The History of White People (6 page)

I
NTERESTINGLY—AND FOR
hardly the last time in history—citified men seem fated to admire tough, virile barbarians. Caesar headed a train of civilized male observers—with Tacitus among the most famous—contrasting the hard with the soft, the strong and the weak, the peaceful and the warlike, all to the detriment of the civilized, dismissed as effeminate. As we see, the seeds of this stereotype—a contrast between civilized French and barbarian Germans—lie in the work of ancient writers, themselves uneasy about the manhood costs of peacetime.

Later commentators cite Tacitus to prove their claims of German manliness and racial purity. Tacitus, of course, did not speak of
race
in the modern sense, for that meaning had not been invented. But he did write, “For myself, I agree with the views of those who think that the inhabitants of Germania have not been tainted by any intermarriage with other tribes, but have existed as a distinct and pure people, resembling only themselves. Consequently, they also all have the same physical appearance…fierce blue eyes, tawny hair, bodies that are big but strong only in attack.”
²⁴

And why are the Germani pure? Not out of any furious ethnic pride, but because they live in a place no one else wants, for “who would abandon Asia or Africa or Italy and seek out Germania, with its unlovely landscape and harsh climate, dreary to inhabit and behold, if it were not one’s native land?”
²⁵
With the passage of time, Tacitus’s rhetorical question—and its answer—fell away, leaving only the notion of rugged German standoffishness.

I
N TRUTH
, it simply is not possible to tie those whom the Romans called Germani to modern Germans securely. Humanity moves around so much that no clear lines of descent trace back over two millennia. Even the efficient Romans lacked solid knowledge of frontiers beyond their own Gallic provinces.

Caesar notes the ways of migration: Germans who moved into Gaul soon became Belgae, and migrants from Belgium now settled across the Channel belong to the British population.
²⁶
Their migrations were part of a much wider phenomenon that marked the first millennium BCE and thereafter. Nomadic and seminomadic tribes, moving east to west under pressure from the Huns, left today’s Turkistan, crossing overland from Asia through Ukraine. In the far west, peoples piled up along the Rhine border of the Roman empire, driving a process so fluid that the tribes fought over territory within themselves and with one another, all the while merging and mingling biologically.

We may think of pre-unification (i.e., pre-1870) “Germans” as a single linguistic group, but in the time of Caesar and Tacitus, speakers of Germanic languages lived well into what is now Poland and, perhaps, beyond. Roman observers did not mention language as a characteristic of the Germani, focusing rather on cultural patterns and physical appearance. Between language, body, and lifestyle, already the identity of the Germani is rife with incongruities.

Such confusions eventually plunged Caesar’s term
Germani
into disuse until the rise of religious and political Pan-German sentiment.
²⁷
By the time German-speakers embraced a common name in the eleventh century, that name had morphed into
Deutsch
. In fact, “German” does not appear in English until the sixteenth century, replacing the French cognate,
Alemain
.
²⁸
Nor has time brought clarity. On the eastern side of what is now the Federal Republic of Germany, controversies still rage over the Germanic or Slavic identity of Wends, Vandals, and various neighboring Germans and Slavs in the eastern German region known as Saxony.
²⁹

One lesson here is that wars and imperial fortunes render political boundaries notoriously prone to dispute; furthermore, cultural boundaries are even harder to pin down. When we speak of “Germany” before the late nineteenth century, we can only mean a cultural idea and a linguistic grouping. But we know now that neither culture (e.g., marriage or burial habits) nor language provides a reliable index to biological descent. Naming does not help either, for we can comfortably reel off a roll call that includes Brandon Riveras, Matthew Feinsteins, and Tamika Washingtons—names that reflect both history and present cultural preference rather than genealogy. White race chauvinists are loath to admit that brown-skinned people speak the English language fluently.

