History of slavery in the Muslim world in the context of "Barbary Coast"

The geography of North Africa has been reasonably well known among Europeans since classical antiquity in Greco-Roman geography. Northwest Africa (the Maghreb) was known as either Libya or Africa, while Egypt was considered part of Asia.

European exploration of sub-Saharan Africa begins with the Age of Discovery in the 15th century, pioneered by the Kingdom of Portugal under Henry the Navigator. The Cape of Good Hope was first reached by Bartolomeu Dias on 12 March 1488, opening the important sea route to India and the Far East, but European exploration of Africa itself remained very limited during the 16th and 17th centuries. The European powers were content to establish trading posts along the coast while they were actively exploring and colonizing the New World. Exploration of the interior of Africa was thus mostly left to the Muslim slave traders, who in tandem with the Muslim conquest of Sudan established far-reaching networks and supported the economy of a number of Sahelian kingdoms during the 15th to 18th centuries.

Between 1441 and 1774, the Crimean Khanate and the Nogai Horde conducted slave raids throughout lands primarily controlled by Russia and Poland–Lithuania. Concentrated in Eastern Europe, but also stretching to the Caucasus and parts of Central Europe, these raids were often supported by the Ottoman Empire and involved the transportation of European men, women, and children to the Muslim world, where they were put on the market and sold as part of the Crimean slave trade and the Ottoman slave trade. The regular abductions of people over the course of numerous incursions by the Crimeans and the Nogais greatly drained Eastern Europe's human and economic resources, consequently playing an important role in the emergence of the semi-militarized Cossacks, who organized retaliatory campaigns against the raiders and their Ottoman backers.

Trading posts in Crimea had previously been established by the Genoese and the Venetians to facilitate earlier Western European slave routes. The Crimean–Nogai raids largely targeted the "Wild Fields" of the Pontic–Caspian steppe, which extends about 800 kilometres (500 mi) north of the Black Sea and which now contains the majority of the combined population of southeastern Ukraine and southwestern Russia.

The history of slavery spans many different cultures, nationalities, and religions from ancient times to the present day. Likewise, its victims have come from many different ethnicities and religious groups. The social, economic, and legal positions of slaves have differed vastly in different systems of slavery in different times and places.Slavery has been found in some hunter-gatherer populations, particularly as hereditary slavery, but the conditions of agriculture with increasing social and economic complexity offer greater opportunity for mass chattel slavery. Slavery was institutionalized by the time the first civilizations emerged (such as Sumer in Mesopotamia, which dates back as far as 4000 BC). Slavery features in the Mesopotamian Code of Hammurabi (c. 1750 BC), which refers to it as an established institution.Slavery was widespread in the ancient world in Europe, Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and the Americas.

Slavery became less common throughout Europe during the Early Middle Ages but continued to be practiced in some areas. Both Christians and Muslims captured and enslaved each other during centuries of warfare in the Mediterranean and Europe. Islamic slavery encompassed mainly Western and Central Asia, Northern and Eastern Africa, India, and Europe from the 7th to the 20th century. Islamic law approved of enslavement of non-Muslims, and slaves were trafficked from non-Muslim lands: from the North via the Balkan slave trade and the Crimean slave trade; from the East via the Bukhara slave trade; from the West via Andalusian slave trade; and from the South via the Trans-Saharan slave trade, the Red Sea slave trade and the Indian Ocean slave trade.

Mamluk or Mamaluk (/ˈmæmluːk/; Arabic: مملوك, romanized: mamlūk (singular), مماليك, mamālīk (plural); translated as "one who is owned", meaning "slave") were non-Arab, ethnically diverse (mostly Turkic, Caucasian, Mongol, Eastern and Southeastern European) enslaved mercenaries, slave-soldiers, and freed slaves who were assigned high-ranking military and administrative duties in the Muslim world.

The most enduring Mamluk realm was the knightly military class in medieval Egypt, which developed from the ranks of slave-soldiers. Originally the Mamluks were slaves of Turkic origins from the Eurasian Steppe, but the institution of military slavery spread to include Circassians, Mongols, Abkhazians, Georgians, Armenians, Russians, and Hungarians, as well as peoples from the Balkans such as Albanians, Greeks, and South Slavs (see Saqaliba). They also recruited from the Egyptians. The "Mamluk/­Ghulam Phe­nom­enon", as David Ayalon dubbed the creation of the specific warrior class, was of great political importance; for one thing, it endured for nearly 1,000 years, from the 9th century to the early 19th. (See: Ghilman.)

The Cossack raids largely developed as a reaction to the Crimean–Nogai slave raids in Eastern Europe, which began in 1441 and lasted until 1774. From c. 1492 onwards, the Cossacks (the Zaporozhian Cossacks of southern Ukraine and the Don Cossacks of southern Russia) conducted regular military offensives into the lands of the Crimean Khanate, the Nogai Horde, and the Ottoman Empire, where they would free enslaved Christians and return home with a significant amount of plunder and Muslim slaves. Unlike the Tatars, Cossack raiders were capable of capturing and devastating highly fortified cities. Though difficult to calculate, the level of devastation caused by the Cossack raids is roughly estimated to have been on par with that of the Crimean–Nogai slave raids. According to History of Ruthenians, Cossack raids during Sirko's era were a hundred times more devastating than Crimean–Nogai raids.

A janissary (UK: /ˈdʒænɪsəri/ JAN-iss-ər-ee, US: /-sɛri/ -⁠err-ee; Ottoman Turkish: یڭیچری, romanized: yeñiçeri, IPA: [jeˈŋit͡ʃeɾ̞i], lit. 'new soldier') was a member of the elite infantry units that formed the Ottoman sultan's household troops. They were the first modern standing army, and perhaps the first infantry force in the world to be equipped with firearms, adopted during the reign of Murad II (r. 1421–1444, 1446–1451). The corps was established under either Orhan or Murad I, and dismantled by Mahmud II in 1826.

Janissaries began as an elite corps made up through the devşirme system of child levy enslavement, by which Christian boys, chiefly from the Balkans, were taken, levied, subjected to forced circumcision and forced conversion to Islam, and incorporated into the Ottoman army. They became famed for internal cohesion cemented by strict discipline and order. Unlike typical slaves, they were paid regular salaries. Forbidden to marry before the age of 40 or engage in trade, their complete loyalty to the Ottoman sultan was expected. By the 17th century, due to a dramatic increase in the size of the Ottoman standing army, the corps' initially strict recruitment policy was relaxed. Civilians bought their way into it in order to benefit from the improved socio-economic status it conferred upon them. Consequently, the corps gradually lost its military character, undergoing a process that has been described as "civilianization".