Gerome, Slave market in Northern Africa.
“Although all these slave counts fluctuated in the short term, there are enough and they are consistent enough over the long run to produce a workable total for the slave populations in Barbary for the century 1580-1680 … Even when keeping to the lower estimates … the averages soon add up: around 27.000 in Algiers and its dependencies, 6.000 in Tunis, and perhaps 2.000 in Tripoli and the smaller centers combined. … The figure of 35.000 that we have arrived at here can be taken as an averaged-out white slave count for Barbary, roughly how many captives were held at any given time between 1580 and 1680. … The result, then, is that between 1530 and 1780 there were almost certainly a million and quite possibly as many as a million and a quarter white, European Christians enslaved by the Muslims of the Barbary Coast. … the estimates arrived at here make it clear that for most of the first two centuries of the modern era, nearly as many Europeans were taken forcibly to Barbary and worked or sold as slaves as were West Africans hauled off to labor on plantations in the Americas. … Hardest hit in [the raids of the Barbary corsairs] … were the sailors, merchants, and coastal villagers of Italy and Greece and of Mediterranean Spain and France. … Overall, relatively few Christian females ended up enslaved in Barbary – some estimates place their proportion as low as 5 percent among the generality of European slaves there.” ( R.C. Davis, Christian slaves, Muslim Masters [Basingstoke, Hampshire 2003], p. 14-36)