That Most Precious Merchandise. Hannah Barker
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as slaves. After the Mamluk sultan complained to Venice, Marcello was ordered to find and release them. Seven of the men had apparently been shipped to Nice, so Marcello asked his family to contact the duke and duchess of Burgundy and find out who had purchased them.160 We do not know whether he ever succeeded in locating the people he had sold.
The threat of capture and enslavement affected the powerful and noble as well as ordinary sailors, merchants, and fishermen. Al-Ḥasan ibn Aḥmad al-Razī, a learned judge and physician who spent most of his life in Damascus, was enslaved in 1299 during the Mamluk–Ilkhan war and sold to a Frankish master in Cyprus.161 In 1311–1312, a ship carrying Mamluk and Mongol ambassadors was captured by Genoese pirates based in Chios.162 The pirates tried to sell the ambassadors and their retinue, about sixty people in total. No one would buy them because Sultan al-Nāṣir Muḥammad had ordered the retaliatory arrest of all Frankish merchants, both Genoese and non-Genoese, who lived in Alexandria, Damascus, and other Mamluk cities. Eventually, Segurano Salvaygo, a Genoese noble in Mamluk service, was able to negotiate the release of both the ambassadors and the merchants. A similar incident occurred in 1388, when Frankish pirates captured the sister of Sultan Barqūq and the daughter of his nephew en route from Syria to Egypt.163 In 1319, a Byzantine ambassador was captured and sold by Venetian pirates while traveling to Venice on official business.164 In 1387, the master of the Hospitaller order in the Peleponnese was captured in battle, sold as a slave, and vanished from the historical record.165
The risk of enslavement applied even to the inhabitants of the Black Sea slaving ports. In 1341, Nicoletto Gata, a Venetian merchant resident in Tana, arranged to send a slave back to his wife in Venice. Yet seven years later, Nicoletto himself was sold as a slave in Saray, the capital of the Golden Horde, because he was unable to pay his debts. He was fortunate to have business associates to whom he could appeal for help.166 Filippo Lomellini, the Genoese castellan of Cembalo in the Black Sea, was not so lucky. He was captured in battle and sold in the 1450s, and he never resurfaced.167
Although slavery and captivity were ever-present dangers in the eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea, the distinction between them could be hazy. Slavery was usually based on religious difference, whereas captivity did not have to be. Slavery was permanent, at least in theory, whereas captivity was expected to end in ransom or exchange. As a rule of thumb, sale marked the transition from captive to slave because it generated a written legal document and witnesses that could serve as evidence of slave status later on. For example, after triumphing over Byzantine forces in 1352, the victorious Genoese general Paganino Doria agreed to release all of his Greek captives, except those who had already been sold. This clause in the peace treaty led to a lawsuit thirteen years later in Genoa. A Greek woman named Lucia petitioned the sindicatori for freedom in 1365 because she had been captured by Doria but never sold as a slave.168 Lucia’s mistress, Violante, argued that Doria had sold Lucia and other captives to Bartolomeo Lercario and Antonio Pellavicino. Lercario and Pellavicino took Lucia to the market of Theologum in Turkish territory and sold her to Iacobus de Guaterio, Violante’s brother, who in turn gave her to Violante as a gift. Lucia, however, testified that she remembered being captured but did not remember being sold to Lercario, Pellavicino, or Guaterio. The outcome of this case is not known, but the result clearly depended on whether Lucia had been sold.
