The study of world slavery is presently vigorous. Rotman's Byzantine Slavery and the Mediterranean World represents the most ambitious treatment of Byzantine slavery during the centuries between Justinian and the crusades, and thus addresses a serious gap. The investigation opens by outlining three ways of conceptualizing slavery: economic, social, and legal. Byzantine Slavery attempts to dislodge the “economic model,” here a somewhat simplified version of Marxist class analysis, even as such accomplished recent practitioners as Wickham, Haldon, and Banaji are not cited. A property-based definition of slavery is conspicuously absent, and Patterson's alternative paradigm of social death is not given a fair hearing. Rotman favors a civil-status definition of slavery and argues that anthropology provides key insights into the specific content of unfree status in any society.
Chapter 2 begins by considering the provenance of Byzantine slaves. Medieval sources resist quantification, but in the absence of an effort to gauge the extent of slavery and its sources, the reader may question claims like “the empire had an unlimited supply of slaves” (p. 26). Supply is always a structural constraint, and the study of slavery in other periods has shown how much Byzantinists can learn from treating supply as a fundamental problem. The most valuable part of the book is a thirty-page discussion of prisoner exchanges between Byzantines and Arabs, in which Rotman tracks the ascent of religious identity as the defining criterion for in-group status. Next the author provides a “map” of the early medieval slave trade, without really engaging the arguments or evidentiary basis of McCormick's Origins of the European Economy. When slave traders did not pass through Constantinople, Rotman explains these “detours” as attempts to circumvent Byzantine tolls (which the author unexpectedly sees as mercantilist tariffs, not revenue generators). Byzantine Slavery underestimates the structural dominance of Islamic demand, and thus is not the most reliable guide to the itineraries, cargoes, commercial networks, or price levels of the medieval slave trade.
Chapter 3 opens with a valuable discussion of the vocabulary of slavery and then considers the role of slavery in Byzantine society. The book analyzes at length the role of slaves in urban manufacture, as reflected in the Book of the Prefect, but basic secondary literature is passed over. Byzantine Slavery claims that “large numbers of slaves” were held in the households of the powerful, but the only documented number is the thirty-one slaves and freedmen of an exceptionally wealthy family: to a Roman senator, this would have been a pitiable lot. On agricultural slavery, Rotman gathers about ten witnesses from six centuries, too few to convince that agricultural slavery was structurally significant in Byzantium, despite the objective difficulties of measuring rural slavery in a pre-modern context.
Chapter 4 argues that baptism, asylum, and marriage acted conjointly to undermine the slave-owner's power. This trend is reflected in hagiography, where slave-saints increasingly appear. There is an important story here, although inconvenient counterexamples that contradict the thesis of middle Byzantine development are ignored (Jerome's Life of Malchus, Pseudo-Nilus' Narrationes) or dismissed in a footnote (Ethiopian Moses). Moreover, the “spectacular metamorphosis in mentalities” depends on the unproven assumption that before the supposed humanization of the slave there was a time when slaves were considered inhuman objects. Byzantine Slavery claims (88, 92, 166–67) that in the ninth century “slave of the king” came to be used of imperial officials, when in fact this language dates back to the sixth century (Procopius. Historia Arcana [Secret history], ch. 30, sect. 26).
Some thematic omissions in Byzantine Slavery are surprising. It does not ask whether Byzantine slavery was closer to the male-biased slavery of Rome or the female-biased slavery of Islam and late medieval cities, nor does it address the different experiences of male and female slaves. Textile work does not appear in the book, although this was presumably a principal employment for slaves. There is little analysis of violence or sexual exploitation and nothing on the strikingly innovative ban on sex with one's own slaves (cf. A. Laiou, ed., Consent and Coercion).
Byzantine Slavery's production standards are lax. One learns that this is a translation of an already-published monograph only on the copyright page and in various tell-tale lapses, such as the failure to substitute “English” for “French” on p. 82 (see also 93, 108, 169, 246). The translation is often obscure in a way that distracts from the argument, and typographical errors are too many. General readers interested in Byzantine slavery should beware of the book's substantive errors, too. For example, the Roman Empire reaching its maximum extent in the sixth century (57), oiketês etymologically linked to a domestic function (86), the servus vicarius as “the overseer of other slaves” (107), manumission in the church dated to the sixth century (123), questioning of the problem of slavery “appeared only in the works of the Cappadocian fathers” (132), Justinian establishing the law of asylum (133), Roman law preventing a slave from having more than one master (138), Roman emperors banning castrated slaves (169), and unreliable accounts of the Roman law of self-sale and child sale (173–75) and of slave prices (appendix C).
Rotman explores fascinating and challenging territory. His book's strengths lie in its discussion of Byzantine-Arab relations, its attention to the vocabulary of slavery, and its presentation of the colorful hagiographical evidence. It is regrettable that the republication of the book in English did not occasion an attempt to take account of recent advances or to correct the original's shortcomings. Errors of fact and judgment remain frequent in Byzantine Slavery, and as its bibliography reveals, the study is disconnected from recent work in ancient and modern slavery.
