Enslavement for Manumission: The Creation of Byzantine ‘Private Subjects’

ABSTRACT

The article challenges current perspectives on slavery as ‘unfreedom’ and proposes to examine the enslaved within a socio-political dynamics of power relations. An analysis of four Byzantine documents from the eleventh century and the place they accorded to slaves and manumitted slaves reveals the way enslavement and manumission served together as a means to acquire socioeconomic independence and private authority by turning the enslaved persons into private subjects: men and women exclusively subordinated to the authority of their owners. Private authority was based on a total subordination towards the enslaver and challenged the public imperial authority over people. An analysis of the place accorded to slaves and manumitted slaves in the private domain as seen from juridical and economic documents from the central Middle Ages from different regions of the Byzantine Empire shows slaves as social capital and slavery as a means to gain socioeconomic independence as part of the power game in a medieval society.

KEYWORDS:

• Byzantine slavery
• private subjects
• manumission
• conversion
• social dependency

The last two decades have witnessed a growing interest in the history of slavery, including medieval slavery.¹ This is perhaps in part a reflection on the contemporary urgency to deal with and fight modern forms of slavery.² And yet, despite the considerable amount of publications in the field, including the second volume of The Cambridge World History of Slavery, the general image of medieval slavery has remained more unclear than its image in other periods in history. This is, in part, due to the nature of the historical documents pertaining to medieval forms of slavery and their greater rarity and diffuseness than is the case with other periods, in particular with early modern and modern sources.³ It is also due to an historiographical perspective that tends to define medieval slavery as a phenomenon confined to the sphere of domestic private service, as opposed to the image of slavery as an engine for production in rural economies in ancient, early modern and modern periods.⁴ ‘Domestic slavery’ therefore is positioned in opposition to ‘plantation slavery’, first and foremost as much as economic aspects of slavery are concerned. Today, this is no longer a sustainable perspective.⁵ In medieval societies slavery was used for varied socioeconomic roles. Medieval societies employed enslaved persons in very different ways for very different objectives. In fact, diversity and versatility in the medieval uses of enslaved people were precisely what made slavery so important. In Byzantium, one of its main functions was as a means to create private subjects.

The meaning of the term ‘private subjects’ that this article coins in reference to Byzantine slavery requires clarification. The conventional definition of slaves as res, a thing to own, is often contrasted with an alternative conception of slavery as a means to enlarge the enslaver’s sphere of influence through control over people, enslaved and manumitted persons alike. Using slavery as a means to increase political and social influence was by no way unique to medieval societies, including Byzantium.⁶ What was highly distinctive to Byzantium was the way its public authority developed over a period of a millennium, increasing its influence over private authority.⁷ In this dynamic, slavery played a significant role in providing private owners with the means to create their own subjects – that is, both men and women who were exclusively subordinated to them in contrast to the public authority, and thus their own people subjected to their authority, whom they could employ to increase their power and independence, both socioeconomic and political. Unlike private agents, private subjects were people who were the exclusive subjects of a private owner.

The main importance of Byzantine slavery therefore lay in providing the private household with means to create its own subjects, and who were not the subjects of the emperor’s sovereignty or the Byzantine state and its institutions. This practice is particularly characteristic of the central medieval Byzantine period, which saw a protracted social struggle for power. Indeed, the historical documents from this period show that the enslavement of women, men, boys and girls served to constitute them as private subjects in order to gain and increase private authority and power. This can be compared with the varied use of slavery also in other medieval societies in both public/governmental and private sectors.⁸ This use of slavery made it an important component in the medieval dynamics of power relations: using the enslaved as private subjects meant creating private sovereignty by means of private authority. Analyzing slavery as a means to acquire and constitute people as private subjects can shed new light on the way in which slavery functions within the social system. Moreover, it reveals the two sides of medieval slavery, enslavement and manumission, as complementary. Indeed, once we consider slavery as means of creating private subjects, we can understand manumission not only as an important aspect of this system, but also as its main objective. Enslavement was thus a means to acquire humans, while manumission was a means to use them as subjects in a variety of roles and situations.

In her study of the concept of manumission and the status of manumitted slaves in ancient Greek societies, Rachel Zelnick-Abramovitz has focused on the status of the manumitted slave.⁹ She has analyzed ancient Greek slavery as a social institution which served to create and enforce a social relationship of dependency. Manumission in ancient Greek societies was a means to develop this dependency. Following in her footsteps, the present article examines the meaning of manumission a millennium later by focusing on four private Greek documents from eleventh-century Byzantium. All four are testaments stipulating the allocation of property following the testator’s death. Two of them were drawn up by women, two by men. They come from different Mediterranean regions – Constantinople, southeast Anatolia and southern Italy – and are reflective of social relations in the eleventh century, a period of political, cultural and economic expansion. The testaments present a vivid image of the Byzantine private household in different regions and socioeconomic milieus. They refer in detail to the place of slaves and manumitted slaves, both women and men, in the private Byzantine sector. Enslavement appears in these sources as a means to acquire humans with the objective of manumitting them as private subjects. Medieval enslavement, including the violence it entailed, can be seen against this background as an investment in social capital, a necessary means to gain an independent position of power.

The four documents under discussion show that in Byzantium, unlike in Rome or ancient Greece, slaves once manumitted did not leave the household. Indeed, they had no prospective to live outside the authority of their former owner who became their manumitter, and to whom they continued to refer as their ‘master’ (Greek: kurios, κύριος). These apeleutheroi (ἀπϵλϵύθϵροι) were not ‘freedmen’ in the modern sense of the term.¹⁰ Indeed, Zelnick-Abramovitz has shown that manumitted slaves in ancient Greece were not ‘free’ in the modern sense, but were bounded to their manumitter. Manumission, she explains, was a legal transaction that benefitted the latter at the expense of the former. In Byzantium, in contrast, manumission created a socioeconomic interdependency between two persons of free status that could not be established otherwise. This interdependency has affinity with the Roman and Islamic institutes of patronage (Latin: clientela, Arabic: walāʾ). In Byzantium it became beneficial for both enslaver and enslaved. Interdependency meant that the relationship, though asymmetrical and non-reciprocal, went both ways. The manumitted person became important for the life and living conditions of the manumitter, whose success and power was dependent on their manumitted slaves.

Understanding enslavement and manumission as two sides of the same coin, a means to create and institutionalize such forms of interdependency by what we term here as ‘private subjects’, challenge the conventional tendency to differentiate between them as two distinct phenomena. The manumitted person was not a slave de jure but was still enslaved de facto. This understanding invites us to challenge the modern concept of ‘unfreedom’ as a term used to include all forms of social dependency, including slavery. If manumitted persons became free, yet were still the subordinated private subjects of their manumitter, their ‘unfreedom’ then would have coincided with their freedom. Are we addressing two different aspects when referring to ‘unfreedom’ of slaves and of ‘freedmen’ – the first legal, the second social; the first dichotomous, the second not? The concept of freedom was dealt with and elaborated by Byzantine authors who applied the term to a range of different meanings, one of which was ‘liberty’.¹¹ Often this entailed a precise notion of douleia, the Greek term for slavery, but also for service, submission and dependency.