In terms of naming, the Native American Indian parallel with the ancient Germani once again has bearing. The untamed Germans outside the Roman empire called themselves by an abundance of local names: Marsians, Gambrians, Vandalians, Tungrians, Araviscans, Osians, Treverians, Nervians, Batavians, Vangiones, Tribocians, Nemetes, Ubians, Mattiacians, Cattans, Usipians, Tencterians, Bructerians, Chamavians, Angrivarians, Bructerians, Dulgibinians, Chasuarians, Frisians, Chaucians, Fosians, Cheruscans, Cimbrians, and Suevians (divided into several communities all bearing distinct names: Langobards, Reudignians, Aviones, Angles, Varinians, Eudoses, Suardones Nuithones, Hermondurians, Nariscans, Marcomanians, Quadians. Marsignians, Gothinians, Osians, Burians, Arians, Helvicones, Manimians, Elysians, Naharvalians, Lygians, Gothones, Rugians, Lemovians, and Suiones). The list comes from Tacitus in 98 CE.

German-speakers who entered Roman society, however, often as mercenary soldiers, adopted Roman usage and called themselves Germani, just as Native Americans within the United States have found reason to evoke a unifying identity as Indians. Beyond Roman reach, the various German-speaking tribes east of the Rhine considered themselves distinct one from another, sharing no sense of common identity or common interest until several centuries after the collapse of the empire.
*

As the Roman empire crumbles, our narrative of people who would later be called “white” moves north. During the so-called Dark Ages between mid-fifth century CE and the fourteenth-century Renaissance, seafaring raiders appeared, perturbing northern societies in a ceaseless quest for plunder. Although much history of these chaotic times has not survived, a key name—Saxon—appears for the first time. It does not denote the people of England, but foreigners: raiders from continental Europe—Scandinavians, Angles, and Jutes, whoever could reach for plunder in Roman Britain. Even the great progenitor of what was later called “Saxon England,” King Alfred (849–99), called his people
englisc
and himself the king of the
Angelcynn
.
³⁰
Interestingly enough, Irish attacking Britain from the west were called Scotti.
³¹
Insecurity forced the peoples of northern Europe to hunker down, pouring the wealth to be had into cities to the south and east.

W
HILE WARLORDS
fought in the west, medieval cities and kingdoms at the edges of Christendom glittered in far-flung, cosmopolitan empires. Trade made the difference, trade in people as well as spices, silk, cotton, dyestuffs, medicines, salt, and, increasingly, sugar. First the seafaring merchants of Pisa, Genoa, and, most gloriously, Venice controlled the Asian trade. After the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453, Venice began to decline. Iberian kingdoms in the far west fattened on trade with Africa and the newly discovered Americas. In Italy and Iberia, wealth and peoples from immense trading networks met and fornicated within polyglot, multicolored, and religiously diverse populations.

Here was a rich and glorious world built on subjugation. Hundreds of thousands in the Italian and Iberian empires were, in fact, not free, but were objects of an ever-flourishing trade. During Roman and medieval times this traffic in workers had flowed one way, from various peripheries toward the metropoles. The Greco-Roman historian Diodorus Siculus offers a clue. When the Celts discovered they could buy Italian wine even without money—for they had no money—they flooded the market with slaves. A good Celtic bargain exchanged a slave for one amphora of wine holding about seven gallons.
³²
The various slave trades brought thousands of northern barbarians—Celts, Gauls, Germani—into the centers of wealth and power, altering those gene pools as surely as did the older flow from the Black Sea. Up in their impoverished, cold, and remote land, ancient Germans saw no such influx from afar. Compared with wealthy centers to the south, German tribal territory remained relatively contained, while the Roman world and its successors blended the descendants of many a hapless barbarian.

This millennium of Venetian and Iberian hegemony barely appears in American white race history as it jelled over the past two hundred years. Rather, race-chauvinist history depends on Tacitus’s ancient Germani and medieval German heroes called Saxons. The race narrative ignores early European slavery and the mixing it entailed, leading today’s readers to find the idea of
white
slavery far-fetched. But in the land we now call Europe, most slaves were white, and that fact was unremarkable.

