A ‘Captive Sea’ for a captive audience
Daniel Hershenzon is is an Associate Professor in the Department of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages at the University of Connecticut. “The Captive Sea: Slavery, Communication, and Commerce in Early Modern Spain and the Mediterranean,” published by University of Pennsylvania Press has won the 2019 Best First Book Prize for books published in the field of Iberian History by the Association for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies and the Sharon Harris Book Award by the University of Connecticut Humanities Institute.
Interviewed by: Peter Kitlas
The recorded conversation begins in media res since the inquisitor did not start the recording device in time …
Daniel: … I’ve gotten that question before: what got you into your project? I think it was a combination of a few books I read. The first seminar paper I wrote in the history department in Michigan was based on a Spanish captivity narrative. Preparing it, I reread Kopytoff’s article in Appadurai’s The Social Life of Things as well as Appadurai’s introduction to think about slavery and social trajectories. At the same time I read Robert Davis’ Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters: White Slavery in the Mediterranean, the most successful book about Mediterranean captivity that came out a couple of years earlier, and it was annoying in a way that motivated me. From its sensationalist title: “White Slavery,” to how it compared the life of captives in the Maghrib to life in a concentration camp while explaining Muslim piracy and captive-taking as a form of a trans-historical Jihad—so captivity according to Davis’ book was simultaneously the result of rational instrumentality and of irrational Islam. Kopytoff and Appaduari provided me with tools to historicize this caricature. Another problem of Davis’ book was his almost exclusive reliance on captivity narratives taking their authors’ claims at their face value. I also used captivity narratives, but you need to remember that the authors of these texts are not disinterested writers, but rather intervene in the very same world they supposedly describe disinterestedly.
Peter: In terms of the captivity narratives, are these mostly published or did you find them in the archives?
Daniel: In the Spanish context, there are three or four published ones and they have been published for a while. They are incredible texts. One of them is by a semiliterate ex-captive (Jerónimo de Pasamonte), whose writing is so bad. Some of his sentences are grammatically not even sentences. But it’s so real. I began looking for captives buried in archival bundles at the National Archive looking at a series called Consultas de Viernes (Friday’s Consultation), petitions of supplicants or their representatives for some money or help. I spent 3 or 4 months doing that, feeling sorry for myself, and wondering why I wasn’t studying Complit instead of history. Eventually, the sporadic ex-captives’ petitions I found, two and a half line captivity narratives, began to form a corpus and disclose patterns. I noticed that many former captives mentioned debt to the merchants who had ransomed them. This was important because the scholarly assumption was that Spanish captives had to rely exclusively on the redeeming orders (Trinitarians and Mercedarians) to obtain their freedom. Only then, I began putting the prospectus I had defended a few months earlier into a dialogue with the messiness of the archive and its documents. I began realizing that there were more actors involved in the ransom market than just the church-funded-state. At the time Wolfgang Kaiser, whose work was important for me, was organizing several conferences about this topic focusing mostly on the central Mediterranean, and what I found resonated with his work and the scholars he collaborated with. It turned out that in the western Mediterranean too cunning merchants and redeeming friars competed, collaborated, and overlapped one with another.
Peter: It’s the wild west, right?
Daniel: Totally the wild west. But, while in Simancas, I noticed something interesting about the distribution of information in the archive—its contingency. I went through a series of four legajos (bands of documents) that recorded the work of a junta dedicated to things Mediterranean. It was established in the 1560s and these four legajos were a Mediterranean treasure trove—captives, spies, merchants, Jews, Greeks, renegades, and pirates… you name it. These bundles are responsible for the richness of studies of the 16th century Mediterranean, but the junta was annulled in the 1580’s more or less when the Trinitarians and the Mercedarians start having regularized and very neat archives. And so the serial records of church ransom institutions subsidized by the crown suddenly substituted this richness and multiplicity of agents. And this is how the archive structured the narrative according to which Spain was a place dominated by religious redemption, with very few links connecting Iberia and the Maghrib.
Peter: And what was it like tracking down these sources? Were you seeing references to them in other archival documents?
