The Captive Sea: Slavery, Communication, and Commerce in Early Modern Spain and the Mediterranean - Hardcover

Hershenzon, Daniel

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0812250486 ISBN 13: 9780812250480

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018

Synopsis

Won the Sharon Harris Book Award, granted by the University of Connecticut Humanities Institute

In The Captive Sea, Daniel Hershenzon explores the entangled histories of Muslim and Christian captives—and, by extension, of the Spanish Empire, Ottoman Algiers, and Morocco—in the seventeenth century to argue that piracy, captivity, and redemption helped shape the Mediterranean as an integrated region at the social, political, and economic levels. Despite their confessional differences, the lives of captives and captors alike were connected in a political economy of ransom and communication networks shaped by Spanish, Ottoman, and Moroccan rulers; ecclesiastic institutions; Jewish, Muslim, and Christian intermediaries; and the captives themselves, as well as their kin.

Hershenzon offers both a comprehensive analysis of competing projects for maritime dominance and a granular investigation of how individual lives were tragically upended by these agendas. He takes a close look at the tightly connected and ultimately failed attempts to ransom an Algerian Muslim girl sold into slavery in Livorno in 1608; the son of a Spanish marquis enslaved by pirates in Algiers and brought to Istanbul, where he converted to Islam; three Spanish Trinitarian friars detained in Algiers on the brink of their departure for Spain in the company of Christians they had redeemed; and a high-ranking Ottoman official from Alexandria, captured in 1613 by the Sicilian squadron of Spain.

Examining the circulation of bodies, currency, and information in the contested Mediterranean, Hershenzon concludes that the practice of ransoming captives, a procedure meant to separate Christians from Muslims, had the unintended consequence of tightly binding Iberia to the Maghrib.

About this title

About the Author

Daniel Hershenzon teaches in the Literatures, Cultures, and Languages Department at the University of Connecticut.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Introduction

In 1608, Genoese naval forces took a thirteen-year-old Algerian girl named Fatima captive and sold her into slavery in Livorno, Italy. Her father almost succeeded in ransoming her that same year, but the ship that would have returned her to Algiers stopped in Corsica, where Fatima was forcibly converted and baptized as "Madalena." In an unrelated incident, also in 1608, Algerian pirates captured Diego de Pacheco, illegitimate son of the Spanish Marquis de Villena, and enslaved him in Algiers. While a captive, Pacheco was taken to Istanbul where, after attempting and failing to arrange his ransom, he converted to Islam. Piecing together these Mediterranean episodes from the archives leads to a third story beginning just a year after the capture of Fatima and Pacheco. In 1609, three Spanish Trinitarian friars were on the brink of departing for Spain with Christians they had redeemed from the Maghrib when the Algerian Governing Council detained them. All three friars and many of the captives they had redeemed would die in captivity. Meanwhile in 1613, the Sicilian squadron of Spain captured Muhammad Bey, a high-ranking Ottoman official from Alexandria. Negotiations over his ransom failed, and Muhammad died in his prison cell in Sicily.

At first glance, though they all occurred within a five-year period and in the same geographic area, these stories do not seem to have much to do with one another. Yet these different Mediterranean trajectories intersected and had strong effects on one another, whether through their ransom negotiations, for example, or in that one captive was taken as revenge for the imprisonment of another. These episodes overlap not only in how each individual was situated in relation to the other by captors and redeemers but also in the way that information about each case was transmitted across the sea. Because captives frequently contacted their kin, who in turn contacted pasha, king, and sultan, who then exchanged messages with one another, these cases had the potential to intersect in Spanish, Moroccan, or Ottoman political hubs as well as in the slave prisons. Such negotiations often led ecclesiastical redemption institutions and North African merchants to establish uneasy ransom coalitions. This was the case of the opening four episodes. Fatima's father set in motion the connections between the stories when he demanded the Algerian Governing Council secure her return. Algiers retained the Trinitarians and the captives they had ransomed as a riposte to Fatima's unsuccessful ransom and forced conversion. The friars tried to repatriate Fatima in return for their own liberty but failed. Subsequently they sought their freedom in exchange for the return of the bey, but Pacheco's father was also using all his influence in Madrid to get permission to exchange the bey for his son. This book is about the Mediterranean world that Fatima, Pacheco, the Trinitarians, and the bey inhabited, a world that captivity, commerce, and communication created.