A
notion of freedom lies at the core of the American idea of whiteness. Accordingly, the concept of slavery—at any time, in any society—calls up racial difference, carving a permanent chasm of race between the free and the enslaved. Any good library embodies this logic by housing a literature of African slavery stretching tens of linear feet. This bibliography seems infinite compared with the literature of white slavery, for the American conventions of slavery have blanketed the topic. Slavery in the Roman empire may be recalled primarily through film and historical fiction, but the Vikings of the Dark Ages are hardly remembered as the preeminent slavers they actually were. If we are to understand the peopling of Europe with its great mixing of folk, we must take Vikings—those great movers of people—into account.

Vikings raided northern Europe and Russia hundreds of times in the fifth to the eleventh century, plundering as they went and scooping up human chattel by the thousands. To sell the enslaved, a system of permanent markets evolved around settlements like Novgorod (where Vikings warehoused and distributed the people they captured or purchased along the rivers Don, Volga, and Dnieper) and in Bristol and Dublin (where they gathered hapless westerners from Germany through the Iberian Peninsula). It is said that Dublin was Europe’s largest slave market during the eleventh century. The Viking slave trades, eastern and western, carried northern European slaves to neighboring localities or into wealthy Mediterranean lands.
¹
*
These slave businesses changed the face of Europe.

History’s most famous British slave of the early medieval period is Patrick, born Succat, Ireland’s patron saint, who provides a cogent example. Patrick’s father was a local official and Christian deacon somewhere near the west coast of Roman Britain or perhaps Gaul in about 373 or about 389 or about 456.
²
Although much of his life remains mysterious, his saint’s name, Patrick, from “patrician,” emerges conspicuously. Identifying Patrick as no ordinary slave matters hugely, for fourth-century Europeans harbored unflattering stereotypes of those lowest in society. (These stereotypes reappeared centuries later and an ocean away as “Sambo.”) Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse literature depicts the
wealh
(a Welsh person, a slave) as drunken and sexually aggressive, and the notion that the Welsh and Celts generally were dark—had hair and skin darkened by exposure to the sun—circulated as the typical coloring of slaves.
^†
In the Old Norse Icelandic poem
Rigsthula
,
thralls
(slaves) appear as dirty, sun-tanned people with ugly, quarrelsome, lazy, gossipy, and smarmy children.
³
The heroic figure of Saint Patrick had to be lifted out of this squalid mass, even though his enslavement was perfectly routine.

At any rate, like tens of thousands of his contemporaries living within reach of slave raiders, fifteen-or sixteen-year-old Patrick fell victim to Viking raiders, who carried him far from home. After serving six years as a shepherd and farm laborer, probably in today’s County Antrim, Ireland, he escaped, an event he credited to divine intervention. Certainly the escape inspired Patrick’s permanent vocation, a mission to convert the heathen Irish to Christianity that lasted some thirty years. The year of his death—461, 490, or 493—remains as uncertain as the year of his birth. Legend, however, declares precisely the day of his death, widely celebrated on March 17. Another five centuries passed before the British Isles quieted down.

In Anglo-Saxon Britain as elsewhere, slaves were valuable property, worth each about eight oxen; in Ireland a female slave represented a unit of currency, like a dollar or a euro.
⁴
Moreover, slavery in Anglo-Saxon Britain applied not merely to the captives themselves, for slave status could also be inherited, as had been the case among the Thracians of antiquity. We cannot know how many of the British poor sold themselves and their children into bondage, but the number must have been significant, for attempts at reform were made repeatedly. Kings Alfred the Great and Canute (1014–35) tried, with uncertain success, to restrict slavery, especially with regard to daughters. Nonetheless, about one-tenth of the eleventh-century British population is estimated to have been enslaved, a proportion rising to one-fifth in the West Country.
⁵
So embedded were slaves in the economy of the British Isles that the Catholic Church, quite a wealthy institution, owned vast numbers of them.
⁶

The Norman conquest of 1066 and subsequent unification did reduce British exposure to slave raiding by local warlords and Vikings. Relative peace, however, did not end hereditary bondage, for serfdom largely replaced slavery, leaving 40 to 50 percent of the rural population in hereditary servitude, some two million people in England at any one time.
⁷
The British case belonged to a much wider pattern.

