The Slave Trade

by Hugh Thomas

  The idea that some element of morality introduced by a more penitent Church played a part should not be entirely ignored. Balthilde, an Anglo-Saxon slave of Erchinoald, the maire du palais, married King Clovis II (the first roi fainéant) in 649, and she became known for her efforts both to stop the slave trade and to redeem those already enslaved (she is now very properly Saint Balthilde). Slaves were beginning to be allowed, in however humble a posture, to enter churches; and there was some intermarriage between freemen and slave girls. The mere act of baptism proved that slaves were men, or women, with souls. Then, in 960 A.D., the bishops of Venice sought to win divine forgiveness for what they admitted to have been their past sins in selling slaves by seeking to prohibit Venetians from engaging in the trade. In England, manumission became increasingly frequent before 1066, especially by bishops in their wills, and seems to have become almost a commandment. William the Conqueror gave his support to ecclesiastical rules forbidding the enslavement of Christians, as did Henry I. Archbishop Anselm, at the London Council of 1102, denounced the practice of selling Englishmen as “brute beasts”; his pious contemporary Bishop Wulfstan preached against the practice of selling English slaves from Bristol to Ireland.3 But it is unclear whether they would have minded selling Frenchmen—or Welshmen, come to that—and the Church remained a slaveowner. Much earlier, the goldsmith Saint Eligius was found enfranchising “only” a hundred of the slaves whom he offered to the new Monastery of Solignac, near Limoges.

  The truth seems to be that many causes for the fall of the ancient institution came together during the eleventh century in Northern Europe. There seem to have been no slaves to speak of by then in central Italy, in Catalonia, in central France. In Spain, the slave system was already on the verge of collapse at the time of the Moorish conquest. Thereafter, the grandsons of many who had been slaves began to be converted into serfs, men with obligations to masters (who provided their houses, as in the mezzadria, the sharecropping arrangement of Italy) but who also worked on their own to gain some part of their living. In northern France, it became evident that serfs not only produced more than slaves did, but they required no permanent guards. All the same, there seems to have been what a modern French historian has called “un moment privilégié,” a “discontinuity,” when slavery was dying, and before serfdom had been properly established.4

  England carried through these changes a little later than did her continental neighbors. But after the Norman Conquest, the new lords freed many of the slaves whom they found on the estates which they seized, and these then joined the ranks of the lower peasantry. Domesday Book records twenty-five thousand servi, or about a tenth of the labor force (many were plowmen, living completely at the lord’s disposal, and in his house). But the Norman Conquest was the first such invasion of England which did not increase the number of slaves in the country. Thereafter, the feudal system was introduced, in a more coherent way than anywhere on the continent, by the king and his tenants, the new lords. By 1200, slavery had disappeared in England, even if William Wilberforce, in a famous speech six hundred years later, introducing in the English House of Commons a discussion of the slave trade, talked of child slaves from Bristol being sold to Ireland as late as the reign of Henry VII—an aspect of the troubles of the latter island which has not otherwise received attention.5

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  The state of slavery was, however, quite different in Southern Europe. In all the countries which bordered the Mediterranean, the institution prospered in the Middle Ages. The reasons were, first, that that sea, and its shore, constituted a permanent war zone between Christians and Muslims; and, second, that slaves continued to be a priority in Islam. Christians and Muslims alike in the Mediterranean still considered that the institution of slavery had a firm basis in Roman and canon law, in the Bible, and also in the Koran—though the latter specifically, and often, proclaimed that to free a slave was one of the most praiseworthy of acts. The third Caliph Othman had done so: he was said to have bought over two thousand captives simply for the purpose of liberating them.

  Just as the entire population of Carthage had been enslaved after its capture by Rome, so, in the early eighth century, the swift conquest of Visigothic Spain by the Moors was followed by mass enslavements of Christians. Thirty thousand Christian slaves are said to have been sent to Damascus, as the prescribed fifth of the booty due to the caliph after the fall of the Visigoths. These slaves were fortunate, since the Koran allowed the killing of all males in cities which resisted, and merely the enslavement of their wives and children. Years later, Willibald, a Kentish pilgrim to the Holy Land, was helped by a Spanish “chamberlain to the King of the Saracens,” who may have been a survivor of these. In Medina, it was for a long time easy to meet Christian slaves of Spanish origin. Abd ar-Rahman III, the most gifted of the caliphs in Córdoba, in Spain itself, employed nearly four thousand Christian slaves in his palace of Madinat az-Zahra, outside that city. The great al-Mansur, grand vizier of that caliphate in the late tenth century, launched over fifty attacks on Christian territories, from all of which he brought back slaves: thirty thousand, it is said, after his conquest of León. When he died, at Medinaceli in 1002, his friends lamented that “our provider of slaves is no more.”6 As late as 1311, Aragonese ambassadors at the General Council of the Church at Vienne claimed that there were still thirty thousand Christian slaves in the kingdom of Granada.

