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MIDEAST SLAVE TRADE

Death toll: 18.5 million (18 million from Africa and 0.5 million from Europe)

Rank: 8

Type: commercial exploitation

Broad dividing line: Arabs enslaving Africans, mostly

Time frame: seventh to nineteenth centuries

Location: Middle East

Who usually gets the most blame: Arab slave traders, African middlemen, Barbary pirates

Summarized in two words: Eunuchs . . . ick

Economic factors: slaves, gold, salt

Background: Slavery in General

Throughout most of recorded history, almost every person was legally subordinate to someone else. Children were at the mercy of their father; husbands ruled over their wives; commoners cringed under the nobility. Most state-level societies have had formal hierarchies connecting all individuals. The Romans maintained complex patron-client relationships with interrelated obligations among all free persons—citizens, foreigners, and freedmen. European feudalism had many layers of lord and vassal, while serfs were bonded to the land.

Slaves were the most extreme type of subordinate. While most members of a lord-peasant or patron-client relationship had reciprocal rights and duties, the master-slave relationship was simpler and entirely one-sided. A master could do anything he wanted to his slave, and a slave could do nothing without the permission of his master. It was totally legal for a master to beat a slave to death well into the eighteenth century, even among peoples we would normally consider civilized, such as Virginians.¹ On the scale of personhood, running from serf to freeholder to lord, a slave was at the bottom, one step below mule.^a On the plus side, slavery was not widely considered a permanent condition.

Most societies didn’t go out of their way to get slaves; they merely acquired them accidentally, and they were often at a loss as to what to do with them. Usually, a person was enslaved only after a string of abnormally bad luck. Being captured in a war, convicted of a crime, abandoned as a child, and taken to pay a debt were the customary paths into bondage, and for the first three, the alternative to slavery was usually death.

Everyday housework created the steadiest demand for slaves, but as the supply of slaves fluctuated with the fortunes of wars, there might sometimes be a glut. In those cases, three of the customary dumping grounds for surplus, expendable people were mines, prostitution, and human sacrifice, depending on the culture.

In some societies, the economy got along fine with a minimum number of slaves. In medieval Europe, for example, there was no shortage of labor; land was the resource in short supply, so moving enslaved farm workers into a region didn’t boost output. On the other hand, in some slave-saturated societies, such as nineteenth-century Sudan, every household that rose above the barest poverty owned at least one slave girl to wash, sew, cook, and clean.

Demand for slaves occasionally surged, sending slave traders out to the fringes of civilization, wherever large populations existed without strong armies to protect the people from being kidnapped. The most famous surge filled the labor shortage that followed the discovery of America, but I will discuss that later (see “Atlantic Slave Trade”). For much of history, the biggest markets for slaves—mostly girls needed for housework—were the wealthy kingdoms of the Middle East, and the deepest reservoir of available people was Africa. Over the centuries, millions of slaves were shipped out from seaports along the East African coast and on desert caravans crossing the Sahara.

East Africa

The slave trade along Africa’s east coast goes back as far as we have records. In the days of the Pharaohs, shipments of new slaves flowed steadily up the Red Sea to Egypt, most likely from Eritrea and Somalia. By the tenth century, Arab sailors had established a chain of trading posts down the African coast as far south as Kilwa (now in Tanzania). Many of these posts were offshore islands that had as little contact with the mainland as possible. By 1300, the southern reach of Arab traders had extended to Sofala (now in Mozambique).

After the Portuguese found their way around the southern cape of Africa in 1493, they quickly used their superior firepower to bundle all of these slave stations into their rapidly expanding empire. However, in 1653, a fleet from the southern Arabian sultanate of Oman, armed with weaponry equal to anything the Europeans had, captured the northern slave ports. With one foot in Arabia and the other in Africa, Oman became a bipolar nation based on the slave trade, anchored at the island of Zanzibar in Tanzania.

In 1780, the Omanis captured the rival slave market of Kilwa and diverted Kilwa’s trade to their own routes. By 1834, sixty-five hundred slaves per year were being exported from Zanzibar. By the 1840s, the number had doubled.² In 1859, nineteen thousand slaves were recorded arriving at Zanzibar from the interior. After 1840, the ruler of Oman moved his court from the Arabian Peninsula to the richer and more cosmopolitan city of Zanzibar, which became independent of its Arab trading partner in 1845. By 1871 the sultan derived a fourth of his income from the slave trade.³

It wasn’t until the European exploration of Africa in the nineteenth century that detailed descriptions of slaving in the heart of Africa emerged. Every day, somewhere deep in Africa, slavers would select a vulnerable village and creep into striking distance. With a sudden attack, the raiders shot down any men capable of resistance and seized the women and children to be herded off to begin their new life of servitude.

