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DePaul University Special Collections and Archives

Vincent de Paul and a Tale of Barbary Captivity

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A holy card depicting Vincent converting his Muslim master to the Christian faith.

From his time aiding galley slaves in Marseilles as the Chaplain of the Galleys of France, to his interest in bringing his model of Christian charity to North Africa, Vincent de Paul certainly interacted with the Mediterranean Sea directly and indirectly throughout his life. While he spent most of his time in and around the area of Paris, his thoughts often turned south, as evidenced by many of his extant letters.

It is difficult to discuss Vincent and the Mediterranean without first tackling his inspirational, but rather tall, tale of his kidnapping while on a short boat ride from Marseilles to Narbonne. As the story goes, the boat is taken by Turkish pirates, who then bear the crew and passengers to the Barbary city of Tunis. Vincent, along with the other captives, is then sold as a slave to a series of Muslim masters. In time, he finds himself working for a French convert to Islam. Vincent brings both his master and his master’s wife back into the Christian fold, and eventually the man and Vincent launch a small rowboat from North Africa to the southern coast of France. The entire episode lasts two years.

We know all this because Vincent describes his adventure in vivid detail, in a 1607 letter to a creditor explaining Vincent’s two year absence. For various reasons that, for sake of space, cannot be discussed here, most current Vincentian historians doubt the veracity of Vincent’s story. There are myriad details that ring false when compared to other contemporary tales of escape from Barbary slavery, not to mention the sheer unlikelihood of successfully traversing a distance of 500 nautical miles through open ocean in a skiff.

Still, Vincent’s story tells us something about a world in which such dramatic accounts of interactions with the Barbary Coast streamed in from ports throughout Europe. While truth may sometimes be hard to come by in these accounts of slavery, piracy, torture, and deviance, at their center they convey the realities of fear and prejudice in very uncertain times.