title: Syrians

text: A typical Syrian breakfast is a meze. It is an assortment platter of foods with cheeses, meats, pickles, olives, and spreads. Meze is usually served with Arab-style tea - highly concentrated black tea, which is often highly sweetened and served in small glass cups. Another popular drink, especially with Christians and non-practicing Muslims, is the arak, a liquor produced from grapes or dates and flavored with anise that can have an alcohol content of over 90% ABV (however, most commercial Syrian arak brands are about 40-60% ABV).


title: Kavala

text: Kavala (, "Kavála" ) is a city in northern Greece, the principal seaport of eastern Macedonia and the capital of Kavala regional unit.


title: Kavala

text: It is situated on the Bay of Kavala, across from the island of Thasos and on the Egnatia motorway, a one-and-a-half-hour drive to Thessaloniki ( west) and a forty-minute drive to Drama ( north) and Xanthi ( east). It is also about 150 kilometers west of Alexandroupoli.


title: Kavala

text: Kavala is an important economic centre of Northern Greece, a center of commerce, tourism, fishing and oil-related activities, and formerly a thriving trade in tobacco.


title: Kavala

text: Historically the city is also known by two different names. In antiquity the name of the city was Neapolis ('new city', like many Greek colonies). During the Middle Ages was renamed to Christo(u)polis ('city of Christ').


title: Kavala

text: The etymology of the modern name of the city is disputed. Some mention an ancient Greek settlement of "Skavala" near the town. Others propose that the name is derived from the Italian "cavallo" which means horse. The city is situated on the ancient route of Via Egnatia; hence Cavala designated "the horses" (cavalla) where imperial couriers changed horses. The French traveller Bellon, who visited Kavala in 1547, mentions a local tradition that the city initially took its name from Alexander the Great, who named it "Bukephala", after the name of his horse Bucephalus. Another possibility is that "Kavala" is a Turkish name, given by the Turks after they refounded the city at the beginning of the 16th century . Last but not least, as the archaeologist Georgios Bakalakis first pointed out, there was a Byzantine fortress named Kavala close to the Byzantine city of Iconium - now Konya - in Asia Minor. When the Ottomans brought Muslim settlers from Iconium to establish in the territory of Kavala at the beginning of the 16th century, these people brought the name of their homeland with them. Nowadays the city's nickname is "the cyan city" (Η γαλάζια πόλη) and the symbol of the municipality of Kavala is the head of goddess Parthenos, the patron goddess of ancient Neapolis, as depicted in the coinage of the ancient Greek city.


title: Kavala

text: The city was founded in the late 7th century BC by settlers from Thassos. It was one of several Thassian colonies along the coastline, all founded in order to take advantage of rich gold and silver mines, especially those located in the nearby Pangaion mountain (which were eventually exploited by Phillip II of Macedonia).


title: Kavala

text: Worship of Parthenos/Virgin, a female deity of Greek Ionian origin associated with Athena, is archaeologically attested in the Archaic period. At the end of the 6th century BC Neapolis claimed independence from Thassos and began issuing its own silver coins with the head of Gorgo (γοργὀνειο) on one side. A few decades later a large Ionic temple made from Thassian marble replaced the Archaic one. Parts of it can now be seen in the town's archaeological museum.


title: Kavala

text: In 411 BC, during the Peloponnesian War, Neapolis was besieged by the allied armies of the Spartans and the Thassians but remained faithful to Athens. Two Athenian honorary decrees in 410 and 407 BC rewarded Neapolis for its loyalty.


title: Kavala

text: Neapolis was a town of Macedonia, located from the harbour of Philippi. It was a member of the Second Athenian League; a pillar found in Athens mentions the contribution of Neapolis to the alliance.


title: Kavala

text: The military Roman road Via Egnatia passed through the city and helped commerce to flourish. It became a Roman "civitas" in 168 BC, and was a base for Brutus and Cassius in 42 BC, before their defeat in the Battle of Philippi.


title: Kavala

text: In the 6th century, Byzantine emperor Justinian I, an Illyrian from Taor, Dardania (Procopius), fortified the city in an effort to protect it from barbarian raids. In later Byzantine times the city was called "Christo(u)polis" (Χριστούπολις, "city of Christ") and belonged initially to the theme of Macedonia and later to the Theme of Strymon. The first surviving mention of the new name is in a "taktikon" of the early 9th century. The city is also mentioned in the "Life of St. Gregory of Dekapolis". In the 8th and 9th centuries, Bulgarian attacks forced the Byzantines to reorganise the defence of the area, giving great care to Christoupolis with fortifications and a notable garrison. The city remained under Byzantine control and in 837 Byzantine armed forces from Christoupolis under the command of Caesar Alexius Moselie stopped Bulgarian raids in the plain of Philippoi.


title: Kavala

text: At about 830-840 AD dates a Greek inscription on the walls of a defensive tower of the fortifications of the city, still visible today, and in 926, according to another inscription (nowadays in the archaeological museum of Kavala), the General of the Theme of Strymon Vasilios Klaudon, restored the "fallen and damaged" defensive walls.


title: Kavala

text: In the mid of the 12th century the Arab geographer Edrisi visited Christoupolis and described it as a well fortified city and a center of sea trade. According to another inscription, also nowadays in the archaeological museum of Kavala, the Normans probably burnt the city in 1185, after they captured first Thessaloniki. Some years later, the city fell to the hands of the Lombards, after the Fourth Crusade and was liberated again by the leader of the state of Epirus, Theodorus Komnenos, in 1225.


title: Kavala

text: In 1302, the Catalans failed to capture the city. In order to prevent them from coming back, the Byzantine emperor Andronikos III Palaiologos built a new long defensive wall. In 1357 two Byzantine officers and brothers, Alexios and John, controlled the city and its territory. Excavations have revealed the ruins of an early Byzantine basilica under an Ottoman mosque in the Old Town. It was used until the late Byzantine era.


title: Kavala

text: The Ottoman Turks first captured the city in 1387. Kavala remained a part of the Ottoman Empire until 1912. In the 16th century, an Aromanian that had converted to Islam in his late teenhood, Ibrahim Pasha, Grand Vizier of Suleiman the Magnificent, contributed to the town's prosperity and growth by reconstructing the late Roman (1st - 6th century AD) aqueduct. The Ottomans also extended the Byzantine fortress on the hill of "Panagia". Both landmarks are among the most recognizable symbols of the city today.


title: Kavala

text: Mehmet Ali, the founder of a dynasty that ruled Egypt, was born in Kavala in 1769. His house has been preserved as a museum.


title: Kavala

text: Kavala was liberated by the Greek navy during the Second Balkan War and was incorporated into Greece with the Treaty of Bucharest. In August 1916 remnants of the IV Army Corps, stationed at Kavala under Ioannis Hatzopoulos surrendered to the advancing Bulgarian army. These events provoked a military revolt in Thessaloniki, which led to the establishment of the Provisional Government of National Defence, and eventually Greece's entry into the First World War.


title: Kavala

text: The Bulgarian occupation of the city lasted from August 1916 till September 1918 and its result was the death of c. 12.000 Greeks, as the Bulgarian army organized an ethnic cleansing against the Greek population of the city and Eastern Macedonia. Hundreds of victims and eye-witnesses testified about the Bulgarian atrocities in the post-war inter-Allied interrogatory committee, which finally gave its report on 21 April 1919, after "in situ" examination of the circumstances.


title: Kavala

text: After the Greco-Turkish War of 1919–1922, the city entered a new era of prosperity because of the labor offered by the thousands of refugees that moved to the area from Anatolia. The development was both industrial and agricultural. Kavala became greatly involved and developed further in the processing and trading of tobacco. Many buildings related to the storage and processing of tobacco from that era are preserved in the city. During the Interwar period and the Second Hellenic Republic, Kavala was the 4th largest city in Greece (after Athens, Thessaloniki, and Patras). In 1934 Dimitrios Partsalidis was elected mayor of Kavala, the first communist mayor in modern Greek history. The city gained temporarily by the Press, the nickname "Little Moscow".


title: Kavala

text: During the Second World War and after the Battle of Greece, Bulgaria occupied the city again, following the German invasion (April 1941). During the Bulgarian occupation (1941–1944), almost the entire Jewish community of the city was exterminated as part of the Holocaust.


title: Kavala

text: In the late 1950s, Kavala expanded towards the sea by reclaiming land from the area west of the port.


title: Kavala

text: In 1967, King Constantine II left Athens for Kavala in an unsuccessful attempt to launch a counter-coup against the military junta.


title: Kavala

text: On July 16, 2022, Meridian Flight 3032 crashed near the village. The Ukrainian-registered Antonov An-12BK was carrying 11.5 tons of ammunition from Nis to Dhaka when the plane began to lose altitude over the Aegean and turned around, but went down 35 kilometers west of Kavala Airport. All 8 crew members were killed.


title: Kavala

text: The municipality of Kavala was formed at the 2011 local government reform by the merger of the two former municipalities, which became municipal units:


title: Kavala

text: The municipality has an area of . The population of the new municipality is 70,501 (2011). The seat of the municipality is in Kavala.


title: Kavala

text: Kavala is built amphitheatrically, with most residents enjoying superb views of the coast and sea. Some of the areas inside Kavala are:


title: Kavala

text: The province of Kavala () was one of the provinces of the Kavala Prefecture. Its territory corresponded with that of the current municipality Kavala, and part of the municipal unit Eleftheroupoli. It was abolished in 2006.


title: Kavala

text: Traditionally the primary occupation of the population of Kavala was fishing. The fishermen of the town were well known all over northern Greece.


title: Kavala

text: After the country's industrialization, Kavala also became a center of the tobacco industry in northern Greece. The building of the Municipal Tobacco Warehouse (1910) still stands today.


title: Kavala

text: Oil deposits were found outside the city in the 1970s and are currently exploited by two oil rigs (Prinos and Epsilon).


title: Kavala

text: Kavala has a hot-summer mediterranean climate (Köppen climate classification: Csa) that borders on both a semi-arid climate and a humid subtropical climate (Köppen climate classification: BSk, Cfa) with annual average precipitation of . Snowfalls are sporadic, but happen more or less every year. The humidity is always very high.


