FATHER PIERRE DAN: THE ORIGIN STORY OF HISTOIRE DE BARBARIE – PART 2

Last week’s post here in this blog began a series of segments recounting the origin story of Histoire de Babarie, the book written by Father Pierre Dan, the Trinitarian friar. That post ended by describing how the Mercedarians posed an existential threat to the Trinitarians. We pick up the story this week from there.

Fortunately for the Trinitarians, broader circumstances at the time worked in their favor, enabling them to fend off the threat posed to them by the Mercedarians.

France and Spain had fought a brief war in 1627-1629 (sometimes referred to as the War of the Mantuan Succession) and were gearing up for another, more major conflict (the Franco-Spanish War, 1635-1659). These wars played out against the larger backdrop of the Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648) and a long-standing struggle for dominance between the French kings and the Spanish Hapsburg monarchs. As a consequence, all things Spanish became progressively more suspect in France—including the Spanish-based Mercedarians.

Another consequence of the ongoing conflicts was that the French authorities needed vast numbers of ships and men with which to prosecute their wars. Due to sustained attacks by corsairs from Algiers, however, France was hemorrhaging ships and sailors at an unsustainable rate. King Louis XIII and Cardinal Richelieu were desperate to curtail those attacks, and equally desperate to get back the multitude of skilled sailors the corsairs had captured and enslaved. France and Algiers had entered into a treaty in 1628 that formally guaranteed the inviolability of ships and merchandise on both sides.

Despite the solemn commitments the treaty contained, however, both parties continued to prey on each other’s shipping, amidst bitter accusations and recriminations—and the virtual collapse of the treaty.

Private ransom negotiations proved ineffectual as a means of getting back significant numbers of French captives, and in any case did not address the problem of the unremittent corsair raiding. A direct military attack on Algiers would have been punishingly expensive to mount and, even if it were initially successful, would have embroiled the French in an endless series of policing actions in order to prevent the corsairs’ resurgence.

Suppressing the Algiers corsairs would have had another effect as well: they would no longer be harassing the Spanish, with whom the French were in conflict.

So rather than encourage further private ransom attempts or launch a military strike, King Louis XIII tried a version of what had been a successful strategy in Morocco: he sent Sieur Sanson le Page, First Herald of the Armies of France, as an official envoy to Algiers to negotiate a new treaty and to liberate French captives there.

This was the sort of opportunity the Trinitarians had been looking for. They offered their devout loyalty to the French cause, surmounted the internal conflicts within the Order, shouldered the Mercedarians aside, and arranged to be part of le Page’s expedition.

The friar selected to lead the Trinitarian contingent of this Algiers expedition was Father Pierre Dan.

There is no record of how Sanson le Page might have felt about this mission. We do, however, have Father Dan’s reaction:

The merit of this endeavor, and of obedience and charity, made me very happy to undertake this journey. Some others of my colleagues were also chosen for this mission at our General Chapter, in Cerfroid… and we were all very glad that we might have such an opportunity to fulfill the goal of our profession, which requires us to expose our lives to all kinds of dangers in order to liberate the poor captives whom the infidels keep in irons under the oppression of their harsh and unbearable tyranny. [1]

Father Dan makes it sound as if he were motivated by purely altruistic motives. In fact, this Algiers expedition represented a crucially important opportunity for the Trinitarian Order to re-cement its direct connection with the French Crown and regain its lost prestige and purpose. Nothing less than the future of the Order was at stake. Failure, as the old saying goes, was not an option.

The objectives of this mission to Algiers were—in principle at least—quite simple: renegotiate the treaty between France and Algiers, free all the French slaves held in Algiers, and return to France triumphant. To help with the second objective, King Louis XIII had authorized the liberation of a number of Muslim slaves from French galleys (France, like everybody else on the Mediterranean at the time, had a fleet of oared war galleys powered by slaves chained to the rowing benches). These Muslim galley slaves could be swapped for French slaves in Algiers.

The expedition left Marseilles on Wednesday, July 12, 1634. They made the voyage to Algiers in four days—very good time indeed in those days—and arrived on Saturday, July 15. As was typically the case in Algiers, they had to surrender their rudder and sails—a proviso put in place to prevent European ships from sneaking slaves aboard and sailing away with them during the night. Saturday was the day when the Divan—the ruling council of Algiers—regularly gathered. So le Page and Father Dan and the rest were able to meet directly with the Algerine authorities the very day they landed, an auspicious beginning that everybody noted.

Ransoming expeditions, however, were delicate affairs requiring equal parts diplomatic tact, hard bargaining, judicious bribery, nerve, and luck. It was all too easy for things to go wrong.

Algiers was, at least nominally, an Ottoman Regency—that is, a province of the sprawling Ottoman Empire, centered in Constantinople. Power in Algiers was shared between the Divan, a council composed of local janissary officers (a permanent contingent of janissary troops was stationed in Algiers; estimates from the seventeenth century of their total number differ, ranging from 7,000 to 20,000) and by the Pasha, the official Ottoman Governor of the city.

During this period, Pashas were officially appointed for three-year terms and then cycled out and replaced by new ones. Algiers was a turbulent place, however, and Pashas came and went less regularly than that. As (bad) luck would have it, when La Page and Father Dan and their expedition arrived, the old Pasha had just left, and the new Pasha had not yet arrived from Constantinople.

So they had to wait.

Eventually, the new Pasha, Yusuf the Second, arrived. He received a grand and dramatic welcome: no fewer than fifteen hundred cannon were fired off to salute him, and a huge parade, including marching bands, poured through the streets. (Father Dan was unimpressed by the music: “It made such a strange noise,” he observed, “that if it can be called harmony, I must confess it was more capable of producing fright than of giving pleasure.”[2])

Yusuf Pasha greeted the French emissaries shortly after his arrival. They presented him with a series of lavish gifts (as was expected), but he told them he would be extremely busy getting adjusted to his new position and would not have time to see them for several weeks.

So they waited some more.

Things did not look too bad at this point, though. The Pasha and the Divan had issued a joint decree that all residents of Algiers were to avoid harming the French in any way—on pain of “having no more head.” There was also another decree: the French slaves employed in the hard labor of hauling rocks out to the Mole (the stone causeway that formed the breakwater that sheltered the Algiers harbor and that required constant upkeep) were relieved of that onerous work.

Unfortunately, this was the high point of the expedition.

For the next installment of the origin story of Histoire de Barbarie, see Father Pierre Dan: The Origin Story of Histoire De Barbarie – Part 3 here in this blog.

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[1] Pierre Dan, Histoire de Barbarie, 1649, p. 40.

[2] Pierre Dan, Histoire de Barbarie, 1649, p. 44.