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 6 investigates the debate about the freedom of enslaved Africans in the light of the tussle between Mendonça, his family and the Portuguese Overseas Council. The chapter examines the Crown’s slave legislation of 18 March 1684, seeing it as a direct response to Mendonça’s court case in the Vatican. It looks at the sphere of the Overseas Council’s jurisdiction in relation to the internal affairs of the kingdom, that is, Portugal, and its attempt to overturn Mendonça’s court case verdict in the Vatican via a discreet anonymous letter. It examines how Mendonça marshalled his legal arguments to uphold the Vatican’s verdict . The chapter argues that the court case was a tussle between Philipe Hari I and João Hari II of the House of Ndongo and the Overseas Council, which vetoed a decision that Philipe Hari I would continue payment of baculamento, that is, make tax payments in enslaved people. I contend that Mendonça, in taking his criminal court case to the Vatican, sought not only the abolition of African slavery and liberty for Indigenous Americans and New Christians, but also to shake off the burden of his own family’s involvement in the slave trade.