Black Sea slave trade

In the late Middle Ages, trading colonies of Venice and Genoa along the Northern Black Sea coasts used the instable political and religious border zones to buy captives and transport them as slaves to Italy, Spain, and the Ottoman Empire.

Slaves were sold by their families or as war captives to the Greek cities, who exported them West to the Mediterranean or East to Asia along the Silk road.

[4] In the 3rd century BC, Polybius noted that the quantity of humans captured and shipped as slaves from the Northern Black Sea shores were bigger than anywhere in the known world.

In the 1st century, the Roman writer Strabo described Dioscurias, the major Black Sea port of the Caucasus, and the Greek city of Tanais, as major ports of the Pontic slave trade, from which "Pontic" slaves, such as Scythians or Paphlagonians, who had been sold as war captives by enemy tribes or sold by their families as adolescents, were exported to the Mediterranean and could be found in Ancient Athens.

[7] During the Middle Ages, informal slave zones were formed alongside religious borders, which were also crossed at the Black Sea region.

[12] Ahmad ibn Rustah, a 10th-century Persian traveler, remembers it this way:The Magyar country (Etelköz) is rich in wood and water.

They make piratical raids on the Slavs and follow the coast [of the Black Sea] with their captives to a port in Byzantine territory named Karkh.

People taken captive during the Viking raids in Western Europe, could be sold to Moorish Spain via the Dublin slave trade[17] or transported to Hedeby or Brännö and from there via the Volga trade route to Russia, where slaves and furs were sold to Muslim merchants in exchange for Arab silver dirham and silk, which have been found in Birka, Wolin, and Dublin;[18] initially this trade route between Europe and the Abbasid Caliphate passed via the Khazar Kaghanate,[19] but from the early 10th century onward it went via Volga Bulgaria and from there by caravan to Khwarazm, to the Samanid slave market in Central Asia and finally via Iran to the Abbasid Caliphate.

The pagan Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, Livonians, and Latgallians raided each other, Ingria and Novgorod during the 12th- and 13th-centuries, and sold war captives south to the Black Sea slave trade.

[30] Italian merchants, particularly the Genoese and Venetians, who had a large web of contacts as traders in the Mediterranean Sea, early established themselves in the slave trade.

The Crimean Khanate had a small population and a rudimentary agriculture and needed another source of income as well as a supply of laborers for the estates they founded.

[57] The last Crimean slave raid to Hungary was conducted in 1717, during which 1,464 people were captured in the Ugocsa County, 861 of whom succeeded in escaping from the caravan going back to the Crimea.

[61] Circassians in Caucasus were, however, split between Muslims, Christians, and pagans until the late 18th century, with different religions dominating in different regions and different social classes.

[64] During the Great Northern war between 1700 and 1721, Russia invaded the Eastern provinces of the Swedish Empire in Finland, Estonia and Livonia in the Baltics.

Since the 15th century, the Russian Army had allowed private soldiers to capture and sell war captives, and during the Great Northern War many Russian soldiers captured Livonians, Finns, and Baltic civilians (particularly children) from the Swedish provinces and sold them, some of which ended up in the Black Sea slave trade and Persia.

[65] One of these occasions was the fall of Narva, where Lovisa von Burghausen was a famous victim of those captured to Russian soldiers with intent to sell.

[84] The white slave women bought to become concubines and wives of the Mamluks, such as for example Nafisa al-Bayda, were often from the Caucasus, Circassians or Georgian.

[96] The Caucasus was an ideal area for slave trade, since it was a fragmented border zone affected by constant warfare and political instability.

[97] It was commonly claimed that Circassian girls were eager to be enslaved and asked their parents to sell them to the traders, because it was the only way for them to enhance their class status.

[93] It was commonly known that Circassian girls were mainly bought to become wives or concubines to rich men, which made the Circassian slave trade to be viewed as a form of marriage market, with the girls being raised by the slave traders as "apprentices" for marriage and then sold to become the wives or concubines of rich men.

[89] In the Treaty of Adrianople, the Russians were given control over the Ottoman forts along the Black Sea coast between Anatolia and the Caucasus, significantly reducing the Circassian slave trade, which caused the price of white women on the markets of Constantinople and Cairo to skyrocket.

[99] However, in March 1858 the Ottoman governor of Trapezunt informed the British Consul that the 1854 ban had been a temporary war time ban due to foreign pressure, and that he had been given orders to allow slave ships on the Black Sea pass on their way to Constantinople, and in December formal tax regulations was introduced, legitimizing the Circassian slave trade again.

Perceiving that when the Russians shall have reoccupied the coast of the Caucasus this traffic in white slaves will be over, the Circassian dealers have redoubled their efforts ever since the commencement of the peace conferences to introduce into Turkey the greatest possible number of women while the opportunity of doing so lasted.

They have been so successful, notwithstanding the prohibition of the trade by the Porte, and the presence of so many of Her Majesty's ships in the Black Sea, that never, perhaps, at any former period, was white human flesh so cheap as it is at this moment.

[103] Some women who applied for freedom to a legal court were indeed manumitted, but being a free single woman in an Islamic society created significant difficulties, unless she was able to be given protection by a family who could arrange a marriage for her.

I have it on the authority of a respectable slave-broker that at the present moment there have been thrown on the market unusually large numbers of negresses in the family way, some of them even slaves of pashas and men of rank.

A single observation will explain the reason of this, which might appear strange when compared with the value that is attached even to an unborn black baby in some slave countries.

To buy a daughter-in-law was seen as a good alternative when arranging a marriage, since she was likely to become a humble wife, lacking both her own money as well as relatives, and completely dependent upon her new family.

As a result of this system, a constant stream of female slaves – fair-haired beauties from Georgia and Circassia, brown-skinned Arab girls from the borders of the Sahara, and negresses from Equatoria – trickles in to the North African coast towns by various roundabout channels, and though the European officials are perfectly well aware of this condition of things, they are powerless to end it.

The women thus obtained, though nominally wives, are in reality slaves, for they are bought for money, they are not consulted about their sale, they cannot go away if they are discontented, and their very lives are at the disposal of their masters.