Читать книгу Slavery in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia - William D. Phillips Jr. - Страница 9

CHAPTER 2

To Become a Slave

There are three kinds of slaves, the first is those taken captive in war who are enemies of the faith; the second, those born of female slaves; the third, when a person is free and allows himself to be sold.

—Siete Partidas, thirteenth century

There were many variations on the three methods of becoming a slave that the authors of the Siete Partidas noted, and several other ways that they failed to mention. An investigation of the complicated history of slavery in Iberia illustrates many of the paths toward slavery. Throughout the history of slavery, some slaves were born into servitude. Children of slave mothers were slaves; that was the usual rule. In Roman times, the children of a slave mother and either a free or a slave father were slaves from birth. These house-born slaves belonged to the mother’s owner. In Muslim regions, children of slave mothers were slaves, unless the father was the woman’s owner and acknowledged his child. In that case, the child was free. In medieval and early modern Christendom, children followed the status of their mother. Children of slave mothers were slaves. Children of free mothers were free, even if the father was a slave and even if the mother were freed only an hour before the birth, as the authors of a medieval Castilian law code put it.¹

Slave mothers produced slave children, and free mothers produced free children. This neatly posed proposition holds true in almost all cases, but, as with most absolute statements in history, there were exceptions. Scholars recently have found deviations from the general rule in the late Middle Ages in the Iberian Peninsula and other parts of the Mediterranean world. In late medieval Barcelona, for instance, a free father who had a child by a slave woman belonging to a third party could claim the child as free, with a payment to the owner. A medieval law code of Valencia, the Furs, provided that masters who impregnated their slaves were obliged to free the mothers and the children produced. If an owner refused to recognize his obligation, the slave could take him to court. There were also provisions for the recognition as free of a child born to a slave woman and free man who was not the master.²

Self-sale and a variation—debt slavery—were unusual after Roman times, though examples appear in medieval Christian Spain. In the Crown of Aragon in the high Middle Ages, Muslims and recent converts could contract for periods of voluntary bondage and receive a sum of money to pay off debts that they could not otherwise satisfy. The periods of servitude were specified, but the volunteers ran the risk of being sold into permanent slavery if they failed to make the required payments.³ In late medieval Valencia, debtors could sell themselves or their children to satisfy the debt, usually for a temporary term after which the pawn would become free again. As one example, a Valencian Muslim enslaved his son to a Jewish creditor until the sum the Muslim owed was satisfied. Muslims in Christian Valencia could become slaves through penal sentence, for committing crimes such as grand larceny, attempted flight to North Africa, homicide, adultery, prostitution, and robbing owners of their slaves (mainly by aiding fugitives). Valencia’s chief bailiff (bayle general) and his staff had responsibility to sell other slaves that came to be owned by the Crown. These were generally recaptured runaway slaves or transgressors such as vagabonds, unlicensed beggars, and convicted adulterers, whose crimes were punished by enslavement.⁴

Free-born people could become slaves in limited and statistically insignificant ways at different periods. In Roman times, destitute parents could resort to two methods for disposing of children they could not support. Parents could sell their children as slaves, though the practice was illegal. Or they could abandon unwanted infants, a process euphemistically called exposure. Not all the abandoned children died, as each locale had well-known places where parents left their unwanted infants, who could be rescued and raised either as slaves or as free persons.

In some periods, violations of law and custom could lead to enslavement for the guilty, but the numbers of slaves produced as a consequence of such actions were probably small. In the Visigothic kingdom, penal slavery was a mandatory penalty for certain offenders: rapists of free women, adulterous wives, those who induced abortions by drugs, kidnappers of free children, forgers, and counterfeiters. Public crimes, such as failure to come to the aid of the king in wartime, carried the possibility of enslavement to the royal treasury or to a person the king designated. Mistresses of clerics could, in certain circumstances, be sold into slavery by the local bishop.⁵ In later periods, Christians who aided the Muslims by providing them with naval stores or ships or who navigated Muslim ships were to be enslaved when captured, according to a thirteenth-century Castilian law code.⁶

One special category of judicial enslavement could be seen in the Crown of Aragon, when in the fifteenth-century communities of Muslims (Mudejars) and Jews lived under their own authorities, who could judge the conduct of the members of their own community and punish transgressors. The Christian monarchs did impose certain limitations. Muslim and Jewish judges could not enforce the death penalty or corporal mutilation on convicts, even though their own law codes called for such penalties. In such cases, the guilty persons fell under royal jurisdiction and became slaves of the Crown. They could be sold or granted in turn to private Christian owners whom they would serve as slaves.⁷

Spanish judicial authorities during the early modern period sentenced convicts to duties deemed necessary for the state but considered too dangerous or difficult to attract free labor. The categories included galley service, mining, presidio service, naval arsenals, and public works. Convicts provided most of the laborers in these endeavors, but their numbers were almost always insufficient. At times, slaves were used to make up the full work force. The term “galley slave” is so common that we tend to believe that all rowers on galleys were always slaves. That is not true. Free, salaried oarsmen provided the crews of the galleys during the Middle Ages. The practice of sending convicts to row began under Fernando and Isabel at the end of the fifteenth century, and these forzados gradually replaced the free oarsmen over the course of the sixteenth. An increasing number of crimes were punished by condemnation to the galleys, and by the late sixteenth century penal servitude in the galleys had become the usual fate for convicted commoners. Convicted criminals from the nobility and the clergy were usually exempt, but the clergy who committed capital crimes could end up in the galleys.⁸

Forzados alone could not fill the demand for galley rowers, despite the increasing number of crimes punishable by galley service and despite the increasing rate of convictions. Their numbers consequently came to be supplemented by slaves from several other sources. Many were Muslim prisoners of war, captured in naval engagements in the Mediterranean and in attacks on North African cities. Other ways for slaves to enter galley service was for forzados to purchase slaves who would substitute for them, or to provide money for such purchases. Government officials bought others, almost always Muslims, from private owners, frequently using the profits from the auctions of overage or disabled galley slaves. Slave owners, by selling or donating recalcitrant slaves to the royal officials for galley service, rid themselves of unsuitable slaves and perhaps ensured the loyalty of their remaining slaves, who no doubt hoped to avoid a similar fate.⁹ As an example, in 1603 the Spanish government paid don Diego López de Haro two hundred ducats as the price of two Turkish slaves whom he sent to the galleys.¹⁰ The government could confiscate privately owned slaves for galley service in times of heightened demand for galley rowers or at periods when private owners offered an insufficient number for donation or sale. In galley service, forzados could only work at the oars. Slaves might man the oars as well, but they could occupy other positions prohibited to the forzados, such as assistants of the guards and barbers and servants of the officers of the vessels.¹¹

