Balkan slave trade

The trade rested on the fact that the Balkans was a religious border zone, which was significant in the Middle Ages, when religion was the determining factor on who was viewed as a legitimate target of enslavement.

This influence maintained the region's status as a religious border zone to the rest of the then-Catholic Europe.

During the Middle Ages, informal slave zones were formed alongside religious borders.

Since the custom at the time did not approve of enslaving people of the same religion, this made the Balkans a supply of slaves for both Christian and Muslim lands.

Another factor was the fact that the Balkans was for a long time politically decentralized and unstable, and was in the Early Middle Ages known as the Sclaveni or Slav lands.

[4] Venetian slave traders trafficked Balkan slaves from the Balkan west coast across the Adriatic Sea to the Aegean Sea, where Genoese Chios (Lordship of Chios and Maona of Chios and Phocaea) and Venetian Crete (Kingdom of Candia) were transit centers for the export of Balkan slaves to either Spain in the west or Egypt in the south.

Albanian children termed anime were sold to Venice via Durazzo (Durrës); since the Albanians were not Bogomils but either Orthodox or Catholic and therefore not officially deemed legitimate for enslavement, they were officially not categorized as slaves but sold as bond servants which were formally claimed to be contract workers.

A smaller number of slaves were sold in Italy and Spain as enslaved domestic servants, called ancillae.

In the mid-13th century, Pope Innocent IV criticized Italian merchants export of Bulgarian, Greek, and Ruthenian slaves to the Muslims in Jerusalem.