During the late 1960s, when I was a young undergraduate student in history at St. Paul’s College at the University of Manitoba in western Canada, I took a seminar course in the history of the Crusades, in which I had been interested since my youth when I had read Sir Walter Scott, Harold Lamb and other authors who had painted these medieval events in such exciting colors: “…Iron men and saints, off to liberate Jerusalem! Richard the Lionheart, brave to the point of foolishness; the victorious Sultan Saladin, noble, and generous to the vanquished.”
However, my instructor in this course, Prof. L.A. Desmond, who quickly became aware of my East European background, did not assign to me a topic on the Crusades to the Holy Land, as I had expected, but rather on “the Crusade against the Slavs” in the mid-12th century, a topic in which he thought I might be interested because of my ethnic background.
But he was mistaken about this, for I was not enamored by what I then believed to be (perhaps in error) its unspoken but underlying juxtaposition of “Western civilization” versus “Eastern barbarism.” I much preferred to work on the history of the Greek-speaking Byzantine Empire with its great capital at Constantinople, called Tsargrad by the Slavs, and later, Istanbul by the Turks, which I thought was more than the equal in civilization to the western Europe of the Dark Ages.
Be this as it may, at one point discussion did turn to the origin of the English name for an unfree person, a bondsman, or “slave,” as opposed to a half-free person, or “serf,” tied to the land. (Serfs were much more common than slaves in medieval Europe.) I was astounded, offended and incredulous when Prof. Desmond informed us that this ostensibly ancient and accepted English word, “slave,” was not derived originally from Anglo-Saxon, Latin or French, but rather could be traced through some of these languages to the ethnic term “Slav,” the name of the predominant family of peoples of Eastern Europe, to which group belong today’s Ukrainians, Russians, Poles, Czechs, Serbs and many others.
I did not quite know how to answer Prof. Desmond’s assertion and put the matter aside. It did not come up again until several years later, when I had already switched my main interests from the history of medieval Europe to a more modern period, and from the Latin and Germanic West to the Greek and Slavic East.
In studying the modern history of the Slavic peoples, particularly the Ukrainians, this question of the origin of the English word “slave” did not immediately resurface. But over the years, I learned that there were two predominant forms which the name for these peoples and their languages took in the history books. Some books referred to these peoples as the “Slavic” peoples, and to their tongues as the “Slavic” languages; while others, most of them older books, referred to them as the “Slavonic” peoples, and to their tongues as the “Slavonic” languages. In the U.S., the former was predominant; in England, at least in earlier times, the latter was more common. In Canada, there was historically a mixture of the two.
Of course, none of this explained where the term “Slav” had come from in the first place. But I later learned that there are two popular theories or “folk etymologies” for this name. The first, favored by many of the early leaders, or “national awakeners” of the Slavic peoples in the 19th century, proposed that the Slavs got their name from their word for glory – “slava.” Thus the Slavic peoples are “the glorious ones.” One can easily see how appealing this etymology was to those early Slavic awakeners who wished to raise the prestige and cultural level of their peoples on the general European scene.
The second theory, one more favored by philologists, or language specialists, proposed that this ethno-linguistic group, who variously called themselves “Slaviany” or “Sloviany” in their own languages, proposed that their name came from their common term for “word” – “slovo.” That is, the Slaviany or Sloviany are the peoples who have the “word” and can understand each other. This was contrasted to their neighbors, the Germans, who were the “Nimtsy” or “Nemtsy”; that is, the people “who cannot speak the word.”
Now these theories are all well and good, but they cannot be absolutely proven one way or the other. The true origins of the name “Slav” are lost in the mists of time.
By contrast, however, the explanation of the origin of the English word for unfree person, or bondsman, or “slave,” is quite different and can be traced back through written sources to its very origin in early medieval times, the so-called Dark Ages.
It first appeared in medieval Latin in Germany as the word “sclavus” and was used to refer to those prisoners of war taken among the Slavic peoples and used as slaves in Western Europe. (This word, “sclavus,” was indeed an innovation, for the ancient Latin word for slave had been “servus”.) The word “sclavus” was used in Germany for a while, but after a couple of hundred years, the term more or less dropped out of use. It was revived, however, by Italian slave merchants in Crimea on the north shore of the Black Sea, who, from the 1300s on, shipped people captured by the Mongols or Tatars in the Ukrainian steppe region, across the Mediterranean to Italy and North Africa. (This Black Sea Slave Trade, as it is called, was, in fact, a very big business in its time.) From medieval Latin, the word entered French as “esclave,” German as “Sklave,” and finally English as “slave.” So, it turned out, Prof, Desmond knew exactly what he was talking about.
But the story does not end there. In Italy, the Latin word “sclavus” eventually became the Italian “schiavo.” Before modern times, it was considered polite to use this word in the phrase “I am your slave!” (sono vestro schiavo) when greeting, hosting or saying farewell to someone. Eventually, this contracted into “ciao” (or “chow” as it may be spelled in English) and spread all over southern Europe. I first heard it extensively used when I visited Spain in 1969 as a young university student and hitchhiker. Today it is known all over the world.
When I hear this word today, however, something inside me tightens up, especially when it is spoken by my fellow Canadians of Ukrainian, Polish or other Slavic background. I understand that the people using it usually want to be either friendly or polite, but still, I cannot completely forget its dark origin, and I myself use it as little as possible.