Two special categories existed among the slaves on the galleys. One group, the arráeces—usually the captains of Muslim pirate vessels—were held as slaves permanently. They had no hope of being sold away from the galleys or of being freed. The other group was slaves who were sentenced to the galleys after having been convicted of a crime. During the term of their sentence, they blended into the mass of the forzados. When their sentences expired, they did not attain their freedom, unlike the forzados. Their owners could reclaim them; if they did not, the slaves remained in galley service.¹²

Galleys became increasingly obsolete in the eighteenth century, and, even before they were abolished in 1748, the slaves and forzados no longer principally worked as rowers. The galleys usually remained in port and their involuntary crews worked in the naval yards. After the galleys were abolished, it was a natural step for the government officials to assign forzados and slaves to the naval arsenals. There they worked at various tasks of maintenance in the naval yards; their most arduous task was to operate the pumps that kept water out of the dry docks. Convicts continued to labor in the naval arsenals until 1818, but the last figures for slaves working in them come from 1786.¹³

Forzados and slaves also labored in public works and at the mercury mines at Almadén and the silver mines of Guadalcanal. Almadén was a particularly harsh environment. Toxic fumes from the furnaces produced mercury poisoning, and the heavy labor of operating the pumps debilitated the workers and left them vulnerable to infectious diseases. Some of the convicts even asked to be transferred to the galleys to escape the mines. By the early eighteenth century, slaves, usually purchased at low prices, came to be twice as common as convicts in the labor force. Improved technology in the eighteenth century, however, reduced the hazards of working there. It therefore became possible to recruit free workers, who ultimately replaced the slaves and forzados at Almadén.¹⁴

To sum up this section, slavery by birth was a constant throughout slavery’s history. Self-sale, debt slavery, and penal slavery did produce slaves, but not consistently and not in great numbers. None of these methods produced sufficient numbers of new slaves to meet demand. The capture and later enslavement of people born free provided the greatest number of slaves.

From Free to Slave

Captivity in war or in raids was the principal avenue to slavery for freeborn people. Both Romans and Visigoths enslaved captives. In the early years of the rise of Islam, when Muḥammad and his first followers secured control of the Arabian peninsula, the prisoners of war they captured, other Arabs, were enslaved if they were not ransomed. When the Muslims expanded beyond Arabia, the situation changed. By the time the Muslims took Spain, the possibilities of enslavement through war had declined sharply. Islamic religious tradition held that Jews and Christians were “people of the book,” fellow seekers after truth whose holy books governed their religious actions. As dhimmī, protected aliens, they could not be enslaved outright, although during the wars of expansion the victors often violated this prohibition. Free Muslims could not be enslaved legally, but occasional violations of this rule followed quashed revolts. There was no mass freeing of slaves in newly conquered areas, even if the slaves later embraced Islam, and the mere fact of conversion to Islam was not sufficient to free a slave.

The practice of slavery in the Christian kingdoms was changing by the late eleventh and twelfth centuries as the Christian reconquest gained momentum. More and more frequently, campaigns by Christians captured and held whole towns and cities with large Muslim populations. Alfonso VI’s seizure of the large city of Toledo in 1085 is perhaps the best example. No longer was it possible to carry out wholesale enslavements among the conquered population, even though some male prisoners—defeated combatants—were still enslaved. Rather, the remaining Muslims, the Mudejars, were allowed to remain and carry on their lives subject to the authority of the Christian rulers. Enslavement of unransomed captives continued. As one example of the numbers of slaves captured, after the late eleventh-century reconquest of Avila, some two hundred Muslim slaves were put to work in chains to build the town’s famous walls. After the significant Christian victory over the Muslims at Las Navas de Tolosa in 1212, several thousand defeated Muslim warriors entered the market as slaves. Later battles also brought still more slaves to the market: for example, the battle of Jerez de la Frontera in 1231.¹⁵

In the 1260s, the Muslim poet Abū al-Baqā’ al-Rundī lamented the fate of the Muslims who fell into the hands of the Christians after the conquest of Seville:

Yesterday they were kings in their own houses, but today they are slaves in the land of the infidel!

Thus, were you to see them perplexed, with no one to guide them, wearing the cloth of shame in its different shades,

And were you to behold their weeping when they are sold, the matter would strike fear into your heart, and sorrow would seize you.

Alas, many a mother and child have been parted as souls and bodies are separated!

And many a maiden fair as the sun when it rises, as though she were rubies and pearls,

Is led off to abomination against her will, while her eye is in tears and her heart is stunned.

The heart melts with sorrow at such [sights], if there is any Islam or belief in that heart!¹⁶

We can see how the process of captivity and enslavement developed in the conquest of the Balearic Islands. After King Jaume I the Conqueror took over Mallorca after hard fighting (1229–32), many members of the Muslim community fled, while others were enslaved. About the same time (1231), Jaume made a treaty with the Muslim population of Minorca, who accepted client status. The Muslims of Minorca adhered to the treaty until the 1280s, when they began a series of rebellions against the Aragonese. In response to the violations of the treaty, Alfons II subdued Minorca, treated the rebellious islanders in a punitive fashion, and enslaved the captives. The chronicler Muntaner reported that 40,000 captives were put on the slave market, although that figure is likely an exaggeration. Whatever their real numbers were, the captives were offered the possibility of being ransomed. Those who could pay the ransom regained their freedom; the rest became slaves of the king. Some of these slaves were sold in Minorca, and many of the others ended up in the slave markets of the peninsula, in Sicily, or in Mallorca. Others remained in the hands of the king, who gave some of them as gifts to nobles and clerics, including the pope, and set some to work in the shipyards of Barcelona. On the island of Ibiza, as elsewhere, some captives converted to Christianity, gaining perks and the greater possibility of eventual manumission.¹⁷

During the reconquest of Valencia and the campaigns in Murcia, the Christian conquerors sold prisoners of war into slavery but reacted vigorously to stop Muslims who were not war captives from being sold as slaves.¹⁸ From among the captives, though, King Jaume sent some two thousand slaves as gifts to kings, emperors, nobles, cardinals, and the pope.¹⁹ In 1280, after King Pere took Montesa, “slavers continued for at least a year and a half their purchases among the multiple prisoners of war.”²⁰

In addition to war, free people could fall into slavery if they were captured in raids across religious lines, by incursions on land, by coastal raids, or by seizures at sea. Such raids continued through the centuries of the later Middle Ages and into modern times.²¹ They were features of the centuries-long confrontation between Muslim and Christian societies around the Mediterranean. Life was precarious for those, whether Muslim or Christian, who lived along the coasts or near the land frontier between the areas of Islamic and Christian control. As the Christian reconquest moved southward, royal and municipal authorities had to offer incentives for settlers in areas exposed to Muslim raids.

