in a recent book on the Slavonic peoples in the Middle East, the Russian Orientalist and historian Dmitrii E. Mishin examined a major but little- studied aspect of the historical relations between eastern Europe and the Middle East in Sakaliba (Slaviane) v islamskom mire v rannee srednevekove (Saqaliba:

The Slavs in the Islamic World of the Early Middle Ages) (Moscow: Institut vostokovedeniia ran, 2002), 365 pp. Its five substantial chapters discuss how Arabs and other Muslim peoples used the word Saqaliba in their languages, and its evolving meaning.

Mishin states (8) that Saqaliba was probably borrowed from the Greek ethnonym Sklavos, which was first rendered Saklaby in Arabic, and then later Saqaliba. Arab travellers and geographers used it to denote the various countries and peoples of Europe during the early Islamic centuries. (See, for example, Ibn Fadlan, Ibn Fadlan and the Land of Darkness: Arab Travellers in the Far North, trans. Paul Lunde and Caroline Stone [London: Penguin, 2012], 3, and the discussion on 222. Ibn Fadlan was a tenth-century Arab traveller to the northern Volga region.) Mishin then divides use of this Ara­bic word into two kinds. First, during the first Islamic century, the period of the Umayyads (661-744), it covered Slavic soldiers in the Byzantine armies, which the Arabs faced in Asia Minor during the early Muslim-Christian wars. These soldiers fought together in their own regiments and were easily identified as being of European and Slavonic origin. They spoke their own language and kept to their own traditions and customs. In time, some of them deserted the Byzantines and went over to the Muslim side, where for a long time they clung to their language and customs. They lived primarily on

the frontiers of the early Caliphate, and for a while newcomers kept arriving from eastern Europe. Mishin identifies these people as Slavonic “colonists.” And he seems to imply that they formed an early, distinct military corps somewhat like the later Mamluks in Egypt, or like other military slaves elsewhere, but as free men. However, with the ascendancy of the Abbasids (750-1258), more and more settlers from the eastern Iranian province of Khorasan were transplanted into Asia Minor, the principal centre of these military settlers, so the Saqaliba began to assimilate more rapidly.

Mishin's second class of Saqaliba consisted of European bondsmen or slaves pure and simple; that is, people who were captured in war or by Mus­lim raiding parties in Christian lands and sold into slavery for service in the wider Dar al-Islam (Realm of Islan). There existed a constant demand for slaves in the Muslim world because the principle of early manumission was deemed virtuous in Muslim tradition, and was often followed; freed slaves thus had to be replaced, and since the enslavement of free Muslims was strictly forbidden, their replacements had to come from outside the Dar al-Islam, that is, in the Christian north or the “pagan” (kafir) south and east.

During Carolingian times, that is, in the eighth and ninth centuries, the wars in central Europe between the Germans and the Slavs resulted in the enslavement of large numbers of people of Slavonic origin and their sale to the Muslim states to the south, especially to Muslim Spain, which was then still ruled by the Umayyads. The Umayyad Caliphate was rich, and the court at Cordova was splendid, and required a large number of slaves to help run the machinery of state. So it imported slaves from Christian Europe, and most especially castrated slaves, to be used as eunuchs in the administration and to guard the harems of the numerous elite. That terrible operation was usually performed in the Carolingian Empire to the north, as Islamic law forbade the procedure. Eventually, the word Saqaliba was restricted to those eunuchs who staffed the Umayyad court. With time, this usage of the word spread across the Islamic world and lost some of its original ethnic meaning.

There thus seems a parallel here with the use of the Latin Sclavus (orig­inally meaning a Slavonic person), which in the Middle Ages replaced the ancient Latin servus for “slave,” as the Latin Sclavus also lost its original ethnic sense with time and, as in the English word “slave,” the French esclave, and so on, became the common name all over western Europe for an unfree person.

Mishin ends his book with a summary of the Saqaliba in culture. Grad­ually Islamized, they were able to always keep their identity. The colonists kept their Slavonic names; the slaves did not forget their maternal language, and they remembered their Slavic traditions, and so forth. Even more im­portant, the Saqaliba were conscious of their identity as part of a unified and homogeneous force. “This spirit of the Saqaliba,” Mishin proposes, “shows that within the Islamic community, they formed a solid group that is worthy of the attention of researchers” (362-4).

Finally, Mishin reports that during the early Mongol era, the twelfth-cen­tury, Jewish-born Persian historian and vizier Rashid al Din (1247-1318), who composed a great world history that used even some European sources, distinguished at first, as did his predecessors, between the Saqaliba and the Rus', but was also one of the very first to note that later the Rus' were Saqaliba or Slavs (98). In this way, Rashid al-Din provides some external evidence to support the “Varangian,” or Scandinavian theory of the origins of the Rus', who by then had affected European history as a whole.