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Captive Objects
Catholic Artifacts across the Early Modern Western Mediterranean
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 January 2024
Abstract
Catholic artifacts—images and sculptures of Christ, the Virgin, and various saints, as well as rosaries, crucifixes, and liturgical objects—circulated in their thousands throughout the early modern western Mediterranean. This mobility was largely an indirect byproduct of privateering and human trafficking, which bound together Spain’s Mediterranean territories, Morocco, and Ottoman Algiers. The disruptive moment of captivity set these otherwise disparate objects on common trajectories, making it interesting to study them as a category. The article argues that Catholic artifacts played surprising roles in the experience of Catholic captives, renegades, and their Muslim masters, and in the economy of ransom that facilitated the rescue of captives. Against the design of their initial distributors, such objects provided captives, converts, and masters with unexpected affordances, and in so doing helped blur the boundary between the religions, creating new entanglements between members of these groups and Catholic materiality. The argument is developed in three stages. First, the article claims that the surge in captivity following the Spanish-Ottoman truce of 1581 meant that more devotional objects were sent from Spain to Catholics held captive in the Maghrib. Second, it asserts that some of these artifacts ended up serving converts to Islam, while others were plundered by Algerian and Moroccan rulers. Third, the article contends that plunder and repurposing afforded captives the power to redeem an emblem of their God, provided Trinitarians and Mercedarians with opportunities to ransom objects and gain fame back home, and helped Maghribi rulers to secure religious privileges for their subjects enslaved in Spain. Focusing on their mobility demonstrates the degree to which Catholic objects continued to articulate and mediate social, political, and economic relations in the western Mediterranean over the long seventeenth century.
Résumé
Les objets de dévotion catholique – images et effigies du Christ, de la Vierge et des saints, missels, rosaires, crucifix et objets liturgiques – ont circulé par milliers dans la Méditerranée occidentale à l’époque moderne. Pour une large part, cette mobilité a été une conséquence indirecte de la piraterie et de la traite d’êtres humains qui interconnectaient les territoires méditerranéens de l’Espagne, du Maroc et de la régence ottomane d’Alger. Le moment de rupture que constitue la captivité a conféré à ces objets aux caractéristiques très différentes une trajectoire commune, rendant ainsi pertinent leur regroupement sous une même catégorie. L’article soutient que les artefacts catholiques ont joué un rôle prépondérant dans l’expérience des captifs catholiques, des renégats et de leurs maîtres musulmans tout autant que dans l’économie de la rançon qui a permis le rachat des captifs. À contre-pied des intentions de leurs concepteurs initiaux, ces objets ont fourni aux captifs, aux convertis et aux maîtres des ressources inattendues participant à brouiller la frontière religieuse et ont créé de nouveaux enchevêtrements entre les membres de ces trois groupes et la matérialité catholique. L’argument est développé en trois étapes. Tout d’abord, l’article affirme que l’augmentation du nombre de captifs après la trêve hispano-ottomane de 1581 a entraîné une augmentation du nombre d’objets de dévotion envoyés depuis l’Espagne aux catholiques retenus en captivité au Maghreb. Il affirme ensuite que certains de ces objets ont fini par bénéficier aux convertis à l’islam, tandis que les dirigeants algériens et marocains en ont pillé d’autres. Enfin, l’article souligne que le pillage et la réutilisation de ces objets ont conféré aux captifs la capacité de racheter un emblème de leur dieu, ont offert aux Trinitaires et aux Mercédaires l’opportunité de parfaire leur réputation en rançonnant des objets sacrés et ont permis aux dirigeants maghrébins de garantir les privilèges religieux de leurs propres sujets asservis en Espagne. L’accent mis sur la mobilité de ces objets montre à quel point les objets de dévotion catholique ont continué à articuler les relations sociales, politiques et économiques en Méditerranée occidentale au cours du long xviie siècle.
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Footnotes
*
* This article was first published in French as “Objets captifs. Les artefacts catholiques en Méditerannée au début de l’époque moderne,” Annales HSS 76, no. 2 (2021): 269–99.
For their feedback I am deeply grateful to Naor Ben-Yehoyada, Larissa Brewer-García, Claire Gilbert, Yonatan Glazer-Eytan, Thomas Glesener, Yanay Israeli, Jessica Marglin, Miguel Martínez, J. Michelle Molina, Fabien Montcher, Luis Salas Almela, Francesca Trivellato, the anonymous peer reviewers, and the participants in the lecture series “Bonded” at the Silsila Center for Material Histories, New York University, and the early modern seminar at the Institute of Advanced Studies (IAS) at Princeton. I would also like to thank the Centro de Estudios Europa Hispánica for funding the 2019–2020 John Elliott Membership at the IAS, the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) for the 2020–2021 Frederick Burkhardt Fellowship which allowed me to revise this article for publication, and the Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia University for providing a work space.
