THE GREAT PORT city of Seville, in the deep south of Spain, was at the heart of all European trade and traffic to America, the port on which America then depended almost completely for contact with the Old World. As Esteban’s journey brings him ever closer to America and the Spanish colonial world, the probable facts of his life become clearer and more certain. We can be sure, for example, that he passed through Seville, because almost all passengers who sailed for the New World were legally required to register themselves and their slaves at the offices of the “House of Trade,” which were in the city. Moreover, the Seville market was where hopeful conquistadors like Andrés Dorantes bought the slaves they took to America, personal servants purchased to play the role of squire to the master’s knight-errant.
When Esteban entered the city through one of the many gateways that pierced the massive ramparts, he would have found himself hurled headlong into a human boiling pot. This was a quickly growing city, soon to become the richest and one of the most populous places on earth. The good and the bad, the beautiful and the ugly, all enthusiastically came to Seville in search of something—usually money and often adventure. It was like some Vulcan’s forge where the ore of modern European life was smelted, the threshold of the New World, a social and cultural cauldron, the devil’s kitchen. And Esteban was thrown into this rich recipe as the very humblest of ingredients: a newly arrived slave.
By contrast, today, in Seville, History wraps herself around you in an intimate but deceitfully sweet caress. Nowadays, one comes across some unpredictable piece of the past at almost every one of the many turns which punctuate the tortuous lanes of old Seville. As you stroll through the shady streets to the north of the cathedral and the old Jewish quarter, escaping the noonday heat, you come across four marble columns that once formed part of a Roman temple and which stand abandoned in a vacant, flooded lot. Not far away, the elegant arcading of the former Arab bathhouse now forms the entrance hall of a popular pizzeria. Beyond that, a small church with perfect proportions and rococo aisles was once a synagogue, but well over 500 years ago. The fashionable nightclub and flamenco bar that is so difficult to find in the labyrinthine streets behind this church was once a warehouse where charcoal burners smoldered their wares. And the noisy tapas bar next to a disused theater occupies a ground-floor room of the former royal mint, where the gold and silver brought from Mexico and South America were made into bullion and coins.
The intimacy of these surprises, these almost archaeological encounters with the detritus of history, takes place against a backdrop of the grand buildings erected by church, state, and commerce. The bulk of the city hall, the Ayuntamiento, still exudes power; the merchants’ exchange, the Casa Lonja, quietly dominates the main entrance to the town. Here, as almost nowhere else in Europe, the church towers are still among the tallest buildings. The highest point of all is the tip of the cathedral tower, the Giralda, once the minaret of the main mosque, where the muezzin sang out his call to prayer. Now, the baroque bell tower performs the same function for the Catholic faithful.
These vast monuments signal the now long-lost affluence of empire. And, in a city unencumbered by modern skyscrapers, which cast their shadows upon ancient neighbors, these monuments remain the impressive sentinels of an imposing past which continues to preside over the parochial present.
If you enter Seville from the north, once you have driven through the ranks of concrete apartment blocks built beyond the old city walls, you soon come across the imposing Hospital of the Five Wounds, built in 1600. There is a strong sense of the presence of history in this austere stone building. Today it houses the Parliament of Andalusia, but it was built to shelter the poor and for the care of the sick. Despite its great beauty, the place is testimony to the fact that an enormous building was required to tend the terrible privations of many broken souls. It was one of two giant hospitals that gave solace to the needy, along with many smaller institutions that did the same. Wealth and poverty were uneasy bedfellows in sixteenth-century Seville.
On the far side of the traffic-laden boulevard of the ring road, opposite the Hospital of the Five Wounds, the peripheral modern city ends. It is as though the serried ranks of apartment blocks have come up against the grand swath of the crenellated curtain walls with almost all their medieval towers and turrets intact. These strong defenses that still stand after 1,300 years have stayed the hand of progress. Now they are monuments, but they were built by the Moors to defend their city from attack, first by the ruthless Vikings, then by the Spanish crusaders who finally conquered them. The medieval city was born of war and splendor.
