Slavery in Europe

Slavery was common in Europe from the 1500s to the 1800s, but it has received less attention by historiography and is less prominent in public memory than colonial slavery and the Atlantic slave trade. Two main reasons may explain why slavery in Europe in the early modern and modern periods is forgotten. The first is that for an extended period historiography focused on ancient and medieval slavery in Europe, the scholarly perception being that slavery ended in Europe after settlement in the Americas, colonial slavery dominating the trade thereafter.¹ This view has to be reconsidered. The thesis of Marc Bloch that the rise of feudal society coincided with the decline of slavery has been questioned by the historiography of the early 21st century.² The second reason is the difference in the number of slaves in the two spaces. From a quantitative perspective, an estimated 11 to 12 million people were trafficked in the Atlantic slave trade.³ Mediterranean slavery involved an estimated 7 to 9 million people, and the number of slaves in Europe in the period between 1500 and 1800 is estimated at just over 2.5 million.⁴ From a quantitative perspective, historians still do not have the sources to calculate more accurately the number of slaves in each European country.

Early modern Europe, with the exception of Portugal, is considered a “society with slaves” and not a “slave society.” The distinction is that in a “society with slaves” the practice of slavery did not define in an all-encompassing way the economic, social, and cultural reality of that society.⁵ From the end of the 16th century up to 1761, 400,000 slaves were brought to Portugal, the majority to Lisbon. This was higher than the number of slaves in the British colonies in North America at the time.⁶

So, in the case of Portugal, slavery was an omnipresent social phenomenon. The historiography of the first two decades of the 21st century clearly demonstrated that different systems of slavery can coexist in the same geographical area. Thus, in the Mediterranean basin, there were both “societies with slaves” and “slave societies” as in the Atlantic colonial world. For instance, in both the Mediterranean and Europe, there were “Afro-descended” slaves from the Atlantic colonies and others that can be defined as chattel slaves who had diverse geographical origins, especially from around the Indian Ocean and sub-Saharan Africa. Furthermore, there were many captives from the Ottoman Empire and from its satellite states.⁷ In general, in Mediterranean and European contexts, there is a theoretical distinction between captives and slaves, even though the word captive does not feature regularly in the taxonomy of early modern sources, such as in the Italian case. There were, naturally, linguistic differences in every country. Theoretically, captivity was a temporary condition of slavery, from which the slave could be freed by intermediaries, redemption institutions, or relatives.⁸ The captive was a forced worker when he or she was enslaved but only for a certain period. The slave, on the contrary, was unfree from a juridical point of view for an indefinite period. In reality, many captives remained in the part of Europe in which they arrived and started a new life there if they were freed. They did not always return to their native land. Slaves could also be emancipated, of course. Furthermore, a captive could be sold as a slave rather than ransomed.⁹

Captivity in the Mediterranean was a form of reciprocity between the southern European countries and the Ottoman Empire and the Barbary Regencies, because there were Muslim captives in the European countries and Christian captives in North Africa and in the Ottoman Empire. The ransom of captives remained an important commercial enterprise in the Mediterranean basin until the mid-19th century. In the same period, there were also slaves from the colonial world and following the abolition of slavery around Europe, North African slave markets traded illegally slaves from sub-Saharan Africa to Europeans, such as missionaries or nobles, who ransomed or bought them in these markets.

Slaves’ Origin and Trajectories

Slaves in Europe came from the Ottoman Empire, Indian Ocean colonies, sub-Saharan Africa, and the Atlantic colonies. Many slaves in the Mediterranean basin came from the Ottoman Empire, but not all the slaves in Europe passed through the Mediterranean. Many arrived directly from Atlantic colonies to European Atlantic ports, including Lisbon, Cadiz, Nantes, Bordeaux, Liverpool, Bristol, Amsterdam, and London.¹⁰ Other slaves came from the Black Sea and eastern Europe, whereas slaves from sub-Saharan Africa arrived in Europe via the Barbary Regency ports and Egypt. Between the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the early modern period, the slaves were Circassians, Tartars, Abkhazes, Slavs, and Ottoman Muslims. From the 15th century until the middle of the 19th century, slaves from sub-Saharan Africa and Atlantic colonies became increasingly numerous.¹¹ During the same period, ending only in 1856, Muslim captives came from the Ottoman Empire and its satellite states.¹²

The complexities of slave mobility and regular changes in the ownership of slaves resulted in remarkable individual stories, such as that of a black slave named Martino who was born in St. Thomas Island in the Danish Antilles to a Guinean mother. Ownership of Martino changed frequently, and he was transported through various Atlantic ports before reaching the Mediterranean and Genoa. At the age of nine, Martino was stolen by a French captain and transported to the Cape of Good Hope, where he was sold to a Genoese merchant named Pietro Paciugo. After three years, he came under the ownership of a Sir Puglia, a Milanese ship captain who traded as a merchant in Genoa. Martino was then taken to Spain but ended up back in Genoa, where he was sold to the Knight of Malta Andrea di Nigro, a Genoese patrician. Martino was in Genoa in 1786.¹³

