Saint Patrick, Slavery, and the Fall of the Roman Empire

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The wind never stopped here. Patricius ran, hard and fast, through the woods of Focluth, buffeted by the gusts at his back. The many branches above and around him rattled and shook in the wind blowing in from the open ocean a few miles away. It always carried an icy edge that chilled anyone standing in its path to the bone. More often than not, rain came with it in great sheets of driving bullets that stung where they struck skin. Patricius had thought he knew rain and wind and cold before the raiders snatched him from his home in Britain and brought him across the sea to this foreign land. He had been wrong about so many things.

That was six years ago. Six years of cold, wet nights camped on green hills with the flocks of sheep his master made him tend. Patricius hadn’t felt warm since the day the Irish slavers came to his father’s villa and herded him, and so many others, onto waiting boats. Then came the short, storm-lashed crossing, the long forced marches along muddy roads with chains and ropes chafing at his limbs, the incessant blisters on his feet, and the sting of his master’s hand. It was cold and wet up in the hills with the sheep, but at least there he wasn’t constantly at risk of a beating for a wayward word or perceived cheek.

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His bare, frozen feet sank into the mud of the forest path; his soaked wool tunic clung to his chafed legs. But now Patricius heard the voice of God telling him it was time to leave. He thought it was God’s voice, at least; he had sometimes wondered if it was despair or madness speaking to him, or one of the ancient spirits of this benighted land, but here and now in the woods of Focluth, he was certain it was God. Patricius would return home. God would make it so, because Patricius was now a slave of God, no longer his master’s property. He had nothing to fear. God told him so.

Slaves were rarely freed here in Ireland. His father, a Roman, had always treated the slaves he owned decently, and had freed several of them over the years, Patricius remembered. For a while after his own capture, he had held out hope that he might eventually leave captivity. But these Irish were barbarians compared to the Romans amongst whom he’d grown up.

The wind at Patricius’s back ebbed as he ran deeper into the woods. The rain continued to fall, trickling down through the branches, but it was slowing. He heard the voice again, telling him to continue, to not stop, that God was with him. One day, Patricius promised himself, he would return here, and bring the word of God to his former enslavers.

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Alongside Attila the Hun and the Prophet Muhammad, Saint Patrick is probably the single best-known person who lived in the period we call Late Antiquity, spanning the fourth to the eighth centuries AD. He was the Apostle of the Irish, a towering figure who converted a formerly pagan people to Christianity, the foundation of the vibrant Christian culture that would eventually reach far beyond that small island. He also drove out the snakes, if the legends are to be believed. For most, that’s precisely what Patrick is: a legend who barely even belongs in a past world that actually existed.

But Saint Patrick - Patricius - was a real person, and the world he lived in was very real. He was born and grew up somewhere in western Britain while the Roman Empire fell apart. At some point, raiders from Ireland captured him, took him across the Irish Sea, and enslaved him for a period of years. Eventually, he escaped back to Britain, became a bishop, and then returned to Ireland to convert his former enslavers to Christianity. Enslavement was a central experience in Saint Patrick’s life. It made him who he was and set him on a course to everlasting fame. We know all of this not only because of the many later stories and traditions that circulated about Saint Patrick and his actions, but because he himself wrote about them: Patrick is almost unique in that he is one of the very few people in the ancient world who left any firsthand account of their experience of being enslaved. His Confession, a defense of his actions and his past written amid some indecipherable Church controversy, lays out his version of his life story. He also wrote a second surviving text, Letter to the Soldiers of Coroticus, in which he upbraids and excommunicates a British warlord whose Christian soldiers abducted and enslaved some of Patrick’s Christian converts in Ireland.

I care a great deal about Saint Patrick. He’s my namesake, for one, and I remember my extremely Irish-American Catholic grandfather - whose own father was named Patrick - telling me stories about him when I was little. I lived in Ireland for two years, and it was an incredibly formative place and time for me. Beyond that, Saint Patrick inhabited a world in which I’ve spent a lot of my professional time over the past twenty years: the waning days of the Roman Empire in the west. Whatever else he was or became, however later generations remembered him and used his memory, Saint Patrick was first and foremost a product of the late Roman Empire. In today’s episode, we seek to understand Patrick in his context: a very real, and increasingly well-understood world, with the years he was enslaved serving as the defining period of his life. While Patrick eventually became the legend we know today, that’s not what makes him interesting to us; instead, it’s the fact that much of his life echoed broader patterns we rarely see illuminated in such depth. Saint Patrick was one of history’s Great Men, but Patricius the slave wasn’t.

