Description
Book SynopsisA prominent Mediterranean port located near Islamic territories, the city of Valencia in the late fifteenth century boasted a slave population of pronounced religious and ethnic diversity: captive Moors and penally enslaved Mudejars, Greeks, Tartars...
Trade ReviewBlumenthal offer a highly detailed reconstruction of slave experience at a crucial time and place: fifteenth-century Valencia.... This clearly organized and well-written book opens with a close look at how persons became enslaved.... The bulk of the book is devoted to the social and economic dimensions of slave life: the sorts of work sales engaged in, their activities and roles with their masters' households—including the sexual exploitation of women—and the limited but very real means by which they could hope to obtain and retain their freedom.... [It is] a singularly vivid reconstruction of the rhythms of everyday life at the lower levels of a late medieval city.
-- James S. Amelang * American Historical Review *
