The Slave Trade

by Hugh Thomas

  There were more slaves in Seville—the “needle’s eye,” in a later judge’s phrase—in the fifteenth century than anywhere else in Spain.12 They were to be found in the Arenal, where ships for trading were loaded, even selling goods in public squares and in marketplaces. Moors and Moriscos (white slaves, esclavos blancos), had usually been captives in war (either from Granada or captured in Mediterranean wars) and were often disliked; but blacks (esclavos negros), who often became Christians and accepted Spanish culture, were easily absorbed.

  Slaves were also to be found in Italy: not just in commercially adventurous cities such as Genoa, Venice, and Florence, but also in Rome. A law of 1441 in Genoa showed how seriously the slave trade was taken then: a slave ship with one deck could henceforth only carry thirty slaves; with two it could carry forty-five; and one with three, sixty. (These were regulations of a kind which Northern Europe, after it had re-entered the slave traffic in the seventeenth century, would not repeat till 1790 on the occasion of Sir William Dolben’s bill in England.) It was laid down in Florence in 1364 that all kinds of slaves might be imported, provided they were not Catholics. Most of those brought in were Tartars from Kaffa; at least one Florentine firm, that of the family of Marchionni, had a foothold there in a prominently Genoese-dominated city. Between 1366 and 1397, nearly 400 slaves were sold in Florence (mostly women). Many Greek slaves were also sold in Italy, along with Albanians, Russians, Turks, and “Moors.” In the late fifteenth century, Venetians probably enjoyed the services of about three thousand slaves from North Africa or Tartary. Anxiety was sometimes expressed because there were too few slaves (for example, in a debate in the Senate in Venice in 1459); but there was also fear lest slaves might become so numerous as to constitute a danger to the city: a familiar cry in later slave societies in the Americas.

  • • •

  The southern shore of the Mediterranean afforded an even livelier market for slaves in the late Middle Ages than the northern one. No doubt Christian captives dominated the field, mostly kidnapped on the high seas or in maritime raids on Spanish or Italian ports or villages. All the same, for hundreds of years, black slaves, especially girls and young men, had also been sought after by Arab merchants for use in Muslim courts, from Córdoba to Baghdad, as servants, concubines, or warriors. The slave girls of Awdaghost, on the Upper Niger, were prized as cooks, particularly skilled, reported the traveler al-Bakri, at making exquisite pastries out of a mixture of nuts and honey. In the fourteenth century, another traveler, al-Umari, described the empire of Mali, the largest West African monarchy of the time, also on the Upper Niger, as deriving great profit from “its merchandise and its seizures by razzias in the land of the infidel.” The successors of the Mali, the emperors of the Songhai, would customarily give presents of slaves to their guests. In Fez, in the early sixteenth century, the emperor gave Leo the African, a Moor born in Granada who later lived at the brilliant court of Pope Leo X in Rome, “fifty male slaves and fifty female slaves brought out of the land of the blacks, ten eunuchs, twelve camels, one giraffe, twenty civet-cats. . . . Twenty of the male slaves,” he added, “cost twenty ducats apiece, and so did fifteen of the female slaves.” The eunuchs were worth forty ducats, the camels fifty, and the civet-cats two hundred—the high cost of the last item being due to their use in making scent.13

  Egypt had a taste for black eunuchs in the tenth century. Admittedly, they were largely able to satisfy this caprice by trading with the territories to their south. A treaty of 651 A.D. obliged the Nubians to deliver 360 slaves a year to Egypt, and there were Muslim conventions with other conquered peoples in North Africa. Then many of those who set off northwards from the sub-Sahara Sudan would take with them black slaves, whom they would customarily sell when they arrived at their destination.

  The enthusiasm for black slaves was, to be sure, nothing like a private interest of the Muslims: they were also popular as slaves in Java and India in the Middle Ages; even the Chinese seem to have liked East African slaves, a desire presumably satisfied by Muslim merchants in Canton.

