Introduction

Slavery is a social-economic system under which a person (the “slave”) is deprived of freedom and compelled to work for another (the “slave owner” or “master”), without receiving formal compensation (such as a wage) for his labour or having the right to leave and decide upon his own person.

Evidence of this practice predates written records; it has existed to varying extents, forms and periods in almost all cultures in all the five continents. The word “slave” derives from “sclavus”, the Latin designation for the Central and Eastern European Slavs who were submitted by the Germanics and sold as slaves in the West, including the Arabian Spain.

The Arabic name for the Slavics is Saqaliba, the plural of a corruption of the Greek word Sklavinoi, mentioned by the Byzantines. The word “sclavus” was born to distinguish slaves from serfs (servus), who were constrained to be bound to a land, and not to a master. The number of serfs began to rise during the last period of the Roman Empire and kept high during the whole of the middle ages.
 
The earlier examples of slavery we know of resulted from the submission of prisoners of war; these first slaves where therefore individuals who did not belong to the community or tribal group and their enslaving was actually “a humanitarian improvement in the laws of war” (Sumner 1974: 597), in which it constituted an alternative to the massacre of the loosing side by the winning.

Generally speaking, being a slave seems to have been a condition less harsh to endure in the primitive societies than in the so called civilized ones (both antique and modern). In ancient Greece, slaves were usually obtained through war and commerce.

In some Greek city states, the number of slaves to the general population could be as high as 30%, but paid and slave labour seem to have been equally important. Slaves were often employed in transformation activities and many of them were specialized workers.
 
Romans inherited the institution of slavery from the Greeks and the Phoenicians. Their territorial expansion and the emergence of the Roman Empire led to an enormous increase in the supply of slaves; there were entire populations being enslaved all over Europe and in the Mediterranean. In Rome, at the end of the Republican period, the number of slaves was by far higher than that of citizens. At that time, slavery was already one of the major pillars of the Roman economy, but the end of the military expansion would mark the beginning of the transition from slavery to servitude, as far as the labour force was concerned.
 
The fall of the Roman Empire, in 476 A.D., led to a period of great instability in Europe, with invasions and the dispute for power between different groups; in this context of war and chaos, the taking of slaves became widely practised all throughout the continent. The Visigoths, who inhabited the Iberian Peninsula between the 5th and the beginning of the 8th century A.D., practised it as well, and during the period of the Al-Andalus the captured Christians and the Saqaliba (Slavic peoples) were often made slaves.

“The Slavic pirates on the Mediterranean Sea were not uncommon during the 10th century. Ibn Hauqal mentions Slavic pirates plundering the coast of Muslim Spain (…) We should mention the Slavs who arrived in the Muslim Spain. These can be subdivided into two groups: one consisted of the slaves of Slavic origin who were recognized as a highly valued commodity there, and the other were Slavic warriors who voluntarily became mercenaries in the service of the Arabic rulers of Spain; the latter must have been surely attracted by the fabulous wealth of Al-Andalus.

According to Ibn Hauqal the Slavic slaves were brought to Muslim Spain via Galicia, Frankia, the Lombard Kingdom, and Calabria in southern Italy. To Galicia they must have been most likely brought by sea by Danish and/or even Polabian Slavic merchants. (…) The Slavic slaves sold to Muslim Spain included female concubines for the harems of the rich Arabs who were especially valued for their light complexion and blond hair, and males, often brought in as young boys, who either became civil servants, palace servants, eunuchs at the above-mentioned harems, or, in the case of the physically strongest, troops of the elite Slavic Guards of Spain's Arabic rulers, who enjoyed special privileges and high status [something that the Berber components of the caliphatic armies  resented].

There were also many Slavs at the court of the Omayyad Emir of Cordoba al-Hakam I (796-822). The Slavs in Muslim Spain quickly attained an important position in the social structure of Muslim Spain, and many went on to play an important role in its politics in the subsequent future. (…) In the last years of the Cordoban Caliphate, there were so many writers, poets, and bibliophiles of Slavic origin that there arose a need to write a separate monograph devoted just to them.

Eventually, the distinct racial identity of Muslim Spain's Slavs started to diminish. This process was already under way during the Taifa Period. But even afterwards the Slavs continued to play an important role in the local affairs, and are kept on being mentioned until and including the 12th century. It is not until the 13th century that all mentions of their presence disappear from the records; by that time they became completely assimilated into the local population, whose faith they went on to subsequently share.” (Michal Warczakowski, 2004)

After Portugal’s independence (1143), pirates from Normandy and Northern Africa attacked the coastal cities and fishermen villages of the Iberian Peninsula very frequently – the populations were usually sold in slave markets in the North of Africa. Cervantes, the writer, for instance, was captured and made slave of a Sultan in Africa for several years. This traffic would only end in 1810-13, with the signature of the Luso-Algerian peace treaties.

