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Slavery to Serfdom
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0:06
Since the discovery of agriculture in the Neolithic Era slavery became widespread in all the ancient civilizations of the world, from the Americas to China. People would be taken slaves as a result of conquests or raids, because of the debts they had been unable to repay and for a simple reason of being born in a slave family. Slavery was the primary mode of production in such ancient European civilizations as Greece and Rome,
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as it was considered the most efficient and fastest way to increase economic productivity. It wasn’t until the late Roman Empire, when the process of transition from slavery to serfdom started. In this episode, we are going to focus on the gradual decline of slavery, along with the emergence of serfdom in Europe and its coexistence with slavery. What is a slave? The great Greek philosopher Aristotle described the slave as a “property
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with a soul”. Plato suggested that a slave is a tool with a voice, which may also be regarded as an animal. French medievalist Pierre Bonnasie offers this definition: “The slave appears as a de-socialized being whose production and reproduction were entirely under the control of another. A being: certainly not, in the eyes of the free, a man or a woman. De-socialized: since played on the margins of the human community;
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it is clear that free persons reduced to servitude lost their status, and no longer existed for the group, even the family, from which they came.” Slaves did not possess any rights. They could be killed, mutilated, or tortured at the whim of their master without any consequences, and were often categorized together with livestock, i.e. as a living being, who were absolutely rightless, the sole purpose of which was to serve their master. They had no right to own property,
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no rights over their children, as children born into slave families would be automatically considered slaves as well and could be separated from their family by the master, and were used in agriculture, mining, maintenance of the household, as entertainers for their masters, including gladiators and sex slaves. Sometimes a slave would rise to the position of respect in Roman households as tutors for children of their masters and their advisors,
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but in the vast majority of cases, the life of a Roman slave was that of constant overwork, lack of respect, and very poor living conditions. Rome is a classic example of a slave society, as its territorial expansion and constant military victories ensured the high number of slave imports from the-mid Republic period until the start of the decline of the Empire in the 4th century. The Roman society viewed slavery as the logical way of ensuring productivity, as all but the poorest
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Roman households had slaves. It is difficult to know the exact number of the slave population in Rome, but estimates show that millions of slaves were forced to work for the Romans. British historian Keith Hopkins claims that by the late first century BC Italy and Sicily alone has 2-3 million slaves, as from 225 BC to 31 BC, slaves grew from representing 15 percent of the population to 35 percent. His American colleague Kyle Harper argues that in the mid
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to late Empire period nearly 5 million slaves resided on the territory of the Roman Empire.
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The gradual decline of the Roman Empire was hastened by the crisis of the Third Century. Millions of Romans perished as a result of the Antonine Plague and then the Plague of Cyprian. This was followed by a temporary division of the Roman Empire into 3 states. The civil war, the foreign threat coming from the Germanic tribes and the Sassanid Empire, economic collapse, general instability throughout the Empire caused breakdown of trade across the Roman Empire.
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The slave population decreased due to the plagues and inability of the Roman Empire to capture new slaves as a result of military expeditions, and the decrease of the slave population was one of the causes of the drop in economic productivity within the Empire. The high number of slaves allowed the large Roman landowners to produce valuable crops like olives and grapes, which would be transported within the Empire through its trade network. With the breakdown of
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trade and with the trade routes no longer being safe landowners focused on producing the goods of the primary necessity shifting from profiting from trade to sustaining themselves. The third century crisis in the Roman Empire had a huge negative impact on cities as well. The breakdown of trade caused city economies to suffer, prompting thousands of unemployed lower-class free men to move to the countryside in search of jobs and security.
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They would agree to work for the landowners, who would give their lands to them as rents in exchange for their labour and a portion of the produce, which allowed these poverty-stricken free men and women to sustain their families. This development caused the creation of a completely new class in Roman society - the coloni. The majority of the coloni in the Roman Empire consisted of the poorest free people, along with freed slaves, who even when freed, out of lack
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of options often chose to work for people who used to be their masters, as they did not own any land. Initially, their status was that of free men and women, but Emperor Diocletian adopted a law making the coloni bound to the land aiming to ensure the collection of more taxes. They were not allowed to leave the lands they rented or worked on without the permission of the landowner. Their status became hereditary - now a child of a colonus was a colonus too.
