ABSTRACT
In 1682, the English government received embassies from Morocco and Banten that overlapped by several months. Despite the two embassies coming from separate polities and having no shared goals, efforts were made to conflate them in order to celebrate England's post-Restoration empire. The two embassies drew large crowds of spectators and received much attention from the press. The lead ambassadors, meanwhile, were the subject of multiple prints. This chapter first discusses the motivation behind efforts to link the two embassies before examining how they evoked somewhat different responses to the ambassadors in literary texts, visual culture, and contemporaries’ accounts of their encounters with the diplomats. It analyzes how the Moroccan ambassador was consistently incorporated into European expectations while the Bantenese were consistently othered, arguing that one important factor determining these different reactions was the degree of familiarity that those interacting with the ambassadors had with Morocco and Banten.
