THE TRAVAILS OF FRIAR ANTONIO – PART 1

Once upon a time—back in the 1570s—there was Augustinian friar named Antonio, a Portuguese man living in Spain, who had a big problem: he fell in love with a woman.

This was a problem for him in three ways.

First, and most obviously, Augustinian friars—like all members of the Catholic clergy—were (and are) supposed to be celibate. There were ways around this, of course. Over the centuries, innumerable priests quite successfully kept secret mistresses.

But that brings us to the second way in which this was a problem: it was simply not practical for a man living the communal life of an Augustinian friar to keep a mistress; it was not really practical for him to even be able to see much of the mistress.

And then there was the third aspect of the problem. Back in the sixteenth century, a friar could not leave his order except to join another, stricter order. So Friar Antonio couldn’t simply walk away from the Augustinians. Doing so would have made him officially an apostate, that is, somebody who had renounced his faith. The Holy Office of the Inquisition actively prosecuted apostates of all sorts, including lapsed friars.

So Friar Antonio was faced with a big decision.

One solution, of course, would have been to abandon his mistress. But he clearly loved the woman (whose name has not survived the centuries) and was not willing to live without her. So he was left with only one remaining option: to become a (religious) criminal.

He slipped away from the Augustinians, began a new life as a lay priest (a priest not formally connected with any religious order), took his mistress with him… and lied to everybody about his past and his present situation. In the twenty-first century, this option would have never worked. Today, there are just too many ways to keep digital tabs on a person’s identity. The sixteenth century was a looser age, though, and it was neither simple nor easy to keep accurate track of people’s pasts—especially if a person was well connected.

Which Friar Antonio definitely was.

He came from an important Portuguese family, was well educated (he had a doctorate in theology and a degree in canon and civil law), and had an extensive network of patronage contacts among the powerful men of the time, including no lesser a personage that King Philip II, the king of Spain, himself. Using these contacts, Friar Antonio managed to acquire an ecclesiastic position as a Vicar General (essentially an administrative post) on the island of Sicily.

So everything seemed to have worked out. Friar Antonio had managed to successfully separate himself from the Augustinians, had become a lay priest, and had acquired an important (and lucrative) position for himself. All was in readiness for him to begin a new life with his mistress. Moreover, it seems he would be taking with him into this new life not only the mistress herself but also their son.

In 1577 (when he was just shy of forty years old), Friar Antonio boarded the San Pablo, a Maltese galley, in Barcelona (the image above depicts a Maltese galley). With him were his household retinue: three servants and two people he described as his sister and nephew—the “sister” and “nephew” being his mistress and son. Their plan was to take the San Pablo to Malta. From there, they would find passage across the relatively short sea distance to Sicily, where they would all take up their new life together. It must have been a supremely exciting moment: their dream was about to come true.

Friar Antonio chose to travel aboard the San Pablo for a reason. In those days, the Knights of Malta waged unending war against Ottoman shipping in general and Barbary corsairs in particular, and their galleys were warships with a fearsome reputation. Friar Antonio no doubt figured that traveling on such a galley would be the absolute safest way to cross the Mediterranean—which was infested with Barbary corsairs.

The San Pablo left Barcelona at the end of March, traveling in company with two other galleys for safety. At first, all went well. But then a violent storm came up and separated the San Pablo from the other ships. To keep afloat, the crew had to throw overboard everything they could, including the ship’s cannons, the sails, and the oars. The vessel survived the storm—just—and, crippled, limped into port on the small island of San Pedro, a few miles off the southwest coast of Sardinia.

There, their luck ran out completely.

On April 1, a fleet of twelve Barbary corsair galliots (slightly smaller versions of a galley) appeared and attacked them. Crippled as it was, and without armament, there was little the San Pablo could do to mount a defense.

Friar Antonio, his small family, and his servants were taken captive along with all the rest—almost three hundred unhappy people in total.

The commander of the corsair fleet was Dali Mami Reis, who operated out of Algiers (and who had the singular distinction of being the captain who captured Miguel de Cervantes, author of Don Quixote). Dali Mami Reis brought Friar Antonio and his small household retinue to Algiers, where they were all separated from each other and auctioned off in the Batistan, the slave market.

And so ended Friar Antonio’s dream of living happily ever after.

Well… not quite ended entirely.

For what happened next to Friar Antonio and his family, see the second part of this series: The Travails of Friar Antonio: Part 2