Polish pirates

What about polish pirates?Have Poles contributed to the seas navigation as their glorious continent counterparts?

OMG ... someone just finished reading a comic strip about Blackbeard ... :S

In the great days of piracy, pirates could come from any nationality but were loyal to none. Unless they were buccaneers, who were 'loyal' only to whatever country was protecting them. Colour, class and nationality meant nothing to them. If any of them had been Polish, it would have been irrelevant to them and to others.

There may have been Poles among them, but my own feeling is that if any had been from Poland, the numbers would have been small. Most pirates were people who for whatever reaon had ended up in the Western Atlantic or the Barbary coast. Not the Baltic.

Piracy is an ancient tradition and if Edward Gibbon is to be believed Slavs from the mountainous region of the area later to be known as Małapolska did go South and take up piracy in the Adriatic. I will provide the number of the chapter in which this mentioned in The Decline And Fall Of The Roman Empire if i can find my copy.

I think the great heyday of piracy, from the Sixteenth to the late Eighteenth Centuries is a bit more relevant. Poles didn't exist in the period Gibbon was writing about.

Yeah right Poles just magically sprang into existence in the 10th century, get over yourself. Moreover Gibbons great work covers the period up to the fall of Constantinople to the Turks so that shows how much you know.

You're quite wrong here. They consolidated as a nation from various existing groups from that period onwards with the process perhaps having started before. The Tenth Century group you mention was (very arguably) the beginning of this, and part of a non-linear process that continued until a few years into the Second Republic. The process took centuries.


Centuries prior to the heyday of piracy. Of course you can say piracy started with the Sea Peoples (not Polish either, LOL), or before, but the term 'piracy' has very different meanings in different periods. BTW, I did know the period Gibbon's D&F covers. I wouldn't be so quick to rely on it, either.


Don't bother.


Yes it does, rather.

It is the fifty fifth chapter. Don't tell people what to do you are not the boss of this forum. "....yet the Sclavonian pirates were still frequent and dangerous; and it was not before the close of the tenth century that the freedom and sovereignty of the Gulf were effectually vindicated by the Venetian Republic." The Sclavonian pirates had emigrated from "....the inland regions of Silesia and Little Poland, thirty days journey, according to the Greek computation, from the sea of darkness."

So they came from Poland to pirate in Adriatic?Interesting.Of course with Serbs providing shelter nearby nothing can be difficult.Anyway who conducted the piracy in Baltics?Only Vikings had this priviledge?

Southern don't you mean Privateers? The "legalised" Pirates...


There were Poles in Nelsons fleet at trafalgar....they always have found themselves everywhere,sort of eastern europes Irish :)

Re the baltic, the hanseatic league had that place pretty sowed up for a fair chunk of history.

Did Polish rulers ever authorise Privateers in the way Spain ,Britain France the US etc did?

Probably there were on french side too.There is no major war fought in Europe in last century without participation of Poles.
Anyway Slavs do not seem to have a tradition in piracy(for Czechs it is understood since they have no harbours) and they don't seem to have a tradition of colonies and slaves.

There were entire Polish regiments on Boneys side Southern, Duchy of Warsw troops for a start. But yes,no doubt some polish seamen on board the LOSING sides fleet ;)...There were frenchmen on "our"side,britons on "there" side.....nationalism really wasnt the big deal it is these days ....:)


lols...Serfs are slave with a different name mate....and as for colonies,do a search on this site for Polish/Liberia :)
Part of the reason Poland didnt join in with europes empire grabbing activities was simply put,she didnt exist as a free nation at the time,nothing to do with any "better nature" Im afraid.

I wonder how many of those were buccaneers on the Spanish Main...

.... fair well and adue to you spannish ladies fair well and adeu to you ladies of spain,the captains recieved orders to sail for old Poland..........

Maurycy August Beniowski


From Here
angelfire.com/mi4/polcrt/MABeniowski.html

There are loads of links but I suspect most are not too accurate.

God bless Google

oops Barney,He's Hungarian :)
And here we have the forefathers of Blackwater,haliburton et al;
Letters of Marque
The practice of privateering was established, and had definite rules, during the 18th century. British, French, and American privateers had to follow procedure. Captains and ship owners would take a prize and sell the vessel and cargo captured, following an established protocol in Liverpool (England), Dunkirk (France) or Boston (America). Whenever war was declared, a General Prize Act was made to allow privateering,

Applications for these "letters of marque" were made by the captain of the privatering ship or by the captain and his joint ship owners. In Great Britain these letters were delivered to the Admiralty, while in the Americas these were given to the state governors. The Continental Congress of the Americas issued privateering commissions from April 1776 until July 1780. Without a government's sanctions, privateers could be hung as pirates. These letters would name the ship's owner, their town of origin, the name of the captain and senior officers, the ship's name, the weight of the ship, the size of the crew, and its armaments. These letters also stated the country that they were allowed to attack and plunder. Infractions of these orders made them pirates.