Muslim raids into Christian territory were designed for quick seizures of booty and prisoners, and the captives were held until they were ransomed. Along the frontiers of Muslim Granada in the fifteenth century, Christians fell into the hands of Muslims in several ways. Muslims made raids into Christian territory and captured groups and individuals. In addition to defeated warriors, the captives were usually people who had been working alone in the countryside, such as shepherds or farmers, or those traveling the roads, such as merchants. Coastal dwellers, especially those in isolated villages, ran heightened risks, as pirates or corsairs could raid with ease, just as they could capture vessels at sea.²² Christian raiders sometimes found themselves surrounded and captured, and individual Christians at times were sent into Muslim territory as hostages in exchange for other prisoners. As the reconquest moved still farther south, victorious Christian armies freed their coreligionists who were being held as slaves.²³

On the Christian side, Muslim prisoners of war increased the servile population in the aftermath of victorious Christian raids. By the eleventh century, Christian Spain had many fewer slaves of Christian origin and many more of Muslim origin. The multiplication of the manumissions over time meant that by the twelfth century few Christians were slaves. The Muslim slaves in this early period were seldom ransomed. They frequently received baptism, and ultimately they and their descendants became amalgamated into the lower rungs of the society of the Christian states. Once enslaved by war, for the Muslims, and once born into slavery, for the Christian slaves, they could be transferred from owner to owner by purchase and sale, by gift, and by testament. They could also be manumitted. Christians seem to have been manumitted more frequently than were Muslims.²⁴

In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the Portuguese monarchs and nobles conformed to general Iberian practice and enslaved Muslim prisoners of war. Portugal no longer bordered on Muslim territory after the Algarve was conquered in the thirteenth century. Thereafter, the most fruitful source of slaves for Portugal was North Africa, although occasionally the Portuguese participated in Castilian raids on Granada and obtained slaves there. In the late Middle Ages, Portuguese seamen captured North African and black African slaves in the waters off Morocco and took them back to Portugal or Spain. In 1317 King Dinis of Portugal gave the Genoese Manuel Pesagno a naval command and permission for privateering in Moroccan waters. Pesagno could retain one-fifth of all the slaves he captured.²⁵

In the Crown of Aragon, the methods of enslaving were similar to those employed in the same period by the Castilians and the Portuguese: capture in war and raids. The legal code of the town of Teruel shows the manner in which the captives were distributed following a successful raid. Their captors placed them under guard and made an initial sorting: some would be exchanged for Christian prisoners, and the others would be enslaved. The king got a share equal to one-fifth of the captives. This relied on precedent going back to Roman times: the sovereign received a fifth of war booty. The members of the expedition received numbers of slaves that varied according to their social standing and their actions in the campaign. The code of the town of Calatayud in 1120 stated that if a Muslim king were to be captured, he would belong to the Aragonese king.²⁶ After the Black Death of the mid-fourteenth century, the king of Aragon authorized his subjects on the island of Ibiza to conduct privateering raids against the Muslims. These raids, and those from other parts of the Aragonese empire, continued into early modern times. Directed against coastal dwellers in North Africa and, until 1492, the Muslim kingdom of Granada, the raids produced captives sold widely in the Christian Mediterranean and as far as Portugal.²⁷

When the Catholic monarchs Fernando and Isabel entered the newly conquered city of Málaga in 1487, they freed with pomp and ceremony the hundreds of Christian captives, some of whom had been waiting twenty years for their liberation. The traveler Hieronymous Münzer in the last years of the fifteenth century asserted that “When the Muslims took Málaga, seven hundred years ago, they killed all the Christians. King Fernando vowed to do the same [to the Muslims] but lifted by his clemency and humanity, he sold them as captives. . . . The king sold 5,000 men, at 30 ducats each.”²⁸ All told, the victors enslaved between 10,000 and 15,000 Muslim inhabitants of Málaga. Those who could arrange to be ransomed were freed, but they had to go to North Africa and could not remain in Spain. Those who remained were sold throughout southern Spain.²⁹ Even common soldiers in the Granadan war got their share. Alfonso de Vergara of Seville, a legal official and part-time warrior, had two slaves. He took one of them home as war booty after the town of Alhama fell to the Christians and baptized him as a Christian with the name Francisco. The other was a white woman named Naxa; Vergara noted that he “won her with my own lance in the battle of Najarón and turned her into a Christian and who is now called Leonor.”³⁰

Wars of conquest produced slaves in the Canary Islands, but the slavery of the Canarians turned out to be a short-lived phenomenon. The first European captains who entered the Canaries in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries enslaved many of the natives, either legally in the case of the groups that resisted, or illegally in the case of the groups whose leaders signed treaties and were thereby supposedly exempt from enslavement. Despite official watchfulness, the conquerors violated the rules at times and enslaved members of the treaty bands. Members of allied bands who later rebelled or refused to carry out the terms of their treaties could be enslaved as “captives of second war” (de segunda guerra). Native slaves were used both as laborers in the Canaries and as commodities for sale elsewhere, mainly in Andalusia or in Portuguese Madeira .³¹ An example of this is shown in a royal order of Queen Juana of Castile in 1513 to Alonso de Lugo, governor of the Canarian islands of Tenerife and La Palma, and his associates. The queen’s order reviewed the fact that after the conquest was over many of the bands in the islands became Christian and their members married in the Christian religion. Later, they offered twenty-five of their children as hostages guaranteeing their continued allegiance to the peace settlements. Lugo and his associates illegally took the twenty-five to Seville and sold them as slaves, alleging that they were captives taken during warfare with hostile bands. Juana ordered that Lugo and his deputies had one hundred days to locate the twenty-five, free them, and return them to their homes.³²

Christians from the Canaries also made raids on the African coast and brought back Muslim slaves during the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Often those slaves converted to Christianity, won their freedom, and stayed to blend into the local population. On Lanzarote, a late sixteenth-century commentator, with obvious exaggeration, suggested that “three-quarters of the island population were Moors or their descendants.”³³

War also produced captives when Spain conquered cities in North Africa, beginning with Melilla in 1497, and continuing with Oran in 1509, Tripoli in 1511, and Tunis in 1535, along with other Moroccan ports and inland cities. These conquests produced prisoners who were sold as slaves by the Spanish monarchy, by war leaders, and by ordinary soldiers, who received one or two slaves as part of their share of the booty. Most captives ended up in Spain, where they remained until ransomed, or longer if they could not arrange their ransoms.³⁴

The Morisco Revolt

Relations between the Christian authorities and the Moriscos produced complications for the history of slavery. Although converted to Christianity, Moriscos maintained a number of the social customs of their ancestors and were never able to allay the suspicions of Spain’s Old Christians about the sincerity of their Christian beliefs. They can be observed as a distinct group in Castilian history as early as the fifteenth century, when Juan II and Enrique IV employed them in royal service.³⁵ Their numbers swelled during the reign of Fernando and Isabel, when Muslims in the Spanish kingdoms, save only for those of Valencia, were forced 1502 to convert to Christianity or leave the country. Free Muslims followed different paths: some converted and assimilated, while others relocated to North Africa and continued their ancestral religion.³⁶