  The numbers involved in trans-Sahara trading are difficult to estimate. Could there have been seven thousand black eunuchs in Baghdad in the tenth century? Was it the sheer number of black slaves in the fields of Mesopotamia which inspired there the great rebellion of slaves led by Ali ibn Muhammed at the end of the ninth century? Princes in Bahrain in the eleventh century are credited with holding thirty thousand black slaves, mostly employed in gardening or at least domestic agriculture. In 1275, ten thousand natives of the region of the Upper Niger are said to have been sold in Egypt “after a military campaign.”14 The chief buyers would have been the slave soldiers the Mamelukes, who seized power in Egypt in 1250 and in the fourteenth century dominated the Near East. An Egyptian claimed that Mansa Musa, the most remarkable sultan of the Niger empire of Mali, sold, during his pilgrimage to Mecca of 1324, fourteen thousand female slaves in Cairo in order to meet his traveling costs. The exaggeration in statistics in all societies before the twentieth century, from the size of armies to deaths in action, is notorious. Still, anything between five thousand and twenty thousand slaves may have been carried north annually from the region of the Niger to the harems, the barracks, the kitchens, or the farms of the Muslim Mediterranean and Near East during the late Middle Ages; and not just to North Africa, since Sicily, Sardinia, Genoa, Venice, and even parts of Christian Spain had, as has been suggested, their corrals of black slaves in the fifteenth century. The enslavement of black Africans recently converted to Islam might be forbidden to Muslims. All the same, the caliphs and emirs turned a blind eye to it. Thus the black king of Bornu, in what is now Nigeria, complained bitterly to the sultan of Egypt in the 1390s that Arab tribesmen were always seizing “our people as merchandise.”15

  • • •

  This trans-Sahara trade, between West and North Africa, probably began in one form or another as early as 1000 B.C., when the desert was crossed by oxen and carts drawn by horses. The commerce was encouraged by both the Carthaginians and the Romans. After the introduction of the camel, the essential element in communications in Africa till the advent of motor vehicles in the 1920s, it prospered even more. The most important route in Roman days was that which led to Muzuk, the capital of Fezzan, in what is now southern Libya. That linked Tripolitania and Egypt with the cities on the central bend of the Niger. There were, however, even in antiquity, other roads to the Mediterranean. With the fall of Rome, this trade, such as it was, evaporated. But it revived when, in 533-35, Byzantium reconquered North Africa. Probably a few slaves were always brought along these routes, including in classical times.

  The Arab conquests of North Africa in the seventh century, though at first destructive, eventually contributed to the restoration and expansion of trans-Saharan trade.

  Leo the African, who traveled in this region, spoke of twenty cities between Morocco and Tripoli which enjoyed “great traffic into the land of the blacks.”16 The most important of these places—Fez, Sijilmasa, and Ghadames—were inland towns, whose merchants never traded directly with the Christian Catalans, Italians, and Majorcans who were established on the coast. Christian traders were allowed to settle in Marrakesh but nowhere else. The medieval European monarchies in consequence knew little of the details of this flourishing trade between the Maghreb and the people of Guinea.

  The main Arab route across the Sahara to Morocco was that from Timbuktu to Sijilmasa. Though Muslim merchants were the most important traders, a few Jewish, Berber, and black ones also played a part. This commerce was limited, first, by the length of the journey—seventy to ninety days or longer—and, second, by the requirement that all goods (other than slaves) had a high value in relation to their weight. The crossing was dangerous, and could not be made at certain times of the year: there were sandstorms in the summer, as well as sharp changes in the temperature from day to night. Water was always short, and marauders were frequent. It was easy to become lost. It may easily be that as many as a
quarter of the slaves died en route.

  Of the other goods carried, gold was significant, at least from 800 A.D. It became more and more important (in the eleventh and twelfth centuries) after, first, the Muslim countries of the Mediterranean, and then several European ones adopted that metal as their currency. West Africa was Europe’s main source of gold in the late Middle Ages, although the place itself was quite unknown to Europe.