The difficulty inherent in tracing the geographical origin of some slaves is illustrated by the case of a slave named Cassanth. He was transported to Brazil from Africa (his exact place of origin is unknown) and then to Lisbon on a Portuguese frigate commanded by Captain de Bosa. Finally, he reached the Kingdom of Naples on a frigate from Sorrento, commanded by Captain D. Carlo Cilenti. He was eventually baptized under the name of Salvadore Maria Gregorio.¹⁴ Many “Atlantic” slaves who arrived in Italian states and Austria passed through the ports of the Iberian Peninsula. Slaves in the Austrian court were brought through Portugal. Prablanco, the very first slave in the possession of an Austrian noble, was gifted to his master when he lived in Lisbon. He later returned to Austria with Prablanco.¹⁵

While the Mediterranean is often viewed in isolation from the areas of the Arabian Sea and the Indian Ocean, the reality of slaves’ mobility blurs any clear demarcation, just as any line of separation between the Mediterranean and the Atlantic. For instance, in 1641 Emanuel Fernandez—a dark-skinned man from the city of Goa in South Asia was working in Venice as a porter. A slave, he regained his freedom after baptism and then integrated into the Venetian community. The inquisition of Venice later investigated him for committing calumny against the Christian God while intoxicated.¹⁶

Slaves in the German States originated from the Dutch colony of Suriname and the West Indian island of St. Thomas. They arrived first in the Netherlands or Denmark before being donated or sold to Germanic noblemen, merchants, or dukes. In 1752, two twelve-year-old “Moorish” boys were sent as a gift from Holland to the ruling Count of Berleburg, and in 1756, a merchant gave the Duke of Saxony-Weimar-Eisenach a “Moor” as a gift. In 1764, a blacksmith sent Duke Carl Eugen of Wurttemberg a young black slave he had taken from Suriname.¹⁷

These few cases highlight the varied origins of slaves in Europe and how their routes of forced mobility could be more convoluted than the perceived formal “imperial” routes of most slave trades. The traditional historiographical focus was on slaves from the French colonies in France, slaves from the Dutch colonies in the Netherlands, and so on, privileging the link between the metropole and its colonies. While there were some preferred routes between the colonies and the metropole, the picture is complicated by the movement of slaves between European ports, states, and empires. In addition, Italian or German merchants, for instance, could work for the Spanish, Dutch, British, or Ottoman Empires, and as they returned from their journeys, they could purchase slaves along the way, as happened in the case of Martino. The reality is that slaves circulated on a global scale. The description of slaves in the sources is not often concerned with places of origin. References to ethnicity, skin color, and religion are common but are not matched by information that helps better understand and reconstruct the life of slaves before they were taken to Europe.

Slaves’ Assimilation

The process of slaves’ acculturation and assimilation in Europe involved learning new languages and becoming Christian, starting work for a new owner or for the government in a new context. Taken together, these changes created a new social and cultural person. Sometimes the ultimate step in the process would be emancipation if the slave remained in Europe. If the slave was dispatched to slave societies in the American colonies, however, emancipation was much less likely.¹⁸ Freedom for the enslaved in Europe could be gained in a few ways: conversion, ransom, self-ransom, or escape. Slaves might be freed by their owner or the government after baptism, but this was not guaranteed to happen swiftly or at all; freedom could be bought by slaves who earned money or other benefits through work, and this was important because it allowed slaves to buy freedom for themselves and perhaps other family members; escape offered a possible route to freedom also.

In the majority of cases, slaves did not become legally free after baptism. Slaves’ petitions make this perfectly clear. In Rome, Giuseppe Bastoncelli, a renegade slave working in the fortress of Castel Sant’Angelo, petitioned for freedom five years after his baptism.¹⁹ In Leghorn, slaves preparing to join the Catholic Church, received a small daily payment from the state because they could not work. Immediately after conversion, they still could not perform real work, although they could be at the service of officials and other workers in the bagno. Post-baptism, slaves’ living conditions did immediately improve because their feet were unchained. In Leghorn, as in other cities in the Italian region, slaves were not freed after baptism and the chaplain of the bagno declared that slaves could not use religion as an instrument to obtain freedom. So conversion was usually only a first step in an exit strategy from the condition of slavery.²⁰ Slaves could be ransomed or self-ransomed. For instance, in the Iberian Peninsula, masters could free slaves as in the famous case of Juan Latino, the humanist of the Spanish Renaissance, ransomed by his master.²¹ There were also many contracts of self-ransom, and thanks to earnings slaves could buy their freedom as will be shown in the section on Portugal. Another important dynamic in possibly exiting slavery was escape. Many convicts and slaves escaped galleys in Civitavecchia. In July 1782, three slaves, Messana (known as the Tiger), Machmet from Tunis (known as Busolotto), and Machmet from Tripoli (known as Belbello), who worked on the Capitana galley, escaped. Messana was found and brought back to Civitavecchia, while the others made good their escape. Messana’s defense was based on his claim that he was drunk when convinced to join the others in escaping. He was already in a condition of perpetual slavery—the punishment for slaves who attempted escape in the Papal States. In the circumstances, the government of Civitavecchia took his evidence as true. Some slaves on Italian galleys tried to move to other states in pursuit of more promising ransom opportunities.²²

