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Compassion, Fear, Fugitive Slaves, and a Pirates’ Shrine: Lampedusa, ca. 1550–ca. 1750

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Mapping Pre-Modern Sicily

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Abstract

The deserted island of Lampedusa shaped an unexpected meeting of the currents of early modern Mediterranean piracy and slavery that suggests the emotional complexity of European and North African pirates—both the potential that some of them felt compassion for the people whose capture was their business, and the reality of their fear that they themselves could become fodder in the Mediterranean system of slavery. This dyad marked the island’s unusual shrine that was shared by Muslim and Christian mariners. There, pirates made offerings of practical items intended to help any seafarer in need, including fugitive slaves. Though this island was a site of captive-taking, it offered slaves a chance at liberty. Lampedusa and its shrine thus also illuminate slaves’ strategies of sea-borne self-liberation.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Cited in Nabil Matar, Europe Through Arab Eyes, 1578–1727 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 149–50.

  2. 2.

    Bartolomé Bennassar and Lucile Bennassar, Les chrétiens d’Allah: l’histoire extraordinaire des renégats XVIe–XVII siècles (Paris: Perrin, 1989), 208–9.

  3. 3.

    Daniel Herschensohn, The Captive Sea: Slavery, Communication, and Commerce in the Early Modern Mediterranean (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), 2. For estimates of the total numbers of enslaved peoples in Europe and the Islamicate Mediterranean in this period, see Salvatore Bono, Schiavi: una storia mediterraneana (XVI-XIX secolo) (Bologna: Il Molino, 2016), 71–5. There is much debate over the appropriate terminology for violent men of the sea. Despite the significant legal differences between piracy (sea-robbery unsanctioned by any government) and corsair activity (sea-robbery sanctioned by a state), in practice the distinction was often blurry and dependent on one’s perspective—and is, for the purposes of the argument here, largely irrelevant. Hence I use pirate, corsair, and sea-robber interchangeably; the latter term is suggested in Nikolas Jaspert and Sebastian Kollwitz, “Seeraub im Mittelmeer: Bemerkungen und Perspektiven,” in Seeraub im Mittelmeerraum: Piraterie, Korsarentum und Maritime Gewalt von der Antike bis zur Neuzeit, ed. Nikolas Jaspert and Sebastian Kolditz (Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink, 2013), 15–6, 31–2. My usage accords with that of other historians, including Joshua M. White, Piracy and Law in the Ottoman Mediterranean (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2018), 32–5, 59, 272; Albrecht Fuess, “Muslime und Piraterie im Mittelmeer (7.-16. Jahrhundert),” in Seeraub im Mittelmeerraum, 177–8; Molly Greene, Catholic Pirates and Greek Merchants: A Maritime History of the Mediterranean (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010); and, for the late medieval period, Ruthy Gertwagen, “Is There a Typology of Pirate Crews and Ships Across the Byzantine and Medieval Mediterranean (11th to 15th Century)?” in Seeraub im Mittelmeerraum, 70–1; Roser Salicrú i Lluch, “Luck and Contingency? Piracy, Human Booty and Human Trafficking in the Late Medieval Western Mediterranean,” in Seeraub im Mittelmeerraum, 351. For opposing arguments, see, among others, Bono, Schiavi, 89–91; Daniel Panzac, Les corsaires barbaresques: la fin d’une épopée 1800–1820 (Paris: CNRS, 1999), 11, 77.

  4. 4.

    Orders to the Maltese fleet: Anne Brogini, Malte, frontière de Chrétienté (1530–1670) (Rome: École Française de Rome, 2006), 545–6.

  5. 5.

    Subjecthood in particular could muddy the waters, as both Catholic pirates and Ottoman Muslim pirates could take Orthodox Christian Ottoman subjects captive, though neither was supposed to: Greene, Catholic Pirates; White, Piracy and Law, 32–59. Pirates themselves could be of shifting and indeterminate religious affiliation. Corsairs could also capture (but not enslave) co-religionists from nations with whom their own state was officially at war.

  6. 6.

    Cyprian Broodbank, The Making of the Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean from the Beginning to the Emergence of the Classical World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 78–9, 212.

  7. 7.

