CHAPTER 5
To Work as a Slave
[S]laves, by and large, worked side by side with free laborers in the household, field, and artisan’s workshop. . . . [W]hat distinguished the slave experience . . . was not the type of work performed, but the conditions under which they labored.
––Debra Blumenthal, early twenty-first century
A common definition of slavery describes it as a variety of forced, uncompensated labor. Although this definition relates to a single aspect of slavery, slave owners certainly expected their slaves to work for them. In the history of slavery in the Iberian Peninsula, we find slaves working at a wide range of tasks, from domestics to slave soldiers, from artisans to garbage collectors. Domestic service with its many variations was their most common occupation, but by no means their only one, in the wide array of possible tasks for slaves. Slaves worked in the home, in artisan workshops, and in agriculture. Save for the years of Roman expansion into the peninsula, there were no large slave gangs working the fields. Slaves otherwise were not limited in their productive activities.
Domestic Slavery and Its Variations
The old argument over whether domestic slavery represented productive labor seems almost beside the point. Older scholarly generations tended to depreciate the significance of domestic work, in part because women did it. In recent years, historians have come to appreciate the productive work that went on in the domestic context and the significant roles that women played in medieval and early modern households, where domestics, both slave and free, participated in artisan production. Many households produced most of the common clothing and utensils for internal consumption, and the workshops of artisans were extensions of the household and often in the house itself. The work of domestics also allowed the free members of the family to devote themselves to other productive pursuits. Towns and cities in pre-modern eras had close connections to the countryside, and domestic slaves helped with agricultural chores on a seasonal basis.1
The author of the quotation at the head of this chapter found documents from two enslaved sisters, Johana and Ursola, that recount their labors over a period of a decade and a half in mid-fifteenth-century Valencia. They worked in their owner’s townhouse in the city of Valencia and also on his rural estate. In the house they made bread, cooked, cleaned, and swept. They found their laundry duties especially taxing, as they were required to wash, scrub, and rinse the clothing in nearly boiling water. All this could be part of the regular duties of household servants, slave or free. In addition, though, they were involved in many productive and supporting activities far from the home. On the estate, they picked fruit and sold it in the market. They worked in the fields and orchards at other crucial periods of the agricultural year: when the wine grapes were gathered, when the grain was harvested, and when the olive oil was made.2 Theirs is a story that many domestic slaves could have told at any time from ancient to early modern times. It shows that even slaves considered as domestics worked outside the home as part of their regular duties. It also alerts us to gender divisions in the sort of work slaves did. Johana and Ursola did not tend the animals on the estate, as that job typically and almost exclusively fell to men.
Variety in occupations and tasks was a constant for slaves in Iberia. Regardless of the period, prospective purchasers of slaves made a decision, based on at least an implicit cost-benefit analysis, that a slave was cheaper than a paid worker.3 During Roman times, the wealthy and even the moderately well-off householders of Hispania employed slaves as domestic servants. Like their contemporaries elsewhere in the Roman world, they assigned their slaves to all types of household duties, as maids, guards, repairmen, and cooks. The evidence from inscriptions on memorial stones reveals a number of different occupations that doubtless gave their practitioners even more responsible roles. These included nutrix (nurse) and ornatrix (female hairdresser), common occupations in any slaveholding society, and slave occupations as paedagogus (teacher) and medicus (physician) were not uncommon in Roman times.4 The use of slaves in similar roles continued throughout the Visigothic period.
The Muslims of Iberia made use of their slaves in a variety of ways, commonly as domestic servants or business agents. Free people shunned domestic service, and as a result householders frequently employed slaves as servants. From what we know of their treatment in Islamic Spain, it is apparent that women as slaves could enjoy a better situation than that of men. At times women became real members of the family through adoption, and domestic slaves as a rule were sold only if they offended the family. As in Roman times, nursemaids occupied an honored position.5
Slave traders provided most slave women in Muslim Spain, because Spanish Christian captives were usually men, combatant prisoners of war. In the slave markets in each city, slave women received particular care. They were inspected by matrons in the employ of the president of the market. Divided into “distinguished” and “gross” categories, the latter usually went into domestic service, while some of the former became concubines or entertainers. The concubines became an accepted part of family life. The entertainers who had been trained in Spain or other parts of the Islamic world occupied prized positions. Within this wide array of possible tasks for slaves, white women were more sought after and expensive than blacks, although a growing number of mulattos in Muslim Spain indicates that black slaves did not fail to find buyers.6
Christian households employed slaves as domestics throughout the Middle Ages. Barcelona and other cities in the Crown of Aragon had a range of slave owners from elite and non-elite classes.7 Most slaves in late medieval Seville were domestic workers. Well-off families usually had at least two slaves. Wealthier families owned greater numbers, much as their contemporaries in Italy did. Among the buyers of slaves, though, artisans predominated. In a study of slaves in half the neighborhoods of Seville in the late fifteenth century, one scholar found 166 artisans who owned one slave, 49 who owned two, 16 who owned three, 7 who owned four, and 3 who owned five or six.8 The majority of slave owners in the Andalusian town of Rota in the early sixteenth century held one or two slaves.9 Late sixteenth-century Córdoba provided these figures for the purchasers of slaves:10
nobility 23.22%
clergy 12.40%
merchants 18.72%
public officials 6.63%
learned professions 15%
artisans 20%
farmers less than 5%
For Jaén in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the array was roughly similar. Fifty percent of the owners of slaves were members of the noble and clerical elite, 31 percent belonged to the middle class, and 19 percent were artisans.11 At least one university student in early sixteenth-century Salamanca owned and sold a woman slave.12
For women slaves, domestic service was the most important assignment. The hazards of forced sexual activity and of the reproductive functions of women slaves received attention in the previous chapter. Wet nurses were especially important. Owners of lactating slave women often rented them out to different households.13
Artisanry
Many slaves also served as valuable assistants in artisan workshops, in construction, and in shops. They benefited their owners by bringing skills they had learned before they were enslaved or by learning a new craft. At the very least, they learned the customs and life of the society in which they found themselves.
