605 



SLAVE, SLAVERY, SLAVE-TRADE. 



SLAVE, SLAVERY, SLAVE-TRADE. 



there are some important points of difference, and there is no evidence 

 of any historical connection between the Coloni and Villani. The subject 

 of the C'oloni is discussed by Savigny, ' Ueber den Rb'mischen Colonat ; 

 Zeitsehnft fur Geschicht. Rechtswissenschaft,' vol. vi. 



The customary allowance of food for a slave appears to have been 

 four Roman bushels, " modii," of corn, mostly *' far," per month for 

 country slaves, and one Roman libra or pound daily for those in town. 

 Salt and oil were occasionally allowed, as well as weak wine. Neither 

 meat nor vegetables formed part of their regular allowance ; but they 

 got, according to seasons, fruit, such as figs, olives, apples, pears, &e. 

 (Cato, Columella. and Varro.) Labourers and artisans in the country 

 were shut up at night in a house (" ergastulum " ), in which each slave 

 appears to have had a separate cell. Columella adverts to some dis- 

 tinction between the ergastulum for ordinary labourers and that for 

 ill-behaved slaves, which latter was in fact a prison, often under ground ; 

 but generally speaking the ergastula in the later times of the republic 

 and under the empire appear to have been no better than prisons in 

 which freemen were sometimes confined after being kidnapped. The 

 men often worked in chains. The overseers of farms and herdsmen 

 had separate cabins allotted to them. Slaves enjoyed relaxation from 

 toil en certain festivities, such as the Saturnalia. 



The number of slaves possessed by the wealthy Romans was enor- 

 mous. Some individuals are said to have possessed 10,000 slaves. 

 Scaurus possessed above 4000 domestic and as many rustic slaves. In 

 the reign of Augustus, a freedman who had sustained great losses 

 during the civil wars left 4118 slaves, besides other property. 



A master had, as a general rule, the power of manumitting his slave, 

 and this he could effect in several forms, by vindicta, census, or by 

 testamentum. The Lex ,lia Sentia, as already mentioned, laid various 

 restrictions on manumission. Among other things it prevented 

 persons tinder twenty years of age from manumitting a slave except by 

 the vindicta, and with the approbation of the concilium, which at 

 Rome consisted of five senators and five Roman equites of legal age 

 (puberes), and in the provinces consisted of twenty recuperatores, who 

 were Roman citizeus. (Gains, i. 20, 38.) The Lex M\\& Sentia also 

 made all manumissions void which were effected to cheat creditors or 

 defraud patrons of their rights. The Lex Furia Caninia. which was 

 passed about A.D. 7 ' , limited the whole number of slaves who could be 

 manumitted by testament to 100, and when a man had fewer than 

 500 slaves, it determined by a scale the number that he could manu- 

 mit. This lex only applied to manumission by testament. (Gaius, 

 i. 42, Ac.) 



In the earlier ages of the Republic, slaves were not very numerous, 

 and were chiefly employed in household offices or as mechanics in-the 

 towns. But after the conquest* of Rome spread beyond the limits of 

 Italy the influx of captives was so great, and their price fell so low, 

 that they were looked upon as a cheap and easily renewed commodity, 

 and treated as such. The condition of the Roman slave, generally 

 (peaking, became worse in the later ages of the republic ; and many 

 of the emperors, even some of the worst of them, interfered on behalf 

 of the slave. Augustus established courts for tlie trial of slaves who 

 were charged with serious offences, intending thus to supersede arbi- 

 trary punishment by the masters, but the law was not made obligatory 

 upon the masters to bring their slaves before the courts, and it was 

 often evaded. By a law passed in the time of Claudius, a master who 

 exposed his sick or infirm slaves forfeited all right over them in the 

 event of their recovery. The Lex Petronia, probably passed in the 

 time of Augustus, or in the reign of Nero, prohibited masters from 

 compelling their slaves to fight with wild beasts, except with the con- 

 sent of the judicial authorities, and on a sufficient case being made out 

 against the slave. Domitian forbade the mutilation of slaves. Hadrian 

 suppressed the ergastula, or private prisons for the confinement of 

 laves; he also restrained proprietors from selling their slaves to 

 keepers of gladiators, or to brothel-keepers, except as a punishment, 

 in which case the sanction of a judge (judex) was required. Antoninus 

 Pius adopted an old law of the Athenians by which the judge who 

 should be satisfied of a slave being cruelly treated by his owner, had 

 power to oblige the owner to sell him to some other person. The 

 judge, however, was left entirely to his own discretion in determining 

 what measure of harshness in the owner should be a proper ground for 

 judicial interposition. Scptimius Severus forbade the forcible subjection 

 of slaves to prostitution. The Christian emperors went further in pro- 

 tecting the persons of slaves. Constantine placed the wilful murder 

 of a slave on a level with that of a freeman ; and Justinian confirmed 

 this law, including within its provisions cases of slaves who died under 

 excessive punishment. Constantine made also two laws, both nearly 

 in the same words, to prevent the forcible separation of the members 

 of servile families by sale or partition of property. One of the laws, 

 dated A.D 334, was retained by Justinian in his code. The church 

 also powerfully interfered for the protection of slaves, by threatening 

 excommunication against owners who put to death their slaves with- 

 out the consent of the judge ; and by affording asylum within sacred 

 precincts to slaves from the anger of unmerciful masters. A law of 

 Theodosius I. authorised a slave who had taken refuge in a church to 

 call for the protection of the judge, that he might proceed unmolested 

 to his tribunal in order that his case might be investigated. After 

 Christianity became the predominant religion in the Roman world, it 

 exercised in various ways a beneficial influence upon the condition of 



the slaves, without, however, interfering, at least for centuries, with 

 the institution of slavery itself. Even the laws of the Christian 

 emperors which abolished the master's power of life and death over 

 his slave were long evaded. Salvianus (' De Gubernatione Dei,' iv.) 

 informs us that in the provinces of Gaul, in the 5th century, masters 

 still fancied that they had a right to put their slaves t" death. 

