THE TRAVAILS OF FRIAR ANTONIO – PART 2

(This post is a continuation of The Travails of Friar Antonio – Part 1. If you haven’t done so already, it’s best to read that post before reading on here.)

In Algiers, Friar Antonio was bought by Qaid Muhammad, a renegade Jewish merchant with a complicated past: he had first converted to Islam, then to Christianity, and then, after being held captive for some years in Genoa and managing somehow to return to Algiers, reconverted to Islam again. Qaid Muhammad had risen within the government political structure of Algiers to become the Master of the Mint, a position that made him an important and powerful man. He was apparently greedy and corrupt, though, and was accused, among other things, of debasing the city’s coinage—that is, of creating coins that were an admixture of silver and other metals and then passing them off as pure silver.

For Qaid Muhammad, Friar Antonio represented a piece of incredible good fortune. The real profit in the human trafficking that Algiers specialized in wasn’t simply in selling human beings into slavery. It was in ransoms. And a man like Friar Antonio—an important ecclesiastic with connections to the very highest levels of power in Spain—would command a HUGE ransom.

Friar Antonio himself, of course, had a new set of problems. He not only had to figure out a way to somehow come up with the enormous sum of money Qaid Muhammad would demand for his own release; he also had to find a way to free his mistress, his son, and his servants.

Qaid Muhammad chained Friar Antonio up in a fetid basement room in his house—not quite an actual dungeon but close—and handed him pen and paper and told him to start writing people to arrange his ransom. Friar Antonio did just that. The situation was complicated, though. He had been appointed to the position of Vicar General of Sicily, but he hadn’t been able to actually take up the position. The revenues that went along with that position should still have been his, even though he was absent, and he tried to arrange for those revenues to be used to raise the necessary ransom money. In his absence, however, other local Sicilian officials had stepped in and begun acquiring those revenues. They were reluctant to part with them. A years-long, acrimonious set of negotiates ensued involving numerous parties, including the Spanish King, Philip II.

Meanwhile, Friar Antonio had to cope with being a captive in Algiers. Part of his time was spent shackled in the ‘dungeon’ in Qaid Muhammad’s house. Intermittently, though, Qaid Muhammad would send him out on work gangs, doing brutally hard manual labor in the hot sun—a ploy to encourage Friar Antonio to increase his efforts to acquire the ransom funds.

Miserable though much of his time in Algiers was, Friar Antonio had it better than many. Because he was expected to keep up a correspondence regarding his ransom, he was supplied with pen and paper. He also managed to acquire some books (one was the famous Description of Africa, by Leo Africanus ). So though he endured long days in chains in his cramped cell, he spent much of his time there reading and writing—pursuits that, for an academic like him, must have been reassuringly comforting.

He also got to meet a wide variety of people. Qaid Muhammed, being the important man that he was, had many visitors, both official and not. No doubt, Friar Antonio was on display (“Come on down into the basement and meet the new Christian priest I’ve just bought.”), and, as a result, he managed to converse with a cross section of Algerian residents: city officials, janissaries, Jews, corsair captains, slaves, other captives. Also, there was a sort of community of scholars among the captives and slaves in Algiers, men from various European nations who all shared one thing in common: an advanced education. These men exchanged resources and ideas and discussed philosophy and scripture—and poetry. One of the friendships Friar Antonio made while in Algiers was with Miguel de Cervantes, author of Don Quixote, who was also a captive. The two spent hours discussing poems Cervantes was writing.

Meanwhile, years passed, and Friar Antonio was no nearer to acquiring the ransom he needed.

And at some point (it’s unclear exactly when), his son died. There’s no record of how the boy died, whether by accident, overwork, disease, torture, debilitating despair, or some combination of these. It must have been devastating for Friar Antonio, sitting shackled in his cell, hearing the news of his son’s death, helpless to do anything but morn ineffectually. No doubt he redoubled his efforts to arrange ransom as quickly as possible before his mistress and servants died, too.

It took over four years.

Friar Antonio came to Algiers in April, 1577. He didn’t manage to leave until July, 1581. His leaving was quite dramatic, though.

When the ransom funds finally arrived, he didn’t simply hand them over to Qaid Muhammed. Instead, he ransomed his mistress. Then, a day or two after she was safely aboard a European ship headed back home, Friar Antonio… disappeared.

Qaid Mohammed was, of course, furious. He had every corner of the town searched. He offered a reward. He threatened to torture captives and slaves who knew Friar Antonio to force them to reveal his whereabouts. None of it worked. Friar Antonio was gone.

Nobody knows how he managed it.

Every slave and captive in Algiers yearned desperately for freedom. The city authorities, well aware of this, did their very best to shut down potential avenues of escape. All European ships had to surrender their sails and their rudders when they arrived. When it came time to depart, they only got them back after their ship had been thoroughly searched for stowaway slaves.

So Friar Antonio should not have been able to slip away aboard a European ship. He slipped away aboard some ship, though. The likeliest explanation is that he used part of the ransom funds that finally arrived to buy his mistress’s freedom—her ransom would have been considerably less than his—and then employed the remaining money to bribe the port officials who were supposed to be searching ships and to entice some willing ship’s captain to smuggle him out of the city.

However he managed it, Friar Antonio escaped from Algiers and returned to Spain, where he was finally reunited with his mistress.

After that, the two of them lived happily ever after together.

Well… no. Actually, they didn’t.

For what happened after Friar Antonio’s return to his old life, see the next post in this series: The Travails of Friar Antonio – Part 3