That Most Precious Merchandise. Hannah Barker

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      Societies with Slaves: Genoa, Venice, and the Mamluk Sultanate

      The late medieval Mediterranean was surrounded by societies with slaves.¹ This meant that slavery coexisted with other forms of labor, slave labor was not essential to the economy, slave ownership was not a distinguishing characteristic of the ruling class, and the master–slave relationship was not a model for other hierarchical relationships. In the late medieval Mediterranean, few households had more than two slaves. The majority were women purchased in their teens or twenties. The most notable exception was the household of the Mamluk sultan, which included thousands of enslaved men, women, and eunuchs.

      After surveying the demography of slaves and slave ownership, this chapter discusses the services provided by slaves. Although slaves were not economically essential, they performed many important functions. Slaves acted as social and financial assets: their presence added to their masters’ prestige, and their value was part of their masters’ net worth. They also performed domestic service and manual labor. Male slaves were used for military service by the Mamluks. Wealthy Mamluk notables also had eunuchs to manage the parallel male and female spheres of their households.

      Female slaves around the Mediterranean were subject to sexual and reproductive demands as well as demands on their physical labor. Focusing on the sexual and reproductive aspects of the shared culture of Mediterranean slavery reveals three things. First, although historians have paid more attention to the sexual exploitation of slave women in Islamic contexts, sexual exploitation was also common and well documented in Christian contexts. Second, the most important difference between Islamic and Christian practices of slavery had to do with the status of children. Under Christian and Roman law, children inherited the status of their mothers, so the child of a free man and his slave woman would be a slave. In contrast, under Islamic law, if a free man acknowledged paternity of a child by his slave woman, that child was born free and legitimate, and that slave woman became an umm walad (mother of a child). She could not be sold and would be manumitted automatically after her master’s death. In an Islamic context, therefore, sex with slave women produced heirs, while in a Christian context, it produced property. Third, Christian practices regarding the children of slave women gradually came to resemble Islamic practices over the course of the fourteenth century. In other words, a new aspect of the shared culture of Mediterranean slavery emerged during this period.

      In surveying the kinds of service demanded of slaves, this chapter also considers how slave owners’ personalities and social positions shaped their slaves’ lives. It has been asserted that being a slave in a society with slaves, where small numbers of slaves performed domestic work indoors, was a milder experience than being a slave in a slave society, where large numbers of slaves performed manual labor outdoors. This comparison is not helpful for two reasons. First, it sets up a competition of suffering. Was the pain of grueling manual labor greater or lesser than the pain of rape? That question is neither useful nor historically appropriate: both experiences were terrible, each in its own way. Judging which was “better” is beyond the purview of historians, except to the extent that historical sources make such judgments. Late medieval sources do not. Second, a definitional element of slavery is the overwhelming power, backed by violence, of the master over the slave.² A kind master could choose to treat his or her slaves well; a cruel master could choose to treat his or her slaves horribly. Either way, treatment was entirely at the master’s discretion and could vary widely within a slaveholding society.

      Instead of evaluating masters’ treatment of their slaves, this chapter considers the role of masters as social gateways for their slaves. The importance of a master’s position and personality in determining an individual slave’s experience cannot be overstated. A Tatar boy purchased by a Venetian baker was likely to work in his owner’s bakery and run household errands but would probably never ride a horse or wield a spear. A Tatar boy purchased by a Mamluk amir was likely to become an expert horseman and warrior but would probably never bake bread. The fact that these two boys might well have come from the same village is one of the most striking features of the Black Sea slave trade.

       The Slave Population

      It is hard to estimate the size of the free population in most medieval cities. Estimating the size of the slave population is even harder. Chronicles and travel accounts give rough numbers, but they cannot necessarily be trusted. In states that taxed the possession of slaves, the revenue generated by the tax can be used to estimate the size of the slave population in a given year. However, Genoa is the only late medieval Mediterranean state from which tax data of this kind have been preserved. Starting in 1381, Genoa taxed slave possession at half a florin per slave per year to finance its debts from the Chioggia war.³ The half-florin tax applied to inhabitants of the city of Genoa, its suburbs, and the nearby towns of Polcevera, Bisagno, and Voltri. It was collected in April and October. In the collection records, noble families were listed by households (alberghi) and ordinary people by the neighborhoods (conestagie) where they lived. If a slave changed hands or died during the year, the tax was reduced to a quarter-florin.

      The half-florin tax, like other Genoese taxes, was collected by tax farmers.⁴ Individuals bid at a public auction for the right to collect the half-florin tax for up to three years. The auction was conducted in the Piazza Banchi under the loggia of the palace of the Negro family by a pair of officials called the consules galleghe. The winner paid his bid to the state treasury in two to four installments over the course of a year. Meanwhile, he would collect the tax whose revenues he had won. Any money he collected beyond the value of his bid and the cost of collection was his to keep as profit. Thus tax farmers’ bids can be seen as specialist investments, and tax farmers often bid on multiple taxes over the course of several years.

      Tax farmers tried to bid less than the actual revenue they expected to collect to leave a margin for collection expenses and profit. The rule of thumb is that tax farmers’ bids represented about 70 percent of expected revenue, with 10 percent for expenses and 20 percent as profit.⁵ When a tax farmer bid 580 lire for the half-florin tax in 1468–1470, he probably expected to collect about 829 lire in revenue. We know that СКАЧАТЬ