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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 September 2021
By and large, specialists in Roman slavery have long insisted on how exceptional a phenomenon Roman slavery was, and they have been unconvinced about any link between ancient slavery and medieval serfdom ( Finley, Moses I., “Between Slavery and Freedom,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 6 (1963/4): 233–249; Harper, Kyle, Slavery in the Late Roman World, AD 275–425 (Cambridge, 2011), pp. 508–509). This has not deterred medievalists from arguing over when in their own period ancient slavery can be said to have ended. The problem here is that ancient historians and medievalists are not really talking about the same thing. For ancient historians, the relevant question is not so much the disappearance of slaves as such but rather of a mass “slave society,” whereas medievalists have focused less on quantitative aspects and more on labor or tenancy relations, or the various disabilities attached to slaves as individual subjects. In this last sense at least, it is possible to claim that Roman slavery continued to exist well into the early Middle Ages, even if a Roman slave society did not.
The Carolingian era has been the most widely accepted breaking point for medievalists, starting with the (still fundamental) work of Marc Bloch in the 1920s and 1930s – see Slavery and Serfdom in the Middle Ages: Selected Papers, trans. W. R. Beer (Berkeley, CA, 1975). These essays provided a fundamental basis for all subsequent scholarship on the subject. Charles Verlinden, for instance, in his monumental L’esclavage dans l’Europe médiévale, 2 vols. (Bruges, 1955), believed there were no longer slaves but only serfs by the start of the Carolingian era.
The story of the transition from slavery to serfdom underwent some substantial changes after Bloch, most notably with the triumph of the school of Georges Duby from the 1950s onward – see Rural Economy and Country Life in the Medieval West, trans. Cynthia Postan (Columbia, SC, 1968). Duby argued for a greater level of continuity from Rome than Bloch. For him, the most significant binary divide in Frankish society remained that between “free” and “unfree” right up until the “feudal revolution,” which he saw as taking place in the eleventh century, at which point it was replaced by the divide between “noble” and “serf.” This meant that the general conceptual order of society had not fundamentally changed since antiquity. Duby did not, however, claim that Roman slavery (much less Roman slave society) had continued unchanged up to that point. By the 1990s, a small number of scholars inspired by Duby and feudal mutationism did go so far as to make this claim, but this has remained a minority viewpoint. At the more extreme end is Bonnassie, Pierre, From Slavery to Feudalism in South-Western Europe, trans. Jean Birrell (Cambridge, 1991); more controversial still is Bois, Guy, The Transformation of the Year One Thousand: The Village of Lournand from Antiquity to Feudalism, trans. Jean Birrell (Manchester, 1992). Poly, Jean-Pierre and Bournazel’s, Eric textbook The Feudal Transformation: 900–1200, trans. Caroline Higgett (New York, 1991), which expounds a more classical feudal mutationist consensus, is much more prudent on this count. Duby as well as Bonnassie has been much criticized in the work of Dominique Barthélemy, accessible in English in his The Serf, the Knight and the Historian, trans. Graham R. Edwards (Ithaca, NY, 2009). Barthélemy has argued strongly in favor of wresting the Carolingians away from late antiquity and placing them more firmly in continuity with the central Middle Ages.
The rather Franco-French nature of the feudal mutationist debate has not stopped it from having a strong impact on other national historiographies. Italian historiography discusses many of the same issues though tends to offer a less strong sense of rupture in the chronology – see Panero, Francesco, Schiavi, servi e villani nell’Italia medievale (Turin, 1999). German historiography has always tended to make more room than French historiography for changes in the legal content of unfreedom as a motor for change in its own right, in particular by paying greater attention to the appearance of “intermediary” or “half-free” categories, partly populated by bound freed men. It places many of these changes in the Carolingian period: Goetz, Hans-Werner, “Serfdom in the Carolingian period,” Early Medieval Europe, 2 (1993): 29–51; Esders, Stefan, Die Formierung der Zensualität (Berlin, 2010).
Broadly, more recent discussions on the subject of unfreedom in the eighth and ninth centuries have tended to see serfdom as their true object (see for instance Goetz, “Serfdom in the Carolingian period”), rather than being placed in the context of the revival of studies on medieval slavery which has been gathering pace since 2000 for other periods and places. Hammer’s, Carl I. book A Large-Scale Slave Society of the Early Middle Ages (Abingdon, 2002), dealing with Carolingian Bavaria, is less controversial in its content than its title implies since it does not posit fundamentally different conditions of life for the unfree but only opts to define them as “slaves” on the basis of terminological continuity and the highly conservative content of law codes. The important exception is the slave trade, interest in which has been significantly reinvigorated by McCormick’s, Michael Origins of the European Economy (Cambridge, 2001) and “New Light on the Dark Ages: How the Slave Trade Fuelled the Carolingian Economy,” Past & Present, 177 (2002): 17–54 – though this does not challenge the idea that serfdom had become the norm in Francia by the ninth century.