These processes were not always linear. Various European territories had their own legal systems and institutional practices but there were some commonalities: religious conversion uniformly involved the imposition of a new Christian name on the slave; cultural assimilation or integration was usually attempted by the host societies. Conversion was a double-edged sword. On one hand, religion was usually seen as a vehicle for integration into local society. On the other, it constituted an instrument of coercion on the slave because of its erasure of the slave’s original identity (through renaming and changing his religious culture). While the concept of identity is “ephemeral” in the context of the Mediterranean historiography on cross-cultural contacts, emphasizing the alterity of the slave or, on the contrary, changing his or her religious affiliation by converting him or her, resulted in the dissimulation of the person’s origin.²³

Slaves did not necessarily obtain legal emancipation after conversion, but they did benefit from better working and social conditions. These could help redeem the person, perhaps with the aid of the state or the individual owner. Slaves were occasionally freed after baptism, as in a number of cases in Rome, or they could integrate into the local community through marriage, in particular for women.²⁴ Conversion facilitated integration and associated social benefits.²⁵ It is not always possible to define the status of slaves, before and after baptism, in either the early modern period or even following the legal abolitions of slavery in the 19th century.

The various legal frameworks around Europe do not allow for simple comparisons. In some countries, including France and England, slavery was theoretically outlawed in the early modern period but not in practice. In France, even though the legal principle of free soil was established in the 15th century, slavery continued under the Ancien Régime. The exact number is not known but there is an estimation of 15,000 slaves and free blacks.²⁶ Slaves often obtained freedom thanks to the Parliament of Paris and its appellate Admiralty courts before the French Revolution.²⁷ In England, it proved more difficult for slaves to achieve freedom through the courts until the Somerset case (1772), and such legal matters were not automatically more straightforward thereafter, as illustrated by the case of Grace Jones in 1827.²⁸ In others, including the Republic of Venice, slave trafficking was forbidden, but it was permissible to hold a slave if he or she was bought in another country. Antislavery legislation was ambiguous in all European states and the phenomenon of slavery remained common until the 19th century, persisting in some countries until about 1850.²⁹ European societies were interested in assimilating slaves into the labor force or using them as exotic trade goods, status symbols, or objects for sexual exploitation. These were stronger motivations than granting them freedom. Private owners favored religious conversion because it meant that the slave was better assimilated. The government, unsurprisingly, given that it was obliged to improve the circumstances of the baptized, was less interested in converting its Muslim captives, who often manned galleys and had exchange and working value.³⁰

Assimilation rather than integration was the norm for a number of reasons: it was difficult to create Black communities in Europe outside of Portugal and Spain, which had large religious confraternities for slaves and freedmen; across Europe, possibilities for social emancipation and education were limited so that, like in Britain, for example, while there were Black shopkeepers, there were no Black doctors or Black people in senior social positions. Some Black communities organized clubs to help unemployed members. Most of the former slaves in England were poor, but according to Olaudah Equiano, Ignatius Sancho, Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, and Mary Prince, not all of them experienced discrimination related to their skin color in their daily life. Sometimes prejudice emphasized the fact that they were “foreigners” of a different religion and culture.³¹ Among Muslim captives, Blacks had a lower ransom value than Levantines, but skin color had no effect on the living conditions or treatment of galley slaves.

The contemporary categories of assimilation and integration are problematic also because there was no uniform slave profile. Rather, slaves could have multiple affiliations and their individual ethnic or religious attributes often were fluid or uncertain. Slaves had different experiences of conversion, with some becoming free and building new lives. Social context and the availability of dignified work were crucial in this process of emancipation. Yet these were often lacking, so the majority had difficult lives.

Italian States

The problem of slavery in Italian States was strongly linked to the religious question. In the Italian case, conversion to Catholicism was an important step in gaining legal freedom, but there were also cases in which baptism was not enough, and there were instances of baptized slaves petitioning for their freedom in vain. The importance of baptism therefore lay in changing the slave’s original name and forcing the person to accept a new name. Thus, one of the most characteristic traits of identity had to change in order to create a new subject, and this process demonstrated the free and unfree interactions between master, state, and captives or slaves. In the Italian context, masters, noble families, and even cardinals gave slaves their own family names during the rite of baptism, revealing a simultaneous process of integration and erasure of the slave’s original identity.

