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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Perhaps like the subject matter that it aims to discuss, this volume has somewhat complex origins and components. The immediate impetus, and the origin of most of the articles, was a conference on ‘Slavery and the Slave Trade in the Eastern Mediterranean, 12-15 Centuries’, held at the University of Trier on 7-9 September 2009, with participants from Israel, Germany, France, and England. This conference was generously supported by the Thyssen Foundation, whose assistance we gratefully acknowledge here, and we also take the opportunity to thank the local team that took care of administrative matters: Marion Rutz, M.A.; Christine Breckler, M.A.; and Annika Stello, then M.A. and now Ph.D. In addition to the papers first presented at the 2009 conference, Professor Danuta Quirini-Poptawska kindly agreed to contribute a study on the Venetian involvement in the Black Sea slave trade.
The conference was itself an attempt to sum up some of the work that had been conducted in our joint research project, ‘Slavery in the Later Medieval Mediterranean: Turco-Mongolian Slaves from the Black Sea Region as a Case Study’, and to find common ground and scholarly interaction with colleagues working in related fields. The research project, which started in earnest in early 2007, was supported by the German-Israeli Foundation for Scientific Cooperation and Development (G.IF., grant no. I-902-240.4/2005), and has been the basis for interesting and, we think, original work on a subject of some significance for regional history and beyond. It has inspired our own research and provided support for the studies of several students. We are happy to report that it has contributed to increased German-Israeli scholarly cooperation and has laid down the groundwork for further such activity in the future.
One of the early stages of the research project was a short summer school for advanced students, preparing inter alia the cadre of students and assistants in both countries that were to be affiliated with it. On 2-7 September 2007, we convened at the Institute for Advanced Studies (IAS) at the Hebrew University an Israeli-German School entitled ‘Slavery and the Slave Trade in the Mediterranean Region in the Medieval Period (1000-1500): Case Studies in Christian-Muslim-Jewish Interaction’.
Here is the opportunity to thank the many colleagues who joined us to give lectures, as well as the local student assistants who did much of work before and during the School: Shai Shir, M.A.; Jenia Yudkevich, then B.A. and now M.A.; and Amir Mazor, then M.A. and now Ph.D. We are particularly grateful to the Minerva Foundation in Germany that supported this meeting within the framework of their Israeli-German Workshops programme, and the staff of the IAS for their able assistance. Besides laying the groundwork for further work on the research project, this School also gave birth to the English language article by Professor Michel Balard that is found in the present book. We wish to thank Professor Balard, not only for giving the keynote address at the School, but also for joining us at the Trier conference, as well as agreeing to having two separate papers appear in this volume (one in English and one in French).
We owe sincere thanks to Dr Evelien Chayes and members of the editorial board of the ‘Mediterranean Nexus’ series, for their close reading of previous drafts of this book. Their pertinent comments have much contributed to improving the quality of the text. Paolo Sartori of Brepols Publishers assisted us in seeing it through the final stages of publication.
It is also a pleasure to thank Professor Sarah Stroumsa of the Hebrew University for providing the initial spark for this cooperation by indirectly introducing us around 2004, and to Professor Alfred Haverkamp of the University of Trier for his unstinting encouragement. Finally, we are very happy to thank our families for their support and understanding in this long-term endeavour. We both know that without such help little academic work can get done, and we never take for granted this moral and material assistance.
With the publication of this volume, this project will be winding down. However, it is clear to us that the subject of late medieval slavery and the slave trade in the eastern Mediterranean has far from been exhausted, and it may be that individually or together we will return to this matter. We hope that our work so far has provided a firm foundation for such future studies by ourselves and others.
Christoph Cluse
Universitat Trier
Reuven Amitai The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
SLAVERY AND THE SLAVE TRADE IN THE EASTERN MEDITERRANEAN (c. 1000-1500 cE):
INTRODUCTION
Slavery has played a significant role in the history of human society, not the least in the greater Mediterranean region, since ancient times. Long neglected by mainstream historians, the medieval history! of slavery has received an increasing amount of attention by scholars since the pioneering work of Charles Verlinden (1907-96).* Today historians have generally laid to rest the nineteenth-century preoccupation with whether slavery was a significant ‘mode of production’ in the post-classical period, to concentrate on the changing face of the institution over time by looking at legal norms, linguistic representations, and social practice.
