Slavery in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia

William D. Phillips, Jr.

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780812244915, 9780812244915
• eBook ISBN: 9780812209174
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European Medieval History
• Index: History

The enslaved population of medieval Iberia composed only a small percentage of the general populace at any given point, and slave labor was not essential to the regional economy during the period. Yet slaves were present in Iberia from the beginning of recorded history until the early modern era, and the regulations and norms for slavery and servitude shifted as time passed and kingdoms rose and fell. The Romans brought their imperially sanctioned forms of slavery to the Iberian peninsula, and these were adapted by successive Christian kingdoms during the Middle Ages. The Muslim conquest of Iberia introduced new ideas about slavery and effected an increase in slave trade. During the later Middle Ages and the early modern period, slave owners in Christian Spain and Portugal maintained slaves at home, frequently captives taken in wars and sea raids, and exported their slave systems to colonies across the Atlantic. Slavery in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia provides a magisterial survey of the many forms of bound labor in Iberia from ancient times to the decline of slavery in the eighteenth century. William D. Phillips, Jr., examines the pecuniary and legal terms of slavery from purchase to manumission. He pays particular attention to the conditions of life for the enslaved, which, in a religiously diverse society, differed greatly for Muslims and Christians as well as for men and women. This sweeping narrative will become the definitive account of slavery in a place and period that deeply influenced the forms of forced servitude that shaped the New World.

CHAPTER 1

The History of Slavery in Iberia

Slavery was a structural feature of Mediterranean society.

—Fernand Braudel, mid-twentieth century

Slavery was present in the Iberian Peninsula from the beginning of recorded history. It was prominent in Roman times and in the early Middle Ages under the Visigoths. The Muslims maintained a slave system in Iberia as long as they held territory there. The medieval Christian kingdoms of the peninsula all had slaves and laws governing them, and slavery continued in early modern Spain and Portugal before declining and dying out in the eighteenth century.¹

The numbers of slaves and the percentage of slaves in the population during those centuries remained relatively small. At no time was a slave society present. The scholarly standard is Moses I. Finley’s division between slave societies, on the one hand, and societies with slaves, on the other. In Finley’s definition, a slave society had to have something on the order of 30 percent of the population as slaves, and slave labor had to account for a major proportion of that society’s production. Only five places and times figured in Finley’s scheme as slave societies: classical Greece and Rome, colonial Brazil, colonial Caribbean, and antebellum United States.² All others with lower percentages were societies with slaves, and the Iberian societies fit here. Even in Roman Hispania, the percentage of slaves did not reach 30. Throughout the Middle Ages and the early modern centuries, slaves were unevenly distributed over the geography of the peninsula and made up a small percentage of the overall population. Many parts of the peninsula had no slaves at all. Large commercial cities—Lisbon and Seville, Valencia and Barcelona—may have had over 10 percent slaves between the late fifteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and some smaller Atlantic coastal towns may have had around 20 percent. In that period, though, slaves probably made up less than 1 percent of the population in Spain and perhaps less than 7 percent in Portugal. Nowhere and at no time was the economy dependent on slave labor. There were slaves, nonetheless, on Iberian soil throughout the period we are examining, and the premodern societies there were societies with slaves. Even though the numbers of slaves were small in comparison with classical Athens or Rome or colonial Brazil, their lives shared characteristics with those of slaves elsewhere.

The history of slavery in Iberia, though complex and long lasting, was not unique in Europe and the Mediterranean. At one time or another, all Western European countries experienced the presence of slavery and the slave trade. Scandinavians practiced slavery at home and traded slaves abroad in the early Middle Ages. Ireland had slaves and slave traders, as did England up to the eleventh century. The Low Countries, France, and the Germanspeaking areas knew slavery as a long legacy of the Roman domination and as a continuing though diminishing feature of life in the central Middle Ages. The Italian states had a long experience with slavery that lasted from classical times through the early modern centuries and drew slaves from as far afield as the Russian rivers, the Black Sea coasts, and North and sub-Saharan Africa. The Byzantine Empire had slaves throughout its existence. The world of Islam, which for seven centuries counted parts of Iberia within it, had a welldeveloped system of slavery and an expansive slave trade from many areas of Europe, West Asia, and Africa. Iberia’s slave holders to one degree or another or at one time or another interacted with these areas as they acquired slaves and put them to use. The stories of lives of those slaves in Iberia are compelling and form the core of this book.³ Here are a few of those stories to introduce the complexity of the topic.

