Balkan slave trade

Part of a series on
Forced labour and slavery
Contemporary Child Labour Child soldiers Conscription Debt Forced marriage Bride buying Child marriage Wife selling Forced prostitution Human trafficking Involuntary servitude Peonage Penal labour Contemporary Africa 21st-century jihadism Sexual slavery Wage slavery
Historical Antiquity Egypt Babylonia Greece Rome Medieval Europe Ancillae Black Sea slave trade Byzantine Empire Kholop Prague slave trade Serfs History In Russia Emancipation Thrall Genoese slave trade Venetian slave trade Balkan slave trade Muslim world Slavery in the Abbasid Caliphate Slavery in al-Andalus ‎ Baqt Contract of manumission Bukhara slave trade Crimean slave trade Khazar slave trade Khivan slave trade Ottoman Empire Avret Pazarları Barbary Coast slave trade pirates Sack of Baltimore Slave raid of Suðuroy Turkish Abductions Concubinage history Ma malakat aymanukum Avret Pazarları Harem Abbasid harem Ottoman Imperial Harem Safavid imperial harem Qajar harem Jarya/Cariye Odalisque Qiyan Umm al-walad Circassian slave trade Saqaliba Slavery in the Rashidun Caliphate Slavery in the Umayyad Caliphate Slavery in the Abbasid Caliphate Volga Bulgarian slave trade 21st century Atlantic slave trade Bristol Brazil Database Dutch Middle Passage Nantes New France Panyarring Spanish Empire Slave Coast Thirteen colonies Topics and practice Conscription Ghilman Mamluk Devshirme Blackbirding Coolie Corvée labour Field slaves in the United States Treatment House slaves Saqaliba Slave market Slave raiding Child soldiers White slavery Naval Galley slave Impressment Pirates Shanghaiing Slave ship
By country or region Sub-Saharan Africa Contemporary Africa Trans-Saharan slave trade Red Sea slave trade Indian Ocean slave trade Zanzibar slave trade Angola Chad Comoros Ethiopia Mali Mauritania Niger Nigeria Seychelles Somalia Somali slave trade South Africa Sudan Zanzibar North and South America Pre-Columbian America Aztec Americas indigenous U.S. Natives United States Field slaves female Contemporary maps partus prison labour Slave codes Treatment interregional Human trafficking The Bahamas Canada Caribbean Barbados British Virgin Islands Trinidad Code Noir Latin America Brazil Lei Áurea Colombia Cuba Haiti revolt Restavek (Encomienda) Puerto Rico East, Southeast, and South Asia Human trafficking in Southeast Asia Bhutan Brunei China Booi Aha Laogai penal system India Debt bondage Chukri System Indonesia Japan comfort women Korea Kwalliso Malaysia Maldives Slavery in the Mongol Empire Thailand Yankee princess Vietnam Australia and Oceania Australia Human trafficking Blackbirding Slave raiding in Easter Island Human trafficking in Papua New Guinea Blackbirding in Polynesia Europe and North Asia Sex trafficking in Europe United Kingdom Penal Labour Slavery Denmark Dutch Republic Germany in World War II Malta Norway Poland Portugal Romania Russia Spain Sweden North Africa and West Asia Afghanistan Algeria Bahrain Egypt Human trafficking in the Middle East Iran Iraq Jordan Kuwait Lebanon Libya Morocco Oman Palestine Saudi Arabia Syria Tunisia Qatar Yemen United Arab Emirates
Religion Bible Christianity Catholicism Mormonism Islam Judaism Baháʼí Faith
Opposition and resistance Abolitionism U.K. U.S. Brussels Anti-Slavery Conference 1889–90 Temporary Slavery Commission 1926 Slavery Convention Committee of Experts on Slavery Advisory Committee of Experts on Slavery Ad Hoc Committee on Slavery Supplementary Convention on the Abolition of Slavery Abolitionists Anglo-Egyptian Slave Trade Convention Anti-Slavery International Blockade of Africa U.K. U.S. Colonization Liberia Sierra Leone Compensated emancipation Freedman Manumission Freedom suit Slave Power Underground Railroad songs Slave rebellion Slave Trade Acts International law Third Servile War 13th Amendment to the United States Constitution Timeline of abolition of slavery and serfdom Abolition of slave trade in Persian gulf [fa]
Related Common law Indentured servitude Forced labour Fugitive slaves laws convention Great Dismal Swamp maroons List of slaves owners last survivors of American slavery List of slavery-related memorials and museums Slave marriages in the United States Slave narrative films songs Slave name Slave catcher Slave patrol Slave Route Project breeding court cases Washington Jefferson J.Q. Adams Lincoln Emancipation Proclamation 40 acres Freedmen's Bureau Iron bit Emancipation Day
v t e

