THE MEDITERRANEAN MOBILITY

From German and Austrian scholars, we have the first studies about the Mediterranean Seai. The Austrian Eduard von Wilczek in 1895 found in the Mittelmeer a chaotic space where different, and sometimes hostile, cultures confronted and influenced each other, creating that spiritual and material connection that links all the Mediterranean populations. Paul Herre wrote in 1909 the first Mediterranean history from antiquity to his times, even so he acknowledged that to analyse the sea as a single entity was impossible. All these authors brought with them a clear Eurocentrism, the French Paul Auphan, writing after the publication of Braudel book, wrote his “Histoire de la Méditerranée” also emphasizing the discourse of the “clash of civilization” that would have rose specially in the 1990s.

Besides all these authors and various others that I did not include in this brief introduction, we need to present a last scholar a must read for anybody who wants to write and study the Mediterranean sea: Fernand Braudel (1902- 1985). With the publication in 1949 of “La Méditerranée et le Monde Méditerranéen à l’Epoque de Philippe II”, he writes a history of theMediterranean in which the focus is not the political and military events of those times, but the sea became the subject of study.

According to Braudel, there is not a single Mediterranean, it is composed by many seas, split by great contrast and by the “Sicilian threshold”. For Braudel, the shallow waters between Tunisia and Sicily are a geographical evidence of the division between the east and the west of the sea that for him correspond to the division North-Southii. The Mediterranean doesn’t finish on the shores,but it articulates with the plains, the mountains, the Sahara. The Mare Internum is not only deeply connected with Europe, it is a “world” nestled inside the gigantic Euro-Afro-Asiatic continent where ideas, goods, people from all those continents had the chance to meet, often in open hostility, but still creating a common history. To resume, many scholars tried to give a comprehensive definition of the Mediterranean space. However, it is important to acknowledge that each definition is variable because it is subject to changes according to the field of study, the chronology and the topic specifically researched.

The history of Slavery

Before to explore the Mediterranean slavery and its peculiarities is important to tell the history of slavery around the globe. As far as historiography knows, almost every society have experienced slavery. In the Mediterranean antiquity we have the Roman and Greek society that are considered genuine slave society. According to Philip D. Morgan “a slave society is one in which slaves played an important role and formed a significant proportion (say, over 20%) of the population.”iii.

In the Roman world, was praxis to dehumanize the males enslaved by addressing them as “boy” and by head shaving them. Both of the praxis were inherited by the Atlantic slave system, but what mostly differentiate the two systems is the equal opportunities for all ethnicities to be enslaved and in seeing the slaves as social categories, not as an economic asset. The Arab and Muslim populations have been the first to enslave a large number of sub- Saharan Africans. In the sub-Saharan Africa slavery was a common phenomenon, the chronic under population of the continent made a various range of dependent statuses to exist. In fact, slaves were used in many roles, soldiers, domestic slaves and administrators. Moreover, the high fragmentation of power in Africa made difficult for any kingdom to oppose to slave trader kingdomsiv

With the start, in the XII century, of the Crusades, the Genoese and Venetians got increasingly involved in the trade of slaves needed in Palestine and the surrounding territories in the eastern Mediterranean. By doing so, they implemented the long-distance shipment of slaves through permanent forts. The system was then mirrored few centuries after in the Atlantic slave trade. At the beginning of the XV century there were two main sources of African labour. Firstly, the above mentioned trans-Saharan routes used by Muslims that, after crossing the desert, emerged into the Mediterranean through the Libyan and Tunisian ports; second, the Portuguese that, thanks to the Genoese capital, started to bring in the Mediterranean region significant numbers of African slaves from the Atlantic. From this moment, the trade of black slaves from the African shores to South and North America incredibly grew. The number of slaves that crossed the ocean between the XVI and XIX century is estimated to be between 9 millionsv and 12.5

millionsvi, similar numbers are estimated for the amount of slaves in European territories.

Mediterranean mobility and slavery

The phenomenon of slavery in Europe has been a constant scourge since ancient times, the Greek and the Roman slavery are still deeply studied, also in the medieval times the presence of slaves is attested, but with the worsening of the corsairs war the fluxes of people that crossed the Mediterranean under conditions of slavery increased. The corsairs wars lasted from the 15th century till the start of the 19th when the Great Britain sieged the major Maghrebian ports. Four centuries of terror for all the Mediterranean shores left, for sure, a vivid collective memory also expressed by traditional songs. The corsairs war and the human mobility that it fostered are probably one of the most peculiar aspects of the “Mediterranean history”.

