Migration and Enslavement: A Medieval Model

The article examines the conditions that lead societies to acquire and use enslaved foreigners on a large scale as forced migrants. Taking as a framework the medieval world of Byzantium this examination shows that forced migration and slavery were in the Middle Ages two sides of the same coin. Slavery depended on forced migration in order to provide means of socioeconomic expansion, while forced migration depended on the slave markets and the demand for slaves. Religion proved to be a decisive element in this medieval dynamics and oriented these activities further and further away towards the pagans of the Slavic North-East and the African South. Religion also played an important role in the social and cultural integration of these migrants in order to keep them socially and culturally dependent.