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Chapter 1

Slavery in the Late Medieval Mediterranean

When medieval Christians imagined an ideal society, order was among its guiding principles. The ideal society envisioned by Thomas Aquinas, for example, was set in the Garden of Eden, where he believed that humanity had existed in a sinless natural state.¹ Because he also believed that humanity was naturally sociable, the inhabitants of Eden must have lived together in a society. Within that society, there would be naturally occurring differences of gender, age, and physical stature, as well as the differences of goodness and knowledge that would emerge as individuals exercised their free will. Those who cultivated goodness and knowledge would have dominion over the others, but without coercion. Dominion was necessary in Eden, according to Aquinas, for two reasons. First, society needed a ruler to look after the common good. Second, the wisest and best members of society were obligated to use their virtues for the benefit of all. Thus differences among people, both those naturally occurring and those developed through free will, led to social hierarchy. Accepting one’s place in the hierarchy was necessary for peace and order; refusing it constituted pride, the greatest sin.²

The ideal society imagined by medieval Muslims was different. Its setting was paradise, the Garden of the afterlife, where believers experienced never-ending joy surrounded by every kind of beauty and abundance. One aspect of this joy was reuniting with family members across generations. In early descriptions of the Garden, all the branches of an extended family were depicted living together in an infinitely spacious tent or pavilion, thus combining the pleasures of sociability and privacy. They would enjoy banquets together without the work of preparing and serving food. Instead, a retinue of beautiful male ghilmān and female ḥūr would serve the food, fill the cups, and provide the entertainment.³ The ghilmān and ḥūr were not human and had never experienced worldly life. Their sole function was to serve. Like splashing fountains and fragrant trees, they can be understood as living elements of the Garden’s adornment. Over time, depictions of the Garden evolved such that female ḥūr came to be portrayed as singers and sexual partners for the enjoyment of male believers, while female believers and male ghilmān faded into the background.⁴

Real societies in the late medieval Mediterranean were, of course, not anyone’s ideal. Real rulers used force to exercise dominion over their subjects, and real households depended on the labor of real people for their meals. The lowest position in the human hierarchy was in reality filled by slaves. It can be difficult today to understand how masters could recognize the humanity of their slaves while still denying them freedom, but it was precisely their humanity that made slaves valuable. Simply by existing at the bottom of the hierarchy, slaves enabled free people to feel superior. Their presence in a household enabled its head to display his skills as a ruler. Slaves’ reason and capacity for decisionmaking made them capable administrators and soldiers; their capacity for love and companionship made them suitable nurses for children and the elderly as well as sexual partners for their masters.

Christians and Muslims shared three fundamental assumptions about slavery in addition to its place at the bottom of the human hierarchy: that it was legal, that it was based on religious difference, and that it was a universal threat. These assumptions formed the core of a common culture of slavery in the late medieval Mediterranean. All free adults knew that they could legally purchase a slave. They expected the slaves available for sale to come from religious backgrounds different than their own. At the same time, they were aware that they themselves could become enslaved if captured by pirates or raiders in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The line between slavery and captivity in the late medieval Mediterranean was hazy. Captivity ended with a return home after the payment of a ransom or some other mechanism of exchange, and it was not necessarily associated with religious difference.⁵ Slavery was ideologically based on religious difference, and it was usually permanent. It is only clear in retrospect which individuals would be ransomed from captivity and which would remain in slavery. Ransoms, however, were easier to arrange for captives held in geographical or social proximity to their homes than for captives taken far away. In the western Mediterranean, ransoms and exchanges between Iberia and North Africa were mediated by friars, merchants, confraternities, and monarchs.⁶ In the eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea, merchants and diplomats usually arranged ransoms.⁷ But for slaves transported over long distances, from the Aegean to Catalonia or from the Black Sea to Italy, no ransom could be expected.

This distinction between captivity and slavery shaped expectations regarding conversion. Captives taken across religious boundaries might or might not be pressured to convert, depending on how their masters believed conversion would affect their ransom.⁸ Slaves, for whom a ransom was not expected, were converted to the religion of their masters, and such conversions did not confer freedom. Christians who purchased Muslims, Jews, and pagans expected them to convert to Christianity while remaining enslaved. Muslims who purchased Christians, Jews, and pagans as slaves expected them to convert to Islam while remaining enslaved. Jewish law allowed partial conversion to Judaism for slaves, with the possibility of full conversion after manumission.⁹

One consequence of assuming slave conversion without manumission was a rhetoric of competition for slave souls. Conversion was one of the justifications given for slave ownership, because it increased the number of souls belonging to the “right” religion. In the late Middle Ages, some Christians also argued that it was better for Christians to purchase Christian slaves than to allow them to be purchased and converted by Muslims. In other words, they used the rhetoric of competition for slave souls to justify the enslavement of Christians by Christians. As a result, thousands of Christians from the eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea were kept as slaves in the central and western Mediterranean. Some challenged their status in court, arguing that legal slavery had to be based on religious difference. A few won their freedom. Muslim scholars in the late medieval Mediterranean never presented an intellectual argument for the enslavement of fellow Muslims; whether they enslaved fellow Muslims through negligence is a different question. Given such complications, this chapter explores how slave status was defined in the late medieval Mediterranean and how the boundary between free and slave status was enforced.

Terminology

The English language has only two words, slave and serf, to indicate a person of unfree status. The vocabulary of Latin and Arabic is richer. In classical Arabic, all of the following terms may be translated as slave: ‘abd, raqīq, ghulām, fatan, khādim and khādima, mamlūk and mamlūka, waṣīf and waṣīfa, jāriya, and ama.¹⁰ In Mamluk-era texts, a male slave was usually called ʿabd, raqīq, or mamlūk; a female slave jāriya; and a eunuch khādim or fatan. Both freeborn and manumitted people were ḥurr, but ‘atīq was specific to manumitted people. Certain terms, like ghulām and khādim, were used for both slaves and free servants. Others, like mamlūk and ‘abd, were adopted by free people to convey respect in formal contexts, as English speakers once used the phrase “your humble servant.” The term mamlūk has also entered English in two forms. With a lowercase m, mamluk refers to both slaves and former slaves in military service. With an uppercase M, Mamluk refers to the state that governed Egypt and Greater Syria from 1250 to 1517, a state headed by mamluks.

In medieval Latin, the range of terms for unfree people was similarly broad, including servus and serva, sclavus and sclava, mancipium, colonus, villanus, emtitus, famulus, verna, ancilla, and others. Servus was by far the most commonly used term. In classical Latin, it meant “slave,” but over time, its meaning evolved to include serfs and others of unfree status. According to the thirteenth-century jurist Rolandinus Passeggieri, the division between servi and free people was one of six fundamental divisions that characterized humanity.¹¹ An invented etymology connected servus with the verb servare, “to save,” on the basis that slaves were those saved and not killed in war. Iacopo da Varagine, archbishop of Genoa in the late thirteenth century, listed four types of servi: those born into slavery, those captured in battle, those purchased with money, and those hired to serve.¹² Even those who voluntarily served a great man might count as servi.¹³ The term sclavus (and its vernacular equivalent schiavo) was coined in the eleventh century to distinguish slaves from serfs and other servi, but it was not widely adopted until the fourteenth century.¹⁴ Because most of the authoritative legal texts of the late Middle Ages were compiled in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, they used servus for all unfree people. The multiple meanings of servus thus complicated the work of both medieval and modern interpreters.

Other Latin terms for unfree people appeared less frequently. Ancilla, exclusively for female slaves, and verna, the Roman term for a slave born into the master’s household, remained in use.¹⁵ Mancipium and emtitus carried associations of purchased property or chattel, as did the vernacular testa. Famulus changed its meaning: a Roman famulus was a slave member of the household, but a late medieval famulus was a free servant, usually an apprentice serving to learn.¹⁶ Terms such as colonus, ascriptus, and villanus for people bound to the land or to agricultural service indicate an unfree status more like serfdom than slavery.¹⁷ Every free person was liber. Ingenui were born free; liberti or libertini were manumitted.