title: Kavala

text: Kavala hosts a wide array of cultural events, which mostly take place during the summer months. One of the top festivals is the Festival of Philippi which lasts from July to September and includes theatrical performances and music concerts. Since 1957, it has been the city's most important cultural event and one of the most important of Greece.


title: Kavala

text: "Cosmopolis" is an international festival held in the Old Town of Kavala that offers an acquaintance with cultures around the world through dancing and musical groups, traditional national cuisines, cinema, and exhibits at the kiosks of participant countries. The first festival took place in 2000, and from 2002 until 2009 was organized annually. It was revived in 2016 with a participation of 250 artists and musicians from all over the world.


title: Kavala

text: "Ilios kai Petra" (Sun and Stone) (July) is a festival held in "Akontisma" of Nea Karvali. The event is of folkloric character, with the participation of traditional dancing groups from all over the world.


title: Kavala

text: Wood Water Wild Festival is an outdoor activities festival, inspired by nature. It includes live bands and DJ sets, body&mind activities, a book fair, outdoor theatre, ecology, camping, and debates.


title: Kavala

text: Fish and seafood, as well as the products of the local livestock breeding and agricultural sectors, are the prevailing elements of Kavala cuisine. In Kavala, the traditional local recipes have been also influenced by the cuisine of the refugees from Pontus and Asia Minor.


title: Kavala

text: Fresh fish and seafood, especially sardines, shrimp salad ("garidosalata"), mackerel "goúna" (sun-dried mackerel on the grill), kavouropilafo, mussels with rice, herring saganáki, anchovies wrapped in grape leaves, stuffed eggplants and from meat plates, lamb with spinach, are some renowned recipes in Kavala and the coastal settlements of the region. The grapes, wine, and tsipouro produced in the area, as well as the kourabiedes (sugar-coated almond biscuits) from Nea Karvali, are particularly famous.


title: Kavala

text: European route E90 runs through the city and connects Kavala with the other cities. The Egnatia Motorway (A2) lies north of the city. One can enter the city from one of two junctions: Kavala West and Kavala East. Kavala has regular connection with Interregional Bus Lines (KTEL) from and to Thessaloniki and Athens.


title: Kavala

text: The Kavala International Airport "Alexander the Great" ( from Kavala) is connected with Athens by regularly scheduled flights and with many European cities by scheduled and charter flights.


title: Kavala

text: Kavala is connected with all the islands of the Northern Aegean Sea with frequent itineraries of various ferry lines.


title: Kavala

text: The city is connected with all of the large Greek cities such as Thessaloniki and Athens. All of the local villages are also connected via bus lines. The cost of tickets is very cheap. There is also a shuttle bus in Kavala with these lines:


title: Kavala

text: Kavala is not currently connected to the Greek rail network. However, plans exist to build a new Thessaloniki–Xanthi rail line via Kavala, as part of the Egnatia Railway corridor, at a cost of €1.25 billion. In 2019, Hellenic Railways Organisation awarded the contract to build the initial section between Xanthi and Kavala at a cost of €250 million.


title: Kavala

text: The Kavala Water Trail is a hiking trail that connects the village of Palaia Kavala with the Agios Konstantinos neighborhood of Kavala.


title: Kavala

text: Neapolis was important enough in the Late Roman province of Macedonia Secunda to be a suffragan of its capital Philippi's Metropolitan Archbishopric into the frames of the Greek - Christian eastern church. In the 8th century A.D. refers for the first time a bishopric of Christoupolis and later, between 886 - 912, during the reign of the emperor Leo the Wise, Christoupolis is mentioned as one of the six bishoprics of the metropolis of Philippi. Only later, in 1260, Christoupolis became a metropolis itself.


title: Kavala

text: After the liberation of the city of Kavala by the Greek army during the Balkan Wars, the local church was re-established under the official title "Metropolis of Philippi, Neapolis and Thasos" till nowadays. Metropolis of Kavala established a conference center dedicated to Saint Paul, in the village of Lydia, near the spot where, according to tradition, Paul baptized saint Lydia, in the river Zygaktis. In the same spot, Metropolis established a unique open-air baptistery as well as a unique octagonal baptistery, with mosaic and stained - glass decoration, the only such temple in Greece.


title: Kavala

text: The diocese of Christopolis was nominally restored in 1933 as a Latin Catholic titular bishopric. There is also a Catholic church in the city ("Saint Paul", in the building of the old Lazarist monastery).


title: Kavala

text: It is vacant, having had the following, far from consecutive, incumbents of the lowest (episcopal) rank, "except the latest (archiepiscopal, intermediary rank)":


title: Kavala

text: Austria opened a post office in Kavala before 1864. Between 1893 and 1903, the French post office in the city issued its own postage stamps; at first stamps of France overprinted with "Cavalle" and a value in piasters, then in 1902 the French designs inscribed "CAVALLE".


title: Kavala

text: In the past the city hosted consulates from different European countries. Currently hosts consulates from the following countries:


title: Plastic Memories

text: "Plastic Memories" takes place in a city (modeled after Singapore) in the near future, in which humans live alongside androids that look exactly like humans and have human emotion and memory. SAI Corp, the leading android production company, has introduced the Giftia, an advanced android model with the most human-like qualities of any model. However, there is a catch. The lifespan of a Giftia is determined beforehand, and a Giftia can only live for a maximum of 81,920 hours (roughly nine years and four months). If they pass their expiration date, it causes personality disintegration, memory loss, and outbreaks of violence; those who experience this are known as wanderers. Wanderers only act on instinct and can no longer recognize their owners. As a result, the Terminal Services are established with the duty of retrieving Giftias who are close to the end of their lifespans from their owners, and erasing the Giftias' memories. To perform this job, the Terminal Service employees work in teams consisting of a human (called a "spotter") and a Giftia (called a "marksman"). The story follows the work and life of such a team in SAI Corp's Terminal Service One office, the human protagonist Tsukasa Mizugaki and a Giftia named Isla. Their relationship progresses, and as they both slowly fall in love, Isla is revealed to be nearing the end of her own lifespan.


title: Plastic Memories

text: The 13-episode anime television series is produced by Doga Kobo and is directed by Yoshiyuki Fujiwara. The series was created and written by Naotaka Hayashi, and the music is produced by Mages. Okiura provides original character designs, which were later adapted by Chiaki Nakajima for the anime, while the backgrounds are made by Atelier Rourke 07, Gachi Production, and Nara Animation. The series aired from April 5 to June 28, 2015, on Tokyo MX. It aired on later dates on GYT, GTV, ABC, GBS, MTV, BS11, and AT-X. It also started broadcasting online on Niconico starting April 9, 2015. The opening theme is "Ring of Fortune" by Eri Sasaki and the ending theme is by Asami Imai. The first and seventh episodes feature the insert song "Again & Again" by Melody Chubak. The eighth episode uses "Ring of Fortune" as the ending theme instead of the opening theme. The tenth episode features an insert song sung by Isla's voice actress Sora Amamiya, titled .


title: Plastic Memories

text: Crunchyroll streams the series in North America, Central America, South America, and Europe excluding the United Kingdom, Republic of Ireland, Germany, Austria, and Liechtenstein. Funimation streams the series in United States and Canada with subtitles.


title: Plastic Memories

text: A spin-off manga adaptation, illustrated by Yūyū and titled , features Michiru Kinushima as the protagonist. It began serialization in the June 2015 issue of ASCII Media Works' "Dengeki G's Comic". The first "tankōbon" volume, which contains chapters published before the serialization, was published on April 27, 2015.


title: Plastic Memories

text: A video game adaptation developed by 5pb. for the PlayStation Vita was released in Japan on October 13, 2016.


title: Military reserve force

text: A military reserve force is a military organization whose members have military and civilian occupations. They are not normally kept under arms, and their main role is to be available when their military requires additional manpower. Reserve forces are generally considered part of a permanent standing body of armed forces, and allow a nation to reduce its peacetime military expenditures and maintain a force prepared for war.


title: Military reserve force

text: In countries with a volunteer military, such as Canada, Spain, the United States and the United Kingdom, reserve forces are civilians who maintain military skills by training periodically (typically one weekend per month). They may do so as individuals or as members of standing reserve regiments—for example, the UK's Army Reserve. A militia, home guard, state guard or state military may constitute part of a military reserve force, such as the United States National Guard and the Norwegian, Swedish and Danish Home Guard. In some countries (including Colombia, Israel, Norway, Singapore, South Korea, Sweden, and Taiwan), reserve service is compulsory for a number of years after completing national service. In countries with conscription, such as Switzerland and Finland, reserve forces are citizens who have completed active duty military service but have not reached the upper age limit established by law. These citizens are subject to mandatory mobilization in wartime and short-term military training in peacetime.


title: Military reserve force

text: In countries which combine conscription and a volunteer military, such as Russia, "military reserve force" has two meanings. In a broad sense, a military reserve force is a group of citizens who can be mobilized as part of the armed forces (). In a narrow sense, a military reserve force is a group of citizens who have signed contracts to perform military service as reservists, who were appointed to positions in particular military units, and who are involved in all operational, mobilization, and combat activities of these units (active reserve) (). Other citizens who do not sign a contract (the inactive reserve) can be mobilized and deployed on an involuntary basis ().


title: Military reserve force

text: The deployment of military units composed of reservists generally takes little time and does not require retraining. Mobilization of non-reservists involves the formation of new military units, requiring more time. A military reserve force differs from a reserve formation (sometimes called a military reserve), which is a group of military personnel (or units) not committed to a battle by their commander and available to address unforeseen situations, bolster defences, or perform other tasks.


title: Military reserve force

text: Some countries' 18th-century military systems included practices and institutions which functioned as a reserve force, even if they were not designated as such. For example, the half-pay system in the British Army provided the country with trained, experienced officers not on active duty during peacetime but available during wartime. The Militia Act of 1757 gave Britain an institutional structure for a reserve force. Although contemporaries debated the effectiveness of the British militia, its mobilization in several conflicts increased Britain's strategic options by freeing regular forces for overseas theaters.


