I found this time line on a website. I thought it was an interesting read since it included some things I didn't know (such as the Papal Bull giving the Portuguese a virtual monopoly on african slaves)
website: http://www.brycchancarey.com/slavery/chrono2.htm excerpt: 1441 * 1441: Start of European slave trading in Africa. The Portuguese captains Antão Gonçalves and Nuno Tristão capture 12 Africans in Cabo Branco (modern Mauritania) and take them to Portugal as slaves. 1444 * 1444: Lançarote de Freitas, a tax-collector from the Portuguese town of Lagos, forms a company to trade with Africa. * 8 August 1444: de Freitas lands 235 kidnapped and enslaved Africans in Lagos, the first large group of African slaves brought to Europe. 1450 1452 * 1452: Start of the 'sugar-slave complex'. Sugar is first planted in the Portuguese island of Madeira and, for the first time, African slaves are put to work on the sugar plantations. * 18 June 1452: Pope Nicholas V issues Dum Diversas, a bull authorising the Portuguese to reduce any non-Christians to the status of slaves. 1454 * 8 January 1454: Pope Nicholas V issues Romanus Pontifex, a bull granting the Portuguese a perpetual monopoly in trade with Africa. Nevertheless, Spanish traders begin to bring slaves from Africa to Spain. 1461 * 1461: The first of the Portuguese trading forts, the castle at Arguin (modern Mauritania), is completed. 1462 * 1462: The Portuguese colony on the Cape Verde Islands is founded, an important way-station in the slave trade. * 1462: Portuguese slave traders start to operate in Seville (Spain) 1470 * 1470s: Despite Papal opposition, Spanish merchants begin to trade in large numbers of slaves in the 1470s. 1475 1476 * 1476: Carlos de Valera of Castille in Spain brings back 400 slaves from Africa. 1481 * 1481: A Portuguese embassy to the court of King Edward IV of England concludes with the English government agreeing not to enter the slave trade, against the wishes of many English traders. * 1481-86: Diogo da Azambuja builds the castle at Elmina (modern Ghana) which was to become the most substantial and the most notorious of the slave-trading forts in West Africa. 1483 * 1483: Diogo Cão discovers the Congo river. The region is later a major source of slaves. 1485 * 1485: Diogo Cão makes contact with the nation of Kongo and visits its capital, Mbanza Kongo. He establishes relations between Portugal and Kongo. 1486 * 1486: João Afonso Aveiro makes contact with the kingdom and the city of Benin. * 1486: Portuguese settle the West African island of São Tomé. This uninhabited West African island is planted with sugar and populated by African slaves by the Portuguese. The settlement thus extended and developed the sugar-slave complex that had been initiated in Madeira. 1487 * 1487-88: Bartolomeo Dias rounds the Cape of Good Hope and explores the Indian Ocean and the East African coast. 1492 * 2 January 1492: The Moorish town of Granada surrenders to the Spanish forces of the Catholic Kings, Ferdinand and Isabella, marking the end of La Reconquista, the war between Moors and Spaniards in the Iberian peninsular. Both sides retain many slaves taken during the course of the war. * 12 October 1492: Christopher Columbus becomes the first European since the Viking era to discover the New World, setting foot on an unidentified island he named San Salvador (modern Bahamas). --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Follow the confirmation directions when they arrive. For more options, such as changing to List, Digest, Abridged, or No Mail (vacation) mode, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/Azores. Click in the blue area on the right that says "Join this group" and it will take you to "Edit my membership." -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
