“Think of jihad as an island,” wrote the sixteenth-century Ottoman bureaucrat, historian, and social commentator Mustafa Ali: “On its right is a sea of wealth, on the left is corruption.” Corsairing and piracy, holy war and criminal rebellion – the opposing legal poles of Mediterranean maritime raiding were not distinguished by tactics, equipment, or even personnel, but by targeting and authorization, or its absence. Mustafa Ali argued that many of the holy warrior heroes (gazis, in Ottoman parlance) who had brought North Africa into the Ottoman fold, corsairs like Hayreddin Barbarossa (d. 1546) and Turgud Reis (d. 1565), had begun their careers as petty coastal pirates, preying on Christian and Muslim Ottomans in the Aegean. With time and success, they expanded their operations, improved the size and range of their craft, and only then transitioned to legitimate corsairing in service of the faith and the sultan. By repenting of their earlier sins and devoting themselves to maritime jihad against the enemies of Islam and the Ottoman dynasty, however, these corsairs earned their place in the Ottoman pantheon and their reward in the hereafter.

But, writing just before his death in 1600, Mustafa Ali observed that over the past generation it had become increasingly difficult to distinguish between the small-time pirates then following similar career paths along the Adriatic and Aegean coasts and the North Africa-bound corsairs they may have aspired to become.