Race and Slavery in the Middle East: An Historical Enquiry (4 page)

As we have seen, the slave population was recruited in four main ways: by
capture, tribute, offspring, and purchase.

Capture: In the early centuries of Islam, during the period of the conquest
and expansion, this was the most important source.29 With the stabilization of
the frontier, the numbers recruited in this way diminished, and eventually
provided only a very small proportion of slave requirements. Frontier warfare
and naval raiding yielded some captives, but these were relatively few and
were usually exchanged. In later centuries, warfare in Africa or India supplied
some slaves by capture. With the spread of Islam, and the acceptance of
dhimmi status by increasing numbers of non-Muslims, the possibilities for
recruitment by capture were severely restricted.

Tribute: Slaves sometimes formed part of the tribute required from vassal
states beyond the Islamic frontiers. The first such treaty ever made, that of the
year 31 of the Hijra (= 652 A.D.), with the black king of Nubia. included an
annual levy of slaves to be provided from Nubia.3 This may indeed have been
the reason why Nubia was for a long time not conquered. The stipulated
delivery of some hundreds of male and female slaves, later supplemented by
elephants, giraffes, and other wild beasts, continued at least until the twelfth
century, when it was disrupted by a series of bitter wars between the Muslim
rulers of Egypt and the Christian kings of Nubia." Similar agreements, providing for the delivery of a tribute of slaves, were imposed by the early Arab
conquerors on neighboring princes in Iran and Central Asia, but were of
briefer duration.
32

Offspring: The recruitment of the slave population by natural increase
seems to have been small and, right through to modern times, insufficient to
maintain numbers. This is in striking contrast with conditions in the New
World, where the slave population increased very rapidly. Several factors
contributed to this difference, perhaps the most important being that the slave
population in the Islamic Middle East was constantly drained by the liberation
of slaves-sometimes as an act of piety, most commonly through the recognition and liberation, by a freeman, of his own offspring by a slave mother.
There were also other reasons for the low natural increase of the slave population in the Islamic world. They include

1. Castration. A fair proportion of male slaves were imported as eunuchs and
thus precluded from having offspring. Among these were many who otherwise, by the wealth and power which they acquired, might have founded
families.

2. Another group of slaves who rose to positions of great power, the military
slaves, were normally liberated at some stage in their career, and their
offspring were therefore free and not slaves.

3. In general, only the lower orders of slaves-menial, domestic, and manual
workers-remained in the condition of servitude and transmitted that condition to their descendants. There were not many such descendants-casual
mating was not permitted and marriage was not encouraged.

4. There was a high death toll among all classes of slaves, including great
military commanders as well as humble menials. Slaves came mainly from
remote places, and, lacking immunities, died in large numbers from endemic as well as epidemic diseases. As late as the nineteenth century, Western travelers in North Africa and Egypt noted the high death rate among
imported black slaves.33

Purchase: This came to be by far the most important means for the legal
acquisition of new slaves. Slaves were purchased on the frontiers of the Islamic world and then imported to the major centers, where there were slave
markets from which they were widely distributed. In one of the sad paradoxes
of human history, it was the humanitarian reforms brought by Islam that
resulted in a vast development of the slave trade inside, and still more outside,
the Islamic empire. In the Roman world, the slave population was occasionally recruited from outside, when a new territory was conquered or a barbarian invasion repelled, but mostly, slaves came from internal sources. This was
not possible in the Islamic empire, where, although slavery was maintained,
enslavement was banned. The result was an increasingly massive importation
of slaves from the outside. Like enslavement, mutilation was forbidden by
Islamic law. The great numbers of eunuchs needed to preserve the sanctity of
palaces, homes, and some holy places had to be imported from outside or, as
often happened, "manufactured" at the frontier. In medieval and Ottoman
times the two main sources of eunuchs were Slavs and Ethiopians (Habash, it
term which commonly included all the peoples of the Horn of Africa). Eunuchs were also recruited among Greeks (Rum), West Africans (Takruri, pl.
Takarina), Indians, and occasionally West Europeans.34

