The Slaves of the Churches

Abstract

This ambitious book discusses the attitudes that “the Churches” (almost always identified with the pre-reform Catholic Church) had vis à vis slaves and slavery from the New Testament era to early modern times. In the introduction, Sommar warns that the lack of records about the social practices of slavery forces her study to focus on church norms regarding its unfree dependents. Her statement, however, is only partially true: Dozens of studies, particularly of the medieval period, investigated the social and legal practices of ecclesiastical unfree people in many parts of Europe, Italy, Russia, Eastern Europe, France, and Germany. Unfortunately, this volume ignores these sources almost entirely, making use almost exclusively of an English-written historiography with a few exceptions in German. This approach is regrettable for a study concerning European continental areas about which copious discussions and valuable source materials are available.Chapter 2 discusses the way in which the New Testament presents slavery and relates it to ancient Roman and Jewish law. Unsurprisingly, it concludes that the New Testament did not condemn slavery per se. Chapter 3 treats slavery in the early Church, presenting first “non-biblical texts” before moving to post-apostolic generations and finally proto-canon law regarding slavery. Sommar’s main conclusion is that Christians did not treat their slaves better than the Romans did. Chapter 4, which examines slavery in the imperial Church, provides examples drawn from imperial legislation in general as well as from such areas as Gaul, Spain, Africa, and Italy. According to Sommar, texts in all these areas reaffirmed the biblical command for slaves to obey their masters and for masters to treat their slaves decently. Chapter 5 explores ecclesiastical slavery in the Germanic kingdoms (strangely including Byzantium). Unlike previous chapters, this one raises analytical questions primarily about differences between Visigothic/„Frankish societies and Lombard traditions in their rules about slavery. Sommar wonders whether these differences were “simply cultural manifestations or the accident of geography.” She concludes that “it is hard to say.” Chapter 6 investigates “Carolingians and Ecclesiastic Servitude,” a title that is problematical because it presupposes a discussion about forms of servitude other than slavery in the book. Sommar concludes that the sources do not reveal any legal or practical distinctions. Chapter 7 argues that classical canon law (a widely investigated topic) followed the general social evolution of unfree people: By the thirteenth century, differences between free and unfree laborers had become irrelevant because peasants were increasingly bound to the land and because chattel slavery continued all across the Mediterranean. In this context, unfree ecclesiastical dependents were treated no differently than were their counterparts who had lay masters. Sommar’s final point, that a new kind of legal thinking—known as the ius commune—eventually spread throughout Europe, marking the end of slavery, as well as the Church’s hold on unfree people, is also problematical. Ecclesiastical serfs, bonded people, and even slaves appear in historical documents as late as the nineteenth century in Italy and in Central and Eastern Europe.This book will be valuable to those who are curious about how individual churches in Europe regulated slavery and serfdom. However, it will not answer questions about the social practice and meaning of bondage in the Church as a whole.