Connecting slavery and medicine across the Mediterranean: Isabel de la Cruz and berberisco healers in seventeenth-century Madrid
Christoph Weiditz, Enslaved ‘Moor’ in Castile, Trachtenbuch, ca. 1530-1540. Germanisches Nationalmuseum Nürnberg, Hs. 22474. URL: <https://dlib.gnm.de/item/Hs22474/61>, accessed 13 January 2024.
In recent years, numerous studies have shed light on the role of enslaved individuals and communities in the circulation of varied forms of medical and magico-medical knowledge across the Atlantic, between Europe, Africa, and the Americas.[1] On the other side of the Strait of Gibraltar, however, the history of slavery and the history of medicine largely continue to be studied in isolation from one another. Until very recently, investigations into the circulation of medical knowledge across the medieval and early modern Mediterranean primarily focused on the transmission and assimilation of texts among scholarly communities, overlooking other mechanisms that governed the dissemination of practical medical knowledge. This has led to partially obscure the crucial role played by enslaved communities, which often did not rely on written documents but on orality, in imparting medical skills and expertise across the region.[2]
Though the Mediterranean slavery system differed in many ways from its Atlantic counterpart, slavery was integral to Mediterranean societies. For instance, it is estimated that about 2 million enslaved men and women lived in the Iberian Peninsula and its neighbouring islands between 1450 and 1750.[3] If they constituted a minority in early modern Spain and Portugal, enslaved people nonetheless represented a pervasive and enduring presence throughout the early modern period.
The case of Isabel de la Cruz offers unique insights into how enslaved individuals creatively appropriated and made use of medical knowledge in early modern Spain and the wider Mediterranean. In 1648, Isabel, a forty-eight year old woman of North African origin, was arrested in Madrid by the Inquisition on charges of sorcery and apostasy, for the treatments she had recently administered Francisco de Benavente, a coachbuilder.[4] A few weeks earlier, Catalina de Valdemoro, Francisco’s wife, had sought Isabel’s assistance in curing her ailing husband. Upon examining Francisco, Isabel concluded that he had been bewitched and devised a dazzling array of cures to alleviate his pains. According to Catalina, Isabel requested a number of items for her remedies, including a turtle and an eel. Subsequently, she took Francisco to a secluded area, where she buried an egg and a nail in the ground, and asked Francisco to step over her seven times while she muttered what appeared to be Arabic words. [5] After many other remedies and a fortnight without any improvement in Francisco’s condition, Catalina decided to report Isabel to the tribunal.
Before the tribunal, Isabel was compelled to recount her life story, which testified to how pervasive the experience of captivity and slavery was among coastal communities on both sides of the western Mediterranean. Born to Muslim parents in the city of Tlemcen (present-day Algeria), her maternal grand-parents were Christian Spaniards, who had been captured at sea by North African corsairs. Isabel herself was captured as a child, likely during Spanish raids in Muslim territory, and brought to the Spanish stronghold of Oran (present-day Algeria), where she was enslaved at the service of the count of Aguilar. After a few years, she was baptised and sent to the Peninsula. There, she served various masters, before being set free. During the proceedings, Isabel was referred to as a ‘berberisca’ by the judges and the witnesses. This rather vague label, which indicated North African origin, actually encompassed individuals with vastly different relations to the Maghrib. In contrast to the cases of other enslaved North Africans tried before the Inquisition, whose arrival in the Peninsula was often more recent, Isabel had resided in Spain for more than three decades when her trial began.
Francisco Rizi, Auto de Fe en la plaza mayor de Madrid, 1685, oil on canvas, 277x438cm, Museo del Prado, P001126. URL: <https://www.museodelprado.es/coleccion/obra-de-arte/auto-de-fe-en-la-plaza-mayor-de-madrid/8d92af03-3183-473a-9997-d9cbf2557462>, accessed 13 January 2024.
From her testimony, it becomes evident that Isabel’s medical practice was far from marginal in seventeenth-century Spain. The impressive list of witnesses she called upon to attest she was a good Christian demonstrates her extensive connections in Madrid.[6] Her clients, the Benaventes, were not marginals either, but belonged to a well-off family with a good social standing. Most importantly, Isabel successfully sold her remedies in the heart of Spanish territory, challenging the notion that the influence of Maghribi healers was confined to coastal areas with greater contact with the Maghrib. Isabel’s testimony shows that she was not the sole Maghribi practitioner offering medical services in Madrid. She alluded to the activities of other North Africans, such as a woman living in the street of Saint Ann, who, amongst other things, regularly addressed the sun in Arabic.[7] Isabel additionally referred to the medical expertise of Ali, a North African enslaved at the service of the duke of Maqueda.[8] Not only had Ali cured Isabel’s back pains, but he had also shared with her his knowledge of herbal remedies suitable for a variety of ailments.
