What Did Medieval Slavery Look Like? Color, Race, and Unfreedom in Later Medieval Iberia

Abstract

This article asks what medieval images can reveal about the realities of race and slavery in the kingdoms of Aragon and Castile during the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. It examines a group of elite manuscripts in which enslaved people consistently are depicted by means of a Black stereotype despite the relative rarity of sub-Saharan African slaves in those kingdoms at this time, positing that these images functioned not literally, but metaphorically and metonymically, to suggest how the state of unfreedom intersected with transculturally dominant ideas about morality, soteriology, and religious and social norms, as well as racial difference. Emerging at a moment of aggressive Christian expansion into al-Andalus and the introduction of newly enslaved Muslims into societies where their free co-religionists had already lived for some time, the images should be seen a trenchant visual response that, rather than merely recording what late medieval Iberian slavery “looked like,” leveraged racially charged color symbolism to articulate the cultural, social, and moral differences believed to mark the enslaved in medieval Iberian society.