by Emmet Scott
[23] Bat Ye’or, op cit., p. 68.
[24] Bertrand, op cit., p. 33.
[25] Taken from Lewis, op cit., p. 65.
[26]Ibid., p. 66.
[27] The Pharaoh Ramses III proudly boasted that in his time a woman might travel unescorted and perfectly safe through any part of his realm. Such an idea would have been anathema to any Islamic ruler.
[28] Winston Churchill, The River War, Vol. 2 (Longmans, Green and Company, London, 1899), pp. 248-50.
3
Piracy and Slave-Raiding
A religious ideology such as Islam, as we have delineated it above, could not but come into conflict with other cultures and faiths. The tendency towards violence and the belief, enshrined in Sharia Law, that the Muslim community was entitled to subsist off the labor of unbelievers, was bound to lead to a parasitical attitude, which can only have encouraged disrespect for the rights and property of subdued infidel communities; which in turn would have fostered a predatory and lawless culture. When we combine this with the Islamic attitude to women, whose “rights” within the Islamic ummah were tenuous to say the least, we have all the ingredients for the appearance of a slave-keeping and slave-taking culture. And this is precisely what we find in Islam from the very beginning.
Islam’s outlook with regard to slavery is in striking contrast to that of Christianity, which, from the start, worked to alleviate the conditions of slaves and to eventually abolish the institution. Unlike Islam, Christianity taught that the mistreatment of any human being, whether slave or free, was gravely sinful. In the words of one writer, “The effect of the Church upon the [Roman] Empire may be summed up in the word ‘freedom’.”[1] And, “Close upon the Church’s victory [in the Empire] follows legislation more favorable to the slave than any that had gone before.”[2] Whilst it is true that “Constantine did not attempt sudden or wholesale emancipation, which would have been unwise and impossible,” he nevertheless immediately “sought to lessen his [the slave’s] hardships by measures which with all their inequalities are unique in the statute-book of Rome. … he forbade cruelty towards slaves in terms which are themselves an indictment of existing practice.”[3] The Gospel passages of relevance here are too numerous to mention, but we should note in particular the story of the Final Judgment as told in Mark 25: 31-46, where the King (God) tells His servants: “So long as you did it to these, the least of my brethren, you did it to me.” It should be remarked also, at this point, that the whole concept of human rights, attributed by many contemporary westerners to the thinkers of the Enlightenment, is rooted in this Gospel concept – a fact admitted by the Enlightenment philosophers themselves. Human rights are a moral as well as a judicial concept. If God will hold each of us accountable for our behavior towards the lowliest members of society, this places the latter on a par, in moral terms, with the highest members of society.
Thus from the start, the lives of slaves improved. This was especially the case with female and younger male slaves, whose function, in the past, was very often to provide sexual pleasure for their owners. This type of transgression was especially frowned upon by Christians. And so, whilst the owning of slaves was not, to begin with, illegal, mistreatment – especially of a sexual nature – was. This view led, inexorably, to the abandonment and abolition of the entire slave system. We find therefore, from the earliest times, many Christian leaders, such as Gregory of Nyssa and John Chrysostom, condemning slavery itself and calling for better treatment for slaves. In fact, tradition describes Pope Clement I (92 - 99), Pope Pius I (roughly 158 - 167) and Pope Callixtus I (217 - 222) as former slaves.
