CHAPTER 6

To Become Free

For, as slavery is the vilest thing in this world except sin, and the most despised, so, on the other hand, is freedom the dearest and most valuable of all benefits.

—Siete Partidas, thirteenth century

There is no joy on earth in my opinion so good as regaining one’s liberty.

—Miguel de Cervantes, early seventeenth century

Flight

Slaves would certainly have agreed that slavery was vile and freedom dear and valuable. Slaves in every period tried to escape from their masters and from slavery, and flight was a common resort. They always had the option to flee, but that attempt to attain freedom could have only two possible successful outcomes: either the fugitives could try to reach their homes or at least a welcoming country, or they could try to remain undetected in the land of their captors. We have no way of knowing how many slaves succeeded in returning to their homelands or living free lives elsewhere. Almost all the evidence we have comes from the stories of unsuccessful fugitives, who may well have constituted the majority.

The Roman state maintained a system of registration of slaves and rewarded those who informed on fugitives.¹ Fugitive slaves were common enough in the Visigothic kingdom for detailed regulations for dealing with them to be embodied in the legal code, with rewards for those who returned fugitives and punishments for those who harbored them. Free people who disguised slaves by cutting their long hair, a mark of slavery in Visigothic times, received harsh treatment, as did those who encouraged them to flee. The laws provided that long-term fugitives could attain free status after thirty years had passed, but no doubt few slaves won freedom on those terms. Under King Leovigild (569–586), a law was promulgated that permitted the Arian clergy to force masters to sell slaves who had fled to a church for sanctuary. A priest would buy such slaves, compensate the master, and resell the slaves to other masters assumed to be more benevolent. Individual clerics and the church itself owned slaves. Often Visigothic clerics pursued their own slaves who fled and sought sanctuary in churches. The church council of Lérida in the mid-sixth century prohibited clergy from seizing and whipping their slaves who tried to attain safety in churches. Monasteries had different rules. Although fugitives often must have sought refuge in the monasteries to escape their lay lords, the abbots would not receive them without their masters’ permission. Fugitive slaves continued to be perceived as a problem for public order as long as the Visigothic kingdom lasted. In 702, just nine years before the end of the kingdom, King Egica (687–702) enacted draconian penalties for failure to apprehend fugitives.²

The Siete Partidas, the thirteenth-century Castilian law code, included laws about the possibility of attaining freedom through a lapse of time. A slave could be considered free if he believed himself to be free and acted as if he were free for ten years if his master was in the country, or twenty years if the master was out of the country; if the master made no claim on him, the slave could be considered free. All this assumed the slave was acting in good faith, but even if he was not, he could be considered free after thirty years.³ One suspects that few slaves actually benefited from these provisions, which echoed those of Roman laws and have a highly theoretical flavor.

Laws in later medieval Christian Spain considered flight to be the theft of one’s own person and provided punishments for both the fugitive and those who aided in the escape. In 1376, for example, the proprietor of a Majorcan hostel asked the authorities to apprehend his Tatar slave woman Isabel, who had fled with clothing belonging to the owner, and the free man Jaume Soler, who had helped her flee.⁴ Late medieval Barcelona had severe measures designed to discourage slaves from fleeing their masters. Slaves caught in flight or preparing to flee were to be dragged and then hanged. Those who planned the flight were to be hanged, and people who aided the slaves in their flight were to have their ears cut off.⁵ It seems improbable that such harsh laws were consistently enforced, and the legislators may well have intended them to frighten and deter potential runaways and those who might consider helping them.

Most late medieval Muslim slaves who attempted to flee chose to cross religious frontiers by land to reach the Muslim kingdom of Granada, or by sea to North Africa. Some, though, crossed from one Christian kingdom to another in hopes of passing as free. From the early fifteenth century in Aragon, a detailed account survives of the unsuccessful attempt at flight by five Muslim slaves at work in building a monastery in the town of Calatayud. When the slaves fled, searchers went in all directions, with little success at first. Then two were recaptured, and they told where the others had gone. One became exhausted from hunger and thirst. Abandoned by the rest, he was recaptured. Two reached Madrid, where they were apprehended. The prior of the monastery and another monk traveled to Madrid to bring them back. Thereafter, the slaves’ legs were locked each night in a newly constructed wooden stock so they could not flee again.⁶

Public officials in fifteenth-century Seville pursued fugitives, and owners of runaway slaves offered rewards for their return. A recaptured fugitive in Seville could never thereafter be manumitted, a provision that must have acted as a serious deterrent to those slaves who contemplated flight.⁷ The owners of fugitive slaves were often persistent in pursuing them. In Barcelona in 1400, Francesc Muntornés appointed an agent to try to reclaim his three slaves who had fled six years before.⁸

For Africans and other slaves from distant origins, there was little or no hope of escaping and getting back to their homelands. In 1463 a royal agent in Barcelona ordered Guillem de Barberà, who held the castle of Sant Martí Sarroca, to return a black slave, twenty-five years old, who had fled his owner in Barcelona, the armorer Guillem Sobrer, and ended up in Barberà’s castle. His status there was unclear, but he was described as “in the power of ” Barberà, so he may not have attained even a temporary freedom.⁹

Still, slaves constantly tried to flee. So concerned were masters in late medieval Barcelona that they purchased insurance against their losses when slaves fled.¹⁰ Often slaves used false documents of manumission available on the black market. Valencia’s Muslim slaves often attempted to flee to the coast and contact a Muslim ship or to seek refuge by crossing into the kingdom of Granada, before it came under Christian control in 1492. They also could seek aid in the Muslim communities of Valencia, and after 1492 there were isolated Muslim or Morisco communities in the mountains of Granada where they might seek help. They could also find support from freedmen living in Spain, who would shelter runaways and at times even give them false letters of manumission. To counter these tendencies, the kingdom’s parliament suggested that freed slaves should be required to reside in the places where they had been freed. The procurators additionally asked for large rewards to be paid to those who denounced fugitives.¹¹ The port of Málaga, after its Christian conquest in the late fifteenth century, was a favored destination for fleeing slaves, who hoped to pass themselves off as free and to board a vessel bound for North Africa.¹²

