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The extent to which slaves were used as a labour force in farming is disputed. It is certain that rural slavery was very common in Athens, and that ancient Greece did not have the immense slave populations found on the Roman latifundia. Corinthian black-figure terra-cotta votive tablet of slaves working in a mine, dated to the late seventh ...
Besides manual labor, slaves performed many domestic services, and might be employed at highly skilled jobs and professions. Teachers, accountants, and physicians were often slaves. Greek slaves in particular might be highly educated. Unskilled slaves, or those condemned to slavery as punishment, worked on farms, in mines, and at mills.
During the Greek War of Independence, many Greek men, women and children had been captured and sold as slaves in Ottoman slave markets. One such incident was the Chios massacre of 1822. This had caused great indignation in Europe on behalf of the Christian Greeks.
Slave raids were a specific form of banditry that was the primary method employed by the ancient Greeks for gathering slaves. In regions such as Thrace and the eastern Aegean , natives, or " barbarians ", captured in these raids were the main source of slaves , rather than prisoners of war .
Benin grew increasingly rich during the 16th and 17th centuries on the trade of slaves with Europe; slaves from enemy states of the interior were sold, and carried to the Americas in Dutch and Portuguese ships. The Bight of Benin's shore soon came to be known as the "Slave Coast". [61] In the 1840s, King Gezo of Dahomey said: [62] [63]
When Belisarius arrived in Italy, the Goths began to propagate anti-Greek sentiment, usually commenting that the only Greeks that were in Rome were mimes and thieves who did not contribute anything. The sentiment successfully spread due to the resentment already born between the Romans to the Greeks.
In the Early Middle Ages, Venice also supplied slaves from Central Europe via Prague, which in the 10th-century was a center of slave trade in Europe, dealing in pagan East Slavs. The Venetian slave traders participated in the Prague slave trade, purchasing slaves as well as metal via the Eastern passes of the Alps.
The Crimean slave trade in Eastern Europe, and the Barbary slave trade in West and South Europe, were the two main sources of European slaves to the Ottoman Empire. During this period the Crimea was the destination of the Crimean–Nogai slave raids in Eastern Europe, and European slaves were trafficked to the Middle East via the Crimea. [47]