Middle Ages: Economics of Slavery vs Serfdom

If anyone has good sources on this topic, I’d appreciate them.

Anyway, my general question is focused on the value of slaves compared to serfs, inasmuch as we can contrast the two. Beyond social reasons (the Church frowning on enslaving Christians) and political reasons (serfs migt fit the feudal structure better), was there any real economic difference between slaves and serfs? Could an owner/liege generally expect x bushels of grain from a slave and y bushels from a serf? Was the potentially lower cost of maintaining serfs off set by the opportunity cost of not being able to sell them?

Basically, setting aside all but the most tangental non-economic considerations (though we can find economics in almost everything), how did serfdom and slavery stack up against each other?
 
Well considering only the economic side im not sure one is anymore profitable than the other, if thats what you're getting at.

A lord may not be as directly responsible for his serfs as a slave master might, but he has other expenditures that he needs to do to ensure his place, such as maintaining knights/men at arms and armed guards, taxes to maintain his position, etc.

In otherwords, a slaver must spend to maintain his property, a Lord must spend to maintain his status/position.
 
Well considering only the economic side im not sure one is anymore profitable than the other, if thats what you're getting at.

A lord may not be as directly responsible for his serfs as a slave master might, but he has other expenditures that he needs to do to ensure his place, such as maintaining knights/men at arms and armed guards, taxes to maintain his position, etc.

In otherwords, a slaver must spend to maintain his property, a Lord must spend to maintain his status/position.

Would a slave owner’s security costs be comparable, when you consider that they need armed guards to keep the slaves in line? Serfs could be restless, but they’ve bought into the system, to some degree. Rebel, and they lose whatever land their Lord is letting them lose. Slaves have less to lose.

On the other hand, you have more control over slaves. Economics is hard.
 
Would a slave owner’s security costs be comparable, when you consider that they need armed guards to keep the slaves in line? Serfs could be restless, but they’ve bought into the system, to some degree. Rebel, and they lose whatever land their Lord is letting them lose. Slaves have less to lose.

On the other hand, you have more control over slaves. Economics is hard.

From what i understand of slave societies, masters don't generally need to worry about security in that way, as they exist in a social order that allowed him not to. They can rely on wider society, ie: the law and its enforcers, to do most of the work.

A fedual society exists in a context where this is not possible. Power is too spread out and tenuous, there isn't a strong state to enforce his property rights on his behalf. Therefore he must enforce it himself. And thence the political situation developes that its the military elite who become the state and the economic masters of so many.
 
Out of curiosity-Could slavery and serfdom flourish together in the same society?

Depends on how you envision slavery, but Russia and Scandinavia had both concurrently. Russia even had legal slavery (kholop) until the end of Tsar Alexei's reign, they were just vastly outnumbered by serfs (which existed in very small numbers in the middle ages but became the dominant mode of controlling labour with the advent of capitalism, same as what happened in Poland and so on.)
 
Out of curiosity-Could slavery and serfdom flourish together in the same society?

Coexist, sure. But as far as history tells us, they don't seem to flurish together. Slavery was in decline in the Europe when feudalism was developing, and when slavery made its comeback in the colonial era feudalism was begining its drawnout death.
 
Oh my, there is a lot to unpack in that.

Okay.

First of all, the Church didn't actually frown on Christians being slaves, or being enslaved, until relatively late. If we're talking "Middle Ages", the first half was a period in which slavery declined uniformly and consistently on a continental scale despite the absence of any particular struggle to accomplish that change on the part of the Church.

If we're considering a Europe with plantations filled with slaves during the medieval period, there's one obvious question that needs to be addressed: Where did all the slaves go in our TL? India, China, and Europe all experienced a marked decline in chattel slavery within a few centuries of each other. Except as a very peripheral economic practice it stayed gone for nearly a millennium in Europe, much longer in the east. The only medieval moral-economic system that didn't go this route was the Dar al Islam, and that may have been a special case - the practice of enslaving war captives was explicitly legitimized in their founding ethics. To be fair to Muhammed, at the time no one - in 7th century Arabia or 5th century Rome - considered a society without slavery possible. And even so, the previously ubiquitous enslavement of debtors vanished from the Middle East, North Africa, and Central Asia.

Graeber makes a fairly compelling argument in Debt: The First 5,000 Years that this dramatic, but mostly-unremarked-upon change was driven by economic factors. Just not any of the economic factors you seem to be asking about here. It wasn't the economics of cost and benefit that (mostly) eliminated chattel slavery in three continental swathes. It was the economics of war and the economics of debt that did it.

If a civilization regulated or systematically condemned usury, it seems to have been almost impossible to maintain a population of locally-sourced slaves. Debt was the primary means of holding people in bondage indefinitely. It was easy to keep a slave a slave for a lifetime; almost impossible to keep a slave family a slave family for more than a generation or two. People end up free, unless strong institutions maintain slavery. This was true within the Muslim world as well. Slave states where debt slavery was a thing faced periodic crises with much or most of the populace becoming unfree; without debt slavery they had the opposite problem. It took reliable imports, and often laws limiting the liberation of slaves, to maintain the institution. (And race helped once invented.) Systemic slavery is hard.

