Slavery on the medieval Silk Road

Summary

History Extra Podcast: "Slavery on the Medieval Silk Road" Summary

Introduction

In the July 13, 2025 episode of the History Extra podcast titled "Slavery on the Medieval Silk Road," host Claire Taylor delves into the intricate and often grim networks of slavery that traversed the vast expanse of the Silk Road during the Middle Ages. Produced by Immediate Media, the podcast leverages insights from leading historians to uncover the realities of medieval slavery, contrasting it with other historical periods and examining its multifaceted nature across different societies.

Defining the Medieval Silk Road

Claire Taylor begins by redefining the traditional concept of the Silk Road.

“If we're thinking about the Silk Roads and what they are in ancient times, we think about the Silk Roads as the routes kind of through Central Asia, through to China. By the time we get to the Middle Ages, we're aware of many more connections.” ([02:38])

Modern historians view the Silk Road not just as overland routes but as a complex web of land and sea pathways connecting regions from Ireland to Korea and Japan. This broader perspective encompasses north-south and east-west routes, highlighting the interconnectedness of Eurasian societies.

Life Along the Medieval Silk Road

To visualize life along these trade routes, Taylor paints a vivid picture of the sensory experiences and interactions travelers might have encountered.

“You might have come across lots of merchants, bringing things like spices and silks and obviously slaves… you might have smelt lots of spices… towns in the caravanserai… smelly camels… you might also be unlucky and meet an army or slave raiders.” ([03:35])

Travelers would interact with diverse groups, from merchants and monks to envoys and potentially hostile military forces. The caravanserai served as rest stops, bustling with activity but also fraught with dangers such as raids and exploitation.

Prevalence and Nature of Slavery

Slavery was a pervasive institution across medieval Afro-Eurasian societies, though historical records often provide limited insights into the lives of slaves.

“There were no societies really that we know of that didn't have slaves in one form or another… huge, huge numbers of them. It was very, very prevalent indeed.” ([04:42])

Susan Whitfield’s concept of "the unknown slave" underscores the scarcity of detailed historical records about slaves, who were frequently marginalized in historical narratives.

Methods of Enslavement

Taylor explains the various pathways through which individuals became enslaved, drawing on Orlando Patterson's models of intrusion and extrusion.

“Intrusion is where slaves come into a society from outside… extrusion is where slaves come out of that society, from within… self slavery… children who'd been abandoned.” ([07:47])

Slaves were acquired through raids, warfare, debt bondage, and other internal societal mechanisms, illustrating a complex system of capture and enslavement.

Experiences in Slave Markets

Slave markets were central to the medieval slave trade, functioning as hubs where slaves were bought and sold alongside other commodities.

“Slave markets… not just slave markets… people would go literally and choose a slave… from Dublin to Genoa to the Crimea… group sale of slaves by agents was a major characteristic.” ([09:24])

These markets varied geographically but shared common features of commodification and exploitation, often marked by grim conditions and harsh treatment.

Types of Slaves

Taylor categorizes medieval slaves into various groups, highlighting the diversity within the institution of slavery.

1. Women, Girls, and Children: The largest group, often serving as domestic workers or concubines.

   “The largest group are women and girls and children… female slaves could be expected to undertake sea travel… they were certainly at his sexual pleasure.” ([12:12], [40:47])

2. Male Factotum Slaves: Performing a range of tasks from errands to skilled artisan work.

3. Soldier Slaves: Notable examples include the Mamluks and soldiers who sometimes rose to high statuses after training.

   “The Mamluks were a really interesting group… they were often freed and could rise to extremely high status.” ([15:42])

4. Gang Slaves: Engaged in arduous labor, exemplified by the Zanj Rebellion.

Legal Protections and Social Status

While legal documents provide some insights into the lives of slaves, these protections were limited and varied across regions.

“Legal sources… give us things like what they might cost, what you could do with them… laws dealing with complicated situations… the best situation was under Islamic law where a female slave’s children would be free.” ([20:27], [23:17])

The Tang Dynasty allowed extreme punishments, whereas Islamic and Christian laws sometimes prescribed fairer treatments, though actual practices frequently diverged from legal statutes.

Slavery and Race in the Middle Ages

Racism began to emerge during the Middle Ages, but it did not strongly correlate with slavery as seen in later periods.

“Racism emerges in the Middle Ages… there isn't a strong connection between the idea of skin colour and enslaveability.” ([26:17])

While negative stereotypes of black individuals developed, slavery was not predominantly racialized, differing from the transatlantic slave trade where race was a primary factor.