T
HE MEDIEVAL
slave trade exempted no one, as Viking, Italian, and Ottoman merchants moved their captives across long distances for sale. Wealthy Italy was well supplied with slaves, many from Asia. Lumped together as “Tartars,” they might be of Russian, Circassian (Caucasian), Greek, Moorish, or Ethiopian descent. Viking slavers in league with Jewish and Syrian merchants from Asia Minor also shipped some of these Tartar slaves westward from Russia, and others from Poland and Germany for sale in Gaul and Italy. At the same time, Arab merchants sold North African slaves in the Iberian Peninsula.

Eunuchs were also a facet of the business. Centers of castration—“manufacturers” of eunuchs—existed in the town of Verdun (now in northern France) and on the island of Sicily. Most of the Mediterranean region (except Greece) eagerly employed altered young men, so while the market for eunuchs shrank, it disappeared only around 1900. Farther east, Venice, a cosmopolitan commercial crossroads, controlled the market for all eastern commodities, including slaves, until the middle of the fifteenth century. Genoa and Venice between them regulated the slave trade, and Venice levied a head tax on every slave sold in the Venetian market. Between 1414 and 1423, at least ten thousand slaves were sold in Venice.
⁸
*

These systems held well in place until the sixteenth century, when rising prices and a loss of wealth among the Italian city-states virtually removed them from the slave trade. By then the Ottoman conquest of the Black Sea had closed sources to Italian merchants and deprived many Venetians of their livelihood. As the price of slaves increased and slaves became luxury goods, the Italian trade shifted away from able-bodied workers toward good-looking youth, especially adolescent girls. Women with a more European appearance seemed more attractive and fetched higher prices than strong young Tartars. The rare girl considered beautiful rated a higher
prezzo d’affezione
. In 1459, for instance, a Venetian slave agent bought his Medici pope a Circassian woman seventeen or eighteen years old, “not too delicate in face, but of good appearance.”
⁹
Obviously a welcome purchase, this union of servitude and beauty would endure in the European imagination, often associated with the Ottoman harem. In Britain, to the contrary, the idea of freedom became more attractive than the image of slavery.

S
LAVERY FIGURES
prominently in the notion of English identity, even in the British national anthem, which vigorously proclaims, “Britons never shall be slaves.” Psychologists often label so emphatic a pronouncement a “deception clue,” a hint of something concealed. In this case, the label fits, for, as we saw, Englishmen and women
have
been enslaved. The hero of Daniel Defoe’s best-selling 1719 novel
Robinson Crusoe
, it may be recalled, was not only a slave trader but also a slave for two years in Morocco before his island shipwreck.
¹⁰
Crusoe’s story brings together the older story of white slaves with the newer Africa-to-Americas slave trade.

In a chapter of
Robinson Crusoe
called “Slavery and Escape,” we find Crusoe on his way to the West African coast when pirates from Salé, Morocco, capture and enslave everyone on his ship.
*
Crusoe subsequently serves the pirate captain as a slave in Salé for two years before escaping in the company of a young slave boy, “us slaves,” as Crusoe calls them. Their route of escape takes them into the shipping lanes from Africa to Brazil and on to salvation by a Portuguese slaver.
¹¹

Crusoe’s mixed experiences—of both white and black slavery and of enslavement from both sides—were not so unusual at the time. As late as the mid-seventeenth century, some three thousand Britons per year endured involuntary servitude in North Africa, even as the trade from Africa to the Western Hemisphere was gathering momentum and Crusoe was doing his part to profit from it.
^†
It will not be lost on the reader that over more than a millennium, the vast story of Western slavery was primarily a white story. Geography, not race, ruled, and potential white slaves, like vulnerable aliens anywhere, were nearby for the taking.
¹²

And then sugar made its way into the Mediterranean and on to Europe. The history begins with New Guineans’ domestication of sugar long before the Common Era and continues with its spread through Southeast Asia, China, India, and Persia. The seventh-century Muslim conquest of the Middle East took sugar into the Mediterranean, inspiring the commonplace “sugar follows the Koran,” as Muslims planted sugar in Syria, Palestine, Egypt, Rhodes, Malta, Crete, and Cyprus.
¹³
In the course of their crusades in the eastern Mediterranean, northern Europeans encountered this addictive substance and liked it very much. Thus began another story.

