she is the slave of doña Ana Pantoja, wife of Cristóbal de Robles, and she is also a natural daughter. Also, I declare that I have a son named Bernavé Castillo, slave of the said Juan Alonso [Valle] de Cabrera. He was the son of Juan del Castillo, and he is a natural child as the others. Also, I say and declare that after having the said three children, I married Alonso González, according to the rites of the Holy Mother Church, [and] to marry me he ransomed me and made them give me my liberty, because at that time I was the slave of the said Juan [Alonso] Valle de Cabrera, as is already stated, and from that matrimony we had and raised as our legitimate son Alonso González.6
In August 1571, thirteen young Moroccan Muslims, joined by a Morisco (a Christian convert from Islam) of Granada, embarked on a trip of pirate raiding in a small sailing ship. Reaching the coast of Málaga, they captured three Christians and took them to the ship, where four of the Muslims guarded them. The others continued along the shore seeking still more Christians to capture. At that point, two Christian ships from Málaga answered the alarm and sailed out to intercept the raiders’ vessel, whose crew raised sail and fled, leaving ten of their companions ashore. They hid out in the hills behind Málaga for three days before they were captured, taken to the jails of the Alhambra in Granada, and sold at public auction in early September. A silk merchant purchased one of the ten, Hamet Manli, who before long decided to flee into the mountains south of Granada. He walked for six days, finding grapes to eat in the first three days and nothing thereafter. Coast guards apprehended Hamet near Almería and jailed him in the town of Vera. His captors questioned him closely and then sent a message to his owner in Granada. The document ends at that point. Our glimpse of the life of Hamet is of less than three months’ duration, as he became a slave catcher, a captive, a slave, a fugitive, and a captive again.7
Miguel de Cervantes endured five years of captivity in Algiers after having been captured by Muslims at sea in 1575. Passages based on his experiences there before he was ransomed appear in many of his literary works, including Don Quijote. We will see more about his time in Algiers in Chapter 2.8
The records of the Inquisition contain the account of the life of a convert from Islam to Christianity, one José de Santa Ana. Apprehended and brought before the tribunal in Murcia in 1734, he had to counter the accusations of witnesses who saw him frequenting taverns in the company of two students. His accusers reported that he made disparaging remarks about the Christian religion in Spanish and supposedly said, “Hooray for Muḥammad!” in Arabic. He claimed to have been captured off Portugal and imprisoned for fourteen years and that he was trying to get back to North Africa at the time he was apprehended. He changed his story once in custody, blaming his reported behavior on heavy drinking urged on by the students. He then asserted that he was a native of Algiers and that he had gone to Lisbon in the company of some Christian clerics returning from a mission to redeem captives. Baptized and confirmed in Lisbon, he worked for years as a cook in a noble household. He left that employment after a disagreement and then wandered through Portugal and Spain, eventually reaching Murcia. In his interrogation, he swore that he was a good Christian and had no intention of returning to the Islamic world, where he believed that he would not be accepted because he had converted to Christianity. The inquisitors found him to have an acceptable, though incomplete, knowledge of Christianity. Due to his contrition and the extenuation of his drunkenness, they decided not to punish him.9
Mid-eighteenth-century documents reveal the life trajectory of Catalina de Gálvez, a woman of African descent, born on the island of Jamaica and taken to Cádiz at so young an age she could not remember the trip. There Francisco Malberán baptized, raised, and educated her. Later he manumitted her in his will, and she became a free citizen of Cádiz.10
These examples offer glimpses of the complexities in the long history of captivity and slavery in Iberia, a history echoed elsewhere in the world. Slavery was cross-cultural and multi-ethnic. Some slaves were born into their condition; others were captured and enslaved in the aftermath of conquest, war, raids, and kidnapping. Warriors recognized that defeat might be a prelude to enslavement. Christians, Jews, and Muslims could be slave dealers, slave owners, or the enslaved, depending on circumstance. Owners employed their slaves in a variety of ways as domestics, sexual partners, artisans, and farmers. They could sell their slaves, grant them as gifts, rent them as hired laborers, or pledge them as collateral for debts. Slaves endured their condition and occasionally sought and secured their freedom, sometimes by flight but most often by purchasing their manumission. For millennia, the presence of slavery was part of the ordinary experience of life even for those free people who owned no slaves. The freeborn feared it, for they knew that they faced the possibility of capture and enslavement.
Varieties of Slavery in Iberia
The societies of Iberia shared in the wider experience of slavery in the Mediterranean world and beyond. Slavery changed over time, despite elements of continuity. Slavery is a complex institution that had different manifestations from ancient to modern times and assumed a greater or lesser importance in the Islamic and Christian societies and economies of the Iberian Peninsula. The numbers of slaves, their percentage in the overall population, the way the slaves entered the host society, the work they did, the lives they led, their chances for manumission and assimilation all varied by place, period, and circumstance.
We can see slavery in medieval Iberia as a persistent feature that ultimately helped to lead to the great expansion of slavery in the Americas after 1500, but that is only a minor part of the overall story. The men, women, and children who lived as slaves over the course of the centuries were the most affected, but the presence of slavery had an impact as well on the free people who owned slaves and others who came in contact with them. Life in a society with slaves influenced attitudes about social differences and the relations among religions, because most slaves were initially of a different religion from that of their masters. They also usually spoke different languages and came from different ethnic backgrounds, thereby complicating relations between the host society and the slaves.
For Iberia, as for the rest of the Mediterranean world, slavery was present as far back as there are records. The early communities in the Iberian Peninsula practiced slavery, and the Carthaginians began a more intensive use of slave labor. Nevertheless, the Roman period was crucial for the later history of slavery.11 Rome’s domination of the peninsula began with a long period of conquest, beginning in the late third and lasting to the late first century B.C.E., from the time Roman armies first landed at the old Greek colony-city of Emporion (modern Ampurias or Empúries) on the Mediterranean coast to the final pacification of the north of the peninsula by Augustus. While fighting the forces of Carthage in eastern Spain, the Roman leader Scipio Africanus often allowed the native Hispani their freedom and enslaved only the Carthaginians. During the Roman conquest of the rest of Iberia, the Romans peacefully absorbed the peoples and places whose rulers agreed to join the conquerors but killed or enslaved those who resisted. It is impossible to be precise about the numbers of prisoners produced during the Roman conquest of Spain or to determine how many of the prisoners became slaves. Even though the Roman authors loved to list and likely to exaggerate the numbers of captives, at times some of them said only that “many” fell into Roman hands. All told, perhaps as many as 200,000 captives became slaves. Of these, some remained in the peninsula while others were exported. The scenes of battle, the concentrations of the defeated, and their subsequent distribution and sale to slave dealers echoed similar events elsewhere throughout the Mediterranean.12
The Romans colonized and Romanized the peninsula even as the wars of conquest dragged on, and Hispania, as they called it, eventually became fully a part of the Roman world.13 The numbers of slaves and their use in the economy were probably at their height at the time of the late Republic in the first century B.C.E., a consequence of the captives the wars of conquest created. Did Roman Spain become a slave society? One strand among recent studies of Roman slavery holds that only Italy and Sicily became true slave societies. Another view is that the label should also apply to certain other Roman provinces, including Spain.14 Certainly, Roman
