LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

parallel. They could convert to Christianity but often remained slaves thereafter.

      The Captives

      In the intermittent wars between Muslim Granada and various Christian states in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and during the final Christian conquest of Granada in the last decade of the fifteenth, both sides raided by land and sea.⁵⁰ The uncertainty of the frontier was an unchanging feature of life for those who lived close by, a situation that continued for people living along the coasts throughout early modern times. On the Christian side, many people prepared wills that included sums of money, even though often symbolic and small in many cases, for the ransom of captives. Nobles did more, donating money during their lifetimes and leaving major sums in their wills for the redemption of captives.⁵¹ We lack similar evidence from the Muslim side, but it seems clear that they were exposed to the same anxieties. Christian raids on Muslim shipping accompanied the final reconquest of Granada, ending in 1492. Andalusian caravels pursued Muslim commercial vessels, called carabos, that took goods and passengers between the kingdom of Granada and North Africa. Back in Spain, the captors auctioned those they had caught, together with the other goods seized in the raids. The purchasers acquired them for two main reasons: they could hope that the families of the captives would pay their ransoms, or, otherwise, they could put the captives to work as slaves.⁵² Such Muslim captives usually became slaves, either collectively or individually. Christians fell victim to captivity by the Muslims as well. Most raids in the later Middle Ages came from North African and Granadan Muslims, who sometimes collaborated. Muslim raiders could often count on the help of local Mudejars to provide information about local strong and weak points and where booty might be found.⁵³ One prominent noble captive in 1456 was don Juan Manrique, count of Castañeda and royal captain of the Granadan frontier, whose release required the direct intervention of the Castilian king Enrique IV.⁵⁴ In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Muslims of North Africa used captives as slaves unless and until they were ransomed.⁵⁵

      Coastal dwellers at times also had to fear raids by fellow Christians. Muslim raids diminished somewhat in the fifteenth century, especially when Granada became Christian, but raids by enemy Christians increased. Among the most important of these were the Castilian raids, above all during the periods when Castile and Aragon were at war in 1429–30, or when King Alfonso V of Aragon was absorbed in the conquest of Naples in the early 1440s, or when rival forces vied for control of the Castilian throne from 1474 to 1479. The supporters of Isabel won the latter conflict, and in the ensuing peace, Castilian corsair activity against the subjects of the Crown of Aragon fell off drastically. Portuguese corsairs also harassed the eastern coast, but on fewer occasions than the Castilians. The Genoese were great commercial rivals, and their competition at times spilled over to armed raids when Genoese corsairs attacked the coast of the Crown of Aragon. In the 1440s, corsairs from Provence began to raid the Aragonese-held Balearic Islands, the coasts of Catalonia, and the kingdom of Valencia. Both the Genoese and the Provençals took advantage of periods of conflict between Aragon and Castile to use the Castilian port of Cartagena as a staging point for their raids on Valencia and other coastal areas of the Crown of Aragon.⁵⁶ Most of the Christians captured by other Christians secured their ransoms and did not end up as slaves.

      The continuing conflict, nonetheless, pitted Christians against Muslims. After Fernando and Isabel conquered the port of Almería from the Muslims in 1489, they began to resettle it with Christians. By 1500 the Christian authorities were concerned to stem the losses in goods and people that Almería began to suffer from Muslim sea raiders. The Crown undertook to strengthen local defense by repairing and rebuilding existing watchtowers and by building new ones. The numbers of coast guards expanded and their salaries grew. To pay for all this, they taxed the Moriscos, collecting the taxes that had formerly gone to the local mosques and establishing a new tax for coastal defense, called the farda de la mar, which apparently fell on all inhabitants at first but, with the passage of time, came to be paid exclusively by Moriscos.⁵⁷

