Domestic Slavery in Renaissance Italy

This article was downloaded by: [CDL Journals Account] On: 2 October 2008 Access details: Access Details: [subscription number 785022369] Publisher Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK Slavery & Abolition Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~content=t713719071 Domestic Slavery in Renaissance Italy Sally McKee Online Publication Date: 01 January 2008 To cite this Article McKee, Sally(2008)'Domestic Slavery in Renaissance Italy',Slavery & Abolition,29:3,305 — 326 To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/01440390802267774 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01440390802267774 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.informaworld.com/terms-and-conditions-of-access.pdf This article may be used for research, teaching and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, re-distribution, re-selling, loan or sub-licensing, systematic supply or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae and drug doses should be independently verified with primary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material.  Slavery and Abolition Vol. 29, No. 3, September 2008, pp. 305 – 326 Domestic Slavery in Renaissance Italy1 Sally McKee It is unlikely that additional quantifiable data found in Italian archives will alter signifi- cantly the conclusions reached by twentieth-century economic historians about slavery in Italy during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Historians of slavery must now ask new Downloaded By: [CDL Journals Account] At: 00:36 2 October 2008 questions of old sources and new ones that continue to surface. As this study shows, the ways merchants in Italy differentiated along ethnic and religious lines among the slaves they dealt in sheds light more on how the people of Italy made distinctions among them- selves than on the origins and religion of their captives. From the residence granted him by the Venetian Senate while he lived in Venice, Fran- cesco Petrarch could watch the unloading of the cargo from the galleys moored along the waterfront beneath his window. At one point in the late 1360s, he witnessed a scene that he described in a letter to his friend the archbishop of Genoa: Whereas huge shipments of grain used to arrive by ship annually in this city, now they arrive laden with slaves, sold by their wretched families to alleviate their hunger. An unusually large and countless crowd of slaves of both sexes has afflicted this city with deformed Scythian faces, just like when a muddy current destroys the brilliance of a clear one.2 Detailing their caked hair, rough faces, and, in a flourish of exaggeration, the grass stuck in their teeth, Petrarch presents an image of ragged, unclean men and women, boys and girls, subdued, perhaps defeated, huddled in a group on the riva after emerging from the hold of the cogs that had transported them there from the eastern Mediterranean. His contempt, typical of privileged people enured to the misery around them, seems familiar even today.3 Less familiar is what he calls them: Scythians, the name given by the Romans to people who lived in the Central Asian steppes more than 1000 years before. Only someone as fond of classical literature as Petrarch would have called the wretched slaves Scythian. When merchants identified for customs officials the origins of the slaves, as most cities in Italy required them to do, they would not have called them Sally McKee is in the Department of History, University of California, Davis. Correspondence to: Department of History, University of California, One Shields Ave., Davis, California 95616-8611, USA. Email: sjmckee@ ucdavis.edu ISSN 0144-039X print/1743-9523 online/08/030305– 22 DOI: 10.1080/01440390802267774 # 2008 Taylor & Francis  306 S. McKee Scythians. Instead, they used a number of other terms to distinguish slaves from one another: Tartar, Abkhazi, Circassian, Bulgarian, Russian, Turkish, Greek, Mingrelli, and other labels. Those are the ethnic terms most often used in the records of slave sales and importations during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Even if Petrarch’s claim that the merchant vessels disgorged more slaves than grain was an exaggeration, his impression that slaves seemed to be visible everywhere reflects the ambivalence the people of Italy felt about a highly visible economic endeavour. The picture we have today of slavery in late medieval and Renaissance Italy is equally impressionistic, in part because that ambivalence of Petrarch’s contemporaries makes it hard to see slaves clearly in the sources. Also, we view the picture through the lens of subsequent experiences of slavery across the Atlantic. Historians in search of the origins of racism have linked the history of slavery in late medieval and Renaissance Europe to a chain of developments leading to the horrific conclusion in the racialised slavery of the American South. But all roads lead to Rome no more than all histories of Downloaded By: [CDL Journals Account] At: 00:36 2 October 2008 slavery – even within Europe – lead to Charleston, South Carolina. The search for the roots of racialised slavery has led scholars down several miles of good European road, but one turnoff – into Italy – may turn out to be a short path that circles quickly back into the flow of commerce in the Mediterranean. In the history of slavery, Renaissance Italy, even in the agricultural south, was a sideshow. However, to anyone studying changes in the way the people of Renaissance Italy experienced ethnic and religious differences among themselves, the history of slavery in Italy offers a new path. Whether disjuncture or continuity best characterises the history of slavery in the West depends partly on arithmetic. Calculating the social and cultural significance of the numbers is much harder. In the case of Italy, singling out slaves as commodities worthy of study here suggests that the trade in human chattel played a greater role in the economies of Renaissance Italy than it actually did. As Steven A. Epstein reminds us, ‘slavery was not a major part of the economies even of cities like Venice and Genoa, where it remained a secondary factor in overseas trade and local commerce’.4 The trade in slaves played a bigger role in the economies of the kingdom of Aragon (including Sicily) and the Muslim powers of North Africa than it did in the commercial activities of Italian merchants. Equally significant, in contrast to early Spanish and Portuguese exploitation of slave labour in the Atlantic islands off the coast of Africa, slave labour in lands under Italian rule did not even play an important part in agricultural or industrial production.5 Slavery’s relatively insignificant role in the economies of northern Italy has not dis- couraged the interests of economic historians, who have until recently exercised nearly a complete monopoly on the subject. From the late nineteenth through the twentieth century, Vicenzio Lazari, Luigi Tria, Domenico Gioffrè, Mario Gaudioso, Henri Bresc, Michel Balard, Steven A. Epstein and others have culled from Italy’s archives hundreds if not thousands of bills of sale, manumissions, leases, tax receipts, and account books in which slaves figure. Finding a document none of those scholars has seen feels today like an accomplishment.6 The very long list of the Belgian economic historian Charles Verlinden’s works would give any aspiring scholar of slavery pause before diving into the subject. Although only Verlinden produced a synthesis – short on analysis,  Slavery and Abolition 307 however – it is undoubtedly true that more work in notarial sources will only confirm the quantifiable trends previous scholars have identified. What is there left to say? The numbers crunched by several generations of ruminating scholars still leave questions unanswered. For instance, how many of the slaves bought and sold by Italian merchants ended up in Italian households? Do the domestic duties they per- formed adequately explain both the demand for them and their high cost in Italy? What explains the assiduous attention, as reflected in the archival record, that contem- poraries gave to slave origins? Historians in previous generations have considered some of these questions – or, more precisely, some aspects of each of these questions. What follows here is an attempt not only to review the field of slavery in Italy during the Renaissance, but also to address at least and offer partial answers at most to such questions. Previous historians have examined many of the documents I gathered into a database of a little over 2000 slave sales, although I added many others from my excur- sions into the notarial depths of the State Archives of Venice. It should be borne in Downloaded By: [CDL Journals Account] At: 00:36 2 October 2008 mind, however, that 2000 slave sales is not a large sample. Apart from the problem of not knowing how many have been lost over the past 500 years, these sales are only records of retail sales of slaves in a few