The Lion’s Slaves: Meanings of Slave Conversion in Late Medieval Venice

Venice had a long tradition of slavery. In late medieval times, slaves were not only traded by Venetian merchants and via Venetian ports but were also kept in Venetian territory. People from the Black Sea region, the Eastern Mediterranean, Russia and the Balkans were brought to the Venetian mainland and worked as slaves in Venetian households, in salt mines and on Venetian galleys. 

The notarial records documenting the sale of slaves to Venetian citizens usually noted their sex, age and physical appearance, their price and their name. Most of them were given Christian names like Caterina, Clara, Lucia, Magdalena or Marta for women, and Angelus, Michael or Simon for men. Sometimes, their original “pagan” name was noted as well, or a note was added that this specific slave was not yet baptized. We may thus quite easily assume that slaves sold to Venetian citizens were systematically baptized if they had not been Christians anyway. Yet, it is far more difficult to explain why they were baptized at all. Most probably, it was not the slave’s decision to convert to Christianity in order to improve his or her condition, as baptism did not change the status of the slave and as Christian born slaves from the Balkans were not treated differently.

My paper addresses the question of slave conversion by embedding the issue in the broader context of slave beliefs and religious practices in late medieval Venice. The verbalization of religious adherences in the notarial acts will be confronted with references to slave beliefs in parish records, court sentences and preachers’ sermons. While studying the place of the slaves in the religious every day life of Venice, new answers may be found to the meaning of their (forced) religious conversion.