Women, Slavery, and Community on the Island of Mallorca, Ca. 1360-1390
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Women, Slavery, and Community on the Island of Mallorca, ca. 1360-1390 A Dissertation SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY Kevin D. Mummey IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Ruth Mazo Karras and Kathryn Reyerson, advisers December 11, 2013 © Copyright 2013 by Kevin D. Mummey. All rights reserved. Acknowledgements Very little that is truly important is done alone, and this dissertation would never have been started, much less finished, without the help of many teachers, colleagues, and friends. My advisers, Kathryn Reyerson and Ruth Karras, have inspired me with the excellence of their work, and gifted me with their time, patience, expertise, and generosity. William Phillips, Jr., opened my eyes to the world of Mediterranean slavery and the Catalan language. John Watkins provided me with timely advice and support for the project, as has Giancarlo Casale, Michael Lower, Daniel Schroeter, Carla Phillips, and Maggie Ragnow. My gratitude also goes out to my undergraduate mentors, Jarbel Rodriguez and Fred Astren, who transformed me from a casual student to an aspiring professional historian. The staff at the Arxiu del regne de Mallorca was incredibly helpful in guiding me through the vast notarial holdings there. Special thanks to Pere Fullana i Puigserver and Juan Rubi at the Archivo Capitular de Mallorca, who not only opened their collection, but introduced me to local scholars. Jorge Maiz Chacón extended his personal hospitality and shared his recent work on the medieval Jewish community of la Ciutat. Many friends and colleagues read and commented on portions of this dissertation, including Matthias Falter, Verena Stern, Thomas Farmer, Melanie Huska, Justin Biel, Gabriel Hill, Ann Zimo, and Tiffany van Sprecher. Kira Robison, Donald Leach, Tim Smith, Jeff Hartmann, Phillip Grace, and Liz Swedo all offered terrific help to me during my graduate career. Mollie Madden prepared the bibliography and edited the footnotes with characteristic precision, and Sharon Park proofread the chapters. Dan Pinkerton helped format the illustrations. Klaas Van der Sanden, interim director of the Center for Austrian Studies, has given me the time and space I needed to finish the project. Financial support came from the University of Minnesota’s Department of History, the University of Minnesota’s Center for Early Modern History, the Mellon Foundation, the Elka Klein Memorial Fund, and the Center for Austrian Studies, University of Minnesota. Finally, I want to thank my partner, Lynn Slobodien, and our son, Cecil Slobodien Mummey, without whose love and support none of this would have been possible, or fun. i Abstract In Women, Slavery, and Community on the Island of Mallorca, ca. 1360-1390, I contend that Mallorcan women, through their participation in the slavery business, extended their reach beyond that of the traditional women’s sphere and contributed to the social and commercial structure of the medieval City. Using notarial protocols in the Mallorcan state and capitular archives, I trace how women and slaves affected the nature of literal spaces like public ovens, city streets, and domestic quarters, and impacted the worlds of finance, commercial transactions, and personal interactions. I argue that the social and economic facility of Mallorcan women, while possibly heightened by the epidemiological and anthropomorphic crises of the late fourteenth century, was not an anomaly, but represented a practical way of assessing and living with the possible. My research contributes to three distinct, but interrelated fields of inquiry. First, it contributes to the historiography of medieval slavery by moving beyond the commonly studied enslaved women to study women slaveholders. Secondly, by focusing on an understudied segment of social relation it contributes to a more nuanced portrait of a medieval urban environment. Lastly, my research fills a void in scholarship concerning medieval Mallorcan women, about who almost nothing has been written. ii Table of Contents Abstract………………………………………………………………………….. i Acknowledgements……………………………………………………………… ii Table of Contents………………………………………………………………... iii List of Illustrations and Maps…………………………………………………… iv List of Abbreviations……………………………………………………………. v Part I Slavery and Community Prelude…………………………………………………………………………...1 Chapter I: An Island in the Path of Ambitions…………………………………. 24 Chapter II: The Mallorcan Slave Population…………………………………… 49 Part II Women, Slavery, and Community Chapter III: Women and Slaves in Private………………………………………121 Chapter IV: Women and Slaves in Public……………………………………….152 Chapter V: The Financial Realm—Women, Slavery and the Notarial Page…….196 Conclusion………………………………………………………………………. 229 Appendices……………………………………………………………………… 240 Bibliography…………………………………………………………………….. 