And those who didn't die became property, bought and sold like any commodity. Where Africans came from and went to changed over time, but in all, 48% of slaves went to the Caribbean and 41% to Brazil, although few Americans recognize this, relatively few slaves were imported to the US, only about 5% of the total. It's also worth noting that by the time Europeans started importing Africans into the Americas, Europe had a long history of trading slaves. The first real European slave trade began after the Fourth Crusade in 1204, the crusade that you will remember as the crazy one. Italian merchants imported thousands of Armenian, Circassian, and Georgian slaves to Italy. Most of them were women who worked as household servants, but many worked processing sugar. And sugar is of course a crop that African slaves later cultivated in the Caribbean.