Tartars in Spain: renaissance slavery in the Catalan city of
Manresa, c.1408

Jeffrey Fynn-Paul

Research Institute for History and Culture, Utrecht University, Janskerkhof 13, 3512 BL, Utrecht, The Netherlands

Keywords:
Slavery
Catalonia
Manresa
Iberia
Fourteenth Century
Fifteenth Century
Urban
Women
Mediterranean

a b s t r a c t

This article presents a summary and analysis of the slaves and slave
owners who were living in a particular late medieval city at a partic-
ular time. The data for this overview comes from the 1408 Liber
Manifesti of Manresa, a tax document which is quite similar to the
Florentine Catasto of 1427. Unlike the Catasto, however, the Liber
Manifesti consistently designates slaves as distinct from other
servants. As a result, the Manresan document allows us to know many
basic but often elusive ﬁgures such as the total number of slaves in our
town, the proportion of slaves to free people, the percentage of
households who owned slaves, the proportion of women and children
amongst slaves, and even the market value of female, male, and child
slaves vis a

` vis the cost of hiring a domestic servant. Access to such an

unusually complete sample also enables us to make some fresh
assertions about the extent and nature of renaissance slavery as
a whole. Several of Iris Origo’s inﬂuential observations, which still
stand as a benchmark of renaissance slavery some 50 years after they
were presented, are here both corroborated and challenged. For
example, to what extent did renaissance slave owners pair male slaves
with female slaves, as Origo’s anecdotal evidence suggested? Our
sample also provides invaluable data on the wealth, occupations, and
family background of slave owners. We can gain some insight into the
phenomenon of women as slave owners, and also coordinate slave
owning with urban political power. In addition we can suggest an
answer to the elusive question of just how much of a ‘luxury item’
slaves really were in the post-Black Death Mediterranean. In Manresa,
as it turns out, slave owners were anything but a uniform block of
‘wealthy townspeople.’

E-mail address:

jeffrey.fynn-paul@let.uu.nl

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Journal of Medieval History 34 (2008) 347–359

Specialists have long known that the institution of slavery never completely vanished from the

southern fringes of Latin Christendom during the high middle ages. It did become rare enough,
however, that many writers have been content to generalise about a ‘disappearance of slavery’ from
Western Europe during the eleventh century, followed by a ‘reappearance’ in southern Europe after the
Black Death.

There is in fact a good basis for this generalisation, since during the eleventh century the

ancient and long-declining system of chattel slavery, which since late Roman times had countenanced
the enslavement of Christians by Christians, did become extinct. What did not entirely cease during or
after the eleventh century was the tendency for southern Europeans to enslave Muslim prisoners of
war. The numbers of such war slaves, whose presence was established long ago by Charles Verlinden,
were very small relative to the population of southern Europe as a whole, and supply was sporadic.
James Brodman and Stephen Bensch are some of the few historians since Verlinden who have
systematically studied the evolution of war slavery in southern Europe during the high medieval
period.

According to Brodman and Bensch, the eleventh through the thirteenth centuries witnessed

the creation of a normalised process for redeeming captives between Muslim and Christian states. A
captive’s odds of remaining in perpetual slavery thus steadily decreased as diplomatic channels were
regularised. In Catalonia and Aragon, the slave ransoming business became a monopoly of the crown
from the twelfth century, and by the thirteenth century this business had become the province of the
Mercedarian order. Note that along the Christian-Islamic frontier, the difference between redeeming
slaves and redeeming war captives thus came to be virtually identical.

When aggressors and victims

were of different faiths, the latter were usually considered to be slaves during their time in captivity,
whereas when aggressors and victims were of the same faith, the victims were considered to be
prisoners of war. It is not to be doubted that the conditions endured by many such slaves of both faiths
were better than those experienced by many medieval prisoners of war; indeed, those who were not
redeemed outright by family back home found that many avenues to freedom were open to them.
Islamic slaves in Christian Spain were usually allowed to practise a profession, own property, and save
money, with the expectation that they would be able to buy their freedom.

A parallel process existed

For a recent review of the literature on the disappearance of chattel slavery in medieval Europe, see Alice Rio, ‘Freedom and

unfreedom in early medieval Francia: the evidence of the legal formulae’, Past and Present, 193 (2006), 7–11. An article by
Wendy Davies contains much of the current consensus on chronology: ‘On servile status in the early middle ages’, in: Serfdom
and slavery, ed. Michael Bush (London, 1996), 225–46. Despite receiving much criticism, the chronology presented by Pierre
Bonnassie, From slavery to feudalism in south-western Europe (Cambridge, 1991), esp. 51–6, remains important, especially for
Catalonia. Even William Chester Jordan, who is highly critical of Bonnassie’s work, does not appear to argue with his chronology
per se. Jordan, review of Bonnassie, Slavery and Abolition, 13 (1992), 97–102. Jordan’s own book on the Senonais region suggests
that manumission occurred later in some northern French regions than in Catalonia and environs. W.C. Jordan, From servitude to
freedom. Manumission in the Senonais in the thirteenth century (Philadelphia, 1986). David Pelteret has now established a deﬁnite
chronology for the waning of early medieval slavery in England; there, the institution appears to have been all but extinct by
c.1100, with ecclesiastical institutions remaining some of the last holdouts. Pelteret, Slavery in early mediaeval England
(Rochester, NY, 1995), 251–6. In Sweden, farm slavery disappeared soon after Christianisation, but domestic slavery lingered
until it was abolished by royal decree in 1335. See Joan Lind, ‘The ending of slavery in Sweden’, Scandinavian Studies, 50:1
(1978), 66–9. Of course, Charles Verlinden long ago pointed out that slavery did persist during the otherwise slaveless
1100–1350 period, insofar as a relatively small number of Muslim captives were held in frontier regions of Italy, Southern
France, and Spain. See Verlinden, L’esclavage dans l’Europe me´dievale, vol. 1: Pe´ninsule Ibe´rique, France (Bruges, 1955); and Vol. 2:
Italie, colonies italiennes du Levant, Levant latin, Empire bysantin (Ghent, 1977). More recently, Susan Mosher Stuard found Italian
evidence for the survival of early medieval domestic slavery well into the high medieval period. Stuard, ‘Ancillary evidence for
the decline of medieval slavery’, Past and Present, 149 (1995), 4–5. For a reply to Stuard, see Jean-Pierre Devroey, ‘Men and
women in early medieval serfdom: the ninth-century north Frankish evidence’, Past and Present, 166:1 (2000), 3–30. It would
seem as though slavery remained common in Greek-inﬂuenced areas through the fourteenth century. Observers of slavery in
Dalmatia and Crete have however noticed major changes in slave-related trends during the last quarter of the century; this is
probably due in part to the sudden upturn in Italian and Spanish demand. See Neven Budak, ‘Slavery in late medieval Dalmatia/
Croatia: labour, legal status, integration’, in Me´langes de l’Ecole française de Rome, moyen a

ˆge, 112:2 (2000), 745–60, and Sally

McKee, ‘Households in fourteenth-century Venetian Crete’, Speculum, 70 (1995), esp. 58–65.

