Slavery After Rome, 500-1100

The study of slavery in the early and central middle ages: Old problems and new approaches

“…Though mostly well received, the proposed scale and economic significance of the trade McCormick posits have attracted criticism by from some scholars (e.g., Henning, 2003a, 2003b; Jankowiak, n.d. ; Rio, 2017, p. 24–28) 4…”

“…Surprisingly, this revelation has had little impact on the older tradition of locating an extinction of slavery even during the centuries when the European slave trade was at its height. The traditional justification for this is that there is little evidence trafficked slaves were put to work locally, but this partition is dubious, particularly in East Frankia (McCormick, 2001, p. 738; Rio, 2017, p. 24; on eastern Frankia, see Verhulst, 1988, p. 100–101). To take Raffelstetten as an example, which served as a waypoint in the broader European slave trade in the tenth century, Carl Hammer has noted evidence for a local, two‐way trade between Bavaria and its Slavic neighbors, suggesting that the broader slave trade was not wholly divorced from the local trade, although more research is needed to discover whether similar dynamics are identifiable in other regions (Hammer, 2002, p. 54).…”

“…Approaches can be grouped broadly into socio‐legal definitions based on the restricted rights and accepted treatment of slaves, economic definitions based on the organization of servile labor, and cultural definitions focusing on dishonor and the natal alienation of slaves from kinship, drawing on the comparative analysis of Orlando Patterson (Patterson, 1982; for a medieval application, see Wyatt, 2009). The limitations of space do not permit a full discussion of these diverging approaches here, but excellent discussions of each can be found in the works of Ruth Mazo Karras (1988), Cameron Sutt (2015), and Alice Rio (2017).…”

“…Barthélemy's critique represents only the most vociferous dissenting voice among a broader a gradualist rebuttal. As discussed above, Alice Rio, drawing on Barthélemy's work, has recently argued for a more flexible understanding of conditions of unfreedom that evolved constantly over a long period through the 11th century (Rio, 2006; Rio, 2017). Hans Werner Goetz had earlier made quite similar assertions while critiquing Bonnassie's model, analyzing a wide array of sources on unfreedom from the seventh through the ninth centuries to assert that unfreedom encompassed a wide variety of actual conditions and that there was a constant and gradual evolution in its meaning from Late Antiquity to the central middle ages (Goetz, 1993).…”

Justice and legal practice in early medieval Italy, ca. 700–900

“…18 18 For some regions of Europe, formula collections offer one way around such limitations: Brown (2007), Rio (2007, 2009). For the range of business that might come before Carolingian missi , see Theodulf of Orleans's “Verses against judges” (trans.…”