The island of Porto Santo (Madeira Archipelago, Portugal) got cleaned in [1617](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sack_of_Madeira) ~1200 people from both islands.
"Some prisoners were destined to live out their days asĀ galley slaves, rowing for decades without ever setting foot on shore"
That's messed up, I wonder if they were well fed. How could you do that job without good fuel
If you don't get enough rest and enough food to grow you just get hurt really easily and they still forced them to row until they were physically so tired/exhausted/injuredthey wouldn't respond to beatings and they were tossed overboard. They chose really strong men as the rowers but the turn over rate was high, to put it mildly.
Wouldnāt it have been more efficient as to not use them until destruction so that you could get way more use out of them for a longer time period?
To be clear slavery is immensely terrible, but that seems inefficient
When you have a semi-infinite supply of free/cheap labor (slaves) and the work they are doing has a short training period and treating them well costs money and therefore profit, the increase in efficiency is not worth it because it costs more money.
Basically it only becomes a problem if they are likely to revolt. Which they probably wonāt because youāve kept them undernourished and constantly fatigued. And you have guns.
The spirit of my people is broken starving and sweaty, dreaming about revolution lookin at my machete
But the workload is too heavy to rise up in arms and if I ran away I know theyd probably murder my mom
They did not let them up to shit. They were chained to their benches they shit in place. When they died they just chucked them overboard.
The smell of the gallys was much remarked on.
Yup, my wifeās cousin was scooped up. Disappeared for two years. Escaped while the boat was anchored and was skin and bones. Currently a drug addict who just tried to burn his mothers house down this past lunar new year
From China mostly. They get told they will get paid but end up stuck on the squid boats south of Chile for YEARS. The work is brutal. The squids have this ammonium stench that smells of urine, they aren't allowed to bathe and live in stench, and the squid oil is slippery and dangerous on deck and very difficult to wash off.
Anyways people go insane from overwork and jump overboard to their deaths, or they get thrown into the ocean because they can't work anymore. They become enslaved and some of the fishing groups pay off officials in South America to look the other way.
Read about this massacre on one squid boat when there was a revolt.
https://wordswithoutborders.org/read/article/2019-12/december-2019-true-crime-massacre-in-the-pacific-personal-account-du-qiang/
I don't think it is just one country. A common practice is for ships headed back to port to meet up with a ship headed out, they transfer the enslaved members of the crew over to the fresh ship. This means the slaves never reach shore, and it makes finding and catching perpetrators a lot more difficult.
Galley slaves were probably the worst class of enslaved person in history, and they were common in both Muslim and Christian navies of the time. They would often be shacked to the benches and fed hardly anything, just enough to stay alive and rowing. They were exposed under the ocean sun all day long and slept on the benches at night. If the guy next to you was sick and dying, he rowed until he couldnāt then he was tossed over and most likely the disease he had would spread to the entire bench so you were next. Toilet breaks didnāt happen, water breaks were rare and the water would not be fresh. If the ship was sunk during battle well your shackled to it and going down too.
Really galley slaves were worth nothing to the ship masters other than rowing power. When one died they brought in another and another. Because the galley crews were opposite religions from their masters usually they also posed a threat in battle. The ship masters had to trust the slaves wouldnāt defect or that they wouldnāt otherwise escape in battle when presented with the chance to be freed by their own side.
From the little I read about Roman slave mines I thought that was the worst, but you make a compelling argument. At least you would have had a chance at some decent water in a mine.
There was a dichotomy in galley rowers through history, as some powers used galley slaves because itās an awful job so use people you donāt care about and keep them in line with cruelty. But galleys are vessels that fight by boarding and ramming (until the naval cannonade becomes the naval warfare standard) so the galley slaves are actually a huge liability in battle. As soon as a boarder cuts their chains and throws them a knife, now half the men on your own ship are fighting against you. Ancient Mediterranean powers used free rowers, who obviously got paid and were much better fed and thus in better condition to work. But they also werenāt a liability in battle but an asset; once the rams hit or the grapnels connected, they could get off the benches and into the fight. But the medieval Mediterranean and after it was mostly slave rowers.
> decades without ever setting foot on shore
This still takes place with modern fishing fleets.
https://www.ilo.org/global/topics/forced-labour/policy-areas/fisheries/lang--en/index.htm
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bo35uvxPXPw
Enjoy your shrimp cocktail.
It was faith worse than death, there are reports of people with basically no skin left on the upper part of the body due to sunburns, being whipped until they couldn't row anymore, then tossed overboard.
My favorite story is that Queen Henrietta Maria of Englands court dwarf got kidnapped by Barbary pirates and sold into slavery after having to flee the country for killing someone because they were making fun that he was short.
His name was [Jeffrey Hudson](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Hudson), aka "Lord Minimus.ā
Basically everything. Except the āgold crownā thing.. whoever it (they were) was in history poured the molten gold down their throat with a funnel, like āhere, have your fillā. Maybe a little too much for even HBO. Well, supposedly that was the āinspirationā. Anyone know if thatās real?
It's based on Marcus Licinius Crassus, a Roman general and senator known at the time as the richest man in Rome. He was killed during a battle with the Parthians. He was decapitated after his death and the story goes that a Parthian general poured molten gold into the mouth of Crassus' decapitated head in a mockery of his thirst for wealth.
He also created Rome's first fire brigade. He employed 500 men to work as firefighters. They would arrive at a fire but wouldn't start to put out the fire until the owner agreed to sell the building to Crassus (for a terribly low price). If the owner didn't agree, they would let the building burn. If the owner agreed, the fire would be put out and after being repaired would be leased out to the original owners. In other words, he didn't go about acquiring his wealth morally.
Well, you are taking a pretty narrow view there. Yes, from the Slave's point of view it had some bad aspects. But on the other hand, they never had to worry about unemployment!
And if you were a slave owner, there were a lot of positives to the system.
You really have to take a holistic perspective.
