A Cruel Renaissance

“Wicked, an abomination, and against all humanity.” These words, uttered in 1416, shine a light on a dark truth: that slavery thrived in Renaissance Europe. Hannah Skoda tells the stories of people living in bondage in a period when ideals of liberty and the nobility of human nature didn't apply to all

- By Hannah Skoda. Photographs by Bridgeman, Alamy, Public Domain and AKG Images

''I gave and sold myself, of my own free will, as a slave to Elias, son of Blasius of Rastus, for four and a half gold coins, valid until my death, so that the said Elias can do with me as he pleases.” This record of an exchange - noted on a slip of parchment as having taken place in Dubrovnik in 1281 – is a typical sale contract, reminding us that slavery was a common phenomenon across the Mediterranean and southern Europe in the late medieval period. It makes the horrors of slavery very clear - yet it is also striking to see the I of the enslaved person. Despite becoming “property, their voice resonates across the centuries.

We rightly celebrate the achievements of the Renaissance but in the late medieval period, the Mediterranean was effectively a slaving zone, with enslaved people transported between all of its coasts and sold in its cities, both Muslim and Christian.

Those slaves who worked in the households of even prominent humanists tend to get written out of accounts of the Renaissance. Here, however, I will tell some of the stories of slaves sold in southern Europe. From Dubrovnik in modern-day Croatia around the coast of Italy, the south of France, and the coast of Spain up to Porto in Portugal, the archives are full of notarial (legal) contracts about slave sales. In 1367, a woman named Christine was sold in Marseille; the purchaser told that he could “have her, hold her, give her, sell her, exchange her, and do all that he pleases with her”.

Black period