Ottoman History Podcast - The Mediterranean in the Age of Global Piracy

Episode Date: January 28, 2020

Episode 446 featuring Emrah Safa Gürkan, Joshua White, and Daniel Hershenzon narrated by Chris Gratien with contributions by Nir Shafir, Taylor Moore, Susanna Ferguson, and Zoe Griffith Download the podcast Feed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloud Piracy is often depicted as a facet of the wild, lawless expanses of the high seas. But in this episode, we explore the order that governed piracy, captivity, and ransom in the early modern Mediterranean and in turn, how these practices shaped early modern politics, Mediterranean connections, and the emergent notions of international law. Emrah Safa Gürkan talks about Ottoman corsairs and the practicalities of piracy in the early modern Mediterranean. Joshua White discusses facets of Islamic law and gender in the realm of piracy. And Daniel Hershenzon explores the paradoxical connections forged by slavery, captivity, and ransom on both sides of the Mediterranean.  « Click for More »

Test? Yeah. Test. My mic needs to come up a little bit. You want to handle it, Nir? Okay. One, two, three. DJ Nir Shafir.

I'm going to try yours again. One, two, three. All smiles on the dials with Nir Shafir. I think I'm good. You're good. No, I need to come up a little, Nir. Okay. You might be too loud.

Am I too loud? Amra's always too loud. It's a truism to say I'm too loud. Just watch that. Yeah. Just watch Amra's the whole time. Just watch me. Yeah. That sounds the whole time. Just watch me. That sounds weird.

Okay, let's begin. This is the Ottoman History Podcast. I'm Chris Grayton. In this special three-part episode, we'll be investigating the history of the Mediterranean and the global age of piracy. We'll be talking to three historians who've studied different facets of the history of piracy in the Ottoman Empire and the broader Mediterranean world. First up is Emre Safa Gürkan. He's appeared on the program dozens of times over the years. Now his official status is emeritus.

He still joins us from time to time. What happens when two ships meet? Okay, do you have any idea? What does a pirate do? Nobody knows about it. Like, so you see you're a pirate, you see a merchant ship, what do you do? You just attack? Emrah and I are sitting in an Istanbul apartment with Nir Shafir.

Between the three of us, we have literally hundreds of Ottoman History Podcast appearances. But the podcast is getting off to a rocky start. There's a couple reasons for this. The first is that Emrah can't stop cracking jokes. But the second is that I really don't know what to ask to get the conversation started. We're set to talk about piracy, a subject that Emrah has studied in detail. It's the subject of his most recent Turkish language book but we've talked about it so many times over the years that I'm running out of questions oh you mean that you're looking for a question question to us

like who are are there Ottoman pirates or something no it's not stupid but yeah we have come he's getting bored because this is stupid. It's not stupid, but he's getting bored because he did that before. This is like the third time we recorded on this. The first one was really terrible, though. Well, if we already had like three... Yeah, ask what changed in the 17th century. Ask a general question that makes the... You know, what changed in the 17th century in the Mediterranean and in the oceans

that made piracy a global, Ottoman piracy a global phenomenon? So, piracy... he had an answer well everything has changed the story has history itself has changed in you know with the geographical explorations I mean the piracy has always been a part and parcel of Mediterranean Mediterranean Sea because it the sea in itself because it has been shaped by a tectonic movement, was full with coals, shelters, hiding places. It was really a paradise for a pirate or for somebody who wants to have an ambush. But that changed in the 17th century because now these pirates had the opportunity to take their trade to the open waters. Obviously, you know, geographical exploration in the 16th century

and the intensification of trade, not only trade but also ore extraction in the Potos, the silver mines, by the Spanish in the second half of the 16th century, but also the colonial settlements and their trade with their motherlands created so much, so ample opportunity so we see around this time hand in hand with other global piracy centers in the caribbean and in north atlantic and also dunkirk in in the in northern europe algiers salah tunis and tripolitania tripolis have become major pirate centers, pirate ports, privateer ports that actually managed to participate in trans-oceanic raids. For the first time, ships were able to leave the Mediterranean because you know that before the 13th century, no ships were able to leave the Mediterranean because of the adverse currents. So in the 16th century,

starting from the 16th century, they did not only leave the Strait of Gibraltar with ease, but they also plundered faraway places like Iceland, Baltimore and Ireland, Azores, Faroe Islands, Bristol, and places like that. They even held parts of the islands

off the English coast for many years and used them as bases. And when you say they, you're referring to Ottoman privateers from North Africa? Only the North Africa part is beyond dispute. They are Ottoman. If you think Ottoman as a global thing, they weren't paid by the Ottoman state.

They may be Muslim, 95%, but most of them, especially when we talk about the oceans, most of them had Northern origins. People from Flanders, Holland, Northern shores of the France, England, Irish, Scottish, Danish, because they were the ones who knew how to deal with the new ways of sailing in the ocean.

