In the darkness, the strange men came ashore. Gliding through the stillness of the night, they made their way to the peaceful village as it slept—and then, chaos. Wakened from their slumber, the villagers of Gola de la Albufera opened their eyes to the presence of invaders with foreign faces and an alien language. The raiders had caught the village completely by surprise. The clashing of weapons and the sounds of shouted orders drowned out the cries of alarm and screams of panic coming from the houses and streets of the little community. In the ensuing struggle, some villagers...

For those captives who survived the initial capture and the hurried flight that followed, a hard life awaited. At best, they became hostages waiting for embassies and ransomers to come and rescue them. At worst, they were slaves, strangers in a foreign land, torn from family and friends, toiling daily in the harshest labor, underfed, at times mistreated, sometimes brutally. For the majority it was a life they would never escape in spite of the best efforts of their families and others in the Crown of Aragon. This chapter will study the conditions experienced by captives in their daily lives....

In May 1395 John I, king of Aragon, ordered the Mercedarians in his kingdom to dispatch a mission to Bone in North Africa as ″quickly as possible.″ The king had ″heard from many″ about many Christians in captivity there, suffering terrible conditions and in danger of losing their faith.¹ Just two years later, Johnʹs brother and successor, Martin the Humane, wrote a similarly concerned letter to his young nephew Henry III, king of Castile. In the letter, Martin tells Henry how he had recently learned that several Castilian subjects languished in captivity, under ″such oppression and despair″ that they were...

When a Christian fell into captivity, a complex network composed of ransomers, crown and ecclesiastical officials, merchants, and sea captains was set in motion to set the captive free. Due to the myriad reasons explored in the first part of this book, the Crown of Aragon had developed one of the most elaborate ransoming systems in Christian Europe by the fourteenth century. To examine more closely how it functioned we will have to wander from the royal court to merchant houses, from the parish churches to the houses of the ransoming orders, and from the homes of ordinary Christians to...

Besides the response that captivity generated from the victimsʹ families and close associates, there were also communal and institutional responses. Town councils, royal officials, confraternities, religious figures and, of course, the crown often took up the plight of captives on their own. Although the primary responsibility for ransoming captives rested with the family, the larger Christian community was also bound to do all in its power to bring about their release.¹ This chapter will examine the efforts of the Christian community to help captives. These activities ranged from truce agreements to retaliatory raids designed to capture Muslims or rescue prisoners...

The image depicted by Ramond Llull in Blanquerna repeated itself many times over in the cities of the Crown of Aragon: captives and their families begging to pay off a ransoming debt or to secure the liberation of a loved one. Their pleas were augmented by the begging work of the ransoming orders, the church, and individual municipalities. Their combined efforts collected the huge sums of money that ransoms demanded from a Christian populace that was well inclined to give alms to the needy. In this way, captivity afflicted not only the captive and his family. Nor was it solely...