relations between the two countries and to arrange the repatriation of as many Moroccan captives and slaves as possible. He was able to take back a large number, but only after a series of difficulties. His charge was to bring back Moroccans, not Muslims of other origins, such as Algerians or Turks. Complications arose in the case of married captives of different origins. Slaves of the Spanish king received immediate freedom, but individual owners of slaves had to be compensated, thus delaying the repatriation of their slaves.99 Although corsair activities continued into the nineteenth century, the raids and the captures ceased to be an important part of the Spanish experience.100
During the medieval and early modern centuries, the process of hostile encounters and subsequent captivity and possible enslavement continued. We have seen the ways by which some but certainly not all captives regained their freedom. Those who went unredeemed became slaves. All slaves shared common experiences, regardless of the ways by which they became slaves and regardless of how their conditions varied. In the next chapter, we will examine their lives as they passed through the commercial networks to their eventual buyers.
CHAPTER 3
The Traffic in Slaves
In one house [in Valencia in the 1490s], I saw men, women, and children who were for sale. They were from Tenerife, one of the Canary Islands, in the Atlantic Ocean, who, having rebelled against the King of Spain, were in the end reduced to obedience. . . . [A] Valencian merchant . . . had brought 87 in a boat; 14 died on the trip and the rest were put up for sale. They are very dark, but not Negroes, similar to the North Africans; the women, wellproportioned, with strong and long limbs.
– –Hieronymus Münzer, fifteenth century
The Slave Trade
The slave trade lasted throughout the Middle Ages and the early modern period, in both Christian and Muslim areas, even though birth and capture in war and raids produced more enslaved people. Yet the categories of trade and capture are hard to separate, for many of the people traded as slaves in Iberia had originally been born free and had been enslaved during war or in raids far from the peninsula. Some came from as far away as the Russian rivers or Africa south of the Sahara. Others traveled only a few miles as they crossed the religious frontier in the Mediterranean or in the peninsula or simply moved from town to town under the control of slave dealers.
Those captives of war and raids who were not ransomed came to be slaves, as we saw in the previous chapter, and over time their chances for regaining their free status and their homelands diminished or faded completely. They had virtually no status in the new society. Some scholars have even called such unfortunates the “living dead” because of their social and legal isolation.1 They found themselves cut off from the people and things they had known from birth, and soon lost what they might have brought with them, such as their clothing and their accustomed foods. They held on longer to other ties to home: their religion and their language. Much depended on their ages, for those captured and enslaved as children remembered less than adults. Whatever their origins, they all began to acquire, slowly and painfully in some cases or more easily in others, familiarity with and a stake in the households and societies of their masters.
Roman Spain did not have a highly developed slave trade, though the defeated populations of some towns ended up as slaves and were exported from the peninsula. The Visigoths did not enslave the conquered Romans and provincials in a wholesale fashion, and domestic warfare did not usually produce slaves. The Visigoths, like other Germanic groups, were reluctant to enslave members of their own group, even though they did allow fellow Visigoths to fall into slavery for debt, criminal sentence, and self-sale. As the Visigoths looked outside for slaves, the ethnic and religious divisions present in the regions they conquered simplified their search. The Arian Christian Visigoths enslaved those they captured in their wars against the Catholic Franks. The Franks did the same, and large numbers of Arian captives entered the slave markets of Gaul. Arian and Catholic Christians could make slaves of pagans and Jews, and slave traders always brought slaves from distant lands. Pagan slaves from central Europe and from North Africa reached Spain as early as the mid-sixth century. There was a slave trade from Visigothic Spain to other parts of Europe and North Africa, but not much is known of it. Merchants sold slaves from Spain outside the kingdom, including some kidnapped children, even though there were some prohibitions on the export of slaves.2
The Islamic world experienced a golden age during its first centuries, and Muslim Spain shared fully in it. Once the bounds of the Islamic world were set, there were no more slaves to be obtained legally within the frontiers, except for rebels and the children of slaves. War produced relatively few slaves, and consequently the slave trade gained great importance. The Muslim elite acquired great riches and preserved that wealth through many generations. Thanks to the economic advantages that that they possessed over their neighbors, they could afford to import what they needed and wanted from outside. The necessities included timber for fuel and construction, metals (iron and gold above all), and slaves, who formed an important component of the vast new commercial system and who were considered necessities by large numbers of Muslims.3 Even though slaves seldom worked in agriculture,4 they still were imported in large numbers for artisan labor and domestic and military service. One indication of the volume of the slave trade comes from Córdoba. That single, albeit brilliant, city may have had nearly 14,000 slaves under the caliph ‘Abd al-Raḥmān III in the mid-tenth century, when the total population may have reached 250,000. 5
The early period of the slave trade into al-Andalus is not fully documented, though the outlines are fairly clear. Even at the beginning of the conquest, the Muslims brought slaves and free servants with them. These included Ethiopians and Armenians, Egyptians and Nubians. In the ninth century, merchants brought slaves into al-Andalus from Christian Iberia (at that time the northern fringe of the peninsula) and other parts of Europe. Many of the slaves were pagans captured in Central and Eastern Europe, and others were Christians, captured in Muslim raids in France and northern Spain. The merchants included Christian Franks, who dealt in the European pagans, and Muslims and Jews, who dealt in Christians. The enslaved people who found themselves traded into al-Andalus could spend their lives there as slaves, or they could face more distant journeys to other parts of the Islamic world, for there was a lively re-export trade.6
Before the tenth century, the Muslims of Spain generally bought Christian Europeans as slaves, adding them to the descendants of indigenous slaves conquered in the eighth century. By the tenth century, the mostly pagan Slavs became the most numerous imported group throughout Western Europe, where their ethnic name became the origin of the word for “slave” in most Western languages, as we have seen. The Muslims used the term ṣaqāliba in Arabic, still another example of a newly coined word for slave derived from “Slav.” But ṣaqāliba were brought to Spain by slave dealers from any of a number of European origins: Central Europe (brought in via Verdun), the shores of the Black Sea, Italy, southern France, and northern Spain. Byzantine Christians, captured by other Muslims in the eastern Mediterranean, were present as slaves of the Spanish Muslims by the eleventh century, along with North African Berbers enslaved following unsuccessful revolts.7 Some were brought into Spain as eunuchs. Muslim Spain was well known for the presence of eunuchs and for their export to the markets of the Muslim Mediterranean. Young boys among the captives were castrated and then fetched high prices as eunuchs. Some of the slaves were castrated in Verdun and then taken to Spain. Others were made eunuchs in Muslim Spain.8
The rulers of Muslim Spain began to recruit foreigners as soldiers in the eighth century. The history of slave soldiers in the Islamic world is complex, although the basic motivation for their use was simple: they were loyal, with no local ties to compromise their loyalty to their masters. They came from North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, and Europe, with the “Slavs” (Europeans) the most important group among them. They were brought in as children, converted to Islam, and given an education in Arabic. The real rise in their military use came with al-Ḥakam
