Download PDF | (The Middle Ages Series) William D. Phillips - Slavery in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia-University of Pennsylvania Press (2014).
272 Pages
Introduction
This present work of synthesis surveys the history of slavery in Iberia from ancient times to the modern period. It relies in part on the studies of slavery I published in the 1980s but differs greatly in its content, focus, and structure from those earlier works. Though I cite a few archival sources, I have based the work on my reading of as much of the available scholarly literature as possible. This has occupied me for a longer period than I anticipated or would have preferred, in large part because the study of slavery in Iberia has become popular among scholars since the late 1980s.
Their publications appeared in a boom period that began in the second half of the 1980s and peaked around the year 2000, though important contributions have continued to appear. Several factors accounted for the accelerated production, including the greater number of students pursuing advanced degrees and an increased availability of venues for publication.’ This outpouring of material has made it impossible for any one individual to read and digest all that is available. The bibliography indicates what I have been able to do.
Before the 1980s there were a few pioneering studies, and from the midtwentieth century the most prominent scholar on the topic was Charles Verlinden (1907-1996). His massive survey of slavery in medieval Europe, the first volume of which appeared in 1955 and covered Iberia and France, relied heavily on legal sources and created interest in a subject that had not been comprehensively studied before.’ In addition to his major survey, Verlinden’s wide-ranging scholarship included items that he published on medieval slavery for well over half a century.
Antonio Dominguez Ortiz (1909-2003) opened the debate and the scholarly path for the study of slavery in Spain’s early modern period with a seminal article in 1952 on slavery in Castile.> Together, the works of Verlinden and Dominguez Ortiz sparked renewed interest in an almost forgotten topic. In 1981 Jacques Heers, the distinguished historian of Genoa, published a survey of the historical literature on slavery in the Mediterranean in which Spain figured prominently. Heers stressed domestic slavery and related it to the work done by free domestic servants.° In 1985 my survey of the medieval continuity of slavery devoted considerable attention to Iberia.”
Several able historians anticipated the boom in Iberian slavery studies in publications that appeared from the 1960s through the 1980s. Among the best known was Vicenta Cortés Alonso, who published many articles and an important book on slavery in Valencia at the time of the Catholic Monarchs.§ Early modern Valencia found its historian in Vicente Graullera Sanz.’ The city of Seville had one of Spain’s largest populations of slaves, and Alonso Franco Silva published a major work on slavery in Seville that appeared in 1979." Ruth Pike provided important discussions of slavery in Seville in an article and in sections of two of her books and later wrote a book on Spanish penal servitude in the early modern period." The topics of raids across religious lines and the subsequent captivity and ransoming attracted the attention of James Brodman for the Middle Ages and Ellen Friedman for the early modern period.” The Canary Islands, the first stage of European conquest and colonization in the Atlantic, were another focal point for slavery. For slavery in the Canaries, Manuel Lobo Cabrera was the major historian. The most prominent book on slavery in Portugal was that of A. C. de C. M. Saunders."
The majority of the older and more recent studies deal with areas of Christian Iberia in the late medieval and early modern centuries. The medieval studies have been most abundant for areas of the late medieval Crown of Aragon, particularly Catalonia, Valencia, and Mallorca. For Castile, the chronological focus has been the period of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries. Notably, these works have usually concentrated on local areas and regional patterns, with scholars examining local sources and publishing in local venues. At times these publications dealt with places with important slave populations, whereas elsewhere the number of slaves in the place studied was miniscule even though the records are comprehensive.” Studies of slavery in Portugal have not appeared in anything approaching the same numbers as those in Spain, but important and distinguished works are available.
There still has been no comprehensive early modern survey equivalent to Verlinden’s work on slavery in the Middle Ages. French scholars have perhaps taken the broadest view. Bernard Vincent published a number of important articles on early modern slavery, most of them focused on specific locales. We will mention them in their proper place, but one cuts across regional lines.’6 Vincent collaborated with Alessandro Stella in an article surveying recent work up to 1996 on slavery in early modern Spain.” Stella himself went on to publish a book, Histoires d’esclaves dans la péninsule ibérique,* dealing with the early modern period and heavily weighted toward evidence derived from ecclesiastical records in Cadiz. It is useful for Stella’s efforts to find and bring to the forefront the words of the slaves themselves, the “stories of slaves” of his title, and to document the extensive geographical mobility that some eighteenth-century slaves experienced.”