Slaves of the Romans also worked in commerce and manufacturing. Along with free artisans, they engaged in the artisan production of pottery, glassware, jewelry, bricks and stonework, metalwork and baked goods. Slaves worked in the warehouses and on the docks of the ports. Some of the slaves in commerce and artisanry were more fortunate than other slaves and occupied higher positions, serving as agents for their owners or acting as shopkeepers, managers, secretaries, and accountants. They had greater freedom of action, and their masters rewarded them better. As one example, many of the amphorae used to transport wine and olive oil to Italy and beyond bore the names of the owners and their slaves, and at times only the names of the slaves. These stampings indicate the participation of some slaves as responsible agents in production and commerce. Such slaves could more easily and quickly accumulate money to pay for their manumissions. Appreciative masters might bequeath their businesses to their slaves.14 The same was true in Muslim times.
Salt production was important in medieval and early modern times and included the extraction of salt from evaporative pools (salinas) located in coastal and inland regions and rock salt mined in various locations. One of the most famous was the salt mountain near Cardona in Catalonia, where for centuries salt was excavated in open-pit operations. Though the documentation is scant in Spanish territories, it would be surprising if slaves were not employed in salt production there throughout pre-modern times.15 They certainly worked in production of the mineral in salt-pans in various places in Portugal, most notably along the Sado River near Setúbal in early modern times.16
Slave owners in late medieval Valencia employed most of their slaves as domestic servants and artisans. Slaves worked in all sectors of the economy, but there were no large slave gangs. Some masters rented their slaves to work for others for specified periods. Slaves were prohibited from being sailors or galley oarsmen, because the authorities feared that they might use their relative freedom to flee. Those who purchased slaves came from many of the classes in Valencian society: nobles, clergy, merchants, manufacturers, professionals, soldiers and military officers, and royal officials. Slaves owned by merchants often had wide freedom of movement as they worked as agents of their masters. The merchants especially valued Muslim slaves because they could easily conduct business with other Muslims, thanks to their knowledge of Arabic.17
Late medieval and early modern Christian artisans found slaves to be good investments, who probably cost them less than a free apprentice would. Though guilds prohibited slaves from joining and at times stopped masters from teaching slaves certain skills, the slaves could assist in many aspects of production and the maintenance of the small artisan shops. Usually masters recruited unskilled workers and gave them the dirty work. Pierre Bonassie asserted that “slave labor, without a doubt, provided one of the motors of industrial activity” in late medieval and early modern Barcelona.18 At the same time, there were even more highly skilled slaves in Barcelona. The painter Lluís Borrassà owned a slave of Tatar origin to whom he gave the name Lluc Borrassà. The slave learned the skills of the artist, later attained his freedom, and made a reputation as a painter of altarpieces for churches. Other former slaves in Barcelona who made names for themselves included a sculptor, master stonemasons, and a maker of crossbows.19
Slaves in late fifteenth-century Seville and Granada served as helpers for a variety of artisan owners. The work day for free labor in Christian Granada was between twelve and thirteen hours, but masters could force slaves to work at any time.20 The owners included those who worked in construction: masons, carpenters, and painters. Other owners worked in cloth making and clothing: carders, spinners, weavers, silk makers, tailors, and rag merchants. Proprietors in the cloth industries valued Moriscas highly, especially as spinners and embroiderers. There were tanners, shoemakers, and hat makers. There were chair makers, upholsterers and the makers of enamels. Seville’s connection with the sea meant that among its slaveholders were ship owners, mariners and sailors, caulkers, and fishermen. Other slave owners were blacksmiths, millers, and makers of armor. Tavern keepers, millers, pharmacists, brokers, and merchants owned slaves, as did a few public officials. Many women and men slaves worked in the leather industry. Slaves also worked in smaller numbers in additional income-producing ventures, such as the soap factory of Seville and the municipal granary. Their owners employed them as porters and longshoremen, retail sellers in the streets and plazas, assistants for shopkeepers and merchants. Some of the slaves acted as agents for their merchant-owners, a few even being entrusted with business trips to the Spanish settlements in the Americas. The prominent artist Alejo Fernández (1475–1545) owned several slaves who worked in his atelier in Seville. One, named Gaspar de Güejar, likely of American Indian origin, had the artist’s power of attorney and collected debts for him in various places in Andalucía. Many of the skilled crafts guilds excluded slaves, although some slaves did work as helpers for guild masters. They worked in Seville’s printing shops, and at least two weapon makers employed black slaves.21