As a friend of the outcast and the poor, Jesus himself had given the lead in this issue, and from the beginning the Church made no account of the social condition of the faithful. Bond and free received the same sacraments. Clerics of servile origin were numerous (St. Jerome, Ep. lxxxii). As the Catholic Encyclopedia states, “So complete—one might almost say, so leveling—was this Christian equality that St. Paul (1 Timothy 6:2), and, later, St. Ignatius (Polyc., iv), are obliged to admonish the slave and the handmaid not to condemn their masters, ‘believers like them and sharing in the same benefits.’ In giving them a place in religious society, the Church restored to slaves the family and marriage. In Roman, law, neither legitimate marriage, nor regular paternity, nor even impediment to the most unnatural unions had existed for the slave (Digest, XXXVIII, viii, i, (sect) 2; X, 10, (sect) 5).”[4]
The above writer continues:
“Primitive Christianity did not attack slavery directly; but it acted as though slavery did not exist. By inspiring the best of its children with this heroic charity, examples of which have been given above, it remotely prepared the way for the abolition of slavery. To reproach the Church of the first ages with not having condemned slavery in principle, and with having tolerated it in fact, is to blame it for not having let loose a frightful revolution, in which, perhaps, all civilization would have perished with Roman society. But to say, with Ciccotti (Il tramonto della schiavitù (French trans., 1910) pp. 18, 20), that primitive Christianity had not even ‘an embryonic vision’ of a society in which there should be no slavery, to say that the Fathers of the Church did not feel ‘the horror of slavery,’ is to display either strange ignorance or singular unfairness. In St. Gregory of Nyssa (In Ecclesiastem, hom. iv) the most energetic and absolute reprobation of slavery may be found; and again in numerous passages of St. John Chrysostom’s discourse we have the picture of a society without slaves - a society composed only of free workers, an ideal portrait of which he traces with the most eloquent insistence (see the texts cited in Allard, Les esclaves chrétiens, p. 416-23).
“Under the Christian emperors this tendency [to ameliorate the conditions of slaves], in spite of relapses at certain points, became daily more marked ...”[5]
One by one the Christian emperors abolished the more noxious manifestations of slavery, such as gladiatorial contests; and finally, with the Corpus of laws promulgated by Justinian, in the sixth century, we find a formal condemnation of the institution. The rationale was explained in the Institutiones, (Title III, Book 1, paragraph 2) where we read the following: “Slavery is an institution of the law of nations, against nature, subjecting one man to the dominion of another.” Again, in Title II, Book 1, paragraph 2, it states “... the law of nations is common to the whole human race; for nations have settled certain things for themselves as occasion and the necessities of human life required. For instance, wars arose and then followed captivity and slavery, which are contrary to the law of nature; for by the law of nature all men from the beginning were born free.”
The Justinianic code was introduced into Italy (in 554), from where it was to pass to Western Europe in the twelfth century and become the basis of much European law. It passed also to Eastern Europe where it appeared in Slavic editions, and became the cornerstone of Russian law.
The end result of all this was that by the tenth or even ninth century the Church had effectively ended slavery in Europe. And this is a fact well-known. In the words of Rodney Stark, “… slavery ended in medieval Europe only because the church extended its sacraments to all slaves and then managed to impose a ban on the enslavement of Christians (and Jews). Within the context of medieval Europe, that prohibition was effectively a rule of universal abolition.”[6]
The above statement is conservative. In fact, by the eighth century slavery was well on the way to disappearing throughout Europe; but then, at that point, new life was breathed into it, and the slave-trade experienced a massive revival. The revival was a direct result of the arrival of Islam.
Islamic custom and practice with regard to slavery was always diametrically opposed to that of Christianity: For whereas Christianity acted to emphasize the equality of all before God and to alleviate the conditions of slaves, whose bodies were certainly not open to the sexual exploitation which was frequen
tly the fate of the slave in classical antiquity, Islam had no problem whatsoever with slavery. Indeed, the taking of comely captives seems to have been seen as a legitimate bonus owed to the warriors fighting to spread the faith. Thus for example after the slaughter of the male members of the Jewish tribe of Banu Quraiza Muhammad is said to have taken one of the most beautiful female captives as a concubine; whilst other successful military exploits of the Prophet invariably involved his procuring of slaves. And this behavior is fully sanctioned, for later generations, by the authority of the Qur’an. Thus, we read, in Sura 23: 5-6: “…abstain from sex, except with those joined to them in the marriage bond, or (the captives) whom their right hands possess - for (in their case) they are free from blame.” See also Sura 4:24.