Histories of the Byzantine Empire are numerous. A concise and readable recent summary can be found at Stathakopoulos, D., A Short History of the Byzantine Empire (London, 2014). The general history of the Byzantine economy is covered in brief by Laiou, A. and Morrisson, C., The Byzantine Economy (Cambridge, 2007). Fiscal and monetary issues, including excellent coverage of the scale of public and private wealth, are treated at Hendy, Michael F., Studies in the Byzantine Monetary Economy, c. 300–1450 (Cambridge, 1985).
Histories of Byzantine slavery include Hadjinicolaou-Marava, A., Recherches sur la vie des esclaves dans le monde byzantin (Athens, 1950), which is brief and readable, and Köpstein, H., Zur Sklaverei im ausgehenden Byzanz (Berlin, 1966), which is excellent on later Byzantine slavery. Rotman, Y., Byzantine Slavery and the Mediterranean World, trans. J. M. Todd (Cambridge, MA, 2009) offers plentiful sources for early and middle Byzantine slavery. For the earliest period (“late antiquity”), Harper, K., Slavery in the Late Roman World, AD 275–425: An Economic, Social, and Institutional Study (Cambridge, 2011) is magisterial.
There is no adequate comprehensive study of the law of slavery in Byzantium despite the abundance of sources. M. Melluso, La schiavitù nell’età giustinianea: Disciplina giuridica e rilevanza sociale (Besançon, 2000) surveys the sixth-century material, focusing on its relationship to earlier Roman law, and Köpstein, H., “Sklaven in der Peira,” in Fontes Minores IX, Burgmann, L., ed. (Frankfurt, 1993), pp. 1–33, focusing on the eleventh-century Peira, is a model of the possibilities for further work. For the slave trade, the analysis of slave dealing by Italian merchants in later Byzantine Constantinople in Verlinden, C., “Traite des esclaves et traitants italiens à Constantinople (XIIIe–XVe siècles),” Le moyen âge, 69 (1963), pp. 791–804 remains unsurpassed.
There has been little dedicated analysis of the deployment of slave labor in Byzantium. Kolias, T. G., “Ein zu wenig bekannter Faktor im byzantinischen Heer: die Hilfskräfte (παῖδες, πάλληκες, ὑπουργοί),” in Polypleuros Nous: Miscellanea für Peter Schreiner zu seinem 60. Geburtstag (Munich, 2000), pp. 113–124, which explores the military context, helps explain why Byzantine society drew no firm distinction between slaves and other socially disadvantaged laborers in this, as in many other contexts. The best treatment of eunuchs is Tougher, S., The Eunuch in Byzantine History and Society (New York, 2008). Dependent agricultural labor has been explored in much more detail. Exemplary studies include Lemerle, Paul, The Agrarian History of Byzantium: From the Seventh to the Twelfth Century – Sources and Problems (Galway, 1979); Kaplan, Michel, Les hommes et la terre à Byzance du VIe au XIe siècle (Paris, 1992); and Bartusis, M. C., Land and Privilege in Byzantium: The Institution of the Pronoia (Cambridge, 2012) for the middle Byzantine period, and Laiou-Thomadakis, Angeliki, Peasant Society in the Late Byzantine Empire: A Social and Demographic Study (Princeton, NJ, 1977) for later Byzantium. The question of attitudes to slavery in Byzantium is also ripe for further exploration, but Kazhdan, A. P., “The Concepts of Freedom (eleutheria) and Slavery (douleia) in Byzantium,” in Makdisi, G., Sourdel, D., and Sourdel-Thomine, J. (eds.), La notion de liberté au Moyen Age: Islam, Byzance, Occident (Paris, 1985), pp. 215–226, offers a good starting point.
