Women Enslaved
Our focus thus far has been on intermarriage between Muslims and Christians. None the less, it is important to recognize that the vast majority of the Christian women who were taken as sexual partners by the Umayyad rulers and other Islamic potentates in al-Andalus were not legitimate wives at all. They were, rather, jawārī (singular jariya), slaves of Iberian or other origin, who had been taken as concubines (sarārī; singular surrīya) on account of their beauty, or their abilities as singers, dancers, or reciters of poetry. The institution of concubinage was recognized by the Qur’an and came to enjoy popularity in all parts of the Islamic world, with the acquisition of jawārī widely regarded as an important status symbol.116 Islamic legal schools regulated the relationship between a man and his concubine and defined her rights closely. A concubine who bore a child to her Muslim master assumed the status of umm walad (mother of a child), which meant that she could not be sold, would enjoy permanent residence in her master’s household, and would be manumitted on his death, if not sooner; their child would be regarded as a free, legitimate heir, whose legal and social status was equal to that of any siblings born to their father’s free wives.
We know the names of a few of those Christian women who were taken as slave concubines in this way.117 One was Qalam, a woman of Navarrese origin, who had been enslaved at a relatively young age and joined the harem of the emir ‘Abd al-Raḥmān II (822–52), where she won renown as a skilled singer and dancer, as well as an outstanding calligrapher and storyteller.118 Another was Ailo, who bore Muḥammad I his son and succcessor al-Mundhir (886–88).119 By far the best known of the jawārī, however, was the Christian Navarrese woman known as Subḥ (d. 998).120 We have no idea of the precise circumstances that led to Subḥ’s enslavement, but given her reputed expertise as a singer and poetess in Arabic the likelihood is that she had been taken to al-Andalus at a relatively young age and received her education there.121 This impression is reinforced by the fact that her brother, known as Fā’iq or Rā’iq in the sources, came to hold a series of influential posts in the caliphal administration between at least 972 and 974/5.122 Recruited to the harem of al-Ḥakam II (961–76), Subḥ bore the caliph two sons, and it was reputedly through her influence that one of them later succeeded his father to the throne as Hishām II. Such was her sway over the caliph, one source claimed, that he never opposed her will.123 After Hishām II’s accession to the throne, Subḥ retained an influential role within the machinery of royal government in Córdoba, effectively acting as regent on account of her son’s young age, with control over the state bureaucracy and treasury. In 996, however, she was sidelined from power by the caliph’s ḥājib, al-Manṣūr, whose own career Subḥ had earlier helped to further and with whom she was reported to have had a passionate love affair.124
The capture and onward sale of Christian women in the slave markets of al-Andalus is well enough documented to suggest that there was a considerable demand for such human merchandise.125 Attractive slave girls could command high prices at market, particularly those who were accomplished singers.126 In the vast majority of cases, such women had been taken into captivity in the aftermath of one of the many military expeditions that were launched from al-Andalus against the Christian states of the North. Whether the Christian rulers ever surrendered women to the Umayyads in payment of tribute, in accordance with the terms of a peace treaty, as Christian tradition would later claim, is unknown, but it is not entirely inconceivable. After all, the payment of tribute in the form of slaves is recorded from other regions bordering the Islamic world.127 In other cases, the slave traffickers might have been Jews or even Christians. Thus, one source refers to the sale of a number of Christian women by Jewish merchants in ninth-century Mérida.128 Meanwhile, a charter preserved in the cartulary of the Portuguese monastery of São Mamede de Lorvâo relates how, at the time of the capture of Coimbra by al-Manṣūr in 987, a local Christian, one Ezerag de Condeixa “went to Farfon iben Abdella and became a Moor,” which could either mean that he converted to Islam, or that he pledged support to the Muslim authorities.129 Having been granted command over thirty Muslim horsemen, Ezerag is reported to have captured the Christian inhabitants of the villages in the vicinity by trickery and sold them into slavery at Santarém for six pieces of silver, in exchange for which he was later granted some property near Coimbra by al-Manṣūr.
In many cases, prisoners would have been taken in relatively small numbers, as Muslim raiding parties rampaged far and wide across Christian lands in search of easy pickings. In others, the numbers involved were clearly more substantial: when Barcelona was sacked by al-Manṣūr in 985, it was reported that all of those Christians who had taken refuge in the city at the command of Count Borrell II “for the purpose of guarding it and defending it” were either killed or taken prisoner.130 We can get a clearer idea of how the division of such human plunder was carried out from Ibn Idhārī al-Marrākushī’s relatively detailed account of the winter campaign waged by Abd al-Malik al-Muẓaffar in late 1007, when he besieged the castle of San Martín.131 We are told that when, after several days of fierce fighting, the exhausted Christian defenders finally surrendered, they filed out of the castle, placing themselves and their property under the ḥājib’s authority. Once all had done so, al-Muẓaffar commanded that the Christians be separated into two groups: on one side the warriors and other men; on the other the women and children. The ḥājib then approached the prisoners on horseback, accompanied by his retinue, and was greeted by great cheers and shouts of praise from his troops. On al-Muẓaffar’s command, the Christian men were then put to the sword; the women and children were shared out among the various volunteers and other troops who had taken part in the campaign, “as was the custom.”132 Doubtless some prisoners were also carried back to Córdoba with the army. A charter of Vermudo II of León reports that after the Muslim attack on Simancas in 983 those Christians who had not been executed outright were led off to Córdoba in chains.133 For those of high social status there was always the hope that they might be ransomed.134 But for the majority of Christian captives there was the prospect of a lifetime of servitude, either in al-Andalus or in other regions of the Islamic world. Ibn Ḥawqal, writing in the 970s, listed male and female slaves among the most important exports of al-Andalus.135 Of course, this was not a one-way street: Muslims too were regularly enslaved in the course of Christian cross-border raids.136
The tenth century marked the apogee of the cross-border slave trade, as the Umayyad caliphate and the ḥājibs who wielded power on its behalf exerted ever greater military pressure on the Christian states of the North. According to the North African historian ‘Abd al-Wāḥid al-Marrākushī (b. 1185), the fifty or so campaigns waged by al-Manṣūr from the 980s down to his death in 1002 produced such a glut of Christian slave women in the markets of Córdoba that prices collapsed, and the number of men deciding to take a free Muslim wife, as opposed to a slave concubine, slumped dramatically. The beautiful daughter of one Christian notable was said to have fetched only 20 dinars.137 For its part, the anonymous fourteenth-century Dhikr Bilād al-Andalus, which preserves a catalogue of al-Manṣūr’s numerous military campaigns, places particular emphasis on the large numbers of women and children captured by the ḥājib.138 He claims, for example, that when Barcelona was sacked in 985 some 70,000 women and children were taken into captivity; at Zamora (981) the figure given is 40,000 women; at Pamplona (999) 18,000. These figures are doubtless so much hyperbole, but the chronicler’s repeated emphasis on the numbers of prisoners taken demonstrates that the capture of Christian slaves, and in particular females and their offspring, was regarded as a specially significant and praiseworthy act. This impression is reinforced by the fact that when ‘Abd al-Malik al-Muẓaffar returned from a largely fruitless campaign to Sobrarbe and Ribagorza in 1006 he was widely criticized in Córdoba for not having brought back young captives as his father had regularly done, supposedly prompting the sardonic comment from one slave trader that “the slave importer is dead.”139
Two precious eleventh-century documents enable us to put names to a handful of