title: Military reserve force

text: Reservists first played a significant role in Europe after the Prussian defeat in the Battle of Jena–Auerstedt. On 9 July 1807, in the Treaties of Tilsit, Napoleon forced Prussia to drastically reduce its military strength and cede large amounts of territory. The Prussian army was limited to a maximum of 42,000 men.


title: Military reserve force

text: The "Krumpersystem", introduced to the Prussian Army by military reformer Gerhard von Scharnhorst, gave recruits a brief period of training which could be expanded during wartime. Prussia could draw upon a large number of trained soldiers in subsequent wars, and the system was retained by the Imperial German Army into the First World War. By the time of the German Empire, reservists were given "war arrangements" after completion of their military service with instructions for the conduct of reservists in wartime.


title: Military reserve force

text: In countries such as the United States, reservists are often former military members who reached the end of their enlistment or resigned their commission. Service in the reserves for a number of years after leaving active service is required in the enlistment contracts and commissioning orders of many nations.


title: Military reserve force

text: Reservists can also be civilians who undertake basic and specialized training in parallel with regular forces while retaining their civilian roles. They can be deployed independently, or their personnel may make up shortages in regular units. Ireland's Army Reserve is an example of such a reserve.


title: Military reserve force

text: With universal conscription, most of the male population may be reservists. All men in Finland belong to the reserve until 60 years of age, and 80 percent of each age cohort are drafted and receive at least six months of military training. Ten percent of conscripts are trained as reserve officers. Reservists and reserve officers are occasionally called up for refresher exercises, but receive no monthly salary or position. South Korean males who finish their national service in the armed forces or in the national police are automatically placed on the reserve roster, and are obligated to take several days of annual military training for seven years.


title: Military reserve force

text: In wartime, reserves may provide replacements for combat losses or be used to form new units. Reservists can provide garrison duty, manning air defense, internal security and guarding of important points such as supply depots, prisoner of war camps, communications nodes, air and sea bases and other vital areas, freeing regular troops for service on the front.


title: Military reserve force

text: In peacetime, reservists can be used for internal-security duties and disaster relief, sparing the regular military forces. In many countries where military roles outside warfare are restricted, reservists are exempted from these restrictions.


title: Military reserve force

text: In countries with a volunteer army, reserve enlisted personnel are soldiers, sailors, and airmen who have signed contracts to perform military service on a part-time basis. They have civilian status, except for the days when they are carrying out their military duties (usually two or three days each month and attendance at a two-to-four-week military training camp once per year). Most reserve enlisted personnel are former active duty soldiers, sailors, and airmen, but some join the reserve without an active-duty background. When their contract expires, a reserve soldier, sailor or airman becomes a retired soldier, sailor or airman.


title: Military reserve force

text: In countries with conscription, reserve enlisted personnel are soldiers, sailors, and airmen who are not on active duty and have not reached the upper age limit established by law. In addition to the upper age limit, intermediate age limits determine the priority of wartime mobilization (younger ages are more subject to mobilization). These limits divide the reserve into categories, such as the Swiss Auszug, Landwehr, and Landsturm. Reserve soldiers, sailors, and airmen are subject to mandatory short-term military training in peacetime, as regulated by law. Reserve soldiers, sailors, and airmen have civilian status, except for military training in peacetime and wartime mobilization. A reserve soldier, sailor or airman becomes a retired soldier, sailor or airman at the upper age limit.


title: Military reserve force

text: In countries which combine conscription and a volunteer military, reserve soldiers, sailors, and airmen are divided into two categories: reservists and reserve enlisted personnel. Reservists sign a contract to perform military service on a part-time basis. Reserve enlisted personnel are not on active duty, have not signed a contract to perform military service as reservists, and have not reached the upper age limit. Reservists have civilian status, except when they are performing military duties. Reserve enlisted personnel have civilian status, except for military training in peacetime and wartime mobilization. Reservists are first subject to mobilization in wartime. Reserve enlisted soldiers, sailors, and airmen are divided into categories which determine the priority of wartime mobilization (younger personnel are mobilized first), such as "Первый разряд" (first category), "Второй разряд" (second category) and "Третий разряд" (third category) in Russia. A reservist becomes a reserve soldier, sailor or airman when their contract expires, and retires at the upper age limit.


title: Military reserve force

text: In countries with a volunteer military, reserve non-commissioned officers are military personnel with relevant rank who have contracted to perform military service on a part-time basis. They have civilian status, except for military duty. Most reserve non-commissioned officers are former active-duty NCOs, but some become reserve NCOs without an active-duty background. When the contract expires, a reserve NCO becomes a retired NCO. The main sources of reserve NCOs are:


title: Military reserve force

text: In countries with conscription, reserve NCOs are military personnel with relevant rank who are not on active duty and have not reached the upper age limit. In addition to the upper age limit, intermediate age limits determine the priority of wartime mobilization (younger ages are subject to mobilization first). Reserve NCOs are subject to mandatory short-term military training in peacetime. They have civilian status, except for military training in peacetime and wartime mobilization. A reserve NCO becomes a retired NCO at the upper age limit. Their main sources of NCOs are:


title: Military reserve force

text: In countries which combine conscription and a volunteer military, reserve NCOs are divided into two categories: non-commissioned officers-reservists and reserve non-commissioned officers. Non-commissioned officers-reservists have signed a contract to perform military service on a part-time basis. Reserve non-commissioned officers are not on active duty, have not signed a contract to perform military service as reservists, and have not reached the upper age limit. Non-commissioned officers-reservists have civilian status, except for the days when they are carrying out their military duties. Reserve non-commissioned officers have civilian status, except for military training in peacetime and wartime mobilization. Non-commissioned officers-reservists are subject to mobilization in wartime first. Reserve non-commissioned officers (non-reservists) are divided into categories which determine the priority of wartime mobilization (younger ages are subject to mobilization first)"Первый разряд", "Второй разряд", and "Третий разряд" in Russia. Upon expiration of the contract, a non-commissioned officer-reservist becomes a reserve non-commissioned officer. A reserve NCO becomes a retired NCO at the upper age limit. The main sources of reserve NCOs are:


title: Military reserve force

text: In countries with a volunteer military, reserve warrant officers are military personnel with relevant rank who have signed a contract to perform military service on a part-time basis. They have civilian status, except for the days when they are carrying out their military duties. Most reserve warrant officers are former active duty warrant officers. The main sources of reserve warrant officers are military schools and reserve warrant-officers courses.


title: Military reserve force

text: In countries with conscription, reserve warrant officers are military personnel with the relevant rank who are not on active duty and have not reached the upper age limit. In addition to the upper-age limit, intermediate age limits determine wartime mobilization priority; younger officers are mobilized first. The main sources of reserve warrant officers are promotion during active-duty service or short-term peacetime training, assessment after demobilization, military schools, and reserve warrant-officer courses.


title: Military reserve force

text: In countries with a volunteer military, reserve officers are personnel with an officer's commission who have signed a contract to perform part-time military service. They have civilian status, except when carrying out their military duties. Most reserve officers are former active-duty officers, but some become reserve officers after promotion. The main sources of reserve officers are:


title: Military reserve force

text: In countries with conscription, reserve officers are officers who are not on active duty and have not reached the upper age limit. The main sources of reserve officers are:


title: Military reserve force

text: Military reserves quickly increase available manpower substantially with trained personnel. Reservists are often experienced combat veterans who can increase the quantity and quality of a force. A large reserve pool can allow a government to avoid the costs, political and financial, of new recruits or conscripts. Reservists are usually more economically effective than regular troops, since they are called up as needed. Preparations to institute a call-up (obvious to adversaries) can display determination. Reservists also tend to have training in professions outside the military, and skills attained in a number of professions are useful in the military. In many countries, reserves have capable people who would not otherwise consider a career in the military. They see voluntary training as a hobby, and are inexpensive to train. The skills of reservists have been valuable in peacekeeping because they can be employed for the reconstruction of infrastructure, and tend to have better relations with the civilian population than career soldiers.


title: Military reserve force

text: Reservists are usually provided with second-line equipment which is no longer used by the regular army, or is an older version of that in current service. Reservists also have little experience with newer weapons systems. Reservists who are retired service personnel are sometimes considered less motivated than regular troops. Reservists who combine a military and civilian career, such as members of the United Kingdom's Army Reserve, experience time demands not experienced by regular troops which affect their availability and length of service.


title: Slavery in medieval Europe

text: Slavery, or the process of restricting peoples’ freedoms, was widespread within Medieval Europe. Europe and the Mediterranean world were part of a highly interconnected network of slave trading. Throughout Europe, wartime captives were commonly forced into slavery. Likewise, as European kingdoms transitioned to feudal societies, serfdom began to replace slavery as the main economic and agricultural engine. Throughout Medieval Europe, the perspectives and societal roles of enslaved peoples differed greatly, from some being restricted to agricultural labor to others being positioned as trusted political advisors.


title: Slavery in medieval Europe

text: Slavery in the early Middle Ages was initially a continuation of earlier Roman practices from late Antiquity, and grew more widespread in the wake of the social chaos caused by the barbarian invasions of the Western Roman Empire. With the continuation of Roman legal practices of slavery, new laws and practices concerning slavery spread throughout Europe. For example, the Welsh laws of Hywel the Good included provisions dealing with slaves. In the Germanic realms, laws instituted the enslavement of criminals, such as the Visigothic Code’s prescribing enslavement for criminals who could not pay financial penalties for their crimes and as an actual punishment for various other crimes. Such criminals would become slaves to their victims, often with their property.


title: Slavery in medieval Europe

text: As these peoples Christianized, the church worked more actively to reduce the practice of holding coreligionists in bondage. St. Patrick, who himself was captured and enslaved at one time, protested an attack that enslaved newly baptized Christians in his . The restoration of order and the growing power of the church slowly transmuted the late Roman slave system of Diocletian into serfdom.


title: Slavery in medieval Europe

text: Another major factor was the rise of Bathilde, queen of the Franks, who had been enslaved before marrying Clovis II. When she became regent, her government outlawed slave-trading of Christians throughout the Merovingian empire.


title: Slavery in medieval Europe

text: About 10% of England’s population entered in the Domesday Book (1086) were slaves, despite chattel slavery of English Christians being nominally discontinued after the 1066 conquest. It is difficult to be certain about slave numbers, however, since the old Roman word for slave ("servus") continued to be applied to unfree people whose status later was reflected by the term "serf".