    For introductions to the bibliography on Lampedusa and contemporary migration, see Border Lampedusa: Subjectivity, Visibility and Memory in Stories of Sea and Land, ed. Gabriele Proglio and Laura Odasso (New York: Palgrave, 2018); Heidrun Friese, Grenzen der Gastfreundschaft: Die Bootsflüchtlinge von Lampedusa und die europäische Frage (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2014); Paolo Cuttitta, Lo spettacolo del confine: Lampedusa tra produzione e messa in scena della frontiera (Milan: Mimesis, 2012). For numbers of migrant arrivals on the island up to 2017, see Jussi S. Jauhiainen, “Asylum Seekers and Irregular Migrants in Lampedusa, Italy, 2017,” Publications of the Department of Geography and Geology of the University of Turku 7 (2017): 31–42.

  8. 8.

    An English document of 1611 described Lampedusa as a “Turkish” possession; Memorials of Affairs of State in the Reigns of Elizabeth and King James… 3 vols. (London: W.B., 1725), 3:298. The Sicilian noble family that tried to claim the island was the lineage of Palma: Francesco Maria Maggio, Vita, e morte del venerabile P.F. Alipio di Giuseppe… (Rome: Ignazio de’ Lazari, 1657), 128, 134. The oft-repeated claim that Alfonso V of Sicily gave the island in 1436 to Giovanni Caro, baron of Montechiaro, a putative ancestor of the dukes of Palma (e.g. Giovanni Fragapane, Lampedusa: dalla preistoria al 1878 [Palermo: Sellerio, 1993], 54–5), seems to have no historical foundation. I have been unable to locate an authentic version of the donation in archives in either Barcelona or Palermo and the text appears to be a later forgery uncovered as such in the late eighteenth century; Heidrun Friese, Lampedusa: Historische Anthropologie einer Insel (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 1996), 31–5.

  9. 9.

    Other Sicilian islands such as the Egadians were uninhabited then for the same reason; Ferdinando Maurici, “Per la storia delle isole minori della Sicilia: le isole egadi e le isole dello Stagnone nel medioevo,” Acta historica et archaeologica mediaevalia 22 (2002): 191–212. Many were abandoned by the late Middle Ages, due to the piracy that already flourished then in this region, on which see Dominique Valérian, “Les captifs et la piraterie: une réponse à une conjonture déprimée? Le cas du Maghreb aux XIVe et XVe siècles,” in Les esclavages en Méditerranée: espaces et dynamiques économiques, ed. Fabienne P. Guillén and Salah Trabelsi (Madrid: Casa de Velázquez, 2012), 119–9; and Henri Bresc, “Course et piraterie en Sicile (1250–1450),” Anuario de Estudios Medievales 10 (1980): 751–7.

  10. 10.

    Armida de Miro, “Lampedusa tra il IV ed il VII secolo: nuovi dati dalle esplorazioni archeologiche,” in La cristianizzazione in Italia fra tardoantico e altomedioevo (IX Congresso Nazionale di Archeologia Cristiana, Agrigento 20–25 novembre), ed. Rosa Maria Bonacasa Carra and Emma Vitale, 2 vols. (Palermo: C. Saldino, 2007), 2:1969–82.

  11. 11.

    This same pattern was true of many Mediterranean islands; Helen Dawson, Mediterranean Voyages: The Archaeology of Island Colonisation and Abandonment (Walnut Creek CA: Left Coast Press, 2014) (264 on Lampedusa’s Neolithic residents; see also Broodbank, Making of the Middle Sea, 212).

  12. 12.

    Iacomo Bosio, Dell’istoria della sacra religion e illustrissima militia di San Giovanni Gierosolitamitano 3 vols. (Rome: Stamperia Apostolica Vaticana, 1594–1602), 3:349.

  13. 13.

    Favignana and Ustica: Maurici, “Per la storia,” 193–4, 207–9. Jazīrat Jāliṭah: Ameur Oueslati, “Les îles de la côte nord de la Tunisie de l’intérêt d’une géomorphologie encore peu connue et étudiée : le cas de l’archipel de la Galite,” Dynamiques environnementales: Journal international de géosciences et de l’environnement 38 (2016), 178; Grenville T. Temple, Excursions in the Mediterranean: Algiers and Tunis, 2 vols. (London: Saunders and Otley, 1835), 1: 85–6. Jazīrat Zambrah: Itinéraire d’Anselme Adorno en Terre Sainte, ed. Jacques Heers and Georgette de Groer (Paris: CNRS, 1978), 98–100.

