i.e. a few decades after the saint's death, which occurred in Palermo in 1589 (Morabito, 2000; Vicent, 2016; Garcia, 2016). This phenomenon was doubtless directly related to the promotion of devotions to black saints, a particularly interesting chapter in the history of popular devotional practices promoted by the Council of Trent (Santos, 2016, pp. 138-57; Santana, 2018, pp. 77-85). The first chronicles of the devotion to Saint Benedict in Angola date back to the end of the seventeenth century. At that time, one of the altars of Luanda's Church of the Rosary was dedicated to the black saint of Palermo (Cadornega, [1680] 1972, p. 27). The 'legend' that the mother of Saint Benedict was a native of Kissama, a region south of the Kingdom of Angola, can also be traced to the same period. This legend of a birth on African soil suggests that identification with the saint held other interpretative possibilities in addition to physical appearance (Cadornega, op. cit., p. 27). In any case, similarity of colour may also have been relevant in identification with the black Carmelite saints Elesbaan and Iphigenia. In the second half of the eighteenth century, there was a small chapel in Luanda dedicated to Saint Iphigenia (Amaral, 1961, pp. 409-20), in which there was also an altar dedicated to Saint Elesbaan. It would appear that the Carmelites were chiefly responsible for the propagation of these devotions in the Iberian Peninsula as well as in the Americas (Oliveira, 2008).