There were plenty of slaveries in Europe, who ended on different times. Norse/Viking societies abandoned slavery shortly after taking up Christianity (1000-1100). Europeans owned slaves in their overseas territories and occasionally brought them home to Europe. Roma people/Gypsies were slaves in Romania late into the 19th century. The Portugese overseas empire, who they saw as a part of one united Portugal, relied on forced labour deep into the 20th century. There is no answer for "Europe" as a whole.

It was a gradual process spanning nearly a millennium, with periods of reversal. The Catholic Church took the lead in a general prohibition in the west of enslavement of (and trading in, though not necessarily ownership of) Christians in the 10th-12th centuries. But others were still considered fair game, from peoples of unconverted Slav lands to inhabitants of the regions beyond the Black Sea and ultimately Africans imported directly from the 15th century.

Abolition occurred at different times in different countries, with England finally declaring itself (though not its colonies) slave-free in 1772 after two centuries of conflicting judicial rulings. Portugal banned slave imports in 1761, though those already slaves remained as yet unfree. France abolished slavery in 1794 but it was restored in the colonies from 1802 until 1848. In most of Europe formal abolition was a 19th-century affair, though generally the institution had never taken hold, had faded away or survived on only a small scale.