João Manuel Custódio Aldegalega (KCL) - 2024-25 Students
joao.aldegalega@kcl.ac.uk

Unfreedom in Medieval Catalonia and Aragon: Captivity, slavery, and serfdom c. 900-1200

The study of unfreedom has, over the last decades, become increasingly important for an understanding of the transitions between classical Rome, late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages. Recent scholars have greatly complicated the traditional view of a decline of Rome’s slave society throughout late Antiquity, eventually giving way to Medieval serfdom. Crucial to this has been the recognition that Medieval forms of unfreedom were complex, highly localised and often ambiguous. In my, I investigate unfreedom and the phenomenon of captivity in medieval Iberia during the central Middle Ages (c. 900-1200).

I will seek to understand what criteria were used to define a person as enslavable, how unfree Muslims were understood by Christian societies, whether there were significant distinctive characteristics of Iberian unfreedom in this period and how all this relates to the presence of a confessional and political frontier with al-Andalus. I will approach this subject with the specificity of the Iberian frontier in mind as a key element.

In order to do this, I will focus on forms of unfreedom resulting from frontier conditions and cross-confessional contacts, especially Muslim captives in Aragon and Catalonia. This focus will allow a critical look at the idea of a ‘no-man’s land’ between al-Andalus and the North, emphasising the splintered and localised nature of interactions across the frontier and the overlapping webs of jurisdictions, cultural forms and conflict which characterised it. I will investigate key questions such as gender divisions, what roles Muslim captives played in Christian society, and the impact of the contact with Islamic slavery on Iberian forms of unfreedom.

Unfreedom rarely leaves behind material evidence that could be approached from an archaeological perspective. I am focusing on documentary sources, particularly on the wealth of cartularies that survive in the northeastern regions of Iberia. I will prioritise this type of source as they often contain large numbers of transactional documents which yield a wealth of information. They also, especially in the case of monastic cartularies, provide a more localised viewpoint than other types of sources. I will work with edited and charter documents in Latin and Catalan. Working with documentary sources from different places and institutions within this region will enable me to take a more diverse and spatially contingent approach to the evidence.

A quantitative analysis will include such aspects as the frequency with which unfree ‘Saracens’ (to use the language of the sources) were named or the values attributed to them in cash. The quantitative aspect will form the bedrock of the research. Nonetheless, the primary objective will be to qualitatively analyse the documents and what they can tell us about the nature of unfreedom in this place and time in a way that further defines or challenges current paradigms.

Ultimately, I hope my research on this topic and the conclusions I present may help further our knowledge of slavery and unfreedom in this very important, yet very little-known, period. These conclusions may contribute to the overall picture of the rise of late Medieval slavery, and its connections to the development of a new Atlantic slave system in the wake of Spanish and Portuguese colonialism during the Age of Exploration. The hypothesis of a significant connection between the two has been largely dismissed by the view that Modern forms of slavery are radically different from those of previous historical periods. While I will not be focusing on or attempting to challenge this line of argument, which goes beyond the scope of my project, I hope that my research provides a contribution to the discussion.

Primary supervisor: Professor Alice Rio