Talking Turkey: An Examination of European Slavery In the Arab World

The New York Times’ 1619 Project, that paper’s alternative take on the history and the purported effect of slavery on this country, begins with a dramatic tableau: “In August 1619, a ship appeared off the coast of Point Comfort, Virginia, carrying more than 20 enslaved Africans, who were sold to the colonists. No aspect of the country that would be formed here has been untouched by the years of slavery that followed.”  According to the Times, this moment was the “true origin of the United States.”

Twelve years after the first slaves were brought to the American colonies, a pair of ships appeared off the coast of Baltimore, Ireland.  Captained by a Dutch renegade who had converted to Islam to escape his own enslavement, these ships, unlike that off Point Comfort, were not carrying slaves.  They were arriving in Ireland to seek slaves.  These raiders sacked the town, and transported 109 men, women, and children back to Algiers to be sold into slavery at auction.  The men were, for the most part, sold as galley slaves.  The women became seamstresses and concubines.  The children were separated from their parents and converted to Islam.  Only two of the 109 would ever return to Ireland.

The Sack of Baltimore, which would be immortalized in a poem by Thomas Osburne Davis, an Irish rebel who also wrote the anthem “A Nation Once Again,” was not a one-off.  Raids along the coasts of Great Britain were so frequent that Muslim raiders had established their own colony, on Lundy Island in the Bristol Channel off the west coast of England in 1627.  As before, the purpose of this colony was not to import slaves, but to export them for sale.

Nor was the Sack of Baltimore the beginning of the Arab slave trade in Europe.  To the contrary, that trade had existed for almost one thousand years, and would continue into the 19^th century, when Western arms, including American, finally ended the slave raids emanating from the Barbary Coast.  Even that did not end Arab slave trading, as the Arab world simply increase its raids in Africa to compensate for the loss of European slaves.

Many Americans are familiar with the concept that Europeans were enslaved by various Islamic realms.  The word slave is itself a corruption of word Slav; lying between the Christian West and the Muslim East, Slavs were frequently targets of the slave trade.  Similarly, many Americans are aware that the Arab world engaged in the African slave trade to the same, or even greater degree than the West.  However, one suspects that few Americans are aware to how systematic and widespread the European slave trade was.  If slavery was America’s (and the West’s) original sin, and if it, together with its close cousin, colonization, taints all of America’s achievements, one wonders why the Arab world is not tarred by the same, broad brush.  The Arab empires imported European slaves for over a thousand years, and maintained “colonies” in Europe for centuries.

Origins of the European Slave Trade  

Slavery was known in the West as long as history has been reported.  In particular, the Roman Empire maintained huge slave populations, as made famous by movies such as Spartacus and Ben-Hur.  Slaves were usually captives taken as prisoners of war.  As Bernard Lewis writes in his book, Race and Slavery In the Middle East: An Historical Enquiry, slavery had been practiced in all ancient civilizations from time immemorial.  It was sanctioned by the Old Testament as well as the New Testament, and was even defended by Aristotle in his work Politics.

Slavery was also sanctioned by the Quran.  Mohammed himself owned slaves.  However, the Quran was arguably the first major canon to regulate the practice.  Islamic law prohibited a master from overworking his slave, required him to provide medical care for his slave, and encouraged manumission or emancipation.  Most importantly, contrary to Western custom, any free man could not be enslaved.  As one example, a freeman could not indenture himself or sell himself into slavery to satisfy a debt.

Initially, the Arabs acquired slaves through conquest.  Their slaves came from North Africa, the Middle East, and Spain.  As these areas were consolidated into the empire, the subjugated peoples converted to Islam and were absorbed as free men.  As Lewis notes, these slaves were as educated and as cultured as their masters; as a result, their assimilation was facilitated.  However, unlike African slaves imported into the Western hemisphere, Arabic slaves did not procreate in sufficient numbers to satisfy the demand therefor.  This was due to a number of factors:  a large proportion of male slaves were castrated.  Islamic law prohibited the castration of slaves, so centers arose in Europe, in Prague for example, where castrations were performed before the slaves were delivered to the Levant.  Mortality was high among slaves.  Many slaves, particularly those later imported by the Ottomans, were employed as soldiers and ultimately given their freedom. 

