant to this.

But it's, you know, just one of those things that I learned.

So you're welcome. Anyway, back to the people.

These were thought to be groups of different

clans and tribes further north in the Mediterranean.

Not known

specifically where these groups came from or what exactly their lineage was, but

best guesses surmise that they came from the European side of the Mediterranean.

Further up, they proved to be fearsome warriors conquering

many of the kingdoms in the Med all while being fairly nomadic in nature.

They traveled with women, children, livestock, moving around, terrorizing

the shores of the Southern Med.

At the same time, the Bronze Age was kind of collapsing

and Ramses was nervous and understandably so.

Some kingdoms he was close with were falling destruction

and limited advancement of life echoed in the various areas around Egypt,

all while these damn sea people were throwing kingdoms

like the Hittites around, like children.

And they tried to attack Egypt too, but they failed.

They came through the Nile Delta but were blocked from entering further

and then hammered by volleys of arrows from either Bank of the Nile.

It is, however, said that it was a Pyrrhic victory and

but the Egyptians did beat them and they castrated the men.

And then the women and children were brought in and assimilated

into Egyptian life, which is kind of an interesting, interesting way to do it.

An inscription in Ramzy the Thirds Mortuary Temple describes it as this.

They were dragged in enclosed

and prostrated on the beach, killed and made into heaps from tail to head.

Those who entered the river mouth were like birds ensnared in the neck.

So these are the kinds of examples of early piracy,

not quite the swashbuckling scalawag type that one normally envisions.

It does point out something that I feel like gets lost in piracy in general.

You're not destined to become a pirate and then learn the ways of the water.

You are always a sailor first and then find opportunity for piracy.

These people were great warriors on their own, these sea people.

But their ability to traverse the Mediterranean before

it was a super common thing was their upper hand.

And that's something to consider as the tail moved forward.

Right.

So we visited ancient Egypt was let's see what the Greeks got going on

the other side.

Bella's having a mixture of Friday at three.

Wait, hold on.

No, that's the Greek for out from the movie Neighbor starring Zac Efron.

It has.

No, I just want to throw that in the in the realms of myth.

There are some places that just stand out.

Places like Minoan Crete, home of the king of King minus and his minotaur.

The military has no real ball in this game.

But I wanted to say Minotaur. So you're welcome.

King Minus, on the other hand, is said to have cleansed the sea of pirates

for as far as he was able.

That's a quote from something.

Improve the wealth of his kingdom.

That's what his goal was.

Myth also notes that his fleet held off pirates

until a tsunami destroyed his ships around 1400 B.C..

If these instances are not really pirates in terms of the way we think

or think of today or even further back,

these pirates held no real difference from an enemy army.

So while the acts they performed were the acts of the that the solo band,

as we typically think of, would do,

they were often done in the name of war against another nation.

So our civilization.

So let's skip ahead to the times of Homer.

There are quite a few representations of full fledged pirates

in Homeric poems from around the seventh century BCE.

Even Odysseus got into some pirate action, described to one passage of the Odyssey.

We boldly landed on a hostile place and sacked the city and destroyed the race.

Their wives made captive their possessions, shared in every soldier

and a like reward.

Again, this kind of describes just general war, though at the time

not really strictly only pirate type of things.

Another poem by Homer.

This one, A Hymn to Dionysus, describes pirates kidnaping the disguised

God because, you know, the gods like to dress up and be be mysterious.

Back then, the pirates tried to tie him up and one man was kind of nervous

because the willow twine that they were using wasn't really tying him up.

And he's like, Hey, guys, I think this might be a God.

And none of his fellow crew members listen to him.

Well, chaos ensues.

And Dionysus released a bear and a lion and some sort of weird magic trick.

And then for his next trick, he turns any man

who jumps by fleeing, flees by jumping into the water in an orphanage.

I don't know if that's a major punishment

because it sounds kind of cool, but, you know, I don't I don't know God stuff.

And I suspect that the man who guessed correctly who he was.

My favorite story from ancient Greece is the story of Alexander the Great

and the Pirate in a work called the City of God by Saint Augustine.

Now, this was written in the fifth century, C.E.

So solid 7 to 800 years after Alexander would have been around.

But the story, I think, was passed down

and added to St Augustine's book, and not one of his original creations.

Story goes that Alexander's telephone piracy laws, one such pirate was brought

to the young emperor and came face to face with him for his crimes.

Alexander hated pirates.

His followers,

though, would hire them to control his vast seas following his death.

In any case,

those would be mercenaries, right?

But the differences are pretty slight.

Essentially, pirates worked for their own and mercenaries were hired out,

much like privateers.

We will discuss later on.

Now back to the pirate.

