by Hugh Thomas
Not all the black Africans in the classical Mediterranean were slaves. Eurybatus, a black herald who accompanied Odysseus to talk to Achilles, was presumably free (the recollection of him was one of the ways by which Penelope recognized her husband); and a certain Aethiops, perhaps a black African freeman (or was it just a nickname?), was present at the founding of Corinth.
At least from the time of Xenophanes (the first European to write of the physical differences between blacks and whites), in the sixth century B.C., the Greeks and the Romans were unprejudiced on grounds of race: they were quite insensible as to whether someone with black skin was superior to someone with white, or vice versa. So it is scarcely surprising that miscegenation was neither repugnant nor unexpected. No laws mentioned the matter. Many Ethiopians married Greeks or Egyptians. In the eighth century B.C., Ethiopians, who had provided soldiers and slaves to Memphis, even conquered Egypt and gave it its Twenty-fifth Dynasty.
Nearly all the black Africans of the ancient world came from Ethiopia through Egypt. Several expeditions were sent in that direction, and Pliny the Elder records more than one; all the same, in the second century A.D., a caravan route seemed also to open at Leptis Magna, in what is now Libya, linking the Roman empire with Guinea.
Wild suggestions have been made that the ancient civilization in Greece had both an Egyptian and a black origin. That imaginative view, which, if true, might affect any history of the Atlantic slave trade, derives from a story reported by a Greek historian, Diodorus of Sicily, in the first century B.C. But there is no evidence for the claim; it is no more likely that the mythological first king of Athens, Cecrops, was black than that the lower part of his body was that of a fish. Socrates may have been black, but the odds are against it; Cleopatra may have had black blood, but it is most improbable.
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The Athenians were the first to seek a reason for discussing, as well as explaining, the institution of slavery (as of most other matters). For example, Aristotle, in the first book of his Politics, firmly said: “Humanity is divided into two: the masters and the slaves; or, if one prefers it, the Greeks and the Barbarians, those who have the right to command; and those who are born to obey.” That seemed to imply that, to an Athenian, everyone who was not Greek could be captured and enslaved—even should be. Aristotle also said: “A slave is property with a soul.” Thus he accepted slavery as an institution. He also declared that “the use of domestic animals and slaves is about the same; they both lend us their physical efforts to satisfy the needs of existence.” He noted that some had argued that “the rule of a master over slaves is contrary to nature, and that the distinction between master and slave exists only by law . . . and, being an interference with nature, is thus unjust.” These ambiguous propositions would have importance in the sixteenth century, when Aristotle was looked upon as the guide to almost everything.7
Plato, for his part, compared the slave to the body, the master to the soul. He took for granted the enslavement of foreigners, though he desired to end that of Greeks.8
Yet Euripides, the playwright, realized that there was more to the matter than the philosophers thought; for example, he caused Polyxena in Hecuba, born to marry kings, to declare that she preferred death to being enslaved. His contemporaries, the Sophists, took that reflection to its logical conclusion: they even argued that slavery had no basis in the law of nature, since it derived from custom. The rhetorician Alcidamas, when demanding that the Spartans free the Messenians, thought that distinctions between a freeman and a slave were unknown to nature. The Cynics thought that a slave maintained a free soul, even if he was the instrument of his master’s will; and Diogenes observed that the man who relied on captive labor was the true slave. Such sophisticated reflections had no effect on practice.
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The Romans established the status of a slave (servus) by law and distinguished him from a serf (colonus). A slave in Rome was an object, res, unable to make a will, bear witness in civil cases, or make criminal charges—even if (by a law of Hadrian) he was also theoretically protected against murder and from physical harm at the hands of his master. Yet the mere fact that a Roman slave could also be punished for crimes suggests that the law envisaged the idea of a slave as a person, not just as a thing.
The criticisms of slavery by great Latin writers tended more to denounce the idea of cruelty to slaves than to question the institution. Thus Cicero and Seneca hoped that slaves could be treated humanely, but they never contemplated an end of slavery. Cicero, who thought that all inequality (hence slavery) could be explained by degeneration, wrote in De Republica that the reduction of conquered peoples to slavery was legitimate if the people concerned were unable to govern themselves; which Seneca developed the idea that slavery was a bodily affair: the spirit would remain a thing apart. The latter also thought that (Zurara’s) goddess of Fortune exercised her rights over freemen and slaves alike; in Rome, as in Greece, manumission was, after all, not uncommon.
In the last years of the Roman republic, and again under the Antonine emperors, in the second century A.D., some humane improvements were introduced in servile legislation. The changes did not alter the fundamental definition that a slave was someone’s property. But they did indicate that a master’s rights over his slaves, like his rights over most other property, were restricted in specific ways. The Emperor Antoninus Pius, for example, in the second century A.D., sought to reduce the arbitrary character of the institution of slavery; but he also declared that the power of masters over slaves should remain unquestioned. He justified his humanitarian laws by saying that they were in the interests of the masters.