Slaves in late medieval Barcelona worked in similar occupations and often faced discrimination in the guilds similar to that practiced in Seville. A close reading of Barcelona’s ordinances suggests, however, that the authors of the restrictions had non-Christians as their targets, not slaves in general, for nativeborn slaves (who could be assumed to be Christians) were usually exempt from the restrictions on guild membership that slaves of other origins faced.22
One of the most unusual sets of tasks assigned to slaves comes from fifteenth-century Valencia, where slaves appeared in court with some regularity as aggressors against members of prominent families. In many cases, their trials indicated that they had acted on the orders of their masters, who engaged in feuds with the victims’ families and who seem to have wished to inflict the maximum amount of shame and loss of honor on their enemies by having their slaves do the dirty work.23
In late sixteenth-century Huelva, most slave owners were artisans, who had one or two slaves who assisted them in artisan work.24 In early modern Jaén, many slaves worked as water carriers and bakers. The latter left a trace in the geography of the city, where there is still a street called “Hornos Negros” (black ovens), which could derive from the black slaves and freed people who worked in the bread bakeries there.25
In the Canary Islands, slaves worked in similar capacities, often placed as apprentices to master artisans who paid their masters a salary for their labor. They worked above all in all phases of the sugar industry, but also in lumbering and carpentry, in blacksmithing, and in the production of clothing and shoes. They also served as herdsmen for the flocks of the islands. Wax was an important Canarian export crop, and slaves worked in its collection and processing. In the first half of the sixteenth century slaves also served as fishermen and sailors, and late in the same century some slaves from the Canaries worked as sailors on ships making the Indies run.26
Independent Agents
Not much is known of independently operating slaves in Roman or Visgothic times, but we do know that Muslim masters frequently employed male slaves as business agents. The normal Arabic word for slave (‘abd) was not used for a servile business agent; rather he was the “young man” (ghulām) of the master. While the male slaves could be the chief business agents of their masters and even engage in business on their own account, they also could be put to a variety of other uses, including menial tasks at times. The slaves had their own hierarchy, related to the status of their masters.27
Similar situations were present in Christian Iberia, where slaves did not always live in the owners’ houses. Most masters used their slaves in their own establishments, but others rented out the labor of their slaves for various reasons. Some placed their slaves with artisans to learn the skills of a trade. Two apprenticeship documents from early sixteenth-century Seville reveal slaves serving as apprentices. Juan, a black man and former servant, signed on as an apprentice of the shoemaker Diego Bernal for a three-year term beginning in 1506.28 In 1516 the university graduate Alonso Pérez Mazanedo made a contract with the painter Alonso Fernández Cevadero to take on Pérez’s slave Juan, twenty-two years old, as an apprentice for two years to teach him the trade. In the course of the apprenticeship Fernández would give Juan food and drink, a bed to sleep in, clothes, and shoes.29
Slaves often worked outside the homes of their owners. In Christian Granada, the owners of slaves who knew how to spin, who were almost always women, could have them work for others and gain a salary. The person who rented the slave’s labor paid the salary to the owner, and the slave went to reside in the new home. Other slaves, known as cortados, lived and worked permanently outside the homes of their masters. Either their owners rented out their labor, or the slaves themselves worked on their own account and returned a fixed sum of money to their owners, many of whom seem to have owned slaves mainly as an investment. In Mallorca, owners at times rented their slaves for work outside the home, in a similar manner to the cortados. Called “setmaners” or “setmaneras” (although the term also applied to any free worker paid by the week), they were often rented for short periods, such as at the time of the grain or olive harvest. The usual terms of employment specified that the rented slaves would send back to their master about half the salary they received. They thus often had opportunities to keep part of the money they earned and even speculate with it, frequently with the aim of purchasing their manumission.30
A small number of Muslims remained in Spain until the eighteenth century, as we saw earlier, for Muslim and Morisco slaves received exemptions when the Morisco community was expelled in the early seventeenth century. Many of the exempted slaves were cortados. Their supposedly disorderly lives aroused complaints in the Cortes as early as 1628, but it was not until 1712 that the moros cortados were ordered to leave Spain.31
In early modern Portugal, it was common for slave women to be employed as washerwomen and garbage and refuse collectors. Slave men worked on the docks as stevedores, and as laborers in the construction industry. Slaves with greater skill worked in the craft guilds, although the more prestigious of the guilds—those of sword makers, goldsmiths, and lapidaries—restricted slave access to the higher ranks of membership. Blacksmiths and shoemakers offered seemingly unrestricted advancement to slaves, but hosiers and pastry makers put bounds on the rise of their slaves. Sellers of water, vegetables, and processed food were often slaves, and the authorities regulated their activities because of considerations of public health.32
