Space invaders? slavery, gender, and the remapping of Eighteenth-Century Portuguese imperial geographies

ABSTRACT This article explores the site of the Rossio square in Lisbon as a contested urban space between the dispossessed and the Portuguese imperial authorities over the eighteenth century. Focusing on the aftermath of the Lisbon earthquake, it examines how enslaved and freed women of African and Afro-Brazilian heritage from the Portuguese colonies used and reconfigured the Rossio through their direct confrontations with the imperial authorities. Reading against the grain of traditional manuscript sources, this article demonstrates how contestations of the Rossio not only illuminated and underscored the dependence of the metropolis on the labour of Afro-diasporic enslaved and freed women, but also enabled these women to create alternate geographies of empire and power that pushed back against imperial spatial constructions.


Introduction
On 1 November 1755 at 9.30am, as men, women and children throughout Portugal were preparing to celebrate All Saints' Day, an earthquake of magnitude 9 hit the capital city of Lisbon.Violent tremors lasted seven minutes, punctuated by short pauses and soon followed by a prolonged period of aftershocks.The scale of the earthquake reduced many of the capital's royal, ecclesiastical, and civic buildings to rubble, but it was the impending tsunami of up to 12 metres high that engulfed the lower half of Lisbon, known as the Baixa.The enormous waves reached up to the Rossio, the 'old eccentric square in the center of the medieval city', which had been the popular heart of Lisbon for centuries. 1To make matters worse, these natural disasters led to CONTACT Selina Patel Nascimento s.patelnascimento@lancaster.ac.uk a man-made one: the quake and the tsunami caused the thousands of candles lit to commemorate All Saints' Day to fall.The debris and shattered wooden structures of the city's buildings caught fire and raged for five days until it was finally brought under control. 2As urban planning historian John R. Mullin has noted, 'the core of the city was left virtually uninhabitable'. 335 of the 40 churches in Lisbon were completely destroyed, while only 10 of the 75 convents remained intact.All prisons and hospitals were beyond repair, and 33 palaces were left in ruins. 4Economic historian Alvaro S. Pereira has estimated that the direct cost of the earthquake was between 32% and 48% of the Portuguese Empire's GDP, and that in Lisbon alone, between 20,000 and 30,000 inhabitants perished. 5eedless to say, the destruction of one of Europe's largest and richest cities in the mid-eighteenth century was met with disbelief and debate among the international community.It drove philosophical musings by leading figures such as Immanuel Kant and Voltaire, the latter describing the moment of devastation as his tragic hero Candide watches on. 6ortugal's Minister for Foreign Affairs, Sebastião José de Carvalho e Mello, took a more pragmatic stance.Known to posterity simply as Pombal, he quickly rose to virtual dictatorial power by taking command of the apocalyptic situation. 7He called on Portugal's leading military engineer, Manuel da Maia, to develop a series of plans to rebuild Lisbon, from which he chose a 'clean slate' approach.This involved demolishing what was left of the Baixa and building a new road pattern on top, at a lower urban density and with new earthquake-proof construction standards. 8Lisbon was reconfigured as a modern, ordered urban space, defined by its grid-iron network of uniform blocks and streets, anchored by its two principal squares north and south of the Baixa. 9rchitects, urban planners, and geographers have studied the earthquake and Lisbon's regeneration under Pombal from several perspectives.Marat-Mendes, Teixeira de Sampayo and Rodrigues used public space evaluations to demonstrate how Pombal's plans for Lisbon signalled an increase in public space ratio, despite a strong uniformity of key urban spaces from the seventeenth to the twenty-first centuries. 10While some scholars have noted the 'resilience' of Lisbon's urban identity in the aftermath of the 1755 earthquake into the present day, others have used path dependency theory to argue that the earthquake was a 'disruptive critical juncture' on Lisbon's route to modernity. 11ronically, what is almost always absent in any treatment of the Lisbon earthquake and its aftermath is the omnipresence of transatlantic slavery.
Even in historical and historiographical examinations of Pombal's vision for Lisbon, scholars consistently ignore the central role that transatlantic slavery played in the rebuilding of the metropolis as its financial backing, manual labour, and enslaved human geographies gave urban regeneration programmes new meanings. 12John R. Mullin's little known, yet foundational, contribution to the field argues that Pombal's rebuilding scheme can be understood as a 'study on despotic planning'. 13Symbols and icons were used to create a radically different power structure that illustrated that Lisbon, 'as an abstraction, represented a vehicle for change. ..This new era no longer represented the power of the crown, nobility, and church.It now celebrated the merchant bureaucrat and common man'. 14Historian Timothy D. Walker extends on this by examining the intense 'rivalry between secular authorities and traditional religious power', which Mullins recognises but does not connect to a historical power struggle founded on Enlightened absolutism. 15hile we know that between Lisbon's Black population hovered around 10% between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries, these highly visible bodies, the essential labour of the empire both at home and overseas, have been rendered invisible at this crucial juncture in Portugal's history. 16Urban anthropologist Daniel Malet Calvo is unique in his persistent acknowledgement of the contribution of Black Africans and their descendants to urban processes and space-making in presentday Lisbon. 17Building on his work, this article seeks to address the racial and gendered dimensions of Pombaline Lisbon, which remain a conspicuous lacuna across academic disciplines.In short, it is a call for scholars to reorient dominant perspectives of imperial power in urban Lisbon by centring transatlantic slavery and its broader realities in future analyses of metropolitan space and placemaking.
Using micro-historical methods, this article explores how Black enslaved and free(d) women experienced urban spaces in the eighteenth century.It reveals how Black women's simultaneous exclusion and inclusion into economic and socio-cultural urban spaces were consistently challenged and reworked by these very women in the post-1755 capital city some years after its habitable reconstruction and demonstrates long continuities that ultimately question the scholarship's assertion that Pombaline Lisbon was a complete break with the capital's urban past.Racialised women created symbolic meanings in the new city often by reintroducing traditional practices and activities in defiance of dominant spatial configurations.Examining Inquisition records, civil criminal cases, and imperial legislation, this article turns on the presence of Black female bodies in the Rossio square, traditionally a common space that was increasingly and deliberately encroached upon by the imperial authorities.It demonstrates how this continued to be a contested urban space for marginalised women of colour across the eighteenth century, telling a story of continuity despite huge changes during this period.Thus, this article not only draws Black female bodies back onto the Lisbon landscape, but also contributes to the budding research across various fields by examining how this carefully planned new city and its values were experienced and reconfigured by its most marginalised inhabitants.
