A Companion to Medieval Ethiopia and Eritrea [1 ed.] 9789004419582, 9789004419438

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A Companion to Medieval Ethiopia and Eritrea

Local-religious funerary stela, Tiya, ca. 13th-14th c. photo credit: Claire Bosc-Tiessé

A Companion to Medieval Ethiopia and Eritrea Edited by

Samantha Kelly

LEIDEN | BOSTON

Cover illustration: Yǝmrǝḥannä Ǝgziʾ, Lives of the saints and martyrs, 45.5 × 32 cm, 1453, church of Däbrä Maryam, Qwäḥayn, Eritrea. Photo credit: Alessandro Bausi. © MIE (Missione Italiana in Eritrea 1993, Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche and University of Bologna). Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Kelly, Samantha, 1968– editor. Title: A companion to medieval Ethiopia and Eritrea / edited by Samantha  Kelly. Description: Leiden ; Boston : Brill, [2020] | Includes bibliographical  references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019050992 (print) | LCCN 2019050993 (ebook) |  ISBN 9789004419438 (hardback) | ISBN 9789004419582 (ebook edition) Subjects: LCSH: Ethiopia—History—To 1490. | Ethiopia—History—1490-1889.  | Eritrea—History—To 1890. Classification: LCC DT383 .C66 2020 (print) | LCC DT383 (ebook) |  DDC 963/.02—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019050992 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019050993

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-­typeface. ISBN 978-90-04-41943-8 (hardback) ISBN 978-90-04-41958-2 (e-­book) Copyright 2020 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi, Brill Sense, Hotei Publishing, mentis Verlag, Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh and Wilhelm Fink Verlag. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-­free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

Contents Acknowledgments vii List of Maps and Figures ix List of Abbreviations xi Notes on Contributors xiii Conventions xvi Transliteration Chart: Gǝʿǝz and Amharic xviii Transliteration Chart: Arabic xx Maps xxi 1 Introduction 1 Samantha Kelly 2

Before the Solomonids: Crisis, Renaissance and the Emergence of the Zagwe Dynasty (Seventh–­Thirteenth Centuries) 31 Marie-­Laure Derat

3

Territorial Expansion and Administrative Evolution under the “Solomonic” Dynasty 57 Deresse Ayenachew

4

The Sultanates of Medieval Ethiopia 86 Amélie Chekroun and Bertrand Hirsch

5

Of Conversion and Conversation: Followers of Local Religions in Medieval Ethiopia 113 François-­Xavier Fauvelle

6

Islamic Cultural Traditions of Medieval Ethiopia and Eritrea 142 Alessandro Gori

7

The Medieval Ethiopian Orthodox Church and Its Liturgy 162 Emmanuel Fritsch and Habtemichael Kidane

8

The Ancient and Medieval History of Eritrean and Ethiopian Monasticism: An Outline 194 Gianfrancesco Lusini

vi

Contents

9

Ethiopia and the Christian Ecumene: Cultural Transmission, Translation, and Reception 217 Alessandro Bausi

10

Genres of Ethiopian-Eritrean Christian Literature with a Focus on Hagiography 252 Antonella Brita

11

Christian Manuscript Culture of the Ethiopian-Eritrean Highlands: Some Analytical Insights 282 Denis Nosnitsin

12

Christian Visual Culture in Medieval Ethiopia: Overview, Trends and Issues 322 Claire Bosc-Tiessé

13

Towards a History of Women in Medieval Ethiopia 365 Margaux Herman

14

Medieval Ethiopian Economies: Subsistence, Global Trade and the Administration of Wealth 395 Anaïs Wion

15

Medieval Ethiopian Diasporas 425 Samantha Kelly

16

The Muslim-­Christian Wars and the Oromo Expansion: Transformations at the End of the Middle Ages (ca. 1500–­ca. 1560) 454 Amélie Chekroun and Bertrand Hirsch Bibliography 477 Index 560

Acknowledgments The credit for this volume’s genesis goes to Kate Hammond of Brill Academic Publishers, who first approached me about a collected volume on medieval Ethiopia and Eritrea in 2016, and to my Ethiopianist colleagues, who convinced me that the project was not only feasible but could answer a felt need to bring together recent findings across multiple disciplines. To facilitate conversations across specialties and about the parameters of the volume as a whole, thirteen colleagues convened for a week-­long seminar, “Ethiopia and Ethiopians in the Middle Ages: Towards an Interdisciplinary and Multiconfessional Synthesis,” at the Fondation des Treilles in southern France in March 2018. The lively and substantial dialogue held around the conference table continued on walks through the Fondation’s scenic grounds, over delicious meals prepared by its kitchen, and by a roaring fire in the evenings. A more congenial atmosphere is hard to imagine, and I am grateful to François-­Xavier Fauvelle for co-­organizing the seminar; to Emmanuelle Morel-­Darleux for beautifully arranging the logistics of our stay; to the Fondation’s director, Anne Bourjade, and all the staff for welcoming us so warmly; and to the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University for contributing funding for participants’ travel. In addition to the authors of the following essays, a number of colleagues shared their ideas about particular topics as the volume was being formulated, to whom I am grateful: Getatchew Haile, Steven Kaplan, Robin Seignobos, Kay Kaufman Shelemay, and Benjamin Weber. Initial templates for the maps were provided by Alessandro Bausi from those of the Encyclopaedia Aethiopica, and Marie-­Laure Derat, François-­Xavier Fauvelle, and Emmanuel Fritsch offered me advice on their adaptation for this volume; Michael Siegel of the Rutgers-­New Brunswick Geography Department translated this mass of data into the present images. Antonella Brita’s aid with the bibliography was indispensable. Two anonymous reviewers for the press provided valuable feedback on the draft volume, and Marcella Mulder at Brill oversaw its passage into print. My thanks to them all. While each essay represents a particular area of research and the perspective of its own author(s), the idea from the beginning was that the essays would also work together to provide something in the way of an introduction to the period generally, and would be cognizant of (though not, of course, necessarily in complete agreement with) the contents and conclusions of fellow contributions. A high degree of collaboration and cooperation was therefore demanded of the contributors. It included coordination on different essays’ scope and on their treatment of shared topics, the sharing of findings across subfields,

viii

Acknowledgments

and a certain agreement on issues of nomenclature, orthography, and citation, even when these were not a contributor’s first preference. The discussions held at Les Treilles thus continued long afterward, and my editorial work, in particular, could never have been accomplished without constant recourse to the contributors on questions large and small, philosophical and mundane. My deepest debt is therefore to my fellow contributors, whose inexhaustible patience, generosity, and collegiality is deeply touching to me, and from whom I have learned so much.

Maps and Figures Maps 1 Medieval Ethiopia and Eritrea: Climate Zones and Regions xxi 2 Ethiopia and Eritrea, 7th–­late 13th century xxii 3 Northern Ethiopia and Eritrea, 7th–­late 13th century xxiii 4 Ethiopia and Eritrea, late 13th–­mid-16th century xxiv 5 Medieval Ethiopia-­Eritrea and the Red Sea region xxv

Figures 3.1 4.1 11.1 11.2 11.3 11.4 11.5 11.6 11.7 12.1 12.2 12.3 12.4 12.5 12.6 12.7 12.8 12.9

Č̣äwa military regiments in medieval Ethiopia, 15th–16th c. 79 Remains of mosque. Beri citadel (Ifat city) 107 Untooled leather cover, front (a) and interior turn-­ins (b). MS UM-050a 297 Remains of the headband. MS MY-008 298 Remains of fastenings. MS UM-027 299 Blind-­tooled leather cover. MS SDSM-004 301 Traces of textbook trimming. MSS AP-005 (a), AQG-005 (b) 304 Two-­column layout with ḥaräg. MS KY-002 308 Scribal postures: scribe Dästa Gäbrä Maryam; miniature from MS TKMG-004 (inset) 311 Church of Däbrä Dammo 329 Upper chancel, triumphal arch, and painted apse. Church of Däbrä Sälam Mika‌ʾel 331 Church of Betä Gäbrǝʾel and Rufa‌ʾel (Lalibäla) 333 Low relief sculpture: Saint Cyriacus (Qirqos). Church of Betä Golgota (Lalibäla) 337 Colored stone patterning, external wall. Church of Betä Lǝḥem Maryam 338 Architectural carved stones. Church compounds of Däy Giyorgis (a), Gǝšän Ǝgziʾabǝḥer Ab (b) 340 Mural: two saints. Church of Mika‌ʾel Amba 342 Mural: Wise Virgins/ Kwəleṣewon and Təhrəyännä Maryam. Church of Gännätä Maryam 344 Illumination: Glorious Cross. Gospel Book, Däbrä Libanos of Ham 346

x 12.10 12.11 12.12 12.13 12.14 12.15

Maps and Figures Illumination: Thaddeus (Tadewos) the Apostle. Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles, church of Däbrä Ḥayq Ǝsṭifanos 348 Illumination: Entry into Jerusalem. Gospel Book, church of Kǝbran Gäbrǝʾel 352 Illumination: Amätä Lǝʿul and her husband Yǝmrǝḥannä Ǝgziʾ. Lives of the saints and martyrs, Däbrä Maryam (Qwäḥayn, Eritrea) 354 Lalibäla cross 358 Panel painting: Virgin and Child. Church of Rema Mädḫane ʿAläm (Lake Ṭana) 361 Liturgical fan (märäwǝḥ). Church of Däbrä Ṣǝyon Kidanä Mǝhrät (Gärʿalta) 363

Abbreviations Libraries BAV Bibliotheca Apostolica Vatican (Vatican City) BL British Library (London) BnF Bibliothèque nationale de France (Paris) CRAI  Comptes rendus des séances de l’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres CSCO Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium EAe  Encylopaedia Aethiopica. Vols. 1–3, ed. Siegbert Uhlig; vol. 4, ed. Siegbert Uhlig and Alessandro Bausi; vol. 5, ed. Alessandro Bausi and Siegbert Uhlig. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2003–2014. EMML Ethiopian Microfilm Manuscript Library (Addis Ababa and Collegeville, MN) IES Institute of Ethiopian Studies (Addis Ababa) RSE Rassegna di studi etiopici RSO Rivista degli studi orientali SAe Scriptores Aethiopici (subseries of the CSCO)



Books, Journals, Series

Beckingham-­Huntingford, Prester John Charles Fraser Beckingham and George Winn Brereton Huntingford, eds., The Prester John of the Indies. A True Relation of the Lands of the Prester John, being the Narrative of the Portuguese Embassy to Ethiopia in 1502, written by Father Francisco Alvares, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961). COMSt Comparative Oriental Manuscript Studies: An Introduction, ed. Alessandro Bausi et al. (Hamburg: Tredition, 2015). Conti Rossini-­Ricci, Libro della luce I–­I V Carlo Conti Rossini and Lanfranco Ricci, eds. and trans., Il libro della luce del negus Zar’a Yā‘qob (Maṣḥafa berhān), I= Textus vol. 1 (CSCO 250, SAe 47), 1964; II= Versio vol. 1 (CSCO 251, SAe 48), 1965; III = Textus vol. 2 (CSCO 261, SAe 51), 1965; IV= Versio vol. 2 (CSCO 262, SAe 52), 1965. Louvain: Peeters. CRAI Comptes rendus des séances de l’Academie des Inscriptions et Belles-­Lettres CSCO Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium EAe Encyclopaedia Aethiopica. Vols. 1–3, ed. Siegbert Uhlig; vol. 4, ed. Siegbert Uhlig and Alessandro Bausi; vol. 5, ed. Alessandro Bausi and Siegbert Uhlig. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2003–2014.

xii HPEC

RIÉ 1–3

RSE RSO SAe

Abbreviations History of the Patriarchs of the Egyptian Church, known as the History of the Holy Church by Sawîrus Ibn al-­Muḳaffa‘, bishop of Al-­Ašmûnîn. Vol. 1 = reprint of Basil T. A. Evetts, ed. and trans., History of the Patriarchs of the Coptic Church of Alexandria [to 849 CE], originally published in the Patrologia Orientalis vols. 1, 5, 10 (Paris: Firmin-­Didot, 1907–1915). Vol. 2, part 1 [849–880], ed. and trans. Yassā ʿAbd al-­Masīḥ and O. H. E. Khs-­Burmester. Vol. 2, parts 2–3 [881–1102 CE], ed. and trans. Aziz Suryal Atiya, Yassā ʿAbd al-­Masīḥ, and O. H. E. Khs-­Burmester. Vols. 3 and 4 [1102–1243 CE], ed. and trans. Antoine Khater and O. H. E. Khs-­Burmester. Cairo: Publications de la Société d’archéologie copte, 1948–74. Étienne Bernand, Abraham Johannes Drewes, and Roger Schneider, Recueil des Inscriptions de l’Éthiopie des périodes pré-­axoumite et axoumite. Introduction de Fr. Anfray, vol. I: Les documents (Paris: Diffusion de Boccard, 1991); Étienne Bernand, Abraham Johannes Drewes, and Roger Schneider, Recueil des Inscriptions de l’Éthiopie des périodes pré-­axoumite et axoumite. Introduction de Fr. Anfray, vol. II: Les Planches (Paris: Diffusion de Boccard, 1991); Étienne Bernand, Recueil des Inscriptions de l’Éthiopie des périodes pré-­axoumite et axoumite, vol. III: Traductions et commentaires, A: Les inscriptions grecques (Paris: Diffusion de Boccard, 2000). Rassegna di studi etiopici Rivista degli studi orientali Scriptores Aethiopici (subseries of the CSCO)

Notes on Contributors Alessandro Bausi Professor of Ethiopian Studies at Universität Hamburg, is a philologist and linguist working on ancient, late antique and medieval texts and manuscripts. Journal and series editor and author of many works, he also heads several projects in Ethiopian-­Eritrean philology, manuscript studies, linguistics, and corpus linguistics. Antonella Brita Ph.D. (2008, Università degli Studi di Napoli “L’Orientale”) is associate researcher at the Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures (Universität Hamburg). She is a specialist of Ethiopian hagiography and of Gǝʿǝz manuscript culture. Claire Bosc-­Tiessé Ph.D. (2001), is a researcher at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) and scientific advisor at the National Institute for Art History (INHA). She is a specialist of Ethiopian art history from medieval to modern times. Amélie Chekroun Ph.D. (2013, Université de Paris 1 Panthéon-­Sorbonne), is a researcher at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). She is a specialist of medieval Ethiopian history, especially Muslim communities between the 13th and the 16th centuries. Marie-­Laure Derat is a research director at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). Specialist of medieval Christian Ethiopia (10th–15th centuries), her most recent book is L’énigme d’une dynastie sainte et usurpatrice dans le royaume chrétien d’Éthiopie du Xe au XIIIe siècle (Brepols, 2018). Deresse Ayenachew Ph.D. (Université de Paris 1 Panthéon-­Sorbonne, 2009) is Assistant Professor at Debre Berhan University, Ethiopia and a 2017–18 fellow of the Institute of Advanced Studies of Nantes, France. A specialist of medieval Ethiopian history, he has published on diverse aspects including megalithism, Islamic culture, and royal administration.

xiv

Notes on Contributors

François-­Xavier Fauvelle is Professor of History and Archaeology of African Civilisations at the Collège de France, Paris. The author of numerous books and articles of African history, he recently published The Golden Rhinoceros: Histories of the African Middle Ages (Princeton 2018). Emmanuel Fritsch is a fellow of the French Center of Ethiopian Studies (CFEE) in Addis Ababa and a member of the Society for Oriental Liturgy (SOL) as a liturgiologist specializing in the worship of the Ethiopian Orthodox Täwaḥǝdo Church from its origins in the late antique period to the present. Alessandro Gori Ph.D. (1998, Università degli Studi di Napoli ”L’Orientale”) is Associate Professor of Arabic Language and Literature at the University of Copenhagen. He is a specialist of Ethiopian Islamic culture and history on which he has published extensively. Samantha Kelly Ph.D. (1998, Northwestern) is Professor of History at Rutgers University. Author of several works on later-­medieval Italy, she has since 2012 specialized in Ethiopian-­European relations through the sixteenth century. Habtemichael Kidane Ph.D. (1990, Istituto Pontificio Orientale, Rome), is a specialist of the Ethiopian liturgy and religious literature. He is the author of L’ufficio divino della Chiesa etiopica (Rome, 1998) and Bibliografia della liturgia etiopica (Rome, 2008), as well as many articles. Margaux Herman Ph.D. (2012, Université de Paris 1 Panthéon-­Sorbonne), is a specialist of Ethiopian women’s history and coordinates a research program on Women and Gender in the Horn of Africa at the French Center of Ethiopian Studies (CFEE) in Addis Ababa. Bertrand Hirsch is Professor of Ancient African History at the Université de Paris 1 Panthéon-­ Sorbonne. A former director of the French Center for Ethiopian Studies (CFEE) in Addis Ababa, he has written articles and books on medieval Christian and Islamicate Ethiopia.

Notes on Contributors

xv

Gianfrancesco Lusini Ph.D. (1992) is Professor of Gǝʿǝz and Amharic and of Ethiopian-­Eritrean history at the Università degli Studi di Napoli “L’Orientale.” He is editor of Rassegna di studi etiopici and author of several monographs on late antique and medieval Gǝʿǝz literature and on Ethiopan monasticism and hagiography. Denis Nosnitsin Ph.D. (2002, St. Petersburg State University) is a specialist in the literatures and languages of Ethiopia, and in the codicology of Ethiopic manuscripts. In 2009–15 he headed the ERC-­supported project “Ethio-­SPaRe Cultural Heritage of Christian Ethiopia. Salvation, Preservation, Research.” Anaïs Wion Ph.D. (2003) is a researcher at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), working at the Institut des Mondes Africains. She is presently working on the medieval and pre-­modern history of Aksum as well as on the history of Ethiopian Christian administration.

Conventions For transliteration of Arabic and of Ethiopian languages (Gǝʿǝz, Amharic) into Roman script, see the following charts. Transliteration norms for Ethiopian languages are based on those established by the Encyclopaedia Aethiopica, with some exceptions. Where terms or names have entered into English usage, the common English spelling is used: for instance, the Prophet Muhammad, Quran, jihad, imam, Emperor Haile Selassie, the modern capital Addis Ababa; the port city on the Eritrean coast, also, is given as Massawa (not Mǝṣǝwwaʿ), as in the primary entry in the Encyclopaedia Aethiopica. We also make a distinction orthographically between the site of Lalibäla and the king of the same name, Lalibala. This transliteration of the king’s name reflects the more common usage of the king’s own time (ላሊባላ), and has been recommended for general adoption by the encyclopedia’s most recent editor, Alessandro Bausi, on the basis of Marie-­Laure Derat’s recent research.1 A large number of terms, especially personal names, place names, and titles, are attested in the sources in both Gǝʿǝz and Arabic. In direct quotations, the transliteration will reflect the language of the source (thus ḥaḍāni in an Arabic work, but ḥaṣ́ani in a Gǝʿǝz one). Outside of direct quotations, the transliteration will generally reflect the primary cultural context under discussion, with transliteration from both languages provided where appropriate (for instance, where both Gǝʿǝz and Arabic sources are drawn upon). Names of territories are particularly vexing, as several passed from Islamic to Christian control, and some, even under Christian suzerainty, maintained a Muslim-­majority population. In this volume, a distinction is made between Muslim Šawah (following the Arabic spelling) and the later Christian province of Šäwa (following the Gǝʿǝz); they are traditionally understood to occupy the same general region south of Amhara, though the extent and precise location of Šawah is a matter of ongoing research. The Islamic sultanate that succeeded Šawah is here given according to the Gǝʿǝz spelling as Ifat, though the Arabic spelling (Awfāt) is noted when quoting from or referring to Arabic authors; the same is true for similar regions such as Däwaro, Bali, etc. The sultanate of ʿAdal was only briefly under Christian control and is here generally rendered according to this Arabic spelling, as it is in the Encyclopaedia Aethiopica (the Gǝʿǝz spelling is Adäl).

1  Alessandro Bausi, “The enigma of a medieval Ethiopian dynasty of saints and usurpers” (­review of L’énigme d’une dynastie sainte et usurpatrice by Marie-­Laure Derat), Orientalistische Literaturzeitung 103, 6 (2018): 439–447.

Conventions

xvii

In fact, the sultanate of ʿAdal can be denoted less ambiguously by the term Barr Saʿd al-­Dīn, as Amélie Chekroun and Bertrand Hirsch observe in their first essay in this volume. This is because the term ʿAdal occurs as a toponym in earlier and later sources, where its geographical parameters were different and its historical continuity with the sultanate of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries is uncertain. For ease of cross-­referencing with other literature, the term ʿAdal – the usual name for this sultanate in older scholarship, and the primary entry for it in the Encyclopaedia Aethiopica – is retained here as an alternate designation for the Barr Saʿd al-­Dīn, with the equivalence of terms noted. Churches are here generally identified by locality first, dedicatee (saint) second. Thus, “Bilbala Qirqos” refers to the church in Bilbala dedicated to St Qirqos (Cyriacus). There are exceptions, such as when a church is generally known by its name alone (e.g. Mika‌ʾel Amba in Wämbärta, Tǝgray, or Ǝnda Abba Ṗantalewon near Aksum). The churches of Lalibäla are prefixed by “Betä” (church [lit. “house”] of) – though technically applicable to any church, the term has become particularly associated in common parlance with the churches of this complex, and is used here only for these sites. It should be noted however that Betä Lǝḥem is a place (“Bethlehem”), such that references to “Betä Lǝḥem Maryam” follow the general rule, denoting the church dedicated to Mary in the locality of Betä Lǝḥem. A hagiographical work on a confessor-­saint (Gǝʿǝz gädl – literally “[spiritual] struggle”) is here referred to as a Life, and a work on a martyr-­saint (Gǝʿǝz sǝmʿ) as Acts. The collection of hagiographical texts known in Gǝʿǝz as the Gädlä sämaʿǝtat, which includes both confessor-­saints and martyrs, is here translated literally as “Lives (not Acts) of the martyrs.” Ethiopian personal names are given in references as usual, listing always the personal name and name of the father (and of the grandfather, if a third name is customarily used), without reversal in bibliographic entries. Dates are identified as CE (Common Era) with regard to the modern Western calendar, AH for the Islamic calendar, and EC for the modern Ethiopian calendar.

Transliteration Chart: Gǝʿǝz and Amharic

(based on the system adopted by the Encyclopaedia Aethiopica) 1st order

2nd order

3rd order

4th order

5th order

6th order

7th order

ሀ ha ለ lä ሐ ḥa መ mä ሠ śä ረ rä ሰ sä ሸ šä ቀ qä ቐ q̱ä በ bä ተ tä ቸ čä ኀ ḫa ነ nä ኘ ñä አ ʾa ከ kä ኸ ḵä ወ wä ዐ ʿa ዘ zä ዠ žä የ yä ደ dä ጀ ǧä ገ gä ጠ ṭä ጨ č̣ä ጰ ṗä ጸ ṣä ፀ ṣ́ä

ሁ hu ሉ lu ሑ ḥu ሙ mu ሡ śu ሩ ru ሱ su ሹ šu ቁ qu ቑ q̱u ቡ bu ቱ tu ቹ ču ኁ ḫu ኑ nu ኙ ñu ኡ ʾu ኩ ku ኹ ḵu ዉ wu ዑ ʿu ዙ zu ዡ žu ዩ yu ዱ du ጁ ǧu ጉ gu ጡ ṭu ጩ č̣u ጱ ṗu ጹ ṣu ፁ ṣ́u

ሂ hi ሊ li ሒ ḥi ሚ mi ሢ śi ሪ ri ሲ si ሺ ši ቂ qi ቒ q̱i ቢ bi ቲ ti ቺ či ኂ ḫi ኒ ni ኚ ñi ኢ ʾi ኪ ki ኺ ḵi ዊ wi ዒ ʿi ዚ zi ዢ ži ዪ yi ዲ di ጂ ǧi ጊ gi ጢ ṭi ጪ č̣i ጲ ṗi ጺ ṣi ፂ ṣ́i

ሃ ha ላ la ሓ ḥa ማ ma ሣ śa ራ ra ሳ sa ሻ ša ቃ qa ቓ q̱a ባ ba ታ ta ቻ ča ኃ ḫa ና na ኛ ña ኣ ʾa ካ ka ኻ ḵa ዋ wa ዓ ʿa ዛ za ዣ ža ያ ya ዳ da ጃ ǧa ጋ ga ጣ ṭa ጫ č̣a ጳ ṗa ጻ ṣa ፃ ṣ́a

ሄ he ሌ le ሔ ḥe ሜ me ሤ śe ሬ re ሴ se ሼ še ቄ qe ቔ q̱e ቤ be ቴ te ቼ če ኄ ḫe ኔ ne ኜ ñe ኤ ʾe ኬ ke ኼ ḵe ዌ we ዔ ʿe ዜ ze ዤ že ዬ ye ዴ de ጄ ǧe ጌ ge ጤ ṭe ጬ č̣e ጴ ṗe ጼ ṣe ፄ ṣ́e

ህ hǝ ል lǝ ሕ ḥǝ ም mǝ ሥ śǝ ር rǝ ስ sǝ ሽ šǝ ቅ qǝ ቕ q̱ǝ ብ bǝ ት tǝ ች čǝ ኅ ḫǝ ን nǝ ኝ ñǝ እ ʾǝ ክ kǝ ኽ ḵǝ ው wǝ ዕ ʿǝ ዝ zǝ ዥ žǝ ይ yǝ ድ dǝ ጅ ǧǝ ግ gǝ ጥ ṭǝ ጭ č̣ǝ ጵ ṗǝ ጽ ṣǝ ፅ ṣ́ǝ

ሆ ho ሎ lo ሖ ḥo ሞ mo ሦ śo ሮ ro ሶ so ሾ šo ቆ qo ቖ q̱o ቦ bo ቶ to ቾ čo ኆ ḫo ኖ no ኞ ño ኦ ʾo ኮ ko ኾ ḵo ዎ wo ዖ ʿo ዞ zo ዦ žo ዮ yo ዶ do ጆ ǧo ጎ go ጦ ṭo ጮ č̣o ጶ ṗo ጾ ṣo ፆ ṣ́o

xix

Transliteration Chart: Gǝ ʿ ǝz and Amharic (cont.)

1st order

2nd order

3rd order

4th order

5th order

6th order

7th order

ፈ fä ፐ pä ቨ vä

ፉ fu ፑ pu ቩ vu

ፊ fi ፒ pi ቪ vi

ፋ fa ፓ pa ቫ va

ፌ fe ፔ pe ቬ ve

ፍ fǝ ፕ pǝ ቭ vǝ

ፎ fo ፖ po ቮ vo

3rd order

4th order

5th order

6th order 7th order

ቊ qwi ኊ ḫwi ኲ kwi ጒ gwi ዂ ḵwi ቚ q̱wi

ቋ qwa ኋ ḫwa ኳ kwa ጓ gwa ዃ ḵwa ቛ q̱wa

ቌ qwe ኌ ḫwe ኴ kwe ጔ gwe ዄ ḵwe ቜ q̱we

ቍ qwǝ ኍ ḫwǝ ኵ kwǝ ጕ gwǝ ዅ ḵwǝ ቝ q̱wǝ

Labiovelars 1st order

2nd order

ቈ qwä ኈ ḫwä ኰ kwä ጐ gwä ዀ ḵwä ቘ q̱wä

Numerals ፩ 1 ፪ 2 ፫ 3 ፬ 4 ፭ 5 ፮ 6 ፯ 7

፰ 8 ፱ 9 ፲ 10 ፳ 20 ፴ 30 ፵ 40 ፶ 50

፷ 60 ፸ 70 ፹ 80 ፺ 90 ፻ 100 ፲፻ 1,000 ፻፻ 10,000

Transliteration Chart: Arabic

( following the conventions recommended by Brill) Arabic

translit.

Arabic

translit.

‫ا‬

a, ā

‫ط‬ ‫�ظ‬

ṭ

�‫ب‬ ‫ت‬ � ‫ث‬ � �‫ج‬

‫ح‬ ‫خ‬ � ‫د‬ ‫�ذ‬ ‫ر‬ ‫�ز‬

b t ṯ ǧ ḥ ḫ d ḏ r

‫��س‬ ��‫�ش‬

‫�ص‬ � ‫�ض‬

z s š ṣ

‫ع‬ ‫�غ‬

‫ف‬ �� ‫ق‬ � ‫ك‬ ‫ل‬

‫�م‬ ‫ن‬ �

‫�ھ‬

‫و‬ �‫�ي‬ ‫ء‬

ḍ

1 Initial hamza is not transliterated.

ẓ ʿ ġ f q k l m n h w, ū y, ī ʾ(1)

Arabic

‫�ى‬ �‫�ي‬

translit. ā ī

‫و‬ َ

ū

ِ ُ

i

ْ َ‫ــ‬ ‫��ـ��ي�ـ‬ ْ َ‫ــ‬ ‫ـو‬ ّ ‫�ــِ�ـ��ي�ـ‬ ّ ُ‫ــ‬ ‫ـو‬ ‫�ة‬

a

u ai au īy ūw a, ah, āh, at, āt

Maps

map 1

Medieval Ethiopia and Eritrea: Climate Zones and Regions

xxii

map 2

Maps

Ethiopia and Eritrea, 7th–­late 13th century

xxiii

Maps

map 3

Northern Ethiopia and Eritrea, 7th–­late 13th c.

xxiv

map 4

Maps

Ethiopia and Eritrea, late 13th–­mid-16th century

Maps

map 5 Medieval Ethiopia-­Eritrea and the Red Sea Region

xxv

chapter 1

Introduction Samantha Kelly In the Horn of Africa, the movement of tectonic plates that created the Great Rift Valley has produced a landscape of remarkable diversity.1 From the Red Sea coast in present-day Eritrea, a wide chain of mountains and high plateaus – the Central Plateau – runs southward until it meets a smaller chain, the Eastern Plateau, that stretches eastward toward the coast of present-day Somalia before descending into lowlands. These highlands themselves vary, from the more open plains of eastern Tǝgray, around 2000m above sea level, where wheat was and is grown, to the steep mountains and flat-topped amba of Lasta and Amhara, which can rise to 3000m, and where teff is the principal grain. Throughout these highlands the heat is tempered by altitude and the fertile soil watered by the seasonal rains of July and August, which has made them centers of cereal production for millennia. Within the great eastward-tipping “V” formed by these mountain chains, the land descends toward the sea to arid lowlands suited to a pastoral economy, including, in the northeast, the Danakil Depression, one of the lowest and hottest places on earth. Where the two plateaus meet – the vertex of the “V” – a valley continues southward, punctuated by a series of lakes: Zway, Langano, Šala, with others continuing toward and beyond the modern border with Kenya. West of Lakes Zway, Langano, and Šala the altitude remains high but the rainfall is heavy, creating a tropical ecological zone, heavily forested and known for the cultivation of ensete and coffee. North of this tropical zone, and west of the Central Plateau, the highlands descend toward the modern Sudanese border into midlands, suitable for mixed farming and grazing, and further north still to hotter lowlands in the western areas of present-day Eritrea. The region south of the Eastern Plateau, for its part, is quite variable in itself, but can be briefly described as midlands toward the west, descending to arid lowlands as one approaches the Indian Ocean coast. This region – from roughly the port of Massawa in the north to Lake Šala in the south, and from the present Ethiopian-Sudanese border in the west to 1  The shape of this essay was informed by the discussions held at La Fondation des Treilles among many of the volume’s contributors. François-Xavier Fauvelle and Alessandro Bausi offered precious advice on and corrections to drafts of it, and the anonymous reviewers suggested further refinements, all of whom I thank.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2020 | doi:10.1163/9789004419582_002

2

Kelly

the Red Sea and Indian Ocean coasts in the east – is the zone of activity discussed in his volume (see Map 1). The predominant focus within this region is the temperate highlands, largely for reasons of documentation: it was here that the inhabitants gradually adopted Christianity (from the mid-fourth century) and Islam (from the seventh), and it is the Christian and Islamic societies that have left us all of our indigenous written sources of the period, as well as much, though certainly not all, of the extant visual art and as-yet studied archeological remains. Not surprisingly, the vast majority of scholarship has also concentrated on them. It is nonetheless clear that these highland societies, which were themselves only gradually converted to Christianity and Islam over the course of the Middle Ages, had sustained economic and/or political relationships with the neighboring peoples in the tropical, midland, and lowland regions, who resisted conversion to Christianity or Islam (and who are here called adherents of local religions), and these relationships are part of the history here recounted.2 A more comprehensive title for this volume might therefore be “Medieval Ethiopia, Eritrea, Djibouti, and Somalia/Somaliland” – and indeed the city of Zaylaʿ on the Somali coast was a crucial node in the history here recounted, being the major port of inter-regional trade in the later Middle Ages. It would be unwieldy, and have its own inaccuracies. Very little can be told regarding the medieval past of the area now constituting Djibouti, while Somalia, centered on Mogadishu, was a distinct cultural-political entity in the Middle Ages. The territory delineated here is not coterminous with the modern states of Ethiopia and Eritrea, but most of it falls within their borders and represents their medieval heritage, and it seemed appropriate, if not accurate in every detail, to entitle the volume thus. In the essays that follow, where “Ethiopia” or “the historical Ethiopian area” are found, those terms should be understood as a shorthand for this territory, which was generally called “Ethiopia” (Ityoṗya) or “Abyssinia” (Ḥabaša) in medieval sources. 1

Outline of Ethiopian-Eritrean History to ca. 1560

Already in antiquity the northern reaches of this zone hosted a flourishing society, the Kingdom of Aksum (first-seventh century CE), whose fertile land and access to Red Sea trade made it well known to other societies of the ancient world. Its kings minted coins, built monumental stone structures, and left bilingual inscriptions in three scripts recording their great deeds. In the 2  For a discussion of terms for non-Christian, non-Muslim peoples, see François-Xavier Fauvelle’s essay, “Of Conversion and Conversation,” in this volume.

Introduction

3

first century CE, the author of the Periplus of the Erythrean Sea left an account of his mercantile voyage through its port of Adulis and remarked on the Greek learning of its king. In the fourth, when writings attributed to the thirdcentury Persian writer and prophet Mani had already named it among the four great civilizations of the world, it expanded northward into Nubia – and, in a decision of great historical import, converted to Christianity. In the sixth it extended its territorial conquests into Yemen across the Red Sea. By the seventh century, a constellation of factors, including the spread of Islam and decline of Red Sea trade but perhaps climatic change, internal political causes, and migrations as well, seem to have initiated the Aksumite kingdom’s decline. The minting of coins ceased. Sources on the kingdom, both internal and external, virtually disappear. The mid-fourth to mid-seventh centuries occupy a pivotal position in Ethiopian-Eritrean history, at once the apogee of the ancient Aksumite kingdom and the period in which features fundamental to its later history were established. These include, famously, Christianity and the cultural package that came with it: the codex; the first attested literary texts, virtually all Christian literature in translation; the institutional church and incorporation into its universal hierarchy; monasticism. Islam itself was born in the crucible of these centuries, just across the Red Sea, and tradition places the first migration of Muslims to Ethiopia even before the great hijra to Medina in 622 CE: the origins of Islamic Ethiopia, too, can be sought in this period. The arguments that have long been proffered for viewing late antiquity as period of innovation rather than decline in the social-cultural sphere – part of the ancient world but also the origin of numerous “modern” phenomena – apply to the Aksumite kingdom, which belonged to the same Mediterranean and Near Eastern cultural zone.3 A starting date for the subject of medieval Ethiopia and Eritrea is thus best left flexible, depending upon the topic. Politically and economically, our concern is with the period following decline of Aksum, from the seventh century (as we shall see, data is so scarce for these first centuries that a precise date is neither possible nor very useful). On cultural topics, it is necessary to review crucial developments of late antiquity, and sometimes indeed of earlier 3  The arguments are particularly associated with the work of Peter Brown: see, for instance, The World of Late Antiquity, AD 150–750 (New York, 1971); The Making of Late Antiquity (Cambridge, MA, 1978); Society and the Holy in Late Antiquity (Berkeley and LA, 1982). For a sense of the international dimensions of the historiography and debates, see, for instance, The World of Late Antiquity Revisited, a special issue of Symbolae Osloenses 72 (1997) devoted to the topic, and Andrea Giardina, “Esplosione di tardoantico,” Studi storici 40, 1 (1999): 157–180. On its application to ancient Aksum see, e.g., Stuart Munro-Hay, Aksum: An African Civilisation of Late Antiquity (Edinburgh, 1991).

4

Kelly

ages, as the indispensable foundation and context of later phenomena, but a thorough account of the Aksumite age itself, on which a large literature exists, is not attempted here. The (roughly) four centuries following the decline of the ancient Aksumite kingdom are generally called “post-Aksumite,” in part due to signs of continuity with Aksumite culture (in architecture, in the persistence of a Christian state or states that however the sources no longer call “Aksum”), and in part due to a paucity of data by which to characterize these centuries on their own terms. The historical picture is indeed quite fragmentary. Several foreign contemporary sources converge in the later tenth century to provide a flash of illumination: a crisis in the Christian community, in the form of a violent conquest by a non-Christian queen. In the later eleventh and especially the twelfth century it becomes possible again to follow a narrative thread based on reliable evidence. A series of rulers known to history as the “Zagwe” dynasty (though never so called in their own time) came to power in the Christian kingdom, and oversaw a renewal of Christian life. The boundaries of their realm extended further south than in Aksumite times, into the region of Bugna (now known as Lasta), where by the thirteenth century the famous rock-hewn churches of Lalibäla were carved. As Christian Ethiopian society strengthened and extended from the eleventh to thirteenth centuries, so did Islamic Ethiopian society. The timing and manner of its earliest development has been a subject of recent reinvestigation, as shall be discussed below, but it has long been known that an Islamic society called Šawah existed toward the southern end of the Central Plateau in the twelfth century; by the thirteenth Muslims had control of the port of Zaylaʿ, thus creating an east-west network of settlement and trade distinct from the north-south orientation of Christian society on the Central Plateau. The territorial expansion of both Christian and Islamic society was not, of course, into empty land: the “movements” of this period should rather be envisioned as processes of contact and conversion of previously localreligious peoples, with all the resistance, accommodation, and adaptation that such processes entailed, and that are more visible to us for later periods. Generally speaking, the Ethiopian-Eritrean Middle Ages are divided into an earlier and later period whose threshold is the takeover of the Christian kingdom by King Yǝkunno Amlak in 1270 CE. It has become the norm in modern historiography to refer to this new royal lineage as the “Solomonic” dynasty, though the appellation is a modern one and was not employed as such in the Middle Ages.4 This dynasty did elaborate an ideology based upon its 4  The modern origins of the term are briefly noted by Steven Kaplan, “Solomonic dynasty,” in EAe 4 (2010), 688–690, at 688. Ethiopian rulers explicitly invoked their descent from Solomon

Introduction

5

descent from the biblical king Solomon, through which it linked itself to the ancient Aksumite kings and portrayed Zagwe rule as a break in this ancient and uniquely legitimate succession.5 Texts issuing from the royal court therefore occasionally referred to individual kings or to the lineage as sons of Israel; foreign sources, for their part, generally called them the kings of Ethiopia, of Abyssinia, of Amhara, or simply the Christian kings, among other terms.6 The two and a half centuries following Yǝkunno Amlak’s coup that passed under their aegis are often considered a golden age for the Christian kingdom. They are marked by major territorial expansion; a wave of translations into and original compositions in Gǝʿǝz, the literary and liturgical language of the Christian kingdom; energetic movements of religious reform; and a consolidation of royal power over both church and state. The Christian kingdom’s expansion was in part at the expense of the independence of the neighboring Islamic sultanates, which, according to one contemporary observer, numbered six in the 1330s and had occupied regions from the eastern escarpment of the Central Plateau eastward and southward. Their rulers were now selected by, or required confirmation from, the Christian king as suzerain, and had to pay the suzerain tribute as well. Yet the hereditary ruling lineages in the sultanates were sometimes able to maintain their positions; the inhabitants were permitted to pursue their Muslim faith; and they and their foreign coreligionists controlled (via the medieval and Aksumite rulers) starting in the mid-nineteenth century: see Donald Crummey, “Imperial Legitimacy and the Creation of Neo-Solomonic Ideology in 19thCentury Ethiopia,” Cahiers d’Études Africaines 28, cahier 109 (1988): 13–43. The term seems then to have been applied as a descriptor of the dynasty of Yǝkunno Amlak and his successors in late nineteenth-century scholarship, for instance by Ignazio Guidi, whose Storia della letteratura etiopica (2nd ed. Milan, 1961) includes a section on the “re salomonidi di Abissinia,” and Carlo Conti Rossini, whose Storia d’Etiopia. Parte prima (Bergamo, 1928) is subtitled “from the origins to the advent of the Solomonic dynasty.” 5  The most famous articulation of this ideology is in the Kǝbrä nägäśt (“Nobility of the Kings”), who first redaction in Gǝʿǝz is dated to 1314–22. The origins of this text (said in its colophon to have been translated from Coptic into Arabic in Ethiopia in the thirteenth century, and then into Gǝʿǝz) and its relation to earlier traditions circulating throughout the eastern Mediterranean are difficult matters, and the political context of its translation into Gǝʿǝz a subject of some debate. Paolo Marrassini, “Kǝbrä Nägäśt,” in EAe 3 (2007), 364–368, is a useful introduction, to be complemented by the discussions, with recent bibliography, in the following essays. See also Marie-Laure Derat, L’énigme d’une dynastie sainte et usurpatrice dans le royaume chrétien d’Éthiopie du XIe au XIIIe siècle (Turnhout, 2018), esp. 157–160, for evidence of a linkage to Solomon and the Aksumite kings proposed already by the Zagwe. 6  For an example of their designation as Israelite see Getatchew Haile, ed. and trans., The Mariology of Emperor Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob of Ethiopia: Texts and Translations (Rome, 1992), 153–157. Other medieval terms included “Prester John” in Latin Europe and, in Arabic, ḥaṭī (= Gǝʿǝz aṣe) actually a term of reference or address (“Your [or His] Majesty”): see Denis Nosnitsin, “Aṣe,” in EAe 1 (2003), 364–365.

6

Kelly

most export trade. Available indices suggest that these Islamic societies, too, flourished in the later Middle Ages. The third node in the political and economic networks of this period was the local-religious societies that resisted conversion to monotheistic faiths, the most powerful (or best-documented) of which was, for some time, Damot. They possessed, or acquired from their own neighbors, commodities crucial to long-distance commerce. They were also important military allies and, when they resisted pressure from their monotheistic neighbors, antagonists. On the one hand, the relative stability and prosperity of Ethiopian-Eritrean societies in this period suggests the establishment of a certain modus vivendi among Christian, Islamic, and local-religious powers. At the same time, that modus vivendi was constantly challenged and renegotiated, both within any given polity and between the major powers: regional rebellions, attempted coups, border raids, and major battles occurred throughout the Solomonic era. Particularly significant was the defection of one member of the ruling dynasty of the sultanate of Ifat in the later fourteenth century, as that sultanate came under increasing Christian control: he decamped to the Eastern Plateau, where his successors founded a new sultanate, the Barr Saʿd al-Dīn, as a refuge of Islamic independence. It was from the Barr Saʿd al-Dīn that the charismatic religious leader and warrior Aḥmad ibn Ibrāhīm launched a jihad against the Christian kingdom of Ethiopia in the sixteenth century. Clashes with Christian forces began in the later 1520s and by 1531 focalized into a determined conquest of Christian territory that Aḥmad would undertake for the next twelve years. Until his death in 1543, his armies moved inexorably northward, destroying monasteries, burning libraries, killing and enslaving populations. The material and psychological effect on the Christian kingdom was immense; the toll on its written heritage, incalculable. Imam Aḥmad’s jihad, however, was only one element in a series of developments that transformed Ethiopia and Eritrea in the first half of the sixteenth century. Another was the increasing involvement of foreign powers in the region’s affairs. Already during the jihad of Imam Aḥmad, soldiers from Yemen and other parts of the Arabian peninsula (armed, newly, with firearms) joined his army, and were soon balanced on the Christian side by the Portuguese, who were interested in securing the Red Sea to protect their trading interests in the Indian Ocean. These foreign interventions were succeeded, respectively, by the Ottomans, who in 1555 created an Ottoman province of Abyssinia, and by the Jesuits, first dispatched in 1557, whose efforts to convert the Orthodox Christian Ethiopians were largely a failure in the sixteenth century but achieved the (brief) conversion of king and kingdom in the seventeenth. But ultimately most significant for Ethiopian-Eritrean history was another

Introduction

7

incursion into formerly Christian and Islamic territories that followed on the heels of the jihad, but from quite another quarter. This was the massive expansion, from the south, of the Oromo. They took control of a majority of the territory formerly ruled by Christian and Islamic powers, and not only radically redrew the political map of the region – the Christian kingdom of the subsequent, Gondärine era was reduced to the area north of Lake Ṭana – but became a powerful element in its social-cultural makeup ever afterward. The history recounted in this volume ends here, in the mid-sixteenth century: with the aftermath of the jihad, and the introduction of the new forces that would shape the region’s subsequent chapter. 2

The Scholarly Background

In its broad outlines, if not quite in these terms, this is the story of medieval Ethiopia and Eritrea that was last surveyed by Taddesse Tamrat in his magisterial 1972 monograph, Church and State in Ethiopia, 1270–1527. As the dates in his title signal, his principal focus was on the Solomonic era, from Yǝkunno Amlak’s seizure of power in 1270 to the eve of Aḥmad ibn Ibrāhīm’s jihad, but a first chapter narrated the “back story” from Aksumite through Zagwe times, and an epilogue recounted the jihad and its effects, such that the whole medieval period covered in this volume (as well as some ancient and even prehistoric background) was included, to some extent, in his narrative. His book remains indispensable reading for anyone interested in medieval Ethiopia and Eritrea. It draws on a wide range of sources, including hagiographical texts and land-grant (gwǝlt) documents, which are scrutinized and cross-referenced to yield historical data. A clear line of argumentation connects them, underlining the interplay between ecclesiastical and royal power in the making of the Christian kingdom without ignoring the importance of commerce or the relations with neighboring peoples. It also offers a compelling narrative arc of the Solomonic dynasty, as its chapter titles proclaim: from “expansion” in the reigns of Yǝkunno Amlak (1270–85) and ʿAmdä Ṣǝyon (1314–44), through “consolidation,” particularly under Dawit II (1379/80–1412) and Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob (1434–68), to “fifty years of decline” from the accession of the child-king Ǝskǝndǝr (1478–94) to the eve of the jihad. In some respects, indeed, Taddesse Tamrat’s work represents a summation of the previous century or so of scholarship in medieval Ethiopian Studies. Certainly the articulation of Ethiopia’s medieval past has been going on since the Middle Ages themselves. The Ethiopian authors who wrote the Lives of their own earlier saints and the chronicles and king-lists of their rulers

8

Kelly

were the first fashioners of this past, alongside the medieval Latin Christian authors and Arabic geographers and historians who were writing about the country, too, from their own perspectives and imaginings. The birth of scholarly study of Ethiopian-Eritrean history is generally traced back to the late seventeenth-century German orientalist Hiob Ludolf, who drew upon earlier European scholarship and eyewitness reports, as well as the expertise of his Ethiopian collaborator and informant Gorgoryos, to produce a lengthy history of the Christian kingdom and a grammar of the Gǝʿǝz language that remained authoritative for a century and a half.7 With Ludolf was solidified a European equation of the Christian kingdom with Ethiopia as a whole that was already established in his time and would long outlive him. The work of August Dillmann, the nineteenth-century linguist, theologian, and editor of many Gǝʿǝz biblical books whose grammar replaced Ludolf’s (and whose dictionary remains current today) was another important milestone.8 But the formation of the modern university and its constituent disciplines at the end of that century, together with European colonization in Eritrea and other parts of the Horn of Africa, provided the context for the first flowering of Ethiopian Studies in the contemporary sense.9 It gave form and impetus to philological studies, which, together with history and biblical studies (with which it was intertwined), represent the oldest branches of Ethiopianist scholarship. The noted philologists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, including Ignazio Guidi, Carlo Conti Rossini, Boris Turaiev, René Basset, Fr. M. Esteves Pereira, Jules Perruchon, Enno Littmann, and Ernest A. W. Budge, produced not only textual editions and translations but surveys of Ethiopian 7  Hiob Ludolf, Historia Aethiopica, sive brevis et succincta description regni Habessinorum … (Frankfurt, 1681), translated into English as A New History of Ethiopia … (London: Samuel Smith, 1684), followed by an Ad suam Historiam Aethiopicam antehac editam Commentarius (Frankfurt, 1691); Grammatica Aethiopica, ed. J. M. Wansleben (London, 1661). He also produced Amharic-Latin and Gǝʿǝz-Latin lexicons. 8  For his works and career see Jürgen Tubach, “August Dillmann (1823–1894),” in Christlicher Orient im Porträt – Wissenschaftsgeschichte des Christlichen Orients, ed. P. Bukovec (Hamburg, 2014), 109–150, and M. Güterbock, “August Dillmann und seine Lebenswelt. Vornehmlich aus Berliner Akten” in the same volume at 151–220. His Lexicon linguae aethiopicae (Leipzig, 1865) has been reprinted twice: New York, 1955; Osnabrück, 1970. 9  Though the work of several eminent Ethiopianist scholars (Conti Rossini, Cerulli) as colonial administrators in Eritrea or Ethiopia is well known, the relationship between Europeanauthored scholarship of the late nineteenth and earlier twentieth century and the colonial context has not received the same degree of critical analysis as regards Ethiopia-Eritrea as it has in other regions of Africa or western Asia. See, however, the comments on Cerulli’s scholarship and prominent role in the Italian colonial and occupying governments of the 1920s–1930s in Taddesse Tamrat, “Enrico Cerulli (1898–1988), In Appreciation of His Great Ethiopian Scholarship,” Journal of Ethiopian Studies 23 (1990): 85–92.

Introduction

9

history and literature, art-historical analyses, numismatic studies, and more. The first archeological mission also took place at this time, with the Deutsche Aksum Expedition’s surveys of ancient Aksum in 1906. Some quite important work was accomplished in the interwar period, including Carlo Conti Rossini’s survey of Ethiopian history, Enrico Cerulli’s pioneering studies of medieval Islamic Ethiopia, and François Bernardin Azaïs’s archeological exploration of local-religious sites, which helped inspire (and were later under the aegis of) the Ethiopian Institute of Archeology, created by the regent and future emperor Haile Selassie in 1926.10 But the next major watershed may be located in the late 1950s. Having been forced into exile during the Italian occupation of Ethiopia (1936–41), Haile Selassie, now returned, redoubled his efforts to explore and record Ethiopia’s heritage through multiple initiatives: the foundation of the Institute for Ethiopian Studies (as well as, for more general purposes, Haile Selassie I University, now the University of Addis Ababa); the creation of government bodies charged with overseeing heritage sites; the mounting of exhibitions showcasing Ethiopian art; and an open-door policy to foreign researchers and experts who could aid in surveying, cataloging, and studying the country’s treasures.11 Textual and arthistorical study, which had hitherto been limited to such manuscripts as were already in Europe, could now access an exponentially larger number of materials in Ethiopia. The first archeological excavations focused on the Middle Ages, by Francis Anfray, also took place at this time, as did Richard Pankhurst’s first explorations of Ethiopian social history. In Europe, meanwhile, the 1950s and 1960s were the years of Enrico Cerulli’s later scholarship, and the period in which his seminal wartime publications became more widely available; of Edward Ullendorff at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London; and of the works of scholars in related fields who contributed to Ethiopian Studies, like Charles Beckingham. Taddesse Tamrat, a graduate of Haile Selassie I University and a doctoral student at SOAS, was a product of both the renaissance of historical inquiry within Ethiopia and the tradition of Ethiopianist scholarship in Europe. One sees it in his easy mastery of all the works of Carlo Conti Rossini, on the one hand, and his access to and citation of 10  Conti Rossini, Storia d’Etiopia, cit. at n. 3. Enrico Cerulli’s numerous works on Islamic Ethiopia are listed, with further references, in Taddesse Tamrat, “Enrico Cerulli (1898– 1988).” On Azaïs and the creation of a national institute of archeology, see Amélie Chekroun, “Un archéologue capucin en Éthiopie (1922–1936): François Bernardin Azaïs,” Afriques (online journal), Varia, 27 January 2011: http://journals.openedition.orf/ afriques/785. 11  For further details see Claire Bosc-Tiessé, “Christian Visual Culture in Medieval Ethiopia,” in this volume.

10

Kelly

unedited manuscripts from Ethiopian churches and monasteries on the other. At the same time, he and others of his generation, including his fellow SOAS students Donald Crummey and Merid Wolde Aregay, brought a more historical turn to premodern Ethiopian Studies, laying out questions and analytic approaches that greatly influenced the field’s direction from the early 1970s on. Taddesse Tamrat’s Church and State is a landmark not only for its intrinsic qualities but for being, still, the most recent work to which readers can turn for a synthetic account of the Ethiopian-Eritrean Middle Ages. Yet it is now nearing its fiftieth birthday, and the changes in the field since its time have been many. One is the continual expansion of the available source base, and the greater access to it afforded by microfilm and, more recently, digitization. Among the first major efforts, and still the most fundamental, was the massive project, first conceived in 1971, to microfilm and catalog thousands of manuscripts in Ethiopian churches, monasteries, and other collections. A joint venture of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, the Ethiopian Ministry of Culture, and St John’s Abbey and University in Collegeville, Minnesota, the EMML (Ethiopian Manuscript Microfilm Collection) of Addis Ababa, a copy of which is housed at the HMML (Hill Monastic Manuscript Library) in Collegeville, was created through the efforts of Sergew Hable Selassie, especially, in Ethiopia, and was catalogued in Minnesota, initially by William Macomber and then, for its majority, by Getatchew Haile. The resulting print catalog, published between 1975 and 1993, runs to ten volumes, offers detailed and learned descriptions of some 5,000 manuscripts, and is now available online. Many other cataloging and digitization projects have followed, for manuscripts and for works of art, as Denis Nosnitsin and Claire Bosc-Tiessé note in their essays in this volume. In the realm of old-fashioned print, numerous editions have appeared since the early 1970s of previously unedited or even unknown texts, and the archeological study of medieval sites, in its infancy in 1972, is now a flourishing field, spanning Christian, Muslim, and local-religious remains, sometimes overlapping each other. Methodologies, too, of course, have advanced since the 1970s. Paolo Marrassini’s introduction of Lachmannian principles and new interpretive approaches was an important turning-point in Ethiopic philological studies, and up-to-date tools and principles are now applied in codicology and related areas of Ethiopic manuscript studies.12 The availability, among other technologies, of radiocarbon analysis and remote sensing imagery in 12  “Ethiopic” as a noun is often used as a synonym for the Gǝʿǝz language; as an adjective it is employed in philological and manuscript studies to describe manuscripts and the texts they contain that were produced in the Christian Ethiopian context, and that may

Introduction

11

archeology, and of spectral imaging and chemical analysis of pigments with regard to manuscripts and works of art, has made it possible to ask, and answer, questions unthinkable fifty years ago. As the source base and the methodologies with which to approach it have expanded, the field of medieval Ethiopian Studies itself, its scope and orientation, have altered too. Established fields like philology and the history of art have not only charted the evolution of textual corpora and artistic forms with greater breadth and precision, but approached them from new angles and with new questions. Areas of inquiry that simply did not exist in the 1970s have emerged, including Ethiopic manuscript studies and medieval Ethiopian women’s history. Finally, while research into the non-Christian peoples of medieval Ethiopia and Eritrea did not lack before the 1970s, a notable expansion of medieval archeological projects, the increasingly sophisticated use of ethnography, oral history, bioarcheology, and other methodologies to access the past of societies that lacked writing, and the growing number of Arabists who include Islamic Ethiopia among their interests, have together helped focalize attention on these societies in their own terms, and not only through the prism of Christian sources. They have encouraged a history “in equal parts,” in which Christians, Muslims, and followers of local religions, speaking a variety of languages, were all actors. The Encyclopaedia Aethiopica, whose five volumes appeared between 2003 and 2014, reflects this capacious vision, encompassing all the peoples and cultures in the areas delimited by the contemporary borders of Ethiopia and Eritrea from prehistory to the present, and its often detailed entries, with extensive bibliography, have made it an indispensable tool for Ethiopianists of all periods. Needless to say, a host of scholars is to be credited with effecting these advances. If only the most cursory sketch of the earlier phases of Ethiopian Studies could be offered above to gesture at the broad lineaments of the field and the place of the Middle Ages in it, a proper accounting of all the researchers who have enriched and transformed the study of Ethiopia and Eritrea in this period over the last five decades is impossible in the space of this brief introduction. The essays that follow provide extensive references to the scholarship, as well as commentary on the evolution of research, and offer a more articulated vision of the contributions of many colleagues than could be attempted here.

contain words or passages in other, related languages, usually (for the Middle Ages) Amharic, Tǝgrǝñña, and Arabic.

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Aims and Content

The aim of this volume, then, as for other Brill Companion volumes, is to offer an account of “the state of the field” in the study of medieval Ethiopia and Eritrea, as far as its format and relatively modest proportions allow. In taking stock of the last five decades of work on this topic, an effort has been made to represent particularly dynamic areas of research, in both established and emerging subfields. Many of these areas, and thus eight of the fifteen essays compiled here, focus on the Christian kingdom and its culture, which has historically been the center of research on this period. In keeping with the broader scope of the contemporary field, however, and to represent the new research in non-Christian subjects, two essays are devoted to the region’s Islamic polities and culture, and one to its local-religious cultures; four more address thematic topics that treat the Christian, Muslim, and local-religious components of Ethiopian-Eritrean society together, if unavoidably to different degrees. In form, the essays are not reviews of the historiography (though they may contain some explicit historiographical commentary) but rather narratives: a bird’s-eye view of what can be said on the topic in question in light of accumulated research to date. At the same time, many essays draw on their authors’ expertise to not only synthesize recent scholarship, but exemplify its new directions, and in this sense incorporate elements of the research article. In some cases the innovation centers on source material. In her examination of the post-Aksumite and Zagwe eras, Marie-Laure Derat brackets the accounts of the Zagwe kings written under the aegis of the succeeding dynasty – which, in addition to being removed in time from their subject, were colored by the legitimating needs of the successor dynasty itself – and focuses solely on sources contemporary to the Zagwe themselves. In the process she forces us to rethink assumptions about their ethnic identity, territorial anchorage, and “usurper” status that have guided interpretation of the dynasty for over a century, while also enriching our picture of their ruling practices and institutions and revising our chronology of their rise. Emmanuel Fritsch and Habtemichael Kidane use the Ethiopian Orthodox liturgy as a vehicle to trace the history of the Ethiopian church, deploying an innovative combination of architectural and textual evidence, deeply informed by a comparative perspective, that allows them to pierce previously obscure periods in the church’s historical development and to highlight the importance of space and ritual time in the lived experience of institutional religion. In other essays the innovations concern the questions asked of the sources. Deresse Ayenachew throws fresh light on the Solomonic dynasty’s territorial expansion through a focus on administration, concretely illustrating the

Introduction

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challenges of maintaining control over diverse territories and peoples and the adaptive strategies by which the dynasty sought to do so. Alessandro Bausi, documenting the processes whereby foreign literatures were translated in Ethiopia and Eritrea to form the foundation of the Christian Ethiopian written heritage, not only condenses a deep body of scholarship (and explains its philological methods), but offers a case study of one of its new directions, the “reception history” of translated texts in their medieval Ethiopian context. Antonella Brita surveys this Christian literary heritage with greater emphasis on original Gǝʿǝz compositions, before focusing on hagiography as a case study in the complexity of one literary genre and the ways in which the approaches of different disciplines (philology, history, anthropology, manuscript studies) have come together to diversify and enrich the insights to be drawn from it. Claire Bosc-Tiessé, who takes into her purview the vast subject of medieval Christian art and architecture, simultaneously exemplifies the historical and contextual approach to made objects that constitutes one of the new directions in Ethiopian art-historical analysis. The innovation represented in Amélie Chekroun’s and Bertrand Hirsch’s essay on medieval Islamic polities might be said to rest on its new source base, in the sense that archeological investigations have been key to the field’s new findings and have helped stimulate a reassessment of available written sources as well. But in a broader sense, one might say that the pioneering and largely single-handed work of Enrico Cerulli on medieval Ethiopian Islam up to the 1970s has only blossomed into a research field – a dedicated topic of investigation pursued from a variety of angles by multiple researchers – in the decades since. The history of the sultanates need no longer be appended to a narrative focused on the Christian kingdom and written primarily from the perspective of Christian sources; the descriptions of foreign writers can now be tested against material data and assessed in a more critical light. The result is not only a more precise understanding of the trajectory and locations of Muslim settlement and the internal features of their society, but a more capacious vision of medieval Ethiopian history as a whole. Similar comments can be made, mutatis mutandis, of the study of medieval local-religious societies. Christian Ethiopian references to them have long been known, and surveys of earlier (ancient and prehistoric) local-religious sites date back to the 1920s. But focused study of medieval local-religious culture from the vantage of its own contemporary evidence, necessarily material and not documentary, is a twenty-first century enterprise. Like the more intensive study of the Islamic sultanates, it has occasioned a shift in perspective in which the continued presence and agency of the local-religious inhabitants of Ethiopia comes to the fore, whose implications François-Xavier Fauvelle lays out in his essay. But

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medieval Christian culture, too, has seen new areas of inquiry develop in recent decades, notably manuscript studies. Though not confined to the medieval period – indeed, this historical periodization does not well fit scribal and bookmaking practices that were established in late antiquity and have lasted in some respects to the present – the study of manuscript production in its material aspects has much to tell us about medieval Ethiopian-Eritrean Christian culture, and is a particularly rich and important area of comparative inquiry, as Denis Nosnitsin demonstrates in his contribution to this volume. For some topics, little scholarship yet exists to survey: here the authors have mined the primary sources to provide a first overview of the topic and venture answers to fundamental questions. One such topic is medieval Ethiopian women’s history. Apart from the history of Christian queens – the major subject of Margaux Herman’s own research – much remains unexplored. To fill the gap, Herman has provided a blueprint to future studies, identifying major topics and interpretive approaches and delving into the sources to offer a sketch of women in relation to work, marriage, religious life, politics, war, and symbolic discourse. Similarly, the intellectual-religious traditions of the Muslim communities of medieval Ethiopia have yet to be subject to a scholarly synthesis, in part due to the paucity and heterogeneity of the source material, and in part to the varied interests of the Arabic literary specialists best equipped to address them. Study of the relevant materials has nonetheless grown as part of the general invigoration of Ethiopian Islamic studies, building on the pioneering work of Ewald Wagner in particular. Drawing upon these and upon recent archeological findings while delving deeply, like Herman, into the primary written sources themselves, Alessandro Gori offers a portrait of medieval Islamic intellectual culture, anchored in its institutional settings, that establishes the state of the art. The particular characteristics of medieval Ethiopia-Eritrea, its source materials, and its scholarly traditions have posed specific challenges for the treatment of certain topics. Monasticism, for instance, can well be considered the heart of medieval Christian Ethiopian studies, in the sense that the overwhelming majority of surviving written documentation, as well as art, was produced in a monastic milieu. For philologists, literary scholars, historians, and specialists of manuscript studies, art, and architecture, what can be known of the medieval Christian kingdom is, to a large extent, what the monks have left us. This is a bias in the documentation, of course. At the same time, there is no doubt that monasteries played an extremely influential role in medieval Christian Ethiopian society. In the absence of a developed urbanism, they were primary nodes of economic organization and, from a political perspective, of territorial control. Their members had a virtual monopoly on literacy, with

Introduction

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all the influence that that entailed, but literacy was not necessarily required for the social influence they exerted, evident among other things in the general apprehension of monks – all monks – as qǝddusan, “holy” or “sainted.” Gianfrancesco Lusini’s lapidary essay manages to encompass the many facets of the phenomenon, and at the same time clearly mark chronological change, on a topic that could easily expand into a narrative of Christian Ethiopia as a whole. The medieval Ethiopian economy is another challenging subject to treat, for different reasons. Ethiopian economic history is not a new subject: Richard Pankhurst pioneered such work in the 1950s, with a focus on modern Ethiopia, and Donald Crummey did groundbreaking work, for the early modern period, in the 1980s and 1990s. But economic research specifically on the medieval period has developed very little. Anaïs Wion’s essay for this volume is therefore a first, albeit in what would seem to be a “traditional” field. Drawing methodologically and for relevant data on studies dealing with earlier and later periods, highlighting the economic aspects of scholarship on the medieval period, and mining primary sources where studies lack, she provides a masterfully synthetic picture of agriculture and animal husbandry as well as trade that encompasses, to the extent possible, Christian, Muslim, and local-religious societies in the variety of their ecological settings. Finally, two essays delineate topics that are not established research foci in the field, but that bring together different strands in a way that reflects the growing interest in a multi-confessional approach to the study of the EthiopianEritrean past. My own delineates the topic of medieval Ethiopian diasporas, bringing together existing scholarship on three different strands – Christian and Muslim Ethiopian communities established abroad, and enslaved Ethiopians displaced to locations outside Ethiopia – in a way intended to bring out the specificities of each but also the parallels and conjunctures among them. Where the volume’s general emphasis, as regards Ethiopia and Eritrea’s imbrication in larger regional networks, is upon neighboring cultures’ influence upon Ethiopia (quite naturally, given the volume’s focus on developments within our region), this essay is intended to highlight one manifestation of Ethiopians’ movement to and influence upon its neighbors, and thus to pick out a thread that can be found as well in other contributions. The second is the closing essay of the volume by Amélie Chekroun and Bertrand Hirsch, which outlines events of the first half of the sixteenth century that affected all the regions of the medieval Ethiopian-Eritrean area and radically reconfigured them. As Chekroun and Hirsch observe, this halfcentury, and particularly the period from the 1520s to the 1550s, tends to fall between two stools in broader treatments of premodern Ethiopia and Eritrea:

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a postscript to the Solomonic “golden age” and a prelude to the Jesuits’ establishment in Ethiopia and the quite different conditions of the Gondärine era. As they observe, the marginal position of these decades is partly due to a notion, current at least since Taddesse Tamrat’s classic survey, of 1527 as the end of the Middle Ages,13 and partly to an analytic perspective aligned with that of the Christian kingdom: the jihad of Aḥmad ibn Ibrāhīm, understood to be the signal event of the later 1520s to 1540s, is at once accepted as a cataclysmic watershed and passed over in relative silence. From the Muslim Ethiopian perspective, the historical arc looks rather different, and these decades – which boast a major, contemporary Arabic historical source – are not so easily overlooked. Furthermore, when the arcs of Muslim and Christian Ethiopia are paired, and the crucial impact of local-religious Ethiopians – specifically, the Oromo – is given its due, the consequences for the region as a whole come into clearer focus. Chekroun and Hirsch’s aim is to shed light on a critical “transitional” period that has received rather less scholarly attention, and to do so from a multiconfessional perspective, not to argue for a particular end date to the Ethiopian-Eritrean Middle Ages. Nonetheless, their essay, and particularly its conclusion, does point to some salient reasons for viewing “circa 1560” as the opening of a different historical era, at least in a political perspective: the installation of foreign powers or their proxies (Ottomans, Jesuits) in Ethiopian territory, with the geographically broader and more intensive global entanglements this entailed; the shrinkage of both Christian and Islamic states in the face of Oromo expansion, which would continue for decades but was already decisive by this time; and the establishment of the Oromo themselves at center stage of Ethiopian-Eritrean history, territorially, politically, and socially, where they were to remain in subsequent centuries. 4

Why “Medieval”?

As observed above, there are chronological terms specific to the EthiopianEritrean context for the period covered by this volume (post-Aksumite, Zagwe-era, Solomonic) and they will frequently be employed in the following essays. As concerns the volume as a whole, they have certain drawbacks. First, none describes the period from the seventh to the mid-sixteenth century as a whole, and it is sometimes useful to have such a term at hand. Second, all 13  This is the more surprising in that, though the date 1527 appears in the work’s title, the narrative essentially ends with the accession of Naʿod in 1494, and the whole first half of the sixteenth century is treated briefly in the book’s epilogue.