Slave owners came from a wide range of the Portuguese population, and the sort of work assigned to their slaves responded to the owners’ choices. The higher ranks of society made use of numbers of slaves as domestic servants, but in much smaller numbers than would become common later in Brazil. Aside from domestic servants, other urban slaves worked for institutions; among these, hospitals were significant, using slaves as cleaners and launderers. Owners of slaves could either supervise their work directly or rent them out to craftsmen and tradesmen. As was to be the case later along the west coast of South America, slaves in Portugal were to be found as sailors, boatmen, and ferrymen. We previously mentioned black seamen and interpreters on the trading vessels sailing to Africa. Back in Portugal, black slaves often operated the ferries on the major rivers, and public authorities took various steps to insure the steady performance of the slaves’ duties.33
Slaves were an important component of the local economy in the Spanish coastal city of Almería in the early sixteenth century and contributed substantially to the support of the military defense of the city. The city government rented slaves from their owners to handle such tasks as repairing the city walls and laboring in the gunpowder factory. One episode demonstrated their importance. A number of North African slaves had supported the attacking forces during a combined Turkish-Algerian raid on Almería in 1620. In the following year, a decree required owners to move their North African slaves twelve leagues inland. Soon the gunpowder factory had to shut down and the city walls went unrepaired. The problems also affected the civilian economy: the salt pans were out of operation, silk production had fallen dramatically, the docks lacked workers, and farming declined. Eventually, the government permitted baptized slaves and Muslim slaves under the age of fourteen to return.34
Agriculture
Slaves in Roman Spain were used in agriculture, as both workers and overseers. The usual pattern for the estates was absentee ownership, at least until later in the Empire, with the local management delegated to overseers, often slaves themselves, who organized the work of slave gangs. In Spain, we have the example of the Roman writer Martial (ca. 38–ca.104), who owned a farm near Bilbilis (near the modern town of Calatayud) that was worked by slaves under a manager (vilicus) who was himself a slave.35
The rural slaves among the Visigoths varied considerably in status. A variety of dependent workers provided the staffs for the estates of the nobles. Among the slaves of the nobility, a privileged group of slaves, the idonei, occupied positions of trust in the lord’s household, acting as house managers, estate managers, record keepers, and other specialists. They escaped the most onerous rules of slavery. Certainly they were a small minority among the slaves, most of whom were domestic servants and agricultural workers (viles or vilissimi servi and rusticani). Most slaves of the Visigoths worked the lord’s land and enjoyed land tenure of a sort. In this way their status approached that of Roman coloni and later medieval serfs. Throughout Europe, the greater rural labor requirements as a consequence of the extension of agriculture into newly cleared lands and the introduction of specialization, such as vine growing, allowed some agricultural laborers to secure improved conditions of land tenure and thereby better status.36
Free labor was the norm for agriculture and industry in the Islamic world of the Middle Ages, with a few striking exceptions to the general rule. There was a sufficient supply of indigenous workers, both urban and rural, so that there was no reason to import vast numbers of slaves as laborers.37
Recent studies are affirming the proposition that slaves were more important in agriculture in medieval Christian areas than we formerly thought, with some scholars able to demonstrate that slaves in late medieval Barcelona, for example, frequently worked in agricultural pursuits. The buyers of slaves in Barcelona came from a variety of professions, but many of their slaves worked at least part time in their masters’ fields and gardens or cared for their farm animals. Even in a highly urbanized area such as Barcelona, slaves routinely worked in agriculture.38
On the island of Mallorca in the fifteenth century, there was an elevated servile population, and the percentages of slaves were particularly high in the smaller towns. This suggests that the slaves were used in agricultural pursuits. The social situation of the island points in the same direction. The population was small to begin with and declined because of epidemics and wars. The sex ratio among slaves of 3.9 men to 2.5 women was unusual in Iberia, as we have seen, and the higher percentages of slaves in smaller towns would support a hypothesis that many of the men were working in agriculture.39
