Bagnio is a loan word into several languages (from Italian : bagno). In English, French, and so on, it has developed varying meanings: typically a brothel, bath-house, or prison for slaves.
Bagnio is a loan word into several languages (from Italian : bagno). In English, French, and so on, it has developed varying meanings: typically a brothel, bath-house, or prison for slaves.
The origin of this sense seems to be a prison in Livorno, built on former baths, [1] or a prison for hostages near a bath-house in Constantinople. [2] Thereafter it was extended to all the slave quarters in the Ottoman Empire and the Barbary regencies. The hostages of the Barbary pirates slept in the prisons at night, leaving during the day to work as laborers, galley slaves, or domestic servants. The communication between master and slave and between slaves of different origins was made in a lingua franca known as Sabir or Mediterranean Lingua Franca, a Mediterranean pidgin language with Romance and Arabic vocabulary.
The Slaves' Prison in Valletta, Malta, which was both a prison and a place where Muslim slaves slept at night, was known as the bagnio or bagno. [3]
Bagnio was a term for a bath or bath-house. In England, it was originally used to name coffeehouses that offered Turkish baths, but by 1740 [4] it signified a boarding house where rooms could be hired with no questions asked, or a brothel. [5]
Bagne became the word for the prisons of the galley slaves in the French Navy; after galley service was abolished, the word continued to be used as a generic term for any hard labour prison. The last one in European France, the Bagne de Toulon , was closed in 1873.[ citation needed ]
The penal colony in French Guiana, which was not shut down until 1953, was also called a bagne, and features in the famous bestseller Papillon .
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El trato de Argel (Life in Algiers, 1580), Los baños de Argel (The Bagnios of Algiers, 1615), El gallardo español (The Gallard Spaniard, 1615) and La gran sultana (The Great Sultana, 1615) were four comedies by Miguel de Cervantes about the life of the galley slaves, called "caitiffs". Cervantes himself had been imprisoned in Algiers (1575–1580). His novel Don Quixote also features a subplot with the story of a caitiff (chapters 39-41 of the first part).
A bagnio, in reference to a brothel or boarding house, is mentioned in The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824) by James Hogg as the location of a quarrel between two young Edinburgh nobleman that precedes one of them being murdered and the other arrested for the crime.
In The Day of the Locust (1939) by Nathanael West, Claude Estee's wife, Alice, says "Nothing like a good bagnio to set a fellow up."
Frequent mention of a bagnio is made in A Maggot (1985) by John Fowles, set in 1736 and mainly written in the English of that time. In Fowles' novel, the term denotes a brothel, specifically the one run by 'Mistress Claiborne'.
Algiers is the administrative, political and economic capital and largest city of Algeria as well as the capital of the Algiers Province. The city's population at the 2008 census was 2,988,145 and in 2020 was estimated to be around 4,500,000. Located in the north-central part of the country, it extends along the shores of the Bay of Algiers in the heart of the Maghreb region making it classified among the biggest cities in North Africa, the Arab world and the Mediterranean Sea, making it a major center of culture, arts, gastronomy and trade.
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra was a Spanish writer widely regarded as the greatest writer in the Spanish language and one of the world's pre-eminent novelists. He is best known for his novel Don Quixote, a work considered as the first modern novel. The novel has been labelled by many well-known authors as the "best book of all time" and the "best and most central work in world literature".
The Barbary pirates, Barbary corsairs, Ottoman corsairs, or naval mujahideen were mainly Muslim pirates and privateers who operated from the largely independent Barbary states. This area was known in Europe as the Barbary Coast, in reference to the Berbers. Slaves in Barbary could be of many ethnicities, and of many different religions, such as Christian, Jewish, or Muslim. Their predation extended throughout the Mediterranean, south along West Africa's Atlantic seaboard and into the North Atlantic as far north as Iceland, but they primarily operated in the western Mediterranean. In addition to seizing merchant ships, they engaged in razzias, raids on European coastal towns and villages, mainly in Italy, France, Spain, and Portugal, but also in the British Isles, and Iceland.
Occhiali was an Italian privateer and admiral who served as the commander of the Regency of Algiers and Grand Admiral of the Ottoman fleet.
A galley slave was a slave rowing in a galley, either a convicted criminal sentenced to work at the oar, or a kind of human chattel, sometimes a prisoner of war, assigned to the duty of rowing.
Aruj Barbarossa, known as Oruç Reis to the Turks, was an Ottoman corsair who became Sultan of Algiers. The elder brother of the famous Ottoman admiral Hayreddin Barbarossa, he was born on the Ottoman island of Midilli and died in battle against the Spanish at Tlemcen.
White slavery refers to the enslavement of any of the world's European ethnic groups throughout human history, whether perpetrated by non-Europeans or by other Europeans. Slavery in ancient Rome was frequently dependent on a person's socio-economic status and national affiliation, and thus included European slaves. It was also common for European people to be enslaved and traded in the Muslim world; European women, in particular, were highly sought-after to be concubines in the harems of many Muslim rulers. Examples of such slavery conducted in Islamic empires include the Arab slave trade, the Barbary slave trade, the Ottoman slave trade, and the Black Sea slave trade, among others.