The mobility of the Mediterranean populations is one reason that made Braudel define the Mediterranean area a “world”. As suggested by Galasso, the mobility of the Mediterranean’s littoral populations is so sedimented that looks like a long-lasting behaviour. Despite that, the study of the people’s mobility in the Mediterranean has been for so long neglected to the benefit of studies about the movements of goods, ships and ideasvii.

While many researches have been made on the Atlantic slavery system, until few decades ago the slavery in Europe was not studied and almost minimized, most of the focus was on the slavery on the Muslim part of the sea. In the geographical and historical space of the Mediterranean, the mobility of ideas, goods and people has been constant, not in a one-way direction and not just related to slaves. As also showed from the document analysed by Alberto Rescio, there were good commercial ties between the Kingdom of Naples and the Ottoman Empire. The document talk specifically of an “amicabile practica” (friendly agreement) between the Count of Muro (nearby Lecce, Apulia) and the Sanjak bey of Vlora (Albania). Probably, the good commercial agreement was fostered by the wife of the Italian count, who also belonged to the highAlbanian nobility migrated to the Apulian shores after the Ottoman’s conquest of Albanian territories; again, indicating the intrinsic mobility of the population between the different Mediterranean shoresviii. Therefore, it is wrong to conceive the European territories as a place free from slavery, but the phenomenon in the Mediterranean world articulated differently from the Atlantic slavery but still kept with it some connections.

The first difference of the two phenomena is the “reversibility”: the “middle passage” of the enslaved Africans from their continent to the New World was just a one direction trip. The ones who arrived in America, and did not die on

the ships during the long exodus, found themselves in an unknown place from where they could not escapeix; In the Mediterranean, sailors, farmers, fishermen, all of them knew that there was the risk of being captured, enslaved and brought to places that he had already heard about. But, what can depict the Mediterranean slavery as less traumatic is also the genuine possibility for slaves to be freed because the “two parties” (the Christian and the Muslim one) of the Mediterranean world were continuously in contactx. The reciprocity is another Mediterranean slavery feature. Any population under the influence of the Mediterranean could be enslaved. This particular feature also made the Mediterranean slavery less cruel regarding the condition of slaves. To make myself clear, of course the slavery and the compulsory exploitation of freedom is an awful condition per se, there is no will to reduce or justify the cruelty of slavery in the Mediterranean or anywhere else. Nonetheless, the risk of a reprisal on their co-religionaries made enslavers and masters to be less harsh; also, the value of the slave could have been reduced if there was the evidence of a physical punishment, especially for domestic slavesxi. A person enslaved in the Maghreb could always hope to be freed while working on a galley, for instance, after the battle of Lepanto, between 12 to 20 thousands Christians were freed, and more than seven thousand Muslims were enslavedxii. Slaves could also try to escape from their condition where they were enslaved thanks to the dense Mediterranean commercial web, as the case of the English William Okeley that in 1644 escaped from Algiersxiii.

Michael L. Bush made a classification of the different types of servitude existing in the Mediterranean, they can all be permanent or temporary conditions, for a public or a private, inherited or not. Forced labour, penal servitude and debt subjugation were usually temporary, while slaves and servitude were often transmitted to descendants and they were usually permanent conditions, but there were still chances to be free againxiv. In fact, a peculiarity of the Mediterranean slavery is its reversibility. Another way to be freed was through a ransom. From the Muslim part, a percentage of the waqf were used to pay the ransom, but it was not so common for Muslim to do it as it was for the Christians. Indeed, in the European part during the XVI century, many religious orders were created with this specific purpose, together with older institutions like the Order of the Holy Trinity (1198)xv.

It is important to underline that, even if in the European collective memory they are known as “Turks” or “Pirate”, the historical truth is slightly different. First, the word “Turks” is a generic term used in the modern times to refer to people coming from Islamic countries, often the term “Turk” generically refers to infidelsxvi. Second, the term “pirate” is not totally right because often in the Mediterranean were involved corsairs: both assaulted ships and raided the inlands, but the second were authorized by their government, to whom gave a

percentage of the captured goods (humans included). For the southern part of the Mediterranean the role of the Maghrebian states are known, but also the Knights of Malta and the Knights of S. Stephan can be considered the corsairs operating for the European powersxvii.

