http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1408-1580
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ABSTRACT
Through examining the complex relationship of conquest, Catholicism, and enslavement that defined Iberian expansion into the Atlantic world, this article shows how slavery and the slave trade stood at the center of the foundation of the Spanish Empire. It traces Spanish conquest, settlement, and trade in the Canary Islands, Africa, and the Caribbean in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. It demonstrates how even though by the mid-sixteenth century the Spanish and Portuguese would adopt distinct roles in the trans-Atlantic slave trade, prior to settlement on the American mainland, their shared cultural, religious, and ideological background resulted in many similarities. The article begins in the Canary Islands, where the Spanish first enslaved newly encountered foreign peoples. There, the Castilian monarchs and the Catholic Church collaborated to develop a frighteningly effective logic of overseas colonization and enslavement based on religion and geography – not protean conceptions of “race.” From the Canaries, the Spanish followed the Portuguese to Africa, where they would become eager, if ill-fated, participants in the fifteenth-century rush for gold and slaves. At the same time, Iberian notions linking black skin and perpetual servitude began to crystallize. Soon thereafter, an idealized vision of Portuguese profits from the slave trade inspired Columbus to imagine how the Spanish, boxed out of Africa south of the Sahara by papal treaties and international accords, could create an alternate version of this complex with indigenous slaves in America. By 1500, Ferdinand and Isabella would begin to attack the trade in Amerindian slaves, thereby establishing an essential distinction between the two groups of “others” who resided on the bottom of the colonial Spanish scale of humanity. The Catholic Church’s variant position on indigenous Americans and black Africans first helped to create and then mirrored this separation between Amerindian vassals and black slaves, setting the stage for almost four more centuries of African slavery in Spain’s Atlantic empire.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Manuel Barcia, Alex Borucki, Dustin Booher, Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, Karen Graubart, Marie Kelleher, Kittiya Lee, and Elaine Widas, as well as the editors and two anonymous readers for Atlantic Studies for their perceptive critiques and useful bibliographical suggestions for this piece.
Notes on contributor
Emily Berquist Soule is presently Associate Professor of History at California State University, Long Beach. She is at work on her second book, The Atlantic Slave Trade in the Rise and Fall of the Spanish Empire. Her first book, The Bishop’s Utopia: Envisioning Improvement in Colonial Peru, was published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2014. Her work has also appeared in Slavery & Abolition and The Americas.
ORCID
Emily Berquist Soule http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1408-1580
Notes
1. Columbus, “Letter to Luis de Santangel,” 264–265.
2. “Los Reyes Católicos prohiben,” 49–50.
3. Ibid. The use of the term “Guinea” is complex and amorphous throughout the fifteenth century, a confusion reflecting the uncertainty of those who employed it. The Portuguese first used “Guiné” in the fifteenth century as a generic term for black Africans who lived South of the Senegal river, whom they distinguished from the lighter-skinned Islamic population of North Africa, generally referred to as “Azenegues.” One of the earliest written uses of the word was in Azurara’s Chronica do descobrimento (1453). He wrote that “the Infante, thanking him for his goodwill, decided to arm his caravel […] so that it passed the land of the Moors, and arrived in the land of the blacks, who are called Guineus,” 158. James Duffy has stipulated that the Portuguese used the term “Guinea” to describe the “2000 miles of coast” where they claimed jurisdiction in the fifteenth century. Portugal in Africa, 30. Modern scholars trying to define the area geographically most often relate the old usage of “Guinea” with what would today be considered Upper Guinea, or the “narrow strip of tropical rainforest extending along the southern and southwestern coast of the large Western bulge of Africa.” McKee Evans, “From the Land of Canaan,” 34. Most recently, David Wheat has specified that to the Iberians of the late-sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, “Guinea” was the West African region from the Senegal River to Cape Mount (today corresponding roughly to the Upper Guinea Coast, Senegambia, and Sierra Leone). He confirms that in the fifteenth century, however, the usage was different: ‘echoing medieval European texts, Spanish American sources […] refer to sub-Saharan Africa broadly as “Guinea,” even though in the Caribbean the term was used more specifically to mean “the Rivers of Guinea.”’ Wheat, Atlantic Africa, 21.
4. Although African slaves were most likely brought to Hispaniola via the Iberian peninsula as early as 1502, in 1500 King Fernando sent a shipment of 100 African slaves to work in the mines there. The first known license to import black slaves to the Caribbean (also via th Iberian Penninsula,) was issued in 1513, and by 1520 there were so many slaves on Hispaniola that European settlers on the island feared they might rebel. Green, The Rise of the Trans-Atlantic, 188.
5. Maxwell, Slavery and the Catholic Church, 27–44; and Blackburn, “The Old World Background,” 69, 94.
6. Genesis, 9:25 in The New American Bible, 9.
7. Sweet, “The Iberian Roots,” 149. McKee Evans makes this same argument, pointing out that once political fragmentation made it easier for Arab slave traders to travel south of the Sahara for captives, they began to distinguish cheaper, more expendable black slaves from more valuable white ones, “From the Land of Canaan,” 27–34.
8. Blumenthal, Enemies and Familiars, 5.
9. Palencia, Crónica, 129.
10. Pulgar, Crónica, 135.
11. On moriscos in the Spanish Empire, see Cook, Forbidden Passages.
12. Maxwell, Slavery and the Catholic Church, 10.
13. Exemplary of this school of thought is Seed’s, Ceremonies of Possession, which argues that Spanish conquest was based on “procedures for declaring war,” and “warfare […] as submission to Catholicism and its legitimate representatives, the Spaniards.” In contrast, she characterizes Portuguese activity overseas as focused on “discovery,” or “the systematic process by which new lands and peoples were found,” using nautical astronomy and technology. 70–72, 101–115.
14. Subrahmanyam points out that the Spanish and Portuguese empires “as articulated entities actually came into existence at roughly the same time,” as the sixteenth century began. They shared “personnel, skills […] and ideological presuppositions,” so that ultimately they “were not spaces that were truly isolated from one another.” “Holding the World in Balance,” 1363–1373. Also see Gruzinski, The Eagle and the Dragon.
15. Lobo Cabrera, “Esclavos Indios,” 517.
16. Newitt, A History of Portuguese, 11.
17. Parry, The Spanish Seaborne Empire, 40.
18. Abulafia, The Discovery of Mankind, 71.
19. Cortés Alonso, Esclavos y libertos, 42.
20. Fernández-Armesto, Before Columbus, 148.
21. Kicza, “Patterns in Early Spanish,” 234.
22. Bennett, Africans in Colonial Mexico, chapter 2.
23. Rumeu de Armas, La Política Indigenista, 29–36.
24. Abulafia, The Discovery of Mankind, 85.
25. Eugene IV, Sicut dudum, 75–79.
26. Pius II, Pastor Bonus, 470–479.
27. Italics mine.
28. The author would like to note that moriscos, arriving from Iberia or the Barbary Coast permanently tainted with the infidel roots of their ancestors, were not included in this group.
29. Rumeu de Armas, La Política indigenista, 48–49.
30. “Los Reyes Católicos apoyan,” 161–162. Vander Linden writes ‘at that period it was customary to locate the Ocean Sea toward the south of our hemisphere, around the equatorial zone. Beyond extended the “Southern Indies” […] an expression subsequently applied to South America.’ “Alexander VI and the Demarcation,” 9.
31. “Declaración real sobre la libertad,” 163–164.
32. Crosby, “An Ecohistory,” 198.
33. “Provisión del Consejo Real sobre los excesos cometidos contra los indígenas de la isla de La Gomera. Proclamación de libertad, con encargo particular a los obispos de Málaga y Canaria de velar por su buen tratamiento,” Córdoba, 27 de Agosto, 1490. In Rumeu de Armas, La Política indigenista, vol. 2, 236–237.
34. Rumeu de Armas, La Política indigenista, vol. 1, 67–70. The Gomeros declared “freedom” for which they still had to litigate is strikingly similar to the situation of the first native American slaves brought to Spain, who in order to secure their declared freedom had to proceed through the Spanish legal system to obtain it chronicled by Van Deusen in Global Indios.
35. Espinosa, The Guanches of Tenerife, 83–90.
36. Rumeu de Armas, La Política indigenista, 91.
37. Ibid., 37–40 and 113.
38. Crosby, “An Ecohistory,” 194.
39. Fernández-Armesto, The Canary Islands, 2.
40. Ibid., and Thornton, A Cultural History, 188.
41. Fernández-Armesto, The Canary Islands, 2.
42. Fernández-Armesto, Before Columbus, 140–148.
43. For travel from Cádiz to the Canaries, see Fernández-Armesto, The Canary Islands, 201. For the proximity of the Canary Islands to Africa, see Esteban and López Sala, “Breaking Down,” 89. Early voyages from the Canaries to Africa are discussed in Newitt, A History of Portuguese, 21.
