The preceding chapters have explored a wide range of issues relating to slavery and empire in the writings of early modern Iberian theologians and jurists. This conclusion aims to synthesize select central findings of this study by highlighting a red thread that runs throughout the book: the political and legal logic of protection. Scholars have shown that the language of protection was at the heart of early modern political relations, both as a theoretical principle and a practical strategy. Its flexibility and ambiguity rendered it particularly effective for describing relationships within, between, and across polities. It could serve the interests of the weak and the powerful, and it left room for interpretation regarding who was protecting whom, under what terms, and for whose benefit.1 The study of how protection arranged rights and power in the early modern period has been dubbed “a new way of characterizing the cultural politics of empires”.2 The final pages of this study seek to advance this endeavor by examining several modes of protection that were central to the ways in which Iberian imperial theorists conceptualized and addressed the problem of slavery in the 16th and 17th centuries.
Spanish and Portuguese theologians and jurists, who acted as protectors themselves, assumed the responsibility of offering practical guidance on how to align Catholic morality with realities that often appeared to conflict sharply with this ideal. As the correspondence between the Spanish monarch and the Council of the Indies reveals, the opinions of Iberian imperial theorists were used as guidelines for navigating the moral issues surrounding slavery and empire. Their writings focused on the limits of moral human agency, offering arguments aimed at protecting the souls of those who appeared to be in a state of mortal damnation. Consider Luis de Molina, who maintained that anyone who acquired enslaved Black Africans in good faith was safe in conscience, even if they later began to doubt the legitimacy of enslavement. Another strategy to protect the Christian conscience was to exploit the ambiguous status of slaves as both person and property. As Juan Azor argued, enslaved people abandoned by their careless masters lost their status as members of a domestic community and were treated as ownerless objects that could be seized by anyone. Equally revealing is the case of Juan de Lugo, who argued that the marriage rights of enslaved “infidels” were ultimately irrelevant because the public authority of princes had overridden their individual rights through captivity in warfare.
Early modern Iberians viewed slavery itself as a mode of protection. In “just wars”, enemies could be legitimately enslaved rather than killed. The same rationale applied to civil punishment, with slavery serving as an alternative to the death penalty. In cases of extreme necessity, enslaving oneself or one’s children could effectively save human life, albeit at the expense of human freedom. University theologians, jurists, and missionaries agreed that in a world corrupted by original sin and plagued by wars and inequality, slavery offered protection to those who would otherwise face a legitimate or natural death.
Yet, from an early modern Catholic point of view, slavery remained morally problematic, and all the Iberian imperial theorists invoked charity to prohibit enslavement among Christians. Although the loss of human liberty was permissible in certain situations, it deprived humans of the very faculty that distinguished rational creatures from the rest of creation: the capacity to act according to one’s own will and moral judgment. Accordingly, Spanish and Portuguese thinkers maintained that there could be no enslavement in “just wars” between Christian commonwealths. In their view, the ius gentium—which regulated and licensed slavery in warfare—had been partly abolished among Christians on the grounds of charity. Luis de Molina also made a similar argument regarding voluntary slavery. Charity, he argued, obliged Christians to aid fellow believers in necessity freely, or at least without enslaving them. But the very same virtue also justified the enslavement of non-Christians in need so that they might be converted in the process. In Molina’s logic, charity protected Christians from losing their liberty while saving the souls of “infidels” through legal enslavement. This line of reasoning was later refuted by the French Capuchin missionary Epifanio de Moirans, the most outspoken contemporary critic of the Iberian imperial theorists. He asserted that charity extended not only to those who were already Christians, but also to those destined to convert, namely Black Africans. What united all these thinkers, however, was their shared insistence on the quasi-legal function of charity as a binding moral duty, which was layered on top of strictly juridical considerations and protected (would-be) Christians from slavery.
While the Iberian imperial theorists insisted that there was no enslavement within the Christian commonwealth, membership in that community, and thus protection from slavery, could be precarious. To be sure, enslaved “infidels” who were later Christianized remained in slavery according to Spanish and Portuguese thinkers. But those who joined a Catholic civitas as free subjects could, in their view, no longer be enslaved. This protection extended to such diverse groups as the inhabitants of the Christianized Kingdom of Kongo, Indigenous peoples in the New World—including enslaved Asians who were transported to colonial Mexico and considered free “indios”—and conquered former Muslims in Iberia. Nevertheless, the political status of neophytes in Iberian realms was unstable. As the debates about revolting Moriscos and rebelling Mapuche reveal, it was possible to legitimize the enslavement of vassals on both sides of the Atlantic by casting them as apostate or “infidel” enemies. Some Iberian theorists further complicated the matter by arguing that the baptized children of such rebels were protected from enslavement, since they remained innocent Christians within a hostile commonwealth. The boundary between those within and outside the political community was as tenuous—and consequential—as the line between those within and outside the spiritual community.
