by Hugh Thomas
All the black slaves traded in Portugal, Spain, and Africa were regarded then as just one more form of commodity and, though prized, not as a specially unusual one. Treaties had by then been established with most of the kings or other leaders on the West African littoral, to whom a succession of Portuguese monarchs would regularly send presents. Portuguese merchants made substantial profits from the slave trade; and though the details are missing, in 1488 King João told Pope Innocent VIII, the Genoese Giovanni Cibò, that the profits from the slave trade were helping to finance the wars against Islam in North Africa. Meantime, numerous African aristocrats or princes were to be found in Portugal at the end of the fifteenth century—probably more so than at any time later.
In Spain itself, the institution of slavery was given an impetus by the last wars between Spain and the Muslim monarchy of Granada. Thus, in 1481, the successful Moorish attack on Zahara, in the foothills of the Sierra de Ronda, led to the enslavement of several thousand Christians; in reply, King Ferdinand enslaved the whole population of the nearby rebellious city of Benemaquez. He did the same when he conquered Málaga in 1487: a third of the captives were sent to Africa, in exchange for Christian prisoners held there; a third (over 4,000) were sold by the Spanish Crown to help to pay for the cost of the war; and a third were distributed throughout Christendom as presents—a hundred went to Pope Innocent VIII, fifty girls were sent to Isabella, the queen of Naples, and thirty to Leonora, the queen of Portugal. There is a record of a consistory held out side Rome in February 1488, at which Pope Innocent distributed his share of captives as presents to the assembled clergy.VII
After the end of the war in Granada, in 1492, Queen Isabella had several female Muslim slaves in her service; and a traveler would note that the marquis of Cádiz, one of the heroes of that conflict, had the same on his estates. It was, therefore, appropriate that the decisive division within the Moorish kingdom of Granada, which led to the Christian triumph, should have derived from the affection of the penultimate monarch there, Abdul Hassan, for a beautiful Greek slave, Zoraya.
The trade in slaves from the Canary Islands was also prospering. Although, in the 1470s, Queen Isabella had declared the natives to be under her protection and free from enslavement, the inhabitants of the island of Gomera were in 1488 reduced to slavery, after what was seen as a rebellion; and the same occurred in Gran Canaria in 1493, when Alonso de Lugo conquered that island and made at least twelve hundred slaves of the inhabitants. He probably enslaved even more in Tenerife. The rebellions were scarcely serious affairs, and the punishments were out of proportion to the protest. Genoese merchants living in Seville or Sanlúcar de Barrameda seem to have sold these Canary Islanders.
But the slave trade in Seville, in blacks and Muslims as well as in Canary Islanders, seems to have been dominated by Florentines: for example, Bartolommeo Marchionni and the Berardi brothers, friends of Columbus (though there were even a few English: Robert Thorne and Thomas Mallart, for example). In 1496, the Berardis concluded a contract with Lugo after the conquest and colonization of the smallest island of the Canaries, La Palma: slaves, cattle, and other goods were to be shared half-and-half between them and the conquerer.
The dominant personality in this traffic in slaves at the end of the fifteenth century was undoubtedly Bartolommeo Marchionni, of Florence. A member of the Marchionni family which had traded extensively in Kaffa, in the Crimea—a great source of Tartar slaves in the early fifteenth century—he had slave trading in his blood. He had gone to Portugal in 1470 as garzone, office boy, to the Cambini family, merchant bankers of his home city, which had many connections with Lisbon, as with the Medici bank: one of the fathers of the firm, Niccolò di Francesco Cambini, for example, had been the Medicis’ representative in Naples in the early years of the century. The Cambinis in Lisbon dealt in leather from Ireland, sugar from Madeira, silk from Spain, not to speak of grain from Sintra and Olivenza (then part of Portugal), and no doubt some of their goods were supplied to captains sailing for Africa to barter for slaves. Marchionni, fitting in easily among the other Florentines in the great city on the Tagus, such as Girolamo Sernighi and Giovanni Guidetti, made money in the late 1470s, when Spain and Portugal were at war. Perhaps he was inspired to move into slaving by Antoniotto Uso di Mare, a Genoese who had served Henry the Navigator in the 1450s by buying Africans on the river Gambia; he died in 1462—while serving as an agent for the Marchionnis in Kaffa. At all events, Bartolommeo Marchionni helped to finance some of the “Perfect Prince” João’s expeditions to Africa. So did his fellow Florentine Tommaso Portinari, much to the disgust of the latter’s master, Lorenzo de’ Medici, the Magnificent, for Portinari left him many debts. Marchionni then established sugar plantations in Madeira. In 1480, the king of Portugal allowed him and Girolamo Sernighi to be listed as citizens of Portugal, a rare concession at that time. The same year, the king sold to Marchionni the right to trade slaves from Guinea and spices for the sum of forty thousand cruzados. Thus began the slaving career of one of the most protean of merchants, the range of whose activity would not be equaled in the four centuries during which the traffic lasted. Marchionni’s license, which included the right to trade elephant tusks, was repeated in 1486, this time covering the Slave River in the Gulf of Benin, and it was later extended to 1495, in return for further large payments.VIII
Marchionni had agents in Seville, João and Juanotto Berardi, as early as 1480, with privileges guaranteed by the Catholic kings. These Florentines were friends of Columbus and were later also agents in that city of Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de’ Medici of Cafaggiolo, the head of the younger (and subsequently the dominating) branch of the Medicis. Marchionni had too a representative in Florence (Guidetti), especially concerned with the sale there of “teste nere.”
