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In the early Middle Ages, the city of Verdun was the centre of the thriving European slave trade in young boys who were sold to the Islamic emirates of Iberia where they were enslaved as eunuchs. [313] The Italian ambassador Liutprand of Cremona, as one example in the 10th century, presented a gift of four eunuchs to Emperor Constantine VII. [314]
Other ways people could become slaves was by inheriting the status from their parents. One could also become a slave on account of his inability to pay his debts. Slavery was the direct result of poverty. People also sold themselves into slavery because they were poor peasants and needed food and shelter.
Slavery in medieval Europe was widespread. Europe and North Africa were part of an interconnected trade network across the Mediterranean Sea, and this included slave trading. During the medieval period (500–1500), wartime captives were commonly forced into slavery.
The Velekete Slave Market established in 1502 in Badagry, Lagos State, [12] [13] was significant during the Atlantic slave trade in Badagry as it served as a business point where African middlemen sold slaves to European slave merchants thus making it one of the most populous slave markets in West Africa.
For over four centuries, at least 12.5 million Africans were kidnapped, forcibly transported long distances by mainly European ships and merchants, and sold into slavery.
William Wells Brown, who escaped to freedom, reported that on one plantation, slave men were required to pick 80 pounds (36 kg) of cotton per day, while women were required to pick 70 pounds (32 kg) per day; if any slave failed in their quota, they were subject to whip lashes for each pound they were short.
The slave women in question, along with any of her children, would be freed. [5] If the children the slave women had with the master of the household were recognized by him as his own children, upon his death, the estate would have been divided equally between the children of the slave woman and the first ranking wife.
Officially slavery did not exist in the European area of The Dutch Republic, however, in reality, the status of slavery in the Low Countries was a grey area. [5] According to Leuven professor Petrus Gudelinus, in 16th-century Mechelen, an escaped slave was freed because it was argued that slavery did not exist in the Low Countries. [6]