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

This special issue of Slavery & Abolition presents six studies on the history of slavery in the greater Mediterranean basin, the Near East and the Iranian world during the second half of the first millennium CE. The articles cover a large area that stretches from the Iberian Peninsula in the west to Bactria in the east, an area that was at that time largely controlled by East and West Roman emperors, Sasanian shahs and, later, Muslim caliphs. Despite the widely varying nature of the various historical environments brought together in this special issue, they combine to tell a common story. They gradually developed what one historian recently called (with reference to the later Middle Ages) a ‘common culture of slavery’ that transcended these regions’ political, economic and other boundaries.¹ This early medieval culture of slavery in the Mediterranean basin and Near East was recognizably different from its Roman and Sasanian predecessors and from contemporary forms of unfreedom in other parts of the world, notably in Latin Europe. The culture of slavery in these regions developed to a large extent under the influence of the politicization of Christian and Islamic monotheism and solidarity which, in turn, was embedded in larger historical processes – political, religious and other – in the Greater Mediterranean region of the first millennium.² The articles collected here are situated against the backdrop of this shared culture of slavery and explore its regional expression among the various communities that together formed the early medieval Byzantine and Islamicate world.

The history of this general culture of slavery arguably dates back to the early fourth century, when a Christian ethos started to influence Roman imperial slave laws. Its development was a long and complex process that took place throughout much of the period covered in this special issue. Over the course of centuries, Christian and later Islamic thought increasingly influenced notions of slavery in these regions while political fragmentation caused, to varying degrees, regional differentiation in the exploitation of asymmetrical power relationships. After the division of the Roman Empire into western and eastern halves in 395, for example, and especially after the disintegration of the West Roman Empire in the fifth century, the legacy of Roman slavery followed very different regional trajectories. While the Byzantine Empire in the eastern Mediterranean maintained the unambiguous distinction between slave and free, Roman slavery changed beyond recognition in Latin Europe, giving way to various and sometimes unclearly demarcated forms of unfreedom, which were not limited to slave status and showed great regional diversity.³

The coming of Islam brought further change throughout the region, both east and west. In the seventh and eighth centuries, Arab-Muslim armies established Muslim rule in many of the regions covered by this special issue: the Iberian Peninsula, North Africa, much of the Byzantine Near East and the entire region that had been ruled by the Sasanian shahs. These very successful campaigns of conquest not only unified what had previously been politically divided lands – and enslaved thousands in the process – but also laid the basis for a large culturally and economically integrated region in which Muslims developed a general notion of slavery akin to that of Byzantium.⁴ This is not to say that the systems of slavery in Byzantium and the contemporary Islamicate world were almost identical, although it has been argued that some cultural crosspollination took place.⁵ There were, in fact, many differences with regard to legal institutions as well as various non-institutional forms of domination. In addition, these realms themselves were not internally homogeneous in their treatment of slavery, as their various religious/legal communities had their own slave laws and practices (such as those in late antique and early Islamic Bactria, in what is now Afghanistan, explored in Huseini’s contribution to this special issue). But, in general, the slaveries of Byzantium and the Islamicate world did share a set of fundamental features in the period studied in this special issue and, in fact, continued to do so well into the later Middle Ages.

This common culture of slavery included a shared notion of what constituted the legitimate basis of forced enslavement, namely religious otherness. In both the Christian Byzantine Empire and the Islamic Caliphate, this common idea of what constituted legitimate slavery developed out of a sense of religious communal solidarity and responsibility. Whereas Christian thinkers had long preached such solidarity, it was only in the fifth and sixth centuries that formerly informal acts of solidarity towards enslaved Christians gained a footing in Byzantine imperial law. Under the pressure of violence on its borders, the Byzantine Empire created legal ways for originally free Byzantine Christians, captured and enslaved by enemy forces, to regain their freedom within the empire. Emperor Justinian I (r. 527–565) in particular is known for making far-reaching adjustments to the empire’s law of slavery, often under the influence of Christian thought. Through law, he also encouraged the Church and its bishops to take responsibility for the ransoming of captured Christians.⁶ By the end of the eighth century, Byzantine law no longer acknowledged the forced enslavement of Christians within as well as outside the empire and it was generally considered unethical for Christians to reduce coreligionists to slavery.⁷

Similar but still rudimentary political support for and regulation of religious solidarity towards Muslim captives is known to have already existed in the early years of Islamic history when the so-called ‘Constitution of Medina’, dating from the 620s, stipulated that each of the tribes that had joined Muḥammad’s community ‘ransom its captives according to what is customary and equitable among the Believers’.⁸ By c.800, when Muslim jurists had generally come to reject such forms of enslavement as indentured servitude and self-sale and had developed an enduring basis for medieval Islam’s slave laws, Islamic law no longer acknowledged the enslavement of anyone who recognized the supremacy of Islam, whether that person be a Muslim or a non-Muslim who willingly subjected to the rule of Islam and was thus entitled to the Caliphate’s protection (dhimma).⁹ Peace treaties between the Byzantine Empire and the Caliphate aptly illustrate this parallel development of a similar notion of enslaveability and communal responsibility. From the second half of the eighth century on, such treaties regularly included agreements as to the exchange of prisoners-of-war to save them from being enslaved.¹⁰

