Bernard Lewis. Race and Slavery in the Middle East, Oxford Univ Press 1994.
Chapter. 1 Slavery
In 1842 the British Consul General in Morocco, as part of his government's
worldwide endeavor to bring about the abolition of slavery or at least the
curtailment of the slave trade, made representations to the sultan of that
country asking him what measures, if any, he had taken to accomplish this
desirable objective. The sultan replied, in a letter expressing evident astonishment, that
"the traffic in slaves is a matter on which all sects and nations have
agreed from the time of the sons of Adam . . . up to this day." The sultan
continued that he was "not aware of its being prohibited by the laws of any
sect, and no one need ask this question, the same being manifest to both high
and low and requires no more demonstration than the light of day.''
The sultan was only slightly out of date concerning the enactment of laws
to abolish or limit the slave trade, and he was sadly right in his general historic
perspective. The institution of slavery had indeed been practiced from time
immemorial. It existed in all the ancient civilizations of Asia, Africa, Europe,
and pre-Columbian America. It had been accepted and even endorsed by
Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, as well as other religions of the world.
In the ancient Middle East, as elsewhere, slavery is attested from the very
earliest written records, among the Sumerians, the Babylonians, the Egyptians, and
other ancient peoples. The earliest slaves, it would seem, were
captives taken in warfare. Their numbers were augmented from other sources
of supply. In pre-classical antiquity, most slaves appear to have been the
property of kings, priests, and temples, and only a relatively small proportion
were in private possession. They were employed to till the fields and tend the
flocks of their royal and priestly masters but otherwise seem to have played
little role in economic production, which was mostly left to small farmers,
tenants, and sharccroppers and to artisans and journeymen. The slave population was
also recruited by the sale, abandonment, or kidnapping of small
children. Free persons could sell themselves or, more frequently, their offspring into
slavery. They could be enslaved for insolvency, as could be the
persons offered by them as pledges. In some systems, notably that of Rome,
free persons could also be enslaved for a variety of offenses against the law.
Both the Old and New Testaments recognize and accept the institution of
slavery. Both from time to time insist on the basic humanity of the slave, and
the consequent need to treat him humanely. The Jews are frequently reminded, in both
Bible and Talmud, that they too were slaves in Egypt and
should therefore treat their slaves decently. Psalm 123, which compares the
worshipper's appeal to God for mercy with the slave's appeal to his master, is
cited to enjoin slaveowners to treat their slaves with compassion. A verse in
the book of Job has even been interpreted as an argument against slavery as
such: "Did not He that made me in the womb make him [the slave]? And did
not One fashion us both?" (Job 31:15). This probably means no more, however, than
that the slave is a fellow human being and not a mere chattel. The
same is true of the much-quoted passage in the New Testament, that "there is
neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male
nor female; for ye are all one in Christ Jesus." These and similar verses were
not understood to mean that ethnic, social, and gender differences were unimportant or
should be abolished, only that they conferred no religious privilege. From many
allusions, it is clear that slavery is accepted in the New
Testament as a fact of life. Some passages in the Pauline Epistles even endorse it.
Thus in the Epistle to Philemon, a runaway slave is returned to his
master; in Ephesians 6, the duty owed by a slave to his master is compared
with the duty owed by a child to his parent, and the slave is enjoined "to be
obedient to them that are your masters, according to the flesh, in fear and
trembling, in singleness of your heart, as unto Christ." Parents and masters
are likewise enjoined to show consideration for their children and slaves. All
humans, of the true faith, were equal in the eyes of God and in the afterlife
but not necessarily in the laws of man and in this world. Those not of the true
faith -- whichever it was -- were in another, and in most respects an inferior,
category. In this respect, the Greek perception of the barbarian and the
Judeo-Christian-lslamic perception of the unbeliever coincide.
There appear indeed to have been some who opposed slavery, usually as it
was practiced but sometimes even as such. In the Greco-Roman world, both
the Cynics and the Stoics are said to have rejected slavery as contrary to
justice, some basing their opposition on the unity of the human race, and the
Roman jurists even held that slavery was contrary to nature and maintained
only by "human" law. There is no evidence that either jurists or philosophers
sought its abolition, and even their theoretical opposition has been questioned. Much of
it was concerned with moral and spiritual themes -- the true
freedom of the good man, even when enslaved, and the enslavement of the
evil freeman to his passions. These ideas, which recur in Jewish and Christian
writings, were of little help to those who suffered the reality of slavery.
Philo, the Alexandrian Jewish philosopher, claims that a Jewish sect actually
renounced slavery in practice. In a somewhat idealized account of the Essenes, he
observes that they practiced a form of primitive communism, sharing homes and
property and pooling their earnings. Furthermore,
"not a single slave is to be found among them, but all are free, exchanging
services with each other, and they denounce the owners of slaves, not merely
for their injustice in outraging the law of equality, but also for their impiety in
annulling the statute of Nature, who mother-like bore and reared all men alike,
and created them genuine brothers, not in mere name, but in very reality,
though this kinship has been put to confusion by the triumph of malignant
covetousness, which has wrought estrangement instead of affinity and enmity
instead of friendship. "
This view, if it was indeed held and put into practice, was unique in the
ancient Middle East. Jews, Christians, and pagans alike owned slaves and
exercised the rights and powers accorded to them by their various religious
laws. In all communities, there were men of compassion who urged slaveowners to
treat their slaves humanely, and there was even some attempt to
secure this by law. But the institution of slavery as such was not seriously
questioned, and was indeed often defended in terms of either Natural Law or
Divine Dispensation. Thus Aristotle defends the condition of slavery and even
the forcible enslavement of those who are "by nature slaves, for whom to be
governed by this kind of authority is beneficial"; other Greek philosophers
express similar ideas, particularly about enslaved captives from conquered
peoples. For such, slavery is not only right; it is also to their advantage.
The ancient Israelites did not claim that slavery was beneficial to the
slaves, but, like the ancient Greeks, they felt the need to explain and justify
the enslavement of their neighbors. In this, as in other matters, they sought a
religious rather than a philosophical sanction and found it in the biblical story
of the curse of Ham. Significantly, this curse was restricted to one line only of
the descendants of Ham, namely, the children of Canaan, whom the Israelites
had subjugated when they conquered the Promised Land, and did not affect
the others.
The Qur'an, like the Old and the New Testaments, assumes the existence
of slavery. It regulates the practice of the institution and thus implicitly accepts it. The
Prophet Muhammad and those of his Companions who could
afford it themselves owned slaves; some of them acquired more by conquest.
But Qur'anic legislation, subsequently confirmed and elaborated in the
Holy Law, brought two major changes to ancient slavery which were to
have far-reaching effects. One of these was the presumption of freedom; the
other, the ban on the enslavement of free persons except in strictly defined
circumstances .
