From Status to Contract: Slaves as Business Agents in the Medieval Mediterranean

The emergence of contractual risk-sharing partnerships known as the commenda in Europe during the Early and Central Middle Ages has long been considered pivotal to the economic transformations associated with the medieval “commercial revolution.” These contracts have been dubbed “a medieval innovation of the highest importance [that] contributed greatly to the fast growth of maritime trade,” and portrayed as a radical improvement upon late Roman economic practices. This paper will argue that the emergence of these contractual risk-sharing tools in the post-Roman Mediterranean did not, in fact, immediately displace older techniques for limiting liability. It will trace the long persistence of the Roman approach to managing risk by using enslaved business agents, operating under the legal framework of the peculium, in Byzantium, and identify its parallels in the Islamic world. It will then investigate the factors that prompted the shift from status-based to contract-based forms of commercial agency. Drawing on the earliest business contracts from Venice and Genoa, it will ask how and why between the eleventh and twelfth centuries, business practices in these European entrepôts shifted away from open-ended general partnerships and simple loans and toward more clearly defined and limited arrangements made in writing. I propose that this change was linked to the broader breakdown of institutional infrastructures of public record-keeping, courts, and enforceable norms in early medieval Europe, where written documents came to function as the operating system of social arrangements. Highlighting the significance of this lack or functioning state structures to the spread of contract-based commercial practices helps reframe the medieval coup of the risk-sharing contract as an adaptation to unique sociopolitical conditions rather than as a triumph of a superior organizational technology.