Spain’s golden age of empire has in some ways stood the test of time in the potent sense of bygone glory that now dominates the landscape of this peaceful, pious, provincial capital. The Virgin Mary is still worshipped as fervently as she was in Esteban’s time. As in Esteban’s time, there is deep devotion to the dogma that Mary herself was immaculately conceived, thanks to the miraculous “kiss” between her mother, Saint Ann, and her father, Saint Joachim. Easter and Holy Week bring crowds into the streets to witness the religious processions that wind their way through the city by day and by night. The dirt of centuries clings to the ceilings of wineshops, bars, and taverns on the streets leading to the river. The city is still dominated by landowning families, farmers on a grand scale, the originators of agribusiness. It remains a place of bullfights, flamenco music, and Gypsy bacchanals.
IN SEVILLE, IN the spring of 1522, the despairing city fathers appealed to the royal authorities for help with the devastating famine and plague. They reported that the destitute and the paupers of the surrounding countryside had descended on Seville in such numbers that the hospitals were suddenly too full to accommodate the sick and the hungry. Esteban was almost certainly among them. The good burghers claimed to have done what they could, releasing as much food as possible from the official reserves, but even so, more than 500 emaciated cadavers had already been found in the streets and the death toll was rising steeply. It was a heartfelt plea for assistance from local oligarchs appalled by the suffering on their doorsteps and terrified that this miserable mass of unhappy humanity would soon bring disease and death to their city.
Whether Esteban arrived in Seville at this time by his own wretched volition or was brought to the city already enslaved, the simple fact of being a negro was enough to mark him as a slave. Without documentary proof of his freedom, a black man in early-sixteenth-century Spain was assumed to be chattel. By contrast, esclavos blancos—the Moors, Berbers, and Turks—were usually branded on the face, sometimes with the name and profession of their owner, but more often marked with an S and the symbol of a nail, †, effectively a sort of dollar sign. These marks signified the Spanish word escalvo: S for es and the nail for clavo.
Within days, if not hours, of his arrival in the city, Esteban found himself in the central market, one of the most unusual bazaars in history. There he and hundreds of other woeful figures were in due course put up for sale alongside a seemingly endless variety of other merchandise proffered by the city traders to passersby.
The merchants and contractors of sixteenth-century Seville conducted their business in and around the cathedral. They gathered on a continuous flight of steep stone steps called the gradas, which today still encircle the massive Gothic church, as though trying to raise something sacred above the profane street life. Ironically, these iconic steps provided those businessmen with a sort of sanctuary from the profanity of local taxes, because technically, the gradas were within the precincts of the cathedral and so came under the jurisdiction of the church, and not the city hall.
An Italian ambassador who traveled through Seville in the 1520s described the wide marble pavement above these gradas, fenced off by a series of columns connected by sturdy iron chains. There, merchants and other gentleman promenaded, while all about them the market traders sold their wares, spilling over into the nearby square, which was constantly thronged with crowds. There, the Italian reported, many were tricked by merchants or conned by grafters and cardsharps.
A contemporary Sevillian commentator explained that traders sold their goods by auction there on each and every day of the year, with the exception of Sundays and religious festivals. “As many riches as you could imagine” had their price, but he was particularly struck by the quantities of sumptuous clothing, often embroidered or otherwise decorated with precious metals. He also noted that arms, armor, and slaves were auctioned there as well. Nearby, “in front of the gradas there were various expensive silversmiths’ shops on the right-hand side; and beyond, the buildings of the Bank of Seville, where such an infinite amount of money is exchanged that it is the most liquid bank of any of which I have heard.”
It was from these gradas that Pánfilo Narváez or his captains and agents proclaimed his grandiose adventure. On these steps, hopeful predictions and false promises were made, hands were shaken, contracts were agreed and signed. Esteban was either displayed for sale standing on the top step or paraded through the crowded street below.
