Black Sea slave trade

The Black Sea slave trade trafficked people across the Black Sea from Eastern Europe and the Caucasus to slavery in the Mediterranean and the Middle East. The Black Sea slave trade was a center of the slave trade between Europe and the rest of the world from antiquity until the 19th century. One of the major and most significant slave trades of the Black Sea region was the trade of the Crimean Khanate, known as the Crimean slave trade.
The Black Sea is situated in a region historically dominated by the margins of empires, conquests and major trade routes between Europe, the Mediterranean and Central Asia, notably the Ancient Silk Road, which made the Black Sea ideal for a slave trade of war captives sold along the trade routes.
In the Early Middle Ages, the Byzantine Empire imported slaves from the Vikings, who transported European captives via the route from the Varangians to the Greeks to the Byzantine ports at the Black Sea. 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.
In the early modern period, the Crimean Khanate abducted Eastern Europeans through the Crimean–Nogai slave raids in Eastern Europe, who were transported to the rest of the Muslim world in collaboration with the Ottoman slave trade from the Crimea. The massive slave trade was at this time a major source of income for the Crimean Khanate. When the Crimean slave trade was ended by the Russian conquest of the Crimea in 1783, the slave trade of Circassians from Caucasus became an independent slave trade. The Circassian slave trade of particularly women from Caucasus to the Muslim world via Anatolia and Constantinople continued until the 20th century.

Antiquity

In antiquity, enslaved people were sold, via the Ancient Greek and Roman city ports of the Black Sea, East to Asia via the Silk road; and West to the Ancient Mediterranean world. In antiquity, the Black Sea slave trade was often referred to as the Pontic slave trade.

Ancient Greek slave trade

In antiquity, the Black Sea was called the Pontic Sea and people from the region often simply called Pontics. Greek colonies were established along the Black Sea, which engaged in slave trade between the tribes of the interior North of the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. 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.
In 594 BC, the laws of Solon outlawed the citizens of Athens to enslave other Athenians citizens; it was a common trend in the Greek city states to outlaw the enslavement of citizens of their own cities, and this trend made it necessary for the Greek to maintain a slave trade with non-Greek non-citizens they termed "barbarians", from foreign lands such as the Balkans or the North of the Black Sea.
In the 6th century BC, Greek city colonies expanded in the Northern shores of the Black Sea, which came to play an important role in the slave trade; it has even been hypothesized, that these cities were founded because of the Black Sea slave trade. The Greek Black Sea slave trade is documented from at least the 6th century BC onward, when an inscription from Phanagoria describes the trafficking of a slave named Phaylles to Phanagoria from Borysthenes.
Classic Greek authors described particularly the North Western shore of the Black Sea as a slave coast were the conditions ensured a steady supply of slaves; it was a border zone between the Thracians and the Scythians, where the nomadic Scythians conducted slave raids toward the Thracians, who were also known to sell their children to slave traders, and the inhabitants up the Danube traded slaves for salt. The rural land around the Greek cities were inhabited by Hellenized Scythian farmers, who acted as go-betweens and sold the slaves captured by the nomadic Scythians to the Greeks in the cities.
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.

Ancient Roman slave trade

The Black Sea slave trade continued after the Greek Black Sea cities had become vassals of the Roman Empire, forming the Roman Client state of the Bosporan Kingdom.
The Ancient Silk Road connecting Mediterranean world and China in East Asia may have existed as early as the 3rd century BC, since Chinese silk has been found in Rome has been dated to about 200 BC.
The Silk Road connected to the Mediterranean world via two routes. From China, the Silk Road continued over the Tian Shan, Hami, Turpan, Almalik, Tashkent, Samarkand and finally Bukhara, where it split in two main roads: a southern route from Bukhara to Merv and from there to Antioch, Trebizond, or Aleppo; or the northern route from Bukhara over the Karakum Desert to the Caspian Sea, Astrakhan and Kazan close to the Black Sea. The Silk Road did not sell only textiles, jewels, metals, and cosmetics, but also slaves. connecting the Silk Road slave trade to the Bukhara slave trade as well as the Black Sea slave trade.
The prosperity of the Bosporan Kingdom was based on the export of wheat, fish and slaves, and the Roman Client Kingdom became the economic center of the Black Sea and called the ancient Jewel of the Black Sea.
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.
Byzantium was a market for the Black Sea slave trade.

