THE SLAVE POPULATION OF ALGIERS IN THE EARLY SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

Early seventeenth century Algiers was not a large city geographically, certainly not by modern standards.

It was a harbor city, and the length of the waterfront was about three quarters of a mile (about a kilometer and a quarter). It was also a walled city. The total length of the walls, running up from one end of the waterfront, around the city, and down to the other end of the waterfront, was a little under a mile (about 1.5 kilometers). It had a defensive moat outside the walls, but it was a dry moat, not a flooded one as in the illustration above (early modern European depictions of Algiers, like the one above from the early 1600s, quite frequently depict it as having a water moat, as if the illustrators cannot envision a city without one). The total area within the walls was only something like 125 acres (50 hectares). You could walk around the place, outside the walls, in under an hour—though it would have been a hike more than a walk, since the city was built upon the slope of a mountain.

Despite its relatively modest size, though, Algiers was one of the most populous cities of the age.

Today, we’re used to large cities, with populations in the millions. In the early seventeenth century, there simply were no such cities in Europe. The very largest European cities of this time—Paris, London, Naples—had a population of no more than 300,000-400,000. Cities of the next rank—such as Lisbon, Venice, Amsterdam, Rome—had populations of between 100,000-150,000.

Algiers had a population of well over 100,000, making it one of the most populated cities in the Mediterranean basin; only Naples was significantly larger.

Cramming that many people into that small an urban space meant the city was packed. One European observer claimed that “Neither a horseman nor two people walking side by side can pass through the streets easily. The entire city is so dense, and the houses so close to each other, that it all seems like a very tight pine cone.”

Out of Algiers’ 100,000-plus total population, a significant portion were slaves—it is often said that about a quarter. But the situation is a little complicated.

There are several sources from the early seventeenth century that provide us with slave numbers. One of the clearest is Father Pierre Dan, who was in Algiers in the summer of 1634 as part of an unsuccessful ransoming expedition on behalf of the French Crown (see the Father Pierre Dan and the 1634 Ransoming Expedition to Algiers posts here in this blog in the Captives section, March 2018). Here is what Father Dan has to say about the slave population in Algiers in his day:

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I have learned from several Christians, together with some Turks and renegades, who are all well versed in the affairs of the country, that in the Kingdom of Algiers alone—that is, in the city and in the surrounding villages and other places which are within twenty-five leagues of it—there are nearly twenty-five thousand captive Christians.

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Father Dan goes on to add the following:

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In the countryside within twenty to twenty-five leagues of Algiers, there are fifteen thousand gardens or farms, which they call masseries. Among them, it is difficult to find even one where there is not at least two or three slaves, sometimes seven or eight, kept there permanently either to plow and till the soil and tend the vineyards, to keep livestock, or to tend to the rest of the chores necessary for the maintenance of their households…  Moreover, in the bagnios, that is, the prisons of the city, there are usually locked up more than two or three thousand slaves. Besides all this, anybody of any prosperity at all will own at least one or two slaves to serve in their homes or to lease out to work by day.

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There are two issues with Father Dan’s numbers. First, they include slaves outside the city proper. Second, they don’t quite add up.

If there were indeed 15,000 gardens and farms surrounding Algiers, and each had, say, two slaves (Father Dan’s lowest number), that would amount to 30,000 slaves—5,000 more than he claims as the total number of slaves in Algiers and environs. He does say, though, that not every masserie had slaves. So perhaps the actual total would have been less.

Father Dan is not the only source for the number of masseries in the hinterland surrounding Algiers. Jean-Baptiste Gramaye, a Flemish cleric and scholar who was captive in Algiers for six months in 1619, claimed there were 14,698 masseries, a precise figure he asserted he got from looking at the “account book” of the Pasha—the Ottoman Governor—of Algiers (though how, exactly, he was able to do that is unclear).

