Slave trade in Late Antiquity

[JesusA (imported)]

As I wrote in the post Price of slaves in Late Antiquity

(http://forums.eunuch.org/showthread.php ... -Antiquity (http://forums.eunuch.org/showthread.php ... -Antiquity)), most slaves within the boundaries of the Roman Empire, before its division into eastern and western sections, came from outside the empire. They were captives of the many wars or purchased from traders bringing them from outside. Nearly all eunuchs came from east or northeast of the empire. The Roman emperor Domitian (r.81-96) prohibited the making of eunuchs within the empire, although not their importation. Castration did continue, although much less frequently after that. There were contemporary rumors that Domitian’s father, the emperor Vespasian (r.69-79) had conducted a profitable trade in eunuchs, castrated within the empire, before becoming emperor.

As the western part of the empire, that part ruled from Rome, began to disintegrate into smaller kingdoms, the slave trade from outside diminished. It began to be replaced by locally sourced slaves.

In 528, Cassiodorus, in a letter to the Gothic king Athalarich, described the annual fair in Lucania in south Italy on St. Cyprian’s day (September 16) and wrote about peasants from the countryside who came to sell their sons and daughters. “Boys and girls are on display, marked out by their differences in sex and age, brought to the market not as captives, but by freedom: their parents are right to sell them, since they benefit by slavery itself. Indeed, there is no doubt that slaves can be improved by transference from field work to service in town.” (Vuolanto 2003)

Enslavement of children by their parents was not uncommon. Indeed, some scholars estimate this to be the main source of slaves within the western remnants of the Roman Empire during Late Antiquity.

The Eastern Roman Empire, or Byzantine Empire, continued to get most of its slaves from outside, primarily from further east or across the Black Sea from the north. Eunuchs continued to primarily come from east or north, although there was beginning to be a local supply. Some farmers began castrating “excess” sons in hopes that they would find positions in the church or court.

With the rise of the Muslim caliphate, the eastern source was mostly cut off, although battles between the Muslims and the Eastern Orthodox Byzantines often resulted in captives who became slaves. The Muslims were especially interested in capturing Byzantine eunuchs, as castration was theoretically prohibited within the caliphate and there was a desire for eunuchs. (However, we know the names of many eunuchs who were Muslim before their castration and who were castrated by Muslims within Muslim territory. Damascus and Tabriz were, at times, important castration centers.) The Byzantines occasionally captured Muslim boys and castrated them to serve as eunuchs. Castration was readily performed by the Byzantines and the best information that we have about the surgery in the ancient world is a description by the physician Paulus Aegineta (c.625-c.690) when eunuchs were being produced within the empire.

As wealth and power grew in the east and declined in the west, instead of east to west, the slave trade began to shift to a west to east and north to south pattern. Slaves from Western Europe began to be traded both to the Byzantines and to the Caliphate. The slave trade across the Black Sea increased with more traffic down the Dnieper River with the Rus as the principal slave traders.

Viking raids in Western Europe became a major source of slaves for the Caliphate. Dublin was originally established as a slave port for slaves captured around the Irish Sea, who were then traded through what is now modern Spain. Cordoba became a major castration center for western European boys. There is even a British children’s book, aimed at 11 or 12-year-old boys that mentions the trade in Irish slaves to the Caliphate, where they would be castrated:

In the children’s book, the Vikings had offloaded a group of Irish slaves and were expecting a brief sojourn in the sun when,

As it happened, we didn’t get much of a holiday this year. We were relaxing on the beach when Erik came rushing over in a sweat and ordered us to put to sea immediately. He wouldn’t explain what all the hurry was, and we were miles away at sea before we could get any sense out of him.

“He said he’d found out what happened to slaves in Spain. He said the Moors made them into eunuchs.

Gunnhild, looking all innocent, asked, “How do they do that?”

Blushing like a sunset, Erik said, “They cut their...er...thingies off.”

Gunnhild said, “Their what?”

Blushing even harder, Erik said, “Their doo-dahs...their wotsits...their dangly bits...I don’t want to talk about it!”

I could see his point; Vikings don’t mind getting arms and legs chopped off, but dangly bits are another thingie entirely! (Barlow & Skidmore 1997)

The slave trade down the Dnieper and across the Black Sea was dominated by the Rus, who collected slaves from as far north as modern Finland and Karelia to sell to the Byzantines and the Caliphate, although most of the slaves that they sold were Eastern Slavs. Pretty girls and castrated boys were luxury items in this trade. (Korpela 2019)

As Venice grew into a great trading power across the eastern Mediterranean, slaves became one of the major commodities that they traded to the east, both Byzantine and the Caliphate, in exchange for gold, silver, silks, and spices. There was little else that the easterners wanted from the west beyond European slaves. Over time, Venice became one of the major castration centers and the castration houses in Venice were busy castrating boys from what is today modern England, Ireland, France, and Germany, although the slaves that they castrated and sold were primarily from the western part of the Slavic world (Poland, Czechia, Macedonia, Croatia, etc.).

Paul the Deacon (mid 8th century) describes “innumerable troops of captives” from Germanic and Frankish lands being sold south for further transport as slaves to the Byzantine Empire and the Caliphate. St. Naum (c. 830–910) of Bulgaria wrote of a single group of 200 Slavic boys being sent to Venice for castration and sale to the Muslim world.

The earliest surviving treaty between Venice and the Carolingian empire of Lothar I in 840 included a provision that the Venetians would no longer castrate Carolingian (primarily German and Frankish) boys for sale to the Muslim world. Sale of castrated boys to the Christian Byzantine Empire, another Venetian market, was not mentioned, only sale to Muslims. The treaty was apparently not enforced and when it was renegotiated by Charles III in 880, it was altered to state that the Venetians would no longer castrate Carolingian boys for sale to Muslims UNLESS they were already slaves when they entered Venetian territory. By that time greatest number of the eunuchs that the Venetians sold were Slavic, from the eastern shore of the Adriatic Sea or transported by land from further east. The Venetians were also important middlemen for the Viking slave trade, castrating boys transported from as far west as the Irish Sea. (Valente 2013)

The number of European eunuchs was quite large. It’s reported that the Abbasid caliph al-Muqtadir bi-allah (reigned 908-932), had over 4,000 European (mostly Slavic) eunuchs serving in his palace. The rich and powerful also collected European eunuchs and they could be found in Middle Eastern lands well into the 19th century, although mostly from Russia, Georgia, and Armenia by then. (el-Cheikh 2005)

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Barlow, Steve & Steve Skidmore. (1997). The Lost Diary of Erik Bloodaxe, Viking Warrior. London: Collins.

el-Cheikh, Nadia Maria. (2005). Servants at the Gate: Eunuchs at the Court of al-Muqtadir. Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, 2005, 48 (pt. 2), pp. 234-252.

Korpela, Jukka. (2019). Slaves from the North: Finns and Karelians in the East European Slave Trade. Leiden: Brill.

Valente, Mary A. 2013. Castrating Monks: Vikings, Slave Trade, and the Value of Eunuchs. IN: Castration and Culture in the Middle Ages, Larissa Tracy (ed.). Cambridge: D.S. Brewer.

Vuolanto, Ville. (2003). Selling a Freeborn Child: Rhetoric and Social Realities in the Late Roman World. Ancient History, vol. 33, pp. 169-207.

[magusuk89 (imported)]

Great work, Jesus.

I can absolutely endorse folk getting the Larissa Tracy book -- it has a lot of eye-opening papers/chapters within it.