As indicated in the opening vignette of this book, the moral issues surrounding the transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans reached the highest political circles of the Iberian empires. In 1685, King Charles II of Spain wrote to the Council of the Indies inquiring about the “benefits” that the presence of enslaved Black Africans brought to Spain’s American empire, as well as the “harm” their absence might cause. He further asked “whether it is licit to buy them as slaves” and if there were “authors who have written about this issue”.1 In their response, the councilors highlighted the dramatic decline of the Indigenous population in the New World and the resulting shortage of tributaries for forced labor. They posited that prohibiting the slave trade would therefore amount to the loss of essential food supplies, so that “all of the kingdom, the estates that are principally based on the abundance of Black slaves, would be lost and America would be exposed to total ruin”.2 As for the justice of buying and owning enslaved Africans, the councilors pointed to the authority of Iberian theologians such as Luis de Molina or Tomás Sánchez, who not only elaborated a variety of legal justifications for enslavement but also reassured the conscience of those who had purchased slaves “in good faith and second-hand” from traders.3
Yet the Council of the Indies did not stop there. The letter to Charles II ultimately ended on a much more radical note:
[…] since this genus of people is born to serve, as many say, it is not necessary to consider the strict dispositions of the law of nations (derecho de gentes) as one does with respect to other people, so that any title that is not wholly improbable will suffice for buyers, since these slaves are so urgently needed to preserve this commonwealth, which cannot be maintained without them.4
This line of argument bears a striking resemblance to the claims about the necessity of forced Indigenous labor presented in the previous chapter. By the end of the 17th century, enslaved Africans had taken the place of Spain’s Native vassals, at least in the colonial rhetoric emanating from Madrid. Yet again, this demonstrates how closely related contemporary agents of empire linked life under the yoke of the mita with slavery. The response Charles II received from his advisors illustrates the immediate political purchase of the Iberian imperial theorists’ writings on slavery. Ultimately, however, the Council of the Indies was prepared to defend the business of African slavery even when it violated the prevailing standards of justice and morality.
What explains this sharp intervention? Part of the answer lies in Spain’s waning hegemonic control over the transatlantic trade, for by the late 17th century, its Protestant rivals had become increasingly successful players.5 Developments in Castile were equally bleak. “The prolonged struggles with the Dutch and the French, the revolts of the 1640s and Philip IV’s increasingly desperate attempts to recover control over the newly independent kingdom of Portugal”, as John Elliott writes, “placed enormous strains on a treasury perennially incapable of meeting the demands made upon it”.6 As the demand for wealth from the New World intensified, metropolitan elites fervently defended the significance of the slave trade.
However, this still does not explain why Charles II inquired whether the transatlantic slave trade was licit in the first place. After all, the practice of shipping enslaved humans to the Indies was hardly new. The problem, as the councilors explained in their letter to the king, was that “two Capuchins” in the New World had recently “wished to persuade others that the enslavement of Black Africans is not licit”, provoking such turmoil that colonial authorities overseas “feared an uprising”.7 One of these Capuchins was Epifanio de Moirans (1644–1689), a French theologian and missionary in the service of Rome. Traveling through the Caribbean and the province of New Andalusia (present-day Venezuela), he witnessed the violent realities of transatlantic slavery firsthand. This prompted Moirans to pen a treatise with the provocative title Free Slaves, or the Just Defense of the Natural Liberty of Slaves (1682).8 This work was not only a polemic against the injustice of enslaving, trading, and possessing Black Africans. It also launched a blistering attack on the Iberian imperial theorists’ accounts justifying Atlantic slavery.
∵
The manuscript of Moirans’s Servi liberi seu naturalis mancipiorum libertatis iusta defensio lay buried in the Archive of the Indies in Seville for three full centuries. It was recovered only in 1982, when the Venezuelan historian José Tomás López García published a translation of Moirans’s text, along with another treatise by Francisco José de Jaca—the second Capuchin mentioned by the Council of the Indies in its letter to Charles II—whom Moirans had met in Cuba.9 Both men not only served as missionaries in the field but also intervened in pressing political and theological debates of their day, much like the Franciscan Juan de Silva we encountered in the previous chapter.10 But while they were united in their critique of the African slave trade and effectively reached the same conclusions, Moirans’s Servi liberi is “much more eloquent” and steeped in the language of natural law.11 This makes his text particularly interesting. Although he probably never held an academic position, and little is known about his formation, Moirans’s writing reveals his profound knowledge of moral theology and canon law. As one scholar put it, the Servi liberi “is perfectly in tune with the treatises On Justice and Right that were written over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries”.12
Ever since the rediscovery of Moirans’s and Jaca’s writings, scholars from diverse disciplinary and linguistic backgrounds have portrayed the two Capuchins as proto-abolitionists. López García suggested that their project paralleled Bartolomé de las Casas’s defense of Indigenous freedom (without mentioning Las Casas’s position on African slavery).13 More recent commentators have gone further, claiming that Moirans and Jaca “created a truly antislavery project”;14 that “their aim was to theologically, morally, and juridically disapprove of any kind of slavery”;15 or that they “repudiated slavery and demonstrated why the institution goes against natural law, divine law, and the law of nations (ius gentium)”.16 Even otherwise cautious historians have spoken of a “ ‘two-man-abolitionist-movement’ avant la lettre”.17
By contrast, this chapter argues that Moirans’s advocacy of the natural liberty of Black Africans had very little to do with abolitionism. As Joseph Miller has urged, historians must decenter slavery in order to step out of the epistemic shadow of the antebellum American South—and the same is true for historical critiques of enslavement. The teleological fixation on modern abolitionist discourse that pervades studies of Moirans prevents us from understanding what the Capuchin himself actually wrote. In fact, Moirans did not reject the legitimacy of slavery tout court. The basis of his attack on Iberian theorists’ apologies for the slave trade was the very discourse of natural law and the ius gentium on which the legality of slavery rested in the eyes of contemporaries. Rather than questioning the formal validity of the traditional titles of slavery, Moirans challenged how Iberian thinkers applied them to the concrete circumstances of enslavement in the Atlantic world. He sought to beat the Portuguese and Spanish imperial theorists at their own game.
In what follows, I will argue that Moirans developed a distinctive world-historical understanding of slavery and salvation. The Capuchin missionary not only opposed Iberian theorists’ defense of the trade in enslaved Black Africans in the language of natural law. He also rejected the claim that the Book of Genesis, especially its story of the curse of Ham, provided a legitimate basis for the enslavement of Black Africans. In Moirans’s novel interpretation, the curse of Ham served a dual purpose: it underpinned Black African freedom, simultaneously justifying the enslavement of all Muslim “enemies of Christ” across the globe. A close reading of the Servi liberi, then, not only allows us to reconsider early modern Iberian apologies for the slave trade. It also brings us back to the nexus of slavery and religion, which was even more central to Moirans’s thought than to that of the Iberian imperial theorists.
1 Revisiting the Foundations of the Slave Trade
Little is known about Moirans’s early life and education.18 He was born in a small village in the Province of Franche-Comté, near Geneva, in 1644. At the age of twenty-one, he entered the Capuchin order, which had grown out of a reform movement within the Franciscan order. Apart from doctrinal differences that are not relevant here, what distinguished the Capuchins from other religious orders discussed in this book was their placement under the aegis of the Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith, an institution of the Roman Curia. The missionaries of the so-called Propaganda Fide were thus subject to the Holy See rather than individual monarchs, irrespective of whether they were born in Italian, French, or Iberian territories. In fact, the very existence of the Propaganda Fide was due to the Curia’s attempt to regain control over missionary affairs, which at the time were in the hands of European empires.19
Moirans crossed the Atlantic in 1678 and, after a brief stay on the Caribbean island of Martinique, moved on to the Spanish-dominated mainland.20 His presence and missionary activities greatly displeased the local authorities. Under the pretext of lacking permission to enter Spanish territory, the governor of Cumaná had Moirans arrested and accused him of being a French spy. He was eventually released and managed to get to Cuba in the summer of 1681. In Havana, Moirans made the acquaintance of another Capuchin who shared his concern about the practice of enslaving Africans: the Aragonese Francisco José de Jaca (c. 1645–?). Both joined forces to preach on plantations and estates around the island’s capital.
