Radhanites

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Radhanites or Radanites ( Hebrew sing. רדהני Radhani, pl. רדהנים Radhanim; Arabic الرذنية, DMG ar-Raḏaniyya ) is the name given for the first time by Ibn Chordadbeh around 847 in his book Kitāb al-Masālik w'al-Mamālik (= Book of Ways and Countries ) for Jewish merchants who lived from the 8th to the 11th centuries . Century guaranteed trade relations between the warring Christian countries of the West and the Islamic world and beyond to India and China. They thus contributed to an economic upswing in the West, which had fallen back economically since the end of the Western Roman Empire . As trade routes they used the routes known from time immemorial.

Map of Eurasia with the Radhanite trade network as described by Ibn Chordadbeh.

etymology

The tradition of the term "Radhanites" gives no reliable information about what it means. The French historian Maurice Lombard (1904–1965), who belongs to the Annales School, tends, with others, to believe that the term “Rūdānū” means that the Rhone is used because the Jewish merchants were located in numerous places that differed from the Meuse would have drawn down the Rhône valley via the Saône and would have led via Arles to the Mediterranean Sea and Narbonne into Muslim Spain. Lombard serves as evidence of the family name Narboni, derived from Narbonne, which is still common today among the Jews of the Mediterranean region. He thus rejects other assumptions that the meaning for "Radhanite" refers to the Persian word rāhdān (= route expert), as well as another derivation that it is a reference to the Persian ruined city ​​of Rhaga or a designation of the landscape around Baghdad .

background

The Islamic Conquest

Under the Merovingians , cities had declined since the end of the 5th century, leading to a general cultural decline that was reversed in the Carolingian Renaissance . Henri Pirenne advocated the thesis , which had been decisive for decades , that it was only the Islamic expansion that began in the 7th century that had a negative impact on the West by separating it from important trade relations across the Mediterranean and between the Christian West and those of Islamic expansion conquered countries no longer exchanged.
Today Pirenne's thesis is considered refuted. His main mistake was that he assumed that Muslim merchants only traded with one another and had no interest in the countries beyond the conquered territories and their products. With his investigations into medieval trade routes, Maurice Lombard is one of Pirenne's resolute opponents, as he proves uninterrupted trade relations between East and West. These were initially under the Merovingians next to Jewish merchants, whose position on the 6th and 7th century in the Byzantine Empire and the Visigoth Spain been mainly dependent have, however, deteriorated by merchants, the "Syri" (= Syrian ) were called and Christians have been be. According to Lombard, the "Syri" mainly imported oriental luxury goods from their centers in the Orient to the barbaric Occident. The trade relations would then have expanded with the Islamic expansion even without Muslim long-distance traders in the Christian West, because the Muslim conquerors had a great need for goods which they could not dispose of in the areas they had occupied and which they therefore had to import. With the triumphant advance of Islam, the majority of long-distance trade was taken over by Jewish merchants until the 11th century.
The Jews found themselves in a favorable starting position in the developing Islamic world, especially since the jihad was not waged against the Jews but against the pagans . However, the Arabian Peninsula, where the Jews had a center in Himyar and where pagan tribes were obliged to obey and tribute to them in the area around Medina until the appearance of Mohammed , was excluded from the freedom of religious practice and settlement. In contrast to the Christian countries, however, in the Islamic world they could settle down anywhere else and practice their religion. Since the armies of the Muslim conquerors were only small, it had proven to be more expedient to insure themselves alongside the Jews and the other monotheistic minority, namely the Eastern Christians , since suitable people were needed for the reconstruction and administration of the conquered countries. For the Jews, however, it was even more important than for the Christians that in the 9th century they saw themselves united within a new world power “ which granted them far-reaching autonomy and let them lead their lives as they pleased. “In the 10th century, numerous Jewish families in Al-Andalus lived in the Caliphate of Cordoba under Abd ar-Rahman III. and his son Al-Hakam II. a period of prosperity.

