153 A Soldier’s Shame: he Specter of Captivity in “La historia del cautivo” ___________________________________Paul Michael Johnson Le capturé apparaît donc toujours comme frappé d’une tare originelle et indélébile qui pèsera sans in sur son destin. Claude Meillassoux M any of the political, economic, and religious anxieties of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Mediterranean were brought to bear upon and largely embodied in the igure of the captive, a living commodity whose circulation in turn permeated the consciousness of Spanish national identity and informed the con- struction of an early modern political, popular, and literary imaginary. 1 Much as the Mediterranean was a contested space of empire, the cap- tive can be read as a contested body which is afected and inscribed by imperial forces, a body imprisoned and marked indeinitely by its encounter with the otherness of captivity. For despite many attempts at deining the legal status of the captive in the theoretical, philosophical, and juridical writings of scholars from Aristotle to Francisco de Vitoria, the Mediterranean powers of the early modern era were far from es- tablishing a practical consensus on the ethically problematic nature of captivity. Many authors of the period contributed to this debate by exploring the complex status of the captive in their ictional writing 1 I am grateful to Luis F. Avilés, Ivette Hernández-Torres, and Santiago Morales-Rivera for their generous assistance and valuable feedback on this project.