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.

Dio often portrays effective rulership in negative terms, defining a ruler's traits, policies, and associates by deficits when he sees a great vacuum at the center of power, an emptiness in an unsatisfactory emperor such as Commodus, waiting to be filled with unsuitable notions from the worst people. His history offers an array of faults to contemplate, many and specific, whereas positive terms are few and with little variety. Substandard rulers share negative traits typical of a tyrant’s behavior: cowardice, deceit, emptiness, gluttony, greed, pretense, overall unworthiness characterized by nullity: excessively improper, insatiate, shameless, unclean, unholy, lawless, senseless, impious, unseemly, uneducated. The only traits not negative in form are terrible indeed: savage, blood-guilty, cruel. The historian describes those of whom he approves with a few positive phrases – a good man, worthy, excellent – but here again goodness is oftener defined by what it is not: not greedy, deceptive, vicious, or any of the other things that unsatisfactory people are. The first part of the chapter offers a general account of specific traits and vocabulary. It is followed by a chronological review of specific leaders: some prominent Republican figures, especially dynasts of the Late Republic, and the emperors from Augustus through Elagabalus.

In a number of colourful episodes, Cassius Dio narrates the behaviour and fates of the Roman collective. He treats it as a symbolic entity that serves to illustrate the state of the Roman political community under monarchic rule, from the dynasteiai through the Severans. Inextricably linked to their rulers like limbs to the head, the Roman ‘people’ is the first victim of their vices and the ultimate judge of their character. The Roman collective is portrayed as a sentient organism, ideally solemn and passive but stirred to restless, destructive action by perverse events. All such events ultimately emanate from the emperors, and the people’s behaviour is thus a direct reflection of their character. ‘People’ scenes form part of the biographies of autocrats and represent Dio’s own creative additions. They are not a source to the historical roles and actions of the actual people of Rome, but a literary device used as a means to narrate a larger, moral truth about Rome’s political leadership.

In 53.19, Dio discusses the impact that the transition of Rome’s system of government from a Republic to a monarchy under Augustus had for the flow of accurate political news and information. This programmatic section of the Roman History has often been discussed for the insight it provides into Dio’s historical methodology. This chapter takes a complementary perspective on 53.19, examining Dio’s view that the new monarchical government led to the rise of rumour, and the way that this theme plays out in the Roman History at large. It shows that the presence of rumour in Dio’s narrative increases the closer one comes to Octavian assuming sole power, especially during the triumviral period, which is marked by attempts to control channels of news. Dio’s emphasis on rumour in the imperial books, it is argued, reflects the uncertainty engendered by the concentration of political power in the hands of one man, whose real thoughts and intentions always remained inscrutable.

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.

This chapter begins by contextualizing Cassius Dio’s Roman History in the political and literary culture of Severan Rome. From there, it introduces the major themes of this volume, namely the idea of Roman political culture under the Principate, Cassius Dio’s understanding of this culture, and the reception of Dio’s construction of Roman imperial culture after antiquity.

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.

This paper re-evaluates Dio’s famous passing reference to Caracalla’s universal grant of citizenship by recontextualizing it within Dio’s larger narrative. Dio was the first historian to see the spread of Roman citizenship as we do – as a progressive expansion culminating in universal citizenship. Dio’s treatment of the topic of enfranchisement repeatedly returns to the question of whether an exclusive citizenship distorts or affirms the natural hierarchy of honour in the empire. The question is explored almost exclusively through the medium of embedded speech, with various voices within the text contributing to an emerging opposition between two competing visions of the proper relationship between citizenship and honour. This emerges in the tension between two important texts in Dio’s Augustan narrative: the speech of Maecenas, which recommends the enfranchisement of all the emperor’s subjects in order to erase the distinction between Romans and subjects (52.19.6), and the political testament of Augustus, which urges against mass enfranchisement and insists on the importance of the very same distinction (56.33.3). The narrative voice offers no explicit guidance on how to resolve these contradictory visions, leaving individual readers to confront the questions that they raise, with significant implications for their evaluation of Caracalla’s grant.

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.

The chapter analyses Tiberius’ funeral oration in honour of the deceased emperor Augustus, as composed and inserted by Cassius Dio at the end of his Augustan narrative (56.35-41). The chapter reveals that Dio devised this speech with a keen interest in exploring the perspective of the imperial domus and its relationship to his own assessment of Rome’s first emperor as presented in the main narrative in Books 45–56. By examining the content, structure and rhetoric of the oration and comparing it with the Res Gestae Divi Augusti, the chapter argues that Dio may have drawn on this important epigraphic document as a key source for the composition of the speech. The chapter furthermore examines the authenticity of Dio’s reconstruction of the imperial perspective and assesses to what extent he left his own imprint on the speech to make it relevant for his third-century audience. In addition, it investigates Dio’s motivation for composing the oration: it shows that the historian not only employed the speech to present the imperial perspective at a key moment of Roman history but also to discuss the principles of good imperial governance and imperial virtues. By inserting the oration at this particular point of his Roman History, Dio invites his readers to compare all the later emperors to the Augustan model.