This is an exciting and remarkable piece of historical research. It will provide useful stimulus to contemporary scholarship, a model for how to do rigorous thinking about shared Mediterranean cultures, as well as a valuable introduction for undergraduates to how medieval Mediterranean slavery functioned generally.
The book discusses the enslavement and sale of people through the Black Sea region at the height of this practice. Its bookends are the 1260s, when Byzantine emperors initially granted commercial privileges in the Black Sea to Italian and Mamluk merchants, and 1475, when the Ottoman Sultans conquered Caffa, the main hub of Italian-dominated slave trading in the Black Sea. While slaves were taken in the Black Sea region long before 1260 and after 1475, this was a distinctive period. In it, Genoese and Venetian hegemony over maritime commerce and the Mamluk Sultanate’s reliance on imported slave-soldiers combined, creating a sustained pattern in which thousands of slaves were exported annually from the northern shore of the Black Sea to Egypt and the Italian peninsula.
Barker is able to sustain an argument for a shared “Mediterranean” culture of slavery common to both Latin Christians and Muslims because of impressive work with both western (Latin, Italian, et al) and non-western (Arabic) languages. She has also done archival work on both southern and northern shores of the Mediterranean, in Genoa, Venice, Paris, and Cairo. This book is an impressive achievement, particularly in light of the quantitative and qualitative unevenness of primary sources between Muslim and Latin Christian worlds. The contours of the Mediterranean culture of slavery that emerge from this book are precisely and thoughtfully pieced together. Barker does not present a historically nebulous, one-size-fits-all Mediterranean culture. Instead, she offers a well-evidenced and careful look at both what was actually shared between Muslim Egypt and Latin Christian Italy as well as the limits of the shared culture of slavery.
That Most Precious Merchandise will be valuable as a classroom text. Undergraduates studying medieval slavery can struggle to navigate between a sensible desire to condemn slavery morally in the present and the academic historian’s need to take the past seriously in its own right. Barker argues against “generational chauvinism,” an attitude of easy moral condemnation of past societies because they do not share our contemporary (and therefore correct) values. Yet she never loses sight of the ugly nature of medieval slavery, particularly as it involves the exploitation of female reproduction by male slave-owners. She writes clearly and accessibly without losing sophistication, and the first three chapters would all make excellent classroom readings to introduce students or general readers to the ideological underpinning and practical realities of late medieval Mediterranean slavery.
The introduction and historiographic framing are the least useful part of what is otherwise an excellent book. Barker positions her study as challenging what she sees as two problematic narratives. One echoes Marxist schemes of history, downplaying late medieval slavery because late Roman slavery had already withered away, supposedly due to economic reasons. The other is the narrative of Christian amelioration, which treated medieval slaveowners as sinful and corrupt, “behind their own times,” because, supposedly, “the Christian principles of spiritual equality and brotherly love were incompatible with slavery.” Barker suggests that the idea of Christian amelioration has not been challenged, and therefore haunts scholarship like an unexorcised ghost, leading to the misinterpretation of medieval sources (7-8). Yet the example she gives, a 1999 article by Steven Epstein, does not seem to imply that slavery was un-Christian, or that slave owners were sinful and corrupt. It is unfair to point to Epstein as an example of “unquestioning adherence to the Christian amelioration narrative” (7-8) when his later and more complete discussion of Christianity and medieval slavery (Speaking of Slavery, Cornell 2001) is nuanced in ways that prefigure and complement Barker’s own perspective. Fortunately, positioning against Christian amelioration disappears from the rest of the book, replaced by careful empirical work and thoughtful engagement with the problems of studying medieval slavery in the twenty-first century.
The first chapter, “Slavery in the Late Medieval Mediterranean,” establishes the general ideology that undergirded slavery in both the Muslim and Latin Christian worlds. Mediterranean people shared three core understandings: slavery was legal; it was based on religious difference; slavery was a universal threat and anyone might, if unlucky, be made a slave (13). Despite some differences (Christians were more likely to see slavery as punishment for sin / original sin than Muslims), both Christians and Muslims enslaved their co-religionists in practice. They justified buying slaves of their own religion because it prevented them from being purchased away from the ‘true’ faith and forcibly converted.
The second chapter, “Difference and the Perception of Slave Status,” explores the way more visible criteria supplemented and structured the broad religious framework. For students in particular, the discussion of race, ethnicity and religion will be valuable for its clarity and concision. Barker shows how, although religion was the dominant consideration for enslavement, language, racial categories, and geographical origin could all be motivated to justify enslavement when religion was either difficult to determine or disadvantageous for slave takers/buyers. So while racial categories were an important part of slaving and slave trading, they were not a foundational element of the system of slaving itself.
