IntroductionFootnote 1
The kingdom of Allada, situated in what is today the south of the Republic of Bénin, was until its conquest by its northern neighbor Dahomey in 1724, the most powerful state in this region.Footnote 2 In the seventeenth century, it was an important supplier of slaves for the trans-Atlantic trade, exported through the coastal villages of Offra and Jakin, in the area of modern Godomey.Footnote 3 It was also an object of Christian missionary enterprise, notably a Spanish mission in 1660–1661.Footnote 4
However, the history of European contacts with Allada prior to the seventeenth century, when trade with western Africa was still largely monopolized by the Portuguese, is poorly documented. In contemporary European sources, the name Allada is spelled in various forms, including “Arida,” “Arda,” “Ardra,” “Arada,” and also “Arara.”Footnote 5 The first substantial reference to trade at Allada in contemporary published sources is in the account of the Dutch merchant Pieter de Marees, describing conditions in 1601. Although de Marees did not himself visit Allada, he records meeting a ship from Oporto which called at Elmina, on the Gold Coast (modern Ghana), intending to go on to trade at the “Rio de Ardra [River of Allada];” and he understood that the Portuguese were buying “many slaves” there, and that there were Portuguese merchants resident in Allada for the purpose of this trade.Footnote 6
In surviving Portuguese sources, the earliest reference to Allada so far traced is from 1539, when Christian missionaries visiting the kingdom of Benin, 400 km to the east (in what is today Nigeria), reported that its king was currently holding captive and mistreating ambassadors from, among other places, “Arida and Labida.”Footnote 7 The second of these names presumably represents Labadi, on the eastern Gold Coast, with which the Portuguese had made contact in 1520; but the inference that Allada also had been “recently opened to Portuguese trade” seems unwarranted.Footnote 8 The earliest reference to Portuguese trade along the coast of the modern Republic of Bénin has hitherto been assumed to have been in 1553, when problems in relations with the kingdom of Benin caused the Captain of the island of São Tomé, the Portuguese headquarters in the Gulf of Guinea, to interdict trade there, and to explore alternative sites of trade, including a “River which is called the Papoues,” i.e. Popo, nowadays Grand-Popo, 60 km west of Godomey.Footnote 9 Although Allada itself is not mentioned in this context, it appears that contact was made with it either then or soon after, since it is marked on Portuguese maps from 1570 onwards.Footnote 10 An analysis of shipping records relating to Cartagena in Spanish America (modern Colombia) from the 1570s onwards does not include any ship bringing slaves from Allada before 1600;Footnote 11 but African-born slaves designated as “Ardas” or “Araras” are documented in Peru from the mid-1560s onwards.Footnote 12
Christian influence in Allada also predated the arrival of the Spanish mission in 1660, the initiative for which in fact came from the local side, the king of Allada having sent an ambassador to the King of Spain in 1657 requesting the sending of missionaries. The missionaries in 1660 found that there were already some professed Christians in Allada, including some who served as the king’s Portuguese-speaking interpreters, one of whom was named as Mattéo Lopes.Footnote 13 A subsequent French trading expedition in 1670 also found Christians there, who asked them (in Portuguese) for priests to say mass; and Mattéo Lopes was still acting as the king’s interpreter (and indeed subsequently undertook an embassy to the King of France). Moreover, the king in 1670, who was then thought to be aged about seventy years, had been educated in his youth in a “convent” on São Tomé, by implication perhaps in the 1610s or 1620s.Footnote 14
However, newly discovered archival material shows that contacts between Allada and Portugal, and indeed Allada interest in Christianity, began earlier than the exploratory contact with Popo in 1553. These documents were discovered accidentally, by Pedro Pinto, in the course of research on a group of merchants of Lisbon in the sixteenth century, including some who were involved in the trade to West Africa. They relate to an ambassador of the King of Allada, named Dom Adȃo, who was in Lisbon apparently in the middle decades of the sixteenth century, and whose message from the King envisaged the establishment of a Christian church in Allada, as well as commercial relations.
