In the Manchester Medieval Studies series, Janel M. Fontaine has published the volume Slave Trading in the Early Middle Ages: Long-Distance Connections in Northern and East Central Europe, which, as it says in the Acknowledgements, (astonishingly) began as an undergraduate thesis from 2011. I hope Fontaine got a very good mark for this dissertation (if it resembles the result of this book), because this is a very good and important book.
The book compares two regions, the Czech lands and the British Isles and Ireland, considering how slavery was conducted—whether through small-scale raiding, during wars, or in the form of larger slave-trading networks—by examining the available primary sources. The period she focuses on is the seventh to eleventh centuries, the era when northern Europe saw a very extensive slave trade. The book is divided into two parts, where Part 1 examines the economic basis for slave trading, the demand for slaves, and where they came from, while Part 2 addresses, as she says, “the strategies of enslavement and slave trading” (11).
With the structure Fontaine has chosen for this book, looking at different ways of slaving (small scale raids; war captives; large slaving networks, etc.) by analysing the same primary sources from different angles and starting points, it is inevitable that she will end up with a lot of repetition. In most cases these repetitions and retakes don't become too disturbing. However, it becomes a little irritating to reread the famous stories of the Northumbrian aristocrat Imma who is sold as a slave to a Frisian in London; the Irish saint Findan’s enslavement and experience of being resold as a slave in Orkney; and the story, with the famous wordplay, when an English boy is sold as a slave in Rome and Pope Gregory identified him as “angelic,” occurring several times in the volume.
A common and recurring theme in the book is the lament over the paucity of sources to consult, especially when dealing with the Czech region and also Scandinavia. This is pointed out by Fontaine over and over again with expressions such as “The lack of explicit evidence” (34), “Documentary sources that illuminate slave trading...do not survive for our period in either of the regions studied here” (9), “This may also have been the case in the Czech lands, but the difficulties of textual transmission prevent any certainty” (80), etc., but now and then it seems as if the author has forgotten this fact when declaring, e.g., “All cultures and societies in the British Isles and the Czech lands...practiced slavery, as is evident from their earliest records” (37, cf. 235). This is of course deflating for a reader to read, but it is necessary to point out this fact, because it forces the reader to understand that there is not enough written evidence in the few sources we have, if any, so the discussion must become tentative. This acknowledgement of a lack of sources is an unfortunate fact we all have to deal with when trying to research early medieval slavery in Scandinavia and elsewhere in large parts of northern Europe.
Fontaine all the same deep-dives into a huge body of primary source material of very different origins and languages, and cites and refers to these primary sources, which, of course, is very commendable, whereas secondary sources, with discussions of the primary sources, are scarcer. However, and this is my personal opinion, we all are standing on the shoulders of earlier scholars, who have worked on the topics we are dealing with, and I like to give credit to especially those who have really in a clever and useful way discussed that particular aspect in that particular primary source, showing reverence for that scholar’s effort and perhaps even ingenuity analysing the primary source. Although today many scholars’ readings and reference horizons are not so many years back in time, it is uplifting to note that Fontaine repeatedly refers to Peter Sawyer and his important works from the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, which in many ways changed the direction of research.
After an introductory chapter, Fontaine gives a very comprehensive and important discussion of the demand for and usage of slaves in the Muslim world, from around 800 and onwards. Here, thanks to Arabic sources, she is even able to come up with numbers, such as 5,000 enslaved men in the Umayyad army in Al-Andalus; in Baghdad there were 11,000 eunuchs, where 7,000 were Black Africans and 4,000 Slavs, guarding 4,000 free and enslaved women, etc. Fontaine also has an important discussion regarding the number and usage of slaves in Francia, stating that the number is often exaggerated and captured people found in Frankish society were mostly destined for household servitude, whereas agricultural labour was performed overwhelmingly by tenants. As for the Scandinavians and the Rus, she states that slaves were not taken “necessarily...for their labour” (63); the Rus were undoubtedly slaveholders, she adds, but these slaves were to be sold onwards further east. A general conclusion by Fontaine is that slave ownership in Europe operated, compared to Islamic polities and the Byzantine Empire, on a vastly different scale. Here slavery appears to have existed at low to moderate levels, dominated by household servitude and farm work, with thus not so much external demand for slaves to be used in European societies.
Turning to the British Isles, in a general conclusion, Fontaine identifies two peaks of slave-raiding during the Viking Age. The first, in the late ninth century and early tenth, coincides with the initial settlement of the North Atlantic, most noticeably Iceland. The second, which was a more substantial peak, emerged in the late tenth century and early eleventh, which coincides with the expansion of slave trading generally in Europe. In England there was a rather abrupt stop with the establishment of the Anglo-Danish kingdom and the coronation of Cnut in 1016, whereas in Ireland slave raiding continued and the Irish themselves surpassed the Scandinavian settlers as the major slave raiders. Fontaine has furthermore an interesting proposal regarding this first peak in the late ninth century and tenth. She sees this expansion in the light of the colonization of Iceland, which she, one must assume, considers must have demanded a large workforce, which was to a large extent taken from the British Isles in the form of slaves. This is in a way confirmed by the Old Icelandic literature and the often-occurring mention of especially Irish-born slaves. This plausible hypothesis has, as I see it, the consequence that it is not possible to see Scandinavia in this period as a homogenous societal entity. The need for the same amount of extra workforce was not needed in the same way in Norway, Sweden, and Denmark. If Fontaine is right here, Iceland is an exception in Scandinavia regarding slaves in society, and east Scandinavian slavery cannot be seen in the same light as the Icelandic one.
One of the merits with Janel Fontaine’s book is the material dealing with eastern Europe and especially the Czech lands and also Hungary, and with Prague as an important slave market. This eastern realm is seldom discussed—or sometimes even mentioned—in general overviews of slavery in Europe, which has been very westward-looking. The traditional view regarding slavery in this period among Czech and eastern European scholars generally, which mainly worked according to Marxist theories, was that slaves were not that plentiful here; instead, these regions functioned as a transit zone between the west and the Muslim and Byzantine world. With new theoretical glasses on, modern research can see resemblances, but also, as is articulated in Fontaine’s book, differences between eastern and western Europe regarding slavery and slave-trading.
Janel M. Fontaine has in her book, Slave Trading in the Early Middle Ages: Long-Distance Connections in Northern and East Central Europe, presented us with an important study regarding slavery and slave trading in medieval Europe. The book presents both a good and up-to-date summary of the human abomination called slavery and unfreedom, as well as—and here lies the great merit of her work—a discussion of slavery and slave trading in eastern Europe, especially in and around the Czech lands, comparing what we find here with what we understand of slavery and slave trading in England and the British Isles. This is an important book for our understanding of slavery in early medieval Europe.