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from Part II - Race, Sex, and Everyday Life
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 September 2021
This chapter looks at the enslavement of children (below 16 years of age) from the 5th to the 15th centuries, focusing on the Mediterranean and the British Isles. It uses contemporary documents, such as personal narratives, laws, contracts, letters and ecclesiastical sources, to construct case studies illustrating the major ways that children could become slaves. These include capture in war or kidnapping and sale by pirates and unscrupulous slavers; abandonment as a newborn, rescue, and rearing as a slave; pledging into servitude by parents to pay a debt; and birth to an enslaved mother. Domestic slavery was the most usual fate for children, though a few boys were made into eunuchs destined for elite households in the Byzantine Empire and the Caliphate, and girls might become concubines or sex slaves. There was little official effort to prevent child enslavement, although the Byzantine emperor Justinian attempted to abolish the use of children as debt-pledges and the enslavement of abandoned newborns, and banned castration within the bounds of his Empire. In general, the enslavement of even very young children and their transport across long distances was common and uncontroversial.
There is little modern scholarship specifically on child slavery in late antiquity and the Middle Ages. The collection by Campbell, Gwyn, Miers, Suzanne, and Miller, Joseph C. (eds.), Children in Slavery through the Ages (Athens, OH, 2009) includes only one chapter on child slaves for the period and regions studied here, and it actually focuses on the adult lives of these “slave girls.” Harper’s, Kyle Slavery in the Late Roman World AD 275–425 (Cambridge, 2011) has a valuable chapter on Constantine’s legislation on exposure and sale of newborn children. A more long-range approach to the same topic is Boswell’s, John The Kindness of Strangers: The Abandonment of Children in Western Europe from Late Antiquity to the Renaissance (Chicago, IL, 1998). He argues for the survival of many abandoned newborns and their rescue by “the kindness of strangers,” although he is much too optimistic about their ultimate fate and misinterprets some of the legal evidence. Boswell’s argument that medieval oblation was essentially a continuation of ancient infant abandonment has been refuted, but his book is still the most extended treatment of child slavery in medieval Europe.
Recent work on slavery in the Middle Ages, while not focusing on child enslavement, offers much of importance and relevance. Michael McCormick’s groundbreaking Origins of the European Economy: Communications and Commerce AD 300–900 (Cambridge, 2001) draws on many individual narratives of enslavement, among them those enslaved as children like St. Elias the Younger (especially pp. 244–267 and 733–777). However, McCormick’s thesis that the early medieval slave trade spurred development of the Carolingian economy has been challenged (see Rio, Slavery After Rome and Chapter 18 in this volume), and he focuses on the trans-Mediterranean slave trade between Europe and North Africa at the expense of other important trade networks (see Chapter 14 in this volume). Alice Rio’s recent book, Slavery After Rome, 500–1100 (Oxford, 2017) offers a bold new perspective on what unfree status meant in the early Middle Ages, with attention to the differing trajectories of slavery in Francia, England, Italy, and the Byzantine Empire. She takes an essentially transactional view of freedom in this period (see also Chapter 18 in this volume), where the weak use their status as a tool for negotiating with the more powerful and sell or give themselves to the more powerful in return for sustenance. Children may figure in these negotiations but as objects with which to negotiate rather than agents. Wyatt’s, David Slaves and Warriors in Medieval Britain and Ireland, 800–1200 (Leiden, 2009) stresses the vulnerability of children as well as women in societies of the early medieval British Isles, where raiding and the sexual exploitation of enslaved captives were important elements of male hierarchy and honor.
Iris Origo’s 1955 article “The Domestic Enemy: Eastern Slaves in Tuscany in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries,” Speculum, 39: 321–366 remains essential for understanding the resurgence of domestic slavery in Italian cities in the late Middle Ages. She marshaled extensive archival, literary, and even visual evidence for the presence of many domestic slaves in Florence, who were primarily women and children. Origo also has a brief discussion of the so-called animae (souls), children from the Adriatic region who were not legally slaves but were consigned to service in Italian households. For Spain, Blumenthal’s, Debra Enemies and Familiars: Slavery and Mastery in Fifteenth-Century Valencia (Ithaca, NY, 2008) studies master–slave relations in late medieval Valencia, including disputes over the paternity of slavewomen’s children and claims for freedom by the mothers. Many of the chapters in Reuven Amitai and Christoph Cluse’s recent collection, Slavery and the Slave Trade in the Eastern Mediterranean (c. 1000–1500) (Turnhout, 2017), mention the traffic in children and teenagers.
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