by Hugh Thomas
At all events, early in the reign of the new King Charles, soon to be the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, in 1518, the Spanish colonists requested their government to permit the dispatch of more black slaves, to compensate for the loss of the indigenous population. These requests came both from the hard-bitten leaders of the deeply distressed colony on the main Spanish island, Hispaniola, and from those who might, at first sight, have seemed to be among the most liberal of Spaniards. For example, in January 1518, Judge Alonso Zuazo, who was seriously concerned about the fall in the Indian population, wrote to Charles V about ways to increase the workers of the New World. He said that the land there was the best in the world, “where there is neither cold nor too much heat nor anything to complain of. Everything is green, and everything grows, just as when Christ, in the great Augustan peace, came to redeem the old world.” Now, the judge went on unctuously to say, there was something similar in the arrival of Charles, who could redeem the New World. Zuazo’s recommendation was that a general license should be given for the “import of negros, ideal people for the work here, in contrast to the natives, who are so feeble that they are only suitable for light work.” It was foolish, Zuazo added, to suppose that, if brought there, “these blacks would rebel: after all, there is a widow in the isles belonging to Portugal [Madeira, no doubt] who has 800 slaves. Everything depends on how they are governed. I found on coming here that there were some robber blacks, others having fled to the mountains. I whipped some, cut the ears off others and, in consequence, there are no more complaints.” Zuazo added that already there were excellent plantations of sugar cane. Some grew cane as thick as a man’s wrist. How wonderful it would be if large factories for making sugar could also be built!16
A similar request for black slaves was made by the four Jeronymite priors, who were, most surprisingly, the Crown’s governors in the islands at that time. One of these holy men, Fray Manzanedo, wrote to Charles V that “all the citizens of Hispaniola demand your majesty to give them a license to be able to import blacks, because the Indians are insufficient to sustain them in the island.”17 He argued that as many women should be sent as men, and they had to be bozales—that is, slaves straight from Africa—for slaves bred in Castile might turn out rebellious. They had to come from “the best territories” in Africa, by which he meant anywhere south of the river Sénégal, in order to avoid any Muslim taint.
These requests were strongly supported by Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas, already the self-constituted advocate of the interests of the indigenous population. His desire to protect the Indians from ill-treatment blinded him for many years to the need to guard against similar mistreatment of Africans. Like all enlightened men of his time, he believed that an African enslaved by Christians was more fortunate than an African in domestic circumstances.
At first, Las Casas was concerned to send a few—twenty only—of the slaves who were already in Seville to the Americas, rather than pursue new ones in Africa, as recommended by his colleagues. Later, however, he would suggest larger numbers: thus, in 1535, he sent a letter to the king saying that “the remedy of the Christians is this, that His Majesty should think it right to send to each one of the islands 500 or 600 blacks or whatever other number seems appropriate.”18 Only later still, in the 1550s, when writing his Historia de las Indias, he explained that he had realized that it was wrong to seek to replace one form of slavery with another—though the book was not published for another 350 years.19
King Charles accepted the recommendations of Zuazo, Las Casas, and the priors. The Court was then at Saragossa, the king being eager to placate the Aragonese. Subsequently the most conscientious of Holy Roman Emperors, Charles was at that time only eighteen years old. So far as policy in the Americas was concerned, he was in the hands of his advisers. Of these, the closest with regard to the Indies was still the implacable, ubiquitous, meticulous, and indefatigable Rodríguez de Fonseca, who had by now become bishop of Burgos.
The consequence was that, on August 18, 1518, permission to import black slaves into the New World was granted to a friend of the king’s, one of those clever Flemish courtiers who inspired such suspicion among Spaniards, Lorenzo de Gorrevod (Laurent de Gouvenot, or Garrebod), governor of Bresse in Burgundy, and the emperor’s majordomo.20 He was a Savoyard, having been brought, with other counselors of the Crown, to the Low Countries by the emperor’s aunt, the regent Margaret, who had previously been married to Count Philibert of that Alpine territory. “The second most avaricious of the Flemings,” as he was considered by the Spaniards, he had wanted to receive, as a perpetual fief for himself, the whole of the new territory of New Spain, Mexico, which Cortés was about to offer to the emperor. But, as a compensation for not receiving that grant, he was to be allowed to import no fewer than four thousand blacks, brought direct from Africa, if need be, into the new territories of the Spanish empire. A subsequent document (signed by the king, Fonseca, and secretaries Cobos and García de Padilla) told the royal officials not to collect taxes on the import of these slaves.
