Piracy and Captivity in the Mediterranean: 1550-1810 9781351207973, 1351207970

Table of contents :
Cover
Title
Copyright
Contents
Figures
Acknowledgments
Notes on contributors
Introduction
PART 1 Labor and Law
1 Trading identities: Balthasar Sturmer's Verzeichnis der Reise (1558) and the making of the European Barbary captivity narrative
2 Unkind dealings: English captivity narratives, commercial transformation, and the economy of unfree labor in the early modern period
3 Ambivalences of recognition: The position of the Barbary corsairs in early modern international law and international politics
4 "Free, unfree, captive, slave": António de Saldanha, a late sixteenth-century captive in Marrakesh
PART 2 Home and Hybridity
5 "Renegades": Converts to Islam in American Barbary captivity narratives of the 1790s
6 Identity crises of homecomers from the Barbary Coast
7 "Arab speculators," states, and ransom slavery in the Western Sahara
PART 3 Diplomacy and Deliverance
8 Michael Heberer: A prisoner of the Ottoman navy
9 Piracy, diplomacy, and cultural circulations in the Mediterranean
10 Confraternity models in the "redemption of slaves" in Europe: The Broederschap der alderheylighste Dryvuldigheyt of Bruges (Brugge) and the Scuola della Santissima Trinità of Venice
PART 4 Oppositions and Otherness
11 Khayr al-Din Barbarossa: Clashing portraits of a corsair-king
12 A Huguenot captive in 'Uthman Dey's court: Histoire chronologique du royaume de Tripoly (1685) and its author
13 Two Arabic accounts of captivity in Malta: Texts and contexts
Index

Citation preview

Piracy and Captivity in the Mediterranean

Piracy and Captivity in the Mediterranean explores the early modern genre of European Barbary Coast captivity narratives from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. During this period, the Mediterranean Sea was the setting of large-scale corsairing that resulted in the capture or enslavement of Europeans and Americans by North African pirates, as well as of North Africans by European forces, turning the Barbary Coast into the nemesis of any who went to sea. Through a variety of specifically selected narrative case studies, this book displays the blend of both authentic eyewitness accounts and literary fictions that emerged against the backdrop of the tumultuous Mediterranean Sea. A wide range of other primary sources, from letters to ransom lists and newspaper articles to scientific texts, highlights the impact of piracy and captivity across key European regions, including France, Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Scandinavia, and Britain, as well as the United States and North Africa. Divided into four parts and offering a variety of national and cultural vantage points, Piracy and Captivity in the Mediterranean addresses both the background from which captivity narratives were born and the narratives themselves. It is essential reading for scholars and students of early modern slavery and piracy. Mario Klarer is a professor of American Studies at the University of Innsbruck, Austria. He is the author of several Routledge textbooks, monographs on literature and the visual arts as well as literary utopias. His forthcoming publications include a primary text anthology of Barbary Coast captivity narratives and a digital edition of the Ambraser Heldenbuch.

Routledge Research in Early Modern History

In the same series: The Solemn League and Covenant of the Three Kingdoms and the Cromwellian Union, 1643–1663 Kirsteen M. MacKenzie London, Londoners and the Great Fire of 1666: Disaster and Recovery Jacob F. Field The Turks and Islam in Reformation Germany Gregory J. Miller Church and Censorship in Eighteenth-Century Italy: Governing Reading in the Age of Enlightenment Patrizia Delpiano Individuality in Early Modern Japan: Thinking for Oneself Peter Nosco Guilds, Labour and the Urban Body Politic: Fabricating Community in the Southern Netherlands, 1300–1800 Bert De Munck An Unproclaimed Empire: The Grand Duchy of Lithuania: From the Viewpoint of Comparative Historical Sociology of Empires Zenonas Norkus The Discourse of Exile in Early Modern English Literature J. Seth Lee Piracy and Captivity in the Mediterranean 1550–1810 Edited by Mario Klarer

Piracy and Captivity in the Mediterranean 1550–1810 Edited by Mario Klarer

First published 2019 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2019 selection and editorial matter, Mario Klarer; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Mario Klarer to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Names: Klarer, Mario, 1962– editor. Title: Piracy and captivity in the Mediterranean, 1550–1810 / edited   by Mario Klarer. Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2018. |   Series: Routledge research in early modern history | Includes   bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017040642 | ISBN 9781138640276 (hardback :   alk. paper) | ISBN 9781351207997 (ebook : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Captivity narratives—Mediterranean Region. |   Piracy—Mediterranean Region—History. | Captivity—   Mediterranean Region—History. Classification: LCC HT1240.M48 P57 2018 |   DDC 364.16/4091822—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017040642 ISBN: 978-1-138-64027-6 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-351-20799-7 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Contents

Figuresviii Acknowledgmentsix Notes on contributorsx Introduction1 MARIO KLARER

PART 1

Labor and Law23   1 Trading identities: Balthasar Sturmer’s Verzeichnis der Reise (1558) and the making of the European Barbary captivity narrative

25

MARIO KLARER

  2 Unkind dealings: English captivity narratives, commercial transformation, and the economy of unfree labor in the early modern period

56

DANIEL VITKUS

  3 Ambivalences of recognition: The position of the Barbary corsairs in early modern international law and international politics

76

WALTER RECH

  4 “Free, unfree, captive, slave”: António de Saldanha, a late sixteenth-century captive in Marrakesh PETER MARK

99

vi  Contents PART 2

Home and Hybridity111   5 “Renegades”: Converts to Islam in American Barbary captivity narratives of the 1790s

113

ANNA DIAMANTOULI

  6 Identity crises of homecomers from the Barbary Coast

128

ROBERT SPINDLER

  7 “Arab speculators,” states, and ransom slavery in the Western Sahara

144

CHRISTINE E. SEARS

PART 3

Diplomacy and Deliverance165   8 Michael Heberer: A prisoner of the Ottoman navy

167

ROBERT REBITSCH

  9 Piracy, diplomacy, and cultural circulations in the Mediterranean

186

KHALID BEKKAOUI

10 Confraternity models in the “redemption of slaves” in Europe: The Broederschap der alderheylighste Dryvuldigheyt of Bruges (Brugge) and the Scuola della Santissima Trinità of Venice

199

ANDREA PELIZZA

PART 4

Oppositions and Otherness221 11 Khayr al-Din Barbarossa: Clashing portraits of a corsair-king DIANA DE ARMAS WILSON

223

Contents vii

12 A Huguenot captive in ‘Uthman Dey’s court: Histoire chronologique du royaume de Tripoly (1685) and its author

234

GILLIAN WEISS

13 Two Arabic accounts of captivity in Malta: Texts and contexts

258

NABIL MATAR

Index277

Figures

0.1 Portrait of Chaireddin Barbarossa (c. 1478–1546), Turkish naval commander and privateer 3 0.2 Portrait of Andrea Doria (1468–1560), Genoese admiral4 0.3 Pierre Dan, Historie van Barbaryen, En des zelfs Zee-Roovers (1684) 5 0.4 The victors of the sea battle of Lepanto 1571 15 1.1 Title page of Balthasar Sturmer, Verzeichnis der Reise (1558) 27 1.2 Balthasar Sturmer, Verzeichnis der Reise (1558) 28 1.3 Franz Hogenberg, Geschichtsblätter (1560–1623) 33 1.4 Georg Braun and Frans Hogenberg, “Tunis,” Civitates Orbis Terrarum, vol. 2, Cologne, 1575 34 1.5 Pierre Dan, Historie van Barbaryen, En des zelfs Zee-Roovers (1684) 44 7.1 Northern Africa, Anthony Finley from A New General Atlas, Comprising a Complete Set of Maps, Representing the Grand Divisions of the Globe, 1829 145 10.1 Baldassarre d’Anna, Approval of the Venetian Brotherhood of the Most Holy Trinity for the Ransom of the Slaves, oil on canvas, c. 1619 207 10.2 Jan Garemijn, A Trinitarian in Act of Ransoming a Christian Captive, oil on canvas, c. 1770 210 12.1 Jean Mauger, medal announcing “De Piratis Turca Spectante, Ad Insulam Chios” (“Defeat of the Pirates Before the Turk at the Island of Chios”) 241 12.2 Pierre Landry, Le Triomphe de l’Eglise sur Calvin et sur Mahomet, Royal Almanac for 1686 246 13.1 Sculpture of two hand-tied men in the Maltese Church in Vienna, carved in 1806 260

Acknowledgments

I am indebted to a number of organizations and individuals who contributed to this collection of essays. The Austrian Science Fund granted the four-year research project ESCAPE (www.uibk.ac.at/projects/escape/) from 2014 to 2018. The University of Innsbruck and the Faculty of Language and Literature supported the publication of this volume as well as two conferences on piracy and captivity in the early modern Mediterranean in 2015 and 2016. These events brought many of the contributors to this collection together for a fruitful exchange of ideas and perspectives. Particular thanks go to Julia Ott, Almyria Wilhelm, and Robert Spindler for their help in seeing the collection through the final stages of production.

Notes on contributors

Khalid Bekkaoui (Sidi Mohamed Ben Abdellah University, Fez) is professor of English and Cultural Studies at Sidi Mohamed Ben Abdellah University in Fez, Morocco. His most recent books include White Women Captives in North Africa: Narratives of Enslavement, 1735–1830 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); The British Bride of Tangier: The Extraordinary Love Story of Emily Shareefa of Wazzan (Moroccan Cultural Studies Centre, 2012); and Maghrebi Sufism Youth Gender Politics and the West (in Arabic: Fez University Press, 2013). He is currently working on a book project entitled Muslim Discovery of America. Anna Diamantouli (King’s College, London) is a doctoral candidate in the Department of English at King’s College, London, and a graduate of the Universities of Cyprus and Sydney. Her present research centers on American Barbary captivity narratives of the post-revolutionary period, exploring how these narratives refract the instabilities and uncertainties surrounding negotiations of national definition in the new nation. Mario Klarer (University of Innsbruck) is a professor of American Studies at the University of Innsbruck. He is the author of Frau und Utopie: Feministische Literaturtheorie und utopischer Diskurs im anglo-amerikanischen Roman (Wiss. Buchges., 1993); An Introduction to Literary Studies (Routledge, 1999); Ekphrasis: Bildbeschreibung als Repräsentationstheorie bei Sidney, Spenser, Lyly und Shakespeare (Niemeyer, 2001); and A Short Literary History of the United States (Routledge, 2014). His forthcoming publications include a primary text anthology of Barbary Coast captivity narratives (Columbia University Press, forthcoming 2019) and a digital edition of the Ambraser Heldenbuch. Peter Mark (Wesleyan University) is a cultural historian of Africa, professor at the Wesleyan University and visiting professor at the University of Lisbon, Faculty of Letters. His books include The Forgotten Diaspora: Jewish Communities in Africa and the Making of the Atlantic World (Cambridge University Press,

Notes on contributors xi 2011; with José da Silva Horta); Portuguese Style and Luso-African Identity: Precolonial Senegambia, Sixteenth–Nineteenth Centuries (Indiana University Press, 2002); and The Wild Bull and the Sacred Forest: Form, Meaning and Change in Senegambian Initiation Masks (Cambridge University Press, 2011); and, as editor, The Mountains in Art History (Wesleyan, 2017). He is the editor of Mande Studies. He has been a senior fellow at re:work (HumboldtUniversität, Berlin), an Alexander-von-Humboldt-Fellow, and a visiting professor at the EHESS in Paris. Nabil Matar (University of Minnesota) is presidential professor in the Department of English as well as adjunct faculty in the History Department and the Religious Studies Program at the University of Minnesota. Matar’s research in the past two decades has focused on relations between early modern Britain, Western Europe, and the Islamic Mediterranean. He is the author of numerous articles, chapters in books and encyclopedias, and the trilogy Islam in Britain, 1558–1685 (Cambridge University Press, 1998); Turks, Moors, and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery (Columbia University Press, 1999); and Britain and Barbary, 1589–1689 (University Press of Florida, 2005). He also wrote the introduction to Piracy, Slavery, and Redemption, ed. Daniel Vitkus and Nabil Matar (Columbia University Press, 2001). His current projects are “Land of the White Palace: Arabic Writings about America before World War I,” and “Religious Encounters in the Early Modern Mediterranean: The Arabic Archives.” Andrea Pelizza (State Archives of Venice) studied history at the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice and received his PhD in history and geography of Europe at the University of Bologna. He works as an archivist in the State Archives of Venice, where he also teaches Latin Paleography. His main research interests relate to healthcare and assistance in Venice during the modern age, Mediterranean slavery, and the Venetian Lombardy. He is the author of Riammessi a respirare l’aria tranquilla. Venezia e il riscatto degli schiavi in età moderna (Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti, 2013), and editor of Dell‘historie di Asola fortezza posta tra gli confini del Ducato di Mantova, Brescia e Cremona, vol. I and II (Gianluigi Arcari Editore, 1999/2001). Robert Rebitsch (University of Innsbruck) studied history, psychology, philosophy, and educational science in Innsbruck. For eleven years he has been a staff member of the research service of the University of Innsbruck and is, furthermore, lecturer for early modern European history at the Department for History and Ethnology. His research focus is military and political history of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and he is an expert on the Habsburg Imperial Army of the seventeenth century. Rebitsch is (co-) editor of the Innsbrucker Historische Studien. His most recent publications include Wallenstein: Biografie eines Machtmenschen (Böhlau, 2010);

xii  Notes on contributors Rupert von der Pfalz (1619–1682): Ein deutscher Fürstensohn im Dienst der Stuarts (StudienVerl., 2012); and Die Englisch-Niederländischen Seekriege (Böhlau, 2014). Walter Rech (University of Helsinki) received his PhD in 2012 from the University of Melbourne and is a postdoctoral researcher at the Erik Castrén Institute of International Law and Human Rights. His main research interests are political philosophy as well as the history and theory of international law and international politics. Walter Rech’s publications include Enemies of Mankind: Vattel’s Theory of Collective Security (Brill, 2013) and “Rightless Enemies: Schmitt and Lauterpacht on Political Piracy,” Oxford Journal of Legal Studies (2012). He is currently involved in the research projects International Law, Religion and Empire (Academy of Finland) and Order and Contestation in Islamic International Law and International Relations (Gerda Henkel Foundation). Christine E. Sears (University of Alabama in Huntsville) is an associate professor at UAH, where she teaches courses in comparative slavery, slavery and public history, and American history. Her first book, American Slaves and African Masters (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), explores the fate of Americans captured by Barbary pirates or shipwrecked in the Western Sahara. In 2015, Christine co-edited New Directions in Slavery Studies: Commodification, Community and Comparisons in Slave Studies (LSU Press, 2015), a collection in which twelve contributors examine recent trends in slavery scholarship. Currently, she is working on a chapter on comparative slavery for an edited collection and is embarking on a new project that examines the maritime world of the early American republic. Robert Spindler (University of Innsbruck) is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of American Studies at the University of Innsbruck. He earned his doctoral degree in 2016 with his dissertation Among Pirates: Barbary Captivity and Early Modern Literature and Culture in Europe and America. His research and teaching interests include English, American, and German adventure literature from the Middle Ages to the nineteenth century, as well as the Western film. He is currently a team member in the project ESCAPE (European Slaves: Christians in African Pirate Encounters) funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF). Daniel Vitkus (University of California, San Diego) earned his Master’s Degree in English Language and Literature at Oxford University (Hertford College) and his PhD in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. Since 2013, he has been the Rebeca Hickel Endowed Chair of Early Modern Literature at the University of California, San Diego. He is the editor of The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies. His interests include Shakespeare; Renaissance literature; travel writing, cultural studies,

Notes on contributors xiii literary theory, postcolonial literature, Islamic culture and its representation in the West; economic history, global theory, the origins of capitalism, and the cultural history of empire. He is the author of Turning Turk: English Theater and the Multicultural Mediterranean, 1570–1630 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), and the editor of Three Turk Plays from Early Modern England (Columbia University Press, 2000) and Piracy, Slavery, and Redemption: Barbary Captivity Narratives from Early Modern England (Columbia University Press, 2001). Gillian Weiss (Case Western Reserve University) is an associate professor of history at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. She received her AB from Princeton in 1993 and her PhD from Stanford in 2002. A scholar of France and the Mediterranean world during the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, she is the author of Captives and Corsairs: France and Slavery in the Early Modern Mediterranean (Stanford University Press, 2011), translated into French (Anacharsis, 2014). Gillian Weiss recently coedited a special issue of French History with Megan Armstrong on “France and the Early Modern Mediterranean” and is currently working on two projects: a study of North African slaves in seventeenth-century France and a book (co-authored with art historian Meredith Martin) entitled The Sun King at Sea: Maritime Art and Slavery during the Reign of Louis XIV, for which they were awarded a collaborative fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies. Diana de Armas Wilson (University of Denver) is professor emeritus at the University of Denver. She has published books on Cervantes with Princeton, Johns Hopkins, and Oxford University Presses, and is currently sole editor of the 2nd Norton Critical Edition of Don Quijote. Wilson was keynote at Cornell University’s Cervantes Symposium in October 2016. She has translated a captivity narrative written in the 1580s by Antonio de Sosa, a friend of Cervantes and fellow slave in Algiers (An Early Modern Dialogue with Islam, University of Notre Dame Press, 2011), and is currently working on a complementary volume, an NEH-funded translation of Antonio de Sosa’s Epítome de los reyes de Argel.

Introduction Mario Klarer

In the early modern period, the Mediterranean Sea was the setting of largescale corsairing that resulted in the capture or enslavement of Europeans and Americans by North African pirates as well as North Africans by European forces. This historical phenomenon turned the so-called Barbary Coast—a pejorative but widely used term for the city-states of Tripoli, Algiers, and Tunis under Ottoman rule, and the independent sultanate of Morocco—into the nemesis of any European who went to sea between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. The Knights of Malta as the most pronounced force on the Christian side—together with the slave markets in Livorno, Malaga, Marseille, and Malta—epitomized piracy and captivity for the Muslim world. Both players, the Barbary corsairs and their Christian counterparts, embodied the risk of pirate attacks and enslavement for anybody who went to sea or inhabited coastal regions of the Mediterranean basin at this time. The activities of the North African privateers not only affected the lives of thousands of Europeans—including burghers of landlocked cities such as Augsburg in Bavaria or inhabitants of remote Iceland, which fell victim to pirates in 1627—but also impacted American citizens during the early Republic. When diplomacy failed to protect American sailors against North African pirates, the young United States founded the U.S. Navy and was able to decide this conflict in its favor through military action. The Barbary Wars and European colonialism in Africa in the early nineteenth century with the French occupation of Algiers in 1830 marked the end of centuries-long corsairing. Piracy and captivity in the Mediterranean were, of course, as old as seafaring itself. Even the earliest specimens of Western literature, for example, Homer’s Odyssey, report incidents of piracy and land raids as well as ensuing captivity. In the Roman Republic piracy in the eastern Mediterranean became such a threat to traffic and commerce that even Julius Caesar fell into the hands of Cilician pirates, was held hostage, and regained his freedom only after paying a high ransom. Immediately after his release, Caesar gathered forces and took cruel revenge on the very pirates who had abducted him. But Mediterranean pirates in antiquity were also subject to large-scale, semi-public operations, most notably by Pompeius, who earned considerable renown after successfully curbing eastern Mediterranean piracy in the first century before Christ.

2  Introduction Although piracy remained an issue throughout the Middle Ages, it once again became a major threat as well as a global economic enterprise with the dawn of the early modern period. Modern North African corsairing in particular, and the rise of privateering in the Mediterranean in general, were intricately interwoven with the Barbarossa brothers, two sea captains from the island of Lesbos, who successfully took possession of Algiers and Tunis in the first decades of the sixteenth century. The younger brother especially, Chaireddin Barbarossa, became the major figure in Mediterranean piracy and the main antagonist of Christian naval forces (see Figure 0.1). By nominally positioning himself and the newly controlled territories in North Africa under the protection of the High Port, Barbarossa was able to back up his position through the support of the Ottoman Empire. The rise of the North African corsairs immediately prompted reactions by Christian forces, culminating in various large-scale operations by the Habsburgs. For example, in 1535 Emperor Charles V conquered Tunis with an enormous fleet, led by Andrea Doria (Figure 0.2), followed by a disastrous and unsuccessful siege of Algiers in 1541. Although in the European imagination piracy and privateering throughout the early modern period is mostly connected to North African pirates, it was a bilateral phenomenon that was carried out by both North African and European forces. In particular, the Christian Knights of Malta were key players who preyed on Turkish and North African vessels, thereby enslaving thousands of Muslims and trading them on the slave markets in Malta, Marseille, Malaga, or Livorno, which structurally resembled those of Algiers, Tunis, Tripoli, or Salé. Especially the human cargo turned out to be extremely sought after by these state-protected pirates or privateers. Unlike transatlantic slavery, which was mostly based on plantation labor, it was ransom for Christian captives that drove the North African slavery system. On the Christian side, a large number of captives from North Africa were destined to serve as galley rowers. However, the status of slaves—as all victims of pirate abduction were referred to in contemporary sources—was a fluid one. Their fate in North Africa as well as in Europe could oscillate between being held as hostages for ransom, exploited as galley rowers, or employed as house slaves who had to perform manual labor in various contexts. However, the major share of revenues in this slave economy, especially in North Africa, derived from ransom payments. This flow of cash was funneled through a number of diplomatic and political, as well as formal and informal, channels. In early modern Europe, we find two major models for ransoming slaves from Muslim captivity. One was the Catholic confraternity system, in which specific monastic orders specialized in ransoming slaves from Ottoman or North African captivity. The Trinitarian and Mercedarian friars collected alms in order to finance the ransom of Catholic slaves from North Africa or other Muslim regions. At times, the redemption of slaves went hand-in-hand with large orchestrated processions of the newly freed

Figure 0.1 Portrait of Chaireddin Barbarossa (c. 1478–1546), Turkish naval commander and privateer Source: Schloss Ambras, Innsbruck. KHM-Museumsverband.

Figure 0.2 Portrait of Andrea Doria (1468–1560), Genoese admiral Source: Schloss Ambras, Innsbruck. KHM-Museumsverband.

Introduction 5 slaves (see Figure 0.3). On these occasions hundreds of former captives had to parade through major European cities wearing chains and their North African slave outfits for maximum emotional response by the spectators. These events were an integral part of the orders’ continuous campaigning to generate alms for the future ransom of slaves. On the Protestant side, which lacked the monastic order system, so-called Sklavenkassen (“slave banks”) guaranteed the ransom of sailors from the hands of North African pirates. This system developed in particular in the Hanseatic region, most prominently in the city of Hamburg. The Sklavenkassen were the first social security insurances in early modern Europe; and although they could not limit the risk of falling prey to North African corsairs, they guaranteed efficient and speedy returns of sailors to their hometowns in the event of captivity. North Africa lacked institutionalized ransoming organizations resembling the Catholic orders or the Protestant insurance system. However, this did not prevent local rulers or private individuals from intervening on behalf of Muslim captives in European hands. A limited number of documents have survived that corroborate the existence of large-scale ransoming operations that North African diplomats and envoys successfully carried out in Spain or other European countries. Scholarship is divided over the exact number of persons that were subject to this form of captivity or slavery in the Mediterranean basin during the early modern period. Robert C. Davis (2003) represents the high end of the spectrum by calculating over one million individuals in North African

Figure 0.3 Pierre Dan, Historie van Barbaryen, En des zelfs Zee-Roovers (1684); f. 59 Source: Mario Klarer.

6  Introduction captivity for the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. But even more cautious estimates by Gerald MacLean (2007) of several hundred thousand European slaves captured by Muslim corsairs for this timeframe are impressive enough to drive home the dimension of this phenomenon. Possible numbers for North African victims who fell into Christian hands are even harder to deduce. However, the several thousand Muslim slaves that are mentioned in the few surviving ransom documents by North African envoys suggest that the number of human captives must have been relatively balanced between Orient and Occident. The reason why the fate of Europeans in North African captivity dominates scholarship derives only in part from a Eurocentric bias. The prevalence of European captivity narratives stems largely from the uneven distribution of surviving documents.1 In my research I was able to collect more than one hundred European captivity narratives in almost all European languages, ranging from Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, German, Dutch, Polish, Danish, Swedish, and English to Icelandic, to name only the most prominent ones.2 From the sixteenth to the early nineteenth century, the Barbary captivity narrative almost adopted the status of an autobiographical genre, oscillating between authentic eyewitness account and literary fiction. The European Barbary captivity narrative is the focus of my primary text anthology Christian Slaves among Islamic Pirates: An Anthology of Barbary Coast Captivity Narratives — 1550–1810, ed. Mario Klarer (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019). It brings together in English translation a crosssection of major examples of European Barbary captivity narratives in a variety of different languages, thus making a diverse and pan-European type of narrative available to international readers for the first time. These European eyewitness reports were closely interwoven with Christian notions of spiritual self-stylization, on the one hand, and the economic interests of book publishers and redemption organizations, on the other. All these diverse factors—some of which the essays of this collection discuss in great detail—are responsible for the European perspective on slavery in the early modern period and thereby completely outweigh comparable sources on the North African side. Nevertheless, an emerging body of scholarship has devoted painstaking archival work to unearth North African documents in Arabic and Ottoman Turkish that complement and relativize the uneven—i.e., predominantly European or Christian— perspective on this bilateral phenomenon.3 In addition to the widespread quasi-genre of the European Barbary captivity narrative proper, numerous other documents shed light on Mediterranean piracy and slavery. Major sources constitute letters by captives, diplomats, ransomers, or relatives of hostages, texts that circulated widely across the Orient and the Occident throughout the early modern period. Other documents include ransom lists—especially the ones produced by the Catholic orders who specialized in liberating captives, such as the Trinitarians or Mercedarians. These official, often printed, ransom catalogs

Introduction 7 constituted an important means of advertising the orders’ successful activities. On the Protestant side, as Magnus Ressel (2012) has shown in his monograph, archival documents pertinent to the “slave banks” are most valuable sources for reconstructing ransoming processes and insurance activities in Protestant Northern Germany. In addition to these archival sources, newspaper articles, especially in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, shed light on piracy and captivity from a European public perspective. On the North African side, documents are less abundant or nonexistent. The reasons are diverse: first of all, Muslim practice differed dramatically with respect to the production of autobiographical narratives as a religiously motivated genre, as Nabil Matar demonstrates in the concluding essay to this collection. In addition to the theological dimension, the dissemination of all text types in North Africa during the early modern period could not rely on a widely available print culture, as was the case in Europe at the time. Despite the fact that official ransom lists are not common documents in North African archives, the overall scale of ransom or exchange of North African captives from European hands can be deduced from some of the testimonies of Muslim ransomers and diplomats. The same is true for select letters by captives to North African rulers asking for support in the ransom process. Conversely, royal letters from North Africa on behalf of Muslim captives reached European courts. This collection of critical essays investigates the wide range of Mediterranean piracy and captivity in the early modern period by focusing on a large number of discourses and text types, including some of the sources mentioned above. However, it cannot do full justice to the genre-like European Barbary captivity narrative proper. In order to account for these narratives, as well as the literary transformations prompted by these eyewitness accounts, the essays in the companion volume, Mediterranean Slavery and World Literature: Captivity Genres from Cervantes to Rousseau, ed. Mario Klarer (New York: Routledge, 2019), focus specifically on text types that are responsible for the representations of Mediterranean piracy and Barbary captivity in popular European literature and media. In contrast to the collection focusing on the literary dimensions, the essays in this edited volume focus on the early modern phenomenon of Mediterranean piracy and captivity in general, relying on select case studies from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. I have taken care to select essays by experts on a variety of European regions, including France, Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Scandinavia, and Britain, but also the United States and North Africa, to shed light on the phenomenon from diversified national and cultural vantage points.4 However, a number of essays also map out the larger background before which the discourses surrounding specific events or phenomena evolved, including legal theory, redemption documents, authentic and fictional captivity narratives, scholarly and scientific texts, as well as theological, biographical, and diplomatic Muslim sources on piracy and slavery in Arabic and Ottoman Turkish.

8  Introduction

Contributions Part 1: Labor and Law The essays in the first section of the collection sketch out the setting in which Barbary piracy and captivity evolved or tended to be conceptualized in the European and American imagination. The spectrum spans shifts in the economy of the early modern period to its interdependence on human trafficking, the necessity to legitimize pirates for economic and political goals, and the problematic terminological and conceptual status of captives in this early modern North African economy. Based on cases from three centuries of corsairing and human trafficking in and out of Northern Africa, involving parties on both sides of the Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean, the essays map the temporal and geographical spread of this early modern phenomenon. Trading identities An early, possibly the first, European Barbary captivity narrative is Balthasar Sturmer’s Verzeichnis der Reise (1558), written by hand in German. His account is remarkable in that Sturmer himself adopts all the major roles in this early modern theater of trade, piracy, and human exchange. Sturmer, a merchant’s son, enlists on a Christian pirate ship after selling a shipload of wheat for his father in Lisbon. He then falls victim to Turkish pirates and is forced to fight as a Turkish slave against fellow Christians during Emperor Charles V’s siege of Tunis in 1535. He later has the option to become a slaveholder and eventually returns to his original profession as a merchant. My discussion of Sturmer’s detailed adventures as a merchant, pirate, slave, and slaveholder in the 1530s serves well as the opening essay to this collection on piracy and captivity in the early modern Mediterranean. Despite Sturmer’s idiosyncratic and unique experiences, his account touches upon the major themes pertinent to European and North African piracy and slavery in the centuries to come. I give ample space to Balthasar Sturmer’s own voice, thus providing the reader with a firsthand impression of the different themes or aspects the volume’s subsequent chapters raise in greater detail. Sturmer’s confession-like memoirs negotiate and amalgamate the main ingredients of early modern Mediterranean corsairing and slavery, revolving around questions of identity, alterity, and hybridity, but most prominently the intersection of religion and economy—all of which the contributions to this volume discuss widely. Unkind dealings European captivity narratives depicting events in North Africa—what was then referred to as the Barbary Coast—conspicuously embed real-life experiences in a religiously motivated framework. Depending on whether the

Introduction 9 victim was Protestant or Catholic, autobiographical testimonies of captivity used slavery as a simile or metaphor for hell, purgatory, God’s miraculous workings, Christ-like suffering, or as a manifestation of divine predestination. However, this overall religiously coded surface at times permits glimpses into different, though less foregrounded, dimensions that fuel the Barbary captivity genre from within, namely early modern economic discourses. Daniel Vitkus, the expert on British Barbary captivity narratives, looks behind this veneer of religion and real-life storytelling in this early modern genre. By linking slavery, captivity, and ransom processes to early modern pillars of capitalism and globalized economies, Vitkus lays bare a hitherto widely neglected kernel of the emerging genre of captivity narratives. His case in point is one of the earliest printed specimens of British accounts from North Africa, Richard Hasleton’s 1595 narrative of his threefold captivity. The Protestant Hasleton “escaped” from Algerian pirates, ended up in the hands of the Spanish in Mallorca, and fled from the clutches of the Inquisition back to Algiers, from where he was eventually ransomed with money from a British entrepreneur. Vitkus’s close reading of Hasleton’s overtly religiously coded captivity narrative unlocks a hidden economic deep structure inherent in Barbary captivity narratives in general. The seemingly idiosyncratic British case of Hasleton thus turns into a paradigmatic model for interpreting captivity narratives within an economic framework in a variety of national contexts throughout the early modern period. Ambivalences of recognition In the same way Daniel Vitkus argues for an economic backdrop before which early modern Mediterranean piracy and captivity evolved, Walter Rech retraces the legal frameworks for conceptualizing Barbary corsairs in theories of international law. The necessity of legal decision-making with respect to the goods captured by as well as goods captured from pirates, together with the political legitimizations of actions taken against the Barbary States, prompted two opposing strands of legal reasoning from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. Either Barbary pirates received the legal status of state enemies (hostes) or were degraded to simple thieves (piratae, latrones), who were situated outside international legal standards. Whereas older theories of international law tended to elevate Barbary corsairs to the legal status of legitimate enemies within the rules and regulations of international warfare, their status mostly changed into that of a barbaric Other, which lost its standing as a quasi-legal entity in international relations from the mid-eighteenth century onward. This shift is deeply rooted in the political and economic circumstances that required or facilitated either position. For example, by granting pirates official enemy status, the booty of corsairs could be considered to be in the pirates’ possession legally and thus could be acquired through purchase or capture by third parties without running the risk of having to restitute the goods to the original owners.

10  Introduction Toward the end of the eighteenth century, political powers, such as the early United States, utilized contrary lines of argumentation in order to engage in military conflicts with North African states on the grounds of their lack of equal standing in terms of international law. This binary and gradual succession of “accommodating” versus “realist” positioning deeply reflects the overall attitude toward North African pirates in the systems of Western international law and, by extension, the larger European imagination of the Muslim Other. “Free, unfree, captive, slave” While Walter Rech retraces the legal status of the pirate as one major agent in human trafficking in the early modern period, Peter Mark’s chapter on late sixteenth-century Morocco investigates the terminological and official standing of captives, slaves, hostages, and free laborers in this economy of human exchange. Mark’s case is António de Saldanha, a Portuguese nobleman who fell into Moroccan hands in 1578 and spent fourteen years as a captive in the vicinity of the Moroccan Sultan Ahmed al-Mansur. Saldanha’s narrative sheds light on the fluidity of terminology and status of “human resources” in the early modern Maghreb. Mark pinpoints the different degrees between free versus unfree labor in the kingdom of Morocco as well as the repercussions of this economy on the status of “imported” free guest workers from Europe. The specific logic of the then newly-established armament industry by Ahmed al-Mansur serves as a paradigmatic case in point for economies that blur clear-cut boundaries between free and unfree labor in early modern North Africa in general. Mark thus delves into questions concerning the terminological labeling of victims of North African pirate attacks or land raids through a close reading of a very specific historical incident in the aftermath of the disastrous defeat of the Portuguese army in Morocco in the Battle of Alcazar in 1578. Part 2: Home and Hybridity Similar to the first set of essays—all of which focus on larger questions concerning terminological fluidity when denoting the major structural agents, including captors versus captives or free versus unfree laborers—the next group of contributions also highlight concepts of hybridity. The investigations circle around various notions of individual belonging, such as conscientious religious choice, ambivalence of identity, and cultural or economic crossovers. “Renegades” One of the most obvious manifestations of cultural fluidity with respect to the actors in Mediterranean piracy and captivity is the figure of the renegade.

Introduction 11 The convert or the apostate played an important historical role, both on the captors’ as well as the captives’ sides, and thus advanced as a trope in the literature and the stage of the early modern period. By exploring the modes of representation of renegades in American texts of the 1790s, including both literary and authentic narratives of captivity, Anna Diamantouli pinpoints religious and cultural transformations in a crucial moment of U.S. identity formation in the Early Republic. Characterized by the tension between the United States and North Africa, which will soon culminate in the Barbary Wars, the figure of the renegade becomes an avatar of possibilities or alternatives for individual and national self-fashioning. By juxtaposing the literary transformations of the renegade figure in fiction with authentic descriptions of converts in personal memoirs and eyewitness accounts, Diamantouli sketches a picture of cultural hybridity oscillating between literary stereotypes and individual experiences. Although Diamantouli uses a corpus of texts restricted to the decade of the 1790s, her findings, nevertheless, touch upon the general roles assigned to religious converts in Barbary narratives and popular media of earlier centuries. Identity crises of homecomers from the Barbary Coast Hybridity does not necessarily manifest itself through straightforward apostasy or religious conversion as in the case of the renegade. As Robert Spindler’s chapter demonstrates, cultural ambivalence is an issue in most captives’ accounts, even in texts by those who remained faithful to the Christian religion. Especially in the case of captives who were abducted at an early age, i.e., before or during puberty, the re-acculturation process after returning to their European home communities could prove as problematic as falling into North African bondage. Using a number of cases from different European national and cultural backgrounds, Spindler highlights mechanisms of acculturation and re-acculturation that escape clear-cut notions of captor versus captive and identity versus alterity. In his close readings of select authentic European Barbary captivity narratives, Spindler indirectly fleshes out key terms of recent cultural theory, such as “ambivalence,” “hybridity,” and “mimicry” in these texts. By placing captives’ autobiographical reflections on acculturation in the context of research on posttraumatic stress management, Spindler is able to compile a set of decisive factors in early modern identity formation and reformation. “Arab speculators,” states, and ransom slavery in the Western Sahara Christine Sears’ chapter on the fate of the American Capt. James Riley and his fellow crew members in Sub-Saharan Africa in 1815 widens the scope of this section of the volume, geographically as well as temporally. Although Sears investigates larger economic and trade-related aspects of captivity and ransoming strategies that are not directly concerned with Barbary Coast or

12  Introduction Mediterranean captivity and ransom activities per se, her chapter pinpoints the diverse nature of redeeming mechanisms in North Africa. The case of Capt. Riley and his crew illustrates the mechanisms that govern the trade of captives in a region outside the sphere of influence of the kingdom of Morocco. Sears minutely retraces the well-documented steps of Capt. Riley and his men from the initial shipwreck off the coast of Africa, their fall into the hands of local tribes, the systematic exchange of the captives between several owners, and their final ransom in Mogador. The chapter elucidates a larger logic that involves several structural agents in this economy of captivity and ransom—a procedure that was fundamentally different from the state-governed ransoming processes in the so-called Barbary States. The Sub-Saharan economy of exchange was based on individual initiatives on both sides, i.e., the African captors as well as European captives were individually vested in the ransoming process. Sears provides valuable insight into a slave economy that did not follow the well-known North African piracy or corsair trajectory, but rather relied on locals who salvaged shipwrecks off the coast of Sub-Saharan Africa as well as traded or bartered the stranded sailors. This mutual cooperation of captors and captives guaranteed their respective goals—economic gain on the captors’ and redemption on the captives’ sides. The Riley case thus exemplifies a hitherto neglected form of North African captivity and redeeming practice outside of the Mediterranean basin. Part 3: Diplomacy and Deliverance The degree of acculturation into foreign settings, the decision to convert to another religion, and the success of reintegrating into one’s home culture depended on a number of factors. The next group of chapters explores some of these concepts, which so decisively shaped the individual and collective experiences of early modern captives. The spectrum included modes of communication by slaves to initiate a possible liberation, formal and informal diplomatic channels, as well as institutionalized ransoming organizations. Once again, the cases range from the sixteenth to the late eighteenth century, adopting the perspective of both captives and captors, as well as that of Europeans and North Africans. Michael Heberer: A prisoner of the Ottoman navy Piracy, captivity, diplomacy, and redemption constitute an intricately interwoven network of forces—even in the oldest surviving captivity narratives in the early modern period. An extraordinary example is the 1610 German narrative by Michael Heberer. As a volunteer on a Maltese galley that preyed on Turkish vessels in the Eastern Mediterranean, Heberer fell into Alexandrian captivity and spent three years as a galley rower before he was ransomed out of Constantinople. Heberer’s narrative expounds the bilateral

Introduction 13 phenomenon of piracy or privateering, both on the Christian as well as on the Muslim side; gives insight into the political conditions, culture, and religion of the Ottoman Empire; and, last but not least, permits glimpses into the personal life of a prisoner. However, it also documents late sixteenthcentury diplomacy with respect to ransoming captives—in this particular case, mostly failed diplomacy. Numerous letters and personal meetings testify to Heberer’s personal initiative to bring about his liberation and highlight diplomatic venues available to a slave at the time. Piracy, diplomacy, and cultural circulations in the Mediterranean Diplomacy is also the subject of Khalid Bekkaoui’s analysis of the exchange of material objects—mostly gifts—between the kingdom of Morocco and Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The exchange spanned a wide range of commodities, including exotic animals, items of everyday use as well as technical machinery, and, to a certain extent, objectified human “trophies.” Hinging on individual personae, such as the so-called renegada queens in the harem of the Moroccan emperor, these gifts’ idiosyncratic traits reflected larger mechanisms of an early modern exchange of commodities across cultural divides. These material objects when seen in the context of cultural exchange adopt a discursive dimension reminiscent of Bruno Latour’s “parliament of things.” Bekkaoui’s painstaking catalog of gift exchange from a predominantly North African vantage point offers a privileged perspective of cultural crossover and appropriation processes on a bilateral level. He manages to trace a multitude of diplomatic channels connecting Europe and the Maghreb, all of which at times intersected with the ransom or exchange of captives. Confraternity models in the “redemption of slaves” in Europe These diverse diplomatic channels of communication facilitated a wide array of ransoming efforts and exchanges of captives on both sides—from Muslim North Africa and from Christian Europe. Andrea Pelizza’s chapter demonstrates how complex and, above all, how dependent on denominational as well as political factors ransoming processes were within Europe. Using Catholic redemption organizations in the Republic of Venice and the City of Bruges as two religiously similar but in their political interconnectedness fundamentally different structural entities, Pelizza delineates the scope and limits of institutionalized ransoming. In addition to relying on a rich corpus of textual documents, Pelizza also introduces paintings that the respective organizations commissioned in order to stress their distinct structures on levels of visual self-fashioning and self-representation. Despite focusing on these two select confraternities, Pelizza also outlines the larger ramifications of Protestant versus Catholic institutional liberation practices in general.

14  Introduction Part 4: Oppositions and Otherness The exchange of humans and objects across the religious and cultural divides that separated Europe from North Africa was not solely restricted to material items or ransom. On the contrary, voluntary and involuntary traffic between cultures also resulted in representations of the Other in a variety of media and contexts. The last set of chapters delve into questions of stereotyping and coming to terms with Otherness in early modern Mediterranean piracy and captivity. Although we expect these representations to run primarily along the binary of Islam versus Christianity, some of these discourses escape the opposition of Europe versus North Africa and negotiate inner European tensions, as in, for example, denominational frictions within Europe before and during the religious wars of the seventeenth century. At the same time, the confrontation with the religious Other that North Africans experienced in European captivity produced documents that function as a lever to put cultural and religious attitudes toward captivity into a new perspective and also explain reasons for the development or absence of certain text types in respective cultures. Khayr al-Din Barbarossa Texts about piracy and captivity intentionally or unintentionally celebrate Otherness on various levels, the relativity of which becomes most apparent when we have parallel sources on one incident or acting agent. This is the case with respect to the most important player in Mediterranean piracy in the sixteenth century, Chaireddin Barbarossa, who was largely responsible for the rise of the North African city-states of Algiers and Tunis. He embodied a major threat to European sea trade and functioned as the personification of Muslim privateering and human trafficking in the Mediterranean. Chaireddin Barbarossa established North African privateering as a major economic force aimed against Europe, while at the same time, when opportune, his fleet supported the French king in a war against Spain. His official sixteenth-century biography, Gazavat-ı Hayrettin Paşa, by Seyyid Muradi Reis, documents economic aspects of Mediterranean piracy and slavery as well as inner-European conflicts from an Ottoman perspective. A copy of Muradi’s sixteenthcentury manuscript was “captured” by the Spaniards from an Ottoman ship in the Battle of Lepanto (1571) (see Figure 0.4) and brought back to Spain, where it was translated by an Ottoman slave into Castilian under Emperor Philip II in the second half of the sixteenth century. Therefore, the manuscript is in itself an item of intercultural exchange, including piracy, slavery, and the transmission of commodities as well as translation across cultural and religious boundaries in the early modern Mediterranean.

Introduction 15

Figure 0.4  The victors of the sea battle of Lepanto 1571 Source: Schloss Ambras, Innsbruck. KHM-Museumsverband.

Diana de Armas Wilson juxtaposes the sixteenth-century biography of Barbarossa by the Ottoman chronicler Muradi with the biographical sketches by Antonio de Sosa, a Spaniard and fellow captive of Miguel de Cervantes in sixteenth-century Algiers. Sosa’s multivolume encyclopedic text is one of the earliest European sources on the role of Algiers as a major player and threat to European commerce and politics in the Mediterranean. In her parallel reading of these two roughly contemporaneous, but, culturally and politically speaking, opposing sources, Wilson relativizes stereotypical European depictions of Muslim piracy in general and Chaireddin Barbarossa in particular. A Huguenot captive in ‘Uthman Dey’s court Gillian Weiss also traces notions of Otherness, probing questions of a less obvious binary of religious opposition. She focuses on one of the most unique texts documenting Barbary captivity in the early modern period, the Histoire chronologique. This two-volume, eleven-hundred-page manuscript from the year 1605 is one of the two surviving accounts of Tripolitan captivity and thus

16  Introduction an indispensable source for documenting North African captivity outside of Tunis, Algiers, and Morocco. Weiss convincingly establishes the hypothesis that the Histoire is the work of the French crypto-Huguenot surgeon Girard, who, because of his Protestant background, spent thirteen years in captivity in Tripoli. In her analysis, she pinpoints religious Otherness in Barbary captivity that escapes the Islam–Christianity binary by investigating tensions within the Christian denominations as well as the ensuing repercussions on European Christian captives in Muslim North Africa. She thereby shows how the French religious politics of the seventeenth century impacted the fate of captives in North Africa—reformed Protestants in particular. Two Arabic accounts of captivity in Malta Otherness is also the focus of the concluding chapter. Nabil Matar, the doyen of research on early modern Islam and Europe, investigates twofold Otherness. On the one hand, he draws attention away from European documents on piracy and captivity by privileging North African Arabic discourses; on the other hand, he interrogates the interaction of Muslim captives and diplomats when dealing with European captors or negotiation partners by adopting a North African perspective. Nabil Matar focuses on the fates of North African slaves in the hands of Europeans, and thus advocates and pursues a widely ignored line of investigation. The reason why scholarship has largely neglected the North African perspective on piracy and slavery is not solely a Eurocentric research bias. Rather there is a lack of a textual or literary tradition comparable to the European genre of the Barbary Coast captivity narrative. In his close readings of Arabic documents, Nabil Matar pinpoints a fundamental difference in the status of captivity and suffering in Islam when compared to the European traditions. Christian captives tend to associate their ordeals as captives with Christ’s suffering, thus resorting to a possible allegory of personal testing in a Christ-like pose. The opposite is true for Muslim captives. Nabil Matar shows that accounts by Arab captives in European hands are mostly couched into extensive theological discourses referencing captivity experiences only in passing. The Arab authors of these discourses mention their personal captivity in the hands of the “Infidels” only if their captivity was what Matar calls “dignified captivity.” This term refers to encounters of Muslim slaves with Europeans in which the Muslim captives received good treatment by the Christian captors. The surviving cases that Nabil Matar analyzes prove the dignity of specific instances of Muslim captivity. All of these are preserved in theological disputes with Christian notables that left the Muslim disputer victorious over the Christian interlocutor. Nabil Matar’s analysis of Arab captivity accounts therefore puts European captivity narratives in a completely new light by claiming that the imitation of Christ in his suffering serves as a motor for the development of the genre of captivity narratives and discourses surrounding slavery in Europe. The chapter adopts a new vantage point for reading the wide array

Introduction 17 of European Christian documents and sources on captivity, all of which in one way or another connect to the imitation of the Christ formula, and thereby also highlight the cultural and religious relativity of captivity narration as such. In addition to bringing these novel perspectives to the discussion, Nabil Matar also issues a plea for research on sources outside the European imagination. In other words, he advocates work in North African archives to complete the picture of a Muslim perspective on Mediterranean piracy and slavery. The chapter by Nabil Matar thus comes full circle, back to issues raised in the first section of this volume, as, for example, in the contribution by Daniel Vitkus. Like Vitkus, who connected European early modern captivity and, by extension, narratives of captivity, to a newly emerging economy based on human trafficking, Matar embeds Muslim discourses of captivity in larger culture-specific frameworks. Both vantage points—the focus on the European and the Muslim perspective—explain larger mechanisms underlying the production of certain genres or their respective absence in a given culture. Positioning Nabil Matar as the concluding voice of this edited volume was a conscious choice. His chapter adopts the role of a programmatic stance, arguing which direction the field at large needs to pursue—namely, to make the voices outside of European scholarship heard. This means including scholars from North Africa, but also, as in Nabil Matar’s case, to engage in an exercise of positioning scholarship outside the framework of one’s own culture by adopting the perspective of Otherness for understanding and researching phenomena that are otherwise too close to home for adequate scrutiny.

Notes 1 Scholarship on piracy and the Barbary States is remarkably sparse, let alone literature on Barbary Coast captivity narratives per se. Until now, it has been mainly historians who have indirectly used these autobiographical accounts as documents of historical phenomena (Corbett 1904; Fisher 1957; Playfair 1971; Braudel 1972; Clissold 1977; Wolf 1979; Fontenay 1988; Sha’ban 1991; Panzac 1999; Horden and Purcell 2000; Colley 2002; Requemora and Linon-Chipon 2002; Davis 2003; Lunsford 2005; Marr 2006; Kaiser 2008, 2009; Bono 2009; Weiss 2011; Ressel 2012; and Watzka-Pauli 2016). 2 My four-year Austrian Science Fund research project ESCAPE (www.uibk.ac.at/ projects/escape/) carried out research and editorial projects in this field. So far only a few secondary sources have dealt with individual narratives. These include G.E. Starr’s groundbreaking article from 1965, but also a number of essays and books (Ruhe 1993, 2008a, 2008b, 2011, 2017; Fendri 1993; Snader 1997, 2000; Reinheimer 2001; Vitkus and Matar 2001; Fuchs 2002; Baepler 2004; Maclean 2007; Duprat and Picherot 2008; Peskin 2009; Duprat 2010; Fuchs and Ilika 2010; Vitkus 2010; Garcés 2011; and Bekkaoui 2011). 3 Major exceptions to the overall Eurocentric approach are Nabil Matar’s seminal books and articles on Arabic-European encounters (Matar 1998, 1999, 2005, 2014b) and the publications of Khalid Bekkaoui (2011). In his publications Nabil

18  Introduction Matar collects and translates select Arabic sources, such as, for example, Muhammad Ibn Othman Al-Miknasi’s account (Matar 2014a). Most important are the books and articles on Arabic–European encounters by Matar (1998, 1999, 2005, 2014). Also, scholarship on early modern Ottoman history, Ottoman naval history in particular, contributes to the Muslim perspective (Gallotta 1983; Casale 2010; Gurkan 2010; Isom-Verhaaren 2011; Vatin 2001). 4  Apart from the French online collection La guerre de course en recits, ed. Anne Duprat (2010), it is the first printed volume to feature contributions by most of the leading experts on Mediterranean piracy and captivity. Other multilingual collections (Jaspert 2013; Hans 2014) focus on historical aspects of piracy or slavery in general and only briefly touch upon early modern piracy and captivity in the Mediterranean.

References Baepler, Paul M. “The Barbary Captivity Narrative in American Culture.” Early American Literature 39.2 (2004): 217–46. Baepler, Paul M., ed. White Slaves, African Masters: An Anthology of American Barbary Captivity Narratives. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Bekkaoui, Khalid, ed. White Women Captives in North Africa: Narrative of Enslavement, 1735–1830. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Bono, Salvatore. Piraten und Korsaren im Mittelmeer: Seekrieg, Handel und Sklaverei vom 16. bis 19. Jahrhundert. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2009. Braudel, Fernand. The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II. London: Collins, 1972. Casale, Giancarlo. The Ottoman Age of Exploration. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Clissold, Stephen. The Barbary Slaves. Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1977. Colley, Linda. Captives. New York: Pantheon Books, 2002. Corbett, Julian. England in the Mediterranean: A Study of the Rise and Influence of British Power within the Straits, 1603–1713. London: Longmans, Green, 1904. Dan, Pierre, S. Vries, and G. Broekhuizen. Historie van Barbaryen, En des zelfs Zee-Roovers: Behelzende een beschrijving van de Koningrijken en Steden Algiers, Tunis, Salé, en Tripoli. Amsterdam: Jan ten Hoorn, 1684. Davis, Robert C. Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters: White Slavery in the Mediterranean, the Barbary Coast, and Italy, 1500–1800. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Duprat, Anne, ed. La guerre de course en récits: Terrains, corpus, séries. Dossier en ligne du Projet ANR CORSO, novembre 2010. www.oroc-crlc.paris-sorbonne. fr/index.php?/visiteur/Projet-CORSO/Ressources/La-guerre-de-course-en-recits. Web. Duprat, Anne, and Emilie Picherot, eds. Récits d’Orient dans les littératures d’Europe: XVIe–XVIIe siècles. Paris: Presses de l’Université Paris–Sorbonne, 2008. Fendri, Mounir. “ ‘Barbaresken’—Das Bild des Maghrebiners in der deutschen Literatur im 18. und bis Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts: Imagologie und kultureller Wandel im deutsch/europäisch-arabischen Verhältnis.” Praxis interkultureller Germanistik. Forschung—Bildung—Politik: Beiträge zum II. Internationalen Kongreß der Gesellschaft für interkulturelle Germanistik, Straßburg 1991. Ed. Bernd Thum

Introduction 19 and Gonthier-Louis Fink. Publikationen der Gesellschaft für interkulturelle Germanistik 4. Munich: Iudicium, 1993. 669–83. Fisher, Godfrey. Barbary Legend: War, Trade and Piracy in North Africa, 1415– 1830. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957. Fontenay, Michel. “La place de la course dans l’économie portuair: L’exemple de Malte et des ports barbaresques.” Annales. Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations 43.6 (1988): 1321–47. Fuchs, Barbara. Passing for Spain: Cervantes and the Fictions of Identity. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2002. Fuchs, Barbara, and Aaron Ilika, eds. and trans. The Bagnios of Algiers and The Great Sultana: Two Plays of Captivity. By Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra. 1615. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010. Gallotta, Aldo. “Le ġazavāt di Khayreddīn Barbarossa.” Studi Magrebini 3 (1970): 79–160. Gallotta, Aldo. “Il ġazavāt-I Ḫayreddīn Pas̆ a di Seyyid Murād: Edito in facsimile secondo il Ms. 1663 dell’Escurial di Madrid con le varianti dei mss.” Studi Magrebini 13 (1983): entire issue. Garcés, María A. Cervantes in Algiers: A Captive’s Tale. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2002. Garcés, María A., ed. An Early Modern Dialogue with Islam: Antonio de Sosa’s Topography of Algiers (1612). By Antonio de Sosa. Trans. Diana A. Wilson. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2011. Gurkan, Emrah Safa. “The Centre and the Frontier: Ottoman Cooperation with the North African Corsairs in the Sixteenth Century.” Turkish Historical Review 1 (2010): 125–63. Hanß, Stefan, and Juliane Schiel, eds. Mediterranean Slavery Revisited (500–1800): Neue Perspektiven auf mediterrane Sklaverei (500–1800). Zurich: Chronos, 2014. Horden, Peregrine, and Nicholas Purcell. The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000. Hughes, Jolyon Timothy, ed. and trans. The Jew’s Beech Tree: A Moral Portrait from Mountainous Westphalia; New Biographical Findings, a Critical Introduction, and a Translation of the Original Work. By Annette von Droste-Hülshoff. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2014. Isom-Verhaaren, Christine. Allies with the Infidel: The Ottoman and French Alliance in the Sixteenth Century. London: IB Tauris, 2011. Jaspert, Nikolas, and Sebastian Kolditz. Seeraub im Mittelmeerraum. Mittelmeerstudien 3. Paderborn: Schöningh, 2013. Kaiser, Wolfgang. Le commerce des captifs: Les intermédiaires dans l’échange et le rachat des prisonniers en Méditerraneé, XVe–XVIIIe siècle. Rome: École française de Rome, 2008. Kaiser, Wolfgang. “Sprechende Ware. Gefangenenfreikauf und Sklavenhandel im frühneuzeitlichen Mittelmeerraum.” Zeitschrift für Ideengeschichte 3.2 (2009): 29–39. Klarer, Mario, ed. Christian Slaves among Islamic Pirates: An Anthology of Barbary Coast Captivity Narratives (1550–1810). New York: Columbia University Press, forthcoming 2019. Klarer, Mario, ed. Mediterranean Slavery and World Literature: Captivity Genres from Cervantes to Rousseau. London, New York: Routledge, forthcoming 2019.

20  Introduction Lunsford, Virginia W. Piracy and Privateering in the Golden Age Netherlands. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. MacLean, Gerald. “Slavery and Sensibility: A Historical Dilemma.” Slavery and the Cultures of Abolition: Essays Marking the Bicentennial of the British Abolition Act of 1807. Ed. Brycchan Carey and Peter J. Kitson. Cambridge: Brewer, 2007. 173–94. Marr, Timothy. The Cultural Roots of American Islamicism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Matar, Nabil. An Arab Ambassador in the Mediterranean World: Muhammad Ibn Othman Al-Miknasi. London: Routledge, 2014a. Matar, Nabil. Britain and Barbary, 1589–1689. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005. Matar, Nabil. British Captives from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, 1563–1760. Leiden: Brill, 2014b. Matar, Nabil. Islam in Britain, 1558–1685. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Matar, Nabil. Turks, Moors and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. Owens, W. R. “Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, and the Barbary Pirates.” English 62.236 (2013): 51–66. Panzac, Daniel. Les corsaires barbaresques: La fin d’une épopée, 1800–1820. Paris: CNRS Editions, 1999. Peskin, Lawrence A. Captives and Countrymen: Barbary Slavery and the American Public, 1785–1816. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009. Playfair, Lambert. The Bibliography of the Barbary States. Westmead: Gregg International Publishers, 1971. Requemora, Sylvie, and Sophie Linon-Chipon, eds. Les tyrans de la mer: Pirates, corsaires et flibustiers. Paris: Presses de l’Université de Paris–Sorbonne, 2002. Ressel, Magnus. Zwischen Sklavenkassen und Türkenpässen. Nordeuropa und die Barbaresken in der Frühen Neuzeit. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2012. Rheinheimer, Martin. Der fremde Sohn. Hark Olufs’ Wiederkehr aus der Sklaverei. Neumünster: Wachholtz, 2001. Rhoads, Murphey. “Seyyid Muradi’s Prose Biography of Hizir ibn Yakub, Alias Hayreddin Barbarossa: Ottoman Folk Narrative as an Under-Exploited Source for Historical Reconstruction.” Acta Orientalia Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 54 (2001): 519–32. Rowson, Jennifer Margulis, and Karen Poremski, eds. Slaves in Algiers, or, A Struggle for Freedom. Acton, MA: Copley Pub. Group, 2000. Ruhe, Ernstpeter. “L’aire du soupçon: Les récits de captivité en langue allemande (XVIe–XIXe siècles).” Récits d’Orient dans les littératures d’Europe (XVIe– XVIIe siècles). Ed. Anne Duprat and Emilie Picherot. Paris: Presses de l’Université Paris–Sorbonne, 2008a. 185–200. Ruhe, Ernstpeter. “Christensklaven als Beute nordafrikanischer Piraten: Das Bild des Maghreb im Europa des 16.-19. Jahrhunderts.” Europas islamische Nachbarn. Ed. Ernstpeter Ruhe. Studien zur Literatur und Geschichte des Maghreb 1. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1993. 159–86. Ruhe, Ernstpeter. “Dire et ne pas dire: Les récits de captifs germanophones et les cérémonies de retour.” Captifs en Méditerranée: Histoires, récits et légendes. Ed. François Moureau. Paris: Presses de l’Université Paris–Sorbonne, 2008b. 119–36.

Introduction 21 Ruhe, Ernstpeter, ed. Europas islamische Nachbarn. Studien zur Literatur und Geschichte des Maghreb 1. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1993. Ruhe, Ernstpeter. “Zwei Augsburger Künstler in ‘Algierischer Leibeigenschaft’: Die ‘Wunderbaren Schicksale’ der Brüder Wolfgang.” Oriente Moderno 91 (2011): 1–17. Ruhe, Ernstpeter, and Gustav Andreas Wolffgang. Porträt des Künstlers als Sklave: Zwei Augsburger Kupferstecher als Gefangene in Algier (1684–1688). Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2017. Schneider, Manfred. “Poesie der Piraterie: Lord Byrons ‘The Corsair’ und das Auftauchen des communis amicus omnium.” Seeraub im Mittelmeerraum: Piraterie, Korsarentum und Maritime Gewalt von der Antike bis zur Neuzeit. Ed. Nikolas Jaspert and Sebastian Kolditz. Mittelmeerstudien 4. Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2013. 115–29. Sha’ban, Fuad. Islam and Arabs in Early American Thought: Roots of Orientalism in America. Durham, NC: Acorn Press, 1991. Snader, Joe. Caught between Worlds: British Captivity Narratives in Fact and Fiction. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2000. Snader, Joe. “The Oriental Captivity Narrative and Early English Fiction.” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 9.3 (1997): 267–98. Sobers-Khan, Nur. Slaves without Shackles: Forced Labor and Manumission in the Galata Court Registers, 1560–1572. Berlin: Klaus Schwartz Verlag, 2014. Starr, G. A. “Escape from Barbary: A Seventeenth-Century Genre.” Huntington Library Quarterly 29 (1965): 35–52. Vatin, M. Nicolas. “Études Ottomanes: Programme de l’année 2008–2009: Traduction et commentaire des Ġazavât de Hayrü-d-dîn Paşa.” Annuaire—EPHE, SHP—141e année (2008–2009): 42–5. Vatin, M. Nicolas. Les Ottomans et l’occident (XVe – XVIe siècles). Istanbul: Isis, 2001. Vitkus, Daniel. “Barbary Captivity Narratives from Early Modern England: Truth Claims and the (Re)Construction of Authority.” La guerre de course en récits: Terrains, corpus, séries. Ed. Anne Duprat. 2010. 119–30. www.oroc-crlc.parissorbonne.fr/index.php?/visiteur/Projet-CORSO/Ressources/La-guerre-de-courseen-recits. Web. Vitkus, Daniel, and Nabil Matar, eds. Piracy, Slavery, and Redemption: Barbary Captivity Narratives from Early Modern England. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001. Watzka-Pauli, Elisabeth. Triumph der Barmherzigkeit: Die Befreiung christlicher Gefangener aus muslimisch dominierten Ländern durch den österreichischen Trinitarierorden 1690–1783. Göttingen: V&R unipress, 2016. Weiss, Gillian L. Captives and Corsairs: France and Slavery in the Early Modern Mediterranean. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011. Wolf, John B. The Barbary Coast: Algiers under the Turks, 1500 to 1830. New York: Norton, 1979.

Part 1

Labor and Law

1 Trading identities Balthasar Sturmer’s Verzeichnis der Reise (1558) and the making of the European Barbary captivity narrative Mario Klarer Balthasar Sturmer’s Verzeichnis der Reise (1558)—most likely the first European Barbary captivity narrative—tells the story of a young German merchant who, as a galley slave of the Turks, happened to experience the 1535 Habsburg siege and conquest of the city of Tunis. Despite the fact that this narrative is among the earliest specimens of this text type, it is one of the most extraordinary. With 78 handwritten pages, it is not only an extensive early modern white slavery narrative but also a most unusual and prolific text with respect to narrative technique, plot development, authorial voice, and autobiographical individualism. It is hard to believe that this text was not intended for publication and it is even harder to understand why this text did not make it into print. It contains all the features of the narratives that were later successfully disseminated by English, French, and German publishers, starting in the second half of the sixteenth century and continuing to be published into the early nineteenth century. In layout, scope, and basic intention it is virtually indistinguishable from the printed narratives. On the contrary, in its vividness, personal self-reflection, narrative voice, composition, and irony it seems rather like the culminating point of this genre than one of its earliest examples.1 Even a crude plot summary reveals the extraordinary nature of Sturmer’s account. After having idly spent the proceeds of an entire shipload of wheat, which he sold for his father in Lisbon, Balthasar Sturmer enlists on a ship that raids Turkish vessels. When he becomes aware of the amount of money that can be made from a single captured vessel, he suggests to his shipmates that they invest their money in a galley and become self-employed professional pirates. However, the day after they agree on this business plan Turkish pirates seize their ship, kill half of the crew, and sell the survivors into slavery. As a galley slave among Turkish troops, Balthasar takes part in two major sieges of the city of Tunis. Both times he is a prisoner of the Turks, and in one instance he is even forced to fight against his Christian brothers. After regaining his freedom, when Emperor Charles V takes possession of Tunis in 1535, Balthasar becomes a member of an expedition to Peru and accumulates considerable riches but eventually loses everything after returning to his father in Germany.

26  Mario Klarer Sturmer’s text, similar to other Barbary Coast narratives, tries to embed the narrator’s personal story within the context of larger geopolitical events.2 In this case, Sturmer witnesses the military conflicts between Christian forces under the Habsburg Emperor Charles V, who is supported by the fleet of the Genoese Andrea Doria, and Muslim forces under the command of the pirate Chaireddin Barbarossa, a vassal of the Osman Sultan Suleiman II. Despite adopting, at times, a larger geopolitical point of view in the narrative that is reminiscent of a historiographer, Sturmer primarily provides a deeply personal and autobiographical account of his adventures as an “extra” in this larger theater of history. Even the title page (see Figure 1.1) with its long explanatory title is absolutely typical of later printed captivity narratives, as well as of novel-like personal histories in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: Account of the travels of Mister Balthasar Sturmer. Native of Marienburg in Prussia, from Gdańsk to Lisbon in Portugal, Sicily, and many other places. How he was captured by the Turks and Moors, and finally released in a wondrous manner. Assiduously chronicled and described by himself. (f. 1r) It seems as if the sentences on the first folio page are not simply the opening lines of a private journal, but rather a conspicuously crafted book title, which makes it likely that the author intended some sort of publication or wider dissemination. As the manuscript has a separate title page, including the name of the author and a short synopsis of the plot, which is very similar to the narrative title pages of early novels, it is likely that Balthasar had a wider public in mind. The first folio contains the title-like text on the recto side and is left blank on the verso side. This otherwise unexplainable waste of paper also supports the assumption that it was intended as a book-like title page in the sense of a marketing paratext. This first folio is followed by two pages, folio 2r (see Figure 1.2) and 2v, which correspond to what in a printed narrative would be the dedication or the preface. In this part, Sturmer directly addresses an unspecified “Herr Frantz,” whom he also refers to as “Eure Achtbarkeit,” which literally translates as “Your Honor.” This otherwise unidentified Mr. Frantz apparently requested or asked for an account of how Balthasar was “captured and released” (f. 2r). The remainder of the two preface-like pages allegorizes Balthasar’s adventures in a religious manner. Here as well, Sturmer’s text is in line with other specimens of this genre, most of which frame the actual captivity narrative by exemplifying the narrator’s personal history as a manifestation of God’s will or providence. In this religiously motivated opening section, Balthasar – the merchant’s son – continues using the diction of accounting and commerce

Sturmer and the Barbary captivity narrative 27

Figure 1.1  Title page of Balthasar Sturmer, Verzeichnis der Reise (1558); f. 1r Source: Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin—Preußischer Kulturbesitz. © bpk-Bildagentur.

that he already introduced in the title. “Verzeichnis,” the first word of the title, means “account,” “directory,” “index,” “record,” or “register.” Now, in the dedicatory opening part, he refers to sins committed by using the German word for “register.” “He, Our Good Father, knows well what is good for us and therefore chastises us frequently. In the beginning, we might think

28  Mario Klarer

Figure 1.2  Balthasar Sturmer, Verzeichnis der Reise (1558); f. 2r Source: Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin—Preußischer Kulturbesitz. © bpk-Bildagentur.

we are not being treated properly, but when we look at our register, we realize that we actually deserved a harsher punishment than the one we have endured” (f. 2r-v; emphasis added). Balthasar frames his own account, or “register,” of misdeeds and punishments by arguing that God has to penalize our sins, but also by pointing out that “Our Good Lord also wants to forgive the misdeeds of men when they show repentance for their sins” (f. 2v). He ends this two-page prologue or preface by referring to his adventures

Sturmer and the Barbary captivity narrative 29 as “exempla” of misdeed and punishment. Since God’s relation to man is, according to Balthasar, similar to a business transaction and based on a balance-sheet-like arrangement, he ends the section with a reference to the exchange of goods: “I would also like to speak further of the trade” (f. 2v) that is “the circumstances through which I came into captivity” (f. 2r). As we will learn, trade in the widest sense of the term is the reason for all his adventures and misfortunes. In the narrative proper, which starts on folio 3r, Balthasar tells the story of his adventures that began when he, as a merchant’s son, sailed from the port of Danzig (Gdańsk) in Prussia to Lisbon in order to sell a shipload of wheat on behalf of his father. Danzig was the most important seaport in the early sixteenth century for distributing wheat from northern to southern Europe. This development was in part caused by capital investors, such as Jakob Fugger in Germany, who successfully curbed the monopoly of the Hanse by supporting competitors outside the Hanseatic union (Steinmetz 112). Despite successfully carrying out his father’s business and making a considerable amount of money, equivalent to the annual salary of a sailor, Balthasar ends up penniless. He claims that “victuals are very expensive there” (“sehr theure Zehrung”; f. 3r), which is most likely a euphemism for having squandered all his money. “After the money had vanished, I thought to myself, ‘How can I return home empty-handed?’” (f. 3v). This question could either mean that he would have to return to his father without the proceeds of the business transaction or that he was not even able to pay for his fare back to Danzig. The latter seems more likely. When a German gunsmith offers him a position as his assistant on a vessel bound for Sicily, he jumps at the opportunity. In Sicily, he enlists in the Armada of Emperor Charles V against the Turks. In this capacity, he experiences the siege of the Balkan city of Coron, in which the Habsburg fleet with the aid of the Genoese Andrea Doria is able to defeat the Turkish ships that had blocked the harbor and besieged the castle. The Habsburg forces free the trapped Spanish soldiers in the city of Coron, who “had been deprived of any real food for so long that they resembled ghosts. Indeed, their victuals had run out countless weeks before, and they had been feeding on cats and rats since” (f. 5v-6r). After this adventure, Balthasar enlists on a Maltese galley, which sets out to seize Turkish vessels. In other words, Balthasar voluntarily joins European pirates who are preying on Turkish ships or goods. This part of the narrative is quite extraordinary and unusual when compared to later Barbary captivity narratives. Most European narratives try to polarize the readers through black-and-white stereotyping in which the Muslim corsairs prey upon innocent Christian ships. The mention of European piracy or privateering would muddy the otherwise clear distribution of roles with Christians as victims and Muslims as villains. Therefore, most published captivity accounts do not openly acknowledge that piracy was a bilateral phenomenon in the early modern Mediterranean, carried out by Christian and Muslim forces alike.

30  Mario Klarer Slave markets existed on the Christian side, for example, in Malaga, Marseille, Livorno, and Malta, and on the North African side in Tripoli, Algiers, Tunis, and Salé. North African pirates, who operated from the Ottoman satellite city-states of Tripoli, Tunis, and Algiers, or the independent kingdom of Morocco, were by no means the only ones responsible for Mediterranean piracy and captivity in the early modern period. The Knights of Malta, for example, were key Christian players in Mediterranean privateering and human trafficking.3 Sturmer’s narrative is remarkable since it gives an authentic account of the actual situation in the early modern Mediterranean with respect to corsairing and privateering as an economic factor that escapes religious binaries. The Maltese piracy enterprise in which Sturmer participates is so successful that after the capture of the first Turkish vessel, the crew are already rich men. However, things change swiftly when soon after that successful venture three Turkish galleys attack their ship. Balthasar narrates how they engage in a battle with the Turks, how they defend themselves, and how the Turkish pirates “finally came on board the third time around; [. . .] assailed us and conquered our ship with everything she contained” (f. 9v). In this moment of extreme suspense, when we learn that they fell prey to the enemy and when we are eager to hear what became of them, Balthasar brings the gripping narrative to a halt. Similar to a cliffhanger, he digresses into a flashback in which he tells us about the plans he and the crew had forged out the day before. After having seized the aforementioned huge bounty from the Turkish trading vessel, Balthasar and the crew members contemplated what they should do with the large amount of money which was now at each man’s disposal.4 Some of the men felt that it would be a good idea to transfer the money through a bill of exchange (“Wexsell” f. 9v) to the city of Antwerp.5 But Balthasar tried to convince the crew otherwise: “Why do you want to go home already? We should first try our luck once more and sail to Sicily again, buy a galley there or have one built, and be on our way and amass even more booty. Then we can return home in triumph!” (f. 10r). In other words, Sturmer tried to talk the sailors into engaging in an independent business venture in which they would invest all their money in a galley and become self-employed corsairs. The crew agreed to this proposal and made a deal to put this plan into execution. Balthasar concludes this short but strategically well-placed flashback and digression by writing: “Thus it was decided in good will, but the tables were about to turn, as they say: Homo proponit, Deus disponit [Man proposes, but God disposes]” (f. 10r). When the narrative comes to this major climax—that is, when Balthasar is captured by the Turks and is about to lose his freedom—he brings the narrative to a halt and provides us with a possible reason for God’s punishment in his flashback. We have to remember that in the preface Balthasar had claimed that he is giving us a “register” of sins and their punishment. “I have to report [. . .] the circumstances through which I came into captivity [. . .] and how many times my Faithful God elevated and humbled me” (f. 2v). Balthasar was elevated by God when he

Sturmer and the Barbary captivity narrative 31 received the rich bounty from the vessel they captured, but he fell victim to his own hubris when he was not satisfied with the large sum of money and wanted to quench his lust for even more riches as a self-employed corsair. What is interesting is that his loss of freedom is somehow again coupled with issues of business. We should not forget that he had set his mind on starting his own little piracy joint venture. The punishment for his avarice follows en suite—the next day to be precise, when the Turks take him and his fellow crew members captive. After this short one-paragraph digression from the description of the attack by the Turkish galleys, we learn that half of Balthasar’s fellow crew members, 23 in total, were killed during that hostile encounter and that some “who were still alive but had been wounded were thrown overboard” (f. 10r). Balthasar, who was also seriously injured, escapes this fate by a hair’s breadth: “I was badly wounded myself but pretended to be in better condition than I actually was; I would have hated to come in aquam [into the water]” (f. 10r).6 Having survived despite his injuries, the victorious Turkish pirates sell him as a slave for 40 ducats the next day and a little later he is resold on the island Djerba near Tripoli for 32 ducats as a galley slave. Balthasar Sturmer’s ensuing account as a rower who is “chained” (f. 10v) to a Turkish galley provides astonishing information about the piracy trade, for example, that their ship was able to capture “fifteen Christian ships within three weeks” (f. 10v). After this time Balthasar is sold for the third time, and, as a galley slave on a ship that will become part of the Turkish admiral Barbarossa’s fleet, he has to participate involuntarily in the major battles taking place in the mid-1530s in North Africa. Thus, Balthasar’s personal narrative enters the stage of world history of which he is able to provide a very idiosyncratic perspective from a highly personal vantage point. What follows in the narrative is a large section in which Balthasar gives a detailed account of the geopolitical developments in this region, focusing on the fate of the city of Tunis during a struggle that was fought by at least three different forces. This includes the internal conflict of the King of Tunis with his own brother who in turn asked the Turkish admiral Chaireddin Barbarossa to intervene in this civil war on his behalf against the ruling king. Barbarossa pretends to assist the king’s brother in his attempt to seize power but then kills him when the time seems right. He even outwits the population of Tunis by making them believe that the king’s brother is on board the fleet with which Barbarossa is entering the harbor of Tunis. Balthasar tells us how Barbarossa, through deceit and cunning, is able to conquer the city of Tunis and seize the stronghold. After the conquest of the city, the galley on which Balthasar serves as a rower embarks on a two-month raid in which the crew makes a considerable bounty. Here Balthasar explains the logic of the division of the loot among the pirates. Everything that a ship captures is divided up equally per person, guaranteeing that “a captured Christian who rows receives the same part of the booty as his master” (f. 12v). Of course, this is of no use to the slave himself, since “when it comes to dividing up the loot, the master is

32  Mario Klarer allowed to take the captive’s share as well, which means that the slave has worked for nothing” (f. 12v). After focusing on his personal fate, Balthasar returns to the larger history of the city of Tunis, relating the former king’s attempt to regain power by seeking an alliance with Charles V, even at the cost of becoming a tributary of the Habsburgs. According to Sturmer, Charles V is interested in the strategic position of Tunis, which was situated “in the Mediterranean, thirty miles from Sicily” (f. 13v). Charles V is characterized as a calculating thinker, who, in supporting the Tunisian former king, is motived by opportunities for personal gain rather than notions of loyalty. Balthasar learns, through a captured Christian, about the formation of the Habsburg armada with 4,000 men and their plans to attack the city of Tunis. To give an impression of Balthasar Sturmer’s at times almost theatrical prose, here is a longer passage: Having heard this, I hurried to see a friend of mine and tell him the good news: His Imperial Majesty would soon come to our relief. Soon after, my master came onto the galley, ordered me to his presence, and said, “You should know that your father and all his kin are coming here, but we will face them and capture them, so you will have more company.” I answered, “Everything lies in God’s hands.” He retorted, “Your gods will not help you.” No more than eight days after this episode, however, His Imperial Majesty arrived with 1,000 galleys and 500 ships. The armadas of Spain, Italy, and Rhodes (or Malta) were all with him. (f. 14r-v) It is quite remarkable how Balthasar employs dialogue and direct speech in his narrative in order to give his account an authentic and documentary character, a feature that he further enhances by quoting the slave masters in Turkish throughout his account. When the Habsburg forces arrive, all captives, whom Balthasar estimates to be around “15,000 coming from all nations” (f. 15r), are moved inside the gates of Tunis, put in chains, and distributed all over the city. Balthasar describes the siege of Goletta, which is the stronghold protecting the harbor entrance of Tunis, from his personal perspective as a slave held captive inside the city of Tunis. What makes Balthasar Sturmer’s account of the siege of Tunis particularly exceptional is that a number of parallel visual representations by eyewitnesses survive, thus complementing Sturmer’s text with a wide array of visual material. When attacking Tunis in 1535, Emperor Charles V not only pulled together the largest armada to date with money from the Spanish transatlantic colonies but also made sure that this large-scale operation was documented through state-of-the-art representational media. Similar to modern war journalism, Charles employed the painters Jan Cornelisz Vermeyen and Cornelis Anthonisz to accompany the troops in order to document all moves of the venture. They produced numerous scenes of the siege and conquest of the city

Sturmer and the Barbary captivity narrative 33 of Tunis. The drawings survive in a very unusual format as carton designs for large-scale woven tapestries.7 After the successful conquest of Tunis, Charles V employed the tapestries as a makeshift propaganda instrument that could be set up as a tent-like structure in different locations in order to celebrate his victory over Muslim forces. This three-dimensional virtual-reality-like panorama supported his self-stylization as the Christian emperor who protected Europe against the threat of a Turkish invasion. This danger was quite real, since most of the Balkans had fallen into the hands of the Ottoman Empire in the first decades of the sixteenth century. With the occupation of Hungary and the Turkish siege of Vienna in 1529, the threat was reaching the heartlands of the Habsburg Empire. In addition to using the drawings and sketches of Jan Cornelisz Vermeyen and Cornelis Anthonisz for the tapestry installation, the visual representations of the siege of Tunis in 1535 were also disseminated to a wider public through half a dozen copper engravings by Frans Hogenberg in his Geschichtsblätter—a collection of images depicting major historical events (see Figure 1.3). Also, the 1590 engraving in Braun and Hogenberg’s Civitates Orbis Terrarum (Figure 1.4), one of the most important books with town views in

Figure 1.3 Franz Hogenberg, Geschichtsblätter (1560–1623), “Der Keyser wardt . . . von den Mohren umbzingelt . . .” [ca. 1574] Source: Mario Klarer.

34  Mario Klarer the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, illustrates the unique geographical location of Tunis very well. Figure 1.4 shows Goletta in the foreground, the stronghold securing the narrow waterway that leads into the harbor of Tunis. “La Goulette, the port of Tunis, which lies only three or four Italian miles from the city [Tunis]” (f. 12r). Goletta is divided by a narrow passage leading into the harbor, or as Balthasar writes: “they are divided by a stretch of water two miles wide” (f. 12r-v), one of the only two ways to get into the city. This highly protected and relatively easy to defend position is the reason why Charles V “besieged La Goulette for about three months before it was finally conquered” (f. 15r). When the Christian forces under Charles V enter Goletta, Balthasar’s master gets extremely worried and engages his slave in a discussion on how to proceed under the auspices of a Christian victory. This passage mirrors a previous exchange between Balthasar and his master, when he had learned about the impending arrival of Charles V. During the previous conversation the slave master was full of scorn, suggesting that Balthasar would receive more “company,” that is new Christian slaves, after a Turkish victory over the Habsburgs. Now we find a structurally similar exchange between

Figure 1.4  Georg Braun and Frans Hogenberg, “Tunis,” Civitates Orbis Terrarum, vol. 2, Cologne, 1575 Source: Mario Klarer.

