Keywords

This monograph examines the original and eponymous Lingua Franca, a language spoken across the Mediterranean, through much of the Levant and in Barbary, the North African region comprising Algiers, Tunis and Tripoli. Lingua Franca straddled multiple domains. It was the language of international diplomacy but also of domestic life, spoken, according to Haedo (1612), by man, woman and child. Equally, it was the language of pirates, slaves and merchants and, as such, is the subject of legend and myth. Fact is hard to discern from fiction, not solely in accounts and examples of the language, but also in terms of the numbers and nature of its speakers, and its origins and eventual disappearance. As Hilary Mantel says in her Reith Lecture (2017), however, ‘a myth is not a falsehood – it is a truth, cast into symbol and metaphor’ (Mantel 2017: Reith Lecture 2, BBC Radio 4).

One of my principal intentions, consequently, is to rehabilitate discounted dramatic sources, such as Molière and Goldoni, and re-evaluate them. Indubitably, they do not offer examples of authentic Lingua Franca, and yet it is hard to establish exactly which sources do. Travel writing, memoirs and captivity narratives, all termed factual, exhibit exaggeration and, even, invention. Memoirs of years spent as a slave lend themselves to embellishment. As one former captive writes, his years of hard slavery were not without benefit:

desquels je confesserai ingénument avoir tiré autant ou peut-être plus de profit en peu de temps que de mes etudes de plusieurs années

from which I will candidly confess to have derived as much or perhaps more profit in a short time than from my many years of study. (D’Aranda 1662: 23; my translation)

What the dramatic sources do contribute to a limited corpus is a sense of the widespread and recognized nature of Lingua Franca, and a reinforcement of its lexical character and key grammatical features. They also offer insights into the world they portray and illustrate—particularly valuable to the modern reader who struggles to imagine the people, their houses and cities their social interactions, their daily lives.

The documentary corpus is limited but, even within those sources already identified by erudite Lingua Franca scholars such as Cifoletti, Venier, Dakhlia and Minervini, there are excerpts and references they have not discovered, or at least have not mentioned. I have tried particularly to expand the number of English-language sources within the corpus, in part because I feel these have been under-represented to date, but also predominantly because I believe these sources are valuable for their lack of authorial Romance-language bias. By this I mean that the authors of these sources are not overly influenced in their record of Lingua Franca by their native tongue. In theory, thus, their account should be more objective and, as such, provide a different perspective on the language. This, however, adds an important dimension to the profile of Lingua Franca, and perhaps its very existence: to a non-Romance speaker, the linguistic and lexical variation may have been immaterial—different L2 versions of Italian may all have been perceived as Lingua Franca. Thus Lingua Franca may well have existed in the mind of a non-Romance speaker, where an Italian or Spanish, or even Portuguese, speaker saw it as an impoverished, corrupt or simply ‘bad’ version of their own language. The question of Lingua Franca’s very existence was, and remains, subjective. To adapt the expression, ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder’, Lingua Franca was in the ‘ear of the beholder’.

I have also explored texts in several archives, and will highlight here the contribution these make to our understanding of Lingua Franca’s features, its linguistic domains and its endurance long after many believe it had ceased to be in use. Indeed, texts from the Schuchardt Archive shed light on Lingua Franca’s ongoing shifts and evolution as late as the close of the nineteenth century. The attestations by Schuchardt’s expert correspondents include references to examples of written Lingua Franca as well as samples recorded by these linguists in Algiers and Tunis. These are potentially the most reliable documentary evidence and yet, ironically, most of them are omitted by Schuchardt is in his eventual article that has long been regarded as the definitive portrait and analysis of Lingua Franca.

This first chapter attempts to demonstrate how Lingua Franca evolved, survived and thrived as a result of the particular historic, political, economic and social conditions of Barbary, and the Mediterranean region more widely. Its fortunes depended on the cosmopolitan plurilingualism of the Regencies of Algiers, Tunis and Tripoli, the Levant and European ports across the Mediterranean. It was, as such, a language ahead of its time. Its lexical mix and idiolectal fluidity are features more characteristic of today’s urban metropolises.

Verse

Verse * * *

Today, a lingua franca is a term describing a language used by two or more linguistic groups as a means of communication, often for economic motives. None of the groups speak the chosen language as their native tongue. Largely as a result of colonialism, the three European languages that most often serve as lingua francas are English, French and Spanish. In addition, languages such as Swahili and Hindi are used as regional lingua francas. However, the original and eponymous Lingua Franca was a trading language, used among and between Europeans and Arabs across the Mediterranean. This commercial aspect meant that Lingua Franca was translated by some as ‘free language’, as Schuchardt explains, citing (and translating) MacCarthy and Varnier (1852) ‘doubtless because of the freedom from taxes it enjoyed in all the ports’ (Schuchardt 1909, trans. 1980: 74).

There are linguists who interpret Franca as Franc, meaning French (Hall 1966: 3). He claims that the term derives from the era of the Crusades. The French played a significant role in the religious conflicts of the medieval era, and their language(s), particularly Provençal, was adopted across the Mediterranean in much of the Levant and into North Africa. Hall maintains that much of the commerce across the Mediterranean in the Middle Ages came from South Eastern France, stretching from the port of Marseille as far North as Genoa. Provençal, according to Hall (and much disputed by many others), was a key linguistic constituent in the original Lingua Franca (Hall 1966: 4).

