 If Iceland could only be known for one thing, it would probably be its scenery, which garners millions of tourists each year. Two million or so tourists visited the country in 2019, mostly coming from the United Kingdom and the United States. Despite its recent tourism boom, Iceland has always been one of the more isolated countries in European history, being settled as late as 874 AD by Vikings, and then having relatively limited contact afterwards with the rest of Europe, until of course globalization began. Considering its comparatively short history, however, there was one historical event so out of sorts that hardly anybody has heard of it. In the summer of 1627, pirates from the Barbary Coast, controlled by the Turkish Ottoman Empire, raided Iceland. But how in the hell did this happen? Let's just take a moment to appreciate how different Iceland and Turkey are. They are on opposite sides of Europe, have very different geographies, and while one was only discovered 1150 years ago, the other has been home to human civilization for thousands of years. Of course, Turks actually arrived in Turkey from Central Asia during the 11th century, and after adopting Islam as their faith, created the Ottoman Empire and conquered much of West Asia, Balkans, and North Africa. This land area stretched all the way to modern Algeria and Tunisia, which was the main operation base for the Barbary Pirates. These pirates were responsible for many pillaging across Mediterranean Europe, the Atlantic Coast, and the main focus of today's topic, Iceland. There were in fact two invasions in 1627 that are grouped together in this event. The first invasion began on June 20th from coarse seerships arriving from Saleh in Morocco, and the second began on July 5th by raiders from Algiers. It should also be noted who these raiders were. Barbary pirates could come from many ethnicities, including Arab, Turkish, and even European, the last of which were referred to as renegados, as they betrayed their own countries which were being raided by the pirates. The main reason many joined the Barbary Pirates was to monetize their efforts in the slave trade happening across the Arab world. Anyway, many renegados joined Arab and Turkish pirates on their way to Iceland in both June and July raids. The June 23 raid from Saleh was headed by Dutch renegado Marad the Captain, and he's usually credited with carrying out the entire logistics of the attack. They mainly spent their time in the southwestern coast of Iceland, and they occasionally came onto the land to capture and pillage. When all was said and done, a Salishian pirates had captured a few dozen Icelanders after spending around a week on the Icelandic coast, and they returned to Saleh on July 30th. However, this was the lesser of the two evils the Icelanders had to face in the summer of 1627. On July 5th, another invasion took place, this time from the Algerian course airships. Once again, this fleet was led by a Dutch renegado, Marad Fleming. Icelandic literature refers to him as the Soulripper, and that he was. After his raids along the eastern fjords and southern coast of Iceland, including the Westman Islands, with the island of Hemi having the most brutal of the attacks, this wave of attacks killed around 40 people, and 400 Icelanders were captured into the Arab slave trade. After all this, the Icelandic people have written many accounts of the raids, and look back in poor taste, as only 10% of those captured ever returned to Iceland. Though these numbers might be relatively inconsequential for most countries, one must remember that Iceland was and still is a small country, so any loss at that scale is pretty devastating. So, this brings the question up from the beginning. Did Turkey really invade Iceland? Well, that claim is quite a bit of a stretch. Though the Ottoman Empire stretched all the way to North Africa, and the pirates who invaded Iceland, in the Algerian raid, came from Ottoman lands, they were not really carried out by Turks. Also, even if the raids were quite ambitious due to the distance from their homes to Iceland, both raids were led by Dutch expats with considerable experience on the high seas, and considering their origins they likely knew the western European coastal regions pretty well. So no, Turkey did not explicitly raid Iceland. Rather, it was pirates who partially came from the Ottoman borders in North Africa, headed by Dutch captains with barely any Turks on board these Corsair ships. Nevertheless, it is still a quite intriguing and overlooked historical event. Thank you all for watching. Be sure to like, subscribe, share this video with all your friends, and hit the bell to never miss any new videos from this channel. Considering watching one of these other videos to learn about another historical event, or to learn about politics from another country, I'll see you all next time.