BYZANTINE

SLAVERY and the

MEDITERRANEAN
WORLD

YOUVAL ROTMAN
T R A N S L AT E D B Y J A N E M A R I E TO D D
 Byzantine Slavery and the Mediterranean World
Youval Rotman

Harvard University Press, 2009

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Book Summary

This book fills a gap left by historians of slavery. It links the history of ancient and
modern slavery by focusing on the evolution of medieval slavery. Taking as a starting point
the question of what happened to ancient slavery, the author unveils the story that this
institution underwent throughout a period of seven centuries by analyzing it in the context of
the Mediterranean world in a period of great transformations.
The Mediterranean of the Late Roman world has changed dramatically due to the
arrival of the Germanic kingdoms, Islam and the Slavs. The Byzantine Empire, a direct
continuation of the Roman Empire, had to adapt itself to an international scene shared by
four political and religious blocks. The book studies the changes that the institution of
slavery underwent during this period of great historical transformation, and reveals the
adaptable character of the institution of slavery. An historical analysis of the dichotomy
between what constitutes a free person and a slave allows the author to reject both the
traditional definition of slavery as “social death” and the economic definition of slave as
human property. Slavery appears here not as “the complete opposition” of freedom, but as a
civil status, intrinsic to the social structures of pre-abolitionist civilizations.
At the dawn of a new millennium we are witnessing the emergence of forms of non-
freedom generally termed today as “contemporary slavery.” The book provides a unique
contribution to the understanding of this reappearance by analyzing a period in history in
which the existence of slavery was not derived of the definition of freedom. The book
focuses on the study of two questions: what happened to ancient slavery; and how freedom
is defined in the medieval eastern Mediterranean world. The book argues that the
particularity of medieval slavery in the eastern Mediterranean – the world of Byzantium –
lies in the dynamics of the concepts of free person and slave, dynamics which was an
integral part of the changes the Mediterranean underwent from Antiquity to the Middle
Ages.
As for ancient slavery, the book shows that slavery neither declined, nor was replaced,
but instead was modified in response to the evolution of medieval societies. A strictly
economic approach to define slavery is rejected here in favor of social-historical approach.
Submission, dependency and non-freedom are all concepts that accompany the institution of
slavery. But they should be understood in a broader perspective because they came into play
in many other social relationships. The classic definition of the slave as “a thing” (res)
proves, thus, to be an obstacle for the historian since it implies a perspective that isolates the
relationship slave-master from all other social relationships.
The book consists of four chapters that propose complementary approaches to the
analysis of Byzantine slavery: slavery in historiographic discourse; in the Mediterranean
geopolitical scene; in Byzantine society and economy; and, in the thought and cultural
evolution of the ancient world into the medieval world.

Chapter 1: Theoretical Approaches

This chapter outlines two prevailing historiographies regarding ancient and medieval
slavery and shows that these modern definitions do not correspond with the social reality of
these societies. Modern research has traditionally considered that the political and social
passage from the Roman Empire to the Middle Ages brought with it a decline in the use of
slaves. Modern scholars of Byzantium have echoed this assertion. However, the sources
from the 6th through the 11th centuries show that slaves were very much a part of the
medieval Mediterranean world. To explain this contradiction between the sources and the
attitude prevalent in modern historiography, the chapter analyzes the different currents of
historiographic perspectives regarding slavery. Modern research, influenced by Marxism has
tended to regard slaves as the “proletariat” of Antiquity. This perspective does not take into
consideration the fact that slaves did not hold a distinct economic status and that their
juridical status was not equivalent to an economic one. Such a perspective stems, in fact,
from the models of slave-owning societies in the New-World, where the motives of slavery
were purely economic.
The other common historiographic view, developed in the sixties and the seventies,
leaves the economic dimension aside. It offers a social perspective of slaves-owning
societies with a stratified social structure consisting of different degrees of freedom. The
slaves are at the bottom of this “social ladder” being the “absolute non-free persons”. Such a
perspective not only implies a “freedom ladder”, but inverts this ladder by defining slavery
and all other non-free persons against an “absolute freedom,” a term which did not have a
specific definition in antiquity and is thus confused in modern scholarship with concepts of
ancient citizenship.
The central question of this book is, in fact, how to define slavery and freedom in the
social and historical context of the medieval Mediterranean world. The author therefore
dispenses with modern definitions discussed up to this point, and goes on to examine the
civil status of the slaves in the remainder of the book. Civil status here means a juridical
definition that delimits certain groups within society without necessarily placing them in a
stratified social structure. The book, thus, focuses on the shifting boundary between free
person and slave.
 Chapter 2: Medieval Slavery in a New Geopolitical Space
The medieval Mediterranean world was no longer the Roman world of one empire
facing barbarians, but a world composed of different states. The changing definitions of free
person and slave were inextricable from the changes of the Mediterranean political map.
According to classical Roman law a captive of the Romans and a Roman captured by the
enemy had the same status; that of a slave. For Romans captured by the enemy, that meant
losing their rights of a free person within the Empire. The property of such persons stayed in
holding and their marriage was dissolved.
A change in the way the captive was perceived was introduced in the 6th-8th centuries.
This change was in the large part due to the growing significance of a Christian identity for
the Empire’s inhabitants. On the one hand, Justinian’s legal reinforcement of Christian
marriage prohibited the dissolution of a captive’s marriage. On the other hand, the Church
developed a new religious duty: the ransoming of Christian captives from the “barbaric”
enemy, a term which had taken on a new meaning – that of non-Christians. The continual
wars in the same period against the Arabs, Byzantium’s new rival on the Mediterranean
scene, and their threat to the existence of the Byzantine State help to develop a new identity
for the free Christian Byzantines who must be redeemed by their community. In the 8th
century, their religious community became synonymous with the State. Henceforth,
Byzantine legislation settled Byzantine captives’ status by determining that the civil status of
a free person in the Empire even if they became slaves de facto would be retained.
A parallel development to the custom of ransoming coreligionists in Judaism and Islam
in the same period led in the 8th century to a new international Mediterranean practice: the
exchanging of prisoners of war. The definition of a free person was thus connected to their
identification with the religion of their State. The Byzantine government applied this new
definition by liberating prisoners of war if they agreed to convert, remarry and remain as
married Christians in the Empire. The same policy was also practiced in the Arab Abbasid
Empire. The demarcation between the free person and the slave seems, thus, to have been
fluid on the medieval Mediterranean map because of the political and religious context. The
definition of the free person was modified in line with the new religious identity the State
provided to its inhabitants. This in turn ushered in a new sense of political and religious
responsibility. However, these changes caused a problem for those civilizations: how to
continue to procure slaves? The chapter continues with a thorough analysis of the medieval
slave trade and the economic aspects of medieval geopolitics

