Rethinking Medieval Margins and Marginality

Ann Zimo, Tiffany Vann Sprecher, Kathryn Reyerson, Debra Blumenthal, Ann E. Zimo, Tiffany D. Vann Sprecher

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000034844
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Marginality assumes a variety of forms in current discussions of the Middle Ages. Modern scholars have considered a seemingly innumerable list of people to have been marginalized in the European Middle Ages: the poor, criminals, unorthodox religious, the disabled, the mentally ill, women, so-called infidels, and the list goes on. If so many inhabitants of medieval Europe can be qualified as "marginal," it is important to interrogate where the margins lay and what it means that the majority of people occupied them. In addition, we scholars need to reexamine our use of a term that seems to have such broad applicability to ensure that we avoid imposing marginality on groups in the Middle Ages that the era itself may not have considered as such. In the medieval era, when belonging to a community was vitally important, people who lived on the margins of society could be particularly vulnerable. And yet, as scholars have shown, we ought not forget that this heightened vulnerability sometimes prompted so-called marginals to form their own communities, as a way of redefining the center and placing themselves within it. The present volume explores the concept of marginality, to whom the moniker has been applied, to whom it might usefully be applied, and how we might more meaningfully define marginality based on historical sources rather than modern assumptions. Although the volume's geographic focus is Europe, the chapters look further afield to North Africa, the Sahara, and the Levant acknowledging that at no time, and certainly not in the Middle Ages, was Europe cut off from other parts of the globe.

Part 1

Race

1 The space between Borno and Palermo

Slavery and its boundaries in the late medieval Saharan-Mediterranean region¹

Lori De Lucia

In 1510, thirty-two people listed as black Africans were sold in a public auction in Palermo; they would join thousands of other enslaved Africans living on the island.² Italian historian Salvatore Bono hypothesized that by the sixteenth century there were one hundred and fifty thousand slaves in the European Christian world, with one hundred thousand on the Iberian Peninsula and anywhere from fifty to one hundred thousand in Italy.³ The unreliable estimates for sixteenth-century Sicily range from twelve to fifty thousand slaves in any given year, with the majority being black Africans.⁴ This was a stark difference from the early medieval period in Sicily, during which the majority of its slave population was Caucasians from Eastern Europe.⁵ Yet, scholarship on slavery in Sicily rarely focuses specifically on this African population. More recently Sicily has been incorporated into studies of slavery on the Iberian Peninsula, as an export market of the wider Atlantic-European slave trades growing at the same time.⁶ I approach the example of these thirty-two Africans sold in Palermo as Atlantic Historian Lara Putnam’s telling example; one that “points to unsuspected social networks and flows of information that cut across or swam against fundamental currents.”⁷ The terminology used to document Africans in Sicily revealed that they were arriving from an ancient trans-Saharan slave trade route that extended from the Lake Chad region into present-day Libya. Both the spread of Islam across the Central Sahel and changing alliances in the Mediterranean impacted the increase in this trade.⁸ This chapter aims to reconnect the Sicilian slave trade to its source in the Central Sahel and examine the trans-Mediterranean construction of the archetype of an inherently enslavable black African.

The analysis of marginality is twofold in this chapter. The first is by repositioning Sicily at the margin of a trans-Saharan trade route that originated in Borno, rather than at the periphery of the Mediterranean slave trade connected to the Iberian Peninsula. Many enslaved Africans in the Central Sahel were exported northward to Mediterranean shores. For the medieval period, there is a paucity of scholarship on the volume of these trans-Saharan slave trades, resulting in only rough estimates of the export trade across the Saharan desert, Red Sea, and Indian Ocean ranging from 5,000 to 10,000 slaves per year for the centuries before 1600.⁹ The numbers of enslaved people moving specifically from the Central Sahel into North Africa are even more difficult to estimate. It is however clear that the trans-Saharan slave trade continued to grow with the expansion of the Atlantic, and during the sixteenth century exports of enslaved people from Songhay and Borno to the North reached their peak.¹⁰ There were four major trans-Saharan trade routes in West Africa that could carry enslaved people to Northern markets; the route initiating in Borno was the shortest distance to the northern coast in Tripoli and had been used to transport captives as early as the eighth century.¹¹ Historians have argued that from the fifteenth century Iberian Peninsula exports replaced North Africa as the main supplier of slaves into Europe. This chapter counters with key indicators that the expanding trans-Saharan trade remained Sicily’s primary source at least through the early sixteenth century.¹²

The second analysis of marginality focuses on how blackness was being mapped and defined along the shores of the Mediterranean. In recent scholarship, the increase of enslaved black Africans along the European coasts of the Mediterranean is often treated as a shared phenomenon, and in many ways this was true. Africans were entering into a new category of blackness when they arrived in Europe. In both Iberian and Sicilian markets, there was a distinction being made between enslaved Moors and black Africans that reflected a general knowledge of the northern frontiers of the Bilād al-Sudān, or the “Land of the Blacks.” These borders were borrowed from Muslim scholars. In North Africa, Sahelians had already entered into a new category of blackness that was also increasingly systemically marginalized. By the seventeenth century in Tripoli, freed black Africans were restricted to their own neighborhood and were legally only allowed to marry other black Africans.¹³ In seventeenth-century Morocco, during Mulay Isma’il’s invasion of Songhay, Muslim judges and notaries systemized techniques to classify black Africans that marked them as different from all other free Moroccans, and made them susceptible to enslavement.¹⁴ This chapter connects the two spaces enslaved Sahelians crossed to enter Palermo, the Sahara and Mediterranean, as two heuristic seas in which an archetype of a black African was being constructed in opposition to both whiteness and Abrahamic religions.¹⁵

