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Conversion Narratives in Early Modern England: Tales of Turning Abigail Shinn
Conversion and Islam in the Early Modern Mediterranean
The topic of religious conversion into and out of Islam as a historical phenomenon is mired in a sea of debate and misunderstanding. It has often been viewed as the permanent crossing of not just a religious divide, but in the context of the early modern Mediterranean also political, cultural and geographic boundaries. Reading between the lines of a wide variety of sources, however, suggests that religious conversion between Christianity, Judaism and Islam often had a more pragmatic and prosaic aspect that constituted a form of cultural translation and a means of establishing communal belonging through the shared, and often contested articulation of religious identities. The chapters in this volume do not view religion simply as a specific set of orthodox beliefs and strict practices to be adopted wholesale by the religious individual or convert. Rather, they analyse conversion as the acquisition of a set of historically contingent social practices, which facilitated the process of social, political or religious acculturation. Exploring the role conversion played in the fabrication of cosmopolitan Mediterranean identities, the volume examines the idea of the convert as a mediator and translator between cultures. Drawing upon a diverse range of research areas and linguistic skills, the volume utilises primary sources in Ottoman, Persian, Arabic, Latin, German, Hungarian and English within a variety of genres including religious tracts, diplomatic correspondence, personal memoirs, apologetics, historical narratives, official documents and commands, legal texts and court records, and religious polemics. As a result, the collection provides readers with theoretically informed, new research on the subject of conversion to or from Islam in the early modern Mediterranean world.
Claire Norton is Reader in History at St Mary’s University, Twickenham.
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Conversion and Islam in the Early Modern Mediterranean
The Lure of the Other
Edited by Claire Norton
First published 2017 by Routledge
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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Norton, Claire, Dr., editor.
Title: Conversion and Islam in the early modern Mediterranean : the lure of the other / edited by Claire Norton.
Description: 1st [edition]. | New York : Routledge, 2017. | Series: Routledge research in early modern history | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016045582 (print) | LCCN 2016051275 (ebook) | ISBN 9781472457226 (alk. paper) | ISBN 9781315574189
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Trans-imperial nobility: the case of Carlo Cigala (1556–1631)
2 Conversion under the threat of arms: converts and renegades during the war for Crete (1645–1669)
3 Conversion to Islam (and sometimes a return to Christianity) in Safavid Persia in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
4 Danube-hopping: conversion, jurisdiction and spatiality between the Ottoman Empire and the Danubian principalities in the seventeenth century 77
2
5 The early modern convert as “public property”: a typology of turning 103
BRUMMETT
6 The moment of choice: the Moriscos on the border of Christianity and Islam 129
HOUSSEM EDDINE CHACHIA
7 ‘Saving a slave, saving a soul’: the rhetoric of losing the true faith in seventeenth-century Italian textual and visual sources 155
ROSITA D’AMORA
PART 3
Translating the self: devotion, hybridity and religious conversion
8 Antitrinitarians and conversion to Islam: Adam Neuser reads Murad b. Abdullah in Ottoman Istanbul 181
MARTIN MULSOW
9 The many languages of the self in the early modern Mediterranean: Anselm Turmeda/‘Abdallāh Al-Turjumān (1355–1423) – Friar, Muslim convert and translator 194
ELISABETTA BENIGNI
PALMIRA
1.1 Map of the Mediterranean 10
2.1 Map of the Eastern Adriatic 31
5.1 Thomas Cross, Rigep Dandulo, 144 mm × 87 mm, line engraving, mid-17th century 105
6.1 Map of the Morisco Localities in Tunisia 132
6.2 Mihrab of the Great Mosque of Testour 142
6.3 Star of David on the minaret of the Great Mosque of Testour 143
7.1 Giacomo Farelli, Il riscatto degli schiavi, 1672, Church of Santa Maria della Mercede e Sant’Alfonso Maria de’ Liguori, Naples 163
7.2 Paolo Biancucci, La Vergine che protegge la Nazione lucchese, 1620–1630, Church of San Leonardo in Borghi, Lucca 166
7.3 Frontispiece, Catalogus Captivorum Christianorum, quos Provincia S. Josephi, Ordinis Discalceatorum SSS. Trinitatis De Redemptione Captivorum, Erecta Ditionibus Haereditariis Augustissimae Domus Austriacae, Ab Anno 1777 usque ad Annum 1780, tum Africanis in öris praecipue Algerii, Mascherae & Tripoli; tum in Turcia Europaea & Asiatica, aut percolato litro nativa liberati restituit, aut pecunariis subsidiis ad eam recuperandam adjuvit, Viennae, Litteris Schulzianis [1780] 167
Contributors
The editor
Claire Norton is Reader in History at St Mary’s University, Twickenham. She works on early modern Ottoman history, particularly instances of cultural transfer and interaction among communities living in border areas and other liminal spaces. She is interested in the complexities of identity formation and the role past-focused narratives have in this process, subjects that are explored in her forthcoming book Plural Pasts: Power, Identity, and the Ottoman Sieges of Nagykanizsa. She has edited a number of books including The Renaissance and the Ottoman World (ed. with A. Contadini) (2013); Nationalism, Historiography and the (Re)Construction of the Past (2007). She has also written extensively on the theory of history including Doing History (2011) with Mark Donnelly.
The contributors
Elisabetta Benigni is Assistant Professor of Arabic and Mediterranean Literature at the University of Turin. Her research explores South European and Arabic literary and intellectual encounters during the pre-colonial and colonial periods. She was a fellow of the Italian Academy, Columbia University and of the research programme “Zukunftsphilologie: Revisiting the Canons of Textual Scholarship”, Freie Universität Berlin. Her publications include studies on Arabic translations and readings of Dante and Machiavelli in the nineteenth and twentieth century. She has also published on Italian translations of The Thousand and One Nights against the backdrop of the Italian colonial history of Libya. She is currently completing a monograph on modern Arabic prison literature.
Palmira Brummett is Professor Emerita of History at the University of Tennessee and Visiting Professor of History at Brown University. Her work assesses the rhetorics of cross-cultural interaction in the Ottoman and Mediterranean worlds. Her publications include: Ottoman Seapower and Levantine Diplomacy in the Age of Discovery (Albany, NY: S.U.N.Y.
Contributors ix Press, 1994); Image and Imperialism in the Ottoman Revolutionary Press, 1908–1911 (Albany, NY: S.U.N.Y. Press, 2000); The ‘Book’ of Travels: Genre, Ethnology and Pilgrimage, 1250–1700 (Leiden: Brill, 2009); Mapping the Ottomans: Sovereignty, Territory, and Identity in the Early Modern Mediterranean (Cambridge: CUP, 2015) and numerous articles on Ottoman, Mediterranean and world history.
Houssem Eddin Chachia obtained his PhD in 2014 from the University of Tunis. His thesis was titled “The Sephardim and the Moriscos: The Journey of expulsion and installation in the Maghreb (1492–1756), stories and itineraries”. He is now a researcher on the “Regions and Resources of Heritage in Tunisia” project at the University of Manouba (Tunisia). He mainly works on minorities in the Mediterranean, particularly the expulsion from Iberia of the Sephardi Jewish community (Spanish and Portuguese Jews) and the Moriscos community. He is interested in the processes and complexities of identity formation and religious conversion.
Rosita D’Amora is Lecturer of Turkish Language and Culture at the University of Salento, Lecce, Italy. Her research ranges from Ottoman social history to contemporary Turkish literature and, most recently, to the investigation of gender, religious and cultural differences and borders in Ottoman and Turkish literary and historical sources. She is also interested in the politics of representation in Ottoman society, especially the role played by dress and headgear in the articulation and negotiation of different identities. She is the author of a Turkish grammar and of a number of articles exploring cultural exchanges between the Ottoman Empire and Europe during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. She has also translated into Italian several Turkish authors such as Sabahattin Ali, Yusuf Atılgan and Mehmet Yashin.
Tobias P. Graf is a Research Associate in Early Modern History at Heidelberg University and an Associate Member of the Cluster of Excellence “Asia and Europe in a Global Context”. He read history at the University of Cambridge before pursuing a PhD in Heidelberg under the auspices of the interdisciplinary research group “Dynamic Asymmetries in Transcultural Flows at the Intersection of Asia and Europe: The Case of the Early Modern Ottoman Empire”. Graf’s interests in the conversion to Islam of European Christians and the deep entanglements between the Ottoman Empire and Christian Europe have resulted in The Sultan’s Renegades: Christian-European Converts to Islam and the Making of the Ottoman Elite, 1575–1610 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming). His current research focuses on Austrian-Habsburg foreign intelligence during the reign of Emperor Maximilian II.
