Slavery or What Happens to a Dream Deferred
Written by admin on May 21st, 2011indicates that there was some kind of authoritative protection for them. It is also said that as per common belief (and the stories in the Bible) slave labour was not used to build the pyramids. The pyramids were built by citizens who had no work due to floods in the Nile.
As in Egypt, the ranks of the slaves elsewhere were also made up of slave children born of parents in slavery, victims of unpaid debt, abandoned children, convicted criminals and prisoners taken in wars. It would appear that nearly 25% of the population of the Roman empire before its explosive expansions were slaves. The Greek city states owed quite a lot for their developments to slave labour, and records of slave keeping are extant from Mycenaean Greece. In the neigbouring city state of Sparta, an entire population of some other country was held as slaves, and were called Helots. Greeks were believed to have been somewhat harsh in their treatment of slaves, who constituted as much as 30% of the population of the ancient city of Athens.
With the expansion of the Roman empire, more and more countries were subjugated, leading to a plethora of slaves captured from Mediterrnean and Europe. Oppressive controls exercised by an elite minority over such a vast mass of people often gave rise to slave revolts, the most furiously waged and notably bloody of which was the Third Servile War under the leadership of the slave Spartacus. The slave population consisting of Arabs, Jews, Africans, Germans, Thracians, Gauls and Celts and many more were not only used for works but also for amusement in gladiatorial combats and sexual slavery. More and more and particularly in the late Republican period, the slaves became an important economic tool for the creation of wealth in Rome. They were kept under close watch, and runaway slaves were invariably crucified to serve as a warning to others. With a strict citizenship law in force, qualifying only native-born adult males, there was a time when slaves in Rome far outnumbered the citizens.
Norsemen slave traders
Between the 6th and 13th centuries, Norsemen or the Vikings hit upon the idea of slave trade as a profitable means to acquire wealth along with, of course, their usual vocation of raid, plunder and piracy. This branch of their activity reached a peak in the 8th-9th century when they indiscriminately raided, captured and enslaved people weaker than them and sold them as slaves. A persian merchant, Ibn Rustah narrated how the Swedish Vikings, also known as the Varangians and Rus Khaganate terrorized entire Slavic viillages and took the entire population into slavery, whom they called Thralls (Old Norse). The thralls were captured mostly from western Europe and had Franks, Anglo-Saxons, Celts, Germans and peoples of Baltic, Slavic and south European origins among them. This Viking slave trade admittedly introduced a different kind of pigmentation in the otherwise black-skinned slaves who were in a majority.
It was to the credit of the Catholic Church to bring the practice to an end when Catholicism became the main religion in Scandinavia and followed the injunction that a Christian could not morally own another Christian. Subsequently, in 1350 the thrall system was entirely abolished. Presumably, due to the harsh wintry conditions and the sparsely populated nature of the land, there was never ever any need to introduce serfdom in the countries of Iceland, Norway and Sweden.
Slavery in Europe in the Middle Ages
Unsettled conditions and endemic foreign invasions contributed to taking of slaves in Europe in the early Middle Ages almost a regular practice. It would appear St. Patrick himself was captured and sold as a slave, and in his Letter to the Soldiers of Coroticus protested against enslavement of newly baptized Christians. In France under the Carolingian European Dynasty, slaves formed approximately 20% of the entire population. It was so prevalent in early medieval Europe that the Roman Catholic Church took measures repeatedly prohibiting it and ensured that at least the export of Christian slaves to non-Christian lands was stopped. The matter was thorougly discussed in the Council of Koblenz in 922, in the Council of London in 1102, and in the Council of Aramagh in 1171. Likewise, export of English slaves was stopped by William the Conqueror. Slave trade in the early medieval period was generally carried out in the east where the markets were in the Byzantine Empire and the Muslim World and the supplies came from
pagan Central and Eastern Europe and the Caucasus and the Tartary. The slave merchants were collectively known as Radhanites and were composed of Viking (Scandinavian), Arab, Greek and Jewish nationals. The brunt of the attack was on the Slavs – so many of them were enslaved over so many centuries that the word Slav came to mean slaves not only in English but also in Arabic and other European languages.