cities in Italy and the western Mediterra- nean. Unfortunately, the wholesale trade has left few traces. Account books of compa- nies active in the slave trade are relatively rare. The occasional recovery of reports and correspondence mentioning arrivals in Venice, Genoa, or Palermo of a vessel contain- ing hundreds of slaves reminds us of how little we know as yet about Italian partici- pation in the Mediterranean-wide slave trade. With these caveats in mind, I believe the database has its uses, even if limited. In Table 1, the greater number of slave sales in Venice and Genoa is most indicative of trends. Even so Table 2 shows that the total number of contracts amounts to 10, 20, or at most 30 contracts a year in most decades. The database sheds most light on slavery between the 1390s and the end of the fifteenth century. Some might see the increased number of documents after the mid-fourteenth century as support for the hypothesis that the shortage of labour Table 1 Number of Slave Sale Contracts by City, 1360 – 1499 Place of sale Total Women (% of total) Men (% of total) Unknown gender Venice 965 787 (82) 178 (18) Genoa 962 773 (82) 162 (17) 27 (3) Candia 28 22 (78) 6 (22) Cyprus 21 14 (67) 7 (33) Tana 17 14 3 Chios 11 6 5 Trebizond 7 2 5 Ragusa 5 5 Alexandria 2 1 1 Chilia 1 1 Modon 1 1 Siena 1 1 Total 2021 1627 (81) 367 (18) 27 (3)  308 S. McKee Table 2 Number of Slave Sale Contracts by Decade Decade Number of slave sales 1360–1369 123 1370–1379 38 1380–1389 70 1390–1399 299 1400–1409 136 1410–1419 233 1420–1429 229 1430–1439 173 1440–1449 184 1450–1459 160 1460–1469 104 1470–1479 73 1480–1489 102 1490–1499 97 Downloaded By: [CDL Journals Account] At: 00:36 2 October 2008 Total 2021 brought on by the plague epidemics stimulated a turn to slave labour. There may be some validity to that idea, but evidence, not considered here, of an increased demand for slaves in the thirteenth century needs to be taken into account.7 Origins Before the trade in slaves shifted to the Atlantic Ocean at the end of the fifteenth century, merchants from Genoa, Venice, Palermo, and other Italian cities, supplied Muslim and Christian markets with slaves captured in lands outside of the Roman communion. Although Italians did not engage in slave trading with quite the same dedication that Catalan and Portuguese merchants applied to the business in the four- teenth and fifteenth centuries, the Genoese and the Venetians nevertheless offered them stiff competition. The demise of the Roman Empire in the West and the changes in land tenure in the early Middle Ages contributed to a marked decline in slavery in Italy, but not its extinction. Venetians, for one, were supplying Muslims with slaves from Europe as early as the eighth century.8 Trading in and owning slaves increased after the ports of the eastern Mediterranean became accessible to Italian merchants at the start of the thirteenth century, but the most intense period of Italian involvement in slave trading occurred during the 100 years before the most profitable trade shifted to the Atlantic Ocean in the late fifteenth century. Merchants from Italy acquired slaves mainly in the markets of the eastern Mediter- ranean and the Black Sea and, to a lesser extent, by raiding unprotected coastlines. After the fall of the Byzantine Empire in 1204 and the establishment of the Latin prin- cipalities in what is today mainland Greece and in the Aegean Islands, Venice, Genoa and independent Catalan adventurers vied with the Turkish emirates of Asia Minor for dominance over the region. Traders stripped the dismembered Byzantine Empire of much of its human flesh. Until the late fifteenth century, slave auctions in Black Sea  Slavery and Abolition 309 ports and throughout the Aegean took place at the end of summer. Merchants came to the ports of Caffa and Tana in the Black Sea mainly in search of grain, furs, cow hides, wax, honey, salt and of course fish, which they exported to Italy, but slaves figured pro- minently among their cargoes.9 Thebes and the main port on the island of Negroponte (modern Euboia) also drew Christian and non-Christian traders in search of slaves.10 The slaves came from the hinterlands of the ports and from the islands and coast- lines all around the eastern Mediterranean and Black Sea. They were brought to market by local traders who sold them to the Christians and Muslims who had come there in search of good deals and marketable goods. No description of the markets or the condition of slaves put up for sale in those ports survives, but the methods of their confinement were very likely to have changed little since the ninth and tenth centuries, when travellers described seeing bands of young men and women, often shackled around the neck or legs, herded together on shorelines, waiting to be loaded on to vessels.11 By the fourteenth century, transporting slaves Downloaded By: [CDL Journals Account] At: 00:36 2 October 2008 by sea presented problems that Venice sought to minimise by prohibiting the transport of slaves on galleys.12 Merchants could contain the threat of slave revolt or panic more easily on cogs or other round ships than on narrow and low-laying galleys. Unlike galleys with their limited and unsuitable cargo space, the cogs adapted for use in Med- iterranean water had holds in which groups of slaves could be stowed more securely than was possible in oar-propelled galleys. The overwhelming majority of the women and men sold to and by Italians came from Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Merchants traded in Russians, Circassians, Tatars, Abkhazi, Mingrelli, Geti, Vlachs, Turkish, and others from the Balkan, Caucasus, and Central Asian regions, some of whom were Christians, captured by enterprising local traders or sold into slavery by debt-burdened parents. In late four- teenth-century Florence, most of the slaves were Tartars.13 Genoese traders sold Greek-speaking adherents of the Eastern Church in Italian and Aegean markets until the late fourteenth century, when the Genoese government no longer allowed it. Far fewer Greek slaves appear in Italian notarial sources after the turn of the fifteenth century, which suggests that the populations of Italian slave-owning societies now viewed the enslavement of Greeks to be as illegitimate as their own enslavement.14 Tables 3 and 4 exhibit the general trends of the slave trade identified by previous scholars. The Genoese relied heavily on Russian, Circassian, and Tartar slaves into the 1460s. In Venice, Tartars stand out among the slaves sold there. Only the number of Russian slaves reaches nearly as high a figure. When they lost access to the Black Sea in the late fifteenth century, the Genoese and Venetians resorted to Bosnian, Serb, and Albanian captives of the Ottomans.15 Sub-Saharan African slaves begin to appear more frequently in Genoese and Venetian records in the second half of the century, at the same time that domestic slavery in Italy declined.16 In colonies established by Italians, the origins of slaves changed more slowly than they did in Italy. The reluctance to enslave Greeks, new to the cities of Italy, did not extend to Venetian and Genoese colonies. In Venice’s colony of Crete, as in Frankish Cyprus and Genoese Chios, the enslavement of Greeks persisted into the fifteenth century, although, in the case of Crete, Greek slaves were imported to the island Downloaded By: [CDL Journals Account] At: 00:36 2 October 2008 310 S. McKee Table 3 Origins of Slaves Sold in Genoa Origin 1390s 1400s 1410s 1420s 1430s 1440s 1450s 1460s 1470s 1480s 1490s Total Abkhazi 2 11 19 22 5 10 12 1 4 3 89 Albanian 1 1 2 1 6 1 12 Bulgarian 2 10 7 2 5 5 4 2 37 Canarian 3 1 4 4 12 Circassian 15 33 14 17 9 30 30 11 10 10 179 Goto 4 1 5 Hungarian 1 3 2 1 7 Jew 1 7 8 Mingrelli 2 2 4 1 2 1 12 Moro 2 3 8 32 35 38 118 Niger 1 1 2 Russian 15 21 22 46 38 41 24 7 1 1 215 Serb/Bosnian 1 1 5 17 15 39 Tartar 33 29 19 12 14 18 10 2 138 Turk 2 2 3 2 4 6 16 11 46 Vlach 2 2 Totals 35 65 105 77 103 72 108 94 70 99 93 921  Slavery and Abolition 311 Table 4 Origins of Slaves Sold in Venice Decade 1360s 1370s 1380s 1390s 1400s 1410s 1420s 1430s 1440s 1450s Totals Abkhazi 1 6 2 2 11 Bosnian 12 1 2 15 Bulgarian 1 10 2 5 18 Circassian 1 12 31 8 26 16 11 20 12 137 Greek 2 1 1 4 Niger 1 1 Russian 4 9 2 39 81 25 38 8 206 Sarracen 4 5 9 Tartar 95 35 42 218 20 30 31 21 41 14 547 Totals 97 36 60 285 33 109 134 59 101 34 948 from elsewhere. The indigenous Greek-speaking Cretan peasantry occupied a social Downloaded By: [CDL Journals Account] At: 00:36 2 October 2008 rank slightly higher than that of slaves, similarly tied to landed estates like serfs in Western Europe but without the feudal implications. In the port of Candia on Crete, Catalan and Venetian traders sold slaves they bought in the markets of Thebes, Naxos, and the emirates of Asia Minor, where Turkish merchants sold captives taken mainly along the Aegean and Anatolian coastlines. As the fifteenth century pro- gressed, in the colonies, Balkan and African slaves gradually replaced slaves from the Greek Islands