* * *

In the early modern western Mediterranean, a wide range of individuals, networks, and institutions dealt with the trafficking of people—capturing, enslaving, smuggling, and ransoming—across and beyond the borders of Spain's Mediterranean territories, Morocco, and Ottoman Algiers and Tunis. According to a recent estimation, between 1450 and 1850 at least three million people—Muslims and Christians—lost their liberty at sea or on land and were enslaved. More than a million Christians were enslaved in the Maghrib (northwest Africa) between 1530 and 1780, and a million or more Muslims were enslaved on the inner sea's northern shores. Records do not always clearly distinguish between Muslims from the Maghrib, from the Mashriq (Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine, and Syria), or from Anatolia, but as these calculations exclude the Spanish Balearic and Canary Islands, Sardinia, and France, the number of Maghribis enslaved in southern Europe must have been even higher. Of this number, few managed to obtain release through compensation, swap, or flight. The majority never knew freedom again and became an integral part of the society of their captors. The widespread practice of captive-taking meant, then, that the sight of laboring captives and the recounting of stories about individuals who had lost their liberty to corsairs were common on the southern and northern shores of the early modern Mediterranean.

Piracy has always been endemic in the Mediterranean, but its increase at the turn of the seventeenth century marked the end of the age of large imperial clashes at the high seas. During the preceding century, the Ottoman and Spanish empires reigned in the Mediterranean, gripping the region after the conquest of Constantinople-turned-Istanbul in 1453 and Muslim Granada in 1492. Imperial competition reached an equilibrium of sorts with Ottoman control established in the Balkans, Syria (1516), Egypt (1517), and the Maghrib (1530-1570s), excluding Morocco, and the Spanish controlling Portugal, Naples, Sicily, Milan, Sardinia, and a number of garrison towns along the Atlantic and Mediterranean North African littoral. During the sixteenth century, Christian coalitions clashed with the Ottomans in a series of spectacular battles, but in 1581 the empires signed a truce and turned their attention away from the sea, the Ottomans toward Safavid Persia and the Spaniards toward northern Europe and the Atlantic world. To be sure, imperial structures and logics continued to shape life in the Mediterranean, but the sea was transformed from an offensive into a defensive frontier. This moment ushered in a new age of privateering—corso (Spanish, Italian) or course (French), as the peoples of the Mediterranean called it. Christian and Muslim corsairs and freebooters stepped in to fill the vacuum imperial forces had left in the western half of the sea. Maghribi corsairs raided southern European shores—they even reached as far as Ireland and Iceland in the 1620s and 1630s—and attacked Christian ships on the high seas. Christian corsairs, pirates, soldiers, and royal fleets raided Maghribi cities and ships and captured and enslaved Moroccan and Ottoman subjects.

Unlike black slaves in the Atlantic world, the victims of the Mediterranean system of bondage knew their captors, not personally but rather on the basis of longue durée violent and peaceful exchanges. Moreover, the distances separating southern Andalusia from Morocco (less than nine miles), the Spanish Levant from Ottoman Algiers (about 200 miles), or Sicily from Ottoman Tunis (around 110 miles) were short. Algiers was closer to Majorca than was Madrid, and Majorca was closer to Algiers than was Istanbul. This proximity meant that throughout the medieval and early modern periods intense social, economic, and political interactions prevailed alongside violence, captive-taking, and enslavement. Geography and history meant that this bondage system articulated alienation, or the condition of foreignness, differently than the bondage system in the Atlantic or sub-Saharan world. Unlike black slaves in Africa, the Atlantic world, and Iberia, Mediterranean slaves generally maintained some contact, in the form of letters, with their kinfolk and communities. In North African cities, priests and friars provided religious services for captives in prison churches. Muslims enslaved in Italy had mosques as early as the mid-seventeenth century, and even in Catholic Spain, Muslim slaves had private worship spaces during the seventeenth century. At the turn of the eighteenth century the Spanish king ordered the allocation of burial space to Muslims in any city where Muslim slaves resided.

In the Mediterranean, captivity and slavery were not exclusive conditions but rather dimensions of a single process. Contemporaries used the terms "captive" and "slave" interchangeably to refer to the system's victims. As "captives," slaves retained claims on kin living across the sea. In fact, masters interested in ransom money encouraged their slaves to write home. Ransoming might occur in various ways: the Trinitarian and Mercedarian orders and urban fraternities ransomed Christian captives; Muslim and Christian captives commissioned merchants to ransom them and transfer them home; Muslim and Christian rulers often negotiated the exchange of their subjects; and kin negotiated the exchange of their enslaved relatives. Even slaves with no prospect of paying ransom could send letters to kin and home authorities and receive correspondence in return. Captivity and enslavement were undoubtedly among the worst experiences of the early modern Mediterranean; numerous texts recount the hellish living conditions captives-turned-authors suffered. Yet the mechanisms of captivity, enslavement, and ransom prevented the full alienation or social isolation of enslaved captives in the Mediterranean. Geography and the intensity of exchange in the region left Mediterranean slaves comparatively better-off than their counterparts in other places. This was the world of Diego de Pacheco, Fatima, the Trinitarians, and the old bey.

