Slavery effectively disappeared in most of Christian Europe towards the end of the Middle Ages, because the Church opposed keeping Christian slaves. (Similarly, Islamic Europe had banned Muslim slaves.) As Christianity spread, slaves were no longer conveniently available, and the society had to adapt.
In densely populated areas, that meant systems like serfdom. Agricultural land was a scarce resource mostly owned by the elite. Most peasants were nominally free but tied to the land, with obligations towards whoever owned the land. Peasants farmed land owned by the local lord and paid rent with labor. And if the lord sold the land, the peasants and their obligations went with it.
>Slavery effectively disappeared in most of Christian Europe towards the end of the Middle Ages, because the Church opposed keeping Christian slaves.
It disappeared because it was replaced by indentured servitude on the low end and restriction and tax on who could do what trades on the high end. Because the lords own a huge fraction of all the farmland. So this is very much a "you're nominally free but you're gonna be share-cropping your old master's land" situation for the former serfs. An improvement, sure. But not nearly as big of one as the history books tout.
Lucky for them that didn't last very long until the black death made labor way more valuable so a lot of the rules got eased up and once that unleashed a bunch more productivity at the margin, well there was no going back.
>Most peasants were nominally free but tied to the land, with obligations towards whoever owned the land. Peasants farmed land owned by the local lord and paid rent with labor. And if the lord sold the land, the peasants and their obligations went with i
I'm not saying they're equivalent, but there's a very good comparison to most professional licensure to be made here.
Serfdom was a huge improvement. Serfs could not be taken away from their homes and families. They could own things. They had far more rights.
Debt/war/penal/chattel slavery was not a particularly strong economic activity in Europe in the Middle Ages. What we're mostly talking about is agricultural serfdom.
I think the Church had a lot less to do with the end of _serfdom_ than the Black Death. The sudden population drop mandated that lords who wanted to maintain production had to steal peasants from other lords, and improve their own compensation/conditions to retain their own labor force. And so on for the rest of the economy as well.
This represented a massive transfer of power and rights downwards... for a while. The late 1300's and 1400's have some of the best conditions for the laboring class for the previous 400 years or the next 400 years. You can hear about some of the dark days to follow in England specifically in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ec9Al5ezYs
Slavery effectively disappeared in most of Christian Europe towards the end of the Middle Ages, because the Church opposed keeping Christian slaves. (Similarly, Islamic Europe had banned Muslim slaves.) As Christianity spread, slaves were no longer conveniently available, and the society had to adapt.
This requires a very bold, 115 font asterisk. Or rather it’s plain wrong. Mass slavery in Europe didn’t really end until serfdom was abolished (1800s). And let’s not even get started on the African slave trade which was managed and prospered off of from Europeans, both from direct sales and indirectly from slave labor. Also, many of those slaves converted to Christianity, so it wasn’t based on any religious affiliation.
It was abolished in western Europe. Even in eastern Europe serfdom was not the same as slavery.
The African slave trade happened between west Africa and the Americas, and Africa and west Asia. Not with Europe.
Slave owners refused to free slves who converted, and tired to prevent them being converted : https://www.gresham.ac.uk/watch-now/protestant-slavery
I’m a bit confused by your reply. Pretty sure the rulers of the Dahomey kingdom weren’t trading with people of the “Americas” but with Europeans, before and after its abolishment across Western Europe. In the book Fistful of Shells, historian Toby Green argues the scale of the trade was only made possible by European traders flooding West Africa with cheap currency (shells which had little value to them but that could be collected in the billions from Brazil and the Indo-Pacific).
My points are:
1. slavery in Western Europe had been abolished long before the transatlantic slave trade - the Europeans were intermediaries, but there was little to no slavery in their home countries. There were many court rulings in England against slavery.
2. not enslaving Christians played a role in abolishing slavery in medieval Europe
3. serfdom was a far better condition that being a slave
4. Slave owners in the Americas opposed the conversion of slaves to Christianity. they also censored the version of the Bible available to slaves very heavily.
5. The claim about mass slavery within Europe is misleading on two counts: serfs are not just chattel slaves (they had rights), and Western Europe was very different from Eastern Europe.
https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/inspire-me/blog/bl...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_Britain#Judicial_de...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Select_Parts_of_the_Holy_Bible...