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 freedom raises tantalizing questions about how the people of her time made sense of slavery as a social category.

In a masterful narrative that takes readers from the waters of the Mediterranean to the court of the Angevin King Louis II, claimant to the throne of Naples, Smail describes how Peire, pressed by Magdalena's supporters, reluctantly granted her a tacit manumission through her marriage to her first husband, whose death two years later placed her in a state of considerable ambiguity. In 1406, following her second marriage to an immigrant shoemaker, a dispute with Peire exploded in the law courts of Marseille, where it played out over two tumultuous years through numerous suits and appeals. In a dramatic turn of events, Magdalena traveled to the royal court in nearby Aix-en-Provence, where she successfully petitioned the king and returned home victorious.

Drawing on court records and an array of other archival sources from the period, Magdalena Coline brings these remarkable legal proceedings vividly to life, shedding new light on the ways slavery was understood and practiced in the late medieval Mediterranean world.