Alonso de Sandoval, De instauranda Æthiopum salute, and the Religious Conversion of Black Africans

Alonso de Sandoval (1576-1652) was a Jesuit missionary in the Viceroyalty of Peru, known for his work to convert enslaved Black Africans to Catholicism. This included the publication of De instauranda Æthiopum salute in 1627,[1] now recognised as one of the earliest sources of information on Black Africans and their descendants in colonial Spanish America, now described as ‘a form of early cultural ethnography’.[2]

Figure 1. Illustrated titlepage of De instauranda Æthiopum salute, with images of mass conversions of Black Africans, who are depicted with white skin, in the top left and right corners. Tomo Primero, Edición de Madrid: Paredes, 1648. Digitized and made accessible at University Library of Heidelberg.

Sandoval accumulated the information for the text through his work with the enslaved who had arrived at the port of Cartagena de Indias, alongside his team of assistants. This team included enslaved Black interpreters, who understood many of the languages spoken by those onboard the slave ships. Larissa Brewer-García has shown that some of these individuals did much more than simply translate for Sandoval, as they were also in charge of making the devotional items the Jesuits used in their catechising work like rosary beads, as well as the tin medals placed around the neck of baptised Black Africans.[3] In addition, some preached directly to the enslaved in their native languages, the significance of which Brewer-García makes clear in the following: ‘it is the interpreter, not the priest, who could see all the catechumens and their reactions to his messages, and ultimately it is the interpreter, not the priest, who fashions the content and affect of the catechism in the target languages.’[4] However, Sandoval only ever made passing reference to the team he relied upon, sometimes using the royal ‘we’ when discussing his work on the slave ships.[5] He also emphasised the necessity of interpreters, always unnamed, in order to communicate with those who did not speak Spanish.[6] 

Figure 2. Map of the port city of Cartagena de Indias, where Alonso de Sandoval worked. Plano de la Ciudad de Cartagena de Yndias y sus cercanías, around 1628, Archivo General de Indias.

Sandoval further augmented his knowledge by reaching out to other Jesuits with experience on the African continent, as well as colleagues in the Iberian Peninsula.[7] This pooling of knowledge enabled him to learn more about the many ethnicities he was interacting with on a daily basis, all in the pursuit of catechising more effectively. The work itself was structured into four books: the first was an exploration of African geographies, languages cultures and religions; the second described the suffering of the enslaved that Sandoval had witnessed, the failings of the slave owners, and the negligence of other priests who did not adequately evangelise; the third contained practical advice for others wishing to work amongst the enslaved; whilst the last book was targeted at Jesuits in particular, promoting their Company as a righteous and global evangelising force.

And whilst much of his writing has since been shown to be incorrect, and at times total inventions, revealing much more about Catholic prejudices than anything about the enslaved, Sandoval makes clear that he was not working with a Black monolith. Rather, he was proselytising amongst a diverse array of polities, each with their own languages, cultures, faith systems and political structures. In Chapter 8 of Book 3, Sandoval discusses the disparities in the Catholic education given to the enslaved before the Middle Passage. We are told there that if the enslaved came from the Rivers of Guinea region, ‘almost all of them will not be baptised’,[8] whilst those from the port of Luanda and the surrounding area ‘have usually been sufficiently instructed’.[9] Yet, not only did Sandoval decry the way in which the enslaved were failed by poor religious instruction, he also laid out the horrendous conditions they were exposed to from the moment of their capture, to their crossing of the Atlantic, and in their new lives in the Americas:

Moving on from these endless beatings, I can hardly describe the cruel way that slaves are imprisoned in chains, fetters, handcuffs, shackles, balls and chains, collars, and other horrible inventions designed to imprison and punish them.[10]

Sandoval also described the arbitrary murder of enslaved people, their exposure to epidemics, their forced labour throughout the day and night, a lack of adequate food and drink, or sleeping provisions, and the dangerous nature of their daily toil, be it in mines, farms, in the domestic sphere, or along the coast as pearl divers; with some owners often not even burying the bodies of those who had died.[11] To sum up, the Jesuit writes: ‘I am sure that some masters care more for their animals than for their fellow men’[12]. Yet, despite these, at times, scathing critiques, Sandoval only ever called for the reform of the slave trade, never its abolition. Indeed, the earthly salvation of the enslaved was never the greatest of Sandoval’s concerns. Instead, their souls were the priority:

There is no difference between the merits of a slave who serves well and those of a freedman who enjoys his liberty. All faithful workers, black or white, free or enslaved, have the same value.[13]

Within the boundaries set by this logic, the souls of the enslaved could only be redeemed or saved by being converted. As such, Sandoval set to work on countering the negative connotations of the colour black – which his own writings had reinforced by aligning whiteness with Catholicism – by emphasizing that despite their black bodies, Africans were capable of obtaining white souls, the same colour as all other Catholic souls, through baptism. According to Sandoval’s rationale, Black Africans were literally washed clean, washed white, by the whiteness of Christ.[14] This was made explicit in the preface to his work, where it was stated that the ‘book hopes to transform them – if not their skin color, it will at least make their souls white with grace […] and free them from the ugly blackness of sin.’[15]

De instauranda Æthiopum is a complex and contradictory text, which reveals much about proselytising work in Cartagena de Indias, the brutal realities of the trade in enslaved people, as well as the gradual emergence of the fixed categories of Blackness and Whiteness forged through these historical processes.

Michael Aidan Pope is an Associate Lecturer in History at University College London and earned his PhD at Birkbeck, University of London, in 2022. He is a historian of the Iberian Peninsula and the Iberian World, c. 1450-1800, focusing on religious conversion and religious culture in the early modern Atlantic.

[1] Alonso de Sandoval, Treatise on Slavery: Selections from De instauranda Æthiopum salute, trans. and ed. by Nicole von Germeten (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2008).

[2] Ibid, ‘Introduction’ by Nicole von Germeten, p. xvii.

[3] Larissa Brewer-García, Beyond Babel: Translations of Blackness in Colonial Peru and New Granada (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021) pp. 123-132.

[4] Ibid., p. 134.

[5] Alonso de Sandoval, ‘Book 3, Chapter 8’, pp. 126-130.

[6] Alonso de Sandoval, ‘Book 3, Chapter 4’, p. 110.

[7] Francisco de Borja Medina, ‘La experiencia sevillana de la Compañia de Jesús en la evangelización de los esclavos negros y su representación en América’, in La esclavitud negroafricana en la historia de España siglos XVI y XVII, ed. by Aurelia Martín Casares and Margarita Garcia Barranco (Granada: Editorial Comares, 2010), pp. 75-94.

[8] Alonso de Sandoval, ‘Book 3, Chapter 8’, p. 127.

[9] Ibid., p. 128.

[10] Alonso de Sandoval, ‘Book 2’, p. 68.

[11] Alonso de Sandoval, ‘Book 2’, pp. 65-71.

[12] Alonso de Sandoval, ‘Book 2’, p. 70.

[13] Alonso de Sandoval, ‘Book 1, Chapter 18’, p. 56.

[14] Grace Harpster, ‘The Color of Salvation: The Materiality of Blackness in Alonso de Sandoval’s De instauranda Aethiopum salute’ in Envisioning Others: Race, Color, and the Visual in Iberia and Latin America, ed. by Pamela A. Patton (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2016), pp. 85-95.

[15] Alonso de Sandoval, ‘Approval of Father Vincente Imperial’, p. 7.