TURBULENT TIMES: JASPER KRISTJÁNSSON’S LETTER – PART 2

This week we look at the text of the letter written by Jasper Kristjánsson, the well-to-do Dane discussed in last week’s post who lived on the island of Heimaey. He submitted this letter as evidence in the divorce case of his daughter who had been captured in the Barbary corsair raid on the island and had never returned.

Here is the text of the letter, translated into English for the first time (the image at the top of this post is of a manuscript copy of Jasper’s letter). Parts of the text require some background explanation, which is provided in footnotes.

---

1635 – Letter from Jasper Kristjánsson [containing testimony] about his case, dated 24 October.

That honest and highly respected servant of God, Reverend Gísli Oddsson, Superintendent of Skálholt See[1], has asked me, Jasper Kristjánsson, to provide truthful testimony to that honest man, Kláus Egilsson,[2] regarding the situation of my daughter, Anna Jasparsdóttir, who was abducted on Vestmannaey [i.e., Heimaey], along with others of our countrymen, on 17 July, 1627, and brought to the Turkish lands to be sold for gold or silver, all because of our sins—may God have mercy upon us and heal us because of Jesus Christ’s wounds.

I was there [in Algiers], and the same Turkish man who bought Reverend Ólafur [Egilsson], his wife, and their two children also bought me. I was told this man’s name was or is Johan Pickarick.[3] When we had been in that place [Algiers] for some time after Reverend Ólafur received dispensation to leave [Algiers],[4] my aforementioned daughter was distraught because she had not received any news of me. Therefore, her patron [the man who had bought her] asked her, via an interpreter, what the matter was. She answered and said that she had arrived [in Algiers] with me but did not know where I was. When her patron heard this, he sent the aforementioned interpreter, along with one of his slaves, to search for me until they found me, and to then to bring me to where he, her patron, resided.

He knew I had been bought by the aforementioned Johan Pickarick, and he told me that he purchased my freedom for 300 pieces of eight.[5] I was then in his house for twenty-two weeks. This man’s name was Iss Hamet.[6] He then granted me my freedom, and I was charged, by a legal authority,[7] to go to the closest Catholic land, which is Ligorum [Livorno][8]—as his [the legal authority’s] letter shows, which I still keep with me, even though nobody here in this country can read it. Doctor Hans Reisen Hansen,[9] who is the Bishop in Copenhagen, could not read it.

Since then, I have not heard anything about him [Iss Hamet] except what Þorsteinn Ormsson[10] has told me: that he had two children with the aforementioned woman [Jasper’s daughter, Ana].[11] This aforementioned man had been Spanish but had been captured by the Turks when he was still young and coerced into abandoning his Catholic faith. What he is now, only God knows.[12] He treated me well. As it is written in John 9, “Blind I was, but now I see.” I was a prisoner, but now I am free from their hands as long as God wishes to accept me as a sinner.”

This is the truth as I know it, and of this I bear witness before both God and men that events happened as I have written. With my own hand, I have signed [this testimony]. Written on Vestmannaey [Heimaey], on 13 June, anno 1635.

---

[1]  The “Superintendent of Skálholt See” was another term for the Bishop of Skálholt.

[2] Kláus Egilsson was a sheriff for the island of Heimaey.

[3]  There is no clear documentation for who Johan Pickarick might have been. Jasper’s letter is the only Icelandic source that names him. The name is European, and so the man might have been a renegade and known to Europeans by his pre-Muslim, Christian name. Even if this is so, however, the fact that “Johan” is a northern European name does not necessarily mean that Johan Pickarick was himself of northern European origin. “Johan” is a version of the familiar English name “John” (Jón in Icelandic). It was popular throughout Europe at the time, being rendered as Jan (Dutch), Jean (French), Johann (German), Juan (Spanish), etc. Johan Pickarick might originally have hailed from any of these countries—and Jasper simply rendered the name in its familiar Nordic form. The only clear facts that can be confidently established about Johan Pickarick are that he was a wealthy man, and that like other wealthy men in Algiers, he bought and sold human beings for profit to increase his wealth.

[4]  Reverend Ólafur Egilsson, a Lutheran pastor captured in the corsair raid on Heimaey, was in his early sixties and so would have made a poor slave. He was, however, an educated man with connections in Copenhagen—which made him a good emissary. His captors commissioned him (gave him a “dispensation,” in Jasper’s words) to travel to Denmark to arrange ransom payments for his family and the other enslaved Icelanders. After having been in Algiers for only slightly over a month, Reverend Ólafur departed at the end of September, 1627, aboard a ship bound for Livorno, Italy. So when Jasper writes that events occurred “some time after Reverend Ólafur received dispensation to leave,” he likely means the late fall/early winter of 1627.

