At a distance from the main developments of politics, the economy, and spiritual life, though still intimately connected to each, lay a number of important, if marginalized, groups and activities. Documentation for them is both scattered and scanty, and our narrative sources – so copious for battles and intrigues – are all but silent regarding their more mundane activities; yet enough survives to allow us an occasional glimpse of their actions and stratagems. They seem at first a strange trio: slaves, pirates, and women. But they shared a number of characteristics apart from their marginalized fates. Of the three, slaves numbered the fewest; it is unlikely that the total slave population – that is, the slaves who lived and toiled in Sicily, as opposed to those who appeared briefly on local auction blocks en route to miseries elsewhere – numbered more than a few thousand, far less than it had been only a century before. But they were important beyond their number and affected developments in government policy, regional commerce, and family dynamics, for they stood at the nexus of the kingdom's international and spiritual crises. Their history in the early fourteenth century illustrates powerfully the variety and strength of the forces that were at work in altering the fabric of Sicilian society.

Slaves spent their lives well away from history's spotlight, but at least they can be identified as a discrete group.