a permanent force of salaried and slave soldiers. Al-Ḥakam II (ruled 961–76) made use of Slavs and had a unit of black soldiers as his personal guard. ‘Abd al-Raḥmān III, who declared himself caliph in 929, began to import and to employ Slavs on a larger scale. By the time of his death, their numbers in Córdoba are put at 3,750. The number of Slavs increased still more under the chamberlain al-Mansur (978–1002). The inhabitants of Córdoba, who dubbed them “the silent ones” because of their lack of proficiency in Arabic, regarded them with suspicion. Many of them attained freed status and formed families. Their presence disrupted the balance of ethnic forces in the caliphate and hastened its decline. Their role declined with the end of the caliphate in the early eleventh century, when many of them migrated to certain of the taifa kingdoms, the city-states that replaced the unified caliphate, where they eventually became rulers of Almería, Badajoz, Denia, Mallorca, Murcia, Tortosa, and Valencia. The trade in Slavic slaves virtually ceased, but slaves imported from sub-Saharan Africa rose in numbers and came to constitute a significant element in the slave trade to al-Andalus.9
The Muslims of Iberia obtained black African slaves through their connections with their coreligionists in North Africa. Muslims called the black Africans ‘abid (plural of ‘abd = slave) or sūdān. The latter term came from their place of origin south of the Sahara in the Bilād al-Sūdān, the land of the blacks, where the Sudanic belt of grasslands stretches eastward from the Atlantic Ocean to the Ethiopian highlands. Muslims had been familiar with the peoples of sub-Saharan Africa since they initially crossed the desert in the first Islamic century and brought back a few slaves. Their numbers grew as Muslim penetration into sub-Saharan Africa intensified. The North Africans from the eighth century maintained caravan routes across the Sahara to trade in the black states of the Sudan, many of whose leaders and merchants had converted to Islam. The North Africans provided the sub-Saharan markets with dates, figs, sugar, and cowries (shells for use as currency). Manufactured goods were quite important: copper utensils, ironwork, paper goods, Arabic books, tools, weapons, and cloths of cotton and silk. The Sudanese had cotton cloth of their own, but imported dyed fabrics had an appeal for them. Jewelry, mirrors, and glass, especially Venetian glass, went south with the caravans. North African horses were in great demand south of the Sahara, because the military strength of the Sudanese states depended on cavalry. The North Africans also provided salt that they purchased along some of the caravan routes.10 In exchange, sub-Saharan Africa provided the North Africans with ivory, ostrich feathers, skins and leather, kola nuts, ebony wood, and a type of pepper. Nevertheless, gold and slaves were the most important exports from the Sudan to the Mediterranean. By the end of the eighth century Muslims already knew of the gold from the region. From the tenth century through the fifteenth, the Muslims and Europeans obtained much of their gold from West African sources by way of the trans-Saharan trade routes. The merchants and rulers of the Sudanic states grew wealthy and powerful as a result of their ability to supply the metal and thus to pay for their imports from the Maghrib.11
The Muslim world had a constant demand for sub-Saharan slaves that continued through the Middle Ages and long after 1500, even maintaining maintained a sizeable volume during the period of the trans-Atlantic slave trade.12 The sufferings of those who were forced to make the trek were horrifying. In addition to the heat and cold, the threat of storms, and the lack of water that they shared with the other members of the caravans, the slaves often had to act as bearers of other goods. Even when they did not carry loads themselves, they had to load and unload the camels and help with the daily camp preparations.13 The slaves who survived the desert crossing spread through North Africa, where many remained. Others were sent on to other Muslim lands, including Islamic Spain, but until the fall of Granada in 1492, most slaves of the Spanish Muslims were Christians from the northern kingdoms of the peninsula.
The Slave Trade in Christian Spain
The trade in slaves went both ways, of course. Iberian Christians imported slaves throughout the period as well, just as their Muslim contemporaries did. The slave trade changed over the centuries as the political and military balance shifted. The Muslim ascendancy from the eighth into the eleventh century declined as the Christians gained greater and greater control from the eleventh century to the end of the fifteenth.14 Those who operated the slave trade changed as well. Among the slave traders supplying Muslim Spain, Muslim and Jewish merchants predominated in the early period. Sale documents indicate that Christian merchants tended to replace Jews in the slave trade, beginning in the twelfth century.15 Large populations of free Muslims came under Christian control after the thirteenth-century conquests of the south. Consequently, free Muslims were more numerous than Muslim slaves, who appeared more frequently in the frontier regions and less often at greater distances from the frontier. By the eleventh century, some black slaves began to appear in the Christian regions of the Mediterranean. In 1067, as one example, the Christian Arnallus Mironis and his wife Arsendis donated ten black captives to Pope Alexander III.16
Within Christian Iberia in the later Middle Ages, the lands of the Crown of Aragon were closely tied with the currents of Mediterranean trade and the slave trade, whereas the Castilian kingdom tended to supply its demand for slaves through war and conquest. Slave owning by non-Christians continued in the Crown of Aragon, although in a restricted fashion. Neither Jews nor Muslims in post-conquest Valencia could hold Christian slaves. Muslims could own Muslim slaves, but there was a constant attrition as Muslim slaves gained manumission or accepted baptism and left their Muslim masters. The laws of Valencia explicitly stated that the non-Christian slaves of a Jewish master would be free if they converted to Christianity. By implication, the same would apply to slave converts owned by Muslim masters. Local Muslim slave owners could not make up the losses. After the conquest, the Muslims were cut off from the Muslim slave trade, and their economic situation worsened, making them less able to purchase slaves from Christian suppliers, who used legal and extralegal means to increase the supply of Muslims to put on the market. Merchants from the Crown of Aragon took slaves to southern France, and Muslim envoys who visited Barcelona often bought Muslim slaves there.17
Many Muslim slaves entered the market after being captured in the conquests of King Jaume I, when Valencia and the Balearics came under Christian control in the early thirteenth century. Thereafter, things changed. The late medieval commercial and imperial expansion of the Crown of Aragon in the Mediterranean coincided with the period in which it was less possible to secure slaves within the peninsula. Slave recruitment shifted as a consequence. Piracy and the slave trade fed medieval slavery in the Crown of Aragon.18 Throughout the thirteenth century, Muslims made up the bulk of the slaves; some were captives of pirate raids and from the Castilian raids on the Muslim kingdom of Granada. In the thirteenth century, too, documents began to show distinctions among the Muslim slaves—white, brown, olive—which indicated recruitment from wider areas than before.19 By the fourteenth century slaves of other origins came into the Iberian Mediterranean.
Then the Black Death hit. A great pandemic came to Europe from Central Asia, crossing to the areas around the Black Sea by way of the caravan routes opened by the Mongols and reaching the Crimea in 1346. Two years later it entered Italy by way of Constantinople. From Italy it spread throughout Europe, causing the deaths of a third or more of the European population in a period of three years.20 Among the catastrophic consequences of the plague was an increase in slavery, as local free survivors of the plague could demand higher wages and better working conditions. Those who sought servants and manual laborers turned to buying slaves. In the Iberian slave markets of the later fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, more women than men appeared. This set of facts fits well with the Italian evidence for the period that points to a strong growth of slavery, especially domestic slavery, following the Black Death.21
New sources of slaves began to supply the markets of Catalonia and Valencia, whose merchants were active throughout the Mediterranean and into the Black Sea. They, together with Italian merchants, brought slaves from distant regions to Barcelona and other cities. For a time in the fourteenth century, Greeks appeared in the Crown of Aragon as slaves. Their presence was due to the Catalan freebooters called the Almogávares and their conquests
