Slavery in the Western Mediterranean

Abstract

This chapter discusses household slavery in relation to the urbanization process and Mediterranean colonialism taking place in late medieval Europe. It reassesses the Ehrenkreutz thesis that urban slavery in late medieval Europe was a secondary byproduct of power relations in Central Asia and the Black Sea region by evaluating information on the entry of individuals into slavery from fragmented documents. Furthermore, the chapter shows that urban slavery in the late medieval Mediterranean included far more than domestic services and discusses the value of court papers and wills for the understanding of exit scenarios for slaves.

Introduction

The history of the Mediterranean Sea has always been closely linked to the history of human trafficking and slavery. From ancient times until today, people have been transported across the sea against their will to serve others with their bodies and labor. They have been used as goods, as currency for other goods, or as gifts for the purpose of establishing and maintaining social networks and diplomatic relations. The naming and legal framework as well as the social settings and contexts of exploitation have changed over time. From slavery in the wealthy city-states of ancient Greece and the Roman colonate system through the use of enslaved workers in the urban and agricultural economy of Byzantium and the military and imperial slavery system in early Muslim societies to the import of slaves to Southwestern Europe as cheap labor or status icons and the ransom economy between Christian and Muslim parties: The Mediterranean has continually represented a hub for human exploitation and a central point of reference for interconnected practices of slaving between the religious and political cultures shaping the region and linking the ancient to the medieval, the medieval to the modern, and the modern period to the world of today. This chapter focuses on the social realities of slaves in the late medieval Western Mediterranean by showcasing the interconnectedness of individual slave biographies with the slaving practices of the neighboring empires, as well as the links between these practices and those in earlier and later periods.

From around 1300 onwards, the number of persons transported across the Mediterranean Sea to Southwestern Europe as slaves increased significantly. While slaves traded over long distances were a rare and high-priced merchandise only accessible to the political and economic elites of the Western Mediterranean prior to the thirteenth century, unfree servants from Central Asia—and to a lesser extent from sub-Saharan Africa—had already begun to populate the urban and aristocratic households of the Italian and Iberian peninsulas. By 1400, between 2000 and 5000 slaves were being sold in Genoa each year. Every moderately wealthy household included at least one or two slaves working and living side by side with local domestic servants and wet nurses, agricultural laborers and artisanal apprentices, carters and messengers. Members of the ruling classes of Renaissance Europe often employed up to ten or fifteen slaves under their roofs. Based on fundamental research performed by early experts in the field, the percentage of slaves in Western Mediterranean societies during this period is estimated to have been between 1 and 2 percent in rural areas, between 3 and 5 percent in the urban centers, and up to 10 percent on the Mediterranean islands such as Mallorca, Malta, and Crete.¹

The reasons for this sharp increase are still heavily debated among historians. One of the traditional explanations, the so-called Ehrenkreutz thesis, has recently been challenged by an interdisciplinary group of researchers. In his Strategic Implications of the Slave Trade, Andrew Ehrenkreutz depicted the revival of the European slave trade as a secondary byproduct of power relations in Central Asia and the Black Sea region.² According to Ehrenkreutz, when the rising European maritime powers expanded their trading routes toward the Eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea, Genoese merchants came to function as intermediary shippers between the slave markets on the Black Sea coast and the imperial ports of the Mamluk state. As Italian merchants provided the rulers of the Sultanate in Egypt and Syria with thousands of boys and young men for their armies of slave soldiers, they gradually began to bring the sisters and mothers of these young recruits back home to the booming urban centers of the Latin Western Mediterranean. New research has now shown, however, that the so-called Mamluk system relied on the support of Italian shippers much less than previously assumed, while European participation in the slave trade followed its own logic from the very beginning.³ Another explanation provided in relevant literature refers to the Black Death as a major factor in the increase of slaves from Central Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. Jeffrey Fynn-Paul, for example, has argued that town dwellers in Catalonia and Italy had strong economic reasons to keep slaves after 1348, when wages had increased dramatically and profits had stagnated or declined for many urban elites. As the normative power of the Roman Catholic Church had made Europe a “no slaving zone” where the enslavement of fellow believers was forbidden, slave labor had to be imported over long distances from non-Catholic regions.⁴ Other voices have contested the assumption that the loss of life from the Black Death played a decisive factor, instead pointing to the dynamics of the late medieval urbanization and colonization processes that gave rise to a new sex industry and settlement policy heavily reliant on human trafficking and slave trading.⁵

