The ancient Mediterranean region had been a society of slavery. Slaves then were usually people who had been captured in battle, or the children/descendants of such people. Slavery is distinguished from other sorts of subservience by the fact that slaves are treated as having no will of their own. They cannot say No to any command, no matter how arbitrary or foolish, and they can be bought and sold like animals. Ancient slavery did not have the racial component of later slavery in the Americas, because slaves might be the captured citizens of a different city located only a few dozen miles away, who had (until captured) shared language, religion, and culture with their captors.
The Roman Empire was built on slavery. Rather than just raiding their neighbors, they captured hundreds of people from all over their vast territory. Successful generals would have big parades, with captured slaves in chains walking along with the carts piled high with loot. Some slaves were well treated, but there was no penalty for maltreating one's slaves, and even well treated slaves had nothing that we would call rights. Runaway slaves would be captured and brought back. In the city of Rome itself, slaves probably outnumbered the free people, and the Senate periodically worried that the slaves would figure this out and revolt (which they sometimes did anyway).
Mediterranean-region slaves might be given responsibility as school teachers, or those who ran shops, or those who ran a household, even as the equivalent of policemen in ancient Athens. Certainly not every family had slaves, but all well-to-do ones did. The gladiators who fought for the entertainment of the Roman masses were slaves. The Romans used slaves for agriculture, working them very hard, even to death on big plantations. Many Roman citizens in the countryside worked their own fields, and indeed it was from such yeomen farmers that the Roman legions were recruited, but with a lot of the young men off fighting, slaves made up the difference.
All of this changed in late antiquity. Once the Roman legions stopped winning and bringing home new captured slaves, an economy built on the labor of slaves considered disposable become unsustainable. With the breakdown of many of the structures of the Empire, due in part to changing climate, disease, and the rise of Islam, slaves could just run away. In addition, freeing one's slaves became considered a Christian duty once the Empire became Christian, and it was clear that one was not supposed to enslave someone already a Christian.
Agricultural slavery was replaced during the sixth and seventh centuries by serfdom, as I have discussed earlier. Serfs were not really free (and the term servus was the same Latin word used for slaves), but serfs could not be bought and sold or treated horribly without repercussions. Most importantly, serfs had their own houses and own families and own plots of lands on which they raised their own food, rather than just being worked in gangs until they dropped, to be replaced by new slaves.
Household slavery continued until the eighth or ninth century in some cases, and one would never have wanted to be a serf, but for much of the Middle Ages slavery was not found in the West. Slavs (in the Balkans and further east), who were not yet Christian, might be captured and sold as slaves (Slav is the root of the word slave), and Muslims and Christians might sometimes have engaged in the slave trade with each other around the Mediterranean, but this was rare.
But slavery returned at the end of the Middle Ages. Both legal scholars at the universities and town councils in Renaissance Italy studied Roman law, where there was a great deal said about slavery. North of the Mediterranean, there were attempts to reimpose serfdom, which had been dying out since the twelfth century. as I have discussed earlier. In Italy, which considered itself the heir to Rome, slavery was once again considered appropriate.
And then Europeans started exploring the rest of the world in the late fifteenth century, discovering all sorts of people, especially in Africa and the Americas, who seemed very strange by their standards, thus perhaps to be treated as a lesser race, and who were not Christians. With Roman law as their guide, people of the early modern period re-embraced slavery.
Today, one hopes, almost everyone would agree that slavery, treating humans like animals, is wrong. But it has only been gone in the West (including North America) for about 150 years, and its legacy deplorably still lingers.
© C. Dale Brittain 2022
For more on medieval peasants, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages. Also available in paperback.
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