Slaves in Byzantium: A complex history of legacy and evolution
Slavery in the Byzantine world remains a phenomenon that is largely unknown. Unlike the extensive study of slavery in ancient Greek and Roman societies, or in medieval Latin Europe and post-contact Americas, the history of slavery and slaves in Byzantium has received much less scholarly attention. Let’s try to outline this complex history of legacy and evolution.
The Byzantine slavery: Roman legacy and Christian influence.
Byzantine slavery differed significantly from its Roman predecessor and from contemporary forms of unfreedom in Latin Europe. It evolved from the classical slavery known in the Greek world and the Roman Empire. However, its development in late Roman antiquity and the early Byzantine era was deeply influenced by Christianity. In the early 4th century, Christian ethos began to shape Roman imperial slave laws. Over time, this influence reshaped the notion of slavery in these regions. Political fragmentation also caused regional differentiation in the exploitation of power relationships. For instance, the division of the Roman Empire into western and eastern parts in 395, and the disappearance of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century, led to two different regional trajectories for the legacy of slavery.
The Byzantine redifinition of “Legitimate Slavery”.
The Byzantine Empire maintained a clear distinction between slaves and free persons. In Latin Europe, Roman slavery evolved into various forms of unfreedom, often unclear and regionally diverse. In the 7th and 8th centuries, Arab-Muslim armies established rule across regions from the Iberian Peninsula to North Africa, much of the Near East, and Persia. Both Byzantine and Islamicate worlds shared fundamental features of slavery, including the idea that religious otherness legitimized enslavement. This notion developed from a sense of religious communal solidarity and responsibility. Christian thinkers preached solidarity towards enslaved Christians, an idea reflected in Byzantine imperial law. Under enemy pressure, the Byzantines created legal ways to free captured Christians and regain their freedom within the empire.
Emperor Justinian I (r. 527-565) significantly changed the empire’s slavery laws, often influenced by Christian thought. He recognized that slavery was an unnatural condition for humans and not a part of natural law. Justinian’s legal code maintained the principle that a slave was considered property, but it did not deny slaves a personality. He also repealed some of the harsher slave laws from earlier times. For instance, he granted slaves the right to personally petition for their freedom and declared that a master who killed a slave was guilty of murder. He also encouraged the Church and its bishops to ransom captured Christians.
By the end of the 8th century, Byzantine law no longer acknowledged the forced enslavement of Christians, considering it unethical. A similar idea emerged in the islamic world. By 800, Muslim jurists acknowledged that anyone recognizing Islam’s supremacy could not be enslaved. Subsequently, both sides tried to freed their own from slavery. Peace treaties between the Byzantine Empire and the Caliphate illustrate this parallel development of enslaveability and communal responsibility. From the second half of the 8th century on, they regularly included agreements for the exchange of prisoners-of-war to save them from being enslaved.
Sources of slaves in the Byzantine world.
Nonetheless, nslavement of coreligionists within the Byzantine Empire still occurred. It could happen illegally through abduction and piracy, or during revolts and civil wars. It could also happen legally when a child was born into slavery because its parents were slaves. However, the empire itself no longer supplied the domestic demand for slaves. Conflicts could supply a large number of slaves through prisoners of war. A medieval Arab historian estimates that 200,000 women and children were taken as slaves after the Byzantine reconquest of Crete. While numbers from that time should be viewed carefully, it certainly shows that military victories or conquests could be an important source of slaves when the empire was triumphant.
Extensive and complex slave-trading networks connected the Byzantine and Islamic empires, with “slaving zones” beyond their frontiers. Slave traders operated mainly in sub-Saharan Africa, Northern and Eastern Europe, and Central Asia, against vulnerable societies unable to protect their members. “However, early medieval slavers and slave traders did not legitimize their activities based on the belief that their captives were uncivilized ‘barbarians,’ as their Greek and Roman predecessors had done in antiquity. Instead, they justified their actions based on the different faith of the attacked communities, deeming them unworthy of freedom.”
The racial question in the Byzantine slavery.
In principle, race did not influence the legitimacy of enslavement. Byzantium adopted an ancient environmental theory that divided the world into climate zones. While the boundaries of these zones were debated, their climatic and geographic features, particularly the intensity of sunlight, were thought to impact the inhabitants’ physiology, especially their skin color and psychology, leading to racial differentiation. However, medieval medical texts and slave acquisition guides did not deem any particular race more fit for enslavement than others. Instead, they advised allocating tasks to slaves based on their presumed racial traits.
