THE REDEMPTIVE ORDERS – PART 1

From the mid sixteen through to the beginning of the nineteenth centuries, the Barbary corsair enterprise was huge. Corsairs ranged throughout the Mediterranean and all along the Atlantic littoral of Europe, seizing enormous quantities of booty and capturing thousands of Europeans every year. Returning triumphantly to their home ports along the Mediterranean coast of North Africa, they sold the 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.”

Mostly, when we think of slavery, we think of it in terms of the Africans who were forcibly shipped across the Atlantic to the Americas to work the sugar, rice, tobacco, and cotton plantations there. Moreover, we tend to think of things as they were in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: large-scale plantations worked by hordes of African slaves who spent their entire lives toiling away miserably with no possibility of ever being liberated, kept under control by ruthless methods of repression, the whole system buttressed by a brutal, institutionalized racism.

Slavery in North Africa—in Barbary corsair cities like Tripoli, Tunis, Algiers, and Salé—wasn’t like that.

In the Americas, slavery was fundamentally an economic enterprise. The great plantations of the Americas served as primary economic drivers. In order to succeed, they needed a cheap workforce. The value of plantation slaves was their contribution to the economic viability of the plantations, and thus to the large-scale viability of the New World colonies that were dependent upon those plantations.

There was no real equivalent to this in North Africa.

Slaves in North Africa did indeed serve an economic purpose, but it wasn’t a monolithic purpose, as was the case with the great plantations in the Americas. And slaves weren’t kept isolated out in the fields. Rather, they were interwoven throughout the social and economic fabric of North African society. Some did indeed serve as agricultural laborers, but others worked on building projects, or as domestic servants, or as carpenters, or shipwrights, or tailors, tavern keepers, or served as doctors, miners, soldiers, book keepers, or translators. In short, slaves in North Africa did almost everything.

Another difference was that slavery in North Africa had little to do with race.

Islam is more than just a spiritual practice; it is a social contract containing instructions for all aspects of life, including institutionalized slavery. Under traditional Islamic law, people could only be legally enslaved in two ways: 1/ if they have been defeated in a ‘just war’ (that is, a war that was permitted under sharia law), and 2/ if they were the children of two legally enslaved parents. In other words, under Islam, the only legal slaves were prisoners of war and their descendants. Race didn’t play any significant role in this.

A final difference between slavery in the Americas and in North Africa was that Europeans enslaved in North Africa were not necessarily doomed to servitude for life.

The Barbary corsair enterprise was considered to be a holy war—a jihad. This is what allowed the corsairs to claim their captives were prisoners of war and thus legally enslavable. But the corsair enterprise was, essentially, piracy turned into a business enterprise. Barbary corsairs stole merchandise and people and made gross profits by selling their booty and captives in markets back in their home ports.

The real profits in the human trafficking, though, came not from auctioning off captives in the local slave markets, or from benefiting from the free labor they provided, but in negotiating exorbitant ransoms for them. There were exceptions, but, in general, anytime a slave could manage to arrange ransom, he or she could be liberated.

So Europeans enslaved in North Africa dreamed, above all else, of ransom.

It was not as unrealistic a dream as one might think.

The trauma of enslavement was experienced 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, of course, 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 three sources of potential financing: alms collected by the church, private donations raised by generous-minded individuals, or funds from their monarch’s or government’s treasury.

Citizens of Catholic countries also had a fourth choice: the redemptive religious orders.

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, and the Order of Our Lady of Mercy for the Redemption of Captives (Ordo Beatae Mariae de Mercede redemptionis captivorum), known as the Mercedarians,

Both these orders had a history dating back to the Crusades.

Crusaders captured during the fighting in the Holy Land were, naturally, considered to be prisoners of war—and so could be legally enslaved. But as with the Barbary corsairs, financial interests played a role as well, and any captured crusader with the necessary resources could arrange a ransom for himself.

Ransoming was a complicated process, though. It required not just money, but also delicate negotiations: the language barrier had to be bridged and trustworthy connections made across ‘enemy lines.’ Even the simple process of transporting the ransom funds was fraught with risk.

Various individuals and groups developed expertise in this ransoming process, but eventually it was the religious orders that took on the task. They became ‘professional’ ransom negotiators, using the resources of their orders to bring a certain stability to the process.

The Trinitarians were founded at the beginning of the Fourth Crusade (1198-1204; this was the crusade that never made it to the Holy land but, instead, sacked Constantinople) in Cerfroid, France, in 1198 by two devout friars, Jean de Matha and Félix de Valois.

The Mercedarians were founded early in the Fifth Crusade (1217-1221; this crusade made an unsuccessful attempt to conquer Egypt) in Barcelona, Spain, in 1218 by a friar named Pedro Nolasco.

These two redemptive religious orders raised large sums of money—from private, corporate, governmental, and royal donors—and then sent groups of friars equipped with chests of silver or merchandise, by ship across the Mediterranean to negotiate ransoms.

Such negotiations could be dangerous and delicate procedures.

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For more on the Trinitarian and Mercedarian orders, see The Redemptive Orders – Part 2 here in this blog.