PODCAST: Galley Slavery in 17th-Century France

JAMES CUNO: Hello, I’m Jim Cuno, president of the J. Paul Getty Trust. Welcome to Art and Ideas, a podcast in which I speak to artists, conservators, authors, and scholars about their work.
GILLIAN WEISS: There’s been an assumption that any person who stepped foot on French territory in the metropole went free. In fact, enslaved Turks did not go free; they often spent their entire lifetime in servitude.
CUNO: In this episode, I speak with authors Gillian Weiss and Meredith Martin about their new book The Sun King at Sea: Maritime Art and Galley Slavery in Louis XIV’s France.
Studies of art and culture of Louis XIV’s era have privileged Paris and Versailles to the neglect of the port city of Marseilles. The recent rise of material culture studies, as well as art history’s global turn, have broadened this view. In their new book, The Sun King at Sea: Maritime Art and Galley Slavery in Louis XIV’s France, Gillian Weiss and Meredith Martin focus our attention on the many fluid interchanges between Paris and seaport cities in 17th century France. They highlight in particular the lives and labors of enslaved Turks, who were enlisted to help build and decorate ships and other art objects created to proclaim the power and glory of the Sun King.
I recently spoke with Professor Weiss of Case Western Reserve and Professor Martin of New York University about their new book, published by the Getty Research Institute.
Thank you, Meredith and Gillian, for speaking with me in this podcast episode. You introduce your book by describing the Musée d’Histoire de Marseille, which opened its doors in 1983. Describe the museum for us and tell us why you opened the book that way.
GILLIAN WEISS: The Marseille History Museum might be one of the only museums in the world that’s housed in a shopping mall. And it’s there because a series of modern excavations unearthed some Greek archaeological remains on the site. The museum also happens to be located near several locations that are important for our book: the harbor of the Old Port, formerly the site of the royal arsenal, the shipbuilding complex for the galleys; as well as near the seventeenth century promenade known as the Core.
It’s a place that manifests Marseille’s multilayered history and its multicultural population. But what it doesn’t explicitly show is the presence of Louis XIV’s galley slaves. And we wanted to open and close our book with a reflection about issues of memory and erasure, which is something that is evident in both the museum’s galleries and collections, as well as other sites around the city.
CUNO: And Meredith, what role did Charles le Brun and his painted medallion play in the story that’s so prominent?
MEREDITH MARTIN: Yes, it’s actually on the cover of our book, and we describe it in the introduction. But in fact, our entire project and collaboration was inspired by an informal email exchange we had about this painted medallion, which appears on the ceiling of the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, and which represents Louis XIV subjugating three dark-skinned, shackled men, who are all wearing turbans. I came across this image in a Google search and I emailed Gillian to ask her about it, since I knew she’d written a book about the reverse phenomenon of Frenchmen enslaved in North Africa.
And she identified it as representing the thousands of so-called enslaved Turks, who were mostly Muslim and who were captured or purchased to be brought to France during Louis XIV’s reign. These men were forced to row a new fleet of galleys that the French monarchy had built as a way to try and dominate Mediterranean trade, but also to represent Louis XIV as a kind of Catholic crusader.
We started looking around for more images of this phenomenon, and we discovered that it had, in fact, been represented in a really wide range of media: ship design, maritime weapons, and treatises, as well as medals, paintings, and prints. But the fact that there seemed to have been so little written about it is what prompted us to write this book.
CUNO: Now, many of us have long admired the Marie de Medici Cycle of paintings in the Louvre, while overlooking much of what you now draw our attention to. Describe those paintings to us and tell us why they’re so important to the thesis of your book.
MARTIN: So this was really large monumental cycle of twenty-four paintings that Marie de Medici, who was an Italian-born Queen of France had commissioned earlier in the seventeenth century. And most art historians argue that she did so as a way to tell her story, but also to kind of celebrate and legitimate her rule. Her former husband, the King of France, had been assassinated, and she had been serving as the regent for her young son.
