hello darkness my old friend

Poznámky o otroctví z Roger Cowley: Empires of the Sea (nečetl jsem, jen jsem vyhledal odstavce o otroctví).

Galejníci na otomanských galérách 16. století by především křesťanští otroci zajatí buď z pobřežních vesnic a měst nebo z křesťanských (evropských) oblastí Otomanské říše.

Altogether there were seventy serviceable galleys, including three commander’s ships with stern lanterns. Hayrettin’s ornate flagship was rowed by one hundred sixty Christian slaves. “In all he had 1,233 Christian slaves…the rest of the oarsmen were Serbians and Bulgarians, all of whom were chained because they were Christians.”

Aware that the Adriatic shore had been fortified with watchtowers, he swung around the heel of Italy and ravaged the western coastline toward Naples, burning villages, destroying ships, enslaving whole settlements. The suddenness and terror of his mass landings, the impact of the churning galley squadrons closing on the unprotected shore, had the heart-stopping terror of Ottoman frontier raids.

Jak Chajruddín Barbarossa, řecko-albánký pirát a paša vládnoucí otomanskému Alžírsku, prováděl nájezdy na evropské středomořské pobřeží.

Day after day Maurand watched the fleet at work. A combustible mixture of jihad, imperial warfare, personal plunder, and spiteful revenge fueled their rampage. The priest witnessed slave-taking on an enormous scale. From each assault, long lines of men, women, and children were led down to the shore in chains, where they risked the equal perils of the sea. Sometimes a coastal village would try to bargain part of its population in a cruel lottery. Port’Ercole offered eighty people, to be chosen by Barbarossa, in return for thirty going free. He accepted the bargain but torched their village anyway. Only one house was left standing. Fortifications were destroyed as a matter of course. Finding Giglio deserted, the seamen razed it, but the castle resisted and had to be blasted into submission and ruined. The 632 Christians who surrendered were enslaved, but their leaders and priest were beheaded in front of Barbarossa to discourage resistance. It was a calculated and effective means of breaking morale. “It’s an extraordinary thing,” Maurand testified, “how the very mention of the Turks is so horrifying and terrible to the Christians that it makes them lose not only their strength but also their wits.” Barbarossa employed the exemplary brutality of Genghis Khan.

Otroci na galérách bývali krutě potrestáni za neúspěšné nájezdy. Pokud se loď potápěla, utopili se s ní, protože byli přikovaní k lavicím. Turci (muslimové), kteří se dali na galéry dobrovolně zaměstnat, nebývali přikovaní a mohli při potopení lodě odplavat (moc časté to asi nebylo, protože mnozí neměli předchozí zkušenosti s mořem a neuměli plavat).

A sudden storm arose and there was “a cruel sea from the southwest and a blackness so thick that the galleys couldn’t see one another, together with a rain falling without ceasing from the sky that was quite unbearable.” The Christian slaves, huddling on the exposed deck like “drowned ducks,” were cruelly beaten. One galliot, overloaded with captives, foundered in the storm: “They all drowned, except for some Turks who escaped by swimming.”

Evropských otroků byly tisíce.

In the four decades following the launch of Barbarossa’s first imperial fleet in 1534, thousands of people were snatched from the coasts of Italy and Spain: eighteen hundred from Minorca in 1535, seven thousand from the Bay of Naples in 1544, five thousand from the island of Gozo off Malta in 1551, six thousand from Calabria in 1554, and four thousand from Granada in 1566. The Ottomans could apply sudden and overwhelming force at precise points; they could land at and destroy fair-size coastal towns with impunity and threaten even the major cities of Italy.

V 16. století už probíhal transatlantický obchod s otroky z Afriky, přesto to byli Evropané, kdo byli ještě po dlouhou dobu zotročování ve větší míře, než sami zotročovali jiné.

This was a terror sharpened by racial difference; across the narrow sea two civilizations communicated through abrupt acts of violence and revenge. Europe was on the receiving end of the slavery it was starting to inflict on West Africa—though the numbers slaved to Islam far exceeded the black slaves taken in the sixteenth century, and where Atlantic slaving was a matter of cold business, in the Mediterranean it was heightened by mutual religious hatred. The Islamic raids were designed both to damage the material infrastructure of Spain and Italy and to undermine the spiritual and psychic basis of Christians’ lives. The ransacking of tombs and the ritual desecration of churches that Jérome Maurand witnessed in 1544 were acts of profound intention.

