3,251 words

Jukka Korpela
Slaves from the North: Finns and Karelians in the East European Slave Trade, 900–1600
Brill, Studies in Global Slavery, Volume 5, 2019

There is a history of human bondage in Europe that the textbooks rarely teach. While the transatlantic slave trade—with its millions of African captives, its plantation economies, and its enduring racial legacy—has commanded the attention of scholars and the public for generations, another vast machinery of enslavement operated across the eastern half of the continent for centuries, harvesting lives from the forests of Finland and Karelia to the steppes of Central Asia and the slave markets of Istanbul, Cairo, and Bukhara. Jukka Korpela’s Slaves from the North, published in 2019 as part of Brill’s Studies in Global Slavery series, is a landmark effort to recover that history. Scholarly in method, harrowing in detail, and unflinching in its conclusions, this book compels us to reckon with a brutal and largely forgotten chapter of European history.

Korpela, a Finnish historian at the University of Eastern Finland, draws on an extraordinary range of sources: Russian chronicles, Muscovite administrative registers, Tatar diplomatic documents, Italian commercial records, travel accounts by Arab geographers and Habsburg ambassadors, Norse sagas, and Finnish folklore. What he constructs from this mosaic is a sustained argument that the Finnic peoples—Finns, Karelians, Vepsians, Sámi, and related groups—were systematically preyed upon by Viking raiders, Novgorodian warlords, Muscovite troops, Teutonic Knights, and above all the fearsome cavalry armies of the Crimean Tatars, who funneled their captives into a trade network stretching from the Baltic to Persia.

The Vikings and the Origins of the Northern Slave Trade

The book opens with the Viking Age, and Korpela is careful to situate the enslavement of northern peoples within the broader context of early medieval slave economies. Slavery, he insists, was not a peripheral aberration but a core institution of medieval European life. As he observes, there were slaves in practically every Viking household, and they performed ordinary everyday work. Norse law treated the thrall—the Old Scandinavian term for a slave—like other property or domestic animals. Tore Iversen, on whose research Korpela extensively draws, has estimated that as much as a quarter of the population of Norway in the tenth and eleventh centuries may have consisted of slaves. The Domesday Book, compiled in 1086, records that slaves constituted roughly nine percent of the total population of England, and in some regions as much as a quarter.

The Vikings were not merely consumers of enslaved people; they were among the most active traffickers in human beings in the early medieval world. Records of Viking slave transactions are scattered as far apart as the Volga and the British Isles. Ibn Fadlan, the envoy of the Abbasid Caliph of Baghdad, reported on his visit to the court of the Prince of Volga-Bulgaria in 922. According to him, Vikings sold furs and slaves, especially slave girls along the Volga. The sexual poem “Moriuth,” composed by Warnerius of Rouen in the early eleventh century, describes how Danish Vikings kidnapped a man named Moriuth and put him up for sale at the market of Corbridge. Moriuth managed to escape from the nuns who purchased him, only to be kidnapped again and sold once more. Such vignettes illustrate how pervasive and routinised the trade had become.

Viking trading networks connected the forest peoples of the far North to the Islamic markets of the Middle East. The fur-rich territories of what would become Finland and Karelia were also slave-rich, and northern captives—prized for their fair skin and, crucially, for their non-Muslim status, which made them legally enslaveable in Islamic law were transported along the great river routes of the Volga and Dnepr to markets in Constantinople, Caffa, Baghdad, and beyond. Korpela notes that a castration center existed in Verdun in the mid-tenth century, described by Liutprand of Cremona, where merchants produced eunuch slaves for sale to elite households in Spain at extraordinary profit. The trade was industrialized, systematized, and deeply embedded in the political economy of the era.

Slavery declined in Western and Central Europe during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, as royal power consolidated and the Church extended its prohibitions against the enslavement of Christians. In the Baltic and the East, however, it continued largely uninterrupted, adapting to new political configurations. The disappearance of slaves from Scandinavian law codes—Norway in 1274, and Sweden in 1350, did not mean the disappearance of slave hunting. It merely redirected the trade eastward.

The Novgorodians and the Raids on Finland and Karelia

Among the most persistent and systematic enslavers of Finnish and Karelian populations were the men of Novgorod, the great mercantile republic that dominated the forests and waterways of northwestern Russia from the tenth century through to its destruction by Ivan III of Moscow in the 1470s. Korpela has carefully catalogued the chronicle evidence, and the picture that emerges is one of relentless predation across the northern frontier.

