Slavs = Slaves Introduction to the Slavic Slave Trade

Slavs = Slaves
Introduction to the Slavic Slave Trade

Before any meaningful introduction into the history of the slavic slave trade can be conducted first we must address the etymology of the word slave. But even before that this video was made possible thanks to my Patreons and YouTube members. If you want to support what I do it would be tremendously appreciated if you checked my Patreon or YouTube membership. Now back to the video.

Latin had multiple words that could mean slave, like mancipium and ancilla, but the most common latin word for slave was servus or servi in plural. This word survived in usage even after the fall of the Western Roman Empire because Latin still largely remained the governing language of both the state and the church. Of course, some new Germanic words for slaves were sometimes used interchangeably with the latin ones like þeow in old English or þræll in old Norse, but largely, in most written documents, the latin word of servus remained the most dominant word for slave in early medieval Europe. However, this dominance of the word servus at a time when slavery lacked the standardization and uniformity of the old Roman system meant that the word began to be increasingly ambiguous in its definition. In other words, there are a lot of different types of servitude and the word servus, ever since the 5th century, was increasingly ambiguous about the type of servitude it was referring to. As Alice Rio states ‘it is almost impossible to tell what exactly the word servus was intended to describe when it is found in an early mediaeval text without further contextual information.’¹

For example, when the law books of King Stephen mention some servi in charge of a castle these are most certainly ‘royal servants’, not slaves. However, when in the same time period, King Ladislaus orders that the escaped servi be captured, punished, and returned to their masters, he was most definitely referring to slaves not royal servants.² To add even more confusion, during the early to high middle ages a linguistic shift occurred where the word servus started to increasingly mean serf rather than slave, and by the late middle ages servus was almost exclusively used to refer to serfs not slaves.³ In fact, the modern English word serf comes from the latin word servus.

This changing of the meaning of the word servus, over the course of the middle ages, presented a problem, because, even though yes certain kind of feudal serfdoms could resemble slavery, serfdom in practice, and in medieval legal terms, was never actual slavery.⁴ Therefore, the word servus could no longer be used to mean slave and so, a new word had to be adopted. There were several candidates for this new word. For example, the latin word for a ‘captured person’ captivus was sometimes used in the middle ages as the word for a slave, either in combination with the word servus or on its own.⁵ The previously mentioned other latin words which could mean slave where also sometimes used. However, what eventually became the most common type of word to define a slave was not somekind of a latin word but an ethnonym. To explain, enslaved people were often recorded as captivus or servus or both plus an ethnonym.⁶ e.g., servus captivus wealh or captivus sardus.⁷ After a while, especially if the slaves being captured and sold in a particular area were regularly the same ethnicity, these written recordes became abbreviated to just the ethnonym. So, in areas like in early Medieval England, where most of the slaves captured were Welsh, the latin word for welsh, wealh, became, for a bit, synonymous with the word slave.⁸ Same thing happened in medieval Genoa with the ethnonym sardus, meaning sardinian, and with many other ethnonyms in other slave trading areas.

However, there was one ethnonym to rule them all, one ethnonym that would not only become synonymous with the word slave … it is where the word slave comes from, and that ethnonym is … slav, or Sclavus in medieval latin or Σκλάβος (sclavos) in Byznatine Greek. But, to understand how the slavic ethnonym became the foundation for almost every western language’s word for slave, we must talk about the history of the medieval Slavic slave trade.

…

The first undisputed appearance of the Slavs in the written record was in the mid-6th century on the Byzantine northern border.⁹ The Byzantines wrote that these people were called Σκλαβηνοί (Sclavenoi), or Σκλαβοί when shortened (Sclavoi (second declension plural)) or, when Latinized, Sclaveni, or Sclavi when shortened. These latin and greek names for the Slavs were obviously derived from the Slavic endonym (Slověně) which either came from the slavic word ‘slovo’ meaning word or ‘slava’ meaning glory.¹⁰ There were slight variations in the way the slavic ethnonym was written in early mediaeval texts but over the course of the middle ages the shortened versions of the name (that is Σκλαβοί in Greek and Sclavi in Latin) became the standard.

