Strong Earthquakes in North-Western Africa in the Second Half of the 17th Century, AD: A Critical Reappraisal of the Historical Evidence - Historical Seismology: Interdisciplinary Studies of Past and Recent Earthquakes - page 164

Fig. 3 Frontispieces of the pamphlets on the apparemtly fictitious earthquakes of 1685-1686
from a ship just landed in Leghorn”. Here, the same earthquake is described as
having occurred on January 25 instead of May 25. This suggests a case of “pam-
phlet multiplication” (see also: Algieri, 1686, Fig. 3), which is all the more likely
as there is no mention of any Tripoli earthquake in the Naples, Venice and Paris
Avvisi for January-August 1685 (ASMo, 1685a, b). This despite all of these being
extremely interested in news from Tripoli at the tme (which they received via Genoa
and Marseilles) because of the ongoing French-Tripoli conflict that was to result in
the French bombardment of Tripoli (June 22, 1685).
5 Evidence of New Earthquakes “On Paper” Only
By sifting through the collections of 17th century journalistic accounts that are
available in a few of the main European libraries, several pamphlets were discov-
ered that describe previously unknown, strong earthquakes as occurring in north-
west African towns. However, pamphlets are an elusive kind of source, which have
never been seriously studied before very recent times, and which were produced
for commercial and/or ideological ends. While their declared aim was to describe
“real” news, their contents could turn out to be a mix of truth and imagination, and
indeed, even pure fiction. Thus, taking pamphlets at face value can lead to giving
credence to fictional events, and to avoid this risk these pamphlets should first of
all be positioned within the broader national (or even international) publishing con-
text. In the present case, even a partial census of 17th century pamphlets allows
us to identify groups of items that were printed between 1668 and 1694 for which
common features abound, such that they are all clearly based on the same literary
scheme (or even the same original text), which follows two main “traditions” (see
also Appendix 1): The “A” group of pamphlets describe a seismic sequence that was
concurrent with odd astronomical phenomena, and that had severe effects in Algiers
(the destruction of 300 houses and the main Mosques) and surrounding villages. A