Speaking of Slavery , livre ebook

COLOR, ETHNICITY, AND HUMAN BONDAGE
IN ITALY
SPEAKING OF SLAVER Y
STEVEN A. EPSTEIN
Cornell University Press
Ithaca and London
For Jean
Both life itself and the good life are impossible without the essentials.... So a possession is also a tool for the purpose of living, and property is an assemblage of tools; a slave is a sort of living possession, and every assistant is like a superior tool among tools. For if each tool could perform its own task either at our bidding or anticipating it, and if ... shuttles shuttled to and fro of their own accord, and pluckers played lyres, then master-craftsmen would have no need of assistants nor masters any need of slaves.
ARISTOTLE , Politics , Book 1
Man cannot so far know the connexion of causes and events, as that he may venture to do wrong in order to do right.
SAMUEL JOHNSON , Rasselas
The pride of man makes him want to domineer, and nothing mortifies him so much as to be obliged to condescend to persuade his inferiors. Wherever the law allows it, and the nature of the work can afford it, therefore, he will generally prefer the services of slaves to that of free men.
ADAM SMITH , The Wealth of Nations
CONTENTS Prologue Introduction Chapter 1 The Language of Slavery Chapter 2 The Language of the Law Chapter 3 The Human Behavior of Slavery Chapter 4 The Language of the Great Economy Conclusion Selected Bibliography Acknowledgments Index
PROLOGUE
Ciao! This familiar greeting and salutation derives from the expression “(vostro) schiavo,” “(your) slave.” Probably first used in Venice, the word recalls the elaborate courtesies of past centuries, when refined people spoke as though they were slaves or servants, without irony or comradely solidarity with their inferiors. And yet, why a slave? Why would a free person want to be a slave in any context? The meaning of this type of reversal is hard to recover, but a small problem of etymology in Italian prompts larger questions about slavery.
How the language of Italian slavery began and endured is the subject of this book. Since the book is not a narrative or chronological study of Italian slavery, the reader might benefit from some general remarks about the basic story, before and after the medieval experience of slavery in Italy, the main subject here. When Italy was the center of the Roman Empire, a high percentage of the peninsula’s population consisted of slaves. The Roman state was a genuine slave culture, and bequeathed to posterity a sophisticated legal tradition on slavery as well as habits of expression in Latin that eventually shaped the Italian dialects. In the early Middle Ages the Roman slave culture collapsed, even in the Byzantine-held areas of southern Italy, and was replaced by other cultures that owned some slaves-the Lombard states in the north and center of the peninsula, and Sicily under Muslim rule. Why the Roman slave culture gave way to a culture with slaves is a complex issue, but the answer must depend on the state’s power to maintain slavery, and the market’s ability to supply slaves. Slavery always rested on violence, and the Roman Empire was simply more effective than its successors in Italy in providing an experienced mix of force and incentives to sustain an economic system with many slaves. The habit of owning slaves continued in the early Middle Ages, and the old legal and moral arguments for the legitimacy of slavery remained convincing at least to the owners. Early medieval Italy attracted merchants who brought people from the Balkans, Sardinia, and across the Alps who replenished the stock of slaves. Rural slaves gradually became peasants, more efficiently exploitable and likely to produce more peasants, at no capital expense to the masters. A continuous if low-level slavery continued in Italy up to the first documents around the year 1000 that illuminate medieval slavery.
In the central Middle Ages, 1000-1350, slaves became more common as possessions and items of commerce in the northern maritime states of Venice and Genoa, and also appeared in the territories the Normans took from the Byzantines, Lombards, and Muslims in the south. This revived slavery probably resulted from increased military and commercial interactions with the Muslim world, which brought Italians more wealth and new sources of and markets for slaves. Slaves were still rare in some parts of Italy, like Rome itself or the Po valley. They seem to have been more numerous in the ports having external sources of supply, and in the newly conquered Muslim and Byzantine lands, where some of the local population was already enslaved. Estimates of population are educated guesses in these centuries, but slaves probably comprised no more than a percent or two of the population in the northern ports in the thirteenth century, and a little higher percentage in Sicily. Yet these small numbers should not obscure the startling fact that slavery had revived and found a place in Italian society and law, just as it was disappearing for good in much of Europe. The chronology of slavery reveals the choices Italians made about whether or not to practice slavery. Why is there slavery? Why is there not slavery? These are important questions to ask in every phase of slavery’s history.
