SUDDITI MILANESI SCHIAVI DEI BARBARESCHI. RISCATTI, PROCEDURE, PROFILI (SECC. XVI-XVIII)

Against the background of the Corsair warfare and the Mediterranean slavery, almost ignored has been up to now the history concerning the redemption and the repatriating of the slaves coming, in the Habsburg times, from the State of Milan (16th-18th centuries), an important rear of the military conflict opposing the Ottoman Empire and its North African Regencies to the Christian states under the shadow of the Habsburg. This article, on the basis of an unpublished documentation from the archives, aims to propose a preliminary periodization of the phenomenon and a survey of collective and individual profiles of the Lombard subjects redeemed through a “mixed” system, in which were interacting civilian and religious institutions, state and curial diplomacies, private agents and the families of the slaves in the Islamic territories. One of this system’s pivots was, for many decades, the monastery of Barefoot Trinitarians founded in Milan in 1702. The general change occurred in the second half of 18th century and the launch in Austrian Lombardy of a drastic ecclesiastical policy, lead to the suppression of the Trinitarian community and to a more direct state management of negotiations and redemptions.