Domagoj Madunić (PhD in History, 2012, from Central European University Budapest), is an associate member of the project: “Military Life and
Warrior Images In the Croatian Border Territory from 16th century to 1918”, at the Croatian Institute for History in Zagreb (ISP). He is also a visiting lecturer at Zagreb University and Dubrovnik University. His articles cover various early modern military topics, mainly focusing on the Venetian defensive system in the Adriatic during the War for Crete and the Republic of Ragusa (Dubrovnik). He is currently preparing a book on the Republic of Ragusa in the context of the tributary states of the Ottoman Empire.
Martin Mulsow is Professor for Intellectual History at the University of Erfurt and director of the Gotha Research Center for Early Modern Studies. From 2005–2008, he was professor of history at Rutgers University in the United States. Mulsow has published numerous books on Renaissance philosophy, the Enlightenment, the history of scholarship and clandestine literature including, most recently, Prekäres Wissen. Eine andere Ideengeschichte der Frühen Neuzeit (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2012) and Enlightenment Underground. Radical Germany 1680–1720 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015). He was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin and is a fellow of the Sächsische Akademie der Wissenschaften.
Giorgio Rota received his PhD from the Istituto Universitario Orientale (Naples) in 1996. Since 2003, he has been at the Institute for Iranian Studies of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (currently as Senior Researcher). He also held visiting professorships at the universities of Trieste, Bologna, Munich and at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Études (Paris). His main field of research is the military and political history of Safavid Persia (1501–1736), with a particular focus on the ghulam s, the so-called slave members of the army and administration who were mostly of Caucasian origin and often Christians converted to Islam: he has written several articles on the subject. He is also the author of Under Two Lions: On the Knowledge of Persia in the Republic of Venice (ca. 1450–1797) and La Vita e i Tempi di Rostam Khan (edizione e traduzione italiana del Ms. British Library Add 7,655) (both Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2009).
Michał Wasiucionek is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the New Europe College –the Institute for Advanced Study in Bucharest, as a member in the ERC project Luxury, Fashion, and Social Status in Early Modern South-Eastern Europe (LuxFaSS). He obtained his PhD in 2016 from the European University Institute in Florence. His research examines cross-border patronage networks in early modern Polish-Moldavian-Ottoman relations. He has published extensively on the role of the Danubian principalities and their elites in seventeenth-century Eastern Europe, as well as other ceremonial practices in regional diplomacy. Currently, he is working on luxury consumption, space and social boundaries within the Danubian principalities and the Ottoman Empire.
Acknowledgements
This volume developed from a conference The Lure of the Other: Conversion and Reversion in the Early Modern Mediterranean held at St Mary’s University, Twickenham in June 2013. I would like to thank everyone who helped with the organisation of the conference. In particular, I am grateful to St Mary’s University and the Society for Renaissance Studies for providing generous grants that supported the event. I would also like to thank all the participants who gave papers and contributed to the interesting discussions we had both after the individual panels and during the coffee and lunch breaks – it made the conference a very enjoyable experience. Lastly my thanks go to the anonymous reader(s) and to the editorial team at Ashgate for their support for the volume and for making the publication process as painless as it can be.
Introduction
Claire Norton
Religious conversion has often been viewed as the permanent crossing of, not just a religious divide, but in the early modern Mediterranean also political, cultural and geographic boundaries. Although conversion is frequently interpreted in terms of the active spiritual conviction of the convert, the paradigm of religious conversion as solely engendered by a self-conscious psychological and spiritual conviction is problematic in such a context as religious practice was not necessarily viewed as an entity separate from one’s identity and sense of communal belonging. Reading between the lines of a wide variety of sources suggests that religious conversion between Christianity, Judaism and Islam in the early modern Mediterranean often had a more pragmatic and prosaic aspect in that it constituted a form of cultural translation and a means of establishing communal belonging through the shared, and often contested articulation of religious identities.
Following on from some recent ground-breaking work on early modern conversion the chapters in this volume take an approach to religious conversion that does not view religion solely as a specific set of orthodox beliefs and strict practices to be adopted indiscriminatingly by the religious individual or convert. Instead the chapters in this volume analyse conversion as the acquisition of a set of historically contingent social practices, which facilitated a process of social, political or religious acculturation and which did not necessitate a comprehensive relinquishing of previous identities. Moving beyond the normative cultural, geo-political and religious divisions that can delineate scholarship of the early modern Mediterranean, many of the contributors explore the role conversion played in the fabrication of cosmopolitan Mediterranean identities and examine the idea of the convert as a mediator or translator between cultures: a “transimperial subject”.
The chapters in the first section explore the complex, but often flexible, confessional and communal allegiances and loyalties of Mediterraneanbased trans-imperial subjects. Their crossings of geo-political and religious boundaries in search of advancement or to escape difficult situations both reify spatialities of conversion and illustrate networks of interconnected
commercial, familial and diplomatic relationships. Tobias Graf approaches the early modern Mediterranean as an intersectional, symbiotic space in his exploration of the workings of Mediterranean cross-border, trans-imperial networks and the role that converts played in bridging geographical, political and religious boundaries. He focuses on the case of Carlo Cigala, a member of one of Genoa’s oldest noble families and a subject of the King of Spain, who sought to mobilise his trans-imperial familial connection in his attempts at social advancement. His brother, Ciğalazade Yusuf Sinan Paşa, a convert to Islam and high-ranking Ottoman official, in his capacity as admiral of the Ottoman fleet, sought to facilitate the appointment of Carlo Cigala to the Ottoman sancak of the Duchy of Naxos, demonstrating the role of converts in mediating and facilitating trans-imperial networks of patronage.
In contrast, Domagoj Madunić analyses conversion during a time of conflict, in this case the seventeenth-century Venetian–Ottoman war for Crete (1645–1669). Focusing on a number of case studies of conversion from the Adriatic frontier zone, he argues that, during war, conversion could be a survival strategy to save one’s life, escape captivity or avoid forced labour in the galleys. His discussion of the case of Fra Giorgio who converted to Islam under threat of impalement foregrounds the complexity of early modern political relationships and the importance of familial networks that transcended religious and communal boundaries. Fra Giorgio’s sister was the wife of the Pasha of Herzegovina and, as a result of her intercession, a fetwa was issued annulling his conversion as contrary to Islamic law as it was made under duress. Madunić’s second example demonstrates that conversion motivated by self-preservation could also provide opportunities for personal advancement. Conte Vojin, a Montenegrin chieftain based on the Adriatic frontier, oscillated in his military and political support for the Venetians or Ottomans depending on how the war was progressing. Conversion was one of the strategies at his disposal that he employed to gain access to resources or demonstrate his loyalty. Embracing Catholicism in order to advance his career in the Venetian army, when captured by the Ottomans in 1649, he converted to Islam, took the name Cafer Ağa and then, as a member of the Ottoman military-administrative structure, became a staunch enemy of the Venetians. Eventually events would catch up with Cafer Ağa and, having alienated both Christian and Muslim communities along the frontier, he was killed by a chieftain of one of the competing Montenegrin clans and his head was delivered to Venice.
Giorgio Rota focuses on conversion in the context of the Safavid Empire. In particular, he examines the complex interrelationship between Georgian vassal rulers, their Safavid and Ottoman overlords, conversion and political advancement. He explains how, in the sixteenth century, conversion to or from Shiite or Sunni Islam was employed by members of the Georgian administrative and military elite as a means of obtaining political
3 and military support from the Shah or the Sultan respectively. Among the various individuals that Rota details, he examines the case of the Georgian Giorgo Saak’adze whose shifts in political and military allegiance between Georgia, Safavid Persia and the Ottoman Empire were accompanied by concomitant spatial and religious translocations. His moves to avoid enemies or seek personal advantage entailed his repeated conversion to and from Christianity and Shiite and Sunni Islam.
Michał Wasiucionek too is interested in the spatial component of conversion. He concentrates on the spatial movements of the boyar elite to and from the Danubian principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia that accompanied their religious conversions which were largely motivated by political, economic or judicial concerns. These cases of Ottoman non-Muslim subjects (zimmi) who turned Muslim and then turned non-Muslim illustrate an interesting variation in Ottoman cartographies of sovereignty and jurisdictional control. Although the Danubian principalities of Wallachia and Moldovia were an integral part of the Islamic Ottoman Empire, Wasiucionek demonstrates how the boyar elite north of the Danube were able to maintain the Christian identity of the socio-legal and geographical landscape by excluding converts from both the socio-political life of the principalities and from inheriting land or assets despite their generally tolerant and pragmatic view towards conversion to Islam by their compatriots.
