Chapter 4 looks at Mendonça’s journey to Portugal and Spain, and the network he established. It examines his education in Braga, his appointment as an attorney of the Confraternity of Our Lady Star of the Negroes in Lisbon and Toledo and the alliances he formed with the New Christians in Lisbon, in particular the Mesquita family. Then it interrogates his association with Indigenous Americans in Toledo. It presents the period 1670–1681 in Lisbon as crucial for his compact with the Apostolic Notary in Lisbon, Gaspar Mesquita, and his connection with ‘the New Christian question’ in Lisbon and the Atlantic. Their search for freedom is examined in relation to the denial of enslaved Africans’ freedom. The unity of the regional confederation in West Central Africa shaped Mendonça’s engagement with the freedom of enslaved Africans in Angola, Brazil, Spain and Portugal. It also served as a springboard for his networking with the Indigenous people and New Christians in the Atlantic, Portugal and Spain. Engaging with this dialogue provides a better understanding of how those whose liberty had been denied sought to overcome this by allying with different constituencies in the Atlantic region.

In Chapter 5, I explore Mendonça’s court case in the Vatican and argue that liberation of the enslaved Africans in Brazil, Portugal and Spain was part of a wider Atlantic question. By allying himself with these different constituencies in the Atlantic, Mendonça emphasised that his call for freedom was universal – abolition should go beyond the African frontier to include New Christians and Indigenous Americans. Mendonça’s evidence-based court case challenged the established assertion that Africa was a slaving society that already practised and willingly aided the European Atlantic slave trade. His evidence demonstrated how the mechanics of the Atlantic slave trade operated in Africa, and how violence was used as a strategy for maintaining the institution of slavery. The accused were the Vatican and the Italian, Portuguese, and the Spanish political governing authorities, and Mendonça brought together African accusers from different organisations, confraternities and interest groups. This is a significant reinterpretation of slavery and abolition, revealing a new understandings of Mendonça’s criminal court case in the Vatican as a Black Atlantic abolition movement.

Chapter 3 examines how the exile of the Ndongo royals to Salvador and Rio de Janeiro was aligned with power struggles in Luanda. The House of Ndongo was led by a generation that rejected the Portuguese alliance that its predecessors had endorsed. The new generation broke away from this alliance when Portugal was gaining independence from Spain. The chapter focuses on the royals’ lives in Brazil, on what they saw there of the treatment of enslaved Africans and Indigenous people, how their stay was shaped by African slave communities, Black Brotherhoods, and how these experiences shaped Mendonça’s discourse in the Vatican. It examines the case of runaway slaves and connects it with those of Quilombo dos Palmares. It looks at how this community forged a political and economic alliance with Cristovão de Burgos, a judge in the High Court of Salvador. Palmares provoked the governing authorities in Bahia to reconsider their strategy, which led them to send the royals to Rio. The authorities in Brazil feared that the exiled royals’ status could help fortify the enslaved fugitives’ community, which would endanger Portuguese economic interests.