Medieval slavery and blackness

As the 1300s began, the Christian-held areas of Spain saw an influx of slaves from a variety of cultures: Greeks, Armenians, Turks, foreign Muslims, and sub-Saharan Africans. While Christians (as well as Muslims and Jews) had legally enslaved people for centuries, they were newly confronted with the fact that some of their Muslim neighbors were free, while they were making other Muslims their chattel property.

Even though 14th-century Iberian Christians owned or would have seen relatively few slaves from sub-Saharan Africa (most were from other places at this point), portraying enslaved peoples in art with racial features of dark skin and curly hair, often in an exaggerated way, became a common way to express “otherness”. And turning a human into a piece of property is much easier when you can think of them as alien as possible.

Blackness had had a long symbolic legacy in Medieval art — it could signify “foreign and exotic” (including powerful) at best, but it also could signify “sinful” or “servile”. Even though the most common denominator of slaves among Christians in 14th-century Spain was religion (most of their slaves were Muslim), increasingly in art, slaves were depicted as people with exaggerated features of sub-Saharan Africans, like you see in the image here.

This picture comes from a legal manuscript called the _Vidal Mayor_, and was made about 1300 for royalty, probably King Jaume II of Aragon (r 1291-1327). It shows, depicted inside the initial letter “Q”, two dark-skinned and barefoot men wearing paupers’ clothing stand with bound hands under the gaze of an enthroned king with white skin.

The trend of equating slaves with racial characteristics didn’t reflect the actual racial distribution of slaves at this point, but it speaks to the disturbing legacy of coupling visual racial features with unfree social class as a stereotype.