Sturmer and the Barbary captivity narrative 35 Balthasar and his master, but this time the valences of power are changing in favor of the slave. When the sun started to set, some Turks told my master, “Wollacheÿ billacheÿ bihem Oliman, gavor ahabedÿ.” “Verily, the German infidel had spoken the truth.” And they proceeded to inform him about our previous debate, whereupon my master asked me, “What do you think we should do now? Will we be able to keep Tunis?” I told my master that it would be wise to make preparations for his escape, for Tunis is not a fortified city wherein one would want to be caught unprepared. My master answered that he himself doubted this. It was then that my master vowed that after two more years of service, he would set me free; however, I did not believe him. (f. 15v) The passage seems like a mirror image of the exchange the two had earlier, in which the master ridiculed Balthasar. Now, facing a defeat of the Turkish forces, the oppressor gradually tries to prove himself a good master to his slave. What is also quite astonishing is the use of direct speech and of original Turkish sentences that add to the authentic quality as well the exotic nature of the narrative. The Turkish passages seem to fulfill a function similar to the Latin phrases that Balthasar weaves into the narrative in order to show his education or sophistication. A day after this exchange between Balthasar and his master, the Christian troops stand half a mile before Tunis and are about to conquer the city. The castle of Tunis is manned by 600 Turks with instructions to set the castle with the captured Christians on fire in case Barbarossa loses ground in battle. According to Sturmer, 100 of the 600 Turks were Mamlukes. Sturmer calls them “renounced Christians” (“verleugnete Christen”; f. 16r), which means that they used to be Christians but repudiated their faith. The common explanation is that Mamlukes were themselves slaves who had been bought by Turks at an early age and trained as elite soldiers. The Mamlukes strike a deal with the Christian captives. They promise to keep the slaves alive in return for them putting in a good word when the Habsburg forces conquer the city. Again, Balthasar renders this information in direct speech addressed to the captives: “If Barbarossa loses the battle, we will carry out his sentence [that the Christians are to be killed]. However, if you vow to intercede for us with His Imperial Majesty so that we may be released along with our goods and chattels, then we will unshackle you and free you today and slay all the Turks” (f. 16r-v). The Mamlukes keep their word. When Barbarossa with his several thousand men loses ground and wants to get into the castle in order to help carry out his plan of killing the captives and setting fire to the castle, the Mamlukes together with the freed Christians turn against him. They open the

36  Mario Klarer castle gates, aim a cannon at the incoming troops, and open fire on them. An interesting detail with regard to the Mamlukes’ coup is that Charles V seems to have honored their arrangement with the Christian slaves. When he reaches the castle, the Mamlukes only open the gates for Charles after he gives his word to spare their lives. “Therefore, His Imperial Majesty declared before everyone there that no Mamluke was to be harmed and that they would retain possession of their goods. For this purpose, they all had to wear a white piece of cloth around their left arm so they could be easily identified” (f. 17r). Balthasar, who had been outside the castle on the battlefield with his master, muses about how different his fate would have been had he been among the captives inside the castle instead. Against my will, I found myself among the troops out on the field; I would have preferred to stay in the fortress, where at the time I would have gotten rich as well, given that most of the Turks’ treasure had been left behind [. . .] Many captive Christians became rich [. . .] Had I been there, many more would have gotten rich thanks to me, for I knew very well where to find it all [the treasure]. (f. 17r) Once again it becomes apparent how strongly economic issues fuel Balthasar Sturmer’s narrative. Instead of contemplating what could have happened to him while being on the battlefield in the line of fire, he is concerned that he was not able to take part in the heist when the Turkish treasures were parceled out. After describing the aforementioned incidents of the siege, all of which he did not directly participate in, he returns to his personal narrative with a phrase that indicates the end of these digressions in his account: “To return to my subject [propositum]” (f. 17v). His “propositum” is his goal or plan, which, as we learned in the preface, is to give an account or “register,” as he calls it, of his personal adventures and deeds. Balthasar uses this change of setting or narrative perspective in an almost cinematic manner, addressing us as readers with clues of how to perceive these different parts of his personal narrative within a larger historiographic context. Returning to his “propositum,” Balthasar reminds us that he has been “out on the field with Barbarossa” (f. 17v) during all this time while the castle fell, i.e., during his narrative digressions. Now we are back with Balthasar behind enemy lines in a moment of confusion and indecision about how to proceed on the Muslim side. Eventually Barbarossa’s forces retreat to the city of Beserte (Bizerte) in a disorganized manner. According to Balthasar, “this was truly an ‘every man for himself’ sort of situation” (f. 17v). While being pursued by the King of Tunis, who is now an ally of the Habsburgs, Barbarossa and his troops have to hide in the mountains where some of the men die of thirst. With this episode begins probably the most personal part of Sturmer’s entire narrative. Balthasar tells us about his trials and tribulations when

Sturmer and the Barbary captivity narrative 37 trying to regain his freedom. After wandering for three days in his master’s train, Balthasar attempts to escape by pretending to answer the call of nature. He steps out of the train, wanders off to the mountains, and hides under a bush. Again, Balthasar describes the scene by employing direct speech coupled with other rather noteworthy narrative strategies: When my master took notice of my absence, he asked his servants, who had not left the path, where I was. One of them said, “He went into the forest and is probably answering the call of nature.” However, as time passed and I failed to come back, my master called me, “Olyman Gavor!” which means in our tongue: “Unrighteous German!” for they believe that their creed makes them righteous and [ours makes] us unrighteous. For his part, this Olyman Gavor lay still and prayed to God. Several Turks fanned out, called my name, and searched for me. I sometimes saw them, but they never saw me. They even came close to the bush [behind which I was hiding], which made me break out in cold sweat. Had they found me, my life would have been forfeit, but since they did not, they went on their way. (f. 18r-v) Sturmer even experiments with different narrative perspectives. As in other instances he applies direct speech, including Turkish phrases, to increase the authenticity of the scene. However, the passage becomes truly exceptional when he switches from his ongoing first-person perspective, which runs through the entire account, to a figural point of view: “This Olyman Gavor lay still and prayed to God.” In this sentence Balthasar does not refer to himself as “I” but abruptly in the third person as “he.” This short switch highlights two things: first, that Balthasar adopts the perspective of his persecutors, who, of course, think of him in the third person; and second, that he is alienated from his self, seeing himself from an outside perspective, while lying motionless in his hideout for a long time. It is only for the duration of one sentence that Balthasar experiments with this switch in narrative perspective, but it is a most fitting context because it stresses the extreme nature of this moment when his life is on the line. The stress of impending discovery is so high that Balthasar resorts to dissociation strategies—a phenomenon not uncommon in life-threatening situations. Exhausted by thirst and hunger, Balthasar only has access to polluted water out of puddles. He hides during the day and, out of fear of being discovered, only travels by night. Given his state of exhaustion, Balthasar very convincingly makes us believe that he is taken by complete surprise when he suddenly hears “a disturbance coming from above and imagined several squadrons of horsemen coming toward me” (f. 19r). Yet his imagination has tricked him, because the alleged riders turn out to be a pack of deer chased by two lions. By a hair’s breadth, Balthasar escapes the stampeding animals and watches how the lions kill and devour one of the deer. This whole passage functions like a montage scene in film, implying that the killed game

38  Mario Klarer resembles Balthasar’s possible fate.8 He even comments on this analogy a little later in an interior monologue: “The lions will come eventually and devour you, and then nobody will know what became of you, which will deeply grieve your dear parents” (f. 19v). Balthasar continues this technique of interior monologue, especially in the narrative passages in which he is on the run by himself and therefore lacking dialogue partners. Despite being alone or maybe precisely because he himself is his sole interlocutor, Balthasar employs direct speech in soliloquy-like interior monologues. In these virtual dialogues, he ponders his situation as well as his plans for making his way back to the Habsburg forces without falling into the hands of the Turks again. He writes that he thought: “You will want to be on your way by the morrow. If you come across the men of the King of Tunis, you will be safe, for they are your friends. However, if it is Barbarossa’s men you come across, then you will say, ‘I am a righteous one.’ If they ask where you are headed, you will say you could not keep up with your comrades because you fell ill on the way” (f. 19v-20r; emphasis added). Balthasar again renders the seriousness or danger of the situation through strategies of dissociation in which one part of his self becomes an outside observer or interlocutor. Balthasar anticipates what is actually going to happen to him immediately afterward. Feeling physically frail due to the foul water, Balthasar decides to travel only by day. Almost instantaneously he runs into 60 Moors who are subjects of Barbarossa. He is now exactly in the situation that he anticipated the paragraph before in his interior monologues, namely, that he has to pass as a Turk. I was [fortunately] dressed in the Turkish manner. Once they had reached me, they asked me what I was; I answered them in Turkish that I was a Mussulman, which in German means “a righteous one.” They also asked me whither I was bound; I replied that I was completely lost and did not know myself where I was headed. They then inquired, “Do you want to come with us? We want to reach the encampment!” I would have preferred to continue on my way; however, had I taken my leave from them then, they would have realized I was a Christian right away, since they had found me on the way to Tunis. Well, what was I to do? I had to choose the lesser of two evils! (f. 20r-20v) It is amazing how Balthasar builds up suspense. He tells us in advance that he will have to try and pass for a Muslim, later actually finds himself in the situation that he envisioned, and then keeps us in suspense about the outcome of this adventure. Balthasar decides to go with the Moors in order not to raise any suspicion. In order to understand what follows, a modern reader needs background information about the larger framework of this particular episode. Balthasar’s passing for a “just one,” that is a Muslim, is not to be understood as a kind of ethnic or linguistic passing in which Balthasar has to simply talk and look like a Muslim. It is clear from the beginning that

Sturmer and the Barbary captivity narrative 39 he is European and not a member of the Turkish or indigenous population. Thus, the Moors inquire about his background immediately. Once we were on our way, one of them asked me how long ago I had converted and adopted their creed. My manner of speaking had made it obvious to them that I was no real Turk. I answered that I had converted long ago. My life depended on my prompt reply, and, as they say: necessitas frangit legem [necessity breaks the law]. However, in saying I was a righteous one, I did not renounce my faith in God, for we have been justified through our belief in our Lord Christ, who is the maker of justice. (f. 20v) With these passages, Balthasar ventures into the heart of his narrative and the most delicate subject matter of Barbary captivity narratives in general. The question of remaining a faithful Christian and not becoming a renegade or renegado is the motor of many narratives from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. Captives in North Africa had the option to convert to Islam and thus increase the quality of their lives considerably. A large number of renegades were able to achieve quite influential positions within the various political, administrative, and economic sectors of the Barbary Coast. For example, the Danish captive Hark Olufs, who fell into Algerian hands at the age of fifteen, eventually advanced to the position of the military leader of the Bey of Constantine in the early eighteenth century. Some of the renegados became major pirates themselves and, in turn, captured Christians for the Barbary Coast slave economy. Given this enormous temptation for every single Christian captive to improve his overall condition through conversion, loyalty to one’s faith became a major issue whenever a slave was ransomed or able to return to his home country. The suspicion that he had sided with the infidels, or even worse, that he had “turned Turk” or “taken the Turban,” i.e., converted, hovered over all former slaves. Almost every single narrative from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, regardless in what language it was written, concerned itself with possibly proving that the author did not stray from Christianity, even under the most adverse circumstances. Of course, a number of other agendas lie at the heart of these captivity narratives, for example, creating compassion and empathy in the European readers for the fate of the captives. This sympathetic aspect was important to shape the public opinion in order to continue communal efforts to keep the pirates at bay in their activities as well as to continue ransom activities. The charity efforts relied on individual donations to organizations, such as the Trinitarian Order. All these aspects indirectly contributed to the production of these survivor narratives. However, what seems to be the most direct and most personal impact on the survivors themselves is their ability to prove to their countrymen fidelity to the Christian faith under the most hostile circumstances. This means that it was crucial for captives to stress their faithfulness in order to be able to reintegrate into their respective home societies.

40  Mario Klarer Only within this larger framework of Balthasar Sturmer’s narrative—as well as the other specimens of the genre of Barbary Coast narratives—do the following performative acts by Balthasar Sturmer make sense. Balthasar again delves into this episode with his usual technique: He creates suspense by briefly anticipating what will occur, teases the reader with delaying strategies, and only then relates in detail what actually happened to him. “My martyrdom was only about to start, but God sustained me. After we had eaten and the horses had been fed, they got together to confer among themselves. When I saw this, I suspected they were discussing me, which was indeed the case” (f. 20v-21r). After framing the scene through anticipating a major upcoming trial, Balthasar then relates the actual incident. As they disbanded, a cleric among them called me to him and said, “My brothers suspect that you are not a righteous one, given that we found you on the way to Tunis. So come with me to the side, and I will verify if you are circumcised. You cannot refuse that!” I was very shocked when I heard this, but I tried to conceal it. However, every cloud has a silver lining, and I had an ace up my sleeve. It so happened that many years prior, while in Spain, an evil two-legged worm had bitten my foreskin off, which is something the Turks generally have removed. When the cleric looked at me and beheld the signum he bellowed in his language, “Wollachey billachey muselmander kesly,” which means in German: “Forsooth! Forsooth! He is a righteous one and has been circumcised.” (f. 21r-v) This passage needs additional explanation. Balthasar claims that he could fool the priest into believing he was circumcised, which would corroborate that he is a renegade, i.e., somebody who subjected himself to circumcision as part of a conversion to Islam. However, Balthasar manages to turn this “signum” or sign, in the form of his idiosyncratic foreskin, into an escape ticket. While for the Muslim priest the missing foreskin is proof of Sturmer’s true Muslim faith, Balthasar claims to us, his Christian readers, that he was not circumcised in a religious conversion act. Rather he lost his “signum” when a “two-legged worm” bit off part of his foreskin in Spain, most probably in a not so religiously motivated act. It is not clear what this “twolegged worm” refers to. It could mean a woman, a prostitute, or a specific kind of venereal disease mutilated him in such a way that he could pass for a circumcised Muslim—or at least that is what Balthasar wants us to believe. This “signum,” as Balthasar calls his non-intact foreskin, will reappear later in a different context, when the very same “signum” will adopt a totally different meaning. Sturmer does not arbitrarily refer to the foreskin as “signum” but most probably echoes the Vulgate version of Gen 17:11 in which the foreskin or circumcision is a “token [signum] of the covenant” between God and His chosen people.9 The Muslim priest is satisfied with this “signum” and even offers to accompany Balthasar to the interior of the country to see his friends in the

Sturmer and the Barbary captivity narrative 41 “Blackamoor Land” (f. 21v). Balthasar doubts the honest intentions of the priest: “I was inclined to accept his offer but decided against it. Back then, I had thought to myself, ‘Perhaps he knows that you are not truly circumcised and plans to sell you as soon as you reach your destination.’ I was wrong, however, as I would learn later on” (f. 21v). We are again inserted into Balthasar’s thoughts, which he renders through a kind of dialogue with himself, addressing himself in the second person once more. In Constantine, a town situated in what today is eastern Algeria, Balthasar decides to part with the Moors. “I thought to myself, ‘It might be more in your interest to go along with these Turks than [to remain] with the Moors, for they might lead you into Blackamoor Land only to sell you there.’ However, I did not intend to stay with the Turks for long. As soon as an opportunity presented itself, I would turn tail and run away” (f. 22r). Balthasar is again very cautious in his narrative to leave not the slightest possible doubt that his sole intention was to return to the Emperor’s troops in Tunis. With this departure scene, we encounter a peculiar motive in Barbary captivity narratives, namely, that captives often show deep affection for their oppressors or masters. The cleric then told me, “My son, may God guide you and keep you.” His words made me regret our farewell right then and there, for they convinced me he had meant well all along. I had regarded him with suspicion. But now I wished I had gone with him instead—for I would have seen more things under the pretense of being a righteous one, although I did not fully trust him. (f. 22r-v) This passage is typical of the genre and appears in variation in a number of Barbary captivity narratives, usually before the captive is about to escape and meets with the master for the last time. In many cases, if the master has been benevolent, the relationship constellation that emerges in these scenes is that of a son betraying his father. The 1675 account of the Englishman William Okeley, who escaped from Algiers in a collapsible boat, contains a similar passage that shows this structure of emotional bonding with the oppressor. Before Balthasar Sturmer parts with the Moors, the priest introduces him to Turks, telling them that he tested Balthasar and deemed him to be a convert. “I have examined him and found that he is circumcised” (f. 22v). Balthasar is relieved because he does not have to prove himself again and run the risk of being discovered as a Christian. After a few days in the company of the Turks, Balthasar is once again facing a structurally analogous challenge, or as he prefaces this episode: “it was then that my martyrdom began once again” (f. 23r). By chance Balthasar runs into someone who knows him and his master in Tunis. In a drama-like dialogue, we witness the negotiations between Balthasar and the Turk at whose mercy he now finds himself. The Turk agrees to lead Balthasar to Tunis, i.e.,

42  Mario Klarer to his freedom, under the condition that Balthasar in turn will help to liberate the Turk’s father from the hands of the Habsburgs. He explains: “Your countrymen hold my father captive in La Goulette. If you can free him, I will bring you to Tunis” (f. 23v). This passage again resembles the contract that the Mamlukes struck with the Christian captives in Goletta in order to come to terms with the changing hierarchies of power brought about by the victory of Charles V. Balthasar later steals away from the group of Turks and leaves town with his new ally. However, he is held up by two Moors who accuse him of being a runaway slave. His Turkish ally, out of fear that he might be found to have made a deal with a Christian, pretends not to know Balthasar and lets the Moors return Balthasar to the city. The Moors offer Balthasar free passage if he gives them money. In order to demonstrate that he is penniless and cannot accept their business proposal, Balthasar takes off his coat. During the negotiation, Balthasar is once again subject to a physical inspection, which this time yields different results. I was told to take it [my coat] off, and, as I did, my loincloth slipped from my body. When they saw this, they came up to me and said, “We have to verify if the rumors are true, and you are indeed a righteous one.” They had doubted me because the signum was too large. (f. 24v) It is quite telling how Balthasar employs the ambivalence of his “signum,” almost like a free-playing signifier that can take on different meanings. The allegedly mutilated foreskin becomes a means of flexible identity construction. In the first instance, Balthasar uses his lack of an intact foreskin as a means to pass as a Muslim. In the second instance, the very same sign can be read in order to draw completely different conclusions, namely that he is still a Christian. The second foreskin episode, therefore, fulfills two functions. First of all, regardless of the authenticity of this adventure, Balthasar employs it as one of his mirroring episodes in the narrative (similar to the two conversations he has with his slave master). This works very well in terms of advancing the story by picking up a previous theme, albeit with new valences attached to the key concept. Secondly, and this seems to be more important, Balthasar anticipates the Christian trial that he might have to undergo after returning home or when reuniting with the Habsburg forces. By using the Moors, as an ethnic group different from the Turks, he stages an incident of having to prove himself that might subliminally anticipate his need to prove himself to Christians later on. It is probably easier for Balthasar to talk about this humiliating and life-threatening procedure in the context of his escape with Moors than with fellow Christians, who would doubt his faithfulness by subjecting him to a physical inspection. Balthasar is one of the most explicit authors on the issue of circumcision by making the physical inspection part of the narrative. Most authors hint at the threat of circumcision but do not go into the graphic details or the

Sturmer and the Barbary captivity narrative 43 picaro-like adventures that Balthasar spins around it. In sum, this episode, in which the Moors challenge his identity, appears like a subliminal coming to terms with his impending fate upon returning to the Christian community. However, Sturmer projects this scene into a relatively safe setting that only indirectly evokes one of the core problems of escapees, namely the implicit accusation that they abandoned Christianity for personal gain. Immediately after one of the Moors publicly announces that Balthasar is a Christian, Balthasar fears he might lose his life. “The children came and promptly threw rocks at me. They were followed by a tall, stout man, who declared, ‘My two brothers were killed by your people; you shall die at our hands today!’ Now I was really in trouble. As he spoke, he picked up a large stone and threw it at me but missed. He then said, ‘Lead the dog out onto the field and kill him’” (f. 24v-25r). However, the moment he is about to be killed, the two Moors with whom he had spent time after escaping from his master come to his rescue. Then, the two men, who were my angels, said, “You should not say that he is an unrighteous one, for our priest examined him and found him rightly circumcised, so you are about to do this man a great disservice.” Then they added, “And even if he were a Christian, which he is not, you should consider that our lord is now a vassal of his lord. Indeed, [Charles V] has bestowed land and people on our Lord. Think of the repercussions if you insist on carrying out your plans. So set him free at once!” They heeded these words and let me go. (f. 25r-v) With this intervention, the identity issue receives yet another twist. This time the decisive factor is not physical proof but pragmatic behavior. Balthasar feels as if “reborn” but senses that this “accident” (f. 25v) is not over yet. Despite being freed and his life being spared, he is not allowed to travel by himself. Eventually he teams up with a Moor from Granada with whom he can converse in Spanish and who promises to find somebody to accompany Balthasar to Tunis. Again, before going into this episode, Balthasar prepares us to expect a twist. “But he turned out to be a traitor” (f. 25v). Balthasar then tells us how his new companion lured him into the village of his nomad tribe under the pretense of bringing him to Tunis. In the village, he pressures Balthasar into writing a letter to the Christians in Tunis to pay a ransom of 100 ducats for him. “I wrote my letters—one in Spanish, the other in German—and was assigned a Moor who would deliver them in La Goulette” (f. 27r). At that time Charles V had already departed from the city of Tunis, leaving behind a garrison of “2,000 Spaniards [. . .] along with many German gunsmiths” (f. 27r). When the Moor delivers the letters, the Commander reacts in an unexpected manner. The messenger was dispatched and delivered the letters. But what did the commander do? He took the Moor captive and said, “Your messenger

44  Mario Klarer shall be set free when you hand over the captured Christian.” But this was not what I had written in my letter. (f. 27r) Balthasar again renders this incident—which, like many others, he did not witness himself—in a drama-like manner through direct speech and even uses a rhetorical question to heighten the suspense. When the Moors realize what has happened, they return with Balthasar to their village, assuming that he had given instructions for the arrest of the messenger in his letters. They bind him onto a mule, bring him into the mountains, and punish him for his alleged betrayal. Balthasar then undergoes a procedure that is a commonplace mode of punishment in other Barbary Coast narratives, and was therefore often singled out for visual illustration. After we had arrived, my legs were bound together and tied to a stick so that I was suspended upside-down, and two churls, who were carrying the stick on their shoulders, flogged the soles of my feet with a rod. I thought my eyes would bulge out of my head, but I endured it, ever mindful of my innocence. (f. 27v) We find references to this practice in a number of texts, including Pierre Dan’s Historie van Barbaryen, En des zelfs Zee-Roovers (1684), which stresses cruel practices of torture, punishment, or execution in North African captivity in its engravings (see Figure 1.5).

Figure 1.5 Pierre Dan, Historie van Barbaryen, En des zelfs Zee-Roovers (1684); f. 324 Source: Mario Klarer.

Sturmer and the Barbary captivity narrative 45 After this treatment, Balthasar spends two months with the nomads, who force him to eat from the same bowl as a dog. Once they had eaten, they would put my helping on one side of the bowl and the dog’s on the other. The dog would finish his share promptly and immediately start biting my hands, for he wanted to eat mine as well. [The Alarbs] found this amusing. (f. 27v) Eventually Balthasar’s position improves slightly and the nomads try to find a wife for him, an offer which he, at least for the time being, declines by claiming that he has to learn the Moors’ language a little better first. This makes his captors assume that he will eventually convert to Islam and motivates them to treat him slightly better than before. However, before Balthasar has to live up to his promise, he is able to get away from his captors with the help or negligence of a nomad woman. His master’s father had two wives, “a dark-skinned one and a fair-skinned one” (f. 27r). The “dark-skinned” wife was apparently very suspicious of Balthasar and, as it seems, wanted to get rid of him. One evening while she is locking Balthasar into his chains for the night, her husband calls her unexpectedly: She left the key behind. Whether she did this on purpose or not, only she knows. [. . .] After I made certain everyone was asleep, I crawled out of the tent [. . .] followed by my comrade the dog, who always lay beside me, for he was both my dining-brother and my sleeping-companion. I then fell to my knees and heartily begged our Lord God to help me out of my prison. Many promises were made in that moment, but very few were kept later. (f. 28v-29r) In this moment of suspense when we want to know if he can escape or if the dog will give him away by waking up the nomads, Balthasar offers us an almost self-ironic glimpse into his character by telling us about his faulty promises to God. Of course, the dog barks and wakes up the entire camp. Here again Balthasar projects forward into the future by letting us know that he “would later learn from the Alarb that the dog ran for the tents while baying incessantly, causing everyone to wake up” (f. 29r). Once again Balthasar teases us through foreshadowing by letting us know that his captors will later communicate with him. However, Balthasar leaves it up to the reader’s imagination whether he will talk to them again because they caught him on the run or because he met some of them later after having successfully escaped. While we as readers muse about these different possibilities, we learn that dogs are barking, the entire camp is hunting Balthasar down, and that his head-over-heels escape becomes a labyrinth-like, mostly circular journey. In the morning twilight, he finds himself in an open field and believes he sees four men on horseback approaching him. With no place to hide, he gives himself up to God’s grace, and similar to previous life-threatening situations, starts

46  Mario Klarer referring to himself in the second person: “I realized I had no chance to flee. I, therefore, thought to myself, ‘If these riders are the ones chasing you, you will not avoid them. But if they are just travelers, you will greet them and let them pass’” (f. 30r; emphasis added). When the alleged riders approach him, they turn out to be four oxen with bags of grain bound to their backs, accompanied by two men on foot. Balthasar proceeds with self-confidence, greets the men, and keeps on walking. His plan works and they leave him alone. That night he is frightened by the eerie sounds of monkeys that surround him in the dark until he arrives at the gates of the city of Tunis at daybreak. When the gates open in the morning and Balthasar enters the city, he once again confronts the reader with the multicultural maze that he is trying to navigate: When the Moors saw me enter in such a stately manner, they tattled amongst themselves, “Hodde mausy muselman, hodde ansara,” which in the Moorish tongue means: “He is not a righteous one but an unrighteous one.” [. . .] When the Spaniards saw me, they said, “Qui nos vienne allia,” which means: “Who goes there?” I walked up to them quickly, greeted them, and said, “Dios vos de bonos dies Signoros.” That is: “Gentlemen, I wish you a blessed day!” (f. 30–31r) This entire passage is meant to confuse us as readers. We do not know whether the “unrighteous one,” with which the Moors refer to him, is meant from a Muslim perspective or a Christian perspective. This is especially true since Christians now occupy Tunis and hierarchies are turned upside down. Also, Balthasar’s readers, who most likely did not know or even recognize Turkish, probably had no idea if the “Moorish tongue” in which the guards address him is supposed to be Turkish or a language of the indigenous population. After this exchange, in what he refers to as the “Moorish tongue,” he engages in a dialogue with Spanish soldiers, once again demonstrating how well he is able to navigate this labyrinth of different cultures and languages. A little while into the conversation, when the Spaniards learn that Balthasar is German, they realize that he is the one who was mentioned in the letter the messenger had delivered some time ago. Balthasar joins his old captain and meets with German gunsmiths who offer him the imprisoned messenger as his personal slave. “The messenger is still incarcerated; you may make him your servant” (f. 31r). Balthasar declines the proposition and sets the Moor free. However, I set him free and demanded no ransom. I instructed him to tell my master good things and that he had seen me. But, should I encounter him again some time, I would pay him back dearly for having held me captive for so long in contradiction with His Imperial Majesty’s orders. I also gave him money for provisions. (f. 31v)

Sturmer and the Barbary captivity narrative 47 With this gesture of Christian charity, Balthasar ends this part of the narrative that depicts his own captivity, or as he puts it rather awkwardly: “I have recounted virtually all of my captivity and release, and I have done it in detail” (f. 31v-32r). The rest of his “register” deals with “how I have fared up until now” (f. 32r). We learn that he enlists as a mercenary or “knecht” (f. 32r) with the Spanish troops that the son of the King of Tunis sent in order to conquer the city of Beserte, which was still in the hands of the Turks. These 10,000 men are joined by Andrea Doria, who supports the attack on Beserte with 30 ships. While on duty aboard a Spanish galley, Balthasar meets the servant who had helped him sell wheat in Lisbon before his major adventures had started. Now under the command of his former underling, Balthasar muses: “Such is the way of the world” (f. 32r). Shortly before the attack on Beserte, Balthasar runs into his former Moorish master, who treats Balthasar with utmost respect, thanking him for setting free the messenger with provisions for his return. After the fall of Beserte and the defeat of the Turks, the Moorish master, who made a huge bounty, hands the loot over to Balthasar to pick out the best objects for himself in a gesture of gratitude. After this episode, Balthasar leaves North Africa for good and sails to Naples, where all the soldiers receive their pay and take their leave. In sum, Balthasar gets out of his various captivities alive and is in possession of a small fortune. Despite his positive balance sheet financially speaking, his other “register” turns out to be in the red figures. I collected a few hundred Ducats for myself, but as they say, male quæsit male perdit —“thus one gains, and thus one wastes away.” By then, I had already forgotten all my tribulations. I was living at the whim of my earthly appetites and did not remember how my Loyal God had delivered me. However, the Lord observed me closely and kept score, and when my ledger was full, He came to call me to account and punished me rigorously. (f. 33r-v) Again Balthasar uses financial language for moral purposes. It seems as if Balthasar not only loses his entire financial fortune again, but simultaneously also falls out of God’s grace. We learned earlier in the narrative that the annual salary of a common sailor was 24 ducats. So, spending several hundred ducats in one go, as Balthasar did, must have been quite a substantial loss. The rest of Balthasar Sturmer’s narrative remains relatively sketchy, at least when compared to the detailed and lively descriptions of all earlier episodes. In a rather factual style, we are informed that Balthasar sails from Naples to Seville and joins Spanish forces against the French, with whom Spain is now at war. After several months chasing French vessels in the Mediterranean, he becomes master gunner on a ship that is part of a fleet of twelve vessels bound for Peru to collect gold for the Emperor.

48  Mario Klarer Balthasar’s narrative now leads us out of the Mediterranean world into the New World as well as into the southern hemisphere. Balthasar loses sight of the North Star but is able to see the Southern Cross. In an almost philosophical manner, Balthasar muses about cosmography. “Thus, our beloved, beautiful world hovers across the skies. Just what are we so smug about? We are but poor little worms” (f. 34r). It is quite remarkable that Sturmer once again resorts to the word “worm” to denote humans. The first time he applied the term was to a “two-legged worm” (f. 21v) that bit off part of his foreskin, conjuring up biblical imagery of a seducing serpent. Now it stands for mankind in general—we who like “little worms” have only a very limited perspective on the world. Balthasar leaves Nombre Dios, today’s Colon in Peru, with a shipload of gold. He talks about the use of navigational instruments in a long-winded explanation of the training and examination of navigators in Spain. Via Panama (which he falsely refers to as an island) and the Canary Islands, they sail back to Europe, despite heavy storms that almost throw them back to the coast of South America. The main ship, which carried most of the gold, incurred so much damage that it sank shortly after her cargo and crew were distributed among the other vessels. Eventually, the now eleven ships get back to Seville, and Balthasar receives his pay and takes his leave. At this point, Balthasar writes to his father and discloses his adventures and the hardship he endured. However, he asks his father not to tell anybody about his letter. On his way home, Balthasar enlists as a gun master on a ship sailing from Seville to the Eastern Mediterranean in order to transport wine to London. From London Balthasar takes a boat to Danzig and then travels to his hometown Marienburg. I moved back to Malbork with my father, who did not recognize me until I revealed myself. Four days later, he had a feast prepared to celebrate my homecoming because the prodigal son had returned home at last. While sitting at the table, after we had eaten almost everything, my father said, “My dear son, strangers have told me that you were held captive by the Turk. You simply must tell us everything while our friends are gathered here!” [. . .] Only after I had told them almost exactly the same story I have written here did he admit to receiving my letter. (f. 36r-v) The entire scene is peculiar. Balthasar deliberately frames the banquet with direct allusions to the biblical story of the “Prodigal Son,” but he places at its heart a scam or deceptive show. Why would he ask his father not to tell anyone that he is alive and that he was a Turkish slave? There are two possible explanations. Perhaps he did not want anybody to know that he was a Turkish slave for the obvious reason that people might doubt he had remained faithful to Christianity during his time in captivity, i.e., that he could

Sturmer and the Barbary captivity narrative 49 be accused of being a renegade. Although this could have been the reason why Balthasar asked his father to refrain from telling anybody about his fate, it does not make sense since the father, during the feast, asks him about his Turkish captivity. The only explanation is that the entire episode is a carefully crafted surprise through which Balthasar can stage his tale of adventure even more—with a big splash so to speak. After all his years abroad, Balthasar only manages to spend two weeks at home and is then once again tempted to sail off on a merchant vessel. Not 14 days had passed since my arrival, when I found myself loading several loads of wheat onto a ship, which Hans Balser took to Lisbon. My father urged me incessantly to stay at home and take over his business, for he was nearing 70, but I did not want to obey him; I thought I knew better. So I sailed to Lisbon, in God’s name [. . .] I hurried back home to load more wheat onto another ship—the shipper was called Cale Caspa. My father insisted I should stay in the country; I had already had my fair share of adventures. He wanted to find a wife for me, but I could not spare a thought for that. We sailed to Lisbon [. . .]. (f. 36v-37r) Here the narrative attains almost Crusoeesque features. The physical father asks the prodigal son to stay home but the wild young son cannot resist the temptation of adventure. Similar to Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, the figure of the earthly and the heavenly father converge. Disobeying his father simultaneously challenges God’s authority. The motif of leaving home without the consent of the father is not unique to Balthasar Sturmer’s narrative and Robinson Crusoe. It also lies at the heart of the eighteenth-century Barbary captivity account by two brothers from Augsburg, both engravers. Andreas Mathäus Wolffgang and Johann Georg Wolffgang also embark on a journey against the will of their father and end up as Turkish slaves in Algiers.10 Remarkably, narratives similar to Sturmer’s in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries exerted a considerable impact on the plot of Robinson Crusoe. The 1675 British account by William Okeley shows similarities to Robinson Crusoe and most likely served as an inspiration for Defoe. In turn, Robinson Crusoe, immediately after its publication, influenced authentic captivity narratives in the eighteenth century. The Wolffgang brothers’ account is the most striking example of this circular logic in which Barbary captivity narratives influenced the early novel, and the early novel in turn shaped subsequent Barbary captivity accounts. Consequently, an entire subgenre evolved with the Robinsonade as a new avatar for North African captivity narration. The adventures of Gustav Landcron are an example for this crossover of genres. This fictional narrative, which contains Barbary captivity sections, appeared anonymously in German as Eines schwedischen Edelmannes, merckwürdiges Leben und gefährliche Reisen in 1726 and was

50  Mario Klarer translated into Swedish in 1740. However, the most extraordinary amalgamation of fact and fiction is by the Austrian Leonhard Eisenschmied, who embedded his authentic account of North African captivity into a mostly fictional Robinsonade framework.11 After this literary historical excursion, we have to return to our “propositum,” as Balthasar Sturmer would say. The reunion with his father is very brief. Balthasar immediately leaves for Lisbon, stays there for the next four years, and manages to establish a successful business. He is, however, outwitted by a merchant from Danzig who put water in his cargo of wheat in order to increase the weight of the commodity—a fact that Balthasar becomes aware of after having spent a fortune on the worthless cargo. “As the wheat had lain for a few days it heated up and soon the worm entered” (f. 37v). Again it is the worm—this time literally vermin—that destroys the damp wheat. As a victim of foul play, Balthasar once again loses a lot of money. While facing this financial blow, Balthasar retreats into himself and wants to change his behavior and lead a God-pleasing life in the future. In the meantime, my father had died, and from time to time, I found myself reflecting on the impious life I had led since escaping my imprisonment. I felt a sense of trepidation come over me and thought to myself, “Why do you persist in pursuing this unholy life, bereft of the Word of God? Were God to meet you right here, He would judge you as the person you are right now. You should return to your fatherland, do penance, become pious, and enter the holy state of matrimony.” (f. 37v) Balthasar returns home, gets married, and leads a well-to-do life. “I was rich, well-thought-of by everyone, had many friends, and only mingled with highborn individuals. Thus, I made my way in the world and truly believed myself to be the cream of the crop” (f. 38r). However, God’s punishment for his hubris follows en suite. “In the blink of an eye, God reversed my fortune by wondrous means, and I lost almost everything. I had not one friend left. [. . .] In the end, even my dear wife, from whom I was supposed to receive comfort, turned against me—not unlike Job’s wife” (f. 38r). Finally, after Balthasar loses all his earthly possessions, his dear wife passes away, and he almost dies. Here Balthasar returns to his initial themes of business and accounting when claiming that “avarice” (“Geitz”; f. 38v) had taken hold of him, which kept overcoming him whenever he had good intentions. He admits that although he heard God’s words, his thoughts were set on business (“Rentkammer”—“finance office”) and pleasure (“Bierkanne”—“beer jug”; f. 38v). He even returns to the initial image of the “register” (“Zeichnis”) that he had introduced in the title of the narrative and in the preface. “When I woke up early in the morning, I always had a long list of tasks to complete during the day. The list often contained more

Sturmer and the Barbary captivity narrative 51 than thirty errands but none from Our Father, which ought to have been at the very top” (f. 38v). The last lines sound like a Jeremiad or as if straight out of the “Book of Job,” to which Balthasar refers several times in the concluding part of the narrative. But now that I have almost nothing left, I can only pray to God and sigh, “Abba, Dear Father, it is time to once more confer your blessings upon me.” My Faithful God will come, for He does not wish to see me in distress any longer. Instead, He will once again offer me his gracious, bountiful hand, and He will give me more than He has taken from me, just as he did with the poor Job. (f. 39r) In the final sentences, Balthasar Sturmer once again directly speaks to “Herr Frantz” (f. 2r), whom he refers to as “Your Honor” (f. 2r, 39r) and to whom Balthasar had addressed the entire narrative with the plea to include him in his prayers. The narrative ends with the word “Amen,” followed by the date and the author’s name: “Actum, October 20, 1558. Balthasar Sturmer” (f. 39r). In contrast to other Barbary captivity narratives, which openly admit that a ghostwriter had either written the account or helped the survivor to compose the text, there is no reason to doubt that Balthasar Sturmer is the author of the narrative at hand.12 However, the neatness of the manuscript with the ruled page margins, the carefully placed rubrics, and the meticulous handwriting would suggest that the copy that survives was the product of a professional scribe. The watermark on the manuscript paper is also identical to that in use by the Danzig city council (Ritter 190). This would corroborate the fact that a professional scribe—maybe from that particular council—copied the text. The otherwise lighthearted narrative, full of self-irony and positive attitude, ends on a rather bleak note. It is noteworthy that Balthasar rendered the narrative about his adventures abroad mostly in the present tense, which contributes to the immediacy and gripping nature of the incidents he describes. However, the last three pages of the manuscript switch to the past tense and tone down considerably the lightheartedness that dominated major stretches of the previous narrative. It makes one wonder if Balthasar Sturmer had written all parts of the narrative at the same time. The drastic changes in tone rather suggest that he wrote the first part about the adventures in his youth or at an earlier stage, maybe during or shortly after the incidents it describes, or that he relied on older notes. This question, of course, cannot be answered. What remains is a narrative whose frame—comprising the preface and the concluding pages—speaks in a much more disillusioned and pessimistic voice than the rest of the text. If all parts were produced at more or less

52  Mario Klarer the same time—in Balthasar’s old age, when he was stricken with personal loss, poverty, and illness—it could only be a cleverly crafted narrative strategy to differentiate between these two tones or voices. The main parts in which he focuses on his captivity vibrate with Balthasar’s exuberant energy for adventure and his lust for irresponsible behavior. Balthasar manages to narrate these episodes of his life in a voice that makes us believe we are listening to this rogue in his youth. When we turn to the last few passages toward the end of the text, the narrating persona or voice changes, probably on purpose. In this way we almost directly experience, through Balthasar’s own alternating voice, the change that has taken place in the years between the time of the narrative proper and the retrospective reflection on these incidents in his old age. The confession-like mode of Balthasar Sturmer’s Verzeichnis der Reise also evokes the tradition of the spiritual autobiography in the wake of Saint Augustine’s Confessiones. Reminiscent of Augustine’s development from ignorance to true belief, Sturmer embeds his personal account within a religious framework. Moreover, the major setting of Sturmer’s narrative in North Africa, Tunis to be precise, shows striking similarities to Augustine’s Confessiones. Both authors experience numerous significant events with respect to their spiritual evolution in North Africa and use North Africa as a stepping-stone for a larger imperial agenda. In this respect both authors place themselves in the tradition of the mythical founding father of the Roman Empire Aeneas, who leaves Carthage in order to found the Roman Empire. Aeneas embarks from North Africa to new lands, in his case Italy, to build what later became the largest world empire. Saint Augustine deliberately places his own move from North Africa to Italy in that same tradition of a translatio imperii. In his case, he moves to Italy in order to help found the spiritual empire of the Catholic Church and thus consciously places himself in the tradition of Virgil’s Aeneid. Sturmer, we have to remember, also leaves North Africa for a new imperial venture akin to the founding of the Roman Empire. He sails to South America in order to participate in the construction of a new global empire – namely Charles V’s New World possessions. In addition to these similarities in setting, Sturmer’s explicit use of rhetorical and narratological devices in his text also evokes Saint Augustine, who, before becoming one of the church fathers, worked as an orator or rhetoric teacher. Sturmer’s text is not only the first Barbary captivity narrative that we know of but with its narratological and rhetorical features also embodies the characteristics of the first major European novel. It amalgamates aspects of the spiritual autobiography, seafaring adventures, picaro elements of trickery and deceit, and a global economic backdrop before which the plot realizes itself. Furthermore, with its claim to authenticity, it is part of the novelistic tradition that culminates in Robinson Crusoe. All these ingredients will shape and characterize the genre of the novel in the centuries to come.

Sturmer and the Barbary captivity narrative 53 In sum, Sturmer’s text is extraordinary in two respects. First, it provides an eyewitness account of a major historic event from a very unusual vantage point—from that of a Christian slave fighting with the Turks against Habsburg forces during the siege of one of the major cities in North Africa in the first part of the sixteenth century. Second, and intricately connected to the first point, Sturmer provides a highly personal and individualistic account of his adventures. In its realism and personal self-reflection, Sturmer’s narrative appears to anticipate both the genre of the early modern novel and autobiography. Especially the framing of the narrative, which places the events in a larger Christian concept of accounting and retaliation, points to a spiritual autobiography. However, the carefree attitude with which Balthasar Sturmer fashions his youthful persona in the events leading up to and following his captivity shows striking similarities to the picaresque novel of the sixteenth century. Balthasar resembles these rogues in more than one way. By anticipating features that will culminate in the early modern novel half a century later, Balthasar Sturmer’s 1558 account seems to be more than just the first extant Barbary captivity narrative.

Notes 1 Ritter provides the only German edition of the text. Ruhe (“Dire et ne pas dire” and “L’aire du soupçon”) mentions Sturmer’s account in passing. All English quotations from Sturmer’s narrative are based on the translation of the German text, which is part of my forthcoming anthology of European Barbary Captivity narratives (Klarer, Christian Slaves). 2 In this respect, Sturmer’s account differs dramatically from Francis Knight’s A relation of seaven yeares slaverie under the Turkes of Argeire (London, 1640), which almost exclusively centers on the larger political and historical events that Knight took part in. In contrast to Sturmer, Knight refrains almost entirely from the personal voice or story line that a modern reader would expect from an eyewitness narrative. 3 The European perspective on this human exchange is relatively well documented through a large number of captivity narratives by European Christians who fell into Muslim hands. In my four-year Austrian Science Fund project ESCAPE (European Slaves: Christians in African Pirate Encounters, www.uibk.ac.at/ projects/escape), I have compiled approximately 150 of these narratives, which appeared in all major European languages, covering basically all European regions. The Arabic and, to a certain extent, the Ottoman perspective lacks such a homogenous text type for a number of cultural and religious reasons (see Matar’s essay in this volume). 4 Each man had made at least 2,000 ducats. For comparison’s sake: Balthasar’s entire proceeds from the cargo of wheat that he sold in Portugal amounted to a total of 26 ducats. His annual salary in the armada of Charles V would have amounted to 24 ducats and Balthasar’s price as a slave at the auction varied between 30 and 24 ducats. 5 This instrument of safely transferring money across long distances goes back to the Crusades and was already a well-established economic tool in the first half of the sixteenth century. 6 Balthasar’s interspersed use of Latin words in the correct cases—as here when he writes “in aquam” for “into the water”—is typical of his narrative and identifies

54  Mario Klarer him as a fairly well-educated man with a fair knowledge of Latin. His classical education also shows in his later description of Tunis, when he takes great care to point out that the location of the “modern” city of Tunis is not identical with the location of ancient Carthage (f. 12r)—a fact that only someone with a knowledge of classical literature, including Livy or Virgil, would have deemed worth stressing. 7 The designs and some of the tapestries are part of the collection of the Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna and were the focus of a large exhibition in 2015; see Schmitz-von Ledebur. 8 The passage is reminiscent of the montage-like hunting scene in the Middle English Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, in which the disemboweling of deer parallels the protagonist’s anticipation of his upcoming execution. 9 “Hoc est pactum meum quod observabitis inter me et vos, et semen tuum post te: circumcidetur ex vobis omne masculinum: / et circumcidetis carnem præputii vestri, ut sit in signum fœderis inter me et vos” (Vulgate). “Every manchild among you shall be circumcised. And ye shall circumcise the flesh of your foreskin; and it shall be a token of the covenant betwixt me and you” (King James Bible). 10 On the Wolffgang brothers, see Ruhe, “Zwei Augsburger Künstler,” his contribution to this volume, and the monograph on and critical edition of the Wolffgang narrative (Ruhe, Porträt des Künstlers). 11 Leonhard Eisenschmied, Leonhard Eisenschmieds, eines österreichischen Unterthans, merkwürdige Land- und Seereisen durch Europa, Africa und Asien. Eine wahre Geschichte aus den letzten Jahren des achtzehenten Jahrhunderts. Mit einer getreuen Beschreibung verschiedener Länder, Inseln, Völker, ihrer Sitten und Gebräuche, 2 vols. (Grätz: Gebrüder Tanzer, 1807, 1812). On the role of the Robinsonade and Eisenschmied see Spindler. 12 William Okeley (1675), for example, openly admits in his preface that he himself provided the story and that a friend helped “to teach it to speak a little better English” (B3v).

References Dan, Pierre, S. Vries, and G. Broekhuizen. Historie van Barbaryen, En des zelfs Zee-Roovers: Behelzende een beschrijving van de Koningrijken en Steden Algiers, Tunis, Salé, en Tripoli. Amsterdam: Jan ten Hoorn, 1684. Eisenschmied, Leonhard. Leonhard Eisenschmieds, eines österreichischen Unterthans, merkwürdige Land- und Seereisen durch Europa, Africa und Asien. Eine wahre Geschichte aus den letzten Jahren des achtzehenten Jahrhunderts. Mit einer getreuen Beschreibung verschiedener Länder, Inseln, Völker, ihrer Sitten und Gebräuche. 2 vols. Grätz: Gebrüder Tanzer, 1807, 1812. Klarer, Mario, ed. Christian Slaves among Islamic Pirates: An Anthology of Barbary Coast Captivity Narratives (1550–1810). New York: Columbia University Press, forthcoming 2019. Klarer, Mario, ed. Mediterranean Slavery and World Literature: Captivity Genres from Cervantes to Rousseau. London, New York: Routledge, forthcoming 2019. Knight, Francis. A Relation of Seaven Yeares Slaverie under the Turkes of Argeire. London, 1640. Okeley, William. Eben-ezer: Or, a Small Monument of Great Mercy, Appearing in the Miraculous Deliverance of William Okeley, William Adams, John Anthony, John Jephs, John— Carpenter, from the Miserable Slavery of Algiers. . . . By Me

Sturmer and the Barbary captivity narrative 55 William Okeley. London: Printed for Nat. Ponder, at the Peacock in ChanceryLane, near Fleet-Street, 1675. Ritter, Anne-Barbara. “Ein deutscher Sklave als Augenzeuge bei der Eroberung von Tunis (1535). Untersuchung und Edition eines unbekannten Reiseberichts aus dem Jahr 1558.” Europas islamische Nachbarn. Studien zur Literatur und Geschichte des Maghreb. Ed. Ernstpeter Ruhe. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1993. 187–231. Ruhe, Ernstpeter. “L’aire du soupçon. Les récits de captivité en langue allemande (XVIe–XIXe siècles).” Récits d’Orient dans les littératures d’Europe (XVIe–XVIIe siècles). Ed. Anne Duprat and Emilie Piherot. Paris: P.U.P.S, 2009. 185–200. Ruhe, Ernstpeter. “Dire et ne pas dire: Les récits de captifs germanophones et les cérémonies de retour.” Captifs en Méditerranée (XVIe–XVIIIe siècles). Histoires, récits et légendes. Ed. Francois Moureau. Paris: P.U.P.S, 2008. 119–33. Ruhe, Ernstpeter. “Zwei Augsburger Künstler in ‘Algierischer Leibeigenschaft’: Die ‘Wunderbaren Schicksale’ der Brüder Wolfgang.” Oriente Moderno XCI (2011): 1–17. Ruhe, Ernstpeter, and Gustav Andreas Wolffgang. Porträt des Künstlers als Sklave: Zwei Augsburger Kupferstecher als Gefangene in Algier (1684–1688). Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2017. Schmitz-von Ledebur, Katja, and Sabine Haag. Fäden der Macht: Tapisserien des 16. Jahrhunderts aus dem Kunsthistorischen Museum Wien: Eine Ausstellung des Kunsthistorischen Museums Wien 14. Juli bis 20. September 2015. Vienna: Kunsthistorisches Museum, 2015. Spindler, Robert. “Barbary Captivity in Austrian Robinsonades.” Mediterranean Slavery and World Literature: Captivity Genres from Cervantes to Rousseau. Ed. Mario Klarer. London, New York: Routledge, forthcoming 2019. Steinmetz, Greg. Der reichste Mann der Weltgeschichte: Leben und Werk von Jakob Fugger. Munich: FinanzBuch Verlag, 2016. Sturmer, Balthasar. Verzeichnüs der Reise. 1558. Reise in die Türkei: Ms. germ. qu. 1014. Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin: Digitalisierte Sammlung. http://digital. staatsbibliothek-berlin.de/werkansicht?PPN=PPN737576820&PHYSID=P HYS_0001.

2 Unkind dealings English captivity narratives, commercial transformation, and the economy of unfree labor in the early modern period Daniel Vitkus Scholars working on captivity, maritime slavery, and commercial violence in the early modern Mediterranean have made great progress during the last twenty years in their efforts to provide a fuller and more accurate history of these phenomena.1 Thanks to recent work in the field, we have a much more complex understanding of the captivity-slavery system and of the stories that emerged from that system. The various conclusions reached by these scholars, based on their painstaking archival work, form a rich mosaic of historical information that can be gathered and joined together—like a set of overlapping and interlocking puzzle pieces—to produce a fuller transnational picture of maritime violence and the trade in bodies as it developed in the Mediterranean and beyond from the late sixteenth to the late seventeenth centuries and after. If we are to undertake such a comprehensive linkage between various studies of the early modern captivity phenomenon, drawing on a transnational, multilingual archive, then an unavoidable methodological and historiographical question arises: what should be the proper relationship between the reconstruction of a general history of early modern captivity, slavery, etc. and our understanding and interpretation of specific captivity narratives produced during the early modern period? Here, we are obliged to find common ground—or at least to coordinate the relationship—between two different but related disciplinary tasks: on the one hand, the pursuit of “history” in empirical terms, based on archival evidence; and on the other hand, the theoretically informed analysis of narrative texts using a critical toolbox that has been developed and employed in literary and cultural studies. To what degree are the extant captivity narrative documents to be used as empirical evidence in our efforts to understand a material history of the economy of capture, bondage, and ransom; and to what degree should we approach these narratives with greater skepticism and interpretive delicacy, understanding them in terms of a discursive and ideological regime that never delivered simple, unadulterated facts? Here, in my small contribution to the study of this subject matter, I propose an approach that would build on the rich intersection of scholarship that draws on so many different archives from a variety of sources,

English captivity and unfree labor 57 periods, and language contexts. My inquiry here raises two related questions. First: what kind of large-scale historical framework can be employed to comprehend these overlapping phenomena? And second: if we employ such a large-scale perspective as our starting point, how will that help us to make sense of specific captivity narratives? Is it useful to see these texts as artifacts produced by—and responding to—those larger forces? What if we start from a big-picture, long-term point of view and then zoom in to look more closely at particular examples of the captivity narrative genre? For example, what do we gain if we try to understand each Barbary captivity narrative, not only within a particular national tradition, but as a micro-event formed and shaped by larger transnational economic forces? What can this dialectical contextualization, one that sees each text as impacted by and responding to larger historical processes, do to help us understand specific texts, and early modern captivity narratives in particular? In this chapter, my case in point is one of the extant captivity narratives written in English and printed in London in the late sixteenth century, but my proposed approach is applicable to the interpretation of captivity accounts in other languages and later periods as well. Thanks to the efforts of historians who have combed through archival documents and reached such helpful and informative conclusions based on their systematic empirical work, we are in a better position to understand the Barbary captivity narratives, not only as a form of evidence about the experience of captivity, but also as literary and ideological interventions with a particular set of political aims and cultural functions.2 And not only that, but if we look at these texts as specific events that participate in a long historical process and are motivated by large-scale economic and ideological forces, then it is also possible to read these captivity narratives in a way that is meaningfully connected to our own time. Not only can we try to accurately reconstruct past events, but we can also provide a connection between the past and the present—for example, between representations of Muslim-Christian relations then and now; or between violent commerce in its early modern and in its postmodern, neoliberal forms. For instance, during the early modern period, so many of the English texts that describe Muslim masters and Christian slaves work to reinforce a partial image of historical reality that represents Muslims as terrorizing tyrants and Christians as plucky victims who either suffer like Christian martyrs or exact a just revenge against the forces of a so-called “evil empire” ruled by Muslims. But it is rarely so simple, then as now: when examined carefully, Barbary captivity narratives that operate in polarizing and demonizing ways also reveal moments of hybridity or mutual understanding that contradict or even undermine the crude master script. Furthermore, the figure of the convert, the so-called “renegade” or the faith flipper often renders the binary opposition unstable. Certainly, we are all familiar with the way that these Muslim and Christian types (and the narratives that feature them) have been endlessly repeated, from the sixteenth century to the twenty-first.3

58  Daniel Vitkus First, I would like to establish some large-scale frameworks and long-term historical processes within which we can situate and understand the production and function of captivity narratives (and the micro-histories they detail) as specific events: 1) 2) 3) 4) 5)

Globalization or the modern world system Capitalism and violent commerce Slavery and unfree labor Permanent war and empire Political theology: reformation and counter-reformation polemic and anti-Islamic discourse

After 1492, these interrelated phenomena began to become truly global— and each of them can be traced through the centuries and linked to our own age of postmodern globalization. But the texts I will be discussing as examples were printed in early modern London: they are particularly English accounts, responding to these larger forces in local ways that manifest English perspectives on the new global order. In part, what the English captivity narratives show is how the English understanding of slavery and captivity shifted during the early modern period, from an older, pre-capitalist notion of the enslaved subject or the ransomed person to new and emerging forms of human mobility, conversion, commodification, and trafficking within the developing system of long-distance trade, unfree labor, and the English commercial and maritime diaspora that included (but extended beyond) North Africa. These changes were represented, contested, measured, and disseminated through popular forms of writing and performance, including plays, ballads, poems, and prose narratives. But as David Hawkes has shown, during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, what we now call “the literary” was not yet separated from the economic in English cultural responses to the expansion of trade and to the material circumstances that followed, at home and abroad, from that expansion. To use Immanuel Wallerstein’s terminology, early modern England was moving from a peripheral toward a core position in the emergent worldsystem. At the midpoint of the sixteenth century, England’s foreign trade was commercially unsophisticated and isolated, but by the end of that same century, English merchants and mariners had begun to assert themselves as players in the world of international commerce and cross-cultural exchange. One prominent economic historian has described this period in England, 1570–1630, as exhibiting “one of the most striking transformations in economic history,” manifested in “. . . New forms of organization, a new breed of merchants and promoters, new sources of capital, a new sense of purpose, and a new vitality in economic enterprise . . .” (Rabb 2–3). This expansionary thrust of the English into the Mediterranean led to the establishment of unprecedented commercial intercourse with Islamic trade partners and to competition with Spain and other European powers on a global stage.

English captivity and unfree labor 59 Toward the end of the first volume of Capital, Karl Marx describes how, during the early modern period, long-distance trade and European imperialism, before the coming of “industrial capitalism,” helped to hasten the onset of the capitalist mode of production: The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalised the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief momenta of primitive accumulation. On their heels treads the commercial war of the European nations, with the globe for a theatre. . . . The different momenta of primitive accumulation distribute themselves now, more or less in chronological order, particularly over Spain, Portugal, Holland, France, and England. In England at the end of the 17th century, they arrive at a systematical combination . . . [employing] the concentrated and organised force of society, to hasten, hot-house fashion, the process of transformation of the feudal mode of production into the capitalist mode, and to shorten the transition. Force is the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one. It is itself an economic power. (vol. I, ch. 31) Building on Marxian insights, economic historian Ellen Meiksins Wood has clearly defined the historical specificity of capitalism and its origins in both European agrarian economics and long-distance trade between Europeans and others. To quote Wood: “We can certainly say that the European trading system was a necessary condition of capitalism, but we cannot just assume that commerce and capitalism are one and the same, or that one passed into the other by a simple process of growth” (49). Wealth alone is not capital. Again Wood: The essence of Marx’s critique of [Adam Smith’s] ‘so-called primitive accumulation’ . . . is that no amount of accumulation, whether from outright theft, from imperialism, from commercial profit, or even from the exploitation of labor for commercial profit, by itself constitutes capital, nor will it produce capitalism. The specific precondition of capitalism is a transformation of social property relations that generates capitalist “laws of motion”: the imperatives of competition and profit-maximization, a compulsion to reinvest surpluses, and a systematic and relentless need to improve labour-productivity and develop the forces of production. (36) But what Wood terms “the European trading system” was not really “European”—rather, it was a “world system” that included Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas.

60  Daniel Vitkus Taking this Marxian framework as our cue, perhaps we could consider the movement of ships, people, commodities, and capital through a vast system of human harvesting for labor and ransom, and the flow of ransom payments (including the payments made by family members, confraternities, or other “charitable organizations”) as a part of the circulation of capital between various brokers, dealers, investors, and agents who participated in long-distance, maritime trade ventures. In fact, as Wolfgang Kaiser has shown, the financial transaction of slavery and ransom in the early modern Mediterranean was highly innovative in its financial structure and provided crucial new models for exchange that helped to reorganize and financialize the early modern economy. At the same time, the widespread imposition of social death in the form of enslaved and unfree labor worked to enforce inequality and to sustain the labor base necessary for the expropriation of exchange value and primitive accumulation. And so, capitalism was born, from an ugly history of domestic property commodification of the commons at home and a violent history of empire, slavery, and commodity expropriation abroad. Historians looking at economic world history from the early modern period to the nineteenth century have reached a consensus about the causal links between slavery and capitalism. And here, we can chart two waves of scholarship: the postcolonial period that produced Eric Williams’ 1944 classic study, Capitalism and Slavery and Eugene Genovese’s Roll, Jordan, Roll in 1974 to more recent work on how slavery enabled American capitalism by Greg Grandin, Sven Beckert, and others. This long-lasting linkage between capitalism and slavery begins before 1492, and before the triangular Atlantic slave trade, with Portuguese investment in long-distance maritime trade to Africa.4 The European search for profits through the slave trade began with the Portuguese voyages to Africa, and later India, and with the development of new slave systems by the Portuguese that were then imitated by other European powers, including England. Ironically, by the late sixteenth century, the discourses that constructed English Protestant identity strongly condemned an absolute power and abject enslavement, in its supposed “oriental” or “barbaric” forms, and contrasted them with the “justice” and “freedom” allegedly enjoyed in England. Though English merchants had been involved in the slave trade since the mid-sixteenth century, and though there were African and Moorish slaves living and working in England,5 William Harrison nonetheless is typical in perpetuating the myth of a slave-free England when he writes, in his 1587 Description of England: As for slaves and bondmen, we have none; nay, such is the privilege of our country by the especial grace of God and bounty of our princes that if any come hither from other realms, so soon as they set foot on land they become so free of condition as their masters, whereby all note of servile bondage is utterly removed from them. (118)

English captivity and unfree labor 61 Those who, like Harrison, continued to claim that in England slavery was illegal pointed to a shadowy legal precedent called “Cartwright’s case,” based on events in 1569 when the said Cartwright was seen savagely beating another man and to avoid the ensuing charge of battery maintained that the man was a Russian slave he had brought to England. Allegedly, this man was then freed on the grounds that “England was too pure an air for a slave to breathe in.” As a legal matter, this principle remained but was more honored in the breach than in the observance; it was completely overturned by the Yorke-Talbot Slavery opinion in 1729; but then restored in some minimal sense in 1772 with the abolitionist victory in Somersett’s Case.6 But all the while, the British slave trade expanded in scope as the colonies became ever more dependent on slave labor. The myth that the English homeland was a kinder, gentler civilization, marked by the absence of “barbaric” slavery, only grew more insistent during the early modern period as the English began to voyage to the Mediterranean (and later, Africa) more regularly, and as they began to be captured and enslaved themselves with greater frequency. I will not dwell here on linkages between Mediterranean and Atlantic slavery in the longue durée, but that could be a part of the big picture, long-term narrative that connects the early modern period to our own.7 In a sense, it is a presentist approach that we are employing when we consider the role of slavery in the extended genealogy of the violent push for profit conducted by global capitalism, beginning, say, with the first joint-stock companies of the early modern era and continuing today. Another historical process that connects us to the early modern period is the rise of world war, waged along the extended lines of overseas networks that connected Europe to other parts of the world through acts of aggression, invasion, and conquest. In an incisive account of the rise and persistence of a neoliberal “permanent war” that defines our postmodern condition, Iain Boal and the other members of the collective Retort have declared, “War, in a word, is modernity incarnate.” During the early modern period, warfare became both global and “continuous.” The catalogue of conflict is horrifying: by one historian’s count, in Western Europe alone, “between 1480 and 1700 England was involved in 29 wars, France in 34, Spain in 36, and the Empire in 25” (Tallett 13). In his 1977 work, Speed and Politics, Paul Virilio traced an ironic “dromological progress” back to its origins in early modernity: according to Virilio, “history progresses at the speed of its weapons systems” (90) and “total war” begins in the seventeenth century, where it is “first waged on the sea” (29). For Virilio, “military proletarianization” (102) is instituted by the state during early modernity at the same time as “the right to the sea very quickly became the right to crime, to a violence that was freed from every constraint. . . .” “Soon,” claims Virilio, “the ‘empire of the seas’ replaces the open seas” (65) and “surplus populations disappear in the obligatory movement of the voyage” (99). There was such a high mortality rate among crew

62  Daniel Vitkus members on early East India Company voyages, that company officials and captains had to recruit local laborers as seamen to replace those who had died, creating truly multiethnic crews. Many ships never returned or arrived in British ports with a ragged, sickly skeleton crew. As an alternative to the appalling conditions for maritime laborers working on English and other Euro-Christian vessels owned by the state or corporations, the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries saw the “rise of the pirate” in new and unprecedented forms, both economic and literary. New technologies and increased mobility allowed Euro-Christians to move from one overlapping sector of the maritime network to another, sometimes converting to Islam in order to do so. But the rise of piracy, which drew much of its energy from violent proto-capitalist forms of commercial exploitation, went hand in hand with the emergence of a new kind of slave and captive economy that combined ransom (as systemic human commodification) with various forms of slave labor (including, but not limited to, a very old form— galley slavery). Of course, slavery and ransom were not new practices—they were ancient. But they took on new forms in the early modern period, more systematic forms shaped by new economic structures that were being extended globally. Warfare, slavery, and long-distance trade go back to the beginning of human civilization and empire, but early modern capitalism transformed and expanded them all. For example, the feudal, medieval forms of ransom practiced in European wars were largely exchanges between members of a transnational aristocratic warrior class, conducted under the shared customs of chivalry, but with the rise of the bourgeois merchant class and systematic investment in long-distance trade, loans by the Fuggers and others to support war, along with the role of capitalist investors and their agents in negotiating ransom payments, we see the old forms of ransom morph into something very different indeed.8 The justification for slavery-as-captivity, from the medieval scholastics to John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government (1690), rested on the notion that an enemy prisoner taken in a just war was legally and morally subject to enslavement and could therefore, as a legitimate spoil of war, be held for ransom (and that a captive prisoner-of-war did not have the legal status of a permanent or “natural” slave); but the new capitalist order would reimagine the capture and purchase of slaves as a peculiar economic institution in and of itself, as a legitimated source of long-term, even lifelong, labor, and as a radical commodification of human beings in a new kind of marketplace ruled by investment and reproduction of capital through innovative structures of aggressive profit-seeking. If war was becoming permanent, through imperial conquest and inter-imperial competition, and if an endless “guerre de course” would now be waged on a global scale, then the old notion of the captive taken in a temporary, declared war was weakened. And this would prove to be the case most strikingly during the early modern period, before the technologies of global power would allow for a stronger enforcement

English captivity and unfree labor 63 of international law, at sea or elsewhere. Increasingly, human beings were stripped of their identities as they became mere commodities in a new capitalist sense—that is, not only on the auction block in the slave market, but as the quantified labor force that enabled a far-flung system of investment and profit-taking that extended body-harvesting and mass unfree labor from Africa to Lisbon to Algiers to Iceland to Peru and beyond—while investors sat at home and counted the profits. This new global system produced new narratives about people who were sold into slavery, then transported over vast distances from one continent to another—early examples include the Moroccan slave who accompanied the unfortunate Narvaez expedition described in Cabeza de Vaca’s 1542 Relacion, the enslavement in Mexico and subsequent escape of Miles Philips and Job Hortop, who in 1568 were left on shore by John Hawkins in New Spain, or the tale penned by Hans Staden after his captivity among the Tupinamba people of Brazil in the early 1550s. The traditional form of the old episodic romance tale and its exotic wonders underlay these new stories, but those old forms were radically transformed in the new texts about “true travails” featuring survivors of long-distance travel and captivity who lived to tell their stories and in doing so provided useful ethnographic or geographic information to be compiled and sold in books like Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations. Just as the feudal economy declined and as the New World and other destinations were increasingly accessed and exploited by European capitalists and their early modern technologies, so the technical innovation of print culture allowed for a different breed of narrative—the mass-produced and widely disseminated “true relation” or “report” that detailed far-flung wonders in innovative forms shaped by the new material conditions of travel, empire, and global system. During this period, we also witness a new kind of violent freedom, in unruly forms that evaded control by a centralized state and its navies, that operated before the joint-stock companies gained hegemonic power; this is the “freedom” of the privateer, the corsair, the pirate, the renegade, the outlaw, or “runagate” who “runs out of the gate” beyond the bounds and protections of the Law, but can suddenly attach itself to a place and a ruling power when pardons, licenses, passes, or letters of marque are distributed.9 In the time of Francis Drake and the Spanish conquistadors, longdistance commercial ventures were heavily armed, violent enterprises, led by mobile mercenary captains. Commerce was closely connected to warfare, slave-taking, conquest, and colonization; force, fraud, and intimidation were employed by the commanders of armed vessels operating with state sponsorship. The same tactics were used by those who operated without state sponsorship, including those who turned renegade and operated under the patronage of foreign authorities. In short, “piracy” was business as usual and could be considered either lawful privateering or unlawful theft, depending on who was doing it to whom, where they were doing it, and when.10

64  Daniel Vitkus The law of the sea was in a state of flux at this time: piracy was not fully criminalized, and in fact was sometimes authorized and encouraged by the English monarchy and admiralty. This was especially the case during the time of rising conflict between England and Spain that led to an undeclared war and resulted in the Spanish Armada and its aftermath. In his General and Rare Memorials Pertaining to the Perfect Art of Navigation (1577), John Dee proposed that the English navy incorporate piracy: By this navy also, all pirates—our own countrymen, and they be no small number—would be called, or constrained to come home. And then . . . all such to be bestowed here and there in the aforesaid Navy. For good account is to be made of their bodies, already hardened to the seas; and chiefly of their courage and skill for good service to be done at the sea. (51) Dee calls for renegade pirates abroad to be called home, but already at home in English ports, a system of plunder operated within and on the margins of the law, through the issuing of letters of marque and reprisal. These were licenses authorizing a private vessel to attack and capture enemy vessels, and bring them before admiralty courts for condemnation and sale of their cargo. According to the Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius, letters of marque and reprisal were akin to declarations of a “private war.” A reprisal involved seeking the sovereign’s permission to exact private retribution against some foreign prince or subject. Thus, behind the notion of reprisal was the concept that just war involved avenging a wrong, but in many cases these licenses were simply permits that, once obtained, could be used to justify improvisational plunder. As Christopher Harding points out, the Admiralty, the office of state with the legal power to issue these commissions, promoted for its own profit the ensuing legal ambiguity [surrounding acts of piracy]. Ship-owners, for instance, were able to purchase letters of reprisal in advance for trading voyages, to cover any subsequent opportunities for plunder, as “licenses were thus made available to all and sundry at a price.” (26) Thus state-sponsored piracy was built into the mechanisms of capitalist investment and profit-making that supported overseas trade and early colonial efforts. This kind of officially sanctioned piracy brought income from plunder to the English crown, but at the same time Elizabeth I (and subsequently the Early Stuart kings) promulgated a series of proclamations and laws to control the sort of piracy that did not bring them profit shares or offended their allies. Meanwhile, diplomats and legal theorists like Grotius, William

English captivity and unfree labor 65 Welwood, and John Selden debated about the nature and limits of “freedom” on the high seas, and argued for or against a mare liberum or a mare clausum. Part of this debate focused on individual or mercantile freedom in tension with conformity to a law embodied in the monarch or the nation. But out there in the global trade matrix, in the trans-imperial zone, the long arm of royal authority was weak. The English monarchs struggled to control the piratical activities of their subjects, issuing numerous proclamations, communicating with their trade partners abroad to assure them that English privateers would be restrained, and making a few arrests, but the desperate repetition of these royal efforts is indicative of how ineffectual they actually were. At the same time, rulers tried to employ corsair violence in their desperate efforts to create solvency for an unsustainable feudal form of crown finance. Elizabeth I employed Drake and others, and during the 1630s, Charles I repeatedly licensed English ships and their mercenary captains to pursue plunder on a worldwide scale. For instance, in 1635 he authorized Captain William Cobb “To range the seas the world over” from Africa to Japan “and to make purchase and prize of all such the treasures, merchandises, goods, and commodities, which to his best ability he shall be able to take of infidels” (Marsden 493). The laws regarding piracy were still fluid, in part because the European powers had not yet come together to create a “law of the sea,” “international law,” or “universal jurisdiction” that could be mutually mandated and enforced. Seaborne plunder was not yet criminalized in the way that it would be by the end of the seventeenth century, when larger national fleets would enable state violence at sea to function as a more effective enforcer. As Claire Jowitt puts it, in her book on the culture of piracy, early modern writers “used the term ‘piracy’ to refer to a wide range of extra-legal maritime activities and saw violence at sea as participating in a behavioural continuum, rather than as legitimate or illegitimate” (Jowitt 9). All this is to say that the English ships and seamen who fell victim to “the Barbary pirates” were participating in a widespread, transnational system of plunder and forcible expropriation that fueled their emergent capitalist economy and their early efforts at empire-building. Piracy and plunder were global phenomena, involving actions that facilitated an interlaced network of trade, war and enslavement that connected many cultures and nations in early modernity. Euro-Christian commerce and empire, along with piracy and the corsair activity sponsored by Muslim rulers, were interlocking and mutually supporting activities. Both Christian and Muslim-sponsored maritime violence and long-distance trade were enabled by technological innovation and by technology transfer. Although technology is not teleology in this historical process, the role of ship and gun-building technology, not as an autonomous force, but interwoven with economic and cultural developments, should be considered in our analysis of global economic developments. This was an important factor for the English and their proto-imperial competitors, particularly in

66  Daniel Vitkus the use of military and maritime violence to enforce commercial and colonial power. The English, peripheral and weak as they may have been during the Elizabethan era, were in possession of extremely effective cutting-edge technologies in the areas of metallurgy, gunsmithing, and the construction of gun-bearing ships for long-distance voyages. These were the technologies that sustained the power of English adventurers and pirates as well as that of the East India Company in its violent competition with Portuguese, Dutch, and Spanish forces throughout the maritime matrix. On land, both the Europeans and the so-called “gunpowder empires” revolutionized siege warfare and with it, the art of land-based conquest, while at sea “the Portuguese appearance in the Indian Ocean in the last years of the fifteenth century set in motion a chain of events that were to break down the economic compartmentalization which had kept the maritime wars of the fifteenth century isolated from one another” (Guilmartin 273). The gradual decline of the Mediterranean-style muscle-powered war galley and the rise of wind-powered galleons bearing a variety of heavy guns and lighter swivel guns and suited to heavier weather and longer ocean voyages was a key shift, though we should not exaggerate the decline of galleys in the Mediterranean. Nonetheless, the English development of new methods for casting relatively lightweight and inexpensive iron cannon instead of those made from bronze gave their ships a big advantage by the late sixteenth century. Two developments are crucial: first, guns, especially “cheap, cast-iron ordnance, . . . made it possible to substitute manpower with capital” (Glete 31) as large cargoes in the hold of tall ships replaced the large crews of rowers in the galleys; second, “. . . warships acquired the ability to attack targets onshore” (Glete 33). The first enabled the profit-making of the jointstock trade companies through capitalist investment; the second allowed for a kind of terrorism through fear of bombardment in the Indian Ocean and elsewhere that helped European vessels to overawe people who lacked these technologies and to gain trade concessions from those whose ports and forts were vulnerable. But as Jan Glete points out, “it was not a simple relationship of new technology creating a new world (technological determinism) but rather a case of a rapidly changing world in which new technology was easily adapted, developed, and integrated within society” (34). At the end of the sixteenth century, English shipbuilders and gunsmiths may have enjoyed technological superiority, but this did not yet pay off immediately in terms of territorial gains. Though it was poised at the periphery of the great global system, Elizabethan England was without much of an empire of its own.11 Let me return now to the case of the Barbary captivity narratives produced for English readers during the early modern period. If we understand the Mediterranean slave-captive system and the harvesting of human bodies as part of a complex global process involving maritime labor, permanent warfare, and proto-capitalist commerce, how does that help us read particular narratives? And how do English captivity narratives respond to or

English captivity and unfree labor 67 conceal the material processes that motivated slave-taking and selling? At first glance, these texts appear to speak primarily through the medium of religious discourse: in many ways, they work to conceal powerful economic and political forces and motives under a veil of religious meaning. Obviously, in terms of religious ideology, the Barbary captivity narratives functioned primarily to enforce English Protestant solidarity by making reference to a foreign Islamic threat. The captivity narratives, as printed, mass-produced texts, brought home to England a fear of forced conversion and provoked moral outrage at foreign, non-Christian powers who might conquer Christian lands or enslave “free” English subjects. This sensationalized fear demanded unity, discipline, and obedience at home to Protestant king and to reformed church. This brand of English Protestant ideology operated not only in the Barbary captivity narratives, but in a book that was central to the Protestant project in England, John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments.12 Interestingly, in his second edition of 1570 Foxe added a lengthy new section on “the Turks’ story: of their rising, and cruel persecution of the saints of God, to the great annoyance and peril of Christendom.” Addressing those readers who were wondering why Foxe would “overlay” his domestic martyrology “with heaps of foreign histories,” Foxe states that “yet notwithstanding certain causes there be which necessarily require the knowledge of their order and doings, and of their wicked proceedings, their cruel tyranny, and bloody victories, the ruin & subversion of so many Christian Churches, with the horrid murders and captivity of infinite Christians to be made plain and manifest, as well to this our country of England, as also to other nations” (871). He goes on to list and elaborate these “certain causes.” He writes, the sixth and last cause why I think the knowledge of the Turks’ history, requisite to be considered, is this: because that many there be, which for they be farther from the Turks, and think therefore themselves to be out of danger, take little care and study, what happeneth to their other brethren. Wherefore to the intent to excite their zeal and prayer to almighty God, in this so lamentable ruin of Christ’s church: I thought it requisite by order of history, to give this our nation also something to understand, what hath been done in other nations by these cruel Turks, and what detriment hath been and is like more to happen by them, to the Church of Christ, except we make our earnest invocation to almighty God . . . to stop the course of the devil by these Turks, and to stay this defection of Christians falling daily unto them, and to reduce them again to his faith which are fallen from him. (872) Thus, Foxe makes explicit the kind of ideological work that is also performed in the Barbary captivity narratives, where the experience of the Christian captive (and its narrative representation) was brought home as

68  Daniel Vitkus a powerful model for strength and fortitude in the face of suffering and deprivation. And here we see how the phenomenon of captivity and the enslavement of Euro-Christians could be framed and understood, not as an economic question, but as part of a global, or even a cosmic, struggle between the godly and their enemies. Of course, the post-Reformation conflict in Europe was globalized to include the Mediterranean as well as the New World plantations and the trade factories in the East Indies. Thus, the understanding of conflict and violence in the sphere of maritime trade was often reduced to a religious explanation that concealed the political and economic processes that were actually driving Ottoman expansion and Euro-Christian resistance to that expansion—and also driving European slave-trading and aggression in Asia and the Americas. But the English captivity narratives, while they refer to those who were martyred and never came home, focus on those who undertook risky labor, experienced misfortune and suffering, but in the end were “redeemed” and returned. As scholars like Jane Degenhardt and Valerie Forman have shown, this pattern of risk, loss, suffering, redemption, and return lent itself to both religious and economic discourses. It was a tragicomic model that corresponded to the very structure of capitalist investment, and as such it infused the mercenary profit-seeking enterprise—and the suffering of maritime laborers—with a sense of spiritual redemption consistent with Weber’s Protestant ethic. The cultural capital of the printed captivity narratives takes the form of an investment on the part of the dominant classes in reproducing a set of symbols and meanings that could be misrecognized and internalized by the subordinate classes as if they were their own. The Barbary captivity narratives serve this primary function of indoctrination and misrepresentation insofar as their main purpose is pedagogic, even while they sweeten their basic message with the pleasure of a suspenseful “true story.” In this regard, they work to instill in their readers a sense of separation between English Protestants and others, especially Muslims, and to encourage the nationalistic and religious loyalties that would justify violence against others who were not Protestant. At the same time, Barbary captivity narratives offer their readers two kinds of information: (1) the suspenseful tale of the captive’s ordeal and (2) ethnographical and geographical information about an alien culture. The latter is offered as valuable data with a certain ideological purpose, as a kind of compensation for the captive’s fall into captivity and in order to “redeem” the captive from the taint of “Turkish” culture and religion. Furthermore, as Joe Snader, in his study of “British captivity narratives,” has suggested, For British readers and writers of the 17th and 18th centuries, the captive provided an early and vivid model for the modern individual, freely born yet self-actualizing, subject to an alien-seeming society and perhaps made abject by it, yet capable of mastering its complexities through the

English captivity and unfree labor 69 modern intellectual schema of science, and capable of turning an alienated experience of cultural abjection to personal and national triumph. (Snader 10) Increasingly, the religious framework of the captivity narrative (involving spiritual risk, vulnerability, loss, capture, suffering, subjection, experience, redemption) was linked to commercial and national purposes that demanded quantification and naïve empiricism. I will now turn to a specific English captivity narrative as a test case for my approach to the contextualization and interpretation of such documents within a large-scale framework, an approach that sees such narrative artifacts, not as stand-alone tales but as textual nodes connected to a globalizing network. The narrative I have chosen is Strange and Wonderful Things Happened to Richard Hasleton . . . in His Ten Years’ Travails in Many Foreign Countries (1595).13 Hasleton’s brief book tells of a triple captivity: in 1587, the protagonist escaped from service as a galley slave on an Algerian ship when it wrecked on the coast of Majorca, but then fell into the hands of the Spanish authorities in Palma and was subjected to interrogation and torture at the hands of the Inquisition. Hasleton subsequently escapes from Majorca and returns to Algeria where he is captured and enslaved once more. This three-part test of Hasleton’s English Protestant fortitude clearly functions to define a virtuous Protestant identity against both the commercial cruelties of the Algerians who used him as a galley slave and the irrational persecutions meted out by the Spanish Inquisition at Palma. In the text’s opening passages, Hasleton recounts how he was captured initially after a violent encounter with two Algerian galleys in which the English merchant vessel, the Mary Marten, is sunk by cannon shot after making an unsuccessful resistance (the text is careful to note the names of its merchant “owners” [74] back in London). Hasleton reports that he is wounded by a shot from one of the galleys, but then kills a “Turk” who boards the sinking ship in an effort to ransack some of its valuable cargo. Hasleton reveals to the reader that he is “a merchant” (75) but tells of how he refused to confess this fact to the Algerian captain and was therefore thrown in the hold of the galley. The tale begins, then, in a manner that is typical of the captivity narrative genre, with a description of innocent Christian merchants victimized by “Turkish pirates.” But the English are the first to fire on the Algerian galleys, and though the English ship gets the worst of it, the whole opening scene demonstrates the murderous violence that defined the commercial system in which both the English and the Algerians were participating. For instance, though some of Hasleton’s “company cried to our master to show the Turk’s letters” (75), the English captain chose to shoot first and ask questions later: the letters that might have granted the ship safe conduct (because of the Anglo-Ottoman alliance that existed at the time) were not thought sufficient guarantee against the permanent war of violent commerce with its constant threat of capture and enslavement.

70  Daniel Vitkus At the very center of the narrative is Hasleton’s long ordeal and physical torture under interrogation, his defiant theological dispute with the inquisitor in Majorca, and his stubborn refusal to renounce his Protestant principles. In that central account, the physical suffering of Hasleton is subordinated to a higher spiritual struggle. Here, the modeling of Protestant resistance, taken to the very edge of martyrdom, is clearly a pedagogical parable for the text’s English readers. Physical suffering and unfree labor take on their primary meaning as the harsh but necessary consequences of Hasleton’s fearless loyalty to a providential Protestant God who will offer rewards in the afterlife if not on earth. Thus, the text conceals and represses the political economy of slavery and ransom by overlaying that commercial system and its practical physicality with religious, metaphysical meaning and by emphasizing the temptation or coercion to convert. It insists that what is truly at stake is Hasleton’s Christian soul when in fact the capture of Hasleton and the sinking of his ship are incidents resulting from an economic struggle and competition that was defined by a large-scale, interlocking commercial system. That system linked rather than separated various religious communities, though these linkages could involve theft, coercion, ransom negotiations, deadly violence, and so on. Trade in the Mediterranean and beyond was the system that linked members of many different faiths, but Hasleton’s text tends to deny that kind of cross-cultural, systemic connectedness. No discussion of the Algerians’ motives is offered: they simply appear suddenly and as soon as they are sighted become targets for the English gunners. Ironically, Hasleton must go back to Algiers from Spanish Majorca before he can come home to England—only by escaping the Inquisition and returning from the place of a non-economic irrationalism to a place where he at least can be treated as a commodified and fungible object of exchange in the ransom economy—only then can he become free by finding someone to buy his freedom. According to the logic of this text, Algiers is a place where all can be bought and sold, and even the offer of reward if Hasleton will convert to Islam is religion-for-reward in contrast to a Spanish Catholicism that rejects the logic of the ransom economy, replacing it with a more extreme commitment to spiritual essence, though the Roman Catholic faith is imagined in the text as the idolatrous and Satanic opposite of a true Protestant essence located in England where, according to the narrator, “the Gospel was truly preached and maintained by a most gracious princess” (77). Published in 1595, after the defeat of the Spanish Armada, Strange and Wonderful Things is designed to inspire anti-Catholic, anti-Spanish feeling. It is dedicated to Richard Staper, a leading London capitalist and one of the founders of the Levant Company, which was one of the earliest joint-stock corporations. William Barley, the publisher of Hasleton’s text, writes a dedicatory letter to Staper, in which he praises “the benefit of your bounty, not only in our homeborn country where you have your residence but in those far countries where your honest factors trade” (73). What this dedicatory

English captivity and unfree labor 71 letter reveals is a network of relations that links the merchant Hasleton to Barley, and to Staper, a merchant investor who never leaves his “homeborn country” but rules over a global network of laborers and commercial agents who maintain friendly relations with foreign officials and traders. Clearly, the text is also calculated to serve the profit-seeking interests of men like Staper who need willing laborers to risk the fortune of the seas and to confront the aggression of corsairs and other threats to the economic enterprises of the Levant Company and the profits derived therefrom. Hasleton’s homecoming can occur only after the commercial system and its masters are ready and willing to negotiate a ransom payment that outweighs his value as a galley slave laboring at the oar. This occurs seemingly arbitrarily, after a negotiation and a process that is glossed over very quickly at the very end of the text. After Hasleton spends three more years in the Algerian galleys, Richard Staper buys Hasleton’s freedom. This is explained in one sentence, followed by two sentences thanking God and then the narrative comes to an abrupt stop. Thus, the captivity narrative ends with something of an anti-climax: Hasleton’s freedom is gained, neither by daring escape nor through any other suspenseful test of his physical or spiritual strength. After being forced to return to the house of his old master in Algiers, Hasleton visits the English consul and asks for help in regaining his freedom. He reports that the consul, “gave me very good words but did not show me that favor which he professed” (94). Hasleton’s mention of the English consul’s broken promise is followed by this statement: “I could make some discourse of his unkind dealing with me and others of our countrymen, which I will leave till more fit occasion” (94). But there is no such occasion in the few remaining paragraphs, and this statement works to undermine what is otherwise an unbroken account of English Protestant virtue. If Algiers is presumably one of those “far countries where [Staper’s] honest factors trade,” then what accounts for this “unkind dealing” at the hands of Hasleton’s fellow Protestants and countrymen? And why did Staper not pay his ransom sooner? There are no answers given to these questions. In the end, we are shown a glimpse of Hasleton as a pawn in a larger commercial game played by Staper and the consul, with the English captive’s fate subject to their whims and priorities. Hasleton must simply repress his complaints, but the accusation of “unkind dealing” is a thread that unravels the whole text and its propagandistic function. It is the larger prerogatives and priorities of men like Staper who must maintain the capital flows, the investments and returns, of the corporations they control, and not the individual suffering of a person like Hasleton, that determine the timing of Hasleton’s longdelayed ransom payment. In other words, it is the structure of the largescale economic system that rules the day while individual transactions must be subordinated to that dehumanizing and commodifying system. So, while the text holds up Hasleton as an individual exemplar of Protestant fortitude, it also reveals that the larger commercial system, including its English elements, paid little heed to his well-being.

72  Daniel Vitkus I have only analyzed one English captivity narrative in this chapter, but I hope it has become clear how this kind of analysis could be carried out for other captivity narratives, including others written in English or in other languages. By placing a text like Hasleton’s Strange and Wonderful Things and the Mediterranean slave labor and ransom systems in a larger context, we can perceive these texts and events in new ways. Looking beyond Algiers and Majorca to London and then further, directing our attention along the trade routes and over to the colonial plantations in Virginia and New England, we see how the practices of capture, slavery, and ransom were linked by a new economic system that included the Mediterranean, but also the Atlantic World and beyond. While speaking to their readers at home, English captivity narratives bear traces of a larger human struggle initiated by powerful new forces that were unleashed on the world during a period when a globalizing capitalism first emerged; but at the same time, these narratives attempt to conceal that struggle under a veil of religious discourse or through the assertion of a reductive binary opposition between virtuous Christian and cruel infidel. Then, as now, we see how the demonization of Islam functions to conceal economic aggression abroad and class warfare at home under the guise of a virtuous struggle to defeat evil empires and end tyranny through endless warfare and overseas violence.

Notes 1 For some of the more important recent studies in this field, see Davis, Duprat, Herschenzon, Kaiser, Matar, Vitkus, Voigt, Weiss, and White. 2 For an argument against taking captivity narratives at face value and employing them as evidence for a historical reconstruction of the material practices of captivity in the early modern Mediterranean, see Vitkus, “Barbary Captivity Narratives.” 3 On the long history of anti-Muslim and orientalist representations in the Western tradition, in both scholarship and literary works, see Daniel and Said. 4 See Friedman on the early institution of Atlantic slavery in Portugal. 5 See Habib, Shyllon, and Fryer for information about people of color living in Britain during the early modern period. 6 For the history of these legal cases, see Van Cleave. 7 For an excellent account of the connections between Old and New World slavery, see the first two chapters of Blackburn. 8 For a description of the practices of ransom in medieval European warfare, see chapter one of Ambühl. 9 On piracy and state formation in early modern Europe, see Thomson. 10 For a useful study of early modern piracy in the context of the English Empire, see Hanna, especially chapters 1–4. 11 A helpful account of the gap between English imperial ambition and the realization of viable colonies by the English would-be colonizers is provided by Knapp. 12 See Schmuck and Toenjes for more details about Foxe’s employment of “the Turk” in his martyrology. 13 All quotations here from Hasleton are taken from the edited and modernized version of the text found in Vitkus, Piracy, Slavery and Redemption. That

English captivity and unfree labor 73 edition also includes six additional examples of the English captivity narrative genre, originally printed between 1589 and 1704.