The barely controlled mayhem—the hectic, almost hedonistic atmosphere of this palpitating commercial heart of Seville—led many of Esteban’s contemporaries to describe the city as a Babylon, a town of taverns that attracted prostitutes and other sinners. It was certainly a Tower of Babel, a place where hundreds of nationalities spoke in myriad different tongues, all united by the common language of commerce, a language that at the gradas rivaled the power of religion.
At Azemmour Esteban had become used the sight, sound, and smell of the many Italians, Portuguese, and Spaniards who came and went among the crowds of Moors and Africans. But as Esteban was led, shackled or bound, through the streets to the cathedral he must have been immediately struck by the variety of exotic complexions, by the otherness of the white European world. He saw a sea of foreign faces, some burned by the brutal sun, others as fair as the faces of fairytale princesses, with golden hair and pink cheeks. Among the Spaniards there were Germans, Flemings, and Frenchmen, traders and hopefuls from all across Europe. No doubt even the stench of a unwashed mass of Europeans seemed a rank novelty when compared with the human odors to which he was accustomed.
He may even have gained his first glimpse of an “Indian,” a native of the New World. The Italian ambassador remembered how, at Seville in the spring of 1526, he had seen some youths from America, the sons of important people. They had come to learn about Spain, he reported, accompanied by a friar who had been preaching in the New World. He described them as being bright and lively, with jet-black hair, long faces, and Roman noses. They dressed in their own style, wearing a kind of doublet or smock. This observer was most impressed by a game of ball that they played. The ball was made from a knot of wood the size of a peach, or perhaps bigger, which was very light and bouncy. Most amazing of all was that according to the rules of the sport they could use neither their hands nor their feet. Instead, they kept the ball in the air and passed it from one to another using only their bodies, and they did this so skillfully and at such great speed that the Italian was quite astonished. At times, he explained, they even lay down completely to return a pass.
But as surely as the human eye is drawn to the familiar, so Esteban’s attention soon turned to the many African faces in the crowds of Europeans. There were Wolofs, Mandingas, Guineans, and many more from all over west Africa, including many whose characteristics were almost as foreign to Esteban as those of the Germans and the Flemings.
Seville had a long tradition of black slavery stretching back more than three quarters of a millennium, to the time of the Moorish sultans. In Esteban’s time so many Africans lived in Seville that foreigners compared the city to a game of chess: because it seemed to be populated by as many blacks as whites.
Information from later censuses suggests that as many as 1,500 black African slaves may have been resident in Seville when Esteban arrived. There were also many horros and their children: freedmen, horros were former slaves, often granted their freedom in the wills of their Spanish masters. And there were also countless slaves destined for the Indies who passed through Seville, where their export was licensed and the relevant taxes were paid at the House of Trade. It is impossible to know how many black Africans lived in Seville in the early 1520s, but there were many: perhaps as many as 3,000, almost a tenth of the already considerable population that was on the verge of an explosive increase which would make Seville one the largest cities in Europe by the end of the century.
What is more, this black minority was highly visible: many blacks worked as stevedores in the port, or as porters, as street vendors, or even as constables, a generally unpopular job.
And, while most slaves worked as domestic servants, they were not usually confined indoors, but were instead often out on the street, working as gofers, accompanying their masters, running errands, and the like.
The life of enslaved servants varied from household to household. The greatest of all European writers, Miguel de Cervantes, describes some who slept in the stable, along with the master’s other living chattels, but there were others who benefited because they were treated as luxury goods. Rich Spaniards dressed their household slaves in outlandish finery as symbols of their wealth.
One flabbergasted Flemish scholar, newly appointed as a tutor at the Portuguese court, described how noblemen went into the streets in the town of Évora. Two slaves marched in front of the master, who was on horseback. A third was there to carry his hat, and a fourth to carry his cloak, lest it rain. A fifth held the horse’s bridle, a sixth the gentleman’s silk slippers, a seventh his clothes brush, and an eighth a cloth to rub down the horse while the master attended Mass or chatted with a friend; and yet another, the ninth, brought up the rear, taking good care of his master’s comb.
