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ON AUGUST 26, 1441, a Franciscan friar named Alberto da Sarteano shuffled into Florence after an absence of more than two years. A quiet fifty-six-year-old mendicant, he was not the sort of person who usually attracted a great deal of attention, and in any other circumstances the arrival of so humble a figure would almost certainly have passed unnoticed. Yet almost as soon as he entered the city gates, he was surrounded by crowds of people gasping in amazement and jostling for a better look. But while Alberto himself enjoyed a modest degree of celebrity in Florence for his humanistic learning and his earlier voyages to Byzantium and Palestine, it was not the friar himself who attracted the mob’s attention. Instead, it was Alberto’s traveling companions who were the object of the Florentines’ fascination. For not only was he accompanied by a delegation of Egyptian Copts headed by a bearded abbot named Anthony, but he also brought with him two black Africans from Ethiopia.
Although Florence was already “full of unusual faces and costumes,” Alberto’s little procession was the subject of intense scrutiny from all and sundry, with particular fascination being exerted by the dark-skinned Ethiopians. While they were inclined to sneer at the Africans (one noted that they were “dry and awkward in their bearing” and “very weak”), even the most sophisticated humanists came out of doors especially to see the strange and unfamiliar apparitions walking through the city streets.
It was, however, no accident that Alberto had returned to Florence with such exotic and remarkable companions at just that moment. Together with his Coptic and Ethiopian friends, he had come to fulfill an important mission at the great ecumenical council then being held in the city. Back in the summer of 1439, Pope Eugenius IV had decided that the time had come to unite the whole of Christendom against the Ottoman Turks and set out to bring together all Christian believers, no matter where they were to be found. This being so, he had sent Alberto on a momentous mission to the very edges of the known world. Not only was Alberto to announce the ecumenical council to Copts and Melkites in Jerusalem and Alexandria, but he was also to make contact with the semilegendary Christian realms that were believed to exist somewhere beyond Egypt. He was specifically charged with delivering messages to the shadowy figure of “Prester John” and to the equally mysterious “Thomas of the Indies,” both of whom were thought to be followers of the cross.
Despite his years traveling in the Near East, Alberto had set out on his journey armed with very little in the way of reliable information. At the time, Africa was shrouded in mystery. Little, if anything, was known about what lay beyond the great southern desert, and in the absence of anyone who could have acted as a guide, he had only the vaguest notion of where he might find Prester John or Thomas of the Indies.
Yet he had exceeded all expectations. Venturing through Egypt—then ruled by the Mamluk sultan Sayf al-Din Jaqmaq—he had not found any trace of the legendary potentates to whom Eugenius had written, but had instead managed to identify the Ethiopian Emperor Zara Yaqob, whose Christianity was established beyond question and whose claims to descend from King Solomon became apparent. Ethiopian Christians—many of whom lived in Jerusalem—were deeply interested in the ecumenical council, and it was clear there was scope for securing solid links between Christian Italy and the hitherto-mythical realm beyond the desert.
Pope Eugenius was thrilled by Alberto’s success. With tremendous pomp, he formally received the Coptic delegation in Santa Maria Novella on August 31, and two days later he greeted the intriguing Ethiopian representatives with even greater excitement. Despite their perplexing language and rather unexpected habits, Eugenius’s sub-Saharan visitors were a palpable sign that Christendom was larger than had previously been imagined. And for a brief moment, it would have seemed possible that all the nations of the Christian world—Italian, Greek, Levantine, Egyptian, even Ethiopian—would be bound together by the ties of a common faith in the holy cause of defeating the hated Turks.
Although the negotiations failed to produce a lasting union, the barriers of myth had been broken down, and points of commonality had been found with peoples and cultures never before seen at such close quarters. As a mark of the momentousness of the occasion, the pope commissioned Filarete to immortalize the attendance of the Copts and Ethiopians on the bronze doors of Saint Peter’s Basilica. Depicting the travelers with a sharp eye for detail, Filarete made sure that the two scenes captured both the extraordinary exoticism of the sub-Saharan Africans and the warmth with which Eugenius had received them as brothers in Christ. What his Ethiopian friends made of this encounter, however, may not have been exactly the same.