Most studies of slavery in Spain in the later Middle Ages and the early modern period have concentrated on the use of sales documents, preserved in the records of public notaries, to discuss slaves and slavery. These documents frequently cite the occupation of the buyers and sellers, but they almost never specifically mention the work the slaves did. For example, in sixteenth and seventeenth-century Jaén, farmers figure only occasionally among the owners of slaves, despite the fact that the city was in a prime agricultural area.40 In late sixteenth-century Huelva and Palos, almost no slaves seemingly worked in agriculture.41 In eighteenth-century Cartagena, only 8 percent of the owners of slaves were farmers.42 Many scholars, relying on the sale documents, assume that a slave worked as a household servant for the buyer or as a helper in the buyer’s main occupation. In an article that has not had the attention that it deserves, Bernard Vincent found records of slaves in Málaga in the late sixteenth century that call this into question. The records appear in a revealing census of male slaves above fourteen years of age in that city in 1581, showing the identity of the masters and the slaves, the slaves’ origins and ages, and, most important, the work the slaves did. Most medieval and early modern documents do not reveal how the slaves worked, and as Vincent said of this valuable record, “all at once, 575 individuals step out of the shadows.” They step out, moreover, in very revealing ways. An analysis of the occupations of their owners shows that most (90 of the 162 cases in which the proprietor’s occupation appeared) were in the service sector, comprising merchants, public officials, clerics, and similar occupations. Far fewer were artisans (33/162), and fewer still were farmers (7/162). From these figures, which are similar to the sort of figures that scholars have developed elsewhere from notarial documents, one could easily draw the conclusion that few slaves worked in farming. A very different and more plausible picture emerges when the tasks at which the men actually work are considered. These tasks are specified in 534 cases among the 575 individuals: 118 are in farming, 45 relate to artisanry, 159 are in the household, 97 indicate work outside the house as day laborers, and 138 are those who divided their time between more than one occupation, including agricultural tasks.43 From the first list alone, one could draw the conclusion that just over 4 percent of the slaves in Málaga worked in agriculture, whereas the second set of figures provides the information that 22 percent worked in agriculture full time and even more did so part time. A similar situation was present in the city of Santa Cruz on the Canarian island of La Palma, where in the late sixteenth century many slaves worked either completely or part-time on the agricultural parcels of their owners, who occupied a wide range of professions, including the liberal professions, the military, and the bureaucracy.44 Many slaves in early modern Portugal also worked in agriculture.45 Owners throughout the Iberian world used their slaves periodically on their own farms, while other farmers were eager to secure the temporary labor of slaves at planting time and at harvest by renting slaves from their owners, who no doubt welcomed the income they generated. This changes our view of what slaves did and their importance in agriculture, the main component of the premodern economy.
Nonetheless, medieval and early modern slavery in Spain was predominantly an urban pursuit, and even those slaves and free workers employed in agriculture typically lived in the towns and villages and walked to the fields to do their work. When slaves were used on the land in Portugal at the same period, they seem to have been concentrated in small numbers. The great division was the Tagus River; slave use in agriculture was more common south of the river and much less frequent north of it.46
Sugar Cane: A Special Case
For over a thousand years, favored valleys in the southern part of the Iberian Peninsula have supported fields of sugar cane, and Iberians have extracted juice from the canes and refined sugar from it. Sugar cane production in Iberia, as in all the Mediterranean basin, was a marginal operation in a region too dry in summer and too cold in winter for optimal sugar growing. Iberia’s sugar production occupied an intermediary stage in sugar cane’s spread from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic. Iberia owed that role to its position as a geographical crossroads, where the Mediterranean meets the Atlantic and where Africa and Europe approach at their closest point. Two paths of sugar’s spread converged there: the Muslim path that led from Mesopotamia to Egypt and then around the southern shore of the Mediterranean to Iberia, and the Christian path that led from the twelfth- and thirteenth-century Crusader states in Syria and Palestine to Cyprus and Sicily and from there to Valencia.47
Historians and other scholars have devoted great attention in the last two decades to the histories of slavery in Spain and of sugar production. Nonetheless, historians of sugar have paid relatively little attention to the story of labor, and historians of slavery have seldom concentrated on sugar in Iberia. From the few comments such scholars have made, it is clear that sugar growing and refining in Iberia followed common practice in other Mediterranean areas in the same centuries: free workers mainly provided the necessary labor. There may have been a few slaves involved here and there, but slavery was on a small scale, with slaves employed mainly as additional workers in a system of free or semi-free labor.48 The close connection between slavery and sugar appeared only later in the colonial areas of the Atlantic.
By the late fifteenth century, sugar from the new colonial areas, beginning with the island of Madeira, began to enter European markets, often at substantially lower prices than those of the Iberian producers.49 This foreshadowed the series of sugar booms that followed sugar’s introduction into semitropical and tropical areas in the Caribbean and on the American mainland. Due to the competition, Iberian production suffered in Valencia and the Granadan coast, and the lower Guadalquivir valley ceased to produce sugar on any but a minor scale.50 Nonetheless, sugar production did continue in the peninsula long after the competition from Atlantic production began.
