- Swedish Vikings, the Varangians or Rus 1) The Slavic people are not called that way because they were slaves. But the slaves were called that way because the Slavic people were often enslaved: "Excluding the ambiguous mention by Ptolemy of tribes Slavanoi and Soubenoi, the earliest references of "Slavs" under this name are from the 6th century AD. The word is written variously as Sklabenoi, Sklauenoi, or Sklabinoi in Byzantine Greek, and as Sclaueni, Sclauini, or Sthlaueni in Latin. The oldest documents written in Old Church Slavonic and dating from the 9th century attest slovÄ›ne to describe the Slavs around Thessalonica. Other early attestations include Old Russian slovÄ›nÄ› "an East Slavic group near Novgorod", Slovutich "Dnieper river", and Croatian Slavonica, a river. The name is normally linked with the Slavic forms sláva "glory", "fame" or slovo "word, talk" (both akin to slušati "to hear" from the IE root *ḱlew-). Thus slovÄ›ne would mean "people who speak (the same language)", i.e. people who understand each other, as opposed to the Slavic word for foreign nations, nÄ›mtsi, meaning "mumbling, murmuring people" (from Slavic nÄ›mÑŠ - mumbling, mute). For example, the Polish word Niemcy means "Germans" or "Germany" (as do its cognates in many other Slavic languages). However, some scholars have advanced alternative theories as to the origin of the name. B.P. Lozinski argues that the word sláva once had the meaning of worshipper, in this context meaning practicer of a common Slavic religion, and from that evolved into an ethonym. S.B. Bernstein speculates that it derives from a reconstructed Proto-Indo-European *(s)lawos, cognate to Greek laós "population, people", which itself has no commonly accepted etymology. Meanwhile Max Vasmer and others suggest that the word originated as a river name (compare the etymology of the Volcae), comparing it with such cognates as Latin cluere "to cleanse, purge", a root not known to have been continued in Slavic, although it appears in other languages with similar meanings (cf. Greek klyzein "to wash", Old English hlÅ«tor "clean, pure", Old Norse hlér "sea", Welsh clir "clear, clean", Lithuanian šlúoti "to sweep")." Source and further information: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavic_peoples 2) "slave Etymology: From Middle English, from Old French sclave, from Mediaeval Latin sclavus (“‘slave’”) < Byzantine Greek σκλάβος < Old Slavonic словѣнинъ, словѣне (Slav). Slavs were often enslaved during the early Middle Ages, hence the semantic correspondence. }" Source and further information: http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/slave 3) "In the Viking era starting c. 793, the Norse raiders often captured and enslaved weaker peoples they encountered. In the Nordic countries the slaves were called thralls (Old Norse: Þræll). The thralls were mostly from Western Europe, among them many Franks, Anglo-Saxons, and Celts. Many Irish slaves participated in the colonization of Iceland. There is evidence of German, Baltic, Slavic and Latin slaves as well. The slave trade was one of the pillars of Norse commerce during the 6th through 11th centuries. The Persian traveller Ibn Rustah described how Swedish Vikings, the Varangians or Rus, terrorized and enslaved the Slavs. The slave raids came to an end when Catholicism became widespread throughout Scandinavia. As in the rest of Catholic Europe, the Scandinavian representatives for the church held that a Christian could not morally own another Christian. The thrall system was finally abolished in the mid-14th century in Scandinavia." "Chaos and invasion made the taking of slaves habitual throughout Europe in the early Middle Ages. St. Patrick, himself captured and sold as a slave, protested an attack that enslaved newly baptized Christians in his Letter to the Soldiers of Coroticus. Slavery during the Early Middle Ages had several distinct sources. The Vikings raided across Europe, though their slave raids were the most destructive in the British Isles and Eastern Europe. While the Vikings kept some slaves for themselves as servants, known as thralls, most people captured by the Vikings would be sold on the Byzantine or Islamic markets. In the West the targets of Viking slavery were primarily English, Irish, and Scottish, while in the East they were mainly Slavs. The Viking slave trade slowly ended in the 1000s, as the Vikings settled in the European territories they once raided, Christianized, and merged with the local populace." "The Islamic World was also a main factor in Medieval European slavery. From the early 700s until the early Modern time period (rough the 18th or 19th centuries) Muslims consistently took European slaves." " The Middle Ages from 1100 to 1500 saw a continuation of the European slave trade, though with a shift from the Western Mediterranean Islamic nations to the Eastern, as Venice and Genoa, in firm control of the Eastern Mediterranean from the 12th century and the Black Sea from the 13th century sold both Slavic and Baltic slaves, as well as Georgians, Turks, and other ethnic groups of the Black Sea and Caucasus, to the Muslim nations of the Middle East. The sale of European slaves by Europeans slowly ended as the Slavic and Baltic ethnic groups Christianized by the Late Middle Ages. European slaves in the Islamic World would, however, continue into the Modern time period as Muslim pirates, primarily Algerians, with the support of the Ottoman Empire, raided European coasts and shipping from the 16th to the 19th centuries, ending their attacks with the naval decline of the Ottoman Empire in the late 16th and 17th centuries, as well as the European conquest of North Africa throughout the 19th century." Source and further information: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_slavery