Note 680 — Chapter II · NATURAL SCIENCE IN ITALY.

At this point a few notices on slavery in Italy at the time of the Renaissance will not be out of place. A short, but important, passage in Jovian. Pontan. De obedientia, l. iii. cap. i.: ‘An homo, cum liber natura sit, domino parere debeat?’ In North Italy there were no slaves. Elsewhere, even Christians, as well as Circassians and Bulgarians, were bought from the Turks, and made to serve till they had earned their ransom. The negroes, on the contrary, remained slaves; but it was not permitted, at least in the kingdom of Naples, to emasculate them. The word ‘moro’ signifies any dark-skinned man; the negro was called ‘moro nero.’—Fabroni, Cosmos, Adn. 110: Document on the sale of a female Circassian slave (1427); Adn. 141: List of the female slaves of Cosimo.—Nantiporto, Murat. iii. ii. col. 1106: Innocent VIII. received 100 Moors as a present from Ferdinand the Catholic, and gave them to cardinals and other great men (1488).—Marsuccio, Novelle, 14: sale of slaves; do. 24 and 25: negro slaves who also (for the benefit of their owner?) work as ‘facchini,’ and gain the love of the women; do. 48 Moors from Tunis caught by Catalans and sold at Pisa.—Gaye, Carteggio, i. 360: manumission and reward of a negro slave in a Florentine will (1490).—Paul. Jov. Elogia, sub Franc. Sfortia; Porzio, Congiura, iii. 195; and Comines, Charles VIII. chap. 18: negroes as gaolers and executioners of the House of Aragon in Naples.—Paul. Jov. Elogia, sub Galeatio: negroes as followers of the prince on his excursions.—Æneæ Sylvii, Opera, p. 456: a negro slave as a musician.—Paul. Jov. De piscibus, cap 3: a (free?) negro as diver and swimming-master at Genoa.—Alex. Benedictus, De Carolo VIII. in Eccard, Scriptores, ii. col. 1608: a negro (Æthiops) as superior officer at Venice, according to which we are justified in thinking of Othello as a negro.—Bandello, Parte III. Nov. 21: when a slave at Genoa deserved punishment he was sold away to Iviza, one of the Balearic isles, to carry salt.

The foregoing remarks, although they make no claim to completeness, may be allowed to stand as they are in the new edition, on account of the excellent selection of instances they contain, and because they have not met with sufficient notice in the works upon the subject. Latterly a good deal has been written on the slave-trade in Italy. The very curious book of Filippo Zamboni: Gli Ezzelini, Dante e gli Schiavi, ossia Roma e la Schiavitù personale domestica. Con documenti inediti. Seconda edizione aumentata (Vienna, 1870), does not contain what the title promises, but gives, p. 241 sqq., valuable information on the slave-trade; p. 270, a remarkable document on the buying and selling of a female slave; p. 282, a list of various slaves (with the place were they were bought and sold, their home, age, and price) in the thirteenth and three following centuries. A treatise by Wattenbach: Sklavenhandel im Mittelalter (Anzeiger für Kunde der deutschen Vorzeit, 1874, pp. 37-40) refers only in part to Italy: Clement V. decides in 1309 that the Venetian prisoners should be made slaves of; in 1501, after the capture of Capua, many Capuan women were sold at Rome for a low price. In the Monum. historica Slavorum meridionalium, ed. Vinc. Macusceo, tom. i. Warsaw, 1874, we read at p. 199 a decision (Ancona, 1458) that the ‘Greci, Turci, Tartari, Sarraceni, Bossinenses, Burgari vel Albanenses,’ should be and always remain slaves, unless their masters freed them by a legal document. Egnatius, Exempl. ill. vir. Ven. fol. 246 a, praises Venice on the ground that ‘servorum Venetis ipsis nullum unquam usum extitisse;’ but, on the other hand, comp. Zamboni, p. 223, and especially Vincenzo Lazari: ‘Del traffico e delle condizioni degli schiavi, in Venezia nel tempo di mezzo,’ in Miscellanea di Stor. Ital. Torino, 1862, vol. i. 463-501.