The wealthy of Seville were equally ostentatious and similar displays of arrogant opulence were a familiar sight on streets as the city’s bourgeois nobility waged a permanent war of display among themselves. According to one theory, Europeans may have begun to make mannequins of their African slaves and bedeck them with jewels and luxurious clothes because such gaudiness was traditional in many of the societies from which the slaves had originally been taken.
While the Flemish scholar may have been shocked at the sight of a train of richly dressed black servants, it seems unlikely that such things would have seemed unusual to Esteban. From time to time in Africa he must have seen overattended masters, lords, and princes, white, black, and Moorish.
We know from Juan Daza, the young man who described the plague and famine at Jerez, that the price of slaves had fallen precipitously by the early 1520s because of the many refugees from Azemmour and Safi. But we also know that, in general, Spaniards seem to have preferred negros to the “white” Moors and Berbers, who were more troublesome. So Esteban must have stood out as especially desirable in a market awash with Muslim infidels. He had also probably learned Portuguese at Azemmour, and perhaps some Spanish; and he may have worked as a domestic servant or in some trade. With the Portuguese presence at Azemmour, he may have already been a Christian. With these advantages, he was no doubt quickly sold at a good price.
The burgeoning African population of Seville presented the authorities with a novel problem. Individual black men were a familiar sight, because there had been black slaves and servants in the city for centuries, but en masse they did not fit any of the existing ethnic categories by which Spaniards understood the cultural diversity of their world. They were certainly not Spanish, but neither were they Moorish, Muslim, or Jewish. In fact, they were almost all Christians because African slaves were immediately baptized on arrival in Spain or Portugal.
There was a range of attitudes toward Africans in Spain, and many Spaniards evidently saw them as fellow human beings. Marriages between whites and free blacks who had become assimilated into Spanish society were usual in the lower classes. One very reliable modern scholar has suggested that Spaniards had a reputation for being unusually kind to their slaves, and she may be right. However, the notion appears to based on the passing remarks of an early modern French commentator, taken somewhat out of context. No doubt many Spaniards did in fact treat their slaves well, sometimes out of humanity, sometimes for much the same practical reasons that may have caused them to cared for the rest of their property. But there were many others, including men of considerable influence, whose opinion of black Africans could lead only to abuse.
Of these, Bartolomé de Las Casas is perhaps the best-known. Because of his humanitarian complaints about the treatment of Indians by the Spanish conquistadors, which helped to galvanize the ideas of men like Zumárraga, Las Casas has rightly gone down in history as the “defender of the Indians.” But in his zeal to save the Indians, he eloquently argued the case for sending African slaves to the New World instead.
It has become commonplace to forgive him this aberration because he repented as soon as he saw the evil effects of slavery on black Africans. And there is no question that Las Casas was basically a good man, compared with his peers, even from the perspective of our own age. Which is why it is absolutely essential that history remember he was also an influential advocate of the transatlantic slave trade at its inception. He thereby contributed, right at the start, to the centuries of evil to come. Only if his reputation is made to bear this burden can we understand that it was commonplace in his time for even the most humane and compassionate Europeans to think of black Africans, at least in the abstract, as in some way subhuman.
The argument for enslaving Africans was simply put by another politically influential intellectual, Peter Martyr, chronicler to the court of the Catholic kings, Ferdinand and Isabella, the man who coined the term “New World,” orbe novo. Peter Martyr argued that for all that Natural and Canon Law might decree that all human beings should be free, Roman Law defined an important exception, and in practice enslavement had become established as acceptable. “Long experience has effectively shown the need for the enslavement of those who by their nature have a propensity to abominable sin and who would return to their evil way if not guided and tutored.”
Another influential Spanish writer, Tomás de Mercado, took this argument one stage farther and used the very process of trafficking in human beings as a justification for slavery. Because African blacks are “savage sinners,” he wrote, “they commit ghastly crimes…. They act not out of reason, but in accordance with their passions…. It should surprise nobody to learn that they treat one another abominably, selling each other, for they are uncivilized, wild, and savage…and treat each other like animals.” He then explains that they not only sell their children when in dire straits but also needlessly, “out of irritation or anger at some trivial insult or bad behavior.”