Navigating north Lisbon's medieval landscape into the eighteenth century and focusing particularly on the changing uses of the Praça do Rossio (Rossio Square), this article then examines how Black women contested and redefined the Rossio and its surrounding areas in different ways prior to, and after, the Lisbon earthquake.Through this deep exploration of specific encounters on this urban site, this article opens a window onto an entanglement of empire, illustrating how a requisite mutuality was embedded within these conflicts that reaffirmed broader imperial values whilst simultaneously disrupting European imaginings of colonial and imperial space.It argues that Black enslaved and free(d) women were not only visible social actors, but active agents and participants in the reconstruction of Lisbon after the 1755 earthquake as they etched their alternate geographies onto the landscape.Black women were integral to processes of space-and place-making through their use and contestation of urban spaces as part of a wider network of enslaved and freed individuals living amongst the elite of imperial Portuguese society, which ultimately redrew the city's cartographies to reclaim a traditional popular space in symbolic, physical, and material terms.In sum, this article demonstrates that in this traditional reclamation of urban space, Black women redefined imperial and urban geographies in ideological terms to force the inclusion of Black female bodies into previously White imagined spaces.* Originally a small hillside settlement where the São Jorge Castle stands today, Lisbon was close to a central valley (present-day Baixa district) with waters flowing into the river Tagus.Named Olisipo by the Romans who occupied these lands, it soon became home to numerous ethnic groups from at least the sixth century BCE, including Phoenicians, Lusitanians, Arabs, Visigoths, and Vandals. 18The settlement expanded in all directions during Islamic occupation of the Iberian Peninsula to accommodate a growing population.Known as al-Ušbûna or Luxbuna, it was formally elevated as an urban site with the construction of the cerca velha, the city walls re-erected under the Moors in 953. 19Already in this period, vast urban expansion was visible in the suburbs beyond the city limits, the latter designed simply to protect the most important civic institutions located in the heart of the city.Judiciaries, markets, temples, factories, and extensive housing circled the entire city, dotted by farmlands and clearings outside of the city walls. 20n 1147, Luxbuna was taken from the Moors during the Reconquista (Reconquest), seeing Christian power installed in Portugal.Rebranded Lyxbona, the inner city was restructured and divided into a feudal tripartite space comprising of the Alcáçova Real (Royal Castle), the aristocratic and administrative zone, and the labour and service zone.While the feudal-Christian regime made significant changes to Lisbon's urban landscape, many buildings and structures from the Islamic period were repurposed and some have survived to the present day, marking the city with a distinct architectural style and identity. 21More than two centuries after the Reconquest, the reigning monarch D. Fernando I decreed improvements to, and an extension of, the city walls, these new limits being named the cerca fernandina.It is at this juncture, in 1375, that the Rossio was formally incorporated into Lisbon's central urban landscape. 22orth of the Baixa valley, the Rossio was located originally outside of the city walls and had been a public space open to individuals from all walks of life for centuries.'Rossio' is not a proper noun; rather it derives from ressio 'meaning unused, abandoned, waste or useless land located outside or adjacent to an established site'. 23By the twelfth century, when Lisbon was proclaimed the capital of Portugal, rossio signified commonly held land or 'land without an owner', unowned because it was deemed to be of little agricultural value. 24Nevertheless, rossios held social, cultural, and economic significance for the local population.At the time of the Reconquest, Lisbon's Rossio was already the area's most important common space.Markets, bull running contests, races, gatherings and popular celebrations all took place there, and it housed brick ovens and storage barns, crucial communal resources to ensure the livelihoods of local residents. 25Adjacent to the cerca velha, the Rossio served as a crossroads connecting Lisbon's inner city to its fields and suburbs for 500 years, offering a gateway for the marginalised and dispossessed to mark their presence within the city limits.As Daniel Malet Calvo writes, it was 'a place where they [the common people] congregated and exchanged news, goods, and ideas, and a venue for collective ceremonies, celebrations, protests, and revolutions -most of which were key events in the history of the country'. 26nce absorbed into the city proper, the Rossio went from being common land to a regulated public space, which ultimately redrew its symbolic and social significance from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century.It was designated a praça (town square), a term used to describe an open space within densely populated medieval cities for residents to socialise, but one that was not necessarily regular in shape, size, or topography. 27While the Rossio was still a hub of popular activity, the Crown persevered to alter the square into a centre of power.In addition to its economic and social function for the populace, the Portuguese monarchy imbued the Rossio with elite symbols through rituals such as royal marriages, state funerals, and public executions. 28Seized not only symbolically, but physically, the Rossio became the site of numerous building projects funded by institutions of power to visibly demonstrate an ideological shift that now viewed the Rossio as central to urban administration and court life.
