result of internecine conflict between the Christian powers and Islam. Slavery had largely disappeared as an institution of any significant cultural or economic importance in northern Europe during the medieval era. To the south, however, slavery persisted. In Italy, large numbers of Russians, Slavs, Greeks, and Muslims were held in bondage, but sub-Saharan Africans could also be found in increasing numbers among the enslaved. European slaves from the Black Sea and Balkan regions were less common on the Iberian Peninsula, but large numbers of captured Muslims and prisoners-of-war from other parts of the Mediterranean world filled the ranks of the unfree. In both places, the pattern was much the same: An array of people, regardless of their physical appearance or religion, could be found in bondage. After the fourteenth century, non-European and largely non-Christian slaves were increasingly prevalent as physical appearance and religion began to serve as more absolute indicators of an individual’s legal status. The rise of sub-Saharan African slaves was particularly important. In places where the Reconquista had been achieved, as in Portugal, European buyers acquired Africans through peaceful trade networks that linked southern Europe to a vibrant and extensive trans-Saharan market. By the first decade of the sixteenth century, even the recently recaptured city of Granada, once the center of Moorish civilization on the Iberian peninsula, engaged in a slave trade that was two-thirds black.8
But if slavery was common in southern Europe, that reality could have been missed by Englishmen who were often looking elsewhere during the early Elizabethan era. English privateers and pirates coursed Mediterranean waters in small numbers, but escalating tensions between Protestant England and the Catholic powers made it difficult for English merchants and mariners to ply their trade in the region, at least before 1580. The English government and merchant community did, however, cast about other regions in search of profitable trade and in the process a handful of travelers came face-to-face with human bondage. English engagement with Russia, to pick an early example, brought the subject of continental slavery close to home, not least because it was the previously noted plight of a Russian slave that prompted the Star Chamber in 1567 to declare that England was “too pure an air for slaves to breathe in.” Russia, in and of itself, interested most Englishmen to a limited degree, but of more interest was its value as a highway to places that really sparkled in the imagination of those people who dreamed of wealth and power. Much as early Portuguese awareness of and involvement in the African slave trade was a by-product of Portugal’s effort to circumvent Africa, the search for a northeast passage to the Indies at mid-century and curiosity about alternate routes to Persia led to the creation of the Muscovy Company in 1555. The Muscovy Company dispatched ships annually to Russia and controlled English trade to the Middle East for about a generation, sending out six separate expeditions to Persia via the northern route in search of valuable silks and spices before the Ottoman Turks curtailed the trade in 1580.9 Russia, therefore, provided one of the earliest opportunities for the English to witness and write about slavery as it was practiced in contemporary settings.
Human bondage was an inescapable reality in the Russian environs described so vividly by the early trader Anthony Jenkinson, who made his first trip to the region in 1557, and Giles Fletcher, who was sent to Russia as a special ambassador in 1588.10 Both Jenkinson and Fletcher located the hub of slavery in the central Asian regions on the southern border of Russia. There, Jenkinson observed, slavery manifested itself prominently in the form of concubinage. Jenkinson even attributed some of the internal turmoil he witnessed to the absence of “natural love among them, by reason that they are begotten of divers women, and commonly they are the children of slaves.” Slavery was so common in Bokhara that merchants from India and Persia attended the famous bazaars, in part, to purchase Christian slaves. Even Jenkinson came away with some slaves. When he boarded a ship on the Caspian Sea for his return trip to Moscow, he had with him “25. Russes, which had been slaves a long time in Tartaria, nor ever had before my comming, libertie, or meanes to gette home, and these slaves served to rowe when neede was.” Upon reaching Moscow in late 1559, he demonstrated his willingness to participate in the indigenous system of bondage and exchange by presenting some of his slaves to the Tsar as a sign of his gratitude for the favors bestowed on English traders.11
Giles Fletcher’s travels were not nearly as wide-ranging as those of Jenkinson, but he also provided an insightful picture of human bondage in sixteenth-century Russia. Indeed, Russian slavery may have been relatively easy for Fletcher to grasp, involving as it did categories familiar in contemporary English discourse on the subject. Fletcher was deeply interested in the plight of “the poor people that are now oppressed with intollerable servitude,” such that “people for the most part … wishe for some forreine invasion, which they suppose to bee the onely meanes, to rid them of the heavy yoke of this tyrannous government.” Everyone, in Fletcher’s mind, suffered from an absence of political liberty, but he believed “that there is no servant nor bondslave more awed by his Maister, nor kept downe in more servile subjection, then the poore people are.” In his description of “Novograde,” Fletcher elaborated on the situation of Scythian slaves who had rebelled but were then subsequently put down by their masters with nothing more than horsewhips “to put them in remembrance of their servile condition, thereby to terrifie them, & abate their courage.” Continuing to emphasize the parallels between slaves and animals, Fletcher recounted how the chastened slaves “fled altogether like sheepe before the drivers.”12 Outside Russia proper, Fletcher characterized the Tartars, or Mongols, in even less flattering terms as a people who engaged in more extensive forms of human bondage. Fletcher claimed that the “chiefe bootie the Tartars seeke for in all their warres, is to get store of captives, specially yong boyes, and girls, whom they sell to the Turkes, or other their neighbors.” These eastern slave raiders, however, had little patience or compassion for their victims, such that if any of their captives “happen to tyer, or to be sicke on the way, they dash him against the ground, or some tree, and so leave him dead.”13
English governmental affairs and commercial interests inspired curiosity about Russia and the reports of English merchants, including what they had to say about slavery, indicate that even though Russia was located nearby (at least on a global scale), geographic proximity had little bearing on cultural similarity. Russians were different and their active embrace of slavery was a clear indication of that difference. This point was made even more baldly when the English turned their attention to Ireland. Tudor and Stuart Englishmen thought and wrote about Ireland a great deal, arguably more than any other place in the world in the early modern era.14 When they did so, they rarely had nice things to say. Collectively, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland constituted the English marchlands during the early modern era. Beginning in the eleventh century, the Norman kings inaugurated what turned out to be a protracted, grinding effort to subdue these territories and their inhabitants under Anglo-Norman rule. Medieval Scotland and Wales were less unified nations than ill-defined regions consisting of multiple hotly contested principalities and fiefdoms whose inhabitants posed a serious threat to their English neighbors. During the eleventh and twelfth centuries, Scots repeatedly invaded northern England. As a result, the English chronicler Symeon of Durham lamented, “Scotland was filled with English slaves.” The invasion of 1138, John of Hexam detailed, led to the death of countless men while “the maidens and widows, naked, bound with ropes, were driven off to Scotland in crowds to the yoke of slavery.”15 The attempt by King Edward I, and other English monarchs, to subdue the Scots was partly an effort to extend English sovereignty, but English incursions were also designed to eliminate slave raiding on the northern frontier.
The situation in Ireland was different. Most Englishmen subscribed to long-held and deeply embedded derogatory ideas about the Irish people, ideas that often drew directly on the foundational writing of Gerald of Wales, the twelfth-century chronicler who had journeyed to Ireland in 1185 with an Anglo-Norman force led by the future King John. Gerald’s scurrilous characterizations were the rhetorical armament of an invading army, but they proved long-lasting and his observations were translated into English and reprinted, or echoed, throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.16 In Gerald’s telling, the Irish were naked, wild, and unfriendly people who had more in common with animals than with men. Or, in the unguarded words of Andrew Trollope in a letter to Francis Walsingham written in 1581, the Irish “are not christian,
