To cite this article please use the following terms: A. Duprat, ‘Introduction’ in The Mediterranean Corsairs in Narrative:
territories, corpus and series. Online publication of the CORSO project, November 2010. URL http://www.oroc-crlc.parissorbonne.fr/index.php/visiteur/Projet-CORSO/Ressources/La-guerre-de-course-en-recits.
THE MEDITERRANEAN CORSO
IN
NARRATIVE: TERRITORIES, CORPUS
AND
SERIES —
INTRODUCTION
ANNE DUPRAT
University of Paris-Sorbonne (Paris IV)
The story of one life is all very well, bursting with aweinspiring novelty. But with ten or twelve life-stories we begin
to perceive recurring elements and clichés. What becomes
clear with hindsight is the fact that these individual eyewitness
accounts are themselves highly structured, the bearers of a
discourse that is itself a reflection of socially conditioned
models.
These arguments, advanced by the historian
Michel Vovelle and quoted in 1989 by Lucile and
Bartolomé Benassar in the introduction to Les Chrétiens d’Allah, questioned the conventional
opposition between quantitative methods and the case study1. The authors of this collection of
previously unpublished accounts of the privateers’ war in the sixteenth and seventeenth century
Mediterranean were resolved not to choose between “two methods equally necessary for the
progress of historical knowledge”. They retraced “the extraordinary history of the renegades” by
presenting the specific destiny of six of these former captives accused of apostasy – a destiny which
was not intended to be taken as “exemplary in the strict sense of the term,” according to the authors,
while on the other hand, they presented a series of 1550 similar cases which are only known to us
only through documentary fragments or through the presence of the names on lists.
What appear clearly when reading a series of eyewitness accounts of victims of the
Corsair wars in the Mediterranean, whether these are published or manuscript works, are the
commonplaces and stereotypical passages, the rehearsing of old discourses and the existence of
narrative frameworks imposed by outside agents or spontaneously taken up by the authors of
individual works. This is true even when the accounts do not deal with the most troubling event in
this experience – that of the adoption, even temporarily, of the religion of the other. The appearance
of more and more texts produced by Turkish or North African captives of what the West has termed
Christian counter-piracy only emphasises the recurrence of the same elements: while the stylistic
and ideological elements vary and the framework changes, we can find characteristics shared by the
majority of texts dealing with this experience of captivity. Linked to a time, place and context that
1
Les Chrétiens d’Allah. L’histoire extraordinaire des renégats (XVIe-XVIIe), Paris, Perrin Editions (1989), 2001 for the
present edition, p. 12.
are definitely in the past, to a precarious balance of power that held for two centuries between the
Ottoman and Christian forces in conflict over the control of the sea-routes and trade routes of the
Mediterranean, these common features of the captivity narratives of the Barbary period are essential
to the reconstitution of the complex stakes of this confrontation and the writing of a shared history
of the corsair adventure.
Hence the relevance of the approach which we have chosen here, which is to
examine this history from the point of view of the narratives produced by the captives, those
eyewitnesses thrust by force into the adventure of the Corsair war. In adopting this approach, we
immediately perceive the gap which exists between the anecdotes of captivity that are published in
series and strictly framed by a proselytizing discourse, in particular in the case of the publications of
the redeeming orders, which in many of these corpora are one of the principal sources of
information available to historians of the corsairs, and on the other hand the individual accounts
produced by merchants, soldiers and diplomats or simple travellers who experienced abduction,
captivity and sometimes ransoming. The latter are more familiar to the specialists in this type of
literature. Like the fragments of lives published by the redemptive orders to back up their accounts
of money paid, the narratives published by the former captives themselves bear the imprint of the
debt individually contracted with the institution or the individuals responsible for their liberation.
They affirm the captive’s allegiance to the rules of the society into which they are to be
reintegrated, by the specific means of their narrative’s circulation in some cases. But this imprint is
less profound and the allegiance less clear. Even when the “supervision” exercised by a second
writer is manifest in the text, the narrative agenda often remains surprisingly open – hence the
richness of the documents2.