Apparently this man, Diomedes, was cruel and notorious pirate.

His rap sheet long heavy with all the raiding and torture.

Surely he was to be executed by the Emperor himself, Right?

However, Alexander wanted to ask him some questions,

maybe to see what made this pirate tick, or just to make an example out of him.

Further, who knows for sure he was taught by Plato, right?

So maybe. Maybe there's something to that. I don't know.

Alexander was asking these questions,

this man, and one of the questions he asked was why he felt that he deserved

to take so many things by force and steal things that were not his.

Well, the irony was not lost on the pirate.

He responded something to the effect of Now you condemn me for my acts

with a mere few ships and handfuls of men, and that makes me a pirate.

But you do the same thing with an army and a navy, and you're called an emperor.

I can't tell you who the bigger

criminal is, but if I had the tools you do, I'd be an emperor or two.

The balls on this guy.

I know story is probably hyperbole

and largely mythologized as most things from the Hellenistic times.

Ah, but holy shit, that's a that's a response to give to the

the like one of the few men who's just synonymous with greatness,

you know, for thousands of years following his death.

And apparently it worked.

Alexander pardoned the man and was impressed with his boldness and insight.

But it does raise an interesting point about the perceived morality of piracy,

right?

A few sailors take what they can to give themselves a good life,

take them from mostly large empires, especially when it comes to the pirates.

Later on, they're seen as evil and they do heinous things, but

no real worse than the sailors who fly,

you know, a national flag for the country they serve.

Right.

Something to consider while trying to decide if pirates are a scourge or a hero.

Now, Saint Augustine himself decreed that it was justice

that separated the governing actions of pirates actions.

Right.

Although the debate on that could be had forever is the government

just because they're a government like who's to say it right?

Also, random fact St Augustine

is the name of a place in Florida that has a pirate and treasure museum.

Saint Augustine had plenty of pirate activity in the 17th

and 18th century, was also founded as a place on my birthday in 1565.

So you're welcome.

You might be asking, what is Saint Augustine the patron saint of pirates?

No, but Africa should be

patron saint of brewers, printers, theologians

and obviously a few cities, which is all less exciting than pirates.

But he is associated with a few pirate things.

So kind of interesting.

Anyway, back to the Pirates of the Hellenistic period I mentioned.

When Alexander died, his successors were apt to use ship

borne mercenaries, a departure from the way Alexander handled things,

these mercenaries only being mercenaries since they were hired to be hired by

these successors would undoubtably have been parading as pirates at the time.

Some of the accounts of these pirates included describing their ships.

These ships were not like most of the tri reme galley types,

the tri ring being a ship with three levels of oars on either side.

Right.

These ships are the most iconic of the ancient Greek ships.

If you've seen the movie Troy, you've seen these ships, the ships the pirates are

said to have used were described by Diodorus Siculus or Sicilians.

I don't know who knows?

Ancient Greek historian from the first century BCE,

he described them as deathless ships, which were faster and more maneuverable.

I assume only because of the lesser weight.

This guy rode down quite a bit.

But only a few books remain.

Still very impressive that any of it exists at all.

Now, the ship that is similar to the ships Diodorus

describes was found in the 1960s, and it's kind of cool to look at.

The ship was a merchant vessel,

but there was a slow spear stuck inside it, suggesting foul play.

There's also a curse tablet, which was actually not super uncommon for the time.

The researchers who found the ship suggest

that the pirates may have used it to essentially cover their tracks.

Now, as the Greek states fought for a foothold over the Aegean

in the Mediterranean, there's a power building in the west for Rome, really took

over the roads, took the power of the Navy from the Athenians.

And the Athenians were the naval power of the Greeks and states for a long time.

But then, you know, roads took over and roads is an island

and had five major ports on it.

And the islands around roads all kind of banded together to create this

pseudo naval police to help curb piracy, which made their ports a little more

appealing to those who were interested in trading.

Another thing they did was orienting the ports for the visitors specifically,

so certain ships from certain areas would go into certain ports on this island.

They wouldn't always go to the same, you know, one port.

So that's kind of interesting with being so focused on so many ports,

they had to have a focus on preventing piracy because, you know, piracy

threatened their tariff money and at some point. Right.

So now I mentioned the slogan growth of the Roman Empire.

And really they did not attempt to become a major naval power

as it as they were 100% known for their land conquests.

But some instances forced their hand, push them, take over as a naval power

within the Mediterranean. But it would be a slow process.

The small original instances of the Roman Navy has its roots in combating piracy.

The original fleet consisted of seized vessels from the conquest of Campania.

I'm assuming that's how it's pronounced because it's in the Italian peninsula.

