That Most Precious Merchandise. Hannah Barker

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СКАЧАТЬ to the land of the faithful.”¹⁴⁴ They did not seek to rescue anyone but simply hoped to reach home safely themselves.

      Free people from all parts of the Mediterranean were vulnerable to capture in war. Holy war offered the best opportunity for taking slaves (as opposed to captives), because by definition, it involved opponents of different religions.¹⁴⁵ As a result, the late medieval crusades generated many slaves. Frankish residents of Tripoli were enslaved after the fall of that city in 1268, as were Frankish residents of Acre in 1291.¹⁴⁶ Five thousand Muslim residents of Alexandria were captured by Peter of Cyprus in 1365, some of whom were ransomed and the rest of whom were enslaved.¹⁴⁷ The Mamluk conquest of Cyprus in 1426 generated large numbers of slaves.¹⁴⁸ This is not to mention the slaves, both Franks and Turks, taken in crusades against the Ottomans.¹⁴⁹ Corso (holy war conducted through piracy) threatened everyone who traveled by sea.¹⁵⁰ The arrival of a ship that had captured thirteen Christian sailors en route from Libya to Alexandria was marked by public celebration.¹⁵¹ In Valencia, Muslims captured by Christian pirates were displayed publicly for the satisfaction of local Christians who feared the same fate at the hands of Muslim pirates.¹⁵² Pero Tafur, a fifteenth-century Castilian traveler, told a story about Castilian and Catalan pirates who preyed on Muslim shipping until they themselves were captured and forced into piracy against Christians on behalf of the sultan.¹⁵³

      Travelers and free people living along the coast were also vulnerable to enslavement by ordinary pirates and raiders. The Greek population of the Aegean was prey to Venetians, Genoese, and Catalans as well as Turks from the emirates of Menteshe, Aydin, and the Ottoman sultanate. Caterina, a Greek woman from Negroponte, petitioned the sindicatori of Genoa for freedom after having been captured by the trireme of Domenicus de Nigrono and sold as a slave.¹⁵⁴ Pilgrims bound for Jerusalem were advised not to wander along the seashore in the eastern Mediterranean, “lest [they] be suddenly seized by pirates and reduced to perpetual and miserable servitude, which often happens.”¹⁵⁵ Shipwreck, a danger in itself, might also cast travelers ashore among enemies who “would have carried us into a strange land and sold us all.”¹⁵⁶

      In the late medieval Mediterranean, ship captains could not even be trusted to protect the freedom of their own passengers and crew. For example, in 1316, a Venetian captain decided to enslave and sell several Greeks whom he had taken on board as sailors in Monemvasia.¹⁵⁷ A different Venetian captain enslaved and sold some Greek merchants whom he had accepted as passengers in Salonika.¹⁵⁸ The same thing happened to a group of Tunisian merchants who arranged pas sage from Cairo to the Barbary coast on a Catalan ship in 1408; the captain sailed to Barcelona instead and sold the merchants as slaves.¹⁵⁹ In 1440, a Venetian man named Petrus Marcello decided to kidnap Hajji Ibrahim, a Muslim merchant from Acre who owed him money. He then sailed to Beirut to negotiate with Ibrahim’s son Hassan. Marcello invited Hassan and ten other men to come aboard his ship but then sailed away to Rhodes and sold all twelve as slaves. After the Mamluk sultan complained to Venice, Marcello was ordered to find and release them. Seven of the men had apparently been shipped to Nice, so Marcello asked his family to contact the duke and duchess of Burgundy and find out who had purchased them.¹⁶⁰ We do not know whether he ever succeeded in locating the people he had sold.

