A patriarch declares Ethiopian baptism invalid and loses the country

Alphonsus Mendes reached the Ethiopian court in February 1626, sent as patriarch by the King of Spain. He was a professor of scripture at Evora with no missionary experience. Six governors carried a canopy over his head as he processed into the church, and four days later the Emperor Susenyos knelt in public and swore allegiance to the Pope. Mendes then announced that Ethiopian sacraments were of doubtful validity. The faithful were to be baptised again, the clergy ordained again, feasts and fasts moved to the Roman calendar, Saturday made a fast day, circumcision banned. Rebellions followed, led by members of the royal family and finally by peasants. Susenyos crushed them one after another and then gave way. In June 1632 he restored freedom of worship and handed power to his son Fasiladas. Crowds danced and smashed their rosaries. The Jesuits were expelled, the last of them executed in 1640, and Ethiopia shut itself off from Latin Europe for two centuries.

France established a colony on Tortuga, the island off the northwestern coast of Hispaniola, in 1625. It was a modest thing. A rocky island a few kilometres offshore, occupied by buccaneers, adventurers and men with reasons to be a long way from Europe. What made it consequential is that the French crown claimed it. A crew of raiders becomes a settlement, a settlement becomes a possession, a possession acquires a governor, and the governor's remit reaches across the channel to the mainland coast Spain had abandoned twenty years earlier. From that beachhead France worked its way into the western third of Hispaniola, which Spain conceded formally in 1697 and which became the colony of Saint-Domingue. Within a century Saint-Domingue was producing more sugar and coffee than any other territory on earth and returning more profit than any colony in the history of European empire. All of it traces to a claim staked on an island most maps do not bother to name.

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.

The Jesuit Mateus Cardoso arrived in Sao Salvador in 1625, shortly after King Pedro II died and his son Garcia succeeded him, and found four high ranking women sitting on the royal council. They came from the different groups, royal and non royal, that had claims on the throne, and they were known for their piety and their gifts to the church. Within a year they had turned against the branch of the family Garcia belonged to. Manuel Jordao, duke of Nsundi, marched on the capital and drove the king out, then wrote to the Portuguese governor Fernao de Sousa explaining that he had acted at the request of the matrons. His attack put a nephew of Alvaro III on the throne and returned power to the rival branch. Garcia fled to the coastal province of Soyo, taking with him Pedro's mother Christina, in whom, a Jesuit source says, he placed great trust because of her enormous authority among the Kongo nobility. The count of Soyo would not receive him at court.