the newly conquered city of Málaga in 1487, they freed with pomp and ceremony the hundreds of Christian captives, some of whom had been waiting twenty years for their liberation. The traveler Hieronymous Münzer in the last years of the fifteenth century asserted that “When the Muslims took Málaga, seven hundred years ago, they killed all the Christians. King Fernando vowed to do the same [to the Muslims] but lifted by his clemency and humanity, he sold them as captives. . . . The king sold 5,000 men, at 30 ducats each.”28 All told, the victors enslaved between 10,000 and 15,000 Muslim inhabitants of Málaga. Those who could arrange to be ransomed were freed, but they had to go to North Africa and could not remain in Spain. Those who remained were sold throughout southern Spain.29 Even common soldiers in the Granadan war got their share. Alfonso de Vergara of Seville, a legal official and part-time warrior, had two slaves. He took one of them home as war booty after the town of Alhama fell to the Christians and baptized him as a Christian with the name Francisco. The other was a white woman named Naxa; Vergara noted that he “won her with my own lance in the battle of Najarón and turned her into a Christian and who is now called Leonor.”30
Wars of conquest produced slaves in the Canary Islands, but the slavery of the Canarians turned out to be a short-lived phenomenon. The first European captains who entered the Canaries in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries enslaved many of the natives, either legally in the case of the groups that resisted, or illegally in the case of the groups whose leaders signed treaties and were thereby supposedly exempt from enslavement. Despite official watchfulness, the conquerors violated the rules at times and enslaved members of the treaty bands. Members of allied bands who later rebelled or refused to carry out the terms of their treaties could be enslaved as “captives of second war” (de segunda guerra). Native slaves were used both as laborers in the Canaries and as commodities for sale elsewhere, mainly in Andalusia or in Portuguese Madeira .31 An example of this is shown in a royal order of Queen Juana of Castile in 1513 to Alonso de Lugo, governor of the Canarian islands of Tenerife and La Palma, and his associates. The queen’s order reviewed the fact that after the conquest was over many of the bands in the islands became Christian and their members married in the Christian religion. Later, they offered twenty-five of their children as hostages guaranteeing their continued allegiance to the peace settlements. Lugo and his associates illegally took the twenty-five to Seville and sold them as slaves, alleging that they were captives taken during warfare with hostile bands. Juana ordered that Lugo and his deputies had one hundred days to locate the twenty-five, free them, and return them to their homes.32
Christians from the Canaries also made raids on the African coast and brought back Muslim slaves during the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Often those slaves converted to Christianity, won their freedom, and stayed to blend into the local population. On Lanzarote, a late sixteenth-century commentator, with obvious exaggeration, suggested that “three-quarters of the island population were Moors or their descendants.”33
War also produced captives when Spain conquered cities in North Africa, beginning with Melilla in 1497, and continuing with Oran in 1509, Tripoli in 1511, and Tunis in 1535, along with other Moroccan ports and inland cities. These conquests produced prisoners who were sold as slaves by the Spanish monarchy, by war leaders, and by ordinary soldiers, who received one or two slaves as part of their share of the booty. Most captives ended up in Spain, where they remained until ransomed, or longer if they could not arrange their ransoms.34
The Morisco Revolt
Relations between the Christian authorities and the Moriscos produced complications for the history of slavery. Although converted to Christianity, Moriscos maintained a number of the social customs of their ancestors and were never able to allay the suspicions of Spain’s Old Christians about the sincerity of their Christian beliefs. They can be observed as a distinct group in Castilian history as early as the fifteenth century, when Juan II and Enrique IV employed them in royal service.35 Their numbers swelled during the reign of Fernando and Isabel, when Muslims in the Spanish kingdoms, save only for those of Valencia, were forced 1502 to convert to Christianity or leave the country. Free Muslims followed different paths: some converted and assimilated, while others relocated to North Africa and continued their ancestral religion.36
Among the Moriscos were a certain number of slaves. Nonetheless, the majority of the Moriscos of the sixteenth century were free, and some of them engaged in slave trading, in violation of early sixteenth-century laws prohibiting them from owning slaves and much to the indignation of the representatives to the Cortes (the Castilian parliamentary body). The Cortes of Toledo of 1559 reported that Spanish Moriscos were purchasing black slaves in Spain and sending them to North Africa. They castrated some of them, presumably to fill the demand for eunuchs in the Muslim world, where emasculations were illegal and had to be done clandestinely. In response to the complaints of the Cortes, Felipe II ordered that slaves who suffered castration were subject to royal confiscation, and that the perpetrators would be fined.37
Many Moriscos ended up being enslaved during the Morisco uprisings in the Alpujarras south of Granada that began in 1568 and continued until 1571. Royal armies eventually brought them under control, with many Morisco men killed, and many other men, women, and children held captive. An intense, though brief, debate occupied court circles. Could the defeated Moriscos be enslaved? After all, the Morisco community had been officially Christian for generations, and Christians were not supposed to be enslaved. Nevertheless, most Spaniards, even in the highest circles, considered them to be Muslims who only outwardly conformed to Christianity. The decision was that they were rebels and could be enslaved. Morisco captives began to be sold as slaves even before the government reached its decision. In the interim, sale documents had clauses protecting the buyers in case the enslavements were not permitted, and other Moriscos, ones not involved in the revolt, offered to hold the captives until their fates could be decided.38 Many other Moriscos were killed, making orphans of their children. Still other Moriscos found themselves unable to care for their children and offered them to Christian families to be raised. Such children, both those orphaned and those abandoned or sold, ran the risk of being enslaved, but the licenciado Navas de Puebla, legal official of the army, intervened to save many of them from slavery. As well, Navas exempted many Moriscos from being expelled and no doubt saved their lives in the process. The royal officials ultimately ruled that boys below the age of ten and a half years of age and girls below nine and a half could not be enslaved. They included war orphans or those separated from their parents. Many joined Christian households, where they resided until they reached the age of twenty. Most were contractually linked to their patrons by a process that resembled both the older contracts of apprenticeship and the encomienda system of New Spain. In Almería, Navas de Puebla worked out legal arrangements by which the children were to be sheltered by their patrons and had to work for them until they came of age. Their patron could employ them as domestic servants, and, if he were an artisan, he could teach them his occupation through apprenticeship. Many of the children became thoroughly assimilated and later married into Old Christian families. Their relatives by marriage helped them hide their New Christian backgrounds during the subsequent expulsions, which many of them must have been able to avoid.39
Granada’s Moriscos were relocated throughout the lands of the Crown of Castile in the aftermath of the revolts.40 A generation later, in the early seventeenth century, all Moriscos—though still ostensibly Christians—were expelled from Spain. By various means, free Moriscos became slaves both during and after the expulsions, as others had become slaves during the Alpujarras revolts a generation before. Many expelled Moriscos left their children with Christian families; others sold their children to the soldiers. Adult Moriscos could be and were enslaved if they tried to avoid being expelled. After the expulsions, some Moriscos secretly returned, like Cervantes’s Ricote in Don Quijote. Freeborn North African Muslims traveled to Spain in search of employment, though consciously running the risk of being enslaved. Those who were caught and identified could be enslaved. Others were open and voluntary returnees, who chose to return to Spain even if it meant living in slavery.41
Captives