LIGHT ON THE DARK CONTINENT
Taken together, Alberto da Sarteano’s journey and the Ethiopians’ arrival in Florence in 1441 were emblematic of Renaissance interactions with sub-Saharan Africa, and though often overlooked by historians, the encounter with Pope Eugenius marked a leap forward in the exploration of a continent that had, until then, remained opaque to Europeans.
It was not that the interior of Africa was completely unknown to Italians before Alberto returned from his travels. Those of a humanistic bent were aware of classical interactions with black African peoples in antiquity. From Greek texts such as Herodotus’sHistories, Italians gained a knowledge of ancient Egyptian attempts to explore farther south, while from Roman accounts they derived an understanding of antique trade with peoples beyond the Mediterranean shore. Italians had also encountered black Africans before. Diplomacy had already opened a few channels. The states of Italy had tentatively begun to reach out to others they supposed to lie in the far South. In 1291, for example, Genoa dispatched an embassy to modern Mogadishu in an attempt to determine the whereabouts of the Vivaldi brothers, who had gone missing some time before. Similarly, Africans themselves had nervously begun to extend the hand of friendship. Envoys sent to Spain by Emperor Wedem Arad of Ethiopia had accidentally ended up in Genoa in 1306, and happily imparted tales of their native land to inquisitive citizens. What was more, a small population of sub-Saharan Africans had actually been resident in the Italian peninsula for several centuries. By virtue of Sicily’s position as a major Mediterranean trading hub, a limited number had been welcomed into the medieval courts, and in the late 1430s trade with Arab merchants ensured that at least some colored individuals were known in Florence. Along with Moors and Berbers, a few black African slave girls intermittently found their way across the Mediterranean via Spain and Portugal, and by 1427 some 360 slave girls—mostly from the Caucasus, but including a small number of African descent—were owned by Florentine households.
But despite this, Italian knowledge of the continent south of the desert was limited at best. Maps of the period rarely showed any serious understanding of African geography beyond the former Roman colonies, and display no consciousness of the sheer extent of what remained to be discovered. A now lost portolan chart drawn in 1306 by the Genoese priest Giovanni da Carignano shows nothing below the upper Egyptian Nile, while Pietro Vesconte’s mappa mundi (ca. 1320) simply assumes that only sea lay beyond the Sahara. Apart from the settlements along the North African coast and the lower Nile, there seems to be no knowledge of any major towns, and no awareness is shown of any of the peoples of the interior. Until the time of Alberto da Sarteano’s return to Florence, the gaps left by such ignorance were filled more by mythmaking than by any serious investigation. In 1367, for example, the Venetians Domenico and Francesco Pizzigano produced a telling portolan chart showing a river of gold that connected up with the Nile and had its source in the “Mountains of the Moon” described by Ptolemy. In an attempt to add extra color, the brothers also relocated the legendary Christian king Prester John (whom Marco Polo had described as living in the Orient) to the shady regions of West Africa and postulated that his realm, too, was littered with so much gold that it lacked almost any value. Even as late as the 1430s, such fantasies were accepted at face value, and in this respect it is telling that the letters Eugenius IV entrusted to Alberto were informed by vague rumors of Prester John rather than by factual information.