Among the Moriscos were a certain number of slaves. Nonetheless, the majority of the Moriscos of the sixteenth century were free, and some of them engaged in slave trading, in violation of early sixteenth-century laws prohibiting them from owning slaves and much to the indignation of the representatives to the Cortes (the Castilian parliamentary body). The Cortes of Toledo of 1559 reported that Spanish Moriscos were purchasing black slaves in Spain and sending them to North Africa. They castrated some of them, presumably to fill the demand for eunuchs in the Muslim world, where emasculations were illegal and had to be done clandestinely. In response to the complaints of the Cortes, Felipe II ordered that slaves who suffered castration were subject to royal confiscation, and that the perpetrators would be fined.³⁷

Many Moriscos ended up being enslaved during the Morisco uprisings in the Alpujarras south of Granada that began in 1568 and continued until 1571. Royal armies eventually brought them under control, with many Morisco men killed, and many other men, women, and children held captive. An intense, though brief, debate occupied court circles. Could the defeated Moriscos be enslaved? After all, the Morisco community had been officially Christian for generations, and Christians were not supposed to be enslaved. Nevertheless, most Spaniards, even in the highest circles, considered them to be Muslims who only outwardly conformed to Christianity. The decision was that they were rebels and could be enslaved. Morisco captives began to be sold as slaves even before the government reached its decision. In the interim, sale documents had clauses protecting the buyers in case the enslavements were not permitted, and other Moriscos, ones not involved in the revolt, offered to hold the captives until their fates could be decided.³⁸ Many other Moriscos were killed, making orphans of their children. Still other Moriscos found themselves unable to care for their children and offered them to Christian families to be raised. Such children, both those orphaned and those abandoned or sold, ran the risk of being enslaved, but the licenciado Navas de Puebla, legal official of the army, intervened to save many of them from slavery. As well, Navas exempted many Moriscos from being expelled and no doubt saved their lives in the process. The royal officials ultimately ruled that boys below the age of ten and a half years of age and girls below nine and a half could not be enslaved. They included war orphans or those separated from their parents. Many joined Christian households, where they resided until they reached the age of twenty. Most were contractually linked to their patrons by a process that resembled both the older contracts of apprenticeship and the encomienda system of New Spain. In Almería, Navas de Puebla worked out legal arrangements by which the children were to be sheltered by their patrons and had to work for them until they came of age. Their patron could employ them as domestic servants, and, if he were an artisan, he could teach them his occupation through apprenticeship. Many of the children became thoroughly assimilated and later married into Old Christian families. Their relatives by marriage helped them hide their New Christian backgrounds during the subsequent expulsions, which many of them must have been able to avoid.³⁹

Granada’s Moriscos were relocated throughout the lands of the Crown of Castile in the aftermath of the revolts.⁴⁰ A generation later, in the early seventeenth century, all Moriscos—though still ostensibly Christians—were expelled from Spain. By various means, free Moriscos became slaves both during and after the expulsions, as others had become slaves during the Alpujarras revolts a generation before. Many expelled Moriscos left their children with Christian families; others sold their children to the soldiers. Adult Moriscos could be and were enslaved if they tried to avoid being expelled. After the expulsions, some Moriscos secretly returned, like Cervantes’s Ricote in Don Quijote. Freeborn North African Muslims traveled to Spain in search of employment, though consciously running the risk of being enslaved. Those who were caught and identified could be enslaved. Others were open and voluntary returnees, who chose to return to Spain even if it meant living in slavery.⁴¹

Captives and Slaves

There were important differences between the actual and potential status of captives and slaves, even though historical documents and modern historians may treat the terms captive and slave or captivity and slavery as equivalent. Captives, as in the examples earlier in this chapter, were those people who became prisoners of victorious armies and fleets in time of war or of raiders on land or sea in smaller engagements in times of war or peace. A captive entered a temporary status from which he or she would emerge, either by becoming free again when exchanged or ransomed, or by becoming a slave if neither exchanged nor ransomed.⁴² The wars and the raids in medieval and early modern Iberia usually crossed religious frontiers, for Muslims did not enslave other Muslims, and Christians did not enslave other Christians.⁴³ When Muslims or Christians fought among themselves, as they often did, captives ended up as prisoners of war who were usually ransomed or exchanged and did not become slaves.⁴⁴ Conflicts between Muslims and Christians, on the other hand, produced captives who often failed to obtain ransoms and ended up as slaves. Jarbel Rodríguez, in a recent book, drew the distinction between captive and slave: “In the world of medieval Iberia, therefore, captives were those individuals who, although they suffered many of the limitations and degradations of slavery, had a reasonable expectation of freedom and who owed their bondage to the religious wars between Christianity and Islam.” Captives, both Muslim and Christian, could realize that their rulers, home communities, or their families—or all of these—would make efforts to redeem them. Slaves could not expect to gain freedom except by making a personal agreement with their owner. Though slaves might secure help from family or friends or through community organizations such as religious brotherhoods, they could not look for direct assistance from the larger society from which they had come.⁴⁵ Sometimes the trajectory from captive to free was rapid, a matter of hours or a few days between the end of hostilities and an exchange of prisoners. Normally, though, it stretched over months or years before family or community could arrange a ransom. Captives could never be certain of a quick redemption. In the early twelfth century, Eneco Sanz de Lanes told of his family’s six-year ordeal when he was captured along with his wife and two children when the Almoravids raided Huesca.⁴⁶ From the late fifteenth century through the early modern period, arranging the repatriation of a Christian captive usually took years, often five or six, and at times as long as fifteen.

As they waited to be exchanged or ransomed, captives worked and lived very much as slaves, and many died before they received their ransoms. Given their circumstances, some Christian captives chose another way out of their captivity by converting to Islam.⁴⁷ Christian captives could convert to Islam and thereafter become free Muslims. In the early years of the Muslim domination, such converted captives may have accounted for a fair percentage of the new adherents of Islam. The author of the contemporary chronicle of Miguel Lucas de Iranzo in the fifteenth century put it this way: “And, sinful as it was, there would be some of them, in desperation because of the life they led, who became renegades from the faith, as others have done in cases such as this.”⁴⁸ There is no way of even estimating how many availed themselves of the choice. The Muslim ruler of Granada had a special royal guard unit in the Alhambra in the fifteenth century, consisting of some six hundred troops raised from Christian boys captured, converted, and given military training.⁴⁹ The situation for Muslim captives in Christian lands was not parallel. They could convert to Christianity but often remained slaves thereafter.

