Received: 30 May 2022 Revised: 23 June 2023 Accepted: 25 July 2023

DOI: 10.1111/hic3.12784

ARTICLE

Slave voices and experiences in the later medieval

Europe

Hannah Skoda

St John's College, Oxford, UK

Abstract
Correspondence Late medieval slavery was profoundly entangled in urban life
Hannah Skoda.
Email: hannah.skoda@sjc.ox.ac.uk
in particular. Cities all around the Mediterranean coast were
implicated in the trade—although this article focuses on the
Funding information
Christian Mediterranean which was bound together by a
British Academy mid-career, Grant/Award
Number: MF21\210062; Leverhulme prize 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 medi-
eval slaves were predominantly women, and mostly worked
in domestic settings. Scholars have addressed questions
such as legal regulation; the ways in which racialized think-
ing 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 experi-
ences 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 under-
stood the geopolitics of their situations. All slave experi-
ences were shaped by gender.

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License, which permits use,
distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes.
© 2023 The Authors. History Compass published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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https://doi.org/10.1111/hic3.12784
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1 | INTRODUCTION

Ego Ivica filia quidam Pricod partium Ussore de Bossina generis patarenorum […] sponte et ex certa
mea scientia et non per errorem, non vi nec metu coacta coram vobis testibus et notario subscriptis
confiteor me esse servam empticiam Zanini de Gociis de Ragusio […] de voluntate mea […] Et quod me
et servicia mea possit tam aliis vendere, donare et transferre quam pro se et ejus familia retinere ac de
me omne aliud ejus velle facere tamquam de serva sua empticia et eius re propria
(State Archives, Dubrovnik, Diversa Cancellariae 33, fol. 129r.)

I Ivica daughter of a certain Pricod, from the land of Usora in Bosnia, born of Patarene parents, of my
own free will, and with my knowledge, and not by mistake, pushed neither by violence nor by fear,
in the presence of these witnesses and the notary, declare myself to be sold as a slave to Zaninus of
Gocii of Ragusa, by my own free will. And that he may either sell, give or transfer my services or keep
me for him and his family, and in all other respects do with me as he pleases, as with his purchased
slave and his property.

