FATHER PIERRE DAN: THE ORIGIN STORY OF HISTOIRE DE BARBARIE – PART 1

Father Pierre Dan, a French Trinitarian friar, was the author of one of the most comprehensive books on Barbary corsairs and North Africa in the early seventeenth century.

That book was titled Histoire de Barbarie et de ses corsaires, des royaumes, et des villes d’Alger, de Tunis, de Salé et de Tripoly (The History of Barbary and its Corsairs and Kingdoms, and the Towns of Algiers, Tunis, Salé, and Tripoli). It was first published in 1637 and then revised and reissued in 1649.

Over the years, I’ve written several blog posts connected to Father Dan. This new series of posts presents the origin story of Histoire de Babarie—a story that is not as well known as it deserves to be. It involves not only Father Dan himself, but also the history of the Trinitarian order.

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In the early seventeenth century, the Barbary corsair enterprise was massive. Corsairs ranged throughout the Mediterranean and all along the Atlantic littoral of Europe, seizing enormous quantities of booty and capturing hundreds—sometimes thousands—of Europeans every year.

Returning triumphantly to their home ports along the Mediterranean coast of North Africa, they sold their booty and auctioned off their captives to the highest bidders in crowded, bustling slave markets. At times, the haul of this human cargo from European countries was so great that it was said in places like Algiers that it “rained Christians.”

Europeans so enslaved dreamed, of course, of one thing above all else: freedom. In fact, this was not as unrealistic a dream as one might think. Unlike African slaves in the Americas, Europeans enslaved in North Africa were not necessarily doomed to servitude for life. The piracy and human trafficking practiced by the Barbary corsairs had a religious element to it—corsair raiding was seen as a righteous religious act against the Christian infidels, and corsairs were often referred to as al-Ghuzat “warriors of the jihad”—but it was above all a large-scale business enterprise sanctioned by the Barbary states. Hefty profits could be had by auctioning off captives and by benefitting from their forced labor.

Even greater profits, however, could be achieved by offering up such captives for exorbitant ransoms. As a result, virtually any slave might be freed if sufficient funds could be secured, either directly through family wealth or indirectly through the good graces of others.

The trauma of captivity was felt not only by the enslaved captives themselves, but also by all those connected with them—family, friends, colleagues. Everybody involved was desperate to free those captured and have them return home.

The problem was financing. Only the very wealthy could afford to directly ransom themselves or their family members. Everybody else had to scramble to raise the required funds. Citizens of northern Protestant countries—England, the Netherlands, the German States, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Iceland—who did not have the personal wealth required had two sources of potential financing: private donations raised by generous-minded individuals, or funds from their monarch’s or government’s treasury.

Citizens of Catholic countries also had a third choice: the redemptive friars.

There were two major Catholic religious orders founded specifically for the ransoming of captives held in North Africa:

• The Order of the Most Holy Trinity and of the Captives (Ordo Sanctissimae Trinitatis et captivorum), known as the Trinitarians, founded in Cerfroid, France, in 1198 by Jean de Matha and Félix de Valois
• the Order of Our Lady of Mercy for the Redemption of Captives (Ordo Beatae Mariae de Mercede redemptionis captivorum), known as the Mercedarians, founded in Barcelona, Spain, in 1218 by Pedro Nolasco.

These religious orders raised large sums of money—from private, corporate, governmental, and royal donors—and then organized ransoming expeditions to various cities on the Barbary Coast and bought the freedom of anywhere from a few dozen to several hundred enslaved Catholics at a time.

Both orders functioned effectively and pursued their virtuous goal throughout the era of the Crusades and of the Reconquista in Spain. In the turbulent times of the Reformation and Counter Reformation, however, they began to struggle.

The Trinitarians were hit especially hard. Though they had been founded at Cerfroid (located about 40 miles/65 kilometers northeast of Paris), within a couple of generations they gravitated closer to the center of French power, and they became headquartered in and around Paris. In the thirteen century, King Louis IX endowed them with a church and monastery in the château royal at the royal residence of Fontainebleau (some 35 miles/55 kilometers southeast of Paris), and they also obtained a church in Paris itself, dedicated to Saint Mathurin (Trinitarians were sometimes referred to as Mathurians).

