Technologies of Devotion and Religious Cooperation in the Mediterranean, 18th-20th Century

Daniel Hershenzon^*

The travel account-cum-captivity narrative was among the most popular literary genres of early modern Europe. Drawing on his own years of captivity in Algiers, Miguel de Cervantes, arguably the most celebrated writer in the Spanish canon, both engaged with and shaped the genre. In narratives that revolve around captivity, including Cervantes’s plays and prose works, the first dramatic climax often arrives with the sudden razzia of Maghrebi corsairs upon vulnerable European coastal communities. Villagers awaken to a terrifying cacophony of shouts, cannon fire, flames, looting, and abduction. Alongside their human captives, the raiders seize whatever valuables they can find, especially those housed in local churches, while desecrating what remains. Reciprocity has no place in this script; violence flows in a single direction.

I was therefore surprised when I opened for the first time a 600-page scholarly edition, published in 1946, of a manuscript titled Redemptions of Captives in Africa authored between 1723 and 1725 by Melchor García Navarro.^[1] He was a Mercedarian friar belonging to one of the two religious orders charged with redeeming Christians held captive in the Maghrib. I must have purchased the volume during research I conducted for my first book at least a decade ago. Like my colleagues, I collect more sources than I could ever study, and indeed, this volume remained immaculate, its pages still uncut, waiting for a paper knife to open them. Lacking one, I resorted to a kitchen knife. Soon I found myself captivated by a brief paragraph describing an encounter between García Navarro, a number of his fellow Mercedarians, a certain ‘Moor’ (‘moro’), the site keepers of the church, and the sanctuary of Santa Rosalia, the patron saint of Sicily.

The sanctuary lies at the foot of Mount Pellegrino just outside Palermo. It was built in 1624, and it is believed to be the saint’s resting place after her death in 1166. In 1725, the Mercedarian friar Melchor García Navarro and his fellow friars arrived in Sicily, charged by church with rescuing Catholics held captive in the Maghrib. They aimed to pick up an enslaved ‘Moor’ and exchange him for a Sicilian priest held captive in Tunis. The Mercedarians did not miss the opportunity to pay a call to the sanctuary. García Navarro briefly memorialized their visit in his account of the redemption expedition he carried out that year. He reported that in the sanctuary in Mount Pelegrino, the monks responsible for maintaining the saint’s hilltop shrine gifted the friars and ‘Moor’ small prints of the saint and soil from her shrine. To the astonishment of the friars—not to mention my own—the ‘Moor’ explained that Santa Rosalia was holy to both Christians and Muslims. According to the guardian monks: 

García Navarro’s account is consistent with evidence from other shrines that Muslims and Christians similarly shared in Spain, Morocco, Tunis, and other parts of the Mediterranean. His exceptional account offers unusual insight into our understanding of a vernacular repertoire of devotional technologies made of highly malleable cheap matter like dust, dirt, or soil. The efficacy, exchange, and circulation of wax ex-votos and amuletic soil depended not so much on their distance from the source of baraka that activated votos or amulets, but rather upon cooperation, good faith, and the suspension of religious violence between alleged sworn enemies, Muslims and Christians. 

Captivity, loss, and trauma were painful realities for such villagers, but travel-captivity accounts obscured others. García Navarro’s tale shows non-violent Muslim engagement with the European mainland. In his account, the corsairs break away from established scripts that Mediterranean politics and captivity narratives routinely assigned pirates and their victims. In fact, in the guardian’s telling, the corsairs become pilgrims who risk captivity by Christians to visit a Christian sanctuary. Bitter foes follow a dramatically different set of stage directions, making all effort not to step on each other’s toes. 

The goals of the custodians and pirates only partly overlapped. The custodians sought to boost the site’s prestige, while the pirates were interested in securing their lives, freedom, and health. The success of their respective goals required the temporary suspension of violence, balanced gift-giving, and transmission of carefully measured signals that indicated the boundary beyond which the encounter might fail. Pirates and guardians, Muslims and Catholics—both had to place trust in each another and act in good faith. Their goals stood in tension. The success of the ex-votos and amulets boosted the site’s prestige among the wrong clients—that is, Muslims—and protected them, thus providing aid for their clashes against Christians.  

The fact that the author left the narration of this vignette to the sanctuary keepers to relate is telling. It functions as a literary strategy that bestows credibility on the narrators. In fact, the custodians are more than just narrators. They are protagonists, firsthand eyewitnesses, and a voice for the pirates turned pilgrims. By assigning the function of the narrator to the custodians and by expressing his own surprise upon hearing the sanctuary was shared, the author, García Navarro, helps his readers accept the account as factual. In other words, if the guardians insist the Muslims did not desecrate the site or threatened it, then their story must be true. If they take pride in the inclusivity of the site under their charge, its ability to quell the fiercest enemies, then García Navarro has all legitimacy to repeat the story as an unchallenged truth.

It is time to turn to the exchange at the center of the vignette. What exactly was swapped, by whom, and under which conditions? Two technologies of devotion were in play: ex-votos and amulets. The first comes in two modalities, that of giving thanks and that of seeking grace. They comprise two stages of one cycle. Believers seeking grace vowed to give gratitude should the saint intercede on their behalf; others who won the desired intercession gave the thanks they had promised. The vow sometimes had mimetic qualities, as with the maritime ex-votos made by Algerian seafarer and their families, which I discussed in my CSSH article, but it did not need to. 

