In medieval Latin, the range of terms for unfree people was similarly broad, including servus and serva, sclavus and sclava, mancipium, colonus, villanus, emtitus, famulus, verna, ancilla, and others. Servus was by far the most commonly used term. In classical Latin, it meant “slave,” but over time, its meaning evolved to include serfs and others of unfree status. According to the thirteenth-century jurist Rolandinus Passeggieri, the division between servi and free people was one of six fundamental divisions that characterized humanity.11 An invented etymology connected servus with the verb servare, “to save,” on the basis that slaves were those saved and not killed in war. Iacopo da Varagine, archbishop of Genoa in the late thirteenth century, listed four types of servi: those born into slavery, those captured in battle, those purchased with money, and those hired to serve.12 Even those who voluntarily served a great man might count as servi.13 The term sclavus (and its vernacular equivalent schiavo) was coined in the eleventh century to distinguish slaves from serfs and other servi, but it was not widely adopted until the fourteenth century.14 Because most of the authoritative legal texts of the late Middle Ages were compiled in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, they used servus for all unfree people. The multiple meanings of servus thus complicated the work of both medieval and modern interpreters.
Other Latin terms for unfree people appeared less frequently. Ancilla, exclusively for female slaves, and verna, the Roman term for a slave born into the master’s household, remained in use.15 Mancipium and emtitus carried associations of purchased property or chattel, as did the vernacular testa. Famulus changed its meaning: a Roman famulus was a slave member of the household, but a late medieval famulus was a free servant, usually an apprentice serving to learn.16 Terms such as colonus, ascriptus, and villanus for people bound to the land or to agricultural service indicate an unfree status more like serfdom than slavery.17 Every free person was liber. Ingenui were born free; liberti or libertini were manumitted.
Finally, a quirk of grammatical gender has affected scholarly analysis of late medieval slavery. In both Arabic and Latin, the masculine plural form is used for groups of mixed gender. As a consequence, the presence of female slaves is often hidden behind grammatically masculine forms.18 Authors of legal texts resorted to gendered pairs of plural nouns (sclavi et sclavae, mamālik wa-jawārī) to refer unambiguously to male and female slaves as a group. In genres other than law, it is common to find only the masculine plural noun in cases where slaves of both genders were probably intended.
Slavery in Christian and Islamic Thought
Slavery was legal throughout the late medieval Mediterranean, and there was a broad consensus about what slavery as a legal status entailed. In Christian Europe, slave status was defined by the ius commune, the amalgam of Roman and canon law taught by the law faculties of medieval universities.19 The Roman law curriculum was based on the Justinianic Code, while the canon law curriculum was based on Gratian’s Decretum, compiled around 1140, and the Liber Extra, compiled by Raymond of Peñafort and issued in 1234.20 All three works circulated with standard glosses that elaborated on and challenged the original text. The glosses also referenced biblical and Aristotelian texts, many of which were taught in medieval universities as part of the liberal arts curriculum that was a prerequisite for the study of law. For practical use, jurists created reference manuals with collections of model documents and discussions of the underlying legal principles, including slave status. These were called notarial formularies. The most widely copied and the first to appear in print was that of Rolandinus Passeggieri.
In contrast, Sunni Islamic law was divided into four schools (madhhab, pl. madhāhib): Mālikī, Ḥanafī, Shāfiʿī, and Ḥanbalī. Each school had its own legal texts and commentaries based on the Quran and ḥadīth (sayings and acts of Muḥammad), refined over the course of centuries. Most Islamic rulers favored one legal school over the others, but the Mamluk sultan was advised by judges from all four. The Mamluks also had a civil judicial system (maẓālim) through which subjects could petition the sultan and his administration, but maẓālim courts tended to hear cases concerning land rather than moveable goods like slaves.21 Delving into the full ramifications of slavery in Islamic law is beyond the scope of a single book.22 Instead, the following discussion will highlight the aspects of slavery on which all four schools agreed.
Both Christians and Muslims agreed that freedom was the original state of humanity and that free status should be assumed in ambiguous cases.23 In its Christian formulation, freedom implied both a natural capacity (reason) and a legal capacity (property in oneself).24 Slaves retained the natural capacity but lost the legal capacity: they had reason, but they were the property of others. Manumission meant “restoring them to their former origins and to the right of free birth, and declaring them Roman citizens, and restoring them to the primeval right according to which all men are born free.”25 Because the Roman empire no longer existed in the thirteenth century, gaining Roman citizenship meant gaining equal status to those born free. The Islamic formula for manumission made the former slave “free among the free Muslims, what is for them is for him and what is upon them is upon him.”26
Because the original state of humanity was freedom, slaves’ legal status did not affect their spiritual status. According to Iacopo da Varagine, a late thirteenth-century archbishop of Genoa, “all, whether slave or free, are created from earth and born nude and wailing… all, whether slave or free, have the same place, namely the same world, the same earth, the same air … all, whether slave or free, will die, dissolve into ash, and rot … all, whether slave or free, have one Lord … all, whether slave or free, will come to the judgment of God.”27 Ibn Manẓūr, the author of the fourteenth-century Arabic dictionary Lisān al-‘arab, made a play to similar effect on ‘abd, a word that has two plural forms, ‘abīd and ‘ibād. All people were ‘ibād (worshippers) of God, but some were also ‘abīd (slaves) of God’s creatures.28 Thus slaves were not spiritually inferior and could take part in religious rites alongside free people.
Having accepted the principle of original freedom for slaves, medieval jurists were most interested in situations where obedience to God might conflict with obedience to a master. In general, they held that “if the master commands that which is not contrary to holy scriptures, let the slave be subject to the master. But if in fact he orders the contrary, let him obey the master of the spirit more than [that] of the body.”29 Christian slaves were not to be ordained as priests or admitted to monasteries, while Muslim slaves were not allowed to lead communal prayer.30 Jurists were also interested in slave marriages, because they could produce conflicts between the rights of a spouse and those of a master.31
However, there were some who disputed the idea of spiritual equality for slaves on the basis that slavery was a consequence of sin. The rhetoric of spiritual enslavement to the passions was common in both Christian and Islamic texts, but it was Christian authors who spelled out a direct connection between spiritual and juridical slavery.32 They linked slavery with original sin,33 with Hagar and Ishmael (implying Christian superiority over Islam),34 and with the Israelites’ captivity in Egypt (implying Christian superiority over Judaism).35 Although they also cited the curse of Ham as a divinely instituted basis for slavery, that story played a more important role in early modern ideologies of slavery than in medieval ones.36
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