Slavery and Dependency in the Visigothic Kingdom

Between the sixth and seventh centuries, the Visigothic kingdom ruled much of the Iberian Peninsula, today Spain and Portugal. Its laws treated enslaved people as property, while estate records show them living in family households and managing resources under an owner’s authority. A donation made by Vincent, a deacon from Huesca in northeastern Spain, in 551 transferred land, livestock and both enslaved and tenant workers to a monastery. Later provisions in the law code describe how owners, churches, judges and the royal army asserted claims over enslaved people and their families.

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Law, ownership and dependency

The Liber Iudiciorum, or Visigothic law code, gathered earlier royal laws and took its surviving twelve-book form probably under King Recceswinth in the mid-seventh century. Later rulers added provisions. Its rules were issued at different times: one said that a written or witnessed contract made by an enslaved person without the master’s order was void. A contract could not independently release a person from the owner’s authority.

Vincent’s donation lists coloni and servi as distinct groups on the same estate. Historian Ulrike Roth translates coloni as tenant cultivators and servi as enslaved people. The labels therefore distinguish tenants from people whose labor and movement remained subject to an owner’s claim. Vincent’s list also names buildings, fields, vineyards, olive trees, gardens, meadows, pasture, waterways and herds of sheep, cattle and mares. Crop cultivation and livestock raising formed parts of the same estate economy.

Land, work and the Church

The donation records peculia, resources assigned to enslaved people for their use or management, alongside the estate’s wider stock. Roth argues that the animals and pasture associated with this property helped enslaved families maintain themselves: household members cared for livestock while the estate drew on the animals and cultivated land. The testament later names Campinus and Eugenius among the people Vincent freed. Campinus’s release included his wife and children and his peculium; Eugenius’s release included his children and the grant of Roman citizenship. Roth reads these provisions as family arrangements made within slavery, rather than evidence that the men had been independent tenants.

Vincent’s later testament directed a priest visiting the estates to stay at Alueza and defend the Church of Huesca’s rights over buildings, fields, pasture and enslaved residents. Ecclesiastical ownership involved practical management of the property and labor it received. Monastic rules also addressed ownership directly. The Common Rule said that an enslaved applicant could be received only after bringing proof of freedom from the owner. Isidore’s Rule prohibited an abbot or monk from freeing a slave belonging to the monastery. Joining or belonging to a religious community did not itself cancel another party’s property claim.

Families, property and military demands

The law treated family relationships between enslaved people owned by different masters as a question of property. Book X says that children of such a union were divided between the two owners. If there was only one child, the child stayed with the mother until age twelve, when the law considered the child able to work. The mother’s owner then had to pay the father’s owner half of the child’s appraised value. Property accumulated by the couple under one roof also belonged to both masters. The rule made the owners’ interests part of the household’s family life.

Owners’ control of enslaved labor extended to military service. A law under King Wamba ordered anyone summoned to the army to bring one tenth of the slaves they owned, with arms and equipment. The law complains that landowners hid enslaved people so they could keep working their crops. Another Wamba law threatened loss of freedom for nobles and people of lower rank who failed to defend the kingdom against an enemy attack. A separate enlistment provision allowed the king to reduce a person of lower rank to perpetual slavery if they could not pay the penalty for failing to report. In a later anti-Jewish decree, King Erwig’s law allowed a sixty-day period for the approved sale of Christian slaves held by Jews; it then declared those retained after the deadline free and threatened the Jewish owners with confiscation or lashes and, in a further provision, perpetual enslavement.

Flight and the recovery of fugitives

Book IX instructed neighbors and officials to help recover people who fled. One rule required a person who received a fugitive to bring them before a judge. If the fugitive stayed through the eighth night and then left, the host owed the owner two enslaved people of equal value. Another law required a household sheltering a runaway to notify local authorities; it could keep the person in custody until the master arrived and then return them. If the fugitive left, the host had to swear that they had not encouraged the escape and did not know where the person had gone. These procedures made a runaway’s route through other households a matter for owners, courts and local officials.

Manumission and the limits of freedom

The code recognized freedom granted in writing or before witnesses. A deathbed manumission had to be confirmed within six months by three to five credible witnesses, and property promised with freedom was due to the recipient. A person who shared ownership could not free the enslaved person alone: the other owners’ shares first had to be acquired. Vincent’s testament also records other named men with differing resources. One man whose name is lost in the manuscript received four centuae (units of land area) of vineyard and two enslaved people; Elicianis received land in Ceresa, while Mattheus received land in Alueza. Other men were freed without comparable land or laborers.

Freedom could also bring continuing obligations to a patron, the legal term for the former owner who granted freedom. Book V gives two distinct limits. A freed person who left a living patron lost property received at manumission and could be returned to service. A separate provision covers a freed person who dies without legitimate children: property given by the former owner returns to the patron or heirs, and if the freed person had remained on the patron’s estate, half of property acquired through labor there belongs to the patron. Manumission ended enslaved status, while the code preserved specific claims over a freed person’s estate and service.