To maintain their empire, the Muslim conquerors needed another source of slaves.  As a consequence, the most important means for the legal acquisition of slaves was purchase.  It was this demand for slaves that primarily fueled the slave trade.

The Slave Trade Develops

Among the earliest slave traders in Europe were the Vikings, who initially enslaved, for their own use, those whom they had conquered, but thereafter engaged in slave trading purely for profit.  One of the earliest towns established by the Vikings was Dublin, which was built, in large part, as a slave market.  Indeed, St. Patrick was himself a slave.

Early Viking slaves, or “thralls,” came primarily from Great Britain and Northern European countries.  Such slaves were used domestically and in furtherance of colonization in places such as Iceland.  Quickly, however, the Viking recognized that selling slaves to satisfy the growing demand of the Arab empire was as lucrative as any other plunder they could acquire as a result of their raids.  The Vikings established trade routes along the Danube and Volga Rivers down to the Black Sea.  Inevitably, the Vikings found sources of slaves in the Baltic regions, in Finland, and in Russia.  This slave trade diminished by the 11^th Century as Christianity spread through Scandinavia.

Perhaps more prolific were Italian slave trader, particularly those from Venice, who were engaging in the trade as early as the 8^th century.  The Venetian slavers were prohibited from enslaving fellow Christians, so they sought their slaves from pagan areas in the Balkans, and from areas further away from around the Black Sea and Caucasus.   As Lewis recounts, Central and East European slaves were imported by three main routes: overland via France and Spain, from Eastern Europe via the Crimea, and by sea across the Mediterranean.

The European slave trade waned for primarily two reasons.  In the West, the rise of nation states rendered their citizens less vulnerable to being stolen into servitude.  In the East, the rise of the Ottomans, who would conquer not only the Balkans but all of the territory surrounding the Black Sea, effectively shut off the Venetian slave traders from their traditional sources of slaves.

Slavery In The Ottoman Empire 

The Ottoman Empire dates from the 13^th century, with the rise of Osman I, the first Ottoman sultan.  Within his lifetime, Osman saw his kingdom grow from a sliver of land in Anatolia to control of much of Turkey and land on the European side of the Dardanelles, including all of Gallipoli.   Within decades, the Ottomans had established themselves in Greece and moved their capital to Adrianople, now the Turkish city of Edirne, west of Constantinople.

The Ottomans did not feel themselves constrained by prior Islamic law that forbade the recruitment of slaves from conquered territories.  They instituted the practice of devşirme, in which they forcibly recruited soldiers and government bureaucrats for service in the empire.  Young boys were taken from their families and relocated around the country to learn the customs and language of the empire, and subsequently they were transported to Constantinople for their military training.  The vast majority were employed as soldiers, known as Janissaries, and were forced to convert to Islam. A number were castrated and placed in positions in the government.  According to Lewis: “For a long time, most of the grand viziers and military commanders of the Ottoman forces were recruited in this way.”

If the development of this country can be claimed to be based upon slavery, then a much stronger claim can be made that the growth of the Ottoman Empire was similarly based.  The Janissaries constituted the core of the Ottoman armies.  In effect, they were the first standing, professional army in the West.  During peacetime, they were kept together to garrison border areas or to police the capital of Constantinople.

The Janissaries were primarily responsible for the conquests that the Ottomans made in Europe, expanding the empire in Europe from Grecian Thrace to include all of the Balkans and Hungary.  Originally, the Janissaries endured strict discipline, which included celibacy and penury.  They were not allowed to grow a beard or learn any profession other than soldiering.  To be fair, their lot was better than that of other slaves, but their duty was exclusively in the service of their master, the Sultan.  Over time, this discipline was relaxed, Janissaries were allowed to marry, and their children became members of the corps.  Eventually, the Janissaries, like the Roman Praetorian Guard, grew to be too powerful, deposing and murdering several sultans with whom they clashed.  Ultimately, they were eliminated in 1866.