and Black Sea.17 Because most economic historians assumed – for the most part, correctly – that slavery in the medieval and early modern Mediterranean did not engender racial or ethnic rationales in favour of slavery, they regarded the ancestral origins and skin colour of slaves as merely two among several demographic factors, such as gender and age. They showed more interest in religion, which they understood to play a greater role in legitimising enslavement. Recent efforts to establish continuity between Mediterranean slavery and that of the Atlantic have taken a different approach. Now medieval and early modern scholars well-read in the literature on North and South American slavery have developed a healthy scepticism about the assumptions embedded in the work of economic historians of an earlier generation. Perhaps skin colour and ethnic origins, they hypothesise, were not arbitrary categories as was previously thought. Not surprisingly, the more recent efforts began by reasses- sing what was known about black Africans in the Christian Mediterranean. Sub-Saharan African slaves show up in northern Italian records as early as the mid- fourteenth century. Until the mid-fifteenth century, Italian merchants from the north- ern peninsula acquired black African slaves mainly from Muslim merchants. When Portugal began to transport captives from the western coast of the African continent in the first half of the fifteenth century, Lisbon became another, important source of black African slaves. At no time, however, did black Africans constitute more than a small minority of any slave population in a city of northern Italy. In southern Italy, their presence is detectable much earlier and persists much longer, due in part to Sicily’s commercial and political relations with Aragon and to its proximity to the markets of north Africa. Salvatore Bono estimates that black Africans in Sicily  312 S. McKee accounted for half of the servile population in the sixteenth century, but their numbers decrease sharply thereafter as slave traders directed their supplies of captive Africans increasingly to the colonies in the western hemisphere. To replace them, slave traders in Sicily turned to Muslims from the Maghreb.18 Wherever in Italy black Afri- cans were for sale, their prices fell significantly below those of lighter-skinned slaves, which suggests that they were not as much in demand as slaves from Central Asia or eastern Europe and reinforces the impression taken by previous historians that Ita- lians had a prejudice against dark-skinned people.19 The scarcity of black Africans in Italian cities undoubtedly reinforced the exotic quality that some contemporary Italians attributed to them. But their visibility in the art of the period suggests that they were few enough to be exotic but common enough not to look out of place as servants in a painting. Isabella d’Este and members of her family are the best-known examples of fifteenth-century patrons who avidly sought but had to make considerable efforts to find captive black Downloaded By: [CDL Journals Account] At: 00:36 2 October 2008 African children to add to their collection of slaves, servants, retainers, and objects of curiosity.20 In part, because they never constituted more than a very small minority of the slave populations of the cities of Italy, rationales for their subjugation on the basis of skin colour did not take hold as they did in Spain and Portugal.21 The interest today in black Africans in late medieval and early modern Italy seems shaped more by the knowledge of the catastrophic outcome of the Iberian and English systems of slavery across the Atlantic than their numbers would warrant. Still, sub-Saharan Africans lived in Renaissance Italy, but there is no reason to believe their masters manumitted them less than slaves from elsewhere. This raises the question of freed slaves, all of whom would have been of non-European origin, who were incor- porated into Italian city populations.22 During the period of domestic slavery, slaves could attain free status either through an outright grant of manumission later in life or as a condition of their owners’ last wishes as expressed in wills. Slave owners usually placed conditions on the free status they granted their former slaves. Retaining control over them in the form of patronatus, masters and mistresses freed their slaves on the condition that they continue to serve in their households for a set period of years.23 The promise of manumission in a slave owner’s will incited some slaves to murder their owners, prompting the government of Genoa to prohibit testamentary manumis- sions.24 Nevertheless manumissions do not appear to have been rare. Although there is no way to know how often owners manumitted their slaves, a sufficient number of acts of manumission from Florence, Genoa, and Venice survive to suggest that, even if the great majority of slaves never achieved free status, enough of them did to create the hope of manumission as a reward for a lifetime of involuntary service. Given the ethnic diversity of slaves in Italy, the practice of manumitting slaves meant that Italian cities absorbed ex-slaves into their populations. A much understudied topic, freed slaves and their descendants appear not in only in records but also in the art of the period.25 Venetian court records, for instance, contain numerous references to men and women described as ‘tartarus’ or ‘tartara’ with no indication that they were or had been slaves, although it is highly likely that they had been or were descended from those who were. It was very common for ex-slaves to state their freed status in contracts in order to  Slavery and Abolition 313 ward off possible counter-claims on themselves and their property. By the fifteenth century, the ubiquity in the archival record of the term ‘Tartar’ may indicate that it had become for the Venetians a catch-all label, like ‘Slav’ for ‘slave’, but more likely the term designated ex-slaves and their descendants.26 Moreover, it would be a mistake to assume that all black Africans that appear in fif- teenth- and sixteenth-century art were slaves, since there is nothing to suggest that Africans benefited from the custom of manumission any less often than other slaves. The black African gondolieri in paintings by artists like Carpaccio or Veronese’s servants in ‘The House of Levy’ are likely to have been either slaves or free domestic servants, who had once been enslaved or who were descended from freed slaves. Nor is there any reason to assume that black slave women did not bear the same burden of sexual service. One scholar, in fact, has made a case to show that the mother of Alessandro de’ Medici, the first Medici duke of Florence, was a freed African slave.27 Whether freed slaves, especially those more darkly complected, Downloaded By: [CDL Journals Account] At: 00:36 2 October 2008 stood on the margins of urban populations or became thoroughly and seamlessly assimilated in them is a question awaiting an answer. Although the recent focus on black Africans in Italy has been instructive, it has nonetheless distracted scholarly attention away from aspects of slavery in Italy during the Renaissance that, while less relevant to the subsequent evolution of racia- lised slavery in the Atlantic, are more helpful for understanding mundane practices of making religious and ethnic distinctions in the marketplace and in the courtroom. Prior to the fifteenth century, Christian merchants enslaved non-western Christian women and men with the sanction of secular governments and the papacy. Conversion to the Roman rite, however, did not lead to manumission. The papacy allowed for the continued enslavement of those who converted, but it considered anyone who fol- lowed the Latin rite prior to their enslavement to be illegitimately in bondage. Secular governments in Italy, supported by the papacy, prohibited the enslavement of subjects of those rulers, like the king of Hungary, who recognised the spiritual primacy of the pope. Genoa and Venice at times and only for short periods declared even Muslim Turks off-limits, when negotiating trade treaties with the emirates of Asia Minor in the fourteenth century.28 The origins of slaves mattered principally when they offended the authorities’ current sense of who fell within the boundaries of those protected from enslavement. In contrast to later centuries, when ancestry or race played a role in determining who was a slave, ancestry combined with religious affiliation to determine who could not be a slave in the fifteenth century. The registration of slave origins served partly to monitor who was being enslaved. When Christian merchants bought slaves in the Genoese- and Vene- tian-controlled ports of the Black or the Aegean Sea, they were obliged to register their purchases with the port authorities and in their home ports. Not only was the registration a way for the Genoese or Venetian port authorities to assess the duties on the human cargo to be exported, but it also served, in principle, as a means