Yes, I was trying to keep the concept of 'serf' and 'slave' distinct. But these are legal terms that can shift meaning according to place and time in history. Latin 'servus' originally meant something like 'slave' or 'servant', and through Vulgar Latin and Old French, I'm pretty sure it eventually ended up as "serf", with our present meaning of that word. Presumably slaves were settled on the land to work, as in the American plantations, and eventually their shelters and the land they worked were delegated to them conditionally in return for a rent payment in kind or labor.
As you say, 'slave' comes from the medieval name for 'Slav', because so many of them were sold south or west. Perhaps the social situation in eastern Europe then was comparable to that of West Africa in the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries.
Yes, I was trying to keep the concept of 'serf' and 'slave' distinct. But these are legal terms that can shift meaning according to place and time in history. Latin 'servus' originally meant something like 'slave' or 'servant', and through Vulgar Latin and Old French, I'm pretty sure it eventually ended up as "serf", with our present meaning of that word. Presumably slaves were settled on the land to work, as in the American plantations, and eventually their shelters and the land they worked were delegated to them conditionally in return for a rent payment in kind or labor.
As you say, 'slave' comes from the medieval name for 'Slav', because so many of them were sold south or west. Perhaps the social situation in eastern Europe then was comparable to that of West Africa in the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries.