ABSTRACT
The essay takes a non-Eurocentric point of view and aims to highlight the concurrent concepts of piracy and other forms of maritime violence in the early modern Mediterranean. The author shows that a wide range of concepts were used in the early modern Ottoman Empire to conceptualize what Europeans termed piracy or privateering. As in Europe, there was considerable ambiguity in the use and interpretation of these terms, and the practices that they described. In contrast to the emphasis that contemporary Europeans put on the distinction between piracy and privateering, in theory if not always in practice, Ottoman Islamic law did not differentiate between foreign Christian pirates and foreign Christian corsairs or privateers.