The Captives

In the intermittent wars between Muslim Granada and various Christian states in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and during the final Christian conquest of Granada in the last decade of the fifteenth, both sides raided by land and sea.⁵⁰ The uncertainty of the frontier was an unchanging feature of life for those who lived close by, a situation that continued for people living along the coasts throughout early modern times. On the Christian side, many people prepared wills that included sums of money, even though often symbolic and small in many cases, for the ransom of captives. Nobles did more, donating money during their lifetimes and leaving major sums in their wills for the redemption of captives.⁵¹ We lack similar evidence from the Muslim side, but it seems clear that they were exposed to the same anxieties. Christian raids on Muslim shipping accompanied the final reconquest of Granada, ending in 1492. Andalusian caravels pursued Muslim commercial vessels, called carabos, that took goods and passengers between the kingdom of Granada and North Africa. Back in Spain, the captors auctioned those they had caught, together with the other goods seized in the raids. The purchasers acquired them for two main reasons: they could hope that the families of the captives would pay their ransoms, or, otherwise, they could put the captives to work as slaves.⁵² Such Muslim captives usually became slaves, either collectively or individually. Christians fell victim to captivity by the Muslims as well. Most raids in the later Middle Ages came from North African and Granadan Muslims, who sometimes collaborated. Muslim raiders could often count on the help of local Mudejars to provide information about local strong and weak points and where booty might be found.⁵³ One prominent noble captive in 1456 was don Juan Manrique, count of Castañeda and royal captain of the Granadan frontier, whose release required the direct intervention of the Castilian king Enrique IV.⁵⁴ In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Muslims of North Africa used captives as slaves unless and until they were ransomed.⁵⁵

Coastal dwellers at times also had to fear raids by fellow Christians. Muslim raids diminished somewhat in the fifteenth century, especially when Granada became Christian, but raids by enemy Christians increased. Among the most important of these were the Castilian raids, above all during the periods when Castile and Aragon were at war in 1429–30, or when King Alfonso V of Aragon was absorbed in the conquest of Naples in the early 1440s, or when rival forces vied for control of the Castilian throne from 1474 to 1479. The supporters of Isabel won the latter conflict, and in the ensuing peace, Castilian corsair activity against the subjects of the Crown of Aragon fell off drastically. Portuguese corsairs also harassed the eastern coast, but on fewer occasions than the Castilians. The Genoese were great commercial rivals, and their competition at times spilled over to armed raids when Genoese corsairs attacked the coast of the Crown of Aragon. In the 1440s, corsairs from Provence began to raid the Aragonese-held Balearic Islands, the coasts of Catalonia, and the kingdom of Valencia. Both the Genoese and the Provençals took advantage of periods of conflict between Aragon and Castile to use the Castilian port of Cartagena as a staging point for their raids on Valencia and other coastal areas of the Crown of Aragon.⁵⁶ Most of the Christians captured by other Christians secured their ransoms and did not end up as slaves.

The continuing conflict, nonetheless, pitted Christians against Muslims. After Fernando and Isabel conquered the port of Almería from the Muslims in 1489, they began to resettle it with Christians. By 1500 the Christian authorities were concerned to stem the losses in goods and people that Almería began to suffer from Muslim sea raiders. The Crown undertook to strengthen local defense by repairing and rebuilding existing watchtowers and by building new ones. The numbers of coast guards expanded and their salaries grew. To pay for all this, they taxed the Moriscos, collecting the taxes that had formerly gone to the local mosques and establishing a new tax for coastal defense, called the farda de la mar, which apparently fell on all inhabitants at first but, with the passage of time, came to be paid exclusively by Moriscos.⁵⁷

The authorities of the Crown of Aragon found it difficult to defend against raids by Muslim and Christian adversaries. They established coastal watches and maritime patrols, especially from the port of Valencia, and began to construct a series of watchtowers in the fifteenth century. The line was not complete until the sixteenth century, when officials had to face the even greater threat of Turkish-led North African piracy. As a deterrent, they executed the pirates or corsairs they caught, but they could not stop the raids up and down the long and lightly populated coast. Raiders used small and fast vessels for quick raids and hasty withdrawals with captives and other booty. Communications were slow, and response time for vessels was necessarily slow.⁵⁸ Nonetheless, they tried to do what they could to raise the alarm. Special bugle calls denoted the danger on the coast.⁵⁹

Even if they found it difficult to defend their own coasts, the royal and urban authorities did allow their subjects to take the war to their enemies. Sea captains and fishing-boat skippers turned to raiding against their enemies. Captives produced a great source of income for these raiders. Some ship owners became rich from this piracy, and their sailors lived well. This went little distance toward compensating for the terror that the isolated coastal dwellers and those who fished in small vessels had to live with throughout these centuries, never knowing if they would be caught and hauled off as captives to distant markets.⁶⁰

Some Spanish cities benefited, nonetheless. Valencia and Alicante became important slave markets. Local raiders and other Christian raiders sold slaves there, and the slave population consequently boomed. As a result of the Christian raids in North Africa, seventeenth-century Cádiz had a large supply of slaves and a wide range of uses for them. Numerous Muslim slaves arrived there after having been captured in military action in the Mediterranean. In 1616 Cádiz contained some 300 Muslim slaves; that figure had grown to around 1,500 by 1654. In 1680 alone, following the Austrian victory over the Turks, about 2,000 captives were sold in Cádiz. Because of the influx of new slaves, the range of occupations for slaves was wider in Cádiz than other Spanish cities. They were employed in public works, such as repairing the city’s walls. They worked in provisioning the Indies fleets, and there were also galley slaves.⁶¹ Cartagena, too, benefited from the maritime hostilities. In 1670 Cartagena became the site of a permanent base for Spanish vessels patrolling the Mediterranean coast to prevent Muslim raiding. Local seafarers took advantage of the shield that the patrols provided to increase their own raids and their own trade to Spanish possessions in North Africa to secure slaves. The city of Oran was the principal enclave, in Spanish hands since 1509. When the Muslims retook Oran in 1708, some 5,000 Spaniards, soldiers and ordinary citizens, ended up as captives. When Spain captured Oran again in 1732, many Muslim captives were exchanged for Christian prisoners; others entered the slave markets.⁶²

Conditions in the activities of corsairs changed in the seventeenth century, when the North Africans employed Dutch and English shipwrights to replace the galleys in their fleets with sailing ships. As these required far fewer sailors, the captives gradually ceased to be galley rowers and remained working on shore until they were ransomed. Raids did not stop, however. One spectacular example took place in 1618, when a Turkish raiding party brought thirty-six ships to the poorly defended island of Lanzarote in the Canaries. They took away some nine hundred captives. As the raiders tried to make their way back to Algiers, a Castilian fleet captured seventeen of the ships and freed some two hundred of the captives. The other seven hundred captives had to reside in Algiers and hope for eventual rescue. Some were redeemed, but others were not. Among the latter group, over a hundred decided to convert to Islam in order to be freed from captivity and live a free life in North Africa.⁶³