  14. 14.

    Cited in Matar, Europe Through Arab Eyes, 52–53. By this point, islands and piracy already had a long history; Pinuccia Franca Simbula, “Îles, corsaires et pirates dans la Méditerranée medieval,” Médiévales 47 (2004): 17–30.

  15. 15.

    I am currently writing a book about Lampedusa.

  16. 16.

    Giovanni Lorenzo D’Aniana, L’universale fabrica del monde (Venice: Aniello San Vito di Napoli, 1576), 269; Martinus Crusius, Turco-graeciae libri octo… (Basel, 1584), 528.

  17. 17.

    Alonso de Contreras, Derrotero universal del Mediterráneo: manuscrito del siglo XVII, ed. Ignacio Fernández Vial (Málaga: Editorial Algazara, 1996), 192 (this text was written in 1616, but Contreras probably visited the island in 1601). See also the account in his later Discurso de mi vida, ed. Henry Ettinghausen (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1988), 96. Some subsequent accounts are gathered in Fragapane, Lampedusa, 487–534; others I cite as relevant. For some discussion of the shrine, see Wolfgang Kaiser, “La Madonne et le marabout,” in Lieux saints partagés (Arles: Actes Sud, 2015), 104–7; idem, “La grotte de Lampedusa: practiques et imaginaire d’un ‘troisième’ lieu en Méditerranée à l’époque moderne,” in Topographien des Sakralen: Religion und Raumordnung in der Vormoderne, ed. Susanne Rau and Gerd Schwerhoff (Munich: Dölling u. Galtiz, 2008), 306–24; Simon Mercieca and Joseph Muscat, “A Territory of Grace: Lampedusa in Early Modern Times,” Öt Kontinens (2013): 53–68.

  18. 18.

    On Mary as a maritime patron, see Amy G. Remensnyder, “Mary, Star of the Multi-confessional Mediterranean: Ships, Shrines and Sailors,” in Ein Meer und seine Heiligen: Hagiographie im mittelalterlichen Mediterraneum, ed. Nikolas Jaspert and Marco di Branco (Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink, 2018), 299–325.

  19. 19.

    For introduction to the bibliography on shared shrines in the Mediterranean, see Choreographies of Shared Sacred Sites: Religion and Conflict Resolution, ed. Elazar Barkan and Karen Barkey (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015); Sharing Sacred Spaces in the Mediterranean: Christians, Muslims and Jews at Shrines and Sanctuaries, ed. Dionigi Albera and Maria Couroucli (Bloomington: Indian University Press, 2012); Lieux saints partagés. On renegades, see among others Giovanna Fiume, Schiavitù Mediterranee: corsari, rinnegati e santi di età moderna (Milan: Bruno Mondadori, 2009), 70–86; Bennassar and Bennassar, Les Chrétiens d’Allah.

  20. 20.

    D’Aniana, L’universale fabrica del monde, 269.

  21. 21.

    Francesco da Capranica (attributed), “Lettera di relazione scritta da Tripoli di Barberia dal P. Fr. Francesco Missionario,” edited in Carlo della Valle, “Tripoli nella fine del Seicento,” Nuova Antologia 312 (1937): 128–9.

  22. 22.

    Capranica, “Lettera,” 128–9.

  23. 23.

    Relation de la captivité du Sr. Mouëtte dans les royaumes de Fez et de maroc où il a demeuré pendant onze ans (Paris: Jean Cochart, 1683), 173–5.

  24. 24.

    This belief is mentioned in almost all descriptions of the shrine; for an early instance, see Crusius, Turco-graeciae libri, 528. The sanctions are typical of those associated with maritime shrines.

  25. 25.

    Jean du Mont, Voyages de Mr du Mont, en France, en Italie, en Allemagne, a Malthe et en Turquie… 4 vols. (The Hague: Etienne Foulque et François Honoré, 1699), 2:184 (Letter 6, Chios, 1690). Cf. Capranica, “Lettera,” 129; Contreras, Discurso, 96.

