Khazar slave trade

Map showing the major Varangian trade routes: the Volga trade route (in red) and the Trade Route from the Varangians to the Greeks (in purple). Other trade routes of the eighth-eleventh centuries shown in orange.

Volok by Roerich

S. V. Ivanov. Trade negotiations in the country of Eastern Slavs. Pictures of Russian history. (1909)

Rus Caspian

Khazar 1

The Khazar slave trade took place in the Khazar Khaganate in Central Asia (in modern Kazakhstan).

The Khazar Khaganate was a buffer state between Europe and the Muslim world and played a major part in the trade between Europe and the Middle East between the 8th- and 10th-century, and slaves were one of the main goods. The Khazar slave trade was one of the major routes of the human trafficking of saqaliba slaves from Europe to the Muslim world, between the 8th-century until the 10th-century, when it was replaced by the Volga Bulgarian slave trade.

History

The Khazar Khaganate had initially been an enemy of the Umayyad Caliphate. In the late 8th-century however, the Khazar Khaganate made peace with the Abbasid Caliphate, and between circa 775 and circa 900 the state served a key role as the intermediary in trade between Europe and the Muslim world, in which the slave trade played a major part.

Slave trade

The Khazar Khaganate played a key role for the viking trade route in the 8th and 9th-centuries: the Khazars bought slaves captured by the Vikings in Europe, and exported them to the Abbasid Caliphate of the Middle East via Iran.

People taken captive during the viking raids in Western Europe, such as Ireland, could be sold to Moorish Spain via the Dublin slave trade or transported to Hedeby or Brännö and from there via the Volga trade route to present day 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; until the early 10th-century, this trade route between Europe and the Abbasid Caliphate passed via the Khazar Kaghanate.

The Magyar tribes were another supplyer of slaves to the Khazar slave trade, and the Khazar reportedly bought slaves from the Magyars described as war captives.

The Khazar did not only buy slaves from other people, but also conducted their own slave raids to supply slaves for their slave trade. To perform slave raids was a common practice among the Nomadic people of the Central Asian Steppe, and the Khazars conducted regular slave raids toward several neighboring peoples, among them particularly the Pechenegs, the Ghuzz and the Burta peoples.

Slave market

See also: History of slavery in the Muslim world, History of concubinage in the Muslim world, Islamic views on concubinage, Qiyan, Jarya, and Abd (Arabic)

The majority of the slaves trafficked to the Khazar Khaganate where exported to slavery in the Abbasid Caliphate, but there were also a slave market for domestic use in the Khazar Khaganate. Slaves bought for the domestic market were all officially categorized as Pagans, since the Khazars did not formally approve of the enslavement of Monotheists (Christians, Jews or Muslims). There were a market for slaves used as domestic servants, agricultural laborers, slave soldiers and other tasks within the Khazar Khaganate.

Slaves bought for export were transported from the Khazar Khaganate to either the Black Sea slave trade in the West via the Black Sea port of Kerch, or East from the capital of Itil via the Caspian Sea to Central Asiaand from there to the Caliphate.

The end

The Khazar slave trade flourished in the 9th-century until a crisis occurred during the Anarchy at Samarra which destabilised the Caliphate during the 860s, and the dirham found in Europe diminished.

In the early 10th-century the trade of saqaliba slaves from Europe to the Caliphate was redirected, and the Khazar slave trade was replaced by the Volga Bulgarian slave trade. During the 10th-century, the vikings instead sold their captives to Volga Bulgaria, who exported them by caravan around the Khazar Khaganate to the Abbasid Caliphate via the Samanid slave trade in Central Asia instead, and the Arab silver dirham found in Europe now came from the Samanid Empire rather than directly from the Abbasid Caliphate.

The Khazar Khaganate initially reacted to this change by making Volga Bulgaria their tributary state in order to continue to profit by the slave trade to the Caliphate, but it resulted in Volga Bulgaria converting to Islam in the 920s and becoming directly alligned with the Caliphate. The Volga Bulgarian slave trade and its connection with the slave trade via Bukhara to the Caliphate continued to the Mongol invasions of the 13th-century.

See also

• Prague slave trade