Before 1415, the rescue of Portuguese captives allowed the first contacts with the African slave trade markets in the northern African city of Ceuta (nowadays the enclave of Spain in Morocco). When Ceuta was conquered in 1415, the city was an important centre where different routes for the commerce of Sub-Saharan slaves, who were brought by Bedouin traders, converged. Ceuta would lose that role after the conquest, while its strategic and military importance increased. Through their travels along the coast of Africa heading south, the Portuguese navigators got in touch once again with the slave trade markets.

The first group of slaves was taken to Portugal in 1441 by Antão Gonçalves, who bought them in the coast of Arguin (today’s Mauritania). Half a century after that, the first Portuguese arrived to Guinea, where they got in touch with the black slave trade existent over there, but by then their final goal was already India and its spices. The development of the slave trade by the Portuguese only happened during the 17th century, in strong competition with the Dutch, English and French, while its peak happened during the 18th century with the trade of African slaves to Brazil.

Camões (1524-1580), the greatest Portuguese language poet who was also a tireless traveller, fell in love with an Oriental black slave woman who died, and dedicated to her one of the most beautiful love poems ever written in his language, entitled “Dirges to Barbara the Slave”. Cervantes (1547-1616), taking as inspiration his own life, adopted slavery as a subject matter for several of his literary works, notably the Captive’s tale in Don Quixote, the plays “Traffic of Algiers” and “The Prisons of Algiers”, as well as episodes in a number of other writings. In Quixote, for example, the freed slaves who throw stones at the knight show how his simple morality is inadequate to deal with a complex world. According to other interpretations, this introduces, on the other hand, an idea about how the individual can be right and the society wrong.

Also in Spain, the official painter for the court of Phillip IV (17th century), Diego Velázquez, was inspired by Cervantes and the theme of slavery (he was educated in Seville, in an environment of cultural debate, as the household of his father-in-law and teacher was a gathering place for artists and writers, soon after Don Quixote was written and published). Velázquez painted two Greek philosophers who were former slaves (and whose philosophies inspired him), as well as his own slave, Juan de Pareja.

"It is important to mention here that both Menippus and Aesop were former slaves because one of Velazquez' most unforgettable portraits is that of Juan de Pareja, his mulatto slave whom he had taught to paint. In it, he endowed Juan, whom he freed, with a majestic presence, adorning him with a fancy lace collar, a luxurious form of adornment forbidden by the sumptuary laws of the time, especially to someone of his social category." (Michael Atlee, 2003).

Not only did he paint Juan as a dignified gentleman with an important social status, as he also insisted that Juan himself, dressed like that and behaving as an equal in every sense, should exhibit the finished painting personally before several noblemen and potential clients – like a triumph. This defying attitude by Velázquez clearly demonstrates his disagreement with the established order and the social scenery of those times. Curiously, this portrait of Juan was a rehearsal for the portrait of Pope Innocent X (1650). The contemporary artist Yue Minjun fused the two in a very interesting way, while the Pope’s portrait was a known obsession of Francis Bacon (screaming version).

Meanwhile in the New World, communities and towns formed by slaves who had escaped from their masters were taking shape – these were called “Cimarrones” (Cimarron means "runaway slave") in the Spanish-speaking South America and Quilombos (meaning related with military resistance settlements and ritual initiations in the original kimbundu language of Angola; their inhabitants are called Quilombolas) in Brazil.

Of significant importance in Brazil was the Quilombo dos Palmares, which grew from 1605 onwards and resisted for a whole century to frequent raids and armed attacks by the Portuguese. It was the home for runaway slaves, blacks born in freedom, Indians and caboclos, poor Portuguese whites and mulattos. During its height, more than 20.000 people (some say almost 30.000) lived in the settlement. After 1640, Palmares grew and it became the “kingdom of Angola Janga” (kingdom of “Little Angola”), with 9 major settlements and many more mocambos (structures/huts) surrounding them.

Curiously, and given the smaller number of women and the mixed cultural influences and habits, the Quilombo developed a polyandry system, which contrasted deeply with the patriarchal societies of the coastal colonial cities. Zumbi dos Palmares, king of Angola Janga, was its late leader, unusually determined, brave and skilled as a resistance strategist – he was captured and horrendously beheaded in 1695, after the main settlement of Palmares fell to the assaulters. Some of these original settlements exist until today, in the shape of towns (called Palenques in the Spanish South America), and their inhabitants speak different Creole languages.

Slavery was abolished in 1761 by the Marquis of Pombal, in the Kingdom of Portugal and India, and slave trade was definitely abolished in the whole empire in 1836 (Brazil was independent since 1822). However, slave trade continued by people with distinct nationalities, Brazilians and even… slave traders who were former slaves. Such was often the case, for example, in the Brazilian territory of Minas Gerais, where certain particularities (the gold rush) represented quick highways or opportunities for freedom – but the new wealthy people needed workers to find more gold… and they had to hire slaves, the main working force available. In Brazil only the law Eusébio de Queirós (1850), after the Aberdeen Act was approved by Great Britain in 1845, came to prohibit the inter-Atlantic slave trade.

