I was reading this Wiki about the Children’s Crusade and was struck by this passage. I never realized that Europeans in the 11th and 12th centuries actually enslaved each other.
Is this the same type of “people as chattel” slavery practiced by Americans in the 1700’s and 1800’s?
Many were sold to non-Christians. North Africans, and indeed most Muslims at the time, would have been fine buying Christian slaves. Christians weren’t too averse to buying Muslim ones, either.
The Norse had slaves, and you could call serfdom slavery.
On a slight tangent to the op, there was a lot of this around the 17th century too.
Yes and no. Yes, in the sense that they were chattel, no, in the sense that large-scale agricultural slavery had gone out of style in Europe in the late Roman period. In general they functioned as servants or one sort or another or at certain specialized labor tasks ( i.e. galley slaves ). In Spain ( where slavery was rather more extensive due to the medieval borders with the Muslim world ) Muslim slaves were often kept by monasteries and independent households as labor, including semi-skilled craftsman such as weavers and blacksmiths. When Aragon took Minorca, the entire population was sold into slavery. Similarly the fate of the Muslims of Lucera after the Angevins replaced the Hohenstaufen in south Italy.
Speaker’s point is generally on target - Christian slaves tended to be exported east and south. Church prohibitions against owning other Christians were frequently renewed, though the fact that the issue kept coming up seems to imply that it remained a problem. Meanwhile Muslim or pagan slaves were occasionally exported north and in Spain in particular were taken as prisoners of war.
There were also used in mining.
With a frequent need for new slaves.
While it sucked to be a serf for sure, there were fundamental differences between serfdom and slavery. Serfs were not chattels, instead they were more like resources associated with the land they lived on, much as a river or mine would be. At the time of fully developed manorialism, if you owned the land and it contained serfs, you were entitled to their labor, but you couldn’t sell them. Also there wasn’t a “serf market” where you could go buy them.
Many of those prisoners of war were treated as slaves until (if) their ransom was paid. After all, why keep them in prison when you can get labor off them? Depending on the labor they were doing, they might actually be better off than in prison… no pumping iron, library and daily walks, in those dungeons.
Exactly. Saladin ordered that all Christians in (ahem… this is my failing memory) Jerusalem be enslaved and sold unless they could pay for their freedom, for example.