The Crimean slave trade was a long-running system of raiding, captivity, ransom, and sale linking the northern Black Sea and eastern Europe to markets in the Crimean Khanate and the Ottoman Empire. It was especially important from the fifteenth through the eighteenth centuries. Crimean Tatar forces and allied groups seized captives in raids into territories including present-day Ukraine, Russia, Poland, and the Caucasus; merchants then moved many captives through Black Sea ports. Some captives were ransomed, while others were sold into household, agricultural, military, maritime, or sexual service.
The trade should not be treated as a single uniform institution. Captivity, ransom, chattel sale, and other forms of dependency overlapped, and surviving evidence is uneven. Estimates of its total scale therefore vary more widely than voyage-based estimates for the transatlantic slave trade. The system nevertheless formed a major early-modern corridor of forced migration and supplied labor to Ottoman households, courts, workshops, galleys, and estates.
Further reading
- Felicia Roșu (ed.), Slavery in the Black Sea Region, c.900–1900: Forms of Unfreedom at the Intersection between Christianity and Islam (2022)
- Mikhail Kizilov, “The Black Sea and the Slave Trade: The Role of Crimean Maritime Towns in the Trade in Slaves and Captives in the Fifteenth to Eighteenth Centuries” (2005)
- Mária Ivanics, “Enslavement, Slave Labour and Treatment of Captives in the Crimean Khanate” (2007)