I, Juan de Pareja

The Spanish Golden Age began in roughly 1492, after Christopher Columbus’s exploratory voyage to the Americas, and extended artistically to about 1681. These roughly 200 years marked Spain’s emergence as a major political power and sparked an outpouring of music, literature, and art. However, this period overlapped with one of history’s most significant blights. The Transatlantic Slave Trade began in the 15th century, coinciding with European exploration of the Americas, and enslaved millions of native Africans in European countries or overseas territories and colonies. Spanish traders and colonists often purchased enslaved people from Portuguese traders with established bases on Africa’s west coast. As a result, the Iberian Peninsula emerged as a major center of the European slave trade. By 1600, Spain counted an enslaved population of about 100,000 individuals (Earle, Thomas F. Black Africans in Renaissance Europe. Cambridge University Press, 2005).

Though slavery existed consistently throughout Spain, it took hold specifically in Seville, a major city in the southwest that developed significantly throughout the 16th century. Seville’s river ports ushered in goods from colonial trade routes but also guaranteed the city’s prominence in the Spanish slave trade. In 1565, a citywide census registered roughly one enslaved person for every 14 of the city’s free inhabitants (Pike, Ruth.