A quick note here: For this episode, I’m relying a great deal on a recent book by the scholar Roy Flechner, entitled Saint Patrick Retold. It’s an excellent overview and well worth reading, but there are a few key points I disagree with the author on, which I’ll discuss further in a moment.

Patrick was born somewhere in western Britain in the late fourth or early fifth century AD. We don’t know precisely when, because Patrick’s own writings give us almost no temporal markers to work with. At one point he refers to the Franks of Gaul as a pagan people, which tells us he lived before the year 500 or so; later writings give two dates of death, 457 and 493 AD, with most scholars preferring the latter. Roy Flechner argues that Patrick lived even earlier than the mid-fifth century AD, placing his key actions in the late fourth century, but I disagree with that: His reasoning rests on the idea that Romanness was well and truly dead in Britain by the dates traditionally associated with Patrick’s life. I don’t think we can say that with any confidence. We have practically no surviving texts from Britain in that period, and reading identity through archaeology is a tricky business. Archaeologically, the material markers of Rome were disappearing from Britain over the course of the fifth century; we have no idea how people thought of themselves or what languages they spoke on a day-to-day basis.

But we do know Patrick was a Roman, or had at the very least grown up in a world of Romans. He wrote in Latin, and his language makes it obvious that he had received some of the standard Roman education. He tells us that his father was a decurion, a member of a city council with administrative responsibilities. At the very beginning of his letter to the soldiers of Coroticus, he says: “I live among barbarian peoples, an exile on account of the love of God.” Some have suggested that by “barbarians,” he means non-Christians, and I don’t think that’s right: He distinguishes explicitly between Christians and pagans elsewhere, and doesn’t use “Roman” as a synonym for “Christian” at any point. For Patrick, like many other Latin authors of the fifth century (and I’ve read nearly all of them), the counterpoint to “barbarians” wasn’t “Christians,” but Romans. Patrick tells us implicitly on which side of that divide he belongs. His Britain sat at the very edges of the Roman world, but it was still recognizably part of the Roman world, even at this late date.

Britain had been a Roman province for more than 300 years by the time Patrick was born. Conquered by the Romans piece by piece in the years after the emperor Claudius’s invasion in 43 AD, Britain held the claim (a good one) to being the empire’s most distant outpost. In both space and thought Britain was further from the Mediterranean heart of the empire than all of the outposts dotting the edges of the Sahara or looking up at the peaks of the Caucasus Mountains. Despite that distance, by the time of Patrick’s birth, Britain was as Roman as anywhere in the empire.

What does that mean, exactly? The late Roman Empire into which Patrick was born wasn’t a homogeneous place. Dozens of languages were spoken inside its frontiers, from Syriac and Greek to Frankish and Gaulish. Wheat, olives, and grapes were the empire’s holy trifecta of Mediterranean foodstuffs, but olives and grapes didn’t grow through much of its territory; local people continued to eat the same kinds of foods as they had before the Romans arrived, with a few additions. Local gods stuck around, either on their own or assimilated with Roman deities. The aristocrats filling town councils and later acting as bishops were almost certainly descended, at least in part, from the people who had been powerful in those regions prior to conquest. Decades of recent research has made it clear that even after centuries of Roman rule, there was no evenly distributed process of “Romanization.” There were shepherds in the Balkans speaking Illyrian and farmers in Wales conversing in British Celtic, living in ways that differed little from those of their ancestors before Roman armies arrived. In a state with tens of millions of inhabitants, diversity was the rule by necessity.

Despite all that variety, there were plenty of commonalities between subjects of the empire, some cultural and some material. Latin was spoken everywhere by the late fourth century, from the Adriatic to Hadrian’s Wall and the Sahara to the Rhine. Where common folk continued to use other tongues, they were often bilingual, using their native language at home and Latin in the marketplace. Latin was spoken so widely that it had distinctive regional varieties and accents; a well-traveled individual could distinguish a native of Roman Britain from a person raised in Italy or North Africa purely by their speech. Still, those regional varieties were mutually intelligible, probably more so than English as it’s spoken around the world today. Latin was the language of administration and the army, so when citizens interacted with the state, they did so through Latin. On a deeper level, when asked, practically every free person living in the Roman Empire - no matter what they spoke at home or where they lived - would identify themselves as a Roman. That was true in the Greek-speaking east, in the venerable and still-enormous city of Rome, and in the rain-drenched hills facing the Irish Sea, where Saint Patrick was born and raised. There were plenty of divisions within Roman society, particularly based on wealth and whether a person held office, and many different forms of identity; but nearly every free person would, on some level, have considered themselves to be Roman. When Patrick refers to himself as the son of a decurion, he’s telling his readers precisely where he belonged in the Roman social hierarchy.

