Megalithic shipping and trade routes

[Boreades]

The only commercially valuable slaves are young, fit men

You are clearly out of touch with reality.
The really valuable slaves are female.

[Mick Harper]

Very well. Young, fit males and females.

[Boreades]

Go on, just a little bit.

You are Mrs Doyle, and I claim this week's spot-the-celebrity prize.

[hvered]

Historical records point to examples of this slave trade taking place – such as a 10th century biography of St. Nian tells the story of 200 churchmen who were captured by the Vikings and taken to the slave markets in Venice.

Who? Ninian? Academics should be cautious about stating the "Life" of an 8th century saint is 'a historical account'

Wiki bio is hardly enlightening

Ninian's major shrine was at Whithorn in Galloway, where he is associated with the Candida Casa (Latin for 'White House'). Nothing is known about his teachings, and there is no unchallenged authority for information about his life.

Despite the 'nothing known', Ninian has been given the title of The Apostle to the Southern Picts. Candida Casa is a bit of a give-away, a Christian site with Roman foundations. The Whithorn archaeological trust site says Bede wrote about Ninian so academics can take his words at face value. Not so easy for archaeologists

Bede celebrated the fame of Whithorn and an early saint, Ninian, when he wrote in the early 8th Century, and his comments have prompted a series of archaeological digs here, from the 19th to the 20th Century, all searching for the site of the earliest church, whose foundation is ascribed to the saint. What archaeologists found in the earliest phases of the site was not a church, but evidence of early Christian practices, sophisticated trading contacts reaching as far as Gaul and Tunisia, literacy, knowledge of the liturgy and an elite material culture, similar to that in other high status secular settlements.

Plenty of good 12th century evidence left. Maybe all those pilgrims destroyed the earlier stuff. Or the Vikings of course.

“In the end,” Valante writes, “the expanding uses for slaves during the time of the early Abbasids, including the need for large numbers of enslaved eunuchs, drove much of the slave trade around the Mediterranean basin. The Viking raids, which began barely a generation after the Abbasid dynasty seized the Caliphate, met part of that need.”

She isn't quoting Bede, is she?

[Mick Harper]

We know a fair bit about the 'Viking Age' even if the historical sources are hopelessly corrupt. There were no 'slaving states' in Britain and we know why from first principles not the historical sources. It is true there was endemic warfare and therefore slaves were created in large numbers but these were put to domestic use. This is a vital consideration. In normal circumstances it is not economic to export labour to do tasks when they can do the same tasks at home. This is the key factor in the triangular trade because African labour was relatively unproductive in Africa but highly productive in the Americas. This factor drives all migration whether slave or free. So did Dark Age Brits have a greater value in north Africa or Byzantium than in Britain?

Almost certainly yes -- both areas were more highly developed. But this leads to another consideration. Slaves are a commodity like any other and therefore basic economic principles apply. Are British slaves cheaper than competing slaves? No. Transporting slaves overland is much cheaper than doing it by sea (in those days) and both north Africa and Byzantium had land access to nearby slaves far cheaper than ones shipped in from faraway Britain. The 'Vikings' were involved in the Byzantium slave trade as an adjunct to their trade routes from Sweden via the Russian river-system but we may take it as axiomatic that neither north Africa nor Byzantium were markets for British slaves.

But we still have not got to the really critical factor.

[TisILeclerc]

In the first half of the 1600s, Barbary corsairs - pirates from the Barbary Coast of North Africa, authorised by their governments to attack the shipping of Christian countries - ranged all around Britain's shores. In their lanteen-rigged xebecs (a type of ship) and oared galleys, they grabbed ships and sailors, and sold the sailors into slavery. Admiralty records show that during this time the corsairs plundered British shipping pretty much at will, taking no fewer than 466 vessels between 1609 and 1616, and 27 more vessels from near Plymouth in 1625. As 18th-century historian Joseph Morgan put it, 'this I take to be the Time when those Corsairs were in their Zenith'.

Unfortunately, it was hardly the end of them, even then. Morgan also noted that he had a '...List, printed in London in 1682' of 160 British ships captured by Algerians between 1677 and 1680. Considering what the number of sailors who were taken with each ship was likely to have been, these examples translate into a probable 7,000 to 9,000 able-bodied British men and women taken into slavery in those years.

Not content with attacking ships and sailors, the corsairs also sometimes raided coastal settlements, generally running their craft onto unguarded beaches, and creeping up on villages in the dark to snatch their victims and retreat before the alarm could be sounded. Almost all the inhabitants of the village of Baltimore, in Ireland, were taken in this way in 1631, and other attacks were launched against coastal villages in Devon and Cornwall. Samuel Pepys gives a vivid account of an encounter with two men who'd been taken into slavery, in his diary of 8 February 1661.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/em ... s_01.shtml


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aTFn0ySxs_U

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xx9VT9qe4D8

Mind you it wasn't all bad news. For one Irishman at least.

Another Irish source tells of an Irishman, Murchad, who was taken by Vikings and sold to a nunnery in Northumbria. After leading all the nuns astray he was re-taken by Vikings and sold to a widow in Saxony, whom he also seduced. After many adventures he finally reached home and was re-united with his kinfolk.

https://hubpages.com/education/VIKING-3 ... ave-Routes

[Mick Harper]

Your first quote, Tissie, is entirely standard and confirms everything I have been saying. The second of course is complete tosh but even if true does not advance anybody's case. But I am glad to see you are on the case.

[TisILeclerc]

I bow beneath your omnipotence and withdraw.

[Mick Harper]

It's all down to crew-size. Before 1500 -- some say before containerisation -- long distance sea voyages were inordinately expensive. If you've got fifty people being paid for six months and the wages have to come out of the difference between the price there and the price here, it's only worth doing it for spices, tin and ... um ... that's about it.

Unless the price there is zero, which it is in the case of cod fishing and slave raiding. Then it is just down to the cost of capturing the cod or the slaves. So let's think about that for a moment.

[Mick Harper]

History is full of maritime 'pillaging raids'. We have the Vikings but elsewhere it is Turks, Barbaries, marmelukes and whatnot. Going further back in time, archaeologists often cover inexplicable gaps in the evidence by assuring us that everybody has upsticks and gone inland to avoid the depredations of this or that bunch of raiding miscreants. It's all tosh.

It is true that, for political reasons, these kinds of things get mounted from time to time -- we did it for instance to the Spanish Mediterranean coast during the Napoleonic Wars -- but the idea that they are ever for financial gain is laughable. The reason is simple. What you can get by way of goodies (including carrying off slaves) is small, the costs of mounting the expedition is not. In order to overcome even local opposition you have to arrive with relatively large forces and what's on offer won't come near to covering it.

But there may be exceptions. Like for instance Drake and Co descending on the Spanish Main. We'll see presently whether Dark Age Britain qualified.