James Brodman, Ransoming captives in Crusader Spain (Philadelphia, 1986). Stephen Bensch, ‘From prizes of war to domestic

merchandise: the changing face of slavery in Catalonia and Aragon, 1000–1300’, Viator, 25 (1994), 63–93.

Brodman, Ransoming captives, 5–6. Bensch, ‘Prizes of war’, 74.

Brian Catlos, The victors and the vanquished: Christians and Muslims in Catalonia and Aragon, 1050–1300 (Cambridge, 2004),

232–8.

J. Fynn-Paul / Journal of Medieval History 34 (2008) 347–359

348

in Islamic Spain.

Rulers of both faiths often hoped that ex-slaves would remain in their new country;

in Christian Spain, ex-slaves were encouraged to join the ﬁscally important community of mude´jares, or
free Muslims living under Christian rule.

The high medieval practice of enslaving the inﬁdel thus kept the institution of slavery alive in

southern Europe. When the Genoese began to take over the Black Sea routes during the twelfth and
thirteenth centuries, they found that they had become middlemen in the vast slave trade which took
place between pagan regions of Russia, orthodox Byzantium, and the Muslim states. With Genoese and
other Latin shipping carrying such a volume of Tartar, Slavic, and sometimes Greek slaves, one might
surmise that it would only be a matter of time until this human cargo began to turn up in Latin
Christian cities. References to Tartar slaves can be found in Genoese records from at least 1275.

However, the numbers of these eastern slaves remained surprisingly low, and it must be concluded that
a combination of cheap labour in overpopulated Europe together with the Church’s continuing stric-
tures against slavery worked to discourage the importation of eastern slaves in signiﬁcant numbers
right through the mid-fourteenth century.

Signiﬁcantly, Bensch could locate no references to eastern

slaves in Barcelona before the Black Death; in the medium-sized Catalan town of Manresa, no refer-
ences to slaves turn up in the town council records between 1280 and 1360, though Christian prisoners
of war do ﬁgure from time to time.

If European slave imports from the Black Sea amounted to little more than a trickle prior to the mid-

fourteenth century, things changed abruptly and dramatically when the Black Death of 1348–50 cut the
population of Europe by between one quarter and one half. This was followed by a succession of additional
plagues, which in many areas recurred on a roughly twelve-year cycle, and which helped depress the
population still further. Iris Origo long ago linked the labour shortage caused by the Black Death to the
dramatic increase in eastern slave imports during the second half of the fourteenth century.

It can now be

shown that at this time the demand for slaves, vis a

` vis free labour, shot up dramatically in Catalonia not

merely because of the increased cost of labour, but from a concomitant downturn in upper-class incomes.

In Catalonia, the Black Death began to ravage the populace in May of 1348 and did not abate until the

end of August. When it was over, the nominal price of labour had risen by 50%, and it would never return

See for example, Cristina de la Puente, ‘Entre la esclavitud y la libertad: consecuencias legales de la manumisio´n segu´n el

derecho M

alikı´’, Al-Qantara, 16:2 (1995), 309–33.

See Mark Meyerson, ‘Slavery and the social order: Mudejars and Christians in the kingdom of Valencia’, Medieval

Encounters, 1:1 (1995), 144–73, and its companion piece, ‘Slavery and solidarity: Mudejars and foreign Muslim captives in the
kingdom of Valencia’, Medieval Encounters, 2:3 (1996), 286–343.

William D. Philips, Jr. Slavery from Roman times to the early transatlantic trade (Minneapolis, 1985), 104.

Bonnassie was one of the ﬁrst to re-assert the inﬂuence of Christianity as a primary factor in the decline of early medieval

slavery. Bonnassie, From slavery to feudalism, 37–51. Bensch provides anecdotal evidence suggesting that the Church maintained
an effective anti-slavery stance throughout the middle ages. For example, Innocent III censured the clergy of Barcelona in 1206,
accusing them of refusing baptism to their Muslim slaves, and thereby placing their own economic interests above the spiritual
interests of the enslaved. In 1337, Benedict XII admonished the young king Pere III for his practice of having Saracen slaves wait
at the royal table. Bensch, ‘Prizes of war’, 83, 67. For several decades prior to Bonnassie, most writers on the subject of early
medieval slavery had been Marxist, and these were of course highly concerned to ﬁnd economic explanations for the decline,
none of which, however, is entirely satisfying. Even Georges Duby, who was certainly inﬂuenced by Marxist theory but was
much less orthodox than most writers on this subject, maintained that the Church’s prohibitions dealt slavery ‘barely a glancing
blow.’ Duby, Early growth of the European economy, (Ithaca, NY, 1978), 32.

Bensch, ‘Prizes of war’, 81. In August of 1353, during one of many wars over Sardinia, the Catalans won a major naval victory

over the Genoese; it was presumably at this time that some Genoese prisoners of war were awarded to Manresa as part of that
city’s share of the spoils. In late 1357 some of these prisoners escaped (they had evidently not been ransomed), and the town
council ordered new chains to be made for them. Arxiu Histo`ric de la Ciutat de Manresa (AHCM), Manuales Concilii I-6, entry
dated 1357.11.18.

Iris Origo, ‘The domestic enemy: the eastern slaves in Tuscany in the fourteenth and ﬁfteenth centuries’, Speculum, 30:3

(1955) 321–66 (324).

By upper-class is meant, simply, those inhabitants of a town whose total patrimony and/or annual income placed them in

roughly the top 20% wealth bracket, i.e., those who might routinely employ servants and/or labourers. No rigid Marxist
overtones are meant, i.e., no direct association with a particular ‘mode of production’ is implied by the use of the term ‘class.’
However, it is probably worth rescuing the term ‘class’ for parlance amongst medieval urban historians, since it is too useful and
historically signiﬁcant a term for us to shun it simply because it became too burdened with jargon meanings during the height
of the theory craze.

J. Fynn-Paul / Journal of Medieval History 34 (2008) 347–359

349

to its previously low levels. In 1362–63, a second wave of plague further cut the population of many
European countries, and it is from this time that we can begin to speak of a true labour shortage; the
winter of 1362–63 deserves much more notoriety than it has heretofore received. Evidence for a 1362–
63 watershed in the history of European labour supply can now be adduced in England, Catalonia, and
Tuscany.

