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This paper investigates a special kind of slavery, peculiar to the Mediterranean area in the early modern times, and quite different from slavery in the Antiquity or the Atlantic slave trade. It got its supplies from three main sources. The first one consisted of black men or women, bought or captured in Sahelian Africa and conveyed to the Mediterranean coast, from whence they were shipped to Middle East, where there was a high demand for servile domestic labor. Another group was composed, on the one hand, of war prisoners linked to the Ottoman continental expansion toward Habsburg Europe, and on the other hand, of men and women captured in Slav territories by the Tartars of Crimea. All of them were sold on the slave market at Istanbul and employed for their labor (specialized or not) in private or public works, or as oarsmen on the galleys, mainly in the east Mediterranean area. On the contrary, those made captives by Christian or Muslim Corso in the western Mediterranean and enslaved on pretext of holy war were in fact part of a ransom economy, where a slave was less a worker than a means of making money.