Rome creates Propaganda Fide and the Kongo becomes its favourite cause

Pope Gregory XV founded the Sacred Congregation of Propaganda Fide in 1622 to take control of missions back from the crowns of Spain and Portugal. Juan Baptist Vives, who acted as the Kongo king's agent in Rome, was among its principal architects and bought a palace on the Piazza di Spagna to house it and its training college. Through his eyes the Kongo appeared as a distant and loyal Christian kingdom desperate for clergy, and it became close to the new department's favourite project. Vives had appealed to Spanish Capuchins to volunteer in 1618 and more than four hundred offered. Lisbon refused to let a single Spaniard into what it treated as its own preserve, and twenty five years passed before Italian Capuchins got through. Meanwhile the department's first secretary, Francesco Ingoli, was writing rules that stressed learning languages, training local clergy, staying out of politics and printing books people could read.

Before the seventeenth century opened, Europeans controlled few of the islands in the Caribbean. Spain held Trinidad and the large islands, Cuba, Jamaica, Hispaniola and Puerto Rico, where it raised cattle, grew food and a little tobacco and sugar, and above all watched the sea lanes running to the silver of the mainland. Between 1604 and 1640 the English, the French and the Dutch came in and took all the minor islands. The Dutch held part of Brazil from 1625 to 1654. England seized Jamaica from Spain in 1655. Wallerstein sets this rush inside a long slump in the European economy, when appetite for sugar in the wealthy countries was still climbing and each state moved to secure a source before its rivals could. Where taking territory outright was too expensive, as it was against Spain and Portugal, the same states fed off existing colonies through contraband. After the 1650s the division of the Caribbean stayed largely fixed until 1763.

Mocombe dates the French arrival to a landing on the island of La Tortue off the northern coast of what is now the Republic of Haiti. From there the newcomers began exploring and settling the mainland and eventually pushed the Spanish out of the western part of the island through warfare. He connects this directly to the diplomatic settlement that followed, in which Spain, worn down by French attacks and by the results of war in Europe, signed a treaty ceding the western portion, which the French renamed. The point of the sequence for his argument is that the colony was built on displacement twice over, first of the indigenous population and then of a rival European power, before the plantation system made it the richest colony of its day and imported the population whose descendants would take it back.

Alvaro II ruled Kongo from 1587 to 1614 with vigour and intelligence, and in 1596 obtained a separate bishopric for the kingdom. His successor Alvaro III drew Jesuits into the country in 1619, and one of them put his own candidate on the throne in the succession dispute of 1622. In that same year the tensions between Kongo and the Portuguese colony of Angola broke into war. Black mercenaries known as Jagas fought in it and left a mark on Kongo folk memory that outlasted the war itself. There may have been as many as a thousand Portuguese trading agents living in Kongo at the time, with their own villages, farms and extended African families, and the war damaged them too. Alvaro III died the same year. The uneasy peace that had held through two reigns was finished, and the hostilities that opened destroyed the monarchy at Ambuila in 1665.