Slavery, Dependency and Household Labour under the Umayyads

Between the seventh and eleventh centuries, Umayyad rulers governed two distant settings: the caliphate, a state ruled by a caliph, a Muslim sovereign, centered in Damascus from 661 to 750, and, after 756, an emirate centered in Córdoba and ruled by an emir, a Muslim ruler; it became a caliphate in 929 and lasted until 1031. The eastern state included Syria and Iraq; al-Andalus, the Muslim-ruled parts of Iberia, now Spain and Portugal, lay far to the west. In both, enslaved people could be bought, sold and assigned work, while clients, tenants and hired workers held different relationships to householders and landowners.

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Capture and trade across Umayyad regions

In northern Syria during the 710s, raids brought captives into the eastern caliphate’s frontier conflicts. Historian Chase F. Robinson cites a Syriac chronicle that describes people being captured during these campaigns. Robinson also identifies trade, debt and births within enslaved households as sources of enslaved labor in the early caliphate. Farther west, in North Africa, historian E. Savage traces a different route: during the eighth century, some Berber communities shifted from enslaving people captured in North Africa to importing captives from Bilād al-Sūdān, lands south of the Sahara, through the central trans-Saharan route. Ibāḍī Muslim merchants, members of a religious movement, helped organize this traffic, which increased the wealth and security of their communities.

The Saqaliba, a term medieval Arabic writers applied to Slavic peoples of central and eastern Europe and possibly neighbouring groups, became visible in tenth-century Córdoba. Historian Marek Jankowiak connects the slave trade through Prague, in present-day Czechia, with demand in al-Andalus, where Saqaliba served in palace and military roles. Texts place enslaved men among guards, bureaucrats and soldiers, and women and eunuchs in court households.

Household and productive labour

Enslaved people worked in domestic service, manual trades, crafts, manufacturing and state offices. In southern Iraq, Robinson describes enslaved people chained while they dug canals; some escaped despite the restraints. The same eastern sources name enslaved people as scribes on government documents. These examples show how ownership could direct both a person’s movement and work, from household service to large public works.

The frontier commander Maymun illustrates a change in status. He had been enslaved by Christian cultivators who temporarily joined a Christian frontier group called the Jarajima, also known as the Mardaites. Caliph Abd al-Malik, impressed by Maymun’s abilities, asked his owners to free him. After his manumission, the formal granting of freedom, Maymun commanded a force in a campaign against Tyana, in present-day Turkey. A freed person could enter a patron’s service as a client, or mawlā, a relationship of affiliation and support rather than ownership. By contrast, a tenant owed obligations tied to the land he cultivated, not the transfer of his person.

Court households in Córdoba

Court service could combine coercion, training and access to political power. During the reign of al-Hakam I (796–822), the court chronicler Ibn Hayyan remembered two royal concubines, enslaved women in the ruler’s sexual household, Ajab and Mut’a. Ajab was the mother of al-Hakam’s son Marwan. She gave a suburban villa across the Guadalquivir River to a community of people with leprosy, while Mut’a established a mosque and cemetery and supported charitable works. Art historian Glaire D. Anderson suggests that Mut’a was also a singer or musician, an example of the skilled performer whose training could lead to a place at court.

A century later, Marjan was a favored concubine of Abd al-Rahman III (912–961) and mother of his heir, al-Hakam II. Ibn Hayyan credits her with almsgiving, mosque construction and endowments that paid for mosque services and maintenance from rental income.

Contracts, parentage and manumission

In tenth-century Córdoba, Mālikī jurists, members of the Islamic legal school followed in al-Andalus, prepared wathā’iq, model forms that notaries used when drafting contracts. Historian Cristina de la Puente compares these forms, including the late-tenth-century manual of Cordoban notary Ibn al-Attar. One marriage model cited to Ibn al-Attar and later notaries let a wife make her husband’s taking of a concubine a contract condition. If he broke it, she could choose whether to remain married or seek repudiation; the clause also specified whether she could sell, retain or free the enslaved woman.

The forms also explain the status of an umm walad, an enslaved concubine who became pregnant by her owner and whose child he acknowledged. Under Mālikī doctrine, the child was free. De la Puente describes the mother’s protection from sale or hire and her eventual freedom at the owner’s death. The status depended on pregnancy and acknowledged paternity, not simply on a child’s birth to an enslaved woman.