We talk about one particular painting from this cycle, which shows her arrival at the Port of Marseille prior to marrying her husband. And this was a huge event that was celebrated with great fanfare and with a lot of maritime spectacles. And probably the most famous of these spectacles was her own ceremonial galley, which Rubens depicts in one corner of the painting. And he also shows some of the enslaved oarsmen who rowed it. And he represents them as enslaved Turks or enslaved Moors.
Once Marie de Medici became the Queen of France, she commissioned another ceremonial galley to keep at the Port of Marseille. And at one point, she wrote to her uncle, the Grand Duke of Tuscany, to send her enslaved Muslims from the Medici Port of Livorno, to row this galley. And this is important to our book because it shows that there were earlier precedents—you know, actual precedents as well as artistic precedents—for enslaving Muslims throughout the Mediterranean. That Louis XIV didn’t invent this phenomenon, but he was inspired by it and he took it to new heights. And he was also, of course, personally influenced by Marie de Medici, who was his grandmother. And you can see that influence in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles and in other artistic commissions.
CUNO: Gillian, tell us what a galley is, how big it is, what it looks like.
WEISS: So a galley is a kind of Mediterranean oar-powered vessel that also used sails occasionally when there was wind available. And it had a pointed prow that was used to ram ships during battle. There was a plank that went down the middle, that soldiers would walk on; and just slightly below sat the rowers, who were generally chained five person to a row, with a— depending on the size of the galley, between twenty-five and thirty-six rows.
And there also, in the front of the galley, was a tented area where the commander would give the instructions to the crew. And one thing, actually, that we write about in the book is the way in which a lot of ways, the architecture of the galley resembles that of a church. So in a certain way, it’s a little bit like the priest at the front, who is standing and giving a sermon, is a little bit like the officers telling the rowers what to do.And they, in fact, are pushing forward on their front legs, on sort of like a pew, something called a pedang[sp?], as they lean into the row to power the galley through the water.
CUNO: So the galley is a martial ship; is that right?
WEISS: Well, a galley is both a ship of war and a form of a prison, as well as a boat that transported goods, as well as dignitaries, from port to port. And it had been mostly superseded technologically, by the seventeenth century, by round-bottomed sailing ships. But in a lot of ways, it remained quite useful in Mediterranean waters, which were calm. And it was pretty nimble, to be able to more around the coast.
CUNO: Now, the Marseille Arsenal is the subject of your first chapter. Describe it to us, and its role in French naval control of so much of the Mediterranean.
MARTIN: The Marseille Arsenal, which was built under the direction of Louis XIV and Colbert in the 1660s, was a magnificent spectacle. It was sort of meant to be the maritime industrial counterpart to Versailles. And it took up much of the harbor and it was something that was remarked upon with awe and admiration by visitors to Marseille.
Its walls were painted bright blue with fleur-de-lis in yellow. It had numerous pavilions, and it was used both to store galleys, but also as a shipbuilding palace, where they were built. And it was over the course of the 1660s and 1670s, they managed to build about forty galleys there. And it was also a site of, you know, incredible spectacles.
So for example, trying to imitate the example of Venice, was a spectacle wherein a galley was constructed, in 1678, in a single twenty-four hour period. And that spectacle was described, and also painted.
CUNO: So who were the Turks? You’ve mentioned them already. But tell us who they were and the role they played in French control of the Mediterranean.
WEISS: So enslaved Turks were men who were captured, but more often purchased, in Mediterranean slave markets and along the Habsburg-Ottoman front, and they predominately came from the Ottoman Empire and Morocco. They were presumed to be Muslim, and they mostly were; but occasionally there were Jewish rowers, who nonetheless fell into the category of enslaved Turk. And in one occasion, there were enslaved indigenous Americans, who also were put into that category.
They were expected to represent about twenty-five percent of the rowing force. During the spring and summer months, their main function was to help propel the galleys in the Mediterranean. They were reputed to be particularly strong, and they were put at technically important positions at the oar. But during the winter and fall months, they were actually forced to work at port.
And at port, enslaved Turks, like other rowers, worked both at the naval arsenal and also for craftspeople around the city. And doing that, they actually helped to build and decorate the ships that they also rowed.