Groups of runaways formed successful communities in the Americas from the sixteenth century onward and held out for decades by taking advantage of underpopulated, harsh terrain and thinly spread government agents. Nothing like that was possible in medieval or early modern times in mainland Iberia or on the islands. Fugitive slaves on the island of Mallorca could not hope to establish hidden communities but tried to escape to North Africa by stealing boats or by joining with the Muslim sea raiders who attacked the coastal communities. Mallorcan officials imposed harsh penalties in an effort to discourage fugitives. Both the fugitives and those who helped them were to be beaten, and positive inducements included the offer of freedom for slaves who denounced other slaves who planned to flee.¹³ In the Canary Islands, fugitives could not hope to evade capture for long, and sure safety lay only in reaching Africa. That, however, required a voyage. Stealing boats was not easy, and, even if the fugitives secured a vessel, they had to know how to sail and to navigate it. Few of the many slaves in the Canaries achieved freedom by flight.¹⁴ One may well have thought he would do so. Pedro was a black slave, aged fifty in 1618, when the Turks carried out a massive raid of the island of Lanzarote, described in an earlier chapter. Pedro found a way to join the raiders and left with them when they began their return to Algiers. A Spanish fleet intercepted seventeen of the raiders’ thirty-six ships as they attempted to pass through the Strait of Gibraltar, and Pedro, among others, ended up in Spain. What happened to him there is not recorded, but his owner twice contracted with agents to locate him and bring him back.¹⁵

Accounts of unsuccessful flights abound. Andrés, a slave of African origin, served three masters during his life in Seville: Fernando de Robles, the doctor Nicolás Tello, and don Luis de Guzmán, whose house he fled before he was recaptured in Toledo in 1512.¹⁶ Another African confessed to the Inquisition that he had intended to flee to North Africa and become a Muslim as a first stage in his journey to return to his homeland, where he intended to become a Christian again because his people there were Christian.¹⁷ The black slave Francisco fled his master in Córdoba in April 1611, reaching as far as the kingdom of Murcia before being caught and returned in November of 1613.¹⁸ In his study of the early seventeenth-century town of Martos, Manuel López Molina found no successful cases of flight, and three in which those who attempted to flee were caught and returned.¹⁹ As another example of an unsuccessful flight, in 1680 a slave named Miguel de Dios fled from the city of Jaén and ended up in custody in Córdoba. His owner sent an agent to Córdoba to sell the fugitive at the market price. Miguel de Dios may well have fled before and been recaptured, as he had brand marks on his nose and between his eyebrows.²⁰

Slaves in Portugal also tried to flee their masters. Flight there, too, was generally ineffective, primarily because a slave would have to reach Africa to find a haven. One party, whose members seized a ship and tried to sail to Africa, misjudged their position, put in to shore near Setúbal, and were captured nearby. There were extradition treaties with Castile, so that escaped slaves would be returned if they crossed the borders, and Portuguese agents could enter Castile to apprehend runaways. The laws also provided rewards for informers and penalties for those who aided fugitives.²¹

These examples have been of slaves fleeing from Christian owners. There are counter-examples of the flight of Christian captives and slaves from Muslim control, some of which we saw in Chapter 2. In the fifteenth century a number of Christians fled from captivity in Granada. In 1412 two young captives spent eight days digging from their basement prison to the open air. After their escape twelve other captives used the same tunnel to reach freedom. In 1442, four Christians took advantage of their jailer’s drunken stupor to flee from the royal prison in Granada, somehow avoiding the jailer’s mastiffs. In 1448, forty-seven men escaped from their Granadan prison, and most reached Christian Spain.²²

Obtaining freedom by flight was thus a risky proposition. For early modern lower Andalucía, as one example, there is no documentation that any fugitive was ever successful.²³ The legal path to freedom led to manumission, but even there the way was neither smooth nor easily followed.

Manumission

Slaves did not always live hopeless lives, despite their total dependence and lack of legal standing, and despite the fact that their masters could abuse them. In practice, slaves could negotiate small improvements in their daily lives and could initiate processes that eventually led many of them to freedom.

Manumissions in Roman times were quite frequent, beginning under the Republic while Iberia was still being Romanized. The citizens of many vanquished towns found themselves enslaved. After the resistance was over, the Romans sought to gain popular support whenever possible and freed many of those formerly enslaved. Consequently, many Iberians in the early Roman period began life as free men, then spent a period as slaves, and finally were freed.²⁴

Throughout the Roman period, individual manumissions were the normal way slaves gained their freedom. A small measure of security for some Roman slaves came from the fund of money under the slave’s control, the peculium. It formed the slave’s working capital, derived from gifts, a portion of the wages a slave might receive from working outside the home, tips from guests, or savings from the slave’s allowance. Though legally the fund belonged to the master, the slave could use the peculium for investments and ultimately accumulate enough to purchase freedom. Manumissions for private slaves were ordinarily the master’s prerogative. Masters could choose to manumit during their lifetimes or by testaments providing manumission after their deaths. Slave owners had many reasons for allowing slaves to be manumitted. They might grant freedom as a reward for good service, to free a woman slave to marry, or to grant a dying slave a last request. Pagan writers and later Christian ones counseled masters to free slaves as a pious act, but practical reasons were more probably decisive. Masters customarily forced slaves to purchase their freedom. The master who received his slave’s market value as the price of freedom could use the proceeds to purchase a younger slave to replace the freedman, who still owed him obligations. The most inhumane masters manumitted aged or disabled slaves to starve in the streets or be maintained by the state.²⁵

Roman writers and some modern scholars depicted manumission as a system for the benefit of the slaves, but it was also a tool the owners used to keep their slaves in line. Masters held out the possibility of manumission to their slaves and in return demanded docile comportment, a payment for manumission, and continued deference by their freed slaves. Masters thus possessed powerful tools for controlling their slaves as they manipulated the slaves’ longing for freedom.²⁶

The Roman legal system provided mechanisms for slaves to gain their freedom through the direct intervention of the state, without the need for the master’s permission. Slaves who revealed a crime—by denouncing deserters, illegal coiners, libelous writers, and rapists of virgins or widows—were considered to have rendered services to the state and could therefore be free. Slaves could also gain freedom if their master overstepped the limits of what the state considered permissible harm inflicted on his slave. The state could intervene if masters castrated male slaves, exposed sick or disabled slaves, or forced female slaves into prostitution.²⁷ Such laws probably provided only a relatively few slaves with their freedom. Most slaves who became free used their limited bargaining power to persuade their masters to grant them freedom, even while acquiescing in the dominance the masters had over them. Manumission continued over the centuries of the Roman Empire, along with the practice of providing gifts or bequests to the newly freed for their support. Manumission contracts always provided that the slave would hold his former master as a patron, and at times they included clauses requiring him to work for his former master on special terms.²⁸