They were also, however, a widespread organization, with houses scattered across Europe. During the disruptive times of the Reformation/Counter Reformation, they lost not only all their properties in the north, in what eventually became Protestant Europe, but by the late sixteenth century many of their houses in Catholic Europe, and even in France, were foundering, and the Order began to fail at its primary mission—ransoming captives.

It was also riven by internal strife. In Spain, a reformed faction known as the discalced (barefoot) Trinitarians emerged and, after receiving a Papal blessing, began competing for resources as a rival organization—leaving the Order split between the new discalced and old calced Trinitarian factions.

On a ransom expedition to Algiers in 1609, three friars from this Spanish discalced Order became embroiled in a complicated international incident. Just as they and the 136 slaves they had successfully ransomed were about to leave the city, the Algiers authorities abruptly imprisoned them, keeping them as hostages in an attempt to force the release of the daughter of a powerful Algiers family who was being held in Corsica.

Negotiations dragged on for more than a decade, but nothing was ever resolved. The three discalced Trinitarian friars eventually died in prison in Algiers (there are no details about the fate of the 136 ransomed slaves).

As a result of all this, Spanish discalced Trinitarian ransom expeditions to Algiers were put on hold. During the end of the sixteenth and into the first three decades of the seventeenth century, the French calced Trinitarians organized no ransom expeditions to North Africa at all.

The Mercedarians, a wealthier and more powerful order, fared far better than their rivals and never lost their ability to organize ransom expeditions. Between 1600 and 1635, they managed to launch eighteen successful missions, ten to Tetouan, on the Mediterranean coast of Morocco, two to Salé, one to an unspecified location in “Africa,” and five to Algiers. In total, they redeemed very nearly 2,500 captives during this period.

The magnitude of the Mercedarians’ achievements represented a general challenge to the faltering French Trinitarians.

A ransom expedition to Salé organized by the Mercedarian Order in 1630 posed a very particular threat.

The Mercedarians had been expanding their operations into France and extending their connections and influence there. As a result, in 1629, when King Louis XIII and his chief minister Cardinal Richelieu sent Sieur Isaac de Razilly—a French nobleman, naval commander, and member of the Knights Hospitaller—as an envoy to Salé with a force of seven warships, the Mercedarians managed to get themselves included in this expedition.

De Razilly’s mission was twofold: first, to negotiate a treaty with the Divan (the ruling council) of Salé, which had declared its independence from the Sultan in Marrakesh only a couple of years before, and liberate French captives from that city; second, to negotiate a similar treaty with the Moroccan Sultan in Marrakesh and liberate French captives from there as well.

De Razilly vigorously employed “gunboat diplomacy” to press his negotiations, but it still took more than two years and two more voyages by him before the treaties were eventually hammered out and the French captives liberated.

While all this was transpiring, the Mercedarians on the expedition, who had gone ashore in Salé in 1629, managed to arrange the ransom of fifty French slaves. Traditionally, Mercedarians focused on ransoming Spanish captives, but in this instance they focused on the French and, moreover, returned to France with their liberated captives rather than to Spain.

The ransoming process was slow and complicated, but eventually, in the autumn of 1630, they arrived at Brouage, located about 22 miles/35 kilometers south of La Rochelle (where, several years before, de Razilly had participated in the siege and capture of that city, the last bastion of French Huguenotism). From Brouage, the Mercedarians led the ex-captives in a triumphal parade across France to Paris, advertising their success and using the pageantry of it all to encourage donations for future Mercedarian ransom expeditions.

The Mercedarians’ successful mission in Salé represented a major political victory for them. Royal support was crucially important for the survival and prosperity of both Orders, and the Mercedarians’ astute handling of events in Morocco suddenly made the prospect of their acquiring direct patronage from the French king a possibility.

All of this constituted a genuine existential threat to the French Trinitarians.

Something had to be done.

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For the next installment of the origin story of Histoire de Barbarie, see Father Pierre Dan: The Origin Story of Histoire De Barbarie – Part 2 here in this blog.