That Most Precious Merchandise: The Mediterranean Trade in Black Sea Slaves, 1260–1500
That Most Precious Merchandise: The Mediterranean Trade in Black Sea Slaves, 1260–1500
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最珍贵的商品：地中海黑海奴隶贸易，1260 年至 1500 年
DOI：
10.1080/09503110.2020.1815300
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发表时间：
2020
期刊：
影响因子：
--
通讯作者：
A. Grant
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
A. Grant
本书是作者博士论文（Columbia University, 2014）的修订版。这是对中世纪奴隶制研究的主要实证和理论贡献，其中最重要的成就是整合了黑海奴隶地中海贸易的两个主要背景-意大利和埃及。这些背景通常由不同的专家小组来处理，导致相互错位的印象，巴克认为这是误导性的，因为“一旦把拉丁语和阿拉伯语的来源放在一起研究，很明显，地中海的基督徒和穆斯林居民分享了一套假设和实践，这些假设和实践相当于共同的奴隶制文化。”3）. 这本书分为七章，每一章都有自己的主题。这使得巴克能够将拉丁语和阿拉伯语的证据并置，并揭示出这两种语境的共同之处——但更重要的是，还有不同之处。这本书的第一章，“中世纪晚期地中海的奴隶制”。12-38页)，是巴克所称的“三个基本假设”的概貌。13)当时基督教和穆斯林社会的共同点：奴隶制的合法性，它在宗教差异上的正当性，以及它对每个地方的每个人构成的威胁。这些特征表明，基于种族二元和否认奴隶人性的晚期现代奴隶制概念并不适用于中世纪后期的地中海背景。基督教和穆斯林社会都根据一个人的宗教信仰而不是种族来决定一个人是否可能被奴役，“但在实践中，他们更关心的是保护灵魂免受叛教，而不是保护身体免受奴役。”38)——巴克令人难忘地称之为“奴隶灵魂的竞争”。14)。这一基本原则在基督教内部造成了歧义：东正教和非迦克墩派之间的不同群体，在共同信仰基督教的基础上，在热那亚法庭上要求自由时，表现不同；到目前为止，希腊人过得最好，阿尔巴尼亚人、亚美尼亚人和（不一致的）保加利亚人也有成功的记录；俄罗斯人或高加索人（明格勒人、切尔克斯人、阿布哈兹人）显然从未这样做过。第二章，“差异和对奴隶地位的认知”（页）。39-60页)，在种族问题上做了大量繁重的理论工作。区分了民族（“根据文化对他人进行分类”）和种族（“根据所谓的永久的、固定的和固有的差异对人进行分类”）。46)，巴克接着提出，中世纪社会将宗教类别大致理解为种族类别，这与现代将种族与肤色联系起来形成了鲜明对比。罗马法规定，奴隶的国籍必须在出售时标明，正是因为这个标签被理解为一套固有特征的简写。在巴克令人信服的解读中，Genus和natio（不直接翻译）也是种族类别，如果宗教给出了“错误的答案”（例如，如果一个鞑靼人是基督徒怎么办？），它们可能会被利用。意大利公证人通常在买卖行为中记录种族分类；Mamlūk shurūt（示范合同）手册显示了一些相似之处，“土耳其人”和“Sūdān”被认为是两个首要的受奴役的种族群体。回到她对基督徒被基督徒奴役的讨论，巴克认为，在要求自由的人中，不同的成功率反映了不同的群体被认为在“种族光谱”上比其他群体更接近热那亚人（因此，希腊人比保加利亚人或俄罗斯人“更接近”），而她认为希腊学习的遗产可能……
This book is a revised version of the author’s doctoral thesis (Columbia University, 2014). It is a major empirical and theoretical contribution to the study of medieval slavery, the foremost achievement of which is to integrate the two major contexts of the Mediterranean trade in Black Sea slaves—Italy and Egypt. These contexts have usually been treated by separate groups of specialists, leading to an impression of mutual dislocation that Barker argues is misleading, since ‘once the Latin and Arabic sources are examined together, it becomes clear that Christian and Muslim inhabitants of the Mediterranean shared a set of assumptions and practices that amounted to a common culture of slavery’(p. 3). The book is structured in seven chapters, each of which is thematically focused. This allows Barker to juxtapose Latin and Arabic evidence, and to bring into relief what was common—but also, importantly, what was not common—to these two contexts.The book’s first chapter,‘Slavery in the Late Medieval Mediterranean’(pp. 12-38), is a conspectus of what Barker calls the ‘three fundamental assumptions’(p. 13) common to Christian and Muslim society at that time: slavery’s legality, its justification in religious difference, and the threat it posed to everyone everywhere. These characteristics demonstrate that late modern conceptions of slavery as being predicated on a racial binary and on the denial of the slaves’ humanity do not stand for the later medieval Mediterranean context. Both Christian and Muslim societies determined whether or not a person might be enslaved based upon their religion, not their race,‘but in practice they were more concerned with protecting souls from apostasy than bodies from slavery’(p. 38)—what Barker memorably calls the ‘competition for slave souls’(p. 14). This underlying principle created ambiguity within Christianity: different groups among Orthodox and Non-Chalcedonians fared differently when trying to claim freedom before Genoese tribunals on the basis of shared Christianity; Greeks fared by far the best, with Albanians, Armenians, and (inconsistently) Bulgars also recorded as succeeding; Russians or Caucasians (Mingrelians, Circassians, Abkhazians) apparently never did. Chapter two,‘Difference and the Perception of Slave Status’(pp. 39-60), does a great deal of theoretical heavy lifting on the subject of race. Having distinguished ethnicity (‘categorising other people based on culture’) from race (‘categorising people based on their supposedly permanent, fixed, and inherent differences’)(p. 46), Barker then suggests that medieval societies understood religious categories broadly as racial categories, in opposition to modern associations of race with skin colour. Roman law determined that the natio of a slave should be stated during a sale, precisely because this label was understood as shorthand for a package of inherent characteristics. Genus and natio (not straightforwardly translated) are, in Barker’s convincing reading, also racial categories, and might be exploited if religion gave the ‘wrong answer’(what if a Tatar were Christian, for example?). Italian notaries usually recorded racial taxonomies in acts of sale; Mamlūk shurūt(model contract) manuals suggest some similarities, with ‘Turks’ and ‘Sūdān’given as the two overarching enslaveable racial groupings. Returning to her discussion of the enslavement of Christians by Christians, Barker suggests that the differing success rates among claims for freedom reflect different groups being perceived as closer on the ‘racial spectrum’to Genoese than others (so, a Greek was ‘closer’than a Bulgar or a Russian), while she suggests that the legacy of Greek learning might have …