Metals, Salts, and Slaves

For our last day in Rome our class go to go check out the Vatican City. This was one of my favorite places we went because of all the historical artifacts and beautiful architecture. Here's a few of my favorite things I got to see.

However, one thing dawned on me while I was taking in all the beautiful pieces of art. None of what we see today would have been able to be built if not for the use of slaves. Slavery is a horrible time in history, but is important to study for better knowledge of how society was structured.

Someone could have become a slave one of two ways. The first was you could be sold into slavery by your family if they were impoverished. The second way is to get kidnapped and taken to a different territory to work. Often times crews of men from Italy's west coast area would sail to Egypt to plunder random farms. They would kill all the men and capture the women and children and sell them into slavery. Sometimes merchant ships would get over taken by pirates and the captured crew would be sold into slavery.

Pirates were a big problem for many traders throughout the Mediterranean. This caused quite an economic crisis for these costal regions because they were never able to receive their trade shipments. What these coastal villages had to do was to get all the pirates to stop raiding ships in their area so the trade ships could get through. These raiders were convinced to comply with these rules because whenever they go into a port they were treated with great hospitality and given many gifts. The raiders were even sometimes given slaves as assurance that they would leave the traders alone.

Some of the important items that were heavily traded in this area were metals, salts, and even slaves. The metals were mostly used for military purposes, crafting weapons and armor. The salt was used for food preservation and to create coloring for textiles. Textiles became a huge industry during this time and usually the women were the ones in charge of sewing all the fabric. However, the workload became too great and slaves were very sought after to keep production steady.