The River Takes Me Back

The story is dramatized for narrative effect. The places, dates, sales, sums, letter and return are documented.

I · The river

Behind me is Scutari. Ahead is the road to Durrës and, beyond it, the sea. Beneath the boat is the Bojana, carrying mountain water toward the Adriatic. Beside me is the Frenchman who came out of the fortress with me. We do not have the luxury of looking like men without owners. We look like what we are: two fugitives moving through somebody else’s country.

I have already made one mistake since getting free. I went to a judge.

In Scutari I learned that the judge was related to the man who had owned me. The law did not stand outside the household; it led back into it. So we left. Every pull across the river puts distance between us and that judge, that owner, that fortress whose name the Italian record will spell Sciablac.

The record calls our boat only a barca. It does not give the hour, the owner or the rig. It gives the direction, and it gives the men from Dulcigno who change course toward us before we can follow it.¹

For perhaps a day, perhaps less, I have belonged to no one.

Men are coming toward us. The first men who captured me took my future. These men take the escape I had made from it.

This is not the first time I will be sold.

II · Twenty-seven zecchini

I leave Bologna in 1750, at twenty-five, to seek my fortune. The phrase survives me: in cerca di fortuna.

It sounds almost jaunty two and a half centuries later, as if fortune were a town I could reach by walking hard enough.

I find work as the servant of a Venetian officer. I do not think of it as serving an empire. I think of it as wages. For five or six years the record loses me entirely: no road, no ship, not even the officer’s name.

When it finds me again, men are taking hold of me near a place the pamphlet spells Pastruich. Bologna will call them Montenegrins. It preserves no name, no flag, no grievance, no commission and no charge against me. It preserves what happens next: they put a price on me.¹

First recorded price: 27 Venetian zecchini.

About two years of a building labourer’s pay.

In the towns of Venice’s mainland in those same years a building labourer earned a lira and a quarter to a lira and a half a day, and a zecchino was worth about twenty-two lire. My first price was something like two years of a labourer’s work.²

The buyer commands a fortress the account calls Sciablac. The modern scholar who recovered my story could not identify it, so I will not. The commander is described as a Turk. In his household, the account says, I am pressed violently to abandon Christianity, and the pressure almost kills me. It does not preserve the room, the instrument or the words. I will not supply them.

I live there about a year. I find another captive, a Frenchman, and together we get out. We reach Scutari. We learn who the judge is. We turn toward Durrës.

The blank intervals are part of the evidence. The record becomes detailed when Betti is transferred, priced or redeemed.

The record · Who took him?

Betti’s employer was a foreign sovereign policing a coast it did not fully control. Paštrovići, the district almost certainly hidden inside the pamphlet’s “Pastruich,” governed itself through an assembly and elected judges under Venetian sovereignty, owed Venice military service, and had no resident Venetian official.³

In February 1755 Montenegro’s Metropolitan Vasilije Petrović petitioned the Russian empress for protection against both the Ottoman Empire and Venice. Late that year Venice decided to have him poisoned. Ottoman forces attacked Montenegro in 1756.⁴ The men who seized a Venetian officer’s servant in those months could have been resisting an occupier, settling a local grievance, taking booty or trafficking a vulnerable man. Venetian files elsewhere accuse named Paštrovići of exactly that kind of trafficking; those files are accusations generated by a state policing its subjects, not verdicts.⁵

The pamphlet never asks. It calls the captors Montenegrins and records the price.

III · Seven months in Dulcigno

Hands on the gunwale. The other boat is alongside before the Frenchman has finished saying what it is.

The men are from Dulcigno, the port now called Ulcinj. I do not know their names. I do not know whether they watched the crossing or simply found us on it. I know the quick collapse of distance, the moment when a route becomes an enclosure.

The city rises from the Adriatic on a wedge of rock. From the river its walls make a hard edge against the sky. I enter it without choosing to enter.

The men who take me are Ottoman subjects because Dulcigno is an Ottoman port. That does not make them officers carrying an order from Istanbul. Istanbul, in fact, keeps ordering this coast to stop doing this. The orders have to be repeated.⁶

I am sold in Dulcigno to a relative of the pasha.¹

No surviving line puts that sale in the stone plaza visitors are now shown as the Slave Square. The honest scene is harsher because it is smaller: someone possesses me, someone else pays, and I am made to go with the buyer.

The sign and the record

I try to escape. The attempt nearly kills me. My owner does what owners do with a risk: he sells it. The second buyer is another relative of the pasha. I try again and fail again. Each flight teaches the people around me more about how to keep me. Each sale converts their inconvenience into somebody else’s property.

