Records of Consent
by Hannah Barker
When we use the word consent, we tend to assume a sexual context. But issues of consent, coercion, and control over women’s bodies have always been complex, even in non–sexual contexts. The contractual language of medieval slave sales may seem to have little to do with current debates about sexual harassment. What links them is the way they reflect the power dynamics of the legal system. As we confront questions of consent today, it is worth asking: Who creates records of consent? Who preserves them? When are those records concealed or revealed? Who benefits from them? And what does that tell us about where power lies and how it operates in our society?
These questions may be harder to answer than they appear. On August 21, 1368, a twenty–two–year–old woman named Margarita was sold, with her consent, as a slave in Genoa, a city on the northwest Italian coast (Genoa, Archivio di Stato di Genova, Notai Antichi 292, fol. 156r–v.). In itself, this was not unusual. Genoa had an extensive network of colonies in the eastern Mediterranean and Black Sea. Residents of Genoa regularly imported enslaved people, mainly women and children, from those colonies to use or sell onward. As long as the people enslaved were not Christian, this was considered legal and socially acceptable at the time. In her contract, Margarita was identified as a Tatar. In this way her enslavers connected her with the Golden Horde, a Mongol–governed state located north of the Black Sea. She was probably sent to Genoa via its colony at Caffa on the Crimean Peninsula.
Margarita’s existence is attested by only one document, this sale contract, which has survived almost seven hundred years in the state archive of Genoa. What happened to her before and after the moment of her sale remains opaque. The contract itself was produced by a notary named Benvenuto de Bracelli, a man who had studied law at university (probably Bologna) and then returned to Genoa. There he made a living by recording legal acts. For a fee, he would write down all the essentials of the act in his register using the appropriate legal formulas. This type of record was sufficient as evidence in court cases, but for an extra fee Bracelli would produce copies of documents (wills, property titles, etc.) for his clients to take home.
Recording the sale of a slave was a regular occurrence for Bracelli. His register for the year 1368 contained eighteen slave sale contracts, along with two manumissions and one insurance policy for a pregnant woman. As a result, the document which Bracelli created to record Margarita’s sale was formulaic. In fact, Bracelli knew the legal boilerplate for this kind of transaction so well that he didn’t write most of it down. He only recorded the details unique to Margarita’s sale (her name, the names of her buyer and seller, the price, etc.). Instead of spelling out the standard clauses in the contract, he just wrote the opening words for each clause followed by blank space where the rest of the clause should appear.
Yet after sketching out this particular contract for Margarita, Bracelli had to backtrack and insert an extra clause in the margin. Margarita was “present, willing, and consenting” to her sale. Consent clauses like this were unusual, and their implications are surprising. How could an enslaved person be both an object of sale and a party to that same sale? Why would an enslaved person give consent to her own sale? And why would an enslaver choose to acknowledge in any way the legal agency of an enslaved person?
The short answer is that recording the consent of the enslaved benefited the enslaver. Tempting though it is to analyze this clause as an example of slave agency, in this case agency is a red herring. It is exceedingly rare to find sources which give us direct access to the choices, experiences, or perspectives of the enslaved in fourteenth–century Genoa. In this case, we cannot assume Margarita actually made or was even asked to make a statement of consent. Bracelli may have chosen to add the consent clause on his own initiative, or Margarita’s buyer may have requested that he include it.
If Margarita was asked to say or repeat a phrase of consent, she may not have understood its meaning. It is highly unlikely that she knew Latin, the language in which the contract was written. Her comprehension of Italian may also have been limited, depending on how long she had already spent in a Genoese household. Interpreters, usually Genoese men, assisted with slave sales on occasion. Thoma de Via, for example, acted as a Greek–Latin translator in 1360 in the Black Sea port of Kilia for the sale of a Greek woman named Maria who “asserted… that she was and is a slave” (Michel Balard, Gênes et l’Outre–Mer [Paris: Mouton & Co., 1973], 2:83–86, doc. 41). We have no reason to believe that an interpreter participated in Margarita’s sale though. She may therefore have been unaware of the consent that was recorded on her behalf.
