Introduction: Medieval Unfreedoms in a Global Context

Abstract

IntroductionMedieval Unfreedoms in a Global Context Elizabeth Casteen For decades, at least in scholarship devoted solely to Western Europe, the study of medieval slavery has revolved around two issues: the question of when and why Roman slavery ended and was replaced with serfdom (something that scholars have long answered by demonstrating that slavery persisted in Europe throughout the medieval period), and the question of how and to what degree the slave system of the late-medieval Mediterranean paved the way for the trans-Atlantic slave trade.1 Ultimately, both questions revolve around fixed definitions of slavery that look back to Rome and forward to the Americas, obscuring the manifold forms and degrees of unfreedom that coexisted across the medieval period. Unfreedom encompassed servile status, concubinage, captivity, and a range of semi-free statuses, along with enslavement in the full juridical sense of ownership and control of one person by another. Medieval slavery and unfreedom linked what Jeffrey Fynn-Paul has called "slaving zones," defined and delimited by religion,2 but they also bound people within those zones, shaping and intersecting with developing ideologies of religion, race, and gender. To study medieval unfreedom is to study the interconnections of the premodern world and uncover the ways in which gradations of unfreedom and distinctions between the free and unfree shaped and linked societies. The essays collected in this special issue originated as papers presented at a conference devoted to "Medieval Unfreedoms: Slavery, Servitude, and Trafficking in Humans before the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade," organized by the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at Binghamton University and held on October 19 and 20, 2018. The conversations that took place over those two days gave vibrant testimony to the urgency of questions of [End Page 1] unfreedom in our contemporary moment, as scholars grapple with how to study the medieval world through a global lens and how to historicize injustice, racism, and questions of cultural identity and belonging. In the years since the conference, scholarly interest in medieval unfreedom has only intensified. There have been at least two other major conferences devoted to premodern unfreedom—one organized by the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies in February 2020 and one in June 2022 at Trinity College, Dublin, on "Unfreedom in the Premodern World." The wealth of recent scholarship dedicated to unfreedom in the medieval period demonstrates both how central unfreedom is to understanding the Middle Ages and how many important questions remain regarding the meanings and experience of unfreedom.3 The seven essays published here—much revised and expanded from their original form—provide windows on the vibrancy of scholarship on medieval unfreedom and on the rich potential for future work. In particular, they illuminate not only the ubiquity of unfreedom in the medieval world but also its complexity and nuance across the Eurasian land mass. They highlight the various ways in which unfreedom—ranging from enslavement to captivity to the service of semi-free people—shaped social and religious structures, and the ways in which unfreedom created a web that connected disparate regions, drawing together people of different religions, races, and statuses in relationships of dependence and exploitation. They also shed crucial light on the way that examination of unfreedom allows us to understand the historical interplay of gender, religion, and race during the medieval period, particularly in considerations of who was worthy or unworthy of freedom and why. Lisa Kaaren Bailey probes the limitations—and spiritual possibilities—of the religious metaphor of service used by members of the ecclesiastical hierarchy from the time of Gregory the Great (who first styled himself "servant of the servants of God"), "as a signal of appropriate humility in a religious leader." As Bailey points out, the secular priests, monks, and nuns who portrayed themselves as the humble servants of God were themselves served by unfree people, who served the servants of God in literal rather than metaphorical ways: sweeping churches, lighting [End Page 2] lamps in shrines, preparing meals, and performing all of the mundane but necessary tasks that kept religious institutions running and religious people free to concentrate on spiritual matters. Highlighting this paradox, Bailey ponders "the ways in which the service of...