Miguel de Cervantes endured five years of captivity in Algiers after having been captured by Muslims at sea in 1575. Passages based on his experiences there before he was ransomed appear in many of his literary works, including Don Quijote. We will see more about his time in Algiers in Chapter 2.8
The records of the Inquisition contain the account of the life of a convert from Islam to Christianity, one José de Santa Ana. Apprehended and brought before the tribunal in Murcia in 1734, he had to counter the accusations of witnesses who saw him frequenting taverns in the company of two students. His accusers reported that he made disparaging remarks about the Christian religion in Spanish and supposedly said, “Hooray for Muḥammad!” in Arabic. He claimed to have been captured off Portugal and imprisoned for fourteen years and that he was trying to get back to North Africa at the time he was apprehended. He changed his story once in custody, blaming his reported behavior on heavy drinking urged on by the students. He then asserted that he was a native of Algiers and that he had gone to Lisbon in the company of some Christian clerics returning from a mission to redeem captives. Baptized and confirmed in Lisbon, he worked for years as a cook in a noble household. He left that employment after a disagreement and then wandered through Portugal and Spain, eventually reaching Murcia. In his interrogation, he swore that he was a good Christian and had no intention of returning to the Islamic world, where he believed that he would not be accepted because he had converted to Christianity. The inquisitors found him to have an acceptable, though incomplete, knowledge of Christianity. Due to his contrition and the extenuation of his drunkenness, they decided not to punish him.9
Mid-eighteenth-century documents reveal the life trajectory of Catalina de Gálvez, a woman of African descent, born on the island of Jamaica and taken to Cádiz at so young an age she could not remember the trip. There Francisco Malberán baptized, raised, and educated her. Later he manumitted her in his will, and she became a free citizen of Cádiz.10
These examples offer glimpses of the complexities in the long history of captivity and slavery in Iberia, a history echoed elsewhere in the world. Slavery was cross-cultural and multi-ethnic. Some slaves were born into their condition; others were captured and enslaved in the aftermath of conquest, war, raids, and kidnapping. Warriors recognized that defeat might be a prelude to enslavement. Christians, Jews, and Muslims could be slave dealers, slave owners, or the enslaved, depending on circumstance. Owners employed their slaves in a variety of ways as domestics, sexual partners, artisans, and farmers. They could sell their slaves, grant them as gifts, rent them as hired laborers, or pledge them as collateral for debts. Slaves endured their condition and occasionally sought and secured their freedom, sometimes by flight but most often by purchasing their manumission. For millennia, the presence of slavery was part of the ordinary experience of life even for those free people who owned no slaves. The freeborn feared it, for they knew that they faced the possibility of capture and enslavement.
Varieties of Slavery in Iberia
The societies of Iberia shared in the wider experience of slavery in the Mediterranean world and beyond. Slavery changed over time, despite elements of continuity. Slavery is a complex institution that had different manifestations from ancient to modern times and assumed a greater or lesser importance in the Islamic and Christian societies and economies of the Iberian Peninsula. The numbers of slaves, their percentage in the overall population, the way the slaves entered the host society, the work they did, the lives they led, their chances for manumission and assimilation all varied by place, period, and circumstance.
We can see slavery in medieval Iberia as a persistent feature that ultimately helped to lead to the great expansion of slavery in the Americas after 1500, but that is only a minor part of the overall story. The men, women, and children who lived as slaves over the course of the centuries were the most affected, but the presence of slavery had an impact as well on the free people who owned slaves and others who came in contact with them. Life in a society with slaves influenced attitudes about social differences and the relations among religions, because most slaves were initially of a different religion from that of their masters. They also usually spoke different languages and came from different ethnic backgrounds, thereby complicating relations between the host society and the slaves.
For Iberia, as for the rest of the Mediterranean world, slavery was present as far back as there are records. The early communities in the Iberian Peninsula practiced slavery, and the Carthaginians began a more intensive use of slave labor. Nevertheless, the Roman period was crucial for the later history of slavery.11 Rome’s domination of the peninsula began with a long period of conquest, beginning in the late third and lasting to the late first century B.C.E., from the time Roman armies first landed at the old Greek colony-city of Emporion (modern Ampurias or Empúries) on the Mediterranean coast to the final pacification of the north of the peninsula by Augustus. While fighting the forces of Carthage in eastern Spain, the Roman leader Scipio Africanus often allowed the native Hispani their freedom and enslaved only the Carthaginians. During the Roman conquest of the rest of Iberia, the Romans peacefully absorbed the peoples and places whose rulers agreed to join the conquerors but killed or enslaved those who resisted. It is impossible to be precise about the numbers of prisoners produced during the Roman conquest of Spain or to determine how many of the prisoners became slaves. Even though the Roman authors loved to list and likely to exaggerate the numbers of captives, at times some of them said only that “many” fell into Roman hands. All told, perhaps as many as 200,000 captives became slaves. Of these, some remained in the peninsula while others were exported. The scenes of battle, the concentrations of the defeated, and their subsequent distribution and sale to slave dealers echoed similar events elsewhere throughout the Mediterranean.12
The Romans colonized and Romanized the peninsula even as the wars of conquest dragged on, and Hispania, as they called it, eventually became fully a part of the Roman world.13 The numbers of slaves and their use in the economy were probably at their height at the time of the late Republic in the first century B.C.E., a consequence of the captives the wars of conquest created. Did Roman Spain become a slave society? One strand among recent studies of Roman slavery holds that only Italy and Sicily became true slave societies. Another view is that the label should also apply to certain other Roman provinces, including Spain.14 Certainly, Roman Spain had many slaves, though almost assuredly not so many as to represent 30 percent of the population.
Slaves in Roman Spain endured conditions similar to those elsewhere in the Roman world and worked as household servants, in commerce, and in artisan manufacturing. The Romans used slaves in gangs on large agricultural enterprises, in the mines, and on public works projects. Gang slavery was a characteristic of Roman slavery that did not last into the Middle Ages. Roman slaves existed in circumscribed legal conditions, but many received their freedom and lived out their lives as freedmen. If the freed slaves had children, those children and their descendants were free.
The numbers of slaves and the importance of slavery declined during the third and fourth centuries, as the Roman Empire itself staggered. The demographic, social, and economic changes that collectively made up the decline of the western Roman Empire were accompanied by alterations in the patterns of slave use. As the cities lost population and significance in the economy, the centers of economic and social gravity shifted from the towns to the country villas. The hollow cities no longer provided major markets for rural produce, while the villas tended to become more self-sufficient. Large slave gangs were no longer needed, and urban slaves became fewer in number. Many of the rural slaves eventually blended with free peasants into a group of semi-dependent workers. Roman Hispania was not a slave society by the end of the imperial period, if it ever had been one, but was a society with slaves. With the decline of the western empire, the conditions were set for the Germanic incursions and the establishment of the Visigothic kingdom in Iberia.
Slavery continued to be important in the Visigothic period from the fifth to the early eighth century. The Visigoths had known slavery before they entered Roman territory. Once inside the Roman borders, they generally retained the Roman laws governing slavery and instituted only subtle changes in its practice.