Barbary Captives: An Anthology of Early Modern Slave Memoirs by Europeans in North Africa
Mario Klarer, "Barbary Captives: An Anthology of Early Modern Slave Memoirs by Europeans in North Africa"
English | ISBN: 0231175248 | 2022 | 416 pages | PDF | 30 MB
English | ISBN: 0231175248 | 2022 | 416 pages | PDF | 30 MB
In the early modern period, hundreds of thousands of Europeans, both male and female, were abducted by pirates, sold on the slave market, and enslaved in North Africa. Between the sixteenth and the early nineteenth centuries, pirates from Algiers, Tunis, Tripoli, and Morocco not only attacked sailors and merchants in the Mediterranean but also roved as far as Iceland. A substantial number of the European captives who later returned home from the Barbary Coast, as maritime North Africa was then called, wrote and published accounts of their experiences. These popular narratives greatly influenced the development of the modern novel and autobiography, and they also shaped European perceptions of slavery as well as of the Muslim world.