Sambo’s Worlds: Lutheran Baptismal Sermons and Global Knowledge in the German-Speaking Lands of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

1 Introduction

If we are to believe the account of the Saxon court chaplain Johann Andreas Gleich (1666–1734),^[1] the name of the young baptizand was Sambo. He had been born in the city of Campo on the “island” of Guinea, and had lost his father, a royal timpanist named Gvine, already at a young age.^[2] Sambo’s mother, Tumbe, had given birth to 18 children altogether, three of whom had died early. One day, about three years past, when the young Sambo had left his home for a swim, he and his brother Svvio were kidnapped by slave traders (“black Jews,” as they were called)^[3] and brought to a nearby port town where both brothers were traded to English sailors in exchange for a barrel of brandy and some iron.

Under the tutelage of the ship’s captain they were taken to London, where Sambo and Svvio came into the possession of two German merchant brothers. While one of the German merchants, Hermann Louis, stayed in London with Svvio, his brother Otto Louis brought Sambo to the port of Hamburg. There the young African received his first education in the German language and the Christian religion by a Magister “Windson” (possibly a clergyman), and, shortly after, was handed over as a gift (“verschencket”) to the Chief Marshal (Oberhofmarschall) of Poland-Saxony, Woldemar von Löwendal (1660–1740). Upon Löwendal’s arrival in the Saxon capital of Dresden in June 1716, Sambo continued his education under the guidance of a theology student who taught him reading, writing and mathematics in addition to further instruction in the principles of religion – at the behest of his new owner who probably paid for it.

Sambo was about eighteen years old when he finally received his Lutheran baptism on September 20th of the same year at the castle church (Schlosskirche) of Dresden: Twelve high-ranking court officials including their spouses had been chosen as godfathers and godmothers. They assembled in the church on a Sunday afternoon, accompanied by a large crowd. The congregation first listened to organ music, then sang and prayed together, and finally witnessed the baptizand Sambo, clad in a white baptismal gown (Westerhemd),^[4] who had to answer 75 questions from the Lutheran catechism (including a clear statement that he underwent his baptism voluntarily) and eventually received his new name “Traugott Friedrich.” In order to conduct the baptism of a young adult, the pastor departed from the usual Lutheran formular because it referred to infant baptism only.^[5]

This short but remarkably detailed story of a young African slave turned Lutheran in the Holy Roman Empire was told and printed in Gleich’s baptismal sermon (Taufpredigt). Today it is difficult to verify most of the information presented, or even to localize the exact origins of Sambo. Gleich’s mention of “black Jews” may point to the West African Senegambia region or South of it.^[6] It is unclear whether the location of “Guinea” on an island refers to a real island such as in the Cape Verde or the Bissagos Archipelagoes, or whether the “island” was simply to be understood as a contemporaneous metaphor for a remote and pristine place.^[7]

While the biography of Sambo (now: Traugott Friedrich), as presented by the court preacher Gleich, may well contain fictional elements, it must have derived at least partly from oral information of the baptizand. Biographical details of non-Christian converts appear in similar sermons as well, albeit in various degrees of detail, depending on the pastor’s intention and personal interest and on the fact that some converts were barely able to communicate in the German language. Scant knowledge of German could imply that the rather stereotypical replies to the numerous catechism questions (sometimes more than 200) had to be trained and memorized beforehand by the baptizand.^[8]

Sambo’s baptism and its sermon may have been rare, but baptisms of non-Christians from Africa or Asia were not unique in Central Europe – although, rather paradoxically, the singularity of baptizing a “Heathen” or “Turk” appears as a stereotype in nearly all printed sermons. The number of sermons preserved (somewhere between 50 and 100) and their intertextual references to earlier baptisms of non-Christians, including similar events of which no sermons survived or no prints existed, make clear that these were recurring events in the Early Modern age. Many sermons (and the baptisms they were based upon) seemed to have followed a similar pattern. Aspects that appeared repeatedly throughout the texts and their prefaces were the impressive audience, the large number of godparents from high positions, and the white baptismal gown (in a Lutheran context)^[9] that, according to pastors, complemented the baptizand’s dark skin. There was also a certain and in fact quite repetitive sample of bible passages that pastors used upon these occasions. Many sermons featured deacon Philip’s baptism of an Ethiopian eunuch (Acts 8:26–38)^[10] or the story of the Aramean soldier Naaman’s cure from a skin disease (2 Kings 5:1–14).^[11] Less prominent were distinctly missionary passages such as the Holy Spirit at Pentecost (Acts 2:4–13)^[12] or a line from Mal 1:11 (“My name will be great among the nations, from where the sun rises to where it sets.”)^[13]

