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Sometimes, little-known historical characters from long ago can give us a new window both into their times and into our own. In our current era of polycrisis, this may be more important than ever, as shown by the history of a little-known woman from the town of Cacheu in today’s Guinea-Bissau in West Africa. Crispina Peres was the most powerful trader in the town in the 1650s-60s: though readers may know little about her or about this part of the world, either now or in the distant past, it’s often precisely by stepping into a little-known space that we can gain a richer sense of perspective on our own lives.

Peres was a woman of mixed African-European heritage, born some time in the 1610s. In the 1630s, she married a captain-general of the Portuguese colonial port-enclave of Cacheu. By 1665, she was rich, widowed and remarried to a second captain-general. Peres was thus one of the most powerful and dynamic figures of her generation in Cacheu – however, in a sad irony, she’s known instead for the most traumatic and painful phase of her life: her imprisonment. Virtually all we know of Peres comes from her Inquisition trial records: she was arrested in January 1665 after a conspiracy cooked up by her enemies (as was often the case with Inquisition trials).

As usually happened, the inquisitors charged Peres with heresy. Her crime was consorting with healers known as djabakós, whom she had sought to help heal her sick child. And yet, as the papers of her trial show, almost all of her accusers consulted the djabakós. For Portuguese traffickers and officials in Cacheu, Catholicism was not somehow hermetically sealed, as imperial theory demanded: it could be worshipped alongside making offerings at African shrines. Nevertheless, Peres’s integration of African worldviews into Catholic religious practice was enough for the Inquisition. In the slow and bullying manner in which cumbersome bureaucracies tend to grind, it took several years for the papers to be accumulated, the evidence to be weighed, and the (in fact preordained) decision to be taken by the inquisitors to order Peres’s arrest on a charge that most of her accusers could have been found guilty of too.

Already, the details of this case will strike some readers as unusual. The Inquisition is known for its work in late-medieval and early modern Europe, but few people associate it with West Africa. Yet the rise of the Portuguese Empire in the 16th century had gone hand in hand with a rise in the Inquisition’s interest in policing the faith of the distant colonies. Strict adherence to Portugal’s patriarchal religious doctrine was the other side of the coin of its imperial power. In 1560, a tribunal of the Inquisition was established in Goa, which was also responsible for the Portuguese outposts in Mozambique. Thereafter, the Lisbon tribunal was charged with collating evidence of alleged heresies in its other colonies, in Brazil and in its main outposts in Africa: Angola, Cape Verde, and the coast of today’s Guinea-Bissau, where Cacheu is located.

The Procession of the Inquisition at Goa, India. Courtesy the Wellcome Collection

In the 17th century, Cacheu was still a relatively new town. It had been founded by Portuguese imperial officials based on the Cape Verde islands (around 500 km off the coast of Senegal) in 1589. Cacheu was situated on a major river, the São Domingos, not far inland from the estuary. It was a perfect site to consolidate imperial interests, and the settlers came and built fortifications and a church there for two reasons in particular. Firstly, a series of droughts in the Cape Verde islands had forced many of the colonial residents to move to the adjacent West African coast, where they had business associates and family members. And, secondly, there had been a growing number of attacks on these Portuguese settlers as their involvement in the transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans understandably made them the targets of increasing anger from people in West Africa.

In other words, by the time Peres was rising to prominence, many of the factors that now make her trial records such important historical documents were coalescing. As a major centre for the transatlantic slave trade in this part of West Africa, the town was a hub for peoples from different parts of Senegambia, Cape Verde, the Americas, and other parts of the Portuguese and Spanish empires. It was a place that mixed efforts to impose imperial law with the reality that this was an African settlement, based in a Senegambian culture and legal environment.

The fort at Cacheu as it is today. Courtesy Wikimedia

Perhaps the final piece of the jigsaw for us today in understanding how the town of Cacheu ‘worked’ is therefore this precious document, the record of Peres’s Inquisition trial – a document that also preserves the trauma of the last years of her life, as she was deported to Lisbon and held isolated in her inquisitorial cell facing judgment for heresy. Historians of early modern Europe have long studied such trials to reveal precious aspects of social history, in books such as Montaillou (1975) by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie and The Cheese and the Worms (1976) by Carlo Ginzburg. However, with the exception of James Sweet’s Domingos Álvares, African Healing, and the Intellectual History of the Atlantic World (2011), few such books have looked at the rich social history revealed by trials from the former Portuguese colonies.

I first started studying this document almost 15 years ago, and what has crystallised for me is that 17th-century Cacheu was a plural world in which people shared in one another’s lives, even in an era of unspeakable violence, coexisting in the face of hardship in a way that also marks how much has changed since then.

At times, the Inquisition trial of Peres reads like a modern soap opera, revealing details of the lives of both the woman and her friends and enemies who lived so long ago. The papers that survive offer unparalleled insights into daily life in a West African port town from the distant past, allowing........

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