First Public Slave Auction at Lagos, Portugal
The first large public auction of enslaved Africans in Europe took place at Lagos in the Algarve on 8 August 1444, when 235 people taken on the Saharan coast were landed and sold. The raid had been organised by Lançarote de Freitas, a royal official at Lagos, with six caravels licensed by Prince Henry. It was a commercial venture rather than a voyage of discovery, and its success established slaving as the business of Portuguese expansion for the next four centuries. The account comes from Gomes Eanes de Zurara, Henry's chronicler, writing about a decade later, and it is the most detailed description of such a scene in the fifteenth century. He describes the captives laid out in a field outside the town — some pale and fair, some dark, some already lamenting — and the division into lots, in which husbands were separated from wives, children pulled from parents, and brothers from brothers, with those who tried to hold together beaten apart. He records that the onlookers wept. He then explains, in the same chapter, that the sorrow should be set against the salvation of their souls, and that this had been the prince's purpose throughout. Prince Henry attended on horseback and took forty-six people as his royal fifth, which he immediately gave to the Church. Zurara's passage is the earliest European account of the trade and contains its earliest justification. Raiding gave way to purchase from coastal intermediaries within a few years, because it was cheaper and safer. Portugal built its first permanent trading fort at Arguin in 1445 for the purpose. A museum now stands on the Lagos site.
- Year: 1444 CE
- Category: Social
