History buffs - historical slave turnover question

[Celebrim]

I get a lot of grief over appling the 80/20 rule-of-thumb to a lot of things but it could fit here, for every 100 people of your population 20 would be slaves. I know it is not a exact figure but the ratio always seems to appear when you gather your data.

Actually, depending on how broad you deem the word slave to be, the 80/20 rule of thumb would probably imply that out of every 100 people in your population 80 would be slaves and only 20 would be free.

I tend to use the word slave to mean the general class of people which are 'not free' and would include serfs, bondsmen and indentured servents. Some people tend to quibble with that and define slaves as only those with no rights under the law. The problem with that definition to me is that it shows a real lack of understanding of the breadth of slavery as an institution in history.

Prior to the 19th century, the bulk of people in the world were expressly 'not free', and it isn't really until the 18th century that you see whole societies (England notably) coming out against slavery on moral grounds. Our modern perception that slavery is an immoral institution is a relatively new thing in the world.

Another problem with the limited definition of slavery as being just those people with no legal rights is that it doesn't agree with the definition of slavery used by most of the slave holding societies in history. For example, in medieval england the serfs were called slaves under the law, but they were ranked in several classes (claudia, lida, etc.) according to the rights that they enjoyed. Also, there are cases in history were the legal rights of slaves exceeded the rights of non-slaves. The helots of Sparta were technically serfs, but had inferior legal and social rights compared to slaves. For example, a slave could be legally freed by his master - a helot could not.

So, once you start adding up people who've gone bankrupt and are paying off debts, share croppers indebted to thier landlords, factory workers indebted to the factory owner because thier expenses exceed thier wages, serfs that are endentured to the land, endentured servants and other sorts of covert slavery to the list of things that we normally recognize as slavery, you realize that in your average 'gritty' world, there aren't alot of people left.

Actually, one could make the argument that since the majority of the worlds peoples are not sovereign and enfranchised citizens, that its still questionable whether the majority of the world's people are free.

 

[John Morrow]

Apparantly no society is quite as prone to total war as loosely organized family bands, and if you would allow me to go off on a tangent I might theorize that the purpose of governments is to insulate the majority of the group from the depredations of war.

Have you read Lawrence Keeley's War Before Civilization? He makes roughly this point as well some other interesting observations that are not entirely intuitive (e.g., war in primitive societies is often more common between groups that interact heavily than those who don't because their interaction creates more causes for war). But, yes, that's the trade off of civilization -- giving up liberty for security.

 

[palleomortis]

Palleomortis,

it's not 250,000 slaves in one place.

It might be 10 in one lord's castle, 20 working in a copper mine for a greedy merchant, while 10 are bought monthly for the next city's gladiatorial games, then 50 slaves and 20 concubines in the king's castle; while the next nation may have 100 in the king's castle; while each of the 5 dukes have 50; and each of the 20 barons have 20 slaves, etc...

Well then it's easier, all you have to do is go from place to place. With the slaves greatly outnumbering the masters, then it will be a simple deal of mulitple assassinations befor you have amassed an army of followers.

 

[NewJeffCT]

Well then it's easier, all you have to do is go from place to place. With the slaves greatly outnumbering the masters, then it will be a simple deal of mulitple assassinations befor you have amassed an army of followers.

Well, if Lord Farquard has 10 slaves in his castle whose job is to keep it clean, he might also have quite a few more non-slaves - his personal guard, his wife (wives?), his children, some non-slave servants, a kitchen staff, etc.

 

[palleomortis]

Kill the slave drivers first, then build off the people that have ten slaves and no servants (cheaper, more people would choose that catagory), build and build, train them all as assassins, move in like an army of fridgin' ninjas or somthin'

 

[palleomortis]

The main thing I am saying is that If the players play their card right, then they should be able to amass an avarage army, or at least a few batallions, befor the other find out. But, if your lucky, they will wind up staging an all out war and get them selfs in the trouble that every dm love.