We also found evidence that some enslaved Turks were hired by artists in the Port of Marseille and Toulon, to help with artworks that were made for Versailles. In particular, Pierre Puget hired enslaved Turks and convicts to help him with the completion of some sculptures that were later sent to Versailles.
CUNO: You mean they actually helped them make the sculptures, or they were the subject of the sculptures?
WEISS: Well actually, we do have evidence that enslaved Turks were sent up to Paris, to the École des Beaux-Arts, in order to model for some artworks. And there is also other circumstantial evidence that they were used as models for different kinds of things.
But enslaved Turks and convicts were also used as labor. In the case of Puget’s statues, the documents that we found show that they moved things around. They weren’t actually, like, carving the marble. But in other cases, if you think about a ship itself as a piece of art, enslaved Turks were being trained to do other things, including carving and caulking and so on. So in that respect, they were helping to decorate and make the actual ships that they were serving upon.
CUNO: Meredith, describe to us the weapons sculpted with depictions of enslaved Turks. Why Turks?
MARTIN: So we talk about many such weapons in our book, but I’ll just describe one of them, which is a large naval cannon decorated with the head of an enslaved Turk, which was made by Jean Bebay[sp?], who was the head of the weapons foundry at the naval arsenal.
This Turk head,which seems to have been sculpted from a live slave model, who would’ve posed for Bebay at the port, serves as the round knob that was used to secure or to tie the naval cannon to a ship’s deck. And so actually, there would’ve been a rope wrapped tightly around the neck of this head, and then attached to the deck. And that would’ve kind of amplified the sense of an enslaved Turk being captured and contained within this weapon; but also the pain and suffering that’s really clearly visible on his facial expression.
And in terms of why Turks, we argue that this cannon may have a kind of approachopaic[sp?] function. You know, maybe warning any Ottoman or North African opponentabout the sort of fate that might befall them if they tried to engage in naval activity agais nst the Sun King’s fleet. But I think it also could’ve— have been used to kind of aggrandize this sense of strength and of power of French seamen, who were capable of capturing one of these fearsome infidel opponents.
CUNO: Now Meredith, your second chapter focuses on the meaning of maritime imagery in monumental statues and palace décor. What are the differences in maritime imagery in paintings and sculptures in the capital and those on the coast?
MARTIN: Well, I think one significant difference is that a lot of the maritime art that was made for the coast is ephemeral and doesn’t survive today. Ships were regularly destroyed or shipwrecked; cannons were sometimes melted down. Sometimes ship decoration would itself be recycled or repurposed. MARTIN (And this is one reason why art historians have tended to focus more attention on monumental artworks made for the capital, for Paris and Versailles, as opposed to these ephemeral productions for the coast.
But what we also found in our research is that a lot of the activities that were happening in the coast were represented in the capital. And the phenomenon of galley slavery was represented, as well. So we’ve already mentioned Charles le Brun’s painted medallion for the ceiling of the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, which was this stunning, very large room that integrated these paintings with mirrors and gilding and elaborate furnishings, some of which were made with raw materials that had been sourced through maritime trade or through colonial activities.
And there was also another kind of stunning room in the palace that doesn’t survive today or that was torn down in the eighteenth century, called the Ambassadors Staircase, which featured trompe l’oeil paintings of ambassadors from all around the world who were coming to pay homage to Louis XIV.
And you can see in designs for the room that at the four corners of the ceiling, there are ship prows, which are flanked by chained captives. And these may refer to some of the galley slaves that were involved in this conflict. And I think what this shows is that there’s a kind of myth that Louis XIV wasn’t all that interested in naval affairs, but in fact, he was really interested; and all of this coastal or maritime imagery was a really key component of his propaganda.
CUNO: Did paintings, prints, and drawings of the subjects of maritime power replace the actual instruments of that power?
MARTIN: Well, that’s a good question. I think that, you know, to some extent, these maritime artworks exaggerate, you know, the degree to which France was actually a naval superpower in this period. Louis XIV did score many important victories in the Mediterranean and elsewhere, but the French could never really compete with the superior naval power of the British and the Dutch, who were more focused on Asia and the Atlantic world.