The changes in the geopolitical scene implied a new commercial reality. The chapter
proposes to study this new reality by constructing a map of slave trafficking out of
historiographical, archeological and other documentary data. This map places Byzantium,
the Arab world and the Caucasus as components of the Mediterranean world in their larger
geopolitical frame, instead of limiting the map to the Mediterranean Sea and relegating
Byzantium to the margins. An analysis of this map shows that a confrontation between those
regions and the European regions produced not only a new worldwide commercial
relationships, but also a new conception of economics which was closely tied to the
medieval geopolitical changes.
In the medieval international commercial traffic the source of slaves was Central and
Eastern Europe, while the markets were found in the South-East and South-West of the
Mediterranean. The salve trade seems to flow from North to South. The fact that the Slavic
kingdoms, from the Balkans to the Urals, did not mint until the 10th-11th centuries explains
their demand for Arab and Byzantine coins, and completes the map of commercial
exchanges. Demand for slaves in the South-East answered the demand for hard currency in
the North.
Nevertheless, the merchants did not journey directly from North-West to South-East.
Instead, they made long detours that bypassed the regions under Byzantine domination. In
fact, Byzantium was in competition with the Arab world for slaves from the same sources.
Byzantine government, therefore, manipulated international commercial in order to keep its
economic hegemony by using its strategic geographic position between its three domestic
Seas: the Black Sea, the Aegean Sea, and the Adriatic Sea. The place of Venice proved to be
crucial for the control of Italian commercial routes between Europe and the Arab world, and
the Byzantine politics in Italy was thus understood in view of its commercial strategy. The
same strategy was applied also in the Caucasus and the Black Sea through a Russian-
Byzantine political and commercial pact.
This chapter shows that the slave trafficking, the definitions of the institution of
slavery, and the changes in respond to the medieval geopolitical scene, were all interrelated.
The question of whether these processes had repercussions on the social status of the slave is
the subject of the following chapter.

Chapter 3: Slavery a Component of a Medieval Society

Slaves did not form a distinct group in Byzantine society according to their economic
roles or socioeconomic positions. Their particularity can be explained according to their
civil status which defined their social situation. This chapter examines the social position of
slaves in Byzantium as an example of a medieval Mediterranean society. Possession of
slaves was not the exclusive privilege of the most influential or the wealthiest people.
Contrary to conventional historiographic perspective that sees medieval slaves exclusively in
domestic roles Byzantine sources show them present also in urban manufacture and
agriculture. There they share the same roles with wage-earning workers. Moreover, the
presence of paroikoi, Byzantine dependant peasants, in the documents of the time
(especially starting from the 9th century) does not mean that they replaced the slaves as a
new type of “non-free” labor. In fact, the nature of their “non-freedom,” based on their fiscal
status, differed entirely from slavery.
As for the slaves’ domestic functions, what we call today “household” does not
correspond to the medieval notion of a Byzantine household (Greek oikos). This unity was
not limited to the place of residence, but formed an economically independent family unit.
Slaves held a special place due to their dependency on their master for everything relating to
their private life and their economic activities. Nevertheless, the Byzantine oikos contained
other dependents grouped under a new term: “my men/people” (Greek hoi anthrôpoi mou).
This expression refers to the men and women subordinated to the oikos’ masters, or in other
words their subjects. They could become such by heritage, by birth or through military
subordination. Their dependency, whether in an urban or an agrarian milieu, was always
economic.
Slaves could also become hoi anthrôpoi of their master once they were freed. After
their emancipation they remained always connected to the master by an economic
dependency and continued to be part of the oikos. This economic structure demanded the
presence of slaves and showed the need for their market. The slaves’ civil status hence
defined their special type of dependency. The last chapter of the book examines what
constitutes this definition.