Successive waves of plague continued to cut population levels until, by the 1380s, nominal

wages in Catalonia had doubled their 1347 levels. At the same time, the rising cost of labour appears to
have had a paralysing effect on the Mediterranean economy: when measured in terms of interest rates
on openly traded state bonds, interest rates in Catalonia and Tuscany plummeted to less than 50% of their
former levels between 1347 and 1380. Since many of the wealthiest urban households in both regions
relied on investments as a principal form of income, urban patricians saw their household income fall by
nearly the same factor as interest rates during these decades. Between the rising cost of labour and
falling return on investments, it can be suggested that wealthy urban householders could hire at most
one fourth as many domestics in 1380 as they had been able to keep in 1347. Wealthy householders were
thus caught in a dire economic pincer movement, and their ability to maintain a sizeable famı´lia,
traditionally an important expression of patrician power, was put under severe pressure.

This dire economic pressure on the size of upper-class urban famı´lia helps to explain the sudden and

striking relaxation of centuries-old aversions to slave keeping in southern Europe. Eastern slaves were
certainly available prior to 1363, and yet Florence, at least, had remained opposed to their importation,
presumably on moral grounds, until this time. In Florence, at least, we know that it was illegal for
citizens to own slaves prior to 1363. After the European labour shortage became acute in 1363, we
suddenly ﬁnd that the importation of eastern slaves was legalised and regularised by authorities across
southern Europe.

While we can thus be fairly certain that the number of slaves in southern Europe

increased dramatically after 1363, very few ﬁgures have been published which give us a sense of how
signiﬁcant this new trade became during subsequent decades. Furthermore, most extant work has
tended to concentrate on large urban centres, which were the hubs of the newly expanded slave trade,
but to what extent slaveholding penetrated the smaller towns and the countryside has hardly been
addressed. One of the few relevant data sets, which is very late and which predictably pertains to
a major metropolis, suggests that in 1563, about 7 to 8% of the population of Venice were servants of
some type. Slaves proper made up an unknown proportion of this ﬁgure.

The best estimate for the

number of slaves in the metropolitan centres of renaissance and early modern Italy thus weighs in at
around 1–4% of the population. As to who owned these slaves, little is known except that some famous
names are occasionally found amongst the contracts of sale; some authors suggest that slaves were
within the reach of ‘artisan’ households, while others suggest that slaves remained an item of luxury
consumption.

A. R. Bridbury made this argument for England in ‘The Black Death’, Economic History Review, 2nd series, 26 (1973), 557–92.

In May of 1363 the consellers of Manresa wrote an entry which corroborates Bridbury’s view. Further evidence is supplied by the
fact that, according to Iris Origo, Florence did not legalise slavery until precisely the spring of 1363. Origo, ‘The domestic enemy’,
324–5. The Manresan council entry reads: ‘Because of the pestilence which recently ravaged the city, and because of the many
payments which we must make to the king, this city stands in need of people who practise the mechanical arts; likewise it is
our duty to attempt to populate the city by whatever means possible. Therefore we proclaim that all those who are not natural
to the city and who wish to stay in it for more than ten days must write their name in the book of the city. These shall be free
from all fogatges, questias reyals, and other occasional taxes; likewise they shall be free from all regular civic taxes (imposicions)
for a period of ﬁve years.’ AHCM I-7 (Manuale Concilii) 1363.5.3. Further discussion on the Manresan labour shortage can be
found in Jeffrey Fynn-Paul, ‘The Catalan city of Manresa in the fourteenth and early ﬁfteenth centuries: a political, social and
economic history’ (unpublished Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Toronto, 2005; printed version forthcoming) 72–5.

Jeffrey Fynn-Paul, ‘Civic debt, civic taxes, and urban unrest: a Catalan key to interpreting the late fourteenth-century

European crisis’, in: Money, markets and trade in late medieval Europe, ed. Armstong, Elbl, and Elbl (Leiden, 2007), 119–45.

As noted above, Origo says that Florence legaliaed slavery in a statute of March 1363. Origo, ‘The domestic enemy’, 324–5.

Bensch remarks that the Generalitat of Catalonia created a police force charged with runaway slave issues from about this time;
Bensch, ‘Prizes of war’, 85. For more on this force (in an incarnation which began in 1421), see below.

Philips, Slavery from Roman times, 106.

Peter Spufford, Power and proﬁt: the merchant in medieval Europe (London, 2002) 340, argues that late medieval slaves were

largely luxury items; Stuard writes accordingly, e.g., ‘Ancillary evidence’, 20. Origo argued, however, that middle-class slave
ownership was more widespread than more recent writers seem to allow. See ‘The domestic enemy’, 325. In general, however,
published evidence has been too scanty for deﬁnite conclusions to be drawn on this point.

J. Fynn-Paul / Journal of Medieval History 34 (2008) 347–359

350

Despite the many questions which remain about the phase of southern European slavery which began in

about 1363 and petered out in the seventeenth century, it is clear that it deserves to be studied as a distinct
phenomenon.

This ‘renaissance slavery’ was signiﬁcant in its own right, and it was also to leave

a devastating legacy to the world, insofar as it accustomed the Spanish and Portuguese urban classes to
personal slave ownership on a signiﬁcant scale just before they were to reach the African Islands, Sub-
Saharan Africa, and the New World.

It might be worth noting that by distinguishing renaissance slavery

we can thus describe four distinct, though often overlapping, phases of western European involvement in
slavery. First was chattel slavery, an institution which had been indigenous amongst prehistoric tribes, and
was then co-opted into the Roman system. This lasted in various forms through about the eleventh century,
as has been observed. A second major phase was Christian-Islamic slavery, especially in the Mediterranean;
this phase lasted from about the eighth through the eighteenth centuries, with Europeans enslaving
Muslims into the seventeenth century, and Muslims enslaving Europeans for a century or two longer.

The

third phase is renaissance, or post-Black Death slavery, which is described here; this is characterised by
southern European imports of domestic slaves from the Black Sea between about 1362 and about 1453, and
also from Africa between the 1440s and the seventeenth century. Finally, after some transitional phases in
the African islands, came the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. This began in earnest with legal or de facto
enslavement of indigenous New World populations in the sixteenth century, and then witnessed the
massive transport of African slaves to New World plantations from about 1600 until the nineteenth century.
During this last phase, of course, northern European plantation owners and their socioeconomic networks
introduced the notion of black slavery to northern Europe, with a bit of success. Of these four phases, the
middle two have been least studied, and renaissance slavery least of all, in part because of its hybrid nature.
Black Sea slavery was only signiﬁcant for about a century, and the second phase of renaissance slavery,
beginning with the import of African slaves as domestic servants from the mid-ﬁfteenth century, has with
some justiﬁcation been viewed as a precursor to the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, rather than a continuation of
renaissance slavery per se, although it was in fact both of these things.

