The Silk Roads: A New History of the World

by Frankopan, Peter

  They were involved in the trade of wax, amber and honey, as well as fine swords which were widely admired in the Arabic-speaking world. However, it was another line of business that was the most lucrative, the source of vast quantities of money that washed northwards, back up the river systems of Russia towards Scandinavia. This is demonstrated by the many fine silks from Syria, Byzantium and even China that have been found in graves across Sweden, Denmark, Finland and Norway. These must have represented only a tiny fraction of the textiles that were brought back that have not survived.64

  It is the coin record, however, that speaks loudest about the scale of business conducted with faraway regions. Astonishingly rich coin finds line the great rivers heading north and have been recovered all over northern Russia, Finland, Sweden and above all in Gotland (Sweden’s largest island), which show that the Viking Rus’ made enormous sums from commerce with the Muslims and the fringes of the caliphate of Baghdad.65 One leading specialist in the history of currency estimates that the amount of silver coins brought back from trading with the lands of Islam numbered in the tens and perhaps even hundreds of millions – in modern terms, it was a multi-billion-dollar industry.66

  Rewards needed to be substantial to merit the distance and the dangers involved in travelling as far from Scandinavia as the Caspian Sea – a journey of nearly 3,000 miles. So it is perhaps not surprising that goods had to be sold in large volumes in order to generate substantial profits. There were several commodities shipped south, but the most important were slaves. There was money to be made from human trafficking.

  7

  The Slave Road

  The Rus’ were ruthless when it came to enslaving local populations and transporting them south. Renowned for ‘their size, their physique and their bravery’, the Viking Rus’ had ‘no cultivated fields and they live by pillaging’, according to one Arabic writer.1 It was the local population that bore the brunt. So many were captured that the very name of those taken captive – Slavs – became used for all those who had their freedom taken away: slaves.

  The Rus’ were careful with their prisoners: ‘they treat the slaves well and dress them suitably, because for them they are an article of trade’, noted one contemporary.2 Slaves were transported along the river systems – remaining chained while the rapids were negotiated.3 Beautiful women were particularly highly prized, sold on to merchants in Khazaria and Volga Bulghāria who would then take them further south – though not before their captors had sexual intercourse with them one last time.4

  Slavery was a vital part of Viking society and an important part of its economy – and not just in the east. Considerable literary and material evidence from the British Isles shows that one of the most common purposes of longship attacks was not the indiscriminate rape and pillage of popular imagination, but taking captives alive.5 ‘Save us, O Lord,’ one ninth-century prayer from France implores, ‘from the savage Norsemen who destroy our country; they take away . . . our young, virgin boys. We beg you to save us from this evil.’6 Shackles, manacles and locks have been found along slaving routes especially in northern and eastern Europe, while new research suggests that holding pens previously thought to have been for livestock were in fact designed to corral people who were due to be sold in places like Novgorod, where the market lay at the intersection of the High Street and Slave Street.7

  So rampant was the desire for profit from slavery that, although some Scandinavians obtained licences from local rulers to plunder new regions and take prisoners, others were more than willing to put each other in bond – ‘as soon as one of them catches another’, recorded one well-informed cleric writing in northern Europe in the eleventh century. He would have little doubt what to do next: at the first opportunity, ‘he mercilessly sells him into slavery either to one of his fellows or to a barbarian’.8

  Many slaves were destined for Scandinavia. As one famous Old Norse poem, ‘The Lay of Rigr’ (‘Rígsþula’), puts it, society was divided into three simple categories: aristocracy (jarlar), freemen (karlar) and slaves (ðrælar).9 But many others were sent to where good money was paid for fine specimens, and nowhere was there greater demand, nowhere was there greater spending power than the buoyant and wealthy markets in Atil that ultimately fed Baghdad and other cities in Asia, as well as elsewhere in the Muslim world, including North Africa and Spain.