Experts believe that these ships were used to combat piracy of their coasts

as they expanded this Navy was beaten by the Tarantino's in to 82 B.C.

and continued to be less impressive, but continued to fight the good fight

against pirates around the Italian coasts and, you know, and rivers and such.

But by 61, 67 BCE,

Rome had a plan to steal the business of the roads, ports, instituting

what is essentially a duty free port, still a business

on an island called Delos, which is in the heart of those islands.

I mentioned earlier that we're all combating piracy.

This this port had, you know, low tariffs, low taxes.

So people started flocking to it and thus cut a big hole in Rhodes's business

tax money.

Rhodes was getting dropped from an apparent 1 million drachmas

to 150,000 within one year's time

to create an influx of pirates when, you know, when Rhodes was moved

as removed as a power or a naval power, this vacuum created more piracy.

So not exactly a win win, but

definitely, you know, beat the competition kind of win.

When Rome conquered Macedonian third Macedonian war, they got into another war

against the Seleucid empire.

Following this, they would drive out the former Hellenistic Navy and whatnot,

and once they defeated Carthage, it was pretty much all over.

But the crime in the Mediterranean, they had control over all the coastline

of the Mediterranean and with this did not need a massive naval presence

and by the by the end of the second century BCE.

But this is not the story of the Roman Navy or naval power in general.

But, you know, it's pirates.

So let's get let's move on to another icon coming face to face with some pirates.

Julius Caesar.

Remember him?

He's that guy that makes the pizza

that tastes like rubber if you leave it out for too long.

No, no, no, no, wait. Not him.

But I'm sure he would be impressed

by the coma that it would put him in if he ate a piece.

Anyway, in 75 BCE, Caesar was captured by Lycian pirates.

Remember that name?

Because they'll come up again

and you're probably sitting there going, Hey, man, They said Rome

dominated the whole Mediterranean, though, so why are there pirates?

First off, great question.

Thank you for asking. Secondly, bribery.

See, some of these pirates would offer a captured slave to the senators, which,

as you probably know, where the real powers of the Roman Republic

buying their freedom with human cargoes probably not considered

to be cool these days, but totally fine back then.

So a young 25 years young Caesar,

to be specific, was on his way to Rhodes to study.

And according to Plutarch, who is the name in Roman history,

and you probably like, wow, these pirates literally sold humans for their freedom

and probably pretty ruthless

and this spells trouble for the little list of Caesar's and you'd be wrong.

Apparently this was essentially comparable to being redirected

while driving around a town on a detour for Caesar.

Dude was not even remotely bothered by them,

and maybe it was because he knew they were expecting a big payday

and would not actually hurt him regardless.

Julius, Julie. Jules.

For starters,

laughed in their faces when they told him that they set his ransom for 20 talents.

We're curious what a talent is. I'm with you.

I found one kind, gentle person on Reddit describing a talent of Roman

silver to be 32,300 sentences.

And that is the parole plural form of sisters.

And one of those could buy a couple loaves of bread at the time.

So to put that in perspective, Roman Legionnaires were paid 900 substances

a year.

So one silver talent paid 35 of Rome's finest for a year.

How does this compare?

Well, one talent of silver back then would be like paying millions

to the same amount of soldiers. A modern soldier's.

What does this all mean?

Means that Julius Caesar

thought the idea of these pirates asking for the salary of 700 Roman

Legionnaires was hilarious and any counter offered,

he looked these pirates in the windows of their soul and said, You clearly don't

know who I am or what kind of pizza they will make in my honor in 2000 years.

And he told them that for 50 talents of silver, this working guy,

a room for Roman legions, 5000 men, Julius

Caesar said that he was worth 35% of full Legion's yearly pay.

Talk about the mother of all scores for these pirates.

On top of this, Upcharge Caesar sent out his own man to get the money.

So recapping this little bit of time that he spent with the pirates so far,

he was captured.

They said they're going to ask a crazy amount of money.

He said, You're all morons.

Ask for more than double. In fact, you're all incompetent.

I'm going to have my men go get the money for you.

And if that wasn't enough, while he waited for his crew to return with the money,

he would spend his time bossing the pirates around,

forcing them to listen to him orate speeches and poems.

He's writing, play games with them, work out with them all

while continuing to treat them as if they worked for him.

He even threatened them all with crucifixion when he was freed

and the pirates had their turn at laughing at him.

The staff, he was with them for almost 40 days and the money was paid,

which probably made these dudes minds explode with all that silver.

When he was freed, Caesar promptly assembled a little Navy force in Miletus,

which is on the west coast of modern day Turkey.

And the fact that he did that, while not having a official military title

or public position, is kind of hilarious, almost pirate like in of itself.