title: Slavery in medieval Europe

text: Demand from the Islamic world dominated the slave trade in medieval Europe. For most of that time, however, sale of Christian slaves to non-Christians was banned. In the "pactum Lotharii" of 840 between Venice and the Carolingian Empire, Venice promised not to buy Christian slaves in the Empire, and not to sell Christian slaves to Muslims. The Church prohibited the export of Christian slaves to non-Christian lands, for example in the Council of Koblenz in 922, the Council of London in 1102, and the Council of Armagh in 1171.


title: Slavery in medieval Europe

text: As a result, most Christian slave merchants focused on moving them from non-Christian areas to Muslim Spain, North Africa, and the Middle East, and most non-Christian merchants, although not bound by the Church’s rules, focused on Muslim markets as well. Arabic silver dirhams, presumably exchanged for slaves, are plentiful in eastern Europe and Southern Sweden, indicating trade routes from Slavic to Muslim territory.


title: Slavery in medieval Europe

text: By the reign of Pope Zachary (741–752), Venice had established a thriving slave trade, buying in Italy, among other places, and selling to the Moors in Northern Africa (Zacharias himself reportedly forbade such traffic out of Rome). When the sale of Christians to Muslims was banned ("pactum Lotharii"), the Venetians began to sell Slavs and other Eastern European non-Christian slaves in greater numbers. Caravans of slaves traveled from Eastern Europe, through Alpine passes in Austria, to reach Venice. A record of tolls paid in Raffelstetten (903–906), near St. Florian on the Danube, describes such merchants. Some are Slavic themselves, from Bohemia and the Kievan Rus'. They had come from Kiev through Przemyśl, Kraków, Prague, and Bohemia. The same record values female slaves at a "tremissa" (about 1.5 grams of gold or roughly of a dinar) and male slaves, who were more numerous, at a "saiga" (which is much less). Eunuchs were especially valuable, and "castration houses" arose in Venice, as well as other prominent slave markets, to meet this demand.


title: Slavery in medieval Europe

text: Venice was far from the only slave trading hub in Italy. Southern Italy boasted slaves from distant regions, including Greece, Bulgaria, Armenia, and Slavic regions. During the 9th and 10th centuries, Amalfi was a major exporter of slaves to North Africa. Genoa, along with Venice, dominated the trade in the Eastern Mediterranean beginning in the 12th century, and in the Black Sea beginning in the 13th century. They sold both Baltic and Slavic slaves, as well as Armenians, Circassians, Georgians, Turks and other ethnic groups of the Black Sea and Caucasus, to the Muslim nations of the Middle East. Genoa primarily managed the slave trade from Crimea to Mamluk Egypt, until the 13th century, when increasing Venetian control over the Eastern Mediterranean allowed Venice to dominate that market. Between 1414 and 1423 alone, at least 10,000 slaves were sold in Venice.


title: Slavery in medieval Europe

text: A ready market, especially for men of fighting age, could be found in Umayyad Spain, with its need for supplies of new mamelukes.


title: Slavery in medieval Europe

text: Al-Hakam was the first monarch of this family who surrounded his throne with a certain splendour and magnificence. He increased the number of mamelukes (slave soldiers) until they amounted to 5,000 horse and 1,000 foot. ... he increased the number of his slaves, eunuchs and servants; had a bodyguard of cavalry always stationed at the gate of his palace and surrounded his person with a guard of mamelukes ... these mamelukes were called Al-l;Iaras (the Guard) owing to their all being Christians or foreigners. They occupied two large barracks, with stables for their horses.


title: Slavery in medieval Europe

text: According to Roger Collins although the role of the Vikings in the slave trade in Iberia remains largely hypothetical, their depredations are clearly recorded. Raids on AlAndalus by Vikings are reported in the years 844, 859, 966 and 971, conforming to the general pattern of such activity concentrating in the mid ninth and late tenth centuries. Muslim Spain imported an enormous number of slaves, as well as serving as a staging point for Muslim and Jewish merchants to market slaves to the rest of the Islamic world.


title: Slavery in medieval Europe

text: During the reign of Abd-ar-Rahman III (912–961), there were at first 3,750, then 6,087, and finally 13,750 Saqaliba, or Slavic slaves, at Córdoba, capital of the Umayyad Caliphate.


title: Slavery in medieval Europe

text: Ibn Hawqal, Ibrahim al-Qarawi, and Bishop Liutprand of Cremona note that the Jewish merchants of Verdun specialized in castrating slaves, to be sold as eunuch saqaliba, which were enormously popular in Muslim Spain.


title: Slavery in medieval Europe

text: The Nordic countries called their slaves "thralls" (Old Norse: "Þræll"). There were also other terms used to describe thralls based on gender, such as ambatt/ambott and deja. Ambott is used in reference to female slaves, as is deja. Another name that is indicative of thrall status is bryti, which has associations with food. The word can be understood to mean, cook, and to break bread, which would place a person with this label as the person in charge of food in some manner. There is a runic inscription that describes a man of bryti status named Tolir who was able to marry and acted as the king’s estate manager. Another name is muslegoman, which would have been used for a runaway slave. From this, it can be gathered that the different names for those who were thralls indicate position and duties performed.


title: Slavery in medieval Europe

text: A fundamental part of Viking activity was the sale and taking of captives. The thralls were mostly from Western Europe, among them many Franks, Anglo-Saxons, and Celts.


title: Slavery in medieval Europe

text: Raids on monasteries provided a source of young, educated slaves who could be sold in Venice or Byzantium for high prices.


title: Slavery in medieval Europe

text: Scandinavian trade centers stretched eastwards from Hedeby in Denmark and Birka in Sweden to Staraya Ladoga in northern Russia before the end of the 8th century. The collection of slaves was a by-product of conflict. The Annals of Fulda recorded that Franks who had been defeated by a group of Vikings in 880 CE were taken as captives after being defeated. Viking groups would have political conflicts that also resulted in the taking of captives.


title: Slavery in medieval Europe

text: This traffic continued into the 9th century as Scandinavians founded more trade centers at Kaupang in southwestern Norway and Novgorod, farther south than Staraya Ladoga, and Kiev, farther south still and closer to Byzantium. Dublin and other northwestern European Viking settlements were established as gateways through which captives were traded northwards.Thralls could be bought and sold at slave markets. An account from the Laxdoela Saga spoke of how during the 10th century there would be a meeting of kings every third year on The Branno Islands where negotiations and trades for slaves would take place. Though slaves could be bought and sold, it was more common to sell captives from other nations.


title: Slavery in medieval Europe

text: The 10th-century Persian traveller Ibn Rustah described how Swedish Vikings, the Varangians or Rus, terrorized and enslaved the Slavs taken in their raids along the Volga River.


title: Slavery in medieval Europe

text: Slaves were often sold south, to Byzantine or Muslim buyers, via paths such as the Volga trade route.


title: Slavery in medieval Europe

text: Ahmad ibn Fadlan of Baghdad provides an account of the other end of this trade route, namely of Volga Vikings selling Slavic slaves to middle-eastern merchants.


title: Slavery in medieval Europe

text: Slaves from Finland or Baltic states were traded as far as central Asia. Captives may have been traded far within the Viking trade network, and within that network, it was possible to be sold again. In the Life of St. Findan, the Irishman was bought and sold three times after being taken captive by a Viking group.


title: Slavery in medieval Europe

text: The Mongol invasions and conquests in the 13th century added a new force in the slave trade. The Mongols enslaved skilled individuals, women and children and marched them to Karakorum or Sarai, whence they were sold throughout Eurasia. Many of these slaves were shipped to the slave market in Novgorod.


title: Slavery in medieval Europe

text: Genoese and Venetians merchants in Crimea were involved in the slave trade with the Golden Horde. In 1441, Haci I Giray declared independence from the Golden Horde and established the Crimean Khanate. In the time of the Crimean Khanate, Crimeans engaged in frequent raids into the Danubian principalities, Poland-Lithuania, and Muscovy. For each captive, the khan received a fixed share (savğa) of 10% or 20%. The campaigns by Crimean forces categorize into "sefers", officially declared military operations led by the khans themselves, and "çapuls", raids undertaken by groups of noblemen, sometimes illegally because they contravened treaties concluded by the khans with neighbouring rulers. For a long time, until the early 18th century, the khanate maintained a massive Slave Trade with the Ottoman Empire and the Middle East. Caffa was one of the best known and significant trading ports and slave markets. Crimean Tatar raiders enslaved more than 1 million Eastern Europeans.


title: Slavery in medieval Europe

text: In medieval Ireland, as a commonly traded commodity slaves could, like cattle, become a form of internal or trans-border currency. In 1102, the Council of London convened by Anselm of Canterbury obtained a resolution against the slave trade in England which was aimed mainly at the sale of English slaves to the Irish.


title: Slavery in medieval Europe

text: Although the primary flow of slaves was toward Muslim countries, as evident in the history of slavery in the Muslim world, Christians did acquire Muslim slaves; in Southern France, in the 13th century, "the enslavement of Muslim captives was still fairly common".


title: Slavery in medieval Europe

text: There are records, for example, of Saracen slave girls sold in Marseilles in 1248, a date which coincided with the fall of Seville and its surrounding area, to raiding Christian crusaders, an event during which a large number of Muslim women from this area were enslaved as war booty, as it has been recorded in some Arabic poetry, notably by the poet al-Rundi, who was contemporary to the events.


title: Slavery in medieval Europe

text: Additionally, the possession of slaves was legal in 13th century Italy; many Christians held Muslim slaves throughout the country. These Saracen slaves were often captured by pirates and brought to Italy from North Africa or Spain. During the 13th century, most of the slaves in the Italian trade city of Genoa were of Muslim origin. These Muslim slaves were owned by royalty, military orders or groups, independent entities, and the church itself.


title: Slavery in medieval Europe

text: Christians also sold Muslim slaves captured in war. The Order of the Knights of Malta attacked pirates and Muslim shipping, and their base became a center for slave trading, selling captured North Africans and Turks. Malta remained a slave market until well into the late 18th century. One thousand slaves were required to man the galleys (ships) of the Order.


