one. Russians and Tatars were most often mistaken for each other in this way.121 In other cases, notaries gave two racial categories for a single slave: Tatar Russians, Tatar Alans, Tatar Turks, Tatar Circassians, Greek Circassians, Greek Russians, Greek Walachs, Russian Armenians, Russian Bulgars, Russian Circassians, Russian Bosnians, Wallach Bulgars, Bulgar Turks, Bulgar Tatars, Saracen Ethiopians, and Berber Moors.122 Some combinations can be explained by the dual significance of the term Greek as race or religion. A Russian Greek might therefore be of Russian race and Greek religion. What a notary meant by a Tatar Alan is harder to explain.
Slavery and Physical Appearance
Black Sea slavery was not white slavery. It was not black slavery either. Although both Latin and Arabic sources occasionally described slaves in terms of color, what they intended to convey was not necessarily the color of the slave’s skin. To grasp the significance of color in late medieval descriptions requires knowledge of late medieval theories of physiognomy and physiology as well as ethnography.
In Europe, state and ecclesiastical authorities first began keeping lists of people and their descriptions in the late fourteenth century.123 The initial purpose of the lists was to track undesirables, such as heretics and criminals, who moved from town to town, but they were quickly adapted for tax collection too. Because names were not sufficient to identify wandering heretics and bandits, the list makers added brief descriptions of their clothing, badges and symbols that they wore, marks on their skin, and their color.124 One of the most notable early lists was a register of slaves created in Florence in 1366.125 The Florentine register described slaves in terms of color, stature, and marks on the skin.
When late medieval texts referred to a person’s color, whether that person was free or a slave, they meant the color of the body rather than the color of the skin. According to the Galenic theory of humoral medicine, all living bodies were composed of a mixture of cold, hot, wet, and dry elements.126 In the human body, these elements mingled in the form of four fluids: blood, choler (yellow bile), phlegm, and black bile. Complexion (complexio) was the state created by a specific mixture of the four fluids. It had a range of meanings. Complexion could refer to an individual’s humoral state at a particular moment in time or to an individual’s innate and characteristic humoral balance. It could also be used to characterize groups: sex, age, race, climate zone, and astrological sign were all believed to affect complexion.
From a medical perspective, each human being was believed to have a unique personal complexion shaped by both nature and habit. This personal complexion could be affected at any given moment by many factors, including air, exercise, sleep, diet, excretion, and emotion. Each organ within the body also had its own complexion. Physicians sought to determine the personal complexion of each patient, the balance of elements and fluids that was normal for that particular body. Then they could intervene in various ways to restore and maintain the patient’s health by restoring and maintaining the correct balance of humors for that patient. The best complexion, from a medical perspective, was a well-balanced one.
Because complexion was an internal rather than external state, medical training required physicians to learn how to read their patients’ internal state through external signs. But because humoral balance affected the mind as well as the body, nonphysicians were also interested in reading the external signs to learn about internal qualities of personality and character. This was physiognomy. Over the course of the fourteenth to seventeenth centuries, as both ecclesiastical and state authorities placed increasing importance on listing and identifying people, the dominant meaning of complexion shifted from the internal, concealed blend of humors to the external, visible signs.127 The emphasis also shifted away from the unique humoral balance of the individual to the categories of complexion associated with categories of people. Strong emphasis on complexion as a permanent group state rather than a transient individual state emerged in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, at the same time as the new word race became widespread in the sense that we use it today.128
The principal colors attributed to the human body in Galenic discourse were white, red, yellow, and black, but a healthy body should be mixed in color, ideally a mixture of red and white.129 The poet Petrarch described his own color as “between white and dark brown” (inter candidum et subnigrum), while King Ludwig of Bavaria was compared to the biblical King David, “white and red in color” (colore candidus et rubicundus).130 Healthy young mamluks in training were likewise described as “white and red” (candidus et rubecundus).131 When a slave sale contract mentioned color, notaries tended to place it between the physical description and the health warranty, because it pertained to both clauses. Mixtures such as “whitish brown” (bruna quasi blanca), “brown between two colors” (brunus inter duos colores), “olive-brown” (brunam olivegnam), “blackish olive” (seminigrum seu ulivignum), “mixed color” (coloris lauri), or “medium color” (medio collore) signaled humoral balance and therefore good health.132 Otherwise, the colors attributed to slaves were black (nigra, nera), brown (bruna, bruneta), olive (olivastra, olivegna), red (rubera, rosa), and white (alba, blanca). Blackness has received the most scholarly attention because of its implications for the Atlantic trade in African slaves, but blackness meant something subtly different to medieval notaries than it did to modern slavers.133
Although the color of slaves is of great interest to us today, it was not particularly interesting to medieval Italian notaries. No more than 3 percent of slave-related documents produced in Venice mentioned slaves’ color. In Genoa, thirteenth-century notaries recorded slaves’ color more consistently than those in the fourteenth or fifteenth centuries.134 During the thirteenth century, 38 percent of slave-related documents from Genoa mentioned color. During the fourteenth century, 30 percent of slave-related documents mentioned color, but during the fifteenth century, the figure was only 2 percent. Although the fourteenth-century figure seems significant, 82 percent of those references came from just two notaries, Bartolomeo Gatto and Giovanni Bardi.135 In the thirteenth century, references to color came from a much larger proportion of notaries. The reason for the shift from general interest in color to interest on the part of just a few notaries to general disinterest to renewed interest in the sixteenth century is unclear.136 The shift suggests that the relationship between color and slavery did not develop in a linear way.
The Galenic system of humors was equally fundamental to medical theory in the Islamic world.137 Indeed, it was through Arabic translations of Greek texts that humoral theory reached Latin physicians. As a result of the Galenic emphasis on mixture and balance, the terminology of color in Arabic was complex. The following passage is drawn from a Mamluk shurūṭ manual, a guide to writing legal documents. It comes from a chapter explaining how to compose a physical description of the parties to a contract, including their age, stature, forehead, eyebrows, eyes, nose, cheeks, jaw, lips, mouth, teeth, neck, and distinguishing features. For color, it offers the following array of possibilities:
If a man is very aswad (black), he is called ḥālik (pitch black). If his black is mixed with red, he is called daghmān. If his color is pure, he is called asḥam. If the black is mixed with yellow, he is called aṣḥam. If his color is muddy, he is called arbad. If it is purer than that, he is called abyaḍ. If it is fine yellow and leaning towards black, he is called ādamī in color.138 And if it is below arbad and above adama he is called very adama. If it is pure adama, he is called shadīd al-samra (very brown). And if it is purer than that, he is called asmar in color. And if it is purer than that, he is called raqīq al-samra (fine brown). If it is purer than that and leaning towards white and red, he is called ṣāfī al-samra ta’aluhu ḥamra (pure brown rising to red), and is called raqīq al-samra bi-ḥamra (fine brown with red). If his color is very pure he is called ṣāfī al-samra (pure brown) and is not called abyaḍ (white) because
