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By Root 917 0

others use them as a possible defense when they come to plunder Christian lands: if they happen to be shipwrecked or are taken prisoner, they show their declarations and say that these papers prove their intention to remain in Christian lands, which was the reason they came on a raid with the Turks. In this way they avoid the initial violence of their captors and reconcile with the Church, and no one does them any harm, and at the first opportunity they return to Barbary to be what they were before. There are others, however, who obtain and use these papers with good intentions and remain in Christian lands.

Well, my friend was one of these renegades, and he had statements from all our comrades attesting in every way possible to his good faith, and if the Moors had found him with these papers, they would have burned him alive. I had learned that he knew Arabic very well, and could not only speak it but write it, too, but before I told him everything, I asked him to read the paper for me, saying I had found it in a crack in the wall of my cell. He unfolded it and spent a long time looking at it, analyzing it, and murmuring to himself. I asked him if he understood it; he said he understood it very well, and if I wanted him to repeat it word for word, I should give him ink and a pen, which would allow him to do a better job. We soon gave him what he requested, he translated the letter slowly, and when he was finished, he said: ‘Everything written here in Spanish is exactly what this Moorish letter contains; you should know that where it says Lela Marién it means Our Lady the Virgin Mary.’ We read the paper, and this is what it said:

When I was a little girl, my father had a slave woman who taught me in my own language a Christian zalá, or prayer, and she told me many things about Lela Marién. The Christian slave died, and I know she did not go to the fire but to Allah, because afterward I saw her two times, and she told me to go to a Christian land to see Lela Marién, who loved me very much. I do not know how to go: I have seen many Christians through this window, and none has seemed as much a gentleman as you. I am very beautiful and young, and I have a good deal of money to take with me; see if you can plan how we can go, and when we are there you can be my husband if you like, and if you do not, it will not matter, because Lela Marién will give me someone to marry. I wrote this; be careful who you ask to read it: do not trust any Moor, because they are all false. I am very worried about that: I wish you would not show it to anybody, because if my father finds out, he will throw me in a well and cover me over with stones. I will put a thread on the reed: tie your answer there, and if you do not have anybody who writes Arabic, give me your answer in signs; Lela Marién will make me understand. May she and Allah protect you, and this cross that I kiss many times, as the captive woman taught me to do.

Consider, Señores, if there was reason for the words of this letter to astound and delight us; our feelings were so intense that the renegade realized the paper had not been found by chance but had really been written to one of us, and he implored us that if what he suspected was true, that we trust him and tell him so, and he would risk his life for our freedom. And saying this, he pulled out from under his shirt a metal crucifix, and with many tears he swore by the God that the image represented, and in whom he, though a sinner, believed completely and faithfully, that he would be loyal to us and keep secret anything we wished to tell him; he thought, and could almost predict, that by means of the woman who had written the letter, he and all of us would obtain our freedom, and he would find himself where he longed to be, which was reunited with the body of Holy Mother Church, from whom, like a rotten limb, he had been separated and severed because of his ignorance and sin. The renegade said this with so many tears and displays of so much repentance that we were all of the same opinion and agreed to tell him the truth, and so