Alessandro Riolo
People often speak as if Mediterranean slavery were a one-way story: North-African corsairs preying on innocent Christian shores. It is an evocative picture, but it leaves out half the sea. For centuries the Middle Sea moved in both directions: raiding, ransom and captivity were a shared way of life. The real question is not “who started it?” but who stopped first – and why. My own city’s old proverb, its unofficial motto really, "cu attrappa un Turcu è sòo" – “who catches a Turk will own it” – comes from that earlier world of opportunistic sea-fighting. It carries the dry realism of people who lived by sails and chance. As Master Thucydides once wrote, in the Melian Dialogue: “The strong do what they wish, and the weak suffer what they must.” Our Sicilian variation adds a twist: power acts whenever fortune allows. If the waves throw someone into your hands, then the sea itself has awarded you the prize. If one looks beneath the modern moral lens, the Mediterranean for most of its post Roman history was a three-way system: Christians capturing Muslims, Muslims capturing Christians, and Jews ensnared within the same dangerous waters – often as victims, sometimes as intermediaries, occasionally as corsairs under shifting alliances. Slaves and ransoms criss-crossed the straits and the canals. Each shore answered the other; each community knew what the other was capable of. There was terror in the system, but also crude reciprocity. The turning point arrived not in the ports of Tunis or Algiers, but in the souls and eventually the chancelleries of northern Italy. A moral change spread slowly through Latin Christendom: first close the Christian slave markets, then forbid the trade outright, then redeem and free those already held. Popes – many of them from states that had grown ideologically hostile to slavery – made that programme universal law. What had once been a shared maritime profession became, in Catholic lands, socially condemned, even when traces lingered at the edges - my own citizens closed the slave market, freed the slaves, but if they captured a Muslim raider his destiny was the galley or the American slave markets. This was not merely a Christian story. Jewish communities, long exposed to capture on all sides, eventually used the same ethical shift to press for greater protection. Their networks in Livorno, Venice and Amsterdam organised redemption, translated negotiations, and quietly celebrated each market closure as one less place where their people might disappear. The end of reciprocity meant the end of an old way of surviving. Across the water, a different legal and religious world endured. In the Ottoman Maghreb and the Eastern Mediterranean, corsairing remained a legitimate profession – a naval economy tied to borders, tribute and empire. Figures like Sinan Reis, a Jew who rose to Ottoman command, will show how identities could bend to the grain of local power. Yet this continuity fundamentally meant asymmetry: one side abandoned an ancient custom just as the other still relied on it. The paradox, then, is that Christian withdrawal did not end suffering; it reshaped it. And that is what distorts our understanding. When Catholic powers stopped retaliating, captives had no equal threat behind them. Jewish communities in particular lost the uneasy protection that mutual fear once enforced. Their fate especially depended on diplomacy, charity, and luck, not on a navy that might avenge them. The Sicilians on the other hands had tercios, marines, towers and fleets. What truly emerges is not a morality tale of villains and victims, but a reminder of how quickly a balanced order can tilt when only one half decides to rewrite the rules. The proverb survived; its world did not. It remains a shard of memory from a time when the sea’s laws were harsh – and shared. Today we remember only the final act, when one side still raided and the other no longer replied. But the people of Middle Sea have a longer memory.
Catharsis
Europeans enslaved uncivilized masses lacking basic technology like the wheel or guns. The Turks, on the other hand, enslaved Europeans. If I were a European, I would be ashamed to even mention this. It's kinda pathetic...
