Physiognomy and Work Recruitment Before Europe’s Overseas Expansion
BL Add 24945 fol. 231v., dating to the 15th century and containing Roberto Valturio’s De re militari.
In 1560, at Djerba in Tunisia, an Ottoman fleet attacked 27 ships fighting under an alliance of the Spanish, Genoese, Neapolitan powers, Papal State, and the Maltese. It led to high mortalities: about 10,000 men lost their lives, including the crew of a galley ship owned by Stefano de Mari, a merchant banker from Genoa. Seeking redress for the loss of 36 rowers, De Mari subsequently claimed compensation at the Sommaria, Naples’s chief financial office. His case stated damages as a result of the forced replacement of his experienced Spanish rowers with recruits from Naples, convicts subjected to punitive labour, who had little experience. De Mari’s claim was judged reasonable by the Sommaria. It accordingly calculated the exact amount of time De Mari was deprived of the services of each of the 36 Spanish rowers, as well as the wages and other necessary expenses for food, medicine, and clothing handed out to the Neapolitan replacements. The reparation also took into account the rowers’ level of experience, arguing that skilled recruits enjoyed longevity compared to indentured workers.[1]
The Sommaria’s ruling, factoring in recruits’ experience and health, echoes the discussions of natural competencies, acquired skills, and health in treatises on physiognomy, household economy, and military manuals, that were produced in significant numbers in Latinate Europe from the thirteenth century onwards. These texts stood in a Graeco-Arabic tradition, drawing on, among others, the Physiognomonica and the Oeconomica (fourth-third century BCE) respectively, both ascribed to Aristotle, and Vegetius’s De re militari, produced in the fourth century CE in the Roman empire. Through each of these treatises runs environmental deterministic thought – grounded on the Hippocratic premise that environment and climate effected mortal beings’ physiology and mental capacities. Yet while Vegetius’s military manual discusses the quality of free, rural recruits, the rich vein of translations of and commentaries on the Oeconomica, dealing with the economy of household management, pays extensive detail to the treatment, value, and skills of enslaved workers.
Latin versions of the Oeconomica were remarkably popular: in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, at least 64 commentaries on the text appeared, across the German territories, Bohemia, Flanders, England, France, Spain, and Italy.[2] The text was translated into Latin several times. Of these, the translation by Durandus de Alvernia (fl. 1295-1329), a scholar at the university of Paris, and of Leonardo Bruni (c. 1370-1444), chancellor of Florence, in 1420 were prominent. Bruni’s version survives in dozens of manuscripts and almost seventy printed editions between 1469 and 1598.[3] Bruni’s translation of books I and III of the Oeconomica (presented in translation as books I and II) is accompanied by his own commentary, shedding light on his own views on slavery in the early decades of the fifteenth century. How did he weigh the value of the skills and competencies of enslaved workers, and how should we contextualise these observations?
Bruni’s commentary on enslaved workers departs from the original Greek text on several points, indicating that the issue of the maintenance of enslaved workers was actively considered by the Florentine chancellor around 1400. In his discussion of the humanness of the enslaved, for instance, Bruni considers ‘whether they are the property of a man’, as the original Greek version of the Oeconomica argued. Bruni grappled: ‘[The enslaved] seems to be a kind of mixed race, for man is also a slave: and yet he is acquired through our dominion.’ Bruni also questions the Oeconomica’s claim that ‘the enslaved is an animated instrument’, commenting that an instrument is inanimate. He concludes, hence, that the enslaved must derive ‘from the nobler part of man’. Yet, in keeping with the original text, Bruni certainly did not advocate the equal treatment of free and enslaved workers, advising to ‘make the most of the labours of the enslaved’, who, out of all their possessions, were the most precious. In terms of competencies, it was advisable to purchase enslaved workers who were thrifty and diligent. Those too weak or too strong were unfit for servitude. It was also advisable to feed them well, and to ensure they abstained from alcohol – a rule from which the Germans who served them, Bruni remarked, had strayed afar.
