Lisbon ca 1570: Blacks as Nobles, Artisans, and Slaves

This painting of Lisbon ca 1570 (Chafariz d’el Rey-Alfama district Lisbon- ca 1570-Berardo collection-Lisbon) shows Blacks in overwhelming numbers as well as in a diversity of roles, status, and occupation. There are hidalgo blacks whose “purity of blood” secured them membership into the most prestigious religious-military order of Santiago. They have horses, nobility, and also black pages of their own. There are black pages wielding swords. There are north-African blacks with turbans; one is being arrested. There are sub-Saharan bozales, wearing just a loincloth. There are black rowers taking couples into romantic sailing tours. There are runaway slaves who have been punished by carrying huge chains. There are dozens of black women carrying water jugs from the city fountains. Black and white women fistfight. Blackness is in no way associated here with slavery, dishonor, or early-modern religious impurity. This is a city where blacks can be saints, kings, nobles, knights, vecinos (citizens), slaves, and runaways.The association of blackness exclusively with slavery is something that will come later with the invention of the integrated plantation in British Barbados and Jamaica. This “innovation” of racial slavery, one of the most serious social pathology ever introduced, lies at the very heart of American exceptionalism and explains the persistence of white-supremacist ideologies today.