For seven months Ulcinj is not a picturesque old town or a story about pirates polished for visitors. It is the distance between a door and whoever watches it. It is a port that can turn a person inland toward a household or outward toward a larger market.

Three letters out of Ulcinj
A genuine voice · documents, not reconstruction

Ulcinj, 20 June 1691. A group of captives held in the town wrote home warning that if their messenger did not return with the ransom by the deadline, they would be sold onward to North Africa. On the reverse of their appeal their owners had written a list of goods to be sent with the money: ceramics, cloth, household things.

Ulcinj, 9 August 1667. Francesco Antonio Ascentij wrote to his mother after three years in the town, on paper he had reused from her because he could not afford his own.

Ulcinj, 1739. Nicola Sarcinelli, twelve years old, wrote to his father pleading for ransom and reporting violence. His complete fate is not known.¹⁰

Human beings on one side of the page; consumer wants on the other.

A ship arrives from Tripoli.

The record · Pirates, merchants, or both?

Venice habitually called Ulcinj’s commercial rivals pirates, and Ottoman inquiries sometimes found the accused to be lawful merchants and carriers. The Albanian historian Ardian Muhaj argues from Venetian and Albanian documents that Ulcinj’s eighteenth-century fleet was primarily commercial, with corsairing a smaller activity shaped by rivalry and reprisal.⁷

But Ottoman imperial registers also record named Ulcinj captains seizing protected vessels and ransoming their crews. In 1756, near the time of Betti’s crossing, an Ulcinj vessel took an Austrian noble near Dubrovnik and released him for 126 gold pieces; another entry records Ali Hoca taking twenty-one people from a Venetian ship that year despite earlier orders for his arrest.⁸ The government in Istanbul distinguished lawful war at sea from outlaw raiding and repeatedly ordered the coast to stop. It had to repeat itself because authority weakened between the palace and the quay.⁶

The supportable phrase is therefore Ulcinj raiders operating from an Ottoman port: men inside an imperial system, profiting from its local networks, and not thereby its navy.

IV · The man the account leaves behind

I leave aboard that ship because I am exchanged for another human being.

He is described in the record by his color and by nothing else: an unnamed Black captive, passed from the Tripoli vessel to my Ulcinj owner, with, a later historian adds, fifteen zecchini to balance the account.¹¹ I go south into his place. He goes into mine.

I cannot tell this as though only my freedom matters. I am a white Italian being carried into enslavement; the man passed the other way has been reduced even further by the record, to a description and a price. My name survived because an institution in Bologna had a reason to keep it. His did not survive because nobody in Tripoli or Ulcinj had a reason to write it down.

The account follows me onto the ship. It leaves him at the exchange.

The coast falls away. Ulcinj has sold me south.

V · A 130-zecchino invoice

In Tripoli I am sold to Mamet Cajà, the bey’s chief minister. He was born a Christian in Naples.

The Italian account calls him a renegade, the word for a European who has converted to Islam and risen in a Muslim state.¹¹ It is meant as an accusation. To me it is a fact about the market: an Italian can own an Italian here, and Christianity kept no one from selling me. Around this sea identity is not a wall. It is a door through which money, ambition and fear keep passing.

After about six months Mamet Cajà passes me to the bey, and the bey puts me to heavy labor on public works. Years go by that the record does not divide into days.

What saves me is not purity and not empire. It is paper.

On 6 July 1761 a letter leaves Tripoli for my father in Bologna. With it travels a certificate from Father Filippo da Montevarchi, the apostolic prefect there, attesting that I exist and am held.¹ The surviving summaries do not give me back the letter’s words. I know only what the paper did when it arrived.

My body becomes correspondence.

My father carries it to the men of Santa Maria della Neve, the Bolognese confraternity that redeems Christian captives. On 11 October 1761 they vote to take my case. Their network runs through Ambrogio di Sant’Agostino, a Discalced Trinitarian in Livorno, and Cosimo Conti, the imperial consul in Tripoli.¹² Nobody in this chain has seen me. Everybody in it is deciding what I am worth.

