EARLY MODERN CURRENCY – PART 2: RANSOMS

(This post is a continuation of Early Modern Currency – Part 1. If you haven’t done so already, it’s best to read that post before continuing on here.)

If you had a friend, or a relative—your mother, say— taken captive by Barbary corsairs, there was only one guaranteed way to liberate her: by ransom.

Slavery in the Americas was servitude for life. Slavery in North Africa was different.

In the Americas, slavery was fundamentally an economic enterprise. To succeed, the plantations there needed a permanent, cheap workforce, so the value of plantation slaves lay their contribution to the economic viability of the plantations.

There was no equivalent to this in North Africa.

Slaves in North Africa were interwoven throughout the social and economic fabric of society, and their status wasn’t permanently fixed. The biggest profits in the human trafficking came not simply from selling captives into slavery or keeping them as workers and servants, but in negotiating exorbitant ransoms for them.

So ransoming was a process that people on both sides were eager to pursue.

It wasn’t a simple process, though.

You couldn’t just wire money over and free your mother.

First, you had to find out how much ransom the corsairs were demanding. These demands were usually made in a standard European currency. In Algiers, for example, ransom prices were often quoted in Spanish pesos de ocho—pieces of eight. Ransom prices varied considerably, depending on the value of each particular captive, which was determined by the captive’s profession and/or the wealth and prestige of the captive’s family.

In Algiers, ransom amounts could vary anywhere from around 100 to upwards of 2,000 pesos de ocho.

A few hundred pesos de ocho may not sound like all that much by today’s standards, but it represented serious money in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Trying to convert the buying power of the peso de ocho into modern times is tricky—but not impossible.

If we start with a ransom demand of, say, 200 pesos de ocho—a not untypical amount, and an easy number to work with—we can guesstimate what that amount of money would be worth today. In the early 1600s, 200 pesos de ocho was the equivalent of about 800 days’ wages for a skilled laborer. That’s over three years’ worth of wages. In todays’ terms, that would be something around $250,000.

A great deal of money for anybody who wasn’t seriously rich.

Even if you did have the money, though, the process wasn’t simple.

First, you had to get the money to the place where your mother was being held captive—let’s say, Algiers. As already mentioned, you couldn’t just wire it. It had to be cash. Since there was no paper money, cash meant coins—lots of coins. And you couldn’t just gather those coins, load then into a wooden chest, and send that chest by ship. That would be far too dangerous, for there was a good chance your ship would be attacked by Barbary corsairs en route.

So you would have to use a bank draft.

The early modern period had a quite sophisticated international banking system, so it was possible to get your jingling sacks of coins together, haul them over to a local bank, have them laboriously counted out, and then converted to a bank draft. The bank, of course, would charge you for doing this. But since a bank draft could be conveyed by ship quite safely, it was worth paying the fee involved. And since a bank draft took up zero space on a ship, you might even be able to get it sent free of charge.

One typical route for ransom transactions was from Amsterdam, Holland, to Livorno, Italy. Amsterdam was the financial center of Europe during the Early Modern period, and the Dutch had an extensive and reliable international banking setup. They handled ransom monies as a matter of course.

But since they were Dutch banks, they functioned basically in Dutch guilders. So unless you had gathered together stacks of Dutch guilders to begin with, the value of your coins would have to be converted to guilders—for which the bank, being a bank, would charge you.

Once the bank draft was done, getting it to Livorno wasn’t the end of the complications, though.

The bank draft had to be converted to cash—coins—at the other end. This meant more currency conversion—and more charges for you to pay. Then the coins had to be transported to, in the imaginary case we’re considering here, Algiers. You’d likely have to pay for this, too.

Algiers had an agreement with the merchants of Livorno: those merchants bought (at much reduced prices) the stolen merchandise the Algiers corsairs brought in and then sold that same merchandise (for a huge profit) in Livorno. In return, the Algiers corsairs pretty much left Livorno ships alone.

So sending your cash on a Livorno ship was your best bet.

Even if all this worked out, though there were still complications.

The ransom amount demanded for your mother might have been stated in pesos de ocho, and you might have managed to gather together the equivalent of that in whatever currency you were working with—British pounds, Danish rigsdallers, Dutch guilders, French livres, Italian ducats, whatever—and convert it to Dutch guilders for the bank draft, and then re-convert it to some other currency in Livorno, but it would likely have to be converted yet another time once it reached Algiers—this time into the local currency.

The standard silver coin in the local Algiers currency was known as the double. The exchange rate varied, but 4 doubles were roughly equal to 1 pesos de ocho. So the 200 peso de ocho ransom amount equaled around 800 doubles. Your bags of coins had to be laboriously exchanged for more bags of coins. You had to pay for the privilege of this, too, and it wasn’t cheap. The money changers in Algiers took a hefty cut, sometimes as much as 30%.

You had no choice in the matter if the Algiers corsairs holding your mother insisted on receiving the ransom money in doubles. You either went along with it or you didn’t get you mother back.

There were other things you had to go along with, too.

The whole point in demanding ransoms for captives, remember, was to make huge profits. Everybody involved wanted in on those profits. So in order to successfully ransom your mother, you had to pay not only the corsairs who had captured her, but also a series of other people.

Here’s a typical list:

• The Pasha (Governor) of Algiers – 10% (80 doubles)
• Port tax – 1% (8 doubles)
• The Emmini (the port tax collector) – 2% (16 doubles)
• For the Certificate of Liberty (a legal document guaranteeing that your mother was now a free person) – a flat fee of 46 doubles
• For inspection of the ship transporting the ransomed captives (to make sure there were no escaped slaves trying to stow away) – a flat fee of 46 doubles
• For the Yasakçi (the janissary guardsmen) who guarded captives – a flat fee of 9 doubles
• For the Turgeman (the interpreter) – a flat fee of 18 doubles

So the original 200 pesos de ocho ransom amount would turn out to be 255 pesos de ocho—plus all the other incidental expenses you incurred along the way. You had no choice but to pay all these extra costs. If you didn’t…you didn’t get your mother back.

In fact, the ransoming process was so complicated and disheartening that most people who could left it in the hands of professionals, either merchants and businessmen or, in Catholic countries, the friars of the Mercedarian and Trinitarian orders. These religious orders dedicated themselves to ransoming captives. On a single expedition they might free upwards of a hundred or more.

It must have been quite a sight to see a hundred ex-slaves come marching off a ship and setting foot on their home soil again after months or years of grueling captivity—especially if one of them was your mother.