title: Slavery in medieval Europe

text: While they would at times seize Muslims as slaves, it was more likely that Christian armies would kill their enemies, rather than take them into servitude.


title: Slavery in medieval Europe

text: The role of Jewish merchants in the early medieval slave trade has been subject to much misinterpretation and distortion. Although medieval records demonstrate that there were Jews who owned slaves in medieval Europe, Toch (2013) notes that the claim repeated in older sources, such as those by Charles Verlinden, that Jewish merchants where the primary dealers in European slaves is based off misreadings of primary documents from that era. Contemporary Jewish sources do not attest any a large-scale slave trade or ownership of slaves which may be distinguished from the wider phenomenon of early medieval European slavery. The trope of the Jewish dealer of Christian slaves was additionally a prominent image in medieval Europe anti-Semitic propaganda.


title: Slavery in medieval Europe

text: As more and more of Europe Christianized, and open hostilities between Christian and Muslim nations intensified, large-scale slave trade moved to more distant sources.


title: Slavery in medieval Europe

text: 1338, and, finally, 1425, as slaves sent to Egypt would often become soldiers, and end up fighting their former Christian owners.


title: Slavery in medieval Europe

text: Although the repeated bans indicate that such trade still occurred, they also indicate that it became less desirable.


title: Slavery in medieval Europe

text: In the 16th century, African slaves replaced almost all other ethnicities and religious enslaved groups in Europe.


title: Slavery in medieval Europe

text: Slavery was heavily regulated in Roman law, which was reorganized in the Byzantine Empire by Justinian I as the Corpus Iuris Civilis. Although the Corpus was lost to the West for centuries, it was rediscovered in the 11th and 12th centuries, and led to the foundation of law schools in Italy and France. According to the Corpus, the natural state of humanity is freedom, but the "law of nations" may supersede natural law and reduce certain people to slavery. The basic definition of slave in Romano-Byzantine law was:


title: Slavery in medieval Europe

text: It was, however, possible to become a freedman or a full citizen; the Corpus, like Roman law, had extensive and complicated rules for manumission of slaves.


title: Slavery in medieval Europe

text: In Poland slavery was forbidden in the 15th century; it was replaced by the second enserfment. In Lithuania, slavery was formally abolished in 1588.


title: Slavery in medieval Europe

text: In fact, there was an explicit legal justification given for the enslavement of Muslims, found in the Decretum Gratiani and later expanded upon by the 14th century jurist Oldradus de Ponte: the Bible states that Hagar, the slave girl of Abraham, was beaten and cast out by Abraham’s wife Sarah.


title: Slavery in medieval Europe

text: The Decretum, like the Corpus, defined a slave as anyone whose mother was a slave. Otherwise, the canons were concerned with slavery only in ecclesiastical contexts: slaves were not permitted to marry or to be ordained as clergy.


title: Slavery in medieval Europe

text: As a result of the crusades, thousands of Muslims and Christians were sold into slavery. Once sold into slavery most were never heard from again, so it is challenging to find evidence of specific slave experiences.


title: Slavery in medieval Europe

text: In the crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem, founded in 1099, at most 120,000 Franks ruled over 350,000 Muslims, Jews, and native Eastern Christians. Following the initial invasion and conquest, sometimes accompanied by massacres or expulsions of Jews and Muslims, a peaceable co-existence between followers of the three religions prevailed. The Crusader states inherited many slaves. To this may have been added some Muslims taken as captives of war. The Kingdom’s largest city, Acre, had a large slave market; however, the vast majority of Muslims and Jews remained free. The laws of Jerusalem declared that former Muslim slaves, if genuine converts to Christianity, must be freed.


title: Slavery in medieval Europe

text: In 1120, the Council of Nablus forbade sexual relations between crusaders and their female Muslim slaves: if a man raped his own slave, he would be castrated, but if he raped someone else’s slave, he would be castrated and exiled from the kingdom. But Benjamin Z. Kedar argued that the canons of the Council of Nablus were in force in the 12th century but had fallen out of use by the thirteenth. Marwan Nader questions this and suggests that the canons may not have applied to the whole kingdom at all times.


title: Slavery in medieval Europe

text: Christian law mandated Christians could not enslave other Christians; however, enslaving non-Christians was acceptable. In fact, military orders frequently enslaved Muslims and used slave labor for agricultural estates. No Christian, whether Western or Eastern, was permitted by law to be sold into slavery, but this fate was as common for Muslim prisoners of war as it was for Christian prisoners taken by the Muslims. In the later medieval period, some slaves were used to oar Hospitaller ships. Generally, it was a relatively small number non-Christian slaves in medieval Europe, and this number significantly decreased by the end of the medieval period.


title: Slavery in medieval Europe

text: The 13th-century Assizes of Jerusalem dealt more with fugitive slaves and the punishments ascribed to them, the prohibition of slaves testifying in court, and manumission of slaves, which could be accomplished, for example, through a will, or by conversion to Christianity. Conversion was apparently used as an excuse to escape slavery by Muslims who would then continue to practise Islam; crusader lords often refused to allow them to convert, and Pope Gregory IX, contrary to both the laws of Jerusalem and the canon laws that he himself was partially responsible for compiling, allowed for Muslim slaves to remain enslaved even if they had converted.


title: Slavery in medieval Europe

text: Communities of Muslims, Christians, and Jews existed on both sides of the political divide between Muslim and Christian kingdoms in Medieval Iberia: Al-Andalus hosted Jewish and Christian communities while Christian Iberia hosted Muslim and Jewish communities. Christianity had introduced the ethos that banned the enslavement of fellow Christians, an ethos that was reinforced by the banning of the enslavement of co-religionists during the rise of Islam. Additionally, the Dar al-Islam protected ‘people of the book’ (Christians and Jews living in Islamic lands) from enslavement, an immunity which also applied to Muslims living in Christian Iberia. Despite these restrictions, criminal or indebted Muslims and Christians in both regions were still subject to judicially-sanctioned slavery.


title: Slavery in medieval Europe

text: An early economic pillar of the Islamic empire in Iberia (Al-Andalus) during the eighth century was the slave trade. Due to manumission being a form of piety under Islamic law, slavery in Muslim Spain couldn’t maintain the same level of auto-reproduction as societies with older slave populations. Therefore, Al-Andalus relied on trade systems as an external means of replenishing the supply of enslaved people. Forming relations between the Umayyads, Khārijites and 'Abbāsids, the flow of trafficked people from the main routes of the Sahara towards Al-Andalus served as a highly lucrative trade configuration. The archaeological evidence of human trafficking and proliferation of early trade in this case follows numismatics and materiality of text. This monetary structure of consistent gold influx proved to be a tenet in the development of Islamic commerce. In this regard, the slave trade outperformed and was the most commercially successful venture for maximizing capital. This major change in the form of numismatics serves as a paradigm shift from the previous Visigothic economic arrangement. Additionally, it demonstrates profound change from one regional entity to another, the direct transfer of people and pure coinage from one religiously similar semi-autonomous province to another.


title: Slavery in medieval Europe

text: The medieval Iberian Peninsula was the scene of episodic warfare among Muslims and Christians (although sometimes Muslims and Christians were allies). Periodic raiding expeditions were sent from Al-Andalus to ravage the Christian Iberian kingdoms, bringing back booty and people. For example, in a raid on Lisbon in 1189 the Almohad caliph Yaqub al-Mansur took 3,000 female and child captives, and his governor of Córdoba took 3,000 Christian slaves in a subsequent attack upon Silves in 1191; an offensive by Alfonso VIII of Castile in 1182 brought him over two-thousand Muslim slaves. These raiding expeditions also included the Sa’ifa (summer) incursions, a tradition produced during the Amir reign of Cordoba. In addition to acquiring wealth, some of these Sa’ifa raids sought to bring mostly male captives, often eunuchs, back to Al-Andalus. They were generically referred to as Saqaliba, the Arab word for Slavs. Slavs’ status as the most common group in the slave trade by the tenth century led to the development of the word “slave.” The Saqaliba were mostly assigned to palaces as guards, concubines, and eunuchs, although they were sometimes privately owned. Along with Christians and Slavs, Sub-Saharan Africans were also held as slaves, brought back from the caravan trade in the Sahara. Slaves in Islamic lands were generally used for domestic, military, and administrative purposes, rarely used for agriculture or large-scale manufacturing. Christians living in Al-Andalus were not allowed to hold authority over Muslims, but they were permitted to hold non-Muslim slaves.


title: Slavery in medieval Europe

text: Contrary to suppositions of historians such as Marc Bloch, slavery thrived as an institution in medieval Christian Iberia. Slavery existed in the region under the Romans, and continued to do so under the Visigoths. From the fifth to the early 8th century, large portions of the Iberian Peninsula were ruled by Christian Visigothic Kingdoms, whose rulers worked to codify human bondage. In the 7th century, King Chindasuinth issued the Visigothic Code (Liber Iudiciorum), to which subsequent Visigothic kings added new legislation. Although the Visigothic Kingdom collapsed in the early 8th century, portions of the Visigothic Code were still observed in parts of Spain in the following centuries. The Code, with its pronounced and frequent attention to the legal status of slaves, reveals the continuation of slavery as an institution in post-Roman Spain.


title: Slavery in medieval Europe

text: The Code regulated the social conditions, behavior, and punishments of slaves in early medieval Spain. The marriage of slaves and free or freed people was prohibited. Book III, title II, iii ("Where a Freeborn Woman Marries the Slave of Another or a Freeborn Man the Female Slave of Another") stipulates that if a free woman marries another person’s slave, the couple is to be separated and given 100 lashes. Furthermore, if the woman refuses to leave the slave, then she becomes the property of the slave’s master. Likewise, any children born to the couple would follow the father’s condition and be slaves.


title: Slavery in medieval Europe

text: Unlike Roman law, in which only slaves were liable to corporal punishment, under Visigothic law, people of any social status were subject to corporal punishment. However, the physical punishment, typically beatings, administered to slaves was consistently harsher than that administered to freed or free people. Slaves could also be compelled to give testimony under torture. For example, slaves could be tortured to reveal the adultery of their masters, and it was illegal to free a slave for fear of what he or she might reveal under torture. Slaves' greater liability to physical punishment and judicial torture suggests their inferior social status in the eyes of Visigothic lawmakers.


