Portuguese Enslavement of Africans

When wondering who started the global enslavement of Africans, you might immediately assume Europeans in general, but more specifically, you could say Portugal was the first nation to start the scramble for the resource of African labor. According to the always-resourceful Wikipedia, the Portuguese became involved in the slave trade because in 1452, the Pope issued a papal bull granting the king of Portugal the right to enslave "Saracens, pagans and any other unbelievers," therefore legitimizing the slave trade under Catholic beliefs.

Even before the Church legalized it, the Portuguese port city of Lagos, located on the southern coast became one of the first slave markets in 1441, and the Portugues had been utilizing African labor for slavery long before that. The Portuguese had also colonized Brazil and needed the African human labor for the resources found there, such as sugar, coffee, gold, and diamonds.

While looking around for information on Portugal, I discovered that this little country was really quite active in the world trade market. It makes sense that a geographically small country would not have a diverse collection of resources in their own country, so I suppose the would need to reach out to the rest of the world for material and labor resources. I also found a timeline of Portuguese and Spanish activity within Africa and Brazil- the timeline only spans two hundred years but is five pages long in Word! I also thought it was interesting that many characters from King Leopold's Ghost are on this timeline, such as Afonso and several Portuguese explorers. Seeing cross-references of real historical figures always makes an event or time period more real to me, rather than just seeing it once in a novel or a textbook, so it is interesting to see other factors that we might have learned about in high school, such as Portugal's famous navigators and navy, involved in the ugly global history of slave labor, which is something high school generall glosses over.