Key Takeaways:
The institution of slavery changed dramatically during the 15th century.
Roman slavery was very different from modern slavery.
Slavery was a significant factor in the Fall of Rome.
Modern Slavery
Within relatively recent history, the grisly practice of slavery underwent a fundamental change. This transformation took place on the island of Madeira, located in the Atlantic Ocean, off the coast of Africa.
Though Genoese sailors had already sighted Madeira during the previous century, the Portuguese rediscovered it in 1418 and established a colony there. Madeira remains a part of Portugal to this day. From Sicily, the Portuguese imported sugarcane, which they called “white gold”, because Madeira’s fertile soil and climate were well-suited to its cultivation.
But sugarcane cultivation is a brutally labor-intensive process. Furthermore, to yield molasses and sugar, the tough and sinewy plant must be boiled down in giant evaporators. Few could tolerate that kind of heat in Madeira’s tropical climate. The Portuguese brought in black Africans from the mainland and forced them to perform the labor. So it was that slavery was imbued with the pernicious racial component we recognize today.
Perhaps to assuage a guilty national conscience, Prince Henry the Navigator turned to Portugal’s most famous writer, Gomes Eanes de Zurara, to justify the ghastly arrangement. Zurara accepted the commission and wrote Crónica dos feitos da Guiné, or “Chronicle of the Deeds of Guinea”. He justified the use of black Africans for forced labor by suggesting that proximity to Christianity might ultimately lead to their salvation. Zurara’s dubious notion, in other words, was that the enslavement of Africans was actually to their benefit.
As the Age of Exploration dawned, this horrific production model of race-based slavery was copied and pasted onto the sugar plantations of the Caribbean islands and onto the cotton plantations of the Southern United States. In these places, the descendants of black Africans soon formed a distinct economic class of slaves.
Roman Slavery
The institution of slavery is almost always cruel and exploitative, often in sexual ways. In 1910, Czech painter Otto Pilny captured some of the trauma endured by a young girl being sold into sexual slavery in his dramatic painting The Slave Market. His work serves as the Title Card to this essay.
But some Roman slaves were fully integrated into their masters’ households. They could be true lovers or tutors of children. Although the economic rules of the time compelled these slaves to labor on behalf of a master, they weren’t necessarily considered sub-human by definition.
Slavery in Roman times generally lacked the racial component that set the Portuguese institution apart from its historical precedents. Slaves could be set free by their masters, and free people could become slaves if their city was captured in war or if they fell into debt. Slavery was an unfortunate economic condition—rather like a bankruptcy—instead of a permanent state of affairs.
In addition to debt or war, another unfortunate event that could make someone into a slave was capture by pirates. Piracy was a persistent problem in Roman days; they held captives for ransom, and sold them into slavery if the ransom wasn’t paid.
This almost happened to Julius Caesar in 75 BC. After his vessel was captured by pirates, he announced to his captors that was insulted by their ransom of a mere 20 talents of gold. He demanded that his ransom be raised to 50 talents, a sum more befitting a man of his stature. After the ransom was paid, Caesar returned to the pirate stronghold and crucified them.
The Fall of Rome
Rome’s ruling class failed to equitably distribute the slaves and land that resulted from their many military conquests. Instead, they hoarded these spoils of war for themselves, creating vast slave farms called latifundia that drove Rome’s free farmers out of business.
Unable to pay their mortgages, small farmers were foreclosed upon en masse. A rigid Roman legal code systematically awarded their collateralized farms to the ruling class, who used the land to create even larger latifundia, further exacerbating the wealth inequality that threatened the stability of Roman society.
Great masses of displaced farmers descended on the capitol, only for the oligarchy-controlled Senate to block any redress of their political grievances. In January of 43 BC, the situation finally came to a head when Julius Caesar marched on Rome as a populare, or a political representative of the working class.
But Caesar was assassinated by an oligarchic conspiracy before he could implement the land reforms demanded by the desperate masses. From that point forward, Roman society carried on as an Empire, with an Emperor wielding the only tool that could contain the white-hot class war that roiled it: autocratic political power.
Of course, Caesar was not the only economic reformist to make a big splash in Rome. Within a few decades of his assassination, Jesus proclaimed the good news (gospel in Hebrew, evangelion in Greek) that the debt forgiveness enshrined in Jewish scripture was finally at hand.
This demand for debt forgiveness might have saved the Roman Empire from collapse by mitigating the wealth inequality that was tearing it apart. Small farmers unable to pay their mortgages could have kept their land, instead of seeing it foreclosed upon and transferred to the already-wealthy.
In the end, Jesus Christ famously received the same treatment as Julius Caesar: public execution. But his teachings and the remarkable circumstances surrounding his death combined to create a powerful social movement. One that the Roman authorities tried to suppress.
But as the Roman Empire crumbled and its borders shrank, the oligarchy found that the new Christian faith was too popular. They gave up trying to suppress it. In 313 AD, the pagan Emperor Constantine converted to the new faith. And in 380 AD, Theodosius I declared Christianity the new state religion of the collapsing Empire. The Roman Catholic Church was born.
As Roman civilization gradually vanished from the Italian Peninsula, the former oligarchy retreated into fortified homes at the centers of their vast latifundia estates. The individuals who worked their fields became attached to the land as colonoi, or serfs.
That’s how the stage of history was set for the Middle Ages. The nobility, the peasantry, and the church arose from the ashes of the Roman Empire to form the three famous estates of the Medieval feudal economy.
Conclusion
The poisonous institution of slavery drove the United States into a catastrophic civil war, and the racial component of modern slavery remains a complex legacy American society is still grappling with today. Similarly, slavery drove Roman wealth inequality to that society’s breaking point. It eventually culminated in a debt crisis that defined Roman history and shaped the rise of feudalism in Europe.
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Further Materials
All this fit the broader medieval pattern: actual gold and silver, such of it as was still around, was increasingly laid up in sacred places; as centralized states disappeared, the regulation of markets was increasingly in the hands of the Church. At first, the Catholic attitudes toward usury were just as harsh as Muslim ones, and attitudes toward merchants, considerably harsher. In the first case, they had little choice, as many Biblical texts were quite explicit. Consider Exodus 22:25:
If you lend money to My people, to the poor among you, you are not to act as a creditor to him; you shall not charge him interest.
Both the Psalms (15:5, 54:12) and Prophets (Jeremiah 9.6, Nehemiah 5:11) were explicit in assigning usurers to death and hellfire. What’s more, the early Christian Fathers, who laid the foundation of Church teachings on social issues in the waning years of the Roman empire, were writing amidst the ancient world’s last great debt crisis, one that was effectively in the process of destroying the empire’s remaining free peasantry. While few were willing to condemn slavery, all condemned usury.
David Graeber, Debt: The First 5000 Years, 2011, page 363