Slavery in the Mediterranean

Galley Slave

As part of Missy Bear’s website upgrade, I’ve had to skim through and check the formatting of all the blogs. In doing this, I couldn’t help notice how certain words or subjects or themes recur frequently: “Venice”; “pirates”, “Ottoman”; “knight”; “independence”; or “Arab”, for example.

One word that pops up everywhere is “slave”, and as we haven’t covered that topic yet, I decided to collate what we have learned on Missy Bear's voyages to date.

By using the new [Search] tool on our blog page, I searched for “slave”, and here is what I found, which I have organised chronologically.

1. Etymology

We ought to start with the etymology of this word?

In Our Friend Russia, we discovered that slaves were Slavic peoples such as Russians, Mingrelians (from Georgia), Caucasians, Circassians (from the NW Caucuses) , Bulgarians, Armenians and diverse other people of the Christian world. These peoples “...had been abused and enslaved for centuries by the west and east alike."

‘"'Slave’ is derived from ‘Slav’. "

"These Slavs were sold by Venetians, amongst others, to the Muslim Ottoman empire", including to its vassal state of Egypt.

The term 'slave', was not coined until this time (the Middle Ages onwards). Before that time, different terms for what we now refer to as slaves were in use, depending where you were. For simplicity, even back into antiquity, we will refer to these poor souls as “slaves”.

2. Ancient Times

In Gulets, we find our earliest reference to slaves (about 2,400 BC), but the mention is purely allegorical, as I used it to describe the launch of a new gulet in Bozburun, Türkiye. Here the men in the village "were working like Egyptian slaves, moving the [wooden] runners from back to front, as they popped out from under the sled”. And we all know, from the Bible, that ancient empires and societies like the Egyptians used slave labour.

Moving forward in time, and into the Peloponnese of ancient Greece, I related the Spartan's siege of Messene. The besieged Messenians, in desperation, asked the oracle in Delphi for some help and advice. The oracle said that the victor would be whichever side was first to dedicate a hundred tripods to Zeus on Ithóme. The Messenians set to work, making great bronze tripods.

But word leaked out to the Spartans, "who defied their reputation for stupidity by quickly whipping up a hundred toy tripods, and sending them up to the sanctuary in the bag of one of their spies. When the Messenians saw them, they simply gave up and abandoned the citadel. Sparta took many Messenians as slaves (known then as helots).”

Meanwhile, eastwards across the Aegean Sea on Samos, (off the coast of Asia Minor), we related how the Persians had invaded of the Greek-speaking coastal colonies. The greatest Samosian, Polycrates: "managed to hold off the Persians, but the Persians later took the island, and removed many of the Samosian, to put into slavery.”

Xerxes moved up the coast to Khalkidhiki, in northern Greece, sailing past Mount Athos. When Missy Bear had sailed past this same peninsular, we had to put in two reefs. Whereas strong winds hadn’t been forecast, the tip of the Mount Athos headland is notorious for strongly gusting wind arriving from nowhere. So much so that Xerxes had lost many of his ships on his first attempted raid here.

So, to avoid a second potential disaster at the headland, "he had his slaves build a canal through the rock at the neck of the peninsular” and floated his fleet through this shortcut. Well, you wouldn’t want to dig through solid rock yourself, would you? You would get your slaves to do it for you.

I don’t know the source of Xerxes’ slaves. Perhaps he had brought them all the way from Persia. Or perhaps they were from Asia Minor. (When Missy Bear sailed further south in Asia Minor, we visited the ancient city of Caunos: This city port was important possibly due to its rare flat land, "that allowed agriculture, and the demand or its local salt, salted fish, dried figs. And slaves!”)

Some of Xerxes' slaves might possibly have been other Greek-speakers from the island of Samos.

3. Roman and Post-Roman Times

By Roman times, slaves had been taken and utilised by various civilisations for thousand of years, around the hinterland of the Eastern Mediterranean. I did not find the word “slave” in our blogs about the Romans, but I think we all know enough history to accept that slave-owning and trading was a prevalent feature of life in the Roman Empire.

[As a quick aside, we used to have Roman Slave Auctions at college during rag weeks, where some students got dressed-up (or down) as slaves, and stood on a table, whilst the other students would bid for use of a slave, to perform whatever job took the owner’s fancy. All the proceeds went to charity, But, modern 'wokery' has put a stop to all that.] 

After the fall of the western Roman Empire, in the ‘Frankish’ lands of western Europe, feudal serfdom was the preferred form of tied-labour? Was this a type of slavery in another form?

But in the middle-east, eastern Mediterranean, and north Africa, the new force of Islam liked to use slaves, and it encouraged the capture and import of them. Slaves were either used for domestic service, or for use in the military.

