Slavery in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia. William D. Phillips, Jr.

Moroccan ports and inland cities. These conquests produced prisoners who were sold as slaves by the Spanish monarchy, by war leaders, and by ordinary soldiers, who received one or two slaves as part of their share of the booty. Most captives ended up in Spain, where they remained until ransomed, or longer if they could not arrange their ransoms.³⁴

      The Morisco Revolt

      Relations between the Christian authorities and the Moriscos produced complications for the history of slavery. Although converted to Christianity, Moriscos maintained a number of the social customs of their ancestors and were never able to allay the suspicions of Spain’s Old Christians about the sincerity of their Christian beliefs. They can be observed as a distinct group in Castilian history as early as the fifteenth century, when Juan II and Enrique IV employed them in royal service.³⁵ Their numbers swelled during the reign of Fernando and Isabel, when Muslims in the Spanish kingdoms, save only for those of Valencia, were forced 1502 to convert to Christianity or leave the country. Free Muslims followed different paths: some converted and assimilated, while others relocated to North Africa and continued their ancestral religion.³⁶

      Among the Moriscos were a certain number of slaves. Nonetheless, the majority of the Moriscos of the sixteenth century were free, and some of them engaged in slave trading, in violation of early sixteenth-century laws prohibiting them from owning slaves and much to the indignation of the representatives to the Cortes (the Castilian parliamentary body). The Cortes of Toledo of 1559 reported that Spanish Moriscos were purchasing black slaves in Spain and sending them to North Africa. They castrated some of them, presumably to fill the demand for eunuchs in the Muslim world, where emasculations were illegal and had to be done clandestinely. In response to the complaints of the Cortes, Felipe II ordered that slaves who suffered castration were subject to royal confiscation, and that the perpetrators would be fined.³⁷

      Many Moriscos ended up being enslaved during the Morisco uprisings in the Alpujarras south of Granada that began in 1568 and continued until 1571. Royal armies eventually brought them under control, with many Morisco men killed, and many other men, women, and children held captive. An intense, though brief, debate occupied court circles. Could the defeated Moriscos be enslaved? After all, the Morisco community had been officially Christian for generations, and Christians were not supposed to be enslaved. Nevertheless, most Spaniards, even in the highest circles, considered them to be Muslims who only outwardly conformed to Christianity. The decision was that they were rebels and could be enslaved. Morisco captives began to be sold as slaves even before the government reached its decision. In the interim, sale documents had clauses protecting the buyers in case the enslavements were not permitted, and other Moriscos, ones not involved in the revolt, offered to hold the captives until their fates could be decided.³⁸ Many other Moriscos were killed, making orphans of their children. Still other Moriscos found themselves unable to care for their children and offered them to Christian families to be raised. Such children, both those orphaned and those abandoned or sold, ran the risk of being enslaved, but the licenciado Navas de Puebla, legal official of the army, intervened to save many of them from slavery. As well, Navas exempted many Moriscos from being expelled and no doubt saved their lives in the process. The royal officials ultimately ruled that boys below the age of ten and a half years of age and girls below nine and a half could not be enslaved. They included war orphans or those separated from their parents. Many joined Christian households, where they resided until they reached the age of twenty. Most were contractually linked to their patrons by a process that resembled both the older contracts of apprenticeship and the encomienda system of New Spain. In Almería, Navas de Puebla worked out legal arrangements by which the children were to be sheltered by their patrons and had to work for them until they came of age. Their patron could employ them as domestic servants, and, if he were an artisan, he could teach them his occupation through apprenticeship. Many of the children became thoroughly assimilated and later married into Old Christian families. Their relatives by marriage helped them hide their New Christian backgrounds during the subsequent expulsions, which many of them must have been able to avoid.³⁹

      Granada’s Moriscos were relocated throughout the lands of the Crown of Castile in the aftermath of the revolts.⁴⁰ A generation later, in the early seventeenth century, all Moriscos—though still ostensibly Christians—were expelled from Spain. By various means, free Moriscos became slaves both during and after the expulsions, as others had become slaves during the Alpujarras revolts a generation before. Many expelled Moriscos left their children with Christian families; others sold their children to the soldiers. Adult Moriscos could be and were enslaved if they tried to avoid being expelled. After the expulsions, some Moriscos secretly returned, like Cervantes’s Ricote in Don Quijote. Freeborn North African Muslims traveled to Spain in search of employment, though consciously running the risk of being enslaved. Those who were caught and identified could be enslaved. Others were open and voluntary returnees, who chose to return to Spain even if it meant living in slavery.⁴¹

      Captives and Slaves

      There were important differences between the actual and potential status of captives and slaves, even though historical documents and modern historians may treat the terms captive and slave or captivity and slavery as equivalent. Captives, as in the examples earlier in this chapter, were those people who became prisoners of victorious armies and fleets in time of war or of raiders on land or sea in smaller engagements in times of war or peace. A captive entered a temporary status from which he or she would emerge, either by becoming free again when exchanged or ransomed, or by becoming a slave if neither exchanged nor ransomed.⁴² The wars and the raids in medieval and early modern Iberia usually crossed religious frontiers, for Muslims did not enslave other Muslims, and Christians did not enslave other Christians.⁴³ When Muslims or Christians fought among themselves, as they often did, captives ended up as prisoners of war who were usually ransomed or exchanged and did not become slaves.⁴⁴ Conflicts between Muslims and Christians, on the other hand, produced captives who often failed to obtain ransoms and ended up as slaves. Jarbel Rodríguez, in a recent book, drew the distinction between captive and slave: “In the world of medieval Iberia, therefore, captives were those individuals who, although they suffered many of the limitations and degradations of slavery, had a reasonable expectation of freedom and who owed their bondage to the religious wars between Christianity and Islam.” Captives, both Muslim and Christian, could realize that their rulers, home communities, or their families—or all of these—would make efforts to redeem them. Slaves could not expect to gain freedom except by making a personal agreement with their owner. Though slaves might secure help from family or friends or through community organizations such as religious brotherhoods, they could not look for direct assistance from the larger society from which they had come.⁴⁵ Sometimes the trajectory from captive to free was rapid, a matter of hours or a few days between the end of hostilities and an exchange of prisoners. Normally, though, it stretched over months or years before family or community could arrange a ransom. Captives could never be certain of a quick redemption. In the early twelfth century, Eneco Sanz de Lanes told of his family’s six-year ordeal when he was captured along with his wife and two children when the Almoravids raided Huesca.⁴⁶ From the late fifteenth century through the early modern period, arranging the repatriation of a Christian captive usually took years, often five or six, and at times as long as fifteen.

      As they waited to be exchanged or ransomed, captives worked and lived very much as slaves, and many died before they received their ransoms. Given their circumstances, some Christian captives chose another way out of their captivity by converting to Islam.⁴⁷ Christian captives could convert to Islam and thereafter become free Muslims. In the early years of the Muslim domination, such converted captives may have accounted for a fair percentage of the new adherents of Islam. The author of the contemporary chronicle of Miguel Lucas de Iranzo in the fifteenth century put it this way: “And, sinful as it was, there would be some of them, in desperation because of the life they led, who became renegades from the faith, as others have done in cases such as this.”⁴⁸ There is no way of even estimating how many availed themselves of the choice. The Muslim ruler of Granada had a special royal guard unit in the Alhambra in the fifteenth century, consisting of some six hundred troops raised from Christian boys captured, converted, and given military training.⁴⁹ The situation for Muslim captives in Christian