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Chapter 3

Societies with Slaves: Genoa, Venice, and the Mamluk Sultanate

The late medieval Mediterranean was surrounded by societies with slaves.¹ This meant that slavery coexisted with other forms of labor, slave labor was not essential to the economy, slave ownership was not a distinguishing characteristic of the ruling class, and the master–slave relationship was not a model for other hierarchical relationships. In the late medieval Mediterranean, few households had more than two slaves. The majority were women purchased in their teens or twenties. The most notable exception was the household of the Mamluk sultan, which included thousands of enslaved men, women, and eunuchs.

After surveying the demography of slaves and slave ownership, this chapter discusses the services provided by slaves. Although slaves were not economically essential, they performed many important functions. Slaves acted as social and financial assets: their presence added to their masters’ prestige, and their value was part of their masters’ net worth. They also performed domestic service and manual labor. Male slaves were used for military service by the Mamluks. Wealthy Mamluk notables also had eunuchs to manage the parallel male and female spheres of their households.

Female slaves around the Mediterranean were subject to sexual and reproductive demands as well as demands on their physical labor. Focusing on the sexual and reproductive aspects of the shared culture of Mediterranean slavery reveals three things. First, although historians have paid more attention to the sexual exploitation of slave women in Islamic contexts, sexual exploitation was also common and well documented in Christian contexts. Second, the most important difference between Islamic and Christian practices of slavery had to do with the status of children. Under Christian and Roman law, children inherited the status of their mothers, so the child of a free man and his slave woman would be a slave. In contrast, under Islamic law, if a free man acknowledged paternity of a child by his slave woman, that child was born free and legitimate, and that slave woman became an umm walad (mother of a child). She could not be sold and would be manumitted automatically after her master’s death. In an Islamic context, therefore, sex with slave women produced heirs, while in a Christian context, it produced property. Third, Christian practices regarding the children of slave women gradually came to resemble Islamic practices over the course of the fourteenth century. In other words, a new aspect of the shared culture of Mediterranean slavery emerged during this period.

In surveying the kinds of service demanded of slaves, this chapter also considers how slave owners’ personalities and social positions shaped their slaves’ lives. It has been asserted that being a slave in a society with slaves, where small numbers of slaves performed domestic work indoors, was a milder experience than being a slave in a slave society, where large numbers of slaves performed manual labor outdoors. This comparison is not helpful for two reasons. First, it sets up a competition of suffering. Was the pain of grueling manual labor greater or lesser than the pain of rape? That question is neither useful nor historically appropriate: both experiences were terrible, each in its own way. Judging which was “better” is beyond the purview of historians, except to the extent that historical sources make such judgments. Late medieval sources do not. Second, a definitional element of slavery is the overwhelming power, backed by violence, of the master over the slave.² A kind master could choose to treat his or her slaves well; a cruel master could choose to treat his or her slaves horribly. Either way, treatment was entirely at the master’s discretion and could vary widely within a slaveholding society.

Instead of evaluating masters’ treatment of their slaves, this chapter considers the role of masters as social gateways for their slaves. The importance of a master’s position and personality in determining an individual slave’s experience cannot be overstated. A Tatar boy purchased by a Venetian baker was likely to work in his owner’s bakery and run household errands but would probably never ride a horse or wield a spear. A Tatar boy purchased by a Mamluk amir was likely to become an expert horseman and warrior but would probably never bake bread. The fact that these two boys might well have come from the same village is one of the most striking features of the Black Sea slave trade.

The Slave Population

It is hard to estimate the size of the free population in most medieval cities. Estimating the size of the slave population is even harder. Chronicles and travel accounts give rough numbers, but they cannot necessarily be trusted. In states that taxed the possession of slaves, the revenue generated by the tax can be used to estimate the size of the slave population in a given year. However, Genoa is the only late medieval Mediterranean state from which tax data of this kind have been preserved. Starting in 1381, Genoa taxed slave possession at half a florin per slave per year to finance its debts from the Chioggia war.³ The half-florin tax applied to inhabitants of the city of Genoa, its suburbs, and the nearby towns of Polcevera, Bisagno, and Voltri. It was collected in April and October. In the collection records, noble families were listed by households (alberghi) and ordinary people by the neighborhoods (conestagie) where they lived. If a slave changed hands or died during the year, the tax was reduced to a quarter-florin.

The half-florin tax, like other Genoese taxes, was collected by tax farmers.⁴ Individuals bid at a public auction for the right to collect the half-florin tax for up to three years. The auction was conducted in the Piazza Banchi under the loggia of the palace of the Negro family by a pair of officials called the consules galleghe. The winner paid his bid to the state treasury in two to four installments over the course of a year. Meanwhile, he would collect the tax whose revenues he had won. Any money he collected beyond the value of his bid and the cost of collection was his to keep as profit. Thus tax farmers’ bids can be seen as specialist investments, and tax farmers often bid on multiple taxes over the course of several years.

