The She-Wolf and Her Prey: Cervantes,

Aristotle, and Smith on Slavery

_____________________________________Eric Clifford Graf

“‘Very well,’ thought I. ‘Knowledge unfits a child to be a slave.’”

—Frederick Douglass, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (91)

G
iven that a statue of Miguel de Cervantes was vandalized
in the Golden Gate Park of San Francisco during the recent
wave of protests against racism, colonialism, and capitalism in
the United States, a brief reflection on the significance of slavery in the
novelist’s masterpiece seems appropriate. Cervantes weaves together so
many perspectives on master-slave relationships in Don Quijote de la
Mancha (part one, 1605; part two, 1615) that he inevitably drifts toward
abstract and speculative thinking about the topic. There’s servitude as
a metaphor for love, whereby crazy men are captivated by objects of
desire, as in Don Quijote’s devotion to Dulcinea in part one, chapter
one or Tosilos’s enchantment by the daughter of Doña Rodríguez in
part two, chapter fifty-six; and as we see in Torralba’s fixation on Lope
Ruiz in part one, chapter twenty or Altisidora’s obsession with Don
Quijote in part two, chapter seventy, women are also prone to amo-
rous captivity. There are more mundane forms of bondage, too, such as
punishment for criminals, as seen in the episode of the galley slaves in
part one, chapter twenty-two, or as the byproduct of naval warfare, as
seen in Captain Ruy Pérez de Viedma’s tale in part one, chapters thirty-
nine through forty-one and again in Ana Félix’s romance in part two,
chapters sixty-three through sixty-five.

157
158 Eric Clifford Graf Cervantes

References to a fourth type of slavery, the transatlantic trade in black

Africans, appear in Don Quijote in at least three places: 1) Urganda’s nod
to the black African poet Johannes Latinus in the first dedicatory poem
(v.43); 2) Sancho Panza’s plan to sell the black Africans of the Kingdom
of Micomicón into slavery in part one, chapter twenty-nine; and 3)
Don Quijote’s angry, empathetic remark about the mistreatment of
old black African slaves in part two, chapter twenty-four. Although not
without their ironies, such passages echo Cervantes’s general attitude
against slavery. His reasoning appears to be as follows: reserving slavery
for criminals and prisoners of war allows for abuse and corruption, and
the recent addition of the element of race is yet another injustice.
In sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spain, slavery and labor
were among the many topics studied and debated in technical and the-
oretical terms by the intellectuals of the so-called School of Salamanca.
Bartolomé de las Casas’s Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias
(1542, published in 1552) and Bartolomé Albornoz’s Arte de los contractos
(1573) are two examples of late-scholastic texts that denounce the injus-
tices of slavery. As such, they are early manifestations of an abolitionist
movement that would take three centuries to mature in nations like
the United States (1863) and Brazil (1888). This is a somewhat tortur-
ous ideological circuit, but it’s not impossible to imagine. As Leonard
Liggio once noted, “The expansion of rights theory which reached its
heights from Locke to the American Revolution was founded on the
rights debates which were introduced to Spain from the New World”
(14). Don Quijote supplements Liggio’s point by fleshing out the mid-
dle of this trajectory from Las Casas to Locke with one of history’s most
read novels.
Like Aquinas the late scholastics of the School of Salamanca dis-
play great deference toward Aristotle, who was their preferred point of
departure on most topics, especially when making arguments based on
natural law. During the Renaissance, however, ancient wisdom could
be questioned, often using none other than Aristotle. Early modern
theorists, for example, many of them late scholastics, recognized mul-
tiple justifications for slavery, including war, birth, debt, and crime—
an ancient list to which medieval Christian doctrine added heresy. Las
Volume 40.1 (2020) The She-Wolf and Her Prey 159

