If you look at the practice of slavery, for instance, you'll find evidence that slaves- and by deduction, former slaves, indentured servants, and escapees- from northern Europe were found in Arab and African nations, and vice versa.
The Spanish saying for "the coast is clear" is
"no hay moros en la costa" -- because
Muslim slavers were so feared:
Combing through the historical sources, he concludes that there were about 35,000 enslaved Christians on the Barbary Coast at any one time. He then sets about estimating attrition rates. Slave numbers declined through four causes: death, escape, redemption (i.e. by ransom), and conversion to Islam. Davis gets annual rates from these causes of 17 percent, 1 percent, 2-3 percent, and 4 percent, respectively. This implies a total number of slaves, from the early 1500s to the late 1700s, of one to one and a quarter million. This is an astonishing number, implying that well into the 17th century, the Mediterranean slave trade was out-producing the Atlantic one. Numbers fell off thereafter, while the transatlantic trade increased; but in its time, the enslavement of European Christians by Muslim North Africans was the main kind of enslavement going on in the world.
Christians were captured by two methods. First, there was the seizing of ships by straightforward piracy. The ship itself became a prize along with its crew and passengers. Second, there were raids on the coasts of European countries. Spain, France, and Italy were worst affected, but the pirates sometimes ventured further afield. In 1627 they kidnapped 400 men and women from Iceland.
The victims in either case would be taken back to one of the Barbary ports — the main ones were Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli — and sold in a slave market, by auction. They ended up either as the domestic slaves of private persons, or as slaves owned by the state, to be put to work rowing galleys, or constructing public works. The first of these two fates was usually preferable, as there was some chance of humanity from a private owner. Prof. Davis’s account of the lives of galley slaves is hard to read, and state slaves employed on public works were not much better off. There was no large-scale private-enterprise slavery as in the plantations of the Old South. The North African states had little commercial culture.
The effect on the European coastal populations was dramatic. Entire areas were depopulated. The author even sketches out an argument that the culture of baroque Italy was determined in part by a turning inward from the terrors of coastal life — from the “fear of the horizon” that afflicted all the regions subject to slave raiding. He tells us (he is professor of Italian Social History at Ohio State University, by the way) that to this day there is an idiom in Sicilian dialect to express the general idea of being caught by surprise: pigliato dai turchi — “taken by the Turks.”
If you want to read about a fascinating historical figure, read about
Abram Petrovich Gannibal:
Major-General Abram Petrovich Gannibal, also Hannibal or Ganibal or Ibrahim Hannibal or Abram Petrov, (1696 – 14 May[1]1781) was an African slave who was brought to Russia by Peter the Great and became major-general, military engineer and governor of Reval. He is perhaps best known today as the great-grandfather of Alexander Pushkin, who wrote an unfinished novel about him, Peter the Great's Negro.