Cities were the places most tied to long-distance trade and migration networks, the most important nodes in the economic and political systems keeping the Roman world alive. Rome, Carthage, Milan, Trier, Arles, Tarragona, and dozens of others were the linchpins of Romanness. They were the settlements most likely to have huge quantities of Roman coins and pottery; to be built along the standardized grid patterns the Romans preferred; and to show evidence of Roman religious cults and cultural practices, like inscriptions. New ways of speaking, like accents and slang, tended to start in cities, and to jump between them rather than slowly seeping into the countryside. We could pick up Londinium in the middle of the fourth century AD and put it on the Seine or the Ebro and it wouldn’t have been out of place.

The further one traveled from the cities, the more things were made and consumed locally. Old pre-Roman methods of production stuck around either because there was no need for them to change, or the locals liked doing things a bit differently than elsewhere; people didn’t change how they made and decorated pottery or their clothing just because they were now ruled by Roman officials. They didn’t immediately start planting vines just because Roman soldiers had come through a few times.

It’s more like Roman material culture was another layer of stuff superimposed onto people’s lives, which over time melded with the old into something new. This happened at the local village level, within cities, and across the region, with all of them differing in some small way from their neighbors. Mass-produced Roman pottery, roof tiles, coins, and metalwork could be found anywhere - the Roman world was kind of like an Ikea in that sense - but not at every site, or every time. One villa might have had a yen for fancy but widely distributed fineware; another splurged on fancy mosaic tiles from a distant workshop but used mostly local pottery; while at a third, the owner had a habit of importing amphorae of fine wine to impress his neighbors. There were many different ways of being Roman, and just as many ways to use objects produced in the empire to display status and identity.

That was the world into which Saint Patrick was born. But that world was crumbling, and nowhere more so than in Britain. Only the northernmost parts of Gaul, what is present-day Belgium and the Low Countries, experienced a faster and more complete devolution. Patrick belonged to the last generation that would grow up with memories of town councils and deliveries of mass-produced trade goods. But unlike many people who lived through what we call the fall of the Roman Empire, he didn’t experience it as a lo ng, quiet transformation; he was quite literally ripped away from that world and made a slave.

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While we can’t pinpoint the exact dates of Saint Patrick’s life, it’s not actually that important, because we have almost no knowledge of specific events in Britain during the fifth century AD. We’re not just ignorant of the years in which things took place; we don’t even know exactly what took place. There are no comprehensive narrative histories telling us who did what, who ruled in particular regions, where battles took place or between which forces, much less what people made of the massive upheavals shaping and reshaping their lives. What we have are impressions - vibes, for lack of a better word - from the very few textual sources available to us, and from the immense amount of archaeological material left behind.

The physical evidence of this period tells a stark story. In 350 AD, roughly the year we would assume Saint Patrick’s father was born, Britain was as Roman as anywhere in the Roman Empire; by the time Patrick died, probably sometime in the second half of the fifth century, Britain was completely transformed. Cities like Londinium and Eboracum - York - emptied of people. The market towns scattered across the countryside of lowland Britain were abandoned. The army, the most visible symbol of Roman rule and an essential driver of economic activity, either withdrew from the island completely or stuck around and became local warlords. Coins stopped arriving when the army stopped getting paid, so the economy reverted to barter. The fine villas of the Romano-British aristocracy remained occupied, but their heated baths and mosaic floors fell into disrepair. Anglo-Saxon migrants from the continent’s North Sea coast began settling in the lowlands of eastern Britain; within a couple of centuries, English would be the predominant language in that part of the country, which was well on its way to becoming England.

Patrick probably didn’t experience the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons firsthand, since he lived in the west, but the breakdown of Roman authority was no less noticeable in his part of the island: Picts from north of Hadrian’s Wall and Irish raiders from across the narrow sea attacked formerly safe areas like Patrick’s home, while local strongmen stepped into the power vacuum left by the departing army and disappearin g officials. There are some indications that life was more violent: One study found four times as many identifiable injuries from edged weapons on skeletons in the post-Roman period compared to the era of Roman rule. The canonical date for the army’s exit from Britain is 410 AD, but units had been peeling off for decades before that, and scattered remnants stuck around afterward, sometimes in the same forts legionaries had been occupying for centuries.

