Читать книгу Slavery in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia - William D. Phillips Jr. - Страница 8

CHAPTER 1

The History of Slavery in Iberia

Slavery was a structural feature of Mediterranean society.

—Fernand Braudel, mid-twentieth century

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

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

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

Stories of Slaves

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Varieties of Slavery in Iberia

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Muslims expanded from their origins in Arabia to take control of a swath of territories eastward to India and westward to the shores of the Atlantic Ocean in little more than a century. Slavery and the slave trade were both present in the Arabian Peninsula before the rise of Islam, and the Muslims conquered lands where slavery was present. Past practices of the Arabs and those of the societies they conquered thus intertwined to bind slavery into the fabric of Muslim society.¹⁶ The Muslims crossed the Strait of Gibraltar in the early eighth century after their absorption of North Africa, defeated the last Visigothic rulers, and secured most of the Iberian Peninsula. Al-Andalus, as they called it, became part of the wider world of Islam, unified by religion, the Arabic language, and common patterns of law and custom.

The Muslim invaders operated in a fashion similar to that of the Romans in their expansive phases: they sought to have the cities to ally with them. Where this happened, the Christian and Jewish population could preserve their religions and laws.¹⁷ Cities whose leaders resisted were conquered, and the Muslims enslaved the women and children of the defeated populations and killed or enslaved the men. The chroniclers probably exaggerated the numbers of captives, but just after the Muslim conquest, the caliph in Baghdad reportedly received 30,000 Christian prisoners sent from Spain.¹⁸ As the caliph was entitled to one-fifth of all booty, local officials must have reported the total number of captives at 150,000.

The contest between Christendom and the world of Islam, beginning with the Muslim conquests of the first two centuries of Islam, obviously influenced the history of slavery in medieval and early modern Europe. The conflict lasted in greater or lesser degree throughout the Middle Ages and continued in the early modern centuries. The alterations within the strategic relationship between Christian and Muslim states had important consequences for the development of slavery and the slave trade and helped to account for their complexity.

The Muslims failed to secure portions of Iberia’s mountainous north. Islamic and Christian societies consequently faced one another across a shifting land frontier in Iberia for nearly eight hundred years. Slavery in al-Andalus shows all the features of traditional slavery in the Muslim world. The frequent cross-border skirmishes, interspersed between periods of major campaigns, meant that captives were numerous and that slavery lasted longer as a more fully developed system than in many other parts of medieval Europe. The long-distance trading connections throughout and beyond the world of Islam brought slaves—Christians, Jews, and pagans—from a variety of origins to al-Andalus to add to the descendants of Iberian captives of the eighth century. By the tenth century, Slavs became the most numerous imported group. In fact, so common were Slavs in the slave trade, that their name has become the origin of the word “slave” in Western languages and in Arabic. Called ṣaqāliba in Arabic, Slavs were purchased from slave traders. 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. Sub-Saharan Africans arrived beginning in the eleventh century, a consequence of the increased Islamic penetration into their homelands via the caravan trade across the Sahara desert. Muslim raids into Christian territory in Iberia were designed for quick seizures of booty and prisoners, and the captives were held until they were ransomed. The Muslims held their Christian captives under tight control.¹⁹ Because many tried to flee back across the frontier, they had to be guarded closely to prevent flight. Those captives taken to North Africa were even less likely to be ransomed, as they were farther from kin who could help them.²⁰ If not ransomed, captives were sold at auction. The majority ended up as farm workers, but others worked at urban tasks.

Certain aspects of slavery among the Muslims were unlike anything in the Roman or Visigothic period. The medieval Islamic world was not a slave society, despite the large numbers of slaves in it. Muslims generally made little use of gang slaves in agriculture or large-scale manufacturing, and many of the slaves in al-Andalus were artisans, domestics, or concubines.²¹ Others occupied administrative roles, sometimes filled by eunuch slaves, and military slaves were present. Slaves of the Muslims were usually well integrated into the dominant society and into family life and the domestic production of goods for household use or for sale. The Muslims in Spain and elsewhere in the Mediterranean also made great use of imported slave soldiers. Two features of the economy and society of Islamic Spain foreshadowed developments in the later history of slavery: sugar production and the use of slaves from sub-Saharan Africa.