You cannot train people in those ages. You have to find skilled people. And when the privateers in Algiers and Tunisia, which was Italian and Spanish mostly, and Turkish and Albanian in the 16th century realized they needed to participate in the Indian Ocean they invited all these northerners and most of most of whom have converted Islam and actually taking part in the governing of Algiers and in the in the running of the Corsair privateer business because they they were the ones who taught them how to build and use these new sailing ships like the galleon and the men of wars but you're saying that a good portion of them were

northern Europeans Dutch as the same types of people who would be pirates and privateers throughout the Atlantic Indian Ocean and Pacific that is true they have to be flexible it's a very cosmopolitan environment just like Byzantines using Turks or just like two Turkic dynasties back in the day gaining control of the Abbasids. OK, why did it happen? Because you needed them as soldiers, because you cannot train light archers. You need to go to steppes. A similar logic applies to the seafaring. If you people for your navy you have to go to the fishermen but the mediterranean doesn't have them okay so you have so few fishermen second the fishermen in the mediterranean will be used to the roving galleys the ships that go by the oar that would

be useless in the ocean so if you wanna wait for the sp Spanish galleons coming with silver from the Americas, you need somebody who knew how to sail in the ocean. And these guys have to be either Dutch or English seamen. And they were first employed by the Dutch and the Spanish and England. But after 1609, when the three countries came into 12 years of truth, were unemployed so they said why not why don't we go to Algiers and they went there John Ward being a very famous example Seymour Danziger which was a guy from the Holland settled first in Algiers then in Marseille who never converted to Islam and operated under the banner of Algiers as a Christian

privateer this is fascinating I also had no idea that Algiers was recruiting sailors from northern European countries so that they could man these larger ships on the open ocean. But maybe just to go back to some basics and to get into the nitty gritty of things, one distinction that people often make here and that you've made yourself here is between pirates and privateers. So maybe you could just explain like what is a privateer and how did that work here and whose permission were they taking to undertake privateering and were they successful well private things a state-backed industry pirates are like small-time crooks privateers like mafia

related to state and stuff like that there's a code but even even even code. But even better than that, they are tied by the international maritime law. They are part of the legal system. What we read about pirates have been written way, way later when they were totally discredited in the 18th, 19th century, especially in the 19th century. You look at the relationship between when a pirate attack occurred, they are either in accordance with the law or when there's something wrong. OK, when there's something illegal, at least half of the time it was the merchant ship or the French or English battleship that was on the wrong side. So there's a legal law and all the legal theoreticians of the international maritime law accepted them as legal actors so they had a contract yeah a privateer is a contractor from the state okay who actually was allowed who was carrying a letter of mark letter of reprisal which means that let's say england is at war with spain so if I have a letter of marque from my queen or from my king,

then I can attack Spanish ships. While accepting the letter of marque, I also accepted I will not attack French ships or Dutch ships because England, my commission doesn't allow me. In the Muslim case, these guys were governing themselves. So the Algerian or Tunisian pirates or pirates in Morocco, Saleh, Rabat, today's Rabat, they were getting their own letters of mark from their own divan. So when they did something contrary to the law, since it is the state to pay for the prices, they were being tried by their colleagues. Sometimes they let it slide Sometimes they're a little slight because they're also the investors.

And before they leave, they do not only get a commission from their government, they also get two pieces of paper from the European councils located in that port. One is a piece of paper saying, look, this guy is not going to attack French ships, so leave him alone. So let's say the French battleships came and they will just show it to them.

Look, we are legitimate privateers who actually vowed not to attack the French ships. The French ships will let them go. The second was the uppermost part of a piece of paper that the merchant ships were carrying. So let's say a Corsair meets a merchant ship. The merchant ship has to accept the inspection. So these guys come and inspect. Even though it belongs to a friend of the power, they have to allow the Corsairs,

the privateers, the Ottoman privateers to inspect the ship. So during that inspection, they have to present the paper. But since most of the Corsairs don't know how to read, how are they going to make sure, how are they going to understand that it's actually a valid piece of paper that proves that they're French ship? They use this uppermost part that they took from the French, from the French consul in Algiers, and they just, they just actually match the two and they understand. So there are lots of rules

and regulations. There are courts. You can go to D1 in Algiers. In the case of Malta, you can go to divan alger's in the case of malta you can go to a tribunal and you go and then you know file a lawsuit against against uh for uh against your captors or against the guy who attacked you these privateers you said that they used these the courts of algiers that they were judging themselves i mean what i mean what was their government like every portion is on government they were nominally tied to Istanbul, who used to send them governors. But when they didn't like them, they imprisoned them, they sent them back. They only had this alliance with the Ottoman. It wasn't like one province actually coming directly under the Ottoman Empire. So they had this divan run by the Janissaries.