I think the Sun King’s maritime victories were regularly represented in medals and prints, you know, both of which could be made relatively quickly and somewhat inexpensively, and could circulate widely. So that’s why they were so important as propaganda.
I don’t think they so much replaced the actual maritime power that they depict, but they did, in certain instances, aim to deflect some criticism that Louis XIV was receiving from European rivals. And these rivals created their own kind of maritime imagery and satirical medals and prints that poked fun at Louis XIV and suggested that in fact, he wasn’t as powerful as he was claiming to be, and also that he was double dealing—that he was claiming to be this kind of Catholic crusader, a subjugator of infidels, but in fact, was signing political and commercial agreements with the Ottoman Empire and with various North African states.
So there’s an interesting kind of market at the time, both for these very honorific images of Louis XIV, but also an interest in the satirical counter imagery, too.
CUNO: How popular were medals or medallions at this time?
MARTIN: They were actually extremely popular, and artists would make them in a variety of different materials, so that they could be sold at different price points. So you had gold, silver, and copper medals. And they were one of the most important art forms and forms of propaganda during Louis XIV’s reign.
Of course, satirical medals that attacked the Sun King were also really popular. These were made mostly in Germany and in the Netherlands, and royal censors tries to keep them out of France; but it’s quite clear that they kind of made it in and circulated. And in fact, it seems that Louis XIV really enjoyed looking at some of these satirical medals and that his garden designer, André Le Nôtre, kept a collection of them.
And there’s a funny anecdote or a quote from the time of Le Nôtre kind of running up to Louis XIV and showing him one of these examples of one of these satirical medals and saying, “Sire, this is one that’s certainly against us.”
CUNO: Now Gillian, did this business that we just talked about including imagery of chained convicts? And if so, why?
WEISS: So the first thing I think I need to clarify is that while twenty-five percent of the rowing force on the royal galleys were made up enslaved Turks, the other seventy-five percent were made up of convicts. And these were people who were convicted of some extremely serious crimes, but also some very petty ones.
And after the 1685 revocation of the Edict of Nantes, which made Protestantism illegal in France, a portion of the convicts who were sent to the galleys were convicted for the crime of Christian heresy. And so in our book, we reproduce an engraving from 1686 that depicts enchained Protestants being marched to the galleys.
But in fact, what was also extremely prominent, apart from these engraved images, was the spectacle of actual convict chain gangs leaving a central holding pen in Paris and being marched from the capital through France, along established routes, to the coast and to Marseille and the galleys.
CUNO: Now, tell me a bit more about that. So in Versailles, there are these showplaces of maritime wonder that were decorated with images of enslaved peoples. But there were actually enslaved peoples in Versailles or in Paris, or in the streets of Paris.
MARTIN: Yes. As Gillian mentioned, there were enslaved oarsmen who were sometimes integrated into spectacles in the capital, and who were also brought to row a model galley that policed the waters of the Seine. And at Versailles, you also had actual enslaved oarsmen who were integrated—not just represented in palace décor, but actual people—who were brought up from Marseille and Toulon.
Louis XIV and Colbert, in an attempt to kind of showcase Mediterranean power at Versailles, created a whole kind of miniature flotilla of the Sun King’s naval ships, including a model galley that was used for nautical or maritime spectacles that were shown to foreign ambassadors and visiting dignitaries, including, you know, ambassadors from Spain and Algiers, who were meant to kind of see and maybe, like, reexperience recent maritime conflicts that they had had with France.
And the monarchy actually purchased more than fifty so-called enslaved Moors, who may have been from West Africa, to row this model galley. And these men may have also been forced to participate in court masquerades and in festivals that took place at Versailles.
The model flotilla on the Grand Canal was primarily a sort of form of performance art; but sometimes there were actual ships that played a military role at Versailles. The monarchy tested out bomb ketches, which was a new type of ship that had been invented to carry out several bombardments against Algiers that the French undertook during the 1680s. And I think it’s interesting that many courtiers at the time recognized that there was a kind of fine line between these political performances and actual military activity.
