Michael McCormick argues for the “voracious” appetite of early Abbasid urban society for (European) slaves and slave labor (Origins, 759, 761, 776). He accounts, in other words, for a significant facet of early medieval Near Eastern slave history. His discussion, well founded, turns on the impact of that traffic on the early medieval European economy. This paper turns the lens from Europe to the Abbasid urban landscape itself. It takes up one poorly considered element of this complex history: the physical and human infrastructure in which the interaction of slave merchant, client and slave/freedperson played out. It brings together a range of evidence from the Arabic and Islamic canon, material that McCormick treats wholly from translations and, thus, very much in partial fashion. A further body of literary and documentary references concerns, on one level, the setting for this one sector of the Abbasid economy, and, more broadly, the physical traces of the medieval trans-Mediterranean slave commerce. The paper will consider the fragmentary evidence regarding physical slave markets and other material evidence (cited or actual), including the extensive surviving corpus of papyri documents, most of which originate from Egypt. It will also consider the slave merchants of the Abbasid period. At issue is less the reputation of the slave merchants – they are one of the stock characters of Abbasid literary works – than the extent to which we can grasp the range and nature of their activity; the membership of the slave merchant ‘class’; their networks of connections with other sectors of the Abbasid-era economic, social and political sphere; and so on. The paper, again, underscores the fragmentary yet highly suggestive and, in some areas, wholly convincing character of the evidence, and thus aims to complement and refine McCormick’s invaluable discussion.