No matter what the reasons were for the increase in slaves, the late medieval period brought about a particular type of household slavery that was clearly distinct from earlier forms of slavery as a means of increasing agricultural production, as well as from later phenomena such as aristocratic court slavery and ransom slavery that began to play a role around 1500. Intimately intertwined with slaving practices and discourses found in the neighboring Greek Orthodox and Muslim spheres,⁶ the late medieval form of Latin household slavery can be characterized as very ambivalent and fluent, with slaves not representing a clear-cut social or legal category of its own. The labels used to designate them, the status applied to them in legal documents, and the daily tasks they fulfilled overlapped with the ones assigned to other dependent members of the Latin household. Contemporaries nevertheless knew very well who worked as a slave and who was an ordinary servant, nurse, serf, or apprentice—and in cases of conflict, the fine lines of distinction became apparent and were sometimes controversially debated in court. Unlike other domestics, slaves were bought and sold by oral agreement or written contract, and their services were more easily rented out to third parties than those of other dependent household members. Slaves were associated with non-Latin origins not adhering to the Roman rite. They usually arrived as individuals by sea and were baptized upon entering the Latin sphere regardless of their original religious background. Sexual intercourse, marriage, and the production of offspring with a person outside the master’s household was forbidden. In practice, however, it could either be the reason for some of the severest forms of persecution and punishment by criminal courts or serve as an opportunity to escape the slave status and leave the master’s household. In general, slaves in the Western Mediterranean rarely remained slaves for the entirety of their lives—though almost none of them managed to return home or live their lives as free citizens of European society.

This ambivalent and fluent position of the household slave in the Western Mediterranean was embedded in a multi-layered discourse on slavery. On the one hand, slavery as a legal institution was associated with Muslim practices that were clearly condemned and needed to be combatted: Any activity supporting the Muslim slave trade was officially forbidden and penalized. Christian crusaders often legitimated their actions by proclaiming to be fighting Muslim slavery and freeing or protecting “poor Christians” or “innocent pagans” in the eastern part of the Mediterranean from enslavement.⁷ On the other hand, buying slaves on the slave market, converting them to the Roman Catholic faith, and integrating them into a Christian household was perceived as a pious act—and sometimes even as a Christian duty. The Church and the Pope increasingly encouraged merchants and travelers to buy slaves on their journeys to the East in order to rescue them from Muslim slavery and offer them protection under a Christian roof.⁸ Latin clerics and missionaries living in Central Asia and the Near East bought slave children specifically to raise them in the Christian faith.⁹ The language use reflects this ambivalence in the Latin discourse: The abstract noun schiavitù or esclavitud in the vernacular documents of the Western Mediterranean designated the Muslim institution of slavery and was never used for slaving practices in Latin households. The slaves living in Latin households, however, were naturally called schiavo/schiava or esclavo/esclava. A Muslim master was considered a slaveholder, while a Christian master acted as a pater familias taking care of all members of the household including slaves. The Latin discourse on slavery can thus only be understood in the broader context of late medieval crusades, maritime expansion, and early Mediterranean colonialism.

Given the ambivalence and fluidity of slave biographies and slavery discourses, this chapter will focus on following the fragmented traces of individual slaves in order to explore the range of scenarios people could experience (a) while becoming a slave and entering the Western Mediterranean, (b) while living in a Latin household as a slave, and (c) upon exiting (or attempting to exit) the condition of slavery.

Following the traces of individual slaves means depending on the fragmentary tradition of the time, however. Luckily for us, the number of administrative records increased dramatically in the late medieval period. Starting in Italy, more and more people began to confirm their businesses and last wills with contracts and testaments written and signed by (or in the presence of) official notaries. Even though the overall level of literacy remained low, people were able to write and read their names and referred to written documents as evidence for agreements they had made. Writing was no longer limited to clergymen and high officials of the lordship. Parishes and municipalities, craft guilds, and trading communities now produced their own records.¹⁰ For us as historians, this means that besides official chronicles, legal codes, and deeds from secular and ecclesiastical rulers, a huge number of administrative documents are available for research on household slavery. Sale contracts, letters of manumission, account books, tax lists, parish registers, court records, and of course private wills, letters, and travel accounts help to reconstruct the lives of the slaves of the time. Ego documents from slaves themselves still do not exist, however, and in most cases, only brief references or incidences per slave rather than any form of continued documentation of one and the same enslaved individual have been handed down to us. All existing references and representations of slaves were written from the perspective of those who were not enslaved, and they need to be read with this aspect in mind. Furthermore, the amount of available material varies greatly from place to place. To explore the variety of slave lives in Latin households thus requires us to make sense of scattered fragments by aligning and combining them with one another—like an enormous puzzle where most of the pieces have been lost over time, or were never even produced. In the following three sections, the reader will learn the names of individual slaves whose lives stand for the assumed experiences of many others.

