The World: A Family History of Humanity

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

Coffles of enchained slaves were marched across the steppe to Crimea where the slave market of Kaffa, seized from Genoa, provided the biggest component of Ottoman income – an empire funded by slavery. So important was it that Suleiman’s first assignment was to govern Kaffa, accompanied by his mother Hafsa, who herself had been seized on a slave raid. The first slave raid by the Girays in 1468 captured 18,000, but the raids kept getting bigger – one in 1498 was said to have taken 100,000. The number captured in this way is incalculable: one historian guesses ten million between 1450 and 1650, others suggest six and a half million between the eleventh and nineteenth centuries. More obscure than its Atlantic equivalent – and not based on race – this slave trade was also vast, cruel and deadly for its victims. Its slave markets were desperate places. ‘A man who has not seen this has not seen anything,’ as a Turkish traveller later noted. ‘There a mother is severed from her son and daughter, a son from father and brother, sold among lamentations, cries of help, weeping and sorrow’ – a scene similar to the tragedies of the African slave markets. Yet there were big differences. If they survived the journey across the steppe, there was a route out of slavery. An enslaved boy, converted to Islam and manumitted, could rise to grand vizier, while a girl, as Roxelana would now demonstrate, could end as empress.