Imagining Ethiopia in the early Hispanic Atlantic: Slavery and baptism in Alonso de Sandoval’s Catechismo Evangelico

Scholarship that has embraced pervasive “truths” about blackness in the sixteenth and early seventeenth-century Iberian world – primarily, that Iberians’ visions of purity of blood led Iberian thinkers to exclude black Africans from the possibility of being Old Christians – has erased varied discourses pertaining to Africa, Catholicism, and debates about the legitimacy of enslaving Black Africans in this period. Such erasures or omissions have diminished contemporary understandings of the wide spectrum of plural and often contradictory contemporaneous intellectual discourses about Africa and blackness. Contemporaneous theologians and literati – for vastly different purposes – were sometimes invested in portraying black Africans as ancient Christians who possessed the purest of religious lineages. This article explores how Alonso de Sandoval (1576-1652), an early seventeenth-century Jesuit based in Cartagena de Indias, drew on visions of Christian Ethiopia to construct narratives of Africans’ ancient Christian origins; a history that Sandoval weaponized in order to justify the enslavement of all black Africans. The article traces plural and often contradictory debates about Africa, skin color, and Christianity in this period, while highlighting the need to re-evaluate the early Castilian empire as a site of greater coexistence of starkly different views on the justifications for slavery, blackness, and Africa.