That Most Precious Merchandise. Hannah Barker
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home in Kilia, where she served his wife, Iohanna, and their two daughters. When Bartolomeo abandoned his family and moved to Moncastro to live with another woman, Iohanna was no longer able to support her daughters. She decided to sell Maria to raise money and pay the debt she had already contracted with a priest. Slaves were expensive, and Maria may well have been Iohanna’s single most valuable possession.
When Bartolomeo acquired Maria, was he redeeming a captive or purchasing a slave? Maria and Iohanna said that Maria had been redeemed (redemit), but in the next line, Maria testified that she was a slave (sclava). This is surprising, because slaves were not legal persons and did not have the capacity to give legal testimony. Nevertheless, Maria also testified that there was no formal document or instrument concerning her redemption and thus no written evidence of her status, the price that Bartolomeo had paid for her, any promise of freedom he might have made, or any obligation she might have undertaken to serve or repay him. There was also no indication of how long she had served Bartolomeo’s family or whether she was close to fulfilling the standard five-year term of service.
The testimony in the document was elicited from Maria by her buyer, Precival Marchexano of Genoa. Among the witnesses to the contract was Thomas de Via, a Genoese citizen who acted as an interpreter between Greek (for Maria) and Latin (for Precival). Precival probably intended to take Maria into the Mediterranean and resell her.179 Recording this story would increase her resale value by legitimizing her status as a slave. At the time of her sale in Kilia, Maria’s status was dubious. She was Greek, possibly of free birth, had no documented history as a slave, and had been redeemed from Muslims under conditions that normally entailed manumission after completion of a fixed period of service or payment of a fixed sum of money. However, the testimony in the document emphasized Iohanna’s possession of Maria and right to sell her despite all the factors in her favor. Moreover, Maria testified that she “was and is a slave.” This statement, once carried into the Mediterranean in the register of the notary Antonio di Ponzò, would make it difficult for her to challenge her status later.180 A boilerplate clause in many slave sales was a promise on the part of the seller to uphold the buyer’s right of ownership in court. With written affirmation of Maria’s slave status, Precival could confidently defend his ownership of her and right to sell her onward.
We can only speculate about why Maria testified that she was a slave rather than a ransomed captive. One factor may have been the difficulty of challenging Iohanna’s claim to ownership. Maria did not have any proof of ransom, origin, or free status at birth. She may not have been aware of Genoese laws and norms governing the treatment of Greek captives. She was also facing a language barrier and may not have been able to find a translator willing to help her defend her status. Violence, threats, or other forms of coercion may also have affected her testimony.181 In any case, the fact that her testimony was recorded provides us with an unusual glimpse into the precarious zone between slavery and captivity.
Conclusion
Today we consider slavery an insult to human dignity, and we study slaves’ agency as a way of affirming their humanity.182 We imagine that anyone who owned slaves must have denied their humanity or failed to recognize it. The inhabitants of the late medieval Mediterranean, however, had a different understanding of both slavery and the human condition. They believed that hierarchy and menial labor would exist even in ideal societies like the Garden of Eden or the Garden of paradise. In those ideal societies, the lowest level of the hierarchy would be occupied by free people, and menial labor would be done by specially created nonhuman beings. In the real world, slaves occupied the lowest level of the hierarchy and did the menial work. Their humanity was never in question, but the restrictions and humiliations imposed on them were considered legal and socially acceptable.
Acceptance of both slavery and the humanity of slaves was supported by the perception of slavery as a universal threat. A slave owner one day, whether an Italian merchant or a noble Mamluk lady, might realistically find himself or herself enslaved the next. Slaves were considered the most miserable and unfortunate of people, a status that one wished to avoid for oneself but might choose to alleviate or exploit in others. For example, the fifteenth-century German pilgrim Felix Fabri pitied the slaves he observed in Alexandria, sympathizing with their desire to flee and deploring the horrible punishments they faced if recaptured.183 Yet he and his fellow pilgrims thought it funny to be mistaken for slaves in the Cairo slave market, where they might well have been sold in reality if their ship had been captured by pirates. After the misunderstanding was cleared up, one of his companions tried to purchase an Ethiopian slave in the same market where he himself had just been haggled over.
The universal threat of enslavement was just one aspect of the common culture of slavery in the late medieval Mediterranean. Christian and Muslim authorities agreed that the natural status of humanity was freedom but that slavery was a legitimate aspect of human law. They agreed that individuals could be enslaved through birth and capture in war, but Christian authorities also allowed the sale of free people into slavery and recognized enslavement as a judicial penalty. They agreed that religious difference was the principle underlying slave status, but in practice, they were more concerned with protecting souls from apostasy than bodies from slavery. Catholic authorities were willing to authorize the purchase of Orthodox slaves to protect their souls. Yet they were more likely to grant petitions for freedom by Greeks than by Russians. What made the enslavement of Russian Orthodox Christians in Genoa more acceptable than the enslavement of Greek Orthodox Christians? The next chapter delves more deeply into how the inhabitants of the late medieval Mediterranean understood difference in the context of slavery.
Chapter 2
Difference and the Perception of Slave Status
Religious difference was the legal and ideological basis of slavery in the late medieval Mediterranean. In theory, anyone might be captured and enslaved by adherents of another religion. In practice, some people were more likely to be enslaved than others, and some were enslaved by coreligionists. Russian Christians, for example, were more likely to be enslaved and less likely to be judicially manumitted than Greek Christians in Christian Italy. Such patterns show that despite the legal and ideological importance of religious difference, it was not the only factor at work in determining slave status.
For medieval jurists, the problem with a system of slavery based on religious difference was the difficulty of proving the religion affiliation of specific slaves. Religious belief was an immaterial quality of the spirit, fully accessible only to God and the individual believer himself or herself.1 Religious practices like circumcision might leave visible marks on the body, but because most late medieval slaves were women and circumcision applied only to men, their affiliation could not be proven in this way.2 Some Mediterranean societies used badges or special clothing to signal religious affiliation, but clothes were easy to change.3 In theory, Christians, Muslims, and Jews followed distinctive dietary laws; in practice, slaves were not asked to eat pork or drink wine as a religious test. Slaves were sometimes able to prove their affiliation by reciting a prayer or creed (the shahāda for Muslims; the Pater Noster, Ave Maria, or Credo for Christians), but they were not able to give binding legal testimony about themselves.4 Moreover, newly enslaved people who had not yet learned the language of their masters would struggle to communicate anything about their religious background.
The difficulty of categorizing slaves by religion caused legal and economic problems. People enslaved illegally did have opportunities to challenge their status, as discussed in Chapter 1, and occasionally, they were successful. No master wanted to take on the potential expense and inconvenience of a slave whose status was doubtful. A seller might need to show a contract for his or her initial purchase of a particular slave to verify that slave’s status.5 Slave sale contracts often included a clause in which the seller promised to uphold the legality of the sale in court. But there were other ways to categorize slaves and thereby assess the validity of their status. Previous scholarship has shown that medieval people used language, law, customs, descent, and geographical