Description:
A 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...
Brief description: Debra Blumenthal is Associate Professor of History at The University of California at Santa Barbara.
Review Quotes:
Blumenthal 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"