Fortunately for our understanding of the Black Sea phase of renaissance slavery, a new series of ﬁgures

from the Catalan city of Manresa, outside of Barcelona, can provide us with the ﬁrst snapshot of late
medieval urban slaveholding on a per-household basis. The snapshot is perhaps all the more interesting
because it comes from a secondary city, rather than a major hub of international commerce. In terms of size,
Manresa ranked about seventh or eighth on a list of approximately ﬁfteen signiﬁcant urban centres in late
medieval Catalonia. We can thus use it to judge the extent to which post-Black Death slaveholding became
a part of the Catalan urban landscape as a whole. The ﬁgures presented here are largely derived from the
Liber Manifesti of 1408, an exhaustive tax survey of Manresa that is quite similar to the Florentine Catasto of
1427.

The primary difference between the two documents is that the Liber Manifesti does not list the

names of household dependants; instead it lists only household heads and their assets. Also, the Florentine
document covers both Florence and its contado, while the Liber Manifesti covers only the city of Manresa
itself. Like the Catasto, however, the Liber Manifesti does list all of the property for Manresa’s 640 households
in great detail, including homes, the contents of homes, shops and their contents, land held both inside and
outside the city along with its value, loans, investments, interest received, rent paid, and debts owed, among
other interesting details. The Liber Manifesti is thus the product of what was a relatively common form of

To my knowledge few studies have systematically traced the ending of Renaissance slavery in Spain or Italy. In addition to

the 1563 evidence from Venice referenced above (n. 15), Origo states that ‘as late as 1558, the Statutes of Genoa still included, in
a list of goods carried by cargo-ships ‘‘male and female slaves, horses, and other animals’’’. Origo, ‘The domestic enemy’, 329. An
article by Robert J. Frankle suggests that Iberian and Italian philosophers were generally moving away from broad justiﬁcations
of slavery during the sixteenth century; a papal bull of 1537, inﬂuenced in part by the arguments of Las Casas, did prohibit (in
theory) the enslavement of Native Americans. Frankle, ‘Some aspects of renaissance slavery’, Explorations in Renaissance Culture,
2 (1975), 55–65 (59).

See Phillips, Slavery from Roman times, 131–53. For a discussion of relations between the crown, the nobility, and the

merchants in early Portuguese expeditions to Africa, see Ivana Elbl, ‘The king’s business in Africa: decisions and strategies of the
Portuguese crown’, in: Money, Markets, and Trade in Late Medieval Europe, ed. Armstrong et al., 89–118.

For some new observations, and a bibliography, on Christian-Muslim slavery during the middle ages, see Jeffrey Fynn-Paul,

‘Empire, monotheism, and slavery in the greater Mediterranean region from antiquity through the early modern era’, Past &
Present (forthcoming).

The ofﬁcial citation for the 1408 Liber Manifesti is Arxiu Histo`ric de la Ciutat de Manresa (AHCM) I-165.

J. Fynn-Paul / Journal of Medieval History 34 (2008) 347–359

351

municipal tax assessment in the late middle ages; a census of householders’ wealth. Unfortunately, the
records of most of these assessments have not survived, and many that do survive preserve only minimal
detail. As might be expected, the Manresan book does not list of the wealth of any secular clerical house-
holds in the city, and thus might under-represent totals by a few percent.

It also does not include the

wealth of any noble families living in the city, although some tax disputes during the 1370s in which nobles
were required to pay for the townwalls reveals that these families held only modest property within the city
limits. Only two noble families, the de Manresas and the de Talamancas, were assessed for the wall tax.

The amount of noble property thus overlooked by the Liber Manifesti is probably much less than 1% of the
reported total.

The Liber Manifesti records that 26 slaves were present at Manresa in 1408, in addition to a single

household headed by a manumitted slave whose Christianised name was Marta. The sample size of 27
slaves, while not overly large, is large enough to provide a statistically viable sample for some measures
such as sex ratios. Moreover, the fact that this is perhaps the only late medieval sample we have which
constitutes all the slaves held in a given town at a given time, where we also know the exact number of
slaveholding and non-slaveholding households, and a great many other details about both slaves and
households besides, provides this sample with a unique value well worth investigating.

If we apply a household multiplier of 4.5 people to Manresa’s 640 households, we can conclude that

slaves made up just under 1% of the city’s population of roughly 2900.

Since the 26 Manresan slaves

were held by 17 households, it can be concluded that 2.7% of the city’s households were slave owning.
Only two of the Manresan slaves’ nationalities are speciﬁed, but they both conﬁrm that Manresan slave
routes mirrored the Italian lines of importation from the Black Sea: one slave was a Tartar, and another
was described as Bulgar. These are the two nationalities which ﬁgured most prominently in Venetian
Cretan households in the later fourteenth century. Sally McKee notes that prior to about 1375, most
Venetian Cretan slaves had been Greek, but after this date, a majority of them came from the northern
Black Sea.

Both of the Manresan slaves whose ethnicity is known belonged to the household of Jaume

Sarta, who in 1408 was Manresa’s wealthiest merchant and an active member of the town council. To
what extent Sarta was a ‘typical’ slaveholder will be addressed below.

When we combine the 1408 Manresan slave ﬁgures with a 1431 slave census from Manresa pub-

lished by Charles Verlinden, we can even estimate the direction of slave demographics in Catalonia
during the ﬁfteenth century. Verlinden’s series states that there were 14 male slaves in Manresa in
1431, up from 6 in 1408.

Likewise, it can be surmised from Verlinden’s records that the sex ratio held

In Exeter in 1377, which was very similar in size to contemporary Manresa, Maryanne Kowaleski found that clerics

amounted to only 155/3101, or 0.5% of the total population. Kowaleski, Local markets and regional trade in medieval Exeter
(Cambridge, 1995), 371.

In April 1370, the town council decreed that all people, even nobles, who owned property in town had to pay a tallia for the

construction of city walls to defend against possible raids by the French White Companies. (Arxiu Histo`ric de la Ciutat de
Manresa, Manuales Concilii, 1370.4.22). The previous December, there is record a stating that the knight Berenguer de Manresa
had refused to pay the wall tax for a plot of land he owned in ‘La Parada’. He was presumably contesting payment based on his
noble status. (MC 1369.12.24). In January 1371, we ﬁnd that another de Manresa, Francesc, had paid his share in a similar city
wall tallia. (MC 1371.1.31). In 1372, Blanche, ‘wife of the venerable Berenguer de Talamanca’ was recorded as owing 80s for
a new wall tax. (MC 1372.4.13). This is a signiﬁcant sum, but is a very small part of the town’s annual tax base, which at this
point was about £3000 Barcelona. For Manresan taxes, see Fynn-Paul, ‘Civic debt, civic taxes’, 125–6.