Tax farmers tried to bid less than the actual revenue they expected to collect to leave a margin for collection expenses and profit. The rule of thumb is that tax farmers’ bids represented about 70 percent of expected revenue, with 10 percent for expenses and 20 percent as profit.⁵ When a tax farmer bid 580 lire for the half-florin tax in 1468–1470, he probably expected to collect about 829 lire in revenue. We know that in this year, the tax farmer paid fifty lire, about 6 percent of the expected revenue, to the man who would physically collect the tax for him, leaving 4 percent for other expenses, such as bookkeeping materials.⁶ The 70 percent rule can also be checked against data from 1458, the only year for which both the tax farmer’s bid and the tax collection register have been preserved.⁷ In that year, Gregorio de Cassana bid 900 lire for the half-florin tax. The 70 percent rule suggests that Cassana expected 1,286 lire in revenue from a population of 1,582 slaves. In the 1458 collection register, I counted 2,025 slaves (yielding 1,645 lire, 6 soldi, 3 denari in revenue), and Domenico Gioffrè counted 2,059 slaves (yielding 1,672 lire, 18 soldi, 9 denari in revenue). In this case, the 70 percent rule was too generous: Cassana’s bid was only 54 to 55 percent of the revenue he collected. The actual slave population of Genoa in 1458 would have been higher still, because the Fieschi family and the Spinolas of Luccoli were exempt from the half-florin tax in 1458. In the following discussion, therefore, it should be assumed that estimates of the Genoese slave population are rough and more likely to be underestimates than overestimates. Figure 1 shows the winning bids for the half-florin tax between 1381 and 1472.⁸

Figure 1. The Half-Florin Tax on Slave Possession in Genoa.

(Gioffrè, Il mercato, 69–70; Balard, La Romanie, 2:816; ASG, CdSG, N.185,15002, N.185,15006, N.185,15072.)

Analyses of these data have tended to focus on demand rather than supply. The apparent peak in the late fourteenth century (about 7,223 slaves in 1381) is often linked to the Black Death: slaves could have alleviated the sudden labor shortage, and the threat of slave labor could have been used to coerce free servants into accepting lower wages.⁹ But because the data set begins in 1381, three decades after the first plague outbreak and two decades after the second outbreak, it is impossible say exactly what the effects were. There is no pre-plague baseline against which to measure 7,223 slaves and decide whether that figure is low or high. Moreover, it is impossible to tell whether any effects of plague on the slave population should be attributed to the first or second outbreak. A close examination of wills, merchant letters, Senate decisions, and guild statutes in Venice has yielded no evidence for change in either the number of slaves or the kinds of labor they performed as a result of the Black Death.¹⁰ Major plague outbreaks recurred in 1421, 1430, and 1436. Those correlate with dips in Figure 1, as plague deaths reduced the number of slaves.¹¹ After 1430 and 1436, the slave population rebounded to its previous level as masters replaced those who had died. After the 1421 outbreak, though, the slave population only reached 75 percent of its previous level.

Other factors may have affected the slave population of Genoa. In the late fourteenth century, Genoa came under the rule of France. Difficulties in tax collection during the transition may explain the decline in half-florin tax bids between 1380 and 1400.¹² In that case, however, bids should have returned to higher levels after the transition. No demand-based explanation has been offered for the peaks in 1417 (3,451 slaves) and 1440–1442 (3,049 slaves); factors affecting supply are discussed in Chapter 5. Overall, it seems that slaves made up 1 to 2 percent of the total Genoese population in the thirteenth century and 4 to 5 percent in the fifteenth century.¹³

Venetian and Mamluk records do not offer data comparable to Genoa’s half-florin tax. While Venice also instituted a three lire tax on slave possession in 1379 to fund its part in the Chioggia war, no records have survived.¹⁴ What remains is anecdotal evidence. The Senate received complaints about a slave shortage in 1459, which matches the Genoese data.¹⁵ In 1483, a Swiss pilgrim reported that Venice had three thousand slaves, about 2.5 percent of its total population.¹⁶ The Mamluks did not tax slave possession, nor were slaves included in the poll tax (jizya) paid by non-Muslim subjects.¹⁷ No travelers tried to estimate the slave population of Cairo, much less the entire Mamluk kingdom. Modern scholars have noted shrinking slave retinues (mamluks, concubines, domestic slaves, and slave musicians) in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries.¹⁸ This corresponds to the marked decline in Figure 1 from 1381 into the early 1400s.