In the Visigothic period, manumission was still the safest path to freedom. Authorities of the church, not the state, performed most manumissions; this marked a departure from the Roman past. A Visigothic master could make a written grant of freedom. He could also manumit a slave by proclaiming in the presence of witnesses that the slave was free. Manumissions by testament continued from Roman times. In such a case, the act had to be confirmed by three to five witnesses within six months. Often slaves exchanged one form of servitude for another lighter one, when they were freed upon entrance into one of the rural estates as dependent laborers. Unlike Roman times, emancipation could be revoked for actions the Visigothic masters deemed unacceptable, principally ingratitude. Finally, the freed slaves usually were subject to certain legal disabilities, as the Roman freedmen had been.²⁹

Although most emancipations came from the actions of the masters, Visigothic laws also prescribed manumissions without the master’s approval in a limited number of cases. Slaves who had lived a free life for fifty years could petition for legal freedom, but the long period involved surely restricted the number of individuals who could take advantage of the provision. Slaves who denounced counterfeiters could be freed, as could those who twice had been sold abroad.³⁰ Visigothic lawmakers made efforts to restrict Jewish slaveholding and proselytizing. Jews could not hold Christian slaves, and any slave whose Jewish master converted him to Judaism could for that reason be freed.³¹

Slaves could win their freedom in a variety of ways according to Islamic law. Manumission was an act of piety counseled by the Qur’ān: “free those slaves you possess who wish to buy their freedom after a written undertaking.”³² Masters were encouraged to free slaves as acts of piety or of expiation for the masters’ transgressions.³³ As in Roman times, a slave could be manumitted by testament or by specific act during the master’s life. The master could agree to allow the slave to purchase freedom and to permit him the right to work to earn his purchase price. At the time of manumission, the newly freed slave had to be given a sufficient amount of money or other material goods to allow for his or her support. In the Malikite (Mālikī) interpretation of Islamic law, dominant in al-Andalus, when a master and his slave agreed to a contract to allow the slave to purchase his or her freedom on the installment plan, the slave enjoyed a status somewhere between full servitude and complete freedom. He or she could work independently and buy and sell goods and real property free of the master’s control, although the master could still deny the slave permission to travel. Any children born to the slave during the period of the contract were also in a similar intermediate status and received full freedom when the contract was paid.³⁴ As in the medieval Christian world, charities in the world of Islam had ransoming captives and freeing slaves as a duty prescribed in the Qur’ān.³⁵

Some circumstances brought automatic emancipations in Muslim Iberia. A slave mistress who bore children to the master gained privileges and attained freedom on his death. After the mid-eighth century, bearing her master’s child elevated a slave woman to the status of an umm walad, as we saw in Chapter 4. As such, she could not be sold or otherwise removed from the master’s household, and when the master died she would be free. Her children could be free from birth. Slaves who performed meritorious acts could be freed by the state, and maltreated slaves could petition a judge to expedite their manumission. Slaves who came to be owned by a relative were on that basis freed, as for example, if a master’s will left slave children to a previously freed father.³⁶ After emancipation, the freed person was the client of his former master’s family, who provided protection and patronage in return for certain services or payments. In effect, the client was a legal member of the former owner’s family.³⁷

In thirteenth-century Christian Castile, the introduction to the Siete Partidas’s section on manumission put it: “All creatures in the world naturally love and desire liberty, and much more do men, who have intelligence superior to that of the others.”³⁸ One law in the same section stated: “For, as slavery is the vilest thing in this world except sin, and the most despised, so, on the other hand, is freedom the dearest and most valuable of all benefits.”³⁹ But slaves who wanted freedom had to defer to their owners, who, in normal circumstances, were the only ones able to grant freedom. The Siete Partidas specified the ways the master could free his slaves.

This liberty can be granted by a master to his slave, in church or out of it, before a judge, or anywhere else, by will or without a will, or by a written instrument. He should, however, do this himself, and not by an attorney, except where he orders some of those in his direct line to do so. It is necessary when he frees a slave by a written instrument, or in the presence of his friends, to do so before five witnesses.⁴⁰

These legal provisions, incorporated into later legislation in Spain and the Spanish colonies, offered the slaves some protection from their complete dependence on their masters. As legal codes are not always accurate guides to actual behavior, we must turn to what we know about the historical experience of slaves and their owners and how closely that reality coincided with the laws.

Manumission in late medieval and early modern Castile was called ahorramiento. Freed slaves were called horros, and the documents granting their freedom were called cartas de ahorría or cartas de horro. These words came Latin “allforra,” which in turn resembled the Arabic “al-ḥurr” (freed), “harrar” meant to free, and “harra” meant to free oneself or to be free.⁴¹ Freed slaves could run into real difficulties if they could not produce the proper documents, and they and their former masters made sure that the manumission documents were available. In 1533 the widow Constanza Núñez of Baza, a town near Granada, went before a notary to reconfirm the freeing of her former slave Leonor de Alcaraz, because the papers of the notary who registered the original manumission had been dispersed and lost following the notary’s death.⁴²

The granting of freedom was almost always the master’s prerogative, but there were some exceptions. The Siete Partidas followed Roman law in providing for the emancipation of slaves without the master’s approval in cases of the master’s misdeeds or of the slave’s service to the kingdom. Masters who placed women slaves in prostitution could have their slaves confiscated and freed.⁴³ Some authors report that masters who castrated their men slaves would be punished and the victim freed. In fact, the Siete Partidas provided less for the slave. Those who castrated free men were to be punished as if they had committed homicide, but if a master castrated a slave, he could only be punished by the confiscation of the slave. The slave, in turn, would become the property of the royal treasury, not freed.⁴⁴ Services to the kingdom for which a slave could be freed included reporting the rape or abduction of a virgin, denouncing a counterfeiter, or informing on frontier guards who abandoned their posts. In these cases, the master would be compensated for his loss of the slave. Slaves who denounced the murder of their masters or revealed treason against the state could be freed with no compensation to their masters.⁴⁵

According to the Siete Partidas, slaves who received holy orders could be freed if the master knew and consented. If he neither knew nor consented, things became more complicated. He had only a year and no longer to complain. If the slave had become a subdeacon, the master could claim him and return him to slavery. If the slave had become a deacon or a priest, the master could not reclaim him as a slave, but the former slave had to pay the master a sum equivalent to his market price at the time of ordination or provide him with another slave of equal value. If the slave became a bishop, he would have to provide his master with two slaves of an equivalent value to his own at the time of his ordination.⁴⁶ I suspect that the jurists who wrote the Siete Partidas were merely repeating earlier provisions dating back to the early centuries of Christianity and that few if any late medieval slaves won their freedom in that way.

