Islamic powers
Ottoman advances resulted in many captive Christians being carried deep into Muslim territory.
The Islamic World was a main factor in slavery. After the Muslim conquests of North Africa and most of the Iberian peninsula (632–750), the Islamic world became a huge importer of Saqaliba (Slavic) slaves from central and eastern Europe.[35] Islamic law forbade Muslims to enslave fellow Muslims or People of the Book: Christians, Jews, Sabians and Magians, but an exception was made if they were captured in battle. If they converted to Islam, their master was expected to free them as an act of piety, and if they did not, the master had to teach them.[36] Muslims did not always treat slaves in accordance with Islamic law.[37] The Muslim powers of Iberia both raided for slaves and purchased slaves from European merchants, often the Jewish Radhanites, one of the few groups who could easily move between the Christian and Islamic worlds.[38] Records of Jewish participation in the slave trade go back to the 5th century.[39] Olivia Remie Constable wrote: "Muslim and Jewish merchants brought slaves into al-Andalus from eastern Europe and Christian Spain, and then re-exported them to other regions of the Islamic world."[38] The etymology of the English word slave recalls this period, as the word sklabos means Slav.[40][41]
In the late Middle Ages, from 1100 to 1500, the European slave-trade continued, though with a shift from being centered among the Western Mediterranean Islamic nations to the Eastern Christian and Muslim states. The city-states of Venice and Genoa controlled the Eastern Mediterranean from the 12th century and the Black Sea from the 13th century. They sold both Slavic and Baltic slaves, as well as Georgians, Turks, and other ethnic groups of the Black Sea and Caucasus, to the Muslim nations of the Middle East.[42] The sale of European slaves by Europeans slowly ended as the Slavic and Baltic ethnic groups Christianized by the Late Middle Ages.[42]
From the 1440s into the 18th century, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians were sold into slavery to the Turks. In 1575, the Tatars captured over 35,000 Ukrainians; a 1676 raid took almost 40,000. About 60,000 Ukrainians were captured in 1688; some were ransomed, but most were sold into slavery.[43][44] Some of the Roma people were enslaved over five centuries in Romania until abolition in 1864 (see Slavery in Romania).[45]
Muslims continued to trade in European slaves into the Modern time-period.[42] Muslim pirates, primarily Algerians with the support of the Ottoman Empire, raided European coasts and shipping from the 16th to the 19th centuries, and took thousands of captives, whom they sold or enslaved. Many were held for ransom, and European communities raised funds to buy back their citizens. The raids gradually ended with the naval decline of the Ottoman Empire in the late 16th and 17th centuries, as well as the European conquest of North Africa throughout the 19th century.[42] The United States conducted a war in North Africa to defeat the Barbary Pirates in its early Federal period, 1803-05. State piracy of the North African Arab states continued until France colonized Algeria in 1835.