Entrance into Slavery

In terms of historical tradition, the act of enslavement took place outside the realm of Latin textual sources. Based on this inexistence of written evidence, historians have long been convinced that Western Europeans were not involved in the late medieval enslavement processes themselves. It is only recently that this assumption has been contested by interdisciplinary research. Bringing together archeological findings and implicit references in travel accounts of Latin and non-Latin tradition, it has been shown that Latin and Arab settlers could indeed be involved in inland manhunting. Scholarship has also determined that the moment in which a person’s name appeared on a Latin or Arab sale contract and in the trade register of a merchant vessel disambiguated their status into that of a slave. While people sold on markets or in ports could be used under many labels and in a variety of roles in the local context, transshipment over the Mediterranean Sea explicitly transformed them into slaves.¹¹

Around two thirds of the slaves in the Western Mediterranean were women and one third were men. Male slaves were more often bought as minors, while women were on average five years older than their male counterparts at the time of purchase. What is more, female slaves were generally more expensive than men. Prices could vary significantly from case to case, ranging from 30 to 135 yperperi depending on the age, sex, origin, and health status of the slave as well as on the social relation between seller and buyer. Given the rising demand, the overall price level rose continuously during the late medieval period. By 1430, the average price was 70 yperperi (or around 23 Venetian gold ducats) for male slaves and 100 yperperi (or around 33 ducats) for female slaves. Most of the time, slaves were traded in smaller numbers alongside other goods transported on larger cargo vessels. The Italian merchant Giacomo Badoer, for example, who lived in Constantinople for three and a half years, trading textiles, cotton, linen, and furs for spices, wheat, wine, and copper, also accepted individual orders from family members and business partners for a total of 62 slaves.¹² Only few merchants specialized in the trading of larger numbers of several hundreds of slaves at once on ships specifically dedicated to their transport.

The biggest group of slaves serving in Latin households were purchased from the slave markets on the Black Sea coast. While Caffa and Tana, the main trading posts of the Genoese and the Venetians in the region, had the busiest slave markets at their disposal, Trebizont, Sinope, and other smaller ports also served as points of departure for the transport of enslaved people to the West. In the purchase contracts signed in the notary offices of the Latin administration, these people were identified as tartari, circassi, or rossi, often stating their original and/or baptismal names, their age and sex, and their physical and mental status. Most of them arrived there as a consequence of the unstable political situation in Central Asia following the decline of the Golden Horde. Riots, border wars, and pillages continuously produced captives of all ethnic and linguistic affiliations from the Mongol, Circassian, and Russian principalities, who were then sold to Muslim and Christian merchants operating on the Mediterranean Sea. Others were sold by their parents or relatives (or sold themselves) to escape poverty and famine, hoping for a better fate away from home. But even prominent members of the political elites could end up as slaves in Latin households, with the example of Chebechzi serving as a case in point: Having served as a close advisor to Cazadahuch, the political representative of the Golden Horde in Tana in the 1440s, Chebechzi was captured and sold into slavery when his lord lost his position due to political unrest. He eventually arrived in Catalonia, where he served as a slave for several years. It was only thanks to a chance meeting with a Venetian nobleman and his high level of education that Chebechzi was ultimately able to make his voice heard and regain his freedom.¹³

The second group of slaves populating the Latin households of the Western Mediterranean were of Greek, Turkish, or Slavic origin, hailing from the Peloponnese, the Aegean islands, and most importantly from the Balkans, Bulgaria, and sometimes even Hungary. They were sold in the Peloponnese ports of Modon and Coron, in Famagusta on Cyprus, in Candia on Crete, and at the trading posts of the Adriatic coast such as Ragusa, Spalato (today: Split), and Zadar. In the case of the Adriatic Sea, most ports on its eastern coast were dominated and controlled by the city of Venice. Nevertheless, cargo vessels from Apulia, Sicily, Catalonia, and even Palestine and Egypt frequented the trading ports of Dalmatia and Istria as well, exporting Bosnian and Serbian slaves to their respective home regions or other parts of the Mediterranean. The Slavic hinterlands of the Dalmatian and Istrian coasts were contested between the Roman and Greek Orthodox Churches as well as between the competing dominions on the western side of the Balkans and the Ottoman territories in the east.¹⁴ The mountainous regions were poor areas difficult to access and control by ecclesiastical and political authorities. Besides organized and spontaneous raids, many poor Slavic families sought their fortunes on the Istrian and Dalmatian coast—sometimes by selling the services of their children to foreign merchants across the sea. The numerous cartae servitutis handed down to us note their respective geographic origin (de Bosna, de Verbase, de Trebotich) and specify whether the person in question was sold for life (deffinite ad mortem) or for a certain period of time. The young girl Stana, for example, was sold to the Italian settler Jacobo of Talava in Spalato for three years. Her mother Liuba received 24 denarii for her daughter’s services—roughly the value of a cow.¹⁵ Some of the children serving in Latin households on the eastern Adriatic coast were lucky enough to return to their families with some savings and training in a handicraft. Others were less fortunate, becoming separated from their families for good when a merchant from Apulia or Sicily, from Aragon or Valencia shipped them to his hometown together with other precious goods and sold them into an Italian or Catalan household for life.