Jewish merchants as intermediaries between the West and the Islamic world

The American historian Jane S. Gerber ( City University of New York ) assumes that the Radhanites formed an international trading company, probably based in southern France or Spain. Your trade has spread across several continents and has been supported by branches. They had used four different land and sea routes, one of which led northwards through Europe via Prague , Bulgaria to the land of the Khazars , which was an important outpost for trade with Central Asia ; two ran along the shores of the Mediterranean and ended in Iraq and Iran ; the fourth went to China (see also the Silk Road ). “ In general, the Radhanite trade representatives only covered part of the route, at the end of which they took over goods from colleagues who were touring the next stage. “They communicated with one another using Hebrew as the lingua franca , because it was spoken by all educated Jews. To protect themselves from the risks of long journeys, about which the Geniza in particular provide information, and to transport too much money, they would have carried letters of credit (suftadscha) with them as an early capitalist instrument.
The first mention of the Radhanites by Ibn Chordadbeh is as follows under the heading " Path of the Jewish merchants, the so-called Radhanites ":

“These merchants speak Persian, Romansh (Greek and Latin), Arabic, Franconian languages, Spanish and Slavic. You travel from the Occident to the Orient and from the Orient to the Occident, now by land and now by sea. They bring eunuchs , female slaves and boys, silk, fur products and swords from the West . They embark in the land of the Franks on the Mediterranean and head for Farama (near the ruins of the ancient Pelusium ); there they load their goods on beasts of burden and, at a distance of 20 farsakhs (a unit of measurement of approximately 5.6 km), take five days' marches to Kolzoum (=  Suez ). On the eastern sea (=  Red Sea ) they go to El-Djar (port of Medina ) and to Djeddah ; then they go to Sind (=  Persia ), India and China . On their way back they have loaded musk, aloë, camphor, cinnamon and other products from the oriental regions and reach Kolzoum, then Farama, where they embark again on the Mediterranean. Some set sail for Constantinople to sell their wares there; others go to the land of the Franks.
Sometimes the Jewish merchants on the Mediterranean set course for Antioch on the Orontes . After three days' march they reach the banks of the Euphrates and come to Baghdad . There they sail the Tigris to Basra , from where they sail to Oman , Persia, India and China. So you can travel without a break. "

Trade relations between the West and the Islamic world

Bernard Lewis writes that only three of the goods in Central and Western Europe have attracted the attention of Muslim writers, namely Slavic slaves, Frankish weapons and English wool. Maurice Lombard also lists furs and wood, especially for shipbuilding. The Slavic slaves, according to Arabic records, were the most desirable item for the Muslim slave-holding society . Bernard Lewis states that besides the Jews, many Europeans were involved in the export of slaves. Among them were Christians, “ citizens of the large trading cities of Italy and France as well as Greek slave traders who were active in the eastern Mediterranean. The Venetians , who began to compete with the Greeks as early as the 8th century, played an important role. “Particularly noteworthy is the role of the Varangians and the Rus people , who were avid slave hunters and who either sold their Slavic captives directly or had them transferred to Spain, Byzantium, the Muslim countries or Central Asia through Italian merchants or the Radhanites.

Maurice Lombard emphasizes that the demand from the major centers of consumption in the Islamic world through the respective middlemen revived “ the economic activity of the barbaric West ” and “ whose trade, money circulation and urban movement began to pulsate again under this surge in demand ”. Overall, it is a fact of immense importance: “ The direction of exchange is reversed; the Occident turns from importer to exporter. At the end of the 8th century, instead of the outflow of means of payment, there is slowly an inflow again, which increases from the 9th to the 11th century. "

Muslim Spain, along with Cordoba, was a frequent destination for the Slavic slaves with whom the Radhanites traded.