Building first started at the Rossio in 1242, as its marshlands to the northeast were drained in preparation for the construction of the Igreja e Convento de São Domingos, a Dominican monastery.D. Afonso III's decree opened the way for elite encroachment on the Rossio, as the convent effectively loomed over the square, entrenching a spiritual authority that oversaw popular public activities.The Dominican monastery was the initial signal of the Rossio's remapping as a contested urban space between the authorities and the common people, in which the Catholic Church was the first to mark its permanent presence on common land.Nevertheless, the decree ensured that the main part of the Rossio was retained for communal use. 29he installation of the Portuguese royal court in Lisbon after the Reconquest soon led to public dissatisfaction as the city's inhabitants swelled to unmanageable numbers when court was in session.Accommodation suitable for foreign dignitaries, non-resident courtiers, and their entourages proved increasingly difficult, and locals constantly complained to the monarch of the scarcity of lodgings available yearround.After an aborted start, D. Duarte decreed in 1434 an annual stipend for the construction of 'albergues honrradas' or stately buildings to house this surplus population. 30Named the Estaus, (literally, 'lodgings') this palatial structure was designed to offer spacious living quarters complete with kitchens, gardens, pantries, and access to stables for servants and slaves to operate. 31As an open and ready-cleared area within the city limits, the Rossio provided the ideal space to construct buildings of this size.Various decrees by subsequent monarchs until 1456 all reference construction work on the Paço dos Estaus, or the Estaus Palace.However, as Milton Pedro Dias Pacheco has convincingly argued, there were two different Estaus on the Rossio.The first, slightly older and smaller Estaus was built along the Rossio's eastern face in front of the Dominican monastery. 32The second Estaus was ordered by D. Afonso V in 1449, a much larger palace that adorned the Rossio's northern face, and it is to this edifice that the name Estaus Palace is attributed by historians and the public today. 33lthough both of the Estaus were originally conceived of as guest accommodation for elite dignitaries and court officials, the Afonsine Estaus also functioned as a royal palace.It was temporarily inaugurated in 1451 to receive the embassy of the Holy Roman Emperor Friedrich III in preparation for his marriage to D. Afonso V's sister, the infanta Dona Leonor. 34In the aftermath of the 1531 earthquake that most scholars consider affected the Lower Tagus Basin and its surrounding areas, and as such only moderately impacted the Rossio site, the Estaus Palace came to serve another purpose. 35The establishment of the Holy Office of the Inquisition of Portugal in 1536 led to sessions and trials being regularly held in the Estaus Palace.It was not until 1570 that the Estaus Palace on the northern face of the Rossio was officially ceded to the Holy Office. 36he symbolic oversight of the Dominican monastery over the Rossio was now augmented and crystallised by the Inquisition's permanent physical surveillance over popular practices.The total dedication to Catholicism and its doctrine represented by the convent was complemented by the Inquisition's public punishment of those who questioned the faith, as the Rossio became one of key sites for the Inquisition's infamous public sentencings known as autos da fé. 37ompleting a tripartite Catholic entrenchment in the Rossio was the establishment of the Hospital Real de Todos-os-Santos (1492-1504), its building coinciding with Portugal's imperial expansion in the Americas, Africa, and Asia. 38The symbolic values of religious instruction and correction were enhanced by this hospital, representing charity and mercy. 39Built along much of the Rossio's eastern face next to the smaller Estaus mansion, the Royal All Saints Hospital was a magnificent, sprawling structure organised around four infirmaries and a series of cloisters.Its iconic steps leading up to its ornate entrance were majestic, renowned throughout the city as simply as escadas do Rossio (the Rossio steps) on which street vendors would sell their wares for centuries.Indeed, [a] unique cutting-edge construction, the Royal All Saints Hospital was soon recognised as one of the great public works of Lisbon, be it for its civic utility and function, its monumentality, architectural quality, and role in organising urban space (defining the programme of architectural models), or as a mark of the King's political centralisation of power and propaganda. 40ligious power permeated through the square by the end of the sixteenth century, transforming the Rossio into a site of religious authority and state-sanctioned violence as Portugal became an imperial power.Unlike the Dominican convent, the two Estaus palaces and the Royal All Saints Hospital were built on the edge of Rossio's common land, signalling a further elite encroachment onto public space.Ironically, while the Rossio traditionally signified land without an owner, the edifices constructed on the Rossio most certainly did have owners.They laid claim not only to the buildings and the land, but also the operations and significance of the open space of the Rossio itself, be they through the public punishment and penitence of religious dissenters during the Inquisition's autos da fé or the forced removal of itinerant peddlers and female street vendors from the hospital steps.These physical reminders of religious authority and power remained fixed in the Rossio, indeed extending the size and scale of their buildings right up until the 1750s.
In remapping Lisbon's streets in the aftermath of the 1755 earthquake, the Marquês de Pombal also sought to control the use of urban spaces and reinscribe former areas with new symbolic and ideological meanings.The Rossio square was a principal site for the city's renaissance and was utterly transformed, designed to shift religious power away from these central areas and imbue critical public spaces with economic and political power reflecting Portugal's imperial values.First to go was the hospital, which has been badly damaged during the earthquake and required extensive rebuilding.Upon the ruins of the original hospital, Pombal raised the Praça da Figueira, popularly known as the praça nova da fruta (the new fruit square), to host Lisbon's openair market.Not only financial constraints drove the decision to relocate the hospital elsewhere.António Fernando Bento Pacheco argues that the creation of the Praça da Figueira was a response to Pombal's vision of an Enlightened city that celebrates the Rossio's role as a key urban site for socialisation and circulation by effectively extending a physical area adjacent to it specifically for the Rossio's principal activity: market trade. 41owever, Bento Pacheco fails to recognise the underlying class biases that accompanied Pombal's Enlightened economic vision coupled with an intensification of trade regulation designed to increase efficiency and improve public health, 42 which inadvertently deepened the marginalisation of street vendors who had traditionally operated in the Rossio.In one swift move, Pombal made an obvious and symbolic claim of this contested urban space that removed its popular elements and installed in its place the bourgeoisie.The sale of fruit and vegetables in the Rossio, a centuries-long tradition, was immediately prohibited and all vendors were required to sell their goods only from the Figueira in 1775. 43The sickly, the destitute, and the disenfranchised masses were displaced to the Figueira to make way for the new Estaus Palace that housed the Senate and the Inquisition until their dissolution in 1821, two enormous fountains, and a commissioned statue of King Pedro IV.The Rossio was now the home of refined merchants and shopowners.A royal decree of 22 May 1773 granted hat merchants stores in the Rossio square as their new site for sales, stating that it was a space to 'ennoble, and populate' the corporation, indicating a shift in ideological and symbolic terms that saw the Rossio move from a 'popular' to 'noble' space. 44he gendered significance of this edict cannot be understated.By the late sixteenth century, the Rossio was already famous for its weekly fair held on Tuesdays known as the feira da ladra, which relocated to the Rossio in the 1430s after the Reconquest. 