The word pirate began as a Greek term for someone who tries
Behind the English word pirate sits a Greek noun meaning brigand, built on a verb for attempting. Literally, a peiratēs was anyone having a go at something. Early English writers could not agree on spelling, trying pyrate, pyrat and even pirrot, until the eighteenth century finally settled the matter.
Sea raiding is ancient. The Sea Peoples harried shipping in the Aegean and Mediterranean in the fourteenth century BC, and in early Greece raiding at sea was apparently treated as a respectable living, mentioned casually in Homer. By classical times it had become a disgrace. Rome fought the Illyrians of the western Balkans until defeating their fleets in 229 BC, and in 75 BC Cilician pirates briefly held Julius Caesar captive on a small Dodecanese island. In 67 BC the Senate handed Pompey sweeping powers under the Lex Gabinia to clear the seas.
Medieval Europe had raiders on every coast. Vikings reached as far as Seville, attacked in 844. The Narentines, a Slavic tribe on the Adriatic, repeatedly broke treaties with Venice, beat off Venetian punitive expeditions in 839 and 840, and in 846 raided the lagoon town of Caorle. In the Baltic, the Victual Brothers began as licensed privateers and turned into outright pirates, and shipping in northern seas stayed dangerous until about 1440.
Some pirate communities became almost states. The Zaporizhian Sich, a Cossack haven on the Dnieper from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, drew runaway peasants, outlaws and escaped galley slaves, protected by remoteness and river rapids. Its raiders struck Ottoman shores and, in 1615 and 1625, burned towns near Istanbul. Mediterranean corsairs, though less famous than Caribbean ones, were at least as numerous and used galleys until the mid-1600s.
Popular images owe much to A General History of the Pyrates, printed in London in 1724, which fed later fiction such as Treasure Island in 1883 and Peter Pan in 1911. The trade has not vanished: losses to maritime piracy were estimated at 25 billion US dollars in 2023, up from 16 billion in 2004.
Source: Piracy