According to the First Novgorodian Chronicle mentioned, Novgorodian raiders took countless prisoners from Southern Finland in 1226 and 1227. In total, the Russian chronicles record covers nearly a hundred raids to Southern Lapland, Central Finland, Southwest Finland (Häme), and Karelia over the medieval period, not including raids to the Karelian regions around Lake Onega. Prisoners appear in at least 38 percent of those accounts where enough detail survives.

The raids had an almost mechanical logic. When Novgorodians raided Southern Finland (Häme) in 1226, the chronicle records that the length of the return journey made it physically impossible to transport all the prisoners. So the raiders took some captives with them and simply slaughtered the rest. Killing was not cruelty for its own sake, but rather pragmatic economics. Transportation costs determined survival.

The chronicle entry for 1042 records the first raid unambiguously into the territory that became Finland and Karelia. Prince Aleksandr Nevsky himself attacked chud and yem in 1256, pushing so far north that, as the chronicle puts it, night was inseparable from day—and he too brought prisoners home. The raids were not merely military operations but a form of organized extraction, with prisoners as the primary resource. As Korpela notes, the Muscovite tax books for the Votian fifth region in 1499 and 1539 record repeated devastation: villages emptied, cattle seized, women and children beaten to death, settlements burned to ash. A typical entry from 1499 reads simply that foreigners (Swedes) “have robbed the village, taken the cattle and beaten women and children to death… and burned to ashes the villages of Kochelaksha, Il’mia and Ulyanila.”

The Swedish Chronicle of Eric, describing the wars in Karelia, captures the fate of the captured in a few bleak lines: “They imprisoned people there / and took them along to Viborg.” The chronicle claims the motivation was baptism, but as Korpela drily notes, we may well doubt this. In the last unambiguous medieval Swedish document about slavery, dated 27 February 1310, a wealthy man named Assmund Langh liberated his slave Karelus—likely a Finn from the Karelian region—and gave him a horse and a saddle as he went free. Karelus was probably not exceptional.

The Tatar Khanates and the Industrial Scale of Enslavement

If the Vikings and Novgorodians operated on a relatively modest scale in the North, the Crimean Tatars operated on an entirely different order of magnitude. Korpela devotes extensive sections of the book to the Crimean Khanate, the Tatar state that dominated the northern Black Sea coast from its establishment in the fifteenth century until the Russian conquest in 1783. The picture he paints is of an economy in which slave-raiding was not incidental but foundational.

The Tatar khan organized special troops dedicated to prisoner-hunting, and the system for distributing the spoils between the khan, military commanders, and ordinary soldiers was so sophisticated, as Martin Bronevsky observed, that ransom negotiations took place through diplomatic channels, and there were well-developed guarantee and debt instruments. To a considerable extent, as Korpela remarks, the business was regulated by the rules of international trade. Human beings were a commodity, managed with the same administrative seriousness as grain or timber.

The sheer numbers recorded in the sources are staggering. Sigismund Herberstein, the Habsburg ambassador who visited Moscow in the early sixteenth century, described the campaign of Muhammad Giray of Crimea and Said Giray of Kazan against Moscow in 1521. The Tatars took an almost unbelievable number of prisoners—the rumors put the figure at 80,000. Those prisoners who were too old or too weak to work were killed on the spot, since they could not be sold. Some captives, Herberstein reported, were handed to young Tatar soldiers specifically so that they could practice killing techniques: drowning, stoning, and other methods.

A 1592 entry in the Novyy letopisets describes a Tatar raid on the Ukrainian frontier with a kind of numbed horror: the raiders attacked Ryazan, Kashimir, and Tula, killed people and burned villages, and took such a multitude of Orthodox Christians prisoner—nobles, minor servants of the tsar, their wives and children—that “even old people did not remember that pagans had ever created such devastation.”

The 1408 devastation by Emir Edigu is recorded in the Chronicle of Vologda-Perm as sweeping across the whole of Rus from Ryazan to Galicia and Beloozero. In 1570 and 1571, the Tatar assault on Muscovy was described by Danish diplomat Jacob Uhlfeldt as burning 40,000 houses and killing 200,000 people.

Matthias de Mechow and the 1516 Raid

Among the most vivid eyewitness accounts in the book is the report of Matthias de Mechow, a Polish physician and scholar whose 1517 treatise Tractatus de duabus Sarmatiis constitutes one of the most important Western sources on the Tatar slave trade. Korpela returns to Mechow repeatedly throughout the book, drawing on both his geographical treatise and his chronicle of the Polish kingdom.

