ABSTRACT
Since antiquity, the premodern African presence in Europe had mostly comprised uprooted Africans who had been traded as slaves across the Sahara and who were hardly in a position to act as brokers between their host society and their homeland. Ethiopians defied this pattern: at the dawn of the age of discovery, they became the first sub-Saharan Africans to broker a comprehensive encounter that resulted in extensive and protracted cultural, socio-economic, and diplomatic exchanges between their homeland and various European polities. Most of them visited and sojourned in Western Christendom as pilgrims, whereas some did so as official representatives of their sovereigns. As a result, they became responsible for the first African-European diplomatic exchanges in history.