In order to contextualize Sambo’s baptism and to put it into a broader perspective, the present article addresses baptismal sermons of non-Christians in the Holy Roman Empire of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: African slaves and, for the purpose of this essay to a lesser extent, Ottoman captives. It focuses on a selection of printed sermons from a Protestant, mainly Lutheran, context. My aim is to investigate the way the “worlds” of the converts were presented or even created, and the function of these sermons as vehicles to bring “global” information to Christians at home. I will analyze how these baptismal sermons served as a means of knowledge transmission, i.e., whether or how their authors contributed to an increase of knowledge on non-European regions and peoples among their confessionalized readers. The ensuing passages will discuss which information on non-Christian religions and lands appears in these sermons, where the pastors’ knowledge came from, what purpose and perhaps strategy they followed when they educated their listeners and readers about foreign worlds, and which information may have been – perhaps deliberately – excluded. The article also attempts to shed light on similarities as well as differences in presenting and contextualizing the lives and religious backgrounds of “Turks” (i.e., mostly Muslim captives from the Ottoman realm) and “Moors” (i.e., mainly slaves of African descent who were rarely Muslims but more often adhered to other faiths) with regard to the pastors’ knowledge of distinct world regions and belief systems, keeping in mind the respective audiences of these printed sermons. The topic of slavery and race/racism in Early Modern Central Europe will be addressed only peripherally.^[14] I will rather attempt to add a new perspective to discussions on the global outreach of Early Modern Protestantism by focusing on how information and knowledge about the world was used and perhaps modified among German Lutherans, taking baptismal sermons as one possible entry point. This article thus contributes to a history of knowledge formation on the extra-European world (including non-Christian belief systems) among German Lutherans, trying to highlight connections with a broader history of inter-religious toleration.

The following part will provide background information on baptisms and converts as well as on the genre of printed baptismal sermons in Lutheran Germany. Part three, then, attempts to take a closer look at the knowledge management of the pastors regarding information on the extra-European world as well as on the position of the converts within their worldviews. The final part consists of a summary and offers possible links with the history of Early Modern religious dialogue and toleration.

2 Baptisms of “Turks” and “Moors” in Context

As has become common knowledge among historians of Early Modernity, the German territories were more than just a hinterland of Early Modern globalization. Rather, they were increasingly connected to the wider world.^[15] One significant aspect that bears witness to this, are people (men, women, and children) whose origins lay outside of Christian Europe and who ended up in the Holy Roman Empire, often involuntarily. Some stayed only for a certain time period, others for good.^[16] Many of these people and their stories point to the fact that the German lands were part of Early Modern slave economies.^[17] A rough guess, based on the existing literature, might be that the non-Christians under investigation amounted to several thousand over the Early Modern Era.^[18] A number of them converted from their previous beliefs to the Christian faith, again: often against their will (although most sources are silent about this).

Due to the scant information on the biographies and afterlives of many of these protagonists (apart from their conversions and sermons), it has been a matter of debate whether a baptism changed the legal and/or social status of a convert. However, it now seems quite clear that for many, the act of conversion did not necessarily mean a final step from slavery (or slave-like forms of servitude) into individual freedom.^[19]

