Black Sea slave trade

The Black Sea slave trade trafficked people across the Black Sea from Eastern Europe and the Caucasus to slavery in the Mediterranean and the Middle East. The Black Sea slave trade was a center of the slave trade between Europe and the rest of the world from antiquity until the 19th century. One of the major and most significant slave trades of the Black Sea region was the trade of the Crimean Khanate, known as the Crimean slave trade.

The Black Sea is situated in a region historically dominated by the margins of empires, conquests and major trade routes between Europe, the Mediterranean and Central Asia, notably the Ancient Silk Road, which made the Black Sea ideal for a slave trade of war captives sold along the trade routes.

In the Early Middle Ages, the Byzantine Empire imported slaves from the Vikings, who transported European captives via the route from the Varangians to the Greeks to the Byzantine ports at the Black Sea. In the late Middle Ages, trading colonies of Venice and Genoa along the Northern Black Sea coasts used the instable political and religious border zones to buy captives and transport them as slaves to Italy, Spain, and the Ottoman Empire.

In the early modern period, the Crimean Khanate abducted Eastern Europeans through the Crimean–Nogai slave raids in Eastern Europe, who were transported to the rest of the Muslim world in collaboration with the Ottoman slave trade from the Crimea. The massive slave trade was at this time a major source of income for the Crimean Khanate. When the Crimean slave trade was ended by the Russian conquest of the Crimea in 1783, the slave trade of Circassians from Caucasus became an independent slave trade. The Circassian slave trade of particularly women from Caucasus to the Muslim world via Anatolia and Constantinople continued until the 20th century.