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Found something from a link posted in the other slavery thread here:
Looking at that, I was mostly correct regarding Islamic slavery and that of the Americas (which makes sense, since I've actually studied those), but not aware of the extent of slavery at other times or places, or of it's virulence in some of them (which also makes sense since my knowledge of those is spotty). Huh. Yu learn something new every day.
Anyone willing to take the Encyclopedia Brittanica as a source, and more interested in being informed than arguing, should take a look.
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As applied to Golarion, I'd suspect that worshippers (even lapsed ones, like most Qadirans) of Good deities would likely follow the Judaeo-Christian/Islamic cultural model of seeing slaves as people who've simply fallen on hard times, while those who venerate, say, Zon-Kuthon or Asmodeus might favor the idea of them as nothing more than animals.
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with that service usually at least bordering on duties we would consider slave labor.Such as?
Being forbidden from marrying except as your patron allowed? Working for him without compensation? Having him decide how much food and water you get? Able to sell you to a different patron on a whim?
Serfs (in the medieval definition of the world) even if not slaves were sold together with the pots of terrain on which they worked.
Often they had to get the permission of the landowner to marry.And they had to work for the landowner for most of their time (with no remuneration) in exchange for the "privilege" to cultivate a portion of the land for themselves.
They were not slaves but the weren't freemen either.
About the low survival rate working in the mines, it has always been a problem. It wasn't a direct effect of purposeful mistreatments with the intent to kill (the mistreatments were used to control the slavers when needed), but with the unsafe and unsanitary working conditions.
Silicosis, heavy metal poisoning, low quality food (not purposeful starving), bad food preservation, contaminated water, all common problems with mining till very recent times (and somewhere even today) were all factors that were enhanced by being a slave.
Add that a seriously ill slave was only a liability for the mine owner and was often killed and you get the horrible death rate.
Being chained to a oar was almost as much deadly.
Generally (and it is a broad generalization) the people sent to the mines and galleys as slaves were the worst criminals and dangerous war prisoners. Only if the mine owner had need for more "warm bodies" they resorted to buy them from slavers.
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Yes, in varying forms; don't forget the tradition that your master/king/patron could choose take your brides virginity from her before you married her, which was still around in the French Revolution, even if it was rarely practiced at that point.
"Jus primae noctis" is almost certainly a myth in the depicted form.
Generally it was simply the right by the local lord to require a payment to be allowed to marry.
Yes, in varying forms; don't forget the tradition that your master/king/patron could choose take your brides virginity from her before you married her, which was still around in the French Revolution, even if it was rarely practiced at that point."Jus primae noctis" is almost certainly a myth in the depicted form.
Generally it was simply the right by the local lord to require a payment to be allowed to marry.
Whether the tradition has been passed down accurately or not does not change that the fact that people bothered to remember it or come up with the idea in the first place. As much I would love history to be purely about facts, perceptions and half truths that survive are often just as important and need to be taken into account. In this case, as you pointed out, even if the tradition that got passed down is partially inaccurate, there are kernels of truth to it, so it is not entirely irrelevant, especially since the popular version that got passed down is the version that has shaped perceptions the most.
Jus primae noctis is a product of the post-medieval imagination. It's right up there with 15 pound broadswords, CHAINmail, knights being helpless when dismounted because their incredibly heavy armor wouldn't allow them to move about easily, a neat and tidy 'feudal system' and all that jazz. It's a legend. There's no actual proof it ever existed.
That being said, Golarion is clearly not Medieval Christendom. It's a made-up world with elves, dragons, magic items, etc. If someone wants to incorporate ahistorical stuff, go right ahead! It's not Earth. It's not even a fantasy historical version of Earth. YMMV
Real or not in a strictly historical sense, it is real enough in people's minds to be able to shape their perceptions, so is not entirely invalid. Most people don't really stop to check the validity of their sources, so a legend like the one mentioned often gets as much weight as actual historical fact. It's presence is also important when you go to shift through the inevitable cultural static; historians, professional or amateur, can dismiss it easily enough, but they still have to acknowledge its presence because not everyone dismisses it that easily.
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Thank you all for your posts. it has been a good read.
Mr Jacobs comments earlier were very illuminating ( no pun intended). It will give me a better
handle on how to play my Qadiran cleric of Sarenrae in PFS...Imam Gabrael al Katheer.
I was just curious what attitudes might be for a worshiper of Sarenrae in a land with slavery.
The varying degrees of militentness and corruption across the faith makes allot of sense as does
the relative position of the church of Sarenrae and the State of the Kelish Padishah Empire.
