Bagnio is a loan word into several languages (from ). In English, French, and so on, it has developed varying meanings: typically a brothel, bath-house, or prison for slaves.
In reference to the Ottoman Empire
The origin of this sense seems to be a prison in
Livorno, built on former baths,
or a prison for hostages near a bath-house in
Constantinople.
[ Definition of "bagnio" from the Free Merriam-Webster Dictionary. Accessed 23 February 2015.]
Thereafter it was extended to all the
barracoon in the
Ottoman Empire and the
Barbary pirates 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.
In English
Bagnio was a term for a
bathing or
public bathing. In England, it was originally used to name
that offered
Turkish baths, but by 1740
it signified a
boarding house where rooms could be hired with no questions asked, or a
brothel.
[article from Saint Cloud (Minnesota) Journal, Thursday June 24, 1869.]
In French
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.
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.
In fiction
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'.
Bibliography