The medieval Christian church profited from an eight-century European slave trade

Evidence

Christendom slowly recovered. During what would be called the Dark Age, allied with barbarian chiefs and kings, converted or otherwise, the church gradually grew into the most mature base for the feudal organization that characterized the early Middle Ages. It acquired land, and the peasants and slaves who made that land productive and valuable. Without the slightest sense of its moral bankruptcy, moreover, the leaders of the Christian Church unmercifully exploited its human base, legitimating the brutality of the nobility, their secular kin, and sharing the profits from the labor of bound workers and a foreign trade more than eight centuries long that delivered European slaves (among other goods) to Muslim merchants. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 513

Christendom slowly recovered. During what would be called the Dark Age, allied with barbarian chiefs and kings, converted or otherwise, the church gradually grew into the most mature base for the feudal organization that characterized the early Middle Ages. It acquired land, and the peasants and slaves who made that land productive and valuable. Without the slightest sense of its moral bankruptcy, moreover, the leaders of the Christian Church unmercifully exploited its human base, legitimating the brutality of the nobility, their secular kin, and sharing the profits from the labor of bound workers and a foreign trade more than eight centuries long that delivered European slaves (among other goods) to Muslim merchants. Feudal Europe, for a time, however, proved to be capable of expansion while rotting from within—but it was only for a time. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 513

Categorization

• XREF: Directly feeds the reader’s need to understand the material/economic origins of the racial order against which the Black radical tradition rose. — connects to: A Macon Baptist church financed operations partly through selling slaves — Robert P. Jones, White Too Long: The Legacy of White…, 591
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 513