ICELANDERS IN ALGIERS – PART 4 – Corsairs & Captives

(This post is a continuation of Icelanders in Algiers – Parts 1, 2, & 3. If you haven’t done so already, it’s best to read that post before continuing on here.)

This week continues the series of excerpts from Stolen Lives (the book my Icelandic colleague, Karl Smári Hreinsson, and I published last year) dealing with the captive Icelanders’ experience in Algiers.

Last week described how the captive Icelanders were brought to the Dar al-Soultan (the Pasha’s palace) where they were the Pasha of Algiers (the Ottoman Governor) inspected them and chose the one eighth of the catch that he, as Pasha, was legally entitled to.

After that, the Icelanders were sent to the Badestan—the slave market—to be auctioned off to the highest bidder. This where we pick up the story.

The word “Badestan” is a European rendering of the Ottoman Turkish word Bezistân (from “bez,” meaning canvas or cloth, and “stân,” the familiar suffix used to indicate place). Every Ottoman city of any size had its Bezistân. Generally, a city’s Bezistân was the place where expensive, precious, or luxury items were sold (there were separate markets for more pedestrian commodities such as livestock, grains, fruits, cloth, leather goods, household objects, etc.). So while the Algiers Badestan might be characterised as the slave market, it was not dedicated solely to that purpose. Other commodities could be had there as well, including the merchandise from captured European ships.

The most famous Bezistân was in Istanbul. The Badestan in Algiers was similar to it, both in function and form, since there was a certain generic commonality to such covered markets. Here is a description of the Istanbul Bezistân:

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The place called the Bezistân is large, square, and high. It is constructed as a covered hall, with four gates and laneways within it, with shops lining it furnished with all sorts of rare and expensive merchandise such as rings, precious stones, furs of martins, sables, wolves, deer, foxes, and others… all sorts of cloth of gold, of silver, of silk…Turkish bows, targets and bucklers, and other merchandise very rich and opulent.
There are also sold there, to those who bid the most for them, an infinite number of Christian slaves of all ages and both sexes. They are sold as we sell horses, for those who wish to buy these slaves view their eyes, their teeth, and the whole of their body, and even cause them to be stripped naked and watch them move about so that the buyers might better know the defects of nature that might be in them or the imperfections of their persons, a thing most pitiful and lamentable to behold.
I saw there a Hungarian girl of thirteen or fourteen years of age who, in one of the corners of the Bezistân, was stripped and examined three times in less than an hour, and who, in the end, was sold and delivered to an old Turkish merchant for the sum of thirty-four ducats.

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The Algiers Badestan was likely the same sort of place as the one in Istanbul, and the above description probably fits it quite well: a walled-in rectangular space filled with shops, where all sorts of expensive goods were for sale—including human beings.

The only description in the Icelandic documents of the Algiers Badestan is that of Reverend Ólafur, and it is quite short: “a square built up of stones with seats encompassing it all around… paved with stones which appeared glossy… because they were washed every day.”

The French consul in Algiers in the 1670s described the Badestan as “a long and wide street, closed at both ends, where everything from the prizes the corsairs bring in is sold.” Cornelis Pijnacker, a Dutch Special Envoy who was in Algiers in the 1620s, visited the Badestan. Pijnacker provided no descriptive detail, but he did provide dimensions: “It is a square, not very big, and longer than wide, about eighty or a hundred feet long and half that wide.” By this measurement, the Badestan would have been about 72 to 90 feet (22 to 28 meters) long and 36 to 46 feet (11 to 14 meters) wide.

Putting the details from these various sources together, we can come up with a composite description of the Algiers Badestan: an enclosed rectangular space, likely at least partially covered over, close to 90 feet (30 meters) long by about 50 feet (15 meters) wide, with a flagstone pavement underfoot, lined with shops on all sides.

There were far more things being sold there than just human beings, and it would have been a crowded, noisy, bustling place.

Reverend Ólafur noted that the Badestan was “next to where their local King had his seat.” It was in fact only about 100 meters (330 feet) away from the Dar al-Soultan (see the map of Algiers above). Selling human beings takes time, however, so the captive Icelanders would not have simply been hustled off in a huge group straight from their encounter with the Pasha to the Badestan. Their number might have been reduced by the Pasha’s culling, but there were still something like 350 of them. Instead, they would have been housed in various locations while, one by one, they were auctioned off.

According to Reverend Ólafur, the captives taken in East Iceland were the first to be put up for sale, and it took the better part of two weeks to sell them all. There were slightly over 100 of them, so they were sold at an average of about seven or eight a day. Then it was the Heimaey islanders’ turn.

See the next post in this series here in this blog for the details of how the captive Icelanders (and everybody else taken by the Algerine corsairs) were auctioned off in the Badestan.

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For those who may be interested…

The description of the Bezistân in Istanbul comes from Nicolas De Nicolay, Les navigations, peregrinations et voyages faits en la Turquie par Nicolas De Nicolay (Navigations, Peregrinations, and Voyages made in Turkey by Nicolas de Nicolay), originally published in 1576, p. 114.

Reverend Olafur’s very brief description of the Algiers Badestan comes from Karl Smári Hreinsson and Adam Nichols, The Travels of Reverend Ólafur Egilsson, p. 27.

The French Consul’s very brief description of the Algiers Badestan comes from Laurent d’Arvieux, Mémoires du chevalier d’Arvieux, tome 5, (Memoirs of the Chevalier d’Arvieux, Volume 5), originally published in 1735, p. 266.

The measurements of the Algiers Badestan can be found in G. S. van Krieken, ed., Dr. Cornelis Pijnacker: Historysch verhael van den steden Thunes, Algiers ende andere steden in Barbarien gelegen (History of the Cities of Tunis, Algiers and Other Cities in Barbary), p. 72. It is not altogether clear what kind of “foot” Pijnacker had in mind, but it was probably the Amsterdam foot, a unit of length commonly used during this period, estimated at 28.3 centimeters (just over 11 inches). This is the measurement I have used in converting the size to feet/meters.