On the 1516 Tatar raid into Muscovy, Mechow provides a description of characteristic horror. The Tatars attacked Muscovy and devastated the land with weapons and fire. They burned castles and towns and inflicted horrible cruelties. Finally, they kidnapped people and cattle and transported more than 50,000 prisoners and livestock in chains, making it impossible for them to escape.

Elsewhere in the same work, Mechow specifically notes that the Tatars’ particular targets were women and girls of noble birth—matronas puellasque nobiles—and that their booty consisted of “wretched girls and innocent children” (miserae puellae et innocui infantes). This detail is important. Across the slave trades of the medieval and early modern East, women and children were consistently the most prized captives. Men of fighting age were often killed; the old and infirm were simply abandoned or slaughtered. It was the young—girls destined for harems, domestic service, or agricultural labor; boys who might become soldiers, servants, or eunuchs—who were worth the cost of transportation.

Mechow also provides testimony of a different, equally disturbing, kind of slavery—voluntary enslavement born of desperation. He records that it was an old tradition in Lithuania, Muscovy, and the Tatar lands to sell one’s own people into slavery in the same way as cattle. Free but destitute people sold their sons and daughters, and sometimes themselves, into bondage simply to get food to eat. The First Novgorodian Chronicle records a famine in 1230 so severe that people were driven to this extremity. A chronicle entry from 1445 describes people so desperate that they sold themselves and their children to Muslim and Jewish traders for bread.

The Muscovites as Slavers and Slave Consumers

Korpela is careful to avoid a narrative that casts Eastern Europeans purely as victims. Muscovites were not only targets of Tatar raids; they were themselves active participants in the slave trade, both as captors and as consumers. The Muscovite state maintained its own systems of bonded labour—the kholop institution—and the line between slavery, serfdom, and debt bondage was genuinely blurred throughout the period.

More striking is the evidence of Muscovite troops acting as slavers in the Baltic. The Livonian Chronicle of Balthasar Russow, which covers the devastating conflicts of the third quarter of the sixteenth century, records that on Ascension Day 1574, 10,000 Muscovites and Tatars raided Harjumaa in what is now Estonia, burning, robbing, and taking many prisoners. The following winter, the Muscovites imprisoned Brigittine nuns which Russow records as an extraordinary transgression even by the brutal standards of the day. Troops continued their devastation through Läänemaa, taking primarily people and horses, because they had no means to transport cattle and oxen. Korpela notes the economic logic embedded in this preference: human prisoners were more valuable than livestock.

When the Muscovites conquered Uuemõisa in 1573, they imprisoned soldiers and rural people along with their families. In Paide, the leaders were burnt at the stake while the rural people were smoked to death. When the castle of Põltsamaa surrendered in the summer of 1577, Muscovites and Tatars nearly came to blows arguing over the allocation of the prisoners—nobles, peasant women, and girls—before transporting them all to Muscovy and the Tatar lands. When the Tatars attacked Harjumaa again in 1579, they killed the elderly but imprisoned the young. Male soldiers were killed; women were taken to captivity.

Balthasar Russow’s summary is devastating in its bleakness: “An unknown number of them were killed in forests and countless people were sent all over the lands of Muscovy and Tatars. There they were executed by clubbing under water and burning by fire. Many died also of hunger and thirst.” This was not an aberration but a pattern, replicated across decades and across the entire eastern Baltic littoral.

The brutal partition of captives by age and sex reflected the logic of slave markets far to the south. Jacob Uhlfeldt records that one Tverian prince maintained his own harem of fifty Livonian girls. The ambassador Augerius Gislenius Busbequius, travelling home from Constantinople in the 1550s, encountered a convoy of boys and girls in chains on the road—the human cargo of the trade routes that connected the Baltic periphery to the Ottoman heartland.

Demographic Consequences: A Continent Bled

Perhaps the most arresting sections of Slaves from the North are those in which Korpela grapples with the demographic scale of what was happening. The numbers, where they can be reconstructed, are enormous.

Modern scholars estimate that the total number of slaves of Eastern European origin from the early fifteenth to the end of the seventeenth century was somewhere between 1 and 2.5 million people. Aleksei Novoselsky’s calculations of Muscovite-origin slaves in the Crimean trade during the first half of the seventeenth century, supported by Shmidt’s parallel research, suggest that between 100,000 and 150,000 Muscovite slaves passed through the Crimean trade during that period alone—meaning that the trade affected between 1,000 and 10,000 people annually.

