That Most Precious Merchandise. Hannah Barker
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most intractable obstacle to the study of this slave trade is the lack of material from the Golden Horde, the Mongol state north of the Black Sea, where many of the slaves originated. The Golden Horde’s administrative archive was destroyed by Timur (Tamerlane) in the early fifteenth century.23 Archeologists have excavated medieval sites in the Black Sea region, but most of their findings have been published in Russian.24 Surviving texts from Georgia, Bulgaria, and other medieval states in the region seem to say little about either slavery or trade. In fact, the most substantial surviving archive produced within the Black Sea comes from Genoa’s colony at Caffa. The colonial administration there made clean copies of its most important records, such as treasury (massaria) registers, and sent them back to Genoa for official review.25 Genoese and Venetian notaries who worked in the Black Sea colonies kept registers and deposited them with the state when they returned home.26 Both Italian and Mamluk travelers in the region wrote about their adventures.27 There is undoubtedly room for further research on the basis of Greek, Russian, Ottoman, and possibly Georgian sources, but given the limitations of time and language that constrain a historian working alone, my analysis is restricted to Latin and Arabic sources. My hope is that the present book will provide others with a helpful framework for studying Black Sea slavery using a wider variety of sources and languages.
Modern Mentalities: Erasing the Medieval Slave Trade
Two historical narratives have shaped modern scholarship on slavery: the antislavery narrative of Christian amelioration and the Marxist narrative of modes of production. The Christian amelioration narrative, spread by the late eighteenth-century antislavery movement in Britain, held that Christian principles of spiritual equality and brotherly love were incompatible with slavery. It therefore asserted that the Christianization of the Roman Empire had caused the gradual disappearance of slavery from Europe. This was imagined to be a slow process, as Christian principles acted indirectly to mitigate masters’ behavior and state policies over the course of centuries. Proponents of Christian amelioration dated the end of slavery in western Europe between the sixth and twelfth centuries, depending on whether they considered serfdom to be an extension of slavery or a new and different status.28 Others acknowledged the persistence of slavery into the later Middle Ages but insisted that the treatment of slaves continued to improve gradually.29 Either way, the sixteenth-century resurgence of slavery in European colonies was portrayed as a reversal of civilizational progress.30 The good news was that this lost progress could be restored through abolition. Although the proslavery movement in the late eighteenth century also used Christian texts to support its position, the antislavery movement’s eventual success meant that its historical narrative of Christianity as a force for the amelioration and abolition of slavery became the dominant one.31
The second narrative ascribed the disappearance of slavery in Europe to economic rather than religious forces. Karl Marx presented human history as a series of developmental stages in the mode of production. Over time, the ancient class structure of citizens and slaves was replaced by the medieval class structure of nobles and serfs, followed by the modern class structure of capitalists and workers.32 Although slavery, feudalism, and capitalism all involved a class of property owners dominating a class of producers, each mode of production was characterized by a distinct form of domination and of class struggle. Among twentieth-century historians of slavery, the Marxist narrative has generated debates over the role of capitalism in the rise and abolition of Atlantic slavery33 and over the timing and significance of the medieval transition from slavery to feudalism.34 Thus the Marxist narrative erased medieval slavery in two ways.35 First, because it presented feudalism as the quintessential medieval mode of production, it simply did not occur to most historians that slavery could play a significant role in the Middle Ages. Second, most historians have assumed, like Marx, that slavery was primarily a mode of agricultural production. Because medieval slaves tended to be women engaged in domestic and sexual service in urban households, their presence was easily ignored or dismissed.
Medieval historians who noticed the presence of slaves in their sources have struggled to respond to these two narratives. One approach has been to test the boundaries of the Marxist narrative by debating exactly when and how Roman agricultural slavery in Europe died out. The answer seems to be that the process unfolded over many centuries, varied significantly from region to region, and involved more than two forms of unfreedom (i.e., slavery and serfdom are not sufficient to express the multiplicity of early medieval practices).36 Another approach has been to document the existence of urban slavery in exhaustive detail. Relying heavily on notarial registers, this literature has focused on the slave trade, the demography of the slave population, and the labor performed by slaves.37 There have been efforts to combine these approaches by linking the end of agricultural slavery with the emergence of urban slavery.38 A third approach has been to draw attention to the gendered nature of medieval slavery and the significance of women’s labor.39 Finally, scholars have addressed slavery in medieval law40 and in parts of northern Europe beyond the reach of direct Roman influence.41
Nevertheless, although the Christian amelioration narrative and the Marxist narrative are both more than a century old, they continue to shape the study of slavery. The influence of the Marxist narrative is openly acknowledged, and an economic emphasis has been the norm for scholarship on medieval slavery. In contrast, the influence of the Christian amelioration narrative, especially the static and monolithic role it ascribes to Christianity, has rarely been questioned.42 Since the appearance of Charles Verlinden’s seminal work L’Esclavage dans l’Europe médiévale in 1955 and 1977, it has been clear that Christians owned slaves throughout the Middle Ages and that the Church as an institution not only tolerated slavery but owned slaves itself. Nevertheless, there remains a sense that this should not have been the case. Historians who study medieval slavery still feel compelled to condemn it on moral grounds.43 This is not simply a matter of anachronism, of holding medieval society to modern standards. Rather, it is the Christian amelioration narrative that suggests that medieval slave owners were behind their own times, not fully imbued with Christianity, sinful and corrupt.
Nineteenth-century proponents of Christian amelioration certainly interpreted late medieval slavery (when they acknowledged its existence at all) as a sign of moral corruption, namely, the corruption of Christian principles by sinful greed or the nefarious influence of the Orient.44 Either way, Italians and Spaniards were seen as especially guilty. Their persistence in keeping slaves could be attributed to regional backsliding, associated in the nineteenth century with backward southern European Catholicism as opposed to forward looking northern European Protestantism. Their failings, therefore, did not reflect on Christianity as a whole. The association between slavery, moral corruption, and greedy Italian merchants has been repeated by generations of medieval historians, as discussed in Chapters 4 and 6. Its effects on Anglophone scholarship have been especially pervasive, since Christian amelioration was closely associated with the British Protestant antislavery movement and the civilizing mission of the British Empire.45 But it has influenced medieval historians of other backgrounds too.
Unquestioning adherence to the Christian amelioration narrative has sometimes led to the misinterpretation of medieval sources. For example, the fifteenth-century Genoese lawyer Bartolomeo de Bosco drew up an advisory brief (consilium) in which he defended the inheritance of the son of a former slave woman and her master. Other members of the master’s family had challenged the son’s status as an heir (but not his status as a freeman) because his mother had been a slave at the time of his conception; the son contended that his mother had been manumitted and that his father had declared him legitimate. Bosco’s advisory brief began with a warning that “a judge ought not to decide simply following conscience, but ought to form [his opinion] according to the things which were mentioned and proved pertaining to the truth of the actions.”46 Since Bosco supported the son’s claim to inherit, he was advising the judge not to follow his conscience, which would lead him to rule against the son of a slave, but rather to examine the facts, which would show the son to be a legitimate heir. Bosco’s own conscience could not have been too deeply troubled