For roughly 1,300 years, approximately a million Greeks were captured and sold as slaves through the Muslim-Arab slave t...

For roughly 1,300 years, approximately a million Greeks were captured and sold as slaves through the Muslim-Arab slave trade, a chapter of Greek history that rarely makes it into mainstream accounts. The trade stretched from the seventh century onward, reaching across North Africa, the Middle East, and the Mediterranean. Greek captives were seized in raids on coastal towns and islands and taken during battles at sea, torn from their communities with little warning. Once enslaved, many were sold in markets and shipped far from home. They lost their names, their languages, and any trace of the families they had left behind. The scale of the trade ran across more than a dozen centuries, touching generation after generation of Greeks living along the sea. The numbers sit alongside the broader, largely underdiscussed history of Muslim-Arab slavery in the Mediterranean world. Arab slavers were active in the region centuries before the Atlantic trade began, and their networks extended deep into the Greek world, from the Aegean islands to the coastlines of the eastern Mediterranean. This history is not widely taught, and for many Greeks and members of the diaspora, it remains almost entirely unknown. The coastal raids, the sea warfare, the slave markets, the displacement of so many Greeks over so many centuries, amount to one of the longest-running tragedies in Greek history. #GreekHistory #Slavery #MediterraneanHistory