Our images of the unfree in the medieval world are generally limited to those of land-working serfs toiling in the countryside. This course, however, explores the social category of the unfree in all of its diversity and complexity - contemplating the lives of captives, slaves and serfs as well as eunuchs, concubines and mamluks (slave soldiers). While previous historians have emphasized the disappearance of slavery from most of Europe by the eleventh century, this course emphasizes slavery's persistence throughout the medieval world, in southern and central Europe as well as in northern Europe and in the Islamic world. Inasmuch as we will be studying the institution of slavery during a critical period of transition, some key questions we will be considering include: to what extent was medieval slavery a continuation of ancient slavery? What distinguished a slave from a serf? What impact did the rise of the transatlantic slave trade have on medieval justifications of slavery? What factors favored a growing association of slavery with race?