Sexual Coercion, Religion, and Slavery in Later Medieval Europe

This paper examines the forced prostitution of enslaved Muslim women in later medieval southern Europe. While slavery remained a feature of life in the Mediterranean world throughout the medieval period—long after ancient slavery is commonly held to have given way to medieval serfdom—and while enslaved and servant women were presumed to be under the sexual domination of their masters, forced prostitution of enslaved women was frowned on and, in many places, illegal. Subjection to sexual coercion was assumed to be a marker of unfree status, one that underpinned developing definitions of religious and ethnic difference. Canon law ruled that Latin Christian women could not be servants in the homes of Jews or Muslims, and that Jews and Muslims could not own Christian slaves—rulings predicated on the assumption that women in the households of non-Christians would be under sexual obligation and that taboos against sexual activity across religious lines would be transgressed. Yet, despite such taboos and despite laws that forbade the forcible prostitution of enslaved women (even though they were assumed to be the sexual chattel of their owners), slavery and forcible prostitution went hand in hand. This paper examines the incidence and cultural meaning of the prostitution of Muslim women in the fourteenth century, during a period when municipal and royal authorities in much of Europe passed moral legislation designed to control or curtail prostitution and as Christian prostitutes were encouraged to enter communities of penitents—repenties or Magdalen houses—within which they could be morally and sexually rehabilitated.