The position of domestic slaves in the markets of the medieval Middle East has received relatively little scholarly attention compared to the roles of those slaves in the household after purchase. Studies by Donald Little and Yusuf Ragib on medieval slave markets have laid the essential groundwork on the basis of legal texts, especially documents of sale and the shurūṭ manuals which governed their structure, but they have not extended to the social or economic context of these sales. My paper will analyze the ways in which domestic slaves were marketed and sold in fifteenth-century Mamluk Egypt and Syria on the basis of a late fifteenth-century guide to buying slaves, al-Qawl al-Sadīd fī Ikhtiyār al-Imā’ wa-al-‘Abīd by Maḥmūd ibn Aḥmad al-‘Ayntābī. Although al-‘Ayntābī’s treatise gives advice concerning the purchase of many different types of slaves, I will focus on the medical and ethnographic advice pertaining to non-elite slaves. My analysis will include gender, origin, and skin color as factors in the purchase of slaves, as well as the ways in which these factors may have operated differently in the markets for elite and non-elite slaves. If time allows, I will also compare al-‘Ayntābī’s advice on slave-buying with the rules for slave inspection enjoined on the muḥtasib of the Mamluk slave market through the genre of the ḥisba manual. I will supplement these sources with the observations of European travelers who visited Mamluk slave markets during the fifteenth century and with the few surviving examples, some Mamluk and some Venetian, of contracts for the sale of domestic slaves in Mamluk territory during this period.