Slavery Under the Mongols

The Mongol Empire had a unique and expansive approach to slavery, treating nearly all conquered peoples as potential slaves.

“The Mongols saw the whole of the world as potential slaves under themselves… slavery on a much bigger scale.” ([30:56])

Mongol slavery encompassed a broad spectrum, from chattel slaves working in mines and agriculture to highly skilled artisan slaves who could attain significant status, as seen in the cases of William of Brooke and other European captives ([34:45], [37:50]).

Conflicts in Attitudes and Practices

The vast expanse and diversity of the Silk Road meant varying attitudes toward slavery, which sometimes clashed, particularly under Mongol rule where traditional notions of slavery were upended.

“Mongols didn’t have the sort of ownership in quite the same way as we do in the West… slaves could have relatively high status compared to others.” ([34:45])

These differing practices highlight the cultural specificity and adaptability of slavery systems across societies.

Conclusion and Insights

Claire Taylor emphasizes the importance of understanding the distinct nature of medieval slavery compared to other periods.

“It's useful to not think about a continuity of slavery and slavery being the same right through the historical period… it helps us understand how different cultures have different values.” ([38:54])

By examining medieval slavery through various lenses—legal, social, and economic—listeners gain a nuanced understanding of its role in shaping historical societies.

Recommendations for Further Exploration

For those interested in a more personal glimpse into medieval slavery, Taylor recommends Ibn Battuta’s travel accounts.

“Read the travels of Ibn Battuta… gives us a nice comparison between wives and slaves… the slave that he loved.” ([40:47])

Ibn Battuta’s narratives provide detailed observations of slave life, offering valuable perspectives on the human aspects of slavery during the Silk Road era.

Final Thoughts

Taylor concludes by reflecting on the enduring impact of slavery systems and their relevance to understanding historical and contemporary societies.

“Slaves are understood differently in different ways, places… it’s a horrific form of entanglement in the wider world.” ([38:54])

This episode serves as a compelling exploration of medieval slavery, urging listeners to reconsider simplistic narratives and appreciate the complex realities of historical slavery systems.

Additional Resources

Claire Taylor previously appeared on the podcast discussing the Cathars, a Christian movement from Southern Europe in the 12th century. Interested listeners can find that episode by searching for "Cathars" in the podcast feed.

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This summary captures the key discussions, insights, and conclusions from the "Slavery on the Medieval Silk Road" episode, providing a comprehensive overview for those who have not listened to the full episode.

Transcript

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[Emily Briffet]

Welcome to the History Extra podcast. Fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History magazine. Slavery was a grim but omnipresent reality across the Silk Road during the Middle Ages. Speaking to Emily Briffet, Claire Taylor unpacks the complex networks of enslavement that spanned from Ireland to China, revealing how and why human lives were traded alongside silks and spices.

[Historian Voice]

Could you just explain what we mean when we're talking about the Silk Road at this time?

[Claire Taylor]

Yeah, if we're thinking about the Silk Roads and what they are in ancient times, we think about the Silk Roads as the routes kind of Through Central Asia, through to China. By the time we get to the Middle Ages, we're aware of many more connections. So historians these days think in terms of world structures, world history, and actually we can find connections running from the Atlantic Ocean right through to the Pacific. So from Ireland right through to Korea and Japan. We tend to think about silt roads as over land routes, but particularly when we're thinking about the movement of goods and people, we're also thinking about sea routes as well, and we also think about interconnectedness. So north south routes as well as east west routes that connected with the Silk Roads in the Middle Ages.

[Historian Voice]

Can you give us a glimpse of what life might have been like along the medieval Silk Road? Who might we have met and what would we have seen, heard or smelled?

[Claire Taylor]

Right. Well, you might have come across lots of merchants, that's the obvious one, bringing things like spices and silks and obviously slaves, which we're going to talk about. And so depending on who you were meeting, it might be very different. I think the travel itself was very difficult. The overland route was very difficult. Yeah, you'd have smelt lots of spices. Possibly the towns that people would have met in the caravanserai, where people would have parked up and rested their animals and so on, would have been quite smelly camels and so on. You might also be unlucky and meet an army as well that was traveling, particularly in the later Middle Ages, and that was possibly not who you wanted to meet. And certainly you didn't want to meet slave raiders, which would be a group of people you might meet along there as well, but more kind of pleasantly. You might meet some traveling monks or some envoys going from one political centre to another.

[Historian Voice]

So how integral was slavery along the medieval Silk Road and within medieval Afro Eurasian societies?