Public and church authorities could and did free slaves when they determined that the circumstances warranted. For example, clerical and royal officials in the Balearic Islands in the fifteenth century freed Greek Orthodox slaves on the grounds that free Christians should not be enslaved.⁴⁷ Following the conquest of the Canaries, as we saw earlier, bands of native Canarians signed treaties that made their members legally exempt from enslavement, but members of the conquered, non-treaty groups could be enslaved as captives of “good war.” Members of allied bands who later rebelled or refused to carry out the terms of their treaties were liable to enslavement as “captives of second war.” Despite watchfulness by royal officials, the conquerors at times violated the rules and enslaved members of the treaty bands. The Spanish monarchs Fernando and Isabel had their officials in the islands investigate and free those improperly enslaved, many of whom had advocates in the local bishops or their own families, who hired attorneys to take the plea to the royal court.⁴⁸ As an example, in 1491 the royal council compensated Fernando González, the fortress governor of Gibraltar, for his loss when the bishop of the Canary Islands declared a Canarian slave whom González had purchased to be free.⁴⁹ Similar misunderstandings could find Muslims enslaved in the Canaries. Around 1501, a group of some twenty-four Moroccan Muslims went to the island of Gran Canaria with the governor’s guarantee of free movement through the island. Within two years, a new governor made them captives, including some members of the group who had converted to Christianity. They later appealed to Queen Juana, whose government responded by declaring that all the Christians of the group were to be free. The remaining Muslims could take thirty days to decide if they wished to convert as well. If they did convert, they could remain in the islands; if they chose not to convert, they could return freely to North Africa.⁵⁰

Similar practices operated in the Crown of Aragon, where, as in Castile, the laws relied on Roman legal practice and precedent.⁵¹ Merchants brought slaves from many origins to the prominent commercial center of Valencia, but before they could be sold, an official called the chief bailiff (bayle general) had to register them and collect the royal tax. Some slaves used the occasion of the bailiff’s interview to assert that they were really free and should not be sold. Those who could prove their cases were freed; those who could not were sold.⁵²

Manumission in Portugal, as in other societies, was a popular and secure method of attaining freedom, and by the sixteenth century the population of freed slaves amounted to some 10 percent of the slave population. The manumission document was called the carta de alforria, usually given only by the master himself, either in his lifetime or by will. Manumissions were sometimes freely given, but more often certain conditions had to be fulfilled: payment or an agreement for continued service after freed status had been attained.⁵³

Even the Spanish Inquisition could become interested in the fate of individual slaves.⁵⁴ Slaves who denounced false converts could be freed.⁵⁵ In the middle of the seventeenth century, the officials of the Inquisition in the Canaries petitioned the king to allow them to free a black slave named Herbas. His master was Duarte Enríquez, whom the Inquisition had convicted of secretly practicing Judaism while outwardly living as a Christian. The slave, on the other hand, was thoroughly Christian, and the officials sought a royal order to free him, “because in these islands no one knows that Christian slaves become free because of the heresy of their owners, and accordingly the said slave had not sought his freedom nor talked to anyone about it.”⁵⁶

Not all cases show the Inquisition in such a positive light. In 1583 a converted slave woman of Muslim origin was hauled before the Inquisition in Mallorca on charges of having said she hoped the Muslims would capture her. Her story, it turned out, was that her owner had promised to free both her and her daughter if she would convert. She did so, and the owner even gave her a letter of manumission but then sent her to be sold in Minorca. That was the source of her frustration and the occasion of her bitter statement that she hoped the Muslims would capture her on the way.⁵⁷

Secular courts also heard cases of contested servile status. In 1685 the lawsuit of Ana Hurtado, a freed black woman of the town of Alhaurín, near Málaga, reached the chancellery of Granada, the court of appeals for southern Spain. In the suit, the woman demanded that the owners of her two enslaved daughters should immediately free them. The basis of her case was that her mother had been born and sold in Angola, a Christian country, and that as Christians neither her mother, nor the plaintiff herself, nor her daughters, should have been enslaved. She won the case.⁵⁸

The laws that we have just examined and the actions of public officials based on them probably produced only a limited number of freed slaves over the long run. Most slaves who reached freedom did so because their owners chose to manumit them. Even though the decision to grant freedom was the master’s, there were methods that slaves could use to try to obtain manumission. All slaves had some degree of agency, and many worked hard to maximize their chances of obtaining freedom. Among the strategies that slaves in Christian Spain used to attain freedom, one of the first steps was to adopt the dominant religion. If a Jewish or Muslim slave became a Christian, that did not automatically bring freedom. Castilian laws enforced social norms and expectations concerning the holding of slaves across religious lines. According to the Siete Partidas, non-Christians could not own Christian slaves, and, for knowingly violating the rule, a non-Christian master could be executed and all his property confiscated by the state. If non-Christian masters held non-Christian slaves who converted to Christianity, they could see their slaves go free and could expect no compensation. Even if the master subsequently became a Christian, he would lose any slaves who converted before he did.⁵⁹ The religious diversity in late medieval Valencia, with its communities of Christians, Jews, and Muslims, and the official favor for Christianity posed complications for slavery. The monarchs would not permit non-Christian masters to hold Christian slaves. If a Muslim slave of a Jewish owner converted to Christianity, royal officials took the slave from his owner and assigned the baptized Moor to work for a Christian until he could pay for his manumission. If he could not do so within two months, the officials could arrange to have the new convert work for the king until he had repaid his ransom.⁶⁰

If Christian masters owned non-Christian slaves, baptism alone would not free them; their master still had to agree to their manumissions. Nothing obliged Christian masters to free slaves who converted. They could continue to hold converted slaves, and many did. On the other hand, a slave’s conversion was a usual first step toward manumission. Owners might sell their Muslim slaves or allow them to buy their freedom, but the slaves freed by testament were almost always exclusively Christians, converted as adults, or baptized as infants in the case of those born in the home.