The Balkan slave trade was the trade in slaves from the Balkans via Venetian slave traders across the Adriatic and Aegean Seas to Italy, Spain, and the Islamic Middle East, from the 7th century during the Early Middle Ages until the mid-15th century. It was one of the routes of the Venetian slave trade.

The trade rested on the fact that the Balkans was a religious border zone, which was significant in the Middle Ages, when religion was the determining factor on who was viewed as a legitimate target of enslavement. The Balkans was pagan territory long into the Middle Ages. After it had converted to Christianity by the 11th century, it was influenced by Orthodox Christianity and Bogomilism. This influence maintained the region's status as a religious border zone to the rest of the then-Catholic Europe. The slave trade of first pagan and then Orthodox and Bogomil Christian Slavs were exported to Italy, Spain, and Portugal in Southern Europe, but the major part of the export went to the Islamic Middle East.

The Balkan slave trade was one of the main routes of European Saqaliba-slaves to the Islamic Middle East, alongside the Prague slave trade in the west, and the Black Sea slave trade, the Khazar slave trade and the Bukhara slave trade in the east. It was a major contributor of mamluk slave soldiers for military slavery in the Mamluk Sultanate of Egypt. The Balkan slave trade contributed to the establishment of the Republic of Venice as a prosperous trading empire in the Mediterranean Sea in the early Middle Ages.

In the 15th century, the Balkan slave trade was closed of from Europe due to the Muslim Ottoman conquest of the Balkans, and consequently integrated to the Ottoman slave trade. The end of the Balkan slave trade's supply of slaves to Spain and Portugal contributed to the establishment of the Atlantic slave trade, when there was a demand of slaves to the new Spanish colonies of the New World, and the old Balkans slave supply source had to be replaced by a new source of non-Catholic slaves.

During the Middle Ages, informal slave zones were formed alongside religious borders. Both Christians and Muslims banned the enslavement of people of their own faith, but both approved of the enslavement of people of a different faith.^[1]

The slave trade thus organized alongside religious principles. While Christians did not enslave Christians, and Muslims did not enslave Muslims, both did allow the enslavement of people they regarded to be heretics, which for example allowed Sunni Muslims to enslave Shia Muslims.^[2]

The slave trade was founded upon the fact that the Balkans was a religious border zone between at first pagan and Christian, and later Catholic and Orthodox Christian lands. Since the custom at the time did not approve of enslaving people of the same religion, this made the Balkans a supply of slaves for both Christian and Muslim lands. Another factor was the fact that the Balkans was for a long time politically decentralized and unstable, and was in the Early Middle Ages known as the Sclaveni or Slav lands. These two factors in combination made the Balkans a fertile target for slave trade, when war captives were sold by their enemies to Venetian slave traders at the coasts.

The most targeted category of the slave trade were the Bosnians, since they were adherents of Bogomilism, a faith which was not acknowledged as Christianity and therefore made them legitimate targets of slavery in Catholic as well as Orthodox Europe.^[3]

The Balkan slave trade was separate from the Black Sea slave trade, which took place on the Eastern shore of the Balkan with center of Genoese Caffa and Venetian Tana. The victims of the Balkan slave trade were not sold via the East Balkan coast but via the sea ports alongside the Adriatic Sea coast, primarily Ragusa (Dubrovnik), a center of the Balkan slave trade, were Venetian merchants bought slaves from Balkan in order to sell them in the Aegean Sea.^[4] Venetian slave traders trafficked Balkan slaves from the Balkan west coast across the Adriatic Sea to the Aegean Sea, where Genoese Chios (Lordship of Chios and Maona of Chios and Phocaea) and Venetian Crete (Kingdom of Candia) were transit centers for the export of Balkan slaves to either Spain in the west or Egypt in the south.^[4]