[Claire Taylor]

Very, very prevalent. There were no societies really that we know of that didn't have slaves in one form or another. We, we know much less about them than we do about other people because they don't get recorded in quite the same way very often. We can talk about what evidence we do have for them. Susan Whitfield has coined the phrase the unknown slave because we know so little. We only really know about the more exceptional ones and in general terms, about the less fortunate ones. So in general, yeah, they were a sorry sort of people. It was a very unfortunate position to find yourself in, but huge, huge numbers of them. It was very, very prevalen indeed.

[Historian Voice]

Was there a sense of slavery being somewhat different along the Silk Road, or did it have a similar culture surrounding it or similar patterns as elsewhere in the world.

[Claire Taylor]

There are various generalisations that we can make about the Middle Ages. One of the more recent models that's been put forward, which I think works very well, is to think about slavery, perhaps historically and perhaps three stages. So we might think about the ancient world where slave, say, the Roman world or the Greek world, where slavery was an economic feature, perhaps it was essential in terms of the economic running of the society in the early modern world, after the period we're talking about, it has a very racialized basis. Now we're talking about the transatlantic slave trade, which is very, very different from the medieval slave trade. In the medieval slave trade, we're talking really about religious factors and geopolitical factors, if you like. So slavery has a different kind of function in the Middle Ages and there are similar across the extent of the Silk Road or across Safra Eurasia. And we might think about characteristics of slaves, although the obvious one being that they are owned by somebody. They don't have freedom over themselves, over their own bodies. They're owned like. Well, like a work animal, legally and unethically. In a lot of cases, they wouldn't necessarily have their own property or be paid, certainly have freedom of movement or control over their own bodies. So they would be subject to physical and punishment, sexual exploitation and so on, and not have the right to family or community life. But this, this varied. I mean, we're talking about a big region, obviously, and it varied a lot from place to place. And we have people who are what we might call semi free or unfree in other ways. So in the west, the obvious category would be the serf who's tied to the land but not owned in the same sense. Or in the east and South Asia, we might have debt bondage, people who had fallen into debt or who were criminals and who were debased in some way, but didn't quite have all the disadvantages of slaves and might be able to move out of that status, perhaps when a debt was paid off in.

[Historian Voice]

This period, in this region, very extensive region, we're talking about how were enslaved people bought and sold?

[Claire Taylor]

There were various routes into it. We have two models which Orlando Patterson, who's a great historian of slavery, proposed, which is what we call intrusion and extrusion. And what we mean by that intrusion is where slaves come into a society from outside. So in that situation, they might be, as I said, raided by pirates. You know, people who lived on rivers or by oceans were very vulnerable to this, or captured in warfare and imported into A society. Or we might have slaves who are extrusive, who come out of that society, who are from within that society. So they might be born into that status with various legal codes which affects the way that people are legally slaves and become slaves. You know, in terms of their birth. They might be, again, people who are criminals. We have characteristics like self slavery as well, where people would fall into debt, become slaves, just give up their freedom. Children perhaps, who'd been abandoned because their parents couldn't look after them. So various ways in which slaves were of the same group as the society that they lived in, but their status had been debased. And Orlando Paterson has another model as well, which is to think of slavery as social death, he called it. Whether you come from outside or inside, you're leaving the society of the status, the community that you're part of, you're outside of that.

[Historian Voice]

Now, you've mentioned slave raiders as well as this. How did people go about sourcing these slaves or these people who have fallen into slavery?

[Claire Taylor]

This would largely be at slave markets, particularly slaves who came in from outside. Intrusive slaves. They would be sold at markets by merchants and slave traders. Very often these markets were not just slave markets. And the people who were trading them were not just buying slaves. And the people who were buying them were not just buying slaves. They're buying, you know, other kinds of property in inverted commerce. But we do have a major characteristic of the region is these markets that people would go to literally and choose a slave. And these existed from Dublin was a major slave market right through to numerous slave markets in the east, in the southern Mediterranean as well. Genoa, for example, had a major slave market in the Black Sea. There was, particularly in the Crimea with various markets. And then along the Silk Road, the kind of established nodes, places like Bukhara were places where you could go and either buy slaves for yourself or if you were buying them, on behalf of somebody else. So the group sale of slaves by agents was a major characteristic of the Middle Ages.

[Historian Voice]

Do we get a sense of what these markets might have been like, the experience of it?