Ship owners were required to post a bond with the government to guarantee their good behavior. In 1812, this cost $5.000 - $10,000 (U.S.) or $1,500-$3,000 (in British pounds). If a captain, or any member of his crew, was not in accordance with these rules, he lost his deposit. Therefore, the captain could set uncooperative men in any location and leave them there, upon his own best judgment, to avoid losing this money. (Privateers and Pirates).

I know, I read a lot of stuff about him today. He wasnt actually a pirate either. But he is in the big book of pirates :)

privateerdragons.com/pirates_famous.html

I see nobody having at least a ppm content of elementary knowledge bothers to leave a comment on "Polish pirates" so I have to do it.

First pirates in the Baltic area were Vikings, West-Slavonic to a high degree.
Polish ... hmm...can be disputed.

We can hardly exclude Polish pirates in the famous Klaus Störtebeker's Victual Brothers (German: Vitalienbrüder) but with no historical proofs as far I know.

Jagiellonian and Vasa kings used privateers fighting Teutonic Knights and later Swedes. Same goes for Danzig/Gdansk (the best known one - captain Beneke - the name sounds rather German) as a part of Rzeczpospolita (Polish Commonwealth).

Aha,I see you've been reading "how to win friends and influence people".......


Please,dont feel put upon,by all means dont bother your royal highness.....



well ,er,I guess we can exclude them.....


Thank you for that answer,now,why didnt you just say that to begin with oh font of all saltyseadog knowladge ;)

No read post #8 Slavs from Poland did engage in piracy in the Adriatic. There were Polish pirates. Their lack of rum, parrots, and shoes with big buckles does not exclude them.

It does however make them uninteresting and relatively undocumented compared to the swashbuckling water pikeys of fifteen hundred years later.

They may be uninteresting to you, but others perusing this Polish discussion forum may find the story of Slavs leaving Poland and marching thirty days to reach the sea and become aquatic brigands quite interesting. I know I found it so when I first read about it.

Except there isn't really very much to say about them - and neither the ethnicity nor the geography correspond to anything recognisably Polish.

Why are pirates called pirates anyway?

(They just aaaarrrre)

I dont need to,what I was refering to was his "source" for "baltic pirates" as being some book writtten by some german fellow,and he himself admitted there was no historical basis for it,but,he choose to believe it anyway..........


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This took me back to primary school,and the assemblies when for some bizzare reason teachers thought it was appropriate for 6 year olds to sing "15 men on a dead mans chest" and "What do you do with a Drunken sailor?".........

A pirate walks into a bar and the bartender says, "Hey, I haven't seen you in a while. What happened, you look terrible!"

"What do you mean?" the pirate replies, "I'm fine."
The bartender says, "But what about that wooden leg? You didn't have that before."
"Well," says the pirate, "We were in a battle at sea and a cannon ball hit my leg but the surgeon fixed me up, and I'm fine, really."

"Yeah," says the bartender, "But what about that hook? Last time I saw you, you had both hands."
"Well," says the pirate, "We were in another battle and we boarded the enemy ship. I was in a sword fight and my hand was cut off but the surgeon fixed me up with this hook, and I feel great, really."

"Oh," says the bartender, "What about that eye patch? Last time you were in here you had both eyes."
"Well," says the pirate, "One day when we were at sea, some birds were flying over the ship. I looked up, and one of them shat in my eye."

"So?" replied the bartender, "what happened? You couldn't have lost an eye just from some bird *****"
"Well," says the pirate, "I really wasn't used to the hook yet."

Störtebeker no historical proof??? WTF???
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klaus_St%C3%B6rtebeker

There are memorials and movies about this guy here in Germany!
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klaus_St%C3%B6rtebeker#St.C3.B6rtebeker_today

Geographically they were from a region of Poland. Ethnically they were Slavs as are Poles. They are recognizably Polish on both counts, a branch of the great Slavic People that many on this forum seem intent on belittling, but to no avail. The thread is titled “Polish Pirates” and you insist that the only relevant pirates are the ones which included few or no Poles in their ranks. It is the Caribbean Pirates, in their fruity garments, that are irrelevant to this thread, not the Slavic pirates of the Adriatic.

So are Serbians - but they aren't recognisably Polish. Except maybe to Crow.


There is no more a 'Slavic people' than there is a 'Germanic people' or a 'Latin people'.


Who are obscure by the mists of time.

My niece attends a rather hippy-ish private primary school here in California and it bans pirate costumes from its Halloween celebrations because pirates still exist, especially in South-East Asian waters, and they are brutal murderers.