Every first Sunday of the month, the staff of the frugal Protestant Nikolaikirche in the small town of Siegen, Germany, prepare the church for a special service. Next to the usual arrangement of simple wooden chairs aligned in neat rows inside the typically undecorated, white-walled church, a uniquely ornate object is taken out from the church’s collection. It is a gilded silver baptismal basin, about 54 cm in diameter, 12.3 cm high and weighing about five kilograms, with a frieze seven cm wide adorned with houses, animals, monsters and four medals. Its 7.8 cm base sports an inscription in Latin on the bottom, which reads: Johan Maurits, Count of Nassau, inaugurated in 1658 for use in the holy baptism of the Reformed Church of Siegen this gift which he, as governor of Brazil, received from the African king of Congo.

Baptismal basins are common items found in any Christian church. But the Siegen basin is a unique piece of work whose history and trajectory perfectly exemplify the global connections that brought together Andean miners and metalworkers, European and American slave traders and African rulers during the early modern period. The first point to note is that the basin is made of silver. For centuries China was the primary end market for silver, due to the higher value of silver there compared to other places. The discovery and industrial development of silver mines at Potosí in the 1540s transformed the world economy, oiling the wheels of a global trade that connected Peru with Europe, Africa and Asia. Indeed, Potosí was the world’s leading silver producer until the middle decades of the 17th century, when it was overtaken by Mexican mines. Hispanic American silver flowed around the world in both minted and luxury forms. In this context, an enormous quantity of fine silverwares was transported from Spanish America to Europe, Africa and Asia. Part of this global trade, the Siegen basin made three transatlantic journeys.

The origins of the basin were the subject of curiosity and debate already in the late 17th century. In the November 1693 edition of his monthly periodical Monatliche Unterredungen, German polymath Wilhelm Tentzel published a piece on the basin.¹ Inspired by the dialogical genre found in classical philosophical works, Tentzel’s text takes the form of a disputation among three friends: Antonio, Leonardo and Constantino. The three debate whether the Siegen basin is of American or African origin, taking the ‘hieroglyphs’ engraved on its frieze as a starting point. After pages and pages of baroque erudition, they fail to reach a consensus. The question remained as to whether the ‘hieroglyphs’ were Mexican, Peruvian or Congolese. In the mid 19th century, historian Ludwig Driessen studied the basin, concluding that it was clearly the work of Italian craftsmen. In the hundred years that followed, scholars and historians proposed other hypotheses: it was an Italian basin produced to be exported to Africa, an African piece made by Benin craftsmen or a Portuguese piece made in Congo or Portugal.

In the 20th century, German historian Friedrich Muthmann noted a striking similarity between the images of llamas and monsters on the basin and the drawings found in Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala’s recently discovered El primer nueva corónica y buen gobierno. Guaman Poma’s manuscript or Letter to the King was addressed to Philip III of Spain but was considered lost until the early 20th century, when it was located at its present repository, the National Library of Denmark in Copenhagen. For this reason, the manuscript could not have been consulted either by Tentzel in 1693 or by Driessen in the 19th century.

As far as the dating of the basin is concerned, a closer look at the frieze is very revealing. At the outer rim of the frieze, a few tiny engravings in the form of crowns are accompanied either by the year 1586 or by the initials P.H. set between two thin lines. These can be interpreted as the initials of Philip II (1527–98), king of Spain and the Indies. The small crowns appear to be a later addition to the frieze, possibly denoting a crucial moment of unity in the history of the Iberian empires. Between 1580 and 1640, the kingdoms of Portugal and Spain came under the same dynastic line of Spanish Hapsburg rulers. Upon the death of Henry of Portugal in 1580, a succession crisis was set in motion that ended with Philip II’s claim to the Portuguese throne, initiating a 60-year period under Philip II, Philip III and Philip IV that became known as the Iberian Union. Philip II’s claim to Portugal and her Indies empire was supported by Portuguese merchants, groups of nobles and other interests attracted by expanded trade with the Spanish empire and access to American silver.

About a decade later, the Hispanic monarchy would regularise the commerce between Portuguese Africa and Spanish America by granting special contracts called asientos. These contracts gave exclusive rights to Portuguese merchants to participate in the slave trade to America. As a result, Portuguese slave traders and merchants gained control over the Spanish American slave trade and established the largest slave market in the Atlantic. Portuguese merchants dominated the route between the west coast of Africa and the Spanish colonies in the Americas, selling slaves who endured the transatlantic journey from the region of Congo to the Río de la Plata basin, then to Buenos Aires and finally up the Andes to Potosí.