While conversions between the Christian denominations happened almost everywhere in post-Reformation Europe, intra-Christian converts needed to revoke their old belief, but their previous baptism remained valid.^[20] In contrast, people from other religions had to be baptized. These baptisms were executed by local pastors and are best documented in Protestant contexts, because Lutheran (and, to some extent, Reformed) clergy had the respective baptismal sermons (Taufpredigten) printed and distributed in large numbers (and due to their propagandistic function, the number of copies of these sermons is likely to be much higher than the number of actual converts). This means that these texts are still widely available today in many German libraries, either as separate treatises or bound together in collections with other sermons.^[21] In some cases the sermons are the only known information on the baptisms and the biographies of the converts. However, not all conversions were followed by a printed sermon, and sometimes the sermons referred to earlier and less well-documented examples as points of reference and orientation.^[22]

The documentary basis of the present article consists primarily of printed sources (about fifteen sermons of less than one hundred pages each, sometimes published in more than one edition), with available archival material as occasional addition. Such a sample is far from providing a full picture on “Turks” and “Moors” in Early Modern Germany, since printed sermons are only the tip of the iceberg. In general, the printing of sermons in the vernacular is primarily a Protestant phenomenon.^[23] This also explains why the baptismal sermons under investigation present an overwhelmingly Protestant picture (albeit prints surrounding conversions existed on the Catholic side as well).^[24] They do not provide comprehensive insights into the migrations and baptisms of non-Christians in Early Modern Central Europe – one pastor from Danzig (Gdańsk) even explained the rarity of these events with the assumption that “Moors” in Europe usually lived in the possession of Catholics.^[25] It would necessitate the unfeasible task of a comprehensive investigation of church registers to find out how many “Turks” and “Moors” were really baptized in Early Modern Germany (keeping in mind that registers of baptisms did not always survive or even exist over the Early Modern Era).^[26] Moreover, only few of these immigrants from non-Christian regions were baptized at all.^[27] But contrary to the repeated statements in sermons, “Moors” and “Turks” were no particular rarity in Early Modern Germany, and neither were their conversions.^[28] Obviously, a printed baptismal sermon was produced in retrospect and thus does not necessarily represent the events of a baptism in an accurate fashion. Nevertheless, these prints are full of interesting theological considerations, of social and biographical detail, as well as of historical and ethnographic information. This information appears in the text, in elaborate footnotes and annotations, or can be somewhat hidden between the lines.

In recent years, the conversions of non-Europeans, including their sermons, have increasingly attracted the attention of historians. Baptismal sermons have been interpreted as proof of the fact that a significant number of non-Christians migrated to Central Europe; they were also used by researchers to illustrate how non-Christians and their religions figured in the cross-confessional polemics following the Reformation.^[29] Moreover, these sermons reveal a good deal of information about unfreedom and slavery in Early Modern Europe, and they may be seen as proof of the global dimensions in Early Modern (Lutheran) Protestantism (a globality connected for a long time with the more mission-oriented Catholic faith as well as, to a lesser extent, with the Calvinism exported in the wake of the Dutch global enterprise).^[30]

While baptismal procedures of “Turks” and “Moors” largely followed similar patterns, there were differences regarding the terms used for the baptizands. The word “Turk” mainly designated someone with a Muslim background and often appeared in conjunction with captives from the Ottoman Empire and/or the Mediterranean. It did not necessarily denote an ethnic Turk (but included people of different ethnic backgrounds from Southeastern Europe and beyond). Contrary to this, “Moor” was predominantly used to describe people of African (or African-American) origin, whose lives were often related to the Atlantic slave trade of the time.^[31]

Both “Turks” and “Moors” seem to have become increasingly visible in the Holy Roman Empire since the seventeenth century (just as printed baptismal sermons gained in popularity). This justifies a brief reflection of the political and economic background. Cases of captured “Turks” clearly mirror the renewed conflict of Habsburgs and Ottomans roughly between the 1660s and 1730s.^[32] Especially toward the end of the century, many high-ranking officers from the nobility brought Ottoman captives home from the battlefields – sometimes including women and children – as human booty (Beutetürken), together with weapons of the enemy and other objects deemed to be “exotic.”^[33] These people then worked as “servants” – i.e., in the position of a slave – in private households or they were sometimes donated to monarchs as “presents” and then became part of a court society. We often know of individuals when they underwent a Christian education followed by a baptism, while the latter was not always a prerequisite of living in Christian Europe.^[34]