Stories of Slaves

In 1301 the slave Francesca received conditional freedom in Christian Valencia. She was a Christian, almost certainly a former Muslim, and owned by Bernat Planell, a citizen and moneychanger of Valencia, and his wife Gillemona. Francesca received her freedom in a private notarial act that declared her free, released, and placed in liberty. Despite the rotund terms of the statement, Francesca agreed to abide by a separate provision that she would serve her former owners for a term of three years, during which Planell and his wife would provide her with food and drink, clothing, and shoes.⁴

In the early fourteenth century, Muslim forces captured a Christian boy in the town of Calzada de Calatrava in La Mancha. He was taken to Granada, converted to Islam, and trained as a soldier. Eventually, under the name Riḍwān, he became the grand vizier of the kingdom of Granada.⁵ He is a late example of a long list of former slaves who reached high positions in Muslim Spain.

Catalina Muñoz prepared a will in Almería in 1570. In it she left a graphic account of her life and that of her children by several fathers.

I declare that I have a natural daughter, Isabel Muñoz, wife of Lázaro de Palenzuela, and her father is named Jorge de Brujas, and at the time that he had her in me, I was the slave of Juan [Alonso] Valle de Cabrera. Also, I declare that I have another daughter named Ana de Rojas, daughter of a soldier of the company of the Count of Chinchón, and at present she is the slave of doña Ana Pantoja, wife of Cristóbal de Robles, and she is also a natural daughter. Also, I declare that I have a son named Bernavé Castillo, slave of the said Juan Alonso [Valle] de Cabrera. He was the son of Juan del Castillo, and he is a natural child as the others. Also, I say and declare that after having the said three children, I married Alonso González, according to the rites of the Holy Mother Church, [and] to marry me he ransomed me and made them give me my liberty, because at that time I was the slave of the said Juan [Alonso] Valle de Cabrera, as is already stated, and from that matrimony we had and raised as our legitimate son Alonso González.⁶

In August 1571, thirteen young Moroccan Muslims, joined by a Morisco (a Christian convert from Islam) of Granada, embarked on a trip of pirate raiding in a small sailing ship. Reaching the coast of Málaga, they captured three Christians and took them to the ship, where four of the Muslims guarded them. The others continued along the shore seeking still more Christians to capture. At that point, two Christian ships from Málaga answered the alarm and sailed out to intercept the raiders’ vessel, whose crew raised sail and fled, leaving ten of their companions ashore. They hid out in the hills behind Málaga for three days before they were captured, taken to the jails of the Alhambra in Granada, and sold at public auction in early September. A silk merchant purchased one of the ten, Hamet Manli, who before long decided to flee into the mountains south of Granada. He walked for six days, finding grapes to eat in the first three days and nothing thereafter. Coast guards apprehended Hamet near Almería and jailed him in the town of Vera. His captors questioned him closely and then sent a message to his owner in Granada. The document ends at that point. Our glimpse of the life of Hamet is of less than three months’ duration, as he became a slave catcher, a captive, a slave, a fugitive, and a captive again.⁷

Miguel de Cervantes endured five years of captivity in Algiers after having been captured by Muslims at sea in 1575. Passages based on his experiences there before he was ransomed appear in many of his literary works, including Don Quijote. We will see more about his time in Algiers in Chapter 2.⁸