Moirans and Jaca soon became a thorn in the side of civil and ecclesiastical officials in Cuba. Rumor had it that they denied absolution to anyone who owned Black African slaves. Before long, they were excommunicated by the diocesan vicar of Havana and locked away in a convent. During their confinement, Moirans and Jaca began to document their arguments against African slavery in writing. The Capuchins also protested their imprisonment, arguing that as missionaries of the Propaganda Fide they were solely subject to the jurisdiction of the Curia or indeed the pope himself. After long negotiations, they were sent to Castile and eventually received permission to present themselves before the Propaganda Fide in 1684. The upshot of their hearing was, however, ambiguous. The Sacred Congregation neither endorsed nor criticized the process of excommunication to which the Capuchins had been subjected in Havana and ultimately “left the question open, closing the case without an exact conclusion”.21
In the same year, the Propaganda Fide also received a petition from Lourenço da Silva de Mendonça, a self-styled descendant of the royal families of Kongo and Angola and leader of a Black lay confraternity in the Iberian empires. Mendonça called for the emancipation of all enslaved Africans who had been baptized.22 In 1685, the Procurator General of the Capuchins submitted yet another memorandum to the Propaganda Fide, outlining eleven propositions on the transatlantic slave trade on behalf of the missionaries under his jurisdiction. Scholars widely agree that the document was strongly influenced by Moirans and Jaca, since it denounced the trade in illegally enslaved Africans and demanded the liberation of all those who had been made slaves without a just title.23 The matter was finally brought before the Holy Office, which “formally declared its complete agreement with every position”.24 And yet, the papal nuncios in Iberia were never actively encouraged to raise the issue with the Spanish and Portuguese crowns.25 With the Council of the Indies’ vigorous defense of the slave trade, the controversy was finally silenced and suppressed.
1.1 A Principled Critique
The intellectual foundations of Moirans’s activism have been preserved in his treatise Servi liberi. At the outset, he listed five conclusions that summarized the main arguments of his pamphlet. First and foremost among them was the assertion that all the owners of Black African slaves had an obligation to free them and compensate them for the services they had rendered.26 He also underlined the responsibility of enslaved people themselves, arguing that those who were forced to work on sugar plantations had the duty to flee to places where their spiritual salvation could be assured.27 Finally, Moirans asserted that as a result of the injustice of the trade in human beings from West Africa to the Indies, Christian princes and clerics alike would lose their overseas possessions and eventually become “captives and slaves” themselves.28 Divine punishment, as he argued elsewhere in his treatise, was already imminent: “By the just judgment of God”, control of the transatlantic commerce with enslaved Africans had passed to the “English and Dutch heretics”, who secured precious metals from the Indies—compared to the Spaniards, who traded all their wealth for slaves that “die instantly”.29 In this sense, the Spaniards were already “the slaves of other nations”.30
But Moirans’s aim was precisely to prevent and counteract this unfolding scenario. As stated in his prologue, the treatise aimed to open the eyes of those whom avarice had blinded, “to undertake the just defense of the natural liberty of the slaves from Africa”, and to suggest ways to remedy the wrongs so that “the destruction of Christian kingdoms” and “the captivity of the Catholics” might be avoided.31
The first step in this process, Moirans argued, was to recognize the root of the problem. Those involved in illicit practices of slaving “err in the beginning, in that they capture or buy slaves and carry them away to America, and they go wrong a hundred times in the end, by raising them like beasts and using them as if they were mules”.32 In his view, the entire transatlantic slave trade was based on the deduction of “a good conclusion from bad principles”, whereby it was a syllogism gone wrong.33 For Moirans, the only way to escape this philosophical and moral fallacy was to radically rethink everything from scratch. To that end, he called on his readers to join him in returning
[…] from the end to the principle, from the end of the error to the principle of truth, from the end of the violation of right to the principle of natural law, and from the end of the land where slaves were captured to the principle of the homeland’s soil, so that we may proceed according to the principles of natural law, divine positive law, the ius gentium, canon and civil law.34
1.2 The Titles of Slavery Reappraised
Moirans set out to assess the extent to which the traditional titles of slavery were applicable to contexts of slaving in West and Central Africa. He explained that all those who had been condemned to servitude by public power were indeed just slaves, a status that extended to their children according to the Roman dictum partus sequitur ventrem.35 However, Moirans argued that this title was inapplicable to regions such as Cape Verde and Guinea. In his estimation, the peoples who resided there “neither live politically nor do they have kings who rule them; rather everyone is of his own right, just like the indios, and they live without any public or political control”.36 This assessment strongly echoes the perspectives Tomás de Mercado and Miguel de Palacio put forth a century earlier—and Moirans was well aware of them.37 However, none of these 16th-century thinkers actually questioned whether Sub-Saharan Africans were truly masters of their own affairs. Both Mercado and Palacio had expressly underlined that even if the “Aethiopeans” failed to live up to the standards of justice, they had the necessary features of political societies.38 But Moirans claimed the exact opposite. The “Blacks” in Guinea and Cape Verde, he posited, “have no civil law or law of citizenship, neither kings nor judges, but […] all avenge themselves by private authority, and there is nobody who would administer justice”.39
The picture of life in sub-Saharan Africa that Moirans painted was akin to a Hobbesian state of nature. “Whoever has more power and is stronger”, he stressed, “seizes another and claims them as a slave”.40 Unlike Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), however, Moirans argued that such practices of slaving were entirely at odds with the demands of the law of nature and in violation of man’s natural liberty.41 Whoever held enslaved Africans under the pretense of the title of public punishment was therefore obliged to set them free.42
As a corollary to his ethnographic account of West and Central Africa, Moirans rejected any claims that slavery could be justified by reference to “just wars”. In regions where princely rule was absent, the more powerful entities simply preyed upon the weak, driven by the presence of European traders eager to buy such slaves without any moral hesitation.43 Indeed, Moirans was as critical of the Portuguese ventures in Africa as he was of the deeds of local inhabitants. The only exception he allowed, for the time being, concerned captives taken in the Portuguese “just wars” against the kingdoms of Angola and Mutapa.44 But apart from that, Moirans’s verdict was devastating. “The Christians”, he argued, “steal and seize Blacks whenever they can, for no other reason than the fact that they are Blacks and must be slaves, as if they were not truly human beings but sheep, or dogs and beasts”.45 Since God left nothing unpunished, Moirans argued, the Portuguese themselves, who were now routinely enslaved by the Muslims of North Africa, ended up in Ottoman hands. In this vicious circle, he concluded, Portuguese traders had become the “hens of the sea”—seized and passed on from one Muslim adversary to the next.46
The final two justifications for slavery addressed by Moirans centered on the right to sell oneself or one’s children into slavery in cases of extreme necessity. Once again, acknowledging that these titles were valid in theory, he argued they were inapplicable to the slave trade. He was particularly adamant about repudiating Luis de Molina’s famous claim that parents could enslave their offspring in grave, rather than extreme, necessity.47 “We reject this doctrine from the fundaments”, Moirans argued, because “only in extreme necessity will a father be allowed to sell himself or his children, to avoid natural death”.48 At first glance, it might appear that Moirans was simply reverting to the established Dominican position on voluntary slavery from Domingo de Soto’s De iustitia et iure. But, in fact, he advanced an entirely new argument with wide-ranging implications. According to Moirans, Christian merchants on the shores of Africa were morally obligated to provide aid and not permitted to profit from such cases of necessity: “The purchase of sons by Christians would thus have been unjust, because they would have been obliged to provide, freely and with charity, the necessities of life to those who were in extreme necessity”.49
At the end of the day, Portuguese slave traders could not legitimately invoke this title, and by the same logic, they could not justly buy adult Africans who willingly offered themselves for sale. Iberian imperial theorists invoked the idea of Christian charity in order to protect fellow Christians from slavery while promoting the enslavement of “infidels”. For Moirans, however, the religious affiliation of those in need was irrelevant. Charity, in his view, did not expand but rather defined and limited the rights of Christians vis-à-vis Black Africans.
