Читать книгу Slavery in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia - William D. Phillips Jr. - Страница 10

CHAPTER 3

The Traffic in Slaves

In one house [in Valencia in the 1490s], I saw men, women, and children who were for sale. They were from Tenerife, one of the Canary Islands, in the Atlantic Ocean, who, having rebelled against the King of Spain, were in the end reduced to obedience. . . . [A] Valencian merchant . . . had brought 87 in a boat; 14 died on the trip and the rest were put up for sale. They are very dark, but not Negroes, similar to the North Africans; the women, wellproportioned, with strong and long limbs.

– –Hieronymus Münzer, fifteenth century

The Slave Trade

The slave trade lasted throughout the Middle Ages and the early modern period, in both Christian and Muslim areas, even though birth and capture in war and raids produced more enslaved people. Yet the categories of trade and capture are hard to separate, for many of the people traded as slaves in Iberia had originally been born free and had been enslaved during war or in raids far from the peninsula. Some came from as far away as the Russian rivers or Africa south of the Sahara. Others traveled only a few miles as they crossed the religious frontier in the Mediterranean or in the peninsula or simply moved from town to town under the control of slave dealers.

Those captives of war and raids who were not ransomed came to be slaves, as we saw in the previous chapter, and over time their chances for regaining their free status and their homelands diminished or faded completely. They had virtually no status in the new society. Some scholars have even called such unfortunates the “living dead” because of their social and legal isolation.¹ They found themselves cut off from the people and things they had known from birth, and soon lost what they might have brought with them, such as their clothing and their accustomed foods. They held on longer to other ties to home: their religion and their language. Much depended on their ages, for those captured and enslaved as children remembered less than adults. Whatever their origins, they all began to acquire, slowly and painfully in some cases or more easily in others, familiarity with and a stake in the households and societies of their masters.

Roman Spain did not have a highly developed slave trade, though the defeated populations of some towns ended up as slaves and were exported from the peninsula. The Visigoths did not enslave the conquered Romans and provincials in a wholesale fashion, and domestic warfare did not usually produce slaves. The Visigoths, like other Germanic groups, were reluctant to enslave members of their own group, even though they did allow fellow Visigoths to fall into slavery for debt, criminal sentence, and self-sale. As the Visigoths looked outside for slaves, the ethnic and religious divisions present in the regions they conquered simplified their search. The Arian Christian Visigoths enslaved those they captured in their wars against the Catholic Franks. The Franks did the same, and large numbers of Arian captives entered the slave markets of Gaul. Arian and Catholic Christians could make slaves of pagans and Jews, and slave traders always brought slaves from distant lands. Pagan slaves from central Europe and from North Africa reached Spain as early as the mid-sixth century. There was a slave trade from Visigothic Spain to other parts of Europe and North Africa, but not much is known of it. Merchants sold slaves from Spain outside the kingdom, including some kidnapped children, even though there were some prohibitions on the export of slaves.²

The Islamic world experienced a golden age during its first centuries, and Muslim Spain shared fully in it. Once the bounds of the Islamic world were set, there were no more slaves to be obtained legally within the frontiers, except for rebels and the children of slaves. War produced relatively few slaves, and consequently the slave trade gained great importance. The Muslim elite acquired great riches and preserved that wealth through many generations. Thanks to the economic advantages that that they possessed over their neighbors, they could afford to import what they needed and wanted from outside. The necessities included timber for fuel and construction, metals (iron and gold above all), and slaves, who formed an important component of the vast new commercial system and who were considered necessities by large numbers of Muslims.³ Even though slaves seldom worked in agriculture,⁴ they still were imported in large numbers for artisan labor and domestic and military service. One indication of the volume of the slave trade comes from Córdoba. That single, albeit brilliant, city may have had nearly 14,000 slaves under the caliph ‘Abd al-Raḥmān III in the mid-tenth century, when the total population may have reached 250,000. ⁵

