AFRICHE E ORIENTE N°3/2005

Lumi e corsari.
Europa e Maghreb nel Settecento
Morlacchi Editore, Perugia 2005

Il volume di Salvatore Bono è il risultato di uno studio attento a indagare i rapporti fra Europa e Maghreb nel '700, ma è anche un viaggio lungo il fecondo percorso di attività accademica dell'autore. È superfluo ripetere qui le tappe fondamentali di quel percorso, scandito da studi grazie ai quali l'A. ha offerto nel tempo a lettori e studiosi un ricco patrimonio d'informazioni e ricostruzioni storiche. Ma è doveroso ricordare che si devono a Salvatore Bono molte puntualizzazioni nel dibattito storico sui secoli della guerra di corsa e sui rapporti fra sponda nord e sud del Mediterraneo (fra le quali il tema della reciprocità della guerra di corsa, praticata tanto da musulmani che da cristiani, ed i temi legati al complesso quadro di dipendenza connesso alla schiavitù nel Mediterraneo).
Come si esprime già nel titolo, questo volume nasce dall'idea di indagare il particolare contrasto che il '700 parrebbe esprimere fra le due sponde del Mediterraneo: la sopravvivenza apparentemente anacronistica di reggenze corsare al sud e lo svilupparsi al nord del secolo 'dei Lumi'. Il libro raccoglie e a volte completa e integra alcuni saggi dell'A. stesso apparsi su riviste specialistiche dal 1960 in poi. Il rigore e la cura per le ricostruzioni di vicende storiche (anche personali di un singolo schiavo o viaggiatore) occupano diversi capitoli, soprattutto nella prima parte del libro, dedicata a viaggi, commerci e schiavitù, con l'attenzione puntata sui protagonisti: ambasciatori, consoli, mercanti, corsari, schiavi. Di particolare interesse il tema rivisitato dei riscatti di schiavi e delle conversioni, sull'una e sull'altra sponda; anche se, come ricorda Bono, quando erano i cristiani a farsi musulmani si parlava allora, in Europa, di 'rinnegati'. La riflessione storiografica sul tema, solo apparentemente nominalistica, è efficace ed equilibrata, anche quando l'A. riflette sull'uso critico che si trova a fare oggi di talune categorie o definizioni. Per seguire l'interessante riflessione critica dell'A. sui propri interventi è molto utile e puntuale la 'Nota sui capitoli', posta all'avvio del testo, che guida il lettore.
L'attenzione dell'A. non è limitata alla ricostruzione di eventi, ma esprime anche, nella seconda parte, una singolare vetrina di talune riflessioni sul Maghreb raccolte in opere di autori che si richiamano alle dottrine dei Lumi e. a quel clima culturale. Ne emerge un quadro interessante (ad esempio quella certa persistenza della concezione del Maghreb come parte dell'Europa) i cui tratti essenziali potrebbero consentire di cogliere con maggiore lucidità le successive svolte ottocentesche e le profonde questioni culturali legate alle dottrine e al pensiero coloniale (e alla contemporanea definizione di griglie interpretative di molti saperi europei). E forse sarebbe stato interessante inserire questi contributi in un articolato quadro di riflessione teorica complessiva, per moltiplicarne gli spunti, in ogni modo preziosi.
Un volume utile per gli studiosi e gradevole per ogni lettore interessato.

Lumi a corsari: Europa a Maghreb nel Settecento
SALVATORE BONO
Perugia: Morlacchi Editore, 2005
xiv +313 pp. ISBN: 88 89422 20 3. €20


The Islamic Empires of the Near and Middle East have long been understood as fixtures in the imagination of the European Enlightenment. Less inquiry has been made, however, into the ways in which Enlightenment interest in the Islamic world might have been shaped by actual contacts between Europe and the Maghreb during the 1700s. In Lumi a corsari, Europa a Maghreb nel Settecento, Salvatore Bono, author of over 180 scholarly works on the history of the Maghreb from the sixteenth century to the present, draws upon an eclectic mix of diplomatic, archival, and narrative sources to expose what he terms the `paradoxical' dimensions of this overlooked period of interaction (pp. vii viii). As in preceding centuries, so called 'Barbary corsairs; sanctioned to engage in the interruption of enemy shipping, or corsairing, by the Turkish satellite polities of Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli, as well as the independent empire of Morocco, continued to spar with counterparts enlisted under the flags of the Christian crusading orders of the Knights of Saint John of Jerusalem (housed at Malta after the fall of Rhodes to the Ottomans in 1522) and the Tuscan order of Santo Stefano. Both cohorts combed the Mediterranean basin to capture mariners, merchants, and even coastal peoples, as slaves in one notorious incident, treated in Bono's fifteenth chapter, the entire community of Carloforte, a town on tile island of San Pietro off the coast of Sardinia, was swept off by corsairs from Tunisia in September 1798.