45This was a fair 'where one always finds vendors at portable tents, like those they have in Paris at Ponte Nova'. 46Charles Fréderic de Merveilleux marvelled how 'one can find anything one desires for sale' at the Rossio market in the 1720s. 47rucially, this fair was led by female vendors, who were not formally inducted into guilds or offered royal licences like their male counterparts.It was a space that had for centuries been the place for informal but regular sales amongst women, whose activities were not overly regulated by the Crown.After the 1755 earthquake, the feira da ladra rotated between various locations around the city before finally settling in 1882 in its present-day site of Campo de Santa Clara. 48 decree in 1800 outlining how the Praça da Figueira was to be regulated makes clear that this new square was now the site for sales by female vendors: §I.The huts, or stands, which surround the Praça da Figueira, must only be occupied by women who effectively are physically present [existão] in them during the day without company for the sale of foodstuffs, poultry, and game, fruit, and vegetables, with exclusive rights to any other foodstuffs or trade as stated below. 49e decree goes on to outline exactly where female vendors were allowed to sell their goods.Women selling poultry and game were to stay on the west of the square, which backed onto the Rossio.Along the northern and eastern faces of the Figueira, female vendors could sell fruit at the front and vegetables at the back 'as they have always done'. 50Cheese and eggs could also be sold in small quantities by other women alongside those selling agricultural produce.The displacement of this female vending activity from the Rossio to the Praça da Figueira should not be underestimated as simply an inconvenience that moved the markets a few metres away.The erasure of longheld traditions of female market activity and the symbolic reinscription of the Rossio as a 'noble' space ripped away a key socio-cultural reference point for the popular classes and enforced new socio-economic norms based on elite interests.What is most striking in the 1800 edict is the clear gendered spatialisation envisioned by the Crown.Female vendors were only allowed to sell their wares 'without [male] company', and indeed the decree explicitly states that §VII.No man whatsoever, as a relative or acquaintance, can be physically present in the huts, or stands, that the Saleswomen of any of the said items have leased in the Praça da Figueira, with the exception of those who are legitimately married to the same Saleswomen, because these may be present alongside their wives during the day in these stands, as long as they [the husbands] never appear to own them, nor sell them, or buy anything for them, nor cause, or help any disorder in the Square. . . 51is was a mechanism that helped maintain an economic hierarchy that mapped onto gendered social value systems.Female trade was restricted to relatively low-cost subsistence items and roughly equated to trade stemming from cottage industry.Men sold crafted goods based on recognised professional skills such as saddles, mattresses and ropes on the southern face of the square. 52This skilled work was equated with refinement and public decency, and men in these professions were allowed to continue trading in the Figueira 'as much for their good conduct as for the public utility of the street layout they form', signalling the value placed on bourgeoise commerce. 53It is no accident that the south face of the square leads directly onto the newly built grid-system of roads connecting the Rossio to the Praça do Comércio (Commerce Square), the hub of Portugal's international economic activity on the banks of the Tagus river.Gendered segregation served a range of functions.It was designed to protect women's economic interests and physical security from predatory men, as well as forming a moral buffer to discourage 'illicit relations' between unmarried men and women.A lesser-cited motivation behind nineteenth-century gendered segregation was its role in deterring public disorder, a significant departure from centuries of Crown policies and public discourses that specifically understood market women as rowdy and unruly. 54Lower-class men were now considered to be the principal instigators of public disorder.As the decree explains in §VIII, men were prohibited from entering women's stands as 'experience has shown, that having introduced the sale of [alcoholic] drinks, taverns, and even cattle drovers, and other trade and offices results in many disorders, monopolies, crossings, embarrassments, and [a] lack of cleanliness in the Square, which the people suffer'. 55By creating the Figueira as a female space for subsistence market trade, and offering the Rossio and the newly inaugurated Praça do Comércio as the economic centres of bourgeois commercial activities conducted almost exclusively by men, post-1755 Lisbon was envisioned as a refined, modern capital city based on hierarchies of gender and class, in which expectations of demure femininity were extended to poorer women.Yet this gendered spatial segregation belies an economic logic framed by racial and colonial concerns in the wider Portuguese empire.* In the aftermath of the 1755 earthquake, strategies to finance the rebuilding of the capital were of equal importance to urban planning for the Marques de Pombal, who recognised the astronomical costs involved in regenerating the entire urban landscape could not be met by Lisbon's domestic economy alone.As Lisbon was the metropolitan centre of the Portuguese empire, Pombal felt it only proper that its overseas possessions contribute financially to its rebuilding, and so set out plans for a programme of socio-economic reforms across the empire.At the turn of the eighteenth century, gold and diamond mines had been discovered in the interior of Brazil, somewhat offsetting imperial disappointment over its declining fortunes in Portuguese Asia as Brazilian riches poured into the Crown's coffers.An exponential rise in the demand for African slaves accompanied the gold rush, as prospectors required more and more labour to extract the minerals and replenish the workforce that succumbed to the brutal conditions of fluvial mining. 56In fact, the transatlantic trade in African slaves enabled Portugal to resource this most lucrative economic venture without diminishing revenue streams from traditional Brazilian economies, principally in sugar and brazilwood that had long commanded the world markets. 57hus, in the early eighteenth century, unprecedented levels of human, agricultural, and mineral wealth were transported across the Portuguese Atlantic.Ironically, however, the increase in transatlantic slave trading and goldmining gave rise to economic conditions that threatened immediate and future metropolitan revenues.Concerned by the autonomy of Luso-Brazilian maritime commercial entrepreneurs who had developed a bilateral trade with Angola and had effectively cut Portugal out, Pombal created commercial companies to transform Brazil's economy in ways that reasserted metropolitan interests in Brazilian economic spaces. 58Yet global sugar prices fell significantly by the 1750s, and the ever-smaller shipments of Brazilian gold and diamonds to Portugal exacerbated Pombal's fiscal concerns. 59Stuart B. Schwartz notes that while gold 'provided the Portuguese crown with the resources for pharaonic building projects, . . .[it] created the false impression that there were resources for any project, no matter how ambitious or expensive'. 60raditional agricultural output was never outrun by gold production, and Pombal seized upon this to implement agricultural policies that he felt would maximise financial returns.Rice, cotton, indigo, hemp, cochineal, and linen were introduced to increase marketable goods, while wheat and coffee cultivation was expanded.As the outbreak of war in the late eighteenth century aided price rises in global markets, enslaved labour had become more vital than ever to capitalise on these and maintain high production levels. 61Profits from trade activities in Portugal's key overseas possession relied on enslaved African labour, and any increase in the former was believed to necessitate an increase in the latter.