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are generated from and reflect the perspective of the Christian kingdom, and are therefore less suitable in relation to non-Christian topics. The term “medieval” has therefore been chosen for the volume’s title, and is employed in some (but not all) of the following essays as well. Certainly it has drawbacks of its own. As a European product, its application to non-European regions has been critiqued not only for its imposition of a foreign chronological template onto societies to which it might ill apply, but for its colonial legacy, whereby “medieval” acquired its connotations of backwardness and superstition precisely in relation to non-European societies, deemed less advanced on the linear path to modernity than coeval societies of Europe (or more generally of “the West.”)14 With regard to the first issue, the general conceptual framework and time frame suggested by “medieval” can be considered not wholly inappropriate to the Ethiopian-Eritrean context, nor even perhaps entirely imposed from without. It is generally acknowledged that Ethiopia-Eritrea had an “ancient” and particularly a crucial “late antique” period – that of the Aksumite kingdom – which belonged to the same cultural matrix as that of Greco-Roman antiquity, and this classical past was remembered and celebrated as politically and culturally foundational to Ethiopia-Eritrea’s Christian kingdom in later centuries, just as it was in Byzantium and western Europe. It has thus seemed not inappropriate to some scholars, including Ethiopian ones, to refer to the postantique centuries of Christian Ethiopia-Eritrea as “medieval.”15 Nor is the term “medieval” viewed as locally appropriate only in a Christian context. Scholars of the central and Mediterranean Islamic lands have increasingly adopted it to denote the centuries from the seventh, and for similar reasons (that is, an acknowledgment of late antiquity as the prelude to and crucial context for the rise of Islam);16 it has thus been employed, and periodized, by scholars of Islamic Ethiopia-Eritrea as well.17 Doubtless for both reasons, a period of 14  The latter critique is associated especially with postcolonial scholars. See, among others, Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: Who Speaks for “Indian” Pasts?” Representations 37 (1992): 1–26; Kathleen Davis, Periodization and Sovereignty: How Ideas of Feudalism and Secularization Govern the Politics of Time (Philadelphia, 2008). 15  E.g., Sergew Hable Selassie, Ancient and Medieval Ethiopia to 1270 (Addis Ababa, 1972); Habtamu M. Tegegne, “The Edict of King Gälawdéwos Against the Illegal Slave Trade in Christians: Ethiopia, 1548 – Featured Source,” The Medieval Globe 2, 2 (2016): 72–114, where “medieval” is frequently used in the body of the essay. 16  Konrad Hirschler and Sarah Bowen Savant, “Introduction: What is in a Period? Arabic Historiography and Periodization,” Der Islam 91, 1 (2014): 6–19. For a somewhat earlier, contrary opinion (first formulated in 1999) see Daniel Martin Varisco, “Making ‘Medieval’ Islam Meaningful,” Medieval Encounters 13 (2007): 385–412. 17   François-Xavier Fauvelle-Aymar and Bertrand Hirsch, “En guise d’introduction. Sur les traces de l’Islam ancien en Éthiopie et dans la Corne de l’Afrique,” in Espaces musulmans

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history called “medieval” is taught in Ethiopian universities, albeit with variable termini.18 Undeniably, the term “medieval” still has its flaws, including a more dubious relevance to local-religious societies that did not look to the ancient Mediterranean for their heritage, and contestable terminal dates, especially for phenomena (such as agriculture) that defy this periodization altogether. These, of course, are true of the term’s application to Europe as well. If, as Alan Strathern has opined of “early modern” and its adoption by scholars of Asia, the crucial issue is less the origin of a term than its utility for scholars (and citizens) of the region in question, then “medieval” certainly has a foothold in the study of Ethiopia-Eritrea, although it is by no means always and everywhere applicable or adopted.19 The colonial legacy of the term’s application to non-European regions remains an important consideration: not only the disparaging connotations attached to the term but the asynchronous and evolutionary model, far from eradicated in academic or popular discourse today, that permits a non-European society to be classed as “still medieval” while Europe of the same period is “already modern.” Proponents of a global approach to the Middle Ages continue to grapple with this legacy, advocating that we approach the medieval as a value-neutral and – with some flexibility, as required by local context – chronologically uniform time window in and beyond Europe, precisely in order to stimulate attention to dynamics that invite comparison, cross regional borders, or indeed involve Europe only peripherally.20 As Kathleen Davis has observed, the application of the term “medieval” outside Europe can “run the risk of reconfirming the colonial, Orientalist history from which it emerged,” but it also has the potential to do the reverse: to “push against many of the major claims of colonial and nationalist history …, make all cultures coeval, and insist upon de la Corne de l’Afrique au moyen âge. Études d’archéologie et d’histoire, ed. François-Xavier Fauvelle-Aymar and Bertrand Hirsch (Paris – Addis Ababa, 2011), 11–26, which deploys a “conservative” classification of the region’s pre-eighteenth-century Islamic history as “ancient” (16) before proposing a new periodization of “medieval Islam” in the Horn of Africa, in two phases (23–25). 18  End dates for the medieval period as taught in Ethiopian universities can range from the onset of the sixteenth-century jihad to the traditional beginning of the Gondärine period (1632) to the eighteenth-century “Age of the Princes.” I thank Alessandro Bausi and Solomon Gebreyes for this information. 19  Alan Strathern, “Global Early Modernity and the Problem of What Came Before,” Past and Present 238, Supplement 13 (2018): 317–344. As noted above, the periodization does not apply to manuscript production, and the term “medieval” is not employed by Denis Nosnitsin in his essay in this volume. 20  For a recent example, see Catherine Holmes and Naomi Standen, “Introduction: Towards a Global Middle Ages,” Past and Present 238, Supplement 13 (2018): 1–44, e.g. at 19.

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a broad, non-Eurocentric study of the time called the Middle Ages.”21 Including Ethiopia-Eritrea among these coeval “medieval” societies might contribute to these latter aims. To describe the scholars who work on this period of Ethiopian-Eritrean history as “medievalists,” however, is another matter. Ethiopianists tend not to classify themselves by chronological period, nor indeed are there any Ethiopianist associations or conferences devoted specifically to these centuries or any part of them. Thus while all the contributors to this volume work deeply and extensively with materials from the seventh to the sixteenth centuries, they may do so with an equal or primary interest in what those documents reveal about antiquity, and/or work just as comfortably on phenomena of the seventeenth or nineteenth or twentieth centuries. If I have described this volume as offering an account of the state of the field in the study of medieval Ethiopia and Eritrea, therefore, it is not meant to imply that “medieval Ethiopian Studies” is a recognized field of chronological specialization, but simply to denote the work that philologists, archeologists, historians, and other specialists, who often work in many time periods, have done to illuminate this particular span of time. 5

Further Topics

The foregoing comments may have already alerted the reader that a second aim of the volume, alongside highlighting particularly vibrant areas of research, has been to provide a fairly broad view of the Ethiopian-Eritrean Middle Ages, such that it might serve as an introduction to the topic for readers less familiar with it. It is doubtful that any collection of essays could achieve the kind of synthesis one would hope of a true survey, and certainly fifteen contributions is far too few to be in any way comprehensive. Which omissions seem most glaring with depend upon the reader, but I would like to say a word about two that, though mentioned in the pages to follow, do not receive extended treatment there. One is the Betä Ǝsra‌ʾel (“House of Israel”). This Jewish community has existed in Ethiopia for centuries, and from the later sixteenth century forward our sources about it are relatively plentiful. For prior times, however, only a handful of brief references survive, all from non-Betä Ǝsra‌ʾel sources, which scholars have filled out through philological study of modern Betä Ǝsra‌ʾel texts and through ethnographic analysis of modern communities 21  Kathleen Davis and Michael Puett, “Periodization and ‘The Medieval Globe’: A Conversation,” The Medieval Globe 2, 1 (2015): 1–16, at 1–2.

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and their oral traditions. One finding, around which a scholarly consensus has coalesced since the 1970s, is that the community developed not from an ancient Jewish migration to Ethiopia-Eritrea but from within the indigenous population, probably between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, in response to Ethiopian Christianity. Betä Ǝsra‌ʾel oral traditions trace their liturgy and practice of monasticism to Christian sources; a handful of fourteenthand fifteenth-century references to “former Christians who have denied Christ, like the Jews,” or simply to “Jews,” for their part, suggest a genesis in reaction to Christian orthodoxy, though the precise valence attached to the term “Jew” (ayhud) at the time is elusive.22 It remains difficult to ascertain when these people, generally identified in locations north or east of Lake Ṭana, constituted a single community; their legal standing and occupations, too – landlessness, concentration in craft professions – are better known for the later period but, in the absence of sources, less evident for the Middle Ages. What can be plausibly hypothesized about this most obscure period in the community’s history has been sensitively laid out by Steven Kaplan and Kay Kaufman Shelemay, among others, to whose works readers are referred.23 A second topic that is only touched upon in following essays is the Christian kingdom’s diplomatic contact with Latin Europe in the later Middle Ages. Despite numerous Latin European attempts to send envoys and missionaries to Ethiopia from the thirteenth century forward, with the stated hopes of achieving a union of their Christian churches and a military alliance against Islam, it was the Ethiopian Christian kings who first made official diplomatic contact. The Genoese priest Giovanni da Carignano, in his now-lost Tractatus, claimed to have met a royal Ethiopian embassy directed to a “king of the Spains” in the early fourteenth century, and a recently-discovered work now offers hitherto unattested details of Carignano’s text that suggest he had access to Ethiopian informants (ambassadorial or otherwise).24 About a century later, certainly, Ethiopian royal embassies became rather regular. Those best 22  It has been observed that ayhud, as employed by Christian authors, could refer to any “heretic” or dissenter, and that the contexts of these references suggest the groups in question were political antagonists as well. 23  For a recent historiographical overview see Steven Kaplan, “Betä Ǝsra‌ʾel,” in EAe 1 (2003), 552–559, with references, including Kay Kaufman Shelemay, Music, Ritual, and Falasha History (East Lansing, MI, 1986), esp. chapter 1 and 199–203; Steven Kaplan, The Beta Israel (Falasha) in Ethiopia (New York, 1992), esp. 51–78. 24  Paolo Chiesa, “Galvano Fiamma e Giovanni da Carignano. Una nuova fonte sull’ambasceria etiopica a Clemente V e sulla spedizione dei fratelli Vivaldi,” Itineraria 17 (2018): 63–108; further analysis of the Ethiopian information in Alessandro Bausi and Paolo Chiesa, “The Ystoria Ethyopie in the Cronica Universalis of Galvaneus de la Flamma (d. c. 1345),” Aethiopica 22 (2019), forthcoming.

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attested in European archives are one sent by Dawit II that reached Venice in 1402, another from Yǝsḥaq to King Alfonso of Aragon in Valencia in 1427, and a third from Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob that visited Alfonso in Naples and the pope in 1450. An unofficial Ethiopian delegation (fetched from the Ethiopian monastery in Jerusalem) also attended the ecumenical Council of Ferrara-Florence in 1441, at the pope’s request, and another, almost certainly unauthorized, visited the court of Pope Sixtus IV in 1481. The first official Latin European embassies known to have successfully reached Ethiopia were Portuguese, at the end of the fifteenth and beginning of the sixteenth century, and it was also a Portuguese embassy that returned with the first surviving written correspondence from an Ethiopian ruler. This was the 1509 letter of the queen regent Ǝleni (which reached Lisbon in 1514), expressing interest in the Portuguese proposition of a joint military venture against Muslim enemies. The next Portuguese embassy – the famous delegation that remained in Ethiopia from 1520 to 1526 – occasioned further correspondence from Lǝbnä Dǝngǝl, and more followed from his successor Gälawdewos, with varying responses to Latin propositions regarding military alliance and a union of the churches depending on current conditions in Ethiopia.25 Thanks to the existence of the sixteenth-century Ethiopian letters, we can trace with some precision the vicissitudes of Ethiopian strategy toward European propositions, and, as Chekroun and Hirsch note in their concluding essay, we know some of the diplomacy’s effects. For earlier times, where no royal Ethiopian correspondence to Europe exists, the situation is more obscure. Taddesse Tamrat opined that the Ethiopian rulers were intrigued from the beginning of these contacts in a pan-Christian alliance against Muslim 25  The scholarship on these contacts is very considerable. Several recent works may provide an introduction as well as references to further and earlier literature: Matteo Salvadore, The African Prester John and the Birth of Ethiopian-European Relations, 1402–1555 (London, 2017); Benjamin Weber, “An Incomplete Integration in the Orbis Christianus: Relations and Misunderstandings between the Papacy and Ethiopia (1237–1456),” Medieval Encounters 21 (2015): 232–249; Samantha Kelly, “Heretics, Allies, Exemplary Christians: Latin Views of Ethiopian Orthodox in the Late Middle Ages,” in Late Medieval Heresy: New Perspectives, ed. Michael D. Bailey and Sean L. Field (Woodbridge, 2018), 195–214; and for the later phase, Andreu Martínez d’Alòs-Moner, “The Jesuit Patriarchate to the Preste: Between Religious Reform, Political Expansion and Colonial Adventure,” Aethiopica 6 (2003): 54–69; idem, Envoys of a Human God: The Jesuit Mission to Christian Ethiopia, 1557–1632 (Leiden, 2015). See also the references in Chiesa, “Galvano Fiamma.” The unofficial Ethiopian delegation to the Council of Florence is attested by a number of sources and has therefore generated a sizeable literature of its own, references to which can be found in Samantha Kelly, “Ewostateans at the Council of Florence (1441): Diplomatic Implications between Ethiopia, Europe, Jerusalem and Cairo,” Afriques (online journal), Varia (2016): http://journals.openedition.org/afriques/1858.

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foes, in addition to seeking Latin Christian artisans and artifacts; the latter aim is well attested in the European records of diplomatic contacts, and reflections of it are noted as well in several of the following essays.26 To pursue such questions in any depth, however, would require a deep immersion in the European (and occasionally Egyptian) texts that are our only sources for this diplomacy prior to 1509. They are replete with their authors’ own biases and expectations, and with the broader matrices of received ideas about Ethiopia in their cultures – notably, in Europe, the legend of Prester John, ideal Christian king of fabulous wealth and inveterate hostility to Muslims, which colored European notions of Ethiopia for at least two centuries.27 Moreover, it would be somewhat one-sided to treat Christian Ethiopian diplomacy with Europe and ignore the diplomatic contacts of both Christian and Islamic Ethiopia with Egypt, for instance, and with Yemen.28 Here too the local cultural contexts in which the missions were received and recorded would require exploration, including stories that circulated concerning the Christian king’s ability to destroy Egypt by stopping the flow of the Nile, or his role in apocalyptic literature as the “last emperor” destined to destroy Mecca.29 The authors and cultural contexts of these neighboring societies, in short, virtually demand center stage for the subject to be treated with due critical assessment of the sources, which perhaps exceeds the boundaries of what a single volume focused on the medieval past of Ethiopian and Eritrean peoples can properly provide. At the same time, 26  Taddesse Tamrat, Church and State, 265, and chapter 7 more generally. The Christian Ethiopian interest in Latin Christian artifacts is a central topic in Verena Krebs’ Solomon’s Heirs (Philadelphia, forthcoming). 27  The literature on Prester John is vast, but for an excellent overview (with bibliography), especially as regards his association with Ethiopia, see Gianfranco Fiaccadori, “Prester John,” in EAe 4 (2007), 209–216. 28  No systematic treatment of this diplomacy in its various aspects has yet been undertaken, but see Julien Loiseau, “The Ḥaṭī and the Sultan. Letters and embassies from Abyssinia to the Mamluk court,” in Mamlūk Cairo. A Crossroad for Embassies, ed. Frédéric Bauden and Malika Dekkiche (Leiden, 2019), 638–657; on diplomacy with Yemen, Éric Vallet, L’Arabie marchande: état et commerce sous les sultans rasūlides du Yémen (626–858/1229–1454 (Paris, 2010), 416–420; and on general contacts across the region and datable Christian Ethiopian embassies to Egypt, Marie-Laure Derat, “Du lexique aux talismans: occurrences de la peste dans la Corne de l’Afriqe du XIIIe au XVe siècle,” Afriques (online journal) 9 (2018): http://journals.openedition.org/afriques/2090, at nn. 73–84. 29  See, for instance, Richard Pankhurst, “Ethiopia’s Alleged Control of the Nile,” in The Nile. Histories, Cultures, Myths, ed. Haggai Erlich and Israel Gershoni (Boulder, CO, 2000), 25–37; Lutz Greisiger, Messias Endkaiser Antichrist. Politische Apokalyptik unter Juden und Christen des Nahen Ostens am Vorabend der arabischen Eroberung (Wiesbaden, 2014); Mordechay Lewy, Der Apokalyptische Abessinier und die Kreuzzüge: Wandel eines frühislamischen Motivs in der Literatur und Kartografie des Mittelalters (Berlin, 2018).

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these contacts, and the received ideas about Ethiopia that circulated around and were stimulated by them, are important witnesses to the “outward” influence of medieval Ethiopia-Eritrea, of which these few words can, it is hoped, at least give some idea. 6

Red Threads

Each essay, of course, articulates the revised conclusions that recent research has effected on a particular topic or in a given research area. Reading across the essays, one may note certain themes through which these contributions reinforce each other. One is the repeated invocation of the central role of Egypt as a contact point for the Christian kingdom, and of both Egypt and Yemen as concerns Islamic Ethiopia. These links were religious, diplomatic, intellectual, commercial, and (certainly for Egypt) artistic and institutional as well; they were durable over time and went in both directions. Edward Gibbon’s romantic image of medieval Ethiopians as “sleep[ing] near a thousand years, forgetful of the world by whom they were forgotten” has proven surprisingly resilient, but is quite unfounded.30 In coming years, indeed, the networks across this whole region can be expected to come into even clearer focus. Two large-scale collaborative projects are examining links across the Horn of Africa and between it and the Middle East, while more focused workshops are investigating the ties between Ethiopia-Eritrea and the Christian kingdom of Nubia.31 Looking in the other direction, recent studies of the local-religious kingdom of Damot to the south of the Christian kingdom, and of the societies on the EthiopianSudanese border on the west, promise to further illuminate Ethiopia’s imbrication in networks stretching into the interior.32

30  Edward Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ch. 47; cited in Edward Ullendorff, The Ethiopians: An Introduction to the Country and People, 2nd ed. (London, 1965), 57–58. 31  See the European Research Council Projects “HornEast,” under the direction of Julien Loiseau (https://horneast.hypotheses.org) and “IslHornAfr: Islam in the Horn of Africa, A Comparative Literary Approach,” under the direction of Alessandro Gori (http://www .islhornafr.eu); and the international workshops “Christianization processes along the Nile: Texts, monasticism and ecclesiastic structures in Egypt, Ethiopia and Nubia” (Paris, 20 June 2017) and “Bishops and Bishoprics (Egypt, Nubia and Ethiopia, 4th– 13th c)” (Paris, 2 July 2019). 32  See, e.g., Alfredo González-Ruibal and Álvaro Falquina, “In Sudan’s Eastern Borderland: Frontier Societies of the Qwara Region (ca. AD 600–1850),” Journal of African Archeology 15 (2017): 173–201; Ayda Bouanga. “Le royaume du Damot: Enquête sur une puissance politique et économique de la Corne de l’Afrique (XIIIe siècle).” Annales d’Éthiopie 29 (2014):

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A second reflection concerns the ways in which recent findings revise our geographical mapping of the region’s societies. Several essays stress the importance of eastern Tǝgray, alongside Bugna (Lasta), as a crucial region of Christian activity under the Zagwe kings: rather than a southward “movement” of the Christian kingdom we are given a sense of significant continuity with the Aksumite and post-Aksumite periods, of territorial extension but not necessarily of a wholesale transfer of the political and religious center of gravity. In this same region of Tǝgray, as Derat observes, Christian society was “pushing back” against Muslim settlement, and indeed Chekroun and Hirsch’s essay on the Islamic sultanates articulates a new and more precise trajectory of Muslim settlement in the early Middle Ages, from eastern Tǝgray (where Bilet in present-day Kwiḥa is currently the best-known site) and moving southward along the escarpment of the Central Plateau to Šäwa. The archeological excavations in Islamic Ifat, for their part, indicate a dense settlement precisely on the eastern escarpment of the Central Plateau in the fourteenth century. In sum, rather than a “Christian highlands” and an Islamic Ethiopia perceived as spreading generally over the lowlands toward the sea (and an internet search of medieval Ethiopian maps provides plenty of examples of this geographical conception), recent findings urge us to conceive of Christian and Islamic Ethiopia as developing in close proximity, on adjacent (sometimes identical and contested) lands. The later-medieval Islamic settlement on the Eastern Plateau was similarly focused on highlands and their escarpments, but now of course further removed from the centers of Christian power. The political significance of this remove has long been recognized. In ecological terms, it is of a piece with new findings on Islamic settlement along the Central Plateau, indicating an agricultural environment rather similar to that of Christian society and characterized by the cultivation of grains and other shared crops. Finally, Fauvelle’s reflections on local-religious archeological remains remind us not to assume that those who refused to convert to Christianity or Islam were always or immediately pushed to the geographical periphery: the prized areas contested by Christian and Muslim converts were first controlled by these peoples, and they did not always or easily give them up. Thirdly, while scholars are unlikely to abandon the rich sources of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries anytime soon, the energy at the chronological margins of the Middle Ages is noteworthy. Several essays call attention to the late eleventh century as a turning-point: a moment of renewal for the Christian church, of the resumption of regular contacts with Alexandria, and, in Derat’s 27–58; Ayda Bouanga, “Southern Blue Nile (Abbay) Societies: Production and Slave Trade (Ethiopia 13th–16th centuries),” Northeast African Studies 17, 2 (2017): 31–60.

Introduction

25

proposition, the beginning of Zagwe political control, traditionally dated some half-century later. While datable Gǝʿǝz manuscripts between the sixth and thirteenth centuries are extremely rare, as Bausi and Brita remind us, those authors also point to evidence suggesting an evolution from earlier, short homilies to longer hagiographical texts: both the relative dating of these texts, and the palimpsests and fragments now being studied that suggest quite early dates, may bring valuable textual evidence to bear on this period as well. At the other end of the chronological spectrum, the first half of the sixteenth century may not long remain between two stools. A rising generation of researchers is focusing its attention on this era’s texts: Chekroun’s analysis of the Futūh alHabaša, Solomon Gebreyes’s new edition and translation of the chronicle of Gälawdewos, and Herman’s work on the evolution of the ǝtege to the time of Śärṣ́ä Dǝngǝl all place this era front and center.33 7

Background Information

For readers already acquainted with medieval Ethiopia and Eritrea, the comments above may suffice by way of introduction. For those new to the subject, some background information may prove useful in orienting through the following essays. As noted above, Gǝʿǝz was the literary and liturgical language of medieval Christian Ethiopia, and to the mid-sixteenth century virtually all documents in the Christian kingdom were written in it. It is a member of the Semitic language family, and like other such languages was, in its earliest form, written in unvocalized characters, to which markers representing seven vocal “orders” were added by the fourth century CE at the latest. Its script is unique – that is, shared only with other languages of Ethiopia that were rendered in this script when they were consigned to writing, in or after the Middle Ages. Unlike most Semitic languages, it is written and read from left to right. Arabic, sporadically attested also in Christian Ethiopian documents of the period, was the language of record in the Islamic sultanates of Ethiopia-Eritrea, and all the medieval documents produced in those societies were written in that language. Both are represented in Roman type following specific transliteration norms outlined 33  Amélie Chekroun, Les djihâds de l’imam Aḥmad (Éthiopie, 16e siècle). Lectures du Futūḥ al-Ḥabaša (Paris, forthcoming), based on her dissertation of 2013; Solomon Gebreyes, ed. and trans., Chronicle of King Gälawdewos (1540–1559), 2 vols. CSCO 667–668, SAe 116–117 (Louvain, 2019); Margaux Herman, “Les reines en Éthiopie du XVe au XVIIe siècle. Épouses, mères de roi, ‘mère du royaume’” (Ph.D diss., Université de Paris 1 PanthéonSorbonne, 2012).

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in the following charts. The use of diacritical marks can be heavy going for those unaccustomed to it, but it is essential for specialists and necessary even for the non-specialist reader who wishes to follow up on references to pursue further reading. If the written languages of medieval Ethiopia and Eritrea were essentially two, however, the spoken languages were many. Gǝʿǝz, the “language of state” of the ancient Aksumite kingdom, probably ceased to be a spoken language sometime in the post-Aksumite period, replaced principally by related Ethiopian Semitic languages (Tǝgre, Tǝgrǝñña, and, further south, Amharic). Scattered words or phrases in Tǝgrǝñña and Amharic can be found in some medieval Christian texts. But a host of other languages were certainly spoken as well. The earliest inhabitants of the highlands were probably speakers of Omotic and Cushitic languages, both of the Afro-Asiatic macrofamily, who likely adopted Gǝʿǝz and/or related Ethiopian Semitic languages when they adopted Christianity; linguistic interference of Agäw, in the Cushitic language family, is apparent in both Tǝgrǝñña and Amharic. But Agäw languages remained current spoken languages in medieval Ethiopia-Eritrea as well, especially in the northwest, as did Beǧa, another Cushitic language, in the far north. Omotic languages probably continued to be spoken in, and certainly just beyond, the southern and southwestern areas of the medieval Christian kingdom, where still today Gamo, Wälaytta, and other languages of this family are predominantly spoken. Cushitic languages were spoken in this southern area too, including Sidaama, Hadiyya, and Oromiffaa, the last being the language of the Oromo who expanded in the sixteenth century into a large part of the territory formerly controlled by Christian and Islamic powers. Other, East-Cushitic languages were spoken in the lowlands nearer the Red Sea coast, including ʿAfar and Somali, alongside Semitic languages (Argobba, Harari), while west of Lake Ṭana were spoken languages belonging to a different macrofamily than all of the above, Nilo-Saharan.34 As many of the following essays will have occasion to mention, the ancient Aksumite king ʿEzana (and thus, at least formally, his kingdom) converted to Christianity in the mid-fourth century. This new Christian community needed to be incorporated into the structure of the universal church. Emmanuel Fritsch and Habtemichael Kidane explain the specifics of this process in their essay on the Ethiopian church, but some basic points may be mentioned here. First, from ʿEzana’s time onward, the Ethiopian church was under the spiritual 34  For an overview of the contemporary linguistic picture in Ethiopia and Eritrea, with discussion of its historical evolution, see Jon Abbink, “Languages and peoples in Ethiopia and Eritrea,” in EAe 5 (2014), 381–388, as well as the entries on specific languages.

Introduction

27

authority of the patriarch of Alexandria, and thus of what would later become known as the Coptic (Egyptian) church. The head of the Ethiopian church, technically called ṗaṗṗas (“father,” from which “pope” derives) was virtually always an Egyptian Copt selected by the Alexandrian patriarch and sent to Ethiopia to oversee its flock. Because he lacked certain powers held by other ṗaṗṗasat, however, he is generally denoted in scholarship as the “metropolitan” of the Ethiopian church, and in Gǝʿǝz was often referred to as abun/abunä (“our father,” though this honorific could be used for other religious leaders as well). The Ethiopian church was thus a daughter church of the Egyptian one, headed by an Egyptian – but conducting all its services in Gǝʿǝz, and following practices that, as shall be seen, were sometimes at variance with then-current Coptic norms, on the one hand reminiscent of ancient Christian traditions and on the other hand subject to much influence from kings, monastic reformers, and other influential Ethiopian actors. In addition to its personnel, a second important feature of the Ethiopian church’s relationship with Egypt was its calendar. The months of the Ethiopian Christian calendar were and are thirteen: twelve of thirty days each, plus an intercalary month of five days (or six, in a leap year) that falls at the end of the year, in August. I give them in order, along with the Western date that, in the Middle Ages, corresponded to the first of each month. It will be noted that due to the addition of a day when necessary in August in the Ethiopian system, and in February in the Western system, the correspondence varies between these months. Mäskäräm (starts 29 or 30 August); Ṭǝqǝmt (28 or 29 September); Ḫǝdar (28 or 29 October); Taḫsas (27 or 28 November); Ṭǝrr (27 or 28 December); Yäkkatit (26 or 27 January); Mäggabit (25 or 26 February); Miyazya (27 March); Gǝnbot (26 April); Säne (26 May); Ḥamle (25 June); Näḥase (25 July); Ṗagwǝmǝn (24 August). A slightly different set of corresponding dates applies after 1582 CE, when the Western calendar was reformed.35 The systems for reckoning the year were also based on those of Egypt, and were founded upon a 532-year cycle. The most common dating system in the medieval Christian kingdom was the so-called “Era of Diocletian” (ʿamätä sämaʿǝtat, “Year of the Martyrs”), starting in 284 CE. Another was the “Era of Grace” (ʿamätä mǝhrät, “Year of Mercy”) which started 76 years later; in practice, however, the “Era of Diocletion” was also, often, called the “Year of Mercy” in medieval Christian Ethiopian documents, such that care must be taken in identifying which system was employed. Other systems included 35  For the post-1582 CE correspondences and a fuller discussion of the calendar’s origins, see Emmanuel Fritsch and Ugo Zanetti, “Calendar: Christian calendar,” in EAe 1 (2003), 668–672, at 668–669.

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reckoning from Creation (ʿamätä ʿaläm, “Year of the World”), identified as 5500 years before Christ (=5493 BCE, according to the modern, post-1582 Western calendar), and reckoning from the Incarnation (ʿamätä śǝggawe, “Year of the Incarnation”), which of course begins 5500 years after Creation (=7/8 CE, according to the modern Western calendar).36 The Year of the Incarnation is the system employed for the civil calendar in Ethiopia today: in relevant contexts, for instance with regard to modern scholarly publication dates, it is here designated as EC (Ethiopian Calendar). Though each essay explains the principal Gǝʿǝz and Arabic terms it employs, a few very basic Gǝʿǝz terms may be usefully introduced here for ease of navigation by non-Gǝʿǝz readers. Abun/Abunä for the metropolitan has been noted above. Abba, “father,” frequently prefaces the names of revered church personnel. The most common word for king, from the thirteenth century, was nǝguś (pl. nägäśt); the cognate term for queen is nǝgǝśt (pl. nǝgǝśtat), though a variety of terms for royal women were employed, as Margaux Herman explains in her essay. Of the many administrative titles employed in the Middle Ages, discussed especially in the essays of Marie-Laure Derat and Deresse Ayenachew, it may suffice here to mention two. Gärad (in Arabic, garād), frequently found in the following essays, was one of several terms for a provincial governor. Liq (“chief, senior,” pl. liqawǝnt) prefaced many titles, such as liqä kahǝnat (“chief priest, head of the priests”); liq also denoted a scholar. Of (other) ecclesiastical titles, those most frequently mentioned here are nǝburä ǝd, literally “he on whom hands have been placed,” an important ecclesiastical office associated especially with Aksum, and ʿaqqabe säʿat, “guardian of the hours,” a title granted by the royal administration and usually held by an abbot. An amba is a flat-topped mountain, and the word is often attached to placenames, for instance the church of Mika‌ʾel Amba, or Amba Gǝšän, the famous “royal prison.” Däbr means “mountain,” and of course is used in this sense – another term for the Amba Gǝšän was Däbrä nägäśt, “Mountain of kings” – but was also used to denote monasteries, and will more often be found in following essays in this sense: Däbrä Maryam, e.g., indicates a monastery dedicated to St Mary. Similarly, bet not only means “house” but has a specific meaning as a church, and any church can be described as the bet of its titular saint: Betä Giyorgis means “the church of St George.” The custom in scholarly literature, however, is to use this term only in certain cases; as explained in “Conventions,” 36  These by no means exhaust the medieval Christian reckoning systems in use. For an overview see Siegbert Uhlig, “Chronography,” in EAe 1 (2003), 733–737, and for a thorough discussion, Otto Neugebauer, Ethiopic Astronomy and Computus (Vienna, 1979).

Introduction

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in this volume the term Betä prefaces the names of the churches of Lalibäla only. Finally, as the above examples illustrate, when a root word acquires the ending – ä it means “of,” a useful fact to know in many circumstances: if a gädl is a hagiographical work (a Life), the Gädlä Samuʾel is the Life of Samuʾel. Each essay will discuss the sources relevant to its topic, but it is well to introduce two of them here, to avoid the necessity of repeating, in following essays, the circumstances of their composition and the reasons for the historical value they are accorded despite their foreign authorship. The first is the History of the Patriarchs of the Egyptian Church. Its genesis is usually attributed to the tenth-century Egyptian bishop Sāwīrus ibn al-Muqaffaʿ, who compiled earlier biographical sources to create a history of the patriarchate of Alexandria from its origins and added to them his own contemporary knowledge. The work was continued by multiple authors who covered periods of varying length, each similarly drawing on records close to the events described and on their own knowledge. Because of the ecclesiastical relationship between Alexandria and the Ethiopian church, these authors, and the sources they drew upon, took note of events in medieval Ethiopia-Eritrea, and their general contemporaneity with the events described makes the History of the Patriarchs a valuable historical source, especially in periods where the Ethiopian documentation is scarce, though of course their apprehension of Ethiopian events was filtered by their geographic, cultural, and linguistic distance from the Ethiopian context. The second work, frequently cited in following essays, is that of Francisco Alvares, a chaplain with the Portuguese embassy that spent six years in Ethiopia between 1520 and 1526. Apparently drawing on notes he took during his Ethiopian sojourn, Alvares wrote a lengthy account of his stay, in Portuguese, upon his return to Europe in 1527. The original scope of his work, and its fate, remain obscure: contemporary sources refer to a work in five books, some parts of which are lost. The Portuguese text as we have it was printed in Lisbon in 1540 under the title Ho Preste Joam das indias. Verdadera informaçam das terras do Preste Joam (The Prester John of the Indies: A True Narration about the Lands of Prester John), with somewhat variant versions informing the Italian translations done just before and after this date; all these major versions are taken into account in the modern translation by Charles Beckingham and G. W. B Huntingford, which is therefore the most usual reference for this work.37 The 37   Beckingham-Huntingford, Prester John. The variants and their relationships are briefly discussed in the translation’s front matter (1: 5–9) and more extensively in Charles Beckingham, “Notes on an Unpublished Manuscript of Francisco Alvares,” Annales d’Éthiopie 4 (1961): 139–154.

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surviving account, though representing only parts of Alvares’s original composition (and not necessarily ones chosen by Alvares himself), still fills two volumes. Its degree of detail, particularly its attention to mundane aspects of life that did not merit mention by Ethiopian authors, have made it a valuable resource, particularly for social-historical phenomena, though the author’s European background and incomplete immersion in Ethiopian culture must here too be taken into consideration.

chapter 2

Before the Solomonids: Crisis, Renaissance and the Emergence of the Zagwe Dynasty (Seventh–­Thirteenth Centuries) Marie-­Laure Derat It is commonly accepted that with fall of the Aksumite kingdom in the seventh century, Ethiopia entered a dark age. This characterization largely reflects our inability to provide a coherent account of this period, whose extreme scarcity of written documentation has not been offset by archaeological findings. But it has also, not surprisingly, brought with it an implication of decline, even civilizational crisis, which is generally presumed to have been fully overcome only with the accession of the so-­called Solomonic dynasty in 1270. Briefly put, traditional narratives of this period have rested on three principal ideas.1 The first concerns geographical displacement. After the fall of Aksum, through processes that remain obscure, a more southerly people took leadership of the Christian kingdom and transferred its center to the Lasta region. Here a new capital was founded in a town sometimes called Roha, or Wärwär, but generally known as Lalibäla, after the thirteenth-­century king Lalibala to whose patronage the famous rock-­hewn churches of the site are credited. The second concerns ethnic and cultural identity. The dynasts, called the Zagwe, have been identified as ethnically Agäw and speakers of a Cushitic language, unlike their Semitic-­speaking Aksumite predecessors. They thus embodied a kind of revenge of the pre-­Semitic indigenous populations. Thirdly, due to these different cultural and regional origins, the Zagwe have been characterized as a usurper dynasty, illegitimate heirs of the Aksumite rulers and outside the political family within which power was supposed to be transmitted. Such, certainly, was the view of the dynasty that replaced them, termed “Solomonic” precisely for having restored the ancient royal lineage traceable back to Solomon, and whose coup was therefore a restoration. 1  Concerning the knowledge on the Zagwe dynasty, see Carlo Conti Rossini, Storia d’Etiopia (Bergamo, 1928), 303–321; Sergew Hable Sellassie, Ancient and Medieval Ethiopian History to 1270 (Addis Ababa, 1972), 239–292; Taddesse Tamrat, Church and State in Ethiopia, 1270–1527 (Oxford, 1972), 25–30, 53–68; and the introduction in Paolo Marrassini, ed. and trans., Il Gadla Yemreḥanna Krestos, introduzione, testo critico, traduzione (Naples, 1995), 3–21.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2020 | doi:10.1163/9789004419582_003

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Despite this generally negative view of the Zagwe dynasty, some of its representatives were (and are) recognized as saints and celebrated as such in hagiographical texts written from the fifteenth century on. They include Lalibala himself; his wife, Mäsqäl Kǝbra; his predecessors Yǝmrǝḥannä Krǝstos and Ḥarbay; and his successor Näʾakkweto Läʾab.2 The Lives of these saint-­kings are practically the only documents from which the history of the dynasty was previously written, in order to establish the succession of the reigns, mode of government, center of the kingdom, and so on. Ethiopian hagiographical texts can have historical value, especially when composed shortly after the saint’s death and on the basis of eyewitness testimony to the events. But hagiographies are not chronicles, and especially in cases like those of the Zagwe saints, whose Lives were written considerably later and under a dynasty ideologically antagonistic to its predecessor, their historical information must be approached with much more caution. Moreover, these texts are marked by a sedimentation of information, an intertextuality that, far from affirming their reliability, attests to circular constructions, where repeated borrowing results in the creation of truth-­effects. These evidentiary difficulties can be sidestepped by a more concentrated focus on contemporary sources.3 These, admittedly, are few. Among the documents produced by the Zagwe administration itself, the royal land grants are the most important. One was issued by King Ṭänṭäwǝdǝm at an unknown period and preserved in a small manuscript kept in the church of ʿUra Qirqos.4 Three others were issued by King Lalibala: two, copied into the Gospel manuscript of the church of Däbrä Libanos in Šǝmäzana, are dated respectively to 2  The Lives of Lalibala and Mäsqäl Kǝbra have been partially edited, the first one by Jules Perruchon, ed. and trans., Vie de Lalibala, roi d’Éthiopie (Paris, 1892), the second one by Stanisław Kur, ed., “Édition d’un manuscrit de la Bibliothèque vaticane: Cerulli 178,” Memorie dell’Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, 8th ser., 16, 7 (1972): 383–426. The other editions are Carlo Conti Rossini, ed. and trans., “Gli atti di Re Na‌ʾakuĕto La‌ʾab,” Annali, Istituto Superiore Orientale di Napoli, new ser., 2 (1943): 105–232, and Marrassini, Il Gadla Yemreḥanna Krestos. The life of Ḥarbay is unedited. 3  A recent synthesis based on this approach is offered in Marie-­Laure Derat, L’énigme d’une dynastie sainte et usurpatrice dans le royaume chrétien d’Éthiopie du XIe au XIIIe siècle (Turnhout, 2018). 4  Ewa Balicka-­Witakowska and Michael Gervers took photographs of the manuscript in 2005 and gave me access to their own pictures (http://ethiopia.deeds.utoronto.ca ; username: guest; password: deeds), here Michael Gervers, MG-2005.092:012–023. In the framework of the Ethio-­Spare project, Denis Nosnitsin and his team digitized the complete library of the church of ʿUra Qirqos, including this manuscript: Denis Nosnitsin, Churches and Monasteries of Tǝgray. A Survey of Manuscript Collections (Wiesbaden, 2013), 3–8. See the edition and translation of the text in Derat, L’énigme d’une dynastie sainte, 261–271.

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1204 and 1225,5 while another, undated, is kept in the Gospel of the church of Betä Mädḫane ʿAläm in Lalibäla.6 Also valuable is the History of the Patriarchs of the Egyptian Church produced at the Coptic patriarchal court in Egypt; the biography of Patriarch John VI, in particular, written in the thirteenth century, contains a contemporary account of the reign of Lalibala.7 Architectural remains and archeological data provide further, essential information, especially in light of the paucity of written sources, with which to re-­examine the history of this period. 1 The Post-­Aksumite Period (Seventh–­Eleventh Century): Ebb and Flow of Christianization The fall of Aksum is based on the interpretation of archeological data. Phases of abandonment on the excavated Aksumite sites date back to the seventh century.8 During the same period, minting disappeared completely, after four centuries during which the Aksumite kings minted gold, silver and copper 5  The land grants of the Däbrä Libanos Gospel were first edited by Carlo Conti Rossini, “L’evangelo d’oro di Dabra Libanos,” Rendiconti della Reale Accademia dei Lincei, 5th ser., 10 (1901): 177–219. Two scholars later had access to this precious manuscript. The first was Roger Schneider in 1975: see Roger Schneider, “L’évangéliaire de Dabra Libanos de Ham,” in Proceedings of the 8th International Conference of Ethiopian Studies, University of Addis Ababa, 1984, ed. Taddese Beyene, 2 vols. (Addis Ababa, 1989), 2: 163. Then Alessandro Bausi in 1993 and 1994, who prepared a concordance between his own pictures and the edition of Carlo Conti Rossini: Alessandro Bausi, “Un indice dell’Evangelo di Dabra Libānos (Šemazānā, Akkala Guzāy, Eritrea),” Aethiopica 10 (2007): 81–91. A new edition and translation was proposed by Marie-­Laure Derat in “Les donations du roi Lālibalā : éléments pour une géographie du royaume chrétien d’Éthiopie au tournant du XIIe et du XIIIe siècle,” Annales d’Éthiopie 25 (2010): 19–42, and the question of the date of the first land grant was solved by Gianfranco Fiaccadori, “Per la cronologia di un atto “feudale” del neguś Lālibalā,” Crisopoli. Bollettino del Museo Bodoniano di Parma 14 (2011): 201–204. See also Derat, L’énigme d’une dynastie sainte, 46–59. 6  Derat,“Les donations du roi Lālibalā,” 21–24; eadem, L’énigme d’une dynastie sainte, 59–61. 7  Two editions and translations of this biography were published, in 1898–1899, by Jules Perruchon, based on the manuscript BnF Arabic 302 from the fifteenth century: Jules Perruchon, “Notes pour l’histoire d’Éthiopie. Extrait de la vie d’abba Jean, 74e patriarche d’Alexandrie, relatif à l’Abyssinie,” Revue sémitique 6 (1898): 267–271, 7 (1899): 76–88; and in 1970 by Antoine Khater and Oswald Burmester from MS Hist. 1 of the Coptic Museum in Cairo (thirteenth or fourteenth century): HPEC, vol. 3, part 2, 186–193. 8  David W. Phillipson, Archaeology at Aksum, Ethiopia, 1993–1997 (London, 2000), 268, 372– 379, 485; Francis Anfray, Le site de Dongour. Axoum, Éthiopie. Recherches archéologiques (Hamburg, 2012), 7; Rodolfo Fattovich, “La civiltà aksumita: aspetti archeologici,” in Storia e leggenda dell’Etiopia tardoantica, ed. Paolo Marrassini (Brescia, 2014), 273–292.

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coins. The disappearance of gold coins in the seventh century is usually interpreted as a sign of the exclusion of the Aksumite kingdom from the Red Sea trade. The Ethiopian state was at that time a partner in the commercial networks connecting the eastern Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean, and this partnership contributed to its original culture, mixing the use of Greek, South Arabic (or rather a pseudo-­Sabaean) and Gǝʿǝz for the writing of inscriptions of victories in honor of the rulers, allowing the introduction of Christianity in the kingdom or the minting of coins. The Aksumite decline in commercial activity is associated with the emergence of a new political and religious formation in the Arabian Peninsula, with the preaching of Muhammad. The expansion of Islam and the Arabs, after the Persian conquest of the peninsula, took place at the expense of the Aksumites, who lost the monopoly of trade in the Red Sea. But other factors have been proposed to explain the decline of the Aksumite kingdom: the aridification of the North Ethiopian high plateau, a plague linked to the great epidemic of the Justinian era, or internal disorders, marked by looting and destruction in Aksum, to the point that the obelisks, symbols of the Aksumite power, were destroyed.9 While we can say that sites were abandoned and that minting and the incision of victory inscriptions ceased, still from a strictly political point of view we do not know what happened to the kingdom of Aksum. We must wait until the tenth century to find some information. In the meantime, the decline in trade and the gradual disappearance of a material culture based on long-­distance trade do not tell the whole story. While the occupation which one could qualify as “urban” fades and disappears, on the other hand eastern Tǝgray – the region east of Aksum, stretching from Šǝmäzana in present-­day Eritrea to ʿAgamä in the region of Mäqälä town and beyond, towards Lake Ašange10 – is covered with churches, both built from 9  Karl W. Butzer, “Rise and Fall of Axum, Ethiopia: A Geo-­Archaeological Interpretation,” American Antiquity 46, 3 (1981): 471–495; Yohannes Gebre Sellassie, “Plague as a Possible Factor for the Decline and Collapse of the Aksumite Empire: A New Interpretation,” Ityiopis 1 (2011): 35–60; Stuart C. Munro-­Hay, Aksum, an African Civilisation (Edinburgh, 1991), 258–262; Paolo Marrassini, Storia e leggenda, 184; Wim Raven, “Some Early Islamic Texts on the Negus of Abyssinia,” Journal of Semitic Studies 33 (1988): 197–218, at 201–204; Bertrand Poissonnier, “The Giant Stelae of Aksum in the Light of the 1999 Excavations,” P@lethnologie 4 (2012): 49–86, at 78–83. 10  Francis Anfray, “Nouveaux sites antiques,” Journal of Ethiopian Studies 11, 2 (1973): 13–27; Eric Godet, “Répertoire de sites pré-­axoumites et axoumites du Tigré (Éthiopie),” Abbay 8 (1977): 19–58; idem, “Répertoire de sites pré-­axoumites et axoumites d’Éthiopie du Nord, IIe partie: Érythrée,” Abbay 11 (1980–1982): 73–113; Claude Lepage and Jacques Mercier, Les églises historiques du Tigray: art éthiopien/The ancient churches of Tigrai: Ethiopian art (Paris, 2005), 19, 32–105; Claude Lepage, “Entre Aksum et Lalibela: les églises du sud-­est du Tigray (IXe–XIie s.) en Éthiopie,” CRAI, Jan–­Mar (= issue 1) (2006): 9–39, at

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stone and carved out of the rock. Their dating is not always precisely fixed in time, but they can generally be placed between the ninth and twelfth centuries. Several deserve special mention because they can be dated by criteria other than architectural style and because they will be used for the following demonstration. One is Ham in Šǝmäzana, where a funerary inscription dating from the ninth century (for a woman named Giḥo) bears witness to the enracination of Christian culture here through its use of biblical quotations in the formulae.11 Nearby, the church of Däbrä Libanos of Ham possesses a Gospel manuscript that preserves land grants from the very early thirteenth century, especially from King Lalibala.12 Further south, the church of ʿUra Mäsqäl (neighboring the present-­day church of ʿUra Qirqos) in Gwǝlo Mäkäda was richly endowed by King Ṭänṭäwǝdǝm, whose reign occurred approximately in the twelfth century.13 A short distance away, the church of Däbrä Dammo preserves objects in its treasury that could have arrived in this place only after the tenth century.14 Finally, two churches are to be linked to the activity of an Egyptian metropolitan in Ethiopia: the church of Mika‌ʾel Amba, consecrated by metropolitan Mika‌ʾel I in the mid-­twelfth century, and the church of Nazret Maryam, the southernmost of all, founded by the same Mika‌ʾel.15 A longstanding and intensive settlement in this same geographical swath is confirmed by archeological surveys: the density of archeological sites for 18; Emmanuel Fritsch, “Ethiopian Liturgy and Church Architecture,” Ethiopian Review of Culture 14 (2011): 75–103, at 87–89; idem, “Liturgie et architecture ecclésiastique éthiopiennes,” Journal of Eastern Christian Studies 64, 1–2 (2012) : 91–125; Emmanuel Fritsch and Michael Gervers, “Pastophoria and Altars: Interaction in Ethiopian Liturgy and Church Architecture,” Aethiopica 10 (2007): 7–51; Michela Gaudiello and Paul A. Yule, Mifsas Bahri: a late aksumite frontier community in the mountains of Southern Tigray (Oxford, 2017). 11  Carlo Conti Rossini, “L’iscrizione etiopica di Ham,” Atti della Reale Accademia d’Italia, Rendiconti della classe di scienze morali e storiche, 7th ser., 1 (1939): 1–14; Gianfranco Fiaccadori, “Epigraphia Aethiopica,” Quaderni Utinensi 8, 15–16 (1996): 325–334, at 325– 327, 328–331; Manfred Kropp, “‘Glücklich, wer vom Weib geboren, dessen Tage doch kurzbemessen …!’ Die altäthiopische Grabinschrift von Ham, datiert auf den 23. Dezember 873 n. Chr.,” Oriens Christianus 83 (1999): 162–176. 12  See note 5 above. 13  See note 4 above. 14  David R. Buxton, “The Christian Antiquities of Northern Ethiopia,” Archaeologia 92 (1947): 6–13; Antonio Mordini, “Un tissu musulman du Moyen Âge provenant du couvent de Dabra Dāmmo (Tigrai, Éthiopie),” Annales d’Éthiopie 2 (1957): 75–79; Derek Matthews and Antonio Mordini, “The monastery of Debra Damo, Ethiopia,” Archaeologia 97 (1959): 1–58, at 31–39, 50–51; Antonio Mordini, “Gli aurei kushāna del convento di Dabra Dāmmo,” in Atti del Convegno Internazionale di Studi Etiopici (2–4 avril 1959) (Rome, 1960), 249–254; François-­Xavier Fauvelle, Le rhinocéros d’or. Histoires du Moyen Age africain (Paris, 2013), 127–133. 15  The analysis concerning these two churches is developed below, at nn. 33–36.

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all periods is almost six times greater in northeastern Tǝgray than in western Tǝgray.16 Moreover, this density increased over time, particularly in the Aksumite and post-­Aksumite periods. One of the hypotheses put forward to explain the maintenance over time of the human occupation of the region and its densification relates to the strategic position of Gwǝlo Mäkäda on the trade route between the coast and the interior.17 These elements thus point to a progressive Christianization within Ethiopian society, but also to a cultural shift in which elites abandoned investment in the construction of secular edifices or “villas,” such as are known for the Aksumite period, in favor of religious buildings. Whether the concentration of churches in eastern Tǝgray reflects the existence of a single political authority or several – and which of these, if any, might be considered the “successor” of ancient Aksum – are questions which the available evidence does not allow us to answer. From the tenth century onwards, the comments of Arab authors offer some insight into the political situation in Ethiopia. Three different documents written between the late tenth and the mid-­eleventh century all allude to a queen governing Ethiopia. In his Kitāb ṣūrat al-­arḍ completed in 988, Ibn Ḥawḳal describes the situation of the region based on information obtained in Egypt during his visit in the 950s. Abyssinia was then governed by a queen who “killed the king who was known with the title of ḥaḍānī,” and ruled herself, as he stated in another passage, for about thirty years.18 An anonymous Egyptian author of the tenth century,19 describing a Yemeni embassy to Iraq in 969–970, noted that the zebra it offered as a gift had come “from one of the regions of al-­ Ḥabaša [Abyssinia] over which a woman reigns.”20 Without giving us an absolute dating of this woman’s reign, this information tells us that before 969–970 the queen already ruled Ethiopia. Finally, the History of the Patriarchs of the Egyptian Church, in the section dedicated to Philotheos (979–1003) and written by bishop Mikael of Tinnīs in the mid-­eleventh century, also evokes an Ethiopian queen.21 The patriarch Philotheos received a letter on this subject from King George of Nubia, at the 16  A. Catherine d’Andrea et al., “The Pre-­Aksumite and Aksumite Settlement of NE Tigrai, Ethiopia,” Journal of Field Archaeology 33 (2008): 151–176, at 156. 17  Ibid., 158, 169. 18  Enrico Cerulli, “L’Etiopia medievale in alcuni brani di scrittori arabi,” RSE 3 (1943): 272– 294, at 273. 19  Mohammed El-­Chennafi, “Mention nouvelle d’une ‘reine éthiopienne’ au IV e s. de l’hégire/Xe s. ap. J.-­C.,”Annales d’Éthiopie 10 (1976): 119–121, at 119–120. 20  Ibid., 120. 21  Johannes den Heijer, Mawhūb ibn Manṣūr ibn Mufarriǧ et l’historiographie copto-­arabe. Étude sur la composition de l’Histoire des Patriarches d’Alexandrie (Louvain, 1989), 9.

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request of an Ethiopian king whose name is never given. The Ethiopian king reported that “a woman, queen of the Banū l-­Ham(u)wīya, stood up against him and his country, took many people into captivity, burned many cities, devastated churches and drove him from place to place.” He required the help of the king of Nubia because he feared that “the Christian religion would vanish and disappear from among us; for behold, six patriarchs have occupied [the see of Alexandria] and they have taken no care for our country which is abandoned, without a pastor. Our bishops and priests are dead, the churches have been destroyed […]”.22 These texts therefore describe an identical context. In the years circa 950– 970, a woman from the Banū l-­Ham(u)wīya was able to oppose the Christian Ethiopian king and to occupy his territory. Her destruction of the churches definitely indicates she was non-­Christian. What her religion was remains unknown, as no satisfactory identification of the Banū l-Ham(u)wīya has been made to date.23 Whatever religion the queen professed, she embodied a movement of opposition to the process of Christianisation. This movement does not seem to be internal to the kingdom of Ethiopia, since it involved killing the king, but it perhaps reflects a response to Christian pressure. It appears that when the Christian king wrote to the ruler of Nubia, a Christian reconquest had taken place, but the support of the Alexandrian patriarch remained essential so that a new metropolitan could be appointed to consecrate newly-­built churches and ordain priests. Ethiopian historiography has addressed the episode concerning the queen, now known as Gudit (or Yodit or Ǝsato),24 constructing a negative legend about her from fragments transmitted by oral tradition and by the Synaxary, closely dependent on the History of the Patriarchs of the Egyptian Church. It has come 22  Jules Perruchon, “Notes pour l’histoire d’Éthiopie, Lettre adressée par le roi d’Éthiopie au roi Georges de Nubie sous le patriarcat de Philotée (981–1002/3),” Revue sémitique 1 (1893): 71–76, 359–372, at 362–363; HPEC, vol. 2, part 1, 171–172. 23  Much ink has been spilled to identify the Banū l-­Ham(u)wīya without any satisfactory explanation having been provided. One reads the name as “al-­Damutah,” making our queen the sovereign of Damot (Conti Rossini, Storia d’Etiopia, 286); another as “al-­Yahūdiya,” giving her a Jewish identity (Ignazio Guidi, “Due notizie storiche sull’Abissinia,” Giornale della Società Asiatica Italiana 3 [1889]: 176–179, at 177); another as “al-­Haguya,” the queen of the Agäws (Joseph Halévy, “Remarques sur un point contesté touchant la persécution de Nedjran,” Revue des études juives, 21 [1890]: 73–79, at 79). A more recent proposal makes her a Sidaama queen of the Bali Sultanate (Gianfranco Fiaccadori, “Bâli,” La Parola del Passato 47 [1992]: 439–445). 24  Sergew Hable Sellassie, Ancient and Medieval Ethiopian History, 203, 226; idem, “The Problem of Gudit,” Journal of Ethiopian Studies 10 (1972): 113–124. See also Caroline A. Levi, “Yodit” (Ph.D diss., School of Oriental and African Studies, 1992).

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to symbolize a long devolution of the Christian kingdom (but should it still be considered the kingdom of Aksum?) and confrontations between different political forces to exercise power over spaces freed from Aksumite authority. Ibn Ḥawḳal, as noted above, refers to the Christian ruler by the title ḥaḍānī (in Gǝʿǝz, ḥaṣ́ani). Etymologically ḥaṣ́ani means “nurse” or “tutor.”25 In the Gǝʿǝz translation of Jeremiah’s Paralipomenes, the term ḥaṣ́ani is used to render the title of king’s counselor, and thus perhaps signals a court dignity.26 The term is rare in medieval Ethiopian political usage, and one is tempted to connect Ibn Ḥawḳal’s use of it for the unnamed tenth-­century ruler to its appearance in another source: two related inscriptions in vocalized Gǝʿǝz, undated, difficult to read, and only partially translated, in which one Danəʾel celebrates his military achievements. Danəʾel describes himself as ḥaṣ́ani, and mentions another ḥaṣ́ani named Karuray;27 he also calls himself “son of Däbrä Afrem.” The latter datum seems to link Danəʾel to a Christian religious institution, as däbr typically designates a monastery, but the identification of Afrem remains debated.28 Danəʾel says he fought many peoples and regions and captured important booty; he alludes to people from Wälqayit who came to Aksum and against whom he was forced to fight, which certainly places him in the context of defensive military action in Tǝgray.29 That said, no data allow us to place Danə’el and his fellow ḥaṣ́ani (perhaps a predecessor) Kuraray in the precise context of the tenth-­century crisis described by Ibn Ḥawḳal and others. The twelfth-­century Zagwe king Ṭänṭäwǝdǝm also bore the title ḥaṣ́ani in an undated land grant; so did King Lalibala, in land grants of 1204 and 1225, where he also bore the title of nǝguś, the most usual word for king from the thirteenth century forward. After 1225, ḥaṣ́ani was no longer employed in association with the supreme power. In the reign of King ʿAmdä Ṣǝyon (1314–44), it was merely

25  August Dillmann, Lexicon linguae Aethiopicae, cum indice latino (Leipzig, 1865), 138. 26  Cerulli, “L’Etiopia medievale,” 275. 27  Enno Littmann et al., Deutsche Aksum-­Expedition, vol. 4, Sabaische, griechische und altabessinische Inschriften (Berlin, 1913), nos. 12 and 13. 28  A. K. Irvine, “Däbrä-­Férém,” in The Dictionary of Ethiopian biography, I. From Early Times to the End of the Zagwé Dynasty c. 1270, ed. Belaynesh Michael, Stanisław Chojnacki, and Richard Pankhurst (Addis Ababa, 1975), 45, identifies Däbrä Afrem not as a place but as a person; Gianfranco Fiaccadori (“Epigraphia Aethiopica,” 327–333) responds by hypothesizing that Däbrä Afrem is a place and identifies it with the church linked to Fǝremona (contracted in Fǝrem or Afrem), the first bishop of the Ethiopian Church, located near ʿAdwa. See also Stuart C. Munro-­Hay and Denis Nosnitsin, “Danəʾel,” in EAe 2 (2005), 84. For some scholars, this filiation indicates the usurpation of the title of ḥaṣ́ani by a monk (Fiaccadori, “Epigraphia Aethiopica,” 328). 29  Littmann, ed., Deutsche Aksum-­Expedition, vol. 4, 45.

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the title of a provincial governor.30 In our current state of evidence, therefore, ḥaṣ́ani is attested as a royal title from the tenth to the early thirteenth century. Whoever the unnamed tenth-­century Christian king was, his appeal to the patriarch of Alexandria allowed a renewal of relations between the Coptic Church and the Ethiopian kingdom. As the king’s letter observes, the tenth century had been particularly difficult for the Ethiopian Church, since for many years the patriarchate of Alexandria refused to appoint metropolitans to Ethiopia, and thus new priests could not be ordained. After his cry of alarm, and particularly from the middle of the eleventh century, exchanges between Egypt and Ethiopia resumed. Embassies regularly circulated between the two regions, not only to request and send a new metropolitan, but also as part of inspection visits. The result of these contacts, and of energetic activity in Ethiopia itself, was a thorough revitalization of the Ethiopian church. An important source for this process is the second part of the History of the Patriarchs, from the sixty-­sixth (Christodulos, 1047–1077) to the seventy-­fourth (John VI, 1189–1216). The authors of the biographical notices are contemporaries of the events and well informed of the situation they describe, being either the patriarch’s secretaries or established members of the Coptic community in Egypt.31 From the end of the eleventh century until the beginning of the thirteenth century, three embassies were mentioned by these authors, but there were almost certainly more: in this period at least seven metropolitans were appointed by the patriarchs for the church of Ethiopia. For each appointment, the Ethiopian ruler sent ambassadors bearing a letter of request and gifts to Egypt; the appointed metropolitan, on return, was also accompanied by ambassadors. Relations between the two churches were therefore regular throughout the period and show a real desire on both sides to revitalize Christianization in Ethiopia, from a quantitative perspective (church foundations, priestly ordinations, baptisms) and in terms of bringing Ethiopian practice into line with Coptic norms. The activity of the metropolitan Mika‌ʾel in the twelfth century illustrates this investment of the Coptic Church and its effects. Though the precise dates of his tenure are unknown, he was appointed by Patriarch Macarius II (1102– 1129), and was active in Ethiopia during the patriarchates of Gabriel II (1131– 1146) and John V (1146–1167).32 He was certainly still in office in 1149/1150 when

30  Manfred Kropp, ed. and trans., Der siegreiche Feldzug des Königs ʿĀmda-Ṣeyon gegen die Muslime in Adal im Jahre 1332 N. Chr., CSCO 538–539, SAe 99–100 (Louvain, 1994), 4 n. 29. 31  Den Heijer, Mawhūb ibn Manṣūr, 9–11. 32  H PEC, vol. 3, part 2, 56–57, 90–91.

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he consecrated the church of Mika‌ʾel Amba. So we learn from a document33 preserved in that church, a sort of testament written at the end of his life to sum up his achievements. The surviving text was copied into a Gospel manuscript in the seventeenth or eighteenth century, but analysis of it leads us to believe that it is a faithful copy of the twelfth-­century original.34 In it Mika‌ʾel claims: […] By the good pleasure of God I have anointed seven kings and consecrated 1,009 churches, and I have consecrated this monastery [Mika‌ʾel Amba] in the name of Saint Michael the archangel so that he may listen to my sorrow. This took place in the Year of the Martyrs 866 [1149/ 1150 CE]. And by the good pleasure of God I have ordained 27,000 priests, and I have made monks [or nuns] of 5,000 [persons], and I have baptized 50,000 persons in the rivers and in the churches, and I beg God that he may have compassion on me and hide my sins in his mercy. And I have built 70 churches [in all, including] at Nazret, four at Ś�̣olaʿǝt and one at Nora.35 The Christian renewal facilitated by Mika‌ʾel was therefore considerable, especially if we consider the seventy churches he claims to have founded. Among these one is notable: the church of Nazret, which recent work has shown to be an architecturally Coptic structure completely consonant with a foundation by an Egyptian metropolitan.36 Mika‌ʾel’s investment in the development of the Ethiopian Christian community was met with a corresponding local will, as attested by the churches already mentioned in eastern Tǝgray. In sum, the decline of the kingdom of Aksum from the seventh century, the progression of Christianization in the following centuries, and the breakdown of relations between Ethiopia and the church of Alexandria perhaps paved the 33  Sergew Hable Sellassie, Ancient and Medieval Ethiopian history, 203 n. 117; Stuart C. Munro-­Hay, Ethiopia and Alexandria. The Metropolitan Episcopacy of Ethiopia (Warsaw, 1997), 139–142, 161–162, 167–170; Denis Nosnitsin, “Mika‌ʾel I,” in EAe 3 (2007), 953. 34  See Emmanuel Fritsch, “New Reflections of the Image of Late Antique and Medieval Ethiopian Liturgy,” in Liturgy’s Imagined Past/s. Methodologies and Materials in the Writing of Liturgical History Today, ed. Teresa Berger and Bryan Spinks (Collegeville, MN, 2016), 56–65; Derat, L’énigme d’une dynastie sainte, 42–43; Marie-­Laure Derat et al., “Māryām Nāzrēt (Ethiopia): The 12th-­century transformations of an Aksumite site in connection with an Egyptian Christian community,” in Cult places in ancient Ethiopia and recent archaeological research. Proceedings of the International Conference on Archaeology in Ancient Ethiopia (Paris, 14–16 April 2016), ed. Iwona Gajda et Anne Benoist, forthcoming. 35  Fritsch, “New Reflections,” 57–58. 36  Derat et al., “Māryām Nāzrēt.”

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way for a political crisis that is rather difficult to highlight apart from the episode of the queen who killed the king of Ḥabaša. This period of ebb and flow of Christianisation ended in the eleventh century, with a decisive Christian renaissance made possible by the renewal of regular relations between Ethiopia and the patriarchate of Alexandria, itself undoubtedly supported by a strong political power. 2

The Zagwe Dynasty and the Question of the Territorial Anchoring of the Kingdom

A new royal lineage, known in historiography as the Zagwe dynasty, emerged in Ethiopia in this context. Was this dynasty composed of “southern elements,” instituting a transfer of power southward, and more precisely to the Lasta region? In order to bracket later historiographical projections of this dynasty it is necessary to refocus on the contemporary historical sources, at the cost of a discontinuous history. This documentation is very thin and refers exclusively to two sovereigns, Ṭänṭäwǝdǝm and Lalibala. Importantly, the written sources concerning them come from manuscripts and inscribed objects associated with churches that are not all “south” with respect to the Aksumite kingdom. Certainly, the churches of Lalibäla (in the Lasta region) preserve texts – a donation of land from King Lalibala copied in the Gospel of Betä Mädḫane ʿAläm, altar furniture bearing inscriptions where King Lalibala is the dedicatee – that bear witness to the role played by this sovereign there. But concerning this same king, we find an equally important documentation preserved in the Gospel of Däbrä Libanos of Šǝmäzana, in present-­day Eritrea, which records lands given to religious institutions in eastern Tǝgray. Similarly, the church of ʿUra Mäsqäl (ʿUra Qirqos), located a short distance from Däbrä Libanos but on the Ethiopian side of the present-­day border, holds a cross bearing an inscription in honor of Ṭänṭäwǝdǝm and land grants from the same sovereign, copied in a small manuscript. On the basis of this information, it would seem difficult to assert that the Zagwe came from or identified primarily with Lasta. Ṭänṭäwǝdǝm and Lalibala are linked to each other by their titulature. Ṭänṭäwǝdǝm presents himself as “Solomon, son of Murara”37 while Lalibala says: “I, ḥaṣ́ani Lalibäla, whose regnal name is Gäbrä Mäsqäl … son of Morara, son of Zanśǝyyum, son of ʿAssǝda.”38 Both thus claim to be “sons” of Morara or 37  This ascendency is written on an inscription on a metal cross preserved at ʿUra Qirqos: Derat, L’énigme d’une dynastie sainte, 38. 38  Ibid., 49–50, 56–57.

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Murara. No doubt a family link united Ṭänṭäwǝdǝm and Lalibala, who could be brothers, cousins, or uncle and nephew. But Lalibala alleges a much longer ancestry than Ṭänṭäwǝdǝm, since he evokes the predecessors of Morara, Zanśǝyyum and ʿAssǝda, the latter appearing as the ancestor of this royal lineage. We can therefore think that the first members of our new royal lineage exercised power during the twelfth century, before the reign of Lalibala, and that among the great figures of this dynasty three stand out particularly: ʿAssǝda, Zanśǝyyum and Morara. The latter undoubtedly played a leading role since he appears in the titulature of Ṭänṭäwǝdǝm and Lalibala. He was either the father of these two rulers, or an eminent figure whom both kings wanted to invoke. These reported genealogies on their own do not allow us to determine which ruled before the other. Other data, however, makes it fairly clear that Ṭänṭäwǝdǝm predated Lalibala by a century or more, and also clarifies the region over which he exercised his authority. Ṭänṭäwǝdǝm mentions Muslims from the region of Ṣǝraʿ, whom he fought, defeated, and seized (along with their land and cattle) to give to the Church of the Cross: And again, I had given to the Church of the Cross Ṣäʿandǝwat from Ṣǝraʿ, the land of the Muslims. The Most High gave us their land and possessions – we have faith (in) the Lord – having fought them, they being Muslims. As for me, I gave them to the Church of the Cross and to Gabrǝʾel, with their land, their livestock, their people and their cows – as for my flesh, may the Lord have mercy on me in his kingdom […].39 The region of Ṣǝraʿ in eastern Tǝgray indeed hosted a Muslim community between the tenth and twelfth centuries, as funeral inscriptions at Kwiḥa attest.40 The community had founded places of worship and was buried in the Muslim 39  Derat, L’énigme d’une dynastie sainte, 263, 268. 40  On the region see Wolbert Smidt and Denis Nosnitsin, “Ṣəraʿ,” in EAe 4 (2010), 625–628. On the inscriptions see Carlo Conti Rossini, “Necropoli musulmana ed antica chiesa cristiana presso Uogri Haribà nell’Enderta,” RSO 17 (1938): 399–408; Madeleine Schneider, “Stèles funéraires arabes de Quiha,” Annales d’Éthiopie 7 (1967): 107–125, at 107–118; eadem, Stèles funéraires musulmanes des Iles Dahlak (Mer Rouge) (Cairo, 1983); eadem, “Des Yamāmī dans l’Enderta (Tigre),” Le Muséon 122, 1–2 (2009): 131–148; Gianfrancesco Lusini, “Christians and Moslems in Eastern Tigrāy up to the XIV c.,” Studi Magrebini 25 (1993–1997): 245–252. The last stela discovered at Kwiḥa is attributed to the tenth-­ eleventh century: Wolbert Smidt, “Eine arabische Inschrift aus Kwiḥa, Tigray,” in Studia Aethiopica In Honour of Siegbert Uhlig on the Occasion of his 65th Birthday, ed. Verena Böll et al. (Wiesbaden, 2004), 259–268; idem, “Eine weitere arabische Inschrift von der osttigrayischen Handelsroute: Hinweis auf eine muslimische Kultstätte in der dunklen

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funeral tradition. The History of the Patriarchs of the Egyptian Church refers to such mosques’ construction in the eleventh century, and to the controversies they generated. According to Mawhūb ibn Manṣūr, a continuator of the History, during the patriarchate of Cyril II (1078–1092) a new metropolitan for Ethiopia was confirmed by the Fatimid vizier of Egypt after he promised to have mosques erected in Ethiopia.41 When the metropolitan’s brother later visited the vizier’s court, the vizier accused the metropolitan of failing to keep his promise, to which the brother replied that the metropolitan had built seven mosques in Ethiopia, but the Ethiopians had demolished them and imprisoned the metropolitan himself because of his action.42 These data, correlated with that of Ṭänṭäwǝdǝm’s land grants, are valuable from a number of perspectives. They attest to the close proximity of Muslim and Christian settlements in the eastern highlands, and to efforts toward coexistence (involving also Egyptian authorities) as well as conflicts over land and religious difference.43 They help to situate Ṭänṭäwǝdǝm’s reign chronologically in relation to these conflicts, though his final seizure of Muslims’ lands and goods, proclaimed in the king’s land grant, may have occurred somewhat after the mosque controversy described by Mawhūb in roughly the 1080s. Finally, to return to the question of the Christian kingdom’s regional heartland under the Zagwe, they demonstrate both Ṭänṭäwǝdǝm’s military activity in Kwiḥa/ Ṣǝraʿ and his benefaction to the ʿUra Mäsqäl church in the north of this region. Indeed, his land grant to ʿUra Mäsqäl makes reference to a number of officers in the area, evoking a developed administration. The king threatened excommunication against several śǝyyuman (literally, “appointed ones”) if they contravened the acts he had established: those of ʿAgamä, Bur, and Särawe, as well as an officer with the title of baḥǝr nägaśi, the viceroy (literally “king”) of the coast. He mentioned also a region called Gwǝlo Mäkäda over which several śǝyyuman exercised their authority.44 These regions cover an area in the Periode?” Aethiopica 12 (2009): 126–135; idem, “A note on the Islamic heritage of Tigray: the current situation of the Arabic Inscription of Wuqro,” Ityopis 1 (2011): 150–153. 41  Den Heijer, Mawhūb ibn Manṣūr, 81–116. 42  H PEC, vol. 2, part. 3, 350. 43  Conflicts between the Muslim community of Ṣəra‘ and Christians are mentioned in the late hagiography dedicated to Märqorewos (founder of the convent of Däbrä Dəmaḥ in the fourteenth-­fifteenth century): see Carlo Conti Rossini, ed. and trans., Vitae sanctorum indigenarum. I. Gadla Marqorēwos seu Acta Sancti Mercurii, CSCO 2nd ser, 22 (Paris, 1904; repr. as CSCO 33–34, SAe 16–17 [Louvain, 1955]), 18; John Spencer Trimingham, Islam in Ethiopia (London, 1952), 81 n. 2; Lusini, “Christians and Moslems,” 249, 251; Alessandro Bausi and Gianfrancesco Lusini, “Appunti in margine a une nuova ricerca sui conventi eritrei,” RSE 36 (1992): 5–36, at 18–19. 44  Derat, L’énigme d’une dynastie sainte, 136–140, 264, 269–270.

