HHUMAN TRAFFICKING DURING THE MIDDLE AGES IN THE BLACK SEA

  I was surprised reading Charles King book referring to the white slavery in the middle ages in the Black Sea.  Charles King writes: “…The Black Death had caused a severe labor shortage in Europe , and merchants were eager to meet the demand for household servants and agricultural laborers. Although the enslavement of the Christian was frowned upon by the Pope, Catholic merchants were given license to buy their fellow Christians as a way to of preventing their falling into the hands of the infidel Muslims…Slaves were by far the most significant single source of revenue on the Black Sea littoral. The average sale  price was between twenty and forty gold pieces, enough for the living expenses of an adult for two or three years.  From 1500 to 1650 the annual slave population trafficked via the Black Sea from Poland, the Russian lands, and the Caucasus probably reached over 10.000 people per year…” (C. King, Black Sea, A history, 116-117, 2004).

  Human trade  was not something new in the middle ages. Since antiquity slave trade was the most prosperous business in the Black Sea region.  Greek merchants bought indigenous Scythians and they transferred them to  Athens where they became domestic servants.  In the middle ages, the city of Gaffa in Crimea, under the rule of Genoese was the main supplier of slaves to Europe.  At that time inside the European elite, owing slaves was a matter of   social status and prestige. On the other hand, during the Ottoman Empire many Christians were sold as slaves, either for domestic servitude or, concerning women, as wives in the harems of the wealthy. It is worth mentioning that there was a willingness by some potentials slaves and by their families, to be sold, hoping that they were going to find a wealthy patron.  Another kind of human trade was the recruitment of the Christians minors in the military Ottoman groups, known as Janissaries. The boys were converted to Muslims and constituted the army of the Sultan. Opposite to the European perception, the Ottoman law did not recognized slavery as hereditary status and thus every slave could buy his freedom.