Investing in Infidels: Slavery in Trecento and Quattrocento Florence

In the intake records of the Foundling Hospital in Florence between 1450 and 1453, only two infants, out of the almost three hundred, were marked as “ghezzo” and “nero”, meaning dark-skinned and black. At the same time, about fifty percent of the children left there were the children of enslaved women who accounted for 92% of the enslaved population of Florence. These numbers demonstrate the large role gender, sexual violence, and race formation played in Florentine slavery. My dissertation examines the integration and explanation of slavery in Florence following its revival in the fourteenth century, with emphasis on lived experiences and visible minorities in the enslaved population. In archival sources, including letters, sermons, court records, account books, notarial documents, legislation, and slave and orphan registers, descriptions of enslaved peoples emerge within fluid categories that were placed in hierarchical relationships based on perceived otherness.

My study provides an analysis of the experiences of slavery and its implications in wider Tuscan society. The first chapter focuses on the perception and prejudices of Italian intellectuals against slaves, as well as the formation of identity in Florence against the backdrop of enslavement. I also examine the creation of the Tuscan identity in Florence to reveal how humanism and the revival of classical antiquity was used in rhetoric to justify the ownership of slaves. The second chapter examines letters of women in the domestic sphere for insight into the interactions between enslaved and enslavers in Florentine households as well as in Florentine institutions and society. In the third chapter, I discuss how use of epidermal descriptors and gender divides reveal new possibilities for the study of race and enslavement in the premodern and early modern Mediterranean. My last chapter focuses on the interactions and negotiations between enslaved peoples and legal and government entities and what they reveal about social and cultural ideas on enslavement using court records and legislation. These four chapters argue that slavery in Florence was both distinct and inseparable from the wider narrative of Mediterranean enslavement in the medieval and early modern period.