But we have not finished with people. Slavery had to be reckoned with, and therefore ransoms. More than one refers to the "malcontents" of the Low Countries, unpaid Spanish garrison-soldiers who wandered about on the look-out for Englishmen in particular, and esteeming a younger brother's ransom at twenty thousand crowns of the sun [£35,000], says Wotton. But the risk of capture, in the ordinary way, was confined to Mohammedan territory and the neighbouring seashores, with Algiers as headquarters. Many men who were slaves there at this period have left record of their adventures; of whom Gramaye is perhaps the best to quote from, inasmuch as no one was a more acute, thorough, and trustworthy observer. He lived at Algiers in 1619, one of twenty thousand Christian slaves. According to the statistics he gives of the previous twelve years, two hundred and fifty-one ships had brought in twelve thousand, two hundred and forty prisoners, of whom eight hundred and fifty-seven Germans had apostatised, three hundred English, one hundred and thirty-eight from Hamburg, "Danes and Easterlings" one hundred and sixty; Poles, Hungarians, and Muscovites two hundred and fifty, Low Countrymen one hundred and thirty; besides French and others. Fewest renegades came from Spain and Italy, because in those two countries alone were permanent systematic collectors of money for ransoms; the two orders of the Trinity and of Our Lady of Pity paid out sixty-three thousand ducats [over £70,000], in this way yearly, a drain of gold which does not seem to have been taken into account by economists, although not counteracted, but on the contrary increased, by trade transactions with Mohammedan centres like Constantinople and Aleppo, and added to by all the privately paid ransoms. Sir Anthony Sherley ransomed two Portuguese gentlemen for ten thousand pounds, who had been enslaved sixteen years, and for one of whom three ransoms had been sent, each of which had been captured by pirates. The statement already made about all forms of life insurance being censured as gambling must be modified in connection with slavery, for both the law and public opinion approved of a man paying premiums to assure a ransom being paid, and that promptly, in the event of his capture; and the system seems to have been in frequent use,[148] although it must be admitted that not one of these travellers seems so much as aware of its existence.
The expenses of protection against pirates may be imagined from the estimate for the outfit of the galley intended to carry the Provençal deputation to Constantinople in 1585, referred to earlier. The galley-slaves numbered two hundred; the deputation fifty. Sixty soldiers were to be taken for defence, whose wages for the eight months were to be nineteen hundred and twenty crowns of the sun; in addition to which was their keep, nine thousand and forty crowns, and arms and gunpowder, five hundred crowns, the total equalling about twenty-seven thousand pounds of our money.
Of Turkey Sir Henry Blount says that in assuring himself against loss of liberty lay "the most expense and trouble of my voyage." And Blount's opinion is the better worth having, seeing that he would have been the last to fail in the exercise of courtesy and tact, the absence of which is the commonest cause of martyrdom. Several times he had to use his knife to avoid being pushed into a house, and hardly a day passed without his Janizary being offered a price for him. His defences against it in general were to cultivate or buy friends and to make a practice of pretending he had no friends and little money, and that all that remained to him was wagered against his return, because enslavement would be more in hope of ransom than service.
The enslavement of the Jerusalem pilgrim seems to have been comparatively rare before the end of the sixteenth century; yet two of the most striking narratives belong to the year 1565. The first adventure, however, happened during an excursion to Jordan without escort, a risk that none dreamt of running later. A German, named Fürer, set out in February, with a friend, a eunuch-interpreter, and a monk-guide. Sitting down to a meal on the way back, four Arabs appeared, whom they treated as guests; yet, the meal over, the Arabs enquired whether their hosts had any money or garments worth stealing. Doubting their negatives, they undressed them, and beneath the monkish outer-garment which each one was wearing discovered on the two travellers underclothing which suggested riches. The Arabs forthwith led all four away into the desert to sell them at Medina, but were induced before long to despatch the monk with two of themselves to the nearest monastery, that of S. Saba, some hours' journey from Jerusalem, for ransom. The remaining three Franks, unarmed, chose their time to attack the two armed Arabs, and after a desperate fight and a fearful journey, wounded, parched, and famished, Fürer climbed up a rope-ladder into the monastery through one of the back-windows, while the two other Arabs were being kept waiting in the front.
