McCormick, M. (2016) Slavery from Rome to Medieval Europe and Beyond, in On Human Bondage: After Slavery and Social Death (eds J. Bodel and W. Scheidel), John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ, USA. doi: 10.1002/9781119162544.ch13 Link to Book
Summary
Captured by slave hunters in Britain as the Roman Empire collapsed, Saint Patrick was sold into slavery across the sea. The autobiographical declaration casts his personal story as one of conversion, and spiritual and physical liberation. It is possible that the genetic traces of the forced migration of early medieval Europeans to the economic and political centers of the Islamic world live on in the genomes of modern inhabitants of North Africa and Mesopotamia, just as those of their African ancestors live on in African Americans. Sugar plantations helped finance the kingdom of Jerusalem's ecclesiastical institutions and the French-speaking feudal Lords of Tyre; the Crusaders profited from exporting the new sweetener to Europe in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. When the Muslims reconquered the mainland Crusader states and their sugar plantations, export production for Europe simply shifted offshore to the Crusader kingdom of Cyprus.
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Michael McCormick Born on the banks of the Erie Canal, McCormick received his Ph.D. from the Université catholique de Louvain in 1979. He served on the faculty of the Department of History of the Johns Hopkins University from 1979 to 1991, and was Research Associate at Dumbartons Oaks from 1979 to 1987. He came to Harvard in 1991, where he is presently the Francis Goelet Professor of Medieval History and chairs the new University-wide Initiative for the Science of the Human Past at Harvard (SoHP), an interdisciplinary research networks that brings together geneticists, archaeological scientists, climatologists, environmental, computer and information scientists, humanists and social scientists in order to explore great questions of human history from our origins in Africa to our migrations across the globe. |