Conflicts over corsairing, unsanctioned acts of piracy, and slavery were nonetheless complicated by an expanding web of commercial and cultural exchange over the course of the eighteenth century. A growing cadre of consuls and ambassadors were dispatched from European polities to negotiate the ransom of persons displaced by maritime seizures, as well as the treaties and tribute payments aimed at forestalling these incidents. These exchanges, often involving considerable amounts of money, represented a substantial component of the eighteenth century Mediterranean economy. Diplomatic envoys, sea captains, and Christian veterans of Muslim captivity meanwhile authored a series of works in which the region and people of the Maghreb were described. These texts, argues Bono, would become foundational for the orientalist study that came to justify nineteenth century Europe's colonial projects in Africa.

The book is divided into sixteen chapters. Chapter 1 outlines the basic rhythm of commerce, confrontation, and diplomacy that characterized Europe's relations with the Maghreb during the eighteenth century. European polities of varying strength and influence signed treaties, sometimes at one and two year intervals, that pledged Christian immunity from Muslim corsair attack. In some cases, treaties arranged for the disbursement of tribute, frankly acknowledged as compensation for the opportunity cost incurred when a corsair refrained from executing seizures. In other instances, tribute was disbursed in the form of naval equipment (p. 2). As Maria Teresa Ferrer i Mallol has noted for an earlier period,1 the frequency with which these agreements were ratified is testimony in itself to their limited effectiveness, as seizures and maritime warfare continued unabated well into the Napoleonic era. Treaties nonetheless had their uses, even when breached. In 1766, for example, such a preexisting contract enabled a Venetian captain to negotiate compensation for a corsair attack with the Pasha of Tripoli (p. 6). By the end of the century, even the former admiral Bartolomeo Forteguerri (1751 1809) could envision a future in which commerce would replace corsairing (pp. 9 10). Moving beyond Arm Thomson's Barbary and Enlightenment, Bono nevertheless argues that Turkish corsairing and piracy continued to dominate literary imagination and became central to an emerging ‘paternalistic’ discourse that called for ‘repression’ by means of ‘a permanent European conquest’ such as would ultimately be realized in the French occupation of Algeria in 1830 (p. I I ).

Chapter 2 explores the link between eighteenth century writing about North Africa and diplomatic activity. Many of tile geographies, ethnographies, and histories of the Maghreb produced during this period were penned by European consuls and ambassadors appointed to negotiate settlements in disputes over maritime seizure, or to provide recourse to Christians active in the Maghreb (p.17). Descriptive prose came naturally to these diplomats, most of whom were required to report the disposition of geo political matters to their governments in lengthy relazioni after the Venetian fashion. Bono usefully demonstrates that diplomatic reporting was not unique to Christian Europeans, citing works by the Moroccan ambassadors Ahmad al Gaza (1766) arid Sidi Muhammad ibn Uthman al Mikrlasi (ca. 1780) (p. I5). Bono also discusses a growing number of European authors who travelled to North Africa as merchants, missionaries, ministers to Islam's Christian captives, and even as naturalists.