Whilst the Portuguese empire's fortunes relied on hereditary racial slavery in Portuguese America, Pombal came to view slavery in Portugal as an obstruction to fiscal rejuvenation.Slaves were believed to consume increasingly scarce food reserves in the aftermath of the earthquake without making any direct contribution to the state, whether in terms of their labour or taxes. 62The 1755 earthquake caused great economic turmoil domestically, as thousands of Lisbonites were robbed of their livelihoods having seen their places of work reduced to rubble.Increasing imports of slaves over the eighteenth century had the unintended consequence of severely contracting demand for servants, further aggravating public anxieties over available work.Socioeconomic concerns were validated by racialised assumptions of Black people's propensity towards indolence, vagrancy, prostitution, and theft, underscoring an already strictly stratified social landscape that heaped social ills onto the visibly darker-skinned bodies of the poor and enslaved. 63Although diasporic communities were found throughout Portugal, the majority of Black enslaved and freed persons were concentrated in Lisbon.At least 15,000 Black and African-descended people 'infested' Lisbon by 1777 and in the eyes of the imperial authorities, their presence impeded the nation's return to prosperity, which was deemed contingent on Black bodies labouring in the colonies. 64owever, Pombal's racialised economic theory did not recognise the enormous contribution of enslaved and freed Black women to the informal economy.In particular, they played a hugely important role as regateiras or vendedeiras (street vendors), who hawked their goods throughout the streets and town squares, including of course the Rossio.In 1792, for example, a decree was issued prohibiting people from selling fruit and vegetables in the Rossio or from within the meat stores located around it, suggesting that the practice was still strong in Pombal's new Lisbon, despite attempts to displace trade to the Praça da Figueira. 65Interestingly, the authorities had contested Black women's right to sell foodstuffs in the Rossio long before Pombal's interventions.In the early sixteenth century, significant anxiety over the swelling numbers of Black bodies moving through the capital city was palpable, and complaints were regularly lodged to D. Manuel I that Black women who hawed fruit and other goods were 'unreasonable' and insulted noble and wealthy women in the streets. 66Clamour rose to ban Black women from working as regateiras, but the Crown recognised that this would create antagonism with slaveholders.If enslaved women no longer sold fruit, vegetables, water, and sweetmeats, all of which was profitable trade given the various obstacles a largely itinerant population faced in preparing hot food and the laborious efforts of drawing fresh drinking water, enslavers would lose income as a large proportion of profits were handed over daily.The decree of 23 February 1515 was a compromise.Black women could now only sell their wares from their master's doorstep or at doorsteps of others with whom they had reached a specific agreement, effectively cordoning off the majority of urban spaces from Black women in response to White, misogynistic anxieties. 67uch gendered and racialised restrictions on urban mobility were deeply contested.The Black confraternity of Our Lady of the Rosary, active in Lisbon from the early sixteenth century, protested vehemently against these restrictions, leading to a relaxation of the decree to enable married and widowed Black women to sell their wares on the public streets. 68hile this enabled some women to return legitimately to more profitable work in principle, the underlying logic of this partial repeal drew connections between youth, religious practices, Black women, slavery, sexual availability, and hypersexuality. 69Black female bodies in public spaces were deemed public property and consistently sexually available, notions reinforced by the low rates of marriage practices by African descended populations across the Portuguese empire. 70This meant that in practice, most enslaved Black women would still not have been permitted to hawk their goods on the streets amidst fears of public decency.Not that this made much difference.A census of professions carried out in Lisbon by João Brandão in the 1550s clearly states that '50 women, black and White, enslaved and freed descend on the Ribeira at dawn with huge pans filled with [cooked] rice, couscous, and chickpeas'. 71Others would wander the streets selling stewed prunes, fish, olive oil, pasta and all manner of sweetmeats, covered with freshly laundered cloths. 72In clear defiance of the authorities' restrictions on Black women's mobility, enslaved and freed regateiras continued to sell their wares on the city's streets.
The intervening centuries saw a rise in Black women working in the public squares and streets of Lisbon, lending a greater racialised dimension to public work that fed directly into these discourses.By the eighteenth century, the site of Black women's contestations with the authorities around their mobility and use of urban spaces became the Rossio.In 1709, a group of Black enslaved and freedwomen took it upon themselves to complain of the violence and abuse they received at the hands of local authorities in a written petition to the King. 73ontinuing the tradition of selling foodstuffs on the doorsteps of urban buildings, these women had been selling corn, rice, and fish on the steps of the All Saints Royal Hospital, located on the eastern face of the Rossio.They recounted the extortionate practices of the Senate, which demanded that Black regateiras pay one cruzado a year, an exorbitant sum when considered in light of the low profit margins gained from selling food on the streets. 74Any remaining monies went to their owners, and what little was left was necessary to support their own families and the Black brotherhoods, as well as save for manumission. 75heir petition demonstrates how Black female street vendors not only contested the dimensions of financial and physical abuse they suffered, but also sought to reassert their right to exist, work, and live in the heart of Lisbon.By contesting the Senate's overextension of its authority by imposing an increasing tax burden on foodsellers without sanction from the Crown, Black women attempted to redefine the terms on which they moved through urban spaces as community members, entrenching themselves firmly into the Rossio's long tradition as a space for marginalised groups and resisting State authority over the area.