The background of this decision, like that of King Ferdinand in 1510 to allow four hundred slaves to be taken to the New World, is difficult to reconstruct. No surviving document describes any discussion, no chronicler dwells on the matter, nothing suggests that any courtier or adviser, nobleman or merchant, disagreed.II There was certainly some opposition among Spaniards such as Las Casas to the grant of such a license to a foreigner; but not about the principle of the policy. The king signed the document approving Gorrevod’s contract, but if he thought twice about the matter, he would have considered that he was acting to save the lives of American Indians by agreeing to the petitions of the eloquent Las Casas and of the Jeronymite priors.
Gorrevod was interested in the money to be made from his license, not in the actual consequences, good or evil. He immediately sold his privilege to Juan López de Recalde, the treasurer of the Casa de Contratación in Seville. That official resold it in turn to others, using Alonso Gutiérrez, treasurer of Madrid, as an intermediary. The final buyers were, predictably, a firm of Genoese merchants established in Seville, by now so experienced in Spanish commerce. They bought the rights for twenty-five thousand ducats—that is, six ducats a slave. These Genoese were Domingo de Forne (Fornes) who acquired the right to carry a thousand slaves, Agustín de Ribaldo (Vivaldo) a nephew of the rich Cypriot Ribaldos, and Fernando Vázquez, who were jointly able to carry three thousand slaves. These merchants named as their agents Juan de la Torre, of Medina del Campo, the greatest of Castilian internal markets; Gaspar Centurione (another Genoese, though a Castilianized one); and Juan Fernández de Castro, of Seville.
This first major consignment of slaves for the Americas was thus in every sense a European enterprise: the grant of the Flemish-born emperor was to a Savoyard, who sold his rights, through a Castilian, to Genoese merchants—who, in turn, would, of course, have to arrange for the Portuguese to deliver the slaves. For no Spanish ship could legally go to Guinea, the monarchs of the two countries were then allies, and anyway, only the Portuguese could supply slaves in that quantity.
This grant was not for an absolute monopoly: many minor licenses to carry slaves to the Indies continued to be given; for example, Alvaro Pérez Osorio, marquis of Astorga, also obtained a license in 1518 to send four hundred black slaves to the New World—which permission he, too, sold to Genoese bankers.
Some of these slaves were destined for the new sugar farms. The planter Aguilón, who already had such a farm on Santo Domingo in 1505, had been by now joined by others, assisted by sugar masters from the Canary Islands; the historian Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo had brought back some sugar to show to King Ferdinand in 1515, on his deathbed; for it was beginning to be found that sugar cane could be grown in the Caribbean as easily as the indigenous crops of the country. Cristóbal de Tapia (Cortés’s enemy in 1522) applied from Santo Domingo to import fifteen slaves to work on his new sugar mill there—a vertical three-roller mill, powered by oxen.III By th
e 1530s, Santo Domingo would have the luxury of thirty-four such mills, all worked primarily by Africans and three owned by Genoese (Vivaldo Fornes, Jacome de Castellón, and Esteban Justiniani), all of whom had been concerned in trading slaves also.
Later grants allowed the sugar industry to start up in Puerto Rico: the first mill was built there in 1523 by Tomás de Castellón, a brother of the pioneer in Santo Domingo, in what was then called the plains of San Germán, now Añasco, which was from the beginning worked by slaves. (By 1530, there were nearly 3,000 slaves on that island, and only 327 whites.) There was at least one sugar mill in Jamaica by 1527, founded by the second governor, Francisco de Garay, while the first mill in Mexico seems to have been established by Hernán Cortés in 1524. Again, Genoese were concerned in both furnishing the slaves for this property and in selling the sugar produced.
