A Mother And Child Could Survive The Raid Together. Then The Market Tore Them Apart On Purpose
For Three Hundred Years They Harvested Human Beings
From the middle of the 1400s to the late 1700s, the Crimean Khanate and its Nogai allies ran one of the largest slave-raiding operations in history. They were a vassal state of the Ottoman Empire, and their business was people. Not land. Not treasure. People.
The raiders crossed the open steppe on fast horses and struck villages in Poland, Lithuania, Ukraine and Russia that had no walls and no warning. They avoided armies. They went for farming families. Between 1450 and 1586 there are eighty-six recorded raids. Between 1600 and 1647 there are seventy more.
The average raid took around three thousand people. In the region of Podolia alone, a third of every village was destroyed or abandoned in the space of five years. The captives were bound and driven on foot. Hands tied behind the back, or a rope looped around the neck and run forward to the person ahead, forming columns that stretched for miles across the grass.
The march to Crimea took weeks. Anyone who could not keep the pace was killed where they fell. One Ottoman traveler who watched a column pass in the mid-1500s complained about it in writing, not because it horrified him, but because so many were dying that it was driving up the price of the survivors. At the end of the march was Kaffa, on the Black Sea.
In the 1570s alone, roughly twenty thousand people a year were sold there.
At times the city held thirty thousand human beings waiting to be bought. A Lithuanian writer of the period called it the mouth that drank the blood of his people. One tenth of every catch was handed to the Khan as his share. From Kaffa they were shipped out.
The holds were so overcrowded that captives could not sit or lie down. They ate standing and slept standing. The ones who sickened were thrown into the sea. Greek observers reported that during the Ottoman period, three or four ships arrived in Constantinople every single day carrying Slavic slaves.
The men were sent to the galleys and chained to the benches until the work killed them. The women were sold into households and harems. The children were raised as something other than what they had been born. A Polish ambassador to Crimea in the late 1500s wrote that the captives were so ground down by hunger and beatings that they would rather die than go on living.
Over three centuries, the best estimates put the total at around two million people. Up to a million taken from Poland and Lithuania alone. Two hundred thousand Russians in the first half of the 1600s. Entire regions were emptied. The raids are the reason the Cossack frontier communities existed in the first place, because someone had to stand between the villages and the horsemen. One captive’s account survives with a single line that says everything the numbers cannot. And I saw my mother no more ever since.
How Arab Colonialism Conquered the Middle East
For the past 1400 years, the Arabisation of the Middle East has been an ongoing process.
How did the indigenous peoples of the Middle East outside of the Arabian Peninsula become “Arabs?” A perspective on colonialism.
Jan 18, 2016
With the refugee crisis escalating by the day, we are witnessing a massive influx of refugees into Europe, risking their lives journeying across heavy seas in flimsy rubber boats.
European countries have taken in more than they can handle, yet none of the rich Arabian Gulf countries have taken in a single refugee, even though they are situated close to the areas under attack. Interestingly, Saudi Arabia has offered to finance the building of 200 mosques in Germany for the refugees. Why mosques? Why not housing to ease the burden on Germany and other European countries? Why not take in three million refugee families which can be accommodated immediately in the already existing camp in Saudi Arabia? Three million fire-proof tents with air-conditioning are sitting there empty. To tackle these questions we would have to look into a brief history of the region.
When referring to the Middle East, people automatically assume that one is referring to ‘Arabs’ and ‘Muslims’. So how did the entire region become Arab-Muslim when in fact it is a region composed of a diverse mix of ethnicities and religions?
Originally Arabs were a minority in the Middle East; they existed predominantly in the Arabian Peninsula. How did they expand? What happened to the other nations around them? Did they vanish?