In the vast majority of cases of manumission in Christian Iberia, slaves attained freedom because the owner chose to grant that freedom. The simplest way was by means of a document drawn up by a notary. An example from the late sixteenth century in lower Andalusia shows the standard form.

Let all who see this letter know that I, Lázaro Martín Cordero, citizen and native of Huelva, say that for as much as I have love and good will toward Ginés de la Cruz, my captive slave, son of Ginesa, my captive slave now deceased, for at present you are seventeen years of age, mulatto in color, with a good body, without a beard, with the scar of a wound over the left eyebrow, and because your mother during her lifetime gave and paid me for your liberty the sum of 25 ducats, I therefore am content and waive the bond and proof of payment, mindful of what is said above and for the service of God Our Lord and to do mercy, I grant and acknowledge by this present letter that I liberate and free you, the said Ginés de la Cruz, my slave, from the subjugation and captivity and service that you are under as my slave, and I set you apart from me and from my possessions and those of my heirs, and I give you full power, as is required by law, to be and live on your own and with whomever you wish, and to be present and appear in courts of justice, and to do as you please, and establish legal documents and wills and name heirs and get married, and the children you have will be legitimate and without any obligation of service, to leave and bequeath your goods, those that you have now and have later, to your sons and heirs, and in all the other things and circumstances that a man can and should do, you can act freely in them without any penalty or slander.⁶¹

Manumissions also could be specified in the wills the owners drew up. In an example from Mallorca in 1267, Pere Calafat provided for the freeing of his slaves when he prepared his will. One of its provisions stated:

I call, make and designate Pere the Baptized, and Romia the Baptized, sister of the same Pere the Baptized, my slaves, free, liberated, quit, and freed, so that they can come and go, stay, and remain wherever they desire without bond, restriction, and objection. . . . Moreover, I leave to the said Pere the Baptized ten sous, and to the said Romia the Baptized twenty sous.⁶²

Frequently the owner arranged that the slave would provide compensation either by money or by continued service. In Barcelona in 1395, the Turkish slave woman Elena received her freedom from the widow Eulalia but had to serve her for two years after the manumission.⁶³ As an example of the requirement of continued service, in Córdoba in 1584 the widow of a public official freed her slave Andrés de Córdoba with the provision that for as long as she lived he had to come to her house on Sundays and holidays to serve her.⁶⁴ On the island of Lanzarote, Captain Rodrigo de Barrios Leme freed his slave María, age twenty, on the condition that she continue to serve his sons for four years.⁶⁵

Freedom by purchase was a common pattern, especially for manumissions made during the lifetime of the owner, rather than by will. The price demanded was usually high, normally above market prices, and the prices for women slaves were usually higher than for men.⁶⁶

Some slaves bought their own freedom. In the late medieval Crown of Aragon, slave owners and slaves used the talla, a contract that allowed for the purchase of freedom on the installment plan. The master and the slave contracted on the total purchase price and on the monthly payments the slave was to make. The term of the contract was usually quite long, often six or seven years or more. The slave who made such a contract entered an intermediary stage between slavery and full freedom, described in Latin as “in statu libero” or “in statu libertatis.” Contracts providing for talla payments replaced most contracts calling for continued service by the mid-fifteenth century in Barcelona. The talla slave could work outside the home with the permission of the master as to the terms of the work. They had more freedom of movement than ordinary slaves, but the municipal authorities of Barcelona, as one example, restricted their movements at night.⁶⁷

Legally, anything and everything the slaves had belonged to the master, including any money they earned. In these circumstances, how did they get the money to pay for their manumission? They often earned extra money by working outside the home with the master’s permission. In fifteenth-century Mallorca, owners allowed some of their slaves to live independently and to pay a portion of their income to the owner until they attained the full price of freedom.⁶⁸ If they could not raise the full amount, they could also borrow what was necessary, either from the master or a third party, and they could pay it back by payments over time.⁶⁹ Many of the installment contracts called for manumission only after all the money had been paid, but there were others in which the manumission took place before the slave paid the full amount.⁷⁰ As one example, the mulatto slave Gabriel, born in Granada in the home of his mistress, purchased his freedom in 1567 when he was twenty-seven. He agreed to pay a ducat each month for four years, and if he failed to keep up the payments, he would return to being a slave.⁷¹ In Córdoba in 1574, doña Urraca de Sandoval agreed to permit her woman slave to work outside the house for the next two years in order to raise the sixty ducats she needed for her manumission. The slave was obligated to remain in the city and to pay half the sum at the end of one year and the rest at the end of the second year.⁷² In 1552, a member of the city council of Lucena offered freedom on the installment plan to his slave Magdalena for fifty ducats, with half down and half to be paid over ten years while she still worked for him. By this arrangement, the owner got assured labor for ten years as well as the price of his slave.⁷³

Almanzor, a North African slave who was forty years old in 1567, had been freed with a letter of manumission containing an agreement for him to pay his master in Granada 140 ducats. He was able to pay 60, and when he found himself unable to make additional payments, he fled to North Africa. Captured again in Spanish-held Oran, he ended up back in Spain in Málaga’s public jail. In the meantime, his owner had died and his widow was remarried. Ownership had passed to the couple’s two children, who each inherited a half interest in Almanzor. They recovered Almanzor, but could not sell him because of the terms of the original letter. They reached a new agreement with him, selling him for the 80 ducats remaining, and he was guaranteed that he would obtain his freedom when he had accumulated the required sum.⁷⁴

Other slaves raised money for their manumissions by begging.⁷⁵ In late medieval Valencia and Alicante, the chief bailiff could grant slaves a license to beg, a lletra d’acapte, until the money was raised for the manumission.⁷⁶ Throughout the kingdom of Valencia, Mudejars could receive permission to seek alms to secure their own freedom or the freedom of their kin.⁷⁷ In 1510, the widow of a silversmith in Córdoba gave her white slave María, fifty years of age, permission to go begging for seven months in the hope of raising the 6,500 maravedís she still owned on her price of manumission of 10,000 maravedís.⁷⁸ After a similar agreement, another slave took the opportunity to flee once she obtained the permission to beg. In 1511, Isabel Fernández of Seville reported that she had allowed her white slave Isabel, thirty-five years old and a native of Málaga, to seek alms for a period of a year and a half to pay for her manumission. The slave had gone to a small town near Málaga and had not returned to Seville, even though the time limit had passed.⁷⁹ Other slaves might turn to crime to secure the money needed to secure their manumissions. In the early fifteenth century, Barcelona had ordinances designed to keep slaves from prostituting themselves, as some were doing so to buy their way out of slavery.⁸⁰ In the Canaries in 1536 there were complaints that slaves were robbing to secure the money for their manumissions.⁸¹