they had this divan run by the janissaries but the janissaries here is a very large concept in which you see renegades coming not only from the christians but also from the jews could be could be janissaries this is the only place where a jew can aspire to hold some government office in the entire mediterranean so it's like wild all years all. I'm not sure about Tunis at the moment, but Algiers, definitely. So it is a wild, wild west in a way. It's a frontier. It is a frontier par excellence. It is a place where you can see mixed crews. They are generally portrayed by holy warriors,

and they believed in that at this party. There's this Gaza ethos that they operate under, but it shouldn't lead us to forget the fact that these guys operated with Christians hand in hand and they didn't force people to convert at least some you know including

excluding certain exceptions so it's the Janissary Divan who ruled them but there is always a different power group one group is Janissaries who used to protect the ports from the Arabs in the vicinity and also collect tributes from them. You have the Races, you have the Corsair captains, made up of renegades and natural-born Muslims. Renegades in the 16th century being Italian, Spanish, Mediterranean people,

but in the 17th century, all of them were Nordic. And also you have the Beylerbeyi appearing as a mediator, and also you have disgruntled Kulolu people. Kulolu is the sons of genocides who weren't allowed any power in the government, so they were also a very disgruntled community always trying to start up a revolt it's a very it's like a republic think of a republic but always stuck in the cromwell's time it's always one group of people overtaking over the other well one thing that stands out to me about that when you say like they're governing themselves and all this sounds like a very masculine space and while a normal state or republic or empire in that time period contains men and women i guess in defining the space that

is governed by the privateers does it extend to the broader society in that region so that they're or is it essentially just at a speak everybody makes money out of corsets. So you see the wives of these privateers making voodoo stuff so that their husbands come back. I mean, so they are part of it,

but not on the ship, obviously. On the ship, we don't see any women. There is a lot of, there is a huge amount of influx of women thanks to these,

a lot of Italians or Christians ending up, if you haven't read Cervantes, you will see a lot of secret mo or christians ending up if you haven't read cervantes you will see a lot of uh secret mores or uh you know secretly crypto christian mores crypto christians muslims were forced to become christians muslims and got you know found themselves in harem but they were running with christian fervor which again cervantes was using in order to explain his

own situation because cervantes has been a prisoner for five years in Algiers. So when he came back to Spain, he was tainted. Everybody thought even if you go to another country, you have to explain when you come back that you do have no heretical involvement. So Cervantes was using these elements, all these renegades in cervantes's now place are generally running with their crypto crypto creatures who didn't want to become muslims there are a lot of people like that most of them female who found themselves in the harems and who raised a new generation of corsairs maybe uh so that's generally what the women's role are in the

corsairs well okay so well you So you just mentioned another really interesting thing. The famous Spanish author, Cervantes, having spent time among the Corsairs. You published something recently in Turkish. Apparently this is a story that's been known for a while now that there's like a book about this. Yeah. It's a very interesting book.

Cervantes in Algiers by Maria Antoinette Garces who himself was held captive for two years by Colombian terrorists so that's a very interesting book she is the person you know par excellence who could write a book on that she found all the details about Cervantes thanks to this document that he has to leave behind. When he came back from Algiers, he needed to find witnesses for himself, because this is Inquisition Spain. Five years in Muslim land, you need to find people that would vouch for you so you didn't do nasty things. By nasty things, I mean heretical things, not in today's sense.

Not to digress, my favorite pastime is digression, as you may have realized by now. Emre then proceeded to go on a series of long tangents. Nir brought us back to the basic questions at hand. You spoke earlier about a corsair named Arnavutlu Murat, and you said that he was the best corsair ever. Why don't we use that as an entry point to discuss what makes a good Corsair? Well, he's a good Corsair because he lived long, he wasn't get caught. And also he managed to raid Canary Islands with galleys. Galleys are oared vessels who are not fit for ocean navigation.

So this guy was so actually good with navigation, or his team was so good with navigation, he managed to go over the stress of Gibraltar. But what makes a good Corsair a Corsair requires me to make a distinction between two types of ships. One is galleys or ships that generally operate in the Mediterranean, where you do not have wind patterns. Like there's only one wind pattern from north to south, which means that most of the time you cannot use the wind so you need oars or you need local currents but in the oceans you have prevailing winds okay and you cannot use oars because once you use oars you need 300 oarsmen how are you going to feed them for so long a galley can only stay in the water for like a week or so at best so you have to touch it's like amphibious thing sales is a different thing you

need able semen 15 20 and that's it to go back to the question i mean you're attacking which kind of ships are both or are you attacking villages on land if you're gonna do land raiding you need galleys okay because the galle, you can just move on the beach. But with the sailing ship, you cannot come so near the shore. But they still sacked Baltimore and Iceland with those ships. But what they did was to leave them behind an island or huge piles of rock. And they came with small boats. And then they attacked at the dawn. And carried all these people that they could fire.

It's a very interesting moment. Just around 4.35 when it's dusk. You hear people shouting. And then somebody's trying to ring the church bell. And you've been attacked. And most people are trying to make a run for the mountains. And they capture round everybody up. And it's most of the time who brings you somebody you know,

somebody who actually was captured or who actually turned Turk, as was the expression, Farsi Turko, turned Turk, and brought these guys. They would lead them back to the village to raid them. Who would know where Iceland was. Yeah, it's this English guy praying on and most of the crew would be english or dutch or danish they were the ones who were accustomed to that there were some genesis attached to them but although sometimes people brought them for revenge i know

local histories if you read the local histories of the seventh century italian towns you will see a lot of stories like that. He asked for the hand of his daughter. He was refused. Then he brought the corsairs and he captured the daughter. Or he was, you know, his wife was raped and killed or his daughter was raped and killed

and he couldn't get justice done. So he turns Turk and brings the corsair. So people use corsairs for revenge. And most of the time, one out of three oarsmen die in the first year. Or if you're a sailor, 20-30% dies in the first year or so. So sailing means that you are at the very bottom of the society. So turning on your own people shouldn't be that hard for you.

