THE NEW SCHAFF-HERZOG
bade concubinage with slaves, and secured the freedman against capricious revocation of his liberty, while each parish exercised the right of protection over the freedmen within it. The manumission of slaves, very frequent in pagan time, was carried to an extreme after the conversion of the rich and great in the fourth century. It is clear, however, from the apocryphal acts (e.g., Acts of Peter and Andrew, xx.) that this was not regarded as a Christian duty in behalf of the slaves, but as an act of asceticism on a par with renunciation of property, later coming to form a preliminary to entrance on the monastic life (cf. Augustine, Sermones, ccclvi. 3, 6, 7). Manumission was usually formally declared in the church (Sozomen, Hist, eccl., I., ix. 6; Codex Theodosianus, iv. 7), and the classic legal fiction of sale or gift to a divinity or temple was also observed by Christians. Unlike the Church, which maintained existing conditions, monasticism assailed slavery and finally, as already implied, overthrew it, the two positions being combined in Gregory the Great, who as a monk praised manumission as a good work, and as pope demanded the most rigid discipline from the slaves belonging to the Church 5. European (cf. Epist. vi. 12 with ix. 200). Canons Slavery in of councils, as that held at Agde in 506, the Middle forbade bishops or abbots to diminish Ages. the property of the Church by manumitting slaves; and in many ways, as by the prohibition against ordaining a slave or receiving him in a monastery without his master's consent, it was clearly shown that slavery was accepted as an institution, the council of Elvira, by its eightieth canon, even excluding the freedmen [of pagans] from holy orders. The monasteries, on the other hand, received slaves as readily as freemen, and, unlike the churches, were not expected to own bondmen. Since, as already noted, the Church was more interested in the slave's Christianity than in the slave himself, frequent prohibitions were enacted, beginning with Constantine, against ownership of Christian slaves by Jews; and the laws against the exportation of slaves from the various Christian lands were closely connected with the prohibition against selling Christian slaves to pagans. Nevertheless, the Jews of Lyons imported large numbers of Christian slaves to Spain and Africa in the reign of Louis the Pious; the Venetians had an equally evil notoriety; and Rome itself was a center of the traffic. The slave-trade increased after the Slavic wars and the Tatar inroads, those sold into bondage being chiefly heathens.
It was only in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries that real slavery disappeared from northwestern Europe, although the system of serfdom long continued. In 1031 Conrad II. forbade all traffic in slaves, and a synod held at London in 1102 repeated the prohibition. In southern Europe, on the other hand, slavery still persisted, aided not only by the constant wars with the Mohammedans, but also by pirate raids. Slavery was made by custom to include Christians, despite the protests of the Church, which herself legalized the system as a punishment for heretics and enemies of the Curia, and made bondmen of the offspring of priests. Latin Crusaders did not hesitate to enslave Christian Greeks,
and the revival of Roman law and the reverence in which scholasticism held Aristotle alike combined to maintain the system. At late as 1548 Paul III. confirmed the right of the clergy and laity to hold slaves, although their number was no longer large in Italy. In Spain, on the other hand, there was a regular system of slavery in the old Roman sense until the sixteenth century, the bondmen here being thousands of Moors; while the Portuguese imported negroes direct from Africa after 1441. On the other hand, Christians frequently became slaves of unbelievers, and, the redemption of captives being esteemed a good work from the earliest times (cf. Neh. v. 8; Socrates, Hist, eccl., vii. 21), not only were funds of the Church devoted to this purpose by the council held at Chalons in the middle of the seventh century, but the Order of Mercy (see Nolasco, St. Peter) and Trinitarians (q.v.) were founded with this special object in view.
(E. von Dobschutz.) Personal slavery having diminished in Europe in the fourteenth and following centuries (ut sup.), it was revived upon a gigantic scale on this continent shortly after the discovery of America. The scarcity of labor in the New World, and the necessity for it, seem to have overcome all objections to the system, whether founded upon motives 6. Slavery of Christian duty or upon economic conin America, siderations. All the European nations, Roman Catholic and Protestant, which had colonies in America, engaged in transporting slaves from the coast of Africa to this continent. The result was that more than five millions of human beings were carried from Africa to America between 1579 and 1807, where they and their descendants became slaves. For more than two centuries and a half no voice, either in the Church or out of it, was heard against the slave-trade and its consequences.
About the middle of the eighteenth century, however, two distinct movements arose, one based on philosophical, and the other on Christian, grounds, one confined to France and the other to England. Upon one or the other of them, modern opinion and legislation in regard to negro slavery have been based. The philosophical basis is found in that portion of the celebrated work of Rous- 7. The Phil- seau, Emile, called Profession dc foi osophical d'un vicaire Savoyard. The views there Attack on laid down made a profound impression Slavery, upon all writers on the theory of government during the remainder of the century. According to Rousseau, man is a being by nature good, loving justice and order. In an ideal state of society each member would be free, and the equal of every other. These doctrines and the vast system which grew out of them were, for various reasons, embraced with the utmost enthusiasm in France. But the first public official document in which these opinions are clearly set forth was the Declaration of Independence; though in France, the first article of "The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen," adopted in 1789 at the beginning of the Revolution, asserts, " Men are born free and equal, and have the same rights." And as a logical result of this declaration, based