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.

In antiquity, enslaved people were sold, via the Ancient Greek and Roman city ports of the Black Sea, East to Asia via the Silk road; and West to the Ancient Mediterranean world. In antiquity, the Black Sea slave trade was often referred to as the Pontic slave trade.

In antiquity, the Black Sea was called the Pontic Sea and people from the region often simply called Pontics. Greek colonies were established along the Black Sea, which engaged in slave trade between the tribes of the interior North of the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. Slaves were sold by their families or as war captives to the Greek cities, who exported them West to the Mediterranean or East to Asia along the Silk road.

In 594 BC, the laws of Solon outlawed the citizens of Athens to enslave other Athenians citizens; it was a common trend in the Greek city states to outlaw the enslavement of citizens of their own cities, and this trend made it necessary for the Greek to maintain a slave trade with non-Greek non-citizens they termed "barbarians", from foreign lands such as the Balkans or the North of the Black Sea.

In the 6th century BC, Greek city colonies expanded in the Northern shores of the Black Sea, which came to play an important role in the slave trade; it has even been hypothesized, that these cities were founded because of the Black Sea slave trade. The Greek Black Sea slave trade is documented from at least the 6th century BC onward, when an inscription from Phanagoria describes the trafficking of a slave named Phaylles to Phanagoria (the Kerch Strait) from Borysthenes (Berezan by the Bug/Dnieper).