In Rome, from a juridical point of view, baptism could lead to manumission. In 1556, Pope Pius V promulgated a motu proprio on the emancipation of slaves in Rome. It established that Christians, either by birth or conversion, who presented themselves to the conservatory in the Campidoglio would obtain manumission and Roman citizenship. This act was completely innovative in relation to juridical praxis, which maintained a separation between conversion and the emancipation of slaves.³² On the face of it, Pius’s act should have allowed converted slaves to formally obtain citizenship. The sources from 1750 to 1850, however, do not reveal any case in which this law was applied. For Muslim galley slaves, conversion was more difficult and often not even permitted in the Papal States.³³ Nevertheless, slaves’ desire to convert in the late 18th and early 19th centuries was generally accepted, although it had to be approved by the Catholic Church. The process of conversion consisted of several stages.

In Rome, slaves preparing for conversion were first educated about the Christian religion at the Casa dei Catecumeni. After baptism, the slave was integrated among the citizens, although he or she was not immediately granted manumission. Instead, through conversion and the change of personal identity, the slave could embark on the pursuit of freedom. In other words, conversion merely initiated a process whereby a slave could become legally free. The first step involved in a certain sense a “de facto” freedom, because after baptism the slave began to be treated like a free person by being paid more money or being entrusted with higher responsibilities; the second step was obtaining juridical freedom.

Conditions in the galleys in Civitavecchia were so bad that it is unsurprising that many slaves attempted to get out by converting to Christianity. Conflicts, crime, and a general lack of order characterized everyday life in the galleys. When Christian prisoners and Turkish slaves ended up working side by side, they often clashed. Therefore, attempts were made to keep them apart. Sexual violence, gambling, and forging documents were standard practices. The jailors were often accused of forging false coins and printing coupons stamped with all kinds of seals: of bishops, priests, and notaries. Capuchin fathers who celebrated Mass and who cared for the spiritual welfare of the prisoners complained about poor sanitary conditions. There were episodes of theft of the slaves’ belongings. For example, on October 21, 1795, several individuals were arrested in Torre di Maccarese because they had stolen goods from four Turks. In the same year, slaves in Civitavecchia asked to “not wear cuffs on their feet.” The request was motivated by the fact that Christian slaves in the Barbary Kingdoms did not wear ankle cuffs. Under such circumstances, conversion to Christianity may have seemed like an attractive option for slaves who wanted to be moved out of the galleys. When a slave requested baptism, he was moved to the Casa dei Catecumeni for a year of education in the Catholic faith. After that, baptized slaves often moved to Castel Sant’Angelo. They occasionally served as soldiers or were employed in temporary jobs while they waited for their juridical freedom. In these contexts, baptized slaves sometimes wrote petitions for their freedom, as in the case of Giuseppe Antonio Joannini, who was baptized after ten years as a slave, explicitly requested a position at the cove or as a soldier, and pleaded for grace. This case demonstrates that not all internees of the Castel Sant’Angelo fortress had already obtained the status of free man, nor were they all employed as soldiers.³⁴

In the Kingdom of Naples, many slaves were employed in the construction of the Caserta royal palace, side by side with convicts and free wage laborers. It is revealing that baptized slaves earned more money than non-baptized ones and that they lived separated in diverse districts. Like in the Atlantic context, there were runaway slaves in the Mediterranean, for instance in 1756 there were two escapes of non-baptized slaves, Maomet di Bosra and Mustafà di Smirne.³⁵ The Italian territories legally abolished slavery at different times: the Kingdom of Naples in 1808, Lombardo-Veneto in 1816, the Kingdom of Sicily in 1819, and the Grand Duchy of Tuscany in 1853. Under Napoleon, slaves in the ports of Genoa and Leghorn had been freed in 1797 without a legal act.

German States and Austria

Slaves were present in the German States and Austrian Empire even in the absence of a formal colonial empire. In 1780, the Berlin Superior Court reported to the Ministry of Justice on a Moor who petitioned to be freed. The Moor was purchased in Copenhagen by the German prior Joachim Erdmann von Arnim, who brought him to Prussia. Von Armin was the former director of the Royal Opera and French comedy in Berlin. The opportunity for the slave to find a professional writer occurred when he accompanied his master to Berlin. One of the arguments of the petition was religious:

He has an entitlement to freedom, which is even more his due since von Arnim purchased him 7 years ago in Denmark from Privy Councillor Wurm on the condition that he must serve as his subject for only two more years, since he had already served 8 years, and was originally required to serve only 10 years, at which time he must be free. Nevertheless, von Arnim has already kept him 5 years past this time, and moreover has treated him most cruelly, and did not want to permit him to receive instruction in the Christian religion.³⁶

The Moor wanted to be baptized to secure legal standing and the possibility of freedom, although there was no certain guarantee of freedom on account of baptism. Thousands of similar petitions were addressed to the Prussian king at the end of the 18th century, and he saw only a fraction of them himself, but the case of von Arnim’s slave was closely analyzed. As in Rome, slaves could request freedom only after many years of excruciating work and their legal rights were few.

