Renaissance people did not use the word race the way we do, but often used race, people, and nation interchangeably for ethnic, national, and religious groups — for example, the French race, the Irish people, the Jewish nation. They did make distinctions based on skin color that were in keeping with later conceptualizations of race, but these distinctions were interwoven with other characteristics when people thought about human differences.

Ever since the time of the Roman Republic, a few black Africans had lived in western Europe. They had come, along with white slaves, as the spoils of war. After the collapse of the Roman Empire and throughout the Middle Ages, Muslim and Christian merchants continued to import black slaves, and long tradition sanctioned the practice of slavery. The black population was especially concentrated in the cities of the Iberian Peninsula, where African slaves sometimes gained their freedom and intermingled with the local population. By the mid-sixteenth century blacks, slave and free, constituted roughly 3 percent of the Portuguese population, and because of intermarriage cities such as Lisbon had significant numbers of people of mixed African and European descent.

In Renaissance Portugal, Spain, and Italy, African slaves supplemented the labor force in virtually all occupations — as servants, agricultural laborers, craftsmen, and seamen on ships. Slaves also formed the primary workforce on the sugar plantations set up by Europeans on the Atlantic islands in the late fifteenth century (see “Sugar and Early Transatlantic Slavery” in Chapter 16). European aristocrats sometimes had themselves painted with their black servants to indicate their wealth or, in the case of noblewomen, to highlight their fair skin.

Until their voyages down the African coast in the late fifteenth century, Europeans had little concrete knowledge of Africans and their cultures. They perceived Africa as a remote place, the home of strange people isolated by heresy and Islam from superior European civilization. Africans’ contact, even as slaves, with Christian Europeans would only “improve” the blacks, they believed. The expanding slave trade reinforced negative preconceptions about the inferiority of black Africans.