That Most Precious Merchandise. Hannah Barker
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jurist, was asked about how to avoid buying slave concubines of Muslim origin, his response departed from the legal principle of assuming freedom in ambiguous cases.92 Instead, he ruled that men could keep concubines of probable Muslim origin as long as there was any possibility at all that they might be descended from slaves. Al-Subkī’s response stands in sharp contrast to that of Aḥmad Bābā, a seventeenth-century jurist from Timbuktu, who advised traders in the Saharan oasis of Suwāt about how to avoid buying Muslim slaves.93 Aḥmad Bābā listed African peoples known to be Muslim and urged the traders not to buy slaves from those groups.
Therefore, despite the fact that religious difference was the legal basis of slavery in the late medieval Mediterranean, both Christians and Muslims enslaved their coreligionists from the Black Sea and were aware of what they were doing. How did they justify this conflict between the ideology and practice of slavery? One part of the answer lies in the significance of conversion. By forcing their slaves to convert, masters claimed to increase the number of souls belonging to the “right” religion. This claim fostered a competitive attitude toward slaves’ souls and, in some cases, a desire to accumulate slaves to prevent their conversion to the “wrong” religion as well as to enforce their conversion to the “right” one.
Chapter 7 explains how in the context of the crusades, the Mamluk system of military slavery came to be perceived by both Muslims and Christians as a means to win slaves’ souls for Islam and defend the Islamic world against attacks by pagans and Christians. Similarly, canon law required Christian communities to buy Christian slaves and potential converts from Jews to protect them from conversion to Judaism, while Jewish communities in Egypt regarded the integration of slave converts as a victory for their faith.94 The fourteenth-century Dominican William of Adam dramatized the plight of Christian slaves in Muslim hands with two tales. The first was that of a Greek slave woman on the road to Persia who gave birth to a son. She debated whether to kill the child to prevent him from apostatizing or whether to keep him alive and rely on God’s mercy. William characterized this as a struggle between faith (fides) and love (pietas), with the faithful decision being to kill her son.95 The second tale was that of a slave convert in India who felt abandoned by God: “The Lord has turned His back to us, not His face; He has stricken us with His heel, utterly destroyed, and uprooted, and deserted us as useless logs cut for burning and has apparently deleted us from His memory. What shall we do? … Although I believe and know that it is better to put down the burden of the flesh than to lose eternal life, I have not been granted by heaven the gift of dying for the faith which I hold in my heart.”96 Putting words in the mouths of both real and fictional characters was a common medieval rhetorical device, and William may have invented these two tales to make a point. That point was the spiritual violence of slavery. Conversion was the greatest fear and most painful injury suffered by William’s imagined slaves.97
By the fifteenth century, the Castilian traveler Pero Tafur was able to claim that “the Christians have a Bull from the Pope, authorizing them to buy and keep as slaves the Christians of other nations, to prevent their falling into the hands of the Moors and renouncing the Faith. They are Russians, Mingrelians, Abkhaz, Circassians, Bulgars, Armenians, and other diverse Christian nations.”98 Tafur explained his own purchase of three Christian slaves by juxtaposing it with the Mamluk slave trade taking place around him. If he had not purchased them, they would have been purchased by Mamluk merchants and converted to Islam.
The fifteenth-century humanist Giovanni Gioviano Pontano also offered an explanation for the phenomenon of Christians enslaving Christians. He believed that Muslims (Turks and Africans) observed the prohibition against enslaving fellow Muslims, but
among us, Christians also serve. For as I heard from the ancients, the custom was that Thracians and also Greeks who inhabit the Black Sea be sold: who, lest they be in the service of the barbarians, merchants sailing the Black Sea, having redeemed them from the Scythians, were offering them for sale. For it seemed more honorable to serve them for a short time, while they repaid the money paid per head, than to be the plunder of barbarians and submissive to perpetual servitude, also with the greatest disgrace of the Christian name.… Therefore this great injury to humankind is made the law of humanity.99
In other words, Pontano thought it better for Orthodox Christians from the Black Sea to be purchased by Catholics and serve them in repayment than to be purchased by non-Christians.
In merchant circles, respect for property rights was sometimes given priority over the threat of slave conversion. This caused an outcry in 1445 when a fourteen- or fifteen-year-old slave described as a Christian from the land of Prester John (probably Ethiopia) fled from the house of his Muslim master in Alexandria to a ship belonging to the famous French merchant Jacques Coeur.100 The ship captain took the boy to Montpellier, where he was placed as a servant in the archbishop’s household. But Coeur feared that French galleys might no longer be allowed to trade in Egypt because his captain had violated an agreement with the Mamluks about the return of fugitive slaves. He ordered the boy shipped back; upon his return to Alexandria, the boy converted to Islam. This shocked the French Church, especially the religious orders dedicated to ransoming Christian captives from Muslims. French merchants who did business with Muslims maintained that Coeur had acted correctly. The resulting controversy played a role in Coeur’s fall from royal favor.
I have found only one medieval expression of remorse for the enslavement of coreligionists. Leontios Makhairas, a Greek Cypriot chronicler of the early fifteenth century, felt that the 1373 Genoese conquest of the island was divine punishment for Cypriot enslavement of their fellow Orthodox Christians:
And if you wish me to tell you how it was that Famagusta was taken, I say that this was allowed by God because of our sins. And not Famagusta only: it would have been just that they should have taken all Cyprus as well, because of our many sins. And to tell you about it openly: first of all was the sin of the slaves. The land of the Greeks was being ravaged, and the men were being brought over to the islands as slaves and captives, and our people treated them so hard-heartedly, that they used to throw themselves down from the roofs and kill themselves, and some of them cast themselves into pits, and others hanged themselves, for the heavy torments which they made them endure, and because they were famished.… And they went against the face of God, who says: “Six years your servant shall serve you, and in the seventh you shall set him free.” … For this reason God punished them, and the Bulgarians took horse against them; the slaves also and the Genoese; and they robbed them and carried them off captive, and took away their women and their goods, and humbled them to the ground.101
Makhairas’ remorse was limited, however. Elsewhere in his chronicle, he criticized Greek, Bulgar, and Tatar slaves for supporting the Genoese invasion. His contemporaries in Cyprus did not cease to buy Orthodox slaves.102
Slavery in Court
Because slavery was a matter of human law (ius gentium) in the Christian context, cases of slave status were adjudicated in civil rather than ecclesiastical courts. Each Italian city-state had its own law code (ius proprium), a set of local customs, and a system of courts to enforce them. However, because most Italian jurists studied law at the university in Bologna, the principles of Roman law and the ius commune underpinned most local legislation on slavery.103 Since the Justinianic Code provided an authoritative and comprehensive legal framework for slave status, legislators in Venice and Genoa largely confined themselves to regulating the use and behavior of slaves.104 Only the Genoese legal code attempted to define slave status: “let male and female slaves be understood … as those who were possessed or detained by any person as male or female slaves.”105 In another passage, slaves were defined as submissive persons.106 In a third passage, a slave was defined as “she who is held and owned as a slave by her master or mistress, and she who is considered and held to be a slave by the neighborhood of the said master or mistress.”107 These definitions are more or less circular, although they do highlight the role of reputation and witness testimony alongside written documents in determining slave status.
In Venice, cases of disputed status were handled by the