The slave population of the Islamic world was recruited from many lands.
In the earliest days, slaves came principally from the newly conquered
countries-from the Fertile Crescent and Egypt, from Iran and North Africa,
from Central Asia, India, and Spain. Mostof these slaves had a cultural level
at least as high as that of their Arab masters, and by conversion and manumission they were rapidly absorbed into the general population. As the supply of
slaves by conquest and capture diminished, the needs of the slave market
were met, more and more, by importation from beyond the frontier. Small
numbers of slaves were brought from India, China, Southeast Asia, and the
Byzantine Empire, most of them specialists and technicians of one kind or
another. The vast majority of unskilled slaves, however, came from the lands
immediately north and south of the Islamic world-whites from Europe and
the Eurasian steppes, blacks from Africa south of the Sahara. Among white
Europeans and black Africans alike, there was no lack of enterprising merchants and middlemen, eager to share in this profitable trade, who were
willing to capture or kidnap their neighbors and deliver them, as slaves, to a
ready and expanding market. In Europe there was also an important trade in
slaves, Muslim, Jewish, pagan, and even Orthodox Christian, recruited by
capture and bought for mainly domestic use.35

Central and East European slaves, generally known as Saqaliba (i.e.,
Slavs)," were imported by three main routes: overland via France and Spain,
from Eastern Europe via the Crimea, and by sea across the Mediterranean.
They were mostly but not exclusively Slavs. Some were captured by Muslim
naval raids on European coasts, particularly the Dalmatian. Most were supplied by European, especially Venetian, slave merchants, who delivered cargoes of them to the Muslim markets in Spain and North Africa. The Saqaliba
were prominent in Muslim Spain and to a lesser extent in North Africa but
played a minor role in the East. With the consolidation of powerful states in
Christian Europe, the supply of West European slaves dried up and was
maintained only by privateering and coastal raiding from North Africa.

Black slaves were brought into the Islamic world by a number of routesfrom West Africa across the Sahara to Morocco and Tunisia, from Chad across
the desert to Libya, from East Africa down the Nile to Egypt, and across the
Red Sea and Indian Ocean to Arabia and the Persian Gulf. Turkish slaves
from the steppe-lands were marketed in Samarkand and other Muslim Central Asian cities and from there exported to Iran, the Fertile Crescent, and
beyond. Caucasians, of increasing importance in the later centuries, were
brought from the land bridge between the Black Sea and the Caspian and
were marketed mainly in Aleppo and Mosul.

By Ottoman times, the first for which we have extensive documentation,
the pattern of importation had changed.;' At first, the expanding Ottoman
Empire, like the expanding Arab Empire of earlier times, recruited its slaves
by conquest and capture, and great numbers of Balkan Christians were forcibly brought into Ottoman service. The distinctively Ottoman institution of
the dev~irme, the levy of boys from the Christian village population, made it
possible, contrary to previous Islamic law and practice, to recruit slaves from
the subject peoples of the conquered provinces.3 The devlirme slaves were not servants or menials, however, but were groomed for the service of the
state in military and civil capacities. For a long time, most of the grand viziers
and military commanders of the Ottoman forces were recruited in this way. In
the early seventeenth century, the devsirme was abandoned; by the end of the
seventeenth century, the Ottoman advance into Europe had been decisively
halted and reversed. Sea raiders operating out of North African ports continued to bring European captives, but these did not significantly add to the slave
populations. Pretty girls disappeared into the harem; men often had the
choice of being ransomed or joining their captors-a choice of which many
availed themselves. The less fortunate, like the Muslim captives who fell to
the European maritime powers, served in the galleys.'"

The slave needs of the Ottoman Empire were now met from new sources.
One of these was the Caucasians-the Georgians, Circassians, and related
peoples, famous for providing beautiful women and brave and handsome
men. The former figured prominently in the harems, the latter in the armies
and administrations of the Ottoman and also the Persian states. The supply of
these was reduced but not terminated by the Russian conquest of the
Caucasus in the early years of the nineteenth century. Another source of
supply was the Tatar khanate of the Crimea, whose raiders every year rode far
and wide in Central and Eastern Europe, carrying off great numbers of male
and female slaves. These were brought to the Crimea and shipped thence to
the slave markets in Istanbul and other Turkish cities. This trade came to an
end with the Russian annexation of the Crimea in 1783 and the extinction of
411
Tatar independence.