Slaves are normally procured through banditry and piracy, a circumstance which would lead us to expect widespread Muslim piracy in the seventh century; and there is in fact much circumstantial evidence to suggest that this was the case. However, according to mainstream scholarship the only convincing documentary evidence for large scale Muslim piracy in the Mediterranean comes in the tenth century – precisely three hundred years afterward.[7]
The evidence for widespread Muslim piracy in the seventh century shall be examined presently. The claim that it only began in the tenth century is based on one factor alone: the lack of frequent reference to it in documentary sources before that time. The latter is cited by Michael McCormick in his voluminous study of trade during the Dark Ages. McCormick looked at reports of 239 travelers between Europe and the Near East during the seventh to ninth centuries. As he says; “... the single most remarkable thing about these 239 travelers runs counter to the conventional wisdom. For all the dangers modern medievalists have posited along early medieval shipping routes, very few of our travelers had their voyage interrupted by violence. The dangers of overseas travel were real, but they came as much from shipwreck and, I believe, illness, as predatory violence. Attacks did happen … Yet there is actually only one incident when pirates seized three western envoys, and they returned home, minus their effects, by the end of the year. … The relative rarity of such experiences, at least for diplomats and, so far as we can tell, pilgrims, is confirmed by the fact that the ambassadors’ capture provoked vociferous protest, and was reckoned without parallel. There were even intimations that it was all a Byzantine plot.”[8]
McCormick, and many like-minded historians, has been deceived by too trusting a reliance on documents purporting to come from the three Dark Age centuries. In fact, the latest research, which McCormick seems quite unaware of, suggests that the majority, and perhaps even the great majority, of Dark Age written texts are forgeries.[9] It has now emerged that virtually all of the texts claiming to derive from the mid-seventh to mid-tenth centuries were composed for political or propaganda purposes during the High Middle Ages, usually between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries. Thus it is likely that most, or indeed all, of McCormick’s 239 travelers were fictitious characters who were conjured into existence in order to set some form of legal precedent, and as such, their journeys cannot be used as evidence for conditions in Europe and the Mediterranean in the seventh, eighth or ninth centuries.
The actual archaeological evidence, which is of various types, suggests a tidal wave of violence engulfing the Mediterranean world from the early to middle seventh century onwards. And the evidence points overwhelmingly to Islam as the source of this violence.
First and foremost, there is the fact highlighted by Henri Pirenne of the rapid disappearance in the West of luxury imports from the East roughly between the 630s and 660s. These included such things as papyrus from Egypt, wine from Gaza and spices from further east. Archaeology has confirmed the disappearance of these things and many others at precisely this time. The termination of trade in such products suggests dangerous conditions along the Mediterranean routes.
Secondly, excavation has noted the rapid abandonment during the early to middle decades of the seventh century of the scattered and undefended farms and villas characteristic of the Roman period and their replacement by new settlements on heavily fortified hilltops – the first medieval castles.[10] This process is particularly characteristic of the Mediterranean shore lands of Europe. The retreat to defended hilltops suggests the threat of sudden attack.
Thirdly, archaeologists have noted the appearance throughout the Mediterranean littoral of a layer of subsoil which formed over the late Roman towns and settlements and which blocked harbors. This stratum, known as the Younger Fill, has caused a great deal of comment and has been explained in a number of ways. The best evidence however suggests that it was caused by the abandonment of the Roman system of land use during the seventh century.[11] Dykes, ditches and drainage channels fell into ruin or not repaired and the soil was washed into the valley floors. This again suggests massive disruption at the time.
Finally, evidence has emerged to show that the trade in slaves between the Arab world and Scandinavia – long believed to have commenced only in the ninth century – actually began in the middle of the seventh. This has been suggested by the discovery of a seventh century Scandinavian settlement at Staraja Ladoga in Russia[12] and by the occurrence of hoards of seventh century Islamic coins throughout Scandinavia and Russia.[13] Since it is well understood that the Viking raids were elicited by the Muslim demand for white-skinned European slaves, this would suggest that the Viking raids, and Muslim slave-trading, actually began in the seventh century rather than the ninth.[14] We shall have more to say about the Vikings and their role in the slave trade presently.