Christian and Jewish slave holding continued in Muslim Spain. From the beginning, if Christians and Jews voluntarily accepted Muslim dominance, they could retain their lives, their liberty, and their property. Thereafter they paid a head tax to the conquerors, and one half the normal head tax for their slaves. Initially, the status of the Mozarabs (Christians living under Muslim rule) was sharply reduced, with restricted civil rights that prohibited them from holding offices that would give them authority over Muslims. They could not acquire Muslim slaves, but they could retain their non-Muslim slaves. Any of their existing slaves who converted to Islam were to be sold to Muslim masters, because no non-Muslim could legally hold a Muslim as a slave. By the ninth and tenth centuries, though, Mozarabs could purchase non-Muslim slaves who reached the peninsula through the slave trade.²²

Far northern Iberia remained in Christian hands after the Muslim conquest of most of the peninsula, as remnants of the Visigothic elite took refuge with local Christians and began guerrilla actions against the Muslims. Slavery of various forms also persisted in the Christian areas. In the period of the early reconquest, from the eighth through the eleventh centuries, Christian slave owners gradually ceased to hold Christian slaves, and the descendants of those slaves tended to become hereditary tenants on assigned plots. The bulk of the rural workers in all areas of the Christian states tended to be free or semi-free, though they were tied in varying degrees of dependence to lay lords or ecclesiastical establishments.²³

Slavery in later medieval Iberia was unlike Roman slavery and resembled instead the systems developing in other parts of the Christian Mediterranean. Seldom were there large concentrations of slaves, and in none of the Christian kingdoms was there anything approaching a slave society. Slaves mainly worked as additional workers among a pool of free workers or as those assigned to temporary tasks. This distinguished medieval Iberian slavery from Roman, in which slave gangs were prominent. What distinguished it from slavery among the Muslims of the same period was the restricted number of categories into which slaves fit. There were no military slaves, eunuchs were virtually nonexistent, and slaves only infrequently acted as business agents. Female slaves were usually domestics and often concubines, but they seldom occupied the same positions as the slave entertainers that figured so prominently in Islamic Spain. Even though slavery in medieval Christian Iberia did have an uninterrupted history, the institution functioned only in a restricted fashion. Nevertheless, the Iberian kingdoms were frontier states, sharing borders with Muslim states whose inhabitants, the Christians believed, could be raided and enslaved with complete legality.

Slavery in the Christian areas of eastern Iberia evolved considerably over the period from the eleventh to the end of thirteenth century. The means of acquisition changed, and the slaves on the market were less frequently war captives and more frequently the property of slave dealers. The slaves tended to come from a wider area of recruitment, and women came to constitute the majority of those sold in the markets. All this reflected changes in the balance of power between Muslim and Christian states in the peninsula and in the Mediterranean, as Catalan maritime activity and Castilian land campaigns increased from the late eleventh century onward. Christian city-states and kingdoms profited from their successes as they seized the initiative from the Muslims and began to secure slaves from a wider area. Urban areas expanded, particularly in Catalonia, and the purchasers of slaves tended to be city dwellers, who preferred women as their household slaves. The attitudes of the slave owners altered as well. Earlier they had employed Muslim captives as slaves and tended to avoid close attachments with their slaves. Thereafter, they increasingly considered their slaves, by then predominantly women, as part of the household. They usually referred to them by name in legal documents, took care to supervise their conversion to Christianity, and manumitted them more frequently.²⁴ Slaves still worked at productive tasks, both in the homes and workshops and on the farms and garden plots of their owners. Women slaves often became concubines of their masters.

