This year’s evening lecture at the joint sitting of the Historische Kommission at the Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften and the MGH was held by Dr Karl Ubl, professor for Medieval History at the University of Cologne and since 2015 an elected member of the MGH central board of directors.
As always on this occasion, the lecture was well attended. Drawing on exemplary source material Karl Ubl presented an overview of the living conditions of enslaved persons – enslaved in the medievistic sense of „unfree“ – in the Empire of Charlemagne. The opening question of whether Charlemagne is to be seen as a proponent or opponent of slavery is, as Ubl showed on the basis of individual case studies, to be answered in the former sense in as much as he made use of the existing structure of slavery to strengthen his own power, as did all potentates of his time.
The overview revealed the broad spectrum of lived realities that fall under the term „slavery“, ranging from the privileged position of royal slaves, who themselves could possess settlements and the people living there, to the subhuman conditions experienced by so-called transit-slaves, men, women and children who had been captured or abducted by force and were sold and treated like livestock. Between the two extremes, slavery could entail all manner of social constellations and differentiated conditions of unfreedom. In the 21st century, the concept of slavery is so foreign that it is hard to imagine, which nevertheless makes it an important subject of study.
The lecture will be published in the MGH journal Deutsches Archiv.