This definition of race and racism is broad. In specific historical circumstances, it has overlapped with other categories that we now consider distinct from race, including religion,58 class,59 and language.60 Our belief that physical appearance is a meaningful kind of permanent, fixed, and inherent difference is relatively recent. The word race in its current sense, a category of people distinguished from others by certain hereditary physical traits, entered English in the late fifteenth century.61 The notion that skin color was an important aspect of race emerged in the late sixteenth century, and the ideology of different skin colors as the basis for slavery was not fully developed until the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
All of these developments occurred after the period covered by this book. In medieval Latin, the words used to categorize people were gens, generatio, genus, progenies, and natio. In Arabic, the most common terms of categorization were jins, aṣl, naw’, and umma. Gens (pl. gentes) and jins (pl. ajnās) are linguistically related.62 They can be translated in several ways, all building on the concepts of kind, type, group, and kinship. Medieval people created and shared both verifiable genealogies and myths of common ancestry to explain their systems of categories and groups.63 Some of the most important mythical genealogies made use of the three sons of Noah, the twelve apostles of Jesus, the Homeric heroes, and the founders of Arab tribes, as well as the gens of Adam, which encompassed all humanity, the tribe of the free (banī al-aḥrār), and the gentes of Christianity, Islam, Judaism, and paganism.64
In the late medieval Mediterranean, religious categories were often perceived as permanent, fixed, and inherent. Even after conversion, a convert’s religion of origin remained relevant and could still be used to categorize him or her. This attitude helps to explain why religion could function as the basis of slave status even though slaves were expected to convert. In this sense, then, it is possible to talk about religion as a racial category in the medieval world.
However, medieval people also engaged in something closer to our form of race-thinking, categorizing each other based on physical differences that they supposed to be permanent, fixed, and inherent. The bodies of knowledge through which these racial categories were constructed were ethnography (the study of different kinds of people throughout the world), physiognomy (the study of physical traits associated with different qualities of personality and character), physiology (the study of the functioning of the human body), and astrology (the study of the effects of heavenly bodies on earthly ones). Ethnography, physiognomy, physiology, and astrology were part of a shared medieval Mediterranean intellectual culture: authoritative treatises were written, translated, and exchanged among Christians, Muslims, and Jews.65 Medieval scholars debated whether racial categories were truly fixed; for example, whether the children of dark-skinned Ethiopians who moved north would become paler. This debate was largely irrelevant to slavery, though.66
In constructing their racial categories, medieval Christians started with the observation that although many human beings resemble one another, none look precisely identical, except for twins.67 They interpreted the infinite variety of human bodies as a sign of God’s boundless creativity and natural fertility.68 An individual’s nature was taken to refer to both his or her unique traits and the shared traits that made him or her recognizable as one human among many. Medieval Islamic scholarly discourse also made a distinction between the diversity of individual bodies and the shared physical characteristics of groups.69 Shurūṭ manuals warned scribes that race (jins) and skin color could not substitute for a full physical description (ḥāliyya).70
Medieval discourse on religious difference was largely binary: humanity was divided into believers and unbelievers, the right religion and the wrong ones. The existence of multiple kinds of Christians and Muslims complicated this binary somewhat, but as discussed in Chapter 1, this had only a limited effect on slavery. In contrast, racial difference was perceived as a broad spectrum ranging from the normative body at the center to the monstrous races that peopled the far reaches of the earth.71 Whether cyclops, cannibals, and blemmyae were real was beside the point; they represented the extremes of human possibility, the furthest ends of the racial spectrum. The medieval theory of climate was used to place races in intermediate positions along spectrum, usually from north to south.72 Those living in the frigid northern climate zone were supposed to have pale skin, lank hair, a dull intellect, and a cold temperament. Those living in the tropical southern climate zone were supposed to have dark skin, wooly hair, foolish minds, and a hot temperament. The temperate climate zone in the middle was supposed to produce beautiful, reasonable, and well-balanced people. Since the theory of climate zones was drawn from ancient Greek sources, particularly Hippocrates’ Airs, Waters, Places, it was part of the intellectual inheritance shared by the entire Mediterranean world. Of course, most medieval authors tended to locate the temperate zone close to their own homes, wherever that might be.
The association between race and climate theory explains why notaries and scribes used racial and geographical categories (de progenie russiorum vs. de partibus Russia) interchangeably in legal descriptions of slaves.73 When legislators in Florence tried to define slave status, they struggled to articulate a difference between religious, racial, and geographical categories. Thus they permitted Florentines to own and sell any person “who is not of the Catholic and Christian faith … the aforesaid is understood concerning slaves [who were] infidels by origin of their birth, or born from the race of the infidels, even if at the time when they were brought to the said city, court, or district they were of the Christian faith, or even if at some time afterwards they were baptized.… [A person] is presumed to have been infidel by origin if he or she arose from infidel places and race.”74
When Genoa instituted an inspection regime in Caffa in the early fifteenth century to ensure that no Christians were being exported to the Islamic world, the inspectors asked slaves first about their race (natio), apparently considered equivalent to asking about their religion.75 In cases of doubtful status, the question was not whether the slave’s race was different from the master’s but how far along the spectrum of racial difference the slave fell. The people of the Black Sea were perceived as distant from the people of the Mediterranean: “certainly if it were not for the Genoese who are there, it would not appear that the people [of Caffa] have any lot with us.”76 This is why in Italy, the enslavement of Italian Christians caused outrage, the enslavement of Greek Christians caused discomfort, and the enslavement of Bulgar and Russian Christians was ignored. Although all three categories should have been legally protected from enslavement in Italy, Bulgars and Russians were further along the spectrum of racial difference than Greeks, and therefore it was more socially acceptable to enslave them.
Race and Slavery in the Late Medieval Mediterranean
We have established that racial categories were a factor in determining slave status in the late medieval Mediterranean, even though racial difference was not the ideological basis of slavery. We have also established that late medieval people perceived race not in binary terms but as a profusion of human diversity signifying the endlessly fertile creativity of God in nature. Yet, although the number of racial categories was potentially infinite, only a few of them were strongly associated with slavery in the late medieval Mediterranean. Medieval scholars who produced lists of enslaveable people did not necessarily agree on which races were enslaveable and which were not, but the act of compiling lists demonstrated their belief that it was possible to divide the infinite races of humanity into two categories, the enslaveable and the free.77
According to Mamluk-era shurūṭ manuals (collections of model contracts), the list of enslaveable people could be divided into Turks and Sūdān. Turks were supposed to be light-skinned northerners originating anywhere from Europe to China. They could be further subdivided into Qiyāṭ, Naymān, Mongol, Kipchak, Khita’i, Circassian, Russian, Alan, Bulgar, Tatar, Āq, Chaghatai, Georgian, Greek, and Armenian categories, among others.78 Thus a Circassian