The other tale concerns sixty-two pilgrims who sailed from Jaffa in the August of that same year.[149] On October 16 they were shipwrecked off the coast of Asia Minor, one being drowned. On landing six were killed, the rest taken prisoners, a proportion of whom go to Rhodes. These are urged to apostatise—in vain. They offer ransoms; Frau Johanna of Antwerp three hundred ducats [£540], Pastor Peter Villingen three hundred and twelve kronen [which may mean anything from £200 to £800; probably the former]: the total came to three thousand, two hundred and sixty kronen. This does not seem enough to their owners; the Venetian and some sailors get free somehow; the others are sent to the galleys. During 1566 Frau Johanna and six others die. By May 1, 1568, seven more are dead; two have been redeemed for six hundred kronen; two others for four hundred and eighty kronen. Soon after, an Italian was ransomed by the Venetian "bailo." This is all that is known of the sixty-two.
A SOUVENIR
Another risk that was greater on the Jerusalem journey was that of disease, or enfeeblement through hardship. The state of things normal in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre must alone have told on health; one German on his return to Jaffa counted two hundred and thirty lice in his clothes. But, throughout, disease lay in wait for all in a deadlier form than any we meet with. Just as instead of "nerves" they suffered from "inflammation of the conscience," so, instead of influenza, they had plague, infectious in the highest degree and fatal in a few days, or quicker. In Constantinople it was looked on as inevitable and raged unhindered. Yet, says Blount, the Turks' carelessness was less of a hindrance to trade than the Christians' precautions. In Venice, over the doors of the inn-bedrooms was written "Ricordati della bolletta"—"Remember your bill of health." This "bolletta," or "bolletina," also known as "fede" or "patente," had to be obtained, before entering Venice, from the "commissari" or "soprastanti della sanità," certifying freedom from plague; failing which, or if a "fede" obtained elsewhere was not "clean," i. e. not bearing the official counter-signatures guaranteeing freedom from plague at the last stopping-places, the new-comer had to "far la contumacia," go into quarantine for forty days. The disinfectants consisted of sun, air, and vinegar, and the confinement, if not on board ship, was in a spot chosen for its pleasant healthiness, under shelter which was clean, roomy, and well furnished, with a broad verandah on which one's belongings were to be laid out. This practice was constant at Venice, where ships were always arriving from plague-stricken ports; in the rest of Italy it was frequent but intermittent. Outside Italy a plague-scare occurred more rarely. When it did the healthy but tired wayfarers might find themselves shut out of the town where they looked to find food and rest; perhaps would find the highway itself barricaded[150] by the authorities of a town which was plague-free and determined to remain so, and forced to ride all night by dark and dangerous by-ways[151]—unless they pretended to be an ambassador and his retinue, as some English merchants once did.
Too much stress must not be laid on the troubles of a stranger who fell ill of a less deadly illness. Perhaps, even, a German with the toothache might still have the same experience in Spain as did a countryman of his three hundred years ago. Having tried a cupping-glass himself in vain, he went to the local barber-surgeon; the latter dug the tooth out with a bread-knife! Yet in hospitals a change for the better can be easily proved. The chief hospital at Paris, the Hôtel-Dieu, was visited by an Italian[152] in the middle of the seventeenth century. Three or four men lay in each bed, or two women; and the stench was terrible, even to a seventeenth-century nose. At the galley-slaves' hospital at Marseilles, a boy went in front of visitors with a "pan of perfume." Still more to the point, regarding this particular period, was the predicament of a man at the point of death in a district with a different theological stamp from his own, say, a Protestant in a Roman Catholic country. He would then have the choice of accepting the sacrament in the locally orthodox form or confessing himself a Protestant. In the latter case the priest might cut the heretic off from the help, not only of the doctor, but of the cook also, and if he recovered in spite of this, the Inquisition might be awaiting him. And yet a man of average morality would be far less of an adiaphorist in the sixteenth century than to-day. Some Protestants at Venice resigned themselves at death to the only cemetery-burial—that with Roman Catholic rites; but most chose to be buried at sea off Malamocco, trusting in the phrase, "And the sea shall give up its dead."