Centuries before the rise of Black transatlantic slavery, very many of the slaves imported into Europe where White slaves from eastern Europe, particularly Bosnia. There were so many, in fact, that the word ‘Slav’ is the origin of the English word ‘slave’, as well as the words in other languages – Sklawe in German, schiavo in Italian, for example. The Muslim empires and states also imported them, along with White Turks from the steppes and Black Africans. They were so numerous in al-Andalus, Islamic Spain, that one Moorish writer stated that there were three races there – Arabs, Mozarabs, the Christian Spanish population, and Slavs. These White slaves were called saqaliba, an Arabic term again derived from ‘Slav’. Despite their enslavement, these slaves could rise to position of considerable power and authority.
Bernard Lewis describes them thus in his The Muslim Discovery of Europe (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson 1982):
‘The two major sources of the slave population of Islam were the Eurasian steppes to the north, from which White slaves, mostly Turkish, were imported and used principally for military purposes, and tropical Africa to the south, from which Black slaves were captured or brought for domestic and other labor. There were, however, some secondary sources of recruitment and Europe was one of them. Naturally enough, slaves of European origin were more prominent in the western lands of Islam and especially so in Muslim Spain. As on the other frontiers they were at first recruited mainly by warfare. The infidel enemy captured on the battlefield is lawfully enslaves and, for a while, this sufficed to maintain the supply.
‘With the halting of the Islamic advance, followed by a period of stalemate and then by a gradual Islamic retreat, supplies of prisoners of war were no longer adequate, and those who were captured could be turned to better advantage by ransom or exchange. Slaves were then acquired by purchase, and a flourishing trade developed for the supply of European slaves, both males and female, to meet the domestic and other needs of Muslim Spain and North Africa. These white slaves in the Muslim west are collectively known as Saqaliba, the Arabic plural of Saqlabi or Slav; as in the language of Europe, the term Slav, slave, seems to have combined an ethnic with a social content. In the writings of the geographers, the term Saqaliba refers to the various Slavonic peoples of central and eastern Europe. In the chronicles of Muslim Spain, it becomes a technical term for the slave praetorians of the Umayyad caliphs of Cordoba, thus corresponding to the Turkish Mamluks in the eastern caliphate. The first Saqaliba in Spain appear to have been prisoners captured by the Germans in their raids into eastern Europe and sold by them to the Muslims of Spain. In time the range of meaning of the term was extended to include virtually all foreign White slaves serving in the army or in the households. The tenth-century Arabic author, Ibn Hawqal, a traveler from the east who visited Muslim Spain, remarks that the European slaves whom he encountered there came not only from eastern Europe, but also included natives of France, Italy and northern Spain. Some were still supplied by capture-no longer by military expeditions beyond the frontier but, now, mainly by raids from the sea. A commercial importation of slaves continued overland from France where, to borrow an expression from the Dutch historian Reinhart Dozy, there was an important “manufactory of eunuchs” at Verdun.
‘The peculiar structure of Muslim society, which allowed slaves to occupy positions of great influence and power, enabled the Saqaliba in Muslim Spain to become a very important element in Spanish-Arab society. We find them serving as generals and as ministers, possessing great wealth, and sometimes owning estates and slaves of their own. Adopting the Arabic language, they even produced scholars, poets, and scientists in such numbers, and of such significance, that one of these during the reign of Hisham II (976-1013) composed a whole book on the merits and achievements of the Slavs of Andalusia. No copy appears to have survived.
‘When the Fatimids established their caliphate in Tunisia, in the early tenth century and advance eastward to the conquest of Egypt some fifty years later, Slavonic slaves played a role of some importance in their successes. Jawhar, who commanded the armies which conquered Egypt and ranks as one of the founders of Cairo, may have been a Slav.’ (pp. 188-9)
It’s a pity that the book celebrating the achievements of the Saqaliba has not survived. Unfortunately, slavery in some parts of eastern Europe survived into the early 20th century., Northern Macedonia only outlawed it in 1909.
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