This is a notarial record of a contract drawn up about the sale of a young woman called Ivica from Bosnia. The
contract emphatically foregrounds the voice of Ivica herself. She was one of the thousands of young women traf-
ficked and enslaved in cities across the Mediterranean: my focus in this article is on the Christian Mediterranean
coast. 1 As is well known, ego documents are few and far between in the later Middle Ages, but legal sources such
as these ventriloquise the voices of slaves themselves. It is apparently Ivica who voices her own sale, and she who
expresses the possibility that her owner may do all kinds of things with her: slavery involved sexual exploitation,
domestic service, or re-sale. Many such sales of Patarenes or of eastern orthodox Christians invoked first-person
speech in an effort to convince the reader that the slave agreed to their own sale (Blumenthal, 2009, pp. 39–40) 2:
perhaps the impetus came from anxiety about resistance in the future. In any case, the document opens an appalling
window onto the kinds of control to which a young woman might be subject: even if it is true that Ivica was ‘pushed
neither by force nor by fear’, it does not require much reading between the lines to sense the coercion and manipu-
lation underpinning events. The ‘I’ of the document is a useful reminder to historians that histories of late medieval
slavery can, and should, foreground slave voices, even whilst these must be carefully excavated amidst the erasures
and distortions imposed by the archive. This article will explore the legal, racialised, economic, political, cultural and
religious frameworks which shaped slavery, and which have preoccupied much of the scholarship on the subject; but
it will also suggest how each of these themes can be re-addressed, placing the subjectivities and experiences of slaves
themselves front and centre: their ‘irreducible humanity’. 3
The historiography of late medieval slavery is a rapidly expanding field. 4 Even now, though, many celebratory
accounts of the late medieval Renaissance tend to give short shrift to slavery. 5 The study of late medieval slavery has
perhaps also been marginalised because it is hard to fit into longue durée narratives of slavery in the ancient world,
medieval serfdom, and then the Atlantic slave trade. It is often seen as just a transitional stage during the death
throes of feudalism, and before the horrors of Atlantic slavery. Moreover, many suggest that only a small number
of people were involved in late medieval slavery, and that the Christianisation of Europe marginalised the practice
(Barker, 2019a, pp. 1–11). The slaving practices of the ancient world, of early medieval Europe, and of American
plantations have received far more attention. 6
But late medieval slavery was not just a transitional moment (Perry et al., 2021). A host of immensely scholarly
local studies provide a range of insights drawn from detailed archival observation. 7 A few historians have attempted
to synthesise across wider geographical areas, producing astonishingly rich and textured studies. The work of Jacques
Heers remains a critical starting point, the immense bibliography and painstaking archival work of Charles Verlinden
made an enormous amount of material more readily accessible, and most recently, Hannah Barker has offered a
seminal and pan-Mediterranean view of slavery (Barker, 2019a; Heers, 1996; Verlinden, 1955–77). She demonstrates
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that across both Roman and Islamic legal systems, slavery operated in remarkably similar ways and should be seen
as part of a single slaving culture. At the same time, we need to be attentive to regional differentiation even within
the Christian Mediterranean: slaves from different areas were not necessarily treated in the same way, and legal and
social norms regarding slavery differed from city to city (Barker, 2019a).
Urban societies in the Mediterranean region were fully entangled in the practice of slavery. The diversity of late
medieval cities is very striking, and slaves formed part of this rich texture (Rubin, 2020, p. 88). Political theorists
regularly drew upon slavery as an analogy for tyranny: the slaves who lived and worked in their homes provided
a useful way to conceptualise the validity of different political orders, as well as embodying a trope reaching back
to classical times (Ullmann, 1973, pp. 342–5). Slavery played a major role in the intense commercialisation of the
later Middle Ages, in trade and in banking (Abulafia, 2011, pp. 345–70; Spufford, 2002, pp. 338–41). Many great
merchants had a side-line in the slave trade, and usually merchants had a domestic slave living with them. Indeed,
slave-owning was not limited to the wealthy: even some artisans of more modest means owned domestic slaves
(Romestan, 1995, p. 188).

2 | WHAT WAS MEDIEVAL SLAVERY LIKE?

