Slavery in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia

Abstract

William Phillips Jr.'s synthesis of the history of premodern Iberian slavery arrives in time to be a guide to the explosion of medieval historical studies on the region. Readable and straightforward, it should return Iberia to a central place in the history of Atlantic slavery.Iberia was the first European node in the development of the Atlantic slave trade. Before that, the peninsula was a multiethnic, multiconfessional region whose inhabitants debated ways to integrate subject and enslaved peoples within its porous borders. The medieval Iberian kingdoms in particular wrestled with the governance of subject peoples, and Muslim and Christian rulers allowed all three confessional groups (including Jews) to have semiautonomous juridical institutions. Muslim regimes allowed the enslavement of non-Muslims, as Christian ones did of non-Christians, alongside their community of free coreligionists. Mediterranean slavery was often part of a ransoming economy, and Muslim and Christian officials could arrange the redemption of their coreligionists, often with the aid of the local community. When sub-Saharan Africans became a larger share of the enslaved, they had no such infrastructure for redemption or community to interact with, which radically changed the meaning of slavery in Iberian cities. While positive law did not change drastically, the institutional structure and experiences of enslavement and manumission did, and these changes are central to Phillips's study.Phillips's book is thematically organized: chapters on law, enslavement and slave markets, the lives of enslaved peoples, labor, and manumission all move quickly from the Roman and Visigothic periods into Islamic al-Andalus and then concentrate on the variety of experiences across the Christian kingdoms. After tracing larger patterns, the work dips into regional monographs for deeper exploration. This structure works especially well on topics like law, where continuities and precedents mattered from the Roman to the early modern period. But the lack of patterns can also prove illuminating. In the case of labor, the history does not reveal patterns so much as a scattershot of variations: while historians have often dismissed Iberian slavery as domestic and therefore relatively innocuous, recent studies from a variety of regions demonstrate how complex it was.Phillips's rhetorical technique is to introduce a larger claim and then illustrate it with anecdotes from a particular place and time. This draws attention to the regional quality of much recent work: data is hard to come by in medieval, to say nothing about Visigothic, history, and concrete information is extremely uneven across time and place. Sometimes the results are jarring, as when Phillips asserts that masters tended not to purchase clothing for their slaves, a point he illustrates with Pope Benedict XIII's failure to clothe the slaves building the convent in Calatayud (p. 81). Sometimes the volume of circumstantial cases is overwhelming, as in his discussion of the variety of manumission practices. But Phillips is aware of the limits of his content, and he mostly avoids making arguments that cannot be supported at this historiographical moment.Iberian slavery has been treated as a kind of exceptionalism in the Atlantic world, in which slaves might have access to the courts, to institutions like marriage, and to property. The long-term view of the Iberian case reveals the way that Roman law, Catholicism, and Islam all colored the institution of slavery and contributed to what it would become in the American worlds. This view also provides strong evidence for the contingency of certain features of Atlantic slavery, as when Phillips describes the heterogeneous ways to categorize slaves in the late medieval period, showing how the availability of types of slaves, the systems of belief about others, and the changing parameters of the trade all contributed to that heterogeneity. Religion, skin color, cultural and technical skills, and markets all converged to create descriptive systems for categorizing slaves, disengaging a modern notion of race from its complex antecedents.As with any volume of this breadth, Phillips's synthesis excludes some literature. The literature that links Africa with Portugal prior to the takeoff of the Atlantic slave trade would have made his story even more complex and rich. As is well known, Africans and Europeans had an active relationship within Africa as well as in Iberia not always reducible to enslavement or domination. For Phillips, African practices were foreign to Iberians, and Catholicism could be a cover for ancestral beliefs. Sometimes this was the case, but recent studies demonstrate that the conversation was more two-sided. Similarly, his quick summary of the Latin American literature will not please all specialists but acts as a coda to his argument.This book breaks new ground simply by its existence: the view of the Atlantic world from Iberia is eye-opening and will be appreciated by Latin Americanists in particular. Phillips's text offers a measured, accessible path for readers to a booming scholarship and also reveals the gaps in current knowledge. With its clear style and presentation, it will be read by undergraduates and specialists. It is recommended reading for those who wish to understand how the Iberian kingdoms came into the early modern world, as well as those who want a fuller account of the beginnings of Europe's entry into the Atlantic world.