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In the 1440s, the Portuguese began to bring black slaves from sub-Saharan Africa to Lisbon during their voyages of discovery, and these people were traded across Europe. Many ended up in the northern states of Italy, such as Florence, Genoa, and Venice.
Evidence from Italy in the Renaissance suggests that people who were not white Europeans could integrate into society and were not prevented from doing so because of their skin colour. Very recent archival research carried out by Kate Lowe on black gondoliers in Renaissance Venice demonstrates this – after their manumission, black Africans were able to become functional, accepted members of society and to have occupations. Slavery, whether the person in question was white or black, was seen as a finite period of time in a person’s life, not a permanent status or an inherent part of a person’s identity.
In England, attitudes were founded on the new intellectual ideas that were taking shape during the voyages of discovery in the sixteenth century. Travel writers saw black Africans as very much ‘alien’ and ‘other’ and attempted to find Biblical and scientific explanations for the colour of their skin, which for them came to symbolise the darkness of sin, lust, and death. The scientific theories put forward were based on the idea of heat, cold, and moisture, and it was believed by one French writer that the Africans’ black skin was caused by an outward heat, which left them cold inside, as opposed to English men, who were hot inside and therefore “hardy, couragious, & ful of great boldnesse”. The colour black was also the antithesis of Queen Elizabeth I’s cult, in which she attempted to personify virginity and religious virtue by whitening her face. This is not to say that black Africans did not have their own place in Elizabethan England (although the government attempted to expel them in 1596 and 1601).
Why am I not surprised? you whitoids ruin everything you touch like a fucking plague.