The chapters in the second section explore the ontologically (de)stabilising affect that the practical integration of converts into an existing religious community could have on early modern communities as well as the more abstract threats that conversion could pose. Palmira Brummett is interested in conversion as a process, one in which identities are layered or interleaved together and that can ‘be fast or slow; voluntary or coerced; complete or incomplete; “permanent” chronic, temporary, illusory; “real” or rhetorical’. She explores the legitimising utility of public conversions or ‘turning’ and the variety of ways it has been employed to project and reinforce identities. She illustrates her argument through an analysis of a series of conversion narratives to and from Islam including that of Philip Dandulo, a “borne Turk” who converted to Christianity in 1657 and whose story was the subject of a very popular pamphlet entitled The Baptized Turk, by Thomas Warmstry D.D.
Houssem Eddine Chachia explores how Iberian Moriscos both before and after their expulsion from Iberia occupied a liminal space as new converts and cultural minorities: first as new, Arabic-speaking Christians in Spain following their forced baptism throughout the sixteenth century and then in the early seventeenth century as new Spanish-speaking Muslims in the Maghreb. Reading letters and texts by Moriscos as well as Inquisition documents, he discusses how they imagined and negotiated identities to either facilitate their integration into the cultural and religious life of the Maghreb or to argue for their status as Spanish Christians in Spain.
Rosita D’Amora explores the rhetoric surrounding the ransoming activities of Christian captives by various Christian religious orders and charitable organisations. In institutional texts, captives’ letters and the narratives of returned captives, the literary trope of saving Christian souls from the threat of conversion to Islam and eternal damnation through the provision of ransoms for captives is prevalent. D’Amora analyses this trope in a series of paintings, arguing that such images represent an important visual counterpart to the various written texts on captivity and illustrate the dangerous ontological implications of conversion to Islam for early modern audiences.
The third section delineates the self-fashioning undertaken by converts themselves, and views conversion as a process by which multiple selves are interpolated and interwoven together rather than the simple substitution of religious subjectivities. Mulsow and Benigni analyse the hybrid and syncretic nature of religious conversion and devotional practices in the early modern Mediterranean and the ways that converts adopted, adapted and translated the religious traditions in which they participated. Martin Mulsow explores the self-fashioning of the Protestant, Antitrinitarian Heidelberg minister and convert to Islam, Adam Neuser, in the context of his recent discovery of some hitherto unknown papers of Neuser’s in the Gotha Research Library. Mulsow argues that the Gotha papers essentially constitute fragments of Neuser’s Apologia: an explanation of both his philosophical arguments and his actions in converting to Islam. Focusing on the cryptographic marginalia of the Gotha fragments and the theologian Jacob Palaeologus’ account of a debate he had with Neuser concerning arguments for the superiority of Islam outlined in Murad ibn Abdullah’s Guide for one’s turning towards God Mulsow examines the hybrid persona that Neuser fashioned in Istanbul. Here he was both a Muslim loyal to the Ottoman court, and a “Christian” still in contact with his friends and colleagues in western Europe. He was a scholar who was not only working on a Latin translation of the Qur’an, but was seeking to translate both Christian and Islamic doctrine in order to reconstruct an Islamic Christianity – the perfect synthesis between both religions.
Elisabetta Benigni also investigates the complex identities fashioned by a convert to Islam, ʾAbdallāh al-Turjumān (Anselm Turmeda), through his Arabic and Catalan writings. Turmeda was a fifteenth-century Franciscan friar and renowned Catalan poet who converted to Islam and moved to Tunis where he authored a first-person conversion narrative and polemical treatise on the superiority of Islam entitled Tuḥfat al-Adīb. Like Neuser, ʾAbdallāh al-Turjumān appears to have been committed to his new faith and he also retained a complicated relationship with Christianity and his former Christian identity. Indeed, even after his conversion and move to Tunis, he continued to author works in Catalan directed at an implied Christian audience in which he openly recommended belief in the Trinity and the Catholic
Church. The juxtaposition of his authorship of a polemical text in Arabic that condemned the concept of the Trinity and criticised the four Gospels as mendacious with Catalan works promoting the Trinity has led some scholars to accuse him of duplicity and a lack of sincerity in his religious beliefs. In contrast, Benigni explores al-Turjumān’s conversion as a process of self-translation through inclusion in the context of a fluid early modern Mediterranean world that facilitated the imagination of a “multiplication of identities”.
Part 1
Trans-imperial subjects
Geo-political spatialities, political advancement and conversion
1 Trans-imperial nobility
The case of Carlo Cigala (1556–1631)1
Tobias P. Graf
Introduction
On 15 Rebiülahir in the year 1007 after the Hijra (12 November 1598), Sultan Mehmed III issued a certificate of appointment (berat) to a certain ‘Carlo Cigala who lives in Messina’. According to the sultan’s orders, the man was ‘to bring, without delay and hesitation, . . . [his] mother and [to] go to the . . . Duchy of Naxos and enjoy and govern it in . . . [his] lifetime’.2 Messina, of course, was not part of the sultan’s ‘well-protected domains’, nor was Cigala one of his subjects. This imperial command, therefore, presents somewhat of a puzzle. Why would Mehmed III appoint a foreigner – and a subject of his greatest rival in the Mediterranean, the king of Spain, at that –to what was nominally a vassal state, yet effectively a sancak of the Ottoman Empire? Taking Carlo Cigala’s appointment to the Duchy of Naxos as a starting point, this article examines the links between members of the Cigala family and the Ottoman Empire. I argue that, at least as far as Carlo was concerned, Christendom’s “archenemy” had a crucial role to play in his quest for social advancement. In fact, Carlo aspired to be, and indeed considered himself to be, part of a trans-imperial nobility.3
To begin, however, it would be prudent to briefly comment on the main source for Carlo Cigala’s appointment to the Duchy of Naxos since the quotation from the berat is taken, not from an Ottoman original, but from an Italian translation preserved in the archives in Venice. At first glance, this may make the information rather spurious. Yet Joshua White, who has had the chance to compare a number of copies and translations of Ottoman documents from this period preserved in Venice to their originals in Istanbul, has concluded that the Venetian material is generally faithful and therefore reliable.4 In this particular instance, the genuineness of the sultan’s order is supported by the close correspondence of the Italian text to Ottoman diplomatics which, in fact, makes it possible to classify the command as a berat in the first place. Phrases such as ‘give faith to my imperial seal’, with which the body of the document ends, are commonplace elements to authenticate the document and affirm its validity.5 While this does not preclude the possibility that the berat kept in Venice is a forgery that is very unlikely, all the more so since the translation is contained among the dispatches of the
Figure 1.1 Map of the Mediterranean
Source: Drawn by the author using geographical data provided by Natural Earth.
Venetian baili in Istanbul who stood to gain nothing from spreading false rumour in this case.