In giving an account of their identity and describing their behaviour during the ordeal, and in
the meaning that they attribute to their captivity and subsequent liberation, the former captives
conform in fact to the narrative framework expected in the kind of publication in which their story
will appear – the popular press, irregular publications, travel narratives or embassy accounts. Yet
the exceptional character of the experience of life in captivity within a society that was profoundly
different, and the disorganisation this produced in the universe of cultural, moral and religious
certitudes which the author must have shared with his public, often set off a process in which these
values were called into question. They may subsequently have been reaffirmed all the more
forcefully, or, on the contrary, relativised on the captive’s return by the comparison they made
between the organisation of ‘barbarian’ society – a world where norms are absent to the outside
2
On this subject, see for example Brahimi, D. L’histoire de la longue captivité et des aventures de Thomas Pellow dans
le sud de la Barbarie [1743], translation and notes by M. Morsy. Paris, Bouchène Editions, collection Mediterranea,
2008.
viewer only – and the real functioning of the theoretically rule-governed society into which they
had to reinsert themselves on returning. In both of these cases the confrontation left traces and
showed up the fault lines running through the social fabric. By basing themselves on the apparently
unchanging ideological framework of the antagonism between Islam and Christianity, between
Barbary States and European powers, these narratives give new form to the expression of religious,
social and political conflicts inside European society, conflicts which could often be freely
expressed in writing about the other and within the stable narrative programme of the captivity
scenario.
On the basis of these hypotheses, it was decided that the research group working on the
narratives within the framework of the ANR CORSO project (“Islam and Christianity confronted
with modernity: images and reality of the Mediterranean Corsairs, 1550-1750”), would carry out the
study in two phases.
A first group of studies, collected in the present volume, can be accessed online under the
title La guerre de course en récits (XVIe-XVIIIes). Terrains, corpus, séries . This focuses on the
description of a number of the captivity narratives scattered throughout European literature between
the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries, and to the analysis of certain series which can be found
within this body of writings. A second volume, which will be published by Bouchène editions, will
present, under the title The captivity narrative in Barbary legends : codes, strategies and
appropriations (2011), a number of studies dealing more specifically with the rhetorical and
fictional strategies deployed by the authors of these narratives, but also the use to which these
narratives have been put afterwards – particularly the intensive and often complex use which the
European powers made of these narratives, as heroic as they are terrifying, in the historic and
cultural justification of the colonisation of North Africa in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Narratives of the Corsairs: works and/or documents.
We know that until the last third of the sixteenth century the operations
concerning the corsair war were part of a direct military confrontation
between the Christian powers of Western Europe and the Ottoman
Empire, whose advances in the Mediterranean region seemed
unstoppable at the time. One after the other, Mytilene, Rhodes and
Cyprus fell into the hands of the Porte, in 1464, 1522 and1571
respectively, while the Ottoman advances continued westwards to
Vienna in 1529. From Cairo, taken from the Mamelukes in 1517, they moved on to Algiers in 1529.
Tunis, under Ottoman power on several occasions in the course of the century, was permanently
transformed into Ottoman regency from 1574 onward3. It is worth recalling the importance of the
corsair fleets engaged on both sides of the conflict in determining the final outcome of the Battle of
Lepanto. Just as the siege of Malta had been the theatre of confrontation between the galleys of the
corsair Dragut and those of the Grand Master Jean Parisot of Valetta in 1565, at Lepanto the fleet of
the Santa Lega included the pontiff’s galleys, those of the Venetian Republic, of the Spanish
Hapsburg States, of Naples and Sicily, but also the naval forces of the Tuscan Order of Santo
Stefano. This alliance came up against an Ottoman fleet which had the support of numerous
experienced corsairs such as the rais Euldj Ali « Fartax » whose vessels escaped from the defeat.
Yet on the morrow of the defeat of the Ottomans at the hands of the temporarily-unified forces of
the Catholic powers of Europe under the Holy League, the open warfare between the Ottoman
Empire and the Christian nations of Europe gave way to the golden age of the Corso, or statesponsored privateering, as well as different forms of public or private maritime violence made
possible by the instability of the diplomatic and military relations between the regencies and
kingdoms of North Africa, which became the Barbary states, and the fleets of the different nations
of Europe4.