In their etymological study of Lingua Franca, Kahane and Kahane (1976: 25) assert that the name Lingua Franca is rooted in the East and the Byzantine tradition. An alternative derivation for Lingua Franca, espoused by Schuchardt (1909, trans. 1980: 74) among others, is from the Arabic, lisān al-faranğ. Al-faranğī initially referred to Latin and then to describe a trading language employed largely by Jews across the Mediterranean. It later came to encompass the languages of all Europeans, but particularly Italians (Kahane and Kahane 1976: 26).

The word phrangika, from the Greek, was a term used in the Byzantine region to denote the West, Occidentals and their language. The early language of communication between the Byzantine Empire and Rome was Latin, which the former termed Latinum or Francum. The vernacular, which emerged and spread in commerce and diplomacy, from the early thirteenth century, was given the same name (Kahane and Kahane 1976: 27–28). Venice was, for much of the Middle Ages, the commercial and political centre of Western Europe, up until the late eighteenth century. Venetian was spoken from Dalmatia (in the South and East) across much of the Mediterranean basin as far as the Levant, and colonial Venetian, spoken in the various outposts of the maritime empire, was most likely a colloquial, basic form of Venetian (Cremona 2001: 289–290). Phrangika came to mean Venetian as much as Italian, or indeed, as any Western language (Kahane and Kahane 1976: 31). This is significant because, as will become evident throughout the book, the term Lingua Franca did not denote a single language. It came to define various pidgins, in more or less evolved states, over a substantial geographic and diachronic spread, and the diversity this implies extended further still. There was variation and an inherent acknowledgment of idiolectal adaptation in all the Lingua Franca varieties.

References to Lingua Franca are widespread in terms of history and geography. The earliest record of Lingua Franca dates from the fourteenth century on an island, Djerba, off the coast of Tunisia (Kahane and Kahane 1976: 33). Three thousand kilometres east of Djerba, an Italian diplomat and traveller, Ambrogio Contarini, recalled meeting a speaker in Tblisi, Georgia. He wrote, eravamo abbondonati da tutti, salva che da un vecchio che sapeva poco Franco ‘We were abandoned by everybody, other than an old man who spoke a bit of [Lingua] Franca’ (Ramusio 1583; 119; my translation). Descriptions of Lingua Franca detailing its lexifiers and, in some cases, its salient features, come mostly from the North African Barbary Regencies and from the Levant. While their writers often identify ItalianFootnote 1 and Spanish as lexifiers, there are also, if fewer, mentions of Portuguese, French, Provençal, Arabic, Turkish and Greek. This speaks to the hypothesis that there were multiple Lingua Francas, or perhaps more appropriately lingua francas. It also raises the frequent subjectivity of the source’s writer and his (or her) consequent interpretation of Lingua Franca. His (or her) native language appears to have a bearing on the makeup of the Lingua Franca recorded. It may influence the lexicon he (or she) hears, as well as the orthography he (or she) employs in his (or her) account. Equally, there is the subjectivity of the researcher to bear in mind. The assumption that a French source, for example, has represented Lingua Franca in a particular manner overlooks the fact that the European residents, particularly of port cities across the Mediterranean, most likely would have been multilingual, with an ability to adapt their lexicon to maximize understanding and communication with their interlocutor.

The most widespread documentation of Lingua Franca comes from the Levant and into North West Africa. Algiers, and to a lesser extent, Tunis and Tripoli, had long been the crucible of Mediterranean piracy, and as the slave trade of Barbary pirates increased—with over a million European slaves held there between the sixteenth and nineteenth century (Davis 2004: 23)—so too did the domains and usage of Lingua Franca. The sixteenth–seventeenth century-Spanish Abbott Diego del Haedo described it as follows:

La que los Moros e Turcos llaman Franca… siendo todo una mexcla de lenguas cristianas y de vocablos, que son por la mayor parte Italiano e espanoles y algunos portugueses…Este hablar Franco es tan general que non hay casa do no se use

that which the Arabs and Turks call Franca…being a mix of Christian languages and words, which are in the majority Italian and Spanish and some Portuguese, this Franca is so widespread that there isn’t a house [in Algiers] where it isn’t spoken. (Haedo, 1612: 24; my translation)

Despite its alleged profusion in Barbary, and numerous citations, the corpus of Lingua Franca is remarkably limited. Exclusively European documentary sources (from contemporary diplomats, travellers, priests and slaves) provide mostly phrases and individual words. There are a handful of short dialogues. The most fulsome examples come from literature, and, as such, only provide indirect, and less authentic, evidence of the contact vernacular. However, Kahane and Kahane (1976) suggest that the theatre of Goldoni, a Venetian playwright with direct experience of Lingua Franca, offers accurate renditions of the language. Other prominent playwrights and novelists included scenes or excerpts of Lingua Franca in major works. These include Molière, Cervantes and Dryden. It is striking that these writers span several languages and over two centuries. The language of their Lingua Franca is of varying degrees of realism and in all cases has a dramatic purpose as its primary function. Attention has been paid to the linguistic repertoire of audiences and readers, and yet they all, to some degree, exhibit features linguists have cited as the hallmarks of Lingua Franca, particularly the use of the infinitive for all verb forms (an infinitive which mostly lacks the final -e of Italian verbs, more akin to Spanish or French ending thus -ir or -ar) and a prevalent use of tonic pronouns, mi and ti.

