Slavery in Byzantium and the Medieval Islamicate World: Texts and Contexts

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Acknowledgements

This special issue has emerged from two online workshops on ‘Textual Sources and Geographies of Slavery in the Early Islamic Empire, ca. 600–1000 CE’ (3–4 December 2020 and 3–4 March 2022), organized by the present authors with the support of Leiden University Centre for the Study of Islam and Society. We would like to thank the Juynboll Foundation for financially supporting the present issue’s publication.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Hannah Barker, That Most Precious Merchandise: The Mediterranean Trade in Black Sea Slaves, 1260–1500 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019).

2 See e.g. Michael McCormick, Origins of the European Economy: Communications and Commerce, AD 300–900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001) and Chris Wickham, Framing the Early Middle Ages: Europe and the Mediterranean, 400–800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); and, more recently, Garth Fowden, Before and After Muḥammad: The First Millennium Refocused (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014) and Youval Rotman, Slaveries of the First Millennium (Leeds: ARC Humanities Press, 2021).

3 Alice Rio, Slavery after Rome, 500–1100 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017); Youval Rotman, Byzantine Slavery and the Mediterranean World, trans. Jane Marie Todd (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2009).

4 For enslavement during the Muslims’ campaigns of conquest, see Chase Robinson, ‘Slavery in the Conquest Period’, International Journal of Middle East Studies 49 (2017), 158–163. Our knowledge of the development of ‘classical’, i.e. ninth-century and later, Islamic notions of slavery is still very incomplete. Studies that offer insight into the development of slavery under Islam include Jonathan E. Brockopp, Early Mālikī Law: Ibn ʿAbd al-Ḥakam and His Major Compendium of Jurisprudence (Leiden: Brill, 2000); Ulrike Mitter, Das frühislamische Patronat: Eine Studie zu den Anfängen des islamischen Rechts (Würzburg: Ergon Verlag, 2006); Irene Schneider, Kinderverkauf und Schuldknechtschaft: Untersuchungen zur frühen Phase des islamischen Rechts (Stuttgart: Kommissionsverlag Franz Steiner, 1999).

5 Most famously, Patricia Crone, Roman, Provincial and Islamic Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), with the critical review of Wael B. Hallaq, ‘The Use and Abuse of Evidence: The Question of Provincial and Roman Influences on Early Islamic Law’, Journal of American Oriental Society 110.1 (1990), 79–91 and the detailed study of Mitter, Das frühislamische Patronat. See also Constantin Zuckerman, ‘Learning from the Enemy and More: Studies in “Dark Centuries” Byzantium’, Millennium 2 (2005), 79–135, esp. 107–117.

6 Youval Rotman, ‘Captives and Redeeming Captives: The Law and the Community’, in Judaea-Palaestina, Babylon and Rome: Jews in Antiquity, ed. Benjamin Isaac and Yuval Shahar (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2012), 227–247.

7 Noel Lenski, ‘Slavery in the Byzantine Empire’, in The Cambridge World History of Slavery, vol. 2: AD 500–AD 1420, ed. Craig Perry et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 453–481, at 459–465; Rotman, Byzantine Slavery, 36–37.

8 Michael Lecker, The “Constitution of Medina”: Muḥammad’s First Legal Document (Princeton, NJ: The Darwin Press, 2004), esp. 103–105.

9 Schneider, Kinderverkauf und Schuldknechtschaft, 27 and 30; Rainer Oßwald, Das islamische Sklavenrecht (Würzburg: Ergon Verlag, 2017), 24–26.

10 Maria Campagnolo-Pothito, ‘Les échanges de prisonniers entre Byzance et l’Islam aux IXe et Xe siècles’, Journal of Oriental and African Studies 7 (1995), 1–55; Youval Rotman, ‘Captif ou esclave? Entre marché d’esclaves et marché de captifs en Méditerranée médiévale’, in Les esclavages en Méditerranée: espaces et dynamiques économiques, ed. Fabienne P. Guillén and Salah Trabelsi (Madrid: Casa Velázquez, 2012), 25–46. For reports about a few earlier attempts to release Muslim prisoners-of-war, most of them said to have been initiated by Caliph ʿUmar b. ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz (r. 717–720), see Andreas Kaplony, Konstantinopel und Damaskus: Gesandtschaften und Verträge zwischen Kaisern und Kalifen, 639–750 (Berlin: Klaus Schwarz, 1996), 394–395.