The Mid-Sixteenth Century Mission
In sixteenth-century Lisbon the presence of Africans on the city’s streets was not considered to be anything extraordinary. Although most of them were slaves from sub-Saharan Africa, there were also some Africans who enjoyed a high social status: these were representatives and ambassadors from West African kingdoms and potentates. This article presents a transcription of two petitions that the ambassador of the kingdom of Allada submitted to the King of Portugal. These petitions are not dated but were probably prepared in the mid-sixteenth century, as will be seen shortly. They are part of a collection of documents preserved at the Torre do Tombo National Archives in Lisbon called Fragmentos.
In the mid-sixteenth century Lisbon was a global and cosmopolitan city, owing to the numerous political and commercial relationships Portugal had established with various continents, stretching from the Americas to Africa and Asia. Ships laden with wares from around the world constantly docked in the Portuguese capital. These products not only supplied the domestic market but were also redistributed to other parts of Europe and around the world. At this time, Lisbon had a population of about 100,000 inhabitants and was the largest city of the Iberian Peninsula. The city’s nerve-centre was the Ribeira district, the docks on the waterfront, where King Manuel I had ordered the construction of an imposing palace. This was the main hub for managing commercial activities in the Overseas Empire, since the customs houses of the House of Guinea and India were located on the ground floor of this building. Nearby, the Rua Nova dos Mercadores was a commercial artery, where Portuguese and foreign merchants met and negotiated lucrative business deals derived from the ever-expanding overseas trade.Footnote 15
The old customs house was located at the end of this street, to the East. According to the testimony of the humanist Damião de Góis in 1554, in front of this building, in the square that was the site of the Old Pillory, there were always
many men seated at tables, who could be called notaries or clerks, even though they did not hold official positions. They earned their livelihood in this manner: after listening to people who told them what they wished to do, they wrote sheets of paper, which they handed to their clients, receiving payment according to the contents of the documents. They are always ready to write correspondence, love letters, praise, discourses, epitaphs, verses, plaudits, funerary orations, petitions, notes and similar documents that are requested of them.Footnote 16
This was undoubtedly where the ambassador of Allada, known as Dom Adão, went to prepare the petitions that he wished to submit to the Portuguese court. Both the petitions were written by the same scribe.
The number of petitions that Ambassador Dom Adão submitted during his sojourn in Lisbon (which spanned at least about four years) is not known but two such documents have survived among the papers that are nowadays part of the Fragmentos collection of documents. This collection was created after the 1755 earthquake that, among other destruction, caused the roof and walls of the Torre do Tombo in the Lisbon castle, which housed the national archives, to collapse. Even though relatively few documents at the Torre do Tombo were lost during this tragic event, the papers from the Royal House and the royal secretaries became completely disorganized. While the documents were being collected and organized at a new location in the São Bento convent in Lisbon, the chief-guardian at the time, Manuel da Maia, decided to create a collection organized in chronological order, known as the Corpo Cronológico, comprising 82,902 documents, as well as thematic collections, relating to India, Africa, etc. in the case of complete documents that appeared to contain no indication of when they were written.Footnote 17
A few dozen bundles of truncated or even torn and fragmented documents remained, which did not include elements necessary for them to be included in either of these collections, and they were grouped into the collection known as the Fragmentos. Nowadays, this last collection has been restored and digitalized and is available on the Torre do Tombo website, encompassing about 6,300 documents. Most of the documents included in all these aforesaid collections span the period of the Kings Manuel I (r. 1495–1521), João III (r. 1521–1557), and Sebastião (r. 1557–1578), who were served by a generation of secretaries from the same family, the Carneiros. The first of these secretaries was António Carneiro (1460–1545), who served King Manuel I and his son King João III. Initially his son Francisco Carneiro, who assisted his father, was to have succeeded him as secretary, however, due to hearing problems he was replaced by another son, Pero de Alcáçova Carneiro (1515–1593), who from the age of fourteen onward served King João III. Pero began his career assisting his father in minor tasks for the king but progressively gained the monarch’s trust and confidence and, by the mid-1530s, he was already the king’s secretary and a member of the Royal Council. He also processed petitions and assisted with correspondence exchanged with all important figures, such as foreign potentates. He was a powerful intermediary for individuals seeking access to the monarch. After King João III died in 1557, Pero de Alcáçova continued as secretary during the two regencies while King Sebastião was a minor. His tenure ended due to a decision by the last regent, Cardinal Henrique, who was the brother of King João III, around 1568.Footnote 18 In 1569, he handed over sixty chests, safes, and escritoires to the chief-guardian of the Torre do Tombo, Damião de Góis, which contained documentation relating to the period when his family served the Crown. Among them were the petitions submitted by Dom Adão.Footnote 19
