Mediterranean Slavery and World Literature

Captivity Genres from Cervantes to Rousseau

Mario Klarer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781032239866
• eBook ISBN: 9781351967570
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Saggi letterari

Mediterranean Slavery and World Literature is a collection of selected essays about the transformations of captivity experiences in major early modern texts of world literature and popular media, including works by Cervantes, de Vega, Defoe, Rousseau, and Mozart. Where most studies of Mediterranean slavery, until now, have been limited to historical and autobiographical accounts, this volume looks specifically at literary adaptations from a multicultural perspective.

Part 1

Accounts and Authenticities

1 Before Barbary Captivity Narratives

Slavery, Ransom, and the Economy of Christian Virtue in The Good Gerhard (c. 1220) by Rudolf von Ems

Mario Klarer

Slavery and captivity in the Mediterranean skyrocketed in the early sixteenth century and continued to be a major geopolitical factor as late as the early nineteenth century. The so-called Barbary Coast, which included the city states of Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli, as well as the independent Kingdom of Morocco, became the site of a religiously coded antagonism between a Christian Europe and a Muslim North Africa. The two Barbarossa brothers, the most famous corsairs in the early sixteenth century, were especially responsible for the advancement of piracy and captivity as major cross-cultural issues in the Mediterranean for centuries to come. After seizing power in Algiers and Tunis, the corsair brothers nominally put their newly acquired territories under the protection of the Ottoman Empire and thus became a major naval power in the Mediterranean. The ensuing corsairing activities in the next three centuries by the North African city states resulted in hundreds of thousands of Europeans falling into the hands of pirates, often spending long periods of time in North Africa as slaves or hostages.

However, slavery and piracy in the early modern Mediterranean were not restricted to North African corsairs but were equally practiced by a number of European players, including the Knights of Malta, who supplied the European slave markets in Malaga, Marseille, Livorno, and Malta with an equally high number of Muslim captives. What is interesting is that throughout the centuries this antagonism was primarily connoted in a religious manner, although the economic deep structure that fueled this phenomenon was more than obvious. Pirates or privateers were not primarily interested in the material goods of the ships they attacked; rather, they concentrated on the human cargo that promised valuable working slaves, galley rowers, or hostages who were held for high ransom.

Although a similar number of North Africans – estimates place them in the several hundred thousand – fell into the hands of European forces, North Africa lacks the rich tradition of captivity narratives that we find in Europe (see Matar). This European genre appeared in the sixteenth century and remained highly productive until the early nineteenth century. An impressive number of European captives in North Africa, after returning to their respective home countries, produced autobiographical narratives about their experiences as slaves. Captivity eyewitness accounts were eagerly sought by publishers and printers because of their commercial value and therefore have survived as a large body of published narratives.¹ Specimens of these personal memoirs appeared in all major European languages – from the Iberian Peninsula in the south to Iceland in the far north, as well as the United States in the far west. The Barbary captivity narratives were not only historical documents in their own right but also functioned as catalyst texts for early modern literary prose. The early novel, the modern autobiography, and the African American slave narrative integrated aspects of these eyewitness accounts in order to market themselves to an audience that was already sensitized to sensational true stories in exotic settings.

Even the earliest examples of the European novel drew on these Barbary captivity experiences, as is the case with Miguel de Cervantes, whose five-year captivity in Algiers is indirectly featured in his novels; or Defoe, who, for Robinson Crusoe, implemented elements from seventeenth-century English Barbary captivity accounts. As late as the mid-nineteenth century, the German author Annette von Droste-Hülshoff used an authentic North African captivity narrative as a source for her 1842 novel Die Judenbuche (The Jews’ Beech Tree). Even Rousseau and Voltaire, as well as experts on international law, used Barbary captivity narratives for their respective prose treatises.²