Mines also demanded slaves. In 1524, permission was granted to import three hundred African slaves into Cuba to work in the gold mines at Jagua. That the Church of Rome was as interested in importing Africans as any conquistador can be seen from a petition of the bishop of Puerto Rico and inquisitor-general of the Indies, Alonso Manzo, for permission to bring in twenty blacks. This was granted. Their task was to dig for gold, required to finance the projected Cathedral of San Juan (which they would also help to build). Franciscans and priests also often had black slaves as servants. So did simple conquistadors. Time and again we hear how this or that adventurer arrived with “his horses and slaves,” ready for some unexpected homeric contest.
Another important colonial enterprise which involved the use of black slaves was a fantastic scheme of Las Casas for the north coast of South America. The plan was that forty Spanish colonists should set off with ten black slaves each, to avoid any temptation of misusing Indians. The idea was approved, but most of the settlers were dispersed in the Caribbean before they reached the intended site of the colony. Those who did go were all slaughtered, with their slaves, by Indians who had not yet learned to distinguish between good and bad Spaniards.
Gorrevod’s grant for the transport of slaves ran out in 1526. The Spanish Crown’s preference was still to give licenses to specific merchants, along with, sometimes, the benefit of not paying the usual taxes. So Charles V granted his new secretary, Francisco de los Cobos, a license to send to the Indies, including to New Spain, two hundred black slaves, exempt from all import charges. Of course, no one expected that that permission would be taken advantage of by Cobos in person. Sure enough, he sold it to two German merchants then in Seville, Jerónimo Sayles (Hieronymous Seyler, or Seiler) and Enrique Guesler (Heinrich Ehinger), both of Constance; to the representatives of the famous bankers of Augsburg, the Welsers; and to three more Genoese (Leonardo Cataño, Bautista Justiniani, and Pedro Benito de Bastiniano). The two Germans were also the beneficiaries of a new, larger license granted by the emperor in February 1528, to import four thousand further slaves over the next four years to be sold at forty ducats each. That was the year when the Welsers also received a commission to govern the territory known as New Andalusia, now Venezuela, as a partial repayment of the emperor’s debts to them.
Sayles and Guesler paid twenty thousand ducats for this second privilege, but the usual Portuguese middlemen (the principal being a factor in Santo Domingo, Andrea Ferrer) delivered Africans whom the Spaniards thought inferior, and there were not enough of them. Licenciado Serrano wrote in 1530: “The Germans bring in very bad blacks, so much so that, despite the great necessity that we have for them, no one buys.”21
This setback was followed by a monopoly contract granted to one only of the two Germans, Guesler, though he was soon associated with a citizen of the mercantile city of Medina del Campo, Rodrigo de Dueñas. But his deliveries still did not satisfy the settlers of Santo Domingo. The bishop of the colony wrote in 1530 to the king in Castile that the survival not just of his island but that of Puerto Rico and Cuba depended on the availability of African slaves; he suggested that the colonies be allowed to import them without licenses.
For a time there was no attempt to limit the market. Already in 1527, Alfonso Núñez, a merchant of Seville, in the name of Comendador Alonso de Torres of Lisbon, undertook to sell to Luis Fernández de Alfaro, a friend of Hernán Cortés, one hundred black slaves, of whom four-fifths had to be men, the rest women. They would be procured in Santiago, in the Cape Verde Islands and, after being taken to Spain, sold in Santo Domingo. Two years later, Fernández de Alfaro himself sent to buy slaves in the Cape Verde Islands, for he had a contract with Juan Gutiérrez of San Salvador, Triana, to supply another hundred blacks for Santo Domingo. Actually, a Portuguese decree of 1512 had ordered that all slaves procured in the Cape Verde Islands or elsewhere had to be sent direct to Lisbon, but that rule, like so many emanating from Lisbon, was often ignored, as innumerable licenses issued at the Casa de Contratación in Seville suggest. Then, in 1527, a well-known lawyer from Seville, himself experienced in the Caribbean, Alonso de Parada, proposed to the king a new policy: that he should regularly arrange to buy from his brother monarch in Portugal all the slaves who were needed in the Spanish empire (to begin with, about four thousand slaves) and ship half of them to Hispaniola, fifteen or sixteen hundred to Cuba, and the remainder to Jamaica. Half of the total should be women, so that the men should feel at home and perpetuate themselves in the New World.
