slave raiding

Slave raiding is a military raid for the purpose of capturing people and bringing them from the raid area to serve as slaves. Once seen as a normal part of warfare, it is nowadays widely considered a war crime. Slave raiding has occurred since antiquity. Some of the earliest surviving written records of slave raiding come from Sumer (in present-day Iraq). Kidnapping and prisoners of war were the most common sources of African slaves, although indentured servitude or punishment also resulted in slavery.

The many alternative methods of obtaining human beings to work in indentured or other involuntary conditions, as well as technological and cultural changes, have made slave raiding rarer.

Reasons

Slave raiding was a large and lucrative trade on the coasts of Africa, in Europe, Mesoamerica, and in medieval Asia. The Crimean–Nogai slave raids in Eastern Europe provided some two or three million slaves to the Ottoman Empire via the Crimean slave trade over the course of four centuries. The Barbary pirates from the 16th century onwards through 1830 engaged in razzias in Africa and the European coastal areas as far away as Iceland, capturing slaves for the Muslim slavery market in North Africa and West Asia. The Atlantic slave trade was predicated on European countries endorsing and supporting slave raiding between African tribes to supply the workforce of agricultural plantations in the Americas For three and a half centuries, European slave traders, primarily Iberian, transported African captives across the Atlantic in slave ships. The ships came from the ports of all the major European maritime powers—Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, Great Britain, France, and Brandenburg-Prussia.

Methods

The act of slave raiding involves an organised and concerted attack on a settlement with the purpose of taking the area's people. The collected new slaves are often kept in some form of slave pen or depot. From there, the slave takers will transport them to a distant place by means such as a slave ship or camel caravan. When conquered people are enslaved and remain in their place, it is not raiding.

Historically

Saracen piracy

During the Middle ages, Saracen Andalusian pirates established themselves in bases in southern France, the Baleares, Southern Italy and Sicily, from which they raided the coasts of the Christian Mediterranean and exported their prisoners as Saqaliba slaves to the slave markets of the Muslim West Asia.

The Aghlabids of Ifriqiya was a base for Saracen attacks along the Spanish East coast as well as against Southern Italy from the early 9th-century; they attacked Rome in 845, Comacchio in 875-876, Monte Cassino in 882-83, and established the Emirate of Bari (847–871), the Emirate of Sicily (831–1091) and a base in Garigliano (882-906), which became bases of slave trade.The Cambridge Illustrated History of the Middle Ages. (1986). Storbritannien: Cambridge University Press. p. 408
During the warfare between Rome and the Byzantine Empire in Southern Italy in the 9th-century the Saracens made Southern Italy a supply source for a slave trade to Maghreb by the mid 9th-century; the Western Emperor Louis II complained in a letter to the Byzantine Emperor that the Byzantines in Naples guided the Saracens in their raids toward South Italy and aided them in their slave trade with Italians to North Africa, an accusation noted also by the Lombard Chronicler Erchempert.

Moorish Saracen pirates from al-Andalus attacked Marseille and Arles and established a base in Camargue, Fraxinetum or La Garde-Freinet-Les Mautes (888–972), from which they made slave raids in to France;The Cambridge Illustrated History of the Middle Ages. (1986). Storbritannien: Cambridge University Press. p. 408 the population fled in fear of the slave raids, which made it difficult for the Frankish to secure their Southern coast, and the Saracens of Fraxinetum exported the Frankisk prisoners they captured as slaves to the slave market of the Muslim Middle East.

The Saracens captured the Baleares in 903, and made slave raids also from this base toward the coasts of the Christian Mediterranean and Sicily.

While the Saracen bases in France was eliminated in 972, this did not prevent the Saracen piracy slave trade of the Mediterranean; both Almoravid dynasty (1040–1147) and the Almohad Caliphate (1121–1269) approved of the slave raiding of Saracen pirates toward non-Muslim ships in Gibraltar and the Mediterranean for the purpose of slave raiding.

Vikings

The Vikings raided the coastlines of Ireland for people, cattle and goods. High status captives were taken back to their community or families to be ransomed—this included bishops and kings. In the Annals of Ulster it is recorded that in 821 AD Howth, was raided and "a great booty of women was carried away". By the tenth and eleventh centuries the Vikings had established slave markets in Ireland's major ports. However, following political allegiances with the Vikings, the Irish Kings also took local captives to profit from these slave markets. By the late tenth century, the Vikings began to suffer significant military defeats and the Irish Kings now seized captives from the defeated Viking armies and their captured towns, with the justification that the inhabitants were foreigners bearing the sins of their ancestors.

