Beginning in the fifteenth century AD, the Slave Trade began to arise in the Ottoman Empire, and during the period when the Ottoman Empire marched to Europe, countless Europeans were forced into the slave markets of the Ottoman Empire. It was not until 1830 that the strongholds of Turkish and Arab pirates in Algiers were destroyed by European navies, and the "white slave trade" that lasted for more than four hundred years came to an end. According to incomplete statistics, during that period, about three million whites were trafficked into slavery in the Ottoman Empire.
Crimean Tatars
In the early days of the Ottoman Empire, there was a tradition of selling Europeans captured in the war into slavery, but most of these slaves were given to the Turkish nobility, and it was not until the red-bearded pirates Hayreddin and the Crimean Tatars joined that the Slave Trade in the Ottoman Empire began to really rise. During that period, North African pirates loyal to the Turkish sultans often attacked European countries along the Mediterranean coast, abducting European residents near the coast and then sending these poor people to the Ottoman Empire in exchange for the sultan's support for them.
In addition to importing slaves from the sea, another pillar of the Ottoman slave trade was the Crimean Tatars who lived on the steppes. In 1475, the Ottoman Empire became the suzerainty of the Crimean Khanate, and the Crimean Tatars living on the steppes began to be loyal to the Turks, who in addition to participating in the Ottoman Empire's foreign wars, often plundered the inhabitants of Eastern Europe and sold them to the Ottoman Empire as slaves, resulting in European historians often calling the Tatars "the eagle dogs of the Ottoman lion".
The Crimean Khanate was once part of the Golden Horde
Due to the backwardness of the steppes, the Crimean Khanate began to actively participate in the slave trade in the Ottoman Empire in order to expand the income of the khanate. Among the ancient nomadic peoples, there has always been a custom of "slave plunder", and the Crimean Tatars are no exception, when they became slave traders serving the Ottoman Empire, they began to frequently enter the villages of Eastern Europe and Southern Russia, looking for their masters to become slave inhabitants and obtain a lot of wealth from them.
The chronicles of Eastern Europe show the fear of these slave traders by the locals:
"These Tatars, whose hair had been cut in half, rode into the Slavic enclave in droves, their terrible beards fluttering in the wind, they snatched their sons from their mothers, their wives from their husbands, and then they drove these poor people to the seashore, where more than ten thousand slaves were transported every year from the port of Kaffa City to the slave markets of Istanbul."
Nomadic herders of the Crimean Khanate
After the rise of the slave trade in the Ottoman Empire, the Tatars soon became clever slave traders who knew not only how to plunder slaves, but also how to distinguish the value of slaves. In the eyes of these Tatars, Hungarians and Germans were not very suitable for becoming slaves, because the Tatars believed that German and Hungarian men were weak and could not perform heavy manual labor, resulting in the Ottoman slave market during that period, Germans and Hungarians always had a "bad reputation" for not being able to do hard work.
In addition, the Tatars also believed that German women were not suitable for slave girls, and when they abducted German women, they found that these women's bodies were very stiff and lacked femininity. Because most of the European slave girls who were trafficked by the Tatars were sent to the harem of the Ottoman Empire, some of them were responsible for the Turkish nobles to serve tea and water, and some of them specialized in serving the sultans.
The Tatars, on the other hand, believed that German women were too stiff to be dancers entertaining the Ottoman nobility, much less to be the sultan's concubines.
Slav
The most "good" slaves in the eyes of the Tatar slave traders were the Circassians living in southwestern Russia, a small ethnic group, but the Tatars spoke highly of them. In the eyes of the Tatars, the Circassians were very docile and clever, and their figures were also very well-proportioned, and there were almost no people who were too fat. In the slave market of the Ottoman Empire at that time, the Circassians were expensive endorsements, and the price of four Slavs could be compared to that of one Circassian.
The reason why the Slavs, led by Russians and Ukrainians, are very cheap is only because of their large population and easier to be abducted by the Tatars. For example, in 1572, the cavalry of the Crimean Khanate captured Moscow.
And with nearly 100,000 Russians abducted from the city, the war directly shook the Slave Market of the Ottoman Empire, and the price of Slavic slaves plummeted, and even a horse could be exchanged for three Slavic slaves.