670 skaldic poetry
skaldic poetry SeeICELAND ANDICELANDIC
LITERATURE.
Skanderbeg(George Castriota, Iskander Bey)(1404–
1468)Albanian national hero
George Castriota, later called Skanderbeg, was born in
1404 in the clan of the Castriotes, from the high valleys
of Drin and Mat near the Adriatic. In 1423 he was taken
as hostage to the court of Sultan MURADII. There he
acquired an excellent education and the surname Skan-
derbeg, in Turkish Iskander Bey or Lord Alexander. As a
JANISSARYhe rose to become a general in the Turkish
army. He won numerous battles but reverted to Christian-
ity and returned to ALBANIAin 1443. There he organized
the struggle against the OTTOMANTURKS. He won numer-
ous, as many as 13, victories against an enemy far supe-
rior in number and arms. With little help from the
outside except minor assistance from the PAPACY, he held
back the advance of the Turkish army in the Balkans
between 1444 and 1468. He died undefeated at Lezhe
January 17, 1468. With his death there ended any effec-
tive resistance to the Turks by the Albanians.
Further reading:John V. A. Fine, The Late Medieval
Balkans: A Critical Survey from the Late Twelfth Century to
the Ottoman Conquest(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 1994).
slave trade and slavery Throughout the medieval
world, serfdom had the humiliating and exploitative ele-
ments of ancient slavery, including the loss of personal
freedom and real or bodily dependence on the lord. True
slavery never totally disappeared. Some authors defended
the universal right to personal freedom; however, slavery
was fully recognized as a necessity in the early Middle
Ages. Based by divine punishment from the curse of
Cain, slavery depended on the violent appropriation of
human beings, as in the classical world. ISLAMforbade
the enslavement of Muslims and non-Muslims living
under Muslim rule. The only legal slaves were to be non-
Muslims or their children imprisoned or taken beyond
the borders of Islam. Islam was regularly supplied with
domestic slaves by Saharan dealers, and the first orga-
nized states of West AFRICAwere heavily dependent on
slavery. Some Islamic armies were made up of slaves.
In the BYZANTINEEMPIREbefore the 10th century,
large-scale slave labor was used in AGRICULTUREand in
industry within the city of CONSTANTINOPLE. By the 11th
century slave labor had ended in those activities, but
slaves still passed through its markets to Western Europe,
and particularly into the Islamic world. In the West
Christians were not supposed to be enslaved, but pagans
were fair game. By the later Middle Ages and the RENAIS-
SANCE, slavery in Europe was limited to domestic servi-
tude in ITA LY, with some agricultural labor in Iberia and
its new Atlantic and Mediterranean colonies. These slaves
were from the region around the BLACKSEAand the east-
ern Mediterranean and were then being supplemented by
others captured by Portuguese expeditions along the
West African coast in the 15th century. In the 16th cen-
tury, the conquest of the Americas involved massive
enslavement of the local populations and soon thereafter
large transport of Africans. There was some opposition to
slavery in the early 14th century from the followers of
Ramón LULL; however, economic incentives proved
stronger than moral qualms, so that the practice was not
limited but instead ultimately spread.
See alsoJANISARRIES ANDJANISSARYCORPS;MAMLUKS;
SERFS AND SERFDOM;SLAVS; VILLEINS AND VILLEINAGE.
Further reading:David Ayalon, Islam and the Abode
of War: Military Slaves and Islamic Adversaries(Aldershot:
Variorum, 1994); Robert Brunshvig, “‘Abd,” Encyclopedia
of Islam,1.24–34; Pierre Dockès, Medieval Slavery and
Liberation,trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: Univer-
sity of Chicago Press, 1982); Steven A. Epstein, Speaking
of Slavery: Color, Ethnicity, and Human Bondage in Italy
(Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2001); Carl I.
Hammer, A Large-Scale Slave Society of the Early Middle
Ages: Slaves and their Families in Early Medieval Bavaria
(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002); Bernard Lewis, Race and
Slavery in the Middle East: An Historical Enquiry(New
York: Oxford University Press, 1990); Iris Origo, “The
Domestic Enemy: The Eastern Slaves in Tuscany in the
Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries,” Speculum 30
(1955): 321–366; William D. Phillips Jr., Slavery from
Roman Times to the Early Transatlantic Trade(Minneapo-
lis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985); Susan Stuard,
“Ancillary Evidence for the Decline of Medieval Slavery,”
Past and Present149 (1995): 3–28.Slavs The word Slav might be derived from two roots.
One referred to those who lived in swampy places, and the
other was linked with a word for “glory” or those who had
an “intelligible language.” As a people they first appear in
the sixth century as Sclaveni or Sclavi. By the central
Middle Ages, the name had become linked with SLAVERY
in places such as VENICEthat traded in human beings
for slave labor and could obtain people from the Slavic
population in the Balkans and from around the BLACKSEA.
Slav society was united by a common Indo-European
language and was organized into a tribal structure, under
the leadership of military chiefs. Its economy was based
on AGRICULTUREand ANIMAL HUSBANDRY. Early in the fifth
century, bursting with large populations, the Slav tribes
invaded the Byzantine Empire; by the end of the sixth
century they had settled throughout the Balkan Peninsula
and as far south as the Peloponnese. Other Slavs moved
into what became MORAVIAand BOHEMIA. They eventu-
ally settled in the former ILLYRICUMon the Dalmatian
coast, the valleys of the Elbe, Vistula, Bug, and the Oder
Rivers; and finally in the valleys of the Dniepr and Volga