The early period of the slave trade into al-Andalus is not fully documented, though the outlines are fairly clear. Even at the beginning of the conquest, the Muslims brought slaves and free servants with them. These included Ethiopians and Armenians, Egyptians and Nubians. In the ninth century, merchants brought slaves into al-Andalus from Christian Iberia (at that time the northern fringe of the peninsula) and other parts of Europe. Many of the slaves were pagans captured in Central and Eastern Europe, and others were Christians, captured in Muslim raids in France and northern Spain. The merchants included Christian Franks, who dealt in the European pagans, and Muslims and Jews, who dealt in Christians. The enslaved people who found themselves traded into al-Andalus could spend their lives there as slaves, or they could face more distant journeys to other parts of the Islamic world, for there was a lively re-export trade.⁶

Before the tenth century, the Muslims of Spain generally bought Christian Europeans as slaves, adding them to the descendants of indigenous slaves conquered in the eighth century. By the tenth century, the mostly pagan Slavs became the most numerous imported group throughout Western Europe, where their ethnic name became the origin of the word for “slave” in most Western languages, as we have seen. The Muslims used the term ṣaqāliba in Arabic, still another example of a newly coined word for slave derived from “Slav.” But ṣaqāliba were brought to Spain by slave dealers from any of a number of European origins: Central Europe (brought in via Verdun), the shores of the Black Sea, Italy, southern France, and northern Spain. Byzantine Christians, captured by other Muslims in the eastern Mediterranean, were present as slaves of the Spanish Muslims by the eleventh century, along with North African Berbers enslaved following unsuccessful revolts.⁷ Some were brought into Spain as eunuchs. Muslim Spain was well known for the presence of eunuchs and for their export to the markets of the Muslim Mediterranean. Young boys among the captives were castrated and then fetched high prices as eunuchs. Some of the slaves were castrated in Verdun and then taken to Spain. Others were made eunuchs in Muslim Spain.⁸

The rulers of Muslim Spain began to recruit foreigners as soldiers in the eighth century. The history of slave soldiers in the Islamic world is complex, although the basic motivation for their use was simple: they were loyal, with no local ties to compromise their loyalty to their masters. They came from North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, and Europe, with the “Slavs” (Europeans) the most important group among them. They were brought in as children, converted to Islam, and given an education in Arabic. The real rise in their military use came with al-Ḥakam I (ruled 797–822), who organized a permanent force of salaried and slave soldiers. Al-Ḥakam II (ruled 961–76) made use of Slavs and had a unit of black soldiers as his personal guard. ‘Abd al-Raḥmān III, who declared himself caliph in 929, began to import and to employ Slavs on a larger scale. By the time of his death, their numbers in Córdoba are put at 3,750. The number of Slavs increased still more under the chamberlain al-Mansur (978–1002). The inhabitants of Córdoba, who dubbed them “the silent ones” because of their lack of proficiency in Arabic, regarded them with suspicion. Many of them attained freed status and formed families. Their presence disrupted the balance of ethnic forces in the caliphate and hastened its decline. Their role declined with the end of the caliphate in the early eleventh century, when many of them migrated to certain of the taifa kingdoms, the city-states that replaced the unified caliphate, where they eventually became rulers of Almería, Badajoz, Denia, Mallorca, Murcia, Tortosa, and Valencia. The trade in Slavic slaves virtually ceased, but slaves imported from sub-Saharan Africa rose in numbers and came to constitute a significant element in the slave trade to al-Andalus.⁹

