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

freedom. In such cases when the slaves were promised future manumission, they entered a status in which they enjoyed enhanced rights, notably that they usually could not be sold to a third party. Concubinage, as we will see, was a common situation for female slaves, for whom pregnancy and childbearing often followed. While this could arouse the anger of the owner’s wife and his legitimate children, in many cases the slave mother found her status improved. This was the case in both Christian and Muslim society, but among the Muslims it rested upon strong legal norms and societal customs. A slave who bore her Muslim master a child, always assuming he acknowledged responsibility, entered a new status. She could no longer be sold and would be freed on the master’s death, and her child would be free from the time of birth. We will see many examples of the gradations between full freedom and full slavery in the chapters that follow.

      By necessity, the periods and places where the greatest number of sources exist and where scholars have investigated them most fully receive prominence in this book. Consequently, the emphasis falls on the late Middle Ages and the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The histories of slavery in Roman Hispania and in the Visigothic kingdom are less completely developed, having left fewer traces in the historical records and having attracted fewer modern scholars. The same is true for al-Andalus (Muslim Iberia), where slavery was a common component of society that at the time did not produce controversy, extensive commentary, or archives of business transactions. Consequently, there are fewer documents to be investigated, and, it should be noted, until recently there have been fewer investigators competent in the Arabic language. The documentary base is wider and deeper for the Christian kingdoms of the Middle Ages and the early modern centuries. Records of the sales and manumissions of slaves are readily available in local archives. Wars and skirmishes on land and at sea produced captives—Christians in Muslim hands and Muslims in Christian hands—who could be ransomed if fortune favored them and otherwise could be enslaved. The accounts of ransoms and prisoner exchanges are abundant.

      The sources and the studies of slavery in Spain allow an excellent view to be developed of the trade in slaves, their lives, their work, and their chances to become free. What they do not allow is a comprehensive accounting of prices and numbers of slaves throughout the periods and places we examine. It would be wonderful if they did, but the information about prices and numbers of slaves is quite sketchy for the Middle Ages and not a great deal better for the early modern centuries. This may come as shock and a disappointment to those familiar with the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century history of slavery, for which statistical records are abundant. The prices listed in the documents are of course in the local money of account, and rendering those prices in modern terms would be a meaningless project. Premodern officials did not take censuses or compile statistics on population. Many scholars estimate the figures for the numbers of slaves they study, and most recognize the limitations of their estimates. Their percentages often rely on their own estimates of the numbers of sales or baptisms or manumissions compared to estimates of the total population prepared by other scholars.

      One example of the difficulties involved in setting figures for populations of slaves is that of the island and city of Mallorca in the late Middle Ages. For the early fourteenth century, Charles Verlinden suggested 36 percent of the total population.²⁵ The same author suggested a figure of 20 percent for the early fifteenth century.²⁶ Subsequent estimates by a variety of scholars have reduced the assumed percentages considerably. For the early fourteenth century, Hillgarth accepted at least 10 percent,²⁷ whereas Planas Rossello, following Santamaría, accepted 20 percent.²⁸ Ricardo Soto Campany estimated only 13 percent of the island’s population to be composed of slaves.²⁹ Most recently, Antoni Mas i Forners explained the difficulties in reconciling the various estimates for the fourteenth century population of slaves and restated the variations of 10, 20, and 36 percent. He pointed out that any one of those estimates would have reflected “very elevated percentages within the overall population,”³⁰ Mallorca may have had about 5,000 slaves by the mid-fifteenth century, about 10 percent of the total population.³¹ These varying estimates are testimony to the continuing interest in the history of slaves and slavery in late medieval Mallorca, as scholars have brought differing assumptions and statistical techniques to the same problem. Studies of slavery in other Iberian regions and municipalities may seem more precise, because for most of them we have only single, not multiple, estimations. All this is a sober reminder that precision is never easy and often impossible, given the incomplete documentation that remains from the past for the present.

      The study of slavery in Iberia does not exist in isolation, and scholars working on the history of slavery are increasingly aware of studies elsewhere, especially of slavery in the Americas, that form useful comparative contexts. In the Americas, slavery was more recent, having ended only in the nineteenth century, and it produced more records that have survived, especially the words of the slaves and former slaves themselves. We will see the personal stories of individual slaves in the pages that follow, but readers must be aware that it is not always possible to find the complete life stories of pre-modern slaves in Iberia, due to the incomplete documentary record. Much recent work has concentrated on slavery in individual towns and cities and relied on the rich resources of the records of notaries, in which sales, manumissions, and wills are the main records that relate to slaves. As valuable as the notarial documents are, they usually illuminate a single moment in the life of a slave, such as the day of the sale or the time of the manumission. These documents typically show prices, physical descriptions of the people being sold, and at times something of the past lives of the slaves and the skills they possessed. The notarial documents have limitations. Their foremost drawback is that they were almost always created at the behest of the owners, who had the notaries document the sales of slaves or their manumission. They were not done at the initiative of the slaves or ex-slaves, except in a few exceptional cases. The voices of the slaves, consequently, do not provide the dominant notes in the documents, but at times and with close analysis, something from the slaves’ points of view can be interpreted from them, and the clear and authentic voices of the slaves themselves emerge.³²

      The lives of the enslaved people of pre-modern Iberia provide the points of focus for this book. It begins with a chapter containing an overview of the history of slaves and slavery in the peninsula. Thereafter, the chapters are topical, not chronological, and follow what might be the trajectory of the life of an individual who became a slave, lived and worked as a slave, and eventually became a free person. Chapter 2 shows the many ways a person could become a slave. Some people were born as slaves. Others were born free and became slaves later. Wars, raids, and kidnapping all produced slaves, as did other means, including judicial sentences, sale of children by impoverished parents, and even voluntary slavery. Slaves could be sold, and many were moved long distances before their sales, as Chapter 3 explores. It also reveals that the transport, sale, and purchase of slaves all had complex variations. Chapter 4 shows how people lived as slaves, especially how they interacted with their owners and other living in the same households. Often they had to learn a new language, accept a new religion, and otherwise become culturally fluent in a new social environment. Women and some men slaves had to endure involuntary sexual activities—rape, to put it bluntly—that in the case of the women could and often did lead to pregnancy and childbearing. Slaves were not powerless and made the best of their limited opportunities, even with the severe restrictions that they faced. They relied on themselves and friends and family, while religion and the religious institutions they joined provided possibilities of solace and some material support. They did not lack agency in their own affairs. Chapter 5 shows the ways that slaves were put to work in the wide range of activities of the pre-modern centuries, from service in elite households, to action as business agents, to hard labor in fields or artisan workshops. Some slaves became free, as Chapter 6 indicates. They could flee and attempt to reach freedom across religious and political frontiers. Many more became free by manumission, though it was not won easily. The granting of manumission almost always depended on the master, who could choose to free his slaves for any number of reasons, either during his lifetime