After that, he traveled to the island with his new armada

and found the pirates that were still there

and he captured them this time, bring them back to the local governor.

And this guy was like wishy washy about the punishment.

And I think Caesar got impatient

and just went to the prison and then in fact did crucify them.

So say what you want about all duels.

But he's a man of his word.

So pirates in Roman waters, mostly hail from Cilicia,

which is what I mentioned earlier, and Illyria earlier in Pirates use a boat

called the Olympus, which is a broad term to describe many types of boats

kind of how like the galley is describing a lot of the Roman and Greek ships.

But it's a smaller type of boat, little, but it's pretty maneuverable

and it's notable for their loose use of a low free board, which is the distance

between the water and the upper deck, and usually had around 50 or so men

and most of them are rolling at the time.

So very limited, like free space.

Other ships used for like raiding in attacks on other ships, used for light

raiding and attacks on other vessels were ones

like the light burner, which is similar to Olympus.

But both can be seen on carvings and coins from the second

and first century, which tells us, you know how popular they were.

All of these ships are, like I mentioned galley like.

So the Roman and Greek ships you see in movies

would have been kind of just variations of that style because everybody in

the Med was stealing from one another in both physical things and then also ideas.

So some people fitted them with rams to crash into enemy ships

that would give them bigger sails.

But they all generally have that galley shape.

And while for a while these pirates were able

to pay off Roman senators with all their slave trading,

they did eventually bite off more than they could chew,

or there were too many pirates doing the damn thing, and they soon

were making more concern with Rome than anybody would ever like to do.

Pirate blockade formed in the first century BCE, causing many

Roman citizens to fear for starvation, which is obviously never good.

It's kind of plays into the fact of did pirates really hurt

the people that they were like of the countries they were attacking?

Well, in this case, they definitely seemed like they might have.

So the Roman Senate finally took measures to combat piracy,

hired a man named Pompey, and now not the same as Pompey was

put forward to, you know, fight against these pirates.

The Senate approved of his nomination by a friend, and this gave Pompey

some major power and tools to deal with the menace, right?

Passing a law called Lex Gabinete de Paradis persecutions

or the Armenian law on pursuing pirates in 67 BCE.

Pompey was a popular guy and especially popular among the non noble

class of Roman, a real people's champ, as it were,

So much so that the Senate really didn't want to give him any power.

But they also wanted to get rid of the pirates.

So selfish choice.

While senators feared another dictator coming to power,

the people feared the physical loss of food and gold from the pirates.

So now that Pompey has a great fleet and an army

to the tune of 270 warships, 120,000 infantry and 4000 cavalry.

Now these numbers are very source, the source, but, you know, the inventory

kind of remains unchanged.

They also gave him 144 million sestertius And remember, one could buy two loaves of

bread and 32,000 could pay for the salary of one Legionnaire for a full year.

So send that gave this man

three years time to complete this task and he did it in a couple months.

How did he do this?

Well, let's call our buddy, our old buddy, the hall

old buddy buddy Plutarch to tell us.

He says he divided the waters and adjacent coasts of the Mediterranean

Seas in the 13 districts assigned to each a certain number of ships

with a commander and with his forces thus scattered in all quarters.

He encompassed the whole fleets of piratical ships that fell in his way

and straightway hunted them down and brought others into port.

Other succeeded in dispersing and escaping

and sought their hive, as it were hurrying from all quarters.

And solicitor against these Pompey intended

to proceed and person with the 60 best ships.

He did not, however, sail against them until he had entirely cleared

of their pirates the tyranny and see the Libyan Sea

and the sea about Sardinia, Corsica and Sicily in 40 days.

All told,

this was owing to his own tireless energy and zeal of his lieutenants.

Plutarch

is one of the people that I mention that says that he had more ships in Calvary.

But either way, essentially

what he created was an organized naval rotation and patrol.

He stuck people that he trusted, invaluable places like the Strait

of Gibraltar, Corsica, the Aegean Sea, the mouth of the Black Sea,

Cyprus, Africa, all cleaned up half of the Med in 40 days.

And then the other half and another 40 methods of capturing, said

Pirates are discussed further by Plutarch, saying that a big chunk of the pirates

would surrender and beg for mercy and his forces would grant them mercy

so more and more pirates would surrender after hearing that they weren't

being just slaughtered.

Maybe they saw the writing on the wall. Who knows?

It was kind of funny to think of how meticulous and organized the Roman

armies were and that it was just utter chaos in the seas until this point.

Now, the victories of Pompey,

according to the records in Alexandria, go as follows 71 captured ships,

306 ships, destroyed, 120 cities and forts captured, 10,000 fired

skilled and 20,000 pirates were spared when they beg for mercy.

