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The Genoese slave trade refers to the slave trade conducted by the Republic of Genoa, which was a major business during primarily the Middle Ages.
In the 13th century, the Genoese established colonies in Crimea, and acquired slaves of various religions to sell to either Southern Europe via Crete and the Balearic Islands, or to the Middle East directly via the Black Sea. The Genoese met competition in the Venetian slave trade of the Republic of Venice.
The Black Sea slave trade was closed off from Genoa due to the conquests of the Ottoman Empire in the 15th century and integrated in to the Ottoman slave trade, specifically via the Black Sea slave trade. This ended the old import routes of slaves to Europe, which contributed to the development of the Atlantic slave trade to provide the European colonies in America with slave labor.
After the end of the Black Sea slave trade, Genoa also took part in the Atlantic slave trade.
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 viewed the enslavement of people they regarded to be heretics or schismatics as legitimate, allowing Sunni Muslims to enslave Shia Muslims. [2]
There was still a market for slavery in medieval Europe in the early Middle Ages, but it gradually started to be phased out in favor of serfdom. However, there was a major market for slavery in the Islamic Middle East, and European slaves were referred to in the Muslim world as saqaliba. The Republic of Venice was one of the early suppliers of saqaliba slaves to the Muslim world, having organized in the Balkan slave trade, and Genoa was to become its primary rival.
Slavery died out in Western Europe after the 12th century, but the demand for laborers after the Black Death resulted in a revival of slavery in Southern Europe in Italy and in Spain, as well as an increase in the demand for captives to slavery in Egypt. [3]
Italian merchants, particularly the Genoese and Venetians, who had a large web of contacts as traders in the Mediterranean Sea, early established themselves in the Black Sea slave trade. Initially they did so as traveling merchants, but eventually they managed to acquire their own trading colonies in the Crimea.
In the 13th century, Byzantine control in the Crimea weakened by the fall of Constantinople 1204, and Italian trade colonies took control over the Black Sea slave trade, with the Republic of Venice establishing in Sudak in the Crimea in 1206 and later in Tana, and the Republic of Genoa in Caffa in 1266. [4]
The majority of the slaves in the Italian Black Sea slave trade came to be enslaved via three main methods; as war captives during warfare, such as the Mongol invasions, the wars between the Golden Horde and the Ilkhanate, and the conquests of Timur Lenk; via slave raids; or through parents selling their own children or relatives to slavery, which occurred because of poverty and was a regular and common occurrence especially after the Black Death, when the demand for slaves was high in both Southern Europe and the Middle East. [5]
Common targets of slavery were pagan Finno-Ugric and Turkish people. [6]
In parallel with the establishment of the Italian colonies in the Crimea, the Mongol Empire conquered Russia, and the Italian Black Sea slave trade expanded in parallel with the Mongol warfare, with the Mongols encouraging the trade, using it to dispose of particularly Russian slaves; up until the Russian uprising of 1262, for example, the Mongols sold Russian peasants who were unable to pay tribute to the Italian slave traders in the Crimea. [7]
The slave market were divided into two. Southern Europe were supplied with male slaves for hard labor or female slaves for domestic house work as enslaved maidservants. The Islamic market of the Middle East requested female slaves as domestic house slaves or for sexual slavery as harem concubines; castrated male slaves for eunuchs or intact male slaves for military slavery as slave soldiers.
The Black Sea slave trade was, alongside the Balkan slave trade, one of the two main slave supply sources of future Mamluk soldiers to slavery in the Mamluk Sultanate in Egypt. [8] A smaller number of slaves were sold in Italy and Spain as enslaved domestic servants, called ancillae .
