some remained, while others traveled farther to the ports of the Crown of Aragon and to the more northerly cities of Castile. Still others passed directly from Lisbon to the eastern Iberian ports.32 Thus the Portuguese developed a trade in black African slaves that began small and served the limited needs of the peninsula and the Iberian-controlled Atlantic islands. The trade later grew exponentially with the development of the colonial empires in the Americas.
As they colonized the Americas beginning in the 1490s, the Spaniards established slavery in the new possessions. In doing so, they made use of several long- and short-term traditions present in the peninsula by 1492. One was the persistence of the legal regulations governing slavery, present from Roman times and ratified in the Siete Partidas. Another tradition was the existence of sugar-cane plantations and sugar refining, both in the peninsula and in the Canaries. In the Canaries, at least, the connection between sugar and slavery had been established, just as had the custom of purchasing black African slaves from the Portuguese. The Portuguese overseas ventures followed a similar trajectory as they colonized Madeira and other Atlantic islands and then Brazil across the Atlantic. Growing from these precedents, slavery became an important social and economic institution in the Iberian American empires, and it lasted into the late nineteenth century.
Slavery played a crucial role in colonial economic development, and eventually portions of the Americas became true slave societies. Slavery in Spanish America was complex, and during the first two centuries of the colonial period, two systems of slavery coexisted. One was an outgrowth of the traditional pattern of slavery in the Christian Mediterranean during the Middle Ages. In it, owners employed slaves as domestics, artisans, and assistants of all kinds. In the first decades of the Spanish settlement of the Americas, this was the predominant system, with slaves and freedmen, often of African origin, acting in an intermediate role between the Spaniards and the Amerindians. The other system was large-scale slavery for the sugar plantations and the mines in Spanish America and Portuguese Brazil, a variety of slavery reminiscent of the Rome gang slavery in the late Republic and early Empire and one virtually non-existent in Europe and North Africa during the Middle Ages. With the passage of time, the highly concentrated gang slavery became the more important of the two in many parts of the Spanish and Portuguese colonial areas.33
Back in Iberia, there was a slight rise in the numbers of slaves in Iberia and in the social importance of slavery from the middle of the fifteenth century to the late sixteenth. Despite the growing number of sub-Saharan Africans, slaves of other origins still were important in Spain, including captives from the wars of conquest in the Canary Islands, who began to arrive in greater numbers in the period from 1480 to 1530. Still other slaves were Muslims, captured in the peninsula or at sea in the Mediterranean. There also were Moriscos from the peninsula itself. The numbers of Muslims and Moriscos were significant in the period 1570 to 1630 and reached a peak in the decade of the 1620s, following the expulsion of the Moriscos from Spain.34 Spain and Portugal were prospering, and many Iberians were growing rich from the flows of African and Asian products and eventually of American silver. With increasing prosperity, rural and urban workers began to move from place to place in search of better jobs and improved working conditions. Some employers turned then to slaves, who were by definition fixed to the place the owner assigned them. Keeping slaves in one place was one thing; saving on taxes was another. In the sixteenth century an old Castilian tax, the moneda foránea, came to be converted to a luxury impost paid by those who had free servants. It did not apply to slave owners, many of whom used their slaves in the same way that others used free servants.35
Slave owners came from a wide spectrum of society in the early modern period. The royal governments in Spain and Portugal owned slaves who worked in public enterprises. Officials of state and church of all ranks owned slaves. Nobles owned many slaves, not just for display but also for construction and maintenance of castles and townhouses, for agriculture and animal husbandry, and for domestic service. Down the social ladder, local officials, merchants, artisans, and farmers could own slaves as assistants, farm hands, and domestics.
Even in the absence of firm figures for all of early modern Spain, it is apparent that the densities of the servile population varied in different regions. In general terms, Andalusia and Murcia had the greatest numbers, followed by Catalonia and the kingdom of Valencia, and then by the seat of the royal court, especially after its establishment in Madrid in the mid-sixteenth century. Although most slaves lived in the southern and eastern coastal cities or in the Balearic Islands, there was a wide but uneven distribution of slaves elsewhere in the peninsula. Recent scholarship has documented the presence of slaves even in the Basque provinces, where slavery had been thought nonexistent because of legal prohibitions.36 For Portugal in the same period, the distribution of slaves varied, with more slaves in coastal regions than in the interior and more in cities than in the countryside. A recent set of estimates suggests that few places in sixteenth- century Portugal had more than 10 percent slaves in the population, that the country as a whole in that century had between 6 and 7 percent slaves, and that in the next century the percentage had dropped to below 5 percent. Lisbon likely had just under 10 percent at the sixteenth-century height of slavery there.37
The numbers were never great. During the sixteenth century, Seville’s slaves probably made up about 10 percent of the population, and Seville had the largest slave population of any major city.38 The peak may have come in mid-century.39 Barcelona’s slave population in the late fifteenth century has been estimated at some 10 to 20 percent,40 with that of Valencia not far behind. Granada at the same period had only about 2 percent of its population as slaves. 41 Slaves represented some 10 to 12 percent of the population of the island of Gran Canaria in the sixteenth century, and freed slaves represented some 3.4 percent.42 In the second half of the sixteenth century, Toledo, a city of between 20,000 and 25,000 people, had a slave population of less than 400.43 Palos, a small town on the Atlantic coast near the Portuguese border, had a population of some 25 percent slaves and free people of African origin, but that was due to unusual local circumstances.44
The defeat of the rebellion of the Moriscos of Granada in the 1560s, as we will see in Chapter 2, meant that many of the defeated ended up as slaves. Others escaped to North Africa, and some of them joined the Muslim corsairs and preyed on the Spanish coasts. Of the Morisco slaves remaining in Granada, many gained their freedom, as their relatives ransomed them. Others died as slaves. Morisco children, separated from their families, were often hidden by their Christian owners and others were placed under the control of Christians. They had free status in a legal sense, but many of them were treated in practice as if they were slaves.45 In 1571 came the battle of Lepanto, in which Spanish-led naval forces defeated the Ottoman fleet and brought many captives to the market. King Felipe II of Spain in 1580 assumed the crown of Portugal, at that point the chief European dealer in African slaves. All these events formed the foundation for a growth in peninsular slavery that lasted into the seventeenth century.46
Slavery began to lose its importance after a peak in the seventeenth century. Individual captives and slaves won their freedom: captives by ransom and slaves by flight or by legal manumissions. There were still slaves of Muslim origin in Spain, for slaves had been excluded from the expulsion decree. Most, however, were Muslims captured at sea or in North Africa or purchased there. A few were of Morisco origin.47 After royal orders of 1626 and 1629, Moorish slaves had to be converted to Christianity or sold outside the kingdom,48 but it does not appear that these orders were strictly followed, for a few unconverted Muslim slaves remained until the late eighteenth century. By no means did all of the converted slaves truly embrace Christianity. Some of the last references to such slaves are in the records of the Inquisition, when they fell afoul of the authorities following accusations that they were insincere Christians.49 The Portuguese asserted their independence from Spain in 1640 and fought a long war until 1668 to secure it. During that period, Portuguese slave dealers could not visit Spain to supply slaves. For all these reasons, slavery declined in Spain, outside a few special locations.50
Slavery