The reappearance of Alberto da Sarteano and his Ethiopian companions was a sign that change was in the air. The rise of the Ottoman Turks in the Near East had provided a crucial spur. At a religious level, the desire to find new Christian allies had motivated Italians to test the waters of legend and to acquire a deeper knowledge of under-explored lands. But the desire for commercial profit swiftly took center stage in driving discovery. The fall of Constantinople in 1453 had a major impact on trade. On the one hand, the overland gateway to the Silk Road was more vulnerable than ever before, and the vital trade in spices and raw materials from the Far East was in jeopardy. And on the other hand, the Ottoman seizure of the Bosporus barred the way to the Caucasus, which until then had been the major source of (officially illegal) slaves. The need for solutions provided the spur to exploration. In the quest for a new sea route to the Indies that would bypass the Ottoman-controlled Near East, Portuguese seamen penetrated the interior of modernSierra Leone, Ghana, and the Gold Coast, and discovered not only a rich, hitherto-unknown land but also vast potential for exporting precious metals and slaves. The obvious moneymaking opportunities accelerated the desire for exploration, and though Portuguese sailors continued to lead the way, Italian explorers such as Alvise Ca’da Mosto and Antoniotto Usodimare—who navigated the river Gambia and discovered the Cape Verde Islands in 1455 and 1456—avidly took up the baton.
Although Renaissance Italians had previously had only a limited understanding of sub-Saharan Africa, both their exposure to and their knowledge of the continent and its peoples now increased dramatically. Travelers to the new lands brought back a torrent of information. African travelogues enjoyed a tremendous popularity, and works such as Ca’da Mosto’s Navigazioni became instant hits. Despite clinging to a few old legends, Ca’da Mosto’s account contained remarkably detailed descriptions. His sensitivity for commercially useful observations was particularly pronounced. Identifying the two-way trade in gold and salt linking the Songhay kingdom of Mali with Morocco, Tunisia, and Egypt, he painted a vivid picture of the hot, dry atmosphere of market towns such asTimbuktu, Teghaza, and Ouadane, and conjured up clear images of Berber caravans wending their way lazily across the Sahara. The kingdom of the Wolof (Senegal) was analyzed with a similarly searching eye for precision, and unfamiliar customs, dances, and patterns of cultivation were laid bare for the first time. His remarks on topography, flora, and fauna were no less striking for their exactitude. To the amazement of his readers, he described the rivers Senegal and Gambia, the African elephant, the hippopotamus, and the multitude of new plants and flowers he had encountered on an almost daily basis.
But even those Italians who were neither travelers nor avid readers came into growing contact with the peoples of sub-Saharan Africa. It was in the decades after Alberto da Sarteano’s voyage that Italy saw “the … trade in black slaves become big business”; and though it undoubtedly constitutes the starting point of “one of the most heartrending and shameful episodes in world history,” it also provided the greatest opportunity yet for Renaissance Italians to encounter sub-Saharan Africans at close quarters. With ever-growing regularity, a stream of Portuguese ships bearing human cargoes began to reach the ports of Livorno, Venice, and Genoa, bringing those wealthy enough to own slaves face-to-face with black Africans. Despite the Church’s reservations about slavery, Florentine banks—ever alert to the potential for profit—took a particularly keen interest in human merchandise and hurried to secure as many colored bondswomen (and sometimes bondsmen) as possible to meet the growing appetite for exotic domestics. In July 1461, for example, Giovanni Guidetti, a business agent for the Cambini bank, reported that the Portuguese ship Santa Maria di Nazarette had arrived in Livorno carrying a cargo that included three black female slaves who had been named Isabell, Barbera, and Marta. Valued at between 8,500 and 6,500 reals in proportion to their perceived “blackness” (“comparable to the annual salary of a qualified craftsman”), these girls were subsequently dispatched to perform domestic chores in the households of the Cambini family,Giovanni degli Albizzi, and Ridolfo di ser Gabriello. Similarly, in September 1464, the Cambini account books reveal that Piero and Giuliano di Francesco Salviati paid the princely sum of 36.18 fiorini di suggello “for a black head they received from us … for their own domestic use.” Indeed, by the late fifteenth century, virtually every ambitious merchant family had at least one black slave, and none of Italy’s great noble houses would have thought its court complete without a fair smattering of Africans.
