In The Captive Sea , Daniel Hershenzon explores the entangled histories of Muslim and Christian captives—and, by extension, of the Spanish Empire, Ottoman Algiers, and Morocco—in the seventeenth century to argue that piracy, captivity, and redemption helped shape the Mediterranean as an integrated region at the social, political, and economic levels. Despite their confessional differences, the lives of captives and captors alike were connected in a political economy of ransom and communication networks shaped by Spanish, Ottoman, and Moroccan rulers; ecclesiastic institutions; Jewish, Muslim, and Christian intermediaries; and the captives themselves, as well as their kin. Hershenzon offers both a comprehensive analysis of competing projects for maritime dominance and a granular investigation of how individual lives were tragically upended by these agendas. He takes a close look at the tightly connected and ultimately failed attempts to ransom an Algerian Muslim girl sold into slavery in Livorno in 1608; the son of a Spanish marquis enslaved by pirates in Algiers and brought to Istanbul, where he converted to Islam; three Spanish Trinitarian friars detained in Algiers on the brink of their departure for Spain in the company of Christians they had redeemed; and a high-ranking Ottoman official from Alexandria, captured in 1613 by the Sicilian squadron of Spain. Examining the circulation of bodies, currency, and information in the contested Mediterranean, Hershenzon concludes that the practice of ransoming captives, a procedure meant to separate Christians from Muslims, had the unintended consequence of tightly binding Iberia to the Maghrib. "[A] thoroughly researched, clearly structured, convincingly argued and richly documented monograph on slavery in the early modern western Mediterranean . . . It is time to follow the stories of how enslaved people shaped the communities at home and abroad, and Hershenzon's book will be an indispensable part of this enterprise." ― Bulletin of Spanish Studies "The breadth and depth of research, the insight with which Hershenzon draws out the significance of the sources, and the clarity of his writing all make this an impressive and convincing book." ― Bulletin for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies "Daniel Hershenzon persuasively shows how captivity both tore slaves from their communities and connected those communities across the Western Mediterranean. Extensively researched and bracingly argued, The Captive Sea demonstrates the agency and impact of captives in an enduringly entangled Mediterranean world." ― Barbara Fuchs, University of California, Los Angeles "A serious, probing look at early modern Mediterranean slavery. Daniel Hershenzon locates new and highly personalized sources within the vast bureaucratic archives of Spain and then wields them to identify and theorize the expectations and logics of behavior that underlay the captives' struggles to obtain freedom." ― James Amelang, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid Daniel Hershenzon is Associate Professor of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages at the University of Connecticut. Introduction In 1608, Genoese naval forces took a thirteen-year-old Algerian girl named Fatima captive and sold her into slavery in Livorno, Italy. Her father almost succeeded in ransoming her that same year, but the ship that would have returned her to Algiers stopped in Corsica, where Fatima was forcibly converted and baptized as "Madalena." In an unrelated incident, also in 1608, Algerian pirates captured Diego de Pacheco, illegitimate son of the Spanish Marquis de Villena, and enslaved him in Algiers. While a captive, Pacheco was taken to Istanbul where, after attempting and failing to arrange his ransom, he converted to Islam. Piecing together these Mediterranean episodes from the archives leads to a third story beginning just a year after the capture of Fatima and Pacheco. In 1609, three Spanish Trinitarian friars were on the brink of departing for Spain with Christians they had redeemed from the Maghrib when the Algerian Governing Council detained them. All three friars and many of the captives they had redeemed would die in captivity. Meanwhile in 1613, the Sicilian squadron of Spain captured Muhammad Bey, a high-ranking Ottoman official from Alexandria. Negotiations over his ransom failed, and Muhammad died in his prison cell in Sicily. At first glance, though they all occurred within a five-year period and in the same geographic area, these stories do not seem to have much to do with one another. Yet these different Mediterranean trajectories intersected and had strong effects on one another, whether through their ransom negotiations, for example, or in that one captive was taken as revenge for the imprisonment of another. These episodes overlap not only in how each individual was situated in relation to the other by captors and redeemers but also in the way that information about each case was transmitted across