2 Moirans against the Iberian Imperial Theorists
Moirans’s reappraisal of the principles of African slavery centered less on the theory of enslavement itself than on its practical application. The same approach characterized his engagement with Iberian apologies of slave trade. Moirans was particularly critical of the Jesuits writers in the tradition of Luis de Molina, and this is hardly coincidental. His critique of the Iberian imperial theorists was deeply influenced by the work of yet another Jesuit, who had previously leveled sharp criticism against his intellectual predecessors: Diego de Avendaño.
The Lima-based university theologian was not only a recognized authority on questions of labor coercion but also intervened in the debate on the legitimacy of African slavery. A little over a decade before Moirans penned his Servi libri, Avendaño had dismantled the arguments in favor of the trade in enslaved Africans posited by luminaries as Luis de Molina, Tomás Sánchez, or Fernão Rebello in his Thesaurus indicus.50 Avendaño explained this commerce was “illicit with regard to most slaves that are bought in these regions and comes with the burden of restitution”.51 He even declared it was unlawful to acquire any slaves transported from the shores of Africa to the Indies, since the suspicion of unjust enslavement was so strong.52
And yet, despite his forceful critique, Avendaño ultimately reached a radically different conclusion. After outlining the arguments against his intellectual predecessors’ defense of African slavery, he proceeded to argue that “the aforementioned business in the Indies and Europe can in some way be justified”.53 It was precisely this abrupt reversal, as we shall see, that ultimately prompted Moirans to disagree with Avendaño. In the end, the Capuchin insisted that Avendaño was “contradicting himself” by abandoning his own principles—just like the Jesuits, who had previously written about the slave trade from Spain and Portugal.54
2.1 The Portuguese War against Angola
Among Iberian theorists, it was commonplace to stress that the Portuguese acquired enslaved Africans not just through trade but also through belligerent ventures. There was a general agreement with Luis de Molina that the war against the Kingdom of Angola constituted a legitimate cause for enslavement—and Moirans, at least initially, accepted this interpretation.
In Chapter 8 of his Servi liberi, however, Moirans turned to the opinion of Diego de Avendaño, who offered a re-reading of Luis de Molina’s account of the Portuguese war in Angola, to claim that Molina himself had left room for doubting the justice of Portuguese intervention.55 Indeed, Molina had admitted the possibility that the initial Portuguese military expedition, though formally about avenging a violation of right, might have been motivated “by the rumor […] that there were many silver mines in this kingdom”.56 Molina suspected this was ultimately immaterial. Avendaño, however, emphasized that the uncertainty persisted as to whether the war had at least in part been motivated by the search for material riches.57 His aim was not to invalidate the justice of the Angolan war tout court. Rather, he took issue with a curious remark made by Luis de Molina: the claim that slavery was permissible only “if its justice is clearer than light”.58
This dictum, Avendaño recognized, was at odds with Molina’s own advocacy of probabilistic reasoning. If taken seriously, he argued, “the Angolans captured in war could not be enslaved, because the justice of that war is not clearer than light”.59 The Peruvian professor thus sought to turn Molina’s argument against himself. Although doubts surrounded the legitimacy of the said war, Avendaño underscored, a probable—not a crystal clear—title was sufficient to retain enslaved Angolans with a safe conscience.60
In the final stage of this multilayered and polyphonic exchange within the pages of the Servi liberi, Moirans staked his own ground in the debate. He followed Avendaño insofar as he, too, acknowledged the doubtful justice of the Portuguese war against Angola. And he concurred with Molina’s assertion that titles of slavery needed to be “luce clarior”.61 Yet it was precisely through this selective agreement with the two Jesuits that Moirans ultimately rejected the opinions of each. “Because liberty is by natural law, and every single human being is in possession of their liberty”, he maintained, “it is impossible to deprive them of their freedom unless there is a justified and verified title of slavery”.62 Therefore, Moirans concluded, “all Angolans are unjustly slaves […] just like the rest of the Blacks”.63
2.2 Possession, Probability, and Human Freedom
The claim that just titles of slavery left no scope for speculation was one of the central contentions of Moirans’s treatise, and a direct attack on the probabilistic reasoning of Molina and all those writing in his vein. Throughout the Servi liberi, Moirans repeatedly underscored that “probability favors manumission rather than slavery”, as Fernando Rodrigues Montes D’Oca has aptly put it.64
Where Iberian imperial theorists had focused, almost exclusively, on the validity of the master’s right in the slave, Moirans introduced a novel perspective. He interpreted doubtful cases of enslavement as a conflict between two competing claims to the same thing: a human being’s liberty. Unlike disputes between a possessor and a true owner of a mule, however, the contest between master and slave was framed by two different, hierarchically ordered systems of law. For Moirans, the two claims therefore differed in quality: “the possession that is by natural law prevails over the possession that someone has by the title of purchase, even if the doubt is equal, because the condition of the possessor by natural law is better than the title of purchase”.65 Human freedom was rooted in natural law, and in cases of doubt, Moirans insisted, the slave’s right to freedom would always trump the master’s claim to ownership, which rested on the law of nations.
For Moirans, the idea that enslaved Africans could be justly owned in good faith was untenable for another reason. As he remarked, “it is astonishing what Molina says: although he seems persuaded that the majority of slaves from these places were unjustly subjected to slavery, he is not persuaded that this applies to all of them, and therefore he is not persuaded that it applies to any single slave at all”.66 In Moirans’s estimation, Molina had thereby succeeded in “bringing together a contradiction that not even God could unite”.67
This shift in focus from the rights of slaveholders to the rights of the enslaved also brought Moirans into disagreement with yet another theologian from the University of Évora; Molina’s disciple Fernão Rebello. According to this Portuguese Jesuit, merchants could licitly acquire African slaves “if they followed the royal ordinances on the examination of the titles of slavery”.68 For Moirans, this was sheer hypocrisy. Since these captives had been purchased with the intention of shipping them across the Atlantic, he maintained, this trade was “worthy of damnation and illicit even if the royal ordinances have been kept”.69 Experience had shown that on the transatlantic slave ships Africans were exposed to “the most certain danger of death”—and because nobody had the right to impose such grave conditions on others, Moirans concluded, “this trade is illicit”.70 Emphasizing the principle that no one may endanger the physical and spiritual well-being of others, Moirans imported into the debate on the slave trade an argument that Iberian theologians had previously confined to the governance of slaves within the household. Once again, Moirans sought defeat the Iberian imperial theorists at their own game.
2.3 Moirans contra Avendaño
After his rebuttal of the Jesuits in Iberia, which he had developed through the lens of Diego de Avendaño’s Thesaurus indicus, Moirans finally embarked on his critique of Avendaño himself. The Peruvian professor “fought for truth and justice, but not all the way to the end, and not legitimately”, Moirans bemoaned, “and he swerved in the same way that other fathers of the Society [of Jesus] did”.71
Among Avendaño’s arguments in defense of the slave trade was the claim that “some doctors” justified African slavery even if it was “in a certain way illogical if measured against their own teaching”.72 He also maintained that Atlantic slavery was supported by the Castilian monarch and by ecclesiastical officials in the Indies.73 Above all, however, the colonial intellectual fused an argument about the ostensible inferiority of Black Africans with a claim about their indispensability to the Spanish empire in the Americas: “these slaves are so necessary for the Indies that without them”, Avendaño argued, “this commonwealth could not remain. Thus, because they are the vilest among humans, one can waive a certain requirement of the ius gentium”.74 Since these people “seem to be born to serve”, he went on, all those who held Africans as slaves “should be content with a minor title”.75 This reasoning would later be echoed by the Council of the Indies in its letter to Charles II.76
In the same way that colonial thinkers had previously legitimated practices of Indigenous labor coercion, Avendaño invoked arguments of natural slavery and imperial expediency to justify the commerce in enslaved Africans. There was, however, a crucial difference between these two contexts. Unlike the Indigenous peoples, enslaved Black Africans were forcibly dragged into the colonial body politic from outside. If the case for forced Native labor rested on the idea of an unequal, composite commonwealth, Avendaño’s argument for the slave trade was grounded on the notion of a fundamentally unequal world. In Avendaño’s vision of global power dynamics, the purportedly natural subservience of some licensed their quasi-lawless subjugation by agents from another commonwealth. This was precisely the kind of natural slavery qua chattel slavery that Francisco de Vitoria had vehemently repudiated in his De indis.