Among the locally focused studies of slavery in Spain, one of the most significant books in recent years is that of Aurelia Martin Casares on slavery in sixteenth-century Granada, published in 2000.” This is a work informed by wide reading in empirical and theoretical studies of slavery in Africa and the Americas and by close attention to recent developments in women’s history and feminist theory. It has already proved to be highly influential for subsequent studies. The author’s focus on the city of Granada provided her with a local case with a wealth of documentary sources and a somewhat atypical trajectory of the servile experience over the sixteenth century. Granada had a low level of slavery in that period, unlike the cities of eastern and southern Spain and southern Portugal, all of which were more closely linked with the sea-borne slave trade and which tended to have a higher percentage of slaves in the population. Nonetheless, the late sixteenth century saw a sharp upward jump in slave sales in Granada, as the defeated insurgents of the Morisco” revolt and their wives and children ended up in captivity and flooded the slave market for a decade or so.
Martin Casares applied a series of skillful and well informed interpretations to her material. She emphasized that women slaves were more numerous throughout the medieval and early modern periods in most places scholars have studied. Among the pioneers in commenting on a number of questions about why more women were sold than men, she has suggested that scholars should reflect on how the lives and work of men and women slaves differed, why women tended to command higher prices, what premium derived from women’s reproductive abilities, and the vulnerability of women slaves to sexual exploitation within the domestic context. She also insisted that the individuals should be accorded their full humanity.
She excoriated earlier scholars for their use of terms that objectify individuals and groups. She argued that the modern use of words such as “piece” (pieza) to mean an individual slave, or male (varén) and female (Fembra) to describe men and women, has tended to perpetuate the attitudes of the sixteenth-century slave owners. She even avoided to the extent possible the word “slave” (esclavo and esclava), preferring to use the term “enslaved person” (as, for example, mujer esclavizada) or “captive” (e.g., hombre cautivado). In this way, she endeavored to emphasize that slavery was a condition people were subjected to, and, even though enslaved, they were still human beings, not something less. This is a worthwhile reminder to all those who study slavery in the past, as is her application of feminist and gender theory.
Other scholars have recently published significant works on slavery in Iberia. These include Roser Salicrti i Lluch, who works on Catalonia and particularly Barcelona, and Debra Blumenthal, whose primary focus is Valencia. In 1998 Salicru i Lluch published an important book on slaves and slave owners in late medieval Barcelona. Since then she has published significant articles on topics such as slaves in artisanry, fugitives, and the profitability of slavery.” Blumenthal’s major work to date is Enemies and Familiars: Slavery and Mastery in Fifteenth-Century Valencia,” in which she mines the rich late medieval documentation of the city and kingdom and comes to new conclusions about the agency slaves exercised, both as individuals and in collectivities, and unusual tasks assigned to slaves, such as settling their owners’ scores when honor was involved. They attacked their owners’ rivals and in the process did harm to the rivals’ bodies as well as damage to their reputations.
Along with the expanding base of data provided by the new studies, there have been significant changes from the 1970s to the first decade of the twentyfirst century in the interpretations of many aspects of the history of slavery. Manumission is one example. Writing in the late 1970s, Alfonso Franco Silva stated that “according to the documents studied, the lives of the slave . . . turned out to be acceptable enough and not harsh. . . . [The owners] integrated [the slaves] into the family, as servants, companions, and guardians of their children. If they were faithful and comported themselves well, they could almost be assured that they would be freed upon the death of the master.” Martin Casares, writing a generation later, interpreted the lives of slaves to be much harsher and bleaker, and suggested that few slaves ended their lives as freed people, at least in Granada.
Other major interpretive changes in scholarship include the increasing recognition that slavery in Iberia was complex with significant change over time, regional variations, and a wide range of assignments for slaves; that more women than men were slaves; and that slaves were not just domestics. Many worked primarily in other pursuits, as we will see. Until recently, scholars have tended to emphasize slavery as a system of regulating involuntary labor and to regard the slaves, usually considered to be men, as involuntary laborers. This is probably because of the influence of the well-studied history of slavery in the United States, where numbers were great, the majority of slaves were men, and plantation agriculture dominated the popular imagination. Nothing so extensive and intensive as plantation agriculture existed in medieval and early modern Iberia.
Slavery there was on a much smaller scale. Slaves in Iberia worked as artisans and agricultural workers, and also occupied different roles in the households in which they found themselves. Domestic slaves often worked seasonally in agriculture. It is no longer possible to dismiss domestic slavery as nonproductive or to consider it irrelevant. It is clear that not all slaves lived in the household of their owners; this recognition is another significant departure from the traditional interpretation. Some of these slaves operated freely, while many others worked for those who rented their labor for any number of tasks ranging from nursemaiding to shipbuilding. Despite the fact that the numbers and percentages of slaves in the Iberian population were never large, the intrinsic importance and the complexity of slavery in Iberia justifies the number and scope of the many recent publications. This present work relies heavily upon them and introduces many of them to the wider scholarly community.
