Millennium by Holland, Tom (any book recommendations txt) 📕

were true: one traveller, witnessing a great flotilla of ships in Taranto, then in Saracen hands, claimed to have seen some twelve thousand captives being loaded ready for transport to the markets of Africa.

System as much as savagery was what underpinned this trafficking. The duties of slavers were carefully divided up. Some would guard the ships, others prepare the irons, others bring in the captives. Some even specialised in the rounding up of children. The natives too — those with the determination to profit from the slavers rather than to end up as their victims — had their roles to play. Italians at every level of society were profoundly implicated in the hunting down of their fellow Christians. Even a pope, it was rumoured, feeling the pinch, had once dabbled in it on the quiet. There were others who positively flaunted their collaboration. Amalfi, a city perched on the edge of a rocky peninsula south of Naples, was particularly notorious for her partisanship of the Saracens. So too, indeed – the occasional panic notwithstanding – was Naples herself. These two cities, by offering support and supplies to the slave trade, and by systematically frustrating all attempts to combat it, had begun gradually to pull themselves free of the general impoverishment of the times. Only the cost to their souls, perhaps, had to be put on the debit side. Already, in the ninth century, the markets of Naples had grown so bustling that visitors commented on how they appeared almost African in their prosperity. The Amalfitans, meanwhile, defying the barrenness of their native rock, had profited even more shrewdly from their links to the slavers, and transformed their cliff-top city, somewhat implausibly, into a hub of international trade. While other Italians huddled together for refuge on bleak hilltops, the merchants of Amalfi were to be found in harbours across the entire Mediterranean, from Tunisia to Egypt to Constantinople, flush with Saracen gold.

And all the while, the attentions of the Saracens themselves had been growing ever more predacious. No longer, by the late tenth century, were most slavers operating as freebooters: instead, they had begun to receive official backing in their activities from the rulers of Sicily. The brother of one emir, indeed, had been known to lead slaving expeditions in person. This was an ominous development indeed. No wonder that some Christian leaders, marking the sweep of corsairs across entire provinces of Italy, the winnowing of cities for human booty and the sustained harrowing of the countryside, had begun to wonder whether the depredations might not be motivated by something more sinister than simply greed. Christendom, it appeared to them, was being systematically drained of her lifeblood: her reservoir of human souls. Worse — the more she was emptied, the more those who fed on her were sustained. ‘For it is the fate of

 

 

prisoners of our own race,’ as one despairing monk observed, ‘both male and female, to end up adding to the resources of the lands beyond the sea.’

Such paranoia was not unjustified. True, the main concern of the slavers remained, as it had always been, the harvesting of profit; and their ignorance of their own faith – to say nothing of their appalling Arabic and their fondness for raw onions – were things of scandal across the Saracen world. Nevertheless, state sponsorship of the corsairs had increasingly, throughout the tenth century, served to grace their marauding with a sheen of religiosity: for it was the practice of the rulers of Sicily, even as they creamed off their own percentage, to cast their subjects’ brigandage as a spiritual discipline. ‘Jihad”, they termed it: a word of rare and suggestive potency, signifying as it did the eternal struggle, incumbent upon all followers of Mohammed, to spread his faith to the utmost limits of the world. Corsairs, even as they glided in through the gates of an unsuspecting Italian town, could do so in the certainty that they were following in the footsteps of the divine. ‘How many cities have We destroyed?’ So God Himself, according to Mohammed, had demanded. ‘Our punishment took them on a sudden by night or while they slept for their afternoon rest.”

Well might jurists in the Caliphate have termed the world beyond their frontiers ‘the House of War’. Its strife-torn poverty and backwardness appeared to those who preyed upon it merely the natural state of things: irrefutable proof that God had indeed abandoned the ‘infidel’, and transferred dominion into their own hands. Mohammed himself, the very first of his faith to have assaulted and despoiled a foe, had been graced with a firm assurance of this by the archangel Gabriel, no less. So, at any rate, it was recorded in the Qur’an: the holy book of his revelations. To the Prophet, and to all who followed him, had been granted the ‘spoils of war’ – and a constituent part of this plunder, divinely gifted, had been human livestock. All loot, if diverted to the proper charitable causes — ‘to near relatives, orphans, the needy, and the wayfarer’ – might be reckoned to serve God’s purpose; but prisoners, perhaps, most of all. Slavery did not have to be for life. Mohammed, who had prescribed that only infidels be sold as chattels, had also declared the freeing of converts a blessed act. Even a priest abducted from his church, as he toiled in a foreign field, or a nun, stolen to serve in a master’s bed, might find food for thought in that.

To be sure, there were many Christian slaves, putting their trust in the life to come, who did stay true to their native faith; but there were many more who did not. Conversion to their masters’ religion, for such renegades, brought not only the prospect of freedom, but a measure of dignity. All men, Mohammed had taught, were equal before God – for all men, even the very greatest, were His slaves. So it was that the Prophet’s followers referred to