 Macrobius (' Saturn', i. IT) makes one of his interlocutors, though 

 a heathen, expatiate with great eloquence on the cruel and unjust 

 treatment of slaves. In Spain, in the early period of the Visigothic 

 kings, the practice of putting slaves to death still existed, for in the 

 ' Foro Judicum ' (b. vi., tit. 5) it is said that as some cruel masters in 

 the impetuosity of their pride put to death their slaves without reason, 

 it is enacted that a public and regular trial shall take place previous to 

 their condemnation. Several laws and ecclesiastical canons forbade 

 the sale of Christians as slaves to Jews or Saracens aud other 

 unbelievers. 



The northern tribes which invaded the Western empire had then- 

 own slaves, who were chiefly Slavonian captives, distinct from the 

 slaves of the Romans or conquered inhabitants. In course of time, 

 however, the various classes of slaves merged into one class, that of the 

 ' adscript! glebsc," or serfs of the middle ages, and the institution of 

 Roman slavery in its unmitigated form became obliterated. The 

 precise period of this change cannot be fixed ; it took place at various 

 times in different countries. Slaves were exported from Britain to the 

 Continent in the Saxon period. Giraldus Cambrensis, William of 

 Malmesbury, and others, accuse the Anglo-Saxons of selling their 

 female servants and even their children to strangers, and especially to 

 the Irish, and the practice continued even after the Norman conquest. 

 In the canons of a council held at London, A.D. 1102, it is said, " Let 

 no one from henceforth presume to carry on that wicked traffic by 

 which men in England have been hitherto sold like brute animals." 

 (Wilkin's ' Concilia,' i. p 383.) 



But although the traffic in slaves ceased among the Christian 

 nations of Europe, it continued to be carried on by the Venetians 

 across the Mediterranean in the age of the Crusades. The Venetians 

 supplied the markets of the Saracens with slaves purchased from the 

 Slavonian tribes which bordered on the Adriatic. Besides, as personal 

 slavery and the traffic in slaves continued in all Mohammedan countries, 

 Christian captives taken by Mussulmans were sold in the markets of 

 Asia and Northern Africa, and have continued to be sold till within 

 our own times, when Christian slavery has been abolished in Barbary, 

 Egypt, and the Ottoman empire, by the interference of the Christian 

 powers, the emancipation of Greece, and the conquest of Algiers by 

 the French. 



With the discovery of America, a new description of slavery and 

 slave-trade arose. Christian nations purchased African negroes for the 

 purpose of employing them in the mines and plantations of the New 

 World. The natives of America were too weak and too indolent to 

 undergo the hard work which their Spanish task-masters exacted of 

 them, and they died in great numbers. Las Casas, a Dominican, 

 advocated with a persevering energy before the court of Spain the 

 cause of the American aborigines, and reprobated the system of the 

 " repartimientos," by which they were distributed in lots like cattle 

 among their new masters. But it was necessary for the settlements to 

 be made profitable in order to satisfy the conquerors, and it was 

 suggested that negroes from Africa, a more robust and active race than 

 the American Indians, might be substituted for them. It was stated 

 that an able-bodied negro could do as much work as four Indians. 

 The Portuguese were at that time possessed of a great part of the 

 coast of Africa, where they easily obtained by force or barter a con- 

 siderable number of slaves. The trade in slaves among the nations of 

 Africa had existed from time immemorial. It had been carried on in 

 ancient times : the Garamantes used to supply the slave-dealers of 

 Carthage, Gyrene, and Egypt with black slaves which they brought 

 from the interior. The demand for slaves by the Portuguese in the 

 Atlantic harbours gave the trade a fresh direction. The petty chiefs 

 of the interior made predatory incursions into each other s territories, 

 and sold their captives, and sometimes their own subjects, to the 

 European traders. The first negroes were imported by the Portuguese 

 from Africa to the West Indies in 1503, and in 1511 Ferdinaud the 

 Catholic allowed a larger importation. These, however, were private 

 and partial speculations ; it is said that Cardinal Ximenes was opposed 

 to the trade because he considered it unjust. Charles V., however, 

 being pressed on one side by the demand for labour in the American 

 settlements, and on the other by Las Casas and others who pleaded the 

 cause of the Indian natives, granted to one of his Flemish courtiers the 

 exclusive privilege of importing 4000 blacks to the West Indies. The 

 Fleming sold his privilege for 25,000 ducats to some Genoese 

 merchants, who organised a regular slave-trade between Africa and 

 America. As the European settlements in America increased and 

 extended, the demand for slaves also increased ; and all European 

 nations who had colonies in America shared in the slave trade. It is 

 generally understood that the slaves of the Spaniards, especially in 

 Continental America, were the best treated of all. But the negro 

 slaves in general were exactly in the same condition as the Roman 

 slaves of old, being saleable, and punishable at the will of their owners 

 Restrictions, however, were gradually introduced by the laws of the 

 respective states, in order to protect the life of the negro slave against 



