Slaves and Englishmen. Michael Guasco
readers in the early modern era to avoid the conclusion that slavery was a universal institution. Many works that appeared in print during the late Tudor and early Stuart eras spoke to the subject in a rather matter-of-fact fashion. When Jean Bodin’s Six Books of a Commonweale appeared in English in 1606, many Englishmen were already aware of the writings of the French jurist from the Latin and French editions of his previous works. Bodin treated slavery as a widespread human institution that began “immediately after the general deluge” before it diminished for a time but was “now againe approved, by the agreement and consent of almost all nations.” Regardless of religious or governmental considerations, slavery existed everywhere. From the West Indies, whose people “never heard speech of the lawes of God or man” to places characterized by greater degrees of civility or where Europeans expected to find “the holiest men that ever lived,” slaves were ubiquitous. Like many of his contemporaries, Bodin concluded that human bondage—in all its possible manifestations—was the likely condition of a majority of the world’s peoples. Of course, this depiction shocked no one in England, many of whom claimed that they lived in a land largely untouched by slavery even as they recognized that their situation was exceptional in that regard.3
Similar conclusions could be gleaned from another French author, Pierre Charron, whose treatise Of Wisdom was translated into English by Samson Lennard in the early seventeenth century (and subsequently reprinted eight other times before 1700). Charron declared that “the use of slaves … is a thing both monstrous and ignominious in the nature of man.” Charron noted that the “law of Moyses hath permitted this as other things, … but not such as hath beene elsewhere: for it was neither so great, nor so absolute, nor perpetuall, but moderated within the compasse of seven yeeres at the most.” Charron recognized, as most Englishmen did also, that different types of slavery existed, but that, in essence, slaves “have no power neither in their bodies nor their goods, but are wholly their masters, who may give, lend, sell, resell, exchange, and use them as beasts of services.”4 From the perspective of the enslaved, human bondage must have seemed completely arbitrary, involving as it did the total loss of self-determination, dehumanization, and emasculation. From a comfortable remove, however, slavery was more unfortunate than tragic, a comprehensible institution if only because it was so common.
But the English did not need the French to tell them about slavery. English authors were equally capable of lamenting the continued presence of human bondage and the plight of the enslaved. Slavery’s pervasiveness could easily be gleaned from some of the more important geographical and historical works of the day, especially the multivolume collections issued by Richard Hakluyt and Samuel Purchas between the 1580s and 1620s. Hakluyt and Purchas sought to celebrate past English achievements and ongoing overseas activities, as well as to promote English expansionism. There were, however, important differences between Hakluyt’s late sixteenth-century volumes (1582, 1589, and 1598–1600) and the even more extensive collections published by Purchas a generation later (1613, 1614, 1617, and 1625). Hakluyt devoted himself to memorializing English accomplishments and urged his countrymen to pursue evermore distant and potentially profitable voyages of discovery. He was particularly excited about the potential wealth that might be drawn from American enterprises, although the future development of large-scale plantations was arguably less important in his publications than the broader themes of commerce, exploration, and English national greatness.5 Purchas borrowed from and extended Hakluyt’s scholarly enterprise, but his selections and emendations indicate that he was both a less discriminating editor and more beholden to a particularly overweening theological perspective. Protestant providencialism, perhaps even more than any sense of English patriotism, weighed heavily on Purchas’s otherwise richly detailed and varied collections and they are not necessarily the better for it.6
Regardless of their differences, Hakluyt and Purchas presented material that revealed the depth and breadth of slavery throughout the world. Indeed, in the opening pages of his Hakluytus Posthumus, or, Purchas His Pilgrimes, printed in four large volumes in 1625, Purchas reflected on the subject of bondage in religious, philosophical, and historical terms. “Christians,” he noted as a kind of operating premise to his larger work, “are not their own.” “Hee then that is Christs, is a new Creature, to which, bondage or freedome and other worldly respects, are meere respects and circumstances.” Slavery, at least as far as the Anglican cleric Samuel Purchas would have it, needed to be understood in metaphysical terms before it could be fully appreciated as a physical condition or secular institution that bore down upon the nameless and numberless masses. Englishmen needed to appreciate their indebtedness to God—“[H]ee that denieth himselfe and his owne will, puts off the chaines of his bondage, the slavery to innumerable tyrants, [and] impious lusts”—before they could come to terms with the worldly slavery endured by so many individuals and nations.7 Whether they did as Purchas asked, however, Englishmen encountered slavery wherever they traveled, used its presence to shape their conception of newfound peoples and places, and continued to think more carefully about how—as Englishmen—they were unique in their national antipathy for human bondage.
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If slavery was a global phenomenon, the English did not have to travel far to find it. On the European continent, particularly in those lands that bordered the Mediterranean, slavery was a vital institution, largely as a result of internecine conflict between the Christian powers and Islam. Slavery had largely disappeared as an institution of any significant cultural or economic importance in northern Europe during the medieval era. To the south, however, slavery persisted. In Italy, large numbers of Russians, Slavs, Greeks, and Muslims were held in bondage, but sub-Saharan Africans could also be found in increasing numbers among the enslaved. European slaves from the Black Sea and Balkan regions were less common on the Iberian Peninsula, but large numbers of captured Muslims and prisoners-of-war from other parts of the Mediterranean world filled the ranks of the unfree. In both places, the pattern was much the same: An array of people, regardless of their physical appearance or religion, could be found in bondage. After the fourteenth century, non-European and largely non-Christian slaves were increasingly prevalent as physical appearance and religion began to serve as more absolute indicators of an individual’s legal status. The rise of sub-Saharan African slaves was particularly important. In places where the Reconquista had been achieved, as in Portugal, European buyers acquired Africans through peaceful trade networks that linked southern Europe to a vibrant and extensive trans-Saharan market. By the first decade of the sixteenth century, even the recently recaptured city of Granada, once the center of Moorish civilization on the Iberian peninsula, engaged in a slave trade that was two-thirds black.8
But if slavery was common in southern Europe, that reality could have been missed by Englishmen who were often looking elsewhere during the early Elizabethan era. English privateers and pirates coursed Mediterranean waters in small numbers, but escalating tensions between Protestant England and the Catholic powers made it difficult for English merchants and mariners to ply their trade in the region, at least before 1580. The English government and merchant community did, however, cast about other regions in search of profitable trade and in the process a handful of travelers came face-to-face with human bondage. English engagement with Russia, to pick an early example, brought the subject of continental slavery close to home, not least because it was the previously noted plight of a Russian slave that prompted the Star Chamber in 1567 to declare that England was “too pure an air for slaves to breathe in.” Russia, in and of itself, interested most Englishmen to a limited degree, but of more interest was its value as a highway to places that really sparkled in the imagination of those people who dreamed of wealth and power. Much as early Portuguese awareness of and involvement in the African slave trade was a by-product of Portugal’s effort to circumvent Africa, the search for a northeast passage to the Indies at mid-century and curiosity about alternate routes to Persia led to the creation of the Muscovy Company in 1555. The Muscovy Company dispatched ships annually to Russia and controlled English trade to the Middle East for about a generation, sending out six separate expeditions to Persia via the northern route in search of valuable silks and spices before the Ottoman Turks curtailed the trade in 1580.9 Russia, therefore, provided one of the earliest opportunities for the English to witness and write about slavery as it was practiced in contemporary settings.
Human bondage was an inescapable reality