  26. 26.

    Felix Fabri, Evagatorium in Terrae Sanctae, Arabiae et Egypti peregrinationem, ed. Conrad Hassler, 3 vols. (Stuttgart: Literarischer Verein, 1843–1849), 3:167. For commentary, see Hannah Barker, That Most Precious Merchandise: The Mediterranean Trade in Black Sea Slaves, 1260–1500 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), 37–8.

  27. 27.

    For an introduction to the maroon communities of escaped slaves on Caribbean islands, see Gabriel de Avilez Rocha, “Maroons in the Montes: Toward a Political Ecology of Marronage in the Sixteenth-Century Caribbean,” in Early Modern Black Diaspora Studies, ed. Cassander L. Smith et al. (New York: Palgrave, 2018), 15–35.

  28. 28.

    On enslaved sub-Saharan Africans in these central Mediterranean locations, see Lori De Lucia, “The Space between Borno and Palermo: Slavery and Its Boundaries in the Late Medieval Saharan-Mediterranean Region,” in Rethinking Medieval Margins and Marginality, ed. Ann E. Zimo, Tiffany D. Vann Sprecher, Kathryn Reyerson, and Debra Blumenthal (London: Routledge, 2020), 12–3, 20–1; Godfrey Wettinger, “Black African Slaves in Malta,” in Mediterranean Seascapes: Proceedings of an International Conference held in Malta in Conjunction with Euromed Heritage II, Navigation du Savoir Project (Valletta, 2004), ed. Simon Mercieca (Msida: Malta University Publishers Ltd., 2006), 65–81; Ralph Austin, “The Mediterranean Islamic Slave Trade Out of Africa: A Tentative Census,” Slavery and Abolition 13 (1992), esp. 227, 230–1, 234; Carmelo Trasselli, “Sicilia, Levante e Tunisia nei secoli XIV e XV” in his Mediterraneo e Sicilia all’inizio dell’epoca moderna (ricerche quattrocentesche) (Cosenza: Pallegrini, 1977), 124; Lucette Valensi, “Esclaves chrétiens et esclaves noirs à Tunis au XIIIe siècle,” Annales E.S.C. 22 (1967): 1267–88.

  29. 29.

    Wettinger, “Black African Slaves,” 68–70. On the conditions endured by enslaved Africans in this “Mediterranean Middle Passage,” see John Wright, The Trans-Saharan Slave Trade (London: Routledge, 2007), 126–34.

  30. 30.

    For examples of these methods and others of escape by sea (though not involving Lampedusa), see Giovanni Battista Salvago, “Africa overo Barbarìa:” Relazione al doge di Venezia sulle regenze di Algeri e di Tunisi, ed. Alberto Sacerdoti (Padua: CEDAM, 1937), 93; Contreras, Discurso, 101–2; Pierre Dan, Histoire de Barbarie et de ses corsaires …, 2nd ed. (Paris: Pierre Rocolet, 1649), 5.4, 424; The Diary of Henry Teonge, Chaplain on Board His Majesty’s Ships Assistance, Bristol and Royal Oak, Anno 1675 to 1679 (London: Charles Knight, 1825), 280; William Okeley, “Ebeneezer or; a Small Monument of Great Mercy…,” in Piracy, Slavery, and Redemption: Barbary Captivity Narratives from Early Modern England, ed. Daniel J. Vitkus (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 170–87; Antoine Galland, Histoire de l’esclavage d’un marchand de la ville de Cassis, à Tunis, ed. Catherine Guénot and Nadia Vasquez (Paris: Editions de la Bibliothèque, 1992), 63–4, 94–118. For further evidence, see Brogini, Malte, 665–7; Matar, Europe through Arab Eyes, 55; Bennassar and Bennassar, Les Chrétiens d’Allah, 252–3; Peter Earle, Corsairs of Malta and Barbary (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1970), 175; Salvatore Bono, I corsari barbareschi (Turin: Edizioni Radiotelevisione Italiana, 1964), 337–45; André Vovard, “Chez les pirates barbaresques: les évasions par mer dans la littérature et dans l’histoire,” Bulletin de la Section de Géographie du Comité des Travaux Historiques et scientifiques 63 (1949–1950): 89–104.