However, race was not inconsequential in the acquisition of slaves or the duties assigned to them, and Byzantium was likely not free of racial biases. Recent studies of art, literature, and legal documents from the empire points to the contrary. In practice, slavery was often racialized, with large, ethnically diverse groups, collectively referred to by essentialist terms such as ‘Slavs,’ ‘Turks,’ or ‘Blacks,’ frequently linked to enslaveable populations.
Slaves as property of private individuals.
In addition to the legitimacy of enslavement and the role of race-thinking in it, patterns of slave ownership and labor were much alike in Byzantium and the Islamicate world. In both realms, most slaves were the property of private individuals. In Byzantium, the servi publici of antiquity, owned by cities and performing a range of tasks from financial accounting to aqueduct maintenance, are no longer attested after the 6th century; their jobs had been taken over by privately-owned slaves and free persons. Likewise, the emperor used his own slaves for work that would have been carried out in Roman times by slaves owned by the state.
‘Public slavery’ seems to have persisted mostly in religious institutional contexts, such as in the case of slaves owned by Christian churches and monasteries. In Byzantium, the majority of privately-owned slaves belonged to affluent urban households. Historians agree that most of these slaves were held as domestics and enhanced the social status of their owners by relieving them from menial work, such as performing household chores, running errands, and attending to their owners’ needs.
Other privately-owned slaves worked for their masters outside the home, extending the household economy. These slaves engaged in trade and crafts, or when set to work in non-urban environments, they cultivated land, herded cattle, and worked for their masters in mines. The available sources, however, show relatively little interest in these common usages of slave labor, making it largely impossible for historians to estimate the number of slaves held for these purposes and to gauge their contribution to local economies. Many sources employ terminology that often makes it impossible to know the exact legal status of the person in question. They mostly tell of slaves who enjoyed power, wealth, and status because they operated within the highest echelons of society, such as slaves held as palace guards, soldiers, and courtesans. More common forms of slave labor appear mostly in the background of other events or occasionally when slaves or freedmen came to the attention of political authorities, such as during revolts.
Women were often held for sexual purposes. This could be for commercial prostitution—notwithstanding Byzantine and Islamic laws strictly prohibiting slave owners from using their slaves in this way—or alternatively for private sexual use. In late antiquity, Byzantine imperial law allowed a man to have sexual intercourse with his slave women until this became punishable in the early 8th century. Emperor Leo VI (r. 886-912) prohibited concubinage, which up to that time had been lawful in Byzantium, provided that the relationship remained monogamous.
Humanity of slaves in Byzantine law.
The sources give the impression that slaves were a numerical minority workforce in rural areas in both the Byzantine and Islamic realms, although there may have been considerable regional variation in the use of slave labor there. Although many slaves in Byzantium had been imported from foreign lands and, as such, had been alienated from their natal kin, they were not social non-beings who lived on the margins of freeman’s society. Byzantine law, like Islamic law, recognized the humanity of slaves and stipulated that slave owners should treat their slaves in a humane manner—that is, that they should provide them with their basic needs and that they should not overexploit them or subject them to excessive violence. While slaves legally constituted their masters’ property, socially they belonged to their masters’ household, and we know of at least some instances when a slave’s lengthy close interaction with the household resulted in their development of emotional bonds with other household members, including their owners.
As slave owners controlled the mobility of their slaves, the latter’s ability to form relationships outside the household and to enhance their social integration was limited and largely depended on their masters’ approval. Those enslaved persons who wished to improve their life circumstances were forced to navigate the intricate and often dangerous line between submission to their masters and their own aspirations. Some of those who succeeded attained positions of authority or accrued wealth, such as foreign eunuchs at the Byzantine court. But other slaves lived in conditions that did not allow them to build meaningful relations or to integrate into their new societies. We still know little, however, about the circumstances that allowed slaves in Byzantium to exercise volition and the strategies available to them to attain personal goals.
Freeing of slaves in Byzantium.
In the Byzantine world, a slave’s emancipation constituted a full change in his or her legal status but it did not amount to a full revocation of a slave’s dependency on his or her former owner. Slaves became Roman citizens upon emancipation, although their new legal status (eleutheros) remained inferior to that of a freeborn person (eugenes) and a former master kept much of his authority over a slave he freed. Should a freedman fail to comply with his legal duty to show ‘gratitude’ to his old master and follow the latter’s orders, his old master could revoke his emancipation. Therefore, freedmen were expected to show loyalty towards their patrons, in return for which they could expect support. As a result, freedmen often maintained a close relationship with their former owners and their descendants, worked for them, and lived closely alongside them. The fact of having been reduced to slavery left an irremovable stigma that made many freedmen second-class citizens.
Sources:
Jelle Bruningsaid, Reza Huseini, Introduction: Slavery in Byzantium and the medieval Islamicate world, Slavery & Abolition, 2023.