Christian traders freely sold baptized Christians into Muslim slavery.

Evidence

Evans’s use of his sources is, however, sometimes quite curious. For instance, he uses Iris Origo’s work as one confirmation for his contention that Christian Europe and its rulers denied Christian slaves to the Muslim trade. On precisely the same page cited by Evans, Origo says something quite different: “Nevertheless, it is quite plain that many of the Genoese and Venetian traders in the Black Sea paid little heed as to whether the human wares they carried had, or had not, been sanctified by baptism. The deeds of sale in Caffa and Pera in 1289 show that many of the slaves who were sold there belonged to peoples professing either the Catholic or Orthodox faith, since they included Circassians, Greeks, Russians, Georgians, Alans, and Lesghians … this did not prevent their sale” (“The Domestic Enemy,” op. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1787

Categorization

Category: Factual Claims

• XREF: Relevant to the reader’s Black radical tradition research: this chapter of Black Marxism itself corrects the record on Islamic slavery historiography, which Robinson argues was distorted to excuse Western racial ideology. Connects to Robinson’s broader argument about how Western scholarship has caricatured Islamic slavery.

Related

• European traders sold baptized Christians into Muslim slavery despite papal prohibition (similarity 0.94)
• Medieval slavery in the Mediterranean ran in many directions, not just one. (similarity 0.83)
• The medieval Christian church profited from an eight-century European slave trade (similarity 0.80)
• Slaves were medieval Mediterranean traders’ most valuable commodity. (similarity 0.80)
• Islamic slavery conventions were not adopted into the emerging European world system (similarity 0.79)
• European slaves were medieval Islam’s most important import from the West (similarity 0.79)
• Venetian and Genoese wealth depended on trade with Muslim powers. (similarity 0.78)
• Merchants circumvented religious prohibitions by buying dispensations to trade with Muslims (similarity 0.78)