There were important differences between the actual and potential status of captives and slaves, even though historical documents and modern historians may treat the terms captive and slave or captivity and slavery as equivalent. Captives, as in the examples earlier in this chapter, were those people who became prisoners of victorious armies and fleets in time of war or of raiders on land or sea in smaller engagements in times of war or peace. A captive entered a temporary status from which he or she would emerge, either by becoming free again when exchanged or ransomed, or by becoming a slave if neither exchanged nor ransomed.42 The wars and the raids in medieval and early modern Iberia usually crossed religious frontiers, for Muslims did not enslave other Muslims, and Christians did not enslave other Christians.43 When Muslims or Christians fought among themselves, as they often did, captives ended up as prisoners of war who were usually ransomed or exchanged and did not become slaves.44 Conflicts between Muslims and Christians, on the other hand, produced captives who often failed to obtain ransoms and ended up as slaves. Jarbel Rodríguez, in a recent book, drew the distinction between captive and slave: “In the world of medieval Iberia, therefore, captives were those individuals who, although they suffered many of the limitations and degradations of slavery, had a reasonable expectation of freedom and who owed their bondage to the religious wars between Christianity and Islam.” Captives, both Muslim and Christian, could realize that their rulers, home communities, or their families—or all of these—would make efforts to redeem them. Slaves could not expect to gain freedom except by making a personal agreement with their owner. Though slaves might secure help from family or friends or through community organizations such as religious brotherhoods, they could not look for direct assistance from the larger society from which they had come.45 Sometimes the trajectory from captive to free was rapid, a matter of hours or a few days between the end of hostilities and an exchange of prisoners. Normally, though, it stretched over months or years before family or community could arrange a ransom. Captives could never be certain of a quick redemption. In the early twelfth century, Eneco Sanz de Lanes told of his family’s six-year ordeal when he was captured along with his wife and two children when the Almoravids raided Huesca.46 From the late fifteenth century through the early modern period, arranging the repatriation of a Christian captive usually took years, often five or six, and at times as long as fifteen.
As they waited to be exchanged or ransomed, captives worked and lived very much as slaves, and many died before they received their ransoms. Given their circumstances, some Christian captives chose another way out of their captivity by converting to Islam.47 Christian captives could convert to Islam and thereafter become free Muslims. In the early years of the Muslim domination, such converted captives may have accounted for a fair percentage of the new adherents of Islam. The author of the contemporary chronicle of Miguel Lucas de Iranzo in the fifteenth century put it this way: “And, sinful as it was, there would be some of them, in desperation because of the life they led, who became renegades from the faith, as others have done in cases such as this.”48 There is no way of even estimating how many availed themselves of the choice. The Muslim ruler of Granada had a special royal guard unit in the Alhambra in the fifteenth century, consisting of some six hundred troops raised from Christian boys captured, converted, and given military training.49 The situation for Muslim captives in Christian lands was not parallel. They could convert to Christianity but often remained slaves thereafter.
The Captives
In the intermittent wars between Muslim Granada and various Christian states in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and during the final Christian conquest of Granada in the last decade of the fifteenth, both sides raided by land and sea.50 The uncertainty of the frontier was an unchanging feature of life for those who lived close by, a situation that continued for people living along the coasts throughout early modern times. On the Christian side, many people prepared wills that included sums of money, even though often symbolic and small in many cases, for the ransom of captives. Nobles did more, donating money during their lifetimes and leaving major sums in their wills for the redemption of captives.51 We lack similar evidence from the Muslim side, but it seems clear that they were exposed to the same anxieties. Christian raids on Muslim shipping accompanied the final reconquest of Granada, ending in 1492. Andalusian caravels pursued Muslim commercial vessels, called carabos, that took goods and passengers between the kingdom of Granada and North Africa. Back in Spain, the captors auctioned those they had caught, together with the other goods seized in the raids. The purchasers acquired them for two main reasons: they could hope that the families of the captives would pay their ransoms, or, otherwise, they could put the captives to work as slaves.52 Such Muslim captives usually became slaves, either collectively or individually. Christians fell victim to captivity by the Muslims as well. Most raids in the later Middle Ages came from North African and Granadan Muslims, who sometimes collaborated. Muslim raiders could often count on the help of local Mudejars to provide information about local strong and weak points and where booty might be found.53 One prominent noble captive in 1456 was don Juan Manrique, count of Castañeda and royal captain of the Granadan frontier, whose release required the direct intervention of the Castilian king Enrique IV.54 In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Muslims of North Africa used captives as slaves unless and until they were ransomed.55
Coastal dwellers at times also had to fear raids by fellow Christians. Muslim raids diminished somewhat in the fifteenth century, especially when Granada became Christian, but raids by enemy Christians increased. Among the most important of these were the Castilian raids, above all during the periods when Castile and Aragon were at war in 1429–30, or when King Alfonso V of Aragon was absorbed in the conquest of Naples in the early 1440s, or when rival forces vied for control of the Castilian throne from 1474 to 1479. The supporters of Isabel won the latter conflict, and in the ensuing peace, Castilian corsair activity against the subjects of the Crown of Aragon fell off drastically. Portuguese corsairs also harassed the eastern coast, but on fewer occasions than the Castilians. The Genoese were great commercial rivals, and their competition at times spilled over to armed raids when Genoese corsairs attacked the coast of the Crown of Aragon. In the 1440s, corsairs from Provence began to raid the Aragonese-held Balearic Islands, the coasts of Catalonia, and the kingdom of Valencia. Both the Genoese and the Provençals took advantage of periods of conflict between Aragon and Castile to use the Castilian port of Cartagena as a staging point for their raids on Valencia and other coastal areas of the Crown of Aragon.56 Most of the Christians captured by other Christians secured their ransoms and did not end up as slaves.
The continuing conflict, nonetheless, pitted Christians against Muslims. After Fernando and Isabel conquered the port of Almería from the Muslims in 1489, they began to resettle it with Christians. By 1500 the Christian authorities were concerned to stem the losses in goods and people that Almería began to suffer from Muslim sea raiders. The Crown undertook to strengthen local defense by repairing and rebuilding existing watchtowers and by building new ones. The numbers of coast guards expanded and their salaries grew. To pay for all this, they taxed the Moriscos, collecting the taxes that had formerly gone to the local mosques and establishing a new tax for coastal defense, called the farda de la mar, which apparently fell on all inhabitants at first but, with the passage of time, came to be paid exclusively by Moriscos.57
The authorities of the Crown of Aragon found it difficult to defend against raids by Muslim and Christian adversaries. They established coastal watches and maritime patrols, especially from the port of Valencia, and began to construct a series of watchtowers in the fifteenth century. The line was not complete until the sixteenth century, when officials had to face the even greater threat of Turkish-led North African piracy. As a deterrent, they executed the pirates or corsairs they caught, but they could not stop the raids up and down the long and lightly populated coast. Raiders used small and fast vessels for quick raids and hasty withdrawals with captives and other booty. Communications were slow, and response time for vessels was necessarily slow.58 Nonetheless, they tried to do what they could to raise the alarm. Special bugle calls denoted the danger on the coast.59
Even if they found