Finally, a quirk of grammatical gender has affected scholarly analysis of late medieval slavery. In both Arabic and Latin, the masculine plural form is used for groups of mixed gender. As a consequence, the presence of female slaves is often hidden behind grammatically masculine forms.¹⁸ Authors of legal texts resorted to gendered pairs of plural nouns (sclavi et sclavae, mamālik wa-jawārī) to refer unambiguously to male and female slaves as a group. In genres other than law, it is common to find only the masculine plural noun in cases where slaves of both genders were probably intended.

Slavery in Christian and Islamic Thought

Slavery was legal throughout the late medieval Mediterranean, and there was a broad consensus about what slavery as a legal status entailed. In Christian Europe, slave status was defined by the ius commune, the amalgam of Roman and canon law taught by the law faculties of medieval universities.¹⁹ The Roman law curriculum was based on the Justinianic Code, while the canon law curriculum was based on Gratian’s Decretum, compiled around 1140, and the Liber Extra, compiled by Raymond of Peñafort and issued in 1234.²⁰ All three works circulated with standard glosses that elaborated on and challenged the original text. The glosses also referenced biblical and Aristotelian texts, many of which were taught in medieval universities as part of the liberal arts curriculum that was a prerequisite for the study of law. For practical use, jurists created reference manuals with collections of model documents and discussions of the underlying legal principles, including slave status. These were called notarial formularies. The most widely copied and the first to appear in print was that of Rolandinus Passeggieri.

In contrast, Sunni Islamic law was divided into four schools (madhhab, pl. madhāhib): Mālikī, Ḥanafī, Shāfiʿī, and Ḥanbalī. Each school had its own legal texts and commentaries based on the Quran and ḥadīth (sayings and acts of Muḥammad), refined over the course of centuries. Most Islamic rulers favored one legal school over the others, but the Mamluk sultan was advised by judges from all four. The Mamluks also had a civil judicial system (maẓālim) through which subjects could petition the sultan and his administration, but maẓālim courts tended to hear cases concerning land rather than moveable goods like slaves.²¹ Delving into the full ramifications of slavery in Islamic law is beyond the scope of a single book.²² Instead, the following discussion will highlight the aspects of slavery on which all four schools agreed.

Both Christians and Muslims agreed that freedom was the original state of humanity and that free status should be assumed in ambiguous cases.²³ In its Christian formulation, freedom implied both a natural capacity (reason) and a legal capacity (property in oneself).²⁴ Slaves retained the natural capacity but lost the legal capacity: they had reason, but they were the property of others. Manumission meant “restoring them to their former origins and to the right of free birth, and declaring them Roman citizens, and restoring them to the primeval right according to which all men are born free.”²⁵ Because the Roman empire no longer existed in the thirteenth century, gaining Roman citizenship meant gaining equal status to those born free. The Islamic formula for manumission made the former slave “free among the free Muslims, what is for them is for him and what is upon them is upon him.”²⁶

Because the original state of humanity was freedom, slaves’ legal status did not affect their spiritual status. According to Iacopo da Varagine, a late thirteenth-century archbishop of Genoa, “all, whether slave or free, are created from earth and born nude and wailing… all, whether slave or free, have the same place, namely the same world, the same earth, the same air … all, whether slave or free, will die, dissolve into ash, and rot … all, whether slave or free, have one Lord … all, whether slave or free, will come to the judgment of God.”²⁷ Ibn Manẓūr, the author of the fourteenth-century Arabic dictionary Lisān al-‘arab, made a play to similar effect on ‘abd, a word that has two plural forms, ‘abīd and ‘ibād. All people were ‘ibād (worshippers) of God, but some were also ‘abīd (slaves) of God’s creatures.²⁸ Thus slaves were not spiritually inferior and could take part in religious rites alongside free people.

Having accepted the principle of original freedom for slaves, medieval jurists were most interested in situations where obedience to God might conflict with obedience to a master. In general, they held that “if the master commands that which is not contrary to holy scriptures, let the slave be subject to the master. But if in fact he orders the contrary, let him obey the master of the spirit more than [that] of the body.”²⁹ Christian slaves were not to be ordained as priests or admitted to monasteries, while Muslim slaves were not allowed to lead communal prayer.³⁰ Jurists were also interested in slave marriages, because they could produce conflicts between the rights of a spouse and those of a master.³¹

However, there were some who disputed the idea of spiritual equality for slaves on the basis that slavery was a consequence of sin. The rhetoric of spiritual enslavement to the passions was common in both Christian and Islamic texts, but it was Christian authors who spelled out a direct connection between spiritual and juridical slavery.³² They linked slavery with original sin,³³ with Hagar and Ishmael (implying Christian superiority over Islam),³⁴ and with the Israelites’ captivity in Egypt (implying Christian superiority over Judaism).³⁵ Although they also cited the curse of Ham as a divinely instituted basis for slavery, that story played a more important role in early modern ideologies of slavery than in medieval ones.³⁶

The Quranic stories of Adam and Eve, Noah and Ham, Hagar and Ishmael, and Moses were not connected with slavery. When the Quran mentioned slavery, it was as an aspect of pre-Islamic society rather than as a consequence of sin, so Muslims were less likely than Christians to posit a connection between sin and juridical slavery. Nevertheless, Quranic references to slavery were interpreted by all four schools of Islamic law as divine authorization for the continued existence of slavery in the Islamic era.³⁷

In addition to scripture, those arguing for the inherent inferiority of slaves adopted the concept of natural slavery from Aristotle’s Politics and Ethics. Those texts were less popular among Muslim scholars than Plato’s Republic, so Aristotelian natural slavery had relatively little influence on Islamic thought.³⁸ But because Aristotelian texts formed the bedrock of the Christian university curriculum, Christian scholars were more willing to embrace natural slavery.

The Politics was translated into Latin in the thirteenth century, and scholastic commentaries appeared almost immediately.³⁹ The commentators tended to harden Aristotle’s statements on slavery, seeking consistency in a flexible text. One flexible element was the relationship between natural and juridical slavery. In some passages, Aristotle declared that juridical slaves were also slaves by nature, while in other passages, he conceded that natural masters might find themselves juridically enslaved. To address this inconsistency, the commentators tried to identify natural slaves in their own era, but what they found depended on which aspects of Aristotle’s definition they chose to emphasize.⁴⁰ Those who emphasized rulership concluded that citizens, the ruled, were Aristotle’s natural slaves. Those who emphasized physiognomy concluded that artisans or peasants were natural slaves because they were large and strong. Those who emphasized lack of reason concluded that barbarians were natural slaves. Because Aristotle associated barbarism with Scythians, the inhabitants of the Black Sea, this final answer came closest to the reality of late medieval slavery.

In his Summa theologica, the thirteenth-century theologian Thomas Aquinas famously endeavored to reconcile the truths of scripture and of Aristotle. The result was a powerful argument for the natural inferiority of slaves. Part of Aquinas’ argument was outlined at the beginning of this chapter: he saw the dominion of some people over others as a natural aspect of human society from the moment of creation. However, drawing on Aristotle, he identified two forms of dominion.⁴¹ In the civil form, the ruler exercised power over the ruled for the benefit of the ruled. This was the dominion exercised by the free over the free, rulers over citizens, and husbands over wives, and this was the dominion that existed in Eden. In the second, servile form of dominion, the ruler exercised power over the ruled for the ruler’s own benefit. This form of dominion emerged from sin and was thus appropriate to the fallen world. It was exercised by tyrants over subjects and masters over slaves.

Setting aside philosophical debates about freedom and the nature of humanity, both Christians and Muslims recognized slavery in practice as a legitimate institution arising from and defined by human law.⁴² They agreed that some slaves were born into slave status and that free people could be legally enslaved if they were unbelievers captured in war.⁴³ Penal enslavement and the sale of free people into slavery were forbidden by Islamic law.⁴⁴ The Justinianic Code permitted parents to sell their children into slavery; canon law also permitted it “in greatest necessity.”⁴⁵ Selling oneself into slavery was forbidden, but the punishment for doing so was permanent enslavement.⁴⁶ Both the Justinianic Code and canon law also prescribed enslavement as a punishment for certain crimes.⁴⁷ In theory, for example, the concubines of priests could be sold into slavery, but in practice, the harshest punishment they suffered was exile.