The margins: Palermo and Borno

Periodic census collections in Palermo from 1479 to 1501 show that slave ownership was common among households in urban environments. In 1479, Palermo was divided into six neighborhoods. Kalsa and Albergheria were the two largest neighborhoods, nearly twice the size of the four other neighborhoods.¹⁶ A 1480 census from Kalsa showed that 20% of the population was slave owners, and they represented diverse social classes.¹⁷ The enslaved community composed 12.6% of its population. Twenty years later, a census taken in Albergheria in 1501 showed similar numbers to that of Kalsa. Of the 801 households, 129 owned slaves or 16% of the households.¹⁸ The enslaved community was 10.5% of the entire population. In the wealthy Alliata household, there were two enslaved black males who were working in the fields.¹⁹ A treasurer, Giovanni Ribesaltes, owned six black males.²⁰ There were also court trials that revealed black Africans were loaned as day laborers and even accused of practicing witchcraft in their households.²¹ With ongoing corsair warfare, a consistent factor was that enslaved black Africans were often living in servitude alongside Jews, North Africans, and Eastern Europeans. The census records were inconsistent with terms describing Africans ranging from “blanco di Africa,” “moro,” and “nigro.” There were also often two geographic descriptions that help in discerning the journey many Africans traveled prior to their arrival in Sicily: “Borno,” in the Central Sahel, and “Monti di Barca” on the Libyan coast.

European accounts of the slave trade conducted in the town of “Monti di Barca” – or to Arabic authors Barqa – did not suggest a large-scale system.²² Fifteenth-century Portuguese traveler Zurara wrote of this trade that

to their land (of the Berbers) come some Moors and they sell them of those Negroes whom they have kidnapped or else they take them to Momdebarque (Monti di Barca), which is beyond the kingdom of Tunis to sell to the Christian merchants who go there and they give them these slaves in exchange for bread and some other thing.²³

Zurara’s depiction of a few Christian merchants trading small items for slaves was probably a deliberate downplay of this trade. The recognition of Castilian merchants participating in an African slave trade would have threatened the Portuguese monopoly that was based on their discovery of “Guinea.”²⁴ Twentieth-century historian Charles Verlinden observed that in the medieval period there was a small number of black Africans in both Sicily and the Iberian Peninsula marked as being from “Monds de Barca.” When the trade in African slaves increased in Sicily in the sixteenth century, he attributed it to Sicily’s role as an export market for the growing Portuguese trade, via the port of Valencia.²⁵ But by the sixteenth century in Sicily, common terms from the Iberian records such as “jollof” or “nigro de Guinea,” that reflected regions of the African Atlantic coast, did not appear.²⁶ Verlinden’s observation of small numbers of Africans from Barqa during the medieval period was likely because during this period it was primarily a hub for trans-Saharan trade routes into the Muslim Middle East.²⁷ Later, in a census from 1565 in Palermo half of the total Africans were described specifically as “nigro di Borno.”²⁸ This suggests that starting in the fifteenth century, contrary to Verlinden’s conclusions, Barqa had grown in importance as an export market into Sicily.

This reconfiguration of the strengthening of Sicily’s trade connections to North Africa corresponded to larger political shifts in the Mediterranean. Following the Ottoman capture of Constantinople in 1452, Sicily lost its main source of slaves from the Eastern Mediterranean, forcing it to look elsewhere.²⁹ In 1510, Spain gained control of Tripoli and sent officials from Sicily, which was part of the Spanish monarchy, to govern the city. Diego de Obregon, a known slave trafficker, was sent from Sicily to be the secretary of the customs office in Tripoli in 1512.³⁰ In the same year, Borno sent a mission to Tripoli to assure it would continue its trade in European commodities.³¹ As part of the outcome of this meeting, the Spanish were reported to have made a “great trade in black slaves in Sicily which they had likely received by way of Fazzan.”³² The Fazzan was a major trade hub along the route from Borno.³³ Alliances along the Mediterranean shores were not the only factors determining the increase of enslaved Africans in Sicily. Borno had recently gained exclusive rights of the ancient slave route that originated in the Lake Chad region, and its growth in power directly impacted the increase in trade northward.

Additionally, beginning in the fifteenth century there was a shift to a more institutionalized practice of Islam across the Central Sahel, in which rulers were declaring themselves divinely ordained. Islam had been adopted as early as the seventh century in Egypt and had a strong hold across North Africa by the ninth century.³⁴ In Borno, the first Mai, or ruler, listed in the Diwan had paternal ties to Saif Ibn Dhī-Yazan of the Beni Himyar of Kuraish, from the same family of the prophet Muhammad.³⁵ In the Legend of Daura, the origin of the Hausa states was attributed to the trans-Saharan trek of prince Bayajidda, the son of the king of Baghdad.³⁶ As rulers in Borno and Hausaland fortified the frontiers of an Islamic Sahel, they were simultaneously creating a pagan “other.” According to Islamic law, slaves could only be acquired through Jihad, so the frontiers of Islam also signified the frontiers o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures and tables
• Acknowledgments
• List of contributors
• Introduction
• PART 1: Race
• PART 2: Geography
• PART 3: Gender
• PART 4: Law
• PART 5: Body
• Select bibliography
• Index