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Roundtable
Locating Slavery in Middle Eastern and Islamic History
The Saqaliba--a term that in medieval Arabic literature denoted the Slavic populations of central and eastern Europe (and possibly some of their neighbors)1--offer a particularly insightful case study of the mechanisms of the early Islamic slave trade and the nature of the Muslim demand for slaves. What makes them such an ideal case study is their high visibility in texts produced in the Islamic world between the early 9th and early 11th centuries. Arab geographers and diplomats investigated their origins, while archaeological material, primarily hundreds of thousands of dirhams found in Scandinavia and the Slavic lands, contains traces of the trade in them. By combining these strands of evidence, we can build an exceptionally detailed image of slave trade systems that supplied Saqaliba to the Islamic markets, which, in turn, can be used to illustrate more general mechanisms governing the trade in and demand for slaves in the medieval Islamic world.
In textual sources, the Saqaliba appear mostly in palatial contexts: men filled the ranks of the guards of the Abbasid, Fatimid, and Umayyad caliphs; women and eunuchs populated their harems, with eunuchs also employed in the diwans.2These sources focus on palatine slavery and offer a glimpse of private ownership of Saqaliba slaves only in exceptional circumstances, such as the presence of a dozen of Saqlabi eunuchs in the inventory of the household of a rich governor.3Private demand existed--numerous anecdotes featuring Saqaliba slaves in the works of al-Jahiz suggest that their presence was banal in 9th-century Basra4--but the palaces of caliphs and amirs were no doubt the largest source of demand for Saqaliba concubines, eunuchs, bureaucrats, and guards.
The presence of Saqaliba slaves in Islamic palaces and cities aroused the curiosity of Arab geographers and diplomats. The former left ethnographic descriptions of northern and eastern Europe that allow us to identify the Saqaliba as Slavs.5The latter explored the markets where Muslim merchants acquired captives from northern warriors, such as Bulgar on the Volga where in 921-22 Ahmad b. Fadlan observed the exchange of Saqaliba slave girls brought by Rus (i.e., Scandinavian) merchants for Islamic coins and beads, which were offered by a caravan from Khorezm,...