Captives and Their Saviors in the Medieval Crown of Aragon

2. Life in Captivity

37 C h a p t e r 2 Life i n Capt iv i ty For those captives who survived the initial capture and the hurried flight that followed, a hard life awaited. At best, they became hostages waiting for embassies and ransomers to come and rescue them. At worst, they were slaves, strangers in a foreign land, torn from family and friends, toiling daily in the harshest labor, underfed, at times mistreated , sometimes brutally. For the majority it was a life they would never escape in spite of the best efforts of their families and others in the Crown of Aragon. This chapter will study the conditions experienced by captives in their daily lives. What was it like to live in captivity? What kind of work did captives do? Where did they live? What did they eat? As the details emerge, we must keep in mind that the conditions of captivity were well known back home and the harsh life of the captives, at times exaggerated for effect, became a significant aspect of the propaganda used by those who worked on their behalf. The suffering of the captives and the fear that they might convert to Islam became important motivating forces in the efforts to set them free. y y C APTIVES 38 Any discussion on life in captivity must begin by addressing the captive’s legal status and a definition of his condition. Was the captive a slave? This question is partly demanded by the sources themselves, which do not use the words captive (cautivo, captivi, catiu) and slave (esclavo, servus, esclau) interchangeably . The two terms meant different things, even if the difference was a subtle one. In recent years, many who have written about captivity have compared captives to slaves, with some authors closely linking the two conditions.1 To a point they are correct to make this connection. The natal alienation that resulted in a loss of freedom and rights, the subjugation to the master’s will and dependence on the master for basic survival, the forced labor and services captives were forced to render, and the loss of honor associated with captivity meant that the captive and the slave shared many similar experiences.2 In spite of these similarities, however, there were two significant differences between the two. The first is highlighted in both Muslim and Christian legal codes. The Malikı legal school, which was dominant in Granada and the Maghrib in the Middle Ages, permitted prisoners of war to be executed, enslaved, or ransomed.3 This view allowed for a distinction between the prisoner who is made a slave and the prisoner who is set aside for ransom or exchange, allowing for both types of bondage and accepting the possibility of ransom and liberation.4 Consequently, Christian captives could expect that Muslim authorities would acquiesce to their 1. See, for example, Davis, Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters, in which Davis makes little distinction between the two; Colley’s recent Captives follows a similar path, as she uses slavery and captivity almost interchangeably, again equating the two terms; Yvonne Friedman’s Encounter between Enemies is somewhat ambiguous as to the differences between the captive and the slave, if any. 2. In these categories, I have been influenced by the work of Patterson in Slavery and Social Death, 1–14; Davis, The Problem of Slavery, 31–35; Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery, 1–9. 3. Khadduri and Liebesny, Origin and Development of Islamic Law, 356; also Ruxton, Mâliki Law, II:3:2:4. 4. Charouiti Hasnaoui, “Esclavos y cautivos según la ley Islámica,” 3–8. 39 freedom if a ransom or exchange were involved. The captives could also expect that their own compatriots would make every effort to free them, as the law of the Christian states of the Iberian Peninsula made explicit the captive’s right to be freed.5 For José María Ramos y Loscertales, one of the earliest scholars to write about captivity in the Crown of Aragon, this was critical, as he saw the possibility of being ransomed as the defining characteristic that separated the captive from the slave.6 Moreover, the access to freedom available to the captive was different from the manumission that slaves sometimes received. Manumission was a personal exchange between a master and a slave. Ransoming , on the other hand, functioned on a much broader level. It was the right of a captive...