Resumen de Claims to Distinction: Invoking Sub-Saharian African Origins in Sixteenth-Century Valencia

Thomas Franke

• In the early sixteenth century, Valencia's Batle General was closely involved with the city's trade in enslaved black (negre) captives from throughout sub-Saharan West Africa, North Africa, the Iberian Peninsula, and India. In its capacity as a regulator of the city's slave trade and as a court that investigated individuals suspected of being fugitive captives, the Batle General recorded hundreds of interrogations of enslaved, free, and fugitive black Valencians between 1502 and 1530. In this article I will outline two narratives of Blackness that emerge from analyzing these interrogations.