‘Freedom’ therefore had no single meaning in Byzantium, while ‘unfreedom’ was unknown as a concept. Though Byzantine authors did refer to freedom also as political liberty, in their society no one was a free person in the modern sense of the word, namely as a citizen in a democratic state. Rather, everyone was a subject of another individual or institution: the emperor, the fiscus, the church, the landowner, the military superior, the tax collector, the slaveholder, the manumitter. In other words, ‘unfreedom’ had no sense in the absence of a clear definition of ‘freedom’ nor, correspondingly, was there a clear understanding of what was meant by ‘unfreedom’. Being ‘freed’, manumitted persons remained under their former owner’s authority and constituted this latter’s source of private power. The four documents that are presented and discussed below show that in Byzantium manumission was not only the outcome of slavery but may well have also been its cause.¹²

Enslavement as Means to Acquire Manpower

The four documents in question were all drawn up within a period of fifty years (1049-1098). The earliest is the testament of Gemma, a widow of a Byzantine low dignitary from Apulia.¹³ The second document was drafted ten years later by Eustathios Boïlas, a landowner from Anatolia.¹⁴ The other two documents, from 1090 and 1098, are the testaments of Symbatios Pakourianos and his widow Kalē (renamed Maria) respectively, who together belonged to the elite of the Constantinopolitan aristocracy.¹⁵ All four documents were preserved in monasteries and churches that were among the beneficiaries of the bequests detailed therein. Although the four documents of varied geographic origin reflect a wealthy status of landowners, they pertain to different socioeconomic milieus. This offers a diverse socioeconomic context background to analyze the use of enslavement and manumission in both rural and urban milieus of the central Middle Ages in a Mediterranean society. Moreover, the four documents are rich in details about the functioning of private households, and their position within the Byzantine social structure. They have each been fully analyzed by their respective editors and by other scholars, who give a complete overview of the households they represent. None of these studies have focused on the role that enslavement and manumission played within the household.¹⁶ Yet, all four documents offer abundant information with which to contextualize the social dynamics that enslavement and manumission created in a complex framework of social relations of dependency. The testament of Boïlas is the most comprehensive and revealing document in that respect.¹⁷

Eustathios Boïlas presents himself in his testament as holding a military dignitary of protospatharios. His testament enumerates eleven estates which he constructed and cultivated in a ‘wild region’ most probably in southeast Anatolia.¹⁸ Boïlas’ main heirs are his two daughters, their families and the churches he founded. His vast property qualifies him as a rich landlord. Along with his inheritors he names three orphans whom he has raised and to whom he bequeaths two of his estates. Boïlas also names fifteen manumitted slaves (Greek: oiketai, οἰκέται) along with their families and children, whom he has manumitted in the past.¹⁹ He leaves parcels of land to all of them. Moreover, his testament includes a detailed description of these latter individuals’ lives and family. His household thus comprises kin, manumitted slaves and orphans whom he had adopted (either de jure or de facto).

Boïlas composed his testament as an autobiographic narrative of his achievements and distresses. He refers to his ‘sovereigns’, his ‘superiors’ (Greek: authentai, αὐθένται, from the verb authenteō, αὐθϵντέω, to have full power over): the dux Mikhaēl and his sons, who forced him to give up half of his property in their favour. In the last part of his testament the author bequeaths his lands and cattle to his daughters along with his slaves whom he has not manumitted. They are unnamed and designated together by the term ‘little souls’ (Greek: psukharia, ψυχαρία).²⁰ This does not explain, however, what exactly their place was in the household and their importance to the landlord as compared to that of his manumitted slaves who are enumerated by their name in the first part of his testament.

A second document, a Byzantine fiscal treatise, most probably contemporaneous with Boïlas’ testament, sheds light on these questions by describing the use of enslaved people as manpower in rural Byzantine households.²¹ The document, known as the ‘Marciana Fiscal Treatise’ after the Marciana Library in which it is held, concerns the fiscal responsibilities of different types of rural organizations in the Byzantine countryside, and describes two types: agridion and proasteion. The first is a land inhabited by its owner while the second is uninhabited by him. As labour force the text specifies slaves and wageworkers along with cattle. This is by no means the only document from the period that mentions slaves as a rural labour force alongside wageworkers. Both categories of rural labour appear in another earlier text dated to the eighth century, known as ‘The Farmer’s Law’.²² This collection of regulations for the normal social functioning of the Byzantine village attests to the structure of a Byzantine village at the time of its composition. The ‘Marciana Fiscal Treatise’ complements ‘The Farmer’s Law’ by providing additional information about the conditions for improving private Byzantine estates. The text explains that a landowner who is rich in slaves and cattle can move away from the village and settle in a plot of land outside of the village (agridion) which is larger than the parcel around his house and thus improve his status. He may also engage in developing a plot of land on which he does not reside (proasteion), if he settles there his slaves and wageworkers. The Treatise, which was a public official Byzantine document, clarifies that the development of the Byzantine rural household and its expansion were dependent on the ability to acquire manpower.²³ Enslavement was used for such an objective, and this explains the reference in Boïlas’ testament to slaves (psukharia) whom he does not manumit, but instead bequeaths to his inheritors. These are most probably the slaves whom he had used in setting up and constructing his eleven estates and churches.

We can therefore conclude that Boïlas has managed to build his fortune of eleven estates by acquiring slaves. We do not know how he acquired them and whether his military position was helpful in this respect. But no other form of rural labour force is specified in his testament, which otherwise provides a detailed account of his life and activities. Other sources of the period paint a similar picture. Numerous literary texts that are set against the background of the Byzantine countryside depict the social landscape of small and large Byzantine rural households that included slaves. This is the case, for example, of the Life of Philaretos the Merciful, as well as the Life of Mikhaēl Maleinos. The former tells the story of a rich person who loses his vast estates together with his slaves and stays with only his modest land parcel around his house.²⁴ Thus following an opposite trajectory to the one described by the ‘Marciana Fiscal Treatise’, he deteriorated from proasteion to agridion, and ultimately was left with only two slaves, a man and a woman, whom he employed as rural manpower. The latter text tells the story of Mikhaēl Maleinos who inherits the large estates of his parents in Cappadocia in the tenth century together with slaves whom he renounced in favour of his brothers.²⁵ Another example is the widow Danelis, a rich landlady from the Peloponnesus who bequeathed her vast estates to the emperors Basil I (r. 867-886) and Leo VI (r. 886-912), along with a very large number of slaves who resided there.²⁶

Such evidence points to the fact that the success of the rural household, at whatever scale it operated, depended on the acquisition of people. The same is also the case in regard to urban households, whose success depended on their management capacities as an independent business. Here too we are informed by a collection of regulations of the prefect of Constantinople regarding the organization of guilds of the city. The ‘Book of the Eparch’ of the tenth century mentions slaves as artisans of different kinds as well as managers, foremen of workshops and shops and members of guilds.²⁷

In order to enlarge one’s businesses and household in both urban and rural milieus, therefore, one needed to acquire people. The fact that slaves were the property of the household’s owner meant that, just as as with children, all profit and control went to the owner. The Byzantine household relied on self-managed organization in order to develop as a business. Naturally, links of mutual dependency could be established between businesses, but this put the household in a state of socioeconomic dependency on some external entity. The best way for a household to enlarge its economic organization while retaining its social independence was to acquire people as slaves – provided, of course, that the household could afford it. Slavery was therefore a means to enlarge the family’s socio-economic independence. But why manumit the slaves if they were so useful?

Manumission as Means to Acquire Private Subjects

The dispute that Boïlas’ testament reveals between himself and his powerful superiors about land provides a unique point of view on the dynamics of Byzantine power relations, characteristic of the period, that saw ‘the powerful’ confronting modest landowners. Boïlas, although himself a large landlord, is by no means socially independent. He is subordinated to his military superiors (his ‘sovereigns’ as he names them) who are powerful enough to use this form of military submission to acquire half of the lands of their subordinate.

Although we do not possess documents relating to the activities of Boïlas’ superiors, the dux Mikhaēl, or documents articulating the interests of his family, we do have a few testaments which originated from their circle: the elite of the Byzantine aristocracy of the time. Two such testaments are those of Symbatios and Kalē Pakourianoi, the first written within thirty years of Boïlas’ testament. They show what the picture looked like from the side of ‘the powerful’. Their testaments depict a rich Constantinopolitan household of an aristocratic family. Their household includes the lands of four villages.²⁸ Thirty-one individuals are enlisted by name as the people of their household, of whom eighteen had already been manumitted prior to the signing of the two testaments.

In his testament, Symbatios Pakourianos manumits the rest of his enslaved men with their clothing, bedding and savings, horses, arms, and 20 pholleis each. He bequeaths his enslaved women to his wife. In her own testament, Kalē Pakouriana names other slaves whom she herself owns, both men and women. She names the slaves whom she has already manumitted (Greek: apeleutheroi and apodouloi; ἀπϵλϵύθϵροι, ἀποδοῦλοι) and other staff members whose juridical status is not specified and bequeaths them cloths or other goods. Her testament states that she has already manumitted all her slaves, men and women, and granted them all clothing, bedding and savings in the same manner as her husband. Together the two testaments provide a detailed description of a wealthy aristocratic household’s group of people. The two testaments also employ the term ‘my men’ or ‘my people’ (Greek: hoi anthrōpoi mou, οἱ ἄνθρωποι μοῦ). We can understand this as the people, the subjects of the landowner. While we cannot be sure whether this term comprises slaves as well as manumitted slaves– the two testaments refer to them differently – it is clear that the household in general is built on relationships of social dependency that bind together the people who perform functions in the service of the household – slaves, manumitted slaves and others. Moreover, the Pakourianoi couple’s testaments show the functioning of the household and its management as a unit of people, and slavery-manumission as one of the main means for the creation of such people.

In his study of the structure of the aristocratic household, Paul Magdalino conceptualized this unit as made up of both slaves and free men in the service of the household master.²⁹ Together they form ‘his people’. The three testaments discussed above show that enslaved and manumitted persons are not only an important segment of the household. They are precisely what makes it a household, an oikos (οἶκος). The Greek term oiketai (οἰκέται), although etymologically connected to the Greek term ‘house’, does not in fact refer to house/domestic slaves, but rather serves as a synonym for the term douloi (δοῦλοι).³⁰ Slaves, whether douloi or oiketai, paides, andrapoda or psukharia, were the landowner’s private subjects, their private people who were subordinated to their sovereignty, and in fact constituted it. Enslaved and manumitted persons were not two distinct categories. They were referred to and considered as two phases, two stages of the same process of creating one’s own people. The first was needed in order to generate and use the second.

The Pakourianoi and Boïlas do not belong to the same milieu. Nevertheless, the analysis of the three testaments shows that both elite magnates as well as local landowners acquired manpower as social capital. Each used manpower in accordance with the needs and requirements of their own household and its social position. Powerful people like the couple Pakourianoi and the family of the dux Mikhaēl held their social position through the authority they established with subordinated landowners who needed to acquire their own people elsewhere.³¹ Landowners like Boïlas were subordinated to powerful dignitaries, through military positions and obligations. On the other hand, people like him had the means to acquire their own subordinates through adoption of orphans, enslavement and manumission.³² Although Boïlas does not term them ‘my people’, they form his private subjects. Their acquisition was crucial for the success of a landowner, particularly opposing other landowners who were more powerful. Enslavement and manumission were the main means to achieve an independent socioeconomic position. In order to acquire their own people, Boïlas and the Pakourianoi bought them. Humans served as economic capital but also as social capital. The children and families of the manumitted slaves were no longer of slave status, but nor were they independent either. They remained dependent for their livelihood on their former owner, their manumitter, to whose household they remained attached. They had no other means of living besides the provisions that they received from their manumitter as part of his household, the quid quo pro being that in return for their continued service, the manumitter ensured their means of survival by bequeathing them a house and a land parcel. They remained in the same household while their service passed on to the next generation of the household’s owner, as Boïlas’ testament specifies.

Who Were the Enslaved?

Captivity, forced migration of the captives, coercion and trafficking constituted the main means to acquire and enslaved people in the Middle Ages.³³ The victims were captured whether in war, raids or other means, and enslaved by their captors. These could have acted in the framework of military campaigns, private militias, as well as tribal or private traders. Starting from the eighth century, new international dynamics developed that linked different medieval economies in a network of trading and trafficking in humans. The demand for slaves came mainly from the rich medieval societies: Byzantium, the Caliphates and the emirates from al-Andalus to Iraq. In this commercial dynamic the Sahel and Sub-Saharan Africa were the main source of African slaves to the Islamic societies, while Eastern Europe and the Slavic countries up to the Caucasus were the main source of slaves for the Mediterranean markets and for Byzantium in particular. Another source for Byzantine slaves were the population of the Balkans, Bulgars and Serbs in particular, as Constantine VII Porphyrogentios (913-959) informs us.³⁴ Human trafficking was based on raids by merchants and by private and military militias who seized local inhabitants, sometimes for payment to local chieftains, and led them away from their country of origin to the slave markets in Mediterranean and Middle Eastern countries.³⁵ This meant that the enslaved arrived in Byzantium as complete foreigners with no social or economic ties to the local population.³⁶ Given the provenance of most slaves, the majority of them were not Christian. Indeed, conversion was a means of integration.³⁷ The enslaved got a new name, new religion and a new identity, which made them part of the community of believers. Such a religious and social conversion contributed to the integration of the enslaved foreigners and made them trustworthy members of the extended family. In fact, this is precisely what enabled the family to extend its power and independence. It is reflected in two Byzantine legal customs of slave manumission performed in church: manumission in church and manumission by baptism. The first was introduced in the fifth century and was performed in church in front of a bishop who acted as the magistrate.³⁸ The second, attested since the eighth century, served to manumit non-Christian slaves through their baptism by their enslaver, an act that created kinship between the enslaver and the manumitted slave.³⁹ It was particularly useful in the case of slave children, since it replaced the submission of the enslaved child to the enslaver with another type of submission, a religious type of kinship between the manumitted child and the manumitter. This is reflected in the family-like attitude displayed towards manumitted slaves in the testaments under discussion. Enslavement, conversion and manumission were three aspects of the same procedure that established the enslaved as one’s own private subjects.

This raises the question of what the patronage relationship between Byzantine manumitted slaves and the manumitter might have looked like.⁴⁰ The testaments of Boïlas and Gemma are particularly informative in this regard. Both treat the manumitted slaves as part of the extended family, not only in matters of property but also in education (Boïlas notes the care he took with their education). But it is unspecified whether such treatment came before or after manumission, and indeed the resultant uncertainty perhaps suggests that in the eyes of the slaveholder, it did not matter. This was not only education for training. Boïlas makes it clear that he wanted the children of his manumitted slaves to be educated in the churches that he founded and for some of them to become clerics.