The most common way to become a slave was to be captured during some raid on the coasts or during some battle on the sea. Nevertheless, it is important to remember that, even if we refer to the two “parties” of the Mediterranean, the slaves were not just from the two main faiths of the sea shores but, given the centripetal socio-economic force of attraction of the sea, the people enslaved in the Mediterranean world came from many different cultures, religions and ethnicitiesxviii. As mentioned above, the captured slaves were both given to the government and sold on the slave market, according to S. Bono, the commerce (also in the second market) is the distinctive aspect of the Mediterranean slavery. The enslaved person then was left at a crossroad with no possibility to express a preference, between being enslaved by the government and ending up as a rower on galleys or to work in some public construction (streets, aqueducts etc.). On the other hand, they could become slave of a “private”. Usually, this meant domestic labour, living in contact with the master and sometimes being asked to make some tasks that required trustxix.

Besides the opportunities to escape from the condition of slavery, there were also opportunities for integrating the slaves in the hosting society. Specially in the Muslim world, many Christians decided to convert to Islam to improve their living conditions. It does not mean that there were no psyco-phisical violences to force the conversion of these people, but usually the conversion was at the end of a long assimilation process. Even if in both societies the conversion did not mean an automatic manumission, in the Islamic societies there were good chances to improve their social status. The most famous cases are those of Uluj Ali and Muràd Ustadh; the first, captured in Calabria in 1536 and converted few years after, became fleet commander in Alexandria and Bey of Algiers in 1568; the second, a Genoese captured by corsairs that assaulted his fleet, that became Muslim and in a few decades became so much influential in the Maghrebian society that he became Dey of Tunisxx. This was until the 18th century, in which the great lack of slaves in the Maghreb, made the Algerian Dey in 1770s forbid other conversions of the slaves. Christians were more interested than Muslims to convert the unfaithful slaves. In fact, in 1543, the “casa dei catecumeni” (house of catechumens) was founded in Rome, to teach the Catholic faith to newly converted persons. In south Italy the Jesuits were more involved in the conversion of slaves and in the Latinization of some region that until the 18th century still held a strong connection with the Greek language.

What does Digital Humanities mean?

In the section below I will introduce the Digital Humanities (DH) before analysing two case studies that could help us to better understand how a digital approach could improve the understanding of the phenomenon of slavery in the Mediterranean and how this could help the academic world to introduce the subject to a non-academic audience. To do so, I will analyse two other researches that deal respectively with slavery in the Atlantic Ocean and with trading of books in the Mediterranean area.

Indeed, is necessary to give a definition to Digital Humanities. “Digital humanities work is done at the intersection of computational methods and humanities materials. The research materials may be analog or born digital, and the integration with computational methods depends upon decisions at every stage of a project’s design.”xxi The materials are then subject to computational methods (i.e. statistical analysis) and the outcomes are organized in a presentation. Tools and platforms used by digital humanists were designed to be useful in other disciplines (often quantitatively focused); some scholars argue that this led humanists to detach from the necessity of keeping ambiguity and capacity of contradiction of dataxxii, these problems may be enhanced by relying completely on Artificial Intelligence . Indeed, they often reiterate biases that are written in the code. This dependency on computation on the models is one of the main critiques to digital humanist works, especially those connected to race studies.

Various processes lay between the extraction of data and their final presentation, I will briefly introduce them also to better understand the reasons behind some critiques on DH. Phase A is the remediation, the analogue materials are remade in digital format that can be processed by computers during phase B. Datafication/modeling, the data extracted are then abstracted and made quantifiable according to the model. In this part, we see the intersection of the humanist’s interpretative work and the technological methods that could bring with them some biases that may reverberate through the project. Phase C, processing/analytics of the data, the usage of AI processes can increase the risks of biases. Phase D, presentation/display of the results, usually in a digital form the interface’s design often reflectdecisions about the hierarchy of the information that have been collected and processed. Phase E, preservation/sustainability in which the costs (also ecological) to produce and maintain the digital project are evaluatedxxiii.