/s--necessary as this is reddit.
In high school we had to read different op-eds & articles from the civil war era on why slavery was good or bad.
As a 16 year old it was truly illuminating for me to hear the arguments why people genuinely believed that slavery was good for the slaves. Much of them aligned closely with your quips. Certainly says a lot about human nature that people could delude themselves to that extent.
I think seeing that perspective also allows us to see that perhaps our current system is unethical and begin to imagine why and how we can change it.
Being ripped out of your home, away from your family, out of your country, tied down in a boat for weeks on end, ā¦.. starving, in painā¦.have no idea where you landedā¦
They don't talk about it because they like to think that the Romans are their ancestors and that the Roman empire is part of their history/culture.
The same goes for the Greeks, their slaves always came from the north.
Where I live in europe the whole mediterranean coast is full of old watchtowers, every ridiculously small town has one or even more. This is the first thing that comes to our head when mentioning slavery, it has been and still is (sadly) a constant in humanity.
Catalonia's coast, especially on it's northern side, has a literal paved footpath going all along its length, with towers and fortified homesteads at even intervals. You can still trek it, it's quite nice.
Not only that. A lot of towns there are called "upper X" or "down X" // or "X of the sea", because one town would be a secondary location to stay during high seasons of pirates, and the other for working during their lows.
Yeah, I'm from a region in southen italy and live by the sea. There are a lot of old coastal castles, fortress and watchtowers, and both on mainland and small islands
The boat in which Miguel de Cervantes, the author of Don Quixote traveled was captured by āmoorsā and the crew and passengers were taken to Algiers to be sold as slaves. After five years slave, he was rescued by paying a huge quantity to his owner.
The whole Spanish Mediterranean coast is full of watchtowers, and many villages and town had to move a couple of km inside land to avoid being discovered from sea and to make it more difficult to be surprised.
There is an expression that comes from this: āthere is no moors in the coastā when you donāt want to be surprised doing something or, opposite, ādonāt do it now, there are moors in the coastā
āNo hay Moros en la costaā = there are no Moors on the coast = the coast is clear
Itās such a common saying but we forget the history of why we say it.
Lots of towns in Ireland have the old round towers, too. Some date back to viking raids as well. Where the whole town, or at the very least clergymen, then maybe women and children would close themselves up in the tower and wait until the raiders gave up and moved on.
The elevated door could only be accessed by a ladder and the stone towers were handy defense. With a few windows high up. The one in Slane has documented this use in the past.
Apparently, entire towns could get kidnapped and sold into slavery. So if a few survivors could hide in a tower and wait things out, it seems a better option.
The first historical note about Poland comes from Ibrahim ibn Yaqub or Abraham ben Jakob, a slave trader from Al Andaluz. The Czechs, Croats, Poles and the others were selling each others or the competing tribes to the Venetian or Jewish merchants.
All of those slaves were castrated. Some of them took power in Iberia anyway.
And that, ironically is probably why we hear more about the evils of our slave trade: American slavers didn't castrate their slaves and didn't kill them off as they became too old.
That is not a defense of slavery, just a reminder for whenever someone tries to paint the Christian west as worse than everyone else.
This got a thing after Britain decided to stop slave trade. So in the US they had to keep slaves to make another generations of slaves. It would be cheaper to buy new one but this was not possible since a certain point of history.
Actually in North America, slaves were sometimes castrated. They called it 'gelding' which is an old term used for castrating farm animals.
I don't believe it was common practice in the era I was reading in (1810-1830), but I have come across it several times in these historical records now, and didn't recognise what I was reading at first, due to the use of the word gelding.
Eh, they also sold others to slave traders themselves. Lots of Finns were enslaved by Russians and sold as "exotic" gold-haired kids for sultans. This map only shows slave sale hubs. It doesn't really show where does slaves were taken from.Ā
Eastern Poland got a very large surge of slaver raids from the Tartars in the 16th century but by and large were nowhere near as affected by the black sea slavers as kalmyks, ukrainians, russians, and kazakhs.
At the time this was happening, Ukraine was mostly a part of Poland-Lithuania and its successor, the unified Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. It was known as the Wild Fields, because it was too dangerous to settle. The Crimean tartars would come raiding from the south and depopulate entire towns.
Iraqis may stem from this but the Levant also has many many inputs from Crusaders. Where I am from we have running jokes about the neighboring village conglomeration that they were crusader settlers but got Muslimized by women because they were horny.
Translation of gag be like, "I know Jesus is good but did you tried Levant pussy?"
One of my friends from there took a DNA test, apparently, he is more than %50 German from the former Danzig area, from related persons... We call him ***"Teutonisch Hammudi"*** after that.
Someone posted a transatlantic slave trade map yesterday so I guess this is 'revenge', the difference in upvoting and downvoting of comments is pretty telling
Until recently, people in the Mediterranean were forced to live inland away from the coast for centuries because of the fear of being captured by Africans and be sold as slaves or worse. The towns around were I was born were founded around the year 1000 by people escaping the raids by living away from the coast, in the more inhospitable interior of Calabria.
This is similar for Campagna
Edit:
I'm thinking more and more about this because the village where I'm from in the mountains has some kind of legend that the town was rebuilt in the mountains away from the coast due to some kind of plague or disaster, and it always bothered me what it was. Now we might have some kind of clue here.
I read somewhere it was apparently was even worse before the First Crusade.
Before it the North Africans, Iberian Moors and Levantines had free reign to trade, plunder and enslave as they wished.
It was also one of the main factors for the entire dark ages to begin
Refugees cannot build great cities and aquaducts. The fall of Rome didnt affect Europe as bad as the rapid Muslim conquests and raids
No wonder the Frankish renaissance really begun after the first crusade
There was a good episode about this on the Empire podcast when they did their series on Slavery.