Lombard makes the following balance sheet for the extent of the slave trade with Al-Andalus for a section of the 10th century:

“Within 50 years, between 912 and 961, their number rises from 3,750 to 13,750 and multiplies by 10,000 individuals, which is reflected in new purchases; the males are mostly castrated. (…) A slave brings in 100 dinars on average, so that 10,000 slaves represent a value of one million dinars, which corresponds to an amount of gold of 5,000 kg; For Cordoba alone, 100 kg of gold are to be estimated annually for the purchase of Slavs. If one counts the sums that are to be estimated for the other large cities of Spain and the residence of the caliph, in addition to the sums that are to be estimated for the transit to the Muslim Orient, then one can imagine what Liutprand means with 'immensum lucrum' ( = immense profit) made by the Verdun merchants, and Adalbert von Prag when he wept for this 'infelix aurum' (= unhappy gold), this gold that brings misfortune. "

The two US historians Max L. Margolis (1866–1932) and Alexander Marx (1878–1953), who were born in Germany and Lithuania and trained in Berlin, published “ A History of the Jewish People ” in Philadelphia in 1927 , which was published repeatedly until 1974 . They describe the Jewish merchants in Al-Andalus who were busy supplying the Muslim rulers with slaves:

“You could see rich Jews clad in silk and equipped with magnificent turbans, who rivaled the glamor of the Muslims, drove in stately carriages or rode like men on horseback. Their wealth came mainly from the slave trade. They supplied the harems with residents and eunuchs who guarded them and supplied the army with offspring. They imported large numbers of Slavs who had been captured by Germanic peoples and sold to the Saracens , where they formed the caliph's guard and entire regiments. "

The trade routes from the Slavic border areas to the Islamic world

The Russian-born French historian Alexandre Skirda states that it is difficult in European national historiography to recognize the slave trade legacy: “ You can better understand why almost all historians and commentators keep silent about this phenomenon: they find it difficult to acknowledge that the economic rebirth of the Occident between the 8th and 11th centuries was achieved through the trade in human beings! “
In the meantime, the ways in which the trade in“ speaking goods ”took place, especially in Eastern Franconia, have been described quite extensively, which, in addition to Charles Verlinden, is mainly due to Maurice Lombard and, in addition, the Russian orientalist Dimitri Michine with one at the Russian Academy of Sciences, Section Institute for Islamic Studies in Moscow in 2002 (" Sakaliba, slaviané v islamskom miré " [ Saqaliba - The Slavs in the Islamic World ]).
Lombard describes the trade routes as follows:

“The first of its directions connects the areas of the Elbe and Bohemia with the areas of the Rhine and the Maas regions . The slave traders used the Westphalian Hellwege , which connected Bardowick with Xanten or Duisburg , Aachen , Liège , Dinant and Verdun via a series of clearings ; or the Maintal direction, which includes Erfurt coming from Bohemia and goes to Mainz before it reaches Verdun; or the Upper Danube direction, which crosses Bavaria at the level of Passau and Regensburg and also reaches Verdun via Swabia and Franconia with Worms as a station. At the end of all three ways was Verdun as a large center, which sent its merchants to Spain and where many of these slaves were turned into eunuchs. Verdun, large interim storage facility, collection and castration site , is located on the Meuse, where it is no longer navigable to the south; a land route led to the Saône valley, which is navigable in Saint-Jean-de-Losne . Lyon , Arles, and Narbonne were important stopovers for the slave trade. In Lyon, the ships that were suitable for the leisurely Saône had to be exchanged for more solid and smaller ships so that the faster Rhône could be mastered. In Arles, the river route was abandoned and they reached Septimania by land ; in Narbonne the road to Catalonia and Muslim Spain was finally taken . In Arles you could also embark for Narbonne, from where you continued along the coast to Barcelona , Tortosa , Valencia and Almería . Ships also went from Narbonne to the Muslim Levant . […] The importance of Narbonne was considerable and is comparable to that of Verdun; it was the great distribution center of Slavic slaves for the Muslim Mediterranean. "

Dimitri Michine adds the following places: Prague , Magdeburg as large centers (Prague also for castration), Erfurt, Hallstadt , Forchheim , Nuremberg , Premberg , Regensburg, Raffelstetten , Lorch (Upper Austria) ; then from the Rhine Valley with Worms, Mainz, Koblenz and Cologne to Dortmund , Soest , Paderborn and Goslar and from the Slavic border areas in the opposite direction.