Debate continues over the proper household multipliers to ascribe to documents such as the Liber Manfesti, which

often recorded heads of household only. Most of the recent work on household multipliers has been done in England,
where current consensus holds that household size was continuously in ﬂux and seems to have varied from region to
region. What consensus can be reached points to a number of about 4.5. See Kowaleski, Local markets and regional trade,
374. David Herlihy and Christiane Klapisch-Zuber suggest that Florentine household size might have dipped from about 3.9
in 1351 to about 3.6 by 1408, when Tuscany was at the nadir of its population trough. Herlihy and Klapisch-Zuber, Tuscans
and their families (New Haven, 1985), 63. My own ﬁndings have led me to side with those who argue for a delayed
population decline in Catalonia, indicating that the household multiplier would be signiﬁcantly higher than the Tuscan
ﬁgure. Fynn-Paul, ‘Catalan city’, 91. On the ‘delayed decline’ see See Paul Freedman, The origins of peasant servitude in
medieval Catalonia (Cambridge, 1991), 163. If we use a number of 4.0 for Manresa, we arrive at a total population of about
2560, meaning that the slave population was just over 1%.

McKee, ‘Households, 58–9.

Verlinden, L’esclavage, vol. 1, 431. The document he cites is a register of the male slaves that were insured by the Ofﬁce of

Slave Surveillance, broken down by vegueria.

J. Fynn-Paul / Journal of Medieval History 34 (2008) 347–359

352

relatively steady between 1408 and 1431, at about 65/35 female to male. It is notable that the number
of slaves increased during the ﬁrst half of the fourteenth century, when the population of Catalonia was
falling. Between 1408 and 1453, the number of hearths in Manresa fell from 602 to 425, for a net
decrease of 29.5%.

If we assume, since no major disasters befell Manresa during this time, that this

population decline was uniform, we can expect that by 1431, the town would have lost about 15% of its
1408 population. If we calculate from the sex ratio that 14 males equals a total slave population of about
40 slaves, it would seem that by 1431, the proportion of slaves at Manresa had roughly doubled since
1408, from 1 to 2% of a declining population. If the percentage of slave owning households also
doubled, this would represent a jump from 2.7 to over 5%, meaning that by 1431 one in twenty of the
city’s households held at least one slave. Thus, as the labour shortage continued to worsen over the
course of the early ﬁfteenth century, and possibly due to an increasing acceptance of slavery through
familiarisation, slaves became an increasingly signiﬁcant part of the Catalan population during the ﬁrst
half of the ﬁfteenth century at least. After the conquest of Constantinople in 1453, and with the
introduction of African slaves into southern Europe from the 1440s, the demography and economics of
slave owning probably changed somewhat from the late fourteenth- and early ﬁfteenth-century
pattern that our sources reveal. Another event which probably altered this initial pattern was the
Catalan Civil War of 1462–72, which devastated Manresa, and led to a population decline of some 40%
over the course of the conﬂict.

In 1408, Manresan slaves were worth an average of £36.6, or 732 shillings, in the money of Bar-

celona. This converts to 51.5 Florentine ﬂorins, a ﬁgure which ﬁts nicely into the price range for
Florentine slaves suggested by Iris Origo.

In the decades around 1400, a Florentine slave aged 15–25

cost roughly 45–50 ﬂorins, although a particularly pretty woman could cost 65 or even 80 ﬂorins.

Recording slave prices is not merely a clerical exercise, however, since it enables us to compare the
value of slaves with the cost of hiring workers and domestics, and thus gives us an important measure
of the economic attractiveness of slave owning. If the medieval work year can be calculated at 200 days,
then since Catalan workers in the 1390s were earning about 2.76 shillings per day, for a total of 552
shillings per year, this means that investment in a slave would pay off after less than a year and a half.

Of course, domestics probably earned less money than day labourers, since they would be given room
and board, but in 1354, soon after the Black Death and well before the nominal cost of labour reached
its 1380s peak, one servant received a salary equivalent to 17 ﬂorins per year from the Manresan
patrician Jaume Sarta.

Even by conservative estimates, then, investment in a slave would begin to

return pure proﬁt after only three or four years. This is a powerful argument for the sudden increase in
the popularity of slaveholding in southern Europe after the Black Death.

But like many of the most proﬁtable investments throughout the centuries, the large capital outlay

required for the purchase of a single slave meant that slave owning was an option open only to the
wealthy. At £35, the average slave cost about one third of the value of a typical farmer’s patrimony, and
about 14% of the value of the average householder’s patrimony, as these are recorded in the Liber
Manifesti. While 14% of the city average may sound relatively reasonable, in fact most householders had
difﬁculty raising this percentage of their assets in liquid form. The minimum investment required to
purchase Catalan government bonds, which was the primary means of safeguarding and maintaining

For Manresan demographics see Fynn-Paul, ‘The Catalan city of Manresa’, 88.

The conversion rate of 14s/2.5d Barcelona per ﬂorin is found in Peter Spufford, A handbook of medieval exchange (London,

1986), 144.

Origo, ‘The domestic enemy’, 336, found slave prices as high as 65 Florins; and Spufford, Power and proﬁt, 340, cites prices as

high as 80 ﬂorins. These were, however, exceptional.

For some of the only published data that can establish the length of a medieval work year, see Herman Van der Wee, The

growth of the Antwerp market and the European economy, 14th–16th centuries, 3 vols (Louvain, 1963), Appendix 48, 540–4. Van
der Wee’s calculations are addressed in John Munro, ‘Wage-stickiness, monetary changes, and real incomes in late-medieval
England and the Low Countries, 1300–1500: did money matter?’, Research in Economic History, 21 (2003), 201. On Catalan wages
in the 1390s, see Fynn-Paul, ‘The Catalan City of Manresa’, 102–10.

Arxiu Histo`ric de la Ciutat de Manresa, Tr. 224 (Jacobus Sarta), 1352.5.21, records a salary of 240s paid to a servant, with no

mention of clothing or other payment in kind (this practice, which was prevalent through the 1330s, seems to have been halted
after the Black Death). During this same year, a Manresan company hired two employees for a salary of 500s/year and 300s/year
respectively. AHCM Tr. 224, 1353.12.9.