  The ability and willingness to pay a high price provided rich rewards and laid the basis for stimulating the economy of northern Europe. To judge from the coin finds, there was a surge in trade in the latter part of the ninth century, a time of major growth in the Baltic, southern Sweden and Denmark, with towns like Hedeby, Birka, Wolin and Lund expanding rapidly. Find-spots spread over an increasingly wide area along the rivers of Russia show a sharp intensification in levels of exchange, with a marked rise in the number of coins found that were minted in Central Asia – above all in Samarkand, Tashkent (al-Shāsh), Balkh and elsewhere along the traditional trade, transport and communication routes into what is now Afghanistan.10

  Demand for slaves in these cash-rich locations was intense, and not just from those from the north. Huge numbers were imported from sub-Saharan Africa: one trader alone boasted of selling more than 12,000 black slaves in markets in Persia.11 Slaves were also taken from the Turkic tribes of Central Asia, whom one author from this period notes were highly prized because of their courage and resourcefulness. When it comes to choosing ‘the most precious slaves’, noted another commentator, the best came ‘from the land of the Turks. There is no equal to the Turkish slaves among all the slaves of the earth.’12

  Some idea of the likely scale of the slave trade can be deduced from a comparison with slavery in the Roman Empire, an area that has been studied in much greater detail. Recent research suggests that at the height of its power the Roman Empire required 250,000–400,000 new slaves each year to maintain the slave population.13 The size of the market in the Arabic-speaking lands was considerably larger – assuming the demand for slaves was analogous – stretching from Spain through to Afghanistan, which would suggest that the numbers of slaves being sold may have been far greater even than those for Rome. Although the limitations of the source material are frustrating, some idea of the likely scale comes from the fact that one account that talks of a caliph and his wife owning a thousand slave girls each, while another was said to own no fewer than four thousand. Slaves in the Muslim world were as ubiquitous – and silent – as they were in Rome.’14

  Rome also provides a useful comparison for the way that slaves were bought and sold. In the Roman world, there was keen competition between the wealthy for prize captives taken from beyond the empire’s frontiers – curios valued for their unusual looks and as talking points. Personal preference also played a part, with one well-appointed aristocrat insisting on having matching slaves, all equally attractive and all of the same age.15 Similar ideas prevailed with rich Muslims, as later guidebooks to help with the slave-buying process make clear. ‘Of all the black [slaves],’ wrote one eleventh-century author, ‘the Nubian women are the most agreeable, tender and polite. Their bodies are slim with a smooth skin, steady and well proportioned . . . they respect their master as if they were created to serve.’ Women of the Beja people, whose home was in what is today Sudan, Eritrea and Egypt, ‘have a golden complexion, beautiful faces, delicate bodies and smooth skins; they make pleasant bed-fellows if they are taken out of their country while they are still young’. A thousand years ago, money could not buy love, but it could help you get what you wanted.16

  Other guidebooks offered equally helpful pointers. ‘When you set out to buy slaves, be cautious,’ wrote the author of another eleventh-century Persian text best known as the Qābūs-nāma. ‘The buying of men is a difficult art because many a slave appears to be good’ but turns out to be quite the opposite. ‘Most people imagine that buying slaves is like any other form of trading,’ the author added; in fact, the skill of buying slaves ‘is a branch of philosophy’.17 Beware of yel
lowness of complexion – a sure sign of haemorrhoids; be careful too of men blessed with good looks, floppy hair and eyes – ‘a man having such qualities is either over-fond of women or prone to act as a go-between’. Make sure to have a possible purchase lie down; then you should ‘press on both sides and watch closely’ for any signs of inflammation or pain; and double-check ‘hidden defects’, such as bad breath, deafness, stutter or hardness at the base of the teeth. Follow all these instructions (and plenty more besides), the author declared, and you will not be disappointed.18

  Slave markets thrived across central Europe, stocked with men, women and children waiting to be trafficked to the east – and also to the court at Córdoba, where there were more than 13,000 Slavic slaves in 961.19 By the mid-tenth century, Prague had become a major commercial centre attracting Viking Rus’ and Muslim merchants to buy and sell tin, furs and people. Other towns in Bohemia likewise were good places to buy flour, barley and chickens – and slaves, all of which were very reasonably priced, according to one Jewish traveller.20