[Claire Taylor]

We don't really have much in the way of physical descriptions from the period with archaeology, certainly, and where people do archaeological work on these markets, they'll find manacles, shackles and so on. So we have a sense there of how slaves were treated in that sense. They would have been very different, different parts of the world, obviously. But in general terms, there were very grim places for slave. Possibly, you know, some of the worst experiences were had by female slaves. Who could be investigated in various detailed ways, shall we say they might be sold, but under Islamic law, for example, you could own a slave, a female slave for three days. I'm talking about a man owning a female slave for three days and try her out, see if you liked her in the markets that we have on the sort of north south routes, which are routes run by the Rus or Vikings who were capturing slaves and selling them to the Bulgars, various groups in Central Asia. We have a very lurid account by a writer called Ibn Fadlan in the early Middle ages whereby the slave traders would try out their slaves as a kind of demonstration of what they were like. So fairly grim places physically and for women, centers of sexual exploitation as well.

[Historian Voice]

As who actually became enslaved. Who were these slaves that we were talking about?

[Claire Taylor]

Okay, so there's various groups that it makes sense to think about in the Middle Ages. And it might surprise people to know that the largest group are women and girls and children. More recent research is showing very clearly that the majority of slaves were not involved in mass agricultural labor or industrial labour as they might be in other periods, Although we have got evidence of that. But women and girls were certainly the largest, and they might be sold as domestics or concubines, sexual slaves in some way. The women might be very well educated. In the Berbers, for example, in North Africa, they very much prized educated women. Chinese female slaves often were able to read and write. Things like genital mutilation were quite common as well. There are various other important groups. The group that we perhaps most associate with the sort of pre modern period is the male factotum slave who will do anything that the master needed. And this might be running errands or it might be physical work and artisans as well. They would often be quite skilled people or become quite skilled people or work for artisans, doing the more sort of manual labor. So those would probably make up the majority of slaves. We do have some what we might call gang slaves. So we have, for example, there was a big rebellion of slaves in the Middle Ages, the Zanj rebellion, which was a group of East African slaves who were abd and taken to Iraq. And they were working on the salt marshes and very, very arduous labor. And they revolted at one point, but again, they were pretty much a minority. But the other really big important group to think about is soldiers. And at various points in the Middle ages, slave soldiers play a huge part in the way that warfare is organized, Possibly before the Mongols. The most famous group of those are called the Mamluks under the Abbasid dynasty in the Middle Ages, they were largely Slavic peoples and Turkic peoples. So people who were captured perhaps by the Rus, by the Vikings, taken down into the Crimea and then sold in the Middle east and in Egypt and trained as soldiers. They were a really interesting group because once they were fully trained and they were sort of skilled as fighters, they might be freed. They were often freed. And in that situation it meant that they had loyalty to the people that were running them and might also rise to extremely high status as well. I mean, you can imagine it's quite difficult, it's quite dangerous perhaps to arm a group of slaves if they turn against you. And so we do have rebellions of soldier slaves as well. But the Mamluks were a really interesting group. They were one generational, so that meant that their ranks had to continually be replenished. So the slave trade from north to south of Slavic peoples and Turkic peoples into Islamic Asia was a major feature of the period. And similarly, there's a group of slave soldiers, very famous group, who established the Ghaznavid dynasty in Afghanistan. And they were another group of slave soldiers under the Samanid dynasty who rebelled against their masters and established a new dynasty. None of this tended to make people more favorable towards slaves or treat slaves any better. They were just slaves that had managed to do okay for themselves.

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[Claire Taylor]

So would.

[Historian Voice]

It be fair to say that that this isn't necessarily like a perpetual slave society that we're talking about here?

[Claire Taylor]

Yes, quite a lot of people would be able to move between slavery and freedom. We've talked a little bit about how people might become slaves. There were routes out of slavery and historians have thought quite a lot about the question of agency in terms of slaves. So we talked about slave revolt. Well, that's one extreme. But you could be freed more passively by a process called Manuma mission, which the western word for it comes from the Latin to free from the hand or to send from the hand, which would be a process whereby a master would free a slave. Now we wouldn't necessarily think of that as being a purely altruistic kind of process because it had religious connotations in Christianity and Islam. If you freed a slave that was good for your soul, that was a, you know, it was a meritorious act. And at the extreme end of the cynicism on that was a process whereby people would buy slaves in order to free them or to sell them to somebody else so that they could free them. With an Islamic writer, Usama IBN Munkid, who went to the court of the Crusader king of Jerusalem, King Fulk. And he, Usama IBN Munqid, bought lots of slaves at that court in order to sell them to other people to free. So that was a route out of slavery. But in terms of, you know, the way historians think about slaves, they try not to focus on the things like revolts as much as the demonstration of human agency, if you like. So within the situation of being a slave, you could also adjust your status and if you were lucky you could rise to quite high ranks. A lot of eunuchs, for example, men who were castrated and enslaved would rise to quite high positions of power and they were safe people to allow to have power as well because they wouldn't have dynasties, they wouldn't have children who would threaten the people that held the real power. And we also examples of female slaves who managed to rise to fairly high positions. So with another example of a female slave who managed to do very well for herself and we could argue perhaps wasn't particularly a slave. In reality, she was a slave courtesan in the 9th century Abbasid court, Arabel Mamounya, and she ran her own household of slaves. So she had slaves, and this in itself was not uncommon. And I mentioned the Mamluks, the slave soldiers. They at one point had a queen, one of the few queens of the periods. She was a woman called Shahjah Ardour, and she'd been a slave as well, and she was able to rise to quite high status temporarily. So we think about slaves as being able to raise their own status within their situation sometimes. But again, we have to be aware these are the minority. We know about more about these people because they've done so well.