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The coloni were not allowed to sue their landlords, apart from the complaints related to changes to rent payments agreed between the sides. Even if their landowners would change, they would still be bound to the land they worked on. If a land they worked on was sold to another landowner, the coloni on this land would be part of the deal too and would work on the same land for a new landlord. They were not slaves, but they were not free men and women anymore either.
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Emperor Constantine passed the law stipulating that “coloni who seek to flee ‘should be put in irons like slaves, so that they may be compelled by a servile penalty to perform the duties appropriate to them as free men”. The law of 393 AD adopted during the reign of Flavius Honorius stated that coloni should be “considered slaves of the land on which they were born”. Furthermore, slaves and coloni would receive the same type of punishment in case of being
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found guilty of a criminal offence, or in case of accusing their master or employer of a crime. The punishment for the latter was being stabbed to death.
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Overall, the historians agree that the coloni system was the original form of serfdom, which would then become the dominant system of production in Medieval Europe. Until recently the mainstream understanding of the transition from slavery to serfdom was linear, as it was believed that the emergence of the coloni caused the decline of slavery, as the remaining slaves in the Roman Empire became the coloni. The French historian Marc Bloch
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argued that slavery drastically declined in the Roman Empire as a result of an increase in the price of slaves due to a shortage of slave supply. British historian Moses Finley proposed theory, according to which slavery was gradually replaced by other types of production and labour. But more recently historians have argued that the decline of slavery was more of an up and down process and it didn’t just disappear overnight following the emergence of the coloni
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and until the 11th century it was prevalent along with serfdom in Medieval Europe. The decline of slavery happened due to a number of factors, but it did exist prominently a few centuries after the fall of the Western Roman Empire. One of the blows to slavery was the breakdown of the inter-continental trade system and the decrease of inter-continental warfare, the primary source of overseas slaves. The late Roman Empire was mostly engaged in defensive wars,
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which largely prevented them from acquiring new slaves, and while the war was not particularly uncommon in Medieval Europe, until the achievement of some degree of stability and centralized power under Charlemagne, most of the wars took place within Europe. This prevented Roman Empire-level enslavement, which had numerous episodes where tens of thousands were enslaved as a result of a single military victory. But this blow to slavery was partially compensated
9:48
by the fact that even in the Carolingian era many people sold themselves or their family members to slavery in order to survive poverty or due to the inability to pay their fines or repay their debts. The main difference between slavery in the Roman Empire and Medieval Europe is concerned with the nationality of slaves as the decline of trade and inter-continental warfare due to the fall of the Roman Empire made it very unlikely for slaves from far away countries to be
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seized and brought to Europe. New slaves were predominantly members of neighbouring lands captured in raids, people who often shared the same language and culture with their captors. Another factor causing the decline of slavery in Medieval Europe were regular slave revolts, which were made possible by the weakening of the centralized state power. There were several slave revolts in the Gaul during the period of the Norse invasions. The chaos caused by
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the Viking raid on Paris in 885 allowed slaves living in this region to revolt. Slaves would often kill their masters or just flee individually. The 643 edict of the Lombardian King Rothari mentions that runaway slaves would form into bands and attack slave-owning estates. In 702 the Visigoth King in Spain called Egica passed a law obliging all his subjects to seize runaway slaves. A failure to do so would result in a punishment of 300 lashes. This demonstrates that
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the problem of runaway slaves was widespread and caused concern for the monarch of Medieval Europe.
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The relationship between slavery and Christianity was more complicated than many tend to believe, as while eventually Christianity played a role in the decline of slavery, for quite a long period the Church supported slavery. As early as 324 AD the Church Council of Granges ruled that anyone inciting slaves to revolt against their masters should be anathematized. As late as 914 the Church Council of Altheim compared slaves running from their masters with Christians running
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away from the church. The Church preached resignation and obedience to God's will and called on Christians to prepare for the afterlife instead of acting for a better life in this world.
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This support of slavery was justified with the Letter to the Ephesians written by the apostle Paul: “Slaves, obey your earthly masters with fear and trembling, single-mindedly as serving Christ”. Nevertheless, the Church also preached a humane attitude towards slaves. In the 9th century abbot Regino of Prum told the bishops to deprive those who have killed slaves of communion for two years.
