A Trade That Began With a Single Portuguese Prince
Portugal's Prince Henry, known to history as Henry the Navigator, sponsored a series of exploratory voyages down Africa's Atlantic coast beginning in the 1420s and 1430s, seeking new trade routes and, according to the era's own chroniclers, new sources of labor for Portugal's own agricultural land, which faced a documented labor shortage as farmers abandoned fields amid rising costs. Sometime between 1441 and 1444, the exact year remains debated among historians, the first documented group of captive sub-Saharan Africans, numbering roughly 235 to 240 people, landed at the Portuguese port of Lagos, establishing what became Europe's first slave market on the continent itself. Portugal secured formal religious and legal justification for this practice through a series of papal bulls issued between 1452 and 1456, including Dum Diversas and Romanus Pontifex, which granted the Portuguese Crown exclusive rights to enslave non-Christian Africans encountered along the West African coast.
Lisbon Becomes the Trade's European Center
While Lagos hosted Europe's first slave market, Lisbon quickly became the trade's true administrative and commercial center. In 1486, King John II established the Casa dos Escravos (House of Slaves) in Lisbon specifically to oversee the receipt, taxation, and redistribution of enslaved Africans arriving from Portugal's expanding West African trading network, which by 1481 included Elmina Castle on the coast of modern Ghana, the first purpose-built European slave-trading fort anywhere on the African continent. Portugal's Crown found this trade highly profitable in tax revenue and actively encouraged its continued growth; by the sixteenth century, Portugal was importing an estimated 2,000 to 3,000 enslaved Africans annually, drawn primarily from Senegambia, Guinea-Bissau, the Cape Verde Islands, and, increasingly, the Kingdom of Kongo, examined in this course's companion African History curriculum.
A Documented Tenth of a Major European Capital
The scale of this trade's effect on Lisbon's own population is worth stating precisely, since it establishes something considerably more concrete than the ambiguous historical record this course's first unit examined regarding Al-Andalus: by 1551, according to a contemporary Portuguese official, Cristovao Rodrigues de Oliveira, enslaved and free Africans numbered roughly 9,950 people within Lisbon's total population of approximately 100,000, meaning Africans constituted very close to 10 percent of one of Europe's major capital cities in the mid-sixteenth century, a figure other historians corroborate at roughly 10,000 individuals citywide by the same period. This was not a marginal or incidental presence; contemporary travelers to Lisbon frequently commented on the visible, substantial African population they encountered there, describing it as a defining characteristic of the city itself rather than an unusual curiosity.
Freedom, and a Neighborhood of Its Own
Not every African in Lisbon remained enslaved permanently. Portuguese law and custom permitted paths to manumission, and over the sixteenth century a substantial free African population developed within the city, formally recognized by 1593 through the establishment of the Bairro do Mocambo (Mocambo Quarter), a specific neighborhood, located in what is now Lisbon's Madragoa district, that became predominantly African in character and population, likely the first formally recognized, predominantly African-descended urban neighborhood established anywhere in continental Europe. This detail matters directly for this course's broader argument: Lisbon by the late sixteenth century was not simply a city that used enslaved African labor temporarily in transit to elsewhere, but a European capital that had developed a substantial, settled, partly free African community with its own recognized urban geography, centuries before any of the twentieth-century migrations this course's later units will examine.
