Cimarrón Transimperial Freedom Suits: Rethinking the Origins of Sanctuary Policy in the 17th-Century Spanish Caribbean

In the first decade following the English conquest of Jamaica in 1660, many free and enslaved people of African descent held by the English escaped to Cuba, where they petitioned for royal protection and freedom. Scholars have shown how the formalization of sanctuary policy in 1680 created a legal framework for fugitives to operate within and secure guaranteed legal protections as incorporated free Catholic subjects. From the vantage point of the Spanish crown, sanctuary policy helped consolidate imperial jurisdiction in an increasingly contested trans-imperial Caribbean. This paper reexamines the origins of that policy by analyzing the legal arguments deployed by maritime cimarrones in a 1668 freedom suit. Rather than viewing sanctuary policy as a top-down imperial innovative response to fugitive movements, this paper argues that it emerged from the accumulated efforts of Black litigants. By drawing on Iberian 13th-century justician laws of slavery, these Black litigants challenged the illegitimacy of their enslavement by positioning themselves as Catholic subjects seized in unjust wars. As protestant northern European powers assailed on the Spanish Caribbean in the mid-seventeenth century, captured Black men and women who escaped back to Spanish colonial jurisdictions mobilized these legal frameworks to deligitimize enslavement by non-catholics. By foregrounding this 1668 case and others preceding 1680, this paper suggests that maritime cimarrones were not merely beneficiaries of sanctuary policy but instrumental in shaping its legislative foundations from the ground up as complex legal actors.