You're going to die. I've never heard of cannibalism but you know but what happens when they're attacking other ships first of all the first question will they attack they see a ship they look at it if it's a warship they they will tend to run away if it's a french warship let's say and they are at peace with french no problem they show their papers that they got from the europe Council. They go away. Let's say they need to fight. They are good at running away. But in the first hour or so, they have an advantage. These are their ships, whether oared or sailed, were good sprinters.

But if the warship can't follow them long enough, they would, like a 15-hour pursuit, they will catch them and then take them over. And it's been known to happen a lot actually and if it's a merchant ship if it's a friendly ship the merchant ship have to accept inspection from them so 10-15 people would go there inspect the goods and the passengers among the passengers there's people belonging to to enemy nations they could take them slave and the goods but if they take the, they have to pay the freight money so that he could return the money. These are all in theory. If they want to cheat, there are a couple of things that they could do.

First, they could force the merchant to do something wrong, not opening fire, not accepting. Because if you do that, you forfeit your legal rights. Once you go out of the ceremonial thing, you forgot to salute, boom, you're fair prey. They can attack you. Or they could torture somebody, making him confess that they're Jews or, I don't know, they're French or... Generally, Christians require confession of Jews

because they would impound whatever the Jews have. For Muslims, it's no big problem, but they would look for Spanish because they're always at war with Spanish so they would find a small 14 year old boy torture them maybe if they want to cheat sometimes they kill everybody and then hope that nobody escapes but once in a while

we know the story because once in a while these guys survive and come back and creating a huge amount of scandal then the government have to pay indemnation that's why there's a legal system. There's a system behind it. If you are an unruly captain on both sides of the thing,

that's why you have legal recourse. Algiers or Malta, who's paying the prices for a diplomatic scandal, that's why they're checking up on their own colleagues. Unless they're going to attack, first they want to come close.

So they use false flags, and they change clothes in order to fool them, and then they attack. Most of the times, the merchants do not respond because they don't have that many cannons. With the sailing ships, now it's the age of the cannon. With the gallows, you do boarding, and then you attack.

So they surrender. So the tricky thing while surrendering get ready for your new life as a slave so they're basically you see a ship coming to you you see their corsairs you realize they're going to board you and then you're you're like okay well all my stuff is going to be lost i'm going to become a slave yeah so you're just trying to hide as much yeah in your old private parts and i mean to the letter that's what they did. And also sometimes wigs. By the way, the Corsairs don't generally violate women. They were really respectful.

That was, I mean, seriously, we know a lot of instances that the Christians were surprised how orderly, this is an orderly business. These are professionals. This is not Jack Sparrow when they're like, oh, these are, when they go out. This time I was to blame for the digression when I suggested that Jack Sparrow when they're like, oh, these are, when they go out. This time I was to blame for the digression. When I suggested that Jack Sparrow, the main character of the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise,

might have been a better guy than the actor who portrays him. This could be the end of the podcast. Johnny Depp might come after us. By this point, we had to start wrapping things up. But Emre left us with a few more stories. So you need money. And there's a funny story. A French botanic,

I believe, I forgot. He fell, he falls in the hands of the corsairs and lives the life of a slave for many years. Then he was ransomed. And on his way back,

they encountered another slave. They've been chased. He was so nervous that he actually swallowed 20 big pieces of gold coin. Then he couldn't get them out. So he needed to go to a doctor who's a friend of his. And he said, why did you swallow all these golden coins?

And he said, if you were captured by the courts and if you were a slave for five years, you would have swollen the entire ship. Our conversation with Emrah contained a lot of great takeaways about Ottoman pirates and corsairs. The first was that many of them weren't from the Ottoman Empire, especially after a rise in the importance of northern European nautical expertise. The second was that, especially when it came to corsairs or privateers, they were far from a lawless bunch.

Ottoman corsairs were not only subject to international law, they also had a degree of self-governance. And among the many other lessons, one of the most important related to the story of Cervantes and his period of captivity, Ottoman corsairs and their exploits were central to the history of early modern Europe and the making of the modern international order. Throughout our conversation, I recalled a previous episode of Ottoman History Podcast, in which we interviewed another scholar who focuses on Ottoman piracy. Joshua White is an associate professor of history at University of Virginia, Joshua White is an associate professor of history at University of Virginia.