Isabel did not exclusively rely on the expertise of other Maghribis. In her testimony, she openly acknowledged drawing inspiration from a few Old Christian healers practicing in Madrid. For instance, she explained having attempted to procure a turtle to cure Francisco because she had witnessed her former master, the count of Aguilar, eat a fried turtle when he was unwell.[9] Similarly, she mentioned having uttered the words ‘I cure you, may God heal you’ (‘Yo te curo, Dios te sane’) after hearing a Franciscan use a similar expression with great success in his treatments.[10] Thus, by combining knowledge gleaned in North Africa with experiences from her captivity and the expertise of Old Christian healers and enslaved North Africans residing in Madrid, Isabel was able to synthetise and later monetise her own peculiar form of medical knowledge.
Whether Isabel continued to sell her cures after her trial ended is uncertain. In 1649, she was condemned to perform penance in a public auto de fe, to abjure de levi, to receive a hundred lashes, and temporarily banished from Madrid and Toledo. Nonetheless, Isabel’s career as a healer in Madrid, however brief, encourages to further re-evaluate the role of slavery in the history of medicine as practiced across the Mediterranean – not merely as a site of learning and transmission but first and foremost as a catalyst for the emergence of original ideas and practices.
Ana Struillou is a Past and Present Fellow at the Institute of Historical Research (London). Her doctorate, conducted at the European University Institute, explored the material culture of travel across the western Mediterranean (sixteenth-seventeenth centuries). Her previous research project, at Exeter College (Oxford University) focused on the material culture of Morisco diplomacy across early modern France and Spain. Her research interests include, amongst others, material culture, mobility, and cross-religious relations in the early modern Mediterranean.”
She can be reached at: ana.struillou@outlook.fr.
A digitized version of Isabel de la Cruz’s trial is available here: <http://pares.mcu.es/ParesBusquedas20/catalogo/description/4434766?nm>, accessed 14 January 2024.
[1] See for instance James Sweet, Domingos Álvares, African Healing, and the Intellectual History of the Atlantic World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011). Research on the bolsas de mandinga (magical pouches) also exemplifies this trend. See for instance Cécile Fromont, ‘Paper, Ink, Vodun, and the Inquisition: Tracing Power, Slavery, and Witchcraft in the Early Modern Portuguese Atlantic’, Journal of the American Academy of Religion 88, no. 2 (2020): 460–504; Matthew Francis Rarey, Insignificant Things: Amulets and the Art of Survival in the Early Black Atlantic (Durham: Duke University Press, 2023).
[2] This is beginning to change. Pioneering studies include M’hamed Oualdi, ‘Du hakim renégat au praticien européen : mutations d’identité des médecins de cour et modernisation du service rendu aux beys de Tunis, du milieu du XVIIe siècle au milieu du XIXe siècle’, in Perilous Modernity: History of Medicine in the Ottoman Empire and the Middle East from the 19th Century Onwards, ed. Anne Marie Moulin and Yesim Isil Ulman (Piscataway, Istanbul: Gorgias Press, The Isis Press, 2010), 69–84 ; Stefan Hanß, ‘Hair, Emotions and Slavery in the Early Modern Habsburg Mediterranean’, History Workshop Journal 87 (2019): 160–87. See also the recent panel at HSS Portland 2023, ‘Slavery, Medicine, and Science in the Early Modern Mediterranean World’ organised by Lucia Dacome (University of Toronto).
[3] Alessandro Stella, Histoires d’esclaves dans la péninsule Ibérique (Paris: EHESS, 2000),
[4] Archivo Histórico Nacional (thereafter AHN), Inquisición, Leg. 84, Exp. 9. The case of Isabel has been discussed, more or less extensively, in the following works: Stacey Schlau, Gendered Crime and Punishment: Women and/in the Hispanic Inquisitions (Leiden: Brill, 2013); María Gómez Alonso, ‘Connotaciones en torno a la construcción de la brujería en la España de los siglos XVII y XVIII’ (Santander, Universidad de Cantabria, 2014); María Luz López Terrada and Carolin Schmitz, ‘Licencias sociales para sanar: la construcción como expertos de salud de curanderas y curanderos en la Castilla del barroco’, Studia Historica: Historia Moderna 40, no. 2 (2018): 143–75; Eliza Honor Braverman, ‘Autoridad subversiva: la construcción de poder y conocimiento intergeneracional y transatlántico en círculos femeninos durante la Inquisición española’ (Oberlin, Oberlin College, 2021).
[5] AHN, Inquisición, Leg. 84, Exp. 9, f. 3-8.
[6] Ibid., f. 88-100.
[7] Ibid., f. 51. On North Africans in seventeenth-century Madrid, see Mohamed Saadan Saadan, ‘Los berberiscos en el Madrid del siglo XVII a través de las testificaciones del Santo Oficio’, in La Inquisición vista desde abajo: testificaciones de gente corriente ante el Santo Oficio, ed. Juan Ignacio Pulido Serrano and William Childers (Madrid: Iberoamericana Vervuert, 2020), 73–160.
[8] AHN, Inquisición, Leg. 84, Exp. 9, f. 61.
[9] Ibid., f.72.
[10] Ibid., f. 61v.