THE CHILDREN OF GOD
As the veil of mystery began to fall from the face of sub-Saharan Africa, Italians were compelled to question how they perceived its peoples, and in this regard, too, Alberto da Sarteano’s arrival at the Council of Florence with the Ethiopian delegates testifies not merely to the curiosity that the peoples of the African interior generated, but also to the extent to which Renaissance Italians were prepared to look on black Africans in a markedly positive fashion.
Both the reason for Alberto’s mission and the warmth with which Eugenius IV received the Ethiopians are revealing. In marked contrast to views of Jews and Muslims, perceptions of black Africans were never tainted by religious prejudices. Indeed, quite the opposite. A deep sense of Christian friendship persuaded Renaissance Italians to view sub-Saharan Africans in a manner that was both welcoming and enthusiastic.
Although travelers such as Alvise Ca’da Mosto remarked upon the prevalence of pagan animism in kingdoms such as Benin, for example, black Africans tended to be viewed from the very first as children of God, regardless of whether they were known to adhere to the Christian faith or not. For churchmen of Filippo Lippi’s generation, their supposed origins revealed they were kindred spirits. Elaborating on the biblical story of Ham’s exile, Renaissance Italians imagined that Noah’s son had wandered from the Holy Land into Africa, where he ultimately settled, married, and had children. His descendants were, they believed, the ancestors of the fifteenth-century Ethiopians who arrived in Florence. Indeed, since few distinctions were drawn between different sub-Saharan peoples, all black Africans were thought to be authentic children of Ham and were thus viewed as members of the broader Christian family.
If their supposed descent from Noah’s son was not enough, there was plenty of other evidence suggesting that black Africans should be regarded as authentic Christian brethren. The Queen of Sheba, for example, was just one instance of a close scriptural link between Africa and Old Testament history, and the story of the journey of the Magi to Bethlehem stands out as being of particular importance. Although the biblical narrative contains no mention either of the Magi’s names or of their points of origin, early Christian writers swiftly filled the gap and began to associate the newly dubbed Caspar, Melchior, and Balthazar with the three corners of the known world. While Caspar and Melchior were often linked with India and Persia, respectively, Balthazar came to be cast in the role of an African from a surprisingly early date. By the fourth century, for example, Saint Hilary had postulated that Balthazar was from sub-Saharan Africa, and slowly but surely the idea of the “black Magus” gained ground, until it received wide acceptance in the fourteenth century. As Italians’ exposure to the peoples of the continent increased after Alberto da Sarteano’s arrival in Florence, the art of the period began to embrace the notion of a black Balthazar with tremendous enthusiasm. In Mantegna’sAdoration of the Magi (Uffizi, Florence) (Fig. 39)—which is most commonly dated to ca. 1489 but may be as early as ca. 1462–70—the kneeling figure of Balthazar is a black African, and it is clear that both artist and viewer accepted him as an emblem of colored people’s integral role in the wider Christian drama.
It was an idea that only grew stronger as the years went by. From the mid-fifteenth century onward, the prevailing sense that black Africans were historically part of the Christian family persuaded some of the more adventurous artists and humanists to integrate them more firmly into biblical stories, even where supporting evidence was nonexistent. Perhaps as a consequence of Isabella d’Este’s growing interest in having black servants at her court in Mantua, for example, Mantegna cut new ground in introducing a black African maid into the tale of Judith’s decapitation of Holofernes. In a pen-and-ink drawing dated to February 1492 (Uffizi, Florence), Judith’s maidservant is depicted with identifiably African features, a motif that Mantegna subsequently repeated in at least three other works and that was later imitated by artists such as Correggio. Since Judith was a paradigmatic example of self-sacrificing virtue thanks to her seduction and slaughter of the Assyrian general, the presence of a black African attendant in a representation of the scene indicates a willingness to attribute a reflected glory to colored peoples and to further emphasize their part in the scriptural tradition.
