Slavery in the Byzantine Empire: Enslavement, Labour and Legal Status

Byzantine law allowed people to be owned and sold. Captives and enslaved children entered households, estates and workshops, while owners could also grant freedom. Military campaigns and commercial routes supplied the trade. Rural labour increasingly involved dependent tenants alongside slaves, and wealthy households continued to employ enslaved servants.

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What slavery meant in Byzantine law

Justinian’s legal compilations retained slavery as a form of ownership while describing it as contrary to natural freedom. They reaffirmed restrictions on killing enslaved people and provided procedures for claiming freedom. Manumission under Justinian conferred Roman citizenship. Later legislation continued to restrict the authority of masters. Rules limited abuse, sexual exploitation, abandonment and the killing of enslaved people and their children. Christian teaching supplied arguments for humane treatment and manumission without abolishing ownership of people. Religious institutions could themselves own enslaved workers.

How people became enslaved

War captives were the principal documented source of enslaved people. Campaigns could bring large numbers into imperial territory, where captives were distributed among households and estates or entered commercial markets. The Byzantine chronicle Synopsis of Histories reports that prisoners taken after the Battle of Adrassos were sent to Constantinople in such numbers that mansions and rural districts were filled with them.

Warfare in the Balkans and lands north of the Black Sea became especially important after the tenth century. Slavs and Bulgars were among the groups carried into slavery as a result of military campaigns. Captives could be moved through Black Sea ports and Byzantine Crimea toward Constantinople and the Mediterranean. Traders from the Rus, a northern people with commercial links to Byzantium, and other networks brought enslaved people south by routes connected with the Dnieper and the Black Sea.

Captivity and slave trading crossed political and religious frontiers. Restrictions intended to protect members of one’s own faith did not prevent Christians from enslaving other Christians, and pagan communities were also targets of raiding. Routes through the Black Sea connected the Byzantine market with the river systems of eastern Europe. Genoese and Venetian colonies later became important centres of this trade.

Not all enslaved people were foreign captives. Byzantine families could sell children to meet debts, although imperial laws attempted to prevent this practice.

Domestic work, estates and urban labour

Enslaved labour was used in several settings, and its distribution changed over time. In the earlier imperial tradition, large agricultural estates could employ very large numbers of slaves. The Farmers’ Law, associated with the seventh and eighth centuries, distinguishes a free colonus working in a village from a slave labouring on the estate of a large landowner. Some enslaved people continued to work on landed properties, but this form of labour became less prominent as rural workers increasingly became tied to the land in other dependent arrangements.

Wealthy households could contain substantial numbers of enslaved servants. The Vita Basilii attributes large gifts of slaves to the wealthy widow Danielis; the historical reliability of that narrative is disputed. Accounts also associate Basil Lekapenos with a large household of slaves and retainers.

Legal status and economic position did not always correspond. An enslaved person belonging to a wealthy household might live better than a poor free person. Masters could also place slaves in positions of responsibility. The tenth-century Book of the Prefect describes urban trades and regulations in which an enslaved goldsmith could be confiscated for illicit dealings, whereas a free goldsmith could face corporal punishment and a heavy fine. Because the financial penalty for a free worker could exceed the value of a slave, owners had an incentive to appoint enslaved people as shop foremen. In such roles, they could exercise authority over free wage workers, known as misthioi.

An enslaved foreman could supervise free wage workers, called misthioi. Responsibility within a business operated alongside ownership of the supervisor. Urban trades consequently employed people with different legal positions in the same establishment.

Marriage, children and military service

Family life was constrained by slave status. Enslaved people were not legally permitted to marry until legislation under Alexios I Komnenos in 1095. Legal marriage did not itself confer freedom, and the children of enslaved people remained enslaved even when the father was their master. Sources also record enslaved people serving in military settings. Their relationship to owners and access to subsequent freedom depended on the circumstances of service. Enslavement also limited the security of household and family relationships: legal ownership could separate relatives or place their work and residence under another person’s control.

Eunuchs and service at court

Eunuchs included enslaved servants, although other eunuchs were free. Law prohibited castration within the empire, and trade supplied boys and men castrated elsewhere as well as illegally within Byzantine territory. Eunuch servants worked in wealthy households and the palace. Some rose to senior court posts and political influence, while others remained in subordinate service.

Sale and legal valuation

A law of AD 531 in Justinian’s Code, 6.43.3, prescribed valuations for dividing legacies between competing beneficiaries. It assigned up to ten solidi, or gold coins, for an unskilled enslaved child under ten and twenty for an older unskilled person. Eunuchs were valued up to thirty or fifty respectively, with higher figures for skilled work. These were legal appraisals within an inheritance procedure.

The same law valued skilled artisans up to thirty solidi, notaries at fifty, and physicians or midwives at sixty. Its distinctions attached monetary values to age, occupation and bodily condition when settling ownership claims.

Manumission and the growth of other dependencies

Manumission, or the granting of freedom, was recognised by Byzantine law. Justinian’s legislation enabled enslaved people to petition for freedom and provided Roman citizenship to those who were freed. Sources credit Manuel I with freeing enslaved people in Constantinople. Manumission could be performed and commemorated as an imperial benefaction.

From the seventh century onward, and more clearly from the eleventh century, slavery was increasingly accompanied or replaced by other forms of dependency. Rural workers could become tied to land rather than owned as movable property. The free colonus and the estate slave described in the Farmers’ Law were different legal categories, yet both could move toward a dependent condition attached to the soil. In towns, some workers were bound to hereditary occupations while receiving wages and providing their own support, a system reflected in the Book of the Prefect.

Domestic service and trade continued to employ enslaved workers as other dependent arrangements expanded. Surviving legal records and transactions document particular owners and workers; overall numbers remain uncertain.