The Italian Black Sea slave trade had two main routes; from the Crimea to Byzantine Constantinople, and via Crete and the Balearic Islands to Italy and Spain; or to the Mamluk Sultanate in Egypt, which received the majority of the slaves. [9]
From at least 1382 onward, the majority of the Mamluks of the Egyptian Mamluk Sultanate with slave origin came from the Black Sea slave trade; around a hundred Circassian males intended for Mamluks were being trafficked via the Black Sea slave trade until the nineteenth-century. [10]
The majority of the slaves trafficked to Southern Europe (Italy and Spain) were girls, since they were intended to become ancillae maid servants, while the majority of the slaves, around 2,000 annually, were trafficked to the Egyptian Mamluk Sultanate, in that case most of them boys, since the Mamluk Sultanate needed slave soldiers. [11]
After the fall of Constantinople in 1453, the Ottomans closed the trade between the Crimea and the West. [9] The slave trade gradually diminished, and in 1472, only 300 slaves are registered to have been trafficked from Caffa. [12]
From the 1440s, Spain and Portugal started to import their slaves from first the Canary Islands, and then from Africa; initially via the trans-Saharan slave trade from Libya, and then by starting the Atlantic slave trade. [13]
The Ottoman Empire and the Crimean Khanate conquered the Italian cities in the Crimea in 1475, and the slave trade was then taken over by Muslim slave traders. [14]
After the end of the Black Sea slave trade, Genoa became involved in the emerging Atlantic slave trade. From about 1520, the Genoese controlled the Spanish port of Panama, the first port on the Pacific, founded by the conquest of the Americas. The Genoese obtained a concession to exploit the port mainly for the slave trade of the new world on the Pacific, which lasted until the sacking and destruction of the original city in 1671. [15] [16]
Until the middle of the 17th century, Mexico was the largest single market for slaves in Spanish America. [17] While the Portuguese were directly involved in trading enslaved peoples to Brazil, the Spanish Empire relied on the Asiento de Negros system, awarding (Catholic) Genoese merchant bankers the license to trade enslaved people from Africa to their colonies in Spanish America. Cartagena, Veracruz, Buenos Aires, and Hispaniola received the majority of slave arrivals, mainly from Angola. [18] : 437, 446
Mamluk or Mamaluk were non-Arab, ethnically diverse enslaved mercenaries, slave-soldiers, and freed slaves who were assigned high-ranking military and administrative duties, serving the ruling Arab and Ottoman dynasties in the Muslim world.
The Republic of Genoa was a medieval and early modern maritime republic from the years 1099 to 1797 in Liguria on the northwestern Italian coast. During the Late Middle Ages, it was a major commercial power in both the Mediterranean and Black Sea. Between the 16th and 17th centuries, it was one of the major financial centres in Europe.
Saqaliba is a term used in medieval Arabic sources to refer to Slavs, and other peoples of Central, Southern, and Eastern Europe. The term originates from the Middle Greek slavos/sklavenos (Slav), which in Hispano-Arabic came to designate Slavic slaves.
The concept of Circassian beauty is an ethnic stereotype of the Circassian people. A fairly extensive literary history suggests that Circassian women were thought to be unusually beautiful and attractive, spirited, smart, and elegant. Therefore, they were seen as mentally and physically desirable for men, although most Circassians traditionally refused to marry non-Circassians in accordance with Adyghe Xabze. A smaller but similar literary history also exists for Circassian men, who were thought to be especially handsome.
Slavery in medieval Europe was widespread. Europe and North Africa were part of a highly interconnected trade network across the Mediterranean Sea, and this included slave trading. During the medieval period (500–1500), wartime captives were commonly forced into slavery. As European kingdoms transitioned to feudal societies, a different legal category of unfree persons—serfdom—began to replace slavery as the main economic and agricultural engine. Throughout medieval Europe, the perspectives and societal roles of enslaved peoples differed greatly, from some being restricted to agricultural labor to others being positioned as trusted political advisors.
Slave raiding is a military raid for the purpose of capturing people and bringing them from the raid area to serve as slaves. Once seen as a normal part of warfare, it is nowadays widely considered a war crime. Slave raiding has occurred since antiquity. Some of the earliest surviving written records of slave raiding come from Sumer. Kidnapping and prisoners of war were the most common sources of African slaves, although indentured servitude or punishment also resulted in slavery.
