Slaves and Englishmen. Michael Guasco
the ease with which English propagandists denigrated the Irish, it should come as no surprise that would-be English conquerors routinely justified the continuing effort to subdue the Irish by expressing their profound sympathy for “the country people living under the lords’ absolute power as slaves.” “[U]nder the sun,” Sir Philip Sidney concluded in the 1570s, “there is not a nation which live more tyrannously than they do, one over the other.” In 1567, English officials accused the rebellious Earl of Desmond of treating the inhabitants of Cork “as in effecte they are or were become his Thralls or Slaves.” In 1592, Sir Henry Bagenal reported to Lord Burghley that because the English had allowed the local lords to maintain control of large swaths of land, Irish leaders had “been enabled to enslave all their tenants” and maintain their independence from English rule. In an even more extensive treatment, Sir John Davies, who served in Ireland as Attorney-General and, eventually, Speaker of the Irish Parliament, claimed that the problem with the Irish was not their basic nature but that “such as are oppressed and live in slavery are ever put to their shifts.” Irish laws and traditions, and the oppressive rule and extortions of Irish lords, had simultaneously promoted tyranny from above and made “the tenant a very slave and villain, and in one respect more miserable than bondslaves, for commonly the bondslave is fed by his lord, but here the lord was fed by his bondslave.”22
Because early modern Englishmen were routinely critical of slavery as it existed throughout the world, these accusations are unsurprising. In Ireland, however, slavery provided English apologists with a weapon to claim that they were actually engaged in a war to liberate the mass of poor, downtrodden Irish from the bondage that was imposed on them by their own lords. They recognized, of course, that slavery was a double-edged rhetorical sword. Barnabe Rich argued that the Irish rebellions were routinely excused by people who claimed that they wanted “to free themselves from thralldom (as they pretended).” And, indeed, Rich was correct. Hugh O’Neill justified his efforts in 1598, in part, by lamenting that “we Irishmen are exiled and made bond slaves and servitors to a strange and foreign prince, having neither joy nor felicity in anything, remaining still in captivity.” But Ireland’s problem, according to Rich, was not really the Irish enslaving their own people or the English holding their neighbors in a state of bondage so much as it was the absence of the restraints on the inherent cruelty of the Irish. “[W]hat subjects in Europe do live so lawless as the Irish,” he queried, “when the lords and great men throughout the whole country do rather seem to be absolute than to live within the compass of subjection?” Bondage was relevant because Ireland lacked order, something that could only be rectified through the imposition of English rule.23
Ironically, although slavery may have been listed prominently among the reasons why the English needed to impose themselves on the Irish, it is a measure of the frustration of English proponents of the invasion of Ireland like Sir Arthur Chichester, writing to Burghley’s successor, Lord Cecil, in 1602, that they were led to conclude that “their barbarism gives us cause to think them unworthy of other treatment than to be made perpetual slaves to her Majesty.” Chichester, however, did not generate this recommendation without precedent. The idea that the Irish deserved to be enslaved had previously been mentioned by Gerald of Wales and it reappeared in print when Raphael Holinshed published his Chronicles in the 1570s, the second volume of which dealt largely with Ireland. Holinshed reported on a thirteenth-century gathering of clergymen in Ireland where the participants sought out an explanation for why Ireland “was thus plagued by the resort and repaire of strangers in among them.” After some debate, the congregants concluded that “it was Gods just plague for the sinnes of the people, and especiallie bicause they used to buie Englishmen of merchants and pirats, and (contrarie to all equitie or reason) did make bondslaves of them.” Divine justice “hath set these Englishmen & strangers to reduce them now into the like slaverie and bondage.” It was the sinful behavior of the Irish themselves, Holinshed’s Chronicles reported, that brought the Anglo-Norman invaders to their door. And God, not without a sense of irony, apparently meant for the Irish to be enslaved for retribution while “all the Englishmen within that land, wheresoever they were, in bondage or captivitie, should be manumissed, set free and at libertie.”24 Such was the nature of English ideas about slavery in the early modern era that the effort to rescue the Irish from slavery demanded that the Irish be reduced to slavery.
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The presence of slavery in Russia and Ireland was important to English observers bent on emphasizing the differences between themselves and the inhabitants of other parts of Europe. It also proved to be an easy way to criticize the customary practices and cultural values of other nations. But slavery was not necessarily viewed as inherently bad or as an indicator of moral turpitude in all cases. Many Englishmen approached slavery with a kind of academic curiosity, not revulsion. The subtlety with which English travelers were willing to treat the subject of human bondage as it was practiced in foreign lands is demonstrated in the surviving accounts of the system of slavery that pervaded the Mediterranean world, especially Turkey, Syria, Persia, Jerusalem, the Levant, Egypt, Tunisia, and Morocco (much of which was, in fact, part of the Ottoman Empire). Certainly, English writers like Samuel Purchas did not hesitate to emphasize that slavery was an abject, dehumanizing, and physically punishing system. In the introduction to his 1625 work, he asserted that “the Devill hath sent the Moores with damnable Mahumetisme in their merchandizing quite thorow the East, to pervert so many Nations with thraldome of their states and persons.”25 Slavery was spiritually symbolic in Purchas’s telling, but it was immediate and meaningful as an all-too-real fate suffered by countless individuals. But that was only part of the story.
Most of the English and other European travelers whose accounts were published by Hakluyt and Purchas (or separately printed) during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries were careful and often quite generous observers. Thus, diligent readers could learn a great deal about the particular characteristics of Mediterranean slavery and, when they were not bemoaning the plight of their own countrymen held in bondage (something that will be discussed more fully in Chapter 4), their observations could be quite instructive. From European witnesses, then, it was clear that there were aspects of human bondage as it functioned in the Mediterranean world that conformed to expectations. Slaves were, by definition, owned or in the possession of another power. Slaves in the Mediterranean also typically originated as prisoners of war and many of these captives were Christians from southern Europe. John Locke, who traveled to Jerusalem in 1553, wrote about a battle “a fewe yeeres past” in which the victorious Turks captured a fortress “from the Emperour, in which fight were slaine three hundred Spanish souldiers, besides the rest which were taken prisoners, and made gallie slaves.” George Sandys, who visited the Levant in 1610, reiterated a simple point when he noted that slaves were primarily “Christians taken in the Warres, or purchased with their money.”26 Indeed, English audiences were so familiar with this sort of observation by the seventeenth century that the point was rarely described in detail. Nothing could be less surprising than the presence of slaves who met their fate as a result of being on the losing side of a battle.
A number of subjects, however, either did not cohere with English expectations or were viewed as so fantastic that they were deemed worthy of fuller consideration. Military slavery, for example, elicited considerable attention as a distinctive form of slavery and as a peculiar practice located in one particular region of the world. English travelers in the Mediterranean world routinely commented on the large number of slave soldiers, or Janizaries, in the Ottoman Empire. The remarkably well-traveled Anthony Jenkinson, ultimately more famous for his exploits in Russia, described an elaborate procession “of Soliman the grand Turk” he witnessed into Syria in 1553 that included 16,000 Janizaries, “slaves of the Grand Signior.” On a much smaller scale, slave soldiers were also incidental characters. William Biddulph, an English cleric, noted in 1600 that a local English factor “provided us with horses to ride to Aleppo, and a Janizarie, called Paravan Bashaw … to guard us” on the dangerous three-day journey inland. Although Biddulph praised the assistance he received from this man, he later reported, while in the vicinity of Jerusalem, that the inhabitants of a village called Lacmine “fled into the Mountaynes to dwell, for feare of the Janizaries of Damascus, who travelling that way used to take from them … whatsoever things else they found in their