me to tell you how it was that Famagusta was taken, I say that this was allowed by God because of our sins. And not Famagusta only: it would have been just that they should have taken all Cyprus as well, because of our many sins. And to tell you about it openly: first of all was the sin of the slaves. The land of the Greeks was being ravaged, and the men were being brought over to the islands as slaves and captives, and our people treated them so hard-heartedly, that they used to throw themselves down from the roofs and kill themselves, and some of them cast themselves into pits, and others hanged themselves, for the heavy torments which they made them endure, and because they were famished.… And they went against the face of God, who says: “Six years your servant shall serve you, and in the seventh you shall set him free.” … For this reason God punished them, and the Bulgarians took horse against them; the slaves also and the Genoese; and they robbed them and carried them off captive, and took away their women and their goods, and humbled them to the ground.101
Makhairas’ remorse was limited, however. Elsewhere in his chronicle, he criticized Greek, Bulgar, and Tatar slaves for supporting the Genoese invasion. His contemporaries in Cyprus did not cease to buy Orthodox slaves.102
Slavery in Court
Because slavery was a matter of human law (ius gentium) in the Christian context, cases of slave status were adjudicated in civil rather than ecclesiastical courts. Each Italian city-state had its own law code (ius proprium), a set of local customs, and a system of courts to enforce them. However, because most Italian jurists studied law at the university in Bologna, the principles of Roman law and the ius commune underpinned most local legislation on slavery.103 Since the Justinianic Code provided an authoritative and comprehensive legal framework for slave status, legislators in Venice and Genoa largely confined themselves to regulating the use and behavior of slaves.104 Only the Genoese legal code attempted to define slave status: “let male and female slaves be understood … as those who were possessed or detained by any person as male or female slaves.”105 In another passage, slaves were defined as submissive persons.106 In a third passage, a slave was defined as “she who is held and owned as a slave by her master or mistress, and she who is considered and held to be a slave by the neighborhood of the said master or mistress.”107 These definitions are more or less circular, although they do highlight the role of reputation and witness testimony alongside written documents in determining slave status.
In Venice, cases of disputed status were handled by the Senate. For example, a Venetian patrician returning from Beirut in 1399 brought with him a manumitted Tatar who wished to convert to Christianity and live in Venice.108 Upon their arrival, the patrician entrusted him to another Tatar freedman, Antonius, a vacinarius who prepared cow- and oxhides. Instead of helping him, Antonius sold him as a slave for twenty ducats to Zanino Calcaterra, who sold him again to a Catalan man. When the case came to light, the Venetian Senate condemned Antonius to a beating, three months in prison, and compensation for Calcaterra, but it did not mention the fate of the wrongfully enslaved Tatar.
The most famous and long-running case of disputed status was that of the anime. In 1386, the Senate first ruled against importing Albanian children from Durazzo who “can easily be sold and treated as slaves, which is done wrongly and against God and the honor of our dominions,” explaining that “because they are Christian, they ought not to sell them nor cause them to be sold in any way.”109 Such children were called “souls” (anime). The punishment for selling anime was a fine of one hundred lire and six months in prison for each child. All previous sales of anime were annulled, and sellers were required to compensate buyers for their losses. The anime already present in Venice were not to be exported to other cities, such as Florence, Siena, or Bologna, where their slavery might become permanent.110 However, the anime had to repay the freight charges for their shipment to Venice. The debt was set at six ducats for those older than ten and three ducats for those younger; those with no money could work for four years in lieu of payment.
This ruling proved difficult to enforce, and in 1387, the capisestieri complained to the Senate. The Senate responded that masters who could show documents (cartas, instrumenta, vel probationes) to prove that their child slaves came from beyond Corfu (outside the Adriatic) could keep them.111 In 1388, the Senate received another complaint that the anime were “rustic and of rude intellect” so that “no utility or benefit can follow from them” after liberation.112 In fact, said the complaint, their masters had done them a service by rescuing them from the Turks and supporting them. The Senate’s response was to raise the price of freedom to eight ducats or ten years of service, but anime still had to be registered with the capisestieri and could not be exported. Their status remained a problem as late as 1453, when the penalty for evading registration was extended from the owners of anime to the ship captains who imported them.113
In Genoa, cases of disputed status were decided by the sindicatori. They usually took the form of petitions by slaves claiming freedom on the basis of Christian origin or prior manumission. For example, a slave who had been manumitted in the will of Augustinus Iahele of Savona was nevertheless handed over to Oliverius de Maris in Genoa.114 With Oliverius’ consent, she petitioned the sindicatori to recognize her manumission by Augustinus and officially declare her free.
The process began when the slave designated a procurator, a Genoese citizen with full legal rights, to petition the sindicatori on her behalf. Her master was then called upon to respond: he might do so in person or designate a procurator to represent him. Each side presented legal arguments and evidence, including written documents and oral testimony. For example, three Genoese merchants and a ship captain were called upon as witnesses to the free status of Maurus, a Greek sailor whom a Genoese merchant attempted to sell as a slave in Palermo in 1328.115 An extract from Genoa’s tax cartularies was offered as evidence in the case of Caterina, a Greek woman from Cephalonia, and a sale document in the case of Cali, also known as Theodora.116
Having heard the arguments of each side, the sindicatori would arrive at a decision and order its execution. Thus, in 1479, the sindicatori decided that “Maria has been established as a Hungarian in law and in the presence of the honorable lords sindicatori of the commune of Genoa.”117 Through her ethnicity, Maria’s religion and legal status were made clear: “the said Maria was and is a Hungarian and a Christian, and by consequence free, and cannot be retained as a slave, but rather must and ought to be held as free.”118 Therefore the sindicatori manumitted her by decree and required her to pay 150 lire, an enormous sum, to compensate her former masters for all expenses associated with her purchase in Chios, including the purchase price, taxes, and freight charges. She was given ten days to arrange payment and three months after that to make payment in full. If she failed to pay on time, the decree of manumission would lapse. No punishment was imposed on Maria’s former masters despite the ruling that she had been enslaved illegally.119 This was normal; the sindicatori rarely penalized either the sellers or the owners of wrongfully enslaved Christians, and in many cases, the slave herself was ordered to compensate her former owner for the loss of her value.
We do not know whether Maria was able to pay her owner in time. The consequences of failure are represented by the case of an Albanian woman named Theodora.120 The sindicatori declared her Christian and therefore free in August 1479. One year later, they added a fine of twenty-five lire to cover her initial price, associated expenses, and taxes in response to a petition from the heirs of her former master. Theodora failed to pay the fine within ten days. On July 18, the sindicatori had her detained by the commune until she paid the twenty-five lire plus three soldi in additional expenses.
Although it might seem impossible for a newly manumitted slave to find enough money to compensate her owner within ten days, a woman named Maria managed to do so in 1481. Once Maria was declared free of Melchionis de Monleone, she immediately designated
