The comparison between past and present was only one aspect of the efforts made by early modern writers to classify different kinds of servant. With regard to these classifications, which I have also analysed elsewhere,
1 Raffaella Sarti, ‘Who are Servants? Defining Domestic Service in Western Europe (16th–21st Centuries)’, in Pasleau, Schopp and Sarti (eds), Proceedings of the Servant Project, vol. 2, pp. 3–59. I focus here on two issues: the inclusion of slaves among servants, and the characterisation of the differences between free and unfree servants. The opposition between free and unfree servants implies a clear-cut dualism, and some authors classify servants accordingly. ‘You can have two different kinds of servant at your service’, explained the Jesuit Fulvio Fontana, at the beginning of the eighteenth century. ‘You can have servants whose condition is that of slaves, or you can have free servants who serve in exchange for a salary.’
2 Fulvio Fontana, Il padrone instruito (Milan–Bologna, 1710), p. 31. Yet such a dualism is absent in many other early modern texts: several authors suggest complex classifications that include different degrees of dependency, classifying a large variety of situations under ‘umbrella terms’ such as servitude (
servitù) and servant (
servo), as can be illustrated with examples showing the spread of such classifications in a large variety of texts written over a long period.
The Tuscan physician and writer Francesco Tommasi, the author of a manual on household management (1580), distinguished ‘natural servitude’ – that is, the servitude ‘by which ignorant people serve the learned, and the weak the strong’; ‘legal and positive servitude’, according to which those who are made ‘weak, and defeated by force serve the winners, and the more powerful’; and ‘mercenary’ servitude, which was more complex than the others because ‘some servants serve for wages, but not out of good will’; others ‘out of good will, and not for reward’ and others ‘neither out of good will nor for reward’ and therefore resemble ‘donkeys who are not handled except with a stick’.
3 Francesco Tommasi, Reggimento del padre di famiglia (Florence, 1580), pp. 198–201.Similarly, the Croatian philosopher and politician Nicolò Vito di Gozze (1540–1610), also the author of a book on the management of the family (1589), argued that servants were of ‘varying and different kinds’: ‘servants by nature’, ‘servants by law’, ‘servants by remuneration’ and servants ‘by virtue or pleasure’. The servants by nature were the ‘barbarous and uncouth people’ living in the countryside. The servants by law were the slaves. The servants by remuneration were free people who placed themselves in the service of a master: among them, some served in exchange for board and clothing only; others received an additional salary; others worked ‘for remuneration only’, seeing to all their needs by themselves. Finally, there were those who served not ‘for money or out of compulsion, but for mere and sincere pleasure, feeling great affection towards their master’s virtue’. The ones in this position were called servants, but they were ‘not truly so’, as they were, rather, ‘courtiers’.
4 Nicolò Vito di Gozze [Nikola Vitov Gučetić], Governo della famiglia (Venice, 1589), pp. 100–16.Such classifications imply a complex understanding of the servants’ conditions: some servants were people naturally unable to be free and thus destined to serve; others – those whom we would define as slaves – were forced to serve; others served (more or less) voluntarily in exchange for a reward, others out of good will or virtue, or for pleasure. The aforementioned authors strived to distinguish different cases, creating ordered taxonomies. They did not suggest binary classifications opposing free and unfree servants; rather, they described different degrees of dependence and freedom and different reasons why people might serve.
This might sound surprising if we consider that in classical Roman law there was a clear-cut distinction between free and unfree people (
liberi et servi), and Roman law was a reference for medieval and early modern jurists in a large part of Europe, although within the juridical pluralism common at the time.
5 Beatrice Pasciuta, ‘“Homines aut liberi sunt aut servi”. Riflessione giuridica e interventi normativi sulla condizione servile fra medioevo ed età moderna’, in Giovanna Fiume (ed.), Schiavitù religione e libertà nel Mediterraneo tra medioevo ed età moderna, special issue of Incontri mediterranei, 17 (2008), pp. 48–60; Alice Rio, Slavery After Rome, 500–1100 (Oxford, 2017), p. 1. In fact, even though the distinction free/unfree was important for some authors, such as Ippolito Bonacossa,
6 Ippolito Bonacossa (De servis vel famulis tractatus (Venice, 1575)) makes clear that his treatise is about the ‘homo liber’ who, because of his poverty, is forced to work as a servant. from the Middle Ages jurists, too, were complicating the free/unfree people opposition, and their classifications could be even more complex than those described above.