The Cigala family
The Cigalas were one of Genoa’s old noble families. Carlo’s father Visconte had been born in the city in 1504 but later relocated to Messina. The Sicilian port was an ideal basis of operations for Christian corsairs like Visconte who targeted Muslim shipping. Apart from undertaking private raids in the Mediterranean, Carlo’s father on several occasions sailed with the famous admiral Andrea Doria and participated in Charles V’s naval campaigns in North Africa and against the Ottomans. The Cigala family also maintained close connections to the Vatican. While Visconte’s brother achieved the rank of a cardinal, two of his nephews by another brother joined the Jesuits.6 He himself had two daughters and three sons, of whom Carlo was the youngest.7
By the time Mehmed III issued the ferman for Carlo’s appointment to the Duchy of Naxos, the latter enjoyed considerable social standing in his own right. His wife Beatrice de Guidici was the daughter of a Messinese baron
The case of Carlo Cigala 11 and, according to the Venetian bailo Matteo Zane, by the early 1590s, Carlo was the recipient of ‘a pension of five hundred scudi annually’ from the king of Spain.8 In 1597, moreover, the Sicilian had been granted the title of count by the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II.9
In Carlo’s efforts to further enhance his prestige as much as that of his family, his elder brother played a crucial role. For, when the sultan saw fit to promote the younger Cigala in the Aegean, Carlo’s brother, who had been named Scipione by their parents, was none other than the Ottoman kapudan pa ş a , the admiral of the Ottoman fleet, Ci ğ alazade Yusuf Sinan Pasha. Most probably born in 1544, Scipione Cigala was seventeen years old when he and his father were captured at sea by Maghrebi corsairs in 1561, one year after the disastrous defeat of the Spanish fleet at Djerba. The two men were brought first to Tunis and then to Istanbul where Visconte Cigala was imprisoned in the fortress of Yedikule while Scipione converted to Islam and entered the school of Topkapı Palace. 10 Admission to the school destined him for a prestigious career in Ottoman state service and made his subsequent professional biography virtually indistinguishable from those of illustrious recruits of the dev ş irme , the infamous ‘boy levy’, such as Sokollu Mehmed Pasha. 11 Less than two years after his graduation from the inner palace in 1573, he was appointed agha of the janissaries. He received his first provincial governorship, in Basra, after the outbreak of war with Safavid Iran in 1578.12 In the following years, he distinguished himself on the Eastern battlefield, notably in the conquest of Tabriz during the campaign of 1585.13 As early as 1579, he briefly assumed command of the Ottoman forces in the East when the current commander-in-chief ( serdar ), Grand Vizier Lala Mustafa Pasha, was summoned to Istanbul.14 In recognition of his services, Ci ğ alazade Yusuf Sinan Pasha was promoted to the rank of vizier in 1583. As the war with Iran drew to a close after thirteen years of fighting, he finally secured the appointment which he had desired for years: the office of the kapudan pa ş a . 15
When Mehmed III succeeded to the throne after Murad III’s death in 1595, the Italian-born admiral was dismissed as part of the usual reshuffling of positions in the Ottoman administration which accompanied a new sultan’s accession.16 In the following year, still out of office, he accompanied the sultan on campaign in Hungary where the so-called Long War with the Austrian Habsburgs had broken out in the summer of 1593. This campaign saw not only the conquest of the fortress of Eger (German: Erlau, Turkish: Eğri) by Ottoman troops, but also, in its aftermath, the effective routing of the Ottoman camp on the nearby plain of Mezőkeresztes. By several accounts, Ciğalazade Yusuf Sinan Pasha played a crucial role in turning the tide of battle at the last minute, as a reward for which he was appointed grand vizier. However, owing to palace intrigues as well as the harsh treatment of alleged deserters, he was relieved of his duties after little more than a month.17 Subsequently, he was posted first to Damascus and finally reappointed to
Tobias P. Graf
the kapudanlık in 1598. This time, he remained in office even when Ahmed I succeeded to the throne in December 1603.18 When the Italian-born pasha was removed from his post the following year, it was because his talents as a military commander were once again required in the Eastern provinces where a new war with Iran had broken out.19 He died during that campaign in 1606.20
During his lifetime as well as in the memory of later generations, Ciğalazade Yusuf Sinan Pasha enjoyed considerable fame not just in the Ottoman Empire, but also in Christian Europe. In the middle of the seventeenth century, for example, a man claiming to be a son of the late admiral became the object of public attention. Although this self-styled Jean Michel de Cigala/Mehmed Bey in all probability was an impostor unconnected to the actual Cigala family, he had managed to convince the king of France of the truth of his claim. The episode, as Ciğalazade Yusuf Sinan Pasha’s biographer Gino Benzoni has remarked, provides ‘eloquent testimony of the enduring fascination of the Christian world with the figure of Cigala, who remained an enigma in the West’.21 As late as the nineteenth century, the kapudan paşa appeared as the main character in an homage to William Scott by the German novelist Philipp Joseph von Rehfues, while the Italian singer/songwriter Fabrizio de Andrè dedicated a song to “Sinàn Capudàn Pascià” in 1984.22
Carlo Cigala’s quest for the Duchy of Naxos
Against the background of his success in climbing the Ottoman hierarchy, Ciğalazade Yusuf Sinan Pasha sought to re-establish contact with his family in Sicily. Sometime after his first appointment as kapudan paşa, the convert invited his younger brother Carlo to visit him in Istanbul, an invitation which the latter accepted in 1593. News of this journey instantly gave rise to the rumour that the younger Cigala had been dispatched by the king of Spain in order to breathe new life into negotiations for a truce with the Porte.23 If Carlo had indeed been on such a mission, it came to naught. In any case, during a meeting in the Ottoman capital, he reassured Bailo Matteo Zane ‘that he [was] here on his own private business alone’.24
That ‘private business’, however, was more than merely a reunion between two brothers. According to the Venetian diplomat’s relazione delivered to the Doge and Senate after his return from Istanbul in 1594, ‘the said Signore Carlo . . . was indulging in the belief that he could easily be given charge of Moldavia or Wallachia by paying the usual pension to the Porte. And when this turned out unsuccessful he hatched the idea of having the islands of the Archipelago in imitation of the [sultan’s] Jewish favourite Giovanni Miches [Joseph Nasi]’.25 In this undertaking, Carlo certainly hoped to benefit from his brother’s position in the Ottoman military-administrative elite, not least because Naxos and the other islands of the Cyclades, which were part of the
The case of Carlo Cigala 13 historical duchy, were subject to the kapudan paşa’s jurisdiction.26 Although Carlo had arrived in Istanbul with high hopes, they remained unfulfilled for the time being. After several months, he returned to Messina empty handed because, as Zane put it, ‘his brother the Capudan . . . [would] not support him’.27
On the surface, Carlo’s visit to Istanbul appears rather unusual. Ciğalazade Yusuf Sinan Pasha’s invitation certainly contradicts the prevailing stereotype that conversion necessitated the severance of all previous ties to kith and kin expressed by Ottoman and Christian-European contemporaries alike.28 By and large, however, such contacts between converts and their families, even outside the Ottoman Empire, were a rather ordinary phenomenon. Maria Pia Pedani has drawn attention to the fact that, during the same period, a number of Venetians visited family members who had entered the Ottoman elite. Some of them stayed, others even converted themselves.29 Thanks to Eric Dursteler’s recent work, the best-known example of this pattern is certainly provided by the Venetian Michiel family which included the eunuch Gazanfer Agha one of the most powerful men of his day, and his sister Beatrice, who after her conversion became known as Fatima Hatun.30 That Gazanfer Agha had one of Fatima’s sons abducted from a Venetian boarding school and brought to Istanbul, where he, too, embraced Islam, makes it one of the most spectacular cases of such continuing contacts between converts to Islam in the Ottoman Empire and their families ‘back home’.31
Carlo Cigala’s hope to receive his brother’s patronage likewise finds parallels in the stories of Venetian families. Ciğalazade Yusuf Sinan Pasha’s immediate predecessor in the kapudanlık, Uluç Hasan Pasha, for instance, petitioned the Venetian Senate for an annual income of one hundred ducats and a bakery for his sister Camilla who continued to reside in the Serenissima. During a visit to Istanbul in 1590, moreover, Camilla’s husband explicitly requested his “renegade” brother-in-law to intercede with the Venetian authorities on his behalf and help him secure either a lucrative appointment or a pension. Although Uluç Hasan Pasha complied, the initiative proved unsuccessful. Even before his appointment as admiral of the Ottoman fleet, he had repeatedly used his position as a governor-general in North Africa to obtain pardons for his brother and cousin.32
In the context of Carlo Cigala’s aspirations in the Aegean, it is noteworthy that both Zane and Mehmed III explicitly mention the example of Joseph Nasi as a model for the Sicilian’s appointment to the Duchy of Naxos. Selim II’s famous courtier had become duke of Naxos in 1566 when the duchy had been formally annexed by the Porte. Yet, even after the incorporation of the Cyclades into the Empire’s regular structure of administration as a sancak, which only occurred after Nasi’s death, it remained somewhat exceptional since the sancakbeyis who succeeded Nasi included non-Muslims such as Constantine Cantacuzino and the Croatian Gasparo Gratiani.33 As a general rule, similar positions in other parts of the
Ottoman Empire were reserved for members of the all-Muslim militaryadministrative elite.34 The reference to Nasi, therefore, is an indicator that Carlo expected to avoid following his brother’s example of having to undergo religious conversion in order to qualify for this appointment in Ottoman state service. This conclusion is further supported by his initial attempts to become voivode of Moldavia or Wallachia, both of which were ruled by Christian vassals rather than Muslim provincial governors. The reference to Nasi may also indicate that, like the Jewish favourite, the Sicilian intended to send an agent to carry out the business of government while he himself resided elsewhere.35
Carlo’s aversion to embracing Islam is borne out by the events following Mehmed III’s command concerning his transfer to the Aegean. Although the berat had been issued in 1598, Carlo only arrived on Ottoman soil, notably on the island of Chios, in 1600 to meet up with his brother. Awaiting Ciğalazade Yusuf Sinan Pasha’s arrival, the duke-to-be immediately began to renegotiate the terms of his appointment. In particular, he tried to effect the removal of the local kadi (judge) from the island, an undertaking which his brother considered ‘impossible because it would be an action contrary to the law which the scholars here would not tolerate’.36 Carlo did not, however, heed his brother’s advice to desist from this request, informing him that the permission for settlement on the Cyclades which he had received from King Philip III of Spain was conditional on the kadi’s removal from Naxos.37
That Carlo had felt the need to obtain – and managed to secure – royal approval for his undertaking is both remarkable and revealing. While he was happy to work for the sultan, he took care not to follow his brother’s example too closely in becoming an Osmanlı proper, a Muslim member of the Ottoman military-administrative elite. If nothing else, the younger Cigala wanted to avoid being branded a renegade and thus a traitor to Christianity and Christendom, quite possibly to ensure that he continued to be employable by the Spanish crown. Evidently, Philip III had sufficient trust in the steadfastness of his subject’s faith to consent to the undertaking.