  • • •

  The racial mixture in West Africa was interesting. Before the Arab invasions, the land was principally inhabited by two peoples: in the northwest, the Hamites—called Libyans or barbari by the Romans, and Berbers by the Arabs, a word actually deriving from barbari—and black people to the south of the desert. The arrival of the Arabs brought a most troubling extra element. All the same, the Berbers retained most of their individual characteristics, as highland tillers of the soil and lovers of freedom. They were rarely moved by religious enthusiasm, and were able, on the whole, to preserve their purity of race. But in the south there was much mixture. Thus the people of Timbuktu had black skin but much Berber blood. They thought of the black Songhai, in the Middle Niger Valley, as savages, though the powerful ruling dynasty of that monarchy was Berber in origin. In the desert, the Hamitic Tuaregs were the dominant people at the time of the coming of the Arabs, who named them “the veiled people,” though in truth they adopted the use of veils only after the year 600. They may have had a time as Christians for, even after they adopted Islam, their favorite emblem was a cross, and they continued to be monogamous. In the fifteenth century, they controlled, and maintained, the desert’s oases and pastures, and they levied tolls on the caravan routes crossing the Sahara. In the confusion which attended the collapse of the Roman empire, they also acquired the large herds of camels which were the basis of their strength.

  The distinguishing feature of West Africa was that it was a territory in which the peoples from the desert, such as these Tuaregs, were in the habit of making constant raids on settled communities in the well-watered and prosperous peripheries—on the Muslim Mandingos, for example, or the Songhai, from whom, among other things, they stole slaves. The desert peoples hated agriculture and needed slaves to tend the oases. The Tuaregs and the Arabs liked to employ blacks in this capacity, even though they despised them: a tenth-century traveler from Baghdad, Ibn Hawkal, wrote that he had “not described the country of the African blacks . . . of the torrid zone . . . because, naturally loving wisdom, ingenuity, religion, justice and regular government, how could I notice such people as these . . . ?”17 Ibn Battuta, who has been mentioned before, was also horrified to find that the blacks, whom he had in the past known as slaves, were the masters in their own country. He complained of the food he found there, and thought that this bad food showed that “there was no good to be hoped for from these people.” But he comforted himself all the same by traveling back to Fez with a caravan of six hundred black slaves.18

  Raiding in what the Arabs named “the Country of the Blacks,” the Beled es-Sudan, the tropical rain forest of the Guinea coast, also became a traditional occcupation of Muslims of the plains, especially during dry weather.

  Arab power expanded the trade in slaves. By the fifteenth century, Muslim merchants, usually mullahs, dominated the marketing of them, as of most other things. These holy men constituted an international brotherhood, for they were not attached to any kingdom. They obtained their captives much as the Muslims had done in Spain and elsewhere: by razzias into nearby towns, whose inhabitants they stole without bothering about a pretext. But they also bought slaves, which meant little more than that they let others do the stealing for them.

  Medieval West Africa, after all, constituted a part of the civilization of Islam, if only a frontier zone. That Muslim connection had many positive sides. Indeed, the coming of Islam explains why, by the fifteenth century, the region had mostly advanced beyond a subsistence economy to one using production for exchange. The architect Es-Sahili had come there from Moorish Spain to introduce the idea of stone buildings into the land of Guinea. Craftsmen and hunters as well as fishermen and farmers by then sustained a vigorous commercial life extending over long distances, not just to the Mediterranean. Markets existed, often arranged according to an elaborate plan by which sellers met in rotation, large commercial exchanges being held once a week, smaller ones once a fortnight. Iron of different sizes, copper bars, copper wristlets, manillas (rings of metal used as necklaces or bracelets), and even cowries from the Maldive Islands in the Indian Ocean, all items which would play a part in the Atlantic slave trade, were widely used as currency. The slave dimension of West Africa was stimulated also by the extension of Islam into the region.

