Slavery in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia. William D. Phillips, Jr.
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were even smaller while the pattern was the same.56
Until the eighteenth century, the ransoming of captives remained a preoccupation both of the Christians of Europe and of the Muslims of North Africa. The activity of corsairs produced captives at sea and along the coasts, and many of the captives were held for ransom. The collection of money for the redemption of slaves was a flourishing business and occupied the attention of the specialized religious orders. Without the constant “small war” with the Muslims in the Mediterranean, slavery might have died out even earlier. But the influx of Muslim captives, a few in ordinary years and in greater numbers during major campaigns, offered an opportunity for the government and private owners to employ slaves. The government made use of them in special projects. Privately owned slaves were no longer important in the economy by the eighteenth century. Those who remained were usually domestic servants and assistants in the artisan workshops.
The final decline of slavery in Spain began in the 1760s, when Carlos III established diplomatic relations with Morocco, an act that severely curtailed slaving raids by both sides. 57 With regularization of diplomatic ties with the North African states, the activity of corsairs declined, and with it, the numbers of captives. The last domestic slaves, often of African ancestry though usually born in Spain or the Spanish American colonies, became free by manumission in the late eighteenth century or by law in the early nineteenth. Many entered the market for domestic servants; when they married, they followed the normal gender pattern, with the woman working at home and the man securing employment outside the home.58 Slavery in metropolitan Portugal also ended in the late eighteenth century. In 1761 a decree forbade the entry of slaves into that country; those slaves who happened to arrive thereafter were declared to be free. That left the existing slaves, few in number. They attained freedom under the government of the Marquis of Pombal in 1773.59
Throughout Iberia, slavery had died a natural death. An institution that had predated the Roman conquest of Spain, one that had lasted well over two thousand years, had passed into history. It was a harsh yet fascinating history while it lasted. This rapid summary reveals the highlights of the history of slavery in Iberia and also provides a preview of the various themes pursued in this book. People became slaves, and when they did, they lived and worked as slaves. As slaves, their lives were in the hands of their owners, who could dispose of them as property, treat them harshly or kindly, assign them to work, have forced sexual relations with them. Slaves did what they could to try to improve their lot and exercised various degrees of agency. Many died as slaves, but others became free. In the chapters that follow, we examine the lives of slaves and the varieties of slavery in detail. Taking a thematic approach, we devote attention to how people became enslaved, how they lived, how they worked, and how some ceased to be slaves.
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.