J. Fynn-Paul / Journal of Medieval History 34 (2008) 347–359

353

one’s fortune during these decades, was about £25; any household that could raise this amount or
more would have invested in bonds ﬁrst. Only households which felt that they had enough money in
bonds could then feel free to risk an additional £37 on a slave. A slave, of course, was a very risky
investment, since if the slave took sick or ran away, all of this considerable outlay would be lost; at least,
this was the case in the years prior to the introduction of mandatory slave insurance in 1421, as is
discussed below. Thus, we ﬁnd that while the average wealth of all 640 Manresan households came to
£267 in the money of Barcelona, the average wealth of slaveholding households was £1356, or ﬁve
times that amount. Over half of the slaves were held in households whose wealth ranked them in the
top 2.5%. Four ﬁfths of the slaves were held by householders ranked in the top 6.5%. That slaves
remained expensive even for the wealthiest households, despite their obvious ﬁnancial attractiveness,
is attested by the fact that only one Manresan household held more than two.

The sex ratio of the Manresan slaves is also a topic of interest. The Manresan sample provides further

evidence for the theory that female slaves outnumbered males in late medieval homes by a ratio of about
2:1. Nineteen of twenty-six Manresan slaves, or 73%, were female. This shows a continuity with Stephen
Bensch’s late thirteenth-century ﬁndings, which suggested that 70% of Catalan slaves were female,
especially after slavery became almost exclusively domestic after 1270.

The ﬁgures are also consistent

with Verlinden’s overlooked projection of a 60/40 female to male ratio in Catalonia between 1390 and
1462.

Taken together, these ﬁgures strongly suggest that Catalonia at least, the late medieval slave

trade was not ‘overwhelmingly’ a trade in women, as is often maintained.

Although female domestic

servants were highly prized for well-known reasons, the Manresan data reminds us that the late
medieval labour shortage was acute, and that male labourers were in great demand.

The extent to which these householders would go to circumvent high wages demanded by male

labourers is raised in greater relief when one learns something of the culture of fugitive slaves and slave
insurance which arose during the early ﬁfteenth century in Catalonia. In 1421, the Corts of Catalonia
created a rather remarkable institution, the Ofﬁce for the Surveillance of Slaves.

This required that

each male slave over age fourteen be insured by a sum of 1 Aragonese ﬂorin per year; since a ﬂorin was
valued at 11 sous, this amounted to merely four days’ wages, so the sum was signiﬁcant, but not
prohibitive. The mere fact that the ofﬁce had to be created suggests that Catalan slave owners were
experiencing problems with their male slaves running away. And although he curiously does not
remark on this point, Verlinden’s own ﬁgures suggest that this problem was signiﬁcant. Surveillance
Ofﬁce records suggest that between 1421 and 1431, a total of 327 fugitive slaves were reported; while in
1431, a total of 1739 male slaves were insured. Of the runaways, 325 were males, and two were
women.

Over a 10 year period, then, up to 20% of the male slave population of Catalonia went fugitive.

This is truly remarkable, and suggests that the relative novelty of slave ownership on a large scale found
the Catalans unprepared for the consequences. The 1421 creation of the Ofﬁce of Surveillance of Slaves
thus shows the Catalan state beginning to construct a surveillance apparatus reminiscent of other well-
known early modern policing institutions. Of course, some or perhaps many of the runaways were
repeat offenders; and on an annual basis, the ﬁgures suggest that less than 2% of male slaves actually
ran away. And when one does the math, one ﬁnds that the annual cost of insurance equalled about 1.5%
of the average slave value (11/700 sous) a good indication that our ﬁgures reﬂect the actual historical
situation, and likewise an indication that the Catalans who set up the Ofﬁce of Surveillance of Slaves

Bensch, ‘Prizes of war’, 83–4.

Verlinden found that of 245 slaves treated in Catalan notarial acts dated between 1390 and 1462, 151 were women, and 94

were men, that is, just under 62% were women. Verlinden, L’esclavage, vol. 1, 431–2.

See Stuard, ‘Ancillary evidence’, 3; Origo’s register of 357 slaves is obviously an unrepresentative sample as she is careful to

admit. ‘The domestic enemy’, 336. McKee asserts that female slaves were more valuable than males for much of the fourteenth
century on Crete, although she notes that by 1400, the price of slaves of each sex had reached near parity. McKee, ‘Households’,
59. See also Elisabeth Santschi, ‘Quelques aspects du status des non-libres en Cre`te au XIVe s.’, Thesaurismata, 9 (1972), 104–36
(125–6). Price parity is even more striking in light of the evidence that males ran away far more often than females (see below).

As Verlinden notes in L’esclavage, vol. 1, 431, the ﬁrst to publish a report on this ofﬁce was J. Miret y Sans, ‘La esclavitud en

Catalun

˜ a en los ultimos tiempos de la edad media’, Revue Hispanique, 41 (1917).

Verlinden, L’esclavage, vol. 1, 429. Of these, 23 male slaves belonged to the clergy, 49 to the nobility, and 253 men and two

women to the commons.

J. Fynn-Paul / Journal of Medieval History 34 (2008) 347–359

354

had carefully priced their insurance. All the same, the likelihood of ﬂight, the extra cost of insurance,
and sexual and other considerations made male slave owning much more onerous than female slave
owning, so the fact that male slaves still made up between 25 and 40% of Catalan slaves in the early
ﬁfteenth century is further testament to the high demand for male labour at this time.

Also, the disproportionality of male to female fugitives seems nothing short of shocking. Although

one can guess the reasons for this, that women at this time were raised in the domestic sphere, and
were encouraged to learn little of the ways of the world outside the home, it is still a striking measure
of the stark differences in gender roles that the fugitive tendencies of each sex were so very divergent.
Presumably, male slaves’ routine engagement in business outside the home gave them many more
opportunities to learn of possible escape routes, and more opportunities to network with people who
might help them in their attempt. In addition, the sexist world of the late medieval Mediterranean
made it far easier for males travelling alone to go unremarked and unrecognised, perhaps even joining
a band of outlaws, than for women to do the same.

Perhaps to ensure that male slaves would be less likely to run away, Manresan slave owners took

care to pair them up with a female slave. Of 26 total slaves, 10 were living in households with one male
and one female slave, or in one case, with two male and two female slaves. Since two of the twenty six
slaves were children, this means that 41.6% of adult slaves belonged to couples. This is a surprising
ﬁnding, and might suggest the strength of the ‘Christianisation’ of renaissance slavery. Roman law, of
course, had forbidden slaves to marry, although the inﬂuence of the Church in allowing marriage for
slaves can be discerned in Gaul from the seventh century.