References Ambühl, Rémy. Prisoners of War in the Hundred Years War: Ransom Culture in the Late Middle Ages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Berkert, Sven. Empire of Cotton: A Global History. New York: Vintage, 2015. Blackburn, Robin. The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492–1800. 2nd ed. New York: Verso, 2010. Bono, Salvatore. Schiavi: Una storia mediterranea (XVI–XIX secolo). Bologna: Il Molina, 2016. Daniel, Norman. Islam and the West: The Making of an Image. Oxford: One World, 1993. Davis, Robert C. Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters: White Slavery in the Mediterranean, the Barbary Coast, and Italy, 1500–1800. New York: Palgrave, 2003. Dee, John. General and Rare Memorials Pertaining to the Perfect Art of Navigation. London, 1577. Dee, John. John Dee: Essential Readings. Ed. Gerald Suster. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2003. Degenhardt, Jane. Islamic Conversion and Christian Resistance on the Early Modern Stage. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015. Duprat, Anne, ed. Légendes Barbaresques: Codes, strategies, détournements (XVIe– XVIIIe siècle). Saint-Denis: Editions Bouchène, 2016. Forman, Valerie. Tragicomic Redemptions: Global Economics and the Early Modern Stage. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008. Foxe, John. Actes and Monuments. London, 1583. Friedman, Ellen. Spanish Captives in North Africa in the Early Modern Age. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983. Fryer, Peter. Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain. London: Pluto Press, 2014. Genovese, Eugene. Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made. New York: Pantheon, 1974. Glete, Jan. Warfare at Sea, 1500–1650: Maritime Conflicts and the Transformation of Europe. New York: Routledge, 1999. Grandin, Greg. The Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom, and Deception in the New World. New York: Picador, 2015. Guilmartin, John F. Galleons and Galleys. London: Cassell, 2002. Habib, Imtiaz. Black Lives in the English Archives, 1500–1677: Imprints of the Invisible. New York: Routledge, 2008. Hanna, Mark G. Pirate Nests and the Rise of the British Empire, 1570–1740. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Harding, Christopher. “ ‘Hostis Humani Generis’: The Pirate as Outlaw in the Early Modern Law of the Sea.” Pirates? The Politics of Plunder, 1550–1650. Ed. Claire Jowitt. New York: Palgrave, 2007. 20–38. Harrison, William. A Description of England. Ed. George Edelen. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1968.

74  Daniel Vitkus Hasleton, Richard. Strange and Wonderful Things Happened to Richard Hasleton . . . in His Ten Years’ Travails in Many Foreign Countries. London, 1595. Hawkes, David. Shakespeare and Economic Theory. London: Bloomsbury, 2015. Herschenzon, Daniel. “The Political Economy of Ransom in the Early Modern Mediterranean.” Past & Present 231.1 (2016): 61–95. Jowitt, Claire. The Culture of Piracy, 1580–1630: English Literature and Seaborne Crime. New York: Routledge, 2010. Kaiser, Wolfgang, ed. Le Commerce des captifs: Les intermédiaires dans l’échange et le rachat des prisonniers en Méditerranée, XVe –XVIIIe siècle. Rome: Collection de l’École française de Rome, 2008. Kaiser, Wolfgang and Guillaume Calafat. “The Economy of Ransoming in the Early Modern Mediterranean: A Form of Cross-Cultural Trade between Southern Europe and the Maghreb (Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries).” Religion and Trade: Cross-Cultural Exchanges in World History, 1000–1900. Ed. Francesca Trivellato, Leor Halevi and Catia Antunes. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Knapp, Jeffrey. An Empire Nowhere: England, America, and Literature from Utopia to The Tempest. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. Marsden, R. G. Documents Relating to Law and Custom of the Sea. Vol. 1. Union, NJ: Lawbook Exchange, 1999. Marx, Karl. Capital. Vol. 1. Trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling. New York: International Publishers, 1967. Matar, Nabil. British Captives from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, 1563–1760. Leiden: Brill, 2014. Rabb, Theodore K. Enterprise and Empire: Merchant and Gentry Investment in the Expansion of England, 1575–1630. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967. Retort. Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War. London: Verso, 2006. Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books, 1994. Schmuck, Stephan. “The ‘Turk’ as Antichrist in John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments (1570).” Reformation 10.1 (2005): 21–44. Shyllon, F.O. Black Slaves in Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974. Snader, Joe. Caught between Worlds: British Captivity Narratives in Fact and Fiction. Knoxville: University Press of Kentucky, 2000. Tallett, Frank. War and Society in Early Modern Europe: 1495–1715. New York: Routledge, 1997. Thomson, Janice E. Mercenaries, Pirates and Sovereigns: State-Building and Extraterritorial Violence in Early Modern Europe. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984. Toenjes, Christopher. Islam, the Turks and the Making of the English Reformation. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2016. Van Cleve, George. “Somerset’s Case and Its Antecedents in Imperial Perspective.” Law and History Review 24.3 (2006): 601–46. Virilio, Paul. Speed and Politics. Trans. Mark Polizzotti. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2006. Vitkus, Daniel. “Barbary Captivity Narratives from Early Modern England: Truth Claims and the (Re)Construction of Authority.” Légendes Barbaresques: Codes, strategies, détournements (XVIe–XVIIIe siècle). Ed. Anne Duprat. Saint-Denis: Editions Bouchène, 2016. 141–54.

English captivity and unfree labor 75 Vitkus, Daniel, ed. Piracy, Slavery and Redemption: Barbary Captivity Narratives from Early Modern England. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001. Voigt, Lisa. Writing Captivity in the Early Modern Atlantic: Circulations of Knowledge and Authority in the Iberian and English Imperial Worlds. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009. Wallerstein, Immanuel. The Modern World-System. New York: Academic Press, 1994. Weiss, Gillian. Captives and Corsairs: France and Slavery in the Early Modern Mediterranean. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011. White, Joshua M. Catch and Release: Piracy, Slavery, and Law in the Early Modern Ottoman Mediterranean. Diss. University of Michigan, 2012. Williams, Eric E. Capitalism and Slavery. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994. Wood, Ellen Meiksins. The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View. New York: Verso, 2000.

3 Ambivalences of recognition The position of the Barbary corsairs in early modern international law and international politics Walter Rech Whereas classical international legal scholarship typically described the law of nations as a progressive and humanitarian project (Manning 70; Wheaton 69; Bluntschli 49; Oppenheim 66), critical historiography in the last few decades has endeavored to unmask the “dark sides” of internationalism and humanitarianism (Gong 248; Koskenniemi, The Gentle Civilizer 121; Miéville 318; Anghie 315). Critical legal historians have drawn attention, for instance, to how European colonizers who vindicated purportedly universal values in fact established discriminatory legal systems and operated mechanisms of exclusive inclusion (Koskenniemi, The Gentle Civilizer 131), compelling colonized peoples to enter an international society whose rules were defined by Europeans (Anghie 6). While early critique retained a dichotomic account of Europe and the other borrowed from the colonizers themselves (Fanon 44), later critical historiography has stressed the complexity of the colonial phenomenon. This latter strand of scholarship has drawn out the ambivalence of European and non-European actors’ identities, the specificity of colonial relationships in different times and contexts and the importance of negotiation as opposed to outright subjection in the early phases of imperial expansion (Alexandrowicz, An Introduction 224). Some authors have also underlined the potential for anti-imperial critique within modern international legal discourse (Fitzmaurice 13). This chapter further questions any dichotomic representations of the inter-civilizational encounter by focusing on the relations between European powers and the Barbary regencies of North Africa from the mid-sixteenth to the late eighteenth century. It argues that these relations, though often shaped by intense military hostility, took place within an “accommodating”1 international legal framework sanctioned by state practice, treaty law and legal doctrine. In this context, North African combatants were defined as standing on an equal footing with their European counterparts, at least in point of law. At the conceptual level this sphere of legal equality, which arose from the necessity of establishing a minimal regulation of Europe/Barbary relations, can be regarded as an intermediate locus between rationalist universalism and communitarian particularism. That is, accommodating doctrines stood

Barbary corsairs in international law 77 midway between the rationalist universalist discourse used by Europeans to justify domination overseas, for instance in sixteenth-century America or nineteenth-century Africa, and the particular communitarian framework of the Christian and European customary international law grounded on shared values, habits and religious feelings that applied to inter-European relations (Nuzzo 1–86). Obviously, this does not entail that accommodationism was a golden mean, a tolerant or humanitarian approach that could or should have constituted an ideal model for international law globally. The accommodationist view described in this chapter comes out as a markedly pragmatic doctrine only regulating relations between actors of comparable political magnitude and military strength, and within a specific region, the Mediterranean area. It was grounded on the geopolitical equilibrium between Europe and the Ottoman world, and it is unlikely that it could have emerged in contexts of military and political imbalance. Also, the equality bestowed by European writers, politicians and diplomats on Barbary corsairs was merely formal and legal. It coexisted with attitudes of moral disqualification towards the Barbary corsairs and with biased representations of the Orient. As to European scholarship, most jurists of the time were self-professed natural lawyers who purportedly believed in the universal rationality of natural law and might have felt uncomfortable embracing accommodationism. Yet they were also pragmatic lawyers willing to adjust their theories in light of actual power relationships. It was out of pragmatic concerns that they recognized the de facto existence of an independent international legal order outside Europe, the order of the Ottoman Empire and the growing political autonomy of the Barbary regencies. Thus, as illustrated in detail below, these jurists acknowledged the corsairs’ rights to attack Christian vessels, to own the booty and also to enslave war captives according to “ancient” customs of war, though it was maintained that European belligerents were entitled to enslave Muslim captives in “retaliation.” European jurists gradually abandoned this accommodating approach from the mid-eighteenth century onwards as Ottoman power declined and the European states stepped up their colonial ambitions, requiring international lawyers to articulate apologies of muscular and expansionist foreign policies in the name of universal “reason.” At the forefront of this move towards a Eurocentric universalism were Enlightenment writers such as Emer de Vattel, who constructed a theory of the law of nations that criminalized “barbarous” customs of war. At this stage, early modern accommodationism was supplanted by a dichotomic representation of the world in which Europe was equated with order and civilization, and the Ottoman world and North Africa with anarchy and barbarism.2

The Barbary issue and its legal implications The confrontation between Muslim and Christian corsairs3 in the Mediterranean, which became an endemic phenomenon in the early Middle Ages and

78  Walter Rech continued during the Crusades and the Reconquista, turned into a major problem for nascent international law at the time of the Ottoman expansion (Moschetti 874). By that stage the practice of corsairing, or the corso, resulted not only in goods being seized, but also in seafarers being held captive to be ransomed, employed as forced laborers in construction or agriculture, or sold in flourishing marketplaces along the Mediterranean coasts. As showed by Fernand Braudel, this confrontation was less motivated by ideological or religious hostility than by specific interests pursued by particular actors within the complex economic system of the early modern Mediterranean (190). In this context, captives were traded as goods rather than killed as infidels, renegades were no rarity on either side, and both Muslim and Christian corsairs happened to assault their co-religionists’ vessels for the sake of private gain. From the sixteenth century, as the Ottoman Empire expanded westward in the Maghreb region along what Europeans used to call the Barbary Coast, the North African towns of Tripoli, Tunis, Algiers and Salé came to play a growingly important role in this maritime struggle. Nominally dependent on and waging war on behalf of the Ottoman Porte, they became de facto sovereign entities in the seventeenth century, when they systematically began to wage war and stipulate treaties with European powers without seeking their suzerains’ approval (Bono 23). Although a vast popular literature in Europe depicted the confrontation in the Mediterranean as part of a religious and mortal combat between Christianity and Islam, Christian governments were actually split in their attitude towards and response to Barbary corsairing. A core of great powers including France, Britain, Sweden, and the Netherlands, accompanied by smaller powers such as Denmark and the Republic of Venice, mostly maintained a policy of appeasement with the Barbary regencies (Azuni 102). Until as late as the early nineteenth century, these powers endeavored to bind the Barbary rulers through peace treaties and regularly paid them tributes in exchange for immunity from attack. When immunity was violated, as it recurrently was, retaliatory operations would ensue. For instance, Louis XIV ordered major bombardments of Algiers in the 1680s in retaliation for violations of the peace by Algerian corsairs (Voltaire, ch. 14). The Barbary rulers who signed bilateral agreements with these powers would implicitly reserve the right to assault and seize vessels flying thirdparty flags. This perfectly suited the interests of France, Britain, Sweden and the Netherlands, which indirectly benefited from attacks on rival countries with which they competed for commercial supremacy, most importantly Habsburg Spain but also the Kingdom of Sardinia and the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, which largely rejected any appeasement with Muslim corsairs. Yet it is important to note that even the governments rejecting appeasement regarded the Barbary regencies as legitimate polities, not as piratical communities, and accordingly stipulated official agreements and truces with them (Mössner 89). European scholars provided historical justification for this state of affairs by arguing that Catholic European states such as Spain

Barbary corsairs in international law 79 and the Italian cities had been in a condition of perpetual public war (bellum perpetuum) with the Muslims since at least the Middle Ages; hence, belligerents on both sides should be regarded as lawful enemies (hostes), not as pirates or robbers (piratae, latrones). This legal framework may be designated as a “bilateral” law of war (Haggenmacher 279) affirming the legal equality of all sovereign belligerent parties. It was grounded on the balance of power between the two distinct international legal orders of Europe and the Ottoman Empire. It therefore clearly differed from the hegemonic just war paradigm or the discriminatory laws of war (Mégret 265) applied by Europeans when dealing with less redoubtable opponents in America or Africa, who were typically treated as offenders fighting in a barbaric way and responsible for heinous crimes against the “law of nature and nations” such as cannibalism and piracy. Further, the bilateral law of war regulating the Mediterranean confrontation also differed from the “civilized” law of war applied by Europeans in inter-European relations, which ruled out enslavement and imposed significant restrictions on the conduct of warfare by the eighteenth century (Duffy 4). As an intermediate approach, the accommodating doctrine applied to the Barbary issue was situated in between the extremes of worldwide crime repression and inter-European moderate warfare. Importantly, the mutual recognition of lawful enemy status in the Mediterranean confrontation did not necessarily imply any improvement in the treatment of war prisoners. Circumstances of captivity greatly varied on both sides, with some captives being fortunate enough to be ransomed after a short period of captivity and others being reduced to slave laborers and sex slaves. The recognition of lawful enemy status simply gave rise to the belligerent rights to attack hostile vessels, seize private enemy goods and, indeed, enslave captives. These rights, especially the right to enslave, by no means arose from humanitarian concerns, but rather from a pragmatic need for providing a minimum legal regulation of warfare in the Mediterranean, especially with regard to disputes over the ownership of goods taken by the Barbary corsairs.

The sovereignty argument: Jean Bodin The French kings had built solid ties with the Ottoman sultans, the Barbary corsairs’ suzerains, since the thirteenth century, and Francis I as well as Henry II confirmed the entente by signing friendship and alliance treaties with Suleiman the Magnificent to oppose the Habsburgs in 1535 and 1553 (Testa 15, 43; Ziegler 342). Given this close relationship between France and the Ottomans, it does not surprise that one of the most authoritative jurists to come up with arguments for justifying Barbary corsairing was a French lawyer, Jean Bodin (1530–96). He discussed the matter in his celebrated Six livres de la République of 1576 in which, amidst the turmoil of the French Wars of Religion, he expounded a realist view of sovereignty

80  Walter Rech as the “absolute and perpetual power vested in a commonwealth” (Bodin, bk. 1, ch. 8). While heavily indebted to medieval legal doctrine (Isnardi Parente 11), Bodin put forward a modern concept of sovereignty stressing the necessity of domestic peace and order and minimizing the role of moraltheological principles, thereby substantially obliterating the right of resistance (Quaglioni 123). This realist stance had important ramifications for the princes’ right to make war and the legal status of corsairs, too, as was exemplified in the first chapter of the République, dealing with the ultimate end of the “wellordered commonwealth.” In this chapter Bodin first reasserted the classical Roman law differentiation between unlawful enemies, to be treated as ordinary criminals (piratae, latrones, praedones), and lawful public enemies (hostes) (Digesta 49.15.24, 50.16.118). He construed this dichotomy from a Ciceronian ethical standpoint, arguing that the lawfulness of war stems not only from public authority, but also from the sovereign’s just conduct towards both enemies and subjects. Yet he also proposed a sovereigntybased reading, dismissing any concern about the ruler’s just cause for war and respect of public law standards as well as about belligerents’ compliance with the laws of war. He thus posited that even pirates, despite their morally reproachable behavior, should be regarded as lawful combatants when acting under a sovereign commission. With reference to Barbary, Bodin recalled that Suleiman the Magnificent had enlisted two redoubtable pirate chiefs, Hayreddin Barbarossa and Dragut Reis, “and made them both admirals and pashas, to clear other pirates from the seas as well as protect his state, and maritime trade” (Bodin, bk. 1, ch. 2). Bodin, who like other Renaissance scholars admired the political wisdom and military strength of the Ottomans (Kammel 503), regarded the enlistment of Barbarossa and Reis as a sign of Suleiman’s skillful leadership and foresight. Incidentally, both Barbarossa and Reis had proved valuable allies of the French against the Habsburgs. While discussing the Barbary issue, Bodin distinguished piracy and lawful corsairing on the ground of public authority only. He deliberately overlooked the question of Barbarossa’s and Reis’ lawful grounds, or lack thereof, for waging war as well as their habit of enslaving war captives. In principle Bodin was contrary to slavery, including slavery iure belli, as he explained in detail in book I, chapter V of the République, but he failed to mention Barbarossa’s and Reis’ involvement in the practice. He restrained himself to the classical Roman law argument that those who fell into captivity at the hands of pirates remain de iure free, but Barbarossa and Reis no longer counted as pirates after Suleiman enrolled them. As Bodin failed to discuss the enslavement of captives as a key feature of Barbary (and indeed also Christian) warfare in the Mediterranean, he tacitly recognized the regional, customary and particularistic character of the laws of war. This view inaugurated an enduring realist tradition in early modern legal opinions on the Barbary issue. Methodologically, it confirmed

Barbary corsairs in international law 81 the broader sociological approach Bodin followed in the République, consisting of comparing the laws, usages and constitutions of various nations in an open-ended conversation, sometimes leaving it up to the reader to judge the reasonableness of different normative standpoints. In this respect, Bodin was not only a pragmatic lawyer, but also a typical Renaissance scholar with a penchant for cultural relativism.

The historical argument: Grotius The greater part of European legal scholarship in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries followed Bodin in qualifying the Barbary corsairs as lawful combatants based on the sovereignty argument. Yet in this period the pro-Barbary discourse became increasingly varied and eclectic, frequently accompanied by historical narratives that justified Barbary warfare with reference not only to the Regencies’ de facto sovereignty but also to broader historical or structural causes for the corsairs’ hostile conduct. One of the first legal authorities to provide such a historical narrative was Hugo Grotius (1583–1645) in his masterpiece De iure belli ac pacis libri tres. As a Dutchman, Grotius was not prone to criminalizing Barbary warfare, which mainly targeted the shipping of the United Provinces’ arch-enemy, Spain. Although Dutch sailors and merchants also happened to be victims of Barbary raids, they mostly entertained good relations with the Regencies. Crowds of Dutch businessmen and corsairs put their skills at the service of local authorities in Algiers and other North African cities, contributing to a characteristic blend of Muslim and Christian maritime economy and culture (de Groot 132). As to the Dutch government, its aim was never to wipe out the corsairs but rather to strengthen the Porte’s grasp on them and thereby secure free navigation for Dutch ships (de Groot 135). Indeed, Barbary corsairing proved an important factor curbing Spanish and Italian ambitions in the Mediterranean and facilitating the rise of the Dutch Republic as a great maritime power. Grotius’ asserting the legality of Barbary warfare in De iure belli ac pacis was in line with his broader apology of privateering, including Dutch privateering. Already in 1604, well before drafting De iure belli ac pacis, Grotius had been asked by the United Dutch East India Company to provide a legal justification for the seizure of the Portuguese ship Santa Catarina by captain Jacob van Heemskerck in the Straits of Singapore in February 1603 (van Ittersum, ch. 1). Grotius accomplished this task, and his vindication of Dutch privateering resulted in the drafting of De iure praedae, a longforgotten work recently reassessed by critical historians as evidence of Grotius’ ties to the Company’s economic and political interests and of his paramount role in the history of Dutch imperialism (Tuck 79). In De iure praedae Grotius made a case for privateering based on two main lines of argument. First, he reasoned on the basis of the right of individuals to self-defense and to enforcing natural law. This point was central

82  Walter Rech to Grotius’ natural law theory, and he would reassert it in De iure belli ac pacis too. In De iure praedae he stated that because the Portuguese had prevented the Dutch merchants from enjoying freedom of navigation in Asian waters, Van Heemskerck had a natural right to respond by assaulting and seizing the Santa Catarina. Further, from a more realist, Bodinian perspective, Grotius claimed that Van Heemskerck acted not only in self-defense, but also on behalf of the Dutch state, which allegedly authorized him to capture Portuguese shipping within the context of a regular public war against Philip III (Grotius, De iure praedae c. 13; van Ittersum LV). In the case of Barbary corsairing, however, these arguments for privateering would have clashed with each other. In De iure praedae Grotius described an ideal situation in which the defendant, Van Heemskerck, qualified both as a just enemy from a moral viewpoint and as a regular combatant in the legalist sense. Purportedly, there was no moral or legal ground whatsoever to criminalize the captain’s conduct. But what if the defendant had committed an act of aggression instead of acting in self-defense? This was the case, Grotius conceded, of the Barbary corsairs. On the one hand, they qualified as state-authorized combatants; on the other hand, they waged war without a just cause and seemed to pose a major threat to maritime security and thus jeopardize, among other things, Grotius’ own principle of the freedom of the seas. Grotius attempted to bridge this gap between the moral injustice and formal legality of the corsairs’ behavior by recourse to historical argument. He narrated that after the Flood, and before the spread of Christianity and other world religions, ancient nations would systematically practice piracy and regard it as lawful given the absence of higher moral obligations and the harshness of living conditions in those times (Grotius, De iure belli, bk. 2, ch. 2, para. 2; bk. 2, ch. 15, para. 5; bk. 3, ch. 3, para. 2). Oblivious of the most basic dictates of natural law, these nations came to acknowledge piracy and robbery as licit customs under what Grotius called the “ancient law of nations” (vetus ius gentium). Yet after the renewal of religious feelings, he noted, most nations began to relinquish such barbaric customs and reestablished commercial and political bonds with each other. Belligerents then gave up enslaving or executing war captives and instead took them as hostages to ask for ransom, apparently a far more humane practice (Grotius, De iure belli, bk. 3, ch. 7, para. 9). Grotius argued that by the early seventeenth century the ancient law of nations was still in force among “barbaric” peoples, such as the Algerians, who were accustomed to attack foreigners without valid claims and without officially declaring war (Grotius, De iure belli, bk. 3, ch. 9, para. 19). Yet precisely because he assumed that the laws of war had a customary basis, he concluded that the civilized nations of Europe had no right (or indeed the force, as yet) to impose their own law on barbaric peoples. This entailed that the only viable framework for regulating warfare between civilized and barbarians of equal or comparable strength was one resting on a few basic

Barbary corsairs in international law 83 and mutually acknowledged rights and the principle of reciprocity. None of the thicker ethical obligations and sophisticated rules and techniques of the civilized law of nations could apply to conflicts between barbarians and civilized. In accordance with this harsh yet accommodating understanding of the law of nations, Grotius held that all parties to warfare in the Mediterranean were entitled to take possession of foreign goods and sell them on the market. This accommodating and regionalist approach presupposed the coexistence of a plurality of regional international orders, each with its own laws of war. To prove his point, Grotius referred to the ruling of a Paris tribunal. In our times. . . not only among Christians but also among most Mohammedans, both the right of captivity apart from war (ius captivitatis extra bellum), and likewise that of postliminy, have disappeared . . . Nevertheless that ancient law of nations (vetus illud ius gentium) could be applied if there should be an affair with a people so barbarous that without declaration or cause it should consider it lawful to treat in a hostile manner all foreigners and their possessions. While I was writing these words, a judgement to that effect was rendered in the highest chamber at Paris. . . The decision held that goods which had belonged to French citizens, and had been captured by the Algerians, a people accustomed in their maritime depredations to attack all others, had changed ownership by the law of war, and therefore, when recaptured by others, became the property of those who had recovered them. (Grotius, De iure belli, bk. 3, ch. 9, para. 19) Incidentally, this reference to a court ruling shows that the Barbary issue was not only a political and commercial matter, but also a practical juridical one. Clarifying the status of the Barbary corsairs was necessary for European law professionals to assess the numerous cases of piracy or privateering brought before domestic tribunals and prize courts. Had European judges and lawyers disqualified Barbary corsairing as mere piracy under the law of nations, they should have accordingly applied the Roman rule pirata non mutat dominium (“a pirate does not change the ownership”), entailing that all goods stolen on the high seas should be returned to the original owner. Obviously, this would pose significant practical problems. Since the sale of the merchandises seized by corsairs generated an intense international trade, with goods being exchanged at various market places in Europe and Africa, restitution of this property to the original owners might have been extremely difficult, and would have implied encroaching upon the rights of all bona fide possessors of the goods in question. Grotius himself reported that, to overcome these problems, the Spanish and Venetian domestic legislations stated that even goods stolen by outright pirates should be regarded as rightfully belonging to the eventual possessor when no claim to restitution was made by the original owner. Grotius

84  Walter Rech argued that “it is not unjust that a private Thing should yield to a public Advantage, especially when the Recovery may prove so difficult” (Grotius, De iure belli, bk. 3, ch. 9, para. 17). The point about the difficulty of returning seized goods to the original owner was made by other jurists throughout the early modern age, for instance by Lord Stowell as late as 1801. As a judge at the High Court of Admiralty, Stowell dealt with a case concerning “a British ship which had been taken, on a voyage from Saffee to Lisbon, by an Algerine corsair, and sold by the dey [the ruler] of Algiers to a merchant in Minorca, and by him sold, on the surrender of the island of Minorca to the British arms, to the present holder, a merchant of London” (Robinson 3, italics in original). Stowell relied on the sovereignty argument and declared the Algerian prize and the present holder’s possession to be lawful since the dey of Algiers had intervened in and thereby legalized the transaction. Interestingly, Stowell additionally argued that the prize should also be legalized to fulfill the Court’s commitment to “give security to the title of a bonâ fide purchaser,” since “[o]n this foundation all property rests” (Robinson 4). Although Stowell by 1801 might have been irritated by the Regency of Algiers’ continuing reliance on corsairing, he reasserted an accommodating stance given the Regency’s sovereignty and the need for preserving established standards for the resolution of prize disputes.

Pro-Barbary arguments in the eighteenth century: Johann Friedrich Weidler, Martin Hübner, and Cornelius van Bynkershoek Following Grotius, historical arguments in defence of Barbary corsairing were further refined within a strand of Protestant legal scholarship that felt politically close to the corsairs engaged in the struggle against the Habsburgs. Among the representatives of this strand was the German scholar Johann Friedrich Weidler. A notable polymath, Weidler specialized in astronomy and physics but also pursued legal studies, thus obtaining the title of doctor utriusque and being affiliated to the law faculty at Wittenberg (Günther 453). He was among the few early modern legal scholars who devoted a specific piece of writing to the Barbary issue, the disputation De quaestione iuris gentium utrum praeda Salensibus Afris erepta vindicari possit of 1735. Therein Weidler resorted to a historical narrative to demonstrate that the Moroccan corsairs of Salé acted in self-defence, not as aggressors, in their struggle against Spain. He claimed that the Mediterranean conflict between Christians and Muslims was originally triggered by the Christians at the time of the Crusades and the Reconquista (Weidler II). In Weidler’s view, the Portuguese and Spaniards were especially responsible for driving the Moors out of the Iberian Peninsula and for maintaining a confrontational policy against them, thereby generating a condition of enduring hostility in the area (Weidler X). The latter was the argument of “perpetual war” (bellum

Barbary corsairs in international law 85 perpetuum), usually employed by pro-Barbary lawyers to dismiss moralistic allegations regarding the Barbary corsairs’ aggressiveness.4 In this connection Weidler also noted that Moroccan corsairs did not wage war on all Christian nations but only on those, like Portugal and Spain, that showed little interest in making peace with them (Weidler II). He reported that the Republic of Salé actually entertained peaceful relations with Christian powers such as Sweden and Britain (Weidler XI, XIII). Weidler concluded that the corsairs of Salé ought not to be discriminated against as pirates, but acknowledged as lawful combatants backed by sovereign power as well as just enemies who had been fighting in self-defence since the Crusades and the Reconquista. A further historical advocacy of Barbary was offered by the Danish lawyer Martin Hübner, author of De la saisie des batimens neutres, one of the earliest and most highly reputed treatises on neutral shipping, published in The Hague in 1759. Much like Grotius, Hübner elaborated a historical narrative to defend the customary law of Barbary and deny the superiority of European mores. It is notorious that the Turks, and especially the Barbary Republics on the Coast of Africa, live in a perpetual war with Portugal, Spain and several other Christian states; although the sea-robbers of these republics, following ancient customs, do not commit any wrong by taking possession, by force and wherever they can, of vessels belonging to those states, nonetheless the sea-robbers never pick a quarrel with friend and neutral vessels over the ownership of the latter’s freight. . . . In doing so, the sea-robbers simply follow the prescriptions of the universal law of nations. Everybody knows that. . . the navy of the Ottoman Empire and its vassals is a little thing compared with that of our great maritime powers. This is a further reason that induces the Turks to behave in the manner described above. Like for like, the customs that are received in the vast empire of the Muslims are not less compulsory, nor less respectable, than those that have been deemed suitable elsewhere. (Hübner 1, pt. 2, ch. 2, para. 11) Hübner’s pro-Barbary discourse was characterized by the eclectic approach typical of much eighteenth-century legal scholarship. It incorporated historical narrative, positivist arguments, natural law moralism, and some hints at cultural relativism. Hübner thus posited that the North African corsairs qualified as perpetual enemies of some Christian states and therefore could not be disqualified as aggressors. He also maintained that Barbary warfare was congruous both with natural law and with Muslim customary law, which had to be regarded on the same footing as European customs. Like his predecessors, Hübner did not justify Barbary warfare for the sake of tolerance or humanitarianism. His main, if perhaps not only, intent was to legitimize one particular legal principle that the corsairs observed, the rule

86  Walter Rech that an enemy flag covers enemy goods, a rule dear to his Danish employers during the Seven Years War, a conflict ongoing as Hübner was writing the De la saisie (Stapelbroek 72). When he stressed that this rule was respected even by the Barbary corsairs he implied that it should be considered as a universal principle to be respected by all powers, including the powers currently involved in the war and threatening Danish trade, especially Britain. A survey of the eighteenth century would not be complete without reference to one of the most authoritative lawyers of the age, Cornelius van Bynkershoek, active as a judge of the highest court of Holland, Zeeland and West Friesland from 1704 until 1743 (Akashi 1109). While now and then reiterating the traditional language of natural law, Bynkershoek was a pragmatic and practice-oriented lawyer who acknowledged positive law obligations and state practice as the most important sources of the law of nations. He thus justified Barbary warfare on the basis of the sovereignty argument. He argued that the Barbary regencies were “not pirates, but rather organised states” and he noted that “[t]he States-General [of the Dutch Republic], as well as other nations, have frequently made treaties with them” (van Bynkershoek 99). Bynkershoek had strong doctrinal as well as political motives for justifying Barbary warfare. This justification fits with his sovereignty-centered understanding of the law of nations as well as with the Dutch Republic’s tolerant policy on Barbary. In addition, as a judge and a pragmatic jurist, Bynkershoek was highly concerned with the ramifications of Barbary corsairing for the everyday working of tribunals, especially Dutch tribunals, dealing with cases of piracy or privateering. This practical concern became manifest as Bynkershoek discussed which courts had jurisdiction over piracy, the way piracy should be punished and the competence of Dutch courts in cases of piratical attacks against non-Dutch citizens (Bynkershoek 100–03). For him, and for other early modern European lawyers, it was a pragmatic imperative to legalize Barbary warfare to decide piracy and privateering cases in times in which these phenomena were endemic both in the Mediterranean and on all major oceanic trade routes.

The non-accommodating minority: Alberico Gentili and Heinrich von Cocceji In early modern times, calls for criminalizing Barbary corsairing were voiced almost uniquely by lawyers who served countries whose vessels fell prey to the corsairs or by unyielding just war doctrinarians. Alberico Gentili, one of the foremost authorities on the law of nations at the turn of the seventeenth century, belonged to the former group of lawyers. His doctrinal position was ambiguous and flexible enough to suit varying circumstances and his clients’ interests. In De iure belli, published in 1598 as Gentili held the position of regius professor of civil law at Oxford and acted as a counsellor to the Crown, he addressed the Barbary issue only indirectly while discussing

Barbary corsairs in international law 87 piracy, but his reflections are worth attentive consideration. Although by and large he may be described as a political realist, in his discussion of piracy he dismissed Bodin’s sovereignty argument and revived the just war doctrine to criminalize maritime attacks performed without a rightful ground. This implied that the Barbary corsairs, too, should be designated as pirates. In a telling statement, he recalled that “Charles Martel said of the Saracens, that because they roved about in great numbers and had leaders, camps, and standards, they were nonetheless brigands, since they had no motive for war” (Gentili, De iure belli, bk. I, ch. 4). Arguably, the same applied to early modern Saracens, the Barbary corsairs. Gentili’s recovery of the just war doctrine appears idiosyncratic, since apart from his treatment of piracy he mostly dismissed any substantial concerns about the just cause and instead asserted a formalist definition of war as a confrontation between public and regular armies (Gentili, bk. I, ch. 2). Yet Gentili’s recourse to the just war vocabulary to disqualify the Barbary corsairs may partly be explained by the fact that by the late sixteenth century they had begun increasingly to target English (as well as French and Dutch) ships, not only Spanish ones, and he might be inclined to criminalize Barbary conduct to protect English interests. Gentili took a different doctrinal tack, but again to defend English interests, in some passages of Hispanicae advocationis libri duo, a posthumous work collecting opinions from his late activity as a legal counsellor. Therein Gentili rejected Venetian claims to restitution of booty taken from them by English pirates and sold, through the prefect of Tunis, to English merchants. One of the core arguments he made to drive the point home was that the Tunisian authorities had the right to sell stolen merchandises under both civil law and the customary law of Tunis (Gentili, bk. 1, ch. 23).5 From this perspective, regardless of whether Tunisian officials might be morally blamed for selling stolen goods, they should nevertheless be regarded as public authorities whose approval legitimized the sale. By arguing so, and by recognizing the legal validity and relevance of Tunisian custom for the law of nations, Gentili implicitly acknowledged the Regency of Tunis as an independent and legitimate polity as distinct from a pirate state. Given the inconsistencies of his position on Barbary, Gentili might be portrayed less as a convinced opponent of accommodationism than as a typical humanist lawyer (Tuck 16–50) able to seize argumentative opportunities from a rhetorical repertoire featuring both classical natural law and the emerging doctrine of sovereignty. Instead, a hardline stance on Barbary was taken by a few traditional natural lawyers who condemned the corsairs based on moralist arguments and sometimes out of religious hostility. One emblematic writer in this prong was Heinrich von Cocceji (1644–1719), a professor of ius naturae et gentium at Heidelberg and Frankfurt/Oder and author of an influential commentary on Grotius, Grotius illustratus, seu Commentarii ad Hugonis Grotii libros tres, edited by his son and Prussian grand chancellor Samuel von Cocceji.

88  Walter Rech The fundamental principle of Heinrich von Cocceji’s legal theory was that natural law stems from the will of God. He defined punishment in terms of retribution and revived a radical version of the just war doctrine in opposition to spreading utilitarian legal theory. In his Dissertatio iuris gentium publici de iusto proeliorum exitu he harked back to biblical sources and ancient Germanic customs to elaborate a theological concept of warfare and argued that “all wars and battles are decided by the most just and wise advice of the Heavenly Powers” (Cocceji, Dissertatio, summaria, para. 6). It was on the basis of this moralist understanding of warfare that he branded the Algerian corsairs as sheer pirates in his Prodromus justitiae gentium of 1719. Therein he claimed that the Algerians “attack all with impunity, and infest the seas with their depredations, publicly and in front of the whole world” (Cocceji, Prodromus, ex. 1, para. 118). In this and other statements Cocceji treated the Barbary corsairs as ordinary criminals, thereby rejecting arguments by other Protestant authors who felt sympathetic with the corsairs who targeted Catholic countries’ shipping. Cocceji’s anti-Barbary discourse might have sounded somewhat reactionary to his contemporaries, owing not only to his radical just war theorizing but also to his apparent being out of step with the political constellation of the age. In the aftermath of the failed siege of Vienna in 1683, Ottoman power began to decline, and so did political and ideological support for the Barbary Regencies (Göçek 8; Duchhardt 191). As a result of the growing military predominance of European navies in the Mediterranean, the Barbary Regencies turned from formidable Ottoman-backed belligerents involved in a struggle for military and trade supremacy into isolated mavericks fighting on their own against major international actors. Paradoxically, however, it was precisely the increasing weakness and political irrelevance of the Regencies that made them easy targets for writers like Cocceji and, later on, for western powers growing bold on the international stage.

A decisive doctrinal shift: Vattel’s rejection of the accommodating doctrine While Cocceji’s theory might be viewed as a relic of traditional just war doctrine, novel arguments against Barbary warfare surfaced in the mideighteenth century on the basis of a progressive philosophy of history and a binary opposition between civilization and barbarism. The writers who took this latter stance defined Barbary corsairing not only as piracy, but also as an utterly barbaric phenomenon that could no longer be endured to occur at Europe’s doorsteps and in an “enlightened” age. This prong of scholarship was initiated by the international lawyer and philosopher Emer de Vattel (1714–67). Born in Neuchâtel, Switzerland, Vattel had been raised in a Calvinist family and studied theology before taking distance from religion as he was attracted by the secularized and rather speculative natural law theory of Christian Wolff (Béguelin 37). Vattel never became a speculative

Barbary corsairs in international law 89 writer himself, though. His masterpiece in the field of international law, the Droit des gens, published in 1758, was an easily readable handbook largely conceived of as a tool for diplomats and statesmen. It was well received and became the most authoritative compendium of the law of nations until the mid-nineteenth century (Fenwick 395). Though Vattel wrote the Droit des gens in a pragmatic and synthetic prose accessible to practitioners, he also had a normative intent in mind when drafting this book, that is, to lay the foundations of a rational system of the law of nature and nations as observed by civilized peoples. He thus identified the purportedly rational core of coeval European customs, especially customs of war and diplomatic intercourse, and endeavoured to demonstrate their potential universal validity.6 To this end he picked a few instances of analogous customs being applied both inside and outside Europe and simultaneously delegitimizing unfitting non-European usages as irrational. To secure compliance with this civilized law, Vattel called on all nations to join and strike back against all those who trampled on it, especially those who egregiously violated the laws of war, tyrannized their own population, systematically waged aggressive war or otherwise destabilized international order and the balance of power (Rech 221; Silvestrini 44). In Vattel’s view, such offenders qualified as “enemies of mankind” deserving of being countered and punished by an international coalition.7 Although he upheld a thick notion of state sovereignty, he was convinced that the consistent repression of heinous international crimes was needed to secure the longterm survival of the modern law of nations as a civilized accomplishment. The Barbary corsairs, too, fell in the lot of the enemies of mankind. In book three of the Droit des gens, Vattel characterized them as sheer pirates as they performed acts of aggression for profit and without any sound motive or pretext. Regardless of whether they acted under sovereign commission, they qualified as common robbers. Legitimate and formal warfare must be carefully distinguished from those illegitimate and informal wars, or rather predatory expeditions, undertaken either without lawful authority or without apparent cause, as likewise without the usual formalities, and solely with a view to plunder. To the [latter] class belong almost all the expeditions of the Barbary corsairs: though authorized by a sovereign, they are undertaken without any apparent cause, and from no other motive than the lust of plunder. These two species of war, I say, – the lawful and the illegitimate, – are to be carefully distinguished, as the effects and the rights arising from each are very different. (Vattel, Law of Nations, bk. 3, ch. 4, para. 67) Vattel broke with the accommodating tradition to assert an understanding of the laws of war that was purportedly universal and rational yet in

90  Walter Rech fact Eurocentric, one in which no place was left for barbaric offenders. He rejected former historical narratives legitimizing Barbary warfare, and in particular he rebuked Grotius by claiming that, far from tolerating ancient and barbaric customs, civilized nations should “use their endeavours to effect their abolition” (Vattel, Law of Nations, bk. 3, ch. 15, para. 222).8 Vattel thus lauded Louis XIV for ordering heavy bombings of Algiers in the 1680s (Vattel, Law of Nations, bk. 3, ch. 9, para. 167) and fully justified Spain and some Italian states for rejecting appeasement and carrying out a muscular policy on Barbary. Vattel thus distanced himself from earlier Protestant authors who took an accommodating stance and regarded the Barbary corsairs as fellow opponents of Habsburg Spain. Still the ultimate targets of Vattel’s enemy of mankind doctrine were less the Barbary corsairs, who by 1758 had become negligible irritants for Europe, than the Christian sovereigns capable of causing turmoil on the European continent, for instance Frederick II of Prussia, then at war with Vattel’s employer, Frederick Augustus II of Saxony-Poland. As illustrated by Vattel’s correspondence and formal protest against the Prussian invasion of Saxony (Béguelin 57, 172–73), he considered Frederick II of Prussia as one of those enemies of mankind who jeopardized international security by waging war repeatedly, disrespecting the laws of war and disrupting the balance of power (Rech 138). While Vattel was willing to concede that all sovereigns had a right to wage war, including on the basis of mere pretexts, he was sensitive to war being at least waged in a civilized manner and not threatening a minimum level of international tranquillity,9 something which, in his opinion, Frederick II of Prussia was little concerned about. It is important to note, however, that Vattel proved cautious enough to shrink from denouncing the conduct of Frederick, who among other things was the sovereign of his own principality of Neuchâtel. Vattel’s own family had close ties with the Prussian rulers, and back in 1741 he himself had dedicated one of his early writings, Défense du système Leibnitien, to Frederick in the hope of securing an academic or diplomatic position in Prussia or Switzerland. Since it would have been unwise for Vattel to openly criticize Fredrick and any other potential employer, he rather stigmatized the behaviour of barbaric, non-European enemies of mankind such as the Barbary corsairs, or the Tartars (Vattel, Law of Nations, bk. 3, ch. 3, para. 34). He also prudentially distinguished the mild form of punishment that could lawfully be administered to civilized European sovereigns from the harsh punishment that ought to descend on barbaric nations. He claimed that while European princes might at most be deprived of some territories, barbaric nations who qualified as enemies of mankind might rightfully be exterminated (Vattel, Law of Nations, bk. 3, ch. 3, para. 34). Vattel stood in precarious balance between two different epochs and worldviews, the Enlightenment and the nineteenth century. By stressing the importance of a bilateral law of war, Vattel might be seen as paving the way for nineteenth-century humanitarianism and for a “classic international

Barbary corsairs in international law 91 law” based on the principle of equality (Jouannet 9). However, nineteenthcentury scholarship tended to view all civilized war customs as products of western culture, and all law as reflecting a particular community’s way of life. Vattel instead regarded these customs as grounded on rational principles accessible to all nations, and therefore universally enforceable. In this he remained a typical Enlightenment rationalist and universalist, though one endeavoring to reconcile rationality and universality with political expediency and a state-centred understanding of international relations. His intolerant attitude towards Barbary exemplified a dialectic of Enlightenment in which the achievements of “reason” and civilization in the field of international law would have to be preserved by means of terror and total warfare. He applied a two-tiered logic to the enforcement of the laws of war, justifying the extermination of so-called “barbaric” warlike peoples outside Europe while allowing for milder penalties for European war criminals. This discriminatory logic, which legal authorities such as Vattel contributed to legitimizing, has been a key component of modern international legal discourse from its inception in the sixteenth century, and perhaps to date.

Vattel, Jefferson, and the politics of western Reason At first Vattel did not seem to be winning the day with his aggressive stance on Barbary. After the publication of the Droit des gens a substantial number of European lawyers, such as Martin Hübner and Lord Stowell, continued regarding the corsairs as lawful enemies, and European powers kept on paying tributes to the Barbary States to prevent piratical attacks instead of waging full-scale war against the Regencies as Vattel suggested. However, western states began to assert muscular Barbary policies by the end of the eighteenth century, with the United States leading the way. Following the American Revolutionary War, American nationals sailing in the Mediterranean forfeited the immunity from attacks they enjoyed as British subjects, and United States politicians and diplomats began to express deep concern regarding the security situation along the coasts of Barbary (Irwin 35). Since the early 1780s Thomas Jefferson – an avid reader of Vattel’s work – called for a coalition of civilized countries to be formed to crack down on Barbary “piracy.” Much like Vattel, Jefferson was disappointed by the big European powers’ long-lasting appeasement policy on Barbary and their lack of will and common intent in combating the Regencies. He was determined to bring about a radical change of attitude towards Barbary, and to this end submitted a detailed plan to the United States’ Congress to set up an international anti-piratical confederacy (Irwin 49). He proposed “a convention which called for constant cruising along the [Barbary] coast by a naval force provided on a quota system and directed by a council of ambassadors at some one court, such as Versailles. The aim was not temporary immunity but perpetual peace, without tribute” (Malone 30).

92  Walter Rech Jefferson’s plan was hardly inspired by cosmopolitan values or by any sense of the United States’ responsibility for international peace and security. His principal aim was to secure trade routes for the United States in the Mediterranean and to alter the balance of power in the region in favor of America and at the expenses of England and France, the two great powers that had benefited most from Barbary corsairs’ attacks on foreign shipping (Sofka 520). Further, as Jefferson feared English and French military predominance, he was convinced that the United States needed to build a strong navy and lead action against Barbary to prove to England and France that America had become a formidable enemy whose sovereignty and neutrality ought to be respected in case war broke out in Europe. As Jefferson mentioned in a letter to James Monroe in November 1784, an expedition against Barbary would supply the best possible occasion for increasing the United States’ power and international standing. We ought to begin a naval Power, if we mean to carry on our own commerce. Can we begin it on a more honorable occasion or with a weaker foe? I am of [the] opinion that [John] Paul Jones with half a dozen frigates would totally destroy their commerce: not by attempting bombardments as the Mediterranean states do wherein they act against the whole Barbary force brought to a point, but by constant cruising and cutting them to pieces piecemeal. (Sofka 533) Jefferson’s plan for an anti-piracy confederacy had to be shelved by Congress due to lacking funds, but the occasion for military action arose in 1801 as the pasha of Tripoli Yusuf declared war on the United States on the ground that the Americans had lately paid higher tributes to Algiers than to Tripoli (Sofka 535). Jefferson thus launched a military campaign and signed off on a coup d’état to replace Yusuf with his brother Hamet. The expedition turned out to be a military success, and the American plenipotentiaries were able to conclude a peace deal with Yusuf before the coup was staged. This event was also historically significant as it represented the first of many ground interventions by western powers in the Maghreb region. Later on, in 1830, France’s invasion of Algiers would put an end to the vexed question of Barbary corsairing. The French conquest of the whole country by means, among other things, of scorched earth tactics sadly calls to mind Vattel’s earlier advocacy for a war of extermination against the Algerians. The anti-Barbary “enemy of mankind” rhetoric of Vattel, Jefferson, and later statesmen and diplomats constituted a way of speaking on behalf of humanity and thus legitimize one’s controversial claims and political projects. This universalist language has not always persuaded its audiences but has not become any weaker for that reason alone. In fact, the principal aim for a policymaker such as Jefferson to use the rhetoric of universality was not to truly convince his international public of the validity and sincerity of his claims, but rather to perform the role of the philanthropist and

Barbary corsairs in international law 93 thus avert being charged with acting on the basis of merely national and vested interests. That the fight against Barbary was only staged, not experienced by anybody, as a universal struggle is well illustrated by the actual events of the war promoted by Jefferson. Whilst a few smaller powers like Sweden, Denmark, Piedmont-Sardinia, and the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies provided some logistic and financial assistance for the attack on Tripoli, the Americans alone carried out military operations as Jefferson wished to avoid “entangling alliances” and allow the United States to take full diplomatic and strategic advantage of the war to the detriment of European rivals (Sofka 540). England’s and France’s abstention from the anti-piracy operation clearly showed that the talk of a common fight against enemies of mankind was a rhetorical formula that barely hid deep political disagreements within the West itself.

Conclusion That Vattel and Jefferson used universalist vocabularies for dubious purposes does not constitute evidence that the idea of universality as such is not beneficial in some important way. In Vattel’s lifetime and beyond, universalist ideals have at times been deployed for emancipatory causes and humanitarian projects, whereas accommodationism has occasionally sustained a power-focused view of international affairs buttressing the status quo or yielding to great powers’ pressure. At some points in history, accommodating approaches have legitimized spheres of influence, “large spaces” led by hegemonic countries (Schmitt 2009), and appeasement policies remembered by posterity as utter failures. Likely, there has never been a clear-cut alternative between rationalism and accommodationism from which to pick the perfect theory. Rather, a variety of rationalist and accommodating discourses have emerged, operated, and transformed in various historical and political contexts, sometimes intermingling in hybrid forms yet sometimes prevailing over each other in a perceptible manner. For instance, the early modern accommodationism governing the relations between Europe, the Ottoman Empire, and the Barbary States coexisted with a parallel rationalist discourse that legitimized European colonial domination in other parts of the world. Yet in the second half of the eighteenth century, universalist discourse gained the upper hand in the writings of Vattel and others advocating the obliteration of accommodating practices. Later on, in the nineteenth century, an accommodating vocabulary reasserted itself through the doctrine of the spheres of influence, yet again accompanied by a seemingly contrasting universalist and rationalist ideology of civilization vindicated by European powers that felt entitled to speak on behalf of mankind. Thus, between rationalist and accommodating theories, there seems to be no essential antagonism but rather relative difference that public speakers and writers have tried to overcome or emphasize to further particular projects in specific times.

94  Walter Rech It is precisely this relative difference, simultaneously contingent and historically meaningful, that this chapter has attempted to draw out. The chapter has illustrated how accommodating and rationalist doctrines confronted each other and gained scholarly acceptance, thereby giving rise to relatively stable rhetorical patterns that formalized power and legal relationships in the early modern encounter between Europe and Barbary. While contingent and contextual, accommodating and rationalist arguments were stabilized by reiteration and became powerful rhetorical tools for expressing legal claims and political projects, as well as for shaping particular images of Europe and the other.

Notes 1 Broadly speaking, one may as well describe this accommodating framework as a form of legal pluralism, but the latter term has been widely used in recent legal debates and referring to it in this historical piece would be misleading. 2 Charles Henry Alexandrowicz argued that early modern overseas relations were initially established on a footing of equality or near-equality before degenerating by the late nineteenth century at the peak of western imperialist expansion (The European-African Confrontation 69, 89). However, Alexandrowicz likely idealized this kind of primeval equality. Later historical scholarship has rather stressed that Europeans regarded equal relations as a mere necessity given their comparatively weaker position in the early phase of commercial and colonial expansion, and were quick to drop the egalitarian framework as soon as they acquired overwhelming military superiority over native populations (Fisch 21, 33). From this angle, early modern egalitarian or accommodating approaches can hardly be idealized or seen as a source of inspiration for contemporary international law as implied by Alexandrowicz. This chapter certainly maintains that the period 1550–1750 stands out in the history of the law of nations as the one in which an accommodating view of the laws of war emerged, yet no clearcut normative conclusion in favor of accommodationism can be drawn from this alone. 3 The distinction between piracy as an act committed for the sake of private gain and the lawful corso as an activity backed by sovereign authorization went back to the early thirteenth century, as Italian jurists formulated it to regulate conflict between maritime republics (Moschetti 873, 891). 4 The scholars who talked of perpetual war did not mean an actually never-ending war, but rather an enduring and “hereditary” conflict that outlived those who triggered it. The classical example of this warfare was the Social War of 91–88 BC (Florus, bk. 2, ch. 5). 5 This view contradicted Gentili’s opinion in book 1, chapter 15 of the same work, in which he defined all sales by Barbary authorities to be illegal because the goods sold had been appropriated through illicit activities. 6 While Ian Hunter has rightly claimed that the Droit des gens was not grounded on consistent principles, this alone does not mean that Vattel renounced a normative project altogether (Hunter 88). It is important to note that, however Vattel’s theory (like arguably any natural law theory) was fraught with inconsistencies and ambivalences, he still sought to elaborate “strategies of reconciliation” to overcome the contradictions between the utopianism and positivism embedded in the theory (Koskenniemi, From Apology to Utopia 113).

Barbary corsairs in international law 95 7 This argument was advanced in various passages of Vattel’s Droit des gens, e.g. bk. 2, ch. 4, para. 53; bk. 2, ch. 5, para. 62; bk. 2, ch. 5, para. 70; bk. 3, ch. 3, para. 49; bk. 3, ch. 9, para. 168. 8 As the pragmatic lawyer he was, Vattel conceded that most European states, domestic tribunals and prize courts did recognize the Barbary corsairs as lawful belligerents in order to avert interminable controversies over the ownership of the booty (Vattel, Law of Nations, bk. 3, ch. 13, para. 196), yet he believed that this tolerant practice should be abandoned. 9 A similar reading of Vattel’s doctrine of intervention as grounded on security concerns has been given by Koselleck (36).

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96  Walter Rech Fenwick, Charles. “The Authority of Vattel.” The American Political Science Review 7 (1913): 395–410. Fisch, Jörg. “Law as a Means and as an End: Some Remarks on the Function of European and Non-European Law in the Process of European Expansion.” European Expansion and Law: The Encounter of European and Indigenous Law in 19th- and 20th-Century Africa and Asia. Ed. Wolfgang J. Mommsen and Jaap De Moor. New York and Oxford: Berg, 1992. 15–38. Fitzmaurice, Andrew. Sovereignty, Property and Empire, 1500–2000. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Florus, Lucius Annaeus. Epitome de Tito Livio bellorum omnium annorum DCC libri. Trans. Edward S. Forster. London: Heinemann, 1929. Gentili, Alberico. De iure belli libri tres. First published 1598. Ed. Coleman Phillipson. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1933. Gentili, Alberico. Hispanicae advocationis libri duo. First published 1613. Vol. 2. Ed. Frank F. Abbott. New York: Oxford University Press, 1921. Göçek, Fatma Müge. East Encounters West: France and the Ottoman Empire in the Eighteenth Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987. Gong, Gerrit W. The Standard of “Civilisation” in International Society. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984. Groot, Alexander H. de. “Ottoman North Africa and the Dutch Republic in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries.” Revue de l’Occident musulman et de la Méditerranée 39 (1985): 131–47. Grotius, Hugo. De iure belli ac pacis libri tres (The Rights of War and Peace). First published 1625. Ed. Richard Tuck. Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 2005. Grotius, Hugo. De iure praedae commentarius. Written 1604. First published 1868. Trans. Gwladys L. Williams. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1950. Günther, Siegmund. “Weidler, Johann Friedrich.” Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie. Vol. 41. Munich: Königliche Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1896. 453–5. Web. 15 April 2015. www.deutsche-biographie.de/ppn100696198.html?anchor=adb. Haggenmacher, Peter. Grotius et la doctrine de la guerre juste. Paris: PUF, 1983. Hübner, Martin. De la saisie des batimens neutres, ou du droit qu’on les Nations belligérantes d’arrêter les navires des peuples amis. Vol. 1. The Hague, 1759. Hunter, Ian. “Law, War, and Casuistry in Vattel’s Jus Gentium.” Parergon 28.2 (2011): 87–104. Irwin, Ray W. The Diplomatic Relations of the United States with the Barbary Powers. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1931. Isnardi Parente, Margherita. “Introduzione.” I sei libri dello stato. By Jean Bodin. Vol. 1. Ed. Margherita Isnardi Parente and Diego Quaglioni. Torino: Utet, 1964– 1997. 11–100. Jouannet, Emmanuelle. Vattel et l’émergence doctrinale du droit international classique. Paris: Pedone, 1998. Kammel, Frank Matthias. “Gefährliche Heiden und gezähmte Exoten: Bemerkungen zum europäischen Türkenbild im 17. und frühen 18. Jahrhundert.” Frieden und Krieg in der Frühen Neuzeit. Ed. Ronald Asch, Wulf Eckart Voß and Martin Wrede. Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2001. 503–25. Koselleck, Reinhart. Kritik und Krise. Eine Studie zur Pathogenese der bürgerlichen Welt. 3rd ed. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1973. Koskenniemi, Martti. From Apology to Utopia: The Structure of International Legal Argument. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

Barbary corsairs in international law 97 Koskenniemi, Martti. The Gentle Civilizer of Nations: The Rise and Fall of International Law 1870–1960. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Krüger, Paul and Theodor Mommsen, eds. Digesta Iustiniani Augusti. Corpus iuris civilis. Vol. 1. Berlin: Weidmann, 1911. Malone, Dumas. Jefferson and His Time. Vol. 2. Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Company, 1951. Manning, William O. Commentaries on the Law of Nations. London: Sweet, 1839. Mégret, Frédéric. “From ‘Savages’ to ‘Unlawful Combatants’: A Postcolonial Look at International Humanitarian Law’s ‘Other.’” International Law and Its Others. Ed. Anne Orford. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. 265–317. Miéville, China. Between Equal Rights: A Marxist Critique of International Law. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2006. Moschetti, Cesare Maria. “Pirateria.” Enciclopedia del diritto. Vol. 33. Ed. Francesco Calasso. Milan: Giuffrè, 1958–95. Mössner, Manfred. Die Völkerrechtspersönlichkeit und die Völkerrechtspraxis der Barbareskenstaaten. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1968. Nuzzo, Luigi. Origini di una scienza. Diritto internazionale e colonialismo nel XIX secolo. Frankfurt: Klostermann, 2011. Oppenheim, Lassa. The Future of International Law. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1921. Quaglioni, Diego. I limiti della sovranità. Il pensiero di Jean Bodin nella cultura politica e giuridica dell’età moderna. Padova: Cedam, 1992. Rech, Walter. Enemies of Mankind: Vattel’s Theory of Collective Security. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2013. Robinson, Christopher. Reports of Cases Argued and Determined in the High Court of Admiralty; Commencing with the Judgments of the Right Hon. Sir William Scott, Michaelmas Term 1798. Vol. 4. London: Strahan, 1812. Schmitt, Carl. Völkerrechtliche Großraumordnung mit Interventionsverbot für raumfremde Mächte. Ein Beitrag zum Reichsbegriff im Völkerrecht. First published 1940. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2009. Silvestrini, Gabriella. “Justice, War, and Inequality. The Unjust Aggressor and the Enemy of the Human Race in Vattel’s Theory of the Law of Nations.” Grotiana 31 (2010): 44–68. Sofka, James R. “The Jeffersonian Idea of National Security: Commerce, the Atlantic Balance of Power, and the Barbary War, 1786–1805.” Diplomatic History 21.4 (1997): 519–44. Stapelbroek, Koen. “Universal Society, Commerce and the Rights of Neutral Trade: Martin Hübner, Emer de Vattel and Ferdinando Galiani.” COLLeGIUM: Studies Across Disciplines in the Humanities and Social Sciences 3.4 (2008): 63–89. Web. 15 April 2015. https://helda.helsinki.fi/bitstream/handle/10138/25780/04_stapelbroek_2008_4.pdf?sequence=1. Testa, Ignace de, ed. Recueil des traités de la Porte Ottomane avec les puissances étrangères. Vol. 1. Paris: Amyot, 1864. Tuck, Richard. The Rights of War and Peace: Political Thought and the International Order from Grotius to Kant. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. van Bynkershoek, Cornelius. Quaestionum juris publici libri duo. First published 1737. Vol. 2. Trans. Tenney Frank. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1930. van Ittersum, Martine J. Profit and Principle: Hugo Grotius, Natural Rights Theories and the Rise of Dutch Power in the East Indies (1595–1615). Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2006.

98  Walter Rech Vattel, Emer de. Défense du système Leibnitien contre les objections et les imputations de M. de Crousaz. Leiden: Jean Luzac, 1741. Vattel, Emer de. Droit des gens, ou principes de la loi naturelle appliqués à la conduite des nations et des souverains. London: Neuchâtel, 1758. Vattel, Emer de. The Law of Nations, or, Principles of the Law of Nature Applied to the Conduct and Affairs of Nations and Sovereigns. Ed. Bela Kapossy and Richard Whatmore. Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 2008. Voltaire. Le siècle de Louis XIV. First published 1751. Paris: Librairie Générale Française, 2005. Weidler, Johann Friedrich. De quaestione iuris gentium utrum praeda Salensibus Afris erepta vindicari possit. Wittenberg: Eichsfeld, 1735. Wheaton, Henry. History of the Law of Nations in Europe and America from the Earliest Times to the Treaty of Washington. Vol. 2. New York: Gould, Banks & Co., 1845. Ziegler, Karl-Heinz. “The Peace Treaties of the Ottoman Empire with European Christian Powers.” Peace Treaties and International Law in European History. Ed. Randall Lesaffer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 338–64.

4 “Free, unfree, captive, slave” António de Saldanha, a late sixteenth-century captive in Marrakesh Peter Mark Christian captivity in North Africa From the thirteenth century Reconquista through the seventeenth century, many Christians found themselves captives of North African Muslims in Morocco and in the Ottoman Empire (which extended west to Algeria).1 Especially vulnerable were people living along the Iberian littoral, as well as seafarers in the Mediterranean and along the Atlantic Coast, and the Christian inhabitants of Portuguese colonies in North Africa. Both in the North African city states of Tunis, Tripoli and Algiers, nominally belonging to the Ottoman Empire, and in Morocco (which was never part of the Ottoman realm), hundreds of thousands of captives faced two possible destinies: either they were ransomed by the Crown or the Church (or, for wealthy nobility, by their families), or they faced a life in captivity. Unless one belonged to the nobility, the chances of being ransomed were slight. It is often difficult to distinguish between “captive” and “slave.” Some scholars differentiate on the basis of whether the state of unfreedom was temporary or permanent (Braga 20–21).2 But this tends to be an ex post facto definition, one that, furthermore, does not make allowance for widely varying treatment of the captives, nor for whatever expectations they themselves may have entertained of being liberated. Further, one might ask whether the fact of being liberated in old age, after a long captivity of forced labor, necessarily changes one’s previous status of unfreedom. Other scholars of North Africa define “captives” as those prisoners who were held primarily for their ransom value and “slaves” as those used primarily for their work value.3 This seems a more useful definition. Sometimes, however, the categories seem to conflate, as when captives are well-treated but nevertheless put to work. Such was the case in Marrakesh under Al-Mansur. There was another way Christian slaves could improve their treatment and, in some cases, obtain legal freedom: through conversion. Those Christians who converted to Islam were known as “renegados” or “elches.” The practice was not uncommon. Bartolomé and Lucile Bennassar, in their seminal study of Christian converts to Islam, estimate that roughly 300,000

100  Peter Mark Christian captives in the Maghreb converted to Islam between 1550 and 1700 (Bennassar and Bennassar 174). Age at the time of capture was certainly among the factors that correlated with how likely an individual was to convert. Most converts had been captured as children or as adolescents. One of the seminal events in the early modern history of the western Maghreb was the Battle of Al-Kasr Kebir [Alcazar-quivir] in August 1578, where the Portuguese King Sebastian, who had unwisely invaded Morocco, was killed and nearly 2,500 of his soldiers were taken captive by the victorious forces of Ahmed Al-Mansur.4 Al-Mansur, during his 25-year reign as Sultan, would establish a commercial empire based on both the transSaharan trade and commerce with Europe. He also transformed Marrakesh into an architectural and commercial center. Some of the Portuguese captured at al-Kasr-Kebir were children. When young children became captives they were culturally far more malleable than adults. They could be brought up as Muslims and integrated fully into Moroccan society. For this reason, special effort was sometimes expended in Iberia to ransom the youngest captives immediately. Nevertheless, on occasion, individuals were repatriated to Europe only after decades living as Muslims. Not surprisingly, conversion often came after the captives had lost faith that they would be ransomed. It is, however, clear that some renegados practiced their newly chosen religion with conviction, a fact that one might deduce when one considers that for adult men, conversion from Christianity to Islam entailed the rather painful operation of circumcision. Indeed, there was clearly a wide range of personal reasons for conversion, from calculated self-interest to the split experience of being both Christian and Muslim, to the profound experience of religious conversion. In this respect, conversion to Islam, sometimes under duress, may be likened to the range of motivations and religious experiences that characterized Portuguese Jews who, at the same historical moment, were forced to become New Christians. Of the several hundred thousand Christians who were held captive in North Africa between 1530 and 1780, only five percent ultimately regained their freedom (Clarence-Smith and Eltis 153). Antonio Saldanha was among that fortunate minority. Saldanha lived for 14 years as a hostage in Marrakesh in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Saldanha’s detailed first-person narrative of his long captivity, along with what one might term a “professional friendship,” or a relationship of respect, with the Sultan Ahmed al-Mansur, is the primary source for information about military exploits, about the organization of labor, as well as about the treatment of Christian captives and the creation of a local weapons industry in Marrakesh during Al-Mansur’s reign. Saldanha’s narrative is also noteworthy for its generally positive tone toward the Sultan. A fine scholarly transcription and critical edition of Saldanha’s original Portuguese text, along with a meticulous French translation by Léon Bourdon, makes this seminal primary document accessible to modern scholars.

Saldanha, a late sixteenth-century captive 101 The prodigious publication, entitled Cronica de Almançor Sultão de Marrocos (1578–1603), is greatly enhanced by an excellent introductory essay and extensive critical notes, all by the Portuguese historian António Dias Farinha. Dias Farinha’s contribution actually constitutes a definitive biography of this member of the Portuguese nobility. Saldanha himself, son of Aires de Saldanha, the Portuguese Governor of Tanger (Tangiers) and later Viceroy of India, was finally ransomed in 1605. The younger Saldanha was taken captive not at the Battle of Al-Kasr-Kebir, but a few years later, the consequence of a small-scale, but equally ill-advised captive-hunting sortie from the Portuguese fortress-enclave of Tangiers. Instead of capturing Muslims to hold for ransom, Saldanha found himself a captive of Ahmed Al-Mansur. Historians today may be grateful for the younger Saldanha’s ill-conceived sortie, since the resulting 14-year captivity has provided us with a fascinating and detailed account of Al-Mansur’s reign, by a man who evidently came to know the Sultan rather well. What can we say about the reliability or the objectivity of the Chronica? In other words, can it be read as a historical document? Several historical factors suggest that the answer is “yes.” First, the manuscript was probably written, and was certainly completed, long after the author’s return to Portugal. This removes any likelihood that Saldanha deliberately biased his account in order to curry favor with Al-Mansur. And Saldanha’s account is not entirely laudatory. Mansur is depicted as a highly intelligent, even brilliant strategist and diplomat as well as an innovative organizer of local industry (weapons production) and agriculture (sugar plantations in the Atlas Mountains). He is also presented – except for one notable incident where he ordered the execution of seven Christian captives for overtly proselytizing – as a generally humane captor. On the latter point alone, the contemporary reader may entertain the suspicion that Saldanha shows just a tinge of what, four centuries later, would come to be known as “the Stockholm syndrome.” Of course, Saldanha’s elevated social status gave him a privileged position, even as a captive. Mansur would have appreciated his value and may well have accorded him special favors. This in turn may help to explain why Saldanha offers such a positive view of the man whose prisoner he effectively was. The majority of Portuguese captives of the 1578 battle were not so fortunate. Another contemporary Portuguese source provides confirmation of Saldanha’s depiction of the Sultan as humane toward his Christian captives. Fr. Bernardo da Cruz, alias Antonio de Váena (1541–1579) writes that the Sultan not only allowed the Christians freely to practice their religion, but also made it possible for them to live in greater comfort than they were accustomed to in Portugal (qtd. in Braga 56).5 Indeed, North African Muslim societies often afforded greater possibility for social promotion than did Christian societies of the Mediterranean basin. When Al-Mansur came to power in 1578, he was confronted by the challenge of developing an armaments industry. His solution was both novel and

102  Peter Mark successful. He devised a system that enabled him to take advantage both of manpower – Portuguese captives from the battle – and of the latest technological expertise. That expertise was held by Lisbon weapons manufacturers. Indeed, Portuguese weapons were already much in demand as part of a secret and illegal export trade to West Africa. Historians of the Islamic Maghreb have engaged in a debate regarding the use of “captive” and “slave” to describe Christians who had been captured by Muslims in North Africa. António Dias Farinha, for example, argues that the oficiais (see below) who worked for Al-Mansur held a somewhat transitional status, and that they were definitely not “abid” or “slaves.”6 In view of the modern connotations of the term “slave,” it might be preferable when possible, to use the term “unfree” or “captive” when referring to these men. On the other hand, the historian does have the option to use the term “slave” in a nuanced manner that clearly indicates that these individuals were not treated as chattel. This context may be likened to the situation in late nineteenth-century Zanzibar. In the Swahili city-states of the East African coast, Thomas Vernet describes “slaves considered more as personal clients than chattles, the productivity of slaves being rarely more important than their number and fidelity” (2). In this chapter, I use “captives” to describe those European Christians who served at the court of the Sultan Ahmed Al-Mansur. They definitely did not have the option to leave, although they did have reason to hope that they might eventually be ransomed. Some of them also had the option to change their status from “unfree” by converting to Islam. The key innovation in Al-Mansur’s effort to develop a local arms industry and modernize his armed forces was his effort to attract free European artisans to settle in Marrakesh. Saldanha explains that the Sultan also set up “factories” to produce firearms and light mortars that could be disassembled for transport. The result was that there were two groups of Europeans involved in the Moroccan arms industry: the craftsmen who had come of their own accord and the earlier captives of the Battle of Al-Kasr Kebir. Saldanha writes: And not content with such a great evil, he caused to arrive in Morocco the Masters of all of these arts, for the great projects that the Cherif had them undertake to ennoble in all respects his kingdom.7 (33) By 1583 Mansur had established his own armaments industry, with a crucial role played by English, Flemish, and French artisans: He created an “arms house” where many escopetas [primitive guns], espadas and accouterments for horses were fashioned with complete perfection . . .” (Saldanha 83).8 In each of these factories, the artisans, consisting of English, Dutch, and French masters, worked together with oficiais – who were not slaves – and with the moços, the captives who, as young men, had accompanied King Sebastian to Morocco in 1578.

Saldanha, a late sixteenth-century captive 103 The term “oficiais” is significant. It generally refers to artisans who were in the process of learning a craft. Oficiais may be relatively experienced and able to work pretty much on their own. But they have not yet been formally recognized as master artisans, a process that entails a practical examination for which they would produce a piece of work that was then carefully examined by a group of “masters.” It goes without saying that, in terms of age, the oficiais were younger than were “masters.”9 The term “moços,” or youths, is hardly an exaggeration, since some of the boys who accompanied King Sebastian to Morocco were as young as seven years old.10 Their age, in turn, has implications for our understanding of the life cycle of Christian captives in North Africa. Someone captured as a small child might face the prospect of an entire life spent in captivity. On the other hand, small children are far more adaptable to cultural change. Some of these children were raised as Muslims. We know about the lives of some of these individuals from Inquisition records. The most frequently cited case is that of Francisco Lopes, who had converted to Islam in North Africa at age seven and who returned to Portugal 26 years later only to be brought before the Inquisition to explain his childhood apostasy (Braga 47).11 Al-Mansur treated not only the masters, but also the moços, or young workers, better than most European captives were treated elsewhere in North Africa. Saldanha himself is, of course, a case in point. As a nobleman, Saldanha represented a significant potential ransom. However, on more than one occasion, negotiations for his ransom broke down at the last moment. This suggests that the Sultan may have valued Saldanha’s presence in Marrakesh as a source of information about Portugal, even more than his potential ransom value. Given that Saldanha clearly praises Al-Mansur’s political and diplomatic skills, one may privilege this hypothesis. In the case of arms makers, the good treatment meted out by the Sultan was precisely because he valued the product of their labor. More broadly, however, the situation of the Marrakesh arms makers, including their treatment as prisoners, is consistent with the status and treatment of weapons producers elsewhere in the Islamic Maghreb. In 1565, the Portuguese Crown issued a decree that established the ransom to be paid for each of the various categories of captives, depending both on their social status and on their profession. A simple worker or soldier’s servant was valued at 60 ounces.12 A blacksmith at 100 ounces. Likewise, a specialist who maintained weapons was worth 90 ounces. A man who made guns, arquebuses or powder was worth 120 ounces. By comparison, a ship’s master was valued at 125. Immediately after Al-Kasr-Kebir, new guidelines for ransoming captives were promulgated. A cavalryman of the royal court was valued at 220 ounces. Moços, the young workers, were valued at 100 to 150, depending on their function (Braga 208).13 Clearly, weapons specialists were highly valued by the Portuguese when it came to deciding which captives to try to ransom. But at the same time, they were also valued by their captors. This could diminish their chances to be

104  Peter Mark freed. Their expertise was probably more valuable to Al-Mansur than any ransom they might have commanded. As Ellen Friedman has observed, this is precisely the group who, during the sixteenth and seventeenth century, were least likely to be freed (145).14 One may well ask whether, in adopting a policy of preferential treatment for his Portuguese captives, Al-Mansur was influenced by practice in the neighboring Ottoman empire. According to the Bennassars, he was. They write: The Ottoman model strongly influenced the founders of the cherifian empire, that is, the late sixteenth-century greater Morocco. Abd el’Melek and his brother Ahmed, the future Al-Mansur, driven from power for a time, from Marrakesh, spent their exile in Istanbul . . . the sultan borrowed from the Ottomans the organization of his army and he also made good use of ‘renegades’ of Christian origin.15 The brief exile in Istanbul in 1574–75 exposed Abd el-Malek and his younger brother, the future Al-Mansur, to the Ottoman model. Mansur would soon adopt this model for incorporating renegats, or Christian converts to Islam into the military.16

A novel way for the state to organize labor Al-Mansur also applied the lessons he had learned from studying Ottoman military forces to his armaments industry. But he transformed that model. Not only did he avail himself of Christian manpower and technical expertise, he also set up a two-tiered structure, with unfree labor in the form of the Portuguese captives working under the direction of the master artisans. These masters were free laborers who had come to Marrakesh from Europe of their own volition, attracted by the prospect of economic opportunity and encouraged by the model of good treatment that the Sultan had established for his Christian captives. This suggests, of course, an additional motive for Al-Mansur’s beneficent treatment of the captives. Saldanha observed that these free workers were for the most part English, French and Dutch. But the overall organization appears to have been modeled after the system of contractors and subcontractors that made Lisbon’s blade weapons industry the most modern in Europe. While the technical expertise was provided by the free master artisans, one suspects that some of the organizational skills for these casas were provided by the Portuguese hostages (probably the oficiais). They would more likely have been familiar with the Lisbon system, based on contracts and subcontracts, than were the non-Portuguese artisans. Portuguese blade weapons, or armas brancas, represented the cutting edge of weapons technology at the end of the sixteenth century. As closerange killing instruments, the Portuguese short sword (terçado) – which, parenthetically, was the ideal cavalry weapon – and the dagger, adarga, were

Saldanha, a late sixteenth-century captive 105 without competition, even from firearms. Portuguese soldiers developed the tactical use of these weapons by replacing the customary shield held in the left hand, with a dagger. From Al-Mansur’s perspective, who better to place in charge of developing a modern weapons industry than Portuguese soldiers and armorers? Al-Mansur’s captives led privileged lives in other respects. For example, they were encouraged to cultivate a vineyard and an olive grove in the gardens of the Sultan’s luxurious palace. They literally enjoyed the fruits of their labor (Saldanha 81).17 Mansur’s opulent gardens were botanically innovative and his immense fish basin, fed by a stream that had been diverted from the Atlas Mountains, constituted an engineering tour de force. In the gardens, there were grafted fruit trees and palm trees. In fact, the Sultan derived benefit from the captives’ agricultural expertise. According to Saldanha, they were encouraged by the Sultan’s generosity to care for the royal gardens. Al-Mansur’s goal was to convince them that they were better off in Marrakesh. But one may also assume that he was engaged in agricultural experimentation. The Christians were definitely captives. Nevertheless, the Sultan’s policy was to treat them well. Does his treatment of the captives suggest that their status should be considered as qualitatively different from slavery? Their status appears to have been distinct from court slaves (‘abd/ abid), a conclusion that I share with António Dias Farinha, author of the annotated edition of Saldanha’s account.18 Here, the categories of “free and unfree labor” may be insufficiently nuanced. Saldanha, whose long years in captivity might well have made him skeptical, wrote: He [the Sultan] ordered that a prison be constructed where the captives might live apart with three doorways like a fortress and walls five ‘braças’ in height and 8 ‘palmas’ in thickness and in which daily Mass was held and where the Divine Offices were administered to perfection. And since the captives lived separated [from the rest of the population] they possessed all of the goods they needed to live well and they could even become wealthy, which the Sultan very much appreciated being told and he saw to it that they were very well treated. (Saldanha 83) This passage is of crucial importance, because it illustrates clearly the duality or contradiction of the Europeans’ situation. They were prisoners yet, at the same time, they were well-treated and were granted religious freedom . . . precisely because they were segregated from the Muslim population. In addition, they were provided with whatever goods they might need so that they could even become wealthy – without, however, being freed from their captive status. It was not uncommon for Christian captives held in North Africa to be granted regular access to a church and to religious services. In sixteenth

106  Peter Mark century Algiers, for example, Spanish prisoners were permitted to hold Christian observances (Friedman 81). And the prisão that Saldanha describes Al-Mansur as having constructed resembles the seventeenth-century Algerian baños, which also contained churches for the captives.19 Al-Mansur’s motives in providing his Christian prisoners with a church and access to religious services were distinct from, but reflected the Muslim tradition of according dhimmi, or protected status, to selected Jewish and Christian inhabitants of the Dar-al-Islam.20 Furthermore, captives who were at least reasonably content with their situation were more likely to be good workers than they would be if abused and denied spiritual solace. Saldanha mentions Jews who resided in Marrakesh, including some who worked closely with Al-Mansur. These individuals clearly were dhimmi, even though Saldanha never uses that term. For example, the Sultan’s interpreter, a man named Xeque Rut, was a Jew.21 Members of the resident Jewish population also served as diplomats. Shortly after Al-Mansur’s death, Jan Pallache, for example, began his service to subsequent Sultans, as ambassador to Amsterdam and later to England. By the early seventeenth century, Moroccan Jews also served as intermediaries to negotiate the ransom of Christian captives. In Amsterdam by midcentury, city officials were relying upon the services of Dutch Jews who had commercial and family connections in Morocco to ransom captive Christian seamen. It is significant that the Dutch notary records specifically refer to these transactions as “Vrijkoping uit slaverij [purchasing freedom out of slavery]”.22 The Dutch were using the same term for Christian captives in North Africa that they applied to African captives bought in Africa and sold in Brazil and Curaçao. Once again, we face the problem of terminology and of corresponding categories of “free” versus “unfree.” Mid-seventeenthcentury terms imply that varying or even quite distinct conditions of unfreedom were conflated into a single category. Unlike the Jews in Marrakesh, however, the Christians to whom Mansur provided a church and priest, a doctor and the possibility of financial enrichment after the 1578 battle were not free; while they had some control over their own labor power, they did not control their bodies.

Conclusion Several aspects of Christian captivity in sixteenth-century Marrakesh assume a greater historical significance in the context of the coeval Iberian expansion into the Atlantic world. First, the fact that European Christians could – and did – find themselves captured or enslaved, certainly had an impact upon how Portuguese merchants in West Africa viewed their own participation in the commerce in human captives. In other words, the category of potential captives included Europeans as well as Africans (both North African Muslims and sub-Saharan Africans). It must not have been as

Saldanha, a late sixteenth-century captive 107 easy as some historians have concluded to establish neatly separated categories of potential slaves based on physical characteristics. This circumstance certainly warrants further consideration. Second, European captives in the Maghreb were differentiated on the basis of social class, with members of the nobility far more likely to be ransomed. Significantly, in late sixteenthcentury West Africa, members of local African elites who found themselves in European captivity also had a reasonable expectation of regaining their freedom. Here too, further research is clearly warranted.23

Notes 1 An early version of this paper was presented at the Faculdade de Lettras, Universidade de Lisboa, on 4 April 2014. The present version of this paper was presented at the conference “Travail libre/travail forcé,” Ecole des Hautes Etudes/ Panthéon-Sorbonne, Paris, on 9 January 2015. 2 Braga cites José Luis Cortes Lopez, La Esclavitud Negra en la España Peninsular (Salamanca, 1989). 3 I wish to express my gratitude to Luís Sousa, doctoral candidate, Universidade de Lisboa, Faculdade de Lettras, História de Africa, for sharing this perspective, which is part of his dissertation. 4 Antonio Saldanha estimates 2,400 captives from the battle. Bennassar and Bennassar, who strangely fail to cite Saldanha, propose between 2,000 and 3,000 captives (279). 5 Fr. Cruz’s work, Chronica d’El-Rei D. Sebastião, published in 1837 and again in 1903, is cited at length in Braga 56. 6 Personal communication by António Dias Farinha, 4 April 2014, Lisbon. 7 “E não contente com esta tam grande maldade foram parar a Marrocos os mestres de todos estes oficios por os grossos partidos que o xarife lhe fazia pera em tudo enobrecer seus reino” (Saldanha 33). 8 “Fez ua casa de armas onde se faziam muitas escopetas, espadas e todas as huarnicões de cavalo com toda a perfeição . . .” (Saldanha 83). 9 For an explanation of the distinction between oficiais and mestres, I am indebted to the architectural historian Helder Carita; also to the historian of the history of weapons in the Maghreb, Luís Sousa; and to my colleague, the historian José da Silva Horta; and to António Dias Farinha. 10 Bennassar and Bennassar write that “l’armée de Don Sebastien comprenait . . . un grand nombre d’adolescents ou d’enfants de dix à quatorze ans” (279). 11 In fact, ransomed or escaped captives who had converted to Islam while in captivity were expected to report to the Inquisition of their own accord. If they did so, their treatment by the Holy Office tended to be light and they might hope to avoid punishment (Bennassar and Bennassar). 12 An onça (of gold) was in turn valued at 350 reais (Braga 207). 13 Oficiais are not listed. 14 “Some captives who had valuable skills, such as gun founders . . . were unlikely ever to be rescued” (Friedman 145). 15 “Le modèle ottoman influence considérablement les fondateurs de l’empire chérifien, le grand Maroc de la fin du XVIe siècle. Abd el-Melek et son frère Ahmed, le future El-Mansour, écartés un temps du pouvoir à Marrakesh, vécurent leur exil à Istanbul . . . le sultan saadien emprunte aux Ottomans l’organisation de son armée et il fit grand usage des renegats d’origine chrétienne” (Bennassar and Bennassar). 16 See also Abitbol 180.

108  Peter Mark 17 “Havia nesta [jardim] cerca grande cantidade de vinhos e muitos oliveiras e do mais disto se logravam os cativos que o cultivavem” (Saldanha 81). 18 Personal communication by António Dias Farinha, 4 April 2014, Lisbon. 19 Friedman describes the baños as “large corrals surrounded by small rooms” (60). 20 Dhimmi were Christians or Jews who had been granted the right to live in Muslim lands. They were expected to pay a special tax and they were prohibited from proselytizing – a restriction that weighed far more heavily on some Christians than it did on most Jews – but they were otherwise free to practice their own religion. 21 The fact that a Jew would himself be referred to by a Muslim name (and honorific), Xeque or Cheikh, suggests cordial relations between Muslims and Jews, and hints at a deeper complexity of religious identities. 22 Gemeente Amsterdam Stadsarchief, Notariel archief (NA); NA 1557 A fol. 89, 91, 93, 95, 97, 99, 101, 103, 109, 111, 113, 115, 117, 119, 121, 123, March 18–19, 1649. 23 Together with my colleague José da Silva Horta, University of Lisbon, I am currently engaged in a comparative study of European captivity in North Africa and West African captivity in the Cape Verde Islands and Portugal. Historical evidence strongly suggests that in both instances, captives (or “slaves”) who were members of the elite sometimes did return to their initial status as free. See Mark and Horta (“Senegambian Sephardic Communities”).