Epifanio de Moirans responded forcefully to these claims. Black Africans, he insisted, were human beings and therefore free by nature. Their servitude, far from being natural, resulted from the “greed and injustice of the Europeans”.77 Moirans acknowledged that many enslaved Africans were “dulled by intolerable labor”, but he added that even more “surpassed their masters in wisdom and prudence”.78 In so arguing, he subverted Avendaño’s appeal to the Aristotelian theory of natural slavery: the unjustly enslaved were, in fact, better suited to command the “crude” and “foolish” Spanish slaveholders.79
Moirans went even further, comparing Avendaño’s justification of African slavery to the unjust subjugation of the Hebrews in biblical Egypt. He reminded his readers that the outcome for the Egyptians had been disastrous: instead of preserving their commonwealth, “they all died, and God struck them with terrible plagues.”80 Moirans warned that the Spanish oppressors of Black Africans faced a similar reckoning: “Let the Christians therefore fear the plagues of the Egyptians, for God is very angry!”81
3 The Reinvention of Biblical Slavery
By the time Epifanio de Moirans was writing, Iberian justifications for the transatlantic slave trade were still largely based on the language of natural law and legal titles of enslavement. But an alternative legitimation of slavery that circulated in the 17th-century Iberian Atlantic rested on a story from the Bible. According to some, the skin color of sub-Saharan Africans was a sign of their eternal damnation by God and their predestined lives as slaves. This view of Blackness rested on the claim that Noah’s curse of his son Ham in the Book of Genesis provided a divine foundation for the enslavement of Black Africans. Moirans, true to his polemical style, forcefully countered this reasoning. For him, the Book of Genesis testified to the divinely ordained freedom of Africans—and not to Black enslavement.
3.1 The Curse of Ham—or Whom?
The story commonly known as the “curse of Ham” (Genesis 9–10) is inextricably linked not only to the idea of slavery but also to broader discourses of human classification. It formed the starting point for “one of the most influential taxonomies of race” grounded in “the tripartite scheme derived from the story of Noah and his three sons”.82 In the most basic but historically influential reading, Shem was regarded as the ancestor of the Hebrews, Japhet of the Europeans, and Ham of the peoples dwelling in Africa.83
In Genesis 9, Ham enters Noah’s tent and sees his drunken father naked. He then informs his brothers, who enter their father’s tent, but avert their eyes to avoid witnessing Noah’s nudity. When Noah learns of Ham’s transgression, he curses Ham’s son Canaan, and not Ham himself, condemning him to be a servus servorum, a “slave of slaves”.84 The genealogical account of Noah’s descendants that follows in Genesis 10, however, does not offer a textual foundation linking Canaan to Blackness or slavery. In fact, it is Cush, another of Ham’s sons, who is said to inhabit the African lands of Ethiopia.85 Complicating matters further, Cush’s son Nimrod is later situated in Assyria.86 As Colin Kidd observes, the Bible itself is “colour-blind” and “tells us very little about the racial appearance of the figures and groups who feature within it”.87
Thus, the Bible neither explains how Noah’s curse affected Ham’s descendants, nor ties it to a specific geographic or racial lineage.88 The so-called biblical justification for Black African slavery, therefore, was not rooted in the text itself but in the readers’ interpretations. The centrality of descent in the Book of Genesis and its simultaneous “silence on matters of race” created a fertile ground for a plethora of interpretations of “racial meanings”, stretching from antiquity to the modern era.89
A particularly salient theme is the long and complex history of (mis)identifying Ham as the subject of Noah’s curse. The roots of this narrative can be traced to late antiquity and the medieval period.90 Yet the rigid and fixed association of Ham with Africa, which later served as a justification for African slavery, has a significantly shorter history. As the historian Benjamin Braude notes, “much of what has been assumed to be medieval and well established turns out to be, in many respects, novel and modern.”91 By studying widely circulating texts like Mandeville’s Travels or Hartmann Schedel’s Weltchronik, also known as the Nuremberg Chronicle, Braude reveals the enormous variability—and vagueness—that characterized medieval understandings of Noah’s offspring.92 In part, this variability stemmed from the limited availability of biblical texts, mainly in fragments, and in a non-standardized form before the advent of print.93 Ham was sometimes associated with Asia, and when portrayed as African, he was conventionally depicted as light-skinned.94 The “medieval whiteness of Ham and most of his offspring” reflected the European imagination of Africa as a familiar Mediterranean space that was home to such Christian figures as Saint Augustine.95
According to Braude, the process of casting Ham as the forefather of Black Africans only began to take definitive shape with the Portuguese ventures in Western Africa. From the 15th century onward, European encounters with sub-Saharan Africans sparked polemical debates about their origin.96 In some instances, scribes copying existing texts such as Mandeville’s Travels altered the traditional allocation of the world’s regions to Noah’s sons in light of these emerging debates—transforming a formerly Asian Ham into an Africanized figure.97 In Gomes Eanes de Zurara’s chronicles of the Portuguese ventures in Africa, we find an early manifestation of an express link between Noah’s curse and the justification of Black slavery. Writing in the mid-15th century, Zurara claimed that the enslavement of sub-Saharan Africans was “in accordance with ancient custom, which I believe to have been because of the curse which, after the Deluge, Noah laid upon his son Cain [in fact: Cham], cursing him in this way”.98
3.2 Biblical Slavery in the Spanish Empire
For Iberian imperial theorists, the idea of biblical slavery was inconceivable. They universally agreed that slavery originated from the ius gentium—the law of nations—rather than from any individual curse. Not surprisingly then, this was rejected by one Iberian theologian who had explicitly engaged with the story of Genesis 9. In his Commentaries and Disputations on Justice, Miguel Bartolomé Salón bluntly noted that only “heretics” claimed that slavery was introduced by divine law.99
By the 17th century, however, visions of biblical slavery had also begun to attract the attention of intellectuals in the Spanish empire. The most notable of these was the Jesuit theologian Alonso de Sandoval (1577–1652).100 Born in Castile, Sandoval spent most of his life in the Americas. He studied at the College of San Pablo in Lima and later became the head of the Jesuit College in Cartagena, where he resided from 1624 until his death. Thousands of enslaved Africans passed through the port of Cartagena during this period, leaving a deep imprint on Sandoval’s intellectual work. The Latin title of his vernacular treatise De instauranda Aethiopum salute (1627/47) was a tribute to the De procuranda indorum salute of his Jesuit predecessor Acosta.101 Just as Acosta had been concerned with the salvation of the “indios”, Sandoval was preoccupied with the salvation of the “Aethiopians”. Since they had once been Christians, he referred to the restoration of their salvation. In this sense, Sandoval situated his project in the larger context of sacred history.102
Despite advocating for the re-Christianization of Africans, however, Sandoval advanced a remarkable interpretation of biblical slavery. Drawing on the church fathers, he argued that the true subject of Noah’s curse was Ham, who, along with “all his offspring”, was condemned to slavery.103 Moreover, Sandoval explicitly associated Ham’s lineage with sub-Saharan Africa. The blackness of the skin of the “Etiopes”, he wrote, was both a consequence of “the curse that Noah placed upon his son Ham” and “an innate and intrinsic quality with which God created Ham […] so that the sons he would engender appeared with this soot and as a marker of their descent from a man that had ridiculed his father, as a punishment for his insolence”.104 For Sandoval, therefore, the enslavement of Black Africans was ultimately sanctioned by divine will, even though he similarly acknowledged that slavery must proceed only under just titles, in the manner “eruditely” explained by “our doctor Molina in the first volume of De iustitia et iure”.105
3.3 The Foundation of African Liberty
When Epifanio de Moirans revisited the question of biblical slavery, he did not explicitly mention Sandoval—or any other contemporary theologian. Yet his verdict was crystal clear: those who invoked the curse of Ham to justify Black African slavery were “mad with their own greed” because the one who had been cursed was not Ham “but his son”.106 It was Canaan and his progeny who were enslaved, and, as Moirans argued, “there is nobody who would not see the difference between the peoples of Canaan and Black Africans”, because “the Blacks were never slaves of the sons of Israel—those were rather the Canaanites and all the nations of Palestine—and they neither descend from the Canaanites”.107 He supported this claim by pointing to the geographic distinction between Canaanites and Africans: the former lived “in Palestine in Asia” whereas the latter “possess the West of Africa”.108 Moirans thus repudiated yet another contemporary justification for the transatlantic slave trade.