to prevent the enslavement of followers of the Roman rite, who were deemed free by right of religion and ancestry. Reporting a slave’s ancestry cannot have been a straight-forward business. Well- travelled Italian merchants might have been able to distinguish between slaves of differing  314 S. McKee origins by language or attire, but for the most part they were forced to accept the word of local suppliers, who provided them with information about their captives. Unscrupulous local slavers were as likely to sweep up in their raids Christian as well as non-Christian captives so that, when it came time to sell them into slavery, they had a strong motivation to obscure their captives’ origins. It was generally known among traders that just as Muslim merchants were unlikely to buy Muslim captives, Christian merchants had an obligation to avoid buying Christian slaves. The contracting parties could be not sure where the slave being sold came from, but the point was not really where the slave came from so much as it was to ensure that the slave did not come from somewhere within the Roman communion. A trader’s conscience and his fear of financial penalties if caught were the only incentives to prevent him from buying and selling western Christian women and men who by law were protected from enslavement. Allegiance to the pope alone did not establish who could not be enslaved, as the wording of court cases involving slaves makes clear. A slave’s religion was inferred Downloaded By: [CDL Journals Account] At: 00:36 2 October 2008 from his or her stated origins. In the late fourteenth century, court cases from the Venetian colony of Crete, from Genoa, and from Lucca involved slave women who sued for their freedom on the grounds of ancestry and religion. The women first asserted their ancestry – in three cases Hungarian and in one Bosnian – on the basis of which the court drew the conclusion that they were Latins, in other words, adherents of the Roman church, and therefore illegally enslaved.29 Since few slaves can have been capable of suing for their freedom, these cases suggest that it was rela- tively easy to evade the regulations. It shows, however, that many people were swept into slavery through the breach in slave traders’ scruples. The Trade in Slaves Just how many people were swept into slavery will always be a matter of speculation for one principal reason. The large number of documents relating to the slave trade among Christians that survive in the archives and libraries around Italy obscures a serious loss of sources. For every slave sold to a Christian in Italy, southern France or Aragon, as many if not more were sold to Muslim consumers. We do not know and are not likely to ever know with any precision what the ratio of slaves sold to Christians and to Muslims was, for two reasons. First, the papal prohibitions against selling to Muslims anything that could be used as war materiel – slaves rowed Muslim war galleys – encouraged an illicit trade that left virtually no documen- tation on the Italian side. Second, extremely little has emerged from Muslim sources that would help us understand better how many slaves Italian merchants sold to the Muslims. There can be no doubt that for most of the fourteenth century the demand for slaves from the Aegean and Black Seas was greater in the markets of Egypt and in the Turkish emirates of Anatolia than in Italian ones, whether in Italy or in the colonies.30 As assuredly, in spite of the ban on the sale of Greeks in Christian markets, Christians merchants – both Aragonese and Italian – continued to raid the coastlines of the islands and mainland of Greece for captives whom they sold in Muslim markets. For these reasons, we cannot be sure of the origins of the slaves  Slavery and Abolition 315 exchanged among Christians nor of the degree to which Christian merchants observed the ban on selling Christian slaves to Muslims. What the surviving records reflect most clearly is the disbursement of slaves in the markets of Italy. The slaves purchased in the east travelled to their purchasers’ home ports, where their value was assessed and taxed prior to their re-exportation or resale. Genoa and Venice imposed a tax of 5% on each slave. Florence claimed four lire a head.31 Italian merchants re-exported the slaves either elsewhere in Italy and to the Christian Mediterranean, or they shipped them to markets in the Muslim world. Because nearly all the records of the wholesale trade have been lost, traces of merchants who specialised in slave trading are rare. Among the 2021 bills of slave sales I gathered, ranging from the 1360s to the last decades of the fifteenth century, only three out of 923 traders selling slaves in Genoa – certainly the largest market for slaves in Italy – sold three or more slaves at a time. In Venice, out of 965 slaves sold, seven merchants sold three or more, but no more than six, slaves at one time.32 It is worth reiterating that, as Downloaded By: [CDL Journals Account] At: 00:36 2 October 2008 ample as the documents involving slaves in Genoa that Domenico Gioffré compiled in his work on Genoese slavery might seem, they tell us only about the retail transactions and nothing about the Genoese wholesale market for slaves between Genoese mer- chants and their clients, whether Italian or non-Italian.33 To conclude on the basis of these retail sales that merchants tended not to concentrate their business dealings in slave trading is to ignore the limits of notarial records. Wholesale or retail, slave trading could be lucrative for traders and for governments. Rates of profit are extremely difficult to gauge in the absence of account books that show the price of purchase and the resale price of slaves. A merchant of the middle rank, however, could turn a profit as high as 150% in the Iberian market, although, as Michel Balard points out, the gains may not have been worth the risks involved in transporting slaves by sea.34 The records make the risks abundantly clear. In 1400, a vessel arrived in Venice laden with approximately 40 slaves carrying a price of 50 ducats a piece. When nearly all of them died of plague, the price of slaves in the market shot up to 70 ducats.35 In 1862, Vittore Lazari claimed in still one of the only studies of slavery in Venice that the Venetian state garnered 50,000 ducats from levies on slaves imported from the city. He estimated that, at five ducats a head, 10,000 slaves were exported from Venice between 1414 and 1423.36 He gave no indication of where he found the figure of 50,000 ducats, but, as Monica Boni and Robert Delort hint, the 50,000 ducats may represent the value of slaves rather than the revenue derived from the tax on their sales. If they are correct, and if we use their average slave price of 42 ducats during those years, then only about 1200 slaves were exported from Venice in that 10-year period. The Venetian customs officials would have instead garnered a sum closer to 6000 ducats.37 Merchants complained about the burden of the customs duties placed on the whole- sale trade in slaves. The Datini Archive in Prato holds a rich collection of account books and correspondence of a trading company active in the early fifteenth century. In the letters Datini agents wrote from Venice to the home office in Florence from the late 1380s to the early fifteenth century, a regular concern emerges in the  316 S. McKee attempts to purchase slaves that have gone through customs inspection. In 1387, a slave woman in her late teens could fetch a price of up to 55 ducats, which seemed prohibitively costly to the merchants from Tuscany.38 In a 1402 letter from a Datini agent to the head of the company, Francesco Datini learned of the arrival in Venice of three cogs carrying 306 slaves of both sexes. What struck the agent as noteworthy was not the number of slaves but the reported high price of 70 to 75 ducats each slave fetched on the market.39 In this instance, at five ducats a head, the slaves would have brought a little over 1500 ducats into the government’s coffers. Similarly, the Senate in 1381 raised the maximum number of slaves that could be transported on a cog from three slaves per crew member to four.40 The account books of Giacomo Badoer, a Venetian merchant active in the first half of the fifteenth century, refer to two shipments of 164 slaves on one vessel and 182 slaves on the other.41 The critical question is, how often did vessels carrying hundreds of slaves arrive in Italian ports? The answer would seem to be frequently enough in the late Downloaded By: [CDL Journals Account] At: 00:36 2 October 2008 fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries to be noticeable to the public at large, but infrequently enough that merchants regularly wrote to one another asking in which ports slaves for purchase might currently be found. Scarcity and high prices character- ise the references to slaves made by consumers and merchants in contemporary corre- spondence. Unless more account books from other companies involved in slave trading come to