Seville’s Black African population was ethnically diverse, originating from Angola and the Congo Basin, the Cape Verde Islands, the Kingdom of Dahomey, the Senegambia and its Rivers of Guinea, as well as Mozambique and neighboring Portuguese outposts in East Africa and Goa. The overwhelming presence of Blacks and their descendants in Seville gave way to the city’s alias as the tablero de ajedrez, or chessboard table.
Libro de los Juegos (Book of Games), Alfonso el Sabio, c. 1283
Seville, Spain at the height of the Renaissance bustled like a chocolate city–to borrow from Marcus Anthony Hunter and Zandria F. Robinson‘s masterful work that defines “chocolate cities” as Black enclaves and neighborhoods. Seville embodied this definition extremely well. The city’s cosmopolitan atmosphere, global economic glory, and, at other times, its rampant structural corruption, earned it the ignominious epithet of the “Great Babylon.” For example, literary works such as Lope de Vega’s play Servir a señor discreto (1610/1615) and Luis Vélez de Guevara’s prose work El Diablo cojuelo (1641) refer to Seville as the “Gran Babilonia de España.” The short-skit interlude Los mirones (attributed to Cervantes, 1623), for instance, casts Seville as the ancient Assyrian “Nínive,” another kind of Babylon, whose infinite Black population’s African diasporic cultural presence and languages reverberated in the streets of the Santa María de la Blanca neighborhood.
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