Slavery in Europe

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Slavery in Europe

Mechanical translation from Romanian

main link:  https://ioncoja.ro/sclavia-in-europa/
completion:  https://ioncoja.ro/sclavia-in-europa-completare/

WHITE SLAVES
IN THE BLACK SEA BASIN

Slavos-sklavenos in Greek slave
The Slavic population took its name from the Greek word slave / slave, as it was the predominant population among slaves traded in the Black Sea basin, extending into the Mediterranean Sea and even to Baghdad. .

Descriptions of the Black Sea found in archaic poets, Herodotus, and later geographers were influenced by trade routes circulated among Greek slave traders from the north. Based on an epigraphic corpus of twenty-three letters from merchants in the region dating from c. 550 to 450 BC, the journeys of enslaved people recorded in documents are contrasted with the stylized descriptions found in literary accounts.

Slaves took a variety of routes to – and from – slavery, and the fear of enslavement was widely felt even among the Greeks. Law courts could be as important as "barbarian" warfare in providing captives for export, and even slave traders risked being enslaved alongside their victims.

The history of the Black Sea as a source of Mediterranean slaves stretches from ancient Greek colonies to modern-day human trafficking networks.
At the height of the 14th and early 15th centuries, the Black Sea slave trade was not the only source of Mediterranean slaves; Genoese, Venetian, and Egyptian merchants bought prisoners taken in conflicts throughout the region, from North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, the Balkans, and the Aegean. However, the Black Sea slave trade provided merchants with profit and prestige; "civilized" states with military recruits, tax revenues and diplomatic influence used in their households the service of slave women, men and children.

Even though Genoa, Venice, and the Mamluk Sultanate of Egypt and Greater Syria were the most important components of the Black Sea slave trade network, they have rarely been studied together. Examining Latin and Arabic sources in tandem, Hannah Barker shows that the Christian and Muslim inhabitants of the Mediterranean shared a set of practices that amounted to a common culture of slavery. Indeed, the Genoese, Venetian, and Mamluk slave trade was fully loaded, with far-reaching effects.

The disruption of the Genoese and Venetian trade in Mamluks led to reprisals against Italian traders living in the Mamluk cities, while their participation in the trade led to painful criticism from supporters of the crusade movement who called on the trading powers to use their leverage to weaken the force of Islam.

Reading notarial records, tax records, laws, merchant accounts, traveler's stories and letters, sermons, slave purchase manuals and literary works, as well as treaties governing the slave trade and crusade propaganda, Barker offers a rich picture of the context in that merchants traded and enslaved people met their fate.

The Black Sea, Russia, and Eastern Europe exported slaves throughout the medieval period. Most were born free, but were enslaved by capture or occasionally sold by relatives. In the 8th and 10th centuries, slaves were traded from Eastern Europe and the Baltic Sea to elite households in Byzantium and the Islamic world via the Dnieper and Volga river systems, the Carolingian Empire, and Venice.

In the 13th century, the structure of this slave trade changed as a result of the Mongol invasion of Eastern Europe, the Italian colonization of the Black Sea, the success of the Mamluk state, and the crusading activities of the Teutonic Knights in the Baltic Sea.

People enslaved in the Baltic Sea now tended to be traded to the west rather than the east; enslaved people in Eastern Europe and the Caucasus tended to pass through the Black Sea into the hands of Italians, Mamluks, or Ottomans; and enslaved people in the Balkans were trafficked primarily by Venetians or Ottomans.

Located at the intersection of trade routes from Italy and Byzantium (later Turkey) to Poland, Russia and the Orient, Crimea has always been attractive for international trade, of which the slave trade was one of its most important components. The oldest data on the slave trade in the region dates back to antiquity.

Until the end of the Middle Ages, this business was carried on mainly by Italians and Jews, the Tatars being the most important suppliers of "live goods". Numerous published and archival sources (accounts of European and Ottoman travelers, diplomatic correspondence, letters and memoirs of captives, (registers), Russian and Ottoman chronicles, etc.) show that the most important role in the trade in slaves and prisoners of war was taken over by Crimean maritime towns such as Caffa with the dependent ports of Taman, Azak, Kerș and Gözleve.

The importance of the Black Sea slave trade began to grow in the 13th and 14th centuries, shortly after the establishment of the Genoese colony of Caffa, also known as Kaffa or Capha; the Turkish name was Kefe, while in modern Russian it is Theodosia, on the eastern shore of the Crimean peninsula in the 1260s.4 Caffa became the largest and most important

During the time of the Crimean Khanate, the Tatars engaged in frequent raids on the Danubian principalities, Poland-Lithuania and Muscovy. For each captive, the khan received a fixed share (savğa) of 10 percent or 20 percent. The campaigns of the Crimean forces are classified into seferis, declared military operations led by the khans themselves, and çapuls, raids undertaken by groups of nobles, sometimes illegally, because they violated treaties concluded by the khans with neighboring rulers.

For a long time, until the beginning of the 18th century, the khanate maintained a massive slave trade with the Ottoman Empire and the Middle East. Caffa was one of the most famous and significant trading ports and slave markets. Crimean Tatar hordes enslaved between 1 and 2 million slaves from Russia and Poland-Lithuania between 1500 and 1700.