In 1794, a Prussian Law Code stated that “Slavery shall not be tolerated in royal lands” but another article of the same code was more nuanced: “Foreigners who are in royal lands for a limited time retain their rights over accompanying slaves” and “when such foreigners settle permanently in royal lands . . . slavery ceases to exist.”³⁷ These regulations demonstrate the presence of slaves in Brandenburg-Prussia while abolishing former serfdom as a form of personal slavery. The emancipation of serfs, like the abolition of slavery, was not an immediate phenomenon. As elsewhere in Europe, slavery persisted in German States well into the 19th century.³⁸ There were also slaves in Habsburg Austria from the 1500s to the 1800s. Some were “exotic domestics” of the royal family, others were domestics of noble and middle-class families, prisoners of war from the Ottoman Empire, or slaves from the transoceanic trade.

Prince Nikolaus Esterhàzy I, at the coronation of Emperor Joseph II in Frankfurt in 1764, had in his entourage a Black servant named Jean Sibas. It was a sign of prestige to include Africans in an entourage in early modern (central) Europe.³⁹ There was a similar practice in western Europe. In Bordeaux, young African boys, the sons of royalty, lived temporarily with a family who trafficked slaves, for purposes of diplomacy and political prestige. A Black presence at the Tudor court in London in the period between 1507 and 1512 in the person of trumpeter John Blanke is well documented.⁴⁰

In royal courts, Blacks fulfilled the important role of “representative publicity” and generally did not have to undertake manual work as did galley or agricultural labor slaves. Eighteenth-century Austrian sources refer to “court moors.” Such individuals were subsequently engaged in other roles as messengers, horse grooms, valets, trumpeters, and soldiers. For instance, the musician Friedrich Augustus Bridgetower, who spent several years at the court of Prince Esterházy in Eisenstadt in the Hungarian town of Eszterháza, was from the Caribbean. Most slaves in Vienna and in the Austrian provinces worked for nobles and middle-class families as domestic servants.⁴¹ This was in line with the wider European scenario in which the majority of slaves were domestics. Slavery in Austria was abolished in 1811, but living conditions for Blacks did not improve dramatically, and outcomes varied by age, origin, servant status, and skills. There were rare cases in which Blacks started new lives as successful professionals.

France

In France slavery was not permitted in theory due to the legal principle of “free soil” dating from the 15th century. So, notionally at least, a slave landing in France was free. But in the 18th century, circumstances changed as increased numbers of slaves arrived in the metropole from the colonies. Royal legislation issued in 1716 established the right of colonial owners to bring slaves to France indefinitely for instruction in religion or trade, provided that they obtained permission and registered their slaves on arrival. By a more stringent law issued in 1738, they could be retained as slaves for only three years before they had to be returned to the colony. At first, there were two ways in which they could attain freedom: their owner could grant them freedom in his will, or they could marry a free person, but the 1738 law abolished manumission in the metropole altogether.⁴²

Despite these laws, the black population in France continued to increase. Hundreds of slaves wrote petitions assisted by lawyers and were able to request freedom from the Admiralty Court of France in Paris because the king’s declarations had not been registered in the Parliament of Paris.⁴³ A new worry from certain officials was not the presence of slaves but the threat of Black “blood mixing” with French. Race was the main issue, as described here by Poncet de la Grave:

The introduction of too great a quantity of negroes in France—whether in the quality of slaves, or in any other respect—is a dangerous consequence. We will soon see the French nation disfigured if a similar abuse is tolerated. Moreover, the negroes are, in general, dangerous men. Almost none of those to whom you have rendered freedom have refrained from abusing it, . . . [they] have been carried to excesses dangerous for society.⁴⁴

The new focus on race emerged in an ordinance of 1762 and is evident in the taxonomy of sources. Those to be registered were now “negroes and mulattoes” rather than “slaves”—the problematic status was now race rather than slavery.⁴⁵ In 1777, Louis XVI established the police des Noirs to control the entry of Blacks into France and to oversee the implementation of the laws by masters and slaves. Blacks were to be detained at port and returned to the colonies on the next available ship, but the illegal trafficking of slaves and Blacks into France continued.⁴⁶