Muslim pirates, in particular, operating from North Africa, had a very profitable trade in human goods. But so too did the Christian and Jewish merchants from north of this same sea.

4. The Middle Ages

   
   

Fast-forwarding several hundred years into the Middle Ages, we learned how Barcelona was the key base for the ‘Crown of Aragon’s eastward expansion through the western Mediterranean, to establish its own thalassocracy. I noted that Barcelona was: "the Crown’s leading slave centre, with slaves sourced from the Balkans, north Africa (known as the Maghreb or Barbary Coast) and even sub-Saharan Africa.” The latter source being of peoples with black skin, of course

Alghero, on Sardinia, was strategically located on the Mediterranean ‘Route of the Islands’, and Barbary pirates (Arab Muslims from the north African coast) often operated in the area. This is why the Genoese fortified the town early in the 12th century. Barbary pirate booty would have included slaves. Yet, when Alghero was captured by the Catholic 'Crown of Aragon' in 1325, the locals had no relief: Catalan settlers gradually colonised the island, and many of the native population "were sent back to Mallorca, and the Iberian Peninsula as slaves; an early example of ethnic cleansing.”

As a result of piracy, many island villages throughout the Mediterranean, moved away from the coast, and to higher, fortified land to escape the pirates. Examples are everywhere around the Mediterranean islands, but most easily noticeable on the Greek islands.

The most famous Barbary pirate was Barbarossa, who terrorised Christian lands in the western Mediterranean in the 16^th century. He focussed his raids especially on the Spanish ports (often to help relieve the Spanish persecution of Muslims). Charles I of Spain (who was also the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V) tried in vain to buy off or assassinate Barbarossa. The emperor sent a large Spanish-Italian force recapture Tunis, but corsair had already fled. Barbarossa "continued to create mayhem in mainland Spain, Majorca and Menorca, capturing several Spanish and Genoese galleys and liberating their Muslim oar slaves."

An extraordinary example of Barbarossa’s wide reach and influence was at Nice, in what is now Mediterranean France. Nice was an independent city often allied with Pisa or Genoa, before placing itself under the protection of Savoy. The French and Holy Roman Empire (the Austrian branch of the Habsburgs) often fought over this part of the coast. The French and Ottomans had made an alliance against the Habsburgs (both the Spanish and Austrian branches). And in 1543, "a combined force of Francis I (of France) and Barbarossa besieged the city." Barbarossa "was allowed to pillage the city and take 2,500 slaves! Who knew!?”

So even Christian Frenchmen were condoning the taking of Christian slaves (from what is now France) by Muslim forces, provided it helped them fight their bitter Christian rivals.

Barbarossa and his French allies then sailed south-east. The Spanish-Italians managed to get word to the islanders of Lipari that Barbarossa was on his way, accompanied by a French fleet under a Captain Polin! The islanders evacuated some women and children, and then locked themselves in the citadel inside the Norman Castle. The islanders sued for peace and offered monies for their safety, but Barbarossa laughed at them:

“You came too late for clemency. How dare you offer what is already mine? Keep your gates closed - we’ve opened a hundred such breaches with our cannon. Lipari is already in my power: it is foolishly presumptuous to grant me apparently of your own free will what you no longer possess. This is no time for treaties or agreements: you are all my slaves.””

Barbarossa was a hero to the persecuted Muslims of the Iberian peninsular, but was no-doubt the devil if you were a Spanish or Italian Christian.

In his many voyages, Barbarossa would have often crossed paths with Venetian galleys. These galleys often used enslaved oarsmen, including Muslims. The Venetian thalassocracy stretched as far east as the Black Sea, the Holy Lands and Egypt, and we studied it In La Serenissima. When the great Mongol, Genghis Khan, secured the overland Silk Road, the old Venetian trade route shifted from the Persian Gulf/Levant, northwards to the Black Sea.

The Ukrainian Black Sea ports of Caffa (Crimea) and Tana (Sea of Azov) "were active centres of slave trading. The Mongols raided the interior for slaves to sell. The qualities of the ethnic groups were carefully distinguished. Tartars were highly valued because they were loyal. In general, the slaves were young teenage boys in their teens, with the girls a little older. Some were shipped to Venice as domestic and sexual servants, others to Crete in conditions of (sugar) plantation slavery [see below]. Sometimes they were sold illicitly (i.e., expressly forbidden by the Pope) as military slaves to the Islamic Mamluk armies."

In fact, both the Ottomans and the Egyptians used male slaves for military recruitment. The Ottomans took a “boy levy” from their subjugated peoples, and some of these boys would become paid soldiers or ‘Janissaries’; The Egyptian male slaves might became ‘Mamluks’; also paid soldiers.  

