Raids and wars of the steppe empires carried people away. Some were ransomed, some exchanged, some kept at the court of the captor, and some sold. The sources describe the taking, the ransom, the flight and the sale. They do not give the number of the unfree among the Göktürks or any rule that governed them, and no source describes a law of slavery.[1] What follows collects the scenes that the sources do give.

Taking people

The Xiongnu rule on spoils is the earliest statement. A warrior who took a head or a captive received a cup of wine, and he kept what he plundered. The people he captured he took as slaves.[2] The Wei Shu tells a similar beginning for the house of the Rouran. A rider on a raid took a slave whose hair reached only to his eyebrows and who had forgotten his own name. His master called him Mugulü, “bald head”. When he was grown he was freed and made a mounted soldier. Under the emperor Mu he was liable to be beheaded for coming late, and he fled into the desert. There he gathered more than a hundred fugitives.[3] The story of Mugulü is an origin tale told by an enemy.

The Göktürk raids on China took people by the thousand. In 601 Göktürk groups under Awusili Xijin crossed the desert southward and carried off 6,000 men and women and more than 200,000 animals from the people of Qimin Khan.[4] The Sui general Yang Su caught them and gave everything back to Qimin.[4] In 622 Ilig Khan’s riders took more than 5,000 men and women from Fen and Lu.[5] The Xin Tang Shu says that Kapgan Khan, whom it calls Mochuo, took 80,000 to 90,000 men and women from Zhao and Ding in a raid in the time of the empress Wu. When a Tang army was gathering against him, he had them buried alive.[6]

The Göktürk allies of Heraclius did the same on the Persian side. In the lands that they crossed in 627 they took Persians captive and burned towns and villages.[7] The Huns had a captive class too. At Attila’s court hardly anyone spoke Greek except captives from Thrace and the Illyrian coast.[8] A captive from Sirmium had built the stone bath of Onegesius.[9] Attila’s secretary Rusticius was a captive from Upper Moesia.[10] A Greek merchant of Viminacium, captured when the city fell, had won his freedom by fighting for Onegesius. He told Priscus that he found his new life better than his old.[11] On the road back the Roman envoys saw a Roman spy crucified and two slaves who had killed their masters hanging on timbers.[12]

Ransom and return

The treaties priced captives. At Margus the Romans agreed to give back Roman captives who had come home without ransom, unless they paid eight solidi for each to the captors.[13] After the peace of Anatolius the fine for each Roman captive who had escaped without ransom was twelve solidi. If it was not paid, whoever had taken the captive in had to give him back.[14] The treaty of Margus and the peace of Anatolius thus put a price on each man.

The Tang bought back the people that the Göktürks had taken at the end of the Sui. In 626 the new emperor Taizong refused the 3,000 horses and 10,000 sheep that Ilig Khan sent him, and ordered Ilig instead to return the Chinese households he had carried off.[15] After the fall of Ilig an edict sent envoys to buy back the Chinese who had fallen into the hands of the Göktürks in the Sui troubles. They paid in gold and silk. The Xin Tang Shu counts 80,000 men and women, whom the Tang made commoners again.[6] The Zizhi tongjian dates the officials’ report of the total to the fifth month of 631, and the Jiu Tang Shu says that all were returned to their families.[16] Not all came home. The king of Gaochang kept back some who had fled to him, although an edict ordered their return.[17]

When Ilig fell, the Xueyantuo made a different proposal. The Göktürks, they said, had killed Chinese year after year in great numbers, and the emperor should have taken their tribes as slaves to repay the Tang people. Instead he nourished them as children.[18] The Tang did not take their advice. It settled the surrendered Göktürks on its frontier and invested a khan over them with a drum and a banner, as Diplomacy of the Steppe Empires tells.[19]

Fugitives were handed back to those who sought them. Mukan’s envoys asked the Western Wei to put to death Deng Shuzi, the leader of the Rouran remnant, who had fled to the Wei. Yuwen Tai agreed, seized Deng Shuzi and 3,000 others, gave them to Mukan’s envoys and had them killed outside the Qing gate.[20] A Chinese refugee, Yang Qin, had told Tulan Khan that a Sui duke was plotting against the emperor. The Sui Shu says that Tulan seized him and reported it.[4] The biography of Zhangsun Sheng says that Tulan first answered that no such man was among his guests. Zhangsun Sheng bribed Tulan’s officials, found Yang Qin and took him by night. Tulan then seized Suijia and others who had stirred up the khan against the Sui and handed them to Zhangsun Sheng.[21] In AD 14 Wang Mang’s envoys tried to buy back the rebels Chen Liang and Zhong Dai from the chanyu Xian. Xian collected the four rebels and twenty-seven relatives of another man who had killed a Han colonel, and sent them to the envoys in cages and fetters. Wang Mang had Chen Liang and the others burned.[22] Taspar Khan gave up the Qi pretender Gao Shaoyi in 580, when the Zhou envoy He Ruoyi came to persuade him.[20]