Slaves came to be used in greater numbers on the farms and in the mills of the Atlantic islands, but there too free labor was also present, as Portuguese and Spaniards migrated to the newly discovered islands. The connection between slavery and sugar, though, had been planted, setting the groundwork for the plantation system in the Americas. In the Canaries the export of sugar remained important throughout the sixteenth century, but increasingly its export was restricted to two major receiving ports: Seville and Cádiz. The number of Canarian mills declined from some seventeen early in the sixteenth century to eleven or twelve by 1600. Slaves continued to be a majority in the work force of the sugar mills, although free Spaniards and Portuguese and freed slaves augmented the supply of labor. Slaves certainly worked in the mills and in the transport of sugar.51 The importance of slave labor can be shown from the request of the citizens of Gran Canaria to Felipe II after he prohibited cabalgadas (raids) to the African mainland, beginning in 1572. The citizens’ overriding complaint was that “because the principal enterprises on Grand Canary are sugar mills and vineyards, and because they have no slaves to work and cultivate them, each day they suffer great harm.”52 The reference to vineyards illustrates the fact that slaves in the Canaries worked in traditional agriculture as well as in the sugar industry. 53 Slaves—Canarian, North and sub-Saharan African—also worked in Madeira’s sugar fields and mills from the mid-fifteenth century. The Madeiran operations were small-scale compared to the later American plantations and combined free workers, sharecroppers, and slaves in the labor force.54
Institutional Owners: State and Church
Throughout ancient, medieval, and early modern times, public officials and monarchs owned slaves. Roman Spain had public slaves, owned by city governments or by the Roman state. In the period of the Roman Republic, state slaves were the property of the populus romanus and were controlled and directed by the Senate. The cities and the state acquired their slaves by all the normal means of recruitment, particularly through the capture of prisoners of war and also through confiscations. These slaves worked at public service jobs, building and maintaining roads and aqueducts and filling bureaucratic positions. During the first two centuries of the Roman Empire, the emperors also owned state slaves and other slaves as their personal property; in the succeeding two centuries, the state slaves and the personal slaves of the emperor came under a single control.55
One of the chief purposes for the Roman takeover in Spain was to assert control of the mineral wealth of Hispania. The usual picture is that mining was a harsh occupation, that mining operations were typically on a large scale, and that slaves were the vast majority of the miners, because free men would not submit to the inhuman conditions of work in the mines. The ancient authors created the foundation of such an impression. Polybius reported some 40,000 slaves at work in the silver mines of Cartagena, and one of the most horrifying descriptions of the Spanish mines comes from Diodorus Siculus. Recent work based on epigraphy and on archeology suggests that the picture is more complicated than that presented by the narrative sources. Mines frequently operated on a small scale, and manpower came more often from labor drafts imposed on the towns by Roman authorities. Thus most mine workers were free, even though slaves could be found working as miners and at other tasks in the mining districts. The Roman state at first operated all the mines, but more and more mines were being rented to private operators, although the gold mines remained in the hands of the state. The labor force included a variety of sources: free workers, convicts assigned to the mines, public slaves in the state-operated mines, and private slaves in the leased mines.56
Slaves of the Roman state were known as the familia Caesaris, “the family of the emperor.” They provided the imperial household staff and many of the administrators of the Empire. Those in the administrative group handled record keeping and correspondence, collected taxes, and disbursed money. State slaves could generally look forward to emancipation and often continued their careers as imperial freedmen.57
The crown slaves in the Visigothic kingdom filled royal offices and had a much higher status than ordinary slaves. Similar to the Roman public slaves and known as servi fiscales (slaves of the royal treasury), crown slaves served the king in the royal administration, ran his estates, and served as his household officials. Crown slaves could hold slaves of their own, but could free them only with the lord’s permission. Many crown slaves had begun their careers as skilled slaves of other lords; if they impressed the king or his officials, he often took them into royal service, much to the annoyance of their former masters.58
Many slaves and freed slaves served among the public officials of al-Andalus. In 925 the official in charge of silk and gold manufacturing was a slave, and two former slaves were in charge of the royal household. One slave, Badr, was the sword bearer of ‘Abd al-Raḥmān III. Later Badr rose in the bureaucratic hierarchy, becoming vizier and head of the postal service. One of his sons became secretary of state and then prefect of police. Another son became governor of Seville.59 In fact, large numbers of imported Eastern European slaves, the ṣaqalība, found employment in the Umayyad government and formed a loyal bureaucracy for the rulers. Some were eunuchs, but most were not.60 We will consider slave soldiers, also owned by the state, in a later section.
