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

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      CHAPTER 1

      The History of Slavery in Iberia

      Slavery was a structural feature of Mediterranean society.

      —Fernand Braudel, mid-twentieth century

      Slavery was present in the Iberian Peninsula from the beginning of recorded history. It was prominent in Roman times and in the early Middle Ages under the Visigoths. The Muslims maintained a slave system in Iberia as long as they held territory there. The medieval Christian kingdoms of the peninsula all had slaves and laws governing them, and slavery continued in early modern Spain and Portugal before declining and dying out in the eighteenth century.¹

      The numbers of slaves and the percentage of slaves in the population during those centuries remained relatively small. At no time was a slave society present. The scholarly standard is Moses I. Finley’s division between slave societies, on the one hand, and societies with slaves, on the other. In Finley’s definition, a slave society had to have something on the order of 30 percent of the population as slaves, and slave labor had to account for a major proportion of that society’s production. Only five places and times figured in Finley’s scheme as slave societies: classical Greece and Rome, colonial Brazil, colonial Caribbean, and antebellum United States.² All others with lower percentages were societies with slaves, and the Iberian societies fit here. Even in Roman Hispania, the percentage of slaves did not reach 30. Throughout the Middle Ages and the early modern centuries, slaves were unevenly distributed over the geography of the peninsula and made up a small percentage of the overall population. Many parts of the peninsula had no slaves at all. Large commercial cities—Lisbon and Seville, Valencia and Barcelona—may have had over 10 percent slaves between the late fifteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and some smaller Atlantic coastal towns may have had around 20 percent. In that period, though, slaves probably made up less than 1 percent of the population in Spain and perhaps less than 7 percent in Portugal. Nowhere and at no time was the economy dependent on slave labor. There were slaves, nonetheless, on Iberian soil throughout the period we are examining, and the premodern societies there were societies with slaves. Even though the numbers of slaves were small in comparison with classical Athens or Rome or colonial Brazil, their lives shared characteristics with those of slaves elsewhere.

      The history of slavery in Iberia, though complex and long lasting, was not unique in Europe and the Mediterranean. At one time or another, all Western European countries experienced the presence of slavery and the slave trade. Scandinavians practiced slavery at home and traded slaves abroad in the early Middle Ages. Ireland had slaves and slave traders, as did England up to the eleventh century. The Low Countries, France, and the Germanspeaking areas knew slavery as a long legacy of the Roman domination and as a continuing though diminishing feature of life in the central Middle Ages. The Italian states had a long experience with slavery that lasted from classical times through the early modern centuries and drew slaves from as far afield as the Russian rivers, the Black Sea coasts, and North and sub-Saharan Africa. The Byzantine Empire had slaves throughout its existence. The world of Islam, which for seven centuries counted parts of Iberia within it, had a welldeveloped system of slavery and an expansive slave trade from many areas of Europe, West Asia, and Africa. Iberia’s slave holders to one degree or another or at one time or another interacted with these areas as they acquired slaves and put them to use. The stories of lives of those slaves in Iberia are compelling and form the core of this book.³ Here are a few of those stories to introduce the complexity of the topic.

      Stories of Slaves

      In 1301 the slave Francesca received conditional freedom in Christian Valencia. She was a Christian, almost certainly a former Muslim, and owned by Bernat Planell, a citizen and moneychanger of Valencia, and his wife Gillemona. Francesca received her freedom in a private notarial act that declared her free, released, and placed in liberty. Despite the rotund terms of the statement, Francesca agreed to abide by a separate provision that she would serve her former owners for a term of three years, during which Planell and his wife would provide her with food and drink, clothing, and shoes.⁴

      In the early fourteenth century, Muslim forces captured a Christian boy in the town of Calzada de Calatrava in La Mancha. He was taken to Granada, converted to Islam, and trained as a soldier. Eventually, under the name Riḍwān, he became the grand vizier of the kingdom of Granada.⁵ He is a late example of a long list of former slaves who reached high positions in Muslim Spain.

      Catalina Muñoz prepared a will in Almería in 1570. In it she left a graphic account of her life and that of her children by several fathers.

      I declare that I have a natural daughter, Isabel Muñoz, wife of Lázaro de Palenzuela, and her father is named Jorge de Brujas, and at the time that he had her in me, I was the slave of Juan [Alonso] Valle de Cabrera. Also, I declare that I have another daughter named Ana de Rojas, daughter of a soldier of the company of the Count СКАЧАТЬ