Slave status involved both legal objectification and legal weakness. In the context of property law, slaves were objects and not persons. They could be bought, sold, gifted, rented, pledged, and otherwise disposed of like any other type of property.⁴⁸ The injury or death of a slave was considered property damage. Slaves were often grouped with animals in legal texts because both were living property.⁴⁹ In the context of family and criminal law, slaves were recognized as persons but were legally weak. They could not own property, inherit or bequeath property, conduct business, hold positions of legal authority, testify in court, execute a will, or serve as a legal guardian.⁵⁰ If slaves were found guilty of a crime, their masters might be held responsible for the associated fines or punishments. Some aspects of slaves’ legal weakness could be mitigated by their masters. For example, Islamic law allowed a master to authorize a slave to conduct business.⁵¹ Slaves of both Muslims and Christians could own a small amount of personal property, a peculium, which nominally belonged to their masters but in practice could be used to buy freedom. In certain respects, the legal weakness of slaves was comparable to that of women, minors, and the mentally ill.

Slavery and Religious Difference

Although slavery was legal in the late medieval Mediterranean, there were norms regarding who could enslave whom. Late medieval Mediterranean slavery was intrusive, meaning that slaves were supposed to be outsiders brought into the slaveholding society rather than insiders excluded or degraded from the slave-holding society.⁵² The main criterion used to distinguish outsiders from insiders with respect to slavery was religion. Adherents of the same religion should not enslave one another, but adherents of different religions could enslave one another.⁵³ The special status granted to certain religious groups included both protection from enslavement and restrictions on slave ownership. Muslim authorities did not allow local Christians and Jews to own Muslim slaves, but they also forbade their enslavement by local Muslims.⁵⁴ Christian authorities did not allow local Muslims and Jews to own Christian slaves, but they also forbade their enslavement by local Christians, except in cases where enslavement was the judicial punishment for a crime.⁵⁵ When state protection was withdrawn, as when the Jewish population of Spain was expelled by Ferdinand and Isabella in 1492, these groups became vulnerable to enslavement.⁵⁶ Apart from protected groups, Christians were allowed to enslave Muslims, Muslims were allowed to enslave Christians, Jews were allowed to enslave Muslims in Christian states and Christians in Muslim states, and everyone was allowed to enslave pagans.

In addition to the expectation that slaves must come from different religious backgrounds than their masters, there was also an expectation that slaves would convert to the religion of their masters and that such conversions did not require manumission.⁵⁷ On the Islamic side, jurists permitted the forcible conversion of certain types of people, including women, children, and prisoners of war.⁵⁸ Converting slaves without manumission was thus legally straightforward. On the Christian side, canon law considered forcible conversions invalid because the sacrament of baptism required an intention to convert on the part of the person baptized. Late medieval missionaries, however, argued that masters with pious intentions could baptize enslaved children because they did not yet have the ability to form intentions or make binding vows themselves.⁵⁹ Still, manumission was not required, because the conversion of a slave was not an act of free will and because slavery was closely associated with sin. As explained by Franco Sacchetti, the son of a free Florentine man and a slave woman, “he who does not believe in the reward of Christ ought not to be free … for the most part they are like oxen to baptize. He does not even agree to become Christian through baptism. One is not held to free him, although he may be Christian, if he does not desire it. I do not say, that if he seems good and has the will to be a good Christian, that you do not do [an act of] mercy by freeing him, just as it would be bad and a sin, having a slave man or woman of guilty condition, as the greater part are, although he might be Christian, to free him.”⁶⁰ In other words, converted slaves should remain under the paternalistic control of their masters for their own moral good.

The apparent simplicity of slavery based on religious difference was complicated by sectarianism. The Sunni–Shiʿite split within Islam was used to justify enslavement during the Ottoman era but not under the Mamluks.⁶¹ More important to late medieval slavery was the Catholic–Orthodox split within Christianity. Although the schism had begun in the eleventh century over such issues as papal primacy, the addition of filioque to the Nicene Creed, and the use of leavening in eucharistic bread, bitter hostility between ordinary Catholics and Orthodox did not arise until the thirteenth century.⁶² In the wake of the Fourth Crusade, Catholic powers including the papacy, the newly created Latin Empire of Constantinople, and Frankish states in the Aegean all adopted crusading as their framework for interacting with the Orthodox. Crusade preaching spread the image of the schismatic Greek, and repeated campaigns in the Aegean hardened attitudes on both sides. At the same time as Catholic crusades began to target Orthodox people, the Aegean was being colonized by Genoa and Venice and raided by Catalan and Turkish pirates. Both processes generated large numbers of captives.

In theory, Catholic and Orthodox Christians should not have enslaved one another no matter how much they hated each other. In practice, they did enslave one another, although Catholics had the upper hand and therefore enslaved more Orthodox than the reverse.⁶³ In the early fourteenth century, after the restoration of the Byzantine Empire in Constantinople, Byzantine authorities complained vigorously about this. Patriarch Athanasius I wrote to the Byzantine emperor in 1303–1305 about the misery of Greeks captured by Turks and Italians, “those who escape half-dead from the Ishmaelites and the very Italians … who were able to take them into captivity on account of the magnitude of general lawlessness, their disregard for God, and their scorn and neglect of the divine commandments.”⁶⁴ Emperor Andronicus II Paleologus protested to Genoa in 1308 that “certain Genoese induced certain Greek boys and girls from Constantinople and from other countries in Romania [i.e., Greek territory], promising to do many good things for them, if they would come to Genoa with them. Many boys and girls came, and when they were in the city of Genoa they sold them as slaves, which is unjust.”⁶⁵ In response, Genoa’s colonial governor in Pera agreed to declare the enslaved Greeks free and permit them to leave. Andronicus II also wrote to Venice in 1319 to complain that Venetian pirates were selling Greeks as slaves in Rhodes and Cyprus.⁶⁶ In 1339, Andronicus III Paleologus sent envoys to Pope Benedict XII to discuss ecclesiastical union and an alliance against the Turks. Among various proposals for improving Catholic–Orthodox relations, he asked the pope to order that “all Greeks who were sold by Latins, wherever they are, should be freed, and in addition that Greeks should not be sold, and if certain people buy or sell them, or go against them, they should be excommunicated.”⁶⁷ Benedict XII ignored this suggestion.

Most fourteenth-century Catholics seem to have felt that Orthodox people deserved enslavement. An anonymous English pilgrim in the 1340s observed that because the Orthodox priests of Cyprus did not accept papal primacy, “their punishment, when captured, is life servitude (perpetua servitus), nor does the Church of Rome, although it is a work of charity to ransom slaves (servos), lift a hand for their liberation.”⁶⁸ Another pilgrim in the 1340s, Niccolò of Poggibonsi, also used Orthodox rejection of papal primacy to justify their enslavement:

The Greeks hate us Latins more than they hate the Saracens, and through this great hatred they are separated from the Roman Church. As we make the pope, the vicar of God, to be the head of the Roman Church for Christians, likewise the Greeks make a vicar for themselves. In the place of the pope, they make the patriarch of Constantinople, and he makes the bishops.… Every Sunday the pope communicates with all those who obey him; but the pope treats them [the Greeks] in this way, that he allows others to take them and then sell them as slaves. And many times I saw merchants who had a great line, and they led them thus to sell at the market, as they do beasts; and when a merchant wants to sell this sad merchandise, he has them cried by the auctioneer; and whoever offers the most money, to him they are sold. O Greeks, who were masters of the world, and now are made slaves, resold throughout the world, priced like beasts!⁶⁹

The early fourteenth-century crusade propagandist William of Adam offered a more moderate expression of this position: the pope did not have a pastoral duty toward Orthodox Christians but nevertheless deplored their enslavement by Muslims.⁷⁰

