Slavery and the Slave Trade, 1350–1650
Authors: Fynn-Paul Jeffrey 
Published: June 2023

Slavery and similar forms of unfreedom were normative everywhere in the world during these centuries, including Africa, South Asia, East Asia, Indigenous American societies from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego, and much of Mediterranean and eastern Europe. In most of Asia and Africa, society was stratified into more diffuse “spectrums of unfreedom,” a system that created various levels of dependency, some of which were analogous to Western and Islamic notions of slavery. In the Christian and Islamic worlds, the opposition of “slave” and “free” was often more stark, though in the Islamic world slaves might have higher-status roles than was common in Christendom. In the Christian world, the status of “serfdom” likewise blurred the line between freedom and extreme dependency, especially in the East, where serfdom grew stronger during this period. The only part of the world that did not ostensibly tolerate institutionalized slavery during the centuries under question were those parts of western Europe that developed a “free soil” principle by the later Middle Ages. In that territory, slavery, serfdom, and labor obligations were crowded out by wage labor, and slavery was positively proscribed by the sixteenth century, with some exceptions. The (trans-)Atlantic slave trade remained small-scale during these centuries, picking up only at the very end of our period, while the trans-Saharan trade was already ancient by 1350, and orders of magnitude more extensive. North African and Egyptian merchants acted as middlemen for sub-Saharan African slaves, selling them to the Ottomans and other Middle Easterners in increasing numbers throughout our period. Before 1453, Black Sea markets selling Caucasian and Asiatic “pagans” provided the major source of slaves for Italian middlemen, who passed them on to Italian, Levantine, and Egyptian buyers. With the Balkans, the Black Sea region remained a significant source of high-value slaves for the Ottomans. After 1440, Iberians sailed directly to West African slave markets. After 1500, Mediterranean piracy and shipborne raiding became a major source of slaves. In this bibliography we will confine ourselves to slave trades in which European and peri-Mediterranean lands served a locus of supply, demand, and/or resale. Most historians of slavery now prefer to look at “types of unfreedom,” in which formal notions of slavery did not always play a part. We will focus on systems that saw people treated as sellable property and/or as captives; we will say relatively little about serfdom (in which people owed services based on their bond to a parcel of land), and we will ignore the fact that the rights of wives, children, and servants might be indistinguishable from those of chattel slaves in many of the societies we address. Even thus limited, ours remains a complex topic on three major axes: conceptually, geographically, and historiographically. Conceptually, we run against usual questions such as “What is a slave?” and “When should serfs be counted as slaves?,” but also “When should captives be counted as slaves?” and “How do religion, ethnicity, and gender interplay in Mediterranean slavery and unfreedom?” Geographically, we run into the fact that there were many different “slave trades” going on in our part of the world during the three centuries under scrutiny. Like other commodities, slave populations can be categorized as “flows” and “stocks.” As noted, one principal flow ran from the Black Sea (where mostly “pagan” slaves from the Eurasian interior were sold) to the Levant and Italy; other flows included several distinct trans-Saharan routes; trans-Mediterranean routes both northward and southward; and Atlantic flows that might involve the Canaries and other Atlantic islands, parts of West Africa from Gambia to Angola, and later the New World. For these Atlantic flows, southwestern Iberia often served as a terminus or trans-shipment point. Only the trans-Saharan trade remained relatively steady (gradually increasing), the rest waxed and waned significantly during these three centuries. Most of the time, slave stocks were not auto-reproducing and required inflows to maintain populations. Most slave stocks in Europe were found in and around a few southern trade hubs such as Livorno, Malta, Seville, and Lisbon. A few slave stocks were largely auto-reproducing, as on Romanian monasteries. Historiographically, we are faced with a persistent division between historians trained as medievalists and those trained as early modernists. These often tell stories focused on different groups of slaves and unfree people. For example, early modernists tend to focus on piracy, capture, and galley slavery (and male slaves), while late medievalists focus on domestic slavery (and female slaves). Despite some attempts at synthesis, literatures on captives, slaves, and serfs remain distinct. Though there have been increased efforts to write about “Mediterranean” slavery as a whole in recent years (see section on General Works), many works remain limited to a single topic (e.g., ransoming, galley slavery), and/or to a single country or region. All of this makes gaining a lay of the land relatively challenging.