Slave raiding
Slave raiding is a military raid for the purpose of capturing people and bringing them from the raid area to serve as slaves. Once seen as a normal part of warfare, it is nowadays widely considered a war crime. Slave raiding has occurred since antiquity. Some of the earliest surviving written records of slave raiding come from Sumer. Kidnapping and prisoners of war were the most common sources of African slaves, although indentured servitude or punishment also resulted in slavery.
The many alternative methods of obtaining human beings to work in indentured or other involuntary conditions, as well as technological and cultural changes, have made slave raiding rarer.
Reasons
Slave raiding was a large and lucrative trade on the coasts of Africa, in Europe, Mesoamerica, and in medieval Asia. The Crimean–Nogai slave raids in Eastern Europe provided some two or three million slaves to the Ottoman Empire via the Crimean slave trade over the course of four centuries. The Barbary pirates from the 16th century onwards through 1830 engaged in razzias in Africa and the European coastal areas as far away as Iceland, capturing slaves for the Muslim slavery market in North Africa and West Asia. The Atlantic slave trade was predicated on European countries endorsing and supporting slave raiding between African tribes to supply the workforce of agricultural plantations in the Americas. For three and a half centuries, European slave traders, primarily Iberian, transported African captives across the Atlantic in slave ships. The ships came from the ports of all the major European maritime powers—Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, Great Britain, France, and Brandenburg-Prussia.Methods
The act of slave raiding involves an organised and concerted attack on a settlement with the purpose of taking the area's people. The collected new slaves are often kept in some form of slave pen or depot. From there, the slave takers will transport them to a distant place by means such as a slave ship or camel caravan. When conquered people are enslaved and remain in their place, it is not raiding.Historically
Saracen piracy
During the Middle ages, Saracen Andalusian pirates established themselves in bases in southern France, the Baleares, Southern Italy and Sicily, from which they raided the coasts of the Christian Mediterranean and exported their prisoners as Saqaliba slaves to the slave markets of the Muslim West Asia.The Aghlabids of Ifriqiya was a base for Saracen attacks along the Spanish East coast as well as against Southern Italy from the early 9th century; they attacked Rome in 845, Comacchio in 875-876, Monte Cassino in 882-83, and established the Emirate of Bari, the Emirate of Sicily and a base in Garigliano, which became bases of slave trade.
During the warfare between Rome and the Byzantine Empire in Southern Italy in the 9th century the Saracens made Southern Italy a supply source for a slave trade to Maghreb by the mid-9th century; the Western Emperor Louis II complained in a letter to the Byzantine Emperor that the Byzantines in Naples guided the Saracens in their raids toward South Italy and aided them in their slave trade with Italians to North Africa, an accusation noted also by the Lombard Chronicler Erchempert.
Moorish Saracen pirates from al-Andalus attacked Marseille and Arles and established a base in Camargue, Fraxinetum or La Garde-Freinet-Les Mautes, from which they made slave raids in to France; the population fled in fear of the slave raids, which made it difficult for the Frankish to secure their Southern coast, and the Saracens of Fraxinetum exported the Frankisk prisoners they captured as slaves to the slave market of the Muslim Middle East.
The Saracens captured the Baleares in 903, and made slave raids also from this base toward the coasts of the Christian Mediterranean and Sicily.
While the Saracen bases in France was eliminated in 972, this did not prevent the Saracen piracy slave trade of the Mediterranean; both Almoravid dynasty and the Almohad Caliphate approved of the slave raiding of Saracen pirates toward non-Muslim ships in Gibraltar and the Mediterranean for the purpose of slave raiding.
Samanid Empire
A major supply source to the Samanid slave trade was the non-Muslim Turkic peoples of Central Asian steppe, which were both bought as well as regularly kidnapped in slave raids by the thousands to supply the Bukhara slave trade.The slave trade with Turkic people was the biggest slave supply for the Samanid 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. Many slaves in the medieval Islamic world referred to as "white" were of Turkic origin.
