Slavery in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia. William D. Phillips, Jr.
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Muslim and Jewish merchants predominated in the early period. Sale documents indicate that Christian merchants tended to replace Jews in the slave trade, beginning in the twelfth century.15 Large populations of free Muslims came under Christian control after the thirteenth-century conquests of the south. Consequently, free Muslims were more numerous than Muslim slaves, who appeared more frequently in the frontier regions and less often at greater distances from the frontier. By the eleventh century, some black slaves began to appear in the Christian regions of the Mediterranean. In 1067, as one example, the Christian Arnallus Mironis and his wife Arsendis donated ten black captives to Pope Alexander III.16
Within Christian Iberia in the later Middle Ages, the lands of the Crown of Aragon were closely tied with the currents of Mediterranean trade and the slave trade, whereas the Castilian kingdom tended to supply its demand for slaves through war and conquest. Slave owning by non-Christians continued in the Crown of Aragon, although in a restricted fashion. Neither Jews nor Muslims in post-conquest Valencia could hold Christian slaves. Muslims could own Muslim slaves, but there was a constant attrition as Muslim slaves gained manumission or accepted baptism and left their Muslim masters. The laws of Valencia explicitly stated that the non-Christian slaves of a Jewish master would be free if they converted to Christianity. By implication, the same would apply to slave converts owned by Muslim masters. Local Muslim slave owners could not make up the losses. After the conquest, the Muslims were cut off from the Muslim slave trade, and their economic situation worsened, making them less able to purchase slaves from Christian suppliers, who used legal and extralegal means to increase the supply of Muslims to put on the market. Merchants from the Crown of Aragon took slaves to southern France, and Muslim envoys who visited Barcelona often bought Muslim slaves there.17
Many Muslim slaves entered the market after being captured in the conquests of King Jaume I, when Valencia and the Balearics came under Christian control in the early thirteenth century. Thereafter, things changed. The late medieval commercial and imperial expansion of the Crown of Aragon in the Mediterranean coincided with the period in which it was less possible to secure slaves within the peninsula. Slave recruitment shifted as a consequence. Piracy and the slave trade fed medieval slavery in the Crown of Aragon.18 Throughout the thirteenth century, Muslims made up the bulk of the slaves; some were captives of pirate raids and from the Castilian raids on the Muslim kingdom of Granada. In the thirteenth century, too, documents began to show distinctions among the Muslim slaves—white, brown, olive—which indicated recruitment from wider areas than before.19 By the fourteenth century slaves of other origins came into the Iberian Mediterranean.
Then the Black Death hit. A great pandemic came to Europe from Central Asia, crossing to the areas around the Black Sea by way of the caravan routes opened by the Mongols and reaching the Crimea in 1346. Two years later it entered Italy by way of Constantinople. From Italy it spread throughout Europe, causing the deaths of a third or more of the European population in a period of three years.20 Among the catastrophic consequences of the plague was an increase in slavery, as local free survivors of the plague could demand higher wages and better working conditions. Those who sought servants and manual laborers turned to buying slaves. In the Iberian slave markets of the later fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, more women than men appeared. This set of facts fits well with the Italian evidence for the period that points to a strong growth of slavery, especially domestic slavery, following the Black Death.21
New sources of slaves began to supply the markets of Catalonia and Valencia, whose merchants were active throughout the Mediterranean and into the Black Sea. They, together with Italian merchants, brought slaves from distant regions to Barcelona and other cities. For a time in the fourteenth century, Greeks appeared in the Crown of Aragon as slaves. Their presence was due to the Catalan freebooters called the Almogávares and their conquests in the Balkan Peninsula. The Greeks, however, were Orthodox Christians. Efforts by church officials in Rome and Barcelona freed many of them and eventually stopped the trade, on the grounds that Christians should not enslave Christians. By the fifteenth century, another reason for the end of the trade in Greek slaves was the decline of Catalan influence in the Balkans.22 The slave trade from the eastern Mediterranean diminished by the late fifteenth century, as the Ottoman Turks consolidated their control in the region.
