Michele Bosco è Dottore di ricerca Europeo (Doctor Europaeus) in Storia moderna presso l’Università degli studi di Firenze e presso l’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) di Parigi. La sua tesi di Dottorato, discussa e approvata cum Laude nell’aprile 2017, riceve nel luglio 2018 il “Premio Ricerca Città di Firenze”, che lo porta alla pubblicazione della sua prima monografia: Ragion di Stato e salvezza dell’Anima. Il riscatto dei cristiani captivi in Maghreb attraverso le redenzioni mercedarie (1575–1725), Firenze University Press, Firenze 2019.
Abstract
There is no need to reaffirm the extraordinary vivacity and the dynamism of the traffics which entailed the history of the Mediterranean sea, which has always been an area of encounters, exchange, mingles of millenary cultures. Nevertheless, this area was also for centuries a scenario of conflicts, of a more or less strong clash between the two shores, the Christian and Muslim one: the religious rhetoric of that period presented those two worlds as the most distant one from another. But it is not worth to explicate the many examples of “go–betweens”, already widely documented: we refer to renegades, intermediaries in slaves ransoms, or to voluntary passages from a shore to the other seeking one’s fortune, to informers or spies, ready to change their loyalty to gain a better offer. The article shows the richness of the Mediterranean space, especially focusing on some of the most important and peculiar historical phenomena which characterized it along the Early–Modern Age. Starting from an historiographical introduction on the idea of Mediterranean, it analyses the historical background, from the fall of Granada to the expulsion of the moriscos from Spain, ending with migrations, slavery and the ransoming of Christian captives in Ottoman Maghreb.
Keywords: Mediterranean History, Slavery, Captives’ Ransoming, Migrations, Markets and exchanges, Circulations and mobility, Historiography of ideas.
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