“Review of Libertad a los cautivos, actividad redentora de la orden trinitaria by Bonifacio Porres Alonso”

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 D. Hershenzon « Bonifacio Porres Alonso, Libertad a los cautivos, actividad redentora de la orden trinitaria, in La guerre de course en récits (XVIe-XVIIIes). Terrains, corpus, séries, dossier en ligne du Projet CORSO, novembre 2010, URL http://www.oroc-crlc.paris-sorbonne.fr/index.php/visiteur/ProjetCORSO/Ressources/La-guerre-de-course-en-recits.




BOOK REVIEW / COMPTE-RENDU D’OUVRAGE : Bonifacio Porres Alonso, Libertad a los cautivos, actividad redentora de la orden trinitarian, Córdoba-Salamanca, Secretario Trinitario, 1997-1998, 3 vols.

DANIEL HERSHENZON University of Michigan – Ann Arbor These three volumes are extremely valuable for scholars of the history of the Trinitarian order and its redemption operations, the traffic of people, and captivity of Christians in the early-modern Mediterranean. The first tome and volume provides a brief history of the order surveying the ransom missions conducted by its different European branches. The second tome, the second and third volumes, is a collection of archival sources, especially royal privileges the Castilian and Aragonese Trinitarians received over the years. This is not an academic, critical history of the Trinitarian order but rather a well-documented and useful chronicle of its captive-redeeming activities. In the first section of the first volume, Porres presents a brief history of the order from its foundation in 1198 and surveys royal and papal legislation relating to its ransom and fund raising mechanisms. The fact that the rule of the order stipulated that a third of its income –from alms the friars begged– be dedicated to captive-redeeming was crucial but not enough to fund the ransom operations. Other necessary sources of income were wills, donations, and rents. Much of the funds were collected by the Trinitarian confraternities and individual layman (síndicos). Porres ends this section in a discussion of the conflict between the Trinitarians and the Mercedarians (many of the documents in the other two volumes relate to the tensions between these orders) and of the history of the Trinitarian hospitals in Algiers and Tunis. In the rest of the first volume, Porres surveys in length a large number of documented redemption missions conducted by the order (the calzados and the descalzados), through its history. He goes over the redemptions conducted by the Iberian, French, Italian, Polish, and AustroHungarian Trinitarians. While the discussion about the Eastern branches is especially interesting as less is known about them, the sections on the French and Iberian branches are richer and betterdocumented. Porres shows how, in contrast to what scholars argued, the Iberians and French did not limit their work to North Africa and occasionally were active in Istanbul. His survey points out the important role of intermediaries and of European consuls absent from much of the scholarship in 1

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To
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 this
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 D. Hershenzon « Bonifacio Porres Alonso, Libertad a los cautivos, actividad redentora de la orden trinitaria, in La guerre de course en récits (XVIe-XVIIIes). Terrains, corpus, séries, dossier en ligne du Projet CORSO, novembre 2010, URL http://www.oroc-crlc.paris-sorbonne.fr/index.php/visiteur/ProjetCORSO/Ressources/La-guerre-de-course-en-recits.


 facilitating in many cases the work of the friars. Porres provides interesting information about the processions the Trinitarians conducted upon returning with the captives, the few cases when the Mercedarians and the Trinitarians worked together, and the importance of peace agreements between Muslim and Christian polities for captive-redeeming. Finally and conveniently each of the sections has a table summarizing the number and dates of expeditions sent by each branch, the names of the friars leading it, and the number of rescued captives. The second and third volumes provide chronologically arranged collections of royal privileges the Trinitarians received from the crown –the second volume is dedicated to Castile, the third to Aragon. The records discuss the rights the Trinitarians had over wills, the licenses they received to beg alms, the networks of layman who helped fund raising, and the rivalry between the Mercedarians and the Trinitarians. The volumes have more than a hundred illustrations taken from early-modern Trinitarian publications. The first tome has a sixty-three-page bibliography of primary sources and scholarly works focusing on the order in general, on its ransom activities and on additional related topics. The second offers an annotated bibliography of primary sources focusing on the privileges the order obtained and an additional bibliography of primary and secondary sources on the same subject. Both volumes have useful indices of names and places.

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