![]() ![]() A British diplomatic mission to Algiers led to the Dey to agree to release some Sardinian slaves. A US Navy expedition under Commodore Edward Preble engaged gunboats and fortifications in Tripoli in 1804. The markets declined after Sweden and the United States defeated the Barbary States in the Barbary Wars (1800–1815). Ĭustoms' statistics from the 16th and 17th century suggest that Istanbul's additional slave imports from the Black Sea may have totaled around 2.5 million from 1450 to 1700. Captives who converted to Islam were generally freed, since enslavement of Muslims was prohibited but this meant that they could never return to their native countries. Others were sold into various types of servitude. Those who had family or friends who might ransom them were held captive the most famous of these was the author Miguel de Cervantes, who was held for almost five years – from 1575 to 1580. While Barbary corsairs looted the cargo of ships they captured, their primary goal was to capture non-Muslim people for sale as slaves or for ransom. 1816 illustration of Christian slaves in Algiers Between 16, England alone lost 466 merchant ships to Barbary pirates. On some occasions, settlements such as Baltimore in Ireland were abandoned following a raid, only being resettled many years later. In 1618 the Algerian pirates attacked the Canary Islands taking 1000 captives to be sold as slaves. The Balearic Islands were invaded in 1558, and 4,000 people were taken into slavery. In 1554 corsairs under Dragut sacked Vieste, beheaded 5,000 of its inhabitants, and abducted another 6,000. ![]() In 1551, Ottoman corsair Dragut enslaved the entire population of the Maltese island of Gozo, between 5,000 and 6,000, sending them to Ottoman Tripolitania. In 1544, Hayreddin Barbarossa captured the island of Ischia, taking 4,000 prisoners, and enslaved some 2,000–7,000 inhabitants of Lipari. From at least 1500, the pirates also conducted raids on seaside towns of Italy, Spain, France, England, the Netherlands, Ireland, and as far away as Iceland, capturing men, women and children. įrom bases on the Barbary coast, North Africa, the Barbary pirates raided ships traveling through the Mediterranean and along the northern and western coasts of Africa, plundering their cargo and enslaving the people they captured. A second book by Davis, Holy War and Human Bondage: Tales of Christian-Muslim Slavery in the Early-Modern Mediterranean, widened its focus to related slavery. John Wright cautions that modern estimates are based on back-calculations from human observation. Christian prisoners are sold as slaves in a square in Algiers. Other historians have challenged Davis's numbers. To extrapolate his numbers, Davis assumes the number of European slaves captured by Barbary pirates remained roughly constant for a 250-year period. Robert Davis, author of Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters, estimates that slave traders from Tunis, Algiers, and Tripoli enslaved 1 million to 1.25 million Europeans in North Africa, from the beginning of the 16th century to the middle of the 18th century. ![]() However, most of these captives were people from lands close to Africa, particularly Italy. The majority were sailors (particularly those who were English), taken with their ships, but others were fishermen and coastal villagers. ![]() The authorities of Ottoman and pre-Ottoman times kept no relevant official records, but observers in the late 1500s and early 1600s estimated that around 35,000 European slaves were held throughout this period on the Barbary Coast, across Tripoli and Tunis, but mostly in Algiers. Extent Turk and clergyman with Christian slaves. As late as the 18th century, piracy continued to be a "consistent threat to maritime traffic in the Aegean". The Ottoman Eastern Mediterranean was the scene of intense piracy. European slaves were acquired by Muslim Barbary pirates in slave raids on ships and by raids on coastal towns from Italy to the Netherlands, Ireland and the southwest of Britain, as far north as Iceland and into the Eastern Mediterranean. The Barbary slave trade involved slave markets in the Barbary states. ![]()
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