3. Who Were the Victims?
The victims of Barbary slave raids were ordinary people—fishermen, sailors, farmers, women, and children. Whole villages could vanish overnight, as seen in the infamous 1631 Sack of Baltimore in Ireland, where nearly the entire town was carried off into slavery. The Irish never even considered the possibility of a threat from the corsairs. No one along the vulnerable coasts was truly safe from the corsairs’ reach (via Irish Times – Sack of Baltimore).