But he did not stop there. If Christians had assumed the place of the Hebrews and inherited from them the power over the sons of Canaan, as was commonly accepted, then this also included sub-Saharan Africans. For they too “belonged to the peoples who received the gospel”, Moirans underscored with reference to the conversion of the “Aethiopeans” in the Book of Psalms.109 Although he did not use the notion of “Aethiopean” as a synonym for all Black Africans, he situated the peoples of West Africa within the lineage of biblical Ethiopia. The consequences of this move were far-reaching, as Moirans went on to explain:
[…] if anybody concludes with reason, he will conclude that the Blacks should hold the Canaanites as slaves, and they should all be free by divine positive law and be masters of the Canaanites. Therefore, those who deprive them of this right sin against divine positive law, and those who hold them as slaves sin against divine natural law.110
The inclusion of sub-Saharan Africans into the community of Christ thus protected them from slavery on multiple grounds. As Moirans argued, “Black Christians” were free by natural law “in their capacity as human beings”, and they had an additional claim to freedom by divine law “in their capacity as Christians”. Therefore, to enslave them constituted a “twofold violation of right”.111
With this polemical re-reading of sacred history, Moirans laid the foundation not only for Black Africans’ freedom but also for their God-given authority over others. Just as the enslavement of those who “sinned” against the Hebrews had been divinely ordained, he argued, so did Christians have the right “to take those as slaves who sin against the church and who are enemies of the church’s sons, like the Turks and Moors, and all the Mohammedan enemies of the church”.112 But Moirans insisted “the Blacks” could not be counted among them, for “on the contrary, many are Christians”.113 In so arguing, Moirans echoed the arguments of enslaved Africans who fought for their freedom in Iberian courts in the 16th and 17th centuries, insisting that they had always been Christians and therefore illegally enslaved.114 But Moirans went further, insisting that the peoples dwelling in West Africa were destined to be free, destined to be Christians, and ultimately destined to join the “holy wars” against the Muslims. Moirans’s narrative of African liberty was part and parcel of a broader story of salvation that was inextricably linked to anti-Islamic sentiment and action.
The by-product of Moirans’s vigorous intervention was thus a vindication of the kind of slavery whose ideological origins date back to the European Middle Ages. In the Servi liberi, the nexus between slavery and the faith was even stronger than in the writings of the Iberian imperial theorists. Although Moirans condemned the treatment of enslaved Black Africans in the New World as animals rather than humans, his primary objection was not so much to the real inhumanity of slavery. Rather, he took issue with the fundamental incompatibility between life as a slave and life as a Christian.115 Early in his treatise, Moirans lamented that female slaves in colonial households had been subjected to abuse by their masters, compelled to reproduce servile offspring, and coerced into sexual relations without the right of matrimony.116 Plantation life was even harsher, prompting Moirans to urge enslaved Africans to escape from such places “where they were neither taught and instructed in the faith and customs nor were able to live in a Christian way”.117 Whereas the Iberian imperial theorists had previously prohibited the enslavement of fellow believers, Moirans considered this restriction insufficient. In his view, slavery and salvation were so fundamentally opposed that the ban of enslavement had to necessarily also extend to all Christians in spe. But at the same time, Moirans mounted a spirited defense of enslaving Ottomans, Maghrebians, and all other Muslim “enemies of the church”.
Charles II of Spain, “Decreto de Carlos II a Vicente Gonzaga, Gobernador del Consejo de Indias, Madrid, 5 julio 1685”, in Jaca, Resolución sobre la libertad de los negros, ed. Pena González, 339: “El Consejo de Indias me informará luego de qué conveniencia son los negros en la América y qué daños seguirían de no haberlos […] a fin de reconocer si es lícito comprarlos por esclavos […] si hay autores que hayan escrito sobre este particular, quiénes son”.
Council of the Indies (Consejo de Indias), “Oficio del Consejo de Indias a Carlos II, Madrid, 21 agosto 1685”, ed. Pena González, 350–351: “porque los indios han faltado […] siguese necesariamente que si se prohibiese la continuación de conducirlos, cesaria el alimento preciso para todo: el común reino, las haciendas, que principalmente consisten en la caudal de los esclavos negros, se perderian exponiéndose la América a una total ruina”.
Council of the Indies (Consejo de Indias), “Oficio del Consejo de Indias a Carlos II, Madrid, 21 agosto 1685”, ed. Pena González, 352–353: “También hay quien hace distinción de los mercaderes que van a comprar, al tercero que compra después de conducidos con buena fe y de segunda mano, dando por licita la retención en este caso, como es el Tomás Sánchez, y el Molina”.
Council of the Indies (Consejo de Indias), “Oficio del Consejo de Indias a Carlos II, Madrid, 21 agosto 1685”, ed. Pena González, 353: “y siendo este género de gente nacida como lo dicen muchos para servir, no se ha de discurrir por las estrechas disposiciones del derecho de gentes que se discurre, respecto de otros gentíos, siendo para los compradores título bastante el que no fuere totalmente inverosímil, y siendo necesario con tanta precisión para conservarse aquella república, que sin ellos no se puede mantener”.
Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World, 226.
Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World, 228.
Council of the Indies (Consejo de Indias), “Oficio del Consejo de Indias a Carlos II, Madrid, 21 agosto 1685”, 351: “Y se arriesga tanto en discurrir este punto […] por que dos Capuchinos predicaron en La Habana queriendo persuadir que no era licita la esclavitud de los negros, fue tanta la inquietud que causó a los naturales que se originó una conmoción tan grande que se temió una sublevación de aquel reino”.
I will be citing from the only critical edition of Moirans’s treatise that is currently available: Moirans, Servi liberi, ed. Pena González et al.
See López García’s Dos defensores de los esclavos negros. We shall return to the relationship between Morians and Jaca, and their writings, below.
On this point, see also Lauren Benton and Lisa Ford’s insitence that the making of imperial legal discourses was not limited to “the tomes of jurists” or “written charters and constitutions” (Rage for Order, 3).
Weller, “Humanitarianism before Humanitarianism?”, 159. For a comparison between the two treatises by Moirans and Jaca, see Weller, “Humanitarianism before Humanitarianism?”, 158–166. For a critical edition of Jaca’s treatise, which was completed in 1681, see Jaca, Resolución sobre la libertad de los negros, ed. Pena González.
Pena González, “Estudio preliminar”, xliii: “El Servi liberi, de Epifanio de Moirans, se encuentra en perfecta sintonía con los tratados de Iustitia et iure elaborados a lo largo de todo el siglo XVI y XVII”.
López García, Dos defensores de los esclavos negros, 28. On Las Casas’s shifting account of the African slave trade, see Clayton, “Bartolomé de las Casas and the African Slave Trade”.
Montes D’Oca, “Two Capuchin Friars in Defense of African Slaves’ Liberty”, 93.
Noggler, “Die Kapuziner”, 356: “Ihr Ziel [i.e., Moirans and Jaca’s] ist es, mit ihren Schriften jegliche Sklaverei theologisch, moralisch und juristisch abzulehnen”.
Obregón, “Spanish Colonial Critiques of Enslavement”, 58.
