Powers and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages

by Dan Jones

Rome was not by any means unique in fostering this concept of legal and social privilege – there were citizens in ancient Greece, Carthage and numerous other Mediterranean states of the era. But Rome was unique in the way that it developed and extended the concept of citizenship over its long history to help sustain its own imperial dominion.

There have been a bare few handful of examples in recorded history of true ‘slave-states’, in which slavery permeated every facet of society, and on which an entire economy and culture was built. Rome was one.

During the Middle Ages that followed, slavery declined in scale, yet it remained almost ubiquitous across the west. And even in places where slavery seemed to die out, its place as a pillar of economy and culture was often replaced by serfdom – a system of human bondage to the land. This was not quite the same as chattel slavery, although the difference would have felt slight to the people involved. And a large part of the western attachment to slaving sprang from the fact that slavery had been indivisible from Rome’s swaggering glory.