If a slave could not pay, others might, for a variety of reasons. Mothers often bought the freedom of their slave children, as did fathers of their own slave children.⁸² In Majorca in 1394, Antoni Reixac purchased his five-year-old son Lluis, whose mother was the slave woman Llucía, owned by the widow Margalida.⁸³ In 1549 García de Paredes, a free man of the town of Baza in the kingdom of Granada, purchased the freedom of his son Gabriel, aged fifteen months, for fifteen ducats from the widow Catalina de Cordoncillo, who owned the child’s mother, Isabel.⁸⁴ In the Canaries, free men could purchase and free their children by slave women by outright purchase, by substituting a slave of similar value, or by providing the owner with labor services.⁸⁵ Perhaps some of these purchases by free men were designed to protect the reputation of the owner who was the true father of the child in question. Men paid for manumission of future wives. The Siete Partidas provided that a slave, man or woman, could become free by marrying a free person if the master knew and approved of the match. When a master married his own slave, she became free. Interestingly, nothing in the law provided for a slave man to be free if he married the free woman who owned him.⁸⁶

In late sixteenth-century Huelva, most slaves were freed at an early age, most between one and ten years old. The records suggest, though they do not state explicitly, that most of the manumitted were the children of free fathers.⁸⁷ A barber in sixteenth-century Granada, in the document recording his purchase of a slave girl named María, recognized and revealed that he had had sexual relations with María’s mother, a Morisca slave owned by a local merchant, and that the child was his. With his wife’s explicit support, the barber arranged to purchase and free his daughter.⁸⁸ On Lanzarote in 1623, a widow freed a slave girl born in the household who was the daughter of the widow’s late husband, “according to what is said,” noted the widow.⁸⁹ In Cádiz in the early eighteenth century, a free black man, Antonio José, purchased the freedom of his legitimate wife, María Nicolasa, and their son, Pedro Pablo, from a Flemish resident of the city, Juan Bautista Crof.⁹⁰

Free Canarians in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries frequently aided their enslaved compatriots to obtain freedom, and in numerous wills Canarians left money to executors charged with the redemption of Canarian slaves. The executor could purchase the slave outright, or he could purchase a black slave and exchange him or her for the Canarian. Such exchanges were more easily arranged for slaves who remained in the islands, because relatives had difficulty in determining the whereabouts of those who had been sold in European markets.⁹¹

Slaves could also persuade their masters to free them by the terms of a last will and testament. As we have seen, some slaves won approval because of who they were—children born in the household, for example, especially if the master was the father. Other slaves patterned their behavior in ways designed to win the approval of their owners. The provisions for manumissions in wills usually contained pious statements that the manumission was due to the great love that the owner had for the slave. An exception was the will of Pere Valcanell in Valencia in 1501. He freed his two slaves not because of their good behavior but despite their bad behavior, “because giving freedom to slaves is an act of piety and mercy.”⁹² We should be wary about accepting these statements at face value, for many of the testators placed conditions on the manumission, as we have seen. Some owners required the slave to make a monetary payment to the estate in exchange for freedom. More often, they required the slave to continue rendering service for a number of years. Nevertheless, other wills often provided for liberations without conditions and even with small inheritances.⁹³ On the island of Majorca, testators frequently left money to slaves to help them to purchase their freedom.⁹⁴ In Tenerife in the early sixteenth century, one master made an agreement with his white woman slave, a Morisca, to serve him in honest work while he lived. In return he would provide her with food, clothing, shoes, and an honest life. After he died, the woman would be free.⁹⁵ In 1528, Pedro de Vergara of Tenerife in the Canary Islands freed two Canarian slaves, Pedro and Juan de Abona, because they had become Christians and because each had paid him sixty Castilian doblas, a perfect example of the contemporary mixture of religious and economic motivations.⁹⁶

Slave children born in the home were often well integrated into the life of the family, even more than their mothers, for their fathers often were free men of the same household. Examples abound of such children being freed when their mothers were not. This was the case of the slave Inés, daughter of the slave Juana, owned by a widow, doña Beatriz de Angulo of Córdoba, who left instructions for Inés’s well-being in her will of 1524. Until she reached fifteen, she was to live in the household of Beatriz’s sister in Écija. When Inés reached fifteen years of age, she was to be freed and given 10,000 maravedís and a bed.⁹⁷ Sometimes freedom was not an unmixed blessing. In 1526, the pregnant slave Catalina was about to leave for Cuba with her master, the priest Alvaro de Castro. Castro freed Catalina’s unborn child because the mother would have to be separated from her husband, also Castro’s slave, who had to stay behind in Seville.⁹⁸

The rate of manumission was generally low, despite the availability of the many possible paths to freedom. Alfonso Franco Silva called the rate of manumission in late medieval Seville “frequent,” although he also asserted elsewhere that many slaves lived all their lives under one master and never attained freedom.⁹⁹ Aurelia Martín Casares, after an exhaustive search of the sixteenth-century archival documents for Granada, found a total of 1,600 documents recording slave sales but only 200 manumissions.¹⁰⁰ For early seventeenth-century Córdoba, Albert N’Damba uncovered references to 2,684 slaves and only 198 freeings.¹⁰¹ Manuel López Molina in the documents for the town of Martos found 211 cases of slavery in the documents and only 13 cases in which freedom was attained. For Jaén in the late seventeenth century, the same historian found ninety cases of slavery in the documents, and only eight slaves who became free, all by the concession of the master.¹⁰² For the town of Lucena, Françoise Orsini-Avila found a clear evolution over the century and a half after 1500. In the period 1550–1570, no manumissions at all appeared in the extant documents. From 1570 to 1600 there were very few, and all involved elderly slaves. In the first half of the seventeenth century, with slavery declining, the number of manumissions grew. In the second half of that century, slavery declined even more, and manumissions grew accordingly, when second- and third-generation slaves born in the household obtained their freedom.¹⁰³

