The Redeemed Redeemer: Captivity and Ransom of Images of Christ across the Early Modern Mediterranean

In recent years, scholars have explored the multiplicity of human and material exchanges between Spain, Morocco and Algiers in the early modern period. They have revealed the massive circulation of Muslim and Christian captives across the sea and demonstrated that the volume of commerce between Spain and North Africa continued to grow throughout the period. The parallel and dependent distribution and redistribution of non-commercial objects across the sea that this commerce had engendered has hitherto remained little studied.

This talk focuses on one type of such objects – religious and sacred images. The journey of sculptures and images of Christ or the virgin started either when they were exported to the Spanish presidios and from there taken to churches in Maghribi cities or when Muslim corsairs raiding Spanish villages stripped religious images from churches. In Muslim hands the social career of such images took a radical turn as they were mocked publically, transformed into children’s toys or artisans’ tools. Captives negotiated and ransomed these images, and later, upon the captives’ release, they donated the images to a church back home. Images’ homecoming did not mark the end of their career but rather a new transformation. Back home a cult was constructed around the images and a few began miraculously redeeming captives thereby manifesting their own complicated history of capture and ransom. By focusing on two surviving sculptures of Christ, the talk seeks to reconstruct Mediterranean pathways of religious images and analyze shifts in their meaning and function, in order to understand how visual culture artifacts mediated social relations between Muslims and Christians.