Scattered thoughts on slavery and the Byzantine Empire

On things trivial and non-trivial

For the past two days I have been coding every trip in the Mediterranean area for which we have records, between approximately 600 and 900 AD. I thought it might be interesting to give my impressions of the time period.

i. It was a bad time

It was not remotely a place I would want to live in. Warfare was constant, with slave raids occurring in waves. At times Sardinia and Corsica and Sicily and Italy would suffer the depredations of Arab slave traders every other year — not that anyone else was much better. While there were rules against the enslavement of fellow Christians, their frequent promulgation hinted at their lack of efficacy. Naples in particular was notorious for freeing captured slaves, only to sell them back into slavery to a new set of Arab captains. Louis II (don’t worry about who he is, he’s just one of the Frankish kings) writes in 871 that it was so busy supplying the Arabs that one could mistake it for Palermo (then conquered) or Africa itself. The Vikings raided occasionally, and even more rarely the Slavs. The Byzantines would engage in raids of their own against Arab, to sell in their own lands. There are several instances where an Arab slave raiding party was intercepted, captured, and themselves sold into slavery, like big fish caught by a still bigger one. Piracy was endemic, if only implied in the records. It was an anxious time.

ii. What the record shows, and does not show

It is a record of kings and clerics, not of people. You can sense the activity which must have gone on only in the gaps left unfilled. A man journeys on pilgrimage, from France to Jerusalem — we know there must be merchants plying those routes. But you can only infer it — the chroniclers did not care, nor record, such mundane voyages. It does not show the exactions of lords upon their peasants — nor even does it show the innumerable quarrels, raids, brawls, and other acts of violence which we know must have occurred. The records are simply too bad for that. It is striking how uncertain many of the dates are — even things on seemingly sound footing have error bars around them. Most of the 700s is like that — or above all, the records of saints, which occasionally have a period of 50 years they could have occurred in.

I considered giving a summary of what I learned by accident reading it, but decided against it. Most of it is quotidian letters between Popes and Emperors, arguing about theological dogma, and who really holds power. The only substantial changes were the arrival in force of the Arabs, the switch of the Pope from Byzantium to the Frankish Empire of Charlemagne and successors, and the resurgence of the Byzantines during the Isaurian dynasty.

iii. Why slavery in other lands?

This is a thought I intend to take up in future blog posts (and perhaps expand into a paper). It strikes me, however, as non-trivial question why slavery should flow from one direction to another, or why there should be so much demand for slavery. The problems are twofold: why must we enslave foreign people, rather than the ones the elites had at home? And why should it be profitable at all?

Suppose we are in a Malthusian world. Malthus argued that, in an economy where living standards are dependent on the supply of arable land, rising populations will decrease living standards. The amount of land available will get divided up further and further, until it is unable to sustain people and the population returns to its carrying capacity. For slavery to be profitable, there must be a dearth of people relative to the land. People cannot be at biological subsistence, or there would be nothing to take away.

And why foreign? Presumably it is cheaper to keep them in captivity. The less they have in common with people around them. Of course, the further people away are, the more expensive they are to capture. I argue, and will explore, that Muslim conversion made people more culturally homogeneous, thus raising the cost of enslavement at home. This tracks with Wikipedia — most slaves in the Arab world before Islam were not foreigners, but captives from intertribal wars, often not even predominantly used for their labor, but simply to ransom back. The Pax Islamica meant no more wars, and barred the enslavement of Muslims by fellow Muslims. The attention of slavers was turned outside, to Europe (and to Africa).

Of course, what is confounding is that when plague devastated the Arab world in 750, the slave raiding stopped, and did not start again for at least a generation. This implies that their military strength making it cheap to enslave mattered more than the pressing need for land. It seems that most slaveholding in the Islamic world was a luxury, for domestic labor — plantation economies, while extant (such as in 9th century Iraq, culminating in the Zanj rebellion) were much less common than the American slavery we know better.

Let’s think about American slavery in these terms. Why transport people to the new world, and lose a substantial percentage of your slaves on the voyage there? By growing sugar, the plantation owners found a new production opportunity which could be extracted far more easily than a subsistence crop, such as potatoes. The sugar islands had far less population relative to what they could produce, so it was profitable to import slaves. If Africa, or the places in Africa were they would want to enslave people, was at its carrying capacity, then taking them to the new world has a higher marginal value. It was cheaper to keep them on the islands because they had less to runaway to as well (although some of the larger islands, such as Jamaica, had persistent populations of runaways in the mountains). This was certainly cheaper than enslaving people in Africa. In short, if the environment was sufficiently harsh in Africa such that it was in a Malthusian equilibrium, importation to the new world must be more productive as well.

This is something which concerns me about counterfactual histories of sub-Saharan Africa, in the absence of the slave trade. Papers like the ones by Nathan Nunn trace Africa’s underdevelopment to the slave trade per se. Largely due to the slave trade, Africa’s population stayed roughly flat for hundreds of years. In the absence of the slave trade, however, can we be so sure that it would have grown? The population explosion took place only by the 1970s, after technological changes made it so that fewer people died of preventable causes. Are we sure that Africa would not have had problems from the environment, even if people were not kidnapped? It may be over optimistic to trace back Africa’s underdevelopment to the great trauma.

iv. The meaninglessness of it all

From our perspective, the squabbles and disputes and political issues which animated the elite of the time are almost entirely meaningless. Who remembers, or much cares, about the filioque controversy? That is, whether in the Nicene creed the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father alone, or from the Father and the Son? Or monothelitism, which so vexed the Byzantine Empire that Constans II in 668 forbade under penalty or mutilation to so much as speak about it? (And without taking a side on it either — truly the “I don’t care who started it, you’re both in time out” style of statecraft). Only iconoclasm retains a whisper of meaning to us — but we perceive it as a deracinated ghost. We don’t feel the terror of having lost favor with God — to see the heathen advance with impunity, to see God’s empire fall apart, to live in fear of being bundled away to strange lands. The iconoclasts believed that they had lost God’s favor for their sinful ways — perhaps it was the end of the world. No, it is immaterial to us now. Things worsen; things improve; it was but fluctuations in a static world.

This makes one wonder what will seem important to our progeny. They will little note, nor long remember, our politics — unless something lead to a truly world-altering catastrophe, as we are now capable of doing. Here are my predictions for what the world will remember:

— The era will overwhelmingly be remembered for the development of computers. The period from the 1945-2000 will be compressed in the mind, and the development of artificial intelligence will be seen as a seminal moment. The iphone will not be remembered per se, though, no more than we remember the first cell phone as anything more than a primitive proof-of-concept.

— The Nazis will still be thought about, though Imperial Japan will not be. Hitler will be invoked as an essentially Satanic figure. The Cold War will be obviated, replaced with thinking about the possibility of nuclear devastation per se. Who holds the nukes is of lesser importance. All this presumes that we do not undergo a true catastrophe, and thus look back on it when it was possible.

— I predict that African-American history will remain thought about forever. It has a punchy story to it, and a happy ending. For this reason, Obama will be our most remembered human president — Washington and Lincoln having long since become demigods.

— Going to space will be a really big deal, because humans — or rather, our artifical children — will have spread into the stars.

I do not believe the world will remember me. Perhaps it is for the better. I have no doubt that I will enjoy life, nevertheless. I can live for and through those who I love, and accept obliteration with equanimity.