Revealing the African Presence: 1608-1610

"For reasons that are not entirely clear, around 1608-1610 there occurred a series of political and cultural "events" in disparate locations that each in its own way seemed to signal a new level of acceptance and status for Africans in Europe, to pick four: the elaborate arrangements made by Pope Paul V to receive the Congolese ambassador known in Europe as Antonio Manuel, Marquis of Na Vunda...; Morocco and the Dutch Republic sign a landmark treaty establishing trade relations, the first between a European country and a non-Christian one; the Spanish playwright Enciso writes a play celebrating the life of the black humanist Juan Latino; Philip III of Spain orders a silver casket for the bones of Benedict the Moor (canonized in 1807). However, while these events may appear to presage a new era of normalization, with the perspective of time they look more like markers of the end of an era."

Revealing the African Presence in Renaissance Europe, pg. 10