References
1 Early modern Spanish authors used the word “image” to refer to depictions of a religious figure or scene, whether as a three-dimensional sculpture or a two-dimensional painted or printed representation. See Françoise Crémoux, “Las imágenes de devoción y sus usos. El culto a la Virgen de Guadalupe (1500–1750),” in La imagen religiosa en la Monarquía hispánica. Usos y espacios, ed. María Cruz de Carlos Varona et al. (Madrid: Casa de Velásquez, 2008), 61–82, in particular p. 73.
2 María Cruz de Carlos Varona, “‘Imágenes rescatadas’ en la Europa moderna: el caso de Jesús de Medinaceli,” Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies 12, no. 3 (2011): 327–54.
3 Tomás García Figueras and Carlos Rodríguez Joulia Saint-Cyr, Larache: Datos para su historia en el siglo xvii (Madrid: CSIC, 1973).
4 Even if the actual number was half of this estimate, there were still about a million and a half victims of privateering. For figures, see Salvatore Bono, “La schiavitù nel mediterraneo moderno. Storia di una storia,” Cahiers de la Mediterranée 65 (2002): 1–16; Bono, “Slave Histories and Memoirs in the Mediterranean World: A Study of the Sources (Sixteenth–Eighteenth Centuries),” in Trade and Cultural Exchange in the Early Modern Mediterranean: Braudel’s Maritime Legacy, ed. Maria Fusaro, Colin Heywood, and Mohamed-Salah Omri (London: I. B. Tauris, 2010), 97–115, here p. 105; Robert C. Davis, “Counting European Slaves on the Barbary Coast,” Past & Present 172, no. 1 (2001): 87–124.
5 Following the lead of Ian Hodder and Igor Kopytoff, I seek to reconstruct and analyze the social biography of a class of objects, with a particular focus on the increasing mutual dependencies between humans and things. Ian Hodder, “The Entanglements of Humans and Things: A Long-Term View,” New Literary History 45 (2014): 19–36, here pp. 30–31, Igor Kopytoff, “The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process,” in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 64–91.
6 See, for example, Daniel Hershenzon, “Traveling Libraries: The Arabic Manuscripts of Muley Zidan and the Escorial Library,” Journal of Early Modern History 18 (2014): 535–58.
7 Annette B. Weiner, Inalienable Possessions: The Paradox of Keeping-While-Giving (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992).
8 In addition to the well-known Christ of Medinaceli in Madrid, I have tracked the following captive objects: the Infant Christ of Meknes and a painting of Saint James the Great at the Hospital of the Third Order of Saint Francis in Madrid, a statute of Our Lady of Algiers at the Trinitarian residency in Madrid, another statute of Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception at the Convent of las Descalzas Reales in Madrid, and the Holy Captive Child at the Metropolitan Cathedral in Mexico City.
9 Gillian Weiss, Captives and Corsairs: France and Slavery in the Early Modern Mediterranean (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), 2.
10 For the classical accounts, see Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II [1949], 2 vols., trans. Siân Reynolds (New York: Harper and Row, 1972–1976); Andrew C. Hess, The Forgotten Frontier: A History of the Sixteenth-Century Ibero-African Frontier (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978).
11 Wolfgang Kaiser, ed., Le commerce des captifs. Les intermédiaires dans l’échange et le rachat des prisonniers en Méditerranée, xve– xviiie siècle (Rome: École française de Rome, 2008); Wolfgang Kaiser and Guillaume Calafat, “The Economy of Ransoming in the Early Modern Mediterranean: A Form of Cross-Cultural Trade between Southern Europe and the Maghreb (Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries),” in Religion and Trade: Cross-Cultural Exchanges in World History, 1000–1900, ed. Francesca Trivellato, Leor Halevi, and Catia Antunes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 108–30.
12 In this regard, the work of economic historians—who have significantly increased our knowledge of the expansion of early modern commerce between Spain, Morocco, and Algiers—is also crucial. See Eloy Martín Corrales, Comercio de Cataluña con el Mediterráneo musulmán (siglos xvi– xviii). El Comercio con los “enemigos de la fe” (Barcelona: Ediciones Bellaterra, 2001); Roberto Blanes Andrés, Valencia y el Magreb. Las Relaciones Comerciales Marítimas (1600–1703) (Barcelona: Ediciones Bellaterra, 2010); Roberto Blanes Andrés and Vicente Montojo Montojo, “El comercio del Mediterráneo español a mediados del siglo xvii,” in La corte de Felipe IV (1621–1665). Reconfiguración de la Monarquía católica, vol. 2, El sistema de corte. Consejos y hacienda, ed. José Martínez Millán and Manuel Rodríguez Rivero (Madrid: Ediciones Polifemo, 2017), 1331–70.
13 Elisabeth A. Fraser, introduction to The Mobility of People and Things in the Early Modern Mediterranean: The Art of Travel, ed. Elisabeth A. Fraser (New York: Routledge, 2020), 1–8, here p. 2. We know more about the circulation of devotional objects in the eastern half of the Mediterranean: Yuliana Boycheva, ed., Routes of Russian Icons in the Balkans (16th–Early 20th Centuries) (Seyssel: La pomme d’or, 2016); Felicita Tramontana, “‘Per ornamento e servizio di questi Santi Luoghi’. L’arrivée des objets de dévotion dans les sanctuaires de Terre Sainte (xviie siècle),” Archives de sciences sociales des religions 183, no. 3 (2018): 227–45.
14 One such exception is María Cruz de Carlos Varona’s illuminating analysis of the Christ of Medinaceli: Cruz de Carlos Varona, “‘Imágenes rescatadas’ en la Europa moderna.” Another is Catherine V. Infante’s work on the representations of captive objects: Infante, The Arts of Encounter: Christians, Muslims, and the Power of Images in Early Modern Spain (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2022). Finally, see Giovanna Fiume’s study of the canonization of a Franciscan missionary martyred in Morocco and the veneration of his relics: Fiume, Schiavitù mediterranee. Corsari, rinnegati e santi di età moderna (Milan: Bruno Mondadori, 2009), 263–66 and 281–323.
15 See Cecily J. Hilsdale, “Visual Cultures of the Medieval Mediterranean,” in A Companion to Mediterranean History, ed. Peregrine Horden and Sharon Kinoshita (Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2014), 296–313; Eva R. Hoffman “Pathways of Portability: Islamic and Christian Interchange from the Tenth through the Twelfth Century,” Art History 24, no. 1 (2001): 17–50; Catarina Schmidt Arcangeli and Gerhard Wolf, eds., Islamic Artefacts in the Mediterranean World: Trade, Gift Exchange and Artistic Transfer (Venice: Marsilio, 2011).
16 Economically, however, the Mediterranean continued to be an important arena for both empires. See Corrales, Comercio de Cataluña; Blanes Andrés, Valencia y el Maghreb; Blanes Andrés and Montojo Montojo, “El comercio del Mediterráneo español”; Molly Greene, “The Ottomans in the Mediterranean,” in The Early Modern Ottoman Empire: A Reinterpretation, ed. Virginia H. Aksan and Daniel Goffman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 104–16.
17 Antonio de Sosa, An Early Modern Dialogue with Islam: Antonio de Sosa’s Topography of Algiers (1612), ed. María Antonia Garcés, trans. Diana de Armas Wilson (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2011), 257–59; Jean-Baptiste Gramaye, Alger, xvie– xviie siècle. Journal de Jean-Baptiste Gramaye, “évêque d’Afrique” [1622], trans. Abd el Hadi ben Mansour (Paris: Éd. du Cerf, 1998), 335–37; Relación verdadera en que se da cventa muy por estenso del modo que tienen de vivir assi Moros, Iudios de la ciudad de Argel (Madrid, 1639), Biblioteca Nacional de España (hereafter “BNE”), VE 185/74.
18 António de Saldanha, Crónica de Almançor, sultão de Marrocos (1578–1603), ed. António Dias Farinha (Lisbon: Instituto De Investigação Científica Tropical, 1997), 203.
19 Pascual Saura Lahoz, “Los Franciscanos en Marruecos. Relación inédita de 1685,” Archivo Ibero-Americano 17 (1921): 79–100, especially pp. 95–96.
20 Francisco Ximénez, Colonia trinitaria de Túnez, ed. Ignacio Bauer (Tétouan: Tip. Gomariz, 1934), 28.
21 Ellen G. Friedman, “Trinitarian Hospitals in Algiers: An Early Example of Health Care for Prisoners of War,” Catholic Historical Review 66 (1980): 551–64; Bonifacio Porres Alonso, “Los hospitales trinitarios de Argel y Túnez,” Hispania sacra 48 (1996): 639–717.
22 On the religious services provided for captives, see the report that the Franciscan Luis de San Agustin sent to the Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith in 1685: Saura Lahoz, “Los Franciscanos en Marruecos,” 95–96.
23 On the institution of the dhimma, see Mark R. Cohen, “What Was the Pact of ʿUmar? A Literary-Historical Study,” Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 23 (1999): 100–57.
24 Daniel Hershenzon, “Plaintes et menaces réciproques : captivité et violence religieuses dans la Méditerranée du xviie siècle,” in Les musulmans dans l’histoire de l’Europe, vol. 2, Passages et contacts en Méditerranée, ed. Jocelyne Dakhlia and Wolfgang Kaiser (Paris: Albin Michel, 2013), 441–60.
25 Bonifacio Porres Alonso, Testigos de Cristo en Argel: Juan del Águila, Juan de Palacios, y Bernardo de Monroy, Trinitarios (Córdoba: Secretariado Trinitario, 1994), 112.
26 Bonifacio Porres Alonso, Libertad a los cautivos actividad redentora de la orden trinitarian, 3 vols. (Córdoba: Secretariado Trinitario, 1997–1998), 1:371.
27 Ibid.
28 Rome, Archivio storico di Propaganda Fide, Barberia, bundle 1, fol. 467r, June 8, 1680, “Letter from the apostolic vicar of Algiers to the Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith.”
29 Madrid, Real Academia de la Historia (hereafter “RAH”), MS 9-27-7-E-193, fols. 22r, 24r, and 28r, “Viaje de Argel de Fr. Francisco Ximénez de la ínclita y celestial religión de la SS. Trinidad Redempción de cautivos christianise.”
30 The bishop of Murcia, who gave Ximénez rosaries and medals, also granted forty days of indulgences to all captives who would either recite one Our Father or a Hail Mary or perform an act of contrition in front of a crucifix owned by Ximénez: RAH, MS 9-27-7-E-193, fol. 67r, “Viaje de Argel de Fr. Francisco Ximénez de la ínclita y celestial religión de la SS. Trinidad Redempción de cautivos christianise.”
31 Ximénez, Colonia Trinitaria de Túnez, 188–90. On the circulation and commerce of relics across the Mediterranean, see Fiume, Schiavitù mediterranee, 263–66 and 281–323; A. Katie Harris, “Gift, Sale, and Theft: Juan de Ribera and the Sacred Economy of Relics in the Early Modern Mediterranean,” Journal of Early Modern History 18, no. 3 (2014): 193–226; Katrina B. Olds, “The Ambiguities of the Holy: Authenticating Relics in Seventeenth-Century Spain,” Renaissance Quarterly 65, no. 1 (2012): 135–84.
32 Ximénez, Colonia Trinitaria de Túnez, 188–90.
33 Hélène Vu Thanh, “L’économie des objets de dévotion en terres de mission : l’exemple du Japon (1549–1614),” Archives de sciences sociales des religions 183 (2018): 207–25; Tramontana, “‘Per ornamento e servizio di questi Santi Luoghi’”; Gabriela Ramos, “Living with the Virgin in the Colonial Andes: Images and Personal Devotion,” in Religious Materiality in the Early Modern World, ed. Suzanna Ivanič, Mary Laven, and Andrew Morrall (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2019), 137–50.
34 On these terms and related practices, see Guillaume Calafat, “Jurisdictional Pluralism in a Litigious Sea (1590–1630): Hard Cases, Multi-Sited Trials and Legal Enforcement between North Africa and Italy,” in “Global History and Microhistory,” ed. John-Paul A. Ghobrial, Past & Present 242, supplement 14 (2019): 142–78, here pp. 169–74; M’hamed Oualdi, Esclaves et Maîtres. Les Mamelouks des Beys de Tunis du xviie siècle aux années 1880 (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2011), 23–61.
35 See, for example, the case summary of the Majorcan tribunal: Onofre Vaquer Bennasar, Captius i renegats al segle xvii. Mallorquins captius entre musulmans. Renegats davant la Inquisició de Mallorca (Majorca: El Tall, 2014), 123–236.
36 Giovanna Fiume, “Rinnegati: le imbricazioni delle relazioni mediterranee,” in Identidades cuestionadas. Coexistencia y conflictos interreligiosos en el Mediterráneo (ss. xiv– xviii), ed. Borja Franco Llopis et al. (Valencia: Universitat de València, 2016), 39–62, here p. 43.