 

[Celebrim]

Well then it's easier, all you have to do is go from place to place. With the slaves greatly outnumbering the masters, then it will be a simple deal of mulitple assassinations befor you have amassed an army of followers.

I don't quite understand what you are saying, but you seem to be suggesting that if you kill a slaves master and free him, that he'll be so grateful that he'll be willing to fight for you to the death.

I would be very surprised indeed if this was always the case. Each particular would differ from slave to slave. Lawfully aligned slaves from a culture that accepts slaves are just as likely to fight to the death for thier masters, and even those with no particular love of thier masters might not see the fact that there master was a hard man (or woman) as reason enough to kill him. Remember, in many cases the slave will see himself and be seen as part of the family, and this is especially true if they are born into the family. Consider that the antebellum South's slave culture is widely regarded as one of the most degrading in history, and yet I happen to know many cases even then where newly freed slaves begged thier former owners to let them stay on with the family as hired hands and in fact did so. This may seem strange to us modern folks, but its probably not historically unusual. And even among slaves that see the death of thier master and their freedom as good things, most aren't going to be in general wanting to do anything more but head for the hills or home.

Unless you've got someone with a +30 or better Diplomacy skill, don't expect your actions to be treated by the society at large - even by the slaves - as anything more than random acts of terrorism with occasionally fortutious consequences. See John Brown, for example.

 

[boredgremlin]

Lol in real life you could probably have a huge slave army and a an army of trained and well equipped regulars outnumbered 4 to 1. And the regulars would most likely chop them to pieces.
In D&D this would be an army of slaves made up of 1st level commoners with a few experts and even the leaders would likely still be commoners or experts of 2nd or 3rd level all with padded armor and improvised weapons. The regular army would be warriors of 1st or 2nd level with officers who were between 3rd and 6th level. Or even officers who were regular fighters. Likely all with scale mail, shields and longswords. And likely supported by archers and a troop of heavy cavalry.
The slaves likely wouldnt have any clerics because priests were usually the upper class in society and it sounds like most of your priests will be of this evil god. So the slaves will have no healers and all the preists would probably make it a holy war and do thier best to help quell the uprising.
Wizards are often also the wealthy upper crust of society and so unlikely to support any revolution that may upset thier place. So they will likely also help the army quell the slave uprising.
The goverment forces will have money for supplies and mercenaries. The slaves will probably be struggling just to eat.
This demonstrates why a slave uprising doesnt work in D&D. Lol and why they rarely worked in the real world either.

 

[Dr. Strangemonkey]

Unless you've got someone with a +30 or better Diplomacy skill, don't expect your actions to be treated by the society at large - even by the slaves - as anything more than random acts of terrorism with occasionally fortutious consequences. See John Brown, for example.

Yeah, so Spartacus as a counter-example would have had a +30 diplomacy check then?

 

[Celebrim]

Yeah, so Spartacus as a counter-example would have had a +30 diplomacy check then?

Well, I wouldn't want to peg him with an exact number, but yeah, he certainly seems to have been very charismatic. He also managed to create an aura of success due to the very badly managed Roman responce to the revolt in its early days. Most slave revolts got to nothing like the scale of the Spartacus revolt, and all the big ones occurred in the Late Republic when Rome was at its maximum rate of expansion. Rome during this period had a tendency to take whole populations (in the 10's and 100's of thousands) into slavery and send them back to Italy and Sicily to work the big farms that fed the army. So during the time of the big three revolts, you had really large slave subcultures of Greeks or Gauls living in Italy that did not consider themselves Roman the way the same Greek or Gaul might have one or two hundred years later.

I'd guess that as the Marius reforms of the army began to really have thier impact, and more and more of the empire began to see themselves as Roman, the difficulty of raising up a revolt on the level of the Spartacus revolt got alot harder. As the army became less and less centralized, the need for the big plantations declined, and associated practice of hauling populations off to Italy as part of the booty of war diminished. Certainly no big slave revolts ever happened again.