Describing Otherness in Captives’ Autobiographies in the Late Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries

From Firenze University Press Journal: Journal of Early Modern Studies (JEMS)

Teresa Peláez Domínguez, Universitat de València

The Mediterranean of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was a frontier society, i.e., ‘a place of interactions, producer of social and political links, but also a place of tensions, frictions and internal and external violence’ (Bertrand and Planas 2011, 3). A complex web of econo-mic, cultural, social and political relations was woven on this frontier. Captives and slaves are a central paradigmatic example of this Mediterranean border. Captivity and slavery were part of the idiosyncrasy of the secular conflict between Christians and Muslims from its inception. In the crowns of Castile and Aragón, until the conquest of the Kingdom of Granada, captivity and slavery were primarily related to medieval warfare within Iberian Peninsula boundaries. !ere, slavery was legitimized by being the exchange for sparing the captured enemy’s life, according to the Aristotelian definition that circulated in medieval legislation, as in the Siete Partidas. After the Christian conquest of Granada, the conflict between Christianity and Islam moved to the other side of the Strait of Gibraltar. The Habsburg and Ottoman armies engaged in a series of battles, and corsair warfare and piracy gained strength in the sixteenth century. This led thousands of men and women to be enslaved by their ‘infidel’ enemies. Because of the extent of the phenomenon due to the conflict between Christianity and Islam, Mediterranean captivity and slavery in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were understood, by the common sense of the time, to be an everyday occurrence (Bono 2002; Martínez Torres 2004; Kaiser 2008; Vincent 2008; Fiume 2009; Weiss 2011).In established historiography, captives were viewed as a product of war and as commodi-ties, mainly because of their role in the ransom economy — even their role as a labor force was relegated to the background. However, now they are also understood within the frontier society itself as cultural mediators who participated in a ‘web of connectivity’ that was woven betwe-en the two shores of the Mediterranean (Subrahmanyam 2011; Fiume 2013). Using Natalie Rothman’s concept, these captives led ‘trans-imperial lives’, travelling back and forth between Mediterranean shores. They moved across imperial borders and, at the same time, produced the means to classify imperial alterities, signify their own ‘in-between place’ and shape-shift imperial boundaries (2012). This intermediate place was also engendered in the imperial frontiers of the Hispanic Monarchy that was carrying out a process of ethno-religious uniformization in its societies. In this sense, captivity and slavery are to be understood as disruptive practices, as defined by Daniel Hershenzon:

Piracy and captivity were disruptive practices. !is statement may sound banal. Obviously, captivity disrupted the lives of the individuals who lost their freedom. But, captivity generated an ethno‐religious disorder that also disrupted the political order. Captivity transplanted Christians to Muslim territory and threatened their confessional identity while forging Muslim slave communities in Europe. … and among Spanish subjects. (2017, 1–2)

Some captives managed to obtain freedom and return to their places of origin, whether enslaved or not. However, the fact that they had spent so much time in contact with Islam often led the Christian societies to which they returned to suspect that they may have transgressed certain social norms or even changed their faith. It is important to acknowledge that the captives un-derwent an experience of cultural exchange that potentially led them to question and transgress the values assumed in their place of origin. However, upon their return, they had to readapt to Iberian society, with which they no longer necessarily shared the same cultural norms. Hence, the potential cultural contagion of the Christian former captives placed them in a ‘marginal’ position.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.36253/jems-2279-7149-15265

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