Controversy over Catholic ownership of Orthodox slaves continued into the fifteenth century. In 1388, the bishop of Barcelona persuaded King John I of Aragon to restrict ownership of Greek slaves, but in 1401, the city council of Barcelona obtained a privilege from Pope Martin I that not only permitted ownership of Greek slaves but also prevented slaves “of the nation of the Greeks or who are Armenians, Albanians, Russians, Bulgars, Walachs, or from the parts or regions subject to the emperor of Constantinople” from challenging their status in court.⁷¹ An envoy from John VIII Paleologus to Venice in 1418 protested that a Venetian man in Modon was selling Byzantine subjects to the Catalans and holding others for ransom.⁷² The Venetian Senate denied the claims on the basis that its castellan in Modon would never allow such behavior. Bans by later popes on the sale of Greek slaves were quickly revoked.⁷³ In the 1430s, a Burgundian visiting Constantinople reported that the Greeks “had reached the point of damning the Pope who had held a general council in which they were declared schismatics and damned and that they were a race of slaves (tous fussent serfs à ceux qui estoient serfs).”⁷⁴

Although the status of Greek slaves attracted the most attention and debate, the majority of Orthodox slaves owned by Catholics were not Greek. In fifteenth-century Genoa, for example, Russians and Circassians were the two most common categories of slaves.⁷⁵ Russians had adopted Orthodox Christianity in the tenth century, around the same time that Scandinavians had adopted Catholicism. Orthodox Christianity was also well established in the Caucasus.⁷⁶ The kingdom of Georgia was a regional bastion of Orthodoxy, although it also had suzerainty over small Muslim principalities, such as Samtzkhe. Coastal Circassian and Abkhaz communities maintained close ties with Constantinople. Inland, however, the situation was murkier. Circassian and Abkhaz nobles treated religious allegiance as a political decision and could therefore be flexible about their professions of faith. During the fourteenth century, as Genoa established hegemony in the Black Sea, a few professed Catholicism.⁷⁷ Circassian and Abkhaz villagers practiced a syncretic religion that blended Orthodoxy with animism. They decorated sacred trees with crosses and attached the attributes of older deities like Merise, the goddess of bees, to Christian figures, such as Mary.⁷⁸ As a result, Catholic authors claimed fellowship with Georgians, Circassians, and Abkhaz when they wanted to emphasize the extent of the world’s Christian population but disavowed them in the context of slavery.

Other Christian groups were enslaved in smaller numbers. They included Armenians, Alans, Crimean Goths, Kipchak Turks,⁷⁹ and the Ruthenians of Galicia and Volhyna.⁸⁰ In the 1430s, rumors circulated that Black Sea Christians were descendants of mythical Catholic crusaders who had detoured around the perfidious Greeks of Constantinople.⁸¹ Other rumors suggested that the Crimean Goths were related to the Visigoths, the Germans, or the Scots.⁸² Nevertheless, slaves from all of these groups could be found in Genoa, Venice, and their colonies.⁸³ In consequence, scholars have dismissed centuries of Christian life in the Black Sea, claiming that the region was mostly pagan or that its religious diversity enabled merchants to pick and choose non-Christian slaves rather than acknowledge that Catholic Christians systematically enslaved Orthodox Christians.⁸⁴

The possibility of Muslims enslaving Muslims has also been dismissed by modern scholars. Despite the fact that Islam was the dominant religion of the Golden Horde and its Tatar subjects, modern scholars have assumed that mamluks of Tatar origin were pagan or that the Islamization of the Golden Horde was superficial and therefore legally and ethically irrelevant.⁸⁵ Upon investigation, however, it is clear that many mamluks from the Black Sea must have been Muslim.⁸⁶ Scholars at the time were aware that Islam was widespread among Tatars and Alans and that many mamluks were of Tatar or Alan origin.⁸⁷ In recounting his life story, the amir Taghrī Barmish al-Jalālī revealed that he had been born in Anatolia and that his father was Muslim.⁸⁸ Another amir, Yalbughā al-Sālimī, was born in Samarqand to a Muslim family and given the name Yūsuf.⁸⁹ A popular epic glorifying Baybars, the first Mamluk sultan, said that his original name was Maḥmūd and that he was the son of the Muslim king of Khurasan.⁹⁰ Although this story is untrue, it suggests an awareness among ordinary Mamluk people that some of their slaves had Muslim origins. One reason why mamluks were given the patronymic Ibn ʿAbd Allah, “son of a servant of God,” may have been to veil the names of their Muslim fathers.⁹¹

Mamluk-era scholars showed equally scant concern for the enslavement of Muslim women from peripheral areas like the Black Sea. When al-Subkī, a fifteenth-century Mamluk jurist, was asked about how to avoid buying slave concubines of Muslim origin, his response departed from the legal principle of assuming freedom in ambiguous cases.⁹² Instead, he ruled that men could keep concubines of probable Muslim origin as long as there was any possibility at all that they might be descended from slaves. Al-Subkī’s response stands in sharp contrast to that of Aḥmad Bābā, a seventeenth-century jurist from Timbuktu, who advised traders in the Saharan oasis of Suwāt about how to avoid buying Muslim slaves.⁹³ Aḥmad Bābā listed African peoples known to be Muslim and urged the traders not to buy slaves from those groups.

Therefore, despite the fact that religious difference was the legal basis of slavery in the late medieval Mediterranean, both Christians and Muslims enslaved their coreligionists from the Black Sea and were aware of what they were doing. How did they justify this conflict between the ideology and practice of slavery? One part of the answer lies in the significance of conversion. By forcing their slaves to convert, masters claimed to increase the number of souls belonging to the “right” religion. This claim fostered a competitive attitude toward slaves’ souls and, in some cases, a desire to accumulate slaves to prevent their conversion to the “wrong” religion as well as to enforce their conversion to the “right” one.

Chapter 7 explains how in the context of the crusades, the Mamluk system of military slavery came to be perceived by both Muslims and Christians as a means to win slaves’ souls for Islam and defend the Islamic world against attacks by pagans and Christians. Similarly, canon law required Christian communities to buy Christian slaves and potential converts from Jews to protect them from conversion to Judaism, while Jewish communities in Egypt regarded the integration of slave converts as a victory for their faith.⁹⁴ The fourteenth-century Dominican William of Adam dramatized the plight of Christian slaves in Muslim hands with two tales. The first was that of a Greek slave woman on the road to Persia who gave birth to a son. She debated whether to kill the child to prevent him from apostatizing or whether to keep him alive and rely on God’s mercy. William characterized this as a struggle between faith (fides) and love (pietas), with the faithful decision being to kill her son.⁹⁵ The second tale was that of a slave convert in India who felt abandoned by God: “The Lord has turned His back to us, not His face; He has stricken us with His heel, utterly destroyed, and uprooted, and deserted us as useless logs cut for burning and has apparently deleted us from His memory. What shall we do? … Although I believe and know that it is better to put down the burden of the flesh than to lose eternal life, I have not been granted by heaven the gift of dying for the faith which I hold in my heart.”⁹⁶ Putting words in the mouths of both real and fictional characters was a common medieval rhetorical device, and William may have invented these two tales to make a point. That point was the spiritual violence of slavery. Conversion was the greatest fear and most painful injury suffered by William’s imagined slaves.⁹⁷

By the fifteenth century, the Castilian traveler Pero Tafur was able to claim that “the Christians have a Bull from the Pope, authorizing them to buy and keep as slaves the Christians of other nations, to prevent their falling into the hands of the Moors and renouncing the Faith. They are Russians, Mingrelians, Abkhaz, Circassians, Bulgars, Armenians, and other diverse Christian nations.”⁹⁸ Tafur explained his own purchase of three Christian slaves by juxtaposing it with the Mamluk slave trade taking place around him. If he had not purchased them, they would have been purchased by Mamluk merchants and converted to Islam.

The fifteenth-century humanist Giovanni Gioviano Pontano also offered an explanation for the phenomenon of Christians enslaving Christians. He believed that Muslims (Turks and Africans) observed the prohibition against enslaving fellow Muslims, but

among us, Christians also serve. For as I heard from the ancients, the custom was that Thracians and also Greeks who inhabit the Black Sea be sold: who, lest they be in the service of the barbarians, merchants sailing the Black Sea, having redeemed them from the Scythians, were offering them for sale. For it seemed more honorable to serve them for a short time, while they repaid the money paid per head, than to be the plunder of barbarians and submissive to perpetual servitude, also with the greatest disgrace of the Christian name.… Therefore this great injury to humankind is made the law of humanity.⁹⁹

In other words, Pontano thought it better for Orthodox Christians from the Black Sea to be purchased by Catholics and serve them in repayment than to be purchased by non-Christians.

