European slaves were medieval Islam’s most important import from the West

Evidence

For most of the Middle Ages the most important export to the lands of Islam from Europe was, as from tropical Africa, slaves. They were imported in great numbers across both the northern and southern frontiers of Islam. Both north and south of the Islamic lands slaves were sometimes taken in war, sometimes seized by raiders, sometimes—with increasing frequency— offered for sale by African or European slave merchants. The supply of slaves from western Europe was eventually reduced to a mere trickle, acquired through the efforts of the Barbary corsairs; the supply of east Europeans continued for much longer, as a result of the Ottoman wars in south-eastern Europe and the raids of the Crimean Tartars among the Russians, Poles, and Ukrainians. There is little evidence, however, that these white slaves from Europe had any great effect on Muslim perceptions or ways, any more than did the much greater numbers of black slaves imported from tropical Africa. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 1064

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to my interest in how trade and coercion interweave across civilizational frontiers; also resonates with the Barbary corsair material in other early modern histories.
• QUESTION: Why did massive slave imports have so little cultural impact on Muslim perceptions — worth probing how slavery was naturalized as a status, not an ethnic category.