Jean-Baptiste Debret (1768–1848), a French painter who was part of the French Artistic Mission (1816), founded, in Rio de Janeiro, an academy of Arts and Crafts, later the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts, where he taught painting. He published in France Picturesque and Historic Voyage to Brazil (1934-39), inspired by Diderot’s l'Encyclopédie – more than due to artistic merits, his drawings and paintings became famous as an unusual document of the quotidian and because of their naked observation of the Brazilian society, including representations of slaves and their punishments, daily scenes of exploitation, slave hunters and indigenous tribes.

Spain first abolished slavery in Puerto Rico in 1873 and Cuba in 1886, but for a long time there were strict Spanish laws protecting treasure fleets from South America which kept the slave trader ships away. Nevertheless, they were trading in the Pacific and Far East – a treasure catch by Francis Drake exposed this and begun a crisis which led to the invasion of Portugal by Spain, which was not following the official trade agreements.

Princess Isabel from Brazil (1846-1921), who became known as The Redeemer, was a liberal abolitionist who played a decisive role in ending slavery in her empire. She is considered the first Head of State of the Americas, and was one of the nine women to govern a nation during the whole 19th century. Although many abolitionists were connected to the incipient republican movement, she financed young politicians and artists, bought the manumission of former slaves with her own money and supported the community of the Quilombo of Leblon, where white camellias were planted, the symbol of the abolitionism.  

In 1869, seven years after writing his first abolitionist poems and reading them out loud, the young Brazilian poet Castro Alves (who would live only until the age of 24) was writing the Slave Ship, one of the most emblematic poems of the Brazilian heritage. From Bahia, he had gone to Rio, where he met the writers Otaviano, Alencar and Machado de Assis, the most important writer of Brazilian literature (an inspiration for Susan Sontag, Carlos Fuentes and Harold Bloom, for whom he represents “the supreme black literary artist to date”).

The illegal traffic continued in Brazil after Queirós’ law, as the abolitionist movement grew stronger. The illegal traffic was followed by an internal traffic of slaves and finally by European journeymen who worked on a regime of semi-slavery which, after protests of countries like Germany, gave its turn to the system of aid-funded immigration.  

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Links:

English Translation of the Poem Tragedy at Sea: The Slave Ship (1869), by Antonio de Castro Alves (in 6 parts):
http://oldpoetry.com/opoem/34690-Antonio-de-Castro-Alves-O-Navio-Negreiro-Part-1---With-English-Translation--wbr-
Artist Mariza sings Black Ship (about love and separation in slavery times) in the Union Chapel, London (2003):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ElLSBx9Jo8

DIRGES TO BARBARA, THE SLAVE – by Luis de Camões  (1524-1580)

That captive woman
Who holds me captive,
Because in her I live
She doesn’t want me to live/to live in her [both meanings] anymore.
I never saw rose
In soft bunches, [the word for bunches is “molho”, which can also mean sauce/spices/a subtle reference to female genitals and liquids – he eroticizes Barbara like a queen, with respect, reverence, nostalgy and sadness, because she is dead]
Which to my eyes
Looked more lovely.

Nor in the field flowers,
Nor in the sky stars
Seem to me as beautiful
As my loves. [plural, old and more elegant form of “love” – can be used to mention the act(s) of love making]
Singular face,
Tranquil eyes at rest,
Black and tired,
But not of killing/provoking pain or suffering. [both meanings: she was good and never killed or provoked pain to anyone, but at the same time he is suffering very much with her death and writes this almost with sorrow for the fact that those eyes didn’t kill him too, sorrow for not being able to join her in death]
An alive grace
Which inside them lives,
To be the master
Of whom it is captive. [she is dead, or captive of death, but free at the same time, and her grace is alive, mastering death]
Black the hair hanks,
Where the vain people
Lose their opinion
That the blond are beautiful.
Blackness of Love,
So sweet the figure,
That the snow swears to her
It will change its colour.
Cheerful/glad [“leda”, same word as “Leda”, queen of Sparta in Greek mythology, whom Zeus seduced by assuming the form of a swan] softness/goodness/surrender [all three meanings]
Which accompanies wisdom, [wisdom can be Zeus, or the wisdom of the poet writing with the feather; there are also several references to the legend of Saint Barbara in the poem]
It can look strange/foreign, [both meanings]
But not barbarous.
Serene presence
Which tames the storm;
In her, at last, rests
All my sorrow/feather. [concluded his poem/dirges writing, with feather and ink, about her – feather, of the swan, is the same word as sorrow – the word “pena”]
This is the captive woman
Who holds me captive,
And, because in her I live,
She must live. [could also be translated as “she is strength that will live” – double meaning]

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