Seminar in Ottoman and Turkish Studies presents:
Ariel Salzmann, Department of History, Queens University “Migrants in
Chains? On the Enslavement of Muslims in Early Modern Europe”
Thursday, 3 October 2013, 4-6 pm, Natalie Zemon Davis Seminar Room (Sidney
Smith 2098)
Many are the scholarly and popular accounts of Christian slavery in the
Maghreb and the Ottoman Empire. Far less attention has been paid to the
plight of tens of thousands Muslim men and women who were captured and
forcibly transported to the north between the Renaissance and the French
Revolution. Those who were not part of prisoner exchanges or ransomed by
kin, spent the remainder of their lives in chattel slavery in Catholic
Europe. This presentation considers the enslavement process overall and the
conceptual frameworks that might aide in the recovery of this poorly known
chapter in early modern social history. As the case of the Muslim galley
slaves of the Catholic ports of France, Italy, and Malta suggests, without
appreciating this phenomenon as a form of migration as well as a facet of
the larger history of global slave trade, it is not possible to understand
the specificity of confessionalized enslavement within the early modern
Mediterranean.
