Africa enters the narrative less as a landscape than as a contested destination: Algiers holds Christian captives and makes freedom depend on ransom or escape, while Ricote describes it as a place where expelled Moriscos found neither the welcome nor the security they had expected. These contrasting accounts make the continent a setting of confinement and exile, but also of persistence and movement across borders.

Algiers as a Place of Captivity

Cervantes’s own route to Africa followed years of military service. After leaving a chamberlain’s post in the papal household, he enlisted as a soldier and fought at Lepanto. In 1575, while sailing from Naples toward Spain with his brother Rodrigo and others, he was captured by Algerian galleys and carried to Algiers. Letters recommending him to the King for promotion led his captor to regard him as a person of consequence; when Cervantes’s family raised ransom money, the sum was refused as insufficient. Rodrigo was ransomed, but Cervantes remained a captive.

The account of captivity describes a system organized around ownership and ransom. Captives were held in a bano, where the King’s slaves, private owners’ captives, and municipal slaves were confined. Those awaiting ransom could sometimes avoid work, but delayed payment could bring compulsory labor, including going out for wood. Cervantes, identified as a captain, was classed among gentlemen held for ransom and wore a chain as a mark of that status. His freedom ultimately depended on a further family effort: after Father Juan Gil assembled the required sum through borrowing, Cervantes was released on September 19, 1580, after nearly five years in captivity.

Escape Routes and Cross-Border Networks

Algiers is also the starting point for repeated efforts to escape. In the captive’s account, Cervantes’s resolve to regain liberty survives failed plans and uncertain chances. One organized attempt depends on cooperation between Christian captives and a renegade who helps prepare a vessel. On the appointed night, the group first secures the boat and its Moorish rowers, then makes for Hadji Morato’s garden to bring Zoraida away. The episode gives the surrounding coast a practical role in the story: the vessel, the guarded city, and the garden’s approaches shape the risks and sequence of escape.

These escape narratives place Africa within a wider Mediterranean network of capture, negotiation, and passage. Cervantes reaches Algiers after a voyage intercepted at sea; the captive’s party hopes to leave by boat; and Ricote later imagines moving his family from Algiers to a French port and onward to Germany. Africa is thus neither a sealed setting nor a simple endpoint: people arrive there by force, seek ransom or a route out, and make plans that depend on connections beyond the region.

Exile and the Failure of Refuge

Ricote’s account gives Africa a different significance. After the expulsion edict against his people, he says he left Spain alone to find a place where his family could later settle safely. He traveled through France and Italy to Germany, but his wife and daughter were in Algiers. In his view, the exiles had expected to be received and helped in Barbary and other parts of Africa; instead, they encountered insult and ill-treatment. The hoped-for refuge therefore failed the needs that had driven them from Spain.

The contrast is sharp: Spain remains Ricote’s natural fatherland, yet return is bound up with expulsion, separation, and risk, while life abroad offers no assured welcome. He says that many Moriscos who know Spanish return despite leaving wives and children behind, such is their longing for the country they lost. His planned recovery of buried treasure and effort to bring his family from Algiers show how exile becomes a problem of practical movement as well as belonging. Africa’s role in this account is defined by that tension: it is both a place where separated family members remain and a destination that does not provide the security exiles had sought.