Another method of counting the slave population is by household. The bourgeois style of service described by Dennis Romano, in which one household had two or three female servants, was the norm in late medieval Italy.¹⁹ The best evidence for this pattern again comes from Genoa’s half-florin tax. In 1458, the half-florin tax was collected by household. As shown in Table 1, 95 percent of households who paid the tax had one or two slaves.²⁰ None had more than six. This statistical picture is fleshed out by letters between the Genoese merchant Giovanni da Pontremoli and his family during the same year.²¹ Seven slaves are mentioned in the letters, but only two belonged to Giovanni.

Table 1. Number of Slaves per Household in Genoa, 1458

No. of slaves per household	No. of households	Percentage of households
1	1,143	74
2	330	21
3	57	4
4–6	12	1

Source: ASG, CdSG, N.185,01009.

Evidence from wills indicates a similar pattern in Venice. The famous traveler Marco Polo manumitted one slave in his will in 1324, and the Venetian painter Nicoletto Semitecolo also manumitted one slave in 1386.²² Panthaleo Iustiniano, a procurator of S. Marco, manumitted three slaves in 1393.²³ Madalutia, the wife of Bernardo Aymo, manumitted two slaves in 1410.²⁴ Andrea Barbarigo, a fifteenth-century patrician known for frugality, had two slave women in his household and one rented out.²⁵ Giosafat Barbaro manumitted one slave in 1493.²⁶ At the upper end of the spectrum, the apothecary Nascimbene de Ferraria mentioned six slaves in his will, but only four were present in his household.²⁷

The number of slaves per household in the Mamluk sultanate ranged more widely. ‘Abd al-Laṭīf ibn ‘Abd al-Muḥsin al-Subkī boasted that he had gone through more than a thousand slave women, but elite civilian households more normally counted their slaves in the dozens.²⁸ At lower social levels and after slave retinues shrank in the late fourteenth century, Mamluk civilian households resembled Italian ones. The households represented in a cache of fourteenth-century documents from Jerusalem had no more than four slaves.²⁹ Ibn Ṭawq, a professional witness (shāhid) in Syria, owned two slave women.³⁰ In Damascus, the estate of a private secretary of the sultan (kātib sirr) included five slaves, and a judge’s estate had four.³¹ A study of Syrian amirs in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries found that none had more than one umm walad.³²

Military households tended to have more slaves. Each amir commanded a unit composed of both mamluks and free horsemen.³³ The size of the unit depended on the amir’s rank: an amīr mī’a muqaddam alf could have one hundred mamluks, an amīr arba’īn or amīr ṭablakhāna could have forty, an amīr ‘ashara could have ten or twenty, and an amīr khamsa could have five. Since the Mamluk army was theoretically composed of twenty-four amirs of one hundred, forty amirs ṭablakhāna, twenty amirs of twenty, fifty amirs of ten, and thirty amirs of five, there should have been a total of 26,650 mamluks in the army, both enslaved and manumitted.³⁴ Each amir registered his mamluks with the diwān al-jaysh, which administered the army, and was not supposed to purchase more mamluks than his rank allowed. In practice, powerful amirs could accumulate 150 to 1,000 mamluks.³⁵ Although a large mamluk corps was prestigious, amirs with too many mamluks risked the sultan’s retaliation if they appeared to challenge his power.³⁶

In addition to mamluks, middle-ranking military households might have thirty or forty domestic slaves, while prominent amirs had two or three hundred.³⁷ The number of slave concubines varied. Tankiz, governor of Damascus in the early fourteenth century, had nine, the amir Qawṣūn had sixty, and the amir Bashtak had eighty.³⁸ Taghrī Birdī, governor of Damascus and father of the chronicler Yūsuf ibn Taghrī Birdī, had eight slave mothers (ummuhāt awlād) as well as a group of concubines who had previously belonged to Sultan Barqūq.³⁹ Contemporary estimates of the total slave population of a single military household are rare, but Sunqur, governor of Bahnasā, owned sixty slave concubines, thirty additional slave women, and fifty mamluks at the time of his death in 1335.⁴⁰

Table 2. Number of Mamluks per Sultan

Sources: Ibn Taghrī Birdī, Al-Manhal al-ṣāfī, no. 717; al-Yunīnī, Dhayl mirāt, 3:250; Ibn Iyās, Bidāʾiʿ al-zuhūr, 1:1:361; Simeonis, Itinerarium, 72–73, 79; Frescobaldi, “Pilgrimage,” 47; Gucci, “Pilgrimage,” 100; Lannoy, OEuvres, 116; “Piloti, Traité,” 54; Adorno, Itinéraire, 188; Ghistele, Voyage, 31; Breydenbach, Sanctarum peregrinationum, fol. 85r; Fabri, Evagatorium, 18:25; Harff, Pilgrimage, 106–7, 124.