Slaves were brought from the Middle East, North Africa, the Black Sea area, and the Balkans, largely to perform
domestic service in the southern parts of late medieval Europe (Evans, 1985, pp. 41–58). In Iberia, slaving has a long
history arising from inter-religious warfare (Blumenthal, 2009, pp. 1–30; Phillips, 1990, pp. 1–10). People found
themselves enslaved through trade, war, or piracy (Salicrú i Lluch, 2013, pp. 347–62). This article focuses on the
cities of the Christian Mediterranean: from for example, Dubrovnik, Venice, Heraklion, Palermo, Naples, Siena, Flor-
ence, Pisa, Genoa, Marseilles, Montpellier, Barcelona, Valencia, Seville, to Lisbon and Porto. These cities of southern
Europe all shared legal orders based on the ius commune, a Roman law based regime. They also shared commercial
networks which operated across maritime routes and overland. Strikingly, slavery does not seem to have been prac-
tised further north. Some inland cities, with close connections to maritime trading routes, were heavily involved in
slavery—Florence, for example—but others, such as Toulouse, carefully distinguished themselves from the slaving
cities to the south of them (Peabody, 2011, pp. 341–62).
Statistics are fraught with problems, but it is estimated that female slaves constituted about 10% of their age
group in Genoa, a centre of the slave-trade (Heers, 1996, pp. 125–6). In Barcelona also, over 20% of households
included slaves (Burns, 1999, pp. 135–55). In Italy and Iberia, many households seem to have had a number of slaves;
in southern France, on the other hand, it was more usual for only wealthy households to have one or two slaves each.
The number of slaves per household also depended on the socio-economic status of the owners.
Most of these slaves were female (Gillingham, 2012). Many were young—certainly when they were first traf-
ficked. Most served in a domestic capacity (Boni, 2006). We know that domestic chores were undertaken, that
many slaves were impregnated by their masters, and that many slaves then also performed the task of wet nurses
(Mosher Stuard, 1995, pp. 3–28). However, men were also enslaved, and in rarer cases put to hard agricultural
labour (Heers, 1996, pp. 51–60). Towards the end of the period, early forms of plantation slavery were emerging
in places like the Canary Islands, imposed by the Portuguese and drawing on the legal and cultural frameworks of
slavery familiar from Western Europe (Abulafia, 2011, p. 411). The conditions of slavery were clearly appalling: this
was human trafficking, sexual abuse and exploitation on a major scale. Historians have been keen to explore the
macro-trends dictating the ways in which geography and economies of slavery shifted in this period. It is now timely
to address the full horrors of domestic slavery. It is here that attention to the experiences of slaves themselves, and
indeed a feminist analytical lens on slavery, continue to yield important insights. Scholars of later plantation slavery
offer insights here into the overlaying and mutual intensification of patriarchal and slaving structures of domination
and violence (Fuentes, 2018); these processes of domination can be analysed from the perspective of the slaves
themselves (Johnson, 2020).
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Feminist scholars also remind us that the construction of archives themselves is often a violently patriarchal
exercise (Hartman, 2008; Mummey, 2020). Acknowledgement of processes of objectification and erasure also makes
possible the recovery of slave voices because the identification of this violence means that we can reach beyond
it (Morgan, 2020). It is perhaps extraordinary that medieval slaves of all genders and origins do indeed have voice
in the archives, even if those voices were mediated through the threat (or perpetration) of violence. Indeed, the
source material is rich, and principally of a legal nature. The explosion of notarial culture in this period provides
a dense collection of contracts drawn up between slave traders, potential owners, and the slaves themselves
(Reyerson, 2001). Scholars have also drawn on the extraordinary quantity of litigation, often undertaken by slaves
themselves, though with more opportunity to do so in some areas than others (Blumenthal, 2009). The normative
backdrop against which these legal documents must be set is, of course, legislative. Legislation like the Siete Partidas
in Castile (Parsons Scott, 2001) or the Statutes of Dubrovnik offer important and surprisingly ambivalent responses
to slavery (Budak, 1984, pp. 129–371). Both these sets of law weaponised the idea of slavery as a way to disparage
other polities, claiming that they themselves found slavery to be abhorrent and ‘an abomination against humanity’.
But to allow these legislators a clear conscience would be to do an injustice to the slaves themselves. Despite this
rhetoric, these areas continued to benefit from human trafficking and the attempt to reduce humans to property. The
slaves themselves fought their own battles, articulated their own humanity and argued their own cases.
It is this latter perspective that I propose to examine in the remainder of this article. Slaves did not wait for the
voices of the wealthy, politically and economically powerful to speak for them. Historians are increasingly listening to
the voices of slaves themselves. But there is more work to be done in this respect. The focus of most of the historiog-
raphy remains on questions about the role of slavery from the perspective of those who owned slaves and managed
slavery. In other words, the predominant questions seem to be, ‘how did slavery work, and what did it do for the soci-
eties in which it was entangled?’ But these questions must always be bound up in the far more pressing issue, ‘what
slavery was like for slaves, and how did they manage their own situations?’ In other words, questions of subjectivity
and agency should be front and centre. Medieval historians can take inspiration from the work of Saidiya Hartman,
pushing back against the violence of the archives and the erasure of slave stories by reading against the grain and
through and across silences, which she calls ‘critical fabulation’ (Hartman, 2008). Agency can be addressed through
careful attention to the relationship between violent and exploitative power structures and their engagement by the
dispossessed (McKinley, 2016). Debra Blumenthal's work on slavery in late medieval Iberia stands as a particularly
powerful example of the possibilities inherent in such an approach (Blumenthal, 2009).
I now examine a number of questions which have preoccupied historians and explore ways in which the perspec-
tive can be (and is, by many scholars) flipped to foreground the slaves themselves.

