What Does the Slave Trade in the Saqaliba Tell Us about Early Islamic Slavery?

Abstract

The Saqaliba—a term that in medieval Arabic literature denoted the Slavic populations of central and eastern Europe (and possibly some of their neighbors)—offer a particularly insightful case study of the mechanisms of the early Islamic slave trade and the nature of the Muslim demand for slaves. What makes them such an ideal case study is their high visibility in texts produced in the Islamic world between the early 9th and early 11th centuries. Arab geographers and diplomats investigated their origins, while archaeological material, primarily hundreds of thousands of dirhams found in Scandinavia and the Slavic lands, contains traces of the trade in them. By combining these strands of evidence, we can build an exceptionally detailed image of slave trade systems that supplied Saqaliba to the Islamic markets, which, in turn, can be used to illustrate more general mechanisms governing the trade in and demand for slaves in the medieval Islamic world.

Slavery in the Byzantine Empire

“…āliba) and in Greek in Byzantium (sklavoi, σ κλ άβoι). 4 The term later penetrated most of the Western and Central European languages. The enslaved were mostly victims of slave traders and pirates, including Vikings, who operated along the rivers between the Baltic Sea, the Caspian Sea, and the Black Sea, and between Eastern Europe and southwestern Europe.…”

Race, gender and slavery in early Islamicate history

“…From an art historical standpoint, Lamia Balafrej has recently argued that skin color is not used to distinguish free from unfree in medieval Islamicate art, but rather to distinguish among different types of unfree people performing different types of labor (Balafrej, 2021). In addition to color-based terms, some ethnic terms, such as Turk and Slav, also became highly stereotyped and racialized in medieval Islamicate societies, as many slaves were imported from Central Asia and the Caucasus (see Meouak [2004] and Jankowiak [2017] on the meaning of "Slav" in medieval Iberia, and Yosef [2012] on Turkish identity in the Mamluk sultanate). However, it seems that these and other racialized terms have left fewer traces on modern-day Islamicate societies than the language of Blackness.…”

Translating Race in the Islamic Studies Classroom

“…88 The multivalence of ṣaqāliba often results in qualified glosses, such that Marek Jankowiak defines it as "a term that in medieval Arabic literature denoted the Slavic populations of central and eastern Europe (and possibly some of their neighbors)." 89 People who fell under the term also did so because of how they arrived in different Muslim-ruled lands, in the west via markets in Prague or in the east, of course, via the Volga. 90 Those enslaved from these regions were commonly used in central Islamic lands as concubines, soldiers, and eunuch guards, and they could only legally come under this condition if they were non-Muslim.…”