This chapter presents a case study from late sixteenth-century Rome involving marginalized, non-elite women who, having been trafficked across the Mediterranean as captives, collaborated on a plan to return to Christendom. In North Africa, they negotiated with church officials and lay confraternity members, but also with former captives to set their plan into motion. In Rome, they were sponsored by the papal court, urban elites, and women active in church reform. A variety of manuscript and printed sources offer differing accounts of the affair, ranging from prosaic details about finances to sensationalized tales of their miraculous escape. In a time of religious dissension across Europe, these texts, including one engraving, spread the message of Catholic mercy and triumph. Although their transactions afforded the women greater control of their fates and the path to salvation, their social capital eroded after the demise of Pope Sixtus V in 1590.

In early October 1587, a group of refugees from Algiers arrived in Rome. The leader of the expedition, a Greek renegade called Anna, seized the opportunity to escape when her husband, a high-ranking Ottoman official, went to Istanbul. A Sardinian bishop worked alongside the Archconfraternity of the Gonfalone to bring the group to the Eternal City where Anna, her mother Angela, daughters Maria and Caterina, her servants, and slaves all came under the protection of Pope Sixtus V. This former captive turned catechumen exhibited remarkable ingenuity and resilience while negotiating with both the ecclesiastical and lay circles of papal Rome.