Nothing was decided, and so the way was open for a series of slave merchants based in Seville. The first of these was Juan de la Barrera, who, returning from the Indies to Seville about 1530, already wealthy from the sale of cloth and food, became, after the collapse of the German monopoly, one of the richest men in his home city, with factories (that is, deposits) for slaves as well as other goods, in Cartagena de Indias, in Peru, Honduras, Cuba, and New Spain. Unlike nearly all other slave merchants, he himself made the regular Seville-Cape Verde-Veracruz journey in one of his own boats.
De la Barrera’s itineraries point to an important change. Up till now, most African slaves were taken from Africa to Europe and from there to the Americas. But one ship, Nuestra Señora de Begoña, belonging to the Genoese Polo de Espindola of Málaga, left São Tomé in 1530 with three hundred slaves direct for Hispaniola, and there were no doubt others. Characteristically for a significant innovation relating to the slave trade, there was a lawsuit about details of the matter: Espindola sued Esteban Justiniani, the local representative of the Genoese Agustín de Vivaldo, one of the residuary buyers of Gorrevod’s license, who took the matter to the Council of the Indies.22 This case concerned rich men: Vivaldo was by then the Crown banker in Seville; and Justiniani was a pioneer of sugar in Santo Domingo.
From then on, the slaves taken to the Spanish empire usually came direct from Africa. King João III of Portugal gave explicit permission to captains to ship slaves both from the Cape Verde Islands and from São Tomé to the Americas. He does not seem to have hesitated a moment before agreeing to this, any more than Ferdinand had vacillated in 1510 about arranging for slaves to be sent to Hispaniola. In 1533, nearly 500 slaves were so taken, direct from São Tomé to the Spanish Indies and, in 1534, about 650 traveled thus, even though, at that time, the royal factor at São Tomé was still sending over 500 slaves a year to Elmina and 200 or 300 a year to Lisbon. These voyages were carried through, even though rules had been written against the shipment of slaves born in Europe to the Spanish Indies, since those slaves were now supposed to be potentially a liability.
Thereafter, black slaves, linked to their masters, would play an even more decisive part in European ventures in the Americas. Diego de Ordaz, before his journey to the river Orinoco, received formal permission to carry slaves with him; his onetime comrade in Mexico, Francisco de Montejo, obtained a license for a hundred slaves for use in his conquest of Yucatan. When Francisco Pizarro received royal backing for his expedition to Peru, he had a license to take two African slaves for his personal use, and to carry with him fifty African slaves (a third to be women). One of these was Juan Valie
nte, who rose to become a commander in the conquest; and an African assistant master of artillery was allowed the title of captain. Titu Cusi, son of the Inca Manco, thought that, in the Incas’ determined effort to set fire to the thatched roof of their palace of Suntur Huasi in Cuzco, during the siege of 1536, African slaves stationed on the roof extinguished the flames, even if others thought that the Virgin Mary herself was responsible, with the help of the Archangel Michael.
Between 1529 and 1537, the Crown gave over 360 licenses to import slaves to Peru from Africa, most of them to Pizarro and his immediate family. When Pedro de Alvarado went down to Peru from Guatemala in 1534, to try to share in the plunder of the new zone of opportunity, he took with him two hundred Africans, and probably most of them stayed there after he had been bought out of the adventure by Diego de Almagro. In 1536, four hundred new slaves from Africa were reported to have embarked for Peru in the previous six months; 150 Africans accompanied Diego de Almagro to Chile in 1535; and one or two at least were with Pedro de Valdivia on his later journey there. In 1536, when the president of the Audiencia (Supreme Court) in Hispaniola was prevailed on to send help to the Pizarros, who were besieged by the Inca Manco, “200 Spanish-speaking blacks” who were “very good at fighting” were sent.23 The same year, we find the ex-vicereine María de Toledo receiving a license for 200 slaves, of whom a third were to be women: that seems to have been the largest single consignment until then, though the next year two bankers, Cristóbal Franquesini (born in Lucca) and Diego Martínez (a Portuguese) secured licenses for 1,000 slaves and 1,500 respectively.24