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central and eastern highlands as far as the Eritrean coast, and illustrate again that Lasta was not alone in being under the authority of the Zagwe kings. Ṭänṭäwǝdǝm’s grant mentions only those officials deemed pertinent to the protection of ʿUra Mäsqäl’s lands, and thus provides a glimpse of only a part of the Zagwe territorial administration. King Lalibala also issued land grants to churches in this region. They are of great significance for illustrating a different royal strategy for securing control over and legitimacy in the north, albeit one related to administration: namely, marital alliance with a powerful landholding family of the area. Lalibala’s queen, Mäsqäl Kǝbra, enjoyed a formal prominence unknown to any earlier Ethiopian queen. Lalibala included her name in his title and associated her in his royal acts;45 she also appears on the dedication of one of the altars of Lalibäla churches.46 Her name even reached the ears of the biographer of Patriarch John VI in Egypt.47 She may be called, indeed, a virtual co-­ruler of the kingdom. Now, in Lalibala’s grant to the church of Däbrä Libanos in Šǝmäzana, Mäsqäl Kǝbra is identified as the “Lady of Biḥat.” Biḥat is a locality in the vicinity of Šǝmäzana; Mäsqäl Kǝbra was therefore either from this region or controlled the lands of Biḥat, and perhaps both. Biḥat was among the lands given to the church at Šǝmäzana in the grant of 1225. This strongly suggests that Mäsqäl Kǝbra ceded her rights to these lands, or part of them, to the church on her husband’s behalf. If we square this data with the emphasis Lalibala placed on his queen’s role in his own formal acts and titles throughout the kingdom, we are led to the conclusion that she was a pillar of his power – thanks to her lineage, or to the lands she brought to the crown, or a combination of the two. Indeed, Lalibala invoked a double legitimacy in his land grants, one derived from his agnatic descent from Morara, Zanśǝyyum, ʿAssǝda, and another brought by the “Lady of Biḥat” whose role was probably also essential. This supposition is reinforced by the fact that in the fifteenth century, two queens of each royal reign bore the title bäʿaltiḥat, a contraction

45  As testified in the two land grants preserved in the Gospel of Däbrä Libanos of Šǝmäzana: see Conti Rossini, “L’evangelo d’oro,” 186–190 and Derat, L’énigme d’une dynastie sainte, 50–51, 57–58. 46  Gigar Tesfaye, “Découverte d’inscriptions guèzes à Lalibela,” Annales d’Éthiopie 14 (1987): 75–79, at 77; Claire Bosc-­Tiessé, “Catalogue des autels et meubles d’autel en bois (tābot et manbara tābot) des églises de Lālibalā: jalons pour une histoire des objets et des motifs,” Annales d’Éthiopie 25 (2010): 55–101, at 57–58. 47  Perruchon, “Extrait de la vie d’abba Jean,” 85; HPEC, vol. 3, part 2, 192–193.

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of Bäʿaltä Biḥat48 – Lady of Biḥat – testifying to the importance of the lineage of “ladies of Biḥat” to Ethiopian royalty.49 The importance of Mäsqäl Kǝbra and her lineage is also attested by her ability to place members of her birth family in high positions in the administration. Another episode recounted in the History of the Patriarchs relates that Queen Mäsqäl Kǝbra’s brother “Ḫīrūn” (according to the Arabic text, with uncertainties regarding transcription and vocalization), was consecrated bishop of the “city of the king” by the metropolitan Mika‌ʾel (in Arabic, Kil). The author even indicates that the queen made the metropolitan accede to her brother’s consecration. According to the metropolitan’s account, once installed as bishop Ḫīrūn tried to assassinate the metropolitan, forcing the latter to flee the country in 1210.50 If Lalibala’s land grants illustrate the importance of his queen in his territorial strategies, they also give a better sense than the land grants of Ṭänṭäwǝdǝm of the scope of his administration. The witnesses to these grants include many figures – bishops and other ranking clergy, as well as officers – who together were known in contemporary documentation as the “great [men] of Bǝgwǝna.” Today the term Bǝgwǝna refers to a district, just east of the neighboring district (Lasta) where Lalibäla is located.51 In the sixteenth century, Bǝgwǝna or Bugna was seen as the region of the Lalibäla churches.52 One could therefore interpret “great (men) of Bǝgwǝna” as meaning “great (men) from the region of the Lalibäla churches.” But this is not the sense we glean from contemporary texts. The great men named in them clearly represent an administration spanning the kingdom. The witnesses to the acts, gathered under the generic phrase “the great (men) of Bǝgwǝna,” number nineteen in the first donation of King Lalibala and seventeen in the second. Some held religious offices within the kingdom: the metropolitan, his spokesman, the bishop or bishops, the head of the deacons, 48  See Manfred Kropp, “‘Antiquae restitutio legis.’ Zur Alimentation des Hofklerus und einer Zeugenliste als Imago Imperii und Notitia Dignitatum in einer Urkunde des Kaisers Zär’a Ya’eqob im Condaghe der Hs. BM Or. 481, fol. 154,” Scrinium 1 (2005): 115–147, at 132–133 n. 56. 49  On this topic, see Margaux Herman, “Towards a History of Women,” in this volume. 50  Perruchon, “Extrait de la vie d’abba Jean,” 79–80; HPEC, vol. 3, part. 2, 186–187. 51  Concerning the history of Bǝgwǝna and Lasta place names, see Marie-­Laure Derat, “Du Begwenā au Lāstā : centre et périphéries dans le royaume chrétien d’Éthiopie du XIIIe au XVIe siècle,” Annales d’Éthiopie 24 (2009): 19–42 and Claire Bosc-­Tiessé, “Gouverner et définir un territoire. Géopolitique, art et production manuscrite au Lāstā entre 1667 et 1768,” Annales d’Éthiopie 24 (2009): 87–148. 52  Osbert G. S. Crawford, Ethiopian itineraries circa 1400–1524 including those collected by Alessandro Zorzi at Venice in the years 1519–1524 (Cambridge, 1958), 153.

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the chief priest, the priest of the king, the administrator of the church of Aksum (qäysä gäbäzä Ṣǝyon), and the abbot of the monastery of Mäṭaʿ/Däbrä Libanos bearing the title of ʿaqqabe säʿat or “keeper of the hours.” Other witnesses held secular positions: the head of the mäsänqo (musicians), the bearer of the medicine bottle (ṣäware narge mäsäräy), the secretary of the edicts (ṣähafe tǝʾǝzaz), or the head of the servants (the liqä betä qaṭṭin). Without being able to define precisely the scope of their functions, it is very likely that these dignitaries were persons close to the sovereign and that they participated in court protocol. Only two witnesses held an authority that emanated from a local level: the ʿaqqabe säʿat, who was the abbot of Däbrä Libanos of Šǝmäzana, and the qäysä gäbäzä Ṣǝyon, the administrator of the church of Aksum. All the others carried out a function at a realm-­wide level, whether in a religious or lay capacity. To the extent that these officials had duties over particular regions, those regions – as far as we can determine them – were in the north. For four offices (ṣäḥafälam, liqä ḫädar, mälhäzä and liqä mäkaso) admittedly, their regional ­authority, if such it was, cannot be determined in our present state of knowledge. Three others had regional authority in the north – the ḥasgwa, ma‌ʾǝkälä baḥǝr and ʿaqqabe ṣänṣän (or ʿaqaṣen). To these three dignitaries from northern regions can be added the liqä Barya (leader of the Barya group, in what is now northeastern Eritrea) and the liqä Aqäytat (leader of the Aqäytat group which occupied the land of Aqäyt – the liqä Aqäytat is also involved in the coronation ritual, representing dignitaries from the region around Aksum where the coronation takes place). By contrast, and surprisingly enough, the chief religious officer in Lalibäla, who is referred to as the liqä kahǝnat of Wärwär in later documentation,53 is not included, whereas the ʿaqqabe säʿat of Mäṭaʿ/Däbrä Libanos is. It is possible, and indeed likely, that these northern officers served as witnesses here because the lands being ceded in the relevant grant were in the north. It is nonetheless clear that Lalibala’s administration encompassed these northern regions, and that these northern officers, too, were counted among the “great men of Bǝgwǝna.” Another possibility is that Bǝgwǝna already had a geographical meaning in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, but it here applied to the officers’ origin rather than the sphere of their duties: in other words, the “great men of Bǝgwǝna” were a realm-­wide aristocracy in charge of the administration, but they all hailed from Lasta. Needless to say, in our current state of documentation this hypothesis is impossible to prove or disprove. The names, much less the origins of the Zagwe officers are in almost all cases completely unknown to 53  Claire Bosc-­Tiessé, “Gouverner et définir un territoire,” at 108.

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us. One exception we may cite, however, is the aforementioned Ḫīrūn: as bishop he would have been a member of this aristocracy, and as a member of the family of the “Lady of Biḥat” he must have come from north, from the region around Šǝmäzana in present-­day Eritrea. Given Lalibala’s evident interest in allying with a great family of the north and touting this alliance as a virtual co-­ reign of king and queen, it is hard to imagine that he at the same time defined his aristocracy in terms of a different and purely local identity. It must also be observed that the term “Zagwe” was never used in documents of the time, either by the rulers themselves or by outside observers. The biography of Patriarch John VI in the History of the Patriarchs of Alexandria presents King Lalibala in these terms: “The race of the king (was) the tribe called � �‫( ”]ا � نل‬with question marks concerning transcription from Gǝʿǝz Al-­Nakbah [‫�بك���ة‬ to Arabic and vocalization, and the hypothesis by Jules Perruchon that al-­ Nakbah could be understood as al-­Bekunah).54 Did the Coptic biographer translate “Bǝgwǝnay” with the expression “tribe called al-­Bekunah”? In that case, King Lalibala introduced himself as a member of this Bǝgwǝna aristocracy. Bǝgwǝna may thus well have been the current term for the kingdom, or its administration55 – the “great men of Bǝgwǝna” are simply the great men of the realm56 – and its application to the Lalibäla region is a later phenomenon related to the association of the saint-­king Lalibala and his cult with the churches he founded there. If the Zagwe kingdom was not limited to the region corresponding to the current Lasta and if, on the basis of the available documentation, it is even problematic to determine the geographical origin of this dynasty, then what was the function of the churches of Lalibäla in the kingdom and can we confirm that it was the capital of these kings? The role of King Lalibala in favor of these churches is unquestionable: he gave land to the church of Betä Mädḫane ʿAläm and he dedicated nine altars or altar furniture for the churches of the place.57 But why settle in this region, if the Zagwe were not from this area? We could make this statement for all the 54  H PEC, vol. 3 part. 2, 192–193, ١١٥. Jules Perruchon, “Notes pour l’histoire d’Éthiopie,” 85. 55  Derat, “Les donations du roi Lālibalā.” 56  See for example the mention of the “greats of the kingdom” in the land grant made by King Dawit to the church of Betälǝhem in Laḥä Maryam, Church of Betä Lǝhem, Gayǝnt, microform Donald Crummey Illinois/IES 88.XXIV.9, discussed in Claire Bosc-­Tiessé and Marie-­Laure Derat, “Acts of writing and authority in Begwena-­Lasta between the 15th and the 18th century: a regional administration comes to light,” Northeast African Studies 11, 2 (2011): 85–110. 57   Bosc-­Tiessé, “Catalogue des autels et meubles d’autel,” 62. It concerns the altar BMA02, dedicated to the cherubim.

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places in which the new royal lineage invested. Regarding Lalibäla, we have some answers. Work carried out on the site since 2009 has made it possible to better understand how the site has evolved over time and when particular changes occurred.58 These studies reveal that before the reign of King Lalibala, between the beginning of the tenth and the beginning of the eleventh century, a remarkable occupation of the site was manifested by the construction of monumental walls reminiscent of a fortress, overhanging the rock already partly dug.59 At that time, it is not certain that the entire population of the region was Christian.60 Consequently, during the reign of Lalibala, the churches of the homonymous site were fully functioning. If this marks a kind of southern boundary of the kingdom, because of royal patronage, the region seems to have a status apart from the other regions of the kingdom since it does not appear among those who are under the authority of one of the dignitaries of the kingdom. Unless the ṣäḥafälam, listed in the Bǝgwǝna great men list, is precisely the one who has authority over the area. But there is still a certain imbalance between the northern regions, represented by several lay officers, and this region. Was the site of the churches of Lalibäla established as the capital of the kingdom? This issue is far from being solved today. Some authors argue in favor of the identification of the “city of the king” mentioned in the History of the Patriarchs of the Egyptian Church with the site of Lalibäla, and therefore also with the seat of the metropolitan.61 But others tend to emphasize the absence of archeological evidence supporting the idea of the settlement of a large population in the region.62 Above all, this vision of a state with a fixed capital is not based on any evidence in contemporary documentation. Nor do we have any real evidence that the royal court was mobile at that time. Therefore, the site of Lalibäla undoubtedly holds a particular significance in the reign of King Lalibala, but on the scale of the reign of the Zagwe, from the available documentation, the least we can say is that it is not the only one. ʿUra 58  See François-­Xavier Fauvelle-­Aymar et al., “Rock-­cut stratigraphy: sequencing the Lalibela churches,” Antiquity 84, 326 (December 2010): 1135–1150; Claire Bosc-­Tiessé et al., “The Lalibela Rock Hewn Site and its Landscape (Ethiopia): An Archaeological Analysis,” Journal of African Archaeology 12, 2 (2014): 141–164. 59   Bosc-­Tiessé et al., “The Lalibela Rock Hewn Site,” 156. 60  Yves Gleize et al., “Le cimetière médiéval de Qedemt (Lālibalā): données préliminaires issues des campagnes 2010 et 2012,” Annales d’Éthiopie 30 (2015): 223–258. 61  Claude Lepage, “Un métropolite égyptien bâtisseur à Lalibäla (Éthiopie) entre 1205 et 1210,” CRAI, Jan-­Mar (= issue 1) (2002): 141–174; Jacques Mercier and Claude Lepage, Lalibela, wonder of Ethiopia. The monolithic churches and their treasures (London, 2012), 220–251. 62   Bosc-­Tiessé et al., “The Lalibela Rock Hewn Site,” 151–152.

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Mäsqäl for King Ṭänṭäwǝdǝm, or Däbrä Libanos of Šǝmäzana for King Lalibala place themselves at any rate in equivalent positions. The northern and southern boundaries of the kingdom were thus defined. Power was undoubtedly oriented more towards the southern regions than during the Aksumite period, but does it mean that these regions took power over the north? The arguments are rather weak, even non-­existent. 3

The Issue of the Zagwe Kings’ Identity

This brings us to the question of the identity of the Zagwe kings. The establishment of the Zagwe royal power in the Lasta region led historians to assume a different cultural and linguistic origin from the Aksumite kings. The Zagwe are considered to be Agäw, a Cushitic language group, which would have occupied all of present-­day Eritrea and the northern half of Ethiopia, as far as the Jamma River, and would have provided the linguistic substrate for Tǝgrǝñña (mainly spoken in Eritrea and in the Tǝgray region of Ethiopia) and Amharic. There are only a few pockets of Agäw speakers left, divided into four groups, speaking Bilin in Eritrea, Ḫamta in northern Wag (around Soqota), Kǝmant north of Lake Ṭana, and Awiya in western Goǧǧam. The name given to the dynasty, Zagwe – which does not appear in its contemporary documentation – has given rise to several interpretations. Zäʾagway contracted in Zagway, would mean in Agäw “of the king,”63 while in Gǝʿǝz Zäʾagäw “of Agäw,” would point towards the ethnic identity of this dynasty.64 Or again, it could be a construction starting from the title ḫasgwa (ḫawzǝgwa), a term which is found in the documentation linked to the dynasty. This last etymology would imply that dignitaries carrying this title seized power.65 The works of Carlo Conti Rossini are at the basis of the Agäw identity thesis. This scholar devoted a large part of his research to this dynasty.66 Relying on two types of information, he was the first to postulate an Agäw identity to 63  Carlo Conti Rossini, “Appunti ed osservazioni sopra i re Zāguē,” Rendiconti della Reale Accademia dei Lincei, 5th ser., 4 (1895): 341–359, at 356. The term “za” expresses the origin. 64  Gianfranco Fiaccadori, “Zagwe,” in EAe 5 (2014), 107–114, at 107. 65  Alessandro Bausi, “Ḫasgwa,” EAe 5 (2014), 341. 66  Carlo Conti Rossini, “Appunti ed osservazioni;” idem, “Sulla dinastia Zâguê,” L’Oriente 2, 3–4 (1896–1897): 144–159; idem, “L’evangelo d’oro;” idem, “Lettera a J. Halévy sulla caduta degli Zague,” Revue Sémitique 10 (1902): 373–377; idem, “Lettera a J. Halévy sullo statuto attuale della questione degli Zague,” Revue sémitique 11 (1903): 325–330; idem, “Gli atti di Re Na’akuĕto La’ab,” Annali, Istituto Superiore Orientale di Napoli, new ser. 2 (1943): 105–232; idem, “La caduta della dinastia Zague e la versione amarica del Be’ela Nagast,” Rendiconti della Reale Accademia dei Lincei, 5th ser., 31, 7–10 (1922): 279–314; idem, Studi

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explain, on the one hand, the names of the ascendants of Lalibala, such as Morara or ʿAssǝda, who were not of Semitic origin, and therefore “probably Agäw,” and, on the other hand, the oral traditions relating to the Zagwa in particular, a population occupying present-­day Tǝgray and Eritrea, not of Agäw language, but preserving a mythical origin remembering a migration from Lasta to Tǝgray. Carlo Conti Rossini then proposed a historical reconstruction, making the Zagwa descendants of the Zagwe, forced to flee Lasta and taking refuge in Tǝgray, at the time of the Zagwe’s overthrow in 1270, abandoning thus their Agäw language. In the Lives of Lalibala and Näʾakkweto Läʾab, hagiographers make some remarks about the language spoken by these rulers. They try in particular to give an interpretation to the name of Lalibala, which they consider mysterious since it has no meaning in Gǝʿǝz.67 They also report on a discussion between the king and his wife in which they are said to speak the language of their country and they pretend to translate their words into Gǝʿǝz.68 But the language itself is not identified. In the Life of Yǝmrǝḥannä Krǝstos, we also find the interjection ḥawisa, which Taddesse Tamrat identified with the Kǝmant (Agäw) root huwaš, meaning “to anoint.” Roger Schneider was skeptical about the word’s derivation from huwaš but still conceded that an Agäw origin for ḥawisa was “surely to consider.”69 Paolo Marrassini, however, has pointed out that this interjection is also attested in Gǝʿǝz.70 Ultimately, therefore, there is no concrete evidence whatever that the Zagwe spoke the Agäw language. The mutual borrowings between Cushitic and North Semitic languages generally have been well documented, and indicate above all the close relationships between populations speaking different languages.71 Which languages were spoken then in Ethiopia? In the kingdom of Aksum, Gǝʿǝz was the language spoken at least by the ruling elite. The fact that the victory inscriptions are written in vocalized Gǝʿǝz, and that on everyday objects, such as ceramics, one also finds the use of this language, attests to its current use. But there is no evidence to suggest that it was exclusive: other Semitic languages, such as proto-­Tigre, proto-­Tǝgrǝñña, proto-­Amharic, proto-­Argobba, su popolazioni dell’Etiopia (Rome, 1914), 53–105; idem, Storia d’Etiopia, 303–321; idem, Proverbi, tradizioni e canzoni tigrine (Verbania, 1942), 119–222. 67  Perruchon, Vie de Lalibala, 12, 77–78. 68  Conti Rossini, “Gli atti di Re Na’akuĕto La’ab,” 149, 208; Marrassini, Il Gadla Yemrehanna Krestos, 5. 69  Taddesse Tamrat, Church and State in Ethiopia, 57 n. 3; Roger Schneider, “Notes éthiopiennes,” Journal of Ethiopian Studies 16 (1983): 105–114, at 113. 70  Dillmann, Lexicon linguae Aethiopicae, 116–117. 71  Wolf Leslau, “Analysis of the Geʿez vocabulary: Geʿez and Cushitic,” RSE 32 (1988): 60–109.

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and proto-­Gafat were probably already spoken, but these other languages are more difficult to characterize since they are not transcribed for this period. The borrowings of Gǝʿǝz from Cushitic languages, particularly from the Agäw group, signal at least the use of a proto-­Agäw contemporary with spoken Gǝʿǝz. Agäw populations, indeed, were mentioned from the third century forward on Aksumite inscriptions.72 It is generally considered that from about the turn of the second millennium, Gǝʿǝz was no longer a spoken language, but simply written. Not long thereafter Tǝgrǝñña emerges occasionally in the documentation, another clue to the obsolescence of Gǝʿǝz in common speech.73 Apart from personal names that may be Cushitic – Lalibala, Morara, ʿAssǝda – the texts resulting from the Zagwe administration, in particular the land grants of Ṭänṭäwǝdǝm and Lalibala, are principally in Gǝʿǝz. In the case of the donation of Ṭänṭäwǝdǝm, some words are in Tǝgrǝñña, but none in Agäw.74 Just as in the Life of Libanos, terms in Tǝgrǝñña have been used in the Gǝʿǝz text.75 It is therefore particularly difficult to reach a conclusion as to the language of the Zagwe rulers. The question of the Agäw identity of the dynasty is far from being settled. There is a fragile basis for what is often treated as an established fact today. Above all, by emphasizing the otherness of the Zagwe, we forget to see their affinities or the quest for kinship on the part of the new dynasty vis-­à-­vis its predecessors. Besides the fact that Kings Ṭänṭäwǝdǝm and Lalibala used the Gǝʿǝz language to administer their kingdom and presented themselves as Christian kings, their titles also reveal a desire to embrace the Aksumite heritage. In his land grants, King Lalibala partially reproduces the Aksumite rulers’ style of self-­presentation. He calls himself “a brave man who is not defeated by the enemy through the power of the cross of Jesus Christ”,76 just as the king ʿEzana (fourth century CE) was, according to the Aksumite inscriptions, “son of Ǝllä ʿAmida […] who is not defeated by the enemy. By the power of the Lord of Heaven who has given me, the Lord of all that I believe in, I, the king who is not defeated by the enemy, let no enemy stand before me and let no enemy be

72  Taddesse Tamrat, “Process of ethnic interaction and integration in Ethiopian history: the case of the Agäw,” Journal of African History 29 (1988): 5–18, at 8–10. 73  On the (doubtless gradual) obsolescence of Gǝʿǝz as a spoken language see the discussion in Alessandro Bausi’s “Ethiopia and the Christian Ecumene” in this volume, at n. 5. On Tǝgrǝñña see n. 74 below. 74  Derat, L’énigme d’une dynastie sainte, 33. 75  See Bausi, ed. and trans., La “Vita” et i “Miracoli” di Libānos, XXVIII n. 23. 76  Conti Rossini, “L’evangelo d’oro,” 188–190; Derat, L’énigme d’une dynastie sainte, 50, 57.

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behind.”77 By copying the language of the Aksumite inscriptions, King Lalibala sought to perpetuate the heritage of the ancient kingdom. The use of a nickname (sägwa), in addition to one’s personal and regnal names, is another sign of this perpetuation or reactivation of ancient traditions. King Ṭänṭäwǝdǝm had three names: his personal name Ṭänṭäwǝdǝm, his regnal name Solomon, and his sägwa Gäbrä Madḫen, “servant of the Savior.”78 Virtually all Christian Ethiopian kings had a personal and a regnal name, regardless of the period. The sägwa was more specific to Aksumite rulers, like King Kaleb whose nickname was Ǝllä Aṣbǝḥa.79 King Lalibala also seems to have had a nickname, but a confusion has occurred between his personal name, Lalibala, and his nickname, also given as Lalibala in the Kǝbrä nägäśt: “at the time of King Gäbrä Mäsqäl and his [sc. whose] nickname (sägwahu) was Lalibala.”80 Was this a conscious and deliberate borrowing? Or did the scribes of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries draw on a common cultural background that included Gǝʿǝz, Christianity and an idealistic vision of the king as an invincible warrior? In either case, the intertextuality between the Aksumite inscriptions, which speak of the invincibility of the king in Gǝʿǝz, and the land grants of Lalibala, which use the same expressions in Gǝʿǝz, is undeniable. What is unknown is whether, four or five centuries after Aksum’s decline, the expression was still sufficiently common for scholars to use it from memory, or whether, on the contrary, they had to return to inscriptions, and consequently to investigate in the manner of historians the titulature of the Aksumite rulers. Either way the result is the same: King Lalibala presented himself in the manner of an Aksumite king, thus seeking to emphasize his links to this ancient kingdom. Although the surviving written documentation concerning the Zagwe kings is particularly sparse, the land grants of Ṭänṭäwǝdǝm and Lalibala suggest a well-­established use of this type of document. The four texts of this kind that can be linked to the Zagwe dynasty are only the relics of an undoubtedly much greater documentary production. The formulas used to express the land rights (or exclusions of land rights) given by the sovereigns to the churches are the same at the time of Ṭänṭäwǝdǝm as at the time of Lalibala.81 There was, at least, a solid transmission over time among scribes, secretaries, and guarantors 77  R IÉ 2, 263 (RIÉth 189) ; Marrassini, Storia e leggenda, 231–232. 78  Derat, L’énigme d’une dynastie sainte, 35–36, 261, 266. 79  R IÉ 2, 7–8 (RIÉth 191). 80   Carl Bezold, ed. and trans., Kebra Nagast. Die Herrlichkeit der Könige. Nach den Handschriften in Berlin, London, Oxford und Paris … (Munich, 1905), ፻፸፪ (=138). See also Fiaccadori, “Per la cronologia di un atto,” 202. 81  Derat, L’énigme d’une dynastie sainte, 34–37.

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of land law. The construction of the formula expressing the donation, around three verbs “I have had written, I have had attributed in gwǝlt and I have assigned” is found in the donations of Lalibala as in that of Ṭänṭäwǝdǝm, whereas in the majority of grants we know, the formula is much shorter, such as “I have attributed a gwǝlt” or “I have given a gwǝlt.” This typology characterizes the administrative documents of this period. Other land grants must therefore have existed but have not reached us. Indeed, the function of “secretary of the edicts” (ṣäḥafe tǝʾǝzaz) mentioned in one of Lalibala’s donations confirms the existence of an organized and hierarchical administration, which undoubtedly issued more than a handful of acts. The foundation of churches and the donation to them of land and war booty also place the Zagwe dynasty in real continuity with their Aksumite predecessors. The sixth-­century king Kaleb did the same in the Ḥimyarite kingdom of Yemen after his famous conquests there, as he announced in an inscription, written in South Arabic script, that was discovered in Aksum: “I erected a sanctuary in Ḥamer [Ḥimyar], at ‘qn’l, full of zeal for the name of the Son of God in whom I believe, and I built its gäbäz and consecrated it.”82 According to the Acts of Arethas, Kaleb built a church in the royal Ḥimyarite palace of Zafar and had a bishop sent from Alexandria; he founded another church in Naǧrān, and restored yet others.83 These foundations appear as much as the “booty offered to the Lord” as an act immediately following the military triumph, and Kaleb giving thanks to God for this victory. The Acts of Arethas adds an important detail concerning the church of Naǧrān: the king donated “domains out of the royal possessions and, according to the command of Saint Arethas, three domains out of my [personal] fortune.”84 In the seventh century, King Armaḥ founded churches and allocated land to them, exempting them from the taxes

82  Roger Schneider, “Trois nouvelles inscriptions royales d’Axoum,” in IV Congresso Internazionale di Studi Etiopici, 1. Sezione storica (Rome, 1974), 776–777; Joëlle Beaucamp, Françoise Briquel-­Chatonnet, and Christian J. Robin, “La persécution des chrétiens de Nagran et la chronologie himyarite,” Aram 11–12 (1999–2000): 15–83, at 39. Gäbäz is sometimes translated as “cathedral” in reference to gäbäzä Aksum, but may more cautiously be identified as a large church. 83  Beaucamp, Briquel-­Chatonnet, and Robin, “La persécution des chrétiens de Nagran,” 26–29; Marina Detoraki, ed., Le Martyre de saint Aréthas et de ses compagnons (BHG 166) (Paris, 2007), 280–282. A Gǝʿǝz translation of the Greek text was done before 1291/1292: see Alessandro Bausi and Alessandro Gori, eds. and trans., Tradizioni orientali del ‘Martirio di Areta.’ La prima recensione araba e la versione etiopica. Edizione critica e traduzione (Florence, 2006), 94, 292–297. 84  The Greek text is more explicit than the Gǝʿǝz one, and is cited first here: Detoraki, ed., Le Martyre de saint Aréthas, 282; Bausi and Gori, Tradizioni orientali, 298–299.

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normally due to the royal court.85 The exemptions mentioned are precisely the same as those found in Ṭänṭäwǝdǝm’s and Lalibala’s donations. The model of the Ethiopian Christian king that emerged during the sixth-­seventh centuries thus continued into the twelfth-­thirteenth centuries, just as the writing of royal grants shows real continuity. But the relationship between the Zagwe dynasty and the Aksumite kings is perhaps constructed in a quest for legitimacy and continuity. This raises the question of the usurpation of royal power by the Zagwe. 4

Were the Zagwe Kings Usurpers?

In 1270, under rather obscure circumstances, Yǝkunno Amlak seized the kingdom and established a new dynasty described as “Solomonid” in the historiography. The dynastic rupture was articulated around the regional origins of this new king, who was described as the “king of Amhara” by the Mamluk chancellery in Egypt.86 But Yǝkunno Amlak himself took actions denoting continuity with his predecessors. He returned the land that King Lalibala had donated in the Ham region after it was looted by a local governor.87 He founded a church in Gännätä Maryam in Lasta, near the churches of Lalibäla, where he is depicted on the walls.88 It is only from the fourteenth century that texts dealing with the history of the kingdom accused Yǝkunno Amlak’s predecessors of being usurpers. Among them was the Kǝbrä nägäśt, which articulated an Ethiopian royal ideology based on descent from Solomon and the Queen of Sheba: the royal lineage thus belonged to the “house of Israel,” and was the special chosen of God thanks to its possession of the Ark of the Covenant. The colophon of the Kǝbrä nägäśt states that this book was translated from Coptic into Arabic in 1225 CE, 85  Walter Müller, “Zur Aethiopischen Inschrift vor der alten Kathedralkirche in Axum,” in Neue Ephemeris für Semitische Epigraphik, vol. 1, ed. Rainer Degen, Walter W. Müller, and Wolfgang Röllig (Wiesbaden, 1972), 132; Manfred Kropp, “Siegbert Uhlig: Äthiopische Paläographie. Stuttgart, 1988 (Äthiopistische Forschungen, 22). Mit einem Exkurs: Die Datierung der Hs. Abba Garima II,” Oriens Christianus 76 (1992): 260–266; Getatchew Haile, “The Marginal Notes in the Abba Gärima Gospels,” Aethiopica 19 (2016): 7–26, at 14–15, 22; Derat, L’énigme d’une dynastie sainte, 37. 86  Julien Loiseau, “The Ḥaṭī and the Sultan. Letters and embassies from Abyssinia to the Mamluk court,” in Mamlūk Cairo. A Crossroad for Embassies, ed. Frédéric Bauden and Malika Dekkiche (Leiden, 2019), 638–657. 87  Conti Rossini, “L’evangelo d’oro,” 193, 195. 88  Marilyn E. Heldman and Getatchew Haile, “Who is Who in Ethiopia’s Past, Part III: Founders of Ethiopia’s Solomonic Dynasty,” Northeast African Studies 9, 1 (1987): 1–11, at 4.

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during the reign of Lalibala, in Nazret, the church founded by Metropolitan Mika‌ʾel in the mid-­twelfth century and which presumably hosted a small Egyptian community.89 The colophon adds that King Lalibala did not want this text to be translated into Gǝʿǝz because he was part of a family, the Zagwe, that was not Israelite and therefore did not have the legitimacy to rule the kingdom of Ethiopia.90 The Kǝbrä nägäśt is considered to have spread in the Ethiopian kingdom during the fourteenth century and is seen as a plea written by clerics of Tǝgray to recall that the glory of Ethiopian kings was forged in this region, around Aksum.91 But the idea according to which the kingdom of Ethiopia was that of the Queen of Sheba, who met King Solomon, circulated before this time in Egypt: it is found in the History of the Patriarchs of the Egyptian Church from the beginning of the eleventh century. It then spread in Coptic literature, as testified by the Churches and monasteries of Egypt and the neighboring countries, in the late eleventh-­early twelfth century.92 This latter work adds a further element that may be considered constitutive of the Ethiopian Solomonid myth: the Ethiopians’ possession of the Ark of the Covenant.93 Consequently, the claim in the Kǝbrä nägäśt’s colophon concerning a translation of the work from Coptic into Arabic during the reign of Lalibala is not totally far-­fetched. It suggests that a core of the Solomonid myth was associated with Ethiopia in a period contemporary with the Zagwe dynasty. And indeed, some Zagwe kings evinced an interest in this myth: Ṭänṭäwǝdǝm, as we have seen, took the throne name Solomon.94 Perhaps the perspective of the Zagwe dynasty and its successor must be reversed. To establish their own legitimacy to rule, the descendants of Yǝkunno Amlak may have recovered the ideological arsenal of the Zagwe to turn it against them, calling them usurpers and presenting themselves as the legitimate lineage, the heirs of Aksum. This interpretation could help to explain why the Zagwe, though branded as illegitimate, were also accepted as saints. The recognition of holiness was perhaps a reaction of part of the Ethiopian 89  Derat et al., “Māryām Nāzrēt.” 90  Bezold, Kebra Nagaśt, 138; Gérard Colin, trans., La Gloire des Rois (Kebra Nagast) (Geneva, 2002), 110; Robert Beylot, trans., La Gloire des Rois (Turnhout, 2008), 383–384. 91  Manfred Kropp, “Zur Deutung des Titels ‘Kebrä nägäst,’” Oriens Christianus 80 (1996): 108–115, at 112–115. 92  H PEC, vol. 2, part 1, 118; Basil T. A. Evetts, ed., The churches and monasteries of Egypt and some neighbouring countries, attributed to Abû Ṣâliḥ, the Armenian (Oxford, 1895), 284–286. 93  Evetts, ed., The churches and monasteries of Egypt, 287–288. 94  Derat, L’énigme d’une dynastie sainte, 38–39.

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society to the damnatio memoriae of the Zagwe. The lives of its saints-­kings were eventually written down, beginning with that of King Lalibala in the fifteenth century. The overthrow of the Zagwe dynasty certainly opened a new era in the Christian kingdom of Ethiopia. But here too, as in earlier periods, we may observe elements of continuity, in royal church foundations, in land grants to ecclesiastic institutions, in royal patronage.

chapter 3

Territorial Expansion and Administrative Evolution under the “Solomonic” Dynasty Deresse Ayenachew The so-­called “Solomonic” dynasty, founded by Yǝkunno Amlak (1270–1285) in 1270, ruled the Christian kingdom through the mid-­sixteenth century, and indeed much longer. The longevity of the dynasty is notable, and thanks in large part to the greater survival of sources from the later thirteenth century on, we are much better informed about it than about any other ancient or medieval Ethiopian ruling house, Christian or otherwise. It is not surprising, therefore, that scholars have explored a number of questions that shed light, directly or indirectly, on the factors that contributed to the dynasty’s ability to maintain itself. One feature that has garnered attention in this respect is the dynasty’s succession practices. The kings of this lineage practiced polygamy, and all their sons, whether by official wives or concubines, were eligible to succeed to the royal office.1 The usual practice seems to have been for the eldest son to succeed the deceased king. If that son died without heirs, then the crown passed to his brothers in turn, but if he ruled for some time and left sons of his own, then the crown passed to his sons, not his brothers. Ratification by the royal council rendered the succession official. In a system apparently in place since the onset of the Solomonic dynasty, the “extra” sons/brothers were kept in seclusion on one of the flat-­topped mountains of Amhara, Amba Gǝšän, called in contemporary documents the Däbrä nägäśt or “Mountain of kings”. Though they could receive an education there, work the land, even marry, they could not leave unless called down to rule.2 This system, doubtless intended to maintain a supply of capable male heirs but prevent them from undertaking rebellions and coups, facilitated a number of smooth successions. But it was 1  On royal polygamy see Margaux Herman’s essay, “Towards a History of Women in Medieval Ethiopia,” in this volume. 2  Taddesse Tamrat, Church and State in Ethiopia, 1270–1527 (Oxford, 1972), 279–290; idem, “Problems of royal succession in fifteenth century Ethiopia: a presentation of the documents,” in IV Congresso Internazionale di Studi Etiopici (Roma, 2–4 April, 1972), ed. Enrico Cerulli, 2 vols. (Rome, 1974), 1: 501–535, at 533–534; Haile Gabriel Dagne, “Amba Gǝšän,” in EAe 1 (2003): 220–221.

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not foolproof. If a king’s reign were long, as was the case with Dawit II (1378/9–1412), he might be pressured to abdicate in favor of an eldest son already grown to adulthood; rivalries might develop even within his lifetime between his several sons, or perhaps better between their often different mothers, kin, and other officials allied with them, who were not secluded at Amba Gǝšän.3 Such jockeying for succession and even possible ouster are well attested for another long reign, that of Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob (1434–68), who executed several sons, and their mothers, for plots (real or perceived) against his throne. But the most volatile situations arose when a king left a very young son as heir. As Taddesse Tamrat has observed, those officials who had made their careers under the young heir’s deceased father were intent upon maintaining that specific lineage, and thus the succession of the young (even infant) heir, whereas the brothers of the deceased king, viewing the kingdom as effectively in the hands of officials rather than a true member of the lineage, considered their own rights to have been abrogated. Such occurred at least three times between the late thirteenth and fifteenth century, and serious struggles for the throne amounting to civil war were the result.4 Perhaps in response to the dangers of this eventuality, a three-­person council was instituted, successfully, for the young Ǝskǝndǝr in the late fifteenth century, and again for the underage Lǝbnä Dǝngǝl in the early sixteenth.5 Such challenges from within the extended royal family and its allied elites could spur kings to reassert their God-­given right ro rule. As Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob declared, “O people of Ethiopia, do not search for another (king) that God has not given you, but obey the one whom He makes king for you at different times … [and] follow him in good conduct.”6 A more perennial impetus to legitimization was the need to attract the first loyalty of subjects and unite them in a common cause against the kingdom’s enemies. For the Solomonids, as for most 3  In addition to the works in note 2 above, see Marie-­Laure Derat, “‘Do Not Search for Another King, One Whom God Has Not Given You’: Questions on the Elevation of Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob (1434– 68),” Journal of Early Modern History 8, 3–4 (2004): 210–228. 4  Taddesse Tamrat, “Problems of Royal Succession,” who notes especially the five-­year period after the death of Yagba Ṣǝyon (1285–1294), the four years after the death of Yǝsḥaq (1430– 1434), and the roughly six-­month reign of Ǝskǝndǝr’s infant son ʿAmdä Ṣǝyon II (1494). 5  Ǝskǝndǝr’s regent council consisted of the queen mother and the highest-­ranking ecclesiastical and military officers of the administration, the ʿaqqabe säʿat and the bǝhtwäddäd, to be discussed below. On Ǝleni’s career and the growing role of the queen mother generally see Margaux Herman, “Les reines en Éthiopie du XV e au XVIIe siècle. Épouses, mères de roi, ‘mère du royaume’” (Ph.D diss., Université Paris 1 Panthéon-­Sorbonne, 2012), and her essay in this volume. 6  Getatchew Haile, ed. and trans., The Epistle of Humanity of Emperor Zärʾa Yaʿəqob (Ṭomarä tǝsbǝʾt), 2 vols., CSCO 522–523, SAe 95–96 (Louvain, 1991), at vol. 1 (text), 62–63.

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ruling dynasties, this engendered a royal ideology articulated through texts and enacted in ceremonies. Like succession practices, this too has attracted scholarly attention in recent decades. The classic expression of the dynasty’s royal ideology is that enshrined in the Kǝbrä nägäśt (“Glory [or Nobility] of the Kings”). This work reinforced the authority of the ruling dynasty by asserting its descent from the biblical kings David and Solomon. The biblical story of the visit to Solomon’s court of the Queen of Sheba, here called Makǝdda and identified as the queen of Ethiopia, results in the birth of a son, Mǝnilǝk. Raised in Ethiopia, he returns to Israel where he is recognized by Solomon, anointed (with the throne name David, Gǝʿǝz Dawit), and invited to rule the Israelites, but chooses to rule in Ethiopia instead. From him springs the lineage uniquely chosen by God to rule Ethiopia in perpetuity, and by extension his kingdom becomes the second Promised Land.7 According to its colophon, the Kǝbrä nägäśt was translated from Arabic into Gǝʿǝz by an official who can be securely dated to the reign of King ʿAmdä Ṣǝyon (1314–44), and though its translation may have originally been sponsored to fuel the pretensions of a rival ruling house (as we shall discuss below), the kings of this dynasty promoted its claims in relation to themselves. This can be seen in other works, of a more legal or ceremonial nature, that reflect ideas in the Kǝbrä nägäśt. Many are found in a collection known as the “Order of the Kingdom” (Śǝrʿatä mängǝśt), which compiles works related to the royal court’s rituals and dignitaries and often circulated in manuscripts with the Kǝbrä nägäśt or with royal chronicles. The first work in the collection, also called the “Order of the Kingdom,” traces the origin of the royal administration, its offices and office holders to legends of Mǝnilǝk and his companions. The oldest manuscript copy of this work, from the seventeenth century, asserts that the work was written during the reign of ʿAmdä Ṣǝyon, suggesting that this reign was an important moment in crystallizing the ideology and ruling mechanisms of the dynasty (though the collection, being in continuous use, was updated and expanded after that time).8 7  The work has been translated by Ernest Alfred Wallis Budge, The Queen of Sheba and her Only Son Menyelek … (London, 1922; repr. 2007) and Gérard Colin, La Gloire des rois (Kebra Nagast): Epopée nationale d’Éthiopie (Geneva, 2002). For recent studies and further references see Paolo Marrassini, “Kǝbrä nägäśt,” in EAe 3 (2007), 364–368; Pierluigi Piovanelli, “The Apocryphal Legitimation of a ‘Solomonic’ Dynasty in the Kǝbrä nägäśt – a Reappraisal,” Aethiopica 16 (2013): 7–44; idem, “‘Orthodox’ Faith and Political Legitimation of a ‘Solomonic’ Dynasty of Rulers in the Kebra Nagast,” in The Armenian Apocalyptic Tradition: A Comparative Perspective, ed. Kevork B. Bardakjian and Sergio La Porta (Leiden, 2014), 688–705. 8  Bairu Tafla and Heinrich Scholler, Serʿata Mangest: An Early Ethiopian Constitution (Addis Ababa, 1974; repr. in Verfassung und Recht in Übersee 4 [1976]: 487–99); Denis Nosnitsin, “Śǝrʿatä mängǝśt,” in EAe 4 (2010), 632–634, with references further literature.

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Another important work is that for the ceremony of royal coronation, called the Śǝrʿatä qwǝrḥat (lit. “Order for tonsure”). The ceremony reflected the ideology of Solomonic descent and the rulers’ biblical priest-­king status in the tonsuring and anointing of kings at their coronation.9 Royal chronicles inform us that King Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob celebrated his coronation at Aksum, the most prestigious and symbolically resonant site, in 1436, but the location could vary: his successor Bäʾǝdä Maryam (1468–78) held his at Atronsä Maryam in Amhara, and Ǝskǝndǝr (1478–94) at Yäläbäša/Ṭəlq in Fäṭägar.10 Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob in particular underscored his divine election by having his own dream about his coronation recorded in a book of homilies about the Virgin Mary: in it, the Virgin herself crowned him, saying, “‘This mountain is the throne of the kingdom of Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob. No one can shake it, because he is the executor of the will of my Son.’”11 The king also enacted with particular emphasis his status as priest-­ king, issuing a number of theological works that went under his name and deciding upon important doctrinal questions; his royal authority over church and state was remembered, in the years after his death, in the Life of Märḥa Krǝstos, abbot of Däbrä Libanos of Šäwa from 1463 to 1497.12 His reign, like that of ʿAmdä Ṣǝyon, thus appears as another important moment in the elaboration of Solomonic royal ideology. Finally, the “Order of the Banquet” (Śǝrʿatä gǝbr) has been mined to understand the mechanism of the royal court and the ceremonial enactment of its hierarchies and relationships.13 Though written down during the reign of Bäʾǝdä Maryam, it reflects practices that were certainly in use earlier. Those practices center on the great banquet that was held at the beginning of the Ethiopian new year, in September, when the royal court, reduced in size during 9  Jean-­François Sciarrino, “Le Serʿatä Qwerhät: recherches sur le cérémonial éthiopien du sacre des rois avant le XVI siècle” (master’s thesis, Université de Paris 1 Panthéon-­ Sorbonne, 1994). 10  Jules Perruchon, ed. and trans., Les chroniques de Zarʾa Yâʿeqôb et de Ba‌ʾeda Mâryâm, rois d’Éthiopie de 1434 à 1478 (texte éthiopien et traduction) (Paris, 1893), 48–51; idem, “Histoire d’Eskinder, d’Amda Seyon II et de Naod, rois d’Ethiopie,” Journal Asiatique, 9th ser., 3 (1894), 26 (Gǝʿǝz text). 11  Getatchew Haile, ed. and trans., The Mariology of Emperor Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob of Ethiopia: Texts and Translations (Rome, 1992), 163. 12  Stanislas [Stanisław] Kur, ed. and trans., Actes de Marḥa Krestos, 2 vols., CSCO 330–331, SAe 62–63 (Louvain, 1972), vol. 1 (text), 44–45. 13  Manfred Kropp, “The Serʿata Gǝbr: A Mirror View of Daily Life at the Ethiopian Royal Court in the Middle Ages,” Northeast African Studies 10, 2–3 (1988): 51–87; Marie-­Laure Derat, “Le banquet à la cour du roi d’Éthiopie au XV e siècle: Dons forcés et contreparties,” Hypothèses 5, 1 (2002), 267–274; idem, “Le banquet royal en Éthiopie au XVe siècle: fiscalité et festivités,” in Cuisine et société en Afrique: histoire, saveurs, savoir-­faire, ed. M. Chastenet, François-­Xavier Fauvelle and D. Juhé-­Beaulaton (Paris, 2002), 41–52.

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the rainy season, now regained its full dimensions: in the later fifteenth and sixteenth century, some 30,000 to 40,000 people participated. One thing the text illuminates therefore is the size of the kätäma, the royal court or “camp,” which generally stayed in one place during the rainy season, when travel was more difficult, but moved through the kingdom during the long dry season (September–­June). The roving kätäma was itself an important feature of the Solomonic dynasty’s mode of rule, allowing the king to manifest his presence, dispense justice, and quell disturbances in various parts of his kingdom, while also spreading over different areas the burden of supplying the court with food. The Śǝrʿatä gǝbr also describes the arrangement of the tents within the kätäma, which reflected spatially the hierarchy of the court and kingdom. The king’s lodgings were located at the center; closest to his were those of the royal queens and the highest-­ranking officials, in a central enclosure accessed by two guarded gates that could be entered only at the king’s will.14 The ceremony of the banquet, in its turn, enacted such hierarchies in various ways: the amount of foodstuffs to be offered for the banquet by different ranks of personnel, the sequence in which they were served, and the quality of the plate on which they ate.15 One fundamental principle undergirding the ceremony was that all offices and titles, and the lands attached to them, were a gift of the king: the offerings made for the banquet were therefore a form of tribute, which the king then symbolically redistributed to his people. The banquet thus indirectly reflected ideas about the king’s relationship to the land he governed. The systems by which land was worked and held in pre-­modern Ethiopia have been studied since the 1960s, with a new wave of scholarship appearing in the last two decades.16 For present purposes a few comments specifically regarding the position of the royal power may suffice. In ideal terms, the king was the protector and provider of prosperity for his subjects, and land was certainly their main source of wealth. Subjects owned the land, through a right known as rǝst. Rǝst was heritable and normally inalienable, and Christian Ethiopians of all social ranks, including elites and members of the royal family, held lands by it. A second form of land-­right, overlaid 14  On the royal camp’s arrangement see Deresse Ayenachew, “Le kätäma. La cour et le camp en Éthiopie (XIV e–­X VIe siècle): Espace et pouvoir” (Ph.D diss., University of Paris I Panthéon-­Sorbonne, 2009), 36–39. 15  Ibid., 36–39. 16  See, among others, Taddesse Tamrat, Church and State, 98–103; Merid Wolde Aregay, Land and agricultural productivity in Ethiopia to 1800; Donald Crummey, Land and Society in the Christian Kingdom of Ethiopia from the Thirteenth to the Twentieth Century (Urbana, IL, 2000); idem, “Abyssinian Feudalism,” Past and Present 89 (1980): 115–138; the discussion in Anaïs Wion’s essay, “Medieval Ethiopian Economies,” in this volume.

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upon the first, was gwǝlt. It was provisional, granted by the king in exchange for service, and permitted the gwǝlt holder to extract products from the granted land. The word gwǝlt comes from gwällätä, translated as “to assign a fief;” gwǝlt is therefore often understood as equivalent to “fief.”17 By extension, the gwǝlt holder may be understood as a “lord.” It should be underlined, however, that the common term for gwǝlt holder used in the sources is mäkwanənt, “judges” or “governors;” the more inclusive term is śəyyuman, “elected ones” or “appointed ones.” (Gwǝlt rights were also, however, bestowed liberally on churches and monasteries as a means of sustaining them, and perhaps also of maintaining those institutions’ allegiance to the royal power.) The emphasis was therefore clearly placed on the provisional nature of the grant as a reward for service – a “salary” in kind – that involved no implication of land ownership and that was completely dependent on the king’s goodwill. This was abundantly clear to Francisco Alvares during his sojourn in Ethiopia in the 1520s: “When [a lord] sets out from the land of which he is the lord [to go to the royal court], he does not leave in it either wife or children or any property, because he goes away with the expectation of never returning, since, as has been said before, the Prester [i.e. king] gives when he pleases, and takes away.”18 The overall impression left by the sources is of the king’s close control over gwǝlt rights and, at least as regards secular gwǝlt holders, their function as a reward for administrative and military service. Perhaps the most dramatic feature of the Solomonic dynasty in the medieval era, and one without which the others cannot be fully understood, is its territorial expansion. The regions under the Christian kings’ control grew enormously in the Solomonic period, particularly during the reign of ʿAmdä Ṣǝyon, and included both Christian or newly Christianized territories subject to direct rule, and non-­Christian tributary states. The path and process of this expansion was traced by Taddesse Tamrat in a chapter of his seminal survey of the medieval Christian kingdom, and throughout Marie-­Laure Derat’s more recent monograph.19 It brought renown to the Solomonic rulers, as well as wealth – that is, land – that was doubtless one source of the dynasty’s strength. But it also brought challenges. How to control and manage such a vastly enlarged realm, which included, even in its Christian territories, diverse peoples speaking a variety of languages? 17  Wolf Leslau, Comparative Dictionary of Geʿez (Classical Ethiopic): Geʿez – English/English – Geʿez (Wiesbaden, 2006), 619; Crummey, Land and Society, 10, 287. 18   Beckingham-­Huntingford, Prester John, 2: 445. 19  Taddesse Tamrat, Church and State, 119–155; Marie-­Laure Derat, Le domaine des rois éthiopiens (1270–1527) : espace, pouvoir, et monachisme (Paris, 2003).

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One way to approach this question, exemplified in Derat’s analysis, is to examine the relations between the royal power and the monasteries, whose evangelizing efforts on the frontiers of the Christian kingdom and great influence over local populations made them an indispensable partner in royal control over territory. Another way is by investigating the royal administration. It was the royal power’s direct response to the challenge of maintaining the territories it had acquired, encompassing not only its Christian lands but the tributary, non-­Christian states as well. What is more, the administration was clearly incorporated in the dynasty’s royal ideology. On one level, all subjects were incorporated in that royal ideology: with Mǝnilǝk’s return to Ethiopia, the whole kingdom had become the second Israel, and all its people the chosen of God. But a particular emphasis was placed upon those subjects who served the king in his administration. In the Kǝbrä nägäśt, Mǝnilǝk’s descent from Solomon is mirrored by his councillors’ descent from those of ancient Israel. King Solomon, having tried and failed to convince Mǝnilǝk to remain in Israel, addresses his councillors and officers: Come, let us make him king of the country of Ethiopia, together with your children; ye sit on my right hand and on my left hand, and in like manner the eldest of your children shall sit on his right hand and his left hand. Come, o ye councillors and officers, let us give [him] your firstborn children, and we shall have two kingdoms; I will rule here with you, and our children shall reign there.20 The Solomonic origin of Ethiopia’s administrators – specifically its judges – and of its laws themselves is repeated in the Śǝrʿatä mängǝśt: “The laws and regulations came forth from Jerusalem with the son of Solomon whose name was Menilek. With him came twelve students of the law … whom the kings chose to be judges. They were made judges during the time of Amde Tsion.”21 I call this feature of Solomonic royal ideology its aspect of Shebanization. If on the one hand the dynasty was set apart as a lineage uniquely destined to rule, on the other its exalted heritage could be extended to create a shared identity. What is notable is that service to the king through administrative office was highlighted as a privileged way to acquire this shared heritage and identity. As we shall see, royal service came to include people of diverse regional, linguistic, and even religious backgrounds. Shebanization was therefore

20  Budge, trans., Kebra Nagast, 152; in the French translation of Colin, Gloire des rois, at 36. 21  Bairu Tafla and Scholler, Serʿata Mangest, 10.

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both ideology and practice, and the administration seems to have been, and to have been understood as, a key institution in this process. A brief account of the territorial acquisitions of the medieval Solomonic kings, particularly during the reign of ʿAmdä Ṣǝyon, is necessary to establish the context of the administration. The following sections of the essay will then focus on two key moments in the era’s administrative history: the reign of ʿAmdä Ṣǝyon himself, which established the parameters of the administration after his major conquests, and that of Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob, in which a number of administrative reforms were made. One purpose of this arrangement is to highlight the element of change and adaptation. Scholarly accounts of individual administrative offices, which often begin from and focus on the modern period, tend to telescope the medieval history of the positions and overlook their evolution within that period.22 In terms of the potential causes of the dynasty’s longevity, however, its adaptability in administrative matters deserves attention as much as the basic structure of the administration itself. For both eras, the organization of the central court and the provincial administration are treated. While Taddesse Tamrat and Mordechai Abir offered brief accounts of the Solomonids’ central and regional administration, respectively, neither devoted sustained attention to their interrelation or to such key aspects as the Solomonic kings’ involvement in the oversight of newly annexed territories and in the deployment of military regiments.23 Much of what follows is therefore drawn from this author’s full-­length study of the medieval Solomonic administration as a whole.24 1

Territorial Expansion under the Solomonic Kings

Yəkunno Amlak’s focus was naturally upon securing the territories previously under Zagwe control. Oral tradition in Lasta narrates that he garrisoned his solders in the region of Lasta/Bugna for more than seven years.25 Taddesse 22  For instance, the articles relative to individual offices in the EAe, which must cover the entire history of these positions. 23  Taddesse Tamrat, Church and State, 94–98; Mordechai Abir, Ethiopia and the Red Sea: The Rise and Decline of the Solomonic Dynasty and Muslim-­European Rivalry in the Region (London, 1980), 51–56. 24  Deresse Ayanachew, “Le kätäma.” 25  For evidence of his foundation and patronage of churches in this region to consolidate and affirm his power, see Ewa Balicka-­Witakowska, “The Wall-­Paintings of Mädhane Aläm near Lalibäla,” Africana Bulletin 52 (2004): 9–29, and Denis Nosnitsin and Marie-­ Laure Derat, “Yəkunno Amlak,” in EAe 5 (2014), 43–46, at 44.

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Tamrat suggests that there was also strong resistance to him in the far northern region of Šǝmäzana, in present-­day Eritrea, and his pacification of this region is attested by his land grants to the church of Däbrä Libanos of Ham in this region.26 His successor Yagba Ṣəyon also went to Aksum to establish control over the local dynasties of Ǝndärta in Təgray. Meanwhile, to the south of the Solomonic dynasty’s stronghold in Amhara lay the Muslim sultanate(s) of Šawah. Christian penetration into this region had already begun well before Yəkunno Amlak’s seizure of the royal title, and in 1285 the sultanate, under the control of the Walasmaʿ dynasty, collapsed.27 Muslim resistance certainly did not end here, and the Christian province of Šäwa required much future defense, but the region became an integral part of the Christian kingdom. The most spectacular expansion of the realm, however, took place under ʿAmdä Ṣəyon. In a land grant to the monastery of Däbrä Ḥayq Ǝsṭifanos in Amhara, ʿAmdä Ṣəyon chronicled the territories he had subjugated in 1316/17 CE: God gave me all the people of Damot into my hands; its king, its princes, its rulers, and its people, men and women without number, whom I exiled into another area. And after that God gave me all the people of Hadya, men and women without number, whom I exiled into another area. And after that God gave me the king of Gojjam into my hands, with all his troops, his princes, and his rulers, and all men and women without number. And after that God gave me into my hands the ruler of Ǝntärta [Ǝndärta] with all his army, his people, his relatives, and all his country as far as the cathedral of Aksum. And I, King Amdä-­Siyon went to the sea of Eritrea. When I reached there I mounted on an elephant and entered the sea. And I took up my arrow and spears and killed my enemy, and I saved my people.28 The first three regions mentioned here, Damot, Hadiyya, and Goǧǧam, lay to the west and south of what was then the Christian heartland, and had a strong economic allure. A land grant ʿAmdä Ṣəyon made in Goǧǧam attests to its value

26  Taddesse Tamrat, Church and State, 68; Carlo Conti Rossini, “L’evangelo d’oro di Dabra Libānos,” Rendiconti della Reale Accademia dei Lincei. Classe di scienze morali, storiche e filologiche 5th ser., 10 (1901): 177–219, at 193. 27  Taddesse Tamrat, Church and State, 131; Enrico Cerulli, “Il sultanato dello Scioa nel secolo XIII secondo un nuovo documento storico,” RSE 1 (1941): 5–42, at 10, n. 4. 28  Taddesse Tamrat, “The Abbots of Däbrä Hayq, 1248–1535,” Journal of Ethiopian Studies 8, 1 (1970): 87–117, at 95–96.

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as a source for minerals and agricultural products.29 Damot, and especially Hadiyya to the south, were crucial for control of long-­distance trade, which by the fourteenth century passed primarily through these regions to the port of Zaylaʿ. Hadiyya was also economically important as a mule-­breeding region, and was already exploited as such by ʿAmdä Ṣəyon’s successor Säyfä Arʿad (1344–1371).30 ʿAmdä Ṣəyon’s next major victory was in the east. After the collapse of the Walasmaʿ dynasty’s control of Šawah, ʿUmar Walasmaʿ moved eastward to found the sultanate of Ifat (Awfāt in Arabic). Technically tributary to the Christian king, it remained a powerful antagonist, and in 1332 its sultan, Ṣabr al-­Dīn I, rebelled against ʿAmdä Ṣəyon’s suzerainty. The resulting war and Christian victory, recounted in the Glorious Victories of ʿAmdä Ṣəyon (an important source on the king’s reign and administration), established Ifat more firmly as vassal state of the Christian kingdom.31 The Egyptian writer al-ʿUmarī, who was contemporary with ‘Amdä Ṣəyon and based his account on the testimony of a Muslim Ethiopian informant, adds to this list the sultanate of Bali (Bāli), the most southerly of those mentioned, beyond the Wabi Šäbälle River.32 A song in honor of the medieval kings, probably written in stages and compiled in the middle of the sixteenth century, mentions the extension of the tributary regions of north and south during the reign of ʿAmdä Ṣəyon.33 In addition to long-­established Christian provinces – the “Sea of Eritrea,” Təgray, Angot – it mentions Goǧǧam, Damot, and Hadiyya, as well as intermediate provinces or sub-­provinces between them (Gafat, Gänz, Waǧ); Gədm in the Ifat region to the east; Agäw in the west; and a series of southerly provinces, Fäṭägar, Däwaro, and Bali.34 Sources from the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries indicate that the major territorial acquisition in this period was the easterly Muslim sultanate of the Barr Saʿd al-­Dīn or ʿAdal (Adäl in Gǝʿǝz), sporadically under Christian

29  Ignazio Guidi, “Le canzoni geez-­amariňa in onore di re abissini,” Rendiconti della Reale Accademia dei Lincei, classe di scienze morali, storiche e filologiche 5, 2 (1889): 53–66, at 62–63. 30  Kropp, “Serʿata Gebr,” 85. 31  George Wynn Brereton Huntingford, trans., The Glorious Victories of ʿĀmda Ṣeyon, King of Ethiopia (Oxford, 1965). 32  Ibn Faḍl Allāh al-ʿUmarī, Masālik al-­abṣār fī mamālik al-­amṣār. I, L’Afrique moins de l’Egypte, trans. Maurice Gaudefroy-­Demombynes (Paris, 1927), 19. 33  Guidi, “Le canzoni.” It includes Kings ʿAmdä Ṣəyon I, Yəsḥaq, Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob, and Ləbnä Dəngəl. 34  Ibid., 62–63.

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control in the fifteenth century.35 The rapid transformation of the Christian kingdom during ʿAmdä Ṣǝyon’s reign appears all the more staggering in comparison. The administrative mechanisms employed by the Zagwe for a much smaller territory would clearly be insufficient to maintain control over this much larger realm, whose populations were also religiously and cultural diverse. New methods had to be implemented, and to these, in the time of ʿAmdä Ṣǝyon, we now turn. 2

Administration in the Fourteenth Century (Reign of ʿAmdä Ṣǝyon)

In general, the Christian kingdom in the fourteenth century (and beyond) can be described as divided administratively into provinces, each with its own appointed governor. However, ʿAmdä Ṣǝyon and his successors did not seek to impose a uniform system upon all these provinces, but rather varied the administrative apparatus and its implementation depending on the particular conditions of each. In Amhara, the cradle of the Solomonic dynasty, the governor was called the ṣäḥafä lam; in Angot just to its north, and in the neighboring province of Bugna/Lasta, he was called ras, a general title, often used as a prefix to denote more specialized duties, that simply meant “head” or “chief.” We may infer that Bugna, an important center of Zagwe power, was by now firmly integrated into the Solomonic kingdom, for the Bugna army (särawit) sent by ʿAmdä Ṣǝyon to fight a certain rebellion of Nädhna.36 In general the sources offer little information about the governors of these regions, suggesting that control of these heartland territories was relatively unproblematic. The more northerly provinces were a different matter. As we saw in ʿAmdä Ṣǝyon’s land grant, in 1316/17 he had been compelled to combat “the ruler of Ǝndärta [in eastern Tǝgray] with all his army … as far as the cathedral of Aksum.” The “rulers” of Ǝndärta were also governors, and thus technically royal officers, but they came from a powerful local dynasty, and one that may indeed have aspired to the royal throne itself.37 This aspiration is suggested by 35  See, for instance, the fifteenth-­century map produced in Europe with the help of Ethiopian informants, in O. G. S. Crawford, Ethiopian Itineraries (Cambridge, 1958), 19, and Alvares’s data on the territories under Ləbnä Dəngəl, analyzed in Merid Wolde Aregay, “The Political Geography of Ethiopia at the Beginning of the Sixteenth Century,” in IV Congresso Internationale di Studi Etopici, ed. Enrico Cerulli, 2 vols. (Rome, 1974), 1: 613–633. 36  Huntingford, trans., Glorious Victories, 90. 37  Taddesse Tamrat, Church and State, 72.

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the well-­known colophon of the Kəbrä nägäśt, which states that the work was translated from Arabic into Gǝʿǝz by the nǝburä ǝd of Aksum, Yǝsḥaq, with the approval of the local governor, Yaʿəbikä Ǝgziʾ. The colophon explicitly situates the Kəbrä nägäśt as an anti-­Zagwe work: the Zagwe did not belong to the legitimate line, descended from King Solomon, that was uniquely authorized to rule over Ethiopia. The work’s promotion by Yaʿəbikä Ǝgziʾ may have reflected a claim that his lineage, well established in the capital of the ancient kingdom, did belong to this line. Certainly Yaʿəbikä Ǝgziʾ rebelled against ʿAmdä Ṣəyon’s royal authority, as we know not only from the king’s land grant but from a later source (of the sixteenth or seventeenth century) known as the Liber Aksumae: When Ya‌ʾibiqä Igzi and Ingida-­Igzi rebelled, King Amdä Ṣeyon decreed and deposed them, and destroyed these rebels. Moreover to eliminate the pride of their hearts and to efface their [traditional] honours, [the king] appointed over their countrymen who were not born from Adam and Eve that were called halästiyotat [men of low origin].38 Taddesse Tamrat has hypothesized that halästiyotat refers to a military regiment that ʿAmdä Ṣəyon stationed in Tǝgray, which Merid Wolde Aregay has identified as the Žan amora (lit. “the eagle of the king”).39 There is, however, no evidence that allows us to confirm this hypothesis.40 Nor does the Liber Aksumae’s (much later) claim that men of low status were appointed to rule the area match more contemporary evidence. The king certainly desired close control over Ǝndärta, which he obtained by appointing his queen Bǝlen Saba, apparently a native of the region, as its new governor in 1323.41 To the north of Tǝgray, tradition seems to describe a certain province of Ma‌ʾəkälä baḥər (literally “land between the sea”), including the districts of 38  Cited in ibid., 74. 39  Merid Wolde Aregay, “Military elites in medieval Ethiopia,” Journal of Ethiopian Studies 30, (1997): 31–73. 40  The Žan amora was a regiment in the fifteenth and sixteenth century, but nothing ties this term to a regiment in the fourteenth, when it appears as a toponym. The songs in honor of Ethiopian kings mention it as a personal name: see Guidi, “Le canzoni,” 62. 41  Conti Rossini, ’’L’evangelo d’oro,” 204, 206. Taddesse Tamrat’s assertion (Church and State, 74), also based on this source, that Bǝlen Saba and then ʿAmdä Ṣəyon’s son were governors of Tǝgray is not supported. Tǝgray is not mentioned as an administrative region in this document, rather governors of smaller regions are identified. Bǝlen Saba was specifically governor of Ǝndärta. ʿAmdä Ṣəyon’s son is identified in the document with the title ʿaqänṣän, which cannot be confidently associated with Tǝgray as a whole or any part of it: it was, for instance, the title of the governor of Gǝdm in Šäwa, and here has no geographical identifier.

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Ḥamasen, Säraye, Bäläw and other small chiefdoms. It is reported that the Bäläw chiefs were already tributary to the Zagwe kings,42 and certainly King ʿAmdä Ṣǝyon sought to assert control over the area. He is reported to have gone on the back of elephants as far as the Red Sea, where he said, “I killed my enemies, and I saved my people.”43 The tradition in Eritrea relates that he travelled all over the Rea Sea coast to undermine Muslim expansion in the region.44 King Yəsḥaq settled a military regiment at Massawa in 1417.45 Until the time of Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob, however, it appears that the Ma‌ʾǝkälä baḥǝr was not an administrative unit but a descriptive term for the region between the two waters of the Märäb River and the Red Sea, ruled by local chiefs recognized by the Solomonic kings. In the newly acquired Muslim sultanates, ʿAmdä Ṣǝyon generally left the existing ruling dynasties in power, asserting a suzerain status over them. Al-ʿUmarī describes the situation as it applied, in ʿAmdä Ṣǝyon’s time, to Ifat, Hadiyya, and Däwaro: The power belongs to the royal families who are maintained on the throne…. Although all the rulers of these kingdoms transmit power hereditarily, none of them has authority unless he is invested with it by the king of Amḥara [i.e. of Christian Ethiopia]. When one of these [Muslim] rulers dies, if there are males in his family, they all present themselves before the king of Amḥara and use all methods possible to gain his favor, for it is he who will choose among them the one upon whom he will confer power…. It is he who has supreme authority over them, and they are but his lieutenants. Still, the rulers of these kingdoms respect the high rank of the ruler of Awfāt, and in certain circumstances give him aid and serve him.46 The situation in the sultanate of Bāli was a bit different. There, according to al-ʿUmarī, “[power] has passed today to a man who is not at all of royal stock: he insinuated himself into the good graces of the king of Amḥara and received the investiture of the kingdom of Bāli, where he has made himself independent. There is no member of the ancient royal family of Bāli who is capable of 42  Taddesse Tamrat, Church and State, 79–80. 43  Taddesse Tamrat, “Abbots of Dabra Hayq,” 96. 44  Idem, Church and State, 77. 45  Deresse Ayenachew, “The Evolution and Organization of the Č�̣ äwa Military Regiments in Medieval Ethiopia,” Annals d’Éthiopie 29 (2014): 83–95, at 86. 46   al-ʿUmarī, Masālik, 19.

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ruling.”47 It is interesting to learn from this text that Bāli had had a hereditary dynasty, but as it was apparently weakened, ʿAmdä Ṣǝyon took the opportunity to appoint a “new man” as governor of the region in his name. He was evidently a native of Bāli and not an official from the Christian heartland, for having secured his position through the Christian king’s imprimatur, he promptly made himself “independent” of Christian suzerainty. In all these sultanates, subjection to the Christian state required not only obedience to Christian authority but the payment of annual tribute, which al-ʿUmarī describes as consisting of silk and linen cloth imported from Egypt, Yemen, and Iraq.48 In return, the governors and the Muslim populations were left unmolested in the practice of their faith. As seen already in the case of Bāli, this ideal relationship was not always observed in practice. Hadiyya led a long resistance to the Christian state, starting in ʿAmdä Ṣǝyon’s time: its chief, Amano, allied with Ṣabr al-­Dīn I of Ifat in 1329, requiring ʿAmdä Ṣǝyon to return to the region in person to defeat him.49 Šawah and another region to its south, Fäṭägar, are not included in alʿUmarī’s survey of Ethiopian Muslim polities. For Šawah this is not surprising. As noted above, Muslim political control over the region had collapsed decades before ʿAmdä Ṣǝyon’s reign, and Christian settlement and proselytization in the region had begun even earlier. What became the Christian province of Šäwa was therefore a formerly Muslim territory earmarked for full integration in the Christian state both religiously and administratively. The integrative process nonetheless doubtless took time, as well as royal initiative. ʿAmdä Ṣǝyon’s successors in the later fourteenth century, Säyfä Arʿad and Ḥəzbä Nañ, helped to transform it by building royal churches and camps in the province.50 For Fäṭägar, the process of its incorporation in the Christian kingdom in the fourteenth century is difficult to trace. It likely followed upon that of Šäwa, through which access to it was afforded, and certainly al-ʿUmarī’s neglect of it suggests that Christian settlement and direct political control were already present here in the 1330s. By the turn of the fifteenth century the region becomes more prominent in the documentation, as we will discuss below. The last territories to be surveyed are Goǧǧam and Damot, principally inhabited by adherents of local religions and subjugated by ʿAmdä Ṣǝyon in his campaign of 1316/17. Both were important for their natural resources, as mentioned above, but also for their human ones. Already in 1332, they provided 47  Ibid., 19. 48  Ibid., 2. 49  Huntingford, trans., Glorious Victories, pp. 58–59. 50  Deresse Ayenachew, “Medieval Gǝʿǝz Land Grants of Aṣe Waša Maryam Church in Wägdā (Ethiopia) (1344–1432),” in preparation.

