European Slavery and Christianity

The Roman Empire had a LOT of slaves. Was it Christianity that largely ended this immense scale of abject slavery in Europe?

are you implying christian slave revolts were the cause of the fall of the roman empire? i think its more correlative

No.

>873 AD: Pope John VIII commanded under penalty of sin that all Christians who hold other Christians as slaves must set them free.
Yes.

Not directly. It certainly influenced conventional morality in a way that made slavery seem uncouth and Inhumane. Especially the more brutal forms of traditional Roman Slavery (galley slaves and their ilk).

Such a large slave population simply wasn't sustainable. The empire had stopped growing and the Latins were now a tiny part of the total population. It was neccesary to promote stability, if ultimately only temporary.

Most of the slaves owned by particulars in the Roman Empire weren't picking cotton and getting whipped, they were basically currency, people would educate them and have them doing nothing all day so they wouldn't lose worth.

State-owned slaves, on the other hand, were working in mines until they'd die from it.

No, the collapse of Roman society and its economy that drove its slave trade caused that. Slavery continued well into the early Middle Ages and only severely declined when population growth and serfdom undercut the need and desire for importing manpower in the form of slaves.

Dude no. State slaves were basically janitors and bureaucrats.
Rome made it a point of leaving all business (like mines) solely to privates, to keep the bureaucracy small and making sure everything was sqeezed dry (which a private endeavour was considered far more likely to do than some lazy statal operation).

>slavery ended because it was more economical to use serfs which were basically slaves that you treated better and payed more
Sorry, but I'm not believing any of this. The Church straight up said to stop enslaving Christians and abject slavery of Christians more or less ended until the Triangle Trade.

laurionmines.jpg

>abject slavery of Christians
Well that's not saying much. Catalonian farms were basically run by muslim slaves in the 10th century. Venetian brothels were manned (womaned?) by berbers and turks all the way to the fall of the republic.
Same went with northern pagans.

What about those? Point me to something that says they were a state operation rather than private.

All that meant was that the Church was aware of massive enslavement of Christians by other Christians. It didn't stop the slave trade from focusing on targeting pagans, Jews and Muslims, heretics, and schismatics, nor guaranteed that the decree was always followed or enforced.

I was referring to Christian Europeans enslaving other Christians.

If you are a slave and all you have to do too be free or to make sure your kids are free is to convert to Christianity then you become a Christian. It's pretty simple and explains why slavery wasn't large part of the European economy as it was before Christianity took hold.

Vikings enslaved people. Did they do that after they became Christians?

Except conversion didn't guarantee freedom at all. You will notice the Papal decree was attacking the enslavement of Christians, that is someone who is already a Christian and presumably free, by another Christian. This is why 10% of the English population were slaves in the 11th century over two hundred years after the pope's decree.

>Vikings enslaved people. Did they do that after they became Christians?
Yes.

I dunno about vikings, but the franks certainly didn't. Afterall it was them who bought the slaves captured by vikings.

No. Pic related. Also read about the colonatus and Max Webers article. It's based.
Slavery never ceased to exist in the Catholic World and there was no attempt to do so before the end of the Middle Ages. This pretty much rules out Christianity as the (sole) reason.

So an economic downturn ended large scale slavery and Christianity kept it from becoming large scale again in Europe.

>Pic related.
Wo denken sie sind wir?

>and Christianity kept it from becoming large scale again in Europe
No, it redirected it towards non-Christians.

Who largely weren't in Europe, so what's your point?

How was slavery even legal after Caracalla's edict? Rome made illegal the slavery of citizens in republican times already.

They were imported into Europe.

Most people weren't free men, and you can always bring in more people. What Christianity did was basically take the Roman citizen's privileges and extend them to all (right and proper) Christians. But until most of Europe was soundly Roman Catholic it was business as usual.

>there are germans posting on your board

You can find the translation of it online surely or in Weber's selected work. It's a classic of economic history.
>researching antiquity
>not being able to read Greek and Latin to understand the sources
>not being able to read basis French, German, Italian and English to read the newest papers
literally pleb
>But until most of Europe was soundly Roman Catholic it was business as usual.
The influx of slaves stopped long before that. People also tend to think that the number of slaves in the first/second century BC is representative for the Roman history when there are strong indications that what Gracchus described was the exception and not the role. It's really hard to reconstruct what business as usual was especially since the Imperium wasn't a homogeneous region.

being a patrician means that everybody else has to learn to speak your language, though, not the other way around
pleb

>The influx of slaves stopped long before that
For the same reason the volume of shipping dropped across the board. The Rome's demographics and economy collapsed. That only changed the scale of slavery, not how institutionalized it was.

And that language is obviously Greek.
On that note the way American pronounce Greek names is a disgrace.

Exactly. This is what the chart pointed out in detail. What you described also lead to the decay of the cities - long before the Germans came. The decay of the cities lead to lower tax income which also had negative effects.

Right, I was simply pointing out that Roman and Catholic legalese didn't change things all that much.

How does a dip in the economy suddenly free slaves?