Casas pointed out that most of these did not apply to the Amerindians.
It’s also true, however, that Las Casas based much of his defense of
the Amerindians on an open-minded, pluralistic view of international
law, which, in turn, had its own roots in Aristotle’s comparative sur-
vey of the different political regimes among the nations of the ancient
Mediterranean world in the Politics.
In his De Indis (1532) and De Jure belli Hispanorum in barbaros
(1532), Las Casas’s teacher Francisco de Vitoria took particular aim at
the more recent justification of slavery by heresy. He argued that be-
cause Christianity had not been properly demonstrated to the indig-
enous populations of the New World, the Amerindians were therefore
not necessarily heretics if they refused to accept the faith (Gutiérrez
244). Essentially, Vitoria allowed that Spanish cruelty and hypocrisy
sustained and amplified the notion of “invincible ignorance,” a concept
whereby those Amerindians who had not yet heard the gospel could
not be condemned to the same degree as apostates, Jews, or Muslims.
This is the essential message of Las Casas’s more hyperbolic Brevísima
relación, written about a decade after Vitoria’s two texts. Like Vitoria,
Las Casas argues that the Amerindians have been alienated from
Christianity by the barbarous, unchristian, and unexemplary behavior
of so many Spaniards in the New World. Vitoria’s and Las Casas’s argu-
ments take the last remnants of the religious justification for slavery off
the table, which leaves international law as the only other grounds for
argument, the basis of which is natural law. And in the end, neither
line of inquiry permits Spaniards ipso facto to assume sovereignty over
Amerindians or lay claim to their property or their persons.

***
A simple case of a natural law in Don Quijote is the a priori justifi-
cation of self-defense. Sancho alludes to this unspoken law very early in
the novel when, after casting aside his master’s chivalric laws, he claims
that divine and human laws have already granted him the right to resist
force: “Bien es verdad que en lo que tocare a defender mi persona no
tendré mucha cuenta con esas leyes, pues las divinas y humanas per-
160 Eric Clifford Graf Cervantes

miten que cada uno se defienda de quien quisiere agraviarle” (1.8:99).

Over 100 chapters later, toward the end of part two, the squire resists
his master’s attempt to lash him, performing a kind of jujitsu maneu-
ver by which he manages to pin Don Quijote to the ground under his
knee. It’s the natural law of self-defense in action, and it seems logi-
cal that Sancho should now finally assert his independence: “soy mi
señor” (2.60:1118). Sancho’s phrasing of his self-defense in part two,
chapter sixty also happens to allude to the fourteenth-century civil war
in Castile between Pedro I—known as either el Cruel “the Cruel” or
el Justo “the Just,” depending on your perspective—and Enrique II—
known inversely as el Caballero “the Gentleman” or el Fratricida “the
Fratricide,” again depending on your perspective. Sancho’s reference
to these opposing medieval kings adds tension and ambivalence to the
squire’s struggle for his own autonomy at the beginning of the seven-
teenth century.
I would argue that in spite of all these ironies Sancho articulates
Cervantes’s theoretical criticism of slavery circa 1600, although from a
peculiar angle and not quite in the way modern readers might expect.
Cervantes’s critique of slavery via Sancho comes into focus only after
we consider the squire’s assertions of his natural right to self-defense in
conjunction with two of his other major tendencies: 1) his quest for a
contractual salary from Don Quijote; 2) his repeated encounters with
slaves.
In the first case, Sancho plots a trajectory away from being a me-
dieval serf who is either punished and rewarded at the whims of his
master and toward being a free individual who participates in the early
modern labor market. The effect reflects a shift in thinking about labor
that moves from coercion to voluntary negotiation. It also establishes a
clear connection between political and economic modes of autonomy.
Thus, a few chapters after he pins his master to the ground with his
knee and declares his independence, Sancho manages to negotiate a per
unit labor contract with him in part two, chapter seventy-one.
In the second case, and ironically parallel to his own transforma-
tion from a dependent slave into someone who charges a just price
for his services, Sancho must learn that it is wrong to forcibly enslave
Volume 40.1 (2020) The She-Wolf and Her Prey 161

others. His fantasy about selling the citizens of the legendary equato-
rial African Kingdom of Micomicón in part one, chapter twenty-nine
dovetails with his brushes with two aggressive groups of galley slaves in
part one, chapter twenty-two and part two, chapter sixty-three in order
to situate Sancho at the center of the issue throughout both parts of
Don Quijote. Additionally, the shepherd boy Andrés and Sancho make
the novel into a circle in relation to the theme. A master lashes his slave
in the woods of La Mancha in part one, chapter four; and in those
same woods, only in exchange for money, a paid employee lashes first
himself and then trees in part two, chapter seventy-one.
Sancho’s struggle to be free to negotiate the price of his labor with
his master is especially poignant in the context of Don Quijote’s famous
pronouncement on liberty: “La libertad, Sancho, es uno de los más
preciosos dones que a los hombres dieron los cielos” (2.58:1094). The
phrase confirms Luis Rosales’s thesis that “la libertad es, justamente, el
eje mismo del pensamiento cervantino” (33), and it also provides solid
evidence for Luis Andrés Murillo’s thesis that “The Captive’s Tale,” with
its autobiographical focus on slavery, was the original endpoint of the
exemplary narrative that formed the core of Don Quijote. In what fol-
lows, I’ll go further and argue that the continuities around the theme
of slavery in the first modern novel suggest something deeper and more
theoretical, something like Hegel’s primordial allegory of the master
and the slave (see Kojève) and even more like Adam Smith’s utilitarian
vision of slavery as economically obsolete.

