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.

This chapter examines the social history of slavery in the early Ottoman Empire. Arguing that the range of forms of enslavement and forced labour practiced in the Ottoman Empire cannot be described by the current ‘universal’ definitions of slavery, this chapter looks at the role of slavery in Ottoman dynastic politics, the social history of military and administrative slavery, and the slavery of skilled workers as central to the economic production of the early modern urban centres of the Ottoman Empire. The chapter concludes with an examination of the legal categories that were applied to different forms of slavery and manumission, and presents to the reader to a range of primary and secondary sources for the research of slavery in the Ottoman Empire.

This chapter considers South India, in the period of 500-1500 CE, focusing particularly on the region that is today Tamilnadu. Based primarily on the evidence of stone inscriptions, as well as religious literature composed in Tamil, it argues that slavery must be understood within the framework of a large and complex system of dependency and hierarchy. Virtually all members of society – whether attached to the land or land-owners, or part of the “households” of Hindu temples or royal courts – were bound into relationship of dependency. These relationships were not systematized and caste identities and hierarchies were not fixed. Categories of persons evidently of “lowly” status, such as the paraiyar, might in some cases have been enslaved agricultural laborers but also appear in the inscriptions as temple patrons. Women who were sold to temples were assigned menial domestic duties but sometimes also performed high-status ritual services. The social reality of servitude and slavery in medieval South India, especially in connection with what was probably the extensive use of slaves in rice cultivation (from the 13th century onward), is only hinted at in the inscriptional sources, and in Hindu religious literature was transformed into an idiom of devotion.

The Black Sea, Russia, and eastern Europe exported slaves throughout the medieval period. Most had been born free but were enslaved through capture or occasionally through sale by relatives. During the eighth through tenth centuries, slaves were traded from eastern Europe and the Baltic to elite households in Byzantium and the Islamic world via the Dniepr and Volga river systems, the Carolingian empire, and Venice. In the thirteenth century, the structure of this slave trade changed as a result of the Mongol invasion of eastern Europe, Italian colonization of the Black Sea, the success of the Mamluk state, and the crusading activities of the Teutonic Knights in the Baltic. People enslaved in the Baltic now tended to be traded westward rather than eastward; people enslaved in eastern Europe and the Caucasus tended to pass through the Black Sea into Italian, Mamluk, or Ottoman hands; and people enslaved in the Balkans were trafficked primarily by Venetians or Ottomans. Many aspects of this trade deserve further study, however, such as political marginality and decentralization as factors that enabled slaving; violations of the principle that slaves should come from a different religious background than their owners; and the logistics of local slave trades.

The societies of medieval Northern Europe were slave-holding societies that revered military prowess and expressed wealth and power through symbols of warrior-hood. They were intensely hierarchical and patriarchal societies in which control, guardianship and naked power over people equated with status. Despite the growth of governmental and religious institutions, they remained societies obsessed with notions of honor and shame, with lineage and kinship, identity and belonging. This chapter explores some problematic historiographical assumptions around the diminishing significance of slavery in these cultural contexts, arguing that only when we acknowledge and recognize the slave-holding nature of these societies are we are better able to understand them. Close analysis of the lifestyle, attitudes, and cultural conceptions of the slave-holder and the enslaver are therefore essential. Indeed slave-holding behaviours are evident in a wide range of medieval sources including sagas, poetry, myths, chronicles, legal texts, manorial records, wills and manumissions as well as penitentials, sermons and hagiography. These sources reveal that enslaved people were regarded as the weakest, most dishonorable and degraded of all individuals. Paradoxically, they highlight that the marginalisation of enslaved human beings was extremely important for these communities - underpinning broader power relations and defining and reinforcing the boundaries of community identity and belonging.

When reading Cassius Dio’s account of Nero’s reign, it is easy to become overwhelmed by the sheer, unrelenting criminality of the emperor. In fact, Dio’s Nero is not as much a man as a representation of a rhetorical tyrant. While he is not unique in portraying Nero as a disastrous ruler, Dio is extraordinary in his denial of the emperor’s philhellenism. In doing this, Dio not only contradicts Tacitus and Suetonius, but also discounts the praise of Nero given by other Greek writers, such as Philostratus, Dio Chrysostom, and Pausanias, when they highlight the emperor’s liberation of Greece as a redeeming feature of his principate. With this in mind, this chapter explores the distinctive features of Dio’s narrative when compared to other accounts of the emperor’s reign, and considers the motives behind and the effects of Dio’s portrayal of Nero as a hater, and not a lover, of Greece.

