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1 The Shape of a Diaspora The Movement of Afro-Iberians to Colonial Spanish America leo j. garofalo The presence of Afro-Iberians who helped shape the cultural and physical webs that bound together the African, European, and American continents forces us to broaden our understanding of the history of Iberian empires and the African Diaspora. The creation and activities of populations of African descent in Portugal and Spain, their work in expanding and sustaining the Atlantic system, and their resettlement in the Americas make Afro-Iberian intermediaries as essential to empire as the indigenous go-betweens described by Alida C. Metcalf in the colonization of Brazil.1 The view of how imperial systems develop and function on display in J. H. Elliot and Henry Kamen’s impressive studies and in the work of C. R. Boxer leaves out these key dynamics and actors.2 An equally important and compelling story of Iberian-style expansion and its intimate link to the movement of millions of African peoples appears when we broaden our view and ask how imperial systems take on a reality and operate and expand through individuals ’ actions and participation. This fuller picture includes considering the unexpected presence and mobility of Afro-Iberians as they became a part of urban southern Iberian society, moved back and forth to the Americas, and served the Spanish Crown as sailors and soldiers in the Americas and along the coasts of Africa. The African presence in southern Europe fostered an early appearance of intermediate groups and culture mediators, especially in crossroads locations on both sides of the Atlantic. These East Atlantic and Mediterranean dimensions of the Diaspora did not disappear even after the majority of slaves went directly to the Americas. Thus, a history of empire or slavery in the Americas under colonial rule cannot be fully understood without considering the slaves and ex-slaves in Africa and Europe before and during the European invasion and colonization of the Americas. Significance of Africans in Iberia By the end of the 1400s, a significant African presence existed in Iberia, and Africans in the south of the Peninsula grew in importance over the next 200 years. Of course, an influential medieval Mediterranean model of slavery in Italy, Barcelona, and elsewhere originally treated slavery as nonracial, as predominantly female, and as a subset of human dependence within the flexibility permitted by legal systems that countenanced buying, selling, renting, and freeing the people captured from societies as diverse as those found in the Black Sea regions, the Mediterranean, Southern Europe, and Africa.3 Between the eleventh and the thirteenth centuries, Barcelona engaged in smallscale trade in expensive black African slaves with Tunis.4 Eventually, over the course of the fourteenth century, merchants engaged in the trans-Saharan trade brought slaves from Sub-Saharan Africa to Christian kingdoms in Iberia and to other parts of the Mediterranean. The fifteenth-century expansion of seaborne Iberian raiding and trading expeditions south along the African coast bypassed the Muslim-controlled overland trade routes and significantly increased the number of people brought from sub-Saharan Africa to southern Europe. Following the first sales in Lagos in 1444 of large numbers of West Africans captured by the Portuguese, the presence of enslaved and (eventually) free West and Central Africans in southern Iberian towns and cities of both Portugal and Spain grew steadily during the 1400s and 1500s. In the second half of the fifteenth century, Andalusian nobles, merchants, and ship owners competed with the Portuguese traders by organizing their own raiding missions to bring enslaved West Africans directly to Seville for sale. Although on a smaller scale, direct Spanish participation in the trade continued even after the treaties of Alcaçovas (1479), Tordesillas (1494), and Sintra (1509) recognized a Portuguese monopoly over the trade and defined Spanish and Portuguese spheres of activity in Africa and elsewhere.5 Seville became Europe’s second most important center (after Lisbon) for trading slaves. By 1492, as many as 35,000 people from West Africa—primarily from Senegambia and the Gulf of Guinea—had been sold into slavery on the peninsula.6 According to Alessandro Stella, between 700,000 and 800,000 people arrived as slaves from the Atlantic trade between 1450 and 1750.7 The triangle of the Andalusian cities of Ayamonte, Seville, and Cadiz contained the highest concentration of slaves in all of Spain. Perhaps as many as one in 28 . leo j. garofalo [18.226.96.61] Project MUSE (2024-04-26 12:51...

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