Chapter 4: Evolution of the Concept of Unfreedom

This last section examines the dynamics of the definition of the slave as a human
being, and the way in which those dynamics reflect changes of social and religious
structures. The chapter studies this subject from two angles: the way in which slavery is
presented in the thought of the Church Fathers, and the way in which the slave is perceived
as a Christian. That the Church did not condemn the institution of slavery is well known.
Nevertheless, the cultural consequences of Christian expansion on slavery should not be
considered just from this perspective. The institution of slavery implies a social relationship
between slave and master that corresponds perfectly to the global Christian perspective
according to which one and only God is the master of the universe. This god is named
kurios, a word that was until that period employed in a religious context in Judaism alone. In
that perspective social submission is a central religious element. The submission of the slave
to the master is but an example: the slaves must fulfill the obligations vis-a-vis their master
since these are also obligations vis-a-vis God.
Nevertheless, Christianity is a religion open to everyone and that included slaves. In
Byzantium being Christian implied, among other things, being subject to religious
legislation, which meant that slaves were no longer considered a thing – res. This is clearly
demonstrated in the example of marriage. In Antiquity this institution was exclusively
available for free persons. In the Middle Ages, following the evolution of the Christian
institution of marriage, the State not only allowed marriage for slaves, but even enforced it
as the only family union possible.
This change in the way the slave was perceived was also manifested in literature. In
classical and late antique literature slaves were mostly represented as passive objects in
narratives. They had no name, and seldom thought or spoke. Even when they had active role,
their presence depended almost entirely on the presence of their masters. However, starting
from the 9th century and even more in the 10th-11th centuries the sources reveal other aspects
of slavery. Though some sources still presented the slave as passive objects, others began to
depict the slave as an active agent with his/her own point of view. Moreover, certain
hagiographers expressly chose a slave as a hero or a heroine for their story. The chapter then
discusses the changing representation of slaves in literature.
 The archetype who had the greatest impact on this evolution is the Biblical story of
Joseph’s enslavement. This story was adapted as a model in many Byzantine Saint Lives
because it corresponds to the difficult Mediterranean reality, in which many Byzantines were
kidnapped, sold and found themselves slaves in enemy lands. The literature of the same
period (10th-11th centuries) developed another model of slave: the foreign slave who is
imported, converted, emancipated, who could even become a saint. Contrary to the first
model that presents a saint enslaved by the enemy, here the slave must become a free person
in order to pursue a holy mission. In other words, being a slave was an obstacle to holiness.
This opposition can be explained in a broader social perspective. In fact, all these stories
present a conflict between loyalty to the ultimate master, God, and loyalty to a private
master. Here we are no longer in the early Christian perspective, according to which the first
implies also the second. Presenting slaves as individuals therefore meant presenting them in
a conflict of loyalty between their spiritual and corporal masters. This tripartite relationship
of slave-master-God omits a cardinal element in that conflict: the equivalent of God on
earth: the emperor.
The change to the cultural perception of the slaves as individuals expressed, in fact, a
change in the way state authorities viewed them. Instead of being regarded as private
property, they were considered human beings. This perspective was closely tied to the
changes in the definitions of private and public, which was a crucial medieval phenomenon.
In other words, the mental and cultural changes to the image of the slave reflected the
encroachment of the public domain into the private. Land ownership provides another
example of this process. In order to profit, the imperial government began to intervene in the
relationship between land owners and their property – relationship that had been out of its
control in classic Roman time. It thus changed the relationship between owner and property
to a tripartite relationship. The same process occurred with respect to human property, i.e.
slaves. In applying its authority to the relationship between master and slave, the imperial
government evoked the question of whether slaves were private or public subjects. The
chapter concludes with the idea that state authorities could not recognize the existence of
private subjects.
In Byzantium public power manipulated the institution of slavery by constantly
modifying its juridical definition to the detriment of the private potestas – power/authority.
This had consequences on the relationship between master and slave as on the one between
father and child, as the Byzantine jurists affirmed in the 11e century: “relative to the
emperor’s power, the authority of the pater familias (family’s father) is nothing”. Public
power could not do otherwise since it was built from the private potestates and on their
expense, or, in other words, on the expense of their personal “liberties”. As for the slaves,
this process signified that they were no longer considered the res/thing of another.
Modifying their civil definition proved to be an easy thing for the public power since it was
a juridical definition. The evolution of ancient slavery appears to be, more than anything
else, the story of the rise of public power.