light, estimations of how many slaves were imported into and re-exported out of Italy remain speculative. The Number of Slaves In contrast to the export trade, the number of slaves who remained in Italy is easier to estimate. Slaves did not constitute a significant proportion of any urban population in Italy, with the possible exception of Palermo. Henri Bresc estimates that no more than 12% of Sicily’s principle city belonged in the servile category, but, given how small his sample is, it is reasonable to question whether it was really that high.42 Even in Genoa, whose slave population must have been comparable to Palermo’s, the number of slaves there is thought to have fluctuated between 2 and 5%. The estimates vary between 2– 3000 at any time in the 100 years between 1360 and 1460.43 Slavery in Siena had nearly died out by 1400.44 While Florence held about 1000 slaves at the end of the fourteenth century, the number had fallen to less than 400 by 1427, with very few households pos- sessing more than one slave.45 Boni and Delort counted only 200 slaves in Pisa between 1410 and 1434. Estimating the number of slaves at any time in Venice, Italy’s other major slave- trading power, presents a challenge because of the misleading nature of the evidence. Lane refers to ‘hundreds of slaves’ among the household servants there, which seems plausible, given that population levels in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries fell below 100,000.46 But there are signs that the proportion of slaves in Venice never approached the proportion found in Genoa. Although slaves are easily found in the fifteenth-century court records relating to crime, their absolute number is not high. More tellingly, in a two-year period, between 1366 and 1368, the Council of Forty  Slavery and Abolition 317 (the Quarantia), Venice’s high court and the government body at that time regulating the movement of slaves in and out of the city, granted licenses to 156 Venetians and non-Venetians to take or send slaves out of the city. The 145 slave women and 55 slave men accompanied their masters and mistresses to other cities, like Treviso, Padua, Bologna, Milan, Florence, Genoa, and Rome, or, as in one instance, were sent as a gift to a distant friend. Two hundred slaves over a two-year period, however, seem few, given the traffic into and out of the city. The figure indicates a low number of slaves in Venetian households in the late fourteenth century.47 There- after, domestic slavery in all Italian cities declined over the fifteenth century as part of a shift away from slave labour to free salaried labour and as access to the Black Sea became increasingly difficult for merchants.48 Similar trends are evident in colonies established by Italians. Susan M. Stuard found that in the last two decades of the fourteenth century, nearly 300 slaves ‘entered, lived in, or passed through Ragusa during the years for which we have records’.49 The city Downloaded By: [CDL Journals Account] At: 00:36 2 October 2008 absorbed many of the slaves brought there, but notarial and legislative sources suggest that slaves constituted a small percentage of the servile population and amounted to at most a few hundred at a time. In Venetian Crete, the ubiquity of slaves in the archival records leaves no room for doubt that a larger proportion of households in the colony than in Venice possessed slaves.50 The same was undoubtedly true of Genoese Chios and Cyprus.51 The Demand for Slaves A number of factors contributed to Italian merchants’ increased involvement in slave trading and an increased demand for slaves in Italian cities. The first of these is simply that there was no economic, social, or moral impediment that discouraged them from engaging in an already well-developed and rapidly expanding trade. Wherever mer- chants from Italy gained access to trading emporia from which they had previously been excluded, they quickly delved into trade in a wide variety of goods. Slaves had long been one of many commodities available in the eastern Mediterranean, Black Sea, north African and island ports. Until the sixteenth century, the preferences of Italian merchants, however, differed from those of their Muslim counterparts, a point that emerges clearly into view once the average age, price, and gender of the slaves sold privately among Italians is taken into account. As Table 5 shows, the slaves bought and sold privately by Italians tended consistently to be young and female over the course of the century and a half covered by this study. Italian slave owners preferred young female slaves. When slavery began to decline in Italy during the fifteenth century, older slaves appear with greater frequency in notarial records. Boni and Delort found in the years 1366–1368 that the age of slaves in Tuscany ranged from nine to 30, with the mean at 18. Between 1427 and 1428, however, the range lengthens from eight years of age to 80.52 The prices in Table 6 make clear how expensive the purchase of a slave could be. The prices reported from Florence match the impression gained from the tables above. The average price of 357 slaves sold in Florence between 1366 and 1368 was 30  318 S. McKee Table 5 Average Age of Slaves by Gender in Venice and Genoa Average age of Average age of female slaves in female slaves in Average age of male Average age of male Decade Venice Genoa slaves in Venice slaves in Genoa 1360s 19 13 1370s 21 15 1380 19 14 1390s 21 14 1400s 29 22 21 20 1410s 22 21 17 19 1420s 25 20 13 22 1430s 21 19 18 20 1440s 21 23 16 16 1450s 27 24 24 23 1460s 24 20 1470s 25 17 Downloaded By: [CDL Journals Account] At: 00:36 2 October 2008 1480s 22 19 1490s 22 19 florins; between 1427–1428, the average price in a similar number of sales was 45 florins.53 The high price of slaves encouraged payment in gold ducats and florins to such a degree that one economic historian believes that the demand for slaves in Italy contributed to the flow of gold out of Europe and, thus, contributed to a trade imbalance between the West and Islam.54 The slave trade may be partially responsible for a trade imbalance, but the flow of gold out of Europe was unlikely to have begun in Italian pockets. In Italy, slaves were too expensive and too few. Householders looking for cheap labour found free labour more economical. In fifteenth century Venice, a sal- aried domestic servant’s yearly wages stood in the vicinity of seven ducats for men and Table 6 Average Price of Female and Male Slaves in Sale Contracts by Decade Genoa Venice Female (No. of Male (No. of Female (No. of Male (No. of contracts) contracts) contracts) contracts) Decade Lire Lire Ducats Ducats 1360s 26 (75) 25 (18) 1370s 30 (1) 29 (29) 31 (7) 1380s 59 (1) 42 (45) 34 (15) 1390s 43 (234) 37 (48) 1400s 81 (62) 71 (14) 49 (28) 33 (7) 1410s 100 (87) 70 (14) 52 (97) 44 (11) 1420s 105 (63) 77 (22) 57 (109) 45 (48) 1430s 140 (90) 107 (17) 54 (49) 55 (7) 1440s 133 (55) 92 (15) 41 (75) 39 (23) 1450s 146 (86) 102 (11) 40 (22) 42 (10) 1460s 167 (80) 117 (10) 65 (1) 1470s 167 (49) 98 (6) 1480s 192 (66) 89 (7) 1490s 180 (70) 74 (5)  Slavery and Abolition 319 55 women, while indentured servants received somewhat less. Wet nurses earned higher wages. For most of the same century, they earned between 15 and 20 ducats a year.56 Unskilled workers earned between 15 and 20 ducats a year.57 Buying a slave may have constituted a long-term savings around the turn of the fifteenth century, but as that century progressed, they grew increasingly costly. Despite the high cost of slaves, all levels of society participated in slave owning. Nobles, priests, notaries, master craftsmen, spice merchants, sailors, and textile workers are the principal vendors while just as wide a variety of people bought slaves. In Venice, patricians, not surprisingly, constituted the largest group of sellers and buyers, since as a group they were more likely to have the capital necessary to buy slaves. More interesting, the next largest groups of vendors were patrician widows, followed by priests. Similarly, the recipients of the licenses to take or send slaves from Venice came from all levels of Venetian society: patricians, physicians, cap- tains, merchants, ironworkers, clergy, and notaries.58 In Genoa, over the fifteenth Downloaded By: [CDL Journals Account] At: 00:36 2 October 2008 century, of the 229 buyers whose occupations are mentioned, merchants (37) bought female slaves in retail sales more than did any other occupational group. They are followed by 28 silkworkers (setaiolo, filatore di seta, tintore di seta), 22 notaries, and 15 ironworkers (fabbri). In spite of the very small sample of Genoese who bought male slaves (34), the number of merchants (10) still exceeds those in other professions. The 28 buyers from the silk industry are matched by the 30 sellers of 28 female and two male slaves from the silk, cotton, and wool textile industry in Genoa. Epstein calculated that over half the slaves in Genoa were owned by nobles of the alberghi, but shoemakers and smiths also owned slaves.59 Apparently, slave owners