The Qur'an was promulgated in Mecca and Medina in the seventh century,
and the background against which Qur'anic legislation must be seen is ancient
Arabia. The Arabs practiced a form of slavery, similar to that which existed in
other parts of the ancient world. The Qur'an accepts the institution, though it
may be noted that the word 'abd (slave) is rarely used, being more commonly
replaced by some periphrasis such as ma malakat aymanukum, "that which
your right hands own." The Qur'an recognizes the basic inequality between
master and slave and the rights of the former over the latter (XVI:71;
XXX:28). It also recognizes concubinage (IV:3; XXIII:6; XXXIII:50-52;
LXX:30). It urges, without actually commanding, kindness to the slave
(IV:36; IX:60; XXIV:58) and recommends, without requiring, his liberation
by purchase or manumission. The freeing of slaves is recommended both for
the expiation of sins (IV:92; V:92; LVIII:3) and as an act of simple benevolence (II:177;
XXIV:33; XC:13). It exhorts masters to allow slaves to earn or
purchase their own freedom. An important change from pagan, though not
from Jewish or Christian, practices is that in the strictly religious sense, the
believing slave is now the brother of the freeman in Islam and before God,
and the superior of the free pagan or idolator (II:221). This point is emphasized and
elaborated in innumerable hadlths (traditions), in which the Prophet
is quoted as urging considerate and sometimes even equal treatment for
slaves, denouncing cruelty, harshness, or even discourtesy, recommending the
liberation of slaves, and reminding the Muslims that his apostolate was to free
and slave alike.
Though slavery was maintained, the Islamic dispensation enormously improved the
position of the Arabian slave, who was now no longer merely a
chattel but was also a human being with a certain religious and hence a social
status and with certain quasi-legal rights. The early caliphs who ruled the
Islamic community after the death of the Prophet also introduced some further reforms
of a humanitarian tendency. The enslavement of free Muslims
was soon discouraged and eventually prohibited. It was made unlawful for a
freeman to sell himself or his children into slavery, and it was no longer
permitted for freemen to be enslaved for either debt or crime, as was usual in
the Roman world and, despite attempts at reform, in parts of Christian Europe until at
least the sixteenth century. It became a fundamental principle of
Islamic jurisprudence that the natural condition, and therefore the presumed
status, of mankind was freedom, just as the basic rule concerning actions is
permittedness: what is not expressly forbidden is permitted; whoever is not
known to be a slave is free. This rule was not always strictly observed.
Rebels and heretics were sometimes denounced as infidels or, worse, apostates, and
reduced to slavery, as were the victims of some Muslim rulers in
Africa, who proclaimed jihad against their neighbors, without looking closely
at their religious beliefs, so as to provide legal cover for their enslavement.
But by and large, and certainly in the central lands of Islam, under regimes of
high civilization, the rule was honored, and free subjects of the state, Muslim
and non-Muslim alike, were protected from unlawful enslavement.
Since all human beings were naturally free, slavery could only arise from
two circumstances: (1) being born to slave parents or (2) being captured in
war. The latter was soon restricted to infidels captured in a jihad.
These reforms seriously limited the supply of new slaves. Abandoned and
unclaimed children could no longer be adopted as slaves, as was a common
practice in antiquity, and free persons could no longer be enslaved. Under
Islamic law, the slave population could only be recruited, in addition to birth
and capture, by importation, the last either by purchase or in the form of
tribute from beyond the Islamic frontiers. In the early days of rapid conquest
and expansion, the holy war brought a plentiful supply of new slaves, but as
the frontiers were gradually stabilized, this supply dwindled to a mere trickle.
Most wars were now conducted against organized armies, like those of the
Byzantines or other Christian states, and with them prisoners of war were
commonly ransomed or exchanged. Within the Islamic frontiers, Islam
spread rapidly among the populations of the newly acquired territories, and
even those who remained faithful to their old religions and lived as protected
persons (dhimmis) under Muslim rule could not, if free, be legally enslaved
unless they had violated the terms of the dhimma, the contract governing their
status, as for example by rebelling against Muslim rule or helping the enemies
of the Muslim state or, according to some authorities, by withholding pa'yment
of the Kharaj or the Jizya, the taxes due from dhimmls to the Muslim state.
In the Islamic empire, the humanitarian tendency of the Qur'an and the
early caliphs was to some extent counteracted by other influences. Notable
among these was the practice of the various conquered peoples and countries
which the Muslims encountered after their expansion, especially in provinces
previously under Roman law. This law, even in its Christianized form, was still
very harsh in its treatment of slaves. Perhaps equally important was the huge
increase in the slave population resulting first from the conquests themselves,
and then from the organization of a great network of importation. These led to
a fall in the cash value and hence the human value of slaves, and to a general
adoption of a harsher tone and severer rules. But even after this stiffening of
attitudes and laws, Islamic practice still represented a vast improvement on that
inherited from antiquity, from Rome, and from Byzantium.
Slaves were excluded from religious functions or from any office involving
jurisdiction over others. Their testimony was not admitted at judicial proceedings. In
penal law, the penalty for an offense against a person, a fine or
bloodwit, was, for a slave, half of that for a freeman. While maltreatment was
deplored, there was no fixed shari'a penalty. In what might be called civil
matters, the slave was a chattel with no legal powers or rights whatsoever. He
could not enter into a contract, hold property, or inherit. If he incurred a fine,
his owner was responsible. He was, however, distinctly better off, in the
matter of rights, than a Greek or Roman slave, since Islamic jurists, and not
only philosophers and moralists, took account of humanitarian considerations. They
laid down, for example, that a master must give his slave medical
attention when required, must give him adequate upkeep, and must support
him in his old age. If a master defaulted on these and other obligations to his
slave, the qadi could compel him to fulfill them or else either to sell or to
emancipate the slave. The master was forbidden to overwork his slave, and if
he did so to the point of cruelty, he was liable to a penalty which was,
however, discretionary and not prescribed by law. A slave could enter into a
contract to earn his freedom, in which case his master had no obliation to pay
for his upkeep. While in theory the slave could not own property, he could be
granted certain rights of ownership for which he paid a fixed sum to his
master.
A slave could marry, but only by consent of the master. Theoretically, a
male slave could marry a free woman, but this was discouraged and in practice
prohibited. A master could not marry his own slave woman unless he first
freed her.
Islamic law provides a number of ways in which a slave could be set free.
One was manumission, accomplished by a formal declaration on the part of
the master and recorded in a certificate which was given to the liberated
slave. The manumission of a slave included the offspring of that slave, and
the jurists specify that if there is any uncertainty about an act of manumission,
the slave has the benefit of the doubt. Another method is a written agreement
by which the master grants liberty in return for a fixed sum. Once such an
agreement has been concluded, the master no longer has the right to dispose
of his slave, whether by sale or gift. The slave is still subject to certain legal
disabilities, but in most respects is virtually free. Such an agreement, once
entered into, may be terminated by the slave but not by the master. Children
born to the slave after the entry into force of the contract are born free. The
master may bind himself to liberate a slave at some specified future time. He
may also bind his heirs to liberate a slave after his death. The law schools
differ somewhat on the rules regarding this kind of liberation.
In addition to all these, which depend on the will of the master, there are
various legal causes which may lead to liberation, independently of the will of
the master. The commonest is a legal judgment by a qadi ordering a master to
emancipate a slave whom he has maltreated. A special case is that of the umm
walad, a slave woman who bears a son to her master, and thereby acquires
certain irrevocable legal rights.
Non-Muslim subjects of the Muslim state, that is, dhimmis, were in practice allowed to
own slaves; and Christian and Jewish families who could afford
it owned and employed slaves in the same way as their Muslim counterparts.
