That Most Precious Merchandise. Hannah Barker
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owned a female slave.47
Yet a recent article discussing this brief has interpreted it as a statement in opposition to slavery: “Bosco accepted that slavery was a normal, legal, human condition for some, but he knew that in a perfect world it would not exist. His long consilium on this case reveals his pleasure in defending this colonial family.”48 This is the reverse of Bosco’s own statement, which assumed that conscience would favor slavery, and it illustrates how misleading the Christian amelioration narrative can be when studying medieval attitudes toward slavery.49
The study of slavery in the medieval Islamicate world is part of a different historiographical tradition. The Eurocentric nature of the Marxist narrative combined with the relative lack of surviving economic sources from the Islamicate world means that an economic approach has not gained much traction.50 Instead, scholars have focused on legal history, for which there are excellent sources; and social history, with special attention to questions of race, gender, and sexuality.51 The object of this scholarship has sometimes been framed in ahistorical terms as “Islamic slavery,” but recently, there has been more attention to variations in the practice of slavery by Muslims living in specific times and places.52 Conversations with historians and anthropologists of slavery in Africa have also enriched the study of slavery in Islamicate societies.53
The study of mamluks, or military slaves, under the Mamluk sultanate in Egypt and Syria has been shaped by an additional set of questions. One question is the extent to which military slavery was distinctive to Islamicate societies; comparative research has shown that it was not.54 Another question concerns the legal status and political legitimacy of Mamluk sultans. The Mamluks were unusual among societies with military slaves because Mamluk sultans were former slaves ruling in their own names, de jure as well as de facto. This system of government was possible only because mamluks were manumitted at the end of their training. Their status as freedmen was essential to their legal and political ability to govern: they were not and could not be slave rulers.55 Their previous enslavement mattered politically, however, because the education imposed on them as slaves shaped their careers after manumission. It is this formative aspect of slavery that has occupied the attention of most scholars of the Mamluk system.56
Although the Christian amelioration narrative would seem to have little to do with the history of slavery in the Islamicate world, it has influenced the field in subtle ways. British antislavery societies and representatives of the British state pressured nineteenth-century Muslim rulers to abolish slavery to demonstrate their civilizational progress.57 Their defensive reaction to British pressure coalesced into an Islamic amelioration narrative. According to the Islamic amelioration narrative, Islam held slave owners to a high moral standard and caused Muslims to treat their slaves far better than Christian slave owners ever had. Thus Christians had no moral high ground with regard to slavery. This discourse has developed, on one hand, into an Islamic case for abolition and, on the other hand, into a debate about whether the slaves of Muslim masters were truly well treated.58 A new chapter has recently been added by the Islamic State’s decision to legalize slavery within its territory and to enslave Yazidi captives, a decision that has been condemned by Muslims in other parts of the world.59
Like the Christian amelioration narrative, the Islamic amelioration narrative encourages generational chauvinism: the idea that modern people are inherently better or wiser than medieval people and therefore qualified to judge them.60 Thus, like the Christian amelioration narrative, the Islamic amelioration narrative should be challenged and discarded as anachronistic. Stronger arguments are available to activists who wish to oppose slavery in the present day. As for slavery in the past, arguments about good and bad treatment have not been productive for several reasons. First, an individual slave’s experience of slavery depended on the behavior of his or her individual master and on the overarching legal and social structures that governed slavery. Second, because of the common culture of slavery in the late medieval Mediterranean, the overarching legal and social structures were remarkably similar across Christian and Muslim societies. Finally, because Christians and Muslims in the late medieval Mediterranean acquired their slaves from the same sources in the Black Sea, those slaves were subject to the same violence of capture, the same humiliation of sale, and the same vulnerability of status regardless of where they were eventually taken or who eventually bought them.
Outline of Chapters
This book is not a comparative history of slavery in medieval Italy and Egypt. Mamluks, Genoese, and Venetians shared a common culture of slavery, and they participated together as partners and competitors in the Black Sea slave trade. To present an integrated picture, this book is divided into two parts. The first part, Chapters 1 through 4, defines slavery as it was instituted in the late medieval Mediterranean and highlights some aspects of the common culture of slavery, especially those related to trade and the market. The second part, Chapters 5 through 7, examines the various forces that shaped the slave trade from the Black Sea into the Mediterranean.
The book begins by defining slavery within a specific context: the Mediterranean in the thirteenth through fifteenth centuries. Chapter 1, “Slavery in the Late Medieval Mediterranean,” presents fundamental assumptions about slavery in that context. Slavery was legal and socially acceptable among Christians, Muslims, and Jews living in the late medieval Mediterranean. Although enslavement was a universal threat that affected everyone living in the region, slave status was based on religious difference: people were not supposed to enslave adherents of the same religion as themselves. However, once enslaved, slaves were expected to convert to the religion of their masters, and their conversion did not require manumission. Because religious belief was a difficult quality to prove in court, the second chapter, “Difference and the Perception of Slave Status,” discusses how language and race were used as shorthand for categorizing individuals as enslaveable or not enslaveable in a particular society.
Chapter 3, “Societies with Slaves: Genoa, Venice, and the Mamluk Sultanate,” sketches the demography of the late medieval Mediterranean slave population. It then explores the experiences of slaves and the kinds of labor and service they performed. Gender, race, and the master’s identity all played a role in the services demanded of individual slaves. Chapter 4, “The Slave Market and the Act of Sale,” describes the locations and operations of the major slave markets in Genoa, Venice, Cairo, and Alexandria. It walks through the process of inspecting a slave, explaining how a slave sale differed from the sale of any other commodity. It presents the surviving data for the changing prices of slaves as well as various factors that might affect the price of a particular slave. Finally, it highlights certain unusual contractual clauses specific to the sale of slaves, such as the health warranty and the consent clause.
Chapter 5, “Making Slaves in the Black Sea,” surveys the evidence for violent capture and sale by relatives as the chief mechanisms for enslaving free people around the Black Sea. It then examines regional and local conditions that governed the slave trade across the Black Sea. The long-standing rivalry between Genoa and Venice for control over major ports and shipping in the Black Sea and in the Mediterranean was one important factor. Another was the Mamluk–Golden Horde alliance, established in the mid-thirteenth century, and the Mamluks’ desire to ensure safe passage for their merchants and a steady supply of slaves. Political changes in the states surrounding the Black Sea, especially during the mid- and late fourteenth century, also affected which groups of people were most vulnerable to enslavement.
The heart of the book is Chapter 6, “Constraining Disorder: Merchants, States, and the Structure of the Slave Trade.” It profiles individual merchants who bought and sold slaves in small numbers and in bulk, for themselves and as agents for others. It also traces