The Bukhara slave trade refers to the historical slave trade conducted in the city of Bukhara in Central Asia (present-day Uzbekistan) from antiquity until the 19th century. Bukhara and nearby Khiva were known as the major centers of slave trade in Central Asia for centuries until the completion of the Russian conquest of Central Asia in the late 19th century.
The city of Bukhara was an important trade center along the ancient Silk Road, through which slaves were traded between Europe and Asia. In the Middle Ages, Bukhara came to lie in the religious border zone between the Muslim and non-Muslim world, which was seen as a legitimate target of slavery by Muslims, and referred to as the "Eastern Dome of Islam". It became the center of the massive slave trade of the Samanid Empire, who bought saqaliba (European) slaves from the Kievan Rus' and sold them on to the Middle East, and as such constituted one of the main trade routes of saqaliba slaves to the Muslim world. The conquests and plundering of the Ghaznavid Empire brought a large number of slaves from India into the markets of Bukhara in the 10th and 11th centuries. Bukhara was also a center for the trade of non-Muslim Turkic slaves from Central Asia to the Middle East and India, where they composed the main ethnicity of ghilman (military slaves) for centuries.
In the early modern age, the contemporaneous Emirate of Bukhara met competition in the slave trade with the nearby Khanate of Khiva, but continued to function as a major slave trade center for non-Muslim slaves to Central Asia and the Middle East. In this time period the main traded demographics were Christian Eastern Europeans, who were acquired by a trading connection with the Crimean slave trade in the Black Sea, Shia Iranians, who were seen as heathens and whose slavery was therefore considered legitimate by the local Sunni authorities, and Hindu Indians acquired from raids and trade.The ancient Bukhara slave trade was not closed until its closure was forced upon the Emir of Bukhara by the Russians in 1873.
Background Bukhara was a city along the Silk Road since ancient times, and was thus a center of trade. Bukhara is known from at least 6th century BC. The city was a part of Persia in antiquity and the First Turkic Khaganate.
During the Middle Ages, the city fell after the Islamic conquest of Persia and was a part of the Abbasid Caliphate before gaining independence during the Samanid Empire. Bukhara has been called a center of Islam in Central Asia, or the "Eastern Dome of Islam".Gangler, A., Gaube, H., Petruccioli, A. (2004). Bukhara, the Eastern Dome of Islam: Urban Development, Urban Space, Architecture and Population. Tyskland: Ed. Axel Menges.
Antiquity
The ancient Silk Road connecting the Mediterranean world and China in East Asia may have existed as early as the 3rd century BC, since Chinese silk has been found in Rome has been dated to about 200 BC.Mayers, K. (2016). The First English Explorer: The Life of Anthony Jenkinson (1529–1611) and His Adventures on the Route to the Orient. Storbritannien: Matador. p. 122-123 The Silk Road connected to the Mediterranean world via two routes, which met in Bukhara, who thus served as an important center in the Silk Road trade.
From China, the Silk Road continued over the Tian Shan, Hami, Turpan, Almalik, Tashkent, Samarkand, and finally Bukhara, where it split in two main roads: a southern route from Bukhara to Merv and from there to Antioch, Trebizond, or Aleppo; or the northern route from Bukhara over the Karakum Desert to the Caspian Sea, Astrakhan, and Kazan close to the Black Sea.
The Silk Road did not sell only textiles, jewels, metals, and cosmetics, but also slaves connecting the Silk Road slave trade to the Bukhara slave trade as well as the Black Sea slave trade.
Samanid Empire (9th–10th centuries)
Bukhara was a capital of the Samanid Empire. During the Samanid Empire, Bukhara was a major center of the slave trade in Central Asia. The Samanid Empire was strategically well situated geographically to function as a key supplier of slaves to the Islamic world, because it lay in a religious border zone between Dar al-Islam (The Muslim world), and Dar al-Harb, the world of non-Muslim infidels, who by Islamic law were a legitimate target for slaves to the Muslim world.Gangler, A., Gaube, H., Petruccioli, A. (2004). Bukhara, the Eastern Dome of Islam: Urban Development, Urban Space, Architecture and Population. Tyskland: Ed. Axel Menges. p. 39
Between 711 and 713, the Umayyad Caliphate defeated the Chach dynasty, the last Hindu dynasty to rule over Sindh, and captured Sindh. Intensifying in the late 10th century, these incursions marked a significant chapter in the history of South Asia, with Ghaznavid forces penetrating deep into the Indian subcontinent, including the Punjab region and northern India. The primary objectives of these campaigns included the acquisition of wealth and slaves, the propagation of Islam, and the establishment of Ghaznavid rule in the region.
Slaves were imported to Bukhara from different non-Muslim lands and via Bukhara to the Muslim world over Persia to the Middle East, and over the Hindu Kush (in present-day Afghanistan) in to India. The situation was similar to other religious border zones in Muslim lands, which were also slave trade centers: such as Al-Andalus in Spain, which were the center of the al-Andalus slave trade; Muslim North Africa, which were the center of the trans-Saharan slave trade and the Red Sea slave trade; as well as Muslim East Africa, which was the center of the Indian Ocean slave trade.
