Historians have observed that the only slave-women of the early Abbasid era whose names are known to us were either the concubines of caliphs or singing girls. One may make the modest addition of the mothers of some of the Imams recognized by Imami Shi'ites to this list. Several of these women became the subject of a rich hagiographical tradition in Imami Shi'ite sources of the fourth/tenth and fifth/eleventh centuries. In particular, when the eleventh Imam, Hasan al-‘Askari, died in 260/874 without any publicly known offspring, both his mother and one of his concubines became embroiled in a controversy that would ultimately come to define the Imami community for centuries to come. The grave import of this controversy for the community’s self-definition ensured that it would be preserved – albeit in widely differing versions – in the community’s historical memory. The gravity of this event and the divisions that it created within the community gave rise to a number of separate strands within Imami Shi’ite literature. On the one hand, competing accounts of the events following Hasan’s death arose which were shaped by discernable polemical strategies. I will examine these competing accounts in an effort to highlight the kernel of probable historical truth on which they all agree, while showing how they have been embellished for various polemical and sectarian ends. On the other hand, the challenge posed by these events to the community’s self-definition eventually gave rise to the most imaginative of hagiographical accounts regarding the birth of the twelfth Imam and the origins of his concubine mother. Although she began as a slave-girl whose name was uncertain, she was eventually remembered as the daughter of a Byzantine king miraculously delivered to the Imam Hasan al-‘Askari, her divinely ordained “husband.” Although these accounts are obvious fabrications, I will examine them in an effort to highlight what they reveal regarding the community’s assumptions about the role of the women and slaves of Hasan al-‘Askari’s household, as well as certain aspects of the slave trade of the era. In sum, my paper will examine the hagiography that grew up around a crisis of unprecedented magnitude in the Imami Shi’ite community in order to shed light on the community’s assumptions about the slave-women of the era and the polemical strategies that it employed to respond to that crisis.