In most cases, the distinction between slavery and captivity was not so clear. Captives sold into slavery might still be ransomed, especially if they remained close to home. In Tana, a Russian woman named Maria was ransomed by her brother after three years in slavery, but on the condition that she stay with her master for two additional years to nurse their baby daughter before returning home.169 Greek slaves were occasionally sold within the Aegean Sea with a clause requiring their new masters to accept future offers of ransom. Leo, a Greek slave from Samos, was sold to a physician in Crete “in perpetuity, except however that if his father or any of his relatives want to ransom him, you [the buyer] are bound to return him.”170 Notaries sometimes facilitated the process. Nicola de Boateriis, a Venetian notary in Famagusta, seems to have used his connections in Negroponte to organize the ransom of several slaves.171
On the other hand, ransom did not necessarily mean an immediate return to freedom. Captives ransomed by a charitable stranger instead of a family member were expected to compensate their redeemers with money or service. This expectation may have been rooted in the Roman concept of postliminium.172 It may also have been influenced by canon law, which required pagan slaves redeemed from Jewish or Muslim masters to compensate their Christian redeemers.173 When service was offered as compensation, the term was usually five years, but some jurists allowed the redeemer to keep the ransomed captive indefinitely.174 In other words, ransom might simply mean slavery under a different master.
In the eastern Mediterranean, ransoms by charitable strangers were often formalized with a document of sale in which the stranger purchased the slave followed by a document of manumission in which the stranger promised to free the slave after a certain period of service. For example, in 1427–1428, Giorgio of Milan purchased three Greek slaves in Alexandria who had been taken in the recent Mamluk conquest of Cyprus.175 He immediately freed two but retained the third, a widow, to serve him until she was able to pay back the forty ducats of her ransom. Likewise, Elena, a Greek slave in the house of Andrea de Moneglia in Chios, petitioned the bishop of Chios for freedom.176 The bishop arranged for her to be redeemed by another Genoese man, Nicolaus Pichaluga of Sampierdarena, who paid twenty-five ducats for her. In return, Elena agreed to serve Nicolaus for five years. During that time, she would receive food, drink, and clothing; she would be treated well; and Nicolaus would not dismiss her against her will. These clauses were standard in the employment contracts of free servants. At the end of five years, her debt would be repaid, and she would be entirely free.
In the interval between the ransom payment and the fulfillment of the terms of manumission, the ransomed captive was technically a slave of his or her redeemer. This precarious position sometimes led to permanent enslavement. An extreme case was that of Stefano di Posaga. In 1439, Nicolo Morosini, the captain of an official Venetian galley returning from Tana, stopped at Ponterachia, a Turkish port, to take on water. There he rescued a fugitive slave, Stefano di Posaga. However, when the galley arrived in Venice, Morosini sent Posaga to work on his land in Padua, “holding him as a slave (servum).”177 After four years, he sold Posaga to another ship captain, who was supposed to take him to Syracuse. Posaga finally contested his status in Syracuse, where the judges freed him. Judges in Venice then fined Morosini 200 lire. This is one of the rare cases in which a medieval judge penalized someone for wrongful enslavement. The fact that Posaga was an Italian man and not a Russian woman is undoubtedly relevant to the punishment of his enslaver.
How a person’s status might slip from ransomed captive to permanent slave is illuminated by an unusual passage in a document from Kilia, a Black Sea port at the mouth of the Danube River. In the document, a Genoese woman named Iohanna sold a Greek slave woman named Maria. However, the document deviated from the usual legal formulas to include a statement about the circumstances behind the sale:
This is the slave whom the said Bartolomeo, Iohanna’s husband, redeemed from Saracens in Asprocastro [i.e., Moncastro], in which place she was a slave, as the aforesaid Iohanna and the slave Maria both assert. Maria asserts the aforesaid things to be true, and that it is also true that she, Maria, was and is a slave of the said Iohanna and Bartolomeo on account of the aforesaid redemption, allowing it to be true that there is not any instrument or document concerning the aforesaid matters. And Iohanna made the aforesaid sale, as she asserts, on account of the need which she has for money for the subsistence of life for herself and her two daughters, because she said that the said Bartolomeo her husband does not do and has not done any good for Iohanna or for her daughters, several months having now elapsed, but he stays in Maurocastro [i.e., Moncastro] with a certain woman whom he keeps, and also in order to pay one sommum of silver to a certain priest to whom the said Iohanna is obligated, as she asserts.178
In other words, Maria was trapped in the gray area between captivity and slavery. She had been enslaved by Muslims in the Black Sea port of Moncastro and ransomed by a Christian stranger, Bartolomeo de Azano. Bartolomeo