The slave trade in the Late Middle Ages has received consistent historiographical attention and the theme has been the subject of a rich and established scholarship. These works, however, did not take Bologna – a city both far from the sea and distant to the Genoese/Venetian circuits – into consideration in their analysis. By studying a vast range of archival documents, such as sale deeds, emancipation acts and trial records, the present paper explores the connections between the city and the Mediterranean slave routes in order to try establishing the traits and the size of the enslaved population in the area.
