That Most Precious Merchandise. Hannah Barker
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from Circassia (a Circassian in the specific sense). To make matters more confusing, Turk could also be used in a specific sense as a synonym for Kipchak. Sūdān (literally meaning “blacks”) referred to dark-skinned southerners originating anywhere from Africa to India. They could be subdivided into Ethiopian, Abyssinian, Takrūrī, Nubian, Zaghāwī, Dājūwī, Bajāwī, Indian, Khalanjī, Zanjī, Yemeni, Sarūwī, and muwallad (mulatto) categories, among others.79 The two sets of criteria, skin color and geography, that distinguished the Turks from the Sūdān were linked by the medieval theory of climate.
Legally, misrepresenting the racial category of a slave would not invalidate his or her sale, whereas misrepresenting religion or gender would.80 According to jurists, this was because religion affected slaves’ legal status and gender affected their function, whereas race did neither. However, Mamluk slave-buying guides included lists of enslaveable races and their stereotypical qualities precisely because it would guide the buyer in choosing the right slave for the right function. Unlike shurūṭ manuals, Mamluk guides for slave buyers divided the list of enslaveable people into three categories: Arabs, ʿAjam, and Sūdān.81 Sūdān referred to dark-skinned southern slaves, as before. Arabs rarely appeared as slaves during the Mamluk period, but they may have been included for the sake of ethnographic completeness or as a legacy from earlier models of the genre.82 ʿAjam could refer to all non-Arabs; to all northern, light-skinned non-Arabs; or to Persians specifically. A fifteenth-century slave-buying manual defined ʿAjam in terms of language: “absolutely everybody who differs from the Arab tongue, such as the Persians and the Turks and the Greeks and the Armenians and the Sūdān and the Berber and the rest of them, although this name specifies the Persian people conventionally.”83
The recognized subdivisions of ʿAjam shifted over the course of the Mamluk period. In an anonymous thirteenth-century slave-buying guide, ʿAjam included Persians, Turks, Kurds, Rūmī,84 Armenians, Franks, Alans, Indians (al-hind), and Berbers. In the fifteenth century, al-‘Ayntābī added Circassians, Daylamites, Zaranj, and more Indians (al-sind). Circassian slaves had served in Egypt since the thirteenth century or earlier, but their addition to the list of enslaveable races in the fifteenth century was probably a result of their rise to political power in the late fourteenth century. The inclusion of Indians, al-hind and al-sind, among the ʿAjam is also notable because the shurūṭ manuals tended to categorize them as Sūdān.85
Contemporary observers noticed certain trends in the racial composition of the Mamluk slave population. Circassian, Rūmī, Kipchak, and Turk were the most common categories used for slaves. Tatar, Mongol, Turkman, Kurd, Armenian, Cypriot, Frankish, Indian (hind), and Ethiopian (ḥabashī) categories were used less frequently. Chinese, Russian, Samarqandi, and West African (takrūrī) categories were represented by single individuals.86 One notable trend, according to medieval observers, was the shift in the mamluk population from Kipchak Turks to Circassian Turks at the end of the fourteenth century, as discussed in Chapter 5. Another notable trend was the preference of most sultans and amirs for slaves of the same race as themselves. The perception that political factions were based on racial solidarity was widespread in Mamluk sources, even though modern historians have shown that factions presented as racial often included individual mamluks of various races.87 The two trends were linked by the suggestion that Sultan Barqūq precipitated the shift away from Kipchaks by favoring Circassians like himself.88 Barqūq’s wife, Ird, a Turk, was said to have warned him against this course: “make your army a variegated one of four races, Tatar, Circassian, Anatolian and Turcoman, and then you and your descendants can rest easy,” because no single racial faction would be able to dominate Mamluk politics.89
Medieval Christian philosophers explored the idea of enslaveable races via Aristotle’s theory of natural slavery discussed in Chapter 1. Searching for examples of natural slavery in their own societies led them in a variety of directions. Citizens serving a ruler, artisans, peasants, and barbarians were all identified by medieval philosophers as natural slaves.90 Medieval philosophers knew that the word barbarian signaled linguistic difference: “note that barbarians, according to certain people, are said to be those whose language differs entirely from Latin. Others indeed say that whoever is a foreigner is a barbarian to every other foreigner.… But according to he who speaks more truly [i.e., Aristotle], barbarians proper are said to be those who are strong in the strength of the body, are lacking in the strength of reason, and are almost without laws and without the rule of law.”91 In other words, although barbarians were superficially distinguished by language, they were truly set apart from civilized people by their physical strength, lack of reason, and lack of law, all qualities associated with natural slaves.
Where medieval philosophers diverged from Aristotle was their emphasis on barbarian races, characterizing the customs and bodies of entire groups of people as bestial.92 For example, according to Albertus Magnus, “we call barbarians those who neither law, nor civility, nor the rule of any other discipline disposes to virtue, whom Tullius called forest men in the beginning of Rhetorica, conversing with the wild forest beasts in the manner of wild beasts, who are not Greeks or Latins, who are disciplined and fed by a lordly and paternal rule. For such bestial people eat raw meat and drink the blood of humans, they delight to eat and drink from the skulls of humans, they find new kinds of tortures by which they delight to kill people.”93 Such bestial people were located at the far end of the racial spectrum and could be justifiably enslaved by civilized people. In this intellectual context, the long association between Greeks and civilization may have been another reason why medieval Catholics were less comfortable enslaving Greeks than Bulgars or Russians, even though all were Orthodox Christians.
Because the influx of Black Sea slaves to Italy did not begin until the late thirteenth century, Thomas Aquinas and the other great scholastics of the thirteenth century did not link Aristotle’s slaves with the Tatars serving in the homes of wealthy Italians.94 Aristotle himself had identified the Scythians of the ancient Black Sea as a barbarian people prone to natural slavery on the basis of their climate, and both Thomas Aquinas and Albertus Magnus had repeated the connection between Scythians, barbarians, and natural slaves. But it was Italian humanists who equated Scythians and Tatars with natural slaves. According to Giovanni Gioviano Pontano,
As I heard from the ancients, the custom was that Thracians and also Greeks who inhabit the Black Sea be sold: who, lest they be in the service of the barbarians, merchants sailing the Black Sea, having redeemed them from the Scythians, were offering them for sale. For it seemed more honorable to serve them for a short time, while they repaid the money paid per head, than to be the plunder of barbarians and submissive to perpetual servitude, also with the greatest disgrace of the Christian name. Because today also are saved towards those whom he calls Bulgars and Circassians.95
In other words, the Orthodox Christians of the Black Sea (Thracians, Greeks, Bulgars, and Circassians) could be enslaved by Catholics to save them from the Scythians (Tatars), the archetypical barbarians.
Other humanists also liked to use anachronistic classical terms for the contemporary population of the Black Sea. Racial categories formulated a thousand years ago in quite different historical circumstances reappeared not only in private letters but also in official government correspondence and notarial documents.96 In 1416 and 1417, for example, the Genoese notary Giuliano Canella categorized five different slaves as “Gepids or Zichs.”97 Zich was a widely recognized racial category in the fifteenth century, and it would be possible to find individuals who self-identified as members of that group. Gepid was a racial category dating from the fifth and sixth centuries, a group with no self-identifying members in the fifteenth century.
Being able to categorize slaves by race mattered especially to notaries because it was required by Roman law. The Justinianic Code stated that “those selling slaves should declare their race (natio) when making the sale; for the slave’s race may often induce or deter a purchaser; therefore, we have an interest in knowing the race; for there is a presumption that some slaves are good, coming from a race