***
When thinking about Aristotle, the School of Salamanca, and the
theme of slavery in Don Quijote, we are forced to start with Cervantes’s
early references to the Politics. The novel’s premise—a mentally un-
stable noble who mismanages his estate—is a negative, imbalanced,
and monstrous version of Aristotle’s essential analogy between the po-
litical economy of a healthy city state and a gentleman’s proper direc-
tion of his personal agricultural holdings. The idea appears early in the
first chapter of part one of the novel, when the narrator describes Don
162 Eric Clifford Graf Cervantes

Quijote’s insanity as adversely affecting his ability to be a noble, i.e., to

hunt and to manage his estate: “que olvidó casi de todo punto el ejerci-
cio de la caza y aun la administración de su hacienda” (1.1:37). The nar-
rator then tells us that the old man’s difficulties with certain chivalric
phrases place him completely beyond the assistance of the greatest phi-
losopher that ever lived: “ni las entendiera el mesmo Aristóteles si resu-
citara para solo ello” (1.1:38). In this same vein of assessing Aristotelian
nobility, Cervantes establishes an essential contrast in the second part
of Don Quijote between the two basic types of hidalgo circa 1600: the
irrational and impoverished Don Quijote and the orderly and affluent
Don Diego de Miranda (see 2.18:771-81).
Given Cervantes’s global dependence on Aristotle’s key metaphor
in the Politics of the nobleman (mis)managing his estate, when we
think more specifically about labor and servitude in Don Quijote, we
are also forced to consider Aristotle’s curious and controversial dis-
tinction in book one of the Politics between two antithetical types of
slavery: “where the relation of master and slave between them is natu-
ral they are friends and have a common interest, but where it rests
merely on law and force the reverse is true” (1.6). Modern readers often
mistake Aristotle’s point here as somehow racist, as if he were arguing
chauvinistically that non-Greeks deserved slavery more than Greeks.
What Aristotle means by natural slavery, however, is simply an eco-
nomic relationship devoid of coercion. As Michael Palmer notes, “the
relationship between a ‘natural master’ and a ‘natural slave’ would be
one of mutual advantage and friendship, which is not possible between
a master and a slave of the other (i.e., ‘conventional’) sort” (4). What
Aristotle means by natural slavery is in fact not at all what we mean by
slavery today but, rather, the voluntary exchange of human labor for
food, housing, military protection, etc.
When distinguishing between natural and conventional slavery,
history’s greatest philosopher envisions a cooperative scheme as op-
posed to a coercive one. His description of natural slavery is essen-
tially a formal way of articulating what a modern economist would call
“comparative advantage.” Furthermore, Aristotle envisions this mutu-
ally advantageous cooperative scheme as a nobleman’s means of more
Volume 40.1 (2020) The She-Wolf and Her Prey 163

efficiently managing his agricultural estate. For its part, a properly

managed estate is the fundamental subunit of the overarching political
structure of society that is precisely the ultimate concern of Aristotle’s
political philosophy. In a circular mode of reasoning, the philosopher’s
ideal estate is one that is self-sufficient via the proper employment of
subordinates and slaves such that the owner can then dedicate himself
to other pursuits, most especially philosophy and politics (Palmer 4).
This implies a virtuous spiral in which the right philosophy yields the
right politics which underwrites the proper management of agricul-
tural estates which, for their part, underwrite the proper study and
application of philosophy and politics, and so on. Presumably, too, the
owners of the most efficient and productive of these agricultural estates
would be uniquely positioned to exert maximum philosophical and
political control over society, if only due to the fact that they would
have relatively more time and wealth, which in turn would allow them
to dedicate more of themselves to philosophical reasoning and political
action.
In the very first chapter of Don Quijote, Cervantes creates a fic-
tional network of economic and political allusions to Aristotle which,
thanks to Aristotle himself, are ultimately organized around a funda-
mental contrast between natural and conventional modes of slavery,
the implications of which are far reaching, especially with respect to re-
cent debates over Spanish practices in the New World. But if Albornoz,
Las Casas, and Aristotle offer obvious influences on Cervantes, subse-
quent generations of thinking about labor and slavery are also help-
ful when evaluating these themes in Don Quijote. Just to name a few,
Enlightenment philosophers and classical liberals like Thomas Hobbes,
Voltaire, Adam Smith, and David Ricardo indicate later evolutions in
thinking about bondage and work.
Hobbes was a careful reader of Cervantes in several respects. The
English political philosopher described labor in Leviathan as a market-
priced fungible good no different from any other commodity: “The
value or worth of a man, is as of all other things his price—that is to
say, so much as would be given for the use of his power” (10: 63). This
164 Eric Clifford Graf Cervantes