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three major regiments of cavalry and infantry for ʿAmdä Ṣǝyon’s war against Ifat,51 and the Christian king’s victory brought Damot as a strong ally.52 The title given to the governor of Goǧǧam, nägaš, would seem to reflect the importance of the region. He was assisted by a second officer of considerable importance, the gədm or head of the Goǧǧam cavalry. In both Goǧǧam and Damot, ʿAmdä Ṣǝyon seems to have entrusted the governorship to existing leaders. In the song celebrating ʿAmdä Ṣǝyon, the name of the governor of Goǧǧam is žan kəmər; in Damot, the traditional royal title, motälämi, continued to be used into the fifteenth century, suggesting that its holders too came from the existing Damot royal line. The religious practices of these peoples, however, remained a source of tension and sometimes armed resistance. The unifying link among these diverse provincial administrations was of course the central administration, the royal court or kätäma, to which we now turn. One of its most salient features throughout the Solomonic period (with an important exception, as we will discuss) was its itinerant character. The periodic displacements of the royal court facilitated the suppression of resistance from regional leaders and helped ensure the security of the trade routes. Punitive military expeditions were most rapid and successful when undertaken by royal armies led personally by the king. The king’s physical presence in any military combat was considered a guarantee of victory, and all decisive battles were planned to include him. Issues of security were therefore one reason for the mobility of the king and his army, and by extension of the court. The massive population of the court itself, which numbered above 30,000 during the “mobile” or dry season in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, was another. The local resources for provisioning it would have been quickly depleted in any one location; hygiene may have been an important consideration as well. In this court, the inner council of the king may be said to have consisted of the bəhtwäddädočč as well as the highest ecclesiastical figures in the kingdom (the metropolitan and the ʿaqqabe säʿat), and sometimes the queens. The bəhtwäddädočč (sing. bəhtwäddäd, lit. “only beloved one”) were considered the highest officers in the administration. There were two, the gərra behtwäddäd (of the left) and qäññ behtwäddäd (of the right). Täklä Tsadik Mekuria, the famous popular historian, even portrayed them as the archangels to the left and right of the divine King, making a parallel with the celestial order of the heavenly angels around God. These offices are not mentioned in chronicle of ʿAmdä Ṣəyon’s wars of 1332, and are better known from texts of the time of Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob (1434–68) and his successors, which has led some scholars to hypothesize that 51  Idem, “Č�̣ äwa Military Regiments,” 85–93. 52  Idem, “Le kätäma,” 114–115.

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they were established during Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob’s reign.53 However, two important sources for information on administrative officers, the Śərʿatä gəbr and the Śərʿatä mängəst, both attribute the creation of the bəhtwäddädočč to ʿAmdä Ṣəyon. The latter text explains their duties in this way: Previously there were two Bitwodedeotch, of the Gerra and the Kegne [Qäññ]…. One was responsible for war, the other for government, to keep law and order, camping outside the town in collaboration with Azzajotch who would sit and judge in a tent. On Wednesdays and Fridays, they would bring the cases to the king.54 The gərra bəhtwäddäd thus presided over the supreme court of justice in the royal camp during peacetime, while the qäññ behtwäddäd was the chief of the army (after the king) both in the central and provincial governments. Under the direction of the qäññ behtwäddäd was the army, called the särawit, a term that dates back to the Aksumite era. In the fourteenth century it was comprised of units mustered from the various provinces, including newly annexed ones like Goǧǧam and Damot. In the Glorious Victories of ʿAmdä Ṣəyon, most units are indeed identified by their region of origin. But we also learn from this work about the beginning of established garrisons, for instance of the Žan täkäl, Koräm, Hadari, Adäl hadari, Žan amora etc., which were to have a bright future. Under the principal direction of the gərra behtwäddäd was the judiciary. As mentioned above, the gərra behtwäddäd presided over the supreme court of justice twice a week, with the assistance of another official, the azzaž, when the case required the king’s involvement. The king did not participate directly in the proceedings; rather, he remained secluded in his royal tent and the judgment was communicated through the intermediary of the azzaž and/or the royal pages, to whom we will turn in a moment.55 The azzaž is sometimes mentioned as presiding over legal cases himself, as are other figures: the ṣasargé, žan-­masäre, ṣəraj-­masäre, and mälkäna. All together, the judges (wänbäročč) were forty-­four, identified with the forty-­four men of law who had come from Israel with the legendary King Mǝnilǝk I. Twelve higher-­level judges occupied as many chairs, with a thirteenth, in the center, left perpetually empty, in an 53  George Wynn Brereton Huntingford, The Land Charters of Northern Ethiopia (Addis Ababa, 1965), 10. Sevir Chernetsov, “Bitwäddäd,” in EAe 1 (2003), 593–595, is brief and oriented to the modern period, but does note that the “twinning” of the office suggests an older origin. 54  Bairu Tafla and Scholler, Serʿata Mangest, 15, 35–36. 55  Deresse Ayenachew, “Le kätäma,” 206–207.

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evocation of Christ and his twelve disciples sitting in judgment at the Last Judgment. The remaining judges presided over lower-­level cases, still within the context of the royal kätäma.56 The ʿaqqabe säʿat was by contrast a representative of the Ethiopian Church, usually the abbot of an important monastery. The office predates the Solomonic dynasty and was certainly part of the administration already in the reign of Yǝkunno Amlak, who indeed appointed more than one in order secure ecclesiastical alliances in different regions. Given the literal meaning of the title (“guardian of the hours”), the original nucleus of the office was presumably ensuring the proper observance of the liturgical hours at the royal court. It was evidently highly prestigious, as Yǝkunno Amlak’s strategic bestowals of the title suggest, and doubtless offered that intimate access to the king that made it, by the fifteenth century if not earlier, among the most influential positions at court. The office was held by the abbots of Ḥayq Ǝsṭifanos from the 1290s, and by them uniquely from the later fourteenth century, giving that monastery and its abbot a privileged status in the kingdom.57 Extremely important to the workings of the royal court were the blattenočč or pages, whose head, the blatten geta, was the highest-­ranking official after the ʿaqqabe säʿat and the bəhtwäddädočč. The pages were part of the inner corps of civil servants. They followed the king everywhere. They mediated access to him in judicial proceedings, as noted above, and in general presided over the thresholds between the exterior and the interior within the royal compound. They were not allowed to quit the royal camp without the king’s knowledge, upon pain of death. When the king left or entered the camp, he informed the military regiments of the central court via the pages. According to Francisco Alvares in the 1520s, “the pages used to be the sons of the great gentlemen and lords.”58 It is safe to assume, then, that the pages served in an early period as a link between the royal court and the provincial aristocracy, which would send its sons to serve the king. At once an honor, providing intimate and privileged access to the king, it might also have served the king in providing a guarantee of the fathers’ good conduct in the provinces. Another important link between the central court and the provinces was the qalä-­ḥaṣe, the royal spokesman (literally, “the word of the king”). He took the king’s messages all over the kingdom, and his message was considered the orders of the king. Many verdicts of the king were communicated through the 56  Ibid., 216–225. 57  Steven Kaplan, “ʿAqqabe säʿat,” in EAe 1 (2003), 292–293, and esp. Derat, Domaine des rois, 92–96, for details on the early period. 58   Beckingham-­Huntingford, Prester John, 2: 463.

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qalä-­ḥaṣe. The office is mentioned in many medieval land grants as a witness of donation or restoration. Equivalent regional offices of the speaker were very significant in medieval times. These regional or district offices can be easily remarked in the land grant document as the witness of the charters.59 Similar spokesmen were also attached to other ranking officers, usually with the title afä (“mouth of”): there was an afä-ʿaqqabe säʿat, an afä- ṣäḥafä lam, and an afä-­qaṣ under King Säyfä Arʿad.60 Finally, a number of officers oversaw matters related to the royal household and the complicated matters of its movement and provisioning. These are generally prefixed with the term əras or ras (“head,” pl. rasočč): thus there was an əras-­mäč̣ane (head of house affairs), an əras-­däbänab (head of tents affairs), the aqet žər rasočč (heads of transport affairs), a bäʾälä har ras (head of the wool); there were others in charge of the royal musicians, the guard of the royal treasury, the tent installers, and so on. The rasočč also had duties as guardians of the royal gates of the medieval central court. They were identified as the left and the right side offices. The Šərʿatä gəbr mentions a ḥədug-­ras who had the duty of raising pack animals during the reign of Säyfä Arʿad. Two other officials, both called the raq-­masäre, were in charge of the royal banquets. The queens had their own raq-­masäre, and similar offices could be found within the church; at least some northern provincial governors also had a kantiba with these duties, for instance in Səmen, Gondär, and Ḥamasen (in present-­ day Eritrea).61 3

Administrative Evolution (Fifteenth and Early Sixteenth Century)

In medieval Ethiopia, the evolution of the administrative system related to the political, religious, and economic importance of the regions. Systematic administrative organization had continued since the fourteenth century, but the following two centuries had a deep impact on the formation of a permanent political administrative system for the kingdom of medieval Ethiopia. Šäwa and Fäṭägar, already incorporated into the Christian kingdom in the fourteenth century, received much royal attention in the fifteenth century. Šäwa, indeed, was transformed into the heartland of the Solomonic dynasty.62 It was home to the famous monastery of Däbrä Libanos, which came to rival 59  Ibid., 1: 225. 60  Deresse Ayenachew, “Medieval Gǝʿǝz Land Grants of Aṣe Waša Maryam Church.” 61  Idem, “Le kätäma,” 210. 62  Derat, Domaine des rois, 35–45.

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Ḥayq Ǝsṭifanos as the preeminent “royal” monastery of the kingdom. The province’s administrative size was enlarged to include most of the independent districts to the north like Wägda, Tägulät, Mänz, and Märḥabete, as well as the Muger region in the west. Previously ruled by a Muslim sultan, it was now entrusted to a Christian governor with the title of ṣäḥafä lam (“counter of cows”) just as in the founding region of the Solomonic dynasty, Amhara. Many royal churches of ʿAmdä Ṣǝyon, Säyfä Arʿad, Dawit II, and Hǝzbä Nañ were built in Šäwa. The most definitive sign of the region’s ascendancy is Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob’s decision to establish his capital at Däbrä Bərhan, in the heart of Šäwa, in 1449.63 This decision to abandon the traditional itinerant royal court was connected to other major administrative changes, as we shall see, which perdured even when the itinerant kätäma was resumed by Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob’s successors. Fifteenth-­century kings established themselves more firmly in Fäṭägar, too. According to the chronicle of Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob’s reign, his father Dawit II founded here the royal camp of Ṭəlq (later called Yäläbäša). Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob was born here, and after a major military victory in 1445 built two churches here to commemorate it, dedicated to the archangel Michael.64 Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob’s son and successor Bäʾǝdä Maryam also grew up here; Bäʾǝdä Maryam’s son Ǝskəndər was born in Ṭəlq and held his Śərʿatä qwərḥat here. Ṭəlq was thus the royal semi-­ capital of the southern medieval territories. As for the province more generally, Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob entrusted its administration to his daughter Ših Mängäs until she was imprisoned for a plot against his throne with her husband, the qäññ behtwäddäd Isayyayas.65 Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob then appointed another governor, a certain mälkäňa ʿAmdä Mika‌ʾel, who took the office of gerra behtwäddäd after the death of King Ǝskəndər.66 His successors built royal churches in Fäṭägar and often resided there. In the early sixteenth century, King Ləbnä Dəngəl, too, passed a long time in this region until he was defeated at the battle of Šǝmbǝrä Kwǝrǝ by Imam Aḥmad b. Ibrāhīm in 1529. The sultanate of Ifat was also more firmly integrated into the Christian kingdom, albeit in a different manner. As noted above, Ifat was conquered in 1332, and al-ʿUmarī described it in his contemporary account as tributary to the Christian state. Several decades later, its sultan, Ḥaqq al-­Dīn II (1363/4–1373/4), abandoned Ifat in order to escape Christian suzerainty and establish a basis of power further east.67 The remaining members of the Walasmaʿ dynasty in 63  Perruchon, Chroniques de Zarʾa Yâʿeqôb, 67. 64  Ibid., 67. 65  Getatchew Haile, Epistles of humanity, 1: 62–63. 66  Perruchon, “Histoire d’Eskinder,” 25. 67  Taddesse Tamrat, Church and State, 148.

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Ifat were amenable to Christian suzerainty and were at times allowed to govern Ifat, although without their former autonomy. Dawit II established a semi-­ permanent camp in a placed called Ṭobya to ensure firm control over them.68 Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob instead appointed a Christian, Amätä Giyorgis, as governor. The Ifat governorship was again restored to the Walasmaʿ dynasty during the reign of Bäʾǝdä Maryam, but this king reportedly installed his court at Ṭobya, ensuring oversight as Dawit II had done.69 Ləbnä Dəngəl switched policies again, appointing his qäññ behtwäddäd, Ǝslam Sägäd (literally “to whom the Muslim bows down”) to preside over the province.70 Unlike Fäṭägar and Šäwa, Ifat remained a Muslim-­inhabited region that retained some degree of local hereditary rule, though with close Christian oversight and sometimes Christian governors. The easterly Islamic polity established by Ḥaqq al-­Dīn II’s successors replaced Ifat as the major rival and antagonist of the Christian kingdom in the fifteenth century. Ḥaqq al-­Dīn II himself died in battle against Säyfä Arʿad in 1373/4. Armed conflict continued under his brother Saʿd al-­Dīn, whom Dawit II pursued as far as the port of Zaylaʿ, where Saʿd al-­Dīn in turn was captured and killed in 1402/03.71 Saʿd al-­Dīn’s descendants fled to Yemen to seek refuge. Twenty years later, however, as the Egyptian historian al-­Maqrīzī relates, Saʿd al-­Dīn’s son Ṣabr al-­Dīn returned to Ethiopia and re-­established an Islamic state named, after his father, the Barr (“Land of”) Saʿd al-­Dīn, also known as ʿAdal.72 Ṣabr al-­Dīn and his brothers who succeeded him continued a policy of aggressive antagonism to the Christian kingdom. One of them, Aḥmad Badlāy, occupied the two major provinces of Däwaro and Bali in the 1440s and moved toward the neighboring region of Fäṭägar. In response, Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob met Badlāy in battle in 1445 at Gomit (in the Däwaro region), defeated his army, and killed the sultan himself. The succeeding sultan, Muḥammad, was reduced to vassal status and paid an annual tribute to the Christian kingdom. This arrangement was discontinued when Muḥammad’s son ʿUṯmān refused to pay the annual tribute around 1477, and even led a raid against Däwaro and Bali.73 The king left Təgray for Fäṭägar where he assembled his army under the leadership of the two bəhtwäddädočč, who were eventually defeated 68  Perruchon, Chroniques de Zarʾa Yâʿeqôb, 59, 67, 91–2, 155. 69  Ibid., 147. 70  Deresse Ayenachew, “Le kätäma,” 145. 71  Taddesse Tamrat, Church and State, 145–153. 72  Amélie Chekroun, “Le Futūḥ al-­Ḥabaša: écriture de l’histoire, guerre et société dans le Bar Saʿad ad-­dīn (Ethiopie, XVIe siècle)” (Ph.D diss., Université de Paris 1 Panthéon-­Sorbonne, 2013), 151–152. 73  Ibid., 150.

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and killed by ʿUṯmān.74 This ended Christian suzerainty over ʿAdal. Raids on Christian-­controlled territories continued, particularly in Ifat, despite the efforts of Kings Ǝskəndər and Naʿod to restore their power. Ləbnä Dəngəl was able to stop the Muslim raids of Imam Maḥfūẓ in 1517,75 but could not again subjugate ʿAdal to vassal status. The Christian kingdom was engaged in similar, if less spectacular, conflicts in its northwestern and southern territories throughout the first half of the fifteenth century. In the northwest regions of Səmen and Ṣällämt, royal armies fought against the Betä Ǝsra‌ʾel and their supporters, who were reportedly dispossessed by King Yǝsḥaq for their refusal to convert to Christianity.76 In Hadiyya, an important region for long-­distance trade and the gateway to the southwestern chiefdoms of Wälaytta, Gamo, Gäda and Abäzo, Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob went so far as to form a marriage alliance with the local ruling dynasty, taking the daughter of gärad Mehmad as his queen. However, Muḥammad’s son and successor as provincial governor, gärad Mahiko, refused to pay the required tribute and mobilized a large number of regions against Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob after 1454. In the ensuing conflict Mahiko himself was brutally killed and governance of Hadiyya passed to his uncle, Bamo, who had remained loyal to the Christian king. With the rise of the power of Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob’s Hadiyya queen, the province was not reported as rebelling against the Christian kingdom until her death. Though a Muslim by birth, she converted to Christianity upon her marriage to the king and took the name Ǝleni. She was exalted in King Bäʾǝdä Maryam’s chronicle as the most prominent woman of medieval Ethiopia.77 One of the most significant administrative innovations of the early fifteenth century, which must be seen in relation to such conflicts in multiple regions, was the increasing and evolving use of mobile military regiments deployed by the central government (and not mustered from the provinces), known first as ṣewa and later as č̣äwa. The Liber Aksumae mentions one during the reign of King Yəsḥaq, stating that “in the Year of Mercy 69 [1417 CE] the ṣewa bädəlwaǧč descended [to Təgray].”78 Yəsḥaq was also praised for establishing a regiment known as ṭaräsmba in Massawa.79 Their deployment was at first clearly targeted to controlling rebellions in particular regions on behalf of the royal administration. The early composition of the regiments, meanwhile, can be deduced by the term ṣewa itself, which means “captive.” 74  Ibid. 75   Beckingham-­Huntingford, Prester John, 2:410–115. 76  Steven Kaplan, “Betä Ǝsra‌ʾel,” in EAe 1 (2003), 552–559, at 553. 77  Perruchon, Chroniques de Zarʾa Yâʿeqôb, 59, 125. 78  Conti Rossini, “L’evangelo d’oro,” 68. 79  Deresse Ayenachew, “Č�̣ äwa Military Regiments,” 86.

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In the time of Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob, and through his initiative, these regiments were transformed. For one, they were now termed č̣äwa, and defined as free men, with a corresponding rise in their prestige. By now (if not earlier), they were under the command of a chief called either ras or azmač.80 The azmač (or ras) commanded small military regiments of some 15,000 soldiers; the title eventually bifurcated into two, the azmač of the left and of the right.81 Secondly, the regiments were no longer used as an ad hoc force against occasional uprisings, but adopted as a permanent feature of the administration, representing the royal power in the provinces. Indeed, starting immediately after his victory over Aḥmad Badlāy in 1445, Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob deployed the č̣äwa regiments in massive numbers in virtually every district of the kingdom, with the exception of the new vassal state of ʿAdal. This transformation must be seen in relation not only to the evident threat ʿAdal had posed and to the unrest in other areas of the kingdom, but also and perhaps especially in relation to the king’s decision to settle his court in a permanent place. The roving kätäma was in a sense replaced by the garrisons of č̣äwa regiments as an expression of royal power and presence, which could now be manifested everywhere at once. The first major deployment of regiments seems to have been in Däwaro, the region bordering the sultanate of ʿAdal, where Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob established nine.82 In addition to offering protection against a possible ʿAdali incursion, they served as a threat: if the ʿAdali sultan refused to pay the required annual tribute, the č̣äwa regiments would be sent in for punitive military measures. This is clear from a passage recorded in the chronicle of Bäʾǝdä Maryam’s reign concerning Aḥmad Badlāy’s successor, Muḥammad: “Our King Mohammed, son of Arwe [Ahmäd] Bädlay, sends us to you, O Lord, with the mission to say to you: Let us make peace, I will bring you every year my tribute; but, on your side, give orders to your ṣewa not to make war against me and to cease their incursions in my country.”83 Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob established others in Bali, where the two regiments were called the šäwa Ḥadari and the č̣äwa of Bali, and were used again by Bäʾǝdä Maryam to fight the rebellion of Doba‌ʾa in southern Təgray around 1475.84 Regiments were garrisoned in Hadiyya, to reinforce the administration of gärad Bamo after the rebellion of Mahiko.85 They eventually extended southward from Hadiyya all the way to Gamo. But they were not deployed only in border regions: č̣äwa garrisons were stationed throughout 80  Ibid. 81  Deresse Ayenachew, “Le kätäma,” 195. 82  Deresse Ayenachew, “Č�̣ äwa Military Regiments,” 83–93. 83  Perruchon, Chroniques de Zarʾa Yâʿeqôb, 130. 84  Deresse Ayenachew, “Le kätäma, ” 85–93. 85  Perruchon, Chroniques de Zarʾa Yâʿeqôb, 16–22.

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Massawa Arqiqo Gerer

Maya M

Č̣äwa military regiment harbors on the Red Sea coast approximate limits of the territory under control of the Christian Kingdom

äb är

Bäṣär waǧät

Tä kä zé

DO

č̣čääwa ̣ wa of Tə T Təgray əgray

ea

Žan Qätfa

dS Re

B ’A

Žan amora Žan

č̣äwa of Ṣälämt

Dawit Amba Žan ṣägäna č̣äwa of Bägemdər Ab

ba y

č̣äwa of Angot

č̣äwa of Amḥara

č̣äwa of Goǧǧam

bé

a

Gi

dés

Dä

čč̣ääwa ̣ wa of Fäṭägar č̣äwa of Wäǧ č̣äwa of Hadiyya

č̣äwa of Wälamo o

Gamo

WA

č̣äwa of Šäwa

RO

Žan amora ̣ wa of Gä G Gänz änz č̣äwa of Ifat Bäṣär Šotäl čč̣ääwa č̣äwa of Gafat

Om

Bädəl ṣägäna

Bäṣär waǧät

DA

Damot Hadari

aš Aw

Žan Gädäb

Bädəl amba Bädəl dəb Bädəl nab

‘Adal

Bädəl mäbräq Däräqo Bäṣär waǧät Bädəl nab Bäṣär waǧät Žan amora

bi Wa č̣äwa of Bali

Šäwa Hadari

Bäṣär waǧät Bäṣur amora

N 0

100 km

Map realized by Deresse Ayenachew

figure 3.1 Č�̣ äwa military regiments in medieval Ethiopia, 15th–16th c.

the kingdom (see fig. 3.1). Even when Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob’s successors resumed the tradition of the roving royal court, the network of royal č̣äwa regiments was maintained: for the rest of the Middle Ages this network remained a major centralizing feature of the Christian state. Other strategies were aimed specifically at integrating formerly semi-­ independent states more fully into the central administration. We have seen this already in Ifat, in the wake of Ḥaqq al-­Dīn’s departure and the establishment of ʿAdal, but it was not confined to this case. In Goǧǧam, Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob not only installed a č̣äwa garrison but appointed a new governor, his daughter

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Asnaf Sämra.86 Under Bäʾǝdä Maryam the governor or nägaš of Goǧǧam was named Dawit Anbäsa, and was on such intimate terms with the king that Bäʾǝdä Maryam entrusted the care of his young son Ǝskǝndǝr to him.87 The direct appointment of Goǧǧam would have already begun under King Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob. But his son Bäʾǝdä Maryam reported that as he took power, he reinstituted the local regional chiefs in his kingdom.88 The Solomonic dynasty also patronized and left their mark on the region. In the late fifteenth century, King Naʿod transferred Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob’s remains to a site called Däga Ǝsṭifanos in Goǧǧam.89 In the early sixteenth century, Queen Ǝleni possessed a large fief here upon which she built the royal church of Märtulä Maryam. In Damot, the č̣äwa regiments (called hadari and bäṣär šotäl) were deployed against the local people for their non-­Christian beliefs, in particular their attachment to a deity named Däsk, which was considered essentially the “religion of state” of Damot.90 Here too, Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob installed a provincial governor from the Christian heartland – in fact, one of his daughters – as did Bäʾǝdä Maryam after him. Thus the traditional title of motälämi disappeared in the mid-­fifteenth century, replaced by that used in Šäwa, ṣäḥafä lam. While the Christian kings of the fifteenth and early sixteenth century shifted the kingdom’s political center of gravity southward into Šäwa and devoted much attention to consolidating their hold on the surrounding southern provinces, this does not mean by any stretch that they neglected the provinces of the north. Təgray was celebrated as the ancient seat of both the kingdom and the Solomonic dynasty, with almost the status of an Ethiopian Zion. Already in the later fourteenth century, King Säyfä Arʿad represented Təgray as an especially holy place. In a land charter for the region he proclaimed, “I have given all this, at the time when I went into the country [mədr] of Təgre, that it may be a conductor to the kingdom of heaven.”91 But it was again Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob who underscored most dramatically the sacred and symbolic importance of Təgray, and particularly of Aksum, by holding his coronation ceremony here circa 1438. The Liber Aksumae praised this event as the renaissance of Aksum’s glory.92 86  Ibid., 95, 98. 87  Ibid., 95, 130. 88  Ibid., 111. 89  Perruchon, “Histoire d’Eskinder,” p. 15. 90  Ayda Bouanga, “Le Damot dans l’histoire de l’Éthiopie (XIIIe–­X Xe siècles): recompositions religieuses, politiques et historiographiques” (Ph.D diss., Université Paris 1 Panthéon-­ Sorbonne, 2013), 150–154. 91  Huntingford, Land Charters of Northern Ethiopia, 33. 92  Carlo Conti Rossini, ed. and trans., Documenta ad illustrandam historiam. I: Liber Axumae, 2 vols., CSCO 54, 58, SAe 24, 27 (Louvain, 1961–2; orig. Paris, 1909–10), at vol. 1 (text), 4.

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The chronicles, for their part, remark on the fundamental orientation of the Təgray region in favor of the sacred power of the Solomonic dynasty, since during the Śərʿatä qwərḥat, the governor of Təgray (called the Təgre-­mäkwännən) and the head of the church of Aksum-­Ṣǝyon, the nǝburä ǝd, accompanied the king to take him with joy to sacralize his power.93 The royal lineage and the institutions of Təgray thus enjoyed a symbiotic relationship that, according to the Kǝbrä nägäśt, stretched back thousands of years. More specific historical circumstances were also involved in this particular event. In his Epistle of humanity, Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob accused the Təgre-­mäkwännən Isayyayas of obstructing his succession to the royal title in June 1434.94 The coronation ceremony thus enacted Isayyayas’s acceptance of Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob as the rightful king, while Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob, by holding his ceremony in Aksum, affirmed the symbolic importance of the city and region. Isayyayas himself was appointed to one of the highest offices in the kingdom, qäññ bəhtwäddäd. The relationship between Isayyayas and the king remained fraught, as we shall see. Nonetheless, in general, Təgrayan officials often held important positions at the royal court. The nǝburä ǝd had a privileged position there, and many of the inner däbtära (learned clerics) of the royal court came from the church of Aksum-­Ṣǝyon too. While exalting Təgray symbolically as a sort of spiritual-­historical capital and rewarding many of its officials, Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob also undertook a reform that reduced its actual territorial limits and power. It seems that the territories north of Təgray, in present-­day Eritrea, were under the authority of Təgray before Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob’s reign. In a reform that probably occurred between 1436 and 1439, he changed this. According to the chronicle of his reign, He increased the power of the baḥǝr nägaš and elevated him above all governors, he gave him the authority over Sire and Särawe and over the two Ḥamasen and over the chief of Bur. He established him a prince over them. Our King Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob reorganized conveniently the administration of Ethiopia […].95 The baḥǝr nägaš thus became a provincial governor in his own right, very powerful and influential, but also fully under the authority of the king. It was a new office, and not hereditary. Francisco Alvares, for instance, during his six years in Ethiopia in the 1520s, witnessed the king replace the baḥǝr nägaš three 93  Perruchon, Chroniques de Zarʾa Yâʿeqôb, 49–50. 94  Getatchew Haile, Epistle of Humanity, vol. 1 (text), 62–63. 95  Perruchon, Chroniques de Zarʾa Yâʿeqôb, 47–48.

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times. (They were accused of plotting against the king and exiled to unknown places).96 At the same time, if loyal, the baḥǝr nägaš could not only enjoy the great influence of his position in the north, but rise to the highest offices of the realm: the baḥǝr nägaš Ros Näbyat was appointed to the office of the qäññ bəhtwäddäd by Ləbnä Dəngəl in 1522. The reorganization of these two northern regions was in the interests of the Solomonic dynasty in creating a strong regional Christian power. The appointment of northerners to the high offices of the central court amplified to harmonize the ideology of Shebanization of the northern regions that united to defend the Promised Land of Ethiopia, the second Israel. Offices of the central administration also underwent changes in the fifteenth and early sixteenth century. Among the most important changes concerns the qäññ behtwäddäd, the “general” in charge of both royal and provincial armies. By the reign of Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob at the latest, he had been entrusted with responsibilities over particular provinces as well. After Isayyayas had acquired the position of qäññ behtwäddäd, the king accused him of plotting against him as chief of the royal army and as “king” or governor of the province of Gäň.97 “Isyayyas said, am I not the behtwäddäd and the neguś of Gäni! The whole army of the king and the army of Gäni are under my control.”98 Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob then appointed his daughter, Mädḫən Zämäda, as qäññ behtwäddäd; she was given particular responsibility over the province of Damot. King Bäʾedä Maryam’s qäññ behtwäddäd, Gäbrä Iyäsus, was assigned to look after the most southerly province, Bali.99 The qäññ behtwäddäd during the reign of Ləbnä Dəngəl, Ǝslamo, had administrative authority in Ifat. Francisco Alvares mentions, still in the time of Ləbnä Dəngəl, that a bəhtwäddäd presented tribute on behalf of the chief of Goǧǧam, suggesting a particular relationship with this province.100 This reminds us that Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob accused his qäññ bəhtwäddäd Isayyayas of claiming the governorship of Goǧǧam in addition to that of Gäň.101 The sources do not clearly indicate in what way the qäññ behtwäddäd presided over their assigned province while remaining at the royal court. Perhaps they oversaw matters of peace and order by deploying the č̣äwa regiments in the province, through the intermediary of the governor or the regiments’ azmač. In any case, the regular “assignment” of a particular province to the qäññ behtwäddäd blurred the distinction between the central and the provincial 96   Beckingham-­Huntingford, Prester John, 1: 114. 97  Deresse Ayenachew, “Le kätäma,” 35–36. 98  Getatchew Haile, Epistle of Humanity, vol. 1 (text), 56. 99  Deresse Ayenachew, “Le kätäma,” 114–155. 100   Beckingham-­Huntingford, Prester John, 2:445. 101  Bouanga, “Le Damot, ” 189–190.

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branches of government, and might be viewed as another method of tying the provinces more closely to the central administration. It also gave the bəhtwäddädočč enormous power, as we have seen already in the case of Isayyayas, and when the king was a minor, they were able to exert great influence on royal affairs. After the death of Bäʾǝdä Maryam in 1478, the behtwäddädočč played a central role in the making of kings like Ǝskəndər, Naʿod and Ləbnä Dəngəl.102 Certainly the bəhtwäddädočč were remembered, just after the end of our period, as a crucial stabilizing and protective force in the kingdom. When the Sərʿatä mängəst was rewritten during the reign of Śärṣ́ä Dəngəl (1563–1597), the redactors observed, “after the bitwodedotch perished, the country was sacked and robbed at the hands of the Oromo.”103 A second perceptible evolution in court offices concerns a certain blurring between the military and civil functions, or more precisely the acquisition, by civil officers, of military responsibilities. We have encountered the azzaž as a judicial official who assisted the gərra bəhtwäddäd in the supreme judicial court. They were also members of regional juries, at least in the baḥer nägaš. In the early sixteenth century we hear of military duties attached to the offices of the gerra azzaž and qäññ azzaž (that is, the azzaž of the left and of the right). The famous chief of Bali, the gərra azzaž Dägälḥan and the qäññ azzaž Yəsḥäq are all mentioned in a land grant of King Ləbnä Dəngəl to the cathedral of Aksum. They served as army leaders and regional governors. The complexity of the office of azzaž is its involvement in the jurisdiction of the medieval Ethiopian church. They would direct land tenure disputes along with the metropolitan.104 Similarly, the ḥədug-­ras, whose duties in the fourteenth century concerned raising pack animals for the royal court, also acquired military duties by the early sixteenth century. Alvares recounts that the ḥədug-­ras led an army of č̣äwa regiments from Təgray and the Bahər Nägaš region to confront a rebellion by the brother of the gärad of Hadiyya. The ḥədug-­ras also had legal responsibilities along with the behtwäddäd, and like the behtwäddäd, his responsibilities probably evolved to strengthen royal representation in, an oversight of, the provinces. Thirdly, certain offices seem to have risen in importance, though it may be that the sources, being fuller from the mid-­fifteenth century, simply document their importance more amply in this period. The ʿaqqabe säʿat was clearly a distinguished personage from the beginning, being the only representative of the powerful monasteries at the royal court and (since the metropolitan was 102  Taddesse Tamrat, Church and State, 286–296. 103  Bairu Tafla and Scholler, Sərʿatä Mängəst, 39. 104  Deresse Ayenachew, “Le kätäma,” 188–192, 226.

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of course an Egyptian Copt) the highest-­ranking Ethiopian religious in the administration. The ʿaqqabe säʿat seems to have become a particularly close advisor of the king during the reign of Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob, perhaps due to the king’s difficulties with his bǝhtwäddäd. At Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob’s death in 1468, it was the ʿaqqabe säʿat who declared which of his sons would succeed him, having been entrusted with knowledge of the king’s choice in secret before the king’s death: When King Ba‌ʾǝda Maryam, son of Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob, ascended the throne, the ʿaqqabe säʿat Amḥa Ṣǝyon, standing before the August siege, addressed the people of Ethiopia with the words of Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob: “‘People of Ethiopia, it is not by my own will, but by the command of God, that I give you for king Bäʾǝda Maryam.’ My lord Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob said these words before his death; I testify it before angels and men, and if I lie, my judge will be the Holy Spirit.105 In subsequent times, the ʿaqqabe säʿat was a member of the regent council for King Ǝskəndər during his minority, and also for his six-­month-­old son. Alvares documented that the ʿaqqabe säʿat was the highest royal counsellor regarding civil affairs until the office disappeared in the early sixteenth century.106 The ṣasärge, who were among judges of the Supreme Court, also emerge in the sources as prominent officers from the mid-­fifteenth century. The chronicles of Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob and Bäʾǝdä Maryam present them as intimates of the inner royal court. The office seems to have been hereditary until Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob punished those who held it in his administration: they were accused of plotting the transfer of the remains of his father, King Dawit II, to the newly created royal necropolis in Däbrä Nägwädgwad in Amhara. If nothing else, the plan does suggest the ṣasärge’s involvement in royal affairs outside the sphere of purely judicial matters. King Bäʾǝdä Maryam, for his part, delegated ṣasärge Marqos to achieve a reconciliation with the rebellious governors of Ṣällämt, which Marqos successfully accomplished.107 This diplomatic function again involved an officer of the royal court being deployed to intervene in the provinces, following a pattern we have perceived with other officers in this period. Finally, the pages were reorganized, and their personnel altered, by the reign of Ləbnä Dəngəl. They were divided into four groups. The inner pages attended personally to the king, and had the most privileged access to him. The outer pages served as intermediaries between the king and the judges during legal 105  Perruchon, Chroniques de Zarʾa Yâʿeqôb, 60; Taddesse Tamrat, “Abbots of Däbrä Hayq,” 117. 106   Beckingham-­Huntingford, Prester John, 1: 270. 107  Ibid.

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proceedings, while the pages of the king’s table and the travel pages oversaw the duties that their titles indicate. Alvares explains the major change in personnel that had occurred by his time, and its reasons: The pages … used to be the sons of the great gentlemen and lords, and now they are not so. And as has been said, when the Prester sends to summon the great men, he does not send to tell them why: and when the sons of the great men served as pages, they used to reveal his secrets, and for this he turned them out, and slaves who are sons Moorish or pagan Kings whom they take [daily] in raids [made by the Prester’s people] serve as inner pages. If they see they are suitable they send them to be taught without their coming inside, and if they turn out discreet and good they put them inside, and they serve as pages. And the sons of the great lords serves as outer pages, and also as pages of the halter when they travel, and as pages of the kitchen, and they do not enter inside (as they say), and we saw them.108 Whereas previously all pages had been recruited from aristocratic families, their abuse of the privileged information their access to the king provided – or we might say their divided loyalty between the king and their own aristocratic lineages – led to their ouster from the most intimate positions. The outer, travel, and kitchen pages remained the children of great lords, but the inner pages – and this distinction in role may have accompanied the change in personnel – were now recruited from non-­Christian peoples taken in raids from neighboring regions, whose dependence on the king would be absolute. The inner pages are a striking example of Muslims and adherents of local religions being recruited into the royal administration, and at the most intimate level. But they are not the only example. The č̣äwa too, conceived as royal regiments unattached to any specific provincial identity, were also drawn from captives of diverse origin. We might also recall Zärʾa Yaʿeqob’s marriage to Ǝleni, member of the ruling lineage of Hadiyya, which raised a Muslim-­born woman to the highest possible position open to a woman in the kingdom, and who as regent for the young Ləbnä Dəngəl in later years was not only an administrator but the effective head of the Christian state. We thus see, in various ways, a process of integration of the multi-­ethnic peoples of Ethiopia in the Solomonic administration, a result of the pragmatic realization of the political development of the medieval kingdom of Ethiopia. 108  Ibid., 2: 463.

chapter 4

The Sultanates of Medieval Ethiopia Amélie Chekroun and Bertrand Hirsch Given its geographical situation across the Red Sea from the Arabian Peninsula and the Gulf of Aden, it is perhaps not surprising that the Horn of Africa was exposed to an early and continuous presence of Islam during the Middle Ages. Indeed, it has long been known that Muslim communities and Islamic sultanates flourished in Ethiopia and bordering lands during the medieval centuries. However, despite a sizeable number of Ethiopian Christian documents (in Gǝʿǝz) relating to their Muslim neighbors and valuable Arabic literary sources produced outside Ethiopia and, in some cases, emanating from Ethiopian communities themselves, the Islamic presence in Ethiopia remains difficult to apprehend. This is because it has not attracted the same amount of scholarly investment as Ethiopian Christianity, so much so that epigraphic and archeological evidence have long remained scanty. Only recently has it started to produce a significant corpus of material evidence, which now makes it possible to revisit the history of Islamic penetration into Ethiopia and of MuslimChristian relationships through the centuries. As underlined several times by the Ethiopian scholar Hussein Ahmed,1 historiography on the Muslim communities of Ethiopia during the medieval period is, in comparison with the one devoted to neighboring Christians, quite weak. Thus, the main turning points in the historiography can be rather quickly listed. First must be mentioned the pioneering work of Enrico Cerulli. Attached to the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Ethiopia in the 1920s and 1930s, he carried out an outstanding scientific work in parallel with his official appointments, and notably identified several endogenous Arabic texts that he edited, translated, and analyzed in papers published between 1936 and 1971.2 1  Hussein Ahmed, “The Historiography of Islam in Ethiopia,” Journal of Islamic Studies 3, 1 (1992): 15–46; idem, “Scholarly Research and Publications on Islam in Ethiopia (1952–2002): An Assessment,” in Afrikas Horn, Akten der Ersten Internationalen Littmann-Konferenz, ed. W. Raunig and S. Wenig (Wiesbaden, 2005), 411–426; Hussein Ahmed and Ewald Wagner, “The Islamic and Related Writings of Ethiopia,” in Arabic Literature of Africa, vol. 3, A: The Writings of the Muslim Peoples of Northeastern Africa, ed. Rex Seán O’Fahey (Leiden, 2003), 18–69, 126–136. 2  All of his articles on Ethiopian Islam were collected in a book published in 1971 (L’islam di ieri e di oggi (Rome, 1971). A incomplete English translation of this book has been published

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2020 | doi:10.1163/9789004419582_005

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The value of Cerulli’s work is reflected in the fact that almost no new textual document has been identified since his time, and his scholarly analyses remain the reference works on them. Two syntheses of Ethiopian Islam have also been published: Islam in Ethiopia by J. Spencer Trimingham in 1952 and Islam en Éthiopie by Joseph Cuoq in 1981. Both present a very similar narrative of the history of these societies, despite the thirty years that separate them, for the basic narrative was not really questioned; apart from Cerulli’s work, very few studies on specific points had been published. Finally, the anthropologist Ulrich Braukämper published in 2002 a collection of his papers, Islamic History and Culture in Southern Ethiopia. One of these papers, “Islamic Principalities in Southeast Ethiopia between the Thirteenth and Sixteenth Centuries” (originally published in 1977),3 is very valuable in systematically identifying the main sources concerning the different Islamic regions of Ethiopia in the medieval period, without, however, subjecting them to historical critique. These three publications remain the available reference works today, though many decades have passed since their publication. In the last fifteen years, however, publications have begun to fill this historiographical gap and new data has been made available with which to address medieval Islamic Ethiopia afresh. Philologists have been interested in Arabic texts produced in or about Ethiopia and have begun publishing them.4 But it is archeological research5 that has greatly shaped new approaches to the subject, recently (Islam. Yesterday and Today, trans. Emran Waber [n.l., 2013]), but the translator chose, as he explains it in his preface, to cut out “some isolated words, phrases or entire sections,” “due to social, religious sensitivity or transgression of faith”, because “Islam was, is and will remain unalterable.” This translation must be taken with great caution. 3  Ulrich Braukämper, Islamic History and Culture in Southern Ethiopia (Berlin, 2003), 12–101. 4  See for example Ewald Wagner, “Three Arabic documents on the history of Harar,” Journal of Ethiopian Studies 12, 1 (1974): 213–224; Alessandro Gori, “Lo Yemen e l’Islam in Africa Orientale: contatti, testi, personaggi,” in Storia e cultura dello Yemen in età islamica con particolare riferimento al periodo Rasûlide (Rome, 2006), 201–218; Tamon Baba, “Notes on Migration between Yemen and Northeast Africa during the 13–15th Centuries,” Chroniques du Manuscrit au Yémen Special Issue 1 (2017–2018): 69–86; Manfred Kropp, “La Corne Orientale de l’Afrique chez les géographes arabes,” Bulletin des études africaines de l’INALCO 9, 17–18 (1992): 161–197; Franz-Christoph Muth, “A Globe-trotter from Maghrib in al-Maqrīzī’s booklet on Ethiopia: a footnote from some Arabic sources,” Afrique & histoire 4 (2005): 123–131. 5  Three regions have so far been the subject of archeological excavations: the former territory of the Awfāt Sultanate by the team led by François-Xavier Fauvelle and Bertrand Hirsch (2007–2010); the Č�̣ ärč̣är and Harar region by the same team (2006–2009) then by the ERC project “Becoming Muslim” led by Timothy Insoll (2015–2020); eastern Tǝgray by the ERC project HornEast led by Julien Loiseau (2017–2022). Each of them will be described in this chapter. About the Arabic inscriptions, see Alessandro Gori, “Inscriptions – Arabic inscriptions in the Ethiopian regions,” in EAe 3 (2007), 165–167.

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in providing material remains against which textual claims can be tested, in illuminating aspects of Islamic Ethiopian society little addressed by written sources, and in expanding the corpus of Islamic Ethiopian data such that the Christian sources, and the Christian perspective, need be relied upon less. A number of archeological investigations are still in progress, have not yet been the subject of detailed publications, and therefore have not yet revealed their full potential. Future discoveries in the coming years should bring many essential elements to the history of Muslim societies in Ethiopia. Nonetheless, recent publications about the history of those societies, notably by FrançoisXavier Fauvelle, Bertrand Hirsch, or Amélie Chekroun,6 indicate the directions of this research to date, and point to the important advances that are expected in the years to come. Several sources speak of a Muslim presence in Ethiopia even before the great Hijra to Medina in 622 CE with which the Islamic calendar begins. These sources include the Sīra (biography of Muhammad) by Ibn Isḥāq (ca. 760) and completed by Ibn Hišhām (d. 830), and two biographical dictionaries of the Prophet and his Companions: the Ṭabaqāt al-kubrā by Ibn Saʿd (d. 845) and the Ansāb al-ašrāf by al-Balāḏhurī (d. 892). They recount that in 615, seven years before the Hijra to Medina, some of the Prophet’s Companions (ṣaḥāba or aṣḥāb) were forced to flee Mecca and find refuge with the Ethiopian king, called naǧāšī in the Islamic documentation, in what is called “the first hijra to Abyssinia” (al-hiǧra al-ūlā ilā arḍ al-ḥabaša). The naǧašī is said to have welcomed the new Muslims. Some traditions relate that he converted to Islam. The memory of this contact between the Prophet’s Companions and a king of Aksum is still alive today: in the village of Nägaš in the Tǝgray region are venerated the supposed tombs of twelve companions of Muhammad as well as the shrine of the naǧašī. This holy site, attesting to the primacy of Ethiopia in its contact with Islam, was known in the sixteenth century, according to the Futūḥ al-Ḥabaša, and is today one of the most important pilgrimage destinations for Muslim Ethiopian communities.7 6  François-Xavier Fauvelle-Aymar and Bertrand Hirsch, “Établissements et formations politiques musulmans d’Éthiopie et de la Corne de l’Afrique au Moyen Âge. Vers une reconstruction,” Annales Islamologiques 42 (2008): 339–376; François-Xavier Fauvelle-Aymar and Bertrand Hirsch, eds., Espaces musulmans de la Corne de l’Afrique au Moyen Âge (Paris – Addis Ababa, 2011); François-Xavier Fauvelle, Bertrand Hirsch and Amélie Chekroun, “Le sultanat de l’Awfât, sa capitale et la nécropole des Walasma’. Quinze années d’enquêtes archéologiques et historiques sur l’Islam médiéval éthiopien,” Annales Islamologiques 51 (2017): 239–295; Amélie Chekroun, Les djihâds de l’imam Aḥmad (Éthiopie, 16e siècle). Lectures du Futūḥ al-Ḥabaša (Paris, forthcoming). 7  Alessandro Gori, “Nägaš,” in EAe 3 (2007), 1107–1109.

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After the first contacts at the time of the advent of Islam, two main axes of Islamization have been identified.8 The first route of Islamic penetration, from the ninth-tenth centuries on, was a north-south route, from the Dahlak Islands through eastern Tǝgray to the escarpment of the Central Plateau and the lakes region to its south. Then, from the twelfth–thirteenth centuries, a second dominant route connected the Gulf of Aden from the port of Zaylaʿ to the highlands of the Eastern Plateau and the Rift Valley lakes. 1

First Period: Ninth–Thirteenth Century

The Dahlak Islands (Eritrea): Gateway between Ethiopia and the Islamic World The Dahlak Islands are an archipelago stretching for some 200 miles in the Red Sea and comprising more than a hundred islands, islets, and rocks, the most important of which is Dahlak al-Kabīr (45 km from west to east and 30 km from north to south). Located at the latitude of Massawa on the African coast and of the Tihāma region on the Arabian side, they occupied a strategic position that made them a crossroads for trade and culture: closely linked to the port of Massawa, they were an outlet for the main caravan route coming from the Christian kingdom and other inland regions, while their position in the sea and their proximity to Yemen opened them to long-distance trade and the Islamic world. This strategic position brought inhabitants from Africa, Arabia, and other parts of the Islamic world to the islands; it also meant that a variety of powers vied for control of them. Though a target of conquest by the Christian kings of Ethiopia, they were usually under Muslim control from the seventh century forward. To judge by available evidence, they were also the first gateway of Islam into Ethiopia and Eritrea: that is, the commercial networks they developed on the African mainland served as the principal point of entry for the establishment of Islamic communities in this region in the early Middle Ages. That evidence comes principally from its necropolis, which contains 266 funerary stelae with Arabic inscriptions from 864 CE to the sixteenth century. This corpus, the principal source for the islands’ medieval history, has been studied by Madeleine Schneider in her outstanding work, Stèles funéraires musulmanes des Iles Dahlak (Mer Rouge).9 Supplementary 1.1

8  Fauvelle-Aymar and Hirsch, “Établissements et formations politiques.” 9  Madeleine Schneider, Stèles funéraires musulmanes des îles Dahlak (Mer Rouge), 2 vols. (Cairo, 1983). See also Giovanni Oman, La necropoli islamica di Dahlak Kebir: Le epigrafi del museo Ferdinando Martini di Asmara (Naples, 1976).

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information comes from Arabic authors for whom the islands’ proximity to Arabia, Islamic rulers, and traders coming principally from the Islamic world made them a topic worthy of mention. As noted above, the Dahlak Islands were contested territory, and came under a variety of rulers before achieving independence in the eleventh century. Under the fifth Umayyad caliph ʿAbd al-Malik b. Marwān (r. 685–705), after Abyssinian piracy against Jedda in 702, the Dahlak Islands were occupied by Muslims and became a prison (ḥabs), as recalled in the Ta‌ʾrīḫ al-mustabṣir by Ibn al-Muǧāwir ca. 1228–9.10 Several well-known figures were sent to detention there between 715 and 743–4.11 A similar practice continued under the first Abbasid caliphs, in the 750s and 760s. According to al-Yaʿqūbī (d. 897/8), the Dahlak Islands then fell under the control of the Christian ruler of Abyssinia in the ninth century.12 In the late ninth and early tenth century, the Dahlak Islands were controlled instead by the Ziyādid ruler of Zabīd, a town of the Tihāma region of Yemen.13 According to two Arabic authors, Ibn Ḥawqal (d. 988) and ʿUmāra al-Yamanī (d. 1174), the Dahlak Islands paid tribute to the fourth Ziyādid ruler, Abū al-Ǧayš Isḥāq b. Ibrāhīm (r. 903–981/2), consisting of “black slaves [500 Abyssinian and 500 Nubian female slaves], ambergris, leopard skins and other objects.”14 For the period between 864 and 1010, the necropolis of Dahlak contains 89 stelae (56 undated and 33 dated), reflecting Ismāʿīlī influence and referring to various tribes in Arabia, Mecca, Syria, Iraq, Iran and Byzantium.15 In the first half of the eleventh century, the sources for the first time mention a ruler (sayyid) of the Dahlak Islands, and at the same time we have evidence of a relationship between the islands and Qūṣ, a big trade city in Upper Egypt,16 with stelae of the same deceased found in both Dahlak and Qūṣ.17 By the mid-eleventh century, we know who these rulers were: the Naǧāḥids, 10  Guy Ducatez, “Aden aux XIIe et XIIIe siècles selon Ibn al-Muǧāwir,” Annales Islamologiques 38, 1 (2004): 159–200, at 174. 11  René Basset, “Les inscriptions de l’île de Dahlak,” Journal Asiatique 9,  vol. 1 (1893): 77–111. 12  Aḥmad ibn Abī Yaʿqūb al-Ya‘qūbī, Kitāb al-Buldān, ed. Michael Jan De Goeje (Leiden, 1892), vol. 7, 319. 13  The rule of the Tihāma was transferred to the Ziyādid family by the seventh Abbassid caliph, al-Ma‘mūn (r. 813–833). The Ziyādid family remained in power in Tihāma until the very beginning of the eleventh century. 14  ʿUmārah b. ʿAlī al-Ḥakamī, Yaman, its early medieval history by Nadjm al-Dīn ʿOmarah alHakamī, trans. Henry Cassels Kay (London, 1892), 8 and 143. 15  Schneider, Stèles funéraires, 431. 16   Jean-Claude Garcin, “Al-Ṣaʿīd,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed., ed. P. Bearman et al. (Leiden, 1995), vol. 8, 861–866. 17  Schneider, Stèles funéraires, 29.

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a dynasty of Ethiopian slaves who had ruled in Yemen from Zabīd between 1021/22 and their overthrow in 1063, and who now made the Dahlak Islands their new base of power, from which they reconquered Yemen in 1089. Under their aegis, the Dahlak Islands reached their height as an international trading hub. For this period, there are 62 stelae. Innovations appear in the nisba, with the mention of men, probably traders, from countries such as Georgia, the coast of the Caspian Sea, Morocco, Spain, and Tunisia. The market of Dahlak was important for the transit trade between Egypt and India, as shown by the commercial activities of Joseph Lebdi between Cairo and India in ­1097–98.18 One of the stelae (n° 212) mentions the death in 1093 of the first sultan (“al-sulṭān al-mubārak”) of Dahlak, “client (mawlā) of ʿAlī b. Aḥmad.” The title of sultan, rare at this time, was probably not used outside the islands. Beyond them, the rulers of Dahlak were indicated under variety of titles by Arab authors, such as ṣāḥib, malik or mutamallik dahlak.19 At the height of the commercial boom of the Dahlak Islands in the second half of the eleventh century, little is known about what went on inland along the north-south caravan route. It is certain that Muslim traders were settled along this trade route, but only one community has so far been documented, which seems to have also experienced its acme in the eleventh century. This is a place named Bilet, in the current town of Kwiha in the Tǝgray region, where have been identified about forty funeral stelae with Arabic inscriptions, written in a simplified Kufic without diacritics, on basalt not squared. Twenty-three of them are precisely dated, the oldest from 361 AH (972 CE) and the most recent from 554 AH (1159 CE).20 Bilet cemetery was therefore in use for at least two centuries, with however a peak of stelae (14) dated to the second half of the eleventh century. Bilet was integrated in more than one way in the networks of the Islamic world. The use of Arabic writing, the precise Hijra dating (often up to a mention of the day of the week of the death of the deceased, in a context where precise dates are otherwise extremely rare before the end of medieval 18  S. D. Goitein, “From the Mediterranean to India: Documents on the Trade to India, South Arabia, and East Africa from the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries,” Speculum 29, 2 (1954): 181–197, at 195; see also idem, Studies in Islamic History and Institutions (Leiden, 2009), 333. 19  Schneider, Stèles funéraires, 368–369 and 37 n. 147. 20  About fifteen stelae were identified in the 1960s and published by Madeleine Schneider, “Stèles funéraires arabes de Quiha,” Annales d’Éthiopie 7 (1967): 107–117, and Wolbert Smidt, “Eine arabische Inschrift aus Kwiha, Tigray,” in Studia Aethiopica in Honour of Siegbert Uhlig on the Occasion of His 65th Birthday, ed. Verena Böll et al. (Wiesbaden, 2004), 259–268. The ERC HornEast team accurately identified the location of this cemetery and identified more than twenty new stelae in 2018 (see https://horneast.hypoth eses.org/616) and is conducting archeological excavations. Julien Loiseau is preparing the publication of those inscriptions.

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times) and the Quranic references are very precise markers of Islamization. In addition, the nisba of some of the deceased link them with the Islamic world. The nisba of Ḥafṣ b. ʿUmar al-Yamāmī, buried in 972 CE, connects him to the Yamāma, in the center of the Arabian Peninsula. One of his granddaughters was buried in 980 CE in the graveyard of Dahlak al-Kabīr. Madeleine Schneider hypothesized that this family had passed through Upper Egypt in the Wādī ʿAllaqī mining area, where the Yamāma people were numerous, before settling in the second half of the tenth century in eastern Tǝgray and in the Dahlak Islands.21 The fact that the gold mines of Wādī ʿAllaqī employed many slaves may not be unconnected to the journey of the al-Yamāmī family and its settlement in Tǝgray, as Ethiopia was in the Middle Ages a major slave supply area. The second interesting nisba, al-Damāmīlī, belonging to a man buried in 1056 CE in Bilet, connects him with Damāmīl, a locality in Upper Egypt. If all these clues show the importance of this Islamic settlement and its connections with the rest of the Islamic world and with long-distance trade, its relations with nearby Christian communities are unknown.22 From the twelfth to the fifteenth century the commercial activities of the Dahlak Islands seem to have diminished sharply, as suggested by the scarcity of the documentation and the rather unvaried nisba in the Dahlak graveyard. For the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, some stelae from the necropolis mention sultans, who were probably only big traders, with surprisingly rich Sunni titles. With one exception – Rizqallāh b. ʿAbdallāh al-Ḥabašī al-Qirwāšī (d. 1214), a Muslim of Ethiopia recorded on stela n° 239 – all of them came from Arabian Peninsula. In the fourteenth century, for which there are no stelae, the Dahlak Islands seem to have become more of a regional hub and less a center for traders coming from all over Islamic world. According to Abū al-Fidāʾ (d. 1331), the ruler of Dahlak was then an Ethiopian Muslim, who had contacts with the ruler of Yemen. In 1385, he gifted some wild animals to the Rasūlid ruler of Yemen, and in 1392–1393, male and female slaves to a Mamluk sultan. In the fifteenth century, the decline continued. Only one stela is known. Massawa and the Dahlak Islands were sacked several times by the Christian kings, who tried to establish Ethiopian influence over the Red Sea shore.23 Finally, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, the šayḫ of Dahlak, who was then a vassal 21  Schneider, Stèles funéraires, 223. 22   Marie-Laure Derat, L’énigme d’une dynastie sainte et usurpatrice dans le royaume chrétien d’Ethiopie, XIe–XIIIe siècle (Turnhout, 2018), 120–123: some documents attest to conflicts in the twelfth century between a Christian king, Ṭänṭäwǝdǝm, and Islamic communities in Ṣǝraʿ, where Bilet is located. 23  Johannes Kolmodin, Traditions de Tsazzega et Hazzega (Rome and Uppsala, 1912), A31, A32.

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of the sultan of Aden, told the Portuguese that there were no more traders on the islands, only fighters. In 1520, the Portuguese occupied Massawa and the Dahlak Islands, and in 1526, the sultan of Dahlak, Aḥmad b. Ismāʿīl, submitted to them. During the jihad led by Imam Aḥmad b. Ibrāhīm, he joined the Muslim side and received Ḥǝrgigo as ruler.24 Stela n° 255 is dedicated to him: he is called “fighter for the faith” (muǧāhid), “warrior of the frontier” (murābiṭ), the “sultan of Islam in the march of the well-protected Dahlak” (sulṭān al-islām bi- ṯaġr Dahlak al-maḥrūs). He died on 16 šawwāl 946 AH (24 February 1540 CE). In 1541, as noted by the Portuguese, the Dahlak Islands were under the rule of the local ruler of Massawa. The Sultanates of Šawah and Other Ethiopian Islamic Polities of the Twelfth–Thirteenth Centuries From the twelfth and especially the thirteenth century, the indices of Muslim communities multiply and point to more southern regions. The Ḏikr at-tawārīḫ (literally “Annals”) is a short Arabic text (one folio) identified by Enrico Cerulli in 1936 in a miscellaneous Arabic manuscript dated 186325 and commonly (and misleadingly) entitled “Chronicle of Šawah.” It relates the rise of an Islamic power, possibly the “Sultanate of Šawah,” in the twelfth century at the southern end of the north-south route along the escarpment of the Central Highlands. It is the only written source emanating from this sultanate. This text, which relates events from 1063 to 1289/90 CE, deals mainly with internal quarrels between the different sovereigns who succeeded each other at the head of the region from its Islamization in 1108 to the invasion of the region in 1285 by the head of a different Islamic dynasty, the Walasmaʿ, with the likely support of the Christian ruler. This text is ordered according to a temporal sequence involving three major periods. The first, dealing with the foundation of the Muslim community, covers the later eleventh and twelfth century, from the death in 1063 of the queen Badīt and the Islamization of “Ǧ.bbah” in 1108. The second details political events of the sultanate from 1183 until the end of the dynasty in 1285: it lists different sultans or sovereigns who succeeded one another, main famines, attacks of certain places, and the like. At the end of the text, the author notes that the sultan’s family, who ruled until 1.2

24  Šihāb ad-Dīn Aḥmad b. ʿAbd al-Qāder b. Sālem b. ʿUṯmān, Futūḥ al-Habaša, The Conquest of Abyssinia (16th century), trans. Paul Lester Stenhouse and Richard Pankhurst (Hollywood, CA, 2003), 374. 25  Enrico Cerulli, “Il sultanato dello scioa nel secolo xiii secondo un nuovo documento storico,” RSE 1 (1941): 5–42. Damien Labadie, as part of the ERC project HornEast, is preparing a new edition and translation of this text from the manuscript BAV MS. Vat. Ar. 1792.

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the year 1285, belonged to the Maḫzūmī clan. Finally, a period corresponding to the first conquests of Wālī ʾAsmaʿ (1285–1289) seems to be a new time of foundation. The growing power of the Wālī ʾAsmaʿ family, which seems to have come from another region, became a menace to the Maḫzūmī family. A wedding between the sultan Dilmārrah and the daughter of Wālī ʾAsmaʿ in 1271 could be seen as an attempt to appease this new power. But finally, probably with the support of the Christian king, Wālī ʾAsmaʿ destroyed Šawah, killed all the Maḫzūmī family, and imposed his power on the whole region. Rare information appears about the organization of this (or perhaps these) territories. The area was urbanized, as several cities are mentioned, including Walalah, Kālḥwr (noted Kālgor by Cerulli), or Ḥādbayah (noted Ḥādiyah by Cerulli). The Ḏikr at-tawārīḫ gives the impression of small enemy political formations, each located in a city and engaged in seasonal raids against neighboring seigneuries. This hypothesis is confirmed by a note written in 1292 about the arrival in Cairo of an ambassador of the Christian king Yǝkunno Amlak in 1274. Its author, a secretary of the Mamluk chancery named Ibn ʿAbd al-Ẓāhir, notes: “Among the kings of Abyssinia is Yūsuf b. Arsmāya, master of the territory of Ḥadāya [also noted Ǧidāya], Šawā, Kalǧur, and their districts (aʿmāl), which are dominated by Muslim kings.”26 In his scholarly study, Cerulli hypothesized that the Šawah Sultanate (we would rather say the “Muslim countries of Šawah”) could be located straddling the escarpment of the Central Plateau and the upper part of the escarpment, south of a line Däbrä Bǝrhan- Č�̣ änno.27 The arguments may seem fragile because they are based on oral traditions and toponymy, and no archeological remains of a Muslim occupation in this region have been identified. Nevertheless, some clues drawn from the internal criticism of the text suggest indeed an approximate location of Muslim Šawah in the twelfth–thirteenth centuries in this region, in the northeast of the current province of Šäwa. For example, the probable capital of some sultans, Walalah, could be identified with Wäläle, south of Č�̣ änno.28 One clear marker of the Islamization of this region is its urbanization, which in the Ethiopian context of that time always denotes Islamized societies. But there are other markers as well. The precise use of the Islamic calendar 26  Quoted in Éric Vallet, L’Arabie marchande. État et commerce sous les sultans Rasūlides du Yémen (626–858/1229–1454) (Paris, 2010), 409. About letters and embassies between Ethiopia and Mamluk court, see Julien Loiseau, “The Ḥaṭī and the Sultan: Letters and Embassies from Abyssinia to the Mamluk Court,” in Mamluk Cairo. A Crossroad for Embassies, ed. Frédéric Bauden and Malika Dekkiche (Leiden, 2019), 638–657. 27  Cerulli, “Il sultanato dello scioa,” 15. 28  George Wynn Brereton Huntingford, The Historical Geography of Ethiopia from the First Century AD to 1704 (Oxford, 1989), 76.

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and of Arabic script and language are strong evidence of the presence of an Islamic scholarly elite. This literate elite is represented by the faqīh Ibrāhīm b. al-Ḥasan, “qāḍī al-quḍā (lit. “cadi of the cadis”) of Šawah” whose death occurred in 1255. The title “cadi of the cadis” refers to the judge at the head of the judiciary of a state or of a city, and therefore presupposes a sophisticated judicial hierarchy. Finally, the mention of the capture of Baghdad by the “Tatars” (the Mongols) in February 1258 (although the author places it in 1255) indicates that this space was in contact with the rest of the Islamic world and that the echo of this important event had reached the heart of the Ethiopian highlands. The Ḏikr at-tawārīḫ attests to the existence of other Muslim communities in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries as well, such as Mūrah, ʿAdal, and Hūbat, territories attacked in 1288 by Wālī ʾAsmaʿ after the destruction of Šawah and its surroundings. While those specific territories cannot yet be identified in the landscape, the existence of Muslim communities is confirmed by the identification of Muslim funerary stelae dated from this period in four distinct regions.29 First, to the south of Christian Šäwa, around the present-day towns of Däbrä Zäyt and Nazret, three inscribed stelae have been discovered; though undated, they are attributed to the twelfth–thirteenth century on epigraphic grounds.30 Further south, east of Lake Langano, a necropolis was identified by Azaïs and Chambard in the 1920s containing about thirty graves oriented in the direction of Mecca.31 The authors mention only four stelae bearing Arabic inscriptions, which do not include dates. Paul Ravaisse, who edited them, thinks they can be attributed to the thirteenth century. Further east, along the Eastern Plateau, Azaïs and Chambard also identified about fifteen inscribed stelae in Heyssa, Lafto, Č�̣ ällänqo and Bate. Only two of them bear a date: one from 666 AH (1267/68 CE) and the second 675 AH (1276 CE); the others are also attributed, by stylistic comparison, to the period from the end of the eleventh to the end of the thirteenth century.32

29  George Wynn Brereton Huntingford, “Arabic Inscriptions in Southern Ethiopia,” Antiquity. A Quarterly Review of Archaeology 29 (1955): 230–233. 30  Madeleine Schneider, “Stèles funéraires musulmanes de la province du Choa,” Annales d’Éthiopie 8 (1970): 73–78. 31  François Bernardin Azaïs and Roger Chambard, Cinq années de recherches archéologiques en Éthiopie (Paris, 1931), 203–205, pl. LXIII–LXIV. 32  Paul Ravaisse, “Stèles et inscriptions arabes du Harar,” in Cinq années de recherches archéologiques en Éthiopie, 283–309; Madeleine Schneider, “Notes au sujet de deux stèles funéraires en arabe de Baté (Harar)”, Le Muséon 118, 3–4 (2005): 333–354.

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Finally, in the village of Harlaa, situated about 15km southeast of Dire Dawa, at the east of the last mention locus, four stelae have been identified.33 One is precisely dated to 1259–1260 CE; the others could be attributed to the end of the twelfth or beginning of the thirteenth century. The village of Harlaa also has numerous ruins, attributed by local tradition to a legendary population, the “Harla,” to whom all the archeological remains of the area are attributed.34 The recent archeological excavations conducted by Timothy Insoll, with notably pit tests in a mosque, in the settlement area, and in jewellers’ workshops, have confirmed, with radiocarbon datings, a main occupation dated between the mid-twelfth and mid-thirteenth centuries. Evidence for both long-distance (Red Sea and western Indian Ocean) and regional trade have been found, with imported ceramics (even from China), glass, coins, beads, shells, and some fish bones.35 Some aspects of architecture show technological transfer from abroad, notably the selective use of coralline limestone in the miḥrāb of the excavated mosque and in the mausoleum complex to demarcate individual tombs. The excavation of Harlaa is ongoing.36 In the same period that witnessed this multiplication of permanent Muslim settlements south of the Central Plateau and along the Eastern Plateau, the port of Zaylaʿ was developing on the Gulf of Aden. As François-Xavier Fauvelle and Bertrand Hirsch have shown,37 contrary to a generally accepted opinion,38 Zaylaʿ seems to have acquired a really dominant position only in the thirteenth century. The first mention of Zaylaʿ is in al-Yaʿqūbī’s Kitān al-buldān at the end of the ninth century. It was then a small independent port, little Islamized if at all, exporting products (leather, incense, amber, tortoise shells and maybe also slaves) that could be obtained in the vicinity and did not involve trade 33  Madeleine Schneider, “Stèles funéraires de la région de Harar et Dahlak (Éthiopie),” Revue des études islamiques 2 (1969): 339–343; Frédéric Bauden, “Inscriptions arabes d’Éthiopie,” Annales Islamologiques 45 (2011): 286–293. 34  Amélie Chekroun et al., “Les Harla: archéologie et mémoire des géants d’Éthiopie. Proposition de séquence historique pour les sites du Čärčär,” in Espaces musulmans de la Corne (cit. at n. 6), 75–98. 35  Timothy Insoll et al., “Archaeological Survey and Excavations, Harlaa, Dire Dawa, Ethiopia, January-February 2017. A Preliminary Fieldwork Report,” Nyame Akuma 87 (2017) : 32–38. See also François-Xavier Fauvelle and Romain Mensan, “Moules de coulée en pierre trouvés à Harlaa,” in Espaces musulmans de la Corne, 99–102. 36  See the website of the ERC project “Becoming Muslim” led by Timothy Insoll: http://www .becomingmuslim.co.uk 37   François-Xavier Fauvelle-Aymar et al., “Le port de Zeyla et son arrière-pays au Moyen Âge: investigations archéologiques et retour aux sources écrites,” in Espaces musulmans de la Corne, 50–71. 38   For example by Timothy Insoll, The Archaeology of Islam in Sub-Saharan Africa (Cambridge, 2003), 58–60.

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networks with inland regions. It has long been maintained that in the tenth and eleventh centuries Zaylaʿ was under the control of the Christian kingdom,39 relying in particular on the texts of al-Masʿūdī (in The Meadows of Gold, 956) and Ibn Ḥawqal (977–978) mentioning the presence of Muslims tributary to the Christian rulers. However, there is no explicit mention of Zaylaʿ among these Arab authors, but of Dahlak or more widely of all “al-Ḥabaša.” Zaylaʿ then disappears from the Arab sources in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Commentators have long identified Zaylaʿ, most probably wrongly, with the port of “Zāliġ” mentioned by al-Idrīsī in 1154 in the Nuzhat al-mušhtāq fīʾkḫtirāq al-āfāq (or Tabula Rogeriana, “Book of Roger,” in Latin).40 The port of Zaylaʿ appears to be really Islamized in Arab texts of the early thirteenth century, such as the Muʿǧam al-buldān of Yāqūt al-Rūmī (d. 1229) or that of Ibn Saʿīd (1214–1286) quoted by Abū al-Fidāʾ (1273–1331) in his Taqwīn al-buldān. In the second half of the thirteenth century, Zaylaʿ appears in the Arabic literature as an important stopping place for Muslim pilgrims en route to the holy places in Arabia and as a site of export for slaves from inland regions. Ibn al-Muǧāwir (d. 1291) describes the two coasts facing each other like a mirror, the barr al-ʿArab (“Arab coast”) facing the barr al-ʿAǧam (“coast of non-Arabs”) and Zaylaʿ is then undoubtedly the main port of this barr al-ʿAǧam.41 Yemeni sources mention the circulation not only of merchants, but also of scholars, pilgrims, mercenaries, diplomats or slaves, women and men, between Yemen and the Ethiopian sultanates, via the port of Zaylaʿ. The presence of Muslim communities (maybe not a sultanate) in the Šawah region and of others, further south and east, by the 1260s–1270s at the latest, as well as the development of Zaylaʿ as a Muslim-controlled port from the early thirteenth century, point to a new orientation of settlement and trade, east-west from Šawah to a point on the coast (Zaylaʿ) much further south than Massawa and the Dahlak Islands. It was in this context, in the second half of the thirteenth century, that a new polity, the sultanate of Ifat (often Awfāt in the Arabic sources) arose. Under the rule of the Walasmaʿ dynasty, it took control of Šawah and became the dominant Islamic power in Ethiopia for the next 150 years.

