Bagnio

A bagnio (from Italian: bagno) was a term for a bath or bath-house. In England, it was originally used to name coffee houses which offered Turkish baths, but by 1740 it signified a boarding house where rooms could be hired with no questions asked, or a house of prostitution.

The term was also used to refer to the prison for hostages in Constantinople, which was near the bath-house, and thereafter all the slave prisons in the Ottoman Empire and the Barbary regencies. The hostages of the 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 Lingua Franca (also known as Sabir), 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 also commonly known as the bagnio or bagno.

Bagne became the French 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 in French for any hard labour prison. The last one in European France, the Bagne de Toulon, was closed in 1873.

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