      The threat of capture and enslavement affected the powerful and noble as well as ordinary sailors, merchants, and fishermen. Al-Ḥasan ibn Aḥmad al-Razī, a learned judge and physician who spent most of his life in Damascus, was enslaved in 1299 during the Mamluk–Ilkhan war and sold to a Frankish master in Cyprus.¹⁶¹ In 1311–1312, a ship carrying Mamluk and Mongol ambassadors was captured by Genoese pirates based in Chios.¹⁶² The pirates tried to sell the ambassadors and their retinue, about sixty people in total. No one would buy them because Sultan al-Nāṣir Muḥammad had ordered the retaliatory arrest of all Frankish merchants, both Genoese and non-Genoese, who lived in Alexandria, Damascus, and other Mamluk cities. Eventually, Segurano Salvaygo, a Genoese noble in Mamluk service, was able to negotiate the release of both the ambassadors and the merchants. A similar incident occurred in 1388, when Frankish pirates captured the sister of Sultan Barqūq and the daughter of his nephew en route from Syria to Egypt.¹⁶³ In 1319, a Byzantine ambassador was captured and sold by Venetian pirates while traveling to Venice on official business.¹⁶⁴ In 1387, the master of the Hospitaller order in the Peleponnese was captured in battle, sold as a slave, and vanished from the historical record.¹⁶⁵

      The risk of enslavement applied even to the inhabitants of the Black Sea slaving ports. In 1341, Nicoletto Gata, a Venetian merchant resident in Tana, arranged to send a slave back to his wife in Venice. Yet seven years later, Nicoletto himself was sold as a slave in Saray, the capital of the Golden Horde, because he was unable to pay his debts. He was fortunate to have business associates to whom he could appeal for help.¹⁶⁶ Filippo Lomellini, the Genoese castellan of Cembalo in the Black Sea, was not so lucky. He was captured in battle and sold in the 1450s, and he never resurfaced.¹⁶⁷

      Although slavery and captivity were ever-present dangers in the eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea, the distinction between them could be hazy. Slavery was usually based on religious difference, whereas captivity did not have to be. Slavery was permanent, at least in theory, whereas captivity was expected to end in ransom or exchange. As a rule of thumb, sale marked the transition from captive to slave because it generated a written legal document and witnesses that could serve as evidence of slave status later on. For example, after triumphing over Byzantine forces in 1352, the victorious Genoese general Paganino Doria agreed to release all of his Greek captives, except those who had already been sold. This clause in the peace treaty led to a lawsuit thirteen years later in Genoa. A Greek woman named Lucia petitioned the sindicatori for freedom in 1365 because she had been captured by Doria but never sold as a slave.¹⁶⁸ Lucia’s mistress, Violante, argued that Doria had sold Lucia and other captives to Bartolomeo Lercario and Antonio Pellavicino. Lercario and Pellavicino took Lucia to the market of Theologum in Turkish territory and sold her to Iacobus de Guaterio, Violante’s brother, who in turn gave her to Violante as a gift. Lucia, however, testified that she remembered being captured but did not remember being sold to Lercario, Pellavicino, or Guaterio. The outcome of this case is not known, but the result clearly depended on whether Lucia had been sold.

      In most cases, the distinction between slavery and captivity was not so clear. Captives sold into slavery might still be ransomed, especially if they remained close to home. In Tana, a Russian woman named Maria was ransomed by her brother after three years in slavery, but on the condition that she stay with her master for two additional years to nurse their baby daughter before returning home.¹⁶⁹ Greek slaves were occasionally sold within the Aegean Sea with a clause requiring their new masters to accept future offers of ransom. Leo, a Greek slave from Samos, was sold to a physician in Crete “in perpetuity, except however that if his father or any of his relatives want to ransom him, you [the buyer] are bound to return him.”¹⁷⁰ Notaries sometimes facilitated the process. Nicola de Boateriis, a Venetian notary in Famagusta, seems to have used his connections in Negroponte to organize the ransom of several slaves.¹⁷¹

      On the other hand, ransom did not necessarily mean an immediate return to freedom. Captives ransomed by a charitable stranger instead of a family member were expected to compensate their redeemers with money or service. This expectation may have been rooted in the Roman concept of postliminium.¹⁷² It may also have been influenced by canon law, which required pagan slaves redeemed from Jewish or Muslim masters to compensate their Christian redeemers.¹⁷³ When service was offered as compensation, the term was usually five years, but some jurists allowed the redeemer to keep the ransomed captive indefinitely.¹⁷⁴ In other words, ransom might simply mean slavery under a different master.

      In the eastern Mediterranean, ransoms by charitable strangers were often formalized with a document of sale in which the stranger purchased the slave followed by a document of manumission in which the stranger promised to free the slave after a certain period of service. For example, in 1427–1428, Giorgio СКАЧАТЬ