Magdalena Coline: A Life Beyond Slavery in Mediterranean Europe

The courtroom drama that denied the legitimacy of slavery in late medieval Europe

In 1387, a young Muslim woman from North Africa was captured on a galley in the Bay of Naples and brought to Marseille as a slave. For more than ten years, she was held in bondage to a shipwright and privateer named Peire Huguet. Daniel Lord Smail tells the extraordinary story of Magdalena Coline, a woman who dared to file suit against the man who called himself her master, and whose passage from servitude to f...