Deprived of most of their sources of white slaves, the Ottomans turned
more and more to Africa, which in the course of the nineteenth century came
to provide the overwhelming majority of slaves used in Muslim countries from
Morocco to Asia. According to a German report published in 1860,

the black slaves, at that time, were recruited mainly by raiding and kidnapping
from Sennaar, Kordofan, Darfur, Nubia, and other places in inner Africa; the
white mostly through voluntary sale on the part of their relatives in the independent lands of the Caucasus (Lesghi, Daghestani, and Georgian women, rarely
men). Those offered for sale were already previously of servile status or were
slave children by birth."

The need, from early medieval times onward, to import large and growing
numbers of slaves led to a rapid increase, in all the lands beyond the frontiers
of the Islamic world, of both slave raiding and slave trading-the one to
procure and maintain an adequate supply of the required commodity, the
other to ensure its efficient distribution and delivery. In the ancient world,
where most slaves other than war captives were of local provenance, slave
trading was a simple and mostly local affair, often combined with other articles of commerce. In the Islamic world, where slaves were transported over
great distances from their places of origin, the slave trade was more complex
and more specialized, with a network of trade routes and markets extending all over the Islamic world and far beyond its frontiers and involving commercial relations with suppliers in Christian Europe, in the Turkish steppe-lands,
and in black Africa. In every important city there was a slave market, usually
called Suq al-Ragiq. When new supplies were brought, government inspectors
usually took the first choice, then officials, then private persons. It would
seem that slaves were not normally sold in open markets but in decently
covered places-a practice which continued in some areas to the nineteenth,
~
in others till the twentieth, century.a`

There is a fair amount of information on slave prices, most of it too
heterogeneous in date and provenance to provide more than a general impression. The best-documented data come from medieval Egypt and show a remarkable consistency in price levels. Slave girls averaged twenty dinars (gold
pieces), corresponding, at the rate of gold to silver current at that time, to 266
dirhams (silver pieces). Other medieval data show somewhat higher prices.
Black slaves seem to have cost from two to three hundred dirhams; black
eunuchs, at least two or three times as much. Female black slaves were sold at
five hundred dirhams or so; trained singing girls or other performers, at ten or
even twenty thousand. White slaves, mainly for military purposes, were more
expensive. Prices of three hundred dirhams are quoted for Turks near the
source in Central Asia, and much higher prices elsewhere. In Baghdad they
fetched four to five hundred dirhams, while a white slave girl could be sold for
a thousand dinars or more.43 The mid-nineteenth-century German report
from Turkey quotes prices of four thousand to five thousand piasters, or two
hundred to three hundred dollars, as the current price in Istanbul for a
"trained, strong, black slave," while "for white slave girls of special beauty,
fifty thousand piasters and more are paid.i44 In general, eunuchs fetched
higher prices than other males, younger slaves were worth more than older
slaves, and slave women, whether for work or pleasure, were more expensive
than males. Olufr Eigilsson, an Icelandic Lutheran pastor who was carried off
to captivity with his family and many of his flock when his native village was
raided by Barbary Corsairs in 1627 and who wrote an account of his adventures, notes that his young maidservant was sold for seven hundred dollars
4`
and later resold for a thousand.

Slaves were employed in a number of functions-in the home and the
shop, in agriculture and industry, in the military, as well as in specialized
tasks. The Islamic world did not operate on a slave system of production, as is
said of classical antiquity, but slavery was not entirely domestic either. Slave
laborers of various kinds were of some importance in medieval times, especially where large-scale enterprises were involved, and they continued to be
into the nineteenth century. The most important slaves, however, those of
whom we have the fullest information, were domestic and commercial, and it
is they who were the characteristic slaves of the Muslim world. They seem to
have been mainly blacks, with some Indians, and some whites. In later times,
for which we have more detailed evidence, it would seem that while the slaves
often suffered appalling privations from the moment of their capture until
their arrival at their final destination, once they were placed with a family they were reasonably well treated and accepted in some degree as members of the
household. In commerce, slaves were often apprenticed to their masters,
sometimes as assistants, sometimes advancing to become agents or even business partners.