The study of slavery is complicated and involves much more than a simple dichotomy between slave and free or slavery and freedom. Individuals could find themselves at any number of points between full slavery and full freedom, as we will see in the chapters to come. Captives in warfare could be held until exchanges of prisoners took place between the contending parties. If they were not exchanged, they could be enslaved. It was similar for those captured in raids: some could be exchanged, others ransomed, and the unlucky and unredeemed ended up as slaves. Slaves could seek freedom by flight. Slaves could be manumitted by any number of ways. A family member or a friend could purchase their freedom.
Their owner might agree to manumit them during his lifetime or upon his death through his last will and testament. He might allow them to work to save money to buy their own freedom. In such cases when the slaves were promised future manumission, they entered a status in which they enjoyed enhanced rights, notably that they usually could not be sold to a third party. Concubinage, as we will see, was a common situation for female slaves, for whom pregnancy and childbearing often followed. While this could arouse the anger of the owner’s wife and his legitimate children, in many cases the slave mother found her status improved. This was the case in both Christian and Muslim society, but among the Muslims it rested upon strong legal norms and societal customs. A slave who bore her Muslim master a child, always assuming he acknowledged responsibility, entered a new status. She could no longer be sold and would be freed on the master’s death, and her child would be free from the time of birth. We will see many examples of the gradations between full freedom and full slavery in the chapters that follow.
By necessity, the periods and places where the greatest number of sources exist and where scholars have investigated them most fully receive prominence in this book. Consequently, the emphasis falls on the late Middle Ages and the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The histories of slavery in Roman Hispania and in the Visigothic kingdom are less completely developed, having left fewer traces in the historical records and having attracted fewer modern scholars. The same is true for al-Andalus (Muslim Iberia), where slavery was a common component of society that at the time did not produce controversy, extensive commentary, or archives of business transactions. Consequently, there are fewer documents to be investigated, and, it should be noted, until recently there have been fewer investigators competent in the Arabic language. The documentary base is wider and deeper for the Christian kingdoms of the Middle Ages and the early modern centuries. Records of the sales and manumissions of slaves are readily available in local archives. Wars and skirmishes on land and at sea produced captives—Christians in Muslim hands and Muslims in Christian hands—who could be ransomed if fortune favored them and otherwise could be enslaved. The accounts of ransoms and prisoner exchanges are abundant.
The sources and the studies of slavery in Spain allow an excellent view to be developed of the trade in slaves, their lives, their work, and their chances to become free. What they do not allow is a comprehensive accounting of prices and numbers of slaves throughout the periods and places we examine. It would be wonderful if they did, but the information about prices and numbers of slaves is quite sketchy for the Middle Ages and not a great deal better for the early modern centuries. This may come as shock and a disappointment to those familiar with the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century history of slavery, for which statistical records are abundant. ‘The prices listed in the documents are of course in the local money of account, and rendering those prices in modern terms would be a meaningless project. Premodern officials did not take censuses or compile statistics on population. Many scholars estimate the figures for the numbers of slaves they study, and most recognize the limitations of their estimates. Their percentages often rely on their own estimates of the numbers of sales or baptisms or manumissions compared to estimates of the total population prepared by other scholars.
One example of the difficulties involved in setting figures for populations of slaves is that of the island and city of Mallorca in the late Middle Ages. For the early fourteenth century, Charles Verlinden suggested 36 percent of the total population.” The same author suggested a figure of 20 percent for the early fifteenth century.° Subsequent estimates by a variety of scholars have reduced the assumed percentages considerably. For the early fourteenth century, Hillgarth accepted at least 10 percent,” whereas Planas Rossello, following Santamaria, accepted 20 percent.
Ricardo Soto Campany estimated only 13 percent of the island’s population to be composed of slaves.?? Most recently, Antoni Mas i Forners explained the difficulties in reconciling the various estimates for the fourteenth century population of slaves and restated the variations of 10, 20, and 36 percent. He pointed out that any one of those estimates would have reflected “very elevated percentages within the overall population,”** Mallorca may have had about 5,000 slaves by the mid-fifteenth century, about 10 percent of the total population.*' These varying estimates are testimony to the continuing interest in the history of slaves and slavery in late medieval Mallorca, as scholars have brought differing assumptions and statistical techniques to the same problem. Studies of slavery in other Iberian regions and municipalities may seem more precise, because for most of them we have only single, not multiple, estimations. All this is a sober reminder that precision is never easy and often impossible, given the incomplete documentation that remains from the past for the present.