Since adherence to Islam had become the most important marker of loyalty to the sultan by the sixteenth century, it is remarkable that Mehmed III did not explicitly demand Carlo to embrace the sultan’s faith. The argument from silence, however, is a difficult one to make in this case since the sultan and his advisers may simply have taken the new appointee’s conversion for granted and hence felt no need to spell it out as one of the conditions for appointment in the berat. On the other hand, adopting the ruler’s faith was not the only means by which one could declare and ensure loyalty. In this context, the command that Carlo bring his mother to the sultan’s domains needs to be seen as a demand for a symbolic demonstration of the duke-to-be’s political loyalty. It mirrors the practice of
The case of Carlo Cigala 15 the newly appointed voivodes of Moldavia sending family members as hostages to Istanbul.38 Doubtlessly, the demand for the relocation of the Cigalas’ mother to the Ottoman Empire was meant to offset Carlo’s earlier ties to Spain, thereby preventing the Spanish crown from enforcing a similar claim to the man’s loyalty through the mother’s continued residence in Sicily.
That the berat specifically demanded the relocation of Carlo’s mother, however, had wider implications. Carlo’s first visit to Istanbul in 1593 had caused quite a stir among a section of the Ottoman elite. As Zane reported at the time,
there are some who are seeking a decision from the Mufti [the şeyhülislam] on this point, whether it is lawful to use force to compel the son of a Turkish woman, born at Castel Nuovo, carried slave into Christendom, to return to Islam, which is precisely the case of Signor Carlo Cicalla.
Interestingly, Zane’s summary of the legal issue at stake closely mirrors the kind of abstractions commonly used in fetva s. If Bostanzade Mehmed Efendi, who was ş eyhülislam at the time, indeed produced an opinion on this question, and if a collection of his fetva s was produced, it should be possible to identify it on the basis of the Venetian dispatch. 39 The central issue in this controversy was the religious adherence of the Cigalas’ mother who, as other sources confirm, was a convert to Christianity from Islam. 40 In this light, Mehmed III’s demand for her return to his domains derives from the sultan’s duty as the protector of Islam and Islamic law and, perhaps above all else, had propagandistic value. At the same time, the fact that the mother had become a Christian in this context turned the demand for her relocation to Ottoman territory into a special test of loyalty for a future servant of the Ottoman realm who would be charged with upholding Ottoman law, including the enforcement of the prescriptions concerning apostasy. 41 Clearly, Carlo would only be worthy of his post, if he put his obligation to the sultan above even his filial loyalties. Whether or not the Ottomans expected Carlo to embrace Islam, he certainly did not abandon his Catholic faith. Nor did he transfer his mother’s residence to the Ottoman Empire. When he arrived in Chios in 1600, he arrived alone. Having failed to fulfil the conditions for his appointment and unable to convince the sultan of his loyalty to him, the Italian was never actually invested with the Duchy of Naxos. Nevertheless, he does not seem to have given up his desire until after his brother’s death. Until then, he maintained a second domicile on Chios. According to Emrah Safa Gürkan’s findings, during his time there he played a central role in gathering intelligence on the Ottoman Empire for the king of Spain, as well as vice versa –another sign of his political ambivalence.42
Tobias P. Graf
Carlo Cigala’s quest for social advancement
Carlo Cigala’s attempts to be appointed to the Duchy of Naxos as well as his ambivalence towards the Ottomans need to be seen in the context of what was a life-long and ambitious quest for social advancement in which his elder brother Ciğalazade Yusuf Sinan Pasha played a crucial role. Carlo’s strategic use of his connection to the upper echelons of Ottoman state service, moreover, was by no means restricted to his dream of establishing himself in the Aegean. It is also evident, for instance, in a letter which he sent to Queen Elizabeth I in 1601 concerning reparations for losses caused to his ships and the goods they carried at the hands of English pirates in the Mediterranean. In merely four pages, Carlo mentioned ‘my brother the Captain Pasha’ no less than six times.43
Although the Italian’s attempts to be employed by the Porte were ultimately abortive, in 1610, the wealth he had accumulated through various other ventures enabled him to buy the baronage of Tiriolo in Calabria. In addition to the nobilities of Genoa, Sicily and the Holy Roman Empire, Carlo thus gained admission to the peerage of the Kingdom of Naples. Three years later, like his father before him, he was admitted to the Order of Saint James of the Sword, an honour which required papal dispensation because his mother, as a former Ottoman subject, and thus he himself, lacked the noble pedigree which was normally required of all its members. In light of his attempts to enter the service of the sultan, this honour is particularly ironic. After all, Saint James had been symbolically central to the centurieslong efforts of driving the Moors out of the Iberian Peninsula, commonly referred to as the Reconquista, and the fight against Muslims was one of the main tasks with which the order was charged. Finally, in 1630, Philip IV of Spain elevated the younger Cigala to the rank of a prince.44
In attaining these favours from the papacy and the Spanish crown, Carlo’s relationship with his brother was crucial. When he arrived on Chios in 1600, the former had been authorised to negotiate with Ciğalazade Yusuf Sinan Pasha for the latter’s defection to Christendom. By 1603, the plan, which had originally been conceived in the 1590s, had taken on truly millenarian proportions. Pope Clement VIII even had letters to the Ottoman admiral prepared in which he not only encouraged the kapudan paşa to return to his native religion, but also implored him to take up arms ‘against the tyranny of the Turks’, stage a coup d’état and install a Christian dynasty in Istanbul. Ciğalazade Yusuf Sinan Pasha was to keep all territories which he conquered from the Ottomans, with the exception of Hungary and Jerusalem, which were to be ruled over by the Emperor and the king of Spain respectively. The plan, of course, was never put into practice and, in any case, had no chance of success. Since Ciğalazade Yusuf Sinan Pasha was called to the Ottoman–Safavid border at the outbreak of
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“That’s nothing,” was the answer “He often comes in here, and walks off with three or four books without paying for them. If we see him we always politely call his attention to them. If we don’t, it doesn’t matter, for he generally recollects what he has done when he reaches home, and he sends the money for them. Yes, he is very eccentric.”
“Then I did the right thing,” said Tom, “when I offered to wrap them up for him.”
“Oh, yes. He and Mr. Townsend are great friends. He has bought books of us for years.”
“Here—er—new boy—what’s your name!” suddenly called the book store proprietor, from where he stood talking to Dr. Spidderkins. “Wrap these books up.”
Tom hurried to his employer, and took several large and heavy volumes which the old physician had evidently selected from the shelves.
“Ah, there is the young man who helped me look up some facts about—er—well now, isn’t that queer, I can’t remember what it was about,” said the doctor, as he caught sight of Tom. “Was it about how the Egyptians used to worship cats?”
“It was about belladonna and fruit cake,” answered Tom.
“Oh, yes, so it was. Yes, he was quite a help to me—I mean he showed me that I had the wrong memoranda,” went on the physician. “I must get a secretary if my memory keeps on failing me. But I must pay you for these books, Mr. Townsend. I’ll take them right along with me, or I’ll forget all about them.”
“Better let me send them,” suggested the proprietor of the Emporium. “They’ll make quite a heavy bundle.”
“Perhaps you had better Here is the money,” and the doctor held out several bills.