Weller, “Humanitarianism before Humanitarianism?”, 167.
Biographical information on Moirans is from Pena González, “Estudio preliminar”, xvii–xxxi.
On the history and purpose of the Propaganda Fide, see Noggler, “Die Kapuziner”, 351–354.
The next couple of paragraphs draw on Pena González, “Estudio preliminar”, xix–xxxi. The episode is also recounted by Moirans himself, less comprehensively though, in the prologue of his Servi liberi, ed. Pena González et al., 1–16.
Pena González, “Estudio preliminar”, xxix: “De esta manera, Propaganda no declara nulo el proceso llevado a cabo en La Habana contra los dos religiosos, aunque tampoco afirma que éste fuera correcto, dejando la cuestión en el aire y, zanjándola sin una conclusión precisa”.
See Gray, “The Papacy and the Atlantic Slave Trade”, 52–59; and Rowe, Black Saints in Early Modern Global Catholicism, 101–105. Against Gray, the historian José Ligna Nafafé recently argued that Mendonça went a decisive step further than that: “Mendonça’s intention was to end the institution of slavery entirely—his was a demand for justice and an advocacy of human rights”. Yet he does not offer documentary evidence to sustain this claim. See Lingna Nafafé, Lourenço da Silva Mendonça, 409. See also the discussion in Allemann, “Review of José Lingna Nafafé”.
A translation and discussion of the petition is available in Pena González, “Estudio preliminar”, xxxiv–xxxvii. See also the discussions in Gray, “The Papacy and the Atlantic Slave Trade”, 61–63; and Weller, “Humanitarianism before Humanitarianism?”, 165–166.
Gray, “The Papacy and the Atlantic Slave Trade”, 65.
Gray, “The Papacy and the Atlantic Slave Trade”, 66.
Moirans, Servi liberi, ed. Pena González et al., argumentum libri, concl. 1–3, 4.
Moirans, Servi liberi, ed. Pena González et al., argumentum libri, concl. 4, 4.
Moirans, Servi liberi, ed. Pena González et al., argumentum libri, concl. 5, 4: “captivique et servi fient christiani”.
Moirans, Servi liberi, ed. Pena González et al., cap. 11, no. 118, 178: “omne argentum et aurum deportant nationes asportantes nigros. Nigri statim moriuntur, ut plurimum, et pretium solutum, quod est magnum, est perditum. […] dico quod hoc fit a Domino, iusto Dei iudicio, quo hodie Indiae cadunt in profectum aliarum nationum; sed, quod doleo, praesertim haereticorum anglorum et batavorum”.
Moirans, Servi liberi, ed. Pena González et al., cap. 11, no. 118, 178: “Unde dico hodie quod hispani servi sunt aliarum nationum”.
Moirans, Servi liberi, ed. Pena González et al., prologue, 14: “Vae ergo europaeis, quia caeci sunt cupiditate. Ut ergo videant, aut saltem lumen habeant ad videndum, iustam libertatis naturalis mancipiorum ex Africa aggrediar defensionem […] iniuriam remedium putans indicare, destructionem regnorum christianorum, captivitatemque catholicorum et ecclesiasticorum cupiens evitare”.
Moirans, Servi liberi, ed. Pena González et al., cap. 1, no. 1, 18: “Catholici in omni iure et contra omnia iura committentes quantum ad mancipia, errant in principio, dum captivant eos aut emunt et asportant ad Americam, et centies aberrant in fine, dum educant eos ut bestias et utuntur veluti mulis”.
Moirans, Servi liberi, ed. Pena González et al., cap. 1, no. 20, 34: “Bonam conclusionem faciebant in principiis malis et sollogysmo [sic] male concludente”.
Moirans, Servi liberi, ed. Pena González et al., cap. 1, no. 24, 36: “Sed a fine principium, a fine errorum redeamus ad principium veritatis, a fine iniuriam ad principium iuris naturalis, et a fine terrae captivitatis mancipiorum ad principium patrii soli, ut procedamus secundum principia iuris naturalis, divini positivi, gentium, canonici et civilis”.
Moirans, Servi liberi, ed. Pena González et al., cap. 2, no. 29, 42: “filii parentum qui peccatis suis iuste servi facti sunt potestate publica, nascuntur servi […] Unde dicitur: Partus sequitur ventrem”.
Moirans, Servi liberi, ed. Pena González et al., cap. 2, no. 31, 44: “in Promontorio Viridi, in Guinea, nec vivunt politice nec reges habent dominantes eis, sed unusquisque sui iuris est, sicuti indi, et vivunt sine regimine publico aut politico”.
Moirans referred to Mercado in the very context of this discussion: see Moirans, Servi liberi, ed. Pena González et al., cap. 2, no. 32, 44–46. For Moirans’s explicit engagement with Palacio, see e.g., Moirans, Servi liberi, ed. Pena González et al., cap. 7, no. 81, 120–122.
See Mercado, Suma, ed. Sánchez-Albornoz, lib. II, cap. 21, § 4–5; and Palacio, Praxis theologica, lib. II, cap. 8, 153.
Moirans, Servi liberi, ed. Pena González et al., cap. 5, no. 58, 82: “in nigris Guineae, Promontorii Viridis […] nec habent ius civile aut quiritium, nec reges, nec iudices […] vindicant se omnes privata authoritas, et nemo est qui iustitiam administret”.
Moirans, Servi liberi, ed. Pena González et al., cap. 2, no. 31, 44: “qui praevalet et fortior est rapit alium et sibi vendicat in servum”.
Moirans, Servi liberi, ed. Pena González et al., cap. 2, no. 31, 4.
Moirans, Servi liberi, ed. Pena González et al., cap. 2, no. 35, 50.
Moirans, Servi liberi, ed. Pena González et al., cap. 4, no. 52–53, 72–74: “Igitur inter illos non potest esse iustum bellum; sed qui fortior est illorum, et prevalet, capit sibi quos potest […] et omnium malorum istorum in causa sunt negotiatores et mercatores, qui emunt nigros”.
Moirans, Servi liberi, ed. Pena González et al., cap. 5, no. 61, 88. We shall return to this point in the next section.
Moirans, Servi liberi, ed. Pena González et al., cap. 5, no. 55, 78: “christiani […] quando possunt furantur et rapiunt nigros, nullam aliam habentes nisi ipsos esse nigros et debere servos, quasi vero non essent homines, sed pecudes, ut canes et bestiae”.
Moirans, Servi liberi, ed. Pena González et al., cap. 5, no. 57, 80: “Cum autem a Domino sit poena talionis et oculum pro oculo […] iam videmus lusitanos fieri mancipia maurorum Africae, et in tantum ut communiter vocentur gallinae maris quas accipitres turcae sibi rapiunt, quot naves rapuerunt pyratae maurorum”.
This is also noted in Montes D’Oca, “Two Capuchin Friars”, 98–99.
Moirans, Servi liberi, ed. Pena González et al., cap. 6, no. 72, 106: “Sed a fundamentis doctrinam reiiciamus. Dico falsum esse in gravi necessitate posse patrem filium vendere, aut seipsum […] in sola extrema necessitate ad evitandam mortem naturalem licebit”.
Moirans, Servi liberi, ed. Pena González et al., cap. 5, no. 59, 84: “non possent christiani emere filios, nam patri posito in extrema necessitate tenerentur sucurrere. […] Iniusta ergo esset emptio filii a christianis, cum tenerentur gratis et charitate ministrare necessaria posito in extrema necessitate”.
Avendaño, Thesaurus indicus, tit. IX, cap. 12, § 8, no. 180–199, 324–329.
Avendaño, Thesaurus indicus, tit. IX, cap. 12, § 8, no. 203, 329–330: “negotiatio dicta secundum maiorem parte mancipiorum, qui in illis partibus emuntur, est illicita, iniusta, et cum onere restitutionis”.
Avendaño, Thesaurus indicus, tit. IX, cap. 12, § 8, no. 203, 330: “Mancipiorum copiam a mercatoribus, qui ea ex Africae regionibus asportant, non est licitum emere in Indiis, et Europa. […] neque unum aut alterum mancipium licet emere ex eisdem stante suspicione, ob fundamenta dicta”.
