Book Review – THAT MOST PRECIOUS MERCHANDISE: THE MEDITERRANEAN TRADE IN BLACK SEA SLAVES, 1260-1500, by Hannah Barker

Hannah Barker, That Most Precious Merchandise: The Mediterranean Trade in Black Sea Slaves, 1260-1500. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018. 328 pp.

Reviewed by Emily Sohmer Tai, Professor of History, Queensborough Community College, City University of New York

Historians can trace human enslavement as early as the civilizations of ancient Mesopotamia. Yet, until roughly the second half of the twentieth century, scholars often overlooked ample evidence for slavery in medieval Europe. Hannah Barker is already known to specialists as a co-architect of the spectacular digital resource Teaching Medieval Slavery and Captivity. Her latest book, organized into seven chapters, an introduction, and a conclusion, provides the most comprehensive study produced in English of the extensive medieval Mediterranean market for enslaved peoples from Central Asia and the Caucuses. Concentrated through the Black Sea ports of Caffa, a Genoese colony, and Tana, ruled by the Mongol Khanate of the Golden Horde but managed by Genoa’s rival, Venice, this trade flourished between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries. As Blumenthal, Brodman, and Rodriguez have shown, the victories of the Reconquista and raiding along the North African coast sustained a brisk slave trade in the Christian Iberian kingdoms of this period. But Barker asserts, “the late medieval Mediterranean slave trade cannot be understood independently of its Black Sea context” (150). The same might be said of Barker’s study, which is a substantive revision of her Columbia dissertation and finally answered the call made by Benjamin Kedar in 1976 for a multi-lingual approach to the history of medieval Mediterranean slavery. It earned the Paul E. Lovejoy Prize by the Journal of Global Slavery for the best academic work on slavery published in 2019.

While one reviewer has noted a few missing Mamluk histories, the critical value of Barker’s study derives from how she mines the rich holdings of the Genoese and Venetian notarial archives and Arabic sources for the traffic in enslaved people from the Black Sea to Mamluk Egypt. These records, Barker’s study demonstrates, substantively complement one another. The Latin notarial archives (especially Genoa’s) yield a wealth of practical information about demographics, terms of sale, and the trade volume. The Arabic ḥisba, or slave-buying manuals (which represented an Islamic elaboration of a classical Greek genre), offer a window into the process of the sale of enslaved people in the medieval markets of Cairo and Alexandria that reflect commonalities in both practice and perception. That Most Precious Merchandise combines these sources with a spectrum of legal records, travel narratives, and religious texts to expose what Barker terms a “common culture of slavery” in the late medieval Mediterranean (3). “Christians and Muslims shared three fundamental assumptions about slavery,” Barker writes: “that is was legal, that is was based on religious difference, and that it was a universal threat” (13).  

CCWH members may be most interested in Barker’s discussion of enslaved women, who represented the majority of the Mediterranean slave population, even in Egypt, where Mamluk warriors were critical to the protection of the state. Barker’s study is rich in comparative information in this regard: in Genoa and Venice, enslaved women were the most expensive, while in Mamluk Egypt, it was enslaved men who cost more (107-108). Both Christian Europe and the dar-al-Islam (Islamic world) prized enslaved women who were “…subject to sexual and reproductive demands (as concubines, mothers, and wet-nurses) as well as demands on their physical labor” (61, 77-84, 108-113). Barker draws upon notarial evidence to show that the median age of these women fell between 15 and 22 years, although girls as young as 12 and 13 were preferred (68).

Although most scholars emphasize their exploitation in Islamic contexts, enslaved women had a few protections in the dar-al-Islam. For instance, if her owner impregnated her, an enslaved woman became an umm walad (mother of a child) and could not be sold during a master’s lifetime. The enslaver would manumit an umm walad, and her children would be free, even if she might not be allowed to raise them (80). Christian Europe resisted attempts by enslaved people to invoke the status of umm walad. Still, some male owners did emancipate the children of slave concubines and mistresses and even designated some of them as heirs (83). Twelve to eighteen percent of enslavers in the Christian West were, meanwhile, women. In at least one case Barker discusses, such owners might reverse an absent husband’s disposition to manumit (36-37, 84).  

Throughout her study, Barker is legitimately critical of “Christian amelioration narratives,” “Marxist narratives of modern production,” or “generational chauvinism”– all of which, she argues, have led scholars to variously underestimate the ubiquitousness of the slave trade in the medieval Mediterranean, or imagine that it engendered a level of moral censure for which there would be no evidence until centuries later (5-13, 209-212). This book is missing a more explicit link to the work of scholars like Hartman and Paton, who have studied the enslavement of women during the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Atlantic. They, and others, discuss parallels between this later era and many of the circumstances Barker describes, including the shaming women faced in the marketplace and the possibility of rape, torture, or even murder at a master’s hands (74-84, 88-90, 98-104, 108-113).  Nevertheless, if it is left to the reader to make these connections, That Most Precious Merchandise is no less valuable for illuminating a lesser-known period in a long and tragic history.