“Do you want that book you have under your arm?” asked Mr Townsend with a laugh, pointing to a small volume, almost hidden by the big sleeve of the doctor’s coat.
“Have I a book there? Why, bless my soul, so I have! I remember now, I took it down to look up a certain fact about how the Chinese use opium to deaden pain in sickness. It is just like a book I have, only mine is an earlier edition. I think I will take this. You may wrap it up with the others. Queer, how forgetful I am becoming. Now be sure those books are up to my house to-night.”
“They’ll be there,” Mr. Townsend assured the physician, as Tom went to the counter to wrap them up.
Dr. Spidderkins took his departure, and soon after this, Tom was told he could go out and get some lunch. He did not eat an elaborate meal and was soon back at his place.
During the afternoon he went on a number of errands, arranged several shelves of books, dusted off long rows of volumes, and waited on one or two customers.
“I’m beginning to learn the book business,” thought the lad proudly, after he had made his third sale without an error. True they were only small ones, involving the purchase of a pad, a pencil, and the last one being a small book, purchased by a girl. But they meant a lot to Tom.
“It will be closing time in half an hour,” remarked one of the younger clerks to Tom. “Do you live far from here?”
“Not very. About half an hour’s walk. But I thought you kept open late during the holidays?”
“We will, beginning next week. It will be ten o’clock every night then, but we get supper money.”
“That’s good,” remarked Tom.
“Here, what’s this!” suddenly exclaimed Mr. Townsend, as he saw the bundle of books which Tom had wrapped up for Dr. Spidderkins.
“Haven’t these books been called for by the expressman?”
“No, sir,” replied the clerk, in charge of that part of the work.
“This will never do,” went on the proprietor. “The doctor wants the books to-night. Call up the express office and see if they are
coming.”
The clerk put the telephone into operation, and presently reported to Mr. Townsend:
“He says the man forgot to call on his afternoon trip, and it’s too late now.”
“That’s too bad!” exclaimed Mr. Townsend. “Those books must go to Dr Spidderkins to-night, or he’ll be very much disappointed, and he’s too good a customer to disappoint. Tom, you had better jump on a car and take them to him. Do you know your way around the Back Bay district?”
The Back Bay district is the section of Boston where are located the residences of the rich, and it is quite exclusive.
“I guess I can find the place, sir,” said Tom confidently, though he had only been in the locality a few times.
“Well, here is your car fare. Be careful of the books now, as some of them are quite expensive. Be on hand early in the morning.”
“Yes, sir,” answered Tom, as he put on his overcoat, and with the bundle of books, which were quite heavy, he started off.
He was soon in the Back Bay district, and a little inquiry enabled him to find the doctor’s house.
“My, it’s a big place!” exclaimed Tom. “He must have money to live in a house like that.”
He went up the front steps and rang the bell. The door was presently opened by a woman, and, in the light that streamed out into the darkness from the hall, Tom saw that she was about middle age, and that her features were rather sharp and hard. Her face was not made more attractive by the way her hair was arranged, for it was drawn tightly back on both sides of her head.
“Well, what do you want?” she asked snappishly. “We don’t want to buy anything, and if you’re the boy from the grocery you’re too late with the stuff, and you must go round to the back door. I can’t have tradesmen coming to the front door.”
“These are some books Dr Spidderkins purchased to-day,” replied Tom. “I brought them, because the expressman forgot to call.”
“What’s that? Books?” asked a voice from within, that the boy recognized as the doctor’s. “Who has books for me?”
Tom caught a glimpse of the elderly gentleman. He was in his slippers and a dressing gown, and his arms were so full of books that he could not have carried another one.
“They are books from Mr. Townsend,” said Tom.
“Oh, yes. Come right in,” invited the doctor. “I was wondering why they didn’t arrive. Come right in with them, my boy. I want to look up something about a certain rare plant——”
“He’ll do nothing of the kind!” interrupted the woman. “I guess I’m not going to have snow tracked into my house! Besides, you know you started to go to supper, and there you are puttering over those books. Oh, Lemuel, you’re so forgetful!”
“So I am! So I am,” admitted the doctor in a queer sort of voice. “I remember now, I did start to go to supper. I knew it was something I ought to do. I’m glad you reminded me. I’ll eat at once,” and, placing the books he was holding on a chair in the hall, the old gentleman turned back.
“Leave the books here,” said the woman to Tom. “Are there any charges?”
“No; everything is paid.”
“All right,” and she abruptly shut the door.
“Rather a cool reception,” murmured Tom. “My, but she’s cross! I shouldn’t like to live with her. I wonder how the doctor stands it, he’s so quiet and studious? I wonder if she’s his wife? No, she can’t be.
The clerk said he wasn’t married. She must be a housekeeper, or some relation. My, but she seems to be able to make him do just as she likes! The idea of not letting him take his own books that he bought and paid for I guess he’s so easy that she has him under her thumb.”
The time came when this was demonstrated to Tom, even more forcibly than it was on this occasion.
CHAPTER III
BUSY DAYS
T was on hand so early at the book store the next morning that he found the Emporium had not yet opened. He had to stand out in the street, until the porter came along to unlock the door.
“You’re early; ain’t you?” the man asked.
“Yes; I didn’t know exactly what time I had to begin, so I thought I’d get here as soon as I could. Where will I find a broom? I have to sweep out the place.”
“I’ll get you one. You want to sprinkle damp sawdust on the floor, and cover up all the books on the tables, so they won’t get dusty. Mr. Townsend is a very particular man.”
“I believe he is, but I like him—what little I have seen of him.”
“Oh, you’ll find he’s all right,” went on the porter, as he opened the door, and showed Tom where to find a broom. Then, while the man went to the cellar to open up some cases of books that had arrived late the previous afternoon, Tom began his sweeping. He had just finished, and taken the cloths off the books, when the junior clerk arrived. In a short time all the other employes were at their places, and presently Mr. Townsend came in.
“Ah, good-morning, Tom,” he said. “I see you have the place in good shape for us. Did you leave the books for Dr. Spidderkins?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Ah, a very fine man he is, very fine indeed, if he is a trifle eccentric. Did he say anything to you?”
“Not very much. He said something about waiting for the books.”
“I hope they were not too late.”
“I went as quickly as I could with them.”
“I know you did, Tom. I mean I hope I sent you off with them in time. The doctor likes to have things the minute they are promised, though, often, after he has them, he forgets all about them. Was he much put out?”
“Not very. I didn’t have a chance to say much to him, as the lady who answered the door told the doctor it was time for his supper.”
“Ah, I dare say he had forgotten all about it. That’s his way. What did the woman say? She is his sister-in-law, I believe, though she has married a second time.”
Tom related as much of the conversation as he could remember.
“Hum,” mused the bookseller. “She’s a strange woman—very strange. Well, I guess the books got there in time. Now, Tom, I want you to go on an errand for me.”
When Tom got back from having taken some books to a customer who was stopping at the Parker House, he found the Emporium a busy place. There were a number of customers present, for the holiday rush was on, and all the clerks, and Mr Townsend, were engaged in showing books, or wrapping up parcels.
Seeing that Mr. Townsend was busy, Tom decided to defer for the present reporting on the result of his errand. He hung up his coat and hat, and as there seemed to be nothing else for him to do, he proceeded to tidy up a table of small booklets, that was usually in disorder, as customers were continually looking over the stock.
While he was thus engaged he was approached by a young man, whose clothes were of expensive cut and material.
“I beg your pardon,” he said, in a peculiar drawling accent, “but would you kindly get me a volume of Browning! I can’t seem to locate it amid all the maze of books here, and all the clerks seem to be engaged. I presume I am right in assuming that you are employed here?”
“Browning, the ball player!” exclaimed the young man. Page 25.
“Oh, yes, I work here,” answered Tom, who paid little attention to accent. “But I’ve only been here two days, and I don’t know much about the books yet.”
“Then perhaps you can’t find for me a volume of Browning?”
“I guess I can,” said Tom confidently. “I’ll look in my special catalogue,” and he produced the one Mr Townsend had arranged for him. “Browning, the baseball player, you mean, don’t you?” he asked, for there was an athlete of that name, who had made quite a reputation for himself in the New England circuit that fall.
“Browning, the ball player!” exclaimed the young man, as if horrified.
