Revealing the African Presence: Introduction (Part Two)

"The chronological period covered by the exhibition is the "long sixteenth century" (ca. 1480-1610). In the last decades of the 1400s Africa became a focus of European attention as it had not been since the Roman Empire. On the one hand, markers of Africans' intensified engagement with Europe in the 1480s include the 1484 arrival in Lisbon of a Congolese delegation led by Prince Kasuta and the establishment of a residence in Rome for the numbers of Ethiopian pilgrims and scholars. On the other hand, European thirst for new markets and sources of commodities drove an extension of trading routes established by Portuguese explorers in the mid-1400s down the west coast of Africa; in 1497 Vasco da Gama edged up the continent's east coast, en route to India. The revelations this brought as to the shape of Africa marked one of the pivotal moments in the growth of European knowledge of the continent, to be vastly augmented in the following century and epitomized in Abraham Ortelius's New Map of Africa... Arguably the most influential map of Africa from the 1500s, it was published in 1570 as part of the first systematic atlass of printed maps, Theater of the World (Theatrium Orbis Terrarum). Its fifty-three maps encompass seven representing Africa as a whole or as individual regions. The contour of the continent how has a familiar look, and while many internal place designations remain generalized, as "Kingdom of the Blacks" (Nigritarium Regio) written large across West Africa, others are specific, as the insertion of Simbaoe (Great Zimbabwe) in southern Africa. Subsequent editions were expanded and updated, incorporating as many as nineteen maps of all or part of the continent."

Revealing the African Presence in Renaissance Europe, pg. 9.