The Medicis' slaves

Posted by Tanos on Sat 19 May 07, 5:26 PM

As you can see from my books page, I dived straight into "The Medici: Godfathers of the Renaissance" after finishing "Donnie Brasco" and its account of the 1970's American mafia. One of the footnotes in Strathern's description of the Medici's rise to power is the existence of domestic slavery in fifteenth century Italy, and I've done some more digging with some interesting results.

I've written here before about the difference between commerical and domestic slavery, and how the former can mislead people into thinking that historical slavery only consisted of American-style plantations, rather than households. I've used domestic slavery in 19th century Egypt (the setting, as I've discussed, of Lewis's "Intercepted Correspondence") as an example of this, but Renaissance Italy provides another, probably more compelling precedent for the 21st century - not least because Renaissance Italy feels just so modern and understandable.

What started me off was this passage in Strathern's book, about Cosimo de Medici in 1427 and his time at the Medici Bank branch in Rome, away from his young wife:

during Cosimo's three years in Rome one of the bank's agents bought him a young Caucasian slave girl whom he had purchased in Venice, where she had been adjuged "a sound virgin, free from disease and aged about twenty-one." The girl was employed as Cosimo's household servant, and he called her Maddalena. ... Most of the slaves were young and female, and were employed as household servants. As was customary with servants of the time in Italy, they usually shared the family dinner table and were looked upon as minor members of the family, with whom they often remained for life. ... By all accounts, Cosimo de'Medici was not a promiscuous man, yet he certainly formed an attachment to his slave girl in Rome, who bore him a son called Carlo. This offspring would later be brought up with his two sons in Florence, an arrangement that was not regarded as exceptional at the time. ... The slave girl Maddalena appears to have been brought back to Florence, and judging by Cosimo's catasto {tax} returns was still working for (or being looked after by) the family as late as 1457

That kind of slave is really a concubine or a secondary wife rather than a menial or drudge, or anything like a field hand.

The most comprehensive study of slavery in Cosimo's time was written by Iris Origo back in 1955 ("The Domestic Enemy"). I'm not having much luck with the sources she used, so some of her commentary is mixed in with the passages I'm quoting from now on.

The first thing is that Cosimo's son Giovanni obtained a slave via Venice in very similar circumstances to his father, some 30 years previously:

And in 1459 a letter to Giovanni di Cosimo de'Medici from his agent in Venice gives a good idea of the qualities most highly prized: "I have found for you," the agent wrote, "one of the Circassian nation, between seventeen and eighteen years old ... and not too delicate in face, but of good appearance and handy and lively and intelligent, so that I think she will do very well; and this is the opinion of Lucrezia, and of some other women who have seen her."

Florence, where the Medici were based, maintained a Slave Register to record their sales, and it's clear that most of the city's slaves were coming from the Black Sea area. In particular, the Italian city of Genoa controlled Caffa on the north shore of the Black Sea, which was a large slave trading centre, and open to Venetians and merchants from other states too. Most of the slaves seem to have been Tartars from Central Asia, but Circassians from the Caucasus south of modern-day Russia were highly prized and very European in their appearance. (Hundreds of years later, Edward Lane would describe how nineteenth century Turks and Egyptians still paid higher prices for Circassian slave girls for their harems than any other nationality.)

So we have a picture of the Medici buying female slaves through their agents in Venice, where they enter Italy.

But how did they fit into the household?

To enter such a household, even as a slave, was to become part of the famiglia, and it is quite plain that, in this respect, slaves were treated just like any other servant. This is, indeed, why too much indignation about their legal status is out of place. True, a slave was subject to his master's potestas puniendi; he could be beaten and whipped, according to the statutes of most cities, with impunity; but so, we must remember, could the householder's own wife and children. The slave, if domestic chastisements did not prove sufficient, could be put - at his master's request - in prison; but so could his master's sons. "If he does not obey you well," wrote Lapo Mazzei about his much-loved son, Piero, to Simone d'Andrea, the manager of the firm in which Piero was working, "beat him like a dog, and put him in prison, as if he were your own."

Furthermore, slaves were both relatively cheap to people like the Medici and yet rather rare. For example, a slave or a decent horse or a silk wedding dress might cost 50 gold florins. Maybe 10 or 20 thousand pounds in today's money. But although the Medici bank was making 20,000 florins a year, Cosimo only owned four slaves at the time of his death.

This paints a picture of slaves as a special kind of luxury, rather than a simple way of bringing in more servants. The complication with slaves, compared to the expensive paintings and furniture that they were surrounded with, is that they need maintaining. So just as horses can be bought for the price of a family car today, they're a lot more effort to maintain. With slaves, they even became part of that extended family, and responsibilities and risks come out of that in a way that doesn't happen with the Donatello statue you have in the courtyard.

For example:

Alessandra Macinghi Strozzi, for instance, a woman of great strength of character who, after her husband's exile, managed all the family affairs alone for many years, was yet obliged to write to her son, Filippo Strozzi, in Naples, that she really did not know what to do with her slave Cateruccia, unless he could come home to beat her, "for it is several years now since I have laid hands on her myself ... I cannot bear this strife," she added. "She pays no more heed to me than if I were the slave and she the lady, and she threatens to harm us all, so that Lisandra (her daughter) and I are afraid of her." Yet the mistress did not dare to sell her slave, for fear that the woman's gossip might destroy her daughter's chances of marriage. "I must first get Lisandra out of the house, because of her (Cateruccia's) evil tongue." One would think that such a situation would soon have become intolerable. Yet fifteen years later, Cateruccia was still in casa Strozzi. "She won't go away from here on any account; and then she is not healthy, and complains all the time. I get no service out of her, except for going out a little ... for she stays in her own room, and sometimes spins a little for me and sometimes attends to her own business.

Perhaps that's why Cosimo didn't try to staff his whole household with slaves, rather than limit himself to a few that could be managed and guided properly.

There's also a tension between the status of some slave girls as prized concubines and the desire to maintain social order and social rank. During the Middle Ages and early Renaissance it was common to enact sumptuary laws which dictated what different classes were allowed to wear. This promoted modest dress for women, made the lower and middle orders distinguishable from the nobility, and supposedly stopped the flaunting of wealth which might provoke a jealous reaction. They were also subject to cat and mouse games with the fashionable searching for loop holes.

Some of these laws tried to enforce a clear division between wives and their husbands' slaves:

Moreover, the clothes in which these slave-women were dressed - perhaps in the interests of public morals as well as of economy - certainly did not add to their attractions. The sumptuary laws of Florence - which already forbade any maid-servant to wear the high-soled shoes (pianelle) then in fashion, or a train to her gown - decreed that "all slaves, nurses and maids born outside the territory of Florence" might wear "neither coats nor dresses nor sleeves of any kind, in any bright colors," but must be dressed in coarse grey romagnolo wool "of natural color," with a little cape of black cloth. "On no account" might they have a silk gown or a belt adorned with gold or silver. On their heads they might wear only "a linen towel with black stripes," and on their feet "no soled hose or pianelle," but wooden clogs with black straps.

If people are having to pass such laws, then it's tempting to ask how they were being dressed when their masters could get away with it.

Edited Fri 25 May 07, 9:13 AM by Tanos