prohibitions, imported frequent cargoes of young girls from the countries
about the Black Sea, most of whom were doomed to concubinage and
prostitution, and the rest to menial service.[7] The occurrence of the
Crusades led to the enslavement of Saracen captives in Christendom as well
as of Christian captives in Islam.

[Footnote 7: W.C. Hazlitt, _The Venetian Republic_(London, 1900), pp. 81,
82.]

The waning of the Crusades ended the supply of Saracen slaves, and the
Turkish capture of Constantinople in 1453 destroyed the Italian trade on
the Black Sea. No source of supply now remained, except a trickle from
Africa, to sustain the moribund institution of slavery in any part of
Christian Europe east of the Pyrenees. But in mountain-locked Roussillon
and Asturias remnants of slavery persisted from Visigothic times to the
seventeenth century; and in other parts of the peninsula the intermittent
wars against the Moors of Granada supplied captives and to some extent
reinvigorated slavery among the Christian states from Aragon to Portugal.
Furthermore the conquest of the Canaries at the end of the fourteenth
century and of Teneriffe and other islands in the fifteenth led to the
bringing of many of their natives as slaves to Castille and the neighboring
kingdoms.

Occasional documents of this period contain mention of negro slaves at
various places in the Spanish peninsula, but the number was clearly small
and it must have continued so, particularly as long as the supply was drawn
through Moorish channels. The source whence the negroes came was known to
be a region below the Sahara which from its yield of gold and ivory was
called by the Moors the land of wealth, "Bilad Ghana," a name which on the
tongues of European sailors was converted into "Guinea." To open a direct