[Historian Voice]

Can we get any glimpse into what life was like for the majority at all?

[Claire Taylor]

We can. Perhaps the most useful sources there, apart from the archaeology that I mentioned, are legal sources or written legal documents which would relate to things like sale of slaves. So we sometimes get individual named slaves and we get descriptions of them and what they're like. So we kind of have a sense there of humanity, if you like, of slaves. But really the descriptions are not to do with individuals individualizing the slave, they're to do with describing them as property. And that would also be useful if they escaped as well or ran away. So often we get descriptions of things like skin colour and height, where somebody came from. But again, that's to kind of help us understand how somebody might spot them if they'd run away. So it is difficult, yes, because you have to remember that these are people. And so we're reading documents about them which consider them as property and we have to read through that. Really. It's quite a difficult thing to actually get to. But the legal documents are perhaps the most useful in a lot of senses, in that they tell us things like what they might cost, what you could do with them, how you might be allowed to punish them. For example, the Tango Dynasty legal codes, they break down society into three layers and the base people at the bottom. They're the only people who can be enslaved and they're described as who can be treated literally as property. It says, you know, their masters can do what they like with them because they're their property. So that gives us a bit of a glimpse. We've also a lot of documents relating to things like the status of children, or can a free man marry a slave? And so on. We've got at one extreme, perhaps in under Jewish Law at various points we've got a situation whereby a married man would not necessarily even live in the same house as female slaves. And under Jewish law at various points a woman would have a sort of veto if she didn't like a female slave that her husband wanted to buy. She could say no to that. And we also got, you know, laws dealing with very complicated situations which, which emerged along the Silk Roads, which is where people are taking slaves from very different societies and sometimes men are marrying their slaves. So what is the status of that slave woman? Is she then free? What's the status of her children? Perhaps one of the most favorable situations was under Islamic law whereby if a female slave had a child by a master, the children's status would be free and the female slave herself when he died, she was known as umwallad. And it, it raised her status and she would be free when her master died. That's perhaps the best situation in, in law for a female slave.

[Historian Voice]

Were there any legal protections at all there?

[Claire Taylor]

We've got a distinction between the law and reality. So one thing that historians are very aware of is if a law is passed, it doesn't mean that's what happened, it means that's what wasn't happening. So someone had to pass a law about it. So there are legal protections. Some societies have limitations on the kind of corporal punishment that can be meted out on a slave. And long standing societies in general tended to have an understanding of what was allowed and what wasn't. I'm choosing my words carefully. I'm not going to say what was fair and what wasn't or what was moral or ethical because that would imply that the slave had the same status as other people, which they didn't. A lot of these laws were to do with the fact that people shouldn't go around willy nilly damaging their property. So not all laws which limited physical punishment were necessarily for the benefit of the slave. In Christian and Islamic terms it was the case that fair kind of treatment of slaves was prescribed. You know, in theory and in religious law, but in practice that wasn't necessarily the case. And then, you know, we do have the other extreme, as I said, under Tang dynasty law, where it does seem to be the case that, you know, extreme punishment could be meted out. And so yeah, in longer standing societies we tend to have clearer laws about what ought to happen. Once we get into the period where the Mongols are running a huge amount of Eurasia as a new thing, we have very few legal documents relating to anything at all really. It does seem to be the case from the evidence of narrative sources, of stories that people told, things that people wrote about, their impressions, that slaves were treated incredibly harshly once you get to that period. And one kind of source that tells us about slave life that's very difficult to interpret are things like images or stories, you know, fiction, because there we might get a kind of idealized version of what life was like for a slave and we might have the depiction of something that's unusual. So from the sort of literary sources or visual sources that we find along the Silk Road in the period, we might, for example, see slaves of color. Well, in fact, we know that actually slaves of color were a real minority. There's no connection. We can talk more about race and slavery, if you like. But where we see images of slaves of colour, black slaves, it doesn't indicate that that was common. It might indicate this ruler who commissioned this painting had slaves who was so far away and so exotic and so unusual. And so they would be included in those in a sort of early Orientalist kind of way, if you like.