By the late Middle Ages, the maritime regions of the Crown of Aragon shared in the system of slavery that was characteristic of the Christian countries of the western Mediterranean.²⁵ From the Adriatic Sea westward, the polities of Italy and Sicily, southern France, and eastern Iberia all shared a common pattern of slavery and slave holding, featuring urban and domestic slaves more than rural slaves, and with women typically but not always outnumbering men as slaves. Slaves were most commonly recruited by a well-organized commerce conducted mainly by Italians who sought non-Christian slaves, or at least non-Catholic slaves, around the southern and eastern shores of the Mediterranean and beyond through the straits to the northern shores of the Black Sea. Periodic Christian victories over the Muslims placed large numbers of captives on the market in the western Mediterranean. When Christians conquered the islands of Mallorca (1229–30) and Minorca (1287), the chronicler Muntaner stated that 40,000 Muslim captives were sold as slaves throughout the Christian Mediterranean.²⁶

The special circumstances of medieval Iberia included communities of religious minorities living within the lands of the dominant religions, with Jewish and Christian communities in Muslim Spain and Jewish and Muslim communities in Christian Spain. Complications for slavery naturally arose, for Muslim rulers prohibited Christians and Jews from owning Muslim slaves, just as Christian rulers forbade Jews and Muslims to own Christian slaves. The best studied of these special cases was the Mudejar community in the medieval Crown of Aragon. Mudejars were Muslims living under Christian rule. Many of them continued to own slaves, so long as the slaves were not Christian, and derived significant benefits from slave ownership beyond the normal labor and services any slave owners received. From the eleventh century on, slaves of the Mudejars often engaged in everyday interactions with the Christian community, and thus provided channels for acculturation in language and everyday behavior. At the same time, Muslim slaves imported into the Mudejar communities from Muslim lands brought their experience of living in a dominant Muslim polity and consequently provided support for the Islamic culture of the Mudejars, who faced pressures to assimilate into the dominant Christian society.²⁷

Raiders from both sides of the religious divide preyed on the coastal populations by capturing victims at sea or along the unprotected coasts. Those captives who had the means or who could secure the help of their families back home could arrange ransoms and exchanges. Others less fortunate ended up as slaves.²⁸

Late medieval Castile was not greatly involved in Mediterranean activity and purchased few slaves from Mediterranean merchants. Slaves in Castile up to the late fourteenth century were almost exclusively Muslim in origin, and Castilian slavery was fed by the reconquest and by raids into Muslim-controlled territory. King Alfonso X’s thirteenth-century law code, the Siete Partidas, inspired by the high medieval revival of Roman law, incorporated many Roman elements and went on to influence later Castilian legal codes, as well as the legislation affecting Spain’s American colonies.²⁹ For Portugal, the presence of Muslim slaves is documented from the eleventh century, but a lack of both original sources and modern studies limits what is known about them. More numerous studies of slavery in Portugal focus on the period from the 1440s onward, when the direct trade in sub-Saharan slaves began.³⁰

Two turning points altered the geography of the slave trade to Christian Iberia and brought slaves of different ethnic origins to the markets of the peninsula. One was the Black Death of the mid-fourteenth century. A great pandemic reached the Mediterranean world from Asia, which in a period of less than four years killed a third or more of Europe’s population and had a similar impact on the Middle East.³¹ It was the greatest human catastrophe ever to hit the region, with the death toll in percentage terms far surpassing even the losses in the First and Second World Wars. The survivors faced many adjustments, not all of them bad. For the elite, there was a concentration of wealth, either through inheritance or their ability to sell what their fields and workshops produced at higher prices. Among the non-elite, surviving rural and urban workers could secure better terms of work and higher pay for their labor. Elite households needed servants and had the money to pay for them, while the workers in the smaller labor force could opt out of domestic service and secure jobs with higher status. Slaves could fill the gap and began to be secured and traded in a wider geographical area, from Dalmatia through southeastern Europe to the shores and islands of the Black Sea to the lands of the Russian rivers. This was the case for many of the northern Italian cities and for Barcelona, Valencia, and other smaller ports of the Crown of Aragon.

