Medieval towns ran their own brothels and closed them on Sundays
Between 1350 and 1450, European cities began owning and regulating brothels themselves, confining them to designated streets and banning Sunday opening. Those zones foreshadowed red-light districts. The idea of state-run houses was far older still, reaching back to ancient Athens and, earlier, to a temple in Sumerian Uruk.
The oldest record of prostitution as an occupation comes from Sumer around 2400 BCE and describes a temple establishment in Uruk run by priests and dedicated to the goddess Ishtar. It housed three ranks of women, from those confined to temple rites to a lowest class free to find customers in the streets. In Athens, the lawmaker Solon was credited with founding state brothels with regulated prices. Roman brothels clustered near barracks and city walls, where enslaved women were forced to serve soldiers, and a lit candle signalled that a house was open.
The medieval municipal version came with a thicket of rules. Clerics, married men and Jews were barred, and foreign sailors and traders often supplied most of the income; officials occasionally searched premises for forbidden customers, though penalties were usually light. Women living there could not borrow money from the keeper, sometimes could not keep a lover, and paid steep prices for board, clothing and toiletries. Governments often fixed the cost of lodging, but the other charges could swallow a woman's entire earnings.
Modern law is a patchwork. A United Nations convention approved on 2 December 1949 and in force from 1951 treats prostitution as incompatible with human dignity and commits signatories to ban brothels; 82 states had ratified it by December 2013. Yet in 2012 a UNAIDS-backed commission recommended decriminalising brothels. The Netherlands and Germany are notably liberal, and Cologne's Pascha is Europe's largest brothel, while Sweden criminalises buying sex but not selling it, an approach the European Parliament endorsed in a non-binding 2014 vote.
In the United States brothels are illegal except in 10 rural Nevada counties, and even Las Vegas's Clark County bans all prostitution. Licensing does not end the illegal trade: one 2009 report found unlicensed brothels in Sydney outnumbering licensed ones four to one. Houses working in a building are nonetheless considered safer than street prostitution.
Source: Brothel