Thank you al for your thoughts .
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The prima noctis is an urban legend. And from a different time period than the classical Mediterranean one in any case. Patrons/kings/lords were not allowed to take the virginity of their clients' brides.
Their slaves, however? Sure.
In the case of racial slavery, there's the precedent of the old 'one drop' rule (one drop of blood makes you black, and therefore a slave, even if 7/8ths of your ancestors were white), leading to slave owners in cultures that are slowly restricting the import of slavery (resulting in sky-high prices to replenish 'worn-out stock'), raping their female slaves, to ensure that they'll have a supply of slaves for the future. It's less likely to work with halfling slaves in Cheliax, but if they've got a number of Ulfen or Varisian or Shoanti or Garundi slaves, the Chels can just 'arrange for them to be with child' to set themselves up with a new generation of slaves on the cheap (at the 'cost' of having to wait six to eight years before you can send them into the fields).
Haiti had a sub-population of half-white slaves, who were generally put in charge of the full-blooded slaves, as if being half-white made them better than their darker parents, but still condemned to never be free.
Even after they rose up and kicked the French out, the mulattoes remained nominally in charge and were considered higher status, which some scholars argue was the result of the notion of them being 'better' somehow than the pure-blooded peers becoming ingrained in the popular mindset, and others say was just practicality, since they were the only ones who had ever been taught to read, educated in handling money, running a business, etc. for their former masters.
It's certainly not only in Haiti that this sort of thing happened (indeed, raping slaves to make more slaves seems to have been more common in the US South, as abolitionist notions began making getting 'fresh stock' at 'reasonable prices' more and more difficult, a problem they didn't have in Haiti, where abolitionism never really caught on among people who weren't already slaves...), but when slavery, itself already awful, leads to slave-owners raping their slaves so that they can enslave their own children, because it's cheaper than buying a new slave, it sort of justifies the notion that the moral degeneration fed upon itself, and that slavery ruined and dehumanized the slave-owner as surely as the slave.
As long as places like Katapesh seem to be delivering slaves willy-nilly to the markets of the Inner Sea, this sort of thing probably won't be as common. Andorans anti-slavery stance, however, has already begun to result in the freeing of slaves and the sinking of slaving ships, which is going to create market pressure, and incentive to being 'breeding one's own stock,' to make up for the increased difficulty in just ordering slaves to be delivered.
I'm sure the average Eagle Knight would be horrified to know what the 'logical' result of putting a squeeze on the slave market will be....
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Oh god. I just had a horrible follow-up thought to Set's (quite correct) post: Chelaxians find Tieflings useful. Often very useful. But embarrassing, since they mean someone slept with a Devil.
What if they decide to breed their slaves with summoned Devils? It clears up that embarrassment thing, provides a possibly powerful new slave (potentially bred for a specific purpose depending on the devil), and is just generally a useful (if utterly awful) idea. The Half-Fiend results of this could be given authority over other slaves, much like the mulattoes mentioned above, but likely with much more cruel results.
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I feel dirty having thought of this. How would that Eagle Knight feel now, do you think?
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That is not quite correct. Being black or of mixed race did not automatically mean being a slave, not anywhere in the Americas. There were free blacks in British, Spanish, and French colonies from early times. There were free blacks in the antebellum United States- North and South. There were also Indians and whites who were enslaved in some places- no African blood required.
In the case of racial slavery, there's the precedent of the old 'one drop' rule (one drop of blood makes you black, and therefore a slave, even if 7/8ths of your ancestors were white),...
I was thinking of stuff like this.
It is true that being of any specific race or color didn't make one automatically a slave, so I worded that poorly, but there were areas where having *any* of a certain heritage meant that one was denied the rights and privileges reserved to whites.
I don't understand the whole "raping a slave to make more slaves" arguement. Couldn't/didn't slaves reproduce amoung themselves? Other stock does exactly that. Former slave races that are now free people currently reproduced amoung themselves....
"whites" raping slaves, certainly wasn't necessary for the breeding of new slaves, slaves were good enough at that themselves.
More likely, the white master had a case of jungle fever, got drunk, felt like it, was lustful or whatever. It certainly wasn't a matter of 'doing business'.
Slaves had families and reproduced at the same rate everyone else does.
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I don't understand the whole "raping a slave to make more slaves" arguement. Couldn't/didn't slaves reproduce amoung themselves? Other stock does exactly that. Former slave races that are now free people currently reproduced amoung themselves....