The largest Mamluk household was naturally that of the sultan. The sultan’s mamluk corps (al-mamālīk al-sulṭāniyya) consisted of three groups: mamluks purchased by the reigning sultan (al-mushtarawāt or al-julbān), mamluks inherited by the reigning sultan from previous sultans (al-qarāniṣa), and mamluks inherited or confiscated from amirs who had died or lost favor (al-sayfiyya).⁴¹ The citadel of Cairo had twelve barracks (ṭibāq) with a capacity of one thousand mamluks each.⁴² However, contemporary estimates of the size of the sultan’s mamluk corps varied widely, as shown in Table 2. The sultan’s mamluk corps were subject to high turnover: several sultans purged the qarāniṣa and the sayfiyya to consolidate their power. The most notable purges were those of al-Nāṣir Muḥammad in 1310 and al-Nāṣir Faraj in 1411–1412.⁴³ Their effects on the slave trade remain to be investigated.

In addition, the sultan’s household might include anywhere from forty to twelve hundred women, enslaved and free, as well as six hundred eunuchs and an unknown number of domestics.⁴⁴ A sultan’s chief wife might have her own retinue of up to one thousand slave women.⁴⁵ Like other military households, the sultan’s household tended to be smaller in the fifteenth century, and fifteenth-century sultans were more likely to be monogamous.⁴⁶

Figure 2. Median Age of Slaves Sold in Genoa. Black points are based on more data (at least ten sales per year) than gray points.

(ASG, CdSG, N.185,00624, N.185,00625; ASG, Not. Ant. 172, 236–39, 253, 258, 265, 273, 286–87, 292, 363, 366–67, 379–82, 396–405, 449, 685, 719, 768; ASG, Notai ignoti, b.xxiii; Balard, “Remarques”; Balard, La Romanie; Cibrario, Della schiavitù; Amia, Schiavitù; Delort, “Quelques précisions”; Epstein, Speaking; Ferretto, “Codice diplomatico”; Gioffrè, Il mercato; Heers, Gênes; Tardy, Sklavenhandel; Tria, “La schiavitù”; Verlinden, “Esclavage et ethnographie”; Williams, “Commercial Revolution.”)

A third approach to slave demography is to consider the balance of age, gender, and origin. The origins of the Mediterranean slave population are discussed in Chapters 2 and 5. Age was included in Italian slave sale contracts, but notaries habitually rounded slaves’ ages to the nearest multiple of two or five.⁴⁷ The median age of slaves sold in Genoa and Venice was normally between fifteen and twenty-five years old, as shown in Figures 2 and 3. Girls in their early teens seem to have been the most desirable for domestic work. When Cataruccia Dolfin asked her cousin in Alexandria for a slave, she requested a girl twelve years or older because “you can better use them in this age as you want.”⁴⁸ Guglielmo Querini also preferred slaves between twelve and fifteen years old for domestic service.⁴⁹ Francesco Datini thought that a girl between six and ten would learn his ways more quickly and provide him with better service.⁵⁰ Further analysis shows that the slave women for sale tended to be a few years older than men and that the average age of slaves from the Black Sea increased after 1460, when exporting them became more difficult.⁵¹

Mamluk sale contracts categorized slaves by maturity (nursing, weaned, adolescent, or adult) rather than numerical age. Newly imported mamluks were often described as children (ṣaghīr, pl. ṣugharā’) below the age of maturity (bulūgh). The only evidence for numerical age at the time of sale is anecdotal. Jaqmaq al-Arghūnshāwī arrived in Egypt with his mother at age three, Sanqar al-Zaynī was imported around age six, Sultan Khushqadam at age ten, Sultan Shaykh at age twelve, and Sultan Baybars at age fourteen.⁵² Taghrī Barmish al-Jalālī and the eunuch Fayrūz al-Nawrūzī al-Rūmī also arrived in Egypt in their teens. The oldest reported were Qawṣūn al-Nāṣirī, who came to Egypt and became a mamluk voluntarily at age eighteen, and Sultan Qāytbāy, who was imported in his early twenties.⁵³ The chronicler al-Maqrīzī claimed that the willingness of fifteenth-century sultans to accept older mamluks was a sign of decadence, but this may have been an element of his anti-Circassian rhetoric.⁵⁴ Fifteenth-century European travelers reported that mamluks in training were between seven and eighteen or between ten and twenty years old.⁵⁵

Figure 3. Median Age of Slaves Sold in Venice. Black points are based on more data (at least ten sales per year) than gray points.

(ASVe, Canc. inf., Misc., b.134 bis; ASVe, Canc. inf., Not., b.17; b.19, N.7; b.20, N.8–10; b.23, N.1; b.58–61; b.80, N.7; b.95; b.132, N.9; b.174, N.9; b.211; b.222; b.230, N.1–2; ASVe, PdSM, Misti, b.180; Tamba, Bernardo de Rodulfis; Braunstein, “Être esclave”; Cibrario, Della schiavitù; Colli, Moretto Bon; Dennis, “Un fondo”; Krekic, “Contributo”; Lazari, “Del traffico”; Lombardo, Nicola de Boateriis; Verlinden, “Le recrutement des esclaves à Venise”; Zamboni, “Gli Ezzelini.”)