They were not permitted to own Muslim slaves; and if a slave owned by a
dhimmi embraced Islam, his owner was legally obliged to free or sell him.
Jews and Christians were of course not permitted to have Muslim concubines,
and were indeed usually debarred by their own religious authorities -- not
always effectively -- from sexual access to their slaves. Jewish slaves, acquired
through privateering in the Mediterranean and slave raiding in Eastern
Europe, were often redeemed and set free by their local co-religionists. The
vastly more numerous Christian slaves -- apart from West Europeans, whose
ransoms could be arranged from home -- were for the most part doomed to
remain. Sometimes, Christian and Jewish slaveowners tried to convert their
domestic slaves to their own religions. Jews were indeed required by rabbinic
law to try to persuade their slaves to accept conversion with circumcision and
ritual immersion. A form of semi-conversion, whereby the slave accepted
some basic commandments and observances, but not the full rigor of the
Mosaic law, was widely practiced. According to Jewish law, a converted or
even semi-converted slave could not be sold to a Gentile. If the owner in fact
so sold him or her, the slave was to be set free. Conversely, a slave who
refused even semi-conversion was, after a stipulated interval of time, to be
sold to a Gentile. Muslim authorities, both jurists and rulers, took different
views of this. Conversion from Islam was of course a capital offense, and some
jurists held that only conversion to Islam was lawful. Others, however, saw no
objection to conversion between non-Muslim religions, provided that the
converted slaves had reached the age of reason and changed their religion of
their own free will.
Though a free Muslim could not be enslaved, conversion to Islam by a
non-Muslim slave did not require his liberation. His slave status was not
affected by his Islam, nor was that of a Muslim child born to slave parents.
There were occasional slave rebellions and, from the rules and regulations
about runaway slaves, it would appear that such escapes were not infrequent.
Slaves from neighboring countries might have some chance of returning to
their homes, and examples are known of European slaves in the Ottoman
lands escaping to Europe, where some indeed wrote memoirs or accounts of
their captivity. The chances of a slave from the steppe-lands or from Africa
finding his way back were remote.
As we have seen, the slave population was recruited in four main ways: by
capture, tribute, offspring, and purchase.
Capture: In the early centuries of Islam, during the period of the conquest
and expansion, this was the most important source. With the stabilization of
the frontier, the numbers recruited in this way diminished, and eventually
provided only a very small proportion of slave requirements. Frontier warfare
and naval raiding yielded some captives, but these were relatively few and
were usually exchanged. In later centuries, warfare in Africa or India supplied
some slaves by capture. With the spread of Islam, and the acceptance of
dhimml status by increasing numbers of non-Muslims, the possibilities for
recruitment by capture were severely restricted.
Tribute: Slaves sometimes formed part of the tribute required from vassal
states beyond the Islamic frontiers. The first such treaty ever made, that of the
year 31 of the Hijra (= 652 A.D.), with the black king of Nubia, included an
annual levy of slaves to be provided from Nubia. This may indeed have been
the reason why Nuhia was for a long time not conquered. The stipulated
delivery of some hundreds of male and female slaves, later supplemented by
elephants, giraffes, and other wild beasts, continued at least until the twelfth
century, when it was disrupted by a series of bitter wars between the Muslim
rulers of Egypt and the Christian kings of Nubia. Similar agreements, providing for the
delivery of a tribute of slaves, were imposed by the early Arab
conquerors on neighboring princes in Iran and Central Asia, but were of
briefer duration.
Offspring: The recruitment of the slave population by natural increase
seems to have been small and, right through to modern times, insufficient to
maintain numbers. This is in striking contrast with conditions in the New
World, where the slave population increased very rapidly. Several factors
contributed to this difference, perhaps the most important being that the slave
population in the Islamic Middle East was constantly drained by the liberation
of slaves -- sometimes as an act of piety, most commonly through the recognition and
liberation, by a freeman, of his own offspring by a slave mother.
There were also other reasons for the low natural increase of the slave population in
the Islamic world. They include
- 1. Castration. A fair proportion of male slaves were imported as eunuchs and
thus precluded from having offspring. Among these were many who otherwise, by the
wealth and power which they acquired, might have founded
families .
- 2. Another group of slaves who rose to positions of great power, the military
slaves, were normally liberated at some stage in their career, and their
offspring were therefore free and not slaves.
- 3. In general, only the lower orders of slaves -- menial, domestic, and manual
workers -- remained in the condition of servitude and transmitted that condition to their
descendants. There were not many such descendants -- casual
mating was not permitted and marriage was not encouraged.
- 4. There was a high death toll among all classes of slaves, including great
military commanders as well as humble menials. Slaves came mainly from
remote places, and, lacking immunities, died in large numbers from endemic as well as
epidemic diseases. As late as the nineteenth century, Wes
ern travelers in North Africa and Egypt noted the high death rate among
imported black slaves.
Purchase: This came to be by far the most important means for the legal
acquisition of new slaves. Slaves were purchased on the frontiers of the Islamic world
and then imported to the major centers, where there were slave
markets from which they were widely distributed. In one of the sad paradoxes
of human history, it was the humanitarian reforms brought by Islam that
resulted in a vast development of the slave trade inside, and still more outside,
the Islamic empire. In the Roman world, the slave population was occasionally recruited
from outside, when a new territory was conquered or a barbarian invasion repelled, but
mostly, slaves came from internal sources. This was
not possible in the Islamic empire, where, although slavery was maintained,
enslavement was banned. The result was an increasingly massive importation
of slaves from the outside. Like enslavement, mutilation was forbidden by
Islamic law. The great numbers of eunuchs needed to preserve the sanctity of
palaces, homes, and some holy places had to be imported from outside or, as
often happened, "manufactured" at the frontier. In medieval and Ottoman
times the two main sources of eunuchs were Slavs and Ethiopians (Habash, a
term which commonly included all the peoples of the Horn of Africa). Eunuchs were
also recruited among Greeks (Rum), West Africans (Takrurl, pl.
Takarina), Indians, and occasionally West Europeans.
The slave population of the Islamic world was recruited from many lands.
In the earliest days, slaves came principally from the newly conquered
countries -- from the Fertile Crescent and Egypt, from Iran and North Africa,
from Central Asia, India, and Spain. Most of these slaves had a cultural level
at least as high as that of their Arab masters, and by conversion and manumission they
were rapidly absorbed into the general population. As the supply of
slaves by conquest and capture diminished, the needs of the slave market
were met, more and more, by importation from beyond the frontier. Small
numbers of slaves were brought from India, China, Southeast Asia, and the
Byzantine Empire, most of them specialists and technicians of one kind or
another. The vast majority of unskilled slaves, however, came from the lands
immediately north and south of the Islamic world -- whites from Europe and
the Eurasian steppes, blacks from Africa south of the Sahara. Among white
Europeans and black Africans alike, there was no lack of enterprising merchants and
middlemen, eager to share in this profitable trade, who were
willing to capture or kidnap their neighbors and deliver them, as slaves, to a
ready and expanding market. In Europe there was also an important trade in
slaves, Muslim, Jewish, pagan, and even Orthodox Christian, recruited by
capture and bought for mainly domestic use.
