The Barbary Slave Trade: When Corsairs Raided Europe for Slaves

Most people learn about one slave trade: the Atlantic trade that carried enslaved Africans to the Americas. Far fewer learn that, over roughly the same centuries, another slave trade ran the opposite way across the Mediterranean — one in which the captives were European and Christian, and the raiders came from the coast of North Africa. It is called the Barbary slave trade, and its scale was large.

Telling this story is not point-scoring, and it takes nothing away from the horror of the Atlantic trade. It fills in an honest picture: slavery was a near-universal institution, and Europeans were among its victims as well as, later, its perpetrators.

What the Barbary slave trade was

From roughly the sixteenth to the early nineteenth century, corsairs based in the North African port-states of the Barbary Coast — chiefly Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli, which were nominally Ottoman, together with Salé in independent Morocco — raided the coasts and shipping lanes of Christian Europe and sold the people they seized. The raiders were Muslim and their captives overwhelmingly Christian. How far religion, as against plunder and the ransom economy, drove the raids is debated: the historian Robert Davis stresses the religious motive, while other historians read the trade as mainly commercial.

The numbers are debated too. Davis has estimated 1 to 1.25 million Europeans enslaved between about 1500 and 1750, a figure some historians consider a high extrapolation rather than a firm count. Even the lower end describes a catastrophe that ran for generations.

The raids reached startlingly far. Corsairs struck Italy, Spain, and the Mediterranean islands, and they pushed out into the Atlantic and the English Channel. In 1627 they raided Iceland and carried off hundreds of people. In 1631 they sacked the village of Baltimore in Ireland and took more than a hundred villagers, most of whom never came home. Coastal communities from Portugal to the west of England lived under a real threat of being carried away.

How it worked

Captives were seized in coastal raids or taken from captured ships, then sold in the slave markets of the Barbary ports. From there, lives diverged. Some were worked at the oars of galleys or on public building projects; others became domestic servants, artisans, or concubines.

A large part of the trade ran on ransom. A captive with wealthy relatives, or a church or government willing to pay, might be redeemed. Two Catholic orders, the Trinitarians and the Mercedarians, had been founded centuries earlier for exactly this purpose, raising money across Europe to buy Christian captives back. Whole networks of redemption grew up around the trade.

Ransom was no help to those no one paid for. They faced years of hard labor and steady pressure to convert to Islam — to "turn Turk," in the contemporary European phrase for renouncing Christianity. Conversion could improve a captive's conditions, but it came under duress, and converts generally could not simply sail home.

Not the "milder" slavery

Once you learn the Barbary trade existed, it is tempting to start ranking it against the Atlantic trade. That instinct is worth setting aside. The two were different in shape, not in cruelty. Atlantic slavery was race-based, lifelong, and inherited: captives and their children held as property, with no ransom and no release. Barbary slavery was built around religion rather than race, and around a ransom market that gave some captives a way out. Those are differences in how each system worked, not in how much suffering it caused. A man chained to an oar for the rest of his life, or pressured to abandon his faith under threat, was not living a lesser nightmare.

Why it complicates the familiar picture

Part of why the Barbary trade is unfamiliar is that it cuts against a tidy version of history in which slavery is uniquely Western and uniquely racial. Here the enslavers were North African and Muslim and the enslaved were European and Christian, and it lasted three hundred years.

Noticing this is not a grievance, and it is no way to excuse the Atlantic trade or to indict anyone's religion today. It works the other way. It lets us see slavery for what it was: not the peculiar wickedness of one people or one faith, but a human institution that appeared, in different forms, almost everywhere — in Africa, Arabia, the Ottoman world, the Americas, Europe, and the ancient Near East.

What finally ended it

The Barbary trade was brought to a close in the early nineteenth century, largely by European and American naval power — a long run of blockades and campaigns, and finally the French conquest of Algiers in 1830, which effectively ended the corsair states' slaving.

The timing is telling. The same decades saw Britain abolish its own slave trade and then slavery itself, driven by a movement that argued, in openly Christian terms, that no one made in God's image should be owned by another. The Barbary story sharpens the question that runs through the whole history of slavery: not only who did it, since nearly everyone did, but who finally decided it had to stop.

If you want the biblical arguments that eventually turned against slavery — from the ban on kidnapping in Exodus to Paul's letters — you can read and question them in TheoGPT.

Sources and further reading

• Robert C. Davis, Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters: White Slavery in the Mediterranean, the Barbary Coast, and Italy, 1500–1800 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003) — source of the 1–1.25 million estimate, which some historians regard as a high extrapolation
• On the ransom orders, see the histories of the Trinitarian and Mercedarian orders
• Barbary pirates — Britannica
• On the 1631 raid, see accounts of the Sack of Baltimore, Ireland