Sugar came into medieval western Europe around the year 1000 in a linkage of sugar and colonialism.
¹⁴
In a pattern familiar to Americans later on, Venice processed and sold the sugar that Italian, Greek, Bulgarian, Turkish, and Tartar farm laborers (free, slave, and sharecropper) produced primarily in the Venetian colonies of Crete and Cyprus, where cane grew well. After the Black Death of the mid-1300s created a labor shortage, Christian crusader kingdoms of the eastern Mediterranean resorted increasingly to enslavement. With increased enslavement of people from the Balkans near the crusader kingdoms of the eastern Adriatic—the European slave coast—the word “Slav” turned into the word “slave.” Faceless masses of slaves from Greece, Bulgaria, Turkey, and the Black Sea region grew sugar for western tables until the Turkish conquest disrupted the chain of supply.
¹⁵

The fifteenth-century Ottoman occupation of the eastern Mediterranean—of Constantinople, the Balkans, and the sugar islands of Crete and Cyprus—cut those areas off from the West and shut down preexisting trade routes into northern Europe.
¹⁶
The closure affected trade in sugar, spices, and slaves and, as we shall see presently with the travel narrative of Jean Chardin, in luxuries of all types. Its role as commercial gateway to the east ending, Venice gradually faded from northern view, except as a romantic tourist destination and art market. Though this rich, powerful empire does not figure in American race theory, its multicultural image survives in Shakespeare’s
Othello
and
The Merchant of Venice
.

T
HE MARKET
for sugar demanded other sources and other slaves, prompting the westernmost Europeans to seize the initiative. We still recognize Prince Henry the Navigator (1394–1460) as the vanguard, even though he is not well named, since he himself never went long-distance seafaring. Instead, he sent Portuguese sailors into the Atlantic and down the coast of West Africa, planting sugar on islands like Madeira and São Tomé and finding, in the process, Atlantic currents running from Africa to the land they discovered and named Brazil. Fairly soon the Americas, especially the Caribbean islands, proved so productive that sugar making became synonymous with America—and with African slaves. These new plantations with their African workforce have largely obscured the memory of the older, European history of sugar, with its Mediterranean and Balkan workforce, leaving a large conceptual gap. Yet the Gate of the Sugar Workers still marks the old city walls of Syracuse in Sicily and, clearly, western Europe’s critical nexus of sugar and slavery.
¹⁷
A similar nexus involving tobacco made Europeans, not Africans, the first unfree laborers in British America.

T
HIS SHIFT
to the west did not, however, signal an end to white slavery, for Britain was still in play. With its rapidly increasing population, religious and royal wars, Irish ethnic cleansing, and fear of rising crime, Britain excelled among the European imperial powers in shipping its people into bondage in distant lands. An original inspiration had flowed from small-scale shipments of Portuguese children to its Asian colonies before the Dutch supplanted the Portuguese as the world’s premier long-range shippers.
¹⁸
Vagrant minors, kidnapped persons, convicts, and indentured servants from the British Isles might labor under differing names in law and for longer or shorter terms in the Americas, but the harshness of their lives dictated that they be, in the words of Daniel Defoe, “more properly called slaves.”
*
First in Barbados, then in Jamaica, then in North America, notably in Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania, bound Britons, Scots, and Irish furnished a crucial workforce in the Americas in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In 1618 the City of London and the Virginia Company forged an agreement to transport vagrant children. London would pay £5 per head to the company for shipment on the
Duty
, hence the children’s sobriquet “
Duty
boys.” Supposedly bound for apprenticeship, these homeless children—a quarter of them girls—were then sold into field labor for twenty pounds of tobacco each.
¹⁹