Bukhara slave trade

The conquests and plundering of the Ghaznavid Empire brought a large number of slaves from India into the markets of Bukhara in the 10th and 11th centuries.

During the Middle Ages, the city fell after the Islamic conquest of Persia and was a part of the Abbasid Caliphate before gaining independence during the Samanid Empire.

[3] Beginning in the late 10th century, these incursions marked a significant chapter in the history of South Asia, with Ghaznavid forces penetrating deep into the Indian subcontinent, including the Punjab region and northern India.

The primary objectives of these campaigns included the acquisition of wealth and slaves, the propagation of Islam, and the establishment of Ghaznavid rule in the region.

[5] Warfare and tax revenue policies was the cause of enslavement of Hindu Indians for the Central Asian slave market already during the Umayyad conquest of Sindh in the 8th century, when the armies of the Umayyad commander Muhammad bin Qasim enslaved tens of thousands of Indian civilians and well as soldiers.

[6] During the Ghaznavid campaigns in India in the 11th century, hundreds of thousands of Indians were captured and sold on the Central Asian slave markets; in 1014 "the army of Islam brought to Ghazna about 200,000 captives (qarib do sit hazar banda), and much wealth, so that the capital appeared like an Indian city, no soldier of the camp being without wealth, or without many slaves", and during the expedition of the Ghaznavid ruler Sultan Ibrahim to the Multan area of northwestern India 100,000 captives were brought back to Central Asia, and the Ghaznavids were said to have captured "five hundred thousand slaves, beautiful men and women".

[6] During his twelfth expedition into India in 1018–1019, the armies of Mahmud of Ghazni captured so many Indian slaves that the prices fell and according to al-'Utbi, "merchants came from distant cities to purchase them, so that the countries of Ma wara3 an-nahr (Central Asia), 'Iraq and Khurasan were filled with them, and the fair and the dark, the rich and the poor, mingled in one common slavery".

During the Early Middle Ages, the Samanid Empire was one of the two major destinations of the Viking Volga trade route, along which the Vikings exported slaves captured in Europe to the Abbasid Caliphate in the Middle East via the Caspian Sea and the Samanid Empire to Iran (the other route was to the Byzantine Empire and the Mediterranean via Dnieper and the Black Sea slave trade).

[10] People taken captive during the Viking raids in all across Europe, such as Ireland, could be sold to Moorish Spain via the Dublin slave trade[11] or transported to Hedeby or Brännö in Scandinavia and from there via the Volga trade route to present day 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;[12] initially this trade route between Europe and the Abbasid Caliphate passed via the Khazar Kaghanate,[13] 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.

[14] Also Slavic Pagans were captured and enslaved by Vikings, Madjars, Khazars and Volga Bulgars, who transported them to Volga Bulgaria, where they were sold to Muslim slave traders and continued to Khwarazm and the Samanids, with a minor part being exported to the Byzantine Empire.

Until the 13th century, the majority of Turkic peoples were not Muslims but adherents of Tengrism, Buddhism, and various forms of animism and shamanism, which made them infidels and as such legitimate targets for enslavement by Islamic law.

From the 7th century onward, when the first Islamic military campaigns were conducted toward Turkic lands in Caucasus and Central Asia, Turkic people were enslaved as war captives and then trafficked as slaves via slave raids via southern Russia and the Caucasus into Azerbaijan, and through Karazm and Transoxania into Khorasan and Iran;[5] in 706 the Arab governor Qotayba b. Moslem killed all men in Baykand in Sogdia and took all the women and children as slaves in to the Umayyad Empire [18][5] and in 676 eighty Turkic nobles captured from the queen of Bukhara were abducted to the governor Saʿīd b.

[19][5] The military campaigns were gradually replaced by pure commercial Muslim slave raids against non-Muslim Turks into "infidel territory" (dār al-ḥarb) in the Central Asian steppe, resulting in a steady flow of Turks to the Muslim slave markets of Bukhara, Darband, Samarkand, Kīš, and Nasaf.

[5] Turkic men were particularly preferred to supply the Abbasid Army of ghilman slave soldiers in Baghdad.

[6] Aside from war captives enslaved during that period, the Delhi Sultanate was provided with large numbers of Hindu slaves via their revenue system, in which the subordinate iqta'dars ordered their armies to abduct Hindus in large numbers as a means of extracting revenue.

A Bukhara endowment deed from 1326, for example, named nineteen slaves of several ethnicities: Mongolian, Indian, Chinese (Khitai) and Russian.

[25] In the domestic market in Central Asia, slaves were used in private households, to maintain the garden, and to cultivate the land and managed the livestock on the plantations of Central Asia's wealthy families; they were used for military slaves, as laborers to maintain irrigation canals, in brick factories, and trained to work in construction engineering.

A particular category were sex slavery, and attractive slave girls were sold for a higher price than artisans skilled at construction engineering.

Turkmen tribal groups performed regular slave raids, referred to as alaman, toward two sources of slaves; Russian and German settlers along the Ural, and Persian pilgrims to Mashad, two categories who as Christians and Shia-Muslims respectively were seen as religiously legitimate to target for enslavement.

[6] Alongside Christian Russians, Buddhist Qalmaqs, non-Sunni Afghans and Shia Iranians, Hindu Indians were an important category of slaves in the Central Asian slave trade from at least the Middle Ages and the early modern era.

[26] Shia Persians were seen as legitimate targets by Sunni Muslim Turkmens and Uzbek slave traders.

[6] Many were captured during the warfare between the Uzbeks and the Safavids, and in Turkmen slave raids to villages of northwestern Iran.

[6] During the early modern era (16th–18th centuries), Khiva and Bukhara imported large numbers of Europeans slaves kidnapped by the Crimean Tatars (normally Russians).

[26] Christian Russian settlers were as non-Muslim seen as legitimate target for enslavement, and abducted from the frontiers by Crimean Tatars, Nogay, Qalmaq, and Bashkir, and transported to the slave markets of Khiva, Balkh, and Bukhara.

[29] The royal harem of the ruler of the Emirate of Bukhara (1785–1920) in Central Asia (Uzbekistan) was similar to that of the Khanate of Khiva.

Russia was under pressure by both nationally and internationally Western opinion to abolish slavery and slave trade.

[31] The Russian General Governor congratulated Emir Muzaffar bin Nasrullah for having abolished the slave trade in Bukhara, and expressed his hope that also slavery itself would be gradually phased out during a ten-year period.

[31] However, slavery in Bukhara continued, and the Royal Household and the Royal Harem continued to be staffed with slaves acquired from Turkmen slave trade agents in secrecy;[31] when the Emirate of Bukhara was annexed by the communist Soviet Union after the Bukharan Revolution and the Bukhara operation (1920), when the last Emir, Sayyid Mir Muhammad Alim Khan, fled from the Red Army and left his slave concubines behind.