Defining Slavery in Medieval Europe: A Review Essay

Sara Hidalgo

In the inflammatory 1910 book Barbarous Mexico, American journalist

John Kenneth Turner presented a ferocious indictment of the Mexican
political system due to the existence of a state-sanctioned system of
masked slavery in the Yucatan sisal plantations. 1 True, slavery had
been legally abolished in Mexico since 1829, but Turner was not using
the term metaphorically. After two undercover trips to Yucatan, the
American journalist concluded that what was euphemistically described
as debt peonage actually concealed a de facto system of chattel
slavery in which masters had complete ownership over peons bodies.
The coerced debt acquired with landowners impeded the mobility of
these hooked up peons. Furthermore, hacendados could sell these
peons like mules to another master in a price that fluctuated with the
market, and local police made sure that any runaway peon would be
returned to his masterwho in turn had the power to chastise him.
Turner might have had a deliberate political agenda in providing
such a definition of slavery,2 but the analytical distinction between
1 In Turners own words: Men, women, and children bought and sold like

mulesand like mules they belong to their masters. They are slaves. John
Kenneth Turner, Barbarous Mexico (Chicago: Charles Kerr & Company, 1911),
second edition. Kindle edition, position 122.
2 By that time, Turner was working close to a Mexican anarchist opposition
movement in exile in the United States. He sought to destabilize the Dazs
regime by stirring American indignation, and he knew that in his country few
issues sparked such passions as the issue of slavery. See Claudio Lomnitz,
The Return of Comrade Ricardo Flores Magn (New York: Zone Books, 2014),

slavery and other forms of coerced labor has not been more
transparent to scholars. In a 1974 article analyzing labor conditions in
Mexican plantations during the same period, renowned historian
Frederich Katz was not shy in describing Yucatan plantations as neoslavery.3 Observing similar conditions as those listed by Turner in 18 th
and 19th century Russia, historian Peter Kolchin has more recently
argued that Russian serfdom was not only undistinguishable in nature
from New World chattel slavery, but also an outcome of the same
process:

the

expansion

of

European

markets

and

peripheral

agricultural markets.4
These examples show that far from being a straightforward
issue, the definition of slavery has provoked contentious debates
among scholars, and raised important interpretative questions: What is
the defining feature of slavery? Is it mainly defined by the juridical
ownership of persons? Or should we define it as a form of coerced
labor exploitation, whether legal or illegal? Part of the reason behind
the pervasiveness of these dividing lines lies on the fact that most
scholars have address the issue as part of an examination of New
World slaverynoteworthy for its rapacious form of labor exploitation.
117.
3 Labor Conditions in Haciendas in Porfirian Mexico: Some Trends and
Tendencies, The Hispanic American Historical Review, 54 (1974) , 23.
4 Peter Kolchin, Unfree Labor: American Slavery and Russian Serfdom
(Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1987), 30.

When looking for counterexamples, historians have usually turned to

Ancient Rome, which has left myriad of written juridical sources that
show the extent to which slavery was legally codified during the
period.

But the history of the institution from the dissolution of the

Roman Empire to the colonization of the Americas in the 16 th century

has received much less attention.
For this reason, the recent publication of a number of books and
articles dealing with the history of slavery in Medieval Europe should
be hailed with enthusiasm. Those who hope to find an unambiguous
definition

of

slavery

in

these

pages,

however,

will

soon

be

disappointed. If one thing emerges clearly from surveying this

literature is that much of our modern difficulties to define slavery vis-avis other types of coerced or servile labor emerged precisely during the
Middle Ages. But this literature does contribute to move the
historiographical debate sketched above forward in several ways.
Firstly, it shows that examining the legal framework of slavery need not
mean considering laws as necessarily prescriptive. Secondly, it shows
the ultimately contingent nature of any definition of slavery. Thirdly,
and related to the above, this literature shows that rather than taking
the definition of slavery as a constituted, ahistorical fact (doubtless
influenced by the experience of New World slavery), scholars would do
well in focusing more systematically in the historical processes through

which the term has been socially and legally defined and redefined
during the Middle Ages and beyond.
Because of its comprehensive and synthetic nature, a good place
to start this survey is Robin Blackburns the Making of New World
Slavery: from the Baroque to the Modern, 1492-1800.5 Although, as the
title indicates, this book is mostly concerned with slavery in the New
World, the author dedicates a long first chapter to discuss the evolution
of slavery after the collapse of the Roman Empire as a precedent to
what would come next. Relying mostly on secondary literature, this
chapter describes the evolution of the institution of slavery from the
collapse of the Roman Empire to the conquest of the new Worlda
period in which, in general terms, slavery dramatically decreased in
the continent. The Iberian Peninsula was a mild exception to this rule;
due to recurrent Muslim wars, slavery in the region preserved some
structural importance. Perhaps because Blackburn is trying to explain
the latter consolidation of African slavery in the Americas, his narrative
highlights those traits that were already visible during the medieval
period and would later become central to New World slavery. Important
among these are the Catholic Churchs acceptance of the institution of
slavery; the somewhat different trajectory of the Iberian peninsula,
where due to recurrent Muslims wars, slavery retained some structural
significance; the growing tendency not to enslave insiders, or people
who shared religious creed; and the rise of a racist justification for the
5 (London and New York: verso, 1997).

institution, most notably patent in the Old Testaments story of Noahs

curse to Ham and his descendants.6

The introductory chapters of a recently edited volume that seeks

to confine the legal definition of slavery provides.7 A first brief and
concise article titled The Nature of Slavery by Antony Honor
recapitulates the legal definition of slavery under Roman law. 8 These
principles are important to bear in mind considering that they provided
the basis for jurists and lawyers that attempted to define slavery
during the subsequent periods. A second chapter by R.H. Helmholz
addresses the more pressing issue of how slavery was defined by the
medieval and early modern European ius commune, a synthesis of
both Roman and canon law.9

6 See ibid., 66-68.

7 Jean Allain, ed., The Legal Understanding of Slavery: From the Historical to
the Contemporary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).
8 Antony Honor, The nature of Slavery, in ibid., 9-16.
9 R.H. Helmholz, The Law of Slavery and the European Ius Commune, in
ibid., 17-39