title: Slavery in medieval Europe

text: Slavery remained persistent in Christian Iberia after the Umayyad invasions in the 8th century, and the Visigothic law codes continued to control slave ownership. However, as William Phillips notes, medieval Iberia should not be thought of as a slave society, but rather as a society that owned slaves. Slaves accounted for a relatively small percentage of the population, and did not make up a significant portion of the labor pool. Furthermore, while the existence of slavery continued from the earlier period, the use of slaves in post-Visigothic Christian Iberia differed from early periods. Ian Wood has suggests that, under the Visigoths, the majority of the slave population lived and worked on rural estates.


title: Slavery in medieval Europe

text: After the Muslim invasions, slave owners (especially in the kingdoms of Aragon and Valencia) moved away from using slaves as field laborers or in work gangs, and did not press slaves into military service. Slaves tended to be owned singly rather than in large groups. There appear to have been many more female than male slaves, and they were most often used as domestic servants, or to supplement free labor. In this respect, slave institutions in Aragon, especially, closely resembled those of other Mediterranean Christian kingdoms in France and Italy.


title: Slavery in medieval Europe

text: In the kingdoms of León and Castile, slavery followed the Visigothic model more closely than in the littoral kingdoms. Slaves in León and Castile were more likely to be employed as field laborers, supplanting free labor to support an aristocratic estate society. These trends in slave populations and use changed in the wake of the Black Death in 1348, which significantly increased the demand for slaves across the whole of the peninsula.


title: Slavery in medieval Europe

text: Christians were not the only slaveholders in Christian Iberia. Both Jews and Muslims living under Christian rule owned slaves, though more commonly in Aragon and Valencia than in Castile. After the conquest of Valencia in 1245, the Kingdom of Aragon prohibited the possession of Christian slaves by Jews, though they were still permitted to hold Muslim or pagan slaves. The main role of Iberian Jews in the slave trade came as facilitators: Jews acted as slave brokers and agents of transfer between the Christian and Muslim kingdoms.


title: Slavery in medieval Europe

text: This role caused some degree of fear among Christian populations. A letter from Pope Gregory XI to the Bishop of Cordoba in 1239 addressed rumors that the Jews were involved in kidnapping and selling Christian women and children into slavery while their husbands were away fighting the Muslims. Despite these worries, the primary role of Jewish slave traders lay in facilitating the exchange of captives between Muslim and Christian rulers, one of the primary threads of economic and political connectivity between Christian and Muslim Iberia.


title: Slavery in medieval Europe

text: In the early period after the fall of the Visigothic kingdom in the 8th century, slaves primarily came into Christian Iberia through trade with the Muslim kingdoms of the south. Most were Eastern European, captured in battles and raids, with the heavy majority being Slavs. However, the ethnic composition of slaves in Christian Iberia shifted over the course of the Middle Ages. Slaveholders in the Christian kingdoms gradually moved away from owning Christians, in accordance with Church proscriptions. In the middle of the medieval period most slaves in Christian Iberia were Muslim, either captured in battle with the Islamic states from the southern part of the peninsula, or taken from the eastern Mediterranean and imported into Iberia by merchants from cities such as Genoa.


title: Slavery in medieval Europe

text: The Christian kingdoms of Iberia frequently traded their Muslim captives back across the border for payments of money or kind. Indeed, historian James Broadman writes that this type of redemption offered the best chance for captives and slaves to regain their freedom. The sale of Muslim captives, either back to the Islamic southern states or to third-party slave brokers, supplied one of the means by which Aragon and Castile financed the Reconquista. Battles and sieges provided large numbers of captives; after the siege of Almeria in 1147, sources report that Alfonso VII of León sent almost 10,000 of the city’s Muslim women and children to Genoa to be sold into slavery as partial repayment of Genoese assistance in the campaign.


title: Slavery in medieval Europe

text: Towards the end of the Reconquista, however, this source of slaves became increasingly exhausted. Muslim rulers were increasingly unable to pay ransoms, and the Christian capture of large centers of population in the south made wholesale enslavement of Muslim populations impractical. The loss of an Iberian Muslim source of slaves further encouraged Christians to look to other sources of manpower. Beginning with the first Portuguese slave raid in sub-Saharan Africa in 1411, the focus of slave importation began to shift from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic World, and the racial composition of slaves in Christian Iberia began to include an increasing number of black Africans.


title: Slavery in medieval Europe

text: Between 1489 and 1497 almost 2,100 black slaves were shipped from Portugal to Valencia. By the end of the 15th century, Spain held the largest population of black Africans in Europe, with a small, but growing community of black ex-slaves. In the mid 16th century Spain imported up to 2,000 black African slaves annually through Portugal, and by 1565 most of Seville’s 6,327 slaves (out of a total population of 85,538) were black Africans.


title: Slavery in medieval Europe

text: Slavery existed on the territory of present-day Romania while under The Ottoman Empire and Russian Empire rulership, from before the founding of the principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia in 13th–14th century, until it was abolished in stages during the 1840s and 1850s before the independence of the United Principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia was allowed, and also until 1783, in Transylvania and Bukovina (parts of the Habsburg monarchy and later The Austria-Hungarian Empire). Most slaves were of Roma (Gypsy) ethnicity and a significant number of "Rumâni" in Serfdom slavery.


title: Slavery in medieval Europe

text: Historian Nicolae Iorga associated the Roma people’s arrival with the 1241 Mongol invasion of Europe and considered their slavery as a vestige of that era. The practice of enslaving prisoners may also have been taken from the Mongols. The ethnic identity of the "Tatar slaves" is unknown, they could have been captured Tatars of the Golden Horde, Cumans, or the slaves of Tatars and Cumans.


title: Slavery in medieval Europe

text: While it is possible that some Romani people were slaves or auxiliary troops of the Mongols or Tatars and Nogai Horde, the bulk of them came from south of the Danube at the end of the 14th century, some time before the foundation of Wallachia.


title: Slavery in medieval Europe

text: The Roma slaves were owned by the boyars (see Wallachian Revolution of 1848), the Christian Orthodox monasteries, or the state. They were used only as smiths, gold panners and as agricultural workers.


title: Slavery in medieval Europe

text: The Rumâni were only owned by Boyars and Monasteries, until the Independence of Romania from the Ottoman Empire on 9th of May 1877. They were considered less valuable because they were taxable, only skilled at agricultural work and couldn't be used at tribute.


title: Slavery in medieval Europe

text: It was common for both boyars and monasteries to register their Romanian serfs as "Gypsies" so that they would not pay the taxes that were imposed on the serfs. Any Romanian, regardless of gender, marrying a Roma would immediately become a slave that could be used as tribute.


title: Slavery in medieval Europe

text: The ancient and medieval Near East includes modern day Turkey, the Levant and Egypt, with strong connections to the rest of the north African coastline. All of these areas were ruled by either the Byzantines or the Persians at the end of late antiquity. Pre-existing Byzantine (i.e. Roman) and Persian institutions of slavery may have influenced the development of institutions of slavery in Islamic law and jurisprudence. Likewise, some scholars have argued for the influence of Rabbinic tradition on the development of Islamic legal thought.


title: Slavery in medieval Europe

text: Whatever the relationship between these different legal traditions, many similarities exist between the practice of Islamic slavery in the early Middle Ages and the practices of early medieval Byzantines and western Europeans. The status of freed slaves under Islamic rule, who continued to owe services to their former masters, bears a strong similarity to ancient Roman and Greek institutions. However, the practice of slavery in the early medieval Near East also grew out of slavery practices in currency among pre-Islamic Arabs.


title: Slavery in medieval Europe

text: Like the Old and New Testaments and Greek and Roman law codes, the Quran takes the institution of slavery for granted, though it urges kindness toward slaves and eventual manumission, especially for slaves who convert to Islam.


title: Slavery in medieval Europe

text: In early Middle Ages, many slaves in Islamic society served as such for only a short period of time—perhaps an average of seven years. Like their European counterparts, early medieval Islamic slave traders preferred slaves who were not co-religionists and hence focused on "pagans" from inner Asia, Europe, and especially from sub-Saharan Africa. The practice of manumission may have contributed to the integration of former slaves into the wider society. However, under sharia law, conversion to Islam did not necessitate manumission.


title: Slavery in medieval Europe

text: Slaves were employed in heavy labor as well as in domestic contexts. Because of Quranic sanction of concubinage, early Islamic traders, in contrast to Byzantine and early modern slave traders, imported large numbers of female slaves. The very earliest Islamic states did not create corps of slave soldiers (a practice familiar from later contexts) but did integrate freedmen into armies, which may have contributed to the rapid expansion of early Islamic conquest. By the 9th century, use of slaves in Islamic armies, particularly Turks in cavalry units and Africans in infantry units, was a relatively common practice.


title: Slavery in medieval Europe

text: In Egypt, Ahmad ibn Tulun imported thousands of black slaves to wrestle independence from the Abbasid Caliphate in Iraq in 868. The Ikhshidid dynasty used black slave units to liberate itself from Abbasid rule after the Abbasids destroyed ibn Tulun’s autonomous empire in 935. Black professional soldiers were most associated with the Fatimid dynasty, which incorporated more professional black soldiers than the previous two dynasties. It was the Fatimids who first incorporated black professional slave soldiers into the cavalry, despite massive opposition from Central Asian Turkish Mamluks, who saw the African contingent as a threat to their role as the leading military unit in the Egyptian army.


title: Slavery in medieval Europe

text: In the later half of the Middle Ages, the expansion of Islamic rule further into the Mediterranean, the Persian Gulf, and Arabian Peninsula established the Saharan-Indian Ocean slave trade.


title: Slavery in medieval Europe

text: This network was a large market for African slaves, transporting approximately four million African slaves from its 7th century inception to its 20th century demise. Ironically, the consolidation of borders in the Islamic Near East changed the face of the slave trade. A rigid Islamic code, coupled with crystallizing frontiers, favored slave purchase and tribute over capture as lucrative slave avenues. Even the sources of slaves shifted from the Fertile Crescent and Central Asia to Indochina and the Byzantine Empire.