For slavery in medieval British contexts, see Holm, Poul, “The Slave Trade of Dublin, Ninth to Twelfth Centuries,” Peritia, 5 (1986): 315–345; Pelteret, David A. E., Slavery in Early Medieval England (Woodbridge, 1995); and Wyatt, David, Slaves and Warriors in Medieval Britain and Ireland, 800–1200 (Leiden, 2009). For slavery in Scandinavia and Iceland, see Helle, Knut, “Scandinavian Slavery,” in Helle, Knut (ed.), The Cambridge History of Scandinavia, Vol. 1: Prehistory to 1520 (Cambridge, 2003), pp. 308–311; Karras, Ruth M., Slavery and Society in Medieval Scandinavia (New Haven, CT, 1988); Brink, Stefan, “Slavery in Scandinavia, as reflected in Names, Runes and Sagas,” in Iversen, Tore and Hernæs, Per (eds.), Slavery Across Time and Space. Studies in Slavery in Medieval Europe and Africa (Trondheim, 2002), pp. 107–127; Skyum-Nielsen, Niels, “Nordic Slavery in an International Setting,” Medieval Scandinavia, 11 (1978–1979): 126–148. For slaving and the Baltic Crusades, see Ekdahl, Sven, “The Treatment of Prisoners of War during the Fighting between the Teutonic Order and Lithuania,” in Barber, Malcolm (ed.), The Military Orders; Fighting for the Faith and Caring for the Sick (Aldershot, 1994), pp. 263–269. For Christian perspectives on slavery, see Glancy, Jennifer A., Slavery in Early Christianity (Oxford, 2002). For a gendered perspective, see Stuard, Susan M., “Ancillary Evidence for the Decline of Medieval Slavery,” Past & Present, 149 (1995): 3–28. For archaeological perspectives, see Taylor, Timothy, “Ambushed by a Grotesque: Archaeology, Slavery and the Third Paradigm,” in Pearson, Mike Parker and Thorpe, Ian J. N. (eds.), Warfare, Violence and Slavery in Prehistory: Proceedings of a Prehistoric Society Conference at Sheffield University (Oxford, 2005), pp. 225–233. For useful global comparative studies, see Miller, Joseph C., The Problem of Slavery as History: A Global Approach (New Haven, CT, 2012); Patterson, Orlando, Slavery and Social Death (Cambridge, MA, 1982). Other important and useful works include Bloch, Marc, Slavery and Serfdom in the Middle Ages, trans. W. R. Beer (Berkeley, CA, 1975); Epstein, Steven A., Speaking of Slavery: Color, Ethnicity and Human Bondage in Italy (Ithaca, NY, 2001).
Verlinden’s, Charles magisterial work L’esclavage dans l’Europe médiévale, Vol. 1: Péninsule ibérique – France (Bruges, 1955) is one of the earliest works identifying the Iberian Peninsula as a region where ancient slavery “survived.” For works highlighting medieval Iberia’s importance in the development of the Atlantic world slave system, see Phillips, William D. Jr., Slavery in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia (Philadelphia, PA, 2014); Blackburn, Robin, The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492–1800 (London, 1997); and, more recently, Martínez, Iván Armenteros, “Towards the Atlantic Mediterranean. Catalan Participation in the Early Atlantic Slave Trade (Late Fifteenth–Early Sixteenth Century),” in Cavaciocchi, Simonetta (ed.), Schiavitù e servaggio nell’economia europea, secc. XI-XVIII/Serfdom and Slavery in the European Economy, 11th–18th centuries (Florence, 2014), pp. 631–650. For works locating the “origins” of racialized slavery in medieval Iberia, see Sweet, James H., “The Iberian Roots of American Racist Thought,” William and Mary Quarterly 54 (1997): 41–66; and Frederickson, George, Racism: A Short History (Princeton, NJ, 2002).
For slavery in Visigothic Spain, see King, P. D., Law and Society in the Visigothic Kingdom (Cambridge, 1972), pp. 159–182, and Verlinden, L’esclavage, Vol. 1, pp. 61–101, still among the most extensive discussions of the subject. For a discussion of the lives of “elite” slaves in Umayyad al-Andalus, see Meouak, Mohamed, Saqaliba, eunuques et esclaves à la conquête du pouvoir: Géographie et histoire des élites politiques “marginales” dans l’Espagne umayyade (Helsinki, 2004). Except for Arévalo, Raúl González, “Cautiverio y esclavitud en el Reino de Granada (siglos XIII-XVI),” Vínculos de Historia, 3 (2014): 232–257, there is comparatively little scholarship examining slavery in al-Andalus after the fall of the Umayyad caliphate.
A classic discussion of the transition from slavery to serfdom in northern, Christian-controlled territories in the Iberian Peninsula is Bonnassie, Pierre, From Slavery to Feudalism in South-Western Europe, trans. Jean Birrell (Cambridge, 1991). For the so-called revival of slavery in late Reconquest-era “Spain,” spurred by a demand for female domestic laborers, see Bensch, Stephen, “From Prizes of War to Domestic Merchandise: The Changing Face of Slavery in Catalonia and Aragon, 1000–1300,” Viator, 25 (1994): 63–93. Rodríguez, Jarbel, Captives and Their Saviors in the Medieval Crown of Aragon (Washington, DC, 2007) shows the widespread preoccupation among Iberian Christians with the plight of coreligionists held by infidels.