Things clearly came to a head in the 1760s in the aftermath of the Lisbon earthquake when further royal decrees were published in response to deep unrest in the city.The Crown recognised that street vendors were overwhelmingly women, consistently using the terms regateiras and vendedeiras as specifically feminine plurals.Furthermore acknowledging that they were 'poor, and destitute', it abolished all taxes to be paid to various Crown officials and the Treasury on 21 February 1765. 76Particularly interesting is a decree issued nine days earlier that abolished all monies collected by the Juizo das Bravas, which targeted washerwomen and female street-vendors for shouting loudly in public and disturbing the peace, demonstrating a long continuity in Lisbon's urban history that saw women working in the streets consistently admonished for audacious, loud, and unseemly behaviour from the late fourteenth century. 77nsurprisingly, the practice did not appear to have disappeared, and Lisbon's impoverished women continued to complain of the Juizo's extortions.The Crown issued a further decree in 1769 reinforcing the earlier law 'extinguishing the income from sentences imposed on women shouting (useiras de bradar)'. 78The largesse shown by the Crown in this decree masks how the authorities had long deepened women's poverty and social exclusion.Only a few decades earlier, it was declared that 'every regateira who fights with one another in the market shall pay one tostão for each time'. 79Public orders over the centuries had consistently restricted women's movements and their ability to engage in income-generating activities in lucrative ways, by imposing fines specifically targeted at regateiras.As many enslaved and freed women were street vendors, these decrees had a disproportional and intensely negative impact on their financial and living conditions, as the payment of fines and taxes were imposed on them by the authorities as well as their owners.* Black women contested not only their right to, and use of, the Rossio's urban space through their economic activities, but also through religious practices, punishment, and death.Incredibly, a Brazilian-born enslaved Black woman named Grácia Luzia do Evangelho voluntarily walked up the imposing Estaus Palace on 2 May 1736 and requested an audience with the Portuguese Inquisition. 80She made a well-calculated and pre-emptive strike, asserting her right to confession, forgiveness, and freedom of movement as she made her way through the grand palace.In her confession, Grácia Luzia reeled off a list of at least fifteen people who could directly testify to the various blasphemies she had professed publicly only a few days earlier and had even put down in writing in recent months. 81ather than wait in fear for any (or all) of these witnesses to denounce her, Grácia Luzia took her fate into her own hands by entering the Estaus's audience hall with a determination and assertiveness that would rarely have been seen on this site.This was a risky strategy.Thousands of people had been tried and sentenced by the Inquisition for religious crimes, and the chances of escaping serious punishment were extremely slim.Indeed, Neusa Fernandes has shown how Black men and women across the Portuguese empire were punished by the Inquisition well into the early nineteenth century for all manner of crimes, although Timothy Walker maintains that the enslaved received lighter sentences due to their status as the property of White Portuguese families. 82Nevertheless, the reputation of the Inquisition cast a long shadow over metropolitan and imperial communities; Grácia Luzia would have been well aware of the stakes.
Consider the scene.A 30-year-old enslaved Black woman walked into an imperious structure in which fear, solemnity, religious fervour, and racialised power are palpable in the air.She would likely have been the only Black, enslaved, and female person in the audience hall; the Inquisitors, scribes, and administrators moving in and out of the hall were all well-educated, White Portuguese men.Enslaved and free domestic labourers worked tirelessly deeper within the palace and on the upper floors; the ground floor audience hall was staffed exclusively by White men in positions of power. 83As she moved through this White, Catholic, and masculinised arena of religious power and authority, Grácia Luzia invaded the space not simply in terms of her physical presence but also in emotive and ideological ways.
Her invasion of the Inquisition's audience hall reconfigured the asymmetries of power on which the space relied to function; the positive, self-affirming nature of her presence and confession must have jarred with Inquisitorial expectations of marginalised persons demonstrating anxiety and fear in the Estaus.Grácia Luzia's confession was framed around her sense of victimhood and the numerous injustices she had faced that forced her to consider blasphemy as a strategy to exert agency.She had served the Prioress of the Convento da Anunciada in Lisbon for many years and in her confession, she quickly ensured that the Inquisitor understood that instead of accepting Grácia Luzia's monetary compensation for manumission (a just proposition in financial terms and in light of her long and satisfactory service), the Prioress rejected her offer.Not only did she refuse Grácia Luzia's manumission, the Prioress sought her re-sale to a mariner, who planned to take Grácia Luzia to Brazil with him.In her 'great despair' at this situation, Grácia Luzia began to shout all manner of blasphemies, in the hopes of scaring away her potential purchasers.It clearly worked: the mariner's wife Caetana became so terrified by Grácia Luzia's behaviour that she threw holy water on her to exorcise the Devil within. 84rácia Luzia's indignation at the injustice of her situation is apparent in her confession as she repeated the nuns' refusal to pay her for services rendered or manumit her.She consistently named and shamed nuns from the convent as actively committing injustices against her or as bystanders who refused to intervene as Christians.Educated and enslaved from a young age at the convent, Grácia Luzia was unusual among her Black peers as a literate Black woman.She attempted to wield her privilege to her advantage by writing letters to various nuns threatening to renounce the faith if she were sold. 85Sisters Maria Rosa, Jozepha Joanna, and Maria Lourença were named personally to the Inquisitor in the Estaus, a bold move considering that the wealth, class, and religious status these women enjoyed mirrored the Inquisitor's own background.In this powerfully religious space, Grácia Luzia affirmed herself as the victim of female ecclesiastics and her confession instead brought to light their wrongdoing.She reconfigured the very meaning of the Inquisitorial palace and the Rossio, pushing against religious orthodoxy and power to reassert the more traditional values of the Rossio that vindicated the rights of marginalised peoples to be seen, heard, and acknowledged as members of the urban community.
Nor was Grácia Luzia the only Black woman to step up to the Estaus Palace on the Rossio in this way.Only two years earlier, Marcelina Maria, an enslaved Afro-Brazilian woman who lived on the Rossio square, likely on the southern face, also voluntarily entered the Estaus to confess her pact with the Devil. 86She too spoke of the 'great despair' that she found herself in having suffered horrific sexual and physical abuse from her enslavers, and cited her pact as an attempt to seek immediate respite from her excessive workload and exhaustion. 87Determined, resilient, and defiant, Marcelina Maria squared up to her Inquisitor by baldly stating how 'under great duress [com grande violencia] she accepted this enslavement as she wished to be sold to the Brazils', laying the blame on her enslaver João Eufrásio de Figueiroa.An official at the Casa da Índia on the banks of the Tagus at the Terreiro do Paço, neighbour of the Estaus, and petitioner to join the Inquisition, Figueiroa was a White nobleman who was supposed to uphold all tenets of the Catholic faith if he were to become a familiar (lay representative) of the Holy Office. 88Instead, Marcelina Maria crossed the Rossio from her enslaver's home to the Estaus Palace and denounced him within her own confession, detailing how he was a sadistic and violent master who 'did not let her go to Mass' and on another occasion 'ordered her to strip naked. ..in front of six or seven men, one of them being the said master, and his eldest son' to be whipped and humiliated. 89Like Grácia Luzia, Marcelina Maria reinscribed the rights of marginalised people onto the Estaus Palace and the Rossio, reasserting the long tradition of popular resistance and belonging in an area increasingly encroached upon by the wealthy and powerful.
