chain of patronymics, but slaves and former slaves had only one patronymic, Ibn ‘Abd Allah (son of a servant of God). This naming convention erased the slave’s biological family and signaled his or her foreignness from Mamluk society.50 Many Mamluk names also included a nisba or laqab, an adjectival nickname. A single mamluk could have multiple nicknames referring to different facets of his identity, such as his patron (al-Nāṣirī for a client of the sultan al-Nāṣir Muḥammad), his affiliation with a legal or theological school (al-Mālikī for a jurist of the Mālikī school), his physical appearance (al-A’war for a man with one eye), or his place of origin (al-Asqalānī for a man from Ascalon). Nicknames that appear to indicate a place of origin can be misleading, though. Al-Jarkasī, for example, might refer to a mamluk of Circassian origin or to a mamluk with a previous owner named Jarkas.51
Race in the Late Medieval Mediterranean
We have become used to thinking about slavery as a hierarchy of power built on a racial binary, white over black. This framework does not fit late medieval Mediterranean slavery. First, late medieval Mediterranean slavery was a hierarchy of power built on religious, not racial, difference. Second, neither religious nor racial differences were perceived as binary in the late Middle Ages. Third, racial differences were not articulated in terms of skin color in the late Middle Ages, although skin color was one of many physical characteristics that could carry racial associations. The significance of religion for late medieval Mediterranean slavery was addressed in Chapter 1. The remainder of this chapter addresses the roles played by race, skin color, and other aspects of physical appearance.
To approach race from a new perspective, historians may benefit from conversation with psychologists, anthropologists, and sociologists about how human categories arise and function. The private human self is a consciousness located within a body; it develops by interacting with the world around it. The result is the creation of a social self, “a bundle of perceptions held about an individual by a social world,” in addition to a private self.52 Although individuals may try to maintain their social selves in harmony with their private selves, their social worlds may not allow them to do so. This is certainly the case with slaves. While the private selves of slaves are a fascinating and elusive topic of research, the following discussion seeks only to understand certain aspects of their social selves, namely, the perceptions that were relevant to their status as slaves in the minds of the people around them.
A group is a human collectivity, the members of which recognize both its existence and their own membership in it.53 Groups can be constructed based on all sorts of criteria, and individuals normally believe themselves to be members of numerous groups (professors, Star Wars fans, women, Americans) without contradiction. When other people make the decision about how to identify an individual, what they use are categories rather than groups.54 This book is chiefly concerned with the categorization of slaves: their identification by others rather than their self-identification as a group.
Ethnicity is a way of categorizing other people based on culture. From an anthropological perspective, it is a common and widespread aspect of humans’ social existence.55 Race is a way of categorizing people based on their supposedly permanent, fixed, and inherent differences.56 Those differences are usually assumed to be physical, visible, or biological, but they do not have to be. What matters is the belief that they cannot be changed. Race, unlike ethnicity, is not a common aspect of human experience. It appears only in certain societies and historical periods. When race exists in a society as a way of categorizing people but is not associated with a power hierarchy, it can be referred to as race-thinking.57 When race becomes linked to a power hierarchy, either through explicit ideologies of superiority and inferiority or through institutional structures that implicitly benefit certain racial categories over others, that is racism.
This definition of race and racism is broad. In specific historical circumstances, it has overlapped with other categories that we now consider distinct from race, including religion,58 class,59 and language.60 Our belief that physical appearance is a meaningful kind of permanent, fixed, and inherent difference is relatively recent. The word race in its current sense, a category of people distinguished from others by certain hereditary physical traits, entered English in the late fifteenth century.61 The notion that skin color was an important aspect of race emerged in the late sixteenth century, and the ideology of different skin colors as the basis for slavery was not fully developed until the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
All of these developments occurred after the period covered by this book. In medieval Latin, the words used to categorize people were gens, generatio, genus, progenies, and natio. In Arabic, the most common terms of categorization were jins, aṣl, naw’, and umma. Gens (pl. gentes) and jins (pl. ajnās) are linguistically related.62 They can be translated in several ways, all building on the concepts of kind, type, group, and kinship. Medieval people created and shared both verifiable genealogies and myths of common ancestry to explain their systems of categories and groups.63 Some of the most important mythical genealogies made use of the three sons of Noah, the twelve apostles of Jesus, the Homeric heroes, and the founders of Arab tribes, as well as the gens of Adam, which encompassed all humanity, the tribe of the free (banī al-aḥrār), and the gentes of Christianity, Islam, Judaism, and paganism.64
In the late medieval Mediterranean, religious categories were often perceived as permanent, fixed, and inherent. Even after conversion, a convert’s religion of origin remained relevant and could still be used to categorize him or her. This attitude helps to explain why religion could function as the basis of slave status even though slaves were expected to convert. In this sense, then, it is possible to talk about religion as a racial category in the medieval world.
However, medieval people also engaged in something closer to our form of race-thinking, categorizing each other based on physical differences that they supposed to be permanent, fixed, and inherent. The bodies of knowledge through which these racial categories were constructed were ethnography (the study of different kinds of people throughout the world), physiognomy (the study of physical traits associated with different qualities of personality and character), physiology (the study of the functioning of the human body), and astrology (the study of the effects of heavenly bodies on earthly ones). Ethnography, physiognomy, physiology, and astrology were part of a shared medieval Mediterranean intellectual culture: authoritative treatises were written, translated, and exchanged among Christians, Muslims, and Jews.65 Medieval scholars debated whether racial categories were truly fixed; for example, whether the children of dark-skinned Ethiopians who moved north would become paler. This debate was largely irrelevant to slavery, though.66
In constructing their racial categories, medieval Christians started with the observation that although many human beings resemble one another, none look precisely identical, except for twins.67 They interpreted the infinite variety of human bodies as a sign of God’s boundless creativity and natural fertility.68 An individual’s nature was taken to refer to both his or her unique traits and the shared traits that made him or her recognizable as one human among many. Medieval Islamic scholarly discourse also made a distinction between the diversity of individual bodies and the shared physical characteristics of groups.69 Shurūṭ manuals warned scribes that race (jins) and skin color could not substitute for a full physical description (ḥāliyya).70
Medieval discourse on religious difference was largely binary: humanity was divided into believers and unbelievers, the right religion and the wrong ones. The existence of multiple kinds of Christians and Muslims complicated this binary somewhat, but as discussed in Chapter 1, this had only a limited effect on slavery. In contrast, racial difference was perceived as a broad spectrum ranging from the normative body at the center