Without going too deep in the analysis of the various phases of a Digital Humanities project, it must be said that many field of studies are involved in the implementation of such projects, communication, language studies, archival sciences, cultural heritage expertsxxiv (Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database is one of the major examples of this inderdiciplinarity). For some

scholars, the scope of the Digital Humanities discipline should also include the political, ethical and social consequences of using technology to reassess a critical look of literature. In a society increasingly technology-dependent, is important for digital humanists to bring together services and contents that can support the cultural differences inside and outside the internet.

The two case studies

As I already mentioned, I am going to use two case studies of usage of Digital Humanities to study the slave trade in the Atlantic Ocean and a DH project on the history of economics regarding the book market in 15-16th century.

The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database (TSTDB) is clearly one of the best example of technology applied to slavery studies. The TSTDB focuses on shipments of slave in the Atlantic Ocean. It pulls together results of various works conducted in different national archives. According to their website, 60% of voyages included in the DB have more than 3 sources each. There have been some difficulties in keeping the information consistent, given the variety of bureaucracies and languages involved. To avoid this problem, the developer decided to pick only one value per variable following a certain modelxxv.

There are some variables in the DB that are directly collected from the sources (data variables) and others that are drawn from data variables (imputed variables). In the first type, we find some data that are interesting to better understand how the prices were decided in the slave markets such as “Age”, “Height” and “Gender”. Although, some of these data are not so reliable because the age of the enslaved was set by the look of people. Also, many African cultures did not give much importance to the knowledge of exact age. Sometimes, the informations are not complete and only says the gender of the slaves embarked. Of course, the “price” is a variable of the DB, the distance of the port of arrival from Africa influenced it and indeed by the price of slaves in the African Market.

There is the “Date” variable, also to this the researcher has to cautiously look at, because often the day of departure can be shifted of weeks according to one source to another. Specially attention is reserved to the date regarding the shipbuilding, because often it refers to the day in which the ship was captured (piracy was a worldwide phenomenon). “Names” of people, ships, places are also part of the Database. Really often the orthography and, again, the different languages spoken in the various ports through which the ships passed have been a major problem in following the routes of ships and their captains which names were often abbreviated (specially the Iberian ships which had often multiple names)xxvi.

An interesting data included in the DB is the one related to “slave resistance”, which enlightens the number of vessels that experienced acts of resistance/revolt during the voyage. This data reminds us also that we are talking about enslaved people, with a free will and aware of the fate that were facing. The last variable that I will take into account is “Geography” which has been also one of the most contested because of the way in which the developer decided to take it into account. The names listed in the variable are cited at least 7 times in the records. The critiques regarding this variable also move on the fact that really often on the DB, the port of departure corresponds with the arrival one.

Starting from this last variable, Lovejoy accuses the TSTDB of being Eurocentric for many reasons. First, the only sources used are European’s hence, it does not take into account the African perspective on geography but the European categorizations of the West African coast; which, of course, raise methodological issues. Second, given that the sources are written by European traders, the DB is about European slave traders and does not take into account the role of Africa based merchants. Last issue, some categorization can be misleading, specially in the 19th century, the term “Portugal” could indicate the Portuguese lands, but also Angola and especially Brazil, in which for some years the royal Portuguese family residedxxvii.

Beside all the critics that can be moved toward it, the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database is one of the most interesting examples of digital technologies applied to the study of such a broad phenomenon, that lasted for many centuries and influenced the evolution of the entire planet.

The other case-study that I chose to better explore and explain how digital humanities could help us to increase our knowledge and awareness of the Mediterranean slavery is the EMoBook Trade Project from the University of Milan. The project collects data from ten different European cities between 1540-1630 from catalogues or wholesale book sellers. The project is totally experimental because is the first that focus on book prices and privileges. The researchers used a relational database built upon a conceptual model, allowing users to automatically generate some aggregate informations, this is probably the greatest feature added by information technology to the humanitiesxxviii.

Already the research questions of the project are the witnesses of how much it could be a good example for a future project regarding the Mediterranean slavery. The three main questions are “What influenced the setting of prices? What are the average prices in different cities in different periods? What was the trend of prices over time?”xxix. This project focuses more on the trade of books and how their prices were set. It has been essential to them to respect

the quantitative approach of economic history and hence to normalize the different prices in different currencies.

