EUROPEAN AND AFRICAN SLAVES FOR SALE(6th-15th CENTURY CE)
Merchants of slaves for the Orient stocked up in Europe. Danish merchants had bases in the Volga region and dealt in Slavs with Arab merchants. Circassian slaves were conspicuously present in the harems and there were many odalisques (from the Turkish odalık, meaning “chambermaid“) from that region in the paintings of Orientalists.
Non-Muslim slaves were valued in the harems, for all roles(gate-keeper, servant, odalisque, musician, dancer, court dwarf, concubine). In the Ottoman Empire, the last black slave sold in Ethiopia named Hayrettin Effendi, was freed in 1918. The slaves of Slavic origin in Al-Andalus came from the Varangians who had captured them.
They were put in the caliph‘s guard and gradually took up important posts in the army (they became saqaliba), and even went to take back taifas after the civil war had led to an implosion of the Western Caliphate. Columns of slaves feeding the great harems of Córdoba, Seville and Grenada were organised by Jewish merchants (mercaderes) from Germanic countries and parts of Northern Europe not controlled by the Carolingian Empire. These columns crossed the Rhone valley to reach the lands to the south of the Pyrenees.
There are also historical evidence of North African Muslim slave raids all along the Mediterranean coasts across Christian Europe and beyond to even as far north as the British Isles and Iceland (see the book titled White Gold by Giles Milton).The majority of slaves traded across the Mediterranean region were predominantly of European origin from the 7th to 15th centuries.
The Barbary pirates continued to capture slaves from Europe and, to an extent, North America, from the 16th to 19th centuries.
Slaves were also brought into the Arab world via Central Asia, mainly of Turkic or Tartar origin. Many of these slaves later went on to serve in the armies forming an elite rank.
The refocus of slavery on 'people of colour' came up in the 15th century.
Comments
Post a Comment