It is quite astonishing how these autobiographical narratives influenced literary texts by providing them with narrative techniques, settings, and plot lines. Robinson Crusoe is a case in point. It amalgamates the authentic and spectacular mid-seventeenth-century flight from Algiers to Mallorca by William Okeley into the most successful novel of the eighteenth century. Okeley’s 1675 narrative about his spectacular escape from Barbary in a self-made boat (Figure 1.1), which he embedded within a lengthy religious preface, secured Eben-ezer several editions in the seventeenth century as well as a major, though unacknowledged, literary transformation by Daniel Defoe (see Starr; Hunter; McKeon). We have to remember that Robinson Crusoe spends two years in Moroccan captivity before getting stranded on the deserted island, from which he tries to escape with a self-made boat, thus resembling William Okeley in a number of ways. Also, the context in which Okeley places his narrative – his religiously laden preface covers more than thirty pages – parallels Robinson Crusoe’s religious subtext, a subtext that J. Paul Hunter has so convincingly traced in his study The Reluctant Pilgrim.

However, the exchange between Barbary captivity narratives and the early novel does not stop here. With the publication of Robinson Crusoe and its immediate translations – for example, in 1721 into German – Defoe’s novel in turn shaped subsequent authentic Barbary captivity narratives. The most striking and extraordinary example is the eighteenth-century account of the Wolfgang brothers.³ The two young German copper engravers sailed to England against their father’s will, fell into the hands of Algerian pirates, and spent several years in North African captivity. Only after a long-winded ransom process were they able to return home safely. Despite being an authentic account of captivity at the court of the Dey of Algiers, the published narrative is clearly influenced by the popular German translation of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. Among the most striking similarities is the trope of disobeying the father’s explicit order not to go to sea as well as the ensuing punishment of this act of paternal disobedience – both earthly and heavenly.

Figure 1.1 Pierre Dan, Historie van Barbaryen, En des zelfs Zee-Roovers, Amsterdam (1684), fol. 147; William Okeley’s sensational escape

Source: Mario Klarer, private collection.

As this example shows, authentic captivity narratives and their literary transformations are in constant exchange and mutually influence each other. Barbary captivity accounts led to the publication of best-selling memoirs for audiences who wished to slake their thirst for sensational true stories. These narratives shaped the early novel, which cashed in on a rising public demand for plots of this nature. However, the popularity of novels that were modeled on authentic captivity accounts in turn influenced later authentic narratives. Thus, the interdependence of text types and genres comes full circle and thereby strongly questions the validity of a clear-cut binary separating authenticity from fiction without taking into account its inevitable gray areas of overlap.

This line of mutual influencing is astonishing and often surprises the uninitiated reader of captivity narratives. However, what is truly startling, even to experts on Barbary captivity narratives, is that literary versions of North African captivity are not necessarily influenced by “authentic” Barbary captivity narratives. In this chapter, I would like to argue that, on the contrary, literary versions of Barbary captivity – at least in one prominent case – predate and foreshadow authentic Barbary captivity experiences or narratives by centuries.

Around the year 1220 – roughly three hundred years prior to the Barbarossa brothers establishing corsairing as a major economic and political factor on North Africa’s Mediterranean coast – Rudolf von Ems finished the Middle High German verse narrative Der Gute Gerhard (The Good Gerhard). The seven thousand verses of Rudolf’s text uncannily foreshadow early modern exchanges of captives across cultural divides.⁴ The Good Gerhard is, for the most part, a fictional first-person narrative told by a Cologne merchant who, after conducting business successfully in the Levant, is driven off course to North Africa during a storm. The Moroccan local ruler who hospitably welcomes Gerhard and his crew eventually makes a business proposition that Gerhard for a number of reasons – both economic and ethical – is unable to decline. The Muslim nobleman offers Gerhard twenty-four English knights and the daughter of the king of Norway as objects of trade. A year prior to Gerhard’s arrival, the group had been taken captive and put in shackles after their ship washed ashore. In exchange for the valuable cargo of Gerhard’s own vessel, the Moroccan nobleman offers all the hostages, whose “trading value” in Europe should yield a profit at least twice the worth of Gerhard’s original commercial merchandise. Gerhard closes the deal, sails off to Germany with his new human cargo, and sets free the English knights, who promise Gerhard that they will produce the ransom money after their return to England. The Norwegian princess, who is engaged to the future English king, remains in Gerhard’s custody since the young prince has not returned from a crusade to the Holy Land and is presumed dead. When Gerhard intends to have the princess marry his own son, the long-lost heir to the English throne unexpectedly appears in rags at the wedding. Gerhard and his son bring the ceremony to a halt and honor the original vow between the prince and the princess. Gerhard accompanies the couple to England, where he receives large financial compensation for his original “investment” of buying free the hostages in Morocco.