Few slaves could expect to be freed in their early adult years. For Granada, Aurelia Martín Casares found that most of the manumitted were children under ten years of age or adults over thirty. Alfonso Franco Silva found that most of those manumitted in Seville were people below eighteen or over thirty. Similar patterns have emerged in most other parts of Iberia.¹⁰⁴ Thus it seems that masters freed slaves who were of little immediate economic benefit and held on to slaves in their working prime, freeing those who were younger, older, or ailing. There is a long list of writers who criticized freeing aged and infirm slaves, stretching back to classical times. The master’s motive for freeing his slave is not clear from the wording of this document: “and he has served me for over forty years with good and loyal service, and in respect to that, and for the love and good will that I have toward him” he was to be freed.¹⁰⁵ The “love and good will” might have been genuine, but we could also assume that after forty years the slave had little service left to give. In Seville in 1525 the slave Inés, white and forty-four years old, gained her freedom, as her master reported, “because she is of great age and sick and of little use and because she gave eighteen ducats for her freedom.”¹⁰⁶ In 1617 the merchant Juan de Bargas of Córdoba acceded to the request of his Moorish slave Jamete to be freed. Jamete was about thirty-six, missing an upper tooth, and marked with a brand on his right arm. At the time, he was sick and so lame he could not stand on his feet. Obviously, he could not work, and Bargas freed him after seeking and failing to find a buyer for him.¹⁰⁷ Jamete, like other ailing slaves who found freedom, could have met with any of several fates, as we will see later.

Slaves could go to court or seek the aid of public officials if their promised freedom had not been delivered. In numerous court cases brought by slaves or their advocates, plaintiffs protested that agreed-upon manumissions were not carried out or that individuals had been illegally enslaved.¹⁰⁸ The story of Inés, a black woman, illustrates the difficulty some slaves had in getting their freedom even after it had been given. Her Valencian master, Pedro González Docón, freed her by the terms of his will, but his heir sold her to a man from Málaga. When she told the purchaser that she was free, he returned her to a man named Frutos, who had guaranteed the sale. Thereafter she lived with Frutos for four years until he gave her to a merchant for sale again in Valencia. This time she told the market examiner that she was really free, and the chief bailiff kept her from being sold until the facts could be determined.¹⁰⁹ In seventeenth-century Badajoz, a black man named Antonio sued because his first master had verbally promised him his freedom and then had given him to another owner. The case reached the royal chancellery in Granada, but the document did not state the outcome of the appeal.¹¹⁰ The Siete Partidas said that if a slave were owned by more than one master and if only one of the masters wanted to free the slave, the slave could be freed.¹¹¹ Membership in religious confraternities, mentioned in previous chapters, could also provide benefits for slaves who found themselves in disputes regarding their manumission. The officials of the cofradía of Nuestra Señora de Gracia in fifteenth-century Valencia intervened in several such cases.¹¹²

Life as a Freed Slave

In all periods, freed slaves suffered legal and social disabilities and usually did not enjoy the full rights of the freely born. This was especially clear in Roman times. Unless specific provisions were made at the time of manumission, the newly freed slave was not a Roman citizen.¹¹³ Nor was he or she free from ties to the former master. Freed slaves (liberti in Latin) were tied to their former masters in a client-patron relationship and owed them obsequium, that is, deference and continued social obligations. If the patron died, his heirs became patrons of the freed slaves. The children of freed slaves were also freedmen and the parent’s patron was their patron, too. The links were broken in the third generation; the freed slave’s grandchildren were fully free and no longer under patronage.¹¹⁴ Some freedmen became very wealthy and displayed their wealth with great ostentation. Other former slaves of the state (public liberti) attained high bureaucratic and administrative positions.

In Visigothic times as well, there were two varieties of freedmen: those with full emancipation and citizenship, and those who still retained obligations toward their former masters. In the reign of King Sisebut, Jews were forced to manumit their slaves and were required to grant them full freedom. The freedmen in these categories were no doubt statistically few. Most freedmen received a freedom that was limited by the bonds of duties they still owed to their masters.¹¹⁵

Even in much later times, masters and legislators expected freed slaves to render complete respect to their former masters and the masters’ families. Freed slaves thus still had legal disabilities; they were not slaves but did not enjoy the full rights of the freeborn.¹¹⁶ A law in the Siete Partidas explained that freed slaves “should humble themselves and salute whenever they appear before [their former master] and his children, and every time their master comes where they are, if they are seated, they should rise and welcome him pleasantly.” In practical matters, the freed person should not take the former master into court, save with a judge’s permission, and should do what was necessary to protect the former master’s property. If the master fell on hard times, the freed person “should go to his assistance, and give him food, drink, clothing, and shoes according to his means and ability.”¹¹⁷ The thirteenth-century jurists backed this up with a law providing that the freed person could be returned to slavery for failure to carry out the provisions regarding proper behavior.¹¹⁸

Examples of reenslavement are very rare. One appeared in Toledo in 1289, when a former slave named García was returned to slavery for his failure to comply with the terms of his manumission document.¹¹⁹ That this sort of situation continued is apparent in manumission documents for Toledo in the thirteenth and fourteenth century and also applied in late medieval Barcelona, where different law codes operated.¹²⁰ In the early seventeenth century Bartolomé de Albillos, a lawyer in the town of Martos, revoked the manumission of his former slave, explicitly and correctly citing the Siete Partidas.

Law [9], title 22, of the fourth Partida gives the former master the ability to revoke the manumission and reduce to servitude the slave whom he had freed. . . . The said Ana has been ungrateful for the favor that I granted her and on numerous occasions she has sorely wounded me by word and also hitting me with her hands because I am seen to be old, sick, and weak and I cannot control or punish her. . . . [Therefore] I revoke the manumission document for the reasons I have declared . . . and reduce her to her former state of servitude and slavery.¹²¹

Abillos went on to state that Ana would be freed again on his death. Ana was pregnant when reenslaved, and Abillos stated that the child she produced would be free from birth.