39  Carlo Conti Rossini, Storia d’Etiopia. Parte prima: Dalle origini all’avvento della dinastia salomonide (Bergamo, 1928), 67; Taddesse Tamrat, Church and State in Ethiopia (1270–1527) (Oxford, 1972), 38; Trimingham, Islam in Ethiopia, 51–52 ; Cuoq, Islam en Ethiopie, 55. 40   Fauvelle-Aymar et al., “Le port de Zeyla,” 58–60. 41  Ibn al-Muǧāwir, A traveller in thirteenth-century Arabia: Ibn al-Mujāwir’s Ta‘rīkh alMustabṣir, trans. G. Rex Smith (Aldershot, 2008).

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2.1 Relations between Muslim Territories and the Christian Kingdom From the late thirteenth to the early sixteenth century, we have many more written sources, including the Ta‌ʾrīḫ al-Walasmaʿ, the annals in Arabic of the Walasmaʿ dynasty to 1520;42 Christian Ethiopian chronicles mentioning the Islamic polities;43 and important accounts by Muslim Egyptian writers, notably the Masālik al-abṣār fi mamālik al-amṣār (“Routes toward Insight into the Capital Empires”) of Ibn Faḍl Allāh al-ʿUmarī,44 composed in the 1330s on the basis of testimony from several Ethiopian informants,45 and the Kitāb al-ilmām bi-aḫbār man bi-arḍ al-Ḥabaša min mulūk al-Islām of al-Maqrīzī, completed in 1438, which describes the political situation of Ifat at the turn of the fifteenth century.46 In addition, and importantly, this period offers a growing body of archeological evidence that fleshes out and revises the written testimony in significant ways. Several archeological sites have recently been identified in 42  Enrico Cerulli, ed. and trans., “Documenti arabi per la storia dell’Etiopia,” Memorie della Reale Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei 6th ser., 4, 2 (1931): 39–96, at 42–50. Probably written in the early sixteenth century, this text was also identified and translated by Philipp Paulitschke at the end of the nineteenth century, from another manuscript, BnF Arabe 4257: Philipp Paulitschke, Harar. Forschungreise nach den Somâl – und Galla – Ländern Ost Afrikas (Leipzig, 1888), 503–506. The Cerulli manuscripts of the Vatican contain several versions of this text. An edition of these different versions is being prepared by Amélie Chekroun. 43  Beside the chronicles of the reigns of Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob (1434–1468) and Bäʾǝdä Maryam (1468–1478), the most important one is the account in Gǝʿǝz of the military campaigns led by King ʿAmdä Ṣǝyon (1314–1344) against the Muslim communities of the east in 1332. This very complex text requires further study. It is not contemporary with the events and seems to be a later compilation, probably of the fifteenth century. Cf. the comments of Paolo Marrassini, ed. and trans., Lo scettro e la croce. La campagna di ʿAmda Seyon I contro l’Ifat (1332) (Naples, 1993), 93; Manfred Kropp, ed. and trans., Der siegreiche Feldzug des Königs Amda Seyon gegen die Muslime in Adal im Jahre 1332 N. Chr. (Louvain, 1994), xviii. There is also an English translation of the work: George Wynn Brereton Huntingford, trans., The Glorious Victories of ʿĀmda Ṣeyon King of Ethiopia (Oxford, 1965). 44  Ibn Faḍl Allāh al-ʿUmarī, Masālik el abṣār fi mamālik el amṣār. I: L’Afrique moins l’Egypte, trans. Maurice Gaudefroy-Demombynes (Paris, 1927). 45  Muth, “A globe-trotter,” 126. 46  It has never been properly studied – in fact, there is no edition of the Kitāb al-Ilmām taking into account all known manuscripts (Muth, “A globe-trotter”, 123–131) and no translation of this text, except the one in Latin by F. T. Rinck from 1790 and the unpublished English translation of the Rinck translation (by G. W. B. Huntingford, Maqrizi: The Book of the True Knowledge of the History of the Muslim Kings in Abyssinia, 1955). Only two copies exist of Huntingford’s translation, one at the British Library, the other one at the library of the Institute for Ethiopian Studies, Addis Ababa University.

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the territory of the sultanate of Ifat and are dated to the fourteenth century.47 These sites are witness to the period of domination of the sultanate of Ifat. Some archeological data have also been identified along the route between Zaylaʿ and Ifat, near the present-day Somaliland-Ethiopia border,48 and in the Harar and Č�̣ ärč̣är49 region. Due to lack of excavations, these data cannot yet be connected to the different sultanates of that time, with the notable exception of the city of Harar, where Timothy Insoll is currently conducting pit tests and is able to date the beginning of the occupation of the city in the sixteenth century.50 All told, it is now possible for the first time to give an archeological context to some of the sultanates of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The archeological studies of these sites are still in their early phases. The potential for new discoveries is prodigious and should enable in future great advances in understanding the history of this second period of the Islamic Middle Ages in the region. As noted above, Wālī ʾAsmaʿ took control of Muslim communities of Šawah in the later 1280s with the likely support of the Christian king, at that time Yǝkunno Amlak. The sultanate of Ifat that he thereby established, under the authority of his descendants (known after him as the Walasmaʿ dynasty), became a tributary state, under the suzerainty of the Christian kings. But it was not the only one. Al-ʿUmarī, writing a few decades later, listed six other “Muslim kingdoms” in Ethiopia: “Dawāro, ʿArābabni, Hadiyya, Šarḫā, Bāli and Dāra.” He specified that the whole area was called in Egypt and Syria “the country of Zaylaʿ” which “is however only one of their cities on the sea whose name has extended to the whole.”51 The “seven Muslim kingdoms” were all independent of each other; each paid “a fixed tribute which they bring every year” to the Christian king and “none of them has its own authority unless it is invested by the ruler of Amḥara […] because it is he who has the supreme authority 47  Bertrand Poissonnier et al., “Les mosquées médiévales de Gozé et Fäqi Däbbis (Ifāt),” in Espaces musulmans de la Corne, 103–139; François-Xavier Fauvelle-Aymar et al., “A Topographic Survey and Some Soundings at Nora, an Ancient Muslim Town of Ethiopia,” Journal of Ethiopian Studies 39, 1–2 (2006): 1–11; Fauvelle, Hirsch, and Chekroun, “Le sultanat de l’Awfât.” 48  Alexander T. Curle, “The Ruined Towns of Somaliland,” Antiquity. A Quarterly Review of Archaeology 9 (1937): 315–327; Fauvelle-Aymar et al., “Le port de Zeyla.” 49  The sites identified by Azaïs and Chambard (Cinq années de recherches) in the Č�̣ ärč̣är in the 1920s have recently been revisited: see Chekroun et al., “Les Harla;” Amélie Chekroun, “Dakar, capitale du sultanat éthiopien du Barr Saʿd ad-dīn (1415–1520),” Cahiers d’études africaines 219 (2015): 569–586. 50  Timothy Insoll, “First Footsteps in the Archaeology of Harar, Ethiopia,” Journal of Islamic Archaeology 4, 2 (2017): 189–215. 51   Al-ʿUmarī, Masālik, 5.

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over them and they are before him only lieutenants.”52 The Gǝʿǝz account of the wars conducted in 1332 by the Christian king ʿAmdä Ṣǝyon would seem to confirm this for Hadiyya, in mentioning a tribute levied upon it already in 1316/17, and also for Ifat, the Walasmaʿ sultans being vassals of the Christian kings even before ʿAmdä Ṣǝyon’s reign. The Christian king could depose a sultan and install another one as governor if he wanted. The author of this Gǝʿǝz account explains that one of the reasons for the war between ʿAmdä Ṣeyon and the eastern Muslim territories was the refusal of the ruler of Hadiyya to pay tribute to the king.53 It is difficult to say whether the state of Christian-Islamic relations presented in this text reflects in all respects the conditions of 1332 or rather those of the fifteenth century, when the text seems to have been written, but the general congruence with al-ʿUmarī’s contemporary report does paint a picture of the dependence of the main Islamic powers on the Christian state. This is further confirmed by the Kitāb al-Ilmām of al-Maqrīzī, in the second part of the booklet untitled “The condition of Muslim affairs in the war against the Christians of Abyssinia,” which details the dependence of the sultans of Ifat on the authority of the Christian king during the second half of the fourteenth century. While the first part is based largely on al-ʿUmarī’s text, the second and main section describes precisely the political situation of the sultanate of Ifat in the later fourteenth and early fifteenth century, in particular its highly conflictual relations with the Christian kingdom. For this section alMaqrīzī used oral and written traditions gathered from Ethiopians or travelers to Ethiopia present in Cairo or Mecca in the 1430s, such as Šihāb al-dīn Aḥmad b. ʿAbdl khāliq al-Maǧāṣī, a Maghreb traveler who stayed in the capital city of Ifat and whom al-Maqrīzī met in Mecca. In this part of the work the Walasmaʿ dynasty is again presented, in the period before the reign of Ḥaqq al-Dīn (r. 1376–1386), as under the domination of the Christian king. According to al-Maqrīzī, the Christian king held some members of the Walasmaʿ dynasty as prisoners, granted his “patronage,” appointed the new sultans, offered military aid to the sultans when necessary and protected them, in exchange for which they were constrained to “obey his orders.” Thus, when Ḥaqq al-Dīn rebelled against his uncle, the sultan ʿAlī, the Christian king arrived with an “army of 30,000 men” and participated directly in the war to put down the rebellion. According to al-Maqrīzī, Ḥaqq al-Dīn’s rebellion was motivated by a desire to free the dynasty from Christian tutelage and gain political independence.54 52  Ibid., 2 and 19. 53  See Marrassini, ed. and trans., Lo scettro e la croce, 58–61; Huntingford, trans., Glorious Victories, 19–23 and 58. 54  Huntingford, trans., Maqrizi, 14b; Fauvelle, Hirsch, and Chekroun, “Le sultanat de l’Awfât.”

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Ḥaqq al-Dīn was killed before totally liberating “his kingdom,” but his brother and successor Saʿd al-Dīn continued his policy, leading a “continual war on the infidels of ʾAmḥara.”55 Saʿd al-Dīn fought the Christian king probably until 1415, when after a retreat perhaps as far as Zaylaʿ, he too was killed, by King Yǝsḥaq.56 Al-Maqrīzī thus points to a fissure within the Walasmaʿ dynasty, between those who continued to accept Christian overlordship (the sultan ʿAlī and his successors) and the two brothers who rejected it. Such a fissure is confirmed in Ta‌ʾrīḫ al-Walasmaʿ. In this text, which lists all the ruling members of the Walasmaʿ family, the break appears where the genealogy reaches the reign of Ḥaqq al-Dīn: he is the first for whom a precise date of reign is indicated, and the first of whom it is said that he led a jihad and died a martyr.57 This double break, in the way the reign is recorded and in its ruler’s policy against the Christians, is central to understanding both this text and the history of the dynasty. It also indicates a change in the transmission of memory from Ḥaqq al-Dīn’s time. The territory of Ifat was thereafter absorbed into the Christian state. According to al-Maqrīzī, the Christians destroyed its mosques to build churches and appointed Christian governors, who adopted the name Walasmaʿ (in Gǝʿǝz, wäläšma) as a title, as attested in the chronicle of King Bäʾǝdä Maryam (r. 1468–1478).58 The process of integrating into the Christian kingdom the various Islamic territories in the south (Däwaro, Bali, Fäṭägar, Ifat, Hadiyya) following the collapse of the sultanate of Ifat is unknown. The Christian documentation makes clear that they were under Christian control from the middle of the fifteenth century at the latest, and probably a few decades earlier. The kings founded royal residences in Fäṭägar and Ifat: for example, Dawit II had a royal residence at Ṭǝlq59 and Lǝbnä Dǝngǝl had one at Badǝqe.60 Many royal 55  Huntingford, trans., Maqrizi, 15. 56  One of the islands facing the port of Zaylaʿ still bears the name of “Saad Dīn”, on which a monument is considered the tomb of Saʿd al-Dīn. See Fauvelle-Aymar et al., “Le port de Zeyla,” 35–37 and 66–68. 57  Cerulli, “Documenti arabi,” 142–143. 58  Jules Perruchon, ed. and trans., Les chroniques de Zarʾa Yaʿeqôb et de Ba‌ʾeda Mâryâm, rois d’Éthiopie de 1434 à 1478 (Paris, 1893), 111–112. The title “Walasma‘/Wäläšma” remained attached to this geographical area and was used by both Christian and Muslim leaders until the beginning of the twentieth century: see for example Ahmed Hassen Omer, Aleyyu Amba. L’Ifat et ses réseaux politiques, religieux et commerciaux au XIXe siècle (Paris and Addis Ababa, 2019). 59  Marie Laure Derat, “Fäṭägar,” in EAe 2 (2005), 504–505. 60  The royal city of Badǝqe has not yet precisely located, but was probably not far from the today’s town of Däbrä Zäyt. See Lanfranco Ricci, “Resti di antico edificio in Ginbi (Scioa),” Annales d’Éthiopie 10 (1976): 177–210, at 195 and 201 n. 6; Osbert Guy Stanhope Crawford, Ethiopian Itineraries circa 1400–1524 (Cambridge, 1958), 53–54; Marie-Laure Derat, Le domaine des rois éthiopiens, 1270–1527: espace, pouvoir, et monachisme (Paris, 2003), 46;

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churches were also built on these territories, to spatially mark the presence of the Christian power. Č�̣ äwa garrisons were deployed there, notably in Däwaro and Bali, as noted in the chronicles of the kings Zäʾra Yaʿǝqob and Bäʾǝdä Maryam.61 Those chronicles also mention the appointment of Christian governors for Bali, Däwaro, Fäṭägar and Gänz, which is confirmed a century later in the Futūḥ al-Ḥabaša and the Mäṣḥafä sǝddät. In 1443, in a letter addressed to the Mamluk sultan, Zäʾra Yaʿǝqob stressed the fact that a great number of Muslims were living in his kingdom, that their cities and trade were under his protection, and that their “sultans” obeyed him.62 Hadiyya seems to have been the only former Muslim territory to retain a slight autonomy: although its governor was appointed and under the authority of the king, he was Muslim and seems to have been the descendant of the dynasty that reigned there before the fifteenth century. During his stay at the court of Lǝbnä Dǝngǝl in the 1520s, Francisco Alvares witnessed the arrival of the “queen” of Hadiyya who had come to seek help from the king regarding dynastic problems within her territory. The Futūḥ al-Ḥabaša confirms this particular position of Hadiyya and mentions, like Alvares, that “the governor of Hādyā, who was a Muslim, […] used to pay the poll-tax to the king, and in the same way, every year, he would give him one of his daughters to be baptized a Christian by him.”63 After the death of Saʿd al-Dīn, his family took refuge in Yemen, at the court of the Rasūlid sultan Aḥmad b. al-Ašraf Ismāʿil (r. 1400–1424). Shortly thereafter the sultan “provided them with supplies and six horsemen,” and the older son of Saʿd al-Dīn, Ṣabr al-Dīn (r. 1415–1421/22), came back to Ethiopia, to a place called al-Sayāra,64 where the soldiers who had served under his father joined him. They settled at the eastern limits of the territory controlled by the sultanate (by now, perhaps more properly the Christian province) of Ifat, where they established a new sultanate, called the Barr Saʿd al-Dīn (“Land of Saʿd al-Dīn”).65 Deresse Ayenachew, “Le kätäma: la cour et le camp royale en Éthiopie (XIVe–XVIe siècle). Espace et pouvoir” (Ph.D diss., Université de Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne, 2009), 352–353. 61  Perruchon, Chroniques de Zarʾa Yaʿeqôb, 45, 159, and passim. 62  Julien Loiseau, “Abyssinia at al-Azhar: Muslim Students from the Horn of Africa in Late Medieval Cairo,” Northeastern African Studies 19, 1 (2019): 47–70. 63  Šihāb ad-Dīn, The Conquest of Abyssinia, 307; Beckingham-Huntingford, Prester John, 1:191–194, 2: 427–436. 64  Cerulli, “Documenti arabi,” 46; Huntingford, trans., Maqrizi, 18–19. 65  At the time of the Emirate of Harar (1647–1887), the former state was still referred to as “Barr Saʿd ad-Dīn” in official documents written by the Harari diwan (Wagner, “Three Arabic documents,” 218). This term appears only once in Christian sources (Conzelman, ed., Chronique de Galāwdéwos, 146).

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In some Arabic sources, the area in which they settled is called ʿAdal.66 We may therefore presume a linkage, tighter or looser, between this area and the site of the Muslim community of ʿAdal that Wālī ʾAsmaʿ is reported to have attacked in 1288, whose exact location and extent, however, remain unknown. Adding to the terminological confusion is the fact that Christian Ethiopian sources employ the name Adäl for the area and the sultanate through the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.67 It seems clear, in any case, that the Barr Saʿd al-Dīn, with its capital at Dakar,68 controlled an area more extensive than that of the thirteenth-century community (or perhaps polity) of ʿAdal. Saʿd al-Dīn’s descendants imposed their power over many other formerly independent Islamic territories, both sedentary and nomadic, including Hūbat, Zaylaʿ, the Ḥārla territory, and part of the vast and complex territory of the Somali. The sources do not describe the sultanate’s installation, which makes it difficult to trace either the sultans’ strategies or the reaction of local chiefs to this dynasty coming from Ifat by way of Yemen, imposing taxes and controlling the trade route from the coast. In the 1520s, Francisco Alvares’s impression was that Saʿd al-Dīn’s descendants, in reaction to the defeat of their ancestor, conducted a policy of peaceful alliance with the Christian kings.69 This idea is repeated by many authors who consider that from the second half of the fifteenth century, the Walasmaʿ pursued a peaceful policy towards neighboring Christians, privileging the security of trade routes crossing their territory.70 Others, however, evoke a perpetual war between the Barr Saʿd al-Dīn and the Christian kingdom.71 In all probability the situation lies somewhere between these two positions. Actually the situation 66  Philipp Paulitschke, Die geographische Erforschung der Adâl-Länder und Harâr’s in OstAfrica (Leipzig, 1884), 1 n. 2 ; Braukämper, Islamic History and Culture, 29. 67  See among many: Perruchon, ed. and trans., Chroniques de Zarʾa Yaʿeqôb, passim; Conzelman, ed., Chronique de Galāwdéwos, 147; René Basset, Études sur l’histoire d’Éthiopie (Paris, 1882), 104; Carlo Conti Rossini, ed. and trans., Vitae sanctorum indigenarum. I: Gadla Marqorēwos seu Acta Sancti Mercurii, CSCO 2nd ser, 22 (Paris, 1904; repr. as CSCO 33–34, SAe 16–17 [Louvain, 1955]), 38; Crawford, Ethiopian Itineraries, 172–173. 68  Chekroun, “Dakar,” 569–586. 69   Beckingham-Huntingford, Prester John, 2: 410–416. See also Andreu Martínez d’AlòsMoner, “Francisco Alvarez,” in Christian-Muslim Relations. A Bibliographical History, vol. 7, Central and Eastern Europe, Asia, Africa, and South America (1500–1600), ed. David Thomas and John Chesworth (Leiden, 2015), 781–790. 70  Ewald Wagner, “The Genealogy of the Later Walashma’ Sultans of Adal and Harar,” in Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference of Ethiopian Studies, ed. Bahru Zewde, Richard Pankhurst, and Taddese Beyene (Addis Ababa, 1994), 135–146; Robert Ferry, “Quelques hypothèses sur les origines des conquêtes musulmanes en Abyssinie au XVIe siècle,” Cahiers d’Études Africaines 2–5 (1961): 24–36 at 31. 71  For example Cuoq, Islam en Éthiopie, 219.

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has never been properly analyzed, no study having been done specifically on the fifteenth century. The overviews by Cuoq, Trimingham, and Braukämper just put the point of view of the different sources end to end, without addressing their often opposite characterizations. It is true that most of the documentation about the fifteenth century mentions conflicts between the Walasmaʿ/Saʿd al-Dīn sultanate and the Christian power. The description of the situation in the 1420s–1430s by al-Maqrīzī, for instance, only mentions the fights between Saʿd al-Dīn’s sons, Ṣabr al-Dīn (r. 1415–1422), Manṣūr (r. 1422–1424), Ǧamāl al-Dīn (r. 1424–1433) and Badlāy (r. 1433–1445), and the Christian power, especially King Yǝsḥaq (r. 1414–1430). The chronicles of Kings Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob (1434–1468) and Bäʾǝdä Maryam (1468–1478) repeatedly mention raids ordered by the Christian king against the Barr Saʿd al-Dīn, and record that the Walasmaʿ sultan even sent an embassy to Bäʾǝdä Maryam asking him to stop these incursions, in exchange for the payment of a tribute.72 Here is explicitly mentioned a tribute paid to the Christian power. Did the system of suzerainty established in the fourteenth century extend in the fifteenth century over this new sultanate? It is impossible for now to be affirmative, no other source mentioning it. But the Futūḥ al-Ḥabaša says rather that Christian domination extended only over ancient territories like Ifat and into borderlands, not within the sultanate itself. The work is also very critical of Muslims who paid tribute to the Christian power: “In the time of Saʿd al-Dīn, and in the time of those who governed Harar after him, and even up to the time of garād Abūn, the infidels made incursions into the country of the Muslims and laid it waste many times, so that some of the Muslim towns even paid them the ḫarāǧ. This was the situation until Imam Aḥmad ruled. He prevented the infidels from doing this, and conquered their country.”73 Both Christian and Muslim frontier raids continued regularly until the conquest of Christian Ethiopia starting in 1531. One of the most famous leaders of these raids, on the Muslim side, was Emir Maḥfūẓ. For those who subscribe to a view of the Barr Saʿd al-Dīn as pursuing peace with the Christian kingdom, culminating in an alliance between the early sixteenth-century sultan Muḥammad and the Christian regent Ǝleni, the emir or “Imam Maḥfūẓ” represents the emergence of an “opposition” or “religious” party.74 His annual expeditions against Christian territories, by this interpretation, were conducted against the advice of the reigning dynasty; his successors, continuing his policy, relegated the sultans to the mere role of extras. 72  Perruchon, ed. and trans., Chroniques de Zarʾa Yaʿeqôb, 131. 73  Šihāb ad-Dīn, Conquest of Abyssinia, 22. 74  See for example Cuoq, Islam en Éthiopie, 165; Trimingham, Islam in Ethiopia, 83.

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Imam Aḥmad b. Ibrāhīm, one of Maḥfūẓ’s heirs (he married Maḥfūẓ’s daughter Dalwanbarah), then led this anti-Christian effort to its climax by attempting to impose Islam on the entire Christian kingdom. As mentioned above, the idea of a totally peaceful policy towards the Christian kingdom is highly unlikely, as is the idea of an “opposition party” against this policy.75 Actually, all the sources that mention Maḥfūẓ (Alvares, Śärṣ́ä Dǝngǝl’s chronicle, Pedro Páez’s History of Ethiopia, the Futūḥ al-Ḥabaša76) agree that Maḥfūẓ was a leader of the sultanate’s army, under the orders of the sultan Muḥammad. The Futūḥ alḤabaša however confirms that there were internal struggles for power in the Barr Saʿd al-Dīn at the end of the fifteenth century, with a very rapid succession of sovereigns, legitimate or not; these culminated in the 1520s with the emergence of Imam Aḥmad, who ended up killing the legitimate sultan Abū Bakr. While the sources focus on the conflict between the sultans of the Barr Saʿd al-Dīn and the Christian king, there were certainly diplomatic and economic relations as well. We know for example that the embassies of Christian kings to Cairo (to the patriarch of Alexandria and to the Mamluk court) could be accompanied by representatives of Islamic Ethiopian powers or by Ethiopian Muslim traders.77 The diplomatic relations between Christian and Muslim Ethiopian polities were manifested by matrimonial alliances or diplomatic messengers from one court to another.78 2.2 Organization of the Islamic Territories Except for Ifat, the exact location of the other six Islamic “kingdoms” of the fourteenth century has been the subject of much speculation. Ulrich Braukämper collected in the 1970s all attested information on them and found it to be inconclusive regarding their geographical placement.79 But the archeological evidence of Islamic settlements south and east of Šäwa already in the late thirteenth century, described above, may well correlate with these polities described by al-ʿUmarī a few decades later. 75  See Chekroun, Les djihâds de l’imam Aḥmad. 76   Beckingham-Huntingford, Prester John, 2: 410–515; Manfred Kropp, ed., Die Geschichte des Lebna Dengel, Claudius und Minās (Louvain, 1988), 4; Pedro Páez, Pedro Páez’s History of Ethiopia, 1622, ed. Isabel Boavida, Hervé Pennec and Manuel João Ramos (Farnham, 2011), 477; Šihāb ad-Dīn, Conquest of Abyssinia, 50. 77  See Constantin Marinescu, La politique orientale d’Alfonse V d’Aragon, roi de Naples (1416–1458) (Barcelona: Institut d’Estudis Catalans, 1994), 18; Alfonso Cerone, “La politica orientale di Alfonso di Aragona,” Archivio storico per le province napoletane 27 (1902): 3–93, at 71–72; Loiseau, “Abyssinia at al-Azhar”. 78  Basset, Études, 106; Perruchon, ed. and trans., Chroniques de Zarʾa Yaʿeqôb, 131. 79  Braukämper, Islamic History and Culture, 12–105.

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The sultanate of Ifat is the best documented by both texts and archeology and is the best studied. The dynasty of the Walasmaʿ sultans who reigned over Ifat is mentioned many times in the written sources. But above all, five ruined cities (today called Asbäri, Nora, Mäsal, Rassa Guba, and Beri-Ifat) have been identified in its former territory by a team led by François-Xavier Fauvelle and Bertrand Hirsch and have been firmly dated to the fourteenth century by radiocarbon analysis and by funerary inscriptions.80 These cities are located a few kilometers from each other, at an average altitude of 1500 meters, which presupposes an intense agricultural activity in their immediate environment and therefore populations of sedentary peasants. Al-ʿUmarī reports the cultivation in Ifat of cereals (wheat, sorghum, teff), typical of the highlands, accompanied by the cultivation of č̣at and the presence of fruit trees, such as lemon or banana,81 probably in lower and warmer areas, near streams. He also mentions the importance of animal breeding.82 Today it is impossible to match these archeological sites with the “mother cities” (mudun ʿummahāt) of Ifat mentioned by al-ʿUmarī, which seem to refer to a series of cities or regions making up this sultanate (Baqulzar, Kalǧūra, Šimī, Šawā, ʿAdal, Ǧamā/Ǧabā, Lāw), some of which (rendered in Gǝʿǝz as Bǝqwǝl Zär, Kwǝlgora, Šäwa) are also mentioned in the account of ʿAmdä Ṣeyon’s wars.83 The archeological sites are the remnants of real cities, sometimes protected by defensive works, with stone buildings and an urban organization in neighborhoods with streets, set within terraced landscapes that witness agricultural practices. The inventory and excavation of several mosques (each city possessed a main mosque and neighborhood mosques, and some had oratories in the area) corroborate al-ʿUmarī’s text: “There are, in these seven kingdoms, cathedral mosques, ordinary mosques and oratories, where the ḫoṭba, the Friday prayer and the assembly prayer are performed; the population observes exactly the religious law.”84 According to al-ʿUmarī, most Ethiopian Muslims practiced Ḥanafī Islam, but Ifat’s rulers practiced Shāfiʿism. This is confirmed by a funerary inscription identified in the cemetery adjoining the main mosque at Beri-Ifat, which was most probably the sultanate’s capital city (it is called Wafāt in the texts). 80  Fauvelle, Hirsch and Chekroun, “Le sultanat de l’Awfât.” See also Bauden, “Inscriptions arabes d’Éthiopie;” François-Xavier Fauvelle-Aymar et al., “Reconnaissances de trois villes musulmanes de l’époque médiévale dans l’Ifat,” Annales d’Éthiopie 22 (2006): 133–178. 81   Al-ʿUmarī, Masālik, 9–10. 82  See Thomas Guindeuil, “Alimentation, cuisine et ordre social dans le royaume d’Éthiopie” (Ph.D diss., Université de Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne, 2012). 83  Huntingford, trans., Glorious Victories, 56. 84   Al-ʿUmarī, Masālik, 3.

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figure 4.1 Mosque on the citadel of Beri, in the capital city of Ifat, 14th c. Photo credit: French Archaeological Mission, 2009

According to the inscription’s initial statement, it is the tomb of a “sheikh of the Walasmaʿ” of Šāfiʿite school (al-šāfiʿī).85 Though a complete record of this inscription has yet to be made, it is the first epigraphic evidence that confirms the Arab authors, and the importance of this maḏhab at the Walasmaʿ court. It is also confirmed by the presence of an important Ethiopian community (ṭāʾifa) of students and/or Sufis, called the Zayāliʿa (“those of Zaylaʿ”), at the very famous and important Sunni Shāfiʿī school of al-Azhar in Cairo in the fifteenth century.86 The Arabic documentation also mentions a number of Sufis living at the Islamic Ethiopian courts. One example is ʿAlī b. ʿUmar aš-Šādalī, a Sufi Yemeni of the Šāḏiliyya, who died in Muḫā (Mocha), in the Tihāma region of the Arabian Peninsula, in 1424–1425 AD. According to the biographical sketches devoted to him a few decades later by several Yemeni authors,87 he had traveled, following the ancient practice of the “journey in search of science” (rihla fî talab al-ʿilm), to the Hijaz, Syria-Palestine, and Cairo, before 85  Fauvelle, Hirsch and Chekroun, “Le sultanat de l’Awfât.” 86  See Loiseau, “Abyssinia at al-Azhar.” 87  See Baba, “Notes on Migration,” 78; Gori, “Lo Yemen e l’Islam,” 201–218; Alessandro Gori, “Una famiglia santa tra Africa orientale e Yemen: gli Zaylaʿī nelle “Ṭabaqāt” di Aḥmad b. Aḥmad b. ʿAbd al-Laṭif al Šarǧi,” RSO 72, 1–4 (1999): 41–60.

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settling at the court of Saʿd ad-Dīn, the Walasmaʿ sultan of Ifat. He stayed at the court of the last sultan of Ifat long enough to marry Saʿd ad-Dīn’s sister and have three sons. He ends, on an unknown date, by returning to Mocha with his wife and his sons. Al-ʿUmarī nuances, however, the importance of the scholarly elite of the sultanate, composed of cadis and jurists, stating that “none of them shines in knowledge.”88 As for the political organization of the “seven Muslim kingdoms” of the fourteenth century, we know almost nothing. A little more information is available for the Barr Saʿd al-Dīn, thanks to ʿArab Faqīh’s Futūḥ al-Ḥabaša. An emir was appointed by the sultan to head each territory, with the prerogative of levying the taxes (ḫarāǧ and zakāt) on the population. ʿArab Faqīh mentions a conflict in the 1520s over the zakāt (the alms tax, one of the five pillars of Islam), which is supposed to be distributed among eight categories of people listed in the Quran. But “the sultan, the emirs and the other rulers who governed the land of Saʿd al-Dīn took the alms tax from the Muslims and […] disposed of it for their own profit, instead of giving it to the poor and the wretched and those who really deserved it,” and such “has been the custom of [their] ancestors from the time of Saʿd al-Dīn.”89 ʿArab Faqīh also writes that there was a clear division between the sultan’s prerogatives concerning taxes and those of the emirs: while the sultan derived his income from the taxes (ḫarāǧ) levied on the population, the emirs had the right to gather an army to conduct raids in infidel territory, in order to collect loot.90 Throughout the “Islamic later Middle Ages” (from the thirteenth to the midsixteenth century), these Muslim territories had a central role in long-distance trade. This was true even after their integration in the Christian kingdom, and especially so for the main trade cities. Al-ʿUmarī noted in the fourteenth century that the sultan of Ifat (Awfāt in his text) was respected by other Muslim rulers and dominated long-distance trade, particularly because of his geographical position. The sultanate being “the closest to the Egyptian territory and the shores that face Yemen” and its ruler “reigning over Zaylaʿ, the port where the merchants who go to this kingdom approach … the import is more considerable,” especially with “silk and linen fabrics imported from Egypt, Yemen and Iraq.”91 In the sixteenth century, two sources emanating from Europeans but using, among others, information 88  For a fuller discussion of Islamic religious-intellectual culture, see the essay of Alessandro Gori in this volume. 89  Šihāb ad-Dīn, Conquest of Abyssinia, 101–105. 90  Ibid., 17–18. 91   Al-ʿUmarī, Masālik, 5

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of Ethiopian origin are to be taken into account because they show the decisive commercial role of the Islamic communities and cities. Francisco Alvares’ account of his stay in Ethiopia (1520–1526) is valuable because he describes many places on a route through the highlands from Tǝgray to Bärara in Šäwa (where King Lǝbnä Dǝngǝl’s camp was located), including large towns with major commercial activity animated by Muslim communities settled within the Christian kingdom. One example is the town of “Manadeley,” which already appears in the form Manḥad(e)bē in the chronicle of King Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob,92 and was probably located in Angot: This town is one of about 1000 inhabitants, all Moors tributary to the Prester John. At one end, as if apart, there live twenty or thirty Christians, who live here with their wives, and the Christians receive dues like toll charges. (…) This town of Manadeley is a town of very great trade, like a great city or seaport. Here they find every kind of merchandise that there is in the world, and merchants of all nations, also all the languages of the Moors, from Giada, from Morocco, Fez, Bugia, Tunis, Turks, Roumes from Greece, Moors of India, Ormuz and Cairo….93 The Venetian Alessandro Zorzi collected an itinerary from an Ethiopian monk named “Antonio” (Ǝnṭonǝs) in 1523. This route, on which goods as well as travelers of course passed, went from Bärara to Zaylaʿ. Ǝnṭonǝs (via Zorzi) mentioned the city of “Gendevelu,” 65 days’ walk from Zaylaʿ, in the region of Ifat, at the time controlled by the Christian kingdom: This Gendevelu is a great mercantile city, and it is of the Presta Davit, where the said caravans of camels unload their merchandise in warehouses; and it is the merchants ships of Combaia that bring all the spices except ginger, which is found in this land of the Presta. (…) The currency is Hungarian and Venetian ducats, and the silver coins of the Moors, and by that route various things are brought from the whole of India.94 The first mention of this place is in the chronicle of King Bäʾǝdä Maryam.95 This commercial city, populated mainly by Muslims, submitted to Imam Aḥmad

92  Perruchon, ed. and trans., Chroniques de Zarʾa Yaʿeqôb, 65–66. 93   Beckingham-Huntingford, Prester John, 1: 186–187. 94  Crawford, Ethiopian Itineraries, 173. 95  Perruchon, ed. and trans., Chroniques de Zarʾa Yaʿeqôb, 151–152.

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during his first campaigns, and its Christian population was eliminated.96 The large commercial city of “Gendevelu” is probably among the cities inventoried in this part of Ifat, perhaps the archeological site of Asbäri. However, for the moment, few imported materials from trade with countries bordering the Red Sea or the Indian Ocean have been found here; the ceramics collected during the excavations were mostly produced locally. The Futūḥ al-Ḥabaša, for its part, mentions commercial exchanges and the presence of Christian traders in the Barr Saʿd al-Dīn: “The King of Abyssinia dispatched traders into the country of the Muslims carrying gold, wars [a dyeing plant, ivory, civet cats and slaves – a vast quantity of wealth that belonged to the king. They sold their merchandise in the country of the Muslims and crossed the Sea to aš-Šiḥr and ʿAden and then they turned back and returned, seeking their own country and the presence of the king.”97 Thus, Christians also participated in long-distance trade. Vital for the economy of the region, this trade led to struggles for control of the thresholds between highlands and lowlands. But it also required peace and diplomatic agreements between Christian and Islamic powers, to ensure the safety of caravans and their passage across the neighboring territory. The Islamic territories seem marked by the poverty of coining. Al-ʿUmarī notes that the Muslim political elite did not mint their own coins, but used kāmilī (silver) dirhams minted in Egypt,98 as mention in the description of “Gendevelu” by Zorzi. It is confirmed by the discovery in Ifat at the end of the nineteenth century of a “treasure (now lost) of silver coins,” kāmilī dirhams minted by the Mamluk sultans of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries according to Conti Rossini.99 The Nūr al-maʿārif (“Light of Knowledge”), a set of notes detailing the conditions of trade in Mecca and Abyssinia, collected at the end of the thirteenth century on the order of a Rasūlid sultan, confirms the use of silver dirhams, but points out that for current exchange, a much lower value money was used, “something called ḥaras, consisting of fragments (kusārāt) of poor quality silver, of broken (ḥilqa) rings, bracelets or other [metals] that served as [dirham] kāmilī,”100 and in the more remote regions of the trade routes, an iron money, the ḥakūna, small bundles of iron rods. Some ḥakūna 96  Šihāb ad-Dīn, Conquest of Abyssinia, 36–39. 97  Ibid., 42–43. 98   Al-ʿUmarī, Masālik, 14. 99  Carlo Conti Rossini, “Rapport sur le progrès des études éthiopiennes, depuis le dernier congrès (1894–1897),” in Actes du 11e congrès international des orientalistes (Paris, 1897), 27–66, at 44. 100  Muḥammad Ǧāzim, ed., Nūr al-maʿārif fī nuẓum wa-qawānīn wa-aʿrāf al-Yaman fi al-ʿahd al-muẓaffarī al-wārif. (Ṣanʿāʾ [Sanaa, Yemen], 2003), 360 and 364.

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have been found in the excavation of Nora, dated to the fourteenth century. But, as observed already by al-ʿUmarī, barter, “for example in cows, sheep or textiles,”101 remained the most common medium of exchange in the rest of the region. 3 Conclusion The phases of political and military conflict between the Islamic states and the Christian kingdom should not obscure the deep interconnectedness of the states themselves and of their populations. Indeed, recent research has illuminated the chronological and spatial parallelism in the development of the region’s Christian and Islamic polities. From the tenth to the twelfth century eastern Tǝgray appears to be a critical region, where Ethiopian Islamic settlements first took root and where Christian communities retrenched and revitalized, perhaps in part in response to this new presence, even if the details of this process remain obscure.102 In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, both Christian and Islamic settlements extended southward and developed into notable polities: that of the Zagwe kingdom and that of Islamic Šawah. At the end of the thirteenth century, the overthrow of the Zagwe and the new dynasty’s centering of the Christian kingdom in Amhara occurred just before the founding of the Walasmaʿ sultanate of Ifat, which we can now confidently locate adjacent to the Christian kingdom. This contiguity, and the likely role of the new Christian ruler in facilitating the Walasmaʿ family’s installation in Ifat, facilitated the tributary relationship accepted by the Walasmaʿ thereafter. From the fourteenth century forward we might note the presence of vibrant Muslim communities within the Christian kingdom, as well as the presence, in the major trade cities of Ifat, of Christian officials collecting taxes on the passing caravans: these point to an economic symbiosis (but one undergirded by political will) between these two spheres, in which the long-distance trade routes and major trading entrepots were nevertheless markedly Islamic. It was also often Muslims who guided the embassies sent by the Christian kings, especially because of their knowledge of the Arabic language and the need to go through Egypt. Finally, future research would fill out clues to other aspects of similarity and symbiosis between the Christian and Islamic societies

101   Al-ʿUmarī, Masālik, 18 and 26. 102  See the essay by Marie-Laure Derat, “Before the Solomonids,” in this volume.

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of medieval Ethiopia-Eritrea.103 And, the ongoing historical and epigraphic and archaeological researches will allow in the future to take another look at the history of the Islamic communities which succeed each other through the Middle Ages in Ethiopia, notably in the material circumstances of their urban centers, their multiple mosques, street layout, and irrigation.

103  For example shared farming practices, shared languages – al-ʿUmarī (ibid., 7) specified that the Muslims of Ethiopia spoke “Arabic and Abyssinian” – and perhaps also common forms of power organization.

chapter 5

Of Conversion and Conversation: Followers of Local Religions in Medieval Ethiopia François-­Xavier Fauvelle Contrary to what popular tales and now-­outdated scholarly narratives sometimes suggest, the history of Christianity and Islam in medieval Ethiopia cannot be narrated as that of Christian and Muslim immigrants arriving en masse in an empty land.1 If the initial impetus given to these new religions in the central and eastern highlands of the Horn of Africa was clearly brought by foreign clerics, there is every reason to believe that the vast majority of the people who considered themselves Christians and Muslims by the end of the Middle Ages were descendants of indigenous peoples who had converted. This should lead us to consider these peoples as an integral part of the story. They were initially neither Christian nor Muslim but became so, in the process adopting, adapting, and transmitting Christian and Muslim beliefs and practices. Some of their fellows, meanwhile, remained practitioners of their original religions through the end of the Middle Ages. For reasons having to do as much with the heterogeneity of the available documentation as with the ideological bias found in Christian and Muslim sources about their contacts with such peoples, followers of local religions have failed to find their place in the historiography of this period. Consequently, the religious transformations of medieval Ethiopia are often narrated from the viewpoint of the famous medieval Christian kingdoms and Muslim sultanates who extended their territories and religions at the expenses of the original inhabitants. This essay shifts the focus to those inhabitants, seeking to unearth some of the cultural features of the Ethiopian societies that existed at the time of the arrival of Christianity and Islam, and to highlight their interactions with the newcomers. As we shall see, material remains provide clues to the economic modalities, political framework and chronology of the social transformations among these societies in the Ethiopian highlands in the Middle Ages. These clues both contradict and complement what is suggested or implied by the written 1  For an example of this narrative, see Edward Ullendorf, The Ethiopians: An Introduction to Country and People, 2nd ed. (London, 1965), 58‒60.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2020 | doi:10.1163/9789004419582_006

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sources, thus paving the way for a conversation between textual and material evidence. Such a conversation can only take place if we recognize that these two registers of sources do not have the same angle. Written sources speak about followers of local religions, and only in areas immediately adjacent to or soon to be integrated in Christian and Muslim territories; archaeological evidence speaks from within the materiality and practices of societies who lived in many different regions, regardless of their interactions with Christians and Muslims. Therefore, the chronological and geographical scope of this chapter is determined by this conversational approach: it focuses on periods and regions in which local-­religious societies can be best perceived as co-­agents with the Christians and Muslims in the shaping of medieval Ethiopia. 1

On Terminology

There can be many ways to refer to religions that are not Abrahamic monotheisms (Judaism, Christianity, Islam). Since “local religions” may not be the most familiar to the reader, it requires some justifications. “Polytheism” is generally used to designate religions, both ancient (such as Greco-­Roman Paganism) and modern (Hinduism), that display pantheons of interrelated gods and lesser deities and heroes, corpuses of mythological tales subject to exegesis, and an independent clergy. Though not all aspects of this definition are met by the Aksumites’ pre-­Christian religion, the formulaic dedications of royal proclamations engraved on stone in antiquity seem to follow Greco-­Roman models, and hence can be called “Polytheism”.2 By contrast, there is no evidence of such a degree of autonomy of the religious sphere in the rest of pre-­modern Ethiopia. To take just one example, the initial religion of the Oromo people (the Oromo language, a continuum of closely interrelated and mutually intelligible varieties, is spoken by about one third of modern Ethiopians and their religion is mostly Christian or Muslim nowadays), which can be reconstructed based on sixteenth-­century written sources and ethnographical evidence, included belief in dual gods (one male, Waaqa, “God [of the sky],” and one female, chthonic, Lafa), and in a fluid variety of spirits (including possession spirits and demons) and local deities. “Priests” were not members of a separate 2  R IÉ items 185-­I , 185-­I I, 185 bis-­I , 185 bis-­I I, 188, 270, 270 bis, 277 inter alia. See the comments of Christian Robin in the introduction to Gérard Colin, trans., Saints fondateurs du christianisme éthiopien (Paris, 2017), xxxv; Serguei A. Frantsouzoff, “Religion(s) – Aksumite religion,” in EAe 4 (2014), 360–1. Paolo Marrassini, “Lord of Heaven,” RSE, new ser., 4 (2012): 103‒17, has interesting reflections on the transition between polytheism and monotheism in Aksum.

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class of Oromo society but rather ritual experts, and all aspects of religious life were interwoven with other aspects of the social organization, notably the age-­set (gadaa) system.3 “Polytheist” thus appears inappropriate to describe the non-­Christian, non-­Muslim societies of medieval Ethiopia. “Pagan” is one alternative, and is often used to translate the terms found in Christian and Muslim sources to denote these peoples: Gəʿəz arämi and Amharic arämäni, “idolaters,” Arabic kāfir (pl. kufār), “unbeliever, disbeliever.” If we hope to approach these societies with some distance from the ideological bias of their antagonists, however, there is an obvious objection to adopting those antagonists’ terminology, which is inherently hostile and derogatory in its connotations. While there are historical cases outside of Ethiopia in which the term “pagan” was adopted and rendered neutral by the people so termed, we have no indication that such was the case in medieval Ethiopia. Furthermore, the terms translated as “pagan” applied both to people still unconverted to Christianity and Islam, and to Christians and Muslims whose faith was considered by authorities to be deviant or contaminated by “folk” or “magic” practices (which might or might not be related to existing local religions). Thus for the sake of clarity, it is preferable to avoid “pagan” too. The phrase “traditional religion,” for its part, has raised objections for a reverse derogation: it implies that Christianity and Islam are less traditional, or never attained the status of genuine traditions in Ethiopia, despite having a history going back to the first millennium. Lastly we might consider “animism,” defined as a general belief that all things, whether living or not in the modern Western sense, have a soul with which one may enter into communication. This is a conceptual speculation that sprang from the theory of British evolutionist ethnographer Edward Tylor (1832–1917), one of the founders of social anthropology. It should be discarded as it was probably never encountered in its pure form in any historical society and conveys a strong primitivistic accent.4 Lesser deities, sacred beings and spirits of all kinds were and are present in many religions, Ethiopian or not. In Ethiopia they are found in “territorial cults,” where deities dwell in local features of the landscape such as rivers, trees, or rocks; in “possession cults,” whereby malevolent or benevolent spirits “ride” people, causing illnesses or altering social order, as in the case of the Zar, a famous spirit-­possession cult 3  Dirk Bustorf, “Oromo Religion,” in EAe 4 (2010), 64‒5. On the history of the Oromo, see Mohammed Hassen, The Oromo and the Christian Kingdom of Ethiopia 1300–1700 (Woodbridge, 2015), and Bertrand Hirsch’s lengthy discussion of this book, “Abbā Bāḥrey et azzāž Takla Sellāsē (dit Tino), ou comment écrire l’histoire des Oromo?” Afrique(s), in press. 4  Guy Le Moal, “Animisme,” in Dictionnaire de l’ethnologie et de l’anthropologie, ed. Pierre Bonte and Michel Izard (Paris, 2000); Dirk Bustorf, “Traditional Religion,” in EAe 4 (2010), 361‒4.

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that is widespread in Ethiopia (including among Christians and Muslims) and seems to have followed Ethiopians’ diasporic dispersion;5 and in “ancestor cults,” where the spirits of genealogical ascendants are considered protective deities by their family or lineage, as among the Konso people of southern Ethiopia who worship deceased “heroes” and possibly among the pre-­Christian Aksumites as well.6 In sum, given the diversity of non-­monotheistic cults even in modern Ethiopia – and one may assume it was similarly diverse in the medieval period – there is no easy way to designate them when one does not know the names their practitioners gave to their own religious systems. The expression “local religions” has been chosen as the most serviceable among the various unsatisfactory alternatives. Although it requires some unwieldy locutions (“followers of local religions,” “local-­religious beliefs”), it is at least ideologically neutral and does not presume to characterize the nature of the beliefs in question, which are largely unknown. “Local,” however, must be understood as a relative term: followers of local religions may well have been part of large societies and political entities, as we shall see. 2

A Christian Narrative of How Followers of Local Religions Became Christians

That local-­religious societies were part of Ethiopia’s medieval history is clear from the fact that the Christianization and Islamization of the central and eastern plateaus of the Horn of Africa (the “contact regions” that are the focus 5  Possession is widespread in Ethiopia. See Bogdan Burtea, “Demons,” in EAe 2 (2005) 130‒2; Jon G. Abbink, “Possession Cults,” in EAe 4 (2010), 183‒5; Steven Kaplan, “Zar,” in EAe 4 (2010), 185‒7. 6  For aspects of the Konso cult of heroes, see Nicole Poissonnier, Das Erbe der “Helden”: Grabkult der Konso und Kulturverwandter Ethnien in Süd-­Äthiopien (Göttingen, 2009). As for Aksum, David W. Phillipson, “The Significance and Symbolism of Aksumite Stelae,” Cambridge Archaeological Journal 4, 2 (1994): 189‒210, suggested that the false doors sculpted on several monolithic stelae representing multistoried buildings and on another funerary monument at Aksum were related “to a belief or requirement, currently unknown, concerning post-­mortem phenomena” during the pre-­Christian period of Aksum. Let us add that several of these stelae are standing on baseplates with hollow basins and cupula presumably used for libations or sacrifices. A good synthesis on the archeology of Aksum stelae, the question of their function as grave markers and the complicated problem of their chronology, is provided by David W. Phillipson, Ancient Ethiopia (London, 1998), 95‒111. A reassessment of the history of stelae 1 and 2 is presented by Bertrand Poissonnier, “The Giant Stelae of Aksum in the Light of the 1999 Excavations,” P@lethnology,4 (2012): 49‒86.

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in this essay) took place slowly, suffered setbacks, and was still incomplete at the end of the Middle Ages. On the Muslim side, both Arabic sources and the spatial distribution of Islamic archaeological remains and funerary inscriptions suggest that Islam gradually penetrated the interior of Ethiopia following commercial routes.7 A parallel pattern of southward movement is documented on the Christian side by much more abundant written sources: the conversion of King ʿEzana of Aksum sometime around the mid-­fourth century, though retrospectively considered the official act of conversion of Ethiopia as a whole to Christianity, could only have had an impact on a fraction of the population of present-­day Eritrea and the adjacent Tǝgray region of northern Ethiopia.8 Though the modalities and pace of the southward spread of Christianity along the central Ethiopian plateau are more difficult to reconstruct for the late antique and early medieval periods, it is clear that from the late thirteenth through the early sixteenth century, the gradual expansion of Christianity resulted from programs of evangelization carried out by monastic houses that went hand-­in-­hand with the territorial expansion of the Christian kingdom, reinforcing and legitimizing one another. This is evident in Taddesse Tamrat’s classic book.9 Marie-­Laure Derat’s more recent study is even more focused on the control of space, and by highlighting the intertwined monastic and administrative strategies behind the seizure of new lands and their inhabitants she delineates a more detailed historical-­geographical phasing of this arrhythmic process.10 However, there has not been much work on the demographic aspect of this process. We know for sure that Christian families, monastic communities, and military colonies were settled in newly-­conquered territories.11 We should perhaps not overemphasize the demographic impact of this settlement, but rather think in terms of a transfer of political and religious institutions imposed upon local-­religious populations who found themselves gradually absorbed into a southwardly inflating frontier zone and expanding border.12 7  See Amélie Chekroun’s and Bertrand Hirsch’s “Sultanates of Medieval Ethiopia” in this volume. 8  On ʿEzana’s conversion, see, for two slightly different positions of the problem, Wolfgang Hahn, “ʿEzana,” in EAe 2 (2005), 478–80, and Christian Robin’s introductory comments in Colin, trans., Saints fondateurs, xxviii–­xxxiv. 9  Taddesse Tamrat, Church and State in Ethiopia 1270–1527 (Oxford, 1972). 10   Marie-­Laure Derat, Le domaine des rois éthiopiens (1270–1527): espace, pouvoir et monachisme (Paris, 2003), 51–84 and passim. 11  Taddesse Tamrat, Church and State, 119–55, esp. 120–2. 12  For an archeological exploration of this frontier on the western edge of the central highlands, west of Lake Ṭana, see Alfredo González-­Ruibal et al., “A Christian Frontier: Archaeological Survey of a Religious Landscape in Metema, NW Ethiopia (ca. 1400–1800),” Nyame Akuma 86 (2016): 24‒33; for another example of “landscape archeology” applied

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Who these soon-­to-­be Christian followers of local religions were, however, remains obscure, largely because of the very process through which they became Christians. Becoming a Christian did not mean a replacement of beliefs overnight, nor did this replacement have to be complete; it triggered, to various degrees, changes in one’s religious adherence, daily habits and social relationships.13 It also meant joining a written culture that promoted a different worldview, even if the vast majority of Christians at the time did not know how to read or write. People now listened to religious texts, including biblical readings, homilies, and short Lives of saints read on their anniversaries, that no doubt modified their conceptions of knowledge, memorization, transmission, and power. On this matter, Jack Goody’s observations about the impact of literacy on orality elsewhere in Africa would likely be valid for Ethiopia too, despite a lack of comparative studies.14 Like the West African talismans produced by Muslim clerics, Ethiopian “magic scrolls” – small rolls of written and illuminated parchment produced by Christian clerics to protect their owners against evil spirits despite being strictly forbidden by the Church – serve as a reminder of the occult power ascribed to writing.15 to ancient and medieval churches and monasteries, see Niall Finneran, “Hermits, Saints, and Snakes: The Archaeology of the Early Ethiopian Monasteries in Wider Context,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 45, 2 (2012): 247‒72. 13  Steven Kaplan, “Conversions,” in EAe 1 (2003), 794–7, argues that conversion, i.e. “the total abandonment of previous beliefs,” should be distinguished from mere “affiliation” or “adhesion.” See also Steven Kaplan, The Monastic Holy Man and the Christianization of Early Solomonic Ethiopia (Wiesbaden, 1984), passim. However useful these subjective distinctions may be to assess the depth and sincerity of changes in the inner life of converts, the notion of “conversion” can only be used in this chapter inasmuch as it conveys changes that were captured by the literary and material documents, whether the changes experienced by the individuals were deep or not, sincere or not, steps toward a full conversion or not. 14  Jack Goody, The Interface Between the Written and the Oral (Cambridge, 1987). The relative disinterest of Ethiopian studies in oral material in general seems to be rooted in the severe judgments historians used to express about the oral traces (proper “oral traditions” and legends) found in Christian written sources; see for instance Carlo Conti Rossini, Storia d’Etiopia. Parte prima: Dalle origini all’avvento della dinastia salomonide (Bergamo, 1928), chap. 11, “Tradizioni e leggende indigene sul reame d’Aksum.” However, some researchers have been working with Ethiopian social groups whose oral knowledge makes it possible to reconstruct historical narratives based on the comparison between different versions. For a fascinating example that can be traced back several centuries in time, see Johannes Kolmodin, Traditions de Tsazzega et Hazzega, textes tigrigna (Rome, 1912). 15  On Ethiopian “magic scrolls” (a denomination given by foreign scholars), see Sevir Chernetsov, “Ethiopian Magic Texts,” Forum for Anthropology and Culture 2 (2005): 188‒200. On the significance of talismans made by Muslim clerics in West Africa, see Constant Hamès, “Entre recette magique d’al-­Bûnî et prière islamique d’al-­Ghazali: textes

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Of Demons and Snakes: Lost in Conversion?

Another important aspect of their personality that would have been redefined when followers of local religions entered literate Christian culture was the sense of their own history and identity. Members of a recently-­converted family or community, for example, would hear edifying stories narrating how their land was converted. Listening to such tales, they would soon think of themselves less as former “pagans” on the passive side of the conversion process than as members of communities of newcomers who had brought Christianity with them. We may find hints of this role reversal in the Lives of the Christian monks and martyrs who evangelized Ethiopia.16 Written from the late fourteenth century forward, decades or centuries after the deaths of the saints whose lives they chronicled, and often composed in regions that had been Christianized much earlier (such as Eritrea and Tǝgray), such texts do not offer unbiased evidence for the conversion process itself. But considering that they circulated and were recited in provinces only recently integrated into the Christian kingdom, such as Šäwa, one can suggest that they provided newly converted communities with readily endorsable narratives that reformulated their own history as well as their social and religious belonging. Let us consider the Life of Iyäsus Moʾa, a thirteenth-­century saint and evangelizer of Šäwa who is credited in his hagiography with helping Yəkunno Amlak, lord of Amhara, unseat the last Zagwe ruler and establish the new Solomonic royal dynasty around 1270 CE. The saint’s Life was compiled no earlier than the second half of the fifteenth century, so at least two centuries after his pastoral activities.17 It includes a story that is supposed to have taken place at the very spot where the Däbrä Ḥayq monastery was later established around 1248. There, it is said, “a big arwe [wild animal, reptile] whose name was Tämän [snake, dragon]” held the terrified local population in thrall: they fed him with milk and meat and prostrated themselves before him. Informed of this, the saint made the sign of the cross before the serpent, who fled to an unknown place.18 A very similar episode, longer but virtually identical in plot, is found in a homily devoted to Saint Gärima, one of the so-­called “Nine Saints” of the talismaniques d’Afrique occidentale,” Systèmes de pensée en Afrique noire 12 (1993): 187– 223. On talismanic scrolls in medieval Islam, see Yasmine F. Al-­Saleh, “‘Licit Magic’: The Touch and Sight of Islamic Talismanic Scrolls” (Ph.D diss., Harvard University, 2014). 16  On hagiographical texts of Ethiopian saints, see Antonella Brita’s essay in this volume. 17  Stanisław Kur, Steven Kaplan, and Denis Nosnitsin, “Iyäsus-­Moʾa,” in EAe 3 (2007), 257‒59. 18  Stanisław [Stanislas] Kur, ed. and trans., Actes de Iyasus Moʾa, abbé du couvent de St-­Étienne de Ḥayq, 2 vols., CSCO 259–260, SAe 49–50 (Louvain, 1965), at vol. 1 (text), 14‒15, vol. 2 (trans.), 14‒15 (my thanks to Bertrand Hirsch for his help with Gəʿəz).

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Ethiopian tradition, who are associated with a wave of evangelization and monastic foundations similar to that of Iyäsus Moʾa and his contemporaries, but earlier (in the sixth century), and much further north.19 Gärima’s homily was composed by a certain Yoḥannəs, bishop of Aksum, in the fifteenth century.20 The story is now set in the region of Tǝgray where a “dragon,” described as a giant snake, rules as king. The governors, who are subordinate to the dragon, are obliged to feed him live animals, to prostrate before him and to offer him a virgin girl, whom he devours. The regularity of the offering is not stated but it is said that the reign of the serpent lasted twenty-­five years. Again the saint intervenes, invoking angels, and the serpent is struck dead by divine lightning.21 The tale of a stranger ridding the country of a serpent or dragon is widely distributed in Ethiopia, which suggests a folk motif percolated through religious stories.22 Some scholars go as far as to see a historical reality behind this motif and suggest the existence of a snake cult in the Aksumite cultural substratum.23 This is possible, and would not be surprising: snake cults are found in many places around the world, particularly in Africa.24 But there is no need of a real snake cult to explain the existence of a story wherein a foreign hero confronts and eventually defeats a snake-­like creature that claims food and a tribute of young girls, and thus becomes the country’s new ruler. Similar stories are found in a medieval source about Zāfūn, a kingdom of the eleventh-­twelfth centuries 19  Antonella Brita, I racconti tradizionali sulla “seconda cristianizzazione” dell’Etiopia: il ciclo agiografico dei Nove Santi (Naples, 2010). 20  Denis Nosnitsin, “Gärima,” in EAe 2 (2005), 704‒6. 21  Carlo Conti Rossini, ed., “L’omilia di Yohannes, vescovo d’Axum, in onore di Garimā,” in Actes du XIe congrès international des orientalistes. Section sémitique (Paris, 1897), 139‒77 (Gəʿəz text only); Colin, trans., Saints fondateurs, 11‒9 (French translation). 22  For a good overview see Stuart Munro-­Hay, “Arwe,” in EAe 1 (2003), 356‒7. Paolo Marrassini, “Ethiopian and Near Eastern Dragons,” in Loquentes linguis: Studi linguistici e orientali in onore di Fabrizio A. Pennacchietti, ed. Pier Giorgio Borbone, Alessandro Mengozzi and Mauro Tosco (Wiesbaden, 2006), 459‒68, has proposed a preliminary inventory. 23  E.g. Andrea Manzo, “Snakes and Sacrifices: Tentative Insights into the Pre-­Christian Ethiopian Religion,” Aethiopica, 17 (2014): 7‒24; Manzo provides an interesting dossier of possible written and archeological attestations of human sacrifices and of iconographical representations of snakes in Aksum, but his inquiry seems to be biased by his initial assumption that “the Oriental Christian tradition […] is the only possible source that could have influenced the Ethiopian tradition particularly on the affirmation and spread of Christianity” (8). If this is certainly true of Christian beliefs, it is certainly not the case for the narratives of how Christianity arrived and spread in the country. See also Colin, trans., Saints fondateurs, liv. (Though not credited as such, pages xliii to lvi are due to Gérard Colin; personal communications by Christian Robin and Marie-­Laure Derat). 24  For West African occurrences, see Lilyan Kesteloot, Christian Barbey and Siré Mamadou Ndongo, “Tyamaba, mythe peul, et ses rapports avec l’histoire, le rite et la géographie,” Notes africaines 185–6 (1985): 1–71.

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along the northern bank of the Senegal river, and in modern oral traditions of the Soninke about the origin of Wagadou/Ghâna, another famous medieval kingdom of the western Sahel.25 The story of a stranger becoming king through a serpent-­related ordeal is indeed a widely-­distributed etiological myth explaining the origin of kingship, particularly in Africa, as Paolo Marrassini has already noted.26 The Ethiopian stories, in which a foreign holy man clears a country of an infesting creature, ends anarchy and brings Christianity, can be seen as a variant of this type, other variants of which (such as Saint Patrick ridding Ireland of snakes) can be found in other parts of the world, just as in many Christianized countries “pagan” gods and adepts were redefined as demons and sorcerers.27 Furthermore, given its central role in the Christian creation myth itself, it is not surprising that the figure of the serpent, when encountered in very different social contexts and with very different meanings by Christian evangelizers, would snake its way in as the villain in conversion tales. In addition to the recurring motif of serpents, Christian conversion tales display a second intriguing feature: they frequently associate the serpent or other “demonic” creature with a specific site. For instance the serpent named “Dragon” defeated by Iyäsus-­Moʾa at Ḥayq is said to have lived under a big tree before which local people prostrated themselves and fed him in a trough.28 Christian Ethiopian stories of the coming of Christianity in local-­religious lands are filled with “fights” between archangels (typically assisting the saints) or holy men against gigantic and terrifying demons – whether serpents or not – living in or under trees or mountains, and they eventually expel them.29 Creatures thought to inhabit specific places in the landscape and to be able 25  The medieval source about Zāfūn is al-­Bakrī, in Nehemia Levtzion and John F.P. Hopkins, eds., Corpus of Early Arabic Sources for West African History (Princeton, 2000), 78‒9. For the reading Zāfūn, not Zāfqū, see Tadeusz Lewicki, “Un État soudanais médiéval inconnu: le royaume de Zāfūn(u),” Cahiers d’études africaines 11, 44 (1971): 501‒25. For the Soninke oral traditions, see Germaine Dieterlen and Diarra Sylla, L’Empire de Ghana: le Wagadou et les traditions de Yéréré (Paris, 1992), 38, 108‒9, 123‒5; Nehemia Levtzion, Ancient Ghana and Mali (London, 1973), 17‒8, 47, 50‒1 (a snake by the name of Bida offers good rains and gold as long as he receives a tribute of a beautiful virgin each year); Idrissa Bâ, “Mythes et cultes du serpent chez les Soninkés et les Peuls: étude comparative,” Oráfrica, revista de oralidad africana 8 (2012): 159‒69. 26  Marrassini, “Ethiopian and Near Eastern Dragons,” 466. 27  On the mythological theme of the serpent and the stranger in Africa, see, among others: Marie-­José Tubiana, “Royauté et reconnaissance du chef par le serpent,” Systèmes de pensée en Afrique noire 10 (1990): 189‒205. As just a case study from early medieval Ireland on how “pagan” gods were reimagined through Christian lenses, see Mark Williams, Ireland’s Immortal: A History of the Gods of Irish Myth (Princeton, 2016). 28  Kur, ed., Actes, vol. 1 (text), 14‒15. 29  Steven Kaplan, “Gädl,” in EAe 2 (2005), 642‒4.

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to do harm to people who did not properly appease them by offerings certainly have characteristics of territorial deities. Do these texts then preserve echoes of the existence of territorial cults among Ethiopian followers of local religions? It may be. But it may also be, again, that the “demon devastating the territory” is nothing more than a topos depicting the conversion process as a glorious episode opposing a religious hero and a personified enemy. If anything, such triumphant stories may have been attractive to recent converts: the tales diverted their listeners’ attention from the unsettling consequences of the conversion process as well as from the enduring practical, social and psychological resistances met by cohorts of hermits and monks engaged in life-­ long struggles to uproot beliefs embedded in people’s minds – not just physical creatures hidden in the ground. If this is the case, it is perhaps more apt to view such stories – that recast the conversion narrative so that the evil which needed to be rooted out by the saint was not in the mind of the people but in their land – as allegories. Their efficacy, then, would lie in their providing a new religious identity to recent Christians; they were not tales preserving traces of the cults their listeners had practiced not long before. Texts less stereotyped than saints’ Lives, however, may provide some insight into local-­religious beliefs. Several documents produced at the court of King Zärʾa Yaʿəqob (r. 1434–1468) or not long afterward are testimonies to his religious policy and personal fight against a variety of magicians, sorcerers, diviners, as well as a number of demons or spirits called Dask, Dino, Segwe, among other names. This policy led to recurrent purges during Zärʾa Yaʿəqob’s reign in the clergy, the royal administration, and even the king’s family. A closer examination of these texts may allow us to identify behind these manifold adversaries distinct aspects of possession cults (the spirits themselves, intercessors of these spirits, persons possessed by a spirit, possession cult societies, communities), that reflect the variability of such cults in today’s Ethiopia and may be deeply embedded for centuries in Ethiopian Christianity. This is a promising avenue of research.30 30  I borrow these reflections from a unpublished paper by Bertrand Hirsch, “Zar’a Yā‘qob, la mort et les sorts,” which he kindly passed on to me. The author bases his reflections on a close study of the Ṭomarä tǝsbǝʾǝt, an epistle attributed to the king, in the light of the Life of Saint Samuʾel of Däbrä Wägäg, a hagiography that Hirsch dates to the end of the reign of Zärʾa Yaʿəqob. Getatchew Haile, ed. and trans., The Epistle of Humanity of Emperor Zärʾa Yaʿəqob (Ṭomarä tǝsbǝʾt), 2 vols., CSCO 522–523, SAe 95–96 (Louvain, 1991). Herbert S. Lewis, “Spirit Possession in Ethiopia: An Essay in Interpretation,” in Ethiopian Studies Dedicated to Wolf Leslau, ed. Stanislav Segert and András J. E. Bodrogligeti (Wiesbaden, 1983), 466‒80, has shown that possession cults are more diversified in current-­day Ethiopia than what the apparent sociological success of Zar and its being better-­studied by scholars would suggest.

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Even though the nature of local-­religious deities, the forms of their cults, and the patterns of conversion were by-­and-­large lost in the very process of conversion, some stories might still preserve hints as to the structure of the political élites and the clergy of the local-­religious societies. This may be the case with the story of Motälämi, a king (or, alternatively, a governor under a Zagwe king) of the local-­religious polity of Damot.31 Motälämi is mentioned in hagiographical tales concerning Saint Täklä Haymanot composed from the late fourteenth century on, that is a century or so after the saint’s life (it cannot be securely established whether the name and figure of Motälämi belong to the time of the saint or to that of the composition of his Life).32 One of the most famous Ethiopian saints, Täklä Haymanot devoted much of his life to spreading Christianity in Šäwa (where he founded, among others, the monastery of Däbrä Libanos), a region newly integrated into the Solomonic royal domain.33 In his Life, the saint’s evangelizing activity involves expelling deities living in trees and rivers, knocking down altars devoted to the sun or snakes, and victoriously fighting against “warlocks.” This provokes the ire of Motälämi, the lord of Damot, a powerful local-­religious polity in or possibly neighboring Šäwa, who wreaks havoc on the countryside, kills priests and newly-­converted Christians, and takes prisoners (he was said to have previously abducted the saint’s mother and unsuccessfully tried to make her his wife). Eventually he consults his warlocks to organize an ordeal to test Täklä Haymanot’s powers. The saint bests the priests of the local religion, and Motälämi then asks to be baptized.34 Wondering whether or not everything in this story should be discarded as of no historical value, Denis Nosnitsin has written that “some features of Motälämi’s authority are discernible: he was not an absolute ruler, 31  Denis Nosnitsin, “Motälämi,” in EAe 3 (2007), 1035‒37. 32  Nosnitsin, “Motälämi;” Marie-­Laure Derat, “Les Vies du saint éthiopien Takla Haymanot (XIIIe–­X Ve siècles),” in Histoire d’Afrique : les enjeux de mémoire, ed. Jean-­Pierre Chrétien and Jean-­Louis Triaud (Paris, 1999), 33‒47; Denis Nosnitsin, “The Ethiopic Synaxarion: Text-­Critical Observations on Täklä Haymanot’s Commemoration (24 Näḥase),” Orientalia Christiana Periodica 73, 1 (2007): 141‒83. 33  Derat, Domaine, 96‒110 and passim; Denis Nosnitsin, “Täklä Haymanot,” in EAe 4 (2010), 831‒34. 34  Carlo Conti Rossini, ed. and trans., “Il Gadla Takla Hāymānot secondo la redazione waldebbana,” Memorie della Reale Accademia dei Lincei. Classe di scienze morali, storiche e filologiche, 5th ser., 2 (1894): 97‒143 (text in Gəʿəz and Italian); Ernest A. W. Budge, ed. and trans., The Life and Miracles of Takla Hâymânôt in the Version of Dabra Libânôs […], 2 vols. (London, 1906) (text in English); Colin, trans., Saints fondateurs, 38‒74 (text in French), esp. 38‒45. Paolo Marrassini, “Una nuova versione geez della disputa fra Takla Haymanot e Motalami,” Egitto e Vicino Oriente 3 (1980): 163‒98, is an edition and translation (in Gəʿəz and Italian) of the gädlä Yoḥannes Meśrāqāwi, that contains a different version of the story of Täklä Haymanot.