  Islam in fact accepted slavery as an unquestionable part of human organization. Indeed, Mahomet took over the system of slavery upon which ancient society was based, without question. The greatest of Arab historians, Ibn-Khaldun, believed that it was through slavery that some of the strongest Muslims, such as the Turks, learned “the glory and the blessing and [had become] exposed to divine providence.” By Islamic law, if a people were to convert to Islam before a battle against a Muslim army, their lives, goods, and liberty had to be respected. There were also some tolerant rules, such as that “it is essential that a captured polytheist [the Koran’s euphemism for a Christian] receives his nourishment and good treatment up till the time that his fate is decided.”7 Slave children were not to be separated from their mothers till they had attained the age of seven. Thus the laws of Islam were in some ways more benign in respect of slavery than those of Rome. Slaves were not to be treated as if they were animals. Slaves and freemen were equal from the point of view of God. The master did not have power of life and death over his slave property.

  Not all Christians in Moorish Spain were enslaved after their subjection. Some Christian princes to begin with could even keep their own slaves. But they were not permitted to have Muslim ones, or black ones: the latter were especially coveted by Muslim noblemen, since they were in short supply.

  The Muslims of Spain carried on their pursuit of slaves beyond the borders of the old Visigothic realm. For example, they raided France for captives from a base in the Camargue, and they made razzias to Arles in 842, to Marseilles in 838, and to Valence in 869. Throughout the High Middle Ages, there were also innumerable acts of Mediterranean piracy in which Christians were seized by Muslims (or Muslims by Christians), the captures being followed by long negotiations for ransoms. Entire religious orders, such as the Mercedarians, were founded in Christian Spain to deal with the matter. How often did innocuous-seeming little ships set off from the northern coasts of Africa in order to seize Christians from the shores of the north! And how often, too, did similar ships set off from Barcelona or Majorca with a similar goal.

  The Muslims of Spain also bought slaves, and on a large scale. One important source, after the revival of prosperity under the Carolingians, were the still largely pagan Slav territories (the people lent their name to the institution, and the word “Slav” later became a synonym in Arabic for “eunuch”). Merchants in the eastern marches of Germany would drive captives to markets in the Mediterranean—sometimes via Walenstad in Austria—or Venice—sometimes via Koblenz, on the Rhine, or Verdun. These prisoners might also travel south
, down the Saône and the Rhone, and be embarked at Arles. Thence, crossing the Mediterranean in a middle passage as disagreeable as, if shorter than, that of the Atlantic in later days, they would be landed at Almería, the main port of Muslim Spain. They might be shipped thence to any Muslim port, even to Baghdad or Trebizond, Cairo or Algiers.

  There grew up, too, a thriving two-way commerce in slaves between Christian merchants of Europe, such as Normans (the Vikings often carried away slaves), and the Muslims of the Mediterranean and of the Atlantic coast. Christian representatives in Arab ports sought to obtain treaties, and consuls, to protect themselves. Sometimes they were successful. But they were prevented from penetrating the African interior by the Arab merchants who controlled the trade there. Those middlemen offered sought-after African products as well as slaves—gold, ivory, ebony, dyed goat skins, chillies, or malaguetta peppers (the “grains of paradise”) in return for European treasures such as glass beads, weapons, and woolen goods. Sometimes black slaves from Guinea might be exchanged for blond ones from Poland.

  Thus, in the early Middle Ages, at all the Muslim Mediterranean courts and especially those of al-Andalus, there were gathered together, as in an international brigade of servitude, Greek, Slav, German, Russian, Sudanese, and black slaves. Nubians, Ethiopians, and occasionally those sought-after black men and women from Guinea were also to be seen, having been brought across the Sahara from Timbuktu to Sijilmasa, an important market town in southern Morocco.I With them came ivory which was used by the famous Islamic school of ivory carving at Cuenca. One historian of al-Andalus writes of the “vast hordes of slaves” brought in during the tenth century. Among the merchants who dealt in these slaves from Guinea was the father of the Andalusian historian Ahmad ar-Razi, who was not the last such writer to have financed his research by a fortune accumulated by a slaving forebear.

