How Russians saved the North Caucasus from Turkish slavery

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Before falling into the zone of influence of the Russian Empire, the North Caucasus for centuries was the largest slave market in the world.

The main export commodity of the North Caucasus from the Middle Ages to the beginning of the 19th century was slaves. Even in the 1830s, the Turks exported up to 4,000 slaves a year from the region. The cost of a slave "on the spot" was 200-800 rubles, and when sold in the Ottoman Empire, it was already 1500 rubles. The peoples of the North Caucasus themselves sold slaves to Turkey, or rather, their nobility - the Circassians, Dagestanis. Only in the 1830s was the Russian Black Sea Fleet able to destroy this fishery.

Already in the X-XI centuries, a slave market developed in the eastern Black Sea region. Almost all European travelers in the Middle Ages paid attention to the fact that the peculiarity of trade among the Circassians was the sale and purchase of living goods. For example, the Italian traveler Interiano (early 16th century) noted: “They (the feudal lords) suddenly attack the poor peasants and take away their cattle and their own children, which are then exchanged or sold when transported from one locality to another.” At the end of the 15th century, the Black Sea Italian colonies were captured by the Turks, the Ottoman Empire became the main consumer of Caucasian slaves, which had a wide network of suppliers in the person of the Crimean Tatars and highlanders, as well as a large number of slave markets in the North-Eastern Black Sea region. in the North Caucasus since the 18th century, annually in the 19th century, up to 4,000 thousand slaves of both sexes were exported from Circassia.

Historian Lyudmila Khludova writes about what the slave trade in the Eastern Black Sea region was like at the beginning of the 19th century in the article "Trade in slaves on the Black Sea coast of the North-Western Caucasus in picturesque and written sources of the 19th century." (magazine "Historical and Social-Educational Thought", No. 3, 2016).

In the 18th - early 19th centuries, the largest slave markets in the region were: in the North-Eastern Caucasus “Black Market” or “Kara Bazar” (now the village of Kochubei, Tarumovsky District), Tarki, Derbent, the village of Dzhar on the border of Dagestan with Georgia, Aksai and aul Enderi in Dagestan; in the North-Western Caucasus - Ottoman ports and fortresses in the bays of the Black Sea coast: Gelendzhik, Anapa, Yenikale (near Kerch), Sudzhuk-Kale (Novorossiysk), Sukhum-Kale (Sukhumi), Kopyl (Temryuk), Tuapse, Khunkala (Taman)). Moreover, most of the slaves in the slave markets of the North-East Caucasus (and especially Dagestan) were from Christians (for example, from Georgia), and in the North-West - from Abkhazians and Circassians.

The traveler M. Peisonel in the middle of the 18th century wrote that “depending on the nationality of the enslaved, their price is also assigned. Circassian slaves attract buyers in the first place. Women of this blood are willingly acquired as concubines by the Tatar princes and the Turkish sultan himself. There are also Georgian, Kalmyk and Abkhaz slaves. Those who are from Circassia and Abaza are considered Muslims, and people of the Christian faith are prohibited from buying them."

Quite a lot of Circassian women were sold by slave traders not to neighboring auls, but were delivered to the Black Sea coast for sale to the Ottomans, as this guaranteed great financial benefits. The Dutchman Jean Struy wrote: “The fame of their beauty has spread so well that at the trapezon and Constantinople bazaars, a Circassian woman is almost always paid twice, sometimes three times more than for a woman whose beauty, at first glance, would seem to us equal to the first and even superior."

After the deal was struck, the sold slaves waited for several weeks to be loaded onto the ship. In the 1840s, Moritz Wagner wrote that "it usually takes several weeks for the girl traders to finish their business with the Circassians."A. Fonville, who witnessed the sale of Caucasian slaves, described the conditions for accommodating the girls bought by the traders before they were sent to the Ottoman Empire: “We set off immediately and arrived in Tuapse in the evening of the same day. We have always been told about Tuapse that it is the trade center of the entire region and that the area here is extremely picturesque. Imagine our surprise when we arrived at the seashore, to the mouth of a small river falling from the mountains, and saw here up to a hundred huts, propped up by stones from a destroyed Russian fort and covered with rotten holes with holes. These ill-fated huts were inhabited by Turkish merchants who traded in women. When they had the required stock of this product, they sent it to Turkey on one of the kaiks that were always in Tuapse."