A second source of Balkan slaves to the slave center of the Aegean Sea were captives taken during the warfare between the Ottoman Turks, the Byzantine Empire and the Latin crusader states in Greece (Frankokratia). The Ottoman Turks sold Greek and Bulgarian war captives to the Italian slave traders in the slave market of Venetian Crete during the Ottoman conquest of the Balkan.^[5]

There were also slaves taken which legally were not considered legitimate targets of enslavement. Albanian children termed anime were sold to Venice via Durazzo (Durrës); since the Albanians were not Bogomils but either Orthodox or Catholic and therefore not officially deemed legitimate for enslavement, they were officially not categorized as slaves but sold as bond servants which were formally claimed to be contract workers.^[4]

The slaves were primarily shipped to one of two destinations. A smaller number of slaves were sold in Italy and Spain as enslaved domestic servants, called ancillae. In Italy, the Bogomil slaves were referred to as paterina or pagana, signifying their religious status as Pagans, which were seen as legitimizing their status as slaves. The Balkan slaves sold as slaves in Italy were noted to have been Albanians, Bosnian, Serbs, Slavs, Bulgars, Vlachs, or Ruthenians.

The biggest market for slaves however were the Islamic Middle East, which had been the main market for the Balkan slave trade since the beginning. The slaves normally entered the Middle East via slavery in Egypt, which was also the biggest destination for them. In the Arab world, the Balkan slaves were often termed as rumi.

While the majority of the slaves trafficked to Southern Europe (Italy and Spain) were girls, since they were intended to become ancillae maid servants, the majority of the slaves, around 2,000 annually, were trafficked to the Mamluk Sultanate of Egypt, and in that case most of them were boys, since the Mamluk Sultanate needed a constant supply of slave soldiers,^[6] The Balkan slave trade was, alongside the Black Sea slave trade, one of the two main slave supply sources of future Mamluk soldiers to military slavery in the Mamluk Sultanate in Egypt.^[4] The Mamluk Sultan Sayf ad-Din Khushqadam (r 1461–1467) was for example originally a victim of the Balkan slave trade and termed a rumi slave prior to his manumission.

In the mid-13th century, Pope Innocent IV criticized Italian merchants export of Bulgarian, Greek, and Ruthenian slaves to the Muslims in Jerusalem.^[7]

The Balkan slave trade entered difficulties in the 15th century. The Republic of Ragusa banned the slave trade from Ragusa, one of the major sea ports of the Balkan slave trade, in 1416.

The Venetian slave trade from the Balkans gradually ended in parallel with the conquest of the Balkans by the Ottoman Empire during the 15th century. The slave trade from the Balkans was ended as a separate slave trade and was overtaken by the Ottomans and incorporated into the Ottoman slave trade,^[4] which in the Balkans was connected to the Black Sea slave trade.

Venetian slave traders were not able to compete with Ottoman-Crimean competition. After this, they acquired a smaller number of slaves from Ottoman slave traders via the trans-Saharan slave trade. The Venetian slave trade was however soon supplanted in Europe by the Atlantic slave trade of the 16th century.

You can help expand this article with text translated from the corresponding article in Swedish. (October 2023) Click [show] for important translation instructions. View a machine-translated version of the Swedish article. Machine translation, like DeepL or Google Translate, is a useful starting point for translations, but translators must revise errors as necessary and confirm that the translation is accurate, rather than simply copy-pasting machine-translated text into the English Wikipedia. Consider adding a topic to this template: there are already 222 articles in the main category, and specifying|topic= will aid in categorization. Do not translate text that appears unreliable or low-quality. If possible, verify the text with references provided in the foreign-language article. You must provide copyright attribution in the edit summary accompanying your translation by providing an interlanguage link to the source of your translation. A model attribution edit summary is Content in this edit is translated from the existing Swedish Wikipedia article at [[:sv:Slavhandeln på Balkan]]; see its history for attribution. You may also add the template {{Translated|sv|Slavhandeln på Balkan}} to the talk page. For more guidance, see Wikipedia:Translation.