american-holocaust

180 AMERICAN HOLOCAUSTIf not wiped from the face of the earth, such foul hosts could, as analternative, be enslaved. Slavery, of course, was an ancient tradition in theWest. While no reliable figures exist regarding the number of slaves whowere held throughout all of ancient Greece, there were as many as 100,000slaves laboring in Athens during the fourth and fifth centuries B.C., or atleast three or four slaves for each free household. This is a proportion ofthe population much larger than that of the slave states in America on theeve of the Civil War. 100 The practice continued in Rome, where slaveswhounder Roman law were non-persons-were inspected and auctionedoff in public marketplaces. During the late first and early second centuriesA.D., between a third and nearly half the population of Italy were slaves.It has been estimated that in order to maintain the slave population at astable level throughout the empire during this time-a level of 10,000,000slaves in a total imperial population of about 50,000,000-more than500,000 new slaves had to be added to the population every year. 101In the fourth century the first Christian emperor, Constantine, decreedthat "anyone who picks up and nourishes at his own expense a little boyor girl cast out of the home of its father or lord with the latter's knowledgeand consent may retain the child in the position for which he intended itwhen he took it in-that is, as child or slave, as he prefers." In view ofthe enormous numbers of children who were being abandoned by theirparents in this era, Constantine's edict assured that there would be a vastsupply of young slaves for owners to hire out as prostitutes and laborers,which they commonly did. 102 And when, in the eleventh century, England'sWilliam the Conqueror commissioned the famous Domesday Book,the most extensive population survey and analysis conducted during medievaltimes, it was determined that approximately one out of every ten.citizens of Britain was a slave whose life was totally under the control ofhis or her owner. "Legally no more than chattel goods," writes DavidBrion Davis, "these people could apparently be killed by their ownerswithout penalty." 103During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries slavery began to decline innorthern Europe, but it persisted in the Continent's southern countries.The labor shortage that followed in the aftermath of the Black Death createda new boom in slavery throughout the Mediterranean world, but thistime it was a boom in imported slaves, mostly Turks, Bulgarians, Armenians,Tatars, and Africans, because at the same time that the market forslaves was opening up, the Church-which always had supported the generalprinciple of slavery-was beginning to impose more rigorous restrictionson the enslavement of persons who had been born as Christians.Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese cities thus became huge slave markets,dealing largely in chattel of infidel ancestry. As Davis points out, "between1414 and 1423 no fewer than ten thousand bondsmen (mostly bondswomen)were sold in Venice alone." 104 And in Lisbon, in 1551, 10 percent