In the testament of Symbatios Pakourianos none of this is mentioned. In contrast, the author refers to the arms that his manumitted slaves carry.⁴¹ As was stated above, raids were the means by which an enslaver could acquire more people.⁴² They were also the means to create one’s own military force, or private militia.⁴³ In his manual of military-domestic businesses, Kekaumenos, a Byzantine general from the eleventh century, gives the following advice: ‘you must have enough resources for yourself: your family, slaves and free persons, who must ride with you and go out into battle’.⁴⁴

Enslaved men and women continued to be defined according to the law as property, but the very fact that they were Christians turned them from objects to subjects. In other words, they were perceived not only as property but also as believers. As such they gained a legal personality through which they could exercise the agency afforded them as believers: get married, have a family or become church members or monks.⁴⁵ This development was linked to the fact that the religious believer was perceived not only as the property of his enslaver but also as the property of God.⁴⁶ Manumission, in particular, was considered God’s wish and was part of treating the enslaved as a person.⁴⁷ Enslaving infidels, converting them and constituting them as private subjects of free status, or in other words creating private subjects through the enslavement-conversion-manumission procedure, was supported by a cultural-religious rationale.⁴⁸ This made the Byzantine imperial authority an active partner in the relationship between the enslaver and the enslaved. This type of relationship was also dependent on imperial policy, which used the religious quality of the enslaved person for its own benefit.

Private or Public Subjects in the Dynamics Between the Private and the Public

In the sixth century, Justinian’s legislation gave churches and monasteries the right to offer asylum to fugitive slaves. The case of slaves is only a part of the institution of asylum which is made up of several laws that date to the end of the fourth century.⁴⁹ It provided protection for people who sought to evade penal obligations, such as criminals and convicts, as well as fiscal and social obligations, such as curiales, procurators and coloni. Justinian expanded the provision in regard to slaves who fled their enslaver and became monks or clerics, and granted the Church permission to accept them provided that they had committed no crime other than their escape.⁵⁰ Their owners could claim them during the first year if the slaves had become clerics, and during the first three years if they had become monks, provided that they could prove that the fugitives had indeed harmed them.⁵¹ The institution of asylum gave monasteries power over what was considered private human property. Indeed, the Church is seen here as an autonomous entity, which offers refuge within the boundaries defined by law. However, this refuge remained temporary insofar as the status of the person in question was dependent on the jurisdiction that the asylum provided. In other words, the status of the slave who became a monk changed only within the monastery. In contrast, in the case of a slave who became a cleric, the same law granted the Church the authority to manumit him since his ordination could not be revoked.⁵²

Justinian’s legislation offered the slave the opportunity to run away and enabled imperial and ecclesiastical monastic institutions to keep up with their fiscal obligations towards the state, by providing them with means to enlarge their human capital at the expense of private slave owners. Unlike private landowners, monasteries and church institutions could not count on procreation or on the acquisition of slaves through purchase. They thus depended on people who joined them from outside. Although they did not become legally the owners of the fugitive slaves, they became their legal possessors. One form of enslavement was substituted by another. The fugitive slave who became a monk was in no way free to go his own way.⁵³ He was subordinated, controlled and dominated by the hēgoumenos. Leaving the monastery required the permission of this latter, and in case of a slave would have legally returned him to his former enslaver. The asylum was confined to the boundary of the monastery’s property, of which the enslaved constituted a part.⁵⁴

A priori, these measures enlarged the possession and power of monasteries and church institutions over both land and people. They went together with concessions that the state granted them over land, ensured that they had the necessary human property to exploit it, and guaranteed their fiscal obligations.⁵⁵ Yet, from the viewpoint of private slave owners, these measures resulted in jeopardizing their power and authority. The imperial power manipulated the status of the slave by intervening in and limiting the extent of private authority over slaves by reconceptualizing these latter as human possessions. Nevertheless, private proprietors found other means to keep their private subjects. The two testaments of Gemma and Boïlas show exactly how.

Although the widow Gemma is a much smaller proprietor than Boïlas, her testament reveals a very similar household structure and describes in details its property.⁵⁶ Her rural household is composed of several lands and houses, inhabited and cultivated by kin, enslaved and manumitted persons. Being herself a widow without children, she leaves her land and houses to her four nephews. She also bequeaths houses, lands, and cattle to two manumitted women and three παῖδϵς (paides), who may be either freeborn wageworkers or manumitted slaves.⁵⁷ She mentions three more names without stating their status, who receive modest gifts of land. Gemma also nominates her monastic church of St. Bartholomew of Taranto to be one of her heirs. She bequeaths the legal possession of this church to three of her nephews and passes on to them the jurisdiction over the church and its property. She ties her manumitted slaves to this church by giving the church part of the property on which they live. In this the triparty relationship family-people-church is guaranteed to last for the next generations.

At much the same time, in another part of the Empire, Boïlas built two churches on his property, the Theotokos and St. Barbara (the third church he mentions, St. Modestos the Hierarch, was erected by his mother in Cappadocia). He bequeaths part of his lands to these churches. His testament describes in detail the ways in which he connected his manumitted slaves to his churches. Boïlas brought up those who were born in his house (Greek: oikogeneis, οἰκογϵνϵίς, literally ‘house born’ who could be in fact either slaves or not) in the church of the Theotokos. All of them, he writes, shall become clerics. He had one of them married and ordained to the priesthood.

In his classic monograph on Byzantine private religious foundations, John Philip Thomas contrasted private and public religious foundations, following the ways in which they were defined and treated by the Byzantine public power.⁵⁸ As early as the fifth century, but increasing to a much greater extent under Justinian, imperial legislation and Church regulations limited the authority of private owners over religious institutions founded on private property. We can see the outcome of this policy in the two testaments of the eleventh century: The church is part of the household and the people who compose it, including the manumitted slaves. Moreover, the people who compose it are those who are destined to service the church. By establishing a private relationship between the household and its churches, the private landowner ensures that the manumitted slaves remain within the owner’s private unit. In other words, private subjects and private ecclesiastic institutions ensure the creation and maintenance of private independent households. The service to the household’s church, comprised in the household, guarantees this independence vis-à-vis the state’s authority and ensures that the enslaved-manumitted persons will remain, they and their descendants, the private subjects of the landowner.

Enslaved and Manumitted: Humans as Social Capital

The analysis of four Byzantine documents from the eleventh century sheds new and revealing light on the use of slavery in the central Middle Ages. It joins other studies that show how it was not only an important element of the social structure but also a decisive socioeconomic means in the organization of the private household, whether rural or urban, aristocratic or not. The independence of the socioeconomic organization relied on the ability to acquire people and to use them as social capital, and not only as labour force. The importance of the enslaved women and men went beyond their exploitation in the economic activities of the private household. These enslaved people turned the household into an independent unit. They were dependent on the private household for every aspect of their life, while the household’s independence became dependent on them. This interdependency was based on coercion and violence but nonetheless offered means for integration. Slaves were crucial, indispensable and valuable first and foremost as people. Their conversion and manumission were the norm, though not always applied. The Christian formulae that advocated kindness and manumission towards the enslaved had a social rationale: for the enslaver, the enslaved were not less useful as free persons than as slaves. When manumitted, they served to increase the independence of a household of modest size, in particular facing social forces of increasing power by creating private sovereignty.⁵⁹ Being constructed as an independent unit of people, family and church institutions, the household could increase its economic fortune and social position and remain independent thanks to its social capital.

