This chapter traces the establishment, and evolution of military slavery in north India between ca. 1000-1500. It will moreover investigate the interaction between war and society when it involves enslavement of captured civilians. Lastly, it will argue that the expansion of agriculture and the rise of a large peasant population that served as a potential source of mercenaries that eventually competed with slaves as a source of recruitment.

While captivity was the product of the violent confrontation between Jews, Christians, and Muslims, this essay uses Latin, Arabic, and Romance sources to argue that ransoming was also a phenomenon that intimately linked these communities. Grounded in a shared Roman inheritance, the tradition of ransoming brought Jews, Christians, and Muslims into a dialogic and reciprocal relationship with one another, one that depended on mutual understanding and expectations. It provided a channel to share ideas and institutions. Ransomers also helped pave the paths for commercial and diplomatic relations. Nevertheless, if ransoming drew these communities together, it also tore them apart. The physical and emotional cost of captivity, although shared, became the ground of separation.

The study of pre-modern (i.e. pre-sixteenth century) systems of enslavement and slave trading in sub-Saharan Africa have relied heavily on textual, especially Arabic, sources. By contrast, there have been few archaeological studies of these phenomena, although reference is often made to the Trans-Saharan and Red Sea/Indian Ocean slave trades in archaeological studies of early state formation and globalisation on the continent. This chapter provides a brief review of some of the key written sources concerning the presence of slaves in different regions of sub-Saharan Africa between c. 500-1500 CE, and what these can tell us about prevailing systems of enslavement. This is followed by discussion of the limited number of archaeological studies of enslavement during this same period across the continent, their main findings and the key interpretative challenges faced when trying to detect the presence of slaves from material evidence alone. The chapter concludes with suggestions for the direction of future work, laying emphasis on the need for multi-sited projects that aim to reconstruct landscapes of enslavement and how slave-based economies were organised and functioned.

This chapter provides an overview of slavery as practiced in the Iberian Peninsula over the course of the medieval period, from the era of the Visigoths up until the era of the Catholic Kings, and in both Muslim and Christian-controlled territories. While traditionally scholars have paid attention to medieval Iberian slavery almost exclusively for the purposes of exploring how it laid the groundwork for the Atlantic-World slave system, this chapter argues that the study of slavery in this particular time and place merits scholarly interest for a wealth of other reasons, in particular, it illuminates how gender and the law had a profound impact on both the experiences and trajectories of the enslaved.

Stemming from its primeval origins in ancient notions of punitive punishment, by medieval times, Chinese slavery had already long ago become culturally embedded enough to function effectively as an invisible institution, practiced endogenously as well as exogenously. Since earliest times, slave status in medieval China, which was a class-bound, inheritable, and thus only rarely escapable condition, tended to befall either the surviving dependents of executed elites who had contravened authority or else those oftentimes non-Chinese unfortunates—combatants or otherwise—who were captured alive in battle or simply taken by force. Additionally, at any time, exigency could compel the sale of children into slavery. Slaves themselves were divided into two broad categories according to ownership, being either official slaves or private slaves. A crucial development of the medieval age is that both types of slaves came to be accounted for in the dynastic legal codes, which was an especially important occurrence for private slaves because, for the first time, their treatment by their masters became regulated. Finally worth noting in the medieval Chinese case is the prominence of specialized functionaries who, although unfree by any measure, were not typically regarded societally as slaves. Included under this rubric were eunuchs and concubines.

This chapter explores the intersection of gender, sex, and slavery in the medieval dar al-islam (“the lands of Islam). A background survey is provided for sexual ethics, male social reproduction, and female sexual slavery in these societies that illustrates how Islamic sexual ethics, derived from the Quran, and the Islamic legal understanding of legitimacy were very different from those of Roman law, Christianity, late antique Judaism and seventh century Zoroastrianism. Two central questions of the chapter are how was the status of an enslaved woman defined and whether or not the child of an enslaved woman was born with slave-status. In classical Islamic law, the rule of umm al-walad (“mother of child”) meant that an enslaved woman who bore her Muslim owner a child gave birth to a free born person. The status of umm al-walad thus provided enslaved women with limited opportunities to assert their agency.

The Mongol Empire (1206-1368) had a tremendous impact on slavery across Eurasia. While slaves played a minor role in pre-Imperial Mongolia, the Mongols saw people as a resource, to be distributed among the imperial family and used for imperial needs, like material goods. This view created a whole spectrum of dependency running from free men to full slaves. More specifically, the huge conquests of the United Empire (1206-60) resulted in huge supply of war captives, many of whom eventually sold in the Eurasian slave markets. With the dissolution of the Empire and the halt of its expansion, the demand for slaves remained high, and other means were sought for supplying it. The chapter discusses slavery among the pre-imperial Mongols; the general context of slavery caused by Mongol mobilization and redistribution policies; the various ways of becoming a slave in the Mongol Empire; and the slaves’ dispersion, uses, conditions as well as manumission mechanisms and opportunities for social mobility. It highlights the different types of slavery (extrusive versus intrusive) in China and the Muslim and Christian worlds and argues that in Mongol Eurasia slavery was not always a social death.

