This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1867 edition. Excerpt: ... The Autobiography is here resumed DEGREES Iorbier and Rivasson prevented us from I dying of hunger, as I have already said. We 1 knew that they had plenty of money, and the 8 fear that we should be again reduced to starvation after their departure, made me supplicate them with clasped hands to leave us three or four louis d'or. I told them that I would write out an order, so that my father would repay them at Bergerac. But they were so hard-hearted that they would only leave us half a louis, which I gave back to them when we met in the prisons of Lille, in Flanders, a few days before their release. We economized this half louis d'or extremely, eating nothing but bread. However, we had no time to spend it in the parliament prison, for we were transferred to the prison of the town, named Le Beffroi, for the following reasons: The river Scheldt traverses the town of Tournay. On the south side of this river stands the parliament house, and this side is in the diocese of the Archbishopric of Cambrai; the other part of the town, to the north of the river, is in that of the Bishop of Tournay. I have already said that the cure" of the parish in which the prison was situated sometimes came to visit us, rather to see if our opinions on religion were changing, than to exhort us by good reasons to renounce them. The Bishop of Tournay, having heard of the indifference, or, rather, the negligence and ignorance of this cure " in converting us; sent one of his chaplains to visit us. This chaplain was a good old priest, who had more honesty than theology--at least so it seemed to us; for, after having told us that he was sent by the bishop, he added, "it was in order to convert you to the Christian religion." We replied that we were Christians, both by baptism...

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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. Barbary Captives brings together a selection of early modern slave narratives in English translation for the first time. It features accounts written by men and women across three centuries and in nine different languages that recount the experience of capture and servitude in North Africa. These texts tell the stories of Christian pirates, Christian rowers on Muslim galleys, house slaves in the palaces of rulers, domestic servants, agricultural slaves, renegades, and social climbers in captivity. They also depict liberation through ransom, escape, or religious conversion. This book sheds new light on the social history of Mediterranean slavery and piracy, early modern concepts of unfree labor, and the evolution of the Barbary captivity narrative as a literary and historical genre.