Swedish slave trade

[7] The Persian traveler Ibn Rustah described how Vikings, the Varangians or Rus, terrorized and enslaved the Slavs taken in their raids along the Volga River.

Thralldom was outlawed in 1335 by Magnus IV of Sweden for thralls "born by Christian parents" in Västergötland and Värend, being the last parts where it had remained legal.

The Swedish colony of Saint Barthélemy functioned as a duty-free port and became a major destination center for slave ships.

[14] In the early 19th century, Sweden signed treaties with the United Kingdom[15][16] and France to abolish the slave trade.

The Swedish king Ongentheow, sometimes identified with Angan-Tys in the Beowulf, appear to be another version of the name Týs öttungr.

[21][better source needed] Tasks for slaves in Sweden were helping with agricultural output for males and females, with women additionally serving as concubines or domestic servants.

Thralls could have some social mobility in Norse society, as for example Olav Tyggvason, who went from captured slave of Estonians to king of Norway.

During the eighth to tenth centuries, slaves from Eastern Europe and the Baltic Sea were traded to elite households in Byzantium and the Islamic world via the Dnieper and Volga river systems, the Carolingian Empire and Venice.

[23] Arabic merchants from the Caspian Sea and Byzantine merchants from the Black Sea bought their goods to the trade markets in Rus, where they met the Viking traders and warriors known as Varangians, and traded their goods for the slaves captured by the Vikings in Europe.

[28] People taken captive during the Viking raids across Europe could be sold to Moorish Spain via the Dublin slave trade[29] or transported to Hedeby or Brännö 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, Wollin and Dublin;[30] initially this trade route between Europe and the Abbasid Caliphate passed via the Khazar Kaghanate,[31] 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.

[33] This trade was the source of the Arab dirham silver hoards found in Scandinavia and functioned from at least 786 until 1009, when such coins have been found there, and it would have been so lucrative that it contributed to the continuing Viking raids across Eastern Europe, which was used by the Vikings as a slave supply source for this trade with the Islamic world.

One of the only accounts describing Norse slave practices in detail and first person is the Arabic merchant Ibn Fadlan meeting Volga Vikings.

While poorer farmers probably did not have the financial option as rich noblemen had, this possibly means that farmers or freemen were the last to free their slaves[37][better source needed] In parallel with the increasing manumission-wills of slaves during the 13th-century, different parts of Sweden started to ban slavery within their counties, while it remained legal in others.

Sweden and Denmark were competing for positions as regional powers during this period, and the Danes followed the Swedes to Africa, setting up stations a couple of years later.

However, Swedish and Finnish ships (Finland was a part of Sweden) were attacked by corsairs in the sea outside of Western Europe and in the Mediterranean.

On 20 November 1662 the Lord High Treasurer of Sweden, Magnus Gabriel De la Gardie received a letter of appeal from eight Swedish sailors who had been abducted by corsairs at sea and was being held in slavery in Alger.

[44] The Swede Johan Gabriel Sparfwenfeldt, who visited Alger and Tunis in 1691, described empathically how he had met and spoken to many Swedish slaves who asked him for help to be bought free and return to "their homes, to their children, their parents and the land of their home",[45] and listed 23 names of the Swedes then held as slaves.

[46] Sweden attempted to protect their ships by use of insurrance against slavery, convoys, international treaties and by maintaining friendly contact with the corsairs.

This did not only apply to slaves from rich families: many poor women are known to have collected money to buy their husbands and sons free.

When the young sailor Erik Persson Ångerman was enslaved in Alger after having taken captured from the ship Wibus from Stockholm on 10 May 1725, he sent a letter to his wife Maria Olssdotter via his colleague Petter Wallberg (who had been bought free and was returning to Sweden) and told her he "sat in hard slavery" in Alger.

[47] Maria Olssdotter had no funds to buy his freedom, but appealed to the king via the governor of Gävle for money to be gathered in the churches for the purchase of her enslaved husband, and her application was approved; this was not an unusual case, as many poor women are known to have done the same.

[49] Sweden together with, the United States of America and Kingdom of Sicily, would intervene in 1801 to free Swedish, American and Sicilian slaves from the Barbary Coast.

Gustav also knew that the leading slave trading nations in Europe made large amounts of money from it.

Paragraph 14 in the letter states: "The Company is free to operate slave trade in Angola and the African coast, where such is permitted."

[50] The new constitution stated: "Freedom for all on Saint Bartholomew living and arriving to arm and send out ships and shipments to Africa to buy slaves on the places thus is permitted for all nations.

In 1788, the British Committee for the Abolition of Slavery sent a Swedish opponent of the slave trade, Anders Sparrman, to Gustav III.

Sweden made the slave trade illegal as part of the Treaty of Stockholm with Britain in 1813, but allowed slavery until 9 October 1847.

The case was taken to court in order to test if the slave trade could be considered contrary to the general law of nations.

Exactly how many slaves were brought to the New World on Swedish ships is not known, since most of the archives documents have not been investigated, and many of them are by now not accessible because of their bad preservation.

Then a rival more warlike tribe with the help of European guns defeats them and sells him and his foster family into slavery in the Swedish slave fort of Christina.