[Historian Voice]

As you mentioned earlier, slavery in the early modern period has this much more racialized side to it. Could we talk about this in the Middle Ages?

[Claire Taylor]

Yes, obviously these things are always quite difficult to talk about, but the very important message that is coming from historians that study race as opposed to more generally than race and slavery, the impression that we're getting very clearly is that racism emerges in the Middle Ages. So the kind of derogatory view of people with black skin particularly, that emerges in this period. But by and large, there isn't a strong connection between the idea of skin colour and what we might call enslaveability or, you know, your. Your suitability for being a slave or it being more rights to enslave somebody with dark skin in the. In the Middle Ages, that isn't really a feature of it. Certainly there are black slaves throughout Eurasia. They're mentioned, but again, as something that is unusual. Even though they were north, south, south trade routes between Africa and Europe, running through the Iberian Peninsula, even though there were those routes, what was being traded was not really slaves. It would be more likely to be gold, for example, minerals, something like that. And so, with very few examples really of people of color being a majority of the slave group. And certainly we don't get the stereotypes that we have in the early modern period of people of color being stronger or any of these stereotypes and more able to. To withstand punishment or anything like this. So although racism is taking shape in the Middle Ages, There isn't what we call a somatic connection between race and slavery. So that's quite important to understand in terms of viewing slavery since the Middle Ages, perhaps, and it's one way in which it's very definitely changed.

[Historian Voice]

Is there any evidence of people questioning the morality of slaveholders?

[Claire Taylor]

Very little. There are very few examples. What we do have is the idea that slaves should be treated more fairly sometimes. But in general terms, it's seen as an unfortunate condition for somebody to be in. Then nobody is necessarily more inherently enslaveable. One of the things that does emerge in the period is the idea of justifying groups of people's slavery. But again, this is something that comes into the equation much later on. There are very few, if any, societies in this period that don't have slaves and very, very little discourse about whether or not it's fair in any sense. There isn't really a concept of shared humanity. But one of the key things we have to think about is a model that very important historian of slavery Craig Perry, has talked about, which is the idea of enslaveability and slaving zones and no slaving zones. So what you do get is the idea of idea that you shouldn't enslave somebody of your own religion. This is the case in the west anyway, in Islamic and Christian society particularly. So the idea is that it's okay to enslave other people. And certainly those other people are. They're seen as human, and not necessarily lesser human, but just unfortunate humans of the wrong faith. So it's okay for a Christian to enslave a Muslim or to enslave a pagan, and for a Muslim to enslave a Christian and so on, but not within your own group. But again, it's not just about a concept of morality. The Crusader states, for example, are very interesting in. In terms of slavery. And it's in the context of the Crusades that people start to think about not enslaving other Christians because that reduces, you know, the population, if you like. And so enslaving people of other faiths, that helps the war effort, if you like.

[Historian Voice]

And when we're talking about. About slaveholding, who are we talking about here and what were their motivations? Were there other motivations other than perhaps more practical purposes?

[Claire Taylor]

Definitely. The historian David Wyatt has done some incredibly important work which has shown us that in Northwestern, one of the main reasons for holding slaves was status. The more slaves you'd got, the more important you were, not just that you were more rich, that you have more money but that you had a higher status because you had more people under you. And this model has been show to apply actually throughout Eurasia, that it's often about status. And it's not just the very wealthy who have slaves by any means. It's very, very common. Slaves were very expensive. I'm not saying they were cheap, but if you could afford one, then you would have one to kind of bolster your social standing.

[Historian Voice]

As I understand it, the Mongols had a rather different viewpoint and understanding of slavery. How so?