Other key defining features of Lingua Franca found within the corpus and detailed in the sole lexical and grammatical record of Lingua Franca,Footnote 2 the Dictionnaire, include an absence of agreement of gender and number. Nouns have one case and are in the singular. The lexicon is Romance-based, with Italian predominant but significant Spanish (and, to a lesser degree, other Romance language and dialect) interference.Footnote 3 There also appears to be a reduced vowel space in Lingua Franca, likely influenced by Arabic, such that the three principal vowels /a/, /i/and /u/dominate. Venetian influence is also evident in the Lingua Franca tendency to drop final vowels following -l, -n, -r e.g. colazion instead of colazione ‘breakfast’. Both Venetian and Lingua Franca exhibit examples of degemination: tuto rather than the more accepted tutto ‘all’ and voicing of intervocalic stops—segredo rather than segreto ‘secret’ (Ursini 2011). The voicing of t to d is consistent with the Spanish that also influenced phonologically elements of Lingua Franca.

The disproportionate representation in literature and relative lack of documentary sources have not dissuaded linguists since Schuchardt from the late nineteenth century onwards from expressing dogmatic, at times unsubstantiated views on Lingua Franca. Texts have often been cited by one linguist as exemplary of Lingua Franca, only to be rejected by another, yet the lack of comprehensive, authoritative dictionaries and grammars, other than the Dictionnaire published in 1830, to be discussed in detail in the following chapters, makes it hard to establish which party is correct. Ironically, differences of interpretation may reflect the unfixed character of the language itself. Indeed, several linguists have identified this quixotic character, referring to the language as a seeschlange ‘sea monster’ (Schuchardt 1883: 282) or Nessie (Selbach 2007: 29). Cremona handwrote ‘Sherlock’ in the top right-hand corner of many of the notes in his archive to describe the investigative process he had embarked on and there is undoubtedly an investigative character to my research, a lack of neat answers and issues that remain (as yet) unresolved.

I have taken inspiration from the work of Philip Freeman (2015) in his Searching for Sappho, a record of his, and other historians, archaeologists and literary scholars’ attempt to discover more about the life and work of Sappho, the first woman poet of the ancient world. In his introduction, he writes ‘the facts about her life are few and often subject to dispute’, that there are scattered comments about her in ancient authors’ and of her poems that ‘only a few remnants have survived the centuries. Many have missing words or lines…often nothing remains except for a single line or even a solitary word’ (Freeman 2015: Loc. 103). These latter observations could almost verbatim apply to Lingua Franca with its partial and sparse corpus. Freeman also acknowledges the impossibility of creating an accurate picture of Sappho’s life, striving instead with the assistance of ‘other sources from the ancient world—literary, artistic, and archaeological—we can create a plausible, if partial picture of what Sappho’s life must have been like’ (Freeman 2015: Loc. 108). This harnessing of other fields of expertise informs my own study, although evidently there is a difference between reconstructing a person and her work, and reconstructing a language and its speakers. In order to better understand the potential speakers of Lingua Franca, I have attempted to document the diverse and shifting populations of the Barbary Regencies, the Levant and Mediterranean ports. Linguistic ethnography embraces the variation and fluidity in contemporary language and communication, once again hallmarks of Lingua Franca, and key to a reading of the corpus:

L[inguistic] E[thnography] allows the placing of mobility, instability and uncertainty at the centre of the picture in that bounded notions of language and community are never conceived of as a starting point for data interpretation. (Pérez-Milans 2015: 12)

Close analysis of the texts with language as the ‘entry point to the study of the interrelations between culture, language and social differences’ (Pérez-Milans 2015: 7) is the approach advocated in linguistic ethnography. Varvaro (1984) explicitly differentiated between a contemporary and a historical sociolinguist, adamant that the latter cannot rely solely on ethnographic methods, analysis of community practices, but rather must content himself with sparse excerpts of survived texts. Mallette (2017) echoes this in her article analyzing accounts of sailors’ voyages across the Mediterranean. Her articulated methodology mirrors my own in the research and analysis of the many contexts—social, political, historical, ethnographic and linguistic—of Lingua Franca. Her focus is on the texts, themselves:

rather than use data-driven methodologies that some scholars use in order to think through complexity, I will use narratives: the bits and pieces that wash up on the Mediterranean shores like driftwood following storms at sea. My aim is not to resolve complexity. Rather, I propose that narrative accounts of complexity can yield a story about the past that may prove as useful as the analytic accounts that eliminate complexity using explication, deductive reasoning and teleological argumentation. (Mallette 2017: 117)

In keeping with this, I am presenting texts in this book that contradict and conflict with one another, and exploring the overlap of fact and fiction, and all the complexity and unresolvedness about Lingua Franca that these suggest.

Further, I emulate Mallette’s holistic and largely qualitative (but also quantitative) approach to Lingua Franca (Mallette 2014). She advocates, as her principal method of research, ‘close reading of a relatively small number of narrative details’. This validates my own approach, particularly in my archive research, despite, as she acknowledges, it being ‘rather old-fashioned’ (Mallette 2017: 129).