It really was a big change

for how the Roman Navy approached piracy, but piracy was not done.

It did not disappear after these impressive victories.

Even Pompey's own son took to piracy and had his own pirate fleet.

After the death of Caesar and subsequent fight for power between Cleopatra,

Mark, Antony, Octavian in 31 BCE, Rome found itself wanting slaves once again,

and thus the same pirates came back into the fold was slaves to trade.

However, this partnership, they were not really causing harm

to Rome itself anymore, actually were essentially working for them,

which turned them into very early instances of privateers.

Main bulk of piracy in Rome was limited to for another

250 some odd years around 258 C.E.

There's a new group of pirates that had been causing

trouble around the Black Sea, the Goths, and no, no, no, no.

Stop it.

Get help is not a bunch of pale ladies in fishnets

and scary makeup as much as we would all like it to be now.

And as I wrote that joke, I wondered how often that type of joke

has been made about these people know

they would never have any idea that one day their names would

also be used by a group of people who are really into the Cure.

Depeche Mode Super Wild Anyway,

the gods began to dip their toes in Roman waters around 250

C, as I mentioned, and made their way towards Cyprus and Crete.

Some of their escapades.

Other groups began using piracy to attack the mighty

Roman Empire, like the early Franks and Saxon pirates.

Most of these would continue as the full empire began to splinter and fall.

While we won't talk about the full collapse,

it is a good idea to consider the fallout from it.

When when moving forward with some of these defeats mounting.

My major migration from neighboring areas fleeing the troubles of their homelands

gave them food shortages, changes in social structure

and large scale corruption and moral bleakness.

All of these things kind of culminated

in an empire divided and changed how things were done in different areas.

To quell instability in such a vast empire, Diocletian decided

to split up the empire into 86, see different sections

having their different decreed leaders and hope that it would stabilize

the fractured Empire.

But eventually the full empire would split into two the West and the East.

The East became the Byzantine Empire and outlived the West by a thousand years.

And the West contains modern day Spain, France, Germany,

Britain, Croatia, Bosnia, Hungary, those kind of things

east made up of Greece, Bulgaria,

Romania, Turkey, a middle East, nations and a big chunk of North Africa.

With all that going on,

the next section would be the Dark Ages or the early Middle Ages.

The Dark Ages are the post antiquity times usually dating from the fall

of Rome proper in the fifth century to the Renaissance in the 15th century.

With this time frame,

the written accounts are of a more and more landlocked places,

more prevalent, because instead of it being more Mediterranean centric,

we had, you know, learning and writing

evolving in the areas that were once Germanic tribes.

These places advance

past their so-called barbarian ways and documenting more of their lives.

With that, they're more land struggles and less focus on the water.

Since the Byzantine Empire held a strong foothold on the major

water system in Europe at the time,

not to say there was no battles on the water

that happened at all, but it was much more limited

and a lot of this information has also been lost to time, like the records

just gone.

But most of these example mirror prior ones, so small little things here

and there.

The west of

the west end of the Roman Empire shifted and contorted into the kingdoms.

That would be the ones typically learned about in the Middle Ages.

The West deteriorated throughout the fifth and sixth century.

The coasts of those former places

lost the protection of their navy and were susceptible to raiding.

But were more focused, were more but

were more focused on the turmoil that over their land.

Each group trying to gain their own slice of Rome's former glory from the ashes

rose kingdoms of Germanic barbarian tribes like the Franks,

the swaps arms, the Saxons, the Visigoths and the Vandals.

One thing that did unite these eventually was the spread of the Christian religion

throughout them.

The Franks eventually became the power in which Charlemagne would take a hold

and thus be appointed by the Pope and essentially created the epitome

of the Christian kingdoms we think about when we think of medieval Europe.

It was these times that the world got more compartmentalized

with Western Europe becoming secluded due to the Arabian kingdoms

for mention of the use of their roads and routes.

So while Charlemagne conquered Western Europe, he was not only solidified

the Christian religion, but also helped create a system in which land was given

to different followers and tax money given to the crown in return.

And just as he did this

in the Frankish empire, the Saxons would do the same in Britain.

And as the word of God spread, towns began to be more and more funded

and there monasteries near them.

And these churches also would now be full of gold

because that's where they kept and mostly located on the banks of River

for easy access for commerce, but also as

as these kingdoms, as it were evolved,

they move more inward because they didn't need to go to the sea.

So you had these monasteries that were kind of left out, out in by

by the water and made it so that they were removed from typical

like King Castles and all these things because you needed

that distance for them to be pure and, you know, have their peace.

Right.

And all of these things would spell trouble for the intact

inhabitants of these locations.

