Muslim Slave System in Medieval India c14.25

c14.25

Importation of foreign slaves went on right up to the eighteenth century. In the fifteenth century, the Ottoman capture of Constantinople in 1453 gradually diverted the immense flow of slaves from the Crimea, the Balkans and the steppes of western Asia to Islamic markets. Later on, the southward expansion of Russia, culminating in the annexation of Crimea in 1783, gradually shut off the supply of white slaves to the Islamic markets. As Africa became almost synonymous with slavery, the world forgot the eagerness with which Tatars and other Black Sea peoples had sold millions of Ukrainians, Georgians, Circassians, Armenians, Bulgarians, Slavs and Turks.⁵⁰ In Africa, in the nineteenth century in the Sudan region there were farms that specialized in breeding black slaves for sale like cattle or sheep. Other enterprising merchants in upper Egypt reaped large capital gains by purchasing prepubescent boys at a price of about three hundred piastres apiece, having them castrated by Coptic monks, and then selling them as eunuchs for one thousand piastres each.⁵¹ Islamic civilization did indeed practise castration of slaves on an unprecedented scale. Several cities in Africa were real factories of eunuchs; they were an expensive commodity as only 25% of the victims survived the operation.⁵² In short, black or white, castrated or otherwise, the price of foreign slaves was high as, besides other factors, it also covered the cost of their transportation.