During the 16th to 19th centuries, Islamic pirates of Morocco, Algiers, Tunisia, and Libya raided European coasts from Italy to Iceland and carried away over a million to the North African slave markets.
This is in addition to tens of millions of Africans sold in the notorious Muslim slave markets from Timbuktu to Zanzibar, from the Black Sea to the Indian Ocean.
The Catholic Order of Trinitarians or Mathurins, collected alms to ransom slaves.
Modern-day charities ransoming Christians from slavery in Africa and South Asia include Exodus 51 and Christian Solidarity International, supported by Eric Metaxas.
One of those ransomed from North Africa was in 1580 was Miguel de Cervantes, author of Don Quixote de La Mancha (1605). He described:
"They put a chain on me ... I passed my life in that bano with several other(s) … marked out as held to ransom … We suffered from hunger and scanty clothing … Nothing distressed us so much as … seeing … unheard of cruelties my master inflicted upon the Christians ...
Every day he hanged a man … all with so little provocation … Turks acknowledged he did it merely for the sake of doing it."
Another notable slave ransomed was St. Vincent DePaul in 1607, who then pioneered hospital care in Europe.
In 1617, 800 Barbary pirate ships, called corsairs, took 1,200 captives from Madeira, Portugal.
In 1625, corsairs sailed up the Thames River and raided England.
Giles Milton wrote White Gold: The Extraordinary Story of Thomas Pellow and North Africa's One Million European Slaves, 2004, describing how Pellow was captured at age 11 and escaped 23 years later.
The coast of Cornwall was raided with 60 villagers captured at Mount's Bay and 80 at Looe.
They attacked Lundy Island in Bristol Channel and raised the standard of Islam.
By the end of 1625, over 1,000 English subjects were taken to the slave markets of Morocco.
That same year, 1625, Pilgrims in Massachusetts sent 800 lbs. of beaver skins and dried fish back to England to trade for much needed supplies, but their ship, the Little James, was captured by Turkish pirates.
Governor William Bradford wrote in History of the Plymouth Settlement, 1650:
"They ... were well within the English channel, almost in sight of Plymouth.
But ... there she was unhapply taken by a Turkish man-of-war and carried off to Saller, Morocco, where the captain and crew were made slaves ...
Now by the ship taken by the Turks ... all trade was dead."
In 1627, Algerian pirates, led by Murat Reis the Younger, raided Iceland, and carried 400 into North African slavery.
One captured girl, who had been made a slave concubine in Algeria, was rescued back by King Christian IV of Denmark.
On June 20, 1631, the entire village of Baltimore, Ireland, "The Stolen Village," was captured and herded onto Muslim pirate ships. Only two ever returned.
Thomas Osborne Davis wrote in his poem, "The Sack of Baltimore" (1895):
"The yell of 'Allah!' breaks above the shriek and roar;
O'blessed God! the Algerine is lord of Baltimore."
Des Ekin wrote in The Stolen Village: Baltimore and the Barbary Pirates (2008):
"Here was not a single Christian who was not weeping and who was not full of sadness at the sight of so many honest maidens and so many good women abandoned to the brutality of these barbarians."
The History of Barbary and its Corsairs, 1637, recorded that in 1634, Trinitarian priest Pierre Dan went to Algeria and witnessed “piteous” Irish families split apart at slave markets, never to see one-another again.
Joseph Wheelan wrote in Jefferson’s War: America’s First War on Terror, 2004:
“As soon as Europeans fell into the raiders’ hands, the captives were stripped of their clothes, given rags to wear, and either were put in irons or made to work the ship …
Handsomest male slaves were usually chosen as palace pages, and the prettiest women were sent to Constantinople as gifts to the sultan.
The rest were auctioned in the slave mart … Buyers examined the prisoners … as they would any domestic animal.”
"I arrived in Algiers, that city fatal to all Christians and the butchery of mankind."
In Morocco, Sultan Moulay Ismail had a harem of 500 mostly captured from Europe, who bore him a record 1,042 children.
He forced 25,000 white slaves to build his enormous palace at Meknes.
He once killed an African slave just to try out a new hatchet.
Moulay Ismail was described by John Windus in A Journey to Mequinez, 1825:
"His trembling court assemble, which consists of ... blacks, whites, tawnies and his favorite Jews, all barefooted ...
He is ... known by … the color of the habit that he wears, yellow being observed to be his killing color; from all of which they calculate whether they may hope to live twenty-four hours longer ... He (rides) out of town ... attended by fifteen or twenty thousand blacks … with whom he … diverts himself -- by throwing -- the lance ... knotted cords for whipping.”
Abolitionist Republican Senator Charles Sumner wrote White Slavery in the Barbary States, 1853:
"The Saracens, with the Koran and the sword, potent ministers of conversion, next broke from Arabia, as the messengers of a new religion, and pouring along these shores ...
Algiers, for a long time the most obnoxious place in the Barbary States of Africa, the chief seat of Christian slavery ... the wall of the barbarian world.”
In November 12, 1644, the Massachusetts General Court, as recorded in The Pirates of the New England Coast, 1630-1730, stated:
“Turkish pirates … meaning the Algerines … were a constant danger to shipping trading with Spain.”
In 1669, Captain William Foster sailed the Dolphin out of Charlestown, Massachusetts, and was captured by Barbary pirates.
John Hull, first mint-master of Massachusetts Bay, recorded:
“October 21, 1671. We received intelligence that William Foster, master of a small ship, was taken by the Turks as he was going to Bilboa, Spain, with fish.”
Cotton Mather wrote in Magnalia Christi Americana, 1702:
"There was a Godly gentleman of Charlestown, one Mr. Foster, who with his son, was taken captive by Turkish enemies.”
Rev. John Eliot of Roxbury, “the Apostle to the Indians,” led his congregation in prayer that Moroccan Prince Moulay Rashid would release Foster.
Mather wrote:
“Much prayer was employed, both privately and publicly, by the good people here, for the redemption of that gentleman …
But we were at last informed, that the bloody Prince, in whose dominions he was now a slave, was resolved that in his lifetime no prisoner should be released …
The distressed friends of this prisoner now concluded, our hope is lost! …
Upon this, Rev. Eliot, in some of his next prayers, before a very solemn congregation … begged …
'Heavenly Father, work for the redemption of thy poor servant Foster … and if the Prince which detains him will not … dismiss him as long himself lives, Lord, we pray thee to kill that cruel Prince … and glorify thy self upon him.'"
Shortly after, April 9, 1672, Prince Moulay Rashid fell from his horse and died in Marrakesh at the age of 42.
Cotton Mather added:
"The poor captive gentleman – Foster -- quickly returns to us that had been mourning for him as a lost man, and brings us news, that the Prince which had hitherto held him, was come to an untimely death, by which means he was now set at liberty.”
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Image Credits: Public Domain; Edward Moran (1829–1901); Burning of the Frigate Philadelphia in the Harbor of Tripoli; Blue pencil.svg wikidata:Q966864; USS Philadelphia, previously captured by the Tripolitans, ablaze after she was boarded by Stephen Decatur and 60 men and set afire, making their escape in the ketch Intrepid, depicted in the foreground; Date: 1897; Collection: U.S. Naval Academy Museum Collection; Object history: Gift of Paul E. Sutro, 1940; Inscriptions: signed and dated by the artist; Source/Photographer: Naval History and Heritage Command: Photo #: KN-10849; https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Burning_of_the_uss_philadelphia.jpg