forms of slavery 269
In contrast to the clear-cut juridical demarcation between slave and free person in
Byzantium and the Caliphate, the laws and juridical records of the Latin West suggest
an amalgam of statuses of social dependency of peasants which also included slaves
(Rio, 2009). The ambiguous meaning that the Latin terms servus, servitium, servitus
(originally “slave” and “slavery” in Roman Latin) acquired in the Middle Ages cor-
responded with the fact that these statuses became mixed through marriage, and
reflected the absence of a borderline between free and unfree. Slavery in the early
medieval West seems to have been dependent on hereditary status, rather than on the
importation of slaves. Nevertheless, western Europe played an essential role in the
Mediterranean slave trade by connecting the southern Mediterranean markets to east-
ern and central Europe.
A lack of economic means in the regions outside of Mediterranean influence (cen-
tral and eastern Europe, the Latin West) and the demand for gold in these regions
created a new market economy (McCormick, 2001). This supplied slaves from pagan
populations in Africa and eastern Europe to the southern and the eastern Mediterranean
basin as well as to rich Abbasid Iraq, where the demand for slaves was high, and the
financial means of acquiring them was available. The trade routes of African slaves ran
from the sub-Sahara and east Africa to the Mediterranean south (trans-Saharan routes)
and Near East (via the Persian Gulf), and of European slaves from northeastern
Europe to the Byzantine–Arab Mediterranean. The latter were called (in the Arabic of
Andalusia) saqaliba, referring to their Slavic origin. The term later entered Greek
(sklaboi), and all other western European languages. This economic dynamic reflects
the new function of the Mediterranean as a place of encounters, exchange, war, com-
merce and human exploitation between medieval civilizations which were not
Mediterraneano-centric, but evolved through international relations outside of the
Mediterranean.
Prices of European male slaves varied between 20 gold coins in Constantinople and
33 gold dinars in Fatimid Egypt. The difference in prices marks the difference in trade
routes: in comparison, the price of an African woman in Egypt was about a half of the
price of a European man. Medieval sources rarely designate slaves according to their
“color,” but mostly denote slaves according to their origin (hence sklabos–Slav became
sklabos–slave). The price of a slave was equivalent to the price of a house in the
Byzantine province, or the average price of three shops in Constantinople, a year’s
wage for a Byzantine civil servant, or up to six years of work for a daily worker. While
in Fatimid Egypt the prices of European slaves were 50% higher, the purchasing power
there was double that in Byzantium. The high prices remained relatively stable on the
Mediterranean markets from late antiquity onwards.
The religious aspects of both medieval law and social life affected the status of the
slave, in particular in regard to the slave’s family life. Whether originally of pagan
origin, trafficked and sold in the Mediterranean, or a Mediterranean inhabitant who
was kidnapped and sold in a foreign land, the slave was expected to follow the religion
of the owner (hence the importance put on ransoming captives from the infidels).
This in no way resulted in immediate manumission. Nevertheless household slaves
were likely to be manumitted before their owner’s death, but remained in the service
of the family.
While under Roman law no marriage could exist between a free person and a slave
(though concubinage was customary), the development of marriage as a Christian