The second major change took place in the second half of the fifteenth century, when the Portuguese and Spanish probing expeditions down the Atlantic coast of Africa began to bring sub-Saharan Africans as slaves into Europe. Europeans initially had become aware of the riches of sub-Saharan Africa because of their interest in Morocco and the African goods from farther south—gold and slaves above all—available there. By the end of the fifteenth century, the Portuguese had established a commercial trajectory that brought slaves from coastal enclaves in Atlantic Africa to Portugal. This marked a fundamental change, for now sub-Saharan Africans arrived in Christian Europe directly instead of indirectly via the trans-Saharan caravan routes of the Muslims and the trade across the Mediterranean. Of these slaves, some remained in Portugal, whereas dealers took others to be sold elsewhere in Europe. Many slaves went to Seville, where some remained, while others traveled farther to the ports of the Crown of Aragon and to the more northerly cities of Castile. Still others passed directly from Lisbon to the eastern Iberian ports.³² Thus the Portuguese developed a trade in black African slaves that began small and served the limited needs of the peninsula and the Iberian-controlled Atlantic islands. The trade later grew exponentially with the development of the colonial empires in the Americas.

As they colonized the Americas beginning in the 1490s, the Spaniards established slavery in the new possessions. In doing so, they made use of several long- and short-term traditions present in the peninsula by 1492. One was the persistence of the legal regulations governing slavery, present from Roman times and ratified in the Siete Partidas. Another tradition was the existence of sugar-cane plantations and sugar refining, both in the peninsula and in the Canaries. In the Canaries, at least, the connection between sugar and slavery had been established, just as had the custom of purchasing black African slaves from the Portuguese. The Portuguese overseas ventures followed a similar trajectory as they colonized Madeira and other Atlantic islands and then Brazil across the Atlantic. Growing from these precedents, slavery became an important social and economic institution in the Iberian American empires, and it lasted into the late nineteenth century.

Slavery played a crucial role in colonial economic development, and eventually portions of the Americas became true slave societies. Slavery in Spanish America was complex, and during the first two centuries of the colonial period, two systems of slavery coexisted. One was an outgrowth of the traditional pattern of slavery in the Christian Mediterranean during the Middle Ages. In it, owners employed slaves as domestics, artisans, and assistants of all kinds. In the first decades of the Spanish settlement of the Americas, this was the predominant system, with slaves and freedmen, often of African origin, acting in an intermediate role between the Spaniards and the Amerindians. The other system was large-scale slavery for the sugar plantations and the mines in Spanish America and Portuguese Brazil, a variety of slavery reminiscent of the Rome gang slavery in the late Republic and early Empire and one virtually non-existent in Europe and North Africa during the Middle Ages. With the passage of time, the highly concentrated gang slavery became the more important of the two in many parts of the Spanish and Portuguese colonial areas.³³

Back in Iberia, there was a slight rise in the numbers of slaves in Iberia and in the social importance of slavery from the middle of the fifteenth century to the late sixteenth. Despite the growing number of sub-Saharan Africans, slaves of other origins still were important in Spain, including captives from the wars of conquest in the Canary Islands, who began to arrive in greater numbers in the period from 1480 to 1530. Still other slaves were Muslims, captured in the peninsula or at sea in the Mediterranean. There also were Moriscos from the peninsula itself. The numbers of Muslims and Moriscos were significant in the period 1570 to 1630 and reached a peak in the decade of the 1620s, following the expulsion of the Moriscos from Spain.³⁴ Spain and Portugal were prospering, and many Iberians were growing rich from the flows of African and Asian products and eventually of American silver. With increasing prosperity, rural and urban workers began to move from place to place in search of better jobs and improved working conditions. Some employers turned then to slaves, who were by definition fixed to the place the owner assigned them. Keeping slaves in one place was one thing; saving on taxes was another. In the sixteenth century an old Castilian tax, the moneda foránea, came to be converted to a luxury impost paid by those who had free servants. It did not apply to slave owners, many of whom used their slaves in the same way that others used free servants.³⁵

Slave owners came from a wide spectrum of society in the early modern period. The royal governments in Spain and Portugal owned slaves who worked in public enterprises. Officials of state and church of all ranks owned slaves. Nobles owned many slaves, not just for display but also for construction and maintenance of castles and townhouses, for agriculture and animal husbandry, and for domestic service. Down the social ladder, local officials, merchants, artisans, and farmers could own slaves as assistants, farm hands, and domestics.

