In theory, Catholic and Orthodox Christians should not have enslaved one another no matter how much they hated each other. In practice, they did enslave one another, although Catholics had the upper hand and therefore enslaved more Orthodox than the reverse.63 In the early fourteenth century, after the restoration of the Byzantine Empire in Constantinople, Byzantine authorities complained vigorously about this. Patriarch Athanasius I wrote to the Byzantine emperor in 1303–1305 about the misery of Greeks captured by Turks and Italians, “those who escape half-dead from the Ishmaelites and the very Italians … who were able to take them into captivity on account of the magnitude of general lawlessness, their disregard for God, and their scorn and neglect of the divine commandments.”64 Emperor Andronicus II Paleologus protested to Genoa in 1308 that “certain Genoese induced certain Greek boys and girls from Constantinople and from other countries in Romania [i.e., Greek territory], promising to do many good things for them, if they would come to Genoa with them. Many boys and girls came, and when they were in the city of Genoa they sold them as slaves, which is unjust.”65 In response, Genoa’s colonial governor in Pera agreed to declare the enslaved Greeks free and permit them to leave. Andronicus II also wrote to Venice in 1319 to complain that Venetian pirates were selling Greeks as slaves in Rhodes and Cyprus.66 In 1339, Andronicus III Paleologus sent envoys to Pope Benedict XII to discuss ecclesiastical union and an alliance against the Turks. Among various proposals for improving Catholic–Orthodox relations, he asked the pope to order that “all Greeks who were sold by Latins, wherever they are, should be freed, and in addition that Greeks should not be sold, and if certain people buy or sell them, or go against them, they should be excommunicated.”67 Benedict XII ignored this suggestion.
Most fourteenth-century Catholics seem to have felt that Orthodox people deserved enslavement. An anonymous English pilgrim in the 1340s observed that because the Orthodox priests of Cyprus did not accept papal primacy, “their punishment, when captured, is life servitude (perpetua servitus), nor does the Church of Rome, although it is a work of charity to ransom slaves (servos), lift a hand for their liberation.”68 Another pilgrim in the 1340s, Niccolò of Poggibonsi, also used Orthodox rejection of papal primacy to justify their enslavement:
The Greeks hate us Latins more than they hate the Saracens, and through this great hatred they are separated from the Roman Church. As we make the pope, the vicar of God, to be the head of the Roman Church for Christians, likewise the Greeks make a vicar for themselves. In the place of the pope, they make the patriarch of Constantinople, and he makes the bishops.… Every Sunday the pope communicates with all those who obey him; but the pope treats them [the Greeks] in this way, that he allows others to take them and then sell them as slaves. And many times I saw merchants who had a great line, and they led them thus to sell at the market, as they do beasts; and when a merchant wants to sell this sad merchandise, he has them cried by the auctioneer; and whoever offers the most money, to him they are sold. O Greeks, who were masters of the world, and now are made slaves, resold throughout the world, priced like beasts!69
The early fourteenth-century crusade propagandist William of Adam offered a more moderate expression of this position: the pope did not have a pastoral duty toward Orthodox Christians but nevertheless deplored their enslavement by Muslims.70
Controversy over Catholic ownership of Orthodox slaves continued into the fifteenth century. In 1388, the bishop of Barcelona persuaded King John I of Aragon to restrict ownership of Greek slaves, but in 1401, the city council of Barcelona obtained a privilege from Pope Martin I that not only permitted ownership of Greek slaves but also prevented slaves “of the nation of the Greeks or who are Armenians, Albanians, Russians, Bulgars, Walachs, or from the parts or regions subject to the emperor of Constantinople” from challenging their status in court.71 An envoy from John VIII Paleologus to Venice in 1418 protested that a Venetian man in Modon was selling Byzantine subjects to the Catalans and holding others for ransom.72 The Venetian Senate denied the claims on the basis that its castellan in Modon would never allow such behavior. Bans by later popes on the sale of Greek slaves were quickly revoked.73 In the 1430s, a Burgundian visiting Constantinople reported that the Greeks “had reached the point of damning the Pope who had held a general council in which they were declared schismatics and damned and that they were a race of slaves (tous fussent serfs à ceux qui estoient serfs).”74
Although the status of Greek slaves attracted the most attention and debate, the majority of Orthodox slaves owned by Catholics were not Greek. In fifteenth-century Genoa, for example, Russians and Circassians were the two most common categories of slaves.75 Russians had adopted Orthodox Christianity in the tenth century, around the same time that Scandinavians had adopted Catholicism. Orthodox Christianity was also well established in the Caucasus.76 The kingdom of Georgia was a regional bastion of Orthodoxy, although it also had suzerainty over small Muslim principalities, such as Samtzkhe. Coastal Circassian and Abkhaz communities maintained close ties with Constantinople. Inland, however, the situation was murkier. Circassian and Abkhaz nobles treated religious allegiance as a political decision and could therefore be flexible about their professions of faith. During the fourteenth century, as Genoa established hegemony in the Black Sea, a few professed Catholicism.77 Circassian and Abkhaz villagers practiced a syncretic religion that blended Orthodoxy with animism. They decorated sacred trees with crosses and attached the attributes of older deities like Merise, the goddess of bees, to Christian figures, such as Mary.78 As a result, Catholic authors claimed fellowship with Georgians, Circassians, and Abkhaz when they wanted to emphasize the extent of the world’s Christian population but disavowed them in the context of slavery.
Other Christian groups were enslaved in smaller numbers. They included Armenians, Alans, Crimean Goths, Kipchak Turks,79 and the Ruthenians of Galicia and Volhyna.80 In the 1430s, rumors circulated that Black Sea Christians were descendants of mythical Catholic crusaders who had detoured around the perfidious Greeks of Constantinople.81 Other rumors suggested that the Crimean Goths were related to the Visigoths, the Germans, or the Scots.82 Nevertheless, slaves from all of these groups could be found in Genoa, Venice, and their colonies.83 In consequence, scholars have dismissed centuries of Christian life in the Black Sea, claiming that the region was mostly pagan or that its religious diversity enabled merchants to pick and choose non-Christian slaves rather than acknowledge that Catholic Christians systematically enslaved Orthodox Christians.84
The possibility of Muslims enslaving Muslims has also been dismissed by modern scholars. Despite the fact that Islam was the dominant religion of the Golden Horde and its Tatar subjects, modern scholars have assumed that mamluks of Tatar origin were pagan or that the Islamization of the Golden Horde was superficial and therefore legally and ethically irrelevant.85 Upon investigation, however, it is clear that many mamluks from the Black Sea must have been Muslim.86 Scholars at the time were aware that Islam was widespread among Tatars and Alans and that many mamluks were of Tatar or Alan origin.87 In recounting his life story, the amir Taghrī Barmish al-Jalālī revealed that he had been born in Anatolia and that his father was Muslim.88 Another amir, Yalbughā al-Sālimī, was born in Samarqand to a Muslim family and given the name Yūsuf.89 A popular epic glorifying Baybars, the first Mamluk sultan, said that his original name was Maḥmūd and that he was the son of the Muslim king of Khurasan.90 Although this story is untrue, it suggests an awareness among ordinary Mamluk people that some of their slaves had Muslim origins. One reason why mamluks were given the patronymic Ibn ʿAbd Allah, “son of a servant of God,” may have been to veil the names of their Muslim fathers.91
Mamluk-era scholars showed equally scant concern for the enslavement of Muslim women from peripheral