15th–18th Centuries: (European Missionary Activity Before 1800 — Portuguese Missions to Ethiopia and Kongo in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries, the Lege…

15th–18th Centuries: (European Missionary Activity Before 1800 — Portuguese Missions to Ethiopia and Kongo in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries, the Legend of Prester John, King Afonso’s Poisoned Chalice in Kongo, the Jesuit Attempt to Convert the Abyssinian Emperor Causing Civil War, and Ethiopia Awarded a Special Place in the Christian European Imagination as Flawed but Improvable): European missionary enterprise in sub-Saharan Africa dated to the Portuguese, who dispatched missions to Ethiopia and Kongo in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Such work was associated with the expansion of Portuguese power and the crusading, anti-Islamic ethos of late medieval Europe. The Portuguese were also searching for the legendary kingdom of Prester John, a Christian king somewhere in the East surrounded by Muslim enemies. They reached Ethiopia in the early sixteenth century but were unimpressed — it appeared backward, its armies poorly equipped, its Coptic Christianity corrupted and superstitious. Yet it was Christian, and the Portuguese intervened militarily in the 1540s when the kingdom was invaded by Muslims. In Kongo, Portugal established diplomatic relations impressed by the wealthy empire. King Afonso (1506–1543), a Christian convert, used the new faith to increase his authority and undermine local religious leaders — but it was a poisoned chalice, as royal dependence on Portuguese support cost legitimacy, leading to the kingdom’s fragmentation. In the early seventeenth century, Portuguese Jesuits attempted to convert the Ethiopian emperor to Catholicism, causing massive upheaval and civil war. By the nineteenth century, Ethiopia occupied a special place in Christian Europe’s imagination — flawed but improvable, a curious Christian throwback that had admirably resisted Muslim enemies.