In merchant circles, respect for property rights was sometimes given priority over the threat of slave conversion. This caused an outcry in 1445 when a fourteen- or fifteen-year-old slave described as a Christian from the land of Prester John (probably Ethiopia) fled from the house of his Muslim master in Alexandria to a ship belonging to the famous French merchant Jacques Coeur.¹⁰⁰ The ship captain took the boy to Montpellier, where he was placed as a servant in the archbishop’s household. But Coeur feared that French galleys might no longer be allowed to trade in Egypt because his captain had violated an agreement with the Mamluks about the return of fugitive slaves. He ordered the boy shipped back; upon his return to Alexandria, the boy converted to Islam. This shocked the French Church, especially the religious orders dedicated to ransoming Christian captives from Muslims. French merchants who did business with Muslims maintained that Coeur had acted correctly. The resulting controversy played a role in Coeur’s fall from royal favor.

I have found only one medieval expression of remorse for the enslavement of coreligionists. Leontios Makhairas, a Greek Cypriot chronicler of the early fifteenth century, felt that the 1373 Genoese conquest of the island was divine punishment for Cypriot enslavement of their fellow Orthodox Christians:

And if you wish me to tell you how it was that Famagusta was taken, I say that this was allowed by God because of our sins. And not Famagusta only: it would have been just that they should have taken all Cyprus as well, because of our many sins. And to tell you about it openly: first of all was the sin of the slaves. The land of the Greeks was being ravaged, and the men were being brought over to the islands as slaves and captives, and our people treated them so hard-heartedly, that they used to throw themselves down from the roofs and kill themselves, and some of them cast themselves into pits, and others hanged themselves, for the heavy torments which they made them endure, and because they were famished.… And they went against the face of God, who says: “Six years your servant shall serve you, and in the seventh you shall set him free.” … For this reason God punished them, and the Bulgarians took horse against them; the slaves also and the Genoese; and they robbed them and carried them off captive, and took away their women and their goods, and humbled them to the ground.¹⁰¹

Makhairas’ remorse was limited, however. Elsewhere in his chronicle, he criticized Greek, Bulgar, and Tatar slaves for supporting the Genoese invasion. His contemporaries in Cyprus did not cease to buy Orthodox slaves.¹⁰²

Slavery in Court

Because slavery was a matter of human law (ius gentium) in the Christian context, cases of slave status were adjudicated in civil rather than ecclesiastical courts. Each Italian city-state had its own law code (ius proprium), a set of local customs, and a system of courts to enforce them. However, because most Italian jurists studied law at the university in Bologna, the principles of Roman law and the ius commune underpinned most local legislation on slavery.¹⁰³ Since the Justinianic Code provided an authoritative and comprehensive legal framework for slave status, legislators in Venice and Genoa largely confined themselves to regulating the use and behavior of slaves.¹⁰⁴ Only the Genoese legal code attempted to define slave status: “let male and female slaves be understood … as those who were possessed or detained by any person as male or female slaves.”¹⁰⁵ In another passage, slaves were defined as submissive persons.¹⁰⁶ In a third passage, a slave was defined as “she who is held and owned as a slave by her master or mistress, and she who is considered and held to be a slave by the neighborhood of the said master or mistress.”¹⁰⁷ These definitions are more or less circular, although they do highlight the role of reputation and witness testimony alongside written documents in determining slave status.

In Venice, cases of disputed status were handled by the Senate. For example, a Venetian patrician returning from Beirut in 1399 brought with him a manumitted Tatar who wished to convert to Christianity and live in Venice.¹⁰⁸ Upon their arrival, the patrician entrusted him to another Tatar freedman, Antonius, a vacinarius who prepared cow- and oxhides. Instead of helping him, Antonius sold him as a slave for twenty ducats to Zanino Calcaterra, who sold him again to a Catalan man. When the case came to light, the Venetian Senate condemned Antonius to a beating, three months in prison, and compensation for Calcaterra, but it did not mention the fate of the wrongfully enslaved Tatar.

The most famous and long-running case of disputed status was that of the anime. In 1386, the Senate first ruled against importing Albanian children from Durazzo who “can easily be sold and treated as slaves, which is done wrongly and against God and the honor of our dominions,” explaining that “because they are Christian, they ought not to sell them nor cause them to be sold in any way.”¹⁰⁹ Such children were called “souls” (anime). The punishment for selling anime was a fine of one hundred lire and six months in prison for each child. All previous sales of anime were annulled, and sellers were required to compensate buyers for their losses. The anime already present in Venice were not to be exported to other cities, such as Florence, Siena, or Bologna, where their slavery might become permanent.¹¹⁰ However, the anime had to repay the freight charges for their shipment to Venice. The debt was set at six ducats for those older than ten and three ducats for those younger; those with no money could work for four years in lieu of payment.

This ruling proved difficult to enforce, and in 1387, the capisestieri complained to the Senate. The Senate responded that masters who could show documents (cartas, instrumenta, vel probationes) to prove that their child slaves came from beyond Corfu (outside the Adriatic) could keep them.¹¹¹ In 1388, the Senate received another complaint that the anime were “rustic and of rude intellect” so that “no utility or benefit can follow from them” after liberation.¹¹² In fact, said the complaint, their masters had done them a service by rescuing them from the Turks and supporting them. The Senate’s response was to raise the price of freedom to eight ducats or ten years of service, but anime still had to be registered with the capisestieri and could not be exported. Their status remained a problem as late as 1453, when the penalty for evading registration was extended from the owners of anime to the ship captains who imported them.¹¹³

In Genoa, cases of disputed status were decided by the sindicatori. They usually took the form of petitions by slaves claiming freedom on the basis of Christian origin or prior manumission. For example, a slave who had been manumitted in the will of Augustinus Iahele of Savona was nevertheless handed over to Oliverius de Maris in Genoa.¹¹⁴ With Oliverius’ consent, she petitioned the sindicatori to recognize her manumission by Augustinus and officially declare her free.

The process began when the slave designated a procurator, a Genoese citizen with full legal rights, to petition the sindicatori on her behalf. Her master was then called upon to respond: he might do so in person or designate a procurator to represent him. Each side presented legal arguments and evidence, including written documents and oral testimony. For example, three Genoese merchants and a ship captain were called upon as witnesses to the free status of Maurus, a Greek sailor whom a Genoese merchant attempted to sell as a slave in Palermo in 1328.¹¹⁵ An extract from Genoa’s tax cartularies was offered as evidence in the case of Caterina, a Greek woman from Cephalonia, and a sale document in the case of Cali, also known as Theodora.¹¹⁶

Having heard the arguments of each side, the sindicatori would arrive at a decision and order its execution. Thus, in 1479, the sindicatori decided that “Maria has been established as a Hungarian in law and in the presence of the honorable lords sindicatori of the commune of Genoa.”¹¹⁷ Through her ethnicity, Maria’s religion and legal status were made clear: “the said Maria was and is a Hungarian and a Christian, and by consequence free, and cannot be retained as a slave, but rather must and ought to be held as free.”¹¹⁸ Therefore the sindicatori manumitted her by decree and required her to pay 150 lire, an enormous sum, to compensate her former masters for all expenses associated with her purchase in Chios, including the purchase price, taxes, and freight charges. She was given ten days to arrange payment and three months after that to make payment in full. If she failed to pay on time, the decree of manumission would lapse. No punishment was imposed on Maria’s former masters despite the ruling that she had been enslaved illegally.¹¹⁹ This was normal; the sindicatori rarely penalized either the sellers or the owners of wrongfully enslaved Christians, and in many cases, the slave herself was ordered to compensate her former owner for the loss of her value.

We do not know whether Maria was able to pay her owner in time. The consequences of failure are represented by the case of an Albanian woman named Theodora.¹²⁰ The sindicatori declared her Christian and therefore free in August 1479. One year later, they added a fine of twenty-five lire to cover her initial price, associated expenses, and taxes in response to a petition from the heirs of her former master. Theodora failed to pay the fine within ten days. On July 18, the sindicatori had her detained by the commune until she paid the twenty-five lire plus three soldi in additional expenses.

