Historical romance - a pirate theme

Code d’ Odalisque has a certain romantic “pirate” theme. This reflects the historical models to which it alludes and upon which it is based. Specifically, Code d’ Ode looks to the type of slave trading that took place in the Ottoman Empire in the 1500 and 1600s when Turkish and Berber pirates menaced the Mediteranean and Barbary Coast. In this period pirates would capture men and women to be sold into slavery in Istanbul or in Egypt, Arabia or Persia. The most beautiful of the women would be saved from toil and used as sexual slaves in the harems of the rich and powerful.

In the romance of this period we find the tale of the beautiful, timid white woman – a daughter of an English aristocrat – who is captured by pirates and sold into sexual slavery in the exotic east. She lives in luxury but is used as a sexual toy by her benevolent captors. Code d’ Odalisque is based upon such stories. It is based upon the romance of this period. It makes no claim to be based in the hard facts of history – it is not an historical reconstruction. It is a creative rendering of the odalisque of romance, attuned to the hardcore sensibility of modernity.

The pirate theme in Code d’ Odalisque is muted and tasteful. The days of slavetaking on the high seas are gone. Today’s Slavekeeper is not a pirate but an executive, a businessman, an educated professional gentleman. He retains some connection with the old pirate days, though. In Code d’ Odalisque a Slavekeeper keeps a sword – a cutlass – as an emblem of his authority and as an allusion back to the romantic past. A slave in Code d’ Odalisque is said to be “under the sword”. In other respects, the Code attempts to create an atmosphere of opulent slavekeeping reminiscent of that past era.

Players are free to draw out the pirate theme if they like. It makes a good fantasy scenario in slavetraining, for instance. The odalisque is an English Lady, captured at sea, sold into odalisque slavery, who must be taught how to serve the men of the Sultan's court.

All the same, let it be stressed, there is no Disney-style “pirate fantasy” in Code d’ Ode. Players don’t dress up like Long John Silver and wear eye patches. The theme is implied only. It is a backdrop, a background. Code d’ Ode represents a modern odalisque slavery. The Slavekeeper wears a suit and tie. The days of the white slave trade are a distant tradition. Code d’ Ode continues those traditions but in a modern creative and elegant form, not in kitsch costume fantasies.

This is the historical background to Code d' Odalisque. It looks back to the romantic era of late medieval/early modern slavetrading in Turkey and the East.