Hello and welcome to the History of Japan podcast, episode 417, The Forgotten Past, Part 2.

On June 10, 1586, a wedding took place at the Church of Loretto in Lisbon, Portugal,

which, for complicated reasons, was now kind of a part of Spain also because the same king

ruled both Portugal and Spain

through the magic of European dynastic politics, but that's getting ahead of ourselves.

The headache-inducing world of European power politics was not a concern for our happy couple,

whose names were recorded in the marriage certificate as Nuno Cardoso and Constantina Diaz, or to the nine

witnesses, including to the officiant Father Diogo Fernandez, who were present.

They were, one imagines, concerned primarily with the happy occasion that brought them all together.

And it was a happy one, but an unusual one as well.

The marriage certificate, you see, noted that Nuno Cardoso was not Portuguese.

He was, in fact, Japanese, a former slave who had been freed by his master, and now, as a result, had the right to legally marry.

His wife, Constantine, whose background we do not know, was also

Japanese, and still enslaved herself. Snippets like this one, and I should note that by

1587, the couple would make their way back to Japan, and we don't know what happened to them

afterwards, show that despite an official ban on Japanese slaves imposed by the Portuguese monarchy in 1571,

ownership of enslaved Japanese people remained a reality in Portugal,

and the rest of the then-combined Portuguese and Spanish Empire as well.

This married certificate is not a unique piece of evidence either.

We have others indicating a

continued slave trade from Japan in Portugal proper. Take, for example, the records of a five-ship

expedition that left Lisbon for India in 1581, going thence to Malacca. The voyage is fairly well

...