In the poem “The Lay of Rig,” the god Rig visits three households and has a son with the woman in each one. His eldest son, Träl (“Slave”), and his family are described cruelly:
A swarthy boy was born to Edda.
She sprinkled water on him, called him Träl
Black were his nails, his face was ugly
Gnarled were his joints, crooked his back,
Thick were his fingers, and his feet were long.
Träl grows up and meets a girl with dirty feet and a “down-bent nose.” They have twenty-one children, all with insulting names like Brat, Clod, and Sluggard for their sons, and Clumsy-girl and Servant-girl for their daughters. This repulsive family were supposed to be the ancestors of all the thralls.
Of course, the slaves in Scandinavia didn’t look much different from free people, especially those slaves who were Scandinavian themselves. And even if some did look different, it is heartbreaking to think that they were supposed to be less than human because of their appearance. But the poem shows a view of slaves as ugly, dirty, and cowardly, and of free people as handsome, brave, and noble.
Not all sagas showed slaves in such a hateful light. Some show that free people valued their loyal slaves. In one saga the thrall Asgaut is described as a large man with a shapely body, “And though he was called a thrall, yet few could be found his equal amongst those called freemen, and he knew well how to serve his master.” That was high, rare praise for a slave.
Slavery Laws in the Viking Homelands
Scandinavia included many kingdoms, each with its own laws about slavery. In Denmark, masters were responsible for the crimes of their slaves; if the master denied that the slave had committed the crime, the slave could be tortured with a hot iron to make him confess. An Icelandic law required the owner of a slave suspected of theft to swear an oath on the slave’s behalf – otherwise the slave could be flogged, mutilated, or beheaded. But sometimes the law was more forgiving toward a slave. If a slave committed a crime at the owner’s request, the slave would often go free. Someone who insulted, injured, or killed a free man had to pay the injured person or his family money for damaging his honor. Someone other than a slave’s owner who injured or killed the slave had to pay the owner. The payment was for harm to the owner’s property; honor had nothing to do with it.
In Norway, masters could treat their own slaves however they wanted, including killing them. The only law against killing a slave was one that warned such murderers that they’d have to answer to God.
Freedom
In Scandinavia, as in Ancient Greece and Rome, an owner might free a slave in gratitude, or a slave might be freed after the owner died. Slaves could also buy their freedom with any money they were permitted to earn. But even after they’d been freed, former slaves didn’t have all the rights of a freeborn person. They might not be allowed to marry, to have their own households, or to conduct a business. They couldn’t even choose who would inherit their possessions after their death; their former owners would be their heirs.
Burials
Slaves could be sacrificed at their owner’s death in order to serve him in the next life. The Arab traveler Ahmad ibn Fadlan witnessed a ship burial and human sacrifice in the year 921. He reported that the family turned to the slaves after the chieftain’s death and asked, “Who among you will die with him?”
One of them said, “I shall.” So they placed two slave-girls in charge of her to take care of her and accompany her wherever she went, even to the point of occasionally washing her feet with their own hands. They set about attending to the dead man, preparing his clothes for him and setting right all he needed. Every day the slave-girl would drink alcohol and would sing merrily and cheerfully.
The people prepared the chieftain for burial and readied the ship where they would place him and the slave girl, supplying it with food, alcohol, fruit, herbs, weapons, and other things they thought the dead man would need. They also prepared the slave girl for her death. An interpreter explained the ritual to Ibn Fadlan:
The first time they lifted her, she said, “Behold, I see my father and my mother.” The second time she said, “Behold, I see all of my dead kindred, seated.” The third time she said, “Behold, I see my master, seated in Paradise. Paradise is beautiful and verdant [green]. He is accompanied by his men and his male slaves. He summons me, so bring me to him.” So they brought her to the ship and she removed two bracelets that she was wearing, handing them to the woman called the “Angel of Death,” the one who was to kill her.
The woman stabbed the slave and placed her beside her dead master. A relative of the chieftain set fire to the ship, which was then pulled from the fire and buried. The name of the chieftain and the name of the king were written on a piece of birch as a grave marker. They did not name the girl.
The End of Viking Slavery
The Vikings’ early successes had depended on surprise. After years of attacks, towns and villages could no longer be taken so easily. They were prepared to fight off the Vikings with strong forces of their own. Raiding also became less common among the Vikings themselves.
Although people continued to keep slaves in the Viking homelands for the next few hundred years, the practice gradually faded away, there and elsewhere in Northern Europe. No one knows exactly when it ended, or why. Experts think the spread of Christianity had an influence, in part because the Church encouraged owners to treat slaves well and free individual slaves. Indeed, a Swedish law in 1335 prohibited the enslavement of anyone who had a Christian mother or father.
A Booming Slave Trade
Meanwhile, slavery continued in other lands. In northern Italy, for example, slaves became part of almost every household. They had not been an important part of life there for two hundred years, but a terrible disease was about to change everything.