Daniel: For instance, I remember how stunned I was when I found a second mention of the same unimportant Moroccan Jewish merchant from Chefchouan in a bundle of documents in the section of Guerra Antigua in the Archive of Simancas. This guy, Judas (Yehudah) Malachi, first “entered” the archive in 1579 because he arrived in Spain to claim money owed him by captives he had ransomed, and was immediately arrested. I found a bunch of other documents about him in the same section also related to ransom. Months later, I found him in an inquisitorial record archived in the National Archive in Madrid. Months later, back in Simancas, I found another record in a completely different section mentioning him digging treasures in Spain together with two expert Muslims. In one of my last visits to Madrid I found him again in two other archival sections, each time in a different capacity or involved in a different legal suit with a variety of legal organs and corporations. I have some thirty or forty documents about him from 1579-1602/3. So I can really track down a history and I even have his Hebrew signature because he signs one of the documents in Hebrew. His life shows how mobile some North African Jews and Muslim were, bypassing prohibitions on travel to Spain, and engaging in litigation in a variety of jurisdictions.
Peter: Absolutely. You were able to really get a sense of where these people were moving to and how they interacted. In a way, your project seems to be going against the political narrative of the archives, right? In fact, you seem to have developed a very different take on these archives for your project.
Daniel: Yes, and the book also develops a new take on the early modern Mediterranean against the two main stories—“The Northern Invasion” and “The Forgotten Frontier”—we historians tell our readers and ourselves about sea, both of which are stories of disintegration. The first is about English, Dutch, and French merchants that “invaded” the sea at the turn of the 17th century. That dynamic is often interpreted as a story of modernization, the North modernizing the South, of course, with an economic arena substituting imperial politics, and nation state actors replacing local ones, all of which makes religious violence obsolete. According to the second story during the 16th century, the Mediterranean was transformed into a sterile space where basically nothing happens. My archival work enabled me to tell and support an alternative story, one of unexpected and unintended social, political, and economical integration. I show how in 1581 when the Spanish and Ottoman empires signed a truce and turned their back to the sea, the result was increased number of captives and the formation of Christian bonded communities in the Maghrib and Muslim ones in Iberia. And then when the Spanish Crown increased its efforts to redeem its subjects, namely to separate Christians from Muslims, the social and religious boundaries of Iberian and Maghribi communities were stretched across the sea creating new links between Iberia and North Africa. In other words, the western half of the sea was formed against Spanish and Ottoman political projects, as a result of the interaction between them as well as among them and a host of small scale actors such as Judas Malachi and others, which I mentioned earlier.
Peter: And this brings me - for selfish and personal reasons - to one of the parts that most interested me about this project: your probing of an unspoken, yet formal institutionalization of protocols and practices. I wanted to hear you talk a bit more about that and what you think it means for the study of the western Mediterranean both in the seventeenth century and also moving into the eighteenth century.
Daniel: Right, we historians are bound to reconstruct protocols and repertoires on the basis of their violation or of their creative appropriation, such that were unorthodox to the degree that they elicited responses. In such tense moments when two parties, in my case Algiers and Spain, began debating whether and how the norm was violated, we get a glimpse of that norm, which otherwise was always taken as given. For instance, I was interested in which privileges Muslim rulers expected Christian slave owners to provide Muslim slaves with and vice versa. These expectations manifested themselves in moments of forced conversion to Islam, forced baptisms, and desecrations of slaves’ bodies - actions that were always reported to the other side (providing more evidence of the dense links between Iberia and the Maghrib). So whenever an Algerian enslaved in Spain sent the word about forced baptism of other Muslim slaves, Algerian rulers would demand for Spain to amend the situation otherwise they would retaliate. This was not about good will, liberal attitudes, or religious tolerance, but rather about reciprocity and mutual expectations.
Peter: It’s these areas of friction or failures, in a way, that help to better illuminate various understandings of protocol. But also the idea that the friction or failure plays a key role in developing and institutionalizing various protocols within a dialectic.