And in fact, the seventeenth century French writer Jean de la Fontaine is quoted at one point as saying that, you know, all of Louis XIV’s entertainments or divertisments resemble war.
CUNO: Now Gillian, tell me, how familiar were people in Paris with these kinds of demonstrations? And there were demonstrations, as described, in a theatrical sense. Were they available to people in the streets?
WEISS: Well, for literate people, all sorts of Mediterranean events and spectacles were described in great detail in gazettes, in the Mercure and other newspapers. It kept people up-to-date about Mediterranean battles and bombardments, about visits of ambassadors from North Africa, dignitaries also from other parts of the Ottoman Empire, peace accords that reproduce the text of the accords, the liberation of French slaves from North Africa, the conversion of enslaved Turks in Marseille.
There was also a boom in published narratives in the seventeenth century that described both captivity and liberation from North Africa, as well as just travel to different parts of the Mediterranean. So for the literate reading public, there was a lot of material available.
For people who were not literate, there was various kinds of visual representations, but also included the convict chains of rowers that were headed to the Mediterranean, as well as liberated captives who were returning from enslavement in North Africa.
However, those— they did also have— they did also take place in various Italian city-states, as well as on the Iberian Peninsula and in the Holy Roman Empire.
CUNO: So we have this imagery of enslaved Turks visible on paintings of the time and reenacted in the streets and carved on medals and medallions of the time. What role did imagery of enslaved Turks play in churches?
WEISS: So churches throughout the Mediterranean, notably in Naples and in Malta, feature depictions of enslaved Turks. We didn’t find any surviving images in France. But what we did find were numerous descriptions of elaborate conversion ceremonies that took place both inside and outside churches.
In the 1680s especially, which is a period of increasing orthodoxy leading up to the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, there were large group baptisms that involve prominent members of society functioning as godparents, that had special outfits in white for the neophytes, and decorations on cathedrals borrowed from the galleys—cannon fire and music. But in fact, I mean, just on an individual level, I found hundreds of conversions in the archives of the Marseille Chamber of Commerce, which all were celebrated, to some degree, with pomp, for regular people to see.
CUNO: What about the role that the imagery played in science, in shipbuilding, and humanism, for example?
WEISS: So the humanist movement was marked by a revival in interest in antiquity. And so that included a revival in interest in galleys, in particular. One of the ways that Louis XIV chose to project his power was as a Classical conqueror who, like those that came before, was able to build and staff galleys. Of course, the difference is that Louis XIV was committed to using convicts and slaves to propel his galleys, while in the Classical period, rowers tended to be free men.
We actually have a whole chapter on shipbuilding manuals, which were primarily commissioned by French naval officers in Marseille, who near the end of the seventeenth century, were showing off their knowledge about shipbuilding, and showing off their knowledge about hydrography, while also trying to make a case for the ongoing importance of maintaining galleys and of enslaving Muslims. And this is at a moment that galleys were starting to fall out of favor.
And so that what these manuals demonstrate is that this kind of maritime propaganda wasn’t only a top-down phenomenon, and the interests of officers weren’t always aligned with that of the crown. Not only do they show the step-by-step process for building a galley, but they also feature really elaborate cartouche of enslaved Turks. They attempt to argue visually that France’s sea power and maritime dominance depended on harnessing the supposedly superior strength of enslaved Turks.
CUNO: Meredith, were there other ways that these incidences were depicted?
MARTIN: Well, there’s one other famous example, which is the subject of the last chapter of our book. And those are two monumental paintings that were made by Michel Serre, who served as the chief painter for the galleys at Marseille.
And what they represent is the Great Plague of Marseille that began in 1720 and ended up killing nearly half of the city’s population. And as we talk about in our book and in other publications, there’s lots of eerie similarities between the great plague of Marseille and our own COVID 19 pandemic. Not just the fact that they are separated by exactly 300 years, but also that at their inception, people who commented on the plague both sort of blamed the source of the contagion on foreigners, many of whom were then also tasked with cleaning it up.
And in the case of the 1720 plague, enslaved Turks were conscripted, were forced to remove the dead, contaminated bodies of plague victims from the streets of Marseille. And this is the horrific sort of incident that Serre depicts. And he actually exaggerated the presence or the number of enslaved Turks who took part in this cadaver removal. And we argue that he did so because he wanted to engage with anxieties and debates about the source of the contagion, which was believed to come from Muslim lands, and also to sort stoke fears about global trade that were percolating at the time.
And a few years after he made them, Serre’s paintings were publicly exhibited for pay in Paris, which was a really unusual thing to do at the time. And it forced Parisians to confront the darker side of what was happening in Marseille. You know, not the Sun King’s maritime achievements or victories, but also risks of an interconnected world, and perhaps even the failure or the inability of the monarchy to protect its subjects.
CUNO: Now, there’s something very beautiful in the graphic designs of these galley ships, as you’ve been describing, Gillian and Meredith, but then something horrific about the spectacles of the suffering that they underpin, as well. And that seems to me to be at the center of your book, the intertwining of the beautiful and the horrific, the enslaved and the elegant. How did you reconcile these differences?
MARTIN: I think we don’t try to reconcile them, so much as to put them in dialog, or even in tension, with each other. Many of the most celebrated or beautiful artworks of the past have a really ugly history. And revealing that history maybe, or arguably, tarnishes their image, or maybe tarnishes the Sun King’s image. But we think it also offers a much deeper and richer picture.
And this is obviously part of a much larger conversation that’s happening right now, with regards to the way that historical artworks are displayed in museums, as well as the way that monuments are contextualized, or even maintained. And we want our book to be part of this larger conversation; but at the same time, we want to draw attention to the specific phenomenon of enslaved Muslims in France, which really hasn’t received very much attention at all, who we really feel deserve their due.
CUNO: Gillian?
WEISS: Right now in Marseille, there’s a little bit of a remnant of the arsenal that still stands by the port, but there’s very little signage to indicate what happened on that site. And in fact, the only public signage that makes any reference, in Marseille, to enslaved Turks is from a what turns out to be apocryphal site of a supposed Muslim mosque in the arsenal.
So I think, again, that one of the things we’re interested in thinking about is why the presence of enslaved Turks has been so forgotten in France.
And so I think that on the one hand, the example of American chattel slavery has often served as the prototype for understanding all forms of servitude in other places, and so therefore, it has helped to occlude the presence of enslaved Turks in France. But I think another reason that the presence of enslaved Turks on royal galleys has been overlooked has to do with a longstanding legal maxim that holds there are no slaves in France. And although we know that West Africans were exploited in the Caribbean colonies of France, there’s been an assumption that the free-soil maxim held true for metropolitan France; and that indeed, any person who stepped foot on French territory in the metropole went free. In fact, enslaved Turks did not go free; they often spent their entire lifetime in servitude.
And one of the things that we are trying to do in this book, besides show the preponderance of imagery of enslaved Turks, is simply to show that this imagery actually had actual reference in Marseille and Toulon, that there actually were people who were purchased and captured and made to labor for their lifetimes on French soil.
CUNO: Well, your book captures this hauntingly in its final two sentences, in which you write, “While the composition attempts to draw the eye and mind upward toward a celestial vision of royal grandeur, the Turks bring them down to the reality of dead bodies in the dirt. And that vision, the galley fragments below, look less like building blocks for a reassembled fleet and more like bones from a cadaver tomb, symbols of death, rather than new life.”
Now, your book is important, and the Getty’s grateful for having been given the chance to publish it. We thank you both, Gillian and Meredith, for that and thank you for speaking with me today.
MARTIN: Thank you for inviting us.
WEISS: Thank you.
CUNO: This episode was produced by Zoe Goldman, with audio production by Gideon Brower and mixing by Myke Dodge Weiskopf. Our theme music comes from the “The Dharma at Big Sur” composed by John Adams, for the opening of the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles in 2003, and is licensed with permission from Hendon Music. Look for new episodes of Art and Ideas every other Wednesday, subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and other podcast platforms. For photos, transcripts, and other resources, visit getty.edu/podcasts and if you have a question, or an idea for an upcoming episode, write to us at podcasts@getty.edu. Thanks for listening.