Gramaye makes exactly the same sort of observations about slaves as Father Dan: that the vast majority of the masseries employed at least one or two slaves, and that some employed many more, that every family in Algiers of any means had “at least one or two slaves of one or the other sex attached to their service,” and that the bagnios (the slave pens) in Algiers held thousands of slaves. Gramaye is quite precise about this last aspect:

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Some important men possess such a great number of slaves that they have had to construct their own bagnios: for example, Ferhat Bay, who possesses 72 slaves; Ali Mami, who possesses 132; Ali Bitchnine, who possesses 63; Ali Arabaji, who possess 38; Hassan Portugais, who possess 40; Sulayman Pacha who possess 32…As for the Great Bagnio, it contains no less than 2,000 slaves.

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Father Dan’s and Gramaye’s estimates of the number of masseries match pretty closely (and Gramaye is, on the whole, quite careful and precise in his use of numbers), so perhaps there were indeed about 15,000 masseries, and, in total, they accounted for upwards of 30,000 slaves.

Gramaye’s estimate for the total number of slaves in Algiers was 35,000—10,000 more than Father Dan’s.

There are other estimates.

Antonio de Sosa, a Portuguese clergyman who was captive in Algiers from 1577-81, estimated the total number of slaves to be about 25,000 when he was there. Giovanni Batista Salvago, a Dragoman (interpreter) who was in Algiers in 1625, also estimated the total number of saves in Algiers to be about 25,000. Emanuel d’Aranda, a Flemish gentleman who was captive in Algiers from 1640-42 estimated the total number to be between 30,000-40,000.

Averaging these numbers out (and discounting d’Aranda’s upper limit, which seems a little excessive), we get a total of something like 30,000 slaves.

This number should not be considered anything much more than a ballpark figure, though. Nobody at the time had the means to conduct anything like an accurate census. Even so, it’s still probably a fairly reliable estimate. The total number of saves, for example, is very unlikely to have been 5,000 or 50,000.

According to Father Dan and Gramaye, this ballpark figure, remember, includes slaves from out in the hinterland as well as in the city itself. This tell us something important: that the majority of slaves in Algiers were employed as agricultural laborers on the masseries. At a guess, the city of Algiers probably never housed more than about 5,000-7,000 slaves at any one time. The rest were out in the countryside plowing fields, sowing crops, weeding, pruning vineyards, hauling fieldstone, tending livestock, or bringing in the harvests.

When you think about it, this makes perfects sense. Slaves, after all, were used primarily for manual labor, and the most intensive requirement for such manual labor was on farms. There simply would not have been enough work in the city itself to regularly employ tens of thousands of slaves .

So… the population of early seventeenth century Algiers was 100,000-plus, and a significant portion of that population was made up of slaves. And the total slave population was something like 25,000-30,000. But those slaves weren’t all crammed into the city itself. Most of them by far were out toiling in the agricultural hinterland.

A detail that usually gets overlooked in discussions of seventeenth century slave populations in Algiers.

 

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For those who may be interested:

The passages from Father Pierre Dan come from Book 3, Chapter 5, Part 3, of the second edition (1649) of his Histoire de Barbarie.

The passages from Jean-Baptists Gramaye come from Chapter 5, « La Poniropolis », in Alger, XVIe-XVIIe siècle: Journal de Jean-Baptists Gramaye, « évêque d’Afrique », a French translation by Abd El Hadi Ben Mansour of Gramaye’s Diarium rerum Argelae gestarum ab anno 1619 .

The estimate of slave numbers from Giovanni Batista Salvago comes from « Un mission delicate en Barbarie en XVIIe siècle: Jean-Baptiste Salvago, Drogman venitien, à Alger et à Tunis (1625)  », by Pierre Grandchamp, in the Revue tunisienne.

The estimate of slave numbers from Antonio de Sosa comes from Chapter 2 of An Early Modern Dialog with Islam: Antonio de Sosa’s Topography of Algiers (1612), a translation of de Sosa’s original Spanish text (Topografía e historia general de Argel), edited and translated by Maria Antonia Garces and Diana de Armas Wilson.

The estimate of slave numbers from Emanuel d’Aranda comes from the chapter titled « La situation, force & police de la ville d’Alger » in the 1665 edition of Relation de la captivité et liberté du sieur Emanuel d’Aranda, mené esclave à Alger.