Unveiling Networks: Slavery and the European ENcounter with Islamic Material Culture (1580–1700)

Introduction

From the late sixteenth century, enslaved Muslims were found across Mediterranean Europe, hosted in all major port towns in France, Spain, and Italy. Mainly North Africans, Turks, and Moriscos seized in the Mediterranean during the skirmishes between Christian and Ottoman forces, their movements and activities left traces across many European and Middle Eastern archives.

Some were sold to become domestic slaves, some were traded in exchange for Christian prisoners in Islamic lands, while the majority were employed to row on board the galleys. Their hybrid position, spanning geographical and cultural boundaries, allowed them to move across two worlds, in some cases literally importing goods and medical remedies from Islamic lands to Europe. During periods of non-navigation, they were allowed on land to set up shops and sell to the local population, in a virtually unexplored phenomenon of cross-cultural exchange.

Project Overview

This transnational and interdisciplinary project will investigate an array of sources in five countries, three continents, and seven languages, spanning from archival documents, printed sources, literary evidence, and material survivals across Europe and the Middle East.

Goals

Its goal is to recover the role of Muslim slaves in the transmission of Islamic material culture, techniques, and medical practices to Europe in the early modern period.

Methodology

UNSEEN will bring for the first time under a unifying macro-narrative of Mediterranean global history the myriad of single local micro-histories fragmented along regional, linguistic, and disciplinary divides. An ERC Starting Grant will allow a team of researchers to:

1. Analyse the bountiful traces left by those enslaved individuals in Spanish, French, Italian, English, Latin, Ottoman, and Arabic sources.
2. Reassign to them the role of triggers of the first European engagement with the artistic, technical, and medical production of the Islamic world.
3. Place them at the centre of a Mediterranean-wide knowledge network.