Kashgari’s dictionary of the eleventh century has a verse on a routed foe whom the poet could have taken captive. The foe gathered much ransom, and the poet granted him his freedom.[23] The Kutadgu Bilig, also of the eleventh century, tells the commander to see to the ransoming of captive soldiers and to the wounded.[24] Both texts are Karakhanid and show the custom of their own age.

Captives as gifts

Rulers gave captives to one another. After the fall of Dara in 573 Khosrow I chose two thousand women from his prisoners and sent them to the Turks.[25] They drowned themselves in a river before they arrived.[26] In 591 Khosrow II sent to the emperor Maurice the Turkish prisoners taken in the war against Bahram Chobin, as the first-fruits of his victory.[27] Istemi gave the Roman envoy Zemarchos a female slave, a war captive of the people called Kherkhir, before the march against Persia.[28] Prisoners and slaves were among the gifts that courts exchanged, with horses and silk.

Chinese among the steppe peoples

People also crossed the frontier of their own will, or in the course of an embassy. Several are named in the Han Shu and the Shiji.

Zhonghang Yue, a eunuch, was sent north with a Han princess. He did not want to go. He said that if he went he would be a trouble for the Han, and on arrival he went over to the chanyu, who favoured him closely.[2] Li Ling surrendered with his last men in 99 BC. The chanyu admired him, gave him a daughter, and made him a king. The Han put his family to death on a rumour that he was training the Xiongnu. Years later the Han sent three men to call him home. Li Ling answered that he had already put on Hu clothes, and that a man cannot be shamed twice. He died among the Xiongnu after more than twenty years.[29] Li Guangli surrendered later and was given another daughter of the chanyu. His rival Wei Lü had a shaman say that the late chanyu was angry that Li Guangli had not been sacrificed, and Li Guangli was killed at the altar. When rain and snow followed and the herds and people died, the chanyu built him a shrine.[22] Zhang Qian was held more than ten years among the Xiongnu, was given a wife, and escaped with his Hu guide.[30]

The Han court knew the pull of the north. In a debate of 33 BC the official Hou Ying listed the reasons for keeping the frontier garrisons. Many of the slaves and maidservants of the frontier people were unhappy and wished to flee. They said: “We hear that life is pleasant among the Xiongnu, but what can we do when the watch is so strict?” Many of the men who had gone to the army had not come back, and their poor sons and grandsons ran away to join their kin.[22] The Xiongnu, it is held, built part of their crafts and farming with Chinese prisoners and deserters.[31]

At the end of the Sui the same drift ran north. The Sui Shu says that countless Chinese went over to the Göktürks.[4] In 620 Chula Khan put more than ten thousand Chinese at his court under the Sui prince Yang Zhengdao at Dingxiang.[5] They kept the Sui calendar and their own officials.[5] A captive could also change a court. The Qi monk Huilin was carried off to the Göktürks in a raid. He told Taspar Khan that the Qi were rich and strong because of the Buddha’s law. Taspar believed him, built a monastery and sent to the Qi for sutras.[4]

Words and status

The Orkhon inscriptions have two words for the unfree. Kul is a male slave and küŋ a woman who serves. Bilge Khan says of the time of China’s rule that the sons who should have been lords became kul of the Chinese and the daughters who should have been ladies became küŋ.[32] The same pair describes the Kirghiz after the death of their khan Bars Beg, who had been made khan by the Göktürks.[33] It describes the Göktürk people before Ilterish, who “had been turned into serving-women and slaves”.[34] It names the fate that awaited the royal women if Kül Tegin had lost the camp: “those still alive would have gone into slavery”.[35] In the time of conquest, says the inscription, “the slave had come to have slaves of his own”.[36] In the passage on the price of leaving the homeland, Bilge Khan says that the people made their sons slaves and their daughters serving-women.[37]

