Barbary is a North African coastal setting in the Decameron where a journey undertaken for love and a voyage undertaken for wealth converge in displacement, captivity, and unexpected opportunity. Rather than serving merely as a distant destination, it connects Lipari to Tunis and Susa, placing the fortunes of Costanza and Martuccio Gomito within a region of maritime passage and shifting political power.

Geographic and Narrative Setting

In the story of Costanza and Martuccio Gomito, Barbary enters first as a cruising ground along the coast. Martuccio leaves Lipari after Costanza’s father refuses him because he is poor, swearing not to return until he is rich. He and his companions turn to piracy against vessels weaker than their own, and for a time fortune favors them. The coast thus marks the outward reach of Martuccio’s attempt to convert maritime risk into the wealth needed to overcome a social obstacle.

The region is also associated with places that redirect the lovers’ journeys. Susa lies in Barbary, roughly a hundred miles beyond Tunis; Costanza reaches its shore after setting out alone in a boat, intending to die, and being carried there by a light northerly wind. Tunis, meanwhile, is the seat of King Mariabdela, whose struggle to retain his rule gives Martuccio an unexpected chance to act from within the society that had imprisoned him.

Voyages, Capture, and Refuge

Martuccio’s venture ends in reversal. Saracen ships capture and plunder his vessel after a long defense, scuttle it, and take him to Tunis, where he is imprisoned and kept in misery. The same sea that had offered him a route toward riches therefore becomes the means of his defeat and confinement.

Costanza’s arrival at Susa follows a different kind of crisis. Believing Martuccio dead, she leaves Lipari alone in a small boat, without intending to raise her head or take notice of what happens. A poor woman gathering fishermen’s nets finds her asleep aboard after the boat strands on the beach. When Costanza wakes and learns that she is near Susa in Barbary, she recognizes that she has not reached safety at home and weeps at being alive in an unfamiliar place.

Carapresa, the woman who finds her, takes her to an elderly, compassionate Saracen lady. Costanza is received into a household where women live and work without men, making articles from silk, palm fibre, and leather. She learns some of their crafts and, through the women’s instruction and company, learns their language. Susa is therefore not only the accidental endpoint of her voyage but also a place of shelter and adaptation while she is believed at home to be lost and dead.

Language, Counsel, and Political Change

While Costanza remains at Susa, political conflict in the region changes Martuccio’s prospects. A young claimant from Granada raises a large force against King Mariabdela, seeking to take the throne. Martuccio hears of the war from prison and offers a keeper advice that could help the king win. His knowledge of the Barbary language and his understanding of the king’s military reliance on archers make him useful across the boundary between captive and adviser.

Martuccio’s proposal is a practical stratagem: the king’s archers should use unusually thin bowstrings and arrows notched to fit them, with the change kept secret. In battle, enemy archers could not use the king’s arrows because their own strings would be too thick for the narrow notches; the king’s archers, by contrast, could use the enemy’s wider-notched arrows. The king, seeking counsel to defend his rule, has Martuccio brought before him and listens to the plan. Barbary’s significance in these episodes lies in this sequence of reversals: the coast that first promises Martuccio riches brings him captive to Tunis, while his language and military insight create a new opening within the very political world that holds him.