In the late fifteenth century, the average import of black slaves to the market of Valencia alone was 250 a year. As usual, Marchionni had Florentine agents acting for him in that prosperous city, in this case the brothers Costantino and Cesare de’ Barchi. The former sold over 2,000 African slaves between 1489 and 1497, apparently all Wolofs. (They came via Santiago, in the Cape Verde Islands, where the Barchis had a concession.) Some continued to reach Valencia direct in Portuguese ships which, illegally, evaded contact with Lisbon.
Occasionally, there were acts of piracy against these slave vessels, and the Catholic kings even once had to pronounce against some Basque marauders (“Biscayans or Guipuzcoans”) who seized a ship belonging to “our dear” Marchionni, with 127 slaves on board. (The expression suggests that Marchionni’s relations with the Catholic kings were almost as good as those he had with the monarch of Portugal.)
After 1497, the slave market slumped in Valencia, fewer than ten slaves a year being sold by Cesare Barchi. But, all the same, Barchi had successors in the city, who also worked for Marchionni, such as the Portuguese João de Brandis and the Spaniard Antonio Jacobo de Ancona, with slaves from Benin figuring among their cargoes. There were also substantial sales of Africans in Valladolid, Toledo, and Medina del Campo, as well as in Barcelona and Seville.
The German traveler Thomas Münzer, briefly in Lisbon in the 1490s, thought that all slaves sold in Portugal for export “passed through Marchionni’s hands, being afterwards sold on all the southern coasts of Spain or Italy.”12 Münzer exaggerated: between 1493 and 1495, about 3,600 new slaves were registered with the Casa dos Escravos in Lisbon, while the number that can be attributed definitely to Marchionni reached only 1,648. Still, he was by then the largest entrepreneur in the field. Marchionni was thought to be “the richest banker in Lisbon,” an intimate of the king, in “the best position to know all his secrets.” Assuredly, his properties in Madeira used slaves from the Canary Islands as well as from Africa.
Marchionni was interested in everything. He provided a letter of credit to King João which enabled the intrepid Afonso de Paiva and Pero da Covilhã to go to Ethiopia in 1487; he owned the Santiago, one of the ships taken by Vasco da Gama to India in 149
8; in 1500, he provided another ship, the Anunciada, which sailed with Cabral on the second Portuguese journey to India, discovering Brazil on the way (the Anunciada was later used in the Valencian slave trade). Marchionni invested heavily also in subsequent voyages to India and, in 1501, the fleet of João da Nova not only included ships partly owned by Marchionni but carried his first representative, Leonardo Nardi, to the East; and it was also apparently Marchionni who suggested to King Manuel of Portugal that his fellow Florentine, already known as a great cartographer and explorer, Amerigo Vespucci, who had been living in Seville as another correspondent of Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de’ Medici, and who had already been once to the New World, should go back there, this time on Portugal’s behalf, in 1501. This he did; and Marchionni probably financed that great expedition which discovered so much of Brazil and convinced Vespucci, and soon the world, that the Europeans had encountered a new continent, not an outlying cape of India or China. The career of this extraordinary individual is a reminder that Max Weber and R. H. Tawney were mistaken in thinking that international capitalists were the product of Protestant Northern Europe. Yet his personality is elusive. No portrait of him survives, nor does any anecdote which illuminates his character. All the same, it will not seem surprising that, in the next century, it should have been this same Florentine Marchionni who would provide the first substantial supplies of slaves that the king of Spain would allow to be sent to the New World, which had by then been discovered by a Genoese.13
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IAn arroba was equivalent to about 12 kilos (261/2 pounds).