The sadistic scenes Marcelina Maria described in the Figueiroa household took place 'in' the Rossio, or more precisely in a house along one of the edges of the square, only metres away from the resplendent Estaus Palace where she gave her confession.The Rossio itself was the site not only of domestic abuse, but of encroaching state-sanctioned violence, religiosity, and public resistance, which over the centuries had become etched into the very meaning of this urban space.It was also the site of ecclesiastical punishment, as most Black women ensnared by the Inquisition soon found.Much of the Estaus Palace was in fact secret prisons.The main prison held those awaiting processing, trials, and sentencing, and was located just beyond the audience hall in which Grácia Luzia and Marcelina Maria made their stance.Both women would have been marched through a narrow, barely noticeable corridor to the right of the palace entrance and led to cells deep within the palace.A series of holding cells were located on the ground, second, and third floors of the palace, and both women would certainly have been detained there until their sentences were pronounced. 90Grácia Luzia and Marcelina Maria received the same sentence; both were to be secretly instructed in the mysteries of the faith and released only once they could prove their true understanding of, and devotion to, the catechism. 91For this, they moved deeper into the Estaus Palace still.The cárcere de penitência (penitential prison) was an enormous annex behind the palace proper that had been constructed specifically in the early seventeenth century for the purpose of re-indoctrination. 92The violence of the Inquisition was embedded in the Rossio, deepened symbolically and physically by the prisons as they imprinted themselves onto the landscape yet remained hidden from public view.
Complementing the Inquisition's symbolic authority over the Rossio were the public spectacles of divine punishment (autos-da-fé or 'acts of the faith') increasingly held over the eighteenth century.These were highly formalised events which physically transformed the Rossio landscape from an open communal space to a theatre of violence.As in artistic theatres, the 1634 blueprints for the installations necessary for an auto da fé illustrate how viewing boxes, platforms, and rows of seating surrounded the stage, which in this case was an altar for the penitents to stand and hear their sentences. 93Black women such as Leonor Mendes and Joana do Rego de Souza, amongst other heretics, were sentenced to pain and humiliation there in the early eighteenth century. 94Punishments in the Rossio involved the parading of convicts wearing penitential habits and a public abjuration whilst holding lit candles in the palms of their hands; an individualised mixture of these was applied to each penitent depending on their case. 95he physical transformation of the Rossio into a site of public punishment and death not only continued, but intensified under Pombal's leadership years (1750-1777), as a series of civil as well as religious sentences were carried out up into the nineteenth century.While Marcelina Maria and Grácia Luzia contested the meaning and use of the Rossio as a popular space for expression before the Lisbon earthquake and Pombal's subsequent rebuilding programme, their geographies in the 1730s offer an important counterpoint to another Afro-Brazilian woman's trajectories in the 1770s from which we can clearly see the continuities of intense struggle between the authorities and minoritised, racialised groups within this defined socio-cultural urban space.
Teresa de Jesus was likely one of the many regateiras discussed earlier circling the Rossio in the mid-eighteenth century.Born in Bahia, she was transported to Portugal at an unknown age.While living in Europe, she had gained her manumission from slavery and had lived as a freedwoman selling fruit on the streets by the early 1770s. 96The very nature of her work would have regularly required her to enter the Rossio, where food vendors, artisans, and enslaved women gathered day and night.She would not only have sold her own wares; she would have bought goods from other hawkers, drawn water from the Rossio's fountain, and forged friendships on the steps of the All Saints' Hospital. 97She could be seen carrying baskets of seasonal fruits on her hip or her head, selling her goods to the crowds that thronged the streets and docks.Thus, it was highly likely that Teresa also spent much of her time in the Rossio and in the adjacent Praça da Figueira, as they were well-known hotspots for street vending.
Teresa had been jailed at least twice before she was led to the hangman's rope in the Rossio on 12 May 1772 for the murder and robbery of João da Fonseca, a Portuguese merchant who had dealings in Grão-Pará. 98Teresa's freed Black female body was immobilised periodically in stark contrast with her freer movements in the streets of the Baixa and in João's home, where she had assisted his Black enslaved woman Maria in food preparation. 99Her friendship with Maria and cycles of imprisonment highlight how experiences of slavery and freedom and intersected in the Lisbonite urban landscape, and demonstrate how Black women consistently built networks of support to help them navigate it.Grácia Luzia and Marcelina Maria too experienced repeated cycles of confinement and relative freedom of movement through their respective quotidian struggles against exploitative labour, sexual abuse and domination over their being, and both likely relied on the friendships of other women to assist them in their times of need.Marcelina Maria turned to the Moorish woman Antonia for charms and spells to pacify her cruel owners, 100 while Grácia Luzia perhaps drew strength from Izabel and Anna, two Black enslaved women who witnessed her blasphemous outburst during the moment of her potential sale. 101eresa was conducted, procession-like, through the streets of Lisbon from the Crown jail Limoeira to the Rossio to be hanged as per the secular court's sentence for her alleged crime.In a similar fashion to the scaffolding built for the ecclesiastical autos da fé on the Rossio, gallows were constructed specifically for the occasion, perhaps the ultimate symbol of authoritarian power as the state exercised its right to take the life of one of its citizens.However, Teresa's body charged the Rossio with new physical and ideological meanings of power, constituting a direct challenge to the Pombaline vision of a destroyed metropolis being reconstructed as a modern bourgeois city poised to take its rightful place on the global stage.Taking the lead from the Black women who had gone before her, the Rossio was situated at the centre of Teresa's struggle with the civil authorities in 1772.