  Slaves were often sent as gifts to Muslim rulers. At the start of the tenth century, for example, an embassy from Tuscany to Baghdad brought the Abbāsid Caliph al-Muktafī a selection of high-value gifts, including swords, shields, hunting dogs and birds of prey. Among the other presents offered as a token of friendship were twenty Slavic eunuchs and twenty particularly beautiful Slavic girls. The flower of youth from one part of the world was exported to indulge those in another.21

  The engagement with long-distance trade was so extensive that when Ibrāhīm ibn Yaqūb passed through Mainz, he was astonished by what he found in the markets: ‘it is extraordinary’, he wrote, ‘that one should be able to find, in such far western regions, aromatics and spices that only grow in the Far East, like pepper, ginger, cloves, nard and galingale. These plants are all imported from India, where they grow in abundance.’ That was not all that surprised him: so too did the fact that silver dirhams were in use as currency, including coins minted in Samarkand.22

  In fact, the impact and influence of coins from the Muslim world had been felt much further away – and would continue to be so for some time to come. Around 800, King Offa of Mercia in England, constructor of the famous dyke to protect his lands against the incursions of the Welsh, was copying the design of Islamic gold coins for his own currency. He issued coins with the legend ‘Offa rex’ (King Offa) on one side and an imperfect copy of Arabic text on the other, even though this would have meant little to those handling coins in his kingdom.23 A large hoard found in Cuerdale in Lancashire and today held in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford also contains many Abbāsid coins minted in the ninth century. That the currency had reached the backwaters that were the British Isles is an indication of just how far the markets of the Islamic world had sprawled.

  It was the sale of slaves that paid for the imports that began to flood into Europe in the ninth century. The silks, spices and drugs that become increasingly visible in the sources as highly desirable luxury objects or as medical necessities were funded by large-scale human trafficking.24 And it was not only the Viking Rus’ who profited from the almost insatiable demand for slaves: merchants in Verdun made immense profits selling eunuchs, usually to Muslim buyers in Spain; Jewish traders who dealt with long-range commerce were also heavily involved in the sale of ‘young girls and boys’ as well as eunuchs, as Arabic sources from this period suggest.25

  Other sources likewise note the role played by Jewish merchants in bringing ‘slaves [and] boys and girls’ from Europe, and carrying out operations to castrate young men on arrival – presumably as a form of gruesome certification procedure.26 The slave trade promised good returns, which was one reason why it was not only European slaves that were brought east: Muslim entrepreneurs reportedly also got in on the act, raiding Slavic lands from eastern Iran – although enslaved captives pointedly ‘had their manhood left intact, their bodies unspoiled’.27

  Such captives were also turned into eunuchs and were highly valued. If you took Slavic twins, wrote one Arabic author in this period, and castrated one, he would certainly become more skilful and ‘more lively in intelligence and conversation’ than his brother – who would remain ignorant, foolish and exhibit the innate simple-mindedness of the Slavs. Castration was thought to purify and improve the Slavic mind.28 Better still, it worked, wrote the same author, though not for ‘the blacks’, whose ‘natural aptitudes’ were negatively affected by the operation.29 So great was the scale of traffic of Slavic slaves that it impacted the Arabic language: the word for eunuch (iqlabī) comes from the ethnic label referring to the Slavs (aqālibī).

  Muslim traders were highly active in the Mediterranean. Men, women and children were brought from all over northern Europe to Marseilles where there was a busy market for buying and selling slaves – often passing through subsidiary markets such as Rouen, where Irish and Flemish slaves were sold to third parties.30 Rome was another key slave-trading centre – though some found this repugnant. In 776, Pope Hadrian I decried the sale of humans like livestock, condemning the sale of men and women to ‘the unspeakable race of Saracens’. Some, he claimed, had boarded ships bound for the east voluntarily, ‘having no other hope of staying alive’ because of recent famine and crushing poverty. Nevertheless, ‘we have never sunk to such a disgraceful act’ of selling fellow Christians, he wrote, ‘and God forbid that we should’.31 So widespread was slavery in the Mediterranean and the Arabic world that even today regular greetings reference human trafficking. All over Italy, when they meet, people say to each other, ‘schiavo’, from a Venetian dialect. ‘Ciao’, as it is more commonly spelt, does not mean ‘hello’; it means ‘I am your slave’.32