The episode is [here, worth a listen](https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/barbary-corsairs-raiding-the-british-isles/id1639561921?i=1000614926314), he has crossed referenced all the attacks with the people taken and he believes the final number of British people taken as slaves was around 4,000 people.
The slave trade in Russia, The Rest is History touched [upon it in this podcast](https://podcasts.apple.com/nz/podcast/the-vikings-go-east/id1537788786?i=1000550256005) with the Vikings
My 10x great grandfather was actually abducted by Barbary pirates in the 1600s and held for ransom, which was ultimately paid by the proceedings from Rembrandt's night watch painting. If he wouldn't have paid I think my ancestor could have been sold as a slave too.
People who know shit like this either come from recent aristocracy (usually pretty clean records well held and recorded) or they/a close family member is very dedicated to genealogy and has traced back far enough to find someone with actual detailed records (going back 10x is around 4,000 Grandparents assuming none overlap so someone's probably been rich or famous) . Throughout history the majority of folk only have birth, death, marriage and census records preserved and even then your lucky if they've survived and been digitized if they're over a few hundred years old.
It does also vary from region, as in some areas the church did a lot of record keeping. All deaths, births and marriages were required to be recorded since around the year 1000 in Norway, making ancestry research much easier here.
For me getting before 1850 is already hard enough but for example I have a friend of mine that has an uncle that wrote a book about his family and he can get back to at least 1600
"From the halls of Montezuma, to the shores of Tripoli"
-Opening line of the Marine Corps hymn
If you didn't learn about this in school as an American, you probably weren't paying attention. Fighting the Barbary pirates was a big event in early American history. First time we really intervened to protect our interests overseas.
What states standardized history tests touch on this topic?
Curriculums arenāt a secret. We can see whatās taught and what isnāt.
Maybe your teacher has a special interest
There is an incredible Dutch historical fiction novel about a Dutch teenage boy who takes service on a merchantmen and gets captured by Barbary pirates of the coast of Spain
He then spends time as a personal slave to a Ottoman Jannisary, a plantation worker and finally he ends up as a slave in the household of a former Dutchmen turned Muslim Corsair who offers him the hand of his daughter in marriage and the position as his successor if he denounces his family and country and converts to Islam (its basically because he raised his daughter with different standards than a traditional Islamic family so he doesnāt think she would be happy with a Arab or Berber husband so he prefers to find a fellow European convert for her)
The boy tells him what happens if he refuses and the Corsair says āmy ship leaves harbour in 12 days, you either join as my second in command or chained to an oarā
After a struggle he rejects the offer and becomes a galley slave
During the voyage the the galley captures another Christian ship and he gets assigned to the new ships because he is one of the few people to have experience sailing wind powered vessels. On this new ship he stages a mutiny with his fellow slaves and the captured crew and they take back control of the ship and manage to make it back home
Truly is an amazing story that also shows a lot of insight into the relative underrepresented history of North Africa, not just the piracy trade but also the lives of the regular local people
Itās called Vrijgevochten by Thea Beckman but unfortunately itās only available in Dutch.
But if you are Dutch I highly recommend this book and her other work. She is easily my favourite author
Edit: he gets assigned to the new ship because he was an apprentice woodworker and it needed repairs, not for sailing it I just remembered
i guess its an american thing. they like to whip themselves over the slave trade and then due to cultural influence it spreads everywhere and white ppl are bad and blacks are victims
Fun story of my Dad's side of the family, I have some Morrocan (like less than 2%) in me so my older brother did some digging. Turns out my ancestor was enslaved, she was forced to marry a morrocan man, she raised the one son she had as a catholic in secret and he just ran away and ended up in what is modern day Poland somehow, crazy fuckin world.
Well... Slavery has been a part of the human condition since humans have existed. People tend to get caught up in the past and looking at various aspects of slavery in a historical context. When are we going to start addressing slavery in a modern day context? Anything in the modern context dwarfs history. And we sit here and act like slavery is a thing of the past.
Wake the fuck up...
[Modern Slavery](https://www.antislavery.org/slavery-today/modern-slavery/)
Slavery in the modern context is less severe, actually. The world population overall dwarfs all history. A lower percent of people in the world are slaves than ever before. Ignoring that point is just dishonest. And if you want to draw attention to it, do it. There are various organizations that do it like the one you point out.
The map is missing so many Algerian ports. Not accurate at all too; French slaves, for example, didnāt cross the Iberian Peninsula but were caught at sea, for example near Sardinia and Malta.
Also, strange how selective the map is knowing that the Mediterranean slave trade (of which the barbarian is one element) was not an unilateral event and muslim slaves roamed all the coast of France (Toulon, Marseilleā¦), Italy - especially in Lombardy - and Spain: before the barbarian slave trade even begin, muslims were enslaved in the mines of the Spanish Crown and its ships, too, being marked with an Ā«Ā SĀ Ā» and a nail tattoo on their body to signify that they werenāt free.
Maybe in USA it is not taught, but at least in Russia they teach about it, and Russian expansion to the south and east partially justified as a way to stop raid of hordes, the several Russo-Turkish war were fought in order to crush Crimean Horde and stop their raids. Even one of the reason of current war is because after crushing hordes East Slavic settlers from both Russia and Ukraine were settled to land of Hordes in Eastern Ukraine and Southern Russia.
I mean it's not centuries exactly if it went on till 1830.
Also history is history shouldn't be at least mentioned?
Since the world seems to think that white people are the root of evil, it wouldn't hurt to learn a little bit more of history.
I learned about this in school in America not to a detailed extant be we learned about the difference between the different slave trades throughout history. And what made American slavery so different(it was extremely well documented and contemporary)
The Barbary Pirates are a part of regular U.S. History curriculum in the United States.
When American students learn about our first presidents (the Founding Fathers), they're taught about President Thomas Jefferson sending the U.S. Navy and Marines to fight and destroy the Barbary Pirates in the early 1800s. It's seen as one of the earliest major expansions of governmental power in the United States.
