Sack of Baltimore

[16] After a long period of legal wrangling and harassment, it was decided in 1630 by the courts that the settlers could not be evicted because of the large amount they had invested in the development of the town and Coppinger was ordered to rent the land to the Puritans in perpetuity.

[17] Ekin suggests that Coppinger secretly used aristocratic O'Driscoll exiles in Habsburg Spain as go-betweens and hired Murad Reis to enslave the English Puritans of Baltimore.

Despite official discouragement and orders to the contrary from King James I, all local judges, as Coppinger had found, and even the vice-admiral of Munster were complicit in the Baltimore commerce raiding trade.

According to Cervantes scholar and Hispanic studies professor María Antonia Garcés, surviving accounts by former enslaved Christians in Ottoman Algeria, such as the posthumously published 1612 Topographia of Algiers by Antonio de Sosa, provides yet another lead.

He also made repeated references to Algiers, intriguingly, having a community of Irish "New Muslims" and "Turks by profession", who had also been captured and enslaved, chosen to buy their own freedom through conversion to Islam, and joined local crews of the Barbary pirates.

[19] Furthermore, it is well-documented that the authorities had advanced intelligence that Murad planned to attack a port town along the County Cork coast, although Kinsale was incorrectly thought to be the target rather than Baltimore.