The view of some, then, was that as a black African Esteban was “uncivilized, wild, and savage.” Black slaves certainly had a reputation for being thieves, drunkards, and libidinous. Given such attitudes, it is hardly surprising that in Seville during the sixteenth century, the growing and very visible black population was cause for paranoia among the city fathers. In response, they produced various municipal ordinances intended to restrict the activities of slaves. Slaves were not allowed to carry arms except in the company of their masters, and there were limits on the number of slaves allowed to assemble in public. The municipal oligarchs in Seville were especially concerned about slaves and alcohol. In 1569 they issued an apparently draconian bylaw that excluded slaves from all taverns and public eating houses unless specifically given permission by their masters:
Because the many blacks and Moors who are slaves in this city have plenty of opportunity to go to taverns and public eating houses to eat and drink they become drunk and disorderly, behaving arrogantly. When drunk they commit crimes, for which their owners have to pay…. What is more, the slaves are so addicted to the taverns and the eating houses that they steal money or clothes from their owners, even taking blankets and harnessing for the horses and mules, or anything else lying around…. And the tavern owners, their wives, daughters, and others who go to the taverns fence these stolen goods for them.
In reality, this was simply one aspect of a widespread distrust of taverns, inns, and public eating houses—those much frowned-on but essential services in a city filled with sailors, merchants, and transients. There were continual attempts to control such hostelries, none of which seem to have been very successful. There was even a law forbidding the sale of both food and wine in the same place, on the grounds that a hungry husband was likely to stop boozing, leave the tavern, and return home for dinner. A curious consequence was that itinerant food sellers and cooks went from tavern to tavern offering their wares. The drinkers would simply call these hawkers in and have them prepare food.
But one Italian visitor to the great Portuguese seaport of Lisbon seems to have approved of some of the more rowdy Africans’ behavior, commenting that “while the Portuguese are always sad and melancholic…the slaves are always happy, they do nothing but laugh, sing, dance and get drunk publicly in all the town squares.” No doubt many in Seville felt the same way as this Italian.
The paranoia experienced by the fearful urban elite led to the partial exclusion of African slaves from the society of which they were a vital and integral part. The result was a distinct “slave” society parallel to the white world. And as Esteban began to find his feet in the metropolis, he must have quickly realized that among the whites, he was simply a negro. The European hierarchy decreed that his proper place was among the African slaves. Within that world of black slaves, however, Esteban could be more than just an “African.” He could shed that European label and establish his own ethnic and cultural identity.
Esteban no doubt soon found his way to the small plaza near the church of Santa María la Blanca, where the black population of the city tended to gather, much as the Africans of Lisbon today congregate near the church of San Bernardo. In more tolerant Muslim times, Santa María la Blanca had been a synagogue. It still stands where it was then, just inside the walls, by the Gate of Meat, so called because it was the entrance closest to the municipal slaughterhouse. This gate was also close to the outlying suburb of San Bernardo, a desperately poor working-class district, surrounded by swampy land, where many black Africans lived.
The negros who gathered near Santa María la Blanca were satirized in a literary interlude, a humorous vignette, once mistakenly attributed to Miguel de Cervantes. Writing some eighty or so years after Esteban’s time, the anonymous author rather unoriginally described Seville as being like Babylon, a place where there was a story to be told at every hour on every street corner.
A character in this comedy recalled a story told by a student who claimed “to have been passing through the parish of Santa María la Blanca and that small square where endless blacks gather together.” The student sidled up to a group of negros who were deep in conversation, and began to eavesdrop. They were, he discovered, extremely courteous and formal with each other. Then one of them asked another, “in his half-baked Spanish,” “Your grace, tell me, is it true that your master has sold you?”
“Yes, sir, he has indeed,” replied the other.
“And how much did he sell you for?”
“He sold me for one hundred twenty ducats.”
“Good lord, how expensive! Your Grace is not worth that much, for you cannot be worth a penny more than eighty ducats!”