The records of the Inquisition contain the account of the life of a convert from Islam to Christianity, one José de Santa Ana. Apprehended and brought before the tribunal in Murcia in 1734, he had to counter the accusations of witnesses who saw him frequenting taverns in the company of two students. His accusers reported that he made disparaging remarks about the Christian religion in Spanish and supposedly said, “Hooray for Muḥammad!” in Arabic. He claimed to have been captured off Portugal and imprisoned for fourteen years and that he was trying to get back to North Africa at the time he was apprehended. He changed his story once in custody, blaming his reported behavior on heavy drinking urged on by the students. He then asserted that he was a native of Algiers and that he had gone to Lisbon in the company of some Christian clerics returning from a mission to redeem captives. Baptized and confirmed in Lisbon, he worked for years as a cook in a noble household. He left that employment after a disagreement and then wandered through Portugal and Spain, eventually reaching Murcia. In his interrogation, he swore that he was a good Christian and had no intention of returning to the Islamic world, where he believed that he would not be accepted because he had converted to Christianity. The inquisitors found him to have an acceptable, though incomplete, knowledge of Christianity. Due to his contrition and the extenuation of his drunkenness, they decided not to punish him.⁹

Mid-eighteenth-century documents reveal the life trajectory of Catalina de Gálvez, a woman of African descent, born on the island of Jamaica and taken to Cádiz at so young an age she could not remember the trip. There Francisco Malberán baptized, raised, and educated her. Later he manumitted her in his will, and she became a free citizen of Cádiz.¹⁰

These examples offer glimpses of the complexities in the long history of captivity and slavery in Iberia, a history echoed elsewhere in the world. Slavery was cross-cultural and multi-ethnic. Some slaves were born into their condition; others were captured and enslaved in the aftermath of conquest, war, raids, and kidnapping. Warriors recognized that defeat might be a prelude to enslavement. Christians, Jews, and Muslims could be slave dealers, slave owners, or the enslaved, depending on circumstance. Owners employed their slaves in a variety of ways as domestics, sexual partners, artisans, and farmers. They could sell their slaves, grant them as gifts, rent them as hired laborers, or pledge them as collateral for debts. Slaves endured their condition and occasionally sought and secured their freedom, sometimes by flight but most often by purchasing their manumission. For millennia, the presence of slavery was part of the ordinary experience of life even for those free people who owned no slaves. The freeborn feared it, for they knew that they faced the possibility of capture and enslavement.

Varieties of Slavery in Iberia

The societies of Iberia shared in the wider experience of slavery in the Mediterranean world and beyond. Slavery changed over time, despite elements of continuity. Slavery is a complex institution that had different manifestations from ancient to modern times and assumed a greater or lesser importance in the Islamic and Christian societies and economies of the Iberian Peninsula. The numbers of slaves, their percentage in the overall population, the way the slaves entered the host society, the work they did, the lives they led, their chances for manumission and assimilation all varied by place, period, and circumstance.

We can see slavery in medieval Iberia as a persistent feature that ultimately helped to lead to the great expansion of slavery in the Americas after 1500, but that is only a minor part of the overall story. The men, women, and children who lived as slaves over the course of the centuries were the most affected, but the presence of slavery had an impact as well on the free people who owned slaves and others who came in contact with them. Life in a society with slaves influenced attitudes about social differences and the relations among religions, because most slaves were initially of a different religion from that of their masters. They also usually spoke different languages and came from different ethnic backgrounds, thereby complicating relations between the host society and the slaves.

For Iberia, as for the rest of the Mediterranean world, slavery was present as far back as there are records. The early communities in the Iberian Peninsula practiced slavery, and the Carthaginians began a more intensive use of slave labor. Nevertheless, the Roman period was crucial for the later history of slavery.¹¹ Rome’s domination of the peninsula began with a long period of conquest, beginning in the late third and lasting to the late first century B.C.E., from the time Roman armies first landed at the old Greek colony-city of Emporion (modern Ampurias or Empúries) on the Mediterranean coast to the final pacification of the north of the peninsula by Augustus. While fighting the forces of Carthage in eastern Spain, the Roman leader Scipio Africanus often allowed the native Hispani their freedom and enslaved only the Carthaginians. During the Roman conquest of the rest of Iberia, the Romans peacefully absorbed the peoples and places whose rulers agreed to join the conquerors but killed or enslaved those who resisted. It is impossible to be precise about the numbers of prisoners produced during the Roman conquest of Spain or to determine how many of the prisoners became slaves. Even though the Roman authors loved to list and likely to exaggerate the numbers of captives, at times some of them said only that “many” fell into Roman hands. All told, perhaps as many as 200,000 captives became slaves. Of these, some remained in the peninsula while others were exported. The scenes of battle, the concentrations of the defeated, and their subsequent distribution and sale to slave dealers echoed similar events elsewhere throughout the Mediterranean.¹²