The third group of slaves to be found in Latin households of the Western Mediterranean were people from sub-Saharan Africa, mainly Ethiopia. These individuals usually arrived through the agency of Muslim middlemen on the northern coast of Africa and in Muslim Iberia. Captured in the small Islamized parts of Africa and traded to the Maghreb region over land, they were sold to Aragonese and Catalan merchants. Some of them entered Italy via Barcelona or Mallorca, others were brought from Tunis to Sardinia and Corsica via Sicily. While slaves from the Black Sea region and the eastern Adriatic coast were usually traded as individuals, African slaves often entered the Western Mediterranean in groups. Besides Rialto in Venice, proper slave markets primarily existed in the larger port cities of the Iberian Peninsula.¹⁶

It was only when the Ottomans controlled access to the Black Sea after having conquered Constantinople in 1453 and the Portuguese subsequently discovered the sea route to Western Africa and India that a shift occurred. From the 1490s onwards, most of the slaves living in Latin households were of African origin, while Russian and Mongol slaves only rarely reached the southern part of Europe.

Experiences of Slavery

Being a slave in a late medieval Latin household could mean many different things and assume various forms. The most important common denominator of all slave experiences in the Western Mediterranean was that slaves could be employed as unskilled workers entirely arbitrarily by their masters, in whatever position the latter desired or required their help and presence. Slaves could be assigned to any form of domestic work, side by side and interchangeably with other domestic workers that were not enslaved. They cooked, cleaned, looked after children, and nursed infants. They performed courier services, ran errands, and acted as porters and carters. Outside the domestic sphere, they worked the land alongside serfs and other dependent agricultural workers. They helped in craftsmen’s workshops together with apprentices and journeymen. They supported journeying merchants with various tasks, sometimes even acting as dragomen. And they were at their masters’ disposal for physical pleasures and sexual services, as well as for the production of offspring.

The second important common denominator was that a slave was subject to the direct jurisdiction of his or her master. Other jurisdictions only came into play when the master seized the competent courts. The practical guides for household masters urged the pater familias to ensure the physical and mental integrity of their slaves.¹⁷ While the latter thus lived under the protection of the household’s master, they were also completely and utterly at his or her mercy.¹⁸

These two components of slave existence in the late medieval Western Mediterranean are the primary reason why the actual experiences of slaves left very few traces. Once slaves had been bought, shipped, and baptized, their various unskilled activities in and outside the household as well as their experiences of encounter and negotiation, of conflict and violence remained invisible in historical tradition unless the master or an external institution indicated a problem.

Only letter correspondences provide insight into the daily lives of slaves. The long-term exchange of letters between the merchant couple Margherita and Francesco Datini, who maintained two households in Tuscany, is a prominent example.¹⁹ Here we learn that the slave Bartolomea enjoyed a low level of trust and remained under the direct observation of her mistress, never allowed to leave the house. Other slaves bore babies to Francesco, whose own marriage with Margherita remained childless. The estimation of slave Lucia, for example, clearly improved when she gave birth to Francesco’s daughter Ginevra, who survived infancy and grew up as the Datini’s only child.