The Muslims of Iberia obtained black African slaves through their connections with their coreligionists in North Africa. Muslims called the black Africans ‘abid (plural of ‘abd = slave) or sūdān. The latter term came from their place of origin south of the Sahara in the Bilād al-Sūdān, the land of the blacks, where the Sudanic belt of grasslands stretches eastward from the Atlantic Ocean to the Ethiopian highlands. Muslims had been familiar with the peoples of sub-Saharan Africa since they initially crossed the desert in the first Islamic century and brought back a few slaves. Their numbers grew as Muslim penetration into sub-Saharan Africa intensified. The North Africans from the eighth century maintained caravan routes across the Sahara to trade in the black states of the Sudan, many of whose leaders and merchants had converted to Islam. The North Africans provided the sub-Saharan markets with dates, figs, sugar, and cowries (shells for use as currency). Manufactured goods were quite important: copper utensils, ironwork, paper goods, Arabic books, tools, weapons, and cloths of cotton and silk. The Sudanese had cotton cloth of their own, but imported dyed fabrics had an appeal for them. Jewelry, mirrors, and glass, especially Venetian glass, went south with the caravans. North African horses were in great demand south of the Sahara, because the military strength of the Sudanese states depended on cavalry. The North Africans also provided salt that they purchased along some of the caravan routes.¹⁰ In exchange, sub-Saharan Africa provided the North Africans with ivory, ostrich feathers, skins and leather, kola nuts, ebony wood, and a type of pepper. Nevertheless, gold and slaves were the most important exports from the Sudan to the Mediterranean. By the end of the eighth century Muslims already knew of the gold from the region. From the tenth century through the fifteenth, the Muslims and Europeans obtained much of their gold from West African sources by way of the trans-Saharan trade routes. The merchants and rulers of the Sudanic states grew wealthy and powerful as a result of their ability to supply the metal and thus to pay for their imports from the Maghrib.¹¹

The Muslim world had a constant demand for sub-Saharan slaves that continued through the Middle Ages and long after 1500, even maintaining maintained a sizeable volume during the period of the trans-Atlantic slave trade.¹² The sufferings of those who were forced to make the trek were horrifying. In addition to the heat and cold, the threat of storms, and the lack of water that they shared with the other members of the caravans, the slaves often had to act as bearers of other goods. Even when they did not carry loads themselves, they had to load and unload the camels and help with the daily camp preparations.¹³ The slaves who survived the desert crossing spread through North Africa, where many remained. Others were sent on to other Muslim lands, including Islamic Spain, but until the fall of Granada in 1492, most slaves of the Spanish Muslims were Christians from the northern kingdoms of the peninsula.

The Slave Trade in Christian Spain

The trade in slaves went both ways, of course. Iberian Christians imported slaves throughout the period as well, just as their Muslim contemporaries did. The slave trade changed over the centuries as the political and military balance shifted. The Muslim ascendancy from the eighth into the eleventh century declined as the Christians gained greater and greater control from the eleventh century to the end of the fifteenth.¹⁴ Those who operated the slave trade changed as well. Among the slave traders supplying Muslim Spain, Muslim and Jewish merchants predominated in the early period. Sale documents indicate that Christian merchants tended to replace Jews in the slave trade, beginning in the twelfth century.¹⁵ Large populations of free Muslims came under Christian control after the thirteenth-century conquests of the south. Consequently, free Muslims were more numerous than Muslim slaves, who appeared more frequently in the frontier regions and less often at greater distances from the frontier. By the eleventh century, some black slaves began to appear in the Christian regions of the Mediterranean. In 1067, as one example, the Christian Arnallus Mironis and his wife Arsendis donated ten black captives to Pope Alexander III.¹⁶

Within Christian Iberia in the later Middle Ages, the lands of the Crown of Aragon were closely tied with the currents of Mediterranean trade and the slave trade, whereas the Castilian kingdom tended to supply its demand for slaves through war and conquest. Slave owning by non-Christians continued in the Crown of Aragon, although in a restricted fashion. Neither Jews nor Muslims in post-conquest Valencia could hold Christian slaves. Muslims could own Muslim slaves, but there was a constant attrition as Muslim slaves gained manumission or accepted baptism and left their Muslim masters. The laws of Valencia explicitly stated that the non-Christian slaves of a Jewish master would be free if they converted to Christianity. By implication, the same would apply to slave converts owned by Muslim masters. Local Muslim slave owners could not make up the losses. After the conquest, the Muslims were cut off from the Muslim slave trade, and their economic situation worsened, making them less able to purchase slaves from Christian suppliers, who used legal and extralegal means to increase the supply of Muslims to put on the market. Merchants from the Crown of Aragon took slaves to southern France, and Muslim envoys who visited Barcelona often bought Muslim slaves there.¹⁷

