forms of slavery 271
perpetuated the social dependency of both slaves and their descendants within the
family, while integrating them into the socio-economic structure of the household at
all social levels.
The most characteristic example of the versatile nature of medieval slavery is to be
found in the military function of slaves in the Arab world. The Mamluks, literally the
“owned,” were imported as boys from the Eurasian steppe and the Caucasus to form
the military elite of the Muslim political leaders. They were trained in special military
schools, converted to Islam, and manumitted. They could marry, but could not pass
on their position to their sons. The entire institution was based on the perpetual
importation of enslaved boys, often of Turkish origin, detached from their family and
country, in order to generate the continuation of this elite military institution. This
elite took power in 1250 in Ayyubid Egypt, and held it until 1517. For nearly three
centuries, the sultans who governed Egypt, Palestine, Syria, and the Hijaz from Cairo
were all Mamluks, a dynasty of rulers completely dependent on the traffic in and
integration of imported boys.
The Mediterranean slave trade changed in the late medieval period in view of the
loss of the commercial hegemony of Byzantium in favor of the Italian cities. Amalfi,
Bari and Venice connected the central and eastern European trade routes to the
south-eastern Mediterranean markets already in the central medieval period. In the
late medieval period, the Venetian and Genoese commercial monopoly in the eastern
Mediterranean and the Black Sea embraced the importation of slaves of Mongol,
Tartar, Turkish, Caucasian, Greek, Russian, and Balkan origins. The treaties that
Venice signed in the fourteenth century with the Turkish emirates resulted in the
importation of Greek slaves from Anatolia via Crete to Egypt and Italy.
The new economic position of the Italian cities was followed by an increasing
demand for slaves. These were used as domestics, as workers in small urban enter-
prises and as oarsmen in galleys, but by no means exclusively. The large numbers of
imported slaves per boat (from a few dozen to a few hundred), reveal the increasing
use of slaves in southwestern Europe, in comparison to their disappearance from
northwestern Europe. The disappearance of both slaves and serfs in late medieval
western Europe has been explained (Arnoux, 2012) against the background of the
rise of an ordo laboratorum, a new order of workers, that is, free peasants working in
the countryside and paying a tithe for the land they cultivated. This formed the back-
bone of the economic expansion of western Europe, and restricted the employment
of slaves in western European economies in contrast to Mediterranean Europe.
The expansion of Aragon in the late medieval Mediterranean led to Aragonese
merchants playing an important role in international trade. They supplied slaves to
western Mediterranean markets using the slave market in Mallorca. In Italy a new
system of physiognomy was developed, which aimed at revealing character attributes
according to the slave’s physique and in particular the pupil of the eye (Epstein,
2006). This was another phase in a long history of racism aimed at finding ways of
determining the nature and the behavior of slaves, as well as justifying their exploita-
tion (Isaac, 2004). The importation of the Mamluks was dependent on “the coura-
geousness of the Turks,” while to Circassian women in Italy, for example, were
attributed “sexual qualities.” This determined their relatively high price in relation to
other slaves, although it in no way limited the sexual abuse of other female slaves,
whether prostituted or not.