  The Umayyad rulers of Córdoba, acting in imitation of the Abbasid caliphs in Baghdad, began to employ slaves as soldiers and, by the middle of the ninth century, the caliph there had a slave army of sixty thousand “silent ones,” so named because, being German, English, or Slav, they spoke no Arabic. Yusef ibn Tashufun the Almoravid favored the use of these Christian slaves against Christian rulers: they fought well. Even though Muslim power was in decay by the end of the fourteenth century, Christian slaves also worked on the Alhambra in Granada.

  Slaves could prosper in Muslim courts, and the son of one such, the Slav Badr, became governor of Córdoba. Many caliphs had children by their slave mistresses, and so it was that Abd ar-Rahman III was the son of a Christian slave girl. Some of the rulers of the taifas, the tiny principalities which sprang up in Spain after the collapse of the caliphate of Córdoba in the eleventh century, were slaves in origin: for example, Sabur, the slave king in Badajoz, was probably born Sapor, a Persian; and the ruler of Denia, near Valencia, may once have been a Sardinian slave.

  Perhaps some black slaves were included in the largely Berber army of Gebel el-Tarik, which crossed to Spain in 711. Abd ar-Rahman I, the founder of the Umayyad caliphate in Córdoba, employed a black slave to manage his harem. Al-Hakam I, in the ninth century, surrounded himself with “mamelukes [Egyptians] and blacks.” Al-Hakam II, a hundred years later, had a black slave bodyguard, as did the most powerful king of Granada, Muhammad V, in the mid-fourteenth century.

  The Christians in Spain emulated Muslim behavior. True, they began their reconquest of the peninsula by killing the Muslim populations of the towns which they seized. But, by the end of the eighth century, captured women and children were made into slaves, as were some men. After all, execution was a waste of a resource. A prime purpose of Christian adventurers and municipal councils in penetrating Muslim territory soon indeed became to find slaves. In 1143, a Castilian king, Alfonso VII, made an expedition to Andalusia, and brought back Muslim slaves from Carmona, near Seville, as from Almería. Slaves (principally from Eastern Europe) also began to be given as presents, along with gold, to Christian kings of Spain by Muslim tributaries. Muslim slaves were at work on the rebuilding of the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela about 1150, just as Christian slaves were building the Mosque of Kutubiyya at Marrakesh.

  Castilian razzias, copying Muslim ones, increased in the thirteenth century. The recovery of the great cities of al-Andalus led to the enslavement of thousands who were received with enthusiasm by the conquerors and their followers. Many of the Muslims’ slaves from all over the Mediterranean and beyond also passed directly into Castilian hands. King Alfonso III of Aragon is also said to have sold forty thousand Moors after his capture of Minorca (in 1287); and the best historian of this subject has suggested that it might be enough merely to halve that figure in order to establish the truth.8 It must have been easy for Ramon Llull, the Majorcan mystic and agitator, to buy a Muslim slave about that time, who would teach him Arabic. The extraordinary Arab traveler Ibn Battuta described a Christian raid in 1352 for slaves on the coast of al-Andalus between Marbella and Málaga, perhaps at the fishing port of Torremolinos. The raid must have been similar to that of the Portuguese a hundred years later in West Africa, which brought the Azanaghi back to Prince Henry and the Algarve.

  Thus it is no surprise that slavery, though apparently in decline about 1000 A.D., as it was north of the Pyrenees, received detailed attention two hundred and fifty years later in the major Spanish legal code, the “Siete Partidas” of King Alfonso the Wise. That famous document specified that a man became a slave by being captured in war, by being born the child of a slave, or by letting himself be sold. The code, compiled in the 1260s, confirmed Roman definitions of slavery, though in some respects it was more tolerant (certainly more so than the rough Visigothic laws), for example, allowing that a slave might marry against his master’s will, and that, once married, couples could not be separated. If marriages occurred between slaves with different masters, an effort had to be made to let them work in the same place. If a compromise could not be achieved, the Church had to buy both slaves. Children would take the status of their mothers, so that, if the latter were free, the children could be too. A slave who was badly treated could complain to a judge, and a master who killed a slave could be tried for murder. Castration was forbidden as a punishment. Slaves were to be allowed to inherit property. There was no suggestion in the code that slavery might be an evil in itself. But manumission was possible, and slaves who could afford it could buy their liberty. King Alfonso also provided, bearing in mind that medieval Spain was a country of several cultures, that neither Jews, Moors, nor heretics could legally own Christian slaves.9

  These provisions in theory governed Spanish-owned slaves not just for the remainder of the Middle Ages but, however inadequately applied, or explicitly amended, in one way or another until the nineteenth century.

