That Most Precious Merchandise. Hannah Barker
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and flatness, including flatness of the nose.158 Sculpted Tatar heads on two fourteenth-century capitals in the south and west porticoes of the Doge’s Palace in Venice offer contemporary images.159 A Venetian merchant described a Tatar slave as having “a face like a board,” that is, flat, and implied that she was ugly.160 Franco Sacchetti, a Florentine poet, gave a favorable description of a slave woman who “doesn’t have a very Tatar face.”161 Felix Fabri judged the Tatar face negatively, as well as the Tatar hairstyle, which reminded him of idiots (stulti) in Germany.162 Pero Tafur claimed that among the Tatars, “the most deformed are of the noblest birth.”163
The poet and humanist Petrarch linked the perceived ugliness of the Tatar face directly to its association with slavery. In a 1367 letter from Venice to his childhood friend Guido Sette, at that time archbishop of Genoa, he wrote, “Already, a strange, enormous crowd of slaves of both sexes, like a muddy torrent tainting a limpid stream, taints this beautiful city with Scythian faces and hideous filth. If they were not more acceptable to their buyers than they are to me, and if they were not more pleasing to their eyes than to mine, these repulsive youths would not crowd our narrow streets; nor would they, by jostling people so clumsily, annoy foreign visitors, who are accustomed to better sights.”164 Although the features of a Tatar face did not change much when the Tatar being described was free, the associations were less negative.165 Travelers characterized Mongol women as unattractive but hardworking, able to fight and hold power alongside men. Marco Polo described Tatars at the court of Kubilai Khan as noble and beautiful people. Illustrators of his text portrayed them with the same colors as European nobles.
Descriptions of the faces of Turkish slaves appear in both Italian and Mamluk sources as well. The Italians judged Turks, like Tatars, to be ugly: “[they] have short faces, broad in the upper part and narrow below. Their eyes are very small and very similar to those of that small beast [weasel], which by instinct hunts rabbits in their warrens and underground holes. Their noses are rather like those of the Indians [Ethiopians], and their beards closely resemble those of cats.”166 Mamluk descriptions of Turks portrayed them more positively. According to al-Asyūṭī, a legal description of a Turkish mamluk should mention “whether he has sprouted a moustache, that he is white of complexion, with a prominent forehead, with big deep-black eyes, long lashes, and lids painted with kohl, with a low-bridged nose, flat jaws, ruddy cheeks, red lips, well spaced teeth, with a small mouth, a long neck, of full stature, with small feet.”167 A female Turkish slave should be described as follows: “a young woman, white tinged with red in color, with a prominent forehead, as in the previous description but in feminine form.”168
Conclusion
Although language and race did not form the ideological basis of late medieval Mediterranean slavery, they played an important role in determining who was and was not enslaved in practice. When it proved difficult or disadvantageous for masters to use religion to categorize their slaves, they turned to language and, especially, to race as substitutes. Yet the strength of race as an intellectual framework is also its weakness. Race subsumes many kinds of difference (ancestry, geography, culture, climate, humoral complexion, physical appearance, astrological sign, etc.) into a single category, and it promises us that this category is fixed, inherent, permanent, natural, and therefore reliable. Racial shorthand was useful to Italian notaries and Mamluk scribes who needed to categorize individual slaves in a few brief but meaningful words.169 Racial shorthand was also useful for slave buyers who needed help in choosing the right slave for the right purpose and avoiding slaves whose status was doubtful. Cases in which medieval racial categories broke down could usually be ignored because of the power differential inherent in slavery: if the notary or scribe said that a slave was Circassian, the slave’s ability to refuse that category was severely limited. Notaries and scribes were also able to gloss over paradoxical dual categories, such as Tatar Alans. Some slaves challenged their racial categorization in court, such as the Greeks who proved they were not Bulgars in Chapter 1. But race was used to confirm the status of others, such as Russian Orthodox slaves in Italy and Turkish Muslim slaves in Egypt, even though they should have been freed on religious grounds.
The fact that medieval people understood race as a spectrum rather than a black–white binary helps explain why some slaves were more successful in petitioning for freedom than others. It also helps explain why modern historians have struggled so much to understand how medieval racial categories worked in the context of slavery. We know that race is culturally constructed and historically contingent, as is slavery, and religion, and color. Nevertheless, today we still find race to be a convenient way to collapse many kinds of difference into a single one. Racial categories are so convenient that we sometimes struggle to understand how others could use them differently than we do. To explain the logic underlying medieval Mediterranean slavery, we have to acknowledge that the racial categories with which we are familiar are not permanent, fixed, inherent, or reliable. In fact, no matter what analytical framework we use, the complexity of human experience means that there will always be individuals and cases that do not fit neatly into our categories.
Chapter 3
Societies with Slaves: Genoa, Venice, and the Mamluk Sultanate
The late medieval Mediterranean was surrounded by societies with slaves.1 This meant that slavery coexisted with other forms of labor, slave labor was not essential to the economy, slave ownership was not a distinguishing characteristic of the ruling class, and the master–slave relationship was not a model for other hierarchical relationships. In the late medieval Mediterranean, few households had more than two slaves. The majority were women purchased in their teens or twenties. The most notable exception was the household of the Mamluk sultan, which included thousands of enslaved men, women, and eunuchs.
After surveying the demography of slaves and slave ownership, this chapter discusses the services provided by slaves. Although slaves were not economically essential, they performed many important functions. Slaves acted as social and financial assets: their presence added to their masters’ prestige, and their value was part of their masters’ net worth. They also performed domestic service and manual labor. Male slaves were used for military service by the Mamluks. Wealthy Mamluk notables also had eunuchs to manage the parallel male and female spheres of their households.
Female slaves around the Mediterranean were subject to sexual and reproductive demands as well as demands on their physical labor. Focusing on the sexual and reproductive aspects of the shared culture of Mediterranean slavery reveals three things. First, although historians have paid more attention to the sexual exploitation of slave women in Islamic contexts, sexual exploitation was also common and well documented in Christian contexts. Second, the most important difference between Islamic and Christian practices of slavery had to do with the status of children. Under Christian and Roman law, children inherited the status of their mothers, so the child of a free man and his slave woman would be a slave. In contrast, under Islamic law, if a free man acknowledged paternity of a child by his slave woman, that child was born free and legitimate, and that slave woman became an umm walad (mother of a child). She could not be sold and would be manumitted automatically after her master’s death. In an Islamic context, therefore, sex with slave women produced heirs, while in a Christian context, it produced property. Third, Christian practices regarding the children of slave women gradually came to resemble Islamic practices over the course of the fourteenth century. In other words, a new aspect of the shared culture of Mediterranean slavery emerged during this period.
In surveying the kinds of service demanded of slaves, this chapter also considers how slave owners’ personalities and social positions shaped their slaves’ lives. It has been asserted that being a slave in a society with slaves, where small numbers of slaves performed domestic work indoors, was a milder experience than being a slave in a slave society, where large numbers of slaves performed manual labor outdoors. This comparison is not helpful for two reasons. First, it sets up a competition of suffering. Was the pain of grueling manual labor greater or lesser