Slave voices and experiences in the later medieval Europe

Abstract

Late medieval slavery was profoundly entangled in urban life in particular. Cities all around the Mediterranean coast were implicated in the trade—although this article focuses on the Christian Mediterranean which was bound together by a general reliance on Roman law (alongside local customary laws and the canon law of the Church). Recently, scholarship on late medieval slavery has proliferated, offering a range of detailed studies primarily based on legal records. Late medieval slaves were predominantly women, and mostly worked in domestic settings. Scholars have addressed questions such as legal regulation; the ways in which racialized thinking emerged; the economics of slavery; the implications of slavery for Christian socio‐religious frameworks; the extent to which slaves were integrated into the societies in which they were trafficked; and the role of slavery in geopolitics. This article flips all these questions to explore the experiences of slaves themselves. Surviving legal records allow us to see how slaves could articulate and even, to a limited extent, shape their own experiences through law; what race meant to slaves; how they experienced labour; how they articulated their religious identities; what social integration meant to individuals; and the ways in which slaves understood the geopolitics of their situations. All slave experiences were shaped by gender.