This week continues with the excerpt from Tyrkjarans-Saga describing the experiences of Einar Loptsson, an Icelander enslaved in Algiers in the 1620s.
Last week’s post ended with Einar being ordered by one of his owner’s wives to fetch water from a well located within the Qasba (the fortress at the top of the mountain upon which Algiers was built) that was off bounds for Christian slaves (see the image at the top of this post for a depiction of the Qasba). We pick up the story from there.
Einar was completely unaware that only people of the Muslim faith were allowed to go into the fortress, and that no Christian was permitted to pass under the iron chains that were hung across the entrance doors. Any who did so were put to death.
Nevertheless, the concubine ordered him to fetch water from the well in the fortress.
Einar walked under the iron chains and into the building to the well, filled his water jug, and brought it back to his master’s concubine.
She ordered him to fill the jug again. When he went to the well a second time, two Turks confronted him. One of them hit him five or six times in the face so that blood poured down him.
The Turks then arrested him.
They dragged Einar to the King’s Hall, where all the chiefs sat.[1] As Einar stood before them, the King rose and asked Einar what country he had been captured from, but Einar did not understand him. One of the other Turks explained that Einar was an Icelander. The Turkish King then ordered that Einar be dragged away and returned to jail, which was done. He stayed there from April 29 until May 4, which was a Sunday, when his case was scheduled to be judged.
After Einar had been imprisoned for one night, the Turks brought in a French prisoner who was accused of trying to have sex with a Turkish girl. They executed that prisoner on the same day Einar’s case was to be heard.
On that day, the Turks removed Einar from the prison and drove him, chained up, to another house.
After he had been sitting there for a while, a Turk visited him, asking if he did not want to convert and adopt their Muslim faith. Einar refused. The Turk then left him. Another immediately appeared and said, “It is best for you that you convert, for otherwise you will be tortured.” But Einar refused, as he had done before.
Then a third Turk arrived, accompanied by a renegade,[2] and spoke the same words as the other Turks. Einar was silent and did not answer.
The Turk then ordered the renegade to assault Einar.
The renegade was unwilling and resisted three times, but after the Turk threatened him, the man eventually assaulted Einar, slashing his face so that he cut off the front of Einar’s nose and both his ears. After that, the wicked Turks strung the severed nose and ears on a cord and hung them round Einar’s neck, leaving them dangling there to taunt him.
They then hauled him to his feet, still shackled, and drove him through the streets with a lot of noise and tumult. When Einar came to the city gate called Babason,[3] the Turks pushed him into a different street, where they encountered another Turk. That villain spat in Einar’s face, and those who pushed him through the streets beat him and abused him terribly, as if he were a dog.
Eventually, they brought Einar back to the house in which he had been maimed. There, the long-suffering man fell down and lay for a time.
When Einar came to, he was unshackled. He sat free for a while, since he was very weak and not in control of himself. Eventually, his master’s brother, named Ali, came for him. He commanded Einar to leave with him, but Einar asked to be given some water to drink. Ali did that. Then they went to a surgeon, who bandaged Einar’s wounds.
After that, Einar went to his master, Abraham, who thought Einar had been treated badly and felt pity on him.
Nothing further regarding Einar’s suffering and bondage will be explained here.
Now the story of what happened to the guards at the well will be told.
One evening, three months after the Turks’ tormenting of Einar, a black woman, together with a little boy, was carrying food for her master into the fortress mentioned earlier. On their way, they met the same well guard who had seized Einar.
He took the woman and beat her, spoiling the food. He then grabbed the boy and committed a shameful act with him, for such is the habit of the Turks. When what he had done became known, the well guard was taken before the council of the Turks and sentenced to be taken outside the city gate and have all of his bones broken.
He lived for two nights. Thus he received justice. To this, Einar’s master said good riddance and that now it was plain to see that the guard had done Einar wrong.
I would also like to provide here another example of the inhuman sin of sodomy. Once, a schoolmaster who taught boys took one of them and sodomized him. The boy lay ill afterwards. His parents found him, and he told them of the act that had taken place. The schoolmaster was then taken and punished like the guard mentioned above. He also had a stake thrust up his rear. The stake was then erected, and he sat on it for four days, and then died on the fifth.[4]
Many people behave in these bad ways but do not receive proper punishment if those who suffer from their wicked deeds do not protest.