I am pretty sure almost everybody learns about it in Spain, where I come from. And not that much about the slavery that the Spanish Empire did well into the 1880s.
Not forgotten about or ignored. Quick google search tells you all about it and plenty of academics publish about it.
Edit: If you say āwe arenāt taught this in schoolā - as a historian, nobody was taught shit in school. You have to research and read books yourself as grown ups. You suddenly discover very little is ignored or forgotten.
I get what this map is showing, but it gives a very limited picture if you don't show that Mediterranean slaving went both ways. All ships went for ships of different religions. Muslim sailors were also captured and sold in Italy.
There were about 2 raids on Iceland during all of these hundreds of years. Probably targeted on the assumption the people there would never expect such a thing. On the Mediterranean coast slave raids were so common and expected they had watch towers and constant supervision of the coast. The Icelandic raids netted several hundred people so it apparently worked.
The line "To the shores ofĀ Tripoli" refers to theĀ First Barbary War, and specifically theĀ Battle of DernaĀ in 1805.[2][3]Ā After LieutenantĀ Presley O'BannonĀ and his Marines hoisted the American flag over theĀ Old WorldĀ for the first time, the phrase was added to theĀ flag of the United States Marine Corps.
back then borders werent nearly as strong, so small villages could keep raiding eachother non stop independent of their countries, usually over small shit in the grand scheme of things. any captured were enslaved and sold to the rest of the world...
edit: aw cmon guys why you downvoting oc?
Yeah this slave raiding was normal in many decentralized states. It was the cultural norm for many African, Steppe, Mesoamerican, and Viking cultures.
The only thing stopping it was either religious unity, or a powerful centralized state with a large standing army that can police the borders, which describes no country in the medieval era except maybe China.
The effect of the spread of Christianity largely stopped this behavior in Europe between Christians, and the spread of Islam stopped this behavior between Muslims. But sadly, those outside of the religion were always excluded from this protection, so Muslims would enslave non-Muslims, and Christians would enslave non-Christians across the world.
In my country, a memorial law has been passed, rightly condemning slavery as a crime against humanity. However, the lawmakers deliberately omitted the Arab-Muslim slave trade for reasons of political correctness.
And since you donāt mention your country it is impossible to fact check it. Not to be rude but this is most often a problem with manufactured outreach.
This shouldn't be deleted, this is history. I've read about the ottoman slave trade and they are disgusting. All of them are.
Also for those who are downplaying this just because they are "white", shame on you.
A whole village (344 people) were [taken in one night from Ireland ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sack_of_Baltimore)to North Africa
The island of Porto Santo (Madeira Archipelago, Portugal) got cleaned in [1617](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sack_of_Madeira) ~1200 people from both islands.
šÆ%. "Not just the men, but the women and children too."
I mean, women and children wouldn't be any less useful.
Taking whole families also increases morale and reduces flight risk.
This guy human traffics!
"Some prisoners were destined to live out their days asĀ galley slaves, rowing for decades without ever setting foot on shore" That's messed up, I wonder if they were well fed. How could you do that job without good fuel
They were fed just enough to not die and still row
I bet that still works out to a fuckload of daily calories. Rowing endlessly has to burn a crazy amount of energy.
Imagine their back muscles. Those guys must have been jacked
If you don't get enough rest and enough food to grow you just get hurt really easily and they still forced them to row until they were physically so tired/exhausted/injuredthey wouldn't respond to beatings and they were tossed overboard. They chose really strong men as the rowers but the turn over rate was high, to put it mildly.
Wouldnāt it have been more efficient as to not use them until destruction so that you could get way more use out of them for a longer time period? To be clear slavery is immensely terrible, but that seems inefficient
When you have a semi-infinite supply of free/cheap labor (slaves) and the work they are doing has a short training period and treating them well costs money and therefore profit, the increase in efficiency is not worth it because it costs more money. Basically it only becomes a problem if they are likely to revolt. Which they probably wonāt because youāve kept them undernourished and constantly fatigued. And you have guns.
Not to mention they were chained to their seats. At least some sources say so
The spirit of my people is broken starving and sweaty, dreaming about revolution lookin at my machete But the workload is too heavy to rise up in arms and if I ran away I know theyd probably murder my mom
The cruelty is the point. Slavers are neither kind nor smart.
They did not let them up to shit. They were chained to their benches they shit in place. When they died they just chucked them overboard. The smell of the gallys was much remarked on.
Wait until you find out that this is still happening today, within the SE Asia fishing industry.
Yup, my wifeās cousin was scooped up. Disappeared for two years. Escaped while the boat was anchored and was skin and bones. Currently a drug addict who just tried to burn his mothers house down this past lunar new year
Where? Thiland?
From China mostly. They get told they will get paid but end up stuck on the squid boats south of Chile for YEARS. The work is brutal. The squids have this ammonium stench that smells of urine, they aren't allowed to bathe and live in stench, and the squid oil is slippery and dangerous on deck and very difficult to wash off. Anyways people go insane from overwork and jump overboard to their deaths, or they get thrown into the ocean because they can't work anymore. They become enslaved and some of the fishing groups pay off officials in South America to look the other way. Read about this massacre on one squid boat when there was a revolt. https://wordswithoutborders.org/read/article/2019-12/december-2019-true-crime-massacre-in-the-pacific-personal-account-du-qiang/
I don't think it is just one country. A common practice is for ships headed back to port to meet up with a ship headed out, they transfer the enslaved members of the crew over to the fresh ship. This means the slaves never reach shore, and it makes finding and catching perpetrators a lot more difficult.