While the debate on when and how ancient slavery was supplanted by medieval forms of ‘serfdom’ continues (with dates advanced reaching from the seventh to tenth, sometimes twelfth, centuries), it is becoming increasingly clear that the question has been rather narrrowly focused on the Frankish kingdoms in continental Europe from the start. Even here we have, from the ninth century onward, evidence that mancipia and servi empticii, mostly from the Slavonic countries, were objects of trade.‘ It seems that the continuity of legal forms and social practices was generally more significant in the Mediterranean world than in the continental periphery of the Western Empire.” This may have been particularly true of female household slavery, neglected in earlier mainstream historiography.
In Byzantium, where classical Roman Law did not fall into oblivion as much as it did in the West, slavery was ‘omnipresent’ in the post-classical, early medieval period. And it is again striking that the literary sources reveal a rather stable use of the term oixétyg, ‘domestic’, to denote a slave, while the legal term dodo¢ became a technical term for a slave of the emperor.’ Students of early medieval Latin and Byzantine slavery have long neglected the continuous existence of slavery in the Islamicate world. Yet it is important to keep in mind that much of that world was built on, or expanded into, the lands once informed by classical Greek and Roman customs and law.
In a contribu-tion to the present collection, Kurt Franz demonstrates that what is commonly called ‘Islamic’ or “Muslim slavery’ is also in large part a continuation of the pre-Islamic heritage, qualified by the religious law laid out in Quranic and other sources. Indeed, recent studies on the beginnings of Islam have endeavoured to place the Quran more firmly into its Late Antique setting,* and it would be worthwhile to take a comparative look into the ancient and early medieval legal sources of the eastern provinces of Rome, some of which are preserved in Syriac.? No doubt human bondage took on a variety of forms among medieval Eastern Christians, who left records in a number of languages. '° It is likely that slavery customs in the Islamicate world in turn had a certain influence on the medieval Christian sphere both East and West. Thus, we can observe certain similarities relating to, for example, the contractual self-redemption of slaves, known as ‘mukataba’ in Arabic, ‘mukatebe’ in Ottoman Turkish, and ‘acaptar’ in Spanish."
In the West, the legal terms ‘servus/-a’ and ‘ancilla’ survived but changed their meaning (while ‘mancipium’ became less frequent). !* Of course, contemporaries were still clearly bothered with the distinction between free and unfree status and its implications (reflected, for instance, in the discussions by canon lawyers concerning marriage and priestly ordination '>). However, the eco-nomic expansion and increasing social mobility of the high middle ages served to slacken the bonds of ‘servitus’.
The most telling sign of this development is the fact that new terms had to be coined in the twelfth and thirteenth century to designate those subjected to the ‘dominium’ ofa slaveholder in the full sense of Roman Law. Around 1200, notarial deeds recorded in the Mediterranean port cities of Latin Europe first attest to the use of ethnic labels to designate slaves proper — human beings alienated from their native surroundings, bought and sold or sometimes given as presents, employed or rented out for unpaid, often hard labour, sometimes sexually exploited, and often eventually manumitted, by fellow human beings. In the course of Iberian ‘Reconquista’ and crusading warfare, increasing numbers of Muslim captives were enslaved in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and sold as ‘sarraceni’ in the markets of Latin Christian port cities.'* However, the importation of slaves from the East was to have a more lasting effect on the Latin terminology: From the thirteenth century, ‘sclavus’ and ‘sclava’ became the common term to designate a slave. The terms, clearly derived from the ethnic label for those imported from the lands of the Slavs, had already appeared somewhat earlier in the Byzantine (o«)éboc) and Arabic cultural spheres (saqaliba).!> The fact that people imported from the East also provided a generic term for slaves in Latin Europe relates to the importance of the regions bordering on the northern Black Sea coasts as a reservoir of slaves ever since the ancient period.’ In the tenth century, the Persian geographer Ahmad ibn Rusta writes of the slave market of Kerch on the Crimean peninsula:
When the Magyars (al-Majghariyya) come with their captives to Karh, the Ram come out to them and hold a market. The former give them their slaves in return for Rami brocade, carpets, and other products of the Ram.’