Although it might seem impossible for a newly manumitted slave to find enough money to compensate her owner within ten days, a woman named Maria managed to do so in 1481. Once Maria was declared free of Melchionis de Monleone, she immediately designated Petrus de Camulo as her new procurator. His first task was to pay eighteen ducats to Melchionis as required by the sindicatori. He also took responsibility for defending Maria in court, in general and specifically against Melchionis. Finally, he committed “to renting and pensioning the same Maria in the city of Genoa to that person or those persons of good condition and reputation, and for that price and salary which can best be had.”¹²¹ Once Petrus found work for Maria as a free domestic servant, she would repay him for his assistance.

In the courts of Genoa, some slaves were more successful at challenging their status than others. A clear case of wrongful enslavement was that of Maria, a young woman from Naples who petitioned the sindicatori in 1492. Three years earlier, she had been living with her parents in Naples. A ship’s scribe had enticed her to leave, promising that she would be his servant and mistress, but then he sold her as a slave in Genoa. Fortunately, Maria’s parents were able to locate her. Ladislaus Doguorno, a canon of Salerno, and Antonio Soprano of Naples both traveled to Genoa and testified on her behalf. Ladislaus’ testimony has survived: he told the sindicatori that he knew both Maria and her parents and that Maria was recognized as a Christian in Naples and elsewhere by those who knew her. He protested that her enslavement was illegal “because Christians cannot be sold or obligated.”¹²² Maria was duly declared free.

Other slaves of Catholic origin also petitioned for freedom on the basis of shared religion. In 1487, a slave appealed to the sindicatori because she had been sold as an Iberian Muslim (mora) but was actually an Iberian Christian (hispana).¹²³ In 1455, a Hungarian woman named Anna designated a procurator to petition for freedom on the grounds that “she is Christian and free, conducting herself as a free person, and of Hungarian origin who cannot be sold as a slave either by law or by the form of the ordinances of the city of Genoa.”¹²⁴ However, Hungarian Catholics who succeeded in petitioning for freedom were still required to pay compensation.¹²⁵ Georgius was freed in 1405 but ordered to serve an additional nine years without a salary. Elena was freed in 1418 but ordered to pay ninety lire, which she did by contracting to serve Cattaneo Doria for fourteen years. Maria, mentioned previously, was freed in 1479 but ordered to pay 150 lire in 1479. Caterina was also freed in 1479 but ordered to pay 180 lire.

Italians, Iberians, and Hungarians were widely known to be Catholic. In 1394, a Catholic Tatar slave “presented himself in [the Genoese colony of] Chios before the lord podestà of Chios in his court, asserting himself to be a Christian of the Catholic nation and never a slave but rather free and a man of his own right. The lord podestà of Chios, having seen the witnesses produced by the said slave, liberated him.”¹²⁶ Antonio Coca, a broker in Pera who had sold this slave about one month previously, was ordered to reimburse the buyer. The fact that a Tatar slave won his freedom in a Genoese colonial court on the basis of shared Catholicism should stand as a warning to modern historians not to rely too much on apparent correlations between ethnicity and religious affiliation.

Among Orthodox Christians, some had more success in petitioning for freedom than others. An Armenian woman named Marta was freed in 1417 but required to pay fifty lire, which she did by arranging to serve Isotta Bracelli for seven years (reduced to five years if she worked as a wet nurse).¹²⁷ Two Albanian women also had success with the sindicatori in 1479 and 1480.¹²⁸ We do not know the outcome of three more petitions by Albanians, one of whom identified herself as the daughter of the late Amzrendari Aragi and asserted that she was “free and born from free parents and of Christian race and therefore cannot nor ought to be detained in servitude.”¹²⁹ A woman from Sclavonia designated procurators to present her petition in 1487, but the outcome of her case is not recorded either.¹³⁰ Finally, the podestà of Lucca heard a case in 1413 in which a procurator argued for the freedom of a slave woman “because she was of Bosnian origin and Christian, and in that region Christ the Lord is worshipped, through whose blood all believers are redeemed, and entirely exempt from any yoke of servitude.”¹³¹ His argument is one of the more explicit statements linking redemption or manumission from juridical servitude with Christ’s redemption of humanity from sin.

There were a number of successful petitions from Greek Orthodox slaves.¹³² In 1398, a Greek woman who had served Babilanus Alpanus as a free servant (famula) appointed a procurator when she heard that Babilanus intended to make her a slave (sclava). She protested that this was illegal because “she was begotten of Greek parents.”¹³³ In 1479, a Greek woman named Anna was freed because Greeks should not “be sold nor bought nor kept as a slave as accustomed by law and by justice,” while her owners were urged to accept the decision “lest the soul of the said late Ilarius [Anna’s deceased former owner] suffer on account of such retention.”¹³⁴ Similar cases are documented in Genoa in 1424 and 1489 as well as in Caffa in 1380 and 1398.¹³⁵

Orthodox Christians from Bulgaria were treated inconsistently by the sindicatori. Many Greek slaves based their petitions for freedom precisely on the fact that they were not Bulgar. Thus, in 1380, a slave woman who demonstrated herself to be a Greek from Constantinople and not a Bulgar was freed on the grounds “that all Greeks should be free and held and treated as free in the city and district of Genoa.”¹³⁶ The Christianity of Bulgars apparently did not warrant the same protection. Yet when Michael, a male slave, was determined to be Bulgar and not Tatar in 1391, the sindicatori chose to manumit him on the condition that he serve for another eight years without salary.¹³⁷ A controversy over the baptism of a fugitive slave in 1488 turned on whether she was Hungarian and therefore already Christian, or Bulgar and therefore apparently not Christian enough.¹³⁸ The case of a slave named Cali or Theodora depended on whether she was a Greek from Constantinople, as she herself testified, or a Tatar purchased in Cyprus, as her owners claimed.¹³⁹

Finally, there is no record of a Christian from Russia or the Caucasus being freed on the basis of shared religion. There are records of Mingrelian, Circassian, and Abkhaz women petitioning the sindicatori because their previous manumissions were not being honored, but none cited Christian origin as a factor in her defense.¹⁴⁰ This is odd, because Russians and Caucasians made up the majority of the Genoese slave population during the fifteenth century and because most of the inhabitants of both Russia and the Caucasus were Orthodox Christians at that time. Some possible reasons for the discrepancy will be offered in Chapter 2.

In the Mamluk sultanate, disputes over slave status were heard by a qāḍī, a judge belonging to one of the four schools of Islamic law.¹⁴¹ If the religion of the alleged slave was at issue, the slave herself was allowed to testify. If the dispute arose from a mistake in the act of manumission, witness testimony played an important role. The cases that received the most attention were those of mamluks whose manumission had not been correctly performed and whose status therefore had to be rectified before they could hold government posts.¹⁴² For example, an amir named Aytamush was about to be made a general (atabak) when Sultan Barqūq was informed of a problem with his manumission. Aytamush had belonged to another mamluk named Asandamur, who in turn had belonged to Jurjī, the governor of Aleppo. When Jurjī died in 1370, an amir named Bajjās took possession of both Asandamur and Aytamush and manumitted them, but this manumission was invalid because Bajjās had acquired them illegally. Technically, Aytamush still belonged to the estate of Jurjī. So before Aytamush could become a general, Sultan Barqūq had to contact the heirs of Jurjī, buy Aytamush, and remanumit him.

The Universal Threat of Slavery

“God has given you the right of ownership over them; He could have given them the right of ownership over you.”¹⁴³ This was not a platitude. Slavery in the late medieval Mediterranean threatened everyone, and no group was exempt from its dangers. After encountering prisoners begging for money and children displayed for sale in Cairo, the Franciscan Paul Walther de Guglingen and his fellow pilgrims “lamented the misery of such people, praising God, our creator, who had hitherto kept us safe from such things, and asking him strenuously that he keep us safe from these miseries and bring us back in health to the land of the faithful.”¹⁴⁴ They did not seek to rescue anyone but simply hoped to reach home safely themselves.