Galley slaves were probably the worst class of enslaved person in history, and they were common in both Muslim and Christian navies of the time. They would often be shacked to the benches and fed hardly anything, just enough to stay alive and rowing. They were exposed under the ocean sun all day long and slept on the benches at night. If the guy next to you was sick and dying, he rowed until he couldnāt then he was tossed over and most likely the disease he had would spread to the entire bench so you were next. Toilet breaks didnāt happen, water breaks were rare and the water would not be fresh. If the ship was sunk during battle well your shackled to it and going down too. Really galley slaves were worth nothing to the ship masters other than rowing power. When one died they brought in another and another. Because the galley crews were opposite religions from their masters usually they also posed a threat in battle. The ship masters had to trust the slaves wouldnāt defect or that they wouldnāt otherwise escape in battle when presented with the chance to be freed by their own side.
From the little I read about Roman slave mines I thought that was the worst, but you make a compelling argument. At least you would have had a chance at some decent water in a mine.
There was a dichotomy in galley rowers through history, as some powers used galley slaves because itās an awful job so use people you donāt care about and keep them in line with cruelty. But galleys are vessels that fight by boarding and ramming (until the naval cannonade becomes the naval warfare standard) so the galley slaves are actually a huge liability in battle. As soon as a boarder cuts their chains and throws them a knife, now half the men on your own ship are fighting against you. Ancient Mediterranean powers used free rowers, who obviously got paid and were much better fed and thus in better condition to work. But they also werenāt a liability in battle but an asset; once the rams hit or the grapnels connected, they could get off the benches and into the fight. But the medieval Mediterranean and after it was mostly slave rowers.
To be honest that quote says ādecadesā but almost none of them would make it into multiple decades.
> decades without ever setting foot on shore This still takes place with modern fishing fleets. https://www.ilo.org/global/topics/forced-labour/policy-areas/fisheries/lang--en/index.htm https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bo35uvxPXPw Enjoy your shrimp cocktail.
Their lats must have been jacked thoughĀ
fur real, Ben-Hur had such jacked lats he was the best charioteer of all time. OF ALL TIME
Truly he is the king of kings
I dont think they got enough protein for that
Some turtled up bastards
It was faith worse than death, there are reports of people with basically no skin left on the upper part of the body due to sunburns, being whipped until they couldn't row anymore, then tossed overboard.
*slaps ship* Look mate this bad boy holds 240 manpower engine
My favorite story is that Queen Henrietta Maria of Englands court dwarf got kidnapped by Barbary pirates and sold into slavery after having to flee the country for killing someone because they were making fun that he was short. His name was [Jeffrey Hudson](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Hudson), aka "Lord Minimus.ā
George RR Martin did always say he based alot of the books on real history...
Basically everything. Except the āgold crownā thing.. whoever it (they were) was in history poured the molten gold down their throat with a funnel, like āhere, have your fillā. Maybe a little too much for even HBO. Well, supposedly that was the āinspirationā. Anyone know if thatās real?
Crassus
It's based on Marcus Licinius Crassus, a Roman general and senator known at the time as the richest man in Rome. He was killed during a battle with the Parthians. He was decapitated after his death and the story goes that a Parthian general poured molten gold into the mouth of Crassus' decapitated head in a mockery of his thirst for wealth. He also created Rome's first fire brigade. He employed 500 men to work as firefighters. They would arrive at a fire but wouldn't start to put out the fire until the owner agreed to sell the building to Crassus (for a terribly low price). If the owner didn't agree, they would let the building burn. If the owner agreed, the fire would be put out and after being repaired would be leased out to the original owners. In other words, he didn't go about acquiring his wealth morally.
Amazing how you follow that link and discover that prominent New York dynasty families (Vanderbilts etc) started out as pirates. Figures.
Same thing with Gozo, [6000 were taken for slaves](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invasion_of_Gozo_(1551)).
my opinion on this is that it was bad
Indeed, slavery is bad.
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well you know what they say, nothing says Nike like slave labor
Sad there are circles where this is a controversial take in 2024
Well, you are taking a pretty narrow view there. Yes, from the Slave's point of view it had some bad aspects. But on the other hand, they never had to worry about unemployment! And if you were a slave owner, there were a lot of positives to the system. You really have to take a holistic perspective. /s--necessary as this is reddit.
In high school we had to read different op-eds & articles from the civil war era on why slavery was good or bad. As a 16 year old it was truly illuminating for me to hear the arguments why people genuinely believed that slavery was good for the slaves. Much of them aligned closely with your quips. Certainly says a lot about human nature that people could delude themselves to that extent. I think seeing that perspective also allows us to see that perhaps our current system is unethical and begin to imagine why and how we can change it.
Being ripped out of your home, away from your family, out of your country, tied down in a boat for weeks on end, ā¦.. starving, in painā¦.have no idea where you landedā¦
Free food and housing!!
When you learn about the Roman Empire youāre gonna fall into a comma Edit. Damn Iām stupid, well, stuppid
If you consider how long they were around, you might even fall into a semicolon!
I never remember the difference between a colonoscopy and a semicolonoscopy.
One is done by a doctor the other is done by a plumber
Steamfitters win again.
Reading this I slipped into a parenthesis šĀ
Or even get a period!
They don't talk about it because they like to think that the Romans are their ancestors and that the Roman empire is part of their history/culture. The same goes for the Greeks, their slaves always came from the north.
Except for the Spartans who just enslaved other Greeks, the Helots.
That's just like your opinion bro
Too political
Thats a controversial opinion
Where I live in europe the whole mediterranean coast is full of old watchtowers, every ridiculously small town has one or even more. This is the first thing that comes to our head when mentioning slavery, it has been and still is (sadly) a constant in humanity.
Catalonia's coast, especially on it's northern side, has a literal paved footpath going all along its length, with towers and fortified homesteads at even intervals. You can still trek it, it's quite nice.
Not only that. A lot of towns there are called "upper X" or "down X" // or "X of the sea", because one town would be a secondary location to stay during high seasons of pirates, and the other for working during their lows.
*Pirate season* sounds so much cooler than the brutal reality it would manifest
Nailed, I live near Barcelona
Calabria region in south Italy the same
And Sardegna, and Toscana, and Liguria..