Several of the key texts (Haedo 1612; Broughton 1839; Tully 1819) of the Lingua Franca corpus include not only examples of the language, but also provide ethnographic and sociocultural detail about Barbary. It is evident that even before the Spanish Abbot Haedo, whose topographical study of Algiers (Haedo 1612) provides the earliest detailed information about Lingua Franca’s ubiquity in Barbary, wrote his account of the city-state at the close of the sixteenth century, the population was multilingual, its leaders, albeit sustained by Turks, being western European and Romance language-speaking. The Regencies of Algiers, Tunis and Tripoli were already strategically located, western-looking, commercial hubs. The influx of powerful corsairs, thousands of European slaves, and the financial leverage these brought would only increase the need for a common tongue, a lingua franca.

In his article on the historiography of the Maghreb, Bono (1972) writes that Barbary was a contradiction of an anarchic and often lawless society, but with a well-ordered Ottoman hierarchical system in place, fuelled economically by corsairing, and a diverse multilingual multinational population (Bono 1972: 242–243; my translation). The Regencies, particularly Algiers, were the definition of a cosmopolis. According to Heers, authors and witnesses couldn’t help being ‘dazzled and confused by the diversity which pervaded every street, alley or stairway; they emerged charmed but a little breathless’ (Heers 2004: 146). The potential disorientation was compounded by the sense of constant change and a consequent lack of familiarity of place, people, culture and language.

The population was often swamped and enlarged by waves of new arrivals, shifting the equilibrium of the social order this way and that. People from far away arrived to find themselves under the thumb of strange rulers with different manners and customs. (Heers 2004: 146)

Heers asserts that the Regencies’ Muslim population in the seventeenth century was a diverse community that spoke a wealth of different languages. Groups either maintained their own languages or adapted a local patois that suited their particular needs. As a result, very few European merchants, and slaves, ever learnt an African language (Heers 2004: 117).

The Barbary corsairs carried out raids at sea and on land. Their incursions garnered thousands of coastal and even inland captives across Europe, not solely countries on the Mediterranean. European renegades made up the majority of corsairs working out of the Barbary States. A captured ship’s crew, as potential slaves, constituted the most lucrative part of a ship’s cargo. Clissold describes the fear engendered by the Barbary pirates: an ‘encounter with the corsairs could only be a moment of unmitigated anguish and terror. It was for their captain, often tricked by a false flag or by a voice hailing him in a familiar tongue, to make the fateful decision whether to attempt resistance or surrender’ (Clissold 1977: 35–36). It seems plausible that Lingua Franca would have been the familiar language in question. This is reinforced by the historian, Peter Earle (1970), in his citing of a French diplomat, Chastelet les Boys, who relayed the cries (in Lingua Franca) of the attacking Barbary pirates: ‘when redoubling their terrible yells of Mena pero ‘surrender, dogs’ they gave us the whole broadside, and smashed our bowsprit with angel-shot’ (Earle 1970: 60). Tinniswood refers to the Lingua Francification of names given to some pirates, as found in consular documents: The Genoese renegade Agostin Bianco, also known as Murad Rais, was recorded too as Agostin Bianco Alis Morato Raixi Genovesz and Caytto Morato Genovese Turco (Tinniswood 2010: 68). Morgan, an English Consul in Algiers, uses the phrase a la Christianesca ‘in the Christian way’ disdainfully to describe corsair behavior:

nothing was more common to be seen in the streets of Algiers, than parties of renegades, sitting publicly on mats, costly carpets and cushions, playing cards and dice, thrumming guitars and singing a la Christianesca, inebriating like swine. (Morgan 1731: 532)

According to Morgan, such displays led the local population to complain that ‘these renegades are neither Christians, Musulmans nor Jews; they have no faith nor religion at all’ (Morgan 1731: 533). Certainly, renegades, by virtue of their economic power appear to have been, and certainly to have considered themselves, above the law.

In the early seventeenth century, slavery was a fixed period of 7 years bondage (Fisher 1957: 102–103). D’Arvieux concurs that slaves were treated surprisingly well and could live ‘very commodiously for their state in life, and provided that they are willing to work, pretty much at their ease’ (D’Arvieux 1735: vol. iv, 5). There were unsurprisingly other less positive accounts of slavery but several mention the slaves’ rights to work not solely for their nominal master, and thus earn money. Sale of contraband—including alcohol and tobacco—appeared to be the preserve of Christian slaves, who thereby acquired means and status, and the opportunity, if so desired (though it was not always) to buy themselves out of bondage (Fisher 1957: 100). BagniosFootnote 4—slave quarters—also had chapels and taverns within them where drinking and gambling were acceptable activities for unmarried soldiers, renegades, foreign sailors and slaves. According to D’Aranda who counted twenty-two languages spoken there, the bagnio was the best school in the world for practical experience (D’Aranda 1662: 12). D’Arvieux attributes the survival and spread of Lingua Franca in Algiers to the need for communication among the diverse multilingual slave community, their masters and the various other groups in Regency society (D’Arvieux 1735: vol. v, 235).