As noted above, such dynamics had affinities with the Roman and Islamic system of patronage. The fact that social integration went together with religious conversion suggests that both in Byzantine and early Islamic societies, social and religious subordinations complemented each other as means to create private subjects.⁶⁰ Yet there was a difference between the Islamic institution of walāʾ and the Roman patronage, on the one hand, and Byzantine slavery, on the other – a difference that the analysis of the four Byzantine testaments from the eleventh century reveal. The mawlā (pl. mawālī), ‘client’, enabled the socioeconomic unit to be organized through relationships between different households in a hierarchical model. It was therefore both a horizontal and a vertical hierarchical structure. Roman clients and Muslim mawālī were not necessarily manumitted slaves but could use the patronage as a means to create ties of attachment to a household of an advantageous patron. In other words, the need to establish subordination came from below.⁶¹ Most importantly, the public power was in no way in competition over such clients. On the contrary, it was part of the same hierarchical order of the socio-political system. Clients, in both Roman and Islamicate societies, were subjects of the public authority just like their patrons.⁶² Roman and Islamicate clients did not constitute private subjects, and they were thus very different from Byzantine manumitted slaves.

Byzantine slaves did not become independent clients but remained attached to the extended family of their owner/enslaver/manumitter in the same household that enslaved them. The latter also united his slaves or manumitted slaves in families.⁶³ The fact that most slaves were manumitted in Byzantium has prompted this article to examine manumission as an essential phase in their life. It did not entail a major change in the socioeconomic bondage for the manumitted slave, as was the case in ancient Greece and Rome.⁶⁴ Nor did it entail a flexible bond of patronage as in Ottoman society.⁶⁵ In fact, the four documents under examination point to the fact that manumitted slaves were blended as part of the household in an organic manner to form its private subjects. For this reason, it is sometimes difficult to identify them in medieval documents.⁶⁶ Constituting the slave as a manumitted subordinated subject, legally of free status, was the main objective of Byzantine slavery. Manumitted slaves formed the social capital of an independent private household.

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Youval Rotman

Youval Rotman is a Byzantinist specialized in the social history of the Byzantine Mediterranean, and teaches history in the Department of Jewish History at Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel. Email: [email protected]

Notes

1 Kecia Ali, Marriage and Slavery in Early Islam (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010). Slavery and the Slave Trade in the Eastern Mediterranean (c. 1000–1500 CE), eds. Reuven Amitai and Christoph Cluse (Brepols: Turnhout, 2017). Carl Hammer, A Large-Scale Slave Society of the Early Middle Ages: Slaves and their Families in Early Medieval Bavaria (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2002). Youval Rotman, Byzantine Slavery and the Mediterranean World, trans. J. M. Todd (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009). Alice Rio, Slavery after Rome, 500–1100 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). Cameron Sutt, Slavery in Árpád-era Hungary in a Comparative Context: East Central and Eastern Europe in the Middle Ages 450–1450 (Leiden: Brill, 2015). Les Esclavages en Méditerranée et en Europe continentale: Espaces de traite et dynamiques économiques, eds. Fabienne. Guillén and Salah Trabelsi (Madrid: Casa de Velázquez, 2012).

2 International Labour Organization, Walk Free & International Organization for Migration, Global Estimates of Modern Slavery: Forced Labour and Forced Marriage (2022): https://bit.ly/3uKAlQQ. The Bellagio-Harvard Guidelines on the Legal Parameters of Slavery (2012): https://bit.ly/3FLoIPO. Home Office, Modern Slavery: Statutory Guidance for England and Wales (under s49 of the Modern Slavery Act 2015) and Non-Statutory Guidance for Scotland and Northern Ireland (2022): https://bit.ly/3PhtIPn. U.S. Department of State, 2018 Trafficking in Persons Report: Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons: https://www.state.gov/j/tip/rls/tiprpt/2018/. Revisiting the Law and Governance of Trafficking, Forced Labor and Modern Slavery, eds. Prabha Kotiswaran (Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, 2017).

3 See for example Rio, Slavery, op. cit. Jelle Bruning, ‘Slave Trade Dynamics in Abbasid Egypt: The Papyrological Evidence’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 63, no. 5–6 (2020): 682–742. Yūsuf Rāġib, Actes de vente d’esclaves et d’animaux d’Egypte médiévale, 2 vols. (Cairo: Institut français d’archéologie orientale, 2002–2006).

4 Two characteristic examples of this categorization: Jacques Heers, Esclaves et domestiques au Moyen Age dans le monde méditerranéen (Paris: Fayard, 1981). Craig A. Perry, ‘The Daily Life of Slaves and the Global Reach of Slavery in Medieval Egypt, 969–1250 CE’ (PhD diss., Emory University, 2014).

5 This is thanks to studies such as the following: Edward E. Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 2014). Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman, Slavery’s Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016). Bonnie Martin, ‘Slavery’s Invisible Engine: Mortgaging Human Property’, The Journal of Southern History 76, no. 4 (2010): 817–66. Gavin Wright, Slavery and American Economic Development (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006).

6 Slavery in Africa: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives, eds. S. Miers and I. Kopytoff (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1977).

7 Evelyne Patlagean, Un Moyen Âge grec: Byzance, IX^e-XV^e siècle (Paris: Albin Michel, 2007). Cf. recently Nathan Leidholm, Elite Byzantine Kinship, ca. 950–1204: Blood, Reputation, and the Genos (Leeds: Arc Humanities Press, 2019). See also A. Kazhdan, People and Power in Byzantium (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 1982), and Leonora Neville, Authority in Byzantine Provincial Society, 950–1100 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

8 See in particular the development of the practice of using enslaved boys to form private militias for the ruler in Islamic societies: David Ayalon, Islam and the Abode of War: Military Slaves and Islamic Adversaries (Aldershot, Hampshire: Variorum, 1994). Lutz Berger, ‘Mamluks in Abbasid Society’, in Migration History of the Medieval Afro-Eurasian Transition Zone, eds. Johannes Preiser-Kapeller, Lucien Reinfandt and Yannis Stouraitis (Leiden: Brill, 2020), 413–29. Étienne de la Vaissière, Samarcande et Samarra: Élites d’Asie centrale dans l’Empire Abbaside (Paris: Association pour l’Avancement des Études Iranéennes, 2007). Matthew S. Gordon, The Breaking of a Thousand Swords: A History of the Turkish Military of Samarra (AH 200-275/815-889 CE) (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2001). Idem, ‘Aḥmad ibn Ṭūlūn and the Politics of Deference’, in Islamic Cultures, Islamic Contexts: Essays in honor of Professor Patricia Crone, eds. Aasad Q. Ahmed, Behnam Sadeghi, Robert G. Hoyland and Adam Silverstein (Leiden: Brill, 2014), ch. 9. Slave Elites in the Middle East and Africa: A Comparative Study, eds. Toru Miura and John Edward Philips (London: Kegan Paul International, 2000).

9 Rachel Zelnick-Abramovitz, Not Wholly Free: The Concept of Manumission and the Status of Manumitted Slaves in the Ancient Greek World (Leiden: Brill, 2005).