As for gender balance, it has been argued that the Black Sea slave trade was divided so that boys were sent to Egypt and girls to Italy.⁵⁶ Girls were supposed to be beautiful and docile, more suitable than boys for domestic and sexual service.⁵⁷ Boys were supposed to be tough because of their steppe upbringing, al-ready skilled at archery and horsemanship, and therefore suitable for military service. The presence of slave women from the Black Sea in Mamluk society has been minimized, except as a “necessary complement” to satisfy the sexual needs of mamluks.⁵⁸ Yet the majority of Mamluk as well as Italian slaves were women.⁵⁹ During the 1419 plague outbreak in Cairo, the ratio of male to female deaths was 1,065:669 among free people but 544:1,369 among slaves.⁶⁰ In Genoa, the half-florin tax records showed male to female ratios of 25:104 in 1413 and 9:100 in 1447.⁶¹ The female majority in the Mamluk slave population may have been missed through lack of attention to civilian households. While Mamluk military households owned both men and women in large numbers, civilian households owned more women than men. The female majority of Black Sea slaves across the Mediterranean is less surprising when considered in terms of supply. As discussed in Chapter 5, the raiders who captured most Black Sea slaves tended to take women and kill men.

Slaves as Social and Financial Assets

All slaves were assets of significant value. Their prices were comparable to those of a house, ten pieces of woolen cloth, 150 kg of wool, 160 kg of grain, 25 to 30 percent of a notary’s income, or three years of a sailor’s income.⁶² Purchasing slaves was an investment. Their value might increase as they learned the language, developed skills, and grew to maturity, but it might also decrease through illness, injury, and aging.

Selling slaves for cash was not the only way to utilize them financially. Slaves could be rented to others, especially craftsmen who could teach them new skills and thereby raise their value.⁶³ Lactating slaves could be rented as wet nurses for twice as much money as domestic slaves, and their contracts included provisions regarding the quantity and quality of their milk.⁶⁴ Because wet nurses were entrusted with the health of babies, they tended to be older than the average slave woman. Slaves could also be bartered in lieu of monetary payment;⁶⁵ pledged as collateral against debts;⁶⁶ granted to a daughter as part of her dowry;⁶⁷ stolen;⁶⁸ confiscated by the state;⁶⁹ appraised in estate inventories;⁷⁰ and inherited in wills.⁷¹ As a result of these activities, it was not unusual for slaves to be jointly owned. For example, one slave in fourteenth-century Jerusalem was inherited collectively by six women (two wives, two sisters, and two young daughters of the deceased).⁷² Another slave was jointly purchased by an Egyptian couple and given to their two sons as co-owners.⁷³ Two Venetian brothers, Petrus and Georgius de Manfredis, had joint ownership of a single slave woman, as did a Genoese couple, Petrus and Isolta de Vignolo, and two Genoese dyers, Damiano of Castagna and Antonius of Rapallo.⁷⁴ The fourteen joint owners of one slave sold in Genoa in 1274 were probably the pirate crew who had captured him.⁷⁵

In addition to their monetary value, slaves had social value. A Mamluk saying held that “slaves, even if they consume your wealth, increase your prestige.”⁷⁶ Slave ownership was a way to display power and wealth. A slave attendant or retinue might accompany their master in public. Italian elites liked to include their slaves in portraits.⁷⁷ Slave dancers, singers, lute players, and other musicians entertained guests in elite Mamluk homes.⁷⁸ Fourteenth-century amirs had slave orchestras with up to fifty musicians. Slave women also participated in public mourning for Mamluk elites. Civilians who owned mamluks signaled their pretensions to equality with the military ruling class. For example, the treasury clerk ‘Abd al-Bāsiṭ ibn Khalīl was criticized for aspiring beyond his station when he flaunted a retinue of “mamluks of the widely-available kinds.”⁷⁹ The civilian supervisor of the two shrines in Jerusalem brought his mamluks on hunting excursions and to audiences with the military governor.⁸⁰

When slaves were given as gifts, their value was both monetary and social.⁸¹ Rulers exchanged slaves through diplomatic channels alongside gold, silver, jewels, luxury textiles, and horses. Among the gifts that Sultan Baybars gave Berke, the khan of the Golden Horde, upon the occasion of his conversion to Islam were black male slaves and slave cooks.⁸² Tokhta Khan gave Sultan al-Nāṣir Muḥammad eighty male and twenty female slaves, and Janibak Khan made a similar gift to Sultan al-Nāṣir Ḥasan.⁸³ Mamluk sultans also exchanged slaves with the sultan of Baghdad, the Ottoman sultan, the Ilkhan, and the king of Nubia.⁸⁴ One mamluk, Arghūnshāh al-Nāṣiri, was first sent as a gift from China to Persia, then regifted to the Mamluks.⁸⁵