Dan (1637) writes that the corsairs ont mis à la chaine un million de personnes ‘put a million people in chains’ (Dan 1637: 317; my translation). Although this is an enormous number, the attrition rate of slaves due to the hardship of their lives, frequent outbreaks of plague and a population-wide low life expectancy (and, of course, apostasy which secured slaves freedom) meant there was a need to constantly replace slaves (Davis 2004: 22–23). With regard to the figures suggested by contemporary commentators, Davis (2004) suggests that, as with so much of the testimony of Barbary life, there are issues of accuracy. As with the Lingua Franca corpus, North African sources are minimal and those coming from Europe are held in numerous archives of variable accessibility.

What material there is turns out to be more anecdotal than serial by nature and, although often highly suggestive, these sources by no means allow one to total with any hope of accuracy all those enslaved by the Barbary corsairs. (Davis 2004: 9)

Several sources mention the Dey elevating a Christian to the role of private secretary, or a ‘favourite slave’ (Caronni 1805: 101, 125; Pananti 1841: 69). Such promotion implies the fluidity of power structures in Algiers, and the ability of European slaves to permeate the upper echelons of its society. The Dey’s personal secretary referred to by Caronni was Mariano Stinca, a former Neapolitan slave, who became indispensable to his master, famous throughout Algiers and secured independent wealth through his trade of a rose essence liqueur:

la più squisita in oggi è quella che si compra da Mariano lo schiavo favorito del Rey, e viene a costare al meno dieci scudi all’ oncia

the most delicious one today can be bought from Mariano, the Dey’s favourite slave, and costs ten scudi an ounce. (Caronni 1805: 101; my translation)

Nevertheless, the precariousness of such preferment is equally evident from accounts by both Pananti and Caronni. The latter refers to a favourite Maltese slave whose right hand was cut off for allegedly not declaring some private dealings (Caronni 1805: 125), while Pananti relates his master’s account in Lingua Franca of a former Dey’s secretary:

Star questo costume d’aver segretario uno schiavo. Questo Dey aver avuto primo suo segretario un Cristiano, e questo can d’infedele aver tradito; e Dey far testa tagliara

It is the custom to have a slave as secretary. This Dey had a Christian as his first secretary, and that disloyal dog betrayed him; and the Dey had his head cut off. (Pananti 1841: 69; my translation)

The language here is noteworthy as it has the hallmarks of Lingua Franca in terms of all verb forms in the infinitive, and yet it is indubitably the recollection of an Italian in its orthography, which is more standardized than perhaps the pronunciation of an Algiers slavemaster would have been. There is also agreement of nouns and adjectives, uno schiavo ‘a slave’ and suo segretario ‘his secretary’ which is inconsistent with many of the accounts of Lingua Franca.

Barbary corsairs were themselves a multinational group, at least as diverse as the slave population. Haedo enumerates their nationalities:

No hay naciòn de cristianos, en el mundo de la cual no haya renegade y renegados en Argel. Y comenzando de las remotas provincias de Europa, hallan en Argel renegados moscovitas, rojos […], búlgaros, polacos, húngaros, bohemios, alemanes, de Danimarca y Noruega, escoces, ingleses, irlandeses, flamencos, borgoñones, franceses, navarros, vizcaínos, castellanos, gallegos, portugueses, andaluces, valencianos, aragoneses, catalanes, mallorquines, sardos, corzos, sicilianos, calabreses, napolitanos, romanos, toscanos, genoveses, saboyanos, piamonteses, lombardos, venecianos, esclavones, albaneses[…], griegos, candiotas, cretanos, chipriotas, surianos y de Egypto y aun Abejinos de Preste Juan e indios de las Indias de Portugal, del Brasil y de Nueva España

There is no Christian nation in the world from which there are no renegades in Algiers. And starting with the remote provinces of Europe, in Algiers there are renegade Muscovites, Reds,[…], Bulgarians, Poles, Hungarians, Bohemians, Germans, from Denmark and Norway, Scots, English, Irish, Flemish, Burgundians, French, Navarrese, Basques, Castilians, Galicians, Portuguese, Andalusians, Valencians, Aragonese, Catalans, Majorcans, Sardinians, Corsicans, Sicilians, Calabrese, Neapolitans, Romans, Tuscans, Genoese, Candiotas, Cretans, Cypriots, Surinamese and from Egypt and even Abejinos of Prester John and Indians from the Indies of Portugal, Brazil and New Spain. (Haedo 1612: 9)

Haedo additionally provides a list of the most influential Corsairs—those with Galliots, the highest status ships—in Algiers in 1581. Of the 35 listed, only 10 are described as Turks or native Turks. The other 25 are named as renegades, with Genoese, Venetians and Greeks making up the largest nation groups (Garcès 2011: 160). Haedo conveys the supremacy of the renegades, confirmed by Cervantes, imprisoned in the banios of Algiers from 1575–1580, who also attests to the multinational makeup of the renegade community, according to King who names several of those with whom Cervantes had dealings:

Arnaute Mamí, renegado albanés, Capitán de la flota de Argel..Dalí Mamí, renegado griego…fue el patron de Cervantes…hasta la primavero de 1580, cuando el cautivo fue comprado por Asán Bajá, el renegado veneciano que sirvió de gobernado o rey de Argel desde 1577 hasta septiembre de 1580, y el cosario Morato Ráez Maltrapillo, renegado murciano, amigo de Asán Bajá, quien protegió a Cervantes y le salvo dos veces de duros castigos

