The Barbary slave trade involved the capture of an estimated 1.25 million Europeans and selling them at slave markets in the largely independent Ottoman Barbary states of North Africa during the early modern period. European civilians were captured by Barbary corsairs in slave raids on ships and by raids on coastal towns from Italy to Ireland, coasts of Spain and Portugal, as far north as Iceland and into the Eastern Mediterranean.
The Ottoman Eastern Mediterranean was the scene of intense piracy. As late as the 18th century, piracy continued to be a "consistent threat to maritime traffic in the Aegean".
The Barbary slave trade came to an end in the early years of the 19th century. Frustrated at the continuing costs of tribute and ransom payments, the United States and Western European allies won the First and Second Barbary Wars against the pirates, but this did not end the practice. In 1816, Britain pressured the Beylik of Tunis and the Regency of Tripoli to agree to cease the enslaving of European Christians. When it became clear that the Deylik of Algiers would not comply, a British-Dutch fleet responded by decimating the Algerian navy at Algiers. A definitive end did not come until the 1830s, when the region was conquered by France.
Most of the captives were seamen and crews who were taken with their ships, but there were also many fishermen and coastal villagers who were captured. The majority of these captives were people from countries around the Mediterranean, especially Italy.
Extent
The authorities of Ottoman and pre-Ottoman times kept no relevant official records, but observers estimated that around 35,000 European slaves were held throughout the 17th century on the Barbary Coast, across Tripoli and Tunis, but mostly in Algiers. The majority were sailors (particularly those who were English), taken with their ships, but others were fishermen and coastal villagers. However, most of these captives were people from lands close to North Africa, particularly Italy.
Robert Davis, author of Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters, estimates that slave traders from Tunis, Algiers, and Tripoli transported 1 million to 1.25 million enslaved Europeans to North Africa, from the beginning of the 16th century to the middle of the 18th century. To extrapolate his numbers, Davis assumes the number of European slaves captured by Barbary pirates remained roughly constant for a 250-year period.
Peter Earle, author of The Corsairs of Malta and Barbary and The Pirate Wars, said that Davis may have erred in extrapolating from 1580 to 1680, because that was the most intense slaving period: "His figures sound a bit dodgy and I think he may be exaggerating."
John Wright cautions that modern estimates are based on back-calculations from human observation. A second book by Davis, Holy War and Human Bondage: Tales of Christian-Muslim Slavery in the Early-Modern Mediterranean, widened its focus to related slavery.
From bases on the Barbary Coast, in North Africa, the Barbary pirates raided ships traveling through the Mediterranean and along the northern and western coasts of Africa, plundering their cargo and enslaving the people they captured. From at least 1500, the pirates also conducted raids on seaside towns and villages of Italy, Spain, Greece, Ireland, and as far away as Iceland, capturing men, women and children. In 1544, Hayreddin Barbarossa captured the island of Ischia, taking 4,000 prisoners, and enslaved some 2,000–7,000 inhabitants of Lipari. In 1551, Ottoman corsair Dragut enslaved the entire population of the Maltese island of Gozo, between 5,000 and 6,000, sending them to Ottoman Tripolitania. In 1554 corsairs under Dragut sacked Vieste, beheaded 5,000 of its inhabitants, and abducted another 6,000. The Balearic Islands were invaded by the Ottomans in 1558, and 4,000 people were taken into slavery. In 1618 the Algerian pirates attacked the Canary Islands, taking 1,000 captives to be sold as slaves. On some occasions, settlements such as Baltimore in Ireland were abandoned following a raid, only being resettled many years later. Between 1609 and 1616, England alone lost 466 merchant ships to Barbary pirates.
While Barbary corsairs looted the cargo of ships they captured, their primary goal was to capture non-Muslim people for sale as slaves or for ransom. Those who had family or friends who might ransom them were held captive; the most famous of these was the author Miguel de Cervantes, who was held for almost five years – from 1575 to 1580. Others were sold into various types of servitude. Captives who converted to Islam were generally freed, since enslavement of Muslims was prohibited; but this meant that they could never return to their native countries.
Customs' statistics from the 16th and 17th century suggest that Constantinople's additional slave imports from the Black Sea slave trade may have totaled around 2.5 million from 1450 to 1700. The markets declined after Sweden and the United States defeated the Barbary States in the Barbary Wars (1800–1815). A US Navy expedition under Commodore Edward Preble engaged gunboats and fortifications in Tripoli in 1804.
A British diplomatic mission to Algiers led to the Dey agreeing to release some Sardinian slaves. However, the moment the British left, the Dey ordered the Sardinians massacred. The same British fleet, joined by some Dutch warships, returned and delivered a nine-hour bombardment of Algiers in 1816, leading to the Dey accepting a new agreement in which he promised to end his slavery operations. Despite this, the trade continued, ending only after the French conquest of Algeria (1830–1847). The Sultanate of Morocco had already suppressed piracy by then.
Origins
North African piracy had very ancient origins. It gained a political significance during the 16th century, mainly through Hayreddin Barbarossa, who united Algeria and Tunisia as military states under the Ottoman Empire and maintained his revenues by piracy. With the arrival of powerful Moorish bands in Rabat and Tétouan (1609), Morocco became a new center for the pirates and for the ʿAlawī sultans, who quickly gained control of the two republics and encouraged piracy as a valuable source of revenue. During the 17th century, the Algerian and Tunisian pirates joined forces, and by 1650 more than 30,000 of their captives were imprisoned in Algiers alone.
