Different individuals acquired captives and shipped them down to Byzantine Crimea and other ports across the Black Sea, from where they continued to the slave market of the Mediterranean through Byzantine Constantinople, and to the Middle East. The Black Sea slave trade was a heart of the slave trade between Europe and the rest of the world from antiquity until the 19th century. Various slave routes passed via the Black Sea and the Byzantine Crimea to the Byzantine Mediterranean world and the Islamic Middle East. When the Crimean slave trade was ended by the Russian conquest of the Crimea in 1783, the slave trade of Circassians from Caucasus was separated from it and turned an independent slave commerce. The Black Sea slave trade continued after the Greek Black Sea cities had turn out to be vassals of the Roman Empire. In the first century, the Roman author Strabo described Dioscurias, the key Black Sea port of the Caucasus, and the Greek metropolis of Tanais, as major ports of the Pontic slave commerce, from which “Pontic” slaves, such as Scythians or Paphlagonians, who had been offered as conflict captives by enemy tribes or bought by their families as adolescents, had been exported to the Mediterranean and may very well be found in Ancient Athens.
In antiquity, the Black Sea was known as the Pontic Sea and people from the region usually simply known as Pontics. Silk Road slave commerce to the Bukhara slave commerce as properly as the Black Sea slave trade. From China, the Silk Road continued over the Tian Shan, Hami, Turpan, Almalik, Tashkent, Samarkand and at last Bukhara, where it break up in two fundamental 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 near the Black Sea. In the Early Middle Ages, the Byzantine Empire imported slaves from the Vikings, who transported European captives through the route from the Varangians to the Greeks to the Byzantine ports at the Black Sea. In the course of the Middle Ages, the slave market was organized alongside religious borders. The slave trade from the Balkans was mainly directed toward the Balkan slave commerce of the Adriatic Sea moderately than the Black Sea. Classic Greek authors described significantly the North Western shore of the Black Sea as a slave coast have been the conditions ensured a gentle supply of slaves; it was a border zone between the Thracians and the Scythians, where the nomadic Scythians carried out slave raids toward the Thracians, who were additionally known to sell their youngsters to slave traders, and the inhabitants up the Danube traded slaves for salt.
Greek colonies were established alongside the Black Sea, which engaged in slave trade between the tribes of the inside North of the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. In 594 BC, the legal guidelines of Solon outlawed the citizens of Athens to enslave different Athenians residents; it was a typical trend in the Greek city states to outlaw the enslavement of residents of their own cities, and this pattern made it vital for the Greek to keep up a slave commerce with non-Greek non-citizens they termed “barbarians”, from foreign lands such as the Balkans or the North of the Black Sea. Slaves had been sold by their families or as battle captives to the Greek cities, who exported them West to the Mediterranean or East to Asia along the Silk highway. Christian slaves could not be offered in Christian slave markets, and Muslim slaves could not be bought on Muslim slave markets. Within the early modern period, the Crimean Khanate abducted Eastern Europeans by the Crimean-Nogai slave raids in Eastern Europe, who have been transported to the remainder of the Muslim world in collaboration with the Ottoman slave trade from the Crimea. The Circassian slave commerce of significantly women from Caucasus to the Muslim world by way of Anatolia and Constantinople continued until the twentieth century.
However, in the 9th century, the Magyars of Hungary carried out regular slave raids toward the Slavs, and bought their captives to the Byzantine slave traders in the Black Sea port of Kerch in exchange for brocades, wool, and other merchandise. The Black Sea was situated in a area traditionally dominated by the margins of empires, conquests and major trade routes between Europe, the Mediterranean and Central Asia, notably the Ancient Silk street, which made the Black Sea very best for a slave commerce of conflict captives offered alongside the commerce routes. In the late Middle Ages, trading colonies of Venice and Genoa along the Northern Black Sea coasts used the instable political and religious border zones to purchase captives and transport them as slaves to Italy, Spain, and the Ottoman Empire. Pagans from Eastern and Northern Europe came to be the most popular targets for slavery in both the Byzantine Empire and the Islamic Arab world throughout the Early Middle Ages, the place they had been pressured to convert to Christianity and Islam respectively after their enslavement. In the course of the Middle Ages, informal slave zones were formed alongside religious borders, which have been additionally crossed on the Black Sea region. The slave trade thus organized alongside religious ideas.