slaves, though almost assuredly not so many as to represent 30 percent of the population.
Slaves in Roman Spain endured conditions similar to those elsewhere in the Roman world and worked as household servants, in commerce, and in artisan manufacturing. The Romans used slaves in gangs on large agricultural enterprises, in the mines, and on public works projects. Gang slavery was a characteristic of Roman slavery that did not last into the Middle Ages. Roman slaves existed in circumscribed legal conditions, but many received their freedom and lived out their lives as freedmen. If the freed slaves had children, those children and their descendants were free.
The numbers of slaves and the importance of slavery declined during the third and fourth centuries, as the Roman Empire itself staggered. The demographic, social, and economic changes that collectively made up the decline of the western Roman Empire were accompanied by alterations in the patterns of slave use. As the cities lost population and significance in the economy, the centers of economic and social gravity shifted from the towns to the country villas. The hollow cities no longer provided major markets for rural produce, while the villas tended to become more self-sufficient. Large slave gangs were no longer needed, and urban slaves became fewer in number. Many of the rural slaves eventually blended with free peasants into a group of semi-dependent workers. Roman Hispania was not a slave society by the end of the imperial period, if it ever had been one, but was a society with slaves. With the decline of the western empire, the conditions were set for the Germanic incursions and the establishment of the Visigothic kingdom in Iberia.
Slavery continued to be important in the Visigothic period from the fifth to the early eighth century. The Visigoths had known slavery before they entered Roman territory. Once inside the Roman borders, they generally retained the Roman laws governing slavery and instituted only subtle changes in its practice. The sources of slaves, their conditions, and their possibility of manumission remained much the same as in Roman times, despite a few innovations. For example, the normal pattern was to refrain from enslaving those considered part of the dominant group, and one common definition of inclusion and exclusion was religion. The Visigoths, until the late sixth century, were Arian Christians who felt no compunction about enslaving Catholic Christians. Another innovation was that the Visigoths at times made use of slaves as combat troops, unlike the Romans, who usually confined their slaves to support roles in military activity. The ruralization of the Roman West proceeded as the Visigothic kingdom developed along social and economic lines similar to those of other Germanic successor kingdoms. We have no way of knowing how Visigothic slavery would have developed, because Visigothic rule in Spain abruptly ended when the Muslims conquered the kingdom early in the eighth century.15
The Muslims expanded from their origins in Arabia to take control of a swath of territories eastward to India and westward to the shores of the Atlantic Ocean in little more than a century. Slavery and the slave trade were both present in the Arabian Peninsula before the rise of Islam, and the Muslims conquered lands where slavery was present. Past practices of the Arabs and those of the societies they conquered thus intertwined to bind slavery into the fabric of Muslim society.16 The Muslims crossed the Strait of Gibraltar in the early eighth century after their absorption of North Africa, defeated the last Visigothic rulers, and secured most of the Iberian Peninsula. Al-Andalus, as they called it, became part of the wider world of Islam, unified by religion, the Arabic language, and common patterns of law and custom.
The Muslim invaders operated in a fashion similar to that of the Romans in their expansive phases: they sought to have the cities to ally with them. Where this happened, the Christian and Jewish population could preserve their religions and laws.17 Cities whose leaders resisted were conquered, and the Muslims enslaved the women and children of the defeated populations and killed or enslaved the men. The chroniclers probably exaggerated the numbers of captives, but just after the Muslim conquest, the caliph in Baghdad reportedly received 30,000 Christian prisoners sent from Spain.18 As the caliph was entitled to one-fifth of all booty, local officials must have reported the total number of captives at 150,000.
The contest between Christendom and the world of Islam, beginning with the Muslim conquests of the first two centuries of Islam, obviously influenced the history of slavery in medieval and early modern Europe. The conflict lasted in greater or lesser degree throughout the Middle Ages and continued in the early modern centuries. The alterations within the strategic relationship between Christian and Muslim states had important consequences for the development of slavery and the slave trade and helped to account for their complexity.
The Muslims failed to secure portions of Iberia’s mountainous north. Islamic and Christian societies consequently faced one another across a shifting land frontier in Iberia for nearly eight hundred years. Slavery in al-Andalus shows all the features of traditional slavery in the Muslim world. The frequent cross-border skirmishes, interspersed between periods of major campaigns, meant that captives were numerous and that slavery lasted longer as a more fully developed system than in many other parts of medieval Europe. The long-distance trading connections throughout and beyond the world of Islam brought slaves—Christians, Jews, and pagans—from a variety of origins to al-Andalus to add to the descendants of Iberian captives of the eighth century. By the tenth century, Slavs became the most numerous imported group. In fact, so common were Slavs in the slave trade, that their name has become the origin of the word “slave” in Western languages and in Arabic. Called ṣaqāliba in Arabic, Slavs were purchased from slave traders. 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. Sub-Saharan Africans arrived beginning in the eleventh century, a consequence of the increased Islamic penetration into their homelands via the caravan trade across the Sahara desert. Muslim raids into Christian territory in Iberia were designed for quick seizures of booty and prisoners, and the captives were held until they were ransomed. The Muslims held their Christian captives under tight control.19 Because many tried to flee back across the frontier, they had to be guarded closely to prevent flight. Those captives taken to North Africa were even less likely to be ransomed, as they were farther from kin who could help them.20 If not ransomed, captives were sold at auction. The majority ended up as farm workers, but others worked at urban tasks.
Certain aspects of slavery among the Muslims were unlike anything in the Roman or Visigothic period. The medieval Islamic world was not a slave society, despite the large numbers of slaves in it. Muslims generally made little use of gang slaves in agriculture or large-scale manufacturing, and many of the slaves in al-Andalus were artisans, domestics, or concubines.21 Others occupied administrative roles, sometimes filled by eunuch slaves, and military slaves were present. Slaves of the Muslims were usually well integrated into the dominant society and into family life and the domestic production of goods for household use or for sale. The Muslims in Spain and elsewhere in the Mediterranean also made great use of imported slave soldiers. Two features of the economy and society of Islamic Spain foreshadowed developments in the later history of slavery: sugar production and the use of slaves from sub-Saharan Africa.
Christian and Jewish slave holding continued in Muslim Spain. From the beginning, if Christians and Jews voluntarily accepted Muslim dominance, they could retain their lives, their liberty, and their property. Thereafter they paid a head tax to the conquerors, and one half the normal head tax for their slaves. Initially, the status of the Mozarabs (Christians living under Muslim rule) was sharply reduced, with restricted civil rights that prohibited them from holding offices that would give them authority over Muslims. They could not acquire Muslim slaves, but they could retain their non-Muslim slaves. Any of their existing slaves who converted to Islam were to be sold to Muslim masters, because no non-Muslim could legally hold a Muslim as a slave. By the ninth and tenth centuries, though, Mozarabs could purchase non-Muslim slaves who reached the peninsula through the slave trade.22
Far northern Iberia remained in Christian hands after the Muslim conquest of most of the peninsula, as remnants of the Visigothic elite took refuge with local Christians and began guerrilla actions against the Muslims.