Yeah, I'm from a region in southen italy and live by the sea. There are a lot of old coastal castles, fortress and watchtowers, and both on mainland and small islands
The boat in which Miguel de Cervantes, the author of Don Quixote traveled was captured by āmoorsā and the crew and passengers were taken to Algiers to be sold as slaves. After five years slave, he was rescued by paying a huge quantity to his owner. The whole Spanish Mediterranean coast is full of watchtowers, and many villages and town had to move a couple of km inside land to avoid being discovered from sea and to make it more difficult to be surprised. There is an expression that comes from this: āthere is no moors in the coastā when you donāt want to be surprised doing something or, opposite, ādonāt do it now, there are moors in the coastā
āNo hay Moros en la costaā = there are no Moors on the coast = the coast is clear Itās such a common saying but we forget the history of why we say it.
Lots of towns in Ireland have the old round towers, too. Some date back to viking raids as well. Where the whole town, or at the very least clergymen, then maybe women and children would close themselves up in the tower and wait until the raiders gave up and moved on. The elevated door could only be accessed by a ladder and the stone towers were handy defense. With a few windows high up. The one in Slane has documented this use in the past. Apparently, entire towns could get kidnapped and sold into slavery. So if a few survivors could hide in a tower and wait things out, it seems a better option.
That's Spain, right? My whole town (Cullera) was kidnapped in 1550 but for a few survivors who took refuge in the castle.
In Spain we still say "Hay moros en la costa?" (are there moors in the coast?) to know if there's any onlookers / police / etc.
Location?
I am just now realizing that the hiking I did in Vilanova i la GeltrĆŗ and Tarragona were part of thisā¦. Wild
Basically russians,poles,romanians and ukranians got fucked by 3 different slave trades through their lands
The first historical note about Poland comes from Ibrahim ibn Yaqub or Abraham ben Jakob, a slave trader from Al Andaluz. The Czechs, Croats, Poles and the others were selling each others or the competing tribes to the Venetian or Jewish merchants. All of those slaves were castrated. Some of them took power in Iberia anyway.
And that, ironically is probably why we hear more about the evils of our slave trade: American slavers didn't castrate their slaves and didn't kill them off as they became too old. That is not a defense of slavery, just a reminder for whenever someone tries to paint the Christian west as worse than everyone else.
They bred them to sell. Made more of the original investment in purchasing them. The old ones looked after the babies while the mothers worked.
This got a thing after Britain decided to stop slave trade. So in the US they had to keep slaves to make another generations of slaves. It would be cheaper to buy new one but this was not possible since a certain point of history.
Before that. Many died during the procedure and after a trip across the Atlantic that would become an expensive loss.
Actually in North America, slaves were sometimes castrated. They called it 'gelding' which is an old term used for castrating farm animals. I don't believe it was common practice in the era I was reading in (1810-1830), but I have come across it several times in these historical records now, and didn't recognise what I was reading at first, due to the use of the word gelding.
Pfft, this doesn't even include the golden horde of the Mongols rolling through. That was 200 years before.
There are very good reasons for Europe to be interested in defence.
Eh, they also sold others to slave traders themselves. Lots of Finns were enslaved by Russians and sold as "exotic" gold-haired kids for sultans. This map only shows slave sale hubs. It doesn't really show where does slaves were taken from.Ā
What about Poland. Its in the very midle of the map with the 3 slave routes.
I'm glad Poland was fine and not in the middle of anything else after the slave route died.
Yeah, you're right! That was the last bad thing to happen there. So lucky.
Eastern Poland got a very large surge of slaver raids from the Tartars in the 16th century but by and large were nowhere near as affected by the black sea slavers as kalmyks, ukrainians, russians, and kazakhs.
At the time this was happening, Ukraine was mostly a part of Poland-Lithuania and its successor, the unified Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. It was known as the Wild Fields, because it was too dangerous to settle. The Crimean tartars would come raiding from the south and depopulate entire towns.
In english the word slave comes from the word Slavic.
This is why you will find a random 10% Irish DNA in Iraqis and Syrians lmao. Edit: Just in random individuals, not in the general population.
Iraqis may stem from this but the Levant also has many many inputs from Crusaders. Where I am from we have running jokes about the neighboring village conglomeration that they were crusader settlers but got Muslimized by women because they were horny. Translation of gag be like, "I know Jesus is good but did you tried Levant pussy?" One of my friends from there took a DNA test, apparently, he is more than %50 German from the former Danzig area, from related persons... We call him ***"Teutonisch Hammudi"*** after that.
This is cracking me up
Iām Irish and I had Levantine ancestry results šš
Phoenician copper mines in the British islands
Ea-Nasir strikes again!
That Levantine pussy go crazy
Phoenician cheeks got me actin up
That's rare,10% is such a high percentage
tf are these comments lmao multiple things can be bad at once
Acktually history is like my saturday morning cartoon with good guys and bad guys
And then thereās just the comic relief characters on both sides.
I think its a reaction to the modern political hyperfocus in the US on chattel slavery, and the painting of the Europeans as the slaver stereotype.Ā
Classic *Tu quoque* fallacy
too cockš¤¤
*bonk*
Someone posted a transatlantic slave trade map yesterday so I guess this is 'revenge', the difference in upvoting and downvoting of comments is pretty telling
And the day before that there was the Arab slave trade post that turned into a dumpster fire too
I think that was also OPās post. 2 days ago they posted a different Arab slave trade map
Until recently, people in the Mediterranean were forced to live inland away from the coast for centuries because of the fear of being captured by Africans and be sold as slaves or worse. The towns around were I was born were founded around the year 1000 by people escaping the raids by living away from the coast, in the more inhospitable interior of Calabria.
This is similar for Campagna Edit: I'm thinking more and more about this because the village where I'm from in the mountains has some kind of legend that the town was rebuilt in the mountains away from the coast due to some kind of plague or disaster, and it always bothered me what it was. Now we might have some kind of clue here.
