During the reconquest of Valencia and the campaigns in Murcia, the Christian conquerors sold prisoners of war into slavery but reacted vigorously to stop Muslims who were not war captives from being sold as slaves.18 From among the captives, though, King Jaume sent some two thousand slaves as gifts to kings, emperors, nobles, cardinals, and the pope.19 In 1280, after King Pere took Montesa, “slavers continued for at least a year and a half their purchases among the multiple prisoners of war.”20
In addition to war, free people could fall into slavery if they were captured in raids across religious lines, by incursions on land, by coastal raids, or by seizures at sea. Such raids continued through the centuries of the later Middle Ages and into modern times.21 They were features of the centuries-long confrontation between Muslim and Christian societies around the Mediterranean. Life was precarious for those, whether Muslim or Christian, who lived along the coasts or near the land frontier between the areas of Islamic and Christian control. As the Christian reconquest moved southward, royal and municipal authorities had to offer incentives for settlers in areas exposed to Muslim raids.
Muslim raids into Christian territory were designed for quick seizures of booty and prisoners, and the captives were held until they were ransomed. Along the frontiers of Muslim Granada in the fifteenth century, Christians fell into the hands of Muslims in several ways. Muslims made raids into Christian territory and captured groups and individuals. In addition to defeated warriors, the captives were usually people who had been working alone in the countryside, such as shepherds or farmers, or those traveling the roads, such as merchants. Coastal dwellers, especially those in isolated villages, ran heightened risks, as pirates or corsairs could raid with ease, just as they could capture vessels at sea.22 Christian raiders sometimes found themselves surrounded and captured, and individual Christians at times were sent into Muslim territory as hostages in exchange for other prisoners. As the reconquest moved still farther south, victorious Christian armies freed their coreligionists who were being held as slaves.23
On the Christian side, Muslim prisoners of war increased the servile population in the aftermath of victorious Christian raids. By the eleventh century, Christian Spain had many fewer slaves of Christian origin and many more of Muslim origin. The multiplication of the manumissions over time meant that by the twelfth century few Christians were slaves. The Muslim slaves in this early period were seldom ransomed. They frequently received baptism, and ultimately they and their descendants became amalgamated into the lower rungs of the society of the Christian states. Once enslaved by war, for the Muslims, and once born into slavery, for the Christian slaves, they could be transferred from owner to owner by purchase and sale, by gift, and by testament. They could also be manumitted. Christians seem to have been manumitted more frequently than were Muslims.24
In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the Portuguese monarchs and nobles conformed to general Iberian practice and enslaved Muslim prisoners of war. Portugal no longer bordered on Muslim territory after the Algarve was conquered in the thirteenth century. Thereafter, the most fruitful source of slaves for Portugal was North Africa, although occasionally the Portuguese participated in Castilian raids on Granada and obtained slaves there. In the late Middle Ages, Portuguese seamen captured North African and black African slaves in the waters off Morocco and took them back to Portugal or Spain. In 1317 King Dinis of Portugal gave the Genoese Manuel Pesagno a naval command and permission for privateering in Moroccan waters. Pesagno could retain one-fifth of all the slaves he captured.25
In the Crown of Aragon, the methods of enslaving were similar to those employed in the same period by the Castilians and the Portuguese: capture in war and raids. The legal code of the town of Teruel shows the manner in which the captives were distributed following a successful raid. Their captors placed them under guard and made an initial sorting: some would be exchanged for Christian prisoners, and the others would be enslaved. The king got a share equal to one-fifth of the captives. This relied on precedent going back to Roman times: the sovereign received a fifth of war booty. The members of the expedition received numbers of slaves that varied according to their social standing and their actions in the campaign. The code of the town of Calatayud in 1120 stated that if a Muslim king were to be captured, he would belong to the Aragonese king.26 After the Black Death of the mid-fourteenth century, the king of Aragon authorized his subjects on the island of Ibiza to conduct privateering raids against the Muslims. These raids, and those from other parts of the Aragonese empire, continued into early modern times. Directed against coastal dwellers in North Africa and, until 1492, the Muslim kingdom of Granada, the raids produced captives sold widely in the Christian Mediterranean and as far as Portugal.27
When the Catholic monarchs Fernando and Isabel entered the newly conquered city of Málaga in 1487, they freed with pomp and ceremony the hundreds of Christian captives, some of whom had been waiting twenty years for their liberation. The traveler Hieronymous Münzer in the last years of the fifteenth century asserted that “When the Muslims took Málaga, seven hundred years ago, they killed all the Christians. King Fernando vowed to do the same [to the Muslims] but lifted by his clemency and humanity, he sold them as captives. . . . The king sold 5,000 men, at 30 ducats each.”28 All told, the victors enslaved between 10,000 and 15,000 Muslim inhabitants of Málaga. Those who could arrange to be ransomed were freed, but they had to go to North Africa and could not remain in Spain. Those who remained were sold throughout southern Spain.29 Even common soldiers in the Granadan war got their share. Alfonso de Vergara of Seville, a legal official and part-time warrior, had two slaves. He took one of them home as war booty after the town of Alhama fell to the Christians and baptized him as a Christian with the name Francisco. The other was a white woman named Naxa; Vergara noted that he “won her with my own lance in the battle of Najarón and turned her into a Christian and who is now called Leonor.”30
Wars of conquest produced slaves in the Canary Islands, but the slavery of the Canarians turned out to be a short-lived phenomenon. The first European captains who entered the Canaries in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries enslaved many of the natives, either legally in the case of the groups that resisted, or illegally in the case of the groups whose leaders signed treaties and were thereby supposedly exempt from enslavement. Despite official watchfulness, the conquerors violated the rules at times and enslaved members of the treaty bands. Members of allied bands who later rebelled or refused to carry out the terms of their treaties could be enslaved as “captives of second war” (de segunda guerra). Native slaves were used both as laborers in the Canaries and as commodities for sale elsewhere, mainly in Andalusia or in Portuguese Madeira .31 An example of this is shown in a royal order of Queen Juana of Castile in 1513 to Alonso de Lugo, governor of the Canarian islands of Tenerife and La Palma, and his associates. The queen’s order reviewed the fact that after the conquest was over many of the bands in the islands became Christian and their members married in the Christian religion. Later, they offered twenty-five of their children as hostages guaranteeing their continued allegiance to the peace settlements. Lugo and his associates illegally took the twenty-five to Seville and sold them as slaves, alleging that they were captives taken during warfare with hostile bands. Juana ordered that Lugo and his deputies had one hundred days to locate the twenty-five, free them, and return them to their homes.32
Christians from the Canaries also made raids on the African coast and brought back Muslim slaves during the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Often those slaves converted to Christianity, won their freedom, and stayed to blend into the local population. On Lanzarote, a late sixteenth-century commentator, with obvious exaggeration, suggested that “three-quarters of the island population were Moors or their descendants.”33
War also produced captives when Spain conquered cities in North Africa, beginning with Melilla in 1497, and continuing with Oran in 1509, Tripoli in 1511, and Tunis