Barbary slave trade

The Barbary slave trade involved the capture of Europeans and selling them at slave markets in the largely independent Ottoman Barbary states of North Africa during the early modern period. European civilians and merchant seamen were captured by Barbary corsairs in slave raids on ships and by raids on coastal towns from Italy to Ireland, coasts of Spain and Portugal, as far north as Iceland and into the Eastern Mediterranean. The Ottoman Eastern Mediterranean was the scene of intense piracy. As late as the 18th century, piracy continued to be a "consistent threat to maritime traffic in the Aegean".