Caffa was one of the most famous and significant trading ports and slave markets. In 1769, a last major Tatar raid resulted in the capture of 20,000 Russian and Ruthenian slaves.

Slave markets flourished on the Barbary Coast of North Africa, in what is modern Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and western Libya, between the 15th and mid-19th centuries.
These markets flourished while the states were nominally under Ottoman suzerainty, although in reality they were largely autonomous.

North African slave markets traded European slaves, who were acquired by Barbary pirates in slave raids on ships and by raiding coastal towns from Italy to Spain, Portugal, France, England, the Netherlands, and the abductions of the Turks in Iceland.

Men, women and children were captured to such a devastating extent that a large number of cities on the sea coast were abandoned.

According to Robert Davis, between 1 million and 1.25 million Europeans were captured by Barbary pirates and sold as slaves in North Africa and the Ottoman Empire between the 15th and 19th centuries. However, to extrapolate his figures, Davis assumes that the number of European slaves captured by Barbary pirates was constant for a period of 250 years.

IN THE NEW WORLD
In the 1650s, more than 100,000 Irish children between the ages of 10 and 14 were taken from their parents and sold into slavery in the New World. This was only part of the vast plan of deporting the Irish population devised by the English kings.

Arriving in the New World colonies, these "talking beasts of burden" were subjected to further and more vile treatment by their owners, including attempts to
improve the race of Irish slaves through cross-breeding.
This painful period for Ireland was both genocidal (in the sense of wiping out a population) and the enslavement of the survivors.

Kings James I and Charles I set out to enslave the Irish people, and then Oliver Cromwell continued this practice of dehumanizing his neighbors. The trade began when James I sold 30,000 Irish captives into slavery in the New World. His proclamation of 1625 ordered them to be deported abroad and sold to English settlers in the "West Indies."

By the mid-17th century, the Irish made up the largest contingent of slaves sold in Antigua and Montserrat. At the time, 70% of Montserrat's population were Irish slaves. Ireland became the largest reservoir of people for English traders. Most of these early New World slaves were, in fact, white and not black.

Between 1641-1652, over 500,000 Irish were killed by the English and 300,000 of them were sold as slaves. The Irish population fell from 1,500,000 to 600,000 in ten years. Families were destroyed as the British forbade Irish fathers to take their wives and children across the Atlantic. This resulted in a desolate population of women and children, and the British solution was to sell them off as well.

In the 1650s, more than 100,000 Irish children, ages 10-14, were taken from their parents and sold as slaves in the West Indies, Virginia, and New England. In this decade, 52,000 Irish (mostly women and children) were sold to Barbados and Virginia.

In 1656 Cromwell ordered 2000 Irish children to be sent to Jamaica and sold to English settlers. [this appears to be the origin of the term kid-napper, a thief of human beings, especially children, originally intended for export to the cotton plantations of North America. Many today avoid
the embarrassing term "slavery" to describe this terrible episode in the history of the Irish people. They use the legal term "indentured servant
", but in most cases these poor
"servants" were nothing more than human cattle.

The black slave trade began at this time. Many records and testimonies show that African slaves were more expensive and were treated better than their Irish counterparts.
In the late 17th century, an African slave cost up to £50, while an Irish slave cost no more than £5 to purchase.

If a planter flogged or beat an Irish slave to death, it was not considered a crime, and his death from a financial point of view was an
economic loss inferior to that of a more expensive African slave. English owners soon decided to take Irish women as well, both for their personal amusement and for their greater profit, as the children of slaves were themselves slaves, which increased the amount of free labor.

Because the resulting children remained slaves despite the possible emancipation of their mothers, at some point the English considered crossing their white slaves (often girls as young as 12) with Africans to produce
valuable slaves special These "mulattoes", sold for a higher value than white Irish slaves, represented a saving of money, as the English no longer had to buy blacks from the market.

This practice of interbreeding Irish and African women continued for several decades and was so widespread that in 1681 a law was passed that "prohibited the mating of Irish slaves with African slaves for commercial purposes".

In short, it was a matter of not harming the profits of the big Jewish
slave shipping companies. England continued to transport tens of thousands of Irish slaves for more than a century. Documents prove that after the Irish Rebellion of 1798, thousands of Irish slaves were sold to America and Australia.

The abuses committed against African and Irish prisoners were appalling. It happened, for example, that a British ship threw 1302 Irish slaves into the Atlantic, so that the crew could feed themselves better. It is undeniable that the Irish lived through the horrors of slavery as much (if not more in the 17th century) than Africans.
It is likely that the dark faces of many English-speaking Antilles
come from the combination of African and Irish ancestry.

In 1839, Britain decided to stop its participation in the "sea highway to hell" and stopped transporting slaves. But this decision did not dissuade the pirates who continued this activity.
None of the Irish victims could return to their homeland to describe the ordeal.

They are lost slaves, those whom time and history books have forgotten and easily omit. We talk to the point of saturation about the fate of African slaves caught in the triangular trade between Europe, Africa and America, but we always forget the historical reality of white Irish slaves, but also of other white Christian slaves, sold by Turks and Arabs alike in their areas.

Black slaves must be the first and only to occupy the podium, while, historically, the first really numerous slaves in America, in the modern era, were the whites and not the blacks, who succeeded them.