Venetian slave trade in the context of "Pagan"

Between 1441 and 1774, the Crimean Khanate and the Nogai Horde conducted slave raids throughout lands primarily controlled by Russia and Poland–Lithuania. Concentrated in Eastern Europe, but also stretching to the Caucasus and parts of Central Europe, these raids were often supported by the Ottoman Empire and involved the transportation of European men, women, and children to the Muslim world, where they were put on the market and sold as part of the Crimean slave trade and the Ottoman slave trade. The regular abductions of people over the course of numerous incursions by the Crimeans and the Nogais greatly drained Eastern Europe's human and economic resources, consequently playing an important role in the emergence of the semi-militarized Cossacks, who organized retaliatory campaigns against the raiders and their Ottoman backers.

Trading posts in Crimea had previously been established by the Genoese and the Venetians to facilitate earlier Western European slave routes. The Crimean–Nogai raids largely targeted the "Wild Fields" of the Pontic–Caspian steppe, which extends about 800 kilometres (500 mi) north of the Black Sea and which now contains the majority of the combined population of southeastern Ukraine and southwestern Russia.

The Genoese slave trade refers to the slave trade conducted by the Republic of Genoa, which was a major business during primarily the Middle Ages.

In the 13th century, the Genoese established colonies in Crimea, and acquired slaves of various religions to sell to either Southern Europe via Crete and the Balearic Islands, or to the Middle East directly via the Black Sea. The Genoese met competition in the Venetian slave trade of the Republic of Venice.

The Balkan slave trade was the trade in slaves from the Balkans via Venetian slave traders across the Adriatic and Aegean Seas to Italy, Spain, and the Islamic Middle East, from the 7th century during the Early Middle Ages until the mid-15th century. It was one of the routes of the Venetian slave trade.

The trade rested on the fact that the Balkans was a religious border zone, which was significant in the Middle Ages, when religion was the determining factor on who was viewed as a legitimate target of enslavement. The Balkans was pagan territory long into the Middle Ages. After it had converted to Christianity by the 11th century, it was influenced by Orthodox Christianity and Bogomilism. This influence maintained the region's status as a religious border zone to the rest of the then-Catholic Europe. The slave trade of first pagan and then Orthodox and Bogomil Christian Slavs were exported to Italy, Spain, and Portugal in Southern Europe, but the major part of the export went to the Islamic Middle East.