Chapter 3 elaborates upon material presented ill Bono's Corsari nel Mediterraneo, to furnish a synthetic overview of Muslim and Christian corsair activity in the eighteenth century Mediterranean. While in decline in comparison to earlier centuries, corsairing remained a significant problem for the security of persons and cargo across the basin throughout the century, especially during periods of belligerence such as the Turco Venetian war of 1715 18 (pp. 45 6). As in previous centuries, corsairing remained highly cosmopolitan in a number of respects. Sailors from the economically depressed regions of Dalmatia and Greece served in both Muslim and Christian navies. Ships in the Algerian fleet, the largest of those maintained by a Muslim power in the Maghreb, included several of Dutch construction (p. 40). Bono provides detailed synopses of various incidents, and information on the scale of both Christian and Muslim armament (pp. 40 43). He is gratifyingly transparent about his sources, which include Venetian relazioni, published archival records from the French consulate of Algiers and the corsairs of Tripoli, and narrative accounts of naval battles, preserved as rare books in the libraries of Palermo and Malta (p. 51). Bono turns to a closer consideration of this last genre in his fourth chapter, recounting the careers of a series of Muslim and Christian naval commanders as documented in these and other works (pp. 53 60). These case studies illustrate that conventions in corsairing and the law of prize and booty configured the operation of Muslim and Christian captain alike.

Chapters 5 through 7 consider various aspects of Christian and Muslim slavery in the Maghreb, condensing research that Bono has elaborated more fully in his magisterial Schiavi musulmani nell'Italia moderna. The eighteenth century, argues Bono, saw an ‘important change’ in the ‘dimension and character’ of slavery (p. 65). Much of this change may be attributed simply to declining numbers aggravated, in Algeria, by a severe plague epidemic during the first decades of the 1700s which rendered slaves rarer and more valuable. Bono's fifth chapter studies various sources and estimates for the size of the slave population. Bono cites the research of Robert C. Davies on this point,2 but would seem to depart from arguments Davies has advanced in his more recent Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters,3 for the relatively harsher experience of Christian slaves in the Muslim Maghreb. While both Christian and Muslim slaves laboured at construction sites and as galley oarsmen throughout the Mediterranean, Bono asserts that Muslims were inclined to view their Christian captives as assets worth maintaining for their potential cash yield in ransom (p. 65). A talented and resourceful Christian slave might, moreover, rise to prominence in Muslim society were he or she to choose conversion to Islam. Indeed, obstacles of class and poverty in Christian Europe rendered the economic and social incentives to ‘turn Turk’ irresistible to many (pp. 71 81). By contrast, Muslims who found themselves enslaved in Christian Europe faced far less possibility of successful assimilation (pp. 74 5).

Chapter 6 creatively utilizes the registers of religious confraternities formed to ransom enslaved Christians as sources for the social and economic impact of slavery in the eighteenth century Mediterranean. The value of this chapter lies in its specifics, namely, tire number of slaves seized arid redeemed, and the amounts of money expended in ransom. For example, in one case from 1769 Bono reports that 332 Spaniards enslaved in Algeria were redeemed at a final cost of approximately 700,000 pesos (p. 103). When prominent members of society were among the captured, settlements could become the province of diplomacy (p. 109). Rebellions and escape attempts often unsuccessful were also common to slave populations on both sides (pp.110 11).

In Chapter 7 Bono turns to another source that grew from the traffic in humans and ransom: slave memoirs. Literate Europeans who had suffered capture were encouraged by the leadership of the confraternities treated in the previous chapter to describe their trials in narratives, which were used to stir public sympathy and elicit ransom fund contributions. Bono discusses several lesser known examples of this genre from a more descriptive than critical perspective. He expresses doubts concerning the veracity of a few accounts (p. 118), but elsewhere verifies narrative details (p. 124). In this, Bono's approach would appear to adopt a middle ground between Thomson, Ellen G. Friedman, and Paul Baepeler4 all of whom have critiqued these narratives as `romanticized; sensationalist, and formulaic and those, like Nabil Matar, Norman Robert Bennett, and Davies,5 who have judged these works to be more reliable.

The remaining chapters of Bono's book examine particular sources far corsairing, slavery, and eighteenth century European views of Islam. Chapter 8 discusses the memoirs of Carlo Antonio Stendardi, consul for the Habsburg Empire at Constantinople and Algeria between 1748 and 1755, reprinting portions of this text in two appendices (pp.153 61). Chapter 13 considers the Giornale Istorico of Marino Doxarà, a Venetian of Greek extraction who, like Stendardi, collected his observations concerning the Maghreb while serving in the entourage of the Venetian noble Andrea Maria Querini (1757 1825).

