The difficulty of categorizing an individual slave in a reliable way can be illustrated by two descriptions of the same young woman, a slave purchased by Biagio Dolfin in Alexandria in 1419 and sent to Niccolò Dolfin in Venice. Her sale contract, composed in Arabic, described her as “a female slave of Nubian race, called Mubāraka, a Christian woman.” In a letter to Niccolò composed in Venetian, Biagio described her as “a little slave girl, black, Saracen, about fourteen years old.”7 These two descriptions are fundamentally inconsistent. Was Mubāraka a Nubian Christian or a Saracen (an Arab Muslim)? The answer is that, in the context of slavery, both racial and religious categories were dictated by the master. Mubāraka was a Nubian Christian in Alexandria because that categorization made her legally enslaveable in Alexandria, and she was an Arab Muslim in Venice because that categorization made her legally enslaveable in Venice.
Before embarking on a detailed discussion of language and race as they operated in the late medieval Mediterranean culture of slavery, however, several caveats are in order. First, although sources in Arabic and Latin used many of the same terms to categorize their slaves, we cannot assume that those terms meant precisely the same thing in both languages. Both Latin and Arabic, for example, used the word Turk to categorize slaves. In Latin sources, it referred to people from Anatolia, but Arabic sources were more likely to call people from Anatolia rūmī.8 The term Turk in Arabic sources could be used in multiple ways, but it was associated with nomads, people living in the north, and speakers of Turkic languages.
Second, the use of these terms varied according to genre. In Italy, legal documents and travel narratives used contemporary terms (Tatar, Circassian) for Black Sea people, while literary and scholarly works used classical Greco-Roman terms (Scythian, Sarmatian).9 Though it is frustrating for the historian to find multiple terms used to signify one group of people, it serves as an excellent reminder of the cultural construction of race. In the late medieval Mediterranean, racial categories were used inconsistently because different genres constructed them differently.
Finally, it should be noted that few of the slaves originating from the Black Sea were black by either medieval or modern standards. The subject of race in the Middle Ages is a complex one, contested among specialists and frequently misunderstood by nonspecialists.10 Studies of racism in medieval slavery have generally limited their analysis to black and white rather than engage with this complexity. I argue that the complexity of the medieval framework of race was essential to the medieval framework of slavery. When categorizing a slave by religion did not serve the needs of the master, either because religious affiliation was too difficult to prove in court or because it would lead to the slave’s manumission, masters turned to the much more complex and flexible category of race to justify their ownership. I also find that reexamining the powerful and deeply engrained association between black skin color, race, and slavery in a historical context where slavery was correlated with race but not with skin color helps show the ways in which modern racial thinking is historically contingent.
Language
Language was associated with outsider status in the late medieval Mediterranean culture of slavery. Slaves’ poor command of their masters’ languages, whether or not it was true, was often cited by medieval sources as evidence of their foreign, heathen origin.11 Slaves were also renamed by their masters in ways that marked their status as social outsiders. However, Christians and Muslims perceived the connection between language, outsider status, and slavery in different ways. Christians saw linguistic diversity as a reflection of the diversity of the Christian community and of humanity in general, whereas Muslims saw the Arabic language as a unifying force for the Muslim community.
Muslims placed great weight on Arabic as the language of Islam because it was the language in which God had revealed the Quran. Non-Muslims in disguise could be unmasked through their poor command of Arabic, but Muslims unable to speak Arabic might go unrecognized as believers.12 Under the wrong conditions, this could lead to their enslavement. For example, two Christian ships arrived in Tunis in 1462 with a group of captives for ransom. A passing traveler, ʿAbd al-Bāsiṭ ibn Khalīl, visited the ships and found one captive left unransomed by the locals, “an excellent Muslim of Turkish race, knowing only Turkish and the language of the Franks.”13 Since ʿAbd al-Bāsiṭ spoke Turkish as well as Arabic, he was able to speak with the captive and explain to the locals that he was a Muslim. They hastily ransomed him too and tried to excuse their mistake: “‘By God,’ he said to me, ‘we didn’t know his language at all, we believed that he was an infidel’” because he didn’t speak Arabic.14 Later in his journey, ʿAbd al-Bāsiṭ was shocked to encounter a group of Berbers who did not recognize him as a Muslim even though he was “addressing them in Arabic speech and confessing the two shahāda.”15 In fact, the Berbers “didn’t know Arabic at all: their language is Berber, and they don’t distinguish between the language of the Arabs and that of the Franks. They astonished me greatly.”
The assumption that all Muslims could speak Arabic was also the basis of a slave market scam practiced in al-Andalus during the thirteenth century.16 A female slave was offered for sale at a very high price with the claim that she was a fresh captive from Christian territory. After the sale had been concluded and the seller had gone away, the woman addressed the unwary buyer in perfect Arabic. She threatened to complain to the local judge that she was a free Muslim who had been unjustly enslaved, tarnishing the buyer’s reputation as well as costing him the purchase price. Then she would suggest that he resell her to another dupe and split the proceeds with her, perpetuating the scam but reducing his own losses.
In contrast, Christians interpreted linguistic diversity as a sign of religious diversity within the Christian community.17 Latin and Greek were used as shorthand to represent Catholic and Orthodox Christians. A crusade proposal of 1332 asserted the correctness of Catholicism against the “many Christian peoples of diverse languages who do not walk with us in faith or in doctrine.”18 Pilgrims and travelers used linguistic diversity to express their amazement at the variety of people they encountered. At Christmas celebrations in Bethlehem, the fourteenth-century pilgrim Niccolò of Poggibonsi explained that “each generation (generazione) celebrates in its own rite, in its own tongue, so that it is a marvel to see so many people thus disguised in tongue and attire (in lingua e in vestimenta).”19 He mentioned both spoken and written language in his description of the diversity of Cairo, where “one generation is distinguished from another in language and letters and dress.”20 According to Alberto Alfieri, fifteenth-century Caffa was “ornamented by the tongues of its diverse peoples.”21 Arnold von Harff used linguistic diversity to indicate the sheer length of his physical journey: “I will, with God’s help and according to my small understanding, now describe [my journey] from country to country, from town to town, from village to village, from mile to mile, from one day’s journey to another, from language to language, from faith to faith, together with all that I have seen and experienced.”22
What may appear to be a loose association between language and religion was nevertheless used to distinguish groups of people in law and in the courts. In 1224, a plaintiff speaking through an interpreter appeared before the archbishop of Genoa to challenge the status of a slave woman named Maimona. The archbishop ruled that Maimona’s enslavement was legitimate because “she did not seem to him to be from the land of Egypt, rather she seemed to be from the Maghrib on account of her language.”23 Venice offered to confer citizenship on fifty people in the Black Sea region to boost its presence there, but the offer was open only to those who were “Latin by origin and language.”24 In 1368, Venice forbade its merchants from importing slaves “of the Tatar language.”25 As for Circassians, the Venetian humanist Giorgio Interiano claimed that they were so uncivilized that they did not even have a written form for their language.26 A man named Johan won freedom in Valencia by proving that he was a Hungarian Christian and not a Muslim Turk. His case rested upon the testimony of four Germans who conversed with him in the German and Hungarian languages as well as a doctor who verified that he was not circumcised.27
In Italian documents, the connection