Mamluk Sultante, military slavery, domestic slavery, Egypt, Syria, manumission, slave trade, Islamic Law and slavery

Slavery can exist without racism, which certainly appears and endures in societies without slavery. Slavery and racism become entangled in color symbolism and color prejudice across the planet, and no natural rules determine how hierarchies evolve privileging some people over others. Nevertheless, looking at attitudes toward blackness in medieval Europe shows how one region’s societies evolving attitudes about color and the human family preordained how Europeans treated people who appeared different.Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and pagan antiquity bequeathed to medieval Europe systems of slavery as well as ideas on a hierarchy of “races” privileging some groups and colors over others. The premodern science of physiognomy legitimized constructs of race and color symbolism, to which commentators on the Bible contributed. The apparently stark contrasts among black, brown, red, and white people became proxies for good and evil and other traits. In Europe blackness normally defined Satan, bad things like death and melancholy, and eventually a prevalent type of slave. Color (and gender) of slaves in the late medieval Mediterranean markets affected their prices and revealed buyers’ preferences. Fifteenth-century encounters with sub-Sahara Africa illuminate how Europeans imposed their values of color prejudice on peoples who did not share them.

Much evidence – textual, material and documentary – points to slavery in the early and medieval Islamic Middle East (c. 600-1000 CE) as a social fact, persistent and multivalent. This is especially true for the urban landscape: the presence of enslaved and freed persons would have been impossible to miss. More difficult is the reconstruction of Middle Eastern agrarian slavery. This is a survey essay with particular reference to the early Abbasid Caliphate (c. 750-950) and select questions around which debate in modern scholarship has grown. One must comb medieval Arabic texts (literary and documentary) to reconstruct patterns of early Islamic-era enslavement; the organization and dynamics of slave commerce; the demands on slave and freed labor; and the (relative) social integration of the enslaved. The Arabic/Islamic library illuminates all manner of topics, religious and secular alike. Literary references to slavery and/or enslaved persons therein are plentiful and of a great variety. One has references in works of poetry and adab, an elastic term used for a variety of Arabic prose writings. Equally numerous are references in chronicles, biographical dictionaries, and works of geography and political thought. Medieval Arabic legal and religious writings provide a considerable number of references as well.

A This chapter builds on recent scholarship to assert that the Greater Mediterranean region has been host to large-scale, multicultural, and multi-ethnic slave systems, without a break, from ancient times through the twentieth century. This chapter provides the contours of these systems for the medieval millennium, with a focus on the emergence of ‘Renaissance’ slavery in later medieval southern Europe. It then covers the major theoretical models which have been posited regarding medieval Mediterranean slavery, from Verlinden and Braudel, to Abu-Lughod, Horden and Purcell, Michael McCormick, and Alice Rio. Finally, the chapter addresses some insights which the study of a millennium of slavery in the Mediterranean can have for historians of the Atlantic Slave Trade and other more recent forms of slavery. For example, to what extent was race a determinant of enslaveability in the medieval period? How did religion inform enslaveability in the long run? Why did much of Western Europe prove resistant to slavery after the year 1100? And how did ‘Renaissance’ slavery set the stage for the creation of the Atlantic Slave System, a system already underway with the lucrative exploitation of the Canary Islands from the 1340s?

This chapter looks at the enslavement of children (below 16 years of age) from the 5th to the 15th centuries, focusing on the Mediterranean and the British Isles. It uses contemporary documents, such as personal narratives, laws, contracts, letters and ecclesiastical sources, to construct case studies illustrating the major ways that children could become slaves. These include capture in war or kidnapping and sale by pirates and unscrupulous slavers; abandonment as a newborn, rescue, and rearing as a slave; pledging into servitude by parents to pay a debt; and birth to an enslaved mother. Domestic slavery was the most usual fate for children, though a few boys were made into eunuchs destined for elite households in the Byzantine Empire and the Caliphate, and girls might become concubines or sex slaves. There was little official effort to prevent child enslavement, although the Byzantine emperor Justinian attempted to abolish the use of children as debt-pledges and the enslavement of abandoned newborns, and banned castration within the bounds of his Empire. In general, the enslavement of even very young children and their transport across long distances was common and uncontroversial.

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.

This chapter analyzes scholarly approaches to the study of slave agency and resistance. It focuses on medieval contexts including Spain, Italy and Venetian Crete, and the Islamic Middle East. Even though legal, economic, and social structures were unfavorable for enslaved people, individuals were able to use law and limited social capital to advance their own interests. At times this allowed enslaved people to resist slavery and to challenge their legal status. In other instances, enslaved people used their rights as slaves (and, for example, sometimes as mothers or members of a confessional group) to seek certain benefits. In the Islamic world, enslaved and freed people could gain high status by virtue of their marriages and roles as mothers (in the case of women) and as a result of their military and political skills (mainly men and eunuchs). Women who were highly skilled musicians and courtesans could also use their talents to achieve reknown and, in exceptional cases, great wealth. Acts of everyday and extreme resistance are also documented for the medieval period, though these activities never resulted in a successful slave revolt despite what some historians have written about the ninth-century Zanj rebellion in Iraq.