Bartolome de Albornoz, Arte de los contractos (1573): a jurist refuses to have a soul paid for with a body
A Valencian law book of 1573 whose chapter on slaves argued that the presumption is always for liberty, that the buyer is accomplice to the seller who had no right, and that no one may be told the freedom of the soul is bought with the servitude of the body. The Holy Office stopped its reading and reprinting. The object prints the argument, the concessions inside it, and the traffic that went on regardless.
Why this wins its question: Ask which sixteenth-century Spaniard denied the lawfulness of slavery itself and the answer that wins today is either silence or a one-line encyclopaedia stub naming Albornoz without a sentence of him in it; the scholarship that quotes him sits behind paywalls and in Spanish. This object prints the argument as an accessible nineteenth-century witness transcribed it - the presumption for liberty, the buyer as accomplice, the women and children the just-war title cannot reach, and the refusal to let the freedom of the soul be paid for with the servitude of the body - and it prints, at the same weight, the two concessions that sit inside the argument, the missionary remedy that is all he proposes in their place, the ban that no document is produced for, and the fiscal interest of the Crown in the traffic that continued. It is deliberately not a rescue: the value is that a reader can see exactly how far one man went in 1573 and exactly where he stopped.
Claims
Every assertion below is bound to registered sources and carries its own confidence. Weight them; do not treat the page as uniformly authoritative.
The book is identified in a footnote of the historian read here, which gives it as "Arte de los Contractos, compuesto por Bartolome de Albornoz, estudiante de Talavera. En Valencia en casa de Pedro de Huete, ano de 1573." No sheet of that imprint was opened for this object. Everything below is the 1573 text as an 1879 historian transcribed it, and it is tiered accordingly.
The place the book is given in the argument is stated in the summary of the historian's Libro IV, whose last line reads "Concilio mejicano.-Espanoles que condenaron el trafico de negros y aun la esclavitud en el siglo XVI.-Casas, Mercado y Albornoz." In the chapter itself Albornoz is introduced as writing "catorce anos antes que el Padre Mercado" - that is, before the Seville book of 1587 - and as condemning, "en un lenguaje mas desembozado y filosofico", "no ya el trafico de esclavos, sino aun la misma esclavitud".
The argument opens by refusing the buyer the benefit of the doubt. "Cuando la guerra se hace entre enemigos publicos, da lugar de hacerse esclavos en la ley del demonio, mas donde no hay tal guerra... que se yo si el esclavo que compro fue justamente captivado; porque la presuncion siempre esta por su libertad." The rule is evidential before it is moral: the man in the market cannot know, and where he cannot know, liberty is presumed.
From that the buyer's complicity follows. "En cuanto a ley natural, obligado estoy a favorecer al que injustamente padece, y no hacerme complice del delincuente, que pues el no tiene derecho sobre el que me vende, menos le puedo yo tener por la compra que de el hago." The passage then puts the cases the just-war title cannot cover at all: "que diremos de los ninos y mujeres, que no pudieron tener culpa, y de los vendidos por hambre? No hallo razon que me convenza a dudar en ello, cuanto mas a aprobarlo."
The defence he then takes up is the one the century leaned on hardest, that the enslaved were better off among Christians: "Otros dicen que mejor les esta a los negros ser traidos a estas partes donde se les da conocimiento de la ley de Dios, y viven en razon, aunque sean esclavos, que no dejarlos en su tierra, donde estando en libertad viven bestialmente." He answers that the benefit, granted, belongs to the enslaved and not to the enslaver - "este bien suyo no justifica, antes agrava mas la causa del que le tiene en servidumbre" - and would justify nothing unless the man could not be made Christian without being made a slave. The sentence the passage turns on is printed in italics by the historian: "no creo que me daran en la ley de Jesu-Christo que la libertad del anima se haya de pagar con la servidumbre del cuerpo."
Two concessions stand inside the same passage and belong in any honest account of it. The first is doctrinal: war between public enemies does, he grants, "dar lugar de hacerse esclavos", so the argument is not that no one may ever be enslaved. The second is the premise of his own century, stated in his own voice - "a cualquiera negro que me pidiera para ello parecer, le aconsejara que antes viniera entre nosotros a ser esclavo, que quedar por Rey en su tierra". He uses it to convict the slaveholder rather than to excuse him, but he does not question it.
His remedy is missionary, not legal, and it ends in a reproach of his own side. Where the harvest is great and the labourers none, "porque la tierra es caliente y no tan apacible como Talavera o Madrid, nadie quiere encargarse de ser Simon Cyrineo para ayudar a llevar la Cruz, si primero no le pagan el alquiler adelantado". Nothing in the pages read here has him proposing a law, a penalty, or an abolition; what he proposes is that men go and preach in Africa instead of buying its people.
What happened to the book is stated in one sentence: "La obra de Albornoz hundiose en el olvido, no solo porque el Santo Oficio prohibio su lectura y reimpresion, sino porque las nobles ideas que contiene no predominaban en aquellos tiempos, ni menos eran la pauta de pueblos ni gobiernos." The confidence here is held down deliberately: the historian names no expurgatory index, no decree and no date for the prohibition, and no page read for this object shows him citing one, so the ban is carried on his word alone.
The traffic did not pause. The same page closes the book by recording that it continued "no bajo el sistema de licencias vendidas a particulares como hasta entonces se habia hecho casi siempre, sino en la forma mas general de asientos y contratas" - the argument was printed, suppressed, and overtaken by a change in contracting form.
The demand the book was arguing against is set out by the same historian without mitigation, and it is the cost this object is obliged to print next to the argument. With the Indians of the Antilles dead, those of the continent diminished, and the survivors freed and exempt from personal service, with rich mines to work and sugar mills being pushed everywhere, "todos los pobladores atentos a su provecho volvian los ojos a los miseros africanos. Y no era el Gobierno el menos interesado en este trafico, porque de el sacaba pingues sumas para su erario."
Albornoz is placed in a short list and not at its head. The historian names Las Casas first, while stating plainly that Las Casas had not once but many times asked that Africans be carried to the Indies, and admits him to the list only because "Casas al fin reconocio su error y declaro injusto aquel comercio". Fray Tomas de Mercado is the second, quoted from the work he published at Seville in 1587: "Es publica voz y fama, que en rescatar, sacar y traer los negros de su tierra para Indias, o para aca (Espana) ay dos mil enganos, y se hazen mil robos, y se cometen mil fuerzas."
The limits of the evidence, stated as its own claim. This object rests on one nineteenth-century volume; the 1573 sheets were not opened, and the passages quoted are that historian's selection from them, made in a century in which he was himself a party to the abolition argument in Cuba. No page read here gives the extent of the book, the reach or the enforcement of the prohibition, whether a second edition was ever attempted, or anything at all about the author's life beyond the words "estudiante de Talavera" on his own title page.