The study of slavery in Iberia does not exist in isolation, and scholars working on the history of slavery are increasingly aware of studies elsewhere, especially of slavery in the Americas, that form useful comparative contexts. In the Americas, slavery was more recent, having ended only in the nineteenth century, and it produced more records that have survived, especially the words of the slaves and former slaves themselves. We will see the personal stories of individual slaves in the pages that follow, but readers must be aware that it is not always possible to find the complete life stories of pre-modern slaves in Iberia, due to the incomplete documentary record. Much recent work has concentrated on slavery in individual towns and cities and relied on the rich resources of the records of notaries, in which sales, manumissions, and wills are the main records that relate to slaves. As valuable as the notarial documents are, they usually illuminate a single moment in the life of a slave, such as the day of the sale or the time of the manumission.
These documents typically show prices, physical descriptions of the people being sold, and at times something of the past lives of the slaves and the skills they possessed. The notarial documents have limitations. Their foremost drawback is that they were almost always created at the behest of the owners, who had the notaries document the sales of slaves or their manumission. They were not done at the initiative of the slaves or ex-slaves, except in a few exceptional cases. The voices of the slaves, consequently, do not provide the dominant notes in the documents, but at times and with close analysis, something from the slaves’ points of view can be interpreted from them, and the clear and authentic voices of the slaves themselves emerge.”
The lives of the enslaved people of pre-modern Iberia provide the points of focus for this book. It begins with a chapter containing an overview of the history of slaves and slavery in the peninsula. Thereafter, the chapters are topical, not chronological, and follow what might be the trajectory of the life of an individual who became a slave, lived and worked as a slave, and eventually became a free person. Chapter 2 shows the many ways a person could become a slave. Some people were born as slaves. Others were born free and became slaves later. Wars, raids, and kidnapping all produced slaves, as did other means, including judicial sentences, sale of children by impoverished parents, and even voluntary slavery. Slaves could be sold, and many were moved long distances before their sales, as Chapter 3 explores. It also reveals that the transport, sale, and purchase of slaves all had complex variations. Chapter 4 shows how people lived as slaves, especially how they interacted with their owners and other living in the same households. Often they had to learn a new language, accept a new religion, and otherwise become culturally fluent in a new social environment.
Women and some men slaves had to endure involuntary sexual activities—rape, to put it bluntly—that in the case of the women could and often did lead to pregnancy and childbearing. Slaves were not powerless and made the best of their limited opportunities, even with the severe restrictions that they faced. They relied on themselves and friends and family, while religion and the religious institutions they joined provided possibilities of solace and some material support. They did not lack agency in their own affairs. Chapter 5 shows the ways that slaves were put to work in the wide range of activities of the pre-modern centuries, from service in elite households, to action as business agents, to hard labor in fields or artisan workshops. Some slaves became free, as Chapter 6 indicates. They could flee and attempt to reach freedom across religious and political frontiers. Many more became free by manumission, though it was not won easily. The granting of manumission almost always depended on the master, who could choose to free his slaves for any number of reasons, either during his lifetime or after his death by the terms of his will and testament. Usually slaves had to pay for their freedom, either literally by giving money to their owners or figuratively by providing them or their heirs with specified lengths and terms of service.
The story of slavery is the story of the slaves, who could live any of a variety of lives depending on the circumstances in which they found themselves. Conquerors enslaved defeated enemies in many places, slave dealers secured slaves in numerous locales to bring slaves to Iberia and sell them there. Thus the slaves came from multiple ethnic, religious, and linguistic groups. Did their medieval and early modern owners draw distinctions among them along ethnic or racial lines? Scholars have only recently begun to address questions of the differentiation and discrimination regarding ethnicity, and how this might relate to something akin to modern racism. Answers to those questions are still not clear and likely will be at the forefront of near-future investigations and interpretations. Other new directions in the study of slavery will continue and expand the recent interest in the lives of women as slaves and the even more recent concern for the lives of children as slaves.*
The history of slavery in Spain is complex and lacks a clear narrative line. It contains fascinating and heartrending episodes as slaves suffered, endured, and occasionally triumphed. Slavery in the Iberian Peninsula declined and died out late in the early modern period, as the first chapter shows. In that same period, slavery in the European colonial areas grew, continued in the Spanish empire and in Brazil into the late nineteenth century, and involved vastly greater numbers of slaves than anywhere in Europe. The final chapter, an epilogue, will touch upon this. The historical literature of Latin American slavery is vast and beyond the scope of this book, whose main story is what happened in Iberia.
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