Eggert Bríem Ólafsson, the editor of the 1866 published edition of Björn Jónsson’s Tyrkjaráns-Saga, has this to say about Einar Loptsson in the book’s Foreword:
Einar Loptsson was a farmer on the Westman Islands. His wife’s name was Ásta. They were both captured along with their children and taken to Algiers (in 1627). Ásta died there. Einar suffered terrible torture there and his nose and ears were mutilated. In the autumn of 1632, he was able to free himself from slavery and lived for a time in Algiers by making spirits [i.e., distilling and selling alcohol] and knitting [woolen caps that he sold]. In 1637, he returned home and later married Oddný Þorsteinsdóttir, the widow of Jón Jónsson, a farmer from Búastaðir [on the island of Heimaey]. She was captured with Einar, but her former husband was murdered on the Westman Islands. Einar wrote a narrative about the raid on the Westman Islands and the misfortunes the islanders suffered. We have not seen this narrative.
So if Björn Jónsson is right, Einar spent five years in Algiers as a free man. Why he should have had to do that is unclear. In fact, this assertion of Björn’s is questionable. There are other sources that seem to indicate that Einar return to Iceland earlier.
Another thing to keep in mind about Björn’s narrative is that he, like other Europeans of the time, was concerned—one might almost say obsessed—with the evils of Islamic culture, prominent among which was what he refers to as “the inhuman sin of sodomy.” It’s a sign of the times that European writers focused so much (self)righteous religious outrage on this topic.
The sorts of punishments and executions Björn describes as taking place in Algiers, though, did occur (as the footnotes illustrate). The rulers of Algiers frequently employed torture and painful public executions to enforce the law and their own authority. By our standards today, they were a brutal regime, By the standards of the time, however, they were pretty typical. The world four hundred years ago was a much rougher place than ours in some ways.
As I mentioned in the first part of this pair of posts (and as Eggert Bríem mentioned in his Foreword), after returning to Iceland, Einar Loptsson wrote a narrative describing his experience as a captive and slave. The manuscript(s) containing that narrative disappeared over the centuries, and now all that remains to us is Björn Jónsson’s abbreviated paraphrasing of it.
One can only hope that one day, miraculously, a long forgotten copy of Einar’s narrative might turn up in the attic of some Icelandic farmhouse. Until—if—that happens, Björn’s version is all we have.
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[1] The “King” of Algiers was the Pasha, the Ottoman Governor of the city. The “King’s Hall, where all the chiefs sat,” was the ornate residence of the Governor, a building known as the Pasha’s Palace, or the Dar es-Sultan (House of the Ruler). The Divan, the ruling council of Algiers, met and deliberated at the Dar es-Sultan on a regular basis.
[2] Renegades were Christian Europeans who had converted to Islam. They were universally despised by other Europeans, but the North Africans referred to them as el-Muhtadun, a term which means “those who are guided” in Arabic.
[3] The city gate referred to here as “Babason” was Bab Azoun (Gate of Grief). It was located on the city’s southeast corner, near the sea, and was one of five gates that pierced the protective walls encircling Algiers. Its acquired its name because very unpleasant executions were carried out there. For instance, William Davies, an English barber-surgeon who was in Algiers in the late 1590s, described a form of agonizing execution that typically took place at the Bab Azoun: “He [the man to be executed] is placed upon the top of a wall, measuring five fathoms high. Less than two fathoms from the top, just below where he sits, very sharp and strong iron hooks are embedded in the wall. He is then pushed from the wall onto one of these hooks, which catches part of his body, and he hangs there, sometimes two or three days, before he dies” (William Davies, A True Relation of the Labors and Most Miserable Captivity of William Davies, Barber -Surgeon of London, originally published in 1614, p. 6).
[4] This form of execution was known as impalement. Jacques Villamont, a French nobleman who went on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land in the 1580s, and who wrote a book about his travels, described the process of impalement in excruciating detail: “They stretch out the victim with his belly and face against the ground and, holding his arms and legs so that he cannot move, they thrust the wooden stake up his rear. Then, with a large mallet or hammer, they knock on the other end of the stake until they see the tip of it emerge, either near the head, the shoulder, the stomach, or any other part of the body. Having accomplished this, they then plant this wooden stake in the ground and leave the victim suspended upon it until he dies, suffering miserably, in three or four days” (Les voyages de Jacques Villamont, divisé en trois livres, 1610 edition, Book III pp. 623-24). In Algiers, impalements were commonly carried out near the Bab Azoun (the Gate of Grief), a circumstance that contributed to the gate’s name.
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