treatment of slaves When newly enslaved African people arrived in Europe, they had to begin a difficult process of adjustment to becoming a slave. Being renamed was an especially important part of this process, as it signaled a milestone on the long journey of being forced to readjust to a life of new social realities in a new country, and to a new religious allegiance. Many naming practices make tracing Africans in the records complicated. It is difficult to know from fifteenth- and sixteenth-century documentary sources who is an African, unless their place of origin or skin color is spelled out. When Africans were enslaved and taken to Europe, they were given European Christian names and were forced to drop their own names. A few North African Muslims held onto their own names, so, for example, there is a North African slave named Barack in a Genoese document from 1432,47 but sub-Saharan Africans mainly did not. Some subSaharan Africans in Africa who were not slaves may have chosen their own Christian names when they converted. The ruler of the Kongo, his close family and his “nobles,” when they accepted Christianity in 1491, were baptized with exactly the same names as their royal and noble counterparts in Portugal: the ruler was called João, after King João II of Portugal, his consort was called Leonor, after Queen Leonor, and their eldest son was called Afonso, after Afonso, the son of João and Leonor.48 And so on with all the nobles. Slaves were given Christian names, often from quite a small pool, so in Italy there are many slaves named Lucia, Giovanni, or Marta, and in Portugal there are hundreds of slaves called Maria, António, Catarina, or Francisco.49 They were often referred to by this Christian name in conjunction with the surname of their owner, which would change once again if they were sold to other owners. Many Africans were given nicknames related to their skin
color (Carbone / Charcoal, or Maura / Moor),50 and there were many “joke” names too, such as John White, or its equivalent, which is found across Europe. Occasionally, instead of being given the surname of their owner, they were given their owner’s Christian name, and another “joke” surname was “invented” for them. Edward Winter in England gave his slave the invented surname “Swarthye” so that the slave was known as Edward Swarthye.51 Fashion in slave names went through periods when classical names were common, for example, Pompey or Fortunatus. Learning a new European language was another vital element of the process of becoming a slave in Europe. Europe was not a linguistic entity, but a conglomeration of countries and areas, many of which had different languages, so often Africans had to learn more than one new European language. Vicente Lusitano was of African descent and wrote a famous book on musical theory. He was born in Portugal, went to Rome in the early sixteenth century, and then went on to a German court, and he must have spoken the languages of all these places.52 The common written language of the educated in Renaissance Europe was Latin, which would have been even more difficult to acquire than a vernacular language. However, there is evidence of Africans not only mastering it,53 but also composing and publishing works in it.54 In terms of spoken communication, creole or pidgin were available to recent African arrivals in Renaissance Europe, although it is not known how extensively they were used. Whether they were or not, in Portugal fala de Guiné (Guinea speak—that is, the type of speech used by West Africans) and its Spanish equivalent habla de negros (black speak) were mocked in contemporary plays, poems, and jokes.55 There was discrimination at all levels, just as there was acceptance at all levels, so the picture remains mixed. The sixteenth-century black
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