That Most Precious Merchandise. Hannah Barker
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food, collecting firewood and tending the fire, spinning, sewing, weaving, running errands, caring for and nursing children, tending animals, and personal service.94 Most worked under a wife’s supervision or managed bachelor households.95 Since Italian households usually had one or two domestic servants, free or enslaved, they were expected to be flexible. Wet nurses were the exception: they were expected to devote themselves fully to childcare. In the Mamluk context, elite households had large numbers of slaves (rarely free women) in domestic service, so they were more likely to specialize.96 Men in domestic service usually cared for horses (boats in Venice), acted as guards or doormen, and provided personal service for male masters.97
Although racial stereotypes seem to have affected the use of domestic slaves in Italy, the evidence is anecdotal. Black men were prized as gondoliers in Venice.98 Circassians were said to be beautiful and of “great aspect” (grande aspecto), and Circassian women were reputed to be very domestic.99 Tatars were known for loyalty, “since it may be taken as a certainty that no Tartar ever betrayed a master.”100 Tatar women were preferred for wet nursing and hard labor. A Florentine mother advising her son in Naples on the purchase of a female slave recommended “one of the Tartar nation, who are rough and advantageous for long hard work. The Russians, i.e. those from Russia, are more sensitive and more beautiful; but, it seems to me, a Tartar would be better. The Circassians have a passionate nature; although all the others have that too.”101 Yet in 1368, the Venetian Senate considered and ultimately rejected a proposal to ban “any newly purchased male slave of the Tatar language” because many had already been imported and turned out to be “corrupt and wicked of condition, and they cause daily disputes and rumors, and they can easily introduce scandals and errors in this land.”102
In contrast, Mamluk slave-buying guides included lists of racial stereotypes to help buyers choose the right slave for the right purpose. Black Africans were recommended for domestic work, and mamluks often had black male slaves to look after their horses and collect their food rations from the citadel each day.103 Alans were also recommended for domestic service. They were described as sturdy, gentle, good-natured, agreeable, and morally upright, but also careless and lazy.104 Greeks (rūmī) were characterized as obedient, sincere, loyal, reliable, and intelligent, but also stingy.105 Greek men were valued for their education and good manners, whereas Greek women were supposedly accurate and conservative in managing resources and therefore made good housekeepers. Armenians were said to be strong, sound of constitution, and beautiful, but also dishonest, greedy, rude, and dirty.106 Thus the slave-buying manuals recommended them for hard labor and cautioned that beating or threats might be necessary to make them work.
Eunuchs had a special role as guardians of Mamluk household honor.107 They served in the dual households of the elite, both in the harem where the women and children lived and in the barracks (ṭabaqa) where the young mamluks were trained.108 In both contexts, they helped integrate other slaves into the household. The zimāmdār (head of the harem) and his staff supervised the female slaves, both domestics and concubines. The muqaddam al-mamālīk (supervisor of mamluks) and his staff brought up the young mamluks. One of the more famous eunuchs was Sandal al-Manjakī, who served Sultan Barqūq as treasurer and then head of the Sandaliyya barracks.109 Sandal’s mamluk charges revered him for his generosity, piety, abstemiousness, and holiness (baraka), despite the temptations of his powerful position. Because castration was not permitted by Islamic law, it usually occurred before slaves were imported to the Mamluk kingdom.110 Greeks (rūmī), Indians (hindī), West Africans (takrūrī), and Ethiopians (ḥabashī) were preferred.111 Eunuchs from the Black Sea were less common, but a Russian and a Kipchak eunuch were also mentioned.112
To the extent that slaves were used for heavy physical labor in the late medieval Mediterranean, they tended to be male. Slave oarsmen, though today strongly associated with galley warfare, were not common until the sixteenth century.113 Slaves occasionally farmed or built fortifications in Genoa, but this was more common on the islands (Majorca, Sicily, Crete, and Cyprus) than on the mainland.114 A few Mamluk slaves mined salt and copper in the Sahara.115 When the fifteenth-century German traveler Bernhard von Breydenbach saw people making bricks on the banks of the Nile, he called them slaves, though they may have been free laborers whom he imagined as slaves in the tradition of Exodus.116
Slaves also worked in craft production and in trade. Italian and Mamluk merchants were known to travel with male slaves and authorized them to act as business agents.117 Islamic law enabled masters to confer a special status, maʿdhūn, on slaves so that they could legally conduct business. Artisans were assisted by both male and female slaves.118 In Cairo, a community of Christian slaves worked as masons and carpenters.119 Several Venetian guilds (the gold beaters and the makers of velvet and samite) banned slaves from learning trade secrets in case they were later sold outside the guild, but Genoese guilds allowed slaves to learn trade secrets as long as they did not compete with their former masters after manumission.120 Apothecaries were not permitted to let their slave assistants run the shop or dispense arsenic for fear of poisoning.121
Slaves as Soldiers
The best-documented Mamluk slaves were boys in military training.122 These were the mamluks after whom the Mamluk state was named. New mamluks were housed in special barracks (ṭabaqa) under the supervision of eunuchs. A jurist (faqīh) visited each day to teach them reading, writing, the Quran, ritual prayer, and the rudiments of Islamic law. Military instructors trained them in horsemanship, archery, and the use of various weapons. The end of training was marked by a graduation or passing-out ceremony (kharj).123 During this ceremony, the sultan would inspect his mamluks and issue each one a suit of formal clothing, a horse, and a sword. Each mamluk also received a document of manumission (ʿitāqa). From this moment, he was legally free but enmeshed in a complex system of patronage and factional politics.
The intensity of mamluk training forged bonds of loyalty among boys in the same cohort (khushdāsh) and between the boys and their master (ustādh). The goal of the mamluk system was for these relationships to replace the ties of biological kinship lost through enslavement.124 A son might assassinate his father to gain his inheritance, and a civilian bureaucrat might betray a ruler to benefit his own family, but a slave had no kin and therefore no conflicted loyalties. After manumission, masters became patrons, and fellow mamluks became factional allies. A newly graduated and manumitted mamluk would be enrolled as a soldier (jund) in his former master’s corps and given a salary or a fief (iqṭa’) to live on.125 His subsequent ability to rise through the ranks would depend on the patronage of his former master and the support of his faction as well as his own skill and ambition.126
Mamluks of the sultan could expect faster advancement than mamluks of the amirs. More was written about those who attained high ranks like commander (amīr), governor (nā’ib), or general (atabak), but most mamluks remained in obscurity at the rank of soldier (jund). They lived in the city where they were stationed, received a salary and rations from the state, and supplemented their income by working or extorting money from civilians.127 Of the five thousand mamluks associated with Sultan al-Muʿayyad Shaykh, only sixty (1.2 percent) were prominent enough to be named in a biographical dictionary.128 The most successful Muʿayyadī mamluk, Khushqadam, rose over the course of forty years to become sultan himself. During the same period, his fellow Muʿayyadī mamluk Jānibak Shaykh was not promoted at all. When Khushqadam became sultan, he raised Jānibak Shaykh to the lowest rank of amirs in honor of their metaphorical brotherhood (khushdāshiyya). Yet Jānibak Shaykh was unemployed again at the time of his death six or seven years afterward. His biographer described him as “one of the neglected, lost ones.”129
Mamluks were unique among late medieval Mediterranean slaves in that their manumission was virtually guaranteed and their masters allowed them real opportunities for power and wealth. Their enslavement early in life has been compared to education at a strict boarding school: harsh,