Acts of resistance by enslaved people have often been presented by scholars as signs of their agency. This approach has been criticized, most notably by Walter Johnson, for its failure to acknowledge that enslaved people retained agency whether or not they chose to act in resistance to their legal status at any particular moment. In my paper, I will offer another critique, one based on sources from the Mamluk era. In that context, the legal status of elite slaves (mamluks, eunuchs, and women belonging to elite households) has sometimes been called into question because they seemed to wield power, accumulate wealth, and exercise agency too easily. Yet elite Mamluk slaves also resisted their legal status in various ways, such as killing their masters, fleeing to places of safety, or threatening to apostatize from Islam. I argue that such acts of resistance testify to the violence, fear, alienation, and humiliation experienced by even the most elite of slaves as a consequence of their status. These slaves did not lack scope in which to display their agency; they chose to resist their status because it caused them suffering. To support this argument, I will draw on examples from the chronicles of al-Maqrizi, Ibn Taghri Birdi, and Ibn al-Furat; the travel accounts of Felix Fabri and Bernhard von Breydenbach; and an oration on the fourteenth-century neomartyr Michael of Alexandria. Among my supporting cases, I will devote most attention to those involving enslaved women. One reason is that the military and political activities of male mamluks have dominated most scholarly discussion of Mamluk-era slavery to the exclusion of all other kinds of slaves, especially women. The other reason is the opportunity to analyze the network of associations between femininity, slavery, and poison from a Mamluk perspective.