Strong young men were often worth more than even the beautiful young girls in the eastern slave markets. Their labor was used in hard work (in agriculture, in mines), they were forced to serve in the army, forcibly converted to Islam if they adhered to a different religion.

Since the 1830s, the volume of the slave trade on the Black Sea coast of the Northwestern Caucasus began to gradually decline. This was due to the fact that, according to the Adrianople Peace Treaty of 1829, the Trans-Kuban region went to Russia and the export of prisoners by Turkish merchants began to be suppressed by the Russian military fleet. According to Moritz Wagner, "the trade in Circassian girls is still carried out in the same volume, but now it requires more caution than before and is limited exclusively to the months of sea storms, from October to March, when Russian cruisers move away from the coastline deprived of harbors."

The high profitability of the North Caucasian slave trade attracted Turkish traders and encouraged them to take risks. From the documents of the Raevskys' archive, we see that even if "out of 10 ships they lose 9, then the latter will pay for all the loss." Russian intelligence officer F. Tornau writes that trafficking in women “for Turkish merchants was a source of the earliest enrichment. Therefore, they engaged in this trade, neglecting the danger that threatened them from the Russian cruisers. In three or four voyages of the Turks, with some happiness, he became a rich man and could calmly live out his life; but one should have seen their greed for this living, beautiful product."

The high profitability of the slave business was ensured by a significant difference in the prices of purchasing women in the Caucasus and the cost of selling them in the eastern slave markets. If in Circassia in the 19th century they paid from 200 to 800 rubles for a girl or woman. silver, then after arriving in Turkey, its price rose to 1,500 rubles. silver.

F. Shcherbina writes that in the 1830-1840s, smugglers carried Russian prisoners from the shores of the Black Sea for sale to Turkey, but when Russian military ships overtook the slave traders, they drowned prisoners in the sea "to hide the traces of the criminal trade." Freeing Circassian women and confiscating various goods, Russian sailors "never found Russian prisoners in them (boats)."

In order to unnoticeably bypass the Russian patrol cruisers and land ashore, the Turkish captains preferred dark, if possible moonless nights. In such conditions, it was difficult to get to the meeting point with Caucasian sellers of "live goods", there was a danger of reaching the Russian fortifications. "At night, with a favorable wind, the smuggling ships made their way along the coast, following the lights that were kindled and supported in the mountains by the Circassians." Having moored to the shore, the smugglers made several shots, which gathered the surrounding highlanders. After the ship was unloaded, it was usually dragged ashore and camouflaged with branches or flooded at river estuaries until the next voyage.

The actions of Russian ships against the Anglo-Turkish smugglers were effective. During the naval patrol of the Black Sea coast of the North-West Caucasus, the Russian squadron captured dozens of ships (mostly Turkish) engaged in illegal trade, slave trade and supply of weapons to the highlanders.

After the export of slaves from the Black Sea coast began to be suppressed by Russian military vessels in the 1830s, the cost of captives inside the Caucasus dropped noticeably. This financial pattern was noted by the English traveler Edmond Spencer: “At present, due to limited trade between the inhabitants of the Caucasus and their old friends, the Turks and Persians, the price of women has dropped significantly; those parents who have a full house of girls mourn this with the same desperation as a merchant grieves for a wholesale store full of unsold goods. On the other hand, the poor Circassian is encouraged by this state of affairs, since instead of giving up all his labor for many years or giving up most of his cattle and small ruminants, he can now get a wife on very easy terms - the value of a wonderful product falls from the enormous price of hundreds of cows to twenty or thirty."

This was due to the fact that due to the weak socio-economic and political development of the mountain societies themselves, slave labor as such was in little demand in them, since it did not bring noticeable economic benefits to the owners. The main financial interest of the highlanders-slave traders consisted in the profitable sale of captives to the Turks at a price significantly higher than within the region. But the implementation of this was hampered by the increasingly consolidated Russian economic and legal system in the region.