That sub-Saharan Africans were increasingly perceived as the children of God provided the Church with a powerful reason to reach out positively to newly discovered nations, and to encourage a constructive, welcoming attitude toward black Africans in Africa and in Italy itself. Within sixty years of Alberto da Sarteano’s arrival in Florence, the Church was actively embracing the idea that the entrance of colored people into full communion with the Roman Catholic faith was one more proof that the Golden Age had arrived.
Building on Eugenius IV’s desire to unite Christendom and strengthen the integrity of Christianity worldwide, the Church began to explore any and all methods of propagating Catholicism among peoples who were either known to be believers in Christ or who were at least thought to be “instinctively” amenable to conversion. By the early sixteenth century, Saint Ignatius of Loyola had expressed an interest in going on a mission to Ethiopia to strengthen the ties first glimpsed at the Council of Florence, and before long,Jesuits were setting out to spread the word in West Africa. Some attempt was even made to adapt the Church’s message to local customs, and there is a sense in which tolerance was recognized as an essential precondition of a Christian Africa. In 1518, for example,Pope Leo X was petitioned by King Manuel of Portugal to consecrate the twenty-three-year-old Ndoadidiki Ne-Kinu a Mumemba—the illegitimate son of the native king of the Congo—as a bishop and to provide him with a staff of missionaries. Even though Ndoadidiki (better known as Henrique) was debarred from the episcopal office by virtue of his illegitimacy and his youth, Leo evidently thought this was a brilliant idea and not only had him appointed titular bishop of Utica but also sent a host of theologians to advise the young man until he reached the canonically acceptable age of twenty-seven. Africa, Leo seems to have believed, was better served by native-born prelates, an apparently clear sign of cross-cultural openness.
At home in Italy, too, the supposition of an inherent religious kinship with black Africans led to a sensitive and broadly encouraging approach on the Church’s part. Particularly from the early fifteenth century onward, serious attention was given to providing adequate pastoral care for sub-Saharan Africans, especially among the very large numbers of slaves and ex-slaves in Sicily and Naples. Children were baptized, preachers made visits to fields, markets, and shipyards, and later black slaves were even encouraged to form their own confraternities, such as the one founded at the church of San Marco in Messina in 1584. Yet more strikingly, both slaves and former slaves were actively welcomed into the religious orders. Perhaps the most remarkable example is that of SanBenedetto il Moro (ca. 1524–89), who was born into a largely illiterate family of slaves or freed slaves in Sicily, and who entered the Franciscan Order at the age of twenty-one. So outstanding was his pious asceticism (accompanied by regular bouts of extreme self-flagellation) that after his death Benedetto was eventually venerated as a saint by the overwhelmingly white congregations of southern Italy.
The atmosphere of religious openness that surrounded black Africans in the Italian peninsula occasionally bled out into other spheres of existence and informed a wider acknowledgment of their shared humanity. Although their status as slaves or freedmen necessarily restricted the range of occupations in which they were employed, black Africans were perceived to possess a multitude of skills that were not only integral to the courtly life of Renaissance cities but also closely related to ideals of martial virtue celebrated by authors such as Castiglione. In addition to finding places as wrestlers and divers, they were particularly admired for their prowess as horsemen and soldiers, sure marks of an admirable and “civilized” character. In 1553, for example, the Medici employed a certain Grazzico “il Moretto” of Africa as a horseman and page, while an African slave known as Bastiano was commanded to stand guard over the tomb of Cardinal Jaime of Portugal in San Miniato al Monte in Oltr’Arno because of his evident military acumen. Even more remarkable is a woodcut from ca. 1505 in which a black page is shown valiantly (but vainly) defending Galeazzo Maria Sforza from his assassins in 1476. So, too, black Africans were widely thought to be unusually skilled at music and dancing, two activities that were highly prized in courtiers.
