The Rise Of Slavery During The First Crusades

According to the article, Muslims were the very first to discriminate people against skin color, as stated by Evans that “it was under the Muslims that slavery became largely a racial institution.” Perhaps unintentionally, Islam gave rise to skin-color racism through the unification and expansion of Muslim concepts, whereas previous military and political disorder guaranteed that “most slaves remained racially indistinguishable from their masters.” Muslims and Bedouins (Arabic nomads), by ties of brotherhood and peace, concentrated their energies into a “campaign of conquest”, where Islam expanded its geographical frontiers (from the Iberian Peninsula to the borders of China), and stablished Muslim hegemony over these territories. Based on
During the First Crusades, Europeans learned to make profit in sugar. Initially, they invested in war captives, under similar conditions of slavery, that eventually became expensive; however, with the landing of the navigator Diniz Dias in the land of Guinea, Africa, Portuguese plantation owners discovered a new easy and accessible source of slavery. Because Guinea people were now between the dispute of Portuguese and Muslims, they offered little resistance when conquered by Portuguese. Thus, “Europeans discovered a vast source of black “Slavs.” With the ascension of other countries with white European slaves, such as Russia, and their increasing fortification, the reputation of Slavs began to improve and lose its “psychological connection to Eastern Europe,” now being linked with black people and African regions (slavery entered its “Negro
With the implementation of slavery by Christians in sugar plantations, they “began to look at black in ways that had been characteristic of racially stratified Muslim countries.” For them, blacks were gentiles, therefore Christians had “to bring [slaves] into the path of salvation.” By that, Christians seemed to offer an alternate solution for Noah’s curse, not by emancipating the people “chosen” to be slaves, but by offering a path of salvation, so they could find rest and comfort. Christians basically took the stigma laid upon the “sons of Ham” (now, blacks) thousands of years ago, and gave them the gift of salvation. Eventually, blacks received “names less connected with religion,” because slavery stopped being seen as ethnical and religiously predestined, and began being seen as racial and skin-color