In the War of Spanish Succession (1701–1714), Catalonia resisted the eventual winner Felipe V, and support for his opponents cost the Catalans dearly when the new king disarmed the population and dismantled fortifications. This made coastal defense against Muslim raids almost impossible, and a few years later the royal government permitted and supported the rebuilding of forts along the coast and the arming of merchant and fishing vessels. Change was slow in the early eighteenth century. Muslim pirates still threatened Spanish seaports and their citizens.⁶⁴ Nevertheless, the eighteenth century saw a decline of raids and captivity in Catalonia, as in most other parts of the peninsula. Estimates for the number of Muslims captured in the period are less than a thousand, and a similar number of Catalans became captives of the Muslims.⁶⁵

All commentators stress the harshness that the captives endured. They were quickly transported from the place they were captured, often with only the clothes on their backs, which might have to serve them as their only garments for months. More seriously, women captives faced the possibility or the reality of rape. Once in captivity, they suffered continued deprivations of food and shelter.⁶⁶

The Muslims held their Christian captives under tighter control than slaves of other origins. Because many tried to flee back across the frontier, they had to be guarded closely to prevent flight. As they waited, the captives endured conditions described as “harsh,” “bad and painful,” and “sad.” They usually were locked up in closed cellars, often with leg irons, handcuffs, or other impediments to movement. As they worked as wood cutters, mill workers, harvesters, they could be chained together in gangs, and they faced harsh corporal punishment for infractions. Alvaro de Olid in 1439 described the prison for captives in Granada and wrote of the prisoners: “I swear to God that some of them lacked the appearance of a man, for they were nothing but skin and bone. . . . looking from head to foot one could count how many bones they had in the body, so great was their labor.”⁶⁷ Pedro de Medina, writing long afterward in the mid-sixteenth century, recalled the tradition that late medieval Christian captives in the Muslim city of Ronda, built on high cliffs above the river, had to carry water in leather containers (zaques) up some fifty meters from the river to the city. This gave rise to Spanish commonplace expressions: “May God set me free from the zaques of Ronda,” and “That’s the way you die, carrying zaques in Ronda.”⁶⁸

Existing documents recorded few voices of actual slaves, but we do have the words of the fifteenth-century poet ‘Abd al-Karīm al Qaysī, who was for a time held captive in the Portuguese city of Évora. His ode to Muḥammad related to his own captivity.

O, captive among foes, who enters through his chains upon humiliation and contempt, / whom God has ordained to live in captivity subjected to dreadful trials,/ endure patiently God’s judgment and comply with His decree, then your name will be written with Him among the chosen. / Plead for your deliverance because of the esteem of the most excellent Messenger, then you will see his miracles immediately.⁶⁹

If not ransomed, captives were sold at auction. Some ended up as farm workers, and many others worked at urban tasks. The greatest peril for the Christian captives was to be sold to North Africa or other more distant parts of the Muslim world where they would be farther from possible redemption, and, because slave prices were higher in North Africa, the cost of their ransoms would be greater. Escape from North Africa was almost impossible, and unsuccessful attempts could be punished by mutilation of noses and ears.⁷⁰

In such circumstances, with the existence of the captives in a precarious state and with the prospect of redemption uncertain at best, it is not surprising that stories of miraculous interventions transcended the religious frontier. A late ninth-century example involved the famous Muslim scholar of Córdoba, Baqī ibn Makhlad, who prayed on behalf of an impoverished mother with a captive son. Shortly afterward, the mother returned to the scholar with her son in tow. He told that his chains had miraculously broken and he walked home unimpeded. Various holy Muslims of the twelfth century were said to be able to free themselves or others by various miraculous methods, including changing the wind to blow a Christian ship with Muslim captives onto a Muslim shore where the captives were saved. Such stories about pious scholars and holy men intervening for captives continued across the religious divide into the sixteenth century and perhaps later.⁷¹

On the Christian side, the miracles attributed to Santo Domingo (St. Dominic) of Silos (d. 1073) included stories of miraculous interventions to free captives.⁷² One of the earliest stories, dating to fourteen years after Domingo’s death, involved the Castilian soldier Pedro, captured during a Christian raid into Muslim territory and held in captivity in Murcia. The saint appeared to him and offered him a way to escape. During a siesta one Friday, Peter

effortlessly took the iron fetters from his feet, and with the grace of the man of God, Dominic, going before him, in twelve days of good progress he reached the royal city of Toledo. When he got there, he told everybody all that had happened to him on St. Dominic’s account, giving clear proof that all he has said was true. . . . All who heard this marvelous miracle . . . encouraged Peter to go to the monastery [of Silos] where the Saint’s tomb was and there to tell all that had happened. This he duly did, and in the monastery of Silos narrated the great miracle from which he had benefited, gave thanks to God and to his liberator, and safely and joyfully went home.⁷³

Tales of Domingo’s interventions continued to appear throughout the Middle Ages. Pero Marín, a monk of Silos, collected and recorded a series of the miracle stories over a long period from 1232 to 1293. An early one, dated 1232, told of the Muslim commander in Córdoba who rode out with an armed party to raid Christian lands. At the Alcolea bridge, two leagues from Córdoba,

he met in the middle of the bridge a man surrounded by an intensely bright light. The Moor asked him in Spanish “Who goes there?” The bright light replied: “I am St. Dominic of Silos.” The Moor then asked: “Where are you going?” St. Dominic replied: “I am going to Cordova [sic] to rescue prisoners.” Then the Moor ordered his soldiers to turn, and he got back to Cordova before dawn. In one prison in which he kept fifteen Christians, he shackled them all by the foot and throat and hand, and together with his men lay down to rest on the cover of the entrance to the prison. He sent messages to other Moors who had captives telling them to guard them well, for St. Dominic was in the city: and they put strong shackles on all of them. When day came they inspected the prison where the Moor’s fifteen captives had lain, and found no trace of them, nor of the shackles. The Moor alerted the others, who then inspected their prisons, finding no captives in them. It was said that day 154 prisoners were released by St. Dominic and found to be missing.⁷⁴

A story of 1277–79 related how a group of mariners from Santander received the saint’s assistance to escape from their captivity in Arzila in North Africa, and another told of a soldier’s escape with the saint’s help from Granada, just as his captor was about to send him to North Africa.⁷⁵

Accounts circulated about the assistance of other saints who rescued captives. One story about Santiago (St. James), the patron of Spain, provides a convenient overview of the slaving markets of the whole Muslim world.