10 For the Greek terminology see: Zelnick-Abramovitz, Not Wholly Free, 99–126. For the Byzantine term apodouloi, ἀποδοῦλοι, see below.

11 Dimiter Angelov, ‘Three Kinds of Liberty as Political Ideals in Byzantium, Twelfth to Fifteenth Century’, in Proceedings of the 22nd International Congress of Byzantine Studies, Sofia 22–27 August 2011, 3 vols. (Sofia: Bulgarian Heritage Foundation, 2011), 1:311–31. Alexander Kazhdan ‘The Concept of Freedom (eleutheria) and Slavery (duleia) in Byzantium’, in La notion de liberté au Moyen Age: Islam, Byzance, et Occident, Penn-Paris-Dumbarton Oaks Colloquia, 4 sessions des 12–15 octobre 1982, eds. George Makdisi, Dominique Sourdel, and Janine Sourdel-Thomine (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1985), 215–26.

12 This is not to contradict Orlando Patterson’s theory about slavery as social death: for the manumitted enslaved person, manumission did not change the fact that life has changed forever by their enslaver’s actions: Orlando Patterson, Slavery and social death: a comparative study (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982).

13 Cartulary of the Greek Monastery of St-Elias and St-Anastasius of Carbone, ed. Gertrud Robinson, 3 vols., Oriens Christianus 44; 53; 62 (Rome, 1928–1930), IV, no. 53.

14 Paul Lemerle, Cinqétudes sur le XI^e s. byzantin (Paris: CNRS, 1977), 15–63.

15 Actes d’Iviron II: du Milieu du XIe siècle à 1204 (Archives de l’Athos), eds. Jacques Lefort, Elene Metreveli (Paris: Académie des inscriptions & belles-lettres, 1990), nos. 44 and 47.

16 The four documents are referred to in Rotman, Byzantine Slavery and the Mediterranean World, but are not analyzed together.

17 It was exhaustively studied. See: Lemerle, Cinqétudes. Paul Magdalino, ‘The Byzantine Aristocratic Oikos’, in The Byzantine Aristocracy, IX to XIII Centuries, ed. Michael Angold (Oxford: British Archaeological Reports, 1984), 92–111. Koichi Inoue, ‘A Provincial Aristocratic Oikos in Eleventh-Century Byzantium’, Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 30, no. 4 (2005): 545–69. Claudia Rapp, ‘Zwangsmigration in Byzanz: Kurzer Überblick mit einer Fallstudie aus dem 11 Jahrhundert’, in Erzwungene Exile: Umsiedlung und Vertreibung in der Vormoderne, ed. Thomas Ertl (Frankfurt am Main-New York: Campus, 2017), 59–80.

18 Following Claudia Rapp’s analysis (idem, ‘Zwangsmigration in Byzanz’).

19 In spite of its etymology, this term did not refer exclusively to what historians have termed ‘domestic slave’: Rotman, Byzantine Slavery and the Mediterranean World, 82–93, 183–86. Cf. David Lewis, Greek Slave Systems in their Eastern Mediterranean Context, c.800-146 BC (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 295–306 (appendix about ‘The Meaning of oiketes in Classical Greek’).

20 Lemerle, Cinqétudes, 23. This fact, which clearly shows slavery as a vital rural labor force in eleventh-century Anatolia was ignored in most of the studies that referred to this document.

21 Franz Dölger, ‘Text des Traktates aus Cod. Marc. gr. 173’, in idem, Beiträge zur Geschichte der byzantinischen Finanzverwaltung, besonders des 10. und 11. Jahrhunderts (Leipzig: Teubner, 1927, repr. Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 1964), 113–156 (introduction on pages 3–9). See Ch. M. Brand, ‘Two Byzantine Treatises on Taxation’, Traditio 25 (1969): 35–60. Dölger dates it between 913 and 1139, while Ostrogorsky dates it between 912 and 970: George Ostrogorsky, Die ländliche Steuergemeinde des Byzantinischen Reiches im X. Jahrhundert (Amsterdam: Adolf M. Hakkert, 1969), 4ff. Oikonomides has argued for the beginning of the twelfth century: Nikolaos Oikonomides, Fiscalité et exemption fiscale à Byzance (IXe-XIe s.) (Athens: Ethniko Idruma Ereunōn, 1996), 44–45. Neville, Authority in Byzantine Provincial Society, chs. 3–4.

22 Jus graecoromanum, vol. 2, eds. Ioannes D. Zepos and Panagiotes Zepos (Athens: Scientia Aalen, 1962), 67–71 (Γϵωργικός νόμος, ed. Walter Ashburner). And see also the commentary in Nomos Georgikos: das byzantinische Landwirtschaftsgesetz: Überlegungen zu inhaltlichen und zeitlichen Einordnung: deutsche Übersetzung, ed. Johannes Koder (Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2020), 61–62 and 71.

23 Dölger ‘Text des Traktates aus Cod. Marc. gr. 173’, 115–16. For the question of paroikoi who had a fiscal status and cannot be designated as rural manpower see: Youval Rotman, ‘Formes de la non-liberté dans la campagne byzantine aux VII^e–XI^e siècles’, Mélanges de l’École Française de Rome, Moyen Âge 112, no. 2 (2000): 499–510. Economic History of Byzantium, eds. Angeliki Laiou et al. (Washington, D. C.: Dumbarton Oaks, 2002), 334 –37. Neither Gemma nor Boïlas mention paroikoi. In fact, the Pakourianoi did possess a land for which they gained income from the pariokoi who were registered there. This is mentioned in Maria/Kalē’s testament: see infra, n. 28.

24 The Life of St. Philaretos the Merciful written by his Grandson Niketas, ed. Lennart Rydén (Uppsala: Uppsala University Library, 2002).

25 Louis Petit, Vie et office de S. Michel Maléïnos (Paris: Picard, 1903), 7–26, ch. 11.

26 Chronographiae quae Theophanis Continuati nomine fertur Liber quo Vita Basilii Imperatoris amplectitur, ed. Ihor Ševcenko (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2011), 260–64. Steven Runciman, ‘The Widow Danelis’, in Études dédiées à la mémoire d’André M. Andréadès, ed. Kyriakos Ch Barbareso (Athens: Pyrsos, 1940), 425–31. Barbara Kontava-Delivoria, ‘Qui était Daniélis?’ Byzantion 71, no. 1 (2001): 98–109.

27 Das Eparchenbuch Leons des Weisen, ed. Johannes Koder (Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1991). Daphne Penna, ‘The Role of Slaves in the Byzantium Economy, 10th-11th Centuries: Legal Aspects’, in Slavery in the Black Sea Region, c.900–1900: Forms of Unfreedom at the Intersection between Christianity and Islam, ed. Felicia Roşu (Leiden: Brill, 2021), 63–89. Economic History of Byzantium, 418–22. Rotman, Byzantine Slavery and the Mediterranean World, 96–99.

28 Actes d’Iviron II, no. 53. Jacque Lefort, ‘Radolibos: Population et paysage’, Travaux et Mémoires 9 (1985) : 195–234.

29 Magdalino, ‘The Byzantine Aristocratic Oikos’. Neville, Authority in Byzantine, ch. 3.

30 Supra, n. 19.

31 Compare two other documents that were authored by powerful Byzantine aristocrats: Paul Gautier, ‘La Diataxis de Michel Attaleiate’, Revue des Études Byzantines 39 (1981): 5–143. Paul Gautier, ‘Le typikon sébaste de Grégoire Pakourianos’, Revue des Études Byzantines 42 (1984): 5–145.