title: Slavery in medieval Europe

text: Patterns of preference for slaves in the Near East, as well as patterns of use, continued into the later Middle Ages with only slight changes. Slaves were employed in many activities, including agriculture, industry, the military, and domestic labor. Women were prioritized over men, and usually served in the domestic sphere as menials, concubines ("cariye"), or wives.


title: Slavery in medieval Europe

text: Domestic and commercial slaves were mostly better off than their agricultural counterparts, either becoming family members or business partners rather than condemned to a grueling life in a chain gang. There are references to gangs of slaves, mostly African, put to work in drainage projects in Iraq, salt and gold mines in the Sahara, and sugar and cotton plantations in North Africa and Spain. References to this latter type of slavery are rare, however. Eunuchs were the most prized and sought-after type of slave.


title: Slavery in medieval Europe

text: The most fortunate slaves found employment in politics or the military. In the Ottoman Empire, the Devşrime system groomed young slave boys for civil or military service. Young Christian boys were uprooted from their conquered villages periodically as a levy, and were employed in government, entertainment, or the army, depending on their talents. Slaves attained great success from this program, some winning the post of Grand Vizier to the Sultan and others positions in the Janissaries.


title: Slavery in medieval Europe

text: It is a bit of a misnomer to classify these men as "slaves", because in the Ottoman Empire, they were referred to as kul, or, slaves "of the Gate", or Sultanate. While not slaves per se under Islamic law, these Devşrime alumni remained under the Sultan’s discretion.


title: Slavery in medieval Europe

text: The Islamic Near East extensively relied upon professional slave soldiers, and was known for having them compose the core of armies. The institution was conceived out of political predicaments and reflected the attitudes of the time, and was not indicative of political decline or financial bankruptcy. Slave units were desired because of their unadulterated loyalty to the ruler, since they were imported and therefore could not threaten the throne with local loyalties or alliances.


title: Slavery in medieval Europe

text: Slavery was a widespread phenomenon across the Mediterranean. The total number of slaves in the Mediterranean has been debated among scholars, but the number of slaves in the Mediterranean was significantly smaller than the 11–12 million people brought to the Americas. One scholar estimated three million slaves were taken between 1500 and 1800. Of those slaves, Christians outnumbered Muslims by two-to-one. These numbers are based on archival sources which outlined how many slaves were freed and captured in battles. One of the challenges of accurately counting the number of slaves in the Mediterranean is the wide variety of regions slaves were taken from and brought to. Additionally, the number of slaves in the Mediterranean was constantly changing, most significantly in periods of warfare. Slavery in the Mediterranean is often seen as less horrendous and more transitory than Atlantic slave trade to the Americas; however, slavery in the Mediterranean shared many inhumane characteristics with Atlantic slave trade and greatly impacted the Mediterranean region. However, there were some differences. Slaves in America were transported to an entirely new setting without the opportunity to contact their families left behind or the opportunity to gain their freedom.


title: Slavery in medieval Europe

text: In the Mediterranean, individuals became enslaved through war and conquest, piracy, and frontier raiding. Additionally, some courts would sentence people to slavery, and even some people sold themselves or their children into slavery due to extreme poverty. The incentive for slavery in the Mediterranean was economic. In fact, the motivation behind many raids was the capturing of people to then enslave and sell or demand ransom for. State and religious institutions frequently participated in the ransoming of individuals, so piracy became a lucrative market. Additionally, this meant some individuals were returned home while others were sold away.


title: Slavery in medieval Europe

text: For those who traded in the Mediterranean, it was the humanity and intellect of these enslaved peoples that made them valuable merchandise worth commodifying. To purchase an individual was to purchase their labor, autonomy, and faith; religious conversion was often a motivation for these transactions. Additionally, religious division was the fundamental basis of law for the ownership of slaves during this period; it was not legal for Christians, Muslims, or Jewish people to enslave fellow believers. However, the enslavement, and compulsory conversion, of nonbelievers or people from other religions was permissible.


title: Slavery in medieval Europe

text: There were markets throughout the Mediterranean where enslaved people were bought and sold. In Italy the major slave trade centers were Venice and Genoa; in Iberia they were Barcelona and Valencia; and islands off the Mediterranean including Majorca, Sardinia, Sicily, Crete, Rhodes, Cyprus, and Chios also participated in slave markets. From these markets merchants would sell enslaved people domestically, or transport them to somewhere enslaved people were more in demand. For example, the Italian slave market often found itself selling to Egypt in order to meet the Mamluk demand for slaves. This demand caused Venice and Genoa to compete with one another for control of Black Sea trading ports.


title: Slavery in medieval Europe

text: The duties and expectations of slaves varied geographically; however, in the Mediterranean, it was most common for enslaved people to work in the households of elites. Enslaved people also worked in agricultural fields, but this was infrequent across the Mediterranean. It was most common in Venetian Crete, Genoese Chios, and Cyprus where enslaved people worked in vineyards, fields, and sugar mills. These were colonial societies, and enslaved people worked with free laborers in these areas. Enslaved women were sought after the most and therefore sold at the highest prices. This reflects the desire for domestic workers in elite households; however, enslaved women also could face sexual exploitation. Furthermore, even if freed from their stations, the former masters of these women often maintained power over them by becoming their employers or patrons.


title: Slavery in medieval Europe

text: Slavery was an important part of Ottoman society. The Byzantine-Ottoman wars and the Ottoman wars in Europe brought large numbers of Christian slaves into the Ottoman Empire. In the middle of the 14th century, Murad I built his own personal slave army called the "Kapıkulu". The new force was based on the sultan’s right to a fifth of the war booty, which he interpreted to include captives taken in battle. The captive slaves were converted to Islam and trained in the sultan’s personal service.


title: Slavery in medieval Europe

text: In the "devşirme" (translated "blood tax" or "child collection"), young Christian boys from Anatolia and the Balkans were taken away from their homes and families, converted to Islam and enlisted into special soldier classes of the Ottoman army. These soldier classes were named Janissaries, the most famous branch of the "Kapıkulu". The Janissaries eventually became a decisive factor in the Ottoman military conquests in Europe.


title: Slavery in medieval Europe

text: Most of the military commanders of the Ottoman forces, imperial administrators and "de facto" rulers of the Ottoman Empire, such as Pargalı İbrahim Pasha and Sokollu Mehmet Paşa, were recruited in this way. By 1609 the Sultan’s "Kapıkulu" forces increased to about 100,000.


title: Slavery in medieval Europe

text: The concubines of the Ottoman Sultan consisted chiefly of purchased slaves. Because Islamic law forbade Muslims to enslave fellow Muslims, the Sultan’s concubines were generally of Christian origin ("cariye"). The mother of a Sultan, though technically a slave, received the extremely powerful title of "Valide Sultan", and at times became effective ruler of the Empire (see Sultanate of women). One notable example was Kösem Sultan, daughter of a Greek Christian priest, who dominated the Ottoman Empire during the early decades of the 17th century. Another notable example was Roxelana, the favourite wife of Suleiman the Magnificent.


title: Slavery in medieval Europe

text: Slavery in Poland existed on the territory of Kingdom of Poland during the times of the Piast dynasty, however, slavery was restricted to POWs. In some special cases and for limited periods serfdom was also applied to debtors.


title: Slavery in medieval Europe

text: Slavery was banned officially in 1529 and prohibition on slavery was one of the most important of the Statutes of Lithuania, which had to be implemented before the Grand Duchy of Lithuania could join the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1569. The First Statute was drafted in 1522 and came into power in 1529 by the initiative of the Lithuanian Council of Lords. It has been proposed that the codification was initiated by Grand Chancellor of Lithuania Mikołaj Radziwiłł as a reworking and expansion of the 15th century Casimir's Code.


title: Slavery in medieval Europe

text: In Kievan Rus and Russia, the slaves were usually classified as kholops. A kholop’s master had unlimited power over his life: he could kill him, sell him, or use him as payment upon a debt. The master, however, was responsible before the law for his kholop’s actions. A person could become a kholop as a result of capture, selling himself or herself, being sold for debts or committed crimes, or marriage to a kholop. Until the late 10th century, the kholops represented a majority among the servants who worked lordly lands.


title: Slavery in medieval Europe

text: By the 16th century, slavery in Russia consisted mostly of those who sold themselves into slavery owing to poverty. They worked predominantly as household servants, among the richest families, and indeed generally produced less than they consumed. Laws forbade the freeing of slaves in times of famine, to avoid feeding them, and slaves generally remained with the family a long time; the "Domostroy", an advice book, speaks of the need to choose slaves of good character and to provide for them properly. Slavery remained a major institution in Russia until 1723, when Peter the Great converted the household slaves into house serfs. Russian agricultural slaves were formally converted into serfs earlier in 1679.


title: Slavery in medieval Europe

text: In 1382 the Golden Horde under Khan Tokhtamysh sacked Moscow, burning the city and carrying off thousands of inhabitants as slaves. For years the Khanates of Kazan and Astrakhan routinely made raids on Russian principalities for


title: Slavery in medieval Europe

text: slaves and to plunder towns. Russian chronicles record about 40 raids of Kazan Khans on the Russian territories in the first half of the 16th century. In 1521, the combined forces of Crimean Khan Mehmed I Giray and his Kazan allies attacked Moscow and captured thousands of slaves. About 30 major Tatar raids were recorded into Muscovite territories between 1558 and 1596. In 1571, the Crimean Tatars attacked and sacked Moscow, burning everything but the Kremlin and taking thousands of captives as slaves. In Crimea, about 75% of the population consisted of slaves.


title: Slavery in medieval Europe

text: The evidence indicates that slavery in Scandinavia was more common in southern regions, as there are  fewer northern provincial laws that contain mentions of slavery. Likewise, slaves were likely numerous but consolidated under the ownership of elites as chattel labor on large farm estates.


title: Slavery in medieval Europe

text: The laws from 12th and 13th centuries describe the legal status of two categories. According to the Norwegian Gulating code (in about 1160), domestic slaves could not, unlike foreign slaves, be sold out of the country. This and other laws defined slaves as their master’s property at the same level as cattle; if either were harmed then the perpetrator was responsible for damages, but if either caused damage to property then the owners were held accountable. It also described a procedure for giving a slave their freedom. According to the Law of Scania slaves could be granted freedom or redeem it themselves, upon which they must then be accepted into a new kin group or face societal ostracization.