Enslavement of coreligionists within the Byzantine and Islamic empires still took place – whether illegally, through abduction and piracy or during revolts and civil wars, for example, or legally when a child was born into slavery because its parents held slave status. It is important to note, however, that the Byzantine and Islamic empires themselves no longer constituted slave sources that could supply the market with enough slaves to meet domestic demand. Especially in the last two centuries covered in this issue, slaves were in high demand and the reduction of lawful enslavement to that of the religious Other resulted in the development of extensive and complex slave-trading networks that connected markets in the Byzantine and Islamic empires with ‘slaving zones’ beyond these empires’ frontiers. These zones mainly lay in sub-Saharan Africa, northern and eastern Europe and Central Asia, where slavers captured their human merchandise in societies that were unable to offer their members protection against such depredations.¹¹

In this context it is noteworthy that, in theory, race was not a factor in the legitimacy of enslavement. Byzantium and medieval Islam inherited from antiquity an intricate environmental theory of race that divided the world into a limited number of ‘climes’ or climate zones. Although the exact limits of these zones remained a matter of dispute, these zones’ unique climatological and geographical characteristics, especially the intensity of sunlight, were generally believed to affect their inhabitants’ physiology (most visibly their skin colour) and their psychology, thus creating racial differentiation. In accordance with this race theory, medieval medical literature and slave acquisition advice treatises did not consider one race to be more suitable for enslavement than another. Rather, because each race was believed to possess unique somatic and psychological characteristics, the authors of such texts argued that the work assigned to a slave should preferably match the slave’s perceived racial qualities. For example, the Christian physician Ibn Buṭlān (d. 1066) wrote the following about Berber women in his well-known advice treatise:

Berber women come from Jazīrat Barbar, which lies between the west and the south. Their skin is mostly black, but some of them are yellow. If you find among them a woman born from a mother belonging to the Kutāma (Berbers) and a father belonging to the Ṣanhāja, while she has been raised among the Maṣmūda, you will find her to be naturally inclined to loyalty, to fulfilling all her tasks and to working with zeal. These women are good for procreation and pleasure because they take good care of their children.¹²

To observe that race in theory did not matter for enslavement to be (il)legitimate is not to say that race was irrelevant for the acquisition of slaves or for the work assigned to them; nor does it necessarily imply that racial prejudices did not exist in the societies studied in this issue. Indeed, recent analyses of art, literature and legal documents produced in the societies of Byzantium and the medieval Islamicate world point to the opposite.¹³ Slavery in practice was often racialized, to the extent that certain large and ethnically diverse groups of people, known collectively by such essentialist terms as ‘Slavs’, ‘Turks’ or ‘Blacks’, were commonly associated with enslaveable people. It is important to note, though, that early medieval slavers and slave traders did not legitimise their activities based on the conviction that their captives were uncivilized ‘barbarians’, as their Greek and Roman predecessors had done in antiquity. Their victims were primarily members of freedom-unworthy faith communities who lived in vulnerable societies.

In addition to the legitimacy of enslavement and the role of race-thinking in it, patterns of slave ownership and labour were much alike in Byzantium and the Islamicate world. In both realms, most slaves were the property of private individuals. The servi publici of antiquity, owned by cities and performing a range of tasks from financial accounting to aqueduct maintenance, are no longer attested after the sixth century; their jobs had been taken over by privately-owned slaves and free persons.¹⁴ Likewise, in Byzantium, the emperor used his own slaves for work that would have been carried out in Roman times by slaves who were owned by the state, and Muslim rulers and bureaucrats of the seventh and eighth centuries are known to have used their own slaves and clients (often their own freedmen) for basic administrative purposes.¹⁵ ‘Public slavery’ seems to have persisted mostly in religious institutional contexts, such as in the case of slaves owned by Zoroastrian fire-temples (see Tamari’s contribution to this issue) or Christian churches and monasteries.¹⁶

In both realms, the majority of privately-owned slaves belonged to affluent urban households. Historians agree that most of these slaves were held as domestics and enhanced the social status of their owners by relieving the latter from menial work, such as performing household chores, running errands and attending to their owners’ needs. Women, in addition, were held for sexual purposes. This could be for commercial prostitution – notwithstanding Byzantine and Islamic laws strictly prohibiting slave owners from using their slaves in this way – or alternatively for private sexual use.¹⁷ In late antiquity, Byzantine imperial law allowed a man to have sexual intercourse with his slave women until this became punishable in the early eighth century. Emperor Leo VI (r. 886–912) prohibited concubinage, which up to that time had been lawful in Byzantium (provided that that relationship remained monogamous).¹⁸ By contrast, Islamic law permitted male owners to have sexual intercourse with any of their slave women throughout the period covered by this issue. By the late eighth century, however, laws had developed that gave enslaved women used for procreation a stronger legal position than other enslaved women – a legal position that strengthened these women’s ties with their owners’ households and enhanced their social standing (see Bruning’s contribution to this special issue).¹⁹