Out of a population of approximately 27 to 28 million in 1777, however, there were only about 15,000 Blacks and people of color in France during the Ancien Régime. In Saint-Domingue in the same period, 500,000 of 600,000 people were Black. In Britain, there were only between 15,000 and 20,000 black people out of a population of 8 million.⁴⁷ The majority of slaves and former slaves in France, both women and men, were domestic servants. Among some other roles, there were musicians, soldiers, nurses, valets, and butlers.⁴⁸

There was also the famous case of Ourika, a young female domestic servant who inspired the protagonist of Claire de Duras’s eponymous novel.⁴⁹ In 1786, Ourika was bought by the governor of Senegal, the Chevalier du Boufflers, for the Duchesse d’Orleans. Ourika was baptized in Paris and became Charlotte-Catherine-Benezet-Ourika.

Ourika’s childhood in France was exceptional, however. She was educated in the noble and prominent Parisian family of De Beauvau as their own child, even if she was treated as an exotic ornament in Parisian social circles and her skin color was described as “black as ebony.” Madame de Staël also met Ourika in a salon and used her name for a character in Miraza, Lettre d’un voyageur (1795). In 1794, Ourika was emancipated and became free. She was under the guardianship of Jean Nicolas Deal. In 1799, at the age of eighteen, Ourika died, probably of pneumonia or tuberculosis.⁵⁰ She was buried at Saint-Germain-en-Laye. Ourika was described as single, unsurprisingly, because an official engagement was, in theory, impossible due the 1778 prohibition of interracial marriage. This case is in every case quite exceptional because enslaved people toiled as domestic laborers or artisans, for instance, as cooks, coopers, woodworkers, and carpenters.

Britain

The majority of slaves in Britain were also employed as domestic servants. It can be difficult to determine the legal status of black slaves and servants. By the end of the 17th century there were communities of free and unfree black workers in London and Bristol, while many more Blacks served in urban and provincial households across England. Slaves came mainly from the British colonies, as in the case of a boy named Thomas who served the household of Colonel Thomas Hillyard in East Coker in Somerset. Thomas’s mother, Betty, arrived in East Coker eight years after her son.⁵¹ New research on slavery in England draws on a variety of sources to establish the presence of slaves in every part of the country.⁵²

In 1677, one court recognized that enslaved Africans were property, “being usually bought and sold among merchants, as merchandise.” In a series of later judgments in 1698 John Holt wrote, “A Negro may be a villein in England but not a slave.” Adjudicating the case of a slave named James Somerset in 1772, the King’s Bench declared that, in the absence of positive legislation, the practice of slavery could not be introduced in Britain and that colonial laws establishing slavery did not apply. The Somerset case is interesting for its racial as well as its legal aspects. Somerset was born in West Africa around 1741. When he was eight years old, he was bought by European slave traders and sold in Virginia to Charles Stewart, a Scottish merchant. Somerset frequently traveled not only in North America but also in England, and in 1768 he was in London with his master. In 1771, Somerset absconded from his master’s house, but he was captured by a slave hunter, confined in irons, and bound for sale in Jamaica. The case was immediately taken up by abolitionists, and Granville Sharp was involved in campaigning for Somerset. William Murray, first earl of Mansfield and chief justice of the King’s Bench, declared illegal transportation of slaves to England but remained silent on the general question of slavery in England and the British Empire.⁵³

Somerset’s lawyers attacked government support for domestic slavery and argued that Somerset was not a villein and that the case did not set a precedent for reasons of blood and family: villeinage was a specific British status, and in this case a “white” status; Somerset was neither British nor white.⁵⁴ So it was Somerset’s defenders using the race argument. While Blackness and property were not equated, whiteness and freedom were represented as essentially connected. There were arguments about whether Black slaves in England could be villeins and about how the legal and social frameworks of the colonies applied in Europe and vice versa. It became apparent that slavery was not legally admissible in Europe, even though it was accepted as normal practice.

Whatever the legal technicalities, before the Somerset case in 1772, the reality for African slaves in Great Britain was that they were not free unless manumitted or liberated by their owner.⁵⁵ As in Italy, slaves in Britain changed their name and identity after conversion and baptism but were not necessarily freed. British newspapers regularly featured stories of runaway Black servants, which suggests that living and working conditions for slaves in Britain were difficult.⁵⁶

Portugal

There was a significant cohort of slaves in Portugal from the early modern period until the 19th century. Historian Didier Lahon contends that slavery in Portugal was an omnipresent social phenomenon because it touched all the social classes directly or indirectly and most economic, social, and cultural activities.⁵⁷ Lahon characterized the Portuguese society of the Ancien Régime as a “slave society” as opposed to a society with slaves, which was the case elsewhere in Europe. Between 1450 and 1840, many Muslim slaves from the Ottoman Empire, North and sub-Saharan Africa were held in Portugal. Until the mid-16th century, most slaves came from Senegambia. In the second half of the 17th century, slaves were taken from Angola, Congo, and the Gulf of Guinea, as well as Mozambique. The pretos da India slaves were “Blacks of India.”⁵⁸