This first-person narrative in the merchant Gerhard’s voice is embedded in a frame story in which the emperor of the Holy Roman Empire seeks spiritual answers to the question of how to become a good Christian. An angel who appears to the emperor in a mystical vision points out the merchant Gerhard as a model of Christian virtue. Consequently, the emperor meets with Gerhard and asks him to share his personal story as an example of a God-fearing life. Despite being afraid that he will commit the sin of pride, Gerhard eventually gives in and discloses his story to the ruler, who accepts it as an exemplum of Christian virtue.

As this crude plot outline indicates, The Good Gerhard touches on a number of aspects central to early modern captivity accounts, both literary and authentic. Of course, piracy and ensuing captivity are as old as seafaring as such, and representations thereof appear in the oldest specimens of Western literature, including the Odyssey with its stories of land raids and abductions. Also, politically speaking, privateering became a major factor in classical antiquity when Julius Caesar fell into the hands of Cilician pirates and, after paying a high ransom, took cruel revenge on his captors. Caesar’s contemporary and fellow triumvir Pompeius accumulated political capital by advancing militarily against pirates in the Eastern Mediterranean. Thus, he did away with a major threat and impediment to commerce in the later Roman Republic. In the age of the Crusades, captivity and the commercial exchange of hostages across religious divides also played a major role outside the context of piracy and privateering. European leaders and noblemen often spent long periods of time in Muslim captivity before being ransomed for high sums or in exchange for Saracen prisoners of war.⁵ Some instances of Saracen captivity were highly publicized across Europe and definitively served as models for the Muslim captivity of Christian knights in Rudolf von Ems’ The Good Gerhard.

In addition to semi-commercial human trafficking of captives during the Crusades in the Levant, piracy seems to have been an issue in the early thirteenth century, in the year 1220, to be precise – the year Rudolf von Ems supposedly finished The Good Gerhard. In order to unearth the piracy substructure of Rudolf’s text, we have to look more closely at Gerhard’s first-person narrative. Of particular interest is the section in which Gerhard tells us how he was driven off course during a twelve-day storm and how he eventually became stranded on an unknown coast that later turned out to be Morocco:

On the thirteenth day, we came close to high mountains that were huge and unknown to us. Nobody on board of my ship knew this place or had ever in his life been to this wild region in which we were now. […] After the enormous storms, the day turned out to be nice and pleasant. Soon we forgot about the fear that we all had felt before. Only our lack of knowledge about the foreign region caused anxiety and distress. The waves had carried us into a harbor in front of the mountains. I commissioned a sailor to scale the mountains and to reconnoiter in order to inform us if he could see cultivated land.⁶

(19, lines 1231–54)

The sailor reports that behind the mountain is a large city thriving with commerce. When Gerhard enters the city, he encounters a local nobleman who treats him with the utmost respect but immediately inquires: “Dear stranger, w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part 1 Accounts and Authenticities
• Part 2 Genesis and Genres
• Part 3 Transformations and Translations
• Part 4 Media and Markets
• Part 5 Captives and Concepts
• Index