Mediterranean pirates who transported Arab treasures to Europe. The trip of the Moroccan library of Moulay Zidane to the Spanish El Escorial

In 1612, a Spanish fleet seized a French ship carrying a cargo of Arabic manuscripts stolen from the Sultan of Morocco, Moulay Zeidane, and almost two years later the collection, also known as the "Zidani Treasury", arrived at the Spanish Royal Library "Escoral", which became an important repository of Arabic books in Europe.

Paradoxically, these stolen Arabic manuscripts were included in the Royal Library at the same time period as the crematoriums of Arabic books and manuscripts in the Iberian Peninsula, and severe restrictions on the reading and possession of Arabic manuscripts were placed in the policies of hostility towards the country's Muslim, Jewish, and Morisco Arab Andalusians.

Throughout the sixteenth century, the Spanish crown and the Inquisition enacted policies to eliminate the Arabic language and culture, and Moriscos were forbidden to speak and write Arabic in 1564 in Palencia, while King Philip II banned the use of spoken Arabic in Castile in 1567; in the same circumstances, Moroccan manuscripts were transformed from worthless war spoils into repositories of knowledge to be studied by Spanish scholars and even by Arab travelers and researchers who visited them in the Spanish library.

The political and legal debates that followed the seizure of the library and its cultural content provide an important insight into the development of maritime law, when the Arabic library became the subject of arduous international negotiations between Spain, Morocco, France and the Netherlands, dealing with maritime law, prisoners and prohibited knowledge, according to Daniel Hirchenson, an academic at the University of Connecticut.

Immigrant
librariesThe circulation of Arabic manuscripts shed light on the plight of the Moriscos in Andalusia and their suffering with the censorship of books and reading in Arabic, and although some researchers believe that Arabic studies disappeared from Spain in the seventeenth century as a result of the practices of the Inquisition that destroyed and burned Arabic manuscripts, the irony came in that investigators and students of the Arabic language were racing to obtain Arabic manuscripts, each for his own purpose.

The purification against the Moriscos coincided with the Spanish crown's assertion of its absolute powers in dealing with Islamic collectibles, as it is the only one who can burn or preserve them as he sees fit, according to his paper published in the Journal of Early Modern History, published by Brill Publishing.

Moulay Zidane – who inherited a huge library from his father Mansour Dahabi and increased it – was forced to ship books by sea in a French ship to be transported to the port of Souss, after he was subjected to the uprising of one of his relatives against him and forced him to flee. When the ship arrived and was not paid to its French captain, he departed to the high seas, and the Spanish pirates attacked him and seized the Zidanese treasury, thinking it was filled with gold.

Legal and political negotiations between Spain, Morocco, France and the Dutch Republic over the manuscripts of the Moroccan sultan showed how international politics developed at the time, and the ambassadors of the sultans of Morocco tried to return Arabic books and manuscripts to Morocco later but their mission was unsuccessful.

Manuscript Journey

The Spanish fleet was the first to examine the manuscripts and prepare an inventory and estimate of the value of the seized Moroccan goods, and it appears from the documents related to this incident that the Spanish pirates did not comment on the fact that the manuscripts were written in Arabic.

While scholars and librarians were studying the collection and planning to transfer it to El Escoral, many debates took place among government advisers regarding the proper use of manuscripts, and the history of the Moroccan library shows that even in the seventeenth century in Spain – the Golden Age and the time of the Inquisition – not only scientific imperatives determined the fate of Arabic texts, but law and politics were strongly present in the debate over books, and so the political history of the Mediterranean and the relations between Morocco, Spain and other European powers were linked to the history of Oriental and Arabic knowledge in Europe.

Zaidan's library was not the only collection of manuscripts seized from the high seas, as robberies and war raids were – and still are – a way to obtain books and build new ones.

In the same decade, a Jewish library containing five manuscripts was seized by pirates and taken to Malta, where they were redeemed In 1648, the Spanish seized an English ship containing about 1600,<> volumes and brought it to Lisbon, and author Robert Jones, author of Piracy, Warfare, and the Acquisition of Arabic Manuscripts in the Renaissance in Europe, described in detail the process of forming European libraries through piracy of Arabic and non-Arabic manuscripts.

Dangerous books and useful
knowledgeAt the request of King Philip II sometime between August and November 1612, the manuscripts began to be catalogued and the library moved to Madrid, perhaps arousing the curiosity of the royal court scholars as some of them rushed to look at the unique spoils, and the scholar Francisco Gourmendi was commissioned to evaluate them again and accomplished his task with a report on the Arabic library after a year spent studying it.

The library's holdings amounted to about four thousand books, most of which were untitled, and more than five hundred of them were unbound, so it took a lot of time to divide and arrange them according to their sciences and topics. Gürmendi found that two or more thousand volumes of the library were commentaries on the Qur'an, and about a thousand on various subjects from the humanities, philosophy, mathematics, medicine, and other contents of the Zidani treasury, which also included books in Turkish and Persian.

The existing documents do not indicate what instructions Gormandi received and whether he was explicitly asked to identify and separate the interpretations of the Qur'an and religious texts from other books.

More than a century before the capture of the Moroccan collection, in 1501 in Granada, Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros, chief inspector of the Inquisition and secretary of Queen Isabella, ordered the confiscation and burning of all the Qur'ans in the city, but sent prescriptions in Arabic to the University of Alcalá de Henares, which was founded by him two years before the Holocaust.

Abu Abdullah al-Saghir, the last king of Andalusia before the handover of the city (Al Jazeera Documentary)

Arabic books in Spain Arabic books and manuscripts in Spain
thus faced three different fates: the Morisco books seized and destroyed by the Inquisition, the manuscripts handed over by the Inquisition to the Spanish Royal Library, or those acquired by El Escorial through purchase and worth.

In addition, the Zidani Treasury manuscripts, which were initially inaccessible and placed behind closed doors due to the association between the Arabic language and its religious identity, were later re-established.

The journey of Zaidan's books and the negotiations over their use and value illustrate how important it is to link the history of the Mediterranean, piracy and royal families to the history of library construction and manuscript circulation, and the mobile library and its migration across the Mediterranean shows what can be considered changing connotations of Arabic texts and knowledge in different religious and political contexts.