Incidentally, the port of Caffa, a Genoese trading post that had developed into a veritable colony since the end of the thirteenth century, was situated not far from Kerch. As shown in numerous contributions to the present volume, Caffa became a hub of the international slave trade of the later medieval period, so much that the Spanish traveller, Pero Tafur, in 1437 wrote that ‘more slaves, both male and female, are sold [here] than in the rest of the world’. !8
Thus, notwithstanding the lines of continuity mentioned earlier, the high medieval period, cherished among historians for its aspects of ‘renaissance’ and ‘renewal’, also brought about a resurgence of slavery in the Western Latin Mediterranean. By the last third of the thirteenth century, the slave-trade was fully organised and its legal norms established. Henri Bresc and John Williams, respectively, have spoken of a veritable ‘révolution esclavagiste’ or ‘slave revolution’ in this period.”
The social relevance of slaves for the societies surrounding the Mediterranean Sea during the later medieval period stands beyond doubt. We find widespread slave ownership for a variety of purposes, along with a pervasive slave trade, abetted one way or another by many individual and collective agents, while others did their best to oppose it — not for high moral reasons, but rather to deny their enemies its benefits. It is worth emphasizing that none of the three major religious traditions present in the Mediterranean developed an anti-slavery or even abolitionist doctrine during the medieval period.”° This is not to deny the fact that the religious traditions, beginning with ancient Judaism, proposed guidelines to mitigate the adverse effects of the slavery relationship,”! especially since they all, in one way or another, advocated the conversion of the slave to the slaveholder’s faith, for practical as well as ideological reasons.”* Quite generally, it was forbidden, for example, to hold up slave-girls as prostitutes. Such guidelines served to stabilize rather than weaken the institution of slavery as such.
Thus, while the practice of enslaving captives of war was widely accepted as an aspect of international common law (‘ius gentium’),”> there were limits posed to this rule, resulting from a mixture of political and religious factors. Above all, the religious traditions all forbade the enslavement of people adhering to the same faith. In theory, therefore, Jews should not enslave Jews, Muslims should not enslave Muslims, and Christians should not to enslave fellow Christians.
In practice, there were legal and pragmatic ways of circumventing these prohibitions. Latin Christians, for example, had few qualms about enslaving Greek Orthodox subjects of the Byzantine Empire,” or indeed of buying them from Muslim middlemen. Research has shown that the significant presence of Greek Orthodox slaves in Western cities indeed posed a moral problem. In Sicily, for example, King Frederick III in 1310 demanded that such slaves had to be manumitted no later than seven years after their conversion to the Latin creed and must not be sold on against their will.” In places like Genoa and Valencia slaves could in fact demand to be set free in court if they were able to show that they had been born of Roman Catholic parents.” The ethnic labels we find in so many notarial sources dealing with slave sales thus have more than just a descriptive purpose,” they could serve to justify the enslavement of a person.”*
Clearly, religious alterity could not have been the only factor. Indeed, the existence of protected religious minorities both under Islam and under Christian rulers proves that adherence to a specific religious group did not as such justify a person’s enslavement. It seems, therefore, that state protection was an even more essential factor in preventing people from being enslaved. In this context, Jeffrey Fynn-Paul has recently highlighted the rise of monotheistic empires as ‘no-slaving zones’ in the Dar al-Islam and in ‘most of Latin Europe’, which effectively moved outward the regions where people had a greater risk of being kidnapped and enslaved.”
Apart from vazzias into the enemy empire’s territory, medieval slavers turned to peripheral regions marked by political weakness or instability, such as Africa and the Northeast. There are places such as the Black Sea port of Caffa where Muslim and Christian slave-traders appear at the same time.*° According to this pattern, later medieval Byzantium appears like a ‘failing’ state, no longer able to secure the liberty of its population against Italian, Catalan and Ottoman Turkish raiders. Numerous sales contracts reveal that there was a lively ‘triangular’ trade whereby Latin merchants bought Greek captives ‘from the Turks’, ostensibly to liberate them from Muslim mastery but in fact as a way of procuring slaves for the Italian urban markets.3! Cross-cultural encounters, thus, went hand in hand with human misery. It is worthwhile in this context to recall Orlando Patterson’s dictum —
The Mediterranean, central to the development of human civilization and lovingly celebrated in Euro-American historiography, from the viewpoint of human oppression has been a veritable vortex of horror for all mankind, especially for the Slavic and African peoples. The relationship was in no way accidental. >?