3 | SLAVERY AND LAW

What is slavery? The 1926 Convention of Human Rights provides one useful starting point: ‘the status or condition
of a person over whom any or all of the powers attaching to the right of ownership are exercised’. 8 In such a defi-
nition, law is obviously central. With the reintroduction of Roman law from the twelfth century, the legal underpin-
nings of slavery in southern Europe changed substantially. Alice Rio has written persuasively about the flexibility
of approach, and degrees of unfreedom which characterised the early medieval period (Rio, 2017): with the resur-
gence of Roman law, this simply no longer held. Roman jurists claimed that slavery was not a natural state but one
which only came about through positive law (Digest 1.4.5.3; Florentinus D.1.5.4; Ulpian D.1.1.4; Garnsey, 1996;
Watson, 1987, pp. 1–6).
According to the ius commune, anyone could be a slave whose mother was a slave, who had been captured in
battle, or who sold him or herself to pay a debt. The Ius Commune was of course drawing primarily on the Corpus iuris
civilis, and in the Institutes, we find the explicit dichotomy: ‘All men are either free or slave’ (Inst. 1. 3.1). But scholars
have carefully explored the ways in which jurists problematised this dichotomy. Even Justinian, the father of Roman
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law, had acknowledged that slaves were not things but people. Jurists discussed the possibilities of manumission,
the ways in which slaves could save up a peculium, and their rights as human beings to safety from extreme violence
(Helmholz, 2014). Could slaves marry? What was the legal status of the child whose mother was a slave, but whose
father was the master or indeed another man? Who was liable if a slave committed a crime? and so on.
These are fascinating questions, but what did these legal manoeuvrings mean for slaves? The surviving legal
material does indeed allow us to address these questions. Debra Blumenthal's work uncovers the ways in which
slaves in Iberia could make themselves heard via law (Blumenthal, 2009). The work of historians in other periods
provides insights into how we can think about slaves' involvement in law, respectively through their seeking out of
‘fractional freedoms’ (McKinley, 2016), and their legal consciousness (Welch, 2018). 9 The degree of apparent legal
awareness is very striking, particularly on the part of young women: they used law to empower themselves and their
children.
For example, Sally McKee shows how a mother on Crete was able to keep her children: she had been made preg-
nant by her master several times, and when he suddenly decided to sell these sons (which was apparently his right by
Roman law), the colony's magistrate forbade the sale (McKee, 2004, pp. 31–53).10 As McKee shows, this was a tran-
sitional period in which the assumption that children would inherit the unfree status of their mothers was being prob-
lematised, partly because of a particular desire to maintain the freedom of those of Latin descent in contra-distinction
to Greeks on the island. In another case analysed, a sex worker impregnated by an enslaved man argued in court that
she should keep her child rather than handing them over to the father's master, because the child inherited her free
status. A similar case in Genoa tells of a woman who determined to prove the paternity of her child in a court of law
(Prunai, 1936, pp. 273–5). In Valencia, slave children of free masters acquired their freedom by custom. We gain an
insight into the reactions of their enslaved mothers from a 1488 decree which banned enslaved women from being
heard in court if the masters simply denied their paternity: we know, then, that these women were making their
voices heard about their children (Blumenthal, 2010). The legal ‘opportunities’ explored by these women differed
from region to region, and as Sally McKee shows, were geopolitically highly contingent (McKee, 2004). By turning our
attention to slave engagement with law, rather than just the ways in which law hegemonically controlled their lives,
a far more textured picture emerges.