The real name of the ambassador who wrote to the monarch is unknown. Was Adão, i.e. “Adam,” the name of the first human creature according to the Book of Genesis in the Bible, a name attributed by the Crown or chosen by the ambassador? We do not know. The attribution of such a name could indicate that the person had accepted the Christian sacrament of baptism, but without additional data this can only be speculation. However, the fact that he styled himself with the noble title of Dom Adão while writing to the king could suggest that he was an aristocrat with close ties to the King of Allada, either by kinship or due to the position he held in the African court, owing to which he was allowed to use the title Dom in the kingdom of Portugal. This was a special privilege since, by law, nobody could use the title of Dom if they were not legally entitled to do so, either inherited through their father or grandfather or conferred as a special favor by the king. This reflects how the Portuguese perceived the social position of this envoy sent by the King of Allada. As per established protocol at the Portuguese court, it is likely that when he arrived in Lisbon Dom Adão had brought suitable credentials to be presented (which in the case of African sovereigns usually meant they brought an object of a symbolic nature) and gifts for the King of Portugal. After being recognized in their capacity, foreign ambassadors were afforded the mantle of the protection of the king, who would provide them suitable accommodation, take care of their living expenses during their stay in Portugal and give them gifts to deliver to their sovereign on their return.Footnote 20
Following the habitual procedure for submitting such petitions a bifolio of paper was folded in two, thus creating a four-page document, in which the petition was normally penned on the fourth page, leaving the initial pages blank for placing a possible royal order or warrant. The fact that both Dom Adȃo’s petitions do not contain such an order or warrant could indicate that the petitions did not receive an official response or that any eventual reply could have been transmitted informally. It may be noted that as relations with the monarchs of India and Persia deepened during the early decades of the sixteenth century, resulting in greater political and economic benefits for the Portuguese Crown, Portugal became progressively less interested in strategic alliances in Africa. This could partly explain the apparently laconic silence in terms of written replies to the Allada petitions.Footnote 21
The two documents were not dated, as was normal for such petitions. There is also no explicit indication of their chronological relationship to each other, though since one alludes to the ambassador’s projected return to Allada, it is assumed that it is the later of the two. However, despite the lack of explicit dates, some references in the second petition help to better define a possible time frame. Two individuals are mentioned in the second document: Pedro Álvares Gentil, a ship owner, some of whose ships were due to sail to “that coast” (meaning apparently Allada) “at the end of July,” and an unnamed bishop, who was currently prevented by illness from sailing but intended to leave in March, evidently of the following year.
The bishop referred to was presumably the Bishop of São Tomé, given that this island served as entrepot for procuring slaves in the Gulf of Guinea. In fact, the first petition submitted by the ambassador of Allada explicitly refers to the island of São Tomé as the place to which his king intended to send a certain number of slaves (and also cloth) every year. Presumably, therefore, it was to his diocese in São Tomé that the bishop intended to travel, at least in the first instance (though the petition also implies that he was expected to visit Allada itself). The diocese of São Tomé had been created in 1534 but its first bishop, Dom Diogo de Ortiz de Vilhegas, never went to the island. Neither did his successor, Friar Bernardo da Cruz, who was appointed in 1540. The latter, however, appointed a vicar-general, a Dominican clergyman, Friar João Baptista, to serve in his stead and this man left Lisbon in March 1545 bound for São Tomé, from where he wrote to the king on 25 April that year. Friar João Baptista was not strictly a residential prelate in São Tomé, but he did have the status of “bishop,” having been appointed in September 1542 as the titular bishop of Útica, suffragan or subaltern to Friar Bernardo da Cruz; he was thus a “bishop of the ring,” a prelate in partibus infidelium, without an assigned diocese, where his ring alone confirmed his episcopal status.Footnote 22 Could this be the bishop whom Dom Adão mentioned in his letter?