The church and its clerics were other important proprietors of slaves in the medieval and early modern Christian states, as we have seen. Church slaves among the Visigoths found it difficult to attain freedom, because their institutional master was permanent, and thus they could not benefit from manumission by testament. Even though manumission was held to be a praiseworthy deed for a Christian, the church recognized that the emancipation of church slaves represented a loss to the patrimony of the church. If a clergyman did choose to grant freedom to church slaves, he had to compensate the church for the value of those he manumitted.61 Freedmen of the church and their descendants were still bound by ties of dependence to the church. They did not enjoy full freedom, particularly in regard to their marriage options: they could not marry free people.62
Long after the end of Visigothic times, officials of the church commonly owned slaves. In 1169 the bishop of Gerona, Guillermo de Peratallada, left by testament all his money and his “sarracenos,” his Muslim slaves, to the hospital of Jerusalem. A later bishop of Gerona in 1278 left in his will a baptized black slave and a Muslim slave. The bishop of Tarragona listed slaves among his possessions in his will in 1214. In 1325 the archbishop of Toledo made a perpetual grant of men and women Muslim slaves to the dean and chapter of the collegiate church in the town of Talavera de la Reina. In none of these cases were the occupations of the slaves listed, and one could well suppose most of them worked in the domestic chores of a large ecclesiastical household. But in the case of the slaves of archbishop Sparagi in Mallorca in the 1390s, there is a suggestion that they might have worked on the agricultural estates of the archdiocese.63 In the late Middle Ages and the early modern period, communities of monks and of nuns owned slaves, as did individual monks and nuns. Monks could more easily own, buy, and sell slaves. Nuns led more restricted lives, though they could own slaves of their own in addition to the slaves owned collectively by the convent. Similarly, members of the military orders owned slaves, as did the orders as a whole. Sometimes monasteries received slaves as donations.64
Institutionally owned slaves labored in the construction of fortifications and other major buildings. In twelfth-century Aragón, don Pedro de Atarés built the monastic church of Veruela with the help of free workers and a large number of slaves. In 1276, the bailiff of the bishop of Huesca kept a close accounting of the expenses of building a castle for the bishop at Sesa. The bishop ordered ten slaves to be sent from Huesca to Sesa, with four men to guard them during the trip. When they arrived, one man remained as their guard. Locked up at night, the slaves worked during the day to excavate the foundations for the castle.65
Among the Muslim slaves of the Christians in the later Middle Ages were elite slaves, much in demand by royal and local officials. King Pedro IV of Aragon sought a slave physician from Villafranca, where in 1340 a famous eye specialist was a slave. Educated Muslim slaves were in demand as scholars and copyists throughout Christian Spain.66 The director of the royal mint in Segovia purchased nine slaves in 1589 as workers, as we saw in an earlier chapter. This may have been an isolated experiment, for the director had to travel to Lisbon to purchase them, and of the nine he bought, five died and one fled.67
Slaves were also used in road construction in the eighteenth century and helped build roads from Madrid to Barcelona and from Madrid to Segovia.68 The royal government helped spark a period of significant growth in Cartagena in the eighteenth century by building important defensive works, including a new arsenal. The city grew from around 10,000 in 1700 to about 50,000 by the end of the century. The population boom and government spending stimulated the local economy and seemingly made it difficult to recruit free workers for heavy construction. Instead, slaves, mainly Moroccans and Turks, came to be employed. Slaves owned by the state declined in number and disappeared in the course of the eighteenth century.69
Noble Slaveowners
Many noble households in the south of the peninsula had slaves in the late fifteenth and sixteenth century. In some cases, the work the slaves did was extremely varied, combining domestic service with agriculture, fishing, and construction. The marquises of Cádiz and the dukes of Medina Sidonia had slaves working in their almadrabas, coastal stations where tuna and other fish were netted and caught. The marquis of Cádiz employed fifty-two slaves in 1485 when he was building his famous tower in the town of Cádiz. He may not have owned them all; some may have worked for the marquis under contracts he made with their owners. When don Juan de Guzmán, duke of Medina Sidonia, died in 1507, he owned 216 slaves, 121 men and 95 women, some of whom came from royally licensed raids that the duke made along the Atlantic coast of Africa. The slaves of the duke occupied a series of specialized occupations: masons, carpenters, painters, plasterers, a worker in gold, a master tile setter, esparto workers, a sword keeper, water carriers, gardeners, muleteers, a shoemaker, barbers, a wax maker, cooks, and even a lion tamer, among other skills. The duke maintained such a large slave force not only from a desire to display his wealth but, more importantly, to provide a labor force for his agricultural and construction ventures, as well as his various residences, farms, and workshops. The slaves who lived in the main establishment formed families that combined slaves, freed people, and others born free.70
Madrid and Valladolid had unusual patterns of slaveholding in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. King Felipe II designated Madrid as Spain’s capital and the principal residence of the royal court in the later sixteenth century; it remained there save for a brief period when it moved to Valladolid in 1601–1604. A wide range of slave owners resided in the capital, including merchants, artisans, and ordinary members of the clergy. Nonetheless, the greatest number of slave owners were grandees and lesser nobles, senior government officials, and high clerics. Most had at least one slave and others many more. A generation ago, noted scholars argued that the early modern elites in Madrid and elsewhere employed their slaves as domestics and that the slaves played little role in the economy. Such scholars believed that the wealthier householders maintained slaves primarily to demonstrate their owners’ wealth, power, and social status. More recent scholars have refuted this view and have demonstrated the importance and productivity of household work, as we have seen.71
