Page 183 - Conflitti Militari e Popolazioni Civili - Tomo I

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of ships and merchandise . Privateer attacks on the Portuguese coast and Portuguese ships
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by the Moors of Northern Africa, are a constant feature of Portuguese maritime history since
the time of the Christian Reconquista Moreover, there is evidence suggesting that similar
practices were promoted by Christian agents and ships, in particular the Infants D. Henrique
and D. Pedro, who had their own privateer armadas .
24
For the present analysis, it is important to distinguish between privateering and piracy. Pira-
cy, practised by stateless agents involving hordes of private bandits, implies a strong degree of
unpredictability. The commercial vitality of certain routes and the promise of a valuable cargo,
seemed to be the only factors that determine the number of attacks and the danger embodied by
pirates. Privateering is, on the contrary, influenced by specific political-military contexts, which
define the victims and incidence of attacks. Although privateering and piracy are apparently
driven by the same motivation, plundering, and even if they are similar in substance, they are
differently organised and, therefore, have different margins of success and psychological and
material impacts. Thus, privateers, organised by political, armed by states with great military
and naval power, disciplined by a legally structure and hierarchy, have legal, institutional and
material means of action with a potentially much greater impact on their victims.
However, this framework includes the possibility of using negotiations and legal proc-
esses to seek compensation for looting once diplomatic and political relations between the
belligerent powers has been re-established.
One of the most elucidating collection of documents for analysing this issue is the one
containing the requests for compensation presented at the court of Bayonne, following the
negotiation of the Treaty of Lyon in 1536, which put an end to the maritime conflicts between
Portugal and France. The analysis of this documentary corpus, which refers to attacks carried
out between 1518 and 1538, leads to the cataloguing of vessels captured or looted by French
privateers, including 47 from Vila do Conde – the village under study . the map shows the
25
distribution of these occurrences by port of origin of the ships and indicates the global impact
of these activities.
Although the lack of consistent documentation to study the loss and damage resulting
from attacks by French, English and Dutch privateers in the second half of the century, we
can prove that those occurrences are greater in number and in damages. this gives us some
idea of the impact of this type of informal warfare on the naval contingents and on ship-
owners and crews, all civilian population.
Internal projections of this phenomenon in Vila do Conde proves that the majority of
victims affected are seafaring people. Masters, landlords, pilots and sailors represent 87% of
the civilians victimised, against only 13% of merchants, who amount, nonetheless to about

23 Vd., among others, Godinho, Vitorino Magalhães – As incidências da pirataria no sistema português do sé-
culo XVI in “Mito e mercadoria, utopia e prática de navegar”, Lisboa, Difel, 1990, pp. 459-476 and Ferreira,
Ana Maria - Problemas marítimos entre Portugal e a França na primeira metade do século XVI, Redondo,
Patrimonia Historica, 1995.
24 Vd. documents from 1433 and 1434 publ. respectively in Os descobrimentos Portugueses. Documentos para
a sua História, publ. J.M. da Silva Marques, Lisboa, INIC, 1988, tomo I, p. 274 and Documentos das Chan-
celarias relativos a Marrocos, dir. Pedro de Azevedo, Lisboa, Academia das Sciencias de Lisboa, [1934], t.
II, doc. CLI, p. 160-161.
25 Vd. Ferreira, Ana Maria – op. cit.