Contracts of talla, from captivity to precarious labour in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries

Abstract

ABSTRACT The scarcity of free labourers after the Christian conquests of the Balearic Islands increased the demand for captives. It is assumed that most slaves lived out their lives in captivity, but a significant number of them were in statu libertatis through the so-called contracts of talla or alforria. Historians have often regarded this change of status as an improvement in the captives’ lives, a step closer to freedom; here it is argued that this status was but a different type of subjugation. Captives were made to pay weekly instalments towards the price which their freedom was estimated to be worth. Were they to default, they would revert to fully enslaved status, and this led to the emergence of a contingent of half-free workers. The present study analyses the contracts of talla granted especially in thirteenth-century Mallorca and shows evidence of the contemporary wider spread of this system in Castile.