Slavery - History - Middle Ages - Medieval Europe

Medieval Europe

The early medieval slave trade was mainly confined to the South and East: the Byzantine Empire and the Muslim world were the destinations, pagan Central and Eastern Europe, along with the Caucasus and Tartary, were important sources. Viking, Arab, Greek and Jewish merchants (known as Radhanites) were all involved in the slave trade during the Early Middle Ages. The trade in European slaves reached a peak in the 10th century following the Zanj rebellion which dampened the use of African slaves in the Arab world.

Medieval Spain and Portugal were the scene of almost constant Muslim invasion of the predominantly Christian area. Periodic raiding expeditions were sent from Al-Andalus to ravage the Iberian Christian kingdoms, bringing back booty and slaves. In raid against Lisbon, Portugal in 1189, for example, the Almohad caliph Yaqub al-Mansur took 3,000 female and child captives, while his governor of Córdoba, in a subsequent attack upon Silves, Portugal in 1191, took 3,000 Christian slaves. From the 11th to the 19th century, North African Barbary Pirates engaged in Razzias, raids on European coastal towns, to capture Christian slaves to sell at slave markets in places such as Algeria and Morocco.

At the time of the Domesday Book, compiled in 1086, nearly 10% of the English population were slaves. Slavery in early medieval Europe was so common that the Roman Catholic Church repeatedly prohibited it — or at least the export of Christian slaves to non-Christian lands was prohibited at e. g. the Council of Koblenz (922), the Council of London (1102), and the Council of Armagh (1171). In 1452, Pope Nicholas V issued the papal bull Dum Diversas, granting the kings of Spain and Portugal the right to reduce any "Saracens, pagans and any other unbelievers" to perpetual slavery, legitimizing the slave trade as a result of war. The approval of slavery under these conditions was reaffirmed and extended in his Romanus Pontifex bull of 1455. However, Pope Paul III forbade enslavement of the native Americans in 1537 in his papal bull Sublimus Dei. Dominican friars who arrived at the Spanish settlement at Santo Domingo strongly denounced the enslavement of the local native Americans. Along with other priests, they opposed their treatment as unjust and illegal in an audience with the Spanish king and in the subsequent royal commission.

The Byzantine-Ottoman wars and the Ottoman wars in Europe brought large numbers of slaves into the Islamic world. From the mid to late 14th, through early 18th centuries, the Ottoman devşirme–janissary system enslaved and forcibly converted to Islam an estimated 500,000 to one million non–Muslim (primarily Balkan Christian) adolescent males. After the Battle of Lepanto approximately 12,000 Christian galley slaves were freed from the Ottoman fleet. A few years later Cervantes, who later wrote the famous book Don Quixote, was captured by corsairs and enslaved in Algiers, attempted to escape and was eventually ransomed; he wrote about the plight of Christian slaves in his fiction. Eastern Europe suffered a series of Tatar invasions, the goal of which was to loot and capture slaves into jasyr. Seventy-five Crimean Tatar raids were recorded into Poland–Lithuania between 1474–1569. There were more than 100,000 Russian captives in the Kazan Khanate alone in 1551.

Approximately 10–20% of the rural population of Carolingian Europe consisted of slaves. In Western Europe slavery largely disappeared by the later Middle Ages. The trade of slaves in England was made illegal in 1102, although England went on to become very active in the lucrative Atlantic slave trade from the seventeenth to the early nineteenth century. Thralldom in Scandinavia was finally abolished in the mid-14th century. Slavery persisted longer in Eastern Europe. Slavery in Poland was forbidden in the 15th century; in Lithuania, slavery was formally abolished in 1588; they were replaced by the second serfdom. In Kievan Rus and Muscovy, the slaves were usually classified as kholops.