THE TRAVAILS OF FRIAR ANTONIO – Corsairs & Captives

This week, we continue the series of posts drawn from Corsairs & Captives, my new book.

As promised last week, this week we look at the story of an Augustinian friar named Antonio. It’s a love story—not the sort of thing you’d expect from your average Augustinian.

Once upon a time—back in the 1570s—there was Augustinian friar named Antonio, a Portuguese man living in Spain, who had a big problem: he fell in love with a woman

This was a problem for him in three ways.

First, and most obviously, Augustinian friars—like all members of the Catholic clergy—were (and are) supposed to be celibate. There were ways around this, of course. Over the centuries, innumerable priests quite successfully kept secret mistresses.

But that brings us to the second way in which this was a problem: it was simply not practical for a man living the communal life of an Augustinian friar to keep a mistress; it was not really practical for him to even be able to see much of the mistress.

And then there was the third aspect of the problem. Back in the sixteenth century, a friar could not leave his order except to join another, stricter order. So Friar Antonio could not simply walk away from the Augustinians. Doing so would have made him officially an apostate, that is, somebody who had renounced his faith. The Holy Office of the Inquisition actively prosecuted apostates of all sorts, including lapsed friars

So Friar Antonio was faced with a big decision.

One solution, of course, would have been to abandon his mistress. But he clearly loved the woman (whose name has not survived the centuries) and was not willing to live without her. So he was left with only one remaining option: to become a (religious) criminal.

He slipped away from the Augustinians, began a new life as a lay priest (a priest not formally connected with any religious order), took his mistress with him… and lied to everybody about his past and his present situation. In the twenty-first century, this option would have never worked. Today, there are just too many ways to keep digital tabs on a person’s identity. The sixteenth century was a looser age, though, and it was neither simple nor easy to keep accurate track of a people’s pasts—especially if a person was well connected.

Which Friar Antonio definitely was.

In those days (today too, to some extent), if you had the right connections, you could get away with pretty much anything. Friar Antonio came from an important Portuguese family, was extremely well educated (he had a doctorate in theology and a degree in canon and civil law), and had an extensive network of patronage contacts among the powerful men of the time, including no lesser a personage that King Philip II, the king of Spain himself. Using these contacts, Friar Antonio managed not only to slip away from the Augustinians and become a lay priest, but also to acquire an ecclesiastic position as a Vicar General (essentially an administrative post) on the island of Sicily.

So everything seemed to have worked out. All was in readiness for Friar Antonio—though he was no longer, strictly speaking, a friar—to begin a new life with his mistress. That new life included not only the mistress herself, but also their young son.

In 1577 (when he was just shy of forty years old), Friar Antonio boarded the San Pablo, a Maltese galley, in Barcelona. With him were his household retinue: three servants and two people he described as his sister and nephew—the “sister” and “nephew” being his mistress and son. Their plan was to take the San Pablo to Malta. From there, they would find passage across the relatively short sea distance to Sicily, where they would all take up their new life together. It must have been a supremely exciting moment: their dream was about to come true.

Friar Antonio chose to travel aboard the San Pablo for a reason. In those days, the Knights of Malta waged unending war against Ottoman shipping in general and Barbary corsairs in particular, and their galleys were warships with a fearsome reputation. Friar Antonio no doubt figured that traveling on a Maltese galley would be the absolute safest way to cross the Mediterranean—which was infested with Barbary corsairs.

The San Pablo left Barcelona at the end of March, traveling in company with two other galleys for safety. At first, all went well. But then a violent storm came up and separated the San Pablo from the other ships. To keep afloat, the crew had to throw overboard everything they could, including the ship’s cannons, the sails, and even the oars. The vessel survived the storm—just—and, crippled, limped into port on the small island of San Pedro, a few miles off the southwest coast of Sardinia.

There, their luck ran out completely.

On April 1, a fleet of twelve Barbary corsair galliots (slightly smaller versions of a galley) appeared and attacked them. Crippled as it was, and without armament, there was little the San Pablo could do to mount a defense.