Chapters 9 and 10 offer brief examinations of two works of the French Enlightenment that treated the land and people of Muslim North Africa: the Histoire philosophique et politique des deux Indes (1770) of Abbot Guillaume Thomas Francois Raynal (1713 96), believed by many to have been co authored by Diderot; and the Anecdotes Africaines (1775), one section of a larger melange of history, ethnography, arid folklore that was published in Paris during 1770s, compiled by Gaspard Dubois Fontanelle (1737 1812). Chapter 12 discusses Letters Written during a Ten Year's Residence at the Court of Tripoli (1816), a work attributed, probably falsely, to a certain Richard Tully. Here, Bono focuses upon a fanciful narrative included in this collection that purports to tell the story of a Sicilian marquis who ‘turned Turk’ after murdering his wife in a crime of passion.

Chapter 11 studies the Summarische Geschichte von Nord Afrika (1775) of August Ludwig Schlozer (1735 1809). Unlike Raynal and Fontanelle, Schlozer was a scholar, whose view of the Maghreb was embedded in a longer, progressive, theory of world history (pp.197 8). Of all the authors Bono considers, Schlozer appears to have taken the most positive view of Islam, writing that science and mathematics reached European civilization via Spain, Baghdad, and India, to dispel the Nebelder Unwissenheit, the ‘fog of ignorance’; that had enveloped the medieval cloister (p. 205). Yet Schlozer, like his contemporaries, was critical of what he termed Ottoman ‘feudalism’: Bona's study includes an appendix in which he lists the sources to which Schlozer turned in his research (pp. 211 13).

Chapter 14 traces a lengthy dispute over the enslavement and ransom of Giovan Luigi Moncada, Prince of Paternò, a member of the Sicilian nobility captured by Tunisian corsairs in 1787, who spent years litigating against any obligation to disburse ransom to his captors in a case that outlasted Napoleon. Chapter 15 studies the similarly lengthy course of litigation and diplomatic activity that ultimately ransomed the kidnapped residents of Carloforte. Although Bono provides little comment on this point, both cases illustrate the ways in which actions over maritime theft and slavery continued to meld diplomacy with civil action in the eighteenth century as they had through earlier periods.6 Chapter 16 traces the negotiation of a treaty between the kingdom of Portugal and the Pasha of Tripoli, Yusuf Karamanli, between 1799 and 1800, offering a Portuguese translation of the text in a chapter appendix (pp. 259 76).

Bono candidly concedes that not everything in this volume is new. Substantial sections of the book's final eight chapters and portions of its first half revisit sources Bono has studied in a series of publications since 1959. It is clear that Bono has expanded upon previous writing in this book, but there are a few points at which repetitions might have been more rigorously edited. Bono's long familiarity with his sources and case studies render his chapters slightly episodic. Lumi a corsari provides an invaluable inventory of overlooked narrative sources far European perceptions of the Maghreb, but one that arguably could have been improved by a more explicit and sustained contextual frame. Several sources are described with minimal analysis. Bono might have offered a more critical reading of the captivity narrative, or more frankly interpretative presentations of Raynal and Fontanelle's works.

Yet it could be argued that Bono's descriptive approach stakes an implicit claim for a more conservative method in the reading of historical sources, one in which texts and authors are allowed to speak for themselves. What makes this book valuable is the way in which Bono has braided together two strands of research most studies of corsairing treat discretely: narrative depictions of piracy, and political histories of legal action and diplomatic settlement engendered by particular incidents of maritime seizure. Lumi e corsari discovers a link between these two strands in the figure of the diplomat, whose transactions and perspective encompassed the realms of law, politics, culture, and literature. The impact of diplomatic writing is moreover set in a concrete context of facts and figures. There may indeed be further room for consideration of corsairing's impact upon Enlightenment thought. In Lumi a corsari, Salvatore Bono has nevertheless assembled a formidable foundation that any future research on this topic will be compelled to acknowledge.

