The Medieval Slave Trade, part 4

(Parts one, two, and three.)

There are several parables in the New Testament that are set in the context of a slave-master situation. They all are meant to offer a lesson, but that lesson is never that slavery is a bad thing. In Paul's letters, for example, slaves are told to obey their masters, and masters are told to be kinder to their slaves.

In Galatians 3:28, Paul says "There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus." In fact, Paul's admonishment is not because he wants the slave treated well; it is because he wants the master to remain pure in the eyes of God. After all, when in Gethsemane Jesus' disciple uses a sword to cut the ear off a slave, Jesus does not restore the ear and heal the slave. Instead, Jesus warns the swordsman about his own fate, that "he who lives by the sword shall die by the sword." Although the slave and the free man are to be considered the same spiritually in God's eyes, the existence of slavery is accepted as a social and cultural norm.

If the slave was Christian, that is. Non-Christians held as slaves by Christians were fair game in the Middle Ages, even as popes discouraged enslavement of co-religionists, as did the leaders of Jews and Muslims. This left Northern European pagans and black-skinned Africans as a source of slaves for all three "people of the book."

Popes such as Nicholas V began to justify slavery to allow the capture and use of Saracens, pagans, and other "enemies of Christ." One justification was the Curse of Ham. Ham, son of Noah, saw his father drunk and naked; Noah cursed Ham's offspring to be a servant of servants for Noah's other descendants. There is no indication that Ham's offspring were cursed with darkened skin, but the Curse of Ham was applied to Africans to explain their difference. (This was also used in 19th century North America to justify the existence of American slavery.)

Even Thomas Aquinas accepted slavery as a part of a world that had been tainted by Original Sin.

Besides justifying slavery, Pope Nicholas V was involved in a lot of other political and cultural facets of the 1400s, and we should take another look at him next time.