As far as baptisms of “Moors” were concerned, their growing numbers during the seventeenth century shed light on the increase in global links with the emerging Atlantic slave trade even in seemingly remote places. “Moors” did not normally reach the European continent as prisoners of war. Neither were they brought to Europe as part of the slave trade, since regular slave ships sailed primarily between the coasts of West Africa and the Americas. As could already be seen in the introductory vignette on Sambo, people of African origin reached the European continent on a more individual basis, for instance as private “servants” (slaves) of merchants and colonial elites. They were traded for money or became part of gift exchanges among high-ranking people.^[35] There even seemed to have existed a particular demand and a fairly professional system of exchange (or rather: human trafficking) within diplomatic circles.^[36] Many “Moors” eventually became parts of princely courts, mainly as living objects of monarchical representation.^[37] Others ended up in families of the lesser nobility.

German contemporaries did not always distinguish clearly between “Turks” and “Moors.” Both terms could sometimes be used synonymously in baptismal sermons and other documentation when it came to characterize people (often young adults) from a non-Christian background who underwent a Protestant baptism in Germany.^[38] It also seems that in the eyes of observers, baptisms of both “Turks” and “Moors” functioned in a similar fashion, namely as a welcome attraction and diversion from everyday life. Just like parts of the sermons’ content relating to both “Moors” and “Turks” often resemble one another, the baptism ceremonies themselves followed a similar pattern over centuries and across different regions. The baptisms were often fashioned as extraordinary events with local, and sometimes even territorial significance. They took place in one of the major churches of a city, and lists of sometimes up to 60 godfathers and godmothers reveal their significance as means of social and gender-related integration of the community beyond a single congregation (and beyond simply integrating the convert into such a community). The pastor Christoph Klesch (1632–1706) in the bi-confessional city of Erfurt proudly recorded that even nearby Catholics had attended the baptism of three “Turks” in the Lutheran Kaufmannskirche – the act of baptizing them in his congregation instead of a neighbouring Catholic church served him as Godly proof that his community was in possession of the truth.^[39] Anti-Catholic polemics could feature in baptismal sermons as well, illustrating that such baptisms were an issue of pride and controversy during the Confessional Age (with Islam or “heathenism” as a proxy, so to speak).^[40]

Moreover, baptisms served as a symbolic means to tighten a connection with the ruling nobility: godparents often included the ruler, his family, courtiers and local elites with their wives (as in the Margraviate of Brandenburg-Bayreuth in 1673, where one third of the witnesses were women).^[41] In several cases the ruling prince featured in the convert’s new Christian name, such as in 1662 when a baptism was jointly attended by Margraves Christian Ernst of Brandenburg-Bayreuth and Georg Albrecht of Brandenburg-Kulmbach as godfathers (among many others), and the convert received the name Christian Albrecht.^[42]

Sermons were targeted at a local and regional audience as well as aimed toward an intended wider readership. The significance of these baptisms within and beyond a local society explains why some sermons appeared in more than one edition, why pastors sometimes relied on earlier examples in terms of practical procedures and liturgy, and why stories of these baptisms could reappear in chronicles and historical works even decades or centuries later.^[43] Despite their scatteredness over different regions and time periods, baptismal sermons were a highly intertextual genre, as can be seen in direct references to preceding texts that apparently served the pastors as preparation,^[44] in several editions of the same sermon for different purposes,^[45] in stereotypical discussions of skin colour, occurrences of the same Bible passages, and, as will be illustrated below, in similarities regarding the sources of information on the “worlds” of the baptizands.^[46]

3 Worlds beyond Europe: Baptismal Sermons as Vehicles of Knowledge Transmission

Baptismal sermons contain many topical elements and stereotypes, which makes reading them slightly redundant. However, the sermons provide more than just the expected elements of the genre, namely the interpretation of a bible verse, the description of the baptism, and the answers to questions of the catechism by the baptizand. Usually, they also frame the event with scholarly explanations related to the background of the convert, taken from different fields such as theology, history, geography, early forms of religious ethnography and even medicine, albeit in varying degrees of depth.