These innovations were the product of two influences: that of later Stoic philosophy, and of Christianity; the first of these was the most subversive. Henceforth, at all events, if a master were to treat a slave badly, he had to sell him. If he were to abandon an infirm slave, that slave could be enfranchised. All the same, neither Stoic nor Christian questioned the institution of slavery. The condition was assumed to be from eternity. If a master did not exercise all his rights over his slaves, that concession was never binding, always revocable. The Stoic Epictetus, himself born a slave and freed by his master, wondered whether enfranchisement would benefit every slave, though he was also concerned about the evil effects of slavery on masters.
Christ’s teaching that “all things whatsoever ye would that men should do unto you, do ye even so unto them,” along with the idea of Saint Paul that “God hath made of one blood all men and all nations of men,” played a part in the history of abolition in the United States in the nineteenth century; but, in the early days of Christianity, Christ’s failure to talk specially of slaves was taken to imply that they were excluded from divine generosity.9
Saint Paul, like Seneca, thought that slavery was something external. So he recommended that slaves serve their masters “with fear and trembling.” He thought that every man should abide “in the same calling wherein he was called. Art thou called being a slave? Care not for it: but if thou mayest be made free, use it rather” (the English Authorized Version curiously translates servus as “servant,” not “slave”).10 The apostle believed, it is true, that the slave who receives the call to be a Christian is “the Lord’s freeman.” But the implication was that that liberty could only be expected in the next world. The Epistle to Philemon the Greek described how the apostle returned a fugitive slave, Onesimus, to his master, though he did recommend indulgence. That action was later used by churches to reject the idea that escaping slaves had the right to sanctuary in their church, as common criminals did; and the eighteenth-century French Huguenot trader Jean Barbot thought that the Epistle gave evidence that, though slavery was lawful, slaves should be well treated. An early Christian bishop, and a medieval one, could comfort himself with the reflection that Christ had, after all, come not to change social conditions but to change minds—non venit mutare conditiones sed mentes. What, the “bondsman was inwardly free, and spiritua
lly the equal of his master”? No matter: in external matters, he was a mere chattel. Slaves could of course look forward to freedom in the next world. In the meantime, they should endure their terrestrial condition for the glory of God, whose ways were inscrutable.11
Several centuries after Saint Paul, the austere father of the Church Saint John Chrysostom advised the slave to prefer the security of captivity to the uncertainties of freedom. Saint Augustine agreed. He thought that the first cause of slavery was the sin “which has subjected man to man.” But that “had not been done without the will of God, who knows no injustice.” Augustine, born at Hippo in North Africa, really believed in the equality of races: “Whoever is born anywhere as a human being, that is, as a rational mortal creature, however strange he may appear to our senses in bodily form, or colour, or motion, or utterance, or in any faculty, part, or quality of his nature whatsoever, let no true believer have any doubt that such an individual is descended from the one man who first existed.” All the same, sin made many men slaves; and Augustine remembered the Curse of Ham in Genesis.12 Then Saint Ambrose, commenting on Saint Paul’s Epistle to the Colossians, believed that masters had duties to slaves. He also suspected that God had intended all men to be free, but that the tragic conditions of human life meant that some who were naturally free might, as a result of war, be reduced to slavery. The General Council of the Christian Church (c. 345) at Gangra, in Paphlagonia (that is, northern Turkey), condemned all who, under pretext of religion, taught slaves to despise their masters; one of the Councils of Carthage (419) refused the right even of enfranchised slaves to bear witness in court. Pope Leo the Great proclaimed in 443 that no slave could become a priest. The Emperor Justinian later sought to change that provision, and to arrange for the entry of slaves into the priesthood if their masters did not oppose the matter; but, though a slave’s collar has been found bearing the inscription “Felix the Archdeacon,” the tolerance implicit in the designation had little effect during the late Western empire.
In one of his last speeches, in a debate in the House of Commons in 1806, that passionate friend of liberty Charles James Fox would declare that it was “one of the glories of Christianity to have gradually extinguished the slave trade, and even slavery, wherever its influence was felt.”13 That effulgence was, however, hidden for many centuries.
All the same, even if the Church did not question the institution of slavery, it did encourage manumission: the actions of the saintly Melania have been recalled; and a certain Hermes, converted to Christianity in the days of Hadrian, is said to have freed 1,250 slaves one Easter. A decree Manumissio in ecclesia was also approved by the Emperor Constantine the Great in 321.14
It was only in the case of Jews that later Roman law was in any way less than helpful to masters. But there, Constantine declared that no Jew could own a Christian slave. If a Jew bought a slave who was not Jewish, and forced him to be circumcised, the Code of Theodosius gave that slave a right to liberty. A law of 417 refined the matter: no Jew could buy Christian slaves. Even if he were to inherit one, he could only keep him on the condition that he not try to convert him to Judaism. Thus, very early in history, the problem of Jews and slaves was posed, though not quite in the way that has seemed appropriate to polemicists of the twentieth century.
3
The Slaves Who Find the Gold Are All Black
“The slaves who find the gold are all black but, if, by a miracle, they manage to escape from the mines, they become white.”