Arnaute Mamí, an Albanian renegade, Captain of the Algiers fleet, Dalí Mamí, Greek renegade…[who] was Cervantes’ owner until the Spring of 1580, when the captive was bought by Asán Bajá, the Venetian renegade who served as governor or king of Algiers from 1577 until September 1580, and the corsair Murad Raïs Maltrapillo, the Murcian renegade, friend of Asán Bajá, who protected Cervantes and saved him twice from harsh punishment. (King 1992: 280–281; my translation)

Compounding the need for a common, European lexified tongue was the impenetrability of the Arabs’ language. Tully highlights the opacity of not only the Moorish language, but their whole way of speaking: ‘his hands are absolutely necessary for his discourse, he marks with the forefinger of his right hand upon the palm of his left, as accurately as we do with a pen, the different parts of his speech, a comma, a quotation, or a striking passage. This renders their manner of conversing very singular; and an European, who is not used to this part of their discourse, is altogether at a loss to understand what the speakers mean’ (Tully 1819: vol. i, 15).

Although the 1816 abolition of slavery and the arrival from 1830 onwards of French occupying forces initially to Algiers and subsequently extending further into North Africa would seem to have altered the conditions that promoted and sustained use of Lingua Franca, a socio-geographical study of Algiers produced contemporaneously with the Dictionnaire, by the same Marseille-based publishing house, attests to its continued prevalence. Its author states that despite the altered and reduced population (and the absence of thousands of European slaves), Lingua Franca remains the primary means of communication between the European and Arabic communities:

A Alger, comme dans presque tout le Levant, mahometans et étrangers se servent d’un jargon compose d’italien, de français et d’espagnol, qu’on appelle Langue Franque ou Petit Mauresque, à l’aide de laquelle on entend facilement les trois langues, et l’on se fait comprendre de toutes les espèces d’habitans.

In Algiers, as throughout almost all the Levant, Muslims and foreigners use a jargon made up of Italian, French and Spanish, known as Lingua Franca or Petit Mauresque, which facilitates understanding of the three languages, and in which any resident can make himself understood. (Anonymous 1830: 70; my translation)

One of the most fulsome English-language sources, Elizabeth Broughton’s Six years in Algiers is the publication by the daughter of the former English Consul to Algiers of her mother’s diaries, chronologically the social, political and linguistc mores of Algiers at the start of the nineteenth century. The diaries give a clear impression of the multinational character of Algiers. Mrs. Blanckley refers regularly to the various European nationalities of slaves who move from one household to another:

A Sicilian (slave to a Jew) has been recommended to us by Madame Farara, and has today entered our service, to receive instructions from Juan, whom he will replace as head cook. (Broughton 1839: 49)

The ‘Juan’ referred to was Italian, while Madame Farara’s personal history is emblematic of the complex interweaving of nationality and religion in Algerine society. She was originally of British parents, born in Minorca and orphaned at a young age. Her future husband was an Algerine merchant, though unusually a Christian who had been captured from the island of Tabarca (off the coast of Tunis) by an Algerian corsair and enslaved together with his brother. Both had been fortunate to have come into the service of the Dey and subsequently to have been liberated. On a mercantile visit to Mahon, the capital of Minorca, Signor Farara fell in love with the young English woman who then renounced her Protestant faith in favour of Catholicism (Broughton 1839: 13–14).

Much of the diplomacy effected by Mr. Blanckley was conducted in Lingua Franca, according to his wife’s diary entries, and it becomes apparent, reading her account, that Lingua Franca terms and greetings peppered formal and informal discourse among elites:

Mr. Richards…is much gratified at having shaken hands with the Dey, and having wished his Highness a Buona Pascha. (Broughton 1839: 70)

A later excerpt recounting the reaction in Algiers to a son being born to the Ottoman Sultan is revealing in the allegiance felt by Algerine elites to Constantinople, but also exemplifies the uptake of Lingua Franca or at least Italianate terms into common parlance:

the birth of a son to the Grand Signor… a splendid Regálo, according to usanza, will be sent by the Dey. (Broughton 1839: 249)

The linguistic situation of Algiers was mirrored in Tunis and Tripoli. Italian or perhaps Lingua Franca was the main language among the principal factions of Tunis’ seventeenth-century European population, Maltese and grana, Livornese Jews (Triulzi 1971: 160). It was not confined to the Europeans, however, as Triulzi identifies: ‘Like any makeshift language, [it] extended beyond the European community’ to all those in daily contact with Europeans (Triulzi 1971: 161). He proceeds to explain the infiltration of Italian and Lingua Franca into households, shops, taverns and into the court and the Bey’s household.

From 1783–1793, a century after Baker, the English Consul in Tripoli was Richard Tully. His sister’s journal, detailing Tripoline life at the court and beyond provides further ethnographic insights into the city’s cosmopolitan population and its consequent multilingual landscape. Referring to the bagnio, she writes: ‘There are a number of Maltese, Genoese and Spanish within it at present, but none of any other nation’ (Tully 1819: vol. i, 59). As exemplified by Baker, the polylingual character motivates code-switching and the inclusion of Italian (or perhaps, more accurately, Lingua Franca terms and names) in his journals: such was the success of a Moorish corsair, particularly in his battles with Maltese ‘that the Maltese gave him the name of Chasse Diable, and the Moors that of Rais Draieco, or dragon captain’ (Tully 1819: vol. ii, 96). Draieco does not come from the Arabic or Turkish, and seems to be a variation on either Italian drago or Portuguese dragão. In another entry Tully uses the expression buona mano (from the Italian ‘good hand’): ‘It is customary at the birth of the Bey’s sons, particularly of the heir to the throne…to give a present of money to those who bring the news, which is called a buona mano’ (Tully 1819: vol. ii, 118). The sporadic code-switching highlights the multilingual ecology of Tripoli, a factor in the uptake of Lingua Franca as a contact language.

