Implements of labor, instruments of honor: Muslim, Eastern and Black African slaves in fifteenth -century Valencia

A prominent Mediterranean port located near Islamic territories, the city of Valencia in the fifteenth century boasted a slave population of pronounced religious, ethnic, and cultural diversity. While previous historians have focused their energies on defining the legal status of slaves, documenting the vagaries of the Mediterranean slave trade, or examining slavery---within the context of Muslim-Christian relations, this study explores the social and human dimensions of slavery in a rapidly expanding urban center.;In six chapters, this dissertation traces the varied experiences of Muslim, eastern and Black African slaves from capture to freedom. In addition to describing how they arrived on the Valencian marketplace, this dissertation examines the substance of slaves' daily lives: how they were sold and who bought them, what sorts of labors they performed, and the degree to which they participated in the social, religious, and cultural life of the city. More fundamentally, however, this dissertation is concerned with analyzing the dynamics of the master-slave relationship and the degree to which both slaves and masters utilized the kingdom's court system to promote their agendas. While in recent years scholars have portrayed slavery in the late medieval Mediterranean as an institution working more towards the socialization than the subjugation of distinct peoples, this study reveals that in the city of Valencia, the religious, cultural, and increasingly racial boundaries separating slaves from their masters were not so easily erased, the path towards assimilation, manumission and integration not so smooth.