Daniel: Exactly! We shouldn’t stop at reconstructing repertoires, but continue to ask what happens when one of the parties involved chose options the other actors don’t expect. In other words, how are such repertoires transformed as a result of their violation. When I looked at repeated instances of violence against slaves perceived as a violation of the norm, I saw that it had surprising effects. For example, it afforded Muslim rulers to claim sovereignty and spiritual guardianship over the Mediterranean, it allowed Trinitarians and Mercedarians to claim expertise as intermediaries articulating the relations between Spain and Algiers, and it articulated slaves, not only as political or economic subjects, but also as ones defined in relation to religious practices. More interestingly, you see that over time, negative reciprocity was transformed into positive one. More specifically, forced baptisms led to the institutionalization of the norm which they violated, the establishment of cemeteries for Muslims enslaved in Spanish Mediterranean territories, and even the establishment of a mosque in 18th century Andalusia.
Peter: Yes, and that’s what I’m interested in, at least from the Moroccan and North African perspective. But I also see a framework emerging from you study about the seventeenth century that could play a crucial role in helping us to better understand a continuity in practices and protocols between North Africa and Spain that continues - or at least lays the foundation for - eighteenth century diplomatic practices.
Seeking a break, the questioned becomes the inquisitor, putting an underprepared graduate student in the proverbial ‘hot seat.’
Daniel: So this is partly responding to an earlier question and partly interviewing you. Another way to answer the first question ‘How did I get into my project’ is through those meta-narratives that structure Mediterranean history. And, from there, slowly position and build a counter narrative. How do you do that? What are the main narratives implicit or explicit for the eighteenth century? No ‘northern invasion’? No ‘forgotten frontier,’ right?
Peter: No. It’s a narrative that revolves around enlightenment Europe and an intellectual advancement there in opposition to stagnation in North Africa and the Ottoman Empire. And a mere mimicking of a very Franco-centric version of diplomatic practices and protocol that everybody agrees to, but supposedly plays no role in developing. And so, in reading this book and looking at the entangled networks that you are talking about I see glimpses of these diplomatic practices and engagement because its about relations. Its about dealing with other people and not so much about putting in force a strict institution of how everything operates. And that happens of course by the beginning of the 19th century. But to give France full credit for that or the franco-centric version of diplomacy full credit for that I think misses a whole part of the story.
Daniel: Ok. So I can see three potential constitutive narratives: European Enlightenment and those who stayed behind; a counter narrative to that would be ‘hey the Moroccans were a part of the European Enlightenment’ and that’s already a strong argument, and a third narrative, which goes beyond that is, paraphrasing Latour, that we’ve never been enlightened. Where would you say that you are at?
Peter: I think that in a way, I’m trying to grapple with what it means to do diplomacy, which is interaction and dealing with other people. And seeing that these processes developed on a much wider scale and with a lot more people involved and on various timelines.
Daniel: The first narrative is also very much connected to and produced by the beginning of professional history in the 19th century; German positivism, and the framing of diplomatic sources as the most reliable sources.
Peter: Exactly. And this is why I am so interested in your project because you bring together these sources that are scattered about in order to show how they tell an important narrative that disrupts this notion of the below and the top. It connects these aspects of social, cultural, and political society in really important ways.
Daniel: It emerged in different parts of our conversation, the fact that documents are never simple reflections of reality and even though we tend to attribute higher credibility to diplomatic or political sources they are always situated somewhere in the field they purport to portray objectively and impartially. And this makes me think about another methodological challenge I faced when trying to reconstruct cross-Mediterranean networks generated by popular actors. How to think about referentiality. One set of sources I analyzed I called “recommendation letters.” You can also think about them as insurance policies. There are letters that Christian captives wrote on behalf of renegades (Christians who converted to Islam in the context of captivity) in which they testified that the renegades were good Christians deep in their hearts, despite their conversion to Islam. How do we read such sources? If we think about them in terms of representations than what interests us is the truth-value of the claim the letter writer made—was the recommendee (the renegade) indeed a good Christian? But asking this question and trying to answer it means playing the inquisitorial game, reading the letters as testimonies regarding someone’s religiosity, religious subjectivity. Alternatively you can think about the conditions that enabled the writing, possessing, presenting, and verifying such letters, in other words about the power relations in which they circulated and the effects of their circulation. Then, you realize that renegades were interested in them because they feared getting caught by the Spanish fleet and then having to go through an inquisitorial trial and explain why did they convert. In this context letters could be of help. Thus, renegades exchanged favors with captives in return for such letters. The letters themselves then were objects of exchange whose exchange had to be masked as good works, that in their turn justified writing the letters. On another level, such letters positioned captives as legal witnesses who could give testimony, indeed the letters bestowed captives with a legal personhood,. And they could do this from Algiers and their testimony would be seriously considered in an inquisitorial tribunal across the sea in Spain. Finally, in some cases the Inquisition wrote back to the Maghrib to authenticate the identity of the letter writer, which means that the Inquisition had a foothold in the Maghrib and that from Spain, it participated in shaping social hierarchies among captives in the Maghrib.
