Three Kings between Europe, Africa and America, 1492–1788

This article examines transformations in the images of the Three Kings associated with European expansion in Africa and America. Although sovereigns stopped appearing as magi after the 1520’s, January 5-6 remained propitious for a variety of activities from founding cities to setting sail to staging rebellions. A focus on Iberian Empires extends and clarifies the results of previous work undertaken by Richard C. Trexler, Dan Ewing and Teresa Gisbert, among others. Challenging their idea of a seventeenth-century “decline” in the power of the kings, the present study reveals that taxpayers of Seville baptised their children “Melchor”, “Gaspar” or “Balthazar” more frequently in the late-seventeenth cen­tury than in the early sixteenth century, while those of the “City of the Kings” (Lima, Peru), may have been even more inclined to do so. Providing further testi­mony of the kings’ endurance, some twenty-eight recorded slave voyages took place on ships called “The Three Magi” or “The Three Saintly Magi” in the seven­teenth and, especially, the eighteenth centuries. Far from losing power and popu­larity, the three kings connected distant parts of the world.