Even in the absence of firm figures for all of early modern Spain, it is apparent that the densities of the servile population varied in different regions. In general terms, Andalusia and Murcia had the greatest numbers, followed by Catalonia and the kingdom of Valencia, and then by the seat of the royal court, especially after its establishment in Madrid in the mid-sixteenth century. Although most slaves lived in the southern and eastern coastal cities or in the Balearic Islands, there was a wide but uneven distribution of slaves elsewhere in the peninsula. Recent scholarship has documented the presence of slaves even in the Basque provinces, where slavery had been thought nonexistent because of legal prohibitions.³⁶ For Portugal in the same period, the distribution of slaves varied, with more slaves in coastal regions than in the interior and more in cities than in the countryside. A recent set of estimates suggests that few places in sixteenth- century Portugal had more than 10 percent slaves in the population, that the country as a whole in that century had between 6 and 7 percent slaves, and that in the next century the percentage had dropped to below 5 percent. Lisbon likely had just under 10 percent at the sixteenth-century height of slavery there.³⁷

The numbers were never great. During the sixteenth century, Seville’s slaves probably made up about 10 percent of the population, and Seville had the largest slave population of any major city.³⁸ The peak may have come in mid-century.³⁹ Barcelona’s slave population in the late fifteenth century has been estimated at some 10 to 20 percent,⁴⁰ with that of Valencia not far behind. Granada at the same period had only about 2 percent of its population as slaves. ⁴¹ Slaves represented some 10 to 12 percent of the population of the island of Gran Canaria in the sixteenth century, and freed slaves represented some 3.4 percent.⁴² In the second half of the sixteenth century, Toledo, a city of between 20,000 and 25,000 people, had a slave population of less than 400.⁴³ Palos, a small town on the Atlantic coast near the Portuguese border, had a population of some 25 percent slaves and free people of African origin, but that was due to unusual local circumstances.⁴⁴

The defeat of the rebellion of the Moriscos of Granada in the 1560s, as we will see in Chapter 2, meant that many of the defeated ended up as slaves. Others escaped to North Africa, and some of them joined the Muslim corsairs and preyed on the Spanish coasts. Of the Morisco slaves remaining in Granada, many gained their freedom, as their relatives ransomed them. Others died as slaves. Morisco children, separated from their families, were often hidden by their Christian owners and others were placed under the control of Christians. They had free status in a legal sense, but many of them were treated in practice as if they were slaves.⁴⁵ In 1571 came the battle of Lepanto, in which Spanish-led naval forces defeated the Ottoman fleet and brought many captives to the market. King Felipe II of Spain in 1580 assumed the crown of Portugal, at that point the chief European dealer in African slaves. All these events formed the foundation for a growth in peninsular slavery that lasted into the seventeenth century.⁴⁶

Slavery began to lose its importance after a peak in the seventeenth century. Individual captives and slaves won their freedom: captives by ransom and slaves by flight or by legal manumissions. There were still slaves of Muslim origin in Spain, for slaves had been excluded from the expulsion decree. Most, however, were Muslims captured at sea or in North Africa or purchased there. A few were of Morisco origin.⁴⁷ After royal orders of 1626 and 1629, Moorish slaves had to be converted to Christianity or sold outside the kingdom,⁴⁸ but it does not appear that these orders were strictly followed, for a few unconverted Muslim slaves remained until the late eighteenth century. By no means did all of the converted slaves truly embrace Christianity. Some of the last references to such slaves are in the records of the Inquisition, when they fell afoul of the authorities following accusations that they were insincere Christians.⁴⁹ The Portuguese asserted their independence from Spain in 1640 and fought a long war until 1668 to secure it. During that period, Portuguese slave dealers could not visit Spain to supply slaves. For all these reasons, slavery declined in Spain, outside a few special locations.⁵⁰

Slavery in Western Europe gradually declined during the course of the eighteenth century and finally ceased to exist in the nineteenth. It is clear that slavery relied on a set of factors that included the need for coerced labor, the availability of slaves, and a desire on the part of private individuals and governments to own slaves. By the late eighteenth century, none of these factors operated in Spain. There was a general rise in population in the eighteenth century and a shift in population to the coastal regions. Thus more free laborers were available, just at a time when supplies of slaves were becoming more limited and prices were rising. Thus it made economic sense to employ wage laborers instead of investing in slaves. Free workers could be employed and paid as needed; slaves had to be fed, clothed, and housed whether they worked or not.

