That Most Precious Merchandise. Hannah Barker

During the medieval period, the trade in Black Sea slaves peaked between the mid-thirteenth and mid-fifteenth centuries. More precisely, it was in the 1260s that the Byzantine emperor Michael VIII Paleologus granted commercial privileges in the Black Sea to the rulers of Genoa, Venice, and the Mamluk kingdom of Egypt and Greater Syria (bilād al-Shām). On the basis of those privileges, Mediterranean merchants settled in the Black Sea and exported various goods, including slaves. Slave exports continued until 1475, when Ottoman forces conquered Caffa, Genoa’s chief colony on the Crimean Peninsula. Although the Black Sea slave trade did not end in 1475, it was reorganized to serve Ottoman rather than Italian or Mamluk needs.

      Even at its height during the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, the Black Sea slave trade was never the sole source of Mediterranean slaves.³ Genoese and Venetian merchants bought the captives taken in conflicts throughout the Mediterranean region. The Genoese bought slaves from ongoing wars between Christian and Muslim kingdoms in Iberia, and they also enslaved Sardinians caught up Genoa’s war with Pisa. The Venetians bought slaves from pirates and raiders in the Balkans and the Aegean Sea. Both Genoa and Venice enslaved captives taken from North Africa and the Ottomans. When allowed to do so, they also purchased African slaves in Alexandria, Tunis, and other North African ports. However, the greatest demand for slaves in the medieval Mediterranean was concentrated not in Italy but in Cairo, home of the Mamluk sultan and his amirs, the commanders of his army. The Mamluks preferred Black Sea slaves for military service, but they also imported large numbers of African slaves for domestic service as well as slaves from the Balkans, the Aegean, Central Asia, and the Indian Ocean when they were available. Yet within this diverse population of slaves, those from the Black Sea were the single largest group. The trade in Black Sea slaves provided merchants with profit and prestige; states with military recruits, tax revenue, and diplomatic influence; and households with the service of enslaved women and men.

      The trade system that carried slaves from the Black Sea into the Mediterranean is the subject of this book. Genoa, Venice, and the Mamluk sultanate, the three most significant importers of Black Sea slaves, have never been studied together. The main obstacle has been language: an integrated study of the Mediterranean trade in Black Sea slaves must draw on sources in both Latin and Arabic.⁴ Yet once the Latin and Arabic sources are examined together, it becomes clear that Christian and Muslim inhabitants of the Mediterranean shared a set of assumptions and practices that amounted to a common culture of slavery.⁵ These included the ideas that slavery was legal and socially acceptable, that slave status was based on religious difference, that religious difference could be at least partially articulated through linguistic and racial categories, and that slavery was a universal threat affecting all free people. It also included practices related to slave conversion, the inspection process and contractual language for buying and selling slaves, the use of slaves as social and financial assets, a strong preference for slave women over men, the widespread use of slave women for domestic and sexual service in urban households, and the status of children born to slave women and free men.

      In addition, examining the Arabic and Latin sources together shows that the Genoese, Venetian, and Mamluk slave trades were thoroughly entangled and that this had wide-ranging effects.⁶ Genoese–Venetian rivalry for control of the Black Sea slave trade was an important element in their broader rivalry for commercial dominance of the Mediterranean. Mamluk sultans required a steady supply of slaves to maintain military and political stability, so they offered generous incentives to slave traders from the entire Mediterranean region. Because several of the ports used by these traders were Genoese colonies, Genoese diplomats used their control over the flow of slaves to negotiate with the Mamluks for privileges in lucrative markets like Alexandria. That strategy was risky though: choosing to disrupt the Mamluk slave trade led to reprisals against Italian merchants living in Mamluk cities, while choosing not to disrupt the Mamluk slave trade led to scathing public criticism by supporters of the crusade movement. The rulers of Genoa and Venice therefore managed the slave trade with care, seeking to reap its profits and defuse its conflicts. Their regulations played a greater role than the actions of individual merchants in shaping the Mediterranean trade in Black Sea slaves.