So closely were black Africans ingrained in the society of Renaissance Italy that suspicion of mixed parentage was not regarded as a serious issue, even among the upper echelons of the urban elite. Created duke of Florence in 1532, Alessandro de’ Medici was widely (and perhaps not inaccurately) rumored to have been the natural child of Pope Clement VII and a black African woman, and the frequency with which portraits openly showed him with identifiably “African” features seems to suggest that a certain level of social acceptance had grown out of the broader sense of religious familiarity that had begun with Alberto da Sarteano’s arrival in Florence with the Ethiopian delegation in 1441.
HUMAN, BUT NOT TOO HUMAN
Black Africans were in many senses greeted with a more positive attitude than either Jews or Muslims, but there was another, more insidious dimension to Renaissance Italy’s relationship with sub-Saharan Africa. That Alberto da Sarteano’s Ethiopian delegation was greeted with wide-eyed amazement and even a measure of bemusement by onlookers was itself a sign that previous points of contact had only gone a small way toward facilitating a proper acceptance of black Africans; but that the city’s cultured humanists persisted in viewing them with derision, almost as one might treat a scientific specimen, suggests that they remained “foreign” in a way that was not altogether heartwarming.
Lurking beneath the facade of Christian fellow feeling and Catholic ecumenicalism was a deep sense of disdain and condescension. Although the peoples of sub-Saharan Africa were widely regarded as kindred members of the wider Christian family, this did not mean Italians viewed black Africans as equals. They were, in fact, viewed as little more than oversized infants, and since Italian humanists refused to acknowledge any sub-Saharan culture worth speaking of, they tended to cast black Africans in the role of uncivilized barbarians.
The pattern was set by the earliest explorers. Despite the keenness with which they observed the social habits of the Wolof or the Songhay, for example, the first travelers looked on sub-Saharan Africa through the lens of crude prejudice rather than of objective interest. In his account of his journey across the desert, Antonio Malfante spitefully made much of the fact that the black Africans he encountered were “unlettered, and without books,” and drew a parallel between a perceived cultural primitivism and demonic witchcraft by observing that they were “great magicians, evoking by incense diabolical spirits.” For his part, Alvise Ca’da Mosto was repulsed by what he saw as “lascivious” traits in the peoples of the region, and tempered his admiration of their Christian ancestry with contempt for their “barbaric” practices.
Such views found a willing audience in Italy. Exposed to ever-growing numbers of black Africans, Renaissance Italians gladly ab- sorbed the assertion of base primitivism at the same time as they freely acknowledged a religious kinship. Every imaginable stereotype was deployed to cast colored peoples as uncivilized simpletons who could never hope to occupy a position of parity with the white majority. Quite apart from the Portuguese trope of the “happy black”—which equated unconstrained mirth with childishness or savagery—there was a widespread belief that all sub-Saharan Africans were lazy and thus incapable of accomplishing anything of lasting value. In his 1480 tax return, for example, the heirs of the Florentine Matteo di Giovanni di Marcho Strozzi listed among their chattels a black female slave “who works badly and is of little worth”; “she is lazy,” they claimed, “as are all black females.” More disturbingly, there was a widespread belief that all Africans were morally incontinent and simply incapable of restraining either their propensity for gluttony or their sexual appetite. Drawing on Ca’da Mosto’s contention that incest was widespread south of the Sahara, humanists began to equate the physical strength and unlettered “savagery” of black Africans with an insatiable lust that sought relief at every available opportunity. It was even believed that Africans’ supposed musicality could be explained away as a vain attempt to channel their libidinous urges into some form of rhythmical dance. Similarly, the Africans’ native propensity for wearing gold earrings gave weight to the suspicion that they may have had something in common with the hated Jews, who were associated with the same form of jewelry in the popular imagination.