Patrick grew up in a place he calls Bannavem Taburniae, which has never been positively identified. The most likely candidates are clustered around the city of Carlisle in Cumbria, which marked the western end of Hadrian’s Wall. This was one of the most remote parts of the Roman Empire, quite literally within sight of a territory where Roman officials held no sway. Yet Patrick’s father was a member of a town council, a decurion, a rank that could be found anywhere west of the Adriatic. He received at least part of the traditional education most well-off Roman boys received, something we can discern from the sprinklings of quotations from the classic texts everyone read. But the best proof of Patrick’s Romanness is in the way he writes, how he assembles sentences in Latin, the words he chooses, the persuasive style he utilizes, and a thousand other details that aren’t visible when reading his writings in translation. Scholars have agreed for a long time that Patrick’s Latin is a bit strange: He wasn’t a native speaker, most say, and some of his weirder word choices, spellings, and sentence structures must therefore have been due to interference from his native - presumably British Celtic - language. But that’s not actually the case.

Way back when I was doing my master’s degree, I got very into late Latin: not the literary style that aristocrats and bishops used to show how learned they were, but the meat and potatoes Latin - spoken and written - that residents of the later Roman Empire used on an everyday basis. Late Latin was well on its way to becoming the Romance languages we know from the Middle Ages and beyond, and its non-literary and spoken forms had diverged a great deal from the ornate, almost impenetrable style favored by pretentious elites. I’m not going to give you a tedious rundown of the sociolinguistics of late Latin or toot my own horn too much, but practically none of the scholars who have studied Patrick’s writings know this material. Had the Anglo-Saxons not migrated in substantial numbers, or Roman rule lasted a little while longer, Britain may well have produced its own Romance language, as Africa was on its way to doing before the Arab conquest. Patrick makes much more sense this way than as a half-competent Latin stylist. There’s no evidence of what we call “bilingual interference” in his Latin, no identifiable sign that he was a native British-speaker whose first language seeped into the way he wrote; the peculiarities in his language aren’t the kinds of mistakes that second-language learners tend to make. In fact, its peculiar qualities are all standard for Latin-speakers who hadn’t been steeped in Latin literary culture: people who, for example, were enslaved in their teen years, missed the final stages of their education, and returned to a place where that education no longer existed.

That was Saint Patrick. Growing up somewhere around the northernmost edge of the Roman Empire, speaking a regional variety of Latin that would have made him understood everywhere from Carthage to Trier to Tarragona, his life straddled the end of one world and the beginning of another. In recent decades, scholars have stressed the slow, often barely noticeable aspects of that shift, calling it a transformation instead of a fall. In Britain, however, the word “fall” makes perfect sense. The lives of real people, people like Patrick, were shaped in enormous ways by the disappearance of the state that had formerly governed them.

Enslavement defined Patrick’s life. As he tells the story in his Confession, he was abducted from his home along with thousands of others when he was 16 years old and taken across the sea to Ireland. His journey didn’t end at Ireland’s eastern shore; from there, he was taken to the far northwest of Ireland, present-day County Mayo, near the open waters of the north Atlantic. For the next six years, he says, his life consisted of tending sheep as an enslaved shepherd. It was during his captivity that he experienced a religious conversion. His father had been a deacon; Patrick was nominally Christian, at the very least, but he hadn’t really believed before this. On his own in a foreign land, with seemingly no chance of escape or freedom, Patrick found solace in the one place he still could: in prayer, building a relationship with a God who had previously been only a distant force in his life. One night, after six years of captivity, Patrick dreamed a voice told him a ship was being prepared to take him back across the sea to Britain. Compelled, he ran away, traveling some 200 Roman miles across Ireland, until he found the promised ship. More trials and tribulations followed, but Patrick eventually returned to his family and resumed his life. But now, he had a mission: He determined that he would one day return to Ireland and convert the people who enslaved him to Christianity. This is where the story of Patricius, a Roman teenager, ends, and the legend of Saint Patrick begins.