The literary representation of these events, firstly in the form of the epic and then the novella, began
almost simultaneously in all the vernacular languages of Europe5. These were added to narrative
collections on the confrontation between Islam and Christianity of much more recent origin than the
literature of the Crusades. However, the new narratives of the privateers’ war at the beginning of
the early modern period are often added to the earlier ones without resolving the question of
continuity. Between the Saracens of the Middle Ages and the Barbary pirates of the modern era,
several Italian novellas from Boccaccio onward had already featured the Jews, Greeks, Egyptians,
Turks and Arabs in the vast Mediterranean canvas furnished by the intense and familiar commerce
which linked the great trading cities of Italy with the gateways to the Levant. In Spain it was the
poetic celebration of the Reconquista, followed by the different stages of the Arab withdrawal from
Andalusia – the fall of Grenada in 1492, the rebellion of the Moriscos in the Alpujarras in 1570, and
the final expulsion of the Arabs from Spain in 1609- which gave rise to a Moorophile literature later
3
On these matters, see Braudel, F (ed.) La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l’époque de Philippe II, [A. Colin
Editions, 1949], republished 1990, vol. 3. « Les évenements, la politique, les hommes ». For the English edition, see
Braudel, F. The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II. Trans. Sian Reynolds, University
of California Press, 1995.
4
On the inherent meanings of « Barbary”, “barbaric”, and “barbarian”, on the people and the place which they signify
in North Africa, and on their meanings in ancient texts, we follow the conclusions of the study carried out by G. TurbetDelof in the introduction to his definitive study of French literature on the Barbary region “La barbarie des mots” in
L’Afrique Barbaresque dans la literature française du XVIIe siècle, Geneva, Droz Editions, 1973.
5
For a comparative study of this phenomenon in the vernacular literature of the early modern period, see my
forthcoming study, Histoire du captive. Essai sur la littérature barbaresque dans les littératures d’Europe (XVIeXVIIes), Paris, P.U.P.S, [2011].
to become very popular in Europe. On the stage, French and Elizabethan dramatists began to exploit
the multiplicity of scenarios provided by the dynastic conflicts of the Ottoman court. These oriental
stories begin to spread throughout all forms of literature from the sixteenth century onward, and
contributed to the evolution of rapidly-developing literary genres, from the Spanish romance to the
Italian epic poem, to the Jacobean tragi-comedy and the French baroque novel.
News of the privateers’ war and the counter-attacks carried out by the Knights of the Orders of
Malta and Santo Stefano, as well as the dangers faced by travellers at sea or villagers on the coast of
Spain and Italy, menaced by the privateering carried out by the rais of the Barbary states and by the
European corsair captains, began thus to spread in various reports, in irregular publications or in
collections of travel stories, in the North, in the Scandinavian countries, the Hapsburg states and in
England as well as in the Catholic states of southern Europe. These accounts are linked to a
significant location (Algiers in the sixteenth century, Tunis in the seventeenth, or Sallee in the
eighteenth century) and produced within the framework of a particular genre of writing (accounts of
Portuguese shipwrecks in the sixteenth century gathered together in eighteenth-century collections,
or individual accounts of the adventures of English corsairs put together by Hakluyt around 1580).
They may also be motivated by a specific project (the effort made by Colbert’s administration to
encourage French investment in the colonial enterprise, or the different stages of construction of the
British Empire between the end of Elizabeth’s reign and the eighteenth century). Hence they are to
be understood above all in terms of the context in which they are published – the territories, corpora
and series in which they appear.
Symbolic territories and geographic divisions: the circulation of captivity narratives in the
Mediterranean region (XVIth-XVIIIth century).
In a recent book dealing with the
analysis of the Lingua Franca, the hybrid
speech made up of terms, grammatical
structures and proverbs borrowed from al
the languages of the Mediterranean area6,
Jocelyne Dakhlia highlighted the dense
flow not only of words and letters , but also
of the cultural content whose diffusion they
6
Jocelyne Dakhlia, Lingua franca. Histoire d’une langue métissé en Méditerranée, Arles, Actes Sud, 2008.
orchestrated – along with its shared antagonisms - in the ports and coastal areas of the
Mediterranean at the beginning of the modern era. The Lingua Franca, widely used in the captivity
narratives of the period, was also used on the stage for the threatening otherness that it brought into
theatrical discourse, before going on to make the fortunes of comic poets in England and France
alike. Coming directly from Barbary, which represented a veritable liminary space, the Lingua
Franca also appears as the linguistic emanation of an imaginary territory, a common and contrasted
space projected by the corsair narratives of the different vernacular literatures of Europe from the
sixteenth to the eighteenth century.
Such an enterprise, like that undertaken elsewhere by W. Kaiser on the concrete modalities
of the trade in captives throughout the Mediterranean area7, shows the importance of bringing
together the groups of narratives often studied within the limits of the physical territory which they
describe. This is especially the case with the documents linked to each of the Barbary States of
North Africa – in particular the work carried out by Moulay Belhamissi on the Algerian navy, and
on the fate of Muslim captives in Europe, Michel Fontenay’s work on Malta, or Leïla Meziane’s
research on the Sallee Rovers8. We also know that the majority of studies have been carried out
within the linguistic boundaries marked by the literature of each of the cultural areas in question,
like for example the work of Guy Turbet-Delof on the French Barbary literature of the seventeenth
century, Bartolomé Bennassar, Jean Canavaggio, Emilio Sola, Matias Barchino or more recently
Barbara Fuchs on Spanish texts, Salvatore Bono on Italian narratives, as well as Nabil Matar,
Daniel Vitkus or Linda Colley on the English ones. Ernstpeter Ruhe and Martin Rheinheimer have
worked on the German texts and Peter Madsen on the Danish and Norwegian accounts9. This is
without counting the analyses dedicated to the experience of a single captive – and it is of course
Cervantes’s account which has inspired most of the work of this type10.
Here too, Carlos Watzka and Elisabeth Pauli focus their analysis on the series of narratives
produced within the framework of the redemptive work carried out by the Trinitarians in the
Hapsburg States. Daniel Vitkus focuses on the English narratives of which, in collaboration with
7
W. Kaiser (ed.) Le commerce des captifs. Les intermédiaires dans l’échange et le rachat des prisonniers en
Méditerranée, XVIe-XVIIIes., Ecole Française de Rome, 2008.
8
M. Belhamissi, Histoire de la marine algérienne, 1516-1830, Entreprise Nationale du Livre, Alger, 1983, and Les
captifs algériens et l’Europe chrétienne, 1518-1835, Entreprise Nationale du Livre, Alger, 1988 ; for Spain, see also
Allesandro Stella and Bernard Vincent, « L’esclavage en Espagne à l’époque moderne : acquis et nouvelles
orientations », Captius i esclaus a l’Antiguat i al Mon Modern, Palma de Majorque, 1996
9
References to all these works can be consulted in the Bibliographie at the end of this volume (see “Etudes”).
10
Due to constraints of space we can only mention a few titles from the extensive range in this field: the work of Jaime
Oliver Asin,” La hija de Agi Morato en la obra de Cervantes”, BRAE, 1947-1948, pp.245-339; by Jean Canavaggio,
Cervantès dramaturge. Un théâtre à naître, Paris, PUF, 1977; Enrique Fernandez, “Los tratos de Argel: obra
testimonial, denuncia politica, y literature terapéutica”, Cervantes, 20 (2000), pp.7-26; Emilio Sola et J.de la Pena,
Cervantes y la Berbería, Madrid, F. C.E., 1996, or more recently, Maria-Antonia Garces, Cervantes in Algiers: a
captive’s tale, Vanderbilt University Press, 2005.
Nabil Matar, he has edited a volume that has become irreplaceable11. Daniel Hershenzon, Emilie
Picherot, Caroline Lyvet and Anne Fastrup concentrate on Spanish texts, Suzanne Guellouz,
Denise Brahimi and François Moureau on French sources, Lilian Pestre deals with Portuguese
poems, Peter Madsen with Danish publications and Meriem Dhouib with Italian chivalrous poems.