In his recent book, Piracy in Law in the Ottoman Mediterranean, has unearthed new insights about the role of Islamic law in governing the practice of piracy across the Mediterranean, in the Ottoman realms, and as you'll hear in a moment, even outside Ottoman jurisdictions. In the scenic location of Burgazada, an island that is just a short boat ride from Istanbul. We recorded in an Airbnb that I had booked. It wasn't the perfect space for an interview. Hot, stuffy. The host was sitting on the couch, smoking cigarettes and blasting music when we arrived.

The one charm was a particularly affectionate cat who would become a sort of emotional support animal for Josh over the course of a grueling interview conducted by three different people, myself, Susanna Ferguson, and Taylor Moore. Kat, would you like to comment? Here we go. One of the most interesting parts of our conversation dealt with a chapter of Joshua White's book concerning the Qadu, or Islamic judge, of Malta, which our listeners should note was not under control of the Ottoman Empire, but rather the Maltese corsairs. This was probably one of the more interesting, at least for me, discoveries in the process of researching this book.

We know that many Ottoman functionaries were captured in the line of duty and taken to Malta. And while lower status captives were often sent straight to the galleys as oarsmen, where there was a constant need to fill the benches, mortality being rather high on a galley, those who were more elite and would command a high ransom were sent to the slaves' prison. Now, Ottoman judges were appointed from Istanbul and sent to their district for terms of one or two years, and then they had to go back to Istanbul again at the end of their term. What this means is you constantly have Qadis coming in and out of Istanbul, and any who are going by sea are at risk.

Towards the end of the 16th century, very significant numbers of caddies are being picked off by the corsairs and taken to Malta. But they're not simply valuable captives who will fetch a high ransom, though inevitably they will. These are people who, captured with their writing stands and their reed pens and all the other couturements of their office, are actually extremely valuable for the ransom industry. And this is for the very simple reason that for the ransom industry to work, you have

to be able to have trust, which is paradoxical when the people who are capturing you are your religious and political enemies. But you need to be able to move massive quantities of money back and forth across the sea. You need to rely on brokers who are going to, if you are a captive, meet up with your family or your friends or deal with representatives of the state to collect that money and somehow transport it and complete this complex transaction in a way that leaves everybody, if not satisfied, at least with the captive going home, the captor enriched and the broker having made a tidy profit. And the only way in which this will work in the Ottoman Mediterranean,

ultimately, is if all those transactions necessary, that includes both the loans, the surety agreements to ensure that somebody pays if things go wrong, the assignations of legal agency, all of that has to be concluded according to Ottoman Islamic law with the requisite documentation. Just so happens then that it's rather convenient that you have a whole bunch of Qadis sitting in the prison in Malta who are prepared to do just that. And so what we encounter is that in addition to there being a designated slave's Qadi on Malta, somebody within the prison community who's nominated to serve as their magistrate and who fulfills exactly the same rules that he would were he on Naxos,

or in Izmir, or in Galata, or Istanbul, or anywhere else. In addition to such a figure, is the Qadis of Malta are being asked to draw up these sorts of documents, and they're being referred to explicitly in the courts in the Ottoman core lands, like Galata. When arrangements are contracted there, you must get a hücet, a legal document, from the Qadi of Malta. It says explicitly that. So it's understood that these guys are there, and that they have work to do, and that they're a part of the process. And we just set aside the fact that these are some poor guys who have been captured by corsairs, had their beards shaved, and they've been tossed in a corner of a dungeon. Set that aside for a moment. They're still Qadis. They still have a job to do. And some of their documents that they've issued survive. And they look just like Hujet's issued

within the Ottoman domains, except for a couple distinct factors. One is that the paper doesn't look quite as nice. It hasn't had the nice polish that we see from documents drawn up in Ottoman domains. And second, whereas most Ottoman documents drawn up by Qadis in the mainland will say written in protected Izmir, protected Galata. These say they were written in the island of Malta, may God destroy it. And in their signature, they mention, I was the incumbent Qadi of wherever I was supposed to be. And now I'm on the island of Malta. Other than that, there's no difference. Well, we still have a few. In addition to offering a preview of the book, our interview with Josh White went beyond the

book's content to offer more detail about the social history of piracy in the Ottoman Mediterranean. Women are conveyed not only as victims, but as pirate booty to be captured by corsairs and pirates. Were women merely the victims or spoils of war in the Ottoman Mediterranean? That's a great question. And no, women certainly are not just victims. While I have not encountered any evidence in this context of women pirates, There are a couple of famous examples from the Caribbean, but I've not encountered any here. Women are deeply involved in everything that comes surrounding piracy, that women may very well be involved in investing in pirating expeditions. There's no reason to doubt that they did, that they may well have been receivers of goods. There are certainly instances in which women are involved in loaning money to ransom people,

including princesses themselves are involved in loaning money. Royal women more broadly are involved in ransoming captives, not just for financial gain, but for the gain of spiritual capital. and the gain of spiritual capital. We have the example, for example, of the Valley de Sultan Safia being petitioned by an Ottoman judge on Malta saying that to free a captive is worth more than a soup kitchen or a bathhouse. And there's nothing worth more than having smart men by your side. So the gender comes in there too. But when women were