In renaissance Tuscany, however, most

cities recognised the marriage of one slave to another, as long as this was performed with the master’s
consent.

There is perhaps no way to know whether the Manresan slave couples were in fact married,

but it is important to recall this possibility.

Perhaps even more interesting is the fact that of the six adult male slaves, ﬁve were paired with

a female slave. Origo notes that one line of contemporary Italian thought suggested that slave owners
should provide mates for their male slaves, so as to discourage immorality.

It seems clear that this

advice was strongly heeded in Manresa. A double standard can thus be discerned: it was clearly
deemed necessary to provide male slaves with a sexual outlet, while 12 out of 17, or 70%, of adult
female slaves were not paired with males, against over 80% of male slaves who were paired with
females. Heads of household clearly tried to neutralise the threat posed by their male slaves’ sexuality
by providing them with a mate. Whether the male or female slaves in question had any say in their
choice of mate would probably have varied according to the temperament of the master, although the
interests of domestic tranquility would suggest that the slaves’ feelings be addressed on this point.

That masters routinely took advantage of their slaves’ sexuality has long been recognised. It is

interesting, then, to note that of 12 ‘unpaired’ adult female slaves, only two of them are recorded as
having children, and both mothers had only a single surviving child. The fathers are not named. It is
interesting to speculate on what these low numbers of children could mean. Possible conclusions are
that the slaves’ conditions contributed to low birth rates, that masters sometimes manumitted children
and raised them as members of the household, or, the low numbers could simply be a reﬂection of high
child mortality rates in the early ﬁfteenth century. It is also possible that certain slaves’ bodily integrity
was respected; although it could equally be the case that some form of birth control or even exposure
of infants was practised.

It is generally believed that in the domestic slave market of the later middle ages female slaves were

worth substantially more than male slaves. One of the most surprising aspects of the Manresan
evidence is that a male/female price differential is almost entirely absent, at least prior to the act which
required insurance on male slaves from 1421. The seven male slaves were valued by the Manresan tax
collectors at an average of £35.57, while the 19 female slaves averaged £36.95. It is thus probable that

Duby, Early growth, 32–3.

Origo, ‘Domestic enemy’, 345.

Origo, ‘Domestic enemy’, 344.

Origo’s essay is full of excerpts from Italian journals in which masters lament the extent to which slaves’ personalities

affected a household. See ‘Domestic enemy’, 342–4.

J. Fynn-Paul / Journal of Medieval History 34 (2008) 347–359

355

historians have been struck by the occasional high price that could be fetched by a woman of excep-
tional beauty; in practise, however, the labour provided by a male slave was valued just as highly as that
provided by a woman. Other ﬁgures show a remarkable continuity between Florentine and Manresan
prices, further suggesting that the Manresan male/female price ratio was consistent with the southern
European market at large. Origo reported that prepubescent girls sold for 20 to 30 ﬂorins; at Manresa,
two female children were valued at £10 and £20, for an average of 21 ﬂorins. At Florence, boys up to 12
were worth about 25 ﬂorins; at Manresa, one boy slave was valued at £11, or 15.5 ﬂorins.

One very important aspect of slaveholding that the Liber Manifesti can provide is to give us the

occupations and social status of the Manresan slave owners. We can thus determine whether they
formed anything like a homogenous slave owning ‘class’ in a semi-Marxist (that is, occupation-based)
sense of the term, or whether they were instead a heterogeneous group of citizens who happened to
own slaves. The evidence seems to point towards the latter conclusion. Perhaps the most striking
feature is that there was no one occupational group which tended to own slaves more than any others.
For example, it is traditional to divide Catalan urban society into wealthy rentiers and still powerful but
less wealthy merchants. The Manresan sample shows that four of seventeen slave households were
headed by rentiers or their wives, while ﬁve households were headed by merchants. In the city as
a whole, there were almost equal numbers of rentier and merchant households (26 and 25, respec-
tively), and so given the size of the slaveholding sample, there could be no clearer indication that one’s
occupational or social status had very little to do with one’s tendency to own slaves. Other wealthy
groups, including the coriaterii (furriers) and the lawyers, are all represented in proportion to their
predominance in the city as a whole. That four households, or nearly 25%, were distinctly middle class,
also shows that while slaveholding was easier for the rich, it was certainly not restricted to them by any
effective social barriers. Late medieval slavery in Catalonia at the level of the medium-sized town was
thus a purely economic, rather than a ‘class’ phenomenon. The only exception seems to have been
within the royal court itself, where slaveholding had long been something of a status symbol, as will be
seen.

Thus we may begin our sketch of Manresa’s slave owning households. The principal slave owner in

Manresa was Ramon de Cumbis, whose family is attested in the city only from about 1370. He was
a protonotary of Catalonia, and a royal councillor. That he owned four slaves, rather than merely one or
two, is a sign of his membership in the Catalan national elite. Even before slaveholding became popular
in the towns during the 1360s, the court of Aragon had maintained its ancient custom of keeping a few
enslaved moors for use as demonstrations of royal power. In 1337, Pope Benedict XII had felt it
necessary to admonish the young King Pere III against using such slaves as servants at his dinner
table.

The slaveholding of Ramon de Cumbis is thus probably an indication of his desire to follow

a long-standing courtly fashion that antedated the renaissance slavery phenomenon, and which had
clearly survived Benedict’s censure. That de Cumbis had feudal pretensions, and a concomitant desire
to rise above the social status of the mere burgher, can be seen from the fact that he had recently
purchased a castle and its attendant rights, worth £1000; he also controlled some of the old feudal
revenues from the court of the bailiff and the city market. While Ramon was the wealthiest man in
Manresa on paper, he in fact owed over half of his gross wealth of £4000 in debts, good courtier that he
was. Debts notwithstanding, his net wealth still placed him twelfth in the city.

Of the remaining householders who owned a pair of slaves, one was a rentier, another was a wealthy

merchant, and a third was a member of an ancient family which had fallen on relatively hard times. In
this instance slave ownership might be seen as an attempt to bolster fading dignity. A fourth owner was
listed as a coriaterius, or a furrier; although this might lead us to speculate that slaves were held by
relatively modest ‘artisans,’ in fact Bernat de Sant Joan was one of the wealthiest men in the city, and he
was a major entrepreneur in the city’s fur and leather trade.

A lawyer and a well-to-do grocer both owned female slaves with children; the lawyer’s slave had

a daughter, and the grocer’s slave had a son. Of the remaining seven male householders who owned
a single slave, ﬁve of them were worth more than £1000: two merchants, two rentiers, and another

Benedict XII (1334–42), had earlier in his life been the Cistercian inquisitor (Jacques Fournier) against Catharism whose

report has been made famous by Emmanuel LeRoy Ladurie in Montaillou.