Corpora : the constellations of narratives
It is, however, on the crossover between these linguistic groupings at the heart of numerous
transversal corpora that we wished to focus our work. Like that of the Spanish ballads of the
sixteenth century, many of whose themes can be found in the Portuguese ones, the body of captivity
narratives produced by the English Protestants, profoundly marked by the question of whether to
reject or tolerate other confessions, is best illuminated by setting it against those Catholic narratives
produced in France at the same time, preoccupied with a similar debate. In the same way, this
juxtaposition pinpoints the circulation within the entire European literature on the Barbary period of
the main sources of information available12 on the civil histories of the Barbary regencies, on the
geography of North Africa, as well as the functioning of the Corsair states. These sources consist
essentially of Leon Africanus’s Description de l’Afrique, Marmol’s L’Afrique, mainly based on the
former, Haedo’s edition of the Topographie d’Alger, or in France, l’Histoire de Barbarie (1637) by
Father Dan.
Finally, this juxtaposition highlights the role played beyond the generic frontiers of the
corsair literature by certain narratives which have become famous. From the picaresque or
romanesque models furnished by the works of Vicente Espinel and Cervantes to the heroic escape
stores popularised in England by the Hakluyt collection, to the Portuguese maritime tragedies and
the instructive accounts of the Barbary world composed by the native of Bruges Emmanuel
d’Aranda, many of these texts were adapted and translated into different languages and republished
several times.
Moreover, the coherence of these typological groupings, beyond the national variations
proposed for each collection, appears more clearly and allows us to highlight the way the
experience is informed by the models specific to the type of writing in which the story is
developed. Thus, the accounts of ransoming compiled in Spain and in the Hapsburg states, as well
11
D.J. Vitkus and N. Matar, Piracy, Slavery and Redemption: Barbary captivity Narratives from Early Modern
England, Columbia University Press, New York, 1999. See also D.J. Vitkus, Turning Turk: English Theater and the
multicultural Mediterranean 1570-1630, New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2003
12
Léon l’Africain [Hassan al-Wazzan] Cosmographia dell’Africa, [Ms 1526], Venice, 1550, French translation,
Historiale Description de l’Afrique, Paris, 1556. . !"#$%&'()$*+,-&("$.#'(&/+$&($0#/$1%'&23+4(5$!"#$%&'()*+,(-".+/0%'+$"%1"
!1'+,(2$ )'3+(-3)&/+$ 67$ 89$ :/'75$ 0/+;/+5$ <9$ =&("/>5$ ?@AA9$ 04&($ ;#$ B3C/-$ D3'.3E3-5$ 3$/,'+),+45" &$5$'(-" 6$" !1'+,(2" /7/"
&7$''(/"8"9+,+/+076$/2"6$/6$"-("1756(,+%5"6$-":(*%:$0+/:%"*(/0("$-"(;%"<=><2$<'#+3;35$?FGHI?FJJ9$K&#,/$;#$L3#;/$
M3))'&64)#;9$ )/$ 1+)/+&/$ ;#$ N/(3O$ !/>/,'3%&3$ 7$ L&()/'&3$ ,#+#'3-$ ;#$ 1',#-5$ P3--3;/-&;5$ ?@?Q5$ '#>46-&("#;5$ N/2&#;3;$ ;#$
6&6-&R%&-/($#(>3S/-#(5$?JQGI?JQT9$$
as in France by the redemptive orders, Trinitarian, Mercedarians and Lazarists, codify the sequences
of events leading to the liberation of the slaves with the help of scriptural models in which the
moment of redemption becomes the key to the experience. The presence of such modelling is clear
in the martyrologies such as the Dialogo de los martires, undoubtedly composed by the captive
Antonio de Sosa towards the end of the seventeenth century, and published by the Brother Diego
Haedo in the Topographie d’Alger13, or indeed the collection Plus illustres captives chrétiens ,
which remained an unpublished manuscript, but whose elements, compiled by the Trinitarian father
Dan14, allowed the author to back up the text of his Historie de Barbarie with a collection of
examples taken from life which complete the proselytising effect of the text on the reader..
It is for this reason that we wished
to devote the first part of this
dossier, (I. « Récits de rédemption.
