Slavery in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia. William D. Phillips, Jr.

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      Introduction

      Slavery (servitus) is named from saving (servare), for among the ancients, those who were saved from death in battle were called slaves (servi).

      —Isidore of Seville, early seventh century

      This present work of synthesis surveys the history of slavery in Iberia from ancient times to the modern period. It relies in part on the studies of slavery I published in the 1980s but differs greatly in its content, focus, and structure from those earlier works. Though I cite a few archival sources, I have based the work on my reading of as much of the available scholarly literature as possible. This has occupied me for a longer period than I anticipated or would have preferred, in large part because the study of slavery in Iberia has become popular among scholars since the late 1980s. Their publications appeared in a boom period that began in the second half of the 1980s and peaked around the year 2000, though important contributions have continued to appear.¹ Several factors accounted for the accelerated production, including the greater number of students pursuing advanced degrees and an increased availability of venues for publication.² This outpouring of material has made it impossible for any one individual to read and digest all that is available. The bibliography indicates what I have been able to do.

      Before the 1980s there were a few pioneering studies, and from the mid-twentieth century the most prominent scholar on the topic was Charles Verlinden (1907–1996). His massive survey of slavery in medieval Europe, the first volume of which appeared in 1955 and covered Iberia and France, relied heavily on legal sources and created interest in a subject that had not been comprehensively studied before.³ In addition to his major survey, Verlinden’s wide-ranging scholarship included items that he published on medieval slavery for well over half a century.⁴ Antonio Domínguez Ortiz (1909–2003) opened the debate and the scholarly path for the study of slavery in Spain’s early modern period with a seminal article in 1952 on slavery in Castile.⁵ Together, the works of Verlinden and Domínguez Ortiz sparked renewed interest in an almost forgotten topic. In 1981 Jacques Heers, the distinguished historian of Genoa, published a survey of the historical literature on slavery in the Mediterranean in which Spain figured prominently. Heers stressed domestic slavery and related it to the work done by free domestic СКАЧАТЬ