In . . . 1100 a certain citizen of Barcelona is said to have come as a pilgrim to the cathedral of St. James in Galicia. He prayed to the Apostle only that he should free him from captivity by his enemies, if perchance he should suffer that. Then he went home, and later, while sailing to Sicily on business, he was captured at sea by Saracens. What next? He was bought and sold thirteen times at marts and markets. Those who purchased him were unwilling to keep him, because St. James always broke his chains and shackles. First he was sold in Kurashan, the second time in the city of Jezirah in Slav lands . . . , the third time in Blasia [unidentified], the fourth in Turkish lands . . . , the fifth in Persia, the sixth in India, the seventh in Ethiopia, the eighth in Alexandria, the ninth in North Africa, the tenth in Barbary, the eleventh in Bizerta, the twelfth in Bougie, the thirteenth in the city of Almería. In this last place, when he was shackled by a certain Saracen by a double chain drawn tightly round his legs, as he was praying to St. James on high, the Apostle himself appeared to him, saying: “Since, when you were in my church, you prayed only that I would set your person free, and not for the salvation of your soul, you have been cast into all these perils. But because the Lord has taken pity on you, He sent me to you in order that I should free you from this prison.”⁷⁶

Redeemed captives, no doubt willing to believe they had received miraculous aid in their successful escapes, spread tales such as these that later coalesced into canonical miracle accounts.

The Christian captives who were taken to North Africa were held, at least initially, in special prisons known as “baños” before they could be ransomed and returned to Spain. While awaiting ransom, they could be employed in a variety of occupations that in certain cases mirrored those in which the Muslim captives worked in Spain. They could be put to work as rowers on galleys and other corsair vessels. On land, they worked, often in chains, in the mines and stone quarries or on public works projects. As one example, when the Moroccan sultan established a new capital at the city of Meknes early in the eighteenth century, he employed some two thousand Christian captives among the thirty thousand construction workers. Some captives worked as domestic servants and artisan helpers, and those with specialized skills and occupations often worked in their accustomed trades.⁷⁷

Among the most famous of all Spanish captives was Miguel de Cervantes. He and his brother Rodrigo were traveling by sea from Naples to Spain in September of 1575 in the galley El Sol. Muslim pirates, led by two formerly Christian renegades, fell upon the Christian ship as it passed along the coast of Catalonia and took the Cervantes brothers along with the other captives to Algiers. There Cervantes would remain for five years. Though not of particularly exalted status, Miguel was a former military officer and carried letters of recommendation from two of Spain’s highest figures: the admiral don Juan de Austria and the duke of Sessa. That caused the Muslims to view Cervantes as an important figure himself and to set a high ransom of 2,000 ducats for him and his brother. Though his father exhausted the family fortune, he was only able to ransom Rodrigo. Four years later, the widowed mother finally was able to raise the money for Miguel and arranged for the Trinitarians to negotiate his release. His experiences can be seen in the statements that he obtained from twelve principal Christians in Algiers about how he had comported himself as a captive and, fictionalized, in several of his literary works. His captivity appears prominently in two of his plays, El trato de Argel and Los baños de Argel, and the chapters known as “The Captive’s Tale” in Don Quijote.⁷⁸ The plays and the novel contain realistic descriptions of life in captivity and romanticized accounts of flight and escape (Cervantes attempted to escape four times), enlivened by depictions of remorseful renegades eager to return to the Christian fold, Muslim maidens seeking conversion to Christianity, and the inspirational guidance of the Virgin Mary. Cervantes was wise to secure written evidence of his bona fides. Some captives chose to convert to Islam to buy their freedom. This brought them condemnation from the Christians back at home, who branded the converts as renegades. The humbler ones blended into the local Muslim societies. Others rose to high military or naval ranks, often leading raids against their former homelands or serving as well-informed guides or scouts during raids. Enough of them tried to return to Christian lands and Christianity that all returning captives had to face a degree of suspicion and to prove or at least to swear that their faith had not faltered while in captivity. Many captives, like Cervantes, took the trouble to obtain written statements that they had remained steadfast Christians during their captivity.⁷⁹

Some captives returned home, but they were likely few out of the many originally captured. The two sides frequently exchanged prisoners after the battles, as we have seen. Treaties between Christian and Muslim states frequently specified mutual repatriation of prisoners,⁸⁰ and public and private exchanges took place periodically. By the fifteenth century, Christian raids on Muslim territory were almost always followed by truces whose terms included provisions for the Muslim rulers of Granada to turn over hundreds and even thousands of captives.⁸¹ The prime responsibility for securing the release of long-term captives devolved on the families of the prisoners. In the Muslim parts of the Mediterranean, the mechanisms for ransoming captives remained rudimentary and less developed than in the Christian parts, where both church and state devised means to help Christian captives to return to their homes. Up to about the thirteenth century, Muslims most often redeemed their coreligionists by prisoner exchanges. Thereafter, with Muslims more frequently on the defensive, the task of redemption fell on Muslim communities with support of local magnates. Often this meant that Muslims in places such as the Christian kingdom of Valencia redeemed local captives more readily than captives from North Africa.⁸²

As early as the tenth century in Catalonia, church officials aided Christian captives. By the twelfth century, similar procedures were in place in both Castile and Aragon for those who wished to ransom a prisoner from the Muslims. The municipal law code of the town of Calatayud in the early twelfth century stated that the relatives of a Christian captive in Muslim hands could buy a locally held Muslim captive for the price the owner had paid and then take that person to exchange for their relative. If the exchange failed for any reason, the original owner could buy back the Muslim captive for the same price.⁸³

This practice was general, though the details could vary. Often the captives tended to be of humble origins, and their families frequently lacked the financial ability to ransom their kin. Collective measures were needed, and, before long, officials and deputized merchants began to arrange for the exchange of captives. In the twelfth century, Alfonso VIII of Castile directed officials of the military orders to redeem captives, and in Catalonia the counts controlled ransoming. When peace treaties between Muslim and Christian kings called for mutual exchanges of prisoners, representatives of the Christian authorities arranged to receive the Christians. Soon private citizens, usually licensed merchants, took both ransomed Muslims and Muslim slaves into Muslim territory and returned with Christians whose ransoms were paid or who were exchanged for Muslims. They could also arrange to ransom prisoners on their own account. In all events, these agents received compensation for their activities. In Catalonia the official ransomer was called a mostolaf; the first ones whose names are known were four Jewish merchants early in the twelfth century. The term—exea—for such an official was originally used both in the Crown of Aragon and in Castile. It continued in Aragonese usage, but in Castile from the thirteenth century those who conducted these activities came to be called alfaqueques, from the Arabic al-fakkāk, an envoy or redeemer.⁸⁴

The frontier was a permeable barrier, and people crossed back and forth for any number of reasons, some peaceful and some not. To solve problems that might arise, the Castilian monarchs, beginning in the fourteenth century, named special officials whose tasks included settling cross-border disputes and supervising the work of the alfaqueques. There were four of these agents, called alcaldes mayores entre cristianos y moros (chief officials [negotiating] between Christians and Moors), one for the archdiocese of Seville, and one each for the dioceses of Cartagena, Cádiz, and the combined dioceses of Córdoba and Jaén. Each alcalde had at his command a group of police agents known as the fieles del rastro (lit. faithful ones of the track, or faithful trackers) who pursued criminals who fled across the borders.⁸⁵ Cuenca and other cities regularly taxed their citizens to raise funds for ransoms, and the monks of Santo Domingo de Silos ransomed captives in the kingdom of Granada and in North African ports.⁸⁶