One suburb of Lisbon was named Mocambo in reference to a group of fugitive slaves from the island of Sao Tomé who had arrived in Lisbon. The designation of Mocambo referred to the sociocultural organization of Africans in Portuguese cities. Slaves and black freed slaves were considered a hostile group.⁵⁹ In 1761, the introduction of new slaves to Portugal was prohibited even though slave labor was vital. This new law had some impact so that although slavery persisted, it limited the numbers involved.⁶⁰ The interdiction of 1761 was designed to reduce slave numbers in Portugal by reorienting the trade to northern Brazil. In 1801, however, the intendant of police, Pina Manique, signaled labor shortages in Lisbon. In 1773, the “Law of Free Birth” targeted the hereditary element of slavery and freed fourth-generation slaves (mulatos and pardos). Furthermore, the practice of barring the descendants of slaves from certain roles and from taking part in political life on the basis of “purity of blood,” was outlawed. Again, these laws were not respected, and slavery was not abolished outright in Portugal until 1869.⁶¹

The Portuguese baptized and “lusitanized” (indoctrinated) their slaves: religious and linguistic conversion marked the symbolic entry of the African into Christian society more so than into Portuguese society. Slaves were subjected to the most degrading conditions and functions, but the long-term mechanisms of exclusion were based less on physical violence than on discrimination. Slaves worked mainly in cities, as domestic or menial laborers: water carriers, excrement drainers, sweepers, fish saleswomen, and hawkers. The exercise of a skilled profession allowed a certain social fluidity without disturbing the established hierarchies of Iberian society, but free white servants were in competition with this huge Black community in Portugal. At the beginning of the 16th century, King Manuel prohibited black women, slaves, or freedmen from selling fruit, fish, and vegetables in the ports and streets of Lisbon, but the practices persisted until the 1800s.⁶² In the city of Évora, it was common to find slaves working as cooks or sweepers. Sometimes slaves earned money, such as the 50 reais a day earned by Eva, who belonged to a goldsmith from Évora, for selling bread. In 1583, thanks to her earnings, Eva was able to pay for her freedom and the freedom of one of her sons. She also bought a female slave.⁶³ A similar pattern can be observed in Caserta in the Kingdom of Naples, where baptized slaves earned more than non-baptized slaves.⁶⁴

Conclusion

In early modern Europe, slavery was extensive and prolonged. The examples cited here from the Italian and German territories, Austria, France, Britain, and Portugal were replicated continent-wide. Whatever the legal restrictions on slavery in individual states, broadly similar practices persisted internationally. Assimilation through baptism and the creation of a new identity, the types of work performed by slaves, slaves’ strategies to achieve freedom, and the persistence of the phenomenon in the face of prohibition were shared features. Baptism was not a short-term fix but one step in a longer journey to an often-elusive freedom. Slaves’ post-baptism petitions demonstrate their uncertain status. Some slaves petitioned for baptism simply as a means of improving their status. But there were other silent instruments that slaves used as a form of protest: escape and desertion. Slaves expressed their voice in petitions and by escaping in search of better living conditions and status.

The forms of dependency and the working situations of slaves varied dramatically: slaves of noble families could experience better living conditions and were occasionally immediately freed (as in the case of Ourika) or placed in esteemed positions (as in the case of the Africans at the Austrian court). Occasionally, slaves owned by government officials, and in rare instances privately held slaves, were paid or received other forms of remuneration. Slaves in Europe lived different experiences and different forms of dependency. Slavery in some parts of Europe compared to conditions of local serfdom. Skin color was often a factor in the treatment meted out to slaves but “Blacks,” for example, those serving as “exotic” ornaments at court or in affluent households, did not always have worse living conditions than, for example, light-skinned galley slaves from North Africa. Owning slaves was a symbol of aristocratic prestige and mercantile power, but slaves were also agents of their own lives, as demonstrated by captives’ petitions in Italian cities and the few elite cases in which slaves negotiated social and economic opportunities to attain freedom and integration in new communities.⁶⁵

Discussion of the Literature

Scholarship on slavery in Europe in the early modern period has been deeply influenced by studies on the Mediterranean world such as Fernand Braudel’s La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l’époque de Philippe II (1949).⁶⁶ The discipline began to establish itself from the middle of the 20th century before it boomed in the 1980s. New directions of research emerged in the 2010s.

