Slavery in the Medieval Millennium
Craig Perry2021, The Cambridge World History of Slavery
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Abstract
SLAVERY IN THE MEDIEVAL MILLENNIUM * craig perry, david eltis, stanley l. engerman, and david richardson The three preceding volumes of The Cambridge World History of Slavery (henceforth CWHS) already in print have had a major shaping influence on this final collection of essays and have served to underscore the importance of the present volume. Nonspecialists and the general public alike are acutely aware of the existence, indeed centrality, of slavery as an institution in the postcontact Americas and in ancient Greek and Roman societies. But general knowledge of the history of slavery between the fall of Rome and the rise of the transatlantic plantation complexes might be charitably described as lacking precision. Most readers would recognize that extreme social inequality developed in the larger and more complex polities in this millennium-long era and that some form of coerced labor emerged in just about every society. If pressed for an example, many would be more likely to mention not slavery, but serfdom, a practice closely associated with, though not confined to, medieval Europe. Yet the global perspective underpinning the essays below suggests that slavery continued to flourish in all parts of the world for which records and material objects have survived. In short, both the dismemberment of the Roman Empire and Columbian contact had large effects on who was enslaved but quite possibly not on the incidence of the institution across the globe. What also follows, given what is known of historical global population distributions, is that most enslaved persons in recorded history have not been African and male, much less of Slavic (from which the word "slave" is derived) origins, but rather could come from any number of regions and were most likely female. 1 The impression that the practice of slavery passed through a onethousand-year hiatus is firmly rooted in the Western-language scholarship * We thank this volume's contributors for their valuable feedback on this chapter. Thanks are also due to Roxani Margariti and Devin Stewart and to the members of the Department of Middle Eastern and South Asian Studies at Emory University who participated in a workshop on the chapter. Any mistakes are our own.
Key takeaways
- In the medieval millennium the term "slave" or its equivalent was thus not reserved solely for instances in which an owner assumed title to all the individual rights of the enslaved.
- Given that most slaves were female and that in most societies their offspring assumed the status of the mother, it is even possible that a majority of the global slave population in any given time was born into slavery rather than subsequently enslaved.
- Most conquered subjects were not enslaved, but, initially, many were often reduced to slavery, distributed to military forces as spoils of war, or put to direct use in service of the empire.
- For domestic slavery, free men's demand for sexual slaves and enslaved labor drove the slave trade.
- Such sources are perhaps the closest medieval analogue to the slave narratives of the early modern and modern period that richly describe slavery from the enslaved person's point of view.