Two religious orders, the Trinitarians and the Mercedarians, assumed a major role in redemptions by the thirteenth century and coordinated fund raising for that purpose.⁸⁷ In Christian Córdoba in the fifteenth century, whose citizens still ran the risk of capture and captivity in Muslim Granada, the members of the Cofradía de la Caridad de Jesús, a religious brotherhood, devoted much effort to ransoming captives. Monasteries from places far distant from the frontier, such as the Trinitarian monasteries of Burgos and Arévalo, sent money to help families to ransom captives.⁸⁸ At times, monarchs directed the ransoming orders to favor the ransoming of specified captives, often associates of the monarchs.⁸⁹ Examples of individual ransoming include Juan Batlle, a native of the kingdom of Valencia, who had a brother held captive in North Africa. In 1491 he bought a Muslim slave from a Christian merchant and arranged with the merchant to take the slave to North Africa, find the brother, and exchange the slave for him. In 1494 Francisca Bos sent a Muslim slave to Oran in a German vessel, with the slave to be exchanged for her husband who was being held there.⁹⁰

Muslim captives in the hands of Christians could hope for redemption by a variety of means, many of them similar to those used by Christians and including exchanges of prisoners either immediately after battles or over longer periods. We have fewer individual stories from Muslim sources than from Christian, but one tenth-century example is illustrative. After his forces failed to take the town of Simancas during a campaign against the Christians in 938, Muḥammad b. Hashim, ruler of Zaragoza, became a captive. As the chronicler reported, “His hands were bound and the price demanded for him was excessive. [‘Abd al-Raḥmān III, the ruler of Córdoba from 912 to 961] did not fail in his efforts to ransom him, until that was made possible by heavy expenditure and burdensome expedients. He was delivered to Cordova [sic], a free man, . . . two years, three months and eighteen days having elapsed since the day he was captured.”⁹¹ International merchants could undertake private exchanges. Such activities continued throughout the Middle Ages. Individuals could work to gain money to pay for their own ransom, as when a Muslim judge allowed Muslim captives in the Christian kingdom of Valencia to beg for alms for their own release. Others could hope that their families could arrange their ransom, and in some cases, family members could substitute as hostages for the captive, as, for example, a son might substitute for his father, on the assumption that a father might be better able than a minor child to raise the necessary money.⁹²

In fifteenth-century Castile, if Christian captives were to be redeemed by their families, often a personal exchange was the quickest path. But that implied having a Muslim available to exchange. A normal expectation, resting on long tradition, was that owners of Muslim slaves would make them available for such exchanges. In a number of Andalusian towns, the owners of Muslim slaves had to turn them over for exchanges in return for the price they had paid for them plus 10 maravedís. Problems arose, and in the Cortes of 1462, King Enrique IV provided a set of guidelines for compensation that depended on how long the owner had held the slave and whether he had captured the slave or merely bought him. Sometimes, too, Christians raided Muslim towns just to capture hostages to be exchanged for Christian captives.⁹³

The same procedures for ransoming captives prevailed as late as the eighteenth century, when the Trinitarians and the Mercedarians were still at work. By then they had been joined by the Congregation of the Santo Cristo de Burgos and the Third Order of the Franciscans. These groups collected money in Spain, as their earlier counterparts had done, both in the form of pious donations from ordinary people and as special ransom payments from the families of captives. The redemptors used the money to support relief and religious benefits for the captives in North Africa and to purchase the release of as many captives as they could.⁹⁴ The Castilian Cortes on several occasions requested that bulls for the redemption of captives be preached so that more money for that purpose could be collected.⁹⁵ Cynicism and fraud were also present. King Carlos III issued a royal order in 1778 warning against foreigners who came to Spain, claimed to be redeemers, and pocketed the money they collected.⁹⁶

For those lucky enough to be freed, the homecoming was an emotionally mixed occasion. Following redemptions of Christians, especially when the Mercedarians had arranged them, the repatriated former captives still faced difficulties. They had to prove that their faith had not wavered, as we saw earlier. They had to make at least part of their own way home. On the way they were expected to participate in public processions and religious services, often by carrying their chains and then displaying them in churches. The chains and shackles that the former captives brought back are still to be seen in Spanish churches today. Those who had paid their full ransom prices still had to compensate their redeemers for expenses. Those who still owed the full price of their ransom could beg alms to raise the money. As one example, in the period 1433–1440, the archbishop of Zaragoza issued 111 licenses, called litterae acaptandi, to former captives to allow them to raise what they owed to those who had paid their ransom. These letters, addressed to the parish priests of the archdiocese, ordered the priests to provide hospitality to the bearer and to aid him in his search by making a public announcement asking the parishioners to offer donations to the licensee.⁹⁷

The height of the era of corsairing was from the late sixteenth century to the early eighteenth. This was only one component of the long-term conflict between adherents of Christianity and Islam. Each side raided the other for booty and, above all, captives, either to be put to work as slaves or as hostages to be exchanged or redeemed across the religious frontiers. Some of those captives were forced to row the galleys and other oared vessels. At the battle of Lepanto in 1570, as a significant example, four hundred of the five hundred vessels involved were manned by some 80,000 rowers, about a third of them slaves, with 20,000 to 25,000 Christian slaves on the Ottoman vessels and 6,000 to 8,000 Muslims on Christian vessels.⁹⁸

The raids, captures, and ransoms began to change in the eighteenth century, when the rulers of Spain and the North African states agreed to regular and extensive exchanges of captives. A representative of the sultan of Morocco went to Madrid in 1766 to establish diplomatic relations between the two countries and to arrange the repatriation of as many Moroccan captives and slaves as possible. He was able to take back a large number, but only after a series of difficulties. His charge was to bring back Moroccans, not Muslims of other origins, such as Algerians or Turks. Complications arose in the case of married captives of different origins. Slaves of the Spanish king received immediate freedom, but individual owners of slaves had to be compensated, thus delaying the repatriation of their slaves.⁹⁹ Although corsair activities continued into the nineteenth century, the raids and the captures ceased to be an important part of the Spanish experience.¹⁰⁰

During the medieval and early modern centuries, the process of hostile encounters and subsequent captivity and possible enslavement continued. We have seen the ways by which some but certainly not all captives regained their freedom. Those who went unredeemed became slaves. All slaves shared common experiences, regardless of the ways by which they became slaves and regardless of how their conditions varied. In the next chapter, we will examine their lives as they passed through the commercial networks to their eventual buyers.