The Norsemen were first recorded in Ireland in 795, when they plundered the island of Rathlin. This island, off the northeast coast of Ireland, is home to numerous burial sites with official evidence of their existence. According to the Annals of Ulster, the first raid on this island was known as "Loscad Rechrainne o geinntib," also known as "the burning of Rechru by heathens." Sporadic raids continued until 832, after which the Norsemen began to establish fortified settlements throughout the country. Norse raids continued throughout the 10th century, but resistance to them grew. The Norsemen established independent kingdoms in Dublin, Waterford, Wexford, Cork, and Limerick. These kingdoms did not survive subsequent Norman invasions, but the towns continued to grow and prosper.

Crimean–Nogai slave raids

The Crimean–Nogai slave raids in Eastern Europe provided some two or three million slaves for slavery in the Ottoman Empire via the Crimean slave trade between the 15th-century until the late 18th-century. During this period the Crimean Khanate was the destination of the Crimean–Nogai slave raids in Eastern Europe, and European and Circassian slaves were trafficked to the Middle East via the Crimea.

Between 1441 and 1774, the Crimean Khanate and the Nogai Horde conducted slave raids throughout lands primarily controlled by Russia and Poland–Lithuania. Concentrated in Eastern Europe, but also stretching to the Caucasus and parts of Central Europe, these raids were often supported by the Ottoman Empire and involved the transportation of European men, women, and children to the Muslim world, where they were put on the market and sold as part of the Crimean slave trade and the Ottoman slave trade. The regular abductions of people over the course of numerous incursions by the Crimeans and the Nogais greatly drained Eastern Europe's human and economic resources, consequently playing an important role in the emergence of the semi-militarized Cossacks, who organized retaliatory campaigns against the raiders and their Ottoman backers.

Barbary pirates

European slaves were acquired by Barbary pirates in slave raids on ships and by raids on coastal towns from Italy to the Netherlands, Ireland and the southwest of Britain, as far north as Iceland and into the Eastern Mediterranean. On some occasions, settlements such as Baltimore in Ireland were abandoned following a raid, only being resettled many years later.

West Africa

Raiding villages was also a method of capturing slaves in Africa, and accounted for the overwhelming majority of West African slaves. While there was some slave raiding along the African coasts by Europeans, much of the raiding that took place was performed by other West Africans powers. Gomes Eannes de Azurara, who witnessed a Portuguese raid noted that some captives drowned themselves, others hid in under their huts, and others hid their children among the seaweed. Portuguese coastal raiders found that raiding was too costly and often ineffective and opted for established commercial relations.

The increase in the demand for slaves due to the expansion of European colonial powers to the New World made the slave trade much more lucrative to the West African powers, leading to the establishment of a number of actual West African empires thriving on the slave trade. These included the Bono State, Oyo empire ( Yoruba), Kong Empire, Imamate of Futa Jallon, Imamate of Futa Toro, Kingdom of Koya, Kingdom of Khasso, Kingdom of Kaabu, Fante Confederacy, Ashanti Confederacy, and the kingdom of Dahomey. These kingdoms relied on a militaristic culture of constant warfare to generate the great numbers of human captives required for trade with the Europeans.

Spanish in Chile

Although there was a general ban on enslavement of indigenous people by Spanish Crown, the 1598–1604 Mapuche uprising that ended with the Destruction of the Seven Cities made the Spanish in 1608 declare slavery legal for those Mapuches caught in war.Valenzuela Márquez 2009, p. 231–233 Mapuches "rebels" were considered Christian apostates and could therefore be enslaved according to the church teachings of the day.Foerster 1993, p. 21. In reality these legal changes only formalized Mapuche slavery that was already occurring at the time, with captured Mapuches being treated as property in the way that they were bought and sold among the Spanish. Legalisation made Spanish slave raiding increasingly common in the Arauco War. Mapuche slaves were exported north to places such as La Serena and Lima.Valenzuela Márquez 2009, pp. 234–236 The Mapuche uprising of 1655 had parts of its background in the slave hunting expeditions of Juan de Salazar, including his failed 1654 expedition.Barros Arana 2000, p. 348.Barros Arana 2000, p. 349. Slavery for Mapuches "caught in war" was abolished in 1683 after decades of legal attempts by the Spanish Crown to suppress it.

South African Republic and the Boer Republics

The practice of slavery and slave raiding also took place along the borders of the South African Republic by the Boers up until at least 1870. West Transvaal Boers and others procured women and children as slaves and used them as domestic servants and plantation workers. Boer slave raids in the South African Republic were regular and the number captured totaled in the thousands. This is despite the prohibition of slavery north of the Vaal River under the 1852 Sand River Convention.

See also

* Abduction
* Bride kidnapping
* Blackbirding
* Crimean-Nogai raids into East Slavic lands
* Turkish Abductions
* Shanghaiing

Notes

References

Bibliography

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{{War crimes

raiding
Kidnapping
War crimes by type