wiki page on slaves, chapter: jews Jewish merchants  See also: Jewish views on slavery § Post-Talmud to 1800s Records of long-distance Jewish slave merchants date at least as far back as 492, when Pope Gelasius permitted Jews to import non-Christian slaves into Italy, at the request of a Jewish friend from Telesina.[29][30][31] By the turn of the 6th to the 7th century, Jews had become the chief slave traders in Italy, and were active in Gaelic territories. Pope Gregory the Great issued a ban on Jews possessing Christian slaves, lest the slaves convert to Judaism.[31][32]  By the 9th and 10th centuries, Jewish merchants, sometimes called Radhanites, were a major force in the slave trade continent-wide.[13][33][34] Jews were one of the few groups who could move and trade between the Christian and Islamic worlds.[34] Ibn Khordadbeh observed and recorded routes of Jewish merchants in his Book of Roads and Kingdoms from the South of France to Spain, carrying (amongst other things) female slaves, eunuch slaves, and young slave boys. He also notes Jews purchasing Slavic slaves in Prague.[13][31][35] Letters of Agobard, archbishop of Lyons (816–840),[36][37][38][39] acts of the emperor Louis the Pious,[40][41] and the seventy-fifth canon of the Council of Meaux of 845 confirms the existence of a route used by Jewish traders with Slavic slaves through the Alps to Lyon, to Southern France, to Spain.[13] Toll records from Walenstadt in 842–843 indicate another trade route, through Switzerland, the Septimer and Splügen passes, to Venice, and from there to North Africa.[13] As German rulers of Saxon dynasties took over the enslavement (and slave trade) of Slavs in the 10th century, Jewish merchants bought slaves at the Elbe, sending caravans into the valley of the Rhine. Many of these slaves were taken to Verdun, which had close trade relations with Spain. Many would be castrated and sold as eunuchs as well.[13][25] The Jewish population of Crimea was a very important factor in the trade in slaves and captives of the Crimean Khanate (Tatars) in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries.[42] Jews would later become highly influential in the European slave trade, reaching their apex from the 16th to 19th centuries.[13]