Middle Ages

During the Middle Ages, informal slave zones were formed alongside religious borders, which were also crossed at the Black Sea region. Both Christians and Muslims banned the enslavement of people of their own faith, but both approved of the enslavement of people of a different faith.
The slave trade thus organized alongside religious principles. While Christians did not enslave Christians, and Muslims did not enslave Muslims, both did allow the enslavement of people they regarded to be heretics, which allowed Catholic Christians to enslave Orthodox Christians, and Sunni Muslims to enslave Shia Muslims.
However, both Christians and Muslims approved of enslaving pagans, who came to be a preferred target of the slave trade in the Middle Ages, and Pagan war captives were sold by pagan enemies into the slave trade.

Byzantine slave trade (5th–13th centuries)

Background

The slave trade trafficking humans from the Black Sea region to the Mediterranean Sea during the Roman period continued during the Byzantine Empire, but the Byzantine slave trade is not fully documented, though it appears to have continued to function via the old principles war-captives and children sold by their families.
During the Middle Ages, the slave market was organized alongside religious borders. Christian slaves could not be sold in Christian slave markets, and Muslim slaves could not be sold on Muslim slave markets. The slave trade adjusted to this, and the result was that pagans, who could be sold to both Christians and Muslims, came to be highly valued. Pagans from Eastern and Northern Europe came to be the most popular targets for slavery in both the Byzantine Empire and the Islamic Arab world during the Early Middle Ages, where they were forced to convert to Christianity and Islam respectively after their enslavement.

Slave trade

Various slave routes passed via the Black Sea and the Byzantine Crimea to the Byzantine Mediterranean world and the Islamic Middle East. Different people acquired captives and shipped them down to Byzantine Crimea and other ports around the Black Sea, from where they continued to the slave market of the Mediterranean via Byzantine Constantinople, and to the Middle East.

Magyars of Hungary

The slave trade from the Balkans was mainly directed toward the Balkan slave trade of the Adriatic Sea rather than the Black Sea. However, in the 9th century, the Magyars of Hungary conducted regular slave raids toward the Slavs and sold their captives to the Byzantine slave traders in the Black Sea port of Kerch in exchange for brocades, wool, and other products.
Ahmad ibn Rustah, a 10th-century Persian traveler, remembers it this way:

Viking slave trade

The Vikings trafficked European slaves captured in Viking raids in Eastern Europe in two destinations from present-day Russia via the Volga trade route; one to Abbasid Caliphate in the Middle East—through the Caspian Sea, the Samanid slave trade and Iran. The other route led to the Byzantine Empire and the Mediterranean via the Dnieper and the Black Sea slave trade. 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. One of the reasons Kievan Rus came to be was that Scandinavian settlers established themselves and traded with captured slaves. Arabic merchants from the Caspian Sea and Byzantine merchants from the Black Sea brought 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 Eastern Europe.
The so-called saqaliba, which was the term for white slaves in the Islamic Middle East, is not likely to stand for exclusively Slavic ethnicity in practice, since many victims of the Vikings' saqaliba slave trade was in fact other ethnicities such as Baltics, Lithuanians, and Finno-Ugric people.
During the Middle Ages, organized alongside religious principles, both Christians and Muslims banned the enslavement of people of their own faith, but both approved of the enslavement of people of a different faith; both did allow the enslavement of people they regarded to be heretics, which allowed Catholic Christians to enslave Orthodox Christians, and Sunni Muslims to enslave Shia Muslims. However, both Christians and Muslims approved of enslaving Pagans, who came to be a preferred target of the slave trade in the Middle Ages, and Pagan war captives were sold by Pagan enemies into the slave trade.
People taken captive during the Viking raids across Europe, could be sold to Moorish Spain 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; initially this trade route between Europe and the Abbasid Caliphate passed via the Khazar Kaghanate, 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.
Archbishop Rimbert of Bremen reported that he witnessed a "large throng of captured Christians being hauled away" in the Viking port of Hedeby in Denmark, one of whom was a woman who sang psalms to identify herself as a Christian nun, and who the bishop was able to free by exchanging his horse for her freedom.
Until the 9th century, the Vikings trafficked slaves from the Baltic Sea in the North, via the Wisla or the Donau rivers South East through Europe to the Black Sea. In the 9th century, the Viking slave route was redirected, and until the 11th century the Vikings trafficked slaves from the Baltic Sea via Ladoga, Novgorod and the Msta river to the Black Sea, or to the Caspian Sea via the Volga trade route.
The Viking slave trade stopped in the 11th century, when Denmark, Norway, and Sweden became Christian themselves and thus could no longer trade in Christian slaves.