Irish slave trade

This article is about the slave trade of medieval Ireland. For the conflation of Irish indentured servitude and African chattel slavery, see Irish slaves myth. For the sending of prisoners to British colonies, see penal transportation. For the system of unfree labour in return for passage across the Atlantic, see indentured servitude.

The Irish slave trade had already existed in Ireland for centuries by the time the Vikings began to establish their coastal settlements, but it was under the Norse-Gael Kingdom of Dublin that it reached its peak. Gaelic raiders kidnapped and enslaved people from across the Irish Sea for two centuries after the Fall of the Western Roman Empire destabilised Roman Britain;[1] their most famous victim was Saint Patrick. The raids were discontinued after the British kingdoms consolidated, although an internal trade continued in enslaved prisoners of war and debt slaves caused by famine.[2]

When the Vikings established early Scandinavian Dublin in 841, they began a slave market that would come to sell slaves captured both in Ireland and other countries as distant as Spain,[3] as well as sending Irish slaves as far away as Iceland,[2] where Gaels formed 40% of the population,[4] and Anatolia.[5] Irish slaves in Iceland launched Europe's largest slave rebellion since the end of the Roman Empire in 875, when Hjörleifr Hróðmarsson's slaves killed him and fled to Vestmannaeyjar.

Dublin would eventually become the biggest slave market in Western Europe.[3] The Irish slave trade was dealt a severe blow when the Kingdom of England, one of its biggest markets, banned slavery in its territory in 1102.[2] The continued existence of the trade was used as one justification for the Norman conquest of Ireland after 1169, after which the Hiberno-Normans replaced slavery with feudalism.

See also

References

  1. ↑ "SLAVES (Medieval Ireland)".
  2. 1 2 3 "The Viking slave trade: entrepreneurs or heathen slavers?". 5 March 2013.
  3. 1 2 "The Slave Market of Dublin". 23 April 2013.
  4. ↑ "The Arctic Irish: fact or fiction?". 1 March 2013.
  5. ↑ "Medieval Irish merchants traded in slaves in Tunisia and Iceland". 2 August 2016.

Further reading

  • Holm, P (1986). "The Slave Trade of Dublin, Ninth to Twelfth Centuries". Peritia. 5: 317–345. doi:10.1484/J.Peri.3.139. ISSN 0332-1592. 
  • Wyatt, D (2009). Slaves and Warriors in Medieval Britain and Ireland, 800–1200. The Northern World: North Europe and the Baltic c. 400–1700 AD. Peoples, Economics and Cultures (series vol. 45). Leiden: Brill. ISBN 978-90-04-17533-4. ISSN 1569-1462. 
  • Wyatt, D (2014). "Slavery, Power and Cultural Identity in the Irish Sea Region, 1066–1171". In Sigurðsson, JV; Bolton, T. Celtic-Norse Relationships in the Irish Sea in the Middle Ages, 800–1200. The Northern World: North Europe and the Baltic c. 400–1700 AD. Peoples, Economics and Cultures (series vol. 65). Leiden: Brill. pp. 97–108. ISBN 978-90-04-25512-8. ISSN 1569-1462. 
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