kingdoms was changing by the late eleventh and twelfth centuries as the Christian reconquest gained momentum. More and more frequently, campaigns by Christians captured and held whole towns and cities with large Muslim populations. Alfonso VI’s seizure of the large city of Toledo in 1085 is perhaps the best example. No longer was it possible to carry out wholesale enslavements among the conquered population, even though some male prisoners—defeated combatants—were still enslaved. Rather, the remaining Muslims, the Mudejars, were allowed to remain and carry on their lives subject to the authority of the Christian rulers. Enslavement of unransomed captives continued. As one example of the numbers of slaves captured, after the late eleventh-century reconquest of Avila, some two hundred Muslim slaves were put to work in chains to build the town’s famous walls. After the significant Christian victory over the Muslims at Las Navas de Tolosa in 1212, several thousand defeated Muslim warriors entered the market as slaves. Later battles also brought still more slaves to the market: for example, the battle of Jerez de la Frontera in 1231.15
In the 1260s, the Muslim poet Abū al-Baqā’ al-Rundī lamented the fate of the Muslims who fell into the hands of the Christians after the conquest of Seville:
Yesterday they were kings in their own houses, but today they are slaves in the land of the infidel!
Thus, were you to see them perplexed, with no one to guide them, wearing the cloth of shame in its different shades,
And were you to behold their weeping when they are sold, the matter would strike fear into your heart, and sorrow would seize you.
Alas, many a mother and child have been parted as souls and bodies are separated!
And many a maiden fair as the sun when it rises, as though she were rubies and pearls,
Is led off to abomination against her will, while her eye is in tears and her heart is stunned.
The heart melts with sorrow at such [sights], if there is any Islam or belief in that heart!16
We can see how the process of captivity and enslavement developed in the conquest of the Balearic Islands. After King Jaume I the Conqueror took over Mallorca after hard fighting (1229–32), many members of the Muslim community fled, while others were enslaved. About the same time (1231), Jaume made a treaty with the Muslim population of Minorca, who accepted client status. The Muslims of Minorca adhered to the treaty until the 1280s, when they began a series of rebellions against the Aragonese. In response to the violations of the treaty, Alfons II subdued Minorca, treated the rebellious islanders in a punitive fashion, and enslaved the captives. The chronicler Muntaner reported that 40,000 captives were put on the slave market, although that figure is likely an exaggeration. Whatever their real numbers were, the captives were offered the possibility of being ransomed. Those who could pay the ransom regained their freedom; the rest became slaves of the king. Some of these slaves were sold in Minorca, and many of the others ended up in the slave markets of the peninsula, in Sicily, or in Mallorca. Others remained in the hands of the king, who gave some of them as gifts to nobles and clerics, including the pope, and set some to work in the shipyards of Barcelona. On the island of Ibiza, as elsewhere, some captives converted to Christianity, gaining perks and the greater possibility of eventual manumission.17
During the reconquest of Valencia and the campaigns in Murcia, the Christian conquerors sold prisoners of war into slavery but reacted vigorously to stop Muslims who were not war captives from being sold as slaves.18 From among the captives, though, King Jaume sent some two thousand slaves as gifts to kings, emperors, nobles, cardinals, and the pope.19 In 1280, after King Pere took Montesa, “slavers continued for at least a year and a half their purchases among the multiple prisoners of war.”20
In addition to war, free people could fall into slavery if they were captured in raids across religious lines, by incursions on land, by coastal raids, or by seizures at sea. Such raids continued through the centuries of the later Middle Ages and into modern times.21 They were features of the centuries-long confrontation between Muslim and Christian societies around the Mediterranean. Life was precarious for those, whether Muslim or Christian, who lived along the coasts or near the land frontier between the areas of Islamic and Christian control. As the Christian reconquest moved southward, royal and municipal authorities had to offer incentives for settlers in areas exposed to Muslim raids.
Muslim raids into Christian territory were designed for quick seizures of booty and prisoners, and the captives were held until they were ransomed. Along the frontiers of Muslim Granada in the fifteenth century, Christians fell into the hands of Muslims in several ways. Muslims made raids into Christian territory and captured groups and individuals. In addition to defeated warriors, the captives were usually people who had been working alone in the countryside, such as shepherds or farmers, or those traveling the roads, such as merchants. Coastal dwellers, especially those in isolated villages, ran heightened risks, as pirates or corsairs could raid with ease, just as they could capture vessels at sea.22 Christian raiders sometimes found themselves surrounded and captured, and individual Christians at times were sent into Muslim territory as hostages in exchange for other prisoners. As the reconquest moved still farther south, victorious Christian armies freed their coreligionists who were being held as slaves.23
On the Christian side, Muslim prisoners of war increased the servile population in the aftermath of victorious Christian raids. By the eleventh century, Christian Spain had many fewer slaves of Christian origin and many more of Muslim origin. The multiplication of the manumissions over time meant that by the twelfth century few Christians were slaves. The Muslim slaves in this early period were seldom ransomed. They frequently received baptism, and ultimately they and their descendants became amalgamated into the lower rungs of the society of the Christian states. Once enslaved by war, for the Muslims, and once born into slavery, for the Christian slaves, they could be transferred from owner to owner by purchase and sale, by gift, and by testament. They could also be manumitted. Christians seem to have been manumitted more frequently than were Muslims.24
In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the Portuguese monarchs and nobles conformed to general Iberian practice and enslaved Muslim prisoners of war. Portugal no longer bordered on Muslim territory after the Algarve was conquered in the thirteenth century. Thereafter, the most fruitful source of slaves for Portugal was North Africa, although occasionally the Portuguese participated in Castilian raids on Granada and obtained slaves there. In the late Middle Ages, Portuguese seamen captured North African and black African slaves in the waters off Morocco and took them back to Portugal or Spain. In 1317 King Dinis of Portugal gave the Genoese Manuel Pesagno a naval command and permission for privateering in Moroccan waters. Pesagno could retain one-fifth of all the slaves he captured.25
In the Crown of Aragon, the methods of enslaving were similar to those employed in the same period by the Castilians and the Portuguese: capture in war and raids. The legal code of the town of Teruel shows the manner in which the captives were distributed following a successful raid. Their captors placed them under guard and made an initial sorting: some would be exchanged for Christian prisoners, and the others would be enslaved. The king got a share equal to one-fifth of the captives. This relied on precedent going back to Roman times: the sovereign received a fifth of war booty. The members of the expedition received numbers of slaves that varied according to their social standing and their actions in the campaign. The code of the town of Calatayud in 1120 stated that if a Muslim king were to be captured, he would belong to the Aragonese king.26 After the Black Death of the mid-fourteenth century, the king of Aragon authorized his subjects on the island of Ibiza to conduct privateering raids against the Muslims. These raids, and those from other parts of the Aragonese empire, continued into early modern times. Directed against coastal dwellers in North Africa and, until 1492, the Muslim kingdom of Granada, the raids produced captives sold widely in the Christian Mediterranean and as far as Portugal.27
When the Catholic
