LITMIR.BIZ

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      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.

AN LUSHAN REBELLION

      Death toll: 36 million missing

      Rank: 13

      Type: military uprising

      Broad dividing line: the frontier military vs. the central government

      Time frame: 755–63

      Location: China

      Who usually gets the most blame: An Lushan mostly, but also the dotty and infatuated Emperor Xuanzong

      CHINA UNDER THE TANG DYNASTY REACHED FARTHER WEST THAN AT ANYTIME before or since. This Chinese expansion coincided with the eruption of Arab empire builders all across the Middle East, leading to history’s only battle between Chinese and Arab armies, at the Talas River in central Asia in 751.

      Somewhere in the rugged borderland between these expanding cultures, probably near Bukhara in Turkistan, An Lushan was born around 703. His mother was descended from an important Turkic clan. His father, probably a soldier of

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