By 793, in the northern section of the British Isles, Saxons had a similar

method of their systems and churches and monasteries of the Franks

that the Franks did, one of which the monastery at Lindisfarne was built

on a small island that had remains buried of St Cuthbert.

Cuthbert. I don't know that it's a weird name.

I don't like it.

It was also the foothold of a revitalization

of the Christian message in Northumbria or Northern England.

Apparently it's one of it was one of the oldest

monasteries at the time, but the region was struggling.

All right, so there's writings of famine and even some tales of dragons

flying about.

And all of this would kind of pale in comparison

to the threat that was about to show up and also mythologize

a lot of the events that they were describing before, though,

on a June day, this quaint monastery off the coast of modern day Bamberg

would be visited by a pagan seafaring warriors that we now

refer to pretty much entirely as Vikings.

The Norsemen, Danes, Pagans or Heathens would be their names in those days.

And you might wonder why included him in this episode.

But if you know your history, then

you know how well the actions of these people line up with pirates.

Viking even has its roots in an Old Norse word

for raiding, which sometimes is translated into pirate.

And what what's more is that they were not solely dependent on warfare on the sea.

They for the for most of their days were farming and fishing.

The ship or an attack saw them traveling to places along coasts

first smashing and grabbing and stealing treasures

before leaving and returning to their regular lives in Scandinavia.

They were often in the summer because that was the time

where they really didn't have a whole lot of things to do.

You're waiting on crops to grow and animals can be,

you know, pretty well well off by by themselves.

So they would come in the summer and this raid was in the summer of 1793.

Right. So June, as I mentioned.

So this raid in 1793 was not the first account

of their activity, but it would be the beginning of a long turbulent

time for the people of Northumbria, Franca and other parts of Europe.

Descriptions of the attack on Lindisfarne are not thorough.

Mainly because there was not a lot of dedication

to detail back then, not a whole lot of true crime enthusiasts.

So we're stuck with what they did write.

But a scholar name Alcuin, who was tutoring Charlemagne's children

at the time, corresponded to a bishop who was from Lindisfarne.

And these two between betwixt them, as it were

described, Aftermath as the Church of St Cuthbert.

Cuthbert is spattered with the blood of the priests, priests of God,

stripped of all its furnishings, exposed to plundering of the pagans.

He also described the monks being, you know, trampled

after being slaughtered like there's no respect for the dead.

This was seen as a tragedy to the lovers of the Faith Islands

known as Holy Island, and its importance was known throughout the kingdoms around.

Some even speculated that this attack was, you know, so

random and violent that perhaps the Norsemen sought revenge.

It's even indication that Charlemagne interacted and fought the Danes off

and land skirmishes as he expanded his Frankish empire, North.

The fact that there had been some Norsemen documented traveling down the coast

and what seem to be trading missions a few times before this event

occurred, made some believe that this was revenge.

Charlemagne had a convert or die policy in style with dealing with pagans.

So that's where that idea kind of stems from.

Others speculate that these early mentioned accounts could have been

the Vikings casing the joints, essentially checking

see where they could sneak in to get the most bang for their buck

in terms of raiding

and maybe a full episode on them deserves to be done at some point.

But right now, we'll just continue on the pirating tactics of the Vikings.

So now that we know they really did not just appear from the icy

northern European waters unannounced, but really made their presence

more and more known and more and more hostile,

we can move on to what they did and how they did it.

See, the Danes love themselves good long ago.

And this is the boat.

If you're imagining it like a Viking ship, the low deck, the wide

and which had a wide stance.

Also spacious,

it seemed given room for different like all of the different travelers on it.

Right.

They were also shallow so they could maneuver in shallow

waters and be, you know, land on the beach very easily.

They, like many of the galleys and boats used before, use a combination of sail

and rolling power.

And some even say that the design of the Viking longboat

might have evolved from designs of early iteration

of them interacting with the Romans in like the British Isles way before.

Right?

There are few surviving vessels of such construction,

such as the GOC stag ship, which shows a perfectly preserved ship that was found

in a burial mound in Norway, dating back to like the ninth century

CE ninth century ce in ABC.

There are several sizes and types of ships that feature different construction

methods, but in general they're all known by how many rowing benches they have.

They feature the calves featuring 6 to 16

rowing benches and as you know, the smallest can

that is to be considered a long ship, mostly been used for fishing and trade.

The Snicker, which is Snake, obviously had been had at least 20 rowing

benches and could carry about 41 men and is also the most common type.

The steed had more than 30 rowing benches and some carried upwards of 80 men

that could be, you know, a hundred more feet long.

And the Trackr or the dragon are the ones that we only know about

from historical sources.

Haven't actually found one yet.

Archeologists wise.