[Claire Taylor]

Historians who work on slavery are often different from historians who work on Mongols, but there are people who work on both. And I think myself that there is a difference. The large, big difference, if you like, is that the Mongols are absolutely fascinating, complex group. Most people just know about the world expansion. And if we just think about Mongols in terms of just, you know, that the main thing we know about them, which is that they expanded out of Central Asia and conquered China and conquered right through to Hungary, their worldview was that everybody else was enslaveable. So it was different from these other societies who had ideas about who they might enslave and when and why and how and so on. The Mongols saw the whole of the world as potential slaves under themselves. And partly that was rhetorical, but which, you know, it kind of helps us understand their world view, but it's partly practical as well in that for the very key reason that the Mongols themselves were very few, there wasn't very many of them. They were just a group of tribes who were assembled and brought together by Chinggis Khan. Very much a minority within just Asia. Never mind, you know, why do you Asia. Once they started to expand, they needed huge numbers of people. Now originally there weren't very many Mongol slaves. The Mongols operated in household groups, if you like, and on a kind of an agriculture that was based on animal herds. You don't need so many people in that context. So Mongols might have some domestic slaves, but by and large work was done by a household group and it was fairly self sufficient. Now once you expand and your armies are incredibly successful, you need more armies, you need more people to do more work for you and even agricultural work. So we have evidence that under the Mongols, you know, there were lots of mines, there was farming and so on, and this was all done by slavery. And these slaves were people who were captured. And again, so we have a different method of capture. When the Mongols conquered towns, they tended to be very literate societies. So in the Islamic world, in the Eastern European world, and in the East Asian and South Asian world. We know that when Mongols captured a town, they would bring everybody out and categorize them. Were they people who might rebel, in which case they would kill them? Were they women or children, in which case they might be taken as domestic slaves? Slaves were the young men who could be turned into soldiers. So soldier slaves, again with the Mongols. Soldier slaves are very important. And very importantly, Mongols really liked artisans. So we don't think of the Mongols as being particularly cultured people, but they were obsessed with metal work and weaponry, silks and fabrics, and all the kind of luxuries that the peoples who they conquered had. So they really prime their artisan slaves. And so the vast majority of the populations that they conquered were enslaved. Obviously, lots and lots of people were killed as well, but they would be enslaved. And so in that situation, it's slightly different is slavery on a much bigger scale, if you like, and it's a new group of people that are dominating the world. So we tend to get a different kind of attitude to slavery.

[Historian Voice]

Obviously, in talking about the Silk Road, we are talking about such a huge expanse of land, and in this case, we're talking about such a large period of time. I imagine that there's lots of differing views and ideas about how slavery should be as a system. Now, we've spoken about just the Mongols there, but I'm curious whether differing attitudes ever came into conflict with each other at all, and if we have any insight to that.

[Claire Taylor]

Well, the Mongols are a good example in a sense, in that they didn't have the sort of ownership in quite the same way as we do in the West. It's difficult to think about Mongol slavery as quite the same thing because they didn't have a model for it, if you like. So we tend to get different groups of slaves and historians, they're still kind of working out who was a slave and who wasn't a slave. And historians have put forward different models of this. Michel Beer and her work is particularly useful on this, I think. But I think we can break down slaves in the Mongol world into the chattel slaves, the most exploited. So the ones who were utterly miserable, who worked in mines, in farming. We have a lot of accounts of people sort of, you know, half naked in the freezing weather and so on. We've also got this group of artisans that I mentioned who are very important, and some of these rose to incredibly high status. There's a monk from Western Europe. Well, he went as an envoy actually of the Crusader king of Jerusalem to visit the Mongols, William of Brooke. He's called a Franciscan. And he had a terrible journey across through to the Mongol courts at Karakoram. And he tells us about the fates of Europeans that had been taken all the way across Asia to be slaves. And there, you know, we encounter a really interesting example, a woman called Paquette, who was originally from Metz in Germany. She'd been captured. She had had a really miserable life as a domestic slave. But he tells us now she'd managed to marry a Russian who was a house builder out there who was able to sell his labor and actually make money out of his work. So was he a slave? Was she a slave? Another person that William of Brook tells us about is a French silversmith called William Bouchier. And he is building a fountain, an alcoholic drinks fountain in the shape of a tree for Monkey Khan, the ruler at the time. And it was supposed to produce four different types of alcoholic drinks. For the Mongols, it was supposed to. When one of the chambers of alcoholic drinks ran out of alcohol, an angel's trumpet was supposed to sound. Although we get great details, William Boucher couldn't quite get this right. It didn't quite work. But was he a slave? He was very highly recognized and he had the title of a son of the Gare, which these very high ranking artisans had. So was he a slave? So historians discuss this. I think the bottom line is they couldn't leave. They wouldn't have been allowed to leave. And it wasn't just about physical proximity. I mean, there were people, as we've said, that were traveling east and west all the time. Physically. Paquette and her husband and William Boucher might have been able to pack up and leave. And whilst they lived in the Mongol world, they had a relatively high status compared to other slaves. But now I don't think they were free. So we've got types of people that we wouldn't really have in the west as slaves.

