A shipwrecked ambassador's notes become the book that made Europe notice the Kongo

Alvaro I wanted a bishopric for his kingdom that Lisbon did not control, and in 1583 he sent a Portuguese resident named Duarte Lopes to Rome to get it, first making him a gentleman of the royal house. The voyage went badly. Lopes's ship was driven across the Atlantic and wrecked in the West Indies. He swam ashore and it took him a year to cross back and travel on through Spain. By the time he arrived his king was dead. In Rome he met a writer named Filippo Pigafetta, who turned his notes into a book called Relatione del reame di Congo. It came out in Italian in 1591 and was soon printed in English, in Dutch and in Latin. Before that book, only the Portuguese knew anything about the kingdom. Afterwards the rest of Europe knew there was a Christian state in central Africa, sometimes called Western Ethiopia, badly short of priests.

Francis Drake sacked Santo Domingo in 1586, and the ease of it announced that Spain could no longer hold what it claimed. The deeper trouble was commercial. Spain required its colonists to buy and sell only through Spanish channels at Spanish prices, and the settlers of Hispaniola were poor, remote and badly served. English and French ships began arriving to trade with them directly, undercutting the licensed merchants, and the colonists dealt with them gladly. In 1599 Samuel de Champlain saw thirteen foreign merchantmen working at Mole Saint Nicolas on the northwest coast, in open defiance of an embargo whose penalty was execution or the galleys. The island had become a cost to the Spanish crown instead of a source of revenue. Then in September 1629 the Spanish admiral Federico Toledo Osorio cleared the French and English out of Saint Kitts. The men he expelled had to land somewhere. They went to the north coast of Hispaniola and the small island lying off it.

The Jesuit Jose de Acosta published his Historia natural y moral de las Indias in 1590. In Christian European cosmology nature was something to be known, and understanding it meant understanding its creator. The Aymara and the Quechua had no metaphysics of that shape and no concept comparable to the European one, since they did not place human beings outside the world they lived in. Acosta was therefore describing a nature that existed in his own categories and not in theirs. The habit of treating human beings as separate from and above the rest of creation was carried to the Americas as part of the equipment of conquest, and it survives in the scholarship that grew from books like his. Anyone reading Vodou or Andean practice through that separation will find superstition where the practitioners find an ordinary account of how the world is arranged.

Partly because of Pigafetta's book, the Pope agreed in 1596 to create a diocese for the Kongo with its cathedral at Sao Salvador. It was an unusual thing, a see that was not based in Portuguese territory, and Rome rather than Lisbon had decided on it. Italy and Spain took a lively interest in the place afterwards, which is the only way to explain the scale of missionary effort aimed at it in the following century. The first bishop arrived in 1601 and died a year later. Within twenty five years his successors had effectively moved the see to Loanda in Angola, a colonial port whose economic function was the shipping of enslaved people. The seminary opened by the Bishop of Sao Tome in 1571, closed in the 1580s and reopened in the 1590s, did produce a score or more of priests, white, black and of mixed parentage, to serve the new diocese.