Tracing the Saqaliba: Slave Trade and the Archaeology of the Slavic Lands in the Tenth Century

Abstract

The works of the Arab geographers, the finds of Islamic dirhams in northern and eastern Europe, and mentions of Saqaliba slaves scattered in Muslim sources point to the importation of significant numbers of captives from the North to the Islamic world in the ninth and tenth centuries. This slave trade system stands out by the level of detail in which it can be reconstructed; but slavery and slave trade appear to have been a common occurrence in early medieval northern Europe. Why, then, the apparent discrepancy between their ubiquity in the written sources and the scarcity of the archaeological evidence that has so far been associated with them? This paper argues that, while little direct evidence can be expected due to the ambiguous nature of the archaeological record, a promising approach consists in taking a landscape perspective. Large-scale demographic, economic, social, cultural and political changes reflected in the landscape can be usefully confronted with the mechanisms of the slave trade deduced from written and numismatic sources. Slavery and slave trade are thus valid interpretative frameworks for the early medieval archaeology of northern and eastern Europe.