The result of this project is a clear front-end that easily allows the users to search through the datas and to have them represented together also in downloadable formxxx. Also, the team did not rely on automatically entered informations because of the problem of their reliability. The web application can represent sources in integral transcriptions, which is fundamental to keep the ambiguity of the information, especially important in such an under studied topicxxxi.

For this interdisciplinary project, the researchers consider the usage of a relational database an added value. Already the possibility to store in a relational DB (coherently built upon a conceptual model) the data, allow it to process them and have different perspectives. This model was essential to respect the quantitative approach typical of the history of economics. Moreover, the database allow to import bibliographic descriptions or authority records of editions already published online, ensuring interoperability with bibliographic systems and international authority files.

Conclusions

The purpose of this study was to assess how much the digital humanities could provide the right instruments to go deeper in the analysis of the Mediterranean slavery as much it did in the Atlantic context or for other topics related to economic history. As we saw, every study that deals with the Mediterranean basin has to pass through the first, hard, step of defining what is the Mediterranean. The Mediterranean is a peculiar area not only for its geographical role of pivot between 3 continents but also due to the constant mobility of goods and people. For many centuries, the categories of “commodity” and “person” have been disgracefully overlapped. Indeed, as in many other regions of the world, the phenomenon of slavery had existed also in the Mediterranean history.

While we know a lot about the Latin and Greek slave society, the phenomenon of slavery that occurred between the 15th and the 19th century has been for long neglected. The issue came again under the academic attention only in the late 20th century. The phenomenon’s nature was founded on a intertwined web of personal stories of enslaved or captives thatseldom travelled back and forth from Africa, “New World”, Europe. And often, especially if the captive came from important families of the Mediterranean Muslim reigns or European countries, they could be freed through a ransom.

The slaves, that could be captured during some coastal raid or during battles, could become a slave in the household of the master, or be put on a row in

ships. Some records regarding certain ports about the number of slaves on ships have already been studied and these can be interesting in order to better understand the composition of enslaved populations in different port cities, if and how it changed after certain historical events, and how their ethnicity, geographical origins, gender, age could make them considered good rowers. Regarding the ransom, there exist also many records of the different religious orders that dealt with the issue of freeing enslaved coreligionists. In this process can not be forgotten the active role of the enslaved persons, who could play a role in shaping their ransom price (trading value) that was often much different from the price value according to his taskxxxii.

Another good source to better analyse and comprehend in a relational database could be the Dubia cases. In these trials, often conducted in one of the “Casa dei Catecumeni” in Italy, the slaves had to prove their belonging to Christianism and in doing so they had to talk about their travels and how they became Christians and how they arrived in Italyxxxiii.

The research has stressed how much the Mediterranean slavery is a peculiar phenomenon, and hence how it should be studied with a different perspective from the other study regarding the Atlantic Slave trade. In the latter, the non- European perspective has been totally neglected and little or any data dealt with the personal stories of slaves. The study could help us to better understand how the individual physical characteristics shaped the prices. Thanks to the war reports, we could know the number of captives and slaves coming from battlefields. The notary acts that were written during a slave trade, the certificate of import and export that the city authorities wrote for the trade could give us a better understanding also of the trade networks through which thousands of persons deprived of their freedom crossed the Mediterranean world and beyond.

Given the variety of sources that could be used to deepen our knowledge on the topic, the future approaches to the theme must be interdisciplinary like the EMoBook Project, in which the analytical aspects of economic history intertwined with the historical events that could have changed the prices of books during the 80 years that they studied. The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade is perhaps a perfect example of how to classify the enslaved’s characteristicsand to connect them to the price value that merchants gave them. It is important to know if, and which, physical characteristics played a role in defining the price.

An interesting thing that could be achieved through the usage of digital tools is to retrace all the movements of the enslaved persons, especially those that converted and perhaps integrated and had families. To do so, for the Christian part of the Mediterranean sea, researches could be done in church

archives in order to see how the persons got renamed and perhaps know if there were some criteria behind the choice of the new Christian name or surname. As we said, one of the aims that can be pursued with the digital humanities is to make available, also to a non-academic audience, the discoveries and findings of the disciplines. An interdisciplinary approach to the field of Mediterranean slavery supported by a good and freeware application or website could help to challenge the nowadays concept of closed and militarized Mediterranean border by empirically showing how much the Mediterranean was the place of a continuous osmosis between the two “sides” that overlooked it.