IIHis phrase was “Tum ad Christianos nefarios, qui neophytos in servitutem abstrahebant, coercendos, tantum scelus ausuros censuris ecclesiasticis perculit.”
IIISo the New Catholic Encyclopedia (1967, vol. 13, p. 264) is misleading when it claims, “The slave trade continued for four centuries, in spite of its condemnation by the Papacy, beginning with Pius II on October 7, 1462.”
IV“El Mina” may be a corruption of “A Mina,” “the mine” in Portuguese, but more likely it comes from “el-Minnah,” Arabic for “the port.”
VThe names of some of the Spanish merchants concerned in buying these slaves and reselling them (Hernán de Córdoba, Alfonso de Córdoba, Johan de Ceja, perhaps really Écija, and Manuel de Jaén) suggest that they were conversos.
VISlave duties were substantial. There was first a vintena, a 5-percent duty on all goods including slaves; but there was also a quarto, or 25 percent, always taken in kind. When shippers of slaves began to be charged these duties in the Cape Verde Islands or São Tomé, other duties were charged in Lisbon—for example, the dízima and sisa.
VIIThe fall of Málaga also meant that the well-established Genoese merchants there, such as the Centuriones and the Spinolas, selling European goods to Muslim traders (English woolen goods as well as paper from Genoa), had to adapt. Most left for Seville.
VIIIMarchionni paid 6.3 million réis for each year that he held a contract, 1493-95, a 1,000-percent increase on the previous term.
6
The Best and Strongest Slaves Available
King Ferdinand the Catholic ordering that two hundred Africans be sent to the New World, 1510
THE GREAT DREAMER Christopher Columbus lived for a time on Portugal’s plantation island of Madeira, with its then ample population of slaves. He married the daughter of Bartolomé Perestrello—an elderly fellow Genoese who had been a protégé of Prince Henry and was the governor of the second-largest island of the archipelago, Porto Santo. Columbus had also worked as a sugar buyer for the Genoese banking family of the Centuriones; and he had visited the Portuguese fort of Elmina, on the coast of Guinea, probably in 1482, soon after its foundation—ten years before he made his first crossing of the “Green Sea of Darkness.” Columbus must have seen slaves in the Canary Islands, working on the sugar plantations which he himself knew well, as also in Seville and Lisbon.
Columbus, therefore, was a product of the new Atlantic slave-powered society, and made evident his knowledge of the trade in Africans in a letter to the Catholic kings in 1496, in which he pointed out that, when he was in the Cape Verde Islands, slaves had sold at eight thousand maravedís a head. So it would not have been surprising if he had carried a few black slaves to the Caribbean on his first or second voyage. But there is no indication that he did so, though Alonso Pietro, the pilot of his favorite ship, Niña, on which he returned from the first voyage, is said to have been a mulatto; and a free black African is sometimes said to have accompanied Columbus on his second voyage, in 1493. On his third voyage to the Caribbean, Columbus sailed via the Cape Verde Islands, and he might easily have picked up an African or two from that entrepôt. Some unrecorded black slaves are certainly supposed to have reached the New World before the end of the fifteenth century but, again, there is no evidence of it.
Meantime, in 1493, Pope Alexander VI, a nephew of the first Borgia pope, Calixtus III, drew a line across the world to indicate the zone of influence of Spain as opposed to that of Portugal. So what one Borgia began, another completed. The subsequent Treaty of Tordesillas divided the world in a way which influenced it forever, though its division, setting a line 270 leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands, was disputed till 1777.