For German historiography, Johannes Fried states for the Saxons , who as not yet Christianized pagans themselves could still be “talked about” and sold during the wars with Charlemagne: “ The fertile land between the Saale and Elbe with its enslavable people came under the control of the Saxons in the course of the 10th century. “Saxony, the power base of Henry I from Liudolfingian house,“ was without a doubt the most barbaric of all his countries, the least civilized, the most distant from Mediterranean culture and highly dependent on foreign help ”. For the prerequisites for acquiring the royal rule, in addition to the rich property, the sale of young captured Slavs to Muslim Spain or Byzantium and further into the empire of the caliphs was necessary, because to reach for the royal crown it took indispensable wealth. In the warfare against the Slavic neighbors, the slave trader followed the conquering troops before the priest. The regularly captured Slavs filled the royal treasure with the sales proceeds, a source of money that also lured the Saxon greats to regularly raid Slavic settlements. In addition to the Jewish merchants, who were to be found at all focal points of major economic activities, benefiting from the "Jewish privilege" for their merchant rights, which had arisen since Carolingian times, Frisians , Slavs, free and unfree Germans also participated in long-distance trade according to J. Fried .

The end of Jewish mediation in the 11th century

The French Muslim religious anthropologist and philosopher Malek Chebel speaks in his book about slavery in Islam (2007) ironically of the “ beautiful solidarity of the monotheists ” towards the pagan Slavs. In the 11th century, however, it was initially the Radhanites who were ousted from long-distance trade in Europe. Italian trading and banking houses, whose influence was already noticeable in the letter of the Doge of Venice to Henry I in 932, and Armenian traders in the Orient prevailed over the Jews after Maurice Lombard. Then there were the massacres in the Rhineland on the occasion of the first crusade . Only on the mainland connections between the Upper Danube and the Slavic countries would they have held up. Further difficulties arose as early as the end of the 10th century with the collapse of the Khazar Empire, which had been defeated by the Kievan Rus . So they were “ pushed into the role of shopkeepers, moneylenders and usurers ”.

With the displacement of the Jewish long-distance traders, the slave trade in Central Europe continued for a while in more or less Christianized areas. For example, Helmold von Bosau reports for the year 1168 how Slavic pirates appeared as slave sellers and " 700 Danes captured on a market day were counted in Mecklenburg , all of them for sale if there were enough buyers ".

In Eastern Europe towards the Black Sea , the slave trade with Slavs remained an almost uninterrupted affair until the 18th century and was most recently carried out by the Muslim Tatars residing in the Crimea , who supplied the neighboring Turks . Between 1482 and 1760 between 2 and 2.5 million Ukrainians, Poles and Russians are said to have been their victims.

A controversy

The medieval historian Michael Toch , who teaches in Jerusalem , published in 1998 in the Encyclopedia of German History as Volume 44 “ The Jews in the Medieval Empire ”. There, with criticism of Hermann Kellenbenz , Friedrich Lotter and Charles Verlinden , in which he sees polemical and apologetic tendencies, " because the slave trade was viewed as morally disreputable ", he throws up the thesis that there was no Jewish slave trade in the early Middle Ages " Jewish trade monopoly " is a " modern ideological construct ". He states: “ According to the author's knowledge, since the Jews settled down around the middle of the 10th century, there can be no talk of a professionally operated slave trade, only the acquisition of mostly Slavic slaves as servants for domestic use. “Friedrich Lotter responded with various articles, most recently in 2004 in the historical journal , pointing out that the activity of Jewish merchants was not tied to settling in the Merovingian era and that both Jews and others promoted the slave trade carried out by ecclesiastical and secular authorities because he had nothing disreputable about him. Elsewhere it is said that Toch's assessment of German-Jewish coexistence in the Middle Ages reveals a seemingly post-modern view, “ which denies any relation between text and the world ”.