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but strongly depended on the ‘warlocks’ and had to consider the opinion of his people. He took the wives of the rulers he had subdued as concubines.”35 Though the last point may be a topos (a bad king taking other people’s wives is exactly how folk tales depict the social disorders caused by the reprehensible behavior of their rulers), it remains a possibility that the story’s intimations of a shared power structure in Damot reflect a historical reality. To move beyond conjecture, however, we need to examine a different genre of documentation altogether: namely, the materialities in the landscape. 4

Megalithic Monuments: Witnesses to Ethiopian Local-­Religious Practices

The historian interested in medieval Ethiopian materialities faces two concurrent paradoxes: first, no matter how well documented medieval Ethiopian Christianity is in terms of written sources, it has left few sites (apart from monasteries and churches) and objects (apart from manuscripts, paintings and some liturgical implements), especially when compared with Latin, Greek, Egyptian or Near Eastern Christianities. Only the site of Lalibäla qualifies as a significant religious and political, if perhaps not “urban,” complex.36 Second, medieval Islamic Ethiopia, while much less well documented by written texts, has handed down to us not only numerous vestiges of cities large and small (with their dwellings, religious buildings, distinctly urban features such as reservoirs, luxury items or daily-­life artefacts) but also country oratories, agricultural terraces, and huge cemeteries.37 Considered together, these paradoxes are striking illustrations of the profound differences in modes of occupation and territorial control between Ethiopian Christians and Muslims, and perhaps also of a competitive and symbiotic economic relationship between them.38 But now if we come to religious diversity, a third paradox emerges: sites and monuments found all over Ethiopia that can be attributed to local-­ religious societies, despite far outnumbering Christian and Muslim material 35  Nosnitsin, “Motälämi,” 1036. 36  On the lack of “secular” vestiges and on the site of Lalibäla, see the essay of Claire Bosc-­ Tiessé in this volume. 37   François-­Xavier Fauvelle-­Aymar and Bertrand Hirsch, “Muslim Historical Spaces in Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa: A Reassessment,” Northeast African Studies 11, 1 (2004): 25–53; see also Chekroun’s and Hirsch’s “Sultanates of Medieval Ethiopia” in this volume. 38  Bertrand Hirsch and François-­Xavier Fauvelle-­Aymar, “Cités oubliées. Réflexions sur l’histoire urbaine de l’Éthiopie médiévale (XIe–­X VIe siècles),” Journal des africanistes 74, 1–2 (2004): 299‒314.

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vestiges, have been overlooked by historians of the Middle Ages. The data, admittedly, are usually published by archeologists specializing in prehistory whose technical language can sometimes be opaque to scholars used to work on written sources. They also raise distinctive problems of dating and interpretation. These issues, however, should not prevent us from attempting to deal with these material documents on a par with other categories of sources, nor from trying to integrate them to a reasonable extent into a common narrative. It will be useful, first, to offer an overview of such vestiges with regard to their location, diversity and chronology (when it can be assessed), in our current state of knowledge. It must be acknowledged, however, that the sites thus far surveyed or intensively studied may not be representative of the Ethiopian landscape as a whole, given the many regions that have not yet been surveyed at all. Field research is ongoing and new sites continue to be identified which could significantly alter our aggregate picture of the geographic spread, intensity of settlement, chronology, and internal characteristics of local-­ religious societies. Megaliths are monuments or structures made of large stones, which might be cut or simply piled up, rough or dressed, decorated or undecorated, standing alone or arranged in different ways with other large stones or monuments. Ethiopia, and the Horn of Africa in general, is home to some of the most famous and spectacular megalithic cultures in the world and has drawn the attention of specialists, typically prehistorians with previous or parallel experience with other megalithic cultures elsewhere in the world, since at least the beginning of the twentieth century.39 In addition to the monolithic (“single stone”) giant stele and other kinds of megalithic monuments found in the Aksumite sites of late antiquity, thousands of megalithic monuments of various types are scattered all over Ethiopia and adjacent countries. Megalithic structures can be erected for many different purposes – marking territorial boundaries or commemorating events, as settings for social or religious events, for astronomical use, etc. – but most Ethiopian megalithic monuments studied up till now served a funerary purpose, as grave markers.40 This funerary dimension, 39  Roger Joussaume, “Megalithic Cultures,” in EAe 3 (2007), 911‒2. For a brief history of research on Ethiopian megalithism, see Roger Joussaume, ed., Tuto Fela et les stèles du sud de l’Éthiopie (Paris, 2007), 15‒8. 40  Yohannes Gebre Selassie, “New Data on ʾGZ, Son of a King, from a Third Century AD Unvocalized Gəʿəz Inscription (Ḥənzat, Təgray),” Annales d’Éthiopie 29 (2014): 13‒25, suggested that Aksumite stelae may have been memorials as well as grave markers. Other archeologists also apply this distinction elsewhere. However, the relevance of it should not be admitted without further examination since grave markers are memorials by nature. Only in cases where memorial monuments are demonstrably not associated with graves

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documented through the practices that can be reconstructed from the graves and the monuments themselves, is precisely what allows us to assert that the people buried there were followers of local religions. This is deduced first from the fact that the dead are accompanied by artefacts and ornaments, which is normally not accepted in Christianity and Islam, and second from the fact that some burials are collective, a practice contradicting the Christian and Muslim belief in individual salvation. It is true that Christian and Muslim funerary practices do not always comply with official religious prescriptions, whose degree of standardization and rigor can, furthermore, fluctuate through time.41 But here the number and regularity of the divergences is ample evidence of completely different sets of funerary practices and religious beliefs. Still, in terms of cultural attribution, “megalithism” is a purely descriptive term, and does not imply that all peoples who erected megaliths belonged to the same cultural entity or even to ones closely related in space or time. One kind of megalithic monument found in medieval Ethiopia is the stela, a monolithic stone shaft (sometimes drum-­like, semi-­spherical, or conical) that can be rough or shaped, decorated or undecorated. Stelae are usually between 1.5 and 4 meters high. Francis Anfray has provided a preliminary inventory, description and typology of them, to which many researchers have added casual discoveries, excavation reports and interpretations.42 Based on archeological excavations carried out at a few impressive sites, the stelae can be said to have a funerary function, either because they are directly associated with an underground grave or because they belong to a larger grouping or structure forming a necropolis. These stelae number in the thousands. They are found within a could this distinction operate, not forgetting that “graves” sensu lato do not necessarily implies the inhumation of an entire body or even body parts at all (cf. cenotaphs), and that body remains may have entirely been dissolved due to the acidic nature of the soil. For our purpose, it is enough to assume a reasonable degree of association between a monument and a funerary structure. 41  Even in the “heartland” of Christian Ethiopia, we know of many examples of funerary practices deviating from today’s accepted norm, with for instance mummified bodies collectively (i.e. not individually) exposed (i.e. not buried) in caves (personal field notes, and Deresse Ayenachew, personal communication). At the 14th–15th century Muslim site of Nora, a town that presumably belonged to the medieval sultanate of Ifat/Awfāt, the cemetery adjoining the medieval mosque presents at first glance all characters of standard Muslim graves. But the archeological investigation showed that the body was deposited in an empty pear-­shaped pit (i.e. not buried in the ground) underneath the grave marker; François-­Xavier Fauvelle-­Aymar, Bertrand Hirsch, Clément Ménard, Romain Mensan et Stéphane Pradines, “Archéologie et histoire de l’islam dans la Corne de l’Afrique: état des recherches,” Civiltà del Mediterraneo 16–17 (2009–2010): 29‒58, at 57. 42  Francis Anfray, “Les stèles du Sud, Choa et Sidamo,” Annales d’Éthiopie 12 (1982): 1‒221; further references are provided in subsequent footnotes.

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geographical arc 300 km long and 40 km wide extending from the bend of the Awaš River, through regions inhabited today by the Hadiyya, Kambaata and Wälaytta peoples, west of Bilate River, to Sidamo, east of Lake Abbayya. They can be described by their silhouette (whether the shafts are plain or sculpted into phallic or anthropomorphic shapes), by the engraved decoration that adorns their shafts or faces (which can be simple or a combination of geometric and figurative motifs), or by their physical proximity to other monuments, similar or not. No clear-­cut clusters emerge from these typological descriptions, but there seems to be a geographical pattern in the sense that stelae found in the north of the distribution area tend to be anthropomorphic and/or to display complex decoration, while those in the south tend to have an explicit phallic shape and are rarely if ever decorated.43 Two well-­documented sites deserve special attention, as they are representative of this continuum. One is Ṭəya (or preferably Tiya, as it has been known since its inscription on the World Heritage List in 1980), some 70 km south of Addis Ababa, in Soddo, a region inhabited by the Gurage. It comprises around fifty flat stelae, the majority of which are decorated on one side with engraved swords (up to 19 on a single monument) and a variety of symbols (discs, Xor W-­shaped signs, and a branched design that has attracted almost as many interpretations as interpreters), all in low relief (see frontispiece). Lying one to two meters underground, behind or not far from the stelae, 45 graves were excavated yielding 54 individuals, some found two per grave (always a man and a woman). The dead were buried in a flexed position lying on their side, in wooden chests, sometimes capped with a horizontal stone slab, otherwise with wood branches. Objects such as rare large fragments of ceramic vessels, a necklace of blue drawn glass and red carnelian beads, copper earrings, an iron bracelet and pin, were recovered with the bodies. The radiocarbon analysis of the human bones or the wooden chests are from the early thirteenth to the fourteenth century CE.44 Other stelae sites in the same region have delivered 43  A most useful synthesis is provided by Francis Anfray, Les anciens Éthiopiens: siècles d’histoire (Paris, 1990), 226‒57. Niall Finneran, The Archaeology of Ethiopia (London, 2007), at 243‒8, provides a good summary in English, but his assertion that “the distribution of the known sites tends to group along roads; it may be possible that these stelae are territorial markers as well as grave stones, marking boundaries along long-­established routes of communication through the highlands” (244) deserves to be further discussed: it is the archeologists, not the archeological remains, who for practical reasons tend to group along roads. 44  The most complete presentation of the archeological results at Ṭəya, comprising the catalogues of the stelae and of the graves, is Roger Joussaume, ed., Tiya: l’Éthiopie des mégalithes (Chauvigny, 1995). Roger Joussaume, “Ṭəya,” in EAe 4 (2010), 939‒40, though a useful summary, is misleading on the dates.

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similar dates. The other important site is Tuto Fela, about 20 km south of Dila. This is an impressive barrow of around 50 × 20 meters, made of accumulated graves and topped by over 300 stelae. Partial excavations (54 graves were excavated out of a rough estimation of a thousand) allow us to reconstruct two distinct phases of use: one by people who dug shaft graves containing a single individual in a lateral chamber and marked them with a vertical phallic stelae; the other by people who re-­used the same place to pile up new graves for their own dead, with the result that previous features, including still standing phallic stelae, became hidden inside the growing structure. During this second period of use, graves were made and sometimes reopened on later occasions to accommodate one to four individuals and were topped by stelae displaying schematically carved human faces and other symbols, sometimes by using phallic stelae from the earlier phase of the same monument, sometimes by simply turning them upside down. Offerings of ceramics were made around and on top of the graves. The first phase can be provisionally dated to anytime between the eleventh and thirteenth century CE (based, however, on a single radiocarbon analysis made on a wooden plank concealing a grave), while the later phase is undated.45 A final point about these stelae: nowadays they are more often found lying on the ground than standing up.46 Moreover, it has long been the habit of archaeologists to re-­dress and repair fallen and broken stones during their excavations of, and even their casual visits to, megalithic sites. Unfortunately, such restoration is not always duly documented, although there are some welcome exceptions.47 The effect of such undocumented restoration, however well-­intentioned, is to obscure the series of events (destruction, reuse of stones, use of the site for social events, etc.) that took place after the location ceased to function actively as a funerary site. Indeed, that many stelae sites often display apparent patterns of falling, weathering and sedimentation, 45  The most complete presentation of the archeological data from Tuto Fela is Joussaume (ed.), Tuto Fela. The summary by Roger Joussaume, “Tuto Fela,” in EAe 4 (2010), 1007‒8, should not be relied on as it presents a misleading chronology, as the author confirmed to me by personal communication. For an up-­to-­date synthesis, see idem, “The Superimposed Cemeteries of Tuto Fela in Gedeo Country (Ethiopia), and Thoughts on the Site of Chelba-­Tutitti,” P@lethnology 4 (2012): 87‒110. On the nearby site of Čelba-­Tutitti, which contains roughly a thousand phallic stelae, see Roger Joussaume, Jean-­Paul Cros and Régis Bernard, “Chelba-­Tutitti: site à stèles phalliques du sud de l’Éthiopie,” Afrique: Archéologie & Arts 6 (2010): 85‒100. For lack of funding, no radiocarbon date could be made for this site (Roger Joussaume, personal communication). 46  Anfray, Anciens Éthiopiens, 227. 47  Bertrand Poissonnier, “Restauration des sites à stèles décorées de Tuto Fela et Tiya (Éthiopie),” Annales d’Éthiopie 16 (2000): 25‒34.

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suggests deliberate destruction, raising the possibility that the stelae had been purposely uprooted because they came to be seen as phallic and anthropomorphic “idols” at some stage during the process of conversion to Islam or Christianity. In the southern regions of Ethiopia where stelae are found today, this would have happened sometime between the late Middle Ages and the nineteenth century, when the Ethiopian Empire reached its current borders. But if some stelae sites were vandalized in this way, how many others were totally destroyed, erasing them from both landscape and memory? Indeed, rare outlying stelae sites like Gadilomeda in Gədəm in northern Šäwa (others are known elsewhere in the same province), around 40 kilometers from both Fäqi Däbbis in Yəfat (the remains of a fourteenth to mid-­fifteenth century mosque) and Məsḥalä Maryam in Mänz district (the remains of a mid-­fifteenth to mid-­ sixteenth century church), though undated, seem to indicate that the stela culture of Ethiopia extended, at some point in the past, much further north than the present archaeological core area.48 If anything, it invites us to view the encounter between Christian and Muslim proselytes and local-­religious makers of stone stelae as not just a localized or late phenomenon, but as one occurring over a rather broad geographical and chronological span.

48  Gadilomeda, a site with anthropomorphic and phallic stelae very similar to those in the south of the country, was first mentioned by Tekle Hagos, “Preliminary Notes on the Stelae of Efrata and Gidim of Northern Shoa,” Annales d’Éthiopie 16 (2000): 55‒8. For Gadilomeda’s situation and relevance in view of other medieval remains in the same region, see Bertrand Hirsch and François-­Xavier Fauvelle-­Aymar, “L’Éthiopie médiévale: état des lieux et nouveaux éclairages,” Cahiers d’études africaines 166 (2002): 315‒35. The results of the excavation at the site of Gadilomeda are still unpublished; a report, however, does exist: Bertrand Poissonnier, Régis Bernard and Bernard Farago, “Le site à stèles de Gadiloméda. Rapport de la mission de mai 2000” (Addis Ababa: CFEE/ARCCH, unpublished). No radiocarbon analysis could be made due to lack of organic matter in the samples collected (Bertrand Poissonnier, personal communication). On Fäqi Däbbis, see Bertrand Poissonnier, “Fäqi Däbbis,” in EAe 2 (2005), 491. The full data were later published in Bertrand Poissonnier et al., “Les mosquées médiévales de Goze et Fäqi Däbbis (Ifāt),” in Espaces musulmans de la Corne de l’Afrique au Moyen Âge. Études d’archéologie et d’histoire, ed. François-­Xavier Fauvelle-­Aymar and Bertrand Hirsch (Paris – Addis Ababa, 2011), 103‒39. As for Məsḥalä Maryam, the site was first investigated by Bertrand Hirsch and Bertrand Poissonnier, “Recherches historiques et archéologiques à Meshalä Maryam (Mänz, Éthiopie),” Annales d’Éthiopie 16 (2000): 59‒87. The vestiges of the church and the remains of a royal camp of King Bäʾədä Maryam remain largely elusive, but a sixteenth- to seventeenth-­century Christian cemetery established on the ruins of an (undated) church was excavated; see Marie-­Laure Derat and Anne-­Marie Jouquand, eds., Gabriel, une église médiévale d’Éthiopie (Paris, 2012).

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Followers of Local Religions in Č�̣ ärč̣är and Šäwa: Neighbors to Christians and Muslims

A second category of megalithic monument with a funerary purpose is the tumulus, a man-­made mound of stones and/or other material covering a grave site. Many past cultures have left tumuli around the globe, and in Africa several otherwise undocumented local-­religious societies of the Middle Ages are known today thanks to these sometimes imposing funerary monuments.49 Tumuli are mentioned all over the Horn of Africa (from Eritrea to Kenya and from the Ethiopian highlands to Djibouti and Somaliland), but the uneven amount of research only allows us to outline the cultures found in two regions of present-­day Ethiopia. In both cases, these tumulus cultures were distinctly medieval, and furnish evidence of their coexistence with neighboring Muslims and Christians. One set of tumuli are found in the Č�̣ ärč̣är massif.50 Interestingly, they cover the same geographical area as another type of megalithic construction, the dolmens (or, to Roger Joussaume’s more accurate term, dolmenic stone chests, or “cistes dolméniques” in French) that were constructed by Ethiopian peoples in the second millennium BCE.51 These dolmens were also made for funerary purposes, and were in some cases re-­used: one funerary chamber, for instance, was found to contain a hoard of 67 Ottoman silver coins.52 However, no relation has been found between the prehistoric dolmenic stone chests and the medieval tumuli in terms of typology or the artefacts discovered in them, and chronologically they are at least two millennia apart; their similar geographical 49   François-­Xavier Fauvelle, The Golden Rhinoceros: Histories from the African Middle Ages (Princeton, 2018), chap. 19. 50  Descriptions of this type of monument can be found in François Bernardin Azaïs and Roger Chambard, Cinq années de recherches archéologiques en Éthiopie (Paris, 1931), and Roger Joussaume, Le Mégalithisme en Éthiopie. Monuments funéraires protohistoriques du Harar (Paris, 1974). A very good summary is by Anfray, Anciens Éthiopiens, 222‒6. 51  Joussaume, Mégalithisme, with radiocarbon dating offered on 102–103; Anfray, Anciens Éthiopiens, 218‒22. 52  The hoard of coins is simply mentioned by Joussaume, Mégalithisme, 40. In the republication of this book, Mégalithisme dans le Chercher en Éthiopie (Paris, 2014), 73‒4, Carine Juvin devotes two pages on the study of this collection, based on photographs of 24 of these coins. Those legible indicate that they were struck in Zabid, Yemen, in 948 H./1541–42, under Sultan Suleiman (r. 1520–1566), when the Ottoman Empire was conquering Yemen but before an Ottoman Habasha Province was established (take note that the Arabic transliteration in this publication is wrong, for the author could not correct the proofs. She can provide the correct reading on demand. Carine Juvin, personal communication).

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coverage may be simply a result of the strong environmental opportunities these well-­watered and fertile highlands afforded agriculturalists. As for the tumuli, they number in the dozens, sometimes forming close groups of up to ten monuments arranged in a row.53 Measuring one to ten meters in height, and five to thirty meters in diameter, they are typically conical in shape with a “crater” on the top, an almost unmistakable index that the roof of the inner chamber had naturally collapsed or was destroyed by plunderers at some point in the past. Several such monuments were professionally excavated.54 The inner chamber was found to be a circular space around 2.5 to 3 meters in diameter, to which a smaller lateral chamber is sometimes appended. These are sepulchers, in which the (sometimes incomplete) osteological remains of several individuals were found. These individuals were not interred at the same time, which implies that the monuments were designed to be reopened. The excavation showed that the monuments were in use over a period of four centuries. The dead were buried with their weapons, tools and ornaments (glass, stone, silver, gold beads, copper and silver bracelets, cowrie shells). Ceramics are very abundant; they consist of round bottles, large plates and small containers with perforated rims and square stands that strongly evoke incense-­burners. Two tumuli at Sourré-­Kabanawa excavated by Roger Joussaume yielded several radiocarbon dates between the eighth and the twelfth century.55 Another one excavated by Timothy Insoll at Sofi, a dozen kilometers southeast of Harar, was found to date from the thirteenth to fourteenth centuries by both radiocarbon and thermoluminescence analysis (made on charcoal and a potsherd, respectively).56 Interestingly, these tumuli are often surrounded by Muslim cemeteries, and local Muslims (today of Oromo ethnicity) consider such monuments sacred, suggesting (rightly or not) an in situ continuity between local-­religious and Muslim funerary practices.57 It must be added that many medieval Muslim archaeological remains, either of urban settlements or of isolated mosques, 53  See, for instance, the sites of Cheikha Biyo and Torbane Biyo, both not far from Asbä Täfäri, made up of 5 and 9 tumuli respectively. Locally attributed to legendary giants called Harla, they are briefly described by Amélie Chekroun et al., “Les Harla: archéologie et mémoire des géants d’Éthiopie. Proposition de séquence historique pour les sites du Č�̣ ärč̣är,” in Fauvelle-­Aymar and Hirsch, Espaces musulmans, 75‒102, at 84‒7. 54  Joussaume, Mégalithisme, passim. 55  Ibid., 101‒3 (radiocarbon analysis and interpretation of the timespan of functioning of Monument 3 at Sourré-­Kabanawa). 56  Timothy Insoll, Rachel MacLean and Blade Engda, “Archaeological Survey and Test Excavations, Harlaa, Dire Dawa, and Sofi, Harari Regional State, Ethiopia, August 2015. A Preliminary Fieldwork Report,” Nyame Akuma 85 (2016): 23‒32, at 29‒30. 57  Joussaume, Mégalithisme, 55.

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are found scattered in the same landscape: the meager chronological data available so far point to the mid-­twelfth century as a terminus post quem for these Muslim remains, but we must confess that too little is known as yet to say anything on the transition process between local religions and Islam in this eastern region.58 A clue in favor of a degree of cultural continuity is that the ceramic assemblages found at some local-­religious and Islamic sites offer parallelisms.59 A fascinating aspect of the medieval local-­religious culture of the Č�̣ ärč̣är is the settlements that were often designated “cyclopean towns” in the secondary literature (“villes cyclopéennes” in French).60 They remain to be thoroughly investigated, but their emplacement on rocky spurs barred by massive walls built with large blocks of stone make them look like defensive strongholds where people could take refuge in cases of necessity. Radiocarbon dates obtained from these settlements fall within the same chronological bracket as the tumuli, and the ceramics found in the strongholds and the graves are identical in terms of types and decoration: these are robust arguments to attribute these strongholds to the medieval followers of local religions of Č�̣ ärč̣är.61 Another tumulus culture is found in northern Šäwa, on the Central Plateau of Ethiopia. It has been called the “Shay Culture,” after the name of a river 58   Fauvelle-­Aymar and Hirsch, “Muslim Historical Spaces” (for an abridged presentation of Muslim archeological remains in this eastern region); Chekroun et al., “Les Harla” (for further Muslim sites, including the medieval urban site of Harlaa, 15 km southeast of Dərre Dawa); Insoll et al., “Archaeological Survey,” 2016 (for the preliminary results of his excavation at Harlaa); Timothy Insoll, Nadia Khalaf, Rachel MacLean and Degsew Zerihun, “Archaeological Survey and Excavations, Harlaa, Dire Dawa, Ethiopia, January–February 2017. A Preliminary Fieldwork Report,” Nyame Akuma 87 (2017): 32‒8 (ditto). These two latter publications allow us to securely push the early presence in time of Islam on the Eastern Plateau back to the mid-­twelfth century. The earlier safe radiocarbon date so far for Harar is in the mid-­fifteenth century: Timothy Insoll, Habtamu Tesfaye and Malik Saako Mahmoud, “Archaeological Survey and Test Excavations, Harari Regional State, Ethiopia, July-­August 2014. A Preliminary Field Report,” Nyame Akuma 82 (2014): 100‒9 (report on the test excavations at Harar); Insoll et al., “Archaeological Survey,” 2016, at 30 (radiocarbon date on excavation at the emir’s palace). 59  Timothy Insoll, “First Footsteps in the Archaeology of Harar, Ethiopia,” Journal of Islamic Archaeology 4, 2 (2017): 189‒215, at 208‒9. 60  Anfray, Anciens Éthiopiens, 225, presumably drawing from works by Azaïs and Joussaume, listed thirteen of them in the Č�̣ ärč̣är, and others in neighboring regions east and south of Harär. But it is not clear whether some of them are not Muslim towns, or whether some cannot be attributed to earlier or later periods. See in particular Huguette Joussaume and Roger Joussaume, “Anciennes villes dans le Tchertcher (Harrar),” Annales d’Éthiopie 9 (1972): 21‒44, which closely examines the site of Molé near the former Catholic mission station of Čaffee (Tchaffé). 61  Joussaume, Mégalithisme, 101.

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along which many tumuli were found.62 Its funerary practices mark it as a distinctly local-­religious culture, but we know little beyond that; we do not even know if it had any strongholds. Nevertheless, the funerary aspects of this culture have been studied, and these material observations provide useful insights into how this local-­religious society interacted with its Muslim and Christian neighbors. Francis Anfray was the first to mention tumuli in this region; Bertrand Poissonnier made further observations and produced the first archeological data.63 Around twenty monuments were located in and around the site of Məsḥalä Maryam in the late 1990s, to which another 90 were added in the 2000s.64 Since then, an extended and more systematic survey increased the total figure to more than 200.65 The core area of these monuments is centered on the district of Mänz, but this may be the result of an observation bias since surveys have not been as systematically carried out in the neighboring districts. The outward appearance of these Šäwan monuments is identical to those in Č�̣ ärč̣är, but they are called Gur by the Christian locals (of mostly Amhara ethnicity), a word designating “stone mounds” in the local variety of Amharic. The regional attitude towards those monuments is ambivalent: they are sometimes believed to be ruined churches, which prompts looting to recover tabots (Christian altar tablets), or various kinds of Muslim ruins somehow related to imam Aḥmad ibn Ibrāhīm’s military campaigns in the early sixteenth century (hence names like “Islam Gur,” “Grañ Gur,” etc.), which also leads to looting (in search of gold) or destruction.66 This explains the disturbed state of most of the tumuli investigated by archeologists, though it did not always prevent them from making observations or from excavating whatever was left intact of the initial contents. The monuments were mostly found to have a round – or oval-­shaped inner chamber built with dry stones and covered with corbelled basalt slabs. This 62   François-­Xavier Fauvelle-­Aymar and Bertrand Poissonnier, eds., La Culture Shay d’Éthiopie (Xe–­XIVe siècles). Recherches archéologiques et historiques sur une élite païenne (Paris, 2012); François-­Xavier Fauvelle and Bertrand Poissonnier, “The Shay Culture of Ethiopia (10th to 14th century AD): ‘Pagans’ in the Time of Christians and Muslims,” African Archaeological Review 33, 1 (2016): 61‒74. 63  For a summary of the research on the tumuli of north Šäwa, see Fauvelle-­Aymar and Poissonnier, eds., Culture Shay, 15‒8. 64  Hirsch and Poissonnier, “Recherches historiques et archéologiques,” 72‒6 (for tumuli at Məsḥalä Maryam); François-­Xavier Fauvelle-­Aymar et al., “Les monuments mégalithiques du Manz, Éthiopie: un inventaire provisoire,” Annales d’Éthiopie, 23, 2007–2008, 329‒98 (for the larger inventory). 65  Ongoing research by Alebachew Birru Belay for his doctoral dissertation on the Shay Culture, Université de Toulouse, France. 66   Fauvelle-­Aymar et al., “Monuments mégalithiques,” 334‒6.

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sepulcher proper was in turn covered by sometimes impressive cones of piled stones – some up to 30 meters in diameter and 15 meters high. The chamber was first used to bury a person (or possibly a few people) in the middle, and reopened later (from the roof or from a radial passage built into the superstructure) to bury other people, perhaps more than once, with possible rearrangements of previous remains. Two well-­documented tumuli, namely Tumulus 2 of Məsḥalä Maryam and the tumulus of Tätär Gur, each yielded the remains of at least 20 people.67 The dead were wearing iron bracelets, beaded necklaces and other ornaments, and were accompanied by weapons and numerous ceramics. A striking feature of the Shay Culture is the pottery assemblage, which is both very homogenous (in terms of technique, form and decorations) and sharply different from that of Č�̣ ärč̣är. The forms range from globular jugs and bottles with decorated patterns impressed or in relief to distinctive burnished ultra-­carinated bottles with tubular necks and decorated with engraved patterns or small bumps.68 Because of the dissolution of organic matter, only two radiocarbon dates were obtained from the tumulus of Tätär Gur: they indicate that the monument was first used during the first half of the tenth century.69 Interestingly, another category of funerary structures, though strictly speaking not megalithic, can be attributed to the Shay Culture. They are hypogeum chambers, i.e. chambers dug into the ground and accessible from the surface by vertical shafts sealed with stone lids. Only a few are known so far, partly because they are not as visible as tumuli in the landscape, partly (one guesses) because they may be destroyed by local people without drawing the attention of the authorities or archaeologists. Some are found in Mänz in close vicinity to tumuli, but others have been found as north as Ketetiya, not far from Däse (Dessié), in the Amhara region, no more than 20 km due south from Lake Ḥayq, where no tumulus has so far been recorded (though no systematic survey has been carried out). A hypogeum chamber excavated at Ketetiya contained several dozen examples of typical Shay potteries filled with ashy sediment with burnt, unidentified bone fragments and human teeth – whether the remains 67  See Fauvelle-­Aymar and Poissonnier, eds., Culture Shay, for the results of archeological observations at the tumulus sites of Qopros, Məsḥalä Maryam (Tumulus 2), Tätär Gur, and Mähal Wänz. As the bone remains are often dissolved by the acidic nature of the sediment, the determination of the number of buried people is based on the method of the “minimum number of individuals” used by forensic anthropologists and osteoarcheologists. See Jean-­Renaud Boisserie, “Examen du matériel ostéologique du Tumulus 2 de Meshalä Maryam (Mänz, Éthiopie),” in Culture Shay, 67‒74, and Bernard Farago-­Szekeres, “Les restes humains du tumulus de Tätär Gur (Mänz),” in Culture Shay, 105‒11. 68   Fauvelle-­Aymar and Poissonnier (eds.), Culture Shay, 88‒95, 141‒73. 69  Ibid., 100‒2.

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resulted from cremation could not be ascertained – deposited in successive phases, and topped with a human skeleton. The latter could not be dated, but the truly interesting results are the radiocarbon dates, which indicate that at least two different deposits were made between the late twelfth (a piece of charcoal in a pot resting at the bottom of the filling) and the fourteenth, possibly even the early fifteenth century (a piece of charcoal from another pot found near the top of the filling, just beneath the skeleton).70 These are surprisingly late for a structure displaying a recurring use of ceramics as funerary offerings and/or as urns possibly filled with secondary remains, neither of which comports with standard Christian practices any more than the collective burials under the tumuli. Only the digging of the grave in the ground instead of building a sumptuary structure above surface level may indicate a late tendency toward a more Christian-­like humility – unless, of course, it merely reflects a social or geographical variation within the Shay Culture. But this is not the whole story. One of the pots from the Ketetiya hypogeum chambers is engraved with two symbols, repeated four times, that bear a striking resemblance to letters in the Ethiopic script.71 Other ceramic vessels from Ketetiya are engraved with crosses on their surface. In each case, the cross is repeated three times on the belly. In most cases (including the pot from the twelfth-­thirteenth century), all four legs of the three crosses have three forks.72 The repetition of the ternary pattern makes it likely that it was a Christian symbol. But the social context and the purpose behind this symbol remain obscure, for archaeology has nothing to say about the intention of the people whose remains were deposited in ceramic vessels, nor of those who put them there. All that can be said is that however local-­religious these funerary practices remained, they displayed a discreet Christian veneer, or alternately, that however fully Christian the beliefs of the people were, their funerary practices retained a strongly local tinge. The ornament assemblage coming from the tumuli tells yet another story. Here we have dozens of iron, copper and silver bracelets; gold, silver and copper beads and ornamental twists; other metal tools and ornaments, as well as the remains of clothing, all with a possible regional origin. We also find thousands of tiny monochrome (blue, yellow, brick-­red, green, black, etc.) 70   François-­Xavier Fauvelle-­Aymar, Bertrand Poissonnier, Aurèle Letricot and Habtamu Tesfaye, “Ketetiya (Wällo). Hypogées à céramiques remarquables,” in Fauvelle-­Aymar and Poissonnier (eds.), Culture Shay, 129‒140; Fauvelle and Poissonnier, “Shay Culture,” 2016. The two radiocarbon dates do not overlap, which is proof that there were two deposits separate in time. 71   Fauvelle-­Aymar and Poissonnier, eds., Culture Shay, 168‒9. 72  Ibid., 142 (pottery # 2008-1), 150 (Pottery # 1), 165 (Pottery # 19), 171 (Pottery # 23).

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drawn-­glass beads, sometimes arranged as hair ornaments and necklaces, that were manufactured in a number of workshops between Sri Lanka, Indonesia, and the Indochina Peninsula, likely from raw material produced in the Middle East; larger semi-­precious red stone beads probably produced in northwest India or in Pakistan; eye beads made in the eastern Mediterranean; a unique wound bead, light blue in color with a thin red stripe, likely produced in China under the Sung or Yuan dynasties; other wound beads, possibly manufactured in Fustat (Cairo) or of which parallels are known only in Fustat; and other imported ornaments.73 All these imports found in a local-­religious context reflect, if not exactly the geography of the Islamic world, at any rate the eastern commercial catchment of Islamic merchants. Is it really a paradox? Actually, the Ethiopian situation is far from being unique: we encounter similar troves in local-­religious sites from southern Africa to the western Sahel.74 Yet there remains the apparent paradox that imported luxury goods often appear in archeologically local-­religious contexts at a higher frequency and in larger numbers than in sites closer to the Islamic world, which were much more likely to have been exposed to the direct presence of Muslim merchants. This is typically the case for Ethiopia, where no Islamic (or Christian) site can even remotely compete with the tumuli of the Shay Culture in terms of such luxury imports. But maybe we can better understand this paradox if we consider that local-­religious contexts are much better archaeological conservatories than non-­local-­religious ones, if only because followers of local religions were not required to adhere to an ideal of post-­mortem equality, and thus kept their riches with them after death. Hence, we should perhaps think of the archaeological remains left by the people of the Shay Culture as photo negatives of their economic links with their closest neighbors, thus contributing to counterbalance the one-­sided view of “pagan” history. Indeed, Muslim merchants, possibly belonging to Islamic settlements of the escarpment of the north Šäwan highlands, appear to have been active commercial intermediaries as early as the tenth century (although Muslim sites identified in this segment of the escarpment were found to postdate this date75), while Christian proselytes do not appear until two centuries later in a social environment that seemed to have largely retained its local-­religious characteristics. If indeed the archaeological evidence from Ketetiya is in any way conclusive, then it supports the idea that the monastery of Lake Ḥayq was not only the center of the religious administration of the Solomonic Kingdom, but the bridgehead of a missionary 73  Fauvelle and Poissonnier, “Shay Culture.” 74  Fauvelle, Golden Rhinoceros, passim. 75  See Chekroun’s and Hirsch’s “Sultanates of Medieval Ethiopia” in this volume.

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program of Christianization for the newly-­integrated province of Šäwa as well as for the royal domain of Amhara itself.76 6

A Closer Look at Medieval Local-­Religious Societies: the Question of Damot

One may think, at this point, that assessing a culture from the viewpoint of its funerary practices may be too narrow a perspective. It is partly true, save that funerary practices tell us much more than just things funerary. In this section we will try to provide larger inferences about the society behind the Shay Culture (and to make comparisons with other megalithic cultures when relevant), while at the same time interweaving the archaeological evidence with texts. From the archaeological remains we can certainly infer nothing about the language of the people of the Shay Culture. However, a fourteenth-­century Arabic-­Ethiopic glossary from Yemen provides Ethiopic glosses (in Arabic script) for around 500 Arabic entries. Among these, around 200 glosses belong to the South Ethio-­Semitic (SES) branch of Ethiopic, some being transversal to SES, some being Old Amharic (the ancestor to the main language spoken by Christian highlanders today, and the national language of Ethiopia) or Argobba (the language still spoken by small communities of people living in the eastern escarpment of the central plateau, where medieval Muslim archaeological remains are found), some belonging to other SES languages, and some belonging to now-­extinct SES languages.77 It would be incautious to assign the people of the Shay Culture to one of these branches; still, the linguistic variability offered by this glossary leaves room for the Shay Culture people to take place within the same linguistic and cultural substratum as their Christian and Muslim neighbors. Whether the language(s) they spoke later disappeared while contributing or not to Amharic (if one admits that Amharic came from the north), or whether they were native Amharic-­speakers whose language remained the language of the land under the royal Christian rule, cannot be decided. But it is reasonable to believe that the people who built tumuli and hypogeum chambers for their dead from the tenth to the fourteenth century were the ancestors of the present inhabitants of these regions. The social organization of the Shay Culture people likewise remains largely beyond our reach. But at least we can confidently state that they were 76  Derat, Domaine des rois, 84. 77  Maria Bulakh and Leonid Kogan, The Arabic-­Ethiopic Glossary by al-­Malik al-­Afḍal: An Annotated Edition with a Linguistic Introduction and a Lexical Index (Leiden, 2017).

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sedentary, if only because their reopening of these structures over decades and perhaps centuries implies a strong tie between society and territory. The same can be said of the tumulus culture of Č�̣ ärč̣är. We can even hypothesize that such monuments came to be seen by local communities as signifiers of their identity. As sedentary people having chosen to live on fertile highlands, the inhabitants of Šäwa and Č�̣ ärč̣är would likely have been mixed agriculturalists, cultivating cereals and vegetables while raising domestic stock (bones of cattle and sheep were found among the osteological remains in tumuli78). Since no large medieval settlement has yet been found in Šäwa, and since Č�̣ ärč̣är’s “cyclopean towns” may be better interpreted as defensive strongholds than as settlements per se, it is likely that the settled population lived in networks of small hamlets made up of a few dozen houses constructed from perishable materials. All this suggests a sense of continuity in the pattern of land occupation between the Middle Ages and today. It does not mean, however, that these cultures were isolated and backward. The imported assemblage of the Shay Culture shows strong commercial ties with the outside world (that of the Č�̣ ärč̣är, though apparently similar, has not been studied), while numerous finds of stone scrapers (a type of tool generally associated with hide working) in both tumuli and strongholds in Č�̣ ärč̣är seem to point toward the production of skins as export commodities.79 As for ceramic craftsmanship, the pottery of the Shay Culture bears witness to a remarkable level of achievement in both technique and aesthetics. That the technique and repertoire of forms and decorations found in Shay ceramics varied little across space and time – finds from tenth-­century Šäwa and fourteenth-­century northern Amhara, for example, are remarkably similar – allows us to make a social inference. For one thing, the Shay pottery is different enough from that of the tumulus culture of Č�̣ ärč̣är to posit the existence of two different cultures, at least on material grounds. But the homogeneity of the Shay pottery is also evidence of a strong internal cultural norm. This has probably as much to do with a common worldview as with the values shared by its elites. It is true that we do not know if the people who were buried in the tumuli belonged to ruling families or lineages or age-­sets, or even if they were rulers at all (as opposed to religious leaders or heroes). But they obviously belonged to a category of people who were able to entertain economic relationships with their neighbors, to capture the benefits of this trade to their own profit, to convert these benefits into social legitimacy, and 78  Boisserie, “Examen,” 69‒70. 79  Joussaume and Joussaume, “Anciennes villes.”

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to mobilize considerable manpower to build sumptuous funereal monuments. All the same, such a degree of top-­down material and social normativity does not imply political centralization. On the contrary, the dispersed funerary monuments seem to indicate that the elites themselves were dispersed, as happens in political systems organized into chiefdoms or fiefs, whether or not an overall suzerainty, be it nominal or effective, existed at all. Whatever the case, and whether or not the archaeological features of the Shay Culture are those of Damot, it is of interest to observe that the non-­centralized structure of power as exemplified in the story of Täklä Haymanot defeating Motälämi’s warlocks and eventually converting him may provide a political interpretation for the spatial distribution of the sepultures of the Šäwan landscape before its Christianization. One may argue, however, that the Damot’s ruler was called “king” in the Christian hagiographies and chronicles and that Motälämi may have been a dynastic title (i.e. not a personal name), thus suggesting some sort of strong and lasting political hierarchy.80 But we must remember that such hierarchy was inferred by Christian writers in a military context: Motälämi was possibly no more “king” of Damot than Vercingetorix was “king” of the coalition of the Gallic tribes who revolted against the Romans. A few Gəʿəz and Arabic sources from the thirteenth and fourteenth century, when Damot grappled with the last Zagwe and then the early Solomonic kings, may allow us to go tentatively a little further in terms of the chronology and geographical location of Damot. They seem to indicate that at least a portion of Damot’s territory extended into the region of Šäwa.81 Ibn Ḫaldūn, who wrote around the end of the fourteenth century, says that Walasmaʿ, the founder of the Walasmaʿ dynasty of Ifat (Awfāt), and likely the Muslim king who subdued the sultanate of Šawah in 1285, was “subject to the king of Damot.”82 Enrico Cerulli interprets this assertion as a testimony of Damot’s “hegemony in the Ethiopian South, up to Ifāt [Awfāt], the easternmost country of Muslim Ethiopia on the plateau.”83 But Muslim Šawah can now be confidently located in the escarpment of the central plateau, and there is now compelling epigraphic evidence that the subsequent Walasmaʿ dynasty had its capital displaced from an initial

80   Ayda Bouanga, “Le royaume du Damot: enquête sur une puissance politique et économique de la Corne de l’Afrique (XIIIe siècle),” Annales d’Éthiopie 29 (2014): 27‒58. 81  LaVerle B. Berry, “Damot,” in EAe 2 (2005), 78‒9; Derat, Domaine des rois, 71‒5. 82  Enrico Cerulli, “L’Etiopia medievale in alcuni brani di scrittori arabi,” RSE 3, 3 (1943): 272‒94, at 284; idem, “Il sultanato dello Scioa nel secolo XIII secondo un nuovo documento storico,” RSE 1 (1941): 5‒42. 83  Cerulli, “L’Etiopia medievale,” 284.

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eastern location to that very region.84 So we are strongly incited to believe that Awfāt’s subjection to Damot (whatever this subjection exactly implied on political terms) reflects the very western (not eastern) location of its political center after its seizure of Muslim Šawah. That would situate Damot on top of the central plateau, in and around Mänz (the region where the Shay Culture is mainly documented), topographically overlooking the Muslims of the eastern slopes. Damot’s hegemony over the neighboring Muslim sultanate would have lasted not more than half a century, from 1285 to the 1330s, when the Christian king ʿAmdä Ṣəyon subdued this region and assumed suzerainty over the Walasmaʿ.85 Christian suzerainty over the seven Muslim sultanates of Ethiopia (Awfāt being the most powerful of them) is basically the political situation described by Mamluk chronicler al-ʿUmarī based on information he was able to collect in Cairo in the 1330s.86 Still, he asserts that the Islamic sultanates imported gold from Damot, which may reflect a possibility that was then no longer extant.87 Whatever the case, Damot as an independent political entity certainly was only a vague memory a century later. Šäwa had by then become an integral part of the Christian kingdom, although in the last quarter of the sixteenth century King Śärṣä Dəngəl made expeditions in the region of Damot in order to take booty and slaves, which implies that it was not fully Christianized.88 But such expeditions may have been directed toward the westernmost part of Šäwa and neighbouring Wälläga, where a relic local-­ religious power may have survived longer.89 7

Cultural Conversation and Monumental Competition

The methodological conversation between written and material sources put forward in this chapter may help to re-­envision the relationships between medieval Ethiopian local-­religious communities and their Christian and Muslim neighbors as a cultural conversation across the religious lines. That the followers of local religions were not just people fated to be defeated and to disappear 84   François-­Xavier Fauvelle, Bertrand Hirsch and Amélie Chekroun, “Le sultanat de l’Awfāt, sa capitale et la nécropole des Walasmac: quinze années d’enquête archéologique et historique sur l’Islam médiéval éthiopien,” Annales islamologiques 51 (2017): 239–95. 85  Cerulli, “L’Etiopia medievale,” 285; Derat, Domaine des rois, 77. 86  Ibn Faḍl Allah al-­Umarī, Masālik el Abṣār fi mamālik el amṣār. I, L’Afrique moins l’Égypte, ed. Maurice Gaudefroy-­Demonbynes (Paris, 1927), 2. 87   Al-­Umarī, Masālik, 13. 88   Marie-­Laure Derat, “Chrétiens et musulmans d’Éthiopie face à la traite et à l’esclavage aux XVe et XVIe siècles,” in Traites et esclavages en Afrique orientale et dans l’océan Indien, ed. Henri Médard et al. (Paris, 2013), 121‒48, at 130, 134. 89  Berry, “Damot.”

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from history, but rather agents who belonged to medieval Ethiopian diversity and took part in the shaping of a larger, Christianized and Islamized, Ethiopian medieval society, can be observed on different grounds – economic, linguistic, material. True, this conversational approach does not prevent us from recognizing episodes of social disruption. One of these was the war led by a queen “of the Banū l-­Hamwīya” (as she is mentioned in an Arabic Christian source from Alexandria) against a Christian king of Ethiopia in the second half of the tenth century, and who eventually took over power and was considered by contemporary Arab Islamic sources as the ruler of Ethiopia. This queen could be (or not) the same as Badīt bint [daughter of] Māyā, who is mentioned at the beginning of a dynastic list of rulers in a late thirteenth-­ century Ethiopian Islamic source in Arabic, the so-­ called “Chronicle of Šawah.” Though none of the tenth-­century sources explicitly says she was non-­ Christian and non-­Muslim, it is often suggested that both or either of these queens could be the kernel of truth behind the various avatars of legendary Gudit, Judith, Esther or Ǝsato who is described as a “pagan” queen in many medieval and modern Christian sources.90 Another, and less ambiguous, disruption of local-­religious people is the resistance of Damot in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. A striking aspect of the cultural conversation of medieval multi-­confessional Ethiopia is the emphasis that societies of all religions put on monumentality. It is true that stelae and tumuli can only be described as funerary structures on archaeological grounds, and we cannot be certain they were used as regular sanctuaries in the same way churches and mosques were for the Christians and Muslims. However, the technical and social investment they required from the communities who built them, their continuous use over time, and their visibility in the landscape put them on a par with churches and mosques as territorial markers and possibly places that allowed local-­religious communities to enact and reinforce their sense of belonging in a similar way as Christians and Muslims did at their celebratory gatherings. It may not be too far-­fetched to assume that, if stelae and tumuli, churches, and mosques often are the last remaining medieval vestiges identifiable to the archeologist, or at least the ones that allow researchers to locate sites and characterize the religious identities of their inhabitants, is because they all used a common monumental language to express belonging and competition over souls and territories.

90   Marie-­Laure Derat, François-­Xavier Fauvelle-­Aymar and Bertrand Poissonnier, “La Culture Shay, chaînon manquant de l’histoire éthiopienne,” in Fauvelle-­Aymar and Poissonnier, eds., Culture Shay, 13‒31; Steven Kaplan, “Ǝsato,” in EAe 2 (2005), 376‒7; see also Marie-­ Laure Derat’s essay in this volume.

chapter 6

Islamic Cultural Traditions of Medieval Ethiopia and Eritrea Alessandro Gori The phrase “Islamic cultural traditions” used to delineate the scope of this essay refers to an ensemble of texts, both written and oral, as well as the beliefs and symbols expressed by them, that represent the worldview and a core part of the identity of a community of people following Islam.1 “Traditions” has been preferred to “cultures” tout court, which would include aspects (such as material culture) that fall outside this author’s purview and that are treated elsewhere in this volume.2 The term “tradition(s)” also makes it easier to sort out the “anti-­traditional” streams that every now and then appeared (and still appear) in the Islamic communities in Ethiopia. It includes the individual tales, stories, and myths of the Muslims of the region and the corpora into which they were compiled; it also comprises the Islamic tenets and principles of faith as established in the theological literature produced by many renowned Muslim scholars.3 Reconstructing the history of these traditions in medieval Muslim Ethiopia poses a number of difficulties, which it will be useful to outline at the start. First of all, texts providing useful data on them are quantitatively few and show an extreme diversity in language, shape and genre. From classical Arabic geographical and historical texts to Islamic physical and spiritual genealogical trees, from sayings attributed to the Prophet Muhammad and Quranic commentaries to dry chronographic notes and funerary inscriptions, from Gəʿəz chronicles and hagiographies to European travel accounts, the scanty available information on the early phases of Ethiopian-­Eritrean Islamic 1  The following contribution has been conceived in the framework of the research project Islam in the Horn of Africa: a Comparative Literary Approach (European Research Council Advanced Grant no. 322849 for the period 2013–2018). 2  See Amélie Chekroun’s and Bertrand Hirsch’s essay “The Sultanates of Medieval Ethiopia” in this volume. 3  On the much debated issue of the “Islamic tradition,” see the engaged anthropological contributions by Clifford Geertz, Islam Observed: Religious Development in Morocco and Indonesia (Chicago, 1968) and Talal Asad, The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam (Washington D.C., 1986).

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2020 | doi:10.1163/9789004419582_007

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cultural life is scattered across a great variety of sources and traditions that are difficult to retrieve, and must be analyzed and critically assessed using a unique heuristic approach.4 Secondly, some of the locally written first-­hand sources have a clear origin in oral legends and tales that circulated among the people and came to be recorded at a later stage of their transmission. The evaluation of such sources poses therefore a further problem to the researcher who has to be equipped with a quantum of knowledge of the methodology and procedures used in the field of oral history. A third source of information comes from archeology. Recent surveys of the Islamic areas in the Horn of Africa have yielded absolutely fresh information on the material culture, the geographical distribution, and the organisational structures of some of the oldest Muslim communities of Ethiopia and Eritrea. This information cannot be neglected, even if the archeologists and the historians who have worked with it have difficulties themselves in fully assessing it.5 In sum, it is highly improbable that a single scholar could possess all the linguistic and methodological knowledge and skills necessary to make proper use of all the available sources with the same level of efficiency and precision. This initial difficulty in dealing with the sources is probably one of the reasons for the delay with which the study of Islam in Ethiopia and Eritrea has 4  The difficulty of retrieving and using all the useful sources for the study of Islam in Ethiopia has been already underlined by many scholars. See, among others, François-­Xavier Fauvelle-­ Aymar and Bertrand Hirsch, “En guise d’introduction. Sur les traces de l’Islam ancien en Éthiopie et dans la Corne d’Afrique,” in Espaces musulmans de la Corne de l’Afrique au Moyen Age. Études d’archéologie et d’histoire, ed. François-­Xavier Fauvelle-­Aymar and Bertrand Hirsch (Paris, 2011), 13. For a very brief but precise description of the main different genres of classical Arabic sources dealing with Ethiopia see Alessandro Gori, “Historiography – Classical Arabic on Ethiopia,” in EAe 3 (2007), 46–48. On the Arabic geographic literature more specifically see Manfred Kropp, “La Corne d’Afrique Orientale d’après les géographes arabes du moyen-­âge,” Bulletin des études africaines 9/17–18 (1992): 161–197. 5  Bertrand Hirsch and François-­Xavier Fauvelle-­Aymar, “L’Éthiopie médiévale. État des lieux et nouveaux éclairages,” Cahiers d’études africaines 166/42 (2002): 315–335;  François-­Xavier Fauvelle-­Aymar et al., “Reconnaissances de trois villes musulmanes de l’époque médiévale dans l’Ifat,” Annales d’Éthiopie 22 (2006): 133–178. A recently started ERC project under the very promising and challenging title “Becoming Muslim: Conversion to Islam and Islamisation in Eastern Ethiopia” (Principal Investigator Timothy Insoll) will carry out a wide-scope archaeological survey of the city of Harar and its region. So far two publications have been produced by the team of the project: Timothy Insoll, “First Footsteps in the Archaeology of Harar,” Journal of Islamic Archaeology 4 (2017): 189–215, and Timothy Insoll et al., “Archaeological Survey and Excavations, Harlaa, Dire Dawa, Ethiopia January-­February 2017. A Preliminary Fieldwork Report,” Nyame Akuma 87 (2017): 32–38.

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managed to establish itself as a clearly defined research field.6 In what follows I will sketch the most relevant features and main internal developments of medieval Islamic cultural traditions in the region principally through the witness of Arabic local and non-­local written sources, which are my own area of expertise as a philologist specializing in Islamic studies and Arabic literature. Other kinds of sources will be brought into the discussion, with the caveat that no critical analysis of their nature and content can be undertaken. Coming closer to a first description of the object of the coming lines, it is almost banal to affirm that is extremely difficult to define a general “Islamic” intellectual tradition and even more difficult to define it in Ethiopia/Eritrea and the whole Horn of Africa. In the Islamic world the production and transmission of knowledge and the cultural practices connected with it are extremely diversified and multifaceted. To call a cultural item as “Islamic” is an operation that can be carried out only by exercising the greatest caution and taking into consideration all the possible nuances that such a labelling can obscure. In the medieval Ethiopian-­Eritrean region and the Horn of Africa as a whole, as far as it is possible to understand from the available sources, Islam since its first spread did not take a uniform shape but was characterized by a clear diversity in language, ethnic background, and socio-­political and religious structure. Different law schools, different and differently organized polities and power centres, and different streams of thought can be detected from the very infancy of an Islamic presence in the area. The influence of the local ʿāda and ʿurf (traditional pre-­Islamic practices) has strongly affected the evolution of Islamic culture in the Ethiopian region throughout its history. It is almost impossible to summarize in a general article the polymorphism of medieval and even early modern Ethiopian Islam. As a matter of fact the available sources do not allow us to see a clearly defined constellation of well-­established traditions and modes of production, transmission, and circulation of knowledge7 in Islamic Ethiopia before the eighteenth century.8 For prior periods 6  On this point see Hussein Ahmed, “The Coming of Age of Islamic Studies in Ethiopia. The Present State of Research and Publication”, in Proceedings of the 16th International Conference of Ethiopian Studies, ed. Svein Ege et al., 2 vols. (Trondheim, 2009), 2: 449–455. 7  These terms cannot be discussed here in detail, therefore I am using them in a very broad meaning. An interesting recent problematization of the concept of Islamic knowledge in different African contexts can be found in Rudolph T. Ware III, The Walking Qur’an: Islamic Education, Embodied Knowledge, and History in West Africa (Chapel Hill, 2014) and in Robert Launay, ed., Islamic Education in Africa. Writing Boards and Blackboards (Bloomington, IN, 2016). 8  On the process of formation of a full-­fledged Islamic tradition in Wällo, see Hussein Ahmed, Islam in Nineteenth-­Century Wallo, Ethiopia. Revival, Reform and Reaction (Leiden, 2001). A wide-­scope research project conducted on the Islamic literature of the Horn

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the researcher faces a very magmatic picture which can be interpreted either as the mirror of a formative period, or as a simple reflection of our present limited knowledge. The paucity of the available information and the difficult usability of the sources does not allow one to follow the development of each of the Islamic institutions9 and cultural traditions whose existence can be detected in Ethiopia and Eritrea in earlier times. For the sake of simplicity, therefore, the available data is arranged below chronologically, following the conceptual and practical bipartition into a “first” or earlier Middle Ages (from the seventh to the end of the thirteenth century) and a later Middle Ages (from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century) proposed by Fauvelle-­Aymar and Hirsch.10 With regard specifically to cultural traditions, however, I find the fourteenth century a more apt dividing-­line than the thirteenth, for at least some of the written sources point to this as the moment when Islamic cultural traditions in Ethiopia concluded their formative period, while the following century and a half rather signal a further development until the beginning of the jihad of Imam Aḥmad b. Ibrāhīm.11 1

The Earlier Middle Ages (7th–14th Centuries): Genealogies of Power and Learning

The arrival and spread of Islam in Ethiopia is traditionally connected to the episode of the first hijra to al-­Ḥabaša, the “land of the Ḥabaša,” that is, of the “Abyssinians” or Ethiopians. In 615 CE the Prophet Muhammad invited a group of his first followers to seek refuge in Ethiopia where, he assured them, a righteous king, known under the title of al-­Naǧāšī, would grant them protection from the distress and suffering that the Meccan polytheists were causing to the (see note 1 above) has shown that the copying and circulation of Islamic manuscripts, until nowadays the main vehicle and tool of the preservation and the transmission of the Islamic knowledge in the region, saw a real blossoming only in the nineteenth century, which can be interpreted as a consequence of the relative lateness of the structuring of a “Muslim” tradition. 9  I will here use the term “Islamic institutions” in the very classical (maybe old fashioned) way in which scholars of Islamic studies did it: see e.g. Maurice Gaudefroy-­Demombynes, Les Institutions musulmanes, new ed. (Paris, 1946), and S. D. Goitein, Studies in Islamic History and Institutions (Leiden, 1966). A discussion of what an Islamic institution can be remains quite obviously outside the scope of this paper. 10   Fauvelle-­Aymar and Hirsch, “En guise d’introduction,” 24. 11  For a discussion of the jihad and its aftermath, see Chekroun and Hirsch, “The MuslimChristian Wars and the Oromo Expansion,” in this volume.

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believers in the new faith. The story is well attested in many Islamic sources and functions nowadays as a kind of foundation myth for all Muslims in the Horn of Africa. Without going into a detailed discussion of the episode, the encounter of the Muslim escapees with the king of the Christian state gained a kind of paradigmatic function in the depiction of Islamic-­Christian relationships in the whole area. Christians have tended to consider Muslims as eternal refugees to whom the Ethiopian state mercifully can grant protection and safety but without recognizing them as real fellow countrymen.12 Muslims, for their part, have interpreted the story of the al-­Naǧāšī as a proof of the antiquity of the Islamic presence in the area which could actually predate the formation of the first Muslim community (umma) in Medina. The possibility of tracing the arrival of Islam in Ethiopia back to the very beginning of the new religion gives Muslims of the country a strong sense of pride towards their Christian fellow countrymen and toward their non-­Ethiopian fellow Muslims. One feature of this episode, found in the overwhelming majority of the classical Arabic Islamic sources, is that the al-­Naǧāšī converted to Islam: when the Prophet came to know that Ethiopian king had passed away, he personally prayed for the first time ever in the history of Islam the ṣalāt al-­ġayb (prayer for the absent corpse) in his honor.13 It seems however that among Ethiopian Muslims the tradition about the Ethiopian king who embraced the Islamic faith did not play any significant role in the early formation of an Islamic identity. The first clear mention of local devotion to the Muslim Naǧāšī is relatively late:14 it is found in the Futūḥ al-­Ḥabaša, the chronicle of the wars of Imam 12  The Christian interpretation of the episode is epitomized in a text published by Eugen Mittwoch, “Ein amharischer Text über Muhammed und die Ausbreitung des Islams in Abessinien,” in Festschrift Eduard Sachau zum siebzigsten Geburtstage gewidmet von Freunden und Schülern, ed. Gotthold Weil (Berlin, 1915), 444–451, where the origin of the Islamic presence and its further development are described in terms of the Christian state’s grant of refuge to and subsequent paternalistic toleration of it. 13  The narration of the episode is well attested in the collections of sayings of the Prophet which are traditionally considered the most authoritative, e.g. in the Ṣaḥīḥ of al-­Buḫārī: “Narrated Abū Hurayra: The messenger of God informed about the news of the death of al-­Naǧāšī on the day he died. He went out with us to the muṣallā [place for prayer] and we aligned in rows and he said four takbīrs [the cry Allāhu Akbar] for al-­Naǧāšī’s funeral prayer.” (Ṣaḥīḥ al-­Buḫārī 1333, Book 23, ḥadīṯ 89). The tradition about the ṣalāt al-­ġāʾib is considered to be one of the proofs of the conversion of the king to Islam. 14  The interesting inscriptions published by Wolbert Smidt do not provide decisive evidence of the antiquity of a shrine or cultic tribute to the Naǧāšī. See his “Eine arabische Inschrift in Kwiḥa, Tigray,” in Studia Aethiopica in Honour of Siegbert Uhlig on the Occasion of his 65th Birthday, ed. Verena Böll et al. (Wiesbaden, 2004), 259–268; idem, “Another unknown Arabic inscription from the eastern Tigrayan trade route: Indication for a Muslim cult site during the ‘Dark Age’?” in In memoriam Peter Roenpage. Juden, Christen und Muslime

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Aḥmad b. Ibrāhīm written by Šihāb al-­Dīn Aḥmad b. ʿAbd al-­Qādir, who was an eye witness of most of the events he describes. Narrating the expedition of the Islamic army in ʿAgamä in 1533, the author tells us how the soldiers asked their leader to allow them to pay visit to the tomb of the king. The imam refused and compelled them to march on against their enemy, however promising them to come back on the next day to perform the pious visit. The chronicle does not confirm that the pilgrimage of the Muslim troops really took place.15 On the basis of this information, it can be rightly hypothesized that the holy shrine was built and the veneration of the king’s corpse started sometime before the first half of the sixteenth century but it is almost impossible to specify a more precise chronological frame. Ethiopian Islamic sources are significantly silent on this point. If known in the country at an earlier stage, the story of the Muslim Ethiopian righteous king must have circulated only orally and at any rate it seemingly had not been used as a tool of legitimacy: so far no genealogical document of any Ethiopian Muslim family is known that supports the claim of an ancestry tracing back to the al-­Naǧāšī. Therefore the political usage of the story which is presently very widespread seems to be a relatively modern phenomenon.16 in Äthiopien – ein Beispiel für abrahamische Ökumene, ed. Walter Raunig and Prinz Asfa-­ Wossen Asserate (Dettelbach, 2010), 179–91 (previously published in German as “Eine weitere arabische Inschrift von der osttigrayischen Handelsroute: Hinweis auf eine muslimische Kultstätte in der ‘dunklen Periode’?” Aethiopica 12 [2009]: 126–135); “A Note on the Islamic Heritage of Tigray: the Current Situation of the Arabic Inscription of Wuqro,” Itiyopis: Northeast African Journal of Social Sciences and Humanities 1 (2011): 150–53. 15  See René Basset, ed. and trans., Histoire de la Conquête de l’Abyssinie (XVIe siècle) par Chihab Eddin Aḥmed Ben ʿAbd el Qâder Arab-­Faqih, 2 vols. (Paris, 1897–1909), 1: 318 (text), 2: 419 (trans.). An English translation is in Šihab ad-­Dīn Aḥmad bin ʿAbd al-­Qāder bin Sālem bin ʿUṯmān, Futūḥ al-­Ḥabaša: The Conquest of Abyssinia [16th Century], trans. Paul Lester Stenhouse, with annotations by Richard Pankhurst (Hollywood, CA, 2003), 351. 16  For an evaluation of the political meaning of the story of the figure of the Naǧāšī in the more recent developments of Christian-­Islamic relationships in Ethiopia see Haggai Erlich, The Cross and the River: Ethiopia, Egypt, and the Nile (Boulder, CO, 2002), 25–28; idem, “Islam, War, and Peace in the Horn of Africa,” in Muslim Ethiopia: The Christian Legacy, Identity Politics and Islamic Reformism, ed. Patrick Desplat and Terje Østebø (New York, 2013), 187–199 (in particular 188–189 and 195–196); Dereje Feyissa, “The 2007 Delegation of the Muslim Diaspora to Ethiopia,” in Diasporas, Development and Peacemaking in the Horn of Africa, ed. Liisa Laakso and Petri Hautaniemi (Uppsala – London, 2014), 98–121, at 113–115. The recent growing interest in the story of the Naǧāšī is evident in the Ethiopian Islamic book market where Amharic and Arabic publications about the episode are widespread: see for example al-­ḥāǧǧ Ahmäd Ahmädin, Däggu nəguś Ahmäd Alnäǧaši – Al-­malik al-­ṣāliḥ Aḥmad al-­Naǧāšī (Addis Abäba, n.d.); Mähmud Šakir, Yäḥabäšaw hiǧranna muhaǧirocc – Ma‘a al-­hiǧra ilā al-­Ḥabaša (Addis Abäba, 1988 EC/1416 AH); Muḥammäd Ṭoyyəb, Habäšanna Islam: nəgus Näǧaši (Addis Abäba, 1991 EC); Sayyid b.

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However, it is undeniable that families representing the first political and intellectual elite of Muslims of Ethiopia did feel the need to create for themselves an Arab connection. This becomes evident when looking at the genealogies of the ruling dynasties in early Muslim Ethiopia. The dynasty of the sultans of Šawah claimed to descend from the Maḫzūmī clan in Mecca. The Walasmaʿ dynasty of Ifat and later of the Barr Saʿd al-­Dīn (hereafter called ʿAdal) are given three possible Arab ancestries: from ʿAqīl b. Abī Ṭālib (elder brother of ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib and cousin of the Prophet Muhammad), from the clan of ʿAbd al-­Dār b. Qusayy (a section of the tribe of Qurayš, to which also the Prophet belonged) or even from the more noble Ḥasan b. ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib (son of Fāṭima, daughter of the Prophet and of the Prophet’s cousin ʿAlī). This is not surprising, for the production and circulation of Arab genealogies is a well-­known phenomenon attested in the whole Islamic world. The Arabian Peninsula is the cradle of Islam and the Arabs are, according to a common saying, “the metal of Islam” (maʿdin al-­islam). Besides, the Prophet was an Arab and claiming a physical proximity to him through a genealogical text reinforces a family’s social prestige and position, something which is extremely important for rulers and intellectuals, even if the Quran expressly prohibits any differentiation of the believers according to their family origin.17 Western scholars have made painstaking efforts to use the genealogies and the legendary family trees of some of the most outstanding representatives of the Muslims of Ethiopia as a tool to reconstruct the first phases of the history of some of the communities in the region. Making use of methodologies developed by scholars of oral history,18 Ewald Wagner,19 Bogumil Andrzejewski,20 and Ioan M. Lewis21 have tried to calculate the duration of an average Muḥammad Sādiq, Manhal al-‘aṭšān fī ta’riḫ al-­Ḥubšān (Ṣanʿāʾ 1422 AH/2001 CE), 91–135. In 2009 the Ministry of Culture and Tourism applied to UNESCO to include the mosque of al-­Naǧāšī located in the town of Nägaš (approximately 13 km north of Wəqro) on the World Heritage list. Apparently the request has not been fulfilled. 17  Cfr. Quran 49:13 “Indeed, the most noble of you in the sight of God is the most righteous of you.” 18  E.g. Yves Person, “Tradition orale et chronologie,” Cahiers d’études africaines 2, 7 (1962): 462–476; D. J. Jones, “Problems of African chronology,” Journal of African History 9, 2 (1970): 161–76. 19  Ewald Wagner, “Genealogien aus Harar,” Der Islam 51 (1974): 28–65; idem, “Eine Liste der Heiligen von Harar,” Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft 123 (1973): 269–292. 20  Bogumil Witalis Andrzejewski, “A Genealogical Note Relevant To The Dating Of Sheikh Hussein Of Bale,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 38 (1975): 139–140. 21  Ioan Myriddin Lewis, “Historical Aspects of Genealogies in Northern Somali Social Structure,” Journal of African History 3 (1962): 35–48.

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generation in several different Islamic genealogies of the Horn of Africa in an effort to date the names mentioned in the documents. The usage of pedigree charts and family trees (and also of chronologies, chronological charts and short annals) as dating tools has probably downplayed the socio-­cultural meaning of such documents. “ʾIlm al-­nasab” in the Islamic world is a discipline of extreme importance whose practitioners (nassābūn) are supposed to produce texts aiming to physically describe a social relationship within a given geography and project it on a historical-­mythical background. History is therefore not their main concern and purpose.22 Rather, genealogy is a highly regarded social science in its own right. It describes and justifies an existing social order and legitimizes an aspiration to power, learning, or status by mapping the relationships among and inside families and/or a larger human group that shares a common space or belongs to a particular community (be it a dynasty, a mystical brotherhood or a school of law). A “physical” genealogy of an outstanding personage is very often coupled with spiritual genealogy: Arab ancestry is normally almost a conditio sine qua non for obtaining the special social status that can result in a generally recognized sanctity. The famous Fatḥ madīnat Harar23 is perhaps the most evident example of a local Ethiopian Islamic text that offers a full-­fledged myth of foundation where political power is tightly connected to sanctity. That is, in the construction of the mythical discourse, the holiness of the protagonists plays the pivotal role. The “historical” dimension of the text is just a vague background to the main action, in which the birth of a state in Harar is dramatically described as emerging from the holy bodies and deeds of šayḫ Abādir ʿUmar al-­Riḍā’24 and his 412 fellows. The group of saints coming from the Arabian Peninsula 22  For a series of masterful studies on Arab/Arabic genealogical science and genealogists see Zoltan Szombathy, The Roots of Arabic Genealogy – A Study in Historical Anthropology (Berlin, 2003). 23  The text, attributed to an otherwise unknown Yaḥyā Naṣrallāh, has been critically edited by Ewald Wagner, Legende und Geschichte: der Fatḥ madīnat Harar (Wiesbaden, 1978). 24  As already noticed by Enrico Cerulli (Studi etiopici, vol. 1: La lingua e la storia di Harar [Rome: 1936], 49), the name Abādir is extremely problematic in an Islamic context. According to the Italian orientalist, Abādir could be an Arabic form of the Coptic name Apater (in Greek, Antipater) and could point to a Christian holy personage later “Islamized.” It must however be noticed that the most common spelling of the name Apater/Antipater in the Copto-­Arabic tradition is Abādīr. That the name sounded insufficiently Islamic to the Muslims themselves is proved by the addition to it of a purely Islamic name like ʿUmar. The further addition of al-­Ridāʾ as an epithet to the personal name is also very puzzling, as it immediately recalls the eighth imam of the Twelver Shiites ʿAlī al-­Riḍāʾ (d. 818, buried in Mashhad, Iran, and known in Persian as Imam Reżā). The interpretation of Abādir as a corruption of the name Abā (Abū) Ḏarr could also be hypothesized, pointing once again to a Shiite influence, as the most famous Abū Ḏarr

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fights unbelievers and foreigners (Portuguese and Italians at the same time!) and eventually establishes a polity with Harar as its capital and šayḫ Abādir as its leader. Basing himself on the genealogies of Abādir,25 Wagner dates the arrival of Abādir in Africa to 1216 CE, dismissing the date of his emirate given in another Arabic document which fixes his rule from 945–6 to 964. Such a big difference in the possible chronologies is a clear sign of the many obstacles that these texts present as historiographical sources.26 The symbolic power of the text is, by contrast, self-­evident: Harar is sanctified as a city of holy men (madīnat al-­awliyāʾ: an epithet it proudly carries even today) and the sacredness of its origin legitimates its high rank among the Islamic communities of the region. Šayḫ Abādir ʿUmar al-­Riḍāʾ, chosen as the first ruler of the mythical Harar state by his fellow holy men, is presented as a descendant of Abū Bakr al-­Ṣiddīq (the first caliph of Islam), thus confirming his holy status via a physical Arab origin and a spiritual closeness to the Prophet. Arab ancestry and Islamic holiness are therefore presented by local sources as the very catalysts of the inception of the Muslim tradition in Ethiopia. But saints and rulers are not the only personages of this first act of whom we have traces in earlier medieval Islamic Ethiopia. Learned men are also attested or implied in a variety of sources. The most famous of these sources is certainly the Masālik al-­abṣār fī mamālik al-­amṣār, an encyclopedic work for the education of the officers of the chancellery of the Mamluk state. Written by Aḥmad b. Yaḥyā b. Faḍl Allāh al-ʿUmarī (d. 1349) in Cairo in the 1330s, its eighth chapter is devoted to a description of the land, resources, and kingdom (both Christian and Muslim) of al-­Ḥabaša, based on information al-ʿUmarī collected from the famous Ḥanafī in Islamic history (the one carrying the nisba al-­Ġifārī, d. 652) was a companion of the Prophet who supported the party of ʿAlī against the Umayyads. 25  Wagner, “Genealogien aus Harar,” 111. 26  A locality called Harar is mentioned in the chronicle of the king ʿAmdä Ṣəyon as one of the members of the Islamic coalition led by qāḍī Ṣāliḥ against the Christian state in 1332 to which it contributed 5 “officers” (mäkwännən): see Manfred Kropp, ed. and trans., Der siegreiche Feldzug des Königs ʿĀmda Ṣeyon gegen die Muslime in Adal im Jahre 1332 n.Ch., CSCO 538–539, SAe 99–100 (Louvain, 1994), at vol. 1 (text), 30, vol. 2 (trans.), 36; Paolo Marrassini, ed. and trans., Lo scettro e la croce. La campagna di ‘Amda Seyon I contro l’Ifat (1332) (Naples, 1993), 104–105. For almost two hundred years the name disappeared from written sources. It resurfaced in 1520 – at that moment certainly identifiable with what has been known until now as the city of Harar – when the sultan of ʿAdal, Abū Bakr b. Muḥammad b. Azar, moved his capital there from Dakar. Archeological data on Harar are almost non-­existent: the first excavations conducted so far in some areas in city (see Timothy Insoll, “First Footsteps”) confirm that the first urban agglomeration cannot have begun before the sixteenth century.

