Venetian slave trade

In the Balkan slave trade, Venetian merchants bought Pagan war captives and then sold them to Southern Europe or to the Middle East via the Aegean Islands.

In the later Black Sea slave trade, the Venetians established colonies in the Crimea, and acquired slaves of various religions to sell to Southern Europe via Crete and the Balearic Islands, or to the Middle East directly via the Black Sea.

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

[2] There was still a market for slavery in medieval Europe in the Early Middle Ages, but it gradually started to be phased out in favor of serfdom.

Both the Balkan and the Black Sea routes provided primarily pagan slaves to Southern Europe and, to a larger extent, the Muslim world.

Until the 6th and 7th centuries, the Balkans belonged to the Byzantine Empire, but was split by invasions of the Avars, Slavic tribes, and other peoples.

[7] Trade in Christian slaves from Western Europe was however deeply disliked by the Catholic church and was stopped early on.

The Prague slave trade died out in the 11th-century since it could no longer be legitimately supplied when the East Slavs converted to Catholicism.

Initially they did so as traveling merchants, but eventually they managed to acquire their own trading colonies in the Crimea.

In the 13th century, Byzantine control in the Crimea weakened by the sack of Constantinople in 1204, and Italian trade colonies took control over the Black Sea slave trade, with the Republic of Venice establishing in Sudak in the Crimea in 1206 and later in Tana, and the Republic of Genoa in Caffa in 1266.

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