literature

  • Bernard Lewis : The world of the unbelievers. How Islam discovered Europe , Ullstein, Frankfurt am Main / Berlin 1987, ISBN 3-548-34427-5 .
  • Maurice Lombard: the heyday of Islam. An economic and cultural history 8.-11. Century , Fischer TB 10773, Frankfurt am Main 1992, ISBN 3-596-10773-3 .
  • Johannes Fried : The way into history. The origins of Germany up to 1024 , Propylaea, Frankfurt am Main / Berlin 1998, ISBN 3-548-26517-0 .
  • Nicholas de Lange (Ed.): Illustrated History of Judaism , Campus, Frankfurt am Main / New York, NY 2000, ISBN 3-593-36389-5 .
  • Michael McCormick: Origins of the European Economy. Communications and Commerce AD ​​300-900 , Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, NY 2001, ISBN 0-521-66102-1 .
  • Jacques Heers : Les négriers en terres d'islam VIIe-XVIe siècle , Perrin, Paris 2007, ISBN 978-2-262-02764-3 .
  • Alexandre Skirda: La traite des Slaves. L'esclavage des Blancs du VIIIe au XVIIIe siècle , Les Éditions de Paris, Paris 2010, ISBN 978-2-84621-130-7 .
  • Mark R. Cohen: Under the Cross and the Crescent: The Jews in the Middle Ages . Beck, Munich 2011, ISBN 978-3-406-62434-6 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Gene W. Heck: Charlemagne, Muhammad, and the Arab Roots of Capitalism , Walter de Gruyter: Berlin 2006, p. 275. - Jane S. Gerber: “My heart dwells in the east…” , p. 174. In: Nicholas de Lange (Ed.): Illustrated History of Judaism , Campus, Frankfurt / New York 2000, pp. 161–221.
  2. ↑ Maurice Lombard: The heyday of Islam. An economic and cultural history 8. – 11. Century , Frankfurt a. M. 1992, p. 211. Ibid. In note 10 a large number of papers on the meaning of words.
  3. ↑ Radhan
  4. ↑ Gene W. Heck: Charlemagne, Muhammad, and the Arab Roots of Capitalism , Walter de Gruyter: Berlin 2006, p. 177. - GW Heck repeatedly emphasizes the importance of slaves imported from Asia and Africa as well as from Europe as suppliers of energy for Islamic rule (cf. for a summary p. 315-318: Imperatives of Trade and the Transformation of Europe ).
  5. ↑ See Jane S. Gerber (2000), p. 164. On Spain: Friedrich Lotter: On the social hierarchy of Judaism in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages , in: Aschkenas - Zeitschrift für Geschichte und Kultur der Juden 13/2003, H. 2, (de Gruyter). ( Online. )
  6. ↑ Maurice Lombard (1992), pp. 212-215.
  7. ↑ Maurice Lombard (1992), p. 210 f.
  8. ↑ Jane S. Gerber (2000), pp. 164-169 (citation p. 169).
  9. ↑ Jane S. Gerber (2000), p. 174.
  10. ↑ In the Occident there was already in the early days of the Islamic conquest in southern Spain and in Sicily silk worm breeding and silk weaving, the products of which supplemented the trade in Chinese products and were therefore not intended for trade with China, but for the inner-European market. (Instead of silk, "brocade" is also used here in other traditions.)
  11. ↑ “Le Livre des routes et des provinces par Ibn-Khordadbeh” , publié, traduit et annoté par Charles Barbier de Meynard , 1865.
  12. ↑ Bernard Lewis: The world of the unbelievers. How Islam discovered Europe . Frankfurt / M. / Berlin 1987, p. 193.
  13. ↑ Jacques army : Les négriers en terres d'Islam VII e -XVI e siècle . Perrin, Paris 2007, p. 12.
  14. ↑ Bernard Lewis (1987), p. 195. - A letter from the Doge of Venice to King Henry I (Eastern Franconia) in 932 with the - without consequence - request to remove the Jews from his domain is remarkable for the competition among the traders expel (Gerd Mentgen: The expulsions of Jews in the medieval empire. A research report . In: Aschkenas - Journal for History and Culture of the Jews 16/2006, H. 2. Online. )