References Abitbol, Michel. Histoire du Maroc. Paris: Perrin, 2009. Ba, Idrissa. “Mythes et cultes du serpent chez les Soninkés et les Peuls: Étude comparative.” Oráfrica, revista de oralidad Africana 8 (2012): 159–69. Bennassar, Bartolomé, and Lucile Bennassar. Les chrétiens d’Allah: L’histoire extraordinaire des renégats, XVIe et XVIIe siècles. Paris: Perrin, 2006. Braga, Isabel M. R. M. D. Entre a cristandade e o Islao, séculos XV–XVII: Cativos e renegados nas franjas de duas sociedades em confronto. Ceuta: Instituto de Estudios Ceutíes, 1998. Clarence-Smith, William G., and David Eltis. “White Servitude.” The Cambridge World History of Slavery. Ed. Eltis and Stanley L. Engerman. Vol. 3. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Emon, Anver M. Religious Pluralism and Islamic Law: “Dhimmis” and Others in the Empire of Law. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Ennaji, Mohammed. Le sujet et le Mamelouk: Esclavage, pouvoir et religion dans le monde Arabe. Paris: Mille et une nuits, 2007. Friedman, Ellen G. Spanish Captives in North Africa in the Early Modern Age. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983. Lovejoy, Paul. “The Context of Enslavement in West Africa.” Slaves, Subjects and Subversives: Blacks in Colonial Latin America. Ed. Jane Landers and Barry Robinson. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2006. 9–38. Mark, Peter, and José S. Horta. “Senegambian Sephardic Communities in the Seventeenth Century: Was ‘Racial’ Thought an Issue?” Conf. Colonial History – Sephardic Perspectives. University of Potsdam. 27–29 Oct. 2015.

Saldanha, a late sixteenth-century captive 109 Mark, Peter, and José S. Horta. The Forgotten Diaspora: Jewish Communities in West Africa and the Making of the Atlantic World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Marushiakova, Elena, and Vesselin Popov. “Gypsy Slavery in Wallachia and Moldavia.” Nationalisms Today. Ed. Tomasz Kamusella and Krzysztof Jaskulowski. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Saldanha, António, António D. Farinha, and Léon Bourdon. Crónica de Almançor, Sultão de Marrocos (1578–1603). Lisbon: Instituto de Investigação Científica Tropical, 1997. Vernet, Thomas. “East Africa: Slave Migrations.” The Encyclopedia of Global Human Migration. Ed. Immanuel Ness. Oxford: Blackwell, 2013.

Part 2

Home and Hybridity

5 “Renegades” Converts to Islam in American Barbary captivity narratives of the 1790s Anna Diamantouli From the sixteenth century onwards, the term renegade, or renegado, was employed to refer to Christian individuals who had converted to Islam.1 Originating from the Spanish renegado, or apostate, the term first appeared in English usage when Richard Hakluyt referred to one who had renounced their faith. These individuals who had “turned Turk” or “taken the Turban,” struck English imagination from the early modern period when English travelers, merchants and seamen who visited Ottoman lands directly encountered Islam and encountered converts to “Mahometanism.”2 The renegade’s acts of apostasy constituted a common subject of both literary and theological writings from the sixteenth century onwards, becoming a topic of church sermons as well as tavern yarns (Burton 40). By the mid-seventeenth century this figure had evolved into a significant dramatic type on the English stage, appearing in a number of plays, most notably Robert Daborn’s A Christian Turned Turk (1612) and Philip Massinger’s The Renegado (1623).3 The renegade also featured prominently in captivity narratives set in the Barbary States. These narratives, which contain accounts, both fictional and non-fictional, of captives in North Africa, had emerged in England at least as early as 1563, having begun to establish themselves as belonging to a recognizable genre by 1622.4 John Rawlins published one of the earliest of these accounts.5 He described Christians who had “renounced their faith and become renegadoes” (103). A notable early American example of such an engagement can be found in Cotton Mather’s The Glory of Goodness, which, in recounting the redemption obtained for English Barbary captives, describes that in the history of such captivity: “there was now and then a wretched Christian, who Renounced Christianity & Embraced Mahometism” (39). While there has been considerable critical interest in the literary figure of the renegade in British studies of the early modern period, the renegade in American narratives of the late eighteenth century has not generally been subjected to as much critical analysis.6 Before the “transnational turn” in American studies, exceptionalist conceptions of the American

114  Anna Diamantouli nation left no space for the study of the renegade, a figure who belongs to a transnational literary tradition and who occupies an intercultural position. However, in recent years, a number of critics working within the field of American Studies have foregrounded the significance of this literary figure in Barbary captivity narratives of the New Republic.7 Despite these calls, there remains a marked lack of critical attention on the renegade as it appears in the literature of the late eighteenth century, and particularly in the decade of the 1790s, during which the Barbary captivity narratives caught and held the attention of American readers. American accounts of captivity in the Barbary States of Tunis, Tripoli, Algiers and Morocco had made their first appearance in 1680.8 However, in the decade of the 1790s more particularly, tens of poems, plays, and autobiographical accounts engaging with captivity in the Barbary States appeared primarily in stand-alone publications, but also within periodicals, almanacs, newspapers and pamphlets. The majority of these texts were written and first published in America during the decade of study, while a number were republished, having first appeared in England. The rise in popularity of these narratives took place during a critical moment in the history of the American nation, following American Independence. Their popularity also coincided with the growing number of American captives held in North African bondage as a result of growing diplomatic tensions between the United States and its North African counterparts. The present chapter provides a dedicated survey of Barbary captivity narratives of this key decade, presenting a comprehensive list of accounts written or published in American imprints in the late eighteenth century, establishing a broader understanding of the genre’s publication history. Furthermore, this chapter marks a first step towards restoring to critical view the figure of the renegade by putting forward a systematic review of how these narratives engaged with the renegade, reinstating this figure’s importance within such narratives. In a number of the captivity narratives under study, following their capture, a captive appears before the ruler of the captor Barbary State and attempts are shown to coerce the captive to convert to Islam. This is a common means of engaging with conversion and is notably evident in Robert White’s tale: “A Curious, Historical and Entertaining Narrative of the Captivity and almost unheard-of Sufferings and cruel Treatment of Mr. Robert White, Mariner.” White describes how he is taken by an Algerine cruizer, carried into Algiers and presented before the Dey. He states that: “[The Dey] proposed if we would embrace the Mahometan religion, we should have our liberty; but if we could not comply with this offer, we should immediately be sent as Slaves on board a Row-Galley, and be chained to an oar all our lives.” What follows is an account of White’s refusal to convert: We answered, that we had always found our GOD to be a good and just GOD, and we had rather endure all the cruelty and punishments

Renegades in Barbary captivity narratives 115 he could inflict, than to forsake the GOD who had preserved us all our lives. This answer so enraged the Dey, he immediately ordered the Capt. and Mate to be sent to the mines; myself and 18 shipmates were sent on board a cruising Row-galley. Such attempts by captives at warding off conversion have traditionally and consistently been emphasised as a literary strategy for reinforcing the superiority of the Christian victims of captivity, showing them as possessing the “fortitude to overcome [their] ordeal,” and resisting the threat posed by another culture.9 The following passage from Cotton Mather’s early eighteenth century narrative The Glory of Goodness supports such an assertion: These our Friends, have not thus Resisted unto Blood. But yet they have not been without Bloody Temptations. And, O my Hearers, Will you not now Glorify the Faithfulness of our Lord Jesus Christ, who would not suffer these our Friends to be Tempted above what they were able, but made even their Temptations to be their Preservations! (42) By resisting the religious and moral “threat” posed by conversion, the above passages can, as Degenhardt has claimed in reference to the early modern stage, reshape “threats of conversion into opportunities for Christian triumph” (21); their temptations became their preservations. As suggested in the passage from Robert White’s narrative, conversion could also signal freedom from the labour that captives were expected to perform. This is evident in the anonymously published poem The American in Algiers, or the Patriot of Seventy-Six in Captivity, where the speaker in the first of the poem’s two cantos describes being captured while on board a frigate and taken to Algiers. He is led through the streets of Algiers, being “insulted all the way,” and in “rat’ling chains” he is conducted to the Dey. In the subsequent encounter, the Dey urges the American captive to convert to Islam in order to gain his freedom: Vile wretch, (said he) my subjects rule the main; My God commanded, and Mahomet gave Full leave to make each Infidel a slave; But if you’ll turn Mahometan at once, And all your former principles renounce, Swear by that God who reigns in paradise, You hate a Christian, and a Jew despise; That Mah’met is the prophet of the Lord, The blest revealer of his Holy Word; My princely favor shall to you extend, And break the chains that o’er your limbs impend. (14)

116  Anna Diamantouli However, contrary to such representations of the Dey encouraging conversion and in turn breaking the captive’s chains, it was not necessarily in the best interests of Barbary governments for captives to convert; conversion would deprive them of the captive’s “labour and the benefit of their ransom” (Stevens [1797] 66). This view was expressed in the two major American histories of Algiers which were published in the late eighteenth century. The first was Mathew Carey’s A Short Account of Algiers, of which there were two editions published in 1794.10 The second account was James Wilson Steven’s An Historical and Geographical Account of Algiers, which covered a wider scope than Carey’s text but was less influential, going through two publications in 1797 and 1800 respectively.11 Stevens states that the Algerines “neither force nor tempt any of the Christian slaves to change their religion; as it is not their interest that they should be made converts; for in that case they lose the benefit of their ransoms” ([1800] 251). As a result, Stevens claims that “[t]he present number of renegados in Algiers is very small,” and contrary to claims that the renegade would be at liberty upon conversion, this liberty was limited as they were “prohibited from leaving the kingdom of Algiers under penalty of death,” and were “never delivered up upon the demand of their nation” ([1800] 277). Despite this, attempts by the ruler of the captor Barbary State to have the captive convert remained a prevalent engagement in Barbary captivity narratives. Renegades who converted in order to benefit in some way also feature commonly in these accounts. Rather than conversions that came about as a result of religious conviction, these conversions of convenience, or “opportunistic conversions” as Jocelyne Dakhlia has labelled them, involved captives who converted to Islam as it was “the easiest way,” or to gain riches and advance their positions and roles within the captor state (qtd. in Dursteler). This is evident in Penelope Aubin’s popular tale The Noble Slaves: Being an Entertaining History of the Surprising Adventures, and the Remarkable Deliverances from Algerine Slavery, of Several Spanish Noblemen and Ladies of Quality.12 Penelope Aubin’s The Noble Slaves was first published in England in 1722 but was reprinted in the United States three times following the resolution of the Algerine Crisis between 1797 and the decade’s end. Aubin describes a renegado who upon converting gains vast riches and advances his position in Algerine society: “a servant entered the room, a renegado Spaniard, as wicked as hell, and one who renouncing Christianity, had endeared himself to the Governor of Algiers, and was by him made rich, and used by him for his beastly pleasure”(49–50). Rufus Chetwood’s account was another English narrative that was first published in England in the 1720s and was republished numerous times throughout the eighteenth century in London, Dublin, Edinburgh and Wigan.13 However, the first American publication of Chetwood’s

Renegades in Barbary captivity narratives 117 narrative appeared in 1792 and the novel went through five subsequent publications by 1800.14 The Voyage and Adventures of Captain Robert Boyle also presents an instance of conversion for gain, as the protagonist describes an encounter with a renegade sailor who admits to falsely possessing an outward appearance of conversion “from the teeth outward” (24): The next morning my master sent for me on shore, by a young renegado sailor born at London, whose Christian name (I learnt) was Francis Corbert, but had exchanged it for Mustapha; – a good intelligent young fellow, and one that was perfect master of the mathematics . . . I asked him why he could forget the Saviour of the world to turn Mahometan . . . he thought it better to trust God with his soul, than those barbarous wretches with his body. I thought it was a pretty free declaration to one that was an utter stranger to him. (23–24) Like the renegade sailor in Chetwood’s narrative, Ben Hassan, a leading figure in Susanna Rowson’s play Slaves in Algiers, also typifies the convert who acts upon, as Burton describes in his study of early modern texts, “almost exclusively pragmatic terms” (59).15 The fictitious plot of Rowson’s play, which was first performed in Philadelphia in 1794, centres on female captives and there is no reference to Christian converts to Islam.16 However, the Jewish convert to Islam, Ben Hassan, admits to turning “Mahometan” for personal gain, declaring that he “boarded a ship,” landing safely on Algerine soil and converting as it was “the safest way.” Ben Hassan claims: “I will do everything that is necessary – for my own interest” (25) and indeed, conversion allows Ben Hassan to avoid persecution for his crimes in England and become a very wealthy resident of Algiers. Despite such accounts there are conflicting portrayals concerning the “benefits” of becoming a renegade. The Voyages and Adventures of John Willock, Mariner, a travel narrative first published in England, but republished in America during the decade of the 1790s, describes renegades in Morocco as “seldom arriv[ing] at places of public trust or preferment.” Instead, renegades, who are “more despised by the Christians than the natives . . . are generally employed in the most degrading offices, and in time of war, they are sure to be placed where there is the greatest danger” (188). This brings us to another prevalent means of engaging with the renegade figure in American Barbary captivity narratives. Regardless of any temporary benefit conversion is depicted as granting them, Barbary captivity narratives also describe the graphic and gory fate that befalls renegades. This is indeed the case in A Journal of the Captivity and Sufferings of John Foss, one of the more widely known American Barbary captivity

118  Anna Diamantouli narratives of the period. John Foss was a mariner and one of four known crew members to have survived their Algerine captivity, whose return was enabled by the signing of the treaty between America and Algiers in 1795.17 Upon Foss’s return he edited and published a journal which he claimed to have kept while in captivity. Two editions of Foss’s narrative appeared in 1798, only months apart. The first was comprised primarily of extracts from said journal while the latter, published very shortly afterwards, incorporated additional material taken from previously published texts concerning the Barbary States.18 The latter version features both a first person account and third person accounts, incorporating whole passages from varied sources including passages taken almost verbatim from Mathew Carey’s Short Account of Algiers (1794). The following passages appear in the second edition of Foss’s narrative, which engages in greater depth with the renegade than the first edition.19 In the chapter entitled: “The punishments which are common for Christian Captives, for different offences. For Mahometans and Jews having committed similar crimes, together with some entertaining stories of the punishments inflicted on the Christian slaves, Mahometans, Jews and Renegadoes, which occurred (to my knowledge) during my Captivity, and some accidents which happened,” Foss claims that: “If any Renegado, after embracing the Mahometan religion, deviates from its principles, the most ignominious death immediately follows.” He describes an instance of this that took place during his captivity when a French merchant ship arrived at Algiers: One of the crew (through a mistaken zeal,) expressed an inclination of embracing the Mahometan religion. He was accordingly circumcised, and made as they express it a true believer. On his renouncing the Christian religion, for that of Mahomet, the principal men in the city, made him a present of 5,000 Algerine Sequins. He had not continued above 4 months, in this benighted superstition; before his conscience smote him, and he repented of his folly, for having abandoned the true worship of Jesus Christ, and having embraced that of the imposter Mahomet. (40–41) Regretting his decision and with “weighty remorse” preying upon the renegade’s mind, he “meditat[es] a possibility of his escape”: About the first of July 1795, two English frigates anchored in the bay. The same night he abandoned his riches, stripped himself naked and endeavored to swim to one of them, but was perceived by the centinals on board a guard boat, which was placed between the frigates, and the shore, to prevent any slave making his escape. They rowed

Renegades in Barbary captivity narratives 119 after him and brought him back. They kept him confined on board the boat while morning, then carried him before the Dey, who ordered him to be beheaded immediately. Thus ended the existence of a wretch who was born a Christian, and had exchanged the true religion for Mahometanism. (41) In Foss’s narrative the punishment received by the repenting renegade who attempts to escape the land of captivity is death. Unlike the swift beheading that is visited upon the repenting renegade in Foss’s narrative, a passage entitled “An account of the Persecutions in the States of Barbary,” which features in the 1794 American publication of The New and Complete Book of Martyrs, an American derivative of John Fox’s Actes and Monuments (first published in English in 1563), graphically relays the torture inflicted on the renegades who, regretting their decision to convert, attempt to “reconvert” back to Christianity. Fox relates the punishment carried out by the Algerines, whom he describes as “some of the most perfidious, as well as the most cruel of all the inhabitants of Barbary.” Individuals who turn “Christian [. . .] again, after having changed to the Mahometan persuasion,” are “roasted alive, or thrown from the city walls, and caught upon large sharp hooks, where they hang in a miserable manner several days, and expire in the most exquisite tortures” (Fox 232). Like The New and Complete Book of Martyrs, John Willock’s narrative also illustrates in great detail the torture inflicted on renegades who have been sentenced to death in Morocco by the “emperor who has the sole power of life and death” (189). Willock posits that they are: [P]ut to death in a still more cruel manner [than Christians]; they have a chain fastened around their waist, by which they are dragged from the prison to the place of execution, where they are anointed all over with boiling tallow, then drawn to a stake before a slow fire, where they are allowed to roast while any signs of life appear, and at last the breathless body is cast into the fire. From such wanton cruelties the mind shrinks back with horror. I shall therefore change the subject for one less gloomy. (190) Arguably, one of the most popular narratives engaging with Barbary captivity is the Boston born novelist and playwright Royall Tyler’s fictitious autobiography The Algerine Captive or the Life and Adventures of Doctor Updike Underhill: Six Years a Prisoner among the Algerines. Tyler’s The Algerine Captive differs from the other narratives explored in its engagement with conversion and the renegade figure. There is no grisly and horrible fate awaiting the renegade nor does the captive adamantly refuse to

120  Anna Diamantouli convert, complicating claims of Christian triumph through the overcoming of the “threat” of conversion. While in captivity, and as Underhill is “drooping under [his] daily task,” he is approached by a renegade who “commiserates [his] distresses” and talks of the riches and powers he has gained upon converting to Islam (Tyler 126). He tempts Underhill to visit his friend the Mollah, a Muslim scholar and religious leader, who would “remove [his] scruples” and lead him to “be as free and happy as” he is. The renegade rationally argues that: “If [the Mollah] does not convince you, you may glory in the Christian faith; as that faith will be then founded on rational preference, and not merely on your ignorance of any other religious system” (Tyler 127). Rather than coming about as a result of coercion or in the quest for economic gain, conversion here is presented as a rational spiritual choice, one that has also brought with it wealth and power. Furthermore, contrary to the captive fervently resisting the threat of conversion, Underhill is described as “trembl[ing] for [his] faith, and burst[ing] into tears” (Tyler 130). Thus, the outcome of the encounter between the Mollah and Underhill remains overwhelmingly ambiguous in tone as Underhill is shown to “resume [his] slave’s attire, and [seek] safety in [his] former servitude” (Tyler 136). Notably, as Antonis Balasopoulos has posited: “The comforting reassertion of Christianity’s unchallengeable truth is here severely undercut” and the return to “former servitude” is taken to signify the “return to one’s own enslavement to long-established prejudice and blindness” (40). This ambiguous textual response to the renegade figure and to the potential conversion of the protagonist in Tyler’s narrative opens up space for much more nuanced responses to the renegade figure in late eighteenth-century American narratives than studies of the early modern period can provide. The above systematic review of renegades in American Barbary captivity accounts of the 1790s has provided a preliminary analysis of a number of ways in which these narratives address the renegade figure. While the renegade appears in the majority of Barbary captivity narratives published from the sixteenth century onwards, it is only by engaging with American Barbary captivity narratives as cultural products, acknowledging the renegade figure as making a particular intervention during a critical period, that we can reach a fuller understanding of the complexities of accounts published in the 1790s.

Notes 1 The term “renegade” was not only employed to refer to a convert to Islam in the literature of the era. In his play entitled “Slaves in Barbary,” which was collected in Caleb Bingham’s The Columbian Orator (1797), Oran, a purchaser of slaves, employs the term renegade to refer to a freed slave. Addressing Ozro, a former slave who has been set free by the compassionate Bashaw,

Renegades in Barbary captivity narratives 121 or ruler, of Tunis, and is on a mission to execute his order, Oran exclaims: “Tale-bearing renegade! Well, I shall learn to husband my own property and give up no more slaves for Hamet’s [the Bashaw’s] counsellors . . .” (Everett 102). David Everett’s abolitionist play, which was published twice in the 1790s, links American slavery in Barbary to the situation faced by African slaves in the United States. It was one of a number of Barbary tales with an abolitionist tone. Other such tales include: Royall Tyler’s The Algerine Captive (1797) and arguably Susanna Rowson’s Slaves in Algiers (1794). For a discussion of the link between the Barbary captivity narrative genre and the abolitionist movement see: Baepler (“Barbary Captivity Narrative”); Brezina; Marr; Peskin; Rejeb. For a specific discussion on Rowson and her play Slaves in Algiers, see Elrod. 2 “Turk” referred to any Muslim, including those from the regions of North Africa. For a discussion on such early engagements see Matar (“The Renegade”). 3 Both of these plays appear in a collection edited by Daniel J. Vitkus (Three Turk Plays). For critical examinations of the renegade in plays of the early modern period see: Burton; Degenhardt; Matar (Islam in Britain; “The Renegade”); Vitkus (Turning Turk). 4 For the purposes of this paper, non-fictional narratives are defined as those that engage with “real,” or as Baepler puts it, “historically verifiable” captivity, as differentiated by those accounts which engage with fictitious captivity (White Slaves xi). 5 “By 1621, when Nicholas Roberts and John Rawlins wrote of their bloody encounters with Algerian privateers, the Barbary captivity narrative had begun to establish itself as a recognizable genre” (Baepler 6). 6 Gordon M. Sayre provides the first assertion that the renegade in Barbary captivity narratives has been neglected by academic studies. Sayre makes this claim in order to introduce his particular examination of the renegade, arguing that this figure complicates the comparison of the Barbary and the Indian captivity narrative genres. 7 Gordon M. Sayre, for example, asserts that in order to conceive of the captivity genre as transnational and politically neutral, there must be a focus on the figure of the renegade (327). He highlights the continuities between traditions of English and American literature, arguing that “[n]early every Barbary captivity narrative includes the narrator’s account of how” they were “urged to convert to Islam,” simultaneously evoking “the bugbear of the renegades, the Christians who had converted” (330). B.T. Edwards, writing in response to Sayre, suggests that the renegade “is something of a cosmopolitan in his or her competing systems of reference, language, and social value,” which “suggest a rich (if mostly illegible via the archives of American studies) counter-discourse to the exceptionalist model of American literary studies, which insists on legibility, tradition, and coherence” (334). 8 Joshua Gee’s account of captivity is widely recognized as the first Barbary captivity narrative from America. Only fragments of the original manuscript remain and these were published in 1943. Cotton Mather’s 1703 sermon The Glory of Goodness also contained within it an account of the captivity of English captives who had lately been delivered from the “Tragical, and the Terrible, and the most Barbarous Cruelties of Barbary.” 9 As described by Baepler, White Slaves 33, and Armstrong and Tennenhouse 210–11. 10 Mathew Carey, A Short Account of Algiers, Containing a Description of the Climate of That Country, of the Manners and Customs of the Inhabitants, and of Their Several Wars against Spain, France, England, Holland, Venice, and Other Powers of Europe, from the Usurpation of Barbarossa and the

122  Anna Diamantouli Invasion of the Emperor Charles V to the Present Time, with a Concise View of the Origin of the Rupture between Algiers and the United States (Philadelphia: J. Parker for M. Carey, 8 Jan. 1794); Mathew Carey, A Short Account of Algiers and of Its Several Wars against Spain, France, England, Holland, Venice, and Other Powers of Europe, from the Usurpation of Barbarossa and the Invasion of the Emperor Charles V. to the Present Time. With a Concise View of the Origin of the Rupture between Algiers and the United States. To Which Is Added a Copious Appendix Containing Letters from Captains Penrose, M’Shane, and Sundry Other American Captives, with a Description of the Treatment Those Prisoners Experience. Second Edition, Improved (Philadelphia: Mathew Carey, 20 Oct. 1794). A third edition of the text was published in New York by Evert Duyckinck in 1805. 11 James Wilson Stevens, An Historical and Geographical Account of Algiers; Comprehending a Novel and Interesting Detail of Events Relative to the American Captives (Philadelphia: Hogan & M’Elroy, Aug. 1797; Brooklyn: Thomas Kirks, for Alexander Brodie, 1800). 12 Penelope Aubin’s The Noble Slaves was reprinted eight times in both England and America throughout the eighteenth century. Penelope Aubin, The Noble Slaves: Or, the Lives and Adventures of Two Lords and Ladies, Who Were Shipwreck’d and Cast upon a Desolate Island Near the East-Indies, in the Year 1710. The Manner of Their Living There: The Surprizing Discoveries They Made, and Strange Deliverance Thence. How in Their Return to Europe They Were Taken by Two Algerine Pirates Near the Straits of Gibraltar. Of the Slavery They Endured in Barbary; and of Their Meeting There with Several Persons of Quality, Who Were Likewise Slaves. Of Their Escaping Thence, and Safe Arrival in Their Respective Countries, Venice, Spain, and France, in the Year 1718. With Many Extraordinary Accidents That Befel Some of Them Afterwards. Being a History Full of Most Remarkable Events (London: E. Bell, J. Darby, A. Bettesworth, F. Fayram, J. Pemberton, J. Hooke, C. Rivington, F. Clay, J. Batley, and E. Symon, 1722; Dublin: John Dempsy, 1736; Dublin: R. Reilly, 1736; Belfast: printed and sold by the booksellers, 1775); The Noble Slaves. Being an Entertaining History of the Surprising Adventures and Remarkable Deliverances from Algerine Slavery, of Several Spanish Noblemen and Ladies of Quality (Danbury: Douglas & Nichols, 1797; New Haven: printed by George Bunce, 1798; New York: printed and sold by John Tiebout, 1800). The Noble Slaves was also published as part of a collection of novels, selected and revised by Mrs. Griffith, by G. Kearsly in London in 1777. 13 William R. Chetwood, The Voyages and Adventures of Captain Robert Boyle, in Several Parts of the World. Intermix’d with the Story of Mrs. Villars, an English Lady with Whom He Made His Surprizing Escape from Barbary; the History of an Italian Captive; and the Life of Don Pedro Aquilio, &c. Full of Various and Amazing Turns of Fortune. To Which is Added, the Voyage, Shipwreck, and Miraculous Preservation, of Richard Castelman, Gent. With a Description of the City of Pennsylvania (London: John Watts, 1726). 14 William R. Chetwood, The Voyages and Adventures of Captain Robert Boyle, in Several Parts of the World. Intermixed with the Story of Mrs. Villars, an English Lady, with Whom He Made His Surprising Escape from Barbary. Likewise Including the History of an Italian Captive, and the Life of Don Pedro Aquilio, &c. Full of Various and Amazing Turns of Fortune (Greenfield, Massachusetts: Thomas & Andres, and David West, 1794; Keene, New Hampshire: C. Sturtevant, 1795;

Renegades in Barbary captivity narratives 123 Cooperstown: E. Phinney, 1796; New York: William A. Davis for E. Duyckink & Co., T. & J. Swords, T. Allen, and C., 1796; Walpole, New Hampshire: David Carlisle, 1799). There were also two noteworthy, stand-alone American publications of the story of Miss Villars entitled The Remarkable History of Miss Villars. Daughter of an Eminent Merchant of Bristol in Old England. Containing, an Account of Her Miraculous Escape from Her Seducer published in 1793 and 1795, in Norwich, Connecticut and Keene, New Hampshire respectively. 15 Slaves in Algiers was first performed in 1794 and experienced a modest run in a number of cities. Known performances of this play took place on 30 June and 22 December 1794 in Philadelphia, on 20 November 1794 and 26 November 1795 in Baltimore, and on 9 May 1796 in New York City (Dillon 433). The play was subsequently published as a print version in January 1795. 16 While there are no accounts written by captive American women and verified as being authentic, Barbary captivity narratives of this time did engage with female Barbary captivity in fictional narratives and plays. Two captivity accounts which feature female captivity are the Narrative of the Captivity of John Vandike, which takes the form of a letter addressed to the captive’s brother in Amsterdam, and An Affecting History of the Captivity and Sufferings of Mrs. Mary Velnet, an Italian Lady. It is widely acknowledged that the latter account of female captivity in Tripoli is almost certainly fictitious (Baepler 11). Mary Velnet’s narrative was originally published in England, but was reprinted in Boston by William Crane in 1800 and 1804, as well as by William Crary, who adapted the text for an American audience in 1804. In 1806, Mary Velnet’s narrative was adapted further and reprinted by Crary, who “blurr[ed] the narrator’s nationality, alter[ed] the action, and relocat[ed] the setting to Algiers,” changing the protagonist from Mary Velnet to Maria Martin (Williams and Brown 105). The Maria Martin narrative was so successful that between 1806 and 1818 there were thirteen separate editions of her fictional captivity printed in the United States. 17 In order to reach such an agreement, America had consented to paying Algiers $642,500, and an annual tribute of twelve thousand Algerine sequins ($21,600) in naval stores. However, even after the signing of the treaty, obtaining the funds proved difficult for the United States and the Dey of Algiers grew impatient at America’s inability to keep their end of the deal. After some further delays, various presents of great monetary value being given to the Dey in order to placate him while America gathered the necessary funds, and even under the threat of a declaration of war by the Dey if efforts were not made to swiftly secure the money, the Treaty was finally put into place. See Irwin 72. 18 For example, Foss’s second edition incorporates passages from a poem entitled “Depredations and Destruction of the Algerines,” which was written by David Humphreys, commissioner plenipotentiary of the United States, who was responsible, alongside Joel Barlow, for negotiating the Treaty of Peace and Amity with Algiers on 5 September 1795. 19 Carey’s text was one of two major histories of Algiers published in America in the late eighteenth century. It was originally published in 1794 and was published three times between 1794 and 1805 (Peskin 165). Carey’s History of Algiers begins with a chapter entitled “General description of the Country of Algiers, Climate, Sea-Coast, Principal Cities,” which parallels, almost verbatim, the chapter in Foss’s narrative entitled “A Short Description of the Territory of Algiers – of the City – Their Manners, Customs & Religion . . .”

124  Anna Diamantouli

Primary references The American in Algiers, or the Patriot of Seventy-Six in Captivity: A Poem in Two Cantos. New York: Buel, 1797. Aubin, Penelope. The Noble Slaves. Being an Entertaining History of the Surprising Adventures and Remarkable Deliverances from Algerine Slavery, of Several Spanish Noblemen and Ladies of Quality. New Haven, CT: printed by George Bunce, 1798. Carey, Mathew. A Short Account of Algiers, Containing a Description of the Climate of That Country, of the Manners and Customs of the Inhabitants, and of Their Several Wars against Spain, France, England, Holland, Venice, and Other Powers of Europe, from the Usurpation of Barbarossa and the Invasion of the Emperor Charles V to the Present Time, with a Concise View of the Origin of the Rupture between Algiers and the United States. Philadelphia, PA: J. Parker for M. Carey, 1794. Chetwood, William R. The Voyages and Adventures of Captain Robert Boyle, in Several Parts of the World. Intermixed with the Story of Mrs. Villars, an English Lady, with Whom He Made His Surprising Escape from Barbary. Likewise Including the History of an Italian Captive, and the Life of Don Pedro Aquilio, &c. Full of Various and Amazing Turns of Fortune. Greenfield, MA: printed by Thomas Dickman for Thomas and Andres, and David West; sold at their respective bookstores in Boston, and by the printer in Greenfield, 1794. Everett, David. “Slaves in Barbary.” The Columbian Orator: Containing a Variety of Original and Selected Pieces; Together with Roles; Calculated to Improve Youth and Others in the Ornamental and Useful Art of Eloquence. Comp. Caleb Bingham. Boston, MA: Caleb Bingham, 1797. 102–18. Everett, David. “Slaves in Barbary, a Drama in Two Acts.” The Columbian Orator: Containing a Variety of Original and Selected Pieces; Together with Rules; Calculated to Improve Youth and Others in the Ornamental and Useful Art of Eloquence. By Caleb Bingham. Comp. Caleb Bingham. Boston, MA: Caleb Bingham, 1797. 102–18. Foss, John. A Journal of the Captivity and Sufferings of John Foss Several Years a Prisoner of Algiers: Together with Some Account of the Treatment of Christian Slaves When Sick: – and Observations on the Manners and Customs of the Algerines. 1st ed. Newburyport, MA: A. March, 1798. Foss, John. A Journal of the Captivity and Sufferings of John Foss Several Years a Prisoner of Algiers: Together with Some Account of the Treatment of Christian Slaves When Sick: – and Observations on the Manners and Customs of the Algerines. 2nd ed. Newburyport, MA: A. March, 1798. Fox, John. “An Account of the Persecutions in the States of Barbary.” The New and Complete Book of Martyrs; or an Universal History of Martyrdom: Being Fox’s Book of Martyrs, Revised and Corrected, with Additions and Great Improvements. New York: Durell, 1794. Gee, Joshua. Narrative of Joshua Gee of Boston Massachusetts, While He Was Captive in Algeria of the Barbary Pirates, 1680–1687. Hartford: Wadsworth Atheneum, 1943. Humphreys, David. “Depredations and Destruction of the Algerines.” The Columbian Muse. A Selection of American Poetry, from Various Authors of Established Reputation. New York: printed by J. Carey for Mathew Carey, Philadelphia, 1794. 147–56.

Renegades in Barbary captivity narratives 125 Mather, Cotton. The Glory of Goodness. The Goodness of God, Celebrated; in Remarkable Instances and Improvements Thereof: and More Particularly in the Redemption Remarkably Obtained for the English Captives, Which Have Been Languishing under the Tragical, and the Terrible, and the Most Barbarous Cruelties of Barbary. Boston, MA: T. Green, 1703. Rawlins, John. “The Famous and Wonderful Recovery of a Ship of Bristol, Called the Exchange, from the Turkish Pirates of Argier (1622).” Piracy, Slavery and Redemption. Ed. Daniel J. Vitkus. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001. Rowson, Susanna. Slaves in Algiers; or, a Struggle for Freedom: A Play, Interspersed with Songs, in Three Acts. By Mrs. Rowson. As Performed at the New Theatres in Philadelphia and Baltimore. Philadelphia, PA: Wrigley and Berriman, 1794. Stevens, James Wilson. An Historical and Geographical Account of Algiers; Comprehending a Novel and Interesting Detail of Events Relative to the American Captives. Philadelphia, PA: Hogan & M’Elroy, 1797. Stevens, James Wilson. An Historical and Geographical Account of Algiers; Containing a Circumstantial and Interesting Detail of Events Relative to the American Captives, Taken from Their Own Testimony. Brooklyn, NY: printed by Thomas Kirks for Alexander Brodie, 1800. Tyler, Royall. The Algerine Captive or the Life and Adventures of Doctor Updike Underhill: Six Years a Prisoner among the Algerines. Walpole, NH: David Carlisle, 1797. Vandike, John. Narrative of the Captivity of John Vandike, Who Was Taken by the Algerines in 1791, an Account of His Escape, Bringing with Him a Beautiful Young English Lady Who Was Taken in 1790, the Ill Usage She Received from Her Master. The Whole in a Letter to His Brother in Amsterdam. Trans. James Howe. Leominster, MA: Chapman Whitcomb, 1797. Velnet, Mary. An Affecting History of the Captivity and Sufferings of Mrs. Mary Velnet, an Italian Lady. Who Was Seven Years a Slave in Tripoli Three of Which, She Was Confined in a Dungeon Loaded with Irons, and Four Times Put to the Most Cruel Tortures Ever Invented by Man. Written by Herself. Boston, MA: William Crary, 1800. White, Robert. “A Curious, Historical and Entertaining Narrative of the Captivity and Almost Unheard-Of Sufferings and Cruel Treatment of Mr. Robert White, Mariner.” Bickerstaff’s Boston Almanack, or Federal Calendar for 1791. Boston: Bickerstaff, 1790. Willock, John. The Voyages and Adventures of John Willock, Mariner, Interspersed with Remarks on Different Countries in Europe, Africa, and America; with the Customs and Manners of the Inhabitants; and a Number of Original Anecdotes. Philadelphia, PA: printed by Hogan and M’Elroy for George Gibson, 1798.

Secondary references Armstrong, Nancy and Leonard Tennenhouse. The Imaginary Puritan: Literature, Intellectual Labor, and the Origins of Personal Life. Berkeley: University of California, 1992. Baepler, Paul. “The Barbary Captivity Narrative in American Culture.” Early American Literature 39.2 (2004): 217–46.

126  Anna Diamantouli Baepler, Paul, ed. White Slaves, African Masters: An Anthology of American Barbary Captivity Narratives. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Balasopoulos, Antonis. “Writing Nation Other-Wise: Captivity and the Uses of Alterity in Royall Tyler’s The Algerine Captive.” The Other Within. Vol I: Literature and Culture. Ed. Ruth Parkin-Gounelas. Thessaloniki: Athanasios Altintzis, 2001. Bowen, Patrick D. A History of Conversion to Islam in the United States: White American Muslims before 1975. Leiden: Brill, 2015. Brezina, Jennifer Costello. “A Nation in Chains: Barbary Captives and American Identity.” Captivating Subjects: Writing Confinement, Citizenship, & Nationhood in the Nineteenth Century. Ed. Jason Haslam and Julia M. Wright. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005. Burton, Jonathan. “English Anxiety and the Muslim Power of Conversion: Five Perspectives on ‘Turning Turk’ in Early Modern Texts.” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 2.1 (2002): 35–67. Degenhardt, Jane Hwang. Islamic Conversion and Christian Resistance on the Early Modern Stage. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010. Dillon, Elizabeth Maddock. “ ‘Slaves in Algiers’: Race, Republican Genealogies, and the Global Stage.” American Literary History 16.3 (2004): 407–36. Dursteler, Eric. “To Piety or Conversion More Prone: Gender and Conversion in the Early Modern Mediterranean.” Conversions: Gender and Religious Change in Early Modern Europe. Ed. Simon Ditchfield and Helen Smith. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017. Elrod, Eileen. “Gender, Genre and Slavery: The Other Rowson, Rowson’s Others.” Beyond Charlotte Temple: New Approaches to Susanna Rowson. Spec. issue of Studies in American Fiction 38.1–2 (2011): 163–84. Edwards, Brian T. “Disorienting Captivity: A Response to Gordon Sayre.” American Literary History 22 (2010): 360–67. Irwin, Ray W. The Diplomatic Relations of the United States with the Barbary Powers: 1776–1816. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1931. Marr, Timothy. The Cultural Roots of American Islamicism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Matar, Nabil. Islam in Britain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Matar, Nabil. “The Renegade in English Seventeenth-Century Imagination.” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 33.3 (1993): 489–505. Peskin, Lawrence A. Captives and Countrymen: Barbary Slavery and the American Public, 1785–1816. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009. Rejeb, Lotfi Ben. “America’s Captive Freemen in North Africa: The Comparative Method in Abolitionist Persuasion.” Journal of Slave and Post-Slave Studies 9.1 (1988): 57–71. Richards, Jeffrey H. Drama, Theatre, and Identity in the American New Republic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Sayre, Gordon M. “Renegades from Barbary: The Transnational Turn in Captivity Studies.” American Literary History 22.2 (2010): 347–59. Vitkus, Daniel J. Three Turk Plays from Early Modern England. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000.

Renegades in Barbary captivity narratives 127 Vitkus, Daniel J. Turning Turk: English Theater and the Multicultural Mediterranean, 1570–1630. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Williams, Daniel E. and Christina Riley Brown, eds. Liberty’s Captives: Narratives of Confinement in the Print Culture of the Early Republic. Athens: University of Georgia, 2006.

6 Identity crises of homecomers from the Barbary Coast Robert Spindler

Many Barbary captives, especially those who spent particularly long periods in captivity, were successfully adapted to North African culture by their captors, a process that usually culminated in a conversion to Islam, turning the captive into a so-called renegado. In case these acculturated Barbary captives and renegados returned to their home countries and reintegrated into a Christian community after their captivity, they often faced problems with their identity, especially with their religious identity. Those who came home to small, rural communities, where religion was still a very strong identity component, were under pressure to prove that they had remained faithful Christians. However, the pressure was not only external, but also internal. Homecoming captives were likely to suffer from identity crises and related problems connected to their religious identity. Many Barbary Coast captivity narratives indicate this. The protestant Englishman Richard Hasleton was a galley slave in the Mediterranean for almost ten grueling years between 1582 and 1592. However, in his narrative he puts a much greater focus on the attempts of Muslims and also Catholics to make him convert. This illustrates the importance of religion to the identity of the homecoming captive. It is not the bone-breaking slave labor at the oar that Hasleton finds worth recounting in detail for his readers. Rather, he lingers on the gruesome torture methods of the Catholics, and the promises of luxury and wealth of the Muslims, underlining the extent of the temptations he resisted. Daniel Vitkus has argued that Hasleton focused his narrative thus because he had to reconfirm his Protestant Christian identity. He “needed his identity as a returned captive to be free and clear of either Roman Catholic or Islamic contamination. His testimony of faith served the purpose of clearing his name” (Vitkus 72). The authors testified and “cleared their name” for the public and for themselves. Making one’s captivity experience available in writing was often a measure to refute public suspicions. It allowed captives to negate that they had converted to Islam and had given in to the luring offer of milder conditions or even a prosperous life in the exotic land for the price of apostasy. It was also a means to process the author’s internal crisis that an actual conversion or acculturation might have caused. Donald Polkinghorne has

Identity crises of homecomers from Barbary 129 analyzed the role of narration in identity formation and in creating meaning from past experiences. He argues “the narrative, cognitive handling process results in a story that can provide the self with an integrated identity and the own actions and experiences with meaning” (Polkinghorne 28).1 Chafe notes that one of the key functions of narrative is to deal with events that contradict expectations (Chafe 88 qtd. in Polkinghorne 32). This applies to many Barbary Coast captivity narratives.2 The sixteenthcentury German narrative of Balthasar Sturmer, for example, Verzeichnüs der Reise, might have served to process the author’s inner conflict. It tells of the curious adventures of the seafaring author, who, on the verge of becoming a pirate himself, is captured and gets entangled in the turmoil of Charles V’s conquest of Tunis in 1535. Sturmer becomes a witness of the war from both sides and struggles along through trickery and cunning, before he regains freedom. The narrative is framed by a religious theme. A reconfirmation of his Christian belief surrounds the narrative action – not explicitly because Sturmer converted to Islam, but because he apparently neglected to give appropriate thanks to God for his deliverance from captivity. He tells that he only occupied himself with worldly matters after his return. Sturmer then portrays himself as a present-day Job, who refers back to the word of God after he loses all of his worldly goods and is reminded of how miraculously he was released from the Barbary Coast. If Sturmer actually did convert to Islam, which is not unlikely, this theological framework would illustrate a way of coming to terms with a crisis of conscience and identity. Sturmer might have suffered from such after a conversion, even if it was a superficial or opportunistic conversion. If he did not convert, the framework at least indicates how Sturmer’s religious identity was strongly challenged by his absence from home and his captivity and adventures in North Africa. Another instance is the eighteenth-century German narrative of Johann Michael Kühn. Kühn had been held captive for a very long stint, although he was not captured in adolescence, but as an adult, when he was 25 years old. It also appears that he did not assimilate to the extent that others, who were captured earlier in life, did. His narrative features hardly any obvious or subliminal expressions of sympathy with Algerian culture. Rather, it is filled with invectives against the North African population and their corsairing practices. However, even the identity of the hard-boiled sailor Kühn seems to have been challenged by his long stay on the Barbary Coast. When he returned to his home community, he went to confession to reconfirm that he was still a “good fighter for Jesus Christ” (Kühn 402–03).3 He then took the communion in public, after “the township was ensured through the following formula that I had never in my life deviated from my Christian belief” (Kühn 403).4 What follows is a prayer that recounts the curious fate of the author and interprets it as a demonstration of divine intervention. If it was Kühn’s own decision to reaffirm his Christian belief publicly with this prayer, as he claims, the question might be asked why he found it necessary to do so. Rheinheimer believes that a concealed

130  Robert Spindler conversion might have triggered Kühn’s guilty conscience toward the people who ransomed him (Rheinheimer 89). If, on the other hand, Kühn’s community had demanded the ceremony, this would demonstrate the amount of suspicion a homecoming captive was confronted with. In any case, the religious identity of Kühn obviously demanded reconfirmation. This indicates that its integrity was called into question – either by himself, or by the people around him. Besides their contested religious identity, Barbary Coast captives had to deal with trauma processing. Many must have been plagued by the psychological consequences of a violent capture through corsairs on the open sea and captivity under miserable conditions, often exposed to the whims of fickle masters. Experiences such as these were potent enough to result in post-traumatic stress, the experience of which could resurface in the writings of returning captives. Miguel de Cervantes, for example, seems to have suffered from trauma as a result of his captivity on the Barbary Coast. He processed this in his literary works from the beginning to the end of his writing career, as Garcés has shown in her interseminal book (153–77). Comparable cases where the experience of trauma influenced literary production are not infrequent (see also Caruth; Felman and Laub). Definitions of the causes of post-traumatic stress correlate with the experiences Barbary captives had. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in its fourth edition (DSM-IV) says that post-traumatic stress can, for example, result from a reaction to threats to life, witnessing acts of violence, or the news of the violent death of people close to the person concerned (Rothschild 24–25). War experiences, captivity, or torture – things that many Barbary captives experienced – are among the typical events that trigger post-traumatic stress (Rothschild 25). They manifest themselves in symptoms like reexperiencing the event that caused the trauma (for example in the form of intrusive recollections or dreams), or a reduction of involvement with, and responsiveness to, the external world (for example by an estrangement from others or a lack of affective responses). Also, hyperalertness, sleep disturbance, and similar symptoms can result from post-traumatic stress (Daly 64, 67). However, Rothschild differentiates post-traumatic stress where symptoms typically persist not longer than a month, and the much more severe post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), which prevails for longer periods of time (Rothschild 26). Theoretically, many Barbary captives must have suffered from posttraumatic stress, but evidence is scarce for a number of reasons. Despite the fact that it is a recent medical term, post-traumatic stress is no modern phenomenon, as R. J. Daly has shown in his analysis of Samuel Pepys’ diary entries surrounding the Great Fire of London in 1666 (Daly 67). However, only a certain percentage of people subjected to a traumatic event develop the typical symptoms. Evidence in Barbary Coast captivity narratives is limited for a simple reason: most texts, other than Samuel Pepys’ immediate diary entries, were written a considerable timespan after the traumatizing experiences. At such a point in time, symptoms of post-traumatic stress, or a post-traumatic

Identity crises of homecomers from Barbary 131 stress disorder, would usually have faded (Rothschild 26). Since one sign of post-traumatic stress is a dissociation with and avoidance of anything that reminds one of the trauma retrospectively, it is unlikely that the authors of Barbary Coast captivity narratives were suffering from PTSD at the moment of writing, when they gave detailed and realistic accounts of the traumatic events themselves (see also Rothschild 33–34, 102). Many of the Barbary Coast captives whose narratives are available today have benefited from non-clinical factors that affect traumatic stress positively. For example, preparation for the expected stress, successful fight-or-flight reactions, prior experiences, or support through family, friends, or social networks, are all factors that have positive effects (Rothschild 24). Most Barbary Coast captives could expect and mentally prepare for violent capture through North African pirates. They had encountered an extensive discourse on Barbary Coast captivity, such as preceding narratives, plays, sea shanties, oral narrations, etc. Some also report successful fights with the aggressors in the moment of capture or during captivity. If these could not prevent captivity, they at least provided the captives with a sense of dignity and strength in defending themselves from Barbary pirates. In 1724, the captain of Johann Michael Kühn’s ship, for example, encouraged the crew to defend themselves with all their might against the pirates when they were attacked. Upon his motivational speech, the crew “promised to succor each other to the last drop of blood, defend ourselves up to the last man” (Kühn 133).5 Their desperate fight continued for several days until the Algerians gained the upper hand. Others, like the Englishmen William Okeley or Thomas Pellow, did escape successfully, though only after years spent as captives in North Africa. Some also had the luck to be enslaved together with friends or companions, or even family members, like the German Wolffgang brothers. These offered comfort as fellow sufferers. A few well-to-do captives could also rely on, or at least hope for, the ransom efforts of their relations at home. Although it seems very likely that many of the authors of Barbary Coast captivity narratives suffered from post-traumatic stress or even post-traumatic stress disorder following their capture, evidence for this is missing in the narratives themselves. The reasons may be sought in the relative (temporal and geographical) distance to the experienced events at the time of writing, in combination with favorable factors to counter post-traumatic stress. What many texts do indicate, however, is the difficulty of captives to dissociate from the culture of their captors. Numerous Barbary Coast captivity narratives that contain sections that recount the time immediately after release or escape illustrate this. They tell of encounters with the Muslim world when the captives were back in their Christian home communities, or on their way there. They also demonstrate the captives’ need to process their captivity and assimilation to North African culture. In some instances, this reveals painful associations with the captivity and expresses the captive’s abhorrence of the foreign culture. Johann Michael Kühn found malicious pleasure in an encounter with a Muslim slave he met

132  Robert Spindler during his journey back to Germany on European soil. When he reached Marseille after he was ransomed, he ran into a North African named Hamet, and remembered him from his earlier life on the galleys. Hamet had been taken captive by the Maltese in the meantime, and was now forced to labor on Christian ships. Kühn rejoiced in the idea that Hamet, other than he himself, would never be ransomed by his own people but remain enslaved for life, since the North African states did not conduct such a well-functioning ransoming business as many European countries. With a sense of satisfaction, the liberated Kühn tells this to Hamet’s face (Kühn 416). Other captives did not share this spiteful and entirely negative attitude toward the culture of their captors. The narrative of the Wolffgang brothers mentions that they were granted to take their slave attire with them, and it can be imagined that they did so not without some pride (Wolffgang 28.)6 After all, these must have been finer garments than the rags that made Kühn and his companions so repellent to the rural population of France on their journey back: “. . . thus we looked, I have to admit myself, with our large beards and miserable slave-apparel, so terrible that I did not blame the people if they did not want to have much ado with us” (Kühn 396–97).7 The Wolffgang brothers’ captivity is also noteworthy for the unique illustrations it produced. After their return, the older brother, Andreas Matthäus, depicted the world of the Maghreb and scenes of the brothers’ captivity in the form of engravings (Ruhe 10). Parts of those were already sketched while the brothers were still in captivity. One of them, a self-portrait of Andreas Matthäus in slave attire, is included in the print edition as a frontispiece (Ruhe 2). These engravings are not only rare firsthand representations of the everyday life of an actual Barbary captive, but they also reflect the need of the captive to process the captivity experience. Interestingly, Andreas Matthäus’ engravings are a far cry from the more common depictions of the exceedingly cruel torture methods North African corsairs allegedly used, which, for example, can be found in the 1694 edition of Johann Frisch’s Schauplatz (Frisch 2). Andreas Matthäus Wolffgang depicts himself in splendid attire, with a scimitar in his belt, ready to fulfill his comparatively comfortable task of serving coffee and tobacco to the Dey and his guests. It appears that Andreas Matthäus and his younger brother had adapted to the world of their captors well. They processed their captivity in a way that allowed them to regard it in a not entirely negative light after returning. Patterson argues that household slaves were not necessarily better treated than field slaves, but he also suggests that household slaves tended to assimilate faster to the culture of their patron (175). The Wolffgang narrative supports this argument, but, as in most other Barbary Coast captivity narratives, also purports the idea that household slaves were better off than the field slaves. Another aspect to observe with regard to coming to terms with captivity experiences is that some captives were drawn back to seafaring despite the

Identity crises of homecomers from Barbary 133 traumatic contact with Barbary corsairs. They were captured by pirates, held captive for several years, and forced to labor under miserable conditions. Still, they risked undergoing the same fate again by once again undertaking further sea journeys. During his captivity, Balthasar Sturmer narrowly escaped a number of life-threatening situations. Nevertheless, after he had finally made it home safely, he went to sea several times again and departed only two weeks after his return. Johann Michael Kühn also went to sea again in 1740, only seven months after his return, and before his captivity narrative was even published in print (Kühn 429). Rheinheimer sees this fact as a hint that the seafarer found no inner peace in the tranquility and stability of his home-community after his turbulent adventures in North Africa (Rheinheimer 89). In rare cases, though, Barbary Coast captivity narratives document a complete and complex process of capture, acculturation, and release or escape, followed by an identity crisis and a problematic reintegration into the protagonist’s original culture. The most thoroughly studied example of this is the case of Hark Olufs. As Martin Rheinheimer points out in his in-depth monograph study, the conditions of Hark Olufs’ captivity and return made an identity crisis almost inevitable (Rheinheimer 140–41). Olufs was captured and integrated by force into a foreign culture at age 16 – an age that is crucial for adult identity formation (Rheinheimer 47; see also Helgason 283). In North Africa, he found attachment figures who exemplified values and ways of thinking by which he oriented himself. Thus, he developed his own individual value system and (hybrid) identity. Olufs’ captivity was not one of deprivation, at least not in a material sense. In one episode, where he describes his involvement in a fierce military campaign, his corpulence hinders him from mounting a horse in the nick of time (Olufs 28). Thus, his nourishment must have been a long way from the scant meals and hunger other captives describe. Olufs’ mention of his own corpulence appears like a self-conscious hint at the wealth, status, and opulence he enjoyed in North Africa. However, it also suggests disaffection with his own body image. While corpulence remained a status symbol up to the seventeenth century, it gradually lost this quality when it failed to serve the upper classes as a means of distinction when the security of food supply for the broader population increased (Merta 513). Along with the rising importance of physical attractiveness as an identity component since the Middle Ages (Baumeister 133), obesity came to be considered a sign of immoderateness in the course of the early modern period (Merta 221).8 While Olufs was practically given everything by his captors he could wish for in material terms, the excess of comfort and food made him inept, immobile, and dissatisfied with himself. He was lacking something else much more important. This something might have been emotional stability and support. Although the period and social circumstances did not allow Olufs to speak openly about all aspects of his captivity in his narrative, he occasionally grants the reader insight into his psyche. This reveals that his adolescence

134  Robert Spindler and time in captivity was emotionally difficult (see also Rheinheimer 58). Although he rose in rank among the Bey of Constantine’s army through his apparent bravery, he disparages his own accomplishments in his autobiographical report. He says that what was interpreted as courage and boldness by his captors was more of a recklessness, “for I was not cheery in my senses, and just therefore it was all the same to me whether I lived or was dead” (Olufs 13).9 This lethargy could be an indication of post-traumatic stress. In any case, it demonstrates that his adolescent years in captivity were years of emotional suffering. Despite these indicators of a disturbed personal and emotional development, and despite his apathy, Olufs eventually identified with the North African culture and attached himself to it. When he returned after twelve years, he found it difficult to dissociate himself from this background, and to reintegrate into his home society. Besides money, he not only brought expensive garments and other commodities from Algiers with him as keepsakes, but he also wore and used them. This has led Rheinheimer to conclude that Olufs still considered himself a Turk when back on his North Frisian home island Amrum. He displayed this, as well as the status he achieved, by wearing his Turkish general’s uniform and smoking tobacco in the Turkish manner (Rheinheimer 83, 84–92). An even clearer example of the potential effects on the captive’s psyche and self-conception is the case of the Englishman Thomas Pellow, who lived on the Barbary Coast during the first half of the eighteenth century and documented his captivity in his lengthy autobiographical account. Pellow’s narrative is evidence of the identity crisis of a man who, like Hark Olufs, was thrown into a foreign environment during the crucial years of adolescence. Later he experienced trouble trying to reintegrate into his home society. It is interesting to note that Pellow seems to have been in a crisis of adolescence even before he was captured. This must have alleviated his dissociation from his prior social environment and the adaptation to the world of his captors. At the age of eleven, Pellow was determined to escape the strict Latin School in Penryn he attended. He leveraged his seafaring uncle to receive his parents’ consent to go on a sea voyage to Genoa. However, the adventurous spirit of the youth was curbed when this uncle turned out to be an even stricter schoolmaster. Now, in addition to self-tuition, Pellow had to fulfill tasks on the ship, my uncle keeping me so close to my book that I had very little or no time allowed me for play; and which, if I at any time presumed to borrow, I failed not of a most sure payment by the cat of nine tails;10 so that by the time we got to Genoa I thought I had enough of the sea. . . . (Pellow 49) It is not difficult to imagine how this disappointed youngster easily dissociated himself from his former social network. Of course, Pellow portrays the

Identity crises of homecomers from Barbary 135 following abduction by the Salé Rovers as a jump from the frying pan into the fire, and as a continuation of his unspeakable ordeal. His forced conversion to Islam, when he finally bows to the excruciating torment through Muley Spha, is then the culmination of his sufferings. It is imaginable, though, that Pellow embraced the foreign culture of his captors once he had overcome the initial shock of the violent capture and forced conversion. Notably, he is one of the very few, if not the only known Barbary captive, who admits to have formally converted to Islam. Perhaps mistreatment and abuse also played a role in Pellow’s attachment to Moroccan culture, apart from his crisis of adolescence and his conversion to Islam. Dutton and Painter have argued that relationships with a power imbalance, in which abuse and intermittent good–bad treatment prevail, can result in traumatic bonding, a “powerful emotional attachment” to the abuser (Dutton and Painter, “Traumatic Bonding”; Dutton and Painter, “Emotional Attachments”). This has also been observed in hostage–kidnapper relationships, where hostages eventually developed a positive perception of their captors, the infamous Stockholm syndrome (Dutton and Painter, “Emotional Attachments” 106). According to Pellow’s own depictions, these parameters were given. The power imbalance between captive and captor was great. If abuse alternated with praise and appreciation arbitrarily, he might have developed traumatic bonding, nurturing his difficulties in later detaching himself from the Moroccan culture of his captors. These difficulties of letting go become vivid on Pellow’s return to England. When he finally managed to escape to his home country, Pellow tried to receive some sort of compensation for his ordeal, and some recognition for his endurance and bold escape. However, his efforts to receive an audience with the king through the Navy Office failed. As employment, he was only offered an unattractive post on a man-of-war (Pellow 326). Upon this news, a frustrated Pellow plans one last attempt: I fully resolved with myself to give these worthy gentlemen no further trouble, but to hasten as fast as I could home to the place of my nativity, there to get proper vouchers and recommendatory letters to some worthy person, and return therewith, in order to his introducing me and my petition. (Pellow 326) On his way out, the former captive literally runs into the nephew of the Moroccan ambassador. Ironically, this man and his uncle are the first ones to warmly welcome Pellow on British soil: So I went directly with him, and was by the old man very kindly received; and after he had discoursed me so far as he thought fit, as asking me how I got off, and the like, he told me that he was very glad I was delivered out of an unhappy country, and that he wished himself

136  Robert Spindler in no happier condition than I was, charging his people to make me very welcome, and if I was disposed to take up with his house altogether as to my eating and drinking, it would please him very much; though this I did not care much to accept of, neither did I, after a blunt manner, refuse it, answering him with a low bow. (Pellow 327) Pellow visits the ambassador again several times after this. To his great satisfaction, he is always served his “favourite dish,” couscous (Pellow 327). These indications of Pellow’s affinity to Moroccan culture, together with his dissociation from British culture, give insight into his constructed identity. At about the same time as Pellow corresponded with the ambassador, his fellow countrymen further enraged him. A published newspaper hoax spread the false information that he had actually been granted audience with the king (Pellow 327–28). That the people of the Christian European culture harass Pellow, while he finds comfort in those belonging to the Islamic North African culture, reveals a crucial aspect of his identity. In his identity model, Baumeister proposes that each identity consists of an indefinite number of identity components. Any identity component has to fulfill two defining criteria: continuity over time and differentiation. It has to provide an individual with differentiation from other individuals, over a longer, uninterrupted period of time (Baumeister 20). However, an aspect that Baumeister stresses too little in his identity model is that affiliation with others is as crucial to identity formation as differentiation from others. In the case of Thomas Pellow, his affiliation with people from Morocco was an essential identity component at the time of his return. This, and his failed efforts to find recognition in England, challenged his identity on several levels. Despite his long absence and career in Morocco, and his increasing identification with Moroccan culture, Pellow’s British nationality had remained a major identity component that differentiated him from others while in captivity. Most major identity components, Baumeister proposes, have three functional aspects: interpersonal identity, potentiality, and structure of values and priorities (Baumeister 27–28). He explains: The first functional aspect of identity is the individual’s own structure of values and priorities. Self-definition involves aligning oneself with certain values that determine how people ought to behave and what they should strive for. . . . A second functional aspect . . . is the interpersonal aspect, consisting of one’s social roles and personal reputation. This is sometimes called the ‘social identity’ . . . Relationships with other persons are conducted on the basis of this functional aspect of identity. (Baumeister 19)

Identity crises of homecomers from Barbary 137 About the third functional aspect, individual potentiality, Baumeister writes: To an extent, this aspect consists of having a realistic personal goal and sufficient self-esteem to believe one can reach that goal. . . . The concept of fulfilment is closely linked to that of potentiality, for potentialities are what get fulfilled. (Baumeister 19–20) In all three of those functional aspects, Pellow’s British identity component failed when he returned to England. He felt that as a Briton he should have had the potentiality to receive attention and recompense for his sufferings and deprivations, which he did not. He also lacked a solid social identity, as he had no intact relationship with any British citizens, only with the Moroccan ambassador and his nephew. Pellow also associated certain values and priorities with being British. For example, he felt obliged to find and perform decent work in England, but was disappointed to be offered only a low and unattractive post on a man-of-war. All of this stands in stark contrast to his past life in Morocco. There he served at the court of the King of Morocco and was a soldier in the emperor’s army. He enjoyed a high social rank, with a large amount of power and prestige together with a clearly defined role. Baumeister notes that with the dawn of the early modern period, there was a shift in defining the identity component of social rank from passive assignment to individual achievement (Baumeister 57). Pellow had worked his way up the social ladder in Morocco through individual achievement and acquired a comparably high social rank. Eventually, this constituted a crucial identity component. His escape to England destabilized this component and there was nothing to take its place. Here he only found an interpersonal identity in the house of the Moroccan ambassador, where he was welcomed and valued as a person with some attachment to Moroccan culture. When Pellow finally makes it to his hometown Penryn, he first happily notes that he was as hard pressed by the crowd as when he arrived in Morocco. This time, “instead of boxing me and pulling my hair, saluting me, and after a most courteous manner bidding me welcome home, being all very inquisitive with me if I knew them” (Pellow 328). Then he discovers that his long absence has estranged him from his former social network: . . . my captivity and the long interval of time had made so very great an alteration on both sides, that I did not know my own father and mother, nor they me; and had we happened to meet at any other place without being preadvised, whereby there might be an expectation or natural instinct interposing, we should no doubt have passed each other, unless my great beard might have induced them to inquire further after me. (Pellow 329)

138  Robert Spindler Pellow acknowledges that the one bodily characteristic which differentiates and thus identifies him is one typically associated with Islamic cultures: his unusually long beard. So, it is again wrong affiliation rather than differentiation that troubles his individual identity. All these aspects in Pellow’s own depiction of his return to England vividly illustrate his identity crisis when he was attempting to reintegrate into his home society after captivity in North Africa. A counterexample is Johann Michael Kühn’s return. When Kühn reached his hometown again after an extremely long absence of 21 years, including his travels prior to his 15 years of captivity, he was also wearing a very long beard. His appearance was certainly not the one his friends and family would have remembered (Kühn 396–97). Still, in contrast to Pellow’s, Kühn’s return was not at all overshadowed by estrangement or rejection. There is no comparable evidence for an identity crisis in his narrative, apart from the religious crisis mentioned above. His friends and family welcomed him warmly, and he delightfully noted the great interest of the “many grand and noble people” in the story of his fate (Kühn 402).11 Although both Pellow and Kühn remained in captivity for a substantial period of time, Kühn was more resilient. The reasons for this were, among others, that Kühn was captured as an adult rather than as a youth, and that he was ransomed and did not have to escape. Conversely, what contributed to Pellow’s identity crisis was his young age at the moment of capture, his lack of official recognition upon return and lack of support thereafter, his official conversion to Islam, his strong adaptation to his captors’ culture, and perhaps his traumatic bonding. It was not uncommon for Europeans who were captured by Barbary corsairs to develop an affinity to the diverse culture of the Maghreb. The contact between Europe and North Africa in the early modern period was generally overshadowed by pirate activity from both sides, leading to violence, misunderstanding, rejection, and a grand-scale vilification of the Barbary Coast and its people in the contemporary anti-Islamic discourse. Nevertheless, relationships of mutual sympathy evolved. The so-called renegados converted to Islam and integrated into the culture of their captors. The number of renegados was in fact so high, and the public perception of these cultural hybrids so unfavorable, that returning captives had to justify themselves and prove their allegiance to the Christian faith. I have argued earlier that this pressure came not only from the captives’ social environment, but also from within the captives themselves. The inner conflict of homecoming captives was a consequence of a previous adaptation to the foreign culture and often amounted to a severe identity crisis. With the changes in identity formation during the early modern period, individuals who came into contact with North African culture could easily face such a crisis if the contact was significant enough. This was the case with many Barbary Coast captives, and their narratives document the potential impact of this cultural contact on the European identity.

Identity crises of homecomers from Barbary 139 Captivity narratives also largely escape what is labeled Orientalist discourse, since they present a hybrid perspective. A text like the captivity narrative of Thomas Pellow, who had spent more years in North Africa than in Europe when he returned to England, cannot be considered a part of what is generally called European, colonial, or Orientalist discourse. When Said speaks about Orientalist texts that contribute to a limited number of standard descriptions that “are the lenses through which the Orient is experienced, and they shape the language, perception, and form of the encounter between East and West” (Said qtd. in Bhabha 104), this seems to be true of Pellow’s narrative as well at first sight. However, on second thought it is problematic to speak of an encounter between East and West here. Though written for and consumed by the West, Pellow’s narrative, and other, similar ones, were written from the perspective of European Christians who had assimilated to a Muslim culture to a high degree. They had lived in an Islamic environment for many years or had converted to Islam, and had adopted North African customs, fashions, and mindsets. In short, they returned home with a hybrid cultural identity. Thus, their narratives can be put into context with the theories of hybridity and ambivalence Homi Bhabha develops from the background of British colonialism. While the power relation between Christian European captives and North African captors was practically contrary to the power relation of Bhabha’s “colonizer” versus “colonized,” the European attitude toward North Africa in the early modern period was naturally as discriminatory, and striving to be as dominating, as in the context of territories that were successfully colonized by European nations – foreshadowing the colonial authority Bhabha refers to in The Location of Culture. Bhabha argues for a “colonial hybrid,” who, by subjecting the colonized country, strives to represent it, but on the other hand aspires to differentiate itself from it to reinforce his colonial authority, his status of leader and ruler, through discrimination (153–62). This concept of hybridity is different from the hybridity of acculturated Barbary captives described here insofar that the latter enters this state of hybridity involuntarily. A parallel is perceptible, however, in that the Barbary captive identifies himself with the culture of his captors and expresses this proximity (often unconsciously), but at the same time underlines his distinction from North Africans by emphasizing his European identity. This paradox is the equivalent of what Bhabha describes as “doublethink” in the context of colonization: Colonial authority requires modes of discrimination (cultural, racial, administrative . . .) that disallow a stable unitary assumption of collectivity. The “part” (which must be the colonialist foreign body) must be representative of the “whole” (conquered country), but the right of representation is based on its radical difference. Such doublethink is made viable only through the strategy of disavowal just described, which requires a theory of the “hybridization” of discourse and power

140  Robert Spindler that is ignored by theorists who engage in the battle for “power” but do so only as the purists of difference. (158) In connection with Barbary captivity this very paradox eventually plays into the identity crises described above, and underlines the problem in defining Barbary captivity narratives as Orientalist discourse. To label the writings of these authors European, Western, or Orientalist would also be, in the words of Pnina Werbner, essentialising: If to name is to re-present, to imply a continuity and discreteness in time and place, then it follows that all collective namings or labellings are essentialist, and that all discursive constructions of social collectivities – whether of community, class, nation, race or gender – are essentialising. If Western Orientalism constructed a false non-Western Other, the Saidian critique of Orientalism runs the danger of constructing false counterOccidentalism of the West. (Werbner 228–29; see also Clifford; Carrier) Pellow’s text, which was written from a hybrid perspective, illustrates the problems of essentialising in the context of the Orientalist discourse. It also demonstrates the complexity of concepts of otherness in this context. As Werbner explains further, . . . otherness or alterity exists within a complex field of relations. There is no fixed divide between self and other. Instead, alterities form a continuous series on a rising scale: from the divided or fragmented self to major collective cleavages between ethnic groups or nations. (Werbner 249) Many of the Barbary Coast captives, especially those who had spent long time periods in North Africa and adapted to the foreign culture quickly, vividly illustrate the complexity of such a “field of relations.” This complexity must be kept in mind as a subliminal motor of these fascinating documents of an extraordinary cultural contact. Barbary captives who returned to their home countries often experienced difficulties with reintegrating into their native community and developed identity crises that led to emotional suffering. There are a number of factors that could influence the severity of such a crisis. Especially victims who were captured at a relatively young age, namely in their adolescence, and who were held captive for comparatively long periods of time (up to ten years or more), were particularly prone to show signs of dissociation with their original culture, which then made it difficult to associate with their home community again. A contested religious identity, triggered by a potential conversion to Islam, was one of the major aspects of this dissociation.

Identity crises of homecomers from Barbary 141 One strategy to alleviate the reintegration was the captivity narrative itself, which was often utilized to reconfirm the captive’s Christian identity – for the readers and authors likewise. However, since many captivity narratives feature sympathetic displays of the captors and their culture, reminiscent of what in modern terminology is referred to as Stockholm Syndrome, the success rate of the available reintegration strategies remains questionable.

Notes All translations from German sources are mine. 1 “Das Ergebnis des narrativen, kognitiven Verarbeitungsprozesses ist eine Geschiche, welche die Funktion übernehmen kann, dem Selbst eine integrierende Identität und den eigenen Handlungen und Lebenserfahrungen Bedeutung zu verleihen” (Polkinghorne 28). 2 Rheinheimer has already pointed this out in the context of the Barbary captive Hark Olufs and his eighteenth-century narrative Harck Olufs . . . sonderbare Avanturen (Rheinheimer 140–41). Hark Olufs was captured at the age of sixteen and lived on the Barbary Coast for eleven years. 3 “guten Streiter Jesu Christi” (Kühn 402–03). 4 “die Gemeinde durch nachgesezte Formul versichert wurde, daß ich von dem Christlichen Glaube in meinem Leben nie abgewichen. . .” (Kühn 403). 5 “versprachen einander bis auf den letzten Bluts-Tropffen beyzustehen und uns bis auf den letzten Mann zu wehren” (Kühn 133). 6 “vergönnte” (Wolffgang 28). 7 “ . . . so sahen wir auch, ich muß es selbst gestehen in unsern grossen Bärten und elenden Sclaven-Habit fürchterlich genug aus, daß ich eben die Leute nicht verdachte, wenn sie nicht viel mit uns wolten zu thun haben” (Kühn 396–97). 8 Flemyng is one example of an early modern piece of writing that deals with the problem of obesity and tries to find a cure for it (see also Merta 219). The first marketed diet, by William Banting, who notes that corpulent people might be ridiculed in public, indicates that by the nineteenth century, obesity had become a social stigma (Banting). 9 “ . . . dann ich war in meinm Sinn nicht vergnügt, und eben darum war es mir einerley, ob ich lebte oder todt wäre” (Olufs 13). 10 cat of nine tails: a type of lash used at sea for severe physical punishment. 11 “vielen grossen und vornehmen Leuten. . .” (Kühn 402).

References Banting, William. Letter on Corpulence, Addressed to the Public. London: Harrison, 1864. Baumeister, Roy F. Identity: Cultural Change and the Struggle for Self. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994. Carrier, James G. Occidentalism: Images of the West. Oxford: Clarendon, 1995. Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. Clifford, James. The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988.

142  Robert Spindler Daly, R. J. “Samuel Pepys and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.” British Journal of Psychiatry 143 (1983): 64–68. Dutton, Donald G., and Susan Painter. “Emotional Attachments in Abusive Relationships: A Test of Traumatic Bonding Theory.” Violence and Victims 8.2 (1993): 105–20. Dutton, Donald G., and Susan Painter. “Traumatic Bonding: The Development of Emotional Attachments in Battered Women and Other Relationships of Intermittent Abuse.” Victimology: An International Journal 7.4 (1981): 139–55. Felman, Shoshana, and Dori Laub. Testimony: Crisis of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History. New York: Routledge, 1992. Frisch, Johan. Schauplatz Barbarischer Sclaverey: Worauff Unter Beschreibung der 4 vornehmsten Raub-Städte, Als: Algiers, Thunis, Tripoli und Salee. Derselben Regierung, Raubereyen, Sitten, Gewohnheiten und andere seltsame Begebenheiten und Zufälle vorgestellet werden: Vornemlich aber, die überaus grausahme Barbarische Leibes-Straffen, und das elende kümmerliche Leben, so die gefangene Christen bey den Türcken und Unglaubigen leiden, außstehen und ertragen müssen. Hamburg: Thomas von Wiering; Franckfurt: Zacharias Herteln, 1694. Garcés, María Antonia. Cervantes in Algiers: A Captive’s Tale. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2002. Helgason, þorsteinn. “Historical Narrative as Collective Therapy: The Case of the Turkish Raid in Iceland.” Scandinavian Journal of History 22.4 (1997): 275–89. Kühn, Johann Michael. Merckwürdige Lebens- und Reise-Beschreibung, worinnen nicht nur Dessen Schiffahrten nach Grönland und Spitzbergen, Strat Davis, denen Canarischen Inseln und Lissabon erzehlet, sondern auch seine darauf erfolgte Algierische Gefangenschafft und Vierzehenjährige Sclaverey, in derselben mitgethane Caper-Fahrten, und darbey ausgestandene Gefährlichkeiten, Nebst besonderen Erzehlungen vom Wallfisch-Fange, Sclaven-Stande in Algier, wie auch Sitten und Gebräuchen derer Inwohner daselbst, letzlich noch Dessen endliche Ranzionirung, Reise durch Franckreich nach Hamburg, und Ankunft in seinem Vaterlande, aufrichtig beschrieben werden, Von dem Autore selbst aufgesetzt, und dem Publico mitgetheilet durch P. I. G. Gotha: Mevius, 1741. Merta, Sabine. Wege und Irrwege zum modernen Schlankheitskult: Diätkost und Körperkultur als Suche nach neuen Lebensstilformen 1880–1930. Wiesbaden: Steiner, 2003. Okeley, William. Eben-ezer: Or, a Small Monument of Great Mercy, Appearing in the Miraculous Deliverance of William Okeley, John Anthony, William Adams, John Jephs, John— Carpenter, from the Miserable Slavery of Algiers, with the Wonderful Means of Their Escape in a Boat of Canvas; the Great Distress, and Utmost Extremities Which They Endured at Sea for Six Days and Nights; Their Safe Arrival at Mayork: With Several Matters of Remarque during Their Long Captivity, and the Following Providences of God Which Brought Them Safe to England. London: printed for Nat. Ponder, at the Peacock in Chancery-Lane, near Fleet-Street, 1675. Olufs, Hark. Harck Olufs aus der Insul Amron im Stifte Ripen in Jütland, gebürtig, sonderbare Avanturen, so sich mit ihm insonderheit zu Constantine und an andern Orten in Africa zugetragen. Ihrer Merkwürdigkeit wegen in Dänischer Sprache zum Drucke befördert, itzo aber ins Deutsche übersetzt. 1751. Ed. Martin Rheinheimer. Neumünster: Wacholtz, 2001.

Identity crises of homecomers from Barbary 143 Patterson, Orlando. Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982. Pellow, Thomas. The Adventures of Thomas Pellow, of Penryn, Mariner: Three and Twenty Years in Captivity among the Moors, Written by Himself. 1739. London: T. F. Unwin, 1890. Polkinghorne, Donald E. “Narrative Psychologie und Geschichtsbewusstsein. Beziehungen und Perspektiven.” Erzählung, Identität und historisches Bewußtsein: Die psychologische Konstruktion von Zeit und Geschichte. Ed. Jürgen Straub. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1998. 12–45. Rheinheimer, Martin. Der fremde Sohn: Hark Olufs’ Wiederkehr aus der Sklaverei. Neumünster: Wacholtz, 2001. Rothschild, Babette. Der Körper erinnert sich: Die Psychophysiologie des Traumas und der Traumabehandlung. Essen: Synthesis, 2002. Ruhe, Ernstpeter. “Zwei Augsburger Künstler in ‘algierischer Leibeigenschaft’: Die ‘wunderbaren Schicksale’ der Brüder Wolfgang.” Oriente Moderno 91.2 (2011): 1–17. Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon, 1978. Sturmer, Balthasar. Verzeichnüs der Reise Herrn Balthasar Sturmers. Vonn Marienburg aus Preussenn gebürtig, von Dantzigk ab nach Lisbona in Portugal, Sicilien vndtt in andere Öertter. Wie er von den Turcken vndtt Mooren gefangen vndtt entlichen wunderbarlicher Weise erlösett worden. Von ihme sleber auffs fleisigste verzeichnett vndt beschrieben. Ms. germ. Quart. 1014. Berlin: Staatsbibliothek, 1558. Vitkus, Daniel J. Piracy, Slavery, and Redemption: Barbary Captivity Narratives from Early Modern England. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001. Werbner, Pnina. “Essentialising Essentialism, Essentialising Silence: Ambivalence and Multiplicity in the Constructions of Racism and Ethnicity.” Debating Cultural Hybridity: Multi-Cultural Identities and the Politics of Anti-Racism. Ed. Pnina Werbner and Tariq Modood. London: Zed, 1997. 226–54. Wolffgang, Gustav Andreas. Reisen und wunderbare Schicksale zweyer in die Algierische Leibeigenschaft gerathenen Brüder Andreas Matthäus und Johann Georg Wolffgang, Kupferstecher in Augsburg, ihrer Seltenheit wegen dem Drucke überlassen, von dem Sohne eines derselben. 1767.