Where we have no such telling narrative sources, the range of activities and experiences can only be deduced from contested cases—from situations of conflict and debate. The most important sources for the reconstruction of slave experiences are therefore court records and council or guild orders mentioning slaves. Throughout the late medieval period, more and more regulations were concerned with the danger of criminal slaves being prepared to commit theft or use violence. In the case of Venice, the supposed poison murder of a prominent nobleman by a slave woman called Bona Tatara not only triggered an entire series of conspicuously similar cases in court, it also persuaded the political class to regulate access to toxic substances as well as the granting of licenses to run pharmacies and practice natural medicine. According to the court records, the slaves accused of poisoning their masters complained that they had been beaten or mistreated or that they could no longer endure the hard work requested of them. At the same time, the reader learns from the court documents that slave women moved freely within the town and were often well acquainted with other neighboring women of the popolo.²⁰

A further informative source is the guild prescripts of the time. Besides regulating access to and training in crafts, medieval guilds also protected their members and their families in the event of illness and death, as well as against competition from foreign craftsmen. Employing slaves as unskilled workers in a workshop constituted a cheap alternative for masters practicing a craft, but it also went against the idea of clearly regulated pathways of education and training and created a competitive situation for the apprentices and journeymen. In theory, the employment of slaves not officially registered in the guild register was forbidden. In practice, however, it was largely tolerated except when higher interests were at stake, as the various city council orders show. For example, the Venetian senate pronounced a general ban on slave labor in the production of luxury goods destined for export, arguing that the specialist know-how of a goldsmith or glassmaker could leave the Venetian dominion if an appropriately trained slave were manumitted or resold to a non-Venetian buyer.²¹

Finally, the gradual shift in inheritance law allowing children begotten by a household master with a female slave to inherit the free status of their father (rather than their mother’s slave status, as in the Roman law tradition) and the simultaneous significant rise in foundlings in the foundling hospitals of Southern Europe demonstrates another important element of slave experiences of the time. The sexual power of household masters over their female slaves prevented the noble lines of European aristocracy from becoming extinct while at the same time establishing a new branch of human exploitation: the wet nursing industry. In Florence, like in other Italian cities, the priors of the Ospedale degli Innocenti complained that the number of slave babies had become unmanageable. Household masters were obligated to announce the birth of a slave baby in advance and asked to pay compensation to the hospitals upon delivery. On the flip side, employing and renting out slave women as wet nurses began to become such a lucrative business that the reproductive functions of female slaves were increasingly the subject of purchase negotiations and slave contracts. In Genoa, the Officium Mercantie regularly noted cases in which female slaves were returned or money was reclaimed when the purchased woman did not menstruate.²²

Exit from Slavery

In the late medieval Western Mediterranean, almost all slaves exited the state of slavery at one point or the other. This rarely meant a substantial improvement of their social status, however: While opportunities for social advancement were plentiful for former slaves in Muslim societies at the time, ex-slaves in the western part of the Mediterranean region mostly remained dependent on someone else’s mercy.

Generally speaking, there were four possible scenarios for escaping the state of enslavement. The first and most common of these was manumission. Household masters disposed of their belongings and decided about the future fate of their slaves in their wills or, on special occasions or for specific reasons, by way of notarial deeds. The exact wording of such testaments and deeds proves very telling with regard to the social relationship between the respective master or mistress and his or her slave. Slaves could become a bequest themselves when the master or mistress transmitted them to a close relative, or they could become the recipient of a bequest when their manumission was affirmed with the allocation of movable goods or a certain amount of money. The Venetian doge Antonio Venier, for example, decreed that his slave Lucia was to be set free upon his death with a financial endowment of 20 gold ducats, while slave Lena was to serve his wife for another five years before being manumitted with an endowment of 10 ducats. Another of Venier’s slaves was to serve his daughter Valvina until the latter’s death, at which point she was to be released if she had behaved well.²³ In many cases, manumitted slaves continued to serve in the same household—sometimes in a more favorable position, sometimes not. Francesco Datini’s slave Argomento was rewarded for his excellent services with manumission and became one of the most important carters—and thus a person of trust—in the Datini business.²⁴ Others continued to fulfill similar tasks as before, with the sole difference that they now worked under regularly renewed six- or twelve-month contracts and were remunerated with a small wage. The standard justification stated in wills and notarial deeds for granting a slave freedom was the salvation of the testator’s soul. Manumission was deemed to be a pious act of Christian charity. The real motives of the testators were often much less honorable, however, and the social reality of the manumitted was sometimes quite sad. Many slaves were set free with very little financial or material endowment, or none at all—for in practice, manumission was also an easy means of getting rid of a disagreeable or aging slave no longer willing or able to work. Released from the state of enslavement, these people were forced to accept any type of work and working conditions. In the absence of alternatives, some of them resorted to begging, prostitution, or crime.²⁵