The perception of cultural inferiority, barbarism, and savagery had a number of important implications for the manner in which black Africans were treated in everyday life. Since there was no doubt in most Italians’ minds that they were somehow “less human” than white Christians, it was manifestly obvious that no degree of autonomy or independence could be attributed to any colored person, no matter how positive his or her behavior or manner might be. Thus, while black Africans frequently appear in the art of the period, colored individuals—with the exception of Balthazar—are presented only in the role of supporting or subsidiary characters. In Mantegna’s various renditions of Judith beheading Holofernes, for example, it is of considerable significance that the rather passive servant girl is black, and Judith—who would surely have been of the same ethnic origin—is not. So, too, in Gozzoli’s Journey of the Magi to Bethlehem, the only black face in the entire scene is that of a rather weedy-looking page gamely running alongside the Medici’s horses. This lack of autonomy necessarily carried with it a sense that blacks could, and should, be treated in whatever way their “natural” superiors wished. Female black slaves were habitually subject to sexual advances and even sexual attacks from their masters, and in each case blame was foisted on the victim rather than on the perpetrator.
Yet perhaps the most important implication of this perception of cultural and moral inferiority was with regard to the legal status of black Africans. Although there was always a mixture of free and unfree among the colored population of Renaissance Italy, the belief in a “natural” barbarism gave rise to the contention that colored people were somehow “naturally” slaves. Building on a perversion of Platonic and Aristotelian ideas of slavery, humanists, lawyers, and churchmen accepted that the uncivilized societies of the Dark Continent had been ordained by nature to be ruled over by white, civilized men. And no matter how strong the sense of Christian fellowship may have been, the pernicious idea of a race of natural slaves shaped Renaissance encounters with sub-Saharan Africa.
The enslavement of Christians was categorically forbidden by the Church, but theologians quickly came to believe that sub-Saharan Africans constituted a special case because of their supposed character. Only eleven years after Alberto da Sarteano arrived back in Florence with the Ethiopian delegation, Pope Nicholas V promulgated the bull Dum diversas in an attempt to mediate between the competing claims of Spain and Portugal to supremacy in the new lands being discovered. In the course of this wide-ranging and far-reaching proclamation, Nicholas affirmed that the kings of both nations had the absolute right to invade whatever kingdoms they wished and to reduce the entire population of any territory to slavery, irrespective of creed. Although this was subsequently overturned by Pius II, it was later reaffirmed with even greater insistence in a sequence of bulls that effectively condemned Africans to perpetual and unremitting slavery and set in motion a centuries-long trend that constitutes one of the most unpleasant and vile episodes in human history. It was, indeed, the openness of the Renaissance that led to one of humanity’s greatest evils.
As Alberto da Sarteano and his Ethiopian companions left Florence after the heady excitement of the ecumenical council, the friar could have been forgiven for feeling satisfied. Consciously and unconsciously, he had been responsible for pushing back the boundaries of the Renaissance world and for breaking down the barriers of myth and legend. In adding to the humanistic understanding of sub-Saharan Africa, he had paved the way for generations of explorers and for the growth of genuine ties with entirely new lands. He was, moreover, overjoyed that Christendom itself seemed to have grown massively larger, almost overnight.
Although no written testimony has survived to give any indication of what they made of their Italian sojourn, the Ethiopians would perhaps have been less excited. Despite having been feted in lavish style, they would certainly have been put off by the servile condition into which fellow Africans were being forced, and distressed by the disdain with which they had been treated in the street. They were Christians like any others, but it would have been obvious that they were not viewed as Christians of quite the same stripe. The attraction of learning from and trading with white Italians would perhaps have given them cause for hope, but a sense of fear and anxiety would have been inescapable. It was to their credit as Christians that they put aside such concerns, but it would undoubtedly have been much better had they turned their backs on Florence and run as fast as they could to warn their people of what was already in the air. Tolerance and acceptance were just a facade, and as they may already have suspected, it would have been much better for Africans everywhere if the Renaissance had just left them alone.