Author: stevenattewell

I know this site is mostly about fantasy stuff, and I enjoy it a great deal. However the recent content dealing with slavery and bonded labor has me wanting to ask for your thoughts on the following. To what extent is slavery and un-free labor still in effect in current day society?

For comparative data, I would direct you to the Global Slavery Index, whose 2016 report found that 45.8 million people work in some form of unfree labor.

I read somewhere that most peasant rebellions during the Middle Ages were against the Church. Is this true?

warsofasoiaf:

I would ask @racefortheironthrone for a better answer, he’s the best resource I know for the history of peasant revolution. From my understanding, most peasant rebellions were against the upper classes, not necessarily the Church. There were plenty of different reasons for peasant revolts, including religious reasons (the Ottoman Empire was notorious for these, as were certain heresies like the Lollards and Waldensians), but there were also wholly secular revolts.

There’s criss-cross here too. Church officials could be (and were) corrupt and could give cause for rebellion. Given the rhetoric of revolts like the Peasant’s Revolt of 1381 or the Jack Cade rebellion, they most often seemed to be a revolt against the upper classes for things like social inequality, high taxes and/or high bread prices (these two are very linked, since taxes relate directly into how much money the peasantry has for bread), and poor working conditions.

Thanks for the question, Overlord.

SomethingLikeALawyer, Hand of the King

I can see where this might confuse people: most peasant revolts were aimed primarily at landlords.

So it’s not so much that the Church was the primary target of medieval peasant revolts, it’s more that (as one of the largest landlords in Europe) the Church was included among the targets of peasant revolts by virtue of their economic position. 

A question that has been on my mind for a while. I was reading over your Laboratory of Politics piece on Volantis. Given that the source material notes both a massive salve majority and a military made up of slaves, what keeps the Old Blood or the free population in power exactly? What is there to maintain the monopoly of violence for the free population if they do not make up the military? It seems like the masters would not have any real recourse to rebellion given these conditions.

Well, we learn a number of methods that the Volantenes use, many of which are culled from historical slave societies:

  1. Exemplary punishment to inflict terror. Hence the heads on the Long Bridge, and the use of the army against freedmen disorder. 
  2. Lots and lots of safety valves. Religion, manumission, entertainments (remember all the electioneering), and I wouldn’t be surprised if there were also policies of allowing slaves days off to work on their own account, maybe even wages, etc. 
  3. Use of cultural practices to divide slave from slave and prevent solidarity. We see this with the soldiers – “The slave soldiers of Volantis were fiercely proud of their tiger stripes…what are they, if not tigers?” – but I’m sure there’s an established hierarchy within the ranks of civilian slaves as well. 
  4. Use of cultural practices like the mudsill theory to foster unity among non-slaves. Although they don’t do this as much as they ought (what with the Old Blood), in Volantis “even the vilest beggar stands higher than a slave.” 

What do you think prompted the Triarchs of Volantis to permit the construction of a massive Temple of Rh’llor right outside the Black Walls and the creation of a religious militia wholly responsible to the priest of said temple? Even if the anti-slavery angle is a new one for the Red Priests, arming the Faithful like that seems like a very bad idea.

Well, as I said in my essay, Volantis is a particularly unstable slave society desperately trying to keep ahead of the ball, and that’s especially true with R’hllorism. 

The problem with R’hllorism is A. it’s too popular to destroy (half their slave soldiers worship the Red God, so even a radical reactionary like Malaquo knows that he doesn’t have the internal resources to pull it off), B. it’s not their religion, so they can’t dominate the hierarchy and re-fashion practice or doctrine into pro-slavery messages, and C. it’s an institution that crosses too many boundaries of nation and caste to be cowed by the hegemony of the Old Blood of Volantis. 

So consider their options? They say no to having the Temple built by the Black Walls – the High Priest has it built over in the Shadow City, and now it’s far less under their influence and a de-facto alternate government HQ. They say no to a religious militia – the High Priest tells the faithful that “all those who die fighting in [the] cause shall be reborn,” and now the Old Blood are fighting a religious civil war against the better part of five-sixths of their population, with an army whose loyalties they cannot trust.