In Rome and other ancient civilizations, people became slaves in one of two ways. One way was when poor people went into debt, and the law allowed them to be enslaved when they couldn’t pay their debts. (The Romans eventually abolished this practice.) The other method was military conquest, which usually involved seizing and enslaving large populations at a time.
As early as the seventh century, Saint Bathilde (wife of King Clovis II) became famous for her campaign to stop slave-trading and free all slaves; in 851 Saint Anskar began his efforts to halt the Viking slave trade. That the Church willingly baptized slaves was claimed as proof that they had souls, and soon both kings and bishops—including William the Conqueror (1027-1087) and Saints Wulfstan (1009-1095) and Anselm (1033-1109)—forbade the enslavement of Christians.
Since, except for small settlements of Jews, and the Vikings in the north, everyone was at least nominally a Christian, that effectively abolished slavery in medieval Europe, except at the southern and eastern interfaces with Islam where both sides enslaved one another’s prisoners. But even this was sometimes condemned: in the tenth century, bishops in Venice did public penance for past involvement in the Moorish slave trade and sought to prevent all Venetians from involvement in slavery. Then, in the thirteenth century, Saint Thomas Aquinas deduced that slavery was a sin, and a series of popes upheld his position, beginning in 1435 and culminating in three major pronouncements against slavery by Pope Paul III in 1537.
So slavery was outlawed in some places in the early Middle Ages, and by the high Middle Ages it was illegal to enslave any Christian, while the number of Muslim prisoners of war used as slaves was relatively insignificant.
Thank you. Do you agree with Dirk Struik’s implied argument that this may be a key reason that advanced civilization arose in Christian Europe rather than somewhere that slavery was practiced?
(Wikipedia describes Professor Struik as “Dutch mathematician and Marxian theoretician.” His writings includes such items as Lectures on classical differential geometry … but he’s also shown as co-author with Marx and Engels on Birth of the Communist manifesto. :smack: )
Criminals being a sweeping exception. France and Italy in particular were notorious for the use of criminals ( a gamut ranging from rapists to political prisoners ) and “Christian heretics” as galley slaves alongside Muslim prisoners. And really exceptions slipped through the cracks all the time.
Relative to the trans-Atlantic African trade or mass Roman agricultural slavery? Certainly. But in general it was no small thing. Not for nothing that Fernand Braudel called Livorno the “Algiers of Christianity.” To quote Stephanie Nadalo:
*As Bono articulates, nineteenth-and twentieth-century scholarship consistently dismissed the enslavement of early modern Muslims in Europe in favor of a chronology that began with the galley slaves of antiquity and skipped to early colonialism and African plantation slavery. In more recent decades, Italian and French scholarship has done much to correct this imbalance, as is evident in numerous international conferences and two recent volumes of
Quaderni Storici dedicated to slavery in Europe and the Mediterranean.
However, with a few notable exceptions, Anglophone contributions remain skewed toward a popular interest in piracy and the graphic horrors of European enslavement in the Barbary Coast.
This bias reflects the availability of early modern sources, which abound in polemical Christian captivity narratives published in European languages. In contrast, Muslim slaves did not typically participate in the literary genre of captivity narratives…*.
Struik’s point (“vast supplies of slaves …[would allow] a life of leisure based on slavery”) depends not on the absence of slavery, but on the absence of “vast supplies of slaves.” It would be interesting to know approximately what percentages of the populations of Greece and Rome of antiquity, of ancient China, Islamic Empire, and medieval Europe were enslaved. (I realize this may be difficult to answer for several reasons.)
Estimates can be tough for ancient societies. I’ve seen overall estimates of the slave population for the 2nd century Roman state at ~15%, with much higher concentrations in prime agricultural regions of 25-40% population. This jibes reasonably well with the population of slaves in the American South in 1860, where slave populations varied from ~13% of the population in border states to ~47% in the “lower south”. Both the Roman empire and the American south were economically dependent on massive amounts of agricultural slave labor.
By contrast in 13th-15th century Italy ( where slavery was much more common than in northern Europe ), slave populations may have hit 4-5% in areas with major access to the slave trade, like Genoa and Tuscany. Most would be galley slaves, but slaves were also common as household servants, with light-skinned slaves fetching higher prices. However slaves were not used extensively as agricultural or construction labor and economies were not dependent on them ( large galley navies were a bit ).
Algiers, which basically made its living as a slave mart, may have hit a total population of 20-25% slaves at its height, but that was a population mostly in transit. Livorno at one point early in its history may have briefly rivaled that, but usually it was more in line with that 4-5% figure.
As time went on the value of slaves even in southern Europe decreased as even states dependent on galleys made more and more creative use of criminal proceeding to acquire cheap labor. Sentenced criminals made for cheaper slaves than purchased ones. The Uskoks of the Senj ( basically Croatia-based pirates operating under the loose aegis of the Habsburgs in the 16th-early 18th centuries ) tended to prefer to ransom their captives ( both Muslim and Christian ) rather than selling them into slavery, because it was usually more profitable. At times of war in the Mediterranean the Uskoks could sometimes take advantage in windfall prices from Italian states eager to quickly “recruit” more oarsmen, but usually slaves were sold for quick convenience or because ransoms couldn’t be raised at all. Folks may have still liked the occasional pretty girl slave to serve in a household, but peasants worked cheaply enough that the demand was light.
Welllll… Charles held Holland and the three Spanish Crowns under personal union, all by inheritance, but Holland wasn’t part of the Spanish Empire; it was equal to his other crowns, not part of any of them. By impose in the first place, I mean Charles’ bid for the German Empire, a bid which was his right thanks to Holland, but for which he emptied Castille’s coffers (those of the High Navarre wouldn’t even have paid for the first leg of the trip; going for Aragon’s was a lot more complicated than using Castille’s - and getting the Castillian Parliament to agree took him several tries, the final and finally-succesful meeting took place in the same town from where he set sail).