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39 results

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  • 12 - Slavery among the Visigoths
  • from Part IV - Social and Religious Histories of Slavery on the Borders of the Empire and Beyond
  • Edited by Chris L. de Wet, Maijastina Kahlos, University of Helsinki, Ville Vuolanto, University of Tampere, Finland
  • Book: Slavery in the Late Antique World, 150 – 700 CE
  • Published online: 27 January 2022
  • Print publication: 17 February 2022, pp 251-280
  • View extract

    Summary

    The question of Visigothic slavery has generally been treated in the context of larger studies on the Visigoths or of the Mediterranean economy rather than studies devoted to slavery. Even when it has been examined as a thing unto itself, it has tended to get folded into larger narratives of the development of social relations in the early Middle Ages. Marxist historians, such as Abilio Barbero, Marcelo Vigil, and Chris Wickham, have attempted to fit the evidence into a historical materialist narrative that posits a decline of slavery and slaveholding in the post-Roman world as states contracted and serfs or peasants replaced slaves as the primary agricultural producers. This narrative has been countered by French social historians, especially Georges Duby and Pierre Bonnassie, who argued that slavery continued to predominate in the early medieval West, giving way to serfdom only in the tenth century.

  • Chapter 19 - Slavery in the Byzantine Empire
  • from Part V - Africa, the Americas, and Europe
  • Edited by Craig Perry, Emory University, Atlanta, David Eltis, Emory University, Atlanta, Stanley L. Engerman, University of Rochester, New York, David Richardson, University of Hull
  • Book: The Cambridge World History of Slavery
  • Published online: 09 September 2021
  • Print publication: 12 August 2021, pp 453-481
  • View extract

    Summary

    Byzantium continued traditions of slaveholding it inherited from the Roman Empire, but these were transformed significantly from the fourth century onward as slavery came to play a diminished role in the generation of economic surplus. Laws governing slaveholding gradually diminished the power of slaveholders and improved the rights of slaves by restricting a master’s right to abuse, prostitute, expose, and murder slaves and their children. Legal norms also eliminated penal servitude, opened the door wider to manumission, and created new structures for freeing enslaved war captives through the agency of the Christian church. Simultaneously, new forms of semi-servility arose with the fourth-century invention of forms of bound tenancy, which largely replaced the need for slaves. Byzantine society commonly used slaves in household and industrial contexts but only sporadically for agriculture, although slave prices remained constant through the eleventh century and even increased beginning in the thirteenth century as Italian traders turned Constantinople and Crete into conduits for slave commerce from the Black Sea. From the fourth century onward, Christian discourse began questioning slavery as contrary to natural and divine law, a tradition that continued throughout Byzantine history without ever leading to a call for abolition.

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