16th Century

The United Provinces (modern Netherlands) soon becomes an important slave-trading nation and an aspiring colonial power.

Elizabeth, Queen of England, gives a letter of patent to Sir Humfrey Gylberte to discover, find, search out, and view such remote, heathen and barbarous lands, countries and territories not actually possessed of any Christian prince or people.

Paulo Dias de Novães founds the Portuguese colony of São Paulo de Luanda on the African mainland (modern Angola). The colony soon became a major slave-trading port supplying the vast Brazilian market.

Bartolemé Frías de Albornoz, a Spanish-Mexican lawyer, publishes Arte de los contratos (The Art of Contracts), which casts doubt on the legality of the slave trade.

The Parlement of Bordeaux sets all slaves – “blacks and moors” – in the town free, declaring slavery illegal in France.

Tomás de Mercado, a Sevillian Dominican, publishes Tratos y contratos de mercaderes (Practices and Contracts of Merchants), which attacks the way the slave trade is conducted.

John Hawkins of Plymouth becomes the first English sailor to have obtained African slaves – approximately 300 of them in Sierra Leone – for sale in the West Indies. Hawkins traded the slaves illegally with Spanish colonies, which contributed to increasing tensions between England and Spain.

The Italian city of Genoa tries to prevent trading in slaves – not for any humanitarian reasons – but only in an attempt to reduce the numbers of Africans in the city.

The Portuguese sailor Fernão de Oliveira, in Arte de Guerra no mar (The Art of War at Sea), denounces the slave trade as an ‘evil trade’. The book anticipates many of the arguments made by abolitionists in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Jacques Francis becomes the first known African to give evidence in an English court of law when his Venetian master, Peter Paulo Corsi, is accused of theft by a consortium of Italian merchants based in Southampton.

Jacques Francis, an enslaved African salvage diver, arrives in Portsmouth as part of a team hired to salvage guns from the wreck of the Mary Rose.

Hernando de Soto lands on the coast of Florida with about 1200 men in his expedition, around 50 were African slaves.