The legend surrounding the Cava Rumía is, according to Michael Gerli, one of Spain's «paradigmatic cultural and religious myths» (41). The story of King Rodrigo's violation of La Cava Florinda «marks in the legendary history of Spain the Lord's damnation of the Gothic empire by means of the Apocalyptic silver [p. 119] Arab invasion» of 711, thus «... endowing Spain's history with a prophetic teleology of apocalyptic doom..». (45). (N. from the A.)

John Elliott notes, with specific reference to Cervantes, the paradoxical nature of the image of Lepanto in Spain during the years immediately following the victory: «The spectacular victory of the Christian forces at Lepanto in 1571 was to epitomize for contemporaries all that was most glorious in the crusade against Islam. It was an eternal source of pride to those who, like Miguel de Cervantes, had fought in the battle and could show the scar of their wounds, and of grateful wonder to the millions who saw in it a divine deliverance of Christendom from the power of the oppressor... But, in fact, the battle of Lepanto proved a curiously deceptive triumph, and the attempt to follow it up was peculiarly unsuccessful. Although Don John [of Austria] captured Tunis in 1573, it was lost again in the following year, and the Ottoman-Spanish struggle died away in stalemate» (Imperial Spain 238). It is precisely this emphasis on the deceptiveness of the Mediterranean battles which follow that characterizes the Captive's discourse on Constantinople. (N. from the A.)

Here, Cervantes has his Captive/Captain cast doubt upon the validity of popular Christian accounts of these battles. This process of reevaluation is a critical component of the outward journey, as de Certeau has pointed out (Heterologies 69). Whereas on the outward journey, the ethnographer opposes the new world to his superior point of origin, on the return journey he will make every attempt to emphasize the points of similarity between the new world and the old, thus integrating alterity into the dominant system. (N. from the A.)

Michel de Certeau comments on the blurred boundaries of the «terrain of the name». Early ethnographers attempted to fix a «locus proprius» for shifting identities in their narratives but rarely succeeded (Heterologies 72). For different silver [p. 121] interpretations of the significance of La Cava in «The Captive's Tale», see Garcés (86), Murillo (238), and Gerli (53-58). (N. from the A.)

Percas de Ponseti aptly refers to this lingua franca as a «maraña de la lengua» (I, 226) which both reveals and hides the «naturaleza de los sentimientos» (I, 227). The most recent study of sixteenth- and seventeenth century Algiers also explores the «gran movilidad» available to those individuals most adept at adjusting to that city's turbulent cosmopolitan society (Sola 214). (N. from the A.)

For a different analysis of the Zoraida/Captive/Agi Morato relationship, see Weber (428-31). She concludes that «The Captive's Tale» is «una narrativa estructurada en torno al triángulo erótico: mujer/amante/oponente» (425) in which the figure of the opponent father is displaced by a new «mother», the Virgin Mary (431). (N. from the A.)

Here we see an attempt on the part of the father to counter the dissociation of the name from its referent: «Pues para que entendáis desde aquí adelante que os quiero como padre, y que no os quiero destruir como padrastro...» (I, 473). Money or its absence is a frequent source of such displacement in the tale. (N. from the A.)

Murillo points out that the oidor will later report that his youngest brother «está en el Pirú» (I, 518, n. 15). (N. from the A.)

Michel de Certeau alludes to this commonplace in The Writing of History (xxv), and translator Tom Conley describes an allegorical etching by Jan Van der Straet for Jean-Théodore de Bry's America decimae pars in which America is represented as a «supine, Rubenesque woman rising from her hammock» (xxi). John Elliott also points to the traditional representation of America as a woman in European art: «America -symbolized in the allegories of the four continents that began to appear from the 1570's as a naked woman with feathered headdress, seated on an armadillo, and sometimes surrounded by the exotic flora and fauna of a strange new world...» (World 649). (N. from the A.)

Cervantes, we might recall, was freed from captivity only after his mother secured funds to pay his ransom (Canavaggio 90 and 94). (N. from the A.)