II
Thus, the late medieval period in the eastern part of the Mediterranean basin provides a particularly fertile ground for investigating the social institution of slavery in its transcultural setting. Extant archival and literary records in different languages permit us to reconstruct how pervasive the phenomenon was in the various societies of the region, not regardless of confession, ethnicity or political formation. For the present collection, we have focused on those features of medieval Mediterranean slavery that connected the diverse cultural groups in a complicated network of communications, interaction and confrontation.
In medieval times just as in classical Antiquity, the institution of slavery proved remarkably flexible. Slaves were intended for domestic use, for agricultural work and for military service. It was the trade in slaves of the last-mentioned category to some of the Muslim lands that stood in the centre of our original research project, which in turn became the basis for the conference that provided most of the papers for this present volume. The case of TurcoMongolian slaves from the Black Sea region seemed to provide the best example of convergence and of the similarities between Christian and Muslim societies during the later medieval period. According to the accepted view, most succinctly laid out in an important article by Andrew Ehrenkreutz, Italian (in particular, Genoese) merchants since the late-thirteenth century provided the rulers of the Sultanate in Egypt and Syria with new recruits for their armies of slave-soldiers.*> On the one hand, thousands of boys and young men were thus recruited for the Mamluk army, while their sisters, on the other hand, were shipped to the urban centres of the Mediterranean Latin West, where they served as household slaves.*4 Over the course of our research, more and more questions emerged concerning such a clear model. New research results on the diplomacy and recruitment policies of the Mamluk sultans, but also the findings obtained from the Genoese sources of the Black Sea region indicated a much more complicated and fluid situation. In order to better understand these findings, we sought to discuss them in a larger context, taking into account recent developments in Byzantine studies, Latin Mediterranean economic history, and Islamic studies.
The institution of military slavery in the Islamic world, which we will refer to as ‘the Mamluk institution’ for simplicity’s sake, is a phenomenon swi generis — certainly in terms of its longevity, extent and importance.*° It has already a long history in the Muslim world before the period under discussion here. Already in the first third of the ninth century, units of military slaves, then referred to mainly as ghilman (plural of ghulam, Arabic for ‘youth’) formed at the initiative of the caliphs and their senior officers and officials. These formations were mostly populated by young Turks plucked out of their Eurasian Steppe tribal societies, and at times, they were just known as atrak, or Turks. In the Latin documents drawn up by the notaries of the Genovese, Venetian, or Pisan trading settlements, the individuals sold as slaves are designated by a rather wide variety of ethnic labels, the precise meaning of which is not always clear. Thus, the term de genere (or de progenie) Tartarorum is used so frequently that we may think of it as a generic term for any non-Christian from the north-eastern shores of the Black Sea. However, some notaries who spent longer stretches of time in the Levant seem to have had a clearer idea of what they were recording, and could distinguish between Tatars and Mongols, Circassians, Zygians and Alans. Christian subjects of the Byzantine Empire were commonly designated as “Greeks’.*6 Slaves sold as “Bulgars’ in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries usually came from the Balkans; as with ‘Greeks’ and ‘Russians’, their Christian identity is not emphasized in the sales documents. The term ‘balaban(us)’ is peculiar to young males, and it may actually denote a mamluk.*”
Already by the end of the ninth century, mamluk units played a significant role in the military and political life in much of the Islamic lands from Egypt to the East. Even after the coming of the Seljugs at the head of the tribal Turcomen in the eleventh century, Turkish slave soldiers remained the mainstay of Muslim armies, and it was such formations that fought the Crusaders. The height of this process was the creation of a state in Egypt (and then Syria) by a group of mamluk officers in 1250. From influential soldiers and commanders, they now became the political-military elite, and the ruler — known as sultan — was generally picked from their ranks.