recalls Sancho and Don Quijote’s struggle in the first modern novel
with respect to the squire’s compensation (see Graf, “Martin”).
Voltaire, too, was a close reader of Cervantes. Candide drives home
the shame of black African slavery in the West Indies. The scene in
which Candide renounces Pangloss’s optimism is pivotal. The narrator
describes how “they came on a Negro lying on the ground half-naked…
missing his left leg and his right hand,” and the slave then declares that
his state “is the price you pay for the sugar you eat in Europe” (53-54).
The moral of Voltaire’s satire recalls the negative example of Sancho’s
slaver fantasy in part one of Cervantes’s novel as well as Don Quijote’s
vocalized empathy for black African slaves in part two.
Like Voltaire, Ricardo’s thinking on slavery was abolitionist and
in direct response to reports of abuse on Caribbean sugar plantations.
Even if we were to limit ourselves to his political economy, Ricardo ex-
tended Hobbesian and Cervantine realism about labor in some rather
pessimistic directions. Many have seen dire implications for human
labor as a result of Ricardo’s “iron law of rents,” a concept which John
Stuart Mill  once described as the pons asinorum of economics (qtd.
by MacLeod 96). Perhaps under the influence of his friend Thomas
Malthus, who famously argued that populations constantly outrun their
food supplies, Ricardo seems to have glimpsed an industrial dystopia
in which the labor market transforms human beings into little more
than natural resources. Whichever way it was theoretically, Ricardo
also took an activist stance: “befitting the husband of a Quaker, he
confessed that ‘he was inclined to blush with shame, to hide his face,
when West-India slavery was mentioned’” (Groenwegen 92n7). In his
address of 19 March 1823 to the directors of the East India Company,
Ricardo deplored slavery as “infamous,” “shocking” and “abominable”
(483); that same year, he also criticized slavery in a speech to Parliament
during the debate on West and East Indian Sugar duties (297, 300).
Hobbes, Voltaire, and Ricardo make for useful retrospective com-
parisons with Cervantes’s fiction precisely because they examined many
of the same questions raised earlier by the novelist. In other words,
what we witness in Don Quijote are critically creative lines of philo-
Volume 40.1 (2020) The She-Wolf and Her Prey 165

sophical thinking about labor markets, slavery, and race beginning to

converge in early seventeenth-century Europe.
But Cervantes’s thinking about work and slavery might be best
understood in the context of the economic views of Adam Smith.
On this and other matters, the Scottish philosopher was characteristi-
cally more optimistic than either Hobbes, Voltaire, or Ricardo. In his
magnum opus, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of
Nations (1776), Smith stated the following: “It appears, accordingly,
from the experience of all ages and nations, I believe, that the work
done by free men comes cheaper in the end than the work performed
by slaves” (1.8:83). Although even today it remains a counterintuitive
idea to many, Smith reasoned that labor induced by compensation will
generally be more productive than labor that is coerced. Put simply, a
carrot is more efficient than a stick.
In “The Captive’s Tale” of Don Quijote (1.39-41:450-92), Cervantes
directs readers towards an idea remarkably similar to Smith’s utilitarian
vision of slavery’s obsolescence. Of all the types of slavery on display
in Don Quijote, there is a marked preponderance of galley slaves. We
should consider that by overweighting galley slaves, Cervantes grants
them special status both morally and politically. Now, Cervantes’s most
indelible first-hand experiences with galley slaves were as a soldier at the
Battle of Lepanto in 1571. This battle is also frequently cited by special-
ists as the source of Cervantes’s seemingly elevated esteem for Don Juan
of Austria. Nevertheless, according to historian Roger Crowley, just
prior to the battle, Don Juan “promised liberation for all the Christian
galley slaves if they fought well, and ordered their shackles to be re-
moved,” but, unfortunately, it was “a promise that he could not guar-
antee, as only the oarsmen on his own ships were within his gift” (261).
This helps explain why in the first modern novel Cervantes focuses
his disillusionment with Habsburg rule on the fates of galley slaves in
the topographical and historical proximity of the Battle of Lepanto.
The moral cost of the victory seems to have been very high from his
point of view. The mutinous behavior of so many galley slaves, which
thunders through multiple chapters in both parts of Don Quijote, reads
like a running metaphorical objection to Don Juan’s betrayal of them
166 Eric Clifford Graf Cervantes

