freediver wrote on Oct 23
rd, 2017 at 1:59pm:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbary_Wars
The Barbary Wars were a series of conflicts that culminated in two wars fought at different times over the same reasons between the United States, Sweden, and the Barbary states (the de jure possessions of the Ottoman Empire, but de facto independent, Tunis, Algiers, and Tripoli) of North Africa in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The Swedes had been at war with the Tripolitans since 1800; they were eventually joined by the Americans.[2] At issue was the Barbary pirates' demand for tribute from American merchant vessels in the Mediterranean Sea. If ships of a given country failed to pay, pirates would attack the ship and take their goods, and often enslave crew members or hold them for ransom.
After the Barbary wars, western powers continued to interfere in Muslim countries to first bring about an end to the international slave trade, then local slave trades, and finally to make slavery illegal. Sex slavery is a big reason why everyone is ganging up on ISIS.
It wasn't one way traffic FD:
Quote:European sources often mention Christian captives on the Barbary Coast of North Africa - Cervantes was a slave in Algiers between 1575 and 1580, for instance - but much less is known about Muslims captured on the other side. And yet, the business of kidnapping, ransoming, trading, and owning slaves of a different religion was not only a North African or Ottoman affair. It followed the Christian-Muslim frontier, from Morocco to the Black Sea, and it was fundamentally reciprocal. The Maltese corsairs were just as terrifying as their Tunisian or Algerian counterparts, and Christian Cossacks rivaled Muslim Tatars in Eastern Europe. While captured Christians were sold on the slave markets of Caffa, Istanbul, Tunis, and Algiers, the Muslims snatched by Christian raiders ended up as rowers on the galleys of the pope, builders of imperial palaces in Vienna, or domestic slaves in Venice and Malta.
Numbers
Systematic research on the demography and treatment of Muslim slaves in early modern Europe still remains to be done. We have enough information, however, to draw some preliminary conclusions about their presence in the Mediterranean area, based on the research done by Michel Fontenay, Salvatore Bono, Anne Brogini, Wolfgang Kaiser, and Robert C. Davis. First, their number was higher than previously thought: for instance, Salvatore Bono estimates that there were about twenty thousand Muslim slaves around 1600 in Naples alone, and four to five hundred thousand between 1500 and 1800 on the Italian peninsula. If we extrapolate these numbers to all of southern Europe, we easily get above one million and possibly more for the entire early modern period—as is also the case with the Christian slaves on the Barbary Coast, who amounted to at least one million in a conservative estimate. These numbers are certainly lower than those pertaining to transatlantic slavery, but they are by no means negligible.
http://www.hum.leiden.edu/history/slavery-studies/news/muslim-slaves.html