The early Slavs of the 6th century proved increasingly bothersome for the Byzantines, mainly because the Slavs weren’t unified, which meant it was really hard for the Byzantines to control them. If Byzantium made peace with one tribe, there were 10 other tribes that it didn’t apply to. As a result of this disjointed nature of the Slavs, there were some Slavic tribes that held frequent independent raids into the Byzantine Balkan territories while other Slavic tribes settled in those territories.¹¹ Some tribes allied themselves with the various central European peoples like the Cutrigurs, the Gepids, and the Lombards and fought with them in frequent wars.¹² All while some Slavic tribes allied themselves with the Byzantines and fought alongside them, and some entrepreneurial slavs simply fought as mercenaries for anyone who would hire them.¹³ This disjointed nature of the slavs, combined with the 6th century political instability of central Europe, resulted in a structure in which slavs could be easily captured through frequent wars and raids and sold into the mediterranean slave markets which were still alive even after the fall of the Western Roman Empire.¹⁴ Capturing slaves in wars and raids, however, wasn’t a new thing nor was it initially more common in central and eastern Europe than in other parts of Europe. The Byzantines and Sassanids often enslaved each other's people during war, as did the various post Roman Germanic kingdoms.¹⁵

With that said, between the 7th to the 8th centuries there was a steady increase in written documents mentioning slavic slaves. To give some examples, there is a 7th century account of Justinian II selling Slavic slaves in Anatolia, there is an 8th century mention of slavic slaves being sold in Thessaloniky, there is another 8th century mention of Bavarian slave raids into Carinthia, today’s slovenia, and there is also a particularly interesting mention of a Slavic female slave in the Freising Diocese called Saška the Slav (Sasca Sclauam).¹⁶ However, this steady increase of Slavic slaves in the 7th to 8th centuries was nothing compared to the 9th and 10th centuries’ explosion of slavic slavery.

This explosion of Slavic slavery in the 9th and 10th century can be attributed to multiple factors. The first and most important factor was the establishment of the quite rich Islamic Caliphate which had a huge demand for slaves. Second, unlike in the south or west, political power in eastern europe was still very disjointed, meaning it was much easier to raid the numerous slavic tribes and polities for slaves than more established larger kingdoms. Third, the newly consolidated Frankish Empire, even though largely moving away from slavery in favor of serfdom, was in a perfict position to not necessarily use the slaves they captured on their eastern frontier, but sell them into the Medditeranea Slave markets.¹⁷ Fourth, considering that by this point all the major religions ‘forbade the enslavement of people adhering to the same faith’, the still largely pagan slavs proved to be the perfect source of pagan slaves.¹⁸ Lastly fifth, the emergence of the ‘viking raiding and trading network’ in the 9th century opened up new trade routes in eastern Europe through which Slavic slaves could be more easely captured and sold to Byzantium or the Caliphate.¹⁹ And so, due to all these reasons, the slavic slave trade blew up in the 9th and 10th centuries as the lands of Eastern Europe proved to be the perfect source of new slaves.²⁰

Due to this boom in slavic slavery new trade routes developed that began in Eastern Europe and flowed into the markets of the Mediterranean, Black, and Caspian seas. These trade routes could initially be divided into two major areas of operation. The western trade routes and the eastern trade routes.²¹

In the east the slavic slave trade was largely dictated by vikings, known as Varangians in eastern europe, the Byzantense, and Nomadic polities like the Khazars, Volga Bulgars, and Hungarians. The majority of slaves from eastern Europe were sold to to the Islamic Caliphate. It should, therefore, not be surprising that many of the written records we have about these eastern trade routes come from Arab explorers and geographers like Ibn Fadlan or Ibn Rustah, the latter of whom stated that

‘The Varangians … raid the Saqaliba (the Slavs), sailing in their ships until they come upon them, take them captive and sell them in Khazaria and in Bulgaria. They have no cultivated fields and they live by pillaging the land of the Saqaliba (the Slavs) … They have no dwellings, villages or cultivated fields. They earn their living by trading … They treat their slaves well and dress them suitably, because for them they are an article of trade.’²²
Ibn Rusta also mentions the Hungarians, or in other words the Magyars, while they were still living in the pontic steppe.
‘They [the Magyars] are lords over all the Saqaliba (Slavs) who neighbour them and impose a heavy tribute on them. These Saqaliba (Slavs) are completely at their mercy, like prisoners … They make piratical raids on the Saqaliba (Slavs) and then follow the coast of the Black Sea with their captives to a port in Byzantine territory named Kerch (in Crimea) … When the Magyars bring their prisoners to Kerch, the Greeks go there to trade. The Magyars sell their Saqaliba slaves and buy Byzantine brocade, woollen rugs and other products of the Byzantine empire.’²³

