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Reducing human beings, mostly female but also male, into sex objects for profit was
practiced ubiquitously. Slaves were particularly vulnerable, as were children. Whether
slaves or freeborn, children were prostituted by their families, their families’ creditors,
or by foreigners, especially in times of economic troubles. Although several legal
systems have tried to eradicate or limit this phenomenon, it was, and still is present.
The Mediterranean and the globalization of slaveryThe trans-Saharan slave trade continued throughout the early modern period.
However, the new Atlantic routes gave Portuguese, Spanish and Iberian-based
Genoese merchants direct access to the African slave markets in northwest Africa,
avoiding trans-Saharan and North African mediators. Thus in the fifteenth to
seventeenth centuries Iberia became a hub for the slave trade in both the Atlantic and
southwestern Europe. It complemented the importation of slaves from the Caucasus,
the Black Sea and the Balkans to the west, but soon eclipsed it. The Spanish crown
profited from this by a tax of 10% (alcabala) on the sale of every slave in Spain, and
by the asiento, a license to sell slaves in the Spanish colonies. In fact, just like other
merchandise, the slave trade was a source of profit for public authorities. Rome taxed
slave sales and manumissions, and Byzantium taxed the commercial circulation of
slaves, while in Fatimid Egypt even the ransoming of captives was taxed.
A single map of human trafficking into and within the Mediterranean is therefore
impossible to draw, since it was determined by the changes of the political and eco-
nomic map of the different Mediterranean societies and their relations to African,
European, Eurasian, and Asian economies (the presence of slaves of Indian origin in
the Mediterranean is attested, albeit relatively scantily, from Roman times up to
early modern Iberia). This is what characterizes the medieval and early modern
Mediterranean traffic in human beings. The constant demand for slaves by rich
Mediterranean societies over a millennium cannot be explained solely in terms of a
demand for domestics in Mediterranean households, as one of the more popular views
about Mediterranean slavery maintains. The use of slaves in the two early modern
Mediterranean superpowers reveals a different picture.
Scholars estimate that the number of slaves in the early modern South Iberian pen-
insula was between 5% to 20% of the urban population, that is, a total of two million
(Stella, 2000: Vincent, 2003). To African and Caucasian slaves were added “Moorish”
slaves, that is, local Muslims who were enslaved during the last phase of the Reconquista
and their descendants, along with large numbers of North Africans who were victims
of Christian Mediterranean corsairs. Curial records of legal transactions, marriages,
wills and testaments attest the great variety in the origins of slaves, their social status
and economic position. Although slaves were employed in mines, quarries, galleys,
penal colonies and also in small-scale Iberian sugar-cane plantations, most of the
records concern slaves in cities. Conversion allowed slaves to marry, and to have access
to juridical courts. Marriage was normally conducted by persons of similar “color,”
which normally meant a geographic origin, and restrictions were laid on “mixed”
marriage (see also Epstein, this volume). Similar restrictions prevented slaves and
manumitted slaves from being fully integrated, and from advancing in their socio-
economic positions, in particular those who were Africans and “Moors.” However
regiments and confraternities of slaves and manumitted slaves provided assistance and