Within the Mamluk kingdom, the sultan and high-ranking amirs exchanged slaves as signs of respect and favor. It was common for the governor of Syria to send large groups of slaves, including mamluks and eunuchs, to the sultan.⁸⁶ The amir of Ṣafad also sent a eunuch to Sultan Barqūq, whom Barqūq regifted to his secretary.⁸⁷ A more subtle aspect of gifting slaves involved plays on their personal ties. Al-Nāṣir Muḥammad reinforced his relationship with the amir Yalbughā al-Yaḥyāwī by giving him one of a pair of slave sisters and keeping the other for himself.⁸⁸ When the amir Tanibak al-Yaḥyāwī discovered that his brother Taybars had been purchased by the governor of Malaṭya, the governor obligingly sent Taybars and a group of other mamluks to Cairo as a gift for the sultan.⁸⁹ Refusing to give a slave requested by the sultan could be interpreted as an act of rebellion. When the sultan of Mārdīn substituted two mamluks and a slave woman for a beautiful harpist requested by al-Nāṣir Muḥammad, al-Nāṣir Muḥammad threatened to sack the city.⁹⁰

Finally, in both Mamluk and Italian households, slaves were given as gifts to family members and close friends.⁹¹ Family gifts were often implemented through wills. Lionello Cattaneo gave his slave to a priest before departing on a journey, while Regina Morosini, a Venetian widow, gave a slave to her parish priest because “you have conferred so many services and indulgences on me [that] it would be unfitting if I were ungrateful to you.”⁹² Doctors also received slaves as gifts from their patients.⁹³

Slaves as Domestic and Manual Labor

Most slaves in the late medieval Mediterranean were purchased for domestic service. Their tasks included cooking, cleaning, washing and maintaining clothes and linens, carrying water, buying food, collecting firewood and tending the fire, spinning, sewing, weaving, running errands, caring for and nursing children, tending animals, and personal service.⁹⁴ Most worked under a wife’s supervision or managed bachelor households.⁹⁵ Since Italian households usually had one or two domestic servants, free or enslaved, they were expected to be flexible. Wet nurses were the exception: they were expected to devote themselves fully to childcare. In the Mamluk context, elite households had large numbers of slaves (rarely free women) in domestic service, so they were more likely to specialize.⁹⁶ Men in domestic service usually cared for horses (boats in Venice), acted as guards or doormen, and provided personal service for male masters.⁹⁷

Although racial stereotypes seem to have affected the use of domestic slaves in Italy, the evidence is anecdotal. Black men were prized as gondoliers in Venice.⁹⁸ Circassians were said to be beautiful and of “great aspect” (grande aspecto), and Circassian women were reputed to be very domestic.⁹⁹ Tatars were known for loyalty, “since it may be taken as a certainty that no Tartar ever betrayed a master.”¹⁰⁰ Tatar women were preferred for wet nursing and hard labor. A Florentine mother advising her son in Naples on the purchase of a female slave recommended “one of the Tartar nation, who are rough and advantageous for long hard work. The Russians, i.e. those from Russia, are more sensitive and more beautiful; but, it seems to me, a Tartar would be better. The Circassians have a passionate nature; although all the others have that too.”¹⁰¹ Yet in 1368, the Venetian Senate considered and ultimately rejected a proposal to ban “any newly purchased male slave of the Tatar language” because many had already been imported and turned out to be “corrupt and wicked of condition, and they cause daily disputes and rumors, and they can easily introduce scandals and errors in this land.”¹⁰²

In contrast, Mamluk slave-buying guides included lists of racial stereotypes to help buyers choose the right slave for the right purpose. Black Africans were recommended for domestic work, and mamluks often had black male slaves to look after their horses and collect their food rations from the citadel each day.¹⁰³ Alans were also recommended for domestic service. They were described as sturdy, gentle, good-natured, agreeable, and morally upright, but also careless and lazy.¹⁰⁴ Greeks (rūmī) were characterized as obedient, sincere, loyal, reliable, and intelligent, but also stingy.¹⁰⁵ Greek men were valued for their education and good manners, whereas Greek women were supposedly accurate and conservative in managing resources and therefore made good housekeepers. Armenians were said to be strong, sound of constitution, and beautiful, but also dishonest, greedy, rude, and dirty.¹⁰⁶ Thus the slave-buying manuals recommended them for hard labor and cautioned that beating or threats might be necessary to make them work.