       Medieval Sources on the Slave Trade

      Scholars of the Mediterranean trade in Black Sea slaves have a rich source base. The difficulty lies not in finding appropriate sources but in bringing together disparate sources from different genres in a coherent way. The most useful Latin sources are notarial registers. Notaries were required to keep a register of all the documents they drew up and to deposit those registers with the state. As a result, the state archives of Genoa and Venice contain hundreds of notarial registers with information about the sale, rental, donation, inheritance, and manumission of slaves as well as disputes concerning them. Although many notarial registers have been lost or destroyed over the centuries, those that have survived hold thousands of legal acts involving slaves, enough to create a database and conduct simple statistical analyses.

      Yet the data provided by notarial registers can address only certain aspects of the slave trade. Sources from other genres are needed to round out the picture. Tax records give economic context for the individual acts of import, export, sale, possession, and manumission of slaves recorded by notaries.⁷ Legal context comes from medieval collections of Roman, canon, and civil law, with their learned commentaries and notarial formularies.⁸ Treaties governing the slave trade and crusade propaganda help to fill in the political context.⁹ Finally, there are anecdotes culled from letters, merchants’ accounts, travelers’ tales, sermons, and literary works that flesh out the intellectual, cultural, and social contexts of the slave trade.¹⁰

      The most valuable Arabic sources are slave-buying advice manuals.¹¹ This genre evolved from ancient Greek texts that addressed slavery in the contexts of household management (Bryson’s Management of the Estate), social order (Aristotle’s Politics), geography (Hippocrates’ Airs, Waters, Places), and physiognomy (Polemon’s Physiognomy). Muslim scholars gathered the Greek material; translated it into Arabic, Persian, and Turkish; and made revisions and updates to suit their own times. The most famous slave-buying advice manual, Ibn Buṭlān’s General Treatise on the Skills Useful in the Purchase and Examination of Slaves (Risāla jāmiʿa li-funūn nāfiʿa fī shirā al-raqīq wa-taqlīb al-ʿabīd), was composed in Baghdad in the eleventh century.¹² Three lesser-known manuals have survived from the late Ayyubid and Mamluk periods: the anonymous Inspection in Slave-Buying (Al-Taḥqiq fī shirā’ al-raqīq) from the thirteenth century, Ibn al-Akfānī’s Observation and Inspection in the Examination of Slaves (Al-Naẓir wa-al-taḥqīq fī taqlīb al-raqīq) from the fourteenth century, and al-‘Ayntābī’s The Apt Statement on Choosing Female and Male Slaves (Al-Qawl al-sadīd fī ikhtiyār al-imā’ wa-al-‘abīd) from the fifteenth century.¹³ Both Ibn al-Akfānī and al-ʿAyntābī were physicians associated with the Manṣūrī hospital in Cairo. Their slave-buying advice manuals offered medical as well as ethnographic advice for choosing slaves.

      Because some Mamluk slaves entered the ruling elite, many other sources deal directly or indirectly with the slave trade. Normative legal sources are especially abundant. They include compilations of religious law and legal opinions according to the four Sunni schools (all of which had a presence in Mamluk Cairo),¹⁴ shurūṭ manuals that provided model documents for scribes,¹⁵ ḥisba manuals for market inspectors,¹⁶ and treaties governing the slave trade.¹⁷ These genres all show how the slave trade was supposed to operate.

      Unfortunately, there are relatively few descriptive sources against which to check the normative sources. No tax registers and few documents of sale or manumission survive from the Mamluk period.¹⁸ Instead, a great deal of anecdotal information comes from narrative sources about the lives of elite slaves. These include chronicles,¹⁹ geographical treatises,²⁰ biographical dictionaries,²¹ and travel accounts.²² Although narrative sources are mainly concerned with the political and religious activities of the elite, they sometimes repeat stories about the origins and early lives of prominent mamluks. Such tidbits are most useful when read together with evidence drawn from other genres and from the Latin sources.

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