4 | SLAVERY AND RACE

Slavery in this period was defined through law, not through race. However, late medieval slavery played a key role
in processes of race-making (Heng, 2018; Strickland, 2012), and was itself increasingly inflected by ideas about
race over the course of the period (Epstein, 2001; Patton, 2022). We can trace a trajectory from judgements earlier
in the period about religious and geographical origins of slaves, to a growing tendency to conceive of provenance
and identity in explicitly racialised terms: slave-owners became increasingly selective in commissioning traders to
bring them slaves from a particular area and with a particular appearance. Sexualisation and racialisation tended to
collide: female slaves from Circassia were deemed particularly beautiful for example, (Barker, 2019a, p. 57). As the
Portuguese ramped up slaving in West Africa and the Canary Islands, racial thinking increasingly dominated the ways
in which people thought about slavery (Silleras Fernandez, 2007). In Iberia, in particular, skin colour became more
closely associated with slave status over the course of the fifteenth century (Blumenthal, 2009, pp. 5–6). Iconogra-
phies of skin colour were increasingly mapped onto free and unfree status (Patton, 2022).
But what did these ways of thinking mean for slaves? Blumenthal has explored the strikingly canny ways in
which slaves in Iberia were able to exploit racialised stereotypes, even if only to seek very minor improvements
in their situation. She describes in particular the ingenious ways in which slaves presented themselves in slave
markets—their awareness of the prejudices and desires of sellers, and their ability to subvert and manipulate these
(Blumenthal, 2009, pp. 61–71).
Given that slavery so often involved sexual exploitation, wet-nursing was a frequent duty of slaves. Anxieties
about race in Iberia were entangled with the convenience of using slaves as wet nurses (Winer, 2008). Beliefs about
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the possibility of transmitting certain traits through breast-milk produced a complex and anxious set of attitudes. For
the slave women at the heart of these racialised anxieties, the experience of lactating, feeding another person's child,
and possibly entering emotional relationships with those children, was devastatingly fraught. Debra Blumenthal's
work has highlighted the profound unhappinesses and antagonisms between slaves who were sexually exploited by
owners, and the wives of those owners (Blumenthal, 2014). Histories of late medieval slavery then need to lie at the
heart of histories of racialised thinking and of racism. The sources permit us to listen to what this meant to slaves
themselves.

5 | SLAVERY AND RELIGION

Medieval ideas about race were entangled with judgments about religious identity (Nirenberg, 2014). Slaves from
Christian backgrounds (Greeks and eastern Europeans), even if not Catholics, had more chance of contesting their
status than slaves from Muslim, Tartarian, and Turkic backgrounds. European cities were societies in which Christian
religion played a fundamental part: they were regulated and constrained not just by the ius commune but also by local
customary laws built on distinct cultures and by the canon law of the Church. Canon law produced complex and
ambivalent articulations of the ethics of enslaving fellow human-beings. For example, it sought to reconcile the idea
of marriage as a sacrament with slaves who might also enter relationships (Brundage, 1995, pp. 4–20; Gilchrist, 1976;
Winroth, 2006). Most importantly, canon lawyers grappled with the question of conversion. It was a given that it was
only acceptable to enslave non-Christians—indeed, this was deemed a useful justification for slavery. 11 But if this
justified slavery, then logically, slaves should be encouraged to convert—that was apparently the spiritual benefit.
Canon lawyers were, then, emphatic that if slaves converted after the moment of enslavement, that did not alter their
position. Historians have explored these legalistic niceties in great scholarly detail (Dincer, 2016).
But what happens when we ask what this meant for slaves themselves? The degree of precision and under-
standing with which slaves were able to approach their situation even in the most unpropitious circumstances is
very striking. In one extraordinary case in Genoa, three girls were able to claim that they were Christians before they
were enslaved, despite being described as of the Patarene sect by their enslavers. They won their case (Dinić, 1967,
III, p. 63, document 161). Another case tells of a young Hungarian woman, Maria, who successfully told a court in
Genoa that her enslavement was illegal because she was a Christian. However, since her owner had bought her from
Turks, the payment was redefined as ransom money, and she found herself facing enslavement for debt if she could
not refund the payment (Evans, 1985). The wranglings and disingenuities of the canon lawyers are interesting, but
to slaves, they were a matter of life or death, and articulated as such. The conversion itself looks very different when
we consider the perspective of slaves, rather than the obfuscations of owners and jurists. And of course, there were
implicit racial implications here: only those of particular religio-ethnic origins could even consider litigating about
their Christianity as a basis for freedom. We might contrast such cases with that of a young Muslim woman in Spain
who converted to Christianity and then ran away. She was captured swiftly, when found praying in the Mosque
(Salicrú i Lluch, 2000). 12 For her, conversion, religious practice and religious belief, were meaningful in ways which
canon lawyers really failed to grasp.