Through Teresa's execution, the Rossio continued its tradition as a space for public entertainment.As Diane Brand has noted, closure of the space was important to firstly create a functioning amphitheatre and secondly to seal the place off spatially from the real world beyond, thereby creating a royally sanctioned entertainment zone of suspended consciousness, behaviour and voyeuristic pleasure outside the norm. 102Climbing onto the wooden gallows, Teresa was immobilised once again and hung.Once she was confirmed as dead, her noose was removed and she was decapitated.Most likely her body was buried in an unmarked grave.However, her head and her hands had been cut off after death and mounted onto tall spokes at the site of Teresa's alleged crime on the Poço do Borratem road.Adjacent to the Royal All Saints Hospital and leading out onto the eastern face of the Rossio, Poço do Borratem road had heavy foot traffic as people bustled in and out of the square.Teresa's capital punishment served as a stark reminder to the masses of the power wielded by agents of the Portuguese empire, serving a function similar to the municipal pillories of medieval and early modern town squares across the Portuguese possessions as the fundamental symbol of state authority. 103Her mutilated head physically stamped the new modern metropolis's dimensions of power with pre-Pombaline acts of violence in the geographical space of the Rossio and onto the corporal landscape of a freed Black woman.
Alongside her mutilated head were those of other criminals executed under Pombal's time in office.Now the Rossio had become a place of fear, a space through which fear was coursing.Beggars, peddlers, and Black female vendors lived in fear of being abused, extorted, or jailed by the authorities, as police presence intensified under Pombal.The message of fear would have been hammered home by the rows of decaying skulls surrounding the Rossio, the futility of resistance to the authorities clear to see.Taken together with historian Maria Alexandre Lousada's observation of growing violence concentrated in the Figueira square right next to the Rossio in the nineteenth century, these overlapping elements likely intersected to create something of a 'fearscape'. 104As Simone Tulumello has rightly noted, 'urban fear is at once a spatial/discursive practice, the result of hegemonic representations and policies, and a trigger for less civic urban lives'. 105Tulumello emphasises that people experience urban spaces of fear not because of the actual dangers that they hold, but rather due to quite different factors that work in concert to produce such fears.Officially taking control of the Rossio was not enough; part of the geopolitical takeover from the fourteenth century required that the marginalised refrain from entering the Rossio of their own volition with the construction of noble residences and civic or ecclesiastical institutions of power.As discussed earlier, this did not quite go according to plan even after Pombal's reconstruction of the capital city.
Ironically, Teresa may have played a small part in that.Teresa's Black female face was mounted alongside the decaying skulls of wealthy, White officials who had extorted Lisbonites in the 1760s to such a degree that they were hanged and a royal decree banning tax collection was issued.The irony surely would not have gone unnoticed that a freed Black woman circulating the streets and squares should be placed together with the very same men who sought to control, regulate, and profit from her.While the Rossio was contested between the Crown representatives, the fiscal authorities, and the female vendors in a material sense, Teresa's remains symbolically challenged social hierarchies that correlated gender and race with wealth and influence, redefining the balance of power that the square was to maintain.Although officially removed by Pombal for the bourgeoisie, for the wealthy and those ascending the social ladder (read White), even in death a freed Black fruitseller made her presence felt in the Rossio, symbolically exerting her right to be seen, heard, and acknowledged as others before her did and those after her continued to do.Gruesome though it may be, Teresa was staking her claim and that of thousands of disenfranchised Africans and their descendants for generations to come to a space that was always for the people, regardless of attempts to wrestle it from them.* Taken together, these instances of physical restrictions map out the cyclical nature of (im)mobilisation and the intrusion of the state and religious authorities in the lives of Black women in pre-and late Pombaline Lisbon.Grácia Luzia, Marcelina Maria, and Teresa de Jesus were three of the many thousands of Black women in the metropolis of the Portuguese empire, who experienced the Rossio in different ways over the eighteenth century.Although they had very different lives and experiences, at certain transtemporal diasporic junctures their individual geographies converged.None had been born on the African continent; they were the daughters of enslaved Black parents toiling in Portuguese Brazil.They were crioulas (Brazilian-born dark-skinned Black women) who had spent the earliest years of their lives in slavery, and both had undertaken a 'countervoyage' from Brazil to Portugal, a transformative maritime voyage that transported enslaved men, women, and children in trajectories against the current of transatlantic slave trading. 106This Atlantic crossing that moved against the grain of slave traffic, of which the vast majority flowed bilaterally between West Africa and Brazil, speaks of an alternate geography for enslaved women traversing the Atlantic Ocean.It is a symbolic space that runs across the physical Atlantic space, counter to the currents of imagined flows of human cargo, adding a new dimension to the slave-ship resistance that Black feminist geographer Katherine McKitterick has termed 'oppositional spatial practices'. 107Ironically, Pombal's vision of a Lisbon 'free' from the presence of transatlantic slavery becomes wholly disrupted not only by the journeys of these Brazilian-born Black women, but their consistent presence and movement across the capital's most important social and religious space.The individual geographies and trajectories of these women should alert us to the deep contradictions of their position in the metropolis and within the Rossio square.As Afro-Brazilian women living in Pombal's Portugal, they were simultaneously enmeshed in the fabric of the empire and refused recognition of their place within it.
Little wonder that women kept returning to the Rossio, a space that had been the area of the city for marginalised people to buy, sell, and congregate for centuries.Customers continued to frequent the Rossio and poor Black women continued to offer their services there, despite greater police controls that sought to stamp out public unrest and violence.Interestingly, one of the 'hotspots' of urban violence in 1820 was the area stretching from the Praça da Figueira to Mouraria, which today is still considered to be among the poorest parts of Lisbon. 108ndeed, the stubborn presence of Black women in the Rossio demonstrated their resistance to the new spatial order, reaffirming their right to sell their wares, seek redress, and be acknowledged as members of the community on their own terms.They were maintaining their claim to popular spaces and reinscribing them with the spirit of bygone generations, but in doing so, they reinvented these spaces by creating a place for themselves, a place for Black women in a space that had originally been one for principally White men and women.From the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, much had changed in the Portuguese Empire, due primarily to the increasing flows of African enslaved labour, but the physical transformation of the Rossio, reimagined and rebuilt in the aftermath of the 1755 earthquake, could not shake off its cultural significance as a site of struggle and resistance, with Black women at its very core.Centuries later, the Rossio continues to be a prominent gathering place for Lusophone Africans in Lisbon.