With the end of Rome’s great wars of conquest (around 117A.D), slavery began to decline in the empire. The main source of slaves, war captives, was no longer available because of “peace”, so the large landowners began breeding slaves like cattle. This production of slave labor proved to be costly (the total upkeep of the slave from birth) and inefficient (there was no guarantee that the offspring would amount to be productive slaves after such an investment), so the landowners devised a new procedure, using free tenants, to produce the crops on their lands.
Free tenants, or Coloni, were used more and more during the peaceful era of the Roman Empire because of several reasons:
- Free tenants produced more crops than slaves did because they had a stake in the farm’s success, whereas slaves did not care whether the farms failed or succeed.
- Because of the efficiency of the coloni, the landowners realized that it probably took three slaves to do the work of one free man. (Modern studies on comparative efficiency of slave labor and free labor indicated that the landowners were correct in their use of tenants instead of slaves.)
- Landowners also realized that it was much more inexpensive to pay coloni wages than to have a slave. The capital that was invested into a slave was wiped out upon the death of the slave, and also the owner had to pay for to feed, clothe, shelter, etc, of the slave during his lifetime, a very large, continuous investment if the slave lived long. But a freeman would be paid for his labor, not his upkeep, housing, feeding, his care in sickness, his idleness, or for his young.
During the Pax Romana, or Roman “peace” era, the system of lease farming to tenants grew and the use of slaves began to diminish very slowly. The reason for the slow change was because during the ancient period, it cost approximately the same for the upkeep of a slave as for paying a free man. But as these freemen became “part of the land” through leasing, the costs went down for the owner because the “freeman” was earning his keep from the leased land and at the same time working the land of the owners.
200A.D- a minor renewal of slave supply began when Rome became involved with the constant border warfare with the German barbarians. From this time on barbarian prisoners came onto the slave market. When the barbarians won some battles with the Romans, they took usually took their Roman citizen prisoners, and sold them back as slaves in the outlying Roman slave markets. As time went on, Romans sold on the slave markets grew into the thousands because of the constant clashes with the barbarians. The reason for this increase was because most of the time the Roman captives could not afford the ransoms that the barbarians demanded for their freedom. If the Roman was a wealthy man and could afford his ransom, he was set free, but most of the captives were not wealthy, so they ended on the slave block. Ironically, Roman slave dealers who did business with the German barbarians did not mind buying and selling their own countrymen; profits were their main concern.
Through the 4th and 5th centuries A.D- Roman slave dealers made huge profits dealing in captured barbarians and fellow Romans. This period was when barbarian invasions on the Roman borders began intensifying. Roman army officers, also hungry for profits, often paid less attention to resisting invaders than to slaving. By 300A.D, slaves in the mines had disappeared and were replaced by free workers. Also, in private workshops and in the services areas free craftsmen took the place of slaves and organized guilds (unions). But in the public (state) industries, such as minting, weaving, transport, etc, slave labor persisted.
Agriculture:
During the time of the Roman Empire, freemen had always worked as hired laborers and tenants on the great estates, but under the reign of Diocletian (284- 305A.D), a system began to develop that reduced the free man’s control over himself and his occupation, thus diminishing the distance between himself and the slave. Both free and slave moved by slow degrees into a common condition of serfdom. (Serfdom is when a free tenant is permanently bound to the soil along with his children. He could not marry outside the domain and if he left, he was brought back and punished. His descendents were fixed in the same status as he. Later, he was forbidden to dispose of his own property without the landlord’s permission. Also he was denied the right to sue. Technically, the serf was free (as in personal freedom), but under serfdom his condition was semi-servile.)
How Serfdom Came About:
On the great estates, there were two classes: the coloni, or freemen, and the slave. They worked as a group under an overseer on part of the estate that the owner had not rented or leased out. Often the owner would divide some of his holdings into small farms, which he would settle, some of his slaves to work. Roman law called these slaves quasi-coloni because they worked under the conditions similar to the coloni. But the difference between the coloni and quasi-coloni was that the quasi-coloni was still property with no rights whatsoever under Roman law. In practice though, the landowner/ landlord let the quasi-coloni stay on their holding and these quasi-coloni gradually assumed to have a permanent and hereditary right to them. In 377A.D, Valentinian I decreed that such slaves could not be sold apart from the land that they cultivated. The colonus (freemen) and the slave often intermarried and the differences between the two gradually became fewer and fewer, thus by the end of the 7th century A.D there was little to distinguish the slave from the rural serf.
Roman slavery was fading as an economic institution, not because of an effort to try and abolish it, but because, to a large extent, serfdom was replacing it as society slowly underwent deep economic and social changes. With the Germanic tribes of Central Europe invading the Roman frontiers, and the failure of Roman armies to hold them back and failure to control domestic strife at home, the Roman Empire began to disintegrate from the middle of the 3rd century onward. In the West, it disappeared, but in the East it revived under the Byzantine rulers and lasted another 1000 years.
The End of the Roman Empire:
By 600A.D- was the end of the ancient world. Kingdoms of Germanic peoples replaced the Western part of the Roman Empire. The operation of the large estates/ villas of the Empire (now run by these Germanic invaders) continued into the Middle Ages and evolved into a Manorial system. (A Manorial system is a district over which a lord held authority and which was subject to the jurisdiction of his court.) From this system evolved feudalism. Definition: the economic, political and social system in Medieval Europe, in which land, worked by serfs who were bound to it, was held by vassals in exchange for military and other services given to overlords.
Slavery, although much smaller in numbers and importance, did not disappear from Europe until after the Middle Ages, which was approximately the end of the 15th century. Some Christian writers contend that “the sole agent” in reducing slavery was the Early Church, but in the opinion of other historians, Church teachings had always sanctioned slavery.
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