In this context, while the engravings of monsters and llamas suggest that the Siegen silver basin was originally made in Upper Peru and the year 1586 indicates its latest possible year of production, the small crowns with the initials of Philip II suggest that the silver basin was used as an official payment method in the slave trade. This is likely how the basin made its first transatlantic journey: taken along the route from Potosí to the west coast of Africa, it served first as payment to Portuguese asienteros for a supply of slaves brought to Potosí. It was then used as payment by these same Portuguese merchants to African slave-holders to procure another shipment of slaves in Congo. This is likely how the basin ended up in the hands of the king of Congo. The basin’s second journey across the Atlantic can also be explained with the help of the Latin inscription’s reference to Johan Maurits of Nassau, governor of Brazil. A German nobleman with extensive military training and courtly education, Johan Maurits van Nassau (1604–79) was governor of the Dutch colony of Brazil between 1637 and 1644. During that period, he resided in the port city of Recife, overseeing all matters pertaining to the administration of the sugar-producing colony of Nieuw Holland, including the slave trade with West Africa. For this trade, the Dutch relied heavily on Brazilians’ and Luso-Africans’ expertise in the business. During his eight-year tenure in Brazil, Maurits put together one of the most interesting collections of curiosities of the early modern period. Like all such collections at the time, it was composed of naturalia and artificialia. In Maurits’s case, many objects in his collection were acquired not only in Brazil but as a consequence of his position as governor-general. That is, his collection was augmented by diplomatic gifts.

Maurits took advantage of the diplomatic custom of gift exchanges to establish relationships with Dom Garcia II, the Christian king of Congo, and Dom Daniel da Silva, the count of Soyo (then called Sonho), both of whom ruled over important African slave-exporting regions. By the time Dutch troops broke the resistance of Portuguese forces in the interior of Brazil in 1635, there was a significant shortage of slaves in the colony, which stimulated direct trade with the slave-supplying regions of Western Africa. Slaves were strictly necessary to maintain the sugar-production ambitions of the Dutch West Indian Company. In the early 1640s, both the king of Congo and the count of Sonho sought Maurits’s support in a dispute with one another. In this context, both African rulers sent gifts. In May 1643, the king of Congo sent his representatives to Recife, offering Maurits 200 slaves, a necklace and a silver basin. This was the Siegen silver basin’s second transatlantic journey. In recognition of the gift, Maurits sent to the king of Congo a long silk cloak with golden and silver embroidery, a satin doublet, a hat made of beaver fur and a sword adorned with silver. Upon returning to Europe in 1644, Maurits took all his possessions and his collection of curiosities with him. The basin was part of the heavy cargo transported in one of the 13 ships destined for the Netherlands, thus making its third transoceanic voyage.

Back in Europe, Maurits became governor of Cleve in Germany and in 1658 attended the election in Frankfurt of Leopold I (1640–1705) as the 46th Holy Roman emperor. While in Frankfurt, he hired the services of a goldsmith to coat the basin in gold, engrave it with his coat of arms and add a base with an inscription commemorating the event. That same year, Maurits presented the basin to the Protestant church in Siegen, where it rests today.

FURTHER READING

de Alencastro, L.F. (2018) The Trade in the Living: The Formation of Brazil in the South Atlantic, Sixteenth to Seventeenth Centuries (Albany, NY: SUNY Press).

Françozo, M. (2014) ‘Global connections: Johan Maurits of Nassau-Siegen’s collection of curiosities’, in The Legacy of Dutch Brazil, edited by M. van Groesen, 105–23 (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press).

Lane, K. (2019) Potosí: The Silver City That Changed the World (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press).

Muthmann, F. (1956) Die Silberne Taufschale zu Siegen: Ein Werk aus der spanischen Kolonialzeit Perus (Heidelberg: Winter).

Schwartz, S. (2011) ‘The Iberian Atlantic to 1650’, in The Oxford Handbook of the Atlantic World 1450–1850, edited by N. Canny and P. Morgan, 147–64 (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

Tentzel, W. (1693) Monatliche Unterredungen einiger Guten Freunde von Allerhand Büchern und andern annemlichen Geschichten (Leipzig: J.F. Gleditsch).

¹ W. Tentzel, Monatliche Unterredungen einiger Guten Freunde von Allerhand Büchern und andern annemlichen Geschichten (Leipzig: J.F. Gleditsch, 1693).