6 | SLAVERY AND ECONOMIES

Slavery is also, of course, a labour phenomenon (Schiel, 2020). Accordingly, there is a rich and polemical historiogra-
phy attempting to explain why late medieval southern Europeans were attracted to the idea of buying slaves along-
side other forms of labour (Armenteros-Martínez & Ouerfelli, 2017). An explanation is needed for why this happened
around the turn of the 13th and 14th centuries. The resurgence of Roman law provides part of the answer, but so too
do economic trends. The sudden possibility of cheaper labour could be keyed into the already flourishing merchant
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SKODA 7 of 12

routes; the growing price of indigenous labour during the demographic collapse after the Black Death meant that
slavery was presumably increasingly attractive to owners (Barker, 2019a, pp. 61–91).
But again, the perspective can be flipped, and historians can also ask what these histories of labour meant to
slaves themselves. Historians have been much preoccupied by the relationship between indentured labour and slav-
ery, and the relative economic attractions of each (Mosher Stuard, 1983). It is tempting to see these on a sliding scale,
not least because of the very similar formulae in the contracts, and the often temporary nature of slavery. In any case,
the terminology of slavery is notoriously slippery (Delort, 2000). Seen from the perspective of the slaves, however,
things look very different. Take, for example, the case of a slave woman, Dabraça, from Dubrovnik who purchased her
freedom (State Archives, Dubrovnik, Diversa Cancellariae I, fol. 110v): slaves often were able to purchase freedom
using their peculium, the small pot of money they were able to save themselves under Roman law. She was helped
financially by her sister, Zueta, but could only raise enough funds by selling herself to another owner. But whereas
Dabraça's original contract had stated that she was enslaved ‘usque ad mortem’, the new contract stated ‘usque ad
quatuor annos proxime venturos’. The female and sibling solidarity is very striking here, and clearly it mattered very
much indeed to these women whether the contract was one of enslavement or one of indentured labour. Judgements
about economic realities and values seen from the perspective of slaves become vastly more complex and nuanced.

7 | SLAVERY AND SOCIETY

Orlando Patterson famously defined slavery as ‘social death’ (Patterson, 1982): it brings utter dislocation and margin-
alisation. All the recent scholarship powerfully suggests that medieval slaves exhibited far more agency than this might
suggest. But important questions remain about how far slaves were integrated into the societies in which they were
trafficked. Jacques Heers has argued that slaves were rapidly integrated in European cities (Heers, 1996, p. 20). 13
Blumenthal, on the other hand, points out that things looked very different in Iberia, where slaves remained more
obviously stigmatised and set apart (Blumenthal, 2009, pp. 2–3). Race is a key element here: it is commonly assumed
that many were not visually distinguishable as slaves (Heers, 1996), but that the increasing enslavement of people of
colour increased levels of stigmatisation (Abulafia, 2011).
Slaves played key roles in medieval households and workshops (Salicrú i Lluch, 2009). Thinking about their own
experiences rather than the ways in which owners sought to disempower them, produces rich insights, again often
mediated through questions of race. It is possible that Muslim slaves from within Iberia were more likely to retain their
own sense of cultural identity than Black Africans who were trafficked into the area (Armenteros-Martínez, 2015;
Vinyoles Vidal, 2000). Slaves negotiated a careful path between new cultural demands and customs integral to
their sense of selfhood. Addressing the experiences of Black Africans in Iberia also provides a much more nuanced
picture: stigmatisation was appalling, but striking too are the small clues about solidarity and mutual support
(Blumenthal, 2005).
The question of adoption also looms large. Some slave children were, in fact, adopted (Byrne & Congden, 1999). 14
Many were also sold. But the reality of life for children born to slaves was complex and painfully textured. One
illegitimate child of a young man from Marseille, the son of the mother's owner, was sold to a friend of the father
(Steinman, 2020). The documents tell us a great deal about the social networks of the young father and his fraught
relationship with his own father. But what of the mother, Catarina and her son? What can we learn from them? Given
what we know of the treatment of female slaves and the ways in which they were treated in law as mothers, we can
take the experience of her and her son seriously and place them centre stage. 15
And what happened when slaves gained their freedom? In southern Europe, we find amazing examples of
former slaves who were socially successful after manumission (Coureas, 2021). They are, however, few and far
between. Nevertheless, other stories of freed life—on the rare occasions that we can trace this—suggest a more
interesting picture. For example, there was an association of Black African gondoliers in fifteenth-century Venice
(Lowe, 2013, pp. 428–33). In Barcelona, freed slaves might join the Brotherhood of Black Freedom, and former slaves
joined the brotherhoods of boatmen and dyers for example (Salicrú i Lluch, 2009, pp. 331–40).
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8 | GEOGRAPHIES OF SLAVERY

