Renegade Editor’s Note: This article does not even
cover the White slavery in the New World!
The Ottoman penetration into Europe in the 1350s and their capture of
Constantinople later in 1453 opened new floodgates for slave-trade from the
European front. In their last attempt to overrun Europe in 1683, the Ottoman
army, although defeated, returned from the Gates of Vienna with 80,000
captives.874 An immense number of slaves flowed from the Crimea, the Balkans
and the steppes of West Asia to Islamic markets. BD Davis laments that the
‘‘Tartars and other Black Sea peoples had sold millions of Ukrainians,
Georgians, Circassians, Greeks, Armenians, Bulgarians, Slavs and Turks,’’ which
received little notice.875 Crimean Tatars enslaved and sold some 1,750,000
Ukrainians, Poles and Russian between 1468 and 1694. 876 According to another
estimate, between 1450 and 1700, the Crimean Tatars exported some 10,000
slaves, including some Circassians, annually—that is, some 2,500,000 slaves in
all, to the Ottoman Empire.877 The Tatar slave-raiding Khans returned with
18,000 slaves from Poland (1463), 100,000 from Lvov (1498), 60,000 from South
Russia (1515), 50,000–100,000 from Galicia (1516), during the ‘harvesting of
the steppe.’ Numbers from Moscow (1521), 800,000 were taken and from Valynia
(1676), 400,000 were taken. 800,000 from Moscow (1521), 200,000 from South
Russia (1555), 100,000 from Moscow (1571), 50,000 from Poland (1612), 60,000 from
South Russia (1646), 100,000 from Poland (1648), 300,000 from Ukraine (1654),
400,000 from Valynia (1676) and thousands from Poland (1694). Besides these
major catches, they made countless more Jihad raids during the same period,
which yielded a few to tens of thousands of slaves.878 These figures of
enslavement must be considered in the context that the population of the Tatar
Khanate was only about 400,000 at the time. (1463-1694) while sources are
incomplete, conservative tabulation of the slave raids against the Eastern
European population indicate that at least 7 Million European people-men,
women, children were enslaved by Muslims.
Sources suggest that in the few years between 1436-1442, some 500,000
people were seized in the Balkans. Many of the captives died in forced marches
towards Anatolia (Turkey). Contemporary chronicles note that the Ottomans
reduced masses of the inhabitants of Greece, Romania, and the Balkans to
slavery eg from Moree (1460)-70,000 and Transylvania (1438) – 60,000-70,000 and
300,000-600,000 from Hungary and 10,000 from Mytilene/Mitilini on Lesbos island
(1462) (Bulgaru p 567) and so it continued.
Barbary Slavery
Ohio State University history Professor Robert Davis describes the White
Slave Trade as minimized by most modern historians in his book Christian
Slaves, Muslim Masters: White Slavery in the Mediterranean, the Barbary Coast
and Italy, 1500–1800 (Palgrave Macmillan). Davis estimates that 1 million
to 1.25 million white Christian Europeans were enslaved in North Africa, from
the beginning of the 16th century to the middle of the 18th, by slave traders
from Tunis, Algiers, and Tripoli alone (these numbers do not include the
European people which were enslaved by Morocco and by other raiders and traders
of the Mediterranean Sea coast), 16th- and 17th-century customs statistics
suggest that Istanbul’s additional slave import from the Black Sea may have
totaled around 2.5 million from 1450 to 1700. The markets declined after the
loss of the Barbary Wars and finally ended in the 1830s, when the region was
conquered by France.
In 1544, the island of Ischia off Naples was ransacked, taking 4,000
inhabitants prisoners, while some 9,000 inhabitants of Lipari Island off the
north coast of Sicily were enslaved.870 Turgut Reis, a Turkish pirate chief,
ransacked the coastal settlements of Granada (Spain) in 1663 and carried away
4,000 people as slaves.
The barbaric slave-raiding activities of the Muslim pirates had a telling
effect on Europe. France, England, and Spain lost thousands of ships,
devastating to their sea-borne trade. Long stretches of the coast in Spain and
Italy were almost completely abandoned by their inhabitants until the
nineteenth century. The finishing industry was virtually devastated.
Paul Baepler’s White Slaves, African Masters: An Anthology of American
Barbary Captivity Narratives lists a collection of essays by nine American
captives held in North Africa. According to his book, there were more than
20,000 white Christian slaves by 1620 in Algiers alone; their number swelled to
more than 30,000 men and 2,000 women by the 1630s. There were a minimum of
25,000 white slaves at any time in Sultan Moulay Ismail’s palace, records Ahmed
ez-Zayyani; Algiers maintained a population of 25,000 white slaves between 1550
and 1730, and their numbers could double at certain times. During the same
period, Tunis and Tripoli each maintained a white slave population of about
7,500. The Barbary pirates enslaved some 5,000 Europeans annually over a period
of nearly three centuries.
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