Local merchants often deemed Catholic pirates as the most fearsome, and the white cross on the red flag terrified them the most. The Knights of Malta, who sailed from the 1570s into the 1700s, saw their attacks not as acts of piracy, but as legitimate attacks against Islam. While other histories concentrate on commerce, Greene focuses on Greek Orthodox victims, rather than pirates or the state, to examine the “realities of traveling across the sea and the norms and customs that structured such crossings.” She incorporates perspectives of “the French, the Vatican, Ottoman merchants, and Catholic pirates,” to provide a well-rounded look into this historic period....
....Greene’s examination deftly demonstrates how the maritime world changed for Greek merchants during these two centuries. In the sixteenth, they were subjects of Venice or the Ottoman Empire. Although they practiced Greek Orthodoxy, religion mattered little either legally or diplomatically. The Knights of Malta, however, saw everyone as Christian, Muslim, or Jew, and in the seventeenth century, the Maltese also attacked Greek merchants because of their relations with the Ottoman Empire. The difference between this particular group and other piracy victims is their Christianity allowed them channels of recovery not available to others, which Greene ably proves.
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The Greeks had unfortunate and way too complicit “relations” with the Ottoman Empire and probably were carrying Western European slaves or soon-to-be slaves.
Let’s talk about French and English Protestant piracy on the coasts of Spain and Portugal, and how they would sack the churches and burn the priests alive in them, sometimes with as many members of the faithful as they could capture, and how they made 60 Jesuit missionaries walk the plank (except for the ones they killed by other means) when they captured a missionary ship bound for Brazil off the coast of the Azores. This essentially destroyed the missionary efforts of the Church in Brazil and left Brazil entirely open to the slavers and exploiters.
And then let’s talk about Catholic St Augustine, Florida in the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries under the Spanish, where British Protestant pirates swept in and sacked and burned the city more than once. In one night-time raid on this then tiny town, they left more 60 dead in the streets, including women and children who were simply trying to flee.
Sorry to spoil your anti-Catholic fantasy.