It seems that the quality and extent of background information depended on the individual biographies of the pastors, their education, knowledge, and personal interests, as well as on the intentions of the sponsors of these baptisms (and their printed versions). Only a few examples may suffice here: The abovementioned pastor Christoph Klesch, converting three “Turks” in his church in Erfurt in 1690, had experienced the Ottoman threat in his earlier life in Upper Hungary. He left for Germany as a Lutheran orthodox exile with a disgust for non-Trinitarian religions (including Islam). His own biography was only indirectly reflected in his baptismal sermon of three Ottoman captives, but perhaps it contributed to his mixed attitude as a Hungarian exile toward prisoners and slaves from the Turkish wars of his archenemy, Emperor Leopold I.^[47] Pastor Jacob Fussenegger, who converted a “Moor” in the city of Lindau close to Lake Constance in 1657, had received his education at the renowned Latin school of St Anna in the bi-confessional city of Augsburg (together with the later owner of the convert and sponsor of the baptism), and it is likely that he had known a number of famous geographical works since then, because his school was attached to Augsburg’s municipal library.^[48] The theologian Johann Fabricius of Altdorf, finally, who in 1688 was instrumental in the conversion of a fourteen-year old “Moorish” girl (Möhrin) named Fatmeh – in fact from Ottoman Morea (the Greek Peloponnese) –, had spent his early years as chaplain of the German Lutheran church in the city of Venice, which had brought him in close contact with Mediterranean trading and slaving networks and also with the merchant and consul Pommer, from whom he had eventually received his slave.^[49] Many of these pastors had apparently faced religious antagonism or even belonged to religious minorities at some point during their earlier lives – while now, as converters of non-Christians, they enacted the power of the majority. In relation to Catholics, however, compensation for a perceived minority position may still be inherent in many Lutheran baptismal sermons.

The extent to which pastors dealt with (or did not address) information on the convert’s religious and geographical background depended on the message they wanted to convey with their sermons to an intended audience. Samuel Urlsperger’s publication in 1766 of a baptism fifty years earlier does not feature the baptizand prominently, but rather reads as a political statement on the scandal-ridden Württemberg court of the early eighteenth century and, at the same time, as an autobiographical account of its author.^[50] The Reformed Pietists Conrad and Johann Christoph Bröske, for instance, gave their sermon an eschatological twist which aimed at the conversion of Jews and gentiles during the last days of mankind, showing no particular interest in the background of the convert either.^[51] At times a baptizand was introduced rather vaguely as someone from “the country of the Moors” (Mohrenland). However, even Mohrenland was, with the help of geographical authorities, discussed as a distinct region (“the whole coast of Africa,” or pointing to etymological links between Mohr and Mauretania).^[52]

While the person of the baptizand sometimes appears only as some sort of addition or a distant object of far lesser importance than the overall message, several pastors dealt to a greater extent with the biography, geographical background, and what they considered particular features of the convert. It has been mentioned briefly above that this was even reflected in the Bible passages they selected. Just as other sermons, the Taufpredigten centred around a particular Bible verse, which was selected deliberately in order to relate to the event in question. With regard to “Moors,” the choice was rather limited. Many pastors took a passage with the skin colour of the baptizand in mind, which made verses such as Acts 8:26–38 (the baptism of a black Ethiopian eunuch)^[53] and 2 Kings 5:1–14 (Naaman’s cure from a skin disease) particularly prominent.^[54] The sermons then discussed, for instance, whether a black skin could ever become white, and how it related to the “black,” i.e., “sinful” and “heathen” soul of the unconverted individual.^[55] If the skin was not dark (because someone originated, for instance, from Ottoman Hungary), then at least the soul of the baptizand was supposed to be.^[56]

