mity, when they suspended it to appease the wrath of
God.[869] The intimate connection of the great commercial republics with
the Orient, and hatred for Greek heretics, are charged with causing them
to keep up the trade.[870] Conjugal life at Venice was undermined by the
desire for variety in pleasure, and by the easy opportunity to get
beautiful slaves in the markets of the Orient. From the most ancient
times laws, as fierce as inefficacious, punished with death merchants
who traded in men, but the trade did not cease until the end of the
sixteenth century. The national archives contain contracts from the
twelfth century to the sixteenth about slaves. Priests were the notaries
in these contracts, in spite of the state, the popes, and the councils.
Slaves were brought from every country in the Levant, including
Circassian and Georgian girls of twelve and fourteen. Slaves passed
entirely under the will of the buyer.[871] Biot[872] finds evidence of
slavery in Italy until the middle of the seventeenth century.

+305. Slavery in France.+ When the Armagnacs captured two men, in 1445,
who could not pay ransom, they threatened to sell them to the Spanish
Jews.[873] Bodin[874] admits that it is better to hold captives as
slaves than to kill them, but his argument is all against slavery. He
mentions cases in which it had been decided, apparently on the ground of
the dictum of Philippe le Bel, that slaves who set foot in France became
free.

+306. Slavery in Islam.+ Islam is more favorable to the emancipation of
slaves than Christianity is, as the Visigothic bishops understood it.
Mohammed set free his own slaves and ordered that all slaves should have
the right to redeem themselves. He taught that it is a good work to
emancipate a slave, which will offset many sins.[875] In his last sermon
he said: "Know that every Moslem is the brother of every other Moslem.
Ye are all a fraternity; all equal."[876] The law recognizes only two
ways in which a human being may become a slave,--(1) by birth, (2) by
war. A debtor cannot become a slave, and parents in distress cannot sell
their children. Slaves cannot be so sold that a mother and her child
under seven years of age are separated. Any slave woman may be made a
concubine, but may not be married. Children of slave women are
legitimate and free. A woman who has borne her master a child becomes
free at the master's death, and may not be sold or pawned by him while
he lives. Slaves are i