After the devastating plague of 1348, slaves became more expensive but also more useful in a world of labor shortages. In the fifteenth century Genoese slaves were perhaps 4 to 5 percent of the population, a figure matched by some areas of the south. In Renaissance Florence there were only a few hundred expensive slaves, all women working in domestic service. The increasing prices of slaves explain why they were more numerous at the points where they entered Italy, the ports and the Mezzogiorno, and rarer in the interior. As slavery became increasingly a luxury in the north, the slave population consisted increasingly of women from distant lands in eastern Europe and Africa. Slavery began to wane in Italy in the sixteenth century except on the galleys, where male slavery experienced a second wind as slaves, mostly captured North Africans and convicts, replaced the free men who were no longer as willing to row for their cities against the formidable Ottoman Empire. These slaves were mostly destined to be quickly exterminated by the exhausting work of rowing or by the diseases rife on the galleys. Free servants working for low wages largely replaced expensive slave women in the houses of the wealthy, and international supplies of slaves flowed toward the New World. Plantation-style agriculture never established itself in Italy, and slavery could not be made to pay in farming or even in the galleys. By the late eighteenth century slavery had virtually disappeared in Italy, and the few relics of it were swept away in the disorders and refonns of the revolutionary era. The gradual withering away of slavery must be attributed to either the high prices of slaves or an aversion to purchasing the kinds of slaves available in the early modern, increasingly global economy.
By 1871 Italy was a unified country, and soon its belated search for colonies took Italians to Libya, Eritrea, and Benadir (Somalia), where they found traditional slave regimes as yet unaffected by western European attitudes against slavery, and so Italians resolved to impose enlightened practices on their colonial peoples. The Antislavery Society of Italy fonned to combat slavery in the world and in Italy’s own colonies. During World War II many thousands of Italians eventually found themselves as forced laborers, de facto slaves of the Reich, and thousands ofItalianJews became slaves exterminated through labor. All these subsequent episodes of slavery bear the traces of the medieval Italian experiences with the institution.
Although Italy has been a fully realized country for only a little more than a century, the Italian sense of cultural identity has existed since Roman times. In this book I write about Italians where appropriate, and the Genoese, Pisans, Florentines, Sicilians, and all the rest of the strong local identities where necessary. Since this book focuses on the language of slavery—mainly Italian, but also Latin and the dialects—I have tried to be careful about not using “Italian” anachronistically. I do believe the seas and mountains have given the peninsula and islands a cultural, legal, and social unity or experience, even as rivalries and bitter wars frequently overwhelmed the sense of common identity.
Let me conclude this prologue with a quotation that helps to explain why the history of Italian slavery repays an extended study. In 1498 Cristoforo Colombo wrote back to his patrons in Spain, Ferdinando and Isabella. He described the island of Hispaniola as capable of exporting four thousand slaves a year. 1 I have always been puzzled by this unusual skill Columbus possessed-how and where did he learn to size up an island so that he could estimate the number of slaves it could yield in a year? Centuries of Genoese experience with the realities of the slave trade could produce this kind of expertise. But Columbus knew more than island demographics. He went on to observe that even if these slaves died in the crossing to Europe, it would not always be this way. For the blacks and Canary Islanders also died at first, and he implies that once the routine of the transit was established, the death rate of what would become the Middle Passage would fall. It is intriguing to see Columbus contemplate the use of these slaves in Europe, and already in his time thousands of African slaves were working in Portugal itself. At one level this book is an extended effort to understand the broadest possible context that created Columbus and his way of seeing and describing the people of Hispaniola.
A study of Italian slavery accomplishes two important tasks. The European background to New World slavery matters, and the story of Columbus reveals that there is a vital Italian component t