  31. 31.

    Valladolid, Archivo General de Simancas, Estado Legajo 1119, no. 79. For cases of slaves escaping because of shipwreck elsewhere in the Mediterranean, see Salvatore Bono, “Au-delà des rachats: libération des esclaves en Méditerranée, XVIe–XVIIIe siècle,” Cahiers de la Méditerranée 87 (2013): 6–7 (online: http://journals.openedition.org/cdlm/7270; accessed 27/6/2021).

  32. 32.

    National Library of Malta (NLM), Archives of the Order of Malta (AOM), Ms. 1768, folios 103r, 178v; NLM AOM Ms. 1769, folios 271v, 277r. On Christian buonavoglie, see Bono, I corsari barbareschi, 83–5.

  33. 33.

    Stories about Lampedusa told by slaves: “The Captive of Tunis,” Tratado e la defença de la santa fe Catolica Christiana, respondiendo à los argumentos que de nuestros sagradas escrituras nos opone el Mahometano, Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale Ms. espagnol 49, f. 76v. On the extensive information networks among Mediterranean captives, see Hershenzon, Captive Sea, esp. 18, 25, 39, 40.

  34. 34.

    Though a century later than the putative date of events, the description of this man’s experiences on Lampedusa by a chronicler of the Knights of Malta is the most reliable account: Bartolomeo dal Pozzo, Historia della Sacra Religione Militare di S. Giovanni Gerosolimitano detta di Malta, 2 vols. (Verona and Venice: Giovanni Berno and Gerolamo Albrizzi, 1703–1715), 1:533. For the Ligurian legend, hagiography, and chapel, see Luciano Calzamiglia, “La strana redenzione di Andrea Anfosso del Castellaro,” in Corsari, schiavi, riscatti tra Liguria e Nord Africa nei secoli XVI e XVIII: Atti del Convegno Storico Internazionale Ceriale, 7–8 febbraio 2004 (Ceriale, 2005), 203–25; Ivan Arnaldi, Nostra Signora di Lampedusa: storia civile e materiale di un miraculo mediterraneo (Milan: Leonardo, 1990).

  35. 35.

    It is likely that these enslaved people learned about Our Lady of Lampedusa through their Portuguese masters. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Portuguese vessels called Nossa Senhora da Lampadosa were involved in the global business of empire, including naval battles in the Americas, trans-Atlantic and Indian Ocean trade, corsairing in the Mediterranean—and slaving trips from Brazil to Angola. On the Lampadosa confraternity in Rio, see Mariza de Carvalho Soares, Devotos da cor: identidade étnica, religiosidade e escravidão no Rio de Janeiro, século XVIII (Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, 2000), 148, 154, 156; Mary C. Karasch, Slave Life in Rio de Janeiro 1808–1850 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 83–4, 86–7, 269; Augusto Mauricio, Igrejas históricas do Rio de Janeiro (Rio de Janeiro: Livraria Kosmos Editoral, 1978), 109–17. On Black confraternities as sites of resistance, solidarity, and manumission, see Erin Katherine Rowe, Black Saints in Early Modern Global Catholicism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 56–72, 94–101,105–16; Jorge Fonseca, Religião e liberdade: os negros nas irmandades e confrarias portuguesas (séculos XV a XIX) (Vila Nova de Famalicão: Editora Húmus, 2016), 91–105.

  36. 36.

    On the Christianization implied in the Ligurian story, see Kaiser, “La grotte,” 317–18.

  37. 37.

    Formentera: Dan, Histoire, 4.5, 356 (who also asserts that slaves escaped onto deserted islands in general; 5.10.1, 420); Richard Hasleton, Strange and wonderfull things. Happened to Richard Hasleton, borne at Braintree in Essex, in his ten yeares trauailes in many forraine countries… (London: Abel Ieffes, 1595), n.p. (3rd page of main text), and for discussion, Bennassar and Bennassar, Les Chrétiens d’Allah, 459–60 (who point to instances of flight also on the deserted island of Cabrera). For pirate activity on Formentera, see Nicolay Dauphin, seigneur d’Arfeuille, Les quatres premiers livres des navigations et peregrinations orientales (Lyon: Guillaume Roville, 1568), 1.4, 12; and for discussion, Isidoro Macabich, “Formentera,” Hispania 12 (1952): 578–579, 584. For Jazīrat Zambrah: Dal Pozzo, Historia, 1: 507–14.