of high and middle-ranking social levels in Italy found young female slaves more useful than male slaves, in spite of their high prices, especially in Genoa, and particularly in spite of the risks involved. Female and male slaves, minimally or poorly nourished, were vulnerable to disease and maltreatment, but slave women ran additional risks as well, most notably that of rape. Their owners, their owners’ male kin, visitors to households, and strangers on the street preyed on slave women and domestic servant women. The pregnancies that resulted could benefit their owners in the short term, if the slave women were rented out as wet nurses, but childbirth in that period was so dangerous that slave owners took out insurance on their slaves in the event they died as a result of it.60 In spite of the risks of pregnancy, sexual service undoubtedly contributed largely to the demand for slave women in Italian households. They worked in no manufacturing apart from textile production, and even there they did not amount to a significant pro- portion.61 Other scholars have found evidence of the sexual service slave women per- formed, even though the legislation of Venice, Genoa, and Florence condemned the sexual exploitation of slaves and servants by both members and non-members of the households in which they worked.62 Sexual service might serve as one explanation for widows forming the second largest group of vendors after patrician men. Perhaps in widowhood some of these women sought to remove a source of tension in their households while their husbands were alive. Likewise, the steady and steep rise in the price of slave women in Genoa over the fifteenth century, in contrast to slave  320 S. McKee men in Genoa and slaves of both sexes in Venice, might reflect the city’s tacit tolerance of slave concubinage. But Genoa was not exceptional in this regard. The private, unrecorded nature of human sexual activity makes it impossible to docu- ment this behaviour except in cases where children resulted, and in this respect slave women’s sexual service had an impact on society in Renaissance Italy. By the fifteenth century, positive law in Florence, Genoa, very possibly Venice, and certainly other cities informally condoned sexual relationships between slave women and free men when the children of slave women began to inherit their fathers’ status instead of their mothers’.63 Not all children of slave women by their masters, however, benefited from that change. A child’s life depended entirely on his or her father’s willingness to acknowl- edge his paternity. The large number of abandoned slave women’s children in the found- ling hospitals of those cities gives a good idea how widespread master–slave sexual relations were and how few children were lucky enough to have a father who acknowl- edged them.64 One historian argues that the lucrative business of renting out slave Downloaded By: [CDL Journals Account] At: 00:36 2 October 2008 women as wet nurses constituted an incentive for slave owners to prey sexually on slave women.65 The sexual service of slave women in Italian households is well documen- ted and its consequences are a subject that merits further scholarly attention. Domestic slavery in Italy declined over the second half of the fifteenth century without disappearing altogether. Italian merchants lost access to the eastern slave markets they once relied on. For the Venetians, the markets of Tana, situated at the end of important caravan routes from Central Asia, remained open to them only for the first half of the fifteenth century. The Genoese managed to retain their base in Kaffa until 1475, when they lost access to the Black Sea to the Ottomans.66 When the source of Black Sea slaves dried up, Venetian slave-owning and slave-trading declined. Genoese slave-trading, too, began to decline, although they remained involved in the on-going Aragonese slave trade in the Atlantic. In Tuscany, slaves dis- appeared almost entirely. The only region of Italy where slaves continued to be bought and sold lay in the south. Palermo remained an important distribution point for the exporting of slaves to the Iberian and Muslim world. A diminishing slave supply does not entirely explain the decline in domestic slavery in Italy. For the merchants, the risks of supplying female slaves to a distant market combined with a growing scarcity at the source drove prices up beyond the reach of all but the wealthiest. The ready availability of cheaper paid labour came to exceed the prestige associated with owning a slave. The people of northern Italy found it cheaper and more convenient to pay minimal wages to poor but free women, men, and children from the rural hinterlands of cities and from the Balkan region.67 Inden- tured service became the norm in Venice and in Tuscan cities. Children, in particular, suffered from the new trends in domestic service. In place of slaves, destitute boys and girls, known as anime, from the Dalmatian coast and the interior regions were brought to Italian cities, where their captors sought reimbursement for the children’s transport and a bit of profit from those in search of household servants. The children, nominally free, were bound by contract to their masters for periods of service lasting four years or longer.68 The line between indenture and slavery grew exceedingly thin, but never- theless the general trend across Italy was towards wage labour. Private individuals  Slavery and Abolition 321 throughout the peninsula came to regard the possession of household slaves as an unusual extravagance. Over the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, millions of people were enslaved in the Christian and Muslim territories of the Mediterranean at the same time that the Atlantic slave trade from Africa to the Spanish, Portuguese, French, and British colonies in the western hemisphere gathered force.69 Both Christian and Muslim powers sanctioned the raiding, seizing, and either sale or ransoming of captives. ‘Piracy and slaving,’ Robert C. Davis notes, ‘became the policy instruments of state for both sides: enslaving ordinary civilians not only deprived the enemy of thousands of useful productive citizens, but also provided serviceable labor and a significant source of income through ransoming.’70 When domestic slavery evolved into galley slavery, slave owning moved from the private to the public sphere. The shifting of slaves from households to galleys moved slaves to the periphery of ordinary people’s line of vision. Christian merchants from Italy may have enslaved 50,000 people between 1500 Downloaded By: [CDL Journals Account] At: 00:36 2 October 2008 and 1700, but those slaves did not dominate the Italian landscape.71 Naples, Messina, and Palermo became the main Italian slave markets where war captives were either sold to state powers looking for labour or to Muslim merchants come to ransom Muslim slaves. Always implicated in slave trading more than most other powers in Italy, Genoa’s population retained a higher proportion of slaves, in spite of the decline of domestic slavery elsewhere.72 By the seventeenth century, the two largest populations of slaves were found in Livorno on the Ligurian coast and in Naples.73 The merchants from Italy who continued to trade in slaves into the sixteenth century operated in the commercial spheres of other powers. By the end of the fif- teenth century, the slave trade was moving out of the Mediterranean into the Atlan- tic.74 When the Portuguese made their way to the Azores, the Canary Islands, and, from there, along the western coast of Africa, Italians went along. Unable to match the scale of trade they witnessed, the Florentines and Venetians could only watch the Portuguese and Spanish develop the routes and trading agreements along the African coast to buy and transport thousands of slaves to distant markets. The mer- chants of Italy trafficked in human beings as long as the profits outweighed the risks. The rise of Iberian economic power and the emerging markets in the Atlantic Ocean discouraged merchants of Italy from deepening and extending their involve- ment in the trade in human chattel. In the end, the history of slave owning in Italy offers a study mostly in contrasts to experiences elsewhere around the Mediterranean. Slaves did not form a significant pro- portion of any population in Italy, not even in the cities like Genoa most involved in the trade. Further work on the wholesale Italian trade in slaves will matter most to economic historians. But the study of slavery has its value for understanding how Italians differen- tiated between themselves and non-Italians and among themselves. The ways in which Italians distinguished ethnically and religiously among slaves – especially in courts of law – reveal that ethnicity, religion, and juridical status were linked in the minds of con- temporaries. In Italy, all adherents of the Roman church were a priori of free status, because no follower of the Roman rite could be legitimately enslaved. Courts inferred religious affiliation from a