Gomes Eanes De Zurara Quotes

Back in 1415, Prince Henry and his brothers had convinced their father, King John of Portugal, to capture the principal Muslim trading depot in the western Mediterranean: Ceuta, on the northeastern tip of Morocco. These brothers were envious of Muslim riches, and they sought to eliminate the Islamic middleman so that they could find the southern source of gold and Black captives. After the battle, Moorish prisoners left Prince Henry spellbound as they detailed trans-Saharan trade routes down into the disintegrating Mali Empire. Since Muslims still controlled these desert routes, Prince Henry decided to “seek the lands by the way of the sea.” He sought out those African lands until his death in 1460, using his position as the Grand Master of Portugal’s wealthy Military Order of Christ (successor of the Knights Templar) to draw venture capital and loyal men for his African expeditions. In 1452, Prince Henry’s nephew, King Afonso V, commissioned Gomes Eanes de Zurara to write a biography of the life and slave-trading work of his “beloved uncle.” Zurara was a learned and obedient commander in Prince Henry’s Military Order of Christ. In recording and celebrating Prince Henry’s life, Zurara was also implicitly obscuring his Grand Master’s monetary decision to exclusively trade in African slaves. In 1453, Zurara finished the inaugural defense of African slave-trading, the first European book on Africans in the modern era. The Chronicle of the Discovery and Conquest of Guinea begins the recorded history of anti-Black racist ideas. Zurara’s inaugural racist ideas, in other words, were a product of, not a producer of, Prince Henry’s racist policies concerning African slave-trading.1

Writing in 1453 Portuguese royal chronicler Gomes Eanes de Zurara called upon the “Curse of Ham” story in Genesis to justify his countrymen’s enslavement of Africans, the race cursed “to be subject to all the other races of the world.” Slavery had been going on since the ancient civilizations, but Zurara’s explanation marked the first time that enslavement was seen as a matter of biological inheritance rather than a conditional state brought about by war or an economic transaction. The notion that servitude was passed down through blood became particularly expedient as the plantation societies in the New World required more and more labor. Not only could the workforce continually regenerate itself through reproduction, but a seemingly infinite supply of new slaves were available for purchase on the Dark Continent. While African states had long been selling war prisoners to their Muslim neighbors, the Europeans, armed with their quasi-religious, then quasi-scientific rationale, elevated the practice into an international institution.