slaves in Alexandria who had been taken in the recent Mamluk conquest of Cyprus.175 He immediately freed two but retained the third, a widow, to serve him until she was able to pay back the forty ducats of her ransom. Likewise, Elena, a Greek slave in the house of Andrea de Moneglia in Chios, petitioned the bishop of Chios for freedom.176 The bishop arranged for her to be redeemed by another Genoese man, Nicolaus Pichaluga of Sampierdarena, who paid twenty-five ducats for her. In return, Elena agreed to serve Nicolaus for five years. During that time, she would receive food, drink, and clothing; she would be treated well; and Nicolaus would not dismiss her against her will. These clauses were standard in the employment contracts of free servants. At the end of five years, her debt would be repaid, and she would be entirely free.
In the interval between the ransom payment and the fulfillment of the terms of manumission, the ransomed captive was technically a slave of his or her redeemer. This precarious position sometimes led to permanent enslavement. An extreme case was that of Stefano di Posaga. In 1439, Nicolo Morosini, the captain of an official Venetian galley returning from Tana, stopped at Ponterachia, a Turkish port, to take on water. There he rescued a fugitive slave, Stefano di Posaga. However, when the galley arrived in Venice, Morosini sent Posaga to work on his land in Padua, “holding him as a slave (servum).”177 After four years, he sold Posaga to another ship captain, who was supposed to take him to Syracuse. Posaga finally contested his status in Syracuse, where the judges freed him. Judges in Venice then fined Morosini 200 lire. This is one of the rare cases in which a medieval judge penalized someone for wrongful enslavement. The fact that Posaga was an Italian man and not a Russian woman is undoubtedly relevant to the punishment of his enslaver.
How a person’s status might slip from ransomed captive to permanent slave is illuminated by an unusual passage in a document from Kilia, a Black Sea port at the mouth of the Danube River. In the document, a Genoese woman named Iohanna sold a Greek slave woman named Maria. However, the document deviated from the usual legal formulas to include a statement about the circumstances behind the sale:
This is the slave whom the said Bartolomeo, Iohanna’s husband, redeemed from Saracens in Asprocastro [i.e., Moncastro], in which place she was a slave, as the aforesaid Iohanna and the slave Maria both assert. Maria asserts the aforesaid things to be true, and that it is also true that she, Maria, was and is a slave of the said Iohanna and Bartolomeo on account of the aforesaid redemption, allowing it to be true that there is not any instrument or document concerning the aforesaid matters. And Iohanna made the aforesaid sale, as she asserts, on account of the need which she has for money for the subsistence of life for herself and her two daughters, because she said that the said Bartolomeo her husband does not do and has not done any good for Iohanna or for her daughters, several months having now elapsed, but he stays in Maurocastro [i.e., Moncastro] with a certain woman whom he keeps, and also in order to pay one sommum of silver to a certain priest to whom the said Iohanna is obligated, as she asserts.178
In other words, Maria was trapped in the gray area between captivity and slavery. She had been enslaved by Muslims in the Black Sea port of Moncastro and ransomed by a Christian stranger, Bartolomeo de Azano. Bartolomeo brought her to his home in Kilia, where she served his wife, Iohanna, and their two daughters. When Bartolomeo abandoned his family and moved to Moncastro to live with another woman, Iohanna was no longer able to support her daughters. She decided to sell Maria to raise money and pay the debt she had already contracted with a priest. Slaves were expensive, and Maria may well have been Iohanna’s single most valuable possession.
When Bartolomeo acquired Maria, was he redeeming a captive or purchasing a slave? Maria and Iohanna said that Maria had been redeemed (redemit), but in the next line, Maria testified that she was a slave (sclava). This is surprising, because slaves were not legal persons and did not have the capacity to give legal testimony. Nevertheless, Maria also testified that there was no formal document or instrument concerning her redemption and thus no written evidence of her status, the price that Bartolomeo had paid for her, any promise of freedom he might have made, or any obligation she might have undertaken to serve or repay him. There was also no indication of how long she had served Bartolomeo’s family or whether she was close to fulfilling the standard five-year term of service.
The testimony in the document was elicited from Maria by her buyer, Precival Marchexano of Genoa. Among the witnesses to the contract was Thomas de Via, a Genoese citizen who acted as an interpreter between Greek (for Maria) and Latin (for Precival). Precival probably intended to take Maria into the Mediterranean and resell her.179 Recording this story would increase her resale value by legitimizing her status as a slave. At the time of her sale in Kilia, Maria’s status was dubious. She was Greek, possibly of free birth, had no documented history as a slave, and had been redeemed from Muslims under conditions that normally entailed manumission after completion of a fixed period of service or payment of a fixed sum of money. However, the testimony in the document emphasized Iohanna’s possession of Maria and right to sell her despite all the factors in her favor. Moreover, Maria testified that she “was and is a slave.” This statement, once carried into the Mediterranean in the register of the notary Antonio di Ponzò, would make it difficult for her to challenge her status later.180 A boilerplate clause in many slave sales was a promise on the part of the seller to uphold the buyer’s right of ownership in court. With written affirmation of Maria’s slave status, Precival could confidently defend his ownership of her and right to sell her onward.
We can only speculate about why Maria testified that she was a slave rather than a ransomed captive. One factor may have been the difficulty of challenging Iohanna’s claim to ownership. Maria did not have any proof of ransom, origin, or free status at birth. She may not have been aware of Genoese laws and norms governing the treatment of Greek captives. She was also facing a language barrier and may not have been able to find a translator willing to help her defend her status. Violence, threats, or other forms of coercion may also have affected her testimony.181 In any case, the fact that her testimony was recorded provides us with an unusual glimpse into the precarious zone between slavery and captivity.
Conclusion
Today we consider slavery an insult to human dignity, and we study slaves’ agency as a way of affirming their humanity.182 We imagine that anyone who owned slaves must have denied their humanity or failed to recognize it. The inhabitants of the late medieval Mediterranean, however, had a different understanding of both slavery and the human condition. They believed that hierarchy and menial labor would exist even in ideal societies like the Garden of Eden or the Garden of paradise. In those ideal societies, the lowest level of the hierarchy would be occupied by free people, and menial labor would be done by specially created nonhuman beings. In the real world, slaves occupied the lowest level of the hierarchy and did the menial work. Their humanity was never in question, but the restrictions and humiliations imposed on them were considered legal and socially acceptable.
Acceptance of both slavery and the humanity of slaves was supported by the perception of slavery as a universal threat. A slave owner one day, whether an Italian merchant or a noble Mamluk lady, might realistically find himself or herself enslaved the next. Slaves were considered the most miserable and unfortunate of people, a status that one wished to avoid for oneself but might choose to alleviate or exploit in others. For example, the fifteenth-century German pilgrim Felix Fabri pitied the slaves he observed in Alexandria, sympathizing with their desire to flee and deploring the horrible punishments they faced if recaptured.183 Yet he and his fellow pilgrims thought it funny to be mistaken for slaves in the Cairo slave market, where they might well have been sold in reality if their ship had been captured by pirates. After the misunderstanding was cleared up, one of his companions tried to purchase an Ethiopian slave in the same market where he himself had just been haggled over.
The universal threat of enslavement was just one aspect of the common culture of slavery in the late medieval Mediterranean. Christian and Muslim authorities agreed that the natural status of humanity was freedom but that slavery was a legitimate aspect of human law. They