at Lepanto. Moreover, many of the Christian galley slaves at Lepanto

were Moriscos previously captured during the Alpujarras Rebellion
(1570-71), that is, Moriscos whom Don Juan himself had repressed
and who were then forced to man the oars of Spanish galleys earlier
that year. Intellectuals like Diego Hurtado de Mendoza and Johannes
Latinus disapproved of the Spanish mistreatment of the Moriscos (see
Darst and Gates). That Cervantes shared their pro-Morisco sentiments
is visible in transethnic characters like Zoraida, Aldonza Lorenzo,
Ricote, and Ana Félix, all meant to repair the national sin of expulsion
that occurred between the publications of parts one and two of Don
Quijote (see Márquez Villanueva).
At one point in his narrative, however, Cervantes moves from a
moral and political critique of the racism and injustice of slavery onto
a more Smith-like theoretical critique that considers slavery in more
utilitarian terms. The idea that Don Juan’s promise to the galley slaves
might have influenced the outcome at Lepanto already implies two
competing systems of incentives. But in part one, chapter thirty-nine,
Captain Viedma narrates an even more precise allegory that reinforces
the link between victory and freedom during the epic struggle between
the Holy League and Constantinople for control of the Mediterranean
Sea. Viedma reproduces his general proposition in miniature, reducing
civilization versus barbarism and Hapsburg Empire versus Ottoman
Empire down to a single exemplary case of naval combat between two
ships with two captains: Bazán versus Barbarossa. Viedma reports that
the outcome hinged on one difference, namely, the ways in which the
two opposing captains treated their respective galley slaves:

En este viaje se tomó la galera que se llamaba La Presa, de quien

era capitán un hijo de aquel famoso corsario Barbarroja. Tomóla la
capitana de Nápoles, llamada La Loba, regida por aquel rayo de la
guerra, por el padre de los soldados, por aquel venturoso y jamás
vencido capitán don Álvaro de Bazán, marqués de Santa Cruz. Y
no quiero dejar de decir lo que sucedió en la presa de La Presa. Era
tan cruel el hijo de Barbarroja y trataba tan mal a sus cautivos, que
así como los que venían al remo vieron que la galera Loba les iba
Volume 40.1 (2020) The She-Wolf and Her Prey 167

entrando y que los alcanzaba, soltaron todos a un tiempo los remos

y asieron de su capitán, que estaba sobre el estanterol gritando que
bogasen apriesa, y pasándole de banco en banco, de popa a proa, le
dieron bocados, que a poco más que pasó del árbol ya había pasado
su ánima al infierno: tal era, como he dicho, la crueldad con que los
trataba y el odio que ellos le tenían. (1.39:455-56)

Here Cervantes figures freedom as a predator and slavery as its prey.

La Loba overtakes La Presa due to the latter’s Achilles’ heel—its crew
of abused galley slaves. Thus, when Captain Viedma’s story boils down
to the competing philosophies of Bazán and Barbarossa, he effectively
renders international law as natural law, and, more importantly, vice
versa. As in Smith, the natural outcome of the international struggle fa-
vors freedom. Moreover, the essential conflict on display functions like
an abstract, theoretical rebuttal of all other conceivable forms of slav-
ery. All factors being equal, Cervantes says, the winner is paternal and
beloved, the loser, tyrannical and cruel. Like the Scottish moral phi-
losopher, the Spanish novelist glimpses a law whereby freedom defeats
oppression by way of efficiency, productivity, and incentive. The vic-
tory of La Loba also seems remarkably like war historian Victor Davis
Hanson’s point that the free markets and individualism that character-
ize Western Civilization have tended to produce the most lethal fight-
ing forces ever known.
In case we missed it, Cervantes later reprises the essential point
of La Loba’s victory over La Presa during Viedma’s description of his
escape from captivity in Algiers. The narrator emphasizes the fact that
because the men at the oars are working for their own freedom, mo-
tivation is not a problem: “los que bogaban dijeron que no era aquél
tiempo de tomar reposo alguno: que les diesen de comer los que no
bogaban, que ellos no querían soltar los remos de las manos en manera
alguna” (1.41:482). The opposite idea appears in comical and grotesque
fashion when a group of galley slaves abuses the tyrannically inclined
Governor Sancho Panza off the coast of Barcelona in part two, chapter
sixty-three of Don Quijote. The message is that when behaving like
Barbarossa and treating people like slaves, you deserve to lose.
168 Eric Clifford Graf Cervantes