In the Middle Ages, the Volga trade route connected Northern Europe and Northwestern Russia with the Caspian Sea and the Sasanian Empire, via the Volga River. The Rus used this route to trade with Muslim countries on the southern shores of the Caspian Sea, sometimes penetrating as far as Baghdad. The powerful Volga Bulgars formed a seminomadic confederation and traded through the Volga river with Viking people of Rus' and Scandinavia and with the southern Byzantine Empire Furthermore, Volga Bulgaria, with its two cities Bulgar and Suvar east of what is today Moscow, traded with Russians and the fur-selling Ugrians. Chess was introduced to Medieval Rus via the Caspian-Volga trade routes from Persia and Arabia.
The Venetian–Genoese Wars were four conflicts between the Republic of Venice and the Republic of Genoa which took place between 1256 and 1381. Each was resolved almost entirely through naval clashes, and they were connected to each other by interludes during which episodes of piracy and violence between the two Italian trading communities in the Mediterranean Sea and the Black Sea were commonplace, in a "cold war" climate.
A freedman or freedwoman is a person who has been released from slavery, usually by legal means. Historically, slaves were freed by manumission, emancipation, or self-purchase. A fugitive slave is a person who escaped enslavement by fleeing.
Slavery was a major institution and a significant part of the Ottoman Empire's economy and traditional society.
The Genoesecolonies were a series of economic and trade posts in the Mediterranean and Black Seas. Some of them had been established directly under the patronage of the republican authorities to support the economy of the local merchants, while others originated as feudal possessions of Genoese nobles, or had been founded by powerful private institutions, such as the Bank of Saint George.
The Black Sea slave trade trafficked people across the Black Sea from Europe and the Caucasus to slavery in the Mediterranean and the Middle East. The Black Sea slave trade was a center of the slave trade between Europe and the rest of the world from antiquity until the 19th century. One of the major and most significant slave trades of the Black Sea region was the trade of the Crimean Khanate, known as the Crimean slave trade.
Ancillae (plural) were female house slaves in ancient Rome, as well as in Europe during the Middle Ages.
Slavery in Egypt existed up until the early 20th century. It differed from the previous slavery in ancient Egypt, being managed in accordance with Islamic law from the conquest of the Caliphate in the 7th century until the practice stopped in the early 20th-century, having been gradually phased out when the slave trade was banned in the late 19th century.
Mikhail Kizilov. He works on the history of Crimea in the Late Middle Ages and Modern Times and on Jews, Khazars and Karaism in Eastern Europe, especially in Crimea, Poland, Ukraine and Lithuania.
The siege of Caffa was a 14th-century military encounter when Jani Beg of the Golden Horde sieged the city of Caffa, between two periods in the 1340s. The city of Caffa, a Genoese colony, was a vital trading hub located in Crimea. The city was then part of Gazaria, a group of seven ports located in Crimea and belonging to the maritime empire of the Republic of Genoa. The event is historically significant primarily because it is believed to be one of the earliest instances of biological warfare.
The Bukhara slave trade refers to the historical slave trade conducted in the city of Bukhara in Central Asia from antiquity until the 19th century. Bukhara and nearby Khiva were known as the major centers of slave trade in Central Asia for centuries until the completion of the Russian conquest of Central Asia in the late 19th century.
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 Venetian slave trade refers to the slave trade conducted by the Republic of Venice, primarily from the Early Middle Ages to the Late Middle Ages. The slave trade was a contributing factor to the early prosperity of the young Republic of Venice as a major trading empire in the Mediterranean Sea.
The slave trade in the Mongol Empire refers to the slave trade conducted by the Mongol Empire (1206–1368). This includes the Mongolia vassal khanates which was a part of the Mongol Empire, such as the Chagatai Khanate (1227–1347), Yuan dynasty (1271–1368), Ilkhanate (1256–1335), and Golden Horde (1242–1368).