| Abstract: | It is unlikely that additional quantifiable data found in Italian archives will alter significantly the conclusions reached by twentieth-century economic historians about slavery in Italy during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Historians of slavery must now ask new questions of old sources and new ones that continue to surface. As this study shows, the ways merchants in Italy differentiated along ethnic and religious lines among the slaves they dealt in sheds light more on how the people of Italy made distinctions among themselves than on the origins and religion of their captives. |