11 Jeffrey Fynn-Paul, ‘Empire, Monotheism and Slavery in the Greater Mediterranean Region from Antiquity to the Early Modern Era’, Past & Present 205 (2009), 3–40.

12 Ibn Buṭlān, Risāla jāmiʿa li-funūn nāfiʿa fī shirāʾ al-raqīq wa-taqlīb al-ʿabīd, ed. ʿAbd al-Salām M. Hārūn, in Nawādir al-makhṭūṭāt, vol. 4 (Cairo: al-Bābī al-Ḥalabī, 1973), 1–389, at 373–374.

13 E.g., Lamia Balafrej, ‘Domestic Slavery, Skin Colour, and Image Dialectic in Thirteenth-Century Arabic Manuscripts’, Art History 44 (2021), 1012–1036; Roland Betancourt, Byzantine Intersectionality: Sexuality, Gender, and Race in the Middle Ages (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020); David M. Goldenberg, The Curse of Ham: Race and Slavery in Early Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003); Yūsuf Rāġib, Actes de vente d’esclaves et d’animaux d’Égypte médiévale, 2 vols. (Cairo: Institut français d’archéologie orientale, 2002–6), 2:30–33, 36–37; Rachel Schine, ‘Race and Blackness in Premodern Arabic Literature’, Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature (2021), online: https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.1298.

14 Noel Lenksi, ‘Servi Publici in Late Antiquity’, in Die Stadt in der Spätantike: Niedergang oder Wandel?, ed. Jens-Uwe Krause and Christian Witschel (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2006), 335–357. See also Panayotis A. Yannopoulos, La société profane dans l’empire byzantin des VIIe, VIIIe et IXe siècles (Louvain: Publications Universitaires de Louvain, 1975), 276–277.

15 Rotman, Byzantine Slavery, 102–105; Jamal Juda, ‘The Economic Status of the Mawālī in Early Islam’, in Patronate and Patronage in Early and Classical Islam, ed. Monique Bernards and John Nawas (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2005), 263–277, at 269–271; Elizabeth Urban, Conquered Populations in Early Islam: Non-Arabs, Slaves and the Sons of Slave Mothers (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020), 153–166.

16 Noel Lenski, ‘Slavery among the Visigoths’, in Slavery in the Late Antique World, 150–700 CE, ed. Chris L. de Wet, Maijastina Kahlos and Ville Vuolanto (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), 251–280, at 257–258; Arietta Papaconstantinou, ‘Notes sur les actes de donation d’enfant au monastère thébain de Saint-Phoibammon’, The Journal of Juristic Papyrology 32 (2002), 83–105, esp. 92–94.

17 Gary Leiser, Prostitution in the Eastern Mediterranean World: The Economics of Sex in the Late Antique and Medieval Middle East (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2017).

18 Angeliki E. Laiou, ‘Sex, Consent, and Coercion in Byzantium’, in Consent and Coercion to Sex and Marriage in Ancient and Medieval Societies, ed. Angeliki E. Laiou (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 1993), 109–221, at 119; Göran Lind, Common Law Marriage: A Legal Institution for Cohabitation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 70–75; Nicolas Oikonomides, ‘Leo VI’s Legislation of 907 Forbidding Fourth Marriages: An Interpolation in the Procheiros Nomos (IV, 25–27)’, Dumbarton Oaks Papers 30 (1976), 173–193, at 186. Leo VI’s prohibition of concubinage may have been designed in such a way so as to have little effect in reality; see Meredith L.D. Riedel, Leo VI and the Transformation of Byzantine Christian Identity: Writings of an Unexpected Emperor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 116.

19 Brockopp, Early Mālikī Law, 192–203; Shaun Marmon, ‘Intersections of Gender, Sex, and Slavery: Female Sexual Slavery’, in The Cambridge World History of Slavery, vol. 2: AD 500–AD 1420, ed. Craig Perry et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 185–213; Pernilla Myrne, ‘Slaves for Pleasure in Arabic Sex and Slave Purchase Manuals from the Tenth to the Twelfth Centuries’, Journal of Global Slavery 4 (2019), 196–225.