Spanish and Portuguese intellectuals also emphasized the rights of enslaved people, placing special importance on the natural right of self-preservation and, by extension, on the right to safeguard the human species through marriage. In their understanding, the natural right of marriage could not be eclipsed by enslavement, which was not a natural condition. Marriage served the basic purpose of procreation, but it also bore political implications, since the spouses were bound by mutual obligations that revolved around the joint administration of their household community. Enslaved people, who were servile subjects of one household, thus had an enforceable right to become heads of another household at the same time. However, if slaveholders came under the pressure of necessity, they too had a natural right of self-preservation: to secure their survival, they were permitted to sell enslaved people without restriction. Self-preservation was thus a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it was the foundation of enslaved people’s rights and protected the integrity of their domestic communities. But on the other hand, self-preservation could also serve the interests of slaveholders by undermining the natural rights of slaves and reducing them to alienable property.
Within the household, enslaved people were also subject to a Janus-faced mode of protection revolving around care and punishment. The Iberian imperial theorists were keen to emphasize that slavery was more than a merely legal relationship. They underscored that, as heads of households, slaveholders had a duty to care for the physical and spiritual well-being of all their domestic subjects, including enslaved people. If masters contravened the good of the enslaved, they could be prosecuted by civil or ecclesiastical authorities. At the same time, however, early modern theologians and jurists defended the legitimacy of branding and imprisoning enslaved persons within Iberian households. In so arguing, they blurred the boundary between domestic discipline and public authority, advocating a vision of slave rule that combined care with coercive power.
A similar duality between protection and subjection is evident in Iberian thinkers’ accounts of the political status of Indigenous vassals in the Americas. So-called “indios” were considered particularly vulnerable subjects and were therefore granted special legal and juridical privileges. But like enslaved people within the household community, Indigenous vassals were also placed at the very bottom of a deeply hierarchical and unequal colonial commonwealth. Iberian intellectuals writing from the New World drew on the Aristotelian idea of natural slavery to support this point: Indigenous vassals, they argued, were unable to lead a fully political life independently and required the guidance of others to govern them. Juan de Matienzo even went so far as to suggest that they were naturally equipped with strong bodies and weak intellects and therefore born to serve. The protection of Indigenous vassals could go hand in hand with a racialized understanding of “indios” as naturally inferior people who were simultaneously included in the community and excluded from the majority society.3
This portrayal of Indigenous subjects amounted to a justification of forced native labor as a necessary contribution to the preservation of the Spanish empire in the Americas. Iberian thinkers drew on the established idea that princes could compel their subjects to perform tasks indispensable to the maintenance of the commonwealth. At the most extreme, individual members could be justly sacrificed to keep the body politic alive, as evidenced by the classic example of subjects’ obligation to fight in wars. Some Spanish voices in colonial Peru used this dictum to make an analogous argument about forced native labor. Juan de Matienzo and Miguel de Agia, among others, claimed that even deadly tasks such as mining could be imposed on Andeans because the economy sustaining the empire would otherwise collapse. However, others turned this argument on its head, asserting that the rising death toll among Indigenous workers in the silver mines of Potosí was what really undermined the colonial commonwealth. As the jurist Juan de Solórzano y Pereira contended, mining was so dangerous that it could only be imposed on enslaved people and criminals sentenced to death. Meanwhile, “indios” should be compelled to tasks that preserved both the empire and the Indigenous population. In this sense, the debate about forced native labor in colonial Peru not only reveals the intimate link between imperial protection and exploitation but also shows how contested the distinction between political subjugation and slavery was in the eyes of early modern Iberians.
Arguments centered on preserving Spain’s colonial possessions in the New World ultimately also shaped debates about the legitimacy of the transatlantic slave trade. On one side of the spectrum, the theologian Diego de Avendaño argued that the Indies could not be upheld without enslaved labor. He insisted that Black Africans were born to serve, thereby invoking the very same natural slavery argument Matienzo had previously made in relation to Andeans. According to Avendaño, imperial expediency licensed the enslavement of Black Africans with an imperfect title, that is, even when it did not satisfy the demands of justice and morality. The Council of the Indies later adopted this line of reasoning and put forward a defense of Atlantic slavery that was steeped in the language of necessity and reason of state.4 On the other side of the spectrum, the Capuchin missionary Epifanio de Moirans invoked a biblical comparison to state the exact opposite. Comparing the unlawful enslavement of Black Africans to the subjugation of the Hebrews in Egypt, he warned that continued injustice would lead to the demise of Spain’s New World empire through divine punishment. For Moirans, safeguarding the colonial commonwealth required ending the slave trade and treating Black Africans as prospective Christians, whom charity shielded from slavery—lest the Catholics themselves become slaves to their Ottoman enemies, whom Moirans regarded as the ones truly destined for slavery.
See the contributions in Benton, Clulow, and Attwood (eds.), Protection and Empire; and in Haug, Weber, and Windler (eds.), Protegierte und Protektoren.
Benton and Clulow, “Introduction”, 8.
I am here following Jean-Frédéric Schaub’s understanding of race-making as a process whereby cultural and social characteristics are biologized and linked to arguments about descent, with the aim of identifying and suppressing a particular group within a given society. See Schaub, Race Is About Politics, 16–17 and 147. See also Schaub and Sebastiani, Race et histoire, ch. 3.
On reason of state in the early modern Spanish empire, see Kattenberg, The Power of Necessity.