Trusted Fanfare: Hospitality, Alliance, and Elite Diplomacy in Sixteenth-Century Malindi-Portuguese Relations

This paper examines the developing African-Portuguese diplomatic relations between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries. I analyze the collective experiences of African ambassadors sent primarily from Kongo and Ethiopia to the courts of Portugal. Documentation of these visits available in the Portuguese National Archives is used to reconstruct and discuss diplomatic receptions, hospitality, gifts and lodgings provided to the African representatives. I then seek to examine these relationships more broadly by considering additional cases of diplomatic relations between Portugal and the kingdoms of Benin, Mombasa and Malindi. Analysis here using published archival collections in conjunction with Portuguese-commissioned ivory artwork pieces from West Africa and early European world maps depicting Africa highlights the evolving ambiguities and challenges between symbolic and actual power felt by both sides. Together these varied examples provide important insights into this era of elite exchange. African rulers from a number of kingdoms were willing to pursue political alliances with the Portuguese Crown. The Portuguese Crown initially attempted to honor these visitors in relationships by employing similar understandings of etiquette and hospitality. Analyzing this dimension of elite diplomatic relationships and considering their later decline when Portuguese Crown perspectives shifted from recognition of African sovereignty to assumptions of their subordinate status in a growing state-driven mercantile network, reveals the vital need for reconsideration of prevalent generalizations about this era. Initial African-European elite relations challenge conceptions that violence and slave-trading initially predominated. The decline of close cooperation in the mid-seventeenth century underscores the need for more inclusive consideration of changing global as well as local realities. Lastly, analysis of this elite history reveals the plurality of agents and causes contributing to these relationships by exposing the limitations of control and intent and their juxtaposition to the agendas of the many others involved in this era of growing world interaction.