The only solution we saw historically was continuous replenishment via enslaved war captives. In the White Huns TL, a Christian North Africa opens a source to Europe, which begins employing sort-of-janissaries. The source of the slaves needs to be considered. Not that having a source is decisive - Europe had access to the Slavic slave trade, India to many sources, but it wasn't chattel working the land.

In a sense, I suppose I am answering your intended question, in a backhanded way. If it was down to cost-effectiveness and overall production, slavery would have won most comparisons with systems of serfdom. It's just that - for economic reasons - it was not feasible to make use of slavery to begin with.
 
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The problem with chattel slavery is that unless you have an extremely profitable cash crop or similar resource as the basis of your economy, it becomes unsustainable on a microeconomic level, as you need to regularly feed your slaves if you want to remain a going concern. With serfdom, their rent-labor doesn't require constantly feeding them, as they can raise their own food, with the exception of emergencies and special occasions. You might get the same productivity from a slave, but the costs would be higher.

You might say, OK, I'll underfeed the slave, but then you need to find a replacement when that slave dies. Over time, the only place you could get that would be if you lived near the Dar al-Islam. Otherwise you're largely SOL.
 
First of all, the Church didn't actually frown on Christians being slaves, or being enslaved, until relatively late. If we're talking "Middle Ages", the first half was a period in which slavery declined uniformly and consistently on a continental scale despite the absence of any particular struggle to accomplish that change on the part of the Church..

Define relatively late, in light of the many various Church actions trying to suppress specific types of slavery.

Heck, half the black population of Virginia and Maryland were already free when Lincoln was elected. Systemic slavery is hard.

Could you provide me some solid numbers on that? I'm looking directly at the 1860 census and the numbers for free blacks and slaves in those two states. I'm seeing that the number of slaves outnumbers the number of free blacks by almost an order of magnitude.
 
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Define relatively late, in light of the many various Church actions trying to suppress specific types of slavery.

I'll show you mine, you show me yours, eh? I'm out with a phone, and then work, but will do. I've not seen evidence suggesting moral objections to slavery played a major role in its disappearance from the European scene. If you can point me in the direction of some, I'd be more than happy to get more complete information.

Could you provide me some solid numbers on that? I'm looking directly at the 1860 census and the numbers for free blacks and slaves in those two states. I'm seeing that the number of slaves outnumbers the number of free blacks by almost an order of magnitude.

And I'm looking at it too. Clearly some wires crossed somewhere; I've "known" that factoid (and been giving credit to Virginians and Marylanders) for years. My apologies; I'll edit my post accordingly.
 
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I am afraid your question is not too correct.

1) It depends on your definition of "Middle Ages" of course, but whatever it is we are speaking about a very long time period - a millennium(!). Even the common sense suggests that things (including Slavery and Serfdom) were not static and there were changes from century to century.

2) I understand that you mean only Europe of course, and my guess it is Western Europe.
But even in Western Europe in different regions some things (including Slavery and Serfdom) were dramatically different.

If anyone has good sources on this topic, I’d appreciate them.
There's a good one:

THE CAMBRIDGE ECONOMIC HISTORY OF EUROPE
VOLUME I THE AGRARIAN LIFE OF THE MIDDLE AGES
SECOND EDITION
EDITED BY
M. M.POSTAN Professor of Economic History in the University of Cambridge


just a short excerpt from it:

CHAPTER VI
III The decline of slavery
From the ninth and early tenth centuries the various grades of dependent cultivators are in process of assimilation into a single class, although originally they and their holdings had been in classes far apart. The process was far from completed. Most of the surveys still refused to mix up free and servile manses. Official terminology, legal rules, with their strict lawyerly style, maintain as best they can the line between the free and the servile tenant. Habit and common speech had already nearly erased it.
It is curious that this fusion—accomplished in that great creative epoch of the tenth and eleventh centuries, an age whose terrible shortage of documents has hidden from us the details—did not lead to the disappearance of the word servus (become serf in. Romance speech) nor yet to the wiping out of the idea of servitude. We are not here concerned with the actual history of medieval serfdom. But the survival for almost a millennium of words which seem to recall slavery may bring—has in fact often brought—such errors in its train, that a sketch of the main lines of evolution is called for. Among the members of seigneuries, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, many—far more than the Carolingian slaves, 'hutted' or not—are held to lack that legal quality called freedom. Yet neither the French or Italian serfs, nor the German Eigene, nor the English bondmen are slaves; not even as a rule descendants of slaves. Not slaves in the legal sense, because they do not belong in body and goods to a master; their relations with their lords are fixed by custom; they have their own possessions; and no one regards them as human beings devoid of rights. Still less slaves in the economic sense: they do not live on the demesne; they have their fields for which they pay dues and services; in short, they are tenants. Even the 'every day' serfs in Germany (Tageschalken; servi cotidiani), unknown elsewhere in the West except in Sardinia, though they owe daily services as their name implies, are much more like labourers than slaves: they have their own cottages and scraps of land. "What really has changed is the very content of the notions of 'free' and 'unfree'. Henceforward the 'free' man is the man who can choose his own lord—as a vassal does, whose homage must be renewed as lord succeeds lord, under pain of losing his fiefn o doubt, but in theory of his own free will; as the peasant also does who is only bound to his lord by holding some tenure, or living on some particular spot. That is the position of the French libre vilain, the German Landsasse, the English socman. The 'unfree' man, on the other hand, is the man bound to a lord by a tie that is personal and hereditary, a tie which in some fashion attaches to his body from birth, and is in consequence rather degrading and socially incapacitating. These new forms of very ancient juridical conceptions, appearing— as it strikes us—rather late in time, had occurred inside seigneuries already formed, seigneuries with no slaves. We may even say that they assume the absence of slaves. For such changes of meaning were only possible because the notion of slavery had lost its ancient content, almost spontaneously.
 