7 “Arab speculators,” states, and ransom slavery in the Western Sahara Christine E. Sears

Archibald Robbins surveyed the inhospitable terrain around him. On the one side a “boundless ocean” (Robbins 46). On the other, an immense desert. Robbins gazed at the foundering 220-ton brig Commerce, on which he had been an able seaman. The vessel had smashed into the Western Saharan coast at Cape Bojador. Robbins and his captain, James Riley, dreaded enslavement from the moment of impact. In fact, fear of bondage drove the crew of ten back to their sixteen-foot leaky long boat with little more than a pig nabbed from the wreck. They hoped a passing vessel would rescue them. But after a week at sea, they had seen no other ships. With the pig eaten and only their own urine left to drink, Robbin’s captain, James Riley, took a vote. The crew unanimously agreed to return to the African coast (“Riley’s Narrative” 12–14; Robbins 8–10, 22). Once again on the African coast, Robbins and his crewmates knew they would die without assistance. They were “anxious to fall in” with anyone who might share food and water, even if the price for sustenance were slavery. When 70 to 80 “natives” appeared, Robbins and the men begged for water (Robbins 44–47). The “natives” shared no water. Instead, they enslaved Robbins and his crewmates. On 8 September 1815, Connecticutborn Archibald Robbins exchanged the “exalted character” of a freeman for the “most degraded” state of slavery (Robbins 46–49). Over the next nineteen months, Robbins served four owners and traveled more than 800 miles through the Western Sahara and southern Morocco before being ransomed in March 1817.1 Robbins, Riley, and others who ran aground in Africa help us understand how ransom slavery and the ransom economy functioned in the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Western Sahara. Other sources assist in this process, including narratives by Americans, Englishmen, and Frenchmen; British and US government records and correspondence; business documents; and contemporary newspaper accounts. These sources show how, in the absence of state control, disparate individuals and governments negotiated the “business of slavery” (Colley 6). In many ways, Arab speculators drove the ransom economy. They aimed to profit by ransoming their slaves, but this required networks and connections to other Arab and Berber

“Arab speculators” and ransom slavery 145

Figure 7.1 Northern Africa, Anthony Finley from A New General Atlas, Comprising a Complete Set of Maps, Representing the Grand Divisions of the Globe, 1829 Source: Courtesy of Murray Hudson—Antique Maps, Globes, Books and Prints.

traders, European agents, and sometimes the Moroccan government. Since no state dictated the ransom economy, multiple actors depended on compromise, not coercion, when arranging ransoms (Pennell 160).2 Robbins and his crewmates were ensnared in a long-standing practice of opportunistic slave making (Panzac 116; Colley 44–45; Allison 110). In the Western Sahara, Arabs and Berbers claimed human and other commodities from wrecks, then sold those items to merchants who re-sold or ransomed them. Some bondsmen were assigned labor, but their primary value was not the work they performed; it was the money that they fetched their owners. A few suffered life-long bondage, but most were eventually redeemed. Of the ten men on the Commerce, for example, eight returned to the United States, including Robbins and Captain Riley, while two remained in Africa, lost to the historical record.3 Robbins and Riley were held in short-term bondage that offered the possibility of redemption. This ransom slavery was not the lifelong, hereditary form seen in New World plantations. New World plantation slavery was,

146  Christine E. Sears in 1815, a comparatively new version of bondage, and it differed greatly from older slaveries (see Bradley, Slavery; Bradley, “Roman Slavery”; Snyder 4–6). Slavery was shaped to serve local conditions; this yielded diverse practices, including ransom slavery (Toledano 479–83; Lovejoy 244–46; Starna and Watkins 35–37). Early modern Europeans and Middle Easterners adapted ransom slavery in the eighth century, as they enslaved rather than slayed war captives. Some prisoners of war were ransomed immediately; others awaited ransom for years; still others were never released from bondage (Rotman 27–29; Blackburn 49; Blumenthal 7–13, 20–23; Marín and El Hour 454–56, 462–64; Jones 130–33).4 Language reflected an attempt to categorize different types of slaves in these societies. Ottoman and Ottoman Algerians referred to people seized at sea as captives, using the terms tutsaklar or kullar. Neither called Christian captives abd, a term applied to black African slaves (Sears 21–22; Weiss, Captives 10–11). In other words, Ottoman subjects made slaves in more than one way and recognized different types of slaves within their society. These terms imply clear distinctions between captives and slaves, but, in fact, hide the fluidity with which one might move between these carefully delineated categories. In the early modern Mediterranean, a captive might easily become a slave, while a slave might be ransomed and become a freedman. In fact, captivity and slavery were so intertwined that early modern French dictionaries “equated slavery with captivity” (Weiss, “French Freedom” 234; Hershenzon 6–10). Other historians have explored how Frenchmen and other Europeans were captured and enslaved by Barbary corsairs. But most scholarship on the Barbary States’ ransom slavery system focuses on Algiers, and, to a lesser extent, Tripoli and Tunis (Sears 3–5; Allison; Parker). These works often conflate Algerian and Western Saharan bondage, yet Algerian and Western Saharan practices differed significantly. Algerian enslavement of captives was state driven. Algerian corsairs were state-licensed privateers who seized their captives at sea. By the late eighteenth century, most captives were owned by the Algerian government and detained in state-run bagnios, or prisons. The Algerian state negotiated ransoms, usually as part of a treaty with another country, and Algiers used this state-to-state arbitration to influence diplomatic and trade negotiations (Panzac 24). Individual slaves rarely arranged their own release. In Algiers, the state controlled and regulated capture, enslavement, and ransom of Europeans and Americans. Robbins and Riley faced something completely different in the Western Sahara. States dictated little in the Western Saharan ransom economy. Archibald Robbins was not captured at sea by state-sponsored privateers. Government agents did not oversee his imprisonment in a port city. Instead, he wrecked in a sparsely populated frontier region beyond Moroccan or European control. Robbins was claimed by Berbers or Arabs who knew the Western Sahara’s challenging terrain and climate and were aware of market locations and preferred trade goods in those markets. Unlike Algiers, no state dictated the ransom economy in the Western Sahara. Yet a process

“Arab speculators” and ransom slavery 147 moved European and American bondsmen to European buyers in Mogador (modern Essaouira), a coastal city where mostly English agents lived and traded. Riley and Robbins help us investigate how ransom slavery functioned during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century in the Western Sahara, and, in the process, assist in uncovering how “bondage, resistance, and freedom were both defined and experienced quite differently in particular places and at particular times” (Newman 3). Robbins knew maritime work was dangerous when he joined the Commerce crew in 1815. Sailors risked shipwreck, stranding, injury, impressment, and imprisonment. Between 1785 and 1794, Algerian corsairs enslaved 140 Americans, some of whom spent more than a decade as slaves in that city. Privateers of other countries exploited the “rapidly changing international scene” during the Napoleonic Wars that consumed much of Europe. American sailors were particularly hard hit by the War of 1812, during which thousands endured impressment and imprisonment (de Groot 250–52; Panzac 2–4; Glete 48–49; Nadal 116). Like hundreds of other US maritime workers, Robbins and Riley felt the effects of war firsthand. Robbins himself was detained thrice by the British during the War of 1812. He spent eighteen months confined in Halifax, Nova Scotia, the third time he was captured (Robbins 4–5). Captain James Riley also experienced maritime perils from firsthand experience. In 1808, French privateers seized a vessel he captained. He returned to the United States in 1809, but European warfare and US embargoes curtailed maritime trade and offered little employment (Riley, Narrative 5–6). Still, Robbins had not anticipated a year and a half of Western Saharan enslavement when he embarked as an able seaman on the brig Commerce in spring 1815. Several recent events signaled less risky maritime voyages. The Treaty of Ghent, signed in December of 1814, ended the War of 1812. The Battle of Waterloo marked the end of the Napoleonic War, bringing peace to the continent and lessening the danger of impressment into European navies. A June 1815 Algerian–American treaty also boded well for US maritime workers. The treaty did not completely curtail Barbary enslavement, but paired with a cessation of war, it did decrease the number of seizures (Allison 211; Panzac 2–4, 10; Sears 109). By 1815, Robbins, Riley, and other maritime workers and merchants banked on safer seas and a return to work. Captain Riley returned to sea as the supercargo and captain of the Commerce and its crew of ten, including Robbins. After sailing from Middletown, Connecticut, the crew discharged hay and bricks at New Orleans, and then headed to Gibraltar where they loaded brandy, wine, and Spanish specie. Thus far, the Commercers eluded privateers, European and North African. Their last stop was at the Canary Islands where they loaded salt destined for the Connecticut market. That salt never crossed the Atlantic. A storm engulfed the Commerce near the Canaries, dashing the brig ashore near Cape Bojador (Robbins 9–11; Riley, MSS 3–6; Riley, Narrative 12–15). Robbins and his crewmates knew what awaited them on this coast. They had read and heard about others stranded from the 1790s into the

148  Christine E. Sears 1800s (Baepler 120–42; Schwartz, “Narrative” 156). Fearing they, like earlier victims, would be enslaved, Robbins and the nine other men launched their damaged long boat into the surf. But after a week at sea, hungry and thirsty and with no respite in sight, they limped to shore near Cape Barbas, almost two hundred miles south of their initial wreck. Now they longed for “natives” to appear, even if it cost them their liberty (Robbins 19–25; Riley, MSS 3–6; Sears 112–13). They trusted that “avarice” would be the “ruling passion” of their owners, and that their captors’ pursuit of profit would ensure their eventual ransom (Paddock 186–87; Schwartz, Captain 77). Robbins and Riley depended not only on the avarice of their owners, but on the willingness of the US government, friends and family, or business connections to redeem them. Their ransom would be negotiated through “crossings and collaborations between governments as well as individuals” (Colley 69). In September 1815, Robbins and Riley were enslaved by what they, and other Americans and Europeans, termed “wild” or “wandering” Arabs. Robbins and Riley would be bartered and sold at least once before what they called a “trading” Arab purchased them. Europeans and Americans applied different terms to people of the region: Berbers, Arabs, Bedouins, Moors, or tribal designations (El Mansour 7–8; El Hamel 226–33; Rouighi; Brett; Fentress). They applied these terms with little understanding or rigor. Americans and Europeans often used these two labels: “wild” and “trading” Arabs. “Wild” Arabs were those they perceived as unsettled, poor, and unaffiliated with a country or government. “Wild” Arabs depended on exchanging coastal loot for trifling goods rather than currency (Adams 66; Paddock 235). “Trading” Arabs were perceived as motivated by profit, adept at haggling, and accustomed to currency. These merchants were willing and able to transport slaves to Mogador or its environs and arrange ransom for their slaves. Importantly, Europeans and Americans identified their redeemers as “trading” Arabs. Most were sold more than once before being acquired by a “trading” Arab. Captain Riley, for example, changed hands five times before he was ransomed, while Robbins served four different owners (Paddock 70, 134; Riley, Narrative 392, 446; Robbins 2–9, 31–49, 146, 166–68; Saugnier 13; Surprise 7–13, 38; Schwartz, “Narrative” 156; Matra to William Grenville, 21 July 1789, 105–06).5 Initial owners rarely ransomed their slaves, but provided the first link in the ransoming trade. They operated on the Atlantic coast south of Mogador, a territory outside of Moroccan control. Moroccan power was uncertain or non-existent south of Mogador in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (El Mansour 8–9, 93–95, 104; Schroeter, “Slavery in Moroccan” 187–88). Coastal groups trafficked goods from an underpopulated Atlantic coast into caravan paths and marketplaces. For these residents, shipwrecks represented business opportunities that required little capital outlay, but could yield strong profits. They carefully extracted useable or saleable items, including human beings. As was typical, Robbins and his crewmates were

“Arab speculators” and ransom slavery 149 stripped of valuable items, particularly clothing or currency. Wise to their captives’ desire to hide valuables, Arabs searched the men carefully (Robbins 48–49; Riley, Narrative 47; Surprise 20–22; Simpson to Secretary of State, 15 August 1800, 27 March 1806). One Englishman reported that “every part” of his body was searched several times before his captors were satisfied that he secreted no treasures (Schwartz, “Narrative” 162). Next, Arabs scoured the coast and, if not at the wreck already, demanded to be led to the original wreck site. At the wreck, they conducted a thorough salvage operation. News about wrecked vessels moved swiftly because they offered rich plunder, so those arriving first hid their loot if they could (Cochelet 11–13; Robbins 13–14, 48; Paddock 70–71, 79–83; Surprise 20–21). Arabs sometimes delegated salvage and concealment labor to their new slaves. Frenchman Charles Cochelet, a passenger on the 1819 wrecked Sophia, was compelled to empty the hold of the ruined vessel and convey the contents to shore. His owners, whom he called Ouadlims, forced him and the Sophia’s crewmen to dig deep holes, roll twenty to thirty barrels of flour into each hole, and cover the holes. This labor, their first as slaves, demanded “incredible exertion,” but protected the Ouadlims’ spoils from the Bedouin Arabs who appeared a few days later (Cochelet 13–17). The new arrivals had heard that a vessel had floundered and came seeking trade goods from the wreck. The newcomers either purchased or appropriated Cochelet and a sailor; Cochelet was not sure which. Fortunately for Cochelet and the sailor, their new owner was a merchant who carried the two men directly to a market near Mogador, a move that fast-tracked their ransom (Cochelet 26–27; Surprise 22–23; Simpson to Secretary of State, 17 August 1799; Castlereagh to Bathurst, 6 October 1819). Initial owners divided their slaves; generally, no more than three slaves to each master. Robbins was claimed by Ganus, a seemingly well-off man with his family, two tents, and twenty camels (Robbins 52, 58). While initial owners like Ganus sought to profit from selling their slaves, they welcomed the work slaves shouldered in the meantime (Robbins 49; Adams 33–35; Saugnier 25; Paddock 79; Surprise 20–21; Cochelet 7–14; Sikainga 59). Masters directed slaves to gather firewood, watch goats, and other relatively simple tasks. As Robbins observed, Ganus and his family “manifested a certain pleasure in having a slave in their family, to serve them,” but they gained more pleasure “because they hoped to make a sum of money by the sale of me” (Robbins 55). Like others, Robbins was sold and resold before being ransomed. Ganus seemingly planned to sell Robbins right away. When he failed to hawk his goods in one location, he moved onto the next “watering place,” which was “generally the market for slaves” (Robbins 125–28). Finally, Ganus succeeded in peddling Robbins to Mahomet Meaarah. Meaarah possessed several signs of wealth, including 68 camels, a female African slave, and a private tutor for his children (Robbins 147–48). Meaarah wanted to recoup immediate return on his investment, not to carry Robbins to Mogador. After

150  Christine E. Sears traveling for weeks, he led Robbins to “a city of tents” where merchants dealt in blankets, tobacco, dates, powder, blue cottons, and all manner of goods (Robbins 164–66). Merchants here judged Robbins a poor risk, too likely to die before reaching Mogador. But, as they left the city of tents, Hamet, a “trading” Arab leading 25 camels and a black slave paid five camels and two blankets for Robbins (Robbins 166–67). Two other owners held Robbins before he was ransomed, but Hamet proved crucial in moving him near Mogador.6 Merchants shrewdly evaluated their human commodities with an eye for profit potential. Meaarah “viewed [Robbins] with the closest scrutiny” before buying him. When trying to entice buyers, Meaarah ordered Robbins to “walk around and be active;” that is, look fit and strong (Robbins 127, 164–65). The Frenchman Cochelet was examined “rudely,” and turned “in all direction” before a buyer paid for him (Cochelet 54). Buyers examined slaves to ascertain their health. If they were to redeem the slaves, they required healthy property able to withstand the grueling trip to Mogador. But their careful inspections also allowed them to “assign value to our persons” (Cochelet 54). Slaves worked to influence potential purchasers to speed their redemption. One way to do this was to claim British nationality, as Robbins and Riley and most American wreck victims did. English agents often ransomed Englishmen, and, knowing this, Americans claimed that they were English (Paddock 49; Riley, MSS 30–31; Matra to Duke of Portland, 7 February 1795). Masters asked what nationality their captives claimed to determine with whom they would be negotiating ransom. Because English agents had been in Mogador since the 1760s, Arab merchants may have worked with Englishmen and thus knew from experience that they would buy English captives. Englishmen were present. The British were commercially active in southern Morocco. In fact, in the early 1800s, the only European commercial houses in Mogador were English. No Americans resided in southern Morocco, though US ships traded occasionally in Mogador (El Mansour 44–45, 61–65; Sears 113–14). English agents did negotiate Americans’ ransom, but both slaves and masters presumed that Englishmen were a sure sell and other nationalities riskier. Slaves tried to influence buyers in many ways, but captains were best positioned to bargain effectively. Captains leveraged their ability to gather funds, and their captors’ belief that they commanded greater funds, to speed their redemption. Captains engaged with merchants bearing markers of wealth: numerous camels, African slaves, expensive guns, and superior clothing. Just as their captors evaluated possible slaves, captives sized up potential redeemers. Captain Riley bargained with a merchant, Hamet, carrying an expensive double-barreled musket, and his mistress encouraged his haggling. Like Riley, she stood to benefit from his sale. Riley promised his potential buyer traveling and provisioning costs for himself and his crewmen. He guaranteed a payment of $200 for himself, $200 for his second mate, and $100

“Arab speculators” and ransom slavery 151 each for the cabin boy, Horace Savage, and two sailors. He threw in gifts of sugar, tea, and two double-barreled shotguns. In total, Riley pledged $1200 for transport and ransom of five men, including himself. The Arab merchant paid for Riley in trade goods: two blankets, one piece of blue cotton, and a bundle of ostrich feathers, a price surely less than the $200 he would collect in Mogador for Riley (Riley, MSS 29–36; Cochelet 53).7 Captain Juddah Paddock’s master, Ahamed, required a similar deal before purchasing Paddock and seven of his crew members. Paddock pledged $40 per person more than the official ransom paid in Mogador. Ahamed had ransomed Europeans before, and he knew that English agents tried to cap costs at $100 a head, so he maximized his profits by squeezing his (desperate) cargo. Ahamed hinted that European agents would not redeem his slaves and may have sought a sure payment through Paddock’s promises. Maybe Ahamed stirred fear in his captives, to ensure their good behavior on the road or to wrest money out of them. According to Paddock, Ahamed asserted that the English consul “kept no horses nor servants, nor bought goats’ skins, sheep’s wool, nor anything else;” in short, that he was too poor to redeem slaves (Paddock 110, 172–73; Simpson to Secretary of State, 14 July 1800). Arab merchants sped captains toward redemption because captains agreed to set ransoms and additional costs for themselves and seamen purchased with them. Mariners held alone, or even with other seamen, but without their captain, were enslaved longer and more likely not to be redeemed. But sailors held with their captain were surer of ransom and a speedier ransom. Recall that Captain Riley and the seamen with him spent three months enslaved. Captain Paddock and the crew with him suffered eight months in Africa. On the other hand, Seaman Robbins endured nineteen months and mariner John Hill of Paddock’s Oswego bore two years of slavery before being ransomed (Paddock 281; Simpson 15 and 30 August 1800, 3 September 1802, 8 January 1802). Sailors did not pledge money for their ransom, or they do not describe doing so in their narratives. Perhaps mariners avoided making promises they could not keep. Maybe their captors did not accept such promises if they were made by sailors. Captors seemingly expected captains to bargain for themselves, and anticipated that captains could marshal funds to make promised payments. Other slaves brokered deals with their masters occasionally. An Arab merchant paid $180 for Frenchman Saugnier, a French passenger on a ship bound to Senegal in 1783, but only after Saugnier swore he would be ransomed at that rate. Saugnier was vague about who would foot his ransom bill (Saugnier 43). And his guarantee was not the only motive driving his master. The Arab merchant who bought him held five other men to redeem, and likely would have transported Saugnier as part of the redemption parcel with the expectation of some compensation. “Trading” Arabs maximized profit by transporting slaves in bulk. When Ahamed bought Paddock and six of his crew, he already owned four English boys from the Martin Hall of London, a 1799 casualty of the coast

152  Christine E. Sears (Paddock 100; Matra to Duke of Portland, 20 November 1798, 20 November 1800). Altogether, Ahamed moved 11 slaves toward Mogador and redemption. Frenchmen Saugnier and Cochelet were each redeemed with six other men. Riley’s master, Hamet, conveyed Riley with four of his crew. Hamet could have bought Robbins, but declined. According to Riley, Hamet declared that he lacked trade goods to pay for Robbins (Riley, Narrative 114–15; Robbins 93–94). Hamet’s economic decision had real and painful costs for Robbins. Riley and the men with him were ransomed and free in three months. Robbins would spend nineteen months in Africa before being redeemed. Arab merchants also maximized their profits by transporting other commodities. They circulated among the same markets over time, moving goods between markets along particular routes. One of Robbins’ masters stocked up on camels, goats, tobacco, blankets, gunpowder, and “considerable quantities of African and European merchandize” before heading toward Mogador (Robbins 167). This was by no means atypical. Such merchants transferred the flow of goods, which included Africans, from the “Zahara desert” and Atlantic coast to markets in Wadinoon and Mogador (Robbins 164–67; Riley, MSS 26; Schroeter, “Slave Markets” 187). “Trading” Arabs plied an uncertain and dangerous trade when transporting human bondsmen, so they took precautions to protect their trade goods. They journeyed in a caravan or in smaller, though armed, groups. Robbins’ master guarded him carefully, surrounding him with men on horseback carrying muskets when they moved (Robbins 109, 172–76; Riley, Narrative 258). Other owners, like Paddock’s master Ahamed, avoided well-used roads, choosing less traveled, and thus more challenging, routes. Because Ahamed was “haunted with the fear of meeting with molestation,” he picked untraversed routes on which they saw few other people including fewer thieves (Paddock 194). One Englishman’s master traveled in a caravan, but pitched his tent some distance from those in his party. He hoped to elude robbery and have better fodder for his animals (Trail 41–42; Saugnier 49–50). Above all, Arab merchants with European or American slaves avoided Moroccan territory. Given the chance, Moroccan leaders commandeered captives and used their redemption as a “diplomatic lever” in international negotiations (Panzac 24). By the late eighteenth century, the Moroccan state dictated little south of Mogador, despite repeated attempts to expand there, or, more to the point, to regulate the valuable trans-Saharan trade passing through that area (Surprise 36; Matra, 28 March 1789; Green, 20 October 1806; Simpson to Secretary of State, 30 November 1815; Mansour 57). The Moroccan state had some success regulating trade through Mogador, which was an important conduit for trans-Saharan and regional trade. Moroccan Emperor Muhammed b. ‘Abd Allah (r. 1757–1790) constructed Mogador, or Essaouira as he called it, to facilitate and supervise Morocco’s Atlantic trade. Mogador replaced Santa Cruz (Agadir), an older

“Arab speculators” and ransom slavery 153 port city outside of the Moroccan government’s direct control. Mogador swiftly became the main conduit for trans-Saharan trade goods moving through Marrakesh and into North African and Atlantic markets. Sultan Muhammed garrisoned slave soldiers in the port to safeguard the city and maintain direct control of it. Muhammed and subsequent sultans permitted only designated Europeans to conduct business with state-chosen agents in Mogador (Saugnier 52–53; Matra to Sydney, 28 March 1789; Mansour 10, 56–62, 104–05; El Hamel, Black Morocco 158, 221–25; Schroeter, Merchants xxi, 2–7; Schroeter, “Town” 24–25; Moseley 544–46; Brett 1–10; Gutelius 40–41; Sears 136–37). The Moroccan government complicated Bedouin and Arab negotiations when it did intervene. When a Moroccan Emperor could, he compelled masters to sell their slave to him for a set price, then dictated the ransom process and retained any fees collected. Invariably, merchants saw their profits plummet in such cases. Often, an emperor covered the ransom fees, but left European agents to compensate masters for their time and expenses. Europeans might have to pay gratuities to Moroccan soldiers sent to escort released slaves to Tangier, a visit some rulers required of freedmen. In 1812, Emperor Mawlay Sulayman redeemed three members of the Charles’ American crew, but reimbursed the Arab merchants who escorted the slaves to Mogador little. The Arabs complained. They lost not only money, but time in bringing the three slaves to Mogador and had not been fairly compensated. Concerned that underpaid Arab merchants might not bring captives to Mogador, the English agent paid each Arab $8 (Simpson to Secretary of State, 2 October 1806, 6 July 1812, 29 September 1812, 3 April 1813). Because these Arab merchants were autonomous, European agents could not arrange or enforce treaties to prevent their countrymen’s capture, nor implement a set ransoming process. They negotiated individually and piecemeal, a process in which they had little leverage. However, European agents had even less clout when the Moroccan state interceded. In those cases, the Moroccan Sultan dictated terms. In some cases, the Emperor charged nothing. In 1797, the Emperor paid the (English) Solicitor General crew’s expenses while they awaited transport from Mogador and gave each man new clothes. In 1810, the Emperor recovered most of the eighteen-man crew of the Montezuma, but charged the English government nothing for their countrymen’s release (Paddock 162; Matra to Grenville, 3 December 1789; Matra to Portland, 31 October 1795, 18 November 1795, 30 December 1795, 24 July 1797; Green to Earl of Liverpool, 27 March 1811). At other times, an emperor sent ransomed men to European consuls as gifts, with strings attached for their release. In 1789, the Moroccan Emperor arranged for nine Englishmen to be redeemed, but claimed a “Present” in return. In this case, the Emperor demanded a cannon for the nearly £600 he expended on the crew. To sweeten the deal, he agreed to give the British preferred provisioning privileges in Gibraltar (Robbins 181; Simpson to Secretary of State, 6 July 1812; Matra to Grenville, 21 July 1789, 3

154  Christine E. Sears December 1789, 19 December 1789, 26 January 1790, 11 March 1790, 15 July 1790; Matra to Portland, 31 October 1795; Green to Windham, 20 October 1806; Matra to nephew, 29 December 1780). Occasionally, an emperor commanded a much higher ransom rate before handing over Europeans. Consuls generally agreed that when the Emperor intervened, it “cost” them “very dear.” Arab and Bedouin merchants no doubt agreed with that assessment (Simpson to Secretary of State, 27 March 1806; Surprise 37). Slave owners assiduously avoided Moroccan intervention but needed to reach European agents in Mogador to negotiate slaves’ ransom. The Moroccan government made this challenging. Determined to control trade through their country, Moroccan rulers restricted European presence in Morocco. Few Europeans lived in Morocco, and even fewer resided south of Mogador. In the early 1800s, only one French commercial house and a handful of British merchants operated from Mogador (El Mansour 64–67; Schroeter, Merchants xi, 2–7; Schroeter, “Town” 24). The English sometimes posted a consular agent in Mogador, but, as was common, consuls served as government agents and private merchants. For example, William Willshire was the British Vice Consul at Mogador in 1817. Willshire also represented the English business of James Renshaw and Company in the port (Surprise 40). Arab merchants stayed just out of the Moroccan state’s reach, often in the market town of Wadinoon (also rendered Wadinoun, Oled Nun, or Ouadnoun) or smaller towns near it. Wadinoon was a sizeable town about 200 miles or several days travel from Mogador. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, local leaders ruled the town autonomously (Riley, Narrative 259–61; Surprise 36). Wadinoon was out of the Moroccan state’s reach and within communication range of Europeans and their agents. Because it was a significant regional market, Wadinoon, or villages nearby, served as a home base for some merchants (Adams 67–80; Sears 141–42). Bel Cossim, a trader who held Robbins, owned dwellings and land in a nearby town, where he lived with his family and slaves. According to Robbins, Wadinoon was visible from Bel Cossim’s tent in this smaller, neighboring town (Robbins 180–83; Simpson, 15 April 1800; Schroeter, “Slave Markets” 187). Once in or close to Wadinoon, owners opened lines of communication with Europeans or their agents. To start the process, masters encouraged, even ordered, their slaves to write letters to European consuls. Riley’s owner gave him paper, reed, and black liquid and dictated what ransom to demand from the English consul in Mogador. French captive Cochelet also directed a letter to the English consul at Mogador. He knew an English agent resided there, though he did not know that person’s name. Though he did not expect it, he received a French agent’s answer twelve days later (Riley, Narrative 204–05; Cochelet 65–67, 70; Surprise 31; Paddock 247–48; Simpson to Secretary of State, 7 May 1806, 10 May 1816).

“Arab speculators” and ransom slavery 155 English and European consuls did not wait for word from slaves or their masters. They hired agents to locate slaves and start bargaining for their release. British consuls dispatched agents to Wadinoon, like the Berber man who handed Robbins, who was at the market in Wadinoon, a letter addressed in English to “Any Christian Slave” (Robbins 213–15; Adams 61; Sears 143–45). This letter directed the receiver to add his full name, name of his ship, date of its wreck, nationality, and other information to the letter, and then return it to the agent. The agent bargained with Robbins’ master over Robbins’ price before delivering it to the English consul, who could complete the deal. English consuls sent agents much farther afield to find Christian slaves. In 1817, English and US consul James Simpson dispatched a “Moor” in “his confidence” as far as the “country of Wadelims”—near Cape Bojador—to find the four missing Commercers. This Moor was authorized to redeem the men, if they could be located (Simpson to Shaler, 28 February 1817; Simpson to Secretary of State, 30 November 1815; Hershenzon, ch. 5). Europeans hired and collaborated with Arab and Jewish agents who represented a long-term change in the Moroccan economy (Surprise 33; Matra, 2 August 1790, 18 November 1795). Since 1764, when the Moroccan empire built Mogador and asserted greater control over trade, interior routes shifted to the Atlantic coast and maritime trade. Merchants moved their investments from the “caravan trade to maritime commerce,” which depended more on Europeans and Atlantic markets than previous Moroccan trade patterns (Mansour 43; Gutelius 40–42). Europeans benefitted from these economic changes and from commercial relationships with local traders. European consuls were merchants and state officials, but they earned the bulk of their income through trade, not government pay. Their “commerce obliged them to disperse” brokers “around the country,” and these brokers conducted business and scoured the country for Christian slaves (Saugnier 43). They hired local agents to mediate commercial and ransom arrangements on their behalf. Often, local agents and Europeans forged long-lasting commercial ties. For example, Saugnier was transported by Bentahar, “an Arab connected with the house of the English merchants” to Mogador (Saugnier 49; Matra to Dundass, 2 July 1791; Matra to Portland, 18 November 1795). Local agents and merchants also benefitted from connections to Europeans. Arab and Jewish agents were reimbursed for travel and expenses. Their fees might include hiring mules and guards, provisioning Christian slaves, and providing clothing for them. In 1792, English consul James Matra paid an Arab merchant named Hazan Massoud £1000. Massoud had purchased Captain Henry Driver and his men and guaranteed their “safe delivery to Mogador.” In addition, Matra handed over £1700 for maintaining Driver and his men while at Wadinoon. He also shelled out £680 for clothing and shoes furnished for Driver and his crew while awaiting ransom. Massoud

156  Christine E. Sears very likely earned some return on his investments (Matra to Dundass, 5 October 1792, 2 August 1791, 15 April 1792). Arab merchant Bel Cossim worked with English consuls for many years, and the partnership appears to have been lucrative. British agents in Mogador told Robbins that Bel Cossim owned and ransomed numerous Christian slaves over the years. Indeed, Bel Cossim (sometimes rendered Belcassam) was frequently recorded as the owner who ransomed Christian slaves. Bel Cossim was a common West African name, so Bel Cossim may not have referred to the same individual each time. But according to Robbins, his master Bel Cossim had dealt in Christian slaves for years. He purchased slaves for little from coastal Arabs and Berbers, and then demanded high sums from Europeans for their redemption. Slave ransoming, Robbins reported, was a “great source of his wealth” (Robbins 207, 183; Riley, Narrative 264). It is possible, however, that Bel Cossim acquired wealth and connections first, and then moved into the ransom trade. Riley wrote that Bel Cossim had captained a Moorish ship trading grain between Morocco and Europe. If true, this signals Bel Cossim’s diversified trade, knowledge of international business, and widespread connections. He was well known to the English. Indeed, one British sailor referred to Bel Cossim as the “friend of the [English] Consuls” (Surprise 43). Though perhaps not a “friend” to Bel Cossim, Riley felt grateful to his redeemer. Riley visited Mogador in 1833, hoping to see Bel Cossim who, Riley knew, worked with Willshire after Riley’s ransom. Sadly, Bel Cossim died in 1825, before Riley’s visit (Riley, MSS 71–72; Riley, Narrative 240; King 214). Like Bel Cossim, other Arab merchants possessed wealth and international experience. Hali Laze, whom Frenchman Saugnier described as the chief of Glimi, a town near Mogador, purchased Saugnier for $150. Saugnier described Laze’s large household, including numerous horses, camels, cows, and African slaves. Saugnier claimed that Laze had been an ambassador for Morocco to Paris, though Laze later rebelled against the Moroccan Emperor. In his role as ambassador, Hali Laze created connections and networks with people in and outside of Morocco, connections that likely assisted in his business, including the ransoming of Christian slaves (Saugnier 41–42). Europeans worked with local agents, Arab merchants, European businessmen and governments, and sometimes the Moroccan state to redeem their countrymen. Because ransoms were individually arranged, no state could set or enforce a set price (Simpson to Secretary of State, 27 March 1806; Sears 50–51). Thus, prices fluctuated depending on political and economic conditions, ability of the redeemer to gather funds, and determination of the seller. European and American consuls wanted Arabs to ransom their slaves, but worried that the cost was high. James Simpson, an English and American agent, celebrated the 1816 redemption of an English boy, who, after six years in Africa, was finally ransomed. Arabs carried the boy to Mogador after hearing reports that “large

“Arab speculators” and ransom slavery 157 premiums [were] being paid for Christians.” On the one hand, Simpson was apprehensive about the “large premiums” demanded for slaves. On the other hand, Simpson wrote, it was “absolutely necessary” to give “good encouragement to the Arabs” to ensure they would redeem Christian slaves rather than holding them in “perpetual Slavery” (Simpson to Secretary of State, 28 March 1803, 24 September 1816). European officials worried that repeated selling of Christian slaves drove their prices up; that each time a Christian slave was exchanged, the cost for ransom went higher and higher. In 1796, one British agent complained that “Arab speculators” pushed prices beyond $200 per person. European agents strove to limit costs to $100 a person. But roughly $200 a head seemed to be the going rate for ransoming a Christian slave, regardless of how many owners one had or how long one was enslaved. Mariner Robbins belonged to four masters in nineteen months. He was ransomed for $230. Captain Riley’s fifth master redeemed him for $200 after three months (Simpson, 7 June 1800, 2 October 1806, 20 November 1815, 18 May 1819, 13 June 1819; Matra, 24 March 1795, 26 June 1796, 10 September 1796).8 Money for ransom came from different sources, and often more than one source. Some redemptions were paid by charity, others by a government, business connection, or family and friends. Americans seemingly raised no subscriptions to ransom these men, as they had for those held in Algiers. A British charity rescued some Englishmen. The Ironmongers Company of London ransomed British Barbary captives, though the organization usually capped its fees at £100 a person. In 1815, the Ironmongers helped ransom sixteen men from the English ship Surprise. Fortunately for the redeemed men, the Company agreed to exceed their maximum payment (Simpson, Letterbook 78; Surprise 8, 36–52; Simpson, 6 March 1807; Traill 53–54). European agents in Mogador arranged ransoms and usually distributed the payments. English agent William Willshire haggled with local merchants over the Surprise crews’ ransom prices. But Willshire would not advance money based only on “faith” in the crew, which the crew understood, as they were “entire strangers to him.” Willshire secured funds from the Ironmongers and the enslaved men solicited funds from “friends in Glasgow.” Those friends lodged money with Messrs. Renshaw and Company of London, a company for which Willshire worked. Willshire then funneled funds to local merchants, who released the crewmen (Surprise 35–36). Willshire arranged ransoms for Robbins and Riley. Though Willshire did not front the money, Robbins thought of him as an “angel of mercy” (Robbins 235). According to Robbins, Willshire tirelessly tracked Christian slaves and did not rest until each “taste[d] the fruits of his ransoming benevolence” (Portsmouth Oracle 3). Willshire also facilitated Riley’s ransom. Riley had promised a ransom amount, which James Simpson guessed would amount to $1200 with ransom, tips, and “incidentals” (Simpson to Secretary of State, 6 February 1817). Assisted by Willshire and Simpson,

158  Christine E. Sears Riley requested funds from Horatio Sprague, an English merchant in Gibraltar, whom Riley met prior to his wreck. They may have contacted Sprague because he advanced ransom for Paddock and his men in 1800. Sprague was eventually repaid for Riley’s ransom. The US government allocated $1853.56 for the ransom and expenses of Riley and his crew (Riley, Narrative 304–05, 453, 526–27, 530; Matra to Portland, 24 March 1796). As seen in Riley’s case, ransom was only a part of the redemption cost. The English agent recorded ransom for Paddock and his five men, along with clothing and “gratuities to the Governor” (Simpson to Secretary of State, 15 August 1800, 3 October 1799, 2 March 1804). He disbursed $1783 for their release. When Captain Driver was ransomed in 1792, the English consul paid £180 for the “Moor” and mules who transported them from Santa Cruz to Mogador and £559 in gratuities for a grand total of £25940 (Matra to Dundass, 5 October 1792). In 1800, an English agent shelled out £1907.2 for 5 men from the English ship Martin Hall. He expended £5472.2 for ransom alone, but recorded a total disbursement of £14795 for this crew’s release from slavery (Matra to Portland, 20 November 1800). In the absence of state rule, multiple agendas influenced the ransom process. The enslaved wished for redemption. Their captors wanted to turn a profit. But captor and captive shared the goal of accessing receptive European buyers in Mogador, as this would gain freedom for one and fees for the other. Owners might be Arabs or Berbers, nomadic or sedentary, farmers or traders, but many were involved in moving West Africa’s “unprocessed raw materials” to Mogador, a main terminus for the trans-Saharan caravan trade (El Mansour 6–10, 40; El Hamel, “Race” 31; Wright 54–56). Arab, Berber, and Jewish owners in Morocco shared a desire and ability to turn a profit. First owners moved slaves and other commodities salvaged from wrecked vessels into the Western Saharan market. These owners often sold their wares locally for a surer, if smaller profit. They opted not to make the long, costly trip to Mogador, a trip that required risking bandits, the Sultan’s operatives, and other dangers to ransom their slaves. Arab merchants appeared to command more capital and developed trade networks, including close relationships with Europeans. These merchants transported European and American slaves along with other goods to markets accessible to Europeans. They evaded the Moroccan state’s intervention, but lived or traded close to Mogador, just out of the Moroccan government’s reach, yet within communication range of European agents. Ransom slavery was a widespread “species of trade,” one found in the Americas, Middle East, and Africa. Exploring the Western Saharan ransom slavery helps move “beyond the homogenous conception of slavery” (Barr 20) as we consider what slavery meant in places outside the nineteenth-century antebellum US South. The Western Saharan ransom slavery system indicates the considerable resources European and American states mobilized to find and ransom countrymen. And, in doing so, highlights how trade operated in a frontier region not controlled by Europeans or the Moroccan state.

“Arab speculators” and ransom slavery 159

Notes The author is grateful to the Alabama Early American Seminar, UAH colleagues, particularly Ethan Hawkley and Tom Reidy, and John Davies and Katie Turner for feedback on drafts. English consul James Matra refers to “Arab Speculators” (Matra to Duke of Portland, Tangier 25 March 1796, Public Records Office, General Correspondence Morocco before 1906, FO 52/11 CUST). 1 The Commerce’s crew included the following: Supercargo and Captain James Riley; George Williams, first mate; Aaron Savage, second mate; Archibald Robbins, Thomas Burns, James Clark, and William Porter, able seamen; James Barrett and John Hogan, ordinary seamen; Horace Savage, cabin boy; and Richard Deslisle, cook. They picked up a passenger, Antonio Michel, in Tenerife, but he was taken captive at Cape Bojador, on their first landing (Riley, MSS 3; Robbins 6–7). 2  Definitions of slavery differ depending on the time and place. Scholars who address the necessity of defining slavery within a specific time and place include the following: Toledano; Kolchin (“Some Recent Works on Slavery,” “The Big Picture”); Snyder; Stilwell. 3 The two Commercers left in Africa were the free African American, the only man of color in the crew, Richard Deslisle, and James Barrett, an ordinary seaman who joined the crew in New Orleans. 4 My understanding of ransom slavery was sharpened in discussions with Gillian Weiss, Paul E. Lovejoy, Jennifer Lofkrantz, Olatunji Ojo, Daniel Hershenzon, and other attenders at “Perspectives on Historical and Contemporary Ransoming Practices,” a conference at York University sponsored by the Harriet Tubman Institution, 25–26 April 2014. Lofkrantz and Ojo restrict ransom slavery to those captives paid for and released when captured or “soon afterwards,” while redeemed captives remain with former owners in subservient positions. These distinctions apply well to the Sokoto Caliphate, the object of the study, but not to Mediterranean or other early modern systems of ransom slavery (Lofkrantz and Ojo; Lofkrantz). For more on ransom slavery see the following: Dávid and Fodor; Friedman; Constable; Korpela; Faroqhi. 5 Captain Juddah Paddock was sold only once, while Charles Cochelet was claimed by three different masters. Saugnier and Robert Adams served four different owners. 6 Saugnier reported that Arabs without at least one black African slave were “poor indeed” (99). This rate is in line with other reported fees for slaves. One of Adams’s masters sold him for $50 worth of blankets and dates, while a later owner bought him for $70 of blankets, gunpowder, and dates (Adams 66–68, 73). 7 Aaron Savage, Horace Savage, James Clark, and Thomas Burns were with Riley. 8 For comparison, sailor Lemuel Gifford was ransomed for $238.95 in 1819. For more on European humanitarian interest in ransoming countrymen, see Ressel.

References Adams, Robert. The Narrative of Robert Adams, an American Sailor, Who Was Wrecked on the Western Coast of Africa in the Year 1810. Boston, MA: Wells and Lilly, sold by M. Carey and Son, 1817. Allison, Robert J. The Crescent Obscured: The United States and the Muslim World, 1776–1815. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.

160  Christine E. Sears Baepler, Paul. “The Barbary Captivity Narrative in Early America.” Early American Literature 39 (1995): 120–42. Barr, Juliana. “From Captives to Slaves: Commodifying Indian Women in the Borderlands.” The Journal of American History 92.1 (2005): 19–46. Blackburn, Robin. Making of New World Slavery. New York: Verso, 1997. Blumenthal, Debra. Enemies & Familiars: Slavery and Mastery in Fifteenth-Century Valencia. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009. Bradley, Keith. “Roman Slavery: Retrospect and Prospect.” Canadian Journal of History 43.3 (2008): 477–500. Bradley, Keith. Slavery and Society at Rome. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Brett, Michael. “Great Britain and Southern Morocco in the Nineteenth Century.” The Journal of North African Studies 2.2 (1997): 1–10. Brett, Michael and Elizabeth Fentress. The Berbers. Cambridge: Blackwell, 1996. Castlereagh, Viscount to Earl of Bathurst. Downing Street, London, 6 October 1819. Public Records Office. Barbary States General Correspondence before 1906. FO 87. Cochelet, Charles. Narrative of the Shipwreck of the Sophia, on the 30th of May 1819, on the Western Coast of Africa. London: Richard Philips and Company, 1822. Colley, Linda. Captive: Britain, Empire, and the World 1600–1850. New York: Anchor Books, 2002. Constable, Olivia R. “Muslim Spain and Mediterranean Slavery: The Medieval Slave Trade as an Aspect of Muslim-Christian Relations.” Christendom and Its Discontents: Exclusion, Persecution and Rebellion 1000–1500. Ed. Scott L. Waugh and Peter D. Diehl. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Dávid, Géza and Pál Fodor, eds. Ransom Slavery along the Ottoman Borders. Leiden: Brill, 2007. Faroqhi, Suraiya. “Quis Custodiet Custodes? Controlling Slave Identities and Slave Traders in Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Istanbul.” Frontiers of Faith. Ed. Eszter Andor and István György Tóth. Budapest: Central European University, 2001. Friedman, Yvonne. Encounters between Enemies: Captivity and Ransom in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem. Leiden: Brill, 2002. Glete, Jan. “Warfare at Sea, 1450–1815.” War in the Early Modern World 1450– 1815. Ed. Jeremy Black. London: UCL Press, 1999. Green, James to Earl of Liverpool or William Windham. Great Britain. General Correspondence before 1906. Morocco. FO 52. Series I: 1761–1837. Public Records Office, London. Groot, Alexander H. de. “The Ottoman Threat to Europe.” Hospitaller Malta 1530–1798: Studies on Early Modern Malta and the Order of St. John of Jerusalem. Ed. Victor Malla-Milanes. Malta: Mireva Publications, 1993. Gutelius, David P.V. “The Path is Easy and the Benefits Large: The Nāşiriyaa, Social Networks and Economic Change in Morocco, 1640–1830.” The Journal of African History 43.1 (2002): 27–49. El Hamel, Chouki. Black Morocco: A History of Slavery, Race, and Islam. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. El Hamel, Chouki. “ ‘Race,’ Slavery and Islam in Maghribi Mediterranean Thought: The Question of the Haratin in Morocco.” The Journal of North African Studies 7.3 (2002): 29–52.

“Arab speculators” and ransom slavery 161 Hershenzon, Daniel Bernardo. “Early Modern Spain and the Creation of the Mediterranean: Captivity, Commerce, and Knowledge.” Diss. University of Michigan, 2011. Jones, Oakah L. “Rescue and Ransom of Spanish Captives from the indios bárbaros on the Northern Frontier of New Spain.” Colonial Latin American Historical Review 4.2 (1995): 128–48. King, Dean. Skeletons on the Zahara: A True Story of Survival. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2004. Kolchin, Peter. “The Big Picture: A Comment on David Brion Davis’s ‘Looking at Slavery from Broader Perspectives.’” The American Historical Review 105.2 (2000): 467–71. Kolchin, Peter. “Some Recent Works on Slavery outside the United States: An American Perspective. A Review Article.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 28.4 (1986): 767–77. Korpela, Jukka. “The Baltic Finnic People in the Medieval and Pre-Modern Eastern European Slave Trade.” Russian History 41.1 (2014): 85–117. Lofkrantz, Jennifer. “Intellectual Discourse in the Sokoto Caliphate: The Triumvirate’s Opinions on the Issue of Ransoming, ca. 1810.” International Journal of African Historical Studies 45.3 (2012): 385–401. Lofkrantz, Jennifer, and Olatunji Ojo. “Slavery, Freedom and Failed Ransom Negotiations in West Africa, 1730–1900.” Journal of African History 54 (2012): 25–44. Lovejoy, Paul E. “Muslim Freedmen in the Atlantic World: Images of Manumission and Self-Redemption.” Slavery on the Frontiers of Islam. Ed. Lovejoy. Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener Publishers, 2004. El Mansour, Mohammed. Morocco in the Reign of Mawlay Sulayman. Cambridgeshire: Middle East and North African Studies Press, 1990. Marín, Manuela and Rachid El Hour. “Captives, Children and Conversion: A Case from Late Nasrid Granada.” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 41.4 (1998): 453–73. Matra, James to Duke of Portland, Henry Dundass, his Nephew, Sydney, or William Grenville. Great Britain. General Correspondence before 1906. Morocco. FO 52. Series I: 1761–1837. Public Records Office, London. Moseley, K.P. “Caravel and Caravan: West Africa and World-Economies, ca. 900– 1900 A.D.” Review: A Journal of the Ferdinand Braudel Center 15.3 (1992): 523–555. Nadal, Gonçal López. “Mediterranean Privateering between the Treaties of Utrecht and Paris, 1715–1856: First Reflections.” Pirates and Privateers. Ed. David Starkey, E.S. Van Eyck Van Heslinga, and J.A. De Moor. Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1997. A Narrative of the Shipwreck of the British Brig “Surprise.” London: The Company, 1817. Newman, Simon P. A New World of Labor: The Development of Plantation Slavery in the British Atlantic. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013. Paddock, Juddah. A Narrative of the Shipwreck of the Ship Oswego on the Coast of South Barbary. New York: J. Seymour, 1818. Paddock, Juddah. Narrative of the Shipwreck of the Ship Oswego on the Coast of South Barbary and of the Sufferings of the Master and Crew While in Bondage Among the Arabs. New York: James Riley, 1818.

162  Christine E. Sears Panzac, Daniel. Barbary Corsairs: The End of a Legend, 1800–1820. Boston, MA: Brill, 2005. Parker, Richard B. Uncle Sam in Barbary: A Diplomatic History. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2004. Pennell, C.R. “Accommodation between European and Islamic Law in the Western Mediterranean in the Early Nineteenth Century.” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 21.2 (1994): 159–89. Portsmouth Oracle. New Hampshire. 31 May 1817. Ressel, Magnus. “The North European Way of Ransoming: Explorations into an Unknown Dimension of the Early Modern Welfare State.” Historical Social Research 35.4 (2010): 125–47. Riley, James. An Authentic Narrative of the Loss of the American Brig Commerce. New York: T & W Mercein, 1817. Riley, James. “Riley’s Narrative: Manuscript [1817].” Manuscript Collection, New York Historical Society, New York. Robbins, Archibald. A Journal Comprising an Account of the Loss of the Brig Commerce of Hartford Connecticut. Hartford, CT: F.D. Bolles, 1817. Rotman, Youval. Byzantine Slavery and the Mediterranean World. Trans. Jane Marie Todd. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009. Rouighi, Ramzi. “The Berbers of the Arabs.” Studia Islamica 106 (2011): 49–76. Saugnier. Voyages to the Coast of Africa by Messrs. Saugnier and Brisson. London: G.G. J. and J. Robinson, 1792. Schroeter, Daniel J. Merchants of Essaouira: Urban Society and Imperialism in SouthWestern Morocco, 1844–1886. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Schroeter, Daniel J. “Slave Markets and Slavery in Moroccan Urban Society.” Slavery & Abolition 13.1 (1992): 185–213. Schroeter, Daniel J. “The Town of Mogador (Essaouira) and Aspects of Change in Pre-Colonial Morocco: A Bibliographical Essay.” Bulletin: British Society for Middle Eastern Studies 6.1 (1979): 24–38. Schwartz, Suzanne. “ ‘The Narrative of the Shipwreck of the Ann,’ 1789–90.” The Yale University Library Gazette 82.3–4 (2008): 155–76. Schwartz, Suzanne, ed. Slave Captain: The Career of James Irving in the Liverpool Slave Trade. 2nd ed. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2008. Sears, Christina. American Slaves, African Masters: Algiers and the Western Sahara, 1776–1820. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Sikainga, Ahmad Alawad. “Slavery and Muslim Jurisprudence in Morocco.” Slavery and Colonial Rule in Africa. Ed. Suzanne Miers and Martin A. Klein. Portland, OR: Frank Cass, 1999. Simpson, James to Captain Timothy Newman. 19 May 1794. Gibraltar. Letterbook of James Simpson, 1793–1797. Manuscript Division. Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. Simpson, James to Secretary of State. General Services. Dispatches from United States Consuls in Tangier 1797–1906. Washington: National Archives and Records Administration, 1959. Simpson, James to William Shaler. 28 February 1817. Box 1, Folder Correspondence 1817. Shaler Papers 1794–1832. Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. Snyder, Christina. Slavery in Indian Country: The Changing Face of Captivity in Early America. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010.

“Arab speculators” and ransom slavery 163 Starna, William A. and Ralph Watkins. “North Iroquoian Slavery.” Ethnohistory 38.1 (1991): 34–57. Stilwell, Sean. Slavery and Slaving in African History. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Toledano, Ehud R. Slavery and Abolition in the Ottoman Middle East. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1998. Traill, Thomas Stewart and William Lawson. “Account of the Captivity of Alexander Scott.” The Edinburgh Philosophical Journal 4.7 (1821): 38–54. Weiss, Gillian. “Barbary Captivity and the French Idea of Freedom.” French Historical Studies 28.2 (2005): 231–64. Weiss, Gillian. Captives and Corsairs: France and Slavery in the Early Modern Mediterranean. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011. Weiss, Gillian, Paul E. Lovejoy, Jennifer Lofkrantz, Olatunji Ojo, and Daniel Hershenzon. “Perspectives on Historical and Contemporary Ransoming Practices.” Conference. York University sponsored by the Harriet Tubman Institution. 25–26 Apr. 2014. Wright, John. “Morocco: The Last Great Slave Market?” The Journal of North African Studies 7.3 (2002): 53–66.

Part 3

Diplomacy and Deliverance

8 Michael Heberer A prisoner of the Ottoman navy Robert Rebitsch

The life of Michael Heberer Few details are known about Michael Heberer’s life.1 He was born between 1555 and 1560 in Bretten, a small town in the Palatine Kraichgau near Karlsruhe, and died after 1623. Bretten was also the birthplace of Martin Luther’s colleague, the reformer Philipp Melanchthon, born Philipp Schwartzerdt or Schwarzerd (Stupperich). Indeed, Heberer was related to Melanchthon. His mother Catharina was a Schwarzerd. After attending Latin School (Lateinschule), young Michael joined the newly established Fürstenschule in Neuhausen near Worms. He later studied in Wittenberg, Leipzig, and Heidelberg. In his autobiographical work, he does not mention what he studied or what degrees he took. However, Heberer certainly had a solid higher education. From 1580 to 1582, he worked as a private tutor for the Swedish count Erich Bielke in Heidelberg. In 1582, he went to France. This was not uncommon in sixteenth-century Europe. Young men wanted to see the world. In Marseille, he witnessed a brutal, religiously motivated massacre of Huguenots by French Catholic troops. This event had a formative influence on his work and life as a Protestant (Ulbrich 89–92). In 1585, he traveled to Malta, an island ruled by the Order of Saint John since 1530. The Order of Saint John, also known as the Hospitallers, which was feoffed by Charles V, had a long tradition of skirmishing with the Ottoman Empire and Muslim pirates in the Mediterranean (Bradford; Daubner). Fighting and plundering the Muslim enemy was part of their daily business. Michael Heberer joined the Order’s navy. During an operation in the eastern Mediterranean, the ship he served on was surrounded by an Ottoman fleet. Although Heberer and some comrades managed to escape to the Egyptian coast, they were later captured and sold as slaves. He spent three years as a galley slave in Ottoman war captivity. In his travel description Aegyptiaca Servitus, Das ist Warhafte Beschreibung einer Dreyjährigen Dienstbarkeit, so zu Alexandrien in Egypten ihren Anfang und zu Constantinopel ihr Endschaft gefunden, Heidelberg (1610), Heberer provides interesting insights into political conditions, culture, and religion of the Ottoman Empire; views on the landscapes, traditions, and costumes of the eastern Mediterranean; and, last but not least, into his life as a prisoner.

168  Robert Rebitsch In 1588, the French envoy to Constantinople gained Heberer’s release from slavery. Heberer returned to his home town in February 1589 and was admitted to electoral services. After his adventurous journey and captivity, he had become an interesting man for official services, especially for foreign duties. In 1592, he accompanied a legation from the Palatinate to Poland and, in the same year, to Sweden. Three years later, he traveled to the imperial court in Prague. These three journeys are reported in Aegyptiaca Servitus as well (but not in the 1967 printed edition by Karl Teply). But Heberer’s primary – and well-paid – position was as registrator and archivist in the Palatinate office. In 1610 – four years after the Peace of Zsitvatorok, which ended the Long Turkish War between the Ottoman Empire and the Habsburgs2 – he published his travel description Aegyptiaca Servitus with the publisher Gotthard Vöglin in Heidelberg.3 He dedicated his work to elector Friedrich, Pfalzgrafen bey Rhein and Hertzogen in Bayern.4 But Heberer’s adventures were not over. In 1622, he witnessed the fall of Heidelberg to the troops of the Catholic League during the Thirty Years War, and there is also some evidence that he was still alive in 1623. His date of death is – like his date of birth – unknown.

The Mediterranean Sea and the Ottoman Navy The Mediterranean Sea was a traditional region of commerce and cultural transfer but a combat zone as well.5 In the sixteenth century, the main actors were Spain, the Ottoman Empire, France, Venice, Genoa, the Muslim states in the Maghreb, the Pope, and the Order of Saint John headquartered on Malta.6 Spain, under the rule of the Habsburgs since 1516, was a composite monarchy (Elliott), consisting of the Kingdoms of Castile and Aragon (Kamen 6–13). Naples, Sardinia, and Sicily were part of the Kingdom of Aragon. As hispaniarum rex, Charles I (Carlos I)7 more or less controlled the western Mediterranean – “more or less” because the Muslim pirates from the Maghreb were a permanent danger for the northern shores of the Mediterranean Sea. The eastern Mediterranean was controlled by the Ottoman Empire (Faroqhi and Fleet; Majoros and Rill 201–58). Since the conquest of Constantinople in 1453, they had expanded their influence at sea and worked in joint venture with the Maghreb corsairs (called the Barbary pirates or Ottoman corsairs),8 because many talented and ruthless admirals could be found in Northern Africa. Both monarchs, the king of Spain (as emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, the defensor ecclesiae and miles christianus) and the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire (as Khalifeh ül-Rasul Rab al-A’alamin, Successor of the Prophet), were convinced to wage a holy war against infidels. The Pope and the Hospitallers (even though they acted like corsairs) fought in the name of Jesus Christ. Many popes relentlessly attempted to form coalitions against the Turks. Pius V, for example, arranged for the formation of the famous Holy League consisting of the Papal States; the Habsburg dominions of Spain, Naples, and Sicily; the Republic of Venice; the Republic of Genoa; the Grand Duchy of Tuscany; the Duchies of Savoy,

Heberer: prisoner of the Ottoman navy 169 Parma, and Urbino; and the Hospitallers.9 This league successfully fought the Battle of Lepanto in 1571. The trading nation Venice was always in a precarious situation. On the one hand, it was expected from the west that a militarily and fiscally powerful state like Venice would support Christian matters; on the other hand, the trading nation had to protect its lifelines running from the coasts of the Middle East to the eastern Mediterranean, and they wanted to do business with the Ottoman Empire (Lane 234–37, 242–48). Genoa was mainly involved in these wars through the charismatic admiral Andrea Doria, who was contracted by Charles V (Grendi). France played the most unpopular role within the Christian states. Afraid of the Habsburgs’ power, King Francis I established diplomatic and military relations with Suleiman the Magnificent.10 This was a first-class breach of taboo in the Christian world. In the winter of 1543–1544, the Ottoman fleet was even stationed in Toulon, from where they attacked the Spanish and Italian coasts, afterwards besieging Nice (Crowley 74–80). It is noteworthy that at this time Pope Paul III was in close connection with France. Some other highlights of the sixteenth century were the conquest of Tunis by Charles V in 1535, the unsuccessful siege of Algiers by Charles in 1541 (Kohler 240–60) and of Malta by the Ottoman Navy in 1565 (Majoros and Rill 248–49), and, of course, the already mentioned Battle of Lepanto, in which the Ottoman fleet was defeated by the Holy League under John of Austria (Don Juan de Austria).11 But the Christian powers could not capitalize on this victory. Before this battle, the Ottomans had conquered Cyprus, an exposed stronghold of the Venetian Limes, as the French historian of the Annales School Fernand Braudel called it (Braudel 665–67). Therefore, after Lepanto a kind of military stalemate existed between the European powers and the Ottoman Empire with their allies in the Maghreb. Plundering as well as the taking and selling of slaves by all sides continued. It is estimated that between 1580 and 1680 an average of 35,000 Christian slaves were sold or held annually in the cities of Northern Africa like Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli (Davis 14–15). Although it was not originally a seafaring nation, the Ottomans worked to establish a navy from the fifteenth century on (Majoros and Rill 36–39; Dávid 304–08). The sultans Mehmed II, Bayezid II, and especially Suleiman the Magnificent with his admiral Hayreddin Barbarossa, a corsair, built up a strong fleet. This navy under the so-called Kapudan Pasha (Kaptan Paşa),12 with dockyards at Galata and Gallipoli (Turkish Gelibolu), and later with a new arsenal in Istanbul during the winter, was competitive with the Christian fleets until Lepanto. It is estimated that the Ottomans led about 280 ships in this greatest sea battle of the sixteenth century (Tucker). Another famous Kapudan Pasha was Piyale Pasha, who raided the Balearics in 1558, won the Battle of Djerba in 1560, and besieged Malta in 1565. During Heberer’s time, Murad III (1574–1596),13 a ruler more influenced by his harem than by good political ideas, was the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire. Fortunately for the Sultan, Kiliç Ali Paşa, a convert from Calabria, corsair and veteran from Lepanto, was the great admiral of the Ottoman Empire.

170  Robert Rebitsch Apart from the recruitment of corsairs from the Maghreb or from Christian countries, the Ottoman navy employed a lot of foreign specialists for shipbuilding and maintenance. The galley was the most common warship in the Mediterranean at this time. For three years Michael Heberer was a slave on such a warship, which was an average of 40–50 meters in length, 5–6 meters wide, equipped with 25 thwarts, and manned with about 200 oarsmen. The great galleys had even more than 200 (Guilmartin 221–52; Aymard). Michael was stationed at the kapudanlik (admiralty) of Alexandria (Turkish: Iskenderiyye) but he was often at Cairo, Galata, or other moorings. He was not involved in fighting operations. His chief’s galley was more or less a shuttle service for prominent persons and goods from Alexandria to Istanbul.

The perception of the Ottomans in the Holy Roman Empire In Christian propaganda, the picture of the Ottomans was quite clear: As Muslims, the Turks were the hereditary enemies, or, even worse, the Antichrists. In stereotypical leaflets and pamphlets and even in sermons, Turks were discredited as barbaric and cruel warriors, merciless killers as well as child murderers (in allusion to the infanticide of Bethlehem), a horde of Renner und Brenner (the famous akıncı – raider; light cavalry for raids). But the Turkish expansion did not only arouse a sense of menace; it was not just a profane threat. Turkish raids and conquests also had very highly religious implications. Especially for the Casa de Austria and the people of the Holy Roman Empire, Turkish troops were seen as an apocalyptic danger.14 Contemporaries regarded the Ottoman threat as an eschatological phenomenon, as a sign of the end of the world, and as a just punishment from God. The Turks were not enemies like any others; they were religious enemies, yet not comparable to the hostilities between Catholics and Protestants. (However, if one confessional party wanted to discredit the other, they often used the phrase “more cruel than the Turks.”) The Turk was the antipode, an effective figure of alterity, especially in the papal propaganda.15 Not without reason did Charles V, whose entourage knew very well how to use propaganda, try to stylize his operation against Tunis in 1535 as a crusade (Duchhardt). But if we closely examine journey descriptions by Christian travelers through the Ottoman Empire, we get a more nuanced view. While these travel descriptions do not contribute to a revision or deconstruction of Western stereotypes and clichés about the Ottomans, these stories comprise details that do not fit the mould of an empire of evil. Hans Christoph von Teufel, a rich, humanistically-educated nobleman from Austria, was traveling through the Ottoman Empire at about the same time as Michael Heberer. Teufel’s description seems quite surprising (Greil): It does not read like a journey through enemy territory, instead, stories like Teufels Beschreibung der rayß, so ich den neundten Septembirs im 1587. jar von Venedig auß nach Constantinopel und dannen gegen aufgang vorgenommen . . . read occasionally

Heberer: prisoner of the Ottoman navy 171 like sightseeing tours. Teufel visited Constantinople, Alexandria, Cairo, the pyramids, and Cyprus. Furthermore, he traveled through Syria and decided to go to Babylonia, and he even reached the Portuguese Hormuz. From Hormuz, he went to Persia and across the Middle East through independent kingdoms back into the Ottoman Empire. He traveled partly with big caravans, partly alone on foot. The freedom of movement Teufel describes seems fascinating – he even crossed the Persian-Turkish border without problems, and the Persian Safavid dynasty was one of the worst enemies of the Sultan in Constantinople. For Teufel it was often possible to contact the dense network of European embassies, consulates, trading establishments, and even monasteries that existed in the Ottoman Empire. In October 1590, he reached Jerusalem – but, of course, his travels were much more than a normal pilgrimage. This journey spanned the Middle East, where Teufel had some good experiences with local Muslims. Thus, Europeans did not meet an inhuman enemy in these countries but human beings, or to express it in a more sociological diction: The experience of alterity was rather low.16 Due to cultural and economic interactions these two worlds, Europe and the Ottoman Empire, were anything but strangers. Another traveler through the empire was Hans Dernschwam, a well-educated man working for the Fuggers. He visited Constantinople while accompanying an imperial legation to the Sublime Porte and went across Anatolia from 1553 to 1556.17 His picture of the Ottoman Empire was less friendly: For him all sultans were tyrants; the peasants of Anatolia were lazy, rough, and uncivilized; and Christians in the realm were suppressed. All in all, the characterization of Turkish society in Dernschwam’s report is negative. Contrary to pamphlets written for political exploitation, travel descriptions partly paint (but not all of them, of which Dernschwam’s Tagebuch einer Reise nach Konstantinopel und Kleinasien is an example) a different picture of Muslim culture and people.18 But, of course, by reading these historical sources, we are confronted with some serious methodological problems. Travel books are a subjective and judgmental source.19 We have to question it as a source, and it must be placed in the right situational and biographic context. Finally, it is always a very individual view on cultures, people, and political conditions.

Experiences and views of a slave: the travel description of Michael Heberer In contrast to Hans Christoph von Teufel or Hans Dernschwam, Michael Heberer was not a “tourist” but a prisoner. His freedom of movement was severely limited but not completely restricted. Especially his captivity on land was handled quite loosely. Michael Heberer’s travel description consists of four books:20 The first book deals with his journey to France and Malta, the second is the description of his life as a galley slave, the third is a travel description of the area of Constantinople

172  Robert Rebitsch and his journey back home, and the last book addresses his journey to Bohemia, Poland, Sweden, and Denmark in the years of 1592 and 1595. Let us start from the beginning. Heberer left Heidelberg in 1582: An dem Jahr nach Christi unsers einigen erlösers und Seligmachers geburt ein tausend fünfhundert achtzig und zwey als der Wolgeborne herr Erich Bilcke Grave zu Salestatt und Sedeholm etc. auß dem Königreich Schweden bürtig (Dessen Præceptor ich zu Heydelberg in das dritte jahr gewesen) wider nach haus erfordert und ich dazumal umb andere dienst mich zu bewerben auß gewissen ursachen nicht gesinnet war sondern viel mehr begierd hatte frembde landschaften zu besichtigen. Derowegen trachtete ich nach einer gelegenheit in das Königreich Franckreich mich zu begeben. (Heberer, bk. 1, ch. 1) Like many young men of his age, Heberer wanted to get to experience the world. For two years, he traveled through France, where he also visited Paris (bk. 1, ch. 8, ch. 9). After the aforementioned massacre in Marseille,21 in 1585 he went to Malta, where he was contracted by Philibert de Foyssy Dominus de Chammesson, Commendator de la Romagnia, Nancy & Bellae crucis (bk. 1, ch. 15). Foyssy was a French nobleman serving in the Order of Saint John. Heberer’s adventurous spirit led him to stay with the Order: Aber mein Herr [Foyssy] wolte es mir nicht gestatten, sondern sprach, er köndte mich so bald nicht von ihm lassen. Ich müßte erst ein reise oder zwo mit ihm thun. Dann er wüßte wol, daß ich lust hette, frembde Land zu sehen und vermeinete ich köndte allzeit in meinem heimreisen auff Venedig zuziehen, also verharret ich zu Malthen mich was weiter zu versuchen. (bk. 1, ch. 15) The Hospitallers assessed him accurately. So, Michael set sail on an Order galley on a plundering tour to the Levant. Now the real story of pain, misery, deprivation, and survival starts. After some encounters, the Order galley was surrounded by an Ottoman fleet. Heberer and a couple of comrades decided to flee the galley to the Egyptian coast where they were caught by locals22 – called Mohren (moors – heathen) by Heberer. In the course of his story, he distinguishes between black and white Moors. These armed locals brought the Christians to Alexandria to sell as slaves. But even in this act of the drama we find some compassionate gestures: The Mohren supplied the Christians with good white bread and water. In Alexandria, all Christians were bound in chains. But the greatest problem for them seemed to have been that they were shaved and their hair cut: Uber die harte gefengnüs fieng man an uns die haar auff dem Haupt wie auch den Bart mit einem Schermesser gantz glat abzuscheren welches

Heberer: prisoner of the Ottoman navy 173 uns viel mehr verdroß und solcher Spot uns weher that dann die Gefengnüs selbst. (bk. 1, ch. 23) In Alexandria, they were interrogated by the governor, the Bey of Alexandria. He asked Michael’s comrades in Italian if Heberer was a Lutheran, ein Lutherischer Hund like all Germans. Michael was astonished that a Muslim would know the different denominations of Christian religion. But the governor was a Spanish Renegat, a renegade, as these people were called by the Christians (bk. 1, ch. 22). Such renegades, or rather converts, occur quite often in Heberer’s story.23 Whether the conversion was forced or voluntary, the Ottoman Empire actually offered numerous opportunities for good and even high-level careers in the political and military sector for non-Muslims who were ready to convert to Islam (Faroqhi, “Ottoman” 372). Not only on account of the slaves but also because of these renegades, Michael was integrated in an international community, in which even the commands on the galley were given in Italian (Heberer, bk. 2, ch. 48). Michael was now a slave in the service of the Egyptian Pasha. He blamed only his sins and himself for being in this situation, and so he saw his slavery as a punishment of God. Certainly, this was a typical rhetorical device in autobiographical sources of early modern times, but it was a common attitude of pre-modern religious people as well. Heberer leaves no doubt that his time as a prisoner and galley slave was full of privations. He and his comrades endured violence and brutality. Moreover, Mahomet Beg, as his patron was called, was ruthless and strict. It is not surprising that Heberer reports many stories of violence from Turks against Christians in the Ottoman Empire.24 But he also describes – as already mentioned – gestures of mercy from Muslims. One day the galley Michael served on had to transport one of Sultan Murad’s wives from Alexandria to Constantinople. She was returning from Mecca with a large retinue.25 The Sultan’s wife ordered the captain to stop ongoing whipping of the slaves, and her entourage supplied the slaves with biscuits, vinegar, and olive oil. Und ist in warheit nit zu glauben wie daß Bißquit mit Essig und Oel genossen einen müden außgematteten Menschen stercke und wider zu krefften bringe. Ich hette es mein lebenlang nit geglaubt wo ich es nit dazumal und offt hernacher mehrmals erfahren hette (bk. 2, ch. 25) Michael wrote about the benevolence of their prominent passenger. In addition, the prisoners were given meat, wine, bread, and cherries. During the whole journey, the Trewhertzige Soltanin oder Türckische Kayserin, as she was called by Michael, held her protecting hand over the Christians. Heberer was deeply impressed. At the end of the journey, the Sultan’s wife presented every Christian with one ducat so that the men would pray to the Christian god for her. Also, this wish from a Muslim was quite surprising

174  Robert Rebitsch for the Christians. As an aside, it should be mentioned that the slaves could only keep half of the ducat, as the other half ducat had to be given to the Guardian (guard). The galley slaves had their ways of getting and saving money on board. It was also during this journey, on Rhodes, that Heberer and some comrades were ordered to carry ammunition and powder from a warehouse to the galley. Michael set some cannon balls aside and sold them to Jews (Heberer, bk. 2, ch. 28). With this money he bought cheese, garlic, and onions for the trip. During another work detail on land, the galley slaves met an old Turkish nobleman with a long grey beard as described by Michael. The Christians bowed before the old man. Because of this polite behavior, the man gave them two ducats together with the request that the Christians would pray to their god for him (bk. 2, ch. 32). Back in the harbour, a Turk saw Michael barefooted and presented him with a pair of shoes: Als ich nun elendiglich und barfüssig also durch die Stadt loff eilet mir ein Burger so auch ein Türck zu Constantinopel uff der Gassen nach und verehrt mir auß Mitleiden ein par Schue die name ich zu grossen danck an. Dann uff dem Pflaster ich deren wol bedürfftig war. (bk. 2, ch. 32) That was another gesture of compassion by a Muslim. Michael was grateful not to go barefooted through the streets anymore. It was during such work assignments for his patron and other high-ranking people that a slave could set aside materials (like nails when he was scheduled for shipbuilding in Galata),26 tools, and even military resources (like cannon balls) and sell them to merchants or whomsoever. While others suffered from hunger, Michael was always in possession of food like bread, garlic, onions, and cheese, and even sometimes wine, while the others had to drink stinking water: Da andere meine gesellen weder zu beißen noch zu nagen hatten, ja bald hunger sturben, so hat ich allzeit ein guten vorrath an Brodt, Knobloch, Zwibeln und Käß. Auch kondte ich underweilen in grosser schwerer Arbeit und Mattigkeit zur Sterkung meines Leibs ein Trüncklein Wein thun, da andere sich mit stincendem Wasser mußten genügen lassen, weil sie stetigs ausser der Galleren arbeit müssig lassen, welches mir unmüglich war. (bk. 2, ch. 35) This was quite an impressive but also a potentially dangerous strategy. Although they were always held captive on land, the prisoners surprisingly had some freedom of movement. Michael was allowed to celebrate Easter in the trading establishment of the French consul in Alexandria. All he had to do was to make a deal with his guard and, of course, he had to pay for these favors. At the consulate, he met French merchants and

Heberer: prisoner of the Ottoman navy 175 Italian monks (bk. 2, ch. 18). On the way back to the prison, one French merchant gave him some money. He was again able to buy food for himself and his comrades. Apparently, in Muslim countries, some solidarity among otherwise rival Christians existed. This international community consisted of merchants, craftsmen, diplomats, and monks. Constantinople, a centre of European diplomacy in the sixteenth century, was especially a hot spot.27 The French – as already mentioned – were allies of the Ottomans; the Habsburgs, even though they were defending themselves against the Ottomans most of the time, had to stay in contact with the Sultan; and England was interested in commercial relations. Did Heberer think about escaping? Yes, sometimes. But he witnessed the consequences of some failed attempts: Slaves who fled were captured and brutally tortured.28 And, of course, the second problem was that he did not know where to go in Alexandria or Constantinople. So, Michael made no serious plans for escaping. This academically trained and literate man was pursuing another plan. When Heberer was not on the galley, he always had the opportunity to meet Europeans. He succeeded in building a network of people who would finally help him.29 He was also able to write letters. He arranged to get a pen, ink, and paper, which he could hide on board.30 He also found people to deliver the letters. At first Michael tried to get in touch with the European missions in Constantinople. The first important letter he wrote was to Bartholomäus Pezzen, who was the deputy of Baron Paul von Eitzing, the imperial ambassador (Orator) at the Sublime Port (bk. 2, ch. 21). Pezzen,31 a scholarly legal advisor, was the first ambassador of Emperor Rudolf II in Constantinople from 1587 onwards, and he plays an unpleasant role in Heberer’s story. With the experienced diplomat Pezzen, we also have a reference to the Tyrol: With the utmost probability, the Germanspeaking Pezzen came from the Prince Bishopric of Trento or from Brixen, a Tyrolean family. The patron’s clerk, an Italian who maintained a good relationship with Heberer, passed this letter on. Michael also wrote to Hans Rattich, a German goldsmith in Constantinople with good connections to the imperial embassy. Michael knew that the European ambassadors used to purchase Christian slaves;32 it was one of their side duties, but important and honorable as well. Indeed, Rattich appeared at the galley to investigate about Heberer but could do nothing for him. Heberer wrote a further letter to Zacharias Sturm, the court chaplain of Eitzingen (bk. 2, ch. 35). . . . und an den Hoffprediger Sturmium zu schreiben, ihm zuvorderst ein Glückseliges Newes Jahr zu wünschen und nochmals zu bitten Ihrer Gnaden dem Herrn Oratori und anderen Herrn mein eusserste noth vorzubringen und von meinetwegen underthenig um hülf, Beystandt und Errettung zu bitten.

176  Robert Rebitsch A massive correspondence with several European diplomats and merchants followed this letter (bk. 2, ch. 37). The best opportunity to write occurred when his galley was stationed in Galata (Pera), the former Genoese colony, opposite Constantinople, on the northern shore of the Golden Horn. Galata was an important harbour for Constantinople. From Galata, it was generally not a problem to deliver communications to the embassies. The correspondence with the imperial embassy was friendly but finally fruitless. Heberer even had the opportunity to personally visit the embassy of the Holy Roman Empire (bk. 2, ch. 42). Accompanied by a guard (to whom it seems he had good relations: “Als ich mit meinem Guardian wider in Galatam kam gieng ich mit ihm in ein Griechisch Wirtshaus und that ein gute Zech mit ihm damit er wegen des langen uffwartens nit uberdrüssig sein sollte”),33 he went to the Imperial Embassy, where he met close acquaintances, got something to eat as well as money, and spoke to the Jesuit Sturm, who was very friendly to him. Nevertheless, the ambassador did not receive him. Michael remained obstinate. He used every opportunity to go to the embassy and to ask for assistance.34 He needed at least 100 ducats to buy his freedom. It was always the same procedure: Michael was well received by Sturm, but Pezzen obviously did not want to help the galley slave. Heberer was deeply disappointed by the imperial ambassador. According to Sturm, Pezzen stated that he had no interest in supporting lost men and, furthermore, Heberer was not caught while in imperial service, so that Pezzen, as the representative of the Holy Roman Empire, had no obligations toward the prisoner. And, in general, his highness had no more money for such expenses. Or was it just the aversion of the Catholic toward the Protestant (Teply XXVII–XXXII)? Therefore, unsurprisingly, Heberer characterized Pezzen as a disgusting and disliked person among the European diplomats.35 On his mission to Prague in the service of his Elector years later, he met Dr. Pezzen again and publicly confronted him with this act of unfaithfulness, as Heberer put it. According to Heberer, the former imperial diplomat was filled with consternation upon hearing this (Teply XXXIII–XXXVIV). Michael contacted the English embassy as well. In the 1580s, the English arrived in the Eastern Mediterranean and in Constantinople (Abulafia 588–94). But the English ambassador did not want to help the unfortunate serf either (Heberer, bk. 2, ch. 50). Michael argued that England and the Palatinate were religious relatives, but it did not help. His destiny was finally decided by the French embassy. A former fellow prisoner, a Frenchman named Cambout, who had contacted Heberer, intervened for him at the French embassy, and the French ambassador managed to buy his freedom (bk. 2, ch. 49, ch. 51, ch. 52). Da schlug mich der Guardian auß der Ketten und ließ mir nur die eisene Fessel am Fuß. Also nam ich in Frewd und angst von meinen Mitgefangenen einen Abschied, befahl sie Gott und wünschete Ihnen auch ihre

Heberer: prisoner of the Ottoman navy 177 Freyheit. Sie wünscheten mir hinwider mit weinenden augen alles glück und wolfahrt. (bk. 2, ch. 53) Besides his personal destiny and account of his survival strategies and efforts to achieve his release, the Aegyptiaca Servitus also contains descriptions of islands like Cyprus, Chios, Lemnos, and Rhodes; cities like Alexandria, Cairo, Constantinople, and Galata; and landscapes like the Levant. Furthermore, Heberer writes about Egyptian and Turkish culture and religion. During his captivity, he saw wide swathes of Egypt, Asia Minor, and the islands in the Aegean. After his release, he had more time to see Galata, Pera, and, of course, Constantinople. One of the cultural topics he covered was the Turkish bath. He was impressed by the bath of Galata, which was visited by Muslims and Christians alike. Males and females had separate buildings. With a Frenchman from the embassy, he visited the bath at 2 a.m. This was possible because the bath was open 24 hours (bk. 3, ch. 5). Heberer describes, in detail, the process of bathing, the massages, and the technology – for example, how the building was heated.36 He also mentions the women’s bath (bk. 3, ch. 6): It was strictly forbidden for men to enter the buildings designated for females. According to Heberer, Turkish women visited the bath quite often because it was a good change for them. They did not have the opportunity to go out, and, during the day, they were forced to wear full-body clothing. (Heberer probably meant something like the chador.) Heberer adds a detailed description of Turkish as well as of Greek female clothing in this chapter. He regarded the Greek women as especially arrogant: Dieser der Griechischen Weiber pracht ist ein grosse ursach, daß sie an der Zucht und Erbarkeit sich viel mehr wollust und unzucht (bey andern, die ihnen zu ihrer hoffart behülfflich seindt) befleissigen. (bk. 3, ch. 6) These strict moral guidelines were somehow different from the customs in the Holy Roman Empire. The so-called Badestuben,37 the public bath, was a popular meeting place for recreation and medical requirements. In contrast to the Turkish Hammăm,38 which had a ritualistic and religious background, no gender separation existed in European public baths but sometimes moral laxity did, even if in the course of the Counter Reformation moral standards were enforced again (but sometimes in Protestant territories as well). Heberer also commented on the Turkish religion (bk. 3, ch. 9): Without a doubt, he considered the Muslims to be a religious and pious people. He was of the opinion that the Muslims were more religious than the Christians – at least concerning their religious performance. As an example of the high religious and moral standards, Heberer records the brutal story of a Turkish widow who had a romantic relationship with a Greek man (bk. 2, ch.

178  Robert Rebitsch 38). They were both sentenced to death in a most cruel manner: The widow was drowned in the sea, and the Greek was hung on an iron hook for four days. Heberer was not shocked by the brutal death penalty. Rather, he thought the story was a good example that, contrary to the opinion of many Europeans, the Ottomans were indeed punishing fornication and similar “offenses.” Therefore, Muslims also had high moral standards. For him, as a pious Protestant, sins like fornication, harlotry, or sodomy were unacceptable. Heberer goes on to say: If you ask Muslims about their confession, they will answer, “There is only one true and almighty God.” But they do not say, “I believe in God.” The problem is, in Heberer’s eyes, that they do not know who God is. They have the word of the prophet but not the word of God. Therefore, they do not have real faith and knowledge of God. Mahomet is entitled by Heberer as Abgott – a false idol (bk. 2, ch. 20). Moreover, Muslims do not know anything about God’s son and the Holy Ghost. That is the cause of the perdition of Muslim people. Even though Heberer does not, of course, present any profound theological analyses of Islam, it is interesting that he regards one of the most complex problems in Christian dogmatics as the greatest deficit of the Muslim religion: The Holy Trinity.39 Furthermore, he writes about the Islamic prophets, the Quran, their way to pray, the period of fasting, and the Bayram celebrations with all their habits and customs. Even if Heberer’s descriptions are not always completely accurate, he at least wants to give a rather neutral impression of Muslim traditions. He mentions an act of tolerance on the part of the Ottoman Sultan toward Christians. The heathens (Mohren) of Alexandria, according to Heberer, had destroyed the St. Catherine Church in Alexandria. But upon intervention of the orthodox Patriarch of Alexandria, the Turkish Sultan ordered the locals to rebuild the church in a more beautiful and more splendid fashion than before.40 Such behaviour can hardly be seen in Christian countries, Heberer stated. Besides such acts of tolerance by Muslim rulers, Heberer was deeply impressed by the Sultan’s parade. He describes an event of pure pomposity and full splendour as the Sultan rode out with his entourage for hunting (bk. 3, ch. 3). This was the ever-impressive glamorous side of the Ottoman Empire. After this extensive tour through Constantinople, Michael traveled home via Malta, Sicily (where he admired Mount Etna), Naples, Rome, Ferrara, Venice, Padua, Milan, Chur, Zürich, Baden, Basel, Breisach, and Strasburg to Heidelberg (bk. 3, ch. 11–31). In his home town, he was able to spend hours with the Elector telling his stories.

Instead of a conclusion: a short comparison with other books of travels about the Ottoman Empire Michael Heberer’s Aegyptiaca Servitus is a mixture of a travel description and a captivity report with a detailed portrayal of his survival strategies as a galley slave. Although the majority of reports are from diplomats or envoys,

Heberer: prisoner of the Ottoman navy 179 accounts from prisoners and slaves written later as a kind of diary are not uncommon. Using a quantitative method, Almut Höfert has analyzed the different ethnographic topics and chapters of twelve travel descriptions by eleven authors: Hans Schiltberger, George of Hungary, Benedetto Ramberti, Antoine Geuffroy, Bartholomäus Georgejevic, Luigi Bassano, Giovanantonio Menavino, Teodoro Spandugino, Pierre Belon, Nicolas de Nicolay, and Jacques de Villamont.41 Four of them were prisoners. She organized the issues into the most frequent categories: “court, government and military”; “habits and customs”; and “religion.”42 By means of her investigations, we are able to get an excellent overview of the different topics chronicled in travel descriptions and reports from the Ottoman Empire in the fifteenth and in the sixteenth centuries. Even if the Aegyptiaca Servitus has not been examined for a precise percentage of topics, it is remarkable that many topics are congruent with other travel descriptions of the late Middle Ages and early modern period. Naturally, Michael would discuss subjects mentioned by others: religion, isolation and Turkish women’s veils, the Bayram, women’s clothing, fasting, Muslim prayers and the mosques, the harem (Heberer, bk. 2, ch. 44), the prohibition of wine, prophets and saints, the baths and bazaars, the military and the navy, pilgrimages to Mecca, and many other topics. He deals in detail with cities (well-known places and buildings, architecture, churches and mosques, legends, history and famous people), islands, and landscapes. With his interest in the history and geography of the “visited” sites, he clearly stands in the tradition of Renaissance pilgrimage reports.43 From this perspective, Heberer’s work is no exception. In his essay about Christian slaves in the hands of pirates from the Barbary Coast, Ernstpeter Ruhe points out that in many reports the subject of torture is central (Ruhe). As a result of the brutal methods of North African corsairs, many Christians became renegades – they sought their salvation by converting to Islam. Afterwards, of course, the authors were anxious to hide any evidence that they ever converted to Islam. So, these stories are in a way martyr stories, apologies of captured people who went to great lengths to survive. Michael Heberer in contrast did not need to justify himself. He wrote his travel description more than 20 years after his adventure as a wellestablished official in the service of the Elector of the Rhine. Heberer experienced torture and pain but not in extenso. Obviously, he did not turn away from the Protestant faith. And, of course, he was not in the hand of pirates but was a prisoner of the Ottoman navy. He dedicated a major part of his story to his networking, his survival strategies, and his plan of being released. This gives us an interesting insight into the life of a galley slave in Ottoman captivity.

Notes 1 For details on the biography of Heberer, see Press; Teply XIII–XXI; Frank; Fröhlich.

180  Robert Rebitsch 2 For this war, see Niederkorn. 3 In the middle of the eighteenth century, Michael Heberer’s travel description was called – which was the custom of this time after the success of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe – “Der Pfӓlzische Robinson.” Des Pfӓlzischen Robinsons und Creutz-Bruders, Herrn Johann Michael Heberers, gewesenen ChurPfӓlzischen Canzley-Reistratoris zu Heydelberg, aus der Chur-Pfӓlzischen Stadt Bretten gebürtig, Vortrab oder Erster Theil. Betreffend Seine Dreyjӓhrige Dienstbarkeit, . . . Von Anno 1582 biβ 1592. Anno 1622 aber genommenen erbӓrmlichen, fatalen und höchst-schmerzlichen Endes. Neu aufgelegt, Nach heutigem Stylo und marginirten, explicirten Kayserthümer, Königreichen, . . . von F.D.L. Notario Publico Caesareo, Franckfurt und Leipzig, Anno 1747. For further editions, see Teply V-XIII. 4 Frederick IV of the Rhine, elector from 1583 to 1610. 5 For the history of the Mediterranean Sea, see the classical study of Braudel and a new interpretation by Abulafia; for special aspects, see Schwara. 6 See also Schwara 391–479. 7 For Charles V, Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire and King of Spain, see Kohler. 8 See Wolf; Davis. 9 For the ideology of the crusade and the Holy League, see Jedin. 10 For the French–Ottoman friendship in early modern times, see Hochedlinger. 11 For the Battle of Lepanto, see Beeching 299–329; Capponi. 12 For the function of the commander-in-chief of the Ottoman navy, see Ozbaran. 13 For Murad III, the twelfth Ottoman Sultan, see Groot. 14 For the perception of the Turkish in Europe, especially in Habsburg lands, see the introduction and the relevant articles in Kurz; see also the prints from the sixteenth century in Göllner (Turcica 1 und 2) and the study of Göllner (Turcica 3), especially 11–31, and in Höfert 76–78. 15 For the Turk as a construction of alterity in terms of media theory, see the study of Topkaya. 16 See also Neuber, who is of the opinion that oriental exoticism and alterity in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries are a construction of the modern age. 17 For his biography and journey, see Jeggle. 18 For different views of Europeans from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century on the Ottoman Empire, see Stagl, who analyzed the travel descriptions of Johann Schiltberger, Georg von Ungarn, Benedict Kuripešič, Hans Dernschwam von Hradiczin, Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, Jakob von Betzek, Michael von Saurau, Stephan Gerlach, Salomon Schweigger, Reinhold Lubenau, Johann Wild, and Paul Tafferner. 19 For travel descriptions as a historical source, see Maurer. 20 Online version of all four books: www.dilibri.de/id/455924 (27 Mar. 2015). 21 “Nun war durch den von Guysen [Duc Henri de Guise, leader of the Holy League against the Huguenots] und andere zugethane der S. Liga, ein grausam Blutbad in der Stadt Marsilien angestelt, der hoffnung, die Stadt durch solche list und verrӓtherey einzunemen und dem Spanier ein freyen zugang auff dem Mari mediterraneo in Frankreich zu öffnen . . . .” (Heberer, bk. 1, ch. 11). See also commentary of Ulbrich. 22 “Da wir in dem ersten Schlaff waren sihe da kamen etliche Mohren mit gewehrter hand so unser gefahr deβ Tages wol gesehen. Derowegen sie gegen die Nacht auf uns lawerten und uns gefangen namen” (Heberer, bk. 1, ch. 22). 23 See also Heberer, bk. 3, ch. 3. For converts in the Ottoman Empire, see Bennassar and Bennassar; Göllner 316–33. 24 For this topic, see Ulbrich 92–102.