Trinitaires
et
mercédaires »)
,
introduced by J.-C. Laborie, to the
description of the considerable
corpus
of
documents
on
the
privateers’ war which were issued
by the redeeming orders between
the sixteenth and the eighteenth
centuries in Europe. To the typical portrait of the captive bought back by the Trinitarians of the
Hapsburg states, as reconstituted by the historians E. Pauli and C. Watzka on the basis of the huge
amount of documentation which they have collected15 and also analysed by E. Ruhe, are added two
studies drawing on the French corpus. Yves Rodier analyses the pathetic resources deployed during
the first part of the seventeenth century in the writings of those who organised the ransoming and/or
the freeing by force of the Christian captives in Islamic lands, while C. Zonza’s study focuses on
the problematic of the financial exchange dramatised by the discourse of the redeeming orders, in
particular within the framework of the rivalry between the publications brought out by the Orders of
Mercy and the Trinitarians, respectively, for the monopoly of the co-ordination of the alms destined
13
Dialogo de los martires, in the Topografia de Argel, op.cit, 1612 ; critical edition by E. Sola and J. Maria Parreno,
Madrid, Hiperion Editions, 1990. French translation (greatly expurgated version) by R. Molinié-Violle, entitled De la
captivité à Alger, Alger, Jourdan, 1911.
14
Les plus illustres captives ou recueil des actions héroïques d’un grand nombre de Guerriers, et autres chrétiens,
réduits en esclavage par les Mahométans. Manuscrit de la bibliothèque Mazarine, édité intégralement pour la première
fois par le père Calixte de la Providence, (2 vols), Paris, 1892.
15
Readers are directed to the Annex to this first part of the dossier, in which E. Pauli and C. Watzka introduce the site
they have dedicated to the online presentation of the Trinitarian sources on the redeeming of captives: Sources on the
redemption of Christian captives by the Trinitarian Order during early modern times - an online collection of digitalized
sources and other information.
to ransom the captives. Finally, one can peruse D. Hershenzon’s account of
the book written by
Bonifacio Porres Alonso, Libertad a los cautivos, actividad redentora de la orden trinitaria,
Cordoba-Salamanca, Secretario Trinitario, 1997-1998, 3 vols.
Series : cross-referencing eyewitness accounts
The reconstitution of different series of narratives, either on
the basis of a single set of events narrated by several different
authors, or a single authorial genre, allows us to get a better insight
into the narrative configuration. Thus the “ prisons” which we come
across in the literature on travel are recounted differently in a story
of a pilgrimage to the holy land (for example the Bouquet sacré by
Jean Boucher, 1614),
of a spy (L’Itinerario by Lodovico de
16
Varthema, 1510 ) of an explorer ( Les Voyages fameux by Vincent
Le Blanc [published in 1649]), or a return from the Indies (The
Memoravel relaçam da perda da nao Conceiçam by Joao
Mascarenhas, 162717), in an account of a journey for learning
purposes (Relation de la captivité et liberté by E. d’Aranda, 165618), or emigration (Eben-ezer by
W. Okeley), of an ambassador (Recollections by Laurent d’Arvieux, published in 1735) or in a
simple account of a commercial transaction in the Levant. The genre, like the publication context,
structures the lived experience and determines the light in which it will be presented by the author:
tragic, providential, heroic or moral.
The second part of this dossier, ((II. « Récits de captivité. Cas et séries ») is thus dedicated
to the reconstruction of the significance of some of these series. Here, Daniel Vitkus studies the
functioning of the affirmations concerning the truthfulness and authenticity of the accounts which
systematically accompany the Barbary prison narrative, whether this affirmation is made by
Rabelais’s Panurge or on the contrary by real English captives, while Catherine Curran-Vigier
places the individual narrative of the puritan William Okeley (1675) in the context of the total range
of publications produced by the Dissenters in England in the second half of the seventeenth century.
Peter Madsen deals with the series of documents and accounts of Corsair activity published from
the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries in the Scandinavian domain and François Moureau with the
16
French translation, Voyage de Ludovico di Varthema en Arabie et aux Indes orientales (1503-1508), by P. Teyssier,
preface by Jean Aubin, Paris, Chandeigne Editions, 2004.
