Alatiel Returns to Her Father after Abduction and Repeated Transfers

Alatiel Returns to Her Father after Abduction and Repeated Transfers is a story of a royal woman repeatedly displaced by shipwreck, murder, and abduction, until recognition brings her home. Its central reversal is not that her trials are undone, but that Alatiel’s identity is recovered and her return made possible through a carefully sustained fiction about her past.

Shipwreck and First Captivity

After departing Alexandria, Alatiel’s ship sailed prosperously for many days and passed Sardinia. Near Majorca, a sudden storm drove the vessel through two days of heavy seas; on the third night, the ship began to break apart. The sky was hidden by clouds, the crew could not establish their position, and the gale drove the nearly waterlogged ship onto a beach. By morning, Alatiel and her women lay on deck as if dead from exhaustion and terror. The princess awoke weak and alone among her silent attendants, with the wreck stranded in the sand and the sea still beating against it.

A servant of Pericone da Visalgo examined the vessel and reported what he found. Pericone had the surviving women brought ashore with the most precious goods that could be recovered, then took them to his castle and provided food and rest. Alatiel’s rich clothing and the deference shown her by the other women disclosed her high rank, while her beauty made a strong impression on him despite her pallor and disordered appearance. He considered marrying her if she had no husband; failing that, he meant to obtain her sexual favors. The shipwreck had thus carried the princess from the prospect of a royal marriage into the power of a local ruler, who treated her status as an opportunity to claim her.

Pericone’s brother Marato, twenty-five and handsome, also desired Alatiel. Reading her gestures as evidence that she favored him, he concluded that Pericone’s vigilance was the only obstacle between him and what he wanted. He arranged passage aboard a Genoese merchant ship bound for Chiarenza, then entered his brother’s house at night with trusted accomplices. They killed Pericone as he slept and took Alatiel, who had awakened and was weeping, threatening to kill her if she cried out. They escaped with much of Pericone’s valuable property and carried her to the ship. Her first transfer from one man’s household to another was therefore accomplished through fratricide and an explicit threat, setting the pattern of violence and unstable protection that governs the next stages of her journey.

Marato’s Death and the Rival Captains

Marato’s escape did not end Alatiel’s captivity. The two Genoese shipmasters who had carried her away from Pericone’s house desired her for themselves, but Marato kept her under close guard. While their vessel was speeding toward Chiarenza, they seized him from behind and threw him into the sea. They had sailed more than a mile before anyone noticed he was gone. Alatiel wept again, lamenting what she understood as her ill fortune; the two men tried to comfort her with promises and gentle words, though she understood little of what they said. Their attention offered no secure refuge: it arose from the same contest for possession that had already cost Pericone his life and Marato his.

A further turn of fortune came when one of the shipmasters was wounded. His relatives learned of the affair and sought to kill Alatiel, but the wounded man’s prayers and their timely arrival at Chiarenza spared her. She went ashore with him and stayed at an inn. The report of her beauty reached the Prince of the Morea, who was staying in the city; after seeing her, he became enamored and resolved to obtain her. The movement from ship to inn, and from the protection of a wounded captor to the desire of a prince, repeatedly changed Alatiel’s circumstances without giving her control over them.

The Prince and the Duke

The wounded shipmaster’s kinsman, a duke, came to regard his relative’s possession of Alatiel with envy. His desire outweighed his honor, and he arranged a secret departure with Ciuriaci, a chamberlain in the prince’s service. One night the duke and an armed companion entered the prince’s chamber. The prince stood naked at a window above the shore, taking the breeze; the duke stabbed him in the back and threw his body from the high window onto houses undermined by the sea. The fall was not heard, and the murder remained undiscovered.

The duke then carried a light to the sleeping Alatiel, uncovered her, and admired her. With his hands still bloody, he lay beside her while she remained half asleep and mistook him for the prince. Afterward, he had her carried out through a private door and took her away on horseback with his men. The episode makes the instability of her apparent alliances stark: even intimacy with the prince offered no protection from the violence of a rival who killed him and appropriated her in the same night.