44. McKee Evans, “From the Land of Canaan,” 35.
45. On Arguin, see Blake, Europeans in West Africa, 21. Early Portuguese dominance is discussed in Phillips, Slavery in Medieval, 63.
46. Thornton, “The Portuguese in Africa,” 141.
47. Tolan, Saracens, xx. The term “saracens” first appears in the Bible, where it is used to refer to people of Arabic descent, Muslim “enemies” of Christianity.
48. Nicholas, Dum diversas, 22–23.
49. Thornton, A Cultural History, 205.
50. Fernández-Armesto, Before Columbus, 142–143.
51. Pintado, “The Archaeology,” 122.
52. Fernández-Armesto, Before Columbus, 142–143. Also see Rumeu de Armas, España en el Africa, 107.
53. For more on the Spanish efforts to establish trade networks in the Maghreb see Rumeu de Armas, España en el Africa.
54. Crónica del serenisimo principe, 201–202.
55. Blake, Europeans in West Africa, 186.
56. Duffy, Portuguese Africa, 133.
57. Rumeu de Armas, España en el Africa, 163.
58. Disney, A History of Portugal, 62.
59. Green, The Rise of the Trans-Atlantic, 178–185.
60. Elbl, “The Volume of the Early Atlantic,” 44.
61. Ibid., 41–42.
62. Rumeu de Armas, España en el Africa, 103.
63. “La Reina Isabel de Castilla designa,” 8–10.
64. Newitt, A History of Portuguese, 38–39.
65. Disney, A History of Portugal, 48.
66. Newitt, A History of Portuguese, 41.
67. Ruiz, Spanish Society, 113.
68. Elbl, “The Volume of the Early Atlantic,” 47, 74.
69. Borucki, Eltis, and Wheat, “Atlantic History and the Slave Trade,” 440.
70. “Treaty of Alcaçovas,” 44.
71. Vander Linden, “Alexander VI,” 20.
72. “Treaty of Alcaçovas,” 44.
73. Vander Linden, “Alexander VI,” 9.
74. Schimmelpfenning, The Papacy, 248.
75. Phillips, “Africa and the Atlantic,” 149–164.
76. Ibid., 154–156.
77. Italics mine.
78. Columbus, “Letter to Luis de Santangel,” 270.
79. Sauer, The Early Spanish Main, 88.
80. Columbus, “Letter to Luis de Santangel,” 265.
81. Sauer, The Early Spanish Main, 88.
82. Reséndez, The Other Slavery, 25. Recently, leading scholars have concurred: in assessing Columbus’s rhetoric of slavery, Wey-Gómez argues that “Columbus was not just promising limitless payloads of Indian slaves. He was promising that these slaves would be better than any slaves currently imported to Europe from sub-Saharan Africa” (The Tropics of Empire, 223).
83. Sauer, The Early Spanish Main, 88.
84. “Carta misiva,” 314–315.
85. These suits are the subject of Van Deusen, Global Indios.
86. The most favored “just title” for Amerindian enslavement, however, was cannibalism, which was indeed practiced in some parts of the Caribbean and elsewhere in the New World. Reséndez, The Other Slavery, 42.
87. Overall, throughout the period of Spain’s imperial rule in America, “somewhere between 2.5 and 5 million slaves” were taken from Amerindian communities and forced to work against their will. Of course, the definition of a slave in this context is much more complicated – Reséndez himself admits that “no simple definition (of Amerindian slavery) is possible.” Ibid., 405, 9.
88. Lobo Cabrera, “Esclavos Indios,” 532.
89. For Amerindian slavery and its prohibition, see Van Deusen, Global Indios, and Reséndez, The Other Slavery.
90. Lewis argues that “while Indians were given a sociopolitical designation, Africans were labeled with a color term, negro […] Spaniards thus saw indios as something like themselves, but about blacks they were more ambivalent.” Hall of Mirrors, 29.
91. Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man, 22.
92. Green, The Rise of the Trans-Atlantic, 184–185.
93. These ventures are at the core of my book in progress, The Atlantic Slave Trade in the Rise and Fall of the Spanish Empire, and are also discussed in Berquist, “Early Anti-Slavery Sentiment.”
94. Borucki, Eltis, and Wheat, “Atlantic History and the Slave Trade,” 440.