Daniel Hershenzon
“Countering Captivity, Contouring Slavery: Enslaved Europeans in the Ottoman Maghrib”
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Abstract
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During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the number of Europeans enslaved by Maghrib Muslims almost equaled that of Black Africans enslaved in the Atlantic world. More than a million Spaniards, Italians, French and north Europeans crowded the North-African Barbary regencies. My project will examine European, especially Spanish, slavery in North Africa and reconstruct the social reality of which such slaves were part and the way European bureaucracies articulated that phenomenon in political-belligerent and religious-redemptive terms, rather than in social-relational ones.
In spite of the magnitude of this phenomenon, early-modern European institutions tried to silence it in a way that produced the conflicted, political-geography of Mediterrenaen. Inquisition priests and members of the Mercedarian and the Trinitarian orders, whose mission was to liberate enslaved captives, articulated the presence of enslaved Europeans in the Maghrib as ‘captivity,’ rather than as ‘slavery.’ Thus, they ignored the transitional nature of captivity and the fact that most enslaved Europeans were not ransomed and lived and died as slaves. I argue that the enslavement of Europeans can neither be reduced to nor described in mere military terms – prisoners of war – or religious terms – captives to be redeemed and martyrs. Employing the category of slavery, a category that denotes a social relationship, I will reconstruct the silenced reality of enslaved Christian captives in the Maghrib and the social production of these silences.
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