Human–animal entanglements in the early medieval European slave trade: re-reading the Raffelstetten customs regulations

Abstract

Frankish customs regulations recorded in the tenth-century ‘Inquest on the tolls of Raffelstetten’ have long formed a cornerstone of traditional arguments about slavery's role in the early medieval European economic revival. This paper experiments with the application of a more-than-human lens to the Raffelstetten record and other evidence to generate new insights into the intimate experience of enslavement and the interspecies networks of relations that shaped the slave trade and slave markets in early medieval Europe. Human and animal entanglements, as revealed in the Raffelstetten record, determined how enslaved people experienced capture, transport, and sale.