The passages do not say what status the people had. One study notes that the words are broad and that the passages do not give enough about the social position of those they name.[38] In the eleventh century Kashgari lists qul as slave and qırnaq as a slave girl. He lists til for an enemy captive taken to learn his circumstances, bulun and tutγun for a captive, and tutuγ for a pledge or hostage.[39]

Slave and subject are close words in the sources. In 584 Ishbara Khan asked what the word “subject” meant, and was told that in the Sui a subject was what the Göktürks called a slave.[4] In 576 Türk-shad called the Avars the Göktürks’ runaway slaves.[40] He said that the Alans and the Unigurs, who had trusted in their strength, were now numbered among the Göktürks’ slaves.[40] Wang Mang’s envoys of AD 15 asked the Xiongnu to take the name “Respectful Slaves”.[22] In each case the word describes rank between rulers and not a person bought and sold.

The title of the Xiongnu office over the Western Regions is rendered Commandant of Slaves. The Han Shu says only that it taxed the states and drew supplies from them.[41] Whether it had to do with enslaved people is not known.[41]

Ibn Faḍlān travelled through the land of the Oghuz in 921 and 922.[42] When an Oghuz fell ill and had slaves, they nursed him, and no member of his family came near him. If the sick man was a slave or a poor man, they threw him out into the country and left.[43] The Oghuz carved wooden statues for the men that a dead warrior had killed, and said: “These are his slaves who will serve him in paradise.”[44] The wooden figures belong to the custom of the balbal.

The slave trade in the Arabic and Persian sources

The geographers of the tenth century record a trade in slaves from the steppe and its edges to the Islamic world. The Ḥudūd al-ʿĀlam, a Persian geography written in 982, says that great numbers of Turkish slaves are brought to Farghana.[45] Azerbaijan receives Greek, Armenian, Pecheneg, Khazar and Slav slaves.[46] Darband receives slaves of every kind of infidel living near it.[47] The Khazar slaves in the Islamic lands, it says, mostly come from the Khazarian Pechenegs, and from the country of the Khazars come cows, sheep and “innumerable slaves”.[48] Minorsky’s commentary quotes Gardīzī on the Hungarians, who raided the Slavs and the Rus and took their captives to Byzantine lands to sell them.[49]

Ibn Faḍlān gives the trade on the Volga. The king of the Volga Bulgars could choose one slave in ten from the Rus and the other peoples who came with slaves.[50] At the Rus camps on the river there were young slave girls for the merchants.[51] Kashgari records that a slave could be bought for a horse.[52] The ghulam of the caliphs, a Turkic slave soldier, belongs to the same trade.

These sources are of the tenth and eleventh centuries. They describe the markets of the Islamic world and its neighbours, and they do not show whether the Göktürks or the Uyghurs sold people in the same way.

Limits of the evidence

The sources name captives, slaves and defectors and tell what became of them. They give no figure for the unfree in any steppe empire and no description of how they were held, owned or freed. The treatment of the word kul in the inscriptions remains open. The Xiongnu rule on spoils, the Hun captives of Priscus and the slave markets of the geographers show that people were taken and sold in the steppe world. How large a part of the economy they carried is not known.

