António Fernandes de Elvas

António Fernandes de Elvas (died 1623) was a Portuguese-born merchant, including investor in pepper tax farm and Asian spices. Fernandes de Elvas and his family were Marranos; that is to say Sephardic Jews who conformed outwardly as Cristão-Novo due to the demands of the Portuguese Crown but privately continued to adhere to Judaism. He was contracted by the Spanish Empire with an official asiento to provide their colonies in the Spanish Americas with African slaves from 27 September 1615 to 1 April 1623. During this time, he was the Contratodore (monopolist trader) for the Atlantic slave trade in Portuguese West Africa: Angola, Cape Verde and Guinea. He was succeeded in his position as monopolist for providing slaves to the Spanish by a fellow Marrano, Manuel Rodrigues Lamego.

Biography António Fernandes de Elvas was born in the Kingdom of Portugal to a Sephardic Jewish converso family, who had outwardly conformed to the Catholic Church to avoid being expelled from the country, but continued to practice Judaism in private. Fernandes de Elvas and his family was engaged in the spice trade, particularly black pepper from Portuguese India.

It is this position that was awarded to António Fernandes de Elvas from 1615 until 1623. The two main places in the Spanish Americas that slaves from Africa were brought under Fernandes de Elvas were Cartagena de Indias (in modern Colombia) and Veracruz (in modern Mexico) For its era, Fernandes de Elvas' time as asiento represented the most intense uptick of the slave trade and largest mass movement of African slaves to the Americas since the trade had begun, most of it from Luanda, Portuguese Angola and the Portuguese Congo. He also worked in the slave trade under his father as his agent at Cartagena de Indias, but squandered a lot of his family's wealth at parties in Madrid. Even after the death of her husband, Elena continued to work in the slave trade. However, she failed to gain the asiento, working under her brother Francisco Gomes Solís in Cartagena de Indias.