Tomas de Mercado, Summa de tratos y contratos: a confessor audits the Seville slave trade
A Dominican manual of commercial morality written for the merchants who dealt on the steps of Seville cathedral, and the place where one of them set down what the Cape Verde traffic actually was: manufactured titles, ambushes, five hundred people in one hold, a hundred and twenty dead by morning. It ends in two propositions that do not agree with each other, and the object prints both.
Why this wins its question: English-language coverage of Mercado, where it exists at all, reduces him to a line in the history of economic thought and, on slavery, to the paraphrase that he thought the trade lawful in theory and abusive in practice. That paraphrase is true and it is useless, since it carries none of the evidence. This object opens the chapter and prints what is on the leaves: the titles by which enslavement was held lawful, the mechanisms by which each was counterfeited, the one-in-two estimate the trade itself circulated, the five hundred embarked and the hundred and twenty dead by morning with the nearly three hundred dead before Mexico, the comparison with the Turks, and both concluding propositions with the reasons attached to the second. It also prints, in the same voice and at the same weight, the contempt for the enslaved that the author never questioned and the mitigation he offered - which is what makes the condemnation legible as something a sixteenth-century confessor actually wrote rather than as something a later century would like him to have written.
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 copy read here gives the work and its imprint in full on the title page: "SVMMA DE TRATOS, Y CONTRATOS, COMPVESTA POR EL MVY REVERENDO Padre Fray Thomas de Mercado, de la Orden de los Predicadores, Maestro en Sancta Theologia. Dividida en seys libros", with the note that to the earlier edition were added "muchas nuevas resoluciones. Y dos libros enteros", and the imprint "CON LICENCIA. En Sevilla, en casa de Fernando Diaz Impressor. Ano de M.D.LXXXVII", the sheet priced at five blancas and the printing paid for by the bookseller Diego Nunez. No page opened here dates the first edition, and this object gives none.
The subject enters the book as a working problem of the confessional rather than as a treatise on liberty. Folio 102 verso opens by naming two dealings the author thought had to be treated in the last part of the work, both constant on the gradas - the steps of Seville cathedral where merchants met - and both "muy escrupulosas, y aun escandalosas". The first is the traffic in people from Cape Verde. The second is a credit device used in the city. The chapter is addressed to men who would have to confess.
He declines the political question and states the factual one. The jurisdiction the king of Portugal held in those parts he will not touch, "que seria entrar en vn labirintho"; he presupposes instead what is commonly reported, that in ransoming, taking out and bringing people from their land to the Indies "ay dos mil enganos, y se hazen mil robos, y se cometen mil fuercas", and announces that after resolving the law he will descend to the fact, which is "no solo es tuerto, sino lamentable, y miserable".
The law is set out first, and it is permissive. Folio 102 verso holds that to capture or sell people is licit and of the ius gentium, and folio 103 lists the titles: capture in a war, in which the vanquished belongs to the victor; public crimes, since their own laws punish certain offences with loss of liberty, as the laws of the Indians had done; and the natural faculty of parents in extreme necessity to sell their children for their own relief. The chapter is not built on a denial that anyone may lawfully be enslaved.
Folio 104 then shows each title being manufactured. Rulers displeased with a man are described as procuring that he and his whole household lose their liberty, seizing them "con dos mil enganos y testimonios falsos", for which "nunca falta vn par de testigos que arrimarles". Others send people along rough roads and through woods and mountains where servants lie in ambush, take them where they cannot defend themselves, and deliver them at some port. The author signs the report in the first person: "E yo he visto venir muchos desta manera."
Folio 104 verso gives the estimate the trade itself carried. It is and has always been public report, he writes, "que de dos partes que salen, la vna es enganada o tyranicamente captiua, o forcada" - of every two people shipped, one taken by deception or force. The same page records a man he knew who took four hundred people from those islands with less than four thousand ducats of trade goods and no licence or register, and who had gone back to try the same again.
The passage is described in figures rather than in adjectives. Four to five hundred people are embarked in one ship, at times not even a carrack, where the smell alone suffices to kill most of them, "como en effecto muchos mueren. Que marauilla es no mermar a veynte por ciento." Lest anyone think this exaggeration, he dates a case: not four months earlier two merchants of the gradas shipped five hundred people from Cape Verde for New Spain in one vessel, and in a single night "amanecieron muertos ciento y veynte", they having been put below deck "como a lechones, y aun peor"; nearly three hundred, folio 105 adds, "murieron casi trezientos" before reaching Mexico.
Two comparisons on folio 105 place the responsibility at home. Spaniards are shocked at the cruelty of the Turks towards Christian captives shut in their dungeons at night, he writes, and certainly these Christian merchants treat far worse people who are now themselves of the faith. And the practice of baptising everyone together on the shore at embarkation with a single hyssop he calls "otra barbaridad grandissima".
The chapter closes in two propositions that sit against each other, and both belong in any honest account of it. "La primera, que la venta y compra de negros en Cabo verde es de suyo licita y justa." "La segunda, que supuesta la fama que en ello ay, y aun la realidad de verdad que passa, es peccado mortal, y viuen en mal estado, y gran peligro los mercaderes de gradas, que tratan en sacar negros de Cabo verde." The reason given is that the trade is so infamed, and it is public knowledge that many are taken by force, that those in Seville are bound not to enter it "por no participar de la injusticia"; and paying well is no defence, "Y no aprouecha dezir buenos dineros me cuesta, ni es disculpa el costar".
What the text does not do should be stated with the same care. Mercado does not conclude that holding people as property is unlawful; his first proposition preserves it, and his second condemns a particular commerce as it was being conducted. He writes of the peoples enslaved in the contemptuous vocabulary of his century, calling them "gente barbara y saluage" and reasoning from that barbarity to the credibility of the abuses. He also reports that greater corruption existed in times past and had been remedied in great part, in part by penal laws the king of Portugal had enforced with rigour - a mitigation that sits oddly beside the case he had just dated to four months before.
The limits of the evidence. These are pages from a manual of moral theology, and they are evidence of what a Dominican told the merchants of Seville they were obliged to do, not evidence that any of them did it. Nothing in the leaves opened here gives a total for the traffic, a series of any kind, or an instance of a merchant leaving the business. The mortality figures are the author's, reported from a case he places four months back, and no page read here shows him checking them against a register.