The Romans colonized and Romanized the peninsula even as the wars of conquest dragged on, and Hispania, as they called it, eventually became fully a part of the Roman world.¹³ The numbers of slaves and their use in the economy were probably at their height at the time of the late Republic in the first century B.C.E., a consequence of the captives the wars of conquest created. Did Roman Spain become a slave society? One strand among recent studies of Roman slavery holds that only Italy and Sicily became true slave societies. Another view is that the label should also apply to certain other Roman provinces, including Spain.¹⁴ Certainly, Roman Spain had many slaves, though almost assuredly not so many as to represent 30 percent of the population.

Slaves in Roman Spain endured conditions similar to those elsewhere in the Roman world and worked as household servants, in commerce, and in artisan manufacturing. The Romans used slaves in gangs on large agricultural enterprises, in the mines, and on public works projects. Gang slavery was a characteristic of Roman slavery that did not last into the Middle Ages. Roman slaves existed in circumscribed legal conditions, but many received their freedom and lived out their lives as freedmen. If the freed slaves had children, those children and their descendants were free.

The numbers of slaves and the importance of slavery declined during the third and fourth centuries, as the Roman Empire itself staggered. The demographic, social, and economic changes that collectively made up the decline of the western Roman Empire were accompanied by alterations in the patterns of slave use. As the cities lost population and significance in the economy, the centers of economic and social gravity shifted from the towns to the country villas. The hollow cities no longer provided major markets for rural produce, while the villas tended to become more self-sufficient. Large slave gangs were no longer needed, and urban slaves became fewer in number. Many of the rural slaves eventually blended with free peasants into a group of semi-dependent workers. Roman Hispania was not a slave society by the end of the imperial period, if it ever had been one, but was a society with slaves. With the decline of the western empire, the conditions were set for the Germanic incursions and the establishment of the Visigothic kingdom in Iberia.

Slavery continued to be important in the Visigothic period from the fifth to the early eighth century. The Visigoths had known slavery before they entered Roman territory. Once inside the Roman borders, they generally retained the Roman laws governing slavery and instituted only subtle changes in its practice. The sources of slaves, their conditions, and their possibility of manumission remained much the same as in Roman times, despite a few innovations. For example, the normal pattern was to refrain from enslaving those considered part of the dominant group, and one common definition of inclusion and exclusion was religion. The Visigoths, until the late sixth century, were Arian Christians who felt no compunction about enslaving Catholic Christians. Another innovation was that the Visigoths at times made use of slaves as combat troops, unlike the Romans, who usually confined their slaves to support roles in military activity. The ruralization of the Roman West proceeded as the Visigothic kingdom developed along social and economic lines similar to those of other Germanic successor kingdoms. We have no way of knowing how Visigothic slavery would have developed, because Visigothic rule in Spain abruptly ended when the Muslims conquered the kingdom early in the eighth century.¹⁵

The Muslims expanded from their origins in Arabia to take control of a swath of territories eastward to India and westward to the shores of the Atlantic Ocean in little more than a century. Slavery and the slave trade were both present in the Arabian Peninsula before the rise of Islam, and the Muslims ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Maps
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. The History of Slavery in Iberia
• Chapter 2. To Become a Slave
• Chapter 3. The Traffic in Slaves
• Chapter 4. To Live as a Slave
• Chapter 5. To Work as a Slave
• Chapter 6. To Become Free
• Epilogue: The Wider Extensions of Iberian Slavery
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Acknowledgments