Central and East European slaves, generally known as Saqaliba (i.e.,
Slavs), were imported by three main routes: overland via France and Spain,
from Eastern Europe via the Crimea, and by sea across the Mediterranean.
They were mostly but not exclusively Slavs. Some were captured by Muslim
naval raids on European coasts, particularly the Dalmatian. Most were supplied by
European, especially Venetian, slave merchants, who delivered cargoes of them to the
Muslim markets in Spain and North Africa. The Saqaliba
were prominent in Muslim Spain and to a lesser extent in North Africa but
played a minor role in the East. With the consolidation of powerful states in
Christian Europe, the supply of West European slaves dried up and was
maintained only by privateering and coastal raiding from North Africa.
Black slaves were brought into the Islamic world by a number of routes --
from West Africa across the Sahara to Morocco and Tunisia, from Chad across
the desert to Libya, from East Africa down the Nile to Egypt, and across the
Red Sea and Indian Ocean to Arabia and the Persian Gulf. Turkish slaves
from the steppe-lands were marketed in Samarkand and other Muslim Central Asian
cities and from there exported to Iran, the Fertile Crescent, and
beyond. Caucasians, of increasing importance in the later centuries, were
brought from the land bridge between the Black Sea and the Caspian and
were marketed mainly in Aleppo and Mosul.
By Ottoman times, the first for which we have extensive documentation,
the pattern of importation had changed. At first, the expanding Ottoman
Empire, like the expanding Arab Empire of earlier times, recruited its slaves
by conquest and capture, and great numbers of Balkan Christians were forcibly brought
into Ottoman service. The distinctively Ottoman institution of
the devsirme, the levy of boys from the Christian village population, made it
possible, contrary to previous Islamic law and practice, to recruit slaves from
the subject peoples of the conquered provinces. The devsirme slaves were
not servants or menials, however, but were groomed for the service of the
state in military and civil capacities. For a long time, most of the grand viziers
and military commanders of the Ottoman forces were recruited in this way. In
the early seventeenth century, the devsirme was abandoned; by the end of the
seventeenth century, the Ottoman advance into Europe had been decisively
halted and reversed. Sea raiders operating out of North African ports continued to bring
European captives, but these did not significantly add to the slave
populations. Pretty girls disappeared into the harem; men often had the
choice of being ransomed or joining their captors -- a choice of which many
availed themselves. The less fortunate, like the Muslim captives who fell to
the European maritime powers, served in the galleys.
The slave needs of the Ottoman Empire were now met from new sources.
One of these was the Caucasians -- the Georgians, Circassians, and related
peoples, famous for providing beautiful women and brave and handsome
men. The former figured prominently in the harems, the latter in the armies
and administrations of the Ottoman and also the Persian states. The supply of
these was reduced but not terminated by the Russian conquest of the
Caucasus in the early years of the nineteenth century. Another source of
supply was the Tatar khanate of the Crimea, whose raiders every year rode far
and wide in Central and Eastern Europe, carrying off great numbers of male
and female slaves. These were brought to the Crimea and shipped thence to
the slave markets in Istanbul and other Turkish cities. This trade came to an
end with the Russian annexation of the Crimea in 1783 and the extinction of
Tatar independence.
Deprived of most of their sources of white slaves, the Ottomans turned
more and more to Africa, which in the course of the nineteenth century came
to provide the overwhelming majority of slaves used in Muslim countries from
Morocco to Asia. According to a German report published in 1860,
"the black slaves, at that time, were recruited mainly by raiding and kidnapping
from Sennaar, Kordofan, Darfur, Nubia, and other places in inner Africa; the
white mostly through voluntary sale on the part of their relatives in the independent
lands of the Caucasus (Lesghi, Daghestani, and Georgian women, rarely
men). Those offered for sale were already previously of servile status or were
slave children by birth."
The need, from early medieval times onward, to import large and growing
numbers of slaves led to a rapid increase, in all the lands beyond the frontiers
of the Islamic world, of both slave raiding and slave trading -- the one to
procure and maintain an adequate supply of the required commodity, the
other to ensure its efficient distribution and delivery. In the ancient world,
where most slaves other than war captives were of local provenance, slave
trading was a simple and mostly local affair, often combined with other articles of
commerce. In the Islamic world, where slaves were transported over
great distances from their places of origin, the slave trade was more complex
and more specialized with a network of trade routes and markets extending
all over the Islamic world and far beyond its frontiers and involving commercial relations
with suppliers in Christian Europe, in the Turkish steppe-lands,
and in black Africa. In every important city there was a slave market, usually
called Suq al-Raqiq. When new supplies were brought, government inspectors
usually took the first choice, then officials, then private persons. It would
seem that slaves were not normally sold in open markets but in decently
covered places -- a practice which continued in some areas to the nineteenth,
in others till the twentieth, century.
There is a fair amount of information on slave prices, most of it too
heterogeneous in date and provenance to provide more than a general impression. The
best-documented data come from medieval Egypt and show a remarkable consistency
in price levels. Slave girls averaged twenty dinars (gold
pieces), corresponding, at the rate of gold to silver current at that time, to 266
dirhams (silver pieces). Other medieval data show somewhat higher prices.
Black slaves seem to have cost from two to three hundred dirhams; black
eunuchs, at least two or three times as much. Female black slaves were sold at
five hundred dirhams or so; trained singing girls or other performers, at ten or
even twenty thousand. White slaves, mainly for military purposes, were more
expensive. Prices of three hundred dirhams are quoted for Turks near the
source in Central Asia, and much higher prices elsewhere. In Baghdad they
fetched four to five hundred dirhams, while a white slave girl could be sold for
a thousand dinars or more. The mid-nineteenth-century German report
from Turkey quotes prices of four thousand to five thousand piasters, or two
hundred to three hundred dollars, as the current price in Istanbul for a
"trained, strong, black slave," while "for white slave girls of special beauty,
fifty thousand piasters and more are paid." In general, eunuchs fetched
higher prices than other males, younger slaves were worth more than older
slaves, and slave women, whether for work or pleasure, were more expensive
than males. Olufr Eigilsson, an Icelandic Lutheran pastor who was carried off
to captivity with his family and many of his flock when his native village was
raided by Barbary Corsairs in 1627 and who wrote an account of his adventures, notes
that his young maidservant was sold for seven hundred dollars
and later resold for a thousand.
Slaves were employed in a number of functions -- in the home and the
shop, in agriculture and industry, in the military, as well as in specialized
tasks. The Islamic world did not operate on a slave system of production, as is
said of classical antiquity, but slavery was not entirely domestic either. Slave
laborers of various kinds were of some importance in medieval times, especially where
large-scale enterprises were involved, and they continued to be
into the nineteenth century. The most important slaves, however, those of
whom we have the fullest information, were domestic and commercial, and it
is they who were the characteristic slaves of the Muslim world. They seem to
have been mainly blacks, with some Indians, and some whites. ln later times,
for which we have more detailed evidence, it would seem that while the slaves
often suffered appalling privations from the moment of their capture until
their arrival at their final destination, once they were placed with a family they
were reasonably well treated and accepted in some degree as members of the
household. In commerce, slaves were often apprenticed to their masters,
sometimes as assistants, sometimes advancing to become agents or even business
partners.
