Barbary Captive — Allan Aldiss

The Barbary books feature the erotic adventures of the renegade Rory Fitzgerald during the Napoleonic Wars when there actually were slave breeding farms in the Ottoman Empire. although you won't find the territory of Marsa on the map, it could well have been there. The principal naval powers were busy fighting each other - the long drawn out war between Britain and Revolutionary and then Napoleonic France started in 1793 and only ended with the battle of Waterloo twenty-two years later - and this gave the Corsairs great freedom of action. This period also saw the elimination of one of their main enemies, the Knights of Malta. Thus, at the time of this story, the Corsairs had an almost free rein to plunder and kidnap along the coasts and islands of Southern Europe. By this time they had replaced their sea-going galleys with fast sailing craft such as Polacca-Chebecs, which carried a mixture of European style square sails and Arab style lanteen sails. The demand for large numbers of young male Christian galley slaves had therefore dwindled. Instead, many of the Corsos, as the raids were called, concentrated more on capturing young women and boys. In 1798, for instance, only a few years before the setting of this novel, Barbary Corsairs from Tunis carried off almost a thousand women and children in one raid on the island of San Pietro, off Sardinia. Years later some were ransomed, but many had been sold off in the slave markets and were never seen again. So although what follows is fiction, the background is realistic and those of a squeamish disposition are advised not to read the books in this series. For a more serious study of the period I would recommend books such as Stephen Clissold's 'The Barbary Slaves' (Elek Books), Noel Barber's 'Lords of the Golden Horn' (Macmillan), 'Harem, the World Behind the Veil' by Lytle Croutier (Bloomsbury), and books about the Knights of Malta.