Revealing the African Presence: White Slaves

"During the Renaissance, slavery was not just a black phenomenon -- slaves in Europe were both "white" and "black." Europe had a long history of white slavery. There was mass white slavery in Europe before there was black slavery, and white slavery continued after the influx of black slaves from sub-Saharan Africa in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, so that often white and black slaves worked alongside each other in the same households or on the same properties. Because of its ancient settlement and diverse civilizations, European society in the Renaissance was fractured and complex, and this had consequences for the variety of ways in which slavery developed."

Revealing the African Presence in Renaissance Europe, pg. 13.