The slave and also the liberated ex-slave played an important part in
domestic life. Eunuchs were required for the protection and maintenance of
harems, as confidential servants, as palace staff, and also as custodians of
mosques, tombs, and other sacred places. Slave women were required mainly
as concubines and as menials. A Muslim slaveowner was entitled by law to the
sexual enjoyment of his slave women. While free women might own male
slaves, they had of course no equivalent right.
The economic exploitation of slaves, apart from some construction work,
took place mainly in the countryside, away from the cities, and like almost
everything else about rural life is sparsely documented. The medieval Islamic
world was a civilization of cities. Both its law and its literature deal almost
entirely with townspeople, their lives and problems, and remarkably little
information has come down to us concerning life in the villages and the
countryside. Sometimes a dramatic event like the revolt of the Zanj in southern Iraq or
an occasional passing reference in travel literature sheds a sudden
light on life in the countryside. Otherwise, we remain ignorant of what was
happening outside the cities until the sixteenth century, when for the first time
the surviving Ottoman archives make it possible to follow in some detail the
life and activities of rural populations -- and the exploration of this material
has still barely begun. The common view of Islamic slavery as primarily domestic and
military may therefore reflect the bias of our documentation rather
than the reality. There are occasional references, however, to large gangs of
slaves, mostly black, employed in agriculture, in the mines, and in such special tasks
as the drainage of marshes. Some, less fortunate, were hired out by
their owners for piecework. These working slaves had a much harder life. The
most unfortunate of all were those engaged in agricultural and other manual
work and large-scale enterprises, such as for example the Zanj slaves used to
drain the salt flats of southern Iraq, and the blacks employed in the salt mines
of the Sahara and the gold mines of Nubia. These were herded in large
settlements and worked in gangs. Large landowners, or crown lands, often
employed thousands of such slaves. While domestic and commercial slaves
were relatively well-off, these lived and died in wretchedness. Of the Saharan
salt mines it is said that no slave lived there for more than five years. The
cultivation of cotton and sugar, which the Arabs brought from the East across
North Africa and into Spain, most probably entailed some kind of plantation
system. Certainly, the earliest relevant Ottoman records show the extensive
use of slave labor in the state-maintained rice plantations. Some such system, for
cultivation of cotton and sugar, was taken across North Africa into
Spain and perhaps beyond. While economic slave labor was mainly male,
slave women were sometimes also exploited economically. The pre-lslamic
practice of hiring out female slaves as prostitutes is expressly forbidden by
Islamic law but appears to have survived nonetheless.
The military slaves were in a sense the aristocrats of the slave population.
By far the most important among these were the Turks imported from the
Eurasian steppe, from Central Asia, and from what is now Chinese Turkistan.
A similar position was occupied by Slavs in medieval Muslim Spain and North
Africa and, later, by slaves of Balkan and Caucasian origin in the Ottoman
Empire. Black slaves were occasionally employed as soldiers, but this was not
common and was usually of brief duration.
Certainly the most privileged of slaves were the performers. Both slave
boys and slave girls who revealed some talent received musical, literary, and
artistic education. In medieval times most singers, dancers, and musical performers
were, at least in origin, slaves. Perhaps the most famous was Ziryab, a
Persian slave at the court of Baghdad who later went to Spain, where he
became an arbiter of taste and is credited with having introduced asparagus to
Europe. Not a few slaves and freedmen have left their names in Arabic poetry
and history.
In a society where positions of military command and political power were
routinely held by men of slave origin or even status and where a significant
proportion of the free population were born to slave mothcrs, prejudice
against the slave as such, of the Roman or American type, could hardly
develop. Where such prejudice and hostility appear -- and they are often expressed in
literature and other evidence -- they must be attributed to racial
more than to social distinction. The developing pattern of racial specialization
in the use of slaves must surely have contributed greatly to the growth of such
re judice .
Chpt. 9 Slaves in Arms
The military slave, who bears arms and fights for his owner, was a known but
not common figure in antiquity. In the late fifth and early fourth centuries
B.C., the city of Athens was policed by a corps of armed Scythian slaves,
originally numbering some three hundred, who were the property of the city.
Some Roman dignitaries had armed slave bodyguards; some owned gladiators, as men
in other times might own gamecocks or racehorses, but in general
the Greeks and Romans did not approve of the use of slaves in combatant
duties. It was not until the medieval Islamic state that we find military slaves
in significant numbers, forming a substantial and eventually predominant
component in their armies.
The professional slave soldier, so characteristic of later Islamic empires,
was not present in the earliest Islamic regimes. There were indeed slaves who
fought in the army of the Prophet, but they were there as Muslims and as loyal
followers, not as slaves or professionals. Most of them were freed for their
services, and according to an early narrative, when the Prophet appeared
before the walls of the Hijaz town of Ta'if, he sent a crier to announce that
any slave who came out and joined him would be free. Abu Muslim, the first
military leader of the Abbasid revolution which transformed the Islamic state
and society in the mid-eighth century, appealed to slaves to come and join him
and offered freedom to those who responded. So many, we are told, answered
his call that he gave them a separate camp and formed them into a separate
combat unit. During the great expansion of the Arab armies and the accompanying
spread of the Islamic faith in the seventh and early eighth centuries,
mally of the peoples of the conquered countries were captured, enslaved,
convcrted, and liberated, and great numbers of these joined the armies of
Islam. Iranians in the East, Berbers in the West, reinforced the Arab armies
and contributed significantly to the further advance of Islam, eastward into
Central Asia and beyond, westward across North Africa and into Spain.
These were, however, not slaves but freedmen. Though their status was at
first inferior to that of freeborn Arabs, it was certainly not servile, and in time
the differences in rank, pay, and status between free and freed soldiers disappeared.
As so often, the historiographic tradition foreshortens this development and attributes it
to a decree of the Caliph 'Umar, who is said to have
ordered his governors to make the privileges and duties of manumitted and
converted recruits "among the red people" the same as those of the Arabs.
"What is due to these, is due to those; what is due from these, is due from
those." The limitation of this concession to the "red people," a term commonly applied
by the Arabs to the Iranians and later extended to their Central
Asian neighbors, is surely significant. The recruitment of aliens, that is, non-Arabs and
often non-Muslims, was by no means restricted to liberated captives, and the distinction
between freed subjects, free mercenaries, and
bought barbarian slaves is often tenuous.
In recruiting barbarians from the "martial races" beyond the frontiers into
their imperial armies, the Arabs were doing what the Romans and the Chinese had
done centuries before them. In the scale of this recruitment, however, and the
preponderant role acquired by these recruits in the imperial and
eventually metropolitan forces, Muslim rulers went far beyond any precedent.
As early as 766 a Christian clergyman writing in Syriac spoke of the "locust
swarm" of unconverted barbarians -- Sindhis, Alans, Khazars, Turks, and
others -- who served in the caliph's army. In the course of the ninth century,
slave armies appeared all over the Islamic empire. Sometimes, as in North
Africa and later Egypt, they were recruited by ambitious governors seeking to
create autonomous and hereditary principalities and requiring troops who
would be loyal to them against their immediate subjects and their imperial
suzerains. Sometimes it was the caliphs themselves who recruited such armies.
Such, for example, were the palace guards recruited by the Umayyad Caliph
al-Hakam in Cordova and the Abbasid Caliph al-Mu'tasim in Iraq.
This was a new institution in Islam. The patriarchal caliphs, and their
successors for more than a hundred years, had no slave praetorian guards, but
were protected in their palace by a small force of free Arabs and, under the
early Abbasids, freed soldiers and their descendants from Khurasan. Within a
remarkably short time, the slave palace guard became the norm for Muslim
rulers, and rapidly developed into a slave army, serving both to maintain the
ruler in his palace and his capital and, for a sultan, to uphold his imperial
authority in the provinces. In the East, slave soldiers were recruited mainly
among the Turkish and to a lesser extent among the Iranian peoples of the
Eurasian steppe and of Central and inner Asia; in the West, from the Berbers
of North Africa and from the Slavs of Europe. Some soldiers, particularly in
Egypt and North Africa, were brought from among the black peoples farther
south. As the frontiers of Islam steadily expanded through conversion and
annexation, the periphery was pushed farther and farther away, and the enslaved
barbarians came from ever-remoter regions in Asia, Africa, and, to a
very limited extent, Europe.
Some of these soldiers were captured in wars, raids, and forays. The more
usual practice, however, was for them to be purchased, for money, on the
Islamic frontiers. It was in this way that Muslims bought and imported the
Central Asian Turks who came to constitute the vast majority of eastern
Muslim armies. Captured and sold to the Muslims at a very tender age, they
were given a careful and elaborate education and training, not only in the
military arts but also in the norms of Islamic civilization. From their ranks
were drawn the soldiers, then the officers, and finally the commanders of the
armies of Islam. From this it was only a step to the ultimate paradox, the slave
kings who ruled in Cairo, in Delhi, and in other capitals. Even the Ottomans,
though themselves a freeborn imperial dynasty, relied for their infantry on the
celebrated slave corps of Janissaries, and most of the sultans were themselves
sons of slave mothers.
Various explanations have been offered for the reliance of Muslim sovereigns on slave
armies. An obvious merit of the military slave, for the kings or
generals who owned him, was his habit of prompt and unquestioning obedience to
orders -- a quality less likely to be found among freeborn volunteers or
even among conscripts, in the relatively few times and places when conscription was
known or feasible before the nineteenth century. Perhaps the most
convincing explanation of the growth of the slave armies is the eternal need of
autocratic rulers for an armed force which would support and maintain their
rule yet neither limit it with intermediate powers nor threaten it with the
challenge of opposing loyalties. An army constantly renewed by slaves imported from
abroad would form no hereditary nobility; an army manned and
commanded by aliens could neither claim nor create any loyalties or bases of
support among the local population.
Such soldiers, it was assumed, would have no loyalty but to their masters, that is, to the
monarchs who bought and employed them. But their
loyalty, all too often, was to the regiment and to its commanders, many of
whom ultimately themselves became kings. The mamluk sultans and emirs
who ruled Egypt, Syria, and western Arabia for two-and-a-half centuries,
until the Ottoman conquest in 1517, rigorously excluded their own freeborn
and locally born offspring from the apparatus of political and military power,
including even the sultanate itself. They nevertheless succeeded in maintaining their
system for centuries. In part, the common bond of mamluk regiments was ethnic. Many
regiments, and the quarters which they inhabited,
were based on ethnic and even tribal groups. But in the main, the bond was
social rather than racial. At a certain stage in his career, the mamluk was
emancipated, and, on becoming a freeman, himself bought and owned
mamluks who, rather than his physical sons, were his true successors. The
most powerful bond and loyalty, within the mamluk system, was that owed
by the slave to his master, and, after manumission, by the freedman to his
patron.
In the military sense, the slave armies were remarkably effective. In the
later Middle Ages, it was the mamluks of Egypt who finally defeated and
expelled the Crusaders and halted the Mongol advance across the Middle
East, the Ottoman Janissary infantry who conquered Southeastern Europe. It
was in accordance with the logic of the system that the mamluk armies of
Egypt consisted mainly of slaves imported from the Turkish and Circassian
peoples of the Black Sea area, while the Ottoman Janissaries were recruited
mainly from the Slavic and Albanian populations of the Balkans.
Ibn Khaldun, surely the greatest of all Arab historians, writing in the
fourteenth century, saw in the coming of the Turks and in the institution of
slavery by which they came, the manifestation of God's providential concern
for the safety and survival of the Muslim state and people:
"When the [Abbasid] state was drowned in decadence and luxury. . . and
overthrown by the heathen Tatars . . . because the people of the faith had
become deficient in energy and reluctant to rally in defense . . . then it was
God's benevolence that He rescued the faith by reviving its dying breath and
restoring the unity of the Muslims in the Egyptian realms.... He did this by
sending to the Muslims, from among this Turkish nation and its great and
numerous tribes, rulers to defend them and utterly loyal helpers, who were
brought . . . to the House of Islam under the rule of slavery, which hides in
itself a divine blessing. By means of slavery they learn glory and blessing and
are exposed to divine providence; cured by slavery, they enter the Muslim
religion with the firm resolve of true believers and yet with nomadic virtues
unsullied by debased nature, unadulterated by the filth of pleasure, undefiled
by ways of civilied living, and with their ardor unbroken by the profusion of
luxury.... Thus one intake comes after another and generation follows generation, and
Islam rejoices in the benefit which it gains through them, and the
branches of the kingdom flourish with the freshness of youth."
Most of the military slaves of Islam were white -- Turks and Caucasians in
the East, Slavs and other Europeans in the West. Black military slaves were,
however, not unknown and indeed at certain periods were of importance.
Individual black fighting men, both slaves and free, are mentioned as having
participated in raiding and warfare in pre-Islamic and early Islamic times.
According to the biographies and histories of the Prophet, there were several
blacks, both in his army and in the armies of his pagan enemies. One of them,
called Wahshi, an Ethiopian slave, distinguished himself in the battles against
the Prophet at Uhud and at the Ditch; and later, after the Muslim capture of
Mecca, he fought for the Muslims in the wars that followed the death of the
Prophet. Black soldiers appear occasionally in early Abbasid times, and
after the slave rebellion in southern Iraq, in which blacks displayed terrifying
military prowess, they were recruited into the infantry corps of the caliphs in
Baghdad. Ahmad b. Tulun (d. 884), the first independent ruler of Muslim
Egypt, relied very heavily on black slaves, probably Nubians, for his armed
forces; at his death he is said to have left, among other possessions, twenty-four
thousand white mamluks and forty-five thousand blacks. These were
organized in separate corps, and accommodated in separate quarters at the
military cantonments. When Khumarawayh, the son and successor of
Ahmad ibn Tulun. rode in procession, he was followed, according to a chronicler,
"by a thousand black guards wearing black cloaks and black turbans, so that a watcher
could fancy them to
be a black sea spreading over the face of the earth, because of the blackness of
their color and of their garments. With the glitter of their shields, of the
chasing on their swords, and of the helmets under their turbans, they made a
really splendid sight. "
The black troops were the most faithful supporters of the dynasty, and shared
its fate. When the Tulunids were overthrown at the beginning of 905, the
restoration of caliphal authority was followed by a massacre of the black
infantry and the burning of their quarters:
"Then the cavalry turned against the cantonments of the Tulunid blacks, seized
as many of them as they could, and took them to Muhammad ibn Sulayman
[the new governor sent by the caliph]. He was on horseback, amid his escort.
He gave orders to slaughter them, and they were slaughtered in his presence
like sheep."
A similar fate befell the black infantry in Baghdad in 930, when they were
attacked and massacred by the white cavalry, with the help of other troops and
of the populace, and their quarters burned. Thereafter, black soldiers virtually
disappear from the armies of the eastern caliphate.
In Egypt, the manpower resources of Nubia were too good to neglect, and
the traffic down the Nile continued to provide slaves for military as well as
other purposes. Black soldiers served the various rulers of medieval Egypt,
and under the Fatimid caliphs of Cairo black regiments, known as 'Abid al-Shira', "the
slaves by purchase," formed an important part of the military
establishment. They were particularly prominent in the mid-eleventh century,
during the reign of al-Mustansir, when for a while the real ruler of Egypt was
the caliph's mother, a Sudanese slave woman of remarkable strength of character.
There were frequent clashes between black regiments and those of
other races and occasional friction with the civil population. One such inci-
dent occurred in 1021, when the Caliph al-Hakim sent his black troops against
the people of Fustat (old Cairo), and the white troops joined forces to defend
them. A contemporary chronicler of these events describes an orgy of burning, plunder,
and rape. In 1062 and again in 1067 the black troops were
defeated by their white colleagues in pitched battles and driven out of Cairo to
Upper Egypt. Later they returned, and played a role of some importance
under the last Fatimid caliphs.
With the fall of the Fatimids, the black troops again paid the price of their
loyalty. Among the most faithful supporters of the Fatimid Caliphate, they
were also among the last to resist its overthrow by Saladin, ostensibly the
caliph's vizier but in fact the new master of Egypt. By the time of the last
Fatimid caliph, al-'Adid, the blacks had achieved a position of power. The
black eunuchs wielded great influence in the palace; the black troops formed a
major element in the Fatimid army. It was natural that they should resist the
vizier's encroachments. In 1169 Saladin learned of a plot by the caliph's chief
black eunuch to remove him, allegedly in collusion with the Crusaders in
Palestine. Saladin acted swiftly; the offender was seized and decapitated and
replaced in his office by a white eunuch. The other black eunuchs of the
caliph's palace were also dismissed. The black troops in Cairo were infuriated
by this summary execution of one whom they regarded as their spokesman
and defender. Moved, according to a chronicler, by "racial solidarity"
(jinsiyya), they prepared for battle. In two hot August days, an estimated
fifty thousand blacks fought against Saladin's army in the area between the
two palaces, of the caliph and the vizier.
Two reasons are given for their defeat. One was their betrayal by the
Fatimid Caliph al-'Adid, whose cause they believed they were defendrng
against the usurping vizier:
"Al-'Adid had gone up to his belvedere tower, to watch the battle between the
palaces. It is said that he ordered the men in the palace to shoot arrows and
throw stones at [Saladin's] troops, and they did so. Others say that this was not
done by his choice. Shams al-Dawla [Saladin's brother] sent naphtha-throwers
to burn down al-'Adid's belvedere. One of them was about to do this when the
door of the belvedere tower opened and out came a caliphal aide, who said:
"The Commander of the Faithful greets Shams al-Dawla, and says: 'Beware of
the [black] slave dogs! Drive them out of the country!'" The blacks were
sustained by the belief that al-'Adid was pleased with what they did. When they
heard this, their strength was sapped, their courage waned, and they fled."
The other reason, it is said, was an attack on their homes. During the
battle between the palaces, Saladin sent a detachment to the black quarters,
with instructions "to burn them down on their possessions and their children."
Learning of this, the blacks tried to break off the battle and return to their
families but were caught in the streets and destroyed. This encounter is variously
known in Arabic annals as "the Battle of the Blacks" and "the Battle of
the Slaves.'' Though the conflict was not primarily racial, it acquired a racial
aspect, which is reflected in some of the verses composed in honor of Saladin's
victory. Maqrizi, in a comment on this episode, complains of the power and
arrogance of the blacks:
"If they had a grievance against a vizier, they killed him; and they caused much
damage by stretching out their hands against the property and families of the
people. When their outrages were many and their misdeeds increased, God
destroyed them for their sins."
Sporadic resistance by groups of black soldiers continued, but was finally
crushed after a few years. While the white units of the Fatimid army were
incorporated by Saladin in his own forces, the blacks were not. The black
regiments were disbanded, and black fighting men did not reappear in the
armies of Egypt for centuries. Under the mamluk sultans, blacks were em-
ployed in the army in a menial role, as servants of the knights. There was a
clear distinction between these servants, who were black and slaves, and the
knights' orderlies and grooms, who were white and free.
Though black slaves no longer served as soldiers in Egypt, they still fought
occasionally -- as rebels or rioters. In 1260, during the transition from the
Ayyubid to the mamluk sultanate, black stableboys and some others seized
horses and weapons, and staged a minor insurrection in Cairo. They proclaimed their
allegiance to the Fatimids and followed a religious leader who
"incited them to rise against the people of the state; he granted them fiefs and
wrote them deeds of assignment."
The end was swift: "When they rebelled during the night, the troops rode
in, surrounded them, and shackled them; by morning they were crucified
outside the Zuwayla gate."
The same desire among the slaves to emulate the forms and trappings of
the mamluk state is expressed in a more striking form in an incident in 1446,
when some five hundred slaves, tending their masters' horses in the pasturages
outside Cairo, took arms and set up a miniature state and court of their
own. One of them was called sultan and was installed on a throne in a carpeted
pavilion; others were dignified with the titles of the chief of ficers of the
mamluk court, including the vizier, the commander in chief, and even the
governors of Damascus and Aleppo. They raided grain caravans and other
traffic and were even willing to buy the freedom of a colleague. They succumbed to
internal dissensions. Their "sultan" was challenged by another
claimant, and in the ensuing struggles the revolt was suppressed. Many of the
slaves were recaptured and the rest fled.
Toward the end of the fifteenth century, black slaves were admitted to
units using firearms -- a socially despised weapon in the mamluk knightly society.
When a sultan tried to show some favor to his black arquebusiers, he
provoked violent antagonism from the mamluk knights, which he was not able
to resist. In 1498 "a great disturbance occurred in Cairo." The sultan (according to the
chronicler) had outraged the mamluks by conferring two boons on a
black slave called Farajallah, chief of the firearms personnel in the citadel --
first, giving him a white Circassian slave girl from the palace as wife, and
second, granting him a short-sleeved tunic, a characteristic garment of the
mamluks:
"On beholding this spectacle [says the chronicler] the Royal mamluks expressed
their disapproval to the sultan, and they put on their. . . armour. . . and
armed themselves with their full equipment. A battle broke out between them
and the black slaves, who numbered about five hundred. The black slaves ran
away and gathered again in the towers of the citadel and fired at the Royal
mamluks. The Royal mamluks marched on them, killing Farajallah and about
fifty of the black slaves; the rest fled; two Royal mamluks were killed. Then the
emirs and the sultan's maternal uncle, the Great Dawadar, met the sultan and
told him: "We disapprove of these acts of yours [and if you persist in them, it
would be better for you to ride by night in the narrow by-streets and go away
together with those black slaves to far-off places!" The sultan answered: "I
shall desist from this, and these black slaves will be sold to the Turkmans."
In the Islamic West black slave troops were more frequent, and sometimes
even included cavalry -- something virtually unknown in the East. The first
emir of Cordova, 'Abd al-Rahman I, is said to have kept a large personal
guard of black troops; and black military slaves were used, especially to
maintain order, by his successors. Black units, probably recruited by purchase
via Zawila in Fezzan (now southern Libya), figure in the armies of the rulers
of Tunisia between the ninth and eleventh centuries. Black troops became
important from the seventeenth century, after the Moroccan military expansion into the
Western Sudan. The Moroccan Sultan Mawlay Ismaili (1672-1727) had an army of
black slaves, said to number 250,000. The nucleus of this
army was provided by the conscription or compulsory purchase of all male
blacks in Morocco; it was supplemented by levies on the slaves and serfs of the
Saharan tribes and slave raids into southern Mauritania. These soldiers were
mated with black slave girls, to produce the next generation of male soldiers
and female servants. The youngsters began training at ten and were mated at
fifteen. After the sultan's death in 1727, a period of anarchic internal struggles followed,
which some contemporaries describe as a conflict between
blacks and whites. The philosopher David Hume, writing at about the same
time, saw such a conflict as absurd and comic, and used it to throw ridicule on
all sectarian and factional strife:
"The civil wars which arose some few years ago in Morocco between the Blacks
and Whites, merely on account of their complexion, are founded on a pleasant
difference. We laugh at them; but, I believe, were things rightly examined, we
afford much more occasion of ridicule to the Moors. For, what are all the wars
of religion, which have prevailed in this polite and knowing part of the world?
They are certainly more absurd than the Moorish civil wars. The difference of
complexion is a sensible and a real difference; but the controversy about an
article of faith, which is utterly absurd and unintelligible, is not a difference in
sentiment, but in a few phrases and expressions, which one party accepts of
without understanding them, and the other refuses in the same manner....
Besides, I do not find that the Whites in Morocco ever imposed on the Blacks
any necessity of altering their complexion . . . nor have the Blacks been more
unreasonable in this particular."
In 1757 a new sultan, Sidi Muhammad Ill, came to the throne. He decided
to disband the black troops and rely instead on Arabs. With a promise of royal
favor, he induced the blacks to come to Larache with their families and
worldly possessions. There he had them surrounded by Arab tribesmen, to
whom he gave their possessions as booty and the black soldiers, their wives,
and their children as slaves. "I make you a gift," he said, "of these 'abid, of
their children, their horses, their weapons, and all they possess. Share them
among you.''
Blacks were occasionally recruited into the mamluk forces in Egypt at the
end of the eighteenth century. "When the supply [of white slaves] proves
insufficient," says a contemporary observer, W. G. Browne, "or many have
been expended, black slaves from the interior of Africa are substituted, and if
found docile, are armed and accoutred like the rest." This is confirmed by
Louis Frank, a medical officer with Bonaparte's expedition to Egypt, who
wrote an important memoir on the Negro slave trade in Cairo.
In the nineteenth century, black military slaves reappeared in Egypt in
considerable numbers; their recruitment was indeed one of the main purposes
of the Egyptian advance up the Nile under Muhammad 'Ali Pasha (reigned
1805-49) and his successors. Collected by annual razzias (raids) from Darfur
and Kordofan, they constituted an important part of the Khedivial armies and
incidentally furnished the bulk of the Egyptian expeditionary force which Sa'id
Pasha sent to Mexico in 1863, in support of the French. An English traveler
writing in 1825 had this to say about black soldiers in the Egyptian army:
"When the negro troops were first brought down to Alexandria, nothing could
exceed their insubordination and wild demeanour; but they learned the military
evolutions in half the time of the Arabs; and I always observed they went
through the manoeuvres with ten times the adroitness of the others. It is the
fashion here, as well as in our colonies, to consider the negroes as the last link
in the chain of humanity, between the monkey tribe and man in intellect; and I
do not suffer the eloquence of the slave driver to convince me that the negro is
so stultified as to be unfit for freedom.
Even in Turkey, liberated black slaves were sometimes recruited into the
armed forces, often as a means to prevent their reenslavement. Some of these
reached of ficer rank. A British naval report, dated January 25,1858, speaks of
black marines serving with the Turkish navy:
"They are from the class of freed slaves or slaves abandoned by merchants unable
to sell them. There are always many such at Tripoli. I believe the government
acquainted the Porte with the embarrassment caused by their numbers and
irregularities, and this mode of relief was adopted. Those brought by the Faizi
Bari, about 70 in number, were on their arrival enrolled as a Black company in
the marine corps. They are in exactly the same position with respect to pay,
quarters, rations, and clothing as the Turkish marines, and will equally receive
their discharge at the expiration of the allotted term of service. They are in short
on the books of the navy. They have received very kind treatment here, lodged
in warm rooms with charcoal burning in them day and night. A negro Mulazim
[lieutenant] and some negro tchiaoushes [sergeants], already in the service have
been appointed to look after and instruct them. They have drilled in the manual
exercise in their warm quarters, and have not been set to do any duty on account
of the weather. They should not have been sent here in winter. Those among
them unwell on their arrival were sent at once to the naval hospital. Two only
have died of the whole number. The men in the barracks are healthy and appear
contented. No amount of ingenuity can conjure up any conncxion between their
condition and the condition of slavery."
While the slave in arms was, with few exceptions, an Islamic innovation,
the slave in authority dates back to remote antiquity. Already in Sumerian
times, kings appointed slaves to positions of prestige and even power -- or,
perhaps more accurately, treated certain of their court functionaries as royal
slaves. Different words were used to denote such privileged slaves, distinct
from those applied to the menial and laboring generality. Under the Abbasid
caliphs and under later Muslim dynasties, men of slave origin, usually but not
always manumitted, figured prominently in the royal entourage. The system
of court slavery reached its final and fullest development in the Ottoman
Empire, where virtually all the servants of the state, both civil and military,
had the status of kul, "slave," of the Gate, that is, of the sultan. The only
exceptions were the members of the religious establishment. The Ottoman
kul was not a slave in terms of Islamic law, and was free from most of the
restraints imposed on slaves in such matters as marriage, property, and legal
responsibility. He was, however, subject to the arbitrary power of the sultan,
who was free to dispose of his assets, his person, and his life in ways not
permitted by the law in relation to free- or freedmen. This perception of the
status of political officeholders and their relationship to the supreme sovereign power
was of course by no means limited to the Ottoman Empire, or
indeed to the Islamic world.
Source:
This text is part of the Internet Medieval Sourcebook. The Sourcebook is a collection
of public domain and copy-permitted texts related to medieval and Byzantine history.
Unless otherwise indicated the specific electronic form of the document is copyright.
Permission is granted for electronic copying, distribution in print form for educational
purposes and personal use. If you do reduplicate the document, indicate the source. No
permission is granted for commercial use.
Paul Halsall, May 2023