The other, far from getting angry, then explained that he had married a black girl from the area against his master’s wishes. His master, angry at such insubordination, told him that he could only sleep with his wife on Saturdays, to which the slave had responded by asking how many Saturdays there might be in the week.
When the master told him that there was only one, the slave had replied that he would be happier with three Saturdays in the week. Moreover, if he was only allowed one Saturday he would have a word with the authorities and request that justice be done. His master was so annoyed that he sold him to the master of the black girl for whatever the other master was prepared to offer, which seems to have been a good price.
This absurd story was quite probably based on some real exchange that was overheard by the author and then grossly distorted and exaggerated for the sake of theatrical comedy. But such racist portrayals of blacks as ludicrously ignorant, though with some native cunning, are typical of Spanish theater in this slightly later period. It seems likely that such racism had been commonplace in daily life for many centuries.
The most serious problem for Africans in this society was the horrifyingly casual and extreme violence that punctuated everyday life in sixteenth-century cities. For example, in Granada in 1580, some unpleasant banter between two black slaves and two jailors guarding a lockup led to a fight and the death of one of the slaves. Violence was not only a problem for Africans, of course; and in this story the jailors then turned on a white passerby who had stopped to help the slaves, chasing him into a church. There, on holy ground, the two jailors murdered the good Samaritan.
All across Europe, crime rates were rising, and in Spain, Seville had a reputation as the most criminal, vice-ridden, and violent city. Analysis of the limited data available paints a vivid picture of a people ready to kill one another over the slightest dispute. While it may be deplorable, it is at least easy to understand how disagreements over women, money, and business arrangements could get out of hand, leading to hotheaded homicide. But the records also show that men might murder each other over such trivial matters as a seat in a theater, accidentally dirtying someone else’s clothing, or a disagreement over the quality of a batch of olives. Nor was such fighting confined to dingy back alleys and poverty-stricken inner-city barrios. Trouble could break out at any moment in any part of the city, by day or night. And these fights quickly escalated into mass battles, brawls which uninvolved bystanders joined, apparently for the fun of it.
AS A SEVILLANA friend once told me, the devil prefers to strike where faith is strongest, in places where there are many believers. Perhaps she was right, for while sixteenth-century Seville was a place of sin and all forms of human corruption, it was also a center of strong Catholicism and particular devotion to a cult of the Madonna of the Immaculate Conception. This tenet of faith did not achieve acceptance as orthodoxy or dogma until the nineteenth century, but it was supported, sometimes with unholy fervor, in Seville: widespread hooliganism and rioting resulted when a Dominican friar offered a theological refutation of the doctrine during a sermon he preached in the early seventeenth century.
Seville remains a city where, almost uniquely in the modern western world, the rhythm of life is dictated by religion, the church calendar, and the passage of the seasons. Of course, the relationship between church festivals and the progress of the agricultural year is as natural as the relationship between God and life itself. It stretches back to the pagan religions that existed before Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. But there are few places today where these roots are remembered or appreciated, and nowhere else does a whole city interrupt the ordinary mundane business of day-to-day existence as Seville does at Easter.
During Holy Week, Semana Santa, the streets of Seville become a stage on which multiple, breathtaking reenactments of Christ’s Passion are celebrated against a backdrop of beautiful buildings. This stage is walked by the Sevillians themselves who take part in their religious rituals as both spectators and actors, but the principal protagonists of this fanfare of collective grief are baroque sculptures, animated only by the spirituality of the spectacle and the artifice of the bearers known as costaleros who carry them. It is a most extraordinary experience for anyone lucky enough to be present.
From Palm Sunday to Easter, the eighty official hermandades or cofradías, religious brotherhoods, set out in procession from the churches and chapels where they are based. Their purpose is to carry the heavy pasos, enormous processional floats made of plated metal, intricately worked in baroque designs. The first paso always bears an image of Christ crucified, or carrying his cross on the way to Golgotha. Next, there may be pasos showing displays of scenes from Christ’s life. Finally, the Madonna is borne in outstanding splendor, dressed in sumptuous robes, her paso crowned with a glittering canopy on which the devout sprinkle the petals of thousands of flowers, all lit by a thousand candles.
