Europe’s Other Ethiopian Diaspora: The Ordeals of AntoĢnio, an Enslaved Muslim in Early Modern Lisbon
By Matteo Salvadore
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Abstract: This article reconstructs the diasporic life of António, a story of multifarious oppression and relentless resistance spanning three continents. Kidnapped as a child from his Christian family in mid-16th century Ethiopia, António toiled as a slave first in Muslim India, and after an interlude of freedom in the Estado Da India, in Lisbon. Here he came to the attention of the Inquisition because of his attempts to flee to the Maghreb, with fellow Muslims hailing from all over the Portuguese world. His life history sheds light on the slave trade out of the Horn of Africa, mobility within and beyond the Portuguese empire, Lisbon’s diverse Muslim community, and the modus operandi of the Portuguese Inquisition. As a rare testimony of Ethiopian enslavement in 16th century Lisbon, it also offers a corrective to the historiography on the Ethiopian presence in early modern Europe, which has so far focused only on the arrivals of ambassadors and pilgrims and ignored the existence of what was probably a substantial presence of enslaved Ethiopians in Lisbon and elsewhere in Latin Europe.