Free people from all parts of the Mediterranean were vulnerable to capture in war. Holy war offered the best opportunity for taking slaves (as opposed to captives), because by definition, it involved opponents of different religions.¹⁴⁵ As a result, the late medieval crusades generated many slaves. Frankish residents of Tripoli were enslaved after the fall of that city in 1268, as were Frankish residents of Acre in 1291.¹⁴⁶ Five thousand Muslim residents of Alexandria were captured by Peter of Cyprus in 1365, some of whom were ransomed and the rest of whom were enslaved.¹⁴⁷ The Mamluk conquest of Cyprus in 1426 generated large numbers of slaves.¹⁴⁸ This is not to mention the slaves, both Franks and Turks, taken in crusades against the Ottomans.¹⁴⁹ Corso (holy war conducted through piracy) threatened everyone who traveled by sea.¹⁵⁰ The arrival of a ship that had captured thirteen Christian sailors en route from Libya to Alexandria was marked by public celebration.¹⁵¹ In Valencia, Muslims captured by Christian pirates were displayed publicly for the satisfaction of local Christians who feared the same fate at the hands of Muslim pirates.¹⁵² Pero Tafur, a fifteenth-century Castilian traveler, told a story about Castilian and Catalan pirates who preyed on Muslim shipping until they themselves were captured and forced into piracy against Christians on behalf of the sultan.¹⁵³

Travelers and free people living along the coast were also vulnerable to enslavement by ordinary pirates and raiders. The Greek population of the Aegean was prey to Venetians, Genoese, and Catalans as well as Turks from the emirates of Menteshe, Aydin, and the Ottoman sultanate. Caterina, a Greek woman from Negroponte, petitioned the sindicatori of Genoa for freedom after having been captured by the trireme of Domenicus de Nigrono and sold as a slave.¹⁵⁴ Pilgrims bound for Jerusalem were advised not to wander along the seashore in the eastern Mediterranean, “lest [they] be suddenly seized by pirates and reduced to perpetual and miserable servitude, which often happens.”¹⁵⁵ Shipwreck, a danger in itself, might also cast travelers ashore among enemies who “would have carried us into a strange land and sold us all.”¹⁵⁶

In the late medieval Mediterranean, ship captains could not even be trusted to protect the freedom of their own passengers and crew. For example, in 1316, a Venetian captain decided to enslave and sell several Greeks whom he had taken on board as sailors in Monemvasia.¹⁵⁷ A different Venetian captain enslaved and sold some Greek merchants whom he had accepted as passengers in Salonika.¹⁵⁸ The same thing happened to a group of Tunisian merchants who arranged pas sage from Cairo to the Barbary coast on a Catalan ship in 1408; the captain sailed to Barcelona instead and sold the merchants as slaves.¹⁵⁹ In 1440, a Venetian man named Petrus Marcello decided to kidnap Hajji Ibrahim, a Muslim merchant from Acre who owed him money. He then sailed to Beirut to negotiate with Ibrahim’s son Hassan. Marcello invited Hassan and ten other men to come aboard his ship but then sailed away to Rhodes and sold all twelve as slaves. After the Mamluk sultan complained to Venice, Marcello was ordered to find and release them. Seven of the men had apparently been shipped to Nice, so Marcello asked his family to contact the duke and duchess of Burgundy and find out who had purchased them.¹⁶⁰ We do not know whether he ever succeeded in locating the people he had sold.

The threat of capture and enslavement affected the powerful and noble as well as ordinary sailors, merchants, and fishermen. Al-Ḥasan ibn Aḥmad al-Razī, a learned judge and physician who spent most of his life in Damascus, was enslaved in 1299 during the Mamluk–Ilkhan war and sold to a Frankish master in Cyprus.¹⁶¹ In 1311–1312, a ship carrying Mamluk and Mongol ambassadors was captured by Genoese pirates based in Chios.¹⁶² The pirates tried to sell the ambassadors and their retinue, about sixty people in total. No one would buy them because Sultan al-Nāṣir Muḥammad had ordered the retaliatory arrest of all Frankish merchants, both Genoese and non-Genoese, who lived in Alexandria, Damascus, and other Mamluk cities. Eventually, Segurano Salvaygo, a Genoese noble in Mamluk service, was able to negotiate the release of both the ambassadors and the merchants. A similar incident occurred in 1388, when Frankish pirates captured the sister of Sultan Barqūq and the daughter of his nephew en route from Syria to Egypt.¹⁶³ In 1319, a Byzantine ambassador was captured and sold by Venetian pirates while traveling to Venice on official business.¹⁶⁴ In 1387, the master of the Hospitaller order in the Peleponnese was captured in battle, sold as a slave, and vanished from the historical record.¹⁶⁵

The risk of enslavement applied even to the inhabitants of the Black Sea slaving ports. In 1341, Nicoletto Gata, a Venetian merchant resident in Tana, arranged to send a slave back to his wife in Venice. Yet seven years later, Nicoletto himself was sold as a slave in Saray, the capital of the Golden Horde, because he was unable to pay his debts. He was fortunate to have business associates to whom he could appeal for help.¹⁶⁶ Filippo Lomellini, the Genoese castellan of Cembalo in the Black Sea, was not so lucky. He was captured in battle and sold in the 1450s, and he never resurfaced.¹⁶⁷

Although slavery and captivity were ever-present dangers in the eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea, the distinction between them could be hazy. Slavery was usually based on religious difference, whereas captivity did not have to be. Slavery was permanent, at least in theory, whereas captivity was expected to end in ransom or exchange. As a rule of thumb, sale marked the transition from captive to slave because it generated a written legal document and witnesses that could serve as evidence of slave status later on. For example, after triumphing over Byzantine forces in 1352, the victorious Genoese general Paganino Doria agreed to release all of his Greek captives, except those who had already been sold. This clause in the peace treaty led to a lawsuit thirteen years later in Genoa. A Greek woman named Lucia petitioned the sindicatori for freedom in 1365 because she had been captured by Doria but never sold as a slave.¹⁶⁸ Lucia’s mistress, Violante, argued that Doria had sold Lucia and other captives to Bartolomeo Lercario and Antonio Pellavicino. Lercario and Pellavicino took Lucia to the market of Theologum in Turkish territory and sold her to Iacobus de Guaterio, Violante’s brother, who in turn gave her to Violante as a gift. Lucia, however, testified that she remembered being captured but did not remember being sold to Lercario, Pellavicino, or Guaterio. The outcome of this case is not known, but the result clearly depended on whether Lucia had been sold.

In most cases, the distinction between slavery and captivity was not so clear. Captives sold into slavery might still be ransomed, especially if they remained close to home. In Tana, a Russian woman named Maria was ransomed by her brother after three years in slavery, but on the condition that she stay with her master for two additional years to nurse their baby daughter before returning home.¹⁶⁹ Greek slaves were occasionally sold within the Aegean Sea with a clause requiring their new masters to accept future offers of ransom. Leo, a Greek slave from Samos, was sold to a physician in Crete “in perpetuity, except however that if his father or any of his relatives want to ransom him, you [the buyer] are bound to return him.”¹⁷⁰ Notaries sometimes facilitated the process. Nicola de Boateriis, a Venetian notary in Famagusta, seems to have used his connections in Negroponte to organize the ransom of several slaves.¹⁷¹

On the other hand, ransom did not necessarily mean an immediate return to freedom. Captives ransomed by a charitable stranger instead of a family member were expected to compensate their redeemers with money or service. This expectation may have been rooted in the Roman concept of postliminium.¹⁷² It may also have been influenced by canon law, which required pagan slaves redeemed from Jewish or Muslim masters to compensate their Christian redeemers.¹⁷³ When service was offered as compensation, the term was usually five years, but some jurists allowed the redeemer to keep the ransomed captive indefinitely.¹⁷⁴ In other words, ransom might simply mean slavery under a different master.

