Did the Maya Have Slaves?

The Maya concept of bondage

The Maya did have slaves, but their form of slavery was very different from the chattel slavery of the later Atlantic world. Maya slaves were not members of a hereditary caste, and they did not lose their status as human beings. They were people who, through specific events — capture in war, debt, or the sale of themselves or their children — had entered a condition of bondage. The system is best understood against the background of Maya social hierarchy and class structure and the wider political order described in Maya society, politics, and daily life.

The Maya term most often translated as “slave” was pentacab in the colonial Yucatec sources, sometimes also written as pentacob or ppentoc. The term probably meant something like “he of the captive group” or “he of the exchanged one,” and it refers to the person who had been the subject of an exchange of services. The colonial Spanish sources, drawing on the legal concepts of Roman and Iberian law, sometimes translated the term as esclavo (slave), but the underlying Maya concept was not the same.

A second term, ya-unen, is sometimes translated as “debt-slave” or “indentured servant,” and it refers to a person who had pledged his or her services in exchange for a loan or an advance of goods. The ya-unen could work off the debt and regain freedom, and the children of a ya-unen were not automatically bound.

Three paths into slavery

There were three principal paths into Maya slavery. The first was capture in war. A man or woman taken prisoner in a campaign could be ransomed, sacrificed, or enslaved. The fate depended on the captive’s status, the political needs of the captor, and the calendrical situation. A commoner captive was most often enslaved, while a noble captive was more likely to be sacrificed in a public ceremony. The treatment of war captives is described in warfare, captives, and human sacrifice.

The second path was debt. A man or woman who could not pay a debt could be compelled to work for the creditor, sometimes for a fixed period and sometimes for life. The system was a form of pawnship, and it allowed poor families to survive famine and other disasters. The debtor’s labor was the interest on the loan, and the principal had to be paid off before the debtor could be freed.

The third path was the sale of oneself or one’s children. In times of famine or other disasters, a family might sell a child or even an adult relative to a wealthier household, in exchange for food, shelter, or protection. The sale was often a desperate measure, and the freed slave was expected to maintain a relationship with the former owner. The colonial sources record many such transactions, and the practice is described in Maya trade, markets, and economy.

The status of the slave

A Maya slave was a person of low status, but not of zero status. A slave could own property, marry a free person, own slaves of his or her own, and accumulate wealth. The wealthier slaves could buy their freedom, and a slave who had saved enough to purchase a substitute could be freed. The master could not arbitrarily kill a slave, and the killing of a slave was considered a serious offense, punishable by fines or by the loss of the master’s own freedom.

A slave’s children were born free, a fact that distinguished Maya slavery from later forms. The child of a slave mother and a free father was free, and the child of a slave mother and a slave father was also free, because the slave status did not pass through the parent. This meant that the slave population was constantly being replenished from outside, and that there was no hereditary slave class.

A slave could marry a free person, but the marriage had to be approved by the master. The free spouse could purchase the slave’s freedom before the marriage, and the children of the marriage were free. The same arrangements existed for slaves who married each other: if both spouses were slaves, the master had to agree to the marriage, and the children of the marriage were free.

A slave could, in principle, work his or her way up the social scale. A slave who had been a free person before being enslaved could expect to be freed eventually, especially if the original cause of enslavement was debt. A slave who had been a captive in war could be ransomed by his or her family, and a slave who had distinguished himself in the service of a powerful master could be raised to a position of authority.

The inscriptions record several cases of slaves who rose to prominence. The most famous is the case of the Quiriguá general K’ahk’ Tiliw Chan Yopaat, who was originally a subordinate of the Copán king Waxaklajuun Ubaah K’awiil and who captured and sacrificed his overlord in 738 CE. K’ahk’ Tiliw went on to found his own dynasty at Quiriguá, and his descendants ruled the city for several generations. The political background is described in Maya social hierarchy and class structure and in the Petexbatun wars.

The economy of slavery

Slaves performed many kinds of labor. They served in the households of the elite, where they cooked, cleaned, and carried out the various tasks of domestic service. They worked in the fields and in the workshops, where they performed the menial labor that supported the production of goods for tribute. They served as porters for the long-distance merchants, and they served as rowers in the canoes that plied the rivers and the coasts.