It would certainly be worthwhile to investigate and discuss in greater depth the potentially xenophobic and racist connotations contained in these and other religious texts of the time – something the present article cannot sufficiently and satisfactorily do.^[57] But the question whether “Moors” were able to change their skin colour was debated in several sermons. This could be treated as a theological, scientific, and sometimes medical issue. With respect to the theological narrative of a sermon, the opposition between black skin and a white, i.e., “pure” soul of the convert formed a rhetorical device, and corresponded with regular mentions of the white baptismal gown in Lutheranism (although certain exceptions apply).^[58] Drawing upon medical literature, authors of sermons conceded that neither extensive washing nor make-up would change the colour of skin. While observations of travellers had revealed the different grades of skin colour among non-Europeans, post-mortem examinations had seemed to prove that there were anatomical reasons for this.^[59] Hermann Bordewisch from Danzig even quoted (from the staunchly Lutheran periodical Unschuldige Nachrichten) a review of a pamphlet from Dublin where, following Thomas Burnet’s Sacred Theory of the Earth (1681), the idea was proposed that black skin might in fact be changed into white. The pastor seemed to have missed a certain irony in the review which linked the Irish origin of the pamphlet to “British Africa” (das Britannische Africa, i.e., Ireland).^[60] But the idea of some scholars that skin colour – which was part of God’s creation, after all – could be changed, was sacrilegious to a conservative Lutheran.

Sometimes even the pastors conducted examinations of the converts’ bodies themselves: When Hermann Bordewisch from Danzig mused in 1741 about whether the African he was going to baptize had possibly descended from Jews or Muslims, he wrote:

[I]t is known of the Moors that they are either still gentiles, or follow a mixed religion consisting of Judaism and Christianity, which is also partly based on the Alcoran, and that they therefore not only circumcise their children on the eighth day, but also baptise them some time afterwards. […] Since there is no sign of circumcision on this young person, one cannot assume otherwise than that his parents must have been gentiles.^[61]

In their search for explanations and interpretations of the geographical, religious, and ethnic background of the converts, the authors of the sermons increasingly realized that the Bible was of limited use. Authors now distinguished between the amount of authority and credibility of their information, as the Nuremberg pastor Dittelmayr, who cited and later rejected classical and rabbinical theories on the relationship between climate and skin colour.^[62] Travelogues served them to criticize information from ancient authorities. For example, Adam Olearius’ account on Persia was cited by Pastor Gleich to discard Pliny’s connection between a hot and sunny region and the skin colour of its inhabitants – on the grounds of the dark skin of some Inuit of Greenland.^[63]

The pastors drew upon a wide and quite eclectic array of other sources they discussed in the text and/or referred to in extensive footnotes. Therefore, baptismal sermons quite impressively illustrate the interest as well as increase in (including the accessibility of) information on foreign lands in the course of the Early Modern Era. At the turn of the eighteenth century, and in contrast to learned authorities of antiquity, contemporaneous geographers such as Abraham Ortelius and Gerhard Mercator appeared among the authors’ sources. The Lindau pastor Fussenegger’s knowledge was particularly impressive, since he referred to Ptolemy, Flavius Josephus and the Church fathers, explorers such as Columbus, Vespucci, and Magellan, the Portuguese author Barreiros, Protestant authorities from Luther to Brenz, Buxtorf and Johann Gerhard, and travelogues such as from the de Bry collection. No wonder he showed a wide geographical knowledge ranging from Latin America (Peru) to West Africa, East India and even the Southeast Asian empire of Pegu.^[64]

While ancient authorities such as Herodotus, Pliny the Elder, and Flavius Josephus still featured,^[65] knowledge about Solomon and the legendary Gold Land of Ophir was occasionally mentioned but then discarded quickly: The Dresden court preacher Gleich first provided the story of Christian kings ruling over Central Africa as successors of Solomon and the queen of Saba (referring to Sebastian Münster, Catholic scholars Johannes Lorinus and Laurentius Beyerlinck, among others). Then he made clear that these stories all “sounded like a myth.”^[66] Instead, information on the African Christian kingdom of Ethiopia was prominent, based on scholars from Matthaeus Merian to Hiob Ludolf, and including several contemporaneous Protestant orientalist theologians. This connection between “Moors” and Ethiopia was common knowledge up until the eighteenth century, as an entry in the famous Zedler encyclopedia illustrates.^[67]

