On top of one of the monuments itself in Peponi is a weapon, the Akin-Eno used by the Final King of the Humans a weapon so great the Serwans (a race of Noble Ones) refuse to acknowledge that it has human origins but to esclaves the Akin-Eno is a gift from Heaven that was given to them some time after creation from Origin, the Creator God. It is kept as a reminder by the Serwans of their victory over human kind... The Sentient War, the 600 year struggle that laid waste to the land of the humans and Ended the Age was told in every home. As it came to an end there had only been a few human kingdoms left who still posed a threat to permanent control of the land of Kiskeya. One Kingdom managed to unite neighboring territories through bloody civil wars and another had possession of the Tomb of Creation. It is said that during the battle the Final King took the Akin-Eno and plunged it into a tree turning it to diamond and ever since the human race has been enslaved for over 2000 years.

Slavery After Rome, 500-1100 offers a substantially new interpretation of what happened to slavery in Western Europe in the centuries that followed the fall of the Roman Empire. The periods at either end of the early middle ages are associated with iconic forms of unfreedom: Roman slavery at one end; at the other, the serfdom of the twelfth century and beyond, together with, in Southern Europe, a revitalized urban chattel slavery dealing chiefly in non-Christians. How and why this major change took place in the intervening period has been a long-standing puzzle. This study picks up the various threads linking this transformation across the centuries, and situates them within the full context of what slavery and unfreedom were being used for in the early middle ages. This volume adopts a broad comparative perspective, covering different regions of Western Europe over six centuries, to try to answer the following questions: who might become enslaved and why? What did this mean for them, and for their lords? What made people opt for certain ways of exploiting unfree labor over others in different times and places, and is it possible, underneath all this diversity, to identify some coherent trajectories of historical change?

The year 922 saw a series of remarkable face-to-face encounters in the steppes between Bukhara and the Middle Volga. Ibn Fadlan was an intrepid member of a diplomatic and religious mission from the distant caliphate in Baghdad to the ruler of the Volga Bulgars. His account gives a vivid eyewitness description of the peoples he came upon (whose appearance, rituals and filthy habits both fascinate and appal) and a famous depiction of a Viking Rus ship burial. It is unique testimony to burgeoning exchanges between several different cultures, and to the emergence of new political structures on the steppes. Yet the account survives only as part of a later composite work, raising questions of meaning and historical interpretation. This pioneering interdisciplinary study of Ibn Fadlan's text and the world he surveyed draws on a variety of specialists to give readers both 'the bigger picture' of cultural and economic change in Eurasia, Byzantium and the Muslim world, and hard facts, in the form of archaeological and numismatic data.

This book is divided into three parts. The first two chapters provide an introduction to the historical problem of early medieval slavery and a short history of Bavaria to provide background information. The next six chapters deal with a series of topics, which provide a complete historical overview of the institutions and conditions of slavery. This historical analysis is based upon an extensive collection of primary documents, each referenced in the text as it occurs in the discussion. These documents are then provided in English translation in the final three chapters of the volume.

This study draws a comprehensive picture of medieval old age in western Europe, combining primary sources and secondary litrature to produce a broad cultural history.

British Captives from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, 1563-1760 provides the first study of British captives in the North African Atlantic and Mediterranean, from the reign of Elizabeth I to George II. Based on extensive archival research in the United Kingdom, Nabil Matar furnishes the names of all captives while examining the problems that historians face in determining the numbers of early modern Britons in captivity. Matar also describes the roles which the monarchy, parliament, trading companies, and churches played (or did not play) in ransoming captives. He questions the emphasis on religious polarization in piracy and shows how much financial constraints, royal indifference, and corruption delayed the return of captives. As rivarly between Britain and France from 1688 on dominated the western Mediterranean and Atlantic, Matar concludes by showing how captives became the casus belli that justified European expansion.

Free Soil in the Atlantic World examines the principle that slaves who crossed particular territorial frontiers- from European medieval cities to the Atlantic nation states of the nineteenth century- achieved their freedom. Based upon legislation and judicial cases, each essay considers the legal origins of Free Soil and the context in which it was invoked: medieval England, Toulouse and medieval France, early modern France and the Mediterranean, the Netherlands, eighteenth-century Portugal, nineteenth-century Angola, nineteenth-century Spain and Cuba, and the Brazilian-Paraguay borderlands. On the one hand, Free Soil policies were deployed by weaker polities to attract worker-settlers; however, by the eighteenth century, Free Soil was increasingly invoked by European imperial centres to distinguish colonial regimes based in slavery from the privileges and liberties associated with the metropole. This book was originally published as a special issue of Slavery and Abolition.