ABSTRACT
The title of this chapter is “Black Africans in the Iberian peninsula”, rather than black slaves or slavery in Iberia. In contrast to other minorities in the peninsula—individuals with Jewish or Muslim ancestry—black Africans were seen as unequivocal outsiders, all of them without exception descended from sub-Saharan peoples forced into slavery in the peninsula since at least the late medieval period. For this reason, slavery in all its facets (numbers, legal status, views of slavery and of the enslaved, and the existence of a system of slavery that was according to many distinct from those of other regions) are important, and even central themes of this chapter. However, that is not to say that black Africans were present in the Iberian peninsula only as slaves. Scholars have increasingly drawn attention to the existence, at least since the sixteenth century, of a significant population of African freedmen. As a result, we will consider this group in relation to the dominant political, social, and cultural processes from the sixteenth to the early nineteenth century. The goal is not only to understand the treatment of slaves, but also of freedmen, and the extent to which they were able to become part of the Spanish and Portuguese communities that were themselves in the process of being constructed during this period.