In the eastern Mediterranean, ransoms by charitable strangers were often formalized with a document of sale in which the stranger purchased the slave followed by a document of manumission in which the stranger promised to free the slave after a certain period of service. For example, in 1427–1428, Giorgio of Milan purchased three Greek slaves in Alexandria who had been taken in the recent Mamluk conquest of Cyprus.¹⁷⁵ He immediately freed two but retained the third, a widow, to serve him until she was able to pay back the forty ducats of her ransom. Likewise, Elena, a Greek slave in the house of Andrea de Moneglia in Chios, petitioned the bishop of Chios for freedom.¹⁷⁶ The bishop arranged for her to be redeemed by another Genoese man, Nicolaus Pichaluga of Sampierdarena, who paid twenty-five ducats for her. In return, Elena agreed to serve Nicolaus for five years. During that time, she would receive food, drink, and clothing; she would be treated well; and Nicolaus would not dismiss her against her will. These clauses were standard in the employment contracts of free servants. At the end of five years, her debt would be repaid, and she would be entirely free.

In the interval between the ransom payment and the fulfillment of the terms of manumission, the ransomed captive was technically a slave of his or her redeemer. This precarious position sometimes led to permanent enslavement. An extreme case was that of Stefano di Posaga. In 1439, Nicolo Morosini, the captain of an official Venetian galley returning from Tana, stopped at Ponterachia, a Turkish port, to take on water. There he rescued a fugitive slave, Stefano di Posaga. However, when the galley arrived in Venice, Morosini sent Posaga to work on his land in Padua, “holding him as a slave (servum).”¹⁷⁷ After four years, he sold Posaga to another ship captain, who was supposed to take him to Syracuse. Posaga finally contested his status in Syracuse, where the judges freed him. Judges in Venice then fined Morosini 200 lire. This is one of the rare cases in which a medieval judge penalized someone for wrongful enslavement. The fact that Posaga was an Italian man and not a Russian woman is undoubtedly relevant to the punishment of his enslaver.

How a person’s status might slip from ransomed captive to permanent slave is illuminated by an unusual passage in a document from Kilia, a Black Sea port at the mouth of the Danube River. In the document, a Genoese woman named Iohanna sold a Greek slave woman named Maria. However, the document deviated from the usual legal formulas to include a statement about the circumstances behind the sale:

This is the slave whom the said Bartolomeo, Iohanna’s husband, redeemed from Saracens in Asprocastro [i.e., Moncastro], in which place she was a slave, as the aforesaid Iohanna and the slave Maria both assert. Maria asserts the aforesaid things to be true, and that it is also true that she, Maria, was and is a slave of the said Iohanna and Bartolomeo on account of the aforesaid redemption, allowing it to be true that there is not any instrument or document concerning the aforesaid matters. And Iohanna made the aforesaid sale, as she asserts, on account of the need which she has for money for the subsistence of life for herself and her two daughters, because she said that the said Bartolomeo her husband does not do and has not done any good for Iohanna or for her daughters, several months having now elapsed, but he stays in Maurocastro [i.e., Moncastro] with a certain woman whom he keeps, and also in order to pay one sommum of silver to a certain priest to whom the said Iohanna is obligated, as she asserts.¹⁷⁸

In other words, Maria was trapped in the gray area between captivity and slavery. She had been enslaved by Muslims in the Black Sea port of Moncastro and ransomed by a Christian stranger, Bartolomeo de Azano. Bartolomeo brought her to his home in Kilia, where she served his wife, Iohanna, and their two daughters. When Bartolomeo abandoned his family and moved to Moncastro to live with another woman, Iohanna was no longer able to support her daughters. She decided to sell Maria to raise money and pay the debt she had already contracted with a priest. Slaves were expensive, and Maria may well have been Iohanna’s single most valuable possession.

When Bartolomeo acquired Maria, was he redeeming a captive or purchasing a slave? Maria and Iohanna said that Maria had been redeemed (redemit), but in the next line, Maria testified that she was a slave (sclava). This is surprising, because slaves were not legal persons and did not have the capacity to give legal testimony. Nevertheless, Maria also testified that there was no formal document or instrument concerning her redemption and thus no written evidence of her status, the price that Bartolomeo had paid for her, any promise of freedom he might have made, or any obligation she might have undertaken to serve or repay him. There was also no indication of how long she had served Bartolomeo’s family or whether she was close to fulfilling the standard five-year term of service.

The testimony in the document was elicited from Maria by her buyer, Precival Marchexano of Genoa. Among the witnesses to the contract was Thomas de Via, a Genoese citizen who acted as an interpreter between Greek (for Maria) and Latin (for Precival). Precival probably intended to take Maria into the Mediterranean and resell her.¹⁷⁹ Recording this story would increase her resale value by legitimizing her status as a slave. At the time of her sale in Kilia, Maria’s status was dubious. She was Greek, possibly of free birth, had no documented history as a slave, and had been redeemed from Muslims under conditions that normally entailed manumission after completion of a fixed period of service or payment of a fixed sum of money. However, the testimony in the document emphasized Iohanna’s possession of Maria and right to sell her despite all the factors in her favor. Moreover, Maria testified that she “was and is a slave.” This statement, once carried into the Mediterranean in the register of the notary Antonio di Ponzò, would make it difficult for her to challenge her status later.¹⁸⁰ A boilerplate clause in many slave sales was a promise on the part of the seller to uphold the buyer’s right of ownership in court. With written affirmation of Maria’s slave status, Precival could confidently defend his ownership of her and right to sell her onward.

We can only speculate about why Maria testified that she was a slave rather than a ransomed captive. One factor may have been the difficulty of challenging Iohanna’s claim to ownership. Maria did not have any proof of ransom, origin, or free status at birth. She may not have been aware of Genoese laws and norms governing the treatment of Greek captives. She was also facing a language barrier and may not have been able to find a translator willing to help her defend her status. Violence, threats, or other forms of coercion may also have affected her testimony.¹⁸¹ In any case, the fact that her testimony was recorded provides us with an unusual glimpse into the precarious zone between slavery and captivity.

Conclusion

Today we consider slavery an insult to human dignity, and we study slaves’ agency as a way of affirming their humanity.¹⁸² We imagine that anyone who owned slaves must have denied their humanity or failed to recognize it. The inhabitants of the late medieval Mediterranean, however, had a different understanding of both slavery and the human condition. They believed that hierarchy and menial labor would exist even in ideal societies like the Garden of Eden or the Garden of paradise. In those ideal societies, the lowest level of the hierarchy would be occupied by free people, and menial labor would be done by specially created nonhuman beings. In the real world, slaves occupied the lowest level of the hierarchy and did the menial work. Their humanity was never in question, but the restrictions and humiliations imposed on them were considered legal and socially acceptable.

Acceptance of both slavery and the humanity of slaves was supported by the perception of slavery as a universal threat. A slave owner one day, whether an Italian merchant or a noble Mamluk lady, might realistically find himself or herself enslaved the next. Slaves were considered the most miserable and unfortunate of people, a status that one wished to avoid for oneself but might choose to alleviate or exploit in others. For example, the fifteenth-century German pilgrim Felix Fabri pitied the slaves he observed in Alexandria, sympathizing with their desire to flee and deploring the horrible punishments they faced if recaptured.¹⁸³ Yet he and his fellow pilgrims thought it funny to be mistaken for slaves in the Cairo slave market, where they might well have been sold in reality if their ship had been captured by pirates. After the misunderstanding was cleared up, one of his companions tried to purchase an Ethiopian slave in the same market where he himself had just been haggled over.

The universal threat of enslavement was just one aspect of the common culture of slavery in the late medieval Mediterranean. Christian and Muslim authorities agreed that the natural status of humanity was freedom but that slavery was a legitimate aspect of human law. They agreed that individuals could be enslaved through birth and capture in war, but Christian authorities also allowed the sale of free people into slavery and recognized enslavement as a judicial penalty. They agreed that religious difference was the principle underlying slave status, but in practice, they were more concerned with protecting souls from apostasy than bodies from slavery. Catholic authorities were willing to authorize the purchase of Orthodox slaves to protect their souls. Yet they were more likely to grant petitions for freedom by Greeks than by Russians. What made the enslavement of Russian Orthodox Christians in Genoa more acceptable than the enslavement of Greek Orthodox Christians? The next chapter delves more deeply into how the inhabitants of the late medieval Mediterranean understood difference in the context of slavery.