Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 28 (2020): 411-412

Pulling together enough primary sources in translation to sustain an undergraduate course on slavery 
in the medieval period is difficult. If the 
students need to write research papers,  
it becomes even more difficult. After my 
first attempt at teaching such a class, I 
decided to create a permanent and easily 
accessible place to share the transla-
tions I had done for my own students 
and to enable colleagues to share theirs. 
A website, Teaching Medieval Slavery and 
Captivity (www.medievalslavery.org), 
turned out to be the best way to meet 
these twin goals of sharing resources and 
making it easier to teach about the long 
history of slavery and captivity, whether 
as the focus of an entire course or as the 
topic for a single day’s discussion. 

To make the website useful across 
disciplines, I decided that the geographical 
scope should be global and that the 

m e d i e v a l  e r a  s h o u l d  b e  i n t e r p r e t e d 
broadly. I also used thematic categories 
to connect sources from disparate regions 
and time periods that might be interesting 
to teach in comparative perspective. 
Consulting with scholars in areas beyond 
my expertise was great fun (and valuable 
for incorporating slavery into my global 
history survey), but as a scholar of the 
Mamluks, I also wanted to have a robust 
collection of sources on slavery in a variety 
of Islamicate societies. If you access the 
website today, most of these have been 
gathered under regional headings (Middle 
East and North Africa, Africa, Europe, and 
Russia and Central Asia), but there are also 
some short passages formatted for the AP 
World History exam that could be adapted 
for other purposes. 

For those of us teaching the medieval 
Middle East, I hope that this website 
w i l l  h e l p  a d d r e s s  t h r e e  p e d a g o g i c a l 

Teaching Note

Teaching Medieval Slavery and Captivity:  
An Online Pedagogical Resource

Hannah Barker 
Arizona State University

(Hannah.Barker.1@asu.edu)

© 2020 Hannah Barker. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 
License, which allows users to copy and distribute the material in any medium or format in unadapted form only, for noncommercial purposes only, and 
only so long as attribution is given to the original authors and source.

http://www.medievalslavery.org
mailto:Hannah.Barker.1%40asu.edu?subject=


Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 28 (2020)

412  •  HannaH Barker 

challenges. First, I hope that it will add 
interdisciplinary richness to our classes. 
As a historian, I am used to working 
with written texts, but in teaching I 
want to include art, architecture, music, 
archaeology, and many other ang les 
into the past. Enslaved and manumitted 
people were involved in so many aspects 
of cultural and artistic life in the medieval 
Middle East, as creators and patrons as well 
as objects of depiction or description, that 
it makes sense to use their status as the 
focus of an interdisciplinary discussion. 

S e c o n d ,  g i v e n  s o m e  o f  t h e  l u r i d 
stories that circulate about practices of 
slavery in medieval Muslim societies,  
I hope that a comparative perspective 
will help undergraduates reexamine their 
assumptions in this area. For example,  
it is worth reminding students that slave 
ownership, including sexual exploitation 
and physical abuse, was normal among 
medieval Christians and Jews as well as 
Muslims, in the Middle East and elsewhere, 
a n d  t h a t  t e n s i o n s  s u r r o u n d i n g  t h e 
treatment of slaves were connected to 
the policing of social boundaries. For this 
purpose, I might pair a source such as “The 
Slave Women of al-Manṣūr Ḥajjī,” in which 
political boundaries are at stake, with  
“A Legal Query to Moses Maimonides” 
and “Felix Fabri’s Wanderings in the Holy 
Land,” in which the boundaries between 
religious communities are threatened. For a 

1. Tiffiny Tung, “Violence against Women: Differential Treatment of Local and Foreign Females in the 
Heartland of the Wari Empire, Peru,” in The Bioarchaeology of Violence, ed. Debra Martin, Ryan Harrod, and 
Ventura Pérez, 180–98 (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2012). 

2. Debra Martin, “Ripped Flesh and Torn Souls: Skeletal Evidence for Captivity and Slavery from the La 
Plata Valley, New Mexico, AD 1100–1300,” in Invisible Citizens: Captives and Their Consequences, ed. Catherine 
Cameron, 159–80 (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2008).

course with a global/comparative element, 
I also recommend the bioarchaeological 
work of Tiffiny Tung1 on Peru and Debra 
Martin2 on the American Southwest. On a 
more mundane level, I also have students 
compare the contractual formulas used 
in sale documents for slaves, such as  
“A Deed of Sale of Yumn” and “Slave Sale 
Contracts from Genoa.” This helps them 
both compare practices of slavery and 
understand the distinction between the 
fixed and variable elements of a contract. 

Finally, I hope that presenting a broad 
array of sources will enable students to 
have more nuanced discussions about 
the ways in which slavery intersected 
with religion, race, and gender within 
medieval Islamicate societies. The complex 
positionality of eunuchs between power 
(“The Sabīl-Kuttāb of Yūsuf Āghā Dār 
al-Saʿadāt) and vulnerability (“The Guide 
Book for Obtaining Divine Favors”) is 
one example; the contrast between the 
honored mother of a former mamluk 
and the domestic slave who killed her is 
another (“Execution of a Mamluk Slave 
Woman”).

I plan to continue adding materials to 
this website for the foreseeable future.  
If you would like to contribute a source 
t o  t h e  c o l l e c t i o n ,  o r  i f  y o u  u s e  t h e 
website in your class and would like to 
write a teaching reflection about your 
experiences, please get in touch.