Slave market
place where slaves are bought and sold
A slave market was a place where slaves were bought and sold. These markets were a key phenomenon in the history of slavery.
Asia
Central Asia
Since antiquity, cities along the Silk road of Central Asia, had been centers of slave trade. In the early middle ages, Central Asia was a transit area for European slaves sold by the Vikings in Russia to slavery in the Abbasid Caliphate via the slave markets of the Central Asia. The slave trade in the Mongol Empire created a network of connected slave markets between Asia and Europe. The Mongol Empire established a massive international slave trade founded upon war captives enslaved during the Mongol conquests, which were distributed by market demand around the empire via a network of slave markets connected through the cities of the empire.
In the 19th century, the slave markets of Khiva and Bukhara were still among the biggest slave markets in the world.
In Bukhara, Samarkand, Karakul, Karshi, and Charju, mainly Indians, Persians, Russians, and some Kalmyk slaves, were traded by Turkmens, Kazakhs, and Kyrgyz.
From the 17th to 19th centuries, Khiva was a notorious slave market for captured Persian and Russian slaves.
The slave markets of central Asia were eradicated with the Russian conquest of the Islamic states of Central Asia in the 1870s.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 14, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3289824. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Slave market” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.