Determined to show some reason for his explorations, and with gold in short supply in the Caribbean, Columbus sent back from Santo Domingo to his Florentine friend in Seville, Juanotto Berardi, associate of Marchionni, the first known cargo of slaves to cross the Atlantic: Taino Indians, and in a west-east direction. These men and women were not natives of Hispaniola, but captives from other islands whom Columbus considered, merely because they resisted him, to be cannibals, though they ate the flesh of their captives merely in order to appropriate their valor to themselves, as they believed. Of this consignment, carried to Spain by Antonio de Torres,I nothing more seems to be known, but Torres returned to the Caribbean and, the following year, brought back another, larger, consignment, of four hundred slaves. Half of these died when the ships entered Spanish waters: “The cause I believe to be the unaccustomed cold,” wrote Michele Cuneo, a Genoese on board. The rest were received by Amerigo Vespucci, then still working with Berardi. The king ordered these slaves to be sold in Seville on April 12, 1495, but next day the sale was annulled, because of doubts about the legality of the scheme. Cuneo thought, “They are not people suited to hard work, they suffer from the cold, and they do not have a long life.”1
In 1496, Columbus himself returned to Spain with thirty Indians whom he hoped to dispose of as slaves. They were sold at 1,500 maravedís each, but the queen ordered Juan Rodríguez de Fonseca, a young deacon of good family in Seville, already her chief adviser on matters relating to the Indies, to delay the sale once more, till the legal implications could be settled. All the same, a few slaves from these boatloads were sent to row on the royal galleys. In the late 1490s, Columbus was thinking of sending back to Spain four thousand slaves a year, which would bring in twenty million maravedís, he thought, with an outlay of only three million. That Columbus thought that Hispaniola could continue to produce so many slaves regularly suggests that the Indian population had not yet begun anything in the way of vertiginous decline.
The trade in the Indians never reached the dimensions promised by Columbus but, all the same, three hundred disappointed Spanish immigrants to Hispaniola returned to Seville in 1499, each with an Indian slave as a leaving present from Columbus. The queen was annoyed: “What power from me has the admiral to give anyone my vassals?” she is supposed to have asked in anger.2 In 1500, the survivors were released and sent home, on the queen’s order.
Three years later, Isabella, though repeating that no Indians under her dominion were to be hurt or captured, decreed nevertheless that, “a certain people called ‘cannibals’ ” might be fairly fought and, if captured, enslaved, “as punishment for crimes committed against my subjects.”3 This was not the first nor the last time a ruler would seem to be influenced by two separ
ate sets of advisers. The queen obviously had been told a series of tales about the evil of cannibals, who were said not only to eat her subjects but to resist their Christian teaching. That designation “cannibals” must have covered the slaves whom Alonso de Hojeda and Amerigo Vespucci brought back from the Bahamas after their journeys of discovery along the north coast of South America in 1499. (“We agreed to seize shiploads of the inhabitants as slaves, and to load the ships with them and turn toward Spain. We went to certain islands and took by force two hundred and thirty-two persons and set course for Castile.”4 Two hundred survived the journey, to be sold in Cádiz.) Cristóbal Guerra also “took and killed certain Indian men and women in the island of Bonaire . . . and sold many of them in the cities of Seville and Cádiz and Jerez and Córdoba and other places.”5 Vespucci brought back slaves from his voyage along the coast of Brazil, and these Cristóbal Guerra sold as well, in Cádiz, Jerez, and Córdoba.
Among those who remembered these “Indians” in Seville was the future apostle of the Indies, Bartolomé de Las Casas, whose father had been to Hispaniola on Columbus’s second voyage, and who came home at this time.
Very slowly, black slaves also began to be seen in the new Spanish imperial possessions. But this occurred without fanfare, and with false starts. Thus a decree of 1501 forbade imports to the Indies of slaves born in Spain, as well as Jews, Moors, and New Christians—that is, converted Jews. The purpose of this, the first of many Castilian prohibitions on the subject in the Indies which were not fulfilled, was to prevent the contamination of the natives by people who already knew the language of empire. All the same, some merchants and captains privately gained permission to carry to the Indies occasional black slaves, from the large stock of them available in Seville or elsewhere in southern Spain. The first such merchant seems to have been a rich converso, a silversmith, Juan de Córdoba, a friend of Columbus, and later of Cortés, who in 1502 sent a black slave with some other agents to sell goods on his behalf—clothes, no doubt—in Hispaniola. With Luis Fernández de Alfaro, a former captain of merchant ships, Córdoba would found the Yucatán company which traded to the newly discovered Spanish dominion of New Spain (Mexico). Both were friends and allies of the conquistador Hernán Cortés. A black, Diego, served as a cabin boy on Columbus’s disastrous fourth voyage beginning in 1502, but it is unclear if he was a slave.