Constantine, Osbech, and Antiochus

After the duke had taken Alatiel away, Constantine arranged a further seizure. He secretly prepared a light vessel and sent it near the garden where she was staying. Under the pretext of speaking with her on the duke’s behalf, he drew her alone toward a gate opening onto the sea. His men had already opened it; at a signal, they seized Alatiel and carried her aboard. Constantine threatened her attendants into silence, insisting that he meant to take the duke’s woman, not rob the duke. He departed with Alatiel in tears, reached Egina after daybreak, and soon moved on to Chios, where fear of his father’s anger and of losing her led him to remain in hiding with her.

The next change of captor came through war. Osbech, King of the Turks, arrived at Chios by night with light-armed ships and surprised the inhabitants before they could prepare a defense. His forces killed some who ran to arms, burned the city, and carried away its goods and captives. Finding Alatiel among them, Osbech recognized her as the woman taken with Constantine and made her his wife. A military raid had once again transformed her position, from a sheltered mistress in Chios to a royal captive and queen.

Osbech left Alatiel in the charge of his servant Antiochus. Though older and bound to his friend and master, Antiochus became enamored of her. Unlike the earlier men around her, he knew her language; after years in which she could neither understand those around her nor make herself understood, speech gave the two a means of intimacy. Their relationship moved from familiarity to a secret love affair while Osbech was away at war. When they heard that Osbech had been defeated and killed and that Bassano was advancing, they decided not to wait. Antiochus and Alatiel took much of the dead king’s property and fled.

Their escape ended at Baffa, where Antiochus stayed with a merchant from Cyprus, his close friend. As Antiochus approached death, he arranged for the merchant to inherit his possessions and care for Alatiel, whom he described as the person he had loved above all others. His farewell joins affection to practical concern: he feared that after his death she would be left a stranger, without protection or counsel. The merchant became the next link in her passage, though the evidence presents this transfer as Antiochus’s deathbed arrangement rather than another seizure.

Recognition and Return

At Baffa, Alatiel’s passage through unfamiliar households finally gave way to recognition. Antigonus of Famagosta, an elderly gentleman with little wealth but considerable wit, saw her at a window and thought her face familiar. She recognized him as a former servant of her father in Alexandria and, weeping, embraced him. Antigonus then understood that the woman believed drowned was the Soldan’s daughter. Asked how she had survived, Alatiel told him the history of her shipwreck and the events that followed. He wept at her account and promised to restore her to her father, and afterward to the King of Algarve, who had been intended as her husband.

Antigonus went to Famagosta and persuaded the King of Cyprus that helping Alatiel would bring honor to the king and service to himself. The king agreed. Alatiel was received with ceremony and generous hospitality, then sent back toward Egypt under Antigonus’s escort, with a large company of men and women. The journey reversed the direction of her earlier transfers: she was no longer carried away as booty or claimed by a succession of captors, but accompanied home with public honor and royal protection.

On her return, Alatiel repeated to her father the account Antigonus had instructed her to give. She described a shipwreck on a western coast and claimed that she and two attendants had been put ashore and seized by local men. Her story concealed the successive sexual relationships and changes of captor that had defined her actual journey. Antigonus reinforced the account before the Soldan: he said that Alatiel had left out what would ill become her to tell, namely the reports of the company that she had lived chastely and modestly among religious women. He further described the companions’ tears when they parted from her. The recovered princess thus returned not through a public disclosure of everything that had happened, but through a jointly maintained narrative that restored her reputation as well as her place in her father’s household.

The Soldan rejoiced, thanked God, and prepared rich gifts for Antigonus; he also sent letters and ambassadors to express his gratitude to the King of Cyprus. He then renewed the marriage arrangement with the King of Algarve, who welcomed Alatiel joyfully. The story closes on its sharpest irony: after having lain with eight men, perhaps ten thousand times, Alatiel went to bed with the King of Algarve as a supposed maiden, and lived happily as his queen for a time. The narrator seals the reversal with the maxim, “Lips for kissing forfeit no favour; nay, they renew as the moon doth ever.” Her return is therefore both a restoration and a successful concealment: the same beauty that had exposed her to repeated seizure becomes, in the final account, compatible with an untouched bridal identity.