Eunuchs had a special role as guardians of Mamluk household honor.¹⁰⁷ They served in the dual households of the elite, both in the harem where the women and children lived and in the barracks (ṭabaqa) where the young mamluks were trained.¹⁰⁸ In both contexts, they helped integrate other slaves into the household. The zimāmdār (head of the harem) and his staff supervised the female slaves, both domestics and concubines. The muqaddam al-mamālīk (supervisor of mamluks) and his staff brought up the young mamluks. One of the more famous eunuchs was Sandal al-Manjakī, who served Sultan Barqūq as treasurer and then head of the Sandaliyya barracks.¹⁰⁹ Sandal’s mamluk charges revered him for his generosity, piety, abstemiousness, and holiness (baraka), despite the temptations of his powerful position. Because castration was not permitted by Islamic law, it usually occurred before slaves were imported to the Mamluk kingdom.¹¹⁰ Greeks (rūmī), Indians (hindī), West Africans (takrūrī), and Ethiopians (ḥabashī) were preferred.¹¹¹ Eunuchs from the Black Sea were less common, but a Russian and a Kipchak eunuch were also mentioned.¹¹²

To the extent that slaves were used for heavy physical labor in the late medieval Mediterranean, they tended to be male. Slave oarsmen, though today strongly associated with galley warfare, were not common until the sixteenth century.¹¹³ Slaves occasionally farmed or built fortifications in Genoa, but this was more common on the islands (Majorca, Sicily, Crete, and Cyprus) than on the mainland.¹¹⁴ A few Mamluk slaves mined salt and copper in the Sahara.¹¹⁵ When the fifteenth-century German traveler Bernhard von Breydenbach saw people making bricks on the banks of the Nile, he called them slaves, though they may have been free laborers whom he imagined as slaves in the tradition of Exodus.¹¹⁶

Slaves also worked in craft production and in trade. Italian and Mamluk merchants were known to travel with male slaves and authorized them to act as business agents.¹¹⁷ Islamic law enabled masters to confer a special status, maʿdhūn, on slaves so that they could legally conduct business. Artisans were assisted by both male and female slaves.¹¹⁸ In Cairo, a community of Christian slaves worked as masons and carpenters.¹¹⁹ Several Venetian guilds (the gold beaters and the makers of velvet and samite) banned slaves from learning trade secrets in case they were later sold outside the guild, but Genoese guilds allowed slaves to learn trade secrets as long as they did not compete with their former masters after manumission.¹²⁰ Apothecaries were not permitted to let their slave assistants run the shop or dispense arsenic for fear of poisoning.¹²¹

Slaves as Soldiers

The best-documented Mamluk slaves were boys in military training.¹²² These were the mamluks after whom the Mamluk state was named. New mamluks were housed in special barracks (ṭabaqa) under the supervision of eunuchs. A jurist (faqīh) visited each day to teach them reading, writing, the Quran, ritual prayer, and the rudiments of Islamic law. Military instructors trained them in horsemanship, archery, and the use of various weapons. The end of training was marked by a graduation or passing-out ceremony (kharj).¹²³ During this ceremony, the sultan would inspect his mamluks and issue each one a suit of formal clothing, a horse, and a sword. Each mamluk also received a document of manumission (ʿitāqa). From this moment, he was legally free but enmeshed in a complex system of patronage and factional politics.

The intensity of mamluk training forged bonds of loyalty among boys in the same cohort (khushdāsh) and between the boys and their master (ustādh). The goal of the mamluk system was for these relationships to replace the ties of biological kinship lost through enslavement.¹²⁴ A son might assassinate his father to gain his inheritance, and a civilian bureaucrat might betray a ruler to benefit his own family, but a slave had no kin and therefore no conflicted loyalties. After manumission, masters became patrons, and fellow mamluks became factional allies. A newly graduated and manumitted mamluk would be enrolled as a soldier (jund) in his former master’s corps and given a salary or a fief (iqṭa’) to live on.¹²⁵ His subsequent ability to rise through the ranks would depend on the patronage of his former master and the support of his faction as well as his own skill and ambition.¹²⁶

Mamluks of the sultan could expect faster advancement than mamluks of the amirs. More was written about those who attained high ranks like commander (amīr), governor (nā’ib), or general (atabak), but most mamluks remained in obscurity at the rank of soldier (jund). They lived in the city where they were stationed, received a salary and rations from the state, and supplemented their income by working or extorting money from civilians.¹²⁷ Of the five thousand mamluks associated with Sultan al-Muʿayyad Shaykh, only sixty (1.2 percent) were prominent enough to be named in a biographical dictionary.¹²⁸ The most successful Muʿayyadī mamluk, Khushqadam, rose over the course of forty years to become sultan himself. During the same period, his fellow Muʿayyadī mamluk Jānibak Shaykh was not promoted at all. When Khushqadam became sultan, he raised Jānibak Shaykh to the lowest rank of amirs in honor of their metaphorical brotherhood (khushdāshiyya). Yet Jānibak Shaykh was unemployed again at the time of his death six or seven years afterward. His biographer described him as “one of the neglected, lost ones.”¹²⁹

