Slavery in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia. William D. Phillips, Jr.
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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.
CHAPTER 3
The Traffic in Slaves
In one house [in Valencia in the 1490s], I saw men, women, and children who were for sale. They were from Tenerife, one of the Canary Islands, in the Atlantic Ocean, who, having rebelled against the King of Spain, were in the end reduced to obedience. . . . [A] Valencian merchant . . . had brought 87 in a boat; 14 died on the trip and the rest were put up for sale. They are very dark, but not Negroes, similar to the North Africans; the women, wellproportioned, with strong and long limbs.
– –Hieronymus Münzer, fifteenth century
The Slave Trade
The slave trade lasted throughout the Middle Ages and the early modern period, in both Christian and Muslim areas, even though birth and capture in war and raids produced more enslaved people. Yet the categories of trade and capture are hard to separate, for many of the people traded as slaves in Iberia had originally been born free and had been enslaved during war or in raids far from the peninsula. Some came from as far away as the Russian rivers or Africa south of the Sahara. Others traveled only a few miles as they crossed the religious frontier in the Mediterranean or in the peninsula or simply moved from town to town under the control of slave dealers.
Those captives of war and raids who were not ransomed came to be slaves, as we saw in the previous chapter, and over time their chances for regaining their free status and their homelands diminished or faded completely. They had virtually no status in the new society. Some scholars have even called such unfortunates the “living dead” because of their social and legal isolation.1 They found themselves cut off from the people and things they had known from birth, and soon lost what they might have brought with them, such as their clothing and their accustomed foods. They held on longer to other ties to home: their religion and their language. Much depended on their ages, for those captured and enslaved as children remembered less than adults. Whatever their origins, they all began to acquire, slowly and painfully in some cases or more easily in others, familiarity with and a stake in the households and societies of their masters.
Roman Spain did not have a highly developed slave trade, though the defeated populations of some towns ended up as slaves and were exported from the peninsula. The Visigoths did not enslave the conquered Romans and provincials in a wholesale fashion, and domestic warfare did not usually produce slaves. The Visigoths, like other Germanic groups, were reluctant to enslave members of their own group, even though they did allow fellow Visigoths to fall into slavery for debt, criminal sentence, and self-sale. As the Visigoths looked outside for slaves, the ethnic and religious divisions present in the regions they conquered simplified their search. The Arian Christian Visigoths enslaved those they captured in their wars against the Catholic Franks. The Franks did the same, and large numbers of Arian captives entered the slave markets of Gaul. Arian and Catholic Christians could make slaves of pagans and Jews, and