  There were others who viewed the bonding of Christians into captivity and their sale to Muslim masters as indefensible. One such was Rimbert, bishop of Bremen, who used to tour the markets in Hedeby (on the borders of modern Germany and Denmark) in the late ninth century ransoming those who professed their Christian faith (but not those who did not).33 This sensibility was not shared by all. Among those with no compunction about human trafficking were the inhabitants of an unpromising lagoon located at the northern point of the Adriatic. The wealth it accumulated from slave trading and human suffering was to lay the basis for its transformation into one of the crown jewels of the medieval Mediterranean: Venice.

  The Venetians proved to be singularly successful when it came to business. A dazzling city rose up from the marshes, adorned with glorious churches and beautiful palazzi, built on the lucrative proceeds of prolific trading with the east. While it stands today as a glorious vision of the past, the spark for Venice’s growth came from its willingness to sell future generations into captivity. Merchants became involved in the slave trade as early as the second half of the eighth century, at the very dawn of the new settlement of Venice, though it took time for the benefits and the profits to flow through in volume. That they eventually did so is indicated by a series of treaties drawn up a century later, in which the Venetians agreed to be bound by restrictions on the sale of slaves, including returning slaves to other towns in Italy who had been brought to Venice illegally for sale. These negotiations were in part a reaction to the growing success of the city, an attempt to clip Venetian wings by those threatened by its affluence.34

  In the short term, the restrictions were circumvented by raiding parties that captured non-Christians from Bohemia and Dalmatia and sold them on at a profit.35 In the longer term, however, normal business was resumed. Treatises from the late ninth century suggest that Venice simply paid lip-service to local rulers who were concerned that it was not just slaves that were being sold but also freemen. The Venetians were accused of willingly selling the subjects of neighbouring lands, whether Christians or not.36

  Eventually, the slave trade began to dwindle – at least from eastern and central Europe. One reason for this was that the Viking Rus’ shifted their focus from long-distance trafficking to the business of protection rackets. At
tention focused on the benefits that the Khazars enjoyed from the trade that passed through towns like Atil, thanks to the levies raised on all merchandise transiting Khazar territory. The famous Persian geographical treatise Hudūd al-Ālam states that the very basis of the Khazar economy lay in its tax revenues: ‘the well-being and wealth of the king of the Khazars are mostly from maritime duties’.37 Other Muslim commentators repeatedly note the substantial tax receipts collected by the Khazar authorities from commercial activities – which included levies charged on inhabitants of the capital.38

  Inevitably, this caught the attention of the Viking Rus’, as did the tribute paid to the khagan by the various subject tribes. One by one these were picked off and their loyalties (and payments) redirected to aggressive new overlords. By the second half of the ninth century, the Slavic tribes of central and southern Russia were not only paying tribute to the Scandinavians, but were being forbidden to make any further payments ‘to the Khazars, on the grounds that there was no reason for them to pay it’. Payment was to be made to the Rus’ leader instead.39 This mirrored practices elsewhere – such as in Ireland, where protection money gradually replaced human trafficking: after being attacked year after year, records the Annals of St Bertin, the Irish agreed to make annual contributions, in return for peace.40

  In the east, it was not long before the increasingly heavy presence of the Rus’ resulted in outright confrontation with the Khazars. After launching a series of raids on Muslim trading communities on the Caspian Sea that ‘spilled rivers of blood’ and continued until the Viking Rus’ were ‘gorged with loot and worn out with raiding’, the Khazars themselves were attacked.41 Atil was sacked and completely destroyed in 965. ‘If a leaf were left on a branch, one of the Rus’ would carry it off,’ wrote one commentator; ‘not a grape, not a raisin remains [in Khazaria].’42 The Khazars were effectively removed from the equation, and profits from trade with the Muslim world flowed in even greater volumes towards northern Europe – as the quantities of coin hoards found along the waterways of Russia show.43