There are all sorts of issues with the internal coherence of Patrick’s autobiography, and so little to work with that practically every detail has been called into question in the years since he wrote it: how long he was in Ireland and where he was held; whether he was freed, or ran away; how he managed to convince a shipful of sailors to take him across the sea to Britain; and even whether he was actually enslaved, or was instead running away from his inherited responsibilities as a Roman official, a common late Roman phenomenon called “curial flight.”

I’m not casting aspersions on the scholars who have questioned Patrick’s narrative - it’s pretty clear that my namesake was playing fast and loose with the facts in his writing - but there’s nothing implausible about the basic outline he gives us. Slave-trading across the Irish Sea had been going on for centuries, probably even before the Romans arrived in Britain. There were petty kings in eastern Ireland capable of assembling military forces large enough to grab hundreds or even thousands of captives at a time. And in this misty time somewhere between the 390s and the 430s, the Roman army that would have served as a powerful deterrent to large-scale raiding in northwest Britain was either crumbling or gone. Had he lived along Britain’s southeastern coast, Patrick might have been taken by Saxons across the North Sea to the Continent; had he lived in the northeast, he might have been taken north to present-day Scotland by Picts; had he lived in the southwest, he might have been taken by local British-speaking warlords. Because of where he lived, it was Irish raiders who got him. What Patrick experienced - being abducted and enslaved - was a more common experience in the Britain of his time than it had been in his father’s or grandfather’s.

Patrick had grown up with slaves. He tells us that his father’s estate - he calls it a villula, a little villa - housed both male and female slaves who were captured by the Irish along with him. Late Roman slavery had changed a bit since the time of Crixus, Eurysaces’ bakers, and little Abbas, but it was still slavery in every way that mattered. Patrick saw his enslavement as an unfortunate occurrence, a punishment for his and his neighbors’ sins, but there was nothing out of the ordinary about being enslaved. Slavery in Ireland functioned a bit differently than it did in other times and places: It was more akin to the general, and less intense unfreedom of later medieval serfdom, though it still operated on the principle of people as property, and Patrick draws no distinctions between the two. Not that his experiences gave Patrick any sort of fundamental opposition to slavery as an institution, even once he returned to Ireland on his mission of conversion: His Letter to the Soldiers of Coroticus takes issue not with slave-raiding or slavery as a whole, but with the fact that Coroticus’s men were targeting Patrick’s Christian converts in Ireland. It was unseemly for Christians to enslave free Christians, and one gets the sense that Patrick was angriest of all that his authority and prestige were being damaged by Coroticus’s actions.

Yet slavery nevertheless had a profound impact on Patrick’s way of thinking about the world, and especially on his faith in God. Patrick was far from the only late Roman author to use slavery as a metaphor for the relationship between the human and the divine: The parable of the faithful servant, from the Gospel of Matthew, left a particularly outsize impression. For example, the Church father Saint Jerome writes of Paul, “the apostle, who was not a slave to sin, is rightly called the slave of God the Father and Christ.” Yet despite its commonality, the extent to which that metaphor dominates Patrick’s thinking is remarkable. He doesn’t just reach for the allusions to support his arguments; they effectively structure the way he tells his life story. Being led away into slavery parallels his journey from lacking faith - being a slave to sin, in Jerome’s terms - to becoming a dedicated servant of God.

We can read Patrick’s life in all sorts of different ways. He was clearly a complex figure for his contemporaries: His fellow bishops and Church officials weren’t altogether fond of him, hence the need for Patrick to write his Confessio as a form of self-defence. He’s even more complicated for us today, as we try to disentangle the real person—as well as historical fact—from the legend. But he was indeed a real person, one who sheds a great deal of light on both a dying world and how enslavement could shape a person’s life. In that, more than his missionary activity or his later fame, Patrick is unique in the ancient world.

Next time on Past Lives, we’re going to jump forward into the Middle Ages, but probably not to a place you’ve visited before: the shores of the Black Sea during the age of Mongol conquest, where a boy named Baybars watched his parents die before he was being sold into slavery. Through a twist of fate, Baybars became one of the most powerful people in the world: the ruler of Mamluk Egypt.

Until then, thanks so much for joining me, and I look forward to chatting with you again. If you haven’t already, please subscribe to our Patreon. It’s only 7 bucks a month, and you get access to tons of bonus content, like interviews with great scholars, Q&As with me, our book club, and much more. You can follow me on Instagram or on Bluesky.

Past Lives is written and narrated by me, Patrick Wyman. The producer is Morgan Jaffe. The music and sound design is by Gabriel Gould. The story editor is Rachel Kambury.

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