Notes
[1] Fewer i Mallol, ‘La pace del 1390’; esp. 159 60.
[2] Davies, ‘Counting European Slaves’.
[3] Davies, Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters, xxiv xxx, 8 9.
[4] Thomson, Barbary and Enlightenment, 6; Friedman, ‘Christian Captives’; and Baepeler, White Slaves, African Masters.
[5] Matar, ‘Introduction’; 4 6; Bennett, ‘Christian and Negro Slavery’; and Davies, Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters, xxvii.
[6] See Tai, ‘Restitution and the Definition of a Pirate’; and Rubin, The Law of Piracy.

Lumi e corsari. Europa e Maghreb nel Settecento
Morlacchi editore, Perugia, 2005, pp. 313

In quest'opera di Salvatore Bono, che non è l'ultima, si possono seguire le vicende che interessarono nel corso del Settecento il Mediterraneo: specialmente il bacino occidentale, dove avvennero le incursioni corsare barbaresche contro le coste dell'Europa, seguite da altrettanto devastanti incursioni di naviglio corsaro europeo contro le popolazioni del Maghreb.
Bono è uno storico che ha saputo fondere insieme alcuni aspetti della sua attività, fornendoci informazioni a volte di prima mano sugli scontri «sul mare, le catture di uomini e donne da una parte e dall'altra e la conseguente riduzione in schiavitù. Tutti questi fenomeni ebbero peraltro certamente dimensioni minori che non nei secoli precedenti. Proseguirono altrettanto, anzi divennero più frequenti. meglio organizzate e più dotate di mezzi, le missioni per il riscatto degli schiavi cristiani e parimenti si intensificò la pratica degli scambi fra cristiani e musulmani. Un certo numero di schiavi da una parte e dall'altra continuò - come nei secoli precedenti - a 'convertirsi' integrandosi di conseguenza nella società sino allora nemica.
I contrasti che permeavano tutta l'attività dei corsari nel Mediterraneo incrementarono i contatti diplomatici tra le due sponde: di volta in volta furono stipulati patti di pace, convenzioni, tregue e relazioni commerciali, tra i governi europei e i governanti barbareschi. Ma l'assoluta dipendenza dell'economia del Nordafrica dalle rimesse del mercato delle prede (di cui paradossalmente erano fautori e beneficiari i mercanti europei presenti nei porti africani pronti ad acquistare a poco prezzo le mercanzie razziate dai pirati musulmani) rendeva aleatorio il rispetto degli accordi precedentemente stipulati.

Visti vani i tentativi diplomatici, agli europei non restò altro che proporre un rilancio della vecchia pratica corsara adeguandola alle necessità del tempo. S'inaugurò così quella che gli studiosi indicano come la fase statale del fenomeno corsaro. Cioè, lo stato concedeva ai privati licenze per andare in corsa provviste di varie agevolazioni ma legate all'osservanza di precise regole.
I saggi, già editi in riviste e congressi, sono stati quasi tutti rivisitati e il Bono ha «esplicitamente rilevato e 'corretto' valutazioni ed espressioni non più condivise: in altri casi si è trattato di integrazioni e ritocchi, grazie anche a nuove fonti e documenti reperiti attraverso successive ricerche. Questo lavoro di selezione, di rievocazione e soprattutto di riesame, significa e attesta, in primo luogo e senza lasciar adito a dubbio, la lunga continuità di un impegno intellettuale dettato da grande sensibilità per gli avvenimenti storici. È un impegno proficuo, perchè si tratta della sensibilità di un uomo colto che riconduce l'impulso istintivo entro la doverosa organicità di un approccio metodico e di una sistemazione organica degli accadimenti settecenteschi. «La persistente 'presenza' dei barbareschi nel Mediterraneo settecentesco e il paradossale contrasto della convivenza di quegli stati - dall'apparente oscura e statica realtà, quasi anacronistica sopravvivenza di altri secoli con l'Europa dei lumi e la varietà di ricchezza dei suoi 'progressi' aveva attratto l'attenzione del Bono già nei primi anni di ricerca.
La ristampa di alcuni lavori già editi nulla toglie però all'originalità dell'opera, che si rivela un libro coerente nello stile, di facile lettura, scientificamente condotto sulla scorta sia delle testimonianze coeve sia della bibliografia sull'argomento. e nello stesso tempo ricco di colore e di particolari che riescono a riassumere lo spirito del tempo e dei suoi protagonisti.
Altro pregio dell'opera è la precisione e chiarezza cronologica.