"whites" raping slaves, certainly wasn't necessary for the breeding of new slaves, slaves were good enough at that themselves.
More likely, the white master had a case of jungle fever, got drunk, felt like it, was lustful or whatever. It certainly wasn't a matter of 'doing business'.
Slaves had families and reproduced at the same rate everyone else does.
While I lack documentation about this I think you and Ewan are right.
If the master was interested in fast breeding it would be easier and more efficient to give "breeding rights" (ugh) onto newly acquired slaves or slave women getting to breeding age to other slaves that were well behaved and productive or "good specimens".
From what little I know high class owners openly breeding with slaves was seen as unseemly by their peers. It was more probable for the white men overseeing the slave labour in the fields to force themselves on the slave women than the masters.
About the idea of "breeding slaves with devils" it is fairly dangerous. First generation half fiends would have access to some serious power.
And yes, I feel dirty speaking of "efficiency" about this kind of stuff.
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Well this thread has certainly taken on a life of its own. Having a character that is a qadiran cleric of sarenrae, i was just curious about what i thought of as a contradiction. but then the world is full of contradictions.
i have to admit I find the whole slave eugenics discussion to be repellant. i suppose if i didn't there would be something wrong with me.
I would guess should the supply of fresh stock become restricted say to the success of Andoran privateering from their perspective and "disruptive trade practices at best or piracy at worst, from the Chelaxian, Qadiran, Katapesh, Rhoadom perspective, that the chelaxians would not turn to summoned devils to breed with the stock.....as someone mentioned before, the next generation you produce would be more powerful and more diffiuclt to controll. Also i am not sure what costs are involved in the summoning circles etc.
I would guess the slave owners could start a "eugenics" program, and take all of their "breeding fillies" girls of breeding age, and put them in some sort of stable, and take the male specimens they want, and reward them with theoppertunity to mate. That alone could be an incentive to keep people in line.
I would guess most devilish tieflings come from couplings that occur for one of two reasons: One of their parents in some way wanted power, and saw mating with a devil as an avenue to power, or perhaps the parent wished to satiate his or her lust and or bordem.
The tiefling would be the embarrasing result. I suppose there is always rape and humiliation. lets not forget that.
Anyways.. this has grown beyond my original question.
Well I didn't say that black women were not raped by white masters. I'm just questioning their motives. Certainly it happened. As evidenced by half white people of the era. it it obviously wasn't due to interracial marriages. As a means to make more slaves it certainly wasn't a motivation.
Jews captive in Egypt multiplied just fine, as there were generations and generations of them, they multiplied in the 'wild' after their escape from Egypt, as some of the original escaped slaves never actually saw the promised land, and some of those that came to the promise land were born in the wild and never actually saw enslavement.
Anywhere you have a breeding population, breeding will occur, humans or not. It makes no actual sense for slave masters to 'restrict' breeding rights of slaves. More slaves is always going to be good for a slave master, either he can use them for himself or sell them.
If someone happened to be a control freak, and separated males from females and kept them from breeding, he would only be hurting himself as a) slaves without family life die earlier and obviously do not breed to replace themselves b) are more likely to rebel and c) need alot more supervision to make sure they aren't sneaking off and breeding anyway.
Doesn't seem to be anything likely to actually have happened.
It's interesting to note, that although people don't 'think' there is slavery today, The Human trafficking for Porno purposes gambit is alive and thriving. People (mostly girls) are told "you can have a great life as a model (or whatever) in America (or Europe) and we will help you get there". They are then promptly drugged and captured and poof, porn slave. I do not know much more about it than that, and it seems like it would be awfully hard to keep a sex slave "pretty" for long, what with drugging them and not feeding them and the inevitable physical abuse, I would think they wouldn't look very appealing for long. But with all the digital doctoring available these days maybe that's not a problem.
Even indigenous girls to the US and Europe and enslaved this way (doesn't have to be from some foreign land) and account for a large percentage of the missing children that are never found.
It seems weird to me how 'easy' this kind of thing seems to be to get away with. But Drugs and Porno are really powerful with a lot of people (IMO) turning a blind eye to it. I haven't read anywhere what the guesstimate on actual population of enslaved peoples are being human trafficked, but it could be quite staggering.
The type of slavery of the modern era is actually worse now, because a) these people aren't living together with other slaves and having families, b) their life expectancy is no longer an issue for being valuable, because the allure is always looking for someone new and c) they are being drugged and living even less of a 'free' life than someone working on a plantation, mine, or building the pyramids.
