Battle of Honey Springs

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Slavery was a major part of society, culture and economy in the Abbasid Caliphate (750–1258), which during its history included most of the Middle East. While slavery was an important part also of the preceding Umayyad Caliphate (661–750), it was during the Abbasid Caliphate that the slave trade to the Muslim world reached a permanent industrial scale.

The Caliphate was a major slave trade destination, and slaves were imported from several destinations. Since Islamic law prohibited enslavement of Muslims, slaves were imported from non-Muslim lands around the Muslim world. These included Pagan Africa in the South; Christian and Pagan Europa in the North; and Pagan Central Asia and India in the East.

They slaves came from the North along the Balkan slave trade and the Volga trade route; from the East via the Bukhara slave trade; from the West via the Andalusian slave trade, the Trans-Saharan slave trade and the Red Sea slave trade; and from the South from the Indian Ocean slave trade. The slave trade to and slavery in the area continued during subsequent rulerships, and continued in the Ottoman Empire until the 20th-century.

Slave trade

The slave trade had been big also during the Umayyad Caliphate, but then, it had been fueled by war captives and people enslaved as tax levy; during the Abbasid Caliphate, the slave trade in war captives was supplanted by people bought through commercial slave trade provided for the slave markets in Basra, Baghdad and Samarra.^[1] In parallell with the slave trade in captives and the slaves provided as tax levy and tributes, the expansion of the commercial slave trade expanded slavery during the Abbasid period.

African slave trade

In the Abbasid Empire, African slaves were referred to as Zanj. African slaves were favored for hard labor.

Baqt

The Christian Kingdom of Dongola in the Sudan was obliged to provide between 360 and 400 slaves every year to Islamic Egypt (then an Abbasid province) in accordance with the terms of the Baqt treaty.^[2]

Red Sea slave trade

African slaves were transported in the 9th-century via the Red Sea slave trade from Africa across the Red Sea to the slave markets of Jeddah, Mecca and Medina, and from there by caravan over the desert to the slave market of Baghdad.^[3][4]

Indian Ocean slave trade

The Indian Ocean slave trade established, in which slaves were trafficked from East Africa across the Indian Ocean by dhow through the Persian Gulf to Ras al Khymah, Dubai, Bandrar Abbas, Bushine and Basra.^[3][4]

European slave trade

European slaves were referred to as saqaliba. The Vikings sold both Christian and Pagan European captives to the Muslims, who referred to them as saqaliba; these slaves were likely both Pagan Slavic, Finnic and Baltic Eastern Europeans ^[5] as well as Christian Western Europeans.^[6] European slaves were viewed as luxury goods and primarily served in the households of royalty and rich people. There were several routes for saqaliba slaves to the Abbasid Caliphate.

Khazar and Bukhara slave trade

The main route of European slaves to the Caliphate was the Eastern Volga trade route via Russia and Central Asia down to Baghdad via Persia. Initially via the Khazar slave trade, and later via the Samanid slave trade.

The Khazar slave trade and the Samanid slave trade in Bukhara constituted the two great furnishers of slaves to the Abbasid Caliphate.^[7] People taken captive during the viking raids in Western Europe could be sold to Moorish Spain via the Dublin slave trade^[8] 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, Wollin and Dublin;^[9] initially this trade route between Europe and the Abbasid Caliphate passed via the Khazar Kaghanate,^[10] 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 finnally via Iran to the Abbasid Caliphate.^[11]

This slave trade is known to have functioned from at least between 786 and 1009, as big quantities of silver coins from the Samanid Empire has been found in Scandinavia from these years, and people taken captive by the Vikings during their raids in Western Europe were likely sold in Islamic Central Asia, a slave trade which was so lucrative that it may have contributed to the Viking raids in Western Europe, used by the Vikings as a slave supply source for their slave trade with Islamic world.^[12]

Al-Andalus slave trade

Other routes for saqaliba slaves to the Caliphate was via the al-Andalus slave trade in Western Europe. From the Prague slave trade of Pagan Slavs via France to slavery in al-Andalus in Spain, and via the al-Andalus slave trade to the Abbasid Caliphate. The al-Andalus slave trade was significantly reduced with the end of the Prague slave trade in the 11th-century, but continued in a smaller scale until the end of the reconquista.

