Slavery in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia

Chapter 5. To Work as a Slave

C h a p t e r 5 To Work as a Slave [S]laves, by and large, worked side by side with free laborers in the household, field, and artisan’s workshop. . . . [W]hat distinguished the slave experience . . . was not the type of work performed, but the conditions under which they labored. ––Debra Blumenthal, early twenty-first century A common definition of slavery describes it as a variety of forced, uncompensated labor. Although this definition relates to a single aspect of slavery, slave owners certainly expected their slaves to work for them. In the history of slavery in the Iberian Peninsula, we find slaves working at a wide range of tasks, from domestics to slave soldiers, from artisans to garbage collectors. Domestic service with its many variations was their most common occupation, but by no means their only one, in the wide array of possible tasks for slaves. Slaves worked in the home, in artisan workshops, and in agriculture. Save for the years of Roman expansion into the peninsula, there were no large slave gangs working the fields. Slaves otherwise were not limited in their productive activities. Domestic Slavery and Its Variations The old argument over whether domestic slavery represented productive labor seems almost beside the point. Older scholarly generations tended to depreciate the significance of domestic work, in part because women did it. In recent years, historians have come to appreciate the productive work that went on in the chapter 5 104 domestic context and the significant roles that women played in medieval and early modern households, where domestics, both slave and free, participated in artisan production. Many households produced most of the common clothing and utensils for internal consumption, and the workshops of artisans were extensions of the household and often in the house itself. The work of domestics also allowed the free members of the family to devote themselves to other productive pursuits. Towns and cities in pre-modern eras had close connections to the countryside, and domestic slaves helped with agricultural chores on a seasonal basis.1 The author of the quotation at the head of this chapter found documents from two enslaved sisters, Johana and Ursola, that recount their labors over a period of a decade and a half in mid-fifteenth-century Valencia. They worked in their owner’s townhouse in the city of Valencia and also on his rural estate. In the house they made bread, cooked, cleaned, and swept. They found their laundry duties especially taxing, as they were required to wash, scrub, and rinse the clothing in nearly boiling water. All this could be part of the regular duties of household servants, slave or free. In addition, though, they were involved in many productive and supporting activities far from the home. On the estate, they picked fruit and sold it in the market. They worked in the fields and orchards at other crucial periods of the agricultural year: when the wine grapes were gathered, when the grain was harvested, and when the olive oil was made.2 Theirs is a story that many domestic slaves could have told at any time from ancient to early modern times. It shows that even slaves considered as domestics worked outside the home as part of their regular duties. It also alerts us to gender divisions in the sort of work slaves did. Johana and Ursola did not tend the animals on the estate, as that job typically and almost exclusively fell to men. Variety in occupations and tasks was a constant for slaves in Iberia. Regardless of the period, prospective purchasers of slaves made a decision, based on at least an implicit cost-benefit analysis, that a slave was cheaper than a paid worker.3 During Roman times, the wealthy and even the moderately well-off householders of Hispania employed slaves as domestic servants. Like their contemporaries elsewhere in the Roman world, they assigned their slaves to all types of household duties, as maids, guards, repairmen, and cooks. The evidence from inscriptions on memorial stones reveals a number of different occupations that doubtless gave their practitioners even more responsible roles. These included nutrix (nurse) and ornatrix (female hairdresser), common occupations in any slaveholding society, and slave occupations as paedagogus (teacher) and medicus (physician) were not uncommon in Roman times.4 The use of slaves in similar roles continued throughout the Visigothic period. 105 To Work as a Slave The Muslims of Iberia made use of their slaves in a variety of ways, commonly...