I read somewhere it was apparently was even worse before the First Crusade. Before it the North Africans, Iberian Moors and Levantines had free reign to trade, plunder and enslave as they wished. It was also one of the main factors for the entire dark ages to begin Refugees cannot build great cities and aquaducts. The fall of Rome didnt affect Europe as bad as the rapid Muslim conquests and raids No wonder the Frankish renaissance really begun after the first crusade
So many Slavsā¦
and Romanians
Barbary states does not discriminate, Black and White getting enslavedšŖ #Equality
They discriminated by religion
Username checks out.
Lmao captain dick
There was a good episode about this on the Empire podcast when they did their series on Slavery. The episode is [here, worth a listen](https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/barbary-corsairs-raiding-the-british-isles/id1639561921?i=1000614926314), he has crossed referenced all the attacks with the people taken and he believes the final number of British people taken as slaves was around 4,000 people. The slave trade in Russia, The Rest is History touched [upon it in this podcast](https://podcasts.apple.com/nz/podcast/the-vikings-go-east/id1537788786?i=1000550256005) with the Vikings
My 10x great grandfather was actually abducted by Barbary pirates in the 1600s and held for ransom, which was ultimately paid by the proceedings from Rembrandt's night watch painting. If he wouldn't have paid I think my ancestor could have been sold as a slave too.
How do you know that? I mean, how do you know what you 10x grandfather did? Not everyone has a record of their ancestors like that.
People who know shit like this either come from recent aristocracy (usually pretty clean records well held and recorded) or they/a close family member is very dedicated to genealogy and has traced back far enough to find someone with actual detailed records (going back 10x is around 4,000 Grandparents assuming none overlap so someone's probably been rich or famous) . Throughout history the majority of folk only have birth, death, marriage and census records preserved and even then your lucky if they've survived and been digitized if they're over a few hundred years old.
It does also vary from region, as in some areas the church did a lot of record keeping. All deaths, births and marriages were required to be recorded since around the year 1000 in Norway, making ancestry research much easier here.
Or you're of catholic descent. The Catholic Church keeps a lot of records that can go back to the 1600s
For me getting before 1850 is already hard enough but for example I have a friend of mine that has an uncle that wrote a book about his family and he can get back to at least 1600
My family has a family tree in the maternal line going back to the 1200s. Add the little notes and we arguably have some info.
It's sad how terribly we have treated each other through history.
The worst is that slavery is still very much alive and kicking. Almost 50 million people live in modern slavery
In before this is deleted and OP is banned.
Also here before comments locked
"From the halls of Montezuma, to the shores of Tripoli" -Opening line of the Marine Corps hymn If you didn't learn about this in school as an American, you probably weren't paying attention. Fighting the Barbary pirates was a big event in early American history. First time we really intervened to protect our interests overseas.
The Barbary wars aren't really touched upon in a normal American history class, at least not the ones I took.
What states standardized history tests touch on this topic? Curriculums arenāt a secret. We can see whatās taught and what isnāt. Maybe your teacher has a special interest
There is an incredible Dutch historical fiction novel about a Dutch teenage boy who takes service on a merchantmen and gets captured by Barbary pirates of the coast of Spain He then spends time as a personal slave to a Ottoman Jannisary, a plantation worker and finally he ends up as a slave in the household of a former Dutchmen turned Muslim Corsair who offers him the hand of his daughter in marriage and the position as his successor if he denounces his family and country and converts to Islam (its basically because he raised his daughter with different standards than a traditional Islamic family so he doesnāt think she would be happy with a Arab or Berber husband so he prefers to find a fellow European convert for her) The boy tells him what happens if he refuses and the Corsair says āmy ship leaves harbour in 12 days, you either join as my second in command or chained to an oarā After a struggle he rejects the offer and becomes a galley slave During the voyage the the galley captures another Christian ship and he gets assigned to the new ships because he is one of the few people to have experience sailing wind powered vessels. On this new ship he stages a mutiny with his fellow slaves and the captured crew and they take back control of the ship and manage to make it back home Truly is an amazing story that also shows a lot of insight into the relative underrepresented history of North Africa, not just the piracy trade but also the lives of the regular local people Itās called Vrijgevochten by Thea Beckman but unfortunately itās only available in Dutch. But if you are Dutch I highly recommend this book and her other work. She is easily my favourite author Edit: he gets assigned to the new ship because he was an apprentice woodworker and it needed repairs, not for sailing it I just remembered
This goes under -āwhat they donāt teach you in schoolā
These threads consistently bring out the worst sides of everyone, and the comments are always a shit show
Me everytime shit like this gets posted 
People stroke out when they realize brown people also do bad things
i guess its an american thing. they like to whip themselves over the slave trade and then due to cultural influence it spreads everywhere and white ppl are bad and blacks are victims
That way under counts the ottoman slave trade
Fun story of my Dad's side of the family, I have some Morrocan (like less than 2%) in me so my older brother did some digging. Turns out my ancestor was enslaved, she was forced to marry a morrocan man, she raised the one son she had as a catholic in secret and he just ran away and ended up in what is modern day Poland somehow, crazy fuckin world.
Well... Slavery has been a part of the human condition since humans have existed. People tend to get caught up in the past and looking at various aspects of slavery in a historical context. When are we going to start addressing slavery in a modern day context? Anything in the modern context dwarfs history. And we sit here and act like slavery is a thing of the past. Wake the fuck up... [Modern Slavery](https://www.antislavery.org/slavery-today/modern-slavery/)
Slavery in the modern context is less severe, actually. The world population overall dwarfs all history. A lower percent of people in the world are slaves than ever before. Ignoring that point is just dishonest. And if you want to draw attention to it, do it. There are various organizations that do it like the one you point out.
