Forged Letters: Counterfeit Manumission Certificates and Subaltern Writing Practices as Used by Enslaved Individuals in Early Modern Iberia
From Firenze University Press Journal: Journal of Early Modern Studies (JEMS)
Fernando Bouza, Universidad Complutense de Madrid
In October 1580, Leonor, a young black woman and resident of Lisbon, crossed the frontier between Portugal and Castile. As far as she was aware, she was travelling as a servant of Captain Fernán López de Avellaneda, who was returning to the court in Madrid following his tour of duty during the sack of Lisbon, which had taken place in August that same year. On reaching Alcuéscar, in the district of Montánchez in Extremadura, the young woman discovered that the soldier intended to sell her there as a slave. He declared that he had legitimately captured her during military action from the encampment of Dom Antó-nio, Prior do Crato, on the outskirts of Lisbon. It was then that Leonor revealed to a local priest that she was not a slave, but in fact a freedwoman, and she showed him her carta de horro (manumission certificate), the document that demonstrated that freedmen and women had been legally granted manumission (ahorría, alhorría, ahorramiento) by their owners.As a result, a lengthy lawsuit began and it dragged on until 1584, during which time it was transferred to Madrid; Avellaneda declared throughout that Leonor’s carta, or certificate, was false and had been fabricada (forged) to his slave’s advantage. Thanks to the legal enquiries that were undertaken, it is possible to reconstruct the manumission process Leonor had undergone, and her Portuguese manumission certificate (carta de alforria), which had been drawn up before a public notary in Lisbon in 1574 by her past owner, María Ortiz, was cited as evidence. Leonor had sub-sequently gone to live ‘en casa de por sí’(in a house on her own) and was not subject to anyone.During the trial, Leonor’s testimony, in which she was referred to as Leonor morena (dark-skinned Leonor), Leonor negra (black Leonor) and Leonor Ortiz, was taken down in writing. She gave an account of her life, stating that she had been a slave, was a mother of two sons, a resident of the Lisbon district where she resided near Portas de Santa Catarina (St Catherine’s Gate), and that she worked as freedwoman washing household linen. Although she did not sign her declaration, given that she did not know how to, she participated as autora (author); in other words, as plaintiff in this trial. Furthermore, she had brought the document demon-strating that she was a freedwoman with her from Portugal to Castile, and this sufficed for her to be freed from the power of Captain Avellaneda following the unequivocal judicial sentence.1The recourse that groups from amongst the predominantly illiterate rural population made to formal legal procedures occurred on a mass scale in early modern Spain. Pegerto Saavedra has studied this issue in the greatest depth. He has shown that for the Galician peasants who tended land either as colonate tenants of ecclesiastical landowners, or else as vassals to the nobility, bringing lawsuits, involving lengthy proceedings and appeals against their ecclesiastical or civil landowners, proved to be a strategy that provided excellent results (Saavedra 1996). A number of legal memoranda submitted by Christian captives held by Muslims have also been conserved(Tarruell Pellegrin 2013). However, a less well-known phenomenon is the submission of legal memoranda by, or on behalf of, freedmen or enslaved individuals (Olsen 1998; Jouvé Martín 2005; Oliveira 2005), and likewise the latter’s recourse to the law courts. Slaves undoubtedly went on to pursue legal action against their owners for both detaining them illegitimately as well as for mistreating them, and also for keeping them in inappropriate conditions and not attending to their basic needs (Periáñez Gómez 2010, 402–410; see van Deusen 2015).It is significant that we know much more about the oral (Fra Molinero 1995) as well as the phatic and musical (Rodulfo Hazen 2022) forms used by slaves than we do about the bonds they formed through writing in its most diverse forms of representation. The aim of this arti-cle is to analyse a series of legal trials involving enslaved men and women — above all, but not solely, those of African origin, Berbers and Moriscos — in Spain and Portugal during the Early Modern Age, all of whom sought to claim su libertad (their freedom). For this purpose, they all clearly stated that they had been freed, and they did so either because they were kept in a state of slavery despite having been manumitted, or because their owners accused them of presenting counterfeit cartas de horro. On the basis of these trials, it is possible to reconstruct accounts of both the lives of the individuals involved, and the broader collective experience of slavery. Furthermore, it is argued that the testimonies given at court provide a valuable form of egodocument. The accounts discussed here shed light on the sought-after ‘slaves’ view of slavery’, albeit without attaining the same scale and scope of the sources discussed in Stuart B. Schwartz’s classic study on the conditions imposed by a group of slaves on Manuel da Silva Ferreira, following their flight from the Engenho (sugar plantation) of Ilhéus to create a mocambo (community) of escaped slaves between 1789 and 1790 (1977).4It goes without saying that the documentation uncovered here could be framed within the extensive spectrum of practices of writing through delegation5 (Petrucci 1989; Métayer 2000; Bouza 2001), bearing in mind the fact that the great majority of enslaved individuals discussed in this study, just like Leonor, were illiterate.6 Nevertheless, the case of Juan Rodríguez Prieto, a slave of African origin, is of special relevance as he was able to write, and was tried for having written counterfeitcartas de libertad for a third party, for whom he copied an authentic carta he had borrowed from a freedman.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.36253/jems-2279-7149-15261
Read Full Text: https://oajournals.fupress.net/index.php/bsfm-jems/article/view/15261