17
French translation, Esclave à Alger. Récit de Joao Mascarenhas (1621-1626), par P. Teyssier, Paris, Chandeigne
Editions, 1993. Cf also the Répertoire Nominatif des Récits de captivité, fiche Mascarenhas
18
Relation de la captivité et liberté du Sieur Emanuel d’Aranda, Mené esclave en Alger en 1640, et Mis en liberté l’an
1642, Bruxelles, 1656. Critical Edition : E. D’Aranda, Les captifs d’Alger, text established by Latifa Z’rari, J-P.
Rocher, Paris, 1997. On the republication of his account and his itinerary, see the Répertoire Nominatif des Récits de
Captivité, fiche E. d’Aranda.
question of the Corsican renegades over the same period. Finally, Denise Brahimi reconstitutes the
body of writing comprising three versions of a single event, the capture and liberation of Miss de
Bourck, published in France at the beginning of the eighteenth century and related from different
points of view.
Finally, it is of course the genres which are inherently literary – a corpus which between the
Renaissance and the Enlightenment coincides, only partially, as we know, with that of the texts
which are obviously fictional – which provides the richest contribution to this exploration of the
possibilities of the Barbary prison narrative. The inclusion of an episode of captivity in a Spanish
ballad (« La hermosa Zara Zegri »), or a Portuguese one (« Romance do cativo de Argel »), in an
exemplary novella (El Amante liberal, or La Española Inglesa by Cervantes, 1613), in a picaresque
novel (Vicente Espinel’s Marcos Obregon) Byzantine piece ( Cervantes’s Persiles y Sigismunda
(1616)), baroque writing (Gomberville’s Polexandre (1629 and 1637)
or philosophical text,
determines the meaning of the episode. Similarly, its dramatisation in a tragi-comedy (Daborne’s
(1612) A Christian turn’d Turk) or The Renegade by Philip Massinger (1630) in England, Mairet’s
L’Illustre corsaire (1640) or in a comedy (Here the Fourberies de Scapin) determines both the
meaning and the outcome of the adventure.
The third part of this dossier (III. « Poèmes et romans de la course » ) is thus dedicated to some of
these literary variations on the theme of the captivity narrative. Emilie Picherot studies their
importance in the context of the sixteenth century Spanish ballads, from which the European
captivity narrative inherits many of its characteristics and essential themes, while Lilian Pestre de
Almeida focuses on the different reformulations of a recurrent element of the Portuguese ballads,
namely a Jew, his daughter and a Christian captive. Caroline Lyvet offers a description of the truly
novelistic versions of the captivity experience in the Spanish literature of the beginning of the
seventeenth century. An annex to this last chapter also provides a bibliography of poems and novels
dealing with Araby or Barbary, produced in Italy in the course of the 16th century, commented by
Meriem Dhouib. By focusing on single novels – Cervantes’ Don Quixote on the one hand and
Scudéry’s Ibrahim on the other Ann Fastrup and Suzanne Guellouz respectively enable us to view
the extent of the variations allowed by an openly poetic treatment of the Barbary material at the
beginning of the early modern period.
Illustrations:
P.1. Three-masted ship, Engraving by Jacop Custodis, in Joseph Furtenbach, Architectura Martialis....et navalis, Ulm,
1629, pl. 14. Gallica (BNF).
P.3 Ottoman vessel, sixteenth century.
P.5. Map of Barbary, Engraving by Jan Cloppenburgh, in Gerhard Mercator’s Atlas Minor, Amsterdam, 1630,
http://www.kelibia.fr/histoirepostale/x_azdivers.htm.
p. 8. Procession of Christian slaves, in Historie van Barbaryen en des Zelfs zee-roovers, 1684, Amsterdam, translation
of l’Histoire de Barbarie by Father Pierre Dan (1637), p.194-195,Gallica (BNF)
P.9. William Okeley, Ebenezer or a Small Monument of Great Mercy, London, 1675.P. 10. Ibrahim, Scudery, (1640)
Frontispiece engraving, Gallica (BNF).