  38. 38.

    Given the distances involved, Dal Pozzo’s assertion (Historia, 1:533) that this man floated in a makeshift raft from Lampedusa to the Maltese island of Gozo is far more plausible than the hagiographic version of his voyage, which has him arriving via a “skiff” in far-off Liguria (texts cited in Calzamiglia, “La strana redenzione,” 214–16).

  39. 39.

    Felice Caronni, Ragguaglio del viaggio in Barberia, ed. Salvatore Bono (Milan: San Paolo Edizioni, 1993), 94 (cf. Bono’s commentary, 9). Caronni’s unflattering portrait of this pirate is doubtless exaggerated and intended to contrast with his positive depiction of the ship’s raïs, whom he described as sympathetic toward and gentle with captives. See below at note 44.

  40. 40.

    Felix Fabri, Evagatorium 3:168 (there is a partisan slant in this description, as he did not decry slave markets in Europe; Barker, That Most Precious Merchandise, 211–12).

  41. 41.

    Matar, Europe through Arab Eyes, 51–2; see also his Mediterranean Captivity through Arab Eyes, 1517–1798 (Leiden: Brill, 2020), 79.

  42. 42.

    This is the one of the main arguments made by Brogini, Malte.

  43. 43.

    NLM, AOM Ms. 1769, f. 271v, 277r; Contreras, Discurso, 97; Philemon de la Motte, État des royaumes de Barbarie, Tripoly, Tunis, et Alger… (Rouen: Guillaume Behourt, 1703), 18; Leonardo Orlandini, Trapani in una brieve descrittione (Palermo: Gio. Antonio de Franceschi, 1605), 77; Jean Thévenot, Relation d’un voyage fait au Levant… (Paris: Lovis Bilaine, 1664), 538.

  44. 44.

    Caronni, Ragguaglio, 97 (and 98–99, 107, 114 for examples of the raïs’s benevolence and of Caronni’s gratitude).

  45. 45.

    Here I intend “rough compassion” to evoke Christopher MacEvitt’s powerful coinage “rough tolerance” in his The Crusades and the Christian World of the East: Rough Tolerance (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008).

  46. 46.

    Barker, That Most Precious Merchandise, 31–3 (who includes pirates among her examples but does not focus on them).

  47. 47.

    White, Piracy and Law, 2, 34. The medieval situation was similar: Kathryn Reyerson, “Identity in the Medieval Mediterranean World of Merchants and Pirates,” Mediterranean Studies 20 (2012): 129–46.

  48. 48.

    Fatiha Loualich, “In the Regency of Algiers: the Human Side of the Algerian Corso,” in Trade and Cultural Exchange in the Early Modern Mediterranean: Braudel’s Legacy, ed. Maria Fusaro, Colin Heywood, and Mohamad-Saleh Omro (London: I.B. Tauris, 2010), 69–96 (esp. 76–8, 83, 86–7, 92).

  49. 49.

    Proverb: José Gella Iturriaga, “Quattrocento proverbi marina comuni agli italiani e agli spagnuoli,” in Congresso internazionale di etnografia e folklore del mare, Napoli 3–10 ottobre 1954: Cronaca dei lavori (Naples: L’arte tipografica, 1957), 374. Pirate death at sea was frequent enough that secretaries of Algerian pirate ships were sometimes called the “khodja of the disappeared.” They kept inventories of who died at sea and how; Loualich, “In the Regency of Algiers,” 190–1.

  50. 50.

    Panzac, Les corsaires, 54.

  51. 51.