Avendaño, Thesaurus indicus, tit. IX, cap. 12, § 8, no. 204, 330: “Emptio dicta in Indiis, et Europa iustificari potest aliqualiter”. This is also noted by Francisco Cuena Boy, who offers a compelling account of Avendaño’s views on the legitimacy of the trade in enslaved Black Africans and his engagement with Iberian theorists who had previously addressed the issue. See Cuena Boy, De servitue, 209–237.
Moirans, Servi liberi, ed. Pena González et al., cap. 10, no. 110, 164: “Sibi ergo contradicit declinando, sicut et caeteri, quia omnes declinaverunt”. See also Moirans, Servi liberi, ed. Pena González et al., cap. 11, no. 113, 170: “Cum autem dicat illos doctores favere hic iniustae negotiationi, siquidem probavit superius nullo modo favere, ergo sibi ipso contradicit. Sicut et caeteri”.
Moirans, Servi liberi, ed. Pena González et al., cap. 8, no. 84, 126: “Sed certe, ut dubitari de iustitia possit, dubitatio ipsius patris [i.e., Molina] facit”. Moirans here cited verbatim from Avendaño, Thesaurus indicus, tit. IX, cap. 12, § 8, no. 190, 326.
Molina, DIEI, vol. 1, tr. II, disp. 34, no. 9, col. 171: “expeditionem a Rege Sebastiano ad iniuriam […] vindicandam obtinuit. Neque parum ad eam comparandum ad contulit fama […] esse in regno argenti fodinas non paucas”. As Toby Green argues in his new economic history of early modern Africa, the myth of gold in Angola was a persistent and crucial motivation for Portuguese expeditions. See Green, A Fistful of Shells, 225.
Moirans, Servi liberi, ed. Pena González et al., cap. 8, no. 84, 126: “de avaritia esse satis fundata suspicio poterat, quando bellum illud non tantum ob vindicandas iniurias, sed propter argenti fodinas, quae in eo tractu esse fama vulgaverat, potius agebatur”. Moirans here cited verbatim from Avendaño, Thesaurus indicus, tit. IX, cap. 12, § 8, no. 190, 326.
Molina, DIEI, vol. 1, tr. II, disp. 35, no. 19, col. 192: “neque aliter servitutis cuiusque illorum est permittenda, quam si luce clarius eam iustam esse constet”.
Moirans, Servi liberi, ed. Pena González et al., cap. 8, no. 85, 128: “si titulus luce clarior ad servitutem permittendam requiritur, bello capti angolani non poterunt in servitutem redigi, quia iustitia illius belli non est luce clarior, ut numero praecedenti dicebamus”. Moirans here cited verbatim from Avendaño, Thesaurus indicus, tit. IX, cap. 12, § 8, no. 191, 327.
Moirnans, Servi liberi, cap. 8, no. 85: “Tuta enim consciencia potest probabilis sententia teneri circa titulum huiusmodi, sicut circa alia et de bello est satis communis sententia inter recentiores”. Moirans here cited verbatim from Avendaño, Thesaurus indicus, tit. IX, cap. 12, § 8, no. 191, 326–327.
Moirans, Servi liberi, ed. Pena González et al., cap. 8, no. 88, 134.
Moirans, Servi liberi, ed. Pena González et al., cap. 8, no. 88, 134: “Nam cum libertas sit de iure naturali, et quilibet homo sit in possessione suae libertatis, non potest privari illa nisi iustificato et verificato titulo iustae servitutis”.
Moirans, Servi liberi, ed. Pena González et al., cap. 8, no. 88, 134: “Unde cum non constet de iustitia belli, omnes angolani iniuste servi sunt […] sicuti et caeteris nigris”.
Montes D’Oca, “Two Capuchin Friars”, 107. On probabilism in early modern Catholic moral theology more generally, see Schüssler, The Debate on Probale Opinions.
Moirans, Servi liberi, ed. Pena González et al., cap. 7, no. 80, 120: “possessio quae est de iure naturali praevalet possessioni quam habuit titulo emptionis, etiam si dubium sit aequale, quia melior conditio possidentis de iure naturae quam titulo emptionis”.
Moirans, Servi liberi, ed. Pena González et al., cap. 8, no. 91, 140: “Sed admirabile est quod dicit Molina: Licet persuadere videantur plurima mancipia ex illis locis iniuste servituti subiecta, non tamen persuadent omnia, ac proinde de nullo in singulari persuadent”.
Moirans, Servi liberi, ed. Pena González et al., cap. 8, no. 91, 140: “Potens ergo Molina iungere contradictionem quam Deus non potest facere”.
Moirans, Servi liberi, ed. Pena González et al., cap. 9, no. 92, 142, original emphasis: “Cum aliis societatis nostrae magistris affirmat [i.e., Rebello] negotiationem esse licitam si mercatores ordinationes regias servent de examine circa titulum servitutis faciendo”. Moirans here cited verbatim from Avendaño, Thesaurus Indicus, tit. IX, cap. 12, § 8, no. 195, 328. For the original passage in Rebello, see his Opus de obligationibus iustitiae, pars 1, lib. I, q. 10, sect. 1, no. 4: “Non videtur regulariter illicitum emere Aethiopes […] ubi forma examinandi titulum servitutis eorum a regibus Lusitanis tradita est, eaque observari praesumitur”.
Moirans, Servi liberi, ed. Pena González et al., cap. 9, no. 97, 148: “Negotiatio autem principalis est ad asportanda mancipia ad alias regiones instituta, ergo damnabilis et illicita, etiam servatis regiis ordinationibus”.
Moirans, Servi liberi, ed. Pena González et al., cap. 9, no. 97, 148: “miseros istos certissime mortis periculo in navigationibus exponi, ut quotidianis experimentis constat. Non licet autem exponere certissimo mortis periculo homines, ergo illicita negotiatio”.
Moirans, Servi liberi, ed. Pena González et al., cap. 10, no. 111, 166: “Pugnavit ergo pro veritate et iustitia, sed non usque ad finem, nec certavit legitime. Quapropter, sicut et alii Societatis Patres, declinavit”.
Avendaño, Thesaurus Indicus, tit. IX, cap. 12, § 8, no. 204, 330: “doctores aliqui, licet eorum quidam inconsequenter ad suam ipsorum doctrinam, eam non esse aperte damnabilem affirmant, immo et illi favent, ut Molina, Rebellus […] Fagundez”.
Avendaño, Thesaurus Indicus, tit. IX, cap. 12, § 8, no. 204, 330. For Moirans’s s critique, see his Servi liberi, cap. 12, no. 115–116.
Avendaño, Thesaurus Indicus, tit. IX, cap. 12, § 8, no. 204, 330: “quia pro Indiis adeo sunt necessarii, ut sine illis stare Respublica ista nequeat. Cum ergo vilissimi isti inter homines sint, dispensari cum aliquo requisito iuris gentium potest”.
Avendaño, Thesaurus Indicus, tit. IX, cap. 12, § 8, no. 204, 330: “quia cum mancipia ista videantur ad serviendum nata, ut multi expendunt, non videtur circa illa eodem, quo circa alios, exactissimo iure agendum, sed minore titulo […] emptores debere esse contentos”.
Council of the Indies (Consejo de Indias), “Oficio del Consejo de Indias a Carlos II, Madrid, 21 agosto, 1685”, 353.
Moirans, Servi liberi, ed. Pena González et al., cap. 12, no. 117, 176: “respondeo haec mancipia homines esse, ergo de iure naturae liberi […] Unde non sunt nati ad serviendum, sed factum hoc est cupiditate europaeorum et iniquitate”.
Moirans, Servi liberi, ed. Pena González et al., cap. 12, no. 117, 176: “quantum ad ingenii vigorem, prae labore incomportabili hebetantur plurimi, sed quamplurimi praecellunt in sapientia et prudentia dominos”.
