There were so many Slavic slaves in Moslem lands in the 9th through the 11th centuries that the Arabic name for the Slavs, saqāliba, became the common word meaning “slave.” So many of the Slavic slaves were eunuchs that one Arab author had to point out that not all Slavs were castrated and not all eunuchs were Slavic.

Slavic eunuchs were found throughout the Caliphate although they were especially common in al-Andalus. They were mostly traded from Prague west to al-Andalus, but Venice was also an important castration center for Slavic slaves being sold into the Caliphate.

I recently ran across a doctoral dissertation that describes slave trading in the Slavic lands. Here are a couple of excerpts from it:

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Changing status appears to have been a concern in the Czech lands as well. In the ninth-century penitential Někotoraja Zapověd, church authorities established the castration of boys by their parents for sale as a sin.While the canon does not prohibit the direct sale of oneself or one’s children, it does seek to prevent certain situations, namely direct sale for a parent’s monetary gain. ... [E]unuchs were in high demand in the Islamic world; rather than simply selling a child to alleviate a family’s poverty or ensure a child was provided for, castration indicates that parents sought to obtain the highest price. The reduction in status of children for monetary gain and for their sale to non-Christians must have been particularly disturbing to Czech ecclesiastics, who turned to the threat of penance in an attempt to regulate these sales. [pp.201-202]

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From Přemyslid Bohemia, we have not only evidence of ecclesiastical disapproval for the sale of Christians to non-Christians, but also the attempt to prevent castration for sale in the Někotoraja Zapověd, which likely targeted Muslim demand for Slavic slaves.This penitential, composed sometime between the ninth and eleventh centuries, does not impose any direct restrictions on slave trading itself, only on the treatment of children by those who wished to sell them directly into slavery. It does, however, indirectly limit the sale of insiders to outsiders. Middlemen trading with the Arab caliphate wanted eunuchs. By attempting to prevent forcible castration of children, the Bohemian clergy would have lessened the prospect of those children being purchased for direct transport to Muslim buyers. This method certainly would have had a limited effect; merchants could easily have castrated the boys themselves outside of the Czech lands, and penance was restricted to those who accepted their behaviour as sinful and confessed. [p.209]

Někotoraja zapověd, ed. J. Vašica, ‘Církevněslovanský penitenciál českého puvodů’ [A Church Slavonic penitential of Bohemian provenance], Slavia 29 (1960), 31-48.

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Fontaine, Janel M. (2017). Slave Trading in the British Isles and the Czech Lands, 7th-11th Centuries. PhD dissertation: King’s College London.

Why are Slavs called Slavs?

At the beginning, there was the word. Well, the word “word” is translated as “slovo” to Slavic languages. Those who can say “words”, at least “words” (“slovo”) that are understandable to the Slavs, are called “Slavs” which is derived from the word “slovo”.