THE ALGIERS SLAVE MARKET: PART 3

(This post is a continuation of The Algiers Slave Market: Parts 1 & 2. If you haven’t done so already, it’s best to read those posts before continuing on here.)

Taken together, the various first-hand descriptions in the previous post in this series give us a pretty clear idea of the sales process in the Badestan. With only a little bit of imagination, we can recreate what it would have been like to be put up for auction there.

— § —

Your captors haul you stumblingly into the crowded enclosure of the Badestan. The place is noisy and dim and bewildering, with people moving about everywhere, voices shouting, porters rushing by carrying merchandise. And it is stiflingly hot, for Algiers is brutally hot for much of the year. You stand there blinking, disoriented, trembling.

The captain of the corsair ship that captured you hovers nearby, arms crossed, a cutlass and a brace of flintlock pistols stuck in his belt. He watches as the auctioneer managing your sale—an older man with a thick gray beard, wielding a stout cane—begins to parade you through the place crying out his sales pitch in a loud, piercing voice that penetrates the hubbub all around. People turn and look at you, curious. Buyers begin to gather.

“Look what a broad back this one has!” the auctioneer cries. “Look how strong he is! Fit for doing any sort of work you bid him to do!”

“He doesn’t look so strong to me,” one of the buyers says. “He looks like he would fall over if I brushed him with a feather.”

“Nonsense! He is strong and healthy. Just look at his teeth! No cavities at all.  And his hands… Look how calloused they are. Feel them! This one is used to working hard.”

“One hundred doubles,” a buyer calls out (the double being the currency used in Algiers at this time).

“Arrache! Arrache!” the auctioneer cries. “Who will pay more?” He grabs you by the arm and drags you onward though the crowd. The corsair captain follows after, keeping a close eye on things. The auctioneer shouts again, “Arrache! Arrache!”

“One hundred and fifty doubles,” a buyer offers.

“You insult the brave Captain here,” the auctioneer responds, gesturing towards the corsair Captain. “This captive is worth ten times that!”

“Let me see his teeth again,” a buyer demands.

“Where is he from?” another asks. “Does he have any skills?”

“Is he a carpenter?” a different buyer asks. “I need carpenters.”

The buyers begin to crowd closer.

“Make him jump about a bit,” one of them says. “Let us see how healthy he really is.”

The auctioneer prods you with his cane. “You heard the man. Jump!”

You hop from one foot to the other.

“Higher!” The auctioneer gives you a hard whack across your shoulder with his cane. “Jump higher!”

You jump, your shoulder stinging painfully.

— § —

And so it would have gone. The buyers would have interrogated you as best they could (in most cases they needed translators to do so), poking and prodding and examining you all the while. Slowly but surely the bidding price would have risen. If you possessed a valuable skill—if you were, for example, a carpenter or a smith, a sail maker or a barber—your sales price might be quite high. If you were just an ordinary, hard-working peasant, the price would be less.

Eventually, a price would be agreed on, and you were passed over to your new owner.

You were now officially property.

The above example assumes you to be a male captive. If you were a woman, the process would be slightly different.

Women were bought, basically, for two reasons. If they were past a certain age, they were acquired to serve as domestic servants. If they were young and attractive enough in the estimation of the buyers, they were purchased as concubines.

Young women were carefully examined, but it wasn’t their hands, or the breadth of their shoulders, or their muscle mass the buyers were interested in. Buyers wanted virgins, either for themselves or to serve as gifts they could pass on to important men—including the Ottoman Sultan himself. So the examination that young women underwent was a lot more intimate than anything the men had to endure. Women were taken to a secluded area, stripped, and inspected carefully.

A young, attractive virgin could easily command a buying price three times higher than a man’s, even a man with valuable skills.

(The idea of Muslim slavers buying and selling young European girls for nefarious purposes preyed on the imagination of nineteenth and early twentieth century European artists—to the point that it became an obsession and spawned an entire genre of art: half naked European white girls being ogled by swarthy Muslim men. The image above is a pretty typical example.)

The only type of captive more expensive than a woman was a child. Children too, especially boys, were objects of sexual desire and so commanded high prices. But, also, children are more malleable than adults, and so a child could be brought up and reliably converted to Islam—and bringing converts into the religion was considered a very worthy thing to do. Hence, for one reason or another, a lot of buyers were interested in children, even very young children. The youngest were, quite literally, torn from their mothers’ arms and carried away.

There was one final category of captives for whom high prices were paid: rich people.

The really serious profits came not from buying and selling captives in the Badestan, but from buying rich captives and demanding exorbitant ransoms for them. If an Algiers buyer was canny enough—or lucky enough—he might be able to ransom a captive he bought for five times what he paid, sometimes more, sometimes much more.

— § —

Such was the Algiers Badestan. It was by no means an exceptional place at the time. Similar markets existed in Tripoli, Tunis, Tetouan, Salé, and a host of other North African cities and towns. They also existed in European cities like Naples, Livorno, and Valetta, on the island of Malta.

The sort of human trafficking that went on in these markets is, of course, quite appalling by modern standards. We take it for granted that human beings are not property, and that buying and selling and ransoming them is absolutely wrong. But that is not at all how people in the past felt about it.

Slavery was quite common and accepted as an inescapable part of life—on both sides of the Mediterranean.

It was a much tougher—much more brutal—age than our own, an age that should make us appreciate the time in which we now live. We have our problems, but things are much better now in many ways than they were four hundred years ago. Slavery and piracy are things most of us will only ever read about and will never personally experience.

Maybe the arc of the moral universe really does bends toward justice after all.