FATHER PIERRE DAN ON RENEGADES – Corsairs & Captives

This week continues the series of excerpts from Father Pierre Dan, the Trinitarian friar. This week’s post is on renegades—Christians who had converted to Islam.

North African Muslims welcomed European converts to their religion. In Europe, these converts were known as renegades and were universally detested as traitors to the true faith. Nonetheless, many Europeans did convert. Some did so no doubt because they underwent a true transformation of faith, but there is a persistent tradition among European writers that Christian slaves were tortured to force them to convert.

The truth of this is open to debate: some authors writing at the time claim this tradition of torture was hugely exaggerated. Exaggerated or not, though, it was a common theme among Christian writers—especially among members of redemptionist orders like the Mercedarians and Trinitarians.

So it is not surprising that Father Dan should be among those spreading tales of Muslim masters employing torture to force their slaves to convert.

The excerpt from Father Dan’s Histoire de Barbarie below should really be seen more as propaganda rather than a sober relation of facts. Father Dan didn’t invent the details—his description of the various tortures employed matches that of other writers—but he strings those details together to form a dramatic, almost hagiographic narrative of the sufferings of brave Christian martyrs—all in an attempt to inspire Christian piety in his readers (and perhaps to prompt the more wealthy ones to consider donating funds to the Trinitarians to help ransom captives).

Here is Father Dan on renegades.

After having taken some Christian vessel, the Turks choose from among them the children, the young boys, and all the others who seem to them the most adroit. Then, to encourage them to follow the false law of Mahomet, they amuse them by fine words and great promises and treat them very well. But if they gain nothing by these practices, they change their pretended sweetness into excessive severity and resort to all the tortures which rage and caprice can furnish them.

For this purpose, some employ either the staff or of the strop, which is a rope three feet long. Laying the poor slave on the ground, they get four of their number to hold his hands and feet while the boss, or rather the inhuman executioner, gives him two or three hundred blows on his belly and back, striving by this cruel treatment to reduce him to declaring that he wants to be renegade.

Another torture they employ, that is no less pitiless, is to make the slave lie down with his feet up. The torturers then bind his feet to a large staff which two of them take hold of and lift up off the ground. The torturer then unloads on the poor slave a hundred or two hundred slashes upon the soles of his feet.

The only remedy the torturers use to treat the wounds which they have caused is to apply salt and vinegar mixed together.

The apprehension these poor people have of such torments often makes them consent to be Turks, although they confess this most of the time only in order to placate their inexorable persecutors.

Among these unnatural men there are only too many who treat their unfortunate captives even more cruelly, for they pitilessly tear off their fingernails and cause them to experience many other tortures, which are rather the invention of demons than of men. It is true, however, that those who suffer from such brutality are often strengthened by a great constancy which comes to them from God, so much so that they weary the strength of these barbarians, and these holy souls lose neither perseverance nor courage

The various examples I have learned of these tortures are irreproachable proofs, but I will also add the following, which was told to me in Algiers by some persons of my acquaintance.

In the year 1633, some Barbary pirates met with a vessel out of Saint-Tropez, a maritime city in Provence. The pirates chased this vessel down, captured it, and brought it to Algiers, where all those found in the ship were put on sale. Among them was a young man named Guillaume Sauveir, aged fifteen to sixteen, a native of the said place of Saint-Tropez, who served as a cabin boy aboard the ship. The Turk who bought him did not wish to frighten him at first and so treated him gently for a few days, begging him to be renegade, without sparing any artifice to win him. But all his efforts were vain, so deep were the roots of Christian piety in the boy’s soul

The more the Turk threatened the boy, the more the boy stood firm. As the Turk prepared torments to shake his perseverance, the boy prepared to suffer them patiently. In the end, this Barbarian, transported with rage and fury, took the young slave, hung him up by the feet with a rope fastened to a floor beam, and struck him many blows with a stick.

When he saw that this brutality did not advance anything, he had recourse to another kind of cruelty, which was to tear the nails from his big toes.

Then, perceiving that this second torture, although terribly cruel, had no more effect than the first, he devised a third, imagining that this last effort would triumph over the constancy of this young man. The Turk took a torch of burning wax and applied it, little by little, to the soles of the boy’s feet. The effect of this, however, was useless, as the victim remained inviolable in his faith.

At this point, seeing his slave half dead from having been so tormented, the barbarian was overcome by that covetousness which is common to the Turks and incites them not to render their property crippled, for if they did so they would lose money. Thus the Turk made prompt recourse to return his property to a state of usefulness. Accordingly, he restored the boy to health and never again spoke to him of being a renegade.

Since most renegades become such due to the violence that is done to them, they do not care much about the false religion which they have been forced to adopt, and they profess their new religion only in appearance, being content to be clothed in Turkish fashion, without frequenting the Mosques as do the other Turks. Nor do they go to prayer, for which there is no constraint which obliges them. A great number of them, when talking with me, showed extreme regret at seeing their head covered with a turban and assured me that they might have been renegades for the last ten years but they had had never been to the Mosque, and that, at the first opportunity that would arise, they would risk their lives to save themselves and return to the land of Christians. And certainly to testify that charity was not yet extinct in them, they willingly assisted the poor Christian captives and did their best for them.

To tell the whole truth, however, not all renegades are the same. This is shown in the fact that there are some renegades, principally those who, by their own volition, and without being forced to do so, have abandoned the sacred altars of a crucified God. Their damnable inclination renders them such violent enemies of Christians that they surpass in cruelty the natural Turks. So zealous are they for this accursed Mohammedan sect that there is no barbarism comparable to that which they continually exercise against Christians, whom they so outrage at every encounter that they seem to have entirely lost their humanity—all because they abandoned the faith that they had sworn inviolably to God upon the sacred founts of baptism.

For those who may be interested…

This except about renegades comes from Book 4, Chapter 1, parts 3 and 4 of Father Dan’s Histoire de Barbarie. As with the other excerpts in this series, I translated (and slightly abridged) the above directly from the original seventeenth century French.