Sailors knew the risk: captivation by pirates and becoming a slave in North Africa. From to one million European seamen and passengers were captured by Muslim pirates in the Mediterranean and the Atlantic. The greatest threat came from North Africa from the Barbary Coast. Pirates endowed with state permits took captives and sold them at slave markets. On board was a young Spanish soldier by the name of Miguel — on a voyage that was to change the life of the young man who went on to become one of the greatest, most widely-read authors in the history of literature. Miguel de Cervantes was enslaved in the dungeons of Algiers for five years before he was ransomed.
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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 ; 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 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. Enter your mobile number or email address below and we'll send you a link to download the free Kindle App.
Daniel Hershenzon
For over years, the coastlines of the south west of England were at the mercy of Barbary pirates corsairs from the coast of North Africa, based mainly in the ports of Algiers, Tunis and Tripoli. Their number included not only North Africans but also English and Dutch privateers. Their aim was to capture slaves for the Arab slave markets in North Africa. The Barbary pirates attacked and plundered not only those countries bordering the Mediterranean but as far north as the English Channel, Ireland, Scotland and Iceland, with the western coast of England almost being raided at will. They take ships only to take the men to make slaves of them.
Winner of the Best First Book Prize by the Association for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies "The breadth and depth of research, the insight with which Hershenzon draws out the significance of the sources, and the clarity of his writing all make this an impressive and convincing book. Extensively researched and bracingly argued, The Captive Sea demonstrates the agency and impact of captives in an enduringly entangled Mediterranean world. Daniel Hershenzon locates new and highly personalized sources within the vast bureaucratic archives of Spain and then wields them to identify and theorize the expectations and logics of behavior that underlay the captives' struggles to obtain freedom.