Many Muslim slaves entered the market after being captured in the conquests of King Jaume I, when Valencia and the Balearics came under Christian control in the early thirteenth century. Thereafter, things changed. The late medieval commercial and imperial expansion of the Crown of Aragon in the Mediterranean coincided with the period in which it was less possible to secure slaves within the peninsula. Slave recruitment shifted as a consequence. Piracy and the slave trade fed medieval slavery in the Crown of Aragon.¹⁸ Throughout the thirteenth century, Muslims made up the bulk of the slaves; some were captives of pirate raids and from the Castilian raids on the Muslim kingdom of Granada. In the thirteenth century, too, documents began to show distinctions among the Muslim slaves—white, brown, olive—which indicated recruitment from wider areas than before.¹⁹ By the fourteenth century slaves of other origins came into the Iberian Mediterranean.

Then the Black Death hit. A great pandemic came to Europe from Central Asia, crossing to the areas around the Black Sea by way of the caravan routes opened by the Mongols and reaching the Crimea in 1346. Two years later it entered Italy by way of Constantinople. From Italy it spread throughout Europe, causing the deaths of a third or more of the European population in a period of three years.²⁰ Among the catastrophic consequences of the plague was an increase in slavery, as local free survivors of the plague could demand higher wages and better working conditions. Those who sought servants and manual laborers turned to buying slaves. In the Iberian slave markets of the later fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, more women than men appeared. This set of facts fits well with the Italian evidence for the period that points to a strong growth of slavery, especially domestic slavery, following the Black Death.²¹

New sources of slaves began to supply the markets of Catalonia and Valencia, whose merchants were active throughout the Mediterranean and into the Black Sea. They, together with Italian merchants, brought slaves from distant regions to Barcelona and other cities. For a time in the fourteenth century, Greeks appeared in the Crown of Aragon as slaves. Their presence was due to the Catalan freebooters called the Almogávares and their conquests in the Balkan Peninsula. The Greeks, however, were Orthodox Christians. Efforts by church officials in Rome and Barcelona freed many of them and eventually stopped the trade, on the grounds that Christians should not enslave Christians. By the fifteenth century, another reason for the end of the trade in Greek slaves was the decline of Catalan influence in the Balkans.²² The slave trade from the eastern Mediterranean diminished by the late fifteenth century, as the Ottoman Turks consolidated their control in the region.

Sards came on the market in relatively small numbers during the early fourteenth century, when the Crown of Aragon was taking over Sardinia. Theoretically Sards were subjects of the Aragonese king, but those who resisted the conquest and those who later revolted against the conquerors could be enslaved.²³ In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Italian merchants brought back Albanians, Tartars, Russians, Caucasians, and other Crimean peoples. Albanians also fled from the Turkish advance in the Balkan Peninsula in the 1380s. Some, in desperation, sold themselves into slavery and ended up in Venice, from where dealers transported some of them to Mallorca and Catalonia. Turks and Armenians appeared among the slaves of the Crown of Aragon, but they were only a small proportion of the total numbers.²⁴ The town of Vic in Catalonia, isolated from the sea and from the frontier with Islam, had slaves from a surprisingly varied set of origins in the early years of the fifteenth century. Of 39 slaves sold in that period, 14 were Tartars, 7 “Saracens” from either Spain or North Africa, 6 black Africans, 2 Circassians, 2 Russians, a Canarian, a Bulgar, and a Bosnian.²⁵

To move to the center of the peninsula, slaves in Castile were almost exclusively Muslim in origin during the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries. Before the fifteenth century, Castile was not greatly involved in Mediterranean activity and purchased few slaves from Mediterranean merchants. Thus only small numbers of slaves from the Mediterranean reached Castile. Rather, Castilian slavery was fed by the reconquest and the raids into Muslim territory, and, within the territories under Castilian rule, Andalusia was the most prominent location where slaves were used.34 In Cádiz at the end of the fifteenth century, there was a sizeable number of slaves, both because many citizens of the town owned a small number of slaves, and because many Muslim slaves passed through Cádiz before being sold elsewhere, notably in Valencia. In Cádiz, too, we see evidence of a few Jews sold as slaves.²⁶ On increasingly rare occasions, slaves from Eastern Europe could find themselves in Andalusia.²⁷