James Leander Cathcart was an American diplomat, slave, and sailor of Irish descent. He is notable for his narrative as a slave in Algiers, Ottoman Algeria, for eleven years.
The Mediterranean Lingua Franca, or Sabir, was a contact language, or languages, that were used as a lingua franca in the Mediterranean Basin from the 11th to the 19th centuries. April McMahon describes Sabir as a "fifteenth century proto-pidgin" and "a relic of the original Lingua Franca, a medieval language used by Mediterranean traders and by the Crusaders." Operstein and McMahon categorize Sabir and "Lingua Franca" as separate but related languages.
The conquest of Tunis occurred in 1535 when the Habsburg Emperor Charles V and his allies wrestled the city away from the control of the Ottoman Empire.
The Barbary slave trade involved the capture and selling of white European slaves at slave markets in the largely independent Ottoman Barbary states. European slaves were captured by Barbary pirates in slave raids on ships and by raids on coastal towns from Italy to Ireland, and the southwest of Britain, as far north as Iceland and into the Eastern Mediterranean.
The Bagne of Toulon was a notorious bagne, or penal establishment in Toulon, France, made famous as the place of imprisonment of the fictional Jean Valjean, the hero of Victor Hugo's novel Les Misérables. It was opened in 1748 and closed in 1873.
The conquest of Tunis in 1574 marked the conquest of Tunis by the Ottoman Empire over the Spanish Empire, which had seized the place a year earlier. The event virtually determined the supremacy in North Africa vied between both empires in favour of the former, sealing the Ottoman domination over eastern and central Maghreb, with the Ottoman dependencies in Algiers, Tunis and Tripoli ensuingly coming to experience a golden age as corsair states.
The siege of Tripoli occurred in 1551 when the Ottoman Turks and Barbary pirates besieged and vanquished the Knights of Malta in the Red Castle of Tripoli, modern Libya. The Spanish had established an outpost in Tripoli in 1510, and Charles V remitted it to the Knights in 1530. The siege culminated in a six-day bombardment and the surrender of the city on 15 August.
Anglo-Turkish piracy or the Anglo-Barbary piracy was the collaboration between Barbary pirates and English pirates against Catholic shipping during the 17th century.
The Conspiracy of the Slaves was a failed plot by Muslim slaves in Hospitaller-ruled Malta to rebel, assassinate Grand Master Manuel Pinto da Fonseca and take over the island. The revolt was to have taken place on 29 June 1749, but plans were leaked to the order before it began; the plotters were arrested and most were later executed.
Slavery in Malta existed and was recognised from classical antiquity until the early modern period, as was the case in many countries around the Mediterranean Sea. The system reached its apex under Hospitaller rule, when it took on unprecedented proportions, largely to provide galley slaves for the galleys of the Order, as well as other Christian countries. Commerce raids, which were the backbone of the Knights' economic military system helped to maintain this system, partly through creating the demand for slaves to maintain the military fleet, but also due to the influx of Muslim prisoners when battles were won. Thus Malta became the hub of slavery in Christian Europe. Slavery was abolished in Malta by Napoléon Bonaparte during his invasion of the Maltese archipelago on 16 June 1798.
The Slaves' Prison officially known as the Grand Prison and colloquially as the bagnio, was a prison in Valletta, Malta. It was established in the late 16th century, and remained in use as a prison throughout the 17th and 18th centuries. It was subsequently used as a naval hospital, a school and an examination hall. It was bombed in World War II, and the ruins were demolished to make way for a block of flats.
The ta'ifa of raïs or the Raïs for short, were Barbary pirates based in Ottoman Algeria who were involved in piracy and the slave trade in the Mediterranean Sea from the 16th to the 19th century. They were an ethnically mixed group of seafarers, including mostly "renegades" from European provinces of the Mediterranean and the North Sea, along with a minority of Turks and Moors. Such crews were experienced in naval combat, making Algiers a formidable pirate base. Its activity was directed against the Spanish empire, but it did not neglect the coasts of Sicily, Sardinia, Naples or Provence. It was the taifa which, through its seizures, maintained the prosperity of Algiers and its finances.
In French history, bagne is a term used to describe a penal establishment where forced labor was enforced. These establishments were typically in penal colonies or galleys where there were the port bagnes. Not all convicts in the penal system were sentenced to forced labor.
D'Italie où il signifie à l'origine « bain » (lat. balneum, bain*), l'établissement pénitentiaire de Livourne étant construit sur un anc. bain (Esn., Bl.-W.5), le terme passa en Turquie (spéc. à Constantinople où les prisonniers chrét., en grande partie ital. dénommèrent l'établissement bagno pour la même raison,[...]
This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain : Chambers, Ephraim, ed. (1728). "Bagnio". Cyclopædia, or an Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences (1st ed.). James and John Knapton, et al.