Genoese and Venetian merchants and cartels took over the slave trade during the late Middle Ages and operated in the area known as Golden Horde, which was the name a Mongol and later Turkicised Khandom in the parts of present day Russia, Ukraine and the Caucasus after the dissolution of the Mongol Empire in the 1240s. It would appear that some 10,000 eastern European slaves were sold in Venice in the decade 1414-1423 while Genoese traders organized the slave trade from the Crimea to Mamluk Egypt. The Mamluks were slaves converted to Islam who served in the army of the Caliphs. Haci I Giray in 1441 separated from the Golden Horde and created the Crimean Khanate. The khanate was a massive supplier of slaves to the Ottoman Empire and the Middle East until the early eighteenth century by a process called the “harvesting of the steppe”, in which they enslaved many Slavic peasants. Consequently, in Crimea nearly 75 percent of the population were slaves. The Islamic World gained a lot of Christian slaves during the Byzantium-Ottoman wars and the other wars Ottomans fought in Europe.
The Christians were also not beyond selling Muslim slaves captured in wars. In Malta, the Knights of the realm attacked Muslim and pirate ships and took the sailors as slaves. Malta became a centre for selling captured North African and Turkish slaves, and continued to do so upto the late 18th century CE. Those slaves were used as galley slaves, and normally a ship would require a thousand pairs of such hands. In the 15th century, slavery was banned in Poland while Lithuania abolished it with a decree in 1588. Russians retained slavery as a major institution upto 1723, when Peter the Great converted the household slaves into house serfs. Those known as agricultural slaves were named agricultural serfs in 1679.
Slavery in Europe before Industrialization
European colonialism beginning with 15th century Portuguese exploration of the African coast brought in its wake slave trade, a major prop of colonialism till the late eighteenth century. Afonso V of Portugal was ordained by Pope Nicholas V to bring into hereditary slavery “Saracens, pagans and any other unbelievers” under the papal bull Dom Diversas issued in 1452. Confirmed by his Romanus Pontiflex bull of 1454, these papal decrees provided a sort of legitimacy to European colonialism and slave trade. However, for a short period after 1462, Pope Pius II declared slavery as “a great crime”. Anyway, Mercado de Escarvos, the first slave market in Europe for impoprted African slaves was opened in 1444 in the Portuguese maritime town of Lagos, a site even now shown to tourists. The famous Prince Henry the Navigator was a major sponsor of Portuguese expeditions and received 20% of the profits from slave trade. Subsequently, European slave trade diverted the slaves to newly established colonies in America, which for Portugal was Brazil. Nonetheless, it was the custom of the Meditteranean countries to use condemned criminals as rowers or galley slaves in their war ships or galleys. Although the sentences were for a specified number of years, most of the rowers died due to the harsh conditions even if they were lucky to survive shipwreck or torture and death at the hands of the enemies or pirates. It was also the practice of victorious navies to use “infidel” prisoners of war as rowers, a fate suffered by historical figures like the Ottoman navy chief Turgut Reis.
During that time in Austria, Hungary, Poland, Prussia and Russia, second serfdom was introduced, giving nobility the power to put a serf to death. It was in effect in Poland upto 1768, and in most of Russia until 19 February 1861. In fact, some clans of the Roma people in Romania were held under slavery for over five centuries and were relieved only in 1864. The famous warrior Timur Lame conquered Armenia and Georgia in 1400 introducing “devsirme”, also known as blood tax or child collection. Through this numerous Balkan and Turkic males along with Circassian males from the Caucasus mountains as also the Black Sea regions were captured from their homes and forcibly enlisted in the Ottoman army. They were called Janisseries in the Balkans and Mamluks in Egypt. The first became an important element in the court intrigues of Istanbul while the second defended Egypt against the Crusaders and the Mongols. Moulay Ismail, known as the Bloodthirsty Sultan (1672-1727) brought Morocco under his domination through his 150,000 strong army of slaves called the Black Guards.As a consequence (of such slave acquisitions), many regions of Armenia were depoulated and over 60,000 people were captured from the Caucasus. The Poland-Lithuanian region were subjected to the depredations of the Tatars from !569, who looted,
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