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And I'd like to welcome our newest patrons, Bobby, Montecah, and Doug. And I'd like to welcome our two newest

Commodores, Gin Soaked Jim, and the night of dampier.

And last but certainly not least, warm birthday wishes to one of our newest patrons, Skipper. The Hello, welcome to the Pirate History Podcast.

The Barbary Corsairs are a topic that we have criminally neglected here on the Pirate History Podcast.

And we're not going to rectify that today, but I do want you to keep it in the back

of your mind that they're always out there in the Mediterranean and the Atlantic coastal waters praying primarily on European shipping.

We've talked about the height of the Barbary pirates, the brothers Barbarossa, and of course John

Ward and Simon Dansaker, but they were around far before Columbus ever sailed for America,

and they're going to continue to be a problem long after the golden age of piracy has ended.

While we in the U.S. often over the The Barbary Pirates do hold a special place in the European mind.

A capture by Barbary Pirates was a sentence of lifelong slavery.

The only way out was to buy your freedom, and unless you or your family was independently wealthy,

there wasn't a lot of hope.

One or two popes did get involved when high-ranking church officials were captured, and there were

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