Evidently, the renegades remained powerful until the dying days of the Regencies. A despatch sent from Hanmer Warrington, English Consul in Tripoli, to Robin Wilmot Horton, Under-Secretary of State for War and the Colonies, 22nd February 1824 (TNA: FO: 161/9 (a)), giving details of various persons about the Tripoline court, includes two foreigners who held senior positions in the regime’s hierarchy. Warrington describes first a Georgian former corsair:

Mustapha Georgia takes his name from the land which gave him birth, came very young to Tripoli, was a Mohametan and Mameluke, married one of the Bashaw’s daughters. Has been Reis of Marina, Captain of the Port for a number of years…of age say thirty-five years, a clever active fellow but as haughty and proud as Lucifer. His unbending stubbornness will some day cost him his head and nothing hither to has kept it on his shoulders but the love of his Highness and his daughter, Mustapha’s wife. (TNA: FO 161/9 (a))

Mustapha Gurgi came to the attention of the Tripolitan elite when he captured the American ship, Philadelphia, off the coast of Tripoli in December 1803. He was later captured by the US navy and imprisoned in Naples. He was released around 1811 and, returning to Tripoli, was appointed the captain of the port, responsible for the tax and customs of Tripoli. In 1835, the Ottoman army recaptured Tripoli but Mustapha, alone among the ruling family, was allowed to stay in the country and held various high-governmental positions. He built the Gurgi (meaning Georgian) Mosque in 1833, a landmark of Tripoli still today (Teijgeler 2011: 13).

Warrington also describes a former corsair, who had also integrated into the ruling family of Algiers:

Murad Reis, or Peter Lisle, a Scotsman by birth, came to the Regency twenty nine years since with Mr Lucas [Simon Lucas, consul in Tripoli 1793-1801] as mate of a large ship belonging to that gentleman…I consider him a good man and very useful to this country…. (TNA: FO 161/9 (a))

Peter Lisle had converted to Islam in 1795 and became High Admiral of the Tripolitan Navy, employed by the Qaramanli dynasty. He later married the daughter of the Pacha Yusuf Qaramanli, and remained High Admiral (other than a brief period of exile 1816–1819). He also worked as a negotiator for the British government. He is alleged to have taken his name in honour of the seventeenth-century corsair, Murad Reis of Morocco (Tucker 2014: 437). His predecessor was actually a Dutch privateer, Jan Janszoon, who had also converted to Islam and become a notorious corsair operating out of the port of Salé, on the Moroccan coast (Jamieson 2013: 120).

Such power in the hands of potentially non-Arabic speaking individuals might suggest that Lingua Franca endured in part because it was not merely the preserve of slaves, or the master–slave domain, but penetrated the upper echelons of Regency society.

Cities of the Levant shared the cosmopolitan and multinational multilingual complexion of the Barbary Regencies, with one significant exception—there was no slave trade. Europeans, nevertheless, constituted sizeable proportions of the urban populations. Mansel’s profile of Levantine cities enumerates the following characteristics:

location on or near the Eastern Mediterranean; the prominence of international trade and foreign consuls; the use of international languages such as lingua franca or broken Italian, and later French; and relative tolerance, and numerical balance, between different communities. No single group was exclusively dominant. (Mansel 2016: 15)

Aleppo in the sixteenth century became a preferred location for European consuls. In 1548, Venice moved its consul from Tripoli to Aleppo because, according to one merchant, it was ‘where the merchants live and business is done’ (Tucci 1957: 7). Other European nations, including England, France and the Netherlands, soon followed in establishing consuls. Aleppo was on trading routes to India, and was visited by ‘North Africans, Iranians, Arabs and Indians as well as Europeans’ (Mansel 2016: 29). Mansel cites John Barker, the British consul between 1803–1826 in Aleppo, who wrote that ‘men of different creeds live in perfect peace and not infrequently in relations of closest friendly intercourse’ (Mansel 2016: 30). The city’s multinational, multidenominational and multilingual population was evidently cohesive with sustained, regular communication between the multiple communities.

The seventeenth-century Ottoman traveller and writer Celebi is cited by Mansel (2010), bemoaning how Smyrna ‘resembled an ocean of people. The streets were so crowded that people rubbed shoulders’ (Mansel 2010: 22). Woodruff’s early nineteenth-century memoir of his journey through the eastern Mediterranean details the multilingual European section of Smyrna: ‘Along Frank Street the throng of languages included Dutch, English, Italian and French, and especially Provençal’ (Woodruff 1831: 155). It would seem plausible that Lingua Franca was also one of the neighbourhood languages, given its lexical similarities to Italian and Provençal. The nomenclature, Frank Street, reinforces the sense of a pan-European identity known as Frank, and the umbrella terms Frank and Lingua Franca may have represented, particularly to non-romance speakers. Mansel cites an 1813 census that counted 130,000 residents in Smyrna, 10,000 of whom were Jews and 5000 Franks. Although these are smaller proportions than in the Barbary ports, there would have been a significant European presence. Certainly, Smyrna retained its European character: at the outset of the nineteenth century, Chateaubriand compared the city to Paris, describing it as ‘an oasis of civilization, a Palmyra in the middle of the desert of barbarism’ (Chateaubriand 1846: vol. 1, 171).

