That Most Precious Merchandise. Hannah Barker
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stand as a warning to modern historians not to rely too much on apparent correlations between ethnicity and religious affiliation.
Among Orthodox Christians, some had more success in petitioning for freedom than others. An Armenian woman named Marta was freed in 1417 but required to pay fifty lire, which she did by arranging to serve Isotta Bracelli for seven years (reduced to five years if she worked as a wet nurse).127 Two Albanian women also had success with the sindicatori in 1479 and 1480.128 We do not know the outcome of three more petitions by Albanians, one of whom identified herself as the daughter of the late Amzrendari Aragi and asserted that she was “free and born from free parents and of Christian race and therefore cannot nor ought to be detained in servitude.”129 A woman from Sclavonia designated procurators to present her petition in 1487, but the outcome of her case is not recorded either.130 Finally, the podestà of Lucca heard a case in 1413 in which a procurator argued for the freedom of a slave woman “because she was of Bosnian origin and Christian, and in that region Christ the Lord is worshipped, through whose blood all believers are redeemed, and entirely exempt from any yoke of servitude.”131 His argument is one of the more explicit statements linking redemption or manumission from juridical servitude with Christ’s redemption of humanity from sin.
There were a number of successful petitions from Greek Orthodox slaves.132 In 1398, a Greek woman who had served Babilanus Alpanus as a free servant (famula) appointed a procurator when she heard that Babilanus intended to make her a slave (sclava). She protested that this was illegal because “she was begotten of Greek parents.”133 In 1479, a Greek woman named Anna was freed because Greeks should not “be sold nor bought nor kept as a slave as accustomed by law and by justice,” while her owners were urged to accept the decision “lest the soul of the said late Ilarius [Anna’s deceased former owner] suffer on account of such retention.”134 Similar cases are documented in Genoa in 1424 and 1489 as well as in Caffa in 1380 and 1398.135
Orthodox Christians from Bulgaria were treated inconsistently by the sindicatori. Many Greek slaves based their petitions for freedom precisely on the fact that they were not Bulgar. Thus, in 1380, a slave woman who demonstrated herself to be a Greek from Constantinople and not a Bulgar was freed on the grounds “that all Greeks should be free and held and treated as free in the city and district of Genoa.”136 The Christianity of Bulgars apparently did not warrant the same protection. Yet when Michael, a male slave, was determined to be Bulgar and not Tatar in 1391, the sindicatori chose to manumit him on the condition that he serve for another eight years without salary.137 A controversy over the baptism of a fugitive slave in 1488 turned on whether she was Hungarian and therefore already Christian, or Bulgar and therefore apparently not Christian enough.138 The case of a slave named Cali or Theodora depended on whether she was a Greek from Constantinople, as she herself testified, or a Tatar purchased in Cyprus, as her owners claimed.139
Finally, there is no record of a Christian from Russia or the Caucasus being freed on the basis of shared religion. There are records of Mingrelian, Circassian, and Abkhaz women petitioning the sindicatori because their previous manumissions were not being honored, but none cited Christian origin as a factor in her defense.140 This is odd, because Russians and Caucasians made up the majority of the Genoese slave population during the fifteenth century and because most of the inhabitants of both Russia and the Caucasus were Orthodox Christians at that time. Some possible reasons for the discrepancy will be offered in Chapter 2.
In the Mamluk sultanate, disputes over slave status were heard by a qāḍī, a judge belonging to one of the four schools of Islamic law.141 If the religion of the alleged slave was at issue, the slave herself was allowed to testify. If the dispute arose from a mistake in the act of manumission, witness testimony played an important role. The cases that received the most attention were those of mamluks whose manumission had not been correctly performed and whose status therefore had to be rectified before they could hold government posts.142 For example, an amir named Aytamush was about to be made a general (atabak) when Sultan Barqūq was informed of a problem with his manumission. Aytamush had belonged to another mamluk named Asandamur, who in turn had belonged to Jurjī, the governor of Aleppo. When Jurjī died in 1370, an amir named Bajjās took possession of both Asandamur and Aytamush and manumitted them, but this manumission was invalid because Bajjās had acquired them illegally. Technically, Aytamush still belonged to the estate of Jurjī. So before Aytamush could become a general, Sultan Barqūq had to contact the heirs of Jurjī, buy Aytamush, and remanumit him.
