Eurasian Slavery, Ransom and Abolition in World History, 1200-1860 by Christoph Witzenrath

Author:Christoph Witzenrath [Witzenrath, Christoph]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781472410580
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2015-10-28T00:00:00+00:00

The Swedish Official View

The Viking society of the sagas was a slave-owning society. Although slave markets and slaves are mentioned and high-ranking individuals were sometimes objects of hostage-related slave trading like the later King of Norway Olov Tryggvason and his mother Astrid, who were finally ransomed in an Estonian slave market, the slave-trading system and its extent are not described as a whole.67 The few stories concerning the raids against Finns (including the Sámi) do not speak about captives, but mention only a rich booty without any specifications. There are exceptions, like Skjálf, a daughter of Finnic leader Frosti, imprisoned by the Svea prince Agni but in this case the prince’s aim was to marry her. Probably the story is a literary topos describing exogamic marriages.68

The first Scandinavian legislation that does not mention the institution of slavery is from the late thirteenth century (Denmark, Norway, Iceland) and the mid-fourteenth century (Sweden). Slaves are present in the sources up until the fourteenth century, but it is unclear what kind of position free servants and peasants took thereafter.69 Swedish noblemen colonized the southern coasts of Finland with peasants from central Sweden from the eleventh to the fourteenth century,70 and this may indicate that the Swedes were using unfree labour.

The last slavery document from Sweden is the last will and testament of a wealthy man named Assmund Langh. He released his male slave ‘Karelus’ and donated for this a horse and a saddle on 27 February 1310. The name of the slave refers to East Finland (Karelia) and Assmund may have bought his slave from Karelia which, from the late thirteenth century until 1323, suffered Swedish and Novgorodian raids almost every year. Most probably ‘Karelus’ was not an exception, but a proof of the slave trade that was connected to Swedish Viking raids to the east.71 According to the Russian chronicles, the Swedes were still taking prisoners in 1445 in Dvina and Ingermanland, but this information is obscure and we cannot know whether the captives were made slaves.72

When the bailiff of Häme, Magnus Kazi, donated the house of Kantala for the requiem mass of the late Bo Jonsson on 5 January 1390, he placed certain restrictions in his donation, one of which concerned ‘the Lapps that belonged to the house’. The bailiff of Norrbotten, Sten Henriksson, decided on 27 December 1454 that a group of Lapps were not the king’s Lapps but belonged to the Birkkarlar (private tax collectors) of Piteå and Luleå. Thus, Swedish law regarded Lapps as material objects that could be owned.73

The chronicle of the bishops of Finland confirms the Russian raid of 1317/1318 and does not speak about captives.74 Russian raids into the area of modern Finland continued, but Swedish sources neither mention them nor speak about captives, because they were directed to the area outside of the realm of the king. The first description in a Swedish chronicle concerns the Russo-Swedish War of 1495–97 which was indeed a big and important international event for the entire Baltic Sea area.

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