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

activity and Castilian land campaigns increased from the late eleventh century onward. Christian city-states and kingdoms profited from their successes as they seized the initiative from the Muslims and began to secure slaves from a wider area. Urban areas expanded, particularly in Catalonia, and the purchasers of slaves tended to be city dwellers, who preferred women as their household slaves. The attitudes of the slave owners altered as well. Earlier they had employed Muslim captives as slaves and tended to avoid close attachments with their slaves. Thereafter, they increasingly considered their slaves, by then predominantly women, as part of the household. They usually referred to them by name in legal documents, took care to supervise their conversion to Christianity, and manumitted them more frequently.²⁴ Slaves still worked at productive tasks, both in the homes and workshops and on the farms and garden plots of their owners. Women slaves often became concubines of their masters.

      By the late Middle Ages, the maritime regions of the Crown of Aragon shared in the system of slavery that was characteristic of the Christian countries of the western Mediterranean.²⁵ From the Adriatic Sea westward, the polities of Italy and Sicily, southern France, and eastern Iberia all shared a common pattern of slavery and slave holding, featuring urban and domestic slaves more than rural slaves, and with women typically but not always outnumbering men as slaves. Slaves were most commonly recruited by a well-organized commerce conducted mainly by Italians who sought non-Christian slaves, or at least non-Catholic slaves, around the southern and eastern shores of the Mediterranean and beyond through the straits to the northern shores of the Black Sea. Periodic Christian victories over the Muslims placed large numbers of captives on the market in the western Mediterranean. When Christians conquered the islands of Mallorca (1229–30) and Minorca (1287), the chronicler Muntaner stated that 40,000 Muslim captives were sold as slaves throughout the Christian Mediterranean.²⁶

      The special circumstances of medieval Iberia included communities of religious minorities living within the lands of the dominant religions, with Jewish and Christian communities in Muslim Spain and Jewish and Muslim communities in Christian Spain. Complications for slavery naturally arose, for Muslim rulers prohibited Christians and Jews from owning Muslim slaves, just as Christian rulers forbade Jews and Muslims to own Christian slaves. The best studied of these special cases was the Mudejar community in the medieval Crown of Aragon. Mudejars were Muslims living under Christian rule. Many of them continued to own slaves, so long as the slaves were not Christian, and derived significant benefits from slave ownership beyond the normal labor and services any slave owners received. From the eleventh century on, slaves of the Mudejars often engaged in everyday interactions with the Christian community, and thus provided channels for acculturation in language and everyday behavior. At the same time, Muslim slaves imported into the Mudejar communities from Muslim lands brought their experience of living in a dominant Muslim polity and consequently provided support for the Islamic culture of the Mudejars, who faced pressures to assimilate into the dominant Christian society.²⁷

      Raiders from both sides of the religious divide preyed on the coastal populations by capturing victims at sea or along the unprotected coasts. Those captives who had the means or who could secure the help of their families back home could arrange ransoms and exchanges. Others less fortunate ended up as slaves.²⁸

      Late medieval Castile was not greatly involved in Mediterranean activity and purchased few slaves from Mediterranean merchants. Slaves in Castile up to the late fourteenth century were almost exclusively Muslim in origin, and Castilian slavery was fed by the reconquest and by raids into Muslim-controlled territory. King Alfonso X’s thirteenth-century law code, the Siete Partidas, inspired by the high medieval revival of Roman law, incorporated many Roman elements and went on to influence later Castilian legal codes, as well as the legislation affecting Spain’s American colonies.²⁹ For Portugal, the presence of Muslim slaves is documented from the eleventh century, but a lack of both original sources and modern studies limits what is known about them. More numerous studies of slavery in Portugal focus on the period from the 1440s onward, when the direct trade in sub-Saharan slaves began.³⁰

      Two turning points altered the geography of the slave trade to Christian Iberia and brought slaves of different ethnic origins to the markets of the peninsula. One was the Black Death of the mid-fourteenth century. A great pandemic reached the Mediterranean world from Asia, which in a period of less than four years killed a third or more of Europe’s population and had a similar impact on the Middle East.³¹ It was the greatest human catastrophe ever to hit the region, with the death toll in percentage terms far surpassing even the losses in the First and Second World Wars. The survivors faced many adjustments, not all of them bad. For the elite, there was a concentration of wealth, either through inheritance or their ability to sell what their fields and workshops produced at higher prices. Among the non-elite, surviving rural and urban workers could secure better terms of work and higher pay for their labor. Elite households needed servants and had the money to pay for them, while the workers in the smaller labor force could opt out of domestic service and secure jobs with higher status. Slaves could fill the gap and began to be secured and traded in a wider geographical area, from Dalmatia through southeastern Europe to the shores and islands of the Black Sea to the lands of the Russian rivers. This was the case for many of the northern Italian cities and for Barcelona, Valencia, and other smaller ports of the Crown of Aragon.

      The second major change took place in the second half of the fifteenth century, when the Portuguese and Spanish probing expeditions down the Atlantic coast of Africa began to bring sub-Saharan Africans as slaves into Europe. Europeans initially had become aware of the riches of sub-Saharan Africa because of their interest in Morocco and the African goods from farther south—gold and slaves above all—available there. By the end of the fifteenth century, the Portuguese had established a commercial trajectory that brought slaves from coastal enclaves in Atlantic Africa to Portugal. This marked a fundamental change, for now sub-Saharan Africans arrived in Christian Europe directly instead of indirectly via the trans-Saharan caravan routes of the Muslims and the trade across the Mediterranean. Of these slaves, some remained in Portugal, whereas dealers took others to be sold elsewhere in Europe. Many slaves went to Seville, where some remained, while others traveled farther to the ports of the Crown of Aragon and to the more northerly cities of Castile. Still others passed directly from Lisbon to the eastern Iberian ports.³² Thus the Portuguese developed a trade in black African slaves that began small and served the limited needs of the peninsula and the Iberian-controlled Atlantic islands. The trade later grew exponentially with the development of the colonial empires in the Americas.

      As they colonized the Americas beginning in the 1490s, the Spaniards established slavery in the new possessions. In doing so, they made use of several long- and short-term traditions present in the peninsula by 1492. One was the persistence of the legal regulations governing slavery, present from Roman times and ratified in the Siete Partidas. Another tradition was the existence of sugar-cane plantations and sugar refining, both in the peninsula and in the Canaries. In the Canaries, at least, the connection between sugar and slavery had been established, just as had the custom of purchasing black African slaves from the Portuguese. The Portuguese overseas ventures followed a similar trajectory as they colonized Madeira and other Atlantic islands and then Brazil across the Atlantic. Growing from these precedents, slavery became an important social and economic institution in the Iberian American empires, and it lasted into the late nineteenth century.

      Slavery played a crucial role in colonial economic development, and eventually portions of the Americas became true slave societies. Slavery in Spanish America was complex, and during the first two centuries of the colonial period, two systems of slavery coexisted. One was an outgrowth of the traditional pattern of slavery in the Christian Mediterranean during the Middle Ages. In it, owners employed slaves as domestics, artisans, and assistants of all kinds. In the first decades of the Spanish settlement of the Americas, this was the predominant system, with slaves and freedmen, often of African origin, acting in an intermediate role between the Spaniards and the Amerindians. The other system was large-scale slavery for the sugar plantations and the mines in Spanish America and Portuguese Brazil, a variety of slavery reminiscent of the Rome gang slavery in the late Republic and early Empire and one virtually non-existent in Europe and North Africa during the Middle Ages. With the passage of time, the highly concentrated gang slavery became the more