On the exploratory safaris that opened up the Dark Continent, Europeans usually followed the slave trails into Africa, which were often the only trade routes that connected the coasts and the interior. Christian missionaries heading deeper into unexplored Africa encountered long columns of slaves, mostly women, scarred by whips, chained by the neck, being driven toward the coasts. Explorers retracing paths they had followed on an earlier trip often found districts that had lost half of their villages to slavers since the last visit. A British superintendent of missionaries estimated that “four or five lives were lost for every slave delivered safe at Zanzibar.”⁴

By the 1860s, the African slaver Tippu Tip was plundering an area deep in the interior, beyond the African lakes in the eastern Congo. His reach became a virtual kingdom, predatory and unstoppable, pillaging up and down the Congo River until Belgians carving out their own empire bought him off. In Kenya, near Lake Rudolf, slavers operated in the 1890s until the British established a protectorate over the region. One European reported that “an Arab who has lately returned from Lake Nyasa informed me that he has traveled for seventeen days through a country covered with ruined towns and villages . . . and where now no living soul is to be seen.”⁵

In the late nineteenth century, worldwide demand for ivory surged, as did the price, which temporarily made slaves more valuable as porters to carry the elephant tusks to the coast, rather than as a distinct commodity. Porters were taken from inland villages and sold overseas when their job was done.⁶

To feed the slave caravans crossing the Tsavo River region in Kenya, traders hunted the big game into local extinction. With their usual food sources gone and caravan trails littered with the bodies of exhausted slaves, the local lions quickly discovered that humans were good eating. Then after the slaves stopped coming, the lions of Tsavo satisfied their newfound taste for humans by eating dozens of railroad workers, which temporarily halted the expansion of British control in the colony. In 1898 the most brazen man-eaters were killed; the wild game returned eventually, and the remaining lions went back to avoiding people.⁷

Arriving at the coasts, the slaves were delivered to traders for shipment overseas. A British visitor described the slaves at a market on the Indian Ocean in the late 1860s: “. . . all young boys and girls, some of them mere babies . . . Skeletons, with a diseased skin drawn tight over them, eyeballs left hideously prominent by the falling away of the surrounding flesh, chests shrunk and bent, joints unnaturally swelled and horribly knotty by contrast with the wretched limbs between them, voices dry and hard, and ‘distantly near’ like those of a nightmare . . .”⁸

Small Arab trading vessels ferried the slaves from East Africa to the Middle East. A British captain on anti-slave patrol^b stopped a local boat carrying slaves on the Indian Ocean. Male slaves were chained above decks, in the open. Below decks were the women. “On the bottom of the [boat] was a pile of stones as ballast, and on these stones, without even a mat, were twenty-three women huddled together, one or two with infants in their arms. These women were literally doubled up, there being no room to sit erect.”⁹

North Africa

When the Arabs introduced camels into North Africa in the Middle Ages, it became a lot easier to cross the Sahara and see what lay on the other side. Those who made the trip usually came back with slaves. Throughout the Middle Ages, the nomadic Bedouin in the Sahara raided the settled communities along the southern edge of the desert, in the band of savannah known as the Sahel, gathering slaves to be hauled to markets on the Mediterranean. By 1300, however, the Sahel had developed a line of powerful kingdoms, such as Ghana and Mali, along the edge of the desert that could stand up to the Bedouin. Unfortunately, rather than forming a barrier to slave raids into deeper parts of Africa, these kingdoms became the new middlemen, raiding farther south for fresh slaves to send north.

When raiding didn’t work, the Bedouin traded salt they found in the desert for slaves and gold from the Sahel. From the scattered records we have, it seems to have been a thriving business. In 1353, the Muslim travel writer Ibn Battuta returned to the Mediterranean coast on a caravan hauling 600 female slaves.

By the 1700s, at least 1,500 slaves per year were being taken north, the number peaking at as many as 3,000 per year in the late 1800s. As British warships closed off the Atlantic slave trade in the nineteenth century, the slaves that would have been sent to America were sent north instead, across the desert. Because Libya remained free of European control longer than any other stretch of North African coast, Benghazi and Tripoli became the major outlets of the Saharan slave trade in the nineteenth century.