It is unsurprising, given the active trade in enslaved persons in Florence at this time, that Bruni offered his own views on the status of the enslaved. Bruni’s translation was dedicated to Cosimo de’Medici (1389-1464), the Florentine merchant banker and ruler, whose dynasty owned African and Circassian enslaved workers and had agents in Venice to buy Black Sea slaves destined for Florence.[4] More surprising, however, is to whom Bruni refers in his advice against purchasing too many enslaved workers from the same ethnic background: Charas (meaning unclear), Dalmatians, and Germans. His argument rings that these groups made family ‘sects’ and brought about division, speaking their own language to others who did not understand it, and conspiring among themselves to do evil.
Who were these Charas, Dalmatian, and German enslaved workers? At this time, the northern Italian marine industry employed tens of thousands of mariners. Venice strongly relied on migrant recruits from its colonies, considered to be strong and disciplined, to man its crews: Greeks, Dalmatians, and Albanians. According to Bartolomeo della Rocca (1467-1504), a scholar of physiognomy, the Dalmatians, being tall, well built, hygienic, and devout, although with ferocious appetites, were excellent recruits.[5] Their skills and competencies far outstretched those of the local peasants from the Terra ferma impressed to work on the merchant galleys. Experts warned the latter could not stand the climate or diet. The Venetian naval commander Cristoforo da Canal (1510-1562), author of Della milizia marittima, lamented about the competenties of local rural recruits. It was preferable to employ tall and handsome Slavs, compared to, for instance, small and puny Sardinians, Sicilians, Spaniards, Turks, Africans, and Ethiopians.[6] These racializing comments stand in the tradition of environmental climate theory.
However, these recruits generally are not classified as servi in the meaning of enslaved workers. Migrant workers from the Venetian colonies sometimes negotiated citizenship rights in exchange for their services. German recruits worked as birri, police forces, in northern Italy. Notarial records survive detailing their physical features for purposes of identification.[7] This raises questions about the slippery boundaries between the status and representation of serfs, servants, and enslaved workers in this period, the valuation of their competencies, and their treatment. A vigorous interrogation of the commentaries on the Oeconomica and related texts will begin to raise the curtain upon these matters, helping scholars to understand how race, ethnicity, class, gender, age, and perceived skills and competencies were codified and rewarded differently, in theory and in practice, shaping the working lives of men and women during the rise of a market economy before the era of Europe’s overseas expansion.
Claire Weeda
[1] A. Calabria, ‘The Cost of a Man’s Life in Sixteenth-Century Naples: Galley Rowers on the Early Modern Mediterranean’, Essays in Economic and Business History 22 (2004), 1-16.
[2] C. Flüeler, ‘Die stemmatischen Verhältnisse der Aristoteleskommentare, dargelegt anhand der Kommentare zur Yconomica’, Freiburger Zeitschrift für Philosophie Und Theologie 48 1/2 (2001),182-190; G. Jackson, ‘L’Economico pseudo-aristotelico tra xiv e xvi secolo’, Vichiana 12/1 (2010), 56-81.
[3] J. Soudek, ‘The Genesis and Tradition of Leonardo Bruni’s Annotated Latin Version of the Pseudo-Aristotelian Economics’, Scriptorium 12/2 (1958), 260-268.
[4] H. Barker, The Most Precious Merchandise: The Mediterranean Trade in Black Sea Slaves, 1260-1500 (Philadelphia, 2019), 81, 176.
[5] Bartholomeo della Rocca, Bartholomei Coclitis Chyromantie ac physionomie (Bologna, 1504), 71.
[6] B. Doumerc, ‘Cosmopolitanism on Board Venetian Ships (Fourteenth-Fifteenth Centuries)’, Medieval Encounters 13 (2007), 78-95.
[7] T. Dean, ‘Police Forces in Late Medieval Italy: Bologna, 1340-1480’, Social History 44/2 (2019), 151-172.