  By 1100, there were in Christian Spain (or Portugal) few slaves who had the same faith as their masters but many Muslim ones, living alongside a small class of free Muslims. Most of the captives were in one way or another servants in noble households, though some worked in workshops or on farms. Many of them were sold, often outside Spain. Thus, in the thirteenth century, Arles, Montpellier, Narbonne, Antibes, and Nice were important markets for slaves obtained from Africa. Venetian, Genoese, or Florentine merchants often did the selling. Barcelona was important too, its traders busily selling “sarrasines” or “Moors” to buyers in Sicily and Genoa. Palma de Mallorca ran Barcelona close as a slaving port in the fifteenth century. Thus we hear how Thomas Vincentius, of Tarragona, settled in Genoa, bought there, in the course of the summer of 1318, two white slaves (probably Moors), two olive-skinned ones, one slave from the Crimea, two Turks, and a Greek. Greek slaves were then fashionable in Barcelona, being obtained from the Catalan duchy of Athens; and slaves from the Crimea were easily acquired thanks to the Genoese colony at Kaffa (the modern Feodosiya). Other important sources for slaves were Sardinia and Russia: thus, on “24 April 1409, Johannes Vilahut, notary of the royal chancellery and bourgeois of Barcelona, sold to
Narciso Jutglat, bourgeois of Palma, a Russian neophyte, aged 27, named Helen.” There were Circassian, Armenian, and Turkish slaves as well as Balkans of all sorts and particularly Albanians (in 1450, “Jacobus d’Alois, coral fisherman of Barcelona, sold to the widow of a merchant of the same city an Albanian named Erma, aged 25”). The ethnic diversity was remarkable, as it had been in al-Andalus.10

  Ports in Aragon’s southern Italian dominions were also slave ports in the fifteenth century, above all Naples and Palermo. Sales there by Spanish merchants were frequent.

  In Aragon and Valencia, though Christian razzias and kidnappings, especially at sea, continued, commerce played a more and more important part in providing slaves for Europe. No doubt that should be seen as a step towards civilization.

  After the fall of Constantinople in 1453, slaves imported from Russia or the Black Sea became more rare. The conquest of Crimea by the Ottomans brought an end to the Genoese trading post at Kaffa. The shortage was compensated for in Spain by imports of slaves from the recently discovered (or rediscovered) Canary Islands. For example, after the “revolt” of Tenerife, a single merchant of Valencia brought back eighty-seven guanches (Canary Island natives) on one ship.

  Black African slaves were also becoming quite numerous, on the Mediterranean coast of Spain and elsewhere. In the 1250s already, Moorish traders were to be found offering black slaves from Guinea at fairs in Guimarães, in northern Portugal; and blacks bought in North Africa were being sold in Cádiz at the end of that century. In 1306, two inhabitants of Cerbère, on the Spanish-French border, sold “to Bernard Gispert, of Santa Coloma de Queralt, in Catalonia, a ‘black Saracen,’ called Alibez, for 335 sous.” At the end of the fourteenth century, in 1395, King Juan I of Aragon reclaimed two “Ethiopians” (a generic word still used for all Africans) who had hidden in the Monastery of Santa María de Besalú—one of them claiming that he was the son of the king of Ethiopia. Then, in 1416, Jaume Gil, hotelier of Igualada, no distance from Santa Coloma, bought “an Ethiopian negress,” Marguerite, known as Axa before she was baptized, from Elisenda, the widow of an apothecary, for 139 Aragonese gold florins. The records of the markets of those days indeed seem to contain increasing mention of “black Tartars,” of Algerians, even of black Christians from Tunis, and some from Sudan or Cyrenaica. The Africans of Barcelona were numerous enough, in the mid-fifteenth century, to form there a black cofradia, a black Christian brotherhood, such as existed already in both Seville and Valencia—though the direction of these must have been in the hands of freemen.11