      The authorities of the Crown of Aragon found it difficult to defend against raids by Muslim and Christian adversaries. They established coastal watches and maritime patrols, especially from the port of Valencia, and began to construct a series of watchtowers in the fifteenth century. The line was not complete until the sixteenth century, when officials had to face the even greater threat of Turkish-led North African piracy. As a deterrent, they executed the pirates or corsairs they caught, but they could not stop the raids up and down the long and lightly populated coast. Raiders used small and fast vessels for quick raids and hasty withdrawals with captives and other booty. Communications were slow, and response time for vessels was necessarily slow.⁵⁸ Nonetheless, they tried to do what they could to raise the alarm. Special bugle calls denoted the danger on the coast.⁵⁹

      Even if they found it difficult to defend their own coasts, the royal and urban authorities did allow their subjects to take the war to their enemies. Sea captains and fishing-boat skippers turned to raiding against their enemies. Captives produced a great source of income for these raiders. Some ship owners became rich from this piracy, and their sailors lived well. This went little distance toward compensating for the terror that the isolated coastal dwellers and those who fished in small vessels had to live with throughout these centuries, never knowing if they would be caught and hauled off as captives to distant markets.⁶⁰

      Some Spanish cities benefited, nonetheless. Valencia and Alicante became important slave markets. Local raiders and other Christian raiders sold slaves there, and the slave population consequently boomed. As a result of the Christian raids in North Africa, seventeenth-century Cádiz had a large supply of slaves and a wide range of uses for them. Numerous Muslim slaves arrived there after having been captured in military action in the Mediterranean. In 1616 Cádiz contained some 300 Muslim slaves; that figure had grown to around 1,500 by 1654. In 1680 alone, following the Austrian victory over the Turks, about 2,000 captives were sold in Cádiz. Because of the influx of new slaves, the range of occupations for slaves was wider in Cádiz than other Spanish cities. They were employed in public works, such as repairing the city’s walls. They worked in provisioning the Indies fleets, and there were also galley slaves.⁶¹ Cartagena, too, benefited from the maritime hostilities. In 1670 Cartagena became the site of a permanent base for Spanish vessels patrolling the Mediterranean coast to prevent Muslim raiding. Local seafarers took advantage of the shield that the patrols provided to increase their own raids and their own trade to Spanish possessions in North Africa to secure slaves. The city of Oran was the principal enclave, in Spanish hands since 1509. When the Muslims retook Oran in 1708, some 5,000 Spaniards, soldiers and ordinary citizens, ended up as captives. When Spain captured Oran again in 1732, many Muslim captives were exchanged for Christian prisoners; others entered the slave markets.⁶²

      Conditions in the activities of corsairs changed in the seventeenth century, when the North Africans employed Dutch and English shipwrights to replace the galleys in their fleets with sailing ships. As these required far fewer sailors, the captives gradually ceased to be galley rowers and remained working on shore until they were ransomed. Raids did not stop, however. One spectacular example took place in 1618, when a Turkish raiding party brought thirty-six ships to the poorly defended island of Lanzarote in the Canaries. They took away some nine hundred captives. As the raiders tried to make their way back to Algiers, a Castilian fleet captured seventeen of the ships and freed some two hundred of the captives. The other seven hundred captives had to reside in Algiers and hope for eventual rescue. Some were redeemed, but others were not. Among the latter group, over a hundred decided to convert to Islam in order to be freed from captivity and live a free life in North Africa.⁶³

      In the War of Spanish Succession (1701–1714), Catalonia resisted the eventual winner Felipe V, and support for his opponents cost the Catalans dearly when the new king disarmed the population and dismantled fortifications. This made coastal defense against Muslim raids almost impossible, and a few years later the royal government permitted and supported the rebuilding of forts along the coast and the arming of merchant and fishing vessels. Change was slow in the early eighteenth century. Muslim pirates still threatened Spanish seaports and their citizens.⁶⁴ Nevertheless, the eighteenth century saw a decline of raids and captivity in Catalonia, as in most other parts of the peninsula. Estimates for the number of Muslims captured in the

Скачать книгу