Slave Soldiers
The Romans had prohibited the military use of slaves, but disaffected slaves joined with the Visigoths during their incursions. Visigothic monarchs at times required all those nobles who were obliged to fight in the royal armies to bring some of their slaves with them at the time of the muster. King Erwig in the sixth century stated that all nobles were required to bring 10 percent of their slaves—fully armed—to join the levy. If the nobles failed to comply and did not bring the requisite percentage of their slaves, the king could confiscate their remaining slaves.72
Muslim rulers used concentrations of slave soldiers and bureaucrats. The widespread employment of slave troops, the Mamluks, was the most unusual aspects of slavery among the Muslims. Mamluks and state slaves were also an important element among the servile population of Islamic Spain, as we have seen. Loyalty was a rare and precious commodity for those who held power in al-Andalus. Factionalism was widespread, due to the complicated ethnic and linguistic distinctions as well as political squabbles and family disputes. The original impetus for the use of slave troops was a fairly simple one: they were loyal. Thus it is quite understandable that the concept of buying loyal troops spread widely. Completely cut off from their homelands and families, the Mamluks’ allegiances were to themselves and their masters. Their numbers included Berbers, sub-Saharan Africans, and Europeans. The predominant element consisted of Slavs and other Europeans, although black Africans composed some special guards units. In time, many Slavs came to occupy important posts in Islamic Spain, as freedmen or as slaves.
The status and conditions of the Mamluks varied greatly from those of ordinary slaves. Far from being ordinary slaves, they were comparable to the familia Caesaris of the Roman Empire. The members of both groups were legally slaves but also were part of a prestigious organization that gave them communal support and companionship and that offered them a path to freedom and power. They began as slaves taken by slave traders from their places of origin and thus completely separated from the society of their birth. Legally, they were subject to the same laws and rules as other slaves. Beyond these similarities, however, their lives diverged radically from those of other slaves. They went through a military training program designed to reward loyalty. Once they were admitted to the ranks, they could rise as far as their ability and skill at intrigue permitted. They could attain freedom, and many Mamluks, once they were freed, rose to high office.73 In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, following the collapse of the Spanish caliphate, many of the successor taifa kingdoms had former Mamluks as their rulers.74
There was another group of slave soldiers, this one in Granada at the end of the Muslim period. Called gacis, they were black African slaves imported by Granada’s rulers to help defend Granada at the very end of the Christian reconquest. After the Christians took Granada in 1492, many of the gacis went to North Africa, while others remained as dependents of prominent Muslim families. They were gradually manumitted and blended with the rest of the Morisco population.75
The rich Romans in Italy and elsewhere had eunuchs as servants. They were expensive and became even more expensive after the emperor Domitian prohibited the castration of slaves in Roman territory. Thereafter, they had to be imported from outside the Empire.76 Eunuchs were certainly present in imperial Rome itself, though not much is known of them in Roman Spain. More is known about the eunuchs of Islamic Spain. To guard their harems, rich Spanish Muslims frequently employed eunuchs, and rulers employed them in government service for their assumed loyalty. These scarce and unfortunate individuals commanded high prices for their owners. The surgical techniques varied, and the physiological effects varied according to the age at which the surgery took place. The operation itself, regardless whether just the testicles or the testicles and penis were removed, was traumatic, and the risk of postoperative infection was great. The elevated death rate accounted for a large part of the high prices the owners of the survivors could demand. Castration was generally illegal throughout the Christian and Islamic worlds, but the practice continued in certain places. Slave traders brought prospective eunuchs from the great slaving regions outside the frontiers and castrated them in special centers along the trade routes: Verdun in France, Prague in Bohemia, Samarkand and Bukhara in the East, and Christian communities in southern Egypt, or in Muslim Spain, particularly the town of Pechina. Ibn Ḥawqal (tenth century) even wrote—with obvious exaggeration—that “all the Slavic eunuchs that there are on the face of the earth are provided from Spain.” These centers and others flourished because of the experience of the castrators, whose skills helped keep down the death rate.77
From the foregoing discussions, we can see that the work of slaves varied considerably in each period from ancient to early modern times. After Roman times, slaves ceased to be as large a proportion of the population or the labor force. During and after the Middle Ages, and in both Islamic and Christian Spain, slaves were important as workers in all sectors of the traditional economy, and slavery as an institution showed great complexity, despite the relatively low number of slaves. Many slaves had low status and toiled at menial tasks, but more fortunate slaves had positions with greater responsibility and status. As civil servants, military officials, or estate supervisors, others still commanded respect as they managed their masters’ important obligations. We even have occasional records of slaves owning other slaves.78 Regardless of the work they did, we can assume that slaves wanted to be free. In the next chapter, we will examine their efforts to attain freedom.