The second possible scenario for exiting the state of slavery was marriage, an option that mainly applied to female slaves. Generally speaking, marriage offered the greatest potential for upward social mobility for slaves in the late medieval Western Mediterranean world. Marrying a burgher with citizen rights could open up new social and economic possibilities and allow former slaves to live in an economically autonomous household. In some cases, marriage came as an add-on to standard manumission. Francesco Datini’s slave Lucia, for example, who had given birth to his daughter Ginevra, was later compensated with marriage to Nanni da Prato, a laborer in the Datini business, along with a generous dowry that allowed them to live on the Datini estate in their own small house. In other cases, however, the marriage of a slave to a person outside the master’s household was the result of a court settlement or an extrajudicial arrangement following an incident of sexual intercourse between the slave and their eventual spouse. As a matter of fact, slaves were not allowed to have sexual contact with persons outside their master’s household at all—at least not without the master’s consent. Voluntary or involuntary sexual contact with slaves was considered a property crime against the master’s property. Not the potential sexual violence against the slave, but the misappropriation of their body as the master’s property was considered a crime to be brought before a court.²⁶ Irrespective of a female slave’s own will, her marriage to a man from the neighborhood was thus often the outcome of a conflict between her master and her lover or rapist.

The third exit scenario was absconding. Some striking differences between escape practices can be noted here. Generally speaking, enslaved men tried to escape more often than women, who were more vulnerable to violence and sexual exploitation than men. Furthermore, the rate of attempted escapes was considerably higher on the Iberian Peninsula than in Italy. While the majority of the slaves living in Italian households had been traded and sold as individuals at a relatively early age, slaves arriving on the Iberian Peninsula often came in groups or as families from the same place. The fact that they knew each other from the time before their enslavement and/or transfer to Western Europe greatly increased their incentive to flee. Related to this aspect, slaves in Italian households mainly fled from a situation that had become unbearable for them to another household in a nearby town or region in hopes of finding better conditions there. On the Iberian Peninsula, however, at least some of the runaway slaves also hoped to return to their homeland and regain their former lives. In general, slaves’ attempts to escape were more successful when they relied on a network of accomplices who often spoke the same language, no matter whether they had known each other before their enslavement or not.

The final possibility for slaves to attain freedom was court decisions: In rare cases, slaves could be manumitted by a court order because they had been illegally enslaved. Thus we read that the Mongolian slave Chebechzi and his compatriot were freed by the Venetian Signori di Notte and sent back to their homeland when it became known they had fled Catalonia in a small boat and been caught by a Venetian vintner who clandestinely kept them in chains in his wine cellar.²⁷ Other cases concerned the illegitimate enslavement of Catholic Christians from the Balkans. A Sicilian court decision of 1417 returned 25 Bosnians to their homeland who, according to the magistrates, were “true Christians” and had been wrongly “sold as slaves.”²⁸ The other exit scenario by way of a court decision was, of course, the condemnation of a slave for a crime he or she was accused of. In these cases, the vulnerable position of the slave becomes most obvious: Slaves appear in criminal court records as witnesses and as accused persons, but never as plaintiffs. Their testimony before a court served to administer justice in a conflict involving their master, but never to enact justice for wrongs they had suffered themselves. A trial involving a slave could thus easily end with a sentence of death. The case of the previously mentioned Bona Tatara is a striking example here: According to Bona, her master had beaten her almost to death with a leather strap when he learned that she was pregnant. In revenge, she said, she had bought arsenic in a nearby pharmacy and poisoned her master. The criminal court sentenced her to death by being dragged first through water and then along the street, tied to a boat and a horse respectively, before being burned at the stake.²⁹

Conclusion

Placed in a broader context, slavery in the late medieval Western Mediterranean relied on long-distance trafficking networks that mainly traded people across religious and cultural borders. In the context of the crusading age, religious and cultural otherness had become the primary marker for “enslaveability,” and human trafficking as well as a theologically loaded discourse on slavery had become a means of religious conflict. At the same time, military struggles went hand in hand with economic and political expansion, paving the way for a new form of Mediterranean colonialism. Western European maritime powers experimented with different forms of colonial rule while exploring the coasts of the Mediterranean, the Adriatic, and the Black Sea along with their hinterlands, as well as the Mediterranean islands. Their colonizing practices ranged from the imposition of fees and taxes or economic sanctions to the implementation of a Latin administration and the establishment of a centralized settlement policy with a transregional redistribution system. The trade in slaves was an integral part of this new European expansionism driven by the Western Mediterranean Sea powers, since it enabled a new form of labor recruitment. Even though most of the slaves sold into the Western Mediterranean served as individual unskilled workers in urban Latin households, the new labor requirements of the recently colonized islands also presented an opportunity to use coerced labor on a larger scale: The use of slaves for agricultural work on the plantations of Mallorca, Malta, or Crete formed the basis for the new plantation economy of the early modern age. The transatlantic slave trade and the implementation of a colonial economy based on slave labor would not have been possible without the experience gathered in the late medieval Western Mediterranean.³⁰

Notes

• 1. Still relevant for a general overview: Charles Verlinden, L’esclavage dans l’Europe médiévale. 2 vols. (Bruges/Ghent: De Tempel, 1955/1977); Sergej P. Karpov, L’Impero di Trepisonda Venezia, Genova e Roma. 1204–1461: Rapporti politici, diplomatici e commerciali (Rome: Veltro Ed., 1986).