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faqih Ǧamāl al-­Dīn ʿAbdallāh b. Yūsuf b. Muḥammad al-­Zaylaʿī (d. 1360) and his fellows, from šayḫ ʿAbd al-­Muʾmin27 and from an otherwise unknown merchant (tāǧir) called al-­ḥāǧǧ Faraǧ al-­Fuwwi (or al-­Fawwi).28 Al-ʿUmarī confirms that the Muslims of Ethiopia had managed to establish all the basic structures and related personnel to carry out an organized Islamic life and guarantee the preservation and transmission of the basic principles of the Islamic faith: mosques, bigger mosques and ḫaṭībs (preachers) for the communal Friday prayer were at disposal of the Muslim believers in the country. Al-ʿUmarī provides also some interesting data about the phenomenology of Muslim law in the country: both the Ḥanafī and the Šāfiʿī schools were present at that moment in the country. At the same time, he underlines that Ethiopian Muslims had no madrasa (that is, no institutions for higher education), no ḫānqāh or zāwiya (places where members of a brotherhood gather to perform their rituals), and no ribāṭ, this last a more or less organized institution, usually located in a region bordering a non-­Islamic territory, where ascetical practices are combined with military activity. The implication is that certain aspects of Islamic cultural life were simply non-­existent: higher education and mysticism. The testimony transmitted in al-ʿUmarī’s work is partially confirmed, partially negated by other evidence. Some recent archeological surveys in the region of Ifat have revealed five Islamic urban centres (Asbäri, Mäsal, Nora, Goze and Fäqi Däbbis) possessing mosques, walls, and cemeteries.29 The importance of these discoveries for the reconstruction not only of the material but also of the cultural and social history of Ifat cannot be overestimated. The presence of urban agglomerations possessing a mosque – the pivotal architectural element around which the collective life of a Muslim community is organized – implicitly points to the existence of a (more or less) learned class 27  In the last edition of the Arabic text of al-ʿUmarī’s Masālik (ed. Kāmil Salmān al-­Ǧubūrī [Beirut, 2010]), this personage is identified by the editor with Ṣafī al-­Dīn ʿAbd al-­Muʾmin b. ʿAbd al-­Ḥaqq al-­Ḥanbalī al-­Baġdādī (d. 1338), a representative of the Ḥanbalī school of law and author of an abridged version of the geographic dictionary of Yāqūt. 28  In the genealogical repertoire of ʿAbd al-­Karīm al-­Samʿānī (al-­Ansāb, vol. 9 [al-­Qāhira, 1981], 347–348), two possible readings of the nisba are listed: al-­Fawwī, derived from a section of the ancient Maʿāfir Yemeni tribe and al-­Fuwwī (read sometimes also al-­Fawwī) referred to the town of al-­Fuwwah (near Dasūq, on the Delta of the Nile). It is not clear on what basis Gaudefroy-­Demombynes, in his translation of the Masālik, corrects the term into al-­Fūnī, which he gives the meaning of the “Nubian, the Funǧ.” See al-ʿUmarī, Masālik el abṣār fī mamālik el amṣār. I, L’Afrique moins l’Egypte, trans. Maurice Gaudefroy-­ Demombynes (Paris, 1927), 17. 29   Fauvelle-­Aymar et al., “Reconnaissances de trois villes;” Bertrand Poissonnier et al., “Les mosquées médiévales de Goze et Fäqi Däbbis (Ifāt),” in Espaces musulmans de la Corne de l’Afrique, 103–139.

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able to manage the institution and its activities: a muʾaḏḏin to call the faithful to perform their canonical ṣalāt, an imam to lead the prayers, a ḫaṭīb for the weekly speech on Friday. Members of this “basic” mosque personnel could also have been a teacher for the children’s Quranic school (and possibly also for higher level students), as an expert of law and a judge, as a mystic guide and a propagator of a brotherhood. Local Arabic Islamic texts also provide some scattered information confirming the existence of a more or less institutionalized intellectual activity among Muslims at least during the thirteenth century. In the sultanate of Šawah (896–7/1285) the presence of a qāḍī al-­quḍāt is attested: the name of an otherwise unknown faqīh Ibrāhīm b. al-­Ḥasan occupying that high-­ranking position is mentioned in the so-­called Chronicle of Šawah. This personage, who died on 10th of ramaḍān 653 AH (13th October 1255), had apparently received an education in Islamic law: he had the title faqīh even if the document does not specify the school of law to which he belonged nor whether he studied in Ethiopia and/or abroad. The passage of the Chronicle proves also the existence of a well-­organized and hierarchical judiciary system in the sultanate, which must have had several local judges (qāḍī) under the leadership of a head judge. It is obviously impossible to reconstruct how the whole system was managed and how the positions and ranks were granted, in particular to what extent the political power (the sultan) influenced the appointment and the activities of the judges.30 Finally, Yemenite and other non-­ local sources indicate that Muslim Ethiopian intellectuals had close connections to educational centers in Yemen and beyond from the second half of the thirteenth century. A family of learned men carrying the nisba al-­Zaylaʿī is well-­known in Yemen: their ancestor Aḥmad b. ʿUmar al-­Zaylaʿī (d. 704 AH/1304–05) is said to have come to Arabia together with his father ʿUmar and his uncle Muḥammad “from al-­Habaša.” The family settled first in Maḥmūl, and Aḥmad ended his days in Luḥayya, a small port town on the coast of the Red Sea.31 Ethiopian Muslims went to study in Yemen and returned to Ethiopia bringing their knowledge and books, as described in the several hagiographies of šayḫ Ḥusayn of Bali.32 Furthermore, 30  Enrico Cerulli, “Il sultanato dello Scioa nel secolo XIII secondo un nuovo documento storico,” RSE 1 (1941): 5–42, at 21–22. 31  Enrico Cerulli, “L’Etiopia medievale in alcuni brani di scrittori arabi,” RSE 3 (1943): 272– 294, at 288–289; Alessandro Gori, “Una famiglia santa tra Africa Orientale e Yemen: gli Zaylaʿī nelle ‘Ṭabaqāt’ di Aḥmad b. Aḥmad b. ʿAbd al-­Laṭīf al-­Šargī,” RSO 72 (1998): 41–60, at 48. 32  Enrico Cerulli, Studi etiopici. 2, La lingua e la storia dei Sidamo (Rome, 1936), 17–18; Bogumil Andrzejewski, “Sheikh Ḥussēn of Bālī in Galla oral traditions,” in IV Congresso

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students coming from the Horn of Africa and generally known under the label of Zayāliʿ had a reserved space for their community at the Umayyad mosque in Damascus33 and at al-­Azhar in Cairo.34 It can be easily hypothesized that these Ethiopian students were instrumental in the establishment and spread of different schools of interpretation and application of Islamic law in the country. It is impossible to retrace the history of the Islamic law schools in Ethiopia. As mentioned by al-ʿUmarī, Ḥanafī and Šāfiʿī were (and still are) the strongest maḏhabs in the whole region, but it is practically impossible to describe in detail the phases of their spread and local distribution in Ethiopia. No detailed information on the spread of Islamic mystical brotherhoods in Ethiopia is available either. However, there must have been an Islamic mystical milieu in medieval Ethiopian Islam: at least one Ethiopian mystical master became extremely famous abroad, Muʿīn al-­Dīn Yāqūt al-ʿAršī (even if his biography is peculiar),35 and al-ʿUmarī himself, though denying that Ethiopian Muslims had a structured mystical life, recognized that in that country there were “ascetics and pious people.”36 Internazionale di Studi Etiopici (Roma 10–15 aprile 1972), 2 vols. (Rome: Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, 1974) 1: 463–80, at 464; Alessandro Gori, “First Studies on the Texts of Šayḫ Ḥusayn’s Hagiographies,” RSO 70 (1996): 53–82, at 61. 33  See the Riḥlat Ibn Baṭṭūṭa: Muḥammad ibn ʿAbdallāh Ibn Baṭṭūṭa, Voyages d’Ibn Batoutah, ed. and trans. C. Defrémery and B.-­R. Sanguinetti, 4 vols. (Paris, 1853–8), 1: 204: “Fī šarq al-­masǧid maqṣūra kabīra fī-­hā ṣihrīǧ māʾwa-­hiya li-­ṭāʾifat al-­zayāliʿ al-­sūdān” (“In the eastern part of the mosque there is a big compartment with a reservoir: it belongs to the group of the black Zayāliʿa”). 34  On the presence of students coming from the Horn of Africa at al-­Azhar in medieval times, see Julien Loiseau, “Abyssinia at al-­Azhar: Muslim Students from the Horn of Africa in Late Medieval Cairo,” Northeast African Studies 19, 1 (2019): 47–70. 35  The Ethiopian Yāqūt al-ʿAršī (also simply al-ʿArš) is a famous and revered mystical šayḫ of the Šāḏiliyya brotherhood in Alexandria where he was a disciple of Abū al-ʿAbbās al-­ Mursī and teacher of Ibn ʿAṭāʾ Allāh al-­Iskandarī. He is differently mentioned in sources and no unanimity exists on the date of his death or on some details of his biography. Earlier authors (e.g. Ibn Kaṯīr, al-­Bidāya wa-­al-­nihāya [Giza, 1998], 18: 349, and al-­Yāfiʿī, Mir’āt al-­ǧinān [Beirut, 1997] 4: 213) provide only scanty information on him and fix the date of his death in 732 AH /1331–2 CE. Later texts (e.g. al-­Šaʿranī’s al-­Ṭabaqāt al-­kubrā [Cairo, 2005], 2: 40–41 and al-­Munāwī’s Ṭabaqāt [Beirut, n.d.] 3: 104–106) move his death to 707 AH/1307–8 CE and provide some hagiographical tales about him presenting him as a slave brought to Alexandria from Ethiopia. An insightful analysis of his position within the Šāḏiliyya brotherhood is carried out on the basis of a conspicuous amount of Arabic sources by Giuseppe Cecere, “Les réseaux soufis d’Alexandrie au début de l’époque mamlouke Yāqūt al-­Ḥabašī, une étude de cas,” in Sociétés en réseaux dans le monde musulman médiéval, ed. Sylvie Denoix (Paris, 2017), 11–30. 36  “And among them are ascetics and pious” (“Wa-­fīhim al-­zuhhād wa-­al-­abrār”): the passage probably refers to both Christian ascetics and Muslim sufi. The way al-ʿUmarī describes the mystical life of Muslim Ethiopians actually corresponds to what we know also

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The image of the cultural life of the Muslims of Ethiopia and their social structure appear therefore richer than the representation given in the Masālik. It is possible that the informants of al-ʿUmarī deliberately wanted to underline some weak points of the Muslim culture of Ethiopia in order to gain the sympathy of the Egyptian rulers and their support against the Christian state. To complete the picture here sketched, another actor of the play must be mentioned: the merchant. The famous (or notorious) Muslim trader,37 who is customarily considered the main propagator of the Muslim faith everywhere in the world where Islam arrived, was of course active also in Ethiopia. Already in pre-­Islamic times Qurayshites were probably trading with Ethiopia,38 and after the birth of Islam Arab merchants were certainly active in the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean.39 Muslim tombs and funerary inscriptions along the route connecting the Eritrean shore to the highlands testify to the existence of Muslim groups who were protagonists in building up a network of trading entrepots starting from Adulis and Dahlak and continuing inland to Wəqro and Šäwa. A similar epigraphic documentation has been found in a territory between the Indian Ocean and the Č�̣ ärč̣är area pointing to the existence of a constellation of Islamic trading centers connecting the coast to the hinterland.40

for later times, until the “reform” of the nineteenth century and even after that: mysticism has been present in many aspects of the daily life of the faithful without necessarily being inserted within a structured, hierarchically organized brotherhood. 37  For a masterful depiction of the “Muslim merchant” see the acute essay of Maxime Rodinson, “Le marchand musulman,” in Islam and the trade of Asia: a colloquium held by the Near Eastern History Group at Oxford, June 26–30, 1967, ed. Donald Sidney Richards (Oxford, 1970), 21–35. For the Indian Ocean area, see Patricia Risso, Merchants and Faith: Muslim Commerce and Culture in the Indian Ocean (Boulder, CO, 1995). 38  The traditional picture of an intense trade exchange between the Arabs and Ethiopia in pre-­Islamic times has been challenged by the (somewhat controversial) research of Patricia Crone, Meccan Trade and the Rise of Islam (Princeton, 1987), 124–129. 39  For a detailed description of the commercial relationships of the Yemeni Rasūlid dynasty with Ethiopia see Éric Vallet, L’Arabie marchande: état et commerce sous les sultans rasūlides du Yémen (626–858/1229–1454) (Paris, 2010), 405–424. 40  For a general description of the Islamic epigraphic material in Ethiopia see Alessandro Gori, “Arabic Inscriptions in the Ethiopian regions,” in EAe 3 (2007), 165–167; for the constellation of medieval Islamic urban entities in Ethiopia, see Bertrand Hirsch and François-­Xavier Fauvelle-­Aymar, “Cités oubliées: Réflexions sur l’histoire urbaine de l’Éthiopie médiévale (XIe–­X VIe siècles),” Journal des africanistes 74, 1–2 (2004): 299–314. In the framework of a newly launched research project “HornEast: Horn & Crescent. Connections, Mobility and Exchange between the Horn of Africa and the Middle East in the Middle Ages,” directed by Julien Loiseau, two previously unedited inscriptions from Bilet (Tǝgray) have been published. The first is dated 972 and it is therefore the oldest Arabic inscription found in Ethiopia until now: see Julien Loiseau, “Two unpublished

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The role played by merchants in the Islamization processes around the world has been long debated.41 It has been rightly underlined that it is sometimes difficult to distinguish a trader from a mystical master or a learned man, but certainly a degree of social specialization and role differentiation must have been clearly there since the first arrival of Islam in the region. The usage of titles and epithets that are exclusive to learned men can be a hint of a certain degree of work- and role-­division. To conclude this section, even if the picture has to remain vague and tentative, all the data briefly collected here support the hypothesis that the Muslim communities of Ethiopia were able to develop a variegated even if not perfectly structured cultural activity of their own already before the end of the fourteenth century. 2

The Later Middle Ages (Fifteenth and First Half of the Sixteenth Century)

During the fifteenth century Ethiopian Islamic culture started to be more strongly affected by some internal cleavages that became unbridgeable in the following century. Domestic rivalries and conflicts were common among the ruling families and clans of Ethiopian Muslims, which the sources normally explain as the result of the greed and ambition of the leaders of the ruling families. This apparently continuous internal strife weakened the Muslim communities and forced them to accept the supremacy of the Christian state already in the earlier fourteenth century.42 In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, however, a shift can be detected in the internal political trends of the Muslim communities of Ethiopia. Arabic inscriptions from Bilet (Tigray, Ethiopia),” on-­line publication https://horneast .hypotheses.org/publication-­horneast. 41  See among others the classic Thomas Walker Arnold, The Preaching of Islam. A History of the Propagation of the Islamic Faith (Westminster, 1896), and Nehemia Levtzion, ed., Conversion to Islam (New York, 1979). 42  See the clear words of ʿAbdallāh al-­Zaylaʿī, as reported by al-ʿUmarī: “Had their opinion been unified and their elites unanimous, they could have defended themselves or remain united. But their weakness and discord cause rivalry among them and some of them submit to the ruler of Amhara and tend to obey to him” (“Law ittafaqat kalimatuhum wa-­ ǧtamaʿat ḏāt baynahum qadarū ʿalā al-­mudāfaʿa aw al-­tamāsuk wa-­lakinnahum ma hum ʿalayhi min al-­ḍaʿf wa-­iftirāq al-­kalima baynahum tanāfus wa-­minhum man yatarāmā ilā ṣāḥib amḥara wa-­yamīlu ilayhi bi-­al-­ṭibāʿa”). See the French translation by Gaudefroy-­ Demombynes (cit. at n. 28 above), 2.

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Slowly the hegemony of official institutionalized Islam and of its political representatives began to weaken. Waves of protest, led by preachers advocating a stricter interpretation and implementation of the Islamic tenets, were not unknown in previous centuries. Personages like šayḫ Muḥammad Abū ʿAbdallāh,43 who led a war against the Christian Ethiopian king Wədəm Räʿad in 1299, and qāḍī Ṣāliḥ, who took leadership of a Muslim coalition against king ʿAmdä Ṣəyon in 1332,44 clearly show a growing divide between the ruling families and other elements of the Muslim societies. The titles carried by the two “protest” leaders indicate their strong religious orientation and point to the use of a theologically marked ideology to justify and spread the revolt. However, it seems correct to affirm that only starting from the fifteenth century did “oppositional” movements in the Muslim communities of Ethiopia become so strong and well organized that they could first menace and eventually subvert the internal stability of the traditional order. The Kitāb al-­ilmām bi-­aḫbār man bi-­arḍ al-­ḥabaša min mulūk al-­Islām of al-­Maqrīzī,45 the sole Arabic monographic text specifically and exclusively devoted to the description of the history of the Islamic rulers of Ethiopia, recounts the reinforcement of a kind of militant spirit within the ruling Walasmaʿ dynasty of Ifat. Many representatives of this family are presented as valorous fighters for the cause of God against the Christian kings. Other sources confirm that a cleavage between official Ethiopian Islam and that part of the political (and cultural) elite that spearheaded the revolts and rebellions characterized the whole period between the beginning of the fifteenth century and the outbreak of the jihad of Aḥmad b. Ibrāhīm which can be considered the apex of the movement. The military fervor of some of the Walasmaʿ sultans could be thus be interpreted as an attempt to cope with the appearance of what one could call – using a concept widely spread in modern Islamic studies – a “revivalist” stream in the Islamic communities of the country. Tensions started strengthening between the official Islam represented in the polities of Ifat and later of ʿAdal and Harar and oppositional movements gathered by and around charismatic figures like Ladaʿ Uṯmān, the imam Maḥfūẓ and the garād Abūn.46 These three personages represent in different ways the 43  Cerulli, “L’Etiopia medievale in alcuni brani di autori arabi,” 281–284. 44  Kropp, Der siegreiche Feldzug des Königs ʿĀmda Ṣeyon, vol. 1 (text), 52, vol. 2 (trans.), 31 and n. 154; Marrassini, Lo scettro e la croce, 104–105; Ewald Wagner, “Salih,” in EAe 4 (2010), 493. 45   Al-­Maqrīzī informs us that he collected the data for his short text from people informed by Muslims of the country (ʿārifīna bi-­aḫbārihim) in 839 AH (1435–6 CE) while he was staying in Mecca. 46  Other personalities of the same kind probably existed but remain unmentioned in the available sources.

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same social and cultural environment. As far as it is possible to understand from the few available sources, Ladaʿ Uṯmān47 (fl. 15th c.) was a local governor of the sultanate of ʿAdal who, independently from the ruling dynasty, followed his own aggressive policy against the Christian state. His son Aḥmad, after an initial incertitude, eventually joined the forces of Aḥmad b. Ibrāhīm and bravely fought the jihad with him: in this case it is clearly noticeable that his religious/political orientation was tightly connected with his family affiliation. A somewhat similar picture, where family and politics entwined, can be traced for Imam Maḥfūẓ b. Muḥammad (d. 1517).48 He was the governor of Zaylaʿ during the rule of Sultan Muḥammad b. Azhar al-­Dīn of ʿAdal. Like Ladaʿ Uṯmān, he managed to free himself from the control of the governing dynasty and conducted a long fight against the Christian kingdom without the consent and many times even against the will of the sultan, until he was killed by nəguś Ləbnä Dəngəl. His daughter Bati Dəl Wänbära49 married Imam Aḥmad and followed him during his military campaign against the Christians. After the Muslim leader was killed, she became the wife of Emir Nūr b. al-­wazīr Muǧāhid50 who continued to battle the Christian kingdom, defeating and killing nəguś Gälawdewos in 1559. Garād Abūn (or Aboññ) b. Adaš (d. probably 1525) is a relatively less-­known personage mentioned in the first pages of the Futūḥ al-­Ḥabaša, a text which is almost exclusively devoted to the jihad of Aḥmad b. Ibrāhīm but has in its introductory part a description of the way the vast movement led by the imam came into being. There51 Abūn is presented as a kind of forerunner and mentor of imam Aḥmad b. Ibrāhīm. The garād managed to rule by deposing the sultan of the Walasmaʿ dynasty and implemented all the tenets of the Islamic law: .

47  On him see the general article by Ewald Wagner, “Ladaʿ ʿUṯmān,” in EAe 3 (2007), 471. He is mentioned in the chronicle of King Bäʾədä Maryam as “governor of ʿAdal” (mäkwännənä Adäl): Jules Perruchon, Les chroniques de Zarʾa Yâʿeqôb et de Ba‌ʾeda Mâryâm, rois d’Éthiopie de 1434 à 1478 (texte éthiopien et traduction) (Paris, 1893), 150. 48  An introductory article on this personage is Ewald Wagner, “Maḥfūẓ b. Muḥammad,”, in EAe 3 (2007), 659. 49  No specific research has been carried out on this intriguing woman. See however the introductory article by Sevir Chernetsov, “Bati Dəl Wämbära,” in EAe 1 (2003), 505. 50  Emir Nūr b. al-­wazīr Muǧāhid is perhaps the most famous historical personality in Harar. He was the son of one of the bravest officers of the army of Imam Aḥmad. He took the head of the Muslim army and starting from Harar fought the Christian state and later the Oromo. He is credited the building of the wall of the city of Harar which stands until nowadays. For an introductory article on Nūr see Franz-­Christoph Muth, “Nūr b. Muǧāhid,” in EAe 3 (2007), 1209–1210. 51  See in the edition and French translation of Basset (cit. at n. 15 above) vol. 1 (text), 6, 7, 14, 16, vol. 2 (trans.), 12–15; in the English translation of Stenhouse (also cit. at n. 15), 9, 19, 22.

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stability and prosperity were granted and the people lived prosperously. Imam Aḥmad himself was among the zealous supporters of Abūn who respected him very much as he noticed his “bravery and ability” (“ra‌ʾā min suǧā‘atih wa-­barāʿatih”). The righteous (but illegitimate) ruler was eventually overthrown and killed – as a šahīd or “martyr,” according to the Futūḥ – by the legitimate (but unjust) sultan Muḥammad b. Āzar52 who installed an impious and corrupt government. Against this un-­Islamic sultan, Imam Aḥmad successfully guided a revolt that was the military and political preamble to the great anti-­Christian jihad.53 Sources like the Futūḥ, whose author clearly sides with the cause of the anti-­institutional groups, do not provide any clue as to the reasons behind the fracture and the tensions that shook and dramatically divided the Islamic communities in the fifteenth century. What can be called “the militant faction” seems to have reproached the ruling political elites for having compromised with the rival Christian state and for having refused to enforce the main principles of Islamic law. Apparently the elites’ accommodating policy damaged some sections of the society which cannot be identified with certainty (possibly a part of the mercantile class, some military leaders, and local chiefs). This dissatisfaction fostered the emergence of an oppositional movement which is difficult to describe in its initial form. Unfortunately, the way in which the text speaks about the events is colored by the author’s allegiances and aims, and thus discloses only partially the reality of facts behind the ideological curtain.54 The theologically oriented language does not allow a full comprehension of the situation and of the internal causes behind the conflicts. Social dissatisfaction, economic problems, rivalry for control of the trade routes could have been factors in the tensions within

52  Actually Muḥammad b. Aẓhar al-­Dīn: on the intricate history of the later representatives of the Walasmaʿ dynasty and their conflicts with the oppositional movements see Ewald Wagner, “The Genealogy of the later Walashma’ Sultans of Adal and Harar,” Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft 141 (1991): 376–386, in particular on garād Abūn and emir Muḥammad b. Aẓhar al-­Dīn at 377–381. 53  The connection between internal and external jihad in the movement of Imam Aḥmad is well described by David Vô Vân, “À propos du Ǧihâd dans le Futuh al-­Habasha. De la lecture d’Alfred Morabia à la relecture d’Arab-­Faqih,” Annales d’Éthiopie 17 (2001): 127–139, at 130–132. Many jihadistic movements in different regions of the Islamic world followed (and alas follow) the same political and military tactic. 54  For a couple of acute analyses of the text of the Futūḥ al-­Ḥabaša beyond its practical usability as a mere chronicle of facts see Franz-­Christoph Muth, “Allahs Netze: ʿArabfaqīhs Futūḥ al-­Ḥabaša als Quelle für Netzwerkanalysen,” Annales d’Éthiopie 17 (2001): 113–125, and Vô Vân, “À propos du Ǧihâd.”

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the Muslim communities and between them and the Christian state. It is however still unclear how and where the leaders of the opposition were educated and whether their cultural background could account, at least to a certain extent, for their rebellion. It can also be noted that while it is clear that foreign learned men and volunteers, especially from Yemen, played a role in the jihad of Imam Aḥmad at its climax, it remains difficult to assess whether they did so from the beginning. It is however easily conceivable that the institutions which in previous centuries had guaranteed the preservation, transmission, and further development of Islamic knowledge and culture in the country underwent a growing crisis that exploded during the jihad of Imam Aḥmad. Many passages of the Futūḥ al-­Ḥabaša hint at an irremediable fall of all the former establishment structures and the emergence of a new power elite forged by and in the harshness of the conflict. Imam Aḥmad’s jihad provoked an evident change in Muslim cultural and educational traditions. The upheavals that the jihad caused radically modified the relationships between the traditional learned class and the illiterate people, and fostered the emergence of a new intellectual elite that had been legitimized by its direct participation in the war: preachers, itinerant clerics, experts of law, Islamic justice administrators and mystical masters were embedded in the army and were instrumental in galvanizing the spirits of the fighters, enhancing the consciousness of their actions and ensuring that Islamic rules and norms were respected and implemented. It is easily conceivable that their presence favored the creation of networks of followers and devotees that remained active after the end of the war and fostered a new “wave” of Islamization, especially towards the Oromo and in the Awsa region. The emergence of Emir Nūr in Harar paved the way for the creation of a new equilibrium. Nicknamed ṣaḥib al-­fatḥ al-­ṯānī, the “second conqueror” (after Imam Aḥmad), Nūr managed to partially avenge Aḥmad’s death and to curb the pride of the victorious Christians. He also contained the expansion of the Oromo and, thanks to the wall he had built, definitively established the city of Harar as a main urban entity among the Islamic communities. The meritorious activities of Emir Nūr fueled the veneration of his memory, which flourished and still flourishes in Harar, especially at his shrine. The fame of the pious and courageous ruler has obscured the names of most of the older pantheon of holy men of the city; even Imam Aḥmad was cast back into an almost irrelevant position in the collective memory of the Harari people. The movements of the Oromo and their complicated interaction with Islamic culture starting from the end of the sixteenth century definitively closed the medieval era of the Muslims of Ethiopia and opened the early modern age.

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Medieval Heritage and Islamic Intelligentsia: the Challenge of the Future

In the previous paragraphs I have tried to provide a sketchy (and personal) description of some of the main features of the Ethiopian medieval Islamic cultural traditions and their evolution to the middle of the sixteenth century. The picture that emerges from the sources cannot be fully precise and has to remain vague in its contours. Nevertheless, it seems quite clear that since the very beginning and over the course of many centuries, Ethiopian Islamic culture was characterized by the co-­presence of different actors and its manifestations were also variegated and multifaceted. A tendency towards more uniform and standardized ways of cultural production and circulation started much later than the period under discussion here. It is clearly detectable during the nineteenth century when the spread of “revivalistic” trends, an easier connection between Ethiopian Muslims and the Islamic centers of learning and formation in Egypt, Yemen, the Sudan, and Saudi Arabia, and at the same time the influence exerted by the unifying movement of the Ethiopian Christian state caused a change in the form and content of a great part of Islamic culture in the country. More organized and better structured educational centers in Wällo, in the regions around Harar and Jiren/ Jimma, and in Gurageland, as well as networks of law schools, mystical brotherhoods and learned families strengthened their control on the production and transmission of knowledge among the Muslim communities. The tendency was reinforced during the twentieth century and culminated in the period after 1991 when the socialist regime collapsed. For the scope of this paper it is interesting to notice that the more recent developments in Ethiopian Islamic culture have also directly affected the reconstruction and representations of the past. Well-­educated Islamic intelligentsia with a modern, more or less Westernized educational background (a class that is becoming nowadays more and more deeply rooted in the country) have begun to write and publish books on the Islamic history of Ethiopia, while articles and pamphlets with historical content are very common on the Ethiopian Islamic book market. Here is not the place to analyze this production, but it is worth mentioning that the Islamic past and its origins have become a hotly debated topic not only between Ethiopian Muslims and their Christian compatriots but also within the Muslim communities themselves. As in many other instances, also for Muslim Ethiopians history has become a daily political issue and an unavoidable component of their cultural national debate. Efforts to build up a common identity quite naturally entail the

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reassessment (and sometimes the radical rewriting) of the past. The phenomenon is obviously not something specifically Ethiopian but is (and will be) in that country extremely important. It will certainly have an impact on the future shaping of the nation, even if is hard to predict in which direction the influence will be stronger.

chapter 7

The Medieval Ethiopian Orthodox Church and Its Liturgy Emmanuel Fritsch and Habtemichael Kidane Liturgy refers to the organized and public worship of the Church, indeed it is the Church at prayer, an act essential to the very existence and relevance of each and all Christians. Repeated according to different rhythms, even daily, it is “the church” as it is experienced by its members and perceived by others insofar as its development in historical societies brought about various social, artistic, architectural, dietary, and other features. Historical reconstruction of the liturgy requires recourse to texts, of course, but also to spaces: archeological research and architectural analysis reveal the layout of ecclesiastical structures that were designed to facilitate the liturgy and that reflect its form. With regard to the medieval Ethiopian church, rooted in and with parallels to other Christian communities (especially of Egypt and the whole Christian East), the field of comparative liturgical studies is also essential for understanding these texts and structures. If these various sources shed light on the liturgy, it may be said conversely that study of the liturgy provides a key to the history of the Church, and indeed of the society in which it is found. Some essential features of the Ethiopian church are related to the circumstances of its origins, and must be briefly mentioned to understand its medieval incarnation. The origins of Christianity in what is now Ethiopia and Eritrea date to the mid-­fourth century, when Frumentius of Tyre, known in Ethiopia and Eritrea as Abba Sälama, succeeded in converting the Aksumite king ʿEzana and was subsequently named by Athanasius, patriarch of Alexandria, as the kingdom’s first bishop. Based on this precedent, the successors of Frumentius/ Sälama were always appointed by the patriarch of Alexandria. In virtue of a pseudo-­canon (the 42nd) ascribed to the council of Nicaea,1 there were 1  See the nomocanon compiled in Arabic around 1240 by Al-­Ṣafī abū l-­Faḍāʾil ibn al ʿAssāl: William A. Hanna, trans., Magmou Al-­Safawy Ibn Al-­Assal (St. Louis, 1996), chap. 4, 6. This has been kept in the later Ethiopian version of the Fǝtḥä nägäśt: see Paulos Tzadua, trans., The Fetha nagast. The Law of the Kings (Addis Ababa, 1968), Ch. 4, 18, § 42 and n. 9: “As for the Ethiopians, a patriarch shall not be appointed from among their learned men, nor can they appoint one by their own will. Their metropolitan is subject to the holder of the see of Alexandria, who is entitled to appoint over them a chief who hails from his region and

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2020 | doi:10.1163/9789004419582_008

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never a sufficient number to allow them to form their own synod, and thus to elect Ethiopian bishops from within and take their independence from Alexandria. That may have been in the hope that Ethiopia, in remaining attached to the Mother Church of Alexandria, would exercise some pressure on the Egyptian Muslim authorities in case of need; the decision might also have been made under pressure from Muslim Egyptian authorities, whose assent the Ethiopians had to obtain, facilitated with gifts, every time they sent an embassy to request a new bishop.2 In any case, the results were several. First, the bishop who was ordained for Ethiopia was virtually always an Egyptian, called ṗaṗṗas, like the archbishops of Alexandria or Rome and many others at the time.3 However, because of the limitations imposed on him – his dignity ranked eighth in the hierarchical order of the universal church,4 and he could not appoint other bishops – his title is usually rendered as “metropolitan,” muṭran in Arabic. If it happened, as in the fifteenth century, that two or more ṗaṗṗasat were sent, each retained the same title and served in their separate territories. The simple mention of an eṗṗis qoṗṗos, “bishop,” would refer either to the episcopal character received by any bishop of any rank at the episcopal ordination, or else to an auxiliary bishop: this was considered contrary to church regulations,5 but M.-L. Derat and A. Bausi now agree on practical and philological grounds that chorbishops, i.e. “country bishops,” were ministering. Second, the responsibility of the metropolitan (as we shall henceforth call him) was to ensure the proper observance of the faith by his charges according to Egyptian norms, which were not always identical to current practices is under his jurisdiction. And when the said metropolitan is appointed, with the title given to the chief, he is not permitted to consecrate other metropolitans as the other patriarchs do. He shall only be honored with the name of patriarch, without enjoying the power of a patriarch. And if it becomes necessary to hold a council in Roman territory and if the metropolitan of Ethiopia takes part, he shall be seated eighth, next to the titular of Seleucia, which is one of the cities within the boundaries in which Babylon, Iraq and the kingdom of Sabur are found. [The metropolitan of Ethiopia comes in rank after that of Seleucia] because the latter is permitted to consecrate bishops for his own country, but neither is permitted to be appointed by the will of the bishops [under his jurisdiction].” 2  Joseph Cuoq, L’Islam en Éthiopie des origines au XVIe siècle (Paris, 1981), 94 n. 1 with references. 3  Ṗaṗṗas is the Hellenized contraction of Coptic article pi and substantive apa, “the father.” 4  See note 1 above. 5  This is the case of King Lalibala’s brother-­in-­law: see Marie-­Laure Derat, L’énigme d’une dynastie sainte et usurpatrice dans le royaume chrétien d’Éthiopie du XIe au XIIIe siècle (Turnhout, 2018), 181, and her essay “Before the Solomonids” in this volume. In the contemporary era, the eṗṗis qoṗṗos may on occasion not be an ordained bishop but a monk given special responsibility towards evangelization by the monarch: see Stéphane Ancel, “Épiscopat et encadrement des pratiques religieuses en Éthiopie chrétienne contemporaine” (Ph.D diss., INALCO: Paris, 2006), 24–35.

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in Ethiopia, especially as norms changed over time. Notably in the Zagwe period, obtaining the metropolitan identified the prince who did it as the reigning monarch because of the acknowledgement that that supposed on the part of Egypt.6 Below the metropolitan were several levels of Ethiopian clergy. Deacons were young and allowed to marry after their ordination. In this way, they could be ordained to the priesthood later on at any suitable time. Deacons could also opt for celibacy, take monastic vows and be eventually ordained as (celibate) priests. It was the same in Egypt, as documented by Buṭros al-­Ǧamil in the thirteenth century, until the ecclesiastical authorities endorsed the Byzantinizing nomocanon compiled by Al-­Ṣafī abū l-­Faḍāʾil ibn al ʿAssāl.7 Introduced in Ethiopia as the Fǝtḥä nägäśt, this book teaches the same thing, but is far from being entirely received in Ethiopia. It is unclear when the däbtära emerged, who were all ordained deacons or presbyters who qualify as leaders of the execution of the solemn parts of the Divine office. Regarding the relationship of Ethiopia and its Mother Church with the rest of Christendom, the Council of Chalcedon (451) and its outcome are particularly important. The council upheld the view that Jesus Christ’s divinity and humanity are two natures united in his unique person. This appeared to the Alexandrians as a return to the Nestorianism which had been condemned at the Council of Ephesus (431) presided over by Cyril of Alexandria, to whom is ascribed the famous formula: “One incarnate nature of the Word of God” (or “One nature of the incarnate Word of God”).8 Matters were heavily aggravated by the recent deposition and exile – imposed for disciplinary, not doctrinal, reasons – of Patriarch Dioscorus, Cyril’s successor from 444, and by the demotion by Chalcedon of the see of Alexandria from the second position after the Old Rome to the third, to the profit of Constantinople. A schism occurred between the partisans of the council (today’s Latin and Eastern Orthodox Churches) and the Churches organized by Jacob Baradaï (ca. 500–578), today known as the Coptic and Syriac Churches. The latter were eventually joined by the Armenians. The Ethiopian/Eritrean Orthodox church calls itself today Täwaḥǝdo (“united”) in reference to this issue. It is used to express the church’s Christological stance – that Christ’s divinity and humanity are united in his

6  Derat, L’énigme, 144–145. 7  Our thanks go to Wadiʿ Awad Abullif of Cairo’s Franciscan Centre for Oriental Christian Studies, who shared this piece of information. 8  “Nature” then refers to Jesus Christ’s unique form of existence.

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one “nature,” where they retain their full authenticity away from any notion of “mingling or addition, division or alteration” – and not to describe the church.9 1

Aksumite Foundations (Fourth to Seventh Century)

Egyptian influence on the development of the Ethiopian church was therefore marked from the beginning, and remained so during the Middle Ages. The Bible and other Christian texts were first translated into Gǝʿǝz from Greek, then the language of Christian worship in Egypt. The Gärima Gospels, dated to the fifth-­sixth century and the earliest complete copy of the Four Gospels now extant, are an example of this early translation process. By collating these and other Gǝʿǝz texts originating in the Aksumite period with Egyptian Christian documentation as well as archeological and architectural evidence of the era’s Christian structures, the basic outlines of Christian practice in this period can be delineated, as a necessary prelude to the medieval church. Of the first importance in determining the liturgy of the early church in Ethiopia-­Eritrea is a codex recently discovered, edited, and analyzed by Alessandro Bausi, who named it the “Aksumite Collection.” Based on Greek originals produced in late antique or early Byzantine Egypt, the texts in this collection were translated into Gǝʿǝz in Aksumite times. In addition to a baptismal ritual, already known from other sources, the codex includes, among other texts, a collection of forty liturgical texts ranging from single prayers to more complex cycles related to particular liturgical events. Remarkably, a significant proportion of these prayers, notably the Intercessions and the “Prayer of the Offering” (now known as the “Anaphora of the Apostles”) are still in use today. The Egyptian origin of the texts in this collection, as well as the presence in the codex of the Rule of Pachomius (the fourth-­century Egyptian saint credited with establishing coenobitic monasticism), point to the activity in ancient Aksum of monastic missionaries, at least some of whom were Egyptian, and in general to the effort of the Alexandrian See to establish its daughter church on a firm basis. That the Ethiopian church was indeed established in a firm basis in late antiquity is confirmed by archeological evidence. More than a dozen ancient sites in present-­day Eritrea and northern Ethiopia can be dated to the Aksumite era,

9  These qualifications which the Copts, followed by the Ethiopians, added to their confession of faith in the twelfth century look like those of the Council of Chalcedon for the latter as well as the Coptic one derives from the doctrine of St Cyril of Alexandria.

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including at Adulis, Yäḥä, Mäṭära, Qoḥayto,10 Toḵondaʿ,11Agula, and, in Aksum itself, the city’s twin basilicas erected above the tombs of the kings Kaleb and Gäbrä Mäsqäl as well as the first gäbäz (“cathedral”), destroyed in the sixteenth century, and Arba‌ʾtu Ensǝsa. Though little remains of their elevations, plans drawn from their ruins indicate that these buildings were all basilicas, as was common throughout the eastern Mediterranean, but built with materials and methods that were wholly local. They were oriented eastward in order to face the rising sun, an evocation of Jesus Christ coming in glory as the “sun of justice” (cf. Mt. 24:27; Lk. 1:78–79; Malachi 3:20). In the eastern area was the platform of the presbyterium. The altar table stood on its western side, surrounded by a chancel open towards the assembly in its middle, where steps bridged the floor difference, while the presbyters’ seats occupied the easternmost area. A triumphal arch distinguished both these outer and inner parts. At the same level as the triumphal arch, side rooms known as pastophoria opening westward toward the nave flanked the inner area of the presbyterium on the north and south. Foundations for stairs, located in the northwest or southwest corner of the church, indicate the past existence of a gallery and clerestory in the churches’ upper levels. Again, in keeping with early Christian architectural norms, the western end of the nave consisted in a narthex, often divided in three parts, including a porch.12 This architectural arrangement, when collated with the early liturgical texts at our disposal (including those of Egypt, particularly the anaphora of St Mark), allows us tentatively to reconstruct the order of the Eucharistic celebration. The celebrant, together with other ordained clergy, stood eastwards on the platform of the presbyterium or bema, while lay members of the assembly stood in the nave. One of the side rooms (pastophoria) was likely used to prepare the Eucharistic offerings apart from and before the Mass, as in Egypt. Since the pastophoria did not have direct access to the sanctuary, the bread and wine must have been brought to the altar via a procession that passed in front of the congregation. Indeed, a baptismal catechesis preserved in Gǝʿǝz but probably describing a fifth-­century Alexandrian context suggests 10  Steffen Wenig, “Qoḥayto,” in EAe 4 (2010), 294–296. 11  Steffen Wenig, “Toḵondaʿ,” in EAe 4 (2010), 269–270. 12  Caterina Giostra and Serena Massa, “Dal Mediterraneo al Mar Rosso: la cristianizzazione della città-­porto di Adulis e la diffusione di modelli e manufatti bizantini,” Hortus Artium Medievalium 22 (2016): 92–109; David W. Phillipson, The Ancient Churches of Ethiopia (New Haven, 2009); Mario di Salvo, The Basilicas of Ethiopia: An Architectural History (London, 2017). This agrees with a number of ancient Egyptian churches as reported by Peter Grossmann, Christiche Architektur in Ägypten (Leiden, 2002), especially plates 1, 3, 8, 13–14, 16–18, 20, 22, 34, 58–59, 89–99, 103.

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something akin to the yet unborn Byzantine Rite Great Entrance, whereby the celebrants ceremoniously transfer the prepared bread and wine from the place of their preparation to the altar according to a variety of itineraries.13 Thus the first stage of the Eucharistic celebration was the Prothesis – the preparation of the bread and wine, privately, in one of the side rooms. There followed, in public, the Initial Rites (prayer of Thanksgiving, prayer of Absolution of the Son, incensing, intercessions); the Liturgy of the Word with several biblical readings; the pre-­anaphora, including the solemn transfer of the bread and wine to the altar; the anaphora or Eucharistic prayer itself, as documented in the Aksumite Collection; the Communion rites (breaking of the bread, perhaps the recitation of Our Father, distribution of Communion, thanksgiving, ablutions in the pastophorium where the gifts had been prepared), and finally the blessing and dismissal. Conversely, the liturgical celebration demanded the use of certain texts and structures. The inclusion of biblical readings in the liturgy means that the celebrants must have had a calendar indicating the sequence of Sundays and particular feasts to be celebrated and the corresponding texts to be read. Those texts might be read from a Bible – the Gärima Gospels, for example, bear marks pointing to Gospel lessons to be read on specific occasions. Whether a separate purpose-­made index of readings (a typikon) existed is not known. In terms of architectural structures, churches must of necessity have had ovens nearby to bake the Eucharistic breads, which in the Ethiopian church were leavened. Texts and architectural evidence also combine to inform us about the rite of baptism as practiced in antiquity.14 The materials in the Aksumite Collection indicate that an aspirant enrolled for baptism at the end of the catechumenate (seen in the prayer for “those who have given their names” to be baptized). The ritual itself included blessings of the water and the oil; the candidate’s renunciation of Satan and adhesion to Jesus Christ; the priest’s laying on of hands upon him/her; a first anointing; the immersion; the priest’s prayer for the anointing with the balsam (holy Chrism) and the anointing of the candidate; a blessing done again by the laying on of hands; and the newly baptized person’s reception of the Eucharist immediately afterward. Several Aksumite-­era churches bear the remains of a baptismal tank in the southern pastophorium or nearby. 13  Emmanuel Fritsch, “The Order of the Mystery: an ancient catechesis preserved in BnF Ethiopic ms d’Abbadie 66–66bis (fifteenth century) with a liturgical commentary,” in Studies in Oriental Liturgy. Proceedings of the Fifth International Congress of the Society of Oriental Liturgy, New York, 10–15 June 2014, ed. Bert Groen et al. (Louvain, 2019), 195–263. 14   Marcel Metzger, Wolfram Drews, and Heinzgerd Brakmann, “Catechumenat,” in Reallexikon für Antike und Christentum, vol. 20 (Stuttgart, 2003), cols. 497–574.

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The candidate entered the tank via several steps on its west side, was baptized there, and emerged from it via parallel steps on its east side. The Mass would have been celebrated, possibly on Saturdays, surely on Sundays and feast days. While baptisms would have usually been performed on the last day of Lent, namely the Friday before Palm Sunday, the development of the baptism of infants brought about the multiplication of their celebration.15 Meanwhile, the Divine Office was the backbone of Christian practice, the “expansion and formalizing of the tradition of daily Christian prayer that goes back to the beginnings of the Church” as monastic communities or groups of the faithful came together to perform prayers they had previously done individually.16 The Aksumite Collection includes the core prayers of a well-­structured Liturgy of the Hours, including morning, evening, and night prayers, as well as a series of prayers now known as “supplications.” It seems that even the Mǝhǝlla or Mǝhǝlǝla (a match to the Roman tradition of the Rogations) of the later common of the Office (the Mǝʿǝraf )17 can be traced back to the Aksumite Collection for a few words. Like much of its contents, this points to a “cathedral liturgy” (less austere, with hymns, prayers, and some ceremonial aspect) developed in Alexandria and northern Egypt and was probably in use, served by monks or secular, married clergy. Nevertheless the existence of the Rule of Saint Pachomius tells that Pachomian monks, in their monasteries, would have abided by the prayer style their founder established and which did not change under the leadership of Saint Shenoute (d. ca. 466) in southern Egypt. This involved a reader reading or reciting from memory a passage from any portion of the Holy Scriptures, to which everyone listened, then all rising up and reciting the Our Father, arms outstretched, before falling to the ground and praying in silence until they were signaled to stand up again to continue the silent prayer; a new signal made them sit down to start a new cycle, while between each sequence of the cycle, they made the sign of the cross.18 But even Pachomian monks may have had to adapt their life and prayer 15  Section 9 of the Aksumite Collection contains another set of elements previously identified. This ritual sequence matches what developed in the course of the fourth century: see Maxwell E. Johnson, The Rites of Christian Initiation. Their Evolution and Interpretation (Collegeville, MN, 2007), esp. 148–157. 16  The apostolate of Frumentius who is reported as having gathered the Christians present in the region in conventicula may refer to just that. 17  Bernard Velat, Études sur le Meʿeraf, Commun de l’Office éthiopien (Paris, 1966), P.O. 33/155– 158 and 34/159–160; Habtemichael Kidane, L’Ufficio Divino della Chiesa Etiopica. Studio storico-­critico con particolare riferimento alle ore cattedrali (Rome, 1998), 286–303. 18  Ugo Zanetti, “Les moines cénobites de Haute Égypte et leur liturgie,” Irénikon 88, 3 (2015): 348–388, at 363–365. Before stating the use of psalms, one ought to document that the Ethiopians did not like the Pachomian monks in the first place. Zanetti refers to Armand

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style to their missionary commitment, perhaps giving birth to an early fusion of monastic and “cathedral” services.19 Finally, we may surmise that the sistrum, a percussion instrument omnipresent in the Ethiopian liturgy, was introduced in antiquity, before it fell out of use in Egypt. 2 The Post-­Aksumite Period or the Early Middle Ages Despite the greater isolation of the Christian community that came with the decline of Aksum caused by the destruction of the port of Adulis20 and the advent of Islam in the seventh century, architectural evidence points to its continued vitality in the Gärʿalta and Wämbärta regions of eastern Tǝgray. There is little doubt that the church of Zaräma Giyorgis, on the plateau of Aṣbi, should be placed somewhere between the eighth and ninth century. The same may be said of the church of Yoḥannǝs Mäṭǝmǝq (St John the Baptist) at Gazen, near Ǝdäga Rob, and of Gundǝfru Śǝllase, in Wämbärta, south of Aṣbi, both on the same plateau. It may also be said of the two churches of Śǝllase at Dǝgum, of Täklä Haymanot at Ḥawzen, and of Bärakit Maryam, all in Gärʿalta. This sequence was followed by the grand church of Abrǝha wä-­Aṣbǝḥa, when the decorative system and taste was markedly stamped with the Fatimid imprint. In contrast with the edifices of the Aksumite period, almost all of these are rock-­hewn churches, that is, excavated rather than built. This remarkable feature explains their continued existence and use down to the present, whereas other churches, certainly numerous, disappeared like most of the Aksumite ones because of the poor quality of their construction. Yoḥannǝs Mäṭǝmǝq at Gazen is by far the largest, thanks to the size of the rock from which it was cut. The others, hewn from modest sandstone hillocks, are relatively small. Generally, the choice of elevated ground betrays the workers’ concern to provide access within the church to the light of the rising sun. An access route could be dug into the hillock on the eastern side, at the level of the planned Veilleux, La liturgie dans le cénobitisme pachômien au quatrième siècle (Rome, 1968), 307ff; in English, see Robert F. Taft, The Liturgy of Hours in East and West (Collegeville, MN, 1993), 63ff. 19  Zanetti, “Les moines cénobites de Haute Égypte,” 366–368. 20   “Just as Pompeii lies beneath meters of volcano ash, so Adulis lies under meters of mud due to a catastrophic tsunami that destroyed the city at the end of the seventh century A.D.,” archeologist Serena Massa reported to the online news site Sputnik Italy on 15 March 2018 (https://sputniknews.com/science/201803151062558821 -­ancient-­city-­archeologists)

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floor. The access route was then enlarged to create the “wall” of the eastern end of the church and the wall was pierced by a window, as can be seen at Gundǝfru, in the two churches of Dǝgum, at Ḥawzen, and at Bärakit.21 It has not been documented so far whether the east window existed in the Aksumite churches but it remains a feature of churches in Eritrea and Ethiopia today. Certain features suggest discontinuity with Aksumite-­era church construction insofar as the altar was displaced from the fore of the presbyterium, closer to the assembly, to the easternmost section of it, beyond the triumphal arch (now the sanctuary proper). The space between the triumphal arch and the chancel, where the altar used to stand, remained a part of the presbyterium likely to have been left to the cantor deacons. This evolution matches the appearance in seventh-­century Egypt of the choir (χορός / xoρoc / khurus), generally where the altar, now placed in the east at the foot of the seats destined for bishop and presbyters, once stood. Characteristically, while the khurus was fully open eastwards towards the altar beyond the triumphal arch, it was now separated from the assembly to the west by a high screen, pierced with central doors, in place of the much lower barrier which hitherto marked the presbyterium. Ethiopian churches were now equipped with wooden chancels measuring an average of 110 or 120 cm in height, at least in the cases still extant such as Zaräma, Däbrä Sälam Mika‌ʾel, and Mika‌ʾel Amba (compatible posts are found in Gazen and Abrǝha wa-­Aṣbǝḥa, and postholes elsewhere).22 Furthermore, the position of the altar tables in the two churches of Dǝgum prevents circulation between the altar table and the east wall. This suggests that the deacon stood slightly behind and to the right of the presbyter, looking east, and not yet facing the priest and the congregation, a change that would 21  Emmanuel Fritsch, “Liturgie et architecture ecclésiastique éthiopiennes,” Journal of Eastern Christian Studies 63, 1–2 (2012): 91–125, at 100–101; see also Claude Lepage “Les monuments rupestres de Degum en Éthiopie,” Cahiers archéologiques 22 (1972): 167– 200, at 176–177, 180–182; idem, “L’église rupestre de Berakit,” Annales d’Éthiopie 9 (1972): 147–188, at 160–161; Claude Lepage and Jacques Mercier, Les églises historiques du Tigray: art éthiopien/The Ancient Churches of Tigrai: Ethiopian Art (Paris, 2005), 47–49; Jacques Mercier and Claude Lepage, Lalibela, Wonder of Ethiopia. The Monolithic Churches and their Treasures (London, 2012), 70–71, 171. Lepage sees in this window the fenestella of a martyrium. 22  In the case of Zaräma, which relates to the seventh to ninth centuries on stylistic grounds (Claude Lepage, “L’Église de Zarema (Éthiopie) découverte en mai 1973 et son apport à l’histoire de l’architecture éthiopienne,” CRAI, Jul–Sep [= issue 3] [1973]: 416–454), the type of chancel and the placement of the altar point to the post-­Aksumite era, as stated by Mercier and Lepage, Lalibela, 86. The double door system of the pastophoria opening both towards their respective aisles and the sanctuary, as well as the counter-­apse, characterize Egyptian buildings from the 7th c. (e.g. the White and Red monasteries and, for the counter-­apse, Grossmann, Christiche Architektur, 40ff, 54, 384, 499–501).

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occur later in the Coptic rite, followed by the Ethiopian churches. The altar tables were relatively small. The front part of the ancient altar table at Zaräma Giyorgis is still extant, while holes in the floor of the sanctuary in three other churches – the two in Dǝgum (the “northern” and “southern” churches) and that of Gundǝfru – indicate an average size of 60 cm by 45 cm. Another evolution took place in the architectural relationship of the pastophoria to the sanctuary, and suggests a concurrent change in the liturgy. In the two post-­Aksumite churches of Gäzen Yoḥannǝs Mäṭǝmǝq and Gundǝfru Śǝllase, the pastophoria still opened westward, toward the nave, as in the Aksumite churches. However, at Gäzen the pastophorium utilized to prepare the bread and wine (i.e. the prothesis room), which here was located on the north side, connects to the sanctuary through an adjacent arched passage. This suggests that, as in Nubia,23 the offerings were transferred directly to the altar through this discreet passage. At Gundǝfru, where the prothesis room was the southern pastophorium, a window, much later transformed into a doorway, similarly opens onto the sanctuary, doubtless again to allow the offerings to be passed directly to the altar. Finally, the pastophoria of the other churches open directly onto the sanctuary. Taken together, these examples indicate that while the bread and wine were still transferred to the altar from a prothesis room (north or south), it was no longer visible to the congregation: the “Great Entrance” of the Aksumite era was abandoned. This change in the process of transferring the gifts was likely a result of an evolution in the Egyptian world. Around the eighth century, according to Ramez Mikhail, the Egyptian rite for the transfer of the gifts was no longer performed after the reading of the Gospel but rather at the beginning of the Mass, probably as a result of Syrian influence. This simplified the rite of the Mass in that the preparation of the gifts was performed at the altar, as part of the Initial Rites. The sequence of the Mass was therefore as follows, with the changes in italics: simple preparation of the gifts in the designated side room; Initial Rites (Prothesis, now including a doublet of the washing of hands, the transfer of the gifts to the altar, eventually a doublet of the response to the Communion call “Holy Things for the Holy,” and a prayer of support by the assistant presbyter, Prayer of Thanksgiving, incensing, and intercessions); the Liturgy of the Word including lessons drawn from the codices of St Paul’s Letters, of the Apostles’, the Acts of the Apostles, and, after Psalm verses, of the Four Gospels;24 the pre-­ anaphora now without the transfer of the gifts and prayer of support by the assistant presbyter; the anaphora; Communion rites; and blessing and dismissal. 23  William Y. Adams, The Churches of Nobadia, 2 vols. (Oxford, 2009), 1: 73–74, 75, 102–107. 24  Fritsch, “The Order of the Mystery,” 204–213.

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Another testament to Egyptian influence is the excavation of the church floor to replicate a stylobate, the platform upon which the church’s interior columns rest. At Yoḥannǝs Mäṭǝmǝq in Gazen, this feature divides the basilica into an inner nave and a full return aisle surrounding it, the western area playing the role of narthex. In Gundǝfru, too, the pillars of the truncated nave are supported by a stylobate. Evidence for baptismal tanks for this period is limited. At Yoḥannǝs Mäṭǝmǝq in Gazen, such a tank occupied most of the south pastophorium, as in Aksumite times. Out of proportion, leaving no path by which people could safely function in the room, and very worn, it is difficult to tell if it was part of the original structure and if it was actually used to baptize. At the southern church in Dǝgum, by contrast, a rock-­hewn baptismal tank (in perfect condition) is located outside the church to its northeast, where it was once enclosed in a small structure, no longer extant. 3

The Zagwe Era

As noted also in Marie-­Laure Derat’s essay in this volume, the date at which the Zagwe dynasty took power in Christian Ethiopia is difficult to determine. We can say, however, that after a crisis in the tenth century, marked by attacks on Christian churches and the takeover of the realm by the non-­Christian queen “Gudit,” a Christian “renaissance” flowered, heralded by the arrival of the metropolitan Danǝ’el (sometime in the patriarchate of Philotheos, 979–1003) after a half-­century without a metropolitan or ordinations in the kingdom. By and large, Fatimid Egypt was favorable to Christians, except for the very trying time of al-­Ḥākim (985–1021). Under his rule it was difficult for the metropolitan to obtain support from home but may instead have favored a larger migration of skilled Christians to accompany and assist the metropolitan in Ethiopia. The rock-­hewn church of Abrǝha wä-­Aṣbǝḥa in Ṣǝraʿ is a highly significant accomplishment which may have been realized from the very end of the tenth to the twelfth century.25 Cut with precision following a cross-­in-­square plan, the volume is filled with light coming from the transept ends, revealing 25  One of the few things known about it is that it had another name not so long ago (Mika‌ʾel?) and that it has no altar dedicated to the kings Abrǝha and Aṣbǝḥa. The possibility of a tomb (King Ṭanṭawǝdǝm’s?) in the south pastophorium of the church cannot be excluded. See Christian Robin, “L’arrivée du christianisme en Éthiopie,” in Saints fondateurs du christianisme éthiopien. Frumentius, Garimā, Takla-­Hāymānot et Ēwostātēwos, with introduction, translation, and notes by Gérard Colin, and the collaboration of Christian Robin and Marie-­Laure Derat on the introduction (Paris, 2017), xxii–lvi, at

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the engravings which cover all the ceilings, whether flat or barrel-­vaulted. A niche in the apse points to the east, above the synthronos or absidial seat of bishop and presbyters. Past the triumphal arch in the westwards direction, the choir or qǝddǝst (“Holy,” a very old name in so far as it applies to the area reserved to ordained persons and where the altar used to stand), surrounded by a chancel (a number of old posts are still standing there), occupies the centre of the bay, under a fine cupola. On either side of the sanctuary, the pastophoria offer the surprising display of a cupola each, as well as walls ornamented by a “tapestry” of fine carvings, especially in the south. Seeing the period in terms of liturgical development in Egypt, one registers that these pastophoria may well have had an initial funerary purpose explaining their cupolas, with flagstone-­ like marks on the floor in the south suggesting a tomb, before they became additional sanctuaries in following decades, in the wake of the new style ushered in by Metropolitan Mika‌ʾel (see below). Pastoral activity included a general effort on the part of the Alexandrian patriarch and the metropolitans whom he selected to bring Ethiopian practice into conformity with that of Egypt. In so doing they encountered some practices that did not meet with their approval. The metropolitan Sawiros, who served in the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries, remarked upon his own efforts to restore proper Christian behavior to the faithful under his care, noting in particular that patriarch Cyril II of Alexandria (1077–1092) wrote to the Ethiopian king forbidding Ethiopians from observing the “customs of the Old Testament.”26 Since circumcision was (and is still) practiced in Egypt as in Ethiopia at this time, Sawiros may instead have been referring to Ethiopian Christian food prohibitions (which had fallen out of practice in Egypt) or polygamy. The revitalization of the Church continued in the twelfth century. It can be credited in large part to the metropolitan Mika‌ʾel, who was sent to Ethiopia during the patriarchate of Macarius II (1102–1128) and lived slightly past 1150. In Mika‌ʾel’s last will (now surviving only in a later copy, but one believed to accurately reflect the twelfth-­century original),27 the pontiff states among xxxiii; Susanne Hummel, “The Disputed Life of the Saintly Ethiopian Kings ʾAbrǝhā and ʾAṣbǝḥa,” Scrinium 12 (2016): 35–72; Mercier and Lepage, Lalibela, 69–70. 26  H PEC, vol. 2, part 3, 211–212 (text), 329–330 (trans.). 27  This Four-­Gospel Book is locally registered as C3-­I V-415. See Derat, L’énigme d’une dynastie sainte, 40–44, and eadem, “The Zāgwe Dynasty and King Yemreḥanna Krestos,” Annales d’Éthiopie 25 (2010): 157–196, at 160. A translation of the note is found in Sergew Hable Sellasie, Ancient and Medieval Ethiopian History to 1270 (Addis Ababa, 1972), 203 n. 117, as well as Emmanuel Fritsch, “New Reflections of the Image of Late Antique and Medieval Ethiopian Liturgy,” in Liturgy’s Imagined Past/s. Methodologies and Materials in the

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his pastoral achievements the blessing of many altar tablets carved for new churches, thus dedicating as many churches. Similarly, deacons and priests coming from all parts of the country were ordained in scores, and it was the same for the initiation into monastic life of monks and nuns. The anointing of kings the metropolitan mentions credibly indicates political events yet to be elucidated and raises the question of the roles of king and bishop over ecclesiastical matters.28 Actually, Mika‌ʾel refused to ordain several Ethiopian bishops at an unnamed king’s request. His successor Mika‌ʾel II, appointed in 1200 and deposed in 1210, fled back to Cairo to report that he had been forced to ordain as bishop King Lalibala’s brother-­in-­law (called “Ḫīrūn” in the Arabic source).29 Metropolitan Mika‌ʾel’s last will also proclaims his consecration of many new churches, including Mika‌ʾel Amba in 1149/1150, and others, such as Nazret Maryam, for which no precise date of consecration is provided, in which is ­evident the introduction or development of the major innovation of multiple sanctuaries, visible in the transformation of church architecture. Of the churches credited to Mika‌ʾel, Nazret Maryam is the most remarkable. Hitherto assumed to have been an Aksumite ruin rebuilt in an “Islamic” style by King ʿAmdä Ṣǝyon,30 recent research has demonstrated that it is in fact a twelfth-­ century cathedral, with five naves terminating in five sanctuaries, a cupola atop each sanctuary, and other features all characteristic of Egyptian Coptic architecture in the Fatimid period (909–1171) in a place traditionally known as ʿAddi Abun, “the residence (or see) of the metropolitan.”31 The cupolas are its most striking feature. Called in the Coptic Church an iskini (an Arabic transliteration of the Greek σκηνή, “tent”), the cupola referred to the biblical tent of the meeting in the wilderness as described in Exod. 33:7 and recalled in the Writing of Liturgical History Today, ed. Teresa Berger and Bryan Spinks (Collegeville, MN, 2016), 39–92, at 57–58, and Marie-­Laure Derat et al., “Māryām Nāzrēt (Ethiopia): The 12th-­ Century Transformation of an Aksumite Site in Connection with an Egyptian Christian Community,” in Cult Places in Ancient Ethiopia and Recent Archaeological Research. Proceedings of the International Conference on Archaeology in Ancient Ethiopia (14–16 April 2016, Paris), ed. Iwona Gajda and Anne Benoist, forthcoming. 28  It is at the time of an Anbäsa Wədəm that Mika‌ʾel was appointed to Ethiopia between 1102 and 1128. He may have anointed new kings starting from sometime within that window and until around 1150. On Anbäsa Wədəm see the various mentions in the Encyclopaedia Aethiopica, listed in the index (EAe 5 [2014], 695), as well as Stuart Munro-­Hay, “Dǝgnaǧan,” in EAe 2 (2005), 125. 29  H PEC, vol. 3, part 2, 186–87. His name in Gǝʿǝz is not certain, but Sergew Hable Sellasie, Ancient and Medieval Ethiopian History to 1270 (Addis Ababa, 1972), 269, gives [Gebron] as an alternative. 30  Lastly by Paul B. Henze, “Nazret,” in EAe 3 (2007), 1158–1159. 31  Emmanuel Fritsch, “New Reflections,” 56–65; Derat et al., “Māryām Nāzrēt.”

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New Testament (e.g. Heb. 8:2, Rev. 15:5) as a symbol of God’s presence among his people. A cupola was therefore required above an altar.32 The central sanctuary at Nazret Maryam terminates in an apse covered by a semi-­dome, with a niche in the wall indicating the direction of the rising sun. The flanking sanctuaries also bear niches in their flat eastern walls. The central sanctuary is entered through a large triumphal arch, while the west-­facing doorways of the flanking sanctuaries are narrow and low. At the same time, doorways connect the flanking sanctuaries to each other and to the central sanctuary, following the pattern set in the post-­Aksumite period that allowed direct communication between the central sanctuary and the flanking pastophoria. West of the main sanctuary door of Nazret Maryam, piers supporting the arch opening the choir bay onto the next western bays, have been identified. This structure of assembly hall (naos), choir, and eastern sanctuary area is reflected in the space organization of the Ethiopian churches in which, similarly, the assembly spreads eastwards until the chancel-­guarded qəddəst (choir) and the sanctuary. Three other churches, which characteristically follow the same cross-­in-­ square plan with a transept, follow features of Nazret Maryam, albeit with variations. Of those, Mika‌ʾel Amba, mentioned in the last will above, offers no doubt as to its identical space distribution. The other two are the church recently known as Abrǝha wä-­Aṣbǝḥa in Ṣǝraʿ and that of Wǝqro Qirqos, which bear so many commonalities with Mika‌ʾel Amba that it has been proposed that “all three churches were excavated in the early twelfth century as a result of the building activity of Mika‌ʾel I.”33 In fact, while a triple chancel matches the three communicating sanctuaries open to the nave at Mika‌ʾel Amba, Abrǝha wä-­Aṣbǝḥa and Wǝqro Qirqos follow the older disposition: their side rooms are closed by doors and are not guarded by a chancel. Further, while Mika‌ʾel Amba does not display any cupolas beside its main sanctuary dome, the presence of a tomb or tombs, surely hewn for high-­ranking persons, explains the cupolas that top these flanking spaces at Abrǝha wä-­Aṣbǝḥa, as well as the profuse decoration of their walls. The flanking spaces at Wǝqro Qirqos, though lacking cupolas, were also elaborately decorated, in the southern space, on their ceilings and on the walls, suggesting the same use. Remarkably, the careful treatment given to a portion of ceiling, especially when other portions are not so treated, can be tantamount to a cupola; such treatment was generalized 32  According to Peter Grossmann (Christiche Architektur, 83), cupolas had been known for centuries in Egypt but since late antiquity they had been so seldom used and able architects were so rare that the skill had to be re-­learnt, which happened at the time of Badr al-­Ǧamali (1073–1094) who built Cairo’s walls and gates with the assistance of architects from Edessa. 33  Ewa Balicka-­Witakowska, “Ṣǝraʿ Abrǝha wä-­Aṣbǝḥa,” in EAe 4 (2010), 628–630, at 628.