Freed slaves did not have easy lives. As women often were not prepared to hold salaried jobs after they became free, the perceived danger was that they would fall into illegal activities once manumitted unless alternative provisions were in place. Thus when their owners freed slave women by will, they often provided a dowry to enable the new freedwomen to marry or to live honestly.¹²² In the early seventeenth century, Juan Hurtado del Val of the town of Lucena left a fine legacy in his will to his slave Leonor, a North African woman of forty years of age with two children of twenty-one and ten. She was to receive a new house, vineyards, olive groves, wheat land, the chest that she used to store her clothes, and 200 ducats in cash. She was charged to pray for the souls of her masters. A potential danger for Leonor was that all this would not come to her until Hurtado del Val’s wife died.¹²³

Many freed slaves were very poor and had to depend on charity, obtained either by begging or in charity hospitals. That was no doubt the fate of an Algerian slave named Addra Jamán, freed by his owner, the convent-hospital of Nuestra Señora Santa Ana in Cartagena. He probably originally was a war captive, for royal officials gave him to the hospital. For years he had worked as an orderly, helping to bathe the sick. He had reached an advanced age and could no longer work without accidents, and was summarily freed in 1724. We do not know the fate of an unnamed slave freed by a private owner in Cartagena in 1723. The owner reported that the slave had reached the age of 102 years and had served faithfully for years. The owner also reported that he was skeptical about the freed slave’s future. The documents are silent on that point.¹²⁴ The fate of the centenarian freedman could have been to seek the shelter of a public hospital or to remain in the owner’s household in retirement. In a case in early modern Jaén, doña Mariana de Monslave freed her slave Catalina, but obliged her to continue to serve in the family, who “must assume the obligation of feeding her and giving her food, clothing, and shoes within my house, because outside it and not in service, she would not have anything to eat or clothing or shoes.”¹²⁵ Many Portuguese freedmen were very poor.¹²⁶

The questions of the lives of the newly manumitted slaves and the degree of their integration into the larger society are obviously crucial points in the study of the history of slavery.¹²⁷ In the late Middle Ages, many of the former slaves of North African or Spanish Muslim origin left for Muslim Granada or North Africa after they received manumission. Others, particularly those who had converted to Christianity, blended into the larger community, as did those of Eastern European origin. For the sub-Saharan Africans and their progeny, the situation was different. They found their acceptance incomplete, due in part to their easily recognized skin color or other indications of their origins. They tended to reside in well-defined areas, not totally segregated but commonly associated with slaves and other freed people. In Jaén in the early modern period, the freed population still resided in a part of town centered on the street called “Berberiscos,” a name derived from the term often used to designate slaves from North Africa.¹²⁸ Nonetheless, they did what they could to blend in through their work, which in most cases was no different from that of white people of similar incomes and social standing, and through religion.¹²⁹ Religious practice and the communal bonds associated with it allowed former slaves to achieve their most complete acceptance by the wider community, as we saw in Chapter 4.

Few documents allow a look at the life of freed slaves, but the will of Catalina Sureda, a freedwoman of Mallorca, written in 1532, indicated the fortune she had accumulated. She owned the building in which she lived and conducted her business of making parchment. She had several chests full of clothes, bedclothes, and table linen. She slept in a covered bed and dressed before a large mirror. She owned a marble image of the Virgin Mary, a carpet, a tin candelabra, and decorated curtains. She also was a wool-spinner and a money-lender, and owned another house in the leatherworkers’ neighborhood.¹³⁰

Juan Latino was an even more successful ex-slave. His mother was a slave of African origin and his father, possibly, was the count of Cabra in whose household he grew up and was freed. He received a Latin education along with the count’s legitimate son, entered the University of Granada, and earned his bachelor’s degree there in 1546. By 1556 he was teaching Latin grammar and became a lecturer at the cathedral school and consequently a member of the university faculty. There he produced his major literary work, Austrias carmen, a Latin epic of 1573 dedicated to don Juan de Austria, who the year before had put down the Morisco rebellion in the Alpujarras. In writing, he sought to improve the image of people of black African origin in the eyes of intellectuals and to distance them from the recalcitrant Moriscos. He has been called “the first black intellectual in Europe to construct a discourse of black pride.”¹³¹ In his personal life he married a white woman and had a daughter. The archbishop of Granada was his close friend. On one occasion the archbishop asked him, “Master, what would have become of us if we had not studied?” Juan Latino responded: “Your Grace would be a brutish day laborer and I would be brushing down horses.”¹³²

The will written in 1718 by a woman in Murcia provides a view of the trajectory of her life, more humble than that of the Granadan intellectual. She was a Berber from Oran and was captured at a very young age, so young that she could not remember her parents. She ended up as the slave of two brothers, Maximiliano and Antonio Benítez, for whom she worked as a housemaid and was baptized with the name of María de los Ángeles. The brothers died and gave her freedom by testament, and when Antonio’s wife later died, she left a legacy to allow María to marry a man servant of the household, Sebastián García. When María made her own will, she revealed her complete assimilation to Christianity, specifying her place of burial in her local parish church and providing funds for masses to be said for herself and for charity, including the redemption of captives. She directed that she should be buried in a Franciscan habit, a common practice in early modern Spain.¹³³

By no means were all former slaves as fortunate. Free people of color often found problems in their daily lives when they were mistaken for slaves. A Granadan widow drew up her will in 1566 and bequeathed her estate to two black citizens, a brother and sister. She found it necessary to include this clarification: “the color of their faces gives rise to the suspicion that they are slaves, but I say they have never been but free people.”¹³⁴ As late as 1693 in Jaén, María de la Concepción had to go before a town clerk to have a legal document drawn up. She described herself as a free widow of African origin with two adult sons of mixed race. She stated that “my sons and I go about in different places working and seeking a living, and many people doubt that we are free, and many problems arise from that, and they arrest us, saying we are slaves. And to avoid such inconvenience and so that we are held to be free people and not slaves,” she had the document prepared.¹³⁵

Discrimination could follow slaves even after their death. The rules of the confraternity of Santa Vera Cruz of Cañete in 1654 stated that all members of the group who died would be buried with the honors of the confraternity, except for domestics and slaves.¹³⁶

Eventually, though, individual slaves of all races gained their freedom through flight and even more through manumission, and their descendants gradually assimilated into the general population.¹³⁷ In time, the institution of slavery declined in Iberia and died a natural death. It remained crucially important in the colonial empires, and those early modern intellectuals who spoke and wrote in favor of the slaves and their abolition in the Iberian world mainly had colonial slavery as their targets. We will have a brief look at slavery in Spanish and Portuguese America and its eventual end in the concluding epilogue that follows.