• 2. Andrew Ehrenkreutz, “Strategic Implications of the Slave Trade between Genoa and Mamluk Egypt in the Second Half of the Thirteenth Century,” in The Islamic Middle East, 700–1900, ed. Abraham Udovitch (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), 335–45.

• 3. Reuven Amitai and Christoph Cluse, eds., Slavery and the Slave Trade in the Eastern Mediterranean (c. 1000–1500 CE) (Turnout: Brepols, 2017), 401–69.

• 4. Jeffrey Fynn-Paul, “Empire, Monotheism and Slavery in the Greater Mediterranean Region from Antiquity to the Early Modern Era,” Past & Present 205, no. 1 (November 2009): 3–40.

• 5. Christopher Paolella, Human Trafficking in Medieval Europe: Slavery, Sexual Exploitation, and Prostitution (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020), 215–45; Peter Feldbauer, Gottfried Liedl, and John Morrissey, eds., Mediterraner Kolonialismus: Expansion und Kulturaustausch im Mittelalter (Essen: Magnus-Verlag, 2005).

• 6. Hannah Barker, The Most Precious Merchandise: The Mediterranean Trade in Black Sea Slaves, 1260–1500 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019).

• 7. As a representative example of Crusade sermons, see Guillelmus Adae, “De modo Saracenos extirpandi (1317),” in Recueil des historiens des Croisades: Documents arméniens, vol. 2 (Paris: Société des amis de la Romanie, 1906), 521–55.

• 8. As a representative example of Church decrees, see S. Franco, H. Fory, and H. Dalmazzo, eds., Bullarium Romanum, 24 vols. (1857–1872), here vol. 4, no. 16–17 (3 June 1425), 718–21.

• 9. Representative for other accounts, see “Epistolae Fr. Iohannis de Monte Corvino,” in Sinica Franiscana, I: Itinera et relationes fratrum minorum saeculi XIII et XIV, ed. P. A. v.d. Wyngaert O. F. M. (Firenze: Apud Collegium S. Bonaventurae, 1929), 340–55, esp. 347–8.

• 10. Andreas Meyer, Felix et inclitus notarius: Studien zum italienischen Notariat vom 7. bis zum 13. Jahrhundert (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2000); Irmgard Fees, “Ein venezianischer Kaufmann des 12. Jahrhunderts: Romano Mairano,” in Il mito di Venezia: Una città tra realtà e rappresentazione, ed. Peter Schreiner (Rome—Venice: Ed. Di Storia e Letteratura, 2006), 25–59; Linda Guzzetti, Venezianische Vermächtnisse: Die soziale und wirtschaftliche Situation von Frauen im Spiegel spätmittelalterlicher Testamente (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1998).

• 11. Marie Favereau, La Horde d’Or et l’islamisation des steppes eurasiatiques (Aix-en-Provence: Presses Universitaires de Provence, 2018); Barker, The Most Precious Merchandise; Juliane Schiel, “Tatort Tana: Die Rolle Lateineuropas in der Sklavenökonomie des Schwarzmeerraums (ca. 1300–1500),” Historische Zeitschrift 313, no. 1 (2021): 32–60; Juliane Schiel, “The Ragusan ‘Maids-of-all-Work’. Shifting Labor Relations in the Late Medieval Adriatic Sea Region,” Journal of Global Slavery 5 (2020): 139–69.

• 12. Umberto Dorini and Tommaso Bertelè, eds., Il libro dei conti di Giacomo Badoer (Constantinopoli, 1436–1440) (Rome: Ist. Poligr. dello Stato, 1956).

• 13. “Di messer Iosafa Barbaro, gentiluomo veneziano, il viaggio della Tana e nella Persia,” in Navigazioni e viaggi: A cura di Marica Milanesi, ed. Giovanni Battista Ramusio, vol. 3 (Turin: Einaudi, 1980), 485–574, at 504–5.

