This paper will examine the geo-political and economic relationships between the medieval Egyptian state (ca. 10th-13th c.) and the non-Muslim kingdoms and peoples along its southern frontier by analyzing the history of the slave trade. One of the best-known aspects of this history is the baqt treaty between Nubia and Egypt in the seventh century. The dominant interpretation of this treaty is that Egypt ceased hostilities against the Nubians in exchange for an annual tribute. The Nubians paid this tribute by delivering slaves to Egypt (as many as 400 according to Ibn ‘Abd al-Hakam, d. 871) along with exotic animals. In this paper, I will survey recent scholarship that challenges the traditional view of the baqt treaty. Evidence from Arabic papyri, Syriac and Arabic narrative sources, as well as Nubian sources, suggest that the baqt was in fact an agreement that emphasized a mutual exchange of tribute between Egypt and Nubia as part of normal diplomatic relations. When relations between Islamic Egypt and Nubia soured (as was frequently the case), the baqt exchange was suspended. Further, my presentation will explain why states like Nubia, and other African states in the Lake Chad region, willingly traded in slaves with the Muslim world by considering how this trade (along with other luxury items) was an integral part of African statecraft. Another group on the Egyptian frontier that is poorly understood are the semi-nomadic pastoralists, known as the Buja, who inhabited the region between Aswan and the Red Sea coast. While some sources depict the Buja as perennial victims of slave raids that fed Egyptian markets (e.g. Nasir-i Khusraw, fl. 11th c.), other medieval authors describe the Buja as themselves raiders involved in the slave trade. These sources indicate that the Buja benefited from the transit economy (including slave traffic) by collecting tolls and provisioning merchant caravans. In this manner they benefited directly and indirectly from the larger slave trade to Egypt. By reconsidering the baqt and the Buja people, this paper argues that scholars need to more carefully analyze the relationship between the Islamic world and medieval Africa to account for a more dynamic history of interaction and interdependence.

Acts of resistance by enslaved people have often been presented by scholars as signs of their agency. This approach has been criticized, most notably by Walter Johnson, for its failure to acknowledge that enslaved people retained agency whether or not they chose to act in resistance to their legal status at any particular moment. In my paper, I will offer another critique, one based on sources from the Mamluk era. In that context, the legal status of elite slaves (mamluks, eunuchs, and women belonging to elite households) has sometimes been called into question because they seemed to wield power, accumulate wealth, and exercise agency too easily. Yet elite Mamluk slaves also resisted their legal status in various ways, such as killing their masters, fleeing to places of safety, or threatening to apostatize from Islam. I argue that such acts of resistance testify to the violence, fear, alienation, and humiliation experienced by even the most elite of slaves as a consequence of their status. These slaves did not lack scope in which to display their agency; they chose to resist their status because it caused them suffering. To support this argument, I will draw on examples from the chronicles of al-Maqrizi, Ibn Taghri Birdi, and Ibn al-Furat; the travel accounts of Felix Fabri and Bernhard von Breydenbach; and an oration on the fourteenth-century neomartyr Michael of Alexandria. Among my supporting cases, I will devote most attention to those involving enslaved women. One reason is that the military and political activities of male mamluks have dominated most scholarly discussion of Mamluk-era slavery to the exclusion of all other kinds of slaves, especially women. The other reason is the opportunity to analyze the network of associations between femininity, slavery, and poison from a Mamluk perspective.

Most scholars, medieval as well as modern, have understood dhimmi status as a legal arrangement in which non-Muslims under Islamic rule abided by a series of discriminatory restrictions and paid jizya, in return for which they secured their property from plunder and their persons from being enslaved or killed. Yet the post-Mongol Türkmen beys, amirs, and sultans who ruled from Anatolia to Central Asia did not feel bound by such restrictions on their revenue-capturing activities. Plundering the sedentary population, even sometimes the Muslims, is abundantly attested in historical sources from the period, as well as captivity. Some captivities were brief, ending upon payment of an agreed-upon ransom, while other captivities were more open-ended and sometimes involved long-distance relocation. This paper considers the forms of captivity, and the evidence that sometimes enduring captivity took the form of enslavement, in light of recent scholarly discussions of varieties of unfreedom. Sources for the study include descriptive texts in an array of languages and genres (Armenian colophons, Persian court histories of Timur and of Uzun Hasan Aqqoyunlu, and Syriac chronicles continuing the tradition of Ibn al-Ibri), as well as the normative discussions of dhimmi status and enslavement (istirqaq) found in works of Hanafi fiqh, the madhhab which claimed the loyalty of Türkmen rulers. These sources allow us to show that, while juristic sources distinguish precisely between captivity and enslavement, or between ransom and sale, the social processes involved were more continuous. The distinction between “the law on the books” and “the law on the ground” is familiar from socio-legal history in other fields, but historians’ awareness of Islamic social history has often been hindered rather than helped by the influence of normative texts on narrative accounts, whether medieval Arabic sources or modern scholarship. The example of enslavement of dhimmis illustrates how the notion of a unified dar al-Islam run according to “Islamic law” developed by the ulama was an illusory fiction, useful to the ulama’s attempts to bolster their own social power and prestige, when in reality the multitudinous rulers of the region created their own rules subject to the practical limitations of governing diverse populations.

Between the late sixteenth and mid-eighteenth centuries, black eunuchs rose to unprecedented prominence in the political structures of the Ottoman Empire. While this rise to power has finally drawn the attention it deserves in Jane Hathaway’s The Chief Eunuch of the Ottoman Harem (2018), the literary sources that reflect the complicated relationship between gender, race, slavery, and political power surrounding the African eunuchs await further study. The sources I would like to focus on in this presentation are two Ottoman treatises written in the early seventeenth century and presented to the chief black eunuch of the time: The Mirror for Ethiopians by Ali Khabi (d. 1612) and Dispelling the Darkness by Mullah Ali (d. 1623). While arguably different from modern racism, pre-modern Middle Eastern written cultural products nevertheless display undeniable prejudices against Africans. Ali Khabi and Mullah Ali turned these prejudices upside down, giving African slaves a proud place in Islamic history by associating them with the Ethiopian Negus who was a contemporary of Muhammad and protected the Muslim refugees who sought asylum in his kingdom. Thus, whether or not an African slave was actually from Ethiopia or had been a Muslim before enslavement, once he was called Ethiopian, he was associated with a pedigree that went back to the time of Muhammad. The difference in the approaches taken toward the connection between race and slavery in the writings of Ali Khabi, a Turkish jurist from Bursa, and Mullah Ali, who was a former African slave presented to a former chief black eunuch as a gift, is very striking and opens a window to the alternative meanings of blackness, too. While blackness could be associated with slavery as evidenced by Ali Khabi, this association could also be refuted as displayed by Mullah Ali. What is perhaps most striking and what will be the main focus of this presentation, however, is the place of pride given to eunuchs in the Prophetic traditions narrated by Mullah Ali in the several chapters he devotes to eunuchs in his Dispelling the Darkness, associating the term servant specifically with eunuchs already during the lifetime of Muhammad. Eunuchs, with the assumed fluidity of their gender, were the only men who were allowed access to both the sultan and the royal women, and the patronage dispersed by all of them. This particular positioning made these emasculated men more powerful than most in the early modern Ottoman period.