Sards came on the market in relatively small numbers during the early fourteenth century, when the Crown of Aragon was taking over Sardinia. Theoretically Sards were subjects of the Aragonese king, but those who resisted the conquest and those who later revolted against the conquerors could be enslaved.23 In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Italian merchants brought back Albanians, Tartars, Russians, Caucasians, and other Crimean peoples. Albanians also fled from the Turkish advance in the Balkan Peninsula in the 1380s. Some, in desperation, sold themselves into slavery and ended up in Venice, from where dealers transported some of them to Mallorca and Catalonia. Turks and Armenians appeared among the slaves of the Crown of Aragon, but they were only a small proportion of the total numbers.24 The town of Vic in Catalonia, isolated from the sea and from the frontier with Islam, had slaves from a surprisingly varied set of origins in the early years of the fifteenth century. Of 39 slaves sold in that period, 14 were Tartars, 7 “Saracens” from either Spain or North Africa, 6 black Africans, 2 Circassians, 2 Russians, a Canarian, a Bulgar, and a Bosnian.25
To move to the center of the peninsula, slaves in Castile were almost exclusively Muslim in origin during the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries. Before the fifteenth century, Castile was not greatly involved in Mediterranean activity and purchased few slaves from Mediterranean merchants. Thus only small numbers of slaves from the Mediterranean reached Castile. Rather, Castilian slavery was fed by the reconquest and the raids into Muslim territory, and, within the territories under Castilian rule, Andalusia was the most prominent location where slaves were used.34 In Cádiz at the end of the fifteenth century, there was a sizeable number of slaves, both because many citizens of the town owned a small number of slaves, and because many Muslim slaves passed through Cádiz before being sold elsewhere, notably in Valencia. In Cádiz, too, we see evidence of a few Jews sold as slaves.26 On increasingly rare occasions, slaves from Eastern Europe could find themselves in Andalusia.27
The slave trade in Canary Islanders had a relatively short existence from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century. When individual European captains with authorization from the Castilian monarchs undertook the conquest of the Canaries in various phases, they found the islands inhabited by natives akin to the Berbers of northwest Africa who were living at a Neolithic level of culture. They likely had lived in isolation from the rest of the world since the end of the Western Roman Empire, a thousand years before. Politically they divided themselves into smaller or larger bands, and the Castilian conquests proceeded by securing treaties with some of the bands and conquering others. The settlers in time remade the Canaries along the lines of Europe, with cities, farms, and sugar production facilities, but in the initial phases of the conquest the conquerors resorted to enslaving natives as a quick way to make the profits necessary to repay the loans to pay for their expeditions, mainly financed on credit. Only natives of the conquered bands could be enslaved legally, but the royal agents had to maintain constant vigilance to ensure that the conquerors did not violate the rules and enslave members of the treaty bands.28 But there was a loophole. If members of allied bands rebelled or refused to carry out the terms of their treaties, they could be enslaved as “captives of second war” (de segunda guerra), as we saw earlier. Many enslaved Canarians were sold on the mainland, whereas others remained in the islands and found themselves put to work by the Europeans. The material and legal conditions they lived under resembled, not surprisingly, those of the slaves in late medieval Spain.
Natives of the Canaries did not make a substantial or a long-lasting addition to the international slave trade and did not even fill the labor needs of the Canaries. The indigenous Canarian population was small to begin with, and the isolated island peoples fell victim to diseases common in Africa and Europe. Manumission was common for those who did become enslaved. The Canarian slave trade to Europe ceased early in the sixteenth century, as the remaining Canarians increasingly assimilated European culture and intermarried with the colonists. Other sources of labor were necessary before the islands could be developed fully. So the Canaries witnessed the influx of other laborers, including a number