Other privately-owned slaves were set to work for their masters outside the home, extending the household economy. These slaves engaged in trade and crafts, for example, or when they were set to work in non-urban environments, they cultivated land, herded cattle and worked for their masters in mines.²⁰ The available sources, however, show relatively little interest in these common usages of slave labour, making it largely impossible for historians to estimate the number of slaves held for these purposes and to gauge their contribution to local economies. Not only do many of our sources employ terminology that often makes it impossible to know the exact legal status of the person in question, but they also mostly tell of slaves who enjoyed power, wealth, and status because they operated within the highest echelons of society, such as slaves held as palace guards, soldiers and courtesans (see de la Puente’s article in this issue). More common forms of slave labour appear mostly in the background of other events or, occasionally, when slaves or freedmen came to the attention of political authorities (such as during revolts; see Gordon’s contribution). The sources give the impression that slaves were a numerical minority workforce in rural areas in both the Byzantine and Islamic realms, although there may have been considerable regional variation in the use of slave labour there.²¹

Although many slaves in the Byzantine and Islamic empires had been imported from foreign lands and, as such, had been alienated from their natal kin, they were not social non-beings who lived on the margins of freeman’s society, persons whom Orlando Patterson would refer to as being ‘socially dead’.²² Byzantine and Islamic law recognized the humanity of slaves and stipulated that slave owners should treat their slaves in a humane manner – that is, that they should provide them with their basic needs and that they should not overexploit them or subject them to excessive violence. Whereas slaves legally constituted their masters’ property, socially they belonged to their masters’ household, and we know of at least some instances when a slave’s lengthy close interaction with the household resulted in their development of emotional bonds with other household members, including their owners.²³ As slave owners controlled the mobility of their slaves, the latter’s ability to form relationships outside the household and to enhance their social integration was limited and largely depended on their masters’ approval. Those enslaved persons who wished to improve their life circumstances were forced to navigate the intricate and often dangerous line between submission to their masters and their own aspirations. Some of those who succeeded attained positions of authority or accrued wealth, such as foreign eunuchs at the Byzantine court or the slave-entertainers of the higher echelons of Abbasid society.²⁴ But other slaves lived in conditions that did not allow them to build meaningful relations or to integrate in their new societies. We still know little, however, about the circumstances that allowed slaves in Byzantium and the Islamicate world to exercise volition and the strategies available to them to attain personal goals.²⁵

Finally, the shared general culture of slavery in Byzantium and medieval Islam also found expression in the freeing of slaves. In both the Byzantine and Islamicate world, a slave’s emancipation constituted a full change in his or her legal status but it did not amount to a full revocation of a slave’s dependency on his or her former owner. In Byzantium, slaves became Roman citizens upon emancipation, although their new legal status (eleutheros) remained inferior to that of a freeborn person (eugenēs) and a former master kept much of his authority over a slave he freed (see Rotman’s contribution to this special issue). Should a freedman fail to comply with his legal duty to show ‘gratitude’ to his old master and follow the latter’s orders, his old master could revoke his emancipation.²⁶ In the Islamicate world, emancipation could in general not be undone, but it resulted in a similarly inegalitarian patron-client relationship (walāʾ). Although this legal relationship was ‘like agnatic kinship’, according to a maxim ascribed to Muḥammad, and integrated a freedman into the tribal society of free Muslims, his former master held extensive powers over him.²⁷ Freedmen were expected to show loyalty towards their patrons, in return for which they could expect support.²⁸ As a result, freedmen often maintained a close relationship with their former owners and their descendants, worked for them and lived closely alongside them. In both realms, the fact of having been reduced to slavery left an irremovable stigma that made many freedmen second-class citizens.

These broad generalizations about a shared culture of slavery do not do justice to the complex range of political, legal, economic, and social mechanisms that created domination, forced migration, permitted physical and emotional violence and fostered exploitation in the societies of the early medieval Greater Mediterranean region and the Iranian world. A large part of that history of slavery remains unknown, for the often-raised complaint remains valid: in contrast to the long academic interest in slavery and other forms of domination in ancient Greek and Roman societies, medieval and especially Latin Europe and the post-contact Americas, the history of slavery in other parts of the world and in other historical periods, including slavery’s Byzantine and early Islamic history, has received much less scholarly attention.²⁹ The contributions to this special issue explore a variety of textual sources that enrich and complicate our understanding of slavery in these understudied historical settings, studying how the culture of slavery of Byzantium and the Islamicate world in the second half of the first millennium found regional expressions. Presenting these studies, this special issue aims to advance the now growing academic awareness of the importance of studying ‘unfreedom’, in all its modalities, if one wants to understand the historical societies that were shaped by this experience, and the role played by these societies within the larger global history of slavery.³⁰

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).

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]

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.