2.2.3 Conclusion: Slavery in Europe at the End of the Middle Ages: Legally Justified but Institutionally Marginalised
Through Classical Antiquity and up to the end of the Middle Ages, slavery as an institution was legally justified by nearly every European scholar. If scholars disagreed on slavery, it was about its origin.
Here, we have seen a pendulum swinging back and forth between two sides: one which grounded slavery in ius naturale, and another side which believed that it was not part of the “original state of mankind”, but part of the ius gentium (however those two concepts were defined). Only one thing changed as at the end of the Middle Ages writers started taking account of the fact that Christian nations no longer enslaved each other’s troops in war.However, as time progressed, much of these writings on slavery became more fiction than reality in day-to-day life in North-Western Europe. All of these countries had known slaves on their soil in the Roman Era and the beginning of the Middle Ages, but the institution had started its long decline by then. As a result, by the twelfth century, slaves disappeared from the soil of these countries, and the only kind of unfreedom left was serfdom or villeinage. Only in Southern France did a marginal slave presence subsist. That being said, none of these countries explicitly “abolished” slavery in the Middle Ages.