The ship I mentioned earlier, the architecture ship, was actually

even replicated and the new ship called the Viking was even sailed

across the Atlantic to the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago from Norway,

which is a fun fact that just goes to show how well the design work

and also kind of a glimpse to prove that the Vikings would have been able to do so.

And discover the new world, as many finally

have been begun to conclude after years of debate.

Anyway, back to the action.

After 1793, things began to ramp up, right?

Well, the first rate occurred in 793.

There's a couple of actionable deaths

at the hands of Danes in the kingdoms of the lower Europe.

Like in 1789, a party of three ships maybe landed in the wrong spot due to weather.

Nobody really knows, but they were intercepted

by the king of Wessex Reeve and they killed that guy immediately.

So not great.

Where to reach the other places, other kingdoms, Places

like Charlemagne's Frankish Kingdom began setting defenses on the coasts.

Meanwhile, Danes now knew that buildings similar to the one in Lindisfarne,

held potential major potential fuel people to fight and a lot of treasure to take.

Every summer they would travel down for the secluded and often

guarded monasteries before tactics began

to be done to try and protect these sanctuaries.

While they're not, there are not detailed accounts

of every single one, we have a pretty good list to go off of.

They would go to Iona, Scotland and attack then Ireland for the first time in 1785.

By 799 they would raid on the Frankish coast,

which put Charlemagne on high alert for building defenses,

and these fortifications would be successful in repelling them.

But in 14 to 14 years time he would have died

and with him fall out in organization and determination.

Charlemagne also gave men from the North

an axis of ease by way of the Frisian coastline,

which was part of northern Germany and part of the North Netherlands as well.

Charlemagne had destroyed the Frisian fleet,

leaving them defenseless after this victory.

Not really good foresight on his part.

And then after his death he only had one son who outlived him.

And that was Luke Louis, the pious, which I want to say.

Louis the pious or Louis the peewee,

because of the similarity in the letters and those names,

I know they're not spelled exactly the same, but this anyway,

that guy, his son died in 840, and then his three sons were constantly

at each other's throats, you know, splitting his former kingdom in sections

and all this happening while the Vikings, you know, continued to raid in Europe,

utilizing the deep river systems like the Rhine in the sand

to travel inside modern day France and Germany.

In 810, Frasier would be attacked by Danish King Godfried.

In that time, Viking groups would attack Iona, Scotland two additional times.

In 812, a band of Danes founded the City of Limerick in modern day Ireland,

while planned while plundering a monastery,

which they would continue attacking for a few hundred years.

Just we're just going to keep at it because you guys keep refilling this one,

so let's go.

Not that great.

I guess I would just maybe just use a different monastery at that point.

I don't know.

Anyway, they were quiet for a few years before really ramping up an 832

four 700 reported, 120 ships

raided and attacked Armonk and Ireland, and then they raided this town

three times in a month, which again, bro, I would maybe stop.

Well, I guess we're did travel super slow back then,

but you'd think they'd be like, All right,

send the fastest guys, you know, the fastest horses.

Tell them to go to all the places and tell them to stop

sending shit to this place because they keep getting messed up anyway.

Basically the entire entirety of the eight thirties

was really bad for Ireland and the churches within them.

They would repay Ireland by

founding the city of Dublin in eight by 840, which is kind of neat.

And then Vikings would go ahead with going head to head with King Egbert of Wessex

in 836, causing him to retreat and then again in 838.

But then he would be victorious, victorious,

however you want to pronounce that word this time,

because the amount of different clans and places that the Vikings

were hailing from all with different goals and, you know, missions explains

why it was so chaotic for the pseudo organized kingdoms they attacked.

They were not a unified force, but a bunch of like guerrilla forces

attacking in different places, you know, the most part.

Anyway, by 843, three years after the passing of Charlemagne's

heir, Vikings were now raiding parts of France,

these raids got closer and closer to Paris.

And as so-called barbarians at the gate, you know, as it were,

and and the Vikings were paid a handsome ransom to leave Paris in 1845.

Its army was supposedly led by the mythologized Ragnar Lothbrok,

and they were paid £5.6 thousand in gold and silver, which I have seen estimates

putting the equivalent of value at like today's money at $57 million.

But I don't know.

It doesn't, it doesn't work straight like that

because the metals were worth more to the people back then than they are now.

Like, I don't know, it's very complicated, but it just doesn't work that well.

So $57 million on the low end.

And it wasn't just Christian nations that the Vikings were attacking.

They were defeated by Muslim armies in Spain in 844

and I guess the rapid defense in which they used to prevent

the Vikings from attacking them was what scared them away.

So they're not focused on strictly just Europe either.

Vikings associated with Western Europe were, you know, Danish and

Norwegian, but the Swedish Vikings would go down

through the eastern end and end up in the Balkans in modern day Russia.

