Early Book Collections | Ephemeral Renaissance

Barbary Coast Pamphleteering, 1664

During the summer of 1664, under the leadership of César de Bourbon, the Duke of Beaufort, French forces captured Chicher, a Moorish stronghold on the Barbary coast. Knights from the Order of San Juan of Malta, the Catholic religio-military order regularly deployed against Ottoman and Muslim forces, joined the cause and were crucial to the French victory. This pamphlet provides a punchy, four-page narrative of the conflict from the perspective of a Maltese knight. The Valendian printer Geronimo Vilagrasa published this compact and thrilling account for a Spanish Catholic audience immediately following the events. Ostensibly an eyewitness account by an otherwise anonymous Maltese knight, the pamphlet does little to extol the exploit of the main French force, instead emphasizing the Order of San Juan’s heroic feats and eminence as the protectors of the Catholic faith.

The pamphlet spares no time placing Spanish readers from all social ranks into the thick of the battle. The campaign began on July 17 as French and Maltese forces departed from Port Mahón on the island of Menorca. The forces consisted of thirty-three warships, twenty-six merchant ships carrying infantry, eight galleys, and the squadron manned by members of the Order of San Juan. Six days later, on July 23, the soldiers arrived at the Chicher stronghold, and a fierce battle ensued lasting several days. In the initial hours of the battle, the Muslim forces held the fort and seemed to have the upper hand until, according to this pamphlet, the captain of the Maltese knights, Leandro Salvador, opened a passage through which the French forces could surround the stronghold. The next day the combined Catholic forces nearly lost their advantage, which the account blames on the neglect of their allied French force. Captain Salvador and his knights of San Juan once more intervened to maintain the larger Catholic army’s position and save the day. On July 29, nearly a week after the first skirmish, the combined French and Maltese forces captured Chicher.

The French and Maltese attack on Chicher was part of a broader French imperial project. Beginning in 1660, several years before the battle outlined in this pamphlet, Louis XIV, the “Sun King,” established a Galley Corps that, as historian Paul Bamford has argued, expanded his royal control by effectively nationalizing his scattered armed forces, and emboldened his image as the quintessential defender of the Catholic faith. By 1690, three decades later, the crown had assembled largest European galley force in the Mediterranean Sea. While knights of San Juan only began to serve on these galleys around the 1680s, as early as 1663 Louis had sent a mission to Malta to solicit technical advice about the formation of his navy. Building upon that broader historical context, it becomes clearer that an allied purpose of this newsletter account was the representation of the men of the French navy as greenhorns who had yet to embody the full imperial might of the French Bourbon monarchy’s presumed absolute power. This pamphlet, appearing from the sunny shores of Valencia, was an instrument of propaganda designed to smile upon the Habsburg monarchs of the Spanish Empire who were similarly interested in maintaining their own long-standing naval power over the western Mediterranean.

During the seventeenth century, corsairs captained by officers of all religious backgrounds raided one another’s shores in search of hapless captives. The Spanish and French navies were equally invested in successfully ransoming their own subjects captured by Barbary corsairs, and also sponsored religious orders—most notably the Mercedarians and Trinitarians—to raise funds, in turn, that could be used to rescue captured Christians. The corsairs that raided Christian shores were largely associated with the Ottoman Empire while, conversely, the Knights of Malta repeatedly raided the ships and ports of the Ottoman Empire, capturing Greek Orthodox, Jewish, and Muslim Ottoman subjects.

Although they were not under the direct authority of the Spanish Crown, the Knights of Malta owed much of their success to Spanish support. The Order of San Juan was an incarnation of the Knights Hospitaller of Jerusalem, a Catholic military order that emerged during the twelfth century following the Christian conquest of Jerusalem (1099 CE) amid the First Crusade. The Order of San Juan appeared later during the fourteenth century when they managed to occupy the strategic island of Rhodes. While there, the knights of San Juan developed an imposing maritime force and began to attack vulnerable Muslim coastal possessions. By 1522, the Ottoman Sultan Süleyman conquered Rhodes, leaving the knights without a central base or home.

As a remedy, Carlos V, both the king of Spain and the Holy Roman Emperor, gave the knights the island of Malta. Thirty-three years later, a large Ottoman force attempted to repeat their victory at Rhodes, besieging the Malta, though the gathered knights successfully withstood that attack for four months, until Spanish forces struck out from Sicily and drove away the Muslim army. Afterwards, Spaniards began to fill the ranks of the order, its members often ransoming and liberating captured Catholics throughout the Islamic world. Later, in the epic 1571 Battle of Lepanto between a combined Catholic League and the Ottoman navy, the knights again played a critical role. Nearly a century later, for the Spaniards who read this pamphlet, particularly those in western Mediterranean coastal cities like Valencia, news of the Maltese knights’ continued victories allayed fears of further Muslim incursions that might threaten Iberian shores.

In the broadest sense, this pamphlet stands as a perfect example the ubiquitous relaciones pamphlet tradition through which most Spanish subjects received their news, particularly about international events. It is adorned with an intricate and eye-catching headpiece woodcut that dominates the titlepage. With the advent of international trade roots and the creation of state-sponsored postal networks, news pamphlets such as this soon formed a crucial medium through which diplomats, soldiers, state officials, and religious authorities could report, shape, and move information across all of early modern Europe at speed.

Within the context of the information culture of the far-flung global Spanish Empire, this pamphlet constitutes a militaristic sub-genre of a broader category of ephemeral print commonly referred to as relaciones de sucesos, or “reports of events.” Rarely exceeding ten to twelve pages, and often far fewer than that, they were rarely bound, irregularly printed, and frequently discarded once the news they relayed had become obsolete, leading to extremely low survival rates. When individual relaciones such as this appear in the antiquarian book market, they are often unrecorded in any known copy.

Major urban centers like Seville, Valencia, Barcelona, and Madrid often constituted the primary centers for ephemeral newsprint in seventeenth-century Spain. During the second half of the century, printers, particularly in the crucial southern port city of Seville, proliferated relaciones de sucesos like this one, detailing Spain’s various military expeditions, particularly those conducted at sea. Invariably, in addition to accounts of events often favorable to, and biased towards, the role of Spanish Catholics, they also asserted the dominance of the Catholic faith, asserting victories as signs of divine providence and favor.

On a more squarely literary level, as the Hispanist Henry Ettinghausen has noted, many of these relaciones provided readers with quixotic and triumphalist textual performances that could entertain as much as they could inform members of the reading public. In this pamphlet’s depiction of the exploits of Captain Salvador, the text foregrounds the bravery and ingenuity of both general corps and individual officers who together succeed in an existential struggle with an expansionist Islamic empire. Just as in its prose, so too does its dramatic woodcut illustration bring readers closer to the scene of the battle, depicting ships and the sea itself all but overwhelming the vulnerable coast, dwarfing towers and strongholds alike in contrast to battle-ready maritime forces.

—Amrish Nair