Mamluks were unique among late medieval Mediterranean slaves in that their manumission was virtually guaranteed and their masters allowed them real opportunities for power and wealth. Their enslavement early in life has been compared to education at a strict boarding school: harsh, but with the prospect of a bright future.¹³⁰ Yet, although their careers after manumission have led some to dismiss the legal reality of their slave status, the time that young mamluks spent enslaved was the basis of their class identity. No one could hold a high military post in the Mamluk state without undergoing enslavement and manumission.¹³¹ Although there were free soldiers in the Mamluk army (ḥalqa), they were never promoted beyond a certain level. Civilian bureaucrats held important administrative offices, but their career paths were distinct from those for mamluks. If free people wished to join the Mamluk ruling class, they had to become slaves first. One who did so was the amir Qawṣūn.¹³² He had come from the Golden Horde to Cairo as a merchant selling leather goods, but Sultan al-Nāṣir Muḥammad saw him in the citadel and persuaded him to sell himself into slavery. The sultan sent 8,000 dirhams to Qawṣūn’s brother, and Qawṣūn went to the barracks and began training.

The enslavement of mamluks shaped their youth and had consequences for the rest of their lives.¹³³ As slaves, mamluks were not allowed to move freely. They stayed in the citadel barracks and needed permission from their eunuch guardians to go down into the city. They possessed no money, privileges, or military equipment of their own; everything was supplied by their master and could be taken away by him. They themselves could be sold, given away, or confiscated at any time. They also could not marry without their master’s permission.

The legal effects of slavery did not end with manumission. The jurist al-Suyūṭī, for example, said that an amir could never designate his property as a charitable endowment (waqf) like many elite civilians did because of his status as a former slave: “we say that [the waqf] reverts to the treasury because its endowers are slaves of the treasury and the permanence of their manumission is subject to consideration.”¹³⁴ The shaykh Ibn ‘Abd al-Salām refused to swear loyalty to Sultan Baybars until a witness could be found to testify that Baybars had been legally purchased and manumitted.¹³⁵ Any question about the legitimacy of a mamluk’s sale or manumission had to be rectified at once lest it undermine his authority, as in the case of the general Asandamur explained in Chapter 1.¹³⁶

According to Mamluk racial stereotypes, only Turks (in the generic sense of nomadic, Turkic-speaking people from cold northern climates) were suitable for military training because of their vigorous physical strength and animal aggression.¹³⁷ In the late Mamluk period, an exception was made for a new corps of African soldiers who used firearms, apparently because the mamluk cavalry considered firearms beneath them.¹³⁸ Racial categories were also used to assign mamluks to barracks in the Cairo citadel. Al-Burjiyya was for Circassians and Alans, while al-Dhahabiyya and al-Zumurrudiyya were for Kipchaks and Khitai.¹³⁹ Slave-buying manuals elaborated on the supposed characteristics of specific Turkish races. Kipchaks were said to be moderate in temperament, strong, and powerful, with beautiful, proportionate bodies but grim faces.¹⁴⁰ Those from Khurasān thrived best in Egypt. Kipchak children were said to be clean, healthy, skillful, and beautiful. Kipchak men were said to be good soldiers but merciless, potentially treacherous, and coarse of heart because they ate too much horse meat. They were said not to be skilled in politics, judgment, the crafts, or the sciences.

Circassians were characterized as physically powerful, brave, always ready to strike the first blow, and having a strong sense of group solidarity (ʿasabiyya).¹⁴¹ Yet they were also said to be lacking in wisdom, work ethic, and patience for hardship and long-term warfare. Untrained Circassians were said to be proud and unruly, with no grasp of religion. Yet those trained in knightly skills (furusiyya) from a young age were excellent warriors and commanders, while those offered religious education were proficient Muslims and capable of becoming religious scholars (ʿulamāʾ). In other words, the worst Circassians were utterly useless, but the best Circassians—those enslaved and trained as mamluks—were suitable for leadership.¹⁴²

Since Galenic theory linked inner qualities of character, outer qualities of complexion, and the characteristic humoral balance of an individual, the inconsistency of the Circassian character stereotype was reflected in a range of possible Circassian complexions. According to al-ʿAyntābī’s slave-buying manual, a pale (ashqar) Circassian had “no equal in shamelessness, debauchery, evil morals, and lying.”¹⁴³ A Circassian who was both slender and pale was likely to be active, quick to move and speak, and governed by his passions. A black (sawād) Circassian was rash and cowardly to the point that his bad qualities were likely to outweigh his good ones. He might also be greedy and unkind. On the other hand, a Circassian who was white imbued with red (al-abyaḍ al-musharrib bi-ḥumra) should be intelligent and opinionated. A brown color (asmar) shading into black (sawād) and yellow (ṣufra) indicated bravery, responsibility, and boldness. Brownish red (samra ḥumra