The historian Dariusz Kołodziejczyk, cited extensively by Korpela, has calculated that nearly 10,000 Polish-Lithuanian and Russian captives were imported annually to Crimea during the period from 1500 to 1700. Guillaume Le Vasseur de Beauplan, a French officer in the service of the King of Poland from 1630 to 1648, reported that there were between 50,000 and 60,000 slaves for sale in Crimea in an average year and in the best year, 80,000. Modern historians have estimated that the realm of Poland lost one million people in total between 1474 and 1694 to this trade.

Kołodziejczyk’s conclusion, which Korpela endorses, is striking: the Black Sea slave trade was fully comparable in size with the Atlantic slave trade. The Franciscan friar Bartholomaeo de Jano, writing from Constantinople to a colleague in Venice in 1438, described himself as shocked by what he witnessed: thousands of young prisoners bought at low prices in the Black Sea ports of Moncastro, Tana, and Caffa, with more than thirty ships full of slaves arriving in Constantinople every year—and that was less than one percent of all the slaves for sale in the city. The scale of the trade appalled even a man of the fifteenth century.

For northern Finnic peoples, the numbers were necessarily smaller, given their remoteness from the main trade routes. Korpela estimates that Finns and Karelians were taken to Novgorod in the Middle Ages and from there funneled into the broader trading world. The demand for blonde, fair-skinned, non-Muslim slaves from the far North was real—they commanded premium prices—but the logistical challenges of transporting captives from the Finnish forests to the markets of the South meant that the volume was measured in dozens per year rather than thousands.

The Great Northern War (1700–1721) brought a sudden catastrophic expansion of this suffering for Finland. Between 20,000 and 30,000 Finns were imprisoned in Russia during the conflict. Furthermore, Russian troops, many of them Cossacks from the southern steppe who understood the market value of human cargo, specifically targeted children, who commanded the best prices in the slave markets. The clergy of the Diocese of Åbo complained in 1726 that, according to a priest recently returned from Russian captivity, approximately a thousand prisoners from Finland and Livonia had been sold onward to Isfahan in Persia. The majority of those transported were women and small children.

Maghreb, as Korpela notes, was not the center of the slave economy; its markets were small by comparison with Istanbul, Baghdad, Cairo, Bukhara, and Samarkand. Even so, Robert Davis has calculated that the renewal rate in the slave population of the Maghreb was about 25% annually meaning roughly 8,500 new slaves were needed each year to maintain a total enslaved population of only 35,000. The appetite of the larger markets was proportionally greater, and insatiable.

A Forgotten Atrocity in the Long Shadow of Atlantic Slavery

Slaves from the North is a work of genuine scholarly importance, and it is also, in the best sense, a work of moral urgency. Korpela is a careful and often cautious historian—he is the first to acknowledge when evidence is thin, when numbers are unreliable, when the chronicles are exaggerated. He does not seek to sensationalize. But the accumulation of evidence across his pages produces an effect that is difficult to shake: the Eastern European slave trade was not a minor footnote in the history of the continent. It was a centuries-long catastrophe for millions of people, conducted with bureaucratic efficiency and appalling brutality, and it has been allowed to slip almost entirely from the popular historical consciousness.

This amnesia has several causes. The victims were white Europeans rather than African peoples, which has made their suffering harder to fit into the dominant modern frameworks for thinking about slavery. The perpetrators were not Western colonial powers but a complex mosaic of actors—Vikings, Novgorodians, Muscovites, Tatars, Lithuanians, Teutonic Knights—none of whom maps neatly onto contemporary political narratives. The documentation, though extensive in aggregate, is scattered across languages and archives that few researchers command simultaneously. And the slave societies of the East left fewer of the visual records—the manifests, the plantation accounts, the abolitionist testimonies—that have made the Atlantic trade so legible to later generations.

None of these reasons is adequate justification for forgetting. Just as the emphasis on the transatlantic slave trade has been central to the historical consciousness of the modern West, we should never forget the slave trades of Europe. The men, women, and children marched in chains from Finnish villages to Novgorod markets, the mothers and daughters loaded onto ships at Caffa for sale in Constantinople, the Finnish prisoners sent to Isfahan—these people are as fully part of the history of slavery as the captives of the Middle Passage. Their suffering was not less real because it occurred in the wrong geography for easy memorialization.

Korpela’s book does not offer easy conclusions, and it does not pretend to have recovered more than fragments of lives that were systematically erased. But it is a serious, humane, and important act of historical retrieval, and it deserves a wide readership beyond the specialist community for which it was primarily written.