You would think it would be hard to keep captives these days, but what was the name of that girl from Utah that got taken out of her own home and traveled around with that crazy guy and his wife who dressed her up like an arab? They had her out in public all the time, pretending it was their daughter. Really amazing stuff when you think of it.
Doesn't seem like they could get away with it, until they do.
The existence of a Tiefling/ half fiend, or fiendish progeny, is most likely due to the Sire Fiend's wishes to extend his/her influence through flunkies.
Like a Genie, a Fiend may 'appear' to grant those who treat with it, 'wishes'. Not in the mechanical sense, but they can deliver great wealth and power if they so choose. But part fiend servants or off spring of the sire fiend are more likely to be willing and able to carry out the fiends wishes, than the mere mortals who wish to treat with it.
As such the existence of fiendish creatures and tieflings and half fiends are due mostly to the wishes and whims of the fiends that sired/created them.
The existence of a Tiefling/ half fiend, or fiendish progeny, is most likely due to the Sire Fiend's wishes to extend his/her influence through flunkies.
Like a Genie, a Fiend may 'appear' to grant those who treat with it, 'wishes'. Not in the mechanical sense, but they can deliver great wealth and power if they so choose. But part fiend servants or off spring of the sire fiend are more likely to be willing and able to carry out the fiends wishes, than the mere mortals who wish to treat with it.
As such the existence of fiendish creatures and tieflings and half fiends are due mostly to the wishes and whims of the fiends that sired/created them.
curiously, this seems to be the opposite of the half-orc.
I really don't like pathfinders take on the half-orc. Although a human-o-centric world, with humans being more powerful by and large, the part human/part monster race, should be more powerful.
I don't really agree with the +2 to any stat on the half orc, yet the tiefling and aasimar get the +2,+2,-2 jazz.
I understand them wanting to make a half-orc wizard possible, or a half-orc sorceror, bard or cleric/druid, and not wanting to gimp the mental stats.
But the half-orc, like the tielfing should be more powerful than it is.
Looking at the reasons for half-orcs to exist vs the reasons for tieflings to exist.
A human sire would get no benefit from mating with an orc and having a half orc child. Ugly, smelly, toothy and violent, and although their write up makes them sounds like they are more physically superior, their stats make them identical to humans.
An orc wanting to mate with a human? Well from the human perspective, human chicks are cuter than orc chicks, but then we arent orcs.
If you take the Klingon view of humans and apply it to orcs (similar races in my opinion) they found humans weak, pale and disgustingly squishy, and un fit for mating because they were very unlikely to survive the "mating ritual" and human females extremely unlikely to be fit to carry a klingon (read orc) child to full gestation.
As such you can't necessarily say that orcs find humans more attractive that their own race.
I don't find it likely that humans would want to mate with orcs, so I find it unlikely for the reverse to be true.
For the same reason why half-orcs arent statistically superior to humans, Orcs would gain nothing by mating with humans to make "stronger" slaves, because the half-orcs would come out just like humans who can see in the dark.
the benefit to the half-orc in orc society is that they do not have negatives to intelligence.
There for while still remaining "orc-like" they are smarter, in general and make better leaders or councilors. Generally it is bad to have smarter slaves. Well educated slaves turn into successful rebels.
There for I find half-orcs to be unlikely results of Orc masters raping human slaves. Although orcs are cruel, and rape is less an act of desire and more an act of power and abuse, so it is more likely to happen than in the reverse situation with humans.
But orcs might actually seek to mate with evil allied human tribes, or abduct a human female who might be able to support a child to birth, because they desire the intellect a half-orc can bring the tribe without having another race entirely lead them.
for this reason, I would think half-orcs that grew up amoung orc society would be more likely to be casters.
A half-orc martial character is going to be much less powerful than a pureblood orc equivalent and wouldn't compete well, Unless he was going for feats like combat expertise and his tactics made him very hard to hit.
Half-elves obviously are very unlikely to be the result of rape. As the two races are close to being equally aesthetically pleasing to each other. An elven woman might find a human male attractive because he is broader and more muscluar or she digs facial hair, and let's face it, we all know elf chicks are hot.
Humans aren't likely to have an elf slave population and the reverse is also true.
In the Dark Sun campaign setting where seemingly everything was a slave. There were even half dwarves, and if memory serves me correctly, they were deliberately bred to make a superior slave, So human/dwarf unions were forced by the masters.
Since most normal rules don't have this character race, which is obviously better than humans or dwarves, and no other race combined with human comes out statistically better than a normal human, there is no real 'Golarion' incentive, to mix races in a slave population.