The second technology was the amulet. Like the vow, it could contain mimetic elements, letters, signs, or texts that activated the matter or paper of which it was formed. In this case, soil believed to have touched the decomposing body of the saint became a nonmimetic contact relic and activated the amulet with a therapeutic or invigorating power. In early Islam, believers would shape soil and dirt from Mecca and Medina into a tablet to wear around their necks. They sometimes also mixed it with straw to create a handle for carrying.^[3]

The amuletic technology raises questions regarding the therapeutic efficacy of the soil. The sanctuary of Santa Rosalia was the kind of place that possessed the power to charge the most ordinary matter, namely soil, with sacredness. This power was the result of the incorporation of the saint’s body in the soil in which it was buried. The soil that pilgrims received or collected at the sanctuary was not merely soil, then, but a contact relic made into an amulet. Historians have documented in other places and periods the fear that the power of soil or dust amulets diminished with time. In the sanctuary of Santa Rosalia, the fear seemed to concern the diminishing efficacy of the soil in relation to distance rather than to time. What was the relationship between the collected soil’s proximity to the saint’s body or its precise burial site, on the one hand, and the power of the soil to activate the amulet, on the other? 

The question was pertinent. Given the popularity of the sanctuary and the quantities of soil taken by pilgrims it is highly likely that the shrine’s keepers routinely moved soil from areas of the hill further away from the body to its specific burial place. If so, did not this circulation, emptying and refilling dilute the power of the soil to enact the therapeutic and healing qualities associated with it? According to the narrator, the Muslim pilgrims were not worried about that: “they [took] away soil, which they preserved and venerated solely because it originates from that very spot.” The Muslim pilgrims were less worried that the distance damaged the soil’s baraka. Yet the narrator assures his audience that these exceptional pilgrims had to settle for soil distanced from the actual grave: “the [‘Moors’] climbed up the mountain until they got as near as they could to the sanctuary without taking a risk [to be caught].” The soil they collected was far from the actual sanctuary, of lesser efficacy and lower value.

In the early modern period, texts such as those of Cervantes and García Navarro served a practical purpose: they encouraged readers to donate alms to religious orders charged with redeeming Christians held captive in the Maghrib. As I reflected on García Navarro’s literary strategies, I began to wonder: why would a mid-twentieth-century scholar undertake the laborious editing of a lengthy manuscript that had lost its original function and lacked the literary quality that had secured Cervantes’s place in the canon? It dawned on me that the publication of his Redemption of Captives in Africa in 1946 was itself motivated by a certain political constellation. 

In 1946, Morocco remained under Spanish and French colonial rule and Franco’s dictatorship was entering its tenth year. The purge of liberal universities in Spain was still underway, while new academic institutions staffed by regime loyalists emerged in their place. The scholarly edition of García Navarro’s manuscript was published by the Instituto Jerónimo Zurita, a research center founded under the auspices of the newly created Spanish National Research Council (CSIC). The work of García Navarro and its concern with the redemption of Christian captives resonated with the image Francoist Spain sought to project about itself: a devout Catholic nation committed to protecting its faith. The publication of García Navarro’s manuscript invited readers to perceive a continuity between the Catholic Monarchy of the early modern period and Franco’s Spain.

But there may have been more continuity than the editor of the scholarly edition realized. Rather than depicting an irreconcilable struggle between Christianity and Islam, García Navarro’s vignette about the sanctuary of Santa Rosalia reveals forms of cooperation, trust, and shared devotion that unsettled the unforgiving oppositions on which early modern Spanish captivity narratives and colonial ideologies often depended. This tension is particularly striking when compared to Spanish colonial rule in northern Morocco. For example, whereas the French protectorate largely relied on strategies of divide and rule, Spanish colonial discourse frequently emphasized the supposed fraternity of Spaniards and Moroccans as two traditional, monotheistic peoples united by a shared historical destiny in contrast with the atheists of the Spanish left. Indeed, from a year after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936 until the mid-1950s, Franco’s regime financed and transported Moroccan pilgrims to the Hajj aboard Spanish naval vessels, presenting itself as a protector of Islam and a benevolent guardian of Morocco’s religious traditions.^[4]

García Navarro’s account unexpectedly echoes aspects of that discourse while simultaneously exceeding it. The Muslim visitors to the sanctuary of Santa Rosalia are neither enemies nor colonial subjects, but pilgrims participating in a sacred world shared across confessional boundaries. The publication of his manuscript in 1946 brought together two distant historical alternatives about how to tell the story of the relationship between Spain, North Africa, Christianity, and Islam, and neither are fully able to resolve the ambiguities therein.

^*I’d like to thank Ana Struillou, who read an early version of this text, and Lakshmi Ramgopal, who helped me think through its arguments.

^[1] Melchor, García Navarro, Redenciones de cautivos en Africa (1723-1725), Ed. Manuel, Vásquez Pájaro (Madrid: Instituto Jerónimo Zurita, 1946).

^[2] García Navarro, Redenciones, 274.

^[3] On soil, dust, and dirt amulets, see: Christiane Gruber, “The Prophet as a Sacred Ottoman Hilye Bottles” in Eds. Denis Gril, Stefan Reichmuth, and Dilek Sarmis, The Present of the Prophet in Early Modern and Contemporary Islam: Vol. 1. The Prophet Between Doctrine, Literature and Arts: Historical Legacies and Their Unfolding (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2022), 501-535 here 559-560; Finbarr Barry Flood, Technologies de devotion dans les arts de l’Islam. pèlerins, reliques et copies (Paris: Hazan/Musée du Louvre, 2019), 79-97.

^[4] Eric Calderwood, Colonial Al-Andalus: Spain and the Making of Modern Moroccan Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018). 142-207.

Daniel Hershenzon is an Associate Professor at the University of Connecticut. His research focuses on slavery and material culture in the early modern western Mediterranean. He is the author of The Captive Sea: Slavery, Communication, and Commerce in Early Modern Spain and the Mediterranean, as well as articles in Past & Present, Annales-HSS, The Journal of Early Modern History, and other journals.