The costaleros who toil beneath the pasos, hidden from view by a luxuriant velvet skirt, are well drilled and skilled in negotiating the narrow streets. Here, they slow and kneel to slip the Madonna beneath a power cable. There, they stop and turn their burden to face a lone singer who balefully cries a flamenco lament for the suffering of the Lord and the bereft Madonna. In the dark, with the play of the candlelight, the vivid sculptures come to life as these pasos move through the crowds of smartly dressed onlookers who squeeze together on the sidewalks.
Walking before and after the pasos are the members of the brotherhoods, known as nazarenos, dressed in full-length tunics tied with colored cords. They wear long conical masks and carry tall candles, giving them an almost sinister appearance. They proceed through the streets in strictly hierarchical order, and many go barefoot out of penance or devotion. There are brass bands to play a somber march and penitents who carry crosses in imitation of the Savior. All proceed in order, slowly, very slowly, occasionally moving forward, most often waiting patiently, standing silently, contemplating God’s sacrifice or thinking about more profane matters.
These brotherhoods are politically powerful and confer enormous kudos and influence on those who govern them; most important, they raise alms for charitable endeavors carried out on a vast scale. Such activities make these brotherhoods an integral part of the social structure of the city as well as custodians of some of the most beautiful baroque sculpture in the world. It is almost impossible for an outsider to understand the extent to which these independent institutions, individually and collectively, influence almost all aspects of life in this city, the provincial capital of Andalusia, a region with eight million inhabitants.
The origins of this enthusiasm among Sevillians for processions at Easter is usually associated with a young sixteenth-century aristocrat, the first Marquis of Tarifa. A year or two before Esteban first set foot in Seville, the marquis returned from a pilgrimage to the Holy Land and Jerusalem, where he had walked in Christ’s footsteps, following the stations of the cross. According to tradition, he was awestruck by the spirituality of the experience. He did, however, have the presence of mind to minutely measure the route. On his return to Seville, the pious young man laid out twelve stations of the cross along a route of exactly 1,321 paces (about 1,100 yards). This led from his palace, which has been known ever since as “Pilate’s house” (Casa de Pilatos) after the Roman procurator who “washed his hands of Jesus,” to a cross known as the Cruz del Campo, the “Cross in the Country,” today rather prosaically the site of Seville’s principal brewery.
I was astonished to discover that the Cruz del Campo was probably constructed in 1460 by a brotherhood still popularly known as Los Negritos, whose members were, until the nineteenth century, almost exclusively black. Moreover, as a consequence, these black African brothers were responsible for the care of one of the twelve stations of the cross established by the Marquis of Tarifa.
It was during this period, when Esteban first arrived in Seville, that Los Negritos rose to prominence in the religious life of the city. As a result, it is one of the oldest, if not the oldest, of the brotherhoods that process through the city during Holy Week. However, its origins date back even further still, to a period of terrible famine and civil unrest in the 1390s, when the archbishop of Seville established a brotherhood that would provide moral and spiritual leadership for the especially vulnerable black population.
Perhaps not surprisingly, that antiquity has often been ignored or contested by other cofradías disinclined to cede status to such humble bretheren. But Los Negritos have always vigorously defended the processional privileges they derive from the great age of their organization. Indeed, they carry their Christ and Madonna to the cathedral on Maundy Thursday, the most important day of Holy Week. That privilege has been maintained over the centuries, thanks to financial sacrifices made by the brothers to pay the cost of litigation against more powerful and wealthier brotherhoods. They have even taken their cases to the highest of all ecclesiastical authorities, the Pope in Rome.
Such determination is easy to explain, according to the brotherhood’s most important historian of recent years, Isidoro Moreno. For one of the few ways this disdained social group could assert its ethnic dignity and self-esteem was by affirming its antiquity and its consequent symbolic and ceremonial preeminence within the processions.