• 14. Emir O. Filipović, “The Ottoman Conquest and the Depopulation of Bosnia in the Fifteenth Century,” in State and Society in the Balkans Before and After Establishment of Ottoman Rule, eds. Srdan Rudić and Selim Aslantas (Belgrade: The Institute of History Belgrade, 2017), 79–101.

• 15. Gregor Čremošnik, Acta Cancellariae et Notariae Annorum 1278–1301 (Belgrade, 1932), no. 79, 46–7.

• 16. Debra Blumenthal, Enemies and Familiars: Slavery and Mastery in Fifteenth-Century Valencia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009); Aurelia Martín Casares, La esclavitud en la Granada del siglo XVI: Género, raza y religion (Granada: Univ., Centro Prov. de la Mujer, 2000).

• 17. Dennis Romano/Guido Ruggiero Leon Battista Alberti, eds., I libri della famiglia (Torino: Einaudi, 1989). Vera Ribaudo, ed., Benedetto Cotrugli Raguseo. Libro de l’arte de la mercatura (Venice: Edizioni Ca’Foscari, 2016).

• 18. Stanley Chojnacki, “Crime, Punishment, and the Trecento Venetian State,” in Violence and Civil Disorder in Italian Cities. 1200–1500, ed. Lauro Martines (Berkely: University of California Press, 1972), 184–228; Dennis Romano, Housecraft and Statecraft: Domestic Service in Renaissance Venice 1400–1600 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996).

• 19. Elena Cecchi, ed., Le lettere di Francesco Datini alla moglie Margherita (1385–1410) (Prato: Società Pratese di Storia Patria, 1990); Valeria Rosati, ed., Le lettere di Margherita Datini a Francesco di Marco (1384–1410) (Prato: Cassa di Risparmi e Depositi, 1977); Carolyn James/Antonio Pagliaro, eds., Margherita Datini. Letters to Francesco Datini (Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2012).

• 20. Archivio di Stato di Venezia, Avogaria di Comun, Raspe, reg. 3646, fol. 84v–85r (19 June 1410); for more detailed information on the case of Bona Tatara, see Juliane Schiel, “Mord von zarter Hand: Der Giftmordvorwurf im Venedig des 15. Jahrhunderts,” in Mediterranean Slavery Revisited (500–1800)/Neue Perspektiven auf Mediterrane Sklaverei (500–1800), eds. Stefan Hanß and Juliane Schiel (Zurich: Chronos, 2014), 201–28.

• 21. Juliane Schiel, “Die Sklaven und die Pest: Überprüfung eines Forschungsnarrativs am Beispiel Venedigs,” in Schiavitù e servaggio nell’economia europea, secc. XI–XVIII/Serfdom and Slavery in the European Economy, 11th–18th Centuries, ed. Simonetta Cavaciocchi, vol. 1 (Florence: Firenze University Press, 2014), 365–75, at 371–74.

• 22. Christoph Cluse, “Frauen in Sklaverei: Beobachtungen aus genuesischen Notariatsregistern des 14. und 15. Jahrhunderts,” in Campana pulsante convocati: Festschrift anlässlich der Emeritierung von Prof. Dr. Alfred Haverkamp, ed. Frank G. Hirschmann and Gerd Mentgen (Trier: Kliomedia, 2005), 85–123; Sally McKee, “Inherited Status and Slavery in Late Medieval Italy and Venetian Crete,” Past and Present 182 (2004): 31–53.

• 23. Sergio Perini, ed., “Testamento del doge Antonio Venier: 1400, 24 ottobre,” Archivio Veneto 138–139 (1992): 126–33; Juliane Schiel, Isabelle Schürch, and Aline Steinbrecher, “Von Sklaven, Pferden und Hunden: Trialog über den Nutzen aktueller Agency-Debatten für die Sozialgeschichte,” Schweizerisches Jahrbuch für Wirtschafts- und Sozialgeschichte/Annuaire suisse d’histoire économique et sociale 23 (2017): 17–48.

• 24. See endnote 19.

• 25. Romano, Housecraft and Statecraft; Guido Ruggiero, The Boundaries of Eros: Sex Crime and Sexuality in Renaissance Venice (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985).

• 26. Ruggiero, The Boundaries of Eros.

• 27. See endnote 13.

• 28. Ferdinando Lionti, ed., Codice diplomatico di Alfonso il Magnanimo, vol. 1: 1416–1417. Palermo 1891, 159, n. 297.

• 29. See endnote 20.

• 30. Giulia Bonazza, “Connecting the Mediterranean and the Atlantic,” Journal of Global Slavery 3 (2018): 152–75.