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The Church also encouraged slave owners to free their slaves as manumission was considered a pious act. But there was a degree of hypocrisy here as the Church was itself one of the largest slave owners of Medieval Europe, and prohibited bishops and abbots to free slaves working in churches under their supervision, demanding compensation from them for such actions. The single most effective blow on slavery by the Church was arguably its decision to
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prohibit Christians from becoming slaves in the 6th century. While it did not help Christians, who were already slaves, it drastically decreased the opportunities for the creation of new slaves. It took a while for this prohibition to be implemented in practice, but this decision coupled with regular acts of manumission preached by the Church caused a decline in the number of slaves in Medieval Europe.
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Although in the 5th century, the Church forbade slaves from access to the priesthood, it baptized them and allowed them to participate in religious ceremonies. Slaves often attended the same church as free peasants and often worked the same fields, which along with inter-marriage gradually dissolved social boundaries between these two distinct classes. Initially, free men and women were prohibited from marrying slaves, but the church’s eventual
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recognition of the religious validity of such marriages was a further blow on slavery. Slaves and freemen together tilled the land and had more or less the same poor standard of life. Social boundaries between these two classes were gradually disappearing. The decline of cities, trade, and large markets in Medieval Europe decreased the demand for manufactured goods and abundant amounts of agricultural produce. This decreased the
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interest of landowners and masters from using their land for trade and profiting from it, which was making slavery obsolete. There was no need in large groups of slaves working on master’s fields and landowners preferred to rent out their lands to slave families and peasants, effectively turning them into serfs. Technological progress, particularly the upgrade of water mills, made large slave workforce unnecessary, as new tools and techniques allowed for fewer people
15:16
to do the work, which previously required many slaves. Also since slave families were allowed to keep some of the surplus produce to themselves, their motivation to work and produce more on the rented land was higher. Particularly, the Germanic nobility started to employ slaves by renting out their newly acquired land parcels to them. In some regions, slaves who settled in his frontier lands, with an aim to make them work on his rented lands were granted a complete pardon.
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As Pierre Bonnassie puts it slavery “did not die from one blow, but as a result of very violent shocks, spread over time and interspersed with temporary revivals”. But it was a long process, and despite what many previous historians claimed, slavery did not die with the emergence of serfs and the fall of the Western Roman Empire. The social and political prominence of slavery in Medieval Europe is proved by the laws adopted in those countries. 46% of all articles of law
16:24
adopted in the Visigothic Kingdom from 567 to 700 were on slavery. This figure is 24% for Bavaria and 13% for the Salic Law. There are numerous mentions of slavery in the laws adopted by Charlemagne. However, by the mid 11th century such mentions stopped being made, which indicates that by then Europe was already done with slavery or it was on negligible levels. Now the era of serfdom dawned in Europe, which would continue until the 19th century in different parts of the continent.
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The final issue we want to discuss in this episode is the difference between slaves and serfs. Undoubtedly, the vast majority of slaves and serfs had had very difficult lives full of hunger, exhaustion, and lack of respect. Nevertheless, there are significant distinctions between the two classes, as serfdom is considered to be an upgrade over slavery at least in terms of rights. Legally and in practice slaves did not possess any rights, as masters could kill them
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without any questions asked right until the laws of the Church and of some Medieval European states started recognizing their rights, which was essentially how they transformed into serfs. In contrast, serfs were not bound to any master, they were bound to the lands they were working on. A serf had obligations to their lords to till their lands, graze their cattle, pay the rent, fight their wars, but a lord was not allowed to kill a serf. The master could not deny his
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serf the amenities of the Church, work him on holy days, or demand actions of him that were immoral. The serfs had the rights accorded to them by natural law - they could resist a lord attempting to take his life or one attempting to withhold the necessities of life from them. Slaves, particularly in ancient times lived in overcrowded prison-like barracks, while serfs often had a small hut to live in with their families on the lands they leased. All of
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the produce from the work of a slave was owned by a master and it was up to the master to decide how they were going to feed the slaves. In contrast, serfs only had to pay their rent to the landowner and could keep the remaining harvest to themselves, although it was often still insufficient. Slaves could be separated from their families and sent to work wherever the master pleased to send them, while the marriage of serfs was considered a holy union in front of God,
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which provided some extra rights in comparison with slaves. Serfdom was still fundamentally unjust and degrading, as it continued the trend of benefitting the few at the expense of the many, but undoubtedly, it was an upgrade over slavery, the ugly phenomenon, which still exists in the world with estimated 40 million people still living the life of rightless slaves to this day.
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