Yeah, through these escapades

they went down through the Eastern Bloc and even made it to Constantinople.

That's right.

Good.

All Rome, Eastern Roman Empire even had to deal with these dudes.

In 1860, they scorched villages along the coast leading towards the city

and escaping with their winnings and not even stepping foot in the city.

Later on, a different group of Vikings would be paid guards

for Constantinople, which is kind of interesting.

Legendary Northmen Bjorn Ironside traded into the Mediterranean with fellow Dane

Heston, even capturing the town of Pisa of Leaning Tower fame, anybody.

They also made it to a place they believed was Rome and put all pulled

some good old fashioned trick oration by telling the local bishop that Heston

had died and converted to Christianity and wanted to be buried with proper rites.

They brought his body into the city via a coffin,

and then he left from the coffin and slaughtered a bunch of people

making his way to the gates, letting all his friends in.

Now, it's probably more legend than fact, but it makes for a fun story nonetheless.

Either way, he allegedly killed the bishop by either chopping his head off

or stabbing him in the neck, you know, while his friends sacked the city of Luna.

Correct. Not Rome. Still pretty exciting.

As the Vikings continued to raid parts of North Africa,

the Middle East and Russia, while others like Ragnar ended up being killed by 865.

Legend is that this spurned a massive invasion

known as the Great heathen Army arriving and capturing York.

But this time they were no longer just summer expeditions.

Not really weekend warriors anymore.

This was turning into full scale invasions, which I suppose

makes it less piratical and more just war.

So just to summarize this, a bit, Great heathen Army invaded Northumbria, killing

a few different kings and installing puppet leaders in different places.

By 911 different kingdoms were beginning to learn

to work with or just appease the Viking forces.

Rollo A Viking was given a given rule

to a new kingdom named Normandy or the land of the Northman.

This was a partnership that would give the French an ally against Viking invaders.

Following his siege of Paris, defeats mounting against the Viking invaders

in England caused more and more of them to travel further down into the Med,

once again pausing efforts of their attacks in the British Isles.

A lot of different grabs for power, combined

with the exhausted efforts in land granting would bring the Viking

would simmer the violence brought by the men of the North.

Other groups around this time, consisting of the moors from Muslim lands

like Spain gained to reign southern France and northern Italy.

Some come from Crete, even rated the Mediterranean tribes

from the ashes of the former Roman era Algerian pirates

began to resurrect tactics from the same area.

Narratives begin raiding the Adriatic coast and ramped up their

efforts, causing trouble for the Venetian navy through the 11th century.

Slavic piracy also grew in the Baltic Sea and was only strengthened

by the roots Vikings that came from the Swedish side of Scandinavia.

In fact, Slavic piracy mostly fell after Danish forces

conquered Arcola 1168 not eliminating piracy completely,

but obviously it was reduced to very small level of crime for a while.

And honestly, not everyone considers even Vikings to be pirates.

I think it might be because of the full scale invasions later on.

But in my opinion, with all the small scale

smash and grab that they did for a couple of hundred years, these actions

seem more pirate like in my opinion, and it seems like I'm wrapping up.

It's because I am.

This episode ended up being more than enough for two episodes,

and it could be its own series. Really.

So we're leaving Pirates in the mid 12th century.

We'll continue next week with more pirate lore.

Exciting stuff because if you know your history

after the 12th century, naval combat gets intense gunpowder.

Global travel people never met before intermingling larger ships.

Even when there's no remedial rants in this episode.

I will save that for the full wrap up.

But some things I found interesting this week the Sea People in the Bronze Age.

I recently joined one of those RPG pages

on Facebook where everybody pretends to be something.

This one is people pretending to be from the Bronze Age.

And so, so many references to the sea, people that I now understand

and have references for. So that's exciting.

Also how small the world was in Hellenistic in antiquity,

like the Roman Empire, was massive, but not a lot of like world

exploration outside of it,

and the lack of documentation by other societies makes it even smaller.

Also, how Wild Julius Caesar was to be a captive

and bark orders of the pirates holding him hostage.

And how big a pain in the ass the Danes were to most of Europe at the time.

So much fighting within

those places already grabs for power and then bam, you know,

now come these giant Scandinavian bastards riding ships that look like dragons.

They had to be tough.

But that's it for this week.

Next week, we will cover the Pirates of the China Sea, along with

and the long history that can that comes with them,

the European ones as well, as well as the development of larger

ships for further travels over two continents and such.

Damn Portuguese always explore and stuff just kidding obviously.

Thank you for continuing to read and review the show

and all the locations possible.

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And that's it. Thank you. We'll see you next time.