The only alternative candidate would be Dom Gaspar Cão, who was elected to succeed Bernardo da Cruz in 1554 and set sail for the island of São Tomé in March 1556. Moreover, it is known that he resided in his bishopric uninterruptedly until June 1565, after which he went to Lisbon, where he stayed between 1565 and 1571, in the context of canonical proceedings against him. He then returned to the island of São Tomé, where he died in 1574.Footnote 23
The bishop who expected to sail to São Tomé in March of the next year could be either Friar João Baptista, who embarked in March 1545, or Dom Gaspar Cão, in March 1556. The reference cannot be to Dom Gaspar Cão’s return to the island in 1571, however, since Pedro Álvares Gentil, the ship owner mentioned in the document, was already dead by then, as will be seen hereafter. This implies that the petition was drawn up in or before July of either 1544 or 1555.
As for Pedro Álvares Gentil, records relating to his mercantile activities are relatively abundant, but they do not necessarily shed light on a more precise date for the ambassador of Allada’s petitions. Gentil first appears in documents dating from 1513, when he was the guarantor for a craftswoman in Lisbon. This fact indicates that he had material assets and was already an adult, i.e. according to the law in force at the time, he was older than twenty-five years (thus having been born before 1488). His documented connections with São Tomé date back to the years between 1514 and 1519, when he held the slave trading lease for the island, along with two other merchants, Fernão de Castilho and Duarte Belo. During the 1520s he was also the factor of the Mendes Benveniste household in Lisbon (important commercial operators for the court and Portuguese monarchs) and he also supplied sugar to Ercole II d’Este, Duke of Modena, during the 1540s. His commercial interests were almost always linked to São Tomé over the course of the first half of the sixteenth century, including operating sugar plantations, slave trading and sending ships to the region. His documented activities also confirm that he again held the slave trading lease for the island of São Tomé from 1536 to 1543, in partnership with two other merchants, Vicente Gil and Manuel Fernandes. The final definite reference to Gentil dates from 14 December 1546, when he and his wife were listed as witnesses during Inquisition proceedings in Lisbon involving a Flemish weaver. Additionally, when Gentil’s son Alexandre enrolled in the University of Coimbra in May 1549, he did not state that his father had died, which would normally be stated in the registry if it had occurred.Footnote 24 While the absence of documented information does not necessarily mean that Gentil did not continue to send ships to São Tomé in the years after 1549 (when he would already have undoubtedly been older than sixty-one years), considering his ties over decades with the region, there is currently no means of confirming this. What is known for certain is that, in 1571, the heirs of Pedro Álvares Gentil divided and distributed the assets of the deceased merchant, and this after several lawsuits that had been filed concerning the estate and its division, thus pointing to a considerable interval between his death and this final legal agreement.Footnote 25
In conclusion, the second petition could have been submitted in either 1544 or 1555; the evidence relating to Gentil’s commercial activities leads us to favor the earlier date, but the later date cannot be definitely ruled out. Since Dom Adȃo states that he had left Allada three or four years earlier, the initial dispatch of the mission would have been in either 1540/1541 or 1551/1552. In either case, it predated the Portuguese exploration of the possibility of trading at Popo in 1553, which, as noted earlier, has hitherto been assumed to mark the earliest direct contact with this region. Moreover, the wording of the second petition implies that ships were already going to trade at Allada. The earliest explicit evidence for Allada participation specifically in the slave trade (or at least its interest in doing so) now becomes the king’s offer (in the first petition) to send slaves to São Tomé.