“Yes, the one that played short. He’s got the highest batting average ——”
“Don’t! Don’t, my dear young man; don’t I beg of you,” spoke the customer, waving his hands. “Baseball is such—such——”
“It’s a bully game!” exclaimed Tom, enthusiastically. “I used to be captain of a team, when I went to school. Tim Browning——”
“No, no! I mean Browning, the poet,” said the young man hastily. “I want a volume of his verses to send to a young lady. She is very fond of him. So am I.”
“Oh!” said Tom suddenly, much enlightened. “I thought you meant the other Browning. I was looking for the book among the sports. I’ll turn to poetry. Yes, here it is,” he added a moment later, as he found it in the catalogue. “I’ll get it for you.”
He got several different styles of the poet’s work and handed them to the young man.
“Ah, that is what I want!” he exclaimed. “Don’t you think his poetry is simply perfect?”
“I—I don’t care much for poetry,” replied Tom, who, since he worked in a book store, did not want to confess that he had never read a line of Browning.
“Not care for poetry! Not an admirer of Browning! You have missed much, my young friend,” murmured the customer. “I will take this copy,” he went on, selecting an expensive one and handing Tom the money.
“I don’t much care whether he buys poetry or books on sport as long as I sell ’em,” thought the lad as he wrapped up the book. “Five dollars for a book! Whew! I work a week for that. But I’m glad I sold it to him.”
The young man went out, fondly holding the volume of verse to his side. Tom went on arranging the booklets, but presently he had to stop to wait on a lady who wanted a fairy story for her little girl. Here Tom was more at home, and he found the lady quite ready to defer to his judgment as to what sort of a book was best.
Presently a young lady appealed to Tom to find for her a book on philosophy, and though the boy could hardly pronounce the title of it, he managed to locate it.
All that day Tom was kept busy, and he was acquiring more confidence in himself with every sale he made. At the close of the day, when Mr. Townsend looked over the slips made out by the different clerks, he congratulated Tom on the success he had had.
“I hope he keeps me after the holidays are over,” thought our hero. “That’s what I want, a good, steady job, so I can earn money, and then mother and Aunt Sallie won’t have to work so hard.”
Toward the end of that week Dr. Spidderkins paid another visit to the Emporium. He wandered in, and was soon examining volumes in that part of the shop given over to rare and costly books.
“Ah!” he exclaimed as Tom passed him on his way to get some wrapping-paper. “Here is just what I have been looking for. It is a rare old copy of Shakespeare. When did this come in? Why, bless my soul! If it isn’t the boy who prevented me from carrying off books without paying for them the other day,” he added as he recognized Tom. “How are you, young man?”
“Very well, sir.”
“I must have this book,” went on the old doctor. “Let’s see—it will just match that volume of Milton I bought the same day I got the copy of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. No, it wasn’t, either. It was the day I bought Darwin’s volume on evolution, or the day after. I declare, I
can’t remember which. But I must take this book along with me. What’s the price?”
“Ten dollars,” answered Tom, after a look at the mystic letters on the fly-leaf.
“Ah, very reasonable—very reasonable, indeed.”
Tom thought it very unreasonable, for the book was an old one, and he knew of whole shelvesful of brand-new books at much lower prices than that. Dr. Spidderkins, however, seemed to think he had a bargain.
“I’ll take it,” he said, putting his hand in his pocket. Then a blank look came over his face. “Bless my soul, I’ve lost my pocketbook!” he exclaimed.
“Lost it?” repeated Tom. “Do you think you dropped it here?”
“I don’t know, I’m sure. Maybe I left it at home. I’m so forgetful.”
“We have a telephone here—you could call up your house and ask if it’s there,” suggested Tom.
“So I could. I never thought of that. But I can’t talk very well over the wire, and my sister-in-law can’t hear me as well as she can some persons. Suppose you call up for me? I’ll give you the number. It’s 2256 Back Bay.”
“I’ll call up for you,” said Tom. “Shall I wrap up this book?”
“Yes. I’ll take it, anyhow, and send Mr Townsend the money Queer I can’t remember when I last had my pocketbook.”
CHAPTER IV STRANGE ACTIONS
T experience Tom had once had, as a clerk in a grocery store, where he took orders over the telephone, had made him fairly expert in the use of the instrument. He soon got the aged doctor’s house on the wire, and was inquiring of Mrs. Barton Sandow (which the physician gave as his sister-in-law’s name) whether the pocketbook had been left there.
“Yes, it’s here,” answered Mrs. Sandow shortly. “He forgot it, as usual. Tell him he left it on the breakfast-table. Why, is he in trouble?”
“No; only he wants to buy some books, and he hasn’t the money with him,” answered Tom politely
“Well, tell him to be sure and not forget to come home to dinner,” said Mrs. Sandow, as she hung up the receiver with a click that snapped in Tom’s ear.
“What does she say?” asked the old doctor.
“It’s there,” answered the boy. “And she wants you to be sure not to forget to come home to dinner.”
“I’ll not. I’ll start right away, and then I can’t forget. But I must tell Mr. Townsend about this book. I remember once I took a volume without paying for it—let me see, it was the same day I picked up a rare copy of Bacon’s works—and I forgot to send the money for a week, I got so interested reading it. I want him to send after the money for this, in case I don’t forward it right away.”
Tom found the book-store proprietor and told him of Dr. Spidderkins’ desires.
“Tell him to take the book, and welcome,” was the reply Mr. Townsend sent back. “He can take all the books he wants. He is
good for them.”
The doctor left, after insisting that a messenger must be sent to his house that evening for the ten dollars, in case he did not send it sooner.
“I guess you’d better stop up and see the doctor, Tom,” said Mr. Townsend, when it came closing time. “He hasn’t sent the money, and, while I know he’ll pay it, he always likes to have things done just as he requests. I don’t want to offend him. So just take a run up there. You know where the place is now.”
“Yes, sir. Shall I bring back the money to-night?”
“No; fetch it with you in the morning. I suppose you know that, beginning next week, we shall keep open quite late, on account of the Christmas trade?”
“Yes, sir. I don’t mind.”
“I’m glad you don’t. The boy who had the place you now have left on account of that.”
Tom made up his mind it would take a good deal more than that to make him give up his job.
He took a car for the Back Bay district, and arrived at the Spidderkins mansion about seven o’clock. His knock was answered by the woman he now knew to be Mrs. Sandow.
“Well?” she asked ungraciously.
“I called to see Dr. Spidderkins.”
“What about?”
“I was told to collect ten dollars for some books.”
“Oh! Those everlasting books!” exclaimed Mrs. Sandow. “My brotherin-law spends more money on them than he does on the house. It’s all foolishness!”
She opened the door a little wider, and Tom took this for an invitation to enter.
“Are your feet clean?” she asked suspiciously
“I wiped them carefully on the mat.”
“I don’t believe you half did. I never saw a boy yet with clean feet. Wait here, and I’ll tell the doctor.”
“Ah, good evening, my lad,” exclaimed the aged physician, as, with his spectacles half-way down on his nose, and holding a book in each hand, he came out to greet Tom. “You are from the printer’s, aren’t you? Have you the proofs of my new book on ‘The Influence of Environment in Nervous Diseases’?”
“No, sir. I’m not from the printer’s,” said Tom. “I came about the ten dollars, for Mr. Townsend.”
“Oh, yes, to be sure. How stupid of me. I wonder where my pocketbook is?”
“Didn’t you find it?”
“Find it? Did I lose it?”
“Yes. Don’t you remember me telephoning about it for you, when you were in the store?”
“Oh, yes, to be sure. Now I know who you are. Dear, dear, I am getting to have a bad memory, I’m afraid!”
He already had it, Tom thought, but the old gentleman was such a delightful character, that the boy could not help liking him.
“Come right into the sitting-room,” went on the doctor. “Let me see, your name is Theopholus, isn’t it?”
“No, sir, it’s Tom Baldwin.”
“Oh, yes, I recollect now. Well, Tom, just sit down a minute, and I’ll get the money. Please don’t disturb any of the books or papers. I’m writing another book on how to avoid taking colds, and I’m looking up all the authorities about that form of disease.”
The table was covered with books and papers, and Tom took a seat far enough away so that there would be no danger of disturbing them.
“Eliza, have you seen my pocketbook?” Dr Spidderkins called, as he left the room.
“I put it right on top of your desk, where you couldn’t help but see it,” answered Mrs. Sandow.
“Oh, yes, of course; I remember now. I have it in my pocket.”
The doctor came back into the sitting-room. He was followed a moment later by a tall, dark complexioned man, whose eyes, as Tom noticed at a glance, seemed to be continually shifting about.
“Ah, Barton, are you going to sit here and read?” asked the doctor pleasantly.
