Most people, when they think of slavery, think of the race slavery of the American South. A small fraction think of ancient slavery, as in Rome. In Fear of the Horizon, John Derbyshire discusses another kind of slavery, religious slavery:
There was in fact, says Prof. Davis, something of religious revenge in the depredations of the Muslim slavers. The slave trade really got going after 1492, the year the last Muslims were expelled from Spain — what Osama bin Laden calls “the tragedy of Andalusia.” Says the author: “In Barbary, those who hunted and traded slaves certainly hoped to make a profit, but in their traffic in Christians there was also always an element of revenge, almost of jihad — for the wrongs of 1492, for the centuries of crusading violence that had preceded them, and for the ongoing religious struggle between Christian and Muslim that has continued to roil the Mediterranean world well into modern times.”One of the most impressive parts of Prof. Davis’s book is his computation of the numbers of Europeans enslaved by these Muslim raiders. Combing through the historical sources, he concludes that there were about 35,000 enslaved Christians on the Barbary Coast at any one time. He then sets about estimating attrition rates. Slave numbers declined through four causes: death, escape, redemption (i.e. by ransom), and conversion to Islam. Davis gets annual rates from these causes of 17 percent, 1 percent, 2-3 percent, and 4 percent, respectively. This implies a total number of slaves, from the early 1500s to the late 1700s, of one to one and a quarter million. This is an astonishing number, implying that well into the 17th century, the Mediterranean slave trade was out-producing the Atlantic one. Numbers fell off thereafter, while the transatlantic trade increased; but in its time, the enslavement of European Christians by Muslim North Africans was the main kind of enslavement going on in the world.
Christians were captured by two methods. First, there was the seizing of ships by straightforward piracy. The ship itself became a prize along with its crew and passengers. Second, there were raids on the coasts of European countries. Spain, France, and Italy were worst affected, but the pirates sometimes ventured further afield. In 1627 they kidnapped 400 men and women from Iceland.
The victims in either case would be taken back to one of the Barbary ports — the main ones were Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli — and sold in a slave market, by auction. They ended up either as the domestic slaves of private persons, or as slaves owned by the state, to be put to work rowing galleys, or constructing public works. The first of these two fates was usually preferable, as there was some chance of humanity from a private owner. Prof. Davis’s account of the lives of galley slaves is hard to read, and state slaves employed on public works were not much better off. There was no large-scale private-enterprise slavery as in the plantations of the Old South. The North African states had little commercial culture.
The effect on the European coastal populations was dramatic. Entire areas were depopulated. The author even sketches out an argument that the culture of baroque Italy was determined in part by a turning inward from the terrors of coastal life — from the “fear of the horizon” that afflicted all the regions subject to slave raiding. He tells us (he is professor of Italian Social History at Ohio State University, by the way) that to this day there is an idiom in Sicilian dialect to express the general idea of being caught by surprise: pigliato dai turchi — “taken by the Turks.” The distress of those left behind, deprived of a husband of father, is painful to read about.
Wealthy Europeans were often ransomed back to their families:
A side benefit of their work, for the slavers, was the opportunity to extract a ransom from the family of a well-born captive. Many European families beggared themselves to pay ransom for a family member taken by the slavers. The novelist Cervantes, author of Don Quixote, unfortunately had a letter from the Duke of Alba on him when he was captured at sea by slavers in 1575. This caused his captors to think his family must be very rich, and they demanded a hefty ransom that Cervantes’s family could not pay. The novelist was ransomed at last, after five years’ captivity, by the Trinitarians, one of the religious orders that made the ransoming of Christian slaves a part of their mission.
You can imagine what kind of incentive those well-meaning Trinitarians provided:
There was in fact an entire Mediterranean sub-economy based around the ransoming of slaves, which Europeans felt to be their Christian duty, and a proper object of charity, and which orders like the Trinitarians and Mercedarians made their main business. This sometimes had unintended consequences. Willingness to pay ransom on the part of nations, for example, encouraged the slavers to ask higher ransom prices for citizens of those nations: “By 1700 there is the clear beginning of an inflation spiral that would lead to ransoms more than doubling by the 1760s. Moreover, nations that let it be known that they were disposed to buy back their enslaved citizens more or less promptly ran the further risk of making prime targets out of their own ships and citizens — as the United States would find to its immense cost in the 1790s.” No wonder economics is called “the dismal science.”