Istanbul’s population was at least as cosmopolitan as other ports of the Ottoman Empire. Mary Wortley Montagu, the wife of the English ambassador to Istanbul in the early nineteenth century, observed:

I live in a place that very well represents the Tower of Babel; in Pera they speak Turkish, Greek, Hebrew, Armenian, Arabic, Persian, Russian, Slavonian, Wallachian, German, Dutch, French, English, Italian, Hungarian; and what is worse, there is ten of those languages spoke in my own family. My grooms are Arabs, my footmen French, English and Germans, my nurse an Armenian, my housemaids Russians, half a dozen other servants Greeks, my steward an Italian, my janissaries Turks, that I live in the perpetual hearing of this medley of sounds, which produces a very extraordinary effect upon the people that are born here. They learn all these languages at the same time and without knowing any of them well enough to write or read in it. There is very few men, women or children here that have not the same compass of words in five or six of them. (Montagu (ed. Jack) 1994: 122–123)

Montagu’s enumeration of the nationalities and languages in her household, presumably a microcosm of the city, and her own imagery of a ‘Tower of Babel’ suggests the plurilingualism found throughout the Levant and North African society but also at the individual level. It also reinforces a sense of inevitable idiolectal variation and semi-speaker or L2 versions of the household languages.

Although primarily the Regencies and, to a slightly lesser extent, the Levant were the crucibles of Lingua Franca in the seventeenth–nineteenth centuries, ports across the Mediterranean, such as Marseille and Livorno, played host to similarly diverse populations, with ‘Turk’ slaves as well as merchants themselves from the Levant. Marseille, long a republic through French history, mirrored the socio-political order (of lack thereof) and the dominant force of commerce that characterized the Barbary Regencies, and especially Algiers (Takeda 2011: 78). A royal edict opening Marseille up to foreign traders in 1669 led to a surge in the city’s population and by 1720, Marseille was a bustling metropolis of 100,000. An untold number among them were of foreign origin (Takeda 2011: 113). This would have promoted the use of contact languages such as Lingua Franca, at least in the domain of commerce and as Niçaise (HSA 1882: 1–7820) still in 1882 observes of the portside conversations albeit two centuries later, Lingua Franca would have been a principal means of communication among the many nationalities. According to Avril, commerce rendered Mediterranean peoples increasingly similar and congenially intertwined. He wrote that European armies, sailors, and merchants ‘carried their humors with them into the land of the Levantines’, until they increasingly resembled one another (Avril 1692: 113). This presumably extends to the language they would have used among themselves.

The sheer number of Europeans—free and enslaved—living in the Barbary States, and the (largely) unregulated commercial activities, predominantly the trade in stolen goods and people, created the conditions for Lingua Franca to flourish as a basic communication tool between the diverse groups. The power vacuum created by the unusual combination of remote official Ottoman authority that was subverted and/or substituted by local Arabic- or Turkish-speaking leaders in the Regencies, the economic imperative and power held by mostly European corsairs (and their permeation of executive and social hierarchies), and the ever-shifting multilingual slave and mercantile communities, all contributed to an environment which demanded a contact language accessible to all. The populations of the three city-states, Algiers, Tunis and Tripoli, varied from one to another. Geopolitical developments also impacted the social, national and linguistic makeup of each of the Regencies. I suggest that these population demographics influenced the fortunes, as well as the character, of Lingua Franca spoken in each city-state. Although the absence of corsairing and a consequent (mostly European) slave population in the Levant meant that there were fewer European voices, they nevertheless made up a substantial proportion of urban society in cities like Smyrna, Constantinople, Aleppo and Alexandria. A mirror image of these societies existed in European ports like Marseille. These were all cosmopolitan, trading centres necessitating Lingua Franca, or variations thereof to facilitate communication within and among the plurilingual communities.

Lingua Franca is often prefixed today by either Barbary or Mediterranean. While the former would seem appropriate given the prevalence of Lingua Franca, as detailed in this chapter, in daily life in Barbary and thus captures the provenance of the majority of the corpus, it seems indubitable that ports across the Mediterranean—Europe and North Africa alike—witnessed Lingua Franca usage. These ports—their constituent if ever-fluctuating populations and their linguistic diversity—embodied the Mediterranean character. They shared multicultural histories, with shifting dominant powers, such that they should be represented not solely as host to a series of successive cultures, but as a more complex setting of ‘polyvalent cultures that existed in the contact zones of the pre-modern world’ (Akbari 2013: 6). The innate polylingualism of many ports across the Mediterranean which Mallette (2013: 255) compares to a cobweb, an image that captures the sense of interwovenness of linguistic strands, and the sustained contact and exchange among them, makes a definitive linguistic description, a tracing of lexifiers and indeed much certainty about Lingua Franca decidedly elusive.