captured, many were not ransomed. Those who were, again, we don't have the kinds of documents on the Ottoman side that we do for the European side, where you get, of course, this broad genre of captivity narratives is captivity narratives written by women or in the voice of women become very popular and become part of the broader, you know, the kind of drumming up of the colonial project that all these white Christian women being held in captivity in North Africa becomes really critical, as Gillian Weiss has argued, for drumming up support for an invasion of Algiers. At which point, of course,

there aren't any white Christian women hanging out in the bagnios in Algiers, but that's beside the point. They can look to events during the Greek War of Independence as inspiration for that. But there aren't really any comparable documents that I'm aware of on the Ottoman side. Which, of course, I mean, I just want to highlight this really important point that you're making doesn't mean that there weren't Ottoman women who had been enslaved both by Ottoman and Catholic corsairs. And so the growth of the captivity narrative literature is not, you know, that doesn't happen only in Europe because there are no instances of captivity among Ottoman women, right? I mean, that's a very important point, actually.

Absolutely. And probably somewhere in the order of 10% of the Muslim captives taken by the Corsairs of Malta are women. But these women are not held alongside the men. It's unlike all the male captives who have to be kept together in the slave's prison. The women are immediately sold, whether they're captured by private corsairs or by private entrepreneurs. They're immediately sold off, and the ransom rates seem to be much, much lower for them. I have only seen really cases where they're ransomed alongside families, so they're captured with their families. In terms of gendered violence,

the sources tend not to talk much about that at the initial stage of capture. Now we of course know that women who were captured and sold as slaves were kept and used for sexual service. What this of course means though is at least at the moment to capture, most pirates and corsairs, if they plan to sell their captives, may not actually want to abuse their captives because they want to be able to sell them. And legally, if they use them for sexual service, that's going to make things complicated. What we instead encounter much in literature, and this is true, for example, in Mustafa Ali, are references to violence against boys who are sort of a third gender in Ottoman society. So this is a question I actually had, which is that, you know, you go into some detail in the legal texts about repercussions for, you know, illegally raiding property and illegally enslaving Ottoman citizens. But obviously,

you know, the phrase rape and pillage, right, comes to our mind when we think about pirates. Were there any legal repercussions for rape? Rape is extraordinarily difficult to prove in Islamic law. So I've seen no evidence of that being the case, at least in the courts. Outside the courts, there are absolute repercussions for those Ottoman pirates who are found to have raided Ottoman subjects, and their targets usually are women and children. And it requires a little imagination to know or to guess what may be happening to them. The typical punishments in addition to death, which is always popular, are being sentenced to life on the galleys, which has a certain poetic justice. Yeah, return them to the sea. Yes, and being sentenced to life on the galleys is usually a fairly short term because the mortality rates are rather high.

But, I mean, it's interesting in a way, but not really surprising that the sources will look past what is happening to women except after the point of sale, which is when then we know all about what's happening. when then we know all about what's happening. And one of the things we realized very quickly in reading the court records is how rapidly women are being sold and resold. But as long as you're doing this according to the law, and while pirates may not be terribly concerned with the law, at least initially, other than trying to represent those captives

as being legally taken, their owners care. And that means that you can't, there are waiting periods involved and things like that. And so these crimes are often, at least when it involves Ottoman subjects, discovered pretty quickly, it seems. The impression that one gets about the history of piracy in the Mediterranean from the Ottoman historiography suggests that piracy had a lot to do with boundaries, enforcing them and crossing them.

And this is a big subject in the history of the Mediterranean in general. For the last part of this podcast, we're going to turn to a scholar who focuses on the other side of the Mediterranean. Daniel Hershenzen is a professor at the University of Connecticut. His recent book entitled The Captive Sea deals with the subjects of slavery, communication, and commerce in early modern Spain and the Mediterranean. In this regard, his work completes the picture sketched out by our first two guests by focusing on what was really at the heart of much of the early modern business of piracy

and privateering, that is power. Power over people's bodies, enslavement, captivity, ransom, and the rules that govern these practices. Zoe Griffith sat down with Daniel Hershenzen to talk about his new book. We'll conclude this episode with excerpts from their conversation. his new book. We'll conclude this episode with excerpts from their conversation. One of the really nuanced and important conclusions of the book or findings of the book is how at the same time that these boundaries are in some ways policed, like the region is integrated by the movement of the information, the efforts of people trying to ransom these captives.

You say only about 10 to 15% of the captives were ever ransomed, but how did it work? Right, right. So we think about piracy and slavery as disruptive, and obviously they were disruptive in the lives of people that were the victims. And we think about ransom also as a dividing activity, right, Christian zeal, Muslim zeal. And it was, that was the intention behind it. But the unintended results of this

practice was to link together in a million ways, North and South, you know, Morocco, Ottoman, Algeria, Italy, Spain, France, and Portugal. How did ransom work? So you had, I think, you know, you can, we can distinguish between four kinds of factors, religious orders, friars, merchants, family members, and rulers. And, you know, whenever the friars emerge in the documents, it seems mostly as religious redemption. It's nothing.

