ABSTRACT
Not many details are known about Michael Heberer’s life. He studied in Wittenberg, Leipzig, and Heidelberg. In 1582, he decided to go to France and Italy. In 1585, while travelling to Egypt on a ship of the Order of Malta, he was captured by an Ottoman fleet and spent three years as a galley slave in Ottoman captivity. In his account Aegyptiaca Servitus, Das ist Warhafte Beschreibung einer Dreyjährigen Dienstbarkeit, so zu Alexandrien in Egypten ihren Anfang und zu Constantinopel ihr Endschaft gefunden, Heidelberg (1610), Heberer provides insight into political conditions, landscapes, traditions, and costumes of the eastern Mediterranean, and offers a perspective onto Ottoman culture and religion from a subaltern position, as well as his life as prisoner and his survival strategies. This article gives an overview of Heberer’s work and his personal impressions of the Ottoman Empire as a galley slave. In 1588, the French envoy at Constantinople redeemed Heberer out of slavery.
