Most of this chapter is based on the research of Robert Davis, professor of history at Ohio State University, that was published in his book: Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters: White Slavery in the Mediterranean, the Barbary Coast, and Italy, 1500-1800 (Palgrave Macmillan)
Robert Davis observed:
At this point, many of you are probably saying ‘White slaves?’ What in the world is he talking about? Sure, there were white indentured servants and apprentices in Colonial America, and maybe sometimes they were treated badly, but actual White slavery—that’s something that disappeared with the Romans and the Vikings.
One of the things that both the public and many scholars have tended to take as given is that slavery was always racial in nature—that only blacks have been slaves. But that is not true. We cannot think of slavery as something that only White people did to Black people.
What a refutation of the “Curse of Ham” myth!
Abduction of a White Girl by Slave Hunters
Davis observed that “from AD 1500 to 1650, when trans-Atlantic slaving to the US was still in its infancy, more white Christian slaves were probably taken to Africa than black African slaves to the Americas.”
“One million to 1.25 million White slaves,” mainly women , were captured in Europe by Muslim slave traders and deported in chains to the Barbary ports of North Africa. There they disembarked in chains and were brutally marched, some, hundreds of miles, to Muslim Slave Auctions. Up to 80% died on the way.
European men, women and children auctioned off at
Algiers’ Slave Market—Pierre Dan
Muslim Pirates (called corsairs) from cities along the Barbary Coast in North Africa would raid ships in the Mediterranean and Atlantic taking both crews and passengers for the slave trade. Also, they raided seaside villages to capture these unfortunate victims. The impact of these attacks was devastating—France, England, and Spain each lost thousands of ships with their human cargo of crew and passengers doomed to slavery. Also, try to imagine the long stretches of the Spanish and Italian coasts that were almost completely abandoned by their inhabitants desperately fleeing inland.
Slave Market of Algiers in the early 17th Century
Davis estimates that North African Muslim pirates abducted and enslaved up to 1.5 million Europeans between 1530 and 1780. These white Christians were seized in a series of raids which actually depopulated coastal towns from Sicily to Cornwall.
Thousands of white Christians in coastal areas were seized every year. “Enslavement was a very real possibility for anyone who traveled in the Mediterranean or who lived along the shores in places like Italy, France, Spain and Portugal, and even as far north as England and Iceland,” Davis said.
Slave traders traveled as far as Eastern Europe and Russia. In fact, the very word “slave” comes from the people of Eastern Europe, the Slavs. Also, remember Islamic Turkey controlled the Balkan States of Europe until 1913, during which time Arab slave traders captured and chained thousands of white Europeans, many of whom collapsed in death in the trek by foot to the slave markets of Islamic Africa. About 80% of those captured by Muslim slave raiders died before reaching the slave markets.
Even Americans were not immune. For example, one American slave reported that 130 American seamen had been enslaved by the Muslim Algerians in the Mediterranean and Atlantic between 1785 and 1793. Yes, even early American Presidents faced the problem of paying ransom money to Barbary Pirates.
Davis said, “The vast scope of slavery in North Africa has been ignored and minimized, in large part because it is on no one’s agenda to discuss what happened.” Why?
“The enslavement of Europeans doesn’t fit the general theme of European world conquest and colonialism that is central to scholarship on the early modern era,” he said. “Many of the countries that were victims of slavery, such as France and Spain, would later conquer and colonize the areas of North Africa where their citizens were once held as slaves. Maybe because of this history, Western scholars have thought of the Europeans primarily as “evil colonialists” and not as the victims [of slavery] they sometimes were,” Davis said.
The result is that between 1530 and 1780 there were “1 million to 1.25 million white, European Christians enslaved” by the Muslims of the Barbary Coast.
Davis said his research into the treatment of these slaves suggests that, for most of them, their lives were every bit as difficult as that of slaves in America. “As far as daily living conditions, the Mediterranean slaves certainly didn’t have it better,” he said.
White European Slaves—Muslim Masters
One of the strongest disproofs of the “Curse on Ham” myth was that African Muslims, who for 14 centuries indulged in the perverted luxury of slave ownership, although they captured some slaves from nearby black Africa, also traveled thousands of miles to take white slaves from the expanses of Europe.
Remember the interacting for centuries of Muslims with the Black Empire of Aksum. As a result, it is estimated that Muslims have about 17% Black genes. Here we have Muslims who were 17% Hamites holding European Japhethites slaves. Another disproof of the “curse of Ham.”