It's not about manumission. It's not about the salvation of bodies It's not about the salvation of bodies. It's about the salvation of souls, of community members. At the same time, the friars engaged in commercial activities. They exported American silver and clothing and the very beloved Spanish hats

that in the Maghreb were a hot commodity. Similarly, merchants, who obviously were economic actors, also mobilized religious discourses because trade with the infidel was prohibited according to canon law, and in order to do so,

they had to petition from the ruler ad hoc trading licenses with the Maghreb. Interesting. And to get this, they had to explain that they are doing this to ransom captives from the Maghreb, never mind if they did or they didn't, or they also engaged in other economic activities. Moreover, the king that posed trade with the Maghreb,

citing canon law or whatever, issued these licenses again and again and again. And did he receive any? And he received 10 10 commission from whatever economic activity yeah that took place yeah um parents that uh old widow from majorca who runs who exchange her son with a majorca with a moroccan widow that her son is that her son is enslaved in morocco these women transfer money, and in that sense they're economic actors, but obviously they're not economic actors, or at least it

explains to us nothing about them, about their interest, their emotional involvement in the process, if we just reduce it to economics. Finally, rulers, I mean, you know, they did a lot of things by ransoming their subjects. They claimed sovereignty

in the last third of the 17th century, when the Alawite dynasty takes over, Moroccan sultans try to be extremely involved in ransoming captives. They also ransom Algerians and Tunisians. And in so doing, they claim spiritual guardianship over the Mediterranean, making claims counter to that of the Ottoman s Sultan about the caliphate title.

So people did many things when they engaged in ransom. You know, most of the captives that you're able to get a very clear picture of and most of the people involved were men. It seems to be the facets of the work. Right, right. Okay, so Fatima, we don't know her family name. Fatima was the daughter of a high Janissary official. high Janissary official. When she was 13, she was captured. She was on a ship in the Mediterranean.

The Genoese fleet captured her. We don't know exactly the precise circumstances. It's possible that they were on the way for the Hajj, but it's really unclear.

Do we know where she was originally from? Algiers. Algiers, sorry. Yeah. And I think that, I mean, I don't think, I mean,

her father was the governor of Bona. Got it. A city that was subject to Algiers in the Maghreb. She was sold to a Jewish couple

in Livorno that held a number of slaves and from there she managed to send the word back home. Her father negotiated

her ransom. A Corsican merchant that traded with Algiers on a regular basis was responsible to return her home. Fatima's ship stopped in Calvi, in Corsica, back then Genoese colony. There, the bishop saw the little girl that was so beautiful and just knew that she was a Christian.

She was a Christian. He had to convert her. He converted her, and she was baptized as Maddalena. Once a Christian, she became a community member, not a commodity anymore, and she could not be ransomed. I mean, it just was impossible. The corsair can go

between how to travel by himself to Algiers to deliver the bad news. I'll jump in here because things are about to get complicated. So at this point, Fatima can't be ransomed. She's been converted to Christianity. And here her story begins to intersect with the story of other captives and specifically the story of three friars who are visiting Algiers for the purpose of ransoming Christian captives. Three Trinitarian friars who traveled as they often did to Algiers to ransom captives they already negotiated a ransom of 136 captives they paid everything they were ready to board and leave back to Spain. The friars are in

Algiers at the very moment when the course it can go between comes back empty-handed, having been unable to secure Fatima's release. And in response, the Algerians arrested the Trinitarians. Now the story of Fatima's failed ransom has birthed another captivity story, but the friars knew exactly how the ransom game works. The Spaniards, one of the Trinitarians, Monroy, wrote excessively. Some of his letters were published. He pulled all the strings he could. And while all this is going on,

another high-profile person is taken into captivity by corsairs. The Bay of Alexandria, very old Bay of Alexandria, was captured by the Spanish Sicilian squadron, together with his two wives and an entourage of slaves and whatnot this is was not his first captivity was already captured years before that by the Spaniards by that time where the second captivity was old and unhealthy back to the friars when he heard the news about the arrest of the of the Bay of Alexandria in Sicily, he saw an opportunity. He believed that this was the key to his ransom.

I mean, this is an Ottoman high official. He's worth a lot. He started pulling all the strings he could in Madrid. But the friar isn't the only person trying to work his connections for a ransom. The bastard son of the Spanish Marquis de Vigena was captured by Algerian pirates. He was trying to arrange his ransom. He failed. From there, he was sent with his master. Following his master, he ended up in Istanbul.

The Marquis saw the capture of the Bay of Alexandria as an opportunity to secure his son's ransom. His father was also trying to get the Bay to ransom his son. his son's ransom. His father was also trying to get the Bey to ransom his son. So suddenly like two coalitions formed in Madrid, both competing over the Bey

in order to ransom their candidates. But then there's another twist. The problem was that the old Bey was so old and sick that he ended up dying in his prison cell. This is very tragic.

I don't know why we are laughing. Yeah, I know. With the death of the Bey of Alexandria, the son of the Marquis' ransom never materializes. And at some point he converted and died there. That is, in the Ottoman capital of Istanbul.