Fig. 3. Viking trade-routes in Russia.
Along the great rivers of Russia the Vikings conveyed thousands of Slavic captives into the Caliphate during the tenth century.
If all that is not enough, there are in fact many early accounts which seem to hint at widespread violence upon the Mediterranean during the seventh century. These reports usually do not refer specifically to piracy or slave-raiding, but the latter must be strongly suspected, even assumed. The whole of the Levant was scoured by Arab fleets from the 640s onwards, and the very center of the Eastern Empire, Constantinople, was not immune from attack. An Arab army, led by Muawiyah I, laid siege to the city between 674-678. Unable to breach the Theodosian Walls, the Muslims blockaded the metropolis along the Bosporus, but their fleet was eventually destroyed by the famous “Greek Fire” of Kallinikos (Callinicus) the Syrian. Although this was a decisive defeat, within just over half a century the Arabs were back. In 718 an 80,000-strong army led by Maslama, the brother of Caliph Suleiman, crossed the Bosporus from Anatolia to besiege the capital of the Eastern Empire by land, while a massive fleet of Arab war galleys commanded by another Suleiman, estimated to initially number 1,800 ships, sailed into the Sea of Marmara to the south of the city. After some desperate fighting, and the use once again by the defenders of “Greek Fire,” this onslaught was also repulsed. Further west, a similar picture emerges. A series of assaults on Sicily in 652, 667 and 720 are recorded; whilst Syracuse was conquered for the first time temporarily in 708. Sardinia was Islamicized in several stages beginning in 711, the very year of the Islamic conquest of Spain. The Italian island of Pantelleria was conquered by the Arabs in 700, and was attacked again a century later, when the Arabs sold the monks they captured into slavery in Spain.[15] In view of these and numerous other reports, we can surely agree with Pirenne’s assessment of the situation: “In the Occident … the coast of the Gulf of Lyons and the Riviera to the mouth of the Tiber, ravaged by war and the [Muslim] pirates, whom the Christians, having no fleet, were powerless to resist, was now merely a solitude and a prey to piracy. The ports and the cities were deserted. The link with the Orient was severed, and there was no communication with the Saracen coasts. There was nothing but death.”[16]
Irrespective of the argument about when massive Arab piracy and slave-raiding began, there is no doubt about its reality, in the tenth c
entury at least. By that time the impact of the Arab slave-raiding and trading was felt throughout Europe. Slaves were acquired by the caliphate both from direct raids along the European shores of the Mediterranean and by importing others from northern and eastern Europe. Crete, which was occupied by the Arabs in early tenth century became a major center of this activity. In 904 an Arab pirate force captured the city of Thessalonika – second city of the Byzantine Empire – and carried off 20,000 captives. In the west, fleets of Arab and Moorish pirates brought mayhem to the coasts of France and Italy. Sicily, Corsica and Sardinia, as well as the Balearic Islands, were important bases for the holding and selling of captives, large numbers of whom ended up in Spain, as well as in North Africa and the Middle East. But Arab raiders did not confine themselves to the coastal regions; large raiding parties penetrated far inland – on one occasion at least even as far as Switzerland.
In addition to the Mediterranean theater, the Arabs acquired vast numbers of slaves from northern and eastern Europe, purchased from Viking raiders and their intermediaries. In the words of Michael McCormick:
“The geographic breadth and diversity of networks transporting Europeans into the House of Islam [in the tenth century] is arresting. Beyond Frankish Europe, one famous stream of slaves tramped toward the southeast along the northern arc. They certainly were doing so in the early tenth century, and they may have started arriving earlier, along with the furs and Frankish swords, if that is how some of the Slavs of Iraq got there. Many of these slaves are believed to have been collected along the way as tribute or plunder from the Slav tribes whose territories the Rus [eastern Scandinavians] traversed. But at Birka [in Sweden], on the doorstep of the river routes toward Byzantium and the Caliphate, we have already met a troop of Christian slaves from the west. There is no reason to assume that their shipment stopped in the Swedish lakes zone.