The Universal Threat of Slavery
“God has given you the right of ownership over them; He could have given them the right of ownership over you.”143 This was not a platitude. Slavery in the late medieval Mediterranean threatened everyone, and no group was exempt from its dangers. After encountering prisoners begging for money and children displayed for sale in Cairo, the Franciscan Paul Walther de Guglingen and his fellow pilgrims “lamented the misery of such people, praising God, our creator, who had hitherto kept us safe from such things, and asking him strenuously that he keep us safe from these miseries and bring us back in health to the land of the faithful.”144 They did not seek to rescue anyone but simply hoped to reach home safely themselves.
Free people from all parts of the Mediterranean were vulnerable to capture in war. Holy war offered the best opportunity for taking slaves (as opposed to captives), because by definition, it involved opponents of different religions.145 As a result, the late medieval crusades generated many slaves. Frankish residents of Tripoli were enslaved after the fall of that city in 1268, as were Frankish residents of Acre in 1291.146 Five thousand Muslim residents of Alexandria were captured by Peter of Cyprus in 1365, some of whom were ransomed and the rest of whom were enslaved.147 The Mamluk conquest of Cyprus in 1426 generated large numbers of slaves.148 This is not to mention the slaves, both Franks and Turks, taken in crusades against the Ottomans.149 Corso (holy war conducted through piracy) threatened everyone who traveled by sea.150 The arrival of a ship that had captured thirteen Christian sailors en route from Libya to Alexandria was marked by public celebration.151 In Valencia, Muslims captured by Christian pirates were displayed publicly for the satisfaction of local Christians who feared the same fate at the hands of Muslim pirates.152 Pero Tafur, a fifteenth-century Castilian traveler, told a story about Castilian and Catalan pirates who preyed on Muslim shipping until they themselves were captured and forced into piracy against Christians on behalf of the sultan.153
Travelers and free people living along the coast were also vulnerable to enslavement by ordinary pirates and raiders. The Greek population of the Aegean was prey to Venetians, Genoese, and Catalans as well as Turks from the emirates of Menteshe, Aydin, and the Ottoman sultanate. Caterina, a Greek woman from Negroponte, petitioned the sindicatori of Genoa for freedom after having been captured by the trireme of Domenicus de Nigrono and sold as a slave.154 Pilgrims bound for Jerusalem were advised not to wander along the seashore in the eastern Mediterranean, “lest [they] be suddenly seized by pirates and reduced to perpetual and miserable servitude, which often happens.”155 Shipwreck, a danger in itself, might also cast travelers ashore among enemies who “would have carried us into a strange land and sold us all.”156
In the late medieval Mediterranean, ship captains could not even be trusted to protect the freedom of their own passengers and crew. For example, in 1316, a Venetian captain decided to enslave and sell several Greeks whom he had taken on board as sailors in Monemvasia.157 A different Venetian captain enslaved and sold some Greek merchants whom he had accepted as passengers in Salonika.158 The same thing happened to a group of Tunisian merchants who arranged pas sage from Cairo to the Barbary coast on a Catalan ship in 1408; the captain sailed to Barcelona instead and sold the merchants as slaves.159 In 1440, a Venetian man named Petrus Marcello decided to kidnap Hajji Ibrahim, a Muslim merchant from Acre who owed him money. He then sailed to Beirut to negotiate with Ibrahim’s son Hassan. Marcello invited Hassan and ten other men to come aboard his ship but then sailed