By the late 1850s, slaves accounted for two-thirds of the value carried on all of the caravans across the Sahara.¹⁰ The trade was so lucrative that most rulers would use any excuse to arrest a subject and sell her into slavery.

It was a brutal crossing. One European traveler crossed the Sahara in the 1800s on a large caravan that lost three or four slaves to exhaustion, disease, thirst, and heat stroke for every survivor who arrived at market. Entire caravans with hundreds of slaves often disappeared in the desert.

Even if we put aside morality for the moment and look at this from a simple profit motive, it seems wasteful to allow so many slaves to die. You would think the slave dealers would want to protect their investment, but as one contemporary explained, the slave trade was like the ice trade. A certain amount of melting away was acceptable because the final product fetched a high-enough price to cover the losses. It wasn’t even much of an investment to begin with. At their source, slaves were cheap. In the central Sahel, a single horse was worth twenty slaves.¹¹

Abolition in the Middle East was imposed by outside forces, not by an upwelling of local goodwill. Europeans began to have moral qualms about slavery in the late eighteenth century, so when they took control of Africa in the next century, they put a stop to the international traffic in slaves. Local slavery persisted, however, even to the present day, and perhaps a couple of hundred thousand slaves are still being held in Mauritania and Sudan, although their governments deny it.

Eunuchs

Eunuchs were especially useful for guarding the harem—the large assemblage of wives and concubines that every Asian potentate collected. Eunuchs had all of the physical strength of men but none of the sex drive, so they could be trusted not to help themselves to the women and not to produce families to put on the throne in place of the emperor. The disadvantage is that the population of eunuchs was not self-sustaining. They had to be continuously resupplied from elsewhere.

Islam forbids the mutilation of slaves, but rather than let a mere technicality interfere with the demand for eunuchs, Muslims assigned that task to the infidels. The slaves were castrated either by pagans in Africa shortly after being caught or by the Jews and Christians living in the Muslim world.

Eunuch-using societies preferred to castrate boys before puberty. This left them childlike in sex drive, voice, and appearance, unlike castrated adults, who still looked and acted more like men. Slave boys were taken aside, supposedly to be circumcised—as was customary for all males in the Muslim world—but this was a trick to get the knife close enough to strike without the boy struggling. When the barber surgeon got the knife near, he would grab and sever the boy’s entire genitalia instead of just the foreskin.¹²

Eunuchs received a different procedure according to their race. White eunuchs had only their testicles snipped off, but black eunuchs had the whole apparatus—testes, scrotum, and penis—cut away and cauterized with boiling hot butter, leaving just a hole for urination.

Because the final sale of eunuchs came at the end of a long process of raids, caravans, and markets, with their numbers winnowed by disease, brutal discipline, and drowning all along the way, a British consul in the nineteenth century estimated that 100,000 Sudanese had died to produce the 500 eunuchs in Cairo—a loss of 200 lives for each eunuch.¹³

As we’ve seen in the chapters on, for example, the Xin dynasty, the fall of Rome, the Three Kingdoms, and Justinian, royal women were often the center of a web of family intrigue, and ambitious eunuchs would often turn their access to the harem to their own advantage. Eunuchs were not under all of the legal restrictions that kept women repressed, so they could move easily between the world of men and the world of women, serving as useful facilitators and front men. All across the Old World, eunuchs made a lot of history.

Corsairs

Because of the religious divide between the Christian northern and Muslim southern shores of the Mediterranean Sea, the opposite coasts were considered fair game for slave raids. As a rule, both Christians and Muslims did not enslave members of their own religions. Well, actually, they did this quite often, but it was considered wrong . . . not illegal as such, but certainly impolite. Snatching citizens of a fellow Christian or Muslim country could cause all sorts of diplomatic problems. On the other hand, kidnapping infidels was almost a sacred duty.

Generally, the Barbary pirates or corsairs from North Africa were the worst offenders in the Mediterranean trade. A pirate fleet would pounce on any rich and vulnerable ships to seize cargo, crew, and passengers for sale at one of the Barbary ports in North Africa such as Algiers, Tunis, or Tripoli. Most of the people pulled off the ship would be sold ashore, but prosperous or important prisoners were set aside to be ransomed back to their families or governments. Eventually, most seafaring nations in Europe established consulates in the Barbary cities to expedite the ransoming.

