Slavery in the Byzantine Empire

doi:10.1017/9781139024723.019

Chapter 19 - Slavery in the Byzantine Empire

from Part V - Africa, the Americas, and Europe

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 September 2021

Noel Lenski

Edited by

Craig Perry ,

David Eltis ,

Stanley L. Engerman and

David Richardson

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Craig Perry: Affiliation:
Emory University, Atlanta
David Eltis: Affiliation:
Emory University, Atlanta
Stanley L. Engerman: Affiliation:
University of Rochester, New York
David Richardson: Affiliation:
University of Hull

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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.

Keywords

Byzantium slave law Christianity manumission slave prices slave trade eunuchs anti-slavery

Type: Chapter
Information: The Cambridge World History of Slavery , pp. 453 - 481

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781139024723.019 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2021

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References

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A Guide to Further Reading

Histories of the Byzantine Empire are numerous. A concise and readable recent summary can be found at Stathakopoulos, D., A Short History of the Byzantine Empire (London, 2014). The general history of the Byzantine economy is covered in brief by Laiou, A. and Morrisson, C., The Byzantine Economy (Cambridge, 2007). Fiscal and monetary issues, including excellent coverage of the scale of public and private wealth, are treated at Hendy, Michael F., Studies in the Byzantine Monetary Economy, c. 300–1450 (Cambridge, 1985).

Histories of Byzantine slavery include Hadjinicolaou-Marava, A., Recherches sur la vie des esclaves dans le monde byzantin (Athens, 1950), which is brief and readable, and Köpstein, H., Zur Sklaverei im ausgehenden Byzanz (Berlin, 1966), which is excellent on later Byzantine slavery. Rotman, Y., Byzantine Slavery and the Mediterranean World, trans. J. M. Todd (Cambridge, MA, 2009) offers plentiful sources for early and middle Byzantine slavery. For the earliest period (“late antiquity”), Harper, K., Slavery in the Late Roman World, AD 275–425: An Economic, Social, and Institutional Study (Cambridge, 2011) is magisterial.

There is no adequate comprehensive study of the law of slavery in Byzantium despite the abundance of sources. M. Melluso, La schiavitù nell’età giustinianea: Disciplina giuridica e rilevanza sociale (Besançon, 2000) surveys the sixth-century material, focusing on its relationship to earlier Roman law, and Köpstein, H., “Sklaven in der Peira,” in Fontes Minores IX, Burgmann, L., ed. (Frankfurt, 1993), pp. 1–33, focusing on the eleventh-century Peira, is a model of the possibilities for further work. For the slave trade, the analysis of slave dealing by Italian merchants in later Byzantine Constantinople in Verlinden, C., “Traite des esclaves et traitants italiens à Constantinople (XIIIe–XVe siècles),” Le moyen âge, 69 (1963), pp. 791–804 remains unsurpassed.

There has been little dedicated analysis of the deployment of slave labor in Byzantium. Kolias, T. G., “Ein zu wenig bekannter Faktor im byzantinischen Heer: die Hilfskräfte (παῖδες, πάλληκες, ὑπουργοί),” in Polypleuros Nous: Miscellanea für Peter Schreiner zu seinem 60. Geburtstag (Munich, 2000), pp. 113–124, which explores the military context, helps explain why Byzantine society drew no firm distinction between slaves and other socially disadvantaged laborers in this, as in many other contexts. The best treatment of eunuchs is Tougher, S., The Eunuch in Byzantine History and Society (New York, 2008). Dependent agricultural labor has been explored in much more detail. Exemplary studies include Lemerle, Paul, The Agrarian History of Byzantium: From the Seventh to the Twelfth Century – Sources and Problems (Galway, 1979); Kaplan, Michel, Les hommes et la terre à Byzance du VIe au XIe siècle (Paris, 1992); and Bartusis, M. C., Land and Privilege in Byzantium: The Institution of the Pronoia (Cambridge, 2012) for the middle Byzantine period, and Laiou-Thomadakis, Angeliki, Peasant Society in the Late Byzantine Empire: A Social and Demographic Study (Princeton, NJ, 1977) for later Byzantium. The question of attitudes to slavery in Byzantium is also ripe for further exploration, but Kazhdan, A. P., “The Concepts of Freedom (eleutheria) and Slavery (douleia) in Byzantium,” in Makdisi, G., Sourdel, D., and Sourdel-Thomine, J. (eds.), La notion de liberté au Moyen Age: Islam, Byzance, Occident (Paris, 1985), pp. 215–226, offers a good starting point.