[Historian Voice]

Is there an end date that we can place on Silk Road slavery?

[Claire Taylor]

It would be dangerous to. In Western Europe, it fell out of favour with Christian groups, but it continued with other groups. It might have been ameliorated somewhat at different stages, but we certainly can't say it ended because it's. Well, it happens today, doesn't it? We have the modern slave trade. It runs on an east west basis. It's not the same. We don't have slave markets, but we certainly couldn't put a date on it. Not a legal date or a practical date really. But one of the big differences is that slavery, slaves as we get mechanization Slaves have less and less of an economic role. But then at other times, for example, in the later Middle Ages, when we have the Black Death, the slave trade in the Mediterranean increased because of the labor shortages, because so many people died. So I think we could possibly even say it increased to a degree before it decreased.

[Historian Voice]

Is there anything that you would particularly like to leave listeners with with?

[Claire Taylor]

I think to understand the world, it's really useful to think about the very different ways that people have regarded other humans. And I think it's a really useful exercise to think about medieval slavery and think about how it's different from the early modern slavery. So the transatlantic slave trade, in that it isn't necessarily about. About debasing a group of humans or making generalizations about groups of people. It's a way of thinking about other people as legitimately less fortunate and legitimately exploitable, but in a very different way. So I think it's useful for us to not think about a continuity of slavery and slavery being the same right through the historical period. And certainly people who write about medieval slavery and people who write about early modern slavery make a real distinction between the two. And I think if we sort of ponder the differences between different types of slavery, it helps us understand how different cultures have different values. But there's always people at the bottom in some way or another. As with any historical subject matter that we might think about, it's very culturally specific, and slaves are understood differently in different ways, places. Now, what light does the slave system within a particular society shed on that particular society? So we can use it as a lens, if you like, to think about different historical societies as well as about, you know, a horrific form of entanglement in the wider world. If you like the wider trade world, economic world.

[Historian Voice]

If there was a source that would allow our listeners to get closer to the medieval understanding of slavery, what would that be? What would you recommend?

[Claire Taylor]

I think I would recommend reading the travels of an Islamic traveler from North Africa in the period that we're looking at. He was called Ibn Battuta, and Ibn Battuta was from Algiers. So he traveled right the way from the Atlantic right across Asia. He traveled up into the steppe region in the north as well, and an incredibly long journey. And his reason for traveling was intellectual pursuit. He traveled in order to think about religion. He worked along the way as a diplomat and an envoy. And along the way he bought and sold so many slaves that we can't count them. Somebody has estimated that he maybe had 70 slaves along the way and also married and left around 20 wives. So he was very sexually active. These are all female slaves by way. The. The way. And they traveled with him. If you read him, his accounts are in lots of very good modern translations. A historian called Maria Tolcheva has studied his slaves that he kind of collected, and he took them with him because he was traveling. He took these women with him. In fact, female slaves could be expected to undertake sea travel, whereas wives wouldn't be expected to undertake sea travel. So very often, often he's traveling with his female slaves, and he shows us the sort of casual misogyny, if you like, the concubine system in the period. He doesn't necessarily overtly mistreat his slaves, but they're definitely at his sexual pleasure. And when he settles in the Maldives, for example, he takes on four wives, and I think he has something like 10 female slaves. And he takes aphrodisiacs and sleeps with all the slaves every day, but he sleeps with his wives in turn and says, so perhaps they're having an easier time of it than the slaves are. So it gives us a nice comparison between wives and slaves as well. We get some sense of his fond feelings towards his slaves. He only names one of them, actually, a Greek girl called Margalita. I think she's the only one who gets an actual name check. And she's possibly one he had a child by, and he calls her the slave that he loved. And there's a shipwreck at one point and. And there's not enough rafts for everybody, so he chooses between her and another slave that can swim and saves her. We think it's the same slave, the slave that he loved. It might be one or two different slaves, but it's a fantastic account. I mean, people think that Marco Polo is well traveled and exciting, but actually Ibn Battuta is much more interesting. But, yeah, slaves feature all the time in the story.

[Emily Briffet]

That was historian Claire Taylor speaking to Emily Briffet. Claire also appeared on the podcast previously to answer your questions on the Cathars, the Christian movement which emerged in Southern Europe during the 12th century. You can listen to that now by searching for the Cathars in this podcast feed.

[Claire Taylor]

This is history's heroes. People with purpose, brave ideas, and the courage to stand alone, including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War.

[Shopify Voice]

You know, he would look at these men and he would say, don't worry, sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you.

[Claire Taylor]

Join me, Alex. Von Tunzelman for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts.