( #Moors & #WhiteGold ) When #Blacks enslaved #Whites - The Story of Thomas Pellow and One Million White Slaves

Whites slaves tell their own story in their own words about how they were shanghaied and taken back to North Africa as slaves. Over 2 million whites are reported to have been taken as slaves after being shanghaied by Moors known as Barbary Coast pirates or Riff Pirates or Barbary Corsairs.

Descendants of white slaves in Mauritania

has been purposely kept from you. We will discuss the over two million white people who were taken back to various parts of North Africa as slaves to their Muslim black Moorish, Arab masters. The majority were captured by Barbary pirates also known as Barbary Corsairs and Riff pirates. We also discuss a famous statue called "The Four Moors" which depicts King Ferdinand de' Medecini standing over four shackled 'Moors" (black of course) in celebration over his eventual victory over the black corsairs who'd terrorized the coastal areas on their pirate raids. It's a historical fact that over 2000 ships were captured and shanghaied and the white passengers were taken to Morocco and other parts of North Africa as slaves.

The flag of Sardinia, called the flag of the Four Moors or simply the Four Moors (Italian: I quattro mori; Sardinian: Sos bator moros in Logudorese or Is cuatru morus in Campidanese), is the official flag of the autonomous region of Sardinia, Italy, and the historical flag and coat of arms of the Kingdom of Sardinia, described as a "white field with a red cross and a bandaged Moor's head facing away from the left (the edge close to the mast) in each quarter" (Regional Law 15 April 1999, n. 10, Article 1.)^[1]

The flag is composed of the St George's Cross and four heads of Moors, which in the past were not forehead bandaged but blindfolded and turned towards the left. The most accepted hypothesis is that the heads represented the heads of Moorish princes defeated by the Aragonese, as for the first time they appeared in the 13th century seals of the Crown of Aragon – although with a beard and no bandage, contrary to the Moors of the Sardinian flag, which appeared for the first time in a manuscript of the second half of the 14th century.

"From the sixteenth to nineteenth century, the Muslim Barbary Pirates captured over a million Europeans at sea and through raiding parties along the Mediterranean and Atlantic coastlines. The victims were then transported back to North Africa, where they were sold as slaves or sent further east into the Ottoman Empire’s heartland."

https://ostarapublications.com/product/the-adventures-of-thomas-pellow-of-penryn-mariner-three-and-twenty-years-in-captivity-among-the-moors/ 

"Attractive European women were sent to the sultan's harem, and the strongest men to breeding farms to mate with black Senegalese slaves, Ismail believing that mulattos made the most trustworthy workers. One Frenchman was locked up, naked, for six days with a bottle of brandy and four women, a eunuch keeping watch; whenever sexual activity flagged, he ordered a drum serenade." - Giles Milton

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/3619651/The-depraved-sultan-and-his-forgotten-white-slaves.html

One October evening in 1738, the population of Penryn abandoned their village to welcome home a man with a great long beard and sun-blackened face. Not even his parents recognised Thomas Pellow, who had been seized by Barbary corsairs when he was 11 and taken to Morocco, where he spent 23 years as a slave of Mulay Ismail, a sultan of story-book depravity.

Pellow's adventures, ghosted by a local hack in 1740, are the catalyst for Giles Milton's rattling account of the forgotten white slaves of North Africa: an estimated one million Europeans and Americans captured between 1550 and 1816 when Algiers, the hub of this traffic, was bombarded into submission by a relative of Pellow.

Go to the Rif or the Atlas and you will find grey-eyed men and women, the descendants of 400 Icelanders abducted by pirates sailing from another slave capital, the Moroccan port of Salé. In their swift xebecs, the "Sallee Rovers" kidnapped thousands of English, mainly from the West Country. Between 1609 and 1625, they took 466 English ships, raised the Islamic flag on Lundy and, in one spectacular raid, dragged 60 men, women and children from St Michael's Mount.

The corsairs were like English football supporters: "ugly onhumayne creatures" wrote one survivor, who "with their heads shaved and their armes almost naked did terrifye me exceedingly".

Attractive European women were sent to the sultan's harem, and the strongest men to breeding farms to mate with black Senegalese slaves, Ismail believing that mulattos made the most trustworthy workers. One Frenchman was locked up, naked, for six days with a bottle of brandy and four women, a eunuch keeping watch; whenever sexual activity flagged, he ordered a drum serenade.

The Monument of the Four Moors (Italian: Monumento dei Quattro mori) is located in Livorno, Italy. It was completed in 1626 to commemorate the victories of Ferdinand I of Tuscany over the Ottomans.^[1]

It is the most famous monument of Livorno and is located in Piazza Micheli.^[2] Created by Pietro Tacca, the monument took its name from the four bronze statues of "Moorish" slaves that are found at the base of an earlier work consisting of the statue of Ferdinando I and its monumental pedestal.^[2]

In 1617, Cosimo II contracted sculptor Pietro Tacca to create the monument to commemorate his father, Ferdinando I. The completed monument was installed in Livorno in 1626.^[1] It features four bronze statues of enslaved prisoners chained at the base of a statue of Ferdinando I which had been commissioned at an earlier date.^[1] The physical characteristics of three of the statues represent people of the southern Mediterranean coast while the fourth statue has characteristics of a black African.^[1]

Although the four chained prisoners are meant to represent the victories of Ferdinando I over the Ottomans, there may also be a different interpretation due to the presence of the statue with the black African characteristics; Ferdinando II, grandson of Ferdinando I, completed the monument and he may also have been involved in slave trade activities in West Africa in the 1660s, in cooperation with the Genoans.^[1]

The four Moors symbolise the four corners of the world.^[3] Tacca's design of the Moors monument is assumed to have been influenced by three columns in the shape of African men supporting a balcony in Via Carriona in Carrara. The three sculptures are depicted as suffering from the weight they bear supporting the iron structure.^[3]

The monument of the four Moors influenced sculptural design for several decades. A fountain in Marino features four statues of similarly chained prisoners, two of whom possess black African characteristics. The structure was constructed between 1632–1642 to commemorate Marcantonio Colonna's participation in the battle of Lepanto in 1571 which led to the defeat of the Ottomans.^[1]

The monument of the four Moors also influenced Bernini's creation of the Fountain of the Four Rivers (Fontana dei Quattro Fiumi). Bernini may have also been influenced by the Marino monument in his design of the Fountain.^[1]

The ostentatious design of the tomb of Doge Giovanni Pesaro, which was built in 1669 in Venice, and is found in Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari close to the Pesaro Altarpiece, was perhaps strongly influenced by Tacca's monument of the four Moors.^[4]