You can sell your slaves freely. To your serfs, you`re more or less tied, if you want to trade them for something else, you need to give away your land, too, in exchange for whatever you could get for that, which was also not so easy because in the feudal logic, you held every part of your land merely as a fief from your liege.

So, slavery is more fluid that serfdom and works "better" with more abstract types of market economies. What`s even more, medieval serfdom would come to have a tight corset of traditions as to how the master could exploit his serfs. Whenever they would want to change this massively, there were often peasant revolts.
 
Define relatively late, in light of the many various Church actions trying to suppress specific types of slavery.

Sorry, my ibooks is screwing with me; messy day. After an internet refresher:

Looking at late Antiquity, we have an ecumenical condemnation of rebellious slaves in the 5th century and early post-Constantine Christians denying escaped slaves the sacraments.

Already by this time we have individual Church figures trying to push back against slavery - from almost the inception of Christianity. That's incontestable. St Patrick, many others - moral problems tied to slavery are deeply Christian (of course they are - many early converts were slaves).

What I've read of the Church itself doing is different. We find a growing consensus against holding or enslaving Christians that became the overwhelming taboo somewhere around 1000. [Notwithstanding the church still found itself de jure owning - in the late 11th century - large numbers of English slaves whose families had been Christian for centuries. That in a kingdom where a rich saint had expended his wealth more than 400 years earlier freeing slaves.]

By the year 1000 though, slavery had long since de facto ceased to exist in the vast majority of Europe - those English slaves were socially treated much more as we would recognize serfs - and for that matter non-Christians had become equally rare. Probably the Church's most superficially impressive pre-modern steps on slavery, and they seem to have amounted to acknowledging facts on the ground. Aquinas explicitly identified slavery as a sin only in the 13th century, and the first Popes recognized it as such only from the mid-15th. Never mind the hasty rethinking to support Portugal's voyages of exploration. Again, this seems to fall after grassroots Christians had long decided they despised anything reminiscent of the practice.
 
I made a few sentences out of a few pages of the same book, they answer some unanswered questions:

THE CAMBRIDGE ECONOMIC HISTORY OF EUROPE
VOLUME I THE AGRARIAN LIFE OF THE MIDDLE AGES
CHAPTER VI
III The decline of slavery


The decline of slavery is incontestably one of the most notable facts in our western history. Like all great facts, it is hard to explain. Broadly one may say that three groups of causes, converging, brought it about—the military, the religious, and the economic.

The Church refused resolutely to sanction the enslavement of Christians, true Christians, that is, Catholics.
If a Christian captured another Christian he was obliged to respect his free status. Perhaps one of the finest triumphs of Christian ethics was the enforcement of respect for this maxim, slowly to be sure, but in the long run most effectively.
You could hunt for slaves in the countries round about. But these were all distant lands, or lands difficult of approach. They could supply warriors or traders with a few slaves; they could not maintain a great servile economy.

Even the revival of seaborne trade, from the twelfth century, which put on to the Mediterranean markets a much greater supply of wretched creatures, kidnapped in North Africa, the Levant, or on the shores of the Black Sea, though it filled rich establishments with domestics and concubines, and added a few slave farm hands, did little more—except perhaps in the Balearic Islands and in Sicily. Obviously the working of great estates by slave labour was no longer considered possible or desirable. The grouping about a central establishment of dependent holdings, saddled with dues and services, was preferred.
Slave labour requires close oversight. To adopt tenancy as a solution was the line of least resistance. Labour kept itself; the families, each settled on its scrap of land, grew in the natural way. It was merely necessary to take care that the days of work on the demesne were duly given—and that was mostly done for you by custom.

In fact, the troops of slaves who had once lived on the great estates dwindled away from year to year mainly because their masters were always turning them into tenants, 'hutting' them, as the phrase was: giving each his own hut (casa), of course with the necessary fields. In short, at once slave and tenant, in the end he is likely to become much more tenant than slave.​
 
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