Jak to vypadalo na galérách.

Thousands of prisoners were kept in slave pens—the dark, crowded, fetid converted bathhouses—from whence they would be taken daily in chains to work. Wealthy captives such as the Spanish writer Cervantes, held in Algiers for five years, might enjoy tolerable conditions, awaiting liberation through ransom. The poor would lug stones, fell timber, dig salt, build palaces and forts, or, worst of all, row galleys until disease, abuse, and malnourishment finished them off.

Evropané i Turci zotročovali lidi z opačných břehů. Protože byl v té době islám stále ještě na vzestupu, většina otroků byla křesťanských.

It is impossible to know how many slaves were being taken in the decades after 1540, but it was not a one-way trade. Both sides were engaged in “man-taking” throughout the whole length of the sea, and if Islam was in the ascendancy, there were small correctives. The Knights of Saint John were ruthless slavers, particularly La Valette, the French knight who had fought as a young man at Rhodes.

Další poznámka k živoření na galérách.

In the heyday of Venetian sea power in the fifteenth century, galleys had been rowed by volunteers; by the sixteenth, the muscle power was generally conscripted. The Ottoman navy relied heavily on an annual levy of men from the provinces of Anatolia and Europe, and everyone employed chained labor—captured slaves, convicts, and, in the Christian ships, paupers so destitute they sold themselves to the galley captains. It was these wretches, chained three or four to a foot-wide bench, who made sea wars possible. Their sole function was to work themselves to death. Shackled hand and foot, excreting where they sat, fed on meagre quantities of black biscuits, and so thirsty they were sometimes driven to drink seawater, galley slaves led lives bitter and short. The men, naked apart from a pair of linen breeches, were flayed raw by the sun; sleep deprivation on the narrow bench propelled them toward lunacy; the stroke keeper’s drum and the overseer’s lash—a tarred rope or a dried bull’s penis—whipped them beyond the point of exhaustion during long stretches of intensive effort when a ship was trying to capture or escape another vessel.

Otroci na galérách pod sebe káleli do té míry, že lodě byly cítit na dvě míle daleko. V takovém prostředí se snadno šířily nemoce, proto býval trup periodicky potápěn pod vodu, aby se vyplavily fekálie a krysy.

Disease could decimate a fleet in weeks. The galley was an amoebic death trap, a swilling sewer whose stench was so foul you could smell it two miles off—it was customary to sink the hulls at periodic intervals to cleanse them of shit and rats—but if the crew survived to enter a battle, the chained and unprotected rowers could only sit and wait to be killed by men of their own country and creed.

Následuje šťavnatá věta o tom, že galejníci byli “spotřebovávání jako palivo”. Vztahuje se ale k evropským galérám (praxe by ale patrně stejná pro obě strany).

One way or another the oared galley consumed men like fuel. Each dying wretch dumped overboard had to be replaced—and there were never enough. Official Spanish and Italian memoranda report monotonously on the shortage of fodder for the benches, so that the supply of ships often outstripped the resources to power them, as in the case of a sudden disaster that overcame the galleys of the Knights of Saint John in 1555.

Maltskému řádu svatého Jana se v noci převrhly čtyři lodě, které se vracely do zálivu. Když je záchranáři ráno obrátili palubou vzhůru, našli 300 utopených muslimů, stále přikovaných k lavicím. (Kapitán a jeho opička přežili ve vzduchové bublině.) Byl to velký problém, protože sehnat otroky na galéry nebylo jen tak.

It was only when the vessels were righted with the help of buoyant air barrels that the full horror of the event became clear; the corpses of three hundred drowned Muslim slaves still chained to the benches floated in the water like ghosts. Repair and replacement of the vessels was a manageable problem; it was securing new crews that was the real difficulty. The pope threw open the episcopal prison in Naples to supply some of the number; the knights then had to take some of their ships to snatch more slaves to fill the empty spaces. It was the same for both sides: much of the raiding was undertaken solely to make such raids possible. The violence was self-perpetuating. The galleys created their own need for war.