Those historians who have attempted to move beyond local studies of slavery in particular cities have been struck
by the different levels and impact of slavery in their respective areas. There is much to be gleaned about medie-
val trading patterns, notarial cultures, and relationships between cities. Cities would often attempt to differentiate
themselves by expressing different attitudes to slavery. The ebb and flow of slaving provides important insights into
geopolitics on a vast scale. Reduced access to the Black Sea in the late fifteenth century produced a radical shift in
the geography of slaving zones (Barker, 2019a, p. 107). And of course, whilst this article has focused on the slavery of
the Christian Mediterranean, this was a pan-Mediterranean phenomenon: the slaves we consider here could equally
be trafficked across contexts shaped by different religious (Muslim) and legal frameworks, but nevertheless part of
the same network of violent exploitation (Barker, 2019a).
The case of a slave who escaped from Barcelona to the relative safety of Pamiers in the foothills of the Pyrenees
indicates slaves' awareness of slaving zones (Débax, 2017; Lahondès, 1886). The city of Pamiers seems to have
been keen to grant him refuge, most particularly because this was a way of emphasising their own freedom from
the authority of the count of Foix. In the ensuing legal case, the count of Foix attempted to assert his rights over the
municipality by supporting the ex-slave's furious owner. But what of the slave himself? We know enough in this case
to be able to assess his motivations for escaping. We can analyse the brutality of his owner. We can ask ourselves
how he knew to get to Pamiers—after all, the Pyrenees lie between Barcelona and this city of freedom. We can ask
how he was able to find his way across the terrifying mountain terrain. It suggests a network of supporters and
common knowledge otherwise invisible to us.

9 | CONCLUSION

Vast numbers of people, principally young women, were trafficked across the sea and land in the late Middle Ages.
They were dumped in hostile and exploitative domestic settings. They were often sexually abused. Many gained their
freedom, and many integrated into these new societies. An extraordinary case from Marseille tells us of a freed slave
woman who subsequently married not once but twice (Smail, 2001, pp. 112–3). But the surviving documents allow
us to reconstruct the experiences of the slaves themselves. And if we listen carefully, we can hear their voices. The
study of late medieval slavery may be caught up in the great macro-questions of history—economies, law, politics, and
war—but these are devastatingly personal stories. Historians need to be alert to the subjectivities of those involved.

ACKNOWLE DG E ME NTS
I would like to thank Malcolm Vale for his helpful comments on this article. I would also like to thank the Leverhulme
Trust and the British Academy, both of which have generously funded periods of research leave during which I
worked on this subject.