7 Pasciuta, ‘“Homines aut liberi sunt aut servi”’. Jurist and cardinal Giambattista De Luca (1614–1683), the author of an influential legal text (1673), acknowledged a difference between free and unfree people. Yet this was embedded in a complex and far from dualistic classification. He distinguished between personal, real and mixed servitude. Personal servitude could be active or passive: active servitude was servitude seen from the vantage point of the individual who enjoyed service; ‘passive personal servitude’ was the servitude of an individual forced to serve someone else. According to De Luca, there were several types of the latter: a first kind implied a radical change in the legal status of the person who served because such a person lost his/her freedom and became a ‘servant in perpetuity’. De Luca (who, unlike many other jurists, wrote his treatise in Italian, not in Latin) made it clear that, in Italian, the name for this kind of serving person was
schiavo, slave (in legal books written in Latin, the language might create some confusion: the Latin term
servus meant slave, whereas the Italian word
servo was increasingly used in relation to ‘free’ servants; in relation to unfree servants, the term
schiavo was used, a term that originally was an adjective referring to people from the Slavic regions).
8 Grégoire, De la domesticité, p. 26 and Luigi Cibrario, Della schiavitù e del servaggio e specialmente dei servi agricoltori (Milan, 1868), vol. 1, p. 2; Charles Verlinden, ‘L’origine de sclavus = esclave’, Archivium Latinitatis Medii Aevi, 17 (1942), 97–128; Charles Verlinden, L’esclavage dans l’Europe médiévale, vol. 2 (Bruges, 1977), pp. 797–8 and 999–1010 (annexe I: Encore sur les origines de sclavus = esclave); Didier Bondue, De «Servus» à «Sclavus». La fin de l’esclavage antique (371–918) (Paris, 2011).According to De Luca, another kind of personal passive servitude was that of a free person who was forced to perform some service for a master. He or she could be forced to work because of a contract (
locatio operarum, in Italian ‘contratto di locazione delle sue opere’) and, in this case, according to De Luca, his or her condition was legally called, in Italian,
famulato (in Latin
famulus meant servant). Terms such as
famulo,
famiglio and
familiare were certainly used in Italian, yet servants who served on a contractual basis were defined in many other ways, too. De Luca added that an individual could be forced to render some services to a master also because of the ‘quality’ (i.e. the ‘status’) of the master himself. Such was the case of the servitude of children towards their fathers, or that of vassals towards their lords.
9 Giovanni Battista De Luca, Il Dottor Volgare, vol. 4 (Rome, 1673), pp. 7–25. De Luca’s definition was extremely wide and ambiguous: servants, slaves, children and vassals were all involved in some kind of servitude. Furthermore, he considered the members of the regular clergy (monks, friars, nuns) similar to servants because, if they acquired something, it belonged not to them but to their monasteries.
10 Ibid., p. 16.Other authors, too, distinguished different types of servant and, while trying to elaborate comprehensive classifications, included under the heading of
servo (or similar ones) people ranging from slaves to the pope,
Servus servorum dei (the servant of God’s servants). As recalled by several authors, according to the Gospel, Christ came ‘not to be served, but to serve’ (Matthew 20:28; Mark 10:45). ‘Although in ancient times the title of “servant” was disgraceful, once it had been assumed by Christ himself it became very honoured’, don Pio Rossi (1581–1667) claimed, and this was the reason why it was used by the pope, too.
11 Pio Rossi, Convito morale, vol. 1 (Venice, 1639), p. 433. Rossi argued that even the king should be a servant, providing a representation that is often seen as an eighteenth-century elaboration, but was actually already present in ancient times: ‘The good Prince’, who was ‘entrusted with the wellbeing of his people, must serve all of his subjects’.
12 Ibid. Rossi wrote that Agamemnon thought that he was a servant and slave of his vassals. According to Seneca, De clementia, I, 8, 1: ista [= the role of the emperor] servitus est, non imperium.Such an extended and blurred notion of servant might appear confusing to our eyes. It created problems and conflicts in early modern times, too.
13 Sarti, ‘Who are Servants?’ Yet, it was consistent with the
Weltanschauung prevalent in early modern European societies, which generally represented themselves as networks of people involved in dependency and service relationships. Almost everybody might be considered a servant. However, this did not imply that all those who might be defined as servants were equal – rather the opposite, as inequality was at the very core of most early modern societies.
14 Sarti, Servo e padrone, vol. 1, passim; Sarti, ‘Who are Servants?’ A similar point is made by George Boulukus, ‘Social Liberty and Social Death: Conceiving of Slavery beyond the Black Atlantic’, in Srividhya Swaminathan and Adam R. Beach (ed.), Invoking Slavery in the Eighteenth-Century British Imagination (Farnham–Burlington, 2013), pp. 175–90.