Slavery in the Renaissance

Histories of the Renaissance tend to be pretty self-congratulatory, even now, and we tend to forget the women who were scrubbing the floors and washing the linen of these great humanists. Most of those humanists had domestic slaves in their households, and that is a side of the Renaissance that we really need to uncover and think carefully about. There is also a sense in which longer histories of slavery often skip over the later Middle Ages. I think we are all profoundly aware of slavery in the ancient world, and we are all profoundly aware of plantation slavery in a later period, as we should be; however, we often tend to miss this period in the 14th and 15th centuries, when huge numbers of people were being trafficked around the Mediterranean, living stories of extraordinary suffering and often extraordinary resilience.

I have been looking mostly at slavery in late medieval Christian Europe, including Dubrovnik in Croatia, which was then known as Ragusa. One can find slaves in areas around the coast of Italy, such as in Sicily and Sardinia, and also Crete. You can then trace around across the ports of southern France and right around the Iberian Peninsula as well. It is largely a coastal phenomenon, but then it moves into the lands of what we now know as Italy and Iberia. Things get really interesting once you move a little bit further north, in fact. It is very much a slaving zone focused on Mediterranean society. As you move further north, you do not find enslaved people in the later Middle Ages.

Most of them were trafficked women working in domestic roles in households across the Mediterranean. That is not to say that no men were enslaved in this period. Men certainly were, too. It is not to say that there were not people being used in agricultural work; that was also happening. However, the particular demographic and socioeconomic patterns we are seeing at this point mean that the most lucrative thing for owners and traffickers to do was to place women in domestic slavery.

It may be obvious that much of the domestic slavery must have involved sex work as well. A lot of that seems to have been sex trafficking, though theoretically that was forbidden. However, that was quite clearly what was going on in many of these cases. People could be enslaved for a number of reasons; they could be enslaved through capture in war, according to the laws of war in various cultures across the Mediterranean.

They were not supposed to be enslaved if they were Christian. Canon law said that Christians should not enslave other Christians, but that left several loopholes and questions about different sects and movements, which certainly were Christian, but which some Catholics were able to claim did not count.

We also, extraordinarily, have records of litigation sometimes initiated by the enslaved people themselves. Part of the reason for that is that most of southern Europe came under Roman law, but there were also a range of other kinds of laws in operation. There was canon law, which is the law of the church. There were customary laws which were different in different localities. There were statute laws of particular cities. All these laws layered onto one another, but not precisely, so there were little gaps, little interstices, between the different forms of law. I have been particularly interested in the ways in which slaves themselves were able to exploit these gaps between different kinds of law, push them apart and take cases to court, where they could seek slight betterments in their conditions by working with different kinds of laws that were in operation in that period.

She took the case to court and argued her case, which is just extraordinary. We do not know precisely the mechanisms by which someone in such an utterly disempowered position was able to do this, but she brought her case, and the court decided in her favor. The commune of Genoa, represented by a set of judges, decided that Maria was a Christian and, therefore, should not have been enslaved. The people who bought her claimed that they rightfully bought her, because she had been enslaved by the laws of war. Maria put canon law, which said Christians could not be enslaved, against the laws of war, which said people could be enslaved through war – and she won her case.

There was a sting in the tail, very sadly, because the men who trafficked her then said, well, if we did not buy her as a slave because she was a Christian, then we ransomed her from the Ottoman Turks. If we ransomed her, we paid that ransom and, therefore, she owes us the money for that. Of course, Maria had no money with which to pay them, so she then found herself in debt bondage to them for an indefinite amount of time until she could pay the money back. Ultimately, this is a very sad story, but it shows us an enslaved person able to push apart these gaps between different kinds of law.

There is a particularly moving case in Dubrovnik from the early 14th century of a woman named Dabracha, who saved up her peculium to buy her freedom, but there was no way she could save up enough. Rather wonderfully, her sister, a woman named Zueta, helped her by providing half of the sum of money that Dabracha needed in order to purchase her freedom. Even this was not enough. The only way Dabracha could actually raise enough money to purchase her manumission, or her freedom, was by selling her labor to another man. She sold her labor for a set number of years, so she effectively exchanged a slavery contract, which is described in the sources as usque ad mortem – right up to death – for a contract of indentured labor, which says usque ad quattuor annos – up to four years. She sold the labor to work for someone else for four years, plus the money from her sister, plus her own savings. It is a rather extraordinary story of family solidarity.

The councilors and judges of Dubrovnik set them free. We know about this partly because there was then a long battle from the man who bought them with the people that he had apparently commissioned to go off and find him some slaves in the countryside so that he could get compensation. That whole process of seeking compensation also tells us about the extraordinary courage of these girls.

I came across a very interesting case of a woman in Perpignan – now in southern France, then part of the Kingdom of Aragon – and this woman was pregnant. Before she had the baby, she went to court to claim that the father of this child was not her owner but a local miller from a nearby village called Elne. By Roman law, that should not have made any difference, because the child would inherit the mother's status, but in this case this woman knew that there were question marks over how that status would in fact be inherited and that local customary law was so emphatically patrilineal that the child could possibly inherit the status of the father. It really mattered to her to go to court to claim that the father was this miller rather than her owner. We do have a situation in which children are supposed to inherit the status of their mothers, yet we find a number of cases where that is not what happens because of a clash of different legal norms. We also find a number of cases of these extraordinarily courageous mothers who somehow get themselves to court to argue the case for their children.

What is also very striking is that in this period race did not seem to play a huge role in the ways in which people were thinking about slavery. Religion did, and geographical provenance did, in the sense that this had everything to do with geopolitical shifts. In some ways, of course, we might want to think about religion, ethnicity and geopolitics as related to concepts of race, but it was certainly not racialized in the way that slavery was in a later period. What is very striking is that over the course of the 15th century, slavery does become increasingly racialized. Part of that was due to lack of access to Black Sea ports, particularly after the fall of Constantinople in 1453, and it was also due to Portuguese slaving expeditions and expansion down the west coast of Africa.

There were geopolitical shifts and shifts in who is being enslaved, and there were discourses that accompanied that which justified slavery increasingly in explicitly racialized terms. However, that was really toward the end of the period I am looking at, and it is very striking that most of the time this phenomenon was not conceived of in such terms. There was a very strong sense that to be enslaved was bad luck, that it was to do with a set of contingent circumstances that placed an individual in a horrible situation.

To me, the other really interesting feature was the ways in which people in positions of extreme oppression were able to use law. Their understanding of legal mechanisms, their understanding of what law could offer them and the possibility of using the courts to improve their circumstances is really extremely interesting. I think that legal consciousness is a feature of the Middle Ages that deserves to be taken very seriously.

The other striking thing, of course, is that this was also a period when humanists and intellectuals were talking about liberty – concepts of liberty and freedom in an intellectual, political-theoretical sense – more than ever. Trying to address head-on the hypocrisies or dissonances between the prevalence of slavery in this period and this discourse of liberty is really important ethically.

The second misconception I would like to address is the self-congratulatory narrative of the Renaissance to which we are so often drawn. The sense that these intellectual shifts and paradigm-shifting ways of thinking about political theory, life and art are underpinned by stories of exploitation and oppression is extremely pressing.

The third misconception is that people in these situations are just victims. Many of these people were victim-survivors. Their stories of resilience, legal know-how and courage are really extraordinary, and their humanity deserves our attention.

Editor’s note: This article has been faithfully transcribed from the original interview filmed with the author, and carefully edited and proofread. Edit date: 2025