Europe's Forgotten Terror - The Pirates Who Enslaved a Million People [30:39]

YouTube ^ | June 19, 2026 | thehistorysquad

[SunkenCiv]

Who were the Barbary Pirates? 

For over 300 years, the Barbary Pirates terrorized coastal Europe -- striking as far north as Iceland and as close to home as Ireland, England, Spain, and Italy. Men, women, and children vanished from beaches in the dead of night. Some estimates suggest more than a million Europeans were captured and sold into slavery. Yet today, few people are aware of this forgotten slave trade. 

In this documentary, join Kevin Hicks as he uncovers who the Barbary Pirates really were, how they built a slave-trading empire that the most powerful nations of the time struggled to stop. 

Europe's Forgotten Terror - The Pirates Who Enslaved a Million People | 30:39 
thehistorysquad | 73,098 views | June 19, 2026

[Inyo-Mono]

Bookmark.

[Paladin2]

AKA: “naval mujahideen (in Muslim sources)”

[rktman]

Reparations please. 😵‍💫🤣👍

[PGalt]

Thanks for posting.

[grobdriver]

Anybody who has read “Robin Crusoe” will know about them

Any Marine knows about them also.

[SunkenCiv]

That’s nothing to do with this topic. And it’s panic porn.

[SunkenCiv]

My pleasure!

[jroehl]

Since the news media wont report on it. Somebody has to. BTW I like your posts.

[Paul R.]

Men, women, and children vanished from beaches in the dead of night. Some estimates suggest more than a million Europeans were captured and sold into slavery.

Eh? What were large numbers of Euros doing on their beaches in the dead of night?

[ScaniaBoy]

So, muslims enslaved roughly 5.6 times (460%) more slaves than America did.

Oh, much more than that, since you are only counting the Europeans the Muslims enslaved. Then you have the African slave trade, something that was going on for hundreds of years and may still be ongoing in some places. According to Wikipedia some 6 - 10 millions Africans were enslaved by Muslims up until the 20th century.

During the 20th century, this is something never talked about in polite society, the muslim slave trade was slowly abolished:

In the 20th century, the authorities in Muslim states gradually outlawed and suppressed slavery.[10] Slavery in Zanzibar was abolished in 1909, when slave concubines were freed, and the open slave market in Morocco was closed in 1922. Slavery in the Ottoman Empire was abolished in 1924 when the new Turkish Constitution disbanded the Imperial Harem and made the last concubines and eunuchs free citizens of the newly proclaimed republic.[11] Slavery in Iran and slavery in Jordan were abolished in 1929. In the Persian Gulf, slavery in Bahrain was first to be abolished in 1937, followed by slavery in Kuwait in 1949 and slavery in Qatar in 1952, while Saudi Arabia and Yemen abolished it in 1962,[12] and Oman followed in 1970. Mauritania became the last state to abolish slavery, in 1981. In 1990, the Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam declared that "no one has the right to enslave" another human being.[13] As of 2001, however, instances of modern slavery persisted in areas of the Sahel,[14][15] and several 21st-century terroristic jihadist groups have attempted to use historic slavery in the Muslim world as a pretext for reviving slavery in the 21st century.

[Red Badger]

I am one.

But I’d be willing to bet there are more people who have read ‘Crusoe’ than there are Marines. It was on our reading list in High school. People tend to think it was about a guy stranded on an island for decades, but it was more than that. He had many adventures and misadventures as well. He was enslaved by the Barbary Pirates but managed to escape after years of servitude and becoming a trusted slave. He made a fortune in Brazil as a plantation owner. He attacked a group of cannibals that were going to eat a man, that’s how he met Friday. That and many more things are in the book..............

[V_TWIN]

What the heck dude? 🤷‍♂️

[gleeaikin]

Did the Vikings who terrorized the British Isles, and Western Europe also sell people or did they mostly attack and rob?

[gleeaikin]

Do you have figures for the European slave trade from Africa to the Caribbean and Latin American countries including Brazil? Also directly from Latin America to get slaves in Africa, because I imagine some of the Latin American countries got their own slaves, quite independent of the Europeans who had colonies in the Caribbean, and the Guyanas.

[gleeaikin]

If I remember my history, wasn’t Jefferson quite involved in trying to encourage the French to do something about those Barbary Pirates when he was stationed in France, or was that after he became President?

[AZJeep]

Yes, they also enslaved people and used them for work.
So called Thrals.

Since antiquity until some 100+ years ago slavery was pretty common.
E.g. Vikings in Russia (Varjags) took over the whole Russia (the European part) and enslaved all the local population.
That why Slavs (people) got their name, because they were slaves of these Eastern Vikings. The Russian ruling class were basically descendants of those Vikings.
E.g. Ivan the Terrible was direct descendant of the ancient Viking ruler Rurikh (Rus).

In the medieval Europe, the rule was, that it was unethical to enslave fellow Christians, but the pagans were free game.
When Lithuania converted to Christianity around 1400 AD, that was practically the end of Slavery in Europe.