Friar Antonio, his small family, and his servants were taken captive along with all the rest—almost three hundred unhappy people in total.

The commander of the corsair fleet was Dali Mami Reis, who operated out of Algiers (and who had the singular distinction of being the captain who captured Miguel de Cervantes, author of Don Quixote). Dali Mami Reis brought Friar Antonio and his small household retinue to Algiers, where they were all separated from each other and auctioned off in the Badestan.

And so ended Friar Antonio’s dream of living happily ever after.

Well… not quite ended entirely.

In Algiers, Friar Antonio was bought by a man named Qaid Muhammad, a renegade Jewish merchant with a complicated past: he had first converted from Judaism to Islam; then, after being held captive for some years in Genoa, he became a Christian; after escaping and returning to Algiers, he then reconverted to Islam again. Qaid Muhammad had risen within the governmental political structure of Algiers to become the Master of the Mint, a position that made him an important and powerful man. He was apparently greedy and corrupt, though, and was accused, among other things, of debasing the city’s coinage—that is, of creating coins that were an admixture of silver and other metals and then trying to pass them off as pure silver.

For Qaid Muhammad, Friar Antonio represented a piece of incredibly good fortune. The real profit in the human trafficking that Algiers specialized in, remember, was not simply in selling human beings into slavery or profiting from their forced labor. It was in ransoms. And a man like Friar Antonio—an important ecclesiastic with connections to the very highest levels of power in Spain—would command a huge ransom.

Friar Antonio himself, of course, had a new set of problems. He not only had to figure out a way to somehow come up with the enormous sum of money Qaid Muhammad would demand for his own release; he also had to find a way to free his mistress, his son, and his servants.

Qaid Muhammad chained Friar Antonio up in a fetid basement room in his house—not quite an actual dungeon, but close—and handed him pen and paper and told him to start writing people to arrange his ransom.

The situation was complicated, though. He had been appointed to the position of Vicar General of Sicily, but he had not been able to actually take up the position. The revenues that went along with that position should still have been his, even though he was absent, and he tried to arrange for those revenues to be used to raise the necessary ransom money. In his absence, however, other local Sicilian officials had stepped in and begun acquiring those revenues and were reluctant to part with them. A years-long, acrimonious set of negotiations ensued involving numerous parties, including the Spanish King, Philip II.

Meanwhile, Friar Antonio had to cope with being a captive in Algiers. Most of his time was spent shackled in the ‘dungeon’ in Qaid Muhammad’s basement. Intermittently, though, Qaid Muhammad would send him out on work gangs to do brutally hard manual labour in the hot sun—a tactic employed to encourage Friar Antonio to increase his efforts to acquire the ransom money.

Miserable though much of his time in Algiers was, Friar Antonio had it better than many. Because he was expected to keep up a correspondence regarding his ransom, he was continuously supplied with pen and paper. He also managed to acquire some books. So though he endured long days in chains in his cramped cell, he spent much of his time there reading and writing—pursuits that, for an academically minded man like him, must have been reassuringly familiar and comforting.

He also got to meet a wide variety of people. Qaid Muhammed, being the important man that he was, had many visitors, both official and not. No doubt, Friar Antonio was on display (“Come down into the basement and meet the new Christian priest I’ve just bought.”), and, as a result, Friar Antonio was able to converse with a wide cross section of Algerine residents: city officials, janissaries, Jews, corsair captains, slaves, other captives.

Also, there was a sort of community of scholars among the captives and slaves in Algiers, men from various European nations who all shared one thing in common: an advanced education. These men exchanged resources and ideas and discussed philosophy and scripture—and poetry. One of the friendships Friar Antonio made while in Algiers was with Miguel de Cervantes, author of Don Quixote, who was also a captive. The two spent hours discussing poems Cervantes was writing.

Meanwhile, years passed, and Friar Antonio was no nearer to acquiring the ransom he needed…

The rest of Friar Antonio’s story can be found in Corsairs and Captives.

Next week, we’ll look at another excerpt from Corsairs and Captives.