The Muslims conquered the Iberian peninsula, but as they pushed forward into southern France, their advance was halted at Poitiers by Charles Martel in 745 A.D., thus keeping all of Western Europe except for that Iberian peninsula safe from Muslim conquest. This could, however, not prevent incessant Muslim attacks on coastal villages, especially along the coasts of Italy and France, though such attacks also reached as far as Ireland (the raid on the village of Baltimore in 1631, in which everyone was seized and taken back, as slaves, to Algiers) and, in one famous case, the Muslim corsairs reached as far as Iceland, resulting in the kidnapping and enslavement of the entire population of Grindavik in 1627 by Muslims from Algiers and Salé. The Muslims vandalized and destroyed the Christian villages, and seized their inhabitants, bringing them back to North African shores. The men were used as galley slaves, as laborers on construction sites, and as house slaves, while the women and girls became sex slaves of their Muslim masters. The most famous of those Christian slaves in North Africa was Cervantes, who was held in Algeria for five years, working as a house slave, until he could be ransomed.

How many people in the Western world today know that Muslim pirates managed to kidnap and enslave more than a million people taken to North Africa from their European coastal villages, where unless ransomed had to spend their lives as slaves of the Muslims, as revealed in Giles Milton’s study White Gold? Alas, very few.

Hugh Fitzgerald