Given that Cervantes himself experienced slavery for five years in

Algiers, it surely follows that he would come to view Don Juan’s broken
promise of liberty to the galley slaves before the Battle of Lepanto as
particularly reprehensible. On a more theoretical level, however, and in
order to understand how Cervantes could have arrived at a utilitarian
perspective on slavery akin to the one later articulated by Adam Smith,
we would do well to return to Aristotle. Aristotle’s contrast between
natural and conventional types of slavery links mutual benefit to the
first type and coercion to the second. Aristotle also allows that eco-
nomic relationships in which one party dominates another are less just
than those in which exchange is voluntary. Thus, the height of Sancho’s
moral depravity is his dream of selling the citizens of Micomicón into
slavery; and by contrast, Sancho’s moral apotheosis is his contractual
agreement with Don Quijote according to which he will lash himself
3,300 times on a per unit basis.

Vengamos a los tres mil y trecientos, que a cuartillo cada uno, que
no llevaré menos si todo el mundo me lo mandase, montan tres mil
y trecientos cuartillos, que son los tres mil, mil y quinientos medios
reales, que hacen setecientos y cincuenta reales; y los trecientos ha-
cen ciento y cincuenta medios reales, que vienen a hacer setenta y
cinco reales, que juntándose a los setecientos y cincuenta son por
todos ochocientos y veinte y cinco reales. (2.71:1199-1200)

At the end of Don Quijote, then, slavery finally morphs into mutual
benefit. A more bourgeois miracle has not been written. Sancho claims
repeatedly to be illiterate, so this burst of mathematical reasoning is as
astonishing as it is funny. It’s also salvific. Don Quijote is joyful at being
relieved of the burden of having to deliver lashes: “¡Oh Sancho bendito,
oh Sancho amable!” (1.71:1200). In fact, he’s so relieved that he even of-
fers the squire a bonus: “Y mira, Sancho, cuándo quieres comenzar la
disciplina, que porque la abrevies te añado cien reales” (1.71:1200). In this
way, Cervantes signals the civilizing and even the educational effects of
commerce and contractual labor. Beyond Montesquieu’s notion of doux
commerce, the novelist offers something closer to an abolitionist’s doux
salariat.
Volume 40.1 (2020) The She-Wolf and Her Prey 169

Figure 1: Signum Ordinis Sanctae Trinitatis (1210) by Jocobo Cosmedi. San Tommaso
in Formis, Rome (Source: Wikimedia Commons).

As I see it, there are three principal implications of reading Don

Quijote as a satire against the institution of slavery. First, Don Quijote fits
into a greater canon of abolitionist novels that stretches from Apuleius’s
The Golden Ass (c.175) to Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
(1884). In exploring the limits of the narrative form, Cervantes me-
thodically discards all of the more or less plausible justifications of
slavery. He indicates the corruption involved in reserving slavery for
criminals in part one, chapter twenty-two, and he reveals the cruel
abuse that occurs when prisoners of war are used as slaves later in chap-
ter forty. Additionally, Cervantes twice criticizes the modern factor of
race (unaccounted for in Aristotle) in part one, chapter twenty-nine
and part two, chapter twenty-four. The first modern novel’s vision of
slavery, including its attention to the new transatlantic trade in black
Africans, is thus an early and wide-ranging criticism of an institution
that would not end in the West until the advent of industrial capitalism
in the early nineteenth century.
170 Eric Clifford Graf Cervantes

