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I found this comment essay when researching the slave trade on reddit. Im curious how accurate is it cause its giving off red flags vibe
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Something you seem to be missing is slavery was normal and ubiquitous to the entirety of the world and human civilisation. From the Americas to Africa to Asia. What was weird is Christian countries were phasing it out or banning it at all
The Christians had banned it in most of Western, Central and Northern Europe. With the main region of Western Europe that hadn’t banned slavery being Iberia. A region mostly under Muslim control until the 1400s
The venetian slave trade was also in severe decline compared to the later Ottoman slave markets. The declining Venetian slave trade was revived and incorporated into the Ottoman slave trade with gusto
Venice used to deal in hundreds of thousands and by the time of the trades ends. It was a few hundred. You’d notice the difference if that figure was your salary wouldn’t you? You lack of acknowledgement of that is both weird and digesting
Spain was an exception. I told you as much. Slavery was common in Iberia. mainly Ruled by Muslims until the 1400s. Way to prove my point
Portugal. Another one of those Iberian kingdoms that had slave system inherited from Islamic rule. Started the slave trade in Africans and then most of Western Europe had to rediscover slavery and still had laws banning slavery and having to create whole new laws related to the colonies to continue it
Much of what that comment has to say is inaccurate.
What the Catholic Church had actually attempted to ban was the practice of Christians enslaving other Christians and especially selling Christians as slaves to infidels. That is actually why slavery and the slave trade became most common in Italy and Iberia by the time of the High Middle Ages: because of basic geography, they were closest to large populations of peoples who were seen as fair game to be captured and sold into slavery for not being properly Christian. They included, but were not limited to, Muladi, Eastern Slavs, Armenians, Circassians, Albanians, Georgians, Tatars, Abkhaz, Mingrelians, Cumans, Turks, and Bosnians.
Only two medieval Christian realms can be said to have done anything a bit close to abolishing slavery: England and France.
After the Norman conquest of England, its new kings began converting the status of its slaves into serfs (which was a still a status of being unfree, but less restrictive than slavery) and formally banned the slave trade in 1102.
Louis X of France published a decree in 1315 banning slavery in France and that any slave that set foot on French soil would become free. This was never quite overturned, though France later made extensive use of slavery in its colonies.
Iberia was not mostly under Muslim control until the 1400s. By that period, Muslim Iberia rulers had long since been limited to the Emirs of Granada, who had only survived as a tributary state to the kingdom of Castile. Castile, which was ruled by Catholics, was the actual largest kingdom in 15th century Iberia and had been for nearly two centuries.
So what happened? The Almohad Caliphate's fortunes turned sour starting in 1212 when its caliph, Muhammad al-Nasir, was defeated at the Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa by Alfonso VIII of Castile, Sancho VII of Navarre, and Pere II of Aragon. His dynasty and caliphate then began a rapid decline. By 1248, the Almohads had lost Seville, its last Iberian holding, to Alfonso VIII's energetic grandson, Fernando III of Castile. After that date, like I said before, the only Muslim-ruled Iberian state left was the Emirate of Granada. That was what conquered by Isabel I of Castile and Fernando II of Aragon in 1492.
This is exactly backwards. Venice had had a thriving slave trade since the Early Middle Ages. It began to dwindle after the Ottomans conquered Constantinople in 1453 and Caffa in 1475. Both of these prevented Venice and the other Italian city-states from having easy access to the Balkans, Crimea, Eastern Europe, and the Caucasus, which had previously served as their source of sufficiently non-Christian slaves.
It's completely absurd to say that slave systems were unknown in Iberia before they were introduced by the Umayyad Caliphate. The Visigoth kingdom of Iberia absolutely had slavery and numerous laws governing it. So did the other Germanic kingdoms elsewhere in Europe and so had the Roman Empire. Most of the royalty of the Christian Iberian kingdoms were of mixed Visigoth and Basque origins and did not need the Umayyads to teach them a system of how to enslave people.
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Thanks for the thorough response