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106 three Dangerous Passage Pirates, Robbers, Captives, and Slaves ❧ The fascination of early modern media with Imre Thököly and Friedrich von Schomberg found expression not only in newspapers but also in broadsheets, pamphlets, biographies, and, as examined in this study, novels. This fascination was based not only on the notoriety of these two men, their “star quality,” but also on the fact that they represented an early modern form of globalization, of acting in the context of multiple cultural contacts—a circumstance that makes the seventeenth century so similar, in many ways, to our own. These contacts had many origins: the wars that, beginning with the Thirty Years’ War, roiled all of Europe; the hegemonic efforts and successes of the Sublime Porte throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; and the burgeoning trade fueled by the competition between the major seagoing nations and trading companies, including the trade in slaves and ivory.1 In an expansion that was simultaneously feeding and benefiting from this development, the rapidly growing markets for and consumption of media inspired the amalgamation of fact and fiction in Happel’s novels, the subject of this study. Ego-documents—both (auto)biographies and letters by individuals2 who had spent extended periods of time in foreign cultures, whether 1. Jürgen Osterhammel and Niels P. Petersson, Globalization: A Short History, trans. Dona Geyer (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 31–49. See also Faruk Tabak, The Waning of the Mediterranean, 1550–1870 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), especially 1–29. 2. Winfried Schulze, “Ego-Dokumente: Annäherung an den Menschen in der Geschichte? Vorüberlegungen für die Tagung “EGO-DOKUMENTE,” in Ego-Dokumente: Annäherung an den Menschen in der Geschichte, ed. Winfried Schulze (Berlin: Akademie, 1996). Dangerous Passage • 107 as travelers, missionaries, captives, or slaves—tell many tales of experiencing contact with the cultural Other. Captivity narratives (discussed in this chapter), collections of news reports, and travelogues excerpted and redeployed in new collections of travel narratives and translated into multiple languages—all of these found their way into Happel’s writings, whether his collections of news or his novels. That people all across Europe were eagerly reading about this multifaceted Other testifies to the broadening of mental and geographic horizons experienced by even the most sedentary reader.3 One of the ego-documents that circulated widely and in several languages during the second half of the seventeenth century was the autobiography of Emmanuel D’Aranda, a Spaniard from Flanders (Spanish Netherlands ), who told of his capture by pirates, sale into slavery, and five years spent in Algerian captivity.4 Johann Frisch, the German translator/editor of D’Aranda’s autobiography, explains in his foreword that although he never visited Algiers in person, he made every effort to present to the reader a realistic impression of “die Beschaffenheit/ auch der Barbarn/ insonderheit derer zu Algiers Zustand und Gelegenheit” (the way the people of Barbary live, especially those in Algiers) and to move the reader to “Mitleiden gegen die Schlaven” (pity toward the slaves [dedication, 4–5]).5 Beyond this immediate emotional appeal, D’Aranda’s tale was to evoke for the reader who had never left Hamburg, let alone visited Algiers, the city and its sights. In his foreword, Frisch assures the reader that he had checked the document’s facts with persons familiar with Algiers, in an effort to make sure that all locales mentioned in the text were correctly entered on the city map, “wo dieses oder jenes zufinden” (where this and that can be found). Happel mentions D’Aranda by name and comments on the circumstances of his captivity in two of his novels, the Spanische Quintana (1686) 3. Bernhard Klein, “Randfiguren: Othello, Oroonoka und die kartographische Repräsentation Afrikas,” in Imaginationen des Anderen im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert, ed. Ina Schabert and Michaela Boenke (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz , 2002), 185–217; Magnus Ressel, “Hamburger Sklavenhändler als Sklaven in Westafrika,” Zeitschrift des Vereins für Hamburgische Geschichte 96 (2011): 33–34. 4. Johann Frisch, ed., Der Schauplatz Barbarischer Schlaverey/ eröffnet durch J. F. (Altona: Victor de Löw, 1666), http://diglib.hab.de/drucke/gw-162/start.htm. The text is divided into three parts, beginning with D’Aranda’s account (part 1). Parts 2 and 3 intermittently mention D’Aranda’s experiences, which he recounts in the first person; other tales seem to be taken from additional sources relating to Algiers and the business and culture of slave trading. 5. Johann Frisch...

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