Second, and in light of the novel’s methodical critique of slavery,

Thomas Jefferson’s intense interest in Don Quijote, which he often rec-
ommended to friends and family, begs the question of just how the
Aristotelian agrarian idealist, author of the United States Declaration
of Independence and the third president of the United States, un-
derstood Cervantes’s references to this bitter topic. Surely reading
Cervantes heightened the difficult contradiction of being a slave owner
and an advocate of freedom from British tyranny. A further suggestion
of Jefferson’s particularly personal understanding of the meaning of
Cervantes’s masterpiece surfaces in the fact that as president he un-
leashed an aggressive foreign policy against what were essentially the
same Barbary States that had enslaved both Cervantes and Viedma.
Jefferson even appears to have contacted the Trinitarians, the same re-
ligious order that had rescued the novelist from Algiers (Kilmeade and
Yaeger 16).
A third implication of the first modern novel’s focus on slavery is
more theoretical. The capture of La Presa by La Loba in part one, chap-
ter thirty-nine, in which the factor of freedom is decisive in galley war-
fare, as well as Sancho’s calculated lashes in the woods of La Mancha
in chapter seventy-one of part two, in which a salary sutures the rift
between master and serf, are episodes that suggest we place Cervantes
among a canon of liberal thinkers who criticized slavery in economic
terms. More specifically, Aristotle, Cervantes, and Smith trace out the
history of a natural-law argument according to which liberty holds a
moral, economic, and military advantage over slavery. As in Smith,
Cervantes’s utilitarian argument is that slavery fails due to its relative
inability to incentivize. By extension, an economy based on free ex-
change will be more efficient than an economy based on limiting the
worker’s freedom. For his part, even if Aristotle doesn’t hit directly on
Smith’s ultimate idea of slavery as less efficient than remuneration, he
allows that the type of slavery based on free association and mutual
benefit is more natural and just than the type of slavery based on whips
and chains. As William L. Newman once explained: “His theory of
slavery implies, if followed to its results, the illegitimacy of the relation
of master and slave in a large proportion of the cases in which it existed”
(qtd. by Palmer 5). Another reason to suspect that Aristotle leaned in
Volume 40.1 (2020) The She-Wolf and Her Prey 171

the same direction as Cervantes and Smith is the fact that Thucydides
had already pointed out that soldiers motivated by the urge to preserve
their own property will make far more efficient killing machines than
those who fight because they are slaves (see Hanson). In his History of
the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides argued that autocratic collectivist
systems cannot elicit the same effort out of soldiers nor raise the same
funds for military machinery as can mercantile capitalist systems: “It
must be a stock of money, not forced contributions, that support the
wars[...]. So that the Peloponnesians and their confederates, though for
one battle they be able to stand out against all Greece besides, yet to
maintain a war against such as have their preparations of another kind,
they are not able” (1.141:146-47).
In the end, there is something still to be said about the theory that
bourgeois values are involved in the birth of the novel form in the
early modern period. Georg Lukács’s view that Don Quijote dissolves
epic heroism with market realism and José Antonio Maravall’s vision
of class warfare in Fernando de Roja’s La Celestina (1494) are essentially
correct. However, critics like Carroll Johnson and David Quint are also
correct when they argue that Don Quijote highlights the importance of
earning salaries and paying for services. I would simply emphasize the
self-conscious improvement that bourgeois values represented among
the early modern merchant class, as well as the high degree of detail
with which a very bourgeois author like Cervantes presents these same
values in Don Quijote.
In conjunction with its critique of slavery, we should not be sur-
prised to find that a general work ethic is another mainstay of the
novel. Dorotea is conscious that her own skills at managing her fam-
ily’s estate make her attractive: “por mí se recebían y desperdían los
criados; la razón y cuenta de lo que se sembraba y cogía pasaba por
mi mano, los molinos de aceite, los lagares del vino, el número del
ganado mayor y menor, el de las colmenas; finalmente, de todo aquello
que un tan rico labrador como mi padre puede tener y tiene, tenía
yo la cuenta y era la mayordoma y señora” (1.28:322). Similarly, right
after his expression of empathy for the mistreated black African slaves
presumably from the Kingdom of Micomicón in chapter twenty-four
of part two, Don Quijote assists a mule driver by actually performing
172 Eric Clifford Graf Cervantes