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to the ceilings of entire churches in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. In all three churches, as in Nazret Maryam, the central sanctuary was entered through a large triumphal arch and ended in an apse covered by a semi-­dome; the niches found in the eastern wall of each sanctuary at Nazret Maryam, however, are either partially or completely absent.34 All had doorways connecting the sanctuaries directly to each other. At Abrǝha wä-­Aṣbǝḥa and Wǝqro Qirqos, these doorways have always been equipped with doors, as also in the west-­facing doorways that open into the nave. Answering the need for safe storage in the north – where practical niches are found – like the pastophoria of old, their likely primary funerary purpose explains cupolas and ornamentations while differences in size and ornamentation may be related to the different personalities buried there. These churches differ from each other in some respects, Abrǝha wä-­Aṣbǝḥa and Wǝqro Qirqos developing cupolas or their like while Mika‌ʾel Amba displays multiple altars in corresponding sanctuaries. All of them demonstrate a new architectural configuration and new liturgical trends. This is the result of a chain of developments first found in churches of the Antiochene patriarchate around the sixth century. Culminating with the consecration of several altars in Egypt by the Alexandrian patriarch Abraham the Syrian (975–978), it is attested in several churches consecrated in Cairo in the late eleventh century.35 The new practice became the norm in Egypt, where churches are normally equipped with three altars, topped by a cupola each. The new setup was particularly useful during a period when it was difficult to build new churches in Egypt, for it allowed saints other than a church’s titular saint to be venerated at altars of their own. This practice spread in Egypt, matching the process of standardization triggered by Patriarch Gabriel II (1131–1145), during whose pontificate Mika‌ʾel was active in Ethiopia, although it originally regarded the Eucharistic prayers of southern Egypt. The origin of the innovation in Ethiopia, and its associated architectural features (such as multiple cupolas), are therefore to be found in recent changes in the Coptic church. The famous monolithic churches of Lalibäla can be dated to the end of the twelfth and early thirteenth century. They testify both to the perpetuation of 34  At Abrǝha wä-­Aṣbǝḥa and Qirqos, the central sanctuary bears a niche in the eastern wall but the flanking spaces do not; at Mika‌ʾel Amba, no sanctuary bears a niche. 35  Abū l-­Makārim, the actual author, recorded in the very early years of the thirteenth century the consecration by Patriarch Abraham the Syrian of Cairo’s restored church of Saint Mercurius: “Then the church was consecrated, and the first liturgy was celebrated in it, on the middle altar,” in B. T. A. Evetts, ed. and trans., The Churches and Monasteries of Egypt and Neighbouring Countries attributed to Abu Salih, the Armenian (Oxford, 1895), 119 (fol. 36a–36b).

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twelfth-­century practices and to certain innovations. As we have seen, the bread and wine were no longer prepared in the pastophoria but were now prepared at the altar during the Initial Rites of the Mass, which in turn allowed for the replacement of the pastophoria with additional sanctuaries. Occasionally, the pastophoria could also be suppressed.36 Larger churches, with multiple sanctuaries, similarly lacked side rooms, those side rooms being sanctuaries as in the case of Yǝmrǝḥannä Krǝstos, a “cave church” constructed before 1250, and of the rock-­hewn churches Betä Libanos (in Lalibäla), Bilbala Qirqos, and Gännätä Maryam. Access to eastern light also continued to be a concern. For the rock-­hewn churches of Lalibäla, this sometimes demanded special efforts. To let in light to the chapel of Gäbrǝʾel, the rock-­hewn engaged pillars in the inner courtyard of Betä Gäbrǝʾel-­Rufa‌‌ʾel had to be partly removed; the eastern end of Betä Mäsqäl also demanded alterations of the first disposition. In a few churches where access to eastern light was impossible, such as Betä Golgota and Betä Śǝllase, niches were carved to indicate the east. Such niches are an Egyptian feature, and Egyptian influence is also attested by the Coptic vestments worn by the figure of Christ in the relief of the east wall of Śǝllase. A new development attested in these churches is an alteration of the features separating the sanctuary spaces from the spaces occupied by the congregation. At Betä Däbrä Sina, Betä Golgota, and Betä Śǝllase, it was decided that sanctuaries traditionally open to the west and communicating with each other could do without solid partitions at all. The three rock altar tables at Betä Śǝllase, for instance, stand on a common eastern platform, and wooden altar tables were doubtless arranged in the same manner in churches like Betä Däbrä Sina whose single eastern platforms are bare. The openness of the sanctuaries required that some other space be utilized for safeguarding the church’s goods; at Betä Śǝllase this function was filled by the crypt, which was lockable, and by the small room before it known as the “Jesus cell.” The tendency is to do away with the space between sanctuary and faithful as the sanctuary abruptly ends with one or more steps and no other sign telling the laity to keep their distance. By contrast and in keeping with the model of Betä Mädḫäne ʿAläm in Lalibäla, only the central sanctuary of Gännätä Maryam has a doorway opening westwards toward the nave; the flanking sanctuaries instead only have large arched windows facing west, allowing for sound communication. The same pattern is seen at Ǝmäkina cave church or at Waša Mika‌ʾel, later in the church of Wǝqro

36  In Lalibäla, this is the case at the churches of Betä Gäbrǝ’el, Betä Mäsqäl, Betä Dänagǝl, Betä Däbrä Sina, Betä Golgota, Betä Śǝllase, and Betä Giyorgis.

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Maryam in Näbälät, Tǝgray.37 This trend of architecture maintains the central door and the wall in which that door appears. Both trends (leaving alone the presbyterium platform outside the triumphal arch which is found only in Betä Mädḫäne ʿAläm, Betä Maryam, Betä Amanuʾel and Betä Libanos) will develop side by side until the advent of the round churches in the early sixteenth century. A second innovation of this period is the inclusion of platforms in the nave: either one on the northern side, or one each on the northern and southern sides. These recall the reading platforms of Nubia and the pulpits like that of the southern church of Bawit in Middle Egypt. They may have been adapted and used for presidency, or for the cantors as an alternative to the lost distinct choir of the enclosed presbyterium, or for the reading of the Gospel. Lasting in the area during the fourteenth century, one good example is found in Bilbala Giyorgis, while most such platforms, probably marks of honor, are atrophied.38 A third feature that can be attested only from the thirteenth century is the carving of wooden altar tables that did not need the addition of an altar tablet. This can be deduced from the appearance of and inscriptions on altars dedicated, at least in part, by King Lalibala. Shortly thereafter, inscriptions indicate that the altar table and altar tablet could not be dissociated.39 It can also be observed that altar tables of different sizes are sometimes found in numbers above the possibilities structurally offered by the place to offer one sanctuary to each table. For example, while three altar tables would normally fill the centre and the two sides of the easternmost part of a given church, the church of Betä Mädḫäne ʿAläm possesses at least three very large and five rather small altar 37   Built-­in-­cave Wale Iyäsus and hewn Zoz Amba Giyorgis feature a tripartite sanctuary with doorways never meant to be fitted with doors, pointing to a thirteenth-­century intermediary position between the traditional and hall structures. 38  See the discussions initiated by Claude Lepage, “Premières recherches sur les installations liturgiques des anciennes églises d’Éthiopie (X°–XV° siècles),” Documents pour servir à l’histoire des civilisations éthiopiennes: Travaux de la Recherche Coopérative sur Programme RCP 230, Fasc. 3 (Sept. 1972): 77–114 + 19 figures; updated in Mercier and Lepage, Lalibela, 152–155; Fritsch, “Liturgie et architecture,” 105–106. 39  Emmanuel Fritsch, “The Altar in the Ethiopian Church: History, Forms and Meanings,” in Inquiries into Eastern Christian Worship. Selected Papers of the Second International Congress of the Society of Oriental Liturgy, Rome, 17–21 September 2008, ed. Bert Groen, Steven Hawkes-­Teeples and Stefanos Alexopoulos (Louvain, 2012), 443–510, at 456–467; see also Claire Bosc-­Tiessé, “Catalogue des autels et meubles d’autel en bois (tābot et manbara tābot) des églises de Lālibalā. Jalons pour une histoire des objets et des motifs,” Annales d’Éthiopie 25 (2010): 55–101; eadem, “Catalogue des autels et meubles d’autel en bois (tābot et manbara tābot) de Ṭerāsfarē Esṭifānos. Jalons pour une histoire des objets et des motifs (II),” Annales d’Éthiopie 26 (2011): 249–267.

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tables.40 This means that the urge to venerate more saints had become important. Concretely, the practical solution was probably to store on the sides the supernumerary altar tables outside the commemoration days of their saints. Illustrating another aspect of these altars, the dedication made by King Lalibala of one of them found at Betä Däbrä Sina is a long carved text specifying: “I have engraved and I made [the] tabot and I named her name ‘Sabbath of the Christians’ [= Sunday] …” and adding: “I engraved this tabot and I named her ‘Sabbath of the Christians’ …”41 This is an important witness to the special respect given by the king to the Second Sabbath, that of the Christians, rather than to the First Sabbath (Saturday), in accordance with current Coptic Church order. But at the turn of the century Abba Ewosṭatewos (b. ca. 1273– d. 1352 in Armenian Cilicia) rose as an influential monastic reformer and advocate of the observance of Saturday on a par with Sunday, defying both king and church leaders to the point of refusing their ordinations.42 We saw that the concern for a structured communal prayer anchored in the daily cycle was already present in Aksumite times. The lack of ancient documents does not allow us to situate the beginnings of the present Divine Office ascribed to St Yared. While its present form is generally believed to go more or less back to the late fourteenth or early fifteenth century,43 there are as-­yet uncatalogued manuscripts which may go farther back.44 4

The Early Solomonic Age (Fourteenth–­Fifteenth Centuries)

In terms of church construction, the change from the Zagwe to the Solomonic dynasty in 1270 did not usher in any special innovations. The “open style” continued in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries around Lalibäla (at Ašätän, 40   Bosc-­Tiessé, “Catalogue des autels de Lālibalā,” 60–69. 41  Ibid., 76–77; Gigar Tesfaye, “Inscriptions sur bois de trois églises de Lalibala,” Journal of Ethiopian Studies 17 (1984): 107–126, at 115–116. In the second instance, the term is Sänbätiyan, a contraction of Sänbätä krǝstiyan, “Sabbath of the Christians,” i.e. Sunday, rather than a plural (Sänabǝt, Sänbätat). 42  Gianfranco Fiaccadori, “Ewosṭatewos,” in EAe 2 (2005), 469–472; Marie-­Laure Derat and Gérard Colin in Saints fondateurs du christianisme éthiopien, lxxviii–lxxxviii, 75–215. 43  Ignazio Guidi, Storia della letteratura etiopica (Rome, 1932), 66; Carlo Conti Rossini, “Aethiopica II,” RSO 10 (1925): 481–520, at 515ff. For a study of the musical setting of the liturgy, which is also ascribed to St Yared, see Kay Kaufman Shelemay and Peter Jeffery, Ethiopian Christian Liturgical Chant: An Anthology, 3 vols. (Madison, WI, 1993–1997). 44  According to Getatchew Haile, MS EMML 7078, presented as a 13th-­century manuscript of the Dǝggwa, may hail to the Zagwe era or even earlier (personal communication, 29 June 2018).

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Qänqanit, Sarzana Mika‌ʾel, Bilbala Giyorgis) and farther afield in Tǝgray (at Däbrä Ṣǝyon in Gärʿalta, from the late fourteenth century; Abba Yoḥanni and Wǝqen Gäbrǝʾel in Tǝmben; ʿAddi Qešo), and beyond (Wǝqro Mädḫäne ʿAläm near Däbrä Tabor). The central altar now often reproduced the large, baldachin-­covered altars of Coptic churches, as is seen at Wǝqen Gäbrǝʾel and, unfinished, at Abba Yoḥanni, both in Tǝmben, at Wǝqro Maryam near Näbälät, at May Kado Giyorgis near Ḥawzen, or at Wǝqro Mädḥäne ʿAläm, ascribed to King Säyfä Arʿad (1344–71), near Däbra Tabor, where all altars include a canopy and stand atop one step on the two sides, three in the base of the central one, the latter being also covered by the shallow cupola which characterizes the period. The altar with a baldachin, which was probably also constructed in wood at that time although no actual individual such item has been identified so far, has remained the dominant pattern of the Ethiopian altar.45The compartmented ceilings are adorned in a variety of manners amounting to as many cupolas, the “Aksumite frieze” may be irregular, cupolas are shallow and often showing the wooden structure they imitate. Typically, in rock-­churches altars are also rock-­hewn, the central one covered with a baldachin approaching the Coptic examples of the time. Worth special mention is the built grand hall-­basilica of Betä Lǝḥem Maryam in the Gayǝnt region, constructed ca. 1400 by King Dawit II’s daughter Dǝl Mogäsa (or Dǝl Mängǝśa).46 It stands out on account of its majestic size, the perfection of its cupolas and barrel-­vaulted transept aisles as well as its columns, its accomplished woodwork, and its use of glass in the windows. Also notable is its painted altar, where paten and chalice lay on the engraved wings of two cherubs, visible on the sides of the chest. This equates the altar table with the Kapporeth (“mercy seat”) of the Holy of holies of the Jerusalem temple in an evocation of the Ark of the Covenant, referring to Hebrews 9:4 and echoing in Ethiopia developments associated with the Kǝbrä nägäśt.47 Dawit II’s reign is also known for the diplomatic contacts – with Egypt, typically, but more unusually with Latin Europe – that resulted in gifts of relics 45  Emmanuel Fritsch and Michael Gervers, “Pastophoria and Altars : Interaction in Ethiopian Liturgy and Church Architecture,” Aethiopica 10 (2007): 7–50, at 45–50; Fritsch, “Altars,” 500–510. For the Egyptian historical development of the altar, whose present form dates to Fatimid times, see Peter Grossmann, “Altar” and “Ciborium” respectively, in The Coptic Encyclopedia, 8 vols., ed. Aziz S. Atiya (New York, 1991), at 1: 106–107, 202. Adeline Jeudy, “Icônes et ciboria: relation entre les ateliers coptes de peinture d’icônes et l’iconographie du mobilier liturgique en bois,” Eastern Christian Art 1 (2008): 67–88, at 67 and n. 1. 46  Fritsch, “Altars,”499–500. The colonnade and the circular roof have been added at the time of King Ǝgwalä Ṣǝyon (1801–1818) (note in preparation). 47  Fritsch, “Altars,” 482–483, fig. 12.

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venerably housed in Ethiopia. Relics brought back from Venice by the embassy of 140248 were kept in Tädbabä Maryam. A relic of the True Cross (gəmmadä mäsqäl) obtained from the Coptic patriarch Matthew I (1378–1408)49 was reportedly housed by Dawit’s son Zärʾa Yaʿəqob on the cross-­shaped mountain of Amba Gǝšän, together with other important objects, but this is not documented.50 Important for Ethiopian piety, it is kept in the church of God the Father. It is possible that already in Dawit II’s time, as was certainly true later in the century, such contacts occasioned the arrival in Ethiopia of foreign artists and artisans, with lasting influence on the arts associated with liturgical celebration.51 To return to the matter of churches’ form, all witnesses agree that fifteenth-­ century churches were rectangular (and not, as we shall see in the sixteenth century, circular). In his Book of the mystery (Mäṣḥafä mǝśṭir) of ca. 1424, Abba Giyorgis of Sägla pointed to the contrast between the poor appearance of an ordinary church and the glorious reality which inhabits it by saying: “the fourfold structure of its sides [are] in the image of the four living creatures.”52 While pointing to the symbolic nature of the building, he was describing it as four-­sided, not circular. Significantly, Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob’s chronicle states that he “also taught that one was not to set up and place one unique tabot but rather two tabotat or [tabotat] which would be many, and that these tabotat were not supposed to be on their own, but one was to add the tabot of Mary among them.”53 Accordingly, the norm is to have several tabotat in a church, although there are still cases when one only is found. Besides, the mention of a specific altar dedicated to Mary suggests that the rapport between a given tabot / altar-­ tablet on the one hand and, on the other hand, the mänbärä tabot / piece of furniture which supports the tablet, is stable. If this is true of Mary’s tabot, 48  Osvaldo Raineri, “I doni della Serenissima al re Davide I d’Etiopia (ms Raineri 43 della Vaticana),” Orientalia Christiana Periodica 65 (1999): 363–448. 49  H PEC vol. 3, part 3, 144ff. 50  The mountain is nonetheless first identified with the pilgrimage to Mary’s church which lies close to God the Father’s. Pillars and capitals from an earlier basilican church can be observed nearby. 51  See Claire Bosc-­Tiessé, “Christian Visual Culture in Medieval Ethiopia,” in this volume. 52  Yaqob Beyene, ed., Il Libro del Mistero di Giyorgis di Sagla. Parte seconda, 2 vols., CSCO 532–533, SAe 97–98 (Louvain, 1993), at vol. 1 (text), 55.3–16, vol. 2 (trans.), 33.33–34.9. The Italian translation reads, “la quadratura dei suoi lati è fatta a immagine dei quattro animali….” Cited in Robert Beylot, “Les règles de l’Église (d’après le ms éthiopien d’Abbadie 156) relues d’après de nouveaux documents, avec un texte inédit sur les anges et les ordres du clergé,” Pount 5 (2011): 129–37, at 130–1. 53  Jules Perruchon, ed. and trans., Les chroniques de Zarʾa Yâʿeqôb et de Ba‌ʾeda Mâryâm rois d’Éthiopie de 1434 à 1478 (Paris, 1893), 81.

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there is no reason why it would not be true for the other tabotat, which are expected to be placed always on the same mänbärä tabot, at the side of the other altars. Finally, the several tabotat seem to be expected to be placed together in the same location, not in different sanctuaries, which supposes a wide type of sanctuary, like in the “hall churches.”54 The Life of Märḥa Krǝstos, abbot of Däbrä Libanos (d. 1497), written during the lifetime of Märḥa Krǝstos’s successor Ṗeṭros (died ca. 1524 while Alvares was in Ethiopia), presents details that point to the church of Däbrä Libanos having been rectangular at the time, which, again, is all the more normal since the Life itself refers this period to Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob’s reign (1434–1468).55 This negative literary witness is congruent with the little we may know or guess regarding the churches of the kings Naʿod (1494–1508) and Lǝbnä Dǝngǝl (1508–1540) as well as the ruins of all the known churches of Amhara.56 Curtains were usual, but how were they used?57 A few decades later, Alvares observed that “blessed bread is distributed” on Saturdays, Sundays and feast days, indicating that the eulogy (awǝlogiya), that is, the breads presented during the Prothesis but not selected by the celebrant

54  E.g. the churches of Betä Däbrä Sina and Betä Golgota at Lalibäla, of Däbrä Ṣǝyon, Abba Yoḥanni etc. 55  See Stanislas [Stanisław] Kur, ed. and trans., Actes de Märḥä Krǝstos, 2 vols., CSCO 330–331, SAe 62–63 (Louvain, 1972), at 2: xvi. Again, the four angles of the church are mentioned at vol 1 (text), 67, vol. 2 (trans.), 62. 56  See Lanfranco Ricci, “Resti di antico edificio in Gimbi (Scioa),” Annales d’Éthiopie 10 (1976): 177–210; Stanisław Chojnacki, “Day Giyorgis,” Journal of Ethiopian Studies 7, 2 (1969): 43–52; idem, “New Discoveries in Ethiopian Archaeology: Dabr Takla Haymanot in Dawnt and Eneso Gabreʾel in Lasta,” First International Littmann Conference, Munich, 2002, ed. Walter Raunig and Stephen Wenig (Wiesbaden, 2005), 44–59; Paul B. Henze, “The Monastery of Mertule Maryam in Gojjam. A Major Medieval Ethiopian Architectural Monument,” in Äthiopien gestern une heute, ed. P. Scholz (Warsaw, 1999), 520–550; Marie-­ Laure Derat, Le domaine des rois éthiopiens (1270–1527): espace, pouvoir, et monachisme (Paris, 2003); Deresse Ayenachew, “Le kätäma: la cour et le camp royal en Éthiopie (XIV e–­ XVIe siècle). Espace et pouvoir” (Ph. D diss., Université de Paris Panthéon-­Sorbonne, 2009); Emmanuel Fritsch and Marie-­Laure Derat, “Une lecture architecturale et liturgique des ruines de Gabriel,” in Gabriel, une église médiévale d’Éthiopie. Interprétations historiques et archéologiques de sites chrétiens autour de Mashala Māryām (Manz, Éthiopie), XV e–­X VIIe siècles, ed. Marie-­Laure Derat and Anne-­Marie Jouquand (Paris and Addis Ababa, 2012), 195–204. 57  The word “curtain” is not written, only the notion of partitioning, even outside the church, is found. See, e.g., Conti Rossini-­Ricci, Libro della Luce, III: 41 (text); IV: 24 (tr.) (I thank Marie-­Laure Derat for this reference); Kur, ed., Actes de Märha Krǝstos, at vol. 1 (text), 83–86, vol. 2 (trans), 76–79. On the Coptic practice, see Sheila McNally, “Transformations of Ecclesiastical Space: Churches in the Area of Akhmim,” Bulletin of the American Society of Papyrologists 35 (1998): 79–95; Emmanuel Fritsch, “Mägaraǧa,” in EAe 3 (2007), 629–631.

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for the Eucharist, were openly given to all at that time, in contrast with later and indeed present practice.58 In terms of liturgical texts, a wave of new translations from Arabic made its influence felt on the liturgy by the later thirteenth century. The metropolitan Sälama the Translator (1350–d. 1388)59 may have translated the Coptic Horologium in Gəʿəz,60 perhaps as a part of his plan to translate the main books of the Egyptian Mother Church. Or was he making available an alternative to the growing Dǝggwa of Yared, which might have been thought of as taking a degenerated worldly aspect? He had a lasting influence on liturgy on account of the many texts he translated from Arabic. These include hagiographical works, homilies, and texts of the Holy Week service,61 as well as the revision, again from Arabic, of the Old Testament. Also translated in the late fourteenth century – this time by one Sǝmʿon, from the Egyptian monastery of St Anthony – was the Synaxary (Sǝnkǝssar), which provides short accounts of the saints to be read on the saints’ commemorative days as part of the Divine Office. Based on the Coptic Synaxary completed in the thirteenth century, this first version survives in few copies, probably due in part to the need to update its contents with the inclusion of Ethiopian saints. Thus a second, “revised” version, including entries for Ethiopian saints, was completed between 1559 and 1581.62 Among the liturgical books, the Gǝṣṣawe occupies a special position. It is a “directory” or typikon indicating the readings and anaphoras for each Mass of the year and, on the feasts, also those for the morning service. It includes the mobile year, which gravitates around the feast of the Resurrection (Tǝnśa‌ʾe or Pasch, Fasika) of Jesus Christ, and the days or fixed commemorations.63 Such service books must have existed long before but the earliest available Gǝʿǝz 58  Beckingham-Huntingford, Prester John, I: 83. 59  Paolo Marrassini, “Sälama,” in EAe 4 (2010), 488–489. 60  A Book of Hours appears in a book inventory dated to 1292 but there is no clue as to what its content was: see Sergew Hable Sellasie, “The Monastic Library of Däbrä Hayq,” in Orbis Aethiopicus, Studia in honorem Stanislaus Chojnacki natali septuagesimo quinto dicata, septuagesimo septimo oblata, 2 vols., ed. Piotr O. Scholz, Richard Pankhurst, and Witold Witakowski (Albstadt, 1992), 1: 243–258, at 247. 61  Ugo Zanetti, “Is the Ethiopian Holy Week service translated from Sahidic? Towards a study of the Gebra Ḥemâmât,” in Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference of Ethiopian Studies, Addis Ababa, 1–6 April 1991, 2 vols., ed. Bahru Zewde, Richard Pankhurst, and Tadesse Beyene (Addis Ababa, 1994), 1: 765–783; Ugo Zanetti, “Homélies copto-­arabes pour la Semaine Sainte,” Augustinianum 23 (1983): 517–522. 62  Gérard Colin and Alessandro Bausi, “Sǝnkǝssar,” in EAe 4 (2010), 621–623. 63  Emmanuel Fritsch and Ugo Zanetti, “Gɘṣṣawe: Mäṣḥäfä Gɘṣṣawe,” in EAe 2 (2005), 773–775.

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manuscripts date from the early fifteenth century only. Sometimes in the form of an index, the Gǝṣṣawe is at other times an actual lectionary, with the readings given in full. In both cases it includes the movable feasts as well as the fixed days of commemorations. Contents could vary to some degree. For instance, one of the oldest known manuscripts, MS IES 695/EMML 157164 is notable for containing rubrics for Holy Week that deal with the altar, the days when the Eucharist is celebrated during Holy Week and at which the Old Testament is read, the proper time to baptize, the singing of the Zǝmmare Eucharistic hymn, and other uncommon features. Conversely, shorter directories (Asləṭi) came to be composed, that would only contain a single liturgical season or kind of feast (for instance, Marian feasts), or encompass the main occasions of the whole year. The portion of the Gǝṣṣawe dealing with daily commemorations and feasts, i.e. the Sanctoral, is independent in origin from the Synaxary and consists of mere lists of saints. The other portion concerns the weekly Masses and is structured by the pair Saturday-­Sunday. This pairing of the “First Sabbath” and the “Sabbath of the Christians” is an ancient Coptic feature, and may be interpreted here either as an element of continuity from an earlier time, or else as a reform, in the line of Ewosṭatewos’s movement, whose central concern was the observance of the First Sabbath alongside Sunday. Until 1450, however, when King Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob settled the issue, the question of the First Sabbath remained highly controversial in Ethiopia, as is reflected not only in royal and monastic writings of the time but in liturgical compositions as well. For instance, the anaphora ascribed to St Athanasius of Alexandria (Atǝnatewos), certainly an original Gǝʿǝz composition and dating perhaps to the early fifteenth century, can be considered an expression of the anti-­First Sabbath position, in keeping with the then-­current position of the Coptic church, as its ascription to Athanasius suggests. Emulating King Lalibala’s thirteenth-­century altar dedication, this Eucharistic prayer, also

64  Emmanuel Fritsch, “Exploring an Ethiopian Lectionary: Salient Features of 15th-­century manuscript IES 695 (EMML 1571),” in Liturgical Reception of the Bible: Dimensions and Perspectives for Interdisciplinary Research, ed. Harald Buchinger and Clemens Leonhard (Göttingen, in press). Comparable is BL Or. 543 (= Wright 129), 15th century, of unknown origin, which has an index of readings dealing with the whole year (see William Wright, Catalogue of the Ethiopic Manuscripts in the British Museum acquired since 1847 [London, 1877], 85–86) or HMML GG 143 (between 1682 and 1706), very close to IES 695, a lectionary for the days of the year (Sanctoral) found in the library of the monastery of Gundä Gunde.

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called “Anaphora of the Sänbätä Krəstiyan,”65 highlights the greatness of the Lord’s day.66 If the fourteenth century is noted especially for the translations accomplished by and under the auspices of Sälama, the fifteenth century is notable for the wealth of original compositions that enrich the liturgy. In this regard, the most important figure in the early part of the century was Giyorgis of Sägla (or, of Gasǝč̣č̣a: ca. 1365–1425). One of his accomplishments was to revise and enrich the Divine Office existing in his lifetime. This indicates that the material of this office goes back to the thirteenth-­fourteenth century and grew into its present form as a result of centuries of contributions by various authors. The structure of the Divine Office eventually lost its simplicity, yielding way to various biblical and non-­biblical elements.67 To Abba Giyorgis is also attributed the separation of the Ṣomä Dǝggwa from the whole Dǝggwa in order to facilitate the daily and solemn celebration of the Divine Office in Lent. But its increasingly complicated performance caused it to be accessible only to the däbtära – who were highly educated clerics ordained at least to the diaconate, contrary to what is often repeated – obliging the lay people to attend services mostly passively. This type of service inevitably had its opponents in the austere monastic milieu.68 The elaboration of the Divine Office may therefore have been a stimulus to the composition of various types of Books of Hours (Mäṣḥafä Säʿatat). Giyorgis was involved in this too; indeed, he acquired the nickname Bäʿalä Säʿatat, “the Master [composer] of the [Book] of Hours.” He had the merit of presenting a reasonable usage of the psalmody and a liturgy of the Word enriched with readings taken from both the Old and New Testaments69 as well as from the Miracles of Mary (Täʾammerä Maryam). But the demand for a suitable Liturgy of the Hours was such that various competing säʿatat were composed almost

65  Two additional types of mälkəʾat are also dedicated to the Lord’s Day: one praises its “somatic” parts: see the Mälkəʾa Guba’e, “Collection of Hymns” (Addis Ababa, 1996 EC/2003– 2004 CE), 634–643; the second one celebrates its qualities and greatness: MS GG-144, ff. 83a–86b; EAP526/1/12, ff. 90a–95a (bodily parts are not mentioned). 66  Habtemichael Kidane, “Anaphoras,” in EAe 1 (2003), 251–253; idem, “The Sänbät-Sunday in the Gǝʿǝz Liturgical Texts” (see n. 88), at 323–340. 67  Allowance of musical instruments and sacred dancing could have been a quite early feature related to Egypt. 68  E AP526/1/40 [17th Century], f. 4a; Habtemichael Kidane, L’Ufficio Divino, 263ff; Tedros Abraha, “Quotations from Patristic Writings and References to Early Christian Literature in the Books of St. Yared,” Le Muséon 122, 3–4 (2009): 301–404. 69  Habtemichael Kidane, “Old Testament Lessons in the Säᶜatat (“Hours”) of Giyorgis Säglawi,” Aethiopica 22 (2019), forthcoming.

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at the same time.70 Many abbots first opposed the Hours authored by Abba Giyorgis, either by intimidating those who dared to make use of them or by composing their own Säʿatat.71 The existence of other types of Säʿatat is also witnessed by manuscripts belonging to different periods. The authors of various Säʿatat followed their own ways while also borrowing elements from other Säʿatat. It is unlikely that the Säʿatat of Abba Giyorgis or others were composed to replace the Gəʿəz Coptic Horologium. The latter was copied from the early fifteenth to the eighteenth century72 in many manuscripts belonging to various monastic centers, sometimes enhanced by vines (ḥaräg, pl. aḥrag) or full-­page “icons.”73 Significantly, many are darkened by traces of wear which witness to their frequent use. Some manuscripts order the reading of the Tä’ammerä Maryam, Kidan, and Wǝddase Maryam, confirming the integration and familiarity of this Horologium among the monasteries. Giyorgis also composed several anaphoras, including the “Second anaphora of Mary,” still in use in his monastery although it is not printed in the books officially issued by the church.74 In addition to its role in the liturgy, this text reflects Giyorgis’s championing of certain religious practices. The translation of the Miracles of Mary had occurred under King Dawit II, for whom Giyorgis served as a priest of the tabernacle and tutor to the royal princes, and Giyorgis too promoted Marian devotion. He was also known for his support of the first Sabbath, whose proponents were excommunicated and persecuted up to 1404, and advised Dawit II to be lenient toward one of the pro-­Sabbath leaders, Filǝṗṗos of Däbrä Bizän, who had been imprisoned for his views. Equally important to the history of the medieval liturgy, but in a different register, is the reign of Zärʾa Yaʿəqob (1434–1468). He developed for his Christian kingdom a policy of unifying spiritual teaching and discipline, resulting in liturgical initiatives which touch every aspect of the field and have given its properly Ethiopian character to the Christian inheritance received from Egypt, down to the present. Significantly, Zärʾa Yaʿəqob championed 70  Ugo Zanetti and Emmanuel Fritsch, “Säʿatat: Mäṣḥafä säʿatat,” in EAe 5 (2014), 501–503; Taft, Liturgy of the Hours in East and West, 266 ff. 71  Getatchew Haile, “On the Writings of Abba Giyorgis Saglawi from two unedited miracles of Mary,” Orientalia Christiana Periodica 48 (1982): 65–91, at 70–71. 72  The Gə‘əz Coptic Horologium is documented by important manuscripts: EAP432/1/35 (15th century), EAP286/1/1/362 (15th century), EAP704/1/1 (1495–1505), EAP286/1/1/495 (16th century), EAP254/1/60 (18th century). EAP= Endangered Archives Programme. 73  A term justified by the devotional use made of it. 74  Most anaphoras may be ascribed to Abba Giyorgis: see Getatchew Haile, Ethiopian Studies in Honour of Amha Asfaw (New York, 2017), 9–38.

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several of the positions of Giyorgis of Sägla. As mentioned above, the king finally settled the disputed question of the First Sabbath in 1450, at the Council of Däbrä Məṭmaq, making it an official part of the liturgy and a required observance for all the faithful.75 Second, among the competing Books of Hours circulating in his time, the king vindicated that of Giyorgis, which found such lasting acceptance that it became the only one left in use to this day. Third, the king displayed special devotion to Mary, and in particular to the Miracles translated in his father’s time, organizing the text’s inclusion in the liturgy. The Miracles of Mary were (and are) read in church with the same reverence and the same symbolic actions as those rendered to the Gospel read at Mass. This involved gathering the community before the icons of Mary and the Cross, both held side by side under the canopy of a ceremonial umbrella (dǝbab) and incensed by a presbyter. Another presbyter, bareheaded, read out loud the Introduction, then the selected miracle. All listened to it standing up in silence and reverence, bowing down at times indicated by the text, out of respect for Mary, before the book was carried around so as to allow people to kiss it, as for the Gospel.76 Incidentally, this prostration before the icons of Mary and the Cross was condemned by the followers of the monk Ǝsṭifanos (1397/8–1437) as a breach against the first commandment forbidding idolatry,77 although it was probably their refusal to prostrate before the king that most irritated the monarch. The Miracles of Mary constitute a monument of Ethiopian religious literature and a source for the history of the country as well as the expression of a spiritual and liturgical development. The original nucleus of the collection was successively enriched over the years with Ethiopian elements to the point of counting presently 402 miracles.78 Moreover, the king zealously promoted the veneration of Mary not only on the Marian feasts but on the 21st of each month (a practice of Coptic origin), for a total of thirty-­three per year. These matters represented only a fraction of the religious debates of the time. During and beyond Zärʾa Yaʿəqob’s reign theological controversies flourished, with members of the official Church and dissidents challenging one another by composing texts both in self-­defense and as a means to spread their own Trinitarian, Christological, pneumatological or ecclesiological 75  See the essay of Gianfrancesco Lusini in this volume for further discussion of this controversy and its conclusion. 76  Alessandro Bausi, “Täʾammǝrä Maryam,” in EAe 4 (2010), 789–793. 77  Steven Kaplan and Denis Nosnitsin, “Ǝsṭifanos,” in EAe 2 (2005), 390–391; Steven Kaplan, “Stephanites,” in EAe 4 (2010), 746–749. 78  Getatchew Haile, Voices from Däbrä Zämäddo. Acts of Abba Bärtälomewos and Abba Yoḥannes. 45 Miracles of Mary (Wiesbaden, 2013), 115ff.; Gérard Colin, trans., Les Miracles de Marie. Le livre éthiopien des miracles de Marie (Taamra Mâryâm) (Paris, 2004).

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views. It was one of the factors that made the fifteenth century a golden age of Ethiopian literature. Their essays were made into anaphoras or hymns, other prayers, even poetry, because those vectors were more efficient.79 Therefore, the Ethiopian liturgy contains doctrinal teachings on the Trinity, Christology, especially in the anaphoras of John Chrysostom, Cyril of Alexandria, John the Evangelist, Epiphanius or the Marian anaphoras, whose orthodoxy was sometimes “restored” in the process.80 The scholars (liqawənt) ascribed their works to Church Fathers for fear that their works would otherwise be rejected, which facilitated the authoritative transmission of those prayers and reportedly suited their authors’ pursuit of the virtue of humility. Conversely, the homilies, anaphoras and Säʿatat authored by “Zämika‌ʾelites,” for instance, were destroyed by opponents and fell into oblivion; we only know about them through the writings of Zärʾa Yaʿəqob.81 While Zärʾa Yaʿəqob tolerated many such compositions, he was concerned that this proliferation might distract his people from a safe anchorage. He therefore begged them not to abandon the Anaphora of the Apostles (found in the Senodos) and the Anaphora of the Lord (in the Testamentum Domini or Mäṣḥäfä Kidan). These are both Eucharistic prayers, which the king documented in the terms still employed today. The first one is now known to have been edited in the late antique period. In contrast, it was relatively shortly before Zärʾa Yaʿəqob’s own time that the anaphora of our Lord Jesus Christ was also edited for actual liturgical purposes from the Greek fifth-­century 79  Getatchew Haile, “Religious Controversies and the Growth of Ethiopic Literature in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries,” Oriens Christianus 65 (1981): 102–136. 80  A funny example of this shown by Getatchew is the fact that the anaphora of Mary published by the Vatican for Catholic Ethiopians was taken from manuscripts of an older text condition than revised ones, edited for the anaphora of Mary of the Orthodox Church’s missal. 81  Getatchew Haile, “Zämika‌ʾelites,” in EAe 5 (2014), 131–133. The Ethiopian Church honors the Virgin Mary with anaphoras dedicated to her. Her role in the history of salvation is illustrated by the title of Bäzawitä ʿaläm (“Redeemer of the world”) given to her: see Mälkəʾa Maryam # 41:3, in August Dillmann, Chrestomathia Aethiopica (Leipzig, 1866), 146. The main anaphoras are ascribed to Cyriacus of Behnesa (Gwäśǝʿa, “[My heart] overflows [with a good theme]”), witnessed by a large number of manuscripts and the requests of it made by the Gəṣṣawe (“Directory”), and Giyorgis of Sägla (Mäʿaza, “Pleasant perfume [of Sanctity]”). See T. S. Semharai Selim, La Messe de notre Dame dite Agréable Parfum de Sainteté (Rome, 1937); Mario da ʿAbiy Addi [Abba Ayele Teklehaymanot], “La seconda anafora mariana del messale ethiopico,” Marianum 30 (1968): 181–191; Osvaldo Raineri, L’anafora etiopica inedita di Maria (Vatican City, 2000), 337–354. Abba Habtä Maryam (d. 1497) is said to have used it: Osvaldo Raineri, ed. and trans., Atti di Habta Maryam (†1497) e di Iyasu (†1508), santi etiopici (Rome, 1990), 7, 112–113. Nevertheless, the Gǝṣṣawe is silent about it.

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liturgico-­canonical collection of Palestinian origin, the Testamentum Domini,82 whose Gǝʿǝz version “is probably an independent translation upon a Greek Vorlage” going back to the late antiquity.83 The first available manuscripts of the Eucharist go back to the fifteenth century and show that its rite, in particular the Fraction of the Bread, had by then received an important input from that tradition, the Benedictus.84 Despite some markedly Coptic features, the liturgical manuscripts include – with silences – the whole documentation needed for all involved in the service (bishops/presbyters, deacons, assembly), contrasting in this with the Egyptian service books, which are often addressed to either the deacon or presbyter only (Rollenbücher).85 Zärʾa Yaʿəqob also wrote original treatises (or they are ascribed to him) which, though not directly related to the liturgy, delineated the king’s positions and influenced liturgical choices. His concern for the holiness of the Eucharist, already evident in his emphasis on the anaphoras described above, is expressed also in his “Protection of the [Eucharistic] Mystery” (Täʿaqǝbo mǝśṭir), where he asserts the faith of the Church on the basis of the Senodos and, having included a rare discussion on the Holy Chrism (meron), lays out severe practical regulations.86 His “Book of the light” (Mäṣḥafä bǝrhan) – a theological treatise that sets out the king’s views on circumcision, education, and in general his prescriptions for the right ordering of religious life – also makes frequent use of a formula for exorcism; that very formula, the Kǝhdätä

82  See Reinhard Messner and Martin Lang, “Ethiopian Anaphoras. Status and Tasks in Current Research Via an Edition of the Ethiopian Anaphora of the Apostles,” in Jewish and Christian Liturgy and Worship: New Insights into its History and Interaction, ed. Albert Gerhards and Clemens Leonhard (Leiden, 2007), 185–205, 188–189, 202–203; Emmanuel Fritsch, “A Fresh Look at Certain Aspects of the Geʿez Liturgical Edition of the Anaphora of the Testamentum Domini as the Anaphora of Our Lord Jesus Christ,” in Proceedings of the First International Conference on Ethiopian Texts, Asko, 27–30 May 2013, ed. Daniel Assefa and Hiruy Abdu (Addis Ababa, 2016), 21–53. 83  Alessandro Bausi, “Testamentum Domini,” in EAe 4 (2010), 927–928. 84  Heinzgerd Brakmann, “Schwarze Perlen aus Henochs Erbe? Zu ‘Sanctus’ und ‘Benedictus’ der äthiopischen Apostel-­Anaphora,” Oriens Christianus 91 (2007): 56–86. Among the oldest MSS of the Mass are Florence, Bibliotheca Medicea-­Laurenziana, S. Marco 741, and BAV, Vat. et. 22, both 15th century. 85  We are grateful to Heinzgerd Brakmann to have let us have his unpublished work Repertorium der Priester – und Diakonentexte der alexandrinisch-­ägyptischen Messfeier (2013) on the Egyptian manuscript documentation. 86  Carlo Conti Rossini, “Il libro di re Zarʾa-­Yāʿqob sulla custodia del mistero,” RSE 21, 2 (May– Aug. 1943): 148–166, at 1–19 of the internal pagination of the edited text itself.

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Säyṭan (ascribed to scholars in his entourage), has entered the initial sequence of each Church service.87 Another liturgical innovation attributed to Zärʾa Yaʿəqob’s scholarly entourage is the hymnographic genre known as the mälkəʾ (“effigy” or “blason”). It is sung during the Sǝrʿatä maḫlet, the night office or matins ascribed to St Yared. Each stanza exalts a part of a saint’s body, highlighting his/her conception, birth, faith journey, and ending with the separation of the soul and body, the burial etc. Monastic garments (qämis: tunic, qǝnat: girdle, qobǝʿ: headwear) are sometimes included.88 Bodiless beings such as God, the Trinity, and the Holy Spirit, may also receive mälkəʾ, in which case adaptations are made. This genre, rooted in its Coptic origin,89 has shown an enormous development.90 Zärʾa Yaʿəqob’s scholars also enriched the daily proper of the office by nägś hymns (short for Ǝgziʾabḥer nägśä, “The Lord reigns”) intended to highlight a large number of saints. MS EMML 3128 (late fifteenth century) is the oldest document available.91 Finally, regarding the rite of anointing of the sick, nothing is known until Zärʾa Yaʿəqob’s initiative to compose in 1442 the Mäṣḥafä baḥrəy (“Book of the substance,” which contains the Ṣälotä zäyt or “Prayer of the oil”).92 Rather than following the Coptic rite, he interestingly refers to the Senodos, as for the Anaphora of the Apostles, and uses a prayer from the Prayer of the Covenant (Ṣälotä kidan) drawn from the Testamentum Domini, as for the

87  Emmanuel Fritsch, “Turning Everyday to Aksum Ṣeyon Unaware: King Zarʾa Yāʿeqob’s Kehedata Sayṭān identified in the first prayer of the day,” Annales d’Ethiopie 28 (2013): 363–372. 88  Habtemichael Kidane, “The Sänbät-­Sunday in the Gǝʿǝz Liturgical Texts. A Comparative Perspective,” in Studies in Ethiopian Languages, Literature, and History, Festschrift for Getatchew Haile, ed. Adam Carter McCollum (Wiesbaden, 2017), 321–344. 89  Enzo Lucchesi, “Les Sept Marie dans une homélie copte et l’origine du Mälkǝ éthiopien,” Analecta Bollandiana 127 (2009): 9–15. 90  Getatchew Haile, “Gəʿəz Literature,” in EAe 2 (2005), 736–741, at 739; Habtemichael Kidane, “Mälkəʾ,” in EAe 3 (2007), 700–702. 91  A statement by Habtemichael Kidane and Maija Priess in “Ǝgziʾabəḥer nägśä,” in EAe 3 (2007), 248–249, at 248. It is the codex from which Getatchew Haile drew the material he used in The Different Collections of Nägś Hymns in Ethiopic Literature and Their Contributions (Erlangen, 1983), 42a. 92  Perruchon, Chroniques de Zarʾa Yâʿeqôb, 77–78. Marius Chaîne translated Ethiopian MS BnF d’Abbadie 69 in “Le rituel éthiopien. Rituel de l’extrême-­onction,” Bessarione 29, 4 (1913–1914): 415–420; 30, 1 (1914): 12–41, 213–231. See Anaïs Wion, “Onction des malades, funérailles et commémorations : pour une histoire des textes et des pratiques liturgiques en Éthiopie chrétienne,” Afriques [online journal] 3 (2011), put online 17 Jan 2012: http:// journals.openedition.org/afriques/921; Getatchew Haile, “Baḥrǝy: Mäṣḥafä baḥrǝy,” in EAe 1 (2003), 446–447.

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Anaphora of the Lord. But this rite seems not to have been much used and was replaced in the sixteenth century. Reflective of all his efforts to direct the character of the Ethiopian church, Zärʾa Yaʿəqob nevertheless failed to request another Coptic metropolitan after the death of Abunä Gäbrǝʾel in 1458. According to a tradition Alvares reported, the king said that he wanted no more metropolitans from Egypt, but rather one from Rome. His successor King Bäʾǝdä Maryam (1468–78) also failed to call for a new metropolitan for the first nine years of his reign. At a council held in 1477, at which most clerics had asked to appoint an Ethiopian in the position, abbot Märḥa Krǝstos, ǝč̣čạ̈ ge of Däbrä Libanos (d. 1497), begged him not to sever the apostolic tradition obtained through their Alexandrian connection. Bäʾǝdä Maryam took Märḥa Krǝstos’s advice, overruled the vote, and resumed the Alexandrian connection.93 5

The Sixteenth Century: the Kingdom on the Edge

In liturgical matters the first half of the sixteenth century saw little innovation, and indeed some “retrogression” to the Coptic rite compared to the great creative burst of the fifteenth century.94 About a century after the Mäṣḥafä baḥrǝy, the Mäṣḥafä qändil (“Book of the lamp,” for an oil-­lamp is lit, from which the sick are anointed) was translated from the Coptic ritual first recorded with Patriarch Gabriel V (in office 1409–1427), but known in the Byzantine rite from the ninth century whence it spread over the East. It took its definitive shape in the fourteenth century. It did not gain much ground in Ethiopia, one of the reasons apparently being that Ethiopians take literally the requirement that seven priests should serve this sacrament together, which is often nearly impossible and therefore rarely done in the other Churches.95 First found in the fifteenth century, the Mäṣḥafä gǝnzät (“Book of the shroud”) which serves for the funerals, multiplies in the sixteenth century, when MS BnF Éth. 80 shows a Coptic ritual integrated into Ethiopian practices, and especially in the

93   Beckingham-­Huntingford, Prester John, 2: 356–357. For Alvares’s “Abima” read “Abuna” (“our father,” a common term of address for the metropolitan); the king “Alexander” (Ǝskǝndǝr) should be rather Bäʾǝdä Maryam. For details on the latter king’s council see Kur, ed., Actes de Marha Krestos, 1: xvi, 83–86 (text); 2: 76–79 (trans.); idem, “Märḥa Krǝstos,” in EAe 3 (2007), 782–783. 94  After Wion, “Onction des malades,” § 31–47. 95  Wion, “Onction des malades;” Ugo Zanetti, “Qändil: Mäṣḥafä Qändil,” in EAe 4 (2010), 259–260.

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eighteenth, without allusion to origin or translation. Although it could be ascribed to Abunä Sälama (14th c.), its content is varied. The sixteenth century was a time when anaphoras were edited in order to replace the “symbolical” and “typological” language of the Fathers of the Church hitherto understood as “performative” with “real” language in order to make sure that the Eucharistic change of the bread into the body of Christ and of wine into his blood were clear terms. This is particularly evident in the edition of the Anaphora of the Lord.96 The very end of the Middle Ages (as the era is here defined) seems to have seen the major innovation in church architecture, namely round churches. Perhaps going parallel to the rectangular grand churches which survived, the central plan church, generally circular but also polygonal, even square, may have been in existence a long time but, in that case, being popular and made of fragile stuff, such churches disappeared without leaving any traces. The skill, though, may have continued. The central plan may also well have been a novelty. When it was first mentioned by Miguel de Castanhoso (d. 1565?), one of the Portuguese soldiers who helped the Christians during the campaign of Aḥmad b. Ibrāhīm al-­Ġāzī (ca. 1506–22 February 1543),97 it was already prevalent since he wrote: “These churches are round, with a holy place in the centre, and all around outside are verandahs.”98 The central plan church, usually circular, is the contraction of all aspects of previously known buildings, namely the two trends of churches existing since the thirteenth century, giving the advantage to the oldest one when it comes to the fixed arrangement to give the sanctuary, elevated on its own foundations in the center. This is somehow the victory of the “closed” versus the “hall” model of sanctuary in the round (or central plan) church, in which doors and curtains as well as shutters in the east ensure that, in a new arcane directed this time against the very members of the church (even though it may perhaps have originated out of the fear inspired by the recent Muslim jihad), the laity themselves would be unable to obtain any notion as to what is going on in

96  Emmanuel Fritsch, “The Anaphoras of the Geʿez Churches: A Challenging Orthodoxy,” in The Anaphoral Genesis of the Institution Narrative in Light of the Anaphora of Addai and Mari: Acts of the International Liturgy Congress, Rome 25–26 October 2011, ed. Cesare Giraudo (Rome, 2013), 275–316, at 293–298. 97  Emmanuel Fritsch, “The origins and meanings of the Ethiopian circular church: Fresh explorations,” in Tomb and Temple: Re-­Imagining the Sacred Buildings of Jerusalem, ed. Eric Fernie and Robin Griffith-­Jones (Woodbridge, Eng., 2018), 253–279. 98  Whiteway, R. S., ed. and trans., The Portuguese Expedition to Abyssinia in 1541–1543 as narrated by Castanhoso … (London, 1902), 90.

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the sanctuary.99 Regarding the relationship between altar tables and altar tablets, a simplification was now reached whereby, in place of the several altar tables and their individual altar tablets, a single altar table (mänbärä tabot) could be used with rotating altar-­tablets (tabot) as demanded by the occasion. These features became the standard from the early modern period to the present. The outer walls of the sanctuary have offered large possibilities of decoration, in particular the liturgical wall or western area whose main doors allow communication with the priests, and whose decoration evokes for the faithful the sacred mysteries celebrated within.100 6 Conclusion The period which followed was one of intense work, in particular in the realm of sacred chant since it appears that this was when the sign system (mǝlǝkkǝt) was invented and when masters set up the fame of Betä Lǝhem (in Gayǝnt) and especially Gondär with the erection of the Tačč Bet and Lay Bet (lit. the “Upper” and “Lower”) schools of chant (Aqqwaqwam).101 All this once more emphasizes the well-­noted notion that the particular development of Ethiopian liturgy all along its history owes as much to its creativity as to its steady faithfulness to its Egyptian roots. 99  It is probably from that time that older churches have been equipped with sanctuary walls obvious at Bilbala Qirqos and Giyorgis, Gännätä Maryam, Gundǝfru Śǝllase, etc. 100  Wilhelm Staude, “Étude sur la décoration picturale des églises Abba Antonios de Gondar et Dabra Sina de Gorgora,” Annales d’Éthiopie 3 (1959): 185–250; Mario di Salvo, Churches of Ethiopia: The Monastery of Narga Sellase (Milan, 1999); Claire Bosc-­Tiessé and Anaïs Wion, Peintures sacrées d’Éthiopie. Collection Dakar-­Djibouti (Saint-­Maur-­des-­Fossés, 2005), 70– 81; Claire Bosc-­Tiessé, Les îles de la mémoire. Fabrique des images et écriture de l’histoire dans les églises du lac Ṭānā, Éthiopie, XVIIe–­X VIIIe siècle (Paris, 2008), 339–342; Fritsch, “Anaphoras of the Geʿez Churches,” 297–298; Marcel Metzger, “Essai sur l’iconographie de l’espace liturgique,” in Synaxis katholike. Beiträge zu Gottesdienst und Geschichte der fünf altkirchlichen Patriarchate für Heinzgerd Brakmann zum 70. Geburtstag, ed. Diliana Atanassova and Tinatin Chronz (Vienna, 2014), 535–550. 101  Marilyn E. Heldman and Kay Kaufman Shelemay, “Concerning Saint Yared,” in Studies in Ethiopian Languages, Literature, and History: Festschrift for Getatchew Haile, ed. Adam Carter McCollum (Wiesbaden, 2017), 65–93.

chapter 8

The Ancient and Medieval History of Eritrean and Ethiopian Monasticism: An Outline Gianfrancesco Lusini At the beginning of the Common Era, the believers of the first Christian generations inherited from Jews – among many other things – a peculiar way of spiritual life demanding a retreat from earthly affairs and residence far from the cities. Particularly in the Egyptian desert, men and women having as their unique target prayer and the integral imitation of Jesus Christ’s life became monks (from Greek monakhòs, “solitary”), the representatives of an uncompromising attitude of non-involvement in the world, as preached by the Prophets of the Old Testament and the Gospels. Monasticism – the constant search for “holiness” and spiritual perfection through solitary asceticism (anchoritism) or the strict observance of communal rules of life (coenobitism) – became the more accomplished expression of Christian devotion.1 This original spirit is well present in the Ethiopian monastic experience as a whole, and we can dare to affirm that in no other Christian country have monks been more genuinely the engine of national religious history. Specific historical circumstances clarify the paramount role of monks in Christian Ethiopian society. Since the mid-fourth century, when the royal court of Aksum embraced the religion of the Gospel, the Egyptian hierarchy claimed the right to choose the heads of the Ethiopian Church. The first bishop was Frumentius, Fəremənaṭos in Gəʿəz (Old Ethiopic), also known as abba Sälama or Käśate Bərhan (“the Revealer of the Light”), in fact a Syrian philosophy student who arrived fortuitously at the king’s court when the latter was still a polytheist and then succeeded in converting the heir to the throne ʿEzana (ca. 340–350).2 To provide Ethiopia with an ecclesiastical organization, 1  Within an immense bibliography on this topic, see at least Douglas Burton-Christie, The Word in the Desert: Scripture and the Quest for Holiness in Early Christian Monasticism (Oxford, 1993); William Harmless, Desert Christians. An Introduction to the Literature of Early Monasticism (Oxford, 2004). 2  For an evaluation of the literary sources on Frumentius (both classical and Ethiopic), see Françoise Thelamon, Païens et Chrétiens au IVe siècle. L’apport de l’‘Histoire ecclésiastique’ de Rufin d’Aquilée (Paris, 1981), 31–83; Franz A. Dombrowski, “Frumentius/Abba Salama. Zu den Nachrichten über die Anfänge des Christentums in Äthiopien,” Oriens Christianus 68 (1984):

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2020 | doi:10.1163/9789004419582_009

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the converted king sent Frumentius to the patriarch of Alexandria, Athanasius (d. 373), who appointed him as the first bishop of the new Christian country. Up to the mid-twentieth century, Frumentius’s successors – officially bearing the title of ṗaṗṗas, as head of the Ethiopian church, but generally called metropolitans due to certain limitations on their authority – were virtually always Egyptians who supported the kings in preparing the general political outline.3 The extraneousness of the Ethiopian metropolitan to the local cultural milieu and his lack of knowledge about peripheral and local centers of spiritual life often implied that the Christian believers considered the abbots of the monastic communities and the head of the regular clergy (the əč̣čạ̈ ge) as the true and only representatives of their authentic religious feeling. Consequently, monasticism has been a crucial element of the social organization of Ethiopia from ancient to modern times, namely 1) the more important factor responsible for the enracination of evangelical morality, Christian institutions, and a “national” Ethiopian identity; 2) one of the pivots of the economic structure of traditional Ethiopian society before the introduction of industrial processes; and 3) the milieu where the majority of Christian Ethiopian intellectual life developed and the only one that transmitted the written culture. Actually, Ethiopian monastic life presents elements of analogy with other Mediterranean religious experiences of late antiquity and the Middle Ages, and the historical study of this phenomenon is possible only in a comparative way, putting its concrete expressions together with those we observe in all the other Christian contexts, where monks played very similar social functions. Nonetheless, in contemporary Ethiopian society, where economic progress and public school have mostly diminished the historical role of religious feeling, monasticism has kept its own vitality, and remains a cultural landmark for millions of observing Ethiopian Christian believers. They still identify in the monastic institution a safe spiritual guide among the uncertainties and the anguishes of modernization, and still recognize collectively that there is an intrinsic “holiness” in the non-secular lifestyle choice.4 114–169; Gianfranco Fiaccadori, “Sälama (Käśate Bǝrhan),” in EAe 4 (2010), 484–488; Massimo Villa, “Frumentius in the Ethiopic Sources: Mythopoeia and Text-critical Considerations,” RSE, 3rd ser., 48, 1 (2017): 87–111. 3  On the distinctions and overlap between bishop, ṗaṗṗas, and metropolitan, and the juridical status of the head of the Ethiopian church, see Emmanuel Fritsch and Habtemichael Kidane, “The Medieval Ethiopian Orthodox Church and its Liturgy,” in this volume. 4  See Joachim Persoon, “Ethiopian Monasticism Between Tradition and Modernity,” in Afrikas Horn. Akten der Ersten Internationalen Littmann-Konferenz 2. bis 5. Mai 2002 in München, ed. Walter Raunig and Steffen Wening (Wiesbaden 2005), 203–216.

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In Ethiopia even today a number of types of monastic spirituality are represented. In addition to the coenobites or fäläst (singular fälasi, “the one who migrates, who abandons the secular life”) who live communally within a monastery, frequently one can meet anchorites or baḥtawəyan (singular baḥtawi, “the solitary”), wandering monks going from one place to another and living on charity, who are surrounded by a special reputation for wisdom and holiness. Intermediate types of monastic life, definable as half-anchoritic, are adopted by groups of hermits living in isolation in “cells” (ṣomaʿətat) disseminated over a more or less defined territory. Periodically, they can gather around a charismatic guide to listen his spiritual instructions. Sometimes, these hermits get in contact with the world for preaching, particularly on the occasion of religious festivals. In these circumstances, people indicate the monk with the epithet nazrawi, instead of mänäkos, the word generally designating a man who follows all these types of spirituality. About the beginning and the development of monastic life in Eritrea and Ethiopia we lack a reliable documentation. We know only what the intellectual circles and leading groups of the most ancient Ethiopian monasteries produced over centuries of literary and ideological elaboration, with the aim of justifying and glorifying monasticism in general and their specific religious centers in particular. Moreover, the equivalence of monastic life and holiness (to be recognized in the very fact that monks are called also qəddusan – plural of qəddus – namely “holy men”) gave impulse to an edifying literature pivoting around the monk as a model of spiritual values more than as a historical character. Consequently, the main sources for the study of Ethiopian monastic history belong to the hagiographic genre, a kind of non-historical literature.5 The hagiographic text has its own functions and rules, and historicity does not fall among the substantial needs of the hagiographer. Nevertheless, when a hagiographical account is produced close to the saint’s time and with firsthand knowledge of the events of his or her life, or when the hagiographer had access to ancient sources,6 it may well offer reliable historical 5  For some overviews of the Ethiopic hagiographic literature, see Carlo Conti Rossini, “L’agiografia etiopica e gli Atti del santo Yafqeranna-Egziʾ (Secolo XIV),” Atti del Reale Istituto Veneto di scienze, lettere ed arti 96, 2 (1936–37): 403–433, at 403–412; Taddesse Tamrat, “Hagiographies and the Reconstruction of Medieval Ethiopian History,” Rural Africana 11 (1970): 12–20; Steven Kaplan, “Hagiographies and the History of Medieval Ethiopia,” History in Africa 8 (1981): 107–123; Paolo Marrassini, ed. and trans., Gadla Yohannes Mesraqawi. Vita di Yohannes l’Orientale. Edizione critica con introduzione e traduzione annotata (Florence 1981), xxxiii–cix; Denis Nosnitsin, “Hagiography,” in EAe 2 (2005), 969–972. 6  Admittedly, this is the case of several hagiographic accounts transmitted by the collection of ms. EMML 1763, whose author(s) employed works dating back to the Aksumite period; for a

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information. This is also the case for the early phases of Ethiopian-Eritrean monasticism, the Lives of whose protagonists, even if consigned to writing many centuries later, could be grounded in traditions passed down over a long period.7 The introduction of Christianity in Ethiopia is one of the consequences of the direct contact of Aksum with the Greco-Roman world, thanks to its tight economic and political relationship with the port of Adulis, the most important harbor of the whole Eritrean (Red) Sea in late antiquity.8 As observed above, the acceptance of the Gospel by the members of the royal court of Aksum can be fixed under the reign of ʿEzana, around 340–350 CE. A century later, a new impulse to the spread of the Christian doctrine in Ethiopia came from groups of Greek monks fleeing from the Byzantine Empire after the decisions of the Council of Chalcedon (451) and the consequent condemnation of the miaphysite doctrine. The hagiographic and literary traditions about this phase of Ethiopian religious history include Lives of saints (gädlat, plural of gädl), homilies (dərsanat, plural of dərsan), collections of monastic rules, and monastic genealogies. An intense scholarly debate has focused around the crucial issue of the geographic and cultural origins of these monks. The “Syrian” hypothesis,9 though long dominant, has proven to be rather weak and based presentation, see Gianfrancesco Lusini, ed. and trans., “Gli Atti apocrifi di Marco,” Aethiopica 12 (2009): 7–47, at 20–25. 7  See, e.g., Gianfrancesco Lusini, “Philology ad the Reconstruction of the Ethiopian Past,” in Afrikas Horn (cit. at n. 4), 91–106, at 92–95, about the reliability of the traditions transmitted by chronographic texts, king lists, monastic genealogies and hagiographies. Recently, an important case of coincidence between an ancient source and the medieval traditions is that of the two bronze plaques bearing inscriptions in non-vocalized Ethiopic language that mention the fourth-century Aksumite king Ḥafila, provided with the royal name ʾl ʿyg. Of this epithet one can find the corresponding vocalized form Ǝlla ʿAyga in the medieval king lists, and this seems to confirm their non-occasional reliability, according to the investigation by Alessandro Bausi, “The recently published Ethiopic inscriptions of king Ḥafilā (ΑΦΙΛΑϹ): a few remarks,” Bibliotheca Orientalis 75, 3–4 (2018): 286a–295a, at 289a. 8  For recent assessments, see Michael Speidel, “Wars, trade and treaties: new, revised, and neglected sources for the political, diplomatic, and military aspects of Imperial Rome’s relations with the Red Sea Basin and India, from Augustus to Diocletian,” in Imperial Rome, Indian Ocean regions and Muziris: new perspectives on maritime trade, ed. K.S. Mathew (New Delhi 2015), 83–128, and Chiara Zazzaro, “Adulis and the sea,” in Human interaction with the environment in the Red Sea. Selected Papers of Red Sea Project VI, ed. Dionysios A. Agius et al. (Leiden, 2017), 151–170. 9  For a presentation of facts and interpretations, see Aaron Butts, “Ethiopic Christianity, Syriac contacts with,” in The Gorgias Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Syriac Heritage, ed. Sebastian P. Brock et al. (Piscataway, NJ, 2011), 148–153; Theresa Hainthaler, “Syrian Influences on the Christian Faith in Ethiopia,” in Proceedings of the First International Conference on Ethiopian

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upon a substantial misunderstanding of the sources.10 Nowadays, most scholars support the Egyptian origins of the evangelizers who introduced monastic institutions into Ethiopia and their connection with the doctrine approved by the Council of Ephesus (431).11 Particularly, one can compare some aspects of the Ethiopian monastic liturgy with specific religious practices of the ancient Egyptian communities, like those influenced by the preaching of Melitius, bishop of Lykopolis,12 documented by Athanasius of Alexandria in his Festal Letters of 367–369 and by Theodoret of Cyrus in his Haereticarum fabularum compendium. Athanasius attributes to the Melitians an interest in apocryphal literature and in the cult of the martyrs and their relics, inclinations widespread in Ethiopian monasticism as well. Theodoret informs us about features of the Melitians that recall similar practices of the Ethiopian monks, such as ritual purification by water and a liturgy accompanied by musical instruments, dancing, and the clapping of hands.13

Texts, May 27–30, 2013, St. Francis Friary, Asko, ed. Daniel Assefa and Hiruy Abdu (Addis Ababa, 2016), 113–126; Witold Witakowski, “Syrian Influences in Ethiopian Culture,” Orientalia Suecana 38–39 (1989): 191–202, repr. in Languages and Cultures of Eastern Christianity. Ethiopian, ed. Alessandro Bausi (Farnham, 2012), 197–208 (no. 12); idem, “Syrian influences in Ethiopia,” in EAe 4 (2010), 782–785. 10  Even though it can be admitted that the same Egyptian monasticism played a mediating role in transmitting to Ethiopia elements of the asceticism practiced in the deserts of Syria and Palestine since the end of the third century; see at least Sebastian P. Brock, “Early Syrian Ascetism,” Numen 20 (1973): 1–19, repr. in Brock, Syrian Perspectives on Late Antiquity (Aldershot, 1984) (no. 1); Philippe Escolan, Monachisme et Église. Le monachisme syrien du IVe au VIIe siècle: un monachisme charismatique (Paris, 1999), 11–69. 11  According to the conclusions of linguistic and textual studies such as those by Hans Jakob Polotsky, “Aramaic, Syriac, and Ge‘ez,” Journal of Semitic Studies 9 (1964): 1–10, repr. in Languages and Cultures of Eastern Christianity. Ethiopian, ed. Bausi, 187–196 (no. 11); Paolo Marrassini, “Some considerations on the problem of the ‘Syriac influences’ on Aksumite Ethiopia,” Journal of Ethiopian Studies 22 (1990): 35–46; idem, “Ancora sul problema degli influssi siriaci in età aksumita,” in Biblica et Semitica. Studi in memoria di Francesco Vattioni, ed. Luigi Cagni (Naples, 1999), 325–337, trans. as “Once Again on the Question of Syriac Influences in the Aksumite Period,” in Languages and Cultures of Eastern Christianity. Ethiopian, ed. Bausi, 209–219 (no. 13). 12  For an overview of the historical facts related to the so-called “Melitian Schism,” see at least Annick Martin, Athanase d’Alexandrie et l’Eglise d’Egypte au ive siècle (Rome, 1996), 219–298, and the collected essays by Hans Hauben, Studies on the Melitian Schism in Egypt (AD 306–335), ed. Peter van Nuffelen (Farnham, 2012). 13  See Gianfrancesco Lusini, “Per una storia delle tradizioni monastiche eritree: le genealogie spirituali dell’ordine di Ēwostātēwos di Dabra Ṣarābi,” in Aegyptus Christiana. Mélanges d’hagiographie égyptienne et orientale dédiés à la mémpire du P. Paul Devos Bollandiste, ed. Ugo Zanetti and Enzo Lucchesi (Geneva, 2004), 249–272, at 250–252; idem, “Le monachisme en Éthiopie. Esquisse d’une histoire,” in Monachismes d’Orient. Images, Échanges.

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The written records about the foreign monks who spearheaded this “second” Christianization follow different streams. Generic traditions about groups of monks who introduced the ideas of asceticism and martyrdom are those indicated by the word Ṣadǝqan, literally “the righteous ones.” Of “Roman” (i.e. Byzantine) origin, they are remembered through reference to the specific territories where they lived and operated as missionaries, so that we know the Ṣadǝqan of Baräknaha (Šǝmäzana, Eritrea), of Kädiḥ (a river not identified in modern geography), of Ḥawzen (a town in Tǝgray), of Qaḥen (in Tǝgray, between Wǝqro and Mäqälä) and of Dägwe (close to Aksum). Their hagiographies are less known and not yet fully edited.14 Besides the “collective” traditions of Ṣadǝqan, we number monastic figures not belonging to groups of missionaries, and therefore conventionally called “isolated” saints. The most celebrated are Libanos,15 the founder of the monastery of Däbrä Libanos of Šǝmäzana (Eritrea)16 and Yoḥanni, the founder of Däbrä Sina of Sänḥit (Eritrea).17 The more substantial hagiographic stream is that of the “Nine Saints,” again a group of “Roman” (Byzantine) missionaries who preached the Gospel and imported to Ethiopia the first religious rules, following the teaching of the Egyptian founders of monastic spirituality, namely Anthony and Pachomius. The emphasis placed on their role in establishing the Ethiopian church makes one think that the “first” Christianization under ʿEzana, a century before, was rather superficial and had no effect with regard to monastic institutions.18 Influences, ed. Florence Jullien and Marie-Joseph Pierre (Turnhout, 2011), 133–147, at 138–139. 14  For an overview of the written traditions about the Ṣadǝqan, see Antonella Brita, “Ṣadǝqan,” in EAe 4 (2010), 446–447. For a previously unknown group, having as their veneration centre the church of ʿAddiqäḥarsi Ṗäraqliṭos (Gulo Mäkäda, East Təgray), see Denis Nosnitsin, “Vita and Miracles of the Ṣadǝqan of ʿAddiqäḥarsi Ṗäraqliṭos. A Preliminary Study,” in Veneration of Saints in Christian Ethiopia. Proceedings of the International Workshop ‘Saints in Christian Ethiopia: Literary Sources and Veneration,’ Hamburg, April 28–29, ed. Denis Nosnitsin (Wiesbaden, 2015), 137–159. 15  The critical edition of the Life of Libanos is in Alessandro Bausi, ed. and trans., La ‘Vita’ e i ‘Miracoli’ di Libānos, 2 vols., CSCO 595–596, SAe 105–106 (Louvain, 2003). 16  About the monastery, particularly the wealth and value of its library, see Alessandro Bausi, “Su alcuni manoscritti presso comunità monastiche dell’Eritrea (III),” RSE 41 (1997): 13–55. 17  About Däbrä Sina of Sänḥit, see Aśrata Māryām, Storia del convento di Debra Sina, ed. Ignazio Guidi (Rome, 1910). 18  A comprehensive study of the written traditions about the “Nine Saints” is in Antonella Brita, I racconti tradizionali sulla “seconda cristianizzazione” dell’Etiopia. Il ciclo agiografico dei Nove Santi (Naples, 2010); cf. Carlo Conti Rossini, Storia d’Etiopia. Parte prima: Dalle origini all’avvento della dinastia Salomonide (Bergamo, 1928), 155–165; Sergew Hable Selassie, Ancient and Medieval Ethiopian History to 1270 (Addis Ababa, 1972), 115–121; Taddesse Tamrat, Church and State in Ethiopia, 1270–1527 (Oxford, 1972), 21–25; George

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The traditional names attached to the Nine Saints are Alef, Afṣe, Zämika‌‌ʾel called Arägawi (“the Elder”), Yəsḥaq also called Gärima (in fact a second name more than an epithet), Guba, Liqanos, Ṗänṭälewon called Zäṣomaʿət (“the one from the cell”), Ṣəḥma, and Yəmʾat(t)a. A tenth name ʿOṣ, is less frequent. Traditions attribute to most of them the establishment of religious buildings, like in the case of Liqanos and Ṗänṭälewon, to whom the churches of Däbrä Qwänaṣəl and Ǝnda Abba Ṗänṭälewon, both near Aksum, are related, or in the case of Afṣe, to whom the foundation of a church close to the Sabean temple of Yəḥa is ascribed. According to other traditions, from the mid-fourth to the mid-seventh century a number of monastic centers were established over the inaccessible flattopped mountains called ambas. Therefore, from ancient times the presence of a network of religious buildings traversed the ecclesiastical landscape of northern and central Ethiopia.19 Among others, this is the case for the architectural complex of Däbrä Dammo, in eastern Təgray, whose foundation is ascribed to Zämika‌‌ʾel Arