JÓN JÓNSSON: A CAPTIVE’S TALE – PART 4

(This post is a continuation of Jón Jónsson: a Captive’s Tale – Parts 1, 2, & 3. If you haven’t done so already, it’s best to read those posts before continuing on here.)

Slaves did everything in Algiers in the early seventeenth century. They worked as laborers in the farms that dotted the hinterland around the city. But they also labored in the city itself, where they emptied cesspits, worked on building sites, hauled huge chunks of rock down to the mole to reinforce it, milled grain, whitewashed the buildings, and generally performed the varied menial tasks needed to maintain the city’s infrastructure. The unlucky ones ended up chained to a rowing bench in one of the fearsome corsair galleys. Those more fortunate escaped hard labor and served as domestic servants, maintaining their owners’ households and babysitting their owners’ children. Slaves also performed less menial tasks. Some were doctors, translators, scribes, or book keepers—professions for which there was a constant need in Algiers.

Jón Jónsson would have likely been in this latter group.

Unfortunately, we have no clear details about what sort of life Jón led as a slave in Algiers. We do know one thing for sure, though: he was not happy there.

Jón wrote letters, some of which had survived the centuries. He does not describe his day-to-day life in any detail, but he does reveal some of his inner life.

Jón arrived in Algiers, remember, in 1627.

The early seventeenth century was a very different age from our own, more simple technologically, decidedly more brutal, and much more strongly and pervasively religious. The Reformation (the Protestant revolt against the Catholic Church) and the Counter-Reformation (the Catholic Church’s reaction) had played out only a couple of generations before. In fact, it was still playing out in some ways in Jón’s day. All the European slaves in Algiers had the same basic, brute fact in common: they were enslaved. But this didn’t mean they put aside their differences and became allies. In fact, riots sometime broke out in the bagnios (the slave pens) when warring factions of Protestant and Catholic slaves clashed.

So what was the irreconcilable difference that made even fellow slaves attack each other? Like most things, the Reformation/Counter-Reformation was complicated. But one fundamental aspect characterized the difference between Catholics and Protestants at this time: Catholics related to God via the medium of the church and the clergy; Protestants had a personal relationship with God. For seventeenth century Protestants, God was in the world and played a direct part in individual people’s daily affairs.

Martin Luther, who famously nailed his ninety-five theses to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg in 1517 and so singlehandedly precipitated the Protestant Reformation, expressed the direct role of God this way:

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I believe that God created me, along with all creatures. He gave to me: body and soul, eyes, ears and all the other parts of my body, my mind and all my senses and preserves them as well. He gives me clothing and shoes, food and drink, house and land, wife and children, fields, animals, and all I own. Every day He abundantly provides everything I need to nourish this body and life. He protects me against all danger, shields and defends me from all evil.

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As a good (and well educated) Protestant (and a Lutheran to boot), this was Jón’s perspective, too.

There was a problem, though: God was supposed to protect true believers against danger and shield and defend them from evil. But, as we all know, bad things sometimes happen to good people.

So Jón and every other devout Protestant enslaved in Algiers had to believe that the terrible thing that had happened to them was because God had willed it. After all, God was omnipotent. If he was intimately involved in daily affairs, then everything that happened—good or bad—happened because God made it happen.

The conclusion that followed this was inevitable: the way for good Protestants to escape slavery was to get God to intervene to set them free.

The question, of course, was how to do that.

The answer was simple and traditional: prayer.

So when Jón wrote home to his parents on behalf of his brother Helgi and himself, the first thing he did was ask his parents to pray for them:

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From the depths of our hearts, we, your poor sons, thank the both of you for the charity, compassion, faithfulness, kind admonishments, indulgence, and the love you have shown us, in the name of God, the fount of greater mercy than we can repay, and more than we can wish for, and of all prosperity, blessings, and benedictions, body and soul. Amen

We ask you now to forgive, in the name of God, our childhood disobediences, our unruliness and our faults and demerits, for we would wish to be included in your warm prayers and intercessions unto God, trusting that our deserved exile and proscription will end well, since the parents’ blessing builds the children a house. We see here daily indications of God’s mercy, and perhaps your prayers too.

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There’s something a little pathetic in this for modern readers.

There’s Jón, dismally unhappy in his servitude in Algiers, writing home to ask his parents to pray for him and his brother in hopes that God will hear those prayers and think: “Hmmm… Maybe Jón’s not such a bad guy after all. Perhaps I should set him free now.”

Rather like asking your parents to write to President Trump for a pardon for you.

Well… not really.

Such a perspective is unfairly dismissive. Jón lived in a very different world from ours, not just physically, but psychologically as well. And he was an educated man, remember. For him, and others like him, it was a clear and obvious fact that God played a direct role in people’s daily lives.

Later in the letter, Jón writes:

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There is very little possibility of escape from this place unless God himself should choose to intervene—which does happen. Therefore, it is best to wait for a moment when God offers an opportunity.

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Jón waited.

For a man like him, a European Christian captive enslaved in a Muslin city, there was a way out: he could convert to Islam. This didn’t necessarily guarantee him his immediate freedom, but it would have opened doors that otherwise would have remained closed to him. Many European slaves—and quite a few of the captured Icelanders—converted and made new and successful lives for themselves.

Jón resisted that temptation to convert and so ease the conditions of his servitude.

In another section of the letter, he writes:

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Many distressful things have happened during our days here, which we used to pass in coldness and hunger and thirst, ill clothed and in great difficulties and poor circumstances. But all that is now forgotten, for our masters treat us much better since we have learned to understand the language here and so can defend ourselves against their harsh and aggressive words when we have disputes. The hardest test is over, thanks to the mercy of the Holy Spirit—namely the temptation to forsake our holy Christian faith. And thanks to the glorious work of God, all has gone well for us here, and we have suffered neither blow nor beating.

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Jón and his brother may indeed have kept their faith avoided blows and beatings, but they stayed enslaved.

Eight years passed with no opportunity for liberation—God given or otherwise.

And then, finally, the Danish Crown sent an official ransoming expedition to Algiers to liberate the enslaved Icelanders.

Things did not go well for Jón, though.

For a continuation of Jón’s story, go to Jón Jónsson: a Captive’s Tale – Part 5.

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For those who may be interested, the quotation from Martin Luther comes from his Small Catechism. The quotations from Jón Jónsson come from the letter of his included in The Travels of Reverend Ólafur Egilsson, translated from the original Icelandic by Karl Smári Hreinsson and myself.