Slavery in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia by William D. Phillips (review)

This study encapsulates the complexity of slavery in Spain and Portugal during the medieval and early modern periods. The first recorded slaveholders on the Iberian Peninsula, the Romans and the Visigoths, shared the view that those who were part of the dominant group should not be enslaved. When the Muslims conquered the Peninsula early in the eighth century, citizens of towns that had resisted them were enslaved. Although the situation was reversed during and after the re-conquest, it varied across regions. While most slaves in Castile were Muslim, those in the maritime areas of the Crown of Aragon were generally from the southern and eastern Mediterranean and beyond the Black Sea. Although there were Muslim slaves in Portugal, little is known about slavery here prior to the 1440s, when the trade in Sub-Saharan slaves began. By the end of the fifteenth century, the Portuguese were bringing African slaves to the Iberian Peninsula directly from Africa’s west coast. By the beginning of the sixteenth century, these slaves were joined in Spain by enslaved captives from the war in the Canary Islands. William Phillips points out that although there were often large numbers of slaves in Spain and Portugal, they could not be called slave societies. Indeed, during the sixteenth century slaves probably made up only 10 per cent of the population of the city with the largest number of slaves, namely Seville.

Phillips emphasises that the Iberian experience of slavery varied enormously. Christians, Muslims, and Jews alike could be slaves, slave owners, or traders. One could be born into slavery, kidnapped and enslaved, or captured and enslaved as a result of conflict. Moreover, slaves could find themselves ‘at any number of points between full slavery and full freedom’. Phillips brings his survey of slavery to life with examples taken from notarial documents. This means that he is able to provide rather more examples of the Spanish owner/slave relationship than the Portuguese. He does so in the full knowledge that such documents were almost always drawn up at the instigation of the owner rather than the slave. Indeed, when it comes to documents that promise or grant manumission, Phillips rightly points out that the majority of slaves freed in this way actually bought their freedom while others were freed once they became too old and frail to work. In the latter case, manumission was likely to result in destitution and starvation.

While the Roman tradition of having domestic slaves continued on the Iberian Peninsula into the early modern period, their practice of maintaining slave gangs did not. By the medieval period, slaves who worked outside the home did so alongside free workers. Even those who manned the galleys toiled with convicts and free labourers. However, things were very different beyond the Peninsula. The trade in African slaves expanded as the demand for labour grew in the American settlements. During the first two centuries of the colonial period, the medieval Mediterranean style of domestic slavery and plantation slavery coexisted. However, slavery on the Peninsula declined during Portugal’s war with Spain, which lasted until 1668. The death knell came in the 1760s when Carlos III established diplomatic relations with Morocco. Laws were passed in Portugal in 1773, and in the early nineteenth century in Spain, freeing the last slaves. As slavery declined and died out on the Iberian Peninsula, it flourished in the empires, lasting until the late nineteenth century in Brazil.

Slavery in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia provides a richly textured overview of the development of slavery in Spain and Portugal. It is aimed at those interested in slavery in the Americas, as well those concerned with the Iberian Peninsula, illustrating why the experience of slavery came to vary so much across South America, North America, and the Caribbean.