Bagnio

The origin of this sense seems to be a prison in Livorno, built on former baths,^[1] or a prison for hostages near a bath-house in Constantinople.^[2] Thereafter it was extended to all the slave quarters in the Ottoman Empire and the Barbary 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.^[3]

Bagnio was a term for a bath or bath-house. In England, it was originally used to name coffeehouses that offered Turkish baths, but by 1740^[4] it signified a boarding house where rooms could be hired with no questions asked, or a brothel.^[5]

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.^{[citation needed]}

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.