The Black Death – the dreaded plague – swept through Europe and North Africa, Syria, and Iraq from 1348 to 1350. For those who witnessed the spread of the disease, it must have seemed like the end of the world. Some victims suffered from big dark boils, high fevers, and diarrhea before they died in agony. Others dropped dead before they even knew they were sick. There were carts full of corpses, but there was nowhere left to dump them. Whole villages disappeared, with nobody left to bury the last person alive. No one knows exactly how many people died, but it was probably about seventy-five million – more than one-third of the Western world’s population.
In the Italian town of Florence alone, half the people died. The plague infected both rich and poor, but the poor were hit harder because they lived in more crowded conditions. The rich were desperate to replace the servants who had perished, but the workers who had survived had their pick of jobs – and not many wanted to be servants. The leaders of Florence had a solution: they would revive slavery. In 1363, they ruled that Florentines could import foreign slaves as long as they were not Christians.
Import them they did. Most prized were young slaves, especially girls. The children were as young as eight, and most were under eighteen.
This illustration, from a French book handwritten around 1350, suggests the misery and desperation caused by the plague. As people fled infected towns, they carried the disease and spread it.
Photo Credit 3.2
Young Slaves
“Pray buy for me a little slave-girl, young and sturdy and of good stock, strong and able to work hard … so that I can bring her up in my own way, and she will learn better and quicker and I shall get better service out of her,” the wealthy businessman Francesco Datini wrote in 1393. “I want her only to wash the dishes and carry the wood and bread to the oven, and work of that sort … for I have another one here who is a good slave and can cook and serve well.”
The children included Greeks, Russians, Turks, Slavs, Cretans, Arabs, and Ethiopians. They were packed on ships as if they were bales of cloth or vats of olive oil. One vessel that left Romania in 1396 listed “17 bales of pilgrims’ robes, 191 pieces of lead, and 80 slaves.�
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The voyage from their native land must have been terrifying. Captured children would be taken to a large slave market in Genoa, Venice, or Pisa, where a dealer would buy them. Their hands or faces would be marked with cuts or tattoos to identify them as slaves. Imagine the pain, seasickness, terror, and fear of what might happen next.
Slaves of all religions were bought and sold, but soon after they arrived they would be taken to a church where a priest would baptize them as Christians and give them new names. Some owners worried about this baptism. By law they could not import Christian slaves; would they have to free the slaves once they were baptized? Religious leaders assured them that they would not. One of them explained that the baptism of slaves was meaningless, and “to baptize such men is like baptizing oxen.”
The seller would draw up a deed of sale that stated each slave’s place of birth and described his or her appearance. The descriptions were not kind. In a list of 357 slaves registered in Florence, only one was described as handsome. Most descriptions were like the one that said a seventeen-year-old girl had “a wideish face, snub and thick nose, many moles in her face.” As they had centuries before, sellers were supposed to guarantee their slaves’ health and good morals.
The days ahead would be hard for the young slaves. There were so many restrictions – even on what they wore. Free girls and women could adorn themselves with bright colors and soft fabrics, but the laws required slave women to wear clothing of coarse gray wool, or black capes with natural-colored dresses – no purples or reds for them, no silk gowns, no belts with golden threads. On their heads they could wear only a linen towel with a black stripe, and on their feet only wooden clogs with black straps.
The chores that Datini described – “wash the dishes and carry the wood and bread to the oven, and work of that sort” – were not as easy as he made them sound. Household labor was tedious and full of risk. The dishwater was scalding, the wood was heavy, and the bread oven was dangerously hot.
THE CRUSADE INTO SLAVERY
Nicholas was a German boy, perhaps no more than twelve, in the year 1212, when he led thousands of people, mostly children, on a crusade from Germany to Jerusalem. That same year, a twelve-year-old French boy, Stephen, inspired thousands of children to join him in going “to God.” Together these expeditions are known as the Children’s Crusade.
Tens of thousands of older Christians had already marched in four crusades from Western Europe, across mountains and deserts, in unsuccessful attempts to reclaim the Holy Land from the Muslims. The children wanted to succeed where their elders had failed. The German crusade began, one chronicler wrote, when “many thousands of boys, ranging in age from six years to full maturity, left the plows or carts which they were driving, the flocks which they were pasturing, and anything else which they were doing.” Their parents urged them to turn back, but many walked over the snow-covered Alps into Italy, finding hunger, thirst, exhaustion, and disappointment along the way.
Some of the children remained in Genoa, in Italy, but others walked on to other port cities, still hoping to get to the Holy Land. Instead, they met with tragedy. Pirates lured them to their ships and sold them as slaves. Of all the children who left Germany, only a handful ever returned home.