[5]  In European countries, financial speculation involved the buying and selling of goods. In North Africa, it also involved the buying and selling of human beings. Johan Pickarick, the man who had bought Jasper (and Reverend Ólafur and his family), did so as a means of making a profit—on the principle of ‘buy low, sell high.’ The prices given in the official record of ransoms from the 1635-36 Danish expedition to Algiers varied from about 45 to about 250 pieces of eight. So the 300 pieces of eight demanded for Jasper’s freedom was a high price (average annual salaries in Europe at this time—for those who actually received a salary—were about thirty pieces of eight a year, so Jasper’s ransom equalled ten years’ worth of wages for an ordinary person). Johan Pickarick no doubt originally bought Jasper for considerably less than this sum, and when it became clear to him that Ana’s patron was serious about buying Jasper’s freedom (and that he was a wealthy man), Johan Pickarick saw a business opportunity and raised the price—taking advantage of a ‘seller’s market.’

[6]  The name “Hamet” is likely a European rendering of the Turkish name Ahmed, or perhaps a shortened version of Mahamet (Mohammed). It seems to have been a common name at the time (it appears six times in various forms in the official Danish ransom list of 1635-36.

[7]  The “legal authority” that Jasper refers to here would have been the Ottoman authorities of Algiers. The “letter” Jasper received was likely a Hücett—an official certificate from the city authorities stating that he was a free man and granting him permission to leave the city. Reverend Ólafur Egilsson received a similar certificate, though in his case, since he had never been sold into slavery, it was not a legal certificate of freedom. Here is how he describes it in his narrative: “This safe-conduct, written in many different languages, I was to give to any Turkish pirates who might capture a ship on which I was a passenger. The document explained that I should neither be killed nor interfered with because I was acting as a messenger.”

[8]  Livorno was at this time a freeport—that is, merchants and traders could conduct business there without paying port taxes. It was a wide open, bustling place in which pretty much anybody could buy and sell pretty much anything. The city had a complicated relationship with Algiers. On the one hand, thanks to its freeport status, it was a convenient place to sell the stolen merchandise corsairs brought in. Much of that merchandise, auctioned off cheaply in Algiers, made its way to Livorno aboard Italian ships, where it was resold, often at a large profit—sometimes to the outrage of the original owners, who watched their stolen property being sold before their eyes. On the other hand, Livorno hosted its own corsairs (the Order of the Knights of Saint Stephen, created in the 1560s) who attacked Muslim shipping in the Mediterranean, returning with booty and captives to be either ransomed or sold into slavery in the Livorno slave market. Because of the special business relationship between Livorno and Algiers, Italian ships had dispensation to travel in and out of Algiers unmolested, and many freed slaves left Algiers onboard one of them—including not only Jasper but also Reverend Ólafur Egilsson. Here is how Reverend Ólafur describes the fraught relationship between the two cities in his narrative: “The ‘friendship’ between the Italians and the Turks is such that when they have completed trading with one another and are one mile out from the harbour, they will set upon and kill each other remorselessly.”

[9]  “Doctor Hans Reisen Hansen” was Hans Poulson Resen, the Sjálandsbiskup (the Bishop of Sjælland, i.e., Zealand, the island on which Copenhagen is located) and the head of the Danish, and so also of the Icelandic, Church. He had assumed responsibility for collecting the funds to be used to ransom the Icelandic (and Danish and Norwegian) captives held in Algiers. As a young man, Bishop Resen had travelled around Italy, sailing through corsair infested waters to visit Sicily and Malta, voyages during which he had a close encounter with Barbary corsairs. So he must have had considerable sympathy for the captives he was trying to liberate. As part of his remit, the Bishop regularly interviewed liberated captives returning from North Africa in order to unearth any information that might prove useful for organizing the ransoming process. Not only did he interview Jasper (who showed the Bishop his Hücett document, written in Turkish and so indecipherable); he also interviewed Reverend Ólafur Egilsson when he passed through Copenhagen in the winter of 1628 (Reverend Ólafur showed the Bishop his own indecipherable Turkish document; see footnote 6 above).

[10]  Þorsteinn Ormsson, whom Jasper mentions so casually, is a bit of a mystery figure. He is listed as one of the captives taken from Heimaey—his name appears as “Torsten Ormbsön”—on a handwritten document dated 1634 (a year before the Danish ransom expedition arrived in Algiers). However, no variant of the name is listed among the captives ransomed by the Danes in 1635-36. So it is unclear whether Þorsteinn Ormsson ever made it back to Iceland. Perhaps he managed to arrange a private ransom somehow, or perhaps Jasper received news of his daughter from Þorsteinn via a letter. Unless some further documentation shows up, it is difficult to know.

[11]  This statement (“he had two children with the aforementioned woman”) is the most important part of the letter in terms of it being legal evidence in Jón Oddsson’s divorce suit against his soon-to-be ex-wife, Anna Jasparsdóttir, for it identifies Anna as an adultness. It also, by inference, identifies Anna as a Muslim, since it was recognized that Christian women who married Muslim men in Algiers converted. The fact that Jasper does all this indirectly—without even naming his daughter here—perhaps shows how hard he found it to provide the needed testimony.

[12]  ). Iss Hamet was what Europeans of the time called a renegade: a European Christian who had converted to Islam. North African Muslims welcomed such converts—referring to them as al-Muhtadun, meaning “those who are guided”—and some of them become wealthy men of high social status—as Iss Hamet clearly was.