The History of Slavery and the Medieval History of the Iberian Peninsula

The history of slavery in the Peninsula Iberican Peninsula has generated great interest and many publications over the last several decades. Slavery was a constant presence from ancient through medieval to early modern times. At the same time, though, it was relatively low in numbers and low in percentages of the population. In most periods, slaves comprised less than 5 percent of the total population, though there were certain towns where at times it was higher, occasionally reaching 25 percent. Sources of slaves included children born to slave mothers, unredeemed war captives, and enslaved people brought to Peninsula Iberica by slave traders. The latter group varied in its composition over time and encompassed slaves brought from elsewhere in Europe, the Middle East, North Africa, and sub-Saharan Africa. From the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, a few American and Asian slaves appeared in the sales documents. Studies to date have mainly relied on those sale documents for information about the slaves. More recently, the documents produced in legal cases, by religious brotherhoods, and by slaves themselves have become more prominent. The emerging directions in studies of slavery are investigations of the relations between race (a concept variously defined and analyzed) and slavery and an increasing recognition that women made up the majority of the slaves. The stories of those women and their children who grew up as slaves will likely become increasingly important in the study of slavery's history.