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The Saqaliba—a term that in medieval Arabic literature denoted the Slavic populations of central and eastern Europe (and possibly some of their neighbors)—offer a particularly insightful case study of the mechanisms of the early Islamic slave trade and the nature of the Muslim demand for slaves. What makes them such an ideal case study is their high visibility in texts produced in the Islamic world between the early 9th and early 11th centuries. Arab geographers and diplomats investigated their origins, while archaeological material, primarily hundreds of thousands of dirhams found in Scandinavia and the Slavic lands, contains traces of the trade in them. By combining these strands of evidence, we can build an exceptionally detailed image of slave trade systems that supplied Saqaliba to the Islamic markets, which, in turn, can be used to illustrate more general mechanisms governing the trade in and demand for slaves in the medieval Islamic world.

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Northern Europe and the Islamic world, although separated by the wide belt of the steppe, were in contact throughout the pre-Mongol period. The intensity of these contacts varied over time and so did their geography: objects of Islamic provenance were imported to the basin of the Kama in the 7th–10th centuries, to the lands settled by the Scandinavians and those Slavs who were under their political or cultural influence in the 9th and 10th centuries, and to the northern edge of the steppe in the two centuries before the Mongol invasion. This chapter surveys the finds of Islamic objects associated with these interactions—mostly silver coins and silverware—and investigates the mechanisms that account for their importation to the North.

This chapter explores the phenomenon of silver fragmentation from the evidence of silver hoards deposited in the Baltic area. Focusing on the evidence of dirhams, it charts an increase in silver fragmentation in an anticlockwise direction around the Baltic Sea. This culminates in hoards from the west Slavic lands (Poland and eastern Germany), in which dirham fragments often weigh just fractions of a gram. Chronological and geographical patterns are presented to suggest that the degree of dirham fragmentation reflects not local monetary circulation, but the number of times dirhams changed hands in commercial transactions. In this sense, the degree of fragmentation reflects the distance dirhams travelled from their source. The implication is that silver was above all a means of payment in transactions related to the long-distance trade—especially in slaves and furs.