Slave raiding parties of Khazars, Bulgars, Hungarians, Varangians, and rival Slavic tribes where a common place in medieval eastern slavic lives. There where even mentions of slavic raiding parties along the danube river which sold slavic slaves to Byzantium.²⁴ The Byzantines also often enslaved the Slavs living on their northern border. As Youval Rotman states, for the Byzantines ‘the taking of captives and their enslavement seem to have been the general rule in the Balkans until the eleventh century.’²⁵

Switching now over to the western trade routes. They began on the Frankish and Moravian eastern frontiers and flowed into the trade ports of Venice, Marseilles, and overland to Verdun, often eventually ending up in Cordova.²⁶

Arab geographer Ibn Hawqal, tells us that in the 10th century all of the slaves in al-Andalus, todays Spain, came from the ‘western lands of the Saqaliba’. For they are being raided from one side by nomadic tribes and from the other by the Franks. He concludes with ‘In these areas, many captives can still be obtained’.²⁷

In fact, so many captives can still be obtained from this area that Prague became one of the most well known European slave markets of the 10th century.²⁸ Ibrahim ibn Ya‘qub visited Prague in the 10th century, most likely on a trading trip, and described the city thusly. ‘The city of Prague is built of stone and lime and it is the most important trading-site of this country … The Norse and the Saqaliba (the slavs) come there from Kraków with commodities to trade, and so do Muslim merchants from the lands of the Turks, as well as Hungarians and Jews, all with gold. They carry away slaves, tin and various kinds of furs. Their country is the best in the north’²⁹

Just like in the east, slave raiding expeditions into the western Slavic lands where quite common. Franks raided the Polebian Slavs, Moravians and later Bohemians raided Silesians and Poles, and Venice also frequently raided the adriatic coast for slavic slaves.

The slavic slaves captured by the Bohemians and the Franks where mostly sent to Verdun, which was a major medieval slave hub where many of the Slavic Slaves where castrated.³⁰ This was mostly done to prepare them for the islamic market which preferred eunuchs. As one muslim writer put it, ‘If there are two Slavic brothers from the same mother and father, even if one of them is the twin brother of the other, when one of them is castrated, he becomes a better servant and smarter in all kinds of activity and manual work. He will be more skilled in them and more fitting for them. You will also find him more intelligent in conversation – these are all his qualities.’³¹

The volume of primarily Slavic slaves, but not just, being traded through western Europe to the primarily Muslim but also the Byzantine worlds, was so large, that according to Michael McCormick this trade was the Origins of the European Economy well, more precisely, the origin of the western european economy.³² McCormick argues that the export of slaves played a primary, but not exclusive, role in securing the privileged economic position of Western Europe going into the late middle ages and beyond.³³ The fact the west did not use a lot of slaves in the middle ages but traded them for what he calls ‘southern riches’, created a massive trade surplus for western Europe which paved the way for later Western European economic expansion.³⁴ Now this theory is currently being debated, but the fact that it can even be seriously proposed showcases the scale of the medieval Slavic slave trade.

Due to this large scale slavic slave trade, it should not be suprising that the slavic ethnonym became to be synonymous with slavery. The fact that the majority of slaves being traded in the European and Islamic markets where Slavs meant that the latin word for Slav, sclavus, became first synonyms with the word servus, and then, when servus became to mean serf, sclavus simply took its place and gradually, over the course of the 9th to 11th centuries, became the default word for slave.³⁵ To quote William Phillips ‘To describe the true slaves a new word was coined, derived from the most numerous ethnic group in the medieval slave trade, the Slavs. The word has cognates in all Western languages: slave in English, escalve in French, esclavo in Spanish, escravo in Portuguese, schiavo in Italian, and Sklave in German.’³⁶ Same linguistic change happened in Greek, where the word sclavos, derived from the original Byzantine word for the Slavs, today means slave. Same thing also briefly happened in Arabic, where, during the middle ages, the word Saqaliba could mean both slavs or white slaves, although this change wasn’t uniform across the arab world nor did it survive past the middle ages.³⁷

The life of a slave during the middle ages was heavily dependent on where they ended up. But, for the most part, the kind of slavery present in 19th century Americas wasn’t really common in the middle ages. As William Phillips states ‘Most societies had mechanisms for slave acculturation, most provided means for them to become free, and most allowed a lesser or greater degree of assimilation into the dominant group.’³⁸ This is not to say that they weren’t treated poorly. They most certainly were, after all the survival rate of castration in mediaeval Europe was quite low, however, it is important to give some point of reference as to the scale of the treatment compared to something that people might be more familiar with.

