That Most Precious Merchandise. Hannah Barker
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is neither useful nor historically appropriate: both experiences were terrible, each in its own way. Judging which was “better” is beyond the purview of historians, except to the extent that historical sources make such judgments. Late medieval sources do not. Second, a definitional element of slavery is the overwhelming power, backed by violence, of the master over the slave.2 A kind master could choose to treat his or her slaves well; a cruel master could choose to treat his or her slaves horribly. Either way, treatment was entirely at the master’s discretion and could vary widely within a slaveholding society.
Instead of evaluating masters’ treatment of their slaves, this chapter considers the role of masters as social gateways for their slaves. The importance of a master’s position and personality in determining an individual slave’s experience cannot be overstated. A Tatar boy purchased by a Venetian baker was likely to work in his owner’s bakery and run household errands but would probably never ride a horse or wield a spear. A Tatar boy purchased by a Mamluk amir was likely to become an expert horseman and warrior but would probably never bake bread. The fact that these two boys might well have come from the same village is one of the most striking features of the Black Sea slave trade.
The Slave Population
It is hard to estimate the size of the free population in most medieval cities. Estimating the size of the slave population is even harder. Chronicles and travel accounts give rough numbers, but they cannot necessarily be trusted. In states that taxed the possession of slaves, the revenue generated by the tax can be used to estimate the size of the slave population in a given year. However, Genoa is the only late medieval Mediterranean state from which tax data of this kind have been preserved. Starting in 1381, Genoa taxed slave possession at half a florin per slave per year to finance its debts from the Chioggia war.3 The half-florin tax applied to inhabitants of the city of Genoa, its suburbs, and the nearby towns of Polcevera, Bisagno, and Voltri. It was collected in April and October. In the collection records, noble families were listed by households (alberghi) and ordinary people by the neighborhoods (conestagie) where they lived. If a slave changed hands or died during the year, the tax was reduced to a quarter-florin.
The half-florin tax, like other Genoese taxes, was collected by tax farmers.4 Individuals bid at a public auction for the right to collect the half-florin tax for up to three years. The auction was conducted in the Piazza Banchi under the loggia of the palace of the Negro family by a pair of officials called the consules galleghe. The winner paid his bid to the state treasury in two to four installments over the course of a year. Meanwhile, he would collect the tax whose revenues he had won. Any money he collected beyond the value of his bid and the cost of collection was his to keep as profit. Thus tax farmers’ bids can be seen as specialist investments, and tax farmers often bid on multiple taxes over the course of several years.
Tax farmers tried to bid less than the actual revenue they expected to collect to leave a margin for collection expenses and profit. The rule of thumb is that tax farmers’ bids represented about 70 percent of expected revenue, with 10 percent for expenses and 20 percent as profit.5 When a tax farmer bid 580 lire for the half-florin tax in 1468–1470, he probably expected to collect about 829 lire in revenue. We know that in this year, the tax farmer paid fifty lire, about 6 percent of the expected revenue, to the man who would physically collect the tax for him, leaving 4 percent for other expenses, such as bookkeeping materials.6 The 70 percent rule can also be checked against data from 1458, the only year for which both the tax farmer’s bid and the tax collection register have been preserved.7 In that year, Gregorio de Cassana bid 900 lire for the half-florin tax. The 70 percent rule suggests that Cassana expected 1,286 lire in revenue from a population of 1,582 slaves. In the 1458 collection register, I counted 2,025 slaves (yielding 1,645 lire, 6 soldi, 3 denari in revenue), and Domenico Gioffrè counted 2,059 slaves (yielding 1,672 lire, 18 soldi, 9 denari in revenue). In this case, the 70 percent rule was too generous: Cassana’s bid was only 54 to 55 percent of the revenue he collected. The actual slave population of Genoa in 1458 would have been higher still, because the Fieschi family and the Spinolas of Luccoli were exempt from the half-florin tax in 1458. In the following discussion, therefore, it should be assumed that estimates of the Genoese slave population are rough and more likely to be underestimates than overestimates. Figure 1 shows the winning bids for the half-florin tax between 1381 and 1472.8
Figure 1. The Half-Florin Tax on Slave Possession in Genoa.
(Gioffrè, Il mercato, 69–70; Balard, La Romanie, 2:816; ASG, CdSG, N.185,15002, N.185,15006, N.185,15072.)
Analyses of these data have tended to focus on demand rather than supply. The apparent peak in the late fourteenth century (about 7,223 slaves in 1381) is often linked to the Black Death: slaves could have alleviated the sudden labor shortage, and the threat of slave labor could have been used to coerce free servants into accepting lower wages.9 But because the data set begins in 1381, three decades after the first plague outbreak and two decades after the second outbreak, it is impossible say exactly what the effects were. There is no pre-plague baseline against which to measure 7,223 slaves and decide whether that figure is low or high. Moreover, it is impossible to tell whether any effects of plague on the slave population should be attributed to the first or second outbreak. A close examination of wills, merchant letters, Senate decisions, and guild statutes in Venice has yielded no evidence for change in either the number of slaves or the kinds of labor they performed as a result of the Black Death.10 Major plague outbreaks recurred in 1421, 1430, and 1436. Those correlate with dips in Figure 1, as plague deaths reduced the number of slaves.11 After 1430 and 1436, the slave population rebounded to its previous level as masters replaced those who had died. After the 1421 outbreak, though, the slave population only reached 75 percent of its previous level.
Other factors may have affected the slave population of Genoa. In the late fourteenth century, Genoa came under the rule of France. Difficulties in tax collection during the transition may explain the decline in half-florin tax bids between 1380 and 1400.12 In that case, however, bids should have returned to higher levels after the transition. No demand-based explanation has been offered for the peaks in 1417 (3,451 slaves) and 1440–1442 (3,049 slaves); factors affecting supply are discussed in Chapter 5. Overall, it seems that slaves made up 1 to 2 percent of the total Genoese population in the thirteenth century and 4 to 5 percent in the fifteenth century.13
Venetian and Mamluk records do not offer data comparable to Genoa’s half-florin tax. While Venice also instituted a three lire tax on slave possession in 1379 to fund its part in the Chioggia war, no records have survived.14 What remains is anecdotal evidence. The Senate received complaints about a slave shortage in 1459, which matches the Genoese data.15 In 1483, a Swiss pilgrim reported that Venice had three thousand slaves, about 2.5 percent of its total population.16 The Mamluks did not tax slave possession, nor were slaves included in the poll tax (jizya) paid by non-Muslim subjects.17 No travelers tried to estimate the slave population of Cairo, much less the entire Mamluk kingdom. Modern scholars have noted shrinking slave retinues (mamluks, concubines, domestic slaves, and slave musicians) in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries.18 This corresponds to the marked decline in Figure 1 from 1381 into the early 1400s.
Another method of counting the slave population is by household. The bourgeois style of service described by Dennis Romano, in which one household had two or three female servants, was the norm in late medieval Italy.19 The best evidence for this pattern again comes from Genoa’s half-florin tax. In 1458, the half-florin tax was collected by household. As shown in Table 1, 95 percent of households who paid the tax had one or two slaves.20 None had more than six. This statistical picture is fleshed out by letters between the Genoese merchant Giovanni da Pontremoli and his family during the same year.21