who are european and what did they do to africans?
Before New Globe expansion, concepts of race and racial hierarchies did not define who could and could non exist enslaved in Western Europe. Instead, the spread of Christianity in the Early on Middle Ages (from the fifth to 10th centuries) marked the boundaries of slavery throughout Europe. Historian David Brion Davis argues that the Judeo-Christian belief in a monotheistic God who rules over a homogenous group of people eventually served to prevent European Christians from enslaving 1 some other. As more western Europeans converted to Christianity, this unified religious identity enabled the decline of slavery in Europe, merely immune other rigid social and labor hierarchies to remain. By 1500, European Christians believed slavery was a more devastating penalisation than execution for criminals and prisoners of state of war. However, European Christians did non object to the enslavement of non-Christians, peculiarly with ongoing conflicts between Christians and non-Christians within Europe, in the nearby Islamic Earth, and afterwards in West and Primal Africa (which also included Muslim regions) and the Americas.
In northwestern Europe, non-Christian (or pagan) Vikings regularly raided coastal towns for slaves from the fifth to the eleventh centuries. The Norman Conquest of England in 1066 helped protect some areas from these slave raids, simply tensions and conflicts continued between Christian and non-Christian Europeans. Even after many Irish gaelic Celts converted to Christianity starting in the fifth century, English Christians accounted them inferior, based on the suspicion that their religious practices still contained non-Christian rituals. This sense of Christian superiority helped the English justify Irish colonization in the centuries to come.
The Christian Crusades of the Loftier and Belatedly Middle Ages waged against Islamic kingdoms in the eastern Mediterranean, western asia, and northern Africa, also helped form a segmentation between Christians and Muslims. The expansion of Islam in the fifteenth century through the Ottoman Empire (which encompassed parts of southeastern Europe, North Africa, Western asia, and the Heart East by the sixteenth century) further fueled religious conflicts before the trans-Atlantic trade. In improver, from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries, Barbary corsairs (or pirates) raided European coastal towns and enslaved European Christians for Islamic slave merchandise markets. Ultimately, even with the protection of church law, European Christians were familiar with the threat of enslavement.
In response to these conflicts, a series of fifteenth century popes argued for the enslavement of non-Christians equally "an musical instrument for Christian conversion." Co-ordinate to church constabulary, Christians were protected from slavery, but Muslim "infidels" and not-Christian "pagans" were acceptable to enslave. Similarly, in Islamic constabulary, only not-Muslims could be enslaved. While Jewish populations living in Christian-dominated Western Europe were protected from slavery in the Middle Ages, widespread anti-Semitic prejudices amidst European Christians led to Jewish persecution, exile, tearing massacres, and even accusations of causing the Black Death.
In the New World, the criteria for enslavement increasingly shifted from non-Christian to non-European. As Europeans began emphasizing religious, racial, and ethnic differences betwixt themselves and American Indians and Africans, this purlieus moved farther, from not-European to non-"white," peculiarly to enable the enslavement of "blackness" Africans and their African American descendants.
The recovery of classical Greek texts before and during the European Renaissance also provided philosophical and theological justification for a Christian social hierarchy that included slavery. For case, the Greek philosopher Aristotle (384 BC to 322 BC) produced writings near slavery that influenced prominent Christian theologians such as Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century, and later provided legal and moral justifications for implementing slavery based on a racial hierarchy in the sixteenth century. Aristotle argued that the chief and slave human relationship was natural and that some are marked out for subjection, others for rule. Aquinas built on Aristotle's statement to assert that the slave was the concrete instrument of his owner. This condition allowed a slave owner to claim everything his or her slaves possessed and produced, including their children. Aquinas attributed the plight of enslavement to sin and the inevitable weather of a sinful world. Other theologians before and during the Renaissance emphasized Aristotle's belief in a natural order, but asserted that some men were slaves by their very nature.
Based on this evolving theology, European Christians initially saw not-Christians every bit "natural slaves." With New World expansion, however, Europeans came to primarily acquaintance Africans with the establishment of slavery. To explain this racial shift from a Judeo-Christian worldview, sixteenth and seventeenth century theologians merged Aristotle's theory of "natural slaves" with the biblical Curse of Ham. According to this interpretation, Africans are the descendants of Ham and Canaan, who Noah cursed into slavery for Ham'southward transgressions (Ham is Noah's son and Canaan'due south father). Though the Bible does not mention race or skin color in this narrative, according to these sixteenth and seventeenth century theologians, Africans inherited Ham and Canaan's expletive of slavery. By the nineteenth century, pro-slavery advocates in the United states of america connected to employ this misleading biblical justification, every bit well equally Aristotle's theory of natural order and New World racial prejudices, to defend their back up of slavery.
Source: https://ldhi.library.cofc.edu/exhibits/show/africanpassageslowcountryadapt/introductionatlanticworld/europnea_christianity_and_slav
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