J. Fynn-Paul / Journal of Medieval History 34 (2008) 347–359

356

wealthy coriaterius. The middle class scribe Dominic Martor had seen ﬁt to purchase a little girl slave,
described as petita in the Liber Manifesti; she was worth only £20, and it seems clear that Dominic’s
narrower means had forced him to take a gamble, hoping that his chattel would survive into adulthood.
Probably the strangest case in the Liber Manifesti is that of the tailor Pere Cuya, whose total worth was
merely £146; of this, £48 included the worth of his single female slave. Tellingly, Pere also owed a debt
for £40, which was one of the largest debts for anyone in his wealth bracket. How a poor tailor was able
to raise the liquidity to purchase such a valuable slave is probably explained by the fact that Pere also
manifested goods for a ward of his, Bernat de Pinu. Bernat’s estate included a decent house worth £50,
and property totalling £26. It seems possible, since Pere had no known family connections in the city,
that he had used his ward’s estate as collateral for a loan, which he then used to purchase a slave.
Whatever his motives may have been, his purchase was not ﬁnancially responsible.

In Manresa at the turn of the ﬁfteenth century, about 16% of all households were headed by women.

In accordance with Mediterranean custom, widows were allowed to own and administer households
just as their husbands had done. Three of Manresa’s widow householders were also slaveholders; this
means that 18% of the city’s slaves were held by women, a number quite in accordance with the total
number of households headed by women. The proﬁles are also what we would expect: Constança
Villanova was the wife of a wealthy merchant, and Sança de Torre had married into a prominent old
rentier family which had seen better days. In 1408 Sança’s slave was described as vella (old), and her
value was assessed at only £15. It is thus probable that the slave had been purchased some decades
before, probably by Sança’s deceased husband, towards the beginning of the slave craze in the 1360s or
70s. A third widow slave owner was the middle class wife of a locksmith, who was of similar means to
the grocer mentioned above.

We can also use the Liber Manifesti, along with other Manresan town records, to coordinate slave

owning and political power. To what extent was slave ownership a manifestation of local power in
early ﬁfteenth-century Manresa? Of 17 slave owning households, only 8 would appear on a list of
the 43 most politically active families in Manresa over the 1317–1413 period.

The families ranked

ﬁrst, fourth, twelfth, and fourteenth were slave owning, as well as three who were tied for twenty-
third place. Thus, 81% of Manresa’s most politically active families were not slave owners. In addi-
tion, over 50% of slave owning households were only slightly politically active or had not held ofﬁce
at all. This is signiﬁcant given that slave owners on average were very well-to-do. It is seems likely
that that by 1408 at least, slave ownership was not considered de rigeur amongst the political elite of
Catalonia’s secondary cities. This despite our evidence (such that it is) that slave ownership was
fashionable at court, and also despite the assertions of many writers that slave ownership was seen
as a manifestation of personal power. That so many politically active households chose not to
purchase slaves may stem from several reasons. One is the amount of trouble and even danger that
bringing a foreign slave into the household could cause: the title of Iris Origo’s famous essay is, after
all, ‘The domestic enemy.’ A second check which must be taken into account is the late medieval
church’s continuous antipathy, or at least ambivalence, towards slavery of all kinds. If manumission
was a boon to one’s soul, the keeping of slaves was certainly felt to be less than a pious act, except
by the rare apologist. There were surely many who still agreed with Benedict XII, that keeping slaves
was pretentious at best, and sinful at worst. It would appear, then, that the keeping of domestic
slaves in early ﬁfteenth-century Manresa was left largely to the discretion of the buyer; it was
expensive, and risky, but it also made a lot of economic sense, as well as gratifying many of the baser
human desires for domination.

It would be ﬁtting to end this study with a portrait of Marta, qui fuit serva de Bernat Messeguerii. At

the time that the Liber Manifesti was drawn up, there were two Messeguerii households in Manresa:
one was headed by a merchant of relatively modest means, named Bernat, and a second household was
headed by a tailor named Guillem.

Together the two households, whether headed by brothers,

cousins, father and son, or uncle and nephew, were worth some £841. It is also not possible to know if
the Bernat Messeguerii listed as a merchant in 1408 was the same person who had manumitted Marta,

For this table, see Fynn-Paul, ‘The Catalan city of Manresa’, 309–10.

Source: AHCM I-165 (Liber Manifesti).

J. Fynn-Paul / Journal of Medieval History 34 (2008) 347–359

357

or whether this had been a now deceased relative, possibly his father. In any event, it is interesting to
note the possible means of the owning family, so that one can have a sense of the type of settlement
which they provided for their former slave, if indeed she had belonged to this family. The Liber Manifesti
shows that Marta had been provided with a house worth £10 on the Carrer d’en Talamanca, a narrow
street just below the plaça maior. The value of her house meant that it was small indeed, perhaps just
one or two modest rooms. It was more substantial than a shed; these were usually valued at £5. When
recording the value of another house worth £11, however, the redactors of the Liber Manifesti had seen
ﬁt to remark that the widow who owned the house had paid ‘merely’ that price for it: £10 was

Table 1
Owners and slaves in Manresa, 1408

Owner

Gross wealth Occupation of

owner

Female (value in £,
followed by descriptor)

Male (value in £,
descriptor)

Cumbis, Ramon de

£4079

Royal councillor
and protonotary
of Catalonia

Sant Joan,

Bernat de

£2050

Coriaterius

Amargos, Bernat

£3576

Rentier

Sarta, Jaume

£1581

Merchant

40 (Bulgar)

48 (Tartar)

Mas, Arnau de

£1810

Lawyer

55
10 (daughter of his other slave)

Sala, Ramon de

£664

Grocer

11
(son of his other slave)

Villanova, Constancia

£380

Wife of locksmith 55 (claimed to have paid only 38.5 for her)

Riculf, Pere

£961

Merchant

25
25

Bellsola, Catarina de

£1135

Wife of merchant

D’Esglesies, Galceran

£1001

Merchant

Cuya, Pere

£146

Tailor

Santa Conte, Guillem

£2868

Rentier

Canyellis, Joan

£2183

Coriaterius

Amargos, Pere

£1170

Rentier

Solanes, Bartholomeu £1212

Merchant

Martor, Dominic

£260

Scribe

20 (petita)

Des Torres, Sança

£987

Wife of rentier

15 (vella)

Table 2
Manresan slave and slave owner demographics at a glance, 1408

Document Outline

Tartars in Spain: renaissance slavery in the Catalan city of Manresa, c.1408

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