For centuries, tens of millions of Africans were sold at Islamic slave markets from Timbuktu on the Niger River, where the canoe meets the caravan, to Khartoum, to the Zanzibar coast on the Indian Ocean.
In addition, over a million Europeans were captured and sold at Muslim slave markets in Morocco, Algiers, Tunisia and Libya.
Catholic Orders, such as the "Trinitarians" or "Mathurins," would collect alms and ransom slaves.
Notable ransomed were in 1607, St. Vincent DePaul, and in 1580, Miguel de Cervantes, author of Don Quixote de La Mancha, 1605, who wrote:
"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."
Modern-day charities ransoming Christians from slavery in Africa and South Asia include Exodus 51 and Christian Solidarity International, supported by Eric Metaxas.
In 1588, English and Dutch privateers defeated the invincible Spanish Armada.
Privateers captured Spanish ships of gold and brought their treasures back to Queen Elizabeth’s England.
In 1604, King James I made a peace treaty with Spain banning English piracy, issuing a "Proclamation to Repress All Piracies and Depredations upon the Sea.”
This essentially left privateers unemployed. Some became lawless pirates, finding ports for their stolen goods along the Barbary coast.
A few even became accursed “renegado,” or Christians turned Turk, sharing their superior sailing skills with Muslim maritime marauders and directing ships, called corsairs, to attack North Atlantic trade.
In 1617, 800 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, Pilgrims in Massachusetts sent beaver skins and dried fish back to England for trade, but their ship 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, Ottoman Algerian pirate Murat Reis the Younger raided Iceland and carried away 800.
One captured girl was made a concubine in Algeria but was ransomed by Denmark’s King Christian IV.
In 1631, Algerian pirates herded "The Stolen Village" of Baltimore, Ireland, onto ships. Only two ever returned.
Thomas Osborne Davis wrote in "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.”
Kidnapped Englishman Francis Knight wrote in A Relation of Seven Years of Slavery under Turks of Algiers, 1640:
"I arrived in Algiers, that city fatal to all Christians and the butchery of mankind."
The Sultan of Morocco was Moulay Ismail.
He had a harem of 500, mostly captured European women, who bore him a record 1,042 children.
He had 25,000 white slaves build him a palace at Meknes.
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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