THE RISE AND DEMISE OF THE TRADE IN EUROPEAN CAPTIVES

One of the most elaborate slave systems in Europe developed in the Roman Empire (44 BCE–476 CE). The wars that established the empire generated captives from the conquered territories in Europe and the Mediterranean region resulting in the establishment of a large slave system. However, once incorporated into the empire, the general populations in the conquered territories became Roman citizens and were protected by the imperial government against capture and enslavement. Thereafter, the Roman slave system was sustained by imports from territories outside the borders of the empire. While the imperial government in Rome remained strong and the provinces were effectively administered, pax romana (Roman peace) ensured that people in all parts of the empire—from the British Isles to the Balkans and beyond—were protected against capture and enslavement.

But with the collapse of the empire and the disappearance of its strong centralized state, the provinces descended into political fragmentation. Effective imperial protection in Britain ended with the withdrawal of the Roman legions in 407 CE; Roman authority in the Balkans collapsed in the late sixth century; and from the fifth to the eighth century, German political entrepreneurs broke up western Europe into several small Germanic kingdoms. This proliferation of small political units presented a fertile ground for sociopolitical conflict that would expose many people to capture and slavery.

Nevertheless, political fragmentation by itself did not immediately lead to capture and enslavement. For one thing, many of the large urban centers in the Roman Empire, which provided markets for the products of slave labor and made investment in slaves profitable, disappeared after its collapse. Under these conditions, the high cost of slave labor supervision made holding slaves economically unprofitable. Hence, large slaveholders began to look for ways to exploit the labor of their slaves without the high cost of supervision. This was found in serfdom, which gave former slaves more rights and freedom in exchange for labor (on the manors of their former owners) and other dues. Thus, in the decades following the collapse of the empire, there was a general conversion of slaves into serfs, who settled in lands they cultivated for themselves, paying labor and other dues to the former slaveholders. Amid the general insecurity that followed the collapse, even many of the previously free peasants were reduced to serfs.

While serfdom was emerging in parts of western Europe, a large slave market was developing in the Middle East, following the establishment of the Islamic empire in the seventh century. This market encouraged many individuals in the Balkans and other former provinces of the empire in western Europe (including the British Isles) to raid politically fragmented regions for captives in order to satisfy the growing demand from the Middle East. Without relatively strong centralized states to prevent internal breakdown of law and order and hold external raiders in check, internal man-hunting generated internal sociopolitical conflict, and raiding across political boundaries provoked wars among neighbors, both of which produced captives sold for export and for local use.

The cycle of conflict, wars, and enslavement induced by export demand for captives continued in the former Roman provinces for centuries until the general emergence of relatively strong centralized states—first, the Frankish kingdom (786–814) and its successor states in continental Europe; then, the Norman state in Britain after 1066. These states were more or less politico-militarily equally matched. They were strong enough to stop destabilizing internal man-hunt by their own people and maintain law and order internally, while general politico-military parity among them restrained them from exporting each other’s subjects, even in wartimes. For the rest of the Middle Ages and early modern times, trade in European captives became limited to the Balkans and the Black Sea region, where political fragmentation lasted much longer. But with the Ottoman conquest and incorporation of the small autonomous political units in the Balkans into the Ottoman empire in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and a similar incorporation of the small political units in the Black Sea region into the expanding Russian empire in the fifteenth century, the export of white captives from both regions also came to an end.

About the same time that political developments in Europe were ending the export of European slaves to the Middle East, western European explorers and traders were establishing seaborne contacts with the coastal societies of Atlantic Africa in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The drying up of supply from Europe had long been shifting Middle East demand for captives to sub-Saharan Africa, leading to the growth of the trans-Saharan slave trade.