Finally, even if Margarita had been asked to make a statement of consent in a language which she was able to understand, her statement may have been coerced. In Valencia, an enslaved woman named Maria contested the validity of the consent clause in her sale contract on grounds of coercion: she had been stripped, beaten, dragged from the street into the house of the Genoese merchants trying to sell her, and confined there for months until she agreed to cooperate (Debra Blumenthal, Enemies and Familiars: Slavery and Mastery in Fifteenth–Century Valencia [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009], 37).
In other words, the consent clause in this document tells us nothing about Margarita’s situation, perspective, or state of mind at the moment of her sale. We have only the record created and preserved by her enslavers. When consent is recorded, the power lies with the person who makes and keeps the record, not the person who gives or withholds their consent. The contract for Margarita’s sale, including its consent clause, reveals much about the power and vulnerability of her enslavers, as well as the legal, intellectual, and social frameworks within which they practiced slavery. It reveals very little about Margarita.
What, then, does Margarita’s consent clause tell us about the power dynamics of the legal system in fourteenth–century Genoa? It shows that Genoese enslavers feared challenges by the enslaved to their claims of ownership. The laws and norms of the time acknowledged the possibility that people might be enslaved illicitly. They defined illicit enslavement as the enslavement by Christians of other Christians, especially Catholics and Orthodox Greeks. In practice, Catholic and Orthodox Greek slaves did occasionally petition the Genoese state for freedom on the basis that they had been illicitly enslaved. Even more occasionally, the Genoese state recognized their claims and declared them free.
Consent clauses could play an important role in such cases. For example, three years before Margarita’s sale, an enslaved woman named Lucia petitioned the podestà of Genoa for freedom on the basis that she had been illicitly enslaved (Gian Giacomo Musso, Navigazione e commercio genovese con il Levante nei documenti dell’Archivio di Stato di Genova [Rome: Ministero per i beni culturali e ambientali, 1975], 230–232, doc. 1).
All parties in the dispute agreed that Lucia had been captured in the fall of Heraclea, a Byzantine city, thirteen years ago. Her present owner, a Genoese woman named Violante, claimed to have received Lucia as a gift from her brother, who had in turn purchased her from among the captives of the Genoese general who had taken Heraclea. Later, as part of a peace treaty with Byzantium, the general had promised to release all of his captives except those who had already been sold. Lucia, however, testified that she did not know who had captured her and did not remember being sold to anyone. Did the treaty provision apply to Lucia? The outcome of her petition has not survived, but the threat to the enslaver’s power is clear. Without evidence of Lucia’s capture or sale, Violante could not effectively defend her claim to own Lucia.
By creating and preserving a written record of a person’s sale as a slave, and especially by adding a consent clause on the part of the enslaved person, medieval Genoese enslavers equipped themselves to defend their claims of ownership. Although such consent clauses are rare, they tend to appear in cases where the status of the enslaved person was dubious by Genoese standards. For example, Ticho, Stoba, and Milono, a group of three Bulgars captured by an Iberian pirate in Turkish territory, were sold as slaves with a consent clause in the Genoese colony of Chios in 1450 (Laura Balletto, “Schiavi e manomessi nella Chio dei genovesi nel secolo XV,” in De l’esclavitud a la llibertat, ed. M.T. Ferrer i Mallol and J. Mutgé Vives [Barcelona: Consell superior d’investigacions científiques, 2000], 667).
Since they were likely Orthodox Christians, their status as slaves should have been questioned by the Genoese notary who wrote their sale contract. Instead, by recording their consent in the contract, the notary made it easier for their purchaser to enforce his ownership claims if any of the three tried to dispute their status later on. Yet again, creating a record of consent served the interests and reinforced the power of the person making the record, not the person giving consent.
Hannah Barker is a specialist in the history of slavery in the late medieval Mediterranean and an assistant professor in the School of Historical, Philosophical, and Religious Studies. Her research has focused on the trade in slaves from the Black Sea to the markets of Genoa, Venice, and Cairo during the thirteenth through fifteenth centuries, drawing on sources in both Latin and Arabic. Her book, That Most Precious Merchandise: The Mediterranean Trade in Black Sea Slaves, 1260–1500, is forthcoming in 2019.
