Chapter 359: History of the Black Sea Slave Trade
What Xiao Peng said was actually not an exaggeration at all. There is a port city called Feodosia in southern Crimea. Historically, it was called "Kaffa City" and was the largest slave trading center in the entire Black Sea.
However, the slave trade in Eastern Europe did not start with them. The white slave trade had existed here for hundreds of years before they started. The first people to do so were the Italians, and the city of Kaffa was founded by the Genoese.
At the time, the most powerful nations in European maritime trade were present-day Italy, specifically Genoa and Venice. In the 13th century, the Genoese funded the Byzantines to recapture Constantinople (present-day Istanbul), which had been conquered during the Fourth Crusade. They formed an alliance with the Byzantines to control the entrances and exits of the Black Sea. To monopolize Black Sea trade, they purchased a small village in southern Crimea from the Golden Horde and built the city of Kaffa, driving out their old rival, Venice. While trading precious metals, weapons, olive oil, and grain, they also officially launched the slave trade. Slavs, Caucasians, and Turks were all part of their trade. Xiao Peng made his first fortune by scooping up a few Mamluk "slave coins," and the Mamluk dynasty purchased almost all its slave armies from this village.
Many scholars believe that the Black Death, which once terrified the whole of Europe, also flowed into Europe from here.
The slave trade here was developing too fast at that time. The Golden Horde was worried about the large population loss, so in 1347 the Mongol army attacked the city of Kaffa in an attempt to drive out the Genoese.
But the Mongol army had a fatal problem: they had no navy. Kaffa was surrounded by land on three sides and the sea on one. Supplies flowed in continuously by sea, making the Mongol siege a joke. The Mongols blockaded Kaffa for two years but failed to capture it. Eventually, the Black Death broke out within the Mongol army, forcing them to retreat. Before retreating, the Mongols used trebuchets to throw the dead into Kaffa. As a result, the Black Death virus entered Europe via Kaffa's merchant ships. In just six years, one-third of Europe's population died from this horrific disease.
(In fact, the Black Death had already landed in Italy and southern France before the Siege of Caffa, but the consistent virtue of Europeans is to blame all bad things on the East first. History has proven that Westerners are best at passing the buck.)
In any case, after this battle, Kaffa became one of the most important seaports in the world at that time. After the establishment of the Crimean Khanate, slaves were captured everywhere and sold to Kaffa. After the Ottoman Empire drove out the Genoese, the Crimean Khanate also became a vassal state of the Ottoman Empire. The trading partner changed from Genoa to Ottoman, but it had no effect on them.
At the beginning, the slaves they captured were mainly from the Grand Duchy of Moscow. After all, they were a vassal state of the Ottoman Empire. The Ottoman Empire and Russia had been in a state of hostility for a long time due to issues such as beliefs. The Crimean Tatars had attacked Moscow twice, plundered a large amount of property, and captured many Russians as slaves.
When they collaborated with Moscow to attack Lithuania, the Tatars were granted free disposal of prisoners of war according to the agreement. This allowed the Tatars to find a better source of slaves. From Ukraine and Belarus to Poland and Lithuania, these captives became a "paradise" for them, with the locals being referred to by the Tatars as "the harvest of the steppe peoples." These captives were then sold in large quantities through Kaffa, leaving the entire Right Bank of Ukraine practically barren. Travelers at the time would wonder if any Eastern European country still had people living there. At that time, one-fifth of Istanbul's population was purchased slaves, a truly rare phenomenon worldwide.
This is how the slaves who rowed the oars on the Ottoman Empire's rowboats came from.
There is also a very strange thing here: in fact, in that era, many Eastern European serfs were willing to be sold to the Ottoman Empire as slaves, and being sold to Istanbul was even considered "honorable."
Due to the social unrest and constant wars of the Ottoman Empire, slaves were needed to supplement the army and labor force. Therefore, they offered slaves a wide range of options, including a "blood tax" policy. This policy involved sending Christian slave children dressed in red to the gates of Istanbul for selection. These children were categorized based on Turkish physiognomy, astrology, and on-site observation. Some learned Turkish and received military training, while others were sent to peasant families to work the land. Outstanding children were sent to prominent families to be groomed for future military service or government positions.
This gave slaves hope. They saw the possibility of rising to prominence, even by becoming a breeding ground for the nobility, a pedophile, or even a eunuch. Many voluntarily sent their children to Istanbul as slaves. Of course, not everyone was so lucky. If someone was assigned to row a boat, their life was essentially over.
To put it bluntly: You'll have to pay for what you've done.
The city of Kaffa, a thorn in the side of many people due to its centuries-long slave trade, was razed to the ground by the Cossacks in 1615. Although it was later rebuilt by the Ottoman Empire, it coincided with the growing strength of the Russian Empire. After years of fighting, the Crimean Khanate was completely annexed by Russia, and the rebuilt city of Kaffa was renamed Feodosia.
The Tatars who trafficked Russian slaves suffered an even worse fate.
Out of revenge, the Tsar implemented a highly discriminatory ethnic policy against the Tatars in the Crimean Peninsula, depriving them of their land and forcing them to become slaves of the Russians. As a result, the Tatars fled the Crimean Peninsula on a large scale, and a hundred years later, there were very few Tatars left in Crimea.
During the October Revolution, the status of the Tatars improved significantly, with the establishment of Tatar-language schools, theaters, and libraries. However, with the outbreak of the Soviet-German War, the Germans occupied the Crimean Peninsula, fostered Tatar militias to serve them, and trained a large number of Tatar agents to infiltrate the Soviet army. Although many Tatars joined the Soviet army to fight against the Germans, they were ultimately deported en masse to Central Asia. It was not until the dissolution of the Soviet Union that the Tatars returned to their homeland.
But life after returning home was still difficult. During the referendum on Crimea's annexation of Russia, the Tatars were afraid to vote. In the words of their top leader: "Do we have a choice? If war breaks out in Crimea, Ukrainians and Russians will suffer, but for the Tatars, a population of 200,000, it would be a genocide. We can't afford to offend anyone, so we have no choice but to abstain from voting."
As Xiao Peng was talking to the camera about the Tatar slave trade, Hua Chong spoke up: "Boss, we've made a fortune."
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