    Genti di mare made up a high percentage of Sicilian captives in this era; Giovanna Fiume, “Lettres de Barbarie: esclavage et rachat de captifs siciliens (XVIe–XVIIe siècle),” Cahiers de la Méditerranée 87 (2013): 5 (online: http://journals.openedition.org/cdlm/7255; accessed 1/7/2021). Many Muslims captured at sea were also mariners; Moulay Belhamissi, “Course et contre-course en méditerranée ou comment les algériens tombaient en esclavage,” Cahiers de la Méditerranée 65 (2002): 3–5, 8–9 (online: http://journals.openedition.org/cdlm/36; accessed 7/5/2021); Salicrú i Lluch, “Luck and Contingency?” 360. On the different proportions of males and females captured at sea and on land, see Hershenzon, Captive Sea, 21; Gillian Weiss, Captives and Corsairs: France and Slavery in the Earle Modern Mediterranean (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), 17 and 241 (note 94).

  52. 52.

    Hershenzon, Captive Sea, 118–19.

  53. 53.

    Dal Pozzo, Historia, 1:508–509 (1606), 1:540 (1608).

  54. 54.

    On the portraits of the Barbary pirates, see Judith E. Tucker, “She Would Rather Perish: Piracy and Gendered Violence in the Mediterranean,” Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 10 (2014): 28–31. The treaties were an important step in the increasing independence of the North African regencies from the Ottomans; White, Piracy and Law, 140–80.

  55. 55.

    Text cited in Matar, Europe through Arab Eyes, 52–3.

  56. 56.

    Sir Kenelm Digby, Journal of a Voyage into the Mediterranean, 1628 (Westminster: The Camden Society: 1868), 72.

  57. 57.

    Hassan S. Khalilieh, Islamic Maritime Law: An Introduction (Leiden: Brill, 1998), 155–6.

  58. 58.

    On types of interfaith cooperation (and even trust) in the early modern Mediterranean, see Hershenzon, Captive Sea, 69, 92; Wolfgang Kaiser, “Zones de transit: lieux, temps, modalités de rachat des captifs en Méditerranée,” in Les Musulmans dans l’histoire de l’Europe II: passages et contacts en Méditerranée, ed. Jocelyne Dalkhia and Wolfgang Kaiser (Paris: Albin Michel, 2013;), 251–72 (esp. 270–1).

  59. 59.

    Barker, That Most Precious Merchandise, 3. Though Barker focuses on the high Middle Ages, what she describes as the three core beliefs about slavery “(“that it was legal, that it was based on religious difference, that it was a universal threat,” 13) certainly persisted in the early modern Mediterranean.

  60. 60.

    Here I disagree with Kaiser, “La madone,” 106.

  61. 61.

    Relation de la captivité du Sr. Mouëtte, 174.

  62. 62.

    NML AOM Ms. 1768, f. 110r.

  63. 63.

    NML AOM Ms. 1768, f. 274r.

  64. 64.

    Dal Pozzo, Historia, 1:540.

  65. 65.

    “Die Geschichte vom Kerkermeister-Kapitän: ein türkischer Seeraüberroman aus dem 17. Jahrhundert,” ed. Andreas Tietze, Acta Orientalia 19 (1942): 165–7.

  66. 66.

    Traités de la France avec les pays de l’Afrique du Nord: Algérie, Tunisie, Tripolitaine, Maroc, ed. E. Rouard de Card (Paris: A. Pedone, 1906), 122–3, 136.

  67. 67.

    Contreras, Discurso, 96.

  68. 68.

    1680s capture of hermit: Piracy and Diplomacy in Seventeenth-Century North Africa: The Journal of Thomas Baker, English Consul in Tripoli, 1677–1685, ed. C.R. Pennell (London: Associated University Presses, 1989), 101; De la Motte, État, 19–20. 1712 capture of hermit: Paris, Archives Nationales, AE/B/I/119, f. 416v.

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    Bernardo Sanvisente, L’Isola di Lampedusa eretta a colonia dal munificentissimo nostro sovrano Ferdinando II (Naples: Reale Tipografia Militare, 1849), 44–5, note 3.

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    Amy G. Remensnyder

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    Emily Sohmer Tai

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    Kathryn L. Reyerson

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Remensnyder, A.G. (2022). Compassion, Fear, Fugitive Slaves, and a Pirates’ Shrine: Lampedusa, ca. 1550–ca. 1750. In: Sohmer Tai, E., Reyerson, K.L. (eds) Mapping Pre-Modern Sicily. Mediterranean Perspectives. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-04915-6_9

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