title: Slavery in medieval Europe

text: The Law of Scania indicates free men may become slaves as a way to atone for a crime with the implication they would be eventually freed. Likewise, the Gotlander Guta Lag indicates slavery could be for a fixed period and as a method to pay for debt. Within the Older Västgöta Law widows are only allowed to remarry if an enslaved fostre or fostra could manage the farm in her absence. Likewise, the Younger Västgöta Law indicates further trust for fostre and fostra as they could occasionally be entrusted with the master’s keys. Likewise, some fostre were in such a trusted position they could undertake military actions while a slave. Yet, for all their independence, any children of fostre or fostra were still property of their masters.


title: Slavery in medieval Europe

text: A freed slave did not have full legal status; for example, the punishment for killing a former slave was low. A former slave’s son also had a low status, but higher than that of his parents. Women were commonly taken as slaves and forced into concubinage for lords. The children of these women had little formal rights with inheritance and legitimacy possible should they be needed for succession or favored by their parents, but nothing was guaranteed.


title: Slavery in medieval Europe

text: Slavery began to be replaced by a feudal-style tenant farmer economy wherein free men tied to the land worked farms for a lord reducing the need for slaves The Norwegian law code from 1274, "Landslov" (Land’s law), does not mention slaves, but former slaves. Thus it seems like slavery was abolished in Norway by this time. In Sweden, slavery was abolished in 1334.


title: Slavery in medieval Europe

text: British Wales and Gaelic Ireland and Scotland were among the last areas of Christian Europe to give up their institution of slavery. Under Gaelic custom, prisoners of war were routinely taken as slaves. During the period that slavery was disappearing across most of western Europe, it was reaching its height in the British Isles: the Viking invasions and the subsequent warring between Scandinavians and the natives, the number of captives taken as slaves drastically increased. The Irish church was vehemently opposed to slavery and blamed the 1169 Norman invasion on divine punishment for the practice, along with local acceptance of polygyny and divorce.


title: Slavery in medieval Europe

text: In considering how serfdom evolved from slavery, historians who study the divide between slavery and serfdom encounter several issues of historiography and methodology. Some historians believe that slavery transitioned into serfdom (a view that has only been around for the last 200 years), though there is disagreement among them regarding how rapid this transition was. Pierre Bonnassie, a medieval historian, thought that the chattel slavery of the ancient world ceased to exist in the Europe of the 10th century and was followed by feudal serfdom. Jean-Pierre Devroey thinks that the shift from slavery to serfdom was gradual as well in some parts of the continent. Other areas, though, did not have what he calls "western-style serfdom" after the end of slavery, such as the rural areas of the Byzantine Empire, Iceland, and Scandinavia. Complicating this issue is that regions in Europe often had both serfs and slaves simultaneously. In northwestern Europe, a transition from slavery to serfdom happened by the 12th century. The Catholic Church promoted the transformation by giving the example. Enslavement of fellow Catholics was prohibited in 992 and manumission was declared to be a pious act. However it remained legal to enslave people of other religions and dogmas.


title: Slavery in medieval Europe

text: Generally speaking, regarding how slaves differed from serfs, the underpinnings of slavery and serfdom are debated as well. Dominique Barthélemy, among others, has questioned the very premises for neatly distinguishing serfdom from slavery, arguing that a binary classification masks the many shades of servitude. Of particular interest to historians is the role of serfdom and slavery within the state, and the implications that held for both serf and slave. Some think that slavery was the exclusion of people from the public sphere and its institutions, whereas serfdom was a complex form of dependency that usually lacked a codified basis in the legal system. Wendy Davies argues that serfs, like slaves, also became excluded from the public judicial system and that judicial matters were attended to in the private courts of their respective lords.


title: Slavery in medieval Europe

text: Despite the scholarly disagreement, it is possible to piece together a general picture of slavery and serfdom. Slaves typically owned no property, and were in fact the property of their masters. Slaves worked full-time for their masters and operated under a negative incentive structure; in other words, failure to work resulted in physical punishment. Serfs held plots of land, which was essentially a form of "payment" that the lord offered in exchange for the serf’s service. Serfs worked part-time for the masters and part-time for themselves and had opportunities to accumulate personal wealth that often did not exist for the slave.


title: Slavery in medieval Europe

text: Slaves were generally imported from foreign countries or continents, via the slave trade. Serfs were typically indigenous Europeans and were not subject to the same involuntary movements as slaves. Serfs worked in family units, whereas the concept of family was generally murkier for slaves. At any given moment, a slave’s family could be torn apart via trade, and masters often used this threat to coerce compliant behavior from the slave.


title: Slavery in medieval Europe

text: The end of serfdom is also debated, with Georges Duby pointing to the early 12th century as a rough end point for "serfdom in the strict sense of the term". Other historians dispute this assertion, citing discussions and the mention of serfdom as an institution during later dates (such as in 13th century England, or in Central Europe, where the rise of serfdom coincided with its decline in Western Europe). There are several approaches to get a time span for the transition, and lexicography is one such method. There is supposedly a clear shift in diction when referencing those who were either slaves or serfs at approximately 1000, though there is not a consensus on how significant this shift is, or if it even exists.


title: Slavery in medieval Europe

text: In addition, numismatists shed light on the decline of serfdom. There is a widespread theory that the introduction of currency hastened the decline of serfdom because it was preferable to pay for labor rather than depend on feudal obligations. Some historians argue that landlords began selling serfs their land – and hence, their freedom – during periods of economic inflation across Europe. Other historians argue that the end of slavery came from the royalty, who gave serfs freedom through edicts and legislation in an attempt to broaden their tax base.


title: Slavery in medieval Europe

text: The absence of serfdom in some parts of medieval Europe raises several questions. Devroey thinks it is because slavery was not born out of economic structures in these areas, but was rather a societal practice. Heinrich Fichtenau points out that in Central Europe, there was not a labor market strong enough for slavery to become a necessity.


title: Slavery in medieval Europe

text: In late Rome, the official attitude toward slavery was ambivalent. According to Justinian’s legal code, slavery was defined as "an institution according to the law of nations whereby one person falls under the property rights of another, contrary to nature".


title: Slavery in medieval Europe

text: Justifications for slavery throughout the medieval period were dominated by the perception of religious difference. Slaves were often outsiders taken in war. As such, Hebrew and Islamic thinking both conceived of the slave as an "enemy within". In the Christian tradition, pagans and heretics were similarly considered enemies of the faith who could be justly enslaved. In theory, slaves who converted could embark on the path to freedom, but practices were inconsistent: masters were not obliged to manumit them and the practice of baptising slaves was often discouraged. The enslavement of co-religionists was discouraged, if not forbidden, for Christians, Jews, and Muslims alike. Consequently, northern European pagans and black Africans were a target for all three religious groups. Ethnic and religious difference were conflated in the justification of slavery.


title: Slavery in medieval Europe

text: A major Christian justification for the use of slavery, especially against those with dark skin, was the Curse of Ham. The Curse of Ham refers to a biblical parable (Gen. 9:20–27) in which Ham, the son of Noah, sins by seeing his father inebriated and naked, although scholars differ on the exact nature of Ham’s transgression. Noah then curses Ham’s offspring, Canaan, with being a "servant of servants unto his brethren". Although race or skin color is not mentioned, many Jewish, Christian and Muslim scholars began to interpret the passage as a curse of both slavery and black skin, in an attempt to justify the enslavement of people of color, specifically those of African descent. In the medieval period, however, it was also used by some Christians as a justification for serfdom. Muslim sources in the 7th century allude to the Curse of Ham gaining relevance as a justifying myth for the Islamic world’s longstanding enslavement of Africans.


title: Slavery in medieval Europe

text: The apparent discrepancy between the notion of human liberty founded in natural law and the recognition of slavery by canon law was resolved by a legal "compromise": enslavement was allowable given a just cause, which could then be defined by papal authority. The state of slavery was thought to be closely tied to original sin. Towards the middle of the 15th century, the Catholic Church, in particular the Papacy, took an active role in offering justifications for the enslavement of Saracens, pagans, infidels, and "other enemies of Christ". In 1452, a papal bull entitled Dum Diversas authorized King Afonso V of Portugal to enslave any "Saracens" or "pagans" he encountered. The Pope, Pope Nicholas V, recognized King Alfonso’s military action as legitimate in the form of the papal bull, and declared the


title: Slavery in medieval Europe

text: full and free power, through the Apostolic authority by this edict, to invade, conquer, fight, and subjugate the Saracens and pagans, and other infidels and other enemies of Christ, and ... to reduce their persons into perpetual servitude ...


title: Slavery in medieval Europe

text: In a follow-up bull, released in 1455 and entitled Romanus Pontifex, Pope Nicholas V reiterated his support for the enslavement of infidels in the context of Portugal’s monopoly on North African trade routes.


title: Slavery in medieval Europe

text: Historians such as Timothy Rayborn have contended that religious justifications served to mask the economic necessities underlying the institution of slavery.


title: Ulf Ekberg

text: Ulf Gunnar Ekberg (born 6 December 1970), also known as Buddha, is a Swedish singer-songwriter, musician, businessman and television and film producer, best known as a founding member of the pop group Ace of Base, along with siblings Jonas Berggren, Linn Berggren and Jenny Berggren.


title: Ulf Ekberg

text: Ace of Base released its debut album in 1992 and went on to attain major chart success throughout the 1990s. Ekberg played an integral part in the production of the "Happy Nation" album, co-writing nearly all of the album's tracks. Ekberg would continue to provide writing and production for the group's future works, notably the singles "Love in December" and "All for You."


title: Ulf Ekberg

text: Ekberg has produced several artists, TV productions, films and events and has sold over 50 million records worldwide.


title: Ulf Ekberg

text: In 2009, he started a new music production/publishing and management company together with Jonas Berggren based in LA, London and Stockholm.


title: Ulf Ekberg

text: After Ekberg experienced the tsunami in Phuket, Thailand, he founded the Surin Relief Fund to support affected children by providing facilities to educate children and care for orphaned children.