The slave trade in Canary Islanders had a relatively short existence from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century. When individual European captains with authorization from the Castilian monarchs undertook the conquest of the Canaries in various phases, they found the islands inhabited by natives akin to the Berbers of northwest Africa who were living at a Neolithic level of culture. They likely had lived in isolation from the rest of the world since the end of the Western Roman Empire, a thousand years before. Politically they divided themselves into smaller or larger bands, and the Castilian conquests proceeded by securing treaties with some of the bands and conquering others. The settlers in time remade the Canaries along the lines of Europe, with cities, farms, and sugar production facilities, but in the initial phases of the conquest the conquerors resorted to enslaving natives as a quick way to make the profits necessary to repay the loans to pay for their expeditions, mainly financed on credit. Only natives of the conquered bands could be enslaved legally, but the royal agents had to maintain constant vigilance to ensure that the conquerors did not violate the rules and enslave members of the treaty bands.²⁸ But there was a loophole. If members of allied bands rebelled or refused to carry out the terms of their treaties, they could be enslaved as “captives of second war” (de segunda guerra), as we saw earlier. Many enslaved Canarians were sold on the mainland, whereas others remained in the islands and found themselves put to work by the Europeans. The material and legal conditions they lived under resembled, not surprisingly, those of the slaves in late medieval Spain.

Natives of the Canaries did not make a substantial or a long-lasting addition to the international slave trade and did not even fill the labor needs of the Canaries. The indigenous Canarian population was small to begin with, and the isolated island peoples fell victim to diseases common in Africa and Europe. Manumission was common for those who did become enslaved. The Canarian slave trade to Europe ceased early in the sixteenth century, as the remaining Canarians increasingly assimilated European culture and intermarried with the colonists. Other sources of labor were necessary before the islands could be developed fully. So the Canaries witnessed the influx of other laborers, including a number of free Castilian workers. More substantial settlers often brought their own slaves with them. Berbers and black slaves were obtained from Castilian raids and trade along the West African coast, or brought to the Canaries by Portuguese dealers. In the course of time, slaves came to be born in the islands. For a short period after the first Spanish contact with the Americas, Indians were sold in the Canaries. Their numbers were always few, and the trade soon stopped when the Spanish monarchs outlawed slave trade in Indians.

Black African, Muslim, and Morisco slaves came to constitute a significant component among the work force in the Canaries. The settlers in the Canaries acquired imported slaves in a variety of ways. Some slaves, who had already spent time in Spain, accompanied their Spanish owners when they migrated to the Canaries. Portuguese merchants sold others from their ships as they stopped in the Canaries on their return voyages from West Africa. Castilians competed with Portuguese in the trade, especially during the war between Castile and Portugal from 1474 to 1478. By the treaties ending that war in 1479, Portugal received a monopoly on trade with Africa south of the Canary Islands, but illegal Castilian raids continued into the sixteenth century.²⁹ Castilians engaged in raids called cabalgadas mounted from the Canaries, and along the African coast north of Cape Bojador they acquired captives and cattle. Manuel Lobo Cabrera found records for 154 raids from the eastern Canaries during the course of the sixteenth century. The greatest number (87) left from Lanzarote, followed by Gran Canaria with 59. Only 8 left from Fuerteventura. At times, the raiders acquired black slaves directly, although often a more complicated process ensued. Most of the human booty from the raids consisted of Muslims. Some were enslaved, converted, and later freed. Other Muslim captives, those who were able to do so, negotiated for their ransoms, and frequently they paid for their ransoms with variable numbers of black slaves. This became one of the most common means by which sub-Saharan Africans entered the islands.³⁰