Most historians say the children following Stephen through France became hungry and tired, and the king commanded them to go home. But one account tells a different story. A clergyman who arrived in France from Egypt in 1230 said he had been one of Stephen’s followers. He said the children had numbered thirty thousand when they arrived in Marseilles. There, two men had offered seven ships to take them across the Mediterranean Sea. Two of the vessels had been shipwrecked, drowning everyone on board. The others had landed on the North African coast. The men had sold some of the children into slavery there, and had taken the others to Baghdad, where they too were sold. He said that he had eventually escaped, but the other children – now grown up – were still in slavery.
Owners’ Rights
In the formal writing of a contract, sellers typically gave owners permission to “have, hold, sell, alienate, exchange, enjoy, rent or unrent, to dispose of in his will, to judge soul and body” and generally to do whatever they pleased with their slaves.
Owners must have known that their slaves were often miserable, resentful, and angry, because they certainly didn’t trust them. Margherita Datini, Francesco’s wife, called them female beasts and said, “You cannot trust the house to them: they might at any moment rise up against you.”
Owners were especially afraid that their slaves would put magic potions or poisons in their food, and the law called for drastic punishment of slaves suspected of such treachery. A female slave in Venice who poisoned her mistress was branded, whipped, and had her nose and lips cut off. A male slave in the same town had his eyes put out for poisoning his master’s food.
Escape must have been on every slave’s mind, but it was almost impossibly hard. How to hide the scars? How to get a change of clothes? It was illegal to try to escape, and slaves who were caught were considered thieves for stealing their owner’s property – themselves.
Even if they got away, where would they go? Everyone would be on the lookout for a runaway, and anyone found helping one would face a heavy fine or punishment. The town officials would issue a proclamation like this one:
… whoever shall hold or keep or know who is holding or keeping a certain slave belonging to Piero di Dato, called Bernardina, 16 years old, with a brown gown and a black overcoat and shall not give her back to the said Piero, or give information to the Office of the said Eight [the City police] within three days from the date of this proclamation shall be arrested and considered guilty of theft and proceeded against according to the Law.
Slaves were almost always caught and sent back, since their clothes, cuts or tattoos, and mannerisms made it clear that they were fugitives. But there was an exception: a slave who was Christian and belonged to a Jew could take refuge in a church, where he or she would be safe.
This portrait, drawn by the famous artist Albrecht Dürer in 1521, shows a mixed-race woman who was the slave of a Portuguese man. All we know of her is her name, Catherine.
Photo Credit 3.3
There was only one realistic route to freedom: receiving it as a gift from the owner. People often freed their slaves in their wills, because they believed the act would atone for their sins. Francesco Datini’s will said that he freed “for the love of God, every slave of mine in any and every part of the world, restoring to them their pristine liberty.”
One unfortunate slave was supposed to be freed, but her owner died before he could complete the arrangement. A document he left said clearly that he wanted to free his Russian slave Margherita “in view of the love, solicitude and fidelity” with which she had served him. For nine years after his death, however, his mother made Margherita work as a slave, even renting her to another family for four years. Finally she freed Margherita, saying she was “moved by charity.”
Those who were freed still faced obstacles. With no money or skills, they often had no choice but to beg or steal.
The use of slavery in Italy began to decline around six hundred years ago. Wars blocked the trade routes for Italian slave ships, so slaves were harder to import. This didn’t stop the very rich from getting slaves from Greece and the Slavic lands, and from Africa, but these slaves often served more as decoration than as workers. A high Church official, Cardinal Ippolito de’ Medici, used enslaved Arabs and Turks as horsemen, Africans as wrestlers, and Indians as divers, and when he died, his slaves carried his corpse from his country house to Rome. Still, they were slaves, far from home. The very rich remained slave owners until the 1800s.
ALMOST A SLAVE
Nikolai Shipov was not a slave, but you could easily mistake him for one. He had an owner who could whip him whenever he chose, or even sell him. But his owner also let him travel to conduct business, just as Nikolai’s father had done. Nikolai was a serf.
Nikolai and his father were livestock traders with a sideline in furs, leather, and tallow (animal fat). Successful as they were, they never got the rewards they wanted because of the demands of their owner, Saltykov, and his manager, Raguzin. Every year, Nikolai’s father had to pay Saltykov five thousand rubles. In 1830, he told Raguzin that he would pay fifty thousand if Saltykov freed his son. When Raguzin refused, Nikolai ran away, but he returned within months when he heard that his father was ill.
His father died a short time later. Nikolai appealed to Raguzin again for his freedom, and again the manager refused.
Nikolai’s chance came when he discovered a law that said that serfs who were “captured by mountain plunderers would be freed along with all their family upon escaping from captivity.” To make this work, Nikolai had to escape, get himself captured, and then flee his captors. He fled to the Caucasus Mountains, where he was soon caught. His plan succeeded. Eight months after his capture and fifteen years after his father’s offer to buy his freedom, Nikolai and his family became free.
Five Thousand Years of Slavery Page 4
