ALGIERS IN THE EARLY SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

In early May of 1619, Jean-Baptiste Gramaye—a professor at the University of Leuven, in Brabant, in what is now Belgium—had the misfortune to be Captured by Barbary corsairs from Algiers. He spent five months in that city as a captive before being ransomed.

Gramaye was a highly educated man, and like other educated men who spent time in Algiers as captives, he wrote a book about his experiences there. Like all highly educated men of his age, he spoke, read, and wrote Latin, and he chose to write about his time in Algiers in Latin. The result, dated 1620, was the Diarium rerum Argelae gestarum anno 1619 durante detentione Joannis Baptistae Gramayi (Diary of the events of Algiers in 1619 during the detention of Jean-Baptiste Gramaye).

The Diarium wasn’t fully translated from the original Latin until 1998, when a French edition was published (Abd el Hadi Ben Mansour, Alger (XVIe – XVIIe siècle) : Journal de Jean-Baptiste Gramaye, « évéque d’Afrique »). Long before then, however, parts of it were translated into English in a four-volume book originally published in 1625, titled Hakluytus Posthumus or Purchas his Pilgrimes, contayning a History of the World in Sea Voyages and Lande Travells, by Englishmen and others.

Below, is a description of Algiers drawn from the translation of Gramaye’s Diarium in Hakluytus Posthumus. It is not, I must concede, the most exciting of reads, but it contains a wealth in fascinating and very specific details about the city.

Here, then, are excerpts from the 1625 translation of Gramay’s Diarium describing the city of Algiers.

Algiers is situated on the side of a mountain, whereby one house hinders not the prospect of the next. Cheridim Barborossa, fortified it from the land, which yet tempests sometime assault with great hurt to the ships, as happened the year 1619, with five and twenty ships broken in the port. The form of the city is almost bowshaped. The circumference of the Old Towne is three thousand four hundred paces. Barbarossa began and, after 1573, Arabamet finished, a wall about the land, except that part which is open to the port and city. Lately they have founded a five cornered tower to secure both.

The houses within are close to the wall. Without, is a ditch of sixteen paces, scoured by Arabamet, but now in some places mired up, and scarce half of it is clear. Without the town are three castles: two of which were built in 1568 and 1569; the third was finished in 1580. Except for one, all the streets are very narrow, and in winter very dirty…

Since the moors were expelled from Spain, Algiers is very much increased in buildings, not like the descriptions anciently published, which leave therein open and vacant places. And although the houses to the street side are dark, yet being inwardly built with square cloisters as it were, the light is supplied, as the roofs serve them for galleries and prospects; in the midst is a well, but the water brackish. They use no chimneys, but make fires of coals in earthen pans in their porches or roofs. They whitewash the outside of their houses.

The king’s palace and great men’s houses have spacious courts, with pillars about, and many rooms spread with mats or carpets, their custom being to put off their shoes when they enter. Their household furniture is otherwise mean, the vulgar having nothing but a mat, carpet, mattress, two vests hanging, pots and dishes of earth, and long wooden spoons, with a wooden chest. Two or three staves fastened to the walls covered with boards serve for a bed, sitting and lying more commonly on the floor on a mat or carpet. Their garments hang on lines over the bed, pelts are their household linen, water their drink, rice their meat with pulse, meal, a little flesh, and some fruits—whence victuals are cheap.

There are no conduits or sewers, nor wells of sweet water. Five cisterns from without, supplying that want, together with that which is fetched on men’s shoulders out of the fields, by above one thousand slaves and Moors.

There are seven fair mosques, especially the greatest, five colleges of janissaries, where some six hundred of them live together in a house; one hospital built by Hassan Pasha, four large baths (being prisons for slaves); two for washing with hot or cold, paved with marble and furnished with chambers and conduits for water, used by the Moors and Turks of both sexes almost every day, and the two royal courtyards, one of thirty-six feet square with columns, where the Duana of the janissaries is kept, the other before the palace [of the Pasha].

Within the walls are nearly thirteen thousand houses, many of which are inhabited by thirty families; the house of Jacob Abum in the lower Jewish quarter has three hundred; Abraham Ralbin, two hundred and sixty families; and others likewise. The jews have six large synagogues, not able to contain their multitudes, reported to be above eight thousand men.

There are above one hundred mosques, each having three marabouts, and some thirty or forty oratories of hermits and sepulchers; sixty-two bathes, eighty-six schools for children to learn to read and write, and a few others for the Alcoran. Of suburban gardens, there are fourteen thousand six hundred ninety-eight, each having one or more Christians [slaves], some with six or eight to keep them. Nor is there scarce a family in the city which hath not one or more Christian slaves of both sexes, some a great multitude. Faret Bey, seventy-two. Ali-mami, one hundred thirty-two. Ali Pizilini, sixty-three. Aripagi, thirty-eight. Hasan Portuges, forty. Salomon Reis, thirty-two. In the king’s prison are commonly held two thousand, and three thousand row in the three gallies and serve aboard the seventy-two ships of war which, in 1619, were there, so that in and about the city there seem to be above thirty-five thousand slaves…

There are three thousand merchant families of divers nations, and two thousand shops. The handicrafts cannot easily be reckoned. In the smiths’ street are eighty masters. They say there are twelve hundred Taylors, three thousand weavers, three hundred butchers, and five hundred bakers.

Samuel Purchas’ Hakluytus Posthumus or Purchas his Pilgrimes, contayning a History of the World in Sea Voyages and Lande Travells, by Englishmen and others was originally published in 1625. It was not printed again until the University of Glasgow Press brought out a twenty-volume edition in 1905-1907.

The excerpts above are taken from pages 270 – 273 of volume 9 of that edition.

I lightly modernized and the original seventeenth century text to make it a bit more readable and abridged it.