Slavs – First in Chattel Slavery?

Chat slavery is defined as the enslaving and owning of human beings and their offspring as property able to be bought, sold, and forced to work without wages, as distinguished from other systems of forced, unpaid, or low-wage labor. Also considered to be slavery was chattel slavery among the Africans by the Europeans. Unique? Which cultures enslaved the most people? Which cultures practiced slavery the longest? Which slave trade had the most slaves during their history? Hello, I am Colin Heaton, a veteran of the United States Army and Marine Corps, former history professor, book author, and welcome to this episode of Forgotten History. Many believe that European enslavement of Africans was unique and the largest slave trade in history, using the term chattel slavery denoting the method in the United States specifically. This ignores the fact that this was not unique to the North American experience, as South America also had the practice with the Spanish and Portuguese.

Was it unique to the Europeans? History says no, and in fact, this is a myth. Enslaving people in chains for forced labor, owning them as property as well as their offspring, was practiced long before the European powers even first set foot in West Africa, and European slaves were the primary targets for enslavement in Eastern and Central Europe for several thousand years by many empires. It is often believed that the word slave was derived from the Latin word for slave as the Roman Republic and later the Empire expanded into Eastern Europe and Slavs were a primary target for their slave trade. In addition, the slaves were themselves enslavers of others, to include Byzantine Greeks, as stated by historian Igor Fenerov. Many scholars believe that the word slave has its origins in old Greek leia meaning to plunder or taking booty as well as conquer and take. There is also the Greek etymology for the word scabo being a derivation of scabos which translates as Slavic, originally as a self-reference for the Slavic people as slavu. However, Slavs had also been slaves of the ancient Macedonians and ancient Greeks as well as the ancient Bulgars. Likewise, the Byzantine Empire that succeeded the Western Roman Empire also took slaves as slaves, and therefore the word was used in the Greek lexicon. These slaves were in fact in generational servitude under the Byzantines, just as serfdom was also generational later throughout Europe, and these were Christians basically enslaving other Christians, but Muslims were prevented from enslaving other Muslims, though non-Muslims were fair game.

The Romans took their slaves not just for agricultural labor, but also for brothels and for entertainment in the Coliseum starting in the first century AD, many becoming gladiators while many more were simply used as public entertainment and fed to wild animals. When the Huns arrived in Eastern Europe around 376 AD, and while not slavers as such, they did take hostages, and many of these were Slavs, slaves not being a unified people and just a collection of scattered peoples were easy to conquer and enslave. The Moors from Spain and North Africa took Slavs into captivity during the seventh century and beyond. Otto the Great in the ninth century captured pagan Slavs and sold them into slavery. The Seljuk and Ottoman Turks used the same method against their African and European slaves, in fact 20 percent of their populations were slaves in the mid-fourteenth century. Ottoman Sultan Mehmed the First built an army of slaves referred to as the Kapikulu. The devshirme system allowed for promotion and advancement if they converted to Islam, such as within the Janissary Corps, while other slaves were kept for hard labor and basically worked to death. It is believed by many historians that Sultan Mehmed the Second established the first open commercial Ottoman slave market in Constantinople in the 1460s following the model already used throughout turkey, replacing the former Byzantine slave market. Historian Nicholas Dencol states that there were slaves of all ages and both sexes, often displayed naked to be thoroughly checked, and this was true of children and young women for potential buyers.

For 600 years the Ottomans practiced the largest slave trade in history, and sometimes it was brutal. Historian Madeline C. Zilfi chronicles that under both Arab and Ottoman rule, black Africans were considered inferior to European and Caucasian slaves and therefore less valuable, therefore expendable. Many slaves served on Ottoman ships, where the oarsmen’s life was brutal and often short, as these slaves were not considered to be valuable as they were easily replaced, unlike the black slaves from Africa who were considered quite valuable to the English, Portuguese, and Spanish colonial powers, but to the Muslims they were almost worthless. But many people want to do a comparison between the Atlantic African slave trade and other forms of slavery. When it comes to sheer volume, the Arabic and Ottoman slave trades lasted 900 years longer and enslaved tens of millions more than the 13 to 14 million taken from Africa by the Europeans. More sub-Saharan Africans were sold to the Islamic world than to Europe and the Western Hemisphere combined. There were more Europeans enslaved by North Africans than there were sub-Saharan Africans enslaved and sent to the Western Hemisphere. This was slavery based upon race, so it was not created by Europeans, and it was also based upon religion, where non-Muslims as I said before were targets. In fact, the Europeans were very late to the party and basically amateurs when it came to slavery. The Spanish and Portuguese were the most effective, taking over 90 percent of the Africans for their colonial empire starting in the mid-fifteenth century, while the English actively entered the slave trade over 100 years later. Millions of Muslim slaves were Slavic Christians among many other Christian ethnic groups. However, what is of interest was that if Christians or other non-Muslim groups paid tribute, basically paying taxes or bribes, then this often prevented the taking of slaves. In most cases it was a protection racket.

This was also true of the Ottomans for the most part, but not necessarily for the Arab cultures who still extracted tribute but often still raided for slaves all over Europe and East and Central Africa, such as the East African and Barbary slave trades. Slavery for life was not unusual, and the children of slaves inherited that status in many cases. Punishments in their society ranged from impaling, flogging, burning, hanging, and beheading, all were normal punishments in Muslim culture, but for a slave to escape and be recaptured or simply charged with a crime, execution by any means were standard procedures. This was mainly due to the vast numbers of potential slaves that cost nothing to acquire and were worked to death in various ways. Ottoman and Arab slavers took their slaves from territories they either raided or had conquered, requiring no expense for obtaining free labor. A century after the western society’s ended legal slavery, the Young Turks adopted an anti-slavery stance in the early twentieth century, as stated by historians Clarence Smith and William Gervase. Sultan Abdul Hamid the Second’s personal slaves were freed in 1909, but members of his dynasty were allowed to keep their slaves, and finally Mustafa Kemal Ataturk ended legal slavery in the Turkish Republic. However, Turkey waited until 1933 to ratify the 1926 League of Nations convention on the suppression of slavery, nonetheless illegal sales of girls were reportedly continued at least until the early 1930s, and the legislation explicitly prohibiting slavery was not adopted until 1964. In other Muslim countries slavery also lasted longer than in the west, with Saudi Arabia finally ending legal slavery in 1962. Legal slavery lasted in the Islamic world from the sixth century well into the twentieth century. Muslim slavers operated from Europe, Africa, and Asia to the Indian Ocean, which involved hundreds of millions of people being slaves. Yes, Muslim slave trading was the greatest in history, and it still exists today, only it is not openly practiced nor endorsed by any government. Thank you for watching forgotten history, please click like, subscribe, and share, send us comments and show ideas, and we will get back to you as soon as possible, until next time.