O RC ID
Hannah Skoda https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2929-4981

EN D NOTE S
1
My own language skills limit me here, and slavery was of course much more widespread. There is, however, a compelling
case that slavery in Roman law areas produced particular kinds of source, and particular experiences.
2
Blumenthal comments that this emphasis on the first-person consent of the slave seems to be particular to the trafficking
of orthodox and Patarene slaves, and that things were different in the Iberian peninsula: there, she shows, slaves found
other ways to express themselves (2009, pp. 39–40).
 14780542, 0, Downloaded from https://compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/hic3.12784 by Test, Wiley Online Library on [25/08/2023]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License
SKODA 9 of 12

3
‘Irreducible humanity’ is the phrase of David Brian Davis (2001, p. 3).
4
This is indicated by even a quick glance at the wonderful rich web resource: https://medievalslavery.org/, accessed
25.5.2022.
5
A rare exception to the usual scholarly reluctance to acknowledge slavery as part of the Renaissance is Wallace (2002).
Slavery is discussed briefly in Lee (2013).
6
For example, choice selection would include, for the ancient period: Mouritsen (2011); Brunt (2013); Harper (2011). For
the early medieval period: Rio (2017); Glancy (2006); Davies (1996). For the modern world, impressive works include
Morris (1996); Fogel (1989). There is no mention of later medieval slavery in Stevenson (2015).
7
I refer the reader here to the wonderful bibliography by Hannah Barker (2019b): ‘Slavery in Medieval Europe’, Oxford
Medieval Bibliographies, accessed 25.5.2022. Notable local studies include: On Dubrovnik: Budak (1984); Krecic (1997);
Mosher Stuard (1983). On Tuscany and its towns: Boni & Delort (2000); Boni (2006); Origo (1955). On Genoa:
Balard (1986); Gioffré (1971); Epstein (1996). On Sicily: Bresc (1986). On Crete: McKee (2000); Verlinden (1962). On south-
ern France: Romestan (1995); Brutails (1886). On Spain: Blumenthal (2009); Salicrú i Llluch (1998); Franco Silva (1992);
Fynn-Paul (2008); Phillips (1990). On Portugal: Saunders (1982); Stella (2000); Rodriguez (1979). On Cyprus, Dincer (2016).
Local studies are placed in comparative perspective in Cottias et al. (2006); Guillén and Trabelsi (2012); Schiel and
Hanss (2014); Ferrer i Mallol and Mutgé i Vives (2000).
8
‘Slavery Convention’, Geneva Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, September 25th, 1926.
9
For inspiring approaches, see also Scott and Hebrard (2014); Zemon Davis (2011).
10
McKee powerfully explains that ‘During the same period in which people grappled with the issue of free status in oppo-
sition to serfdom and the freedom of cities from external tyranny, a similar struggle was taking place at the bottom of the
social ladder, where slave women brought into life the children of their masters’, p. 52.
11
Fynn-Paul (2009), makes the problematic argument that the growth of monotheistic religions meant that Christian and
Islamic blocs were obliged to seek slaves at their peripheries, leading to the institution of new slaving zone. Nevertheless,
clearly co-religionists did enslave one another, judging by the numbers of complaints: for example, the cases detailed in
Dinić (1967), III, 90, 97, 117, 133.
12
See also Muldoon (2005).
13
There is an instructive set of comparisons here with the paradigmatic example of Mamluk slaving practices and the inte-
gration of Mamluk slaves.
14
I am using this term capaciously. For more legal precision, see Kuehn (1998).
15
Methodologically, we can take our lead from the words of Saidiya Hartman: ‘playing with and rearranging the basic
elements of the story, by re-presenting the sequence of events in divergent stories and from contested points of view,
I have attempted to jeopardize the status of the event, to displace the received or authorized account. […] Narrative
restraint, the refusal to fill in the gaps and provide closure, is a requirement of this method’: 2008, p. 12.

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AUT HOR BI OGRAPHY

Hannah Skoda is a Fellow and Tutor in Medieval History at St John's College, Oxford. She is also an associate
professor at the History Faculty, Oxford.

How to cite this article: Skoda, H. (2023). Slave voices and experiences in the later medieval Europe. History
Compass, e12784. https://doi.org/10.1111/hic3.12784