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; 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 and in 676 eighty Turkic nobles captured from the queen of Bukhara were abducted to the governor Saʿīd b. ʿOṯmān of Khorasan to Medina as agricultural slaves, where they killed their slaver and then committed suicide.
The military campaigns were gradually replaced by pure commercial Muslim slave raids against non-Muslim Turks into "infidel territory" in the Central Asian steppe, resulting in a steady flow of Turks to the Muslim slave markets of Bukhara, Darband, Samarkand, Kīš, and Nasaf. Aside from slave raids by Muslim slave traders, Turkic captives were also provided to the slave trade as war captives after warfare among the Turkic peoples themselves in the steppes, and in some cases sold by their own families.
al-Baladhuri described how Caliph al-Mamun used to write to his governors in Khurasan to raid those peoples of Transoxiana who had not submitted to Islam:
Turkic slaves were the main slave supply of the Samanid slave trade, and regularly formed a part of the land tax sent to the Abbasid capital of Baghdad; the geographer Al-Maqdisi noted that in his time the annual levy included 1,020 slaves. The average rate for a Turkic slave in the 9th century was 300 dirhams, but a Turkic slave could be sold for as much as 3,000 dinars.
The trade in Turkic slaves via Bukhara continued for centuries after the end of the Samanid Empire.
Vikings
The Vikings raided the coastlines of Ireland for people, cattle and goods. High status captives were taken back to their community or families to be ransomed—this included bishops and kings. In the Annals of Ulster it is recorded that in 821 AD Howth, was raided and "a great booty of women was carried away". By the tenth and eleventh centuries the Vikings had established slave markets in Ireland's major ports. However, following political allegiances with the Vikings, the Irish Kings also took local captives to profit from these slave markets. By the late tenth century, the Vikings began to suffer significant military defeats and the Irish Kings now seized captives from the defeated Viking armies and their captured towns, with the justification that the inhabitants were foreigners bearing the sins of their ancestors.The Norsemen were first recorded in Ireland in 795, when they plundered the island of Rathlin. This island, off the northeast coast of Ireland, is home to numerous burial sites with official evidence of their existence. According to the Annals of Ulster, the first raid on this island was known as "Loscad Rechrainne o geinntib," also known as "the burning of Rechru by heathens." Sporadic raids continued until 832, after which the Norsemen began to establish fortified settlements throughout the country. Norse raids continued throughout the 10th century, but resistance to them grew. The Norsemen established independent kingdoms in Dublin, Waterford, Wexford, Cork, and Limerick. These kingdoms did not survive subsequent Norman invasions, but the towns continued to grow and prosper.
Crimean–Nogai slave raids
The Crimean–Nogai slave raids in Eastern Europe provided some two or three million slaves for slavery in the Ottoman Empire via the Crimean slave trade between the 15th century and the late 18th century. During this period the Crimean Khanate was the destination of the Crimean–Nogai slave raids in Eastern Europe, and European and Circassian slaves were trafficked to the Middle East via the Crimea.Kazakh and Turkmen raids
The Kazakh-Russian conflicts of the 17th–18th centuries were a series of armed confrontations between the Kazakh Khanate and the Tsardom of Russia, later the Russian Empire, as well as their subjects: the Cossacks, Bashkirs, and Kalmyks. The Kazakh raids into Russia were accompanied by looting and the abduction of people into slavery. The raids began during the reign of Tauke Khan in 1690 and continued intermittently until the end of the 18th century. Isolated raids also occurred in the early and late 19th century. The captives of the Kazakh raids were among the suppliers to the Khivan slave trade and the Bukhara slave trade.Turkmen tribal groups also performed regular slave raids, referred to as alaman. Shia Persians were considered legitimate targets by Sunni Muslim Turkmens and Uzbek slave traders. Many of them were captured during Turkmen slave raids into the villages of northwestern Iran. A notorious slave market for Persian slaves was located in the Khanate of Khiva from the 17th to the 19th centuries.