268 iii List of Illustrations and Maps Cover: A window of La Llotja (photo author) P.1 A protocol of the notary Pere de Cumba 23 1.1 The division of la Ciutat by Sa Riera 28 1.2 The arco de la calle Almudaina 29 1.3 Madinah Mayurqah, according to Riera i Frau 34 1.4 Madinah Mayurqah, according to Garcia Delgado 35 1.5 Map of la Ciutat, Antonio Garau, 1644 36 1.6 The partition of la Ciutat 38 4.1 A segment of la Ciutat from the Garau map 167 4.2 Women producing bread, from the Vidal Mayor 171 4.3 Location map of the fountains of la Ciutat 179 4.4 The Font del Sepulcre 179 4.5 The Font del Gall 180 4.6 The Monastery of Santo Domingo from the Garau map 182 4.7 The Gate of Sant Antoni from the Garau map 183 iv List of Abbreviations BSAL El bolletí de la societat arqueológica Lul.liana CHCA Congreso de Historia de la Corona de Aragón CSIC Consell Superior d'Investigacions Científiques DELL De l'esclavitud a la llibertat: esclaus i lliberts a l'Edat Mitjana : actes del Col·loqui Internacional celebrat a Barcelona del 27 al 29 de maig de 1999. Edited by María Teresa Ferrer i Mallol and Josefa Mutgé Vives. Barcelona: Consell Superior d'Investigacions Científiques, Institució Milà i Fontanals, Departament d'Estudis Medievals, 2000. IEB Institut d'Estudis Baleàrics Sta. C Els Pergamins de l’Arxiú Parroquial de Santa Creu, Vol. 1. Edited by Joan Roselló Lliteras. Palma: Consell Insular de Mallorca, 2000. Sta. E Els Pergamins de l Arxiú Parroquial de Santa Eulàlia. Edited by Joan Roselló Lliteras. Palma: Consell Insular de Mallorca, 2000. v Women, Slavery and Community on the Island of Mallorca, ca. 1360- 1390 Part I Slavery and Community Prelude In the streets, narrow, winding, and secluded, here and there buildings arise, on whose fronts are arched doorways and slender-columned windows. Catalans, Sardinians, Italians, Greeks, Arabs, Jews and others from many walks of life…walk at their desired pace, slowly or quickly. It is not unusual, also, to hear conversations in the most colorful variety of languages, or witness the parade of eye-catching fashions of every color and flavor.1 Antonio Pons, Libre del Mostassaf de Mallorca While Antonio Pons layered his description of medieval Mallorca with language reminiscent of a picaresque novel, underneath the colorful prose is a fundamental truth about la Ciutat. The streets of la Ciutat (modern-day Palma de Mallorca) —choked with building materials, transport, and domestic animals, living and dead—as well as its plazas, workshops, and homes were colored by the bump and jostle of Catalans, foreigners, and the enslaved.2 The latter were brought to the island from the greater Mediterranean world, as far away as the plains of central Asia, as nearby as Sardinia, Sicily, and the coasts of North Africa. Disembarked into the hands of auctioneers and 1 Antonio Pons, Libre del Mostassaf de Mallorca (Mallorca: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, Escuela de Estudios Medievales, 1949): XII. En las calles, estrechas, tortuosas y recoletas, a trechos levantábanse edificios en cuyas fachadas abríanse portales de medio punto y esbeltas finestres coronelles.Catalanes, sardos, italianos, griegos, árabes, judios y otras personas de diversa 2 Margalida Bernat i Roca pointed out the character of Mallorca’s choked streets in her discussion of the maintenance of public health in the fourteenth and fifiteenth centuries, “El Manteniment de la salubritat pública a Ciutat de Mallorca (segles XIV-XV),” Acta historica et archaeologica mediaevalia (1998): 92- 125. I use the term la Ciutat, or its English equivalent “the City,” for modern-day Palma de Mallorca, in keeping with medieval usage. La Ciutat was changed to Palma as part of the Bourbon reforms of the early eighteenth century, though modern-day locals use the medieval term. 1 middlemen or sold directly to merchants, artisans, and a variety of middling and upper- status Mallorcans, the enslaved could be found everywhere in and around the medieval Ciutat. They toiled in gardens and fields on the outskirts, helped build the churches, baked bread at the ovens, cleaned homes, nursed children, drew water, carted wood, quarried stone. The public presence of slaves was made possible by the private business of the dominant population, among them women—widows, wives, and daughters—who bought, sold, leased, and borrowed human property. Women utilized slave labor in public and private spaces, in homes, fields, and workshops. They used the enslaved as investment properties, gave them away in testimonial bequests, committed them to years of service and manumitted them, unconditionally and after fulfillment of work-release contracts. Their relationships to their slaves ranged from exploitative to familial. Occasionally enslaved women themselves entered into freed status and faced many of the same decisions as their former masters. Through the system of slavery, women were able to extend their economic resources and personal authority throughout the Ciutat, while others were trapped within it. This dissertation is an exercise in imagining a specific place in a specific time— the late-fourteenth century Ciutat of Mallorca.3 The means by which I have a chosen to imagine it is through an analysis of the slavery system, and the role that women of all statuses played in it.