Captives and Corsairs: France and Slavery in the Early Modern Mediterranean
2012; Oxford University Press; Volume: 26; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1093/fh/crs056
ISSN1477-4542
Autores Tópico(s)Medieval History and Crusades
ResumoThe western Mediterranean of the early modern period was a sea of piracy in which all nations were active: European as well as North African, Christian as well as Muslim. Although piracy was not clearly separated from privateering, victims ended up as slaves sold in the markets that dotted the northern and southern shores of the basin, as well as the Atlantic rim, from Genoa to Tripoli and from Cadiz to Salé. The result was a large number of men, women and children, Christian, Muslim and Jewish, who found themselves put to hard labour, awaiting God to liberate them - or the ransomer /fakkāk who paid handsomely either with pieces of eight (the international currency of negotiation) or with exchanges of other captives. Upon their return from North African captivity, many Europeans wrote about their ordeals. Relying on a culture of print and marketing, they described in graphic detail and sometimes with woodcuts, the grimness of their suffering and their heroic Christian endurance. They also wrote about the Godly miracle of their escape, or their liberation at the hands of members of the ecclesiastical orders, as in Spain, France and Malta, or of the trading companies, in which the Stuart monarchy had a stake, as in Britain. The impact of their writings was powerful and consolidated in readers’ minds the image of a heinous adversary, driven by anti-Christian fervour. It is an image that has dominated scholarship on European captivity in the Mediterranean for over a hundred years: one need read no more than Playfair’s 1884 title about the ‘Barbary Corsairs,’ The Scourge of Christendom, to realise how much captivity has been viewed as a form of Islamic violence. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, the corsairs had become ‘terrorists.’
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