20 For discussions, see Rotman, Byzantine Slavery, 95–120; Youval Rotman, ‘Slavery in the Byzantine Empire’, in The Palgrave Handbook of Global Slavery throughout History, ed. Damian A. Pargas and Juliane Schiel (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2023), 123–137, at 127–130; and Kurt Franz, ‘Slavery in Islam: Legal Norms and Social Practice’, in Slavery and the Slave Trade in the Eastern Mediterranean (c. 1000–1500 CE), ed. Reuven Amitai and Christoph Cluse (Turnhout: Brepols, 2017), 51–141, at 90–124.

21 Whereas extensive use of slave labour in the marshlands of southern Iraq has been documented for the seventh through ninth centuries as has some use of slave labour in North Africa and in Arabian and Egyptian mines in these centuries, our sources for late antique and early Islamic Egypt, for example, attest much less to the large-scale use of slave labour in agriculture. See Kurt Franz, Kompilation in arabischen Chroniken: Die Überlieferung vom Aufstand der Zanǧ zwischen Geschichtlichkeit und Intertextualität vom 9. bis ins 15. Jahrhundert (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2004); Mohamed Talbi, ‘Law and Economy in Ifrīqiya (Tunisia) in the Third Islamic Century: Agriculture and the Role of Slaves in the Country’s Economy’, in The Islamic Middle East, 700–1900: Studies in Economic and Social History, ed. Abraham L. Udovitch (Princeton, NJ: The Darwin Press, 1981), 209–249, at 214–219; and Michael Morony, ‘The Early Islamic Mining Boom’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 62 (2019), 166–221. See also the critical observations in Franz, ‘Slavery in Islam’, 100–102.

22 Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982).

23 Nathan Leidholm, ‘Parents and Children, Servants and Masters: Slaves, Freedmen, and the Family in Byzantium’, in The Routledge Handbook on Identity in Byzantium, ed. Michael E. Stewart, David A. Parnell and Conor Whately (London and New York: Routledge, 2022), 263–281. See also Bruning’s contribution to this special issue.

24 Matthew S. Gordon, ‘Abbasid Courtesans and the Question of Social Mobility’, in Concubines and Courtesans: Women and Slavery in Islamic History, ed. Matthew S. Gordon and Kathryn A. Hain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 27–51; Shaun Tougher, The Eunuch in Byzantine History and Society (London and New York: Routledge, 2008), 60–61.

25 For a useful discussion of examples of ‘everyday resistance’ in sources that mostly postdate the period studied in this special issue, see Craig Perry, ‘Slavery and Agency in the Middle Ages’, in The Cambridge World History of Slavery, vol. 2: AD 500–AD 1420, ed. Craig Perry et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 240–267, esp. 255–264.

26 Kyle Harper, Slavery in the Late Roman World, AD 275–425 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 488–489; Rosemary Morris, ‘Emancipation in Byzantium: Roman Law in a Medieval Society’, in Serfdom and Slavery: Studies in Legal Bondage, ed. M.L. Bush (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), 130–143 at 135–137; Rotman, Byzantine Slavery, 121–122.

27 E.g., Ulrike Mitter, ‘Origin and Development of the Islamic Patronate’, in Patronate and Patronage in Early and Classical Islam, ed. Monique Bernards and John Nawas (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2005), 70–133, at 111.

28 Roy Mottahedeh, Loyalty and Leadership in an Early Islamic Society (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), 82–95.

29 On the basis of an analysis of Slavery & Abolition’s annual bibliography, the editors of the second volume of The Cambridge World History of Slavery recently made this point very clearly in their introductory chapter. See Craig Perry et al., ‘Slavery in the Medieval Millennium’, in The Cambridge World History of Slavery, vol. 2: AD 500–AD 1420, ed. Craig Perry et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 1–24 at 1–3.

30 For a recent overview of early Islamic slavery studies, see Elizabeth Urban, ‘Race, Gender and Slavery in Early Islamicate History’, History Compass 20, no. 5 (2022), e12727.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jelle Bruning

Jelle Bruning (corresponding author) is a lecturer in the Department of Middle Eastern Studies, Leiden University, P.O. Box 9515, 2300 RA Leiden, The Netherlands. Email: [email protected]

Said Reza Huseini

Said Reza Huseini is a PhD candidate at Leiden University and a research fellow at King’s College, King’s Parade, Cambridge CB2 1ST, UK. Email: [email protected]