Heberer: prisoner of the Ottoman navy 181 25 For his experience with the Sultan’s wife, see Heberer, bk. 2, ch. 24, 25, 26, and 29. 26 See Heberer, bk. 2, ch. 42. 27 For the relevance of Constantinople for the European diplomatic system see Rudolph 174–79 (with further important literature). 28 For example: “Es understund sich aber kurtz hernacher ein alter gefangener so der Sprach des Lands zum theil erfahren, mit einem Christlichen jungen Knaben den unser Tyrann zum Türkischen glauben genötigt die Flucht zunemen und sich mit dem jungen wieder in die Christenheit zu begeben. Aber er ward in seinem vornemen verrathen, ergriffen, und wider zu uns in schwere Gefengnüs geworfen, in welchem er unmenschliche Straff seines auβreissens biβ in den Todt auβgestanden. Dann ihm alle Tag auff blossem Leib mit einem geflochtenen Seil hundert Streich gegeben warden. Darauff lieβ man ihn liegen und labet ihn mit wenig Wasser und Brodt biβ er endlich von grossen Schmerzen der Streich deβ gerunnen Bluts auch hunger und kummer (nach dem er solchen jammer in den Zehenden Tag auβgestanden) mit grosser begierd und verlangen Gott in der gröβten angst und qual seinen Geist auffgabe. Welches grewlich Exempel uns andern gefangenen einen solchen Schrecken eintrieb, daβ wir alle vor forcht zitterten” (Heberer, bk. 2, ch. 15). 29 For detail on this network, see Röhricht 271–77. 30 “Ich hatte aber heimlich in der Galleren uff meinem Banck under dem leder noch Feder und Dinten und Papier verborgen” (Heberer, bk. 2, ch. 28). 31 For his biography, see Loebl. 32 “Das ich leider keinen andern weg zu meiner Erledigung wisse vorzuschlagen dann das ich von der Teutschen Bottschaft möchte loβ gekauft werden” (Heberer, bk. 2, ch. 37). 33 See Heberer, bk. 2, ch. 46. 34 For his contacts to Pezzen, see Heberer, bk. 2, ch. 46, 50, and 51. 35 “Dann so bald der herr von Eitzingen hinweg kommen ist Doctor Betz als nunmehr keys. Maiest. Orator, wie er sich nent, hochmütig worden und sich nicht allein Armer leut nichts mehr angenommen, sondern auch anderer Potentaten Bottschaften veracht, sich uber sie erheben wollen, welches ihme als einem gelerten erfahrnen verstendigen Mann, der von geringem stande also erhöhet worden, sehr ubel angestanden und mehr zu verachtung als zu Lob und Ruhm gereichet” (Heberer, bk. 2, ch. 50). 36 “Underwegen fragt ich den Herren de la Planche wie doch das Bad so heiβ würde, auch das Vorgemach, da ich doch weder Ofen noch Fewer gesehen hette. Da erzehlet er mir es hette unter dem Bad ein grosses Gewelb wie ein Keller sehr wol verwart. Das hette auff den seiten oben Luftlöcher dadurch man holz von oben herab zuwerffen köndte das Fewer zuerhalten, welches mit wenig holz geschehe dieweil es stetigs warm gehalten, so Tag so Nacht und die ganze Wochen nicht erkalten” (Heberer, bk. 3, ch. 5). 37 See remarks on the Badestuben in Munch 300–01 and, as a good example of the culture of bathing, see Buchner. 38 For this steam bath called Turkish bath, see the short but informative article of Sourdel-Thomine. 39 “Der Eckstein ihres verderbens ist, daβ sie von dem Sohn Gottes und dem heiligen Geist nichts wissen. Weil sie nun den Sohn nicht kennen, so kennen sie auch den Vatter nicht, wie Christus selber lehret in dem Evangelisten Johannis am Achten Cap. Dann der Vatter und der Sohn seind Eins. Johannis am Zehenden Capitel” (Heberer, bk. 2, ch. 20). 40 “Auch sol ich zu melden nicht underlassen wie daβ die Mohren durch mutwillen (wie die Griechen mir selber erzehlet) solche kirch einmal zerstört. Aber der

182  Robert Rebitsch Patriarcha Alexandrinus ist deβwegen nach Constantinopel verreiset und hat solchen der mohren ubermuth und gewalt dem Türkischen Keyser geklagt. Da seind auf des Türkischen Keysers befelch die gemelten Mohren gezwungen worden solche Kirchen wider auff ihren kosten zuerbawen, schöner als sie zuvor gewesen, wie sie dann noch heutigs tags zu sehen. Welches vom Türkischen Keyser wol zu verwundern, da man in der Christenheit nicht bald dergleichen thut, sonderlich in geistlichen Gebewen” (Heberer, bk. 2, ch. 1). 41 See Höfert, especially 198–227. 42 For a detailed list of topics in these twelve travel descriptions, see Höfert 229–312, 404–11. 43 For examples, see Röhricht.

References Abulafia, David. Das Mittelmeer: Eine Biographie. Frankfurt: Fischer Verlag, 2014. Aymard, Maurice. “Chiourmes et galères dans la seconde moitié du XVIe siècle.” Benzoni 71–91. Beeching, Jack. Don Juan d’Austria. Sieger von Lepanto. Munich: Prestel-Verlag, 1983. Bennassar, Bartolomé, and Lucile Bennassar. Les chrétiens d’Allah: L’histoire extraordinaire des renégats, XVIe–XVIIe siècles. 2nd ed. Paris: Réédition Librairie académique Perrin, 2006. Benzoni, Gino. Il Mediterraneo nella seconda metà del ’500 alla luce di Lepanto. Civiltà Veneziana Studi 30. Firenze: Leo S. Olschki Editore, 1974. Bradford, Ernle. Johanniter und Malteser: Die Geschichte des Ritterordens. 3rd ed. Munich: Universitas, 1996. Braudel, Fernand. Das Mittelmeer und die mediterrane Welt in der Epoche Philipps II. 3 vols. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1994. Büchner, Robert. Im städtischen Bad vor 500 Jahren: Badhaus, Bader und Badegäste im alten Tirol. Vienna: Böhlau Verlag, 2014. Capponi, Niccolò. Victory of the West: The Great Christian–Muslim Clash at the Battle of Lepanto. London: Da Capo Press, 2007. Crowley, Roger. Empires of the Sea: The Siege of Malta, the Battle of Lepanto, and the Contest for the Center of the World. London: Faber and Faber, 2008. Daubner, Robert L. Die Marine des Johanniter-Malteser-Ordens – 500 Jahre Seekrieg zur Verteidigung Europas. Graz: n.p., 1989. Dávid, Géza. “Ottoman Armies and Warfare, 1453–1603.” Faroqhi and Fleet 276–319. Davis, Robert C. Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters: White Slavery in the Mediterranean, the Barbary Coast, and Italy, 1500–1800. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Duchhardt, Heinz. “Tunis – Algier – Jerusalem? Zur Mittelmeerpolitik Karls V.” Karl V. 1500–1558: Neue Perspektiven seiner Herrschaft in Europa und Übersee. Ed. Alfred Kohler et al. Zentraleuropa-Studien Band 6. Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2002. 685–90. Elliott, John H. “A Europe of Composite Monarchies.” Past & Present 137 (1992): 48–71. Faroqhi, Suraiya. Approaching Ottoman History: An Introduction to the Sources. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Faroqhi, Suraiya. “Ottoman Population.” Faroqhi and Fleet 356–403.

Heberer: prisoner of the Ottoman navy 183 Faroqhi, Suraiya, and Kate Fleet, eds. The Cambridge History of Turkey: The Ottoman Empire as a World Power (1453–1603). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Franck, Jakob. “Heberer Michael.” Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie 11 (1880): 197–98. Fröhlich, Hugo. Johann Michael Heberer von Bretten, der “Churpfältzische Robinson.” Veröffentlichungen der Pfälzischen Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Wissenschaften Band 50. Speyer: Verlag der Pfälzischen Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Wissenschaften, 1965. Göllner, Carl. Turcica 1 und 2: Die europäischen Türckendrucke des XVI. Jahrhunderts. Berlin: Ed. Acad. Republicii Socialiste România et al. Bukarest, 1961/1968. Göllner, Carl. Turcica 3: Die Türkenfrage in der öffentlichen Meinung Europas im 16. Jahrhundert. Bucharest/Berlin: Ed. Acad. Republicii Socialiste România et al. Bukarest, 1978. Goffman, Daniel. The Ottoman Empire and Early Modern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Greil, Michael. “ ‘Den ohne grosse gedult ist nit müglich, durch die Turggey zum kommen’: Die Beschreibung der rayß (1587–1591) des Hans Christoph von Teufel.” Kurz et al. 449–60. Grendi, Edoardo. “Doria Andrea.” Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani 41 (1992). Web. 21 Feb. 2015. www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/andrea-doria_(DizionarioBiografico)/. Groot, A. H. de. “Murad III.” The Encyclopedia of Islam. New Edition. Vol. VII. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1993. 595–97. Guilmartin, John Francis, Jr. Gunpowder and Galleys: Changing Technology and Mediterranean Warfare at Sea in the Sixteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974. Heberer, Michael. Aegyptiaca Servitus, Das ist warhafte Beschreibung einer dreyjährigen Dienstbarkeit, so zu Alexandrien in Egypten ihren Anfang und zu Constantinopel ihr Endschaft gefunden. Heidelberg: Gotthard Vöglin Druckerei, 1610. Hochedlinger, Michael. “Die französisch-osmanische ‘Freundschaft’ 1525–1792: Element antihabsburgischer Politik, Gleichgewichtsinstrument, Prestigeunternehmung. – Aufriß eines Problems.” Mitteilungen des Instituts für Österreichische Geschichtsforschung 102 (1994): 108–64. Höfert, Almut. Den Feind beschreiben. “Türkengefahr” und europäisches Wissen über das Osmanische Reich 1450–1600. Campus Historische Studien 35. Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 2004. Jedin, Hubert. “Papst Pius V, die heilige Liga und der Kreuzzugsgedanke.” Benzoni 193–213. Jeggle, Christof. “Die fremde Welt des Feindes? Hans Dernscharms Bericht einer Reise nach Konstantinopel und Kleinasien 1553–1556.” Kurz et al. 413–26. Kamen, Henry. Spain’s Road to Empire: The Making of a World Power 1492–1763. London: Penguin Books, 2003. Kohler, Alfred. Karl V. 1500–1558: Eine Biographie. Munich: C. H. Beck Verlag, 1999. Kurz, Marlene, Martin Scheutz, Karl Vocelka, and Thomas Winkelbauer, eds. Das Osmanische Reich und die Habsburgermonarchie: Akten des internationalen Kongresses zum 150-jährigen Bestehen des Instituts für Österreichische Geschichtsforschung Wien, 22–25 September 2004. Mitteilungen des Instituts für Österreichische Geschichtsforschung, Ergänzungsband 48. Vienna/Munich: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 2005.

184  Robert Rebitsch Lane, Frederic C. Venice: A Maritime Republic. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973. Loebl, Pezzen. “Ulrichskirchen, Barthlmä Freiherr von.” Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie 53 (1907): 41–47. Majoros, Ferenc, and Bernd Rill. Das Osmanische Reich 1300–1922: Die Geschichte einer Großmacht. Graz, Vienna, and Cologne: Verlag Friedrich Pustet Regensburg and Verlag Styria, 1994. Maurer, Michael. “Reiseberichte.” Aufriß der historischen Wissenschaften, Band 4: Quellen. Ed. Michael Maurer. Stuttgart: Reclam, 2002. 325–46. Müller, Ralf C. “Der umworbene ‘Erbfeind’: Habsburgische Diplomatie an der Hohen Pforte vom Regierungsantritt Maximilians I. bis zum ‘Langen Türkenkrieg’ – ein Entwurf.” Kurz et al. 251–79. Münch, Paul. Lebensformen in der Frühen Neuzeit: 1500 bis 1800. Frankfurt: Ullstein Verlag, 1996. Neuber, Wolfgang. “Grade der Fremdheit. Alteritätskonstruktion und experientiaArgumentation in deutschen Turcica der Renaissance.” Europa und die Türken in der Renaissance. Ed. Bodo Guthmüller and Wilhelm Kühlmann. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 2000. 249–65. Niederkorn, Jan Paul. Die europäischen Mächte und der “Lange Türkenkrieg” Kaiser Rudolfs II. (1593–1606). Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1993. Ozbaran, S. “Kapudan Pasha.” The Encyclopedia of Islam. New Edition. Vol. IV. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1978. 571–72. Press, Volker. “Heberer, Michael.” Neue Deutsche Biographie 8 (1969): 170. Röhricht, Reinhold. Deutsche Pilgerreisen nach dem heiligen Lande. Gotha: Perthes, 1889. Rudolph, Harriet. “The Ottoman Empire and the Institutionalization of European Diplomacy, 1500–1700.” Islam and International Law: Engaging Self-Centrism from a Plurality of Perspectives. Ed. Marie-Luisa Frick and Andreas Th. Müller. Leiden: Brill, 2013. 161–83. Ruhe, Ernstpeter. “Christensklaven als Beute nordafrikanischer Piraten: Das Bild des Maghreb im Europa des 16.–19. Jahrhunderts.” Europas islamische Nachbarn: Studien zur Literatur und Geschichte des Maghreb. Ed. Ruhe. Würzburg: Verlag Königshausen & Neumann, 1993. 159–86. Schwara, Desanka. Kaufleute, Seefahrer und Piraten im Mittelmeerraum der Neuzeit: Entgrenzende Diaspora – verbindende Imaginationen. Munich: Oldenbourg Verlag, 2011. Sourdel-Thomine, Janine. “Hammăm.” The Encyclopedia of Islam. New Edition. Vol. III. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1971. 139–44. Stagl, Hemma. “Das Leben der nichtmuslimischen Bevölkerung im Osmanischen Reich im Spiegel von Reisebeschreibungen.” Kurz et al. 359–91. Stupperich, Robert. “Melanchthon, Philipp.” Neue Deutsche Biographie 16 (1990): 741–45. Teply, Karl. “Einleitung.” Michael Heberer von Bretten, Aegyptiaca Servitus. Frühe Reisen und Seefahrten in Originalberichten Band 6. Graz: Akademische Druckund Verlagsanstalt, 1967. V–XLII. Tongay, Pervin. “Die europäische Sicht auf den Fremden in den Berichten des 16. Jahrhunderts: Das Bild der Türken und Azteken im Vergleich.” Kurz et al. 393–411.

Heberer: prisoner of the Ottoman navy 185 Topkaya, Yiğit. Augen-Blicke sichtbarer Gewalt? Eine Geschichte des “Türken” in medientheoretischer Perspektive. Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2015. Tucker, Ernest. “Lepanto, Battle of.” Europe 1450 to 1789: Encyclopaedia of the Early Modern World III. Ed. Jonathan Dewald. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2004. 485–87. Ulbrich, Claudia. “ ‘Hat man also bald ein solches Blutbad, Würgen und Wüten in der Stadt gehört und gesehen, daß mich solches jammert wider zu gedenken . . . ’ Religion und Gewalt in Michael Heberer von Brettens ‘Aegyptiaca Servitus’ (1610).” Religion und Gewalt. Konflikte, Rituale, Deutungen (1500–1800). Ed. Kaspar von Greyerz et al. Veröffentlichungen des MaxPlanck-Instituts für Geschichte Band 215. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2006. 85–108. Wolf, John B. The Barbary Coast: Algiers under the Turks 1500–1830. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1979.

9 Piracy, diplomacy, and cultural circulations in the Mediterranean Khalid Bekkaoui

Captivity historiography has routinely projected the Mediterranean as a space of confrontation between the Cross and the Crescent, dark flags hoisted on heavily armed corsair galleys, naval warfare, and the enslavement of white crew and passengers. Europe and North Africa are often invoked as two worlds separated by impenetrable borders of radical ethnic, cultural, religious, and ideological differences. This chapter tries to write an alternative history where the Mediterranean is a contact zone for encounter, negotiation and cross-cultural discovery, exchange and dialogue between Occident and Orient, and a fluid site for the circulation of people, geographical knowledge, animals, cultural artefacts, and agricultural and manufactured products across the borders of Islam and Christendom. A sophisticated network of communication and exchange between captors, captives, ransomers, ambassadors, negotiators, traders, translators, and rulers facilitates such fluidity.

Muslims and Christians unite in a common glorious cause In the early seventeenth century, Moulay Zaidan sent a letter to Charles I soliciting his assistance to subjugate the rebellious subjects who wanted to establish an independent republic in Salé. The letter characterizes such Anglo-Moroccan military endeavour as a “glorious cause” and “a work whose memory shall be reverenced so long as there shall be any remaining among men.” During the reign of Moulay Ziadan’s successor, Moulay EcChikh, Charles dispatched a fleet to bombard the Saleteen’s fortifications, while the Sultan’s army attacked the city by land. The rebels were compelled to capitulate. In acknowledgement for his assistance, Moulay Ec-Chikh sent Charles I “a present of horses and 300 Christian slaves” (Meakin 165). In the same year, the Moroccan sultan sent his ambassador, Kaid Jawdar Ben Abdalla, a Portuguese renegade, to London “for the purpose of concluding a treaty and peace between the two sides and to revive the affection and treaty relationship and friendship that existed between our ancestors” (Hopkins 14). On his way to Whitehall Palace on 5 November, the ambassador rode in great pomp “on Horseback through the Streets . . . His Present

Piracy, diplomacy, & cultural circulations 187 of four Barbary Horses was led along in rich Caparisons, and richer Saddles, with Bridles set with Stones; also some Hawks, many of the Captives whom he brought over going along a-foot clad in white” (Strafford, Knowler, and Radcliffe 2: 129). A large crowd congregated to gaze at the exotic Moorish procession so that the streets “were much throng’d and crowded by innumerable multitudes of people” (Strafford, Knowler, and Radcliffe 2: 12). Upon returning to his country, after eight months in England, Kaid Jawdar carried back with him Charles’ magnificent presents to Moulay EcChikh: a coach “embroidered with gold and seven horses, one hundred and thirty-four pieces of cambric, thirty pieces of fine Holland cloth,” in addition to “five whole peeces and three remnantes of fine Spanish cloath.” And, interestingly, paintings of Charles I and Queen Henrietta Maria (Rodgers 35–36; Bruce 24: 417). Moroccan and English gift lists are indicative of a dynamic process of cross-cultural exchange between the Maghreb and Europe. The gift of the royal portraits is unique in early diplomatic gift exchanges between Christian and Muslim monarchs. It is a significant token of a genuine friendship between two religiously and culturally different sovereigns, beyond mere political expediency. Commenting on such friendship, a contemporary chronicler notes that although Morocco and Britain “are far remote from each other in Religions, Realmes, Regions and Territories; yet they are conjoyned in leagues and friendship together” (Glover 2). European royal coaches were highly prized by Maghrebi rulers. The eighteenth century Moroccan ruler Moulay Ismail (1645–1727) is known to have possessed at least six, from different European nations (Windus 110–11). Sultan Sidi Mohammed Ben Abdallah (1757/1759–1790) inherited the throne as well as the royal coaches. In a missive to the English consul in Tetuan, Sidi Mohammed was angry at Britain’s failure to repair and return to him a coach he had sent to Gibraltar (Rogers 105). The coach meant a lot to him, being an heirloom from his grandfather, Moulay Ismail. European coaches were first used by Maghrebi monarchs1 for leisure promenades or riding to the mosque on Fridays, then they were gradually incorporated in the bayaa, an allegiance ceremony, ensuring prestige, power, and authority to the royal rider.

Barbary horses: privileged diplomatic gifts In February 1704, the Bey of Tripoli appointed Hadgy Mustapha, a man who had carried diplomatic missions to France and Britain, as ambassador to the court of Louis XIV and bid him and the French consul to choose a suitable gift for the king of France. They went to the Bey’s stable and selected “the most beautiful stallions they could find and two excellent Arabian mares, and six more horses, all of the best race” (Mercure 231–32).2 Knowing that Europeans highly esteemed Arabian horses, Maghrebi potentates consistently incorporated them on their lists of diplomatic

188  Khalid Bekkaoui presents. In April 1625, an Algerian envoy brought Charles I “a present of Barbary horses, tigers, and lions” (Bruce 12). Traveling to Marseilles in October 1627, Tunisian envoy Yusuf Dey carried a present of four horses (Matar, Europe). In 1711, the Dey of Algiers sent Louis XIV a present of two magnificent steeds. Thrilled with the gift, the French monarch reciprocated with the manumission of twenty Muslim captives and a present of a diamond to the Dey (Plantet 74). In 1719, the Dey sent Louis XV three horses and four French slaves with a letter hoping “that peace and renewed correspondence will be strengthened forever between the two countries” (Plantet 104). The following year, the Dey’s presents to Louis XV comprised three fine horses and 40 liberated Christian slaves. He wished in return the liberation of an equal number of Muslim slaves from French galleys (Plantet 105–06). In 1731, the Bey of Tunis and Louis XV of France concluded a peace treaty and the Bey sent “a gift of eight horses to the French monarch” (Winnipeg Tribune).

Exotic animals: visual curiosity and scientific inquiry In May 1846, a Tunisian envoy, Sadi Ahmet, arrived in London with a present to Queen Victoria consisting of seven horses, together with bridles and saddles, six gazelles, two ostriches, and a lion. The horses were delivered to the Royal Mews, while the gazelles, ostriches, and the lion were conveyed to the Zoological Society (Royal Companion 22). In Europe, scientific societies were increasingly desperate to acquire strange and unknown specimens and zoos eagerly competed to collect exotic animals imported from remote lands. North African gifts helped cater for the increasing demand. Some of the creatures sent were so unfamiliar in Europe that they were referred to simply as “a present of some wild beasts for George the Second” (Russel 337). Writing to Colonel Kirk, Moulay Ismail informed him that he had sent “two young little Lions” because his ambassador who visited Britain informed him that “a Lion is rare in your Country, and that you love to see him” (Ockley 139). On another occasion, in 1728, Moulay Ismail sent George II a special little lioness “which many an ambassador has desired of us but . . . Ever since she has been reared in our stables she has been destined for you.” The Sultan explains that he wanted to send it to King George II because “your nation loves to be at peace with the followers of the Hanafi creed,” adding that “If we knew of anything in our possession apart from her which would please you in this blessed state we would send it to you with the utmost speed” (Rogers, text 42 SP 71/17 187). Most Maghrebi wild animals ended up at the menagerie of the Tower of London, where they were attributed Christian names, as a late eighteenthcentury catalogue of the Tower menagerie mentions “Miss Sally, a beautiful leopardess,” “Hector, a most beautiful lion,” and “Helena, a very handsome

Piracy, diplomacy, & cultural circulations 189 lioness,” all gifts from the emperor of Morocco. “Miss Groggery, a beautiful leopardess” was sent to his late majesty by the Dey of Algiers. Two other lionesses in the menagerie were also gifts from the Dey (Henry 15–22). The Barbary exotic creatures provided not only a popular attraction but also valuable objects for scientific inquiry. Moulay Ismail’s gifts, carried by Ben Haddu to Charles II in 1682, consisted of two lions and 30 ostriches.3 The lions were sent to the Tower and the ostriches to St. James’ Park. The Royal Society of London was eager to obtain and study exotic birds. At first, the Society bought and dissected a sick ostrich, but later, as ostriches died of cold, disease, or swallowed harmful objects, the Society had plenty of ostrich bodies to anatomize (Cunningham 305). North Africans were keen to contribute to European scientific knowledge. In 1699, after returning from his redemption embassy to the court of Louis XIV, Ben Aicha wrote to his French friends informing them of an important archaeological discovery made in Morocco. “Learn that a house was discovered under the ground here in our region in which we found three marble statutes, one in the shape of a man who was king of this land in past times during the period of God’s prophet, Ibrahim.” He thought of communicating this valuable discovery to the French for the benefit of a historical researcher. Being aware of Moroccan passion for astrology, Cassini gave the Moroccan delegation that was visiting France on a redemption mission a collection of astrological maps made by the French Royal Observatory, to which the Arabist François Pétis de la Croix, professor of Arabic and Louis XIV’s interpreter, had added a few handwritten clarifications in Arabic (Thomassy 180). Among the exotic creatures North Africans were keen to acquire from Europe were deer. From Louis XIV, Moulay Ismail requested “five hinds and the same number of males, as well as two does which his ambassador had admired at Versailles.” A French report affirms that this “is the presents he aymes at more than anything else” (Blunt 188). Deer also figure consistently in Moulay Ismail’s epistolary exchanges with Queen Anne. From her he wished to receive a sort of white-spotted deer, explaining that he intended to have them exhibited in the royal zoological garden “so that the people going in and out can see them.” There was, however, another occult reason. He told Queen Anne that he needed the deer because in his country they “give protection even from the evil eye” (Hopkins 37). Knowing the Sultan’s keenness for the deer, Queen Anne laid a condition: “If sixty-nine British prisoners were to be freed, the Emperor must ‘with the utmost expedition’ have the deer plus ‘two dozen of the largest china dishes that can be had’ plus ‘two large copper tea-kitchens and a little fine tea’” (Green 242, 316). In 1711, Bentura, his Christian envoy, brought him a herd of 42 deer from Britain, 20 were a gift from Queen Anne while the rest he bought himself (MacLean 184).

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Muslims drink infidel tea North Africans were accustomed to drinking coffee, a beverage brought by the Turks. With their encounter with Europe, North Africans discovered tea in the early modern period and soon this commodity became a luxury widely cherished by the Muslim nobility. French Consul Chenier writes that “The Moors are exceedingly fond of tea, also of sugar . . . they have learnt the use of this beverage from the northern nations” (Chenier 271). Tea and tea utensils feature consistently in lists of presents of European diplomatic gifts to North African rulers. In 1734, the list of presents from George II to the Dey of Algiers for the redemption of one hundred captives consisted of “20 Pieces of Broadcloth, 2 Pieces of Brocade, 2 Pieces of Silver Tabby, 1 Piece of Green Damask, 8 Pieces of Holland, 16 Pieces of Cambrick, a Gold Repeating Watch, 4 Silver ditto, 20 Pound of Tea, 300 of Loaf Sugar, 5 Fusees, 5 Pair of Pistols, an Escrutoire, 2 Clocks, and a Box of Toys” (Gentleman’s 4: 104–05). In 1778, the Sultan of Morocco received from Britain a tea-service (Dillon 297). The invoice of articles received by the Dey of Algiers in 1795 included “one tea or Coffee pot, one cream pot one sugar dish, and a salver 1 Set of Ditto, consisting of two Cups, two Saucers, one tea or coffee” (US Office 159). When the Englishwoman Elizabeth Marsh was taken captive in Morocco in 1756 the sultan invited her to have tea with him in the royal palace. She gives this description: A low Table, covered with a Piece of Muslin edged with Silver, was placed before him, and on that was an elegant Waiter, containing a small Tea-kettle and Lamp, and two Cups and Saucers which were as light as Tin, and curiously japanned with Green and Gold; these I was told were Presents from the Dutch. (Marsh 87) The introduction of tea in Morocco triggered a debate on whether its drinking was halal or haram, permissible or prohibited. Ahmed Hamid ibn Muhammed, a religious scholar, wrote a treatise entitled On the Prohibition of Tea. He observes that in Morocco there is “no beverage or food as lovable as tea, they crave for it as they crave for women, nay even with stronger desire, and sing and compose verse about it” (US Office 212–13). Ibn Muhammed went as far as issuing a fatwa forbidding the consumption of tea on account that it promotes promiscuity, encourages indolence and idleness; diverts pious people from attending communal prayers at the mosque; and encourages the frequenting of the company of the wicked and dissolute (US Office 209–24). Despite these strictures, the Asiatic herb continued to be drunk throughout Morocco and became the country’s national beverage.

Piracy, diplomacy, & cultural circulations 191

Christian watches that tell Muslim time In addition to tea, watches were highly appreciated by North Africans. Chenier affirms “that of all presents offered to the sultan, excellent tea and watches were the most appreciated, tea for his health and the watches to regulate more precisely the hours of prayer” (Roberts and Roberts 186). Hence watches consistently feature in diplomatic gift lists. Louis XIV bestowed on the Moroccan ambassador, Ben Aicha, in 1699, a present of “two crystal candelabra, two clocks, a dozen watches – two of which were set with rubies and diamonds, twelve brocaded coats, two bowls of embossed silver, four pairs of pistols ornamented with Damascene work, a carpet, and a sofa and chairs of Savonnerie” (Blunt 230). In 1784, Sidi Mohamed Ben Abdallah allowed the Gibraltar Garrison to be supplied with provisions from his country free of export duty. In acknowledgment of this trading favor, King George sent a present “of broadcloth and other things, the manufacture of our country . . . also a quantity of linen cloth conformably to the pattern brought to us by our said Ambassador.” He also delivered to him a watch the Sultan had sent to be mended in Britain “and which has been repaired agreeably to your desire, together with a new repeating gold watch, and a musical clock.” On the two watches the Sultan had requested to be made for him with precise specifications, King George informed him that they “are now preparing with all expedition, by the two first artists in our Kingdom. They are ordered to be cased in gold, and set with jewels” (Rogers 117, FO 52/6). Following the conclusion of the treaty of peace and friendship between Morocco and America in 1786, George Washington presented Sidi Mohammed Ben Abdallah with a longcase clock. A few months later, the Sultan gave the American clock as a present to the Portuguese Queen, Dona Maria (Tazi 9: 299n16), perhaps because the time was announced with the call of a bird, which he might have considered to be religiously inappropriate. In any case, in the same year, we find Sidi Mohammed communicating to British Consul James Matra his wish to have a carriage clock made for him with particular specifications, most importantly, that it should strike four times a day with the loudest possible noise. The clock was destined to his own bedroom as a means “to alarm the whole house at prayer times” (Rogers 122, FO 52/8). Muslims valued European timepieces as decorative accessories and markers of social prestige and status, but they also expected Christian watchmakers to adapt their technological designs and inventions to the Islamic environment, by regulating them to indicate the Muslim time of prayer.

Gendered diplomatic gifts Contrary to Orientalist stereotypes of Muslim women as passive and submissive women in the harem of North African potentates, some were involved

192  Khalid Bekkaoui in the political affairs of their countries and enjoyed considerable power and influence on the politics of the state. One such woman is Lalla Khnatha, mother of Sultan Moulay Abdallah (1734–1757). She manoeuvred the succession of her son to the throne and was involved in the negotiations for the redemption of captives. Because of Lalla Khnatha’s political influence, Louis XV sent a letter to her dated September 1734, calling her “The greatest Sultana” (Tarikh 89). When negotiations for the liberation of captives between the Royal Navy officer and negotiator Charles Stewart (1681–1741) and Moulay Ismail reached a dead end, Stewart wrote a letter to Lalla Khnatha addressing her as the “Powerful Lady, Mother of Muley Abdallah” (Rhorchi) and explaining that while in Lisbon he met a Christian slave whom she had manumitted who informed him that Lalla Khnatha “was the Chief Person in this Court, who could do me Service” (Windus 160). To this letter, the Queen responded telling the English ambassador that she “spoke to my Master (whom God preserve) of what you say, without failing to explain to him all in its full meaning: With which his Majesty was well pleased” (Windus 169). And on the subject of the redemption of captives she reassures him, “I will speak to my Master (whom God preserve) to the End that he may renew the Agreement entirely, and do every thing you desire” (Windus 170–71). Her intercession was successful. Charles Stewart was granted audience on 23 July 1721. He returned to England with 296 liberated British captives. The presents the British envoy brought to Queen Lalla Khnatha are not recorded. But we know the presents he carried to the Sultan’s British bride, “Lala Balkies, a Reinagodo Queen, 5 loads Cloth, 1 piece of Cambricks, and one piece of Gazes.”4 In 1715, Thomas Baker and George Paddon took care to send Lala Balkies “A rich crimson velvet sedan or chair for the darling sultaness, a native of England, 50l., and 10 pound of the finest tea” (Bruce 142). In 1795, the Dey of Algiers received in return for concluding a treaty of amity and friendship and releasing American prisoners a large gift, including “25 Chests of tea of 4 different qualities. 6 Quintal of loaf sugar refined, some elegant penknives, some small guilt thimbles, scissors cases &c calculated for the Queen and daughter, a few shawls, with roses curiously wrought in them – a few rosed China Cups &c &c 2o lb of fine Tea” (US Office 2: 191). During his visit to Marrakesh in 1789, William Lempriere carried presents specifically for the “ladies of the harem.” He provides their names and the specific presents allocated to each: For Lalla Batoom, the queen of the harem, a set of elegant, but very small cups and saucers. For Lalla Douyaw, the emperor’s favourite wife, a neat mahogany tea-board, with four short feet, to have two drawers, and to be elegantly ornamented with glasses; a set of very small Indian cups and saucers; a set of different kinds of perfumed waters. For Lalla

Piracy, diplomacy, & cultural circulations 193 Zara, nine yards of yellow, the same of crimson, and the same of coch Vineal coloured damasks; the same quantities and colours in sattins; one dozen of Indian cups and saucers; one hundred large red beads; one chest of tea and sugar; a large quantity of coffee and nutmegs. It was not rare that the presents were emblematic rather than opulent. A report in 1777, for instance, stated that the French consul in Tunis sent “dried fruits and jams from France to the prince, and . . . fresh bread from his oven everyday and a basket of biscuits to the queen every week.” The report adds that “the bey and his children had become used to them and developed a taste for them” (Windler 190).

Western women too received Muslim gifts In the late sixteenth century, Queen Elizabeth I sent the Sultana Safiye, Murat’s favourite wife, a present of “a jewel of her majesties picture, set with some rubies and diamants, 3 great pieces of gilt plate, 10 garments of cloth of gold, a very fine case of glasse bottles silver & gilt with 2 pieces of fine Holland.” The Sultana was very pleased with the present and asked the English ambassador what presents “would most delight her maiestie,” who replied that “a sute of princely attire being after the Turkish fashion would for the rarenesse thereof be acceptable in England.” Whereupon the Sultana “sent an vpper gowne of cloth of gold very rich, an vnder gowne of cloth of siluer, and a girdle of Turkie worke, rich and faire” (Hakluyt 446). The Queen’s consort of Sultan Mohamed, Lalla Fatima, maintained diplomatic correspondences with European princesses. In 1774, for instance, Lalla Fatima sent the Spanish Princess, Maria Luisa of Asturias, “a chest of pearls” and a pair of bracelets in gold with a request to liberate “one or two Muslim women captives.” “Such liberation will benefit both countries” (Sadiqi and Owusu-Sarpong 169), says Lalla Fatma in a letter to the Spanish princess. In 1805, the United States naval officer Stephen Decatur (1779–1820) negotiated with the Bey of Tunis and upon his return home the Tunisian ambassador, Soliman Meley Meley, sailed with him on board the Congress ship to America to negotiate directly with the president on some Tunisian vessels captured by the US navy. Thus, Soliman became the first Muslim diplomat to arrive in the country. For members of government the envoy brought most sumptuous presents: “curious and richly inlaid sabres, muskets etc for the officers of government.” For their spouses: “Rich cashmere shawls, and robes, a superb silver dressingcase, rare essences and other splendid articles for female use.” After his arrival in Morocco Ben Aicha maintained an epistolary relation with his French hosts and friends and regularly sent them presents: You will be receiving, my friend Mr. Jourdan, five shawls for your wife and her daughters from you, and for her sisters. She also has a pair of shoes and a piece of cloth. Other shawls will reach you, two for

194  Khalid Bekkaoui Madame Saint-Olon and her daughter. Another shawl is for Madame Le Camus Melson. The name of each is written on each of the presents. Please give each gift to each. You will also receive a table cover that Mrs. Jourdan could put on her card table. (Matar, Lands 206) Ben Aicha does not forget to send a gift to Mrs. Jourdan, “a gazelle with which your children, whom I cherish as my own, will play.” The gifts sent privately by Ben Aicha represent a form of public diplomacy. Their significance was not in their material but emblematic value. And it seems to me that it was largely thanks to this unofficial gift-giving diplomacy that war between France and Morocco was averted in the aftermath of the failure of Ben Aicha’s embassy to the court of Louis XIV. During Ben Aicha’s embassy to France, his host Mrs. Jourdan was pregnant. In his letters Ben Aicha does not fail to enquire about her health and whether “she has been delivered of her burden. Do let me know, and you will receive some cloth which our children want to send to her: we hope she will accept it.” It is extraordinarily interesting that when Mrs. Jourdan delivered her baby, she baptized him Jean-François Abdalla Benache Jourdan (Blunt 231). Ben Aisha’s idea of a world “which will make the Moors Frenchmen and the Frenchmen Moors” (Blunt 228) seems to have materialized.

Conclusions Evidently there was an extensive commercial, cultural, and political exchange between the Crescent and the Cross in the early modern period. Gift-giving was a salient feature of the commercial, diplomatic, and political transactions between Europeans and Maghrebi. It reduced political tensions and hostilities and facilitated the redemption of captives and negotiation of commercial and diplomatic treaties. When the negotiation for the ransoming of the eighteen captives of the British brig Surprise faltered, a present of some loaves of sugar and tea “had a powerful effect in sealing the bargain” (Narrative 43). Obviously, the present had a symbolic rather than sumptuous value. North Africans had a passion for curious rather than lavish presents. As a French envoy to Morocco put it, “in negotiations at that court the novelty of a present is frequently of more consequence than the intrinsic value of it” (Jefferson 96). The envoy mentions in this respect that Sultan Sidi Mohammed Ben Abdallah was much more pleased with a hand organ than with any other presents he gave him. The gifts were pieces of wonder that Maghrebi rulers freely displayed for the admiration of their subjects. The Bey of Tunis, as Mordecai Manuel Noah records, exhibited all his gifts in the palace which “became a warehouse of merchandize; fine cambrics and linens, superfine cloths, rich brocades, gold and silver mounted guns and pistols, diamonds and musical snuff boxes, watches, and gold rings, were spread around, and each person pressed forward, to look at the curiosities.”

Piracy, diplomacy, & cultural circulations 195 Among the gifts were watches, snuffboxes, and seals with a musical mechanism. The Bey made them play their tunes while the gathering “sat in solemn state, listening; the Ministers, guards, and slaves, all with sober looks, not a muscle discomposed, were attending to the tunes, with as much gravity, as they would to a mufti” (Noah 257–58). Their exposure to artifacts manufactured in Europe overwhelmed them with awe and wonder, and certainly infinite curiosity about the land of infidels. Beholding all these alluring treasures, the land of the Christians began to be configured in Muslim Mediterranean imagination as a land of extraordinary marvels. Hence, when Hadgy Mustapha was commissioned to carry a diplomatic mission to France in 1704, he eagerly begged the Bey to allow his son, Sid Mohamed, to accompany him so as to expose him to the “infinite marvels” of France (Mercure 231–32). Encounters with Europe offered also an opportunity for North Africans to discover the technological innovations in Europe, which inspired them to introduce reforms. For instance, during his embassy to Portugal in October 1774, Kaid Abdelmajid Al-Azrak visited a mint in Lisbon. He manifested a lively interest in the coining machinery and begged the Queen to send experts to establish a mint in his own country. The Queen generously complied and allowed six experts to accompany Al-Azrak and sent with them four big chests containing the necessary equipment for the mint, all as gifts to the Moroccan sultan (Tazi).5 The following year, the sultan sent merchant Tayeb Bouhlal to reside in Lisbon with a letter proposing to the Portuguese Queen the establishment of a trading house for the benefit of both countries (Tazi). A successful exchange of diplomatic gifts and political negotiations involved a sophisticated deciphering of culture codes and learning the language of the other. Thus, Moulay Ismail engaged a French captive, named Bernard Bausset, to teach his sons Spanish (Mouette 94). And Queen Anne gave a sum of money to her “chaplain at Algiers, to encourage him to master the Moorish, Arabic, and Turkish languages, in which he had made considerable progress” (Bruce 20). In 1715, when Moulay Ismail learnt that Queen Anne decided to appoint a new consul in Morocco, he recommended Jezreel Jones for this position because of his fluency in Arabic (Hopkins 43). The exchange of gifts allowed the movement of manufactured commodities, animals, money, cultural artefacts, and the transfer of technologies and skills between Europe and North Africa. It allowed North Africans to discover European commodities and integrate them in their commercial networks. Hence, Maghrebi ambassadorial delegations to Europe almost inevitably included merchants with ready money who engaged in mercantile activities simultaneously with their diplomatic mission. They visited commercial centres where they purchased goods and shipped them to markets in their homelands. The Moorish delegation to the court of Elizabeth in 1600 actively toured the London markets to be acquainted with English trade and commodities. Immediately after their return home, reports state that English merchants

196  Khalid Bekkaoui regularly supplied the Saidian Sultan Ahmed Al Mansour (1578–1603) with “necessaries and furnitures for his own use . . . and sundrie merchandize,” including the “transportation of a coach and bedd for the same late King” (Castries 237). With such commercial activities, the Maghreb developed into a market for European commodities, prompting Maghrebi Tujar in the early nineteenth century to immigrate to Britain, France, Spain, Italy, Germany, and Gibraltar to conduct trade from the metropolis to their home countries. The imported European goods impacted immensely on the lifestyle of North Africans. Their houses and palaces were decorated with European furniture: beds, armchairs, carpets, clocks, and mirrors; and their tables with tea trays complete with saucers and cups, and European coaches deeply influenced royal ceremonies and rituals. This is demonstrative of how open the court and popular culture in the Muslim Mediterranean was to European tastes and customs, and, consequently, increasingly dependent on imported commodities from the West.

Notes 1 Coaches continued to be valuable presents. Loti writes in Morocco that Queen Victoria sent the Sultan of Morocco as a present “a gilt coach, in the style of Louis Quinze” (152). She also sent the Bey of Tunis “a handsome blue coach with red wheels” (Leaves 2: 87). 2 The Bey’s present included several deer. All died on the voyage. 3 The Memoirs and Travels of Sir John Reresby. 4 NA, SP, 71/16/ fol. 615. 5 His gifts included lions, tigers, and ostriches.

References Black, Hector. A Narrative of the Shipwreck of the British Brig, “Surprise” . . . on the Coast of Barbary: On . . . 28th December, 1815; and Subsequent Captivity of the Passengers and Crew by the Arabs, Until Ransomed by the Worshipful Company of Ironmongers. London: The Company, 1817. Blunt, Wilfrid. Black Sunrise: The Life and Times of Mulai Ismail, Emperor of Morocco 1646–1727. London: Methuen, 1951. Bruce, John. Calendar of State Papers: Domestic Series of the Reign of Charles I. Burlington, ON: Tanner Ritchie pub. in collaboration with the Library and Information Services of the University of St. Andrews, 2005. Castries, Henry. Les sources inédites de l’histoire du Maroc de 1530 à 1845. Paris: E. Leroux, 1905. Chenier, Louis. The Present State of the Empire of Morocco. Vol. 1. New York: Johnson, 1967. Cunningham, Andrew. The Anatomist Anatomis’d: An Experimental Discipline in Enlightenment Europe. Farnham: Ashgate, 2010. Dillon, Edward. Porcelain. New York: G.P. Putnam’s, 1904. The Gentleman’s Magazine. London: n.p., 1731.

Piracy, diplomacy, & cultural circulations 197 Glover, George. The Arrivall and Intertainements of the Embassador, Alkaid Jaurar Ben Abdella, with His Associate, Mr. Robert Blake: From the High and Mighty Prince, Mulley Mahamed Sheque, Emperor of Morocco, King of Fesse, and Suss. with the Ambassadors Good and Applauded Commendations of His Royall and Noble Entertainments in the Court and the City. Also a Discription of Some Rites, Customes, and Lawes of Those Affrican Nations. Likewise Gods Exceeding Mercy, and Our Kings Especiall Grace and Favour Manifested in the Happy Redemption of Three Hundred and Two of His Majesties Poore Subjects, Who Had Beene Long in Miserable Slavery at Salley in Barbary. London: Okes, 1637. Green, David. Queen Anne. London: Collin, 1971. Hakluyt, Richard. A Selection of Curious, Rare and Early Voyages: And Histories of Interesting Discoveries, Chiefly Published by Hakluyt, or at His Suggestion, but Not Included in His Celebrated Compilation, to Which, to Purchas, and Other General Collections, This Is Intended as a Supplement. London: Evans and Priestly, 1983. Henry, David. An Historical Account of the Curiosities of London and Westminster. London: Printed for Newbery and Carnan, 1769. Hinds, A. B. Calendar of State Papers and Manuscripts Relating to English Affairs Existing in the Archives and Collections of Venice and in Other Libraries of Northern Italy. Vol. 24. Burlington, ON: Tanner Ritchie pub. in collaboration with the Library and Information Services of the University of St. Andrews, 2008. Hopkins, J. F. P. Letters from Barbary, 1576–1774: Arabic Documents in the Public Record Office. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982. Jefferson, Thomas. The Papers of Thomas Jefferson: November 1785 to June 1786. Vol. 9. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950. Leaves from a Lady’s Diary of Her Travels in Barbary. London: Colburn, 1850. Loti, Pierre. Morocco. Trans. W.P. Baines. London: T.W. Laurie, 1914. MacLean, Gerald M., and Nabil I. Matar. Britain and the Islamic World: 1558– 1713. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Marsh, Elizabeth. The Female Captive: A Narrative of Facts Which Happened in Barbary in the Year 1756, Written by Herself. Ed. Khalid Bekkaoui. Casablanca: The Moroccan Cultural Studies Centre, 2003. Matar, Nabil. Europe Through Arab Eyes, 1578–1727. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009. Matar, Nabil. In the Lands of the Christians: Arabic Travel Writing in the 17th Century. Hoboken, NJ: Taylor and Francis, 2013. Meakin, Budgett. The Land of the Moors: A Comprehensive Description. London: Darf, 1986. Mercure Galant. Paris: Guillaume de Luyne, 1704. Moüette, Germain. Relation de la captivité du Sr. Moüette dans les royaumes de Fez et de Maroc: Où il a demeuré pendant onze ans. Paris: Chez Jean Cochart, 1683. Noah, M. M. Travels in England, France, Spain, and the Barbary States, in the Years 1813–14 and 15. New York: Kirk and Mercein, 1819. Ockley, Simon. An Account of South-West Barbary. London: Bowyer & Clements, 1713. Plantet, Eugène. Correspondance des deys d’Alger: Avec la cour de France, 1579– 1833, recueillie dans les dépôts d’archives des affaires étrangères, de la marine, des colonies et de la Chambre de commerce de Marseille et pub. avec une introduction, des éclaircissements et des notes. Paris: F. Alcan, 1889.

198  Piracy, diplomacy, & cultural circulations Redington, Joseph. Calendar of Treasury Papers, 1714–1719: Preserved in the Public Record Office. Burlington, ON: Tanner Ritchie pub. in collaboration with the Library and Information Services of the University of St. Andrews, 2008. Rhorchi, Fatima. “Consorts of Moroccan Sultans: Lalla Khnata Bint Bakkar ‘a Woman with Three Kings.’” Queenship in the Mediterranean: Negotiating the Role of the Queen in the Medieval and Early Modern Eras. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Roberts, Priscilla H., and Richard S. Roberts. Thomas Barclay (1728–1793): Consul in France, Diplomat in Barbary. Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University Press, 2008. Rogers, P. G. A History of Anglo–Moroccan Relations to 1900. London: Foreign and Commonwealth Office, 1991. The Royal Companion to the “Sights of London”: And Within Twenty-Five Miles of St. Paul’s: Containing a Mass of Valuable Information, Useful, Entertaining, and Instructive, Especially to Visitors to “the Great Metropolis.” London: Clayton, 1855. Russell, Michael. History and Present Condition of the Barbary States. Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1835. Sadiqi, Fatima, and Christiane Owusu-Sarpong. Des femmes écrivent l’Afrique. Paris: Éditions Karthala, 2013. Strafford, Thomas W., William Knowler, and George Radcliffe. The Earl of Strafforde’s Letters and Dispatches: With an Essay Towards His Life by Sir George Radcliffe: From the Originals in the Possession of His Great Grandson the Right Honourable Thomas Earl of Malton. London: Printed for the editor, by William Bowyer, 1739. Tazi, Abdelhadi. Attarish Adiplumassi li Al-Maghrib. Vol. 9. Mohammadia: Fdala, 1988. Thomassy, Marie J. R. Le Maroc et ses caravanes, ou relations de la France avec cet empire. Paris: n.p., 1845. United States Office of Naval Records and Library. Naval Documents Related to the United States Wars with the Barbary Powers . . . Naval Operations including Diplomatic Background . . . Published under Direction of the . . . Secretary of the Navy. Washington, DC: US GPO. Windler, Christian. “Tributes and Presents in Franco–Tunisian Diplomacy.” Journal of Early Modern History 4.2 (2000): 168–99. Windus, John. A Journey to Mequinez; the Residence of the Present Emperor of Fez and Morocco: On the Occasion of Commodore Stewart’s Embassy Thither for the Redemption of the British Captives in . . . 1721. Dublin: n.p., 1725. Winnipeg Tribune. Winnipeg, MB: Tribune Newspaper Co., 1938.

10 Confraternity models in the “redemption of slaves” in Europe The Broederschap der alderheylighste Dryvuldigheyt of Bruges (Brugge) and the Scuola della Santissima Trinità of Venice Andrea Pelizza “Mediterranean slavery”: a long-lasting phenomenon One of the most widespread charitable works in Europe during the Modern Age was the so-called “redemption of slaves.”1 Between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, the need to organise permanent or periodic alms collections for this purpose was felt in practically every nation, city and even small village. The phenomenon can only be fully understood in light of an event that regularly and frequently struck coastal populations and all those obliged to go to sea for work or travel: both were in fact at risk of being captured by corsairs. Unlike simple pirates, corsairs were in possession of specific “licences” or other forms of safe-conduct issued by a public authority, legitimising them to carry out coastal raids and intercept the merchant ships of the enemy of the moment, whenever there was a state of open conflict or less obvious forms of religious or commercial dispute.2 Between the sixteenth century and first decades of the nineteenth century, fierce corsairs from Europe or affiliated to the Ottoman Empire (in the first place the “Barbary corsairs” from North Africa) plied the length and breadth of the Mediterranean, dedicated principally to the capture of ships, cargoes, and people. And their profit came precisely from the sale of the ships, cargoes, men, women and children plundered during the attacks. Privateering by what were defined as genuine “entrepreneurs of violence” generated a flourishing trade, necessitating a constant supply of new captures. This complex scenario was governed by a precise structure based on formal agreements and procedures varying from country to country, specifying how the takings should be divided out, what percentage of the earnings from the seizures had to be shared with the State, shipowners and captains, and, of course, how the trade itself was to be carried out, with specific explicitly organised markets. The people seized were sold, bought and used in various

200  Andrea Pelizza menial tasks. In the case of adult men, the most arduous of all was that of rower in one of the famous oared galleys that still represented a far from negligible component of all Mediterranean fleets at the time. To give an idea of the proportions reached by the phenomenon, according to recent calculations, between 1500 and 1799 at least seven million people were involved (Bono, Schiavi 71–75).3 With merchants, financiers, shipowners, captains and all kinds of public authority involved in what has been defined as a genuine “économie de la rançon” (“ransom economy”), the context briefly described above also included activities aimed at obtaining the liberation and repatriation of the captives.4 This type of “slavery” was in fact distinguished by being potentially reversible. In other words, at least in theory, the liberation (“redemption” was the preferred term in Christian countries) of the “slave” could be obtained through payment of a ransom.5 The forms and protagonists of the alms collections and liberation negotiations were also defined according to precise codes. The procedures adopted by both Europeans and subjects of the Ottoman world to periodically free their compatriots held captive in enemy territory can be divided roughly into three categories: payment of money as a ransom; the mutual exchange of a certain number of captives; and the signing of an agreement between states including clauses pertaining to the release of captives.6 On the European side, a fundamental role was played by an extensive network of religious orders, confraternities, public institutions and private mediators, as described in the following pages.

Different strategies Considerable importance was attached to the strategies considered most valid to provide the money indispensable to assist the unfortunate victims unable to cover the redemption costs out of their own pocket, due to the limited economic possibilities of themselves and their families. Throughout the European continent, very different attempts were made to provide a response to this fundamental need, with results of crucial importance for the social development of modern Europe.7 For example, it was precisely the need to procure ransoms that led a number of governments to introduce embryonic forms of personal protection for their subjects, while the evident needs of those working in certain sectors most exposed to risk at sea led to ever more organised, specific co-operative and welfare institutions. As highlighted in a number of recent studies, after a somewhat difficult start, in northern Europe, support for compatriots in captivity gradually took on the ever more authentic characteristics of decisive public intervention to protect its nationals. The initial intention of simply supporting men and women in difficulty in fact developed into an extensive systematic network with the precise objective of guaranteeing the safety of subjects, even when outside the State’s borders. The resulting logic and strategies were those typical of the modern State, aimed at safeguarding all those who were

Confraternity models 201 gradually acquiring the status of full citizenship. In still Catholic southern Europe, on the other hand, the “redemption of captives” continued to be performed through forms of charitable intervention inherited from the Middle Ages. Ransoming therefore remained a devotional exercise of private charities, or in the case of public intervention, a form of paternalistic support conceded to the neediest classes of the population (Ressel, “Conflicts,” “North”; Östlund; Müller).

An example in the Catholic area: ransoming in the southern Low Countries The example of the Flemish area helps clarify this situation. The southern Low Countries (consisting of the ten provinces with a Catholic majority still in Habsburg hands even after secession of the seven northern provinces that had gained de facto independence from Spain after the bloody uprisings at the end of the sixteenth century) had a complex political organisation reflecting the particularistic organisation of the area during the Burgundian period. In particular, the city of Bruges (Brugge) acted as the capital of the rural district known as “Brugse Vrye” (or “Franc de Bruges”) and consisted of a “castellany,” namely an administrative ward in the larger county of Flanders. Bruges was represented in the territory’s States-Provincial assembly, where its envoys (chosen from among local worthies) sat as part of the so-called “Four Members of Flanders” (“Vier Leden van Vlaanderen”: Bruges itself, with Gent/Gand, Yper/Ypres and “Brugse Vrye”). In turn, the States-Provincial of Flanders sent its delegates to Brussels with the clergy and local nobility when the States General of the Habsburg Low Countries was convened. Alongside these assemblies, manifestation of the different rights and “privileges” conceded to the cities and provinces since ancient times, the royal authority was expressed in the figure of the Governor General, in turn assisted by the Council of State, Privy Council, and Council of Finances. To govern the provinces, the monarch (first in Madrid, then in Vienna) relied on various dedicated councils and offices based in the two capitals.8 The region was therefore greatly fragmented and without autonomous sovereignty, as it was under Spain until 1713, then (following the Treaty of Utrecht which brought the long War of the Spanish Succession to an end) Austria until the dawn of the nineteenth century.9 Given this context, more than an organised form of central and systematic management of the “redemption of slaves,” in southern Flanders a general awareness throughout the territory of a problem perceived as critical does appear to have existed, a sentiment expressed through an extensive network of confraternities. Communities of the faithful dedicated to Our Lady of Mercy, or the Holy Trinity, sprang up almost everywhere, dedicated to ransoming10 and to providing mutual support and spiritual and material succour to seafarers, represented in large numbers among the inhabitants.11 Even after the insurrection of the northern provinces, ships from the southern Low Countries continued, in fact, to be present in the Mediterranean where they were

202  Andrea Pelizza involved in trading lead, English woollen fabric and sheepskin, particularly with Italian cities, especially with Venice.12 The connection between the confraternities and their spiritual inspiration13 was the Order of the Trinitarians, members of a religious family founded in the twelfth century with the main purpose of the “redemption of slaves.” The Trinitarian fathers periodically paid the ransoms using money from the alms collected by members of the brotherhood. Moreover, in the Modern Age, the Orders of the Trinitarians and Mercedarians were typically a first choice for ransoming subjects in the Catholic monarchies of Spain, France and Portugal, and the heads of the two orders had always maintained close ties with these countries, in particular with the Habsburgs of Spain (Martínez Torres 73–74).14 Neither was a centralised ransoming organisation set up in the independent United Provinces, bordering with Spanish Flanders. The policy towards North African corsairs, responsible for causing heavy damage to Dutch trade in the Mediterranean, wavered continuously between an attempt to resolve the situation through military intervention with repeated naval expeditions and the quest for a peaceful settlement with the Barbary corsairs by signing treaties. Dutch captives were most often ransomed through the intervention of the Dutch consul, present in Algiers since 1616, while back in the home country, the money required for the redemption was collected by the individual provinces and private individuals in extemporary local initiatives.15

The confraternity “der alderheylighste Dryvuldigheyt” of Bruges Although there was no formal centralisation, coordination did, however, exist among the brotherhoods dedicated to ransoming in the Spanish Low Countries. This was entrusted to the Trinitarian confraternity founded in Bruges, the Aartsbroederschap der alderheylighste Dryvuldigheyt (“Archconfraternity of the Most Holy Trinity”), usually led by the priest from the parish church of Sint-Gillis. The priest performed the far from simple role of “general collector” for all the sister institutions and entrusted the proceeds from the donations collected to the Trinitarian fathers who regularly travelled to North Africa to pay the ransoms. The Bruges brotherhood dedicated to the Most Holy Trinity was based in the church of Sint-Gillis/Saint-Gilles, as this was where the confraternity was founded in 1642, largely thanks to Joannes Jennyn, parish priest since 1636. The priest had probably first come into contact with the redemption activities typical of the Trinitarian Order as a young man while studying at the University of Dowaai/Douai, the then cultural heart of the Flemish territories, still in Spanish hands (Van Acker, “De confrerieen” 360).16 Since 1252, this important city had been home to a convent of friars devoted to the redemption of Christians captured “in the land of the infidel” and acted as a centre of radiation and propaganda for Trinitarian devoutness in the area.17

Confraternity models 203 In eastern Flanders, devotion to Our Lady of Mercy (Onze Lieve Vrouwe van Remedie) and the associated charitable work in favour of captives had been flourishing since the mid-sixteenth century. It is, however, probable that the immediate and decisive stimulus for founding the Sint-Gillis confraternity was the capture at sea of a number of illustrious fellow-townsmen by Algerian corsairs, probably inspired by a Flemish “renegade” in 1640.18 On that occasion, the captives deported to North Africa included Emmanuel de Aranda from a noble Bruges family of Spanish origin, who later became the well-known author of one of the most widely read accounts of captivity of the time with a vast circulation.19 Aranda remained in Algiers for about a year and managed to disguise his real identity behind a pseudonym until he and his companions could be exchanged for a number of Ottoman subjects held prisoner at Dunkirk (at the time still in Spanish hands). He was thus able to return home in August 1642, about two months after the priest Jennyn had founded the brotherhood (Saint-Genois 357–59). The liberation of Aranda had not been achieved by paying a ransom but following an exchange, but it is probable that in Bruges the attention and clamour associated with the captivity of a local worthy had reached very high levels during those two years. The priest of Sint-Gillis would therefore have doubtless found fertile ground for his activities to increase awareness of the problem (Van Acker, “De confrerieen” 360). To give his confraternity a formal structure, Jennyn followed a welldefined path, drawing on the universal model and parameters already existing within the Catholic world for such an institution, closely associated with the Trinitarian Order and its spirituality.20 To be canonically instituted, the new brotherhood of lay devotees therefore had to first obtain approval from the diocesan ordinary, then of Paschasius Clocquet, vicar general of the Trinitarians in the Spanish Low Countries. Aspiring members first had to be duly registered. They were then required to observe a number of specific devotions, reciting the prescribed daily prayers, attending church during the Trinitarian religious celebrations and wearing the scapular with the red– blue cross, sign of their spiritual affiliation to the Trinitarian family. Above all, they were obliged to make a regular contribution for the redemption of their fellow citizens fallen into Muslim hands.21 It was also established that the confraternity would always be led by the pro tempore parish priest of Sint-Gilles or another priest, supported by a council of 12 members. In the parish church, an altar dedicated to the Trinity was reserved for the communal devotions of the brothers of the confraternity.22 The response on the ground came immediately, with the participation of eminent personages (including a number of bishops, some of the canons of Bruges and many abbots and exponents of religious orders, including numerous Augustinian and Jesuit fathers) (Jennyn 54). As shown by the confraternity’s registers, over the next few years, the Sint-Gillis Broederschap continued to attract a large number of members, although the local context certainly did not stand out as a particularly flourishing economy as

204  Andrea Pelizza in the past. The members largely came from the families of small shipowners, captains and traders involved in short-range coastal traffic, or, more rarely, expeditions in the Mediterranean, together with a number of fishermen operating in the English Channel or North Sea. After being duly instituted, the pious foundation immediately set about fulfilling its primary objective. Its first success was the liberation of Diederick Janssens, a citizen of Bruges redeemed thanks to the money collected in 1644 after 11 years rowing in the galleys of Algiers (Declercq 143).23 This was followed over the next century and a half by numerous other redemptions. The last “slave” able to return thanks to the intervention of the confraternity was Francis de Mulder who, in 1781, was brought home to Dunkirk by the vessel L’Active where the father and many dignitaries rushed to welcome him.24 As will be described below, the young man’s repatriation was celebrated with particular emphasis and it is to him that the interesting cycle of paintings still present in the church of Sint-Gillis is dedicated (Van Acker, “De confrerieen” 364–65; Rembry 144–76). In Bruges, performances and dramatized reconstructions are still dedicated regularly to this event.25 Ransoming continued to be thus organised even after the territories of southern Flanders passed from Spain to Austria. Along with other similar institutions, the crisis arrived with the reformist climate at the end of the eighteenth century that also affected the welfare sector. A first inspection of the initiative of Empress Maria Theresa in 1771 identified accounting irregularities in management of the confraternities’ funds. A few years later, between 1783 and 1786, partly in consideration of the fact that there were ever fewer captives needing succour in “Turkish” territories and in implementation of his rigid religious policy, Emperor Joseph II first suppressed the Trinitarian monasteries, then also those of the associated confraternities (Van Acker, “De confrerieen” 362–63).26

Redemption confraternity in Venice Analysis of the Bruges case shed light on the activities and characteristics of a “typical” Catholic confraternity “for the redemption of slaves,” similar to numerous others across central-southern Europe. Partially different attitudes (dissimilar in substance, rather than form), also occurred in a number of countries of the Roman faith. One such example is the Republic of Venice, a power which, during the Modern Age, still had thriving (although declining) seafaring interests. In Venice, while very far from presuming to bring the subjects together to manage public affairs (reserved strictly for the patrician class), there were, however, numerous forms of patronage and protection that in some ways went beyond mere welfare. To forcefully assert the State’s prestige in safeguarding commercial shipping and merchants in particular, the Serenissima government always provided active and systematic protection for captives. In 1586, motivated by the intention to guarantee a constant public presence in this delicate sector, the Senate, in fact, reformed the existing legislation

Confraternity models 205 and made the magistracy of the Provveditori sopra ospedali e luoghi pii (“Superintendents of hospitals and charitable institutions”) responsible for supervising the “redemption of slaves.”27 In particular, the three constituent noblemen had to supervise the collection of alms destined to provide support for subjects of the Venetian Republic, or foreigners captured while working at the service of the State, and guarantee correct management and distribution of the funds to the interested parties. The money came from donations from State offices or private benefactors who were solicited in special collections, first limited to Venice, then extended to the whole territory of the Republic. The Provveditori (to whom the requests for help from fellow countrymen in captivity were referred) did not, however, supervise either the redemption expeditions, nor the often-laborious negotiations they involved (delegated to others, often professional mediators, diplomats or representatives of the Serenissima). Again, in Venice, from 1604, the public initiatives were supported by a lay confraternity (Scuola) named after the Most Holy Trinity (Santissima Trinità). Founded on the initiative of Don Cesare Rinaldino, parish priest at the church of Santa Maria Formosa, and a group of devotees, it immediately set about collecting funds with which to at least partly reimburse the cost of the ransoms. Subsequently, particularly in the eighteenth century, the Scuola planned and directly implemented collective or individual “redemptions” in North Africa and other “Turkish” places. An important factor, constant up until extinction of the confraternity, was, however, its relative lack of independence from the government. The brotherhood was, in fact, directly answerable to, controlled and protected by the Provveditori who received the sums raised through the donations. As organised in Venice, the “redemption of slaves,” at least as regards collection of the necessary capital, could therefore be defined as having a centralised logic. During the seventeenth century, on the express solicitation of the Venetian authorities, other confraternities were progressively created throughout the territories of the Republic. These were associated with the central institution that, by law, exerted a certain predominance over them. There was also a network of “sub-alms-collectors” operating in less important places who regularly dispatched to Venice the revenue raised from the collection of charitable donations “for destitute slaves.”

A comparison of models: similarities  . . . The result of this necessarily brief comparison of the two types of confraternities for the redemption of captives appears rich in interest. As described above, the two forms emerged almost at the same time in two areas of Catholic Europe, distant both geographically and by political organisation, but profoundly bound to the world of seafaring and frequently subjected to the hostile activities of North African corsairs. First, it is evident that both the Bruges and Venice confraternities display many characteristics deriving from a prototype shared by the Trinitarian

206  Andrea Pelizza “redemption” confraternities so common in Catholic Europe from the late sixteenth century onwards.28 With the parameters inherited from its original medieval context brought up-to-date, the post-Tridentine welfare– devotional model, in fact, adapted them with remarkable flexibility to the various social and environmental contexts, obviously with the addition of the distinctive traits specific to the Trinitarian Order. In both Venice and Bruges, a certain number of similar elements reoccurred a few lustres apart (in 1604 in Venice, in 1642 in Bruges): in both cases, the initiative to found a Trinitarian confraternity in the city was taken by a diocesan priest (Joannes Jennyn, parish priest of Sint-Gillis on one hand; Cesare Rinaldino, parish priest of Santa Maria Formosa on the other), driven by the fact that many impoverished citizens were held captive in Ottoman or Barbary hands and the money collected by the faithful could help bring them home. It is clear from the “directives” that (as explained above) circulated widely throughout the Catholic world, that care was taken to obtain canonical legitimisation from the ecclesiastical authorities (diocesan ordinary and competent Trinitarian superior) for the new institutions. They therefore adopted and published “chapters,” the indispensable rules regulating the life of the brotherhood and obligations of the members (the obligation to donate alms “for redemption of the slaves” was fundamental).29 To emphasise the importance and quality of the institution in the eyes of members, these “chapters” were published in slim manuals accompanied by the devout precepts characteristic of all Trinitarian confraternities and, most importantly, the text of the indulgences and spiritual merits conceded to the members by many popes.30 At the same time, the registers listing the confraternity members, resolutions approved by the organs of the confraternity and, most significantly, lists of liberated “slaves” with relative sums paid by the confraternity for the ransom of each, were organised in an archive and kept meticulously up to date.31 Thus organised, the Broederschap of Bruges and the Scuola of Venice (another similarity) became ever more important in their particular area of competence. Truth to tell, while over time the predominant role of the former was acknowledged de facto in the Spanish, then Austrian, Low Countries, a region where there were also many other similar institutions (Van Acker, “De confrerieen” 364), some founded much earlier, the latter was recognised by law as occupying a position of exclusivity throughout the territories of the Republic of Venice.32 When the freed slaves returned to their homeland, both the Scuola della Santissima Trinità and the Broederschap der Alderheylighste Dryvuldigheyt staged solemn welcome ceremonies. By way of example, processions of “slaves” freed by the cities’ Trinitarian confraternities took place in Bruges in 1730, 1733, 1735 and 1737; and in Venice in 1740, 1747, 1749, 1752, 1753, 1754, 1756, 1760, 1761, 1762 and 1763 (Van Acker, “De laatste”; Pelizza, “Una confraternita”). In terms of the “spectacle,” they were very similar (with the exception of the “water factor,” particularly relevant in Venice), as in both cases the matrix was the model proposed by the Trinitarian fathers throughout Europe. Whether the “redemption” expeditions

Confraternity models 207 were supervised directly by them or carried out with the active participation of a confraternity, they organised the events to conclude with an imposing procession of redeemed slaves who were often made to parade through the city streets in chains as if they were still “slaves” accompanied by local worthies, those responsible for the repatriation, and young children dressed as angels.33

. . .   and differences. Iconographic repercussions Having so far highlighted the numerous affinities existing between the two institutions on a formal level, the moment has now come to examine the much more characteristic dissimilarities in substance. First, while in the Flemish case the Broederschap derived from, and was dependent on, an almost exclusively religious institutional context (Trinitarian fathers and parish), in the Venetian case, the State’s jurisdiction over the Scuola della Trinità, through the magistracy of the Provveditori sopra ospedali, was immediately and explicitly expressed. Strict public control was extended over almost every aspect of the institution’s activities, above all over collection of the alms destined for the “redemption of slaves” and preparation of the expeditions to recover them. Moreover, those at the summit of the Republic often attended to the ransoming of subjects without the intervention of the Scuola, delegating the ambassadors and public representatives in contact with the Ottoman authorities or other mediators. After the first quarter of the eighteenth century, the Trinitarian fathers were also invited to establish a convent in Venice, for the precise purpose of carrying out ransoming on a mandate from the government. Such a different approach is also emphasised and confirmed in the paintings that still today decorate the seats of the two confraternities in Bruges

Figure 10.1 Baldassarre d’Anna, Approval of the Venetian Brotherhood of the Most Holy Trinity for the Ransom of the Slaves, oil on canvas, c. 1619 Source: Church of Santa Maria Formosa, Venice. By kind permission of the Patriarchate of Venice.

208  Andrea Pelizza and Venice. The section of the church of Santa Maria Formosa reserved for the confraternity “for the redemption of slaves” is dominated by a large canvas, commissioned in about 1619 to the Venetian painter of Flemish origin, Baldassarre d’Anna.34 It has a complex composition (see Figure 10.1). On the left of the painting, the reigning Pope seated on a throne surrounded by an entourage of cardinals approves the redemption confraternity’s statute, presented by two kneeling members of the brotherhood.35 But of particular interest here is the central and right-hand parts of the picture that, almost three-dimensionally, portray the operating mechanism of the Venetian redemption institution. The composition is perfectly triangular. One of the three Provveditori in his official robes looks out from an arcade of the Procuratie Nuove in Piazza San Marco (seat of the Provveditori sopra ospedali and luoghi pii e riscatto degli schiavi). He is depicted in the act of taking the sum required to free the captives from a heap of coins that other collaborators (perhaps members of the Scuola) are piling up at his side. The nobleman hands the money to a man dressed in Oriental garb with turban and long coat and in turn surrounded by a group of people. This is probably a mediator delegated to supervise the redemption negotiations. In the background, an armed ship is ready to set sail. The naked and suffering Venetian “slaves” are depicted at the foot of a long flight of steps and therefore at the bottom of the complex structure (the base, literally of the painting, but also figuratively, of the entire “redemption” mechanism), significantly located at the point nearest the observer’s eye. They are portrayed in the act of looking beseechingly towards, on one hand, the Pope and, on the other, the sky where the group of the Most Holy Trinity in Glory dominates the entire composition. Having evidently received the agreed recompense, a guard is already setting about breaking the chains and fetters with a robust sledge-hammer. Such a descriptive treatment would seem to illustrate significantly and explicitly the Venetian approach to the “redemption of slaves.” The imposing painting was not, in fact, a public commission to decorate the offices of the competent magistracy. It was rather commissioned by the confraternity devoted to the charitable repatriation of the captives to decorate the place where the members met. Given this, it is immediately clear that the role actually performed by the members is completely understated in the portrayal. They are indeed depicted at the feet of the Pope while with a sweeping gesture they present the suffering “slaves,” but at the same time, they are completely absent during the liberation process. In the painting, these operations are, in fact, presided over by the patrician who hands over the money, an emphatic embodiment of the determining presence of the State. Although in fact crucial, the artist merely hints in passing at the collection of the donations coming from the private charity and the delicate phase of the negotiations, during which it was the confraternity’s emissaries, and not the public representatives, who played an essential role. It is almost as though the exponents of the confraternity were under a self-imposed conditioning to such an extent that they do not dare attribute to the brotherhood a role of greater importance than the

Confraternity models 209 structures and bodies of the Republic, located in an unequivocally dominant position, even in an iconographic representation aimed at its own members. At Bruges, the approach is completely different. As described above, the Broederschap der alderheylighste Dryvuldigheyt was based in the parish church of Gilliskerk and, just as in Venice, the church still contains a number of paintings commissioned specifically for the confraternity. Originally the paintings all decorated a single chapel, forming a coherent and complete cycle around the high altar. At the end of the nineteenth century, the entire Gilliskerk was reconstructed in neo-Gothic style and the paintings were dispersed in different parts of the church. Thanks to the inventories and historical descriptions, the original arrangement can, however, be easily reconstructed.36 Dating from between 1777 and 1783, the canvases are the work of two painters from Bruges, Jan Garemijn and Paul de Cock (Devliegher 211–12),37 each in turn head of the local Free Fine Arts Academy (Vrije Academie voor Schone Kunsten). The first series of paintings portrayed the origins of the Trinitarian Order. A grand oil painting is dedicated to the vision of Jean de Matha, the founding saint,38 another represents papal approval of the Bruges confraternity, while a third portrays a generic redemption mission entrusted to the Trinitarian fathers. A second series of paintings is dedicated to a single “redemption” episode, the previously mentioned liberation of the young Francis de Mulder in 1781. This albeit brief presentation of the cycle of paintings already reveals an important difference with respect to the representation in Venice. In the Gilliskerk paintings, the interest is almost exclusively concentrated on subjects involving the Trinitarian Order and its founding saint. As in the Venetian painting, the canvas attributes no particular role to the local confraternity, but at Sint-Gillis, there is not even the slightest hint of any form of State intervention in the liberations – a fundamental difference between the Bruges pictures and those in the church of Santa Maria Formosa. Any reference to a public presence, absolutely central in the Venetian depiction, has totally disappeared. The character of the paintings by Garemijn and de Cock also appears highly stereotyped and more conventional, almost affected in their oleographic eighteenth-century style, with respect to the more incisive figuration of Baldassarre d’Anna, older by a century and a half and strongly influenced by Tintoretto.39 In illustrating the meeting between the Trinitarian friar come to bring the “redeemed” citizens of Bruges back home and their “Turkish” master, Garemijn portrays the figure of the friar with his meticulous eighteenth-century century hairstyle and powdered wig, while he walks in an attitude not apparently overly interested in those at the receiving end of his mission imploring salvation at his feet. The North African worthy, on the other hand, is depicted in a more conventional pose, with the corpulent dissolute traits habitually attributed to Oriental “satraps” in the iconography of the time. For their part, the captives, facing the two arbiters of their fate, appear as emaciated, pitiful figures devoid of all muscular tension, invoking succour in an act of supplication (see Figure 10.2).

Figure 10.2 Jan Garemijn, A Trinitarian in Act of Ransoming a Christian Captive, oil on canvas, c. 1770 Source: Parochiekerk Sint-Gillis, Brugge. © KIK-IRPA, Brussels.

Confraternity models 211 In Baldassarre d’Anna, on the other hand, all characters are treated with absolute dignity, without any apparently less than respectful intent. The presumed “moral slackness” of the “Turkish” masters is not emphasised, neither are there any noticeably cruel attitudes towards the Christian prisoners who are depicted naked in the twisting “serpentine” pose typical of Michelangelo and Mannerism.40

Conclusions A number of final considerations emerge from the brief notes set out here and the albeit limited comparative study. In Europe between the second half of the sixteenth century and end of the eighteenth century, there was a proliferation of initiatives in favour of compatriots captured by the “infidels” and held captive waiting for a ransom to be paid. Succour assumed different forms in the Catholic and Protestant worlds, but there was a rich range of nuances even in that part of Europe remaining true to the Roman faith. This argument is supported by analysis of two confraternities, both named after the Most Holy Trinity and founded with the identical purpose of the “redemption of slaves” at more or less the same time in two places affected by the phenomenon, Venice and Bruges. They have numerous elements in common, but even more differences. In Venice, there was no full awareness of ransoming as an exercise of public protection towards subjects living and working outside the “national” frontiers, neither were there fully organised para-welfare functions for seafarers, as was the case in other contexts, particularly in Northern Europe. The Republic’s definite commitment to guaranteeing aid and advocacy to subjects in difficulty was, indeed, evident with a certain continuity. Unlike other State entities in and outside Italy, the Serenissima always considered the redemption of its captives to be a particular public duty, overseeing it through a special magistracy and giving instructions on the matter to its representatives throughout the Mediterranean. Such an attitude responded primarily to the government’s necessity for prestige in the eyes of its territories and for social cohesion and trade protection, rather than stemming from a conscious acknowledged need to safeguard the personal safety of individuals. Albeit within these limits, this position went well beyond the limits of mere devotional charity or the simple institution of devout associations and compliance with the directives promulgated by the charitable sensitivity of the Church or religious orders. This latter attitude, on the other hand, appears evident in the case of Bruges and the associated confraternities, whose example thus helps to illustrate a choice shared and practised by many other institutions in Catholic Europe.

212  Andrea Pelizza

Notes 1 The example of the confraternity of Bruges was chosen by the author of this text as an objective of study and term of reference on his return from a trip to Belgium in 2012, following a visit to the Gilliskerk and “discovery” in the church of the cycle of paintings described. 2 See Bono, Schiavi 447: “Nel mondo mediterraneo ogni abitante di zone costiere, ogni navigante anche giunto da lontano, ogni combattente sui fronti di mare o di terra – di qualunque etnia, fede religiosa, condizione sociale, età e sesso – era suscettibile di cadere in schiavitù” (“In the Mediterranean world, everyone living along the coast, every seafarer whether from near or far, every combatant at sea or on land, irrespective of nationality, religion, social class, age or gender, risked slavery”). For other references on corsairs and the phenomenon of “Mediterranean slavery,” see Fiume 267–318. Lastly, Salvatore Bono’s Schiavi includes an extensive, up-to-date review of the now huge international literature on the subject. 3 Other calculations in Davis, Christian Slaves 23. 4 In recent years, numerous contributions have described the various forms of this significantly termed “économie de la rançon.” See in particular Kaiser’s “L’économie,” from which the definition “entrepreneurs of violence” comes (359); Le commerce. 5 ”Con ‘schiavitù mediterranea’ non intendiamo [. . .] una forma specifica di schiavitù, e tantomeno un “sistema” schiavista definito, ma un insieme di presenze schiavili segnato da almeno due caratteristiche – la “reciprocità” e la tendenziale “reversibilità” – grazie alle quali, e specialmente alla prima, la schiavitù mediterranea appare fondamentalmente diversa da quasi ogni altra” (“The term ‘Mediterranean slavery’ does not refer to either [. . .] a specific form of slavery, or a definite slavery ‘system,’ but to the presence of a certain number of slaves distinguished by at least two characteristics – ‘reciprocity’ and tendential ‘reversibility’ – characteristics which (particularly the former) make Mediterranean slavery appear fundamentally different from all other forms”) (Bono, Schiavi 17–18). 6 For more information, see Fiume (Quaderni storici), with the emblematic title Riscatto, scambio, fuga (“Redemption, exchange, flight”). 7 A review of publications covering the institutions involved in the redemption of captives locally in Italy and in Europe can be found in Bosco 1–6. 8 For basic information on the structures described, see Dhondt. For the institutions responsible for governing the Habsburg Low Countries during the Spanish and Austrian periods, see Aerts. 9 For a general résumé of the history of the southern Low Countries, see Bitsch. For the territorial organisation of Flanders, and Bruges in particular, during the Modern Age, see Gilliodts-Van Severen. 10 First at Diskmuide in 1558; then at Dadizele, Heule, Ieper, Komen, Kortrijk, Lapscheure, Lendelede, Lo, Luingne, Menen, Mesen, Nieuwkerke, Nieuwpoort, Noordschote, Oostende, Poperinge, Ruiselede, Sint-Rijkers, Staden, Tielt Veurne, Waardamme, Waasten, Wakken, Wervik (Van Acker, “De confrerieen” 364–76). 11 On this particular aspect and for other bibliographic references on seafaring in Flanders, see Davids 150. 12 For a specific and detailed analysis of this theme, see Brulez, “La navigation.” For specific relations with Venice, see Brulez and Devos (Marchands I, Marchands II). In the eighteenth century, the navigation in the Austrian Low Countries experienced a revival, even in the direction of India. In 1722 the Ostend Company was founded and in 1775 the Austrian East India Company. The ships were often attacked by North African corsairs and the crews captured (a sensational

Confraternity models 213 episode was the capture of the Keyserinne Elisabeth in 1724). See Huisman 305; Prims. 13 An action of “redemption” operated in Algiers by the Trinitarian Fathers in 1619–20 in favour of Flemish subjects of the king of Spain is described by JeanBaptiste Gramaye (1579–1635), a clergyman native of Antwerp. The alms to rescue about 130 captives were collected in a general collection, organised by order of the king, Archduke Albert of Habsburg, who then ruled in the Spanish Low Countries (Gramaye 95–109). On the Trinitarian religious order, see Deslandres; Grimaldi-Hierholtz; Porres; Cipollone 1330–71. 14 On the Order of Mercedarians, see Rubino 1219–27. On the origins of ransoming captives in medieval Spain, see Calderón Ortega and Díaz González. 15 For relations between the Netherlands and the Barbary countries, see Groot; Krieken, particularly 129–44; Ressel, “North” 136–38. 16 On the priest Joannes Jennyn, see also Foppens 668: “Brugensis, S. Theol. & J.U. doctor, poenitentiarius ac protonotarius apostolicus, ecclesiae parochialis S. Aegidii in civitate Brugensi pastor, ac demum in cathedr. Iprensi canonicus.” Dowaai/Douai was conquered and annexed by the France of Louis XIV in 1668. 17 For documentation on the convent, see Archives Dèpartementales. 18 On the presence of numerous Flemish “renegades” among the Maghreb corsairs, see Boyer; Vermeulen, in particular 324–35; Van Gelder 41–55. 19 See Kattenberg on d’Aranda. 20 A widely read example of these “manuals” is given by Conceptione. 21 The register containing a list of the confraternity members (“Ledenlijst, 1642– 1743”) is today kept in the Rijksarchief te Brugge (Bruges State Archive), Kerkfabriek Sint-Gillis (Brugge), 8. Confrerieen en Ambachten, C. Confrerie van de H. Drievuldigheid, reg. n. 316 (cfr. Inventaris van het archief van de kerkfabriek St. Gilliskerk te Brugge, ed. J. Mertens). See also Van Acker, “De confrerieen” 356, 364. 22 “Electi ex clero praepositus unus cum duodecim viris primariis, qui tempore suo confraternitatis bonum curent et augeant” (Jennyn 56). 23 The complete list of slaves freed by the Trinitarian confraternity of Bruges is contained in the “Resolutieboek 1647–1833,” the register of resolutions, today deposited in the Rijksarchief te Brugge, Kerkfabriek Sint-Gillis (Brugge), 8. Confrerieen en Ambachten, C. Confrerie van de H. Drievuldigheid, reg. n. 317. 24 De Mulder’s appeal to the father for his liberation is published (in French) in Carton 47–49. 25 See Frans De Mulder, a historical account in theatrical form staged in 2013: https://deandereverbeeld.wordpress.com/2013/02/13/erfgoeddag-brugge/. 26 For information on the activities of the Trinitarian Order and associated institutions under Habsburg–Austrian territories, as well as the relative policy of Maria Theresa and Joseph II, see Pauli. 27 They were rather called on to coordinate the collection of alms “per la recuperatione de’ poveri schiavi sudditi nostri, et anco non sudditi, ma presi in servitio del Stato nostro” (“to recover destitute slaves, our subjects, or not our subjects but serving our state”) according to the provisions of 1586/1587 (Pelizza, Riammessi 63). On the organisation of ransoming in Venice, see Davis, “Slave Redemption” 454–87; Pelizza, Riammessi, in particular 63–75 (the above quotation can be found on p. 63). 28 For further information, see Lenci. 29 On the broederschap of Bruges, see Broederschap; Jennyn. 30 For the Scuola della Santissima Trinità confraternity of Venice, see, among numerous similar publications, Concezione’s Manuale; Arciconfraternita, Manuale novissimo (1708) and subsequent updates and reprints; Arciconfraternita, Manuale ristretto (1740) and subsequent updates and reprints.

214  Andrea Pelizza 31 The registers of the Bruges confraternity, as mentioned in notes 21 and 23, are today kept in the Rijksarchief te Brugge. Those of the Venetian confraternity, on the other hand, are divided between the Venice State Archive (Provveditori sopra ospedali e luoghi pii e riscatto degli schiavi and Scuole piccole e suffragi collections), and the Archivio storico del patriarcato di Venezia (Historical Archive of the Patriarchate of Venice or Scuola della santissima Trinita in Parrocchia di Santa Maria Formosa di Venezia collection). 32 “Unica e sola in questa Dominante e veneto Stato che s’adopra col soldo proprio e de’ divoti e con indeffesso maneggio in quest’opera cosi segnalata” (Arciconfraternita, Relazione 2). 33 For this type of ceremony and the significance of the reintroduction of the freed slaves into the cultural and religious sphere of origin as implicitly and explicitly expressed, see Ricci; Sarti. 34 On the painter Baldassarre d’Anna, see Romano 614–16. 35 See Il forestiere 279: “Baldassare d’Anna dipinse il quadro dirimpetto a questa Cappella, in cui è raffigurato il pontefice, che approva l’Istituto per la liberazione degli schiavi, al cui oggetto eravi in questa chiesa una confraternita” (“Baldassare d’Anna painted the canvas opposite this chapel, portraying the pope approving the institution for the redemption of slaves, for which purpose a confraternity was founded in this church”). “La tela è firmata dall’artista e datata 1619. Il dipinto, commissionato dalla Scuola della Santissima Trinità o del Riscatto degli Schiavi, è diviso in due episodi: a sinistra papa Pio V approva l’istituzione della Scuola; a destra è raffigurato l’incontro dell’ambasciatore veneto con il sultano” (“The canvas is signed by the artist and dated 1619. Commissioned by the Scuola della Santissima Trinità or of the ‘Redemption of Slaves,’ the painting is divided into two episodes: on the left, Pope Pious V approves founding of the Scuola; on the right, the artist depicts the meeting between the Venetian ambassador and the sultan”). See www.chorusvenezia.org/opere/approvazione-dellordine-della-santissima-trinita-o-del-riscattodegli-schiavi/440. 36 For example, Inventaire 9–15; Devliegher 210–14. For an exact indication of the titles of the individual works, see De inventaris van het bouwkundig erfgoed, Parochiekerk Sint-Gillis: “Mobilair. Schilderijen: Reeks van zes met taferelen van de Orde van de Trinitariers, enerzijds van J. Garemijn: ‘De aankomst van Jan De Mulder in Duinkerke,’ 1783, ‘De Heilige Johannes van Matha en Felix van Valois overhandigen de erkenningsbul aan de bisschop van Meaux,’ 1777, ‘De Heilige Johannes van Matha koopt slaven vrij,’ 1777 en ‘De verkoop van slaven in een Turkse haven,’ 1777; anderzijds van P. De Cock: ‘Paus Innocentius III overhandigt de erkenningsbul aan de Heilige Johannes van Matha,’ 1777 en ‘De legendarische verschijning van het hert aan de Heilige Johannes van Matha en Felix van Valois,’ XVIII d.” The inventory can be found online at: https:// inventaris.onroerenderfgoed.be/dibe/relict/82863. 37 On Jan Garemijn (1712–99), see Stappaerts 485–87. On Paul (Paulus) Jozef de Cock (1724–1801), see Dendooven 119. 38 In 1198, together with Felix de Valois, he had obtained the institution of the religious family of the Trinitarians from Pope Innocent III. According to tradition, he had a vision of an angel holding two slaves, one white and one black, by the hand, apparently in the act of exchanging them after shattering their fetters. 39 Venturi mentions the Santa Maria Formosa painting in Storia dell’arte Italiana 257, as does Harper in The Turk and Islam in the Western Eye 56–57. 40 The international literature covering the European image of the “Turk” and the Oriental in general during the Modern and Contemporary Ages in the visual arts, literature, and non-fiction writing is vast. After the fundamental study dating from 1978 by Edward W. Said, Orientalismo. L’immagine europea dell’Oriente (Milan: Feltrinelli, 2015), purely indicatively (including for the additional references) the list includes: Enzo Colombo, Rappresentazioni dell’altro: lo straniero

Confraternity models 215 nella riflessione sociale occidentale (Milan: Angelo Guerini, 1999); Marzia Pieri, “La geografia dell’altro fra Cinque e Settecento,” La maschera e l’altro (Florence: Alinea, 2005); Bernard Heyberger, L’Islam visto da Occidente. Cultura e religione del Seicento europeo di fronte all’Islam, Milan conference proceedings, 17–18 Oct. 2007 (Genoa: Marietti, 2009); Marina Formica, Lo specchio turco: immagini dell’altro e riflessi del se nella cultura italiana d’eta moderna (Rome: Donzelli, 2012); Enrico Manera, Orientalismo. L’immagine dell’Oriente come “l’altro” della cultura europea, “Novecento.org,” 4 (June 2015). For a recent in-depth study of the theme, with particular emphasis on the historiography, see Pedani 445–58.

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218  Andrea Pelizza Kattenberg, Lisa F. “The Free Slave. Morality, Neostoicism and Publishing Strategy in Emanuel d’Aranda’s Algiers and Its Slavery, 1640-1682.” Mediterranean Slavery and World Literature: Captivity Genres from Cervantes to Rousseau. Ed. Mario Klarer. London: Routledge, 2019. Forthcoming. Krieken, Gérard. Corsaires et marchands: Les relations entre Alger et les Pays-Bas 1604–1830. Saint-Denis: Bouchene, 2002. Lenci, Marco. “Le confraternite del riscatto nella Toscana di età moderna: Il caso di Fireneze.” Archivio storico italiano 167.620 (2009): 269–97. MacLean, Gerald. “Slavery and Sensibility: A Historical Dilemma.” Slavery and the Cultures of Abolition: Essays Marking the Bicentennial of the British Abolition Act of 1807. Ed. Brycchan Carey and Peter J. Kitson. Cambridge: Brewer, 2007. 173–94. Manera, Enrico. “Orientalismo. L’immagine dell’Oriente come ‘l’altro’ della cultura europea.” Novecento.org. 4 (June 2015). Martínez Torres, José Antonio. “Europa y el rescate de cautivos en el Mediterráneo durante la temprana edad moderna.” Espacio, tiempo y forma 4 (1990): 71–85. Müller, Leos. “Swedish Shipping in Southern Europe and Peace Treaties with North African States: An Economic Security Perspective.” Historical Social Research 35.4 (2010): 190–205. Östlund, Joachim. “Swedes in Barbary Captivity: The Political Culture of ‘Human Security’, Circa 1660–1760.” Historical Social Research 35 (2010): 148–63. Pauli, Elisabeth. “Befreiung aus tyrannischer Gefangenschaft. Der Trinitarierorden in der Habsburgermonarchie und die Rückführung christlicher Sklaven aus dem Osmanischen Reich und seinen Vasallenstaaten (1688–1783).” Archiv für Kulturgeschichte 90.2 (2008): 351–78. Pedani, Maria Pia. “Note di storiografia sull ‘impero ottomano.” Mediterranea. Ricerche storiche 12.34 (2015): 445–58. Pelizza, Andrea. “Una confraternita veneziana per il riscatto degli schiavi (1604– 1797). La Scuola della Santissima Trinita in Santa Maria Formosa.” Mediterranean Slavery Revisited (500–1800) – Neue Perspektiven auf mediterrane Sklaverei (500–1800). Ed. Stefan Hanns and Juliane Schiel. Zurich: Chronos Verlag, 2014. 275–307. Pelizza, Andrea. Riammessi a respirare l’aria tranquilla: Venezia e il riscatto degli schiavi in età moderna. Venice: Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti, 2013. Pieri, Marzia. “La geografia dell’altro fra Cinque e Settecento.” La maschera e l’altro. Ed. Maria Grazia Profeti. Florence: Alinea, 2005. Porres, Alonso B. Libertad a los cautivos: Actividad redentora de la Orden Trinitaria. 2 vols. Córdoba: Secretariado Trinitario, 1997. Prims, Floris. “De slaven van de ‘Keyserinne Elisabeth’ kapitein Gheselle, 1724– 1727.” Bijdragen tot de geschiedenis 18 (1927): 1–21, 77–107. Rembry, Ernest. François-Joseph De Mulder, le dernier esclave Brugeois: sa captivité, sa délivrance, son retour à Bruges. Bruges: L. de Plancke, 1905. Ressel, Magnus. “Conflicts between Early Modern European States about Rescuing Their Own Subjects from Barbary Captivity.” Scandinavian Journal of History 36.1 (2011): 1–22. Ressel, Magnus. “The North European Way of Ransoming: Explorations into an Unknown Dimension of the Early Modern Welfare State.” The Production of Human Security in Premodern and Contemporary History. Spec. issue of Historical Social Research. 35.4 (2010): 125–47.

Confraternity models 219 Ricci, Giovanni. “Restauri di identità contaminate: Gli schiavi liberati dai ‘Turchi’.” Identità collettive tra Medioevo ed età moderna. Atti del convegno internazionale di studio. Ed. P. Prodi and W. Reinhard. Bologna: CLUEB, 2002. 65–83. Rijksarchief te Brugge (Bruges State Archive). Kerkfabriek Sint-Gillis (Brugge), 8. Confrerieen en Ambachten, C. Confrerie van de H. Drievuldigheid, reg. n. 316, reg. n. 317. Romano, Serena. “d’Anna, Baldassarre.” Dizionario biografico degli italiani 32 (1986). 614–16. Rubino, Antonio. “Mercedari.” Dizionario degli istituti di perfezione V (1978). Said, Edward W. Orientalismo: L’immagine europea dell’Oriente. First published 1978. Trans. Stefano Galli. Milan: Feltrinelli, 2015. Saint-Genois, Jules De. “Aranda (Emmanuel De ou D’).” Biographie nationale de Belgique 1. Brussels: Bruylante-Christophe, 1866. 357–59. Sarti, Raffaella. “Bolognesi schiavi dei ‘Turchi’ e schiavi ‘turchi’ a Bologna tra Cinque e Settecento: Alterità etnico-religiosa e riduzione in schiavitù.” Quaderni storici 36.107 (2001): 437–74. Stappaerts, Felix. “Jean Garemyn.” Biographie nationale de Belgique 7. Brussels: Bruylante-Christophe, 1883. 485–87. Van Acker, Lucien. “De confrerieen van de Trinitariers in West-Vlaanderen.” Biekorf 75.7–10 (1974): 353–78. Van Acker, Lucien. “De laatste grote Vlaamse slavenprocessies.” Biekorf 84.2 (1984): 122–27. Van Gelder, Maartje. “ ‘Een verlochend Christen [is] een quaetsten Mahumetaen.’ Nederlandse renegaten in beeldvorming en praktijk.” Kapers & piraten. Schurken of helden? Ed. Joost Scokkenbroek and Jeroen ter Brugge. Rotterdam: Stichting Maritiem Museum Rotterdam, 2010. Venturi, Adolfo. Storia dell’arte italiana: T. 9, 7. Milan: U. Hoepli, 1934. Vermeulen, Joos. Sultans, slaven en renegaten: De verborgen geschiedenis van het Ottomaanse rijk. Leuven: Acco, 2001.

Part 4

Oppositions and Otherness

11 Khayr al-Din Barbarossa Clashing portraits of a corsair-king Diana de Armas Wilson

Of corsairs and caliphates The island of Lesbos, six miles off the coast of Turkey, appears to have suffered its earliest documented crisis in Homer’s Iliad, where Achilles reminds Priam about its loss in the Trojan War: “Think of yourself, old man./We hear that you were fortunate in former times/In all the lands from Lesbos to the south” (XXIV.543–5). Many centuries later, while under Byzantine rule, Lesbos would experience yet another epic crisis: less than a decade after Sultan Mehmet II conquered Constantinople in 1453, he also conquered Lesbos. Its ruler, Niccolò Gattilusio, surrendered the island only after the Sultan bombarded its fortress town of Mytilene with six giant cannons. According to a Turkish chronicle, Mehmet the Conqueror then commanded his soldiers to ask the Christians of Lesbos to give them their daughters as wives, and if the women refused, “se las tomasen por fuerza y se casasen con ellas [they should take them by force and marry them]” (Seyyid 33).1 Four years after that 1462 conquest, a Christian woman on the island gave birth to a boy named Ḵh̲i̊ ḍi̊ r, who would grow up to become a terror among Christians. He would be called Barbarossa among Europeans, a name inherited from his more red-bearded but less famous older brother, ‘Arudj. This younger Barbarossa would be granted, by Suleyman the Magnificent (1520–1566), the honorary Turkish name of Khayr al-Din (Arabic = Defender of the Faith). Spaniards would call him, in various divergent spellings, Cheredín or Hayredín or Jeredín Barbarroja. Dr. Antonio de Sosa—the celebrated chronicler of sixteenth-century Algiers2—sums up his long chapter on Khayr al-Din Barbarossa as follows: “Fue para los cristianos cruelísimo y para los turcos muy humano [For Christians, he was extremely cruel and, for Turks, very humane]” (“Epítome” 277).3 This essay aims to weigh the justice of Sosa’s binary statement, using both Spanish and Turkish points of view and looking into the differences within each. Christian and Muslim sources do tend to see things differently, beginning with the date of Barbarossa’s birth, although we may settle on the Encyclopedia of Islam’s claim of 1466.4 His mother, Catalina, was the widow of a Greek priest who may have remained a Christian even after her second

224  Diana de Armas Wilson marriage to a Muslim potter. A contemporaneous Turkish source claims that this second husband was a Turk, a sipahi or janissary5 named Yak’ub Aga, and that he participated in the conquest of Lesbos.6 Given this interfaith marriage, the issue of Barbarossa’s ancestry remains debatable: Christian sources paint him as a Greek, Turkish sources refer to him as a Turk, and at least one British source regards him as an Albanian.7 Europeans who claim Christian roots for him are dismissed, by the Turkish scholar Svat Soucek, as satisfying the “prejudiced expectations of the average Christian of the time” (247). All sources agree, however, that Barbarossa’s parents produced four sons, two of whom became celebrities, and two daughters, about whom nothing is known. How did Barbarossa rise from his obscure origins—from being “hijo de un pobre ollero [the son of a poor potter],” in Sosa’s phrase (“Epítome” 268)—to power, wealth, and fame as Grand Admiral (Kapudan Pasha) of the Turkish navy? At age seventeen, he went to sea and remained there for over 50 years, crisscrossing the Mediterranean as a corsair or privateer during the reigns of three different Ottoman sultans: Bayezid II (1481–1512), Selim I (1512–1520), and Suleyman (1520–1566).8 The young Barbarossa worked closely with his older brother ‘Arudj and, in time, with an inner circle of colorful corsairs such as Dragut, Cachidiablo, Uludj Ali, and Sinan the Jew.9 In 1516, the Barbarossa brothers seized control of Algiers by winning over the allegiance of local populations. According to Dr. Sosa, however, the elder brother ‘Arudj “deceitfully” took over Algiers by strangling in his bath the Berber Sheik Salim al-Tumi, a man who had hosted him with much honor and courtesy (I.11). Two years later, ‘Arudj would himself be killed by a Spanish pike in Tlemcen. At that point, the surviving Barbarossa brother, fearing the loss of his possessions to Spain, turned for help to Selim I (1512–1520).10 Having officially claimed the title of caliph both for himself and his heirs, this Turkish sultan had bolstered that claim by bringing back to Istanbul “a collection of the Prophet’s garments and beard hairs” (Danforth). The Turkish claim for caliphal authority, however, had actually begun long before Barbarossa’s lifetime. The fourteenth-century Murad I had called himself the “chosen khalifa of the Creator,” and the fifteenthcentury Mehmet I spoke of his own “caliphate.” In present-day usage, the term caliphate (from the Arabic: khalifa, or “successor”) suggests a pan-Islamic government ideally led by descendants of Muhammad, but non-descendants have also laid claims to the office. Caliphal legitimacy, however, has been a contested issue down the ages. When the Ottoman Empire fell into a decline in the eighteenth century, the claim to the caliphate was thought to give Turks prestige among Sunni Muslims. Sultan Abd al-Hamid in 1876 embraced the model of pan-Islamic unity: he formulated in his constitution that, in his capacity as caliph, the sultan could assert authority over Arab countries. And even prior to World War I, the Young Turks toyed with the idea of a caliphate in order to retain Turkish influence over Arab lands.

Barbarossa: portraits of a corsair-king 225 There have been endless conflicts and contradictions in the conception of the caliphate across the Muslim world, including countless pretenders, dethronements, and abdications—sometimes forced. We read of an Abbasid caliph who, refusing to bow to pressure to abdicate, “had his eyes put out.”11 Having declared his own rule a caliphate in 1517, Selim I was more than ready to accept Algiers as his sanjak or “province.” And so, when Barbarossa turned to him for help in 1519, Selim I declared him a client-king, or beylerbey, of the Ottomans. As a Muslim vassal of a Turkish caliph, Barbarossa would go on to make Algiers the most powerful city in the Mediterranean and the great stronghold of the Barbary corsairs. Barbarossa was not without his Christian admirers. The Italian satirist Pietro Aretino—described by Bruce Ware Allen as “poet, pornographer, and blackmailer”—wrote Barbarossa fan letters from Venice, assuring our corsair that his presence would be forever memorialized. And Khayr alDin responded with his own letter and gifts to Aretino (Allen 43; Aretino). Yet another Italian contemporary, the historian Paolo Giovio (1483–1552), praised Barbarossa for his profound knowledge of naval techniques as well as his “forza d’animo indomabile [indomitable force of spirit].”12 Giovio was so taken with Barbarossa that he displayed a tempura portrait of him in his villa outside Como, a portrait today in the Art Institute of Chicago. Giovio also collected Barbarossa’s Qu’ran, the vessels he used for eating, and even one of his velvet kaftans (una giubba di velluto) (Klinger and Raby 47–50). Unhappy at Giovio’s description of Spain’s conflicts with the Turks, Charles V tried to censor his work (Kagan 86–89). Barbarossa also had a French admirer in the Chevalier de Brantôme (1540–1614), who wanted the world to know that even among the Greeks and Romans, those great conquerors of kingdoms and territories, there was never an equal to Barbarossa. Thanks to his ability and skill, he overran and conquered two kingdoms, Algiers and Tunis, a second Carthage. What those valiant Romans took so many years to destroy, this Barbarossa conquered in no time. And to this end he confronted that great and feared Emperor Charles V.13 Those confrontations are worth noting. Barbarossa proved a continuing nightmare for Charles V, along with what was commonly known as “la peste luterana [the Lutheran plague].” After the corsair’s flight during Spain’s famous 1535 conquest of Tunis, the Spanish king sent an agent to offer Barbarossa the lordship of North Africa if he changed loyalty. Barbarossa rejected the offer. Exasperated throughout his reign by repeated crises with the corsairs, Charles V was not helped in the 1538 Battle of Preveza by his alliance with the Genoan Admiral Andrea Doria, who worked, in turn, for France, Spain, the Ducal States, the Pope, and, finally, the Genoans. Leading a combined Spanish–Venetian–Papal fleet at Preveza, Andrea Doria oddly retired from the battle scene, allowing Barbarossa’s Turks to secure the eastern Mediterranean for over 30 years. There were accounts of a nonaggression pact between Barbarossa and Andrea Doria. The historian Fernand Braudel paints Andrea Doria as “capable of all the treachery imputed to him” and even blames him for putting Christendom

226  Diana de Armas Wilson “on the losing side” (Braudel 905). After unsuccessfully repeating an offer to Barbarossa to switch allegiances in 1540, Charles V decided to attack Algiers, one of the great errors of his reign. When he arrived there in October of 1541, his imperial fleet was devastated by a violent storm. And by the time the Christians defeated the Ottomans at the Battle of Lepanto in 1571, both the king and Barbarossa would be dead.

Cervantes and Sosa Several years after that battle and almost 50 years after Algiers had become a religious protectorate of the Ottomans, two notable Iberians were imprisoned in its dungeons: Miguel de Cervantes and his friend and first biographer, Antonio de Sosa, were to spend over three years together (1577–1580) as captives in Algiers. Both of these figures stand conspicuously at the confluence of Muslim and Christian cultures. And both were aware of Barbarossa. Cervantes mentions his name twice in passing. In Act II of El gallardo español, a renegade called Bairán announces the coming of a Turkish armada of 13,000 warriors led by the son of Barbarossa and aided by two Berber principalities—“Alabez” and “el Cuco”—who have offered him “más moros . . . que en clara noche estrellas se parecen [more Moors than stars in the sky on a clear night]” (247). A second and perhaps mistaken reference to Barbarossa occurs in Don Quijote, Part I. In the interpolated Captive’s Tale of this text, the hero relates the Spanish capture of a galley called La Presa, whose Muslim captain he identifies as the cruel son of “aquel famoso cosario Barba Roja [that famous corsair Barbarossa],” a son bitten to pieces (“le dieron bocados”) by his liberated galley slaves (Cervantes 479n33). A different version of this story appears in Sosa, proof that there is no such thing as impartial witnessing. Sosa not only identifies the captain as the grandson of Barbarossa, but also pictures him as hacked, not bitten, to pieces by his galley slaves.14 Unlike his fellow-captive Sosa, Cervantes tends to reveal the vitality more than the cruelty of Muslim cultures. Serge Gruzinski notes that the “Renaissance writer who is most ‘alive’ to us today is Miguel de Cervantes, who spent five years in Algiers, at the heart of that African Babel, and who never stopped writing about the Muslim worlds as if . . . he was part of them” (Gruzinski 160). Unlike Cervantes, however, Sosa has left us portraits of all the “kings” or beylerbeys of Algiers in his Epítome de los reyes de Argel, the second volume of his Topografía. And his portrait of Barbarossa is both lengthy and gripping.

Sosa and the Gazavat A distinctly different portrait from Sosa’s, however, is available to scholars in the Turkish Gazavat-i Hayreddin Paşa. Belonging to the genre of “empresas de la guerra santa [holy war enterprises],” the Gazavat is in many ways

Barbarossa: portraits of a corsair-king 227 the antithesis of Sosa’s Spanish history. Essentially a panegyric dedicated to Barbarossa, it was written by Seyyid Murad under orders of Sultan Suleyman. Regarded as a most important contemporary source, the Gazavat was composed on the basis of directly-communicated eyewitness reports from Barbarossa and his companions. This Turkish text was amazingly found in the captured flagship of the Ottomans, the main galley taken by the Christian coalition during the Battle of Lepanto in 1571. The manuscript is conserved in the library of the Escorial (ms. 1663). Translated into Castilian for Philip II in 1578—the first translation into a European language (Seyyid 95)—the Gazavat details endless long battles of the Turks for dominions of North Africa, especially its coastal cities such as Orán, the Peñon of Algiers, Bidjāya, the Algerian city of Bougie, and Tripoli. These cities had been in the hands of “el Emperador de España [the Emperor of Spain]”—the Turkish text’s stock phrase for Charles V, portrayed as furious about “los grandes males que el diablo de Barbarroja le hacía en sus tierras [the great evils that the devil Barbarossa was performing in his lands]” (Seyyid 104). The Gazavat details virtually every pledge of allegiance given to Barbarossa by one Algerian city after another—e.g., Collo, Constantine, Bône (St. Augustine’s Hippo)—as well as similar pledges from some eight cities in the kingdom of Tunisia. Even in Spanish translation, this Turkish text finds colorful ways to brag about the power of its subject. According to the Gazavat, Barbarossa performed a bogeyman role for Spanish Catholic children, not unlike the fright that Napoleon would give English children centuries later: “cuando los niños lloraban, con ninguna cosa los acallaban sino con decirles que venía Barbarroja [when the children would cry, nothing would pacify them like the warning that Barbarossa was coming]” (Seyyid 95).15 The Gazavat never mentions, understandably, the horrific cruelties ascribed to Barbarossa by a series of Christian writers. Sosa, for one, describes in lurid detail how Barbarossa—“como bárbaro que era inhumano [as barbarous as he was inhumane]”—killed General Martín de Vargas. Captain of the garrison at El Peñon, a fortress fronting Algiers that had been held by the Spaniards since 1510, Martín de Vargas was one of the 54 surviving soldiers after the Turks spent a few weeks destroying the fortress in 1530. According to eyewitnesses in Dr. Sosa’s text, this Spaniard was clubbed to death at Khayr al-Din’s orders. The passage that follows gives readers a sense of Sosa’s occasionally lurid prose: Porque el cruel Barbarroja—como bárbaro que era inhumano— [. . .] mandó a grandes voces que, luego, allí matasen aquel perro a palos delante de él. Por lo cual, asiendo de Martín de Vargas algunos turcos que allí estaban, le tendieron en el suelo y—sentándose uno sobre la cabeza y otro sobre las piernas, como es de su costumbre—le dieron con un rebenque, estribo grosísimo de cáñamo, tantos, tan fieros golpes y azotes, hasta que ellos se cansaron; y sucediendo otros, le molieron

228  Diana de Armas Wilson todos los huesos, los hígados y las entrañas sin ninguna piedad; y de tal suerte que a fuerza de los crueles azotes y golpes le sacaron la alma y mataron allí, en el suelo tendido. [Because the cruel Barbarossa—as barbaric as he was inhuman— [. . .] loudly ordered that, in turn, they kill the dog in front of him by clubbing. To that end, some Turks in the vicinity grabbed Martín de Vargas. After stretching him out on the floor—one man seated over his head and another at his feet, as is their custom—they hit him with a stick, beating him grossly with a cane, delivering so many, and such furious, blows and beatings, until they exhausted themselves; and then, with other Turks stepping in as replacements, they ground down all his bones, liver and entrails without any pity; and in such a way that, by force of those cruel blows and beatings, they killed him and drew out his soul, even as he was stretched out there on the floor]. (Sosa, Diálogo 77) A later Spanish chronicler, Fray Prudencio de Sandoval, claims that Barbarossa dispensed an even more ghastly death for Martín de Vargas: “Descoyuntó el cuerpo a Martín de Vargas, valiente capitán, cortándole . . . cada miembro por su parte, y porque no se quiso tornar turco ni casarse con mora [He dismembered the body of Martín de Vargas, a valiant captain, cutting off one member at a time, because he refused to turn Turk or marry a Moorish woman]” (Sandoval 1242). The remainder of this chapter focuses on two even more conflicting reports in Barbarossa’s career, narrated, in turn, by the Christian Dr. Sosa and the Turkish Gazavat. Dealing with love and war, these reports focus on Barbarossa’s encounters with both an enemy general and an unnamed wife. Regarding the first encounter, Sosa writes at length about Barbarossa’s treatment of Rodrigo de Portuondo, Captain General of the Spanish Armada and a friend of Ignatius Loyola. During the 1529 sea battle off Formentera, Sosa portrays Portuondo as killed by a harquebus shot to the chest, while his 25-year-old son Juan is taken captive to Algiers. Upon the discovery that this son planned to escape with sixteen other captives, Barbarossa ordered the group to be shackled together and then massacred. As Sosa puts it, “a grandes y fieras cuchilladas los hicieron pedazos hendiéndoles las cabezas, cortándoles los brazos, jarretándoles las piernas y todos los otros miembros del cuerpo [with great and savage sword strokes they sliced these men to pieces, removing their heads, cutting off their arms, chopping off their legs and other members of their bodies].” And then, in Sosa’s closure, Barbarossa ordered the bodies to be left in situ for the birds and dogs to eat them (Diálogo 80–81). An earlier Spanish chronicler, Francisco de Gómara, repeats Captain Portuondo’s death in the sea battle off Formentera but claims that Barbarossa impaled the son (López de Gómara 136–37).16 In contrast to these Spanish reports of such superlatively cruel [“cruelísimo”] conduct, the Turkish Gazavat presents the same event in a humane light. To begin with, Barbarossa previews the victory in a dream: “siempre

Barbarossa: portraits of a corsair-king 229 soñaba lo que había de ser [he always dreamed of future events]” (Seyyid 103) becomes a refrain across this Turkish text. “Portundo” and son are invoked here, but with no trace of death in either of their fates. About the son, we read only that his galley suffered an accident: “encalló en una peña [it ran into a rock]” (Seyyid 93). There is not a word here about his transfer to Algiers nor of any atrocities he may have suffered there. As for the father, this Turkish version lets him live. Of the nine Christian galleys captured at Formentera, the Turks send two off to the Sultan in Istanbul with “[el] capitán Portundo” installed in one of them (Seyyid 94, 101). The Captain’s trip to the Sublime Porte is mentioned twice. Readers are left to wonder about the rest of this Spanish captain’s fate in Constantinople. A comparison of both Spanish and Turkish texts on the topic of Barbarossa’s erotic life shows similar contradictions, with Sosa’s version far more romantic. En route to France in 1543, leading the Franco–Ottoman alliance against Spain, Barbarossa and his 12,000 Turks make a layover in Gaeta, near Naples, where, according to Sosa, they savagely sack the city and enslave its populace: Entre otros captivos que se tomaron fué una hija del dicho don Diego Gaitán, doncella de dieciocho años, y de extremada hermosura, la cual, presentada a Barbarroja y quedando él muy aficionado a la moza, la tomó por su muxer. Y por su respecto, dio luego libertad al padre y a la madre. [Among other captives taken was the daughter of the aforesaid Don Diego Gaitán, a young girl of eighteen years and of extreme beauty, who, when presented to Barbarossa, he became very enamored of her and took her as his wife. And out of respect for her, he later liberated both her father and mother]. (Sosa, “Epítome” 272) López de Gómara cites similar hearsay about Barbarossa’s being “muy lujurioso, que dicen que se consumió con la hija de Diego Gaetán [so lustful that they say he was consumed with desire for the daughter of Diego Gaetán]” (López de Gómara 233). To this “consummation,” Fray Prudencio de Sandoval adds the claim that Barbarossa was “muy lujurioso en dos maneras [very lustful in two ways]” (Sandoval, ch. 32). Not a trace of sexuality appears in the chaste Turkish Gazavat, where a wife is mentioned four times—albeit years earlier, long before Barbarossa is allied with the French king, Francis I. After dreaming that enemy forces “se llevaban a su mujer con toda su hacienda [were taking his woman along with all his goods],” Barbarossa decides to leave Algiers. “Su mujer” is mentioned thrice more: when they exit the city gates, when he drops her off in Giger, and when she weeps to see him alive after the Christian conquest of Tunis. Because the Turkish Gazavat ends abruptly in 1541, after the Emperor’s disastrous attempt to invade Algiers, it misses the final five years of Barbarossa’s life. After partially destroying Nice on behalf of the French king,

230  Diana de Armas Wilson Barbarossa winters in France, where he appropriates the cathedral in Toulon as a mosque for his 30,000 Turkish soldiers. He then heads to Genoa in 1544 to negotiate with Andrea Doria for the liberation of his corsair comrade Turgut Reis (Dragut), a galley slave and prisoner of the Christians. Not long after paying a ransom of 3,500 gold ducats to free Dragut, our corsair begins a slow return to Constantinople, where he will build a seaside palace on the Bosphorus and a tomb or kuba for himself. Having survived 50 years of violent sea battles, he manages—like the knights in Tirante el Blanco, the chivalric romance spared from the bonfire in Don Quixote (I.6)—to die in bed peacefully in 1546, the year before Cervantes is born. Even today, Barbarossa’s deep imprint may be felt in Istanbul. Turkish seamen leaving the city for their naval operations will salute his mausoleum with a cannon shot. Well beyond Istanbul, however, Barbarossa lives on in the Cloud: a Nintendo (3DS) video game called Bravely Default features a corsair captain named Hayreddin Barbarossa. But there is no need to play online games to learn about holy wars. We can look to history—on both sides of the Christian-Muslim divide—to understand how these games were being played in the sixteenth century.

Notes 1 G̲ h̲ azawāt-i Ḵh̲ayr Dīn Pas̲ h̲ a, written by Seyyid Murad Çelebi and translated into Castilian in 1578 as Crónica del guerrero de la fe Hayreddin Barbarroja. I used the twentieth-century Spanish version, La vida, y historia de Hayradin, llamado Barbarroja: Gazavat-i Hayreddin Pasa (la crónica del guerrero de la fe Hayreddin Barbarroja), ed. Miguel Ángel de Bunes and Emilio Sola (Granada: Universidad de Granada, 1997). All English translations of this text are mine. 2 For a lengthy, detailed introduction to Sosa’s work—including its structure, arrangement, and generic type—see the introduction by editor María Antonia Garcés to my English translation of Sosa’s first book, Topografia, e historia general de Argel, titled An Early Modern Dialogue with Islam: Antonio de Sosa’s Topography of Algiers (1612) (1–78). Our second volume of Sosa’s chronicle— now ready for publication and tentatively titled Of Caliphs and Corsairs—opens with lengthy chapters on the two Barbarossa brothers. 3 Diego de Haedo, “Epítome de los reyes de Argel,” Topografia, e historia general de Argel, ed. Ignacio Bauer y Landauer, vol. 1 (Madrid: Sociedad de bibliófilos españoles, 1927–1929). All further Spanish citations by Antonio de Sosa, the true author of this work, will refer to this edition and be parenthetically documented. 4 According to Galotta in the online Encyclopedia of Islam, a later birth for ­Khayr-al-din Barbarossa—which would include Antonio de Sosa’s date of 1478— is less credible. See: http://referenceworks.brillonline.com/entries/encyclopaediaof-islam-2/khayr-al-din-khidir-pasha-SIM_4258. 5 A Sipahi or Janissary would have originally been part of the devshirme (“gathering”) or child tax taken by the Sultan’s agents in their annual conscription from the Peloponnesus. 6 Data on Barbarossa’s father are found in the G̲ h̲ azawāt-i Ḵh̲ayr Dīn Pas̲ h̲ a (33). 7 See entry on Barbarossa in the Encyclopedia Britannica.

Barbarossa: portraits of a corsair-king 231 8 For a discussion of the difference between corsairs and pirates, see my essay “Cervantes.” 9 Originally from Smyrna (present-day Izmir), Sinan the Jew became a great maritime scholar and inventor of navigational formulae. 10 A Turkish sultan who both wrote and spoke Arabic, Selim was infamous for his impious crimes: he was said to have had his father Bayazid poisoned in the Crimea and his three brothers strangled by royal mutes. On the military front, however, Selim tripled the Ottoman realm. He defeated the Mamlūk armies, north of Aleppo in 1516 and again near Cairo in 1517, thereby bringing Syria, Egypt, and Palestine under Ottoman rule. While in Cairo, the Sharif of Mecca presented Selim with the keys to that pilgrimage city, a symbolic gesture that acknowledged him as caliph of the Islamic world. By his conquest and unification of Muslim lands, Selim I became the defender of the pilgrimage sites of Mecca and Medina, which further strengthened the Ottoman claim to the caliphate in the Muslim world. 11 See the term “caliphate” in the online Encyclopedia of Islam: http://referenceworks.brillonline.com/entries/encyclopaedia-of-islam. 12 Giovio wrote this praise in 1551 in Elogi 917–18. Giovio also addressed the Barbarossa brothers in both his Commentario de le cose de’ Turchi [Turkish Chronicles] (1531) and in La prima parte dell’ historie del suo tempo (1551). 13 See Brantôme 379–80. I thank María Antonia Garcés for providing in translation Pierre de Brantôme’s remarks on Barbarossa. 14 According to Sosa, after the death of Dragut in the siege of Malta, his only daughter was married to Mahamet Bey, the son of Hasan Pasha. And when Don Juan de Austria went to Navarino in 1561, this very Mahamet joined the Turkish armada with a galley of his own. See “Epítome,” ch. 16. 15 An Italian translation, made from a Spanish version of the Turkish text (MS 1663 of the Escorial) by Giovan Luigi Alçamora in 1578, has been little used. 16 Although López de Gómara wrote this chronicle in 1545, it remained in manuscript form until first published in 1853. I thank Malia Spofford-Xavier for use of the chapter on López de Gómara’s Crónica of the Barbarossa brothers in her dissertation “Life Writing as Political Critique in the Habsburg Empire (1545–1557)” (Cornell University, Aug. 2010). This dissertation is available online, through the Cornell University Library: https://ecommons. cornell.edu/bitstream/handle/1813/17602/Spofford%20Xavier,%20Margaret. pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y.

References Allen, Bruce Ware. The Great Siege of Malta: The Epic Battle between the Ottoman Empire and the Knights of Malta. Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England, 2015. Aretino. The Works of Aretino, Translated into English from the Original Italian, with a Critical and Biographical Essay by Samuel Putnam. 2 vols. Chicago, IL: Pascal Covici, 1926. Brantôme, Pierre de, a.k.a. Pierre de Bourdeille, Abbé et Seigneur de Brantôme (1540–1614). Les vies des hommes illustres & grands capitaines éstrangers de son temps: Memoires de messire Pierre de Bourdeille, seigneur de Brantôme. Project Gutenberg. Braudel, Fernand. The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II. Vol. 2. New York: Harper and Row, 1973.

232  Diana de Armas Wilson “Caliphate.” Encyclopaedia of Islam, Second Edition. Ed. P. Bearman, Th. Bianquis, C. E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel, and W. P. Heinrichs. Brill Online, 2016. Web. 11 Mar. 2016. http://referenceworks.brillonline.com/entries/encyclopaedia-of-islam. Cervantes, Miguel de. “El gallardo español.” Obras completas. Ed. Angel Valbuena Prat. Vol. 1. México: D.F., 1991. 213–69. Cervantes, Miguel de. El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha. Ed. Luis Andrés Murillo. Madrid: Clåsicos Castalia, 1973. Danforth, Nick. “The Myth of the Caliphate: The Political History of an Idea.” Foreign Affairs. Web. 19 Nov. 2014. https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/ middle-east/2014-11-19/myth-caliphate. Galotta, A. “K̲ h̲ayr al-Dīn (K̲ h̲i̊ ḍi̊ r) Pas̲ h̲a.” Encyclopaedia of Islam, Second Edition. Ed. P. Bearman, Th. Bianquis, C. E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel, and W. P. Heinrichs. Brill Online, 2016. Web. 11 Mar. 2016. http://referenceworks.brillonline.com/ entries/ encyclopaedia-of-islam-2/khayr-al-din-khidir-pasha-SIM_4258. Giovio, Paolo. Gli elogi degli uomini illustri. Ed. Franco Minonzio. Trans. Andrea Guaspari and Franco Minonzio. Turin: Giulio Einaudi Editore, 2006. Gruzinski, Serge. What Time Is It There? America and Islam at the Dawn of Modern Times. Trans. Jean Birrell. Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2010. Haedo, Diego de [Antonio de Sosa]. “Epítome de los reyes de Argel.” Topografia, e historia general de Argel. Ed. Ignacio Bauer y Landauer. Vol. 1. Madrid: Sociedad de bibliófilos españoles, 1927–29. Kagan, Richard. Clio and the Crown: The Politics of History in Medieval and Early Modern Spain. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009. Klinger, Linda and Julian Raby. “Barbarossa and Sinan: A Portrait of Two Ottoman Corsairs from the Collection of Paolo Giovio.” Arte veneziana e arte islamica: Atti del primo simposio internazionale sull’arte veneziana e l’arte islamica. Ed. Stefano Carboni, Giovanni Curatola, and Ernest J. Grube. Venice: Ateneo Veneto, 1986. Lafaye, Jacques. Sangrientas fiestas del Renacimiento. La era de Carlos V, Francisco I y Solimán el Magnífico (1500–1557). México, D.F.: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1999. López de Gómara, Francisco. Los corsarios Barbarroja. Crónica de los muy nombrados Oruch y Jaradín Barbarroja. Madrid: Polifemo, 1989. Sandoval, Fray Prudencio de. Historia de la vida y hechos del Emperador Carlos V (1604–1606). 3 vols. Ed. Carlos Seco Serrano. Madrid: Atlas, 1955–56. Seyyid Murad Çelebi. La vida, y historia de Hayradin, llamado Barbarroja: Gazavat-i Hayreddin Pasa (la crónica del guerrero de la fe Hayreddin Barbarroja). Ed. Miguel Ángel de Bunes and Emilio Sola. Granada: Universidad de Granada, 1997. Sosa, Antonio de. Diálogo de los mártires de Argel. Ed. Emilio Sola and José María Parreno. Madrid: Hiperión, 1990. Sosa, Antonio de. An Early Modern Dialogue with Islam: Antonio de Sosa’s Topography of Algiers (1612). Ed. María Antonia Garcés. Trans. Diana de Armas Wilson. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2011. Sosa, Antonio de (see also Haedo, Diego de). “Epítome de los reyes de Argel.” Topografia, e historia general de Argel. Ed. Ignacio Bauer y Landauer. Vol. 1. Madrid: Sociedad de bibliófilos españoles, 1927–29. Epítome de los reyes de Argel was translated into French as Haedo, Histoire des rois d’Alger, trans. De Grammont (1880 and 1881); this work later appeared in print as Histoire des Rois d’Alger

Barbarossa: portraits of a corsair-king 233 (Algiers, 1881). Both the Topographie and Histoire des rois d’Alger have been reedited continuously in France and Algeria (1998, 2004, 2007). Soucek, Svat. “The Rise of the Barbarossas in North Africa.” Archivum Ottomanicum 3 (1971): 243–47. Spofford-Xavier, Malia. “Life Writing as Political Critique in the Habsburg Empire (1545–1557).” Diss. Cornell University, Aug. 2010. https://ecommons. cornell.edu/bitstream/handle/1813/17602/Spofford%20Xavier,%20Margaret. pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y. Wilson, Diana de Armas. “Cervantes y los corsarios de la Berberia.” El segundo Quijote (1615): Nuevas interpretaciones cuatrocientos años después (2015). Ed. Conxita Domènech and Andrés Lema-Hincapié. Madrid: Vervuert/Iberomericana, forthcoming.

12 A Huguenot captive in ‘Uthman Dey’s court Histoire chronologique du royaume de Tripoly (1685) and its author Gillian Weiss Sors bona, nihil aliud (good luck, nothing more),1 proclaims the title page of the Histoire chronologique du royaume de Tripoly de Barbarie.2 A chronological history of the Ottoman province comprising coastal Libya, the unsigned, handwritten, two-volume, eleven-hundred-page manuscript is also an ethnography, a travel account, and a captivity narrative. Thanks to a “bad star” that drove him into the path of corsairs, its author spent the years 1668 to 1676 in servitude, working as personal physician to the Tripolitan dey.3 He wrote to pass the time and in hopes of “presenting some curiosities of Africa” once fortune had finally guided him home.4 Completed nine years later, in 1685, the manuscript entered the collection of France’s national library along with hundreds of others belonging to eighteenth-century politician and coal magnate Gaspard Moïse Augustin de Fontanieu (Omont 39). Starting in the early Italian colonial period, the Histoire chronologique has drawn attention from archeologists interested in its descriptions of Leptis Magna and additional sites of classical antiquity (Romanelli 55; Cumont 151–67; Laronde 229–34), and from Africanists interested in its observations about the Borno sultanate of northern Nigeria (Roncière 73–88; Dewière, “Le discours”; Dewière, “L’esclave”). Other scholars have mined it for information about Tripoli’s political history, naval exploits, and involvement in the trans-Saharan and transMediterranean slave trades.5 All of them repeat biographical details from the text and the published writings of a French contemporary that identify a Provençal ship’s surgeon6 who may have had a second career treating soldiers in King Louis XIV’s Swiss Guard. None consider either circumstantial or concrete evidence that the primary author of the Histoire chronologique du royaume de Tripoly de Barbarie was a Huguenot.7 The only confirmed French Protestant known to have put his recollections of “Barbary slavery” to paper was a refugee pastor seized just after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes.8 His retrospective account takes a heroic form. If the man behind the more contemporaneous one indeed belonged to the same faith, then his work falls within a scarcely known, seventeenthcentury crypto-Calvinist genre.

A Huguenot captive in ‘Uthman Dey’s court 235 Certainly, the man who “started this work in Africa and finished it in the Alps”9 in 1685, the very year King Louis XIV outlawed Protestantism in France, is remarkably coy about both his background and his experience. Unlike the Flemish nobleman Emanuel d’Aranda and the Catholic friar Pierre Dan, whose tales of North African captivity and redemption circulated in print and reportedly inspired his decision to keep a journal,10 this author avers modesty, writing, “I don’t cut a fine enough figure in the world to publish my adventures.”11 He does allow, however, that his skills as a “surgeon by profession” placed him among “the bourgeois of Christians” in captivity with the perquisites of such status. Like enslaved priests and like several Knights of Malta with whom he shared quarters in one of Tripoli’s three bagnes (slave prisons), he was exempted from hard labor and enjoyed considerable freedom of movement, which allowed him to visit sites outside the city and “the means to write this History.”12 Yet this self-revelation lies buried among discussions of geography and demography, customs, politics, history, and trade items. Similarly, the author’s first acknowledgment of England, “the nation to which I owe my deliverance from Barbary,” following Sir John Narborough’s yearlong naval blockade, raid on the Tripolitan fleet and punitive treaty negotiations, comes in a late chapter devoted to miscellanea.13 The circumstances of his seizure aboard the Neptune,14 under the command of Thomas de Lescases, a Marseillais captain hired by Venice to prevent Ottoman provisioning at Crete during the siege of the island’s capital Candia, meanwhile, do not appear until the second volume.15 We owe another Provençal’s tale of capture (and, unusually, escape) in similar circumstances and during roughly the same period to the Catholic orientalist and archeologist Antoine Galland.16 We owe this author’s putative identification to the Huguenot physician and archeologist Jacob Spon, who may have known the manuscript and the man. Spon’s Miscellanea eruditae antiquitatis, first published in 1679, gives credit to “D. Girard, Surgeon of the Swiss Guard, who on his travels” recorded the Latin inscription on Marcus Aurelius’ triumphal arch and “furnishe[d] us with a complete history of the Kingdom of Tripolitanus on these shores of Africa.”17 Since Belgian historian Franz Cumont discovered the acknowledgment and made the connection in 1925 (Cumont 153), most scholars have attributed the Histoire chronologique to D. Girard, despite four reservations. First, there is no indication that Spon’s informant was a slave. Second, there is no way of matching the text to which Spon makes reference with the one at the Bibliothèque nationale. Third, the Swiss Guard was based in Paris, whereas the person (or people) who wrote the account claimed to have finished it in the Alps. Fourth, the name Girard does not appear on extant lists of liberated slaves.18 Instead, there is every reason to believe that the author of the Histoire chronologique was among scores of “strangers Christian slaves” from France, Malta and Portugal for whom, thanks to their respective

236  Gillian Weiss shipbuilding, navigational and medical skills Narborough paid especially high ransoms.19 As the manuscript explains toward the end of the second volume, ‘Uthman Dey had always been “particularly opposed to ceding to the French Admiral; and . . . the King of England, seeing his obstinacy, had wanted to deliver at least the slaves from other nations.” These included 60 Maltese natives and a knight specially requested by Grand Master Nicolas Cottoner y de Oleza and, the author continues, “just ten from other nations of Europe, of which there were five Frenchmen, among whose number I was.” Their liberation from “the unhappy condition where they were in Tripoli” came on 20 March, 1676.20 According to French and English sources, 700–800 French slaves remained in Tripoli after the British departed.21 To have been selected to go free makes the slave whose name might have been Girard a notable exception. Rémi Dewière, the most recent student of the Histoire chronologique, conjectures that it was “his friendship with the British consul” that gave him “favorable treatment,” arguing that the “liberation of the ‘French surgeon’ [was] the direct consequence of his advantageous social position within Tripolitan society” at a moment of particularly poor Franco-North African relations (Dewière, “Le discours”). It is true that in 1676, France’s diplomatic influence and commercial interests were limited, due to a lack of a formal consul on the ground and the signing of an Anglo-Tripolitan treaty that gave English merchants precedence over French ones. At a time that France’s naval resources were directed away from the Mediterranean and toward war with the Dutch, it is also true that the kingdom could not make good on repeated threats to release French slaves with force. No doubt in such conditions any French slave in late seventeenth-century Tripoli would have benefited from British protection, and one of high rank would have had an easier time accessing it. Surely, too, Nathaniel Bradley, who reportedly professed “a natural inclination for those of [the French] nation” had more in common with a well-read surgeon than an unlettered sailor. But what he also likely shared with the Provençal slave was Reformed Christianity.22

Epistolary guises The Histoire chronologique never states that its author is a Huguenot. It never states that he is a Catholic either. Interpreting any text requires attention to absence as well as presence, implicit suggestions along with explicit declarations. In this French surgeon’s 1685 narrative of Tripolitan captivity, hints of Protestant affiliation abound once a 1670 letter from nine Protestant slaves shows the way. Posted from “Tripoly de Barbarie” and addressed to “our most honored fathers and brothers” of the Reformed Church of Lyon, it makes an eloquent plea for assistance in escaping the “misery in which we find ourselves among these Barbarians.” Two of the letter’s signatories come from Switzerland, seven others from sites along France’s “Huguenot crescent”: south from Lyon through Provence, west to Languedoc and Gascony,

A Huguenot captive in ‘Uthman Dey’s court 237 and north into Aquitaine. One stands out: “Pierre Girard Chirgõ de Seyne en Provence,” that is, Pierre Girard, surgeon from Seyne, an Alpine village in Upper Provence.23 Assuming, then, that Spon’s ascription of the manuscript is essentially accurate, it might not be a stretch to suppose that along the way someone made an error in transcription, that “D. Girard” should actually read “P. Girard,” and that the initial P. stands for Pierre. The appearance of a “Peter French” on an English slave roll would seem to confirm this theory, except that this Peter’s release from Tripoli may have come a year too late.24 Another drawback is that D. is, in fact, an abbreviation for the honorific “Dominus,” which Spon employs throughout the text. Furthermore, a recent critical edition of the antiquarian-physician’s letters identifies at least one Geneva-based correspondent named Girard as a jurist, not a surgeon. However, other letters to, from or about someone named Girard pertain to a man with Huguenot medical connections. Two from 1668 conceivably predate the author of the Histoire chronologique’s enslavement. They could have come from the pen of Pierre Girard, or perhaps from a family member in contact with a relative in Tripolitan captivity.25 Pierre Girard probably sent a great many letters from Tripoli, some addressed to relatives and friends in Seyne-les-Alpes. Not to be confused with Seyne-sur-Mer on the Mediterranean coast, this Girard’s hometown was a Protestant stronghold during the sixteenth-century Wars of Religion, one of only two conceded in Provence. By the start of Louis XIV’s personal reign, however, its Huguenot population had dwindled, its Geneva-trained pastor had departed and, on the request of local Dominicans, its temple and cemetery had been destroyed.26 The letter Pierre Girard signed in 1670 went to the Protestant community that counted Jacob Spon as a member. Given the uncertainty of Mediterranean mail routes, Christians held in North Africa often dispatched multiples of a single plea, confiding them to various merchants, travelers, pilgrims and diplomats making the sea voyage, with the hope that at least one would reach its destination. Captives also tailored different versions to different recipients, with the hope that at least one would elicit a favorable response.27 That the 1670 appeal from Girard and his companions, apologizing for the “frequent letters that might seem inopportune,” survives within the holdings of Lyon’s municipal library suggests that it did reach someone in the city.28 That the Protestant church of Gap, 125 miles away and part of a separate synodal province, donated 35 livres to ransom slaves from Tripoli the same year suggests either that it had received a separate petition by sea, or that news of coreligionists in captivity had traveled over land (Charronnet 348). The Protestant consistory of Nîmes heard from the same Huguenots in Tripoli two years later, and forwarded their letter to the leadership of BasLanguedoc, which sent back instructions to take up a collection. Yet organizers who raised 1,142 livres by spring 1673 also raised royal suspicions. An edict promulgated in 1669 had banned correspondence among Protestant synods. Now the consistory was given a month to explain the source of the

238  Gillian Weiss ransom funds to the royal intendant so that he could decide whether to advise confiscation (Benoist 3: 292; Borrel 268–69). Louis XIV may well have seized the money. Rather than be rescued by French brethren, the author of Histoire chronologique remained in captivity for an additional three years. The Histoire chronologique makes no mention of group letters to and from Huguenots. It does, however, reproduce a 1673 petition to Secretary of State for War Michel Le Tellier from seven hundred French captives in Tripoli. If the same author had a hand in both compositions, he adopted distinct epistolary guises, reflecting an acknowledgment of distinct readers and, perhaps, his own dual allegiances to distinct spiritual and political communities. In the first, he writes as one of “your [Protestant] brothers who have long groaned in the pitiless chains of the Turks in Africa.” In the second, he becomes one of “your afflicted patriots” and one of the king’s “oppressed subjects.” The one for a Reformed Christian audience makes Old Testament allusions. Instead of perpetrating a Gibeonite deception or “cloaking [themselves] in the mantle of the true religion” to excite charity, the nine Protestant slaves swear they are truly suffering and beg to be delivered from “this Babylon.” The one for the staunchly anti-Huguenot royal minister asks him “to consider the extreme misery we’re in and to activate, in the name of God, the Christian piety that binds you, by becoming our intercessor with His Majesty.” The plea sent to Lyon enjoins the faithful for “charity in imitation of the first Christians”; the one meant for Versailles appeals to the king’s vanity. The French slaves have become the laughingstock of Tripoli, it asserts, “as if our powerful monarch did not have forces strong enough to destroy the audacity of these pirates,” concluding, “Must it be our unhappy fate to serve as trophies for the infidels while all of France triumphs?”29 Like Girard’s autographed letter, the anonymous Histoire chronologique – whose author claims just a weak knowledge of Latin30 – makes regular biblical references and deploys characteristically Calvinist concepts and turns of phrase. Manuscript mirrors missive in evoking Exodus to urge charitable Christians toward delivering “Israelites from the servitude of Egyptians.”31 A catalogue of citations lists “The Holy Scriptures,” instead of the more Catholic term, “The Bible.”32 A section on Muslim pressure to convert credits divine “grace” for bolstering sexual immunity to Tripoli’s women who “prostitute themselves to Christians for sole motive of getting them to change religion.”33 Meanwhile, Oliver Cromwell earns praise for emancipating Englishmen, and with a remark attributed to François de Sales the papacy opprobrium for abandoning Romans. Riches spent on decorating churches, the future saint reportedly observed, “would be much better employed in ransoming Christians who moan among the Infidels.”34 The next section does pause to acknowledge that in other parts of North Africa friars from two Catholic orders, the Pères de la Sainte Trinité (Trinitarians) and Frères de la Merci (Mercedarians), “bring considerable aid to the slaves,” giving priority to priests, boys and women. (Indeed, they occasionally ransomed Huguenots, hoping that the redemption of the body might engender the redemption of the soul).35 But for some reason, it continues,

A Huguenot captive in ‘Uthman Dey’s court 239 the friars have mostly overlooked Tripoli. As “the poor captives of this city” justifiably complain, “there is a very large number of Christians who have been in misery for fifty years, and it’s no more difficult to go to Tripoli than to the other cities of the corsairs.” Similarly, “the Protestants of France have a few times delivered those of their Religion who were detained in Algiers and Tunis, but they have never taken care . . .” The narrative cuts off.36

Redeeming Huguenots The observation about Huguenot redemption efforts is correct. At the end of 1644, responding to “great laments” from the “maritime provinces” about brethren “in chains in Algiers, Tunis, Salé and other parts of Barbary and the kingdom of Morocco,” the Huguenot central assembly held in Charenton had voted to organize a broad fundraising campaign. Churches in Paris, La Rochelle, and Lyon were to serve as clearinghouses, gathering lists of Protestants in bondage and contributions made on their behalf, allowing money from one province to be used to ransom captives from the same location. Such charitable gifts, made for “the glory of God, the edification of all peoples, and the consolation of all these poor afflicted brothers,”37 were transported by traders or even Trinitarians and Mercedarians traveling to North Africa, with Algiers as the main beneficiary.38 This Ottoman province had the region’s largest overall Christian slave population, estimated at thirty or forty thousand, including perhaps two thousand French subjects, about 15 percent of whom may have been Protestant.39 Huguenots held in Algiers, as in Morocco, also received direct aid via coreligionist merchants. Those from La Rochelle regularly acted as intermediaries, signing contracts that apportioned risk and set terms for commissions and interest.40 The choice of vocabulary in the Histoire chronologique is notable too. It was the rare French Catholic writing in the second half of the seventeenth century who refrained from negative epithets for Huguenots, at the very least referring to them as “R.P.R,” that is, adherents of the “Religion Prétendue Réformée” (So-Called Reformed Religion). In his published account of a 1663 mission to Algiers, for example, Mercedarian Michel Auvry actually cast French Protestants in a positive light but still labeled them “heretics.” With a description of long-suffering countrymen who, “conceiving a furious rage against the wealthy of France (who withhold donations for redemption), apostatize the Catholic religion,” he attempted to chagrin readers into charity. Had they been Huguenots, reasoned these desperate converts to Islam, Auvry wrote, “the heretics would assist them much more than do the Catholics and they would not be enrolling among the partisans of Mahomet.”41 The author of the Histoire chronologique takes a different approach. Rather than impugning Calvinists, he calls them simply “Protestants.” Rather than shaming readers, he seems to be writing from experience about the “poor slaves” in this category “who don’t have property back home” and face many years in captivity. For Reformed Christians with private resources, by contrast, he gives instructions for relatives to commission

240  Gillian Weiss agents in Marseille who charge three to four percent for transporting ransom funds.42 He even recommends particular Christian merchants,43 and a Jewish one, “who trade in Tripoli.”44 Presumably, Pierre Girard’s family could not afford to buy him back from Tripoli, especially at the price demanded for prized surgeons. Clearly, Catholic friars did not pick him out from the masses of French candidates for liberation during one of their rare voyages to the Ottoman province in the years 1668–1676, nor did he manage to escape by sea.45 Fortunately for Pierre Girard, he did not contract plague during one of the frequent epidemics during that period when, according to the Histoire chronologique, 1,130 Christian captives perished, “plague having carried off two thirds.”46 Had he died, he might have been interred in the Christian cemetery near the sea. Unfortunately for Pierre Girard, Louis XIV had not yet deployed either his full diplomatic or naval capacities in Tripoli. A permanent French consul might have lent even a Protestant the money to free himself from captivity. A well-armed French squadron might have coerced the liberation of French and even foreign slaves.47 Indeed, that is what the author of the Histoire chronologique calls upon “Louis le Grand . . . this incomparable monarch” to do: “avenge for all of Christendom and for France in particular the violations and pillages committed by these infidels.”48 As a chronicler writing in 1685 would well know, the king did eventually put his sea power on violent display in the Mediterranean. Ironically, the man he chose to lead the charge against North Africa in the years immediately leading up to the Revocation of Nantes was a Huguenot. In 1681, Abraham Duquesne trapped Tripoli’s corsairs at the Greek island of Chios. Despite the Ottoman sultan’s demands for reparations, royal propagandists celebrated the naval bombardment as a coup that yielded a treaty with provisions for the release and ransom of French captives.49 A painting (by court artist Jan Karel Donatus Van Beecq) depicting the battle was hung at the royal palace at Marly. Two versions of a medal (by Jean Mauger and Raymond Faltz) announcing “De Piratis Turca Spectante, Chios” (Defeat of the Pirates Before the Turk at Chios), show a shirtless pirate kneeling before winged Victory. She stands before a port with ships in the background, palm frond and standard in her grasp to reiterate the visual message of naval triumph. It was distributed to courtiers at Versailles (see Figure 12.1).50 The Histoire chronologique addresses Duquesne’s religious affiliation in the same way these official artistic productions do: not at all. The admiral who refused to abjure had his vocal critics at a time when other Huguenot officers were denied positions and promotions and forced into proselytization sessions (Scoville 53–57; Evesque 1–5; Lehr, chap. 8). On balance, though, he had more admirers, including members of court, willing to overlook heresy in a single case for the sake of naval success. In the captive surgeon’s account, the only place to discern a view might be in the spelling of “Du Quesne’s” name, separating article and location in acknowledgment of his ennoblement as a marquis.51

A Huguenot captive in ‘Uthman Dey’s court 241

Figure 12.1 Jean Mauger, medal announcing “De Piratis Turca Spectante, Ad Insulam Chios” (“Defeat of the Pirates Before the Turk at the Island of Chios”) Source: National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London. MEC0748.

In the aftermath of France’s initial attack, Tripoli unfettered 340 French subjects, but the monarchy’s failure to send timely payments for the rest supplied a new pretext for war, which corsairs dependent on prizes largely preferred to peace. After suffering an additional, brutal round of shelling, however, the city-state surrendered. Compelled to negotiate under gunfire, in June 1685 an elderly Tripolitan envoy agreed to pay France compensation, grant French consuls preeminence over English competitors and empty Tripoli’s prisons of all Christian slaves. Twelve hundred captives, half of them French, went free. It is unlikely that just months before Protestantism was officially banned in France any of the redeemed were declared Huguenots.52

242  Gillian Weiss

Protestant networks For the captive surgeon, French intervention in Tripoli arrived too late. Yet he had found a defender among the English: consul Nathaniel Bradley, “gentleman from London, a very careful and judicious personage.” Upon his arrival in 1671, according to the Histoire chronologique, Bradley offered protection to “the merchants of all the Christian nations,” Catholic, as well as Greek and Protestant. Meanwhile, “the slaves regarded him as their father, and . . . refuge.”53 Even priests reportedly experienced the benefit of the Englishman’s benevolence. “Bradley, though of a different religion,” reads the narrative, again referring non-judgmentally to Reformed Christianity, took four Recollet Fathers sent by Rome under his wing.54 They led mass and heard confession from Catholic slaves in prison chapels whose maintenance recognized the provision of mosques for Muslim slaves in several European ports. As long as a Greek renegade like ‘Uthman Dey remained in power, the narrative explains, Orthodox slaves had places to worship too.55 Protestants seem not to have had a dedicated space; their prayer sessions may have taken place at the English consulate. The author of the Histoire chronologique befriended Bradley during the latter part of his captivity. Then, after his 1676 release by English arms, he joined a wider Protestant Republic of Letters. One member, of course, was fellow medical doctor Jacob Spon who died prematurely in Swiss exile after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. Apart from the compendium of archeological inscriptions that identifies an observer in Tripoli named Girard, Spon is best known for his account of his travels throughout the Mediterranean to collect antiquities, a 1678 book the ex-slave knew well enough both to cite and correct.56 Sailing with Narborough’s fleet, the narrator of the Histoire chronologique also recalls interactions with two additional Protestant writers, one German, one English. Both, he claims, incorporated portions of his manuscript into their books. In a note “to the reader” at the beginning of volume two, he relates meeting Augustus Holstein, duke of the royal house of Denmark, who was eager to borrow details, in order “to embellish” his own Grand Tour narrative.57 Never published, Holstein’s journal does include a passenger list. Among other unnamed captives, it features, “One Frenchman redeemed.”58 Another Protestant the ex-slave encountered at sea was “an English poet who insistently asked me to give him an extract about the false messiah of the Jews who appeared in the year 1666.”59 Having arrived in Tripoli only two years after the Sabbatai Sevi dashed the Jewish world’s millennial hopes by converting to Islam, Girard was well positioned to relate the details, especially since he must have known Abraham Miguel Cardozo, the converso physician and Sabbatean prophet who also served ‘Uthman Dey. “All the Jews of Tripoli became great partisans of this Impostor,” the manuscript maintains, thanks in part to the “persuasions of [the] Spanish doctor Cardoce.” Like Sabbateans across the Ottoman Empire, he followed his spiritual leader into apostasy.60 Who, then, was this English poet whose “curiosity” Girard felt compelled to “satisfy”? Could it have been Paul Rycaut, returning to England during his stint as consul to Smyrna, Sabbatai’s hometown? The scholarly consensus

A Huguenot captive in ‘Uthman Dey’s court 243 has been that Rycaut relied on the eyewitness account of a Dutch Reformed chaplain to write the “famous impostor” tale under John Evelyn’s name.61 Perhaps the version Rycaut also inserted into the 1680 edition of his history of the Ottoman Empire (Rycaut 200–19) has origins elsewhere too. Or perhaps the poet is someone else. Either way, the man responsible for the Histoire chronologique wanted credit. “So, reader,” he writes, “you will do me justice to believe that these pieces come from me, if you see them printed.”62

Huguenot slaves after the Revocation Why didn’t Girard simply publish his chronicle himself? The most obvious answer: because he was a Huguenot. By the time the former Tripolitan captive was putting the finishing touches on his narrative, Louis XIV had definitively criminalized the “Religion Prétendue Reformée.” Emigration was forbidden, foot soldiers and frigates patrolled the borders and sea captains turned away would-be passengers. Of course, thousands of Protestants escaped the kingdom anyway. Hundreds en route to England and Holland ended up in North African captivity instead. “Disappear[ing] without so much as paying the baker,” remarked a Breton official, “these people are being punished more severely than if they had been arrested in France.”63 In spite of standing treaties, the dey of Algiers, for one, defended his right to enslave Huguenots, considering them “no longer French since they were fleeing France” and, as he noted erroneously, “all Lutheran.”64 Still counting captive Calvinists as subjects – albeit bad ones – French officials demanded their liberation while French missionaries pressured them to abjure. Some agreed.65 A pastor from Montauban refused. Having already chanced condemnation to the royal galleys by fleeing, he stood ready to endure any abuse rather than recant his faith. Within a few years, Louis XIV relented. Relinquishing sovereignty, the king instructed his agents to abandon recalcitrant Huguenots in North Africa and allow rival Protestant powers to claim them instead. With the banning of Calvinism in France, members of Reformed Churches across Western Europe stepped up charitable collections for French brethren, whether persecuted at home or enslaved abroad.66 The narrative Isaac Brassard composed in Amsterdam and smuggled to relatives in Bordeaux many years after the events it describes has far worse to say about Catholic missionaries than Muslim masters in Algiers. Once the captive Huguenot rejected his evangelizing overtures, the resident French vicar reportedly turned cruel, bribing the prison guards to mistreat him and inviting “the furor of the populace” by branding him with a notorious nickname, “Ducaine,” after the Protestant admiral who had bombed the city in 1683. But according to Brassard’s version of events, even the pasha came to admire the piety of persecuted Protestants and reserved grisly execution at the mouth of a cannon for Catholics. The minister’s ordeal came to an end 18 months later, in December 1688, when prominent members of the Huguenot diaspora, aided by a local Jewish intermediary, paid his ransom and helped him make the crossing to Livorno and the journey to Florence, Venice, through the Tyrol and Germany to the Netherlands.67

244  Gillian Weiss Though he expresses gratitude for their “charitable care,” Brassard recognizes that “the good Lord,” who by “the wonders of his providence and the grandeur of his mercy” acted as his “true liberator.”68 Contrast these words of divine praise, concluding a tale of religious constancy, with the indirect tribute to the favor of chance and the friendship of a Protestant consul for leading the captive surgeon out of Tripoli.

Calvin against Nicodemism In a series of essays published during the mid-sixteenth century, Jean Calvin considered “what a faithful man . . . ought to do, dwelling among the papists.” The Geneva reformer’s answer was unequivocal: he should leave. While appreciating the dangers of open worship and the perils of flight, Calvin had no patience for “carnal pretence” and “perverse subtlety.” He condemned religious dissembling known as Nicodemism, after the Pharisee who was only willing to visit Jesus at night (John 31: 1–2).69 Of the two presumed Huguenots known to have written North African captivity narratives, one heeded Calvin’s call and one did not. Whereas Brassard risked his life to escape France, if Jacob Spon is right, Pierre Girard stayed in the kingdom and joined the Swiss Guards, an institution that even after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes did not formally require proof of Catholicism (Vallière 112). Such a scenario means that the slave surgeon from Seyne-enAlpes, once a Huguenot in ‘Uthman Dey’s Tripolitan court, then became a Nicodemite or conformist soldier, protecting the royal palaces of France’s King Louis XIV. The evidence suggests that the author of the Histoire chronologique du royaume de Tripoly de Barbarie was or had been a French Protestant. A 1679 book by another Huguenot physician and antiquities enthusiast gives his family name, origin, and profession; a 1670 letter by a group of self-identified Huguenots gives reason to trust this attribution, or at least to propose that the Girard in Tripoli had sent his observations of Leptis Magna to a relative in Geneva who had passed them on to Spon. What about the 1685 account itself? Its content, style, and structure also point to an author with Calvinist sympathies and affiliations. How else to explain a Frenchman with so many Reformed Christian contacts, including the English consul who made sure that he, among so many hundreds of French slaves in Tripoli, went free? How else to explain a Frenchman using neutral rather than insulting terms for Huguenots? How else to explain the manuscript’s peculiar organization? Unlike typical Barbary captivity narratives, this one has no section set aside for personal experience. Instead, it scatters, even conceals, such details throughout the text. The Histoire chronologique resembles other relations from the period in underscoring the dangers of bodily and spiritual corruption for Christians held in North Africa. Yet it lacks the vignettes about triumphant trickery perpetrated against North Africans so prominent in published stories of the second half of the seventeenth century. These include Emanuel d’Aranda’s Algerian tale, as well as the single other known French account of slavery in Tripoli by the avowedly Catholic Antoine Quartier.70

A Huguenot captive in ‘Uthman Dey’s court 245 Seized in 1660 and ransomed nearly eight years later, just a few months before Girard’s arrival, the self-declared “friar-slave” dwells repeatedly on confessional differences among Christians, referring to Catholicism as the “veritable religion”; censuring Orthodox Christians for being “schismatics” without scruples; relating a deathbed renunciation of Calvinism; and launching an assault on Anglicanism. The English consul Samuel Toker in Quartier’s account is neither guardian nor confidante but “protector of Protestants” whom he disparages as insufficiently respectful of “the mysteries of our Religion.” As protagonist of the 1690 narrative, Quartier boasts about various hoaxes he put over Jews and Muslims during his Tripolitan captivity and provides the itinerary of his French homecoming, which culminates in the decision to join the Mercedarian order (Quartier 29, 48, 125, 231). The Histoire chronologique strays from this conventional arc of seizure, suffering, self-protection or self-transformation, then return and re-integration. The absence of an editor to reshape the story may account for the discrepancy. Or its author may be hiding something. If so, everything points to religion.

Conclusion As a record of captivity in Tripoli, the Histoire chronologique is a rarity. It is a slave narrative and a fount of unfamiliar information about the politics, history, commerce, society, trade, and archeology of an Ottoman province, its dependencies and its neighbors. That at least sections of the Histoire chronologique seem to have been principally composed by a French Protestant makes it even more unusual. But among the factors that make it important is its proposed status as a piece of a crypto-Calvinist literature. Even as a revisionist strand rejects a view of converts to any sect hiding pure, authentic selves, a large literature explores the practice of textual as well as personal dissimulation among crypto-Jews, crypto-Muslims, and crypto-Catholics throughout the early modern Mediterranean.71 For France in the years before and after 1685, by contrast, the identification, let alone analysis, of such writings by erstwhile Huguenots is virtually nonexistent. Alexandre Olivier Exquemelin was another ship surgeon and possible Protestant who wrote about the violent effects of sea robbery. His famous History of the Buccaneers of America, translated from Dutch to French in 1686, has been read as a complicated piece of self-concealment and selfrevelation. Which other French Protestants might have feigned faith in print?72 Better known than any crypto-Calvinist text produced inside post-Revocation France is the flurry of anti-Nicodemite pamphlets published outside it – scolding Huguenots who had compromised their convictions by staying put, while comforting refugees who had sacrificed material comforts by maintaining purity of heart.73 In a published sermon from the Netherlands, one exiled minister delivered a special message to a portion of his flock. “Several among you [who] were captives in Barbary,” he observed in 1686, “know by experience that Barbary is humane in comparison to our ungrateful homeland” and Muslims are “lambs” as compared to lupine Catholics “who call themselves converters.”74 The same year, a royal almanac proclaimed “The Triumph of the Church over Calvin and Mahomet” (see Figure 12.2).

Figure 12.2 Pierre Landry, Le Triomphe de l’Eglise sur Calvin et sur Mahomet, Royal Almanac for 1686 Source:  Pierre Landry, Le Triomphe de l’Eglise sur Calvin et sur Mahomet, Royal Almanac for 1686, BN, Estampes, Rés. Qb-201.

A Huguenot captive in ‘Uthman Dey’s court 247 With images of converted Huguenots and vanquished Turks, it showed how Louis XIV’s propagandists connected the battle against so-called heretics and infidels. Is it any wonder Girard, a Huguenot repatriated from Tripoli, declined to sign his name?

Notes 1 Though the line is followed by the word “Tacit,” it appears nowhere in Tacitus’ corpus. Rather it served as the motto for nobleman Miklos Zrinyi (1647–64), a Croatian-Hungarian military leader famous for battling the Ottomans (and also a poet credited with composing his country’s first epic in the vernacular). His death in a hunting accident was mourned across Europe, including in England where a laudatory book on The Conduct and Character of Count Nicholas Serini, Protestant Generalissimo of the Auxiliaries of Hungary . . ., ed. O.C. (London: Samuel Speed, 1664) misconstrued his religious affiliation. 2 The author wishes to thank the participants in the ESCAPE project, especially Mario Klarer, Tobias Auböck and Robert Spindler. She is also grateful to Michel Fontenay for first alerting her to the Histoire chronologique; and to Philip Benedict, Rémi Dewière, Keith Luria and Yves Moreau for generously sharing expertise and sources. 3 On the career of ‘Uthman, who ruled Tripoli as dey and pasha from 1649 until his murder or suicide in 1672 and the military rulers who immediately followed him, see Pennell, “Ottoman” 40–49. 4 “Ma mauvaise étoile m’ayant fait tomber au pouvoir des corsaires de Barbarie . . . lorsque je fus conduit à Tripoly par les Pyrates, prévoyant que ma captivité seroit longue, je formay le dessain de fer un journal de tout ce qui se passeroit de plus mémorable dans ce Royaume, afin de diverter et d’occuper mon Esprit, Et à mesme temps de fer présant à ma Patrie de quelques curiosités d’Afrique à mon retour.” [Pierre Girard], Histoire chronologique du royaume de Tripoly de Barbarie, 2 vols. (hereafter HCRT) (1685), Bibliothèque nationale (hereafter BN), Fonds français 12199–21220, vol. 1, f. 4r. 5 Bergna, Storia; Féraud; Toschi, esp. 115–22; Argenti, esp. 1: 126–48, 338–49; Rossi; Lange 211–22; Fontenay 7–43. 6 All French vessels were required to employ ship’s surgeons, starting in 1642 (Lefèvre 100–01). 7 Dewière (“Le discours”) convincingly argues that a second author contributed contextual sections to the Histoire chronologique. 8 France 349–55. Brassard spent 18 months of 1687–88 in Algerian captivity. He likely dictated his memoirs after 1730, when he was already over 90 years old. 9 “J’ay commencé cet ouvrage en Afrique, et que je l’ay fini dans les Alpes.” [Girard], HCRT, vol. 1, f. 5v. 10 Emanuel d’Aranda, Relation de la captivité, et liberté du sieur Emanuel de Aranda . . . (Brussels: Jean Mommart, 1656), the first published version of this popular slave narrative, which went through numerous seventeenth-century editions, turns out to be a heavily revised translation of a Dutch manuscript held by the Castle Van Loppem Foundation, Brussels. See Kattenberg. Pierre Dan, Histoire de Barbarie et de ses corsaires . . . (Paris: Pierre Rocolet, 1637), which appeared in a second French edition in 1649 and a Dutch one in 1684, is a classic of redemption literature. 11 “Je ne fais pas assez de figure dans le monde pour y publier mes avantures.” Yet he took the time to rewrite episodes from the journal he apparently lost in Tripoli. [Girard], HCRT, vol.1, ff. 4r., 46r.

248  Gillian Weiss 12 Enslaved surgeons “sont ceux qui passent plus doucement leurs jours à Tripoly, aussi on les appelle les bourgeois des chrestiens”; “de tous les esclaves, ils sont les mieux traitez; si bien quil eut moyen de composer ceste Histoire.” [Girard], HCRT, vol. 1, f. 60r; vol. 2, ff. 83v, 87v. 13 “Une nation à Laqlle j’ay L’obligation de ma délivrance de La Barbarie.” [Girard], HCRT, vol. 1, f. 72v. On English-Tripolitan relations, Narborough’s campaign and the 5 March 1676 treaty, see Matar, British Captives 165–69, “Maghariba” 120–24. 14 According to English consul Thomas Baker, the 18-gun, 220-man Neptune, built and decorated in Provence with a gilded god, remained in Tripoli’s 13-vessel fleet as of 2 August 1679 under the command of “Mahomet Rais a Turk” (Pennell, Piracy and Diplomacy 106). 15 [Girard], HCRT, vol. 2, f. 83. On the naval support France offered Venice during the War of Candia, see Greene, Shared World 74–77. 16 Antoine Galland composed this narrative from the perspective of Jean Bonnet of Cassis in 1710, but it remained unpublished for a century, until it was printed by a Louis Mathieu Langlès, ed., Relation de l’esclavage d’un marchand de la Ville de Cassis, à Tunis (Paris: Jourdain, 1810), then re-issued as Histoire de l’esclavage d’un marchand de la ville de Cassis, à Tunis, ed. Catherine Guénot and Nadia Vasquez (Paris: Editions de la bibliothèque, 1992). Although Galland may have invented elements, Bonnet was a real person, seized while ferrying supplies to Crete and held in Tunis from 1669–72 before his escape in a stolen boat. 17 “Elegantem hanc Inscriptionem debemus D. Girard Copiarum Helveticarum Chirurgo, qui absolutâ in his Africae oris peregrinatione nobis Tripolitani Regni historia & descriptionem adornat, ubi hujus Arcus typum exhibebit [.] Observavit ille hanc urbem quae nunc Tripoli vocatur, non aliam esse ab ea quae Plinio & Melae Oea nuncupatur: ibique nonnulla alia Antiquitatis monumenta descripsit” (Spon 269). Reference to the ex-captive “D. Girard” and the inscription he copied was also reported in the Journal des Savants 329. Thanks to Timothy Wutrich for help with the Latin translation. 18 Dewière (“Le discours”) lays out the scholarly concerns by Toschi (120) and Bono (“Recits” 117), while expressing his own about location and the possibility that sections of the manuscript are the work of a different author. 19 Matar (British Captives 123) credits Narborough with ransoming 49 captives from Bristol and London, a handful from other places, including Marseille, and 89 from Malta, France and Portugal, citing the Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series (hereafter CSPD) Charles II, 4 May 1676, 18: 99. 20 “le Day s’estoit toujours particulièrement opposé à bailler à l’Admiral des François; et que le Roy d’Angletterre, voyant son obstination, avoit vouleu qu’on délivra au moins les esclaves des autres nations, Narbrough fût supplié par le Grand Maistre Cottoner d’avoir égard aux Maltois quî estoient les plus pauvres et les moins en estat d’estre . . . il n’y eut que dix des autres nations de l’Europe, dont il y eut cinq François, au nombre desquels je fus . . . quî sortirent de la malheureuse condition, oû ils estoient à Tripoly.” [Girard], HCRT, vol. 2, f. 273r-v. 21 d’Arvieux 5: 416; and Bodleian Library, Oxford, Rawlinson A 194, ff. 117–126, cited in Matar, British Captives 123 and 123n320, who refers to the French slaves as “presumably Catholic.” 22 “Bradley . . . suivit l’inclination naturelle qu’il avoit pour ceux de cette nation.” [Girard], HCRT, vol. 2, f. 262v. A 1679 document from the Archicio storico de Propagande Fide, Scritture Reiferite nei Congressi, vol. 1, f. 457, cited in Davis (100), accounts for 700 Catholics and 1000 “schismatic Greeks,” suggesting that all the Protestants had already been liberated. 23 Nine Protestant slaves to members of the Reformed Church of Lyon, Tripoli, 20 February 1670, Bibliothèque municipale de Lyon (hereafter BML), MS Coste 447.

A Huguenot captive in ‘Uthman Dey’s court 249 24 Expenses incurred by Nathaniel Bradley for 11 slaves ransomed from Tripoli, [1677], The National Archives, Kew, State Papers Foreign, 71/22, vol. 2, f. 2. (scanned by Rémi Dewière). The name “Peter French” also appears on a 23 June 1677 document in the same collection, f. 10, cited in Matar, British Captives 248. 25 Personal communication with Rémi Dewière, 17 June 2016 and with Yves Moreau, 18 November 2016. Letters between Spon and Girard from 1668–1672 (BN, Nouvelles acquisitions françaises 4816, ff. 42v, 47v; BML, MS Fonds général 1720, f. 6) and referencing Girard from 1668–1677 (Bibliothèque inter-universitaire de médecine, MS 2190, f. 415–417; BML, MS Fonds général 1720, ff. 50, 54) are reproduced in Moreau, “Édition.” 26 Arnaud 276, 429–30; Delmas 31–36; Gillier 215–17. See also Elie Benoist, Histoire de l’Edit de Nantes . . ., 3 vols. (Delft, Netherlands: Adrien Beman, 1693–95), 3: 191 for the 12 May 1664 edict confiscating the Protestant temple of Seynes. 27 On epistolary tactics by French slaves in North Africa, see Weiss, “Barbary Captivity” 231–64. 28 “Nos fréquentes letters vous paroitront peut estre inoportunes.” Nine Protestant slaves, BML, MS Coste 447. 29 “vos patriotes affligez . . . ses sujets oppressez . . . comme si nôtre puissant monarque n’avoit pas de forces suffisantes pour abattre l’audace de ces pyrates . . . Considerez l’extreme misere dans laquelle nous sommes, et faites agir, au nom de Dieu, cette piété chretienne que reluit en vous et soyez nôtre intercesseur auprès de Sa Majesté . . . Faut-il par nôtre malheur que nous servions de trophée aux infidelles pendant que toute la France est en Triomphe?” Seven hundred French slaves to Secretary of State for War Michel Le Tellier, Tripoli, 12 October 1673, reproduced in [Girard], HCRT, vol. 2, ff. 202v-203r. “Ne croyez pas que nous goissons en cette conjoncture comme firent iadis les Gabaonites envers Josué, ny que nous usions de fourberies, en nous couvrant du manteau de la veritable Religion, pour vous donner matiere de faire éclater vostre charité . . . contribuez donc au nom de Dieu quelque chose de vostre abondance à celle fin que nous sortions de cette Babilone . . . ouvres ce entrailles de vostre charité en faisant quelques collectes a limitation des premiers Chretiens pour subuenir aux necessites de vos Freres qui gemissent depuis long tems sous les impitoyables chaînes des Turcs en Afrique.” Nine Protestant slaves, BML, MS Coste 447. 30 [Girard], HCRT, vol.1, f. 4v. 31 “por tirer les Israelites de la Servitude des Egyptiens.” [Girard], HCRT, vol.1, f. 62r. 32 “L’Escriture Sainte.” [Girard], HCRT, vol. 1, f. 3r. 33 “Elles se font prostituer à des Chrestiens pour le seul motif de les fr changer de Religion . . . Enfin les solicitations, si presantes attraits, qui sans une Grace partre, il y en auoit peu, qui ne se laissassent seduire.” [Girard], HCRT, vol. 1, f. 62r. 34 “il dit d’un ton de compassion que ces grandes richesses seroient beaucoup mieux Employés à rachepter les Chrestiens qui gémissent parmi les Infidelles.” [Girard], HCRT, vol. 1, f. 63r. 35 For instance, Michelin et al. 214. 36 “Il faut avouer que les soins de ces Religieux sont d’un grand secours aux Esclaves . . . Ler pre bût est de delivrer les Prestres, Les Jeunes Garçons et les femmes . . . Les Protestans de France ont qlq fois fait délivrer ceux de Ler Religion, quî estoient detenus à Alger et à Tunis: Mais ils nont iamais eu soin de . . .” HCRT, vol. 1, f. 63v. Dewière (“Le Discours,” n. 122) uses this same quote as evidence that Girard was not a Protestant. 37 Aymon 2: 677–78; see also Tortat 348 and Bonet-Maury 898–923. 38 Lucien Hérault lists 33 “Captifs de la Religion” ransomed from Algiers in Les larmes et clameurs des chrestiens . . . (Paris: D. Houssaye, 1643), 33. While

250  Gillian Weiss confirming that Hérault had corresponded with minister Jacob Mestrezat about collecting money for Huguenot slaves, fellow Trinitarian Dan (Histoire de Barbarie, 2nd ed. (1649), 144) questioned whether the funds had arrived in time. 39 For counts of French captives in seventeenth-century North Africa, see Weiss, Captives and Corsairs, app. 1. 40 See Delafosse 70–83; Petitpré 16–18; and Friconneau 11–13. 41 [Michel Auvry], Le miroir de la charité chrétienne . . . (Aix: Jean-Baptiste & Etienne Roize, 1663), 194–95. Lazarist priest and French consul to Algiers Paul Le Vacher made the same comparison between French Catholics and Protestants in Relation véritable, contenant le rachapt de plusieurs . . . (Paris: Veuve du Pont, 1672), 4. 42 “Ceste particularité met au dessus pour les pauvres Esclaves, quî n’ont pas des biens chez eux. Pour les autres . . . les parens tachent aussi tot d’avoir une correspondance à Marseille: ce quî n’est pas difficile à cause ql part tous les ans 7 ou 8 vaisseaux de ce port pr porter des marchandises à Tripoly. Ceux quî sont commodes consignent trois ou quatre porcent: Estienne Le Grand, François Savy, Jean-Baptiste Voyron, Nicolas Compian, Et un Juif appelle Villereal, quî font commerce à Tripoly, ses chargent facilemt de ces sortes de commissions, s’ils font le voyage, ils payent eux mesme la rançon, Et s’ils ne les font pas, ils ordonnent à Les correspondans de rachepter les captifs, et de les renvoyer en France.” [Girard], HCRT, vol. 1, f. 63v. 43 On the romanticized tale of Nicolas Compian, son of a notary and nephew of a sea captain who was himself captured by Tripolitan corsairs in 1686, see PierreAugustin Guys, Marseille ancienne et moderne (Paris: Veuve Duchesne, 1786), 47–48n2. For evidence of Compian’s previous role in ransoming captives, see Catalogue général des manuscrits des bibliothèques publiques de France (Paris: E. Plon, Nourrit et Cie, 1893), 20: 474. 44 On the settlement of Livorno Jews – notably Joseph Vaïs Villareal and Abraham Atias – in seventeenth-century Marseille and their involvement in Mediterranean trade, corsairing and redemption, see Crémieux 119–45, 99–123; and Xambo 99–121, esp. 116, citing a 23 August 1675 contract for the ransom from Tripoli of a Marseillais captive (Archives départementales Bouches-des-Rhône, 356 E 451). 45 The accusation that the Mercedarians had never gone to Tripoli is refuted by the order’s own 1685 history (Histoire de l’ordre sacré, royal et militaire de Notre-Dame de La Merci . . . (Amiens: Guislain Le Bel, 1685), 919), which claims 19 individual ransoms between 1669 and 1674. Féraud (136) also credits Mercedarians Jean Plantier and Victor de Saint-Paul of Digne in Provence with repatriating 25 slaves from Tripoli in 1669. Oddly, the Histoire chronologique ([Girard], HCRT, vol. 1, f. 63v) cites a 1671 Trinitarian voyage unremarked in other sources. 46 “Il est vray que La Peste en avoit emporté Les deux tieres.” [Girard], HCRT, vol. 1, f. 65r. 47 Féraud’s account of France’s relatively weak naval demonstrations before Tripoli in 1669 and 1672 (131–33, 140–42, 145–47) relies primarily upon descriptions in the Histoire chronologique. 48 “Louis le Grand . . . ce Monarque incomparable, qûy vengera toute la chrestienté, et la France en particulier, des violations et des pillages que des Infidelles ont fait.” [Girard], HCRT, vol. 1, ff. 58r-v. 49 The 27 November 1681 treaty does not appear in standard diplomatic compendia for North Africa but is held at the Archives de la Chambre de Commerce de Marseille and the Archives des Affaires étrangères, MD, Afrique, vol. 2, ff. 76–79. 50 The painting hangs at the Musée de la Marine in Brest. 51 [Girard], HCRT, vol. 2, ff. 283–287v. On Abraham Duquesne, see Jal; VergéFranceschi.