Valentim Fernandes, c. 1500
AT THE END of the Roman empire, most ancient institutions collapsed. So did most families, gods, and traditions. But slavery survived. In the worst years of the Dark Ages, Scythian slaves could still be bought in Antioch, and Gothic ones could still be found in Rome. Slaves too played a part in the overthrow of the empire. Thus Alaric’s army of forty thousand included many fugitive slaves, many of them Goths in origin. The partisans of the Emperor Honorius in Spain even armed slaves to fight the Franks. In 423, the usurper John seized power in Ravenna and, having no troops, he enfranchised and armed the slaves of the nearby villae. In Gaul, runaway slaves were frequent in the Franks’ invading armies.
The “barbarians” swiftly drew close to the peoples whom they had conquered. It was not their purpose to break up the old social order. Rather, they wanted to capture it. They needed no convincing that their new estates needed slave labor, for they had always used slaves whenever they could, even when they had been nomadic, and they had often suffered from Roman slaving raids in the past.
The new masters of the old Roman world obtained most of their slaves by capture in war; and war was then incessant. There was not only continual fighting between the different Anglo-Saxon monarchies, but by them against the Celts in the west of Britain: wars that often seemed mere manhunts for Celtic slaves. The Franks, too, were always fighting—against Bretons, or Aquitainian Goths—and usually bringing back slaves as booty. In the Dark Ages of Europe, slaves were also made as a result of punishments (a criminal who could not pay a fine allocated to the victim might be reduced to slavery). Most slaves in Visigothic Spain seem to have derived from that source; or from debts; or from simple poverty, for men and women deliberately sold themselves, or their children, into bondage for the sake of a better life. Gregory of Tours, the sixth-century historian, recalled that, in Gaul of his day, “merchants reduced the poor to slavery in return for a morsel of food.”1
Slave markets maintained their rhythm, if at a slower beat than in the past; and, in Visigothic Spain, Jewish merchants were prominent among those providing slaves for sale—Celts or Suevi, no doubt—until the rising tide of anti-Semitism in the seventh century restricted their activities.
The laws of most of these successor states to Rome reflected Roman practice, though they adapted them to the new age: a Burgundian decree, for example, declared that a slave was worth five and a half oxen, or five hogs. There are many references to slavery in Anglo-Saxon, Lombard, and Frankish codes: innumerable provisions related to punishments for slaves who tried to cross the borderline between bondage and liberty; and, in some ways, the rules read at least as if they were harsher than those of Rome. Out of nearly five hundred Visigothic laws which survive (their kings were great lawyers), almost half refer to some aspect of slavery. Saint Isidore of Seville who, at a bleak time, established a philosophical entente between Christian and Gothic customs, had, meantime, no doubts about the divine origin of slavery: “Because of the sin of the first man, the penalty of servitude was inflicted by God on the human race; to those unsuitable for liberty, he has mercifully accorded servitude.”2 It will be remembered that, in Tristan and Isolde, Tristan’s first mission was to kill Morold, a knight from Ireland who came regularly to Cornwall to obtain slaves.
So, throughout the early Middle Ages, slaves constituted a highly prized section of the population of Europe, including Northern Europe. How large a proportion of the population of Charlemagne’s empire constituted slaves is a matter for speculation. But certainly, during the Carolingian “renaissance,” slave markets, like learning, prospered. Saxons, Angles, Wends, and Avars could all be bought at Verdun, Arles, and Lyons, at whose “great fairs” slavs soon became also a prime commodity. Verdun prided herself on her production of eunuchs, most of them being sold to the Moors in Spain. Louis the Debonair, Charlemagne’s heir, unlike his father, followed a defensive policy. So slaves as prisoners of war were less easy to come by. He sold licenses to trade slaves to the powerful merchants whom he knew, who were concerned to buy and sell abroad as well as in France.
Still, there remains doubt as to whether all these servi, to use the Latin word for them, were slaves proper—chattel slaves, that is—rather than serfs, persons with some rights of property. The words are confusing, for, soon after, “slavery” vanished in Northern Europe. The reasons are disputed. Was it because feudal lords found that they could not feed a labor force all the year round and decided to employ them only during the harvest? Was
the eclipse of the old institution the consequence of the use of “new technology”—especially on small holdings (or associations of small holdings)—which made slave labor inappropriate: for example, large cart horses, with frontal collars; frontal yokes for oxen; the new flail, the wheeled plow with a moldboard; iron tools; and, above all, the diffusion of water mills (such a wonderful release from the old hand mill, which had given such exhausting work to slaves for so long)? Or were the feudal lords too poor to be able to afford new slaves? Were there too few foreign wars which could bring home captives in the early Middle Ages (especially in competition with the Muslim markets of the Mediterranean)? Did new lords find it to their economic advantage to free their slaves in return for rent, becoming landlords rather than masters? Did the descendants of slaves rise in the world to merge with a mass of once independent farmers who were in decline, to form a new class of serfs? Or were slave revolts (such as that against King Aurelius in Asturias in 770) and the mass slave escapes of the time too much for masters to endure? (In Visigothic Spain, King Egica in 702 tried to persuade the entire free population to help him seek runaway slaves.)