* * *

This book argues that piracy, captivity, and redemption shaped the western Mediterranean as an integrated region socially, politically, and economically. It explores the entangled experiences of Muslim and Christian captives and by extension the entangled histories of the Spanish Empire, Morocco, and Ottoman Algiers in the seventeenth century. Adopting a sociocultural perspective and drawing on the history of commerce, the book demonstrates that a Mediterranean system of bondage entwined the lives of Muslim and Christian captives in spite of confessional differences. They were connected by a political economy of ransom, the result of the intermingling of the market, social obligation, religion, and politics. Actors from across the sea—captives, merchants, friars, and rulers—shaped this political economy and interacted through an array of texts that captives created and distributed across the sea. Constant circulation of texts and people meant that the lives of Fatima, the Trinitarians, Pacheco, Muhammad, and others, which historians have so far studied in isolation, were interdependent. The history that emerges from their stories is both local and regional; it is a history in the Mediterranean and a history of the Mediterranean. The book offers an analysis of competing Spanish, Algerian, and Moroccan projects intended to shape Mediterranean mobility structures. Simultaneously, it reveals the tragic upending of the lives of individuals by these imperial maritime political agendas and also how Christian, Muslim, and Jewish merchants subverted such plans.

Scholars often write the history of the early modern Mediterranean as either a story of religious enmity or a tale of canny merchants and thriving markets. These are sometimes mutually exclusive approaches, but in the context of the western half of the sea they can also operate as complementary elements arranged along a temporal axis. Historians imagine the sixteenth-century western Mediterranean as a world sharply divided along confessional lines. In The Forgotten Frontier, historian Andrew Hess described the Ibero-African frontier not only as hostile but also as an empty region. Even Fernand Braudel, whose work Hess was criticizing, and who famously and poetically claimed that the "Turkish Mediterranean lived and breathed with the same rhythms as the Christian, [and] that the whole sea shared a common destiny," stressed religious oppositions and the division of the sea into two blocs, Ottoman Muslim and Spanish Christian. The transformation of the western Mediterranean into a religiously and imperially divided maritime space was the result of events and processes internal and external to the sea; the shift was slow and occurred over more than a century. It allegedly began with the Christian conquest of Muslim Granada (1492) and ended with the expulsion (1609-1614) of the Moriscos (Spain's forcefully converted Muslims and their descendants). At the turn of the seventeenth century, these events were complemented by the "northern invasion," when English, Dutch, and French merchants and fleets invaded the Mediterranean en masse, transforming it into an internationalized arena where homogeneous nation-states competed in the market. This was supposedly the time when Christians and Muslims living around the sea had lost their shared world. According to this narrative, an international setting replaced an imperial world, foreigners substituted for local actors, and an impersonal market supplanted archaic religious violence. In short, after the northern invasion, Europeans modernized the sea, a process that completed the region's disintegration or the sea's "death." The common rhythms that according to Braudel had orchestrated the lives of the sixteenth-century Muslim and Christian Mediterraneans were replaced by polyphony in the seventeenth century, and the confessional "shared destiny" shattered into various national destinies. Faruk Tabak has succinctly summarized the shift thus: "In historical studies that investigate the waning of the Mediterranean, the ecumenical setting of the golden age of the basin fades into the background, only to be supplanted by differential and singular settings from the seventeenth century."

The history of piracy and captivity is no exception to these historiographical framings. Studies of captivity in the Mediterranean, a theme that has recently drawn much scholarly attention, follow that trend. Rather than account for how Mediterranean ransom actors interacted and intersected, they focus either on urban and royal-ecclesiastical ransom institutions or, more recently, on small-scale ransom networks. An institutional perspective that is concerned solely with the Trinitarian and Mercedarian orders of redemption favors the nation ("Spain") and religion ("Catholicism") as its units of analysis and fails to account for the ways in which pressures from both Maghribi political actors and merchants who ransomed captives continually influenced Spanish ransom agendas. This approach results in histories of Spanish, French, or Algerian captivity instead of a connected regional history of Mediterranean slavery. When scholars focus on ransom intermediaries, the Mediterranean reemerges as a space defined by commercial exchange. They describe the redemption of captives as part of an "economy of ransom" that regulated religious violence and rationalized commerce with Muslims as a means of freeing captives. This approach sheds new light on the related issues of transaction costs, credit mechanisms, and insurance and rightly avoids reading captivity and ransom in terms of a transhistorical clash between Islam and Christendom. However, in the context of the western Mediterranean this corrective emphasis risks divorcing ransom institutions and individual ransomers, which constantly interacted, and obscures the continuous importance of religion, political dynamics, and social obligation in shaping the market.

* * *

This book seeks to go beyond both the northern invasion thesis and Hess's portrayal of the Mediterranean as a sterile, segregated space. It avoids the bifurcated approach that contrasts market exchange and religion by treating the Mediterranean as both a perspective a...

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 0812250486
• ISBN 13: 9780812250480
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 304