The Samanid slave trade constituted one of the two great suppliers of slaves to the Muslim market in the Abbasid Caliphate; the other being the Khazar slave trade, which supplied it with captured Slavs and tribesmen from the Eurasian northlands.Golden, Peter Benjamin (2011a). Central Asia in World History. New Oxford World History. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-979317-4, p. 64 The Samanid slave trade was one of the major routes of European saqaliba-slaves to the Islamic Middle East, alongside the Prague slave trade and the Balkan slave trade.
The Samanid regulated the transit slave trade across their territories, requiring a fee of 70–100 dirhams and a license (jawāz) for each slave boy; the same fee but no license for each slave girl; and a lesser fee, 20–30 dirhams, for each adult woman.
Turkic peoples A major source of slaves to the Samanid Empire was the non-Muslim Turkic peoples of Central Asian steppe, which were both bought as well as regularly kidnapped in slave raids by the thousands to supply the Bukhara slave trade.
The slave trade with Turkic people was the biggest slave supply for the Samanid Empire. Until the 13th century, the majority of Turkic peoples were not Muslims but adherents of Tengrism, Buddhism, and various forms of animism and shamanism, which made them infidels and as such legitimate targets for enslavement by Islamic law. Many slaves in the medieval Islamic world referred to as "white" were of Turkic origin.
Muslims conquered Transoxiana between 651 and 751, shortly after their conquest of Persia. From the 7th century onward, when the first Islamic military campaigns were conducted toward Turkic lands in Caucasus and Central Asia, Turkic people were enslaved as war captives and then trafficked as slaves via slave raids via southern Russia and the Caucasus into Azerbaijan, and through Khwarazm and Transoxania into Khorasan and Iran; in 706 the Arab governor Qotayba b. Moslem killed all men in Baykand in Sogdia and took all the women and children as slaves in to the Umayyad Empire H. A. R. Gibb, The Arab Conquests in Central Asia, London, 1923, pp. 19–20 and in 676 eighty Turkic nobles captured from the queen of Bukhara were abducted to the governor Saʿīd b. ʿOṯmān of Khorasan to Medina as agricultural slaves, where they killed their slaver and then committed suicide.Naršaḵī, pp. 54, 56–57, tr. pp. 40–41; cf. H. A. R. Gibb, The Arab Conquests in Central Asia, London, 1923, pp. 19–20
The military campaigns were gradually replaced by pure commercial Muslim slave raids against non-Muslim Turks into "infidel territory" (dār al-ḥarb) in the Central Asian steppe, resulting in a steady flow of Turks to the Muslim slave markets of Bukhara, Darband, Samarkand, Kīš, and Nasaf. Aside from slave raids by Muslim slave traders, Turkic captives were also provided to the slave trade as war captives after warfare among the Turkic peoples themselves in the steppes (as was the case of Sebüktigin), and in some cases sold by their own families.
al-Baladhuri described how Caliph al-Mamun used to write to his governors in Khurasan to raid those peoples of Transoxiana who had not submitted to Islam: "when al-Mutasim became Caliph he did the same to the point that most of his military leaders came from Transoxiana: Soghdians, Farhanians, Ushrusanians, peoples of Shash, and others [even] their kings came to him. Islam spread among those who lived there, so they began raiding the Turks who lived there".Pipes, D. (1981). Slave Soldiers and Islam: The Genesis of a Military System. Storbritannien: Yale University Press. p. 213
Turkic slaves were the main slave supply of the Samanid slave trade, and regularly formed a part of the land tax sent to the Abbasid capital of Baghdad; the geographer Al-Maqdisi (ca. 375/985) noted that in his time the annual levy (ḵarāj) included 1,020 slaves. The average rate for a Turkic slave in the 9th century was 300 dirhams, but a Turkic slave could be sold for as much as 3,000 dinars.
The trade in Turkic slaves via Bukhara continued for centuries after the end of the Samanid Empire.
Indian people Warfare and tax revenue policies was the cause of enslavement of Hindu Indians for the Central Asian slave market already during the Umayyad conquest of Sindh in the 8th century, when the armies of the Umayyad commander Muhammad bin Qasim enslaved tens of thousands of Indian civilians and soldiers as well.Levi, Scott C. "Hindus beyond the Hindu Kush: Indians in the Central Asian Slave Trade." Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, vol. 12, no. 3, 2002, pp. 277–88. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/25188289. Accessed 15 Apr. 2024.
During the Ghaznavid campaigns in India in the 11th century, hundreds of thousands of Indians were captured and sold on the Central Asian slave markets; in 1014 "the army of Islam brought to Ghazna about 200,000 captives (qarib do sit hazar banda), and much wealth, so that the capital appeared like an Indian city, no soldier of the camp being without wealth, or without many slaves", and during the expedition of the Ghaznavid ruler Sultan Ibrahim to the Multan area of northwestern India 100,000 captives were brought back to Central Asia, and the Ghaznavids were said to have captured "500,000 thousand slaves, beautiful men and women". During his twelfth expedition into India in 1018–1019, the armies of Mahmud of Ghazni captured so many Indian slaves that the prices fell and according to al-'Utbi, "merchants came from distant cities to purchase them, so that the countries of Ma wara an-nahr (Central Asia), 'Iraq and Khurasan were filled with them, and the fair and the dark, the rich and the poor, mingled in one common slavery".
Viking slave trade