276 youval rotman
this framework offered. A few, especially in Muslim public sectors, rose high. This did
not mean that they were less abused or suffered less from cruelty than slaves else-
where. Just as we cannot categorize slaves in Mediterranean societies as a class accord-
ing to their socio-economic position, we cannot categorize them according to the
cruelty with which they were treated. Cruelty, abuse, rape and death were always
prevalent, and although slaves did not suffer from them exclusively, their juridical
status made them especially vulnerable and their subjugation especially extreme.
Legislators tried to restrict cruelty towards slaves, but cultures found reasons to justify
the inferiority of slaves, the existence of slavery and its perpetuation.
This chapter has tried to show that slavery was not only a consequence of
Mediterranean history, but also played a role in determining its course by its impact
on relations between states, societies and cultures, and through a constant flow of
human beings into and within the Mediterranean. The fact that most slaves were
uprooted, transported and transplanted by force did not conflict with the fact that
they were considered vital in most of Mediterranean societies in both the private and
public sectors. On the contrary, it explains very clearly why they were trafficked by
force. Slaves were considered vital because they were both human and property. And
this two-sided seemingly self-contradicting definition proved to be extremely elastic
and adaptable to changing reality.
It is impossible to estimate the numbers of slaves. Unlike the Atlantic slave trade,
so appallingly well-documented, we have little concrete numerical evidence before the
early modern period. Estimates have varied between 5% to 40% in different societies
and different periods. If we want to take an average of scholarly estimates, we should
probably consider as acceptable an estimate of 5% to 20% of the population in any
given prosperous Mediterranean town. This in itself is enormous, and attests to huge
demographic movements in and into the Mediterranean. It means that up to 20% of
the region’s urban population would have been considered of foreign origin.
Slaves were marked as foreigners even if they were born in the same region. Some
were originally inhabitants of a different part of the same Mediterranean while others
were imported from Africa and Eurasia. We rarely note slaves who were traded from
the Mediterranean out. In most cases a distinction—of “origin,” “ethnicity,” “faith”
or “color”—was used to justify enslavement and subjugation. This was one of the
ways in which the human mind dealt with the exploitation of its own kind, by not
considering a slave as its own kind. But in spite of their distinction, slaves were part of
Mediterranean societies thanks to their socio-economic functions which made their
integration and manumission necessary. More than a century after the abolition of
slavery from the Mediterranean it is today impossible to denote which Mediterranean
inhabitants are descended from slaves, although cases of people segregated by being
marked out as “descendants of slaves” do exist.^3
As for contemporary modes of slavery, forms of extreme exploitation exist every-
where in today’s Mediterranean as elsewhere. In spite of international conventions
which Mediterranean states have signed, human trafficking, limitations on the freedom
of exploited persons, or inequality in regards to other members of the same societies,
whether legal or illegal, are not rare, and extreme cases have been tried in different
Mediterranean countries as violations of the legal prohibition on slavery. Unlike other
parts of the world, in the Mediterranean such cases are mostly the destiny of clandestine
immigrants (from either less prosperous Mediterranean states or other parts of the