4 shows how people lived as slaves, especially how they interacted with their owners and other living in the same households. Often they had to learn a new language, accept a new religion, and otherwise become culturally fluent in a new social environment. Women and some men slaves had to endure involuntary sexual activities—rape, to put it bluntly—that in the case of the women could and often did lead to pregnancy and childbearing. Slaves were not powerless and made the best of their limited opportunities, even with the severe restrictions that they faced. They relied on themselves and friends and family, while religion and the religious institutions they joined provided possibilities of solace and some material support. They did not lack agency in their own affairs. Chapter 5 shows the ways that slaves were put to work in the wide range of activities of the pre-modern centuries, from service in elite households, to action as business agents, to hard labor in fields or artisan workshops. Some slaves became free, as Chapter 6 indicates. They could flee and attempt to reach freedom across religious and political frontiers. Many more became free by manumission, though it was not won easily. The granting of manumission almost always depended on the master, who could choose to free his slaves for any number of reasons, either during his lifetime or after his death by the terms of his will and testament. Usually slaves had to pay for their freedom, either literally by giving money to their owners or figuratively by providing them or their heirs with specified lengths and terms of service.
The story of slavery is the story of the slaves, who could live any of a variety of lives depending on the circumstances in which they found themselves. Conquerors enslaved defeated enemies in many places, slave dealers secured slaves in numerous locales to bring slaves to Iberia and sell them there. Thus the slaves came from multiple ethnic, religious, and linguistic groups. Did their medieval and early modern owners draw distinctions among them along ethnic or racial lines? Scholars have only recently begun to address questions of the differentiation and discrimination regarding ethnicity, and how this might relate to something akin to modern racism. Answers to those questions are still not clear and likely will be at the forefront of near-future investigations and interpretations. Other new directions in the study of slavery will continue and expand the recent interest in the lives of women as slaves and the even more recent concern for the lives of children as slaves.33
The history of slavery in Spain is complex and lacks a clear narrative line. It contains fascinating and heartrending episodes as slaves suffered, endured, and occasionally triumphed. Slavery in the Iberian Peninsula declined and died out late in the early modern period, as the first chapter shows. In that same period, slavery in the European colonial areas grew, continued in the Spanish empire and in Brazil into the late nineteenth century, and involved vastly greater numbers of slaves than anywhere in Europe. The final chapter, an epilogue, will touch upon this. The historical literature of Latin American slavery is vast and beyond the scope of this book, whose main story is what happened in Iberia.
CHAPTER 1
The History of Slavery in Iberia
Slavery was a structural feature of Mediterranean society.
—Fernand Braudel, mid-twentieth century
Slavery was present in the Iberian Peninsula from the beginning of recorded history. It was prominent in Roman times and in the early Middle Ages under the Visigoths. The Muslims maintained a slave system in Iberia as long as they held territory there. The medieval Christian kingdoms of the peninsula all had slaves and laws governing them, and slavery continued in early modern Spain and Portugal before declining and dying out in the eighteenth century.1
The numbers of slaves and the percentage of slaves in the population during those centuries remained relatively small. At no time was a slave society present. The scholarly standard is Moses I. Finley’s division between slave societies, on the one hand, and societies with slaves, on the other. In Finley’s definition, a slave society had to have something on the order of 30 percent of the population as slaves, and slave labor had to account for a major proportion of that society’s production. Only five places and times figured in Finley’s scheme as slave societies: classical Greece and Rome, colonial Brazil, colonial Caribbean, and antebellum United States.2 All others with lower percentages were societies with slaves, and the Iberian societies fit here. Even in Roman Hispania, the percentage of slaves did not reach 30. Throughout the Middle Ages and the early modern centuries, slaves were unevenly distributed over the geography of the peninsula and made up a small percentage of the overall population. Many parts of the peninsula had no slaves at all. Large commercial cities—Lisbon and Seville, Valencia and Barcelona—may have had over 10 percent slaves between the late fifteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and some smaller Atlantic coastal towns may have had around 20 percent. In that period, though, slaves probably made up less than 1 percent of the population in Spain and perhaps less than 7 percent in Portugal. Nowhere and at no time was the economy dependent on slave labor. There were slaves, nonetheless, on Iberian soil throughout the period we are examining, and the premodern societies there were societies with slaves. Even though the numbers of slaves were small in comparison with classical Athens or Rome or colonial Brazil, their lives shared characteristics with those of slaves elsewhere.
The history of slavery in Iberia, though complex and long lasting, was not unique in Europe and the Mediterranean. At one time or another, all Western European countries experienced the presence of slavery and the slave trade. Scandinavians practiced slavery at home and traded slaves abroad in the early Middle Ages. Ireland had slaves and slave traders, as did England up to the eleventh century. The Low Countries, France, and the Germanspeaking areas knew slavery as a long legacy of the Roman domination and as a continuing though diminishing feature of life in the central Middle Ages. The Italian states had a long experience with slavery that lasted from classical times through the early modern centuries and drew slaves from as far afield as the Russian rivers, the Black Sea coasts, and North and sub-Saharan Africa. The Byzantine Empire had slaves throughout its existence. The world of Islam, which for seven centuries counted parts of Iberia within it, had a welldeveloped system of slavery and an expansive slave trade from many areas of Europe, West Asia, and Africa. Iberia’s slave holders to one degree or another or at one time or another interacted with these areas as they acquired slaves and put them to use. The stories of lives of those slaves in Iberia are compelling and form the core of this book.3 Here are a few of those stories to introduce the complexity of the topic.
Stories of Slaves
In 1301 the slave Francesca received conditional freedom in Christian Valencia. She was a Christian, almost certainly a former Muslim, and owned by Bernat Planell, a citizen and moneychanger of Valencia, and his wife Gillemona. Francesca received her freedom in a private notarial act that declared her free, released, and placed in liberty. Despite the rotund terms of the statement, Francesca agreed to abide by a separate provision that she would serve her former owners for a term of three years, during which Planell and his wife would provide her with food and drink, clothing, and shoes.4
In the early fourteenth century, Muslim forces captured a Christian boy in the town of Calzada de Calatrava in La Mancha. He was taken to Granada, converted to Islam, and trained as a soldier. Eventually, under the name Riḍwān, he became the grand vizier of the kingdom of Granada.5 He is a late example of a long list of former slaves who reached high positions in Muslim Spain.
Catalina Muñoz prepared a will in Almería in 1570. In it she left a graphic account of her life and that of her children by several fathers.
I declare that I have a natural daughter, Isabel Muñoz, wife of Lázaro de Palenzuela, and her father is named Jorge de Brujas, and at the time that he had her in me, I was the slave of Juan [Alonso] Valle de Cabrera. Also, I declare that I have another daughter named Ana de Rojas, daughter of a soldier of the company of the Count