The third chapter explores the demographics of the Black Sea slave population and the roles slaves played in society. In both medieval Egypt and Italy, Barker shows that historians face “societies with slaves” and not “slave societies” (61). Slaves were not essential to the economy, owning slaves was not a mark of the ruling class, and the master-slave relationship not used as a conceptual model for other hierarchical relationships. Barker’s painstaking work with the sources shows the harsh and capricious reality of slavery. For some slaves, their master was a gateway into society and they might become archbishops (86) or property owners and managers in their own right (87). For others, they could be brutally exploited and manipulated with no real recourse, driven to suicide or callously murdered (88-90). Interestingly, Barker argues for a cross-Mediterranean convergence of Italian and Egyptian norms about the legal status of children fathered on enslaved women. Initially, the legal tradition of the Latin Christian world assumed that enslaved women’s children would themselves be slaves. Yet in practice, between 1200 and 1500, Italian practices came to resemble the model common to the Islamicate world, in which a slave who gave birth to a master’s child was accorded special legal status and the child was more often presumed to be free, the umm walad model (82).
Chapter 4, “The Slave Market and the Act of Sale,” treats the stages through which the process of slave buying and selling moved, from the marketplace, through the physical inspection of the slave, the negotiation of a price, and finally the contract of sale. This is one of the chapters where differences between Italy and Egypt come through most strongly. In Alexandria, there were specialized markets for slaves, specialized lower-status brokers to match buyers and sellers, and higher-status long-distance traders in slaves (96). None of these things existed in Genoa or Venice. Egyptian authors also produced manuals about inspecting slaves, suggesting a higher level of expertise and a more developed market (98-9). Slaves were also more expensive in Egypt overall, driven by the Mamluk Sultan’s conspicuous consumption of large numbers of new slaves. One particularly valuable section parses the complexities of racial categories in pricing. Barker finds that Mamluk prices show a greater preference for “whiteness” than Genoese or Venetian ones. Yet color, as used by medieval authors, was not synonymous with skin tone (108-112). While racial categories mattered, it would be a mistake to collapse medieval discourses about race and slavery into early modern or modern discourses in which dark skin tone was linked to enslavement and inferiority.
Chapter 5, “Making Slaves in the Black Sea,” is primarily an exploration of how regional political conditions shaped the ethnic or racial makeup of slaves taken and how Italian (especially Genoese) intervention in shipping (taxation, control of ports, et cetera) affected where and how slaves moved in the Black Sea. Supply was especially affected by civil wars and invasions, which often produced large numbers of slaves for export. The transit and marketing of slaves was in turn affected by rivalries between Genoa and Venice for commercial hegemony and the status of Caffa, the Genoese-administered outpost that served as the primary export point for Black Sea slaves. In this chapter, Barker pushes back against medieval reports that Black Sea slavery was largely driven by parents who voluntarily sold their children into slavery, emphasizing enslavement through violence as more typical. Overall, Barker “emphasizes the role of Black Sea supply” over “Mediterranean demand” in explaining the flourishing of slavery. However, the chapter concludes by acknowledging that there is a great deal of work left to be done to explain why the Black Sea produced such large numbers of slaves in the first place.
In Chapter 6, Barker reconstructs the web of constraints and incentives that shaped the trade in Black Sea slaves. While slave-trading was not fully institutionalized as its own separate form of commerce, there were nevertheless important regularities in the trade, created by a “web of constraints” that created a stable pattern of movement, exchange, and negotiation. Alongside geography, Barker emphasizes the active intervention of medieval authorities, both Christian and Muslim, in creating and sustaining trade in Black Sea slaves. Overall, it is compelling, though the linkage between Italian and Egyptian markets is not totally clear. Early in the chapter, we are told that “the two markets were not closely linked” because the peak volume of slaves traded in Egypt is about a century before the peak volume in Genoa (155). Yet by the end of the chapter, we are told that the Mamluk policy of enriching prominent slave traders “makes greatest sense in the context of its competition with Genoa and Venice for the best slaves” (185). (emphasis mine) Ports that compete economically are, by definition, linked. These statements may not be contradictory. As with the statement at the end of Chapter 5 about why the Black Sea was such an important source of slaves, this points to an opportunity for further thinking and research. Now that Barker has done the laudable work needed to bring the common culture of Black Sea slavery into view, hopefully future research can illuminate whether this was a single overarching culture with totally separate markets, or whether there was some meaningful mutual influence or competition between them.
The final chapter casts a critical eye on crusade-related texts concerning the Mamluks. Crusade treatises and papal embargo texts emphasized the role of ‘bad Christians’ in allowing the Mamluk regime in Egypt to sustain itself by trading in slaves. Yet Barker demonstrates that these concerns were greatly over-stated. While Latin Christians tended to assume that Italian merchants were the primary slave traders and that all Mamluks were originally Christians, Barker shows instead that greedy Italian merchants were not the primary means of supply. Indeed, ostensibly commercial concerns were inextricable from religious considerations. Genoese attempts to monopolize shipping from Caffa and the Black Sea, for example, gave Genoese ambassadors economic leverage in Egypt. When the Genoese negotiated with the Mamluk Sultan, they could offer to bring slaves in exchange for a promise from the Sultan that captured slaves who wanted to become Christian should be allowed, so long as their Muslim owners were repaid for the cost (207). What looks at first like pure commercial opportunism and a betrayal of the crusades turns out, on closer inspection, to be another manifestation of the shared culture of Mediterranean slavery--the competition over slave souls.
In sum, Barker has produced a book that is empirically rich, precise in its thinking, and clear in its writing. It is rich and thought-provoking, and ought to be read by students and specialists alike.