Slavery and Forms of Dependence in Europe
(from the 3rd millennium BCE to the end of the 20th century)

The history of Europe, viewed through the prism of bondage, unfolds as a continuous chain of changing forms of coercion.
From the moment the first communities began taking captives, to the time when borders replaced chains and words became crimes – enslavement remained one of the deep folds of civilization.

Early Ages

In the 3rd–1st millennia BCE, as the first city‑states arose in the Aegean and along the Adriatic, the idea of a human‑object appeared.
Fragments preserved in Homer, Herodotus and Aristotle show that war captives and debtors became slaves in households or mines, forming a few percent of early societies.

Greece and Rome

In classical Athens, there were about 5–10 slaves per citizen; in the Roman Empire their number reached 7–10 million – roughly 20–30 percent of the population.
The human trade was fed by captives from wars in Gaul, Spain, Greece, Germania and the Balkans.
Justinian law allowed manumissio (manumission), but the children of slaves remained in bondage.
From the Latin sclavus (“Slav‑slave”) comes today’s English word slave.

Early Middle Ages

After the fall of Rome, the slave economy was replaced by a system of bound peasants.
At the same time, the 8th–11th centuries saw the Slavic slave trade running from Prague through Kyiv to Byzantium and on to Arabia.
Arabic and Latin chronicles suggest that hundreds of thousands of people were sold on Mediterranean markets.

Feudalism and Serfdom

From the 12th to the 17th century, around 30–50 percent of Europeans lived under serfdom.
Peasants were bound to the land, obliged to deliver tribute, and forbidden to change their place of residence.
It was the longest‑lasting model of dependent labor on the continent.

The Age of Empires and Serfdom

Between the 15th and 19th centuries, Central and Eastern Europe became zones of mass serfdom: in Russia about 22–23 million peasants, in the rest of Central Europe 3–5 million.
Abolition came late – in France 1794, in Austria 1848, in Russia only in 1861.

The Empire of Compulsion

From the 13th century eastward, a model of dependence on authority took root, shaped by the traditions of the Mongol khanates and Tsardom.
Ivan IV “the Terrible” called his subjects “slaves of the Tsar,” merging the mystique of divine power with total subservience of society.
From this model grew an empire driven by forced labor and fear.
In the 19th century serfdom gave way to industrial colonization; in the 20th – to the Gulag system (18 million prisoners, 1.5–2 million deaths) and the Holodomor (3.5–7 million victims of deliberate famine).
Altogether, the imperial apparatus of compulsion across Russia and its satellites claimed around 35–40 million lives.

After 1945 – The Iron Curtain

Following World War II, half of Europe – from the Baltic to the Balkans – fell under the Soviet bloc.
Formally free citizens were denied the right to travel, speak, or act against the will of the state.
Roughly 170 million people lived in a system that controlled speech, work and information.
European bondage took a new form: not a chain, but a border; not serfdom, but the “citizen of the people” – a person who still had to think as they were told.

Numerical Summary

Period   Estimated number enslaved (million)   Share of population   Sources 
 Antiquity (Aegean, Rome)   10 – 15   20–30 %   Finley, Scheidel 
 8th–11th c. Slavic trade   0.5 – 1   2–4 %   Arabic and Latin chronicles 
 12th–17th c. Feudalism   20 – 30   25–35 %   Cambridge Economic History 
 14th–18th c. Ottoman and Crimean practices   2 – 3   2–3 %   Fisher, Vernadsky 
 15th–19th c. Central European serfdom   25 – 30   15–25 %   Davies, Hosking 
 13th–20th c. Empire of Compulsion   35 – 40   15–20 %   Conquest, Applebaum 
 1945–1991 Iron Curtain   160 – 180   ≈ 50 % of Europe   Davies, Hosking 
 Total    ≈ 100 million (non‑overlapping epochs); over 250 million overall historically