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Although not “slave-owning societies” in modern terms, it is impossible to think
about Greek and Roman societies without the place they attributed to slavery. Slavery
appears not only as part of the social structure, but a vital element in the evolution of
both society and economy in Mediterranean antiquity. This was not due to the exclu-
sion or the unique exploitation of slaves, but mainly due to their functionality. Slaves
made society and economy dynamic thanks to their complex status: juridically they
were like any other property, yet socially they were the opposite of any other type of
property. The same social and economic importance of slavery as a dynamic institution
continued into the medieval period, although its juridical definition radically changed.
The rise of a medieval MediterraneanWhile no actual decline in the use of slaves is attested for late antiquity or the early
Middle Ages, scholars have tended to connect the idea of the decline of the Roman
Empire to the decline of ancient slavery, and its replacement with “medieval forms of
unfree labor.” Such a view is no longer tenable, mainly thanks to research on slavery
in medieval Mediterranean societies. After the seventh century the Mediterranean
entered a new phase in its history, with its division into three distinct civilizations: the
caliphate, Byzantium and the Latin West, each with its own language, culture and
religious identity (see Valérian, this volume). Slavery continued to play an important
role in the socio-economic life of both Byzantium and the caliphate in contrast to
its role in the Latin west. This difference marks the demographic and economic
differences in the early and central Middle Ages between the rich populated south-
ern and eastern Mediterranean regions, in contrast to the regions northwest of the
basin. This economic imbalance created a new international dynamic around the
commerce in slaves.
Another decisive factor was the role religion played as a political and national iden-
tifier. The new political definition of the state as religious community in both the
caliphate and Byzantium affected the definition of the borderline between slave and
free person. Medieval laws defined the free status of members of their respective reli-
gious communities as a permanent “civil status.” This meant that a free Muslim, for
example, could not lose his status as a free person within the Caliphate de jure.
However, he could well become a slave de facto in Byzantium, and vice versa. The
religious identification that maintained the free status of the member of a religious
community left the enslavement of foreigners as the only source of slaves. Legal meas-
ures were taken in both Byzantine and Muslim law to eliminate the enslavement of
adult and child inhabitants either by legal punishment, self-selling or child exposure.
Both states developed a new international custom: the ransom of captives and prison-
ers of war from the infidel enemy. Jewish communities shared the same perspective,
and developed their own mechanisms for ransoming their co-religionists. Furthermore,
prohibitions on selling co-religionists to slave traders and international conventions
on redeeming co-religionists were aimed at limiting commercial trafficking in local
inhabitants. These measures did not prevent piracy, by both private and public forces,
which became a permanent threat in the central medieval period (Backman, this vol-
ume), and was aimed at filling the demand for slaves on the Byzantine and Arab mar-
kets. For the Mediterranean inhabitants who were victims of such activities that meant
that they were de jure free persons in their homeland, while de facto slaves elsewhere.