That Most Precious Merchandise. Hannah Barker

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      Difference and the Perception of Slave Status

      Religious difference was the legal and ideological basis of slavery in the late medieval Mediterranean. In theory, anyone might be captured and enslaved by adherents of another religion. In practice, some people were more likely to be enslaved than others, and some were enslaved by coreligionists. Russian Christians, for example, were more likely to be enslaved and less likely to be judicially manumitted than Greek Christians in Christian Italy. Such patterns show that despite the legal and ideological importance of religious difference, it was not the only factor at work in determining slave status.

      For medieval jurists, the problem with a system of slavery based on religious difference was the difficulty of proving the religion affiliation of specific slaves. Religious belief was an immaterial quality of the spirit, fully accessible only to God and the individual believer himself or herself.¹ Religious practices like circumcision might leave visible marks on the body, but because most late medieval slaves were women and circumcision applied only to men, their affiliation could not be proven in this way.² Some Mediterranean societies used badges or special clothing to signal religious affiliation, but clothes were easy to change.³ In theory, Christians, Muslims, and Jews followed distinctive dietary laws; in practice, slaves were not asked to eat pork or drink wine as a religious test. Slaves were sometimes able to prove their affiliation by reciting a prayer or creed (the shahāda for Muslims; the Pater Noster, Ave Maria, or Credo for Christians), but they were not able to give binding legal testimony about themselves.⁴ Moreover, newly enslaved people who had not yet learned the language of their masters would struggle to communicate anything about their religious background.

      The difficulty of categorizing slaves by religion caused legal and economic problems. People enslaved illegally did have opportunities to challenge their status, as discussed in Chapter 1, and occasionally, they were successful. No master wanted to take on the potential expense and inconvenience of a slave whose status was doubtful. A seller might need to show a contract for his or her initial purchase of a particular slave to verify that slave’s status.⁵ Slave sale contracts often included a clause in which the seller promised to uphold the legality of the sale in court. But there were other ways to categorize slaves and thereby assess the validity of their status. Previous scholarship has shown that medieval people used language, law, customs, descent, and geographical origin along with religion to identify themselves and categorize others.⁶ Of these options, language and race were the most relevant in the context of slavery.

      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 СКАЧАТЬ