ABSTRACT
“[T]he whip of the Christian World” is the highly graphic metaphor with which Samuel Purchas (278) refers to the Muslim pirates on North Africa’s notorious Barbary Coast in his famous 1625 collection of travel narratives. This pejorative epithet encapsulates a major geopolitical yet religiously coded threat that made Europe tremble for large parts of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries – a danger that today’s readers of early modern texts easily overlook. For example, most of us, as casual readers of Robinson Crusoe, fail to notice that the protagonist’s metaphorical imprisonment as a castaway on a secluded island is preceded by real imprisonment in the hands of Muslim pirates in Salé, Morocco (see Figure I.1). After two years as a white slave in North Africa, he is eventually able to escape and regain his freedom. Robinson Crusoe, the protagonist of the first major English novel, shares the fate of enslavement by Muslim pirates with the first major European novelist, Miguel de Cervantes (see Figure I.2). The author of Don Quijote spent five years as a slave in Algiers and attempted four futile escapes before he was ransomed with money from his parents and the Trinitarian Order (Garcés, Cervantes).