The early historiography focused almost exclusively on Christian slaves in North Africa than on Muslim slaves in Europe, with few exceptions.⁶⁷ Historians referred to the “silence of historiography” on slavery in Europe in all the European languages. One of the pioneering studies in the field was Salvatore Bono’s I Corsari Barbareschi (1964).⁶⁸ In the French context, in the late 1980s, the pioneering works of Michel Fontenay and Lucile and Bartolomé Bennassar on Mediterranean renegades and on the Mediterranean racing war marked important milestones in the development of academic understanding of slavery in the region.⁶⁹

Slavery in Europe has been approached from two perspectives: Mediterranean captivity, privateering, and the economy of ransom and slaves in Europe.⁷⁰ Slavery in Europe has been also studied in comparison with other forms of servile dependency in different times and places.⁷¹ In 21st-century works, the positioning of captivity and slavery as a unique subject has resulted in fresh historiographical insights. The categories of “captive” and “slave” have been interrogated anew on the basis of the emerging complexity of the taxonomy of Mediterranean sources in the volume Les esclavages en Méditerranée.⁷² In 2014, Mediterranean Slavery Revisited marked a turning point in adopting a transcultural perspective.⁷³ The question was framed from Asian, Ottoman, Islamic, and Jewish perspectives. In the last ten years, slavery research in Europe has become interdisciplinary and transcultural.

The global history approach has also recently impacted on slavery studies in Europe. Developments in transnational and trans-sea studies have fittingly connected different geographical spaces and different types of slavery because the trajectories of slaves were not fixed and often meandered from the Atlantic to continental Europe.⁷⁴ An ERC (European Research Council grant) output on German slavery was particularly strong on this dynamic, resulting in the publication of Beyond Exceptionalism. Traces of Slavery and Slave Trade in Early Modern Germany by Von Mallinckrodt, Köstlbauer, Lentz in 2021.⁷⁵ The Mediterranean–Atlantic panorama represents an innovative perspective on Italian slavery and its chronology has also been updated.⁷⁶ The study of the circulation of slaves between the Atlantic colonial world and the metropole represents another important emerging historiographical trend.⁷⁷ Furthermore, European slavery studies have increasingly integrated with labor history studies, particularly reflections on free and unfree labor. Historians focus on the living and working conditions of slaves in different geographical areas and try to compare their lives with those of other unfree workers to understand better the forms of coercion and power relations at play.⁷⁸

Studies on slaves in Europe often formed parts of books on Black history in Europe, volumes also featuring people who were not enslaved (see the important Black Africans in Renaissance Europe, 2005; the collection The Image of Black in Western Art, 1976; Être noir en France by Éric Noël, 2006).⁷⁹ Due to the types of sources in which we find slaves, slavery studies in Europe are also linked to religious studies related to Inquisitions or Catholic conversion.⁸⁰ In short, the historiographical landscape has traditionally been varied, but 21st-century trends are toward cultural and social histories of slavery, with a pronounced emphasis on living conditions. There have also been efforts to reconstruct the biographies of slaves in the Mediterranean and between empires; even partial biographical traces have become central to studies.⁸¹ Historians have become less interested in quantitative analysis even though much work on the number of slaves in Europe remains to be done, and less is known in that regard than it is on the Atlantic.

For the Spanish context, foundational works by Bernard Vincent, Alessandro Stella, Aurelia Martín Casares, Ivan Armenteros, José Miguel López García and Debra Blumenthal focus on slavery and captivity in the Iberian Peninsula or in specific urban settings (Granada, Barcelona, Madrid and Valencia). Concerning Portugal, and more specifically Lisbon, there are the important publications on slaves and freed people of color of Antonio De Almeida Mendes, Didier Lahon, and Jorge Fonseca. For France, Sue Peabody and Pierre Boulle have focused on the problem of slavery and race, Erik Noël has edited the Dictionnaire des gens de couleur dans la France moderne, Julie Duprat has recently worked on slaves and freed individuals in Bordeaux and Krystel Gualdé on slaves in Nantes. On the German states, Rebekka von Mallinckrodt and Sarah Lenz focus on practices of enslavement as well as on people of African and Asian descent. On Habsburg Austria, the works of Josef Köstlbauer and Walter Sauer deal with the questions of missionaries, nobles’ slaves and “moors.” For the Italian states, consult Salvatore Bono’s book, Schiavi is important, as is Giovanna Fiume’s Il Santo Moro furthermore there are many works on slavery in Italian cities, including Luca Lo Basso and Andrea Zappia for Genoa, Serena di Nepi for Rome, Giuliana Boccadamo for Naples, Raffaella Sarti for Bologna, and Cesare Santus and Lucia Frattarelli Fischer for Leghorn. For slavery and abolitionism, see the book by Giulia Bonazza. On the problem of slavery and race in Britain, see Folarin Olawale Shyllon, Susan Dwyer Amussen, Kathleen Chater, Madge Dresser, and Rabin Dana.