El corso en Baleares en el siglo XVI

Abstract

Historiography has dedicated several studies to Mediterranean privateering, focusing its efforts in enumerating the attacks of the Ottoman Navy and the great corsairs, during the war between the Spanish Monarchy and the Sublime Porte. Several works use those aggressions to justify the need to improve the defense of the Spanish coasts, to protect their inhabitants from being captured. However, very few attempts have been made to evaluate the threat. The particular case of Balearic Islands not only shows us an evolution of the corsair activity very similar to the rest of the Spanish Mediterranean territories. It also evinces the need of new and detailed researches, which will allow us to ix some problems and to evaluate the corsair activity in its right measure.