One of the key components of the Mamluk system was the need to continuously bring in fresh recruits, since the sons of mamluks were not considered mamluks (although they might serve in less prestigious units). This gave rise to a complicated and wide-ranging system of trade in young mamluks from the steppes north of the Black Sea and Caucasia. Obviously, it had been necessary to import them on a regular basis before the establishment of the Mamluk Sultanate — as this state is often known today due to the title of its rulers — but we know virtually nothing about how this was achieved. Only with the founding of this state can we begin to reconstruct some of the aspects of this trade, through a combined examination of the exceptionally rich Mamluk historiography and the western sources of different provenance. The latter include archival material from Genoa and elsewhere, Byzantine chronicles, and western polemical material and tracts discussing plans for a future Crusade. We learn of a complicated commercial scheme, which involved the agreement of authorities of both the Mongol Golden Horde (i.e., the Jochid Khanate) and the Byzantine Empire (under the leadership of the new Palaiologos dynasty), Muslim and Italian merchants and shippers, and a vociferous and well paying customer in the shape of the Mamluk Sultan. The nature of Mamluk military slavery and the trade in such slaves are major themes in this present volume (see the articles by Y. Frenkel, A. Mazor, A. Stello, R. Amitai, C. Cluse and J. Yudkevich), and we hope that new perspectives are presented here; these, however, are by no means the only subject matter in this volume.
For all of this takes place in the larger context of continual trade and use of slaves in all of the neighbouring societies, matters that are also discussed in this present volume. Thus we learn first (in K. Franz’s paper) of developing attitudes to slavery both in Muslim law and in social and economic reality, from the very early stages of Islam until the late medieval period. The tentative — and provocative — conclusion offered here is perhaps that the term slavery is not necessarily the best analytical approach to understand the Mamluk military society, and in any event, the slavery of the mamluks is an anomaly in the legal and social norms of Muslim slavery. The great variety of social settings to which the legal concept could be adapted is also reflected in the three articles (by M. Balard, M. Frenkel and J. Pahliztsch) dealing with different aspects of Mediterranean slavery in the later medieval period: general considerations concerning above all the Latin West, slayery and the slave trade among Jews, and the institution in Byzantium in the aftermath of the Palaeologan resurgence. In order to put matters in yet a wider context, we asked N. Housley to provide a more general introduction to Christian-Muslim contacts in the region during the times of the Crusades, in which slavery and the slave trade plays a certain role.
The important role of the Genoese in the Levant, not the least as transporters and purveyors of young mamluks, is well noted (although as said above, there is still more work to be done in the area). At the same time, we should not forget the role played by their Venetian competitors in the slave trade, from the eastern Mediterranean to the western region. Their possible part in the Black Sea trade of slaves (including perhaps some who later served as mamluks) is examined by D. Quirini, while the Venetian fondaco at Alexandria provided the focus of G. Christ’s article. The ‘archipelago’ of the Aegean Sea is dealt with by E. Marcos, who highlights how the Catalan company was involved in this lucrative business. Finally, M. Balard (in a second paper, this time in French) provides us with an overview of the transport of slaves in the Mediterranean world at this time.**
While the matter of trade in young mamluks has found its place in general studies of medieval slavery in the Mediterranean, this may be the first time that an attempt has been made to put it in the centre of the discussion. At the same time, in spite of many excellent studies in the field of Mamluk history, there is little reference to — let alone discussion of — the wider Mediterranean discussion (Ehrenkreutz’s article, cited above, is one partial exception). We therefore think that the present collection of papers will be helpful to two groups of scholars who do not always engage each other in a satisfactory way: the Western oriented medievalists will see the important role of the slave trade in candidates for military slavery in the Muslim countries, while the Islamic oriented historians will learn more of some of the larger Mediterranean context of their own work.
We think that important and interesting advances are made here in the understanding of Mamluk military society and the nature of the trade that brought the young mamluks to Egypt and Syria. It is clear that this trade in the early Sultanate was multifaceted and complex, and we are happy if we have been able to shed some light on this matter. However, even here there is much more to uncover in order to understand the mechanism of the trade, both international and local, let alone what was the fate of the young mamluks after their purchase (in spite of excellent work in this volume, elsewhere, and by some of the founding fathers of Mamluk studies, most notably the late David Ayalon). We still know very little about the trade in mamluks to Egypt and Syria before the establishment of Sultanate in 1250 and in its later years. The role of the overland routes via Anatolia, the Caucasus and northern Syria is also not very clear. We can see this present volume, then, as a certain contribution to the ongoing study of the trade in mamluks, as well as parallel matters across the Mediterranean. However, there is much more to be done. We, ourselves may yet return to the topic, but we hope that others will take up the task and continue to investigate slavery and the slave trade in the region in the late medieval period, both in the Muslim and Christian countries, and the interconnection between them.
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