The Journal of Aurelio Scetti: A Florentine Galley Slave at Lepanto (1565-1577)

On 9 August 1565, on the main square of Arezzo, Aurelio Scetti, a Florentine musician, was about to be beheaded for the murder of his wife. At the last minute, thanks to the intervention of some of Scetti's powerful acquaintances at the court of Duke Cosimo I de' Medici in Florence, his death sentence was commuted, and Aurelio was sentenced to life in the galleys and assigned to the captain of the Pisana. Barely more than a two-masted rowing boat, the Pisana was one of four galleys of the fleet of the Holy Military Order of Saint Stephen, which the duke had created in 1561 to fight the Barbary pirates who were pillaging the northern shores of the Mediterranean. The powers of southern Europe were in the midst of a giant struggle between the great maritime cities of Italy and the Turkish power. Helped by independent Moorish corsairs, whose home bases were in ports of northern Africa, Istanbul pursued a war of attrition and pillage on the coastal areas of Italy and Spain until most of the Catholic states joined together to fight the Islamic enemy at Lepanto, on 7 October 1571.

This is the world described in Aurelio Scetti's manuscript, a chronicle of eleven years of captivity. He sent it to the duke of Florence, with a petition asking to be freed. We do not know whether he was finally released or died in jail; the archives are silent on this point. This text is an exciting account of life on a galley, full of details about naval battles with the Islamic fleet and internal fights among Christian admirals, enhanced by Scetti's own pen-and-ink drawings of galleys, harbors, and storms.