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I'm not a huge fan of the Tiefling stats, for that matter. Demons are associated with brute strength and a primal love of mindless destruction, and the Tiefling stats really don't seem to fit that. Devils are known for their cunning and persuasive talents, eager to tempt others into their own destruction, and, again, Tieflings don't seem to fit that, either.
What Tieflings *do* seem to fit is, 'Hey, let's make a race designed to make good thieves and call them something that sounds very much like thiefling.'
Aasimar seem to fit their heritage, statwise, but also have a terrible name, for different reasons. :)
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I'm not a huge fan of the Tiefling stats, for that matter. Demons are associated with brute strength and a primal love of mindless destruction, and the Tiefling stats really don't seem to fit that. Devils are known for their cunning and persuasive talents, eager to tempt others into their own destruction, and, again, Tieflings don't seem to fit that, either.
The variant Tiefling stats in CoT fix this problem right up. :)
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Elvish warriors on campaign might violate human women, thus fathering half-elven children.
In the Scarred Lands, the elven low Con score and ridiculously low birthrate is described as the result of a great war against a plague-diety a couple centuries back.
Recognizing that their great kingdoms in their land across the sea were practically ghost towns, with unhealthy adults, and few, if any, new elven children being born, they took to enslaving nearby human tribes and populations, and using them to breed a new race of half-elves to inhabit their cities and run their economies and populate their armies, making for a truly freaky setting switcharoo, as the half-orcs have their own kingdom on the northern continent, settled by mercenaries from a long-ago war, and with nine of of ten half-orcs in the setting being the result of a half-orc mommy mating with a half-orc daddy, while the half-elves are the ones more likely to have been born to a human prisoner or slave at the hands of elvish masters, desperate to assure that the inheritors of their lands and culture have at least *some* elvish blood.
With a setting tweak, the happier childhood assumptions of the half-elf, and the tragic assumptions of the half-orc's parentage, are totally flipped on their head.
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Sarenrae herself, and her church, does not tolerate slavery, but nor do they preach "Kill the slavers!" They would certainly look for non-violent ways to seek a slave's freedom—purchasing the slave and setting the slave free is probably the preferred method.
Now that said, there's a wide range of individual variations among the specific worshipers of Sarenrae—as with ANY religion. There are some worshipers of Sarenrae who would, perhaps, seek to simply comfort slaves if possible, espcially if they see the alternative (living on your own with no support structure in a dangerous city) is more painfula nd dangerous than slavery itself. There's ABSOLUTELY some worshipers of Sarenrae who crusade against slavery and slavers themselves and DO use violence against the slavers.
Now, as for Qadira? It's important to keep two things in mind about Sarenrae's faith being the most widespread faith in Qadira:
1) It's not in charge. The government of Qadira is richer and more powerful than the church of Sarenrae in Qadira, and as a result, the government is the one that gets to say if slaves are legal or not. The church has to either go along with that or rebel, and in Qadira's case, the church has opted to go along with it.
2) The church of Sarenrae in Qadira is NOT the most faithful of all of Sarenrae's churches. In fact, it's one of the most corrupt of her churches, because they've more or less lost sight of the "redeem your enemies" and "peace is better than war." Over the course of many generations, the church of Sarenrae in Qadira has become militarized, basically, and they're a lot more pro-war than they should be—but not SO pro-war that the chruch is in immediate danger of losing all their clerical powers. This church's tolerance of slaves in Qadira is but one of many examples of how the church is straying from Sarenrae's path. It's also why there's a schism building among the church, as a growing number of worshipers are coming to realize that things have somehow gone sour in the faith here. But an...
Except the gods in Golarion are active individuals who involve themselves in the material world.
So while the CHURCH of Sarenrae may or may not have the authority to speak out against slavery in Qadira and Katapesh, the goddess herself does.Yet she doesn't. She has a presence and a herald and at no time does she go through with the effort to send down her herald or her messenger to state, in no uncertain terms, that slavery is wrong.
As Elie Wiesel said, "Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented."
Or Ginetta Sagan: "Silence in the face of injustice is complicity with the oppressor."
Or Dietrich Bonhoeffer: “Silence in the face of evil is itself evil: God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.”
By not making it explicit that slavery is forbidden, she is actively participating in its continuance.
And the authorities in Qadira and Katapesh would certainly have a harder time ignoring Sarenrae or her herald than they would the mortals of her church.
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…why on Earth did you necro a decade-old thread?
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... and now you get an all-access membership to an exclusively inclusive , special sorta Guild. ;)