Crewmen captured on ships might be bribed or tortured into assisting the corsair fleet in attacking their seaside hometowns. They would be used as a familiar face to talk their way past the town’s defenses. Even without trickery, a small fishing village was no match for a pirate fleet. Corsairs would swoop in from the sea, round up entire villages, and haul the inhabitants away into slavery. Sometimes pirates stayed ashore for a few days to see if any rich relatives were willing to ransom their prisoners. Because of primitive communications, the corsairs could usually count on several days of safe looting before local authorities could mobilize enough strength to chase them off.

The largest hauls in slaves came from raids against the coastal communities of Italy, Spain, and Greece, although attacks in the Atlantic Ocean were not unknown. Around 1625, a corsair raid against Reykjavik, Iceland, enslaved 400 men, women, and children; in 1631, another raid enslaved 237 from Baltimore, Ireland.¹⁴ Those who were too young, old, or weak might be thrown overboard on the way back to Africa, but the majority of captives were taken to the market. Women were usually sold into harems, while men often became galley slaves.

At this point in history, rowing galleys created the biggest demand for cheap, expendable labor in the Mediterranean. In the ancient world, free men had rowed galleys for wages, but by the Middle Ages it had become slave work. Galley slaves were usually worked to death without a second thought. Chained to their benches, the slaves pulled the oars continuously, constantly, in the sun, in the rain, and then through much of the night. Not even able to lie down for sleep, the slaves could only catch an occasional nap while slumped over their oars. In battles and storms, galley slaves went down with the ship. At the Battle of Lepanto between Ottoman Turkey and Spain in 1571, more than 10,000 Christian galley slaves drowned, shackled in the bellies of the Turkish warships.

Western naval technology eventually surpassed that of the corsairs. By the early 1800s, European and American warships were systematically retaliating against any Barbary ports that continued to harbor pirates. The North African cities were forced to crack down on the corsairs, and the Mediterranean became safe for commerce.

Mamelukes

Slaves served as the backbone of many Muslim armies. The Ottoman Turks (ca. 1450– 1900) required Christian peasant communities in the Balkans to surrender a quota of young boys to be raised as Muslims and trained as soldiers. The Egyptians of the same period usually bought Circassian boys from the Caucasus Mountains. These boys were kept isolated from the outside world during their childhood as they learned war craft and Islam. They were counted as slaves, the personal property of the sultan. Although legally freed upon reaching adulthood, they could never leave the sultan’s service. They would live their entire lives as soldiers in a barracks. Their own children were sent away and forbidden from following in their fathers’ line of work. When these soldiers got too old for combat, they would be moved into support duties and eventually into a comfortable retirement, with slaves assigned to keep them happy.

Called Mamelukes after the Arabic word for slave, these slave soldiers had no family, tribal affiliations, or property to interfere with their loyalty to the sultan. On the other hand, they tended to have more loyalty to their comrades than to the crown, and Muslim dynasties were under constant threat of a coup by Mamelukes if they pushed them too hard.¹⁵

I don’t count Mamelukes in the statistics of this megadeath because I consider them, morally, to be more a type of draftee than a type of slave. The restrictions imposed on the average Mameluke were more in line with military duty than with slavery.

Numbers

Slavery in the Muslim world has not been studied as deeply as slavery in Christendom, so there are fewer trustworthy numbers. In Islam’s Black Slaves, Ronald Segal reported estimates of either 11.5 million or 14 million African slaves shipped to the Muslim world. Other estimates run from 10 to 25 million live slaves imported.

How many Africans died in the slave trade? Although many anecdotes point to dozens of dead slaves for every live one delivered, these may be isolated incidents. Overall, there is no solid proof that the eastern trade was either more or less deadly than the western trade, so I’m going to apply the western ratio from that chapter and declare that three slaves died for every two transported. That would come to 18 million deaths to produce 12 million live slaves.

Robert C. Davis estimated that between 1.0 and 1.25 million European Christians were enslaved by Muslims on the Barbary Coast between 1530 and 1780.¹⁶ Few ever saw their homes again, and we probably should count at least half of them as dead. Because of cruelty and hard labor, the death rate among these slaves was nearly six times the death rate among a free population,¹⁷ and attrition eroded their numbers.