Successfully dodging this flipped inquisition, the conversation meanders back to its original focus on the author.
Peter: Alright, so let’s move on. And because you keep mentioning your next project, let’s hear a bit about that.
Daniel: My next project looks at Christian and Muslim (perhaps Jewish too, but I’m not sure I’ve enough sources for it) religious material culture. I’m interested in the relations between religious artifacts—Qur’ans, bibles, statues of Christ, the Virgin, and the saints, crucifixes and rosaries, and relics—slavery, and the plunder economy. I want to thread together a few seemingly unrelated stories. The first regards the famous manuscript collection of Moroccan Sultan Ahmed al-Mansur stolen by a French consul-cum-pirate who was then intercepted by the Spanish fleet. The manuscripts were soon sent to the El Escorial but the debate over their fate that ensued involved France, Spain—the crown, scholars of Arabic, the prior of the Escorial—and Morocco. Successive generations of Moroccan Sultans and Spanish kings continued to negotiate the restitution of the books for centuries. Another story is about thousands of Christian devotional objects sent from Spain to settlers and captives in the Maghrib, some of them were plundered and then ransomed after negotiations in which they were exchanged for money or in return for Muslims enslaved in Spain. These two different stories indirectly intersected at one point, but beyond it there were so many indirect links between them. Other connections I’d like to tease out are that between the churches of the captives in Muslim cities in the Maghrib and cemeteries and even one 18th century mosque that served Muslim slaves in Spain. Another part of the story is the circulation of relics, of human turned sacred objects. However, I’m not talking about Roman saints, but rather about early modern captives who died as martyrs and their body parts were venerated and often smuggled from the Maghrib to Spain.
Once you start looking at what happens to religious artifacts entrapped by the world of piracy you find a host of relations between objects and humans, relations that varied from objects becoming captives; captives redeeming objects; captives exchanged in return for objects; captives transformed into objects as in the case of captives who had died as martyrs and whose body parts were later venerated as relics. Maybe it’s not that surprising given that at the outset there is something similar about religious objects and slaves—both are extreme cases in their respective groups. Slaves are the humans with the least personhood and religious objects are the things with the highest potential of power. In the process of entanglement with humans and things —in terms of form, function, and meaning, but also of their religious identity, and potential powers—elicit similar expectations and responses. They start operating as religious boundary markers.
Peter: You mentioned these artifacts in connection to humans and slavery networks. Do you see them buttressing your argument from this book? Or do they provide a different angle on a similar question.
Daniel: This question I could answer much better in a year or two. For now, I see them as complementing some of the arguments I developed in the Captive Sea. There I showed how political projects meant to minimize contacts between Islam and Christianity resulted in such contacts getting tighter than before. Similar logic governed the circulation of devotional objects. they were sent in their thousands to the Maghrib to help captives and settlers cling to their Christianity, in other words to set a religious boundary and minimize contacts. But soon they were taken captive themselves and needed the help of captives and friars who would rescue them.
We have a good number of studies that follow single objects, mostly Muslim objects that end up in European museums and mostly medieval ones. What I eventually seek to do is to provide a systematic account of the circulation of religious objects across the sea, one that goes beyond trajectories of individual artifacts.