His fate was the same as Fatima, with whom this chain of Ransom stories began. So once she's freed, is that the end of her story? No. So we know that seven or eight years later, she was married to a Christian in Corsica. And then I have several petitions from Spain from around the time when she was married, submitted by a woman whose name I can't remember now, that claimed to have been her mother, that had certificates of her conversion from Rome, that had certificates of her conversion from Rome and that petitioned the Spanish king to help her reunite with her daughter.

There are many things here. I mean, first it tells us something about the system of slavery in the Mediterranean. You know, this is an exchange system. This is a system. These are mechanisms for the insertion of people into networks of exchange, but the system had complementary mechanisms for the removal of people into networks of exchange, but the system had

complementary mechanisms for the removal of people from networks of exchange people for example people could convert or could be forced to convert and once That happened they were not they were but so one one point that I wanted to stress was that that nature that unique nature of? Commodities in in a place where slavery is religious it's not racial you cannot change your race in the pre-modern world you can change your religion at least in theory the other thing is that such conversions occurred like once in a while forced baptisms or conversions and i said that i i mentioned that like in such cases slaves would write back home and complain to the rulers about it and rulers would you know warn the other side that they will avenge unless.

So we were talking about negative reciprocity, and you would assume that such reciprocity just escalates endlessly, right? I mean, one blow, three blows, let's kill the guy. But interestingly, what we see is that negative reciprocity turns into positive one, and that such instances of violence allow the party to negotiate the norms which they take for granted most of the time, because both sides assume that slaves deserve certain religious privileges, the right to practice their religion, the right to bury their dead according to ritual, the right not to be converted by force, the right not to be baptized, etc., etc., etc. So through such violent instances, the norms were codified to the degree that by the end of the 17th century, the Spanish king orders all the governors of his Mediterranean territories to assign burial spaces to Muslims,

Mediterranean territories to assign burial spaces to Muslims to the degree that in the 18th century there is a mosque in Cartagena in Spain and at some point the Christians break in and break the lamps and like what not and the slaves drive to Algiers and the governor of Algiers immediately warns the Spaniards that if the situation won't be amended it's going to shut all the churches in Algiers and punish all the slaves from Cartagena. And eventually, the mosque was shut down like a few decades later,

but for several decades, in the 18th century, there was a mosque operating in Cartagena, rehumanized. In Fatima Madlena's case, do we have any idea how she felt about

the conversion? No, but she was a child. She was 13 years old. So, I mean, yes, some of the Christian sources says that she converted out of her own volition but i mean give me a break sure fatima was free she was she was freed and so we can compare her to to one of the trinity to all of the trinitarians actually who were enslaved the trinitarians left so many documents they wrote notes to other captives within the city they wrote they wrote to the governors of the spanish garrisons in north africa they wrote

back to spain they wrote to the papacy they wrote to genoa um their letters were published they wrote intelligence reports to the spaniards depicting the the castles in which they were arrested you know just like there is abundant information that they produced. We don't have a single document in which Fatima talks to us. Interestingly, women are much more haired. They leave testimony much more as ransomers

because often it is the men. Men has higher prospects of being ransomed and it's usually the women who ransom them. And then they negotiate with the crown, ask for help, interact with widows, wives, or whatnot on the other side, etc. Piracy, ransom, captivity, and conversion forged paradoxical connections in the Mediterranean world. They were the reason for the Qaeda of Malta. They're the reason why there was a mosque in Cartagena, not because Iberia was any longer a shared space of Muslims, Christians, and Jews, but precisely because they were at political odds on the high seas.

Similarly, a girl from Algiers, an old man from Alexandria, the bastard son of the Marquis, and the three friars became linked by fate, even though they had nothing to do with each other. How did this system end? I mean, when do we see the end of this kind of moment of integration of a kind of captive Mediterranean? In the 18th century, Algiers and Morocco are like European powers using force, signed peace agreement with them. They become more integrated into the European economy. On the other hand, at some point, Spain also signed the peace agreements with all of these powers, with Algiers being the last. And, you know, once piracy stops being part of the Mediterranean world, you don't have captives anymore.

And what would you say kind of took its place, if anything? I mean, does that mark a sort of additional bifurcation of the two sides of the Mediterranean, would you say? Does that mark a sort of additional bifurcation of the two sides of the Mediterranean, would you say? Well, I mean, I think that it requires us to figure out what are the main social dynamics that takes place, that takes the place that wants captivity and enslavement filled in, that shapes the Mediterranean. Full interviews, as well as many other episodes related to the themes of piracy, captivity, slavery, and law in the Mediterranean, can also be found on our website, OttomanHistoryPodcast.com. Thanks to Emre Safa Gurkan, Joshua White, and Daniel Hershenzen, as well as all the other Ottoman History Podcast contributors who were featured in this episode, Nir Shafir,

Susanna Ferguson, Taylor Moore, and Zoe Griffith. I'm Chris Grayton. Thanks for tuning in and join us next time. Are we slandering Johnny Depp or not? I never heard anything about Johnny Depp.

I heard Johnny Depp's totally fucking crazy.