European traders sold baptized Christians into Muslim slavery despite papal prohibition

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

• XREF: This endnote’s dissection of Evans’s misreadings is the scholar-skepticism method reminiscent of an earlier discovery that Industry chose profitable lead additives over safe unpatentable alternatives — sources misrepresented to serve a thesis.