32 Boïlas mentions the three orphans whom he settled on his estates.

33 A few of the studies that focus on the medieval slave trade: Michael McCormick, Origins of the European Economy, AD 300–900 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Charles Verlinden, L’Esclavage dans l’Europe médiévale, 2 vols. (Brugge-Ghent: De Tempel-Rijksuniversiteit, 1977). Bruning, ‘Slave Trade’. Ben Raffield, ‘The Slave Markets of the Viking World: Comparative Perspectives on an “Invisible Archaeology”’, Slavery & Abolition 40, no. 4 (2019): 682–705. Poul Holm, ‘The Slave Trade of Dublin, Ninth to Twelfth Centuries’, Peritia 5 (1988): 317–45. Mohamed Meouak, ‘Esclaves et métaux précieux de l’Afrique subsaharienne vers le maghreb au moyen âge à la lumière des sources arabes’, Espacio, Tiempo y Forma Serie III, Historia Medieval 23 (2010) : 113–34. Idem, ‘Esclaves noirs et esclaves blancs en al-Andalus umayyade et en Ifrīqiya fātimide’, in Couleurs de l’esclavage sur les deux rives de la Méditerranée (Moyen Age – XXe siècle), eds. Roger Botte and Alessandro Stella (Paris: Karthala, 2012), 25–53. Rotman, Byzantine Slavery and the Mediterranean World, 57–81. Idem, ‘The Medieval Slave Trade: Map, Data, Sources’, H-Slavery Resources, ed. D. Prior (https://networks.h-net.org/system/files/contributed-files/yrotman2cmedievalhumantrafficking2cmapanddata.pdf, accessed January 11, 2018). Elizabeth Savage, ‘Berbers and Blacks: Ibāḍī Slave Traffic in Eighth-Century North Africa’, Journal of African History 33, no. 3 (1991): 351–68. Salah Trabelsi, ‘Commerce et esclavage dans le Maghreb oriental (VIIe-Xe siècles)’, in Couleurs de l’esclavage sur les deux rives de la Méditerranée (Moyen Age – XXe siècle), eds. Roger Botte, Alessandro Stella (Paris: Karthala, 2012), 9–23.

34 Constantine Porphyrogenitus, De administrando imperio, ed. Gyula Moravcsik (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 1967), ch. 32. See Actes d’Iviron II, 180 for the origin of the manumitted slaves.

35 Ibn Ḥawḳal, Kitāb Ṣūrat al-arḍ, ed. J. H. Kramers and G. Wiet, 2 vols. (Paris: Adrien-Maisonneuve, 2001), 1:80–92. Al-Bakrī, Kitāb al masālik wa-l-mamālik, ed. A. van Leeuwen and A. Ferré, 2 vols. (Tunis: al-Dār al-ʿarabiyya li-l-kitāb, 1992), 2:833–94. Corpus of Early Arabic Sources for West African History, eds. J.F.P. Hopkins and Nehemia Levtzion (Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener Publishers, 2000), 22. The Russian Primary Chronicle: Laurentian Text (Cambridge, MA: Mediaeval Academy of America, 1953). Aḥmad ibn Faḍlān, Mission to the Volga, trans. James E. Montgomery (New York: NYU Press, 2017).

36 Youval Rotman, ‘Migration and Enslavement: The Medieval Model’, in Migration History of the Medieval, op. cit., 387–412 (https://brill.com/view/book/edcoll/9789004425613/BP000018.xml).

37 Rotman, Byzantine Slavery and the Mediterranean World, 139–52.

38 Codex Theodosianus, ed. Theodor Mommsen (Berlin: Weidmann, 1962), IV.7.1. See also the manumission formulae in Byzantine manuscripts, collected by Fabrizio Fabbrini and Ciro Giannelli: Fabrizio Fabbrini, La manumissio in ecclesia (Milan: Pubblicazioni dell’Istituto di diritto romano e dei diritti dell’Oriente mediterraneo, 1965). Idem, ‘Un nuovo documento relativo alla manumissio in ecclesia’, Rendiconti della Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, ser. VIII, no. 16 (1961): 214–15. Ciro Giannelli, ‘Alcuni formulari relativi alla ‘manumissio in ecclesia’ tratti da eucologi italo-greci e slavi’, Rivista di cultura classica e medioevale 1, no. 2 (1959): 127–47. Alfredo Calonge Matellanes, ‘Algunas observaciones sobre la Manumissio in ecclesia’, Revista Española de Derecho Canónico 20, no. 60 (1965): 579–92.

39 Ecloga: Das Gesetzbuch Leons III. und Konstantinos V, ed. Ludwig Burgmann (Frankfurt am Main: Lowenklau-Gesellschaft, 1983), § 8.1; Jus graecoromanum (Πρόχϵιρος νόμος, § 7.28). See also Nathan Leidholm, ‘Parents and Children, Servants and Masters: Slaves, Freedmen, and the Family in Byzantium’, in The Routledge Handbook on Identity in Byzantium, eds. Michael Stewart, David Parnell and Conor Whately (New York: Routledge, 2022), 263–81.

40 Cf. Henrik Mouritsen, The Freedman in the Roman World (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011), ch. 3.

41 Actes d’Iviron II, 155.

42 Indeed, Alexios I Komnenos (r. 1081–1118) intervened in this custom by ensuring that Bulgar captives, who were by this period Christians of free origin would not be enslaved, and that nor would children captured in military attacks: Jus graecoromanum, 1:401–407 (‘Novellae et Aureae Bullae imperatorum post Justinianum’, coll. 4, nov. 35). Charles M. Brand, ‘Slave Women in the Legislation of Alexios I’, Byzantinische Forschungen 23 (1996): 19–24. Ludwig Burgmann, ‘Lawyers and Legislators: Aspects of Law-making in the Time of Alexios I’, in Alexios I Komnenos: Papers on the Second Belfast Byzantine International Colloquium, ed. Margaret Mullett and Dion Smythe (Belfast: Belfast Byzantine Enterprises, 1996), 185–98. Helga Köpstein, ‘Zur Novelle des Alexios Komnenos zum Sklavenstatus (1095)’, in Actes du XVe Congrès international d’études byzantines (Athens: Association internationale des études byzantines, 1976), 4:160–72. Idem, ‘Einige Aspekte des byzantinischen und bulgarischen Sklavenhandels im X. Jahrhundert: Zur Novelle des Joannes Tzimiskes über Sklavenhandelszoll’, Actes du Premier Congrès International d’Études Balkaniques et Sud-Est Européennes (Sofia: Éditions de l’Académie bulgare des sciences, 1966), 3:237–47. For the practice see: Anne Comnène, Alexiade (règne de l'empereur Alexis I Comnène 1081–1118), ed. Bernard Leib, vol. 3 (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1945), 214 (XV.7.3).

43 Jean-Claude Cheynet, Pouvoir et contestations à Byzance (963–1210) (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1996), ch. 5.

