eighteen ducats to Melchionis as required by the sindicatori. He also took responsibility for defending Maria in court, in general and specifically against Melchionis. Finally, he committed “to renting and pensioning the same Maria in the city of Genoa to that person or those persons of good condition and reputation, and for that price and salary which can best be had.”121 Once Petrus found work for Maria as a free domestic servant, she would repay him for his assistance.
In the courts of Genoa, some slaves were more successful at challenging their status than others. A clear case of wrongful enslavement was that of Maria, a young woman from Naples who petitioned the sindicatori in 1492. Three years earlier, she had been living with her parents in Naples. A ship’s scribe had enticed her to leave, promising that she would be his servant and mistress, but then he sold her as a slave in Genoa. Fortunately, Maria’s parents were able to locate her. Ladislaus Doguorno, a canon of Salerno, and Antonio Soprano of Naples both traveled to Genoa and testified on her behalf. Ladislaus’ testimony has survived: he told the sindicatori that he knew both Maria and her parents and that Maria was recognized as a Christian in Naples and elsewhere by those who knew her. He protested that her enslavement was illegal “because Christians cannot be sold or obligated.”122 Maria was duly declared free.
Other slaves of Catholic origin also petitioned for freedom on the basis of shared religion. In 1487, a slave appealed to the sindicatori because she had been sold as an Iberian Muslim (mora) but was actually an Iberian Christian (hispana).123 In 1455, a Hungarian woman named Anna designated a procurator to petition for freedom on the grounds that “she is Christian and free, conducting herself as a free person, and of Hungarian origin who cannot be sold as a slave either by law or by the form of the ordinances of the city of Genoa.”124 However, Hungarian Catholics who succeeded in petitioning for freedom were still required to pay compensation.125 Georgius was freed in 1405 but ordered to serve an additional nine years without a salary. Elena was freed in 1418 but ordered to pay ninety lire, which she did by contracting to serve Cattaneo Doria for fourteen years. Maria, mentioned previously, was freed in 1479 but ordered to pay 150 lire in 1479. Caterina was also freed in 1479 but ordered to pay 180 lire.
Italians, Iberians, and Hungarians were widely known to be Catholic. In 1394, a Catholic Tatar slave “presented himself in [the Genoese colony of] Chios before the lord podestà of Chios in his court, asserting himself to be a Christian of the Catholic nation and never a slave but rather free and a man of his own right. The lord podestà of Chios, having seen the witnesses produced by the said slave, liberated him.”126 Antonio Coca, a broker in Pera who had sold this slave about one month previously, was ordered to reimburse the buyer. The fact that a Tatar slave won his freedom in a Genoese colonial court on the basis of shared Catholicism should stand as a warning to modern historians not to rely too much on apparent correlations between ethnicity and religious affiliation.
Among Orthodox Christians, some had more success in petitioning for freedom than others. An Armenian woman named Marta was freed in 1417 but required to pay fifty lire, which she did by arranging to serve Isotta Bracelli for seven years (reduced to five years if she worked as a wet nurse).127 Two Albanian women also had success with the sindicatori in 1479 and 1480.128 We do not know the outcome of three more petitions by Albanians, one of whom identified herself as the daughter of the late Amzrendari Aragi and asserted that she was “free and born from free parents and of Christian race and therefore cannot nor ought to be detained in servitude.”129 A woman from Sclavonia designated procurators to present her petition in 1487, but the outcome of her case is not recorded either.130 Finally, the podestà of Lucca heard a case in 1413 in which a procurator argued for the freedom of a slave woman “because she was of Bosnian origin and Christian, and in that region Christ the Lord is worshipped, through whose blood all believers are redeemed, and entirely exempt from any yoke of servitude.”131 His argument is one of the more explicit statements linking redemption or manumission from juridical servitude with Christ’s redemption of humanity from sin.
There were a number of successful petitions from Greek Orthodox slaves.132 In 1398, a Greek woman who had served Babilanus Alpanus as a free servant (famula) appointed a procurator when she heard that Babilanus intended to make her a slave (sclava). She protested that this was illegal because “she was begotten of Greek parents.”133 In 1479, a Greek woman named Anna was freed because Greeks should not “be sold nor bought nor kept as a slave as accustomed by law and by justice,” while her owners were urged to accept the decision “lest the soul of the said late Ilarius [Anna’s deceased former owner] suffer on account of such retention.”134 Similar cases are documented in Genoa in 1424 and 1489 as well as in Caffa in 1380 and 1398.135
Orthodox Christians from Bulgaria were treated inconsistently by the sindicatori. Many Greek slaves based their petitions for freedom precisely on the fact that they were not Bulgar. Thus, in 1380, a slave woman who demonstrated herself to be a Greek from Constantinople and not a Bulgar was freed on the grounds “that all Greeks should be free and held and treated as free in the city and district of Genoa.”136 The Christianity of Bulgars apparently did not warrant the same protection. Yet when Michael, a male slave, was determined to be Bulgar and not Tatar in 1391, the sindicatori chose to manumit him on the condition that he serve for another eight years without salary.137 A controversy over the baptism of a fugitive slave in 1488 turned on whether she was Hungarian and therefore already Christian, or Bulgar and therefore apparently not Christian enough.138 The case of a slave named Cali or Theodora depended on whether she was a Greek from Constantinople, as she herself testified, or a Tatar purchased in Cyprus, as her owners claimed.139
Finally, there is no record of a Christian from Russia or the Caucasus being freed on the basis of shared religion. There are records of Mingrelian, Circassian, and Abkhaz women petitioning the sindicatori because their previous manumissions were not being honored, but none cited Christian origin as a factor in her defense.140 This is odd, because Russians and Caucasians made up the majority of the Genoese slave population during the fifteenth century and because most of the inhabitants of both Russia and the Caucasus were Orthodox Christians at that time. Some possible reasons for the discrepancy will be offered in Chapter 2.
In the Mamluk sultanate, disputes over slave status were heard by a qāḍī, a judge belonging to one of the four schools of Islamic law.141 If the religion of the alleged slave was at issue, the slave herself was allowed to testify. If the dispute arose from a mistake in the act of manumission, witness testimony played an important role. The cases that received the most attention were those of mamluks whose manumission had not been correctly performed and whose status therefore had to be rectified before they could hold government posts.142 For example, an amir named Aytamush was about to be made a general (atabak) when Sultan Barqūq was informed of a problem with his manumission. Aytamush had belonged to another mamluk named Asandamur, who in turn had belonged to Jurjī, the governor of Aleppo. When Jurjī died in 1370, an amir named Bajjās took possession of both Asandamur and Aytamush and manumitted them, but this manumission was invalid because Bajjās had acquired them illegally. Technically, Aytamush still belonged to the estate of Jurjī. So before Aytamush could become a general, Sultan Barqūq had to contact the heirs of Jurjī, buy Aytamush, and remanumit him.
The Universal Threat of Slavery
“God has given you the right of ownership over them; He could have given them the right of ownership over you.”143 This was not a platitude. Slavery in the late medieval Mediterranean threatened everyone, and no group was exempt from its dangers. After encountering prisoners begging for money and children displayed for sale in Cairo, the Franciscan Paul Walther de Guglingen and his fellow pilgrims “lamented the misery of such people, praising God, our creator, who had hitherto kept us safe from such things, and asking him strenuously that he keep us safe from these
