Preliminary Remarks on Ancient Slavery

I have to admit, I am approaching this particular subject with trepidation. First, I will summarize the works of one of my favorite historians. I am afraid that my summary will not do justice to the cogent argument proposed in The Origins of European Economy. Second, writing about the slave trade is not an easy endeavor for anyone born in the aftermath of the Civil Rights movement in the United States. Latent in my subconscious are images of one ethnicity, believing in its innate superiority over another, abusing its brethrens. I have to consistently remind myself of two important details: that analyzing the slave trade with the eyes of the historian does not make me pro-slavery, and that ancient slavery differed in significant ways from the US and Brazilian experience.
It was more humane in that slaves were not of one particular ethnicity: they were pluriethnic, and in Late Antiquity, it is clear that some might have come from the same region, shared the same religion and customs, and yet one was master, the other was slave. In an interesting tale, the fifth-century historian Gregory of Tours mentions that Frankish kings (after Clovis's death, the Frankish kingdom was divided in three kingdoms), would often send young men as hostages. These men were royal, or at least of prominent families. They were part of the court life, until, Gregory tells us, war would break out between the two kings at which points the hostages were sold into slavery (History of the Franks, III.15).
Furthermore, in the first century A.D., the philosopher Seneca wrote a letter to a brethren, Lucillus, in which he outlines the proper treatment of slaves. In short, he stipulates that masters should not be afraid to welcome a slave at their table, that it is not beneath their rank as masters to do so. He explains that slaves did everything for the master, ranging from shopping to providing healthy remedies. Furthermore, he reminds domini that they themselves are slaves to someone or something else, and so should treat their slaves the way they would want their master to treat them (Letter 47). Seneca points to the value of the slave for the home, but slaves were also useful outside of the homes. They provided entertainment as gladiators, and some gladiators were extremely popular (in that regards the movie Gladiator is not a total historical loss- I love that movie...); and, slaves or freedmen (that is slaves who have been freed) were employed by their masters or former-masters to perform some clerical tasks. The historian A.H.M. Jones offers an explanation for this: 'Employers no doubt also preferred to use in positions of trust men whose characters they knew, and on whose obedience they could rely; slaves could be chastised if they disobeyed instructions, and freedmen had formed the habit of executing their master's orders' ('Slavery in the Ancient World,' The Economic History Review 9.2). This does seem an acceptable answer, and I do not have the means at the moment to either prove or disprove this particular statement. In other words, slaves were not limited to doing manual labor or servile duties, and the learned ones served more important roles in the administration of the houses of important people.
I want to explain what I am going to do in the following blog-post. The goal will be really to summarize McCormick's argument for an early-medieval slave trade, and to explain why I think he is correct in his assessment. Doing so, I have realized that I was doing the kind of history that I love: looking at periods of transition. The period that I shall describe is not in any history book, though it is an underlying theme often recurrent when one considers the differences between the ancient and medieval worlds. It is an economic transition: from slavery to serfdom. While I will show that serfdom and slavery co-existed for extensive periods of time, and that serfdom did not occlude the slave trade, the fact remains: slavery disappears from Europe during the Middle-Ages.