It was nevertheless important to illustrate that African peoples had a long biblical history including conversions to Christianity which, according to learned humanist authorities such as Scaliger and Baronius, dated back to late Antiquity. This offered the opportunity for Lutherans of the Holy Roman Empire to place their baptismal sermons within a long history of Christian missions, and even to propagate new Protestant missionary endeavours outside Europe.^[68] This missionary zeal of Lutheran pastors (who were based in places like Altdorf, Lindau, Danzig, Dresden, Lübeck, Stuttgart, or Erfurt) converged with the increase in (and accessibility of) recent ethnographic information taken from travel literature which was quoted with increasing claims to authority. Several sermons referred to what was perhaps the earliest account of West Africa written by a German, namely Wilhelm Johann Müller’s description of Die afrikanische Landschaft Fetu of 1673.^[69] This book was based upon the author’s stay as Lutheran pastor of the Danish West India Company at the Gold Coast (today’s Ghana). It presented depictions of the topography, religion, and population of the region (including the numerous Europeans who lived and traded along the coast), and contained a call to Christian missions.^[70]

Ethnographical descriptions such as Müller’s and travelogues of several authors with a context from the Dutch East India Company (VOC) such as Olfert Dapper, Erasmus Francisci, Philippus Baldaeus, and Wouter Schouten^[71] served some pastors as important, albeit slightly randomly chosen sources of information on indigenous religious practices. The sermons provided information on Islamic prayer rites,^[72] as well as an alleged pagan veneration of trees, rocks, and rivers, of the sun, the moon, and the elements, of dogs and little black figurines.^[73] A pastor from Freiberg in 1746 provided particularly substantial information on Islam and the Qur’an, even quoting – in a polemical form – from the German version of Dutch orientalist Hadriaan Reland’s De religione Muhammedica.^[74] Just as in the ethnographical work of Protestant missionaries of the time, information about the religious ethnography of distant countries can be explained with an, albeit vague, missionary interest.^[75]

However, the use of travelogues and religious proto-ethnographies as sources of information for listeners and readers of baptismal sermons was never intended to provide an accurate picture; rather, it had to serve the goals of the pastors. As was already illustrated in the Dresden pastor Gleich’s sermon on Sambo’s origin from an “island of Guinea,” Guinea sometimes appeared as a relatively imprecise placeholder for West Africa or even Africa as a whole. Some decades earlier, another pastor had referred to the “kingdom and city of Guinea,” and even the mid-eighteenth century encyclopaedia of Johann Heinrich Zedler was only slightly more specific.^[76] In rare instances, exact information of birth places and whereabouts of a convert were presented (for instance, the Dutch Fort of Elmina or the embarking of a slave ship at São Tomé).^[77] These instances seem to point to the fact that pastors, if at all possible, quite heavily relied on oral information from the slave owners or even from the slaves themselves. As we have seen with Sambo/Traugott Friedrich, some pastors were keen to include personal information on the baptizands’ past into their sermons, conducting oral interviews beforehand whenever it was feasible.^[78] This did not so much aim at uncovering objective details about the converts’ origin, but was particularly important when it came to their age, which was not always easy to determine. Contrary to Jewish converts (who encompassed people of almost all age groups),^[79] most “Turkish” and “Moorish” baptizands were in their youth, between 14 and 18 years old.^[80] Only in rare instances, non-Christians were baptized at a younger age, as in the case of a “Turkish” mother and her three-year-old son in Erfurt in 1690 (Ottoman subjects from the Balkans).^[81] In other cases, young children were actively refused baptism because even Lutheran theologians argued that, contrary to the baptisms of Christians, “heathens” needed to be first educated in the Christian religion in order to be able to convert voluntarily and in full awareness of the new faith.^[82]

To determine age, previous religion, and to obtain other relevant information, pastors increasingly relied on their own experience as well as on practice-based knowledge from scientists, travellers, and proto-ethnographic descriptions. An assumed reliability of contemporary information made ancient (and sometimes even biblical) authorities appear less and less convincing.^[83]

4 Conclusion

On an individual level, Lutheran pastors’ primary intention in converting non-Christians such as Ottoman “Turks” and African “Moors” was to save their souls from the “infernal enemy,” namely the devil.^[84] As a collective phenomenon, the image we can take from the sermons is a certain aspiration to Christianize the world, sometimes within an eschatological perspective. The sermons may perhaps not so much serve as evidence that Lutherans “did not need to embark on missions,”^[85] but rather show a different, if not particularly universal approach to evangelization that started at home. They therefore form an integral part of the significant European dimension of Christian missions that has been largely overlooked by a “global” history of Early Modern missionary endeavours.^[86] However, this is merely the other side of the same coin.

