Balkan slave trade

Background During the Middle Ages, informal slave zones were formed alongside religious borders. Both Christians and Muslims banned the enslavement of people of their own faith, but both approved of the enslavement of people of a different faith. The slave trade thus organized alongside religious principles. While Christians did not enslave Christians, and Muslims did not enslave Muslims, both did allow the enslavement of people they regarded to be heretics, which for example allowed Catholic Christians to enslave Orthodox Christians, and Sunni Muslims to enslave Shia Muslims. The slave trade was founded upon the fact that the Balkans was a religious border zone between at first pagan and Christian, and later Catholic and Orthodox Christian lands. Since the custom at the time did not approve of enslaving people of the same religion, this made the Balkans a supply of slaves for both Christian and Muslim lands. Another factor was the fact that the Balkans was for a long time politically decentralized and unstable, and was in the Early Middle Ages known as the Sclaveni or Slav lands. These two factors in combination made the Balkans a fertile target for slave trade, when war captives were sold by their enemies to Venetian slave traders at the coasts. The most targeted category of the slave trade were the Bosnians, since they were adherents of Bogomilism, a faith which was not acknowledged as Christianity and therefore made them legitimate targets of slavery in Catholic as well as Orthodox Europe. Slave routes The Balkan slave trade was separate from the Black Sea slave trade, which took place on the Eastern shore of the Balkan with center of Genoese Caffa and Venetian Tana. The victims of the Balkan slave trade were not sold via the East Balkan coast but via the sea ports alongside the Adriatic Sea coast, primarily Ragusa (Dubrovnik), a center of the Balkan slave trade, were Venetian merchants bought slaves from Balkan in order to sell them in the Aegean Sea. Venetian slave traders trafficked Balkan slaves from the Balkan west coast across the Adriatic Sea to the Aegean Sea, where Genoese Chios (Lordship of Chios and Maona of Chios and Phocaea) and Venetian Crete (Kingdom of Candia) were transit centers for the export of Balkan slaves to either Spain in the west or Egypt in the south. There were also slaves taken which legally were not considered legitimate targets of enslavement. Albanian children termed anime were sold to Venice via Durazzo (Durrës); since the Albanians were not Bogomils but either Orthodox or Catholic and therefore not officially deemed legitimate for enslavement, they were officially not categorized as slaves but sold as bond servants which were formally claimed to be contract workers. The Balkan slave trade was, alongside the Black Sea slave trade, one of the two main slave supply sources of future Mamluk soldiers to military slavery in the Mamluk Sultanate in Egypt. ==End of the slave trade==

The Balkan slave trade entered difficulties in the 15th century. The Republic of Ragusa banned the slave trade from Ragusa, one of the major sea ports of the Balkan slave trade, in 1416. The Venetian slave trade from the Balkans gradually ended in parallel with the conquest of the Balkans by the Ottoman Empire during the 15th century. The slave trade from the Balkans was ended as a separate slave trade and was overtaken by the Ottomans and incorporated into the Ottoman slave trade, which in the Balkans was connected to the Black Sea slave trade. Venetian slave traders were not able to compete with Ottoman-Crimean competition. After this, they acquired a smaller number of slaves from Ottoman slave traders via the trans-Saharan slave trade. The Venetian slave trade was however soon supplanted in Europe by the Atlantic slave trade of the 16th century. ==See also==