“I was going to, but you’ve got your confounded papers all over the table, so I don’t see how I can very well,” answered the man, in surly tones.
“I’ll make a place for you at once,” said the doctor hastily, sweeping the papers to one side.
“You needn’t bother,” was the man’s ungracious remark. “I can go somewhere else. I wish you, wouldn’t make such a muss.”
“But this is about my new book.”
“I don’t care what it is.”
The doctor seemed to shrink away from Mr. Barton Sandow, and Tom felt a natural resentment against a man who would speak so ungraciously to an aged person.
“Allow me to present a friend of mine to you,” went on the physician courteously “This is Tom Baldwin, Mr Sandow Tom, or I suppose I should say Thomas, this is my brother-in-law. That is he is a sort of brother-in-law. His wife was my brother’s wife, but my brother has been dead several years, and his wife married again.”
“You needn’t go into the whole family history,” said Barton Sandow surlily. “How are you?” he added to Tom, but his tone of voice was such that he might as well have told the boy he did not care whether he was well or ill.
“I—I wasn’t going to,” said the doctor gently “I only thought—I—er— and—er—” he seemed to forget what he was going to say.
“Did you call on business?” asked Mr Sandow suddenly, looking at Tom. “Dr. Spidderkins evidently has forgotten what it is about,” he added with a sneer.
“I’m from Mr. Townsend’s book store,” was the boy’s reply.
“That’s it. I knew it was something about books,” said the doctor with an uneasy laugh. “Thank you for reminding me. I had forgotten. I must pay you that ten dollars.”
He drew out his pocketbook, and began fumbling with it, for his eyesight was clearly not of the best.
“Ah, I thought I had a ten-dollar bill somewhere in it,” he said, as he handed Tom an envelope. “I sealed it up in this, and meant to send it, but I forgot it. But there ought to be more money in my wallet. I left fifty dollars in it this morning, and now there are only fifteen. I wonder what has become of the rest?”
“Do you think I took it?” asked Mr. Sandow, almost savagely.
“Why—er—no—of course not,” answered the old doctor, looking over the tops of his spectacles. “I only thought——”
“You don’t know what you thought!” exclaimed the other quite fiercely. “First thing you know you’ll be accusing me or my wife of stealing money from you. ’Liza, come here!” he called. His wife stood in the door.
“What is it, Barton?” she asked.
“The doctor has missed some money from his pocketbook, and he accuses us of taking it.”
“No, no! Nothing of the sort!” said the physician quickly. “I—I didn’t mean that. I—I thought I had more money than I have. But—er—I must——”
“You spent it, and you’ve forgotten all about it,” declared Mrs. Sandow with a hard laugh. “You’re always doing that, Lemuel. Didn’t
you pay for two tons of coal this afternoon?”
“That’s so, I guess I must have, but I don’t recollect about it. Did any coal come?”
“Of course,” answered Mrs. Sandow, quickly, and Tom, looking up suddenly, saw her making some kind of a motion to her husband.
“Then that must be where the money went,” agreed the doctor. “I’m sorry I’m so forgetful. It may interfere with my new book. I don’t mind the money, but I like to know where I spend it.”
“Probably you wasted it on books,” said Mr. Sandow, half growling out the words.
“No, I never waste money on books, and I only spent ten dollars for one to-day.”
“Ten dollars for a book!” gasped Mrs. Sandow. “You’ll be in the poorhouse soon, at that rate.”
“It was a very rare volume,” pleaded her brother-in-law. “I—I couldn’t very well let it go.”
“Humph!” sniffed the woman. “You’ll wish you had that money some day. But it’s time you went to bed. You’re forgetting it’s past your hour.”
“Is it?” asked the doctor humbly. “I knew there was something I ought to remember. Well, good-night, Tom—is it Tom? Oh, yes, I remember now. Perhaps you’ll have some more books to deliver for me next week. I must get some more authorities on colds,” and the aged gentleman tottered off, shaking his white head, as though vainly trying to remember something.
“I guess that’s all that need detain you,” said Mr. Sandow rather roughly to Tom. “We close up early here.”
“Yes; my business is finished,” replied the boy.
As he went down the stone steps, our hero wondered at the queer actions of Mr. and Mrs. Sandow, for they seemed to have some strange control over the aged doctor.
CHAPTER V
CHARLEY GROVE’S IDEA
“H , Tom!” hailed a voice, as our hero got off the street car, near his home. “Where are you going?”
Tom turned, to behold his chum, Charley Grove, whom he had not seen since going to work in the book store.
“Going home,” replied Tom. “Where are you going?”
“Same place. Haven’t seen you in over a week. Where have you been keeping yourself?”
“I’ve got a new job,” replied Tom.
“Where?”
“Down in Townsend’s Book Emporium.”
“What doin’? Readin’ books?”
“Not much. Don’t get any time for that. We’re busy on account of the holidays. What are you doing?”
“Oh, I’ve got a new job, and it’s fine.”
“What at?”
“I run the telephone switchboard in a broker’s office. Short hours and good pay. I get ten a week. All I got was eight in my last place.”
“That’s what I got, before the firm failed. Now I only get five.”
“You ought to strike for more money.”
“Wouldn’t do much good. I’m only an extra hand during the holidays. I’ll be lucky if I stay there after the first of the year.”
“That’s too bad. You ought to learn to be a telephone boy. I know two or three who make more money than I do.”
“Is it hard to learn?”
“Well, it isn’t so very easy, and if you’re in a busy office like mine it keeps you on the jump. It’s no fun to have all three members of the firm trying to get connections at once, and half a dozen parties on the outside wanting to talk to the partners to give orders to sell or buy stocks. I couldn’t do it at first, and I got all mixed up, but I can work it all right now.”
“I’d like to have a place like that,” said Tom. “I used to take orders over the telephone in the grocery store.”
“Bein’ on a private exchange is a heap different from that,” said Charley, as he walked along beside Tom.
“Do you think there’s a place in your office for another boy?” asked Tom, rather wistfully, as he thought of the good salary his chum was getting.
“I don’t believe so. But I’ll keep my ears open, and if I hear of anything in that line, I’ll let you know.”
“I wish you would. I’ll have to look for something after Christmas, and I’m afraid I’ll have a hard task finding anything.”
“Where were you when I saw you getting off the car?” asked Charley.
“I’d been over in the Back Bay section, to collect some money from a Dr. Spidderkins.”
“Dr. Spidderkins! Why he used to be our doctor,” said Charley. “He’s too old to practice now, but I remember my mother saying she had him for me, when I was a baby.”
“He’s rather a queer character,” commented Tom. “He’s always forgetting things.”
“I wish I had his rocks! He’s got slathers of money.”
“He doesn’t look rich. His clothes aren’t very good, but maybe that’s because he spends so much on books.”
“Oh, he’s got lots to spend,” said the other boy. “I heard my dad say Dr. Spidderkins was worth close to half a million. But I guess he
doesn’t have much fun out of it.”
“Why?”
“Well, he’s always studying some queer subject or other, or writing books or papers for the scientific magazines. And then I guess his sister-in-law doesn’t treat him any too good.”
“I believe you’re right there,” agreed Tom. “She seems to make fun of him, because he’s so forgetful.”
“From what I hear, though,” went on Charley, “his short memory just suits Mr. Sandow—that’s his sister-in-law’s second husband.”
“Suits him? How do you mean?”
“Well, I’ve got an idea,” went on Tom’s chum, “that Sandow would like to get control of part of Dr. Spidderkins’ money. He’s got slathers of it, as I said, and I don’t believe he knows where it all is. He’s as careless about cash as he is about other things, dad says. Forgets what he does with his rocks.”
“How do you know Sandow would like to get hold of it,” asked Tom.
“Well, Sandow does some business through our firm. Not much, though. He’s a ‘piker.’”
“What’s a ‘piker’?”
“That’s what we call a chap that buys a few shares of stock at a time. Small business, you know. Well, Sandow does a little business with us, and I heard him telephoning to our junior partner one day, giving an order for a few shares. Mr. Fletcher, that’s the junior partner, asked him why he didn’t buy more, and I heard Sandow say he couldn’t, as he didn’t have the money. Then I heard him laugh, sort of queer-like, and he said he might have more soon. Mr. Fletcher asked him where he was going to get it, and Sandow said he expected to get it from a friend of the family. Mr. Fletcher asked him if he meant Dr. Spidderkins, and Sandow only laughed. That’s all I heard.”
“Can you hear what both people say over the wire?”
