Slavery in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia. William D. Phillips, Jr.
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Lobo Cabrera was the major historian.13 The most prominent book on slavery in Portugal was that of A. C. de C. M. Saunders.14
The majority of the older and more recent studies deal with areas of Christian Iberia in the late medieval and early modern centuries. The medieval studies have been most abundant for areas of the late medieval Crown of Aragon, particularly Catalonia, Valencia, and Mallorca. For Castile, the chronological focus has been the period of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries. Notably, these works have usually concentrated on local areas and regional patterns, with scholars examining local sources and publishing in local venues. At times these publications dealt with places with important slave populations, whereas elsewhere the number of slaves in the place studied was miniscule even though the records are comprehensive.15 Studies of slavery in Portugal have not appeared in anything approaching the same numbers as those in Spain, but important and distinguished works are available.
There still has been no comprehensive early modern survey equivalent to Verlinden’s work on slavery in the Middle Ages. French scholars have perhaps taken the broadest view. Bernard Vincent published a number of important articles on early modern slavery, most of them focused on specific locales. We will mention them in their proper place, but one cuts across regional lines.16 Vincent collaborated with Alessandro Stella in an article surveying recent work up to 1996 on slavery in early modern Spain.17 Stella himself went on to publish a book, Histoires d’esclaves dans la péninsule ibérique,18 dealing with the early modern period and heavily weighted toward evidence derived from ecclesiastical records in Cádiz. It is useful for Stella’s efforts to find and bring to the forefront the words of the slaves themselves, the “stories of slaves” of his title, and to document the extensive geographical mobility that some eighteenth-century slaves experienced.19
Among the locally focused studies of slavery in Spain, one of the most significant books in recent years is that of Aurelia Martín Casares on slavery in sixteenth-century Granada, published in 2000.20 This is a work informed by wide reading in empirical and theoretical studies of slavery in Africa and the Americas and by close attention to recent developments in women’s history and feminist theory. It has already proved to be highly influential for subsequent studies. The author’s focus on the city of Granada provided her with a local case with a wealth of documentary sources and a somewhat atypical trajectory of the servile experience over the sixteenth century. Granada had a low level of slavery in that period, unlike the cities of eastern and southern Spain and southern Portugal, all of which were more closely linked with the sea-borne slave trade and which tended to have a higher percentage of slaves in the population. Nonetheless, the late sixteenth century saw a sharp upward jump in slave sales in Granada, as the defeated insurgents of the Morisco21 revolt and their wives and children ended up in captivity and flooded the slave market for a decade or so.
Martín Casares applied a series of skillful and well informed interpretations to her material. She emphasized that women slaves were more numerous throughout the medieval and early modern periods in most places scholars have studied. Among the pioneers in commenting on a number of questions about why more women were sold than men, she has suggested that scholars should reflect on how the lives and work of men and women slaves differed, why women tended to command higher prices, what premium derived from women’s reproductive abilities, and the vulnerability of women slaves to sexual exploitation within the domestic context. She also insisted that the individuals should be accorded their full humanity. She excoriated earlier scholars for their use of terms that objectify individuals and groups. She argued that the modern use of words such as “piece” (pieza) to mean an individual slave, or male (varón) and female (hembra) to describe men and women, has tended to perpetuate the attitudes of the sixteenth-century slave owners. She even avoided to the extent possible the word “slave” (esclavo and esclava), preferring to use the term “enslaved person” (as, for example, mujer esclavizada) or “captive” (e.g., hombre cautivado). In this way, she endeavored to emphasize that slavery was a condition people were subjected to, and, even though enslaved, they were still human beings, not something less. This is a worthwhile reminder to all those who study slavery in the past, as is her application of feminist and gender theory.
Other scholars have recently published significant works on slavery in Iberia. These include Roser Salicrú i Lluch, who works on Catalonia and particularly Barcelona, and Debra Blumenthal, whose primary focus is Valencia. In 1998 Salicrú i Lluch published an important book on slaves and slave owners in late medieval Barcelona. Since then she has published significant articles on topics such as slaves in artisanry, fugitives, and the profitability of slavery.22 Blumenthal’s major work to date is Enemies and Familiars: Slavery and Mastery in Fifteenth-Century Valencia,23 in which she mines the rich late medieval documentation of the city and kingdom and comes to new conclusions about the agency slaves exercised, both as individuals and in collectivities, and unusual tasks assigned to slaves, such as settling their owners’ scores when honor was involved. They attacked their owners’ rivals and in the process did harm to the rivals’ bodies as well as damage to their reputations.
Along with the expanding base of data provided by the new studies, there have been significant changes from the 1970s to the first decade of the twenty-first century in the interpretations of many aspects of the history of slavery. Manumission is one example. Writing in the late 1970s, Alfonso Franco Silva stated that “according to the documents studied, the lives of the slave . . . turned out to be acceptable enough and not harsh. . . . [The owners] integrated [the slaves] into the family, as servants, companions, and guardians of their children. If they were faithful and comported themselves well, they could almost be assured that they would be freed upon the death of the master.”24 Martín Casares, writing a generation later, interpreted the lives of slaves to be much harsher and bleaker, and suggested that few slaves ended their lives as freed people, at least in Granada.
Other major interpretive changes in scholarship include the increasing recognition that slavery in Iberia was complex with significant change over time, regional variations, and a wide range of assignments for slaves; that more women than men were slaves; and that slaves were not just domestics. Many worked primarily in other pursuits, as we will see. Until recently, scholars have tended to emphasize slavery as a system of regulating involuntary labor and to regard the slaves, usually considered to be men, as involuntary laborers. This is probably because of the influence of the well-studied history of slavery in the United States, where numbers were great, the majority of slaves were men, and plantation agriculture dominated the popular imagination. Nothing so extensive and intensive as plantation agriculture existed in medieval and early modern Iberia. Slavery there was on a much smaller scale. Slaves in Iberia worked as artisans and agricultural workers, and also occupied different roles in the households in which they found themselves. Domestic slaves often worked seasonally in agriculture. It is no longer possible to dismiss domestic slavery as nonproductive or to consider it irrelevant. It is clear that not all slaves lived in the household of their owners; this recognition is another significant departure from the traditional interpretation. Some of these slaves operated freely, while many others worked for those who rented their labor for any number of tasks ranging from nursemaiding to shipbuilding. Despite the fact that the numbers and percentages of slaves in the Iberian population were never large, the intrinsic importance and the complexity of slavery in Iberia justifies the number and scope of the many recent publications. This present work relies heavily upon them and introduces many of them to the wider scholarly community.
The study of slavery is complicated and involves much more than a simple dichotomy between slave and free or slavery and freedom. Individuals could find themselves at any number of points between full slavery and full freedom, as we will see in the chapters to come. Captives in warfare could be held until exchanges of prisoners took place between the contending parties. If they were not exchanged, they could be enslaved. It was similar for those captured in raids: some could be exchanged, others ransomed, and the unlucky and unredeemed ended up as slaves. Slaves could seek freedom by flight. Slaves could be manumitted by any number of ways. A family member or a friend could purchase their freedom. Their owner might agree to manumit them during his lifetime or upon his death through his last will and testament. He might allow them to work to save