At the same time, the interest of pastors in foreign regions and their willingness to discard ancient scholarly authorities for the sake of a certain informational accuracy indicate that the authors also expected their audience to engage more deeply and purposefully with other parts of the world and its religions. This was influenced by an increase in the availability of information through the accounts of travellers (Protestants and Catholics alike), as well as by a certain curiosity among Central European armchair travellers regarding foreign worlds, which can also be seen in the increase in printed captivity narratives as an immensely popular genre during the same period.^[87]

There is no doubt that baptismal sermons are highly confessionalized documents, even in the eighteenth and early nineteenth-centuries. This means that readers cannot expect a particular interconfessional or inter-religious openness. On the other hand, the sermons reveal a certain willingness to integrate newcomers into the Protestant fold, which came with debates about religious and ethnic difference. While it is of crucial importance to keep in mind that baptismal sermons deal with victims of forced migration and slavery, the baptizands were presented in a providential manner, namely as individuals saved from heathenism and the devil, who were even expected to be thankful for their salvation.^[88]

But according to the Lindau pastor Fussenegger, no difference existed between unbaptized people of a different religious upbringing and unbaptized children from Christian families who were just as well “impure children of sin” and “poor young heathen” (unreine Sündenkinder/arme junge Heiden).^[89] In a Lutheran environment, the initiation rite of baptism was based upon an individual’s “inward” features, rather than on his or her place of origin, physical characteristics, or social status: “Be whoever you may/ heathen or Christian/ German or non-German/ black or white/ slave or lord/ for God does not look at the person but at all kinds of people/ whoever fears him and does right is pleasing to him. Acts 10/35.”^[90]

Still, the fact that this quote came from a Lutheran pastor’s baptismal sermon of the mid-seventeenth century should remind us to be careful not to hastily construct an Early Modern prehistory of modern inter-religious tolerance and multiculturalism.^[91] Judging from conversions (and their respective documentation in printed sermons) of Catholics to Lutheranism at roughly the same period (where a revocation of the old faith was necessary, but no new baptism), there seems to have been much more distrust and scepticism towards converts from within Christianity – not to mention conversions from Judaism to Christianity –, because unlike long-distance migrants such as “Moors” and (to an extent) “Turks,” they had the possibility to turn back to the “wrong” faith much more easily.^[92] It may thus have been easier to extend such a limited cultural “openness” to non-Christians from abroad who appeared as a blank slate to German pastors (and it has been argued that in the eyes of a receiving society, strangers seem to bear no individual history).^[93] Local pastors saw an opportunity – and even a necessity – to shape or (re-)invent episodes from the converts’ previous lives, including their religious and cultural backgrounds, and connect them to available local knowledge. Here lies another reason why it was easier to integrate unfree Africans and Ottoman subjects into local Lutheranism (who were expected to be grateful for their spiritual salvation and newly acquired Christian freedom)^[94] than free European Catholics from neighbouring regions.

As has been argued in other cases, toleration during the Early Modern Era was hardly a desirable goal but a pragmatic phenomenon intended to serve particular interest groups – and this was equally true for Lutheran pastors in an age of emerging Protestant globalization. A supposed “cultural diversity,” which may be gleaned from Lutheran baptismal sermons, was instrumental to uphold and support the Lutheran faith of pastors, congregations, reading audiences, and in particular a desired expansion of Lutheranism across the world. When Sambo from “Guinea” became Traugott Friedrich in Dresden, he was therefore turned into a model Lutheran.