37 On the risk of anachronism when applying the cultural category of “sincerity” to non-Protestant contexts, see Talal Asad, “Comments on Conversion,” in Conversion to Modernities: The Globalization of Christianity, ed. Peter Van der Veer (New York: Routledge, 1996), 263–73; Webb Keane, “From Fetishism to Sincerity: On Agency, the Speaking Subject, and their Historicity in the Context of Religious Conversion,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 39, no. 4 (1997): 674–93.
38 Though the three religions developed arguments meant to justify forced conversions, as a recent volume on the topic demonstrates: Mercedes García-Arenal and Yonatan Glazer-Eytan, eds., Forced Conversion in Christianity, Judaism and Islam: Coercion and Faith in Premodern Iberia and Beyond (Leiden: Brill, 2019).
39 For a recent review of the literature, see Robert John Clines, “The Converting Sea: Religious Change and Cross-Cultural Interaction in the Early Modern Mediterranean,” History Compass 17, no. 1 (2019): 1–15.
40 Bartolomé Bennassar and Lucile Bennassar, Les chrétiens d’Allah. L’histoire extraordinaire des renégats, xvie et xviie siècles (Paris: Perrin, 1989). For the tribunals not covered in this study, see Anita Gonzales-Raymond, Inquisition et société en Espagne. Les relations des causes du Tribunal de Valence (1566–1700) (Paris: Annales littéraires de l’université de Franche-Comté, 1996).
41 Bennassar and Bennassar, Les chrétiens d’Allah, 168.
42 Fiume, “Rinnegati,” 48–52.
43 Tobias P. Graf, The Sultan’s Renegades: Christian-European Converts to Islam and the Making of the Ottoman Elite, 1575–1610 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).
44 Fiume, “Rinnegati,” 41.
45 Valentina Oldrati, “El difícil mantenimiento de la fe cristiana en tierras islámicas. Entre nicodemismo y otras estrategias de supervivencia (s. xvii),” in Llopis et al., Identidades cuestionadas, 63–78, here pp. 72–77.
46 See the two fatwas issued by Alī al-Maṭgharī al-Fāsī (d. 1545) and Muḥammad al-Nālī (d. 1521–1522) and included in ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz b. al-Ḥasan al-Zayyātī’s popular mid-seventeenth-century fatwa collection Al-Jawāhir al-mukhtāra fī-mā waqaftu ʿalayhi min al-nawāzil bi-Jibāl Ghumāra (Selected Jewels). Both concerned Muslim women who had married converts suspected of continuing to practice Christianity. I thank Jocelyn Hendrickson for sharing chapters and the appendix of her Leaving Iberia: Islamic Law and Christian Conquest in North West Africa (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2021).
47 Aḥmad ibn Yaḥyā al-Wansharīsī, Archives Marocaines. La pierre de touche des fétwas de Ahmad al-Wanscharīsī, vol. 12, trans. Émil Amar (Paris: Ernest Leroux, 1908–1909), 323–25. For a summary of the fatwa, see Vincent Lagardère, Histoire et société en Occident musulman au Moyen Âge. Analyse du Miʿyar d’al- Wanšarīsī (Madrid: Casa de Velásquez, 1995), 65. Its inclusion in the Clear Standard suggests that legal scholars, rulers, and ordinary people deemed this fatwa relevant to the circumstances of their time, and that it was or was about to become a legal precedent. On issuing fatwas in the early modern Islamic west, see David S. Powers, Law, Society, and Culture in the Maghrib, 1300–1500 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 20–22. On issuing and compiling fatwas in the Ottoman Empire, and on their status as historical sources, see Joshua M. White, Piracy and Law in the Ottoman Mediterranean (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2018), 183–87.
48 For full transcriptions of the summaries of renegades’ trials conducted at the Majorcan Inquisitorial tribunal between 1603 and 1694, see Vaquer Bennasar, Captius i renegats al segle xvii.
49 Ibid., 143, 168, 175, 201, 203, 215, 218, 221, and 234.
50 Ibid., 215. There are a number of settlements called “Saint-Pierre” in France, and it has not been possible to identify which one this French renegade was from.
51 Irene Galandra Cooper and Mary Laven, “The Material Culture of Piety in the Italian Renaissance: Re-touching the Rosary,” in The Routledge Handbook of Material Culture in Early Modern Europe, ed. Catherine Richardson, Tara Hamling, and David Gaimster (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017), 338–53.
52 Carlos José Romero Mensaque, “La universalización de la devoción del rosario y sus cofradías en España. De Trento a Lepanto,” Angelicum 90, no. 1 (2013): 217–46.
53 Carlos José Romero Mensaque, “La devoción al rosario en la ciudad de Zaragoza durante la modernidad (siglos xv al xviii),” Archivo Dominicano: Anuario 36 (2015): 137–64, here p. 146; Ginés de Ocaña, Epitome del viage qve hizo a Marruecos el padre Fr. Francisco de la Concepciõ [1646] (Seville: Ian Cabeças, 1975), fol. 18v.
54 Vaquer Bennasar, Captius i renegats al segle xvii, 221.
55 Ibid., 168.
56 Miguel de Cervantes, The Bagnios of Algiers [1615], in “The Bagnios of Algiers” and “The Great Sultana”: Two Plays of Captivity, ed. and trans. Barbara Fuchs and Aaron J. Ilika (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), act 2, p. 45.
57 Ibid., act 3, p. 91.
58 Arent J. Wensinck, “Subḥa,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam, First Edition (1913–1936), ed. M. Th. Houtsma et al., http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/2214-871X_ei1_SIM_5480.
59 Vaquer Bennasar, Captius i renegats al segle xvii, 175.
60 Ibid., 221.
61 Caroline Walker Bynum, Christian Materiality: An Essay on Religion in Late Medieval Europe (New York: Zone Books, 2011), 82.
62 Bruno Pomara Saverino describes prayer beads as “ambiguous objects,” which might explain their relative popularity among Moriscos (Spanish Muslims obliged to convert to Christianity and their descendants) sentenced at the Sicilian Inquisitorial tribunal: Pomara Saverino, “Quand les objets de la foi fondent la réputation. Les morisques entre Espagne et Italie,” in Matière à discorde. Les objets chrétiens dans les conflits modernes, ed. Marie Lezowski and Yann Lignereux (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2021), 173–86.
63 A dispute in the 1920s over the number of times “The Pearl of Perfection” (a Sufi prayer) should be recited—eleven or the widely accepted twelve—split the Tijāniyya order in the French colony of Upper Volta (now Burkina Faso) into two fractions: the Ḥamawiyya or eleven-bead Tijānīs and the ʿUmarians, or twelve-bead Tijānīs. In 1933, the French tried to convince Shaykh Sawadogo, who introduced the Tijāniyya order to the colony, to join the ʿUmarians, who were supported by the colonizers. Sawadogo pretended to consent, and even ordered his followers to add an extra, twelfth bead to their misbaḥa, but he maintained his loyalty to the Ḥamawiyya, whose liturgy he and his followers continued to practice. To their satisfaction, French colonial administrators reported Sawadogo’s “conversion” authentic. See Ousman Murzik Kobo, “Five Tasbih in West African Islamic History: Spirituality, Aesthetic, Politics, and Identity,” in Islam Through Objects, ed. Anna Bigelow (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021), 81–94.
64 Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote [1605–1615], trans. Edith Grossman and Harold Bloom (New York: Ecco, 2005), part 1.4, chapters 39–41, pp. 334–67.
65 Ibid., part 1.4, chapter 40, p. 347. A similar scene, in which the renegade pulls out a rosary, is recounted in Emanuel d’Aranda, Les captifs d’Alger. Relation de la captivité du sieur Emanuel d’Aranda, où sont descriptes les misères, les ruses et les finesses des esclaves et des corsaires d’Alger [1657], ed. Latifa Z’Rari (Paris: J. P. Rocher, 1998), 174.
66 Infante, The Arts of Encounter.
67 De Sosa, Topography and History of Algiers, 223–24.
68 Archivo General de Simancas (hereafter “AGS”), Estado, Leg. 198, August 1, 1603.
69 AGS, Guerra Antigua, Leg. 992, October 30, 1629.
70 For the original letters and their translation, see AGS, Consejo de Estado, Leg. 2675, September 23, 1658.
71 Barcelona, Archivo de la Corona de Aragón, Consejo de Aragón, Leg. 607, January 24, 1663, and AGS, Estado, Leg. 2679, October 3, 1663. Similar challenges and ripostes continued into the eighteenth century. In the second half of the 1730s, the administrator of the Trinitarian hospital in Algiers reported that news of an attack by local citizens on the mosque of the Muslim galley slaves in Cartagena had reached Algiers. Dey Ibrāhīm ibn Ramaḍān had summoned the Trinitarian administrator and ordered him to send a warning to Spain: if the Muslim slaves in Cartagena were not to be permitted to use their mosque, the Algerian authorities would close the churches in Algiers and burn their images. See Madrid, Archivo Histórico Nacional (hereafter “AHN”), Inquisición Leg. 3733, fol. 301r. The record is undated but the mosque in question was established in 1734 and the Trinitarian administrator died in 1739. Thus, the grievance must have been sent in the second half of the 1730s. For a detailed analysis of this mosque, see Thomas Glesener and Daniel Hershenzon, “The Maghrib in Europe: Royal Slaves and Islamic Institutions in Eighteenth Century Spain,” Past & Present 259 (2023): 77–116.
72 AHN, Inquisición, Leg. 1712/2, carpeta 20 and Inquisición, lib. 862.
73 Archivo de la Venerable Orden Tercera de Madrid (hereafter “AVOTM”), Leg. 732, letters from Meknes, April 15, 20, and 30, and September 1, 1694.
74 RAH, MS 9-27-7-E-193, fols. 16v, 17r, 22v, 30v, 34v–35r, and 62v, “Viaje de Argel de Fr. Francisco Ximénez de la ínclita y celestial religión de la SS. Trinidad Redempción de cautivos christianise.”
75 See note 8 above.
76 On imitatio Christi, see Giles Constable, Three Studies in Medieval Religious and Social Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 143–248.
77 On slaves as “dead things,” see Diego de Haedo, Topografía e historia general de Argel (Valladolid: Diego Fernandez de Cordoua y Oviedo, 1612), 100. Writing about iconoclasm, the Protestant theologian Andreas Karlstadt described images as “deceitful,” claiming they “bring death to those who worship and praise them”: Karlstadt, “On the Removal of Images” [1522], in A Reformation Debate: Karlstadt, Emser, and Eck on Sacred Images; Three Treatises in Translation, trans. Bryan D. Mangrum and Giuseppe Scavizzi (Toronto: Center for Renaissance and Reformation Studies, 1998), 21–22.
78 Porres Alonso, Libertad a los cautivos, 371–72.
79 “Relación primera verdadera, en que se da cuenta de los singulares sucesos, que han tenido los muy Reverendos Padres Redemptores del Orden de Descalços de la Santissima Trinidad …” [place of publication, publisher, and year of publication not indicated], in Papeles de mi archivo. Relaciones de África (Marruecos), ed. Ignacio Bauer Landauer, 6 vols. (Madrid: Editorial Ibero-Africano-Americana, 1922–1923), 2:103–15, here p. 109.
80 This is reported in a published letter written by one of the soldiers of the conquered garrison: Francisco Sandoval y Roxas, “Aviso verdadero y lamentable relación, que hace el capitán don Francisco de Sandoval y Roxas, Cautivo en Fez, al exelentissimo señor don Pedro Antonio de Aragón …” [Madrid, 1681], in Bauer Landauer, Papeles de mi archivo, 2:93–97.
81 “Relación primera verdadera,” 104.
82 Ibid., 108–11.
83 “Segunda relación verdadera en que se prosiguen los singulares casos, que han sucedido en la Redempción que han hecho este presente año de 1682 los muy Reverendos Padres Redemptores de la Sagrada y Esclarecida Orden de Descalços de la Santissima Trinidad …” [place of publication, publisher, and year of publication not indicated], in Bauer Landauer, Papeles de mi archivo, 2:115–26, here p. 120.
84 Porres Alonso, Libertad a los cautivos, 511–13.
85 AHN, Nobleza, Frías, CP. 532, doc. 12, “Memorial de los cristianos cautivos que en la ciudad Argel rescatron los padres Fr. Francisco de la Cruz, y Fr. Gaspar de los Reyes … por el mes de Setiembre de 1642,” or AHN, Nobleza, Frías, CP. 90, doc. 61–67, “Memorias de los cautivos que este año de 1674, en el mes de marzo, de dicho año han traído rescatados de los reinos, y ciudades de Fez, Tetvan, y Zale.”
86 Mariano Arribas Palau, “De nuevo sobre la embajada de al-Ghassānī (1690–1691),” Al-Qantara 6, no. 1/2 (1985): 199–289, here p. 215. There are two earlier extant drafts of this letter, one from May 1690 (ibid., 206) and another from April 1690: Arribas Palau, “A propósito de una carta de Carlos II a Mawlay Ismail,” Al-Qantara 10, no. 2 (1989): 565–69.
87 Alessia Meneghin, “The Economy of Sacred Objects,” in Madonnas and Miracles: The Holy Home in Renaissance Italy, ed. Maya Corry, Deborah Howard, and Mary Laven (Cambridge: Philip Wilson Publishers/Fitzwilliam Museum, 2017), 82–87.
88 Harris, “Gift, Sale, and Theft”; Olds, “The Ambiguities of the Holy.”
89 Medieval members of the clergy did on occasion pawn religious texts and liturgical objects to Jewish pawnbrokers, but in doing so they were violating the prohibitions of the papal and ecclesiastical councils. See Joseph Shatzmiller, Cultural Exchange: Jews, Christians, and Art in the Medieval Market Place (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), 7–44. Similarly, in seventeenth-century Prague Jewish artisans produced sacred images from rosaries to crosses. See Nicolas Richard, “Un Nouveau marché. Diffusion des objets de dévotion et sanctuaires de pèlerinage dans le Bohême de la contre-réforme (fin xvie–début xviiie siècle),” in “Façonner l’objet de dévotion chrétien. Fabrication, commerce et circulations xvie–xixe siècles,” ed. Marie Lezowski and Laurent Tatarenko, special issue, Archives de sciences sociales des religions 183 (2018): 31–49. On local permissions granted to Jews to deal with second-hand disassembled silverware, including liturgical objects, see Marie Lezowski, “Vol sacrilège et règlement de comptes entre voisins. Sienne, 1730,” in Lezowski and Lignereux, Matière à discorde, 71–85.
91 “Relación primera verdadera”; “Segunda relación verdadera”; Arribas Palau, “De nuevo sobre la embajada”; Arribas Palau, “A propósito de una carta.”
91 Cruz de Carlos Varona, “‘Imágenes rescatadas’ en la Europa moderna.”
92 AVOTM, Leg. 404/430, Cardinal Portocarrero to the king, Madrid, July 6, 1692.
93 Anastase Goudal, Histoire de la mission franciscaine à Meknès et origines du culte de la Vierge (Issoudun: Imprimerie Laboureur, 1955), 36.
94 BNE, Varios Especiales, 128, fol. 240v, “Noticia de la forma en que el día 5 de agosto de este año de 1692 se llevaron … a los christianos, que estavan captivos del Rey de Mequínez, a quienes rescato la Venerable Orden Tercera de N. P. San Francisco.”
95 Yonatan Glazer-Eytan, “Transgressing the Sacred: The Crime and Cult of Sacrilege in the Spanish Catholic Monarchy, 1558–1632” (PhD diss., Johns Hopkins University, 2020), 191–97.
96 David Freedberg, The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 89–91; Marie Lezowski, introduction to “Tours et détours des objets de dévotion catholiques (xvie–xxie siècles),” thematic dossier, Mélanges de l’École française de Rome—Italie et Méditerranée modernes et contemporaines 126, no. 2 (2014): 341–51, here p. 344.
97 For instance, in 1618, a “turk” who owned a small statue of Our Lady of Ransom reportedly agreed to sell it to a Trinitarian friar for its weight in silver coins. He set up a scale, placed the statue in one pan and filled the other with coins. But to balance the scale he had to remove so many coins that eventually only fifteen remained, “which was half of what his son had been sold for”: Christoval Granados de los Rios, Historia de Nuestra Señora de los Remedios de la Fuensanta (Madrid, 1648), 63–64.
98 Ibid.; BNE, Varios Especiales, 60-43, “Respuesta que embió el padre difinidor, y redentor Fr. Ioseph del Espíritu Santo, del orden de descalços de nuestra señora de la merced, redención de cautivos, a una carta … este ano de 1648”; Josep Antoni Garí y Siumell, La Órden redentora de la Merced (Barcelona: Imprenta de los herederos de la viuda Pla, 1873), 346–47.
99 Caroline Walker Bynum, “The Sacrality of Things: An Inquiry into Divine Materiality in the Christian Middle Ages,” Irish Theological Quarterly 78 (2013): 3–18.
101 Daniel Hershenzon, The Captive Sea: Slavery, Communication, and Commerce in Early Modern Spain and the Mediterranean (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), 114–16.
101 Such struggles could also ensue from the finding of miraculous images on the high seas. See Guillaume Calafat, “Mercanti, corsari e investimenti devozionali in una città nuova. L’‘altare dei Corsi’ a Livorno nel Seicento,” Quaderni storici 3 (2018): 739–72.