That Most Precious Merchandise. Hannah Barker
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in 1399 brought with him a manumitted Tatar who wished to convert to Christianity and live in Venice.108 Upon their arrival, the patrician entrusted him to another Tatar freedman, Antonius, a vacinarius who prepared cow- and oxhides. Instead of helping him, Antonius sold him as a slave for twenty ducats to Zanino Calcaterra, who sold him again to a Catalan man. When the case came to light, the Venetian Senate condemned Antonius to a beating, three months in prison, and compensation for Calcaterra, but it did not mention the fate of the wrongfully enslaved Tatar.
The most famous and long-running case of disputed status was that of the anime. In 1386, the Senate first ruled against importing Albanian children from Durazzo who “can easily be sold and treated as slaves, which is done wrongly and against God and the honor of our dominions,” explaining that “because they are Christian, they ought not to sell them nor cause them to be sold in any way.”109 Such children were called “souls” (anime). The punishment for selling anime was a fine of one hundred lire and six months in prison for each child. All previous sales of anime were annulled, and sellers were required to compensate buyers for their losses. The anime already present in Venice were not to be exported to other cities, such as Florence, Siena, or Bologna, where their slavery might become permanent.110 However, the anime had to repay the freight charges for their shipment to Venice. The debt was set at six ducats for those older than ten and three ducats for those younger; those with no money could work for four years in lieu of payment.
This ruling proved difficult to enforce, and in 1387, the capisestieri complained to the Senate. The Senate responded that masters who could show documents (cartas, instrumenta, vel probationes) to prove that their child slaves came from beyond Corfu (outside the Adriatic) could keep them.111 In 1388, the Senate received another complaint that the anime were “rustic and of rude intellect” so that “no utility or benefit can follow from them” after liberation.112 In fact, said the complaint, their masters had done them a service by rescuing them from the Turks and supporting them. The Senate’s response was to raise the price of freedom to eight ducats or ten years of service, but anime still had to be registered with the capisestieri and could not be exported. Their status remained a problem as late as 1453, when the penalty for evading registration was extended from the owners of anime to the ship captains who imported them.113
In Genoa, cases of disputed status were decided by the sindicatori. They usually took the form of petitions by slaves claiming freedom on the basis of Christian origin or prior manumission. For example, a slave who had been manumitted in the will of Augustinus Iahele of Savona was nevertheless handed over to Oliverius de Maris in Genoa.114 With Oliverius’ consent, she petitioned the sindicatori to recognize her manumission by Augustinus and officially declare her free.
The process began when the slave designated a procurator, a Genoese citizen with full legal rights, to petition the sindicatori on her behalf. Her master was then called upon to respond: he might do so in person or designate a procurator to represent him. Each side presented legal arguments and evidence, including written documents and oral testimony. For example, three Genoese merchants and a ship captain were called upon as witnesses to the free status of Maurus, a Greek sailor whom a Genoese merchant attempted to sell as a slave in Palermo in 1328.115 An extract from Genoa’s tax cartularies was offered as evidence in the case of Caterina, a Greek woman from Cephalonia, and a sale document in the case of Cali, also known as Theodora.116
Having heard the arguments of each side, the sindicatori would arrive at a decision and order its execution. Thus, in 1479, the sindicatori decided that “Maria has been established as a Hungarian in law and in the presence of the honorable lords sindicatori of the commune of Genoa.”117 Through her ethnicity, Maria’s religion and legal status were made clear: “the said Maria was and is a Hungarian and a Christian, and by consequence free, and cannot be retained as a slave, but rather must and ought to be held as free.”118 Therefore the sindicatori manumitted her by decree and required her to pay 150 lire, an enormous sum, to compensate her former masters for all expenses associated with her purchase in Chios, including the purchase price, taxes, and freight charges. She was given ten days to arrange payment and three months after that to make payment in full. If she failed to pay on time, the decree of manumission would lapse. No punishment was imposed on Maria’s former masters despite the ruling that she had been enslaved illegally.119 This was normal; the sindicatori rarely penalized either the sellers or the owners of wrongfully enslaved Christians, and in many cases, the slave herself was ordered to compensate her former owner for the loss of her value.
We do not know whether Maria was able to pay her owner in time. The consequences of failure are represented by the case of an Albanian woman named Theodora.120 The sindicatori declared her Christian and therefore free in August 1479. One year later, they added a fine of twenty-five lire to cover her initial price, associated expenses, and taxes in response to a petition from the heirs of her former master. Theodora failed to pay the fine within ten days. On July 18, the sindicatori had her detained by the commune until she paid the twenty-five lire plus three soldi in additional expenses.
Although it might seem impossible for a newly manumitted slave to find enough money to compensate her owner within ten days, a woman named Maria managed to do so in 1481. Once Maria was declared free of Melchionis de Monleone, she immediately designated Petrus de Camulo as her new procurator. His first task was to pay eighteen ducats to Melchionis as required by the sindicatori. He also took responsibility for defending Maria in court, in general and specifically against Melchionis. Finally, he committed “to renting and pensioning the same Maria in the city of Genoa to that person or those persons of good condition and reputation, and for that price and salary which can best be had.”121 Once Petrus found work for Maria as a free domestic servant, she would repay him for his assistance.
In the courts of Genoa, some slaves were more successful at challenging their status than others. A clear case of wrongful enslavement was that of Maria, a young woman from Naples who petitioned the sindicatori in 1492. Three years earlier, she had been living with her parents in Naples. A ship’s scribe had enticed her to leave, promising that she would be his servant and mistress, but then he sold her as a slave in Genoa. Fortunately, Maria’s parents were able to locate her. Ladislaus Doguorno, a canon of Salerno, and Antonio Soprano of Naples both traveled to Genoa and testified on her behalf. Ladislaus’ testimony has survived: he told the sindicatori that he knew both Maria and her parents and that Maria was recognized as a Christian in Naples and elsewhere by those who knew her. He protested that her enslavement was illegal “because Christians cannot be sold or obligated.”122 Maria was duly declared free.
Other slaves of Catholic origin also petitioned for freedom on the basis of shared religion. In 1487, a slave appealed to the sindicatori because she had been sold as an Iberian Muslim (mora) but was actually an Iberian Christian (hispana).123 In 1455, a Hungarian woman named Anna designated a procurator to petition for freedom on the grounds that “she is Christian and free, conducting herself as a free person, and of Hungarian origin who cannot be sold as a slave either by law or by the form of the ordinances of the city of Genoa.”124 However, Hungarian Catholics who succeeded in petitioning for freedom were still required to pay compensation.125 Georgius was freed in 1405 but ordered to serve an additional nine years without a salary. Elena was freed in 1418 but ordered to pay ninety lire, which she did by contracting to serve Cattaneo Doria for fourteen years. Maria, mentioned previously, was freed in 1479 but ordered to pay 150 lire in 1479. Caterina was also freed in 1479 but ordered to pay 180 lire.
Italians, Iberians, and Hungarians were widely known to be Catholic. In 1394, a Catholic Tatar slave “presented himself in [the Genoese colony of] Chios before the lord podestà of Chios in his court, asserting himself to be a Christian of the Catholic nation and never a slave but rather free and a man of his own right. The lord podestà of Chios, having seen the witnesses produced by the said slave, liberated him.”126 Antonio Coca, a broker in Pera who had sold this slave about one month previously, was ordered to reimburse the buyer. The fact that a Tatar slave won his freedom in a Genoese