  West Africa itself had known slavery on a small scale before the coming of Islam, and had done so since the establishment there of settled agricultural societies. African kings who collected and sold slaves for lucrative export to the north usually kept a few for their own use. But the Islamic monarchs, such as the emperors of Mali or their successors to great power on the Middle Niger, the Songhai, ushered in a new stage: these rulers were powerful men, with large armies at their disposal, and considerable territories to exploit. Many of their monarchs employed slaves as a kind of Praetorian guard, on the assumption that, if they were foreigners, they must be reliable.

  In the early sixteenth century, Leo the African found that at Bornu, just beyond the Songhai empire, on the southern end of the easternmost, Garamantian, road to the Mediterranean, slaves were usually exchanged for horses: fifteen or twenty slaves for a single Arab horse. The low cost was because the Songhai had an almost limitless stock of captives: they had only to raid their weaker neighbors to the south in order to obtain all that they needed. Slaves were used for all kinds of purposes: for example, the commerce in gum on the river Sénégal was made possible by the use of slaves in the harvest from March till July. Slaves were also used in mines: the Lisbon typographer and translator Valentim Fernandes, a traveler of Moravian origin, who would go to Benin in the 1490s, described how seven kings, possessors of seven mines of gold, “have slaves which they put into the mines, and they are given wives; and they engender and raise children in the mines. . . .” He added mysteriously, “The slaves who find the gold are all black but, if by a miracle, they manage to escape from them, they become white because colour is modified in the mines.”19

  When, in what is now western Nigeria, the Oyo kingdom of the Yorubas came into being (perhaps during the early fifteenth century), there were several thousand palace slaves. Many slaves worked in agriculture: in the 1450s, the Venetian Alvise Ca’da Mosto found that kings on the river Sénégal, tributaries of the Songhai, and before them of the Mali, had numerous slaves, obtained by pillage, “which they make use of in various ways, above all to cultivate their lands. . . .”20

  In West Africa, slaves seem to have been the only form of private property recognized by African custom. They also represented the most striking manifestation of personal wealth.

  This was the world touched at the periphery by de Freitas’s expedition in 1444, which, the ships aside, must have seemed to the Africans a conventional, not a revolutionary, event.

  • • •

  Some of the slaves seen by Zurara on that day at Lagos in the Algarve became “good and true Christians”: the Azanaghi wore their Mohammedanism lightly, and were more easy to convert to other religions than those living farther inland in Africa. Some were freed. Some were put to work on the sugar estates founded farther south in Portugal, often by Genoese investors. Four of those present on that day in Lagos in 1444 were given to monasteries or churches. Of these, one was merely resold by the church to which he had been presented, for it needed money with which to buy decorations. One other, sent to the monastery of São Vicente do Cabo, became a Franciscan friar.

  The expressions of regret and pity by Zurara, though they may now seem modest, were among the few to be recorded not just at that time but for several centuries. Perhaps the goddess
Fortune, to whom the chronicler prayed, was a greater friend of man than more sophisticated deities.

  * * *

  IThe name “Guinea” appears to be a corruption of “Jenné” (Djenné), a trading town on the river Bani, a tributary of the Upper Niger; or, of the Berber word for “black,” namely, aguinaou.

  4

  The Portuguese Served for Setting Dogs to Spring the Game

  “The Portuguese served for setting dogs to spring the game, which as soon as they had done was seized by others.”

  Willem Bosman, 1704

  THE EVENTS of that early summer morning in 1444 in the Algarve when over two hundred slaves were first offered to the Portuguese had their beginnings centuries before, during the earliest attempts of European peoples to explore Africa.

  In the sixth century B.C., the Pharaoh Necho sent down the Red Sea an expedition which returned, two years later, through the Strait of Gibraltar. Herodotus tells the story. But there is little other evidence of such an early circumnavigation.