ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I argue that the socioeconomic changes of the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries laid the groundwork for permanent alterations in human trafficking patterns later in the thirteenth century. In this period, the networks slowly transitioned from supplying predominantly agricultural labor with legally enslaved victims to supplying predominantly sex labor with legally unenslaved victims (largely through illicit sales, coercion, and abduction) in Western Europe, north of the Alps and Pyrenees. The growth in monetary exchange, the popular internalization of Latin Christian identity, and the growing sense of spiritual community among Christians, all caused slavery as a means of compelling agricultural production to decline, but slavery itself nevertheless lingered in other forms, such as domestic slavery, and as a cultural and a legal category.