Slaves were a significant item of commerce. They were bought and sold in the markets, and the value of a slave was roughly the same as the value of a turkey — about 100 cacao beans in the colonial period. The price of a slave was high, and the ownership of several slaves was a sign of wealth. The economic context is described in Maya trade, markets, and economy.

Manumission and the end of slavery

A slave could be freed in several ways. The most common was purchase of self by the slave: the slave saved enough to pay the master the value of the original transaction, and the master agreed to free the slave. The second was ransom by the family: a relative of the slave paid the master a ransom, and the slave was freed. The third was gift by the master: the master, for reasons of piety, gratitude, or political calculation, declared the slave free. The fourth was death of the master: the master’s heirs were often obliged to free the slaves, especially if the slave had been in the household for many years.

A freed slave was still attached to the former master in certain ways. The freed slave was expected to perform certain services for the master on ritual occasions, and the freed slave’s descendants were sometimes expected to attend the master’s descendants. The relationships were conceived as a kind of artificial kinship, and the freed slave’s family became a kind of artificial lineage attached to the master’s lineage.

Slavery in the inscriptions

The Classic-period inscriptions mention slaves explicitly, and the decipherment of Maya hieroglyphs has made it possible to read some of the more elaborate passages. A famous inscription at Quiriguá records the capture of the Copán king and his sacrificial death, and the texts name several of his attendants as “captives.” A passage at Palenque refers to the queen Sak K’uk''s rescue of a captive from execution, an act of royal mercy that is presented as a sign of her legitimate authority. The political theology of the queen is described in did Maya women rule as kings?.

The inscriptions also use specific glyphs for “captive,” “slave,” “debt-slave,” and “freed person,” and the contexts in which these glyphs appear can be reconstructed. The use of the slave glyph is especially common in the context of k’atun-ending ceremonies, where large numbers of captives were sacrificed to mark the close of a major calendrical period. The role of captives in calendrical ceremonies is described in warfare, captives, and human sacrifice.

The colonial transformation

The Spanish conquest in the sixteenth century brought new forms of bondage. The encomienda system, by which the Spanish crown granted Spanish settlers the right to extract tribute and labor from indigenous villages, was a kind of feudal arrangement, and the repartimiento system of forced labor for public works was a form of state slavery. The indigenous people did not, in most cases, become chattel slaves in the Atlantic sense, but they were subjected to new forms of compulsory labor, and the abuses of the colonial system led to demographic catastrophe and to the Caste War of Yucatán.

The Spanish legal system also provided new ways for Maya people to escape bondage. A slave who could prove that he or she had been enslaved unjustly could petition the Spanish courts, and the Spanish authorities sometimes freed slaves on the grounds that their enslavement had violated Spanish law. The colonial sources preserve many such cases, and they provide a unique window onto the realities of Maya slavery.

The legacy in the modern period

The institution of Maya slavery gradually disappeared in the colonial period, replaced by a system of debt peonage that survived in some regions well into the twentieth century. The legacy of slavery is visible in the social structure of some modern Maya communities, and the persistence of debt bondage in some isolated regions was a target of the social reforms of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The survival of the broader Maya cultural tradition is described in the modern Maya identity and survival.

Summary

The Maya did have slaves, but the institution was not a hereditary caste system. Slaves were people who, through war, debt, or sale, had entered a condition of bondage, and they could leave the condition through purchase, ransom, or gift. The children of slaves were free, and the slave could accumulate property, marry a free person, and even own slaves of his or her own. The institution was an important part of the Maya economy and a central element of the political theology of the warfare and sacrifice system, but it did not produce the kind of hereditary slave class that characterized the later Atlantic world. The Maya form of slavery is best understood as a form of temporary bondage, embedded in a wider social and ritual system that allowed for the social mobility of the enslaved and the manumission of the meritorious.

Sources

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Restall, M. (2001). The Maya World: Yucatec Culture and Society, 1550–1850. Stanford University Press. — link
Tozzer, A. M. (1941). Landa’s Relación de las Cosas de Yucatán. Peabody Museum Papers vol. XVIII. Harvard. — link