an overtly Christian act of manual labor for the first and only time
in the entire novel: “ahechándole la cebada y limpiando el pesebre”
(2.25:836). This makes Don Quijote’s later diagnosis of and remedy
for Altisidora’s lovesickness into advice that he should take to heart as
well: “todo el mal desta doncella nace de ociosidad, cuyo remedio es
la ocupación honesta y continua” (2.70:1197). Finally, the novel ends
with the bourgeois mathematical miracle of a contract which Sancho
and Don Quijote negotiate on a per unit basis. Cervantes is all about
teaching his readers and his protagonists to pay for services, earn what
they receive from others, settle their personal accounts, compensate
their victims for losses, and even help resolve payment disputes among
others.
All this bourgeois sentiment, by the way, also appears in the sixth
chapter of the anonymous La vida de Lazarillo de Tormes (c.1554). Here
is a contractual arrangement to deliver water to the center of Toledo
that finally lifts Lazarillo out of poverty for the first time in his life, so
much so that he can actually afford to feed and clothe himself. Here
also is bourgeois bliss: incentive, hard work, capital and labor combin-
ing to meet a popular need, a share in the profits, the accumulation of
wealth, and even social mobility:

Siendo ya en este tiempo buen mozuelo, entrando un día en la

iglesia mayor, un capellán della me recibió por suyo; y púsome en
poder un asno y cuatro cántaros y un azote, y comencé a echar agua
por la cibdad. Éste fue el primer escalón que yo subí para venir a
alcanzar buena vida, porque mi boca era medida. Daba cada día a
mi amo treinta maravedís ganados, y los sábados ganaba para mí, y
todo lo demás, entre semana, de treinta maravedís.
Fueme tan bien en el oficio, que al cabo de cuatro años que lo
usé, con poner en la ganancia buen recaudo, ahorré para me vestir
muy honradamente de la ropa vieja, de la cual compré un jubón
de fustán viejo y un sayo raído de manga tranzada y puerta y una
capa que había sido frisada, y una espada de las viejas primeras de
Cuéllar. Desque me vi en hábito de hombre de bien, dije a mi amo
que se tomase su asno, que no quería más seguir ese oficio. (125-27)
Volume 40.1 (2020) The She-Wolf and Her Prey 173

Figure 2: “Savage Knights” (c.1499). Colegio de San Gregorio, Valladolid (Source:

Wikimedia Commons).
174 Eric Clifford Graf Cervantes

George Orwell once wrote, “Prose literature as we know it is the

product of rationalism, of the Protestant countries, of the autonomous
individual” (171). Hispanic readers need not take offense; Orwell well
understood that the antiorthodox Erasmians who authored the first
modern novels in Spain were advocates of rationalism and individual-
ism. La vida de Lazarillo de Tormes and Don Quijote count as monu-
mental examples of the kind of creative prose literature that Orwell had
in mind. As an expression of variously classical, Erasmian, Salamancan,
and classical-liberal dissent, the novel form has always been an abo-
litionist and mercantile institution that characterizes slavery as anal-
ogous to tyranny. This is true whether we are speaking of Apuleius,
Boccaccio, Cervantes, or Defoe. The specifically early modern insight
regarding slavery was twofold: 1) the new factor of race is absurd and
indefensible, and 2) remunerated work, or even the mere promise of
eventual freedom, is more effective. The logic against slavery didn’t win
out for three hundred years, but arguments had been made that it was
both unjust and inefficient in the galleys of the Mediterranean as well
as on the plantations of the West Indies.
Over the course of the Sierra Morena episodes in part one of Don
Quijote, the metamorphosis of Cardenio from a wild man back into
a gentleman occurs parallel to the dissolution of Sancho’s fantasy of
enslaving the citizens of Micomicón and selling them for a profit.
Cardenio is an ambivalent figure. Sometimes, he’s a savage man doing
summersaults through the woods; other times, he’s perfectly capable of
civilized behavior. In many ways, Cardenio’s intermittent state raises
the same questions as the debate between Las Casas and Sepúlveda at
Valladolid in 1550-51. Can savages be civilized? Are not those of us who
think of ourselves as civilized often just as savage as those whom we
call savages? The image on a façade of the Colegio de San Gregorio in
Valladolid commemorated for posterity this same dilemma during the
reign of the Catholic Kings (1469-1504).
As a relic of scholasticism, the façade represents a long tradi-
tion of subversive thinking about slavery which includes Aristotle,
Las Casas, Mendoza, Latinus, and Cervantes. In turn, late-scholastic
Volume 40.1 (2020) The She-Wolf and Her Prey 175

thinking about slavery anticipates Hobbes’s salaried worker, Rousseau’s

noble savage, Hegel’s skillful slave, Smith’s free laborer, and Frederick
Douglass’s philosophical freedman.

Universidad Francisco Marroquín

ericgraf@ufm.edu

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