Moirans, Servi liberi, ed. Pena González et al., cap. 12, no. 117, 176: “Et contra ius omne naturale et divinum et lumen ratinonis […] hos nigros servos esse talium rudium et stultorum dominorum, sicut dicitur […] ab Aristotele, ducto lumine rationis: Rudes et stulti naturaliter sunt servi sapientium”.
Moirans, Servi liberi, ed. Pena González et al., cap. 12, no. 118, 178: “Immo hac de causa perierunt omnes et plagis horrendis percussit eos Dominus.”
Moirans, Servi liberi, ed. Pena González et al., cap. 12, no. 118, 178: “Timeant ergo plagas aegipti christiani, quia iratus est Dominus valde!”
Kidd, The Forging of Races, 9.
Kidd, The Forging of Races, 36–37.
Gen 9:21–25.
Ezek. 29:10. The King James Bible here renders the Hebrew “Cush” as “Ethiopia”.
Micah 5:6.
Kidd, The Forging of Races, 3.
Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage, 66.
Kidd, The Forging of Races, 20.
See Goldenberg, The Curse of Ham, chs. 11–12.
Braude, “The Sons of Noah”, 104.
Braude, “The Sons of Noah”, 120 and passim.
Braude, “The Sons of Noah”, 107.
Braude, “The Sons of Noah”, 116–117.
Braude, “The Sons of Noah”, 123.
Braude, “The Sons of Noah”, 127.
Braude, “The Sons of Noah”, 118–119.
Zurara, Chronicle, vol. 1, cap. 16, 54. See the discussion in Goldenberg, The Curse of Ham, 175, which also touches on Zurara’s mistaken mention of Cain rather then Ham.
Salón, Commentariorum in disputationem de iustitia, q. 3, a. 1, 112: “Praeter hos haereticos est opinio cuiusdam glossae in cap. 9 Gen. insinuantis servitutem essse iure divino introductae”. This is also noted in Andrés-Gallego and García Añoveros, La iglesia y la esclavitud de los negros, 61.
Biographical information on Sandoval is from von Germeten, “Introduction”.
While the title De instauranda is the title of the second edition of 1647, I follow the established scholarly convention of using this name for references to the earlier 1627 edition as well. In what follows, I will be drawing on the first edition: Sandoval, Naturaleza. The second edition was published as Sandoval, Tomo primero De instauranda Aethiopum salute. For an excellent overview of salient differences between the two editions, see Restrepo, “De instauranda Aethiopum salute”.
On this point, see von Germeten, “Introduction”, xii.
Sandoval, Naturaleza, lib. I, cap. 2, 14v: “por aver maldecido Noe a su hijo Cham […] y aun costandole quedar por esclavo el y toda su generacion, de los hermanos, que fue segun los santos Augustino, Chrisostomo, y Ambrosio, la primera servidumbre que se introduxo en el mundo”. On Augustine, Ambrose, and Chrysostmo’s accounts of Noah’s curse, see Goldenberg, The Curse of Ham, 158–159.
Sandoval, Naturaleza, lib. I, cap. 2, 14r: “la tez negra en los Etiopes, no provino tan solamente de la maldicion que Noé echó a su hijo Cham (como veremos adelante) sino tambien de una calidad innata, e intrinseca, con que le crió Dios […] para que los hijos que engendrasse, saliessen con esse tizne, y como marca, de que descendian de un hombre, qu se avia burlado de su padre, en pena de su atrevimiento”.
Sandoval, Naturaleza, lib. I, cap. 17, 65r: “con todo me he determinado a tratarlo, dexando la determinacion de su justificacion a los Dotores, que tan doctamente han escrito cerca deste punto, principalmente a nuestro Dotor Molina en el tomo I. de iustitia, & iure”. On Sandoval’s justification of Black slavery, see also Hofmeister Pich, “Alonso de Sandoval S.J. (1576/1577–1652) and the Ideology of Black Slavery”; and Ireton, “L’imaginaire éthiopien dans le premier monde hispanique”.
Moirans, Servi liberi, ed. Pena González et al., cap. 3, no. 41, 58: “dico ipsos allucinatos esse cupiditate sua, quia dato es ultra concesso quod nigri sint ex progenie Cham, quod tamen non fateor, dico quod non fuit maledictus et factus servus, sed Chanaan filius eius”.
Moirans, Servi liberi, ed. Pena González et al., cap. 3, no. 41, 60: “Quid intersit autem inter populos chananeorum [sic] et nigros Africae nemo est qui non videat, cum nigri non fuerint unquam servi filiorum Israel, sed chananaei et cunctae nationes Palaestinae, nec sint de genere chananaeorum”.
Moirans, Servi liberi, ed. Pena González et al., cap. 3, no. 41, 60: “Chananaei habitabant Palaestinam in Asia, et nigri occidentem tenent in Africa”.
Moirans, Servi liberi, ed. Pena González et al., cap. 3, no. 41, 60: “Ad id quod dicitur christianos obtinuisse locum israelitarum dico, retroquendo argumentum: ergo nigri successerunt in hoc ius israelitarum, in filios Chanaan. Patet consequentia, quia nigri sunt ex gentibus, quae receperunt Evangelium, unde dicitur in psalmis: Coram illo procident Aethiopes (Ps 71) […] psalmo 67, exponendo illud: Aethiopia praeveniet manus eius Deo”. Moirans here referred to Ps 71:9 and 67:32 in the Vulgate.
Moirans, Servi liberi, ed. Pena González et al., cap. 3, no. 41, 60: “Igitur, si aliquid concluderet ratio, concluderet nigros debere habere chananaeos in servos, et liberos esse omnes iure positivo divino et dominos chananaeorum. Ergo contra ius divinum positivum peccant qui privant eos hoc iure et in naturale divinum committunt qui tenent eos in mancipia”.
Moirans, Servi liberi, ed. Pena González et al., cap. 3, no. 42, 60–62: “Itaque omnes nigri, christiani nigri non solum ius naturale habent in libertatem suam tanquam homines, sed divinum tanquam christiani. […] nec possunt fieri servi, nisi duplici iniuria, ratione hominis et ratione christiani”.
Moirans, Servi liberi, ed. Pena González et al., cap. 3, no. 43, 62: “Quia cum peccaverint [i.e., the Canaanites] in filios Israel, Dominus, completis iniquitatibus, subiecit eos filios Israel […] Sic et christiani possunt habere in servos qui contra Ecclesiam peccant et hostes sunt filiorum Ecclesiae, sicuti turcae et mauri, omnesque mahumetani hostes Ecclesiae, non vero ex fratribus suis, nec ex gentibus que non sunt hostes eorum communes”.
Moirans, Servi liberi, ed. Pena González et al., cap. 3, no. 43, 62: “Nigri autem nec sunt hostes christianorum, imo plurimi sunt christiani”.
See Ireton, “Black Africans’ Freedom Litigation Suits”. As Karen Graubart has shown, enslaved Africans in late 17th-century Lima made a different argument for emancipation as well, claiming that as American-born subjects they should be considered Natives and therefore had the legal status of free Indigenous subjects. But in contrast to the court cases reconstructed by Ireton, Graubart’s petitioners from Lima were not successful. See Graubart, “Pesa más la libertad”.
See e.g., Moirans, Servi liberi, ed. Pena González et al., cap. 4, no. 56, 78: “Nec enim doctrinam fidei et morum accipiunt, sed accepto baptismo, sine doctrina relinquuntur, uti pecudes”.
Moirans, Servi liberi, ed. Pena González et al., cap. 1, no. 8, 22: “quae remanent domi ancillae […] procreare filios et educare, fructificareque domino, non copulatae coniugio, fructum quoque afferre in peccatis debent omnino”.
Moirans, Servi liberi, ed. Pena González et al., cap. 1, no. 7, 22: “agriculturas, villas, domos campestres, habitationes quas galli vocant sucreries et hispani ingenios, in quibus nec docentur et instruuntur in fide et moribus, sed nec possunt vivere christiane”. Apart from his initial conclusion that slaves on plantations were bound to escape, which we encountered above, this was Moirans’s only other reference to plantation slavery in the Servi liberi.