Captured by Pirates: A new translation of a 16th-century manuscript captures a city at the crossroads of civilizations
Antonio da Sosa, a Portuguese priest, was traveling across the Mediterranean to take up a prestigious ecclesiastical post in Sicily when a violent storm swept his ship away from the fleet. North African pirates attacked and carried their captives off to Algiers, where da Sosa spent nearly five years in the city, then under the rule of the Ottoman Turkish empire. As a theologian caught up in the confrontation between Christianity and Islam , da Sosa was not spared what he termed “Barbary cruelty.” But he was allowed to read books borrowed from other captives and from visitors to his captor’s house, and to write in his cell, and he came to know the city as he walked through it, on the way to forced labor sites. Despite his antagonism to his Muslim captors (and antipathy to their religion), he observed carefully and painstakingly recorded what he learned of their history and culture. His Topography of Algiers brings to life the sixteenth-century city situated at the crossroads of civilization with its multicultural population of Turks, Arabs, Moriscos, Berbers, Jews, corsairs, Christian captives, and Muslims. “I know everything that occurs in Algiers, and I even write it all down completely, day by day,” was da Sosa’s boast, and indeed his vibrant narrative ranges from architecture to fashion, from pirates and renegades to laborers and artisans, from festivals to government and the military, from language and currency to marriage ceremonies and funerals.