As many European slaves may have made the Middle(terranean) passage as African slaves made the Middle (Atlantic) passage. More than 2,5000,000 were enslaved.

Historically, slavery is as old and as endemic as prostitution and almost as recent. (Sometimes it was prostitution; more familiary examples include the high prices that octoroon maids fetched in the antebellum New Orleans flesh market, the Japanese comfort women, and the criminal sex trade in kidnapped women today.) Well into the 1800s the Barbary pirates on the south coast of the Mediterranean were raiding the British Isles and elsewhere in Europe for slaves. The Barbary pirates were really Barbary slavers. They enslaved hundreds of Americans even.

The Vikings were also slavers. It is little known, but their most valuable plunder was probably people. Viking merchants led coffles of yoked kidnap victims down to wealthy southern Europe, especially Muslim Spain, or through Russia to the rich slave markets of the Middle East. Or they simply brought their new slaves back to their fjord farms to be beaten and made to drudge.

People have a tendency to exercise unrighteous dominion when they get a little power and authority, the scripture says. What it doesn’t say, but could, is that unrighteous dominion is the reason most people would want a little power and authority. Mastery–slavery–lets you drink that draught in its 200-proof from. its other appeal is that it lets you defy the original commandment, to earn bread by the sweat of your own brow. So it is little wonder that slavery has been so widespread, and in times and places become almost a necessary social institution that day-to-day gospel living had to make terms with. The real wonder is that slavery has been abolished; we should be proud that it was Christians who did it; and we should keep an eye out for attempts to reverse their work.

“[I]t is not right that any man should be in bondage one to another.”