‘Si tu non delinquiris’. Conflictivity about Slavery in Late Medieval Barcelona

Abstract

This article considers the phenomenon of slavery as a conflict which confronts the individuals’ deprivation of liberty to their desire to achieve it, and treats the life experience of the slave and the freedperson from the moment of capture to that of death. The life of the slave, as well as that of the freedperson, is affected by various circumstances that provoke diverse problems affecting them directly or indirectly. Slaves suffer not only the conflict of the absence of liberty; they must also confront the acquisition of a new culture in a continual process of social adaptation that, ironically, reaches its critical point upon the entry into free society. During this journey, which oscillates between the poles of integration and rejection, individuals enslaved and subsequently emancipated can complete a process of positive adaptation, construct an alternative identity with which to bear their situation, or express their rejection through the assumption of clearly conflictive behaviors and attitudes.