Slavery gradually declined over the eighteenth century, for all these reasons. Slavery played little role in the European economy by that time, and without an economic justification it eventually disappeared. In the area of the old county of Niebla, the territory along the Atlantic coast in the lower reaches of the Tinto and Odiel Rivers, slavery faded out in the second half of the eighteenth century.⁵¹ Jaén showed a similar pattern. It was still there in the early eighteenth century, but thereafter the sales are all to merchants and citizens of Málaga. After the early years of the eighteenth century, slavery ceased to exist there.⁵² The last slave to be baptized in the Extremaduran town of Montijo received the sacrament in 1735.⁵³ In Catalonia, the number of slaves fell over the course of the eighteenth century, in part due to the decline of Barcelona and the fact that the Catalan fleet was no longer employed in slaving raids, but mainly because labor costs dropped as a consequence of French immigration and the growth of the local population.⁵⁴ A similar pattern emerges from the records of Cádiz, where the estimated percentage of slaves in the population dropped to nearly nothing over the course of the eighteenth century, a decline due to general population growth and the immigration of free workers from other parts of Spain who took over the often menial jobs that slaves formerly held.⁵⁵ Two small towns in southern Extremadura show a similar trajectory for slavery over the early modern period. Barcarrota and Salvaleón, both close to the Portuguese border, showed declines in the percentages of slave children in local baptisms: for Barcarrota nearly 6 percent of those baptized in the sixteenth century were slaves, 2 percent in the seventeenth, and just over 1 percent in the eighteenth. For Salvaleón, the numbers were even smaller while the pattern was the same.⁵⁶

Until the eighteenth century, the ransoming of captives remained a preoccupation both of the Christians of Europe and of the Muslims of North Africa. The activity of corsairs produced captives at sea and along the coasts, and many of the captives were held for ransom. The collection of money for the redemption of slaves was a flourishing business and occupied the attention of the specialized religious orders. Without the constant “small war” with the Muslims in the Mediterranean, slavery might have died out even earlier. But the influx of Muslim captives, a few in ordinary years and in greater numbers during major campaigns, offered an opportunity for the government and private owners to employ slaves. The government made use of them in special projects. Privately owned slaves were no longer important in the economy by the eighteenth century. Those who remained were usually domestic servants and assistants in the artisan workshops.

The final decline of slavery in Spain began in the 1760s, when Carlos III established diplomatic relations with Morocco, an act that severely curtailed slaving raids by both sides. ⁵⁷ With regularization of diplomatic ties with the North African states, the activity of corsairs declined, and with it, the numbers of captives. The last domestic slaves, often of African ancestry though usually born in Spain or the Spanish American colonies, became free by manumission in the late eighteenth century or by law in the early nineteenth. Many entered the market for domestic servants; when they married, they followed the normal gender pattern, with the woman working at home and the man securing employment outside the home.⁵⁸ Slavery in metropolitan Portugal also ended in the late eighteenth century. In 1761 a decree forbade the entry of slaves into that country; those slaves who happened to arrive thereafter were declared to be free. That left the existing slaves, few in number. They attained freedom under the government of the Marquis of Pombal in 1773.⁵⁹

Throughout Iberia, slavery had died a natural death. An institution that had predated the Roman conquest of Spain, one that had lasted well over two thousand years, had passed into history. It was a harsh yet fascinating history while it lasted. This rapid summary reveals the highlights of the history of slavery in Iberia and also provides a preview of the various themes pursued in this book. People became slaves, and when they did, they lived and worked as slaves. As slaves, their lives were in the hands of their owners, who could dispose of them as property, treat them harshly or kindly, assign them to work, have forced sexual relations with them. Slaves did what they could to try to improve their lot and exercised various degrees of agency. Many died as slaves, but others became free. In the chapters that follow, we examine the lives of slaves and the varieties of slavery in detail. Taking a thematic approach, we devote attention to how people became enslaved, how they lived, how they worked, and how some ceased to be slaves.