Religious Identity and Imperial Security: Arming Catholic Slaves in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Portuguese India

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, enslaved Africans and Asians bolstered the population of Portuguese imperial settlements in India. Purchased for a variety of occupations, their presence partially solved the problem of “peopling the empire” in a context of imperial insecurity. Valued for their capacity to fight in times of crisis, the Portuguese armed their slaves repeatedly. This tendency to arm their slaves has often appeared in the secondary literature. However, the religious dimension of arming slaves has not been explored. In the colonial imagination, conversion to Islam threatened slaves’ military loyalty. Fleeing the empire to Muslim-ruled states, slaves who became renegades represented the fears of Portuguese colonial society – fears of being overtaken by the surrounding states. Imperial anxieties about religion and security shaped inquisitorial responses to slaves’ conversions to Islam and crept into the discourse of ecclesiastical council records advocating for the baptism and Christian instruction of slaves.