In Esteban’s day, every Friday during Lent, a procession of nazarenos set out slowly for the Cruz del Campo, wearing white or black tunics, many of them carrying crosses on their shoulders as a sign of penitence. Some wore hair shirts; others were manacled and carried chains. Some flagellated their bare backs as they processed and others found different instruments of personal torture. Beside them men and women walked solemnly, praying aloud, a lugubrious and sobering sight, characteristic of the time.
In contrast, the return journey was a considerably less pious affair, despite the best efforts of the Franciscan friars to police the occasion. As night fell, given the mixture of the sexes who followed the procession, in the concealing half-light of the burning torches carried by the nazarenos, with the penitents all masked and unidentifiable, there were many who again fell into temptation.
This newly fashionable, pious pastime of Esteban’s Seville is the origin of the modern Easter processions of Semana Santa. It built on a tradition of processions that at the time was focused on the festival of Corpus Christi, when consecrated bread was carried, on display, through the streets, exciting reverence among the faithful. That procession included many flamboyant and eccentric dancers, and there is documentary evidence that during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries there were at least twenty-one African dance which participated. One was a group of eight men with tambourines and bells and four women with bells and flags, accompanied by a drummer and guitarist, who represented the battle of Guinea. Spaniards had always embraced the music and dance of Africa. As early as 1451, Africans had performed traditional dances at the wedding of the King’s sister. African dance and song had become familiar on the streets of Seville.
But although Africans played a key part in these rituals, that prominence was tempered by the nature of the role that might be reserved for them. Mostly, during the Corpus Christi celebrations they dressed as demons, bearing out the common prejudice that black skin in some way betrayed a blackness of the soul. In fact, it was common practice to sneeze in the presence of black people in order to ward off the devil.
Across Spain and Portugal at that time, black Africans were establishing similar institutions or becoming influential within already existing brotherhoods. In Lisbon, for example, a number of Africans were elected to positions of power in the confraternity of Our Lady of the Rosary. In Jaén, in eastern Andalusia, the processions of one cofradía were led by African dancers wearing jingle bells and brightly colored clothes, who moved to the rhythm of a drummer-woman. In Valencia, the main Spanish slave-trading port of the fifteenth century, a “house of blacks” had been set up to as a refuge and source of help and advice to Africans; this institution was eventually given royal status as a brotherhood in 1472.
But these formal organizations were a means of social control the Spaniards imposed on the informal arrangements that originated with Africans themselves. Faced with the growth in the black population and the increasing number of free blacks, the Spanish authorities had established institutions that forced Africans to be more European.
There is a narrow lane in Seville, called the calle del Conde Negro, “the street of the Black Count.” It is named after an official title, established in 1475, for a black sheriff appointed to oversee the affairs of the black community. For the first Black Count of Seville, the Catholic Monarchs chose their former servant Juan Valladolid. He was invested in office by a royal decree, which read:
In return for the many good, loyal and noteworthy services that you have done us and do us each day and because we are aware of your character, ability, and bearing we make you Sheriff and Judge of all the Blacks and Mulattoes, both free and enslaved, in the very noble and very loyal city of Seville and in all its archdiocese. And the said Blacks and Mulattoes shall not celebrate any fiestas except when you the said Juan de Valladolid be present…and we order you to investigate disputes and quarrels, marriages and other business that they may have…and you know the laws and bylaws must be upheld and we are informed that you are from noble lineage amongst the Blacks.
The appointment of Valladolid and the establishment of a specifically black cofradía indicate a society that wanted to give a sense of order to the world. It was the same society that established an inn exclusively for the use of Muslim merchants. The same society also attempted to stop the poor from eating the kind of foodstuffs that were thought appropriate only for the rich, such as game fowl and fruits, a gastro-heirarchy left over from medieval sumptary laws that must have been only imperfectly enforced. And because Seville was the gateway to America, the social and religious attitudes prevalent in the city and moral standards of the sevillanos were central to the formation of the society that Spain exported to the New World.