The first figure to reach Bologna is 110 Tripolitan zecchini. It is a clerical error. The corrected demand is 210, and Bologna refuses it. On 10 January 1762 the confraternity caps what it will spend at 160, then raises the cap to 180. The men who own me hold out for a number; the men who want me back hold out for a smaller one. I am the only party to the negotiation who is not in the room.¹²

Currencies differ and are not converted into one another. Sale and ransom figures from the 1762 Ragguaglio and the confraternity file as reconstructed by Anastasi; wage equivalence from Ferlito’s Verona accounts.²

No one needed to write give us the money or else. The threat was my continued possession, my labor, my resale and the width of the sea between my father and me. Other captives in Ulcinj had spelled it out. In 1691 a group of them wrote home that if their messenger did not return with the ransom by the deadline, they would be sold onward to North Africa.¹⁰ I was the thing they were afraid of becoming. I had already been sold onward.

The ransom closes at 130 zecchini, before the costs of agents, transfers and passage. The confraternity’s ledger will record the whole operation at 1,940 Bolognese lire and 18 soldi.¹²

A letter moves before Betti can

1. Betti and Father Filippo da Montevarchi — Letter and captivity certificate (Tripoli · 6 July 1761)
2. Betti’s father → Santa Maria della Neve — Case accepted; money authorized (Bologna · 11 Oct. 1761)
3. Ambrogio di Sant’Agostino, Discalced Trinitarian — Coordinates the negotiation (Livorno)
4. Cosimo Conti, imperial consul — Closes the ransom (Tripoli)
5. Betti — Reported free; returns; procession 21 Nov. (Livorno → Bologna · Aug.–Nov. 1762)

Five people moved paper and money for fourteen months. None of them had seen Betti.¹²

By 29 August 1762 the men in Bologna hear that I am free and have reached Livorno.¹²

VI · The procession

I reach Bologna at the end of September, twelve years after I left it to find my fortune. The later accounts disagree by a few days about which day.¹

On 21 November the confraternity leads me through the city.¹² I am the proof that redemption works: a body returned, a charity vindicated, a captive who endured, stayed Christian and came home. That year a Bolognese printer sets sixteen pages about me. The pamphlet names the priests, the agents and the sums.¹⁴

It has less reason to ask what I was doing for Venetian power when I was first seized, or why Venice was trying to destroy the political leader of the people among whom I was taken, or how an Ottoman government that kept forbidding raids went on governing through the households that bought what the raiders brought in. Redemption literature preferred a border between faiths. My route crossed systems that were tangled together.

Bologna, too, held enslaved Muslims in these same years. Christian and Muslim polities redeemed their own while exploiting captives from the other side.¹³

The only account of Betti’s captivity, as catalogued (SBN UBOE078792). A reproduction has been requested from the Archiginnasio.

Ragguaglio della schiavitù prima in Dulcigno, e poi in Tripoli di Barbaria di Gian-Marco Betti cittadino bolognese, e del riscatto fattone l’anno 1762. Bologna: Longhi, 1762. 16 pp.¹⁴

The record · What the pamphlet wanted

The only account of Betti’s captivity is a sixteen-page Ragguaglio printed in Bologna in 1762 by the institution that ransomed him. It is not a memoir in his hand. Redemption narratives of this kind commemorated a successful ransom, edified readers and raised money for the next one. Salvatore Bono warns that the sufferings they describe could be heightened for the purpose.¹

The pamphlet is precise about routes, people and payments and silent about motive. That does not make it false. It makes it interested.

I would like to tell you what I did on the morning after the procession. That is where the record stops. It does not say whether I woke believing a locked door belonged to someone else, or how my father looked after twelve years, or whether Bologna felt smaller or impossibly wide.

Somewhere south of me a man whose name no one wrote down is doing my labor, or has been sold again, or is dead. The page that kept my name did not keep his.

On the Bojana, freedom lasted the width of a river. In Tripoli it became an invoice. In Bologna men printed my return as a triumph.

The page records the price. It does not record what the price left in me.

Help extend the record

Five things we are looking for:

1. Betti’s letter of 6 or 7 July 1761 and Father Filippo da Montevarchi’s captivity certificate, or the earliest transcription of either.
2. Archivio di Stato di Bologna, Santa Maria della Neve, busta 31: the deliberations of 11 October 1761, 10 January 1762 and 29 August 1762, and the ledger entry for the operation.
3. An identification of the fortress the pamphlet calls “Sciablac.”
4. Anything on the Frenchman who escaped with Betti, or on the man exchanged for him at Ulcinj.
5. Any document, report or early account that identifies where in Ulcinj captives were sold.

If you hold a document, a family paper, a port or court record, a photograph of an original, or scholarship in any language that bears on Betti, Paštrovići, Ulcinj, Tripoli or the wider captive trade, please write to us and identify the repository or collection, with dates and shelf marks where you have them. Submissions are checked against the surviving record before any change is made.