References

  1. ^ Parlatır 1983, p. 808–810
  2. ^ a b Shiji, juan 110
  3. ^ Wei Shu, juan 103
  4. ^ a b c d e f Sui Shu (Book of Sui), juan 84
  5. ^ a b c Jiu Tangshu (Old Book of Tang), juan 194; Tongdian, juan 197
  6. ^ a b Xin Tangshu (New Book of Tang), juan 215
  7. ^ Theophanes the Confessor; Scott 1997, p. 447
  8. ^ Priscus; Müller 1851, fr. 8, p. 86
  9. ^ Priscus; Müller 1851, fr. 8, p. 85
  10. ^ Priscus; Müller 1851, fr. 8, p. 93
  11. ^ Priscus; Müller 1851, fr. 8, p. 86–88
  12. ^ Priscus; Müller 1851, fr. 8, p. 94
  13. ^ Priscus; Müller 1851, fr. 1, p. 72
  14. ^ Priscus; Müller 1851, fr. 5, p. 74
  15. ^ Jiu Tangshu (Old Book of Tang), juan 194; Zizhi tongjian (Comprehensive Mirror in Aid of Governance), juan 192
  16. ^ Zizhi tongjian (Comprehensive Mirror in Aid of Governance), juan 193; Jiu Tangshu (Old Book of Tang), juan 3
  17. ^ Xin Tangshu (New Book of Tang), juan 221
  18. ^ Jiu Tangshu (Old Book of Tang), juan 194; Xin Tangshu (New Book of Tang), juan 215
  19. ^ Jiu Tangshu (Old Book of Tang), juan 194
  20. ^ a b Zhou Shu (Book of Zhou), juan 50
  21. ^ Sui Shu (Book of Sui), juan 51
  22. ^ a b c d Han Shu, juan 94
  23. ^ Dīvān Lughāt al-Turk; al-Kāshgharī 1072–1074, p. 305
  24. ^ Kutadgu Bilig; Dankoff 1983, couplet 2402
  25. ^ John of Ephesus; Smith 1860, p. 387–388
  26. ^ John of Ephesus; Smith 1860, p. 389–390
  27. ^ Theophylact Simocatta; Whitby 1986, p. 146
  28. ^ Menander Protector; Blockley 1985, fr. 10.3
  29. ^ Han Shu, juan 54
  30. ^ Han Shu, juan 61
  31. ^ Khazanov 1994, p. 226, 254
  32. ^ Kül Tegin inscription
  33. ^ Kül Tegin inscription
  34. ^ Kül Tegin inscription
  35. ^ Kül Tegin inscription
  36. ^ Kül Tegin inscription
  37. ^ Bilge Khan inscription
  38. ^ Parlatır 1983, p. 808–809
  39. ^ Dīvān Lughāt al-Turk; al-Kāshgharī 1072–1074, p. 266, 287, 305, 330, 353
  40. ^ a b Menander Protector; Blockley 1985, fr. 19.1
  41. ^ a b Han Shu, juan 96
  42. ^ Ibn Fadlan
  43. ^ Ibn Fadlan; Canard 1958, p. 74–75
  44. ^ Ibn Fadlan; Canard 1958, p. 75
  45. ^ Ḥudūd al-ʿĀlam; Minorsky 1970, p. 115–116
  46. ^ Ḥudūd al-ʿĀlam; Minorsky 1970, p. 142
  47. ^ Ḥudūd al-ʿĀlam; Minorsky 1970, p. 145
  48. ^ Ḥudūd al-ʿĀlam; Minorsky 1970, p. 160, 161
  49. ^ Gardīzī (Zayn al-akhbār); Minorsky 1937, p. 321
  50. ^ Ibn Fadlan; Canard 1958, p. 115
  51. ^ Ibn Fadlan; Canard 1958, p. 119
  52. ^ Dīvān Lughāt al-Turk; al-Kāshgharī 1072–1074, p. 287

Sources

Literature

  • İsmail Parlatır, Türk sosyal hayatında kölelik (1983)
  • Anatoly M. Khazanov, Nomads and the Outside World (1994)
  • R. C. Blockley, The History of Menander the Guardsman: Introductory Essay, Text, Translation, and Historiographical Notes (1985)
  • Karl Müller (ed.), Fragmenta Historicorum Graecorum, Bd. IV (darin: Menandri Protectoris fragmenta, griechisch mit lateinischer Übersetzung) (1851)
  • R. Payne Smith (trans.), The Third Part of the Ecclesiastical History of John, Bishop of Ephesus (1860)
  • Michael Whitby, Mary Whitby (trans.), The History of Theophylact Simocatta (1986)
  • Cyril Mango, Roger Scott (trans.), The Chronicle of Theophanes Confessor: Byzantine and Near Eastern History AD 284–813 (1997)
  • M. Canard, La relation du voyage d'Ibn Fadlān chez les Bulgares de la Volga (1958)
  • V. Minorsky, Ḥudūd al-ʿĀlam, "The Regions of the World": A Persian Geography 372 A.H. – 982 A.D., translated and explained, with the preface by V. V. Barthold (1937)
  • V. Minorsky, Ḥudūd al-ʿĀlam, "The Regions of the World": A Persian Geography 372 A.H. – 982 A.D., translated and explained, with the preface by V. V. Barthold, 2nd ed. (1970)
  • Maḥmūd al-Kāshgharī, Dīwān Lughat al-Turk (1072–1074)
  • Robert Dankoff (trans.), Wisdom of Royal Glory (Kutadgu Bilig): A Turko-Islamic Mirror for Princes (1983)

Related

What links here1

Institutions and Titles
Diplomacy of the Steppe Empires

Cite this article

Yavuz, Emre-E. “Captives and the Unfree.” Turkic Atlas, revised 8 November 2026. https://turkicatlas.org/institutions/captives-and-the-unfree/

Last revised: 8 November 2026