  15. ↑ Alexandre Skirda: La traite des Slaves. L'esclavage des Blancs du VIIIe au XVIIIe siècle , Les Éditions de Paris: Paris 2010, p. 11 f. - Cf. also the chapter “Les Russes et les Bulgares de la Volga” in: Jacques Heers (2007), pp. 18-21.
  16. ↑ Maurice Lombard (1992), p. 234.
  17. ^ Maurice Lombard: Monnaie et histoire d'Alexandre à Mahomet . Paris-La Haye 1971. Reprint 2001: Mouton u. École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, p. 198.
  18. ↑ Maurice Lombard (1971/2001), pp. 202-203. - See Jacques Heers (2007), pp. 16-18.
  19. ↑ Quoted from the French edition: Max L. Margolis, Alexandre Marx: Histoire du peuple juif . Payot, Paris 1930, p. 291. - At the same time, Margolis and Marx underline that the Slav soldiers, together with the Berbers, brought about the disintegration of Islamic power in Europe and caused the fall of the Caliphate of Cordoba.
  20. ↑ Alexandre Skirda (2010), p. 112.
  21. ↑ Cf. Ch. Verlinden: “ Where, when and why was there a wholesale trade in slaves during the Middle Ages? "(Cologne 1970)
  22. ↑ Alexandre Skirda (2010), pp. 11, 14, 119.
  23. ↑ Maurice Lombard (1971/2001), pp. 199-200.
  24. ^ First mention in the Diedenhofen chapter of 805.
  25. ↑ See Alexandre Skirda (2010), p. 119.
  26. ↑ Johannes Fried: The way into history. The origins of Germany up to 1024 . Propylaea, Frankfurt / M. / Berlin 1998, p. 557.
  27. ↑ Johannes Fried (1998), p. 571 f.
  28. ↑ Johannes Fried: The Middle Ages. History and culture , CH Beck: Munich 2008, ISBN 978-3-406-57829-8 ( dtv 2011, ISBN 3-423-34650-7 ), p. 114.
  29. ↑ Johannes Fried (1998), p. 580 and 935.
  30. ↑ See Johannes Fried (1998), p. 937.
  31. ↑ Johannes Fried (1998), p. 931 f.
  32. ^ Malek Chebel: L'Esclavage en Terre d'Islam. Un tabou bien gardé . Fayard, Paris 2007, p. 80.
  33. ↑ See Gerd Mentgen (2006).
  34. ↑ Maurice Lombard (1992), p. 212 f.
  35. ^ Helmold von Bosau: Slavic Chronicle . 6th edition. Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, Darmstadt 2002, p. 377. - See also Robert Bartlett: The birth of Europe out of the spirit of violence. Conquest, colonization and cultural change from 950–1350 . Kindler, Munich 1996, p. 366.
  36. ↑ Alexandre Skirda (2010), p. 171 f. - In 2004 the American historian Robert C. Davis published a study of the enslavement by Muslims in the Mediterranean area - but also beyond to England and Iceland - where between 1530 and 1780 1.25 million Christians attacked the pirates of the Maghreb, for example from Algiers , Tunis and Tripoli should have fallen into the hands. In Algiers, piracy did not end until the French conquest in 1830 (Robert C. Davis: Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters: White Slavery in the Mediterranean, the Barbary Coast and Italy, 1500-1800 . Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).
  37. ^ Michael Toch: Curriculum Vitae
  38. ↑ Michael Toch: The Jews in the Medieval Empire . Oldenbourg, Munich 1998, ISBN 3-486-55054-3 , p. 96 f. - See also: Michael Toch: "Dark centuries". Was there a Jewish early Middle Ages? 3. Arye Maimon lecture at the University of Trier, November 15, 2000, Kliomedia : Trier 2001, ISBN 3-89890-091-6 .
  39. ↑ Historical magazine 278/2 (2004). In addition, the meeting at H-SOZ-U-KULT , where it is said that Lotter “proves the method used by Toch and its results to be untenable ”.
  40. ↑ Friedrich Lotter (2003) ( Online. )
  41. ^ New Eastern Europe - Cologne Forum for the History and Culture of Eastern Europe, 1/2010, p. 26 f. (PDF; 7.1 MB)