44 Kekaumenos, Straegikon, ed. Maria Dora Spadaro, Raccomandazioni e consigli di un galantuomo (Strategikon) (Alessandria: Edizioni dell’Orso, 1998), iv, 168. For the evidence see: Nicéphore Bryennios, Histoire, ed. Paul Gautier (Brusselles: Byzantion, 1975), II.26 as well as Ἡ Πϵῖρα – The Peira: Ein juristisches Lehrbuch des 11. Jahrhunderts aus Konstantinopel – Text, Übersetzung, Kommentar, Glossar, eds. Dieter Simon and Diether Roderich Reinsch (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2022), 272 and 406: the judge decrees liability extradition of slaves who robbed and invaded the island of Gazuros (Peira, 28.6, page 272), or were part of the private forces of their owners who used them for robbery (Peira 42.17, page 406).

45 Rotman, Byzantine Slavery and the Mediterranean World, ch. 4.

46 Chris L. de Wet, The Unbound God: Slavery and the Formation of Early Christian Thought (London: Routledge, 2018).

47 A few examples for the way to treat slaves: Acta Sanctorum, Nov. 4, 692–705 (‘Vita S. Mariae Iunioris’). Life of St. Andrew the Fool, ed. Lennart Rydén, 2 vols. (Uppsala: University of Uppsala Press, 1995), 95–96 (161–62). See also Vie de Théodore de Sykéôn, ed. André-Jean Festugière, 2 vols. (Brussels: Société des Bollandistes, 1970), ch. 147, for slaves who find refuge with the saint. The saint then educates the enslavers to treat them in a humane way.

48 On the evidence for converting infidel slaves see: Rotman, Byzantine Slavery and the Mediterranean World, 139–44.

49 See for other cases of asylum: Jean Gaudemet, L’Église dans l’Empire romain (IV^e-V^e siècles) (Paris: Sirey, 1958), 249–50. Cf. Codex Theodosianus, IX.44 and IX.45.3 (from 397) and Codex Justinianus, ed. Paul Krüger (Hildesheim: Weidmann, 1997), I.12.6 and I.25.1. Cf. William S. Thurman, ‘A Law of Justinian concerning the Right of Asylum’, Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association 100 (1969): 593–606.

50 Novellae Justiniani, ed. Rudolf Schoell (Hildesheim: Weidmann, 1993), no. 5.2 (from 535) and 123.17 and 123.35 (from 546). Marco Melluso, La schiavitù nell’età giustinianea (Besançon: Presses Universitaires de Franche-Comté, 2000), 201ff. Idem, ‘In tema di servi fugitivi in ecclesia in epoca giustinianea: Le Bullae Sanctae Sophiae’, Dialogues d’histoire ancienne 28, no. 1 (2002): 61–92. John Philip Thomas, Private Religious Foundations in the Byzantine Empire (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 1982), ch. 2. Rotman, Byzantine Slavery and the Mediterranean World, 144–52.

51 In the eleventh century, even a slave condemned to death could be granted asylum by the Church: Georgios A. Rhalles and Michael Potles, Σύνταγμα τῶν θϵίων καὶ ἱϵρῶν κανόνων, vol. 5 (Athens: G. Chartophylax, 1859), 48–49 (Les Regestes des Actes du Patriarcat de Constantinople, eds. Venance Grumel, Vitalien Laurent and Jean Darrouzès, vol. 1, pt. 2–3 (Paris: Institut français d’études byzantines, 1932), no. 888, page 379). Ruth Macrides, ‘Killing, Asylum, and the Law in Byzantium’, Speculum 63, no. 3 (1988): 509–38.

52 Grégoire de Nazianze, Lettres, ed. P. Gallay, 2 vols. (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1964–1967), no. 79. Basile, Lettres, ed. Yves Courtonne, 3 vols. (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, Paris, 1957–1966), no. 115. Stavros Perentidis, ‘L’ordination de l’esclave à Byzance’, Revue historique de droit français et étranger 59 (1981): 231–48. Richard Klein, ‘Die Bestellung von Sklaven zu Priestern: Ein rechtliches und soziales Problem in Spätantike und Frühmittelalter’, in Klassisches Altertum, Spätantike und Frühes Christentum: Adolf Lippold zum 65. Geburtstag Gewidmet, eds. Karlheinz Dietz, Dieter Hennig and Hand Kaletsch (Würzburg: Selbstverl. d. Seminars für Alte Geschichte d. Univ. Würzburg, 1993), 473–94.

53 See Das Novellensytagma des Athanasios von Emesa, eds. Dieter Simon and Spyros Troianos (Frankfurt am Main: Löwenklau, 1982), 62ff. a commentary of Athanasios of Emesa on Justinian’s Novella 5.2, according to which the fugitive slave became free after three years as a monk, but regained the status of a slave upon leaving the cenobium. Following Melluso, ‘In tema’, 86.

54 For the application of Justinian’s legislation see: Imperatoris Justiniani Novellae quae vocantur sive constitutiones quae extra codicem, ed. K. E. Zachariä von Lingenthal (Leipzig: Teubner, 1881), vol. 1, pt. I, x–xii, and Melluso’s comprehensive discussion and interpretation: ‘In tema’ and idem, La schiavitù, 238–40.

55 For an exhaustive analysis of these dynamics see: Thomas, Private Religious Foundations.

56 Cartulary of the Greek Monastery, IV, no. 53.

57 Note that leaving property to one’s παῖδϵς (paides) in a testament is highly unusual. In the period under examination, the term designated both slaves and non-slaves in service as part of the household. Slaves could not receive property. We thus conclude that these were either manumitted slaves or other people who were part of the household and could well be the descendants of the household family’s slaves.

58 Thomas, Private Religious Foundations.

59 Compare with the question of freedmen’s citizenship under Augustus, the problematics arising from this question, and the legislative measures taken to solve it: Mouritsen, The Freedman, ch. 4, in particular pages 89–92.

60 Mouritsen, The Freedman. Patricia Crone, Roman, Provincial and Islamic Law: The Origins of the Islamic Patronate (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1987). Roy Mottahedeh, Loyalty and Leadership in an Early Islamic Society (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980). Clément Onimus, ‘Les mawālī en Égypte dans la documentation papyrologique, Ier-Ve s. H.’, Annales islamologiques 39 (2005): 81–107.

61 For such a need see Jelle Bruning, ‘Voluntary enslavement in an Abbasid-era papyrus letter’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, ser. 3, 33 (2023), 1–17 (and page 16, n. 72), a papyrus from the ninth/tenth century Egypt, written by a prisoner who threatens to sell himself as slave (together with his nine prisoner companions) if his, probably patron, refuses to sustain him properly. It is unclear who could have bought him and sustained him while in prison. Compare Ehud Toledano, As if Silent and Absent: Bonds of Enslavement in the Islamic Middle East (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 30–31.

62 Supra, n. 59.

63 For this see Boïlas’ testament as well as the Novella of Alexios Komnenos, supra, n. 42.

64 Wolfgang Waldstein, Operae libertorum: Untersuchungen zur Dienstpflicht freigelassener Sklaven (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1986). Zelnick-Abramovitz, Not Wholly Free.

65 Toledano, As if Silent and Absent, 32–33.

66 See examples from documents of Byzantine Apulia, where the manumitted slaves sometimes are not mentioned by the conventional terms and are identified as such by checking information from other documents: Cartulary of the Greek Monastery of St-Elias, IV, no. 53; X, no. 59; XI, no. 61.