A Huguenot captive in ‘Uthman Dey’s court 251 52 On France’s late seventeenth-century bombardments of North Africa and its effects, see Weiss, Captives and Corsairs, chap. 4. 53 “gentilhomme de Londres, personage fort prudent et iudicieux . . . il estoit le protecteur des marchands de toutes nations chrétiennes et il ne se laissait jamais à leur rendre de bons offices. Les esclaves chrestiens le regardoient comme leur père, et il estoit leur refuge.” [Girard], HCRT, vol. 1, f. 66r. 54 “Bradley, bien d’une Religion differente, les prit sous sa protection.” [Girard], HCRT, vol. 1, f. 70r. 55 [Girard], HCRT, vol. 1, ff. 69r-70v. 56 Jacob Spon and George Wheler, Voyage d’Italie, de Dalmatie, de Grèce et du Levant, fait en 1675 et 1676 (Lyon: Antoine Cellier le fils, 1678). References to Spon in [Girard], HCRT include vol. 1, ff. 3r, 63r, 72r-v. 57 [Girard], HCRT, vol. 2, “avis au lecteur.” According to Pennell (Piracy and Diplomacy 53), “Augustus Holstein, who travelled with Narborough’s fleet through the Mediterranean, kept a journal for the years 1675–1676.” It is held at the British Library [hereafter BL], Sloane MS 2755. 58 Holstein, “A Journal,” BL, Sloane MS 2755, ff. 48–49, reprinted in Matar, British Captives 44. 59 “Le dernier est un Poeste Anglois quy mayant instammant sollicité de luy donner un extrait de La Relation du Faux Messie des Juifs, qu’on voit sur l’année 1666.” [Girard], HCRT, vol. 2, “avis au lecteur.” 60 Cardozo, chap. 3. In [Girard], HCRT, vol. 2, the section on the Sabbatai Sevi spans several pages: vol. 2, ff. 70r-72r. “Tous les Juifs de Tripoly paruront grands partissans de cet Imposteur particullarament aux persuasions de Cordoce Medecin Espagnol” (71v). 61 Scholem (432) conjectures that Rycaut, who was absent from Smyrna when the Sabbatai Sevi episode broke, got his information from Thomas Coenen, whose letters to the Levant Trade Company were published as Ydele verwachtinge der Joden getoont in den persoon van Sabethai Zevi . . . [Vain Hopes of the Jews as Revealed in the Figure of Sabbatai Zevi] [Amsterdam, 1669]. Popkin (43–54) concurs. John Evelyn, The History of the Three Late, Famous Impostors, Viz. Padre Ottomano, Mahomed Bei and Sabatai Sevi . . . (London: Henry Herringman, 1669). See also Anderson 211–15. 62 “Son honnesteté m’obligea de Satisfier sa curiosité. Ainsi, Lecteur, vous mes fairez iustice de croire q ces pièces viennent de moy, si vous les voyez imprimées.” [Girard], HCRT, vol. 2, f. 2v. 63 Procureur du roi Boissineau to the procureur général, Nantes, 2 July 1686, cited in Vaurigaud 109–10. 64 Consul André Piolle, “Mémoires depuis ma précédente . . .,” Algiers, 18 July 1687, Archives nationales, Affaires étrangères, BI 116, ff. 24–26, cited in Touili 40. For the rest of this paragraph, see Weiss, Captives and Corsairs, chap. 4, esp. 79–82. 65 See, for instance, Moureau, “Quand l’histoire” 26–27. 66 For examples of English, Swiss, German and Dutch intercessions for Huguenots, see Weiss, Captives and Corsairs 276n43 and Matar, British Captives 131. 67 Among the English and Dutch coreligionists who aided him, Brassard (France 354) singles out the former marquis Henri de Massue de Ruvigny, who became Earl of Galway, and the jeweler known for his Persian travels, Jean Chardin. On Ruvigny’s efforts, also see Lady Rachel Russell to Dr. John Fitzwilliam, 26 January 1688/9, reprinted in Letters 193. On those of Samuel Pepys, see his letter to Richard Raines, judge of the high court of the Admiralty, 7 June 1687, Pepysian MSS, Administrative Letters, 13: 128–29, cited in Bryant 3: 216. 68 “Evidamment que le grand Dieu a esté mon véritable libérateur. Ainsy j’admireray et célébreray toujours les merveilles de sa providence et la grandeur de sa miséricorde dont il fait me sentir de si doux et si puissants effets” (France 355).

252  Gillian Weiss 69 Jean Calvin, The Mynde of the Godly and Excellent Lerned Man M. Jhon Caluyne: What a Faithfull Man, Whiche Is Instructe in the Worde of God, Ought To Do, Dwellinge amongest the Papistes (Ipswich: Jhon Oswen, 1548). On Calvin and sixteenth-century Nicodemism, see Zagorin, chap. 4. 70 Antoine Quartier, L’esclave religieux et ses avantures (Paris: Daniel Hortemels, 1690) was annotated by Cocard. On “liberatory imposture and redemption through fraud” in d’Aranda and Quartier, see Weiss, Captives and Corsairs, chap. 3. 71 Within the abundant scholarship on multi-directional religious dissimulation among peoples of the book, see especially Stewart 439–90; Miller. 72 I am grateful to Alexandra Ganser for this observation. For her analysis of pirates as both subversive and stabilizing “coastal figurations,” see “Pirate Science” 115–35. 73 For instance, Jean Graverol, Instructions pour les Nicodemites . . . (Amsterdam: Abraham Wolfgang, 1687). On the condemnation of nouveaux convertis by exiles, see Cherdon 47–65; Linden, chap. 3. 74 “Plusieurs d’entre vous ont esté captifs en Barbarie, mais ils savent presentement par experience que la Barbarie et humaine en comparaison de nôtre ingrate Patrie, & que le Mahometans sont des Agneux aux prix de ces Chrêtiens qui se disent convertisseurs.” [Antoine Le Page], Exhortation à la vigilance chrestienne, et la mort heureuse, ou Deux sermons . . . (Rotterdam, Netherlands: Abraham Acher, 1686), 11.

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Printed Anderson, Sonia P. An English Consul in Turkey: Paul Rycaut at Smyrna, 1667– 1678. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989. Aranda, Emanuel d’. Relation de la captivité, et liberté du sieur Emanuel de Aranda, mené esclave à Alger en l’an 1640 et mis en liberté l’an 1642. Brussels: Jean Mommart, 1656. Argenti, Philip Pandely, ed. Diplomatic Archive of Chios 1577–1841. 2 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1954. Arnaud, Eugène. Histoire des protestants de Provence: Du comtat Venaissin et de la principauté d’Orange. Paris: Grassart, 1884. Arvieux, Laurent d’. Memoires du Chevalier d’Arvieux, envoyé extraordinaire du Roy à La Porte, consul d’Alep, d’Alger, de Tripoli, & autre Échelles du Levant contenant ses voyages à Constantinople dans l’Asie, la Syrie, la Palestine, l’Egypte & la Barbarie, la description de ces païs, les religions, les moeurs, les coûtumes, le négoce de ces peuples, & leurs gouvernemens, l’histoire naturelle & les événemens les plus considérables, recüeillis de ses memoires originaux, & mis en ordre avec

A Huguenot captive in ‘Uthman Dey’s court 253 des réfléxions. Ed. Jean-Baptiste Labat. 6 vols. Paris: Charles-Jean-Baptiste Delespine, 1735. Auvry, Michel. Le miroir de la charité chrétienne ou relation du voyage que les religieux de l’ordre de Nôtre Dame de la Mercy du royaume de France ont fait l’année dernière 1662. En la ville d’Alger, d’où ils ont ramené environ une centaine de chrétiens esclaves. Aix: Jean-Baptiste & Etienne Roize, 1663. Aymon, Jean. Tous les synodes nationaux des eglises réformées de France, auxquels on a joint des mandemens roiaux et plusieurs lettres politiques sur ces matieres synodales. 2 vols. The Hague, Netherlands: Charles Delo, 1710. Benoist, Elie. Histoire de l’Edit de Nantes, contenant les choses les plus remarquables qui se sont passées en France avant & après sa publication, à l’occasion de la diversité des religions: Et principalement les contraventions, inexecutions, chicanes, artifices, violences, & autres injustices, que les reformez se plaignent d’y avoir souffertes, jusques à l’ Edit de révocation, en octobre 1685. Avec ce qui a suivi ce nouvel Edit jusques à présent. 5 vols. Delft, Netherlands: Adrien Beman, 1693–95. Bergna, Constanzo. Storia di Tripoli dal 1510 al 1850. Tripoli: Arti Grafiche, 1925. Bonet-Maury, Gaston. “La France et la rédemption des esclaves en Algérie à la fin du XVIIe siècle.” Revue des deux mondes 35 (1906): 898–923. Bono, Salvatore. “Récits d’esclaves au Maghreb, considérations générales.” Récits d’Orient dans les littératures d’Europe, XVIe–XIXe siècles. Paris: Presses de l’Université de Paris-Sorbonne, 2008. Borrel, Abraham. Histoire de l’eglise réformée de Nîmes: Depuis son origine en 1533 jusqu’à la loi organique du 18 germinal an X (7 avril 1802). 2nd ed. Toulouse: Société des livres religieux, 1856. Bryant, Arthur. Samuel Pepys. 3 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1933–38. Calvin, Jean. The Mynde of the Godly and Excellent Lerned Man M. Jhon Caluyne: What a Faithfull Man, Whiche Is Instructe in the Worde of God, Ought To Do, Dwellinge amongest the Papistes. Ipswich: Jhon Oswen, 1548. Cardozo, Abraham Miguel. Abraham Miguel Cardozo: Selected Writings. Trans. David J. Halperin. Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 2001. Catalogue général des manuscrits des bibliothèques publiques de France. Vol. 20. Paris: E. Plon, Nourrit et Cie, 1893. Charronnet, Charles. Les guerres de religion et la société protestante dans les HautesAlpes, 1560–1789. Gap: P. Jouglard, 1861. Cherdon, Laetitia. “La dénonciation du nicodémisme à l’époque de la révocation de l’Edit de Nantes.” Bulletin de la société de l’histoire du protestantisme français 148 (2007): 47–65. Cocard, Hugues. “Antoine Quartier (vers 1632–1702): voyageur, captif, mercédaire: un précurseur de l’orientalisme, au XVIIe siècle.” Analecta mercedaria 22 (2003): 123–301. The Conduct and Character of Count Nicholas Serini, Protestant Generalissimo of the Auxiliaries of Hungary. . . . Ed. O.C. London: Samuel Speed, 1664. Crémieux, Adolphe. “Un établissement juif à Marseille au XVIIe siècle.” Revue des études juives 55–56 (1908): 119–45, 99–123. Cumont, Franz. “Les antiquités de la Tripolitaine au XVIIe siècle.” Rivista della Tripolitania 2 (1925): 151–67.

254  Gillian Weiss Dan, Pierre. Histoire de Barbarie et de ses corsaires, divisée en six livres, où il est traité de leur gouvernemens, de leurs moeurs, de leurs cruautés, de leurs brigandages, de leurs sortilèges & de plusieurs autres particularités remarquables. Ensemble des grandes misères & des cruels tourmens qu’endurent les chrestiens captifs parmi ces infidèles. Paris: Pierre Rocolet, 1637. Davis, Robert. “Counting European Slaves on the Barbary Coast.” Past and Present 172.1 (2001): 87–124. Delafosse, Marcel. “Les Rochelais au Maroc au XVIIe siècle: Commerce et rachat de captifs.” Revue d’histoire des colonies 35 (1948): 70–83. Delmas, Jacques. “Essai sur l’histoire de Seyne-les-Alpes.” Mémoires de l’Académie de Vaucluse 3 (1903): 21–39, 169–224, 273–345. Dewière, Rémi. “Le discours historique de l’estat du royaume de Borno, genèse et construction d’une histoire du Borno par un captif de Tripoli au XVIIe siècle.” Afriques. Débats, méthodes et terrains d’histoire 4 (2013). http://afriques.revues. org/1170. Dewière, Rémi. “L’esclave, le savant et le sultan: représentations du monde et diplomatie au sultanat du Borno (XVIe-XVIIe siècles).” Thèse de doctorat d’histoire. Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, 2015. Duprat, Anne, and Émilie Picherot, eds. Récits d’Orient dans les littératures d’Europe, XVIe-XIXe siècles. Paris: Presses de l’Université de Paris-Sorbonne, 2008. Evelyn, John. The History of the Three Late, Famous Impostors, Viz. Padre Ottomano, Mahomed Bei and Sabatai Sevi the One, Pretended Son and Heir to the Late Grand Signior, the Other, a Prince of the Ottoman Family, but in Truth, a Valachian Counterfeit, and the Last, the Suppos’d Messiah of the Jews, in the Year of the True Messiah, 1666: With a Brief Account of the Ground and Occasion of the Present War between the Turk and the Venetian : Together with the Cause of the Final Extirpation, Destruction and Exile of the Jews Out of the Empire of Persia. London: Henry Herringman, 1669. Evesque, Jacques. “Les Protestants et la marine à l’époque de la révocation de l’Edit de Nantes.” Neputunia 158 (1985): 1–5. Féraud, L. Charles. Annales tripolitaines. Ed. Nora Lafi. Paris: Bouchène, 2005. Reprint Tunis and Paris: Librairie Tournier and Librairie Vuibert, 1927. Fontenay, Michel. “Le Maghreb barbaresque et l’esclavage méditerranéen aux XVIe et XVIIe siècles.” Cahiers de Tunisie 44.3–4 (1991): 7–43. France, Henri de, ed. “Relation de la captivité de M. Brassard à Alger.” Bulletin de la société de l’histoire du protestantisme français 27 (1878): 349–55. Friconneau, Constant, and Robert Petitpré. “Captifs du pays des Olonnes en Afrique du Nord vers 1650.” Bulletin de la société Olona 126 (1988): 11–13. Galland, Antoine. Histoire de l’esclavage d’un marchand de la ville de Cassis, à Tunis. Ed. Catherine Guénot and Nadia Vasquez. Paris: Editions de la bibliothèque, 1992. Galland, Antoine. Relation de l’esclavage d’un marchand de la ville de Cassis, à Tunis. Ed. Louis Mathieu Langlès. Paris: Jourdain, 1810. Ganser, Alexandra. “Pirate Science, Coastal Knowledge: Chorographies of the American Isthmus in the Late Seventeenth Century.” Agents of Transculturation: Border-Crossers, Mediators, Go-Betweens. Ed. Sebastian Jobs and Gesa Mackenthun. Münster: Waxmann Verlag, 2013. 115–35. Gillier, Georges. “La destruction du temple de Seyne-Les-Alpes.” Bulletin de la société de l’histoire du protestantisme français 131 (1985): 215–17.

A Huguenot captive in ‘Uthman Dey’s court 255 Graverol, Jean. Instructions pour les Nicodemites, où aprés avoir convaincu ceux qui sont tombez de la grandeur de leur crime, on fait voir qu’aucune violence ne peut dispenser les hommes de l’obligation de professer la verité. Amsterdam: Abraham Wolfgang, 1687. Green, Mary Anne Everett, and Francis Henry Blackbourne Daniell, eds. Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series, of the Reign of Charles II. 28 vols. London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1860–1939. Greene, Molly. A Shared World: Christians and Muslims in the Early Modern Mediterranean. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000. Guys, Pierre-Augustin. Marseille ancienne et moderne. Paris: Veuve Duchesne, 1786. Hérault, Lucien. Les larmes et clameurs des chrestiens, françois de nation, captifs en la ville d’Alger en Barbarie. Addresses à la reyne regente, mère de Louis roy de France et de Navarre. Paris: Denys Houssaye, 1643. Histoire de l’ordre sacré, royal et militaire de Notre-Dame de la Merci, rédemption des captifs, dédiée au roi: composée par les révérends pères de la Merci de la congrégation de Paris. Amiens: Imprimerie de Guislain Le Bel, 1685. Jal, Augustin. Abraham du Quesne et la marine de son temps. Paris: H. Plon, 1873. Journal des Savants 27 (1685): 329. Kattenberg, Lisa F. “The Free Slave. Morality, Neostoicism and Publishing Strategy in Emanuel d’Aranda’s Algiers and Its Slavery, 1640-1682.” Mediterranean Slavery and World Literature: Captivity Genres from Cervantes to Rousseau. Ed. Mario Klarer. London: Routledge, 2019. Forthcoming. Lange, Dierk. “Un document de la fin du XVIIe siècle sur le commerce transsaharien.” Revue française d’histoire d’outre-mer 66.242 (1979): 211–22. Laronde, André. “D. Girard et la Cyrénaïque: le regard d’un captif français en Barbarie au XVIIème siècle.” Studi in memoria di Lidiano Bacchielli. Rome: L’Erma di Bretschneider, 2003. 229–34. Lefèvre, Amédée. “Histoire du service de santé de la marine et des écoles de médicine navale.” Archives médicine navale 1–7 (1864–67): 100–22, 417–40; 229–52; 62–92, 256–77, 627–53; 142–65, 328–49, 486–510; 119–44, 300–27, 500–31; 118–47, 271–302, 452–84; 90–124, 255–73, 437–63. Lehr, Henry. Les protestants d’autrefois: Sur mer et outre mer. Paris: Fischbacher, 1907. [Le Page, Antoine]. Exhortation à la vigilance chréstienne, et la mort heureuse, ou deux sermons . . . Rotterdam, Netherlands: Abraham Acher, 1686. Letters of Lady Rachel Russell: From the Manuscript in the Library at Wooburn Abbey: To Which Are Prefixed, an Introduction, Vindicating the Character of Lord Russell against Sir John Dalrymple, &c. and the Trial of Lord William Russell for High Treason, Extracted from the State Trials. 6th ed. London: J. Mawman, 1801. Le Vacher, Paul. Relation véritable, contenant le rachapt de plusieurs . . . Paris: Veuve du Pont, 1672. Linden, David van der. Experiencing Exile: Huguenot Refugees in the Dutch Republic, 1680–1700. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2015. Matar, Nabil. British Captives from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, 1563–1760. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2014. Matar, Nabil. “The Maghariba and the Sea: Maritime Decline in North Africa in the Early Modern Period.” Trade and Cultural Exchange in the Early Modern Mediterranean: Braudel’s Maritime Legacy. Ed. Maria Fusaro, Mohamed-Salah Omri, and Colin Heywood. London: I.B. Tauris, 2010. 117–37.

256  Gillian Weiss Michelin, Pierre, Guillaume Basire, Antoine Dachier, and Victor Le Beau. Le tableau de piété envers les captifs: Ou abregé contenant, avec plusieurs remarques, deux relations de trois redemptions de captifs faites en Afrique, aux villes & royaumes de Tunis & d’Alger en Barbarie, és années 1666. & 1667. Par les religieux de l’Ordre de la Tres-Sainte Trinité (apellez vulgairement à Paris Maturins), des quatre provinces qui composent leur chapitre general en France. Ensemble le martyre du venerable frère Pierre de la Conception, religieux du mesme ordre, souffert audit Alger le 19. juin de l’année dernière 1667. Châlons-en-Champagne: Jean Bouchard, 1668. Miller, Kathryn A. Guardians of Islam: Religious Authority and Muslim Communities of Late Medieval Spain. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008. Moreau, Yves. “Édition critique de la correspondance de Jacob Spon (1647–1685).” Thèse de doctorat en histoire des religions. Université Lyon 3, 2013. Moureau, François. “Quand l’histoire se fait littérature: De l’aventure personnelle au récit de captif et au-delà.” Captifs en Méditerranée (XVIe- XVIIIe siècles): Histoires, récits, legends. Ed. Moureau. Paris: Presses de l’Université de ParisSorbonne, 2008. 7–18. Omont, Henri Auguste. Inventaire sommaire des portefeuilles de Fontanieu conservés à la Bibliothèque nationale. Paris: Émile Bouillon, 1898. Pennell, C.R. “The Ottoman Empire in North Africa: A Question of Degree — Tripoli in the Seventeenth Century.” Studies on Ottoman Diplomatic History. Ed. Selim Deringil and Sinan Kuneralp. Vol. 5. Istanbul: Isis, 1990. 35–55. Pennell, C. R., ed. Piracy and Diplomacy in Seventeenth-Century North Africa: The Journal of Thomas Baker, English Consul in Tripoli, 1677–1685. Rutherford, NJ: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 1989. Petitpré, Robert. “Tentative de rachat de deux captifs chaumois au Maroc en 1636.” Bulletin de la société Olona 97–98 (1981): 16–18. Popkin, Richard H. “Three English Tellings of the Sabbatai Zevi Story.” Jewish History 8.1–2 (1994): 43–54. Quartier, Antoine. L’esclave religieux et ses avantures. Paris: Daniel Hortemels, 1690. Romanelli, Pietro. Leptis Magna. Rome: Società editrice d’arte illustrata, 1925. Roncière, Charles de la. “Une histoire de Bornou au XVIIe siècle par un chirurgien français captif à Tripoli.” Revue de l’histoire des colonies 7.3 (1919): 73–88. Rossi, Ettore. Storia di Tripoli e della Tripolitania: Dalla conquesta araba al 1911. Ed. Maria Nallino. Rome: Instituto per l’Oriente, 1968. Rycaut, Paul. The History of the Turkish Empire from the Year 1623 to the Year 1677. London: J. Starkey, 1680. Scholem, Gershom Gerhard. Sabbatai Sevi: The Mystical Messiah, 1626–1676. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973. Scoville, Warren Candler. The Persecution of Huguenots and French Economic Development, 1680–1720. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1960. Spon, Jacob. Miscellanea eruditae antiquitatis. Frankfurt: J. H. Widerholdt, 1679. Spon, Jacob, and George Wheler. Voyage d’Italie, de Dalmatie, de Grèce et du Levant, fait en 1675 et 1676. Lyon: Antoine Cellier le fils, 1678. Stewart, Devin. “Dissimulation in Sunni Islam and Morisco Taqiyya.” Al-Qanṭara 34.2 (2013): 439–90. Tortat, Gaston. “Un livre de raison, 1639–1668: Journal de Samuel Robert, lieutenant particulier en l’élection de Saintes.” Archives historiques de la Saintonge et de l’Aunis 11 (1883): 323–406.

A Huguenot captive in ‘Uthman Dey’s court 257 Toschi, Paolo. Le fonti inedite di storia della Tripolitania. Intra, Italy: A. Airoldi, 1934. Touili, Mohamed. Correspondance des consuls de France à Alger 1642–1792: Inventaire analytique des Articles A.E. BI 115 à 145. Paris: Centre historique des archives nationales, 2001. Vallière, Paul de. “Histoire du régiment des gardes suisses de France (1567–1830).” Revue militaire suisse 58 (1911): 1–25, 107–27, 189–203, 381–406, 541–71, 621–40. Vaurigaud, Benjamin. Essai sur l’histoire des eglises reformées de Bretagne, 1535– 1808. 3 vols. Paris: Joel Cherbuliez, 1870. Vergé-Franceschi, Michel. Abraham Duquesne: Huguenot et marin du Roi-Soleil. Paris: Editions France-Empire, 1992. Weiss, Gillian. “Barbary Captivity and the French Idea of Freedom.” French Historical Studies 28.2 (2005): 231–64. Weiss, Gillian. Captives and Corsairs: France and Slavery in the Early Modern Mediterranean. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011. Xambo, Jean-Baptiste. “La course barbaresque au cœur des échanges et des conflits sur les deux rives de la Méditerranée: L’affaire Villareal, Marseille 1670–1682.” Revue d’histoire maritime 17 (2013): 99–121. Zagorin, Perez. Ways of Lying: Dissimulation, Persecution and Conformity in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990.

13 Two Arabic accounts of captivity in Malta Texts and contexts Nabil Matar

In the early modern Mediterranean, roughly from 1550 till 1800, large numbers of Muslim and Christian and Jewish Arabic speakers, men, women, and children were hauled to the slave markets in Malta, Spain, and Italy, to the galleys of France, and to the gaols of England.1 But current captivity studies remain predominantly focused on European Christian captives and North African Muslim captors with studies bearing titles such as the (notorious nineteenth-century) “The Scourge of Christendom” to the twenty-first-century “Muslim Masters, Christian Slaves,” and others. In this growing body of scholarship, little attention is paid to the Arab captives and their ordeals because all studies remain confined to a Eurocentric conceptualization of the Mediterranean, to a mare nostrum of Western Christians. But Muslim, Christian (Eastern Orthodox), and Jewish Arabic speakers represented the largest linguistic population in the Mediterranean basin. Stretching from the Atlantic shores of Morocco to the meeting point between Syria and Turkey at Iskenderun, Arabic speakers constituted the highest number of travelers, pilgrims, merchants, marauders, scholars, jobseekers, knowledge-seekers, sailors, and their families who sailed the sea. As they crossed from Tangier or Libyan Tripoli to Izmir or from Algiers to Rhodes or even from Sidon to Alexandria on board small and unprotected ships, they fell victim to various European attackers, ranging from British to Maltese to Russians: in 1658, the English captured Muslims from Algiers and sold them to Venice (Thurloe 7:566–67), and a century later, the Tunisian Ḥammūdah ibn Muḥammad Ibn ‘Abd al-‘Azīz (d. 1788), wrote that in Baḥr al-Shām, the Arabic name for the Mediterranean, mālik al-Mosko/the king of the Russians attacked British and French ships and captured the Tunisians on board (‘Abd al-‘Azīz 1:369). Others found themselves betrayed by European sea captains: instead of being delivered to their destinations, Muslim and Jewish passengers were sold in the slave markets of Valletta and Senj, Genoa and Cadiz, Venice and Livorno, and Palermo. They were also abducted from their homes by European colonists launching from Aghadir all the way to Tunis and reaching as far east as Jaffa: at the end of the eighteenth century, priest Mikhā’īl Brayk wrote that qurṣān al-baḥr/sea pirates attacked the Palestinian port of Jaffa and ‘amilū a‘mālan/committed many

Two Arabic accounts of captivity in Malta 259 deeds, including the seizure of two small ships (Brayk 34, 39, 57); by the early nineteenth century, Greek pirates were regularly attacking Beirut and other port cities on the eastern Mediterranean and taking captives. There is little doubt that from the late seventeenth century on, and with European navigational technology dramatically superseding that of the Ottoman regencies and of Morocco, the number of Arabic-speaking Muslim, Christian, and Jewish captives in European hands far exceeded the European captives in North Africa. The numbers were so high that they inspired a rather grim motif in the art of churches and public spaces in Central and Western Europe: the figure of the cowering, horse-trodden Arab/Moorish/Muslim captive. Although captives are as old as wars, they became prominent in early modern European pictorial representation: from the tapestries about the 1535 invasion of Tunis by Charles V (in Madrid and in Vienna) to Titian’s “Allegory of the Battle of Lepanto” (1573), from Pietro Tacca’s “Quattro Mori” in Livorno (1626) to the memorials in the Cathedral of St John in Valletta, from Venice’s Basilica di Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari to the mustached Turk in the Domplatz fountain in Salzburg (carved 1656–1661), from the two hand-tied men in the Maltese Church in Vienna (carved 1806, see Figure 13.1) to the ceiling painting in the baroque Giants’ Hall in the Hofburg of Innsbruck, subdued and chained Arabs/Moors/Muslims attest to the high number of captives in early modern European cities and galleys. These captives and their “Turkish” corollaries are listed or mentioned in various European sources, at the same time that there is much about them in the vast body of Arabic hagiographies, biographies, private and royal correspondence, ambassadorial reports, Sufi writings, and jurisprudential determinations produced in cities extending from Aleppo to Alexandria, Tunis, Algiers, and Rabat. Be that as it may, there is not likely to be as much about captivity in Arabic writings as there is in English, French, Italian, or German. In this chapter, I will start by proposing three reasons for the dearth of Arabic accounts and why it was that, notwithstanding staggering numbers of captives, writings about, and by, them are limited. I will then move to a description of two hitherto unknown captivity accounts in Malta, and conclude with comparisons and contrasts between the Arabic and the European depictions of captivity.

Dearth of Arabic accounts: three ideas First, Arab writers did not promote the kind of soul-baring that exposed the personal and the private to outside readers. Doubtless, and like all captives, many Arabic speakers who returned told their stories to kith and kin, but chroniclers and biographers did not include them in their tomes, and captives did not write them down. Although from the twelfth to fourteenth centuries, Arab authors became aware of “the ‘autobiographical act’”; whenever they wrote about personal emotions or suffering, they remained reticent and brief.2 Thus Ibn Khaldūn (d. 1406) mentioned the death of

Figure 13.1  Sculpture of two hand-tied men in the Maltese Church in Vienna, carved in 1806 Source: Nabil Matar.

Two Arabic accounts of captivity in Malta 261 all his family by drowning in one line in an otherwise detailed autobiography; in the late sixteenth century, Ibn al-Qāḍī (d. 1616), the court scribe in Marrakesh, was taken captive by the Maltese pirate monks and wrote poems invoking his ruler to ransom him, and later to thank him (al-Marīnī 122–23). But there was no description of his one-year ordeal in his chronicle of Moroccan history except for the following lines: 994 H. [1586]. The author of these notes, Aḥmad ibn Muḥammad [ibn al-Qāḍī], was captured at sea by the infidel enemies, may God almighty destroy them. 995 H. [1587]. I was freed and my brokenness healed at the hands of the great king, Mulay Ibn al-‘Abbās al-Mansūr on Monday 16 Dhu al-Qi‘da [17 October]. (Ibn al-Qāḍī 320) One year of captivity was equal to two sentences even though there had been quite a few complications. After being released from Ceuta and on his way to Tetouan, Ibn al-Qāḍī had been captured again and taken to Gibraltar. Fortunately, the Moroccan ransomer there was able to effect his release, but the captors, after learning how important Ibn al-Qāḍī was to the ruler, sent ships to capture him again. He escaped, although the ransomer, Hajj al-Falūs al-Miknāsī, was captured. These developments were not reported by Ibn al-Qāḍī but by court scribes eager to praise the ruler, Mulay Aḥmad al-Manṣūr, for effecting the release of captives. The reason why the captive did not write: Islam in its Arabic expression has no scriptural precedent that would endow captivity and its suffering with metaphoric or exegetical potential. The image of man as captive to sin prevails in Jewish and Christian imagination, inspired by references to actual captivities in the Bible, such as of Lot as a captive by the enemy and redeemed by Abram (Genesis 14) or of Paul as captive to sin and redeemed by Christ (Romans 7:23). In the vast majority of Christian captivity accounts published in Europe, captives described their suffering as if in imitation of Christ because captivity was not only a physical incarceration but also a spiritual one, a fall into the temptation of apostasy. The more the captive suffered, the more he was, or was made to be by the ghost writer of his account, Christ-like and therefore worthy of admiration and redemption. This trope of captivity as sin was not part of Qur’anic interpretation, and so captives did not elaborate about captivity; they did not have a scriptural model. That is why the Arabic word that nearly always appears about captivity is that of imtuḥin/he was made to submit to an ordeal by God – and so he had better submit and be patient for Inna Allāha ma‘a al-ṣābirīn (Qur’ān 2:153)/God is with those who “stand and wait,” to borrow from Milton’s sonnet. Captivity was part of the unknowable will of God, and the individual had to accept it without making too much of a fuss about it. To write about captivity and to highlight one’s suffering and torture smacked

262  Nabil Matar of disaffection with the fate that God had determined. Nor would any captive write flauntingly about escaping from captivity: again, as captivity was God’s doing, so was liberation. And the Arabic word used for liberation had no New Testament implications like the word “redemption”; it was fikāk from fakka: to untie.3 God of course could intervene, but there was no writing about heroic escape in the manner that so many Europeans, from Spanish Cervantes to English Joseph Pitts, touted their courage and intelligence. Second, nor was there in Arab–Islamic religious institutions the kind of internationalization of the figure of a captive that was effected through the vast reach of a centralized worldwide Catholic Church. Thus, Vincent de Paul (d. 1667), for instance, possibly a captive in Tunis for two years in the early 1600s, became the leader of a religious order that, after his canonization, extended beyond his native France to the rest of Christendom. For devotees and disciples alike, including the Sisters of Charity whose order was established by one of his followers: as they read his biography for spiritual instruction, the story of his captivity became their story of trial and victory over the infidels. And the story, of course, often was turned into paintings that decorated chapels and altars and church windows at home and in overseas missions. Through de Paul and others, the Euro-Catholic captive became a world figure of Christian endurance – and victory over Islam. In Spain and France, there were also the religious orders of the Mercederians and the Trinitarians, whose priests traveled to Muslim slave centers at regular intervals to negotiate for the release of captives. No similar religious orders existed in Islam – Sufis, quite effective in North Africa, were not as institutionalized and protected by monarchs in the manner of the priestly orders in Catholic Europe; actually they were often at odds with rulers, especially in Morocco. There were various waqfs/religious endowments the revenue from which was dedicated to ransoming captives, and, at intervals, rulers gave out money for the same purpose, as in the case of Ibn al-Qāḍī above, but all was to serve local communities and local needs. Nor were there collections in mosques for ransoming captives – as was done in churches, thereby making captives an integral part of the community’s religious life and memory. Finally, the North African polities did not have representatives permanently living in European port cities to visit the equivalent bagnios and list the names of their captured compatriots, or describe the conditions of captivity. The British, French, Italian, Maltese, and other archives are full of reports, letters, lists, and depositions about European captives in Tunis or Algiers or Salé or other ports in North Africa. While there were merchants from North Africa trading in Malta and southern France and Sicily, and visitors to London and Madrid and Paris and Naples, there is no record of continuous Arab residence there chiefly because the North African polities did not have the money to sustain representatives on a long-term basis (as was the case with France); actually, there was ongoing instability in the regencies and in Morocco that militated against regular funding for emissaries. But during

Two Arabic accounts of captivity in Malta 263 times of peace, North African rulers sent the ransomer, the fakkāk, a name that became exclusively associated with the liberation of captives. Only three Moroccans, however, wrote long accounts about their experiences; other ransomers and traders did not leave more than their names, and while they always prepared lists of captives’ names to present to their rulers (in order to account for spending the money he had given them for ransom), no list in the Maghrib has survived. Ottoman records in Egypt reflecting a more organized and institutionalized administration than that of the regencies, contain lists and correspondence about captives, but limited in number (Maḥmūd). Notwithstanding these factors, there were various writings about captivity in Arabic.

Two accounts – and others The first references to actual captivity by Europeans in the early modern period appear in the writings of Aḥmad ibn al-Qāḍī. While he himself wrote a bit about his captivity and liberation, the two accounts/descriptions of captivity below were written by authors to whom captives told their stories, and not by the captives themselves. The reason they were willing to tell their stories, and the reason why the listeners were willing to write them down, are telling: the accounts describe what I am calling “dignified captivity” – captivity that did not entail either personal humiliation or denigration of religion/Islam. The two captivities took place in Malta, one in 1713 and the other later in that century. Malta with its warrior monks was associated with humiliation and enslavement by Arab writers (as well as by the Greek Orthodox, as Greene has shown).4 But, in the two accounts, the captives were treated well. There are two reasons for the positive attitude, the one Maltese, the other Arabic. I will leave the latter reason to the end of this chapter. From the Maltese side: the two captives who were treated with dignity were versatile jurists – and the Hospitallers (who ruled over Malta and the native Maltese) admired literacy and education, even in captives (Muscat 19–20). As Kenneth Gambin has explained, there was a high level of illiteracy in Malta, so much so that even “some Hospitaller Knights, the cream of European noble families, found themselves in difficulty when it came to writing” (Gambin 15). The clergy were the only literate men on the island, and the arrival of educated captives, even though Muslim and “infidel,” could not but have excited them toward interaction and dialogue; perhaps they thought they could convert them to Christianity. Such captives were not held in chains or sent to the galleys, nor were they confined to jail in the Inquisitor Palace in Vittoriosa. Muḥammad ibn Muḥammad al-Ṭayyib al-Mālikī (al-Ḥanafī al-Maghribī) (al-Murādī 4:102–04) His captivity account consists of a disputation, quite common in Christian writings, and not uncommon among Muslim ambassadors: Aḥmad ibn

264  Nabil Matar Qāsim in the early seventeenth century and all subsequent Moroccan ambassadors to Western Europe until the end of the eighteenth century included reports of their victorious disputations. But, that a Muslim captive, rather than an official emissary, in the most zealously Christian of slaveholding sites, had the latitude to confront learned Christians, and of course, defeat them – is intriguing. Did the disputation actually happen – and we are told it lasted eight days? The account tells of a 19-year-old youth whose name, as all Arabic names, conveys a biography. He was Moroccan-born, Malikite by jurisprudence, and Hanafite by orientation – the latter suggesting an Ottoman connection, perhaps as a result of later becoming the mufti of Jerusalem. He told that he had sailed from Morocco to Tripoli in Libya and then to Cairo and its Azhar University where he studied for two years and eight months. On his return home to visit his mother, “he was captured by the ifranj/Franks who took him to Malta, bastion of infidelity, may God almighty protect him, where he remained for two years and some days.” In his short account, he told only of his disputations with the Maltese monks, one of whom knew Arabic. This monk had read much in Islamic lore and therefore posed a formidable intellectual and theological adversary. Muḥammad was quite competent in disputation – perhaps as a result of having completed his education at al-Azhar. One example will suffice: The monk said to me: “O Muhammadan, I read in your books of Hadith that the moon was divided into two halves: one half entered into one sleeve of the Prophet and the other into the other sleeve and then they emerged undivided from his chest pocket. But the size of the full moon is three times and one third the size of the earth and 333 and 1/3 years: what kind of superstitions are these?” I answered: “The meaning of what you read is this: Iblīs came to our lord Idrīs while he was sewing an egg shell with a needle. He said to him: ‘Can your God put the world inside the shell of this egg?’” The monk answered me emphatically: “Yes.” I said: “How?” He said: “Either God will enlarge the egg shell or shrink the world.” I replied: “Praise be to God: sometimes you allow Him things, and sometimes you don’t. So, if you grant this [to Idrīs], why don’t you grant it to our Prophet?” He turned pale and sucked in his breath, ‘abasa wa tawalla “he frowned and turned away” [Qur’ān 80:1]. I said: “How could He?” This was my addition, just to continue the discussion, for the entry of the two halves of the full moon into the two sleeves is rejected by all the notable Hadith recounters. But the monk did not know the consensus of our best scholars. Had I answered that it did not happen, he would have retorted that he had read it in our books and so he would not believe me. I therefore offered definite, rational proof because he would accept evidence from no other source.

Two Arabic accounts of captivity in Malta 265 The disputation is not original if only because the allegation about the moon was often repeated in Christian anti-Muslim polemic, although it had already been discredited by Edward Pococke and his pupil Henry Stubbe the century before (Matar, Henry). What is significant is the captive’s addition – suggesting a rationalistic approach to the history of the Prophetic Sira: he conceded that the story that many Muslims repeated had been false – and he was not unwilling to state that. Why the theological encounter with the monk was included in the captivity account was perhaps to show that Muḥammad had been precocious and therefore deserving of his position later in life as jurist in Jerusalem. The captivity and the disputation served as his curriculum vitae at the same time that it alerted readers to the ongoing danger of Malta – both physically and religiously. The account continues with other victorious disputations so much so that “I became famous among the Maltese monks and elders, and every time I walked in the market place, they showed their respect, and they did not send me to the galleys.” How Muḥammad left Malta is explained in one word: he had a vision. There was no need for elaboration because the main point of the account had been the vindication of Islam rather than the liberation of the Muslim. Muḥammad left Malta and traveled in the Arab world: Alexandria and Cairo, and then to Hijaz various times, then Yemen, Oman, Bahrain, Basra, Aleppo, and Damascus. He continued to the land of the Rūm/Turks after which he settled down in Jerusalem as its mufti. He must have told his story in Damascus where Khalīl al-Murādī, the Syrian author of an eighteenthcentury biographical dictionary, heard it. As it showed no humiliation of Islam, al-Murādī saw fit to record this captivity account – the only one in his 2,000-plus biographies.

Sayyid ‘Alī ibn al-Sayyid Aḥmad, from the tender branch of the people of Mūṣil (al-Dimashqī) The second and longer account is about a man who is captured with his family. Again, we meet a jurist and again we see him respected by the Maltese, including the “sultan” – i.e., the Grand Master. In this case, the jurist is a sayyid and son of a sayyid – claiming descent from the Prophet, and thus wearing a green turban; perhaps that is what made him stand out to the Maltese pirates who treated him well. The pirates sent him with his family to the captain’s cabin and offered them food and accommodation. He was, as his name tells us, Iraqi from Mosul, who told his story to a Damascene chronicler, al-Murtaḍā ibn Muṣṭafā ibn Ḥasan al-Dimashqī, who included it in his book about the ‘ajā’ib /wonders of the world. He had been living and teaching in Egypt and had traveled to Sidon in Lebanon to visit his relatives – reminding us of the transcontinental mobility of members of the republic of letters in Muslim society. On his way back, he had been captured by Maltese pirates operating in the eastern Mediterranean. By the early eighteenth century, the Ottoman navy had lost much of its ability to confront European marauders at sea and to protect subjects.

266  Nabil Matar Upon being captured, al-Sayyid submitted himself to God, telling his family: “God has granted us four blessings: life and wealth are His, but honor and religion He gave to us. O God, we lay our honor and religion before You, You are the steadfast.” But then followed what can only be described as a pleasant one-year vacation on a Mediterranean island. We were welcomed into the house of a certain khawājā/dignitary where we stayed until the end of Ramadan, fasting and breaking our fast every night over twelve kinds of succulent foods – including bee honey, and others. On the Ramadan Feast, his wife prepared a grand dinner for us, which she served on about twelve silver plates. This Christian woman continued to host us generously. We also held disputations with the monks of Christianity during the month of Ramadan, and God revealed the truth at our hands and defeated those who had blasphemed. We became famous among the Christians and so whenever Christians met with us, they honored us, showing great respect. The sultan of Malta ordered us to go to him, and when we reached him, he stood up from his chair and removed with his hand whatever he wore on his head – as is their custom. He walked towards me and my son Ismā‘īl, dressed as we were in the green turban. He led us to two chairs and patted me on my chest saying in his language: “Welcome and most welcome.” There was a Muslim captive in Malta who was one of my companions and known as Suleymān Chalabī. The sultan had appointed him to assist the Muslim captives, and so he served as translator because the sultan knew no other language except his mother tongue, Spanish. The sultan added in his language: “I will do to you what a truthful brother does to his brother.” He then consoled me saying: “This is the way of the world, and such.” He also gave a riyal to my son and then ordered the Christians who were holding us captive to lodge us in a separate house and to offer us money exceeding what we needed for our expenditures. The Grand Master Ramon Perellos y Roccaful (1697–1720) was in his midseventies, having spent most of his years building up the fleet and the fortifications of Malta. Either he had mellowed by 1713 or he commiserated with a fellow religious functionary: in either case, it is evident from the narrative Muḥammad told that the Maltese were quite willing to respect the month of Ramadan, to make concessions to the fasting captives, to prepare special foods for their ifṭār, and to show them respect. How the Maltese knew about all the customs surrounding Ramadan is not explained, nor of course when the month ended and the Eid was celebrated. Did captivity lead to what some scholars like to imagine as cross-cultural fertilization – or was it simply ‘Alī showing that not only he was respected, but his religion, too? Not unlike Catholic accounts of captivity that include miracles and visions of the Virgin Mary, al-Sayyid soon reported having two visions of the Prophet

Two Arabic accounts of captivity in Malta 267 Muḥammad. Importantly, the visions occurred right in the heart of the most Christian of bastions, and across from a church with a resounding bell: We stayed in Malta in comfortable conditions until after the Feast of Sacrifice [al-Aḍḥā]. We continued there for three months until winter had passed. All the time, and in front of our house, a church bell always rang and woke us up at night. One night, I saw the Prophet, God’s prayer and peace be upon him, coming to Malta near the house in which we were staying. He was on horseback, dressed in sable fur atop green, emerald broadcloth, and accompanied by soldiers, all from the Maghrib. He handed me a well-tried sword in its sheath and took me to his right side. As I stood there I woke up and was elated and told my family and everyone with me about my dream. A few days later, I dreamed that I was reading a book in the Small Mosque when I found a Hadith either by or about him [Prophet]. Suddenly, I saw a man in front of me, I mean, facing me, who asked me: “Why don’t you read the Hadith from the beginning?” I said: “What is the beginning?” He answered: “Joy has come, heed the advice.” I woke up elated and told my family everything, adding that God knows best and that we would leave for Tunis in two days. Freedom came not by a miracle or a vision but by al-Sayyid sailing to Tunis where he started lecturing around the country and receiving contributions to help him raise the ransom money for his family. Finally, he had the 5,000 riyals needed, a sum made possible by a generous contribution from the governor, who summoned the English balio and ordered him to take the money to Malta and bring back the family. After that, al-Sayyid and his family stayed in Tunis where he continued lecturing for another year.

Comparisons and contrasts So, what do these two accounts tell us about the characteristics and problematics of captivity in Arabic writing? Admittedly, two short accounts cannot compare with the dozens of accounts in the European corpus. Still, they and the few others show that the manners in which captives from both religious sides of the Mediterranean dealt with their experiences included similarities but also, in the case of the Arabic accounts, an important difference. First, al-Sayyid was captured with his wife. The presence of the female was the weakest link in the chain of honor. That is why, and from the start, al-Sayyid emphasized to his listener/writer that no harm was done to his wife, although some of her jewelry was stolen; actually, she had been smart enough to hide some in the swaddling bands of her newborn babe. But importantly, she had not been violated. This implicitness is similar to what is found explicitly in the writings of European women in North African captivity. In the eighteenth century,

268  Nabil Matar Euro-Christian women wrote accounts describing how they stood up to their North African captors and of course were never compromised sexually (Bekkaoui). Everybody, European and North African and Levantine, wanted to claim that captivity did not lead to sexual dishonor – but it is difficult to find a firsthand report or letter written by a European woman while she was in the throes of captivity. In Arabic, there are two harrowing letters by Lala Fatima at the end of the eighteenth century describing her brutal treatment in Malta. They describe the beatings she received at Maltese hands, causing her to abort her five-month-old fetus: “it was a complete body with hands and feet and head and round eyes,” she wrote in her letter to Mulay Sulaymān seeking his help (Razzūq 177–82; Matar, Europe 245–47). But there is no reference to sexual violence. Generally, it is not possible to determine how much Arab-Islamic women were abused in European captivity, although there are various episodes that are telling. A report in the Alexandria archive tells of a Muslim woman who was sold and resold seven times until her ship moored in Alexandria where she was ransomed; could she have not been sexually abused (Maḥmūd 129)? Mubāraka al-Sharīfīyya in Tangier must have been young to jump over the walls of the British bastion; one of the towers, the Irish Tower, still stands and is quite high (“Tuḥfat al-ikhwān,” fo. 391). Would she have remained unmolested in a British colony where the records at The National Archives in Kew describe a society of raging drunkenness, wifely abuse, riotousness, and with Colonel Kirke, the presumptive governor, at one point keeping a harem to himself? Still, many Muslim women were ransomed and returned, without being socially stigmatized. So, too, were European women. Actually, when an English captive rose to power as one of the wives of Mulay Ismā‘īl in Morocco (reg. 1672–1727), English merchants were perfectly happy to ask for her help and bribe her with presents: she had gained honor rather than dishonor (Matar, Britain 100). Did Europeans and North Africans find themselves compelled to re-negotiate the concept of honor in the context of Mediterranean captivity? But then, a late eighteenth-century anonymous author was livid about dishonor: During the French invasion of Egypt in 1798, the French defeated one of the Mamluke governors and sabū/enslaved the women of his harem; a few pages later, the author angrily wrote how the French were fornicating with the women captives (“Nubdha” 26v). Second, conversion occurred widely among all communities of captives. In both accounts, the captives did not even allude to the possibility of their conversion, showing instead how they had confronted the captors theologically. But whether as a result of coercion, conviction, or expediency, many captives converted out of their religion into the religion of the captor. Sometimes they gained freedom, sometimes not. European records in Italy, France, Spain, Malta, and England, with their powerful church institutions, recorded the original names of Muslim captives and their baptismal names. Because conversion necessitated baptism, and because baptism could only be administered by the priest/the church, registers were kept and therefore

Two Arabic accounts of captivity in Malta 269 it is possible to identify hundreds of Muslims, often described as “Moors” or “Turks” or “Blackamoors” who converted to Christianity. Imtiaz Habib listed every conversion of a Moor/Blackamoor that took place in London and its environs until 1677; de Cottenberg listed the names of dozens of converts in Italy. But there was also active resistance. None is more subtle than the story of Aḥmad ibn Yaḥya al-Zawwāwī (al-Yūsufī), who was captured in Malta sometime in the late 1620s and remained on the island for a few years. Again, an intriguing biography in the name: Zawwāwī, historically a family name from Oman – so from a migrant family possibly from the days of the seventh-century conquests; and Yūsufī – following a Moroccan Sufi tarīqa. The first date he records in a manuscript is 19 April 1629 and the last is 8 July 1633. Again, he was literate and a jurist: thus, his dignified captivity. He was given the easy task of copying Christian commentaries in Arabic – but he hated that task because it was sacrilegious for him to write about fallacies such as the trinity. And, of course, he knew that what he was copying was to be used for the conversion of his coreligionists. So, and aware that his master did not read what he wrote, he would copy page after page, and then when he came to some objectionable doctrine, he would insert his own words in order to warn the targeted Muslim reader about theological error. An example. After copying a passage on the trinity, he inserted the following: Allāh is my love and upon Him I rely. God almighty is one in essence, attributes, and actions – against what the Christians believe. It is necessary that we believe that God almighty exists, but not as we exist, because our existence is limited and circumscribed. Almighty God is absolute. Also, what should be upheld is that God almighty spoke to Moses, who is His prophet and messenger; and to ‘Ῑsa, who is His Spirit; and to Muḥammad, who is His love, may God’s prayer be upon him and upon them all . . . al-Ḥaqq/Truth, blessed and almighty, has no above or below, no ahead or before, no right or left . . . May God guide us, we Muslims, to what satisfies and pleases the prophets and the saints. (MS A 11, 184r–185r) In the privacy of his scriptorium, al-Zawwāwī wrote against his captors and their false belief about Jesus, the prophet whom he always praised. For him, the captivity of God and of Christ in false doctrines was more devastating than his own physical captivity: and even though he was held captive by Christians, he at no point turned to attack Christ; on the contrary, he was passionate in defending him from what to him were false doctrines. In al-Zawwāwī, we encounter the not-unusual situation of a Muslim captive defending Christ, the prophet of his captors, in highly sophisticated theological language – of a man more concerned about religious truth than his own plight. Of course, al-Zawwāwī prayed for liberation, but throughout, he struggled to liberate himself from the captivity of a false theology,

270  Nabil Matar clinging to his faith by his counter-writing and by citing all dates in the Hijri calendar. Giving expression to his religious convictions must have supported him in his captivity and may have given him hope, as he expressed on the last page of one of his manuscripts: although his hand would wither, what it had written would endure, “May God have mercy on a servant who worked for [reward] after death” (MS A 10, 247r). Third, money was of paramount importance in captivity: the Maltese and the Algerians, the Spanish, and the Saletians all commodified the captives. Wolfgang Kaiser has examined the economic side of captivity at great length. In the case of al-Sayyid above, payment of ransom was at the heart of the matter of captivity: as he explained, the Grand Master had been willing to free him without any payment, but the monks alerted him that such an action would undermine future financial transactions. He was, after all, worth 5,000 riyals – perhaps one of the ways in which the Grand Master managed to increase the wealth of the order, for which he was remembered. With money in the balance, and it was always there, the question should still be asked about the role of religion in early modern captivity – and more specifically about how much the story was, as has been alleged, about Christian slaves and Muslim masters. After all, Jews were taken captive, as Godfrey Wettinger has shown in his magisterial work on slavery in Malta and Gozo from 1000 to 1800. And, in Morocco there is evidence that Jewish subjects were ransomed from Christian captors, as was the case during the reign of Mualy Aḥamd al-Manṣūr at the end of the sixteenth century when Jews went to him for captives whom they exchanged for their kinsmen. In 1535, the son of Dei Rossi, an Italian Jew, was held captive by pirates (Stillman 291n7), and over two centuries later, in 1757, a Jew by the name of Būlus Dāwūd Mūsā Monsius, writing about his spiritual journey, stated that while sailing to Rome his ship was attacked by Brusyān (Prussian?) pirates and taken to Sardinia where on 26 December 1758, he converted to Catholic Christianity. His name became Būlus ‘Abd Yasū’ al-Masīḥ (MS 551, fo. 28). Meanwhile, Muslims not only captured but also enslaved fellow Muslims: How could you let a Muslim go through the ordeal of slavery (the verb is imtuḥin), the famous scholar from Timbukto, Aḥmad Bābā al-Tinbaktī, confronted Mulay Aḥamd after his capture and transportation to Marrakesh in 1591 – attesting to the enslavement of sub-Saharan Muslims? He and others, according to an eighteenth-century historian, were hauled “in chains with their women, while their libraries were looted. He fell off his camel and broke his leg. They stayed in Marrakesh for two years” and only returned to their homeland after the death of al-Manṣūr in 1603 (al-‘Ifrānī 115). Meanwhile, Christians in the Ottoman Empire often took on the role of negotiating the liberation of their Ottoman Muslim compatriots: it was Armenian Ottomans who bargained for their Muslim compatriots in captivity in Malta: there are numerous letters in the Damietta and Alexandria archives attesting to the activities of these nasara (Maḥmūd, app. 10 and 11). At the same time, there is evidence of Christian enslavement of other Christians: sometime in the latter part of the seventeenth century an English treatise denounced the

Two Arabic accounts of captivity in Malta 271 capture of Greeks by British ships, “pull’d and haul’d by the Press-Masters like dogs out of the Merchant-Ships,” and then urged to convert to Anglicanism (“The Case”). In 1713, the Memoires d’un Protestant was published, which tells the story of Marteilhe, who was enslaved on the French Catholic galleys (Marteilhe); half a century later, European Catholics were urged to capture Orthodox co-religionists by the Pope: in 1757, the Aleppan priest Mīkhā’īl Brayk reported that the Pope had excommunicated Cyril, the Constantinople-based patriarch, and to punish the patriarch’s congregation, he encouraged (Catholic) “pirates to capture the Orthodox [Christians] when they found them at sea” (Brayk, Tārīkh 55). This sheds a dark light on the papacy of Pope Benedict XIV (reg. 1740–1758).5 Research into the Arabic historical records will show variances from the Eurocentric history of Mediterranean captivity and ransom because Islamic societies, both Ottoman and Moroccan, were by their very nature, multireligious, with significant Christian and Jewish populations. The presence of these populations, who were active in trade, travel, and exchange with the lands of the Christians, resulted in a social complexity and an ethnic mix that did not exist in the exclusionary religious/denominational societies of Britain, Spain, or France. In this period, it would have been inconceivable for Britain, Spain, or France to send a ransomer-ambassador who was not a Protestant or a Catholic (respectively); and yet the Ottoman regency of Algeria and the kingdom of Morocco sent Jewish ambassadors with full diplomatic authority – and not like Samuel Pallache, a rare Jewish intermediary (but not an ambassador), employed by the Protestants of England and Holland. By contrast, Mulay Ismā‘īl of Morocco sent an ambassador to England who was an Armenian, Bentura de Razy, showing the ethno-religious diversity of the early modern Islamic polity. And when the English decided to hold the ambassador captive in his rented house behind Westminster in London because of Moroccan capture of Britons, he wrote to remind them that he was a Christian and then threatened to inform his Muslim ruler of that hostile act “against the Law of Nations” (Matar, “Last Moors”). Fourth, the two Arabic accounts show numerous similarities with European accounts. But there is one factor that is strikingly different: European accounts invariably either demonized captors or “Orientalized” them. In both cases, they invented them – elaborating on their sodomy, or deviant religious worship, or uncouthness, or brutality, or lasciviousness, or stupidity. Sometimes, they found things to praise in their Muslim captors – piety, and for Protestant writers, the Muslims’ apparent antiidolatry/Catholicism. But even so, the captives were able to outwit their captors and escape or outsmart them and sleep with their consorts, or get them drunk and burn their ships. And the sheer fact that they wrote about them, described them, “explained” them, showed how they believed they had gained epistemological control by writing and publishing about them: they “captured” the captors. Their accounts, widely disseminated and popularized, could not but have left their French or English or other European readers – many accounts were translated – confronting a world

272  Nabil Matar of otherness, of danger, of un-Christianity, of Moors, and Turks, and Berbers (“Kabyls”), and Arabs – all nameless and swarthy “Mahometans” of Barbary (a derogatory name that never appears in any Arabic source). For our two Arab captives, the Maltese/the Christian captors were of course the Other and therefore had to be defeated theologically, as both captives claimed they had done. But the difference in their accounts, as well as in numerous other references in Arabic captivity writings and fiction, is that neither of the captives tried to invent/construct the Maltese Christians in order to denigrate or demonize them. There was no mention of porkeating, uncleanliness, uncircumcision, brutalization, cross/idol worship, or shirk/polytheism – the markers of Christian Otherness in Islamic polemic. Nor did such construction appear even in fiction, and even in the fantastic worlds of medieval sagas. The final defeat of the Franks, the Arabic name for the Crusaders, at the hands of Baybars in the thirteenth century, produced many tales of captivity, romance, escape, and heroism; and in the Arabian Nights, there were (rather unusually) tales set in the Alexandria–Genoa axis about captivity and jinn-effected liberation (Matar, “Christians”). But even in these exuberant worlds, there was no denigration. Enmity yes, but not invention. The reason for this difference in representing captivity lies in the unwillingness among Arab captives and their narrators alike to describe humiliation and degradation, as I mentioned earlier. And so, for the experiences of captivity to be dignified, the captors had to be dignified, not vicious and brutal and deviant. Dignified captors ensured dignified captivity and dignified narratives – very much unlike the European captivity accounts that posited an Other who was totally different in skin color and belief, custom and language, diet and clothing, and morality and polity; in his account, Joseph Pitts, the English captive in Algiers (published 1704) even posited alterity in the way that Mahometans went to the bathroom (248). European accounts were produced in the context of emerging religious/ denominational and racial identities, and so the more they showed the captive suffering, the more he won support – and the more money the Mercedarians and the Trinitarians could raise. As a result, the captors were demonized to the point where book frontispieces showed images of the most horrendous tortures carried out on innocent Christians. Without a concept of nationalism, captives from the Ottoman dominions and from Morocco did not use captivity to bolster patriotism or to generate racial or religious opposition. And with no plastic or visual arts in Islam, Muslims did not memorialize the humiliation of the Euro-Christian captives in chains for later generations to admire.

Conclusion Captivity was always on the minds of Arab sailors and sea travelers and traders. Long before there was Hugo Grotius and John Selden, there was Ibn

Two Arabic accounts of captivity in Malta 273 Rushd and his fatāwa/determinations on what one historian has called fiqh al-biḥār/jurisprudence of the sea (Belhemīsī). There were also invocations for escaping from pirates during sea crossings: thus du‘ā al-baḥr/Invocation at sea. And, there were proverbs drawn from daily experience: The month of April whitens the hair of the captive; Luck is in three things: finding a husband, crossing the sea safely, and [escaping] captivity; Morning in Cieza is like death or captivity, and others (Corriente 180, 184, 206). In 1627, Aḥmad ibn Muḥammad al-Maqqarī wrote about the terror of pirates as he sailed to Egypt from Morocco: we feared, he recalled, the attack of the enemy, “may God destroy them and relieve the Muslims, especially of cursed Malta.” And then he repeated a proverb: “whoever escapes the harm of the Maltese will have received divine help” (al-Maqqarī 1:40). But from Muhammad’s Morocco to al-Sayyid’s Iraq, the Arab captive did not describe torture and humiliation; he had no “suffering servant” model. Instead, Arabic accounts of captivity told the stories of men such as Muḥammad and al-Sayyid and others, in their own language and from their own perspective, speaking – and so the subaltern did speak (per Spivak) – sometimes very much like their European counterparts. Listeners and readers may not have believed all the stories they heard from captives, as of course was the case among returning European captives: but at least, they were not given a dose of lurid invention about the naṣāra, the Christians. Be that as it may, Arab captives spoke with a distinct difference: to emphasize the relationship of man to God. As al-Sayyid said: captives were in God’s hands and, therefore, the captivity account was the story of God’s will in history, not of man’s suffering or of man’s complaints. That is why there was no need to describe the full details of the experience as European authors did: where the latter invoked the models of suffering in Job or in Jesus, and wrote about every episode during their captivity in the light of their biblical interpretation of their situation, the Arabic authors did not elaborate on their personal centrality in God’s plan. Both Christian and Muslim captives of course invoked God, but the former always sought to emphasize their “I” and its endurance in the cause of God in a manner that the latter did not – pointing instead to the “He” and His will. Further, many accounts written in the European or American context of North African captivity served very selfish and non-religious motives: from Edward Webbe’s 1590 account that was intended as a job application to Queen Elizabeth, to American John Foss whose 1798 account described his own captivity and liberation as a celebration of the American nation, to James Leander Cathcart who wrote his bitter account to vindicate his public service,6 to the dozens of captives and frauds who wrote to make money, captives wrote not for God but themselves. The Arabic account was not an opportunity either to justify oneself or to attack the Christian Other – for the Christians, too, captors and victors as they were, were in God’s hands. The Arabic captivity account was not an ideological manifesto, nor a political or cultural pronouncement against the

274  Nabil Matar Christian enemy at sea or on land. Rather, it was the dignified recollection of a test by God and of the demonstration of His mercy to those who stand and wait.

Notes 1 I do not include in this study accounts of captivity by Muslims in America. Although there were many short descriptions of them and of their views, the only Arabic account that has survived is by Ibn Said. 2 They tried to “demonstrate their part in the passage of history – and a major element in the concept of history was the transmission of authority, legitimacy, and descent.” Arab writers were brief in describing the personal – unless it could be seen as locating them in “their appropriate channels of transmission” (Reynolds 241–44). It is interesting that the Arabic word khallaṣa has the same implication as 3  “redeem” and is actually used in Christian Arabic theology. In the Arabic of Islam, it can also be associated with divine action, although not in .  The word was not used in Arathe Christian sense: bic sources about the ransoming of captives. www.almaany.com/ar/dict/ ar-ar/%D8%AE%D9%84%D8%B5/. At the same time, the Qur’ān uses the word fidya (3:91) to mean ransom, but it was not used in the Arabic accounts of captivity. But, in Christian Arabic theology, the word was associated with redemption by Christ. 4 See also Earle 23–94 and the exhaustive study by Godfrey Wettinger of Slavery in the Islands of Malta and Gozo, ca. 1000–1812, the most valuable study of the plight of Muslims on the islands. Wettinger, however, did not include Arabic sources. See also Godechot 105–13; Bono 351–97. 5 Much work remains to be done on Christian and Muslim Arabs and others in the Ottoman regions who were enslaved during local and internecine feuds. For instance, in 1733, there is a record of Marguerite, daughter of Sarkis, an Armenian Orthodox from Persia, who had been a slave among the Turks/Mamlukes until she was ransomed by one Jibrā’īl, who converted her to Catholicism and then married her (Carali 1:107). See also 108, and the references to “asra”/captives in the account of the conflicts in south Lebanon (Ma’lūf 204–05). See also the reference to the sale of women for 10 dirhams each (217). 6 I am grateful to Mr. Ian Larson for discussing these texts with me.

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Two Arabic accounts of captivity in Malta 275 Carali, Paul. Les Syriens en Egypte. Héllopolis, Egypt: Syrian Press, 1928. 1:107. “The Case of the Poor Grecian Seamen.” The National Archives, Kew, SP 105/109. de Cottenberg, Rudt. “La baptȇme des musulmans esclaves à Rome aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles.” Melanges de l’école française de Rome. 101 (1989): 9–181. al-Dimashqī, Murtaḍā ibn Muṣṭafā ibn Ḥasan (1713). “Kitāb tahdhīb al-aṭwār fī ‘ajāyib al-amṣār.” Berlin MS Sprenger 23/a, microfilm reel 1369, University of Jordan, Center for the Study of Bilād al-Shām. Earle, Peter. Corsairs of Malta and Barbary. London, 1970. Gambin, Kenneth. Two Death Sentences by the Inquisition Tribunal of Malta, 1639. Malta: Midsea Books, 2006. Godechot, Jacques. “La course maltaise le long des côtes barbaresques a la fin du XVII siècle.” Revue Africaine 1st and 2nd trimester, Algiers (1952): 105–13. Greene, Molly. Catholic Pirates and Greek Merchants: A Maritime History of the Mediterranean. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010. Habib, Imtiaz. Black Lives in English Archives: 1500–1677. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008. Ibn al-Qāḍī, Aḥmad. Laqṭ al-farā’id. Ed. Muḥammad Ḥajjī. Rabat, 1976. Ibn Said, Omar. A Muslim American Slave. Ed. Ala Alryyes. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2011. al-‘Ifrānī, Muḥammad al-Ṣaghīr. Ṣafwat man intashar min akhbār al-qarn al-ḥāḍī ‘ashar. Ed. ‘Abd al-Majīd Khayalāī, al-Dār al-Bayḍā’, Markiz al-Turāth. 2005. Kaiser, Wolfgang, ed. Le commerce des captifs. Rome: École française, 2008. Maḥmūd, Jamāl Kamāl. al-Qarṣana fī-l-Baḥr al-Mutawassiṭ fī-l-‘aṣr al-Uthmānī. Cairo: al-Hay’a al-Miṣriya al-‘āma li-l-kitāb, 2015. Ma‘lūf, ‘Issa Iskandar. Dawānī al-quṭūf fī tārīkh banī al-Ma‘lūf. B‘abda: Ottoman Press, 1907–08. al-Maqarrī, Ahmad Ibn Muhammad. Nafḥ al-ṭīb. Ed. Maryam Qāsim Ṭawīl and Yusuf ‘Ali Ṭawīl. 11 vols. Beirut, 1995. 1: 40. al-Marīnī, Najāt, ed. Shi ‘r Abī al-‘Abbās Aḥmad ibn al- Qāḍī. Casablanca: al-Najāḥ al-Jadīda, 2004. Marteilhe, John. The Huguenot Galley-Slave. New York: Leypoldt & Holt, 1867. Matar, Nabil. Britain and Barbary, 1589–1689. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005. Matar, Nabil. “Christians in the ‘Arabian Nights.’” The Arabian Nights in Historical Context: Between East and West. Ed. Saree Makdisi and Felicity Nussbaum. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. 131–53. Matar, Nabil, trans. Europe through Arab Eyes, 1578–1727. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011. Matar, Nabil, ed. Henry Stubbe and the Beginnings of Islam. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013. Matar, Nabil. “The Last Moors: Maghariba in Britain, 1700–1750.” Journal of Islamic Studies. 14: 37–58. al-Murādī, Muḥammad Khalīl. Silk al-durar fī a‘yān al-qarn al-thāmin ‘ashar. Baghdad: al-Muthannā, 1966. Muscat, Joseph. Slaves on Maltese Galleys. Malta, 2004. “Nubdha fī bayān qiṣat mashyakhat Faransā wa ḥurūbiha wa qudūmihā li-barr Miṣr” (c. 1792). MS 663. Vienna National Library (Flugel 932).

276  Nabil Matar Pitts, Joseph. A True and Faithful Account of the Religion and Manners of the Mahommetans in Piracy, Slavery, and Redemption. First published 1704. Ed. Daniel J. Vitkus, introd. Nabil Matar. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001. Razzūq, Muḥammad. Dirāsāt fī tārīkh al-Maghrib. Rabat: Ifrīqiyā al-Sharq, 1991. Reynolds, Dwight F., et al., eds. Interpreting the Self: Autobiography in the Arabic Literary Tradition. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. Stillman, Norman A. The Jews of Arab Lands: A History and Source Book. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1979. Thurloe, John. A Collection of the State Papers of John Thurloe, Esq. Ed. Thomas Birch. London, 1742. “Tuḥfat al-ikhwān wa mawāhib al-imtinān fī manāqib Sīdī Raḍwān [al-Janawī].” Rabat National Library, MS Kāf, 154. Wettinger, Godfrey. Slavery in the Islands of Malta and Gozo, ca. 1000–1812. San Gwann: PEG, 2002. al-Zawwāwī, Aḥmad ibn Yaḥya (c. 1633). MS A 10, Provincial Library, Valletta, Malta (no title). al-Zawwāwī, Aḥmad ibn Yaḥya (c. 1633). MS A 11, Provincial Library, Valletta, Malta (no title).

Index

Aartsbroederschap der alderheylighste Dryvuldigheyt see Broederschap A Christian Turned Turk (1612) 113 ˁAbd al-Malik 104 acculturation 11–12, 128, 133, 139 Actes and Monuments (1563) 67, 119 Aegyptiaca Servitus (1610) 167–68, 177–79 Aḥmad Ibn al-Qāḍī 261, 263 Aḥmad al-Manṣūr (Sultan) 10, 99–106, 261, 270 Aḥmad Ḥāmid ibn Muḥammad 190 Aicha, Ben 189, 191, 193–94 al-Murtaḍā ibn Muṣtafā ibn Ḥasan al-Dimashqī 265 Al-Kasr Kebir/Alcazar see battle Alexandria (Iskenderiyye) 170–75, 178, 259, 265, 268, 272 Algiers 1–2, 14–15, 30, 41, 49, 70–71, 78, 81, 84, 90, 92, 106, 114–16, 118, 123n16–19, 134, 146, 202–03, 223–27, 229, 239, 258, 272; Dey of 188–90, 192, 243; see also siege Algerine Crisis 116 American Independence 114 American Revolutionary War 91 Anglo-Ottoman alliance 69 Anna, Baldassarre de 208–09, 211 Anne (Queen) 189, 195 Anthonisz, Cornelis 32–33 Antwerp 30 apostasy 11, 113, 128, 261 appeasement 78, 90–91, 93 Arab slave trade 148, 150, 152 Aranda, Emmanuel de 203, 235 Atlantic slave trade 60 Atlas Mountains 101, 105 Aubin, Penelope 116

bagnio (prison) 146, 262 Barbarossa, ‘Arudj 223–24 Barbarossa, Chaireddin/Hayreddin/ Khayr al-Din 2, 26, 31, 35–36, 80, 169, 223–30 Battle of: Al-Kasr Kebir/Alcazar (1578) 10, 100–02; Djerba (1560) 31, 169; Lepanto (1571) 14–15, 169, 226–27, 259; Preveza (1538) 225 Beserte (Bizerte) 36, 47 Blackamoors see Moors Bodin, Jean 79–81, 87 Brassard, Isaac 243–44 Braudel, Fernand 78, 169, 225 Braun, Georg 33–34 Britain 7, 78, 85–86, 187, 196, 271 Broederschap der alderheylighste Dryvuldigheyt 202–09, 211 Bruges (Brugge) 13, 201–11 Bynkershoek, Cornelius van 84, 86 Byzantine rule 223 caliphate 223–25 Calvinism 243, 245 Canary Islands 48, 147 capitalism 9, 58–62, 72 Carey, Mathew 116, 118 Carlos I see Charles I Catholic League 168 Cervantes, Miguel de 15, 130, 226 Charles I (King) 65, 168, 186–88 Charles V (Emperor) 2, 8, 25–26, 29, 32–34, 36, 42–43, 52, 129, 169–70, 225–26 Chetwood, Rufus 116–17 Chios 240 circumcision 40, 42, 100 Civitates Orbis Terrarum (1572–1618) 33 Cocceji, Heinrich von 86–88

278 Index Cock, Paul de 209 Commerce (ship) 144–45, 147 commerce 1, 26, 58–59, 63, 66, 92, 106, 155, 168; European 15, 65; trans–Saharan 100, 152–53; violent 57–58, 69 confraternities 2, 13, 60, 201–09, 211 Constantine 41, 227; Bey of 39, 134 Constantinople 12, 168, 171, 175–78, 223, 230 conversion 11, 39–41, 45, 57, 62, 67, 70, 99–100, 102–04, 113–17, 119–20, 128–29, 135, 138–40, 173, 179, 238–39, 242, 245, 247, 263, 268–70 Coron see siege corsairs (North African) 1–2, 5, 9–10, 29–30, 63, 65, 71, 77–88, 90, 131–32, 146, 167–68, 179, 199, 202, 224–25, 230, 240 counter-reformation see reformation Cronica de Almançor Sultão de Marrocos (1587–1603) 101 Crusades 78, 84–85, 170 Cyprus 169 Daborn, Robert 113 Dan, Pierre 5, 44, 235 Danzig see Gdańsk Decatur, Stephen 193 Dee, John 64 Defoe, Daniel 49 Denmark 78, 93, 172, 242 Dernschwam, Hans 171 diplomacy 12–13, 175, 194 diplomatic gifts see gifts Djerba 31; see also battle Don Juan de Austria see John of Austria Don Quijote (1605/1615) 226, 230 Doria, Andrea 2, 26, 29, 47, 169, 225, 230 Drake, Francis 63, 65 Dutch Republic 81, 86 Early Republic (US) 1, 11, 114 East India Company: Austrian 212n12; British 62, 66; Dutch 81 Edict of Nantes 234, 242, 244 Eisenschmied, Leonard 50 Elizabeth I (Queen) 64–65, 193, 195, 273 Elizabethan England 66 Enlightenment 77, 90–91 eurocentrism 6, 16, 77, 90, 258, 271

fatwa 190 Flemish 102, 201–03, 207–08 Foss, John 118, 273 Foxe, John 67, 119 France 59, 61, 78–79, 92–93, 132, 167–69, 171–72, 187–88, 194–95, 202, 229–30, 234–36, 239–41, 243–45, 262, 271 Francis I (King) 79, 169, 229 Frederick Augustus II (Elector) 90 Frederick II (King) 90 French Wars of Religion 79 Fugger 62, 171; Jakob 29 Gallipoli (Gelibolu) 169 Garemijn, Jan 209–10 Gazavat-ı Hayreddin/Hayrettin Paşa (1578) 14, 226–29 Gdańsk 29, 48, 50–51 Genoa 169, 225 Gentili, Alberico 86–87 George II (King) 188 George III (King) 191 ghostwriter 51 gifts (diplomatic) 13, 153, 186–95, 225 Girard, Pierre 16, 235–38, 240, 242–45, 247 globalization 58 Goletta (Tunis) 32, 34 Grotius, Hugo 64, 81–83, 90, 272 Habsburgs 2, 25–26, 29, 32–36, 38, 42, 53, 78–80, 84, 90, 168–69, 175, 201–02 Hakluyt, Richard 63, 113 halal 190 Hanseatic union 29 haram 190 harem 13, 169, 191–92, 268 Hasleton, Richard 9, 69–72, 128 Heberer, Michael 12, 167–79 Henry II (King) 79 Histoire chronologique (1685) 15, 234–40, 242–46 Hogenberg, Frans/Franz 33–34 Holy League 168–69 homecoming 48, 71, 128, 130, 138, 245 Hospitallers see Order of Saint John Hübner, Martin 84–86, 91 Huguenots 167, 237–39, 241, 243–45 humanitarianism 76, 85, 90 Hungary 33 hybridity 8, 10–11, 57, 139

Index  279 Iceland 1, 6, 63 imperialism, European 59, 81 Indian Ocean 66 Inquisition 9, 69–70, 103, 107n11 internationalism 76 Ironmongers Company of London 157 Islam 14, 16, 67, 72, 78, 138, 178, 186, 191, 224, 261–63, 265, 271–72; conversion to 39–40, 45, 62, 70, 99–100, 102–03, 113–16, 128–29, 135, 138, 140, 173, 179, 239; see also conversion Jaffa, port of 258 Jefferson, Thomas 91–93 John of Austria 169 Kapudan Pasha (Grand Admiral) 169, 224 Khalifeh ül-Rasul Rab al-A’alamin 168 Kingdom of Aragon 168 Kingdom of Sardinia 78, 168 Kingdom of the Two Sicilies 78, 93 Knights of Malta 1, 30, 235 Kühn, Johann Michael 129–32, 138 Lāllā Khnātha 192 Lāllā Fāṭima 193, 268 Landcron, Gustav 49 Lepanto see battle Lesbos 2, 223–24 Levant Company 70–71 liberation see redemption Lisbon 25–26, 29, 47, 49–50, 63, 84, 102, 104, 192, 195 Livorno 1–2, 30, 243, 258–59 Locke, John 62 London 48, 57–58, 72, 116, 130, 151, 157, 186, 188–89, 195, 262, 269, 271 Long Turkish War 168 Louis XIV (King) 78, 90, 187–89, 191, 194, 234–35, 237–38, 240, 243–44 Majorca 9, 69–70, 72 Malaga 1–2, 30 Malta see siege Maltese 29–30, 132, 236, 259, 261, 263, 265–66, 270, 272 Mamluke 35–36, 42, 268 Mannerism 211 manuscript 14–15, 26, 51, 101, 227, 234, 236–37, 242, 244, 269–70

Maria Theresa (Empress) 204 Marrakesh 99–100, 103–06, 153, 192, 261, 270 Marseille 1–2, 30, 132, 167, 172, 188, 240 Marsh, Elizabeth 190 martyr 57, 68, 179; -dom 40–41, 70; -ology 67 Marx, Karl 59–60 Massinger, Philip 113 Mather, Cotton 113, 115 Mehmet II (Sultan) 223 Melanchthon, Philipp 167 Mercedarians 2, 6, 202, 238–39, 245, 272 Mogador (Essaouira) 12, 147–58 Monroe, James 92 Moors 38–39, 41–43, 45–46, 60, 84, 148, 155, 158, 172, 190, 194–95, 226, 259, 269, 272 Morocco 1, 10, 13, 30, 99, 104, 114, 117, 136–37, 150, 152–54, 156, 158, 187, 189–91, 194, 239, 259, 262, 268, 270–71, 273 Mūlāy Ismāˁīl (Sultan) 187–89, 192, 195, 268, 271 Muḥammad ibn Muḥammad al-Ṭayyib al-Mālikī 263–66 Muḥammad ibn ˁAbd Allāh (Sultan) 152 Murad I (Sultan) 224 Murad III (Sultan) 169 Naples 47, 168, 178, 229, 262 Napoleonic Wars 147 Netherlands 7, 78, 243, 245 New England 72 Okeley, William 41, 49, 131 Olufs, Hark 39, 133–34 Orán 227 Order of Saint John 167–69, 172, 263 Orientalism 139–40 otherness 14–17, 140, 272 Ottoman: Empire 33, 77–78, 93, 99, 168–73, 224, 270; expansion 68, 78; navy 167, 169, 172, 179, 265; province 234, 239–40, 245; slave 14, 203; sultans 79, 178, 224 Our Lady of Mercy (Onze Lieve Vrouwe van Remedie) 201, 203 Paddock, Juddah 151–52, 158, 159n5 Paul III (Pope) 169 Paul, Vincent de 262

280 Index Pellow, Thomas 131, 134–40 Pepys, Samuel 130 Philip II (Emperor) 14, 82, 227 pirates 8–10, 31, 39, 62–63, 79–80, 85, 138, 199, 258, 273; European 8, 29, 259, 261, 265, 271; state-protected 2, 80; Turkish 8, 25, 31, 69; see also corsairs; Knights of Malta; privateering Pius V (Pope) 168 Pococke, Edward 265 post-reformation see reformation post-traumatic stress see trauma Preveza see battle privateering 1–2, 13–14, 29–30, 63, 65, 81–83, 86, 146–47, 199 processions see slave processions Prodigal Son 48–49 Prussia 26, 29, 90, 270 publishers 6, 25, 70 Quartier, Antoine 244–45 Qur’an 261, 264 Ramadan 266 ransom economy 70, 144–46, 200 Reconquista 78, 84–85, 99 redemption 2, 5, 12, 68–69, 113, 145, 148, 150–53, 155–58, 190, 192, 194, 199–205, 208, 211, 238–39, 241–42, 261–62, 247; organizations 6, 13, 201–09, 211 see also confraternities reformation 11, 58; counter- 58, 177; post- 68 Reformed Christians 236, 238–39, 244 Reformed Religion see Religion Prétendue Réformée reintegration 133, 141 Reis, Dragut 80 Religion Prétendue Réformée 239, 243 religious identity 128–30, 140 religious ideology 67 renegada queens 13 renegade/renegado 10–11, 39–40, 57, 63, 99–100, 113–14, 116–20, 128, 138, 173, 242 Riley, James 11–12, 144–48, 150–52, 156–58 Robbins, Archibald 144–50, 152, 154–57 Robinson Crusoe (1719) 49, 52 Robinsonade 49–50

Rowson, Susanna 117 Rudolf II (Emperor) 175 Said, Edward 139–40 Saint-Gilles 202–04, 206, 209–10 Saldanha, António de 10, 100–06 Salé 2, 30, 78, 84–85, 135, 186, 239, 262 Saracens 87 Sayyid ‘Alī ibn al-Sayyid Aḥmad 265–67, 270, 273 Sayyid Murādī (al-Murādī) 14–15, 223, 227, 229, 265 Scuola della Santissima Trinità 205–09, 211 Sebastian I (King) 100, 102–03 Seven Years War 86 Seville 47–48 sex slaves 79 Sicily 29–30, 32, 168, 178, 262 Sidi Mohammed Ben Abdallah (Sultan) 187, 191, 194 Siege of: Algiers (1541) 2, 169; Coron (1532–1534) 29; Malta (1565) 169, 231n14; Tunis (1535) 8, 25, 32–33, 129, 169, 225, 259; Vienna (1529) 33, 88 Sint-Gillis see Saint-Gilles slave laborers 79 slave processions 206–07 Sosa, Antonio de 13, 15, 223, 226–29 Spanish Armada 64, 70, 228 spiritual autobiography 52–53 Stockholm syndrome 101, 135, 141 Stubbe, Henry 265 Sturmer, Balthasar 25–55, 129, 133 Sufis 262 Suleiman II (Sultan) 26, 79–80, 169 Swahili city-states 102 Sweden 78, 85, 93, 168, 172 Tangiers (Tanger) 101 tapestries 33, 259 Tartars 90 Teufel, Hans Christoph von 170–71 The Glory of Goodness (1703) 113, 115 Thirty Years War 168 torture 44, 69–70, 119, 128, 130, 132, 175, 179, 261, 272–73 trade see commerce trauma 130–31, 133, 135, 138; posttraumatic stress 130–31, 134

Index  281 Treaty of Ghent (1814) 147 Treaty of Utrecht (1713–1715) 201 Trinitarian 2, 6, 39, 202–07, 209, 238–39, 262, 272 Tripoli 1, 2, 16, 30, 78, 92, 99, 114, 146, 169, 227, 234–38, 240–42, 244–45 Tunis 1–2, 14, 25, 30–35, 41, 43, 46–47, 52, 78, 87, 99, 114, 188, 193, 229, 258, 262, 267; see also siege Tyler, Royall 119–20 Valletta 258–259 Vattel, Emer de 77, 88–93 Venice, Republic of 13, 78, 168–69, 202, 204–06, 211, 235 Vermeyen, Jan Cornelisz 32–33 Verzeichnis der Reise (1558) 8, 25–53, 129

Victoria (Queen) 188 Vienna see siege Virginia 72 War of Spanish Succession 201 Washington, George 191 Weidler, Johann Friedrich 84–85 West Friesland 86 Western Sahara 144, 146–47, 158 White, Robert 114–15 Willock, John 117, 119 Wilson, James 116 Wolffgang, Andreas Mathäus 49, 131–32 Wolffgang, Johann Georg 49, 131–32 Yusuf (Pasha of Tripoli) 92 Zanzibar 102 Zeeland 86