What characterized Black experiences in early modern German-speaking Europe was its diverse nature. People of African descent served in courts as musicians, servants, and confidants, and they entered the Church as priests and nuns. One extraordinary philosopher, Anton Wilhelm Amo, made a name in academia. At the same time, however, the birth of the transatlantic slave trade meant that the status of Black people in Europe was shifting downward. Although German courts played a minor role in the slave trade, as these documents here tell us, they nonetheless established their own slave trading companies and assisted other nations in the creation of the Middle Passage. In this context images of Black people began to take on more demeaning features.
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Life at court
The Black music theorist and composer Vicente Lusitano in Stuttgart (1560s)
Dressing up as Moors at court (1609)- The timpanist Christian Ferdinand (1666)
- Black attendants of the Great Elector (1690)
A baptismal gift from the sovereign (1705)- Baptismal records
- King Frederick I’s smoking party (1709-1710)
- Antoine Pesne, Wilhelmina and her brother Frederick (ca. 1715)
- Antoine Pesne, Portrait of Friedrich Ludwig and Henriette Marie (ca. 1716)
- An inheritance for Christine Charlotte
- Traces of a man named Anthon (1731-1733)
- Knobelsdorff, Frederick the II as crown price (ca. 1735)
- Traces of a woman named Cima
Anton Wilhelm Amo
- Anton Wilhelm Amo (ca. 1703-59)
- Anton Wilhelm Amo argues against the legality of slavery in Europe (1729)
- Two recommendations for Anton Wilhelm Amo (1733 and 1734)
- Anton Wilhelm Amo is defamed (1747)
Travel and trade, science and slavery
- A German knighted in Portugal for an African voyage (1503)
- Albrecht Dürer’s sketches (1508, 1521)
- Balthasar Springer describes “the land of the moors” (1509)
- Balthasar Springer pillages East African cities (1509)
- An ethnographic view of Guinea (1509)
- Johann Schöner’s globes (1515, 1520)
- Caspar van Senden schemes to take “Blackamoores” from England (1596-1601)
- Cannibals and Amazons in the Congo (1598)
- Founding a slave-trading colony in West Africa (1682-1683)
- Brandenburg slaver Otto Friedrich von der Groeben shares his visit to Guinea (1694)
- A slave trader depicts Africans (1694)
Black saintly figures
- Albrecht Dürer, Adoration of the Magi (1504)
- Fragment of a Retable: St. Maurice (1517)
- The meeting of Saints Erasmus and Maurice (c. 1520-24)
- St. Maurice in the Calenberg Altarpiece (ca. 1500-24)
- Lucas Cranach the Elder, St. Maurice (ca. 1520-25)
- Gregory the Moor (ca. 1350-1683)
Black Central Europe 