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Concubines as Commodity: Europe's Export of Slave Women to the Muslim World in the 8th-9th Centuries
Abstract
In the 9th century, Ibn Khurdadhbih, a Persian intelligence official serving the Abbasid caliph, took a textual photograph of the Jewish Radhanite traders passing by his post on the Silk Route. In his work on geography, Kit?b al Mas?lik wa’l Mam?lik (The Book of Roads and Kingdoms) he described their cargo and routes; 'Through the Sea of the Maghrib (Mediterranean Sea) are exported Slavic, Roman, Frankish, and Lombard slaves; Roman and Spanish girls; beaver skins and other furs…they load their merchandise on the back of camels and proceed by land…..On their return from China they load musk, aloe wood, camphor, cinnamon, and other products of the eastern countries….' This paper crosses the frontier between the Islamic world and Europe to analyze the European supply side of this slave trade. In this era, Byzantine/Roman women were still captured by war, either along the long Anatolian Byzantine-Abbasid frontier or through the slow Aghlabid-North African conquest of Byzantine Sicily, which proved to be a rich source for slaves. The Slavic women were victims of raids by the Rus-Norsemen. The Spanish, French, and Lombard women however, had to be acquired either by Muslim raids which pushed as far as Paris and Rome or they were purchased from the European slave markets. Three questions need answered to understand how these women ended up on camels 3,000 miles from home. How did these women enter slavery? Who cooperated in their enslavement, transport, and sale? And how did women becoming a desired inter-regional commodity impact Europe? Michael McCormick in Origins of the European Economy used archaeology, artifacts, coinage, and textual references to show that Europe experienced an 8th century surge in the circulation of Islamic coins, silks, spices, …and shackles in the century preceding Ibn Khurdadhbih. Both European and Arabic texts indicate that the Muslim slave trade was lucrative, wide spread, and resulted from the cooperation of Jews, Muslims, Pagan Norsemen and Christians, both Eastern and Western. Jewish slave dealers particularly had networks that enabled them to cross communal and political lines. The sheer abundance of European slave women in Muslim households, palaces, and literary salons can be better understood by examining the European supply side of the early medieval slave trade taking women to sell in the Muslim world and beyond to T’ang China.
Discipline
History
Geographic Area
Europe
Sub Area
7th-13th Centuries