The background to this book is extraordinary. When I wrote the medieval history of the Swedish Viborg bailiwick fifteen years ago, I began to wonder why Russian chronicles1 often repeat the phrases i polon privedosha beshchisla (‘and countless prisoners were taken along’) and i lyudi poimasha (‘and people were caught’) in relation to raids on the area of Karelia and Eastern Finland. Raiding for wealth seemed reasonable, but what sense did it make to drag people over long distances through roadless terrain to Novgorod where the locals already suffered from famine? Contemporaries must have understood the reason. I asked senior colleagues for their opinion, but they only repeated the old explanation: ‘Russians’ used to kidnap Finns to become servants and farmhands.
Although this was true in the eighteenth century, it does not fit the context of the Middle Ages, because large-scale agricultural production had not yet begun in Russia. The colleagues were not medievalists, moreover,, and their knowledge was limited to stories from the Great Northern War in the early eighteenth century.2 They simply projected the later history onto earlier periods, because nobody had studied the issue properly. In fact, there was no Finnish literature about the slave trade, in contrast to the research available on Eastern and Southern Europe.
With these thoughts, I followed a trail that led to the conference on the Eastern European slave trade in Aberdeen in 2008. I gave a paper there about these phrases from the ‘Russian’ chronicles and published a couple of essays in Finnish, too. However, I made the mistake of following the traditional pattern of the Crimean and Black Sea slave trade, which was a big issue in the premodern research literature. This account suits the Russian national story as well, because it stresses the cruelty of the ‘heathen Tatars.’
The Academy of Finland awarded me an advanced scholar’s grant to explore the topic further in 2010 and 2011. I made field trips through Russia to Caucasia and the Middle East and soon realized that there was more to the story of the ‘Russian slave trade’ and Finns. The Aberdeen article was published in the anthology Eurasian Slavery, Ransom and Abolition in World History, 1200–1860
I published a book about this in Finnish, because I thought an international audience would not be interested. By the spring of 2014 I had moved on to investigate the ‘bazaar economy system’ of late medieval and early modern Russia. However, in 2015, friends from Kazan urged me to publish a text about the slave trade and colleagues asked for an essay about Finnic female slaves for an Austmarr Network book. So in 2016, I spoke at the ‘slavery session’ organized by Marek Jankowiak, within the complex coordinated by Thomas J. MacMaster at the Leeds International Medieval Congress.
In composing these essays on the ‘peaceful Volga slave trade’ I realized that this was connected to my work on the bazaar economy. So when Damian Pargas of Brill invited me to translate my Finnish book into English, I decided to rewrite and develop the manuscript and deliver a totally new English book.
This book, like the Finnish book before it, contradicts my own principles. I try to tell history students to focus on the essentials without long introductions and explanations of the background. My excuse for the focusing on the broader context here, however, is that the entire phenomenon of peripheral Finnic slavery is not understandable without it. The single stereotypical sentences about Finnic prisoners in the chronicles made sense only after I became fully absorbed in the phenomenon, with extensive travels in the Middle East and visits to bazaars there. After I had internalized how this total system worked, the meaning of the incomprehensible sentences became crystal clear. So I ask my readers to be patient when the text ranges far beyond the forests of Finland and Karelia.
Another factor is the vast amount of source material I explored in my search for empirical evidence about ‘Finns.’ My aim was to understand how these sources have formed and why there is (or is not) more information. An absence or a negative result is also a scientific result, if reached through proper research. I think I have reached this in many ways.
There is a third aspect, too. Reza Aslan, author of the famous biography of Jesus of Nazareth, says: ‘Granted, writing a biography of Jesus of Nazareth is not like writing a biography of Napoleon Bonaparte. This task is somewhat akin to putting together a massive puzzle with only a few of the pieces in
I am grateful for countless colleagues and discussants. First of all, I am thankful for my wife Suvi, who worked with me as a research assistant and photographer in difficult and sometimes dangerous journeys in Russia, Caucasia and the Middle East. The text has benefited from the valuable input of four anonymous reviewers, two for Suomalaisen kirjallisuuden seura (The Finnish Literature Society) and two for Brill. Kate Sotejeff-Wilson undertook the task of remoulding my ‘international conference based non-native English’ into a more standard variety. This project was made possible by funding from the University of Eastern Finland (UEF), Finnish Academy of Sciences, Finlands Svenska Kulturfonden (Swedish-Finnish Cultural Foundation) and the Finnish Cultural Foundation.