Andalusian Saracen pirates established a base in Camargue, Fraxinetum or La Garde-Freinet-Les Mautes (888-972), from which they made slave raids in to France ^[13] and the Fraxinetum slave trade exported the Frankisk prisoners they captured as slaves to the Muslim world.^[14]

Slaves captured by the vikings in the British islands were also sold via the Dublin slave trade to the al-Andalus slave market.^[8]

Saracen piracy

Saracens from Aghlabids of Ifriqiya managed an extensive slave trade of Italians captured in Southern Italy to Abbasid Maghreb from the early the mid 9th-century.^[15]

While the Saracen bases in France was eliminated in 972 and Italy in 1091, this did not prevent the Saracen piracy slave trade of the Mediterranean; both Almoravid dynasty (1040-1147) and the Almohad Caliphate (1121–1269) aproved of the slave raiding of Saracen pirates toward non-Muslim ships in Gibraltar and the Mediterranean for the purpose of slave raiding.^[16]

Turkish people

Turkisk peoples belonged to the most common categories of slaves to the Abbasid Caliphate after Africans. They were foremost favored for military slavery.

Turkish people from the Central Asian Steppe, were a major supply source for slaves to the Abbasid Caliphate during the entire Middle Ages. They were Pagans, adherents of Tengrism, and thereby viewed as legitimate targets of slavery. In the Middle East, they were referred to as "white" and used for miliary slavery for centuries during the Middle Ages. Turkish slaves were trafficked to the Abbasid Caliphate via the Bukhara slave trade.

Turkish 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 (ca. 375/985) noted that in his time the annual levy (ḵarāj) included 1,020 slaves.^[17]

From the early 9th-century, military slavery played a major military role in the Abbasid Caliphate, and Turkish male slaves were particularly favored for the role of slave soldiers.^[1]

Slave market

The slave market and use of slaves in the Abbasid Caliphate divided slaves into male, female and eunuchs. The slaves were also divided in skin color. Eunuchs were used for domestic and administrative purpuse; male slaves were used for labor and military slavery; and females were used for domestic service and sexual slavery (concubinage).

Female slaves

Female slaves were primarily used as either domestic servants, or as concubines (sex slaves), while male slaves were used in a number of tasks. The sex slave-concubines of rich Urban men who had given birth to the son of their enslaver were counted as the most privileged, since they became an Umm Walad and became free upon the death of their enslaver; the concubine of a Beduoin mainly lived the same life as the rest of the tribal members and the women of the family.^[18] Female domestic slaves lived a hard life and reproduction among slaves was low; it was noted that the infant mortality was high among slaves, and that female slaves were often raped in their childhood and rarely lived in their forties, and that poorer slave owners often prostituted them.^[18]

The slave trade in the Muslim world focused on women for used of domestic servants and sex slaves.^[19] Women were trafficked to the royal Abbasid harem from Europe via the Volga trade route, as well as from Africa and Asia.^[20] The royal harem was used as a role model for the harems of other wealthy men. Women from Europe, Central Asia, Asia and Africa was used as sex slaves and domestic servants within the royal harem and the lesser harems of private men, as well as the harems of local principalities within the Abbasid Caliphate.

Male slaves

The use of male slaves were far more varied. Since eunuchs lacked family of their own and was unable to have children, they were considered highly thrustworthy, and used as harem guards, as guards at mosques and holy sites, as administrators and family stewards.^[4]

Slave labourers were used in cash-crop production, in the silk textile industry, in salt production and land reclamation, in cotton and sugar production especially in the area of the big slave market center of Basra. Slave labourers were kept in big work camps, and often had to be replaced by new slaves through the slave trade, since the marshlands in Mesopotamia caused slaves to die in large numbers from malaria, and slaves were not allowed to marry or have children.^[1] Around 15,000 slaves were estimated to be kept in the Basra area at any given time, and that a quarter of the labor force consisted of slave labor.^[1] Contemporary writers in the late 9th-century estimated that there were around 300,000 slaves in Iraq.^[1] The harsh condition resulted in a big slave rebellion known as the Zanj Rebellion, which lasted between 869 and 883.

From the early 9th-century, slaves, specifically Turkish slaves, were also employed as slave soldiers.^[1]

Thousands and possibly millions of Africans, Berbers, Turks, and Europeans from Northeastern Europe (saqaliba) are estimated to have been enslaved in this time period.^[1]

See also

References

Referenced material

• Segal, Ronald (2001). Islam's Black Slaves: The Other Black Diaspora. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ISBN 9780374527976.