General readers still lack awareness of the prevalence of slavery between the classical period and the post-1420 wider Atlantic World. This phenomenon is not just temporal but geographic, in that Asia, the Indian Ocean World, Amerindian societies and Oceania still receive far less scholarly attention than their populations warrant. This situation exists despite the rapid growth of interest in the general subject of slavery in recent decades. The Islamic conquests and the Mongol expansions generated large numbers of captives, but in fact no society in the Medieval millennium was without enslaved people. While no consensus on the definition of slavery is possible – in this era it assumed a wide spectrum of dependencies - the existence of slave markets across the known world indicates that buyers and sellers shared enough of a common understanding of the practice to sustain a vibrant slave trade. Despite this traffic and major military disruptions, many enslaved people derived their status via birth even though the sources suggest that probably most slaves were female. They also exercised some agency. Prejudice against black people is apparent but the ebb and flow of empires ensured that any group could be a slave, just as any could be a slave owner.

While the Indian Ocean slave trade is at least 4,000 years old, there are three historical periods when this trade expanded significantly: at the turn of the common era (ca. 1st c. CE), the tenth to thirteenth centuries, and the nineteenth century. This chapter analyzes the ebb and flow of the slave trade in the western Indian Ocean and Red Sea region during the medieval millenium, beginning with an evaluation of how the expansion of Muslim societies impacted slavery. The regions discussed include the west coast of India, East Africa, Yemen and Arabia, Ethiopia, Nubia, and Egypt. The roles of urban markets and island entrepôt in the slave trade are discussed as well as the roles played by smaller polities along imperial frontiers. Large-scale wholesale slave trading was uncommon in the medieval Indian Ocean world. Instead, merchants generally trafficked in small numbers of enslaved people as part of larger mixed cargoes of luxury goods and other commodities. Finally, the chapter assesses recent genetics research that is relevant to tracing the movements of people through the regions of the medieval Indian Ocean.

Dio’s portrayal of Tiberius has traditionally suffered by comparison with that of Tacitus. Whereas some have attempted to look beyond such comparisons and to interpret Dio’s Tiberius as a component in a broader narrative discourse about the nature of Roman imperial power, questions still remain as to how we should read Dio’s portrayal of this most cryptic of emperors. In this chapter, Mallan looks for the unifying themes of Dio’s pre- and post-accession portrayal of Tiberius, before discussing how this portrayal of Tiberius fits into Dio’s overarching conception of the ciuilis princeps and his ideal of imperial behaviour.

The period Korea experienced medieval times in terms of slavery differs from that of Western Europe. From a diachronic view of the development of Korean civilization, the period of medieval Europe corresponds to a time in Korea when slavery was not yet fully developed. With emphasis on the distinctive features of slavery in traditional Korea, this chapter sums up its long-term evolution to provide a panorama of Korean slavery, including its early stage to 1100s, proliferation in the 1200s-1400s, zenith in the 1500s-1700s, and slow decline in the 1700s-1800s, among others. Many a Korean slave can be characterized as bond-tenants, bond-debtors, and land/slave owners. As long as the payment was made in the form of either rent or ransom, the owner did not interfere in the slaves’ lives. For this reason, some slaves emerged from poverty and could even accumulate wealth enough to purchase land and slaves, while the great majority still lived in poverty. Slavery in steady decline in the 1700s was the product of the socioeconomic situation in which slaves began to fall in price because of a shortage of land relative to the population.

The epilogue provides some thoughts on the past and future directions of Cassius Dio studies, while responding to the chapters presented in this volume.

This chapter describes the forms of enslavement that existed in the Americas prior to contact with the Old World. Scholars have long avoided the subject due to their concern that indigenous Americans are already too much associated with savagery. However, the time has come to gather together all that we know of the varied forms of coerced labor. The information only helps us to humanize and comprehend ancient Americans. In Mesoamerica and South America, agricultural states did demand contributions from communities of laboring people; but though these people were diempowered dependents, they were not slaves. The vast majority of those who really were enslaved were prisoners of war who were maintained as domestics, most of them women. We even have some sixteenth-century texts that reveal something of these women's lives. Meanwhile, among the semi-sedentary peoples of North America, slavery likewise existed, as an effect of perennial warfare, but not nearly to the same extent as in the agricultural states to the south.

This chapter looks at the varieties and trajectories of unfree status in the Carolingian empire. Rather than seeing it only as a point of transition from A (Roman slavery) to B (medieval serfdom), it aims to consider the practical logic of unfreedom as a category in the early medieval West, in a variety of different contexts: enslavement (the slave trade, self-sale, penal enslavement), household slavery, on great estates, and in law-making.