For classic works examining how black Africans were described in late medieval Iberian chronicles and their enslavement justified, see Wolf, Kenneth Baxter, “The ‘Moors’ of West Africa and the Beginnings of the Portuguese Slave Trade,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 24 (1994): 449–469; Evans, William McKee, “From the Land of Canaan to the Land of Guinea,” American Historical Review, 85 (1980): 15–43. Saunders, A. C. de C. M., A Social History of Black Slaves and Freedmen in Portugal, 1441–1555 (Cambridge, 1982) examines the lives of black African slaves and freed persons in late medieval Iberia. More recent work on this includes Didier Lahon, Esclavage et confréries noires au Portugal durant l’ancien régime (1441–1830) (doctoral thesis, EHESS, Paris, 2001), 2 vols.; and Lahon, , “Esclavage, confréries noirs, sainteté noire, et puréteé de sang au Portugal (XVI et XVIII siècles),” Lusitania Sacra 2a serie, 15 (2003): 119–162.
A scholarly desire to portray Native Americans as essentially innocent of the abuse of power has limited the study of indigenous slavery in the Americas. The ramifications of this in the Mesoamerican historiography have already been outlined in this chapter. In the case of North America, it was long acknowledged that one of the motivations for warfare was the capture of young women and children who could be adopted and thus bolster the population. However, because so many scholars sought to perceive gentleness in Native American cultures, they emphasized the kind treatment that these young people experienced and how eager they were to become part of their new communities. An article on “white Indians” – that is, those colonists who preferred to remain with their indigenous captors than to return home, even when they could – inspired and influenced a whole generation of scholars: Axtell, James, “White Indians of Colonial America,” William and Mary Quarterly, 32 (1975): 55–88. Again, only years later did scholars feel confident that their peers and the public were finished with vilifying native peoples. As Davis, Natalie Zemon insisted in “Iroquois Women, European Women,” in Mancall, Peter and Merrell, James (eds.), American Encounters: Natives and Newcomers from European Contact to Indian Removal (New York, 2000), p. 104, “Let us consider the enemy wife.” There must, she argued, have been “important consequences for consciousness.” Since then, scholars more readily recognize that slavery formed a part of indigenous culture that merits attention. See most recently, Christina Snyder, Slavery in Indian Country: The Changing Face of Captivity in Early America (Cambridge, MA, 2010), especially chapter 1.
The study of pre-Columbian slavery in much of South America lags behind that of Mesoamerica or North America because we have neither indigenous-language sources nor a plethora of varied European ones produced at contact. The one exception is of course the study of the Inca culture, where, as Silverblatt has pointed out in Moon, Sun, and Witches: Gender Ideologies and Class in Inca and Colonial Peru (Princeton, NJ, 1987), slavery took the remarkable and perhaps unique form discussed in this essay. Elsewhere, young scholars are proceeding as well as they can, drawing together the work of modern ethnologists and archaeologists with a careful reading of early reports written by Portuguese and Spaniards. See, for example, the work of Matallana, Susana, “Yanaconas: Conquistador Indians and Colonizers of the New Kingdom of Granada,” Fronteras de la Historia, 18 (2013): 21–45. Such scholars must in effect seek circumstantial rather than direct evidence.
There has recently been explosive growth in the study of contact-era enslavement of indigenous peoples not only by Europeans but also by other indigenous peoples. The earliest such study was of Brazil: Hemming, John, Red Gold: The Conquest of the Brazilian Indians (Cambridge, MA, 1978). More recent award-winning titles include such works as Brooks, John, Captives and Cousins: Slavery, Kinship and Community in the Southwest Borderlands (Chapel Hill, NC, 2002); Gallay, Alan, The Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of the English Empire in the American South (New Haven, CT, 2002); and Hamalainen, Pekka, The Comanche Empire (New Haven, CT, 2008). The widespread social destruction in certain regions in certain periods now appears almost unfathomable; all seem to agree that although the patterns of enslavement were in place long before, the extent of the phenomenon that unfolded could only have occurred in the presence of Europeans. It does not seem likely that the next generation will have recourse to the notion that responsibility for the enslavement that occurred ultimately lies at the feet of Native Americans themselves, as happened for a while in scholarship on the African slave trade. The nature of slavery in precontact America differed profoundly from the institution introduced by Renaissance Europeans.
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