Slave raids devastated medieval Greece and its scattered Aegean islands for more than 600 years, yet the story remains largely missing from popular accounts of European history.
That gap is the focus of an account by historian Christopher Paolella, who recorded how invaders, mercenaries, and even Byzantine forces captured and sold Greek Christians across the Mediterranean world in one of his books.
The pattern took hold early. In 828, Muslim forces captured Crete and turned the island into a staging ground for attacks on Byzantine territory. The island remained a base for raiders until the empire won it back in the middle of the 10th century.
In 904, raiders sailing from Alexandria sacked Thessalonika, then one of the empire’s largest cities, and carried off residents for sale. Byzantine soldiers took part too.
Records from the eighth century describe imperial attacks on Dyrrachium and mainland Greece that produced captives sold in Constantinople. The practice was common enough that officials later taxed soldiers who profited from selling prisoners.
The Catalan slave raids began across medieval Greece
The most damaging episode came centuries later, after an alliance collapsed. In the early 14th century, Catalan mercenaries under Roger de Flor arrived in Byzantine territory to fight Turkish forces. The company’s early raiding and enslaving focused on Turkish settlements scattered across Anatolia, the Aegean islands, and mainland Greece.
Greek communities in the same regions were harassed and robbed, with mercenaries seizing property and targeting women. Still, historians find little evidence that Greek Christians were being enslaved during this early phase. That changed in April 1305, when Roger de Flor was assassinated, and the Catalans blamed their Byzantine hosts.
The mercenaries adopted the banner of Saint Peter, branding Orthodox Greeks as religious outsiders. Until the company left the empire in 1310, its slave raids swept across medieval Greece and the surrounding islands with new intensity.
Faith became a weapon in the Aegean slave trade
The relabeling mattered. By the 12th century, most of Christian Europe had grown uneasy about enslaving fellow believers. Authorities responded by narrowing the definition of a genuine Christian, creating outsiders who were fair game for capture. Branding Orthodox Greeks as schismatics gave Catalan raiders religious cover for what was, in practice, plunder.
Georgios Pachymeres, a Greek historian who lived through the period, wrote that the Catalans emptied the countryside west of Constantinople, killing or exiling residents and selling survivors near Adrianople. Moreover, he recorded that women captured in a 1306 raid on the Alans were sold within days.
Ramon Muntaner, a Catalan commander who later chronicled the campaign, described a thriving slave market at Gallipoli. Captives from a skirmish near Thessaloniki were reportedly sold there the very next morning.
In 1309, the company pushed farther west, settling near Cassandreia and extending its raids into Thessaloniki and the monastic communities of Mount Athos.
Greek woman’s journey through Crete’s slave markets
Many victims were funneled toward Venetian-held Crete, where Catalan traders sometimes bypassed Italian middlemen and sold Greek captives directly to residents of the island’s capital, Candia.
One transaction, preserved in notarial records, followed a Greek woman named “Keranna” through several hands. A Catalan trafficker recommended her to a buyer in Candia, who arranged to resell her to a merchant on the island of Negroponte.
Rather than deliver her himself, the trafficker shipped her ahead through a fellow Catalan based in Barcelona, a chain of custody that shows how organized the business had become.
Crete, along with the Peloponnese ports of Modon and Coron, formed the backbone of a regional slaving network that ran alongside longer routes controlled by Italian merchants.
Historian Sally McKee has found that through much of the 13th and 14th centuries, most people enslaved on Crete were not brought from the distant Eurasian steppe. Instead, they were swept up in slave raids across medieval Greece, Anatolia and the wider Aegean.
Numbers shifted as violence flowed in both directions
That pattern shifted after 1350. Notarial records kept by Manoli Bresciano show that Orthodox Christians made up 75% of Crete’s slave sales in the 1360s. Moreover, that share had fallen to roughly 30% by the century’s end, as captives from the Black Sea region increasingly took their place in the market.
The violence was not entirely one-sided. Byzantine soldiers carried out slave raids of their own, a reminder that raiding ran in both directions across medieval Greece and the wider empire.
A campaign in 1296 enslaved Turkish women and children, and soldiers were still seizing captives along the Thracian coast for sale in Constantinople as late as 1453.
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