The towns on the North African coast were recorded in Roman times for their slave markets, and this trend continued into the medieval age. The Barbary Coast increased in influence in the 15th century, when the Ottoman Empire took over as rulers of the area. Coupled with this was an influx of Sephardi Jews and Moorish refugees, newly expelled from Spain after the Reconquista.
With Ottoman protection and a host of destitute immigrants, the coastline soon became reputed for piracy. Crews from the seized ships were either enslaved or ransomed. Between 1580 and 1680, there were in Barbary around 15,000 renegades, Christian Europeans who converted to Islam. Half of the corsair captains were in fact renegades. Some of them were slaves who converted to Islam, but most had probably never been slaves and had come to North Africa looking for opportunity.
Robert C. Davis argues that the Barbary slave trade carried a religious dimension beyond profit-seeking. He links its origins to 1492, when the fall of Granada led to the expulsion of Muslims from Spain and describes the raids on Christian shipping as motivated in part by a desire for retribution as well as for the Crusades that preceded it. Davis characterizes the broader conflict as a mutual, centuries-long jihad, also noting that Christian military orders framed their own galley raids against Muslim shipping in comparable religious terms.
Rise of the Barbary pirates
After a revolt in the mid-17th century reduced the ruling Ottoman Pashas to little more than figureheads in the region, the towns of Tripoli, Algiers, Tunis, and others became independent in all but name. Without a large central authority and its laws, the pirates themselves started to gain much influence.
Pirate raids for the acquisition of slaves occurred in towns and villages on the African Atlantic seaboard, as well as in Europe. From around 1500, the pirates also conducted raids on seaside towns and villages of Italy, Spain, Greece, Ireland, and as far away as Iceland, capturing men, women and children, and these raids lasted as late as the early 19th century. Robert Davis estimated that between 1 and 1.25 million Europeans were captured by pirates and sold as slaves in Tunis, Algiers and Tripoli during this time period. The slave trade in Europeans in other parts of the Mediterranean is not included in this estimation. However, other historians such as David Earle have questioned Robert Davis' estimates: “His figures sound a bit dodgy and I think he may be exaggerating.”
Famous accounts of Barbary slave raids include a mention in the diary of Samuel Pepys and a raid on the coastal village of Baltimore, Ireland, during which pirates left with the entire populace of the settlement. The attack was led by a Dutch captain, Jan Janszoon van Haarlem, also known as Murad Reis the Younger. Janszoon also led the 1627 raid on Iceland. About 50 people were killed and close to 400 captured and sold into slavery. Such raids in the Mediterranean were so frequent and devastating that the coastline between Venice and Málaga suffered widespread depopulation, and settlement there was discouraged. In fact, it was said that "there was no one left to capture any longer."
In 1627, a group known as the Salé Rovers, from the Republic of Salé (now Salé in Morocco) occupied Lundy for five years. These Barbary pirates, under the command of Janszoon, flew an Ottoman flag over the island. Slaving raids were made embarking from Lundy by the Barbary Pirates, and captured Europeans were held on Lundy before being sent to Algiers to be sold as slaves.
The power and influence of these pirates during this time was such that nations including the United States paid tribute to stave off their attacks.
An account of the later phase of the trade was published in 1740 by Englishman Thomas Pellow, who had escaped from Morocco after 21 years of slavery, having been captured from a ship in 1716 as an 11-year-old boy.
Slave sources by nation
Between the 16th century and the early 19th century, the Barbary slave trade in South and West Europe was one of two major slave routes for European slaves to the Ottoman Empire and the Middle East, the other being the contemporary Crimean slave trade in Eastern Europe.
The Barbary corsairs attacked a number of different nations in Southern and Western Europe, as well as the Americas. Some of the nations were exclusively attacked by sea, while others were also subjected to slave raids on land. Each nation had their own policy in order to address the issue, and different European governments maintained negotiations with the Barbary states in order to pay ransom for captives, prevent attacks on their ships or raids on their coasts. Armed raids began in the sixteenth century, when the Ottoman states of what is today, Algeria, Tunisia and Libya became de facto independent rogue states that lived on pillage, and persisted as late as the early nineteenth century, when France conquered modern Algeria. From the 16th to the end of the 18th century, the coastal areas of Italy (especially in the south-west) were raided by pirates launched from the coast of North Africa. To protect themselves, people in coastal areas moved inland into mountainous and rugged areas. The long-term impact of these pirate attacks persisted well into the 20th century.
Britain and Ireland
Britain and Ireland were attacked by the Barbary Corsairs pirates primarily at sea but also by raids on land. The Irish Sea was infamous for being frequented by Barbary pirates, although the vast majority captives from the British Isles were sailors and crews of ships around the Mediterranean.
In 1620–1621, the government of James VI and I maintained long negotiations to prevent attacks, but did not succeed.
In the 1620s and 1640s, the coasts of Cornwall and Devon in England, as well as Southern Ireland, were subjected to raids by Barbary corsairs, who raided the coasts after having attacked ships outside of the coasts. In 1625 Barbary corsairs raided Mount's Bay enslaving 60 people the next year they raided St Keverne multiple times the ports of Looe, Penzance, Mousehole and other Cornish ports were blocked by the Corsairs.
Perhaps the most historically famous of the British and Irish slave raids was the sack of Baltimore by corsairs from Algiers against the coastal village of Baltimore in West Cork in Ireland on 20 June 1631, which was the largest slave raid by Barbary slave traders on Ireland.
A couple of years after the sack of Baltimore of 1631, the Irish village of Dungarvan was also attacked by a slave raid resulting in around fifty captives. They also raided Penzance in July 1640.