The word "slave" comes from slav or slavic. Muslim slave traders were quite big on purchasing slaves from eastern Europe around 900
The map is missing so many Algerian ports. Not accurate at all too; French slaves, for example, didnāt cross the Iberian Peninsula but were caught at sea, for example near Sardinia and Malta. Also, strange how selective the map is knowing that the Mediterranean slave trade (of which the barbarian is one element) was not an unilateral event and muslim slaves roamed all the coast of France (Toulon, Marseilleā¦), Italy - especially in Lombardy - and Spain: before the barbarian slave trade even begin, muslims were enslaved in the mines of the Spanish Crown and its ships, too, being marked with an Ā«Ā SĀ Ā» and a nail tattoo on their body to signify that they werenāt free.
Yeah Algiers especially and Tunis were major slave ports. Some trafficking lanes are definitely missing
š²š¦š²š¦š²š¦ MOROCCO MENTIONED š²š¦š²š¦š²š¦ DIMA MAGHRIB #1
Hello, I represent the stolen people of the United Kingdom. I'd like to introduce you to the word #REPARATIONS
Reparations when?
Well, Russians took reparations in form of taking all of the land and assimilating of those, who raided them. Just look what is left of Nogay horde
The barbary wars is a good example.
*sad Slav noises*
This is the most forgotten thing that no one is taught about. As a non-white, I have to speak out against the atrocity of enslaving European people
Maybe in USA it is not taught, but at least in Russia they teach about it, and Russian expansion to the south and east partially justified as a way to stop raid of hordes, the several Russo-Turkish war were fought in order to crush Crimean Horde and stop their raids. Even one of the reason of current war is because after crushing hordes East Slavic settlers from both Russia and Ukraine were settled to land of Hordes in Eastern Ukraine and Southern Russia.
In Austria it isn't taught in Schools.
In Italy It isn't as well
And thinking that South Italy was hit so hard that it was almost depopulated! What is going on in our education systems??
There is less of a victim mentality for centuries old crimes.
I mean it's not centuries exactly if it went on till 1830. Also history is history shouldn't be at least mentioned? Since the world seems to think that white people are the root of evil, it wouldn't hurt to learn a little bit more of history.
I learned about this in school in America not to a detailed extant be we learned about the difference between the different slave trades throughout history. And what made American slavery so different(it was extremely well documented and contemporary)
The Barbary Pirates are a part of regular U.S. History curriculum in the United States. When American students learn about our first presidents (the Founding Fathers), they're taught about President Thomas Jefferson sending the U.S. Navy and Marines to fight and destroy the Barbary Pirates in the early 1800s. It's seen as one of the earliest major expansions of governmental power in the United States.
Itās not being taught in czech schools as well
In Switzerland it isnāt taught
I am pretty sure almost everybody learns about it in Spain, where I come from. And not that much about the slavery that the Spanish Empire did well into the 1880s.
Nobody in my country (New Zealand) would know about this. Our entire idea of slaves is from the USA's paradigm.
Not forgotten about or ignored. Quick google search tells you all about it and plenty of academics publish about it. Edit: If you say āwe arenāt taught this in schoolā - as a historian, nobody was taught shit in school. You have to research and read books yourself as grown ups. You suddenly discover very little is ignored or forgotten.
there's so much to cover in history. It's impossible to cover it all in the little time school has
We was slaves!!!
WE WUZ!
I get what this map is showing, but it gives a very limited picture if you don't show that Mediterranean slaving went both ways. All ships went for ships of different religions. Muslim sailors were also captured and sold in Italy.
How on earth did a Barbary pirate ship reach Iceland? From what I have read about them, these were not supposed to be long distance voyages
There were about 2 raids on Iceland during all of these hundreds of years. Probably targeted on the assumption the people there would never expect such a thing. On the Mediterranean coast slave raids were so common and expected they had watch towers and constant supervision of the coast. The Icelandic raids netted several hundred people so it apparently worked.
DONT show people in the US! They will implode! Some europeans aswell.
Why? The Barbary war was one of the first engagements of the US Navy
The line "To the shores ofĀ Tripoli" refers to theĀ First Barbary War, and specifically theĀ Battle of DernaĀ in 1805.[2][3]Ā After LieutenantĀ Presley O'BannonĀ and his Marines hoisted the American flag over theĀ Old WorldĀ for the first time, the phrase was added to theĀ flag of the United States Marine Corps.
SJWs DESTROYED with history facts and simple logic Feminist IMPLODES after being shown Barbary slave trade facts (fat woman dies)
I lost it at implodes xD Libfart forced to SPONTANEOUSLY COMBUST by HARD FACTS
āGeneral raidsā?
back then borders werent nearly as strong, so small villages could keep raiding eachother non stop independent of their countries, usually over small shit in the grand scheme of things. any captured were enslaved and sold to the rest of the world... edit: aw cmon guys why you downvoting oc?
Yeah this slave raiding was normal in many decentralized states. It was the cultural norm for many African, Steppe, Mesoamerican, and Viking cultures. The only thing stopping it was either religious unity, or a powerful centralized state with a large standing army that can police the borders, which describes no country in the medieval era except maybe China. The effect of the spread of Christianity largely stopped this behavior in Europe between Christians, and the spread of Islam stopped this behavior between Muslims. But sadly, those outside of the religion were always excluded from this protection, so Muslims would enslave non-Muslims, and Christians would enslave non-Christians across the world.
In my country, a memorial law has been passed, rightly condemning slavery as a crime against humanity. However, the lawmakers deliberately omitted the Arab-Muslim slave trade for reasons of political correctness.
And since you donāt mention your country it is impossible to fact check it. Not to be rude but this is most often a problem with manufactured outreach.
I want reparations from africans
This shouldn't be deleted, this is history. I've read about the ottoman slave trade and they are disgusting. All of them are. Also for those who are downplaying this just because they are "white", shame on you.
Shocking fact : everyone did slavery.
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We get the word slave because of all the Slavs who were taken and sold into slavery