When the slave cargos arrived in Venice, merchants from many nationalities would have swarmed around the boats and wharves, buying and selling goods for onward movement. Goods would have also been loaded onto the ships, "including Slavic ‘slaves from north-eastern Europe, for sale to the Ottomans. Sometimes whole shipments of slaves would be placed in the holds in a manner similar to that of the later Atlantic slave trade.”

We also discovered that even the eastern Orthodox Christians (Greek-speakers) were trading slaves. For example The Maniots of the middle finger of Peloponnese were so poor that they made much of their income through piracy. Their sorties were even blessed by the local priest! They were a real pain to the Venetian and Ottoman sailors. But equally, the Venetians and Turks were quite happy "to buy and then sell on the poor sailors or passengers that the Maniots had recently captured and enslaved!”

The Pope was definitely not happy with Barbarossa and the Ottomans. But he was also angry with the Venetians for trading with these Muslims. He tried to ban certain trades, but the only thing he managed to ban (for the most part), "was the trade in Christian slaves, and in products that could be used in war such as iron and timber.”

Ironically, or as was to be expected, this Papal ban on Christian slavery had unintended consequences. It simply led for a deeper search for non-Christian slaves. So, I looked into this progression in more detail. "At first Christian slaves from within the Holy Roman Empire were taken, until that was banned by the Pope. So, the Venetians then sold Christian Slavs from regions outside (east of) the empire." The Pope was then forced to ban the trade of any Christians slave.

One of the reasons that the Ottomans needed slaves in the Levant was to work on the Labour-intensive sugar cane plantations. But the Spanish and Portuguese also began their own plantations to compete with the Ottomans, as the desire in Europe for this new commodity grew. Plantations moved from the Levant, to Cyprus, then to Crete. And when these islands fell to the Ottomans, Christian sugar plantations were established in the Canaries, then Brazil, and then the Caribbean. This was mostly performed by the Portuguese. As the source of Christian slave labour dried up in the east, and new plantations were established, so the Arab Muslim's and Christian's search for new sources of labour continued further west, and into the west coast of Africa.

And thus, "the tightening of European slavery laws, eventually helped led to the establishment of the Atlantic sugar plantations and African slave trade!"

5. Modern Times

Slavery was still very much a feature of Ottoman life in the Mediterranean well into the 19^th century. For example, at the start of the Greek War of Independence started in 1821, the Ottomans used the "the army (the 'Mamluks) of his Egyptian vassal to help quell Greek insurgencies.”

It was the Ottoman's use of Egyptian Mamluks armies in the Peloponnese, that led the Great Powers to intervene on the side of the Greek-speaking nationalists. If we had not, the modern Greek nation would have remained a romantic fantasy.

Equally, the Muslim Arabs of North Africa did not take that much notice of Papal bulls, and piracy and slavery continued from this quarter.  As a result, I highlighted the Royal Navy’s work in the Mediterranean in the 18^th and 19^th centuries. The Royal Navy, eventually instructed by British Acts of Parliament, played the major role in: "stamping out the piracy and Christian slave-taking by the Muslim pirates operating from the north African (Barbary) coast."

It was only after the efforts of Britain, helped by other allied navies, that the residents of Mediterranean islands felt safe enough to leave the comfort of their lofty villages, and to settle in new sea-level ports.

6. Conclusions

This blog is nowhere near a comprehensive review of the slavery in the Mediterranean (never mind more globally), but we might draw some conclusions nevertheless:

• After the fall of Rome, whereas the western Europeans used serfdom for labour/soldiers, the eastern Mediterranean empires (particularly those of Islam) remained wedded to subjugating peoples, and taking slaves for use in standing armies, for hard labour, and for domestic service. This continued up until the late 19th century;

• No religion has been much better or much worse than another in terms of using slaves (commerce and politics often trumps emergent morals and ethics). That being said, it has been Christian forces - from the Papacy to the British Parliament (enabled by the Royal Navy) - that has led the moral and physical battle to end slavery (and not just in the Mediterranean);

• Despite joining-in the slave trade for a relatively short period (albeit on an industrial-scale and often brutal scale), Britain managed to outlaw and finally eradicate this ancient trade ('way of life?') from the Mediterranean, as well as the Atlantic Ocean. And that was achieved in the relative ‘blink of an eye’. And at a high personal cost to the personnel of the Royal Navy. I think that is something about which we should be more proud., shouldn’t t we? and;

  
  

• We should feel blessed, that we live during a time where most men are free, whilst not forgetting that those freedoms were hard won by our forefathers (using the velvet glove of diplomacy, wrapping the iron-fist of the gunboat.)