Studies on Slavery, in Easy Lessons

by John Fletcher

The precise place from which they originated, the causes of such emigration, and the successive impulses that pushed them westward, have now, for centuries, been buried beneath the rubbish of the emigrants themselves and the general ignorance that overspread the events of that age.

But there are some facts that assign to them a place among the Hindoo tribes. Brezowski, speaking the Sclavonic of his day, in his travels eastward, was enabled to understand the language of the country as far east as Cochin-China; and scholars of the present day find numerous Indian roots in this language. A similarity of religious rites is to be noticed between the ancient Sclavonians and the Hindoos. They burned their dead, and wives ascended the funeral piles of their husbands. Their principal gods were Bog, and Seva, his wife. They worshipped good spirits called Belbog, and bad spirits called Czarnebog.

These hordes overspread the countries from the Black Sea to the Icy Ocean; and, in their turn, were forced westward by similar hordes of Wends, Veneti, Antes, Goths, and Huns. Thus attacked and pushed in the rear, they poured themselves upon the inhabitants of the more western regions, who, more warlike, and with superior arms, put them to death by thousands, until the earth was covered with the slain. Thus fleeing from death, they met it in front, until the nations then occupying the north and east of Europe, satiated and sickened by their slaughter, seized upon their persons as slaves, and converted them into beasts of burden. Their numbers exceeding every possible use, the captors exported them to adjoining countries as an article of traffic; and the Venetians, being then a commercial people, enriched themselves by this traffic for many years. All continental Europe was thus filled by this race, from the Adriatic to the Northern Ocean. Thus their national appellation became through Europe the significant term for a man in bondage; and although in their own language their name signified fame and distinction, yet in all the world besides, it has superseded the Hebrew, the Greek, and Roman terms, to signify the condition of man in servitude. Thus the Dutch and Belgians say slaaf; Germans, sclave; Danes, slave and sclave; Swedes, slaf; French, esclave; the Celtic French, &c., sclaff; Italians, schiavo; Spanish, esclavo; Portuguese, escravo; Gaelic, slabhadh; and the English, slave.

Nor was this signification inappropriate to their native condition. For these countless hordes were the absolute property of their leaders or kings, who were hereditary among them,—as was, also, their condition of bondage.

The Romans called their language Servian, from the Roman word servus, a bond-man; and from the same cause, also, a district of country low down on the Danube, Servia, which name it retains to this day. This country belongs to Turkey, from whence they took the name serf. This term has been borrowed from thence, by the Sclavonic Russians, to signify a man in bondage. The whole number of their descendants is now estimated at 100,000,000; and notwithstanding their amalgamation has identified them with the nations with whom they were thus intermingled, yet a thousand years have not ended their condition of bondage in Russia, and 40,000,000 are accounted only as an approximation to the number that still remain in servitude in the north of Europe and Asia.

“The unquestionable evidence of language,” says the author of the Decline and Fall, “attests the descent of the Bulgarians from the original stock of the Sclavonian, or more properly Slavonian, race; and the kindred bands of Servians, Bosnians, Rascians, Croatians, Walachians, followed either the standard or example of the leading tribes, from the Euxine to the Adriatic, in the state of captives, or subjects, or allies, or enemies; in the Greek empire, they overspread the land: and the national appellation of the Slaves has been degraded by chance or malice from the signification of glory to that of servitude. Chalcocondyles, a competent judge, affirms the identity of the language of the Dalmatians, Bosnians, Servians, Bulgarians, Poles, (De Rebus Turcitis, 1. x. p. 283,) and elsewhere of the Bohemians, (1. ii. p. 38.) The same author has marked the separate idiom of the Hungarians.

See the work of John Christopher de Jordan, De Originibus Sclavicis, Vindobonæ, 1745, in four parts. Jordan subscribes to the well-known and probable derivation from slava, laus, gloria, a word of familiar use in the different dialects and parts of speech, and which forms the termination of the most illustrious names. De Originibus Sclavicis, part i. p. 40, part iv. p. 101, 102.

This conversion of a national into an appellative name appears to have arisen in the eighth century, in the oriental France, where the princes and bishops were rich in Sclavonian captives, not of the Bohemian (exclaims Jordan) but of Sorabian race. From thence the word was extended to general use, to the modern languages, and even to the style of the last Byzantines. (See the Greek and Latin Glossaries of Ducange; also Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vol. iv. p. 38.)

The Moors, with whom the early Christians in the south of Europe had so many and frequent contentions, at this day differ from all the other African races, in their physical and mental development;—in person, black, with the straight hair of the Arab, whom they exceed in stature and intellect.

The Arabs are admitted to be an amalgamation of the descendants of Shem, of Canaan, and Misrain. Into the particulars of their admixture, it will be as useless to inquire as it would be into the paternity of the goats on their mountains.