Interestingly, the Janissaries were not the first slaves to be employed as soldiers by the Arabs.  Previously, in the 9^th century, the Mamluks, military slaves recruited from the Eurasian steppe and parts of Europe, had formed a significant part of the Arab armies.  Like the Janissaries, they also became too powerful to control, and they established their own rule in North Africa until brought to heel by the Ottomans.

By the death of Suleiman the Great in 1591, the growth of the Ottoman Empire had reached its zenith.  At the same time, European states had consolidated their power, including Russia, which eventually conquered the Caucasus and annexed Crimea.  From that point on, the supply of European slaves came mainly as a result of slave raids, primarily North African corsairs, on the coastal towns of Europe.

Slave Raiding

For the next several centuries, Arab slave trading consisted of raids conducted by corsairs sailing out of North Africa.  When most Westerners think of Arab slavery of Europeans, it is this manner of slave trading that comes to mind.  It has been popularized in novels, movies and even operas, including Rossini’s L’Itialiana in Algeri and Mozart’s Die Entführung aus dem Serail, or The Abduction From The Seraglio.  North African piracy had long existed, but it was Khayr al-Dīn, or Redbeard, who turned what had been a minor nuisance into a juggernaut beginning in the first decade of the 16^th century.  Together with his older brother, Oruch, Barbarossa seized control of Algiers.  After that town was attacked by Spain, and his brother killed, Barbarrosa, for protection, formally submitted to the Sultan and asked that Algiers be added to the Ottoman empire.  The Sultan promptly accepted Barbarossa’s offer and appointed him governor-general.  Redbeard thereafter conquered Tunisia, remaking the two states into a powerful, Ottoman stronghold.  Redbeard’s piracy, which had once been independent of the Sultan and his empire, now became the governmental policy of the Ottomans, with the Sultan getting his cut.

For the next decades, Barbarossa wreaked terror all along the Mediterranean coastline, attacking villages on the coast of Spain and Italy.  He was the most feared pirate in the that sea.  Individual raids could net slaves numbering in the tens of thousands.  Even after his death, the structure he established continued for centuries.  In service of the Ottoman state, pirates raided as far as England in search of slaves.  It has been estimated that, in just the three hundred years after the death of Redbeard, approximately 1.25 million people were captured into slavery.  The piracy did not come to an end until after the Barbary Wars, in which the United States participated, and ultimately after the French began to occupy Algeria.

Original Sin and Today

The complex struggle between Israel and the Palestinians is viewed by many, particularly on college campuses today, through a prism that is far from complex, but instead is quite simplistic:  West vs. East, white vs, people of color, oppressor vs. oppressed.  As noted above, for these individuals, the original sin of the West is slavery.  According to them, it is the pillar upon which the West’s achievements are based, which delegitimatizes the West’s moral standing at its core. As framed by the New York Times, no aspect of America was “left untouched” by its practice of slavery.

Yet, as noted above, if slavery was central to the American project, it was even more central to the Islamic project, providing not just economic benefits, but military and political as well.  This slavery did not involve an occasional kidnapping of Europeans, as pictured in the popular imagination.  It was systematic and long-standing, encompassing more than a thousand years, likely involving millions. 

If the Western countries were colonizers, so were the Ottomans, who ruled large parts of eastern Europe for over three hundred years, and over Spain for over seven hundred.  If the sins of slavery and colonization “touch” every aspect of America, they necessarily touch every aspect of Arab culture as well.  “Settler colonialist” is not a pejorative that can be exclusively applied to the West.

It is not an exercise in what has been termed “whataboutism” or “bothsidesism” to suggest that the imperfections or sins of one culture are comparable or not comparable to that of another.  Instead, it is to suggest that simplistic analysis rarely provides an adequate answer to complex problems.  Put another way, if one relies upon history as a framework through which to view a particular issue, one should know a little about history.

This itself is perhaps a simplistic notion.  However, that does not make it any less right.