person’s place of origins and ancestry, which means that,  322 S. McKee whereas race came to determine slave status in the Americas of later centuries, an ethno- religious attribution determined free status in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Italy. The passage of free status from, say, a Florentine father to his child by a Circassian woman reflected not just assumptions about his religious affiliation but also, more deeply embedded, about the primacy of his ancestry. Notes [1] I would like to thank the publishers and editors of L’Italia e l’economia europea – Commercio e cultura mercantile in the multi-volume series, Il Rinascimento italiano e l’Europa (Treviso: Fon- dazione Cassamarca, 2008), for allowing my article in that volume, ‘Gli schiavi e il commercio degli schiavi’, to appear here revised and in translation. My gratitude extends as well to the anonymous reviewers. Downloaded By: [CDL Journals Account] At: 00:36 2 October 2008 [2] Petrarca, Opere di Francesco Petrarca, X.2, 956–8. [3] David Wallace has also reflected on Petrarch’s description of slaves: Wallace, ‘Humanism, Slavery, and the Republic of Letters’, 62 –88, 74 –7. [4] Epstein, Speaking of Slavery, 161. [5] Arbel, ‘Slave Trade and Slave Labour in Frankish Cyprus (1191-1571)’, 149– 90. [6] Verlinden, L’esclavage dans l’Europe medievale; Lazari, Del traffico e delle condizioni; Tenenti, ‘Gli schiavi di Venezia alla fine del cinquecento’, 52– 69; Gioffrè, Il mercato degli schiavi a Genova nel secolo XV; Gaudioso, La schiavitù domestica in Sicilia; Bresc, Un monde méditerranéen; Prunai, ‘Notizie e documenti’, 133 –82, 245 –98, 398 –438; Tria, ‘La schiavitù in Liguria’; Balard, ‘Escla- vage en Crimée’, 9 –17; Balard, ‘Giacomo Badoer et le commerce des esclaves’. Although not an economic historian, Iris Origo’s article long stood as the standard reference to domestic slavery in Italy. Origo, ‘The Domestic Enemy’, 321 –61. [7] Venetian Crete was also a major market for slaves. In the database, of the 292 slave sale con- tracts, 264 or 90% were transacted prior to 1333. I have not included them in this study for reasons having mainly to do with their falling outside the period known as the Renaissance. John B. Williams discusses Genoese slavery in the thirteenth century throughout ‘From the Commercial Revolution’. [8] McCormick, Origins of the European Economy, 753. [9] Balard, ‘Caffa from the Fourteenth to the Fifteenth Century’, 149. [10] Archivio di Stato di Venezia (ASV), Notai di Candia, Busta 244, not. Giovanni Similiante, fasc. 1, fol. 138r, 1333; Thiriet, Regestes des délibérations du Sénat, vol. II, 1405, 54 –5, n. 1197. [11] McCormick, Origins of the European Economy, 741. [12] Thiriet, Regestes des délibérations du Sénat, 119, n. 463. Lane drew attention to this restriction in Venice: A Maritime Republic, 133. [13] Boni and Delort, ‘Des esclaves toscans’, 1070. [14] Williams, ‘From the Commercial Revolution’, 207– 08. [15] Evans, ‘Slave Coast of Europe’, 41 –58. [16] Tognetti, ‘The Trade in Black African Slaves’, 213–24; Mueller, ‘Venezia e i primi schiavi neri’, 139 –42. [17] McKee, Uncommon Dominion, 87 –8 and passim. See also Stuard, ‘Ancillary Evidence’; Lane, Venice, 133. [18] Bono, Schiavi musulmani, 38. [19] Sergio Tognetti provides a table of prices of 27 black and white slaves sold in Florence by a mer- chant in Lisbon through the Florentine Cambini Bank. Tognetti, ‘The Trade in Black African Slaves’, 223 – 4. [20] Kaplan, ‘Isabella d’Este and Black African Women’.  Slavery and Abolition 323 [21] For recent work on Iberian slavery, see Stella, Histoires des esclaves; and Blumenthal, ‘Implements of Labor’. [22] Kate Lowe makes a similar point in ‘Introduction’. [23] For discussions of manumissions see Heers, Esclaves et domestiques, 261–2; Epstein, Speaking of Slavery, 86 –93. Evidence of manumissions in Crete can be found in McKee, Wills from Late Medieval Venetian Crete. [24] Epstein, Speaking of Slavery, 99. [25] Kaplan, ‘Local Color’, 50– 56. [26] The best discussion about the rise of the use of ‘Slav’ to mean ‘slave’ is found in Kahane and Kahane, ‘Notes on the Linguistic History of ‘Sclavo’’, 345–60. [27] Brackett, ‘Race and Rulership’, 303 –25. Alessandro is not the only Medici scion whose mother was a slave. A Circassian slave of Cosimo de’ Medici bore him a son, Carlo, who became a church cardinal. [28] Zachariadou, Trade and Crusade, 197 –8. [29] ASV, Archivio di Duca di Candia (ADC), Memoriali, Busta 30bis, Fasc. 26bis, fols. 19v-21v; Tria, ‘La schiavitù in Liguria’, 189, n. LIX, 1455; Tria, ‘La schiavitù in Liguria’, 207–8, Downloaded By: [CDL Journals Account] At: 00:36 2 October 2008 n. LXXV; Archivio di Stato di Lucca, Atti civili del Podesta di Lucca, 881, 1413 (Bosnian). [30] For the trade in slaves between Genoa and Mamluk Egypt in the thirteenth century, see Williams, ‘From the Commercial Revolution’, 178– 80. [31] Epstein, Genoa and the Genoese, 38; Mallett, The Florentine Galleys, 114. [32] Only in the notarial sources from the port city of Candia in the Venetian colony of Crete do merchants with large groups of slaves to sell appear and those bills of sale are not included in the database, because they come from the first decades of the fourteenth century. Eighteen men, Catalans among them, sold between three and 25 slaves. Guillelmo Simon, a Catalan mer- chant from Perpignan, made two trips to Candia, the first in 1332 and the second in the follow- ing year. During the first visit, he sold nine men and four women to a variety of purchasers. In 1333, he sold 14 men and 11 women. ASV, Notai di Candia, Busta 244, not.Giovanni Simi- liante, fasc. 1, fol. 121r-v. 1332. [33] Thus, Pistarino’s comments on the Genoese slave trade must be read with the limitations of Gioffré’s data in mind. Pistarino, ‘Tratta di schiavi da Genova’, 288, 290. [34] Balard, ‘Giocomo Badoer et le commerce des esclaves’, 562. [35] Archivio Datini, Prato, carteggio di Venezia, b. 713, 4 Sept 1400. [36] Lazari, ‘Del traffico e delle condizioni degli schiavi’, 469. [37] Boni and Delort, ‘Des esclaves toscans’, 1070, n. 34. [38] Archivio Datini, Prato, carteggio di Venezia, busta 709, 31 Oct 1386, Z. Gaddi in Venice to the Florence office. [39] Archivo Datini, Prato, carteggio di Venezia, b. 714, 2 Dec 1402, Bindo Piaciti in Venezia to Francesco di Marco Datini and Stoldo di Lorenzo in Florence. I join the long list of scholars indebted to Reinhold Mueller for his generosity. [40] Lane, Venice, 133. [41] Balard, ‘Giacomo Badoer et le commerce des esclaves’, 563. [42] Bresc, Un monde Méditerranéen, I, 474. [43] Gioffre, Il mercato degli schiavi a Genova; Epstein, Genoa and the Genoese, 267; Heers, Esclaves et domestiques, 12 –15. [44] Prunai, ‘Notizie e documenti’, 251. [45] Boni and Delort, ‘Des esclaves toscans’, 1060; Klapish-Zuber, ‘Women Servants in Florence’, 69; Tognetti, ‘The Trade in Black African Slaves’, 214. Because they have found in private records slaves who do not appear in the Commune’s slave registry, Boni and Delort believe that Flor- entines under-reported their purchases of slaves as a way to avoid paying a tax on the sale. [46] Lane, Venice, 332.  324 S. McKee [47] ASV, Quarantia criminal, reg. 16, fols. 63v – 97r. In April 1368, the Council of Forty felt it had weightier matters to deal with than the movement of slaves and so assigned the task of granting exit licenses to owners of slaves to the Capi of the sestieri, a body with powers similar to munici- pal police. No subsequent records of exit licenses, therefore, survive. [48] Romano, Housecraft and Statecraft, 93. [49] Stuard, ‘To Town to Serve’, 42. [50] McKee, ‘Households in Fourteenth-Century Venetian Crete’. [51] Slaves in Venetian-controlled Cyprus worked on sugar plantations. See Arbel, ‘Slave trade and slave labor’. [52] Boni and Delort, ‘Des esclaves toscans’, 1070. [53] Ibid. [54] Spufford, Money and Its Use, 343. [55] Mueller, ‘Aspects of Venetian Sovereignty’, 54 –5. [56] Romano, Housecraft and Statecraft, 139– 41. [57] Lane, Venice, 333. [58] Slaves were employed at menial tasks in Venice’s industries: Lane, Venice, 333; Molà, La com- Downloaded By: [CDL Journals Account] At: 00:36 2 October 2008 munità dei Lucchesi, 72 –3. [59] Epstein, Genoa and the Genoese, 267. [60] Heers, Esclaves et domestiques, 16. [61] This is true except perhaps in Genoa, where Boni and Delort have found signs that the Genoese employed them in their workshops and on their lands outside the city: Boni and Delort, ‘Des esclaves toscans’, 1073. Their figures do not match the figures derived from my database. [62] Heers, Esclaves et domestiques; Pistarino, ‘Tratta di schiavi da Genova’, 286; Epstein, Speaking of Slavery; Balletto, ‘Stranieri e forestieri a Genova’; Ruggiero, The Boundaries of Eros. Boni and Delort doubt the prevalence of concubinage. See Boni and Delort, ‘Des esclaves toscans’, 1073, n. 41, 42. [63] McKee, ‘Inherited Status and Slavery’, 31 –53. [64] Kuehn, Illegitimacy in Renaissance Florence, 142–4. [65] Cluse, ‘Frauen in Sklaverei’. [66] Lane, Venice, 129; Origo, ‘Domestic Enemy’, 354. [67] Stuard, ‘Ancillary Evidence’. [68] Heers, Esclaves et domestiques, 145 –58; Romano, Housecraft and Statecraft, 47 –8. [69] Davis, Christian Slaves; Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery. [70] Davis, Christian Slaves, 140. [71] Bono, Schiavi musulmani nell’Italia, 35. [72] Ibid., 31. [73] Ibid., 27. [74] For an overview of the causes contributing to the decline of Mediterranean slavery in the sixteenth century, see Davis, ‘The Geography of Slaving’. References Arbel, Benjamin. “Slave Trade and Slave Labour in Frankish Cyprus (1191–1571).” Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History 14 (1993): 149–90. Balard, Michel. “Esclavage en Crimée et sources fiscales Génoises au XVe siècles.” Byzantinische Forschungen 22 (1996): 9 –17. ———. “Giacomo Badoer et le commerce des esclaves.” In Milieux naturels, espaces sociaux. Etudes offertes à Robert Delort, edited by E.M. Mornet, 555– 64. Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1997.  Slavery and Abolition 325 ———. “Genuensis civitas in extremo Europae: Caffa from the Fourteenth to the Fifteenth Century.” In Medieval Frontiers: Concepts and Practices, edited by David Abulafia and Nora Berend, 149, 143 –51. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002. Balletto, Laura. “Stranieri e forestieri a Genova: Schiavi e manomessi (secolo XV).” In Forestieri e stranieri nelle città basso-medievali, Atti del Seminario Internazionale di Studio di Bagno a Ripoli, 263– 83. Florence: Salimbeni, 1987. Blackburn, Robin. The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492–1800. London and New York: Verso, 1992. Blumenthal, Debra G. “Implements of Labor, Instruments of Honor: Muslim, Eastern, and Black Slaves in Fifteenth-Century Valencia.” PhD diss., University of Toronto, 2000. Boni, Monica, and Robert Delort. “Des esclaves toscans, du milieu du XIVe au milieu du XVe siècle.” Mélanges de l’Ecole française de Rome 112, no. 2 (2000): 1057–77. Bono, Salvatore. Schiavi musulmani nell’Italia moderna: galeotti, vu’cumpra’, domestici. Napoli: Edizioni scientifiche italiane, 1999. Brackett, John. “Race and Rulership: Alessandro de’ Medici, First Medici Duke of Florence, 1529–1537’.” In Black Africans in Renaissance Europe, edited by T.F. Earle and K.J.P. Lowe, Downloaded By: [CDL Journals Account] At: 00:36 2 October 2008 303 –25. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Bresc, Henri. Un monde méditerranéen: économie et société en Sicile, 1300– 1450. Rome: Ecole française de Rome, 1987. Cluse, Christoph. “Frauen in Sklaverei: Beobachtungen aus genuesischen Notariatsregistern des 14. und 15. Jahrhunderts.” In Campana pulsante convocati: Festschrift anläßlich der Emeritierung von Prof. Dr. Alfred Haverkamp, edited by Frank G. Hirschmann and Gerd Mentgen, 78 –86. Trier: Kliomedia, 2005. Davis, Robert C. Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters: White Slavery in the Mediterranean, the Barbary Coast, and Italy, 1500–1800, 57 – 74. Basingstoke, Hants: Palgrave, 2003. Davis, Robert. “The Geography of Slaving in the Early Modern Mediterranean, 1500– 1800.” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 37, no. 1 (2007): 57 –74. Epstein, Steven A. Genoa and the Genoese. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1996. ———. Speaking of Slavery: Color, Ethnicity, & Human Bondage in Italy. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univer- sity Press, 2001. Evans, Daniel. “Slave Coast of Europe.” Slavery and Abolition 6 (1985): 41 –58. Gaudioso, Matteo. La schiavitù domestica in Sicilia dopo i Normanni: legislazione, dottrina, formule. Catania: Tip. C. Galatola, 1926. Gioffrè, Domenico. Il mercato degli schiavi a Genova nel secolo XV. Genoa: Fratelli Bozzi, 1971. Heers, Jacques. Esclaves et domestiques au Moyen Age dans le mond méditerranéen. Paris: Fayard, 1981. Kahane, Henry, and Renée Kahane. “Notes on the Linguistic History of ‘Sclavo’.” In Studi in onore di Ettore Lo Gatto e Giovanni Maver, 345 – 60. Florence: G. C. Sansoni, 1962. Kaplan, Paul. “Local Color: The Black African Presence in Venetian Art and History.” In catalog, ‘Fred Wilson. Speak of Me as I Am’, 50–56, from the United States Pavilion, 50th Venice Biennale, 2003. Klapish-Zuber, Christiane. “Women Servants in Florence during the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries.” In Women and Work in Preindustrial Europe, edited by Barbara Hanawalt, 56 –80. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986. Kuehn, Thomas. Illegitimacy in Renaissance Florence. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002. Lane, Frederic C. Venice: A Maritime Republic. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973. Lazari, Vincenzo. Del traffico e delle condizioni degli schiavi in Venezia nei tempi di messo. Turin, 1862. Lowe, Kate. “Introduction: The Black African Presence in Renaissance Europe.” In Black Africans in Renaissance Europe, edited by T.F. Earle and K.J.P. Lowe, 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Mallett, Michael E. The Florentine Galleys in the Fifteenth Century. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967. McCormick, Michael. Origins of the European Economy: Communications and Commerce, AD 300 – 900. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001.  326 S. McKee McKee, Sally, ed. Wills from Late Medieval Venetian Crete, 3 vols. 1312–1420. Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 1998. McKee, Sally. “Households in Fourteenth-Century Venetian Crete.” Speculum 70 (1995): 27 –67. ———. Uncommon Dominion: Venetian Crete and the Myth of Ethnic Purity. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000. ———. “Inherited Status and Slavery in Late Medieval Italy and Venetian Crete.” Past & Present 182, (February 2004): 31 –53. Molà, Luca. La communità dei Lucchesi: Immigrazione e industria della seta nel tardo medioevo (Memorie, Classe di Scienze Morali, Lettere, Arti, 53). Venice: Istituto di scienze, lettere ed arti, 1994. Mueller, Reinhold. “Venezia e i primi schiavi neri.” Archivio veneto 110 (1979): 139–42. ———. “Aspects of Venetian Sovereignty in Medieval and Renaissance Dalmatia.” In Quattrocento Adriatico: Fifteenth-Century Art of the Adriatic Rim. Atti del colloquio, Firenze, 1994, edited by Charles Dempsey, 29 –56. Villa Spelman Colloquium, series 5, 225– 30. Bologna: Nuova Alfa Editore, 1996. Origo, Iris. “The Domestic Enemy: The Eastern Slaves in Tuscany in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Downloaded By: [CDL Journals Account] At: 00:36 2 October 2008 Centuries.” Speculum 30 (1955): 321 –61. Petrarca, Francesco. Opere di Francesco Petrarca, edited by Emilio Bigi. Milan: Mursia, 1966. Pistarino, Geo. “Tratta di schiavi da Genova in Toscana nel secolo XV.” In Studi di storia economica toscana nel Medioevo e nel Rinascimento in memoria di Federigo Melis, edited by Cinzio Violante, vol. 290. Pisa: Pacini, 1987. Prunai, Giulio. “Notizie e documenti sulla servitù domestica nel territorio senese (secc. VIII-XVI).” Bulletino senese di storia patria 7 (1936): 133 –82; 245–98; 398– 438. Romano, Dennis. Housecraft and Statecraft: Domestic Service in Renaissance Venice, 1400–1600. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. Ruggiero, Guido. The Boundaries of Eros. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985. Spufford, Peter. Money and Its Use in Medieval Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Stella, Alessandro. Histoires des esclaves dan la Péninsula iberique. Paris: Éditions de l’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, 2000. Stuard, Susan Mosher. “To Town to Serve: Urban Domestic Slavery in Medieval Ragusa.” In Women and Work in Preindustrial Europe, edited by Barbara Hanawalt, 42, 38 –55. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986. ———. “Ancillary Evidence for the Decline of Medieval Slavery.” Past & Present 149 (November 1995): 3 –28. Tenenti, Alberto. “Gli schiavi di Venezia alla fine del cinquecento.” Rivista storica italiana 67 (1955): 52 –69. Thiriet, Freddy, ed. Regestes des délibérations du Sénat de Venise concernant la Romanie. Paris: Mouton, 1958. Tognetti, Sergio. “The Trade in Black African Slaves in Fifteenth-century Florence.” In Black Africans in Renaissance Europe, edited by T.F. Earle and K.J.P. Lowe, 213–24. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Tria, Luigi. La schiavitù in Liguria. Atti della società ligure di storia patria. Genoa: Società ligure di storia patria, 1947. Verlinden, Charles. L’esclavage dans l’Europe medievale, 2 vols. 1955–77. Bruges: De Tempel. Wallace, David. “Humanism, Slavery, and the Republic of Letters.” In The Public Intellectual, edited by Helen Small, 62 –88. Oxford: Blackwell, 2002. Williams, John B. “From the Commercial Revolution to the Slave Revolution: The Development of Slavery in Medieval Genoa (Italy).” PhD diss., University of Chicago, 1995. Zachariadou, Elizabeth A. Trade and Crusade: Venetian Crete and the Emirates of Menteshe and Aydin (1300 –1415). Venice: Istituto ellenico degli studi bizantini e post-bizantini, 1983.