What happened to the slave trade in (northern) Europe between the end of the Vikings age and the beginning of the transatlantic slave trade?

by Luftzig

My base assumptions might be wrong, so I will lay them out:

  1. There was a prevalent slave trade in the Roman empire, which continued also in the Eastern empire.
  2. The Church, either organisation wide or certain individuals, objected the slave trade, or at least the trade in Christian slaves, but never banned it.
  3. The norse took active part in the slave trade, with slaves captured in England, Ireland and the Baltic area in raids and were sold all around Europe and northern Africa.
  4. During 10th century norse chieftains converted to Christianity and consolidated their power as monarchs, which ended the viking raids on in northern Europe.
  5. Around the same time the slave trade in Europe declined dramatically.
  6. But the Scandinavian kings continued to raid the eastern Baltic, up and during the Baltic Crusade.

So my question is a. are my assumptions generally match the historical consensus? b. if they do, how come the norse slave trade died out? They kept raiding other people, which means they could still capture slaves, so why stop?

y_sengaku

While much more can always more to be said, I hope my previous answers below might be useful to consider OP's question:

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A) Very brief answer to your individual assumptions, with possible links to the relevant post by other users and by me in this subreddit.

Generally speaking, all of OP assumptions listed below are more or less correct.

  • Assumption #05: Around the same time the slave trade in Europe declined dramatically.

Late 11th century also saw the decline of the slavery in Northern Europe, especially around the Irish sea areas, though to what extent it might have been able to be ascribed to the single historical event like the Norman Conquest, it is still room to debate.

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b. if they do, how come the norse slave trade died out?

Possible answers are mainly twofold.

The first one is, as I explained before in these two posts linked above, the structural change of society within post-Viking Age Scandinavia that would lead to be that of less dependent on the unfree labors.

The second possible hypothesis, although intricately intertwined with the first one, is the change of Norse (or Scandinavian) direct access to the possible market of slave on demand side, preferably with enough wealth for slaves.

Several recent studies focus on the inflow of Islamic silver into north-western Europe, especially in form of the hoard from Viking Age Scandinavia. The majority of them dates back to the 9th and early 10th centuries, that is to say, the early Viking Age, and the scientific analysis (metal like bismuth) suggests that some of silver in these coins actually come far from central Asia like now Afghanistan. Rus' merchants exchanged slaves from NW Europe/ Eurasia with these eastern silvers, and Russian waterways up to Caspian Sea was, so to speak, crossroads of these silver and slaves, as I also introduced before in: Where did the Piast dynasty originate from?. The imbalance of the price of slaves between Western and Middle-Central Eurasia in the 8th and 9th century, possibly due either to the slavery-based social social structure or/and the regional variance of the demography impact of successive waves of the First Pandemic of Y. Pestis, is also pointed out (in the Origin of European Economy by M. McCormick). Coupled the high demand/price of slaves with the abundant supply of silvers, the slave trade from the West to the East in early Middle Ages was probably really lucrative business.

One possible important point is, however, that this inflow of Islamic silver in Scandinavia by way of Russian waterways stopped in the middle to late 10th century - probably due to the decline of silver production in mines in central Asia (especially under the Samanid Emirates). In short, Norse slave traders lost, or at least was cut from their traditional very profitable slave market by the end of the 1st millennium.

Thus, while some Russians kept on raiding (whose motive was to get slaves as loot, at least partly), the Norse couldn't exploit the raiding/ slave trading as a source of wealth anymore after the 11th century that would eventually lead to the declining trend of slavery in their homeland, though some people still had domestic thralls even in the end of the 12th century.

Recommended Recent Literature:

  • (Introduction level): Hansen, Valerie. The Year 1000: When explorers Connected the World - and Globalization Began. London: Viking- Penguin, 2020, Chap. 4 (though I don't agree to the author's argument on the possible relationship between the Norse explorers and the Native Americans in Chap. 2).

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