It is also prudent to mention, if it wasn’t obvious already, that not all medieval slaves were slavs. The slavs constituted the majority of the medieval european slave population not its entirety. Also, as Mats Roslund states ‘Slave traders made no ethnic distinctions when selling and buying’.³⁹ In other words, slavs weren’t more likely to be enslaved because they were slavs. Slavery based on some kind of perceived race or ethnicity didn’t really exist in the middle ages. Slavs constituted the largest number of slaves because of their economic, political, geographical, and religious situations not because of their quote unquote ‘race’.

In the 11th and 12th century, when Hungarian, Polish, Rus and various Nomadic polities where more firmly established in central and eastern Europe, the slavic slave trade didn’t stop. Wars among these polities provided a supply of slaves and lawless areas inbetween them still harbert some pagan Slavs who could be captured and sold. But past the high middle ages the slavic slave trade did slow down. The primary reason for this slow down was the full conversion of all the Slavs to christianity. Once christian it became harder for the Hungarians, the Germans, and various other Slavs to justify the enslavement of other fellow christians. Plus, the slow expansion of feudalism into eastern europe, and the expansion of control by the various polities into all the lawless areas of eastern europe, meant that slave raiding became much harder to conduct. This didn’t mean that slavic enslavement went fully away, trading cities like Genoa and Venice found ways around the religious rules, and areas in today's southern Ukraine and Russia continued to be raided for slaves by various Nomadic groups who where primarily sponsored by the Ottomans.⁴⁰ But, the height of the medieval Slavic slave trade, the trade that gave us the word slave itself and possibly even contributed to the kickstarting of the Western European economy, was no more.

…

With all that said, some slavs today often react negatively to the idea that the word slave comes from the word slav and sometimes even try to deny it. This response is not unfounded as anti-slavic sentiments had been very strong in Western Europe for centuries.⁴¹ German scholar Friedrich Schlegel in 1808 described the Slavs as a ‘shallow Chinese race’,⁴² Engels and Marx stated in 1851 that ‘the natural and inevitable fate of these dying Slavic nations is to allow this process of dissolution and absorption by their stronger [Germanic] neighbours to complete itself.’⁴³ A British ethnologist Robert Knox, in 1862, described the ‘barbours slavs’ as ‘uncivilised’ and ‘inferior to the Saxon race’.⁴⁴ And, of course, I don’t even need to mention the idea of the ‘Untermenschen from the east’ which was based on 19th century anti-slavic propaganda and was extensively used by the Nazis.⁴⁵ With all this history of racism against the slavs it should not be surprising that some slavs today are quite defensive, even denialist, when someone mentions the prominent medieval slavic slave trade or the fact that the word slave comes from the word slav. Because, after all, it can seem like yet another racist historical take against the slavs rather than actual history.

However, denying the obvious historical and etymological facts isn’t really going to help us improve our understanding of the past or learn from it for the future. Plus, I think the slavic slave trade is an interesting part of history that is sadly not talked about outside of academia. So, hopefully this video introduced you to an interesting part of history that you didn’t know much about.

Well, this video will not be controversial at all. If you want to learn more about slavery in the middle ages a good introduction is the book Slavery After Rome, by Alice Rio, and if you want a more complicated academic deep dive into specifically viking and slavic medieval slavery then I recommend reading The Archaeology of Slavery in Early Medieval Northern Europe. Other than that it’s the holidays so I hope you’re all having a good time and maybe considering giving me some support whether on Patreon or here on YouTube, it really does help and makes a difference and is tremendously appreciated. This fall I was sick for a month and the financial support really did help a lot so thank you to all my supporters. And with that, my name is Matus Laser, and stick around, for history.