It is also noteworthy that the mission referred to the Allada king’s interest in Christianity as well as trade: the first petition transmits the king’s offer, “after a church was established in his land,” to send slaves and cloth to Sȃo Tomé to buy supplies for it; and the second implies that the bishop himself was expected to visit Allada, where Dom Adȃo anticipated welcoming him. Although the origins of this request can only be a matter for speculation, it seems possible that it was inspired by the visit of a party of Portuguese missionaries to Benin which had occurred in 1538–1540.Footnote 26 As has been seen above, this coincided with the presence of an ambassador from Allada in Benin, whose imprisonment there was reported in a letter of the missionaries in 1539. Assuming that the ambassador was eventually able to return to Allada, this may have been the origins of the Allada king’s interest in Christianity: at any rate, the coincidence in time with the dispatch of his ambassador to Portugal, in 1541/1542 (the earlier of the two possible dates, and the one favored by us), makes this plausible.Footnote 27
The documents
Doc. 1
Torre do Tombo, Fragmentos, Caixa 6, Maço 2, Doc. 33
Dyz dom Adãao e[mb]axador d ari[da] que el Rei d arida [q]uando o mandou a vosa Alteza lhe em[c]omendou que pidise a vosa Alteza que ouvese [por b]em e serujço de deus depoys d aver JgreJa em sua terra elle mandar em Cada hum Anno a Jl[ha] de Sam tome trinta peças d escravos E panos da terra pera comprar cousas [da] dita JgreJa e serujço della, ysto sem paguar dereitos do que Asy se leuar pera dita Jlha [……] no que vosa Alteza lhe fara merce
Dom Adão, the ambassador of Allada, says that when the King of Allada sent him to Your Highness he told him that he was to request Your Highness that it would be opportune and would be of service to God if, after a church was established in his land, he [the King of Allada] could send thirty slaves and local textilesFootnote 28 each year to the Isl[and] of São Tomé so as to buy things [for] the said Church and for its service, without paying customs duties on what was taken to [the] aforesaid Island in this manner […] and Your Highness would do him a great favor by allowing this.
Doc. 2
Torre do Tombo, Fragmentos, Caixa 6, Maço 1, Doc. 94
Dyz dom Adam embaxador d el Rey d arida, que aguora faz tres Annos e corre por quatro que partio de sua terra. E que em todo este tempo naão haa nova delle laa, E porque senhor na terra naão haa porto,. somente costa brava E nam vaão senam em certos tempos e meses, muita merce me fara vosa Alteza despachar me pera que tome a costa em tempo de boa desembarcaçaão pera hyr diante A el Rey meu senhor dar conta do que qua tenho neguoçiado,. E tambem senhor pera me hyr em hus navios de pedro aluarez gentil que pera la vaão na fim de Julho,. E vosa Alteza pode manda[r] o bispo devaguar, porque eu faley com elle [e m]e dise que nam estava pera [par]tir senam pera março por [n]am estar saão pera entrar no mar, E Jndo eu senhor aguora como diguo estaremos aguardando por ele pera se Reçeber como mjnha alma deseJa e njsto senhor Reçeberey merce e vosa Alteza fara a deus noso Senhor muyto serujço
Dom Adão, the King of Allada’s ambassador, says that he set out from his land some three or almost four years ago, and that throughout this period no news of him has been received there. And because, sire, in that land there are no ports, only a rough coast, and ships do not go there except during certain periods and months,Footnote 29 Your Highness would do me a great favor if you would issue the necessary authorization for me to go to that coast at a time when it is possible to disembark so that I may continue on my journey to the King, my lord, to describe what I have negotiated here. And also, sire, [permission] for me to sail aboard some ships belonging to Pedro Álvares Gentil, which are going there at the end of July.Footnote 30 And Your Highness can send the bishop later, because I spoke with him [and] he told [m]e that he was not [lea]ving yet and would not go until March because he was not healthy enough to go out to sea. And if I were able to go now, sire, as I have described, we will be able to wait for him and receive him [fittingly], as my soul desires,Footnote 31 and this would be a great favor to me, sire, and Your Highness will be doing a great service for Our Lord God.
