Slaves and Serfs

Abstract

There was nothing to compare with the institution of Roman slavery — in size, scope and nature — until the evolution of black slavery in the New World. But this is not to claim that, in the intervening millenium which separated the decline of Rome from the European settlement of the Americas, slavery was unknown. On the contrary, it was commonplace throughout western Europe. But there was no western slave society as such; none in which slavery occupied a central position in the economic and demographic make-up of society at large. Slavery was commonplace but peripheral. Slave trading continued and would do so as long as people fell victim to conquerors who could profit from selling their captives. We know of a slave market at Verdun in the seventh century. It was usual, for instance, for prisoners of war when not put to death to be sold into slavery, a widespread practice throughout the Viking period of the ninth and tenth centuries. As the Vikings swept across northern Europe conquering and establishing a complex and far-reaching web of trading links, many of their subject peoples were enslaved and sold throughout Europe’s slave markets. There was, furthermore, a thriving slave trade from northern Europe to North Africa, and for centuries after the collapse of Roman authority a European slave-trading system survived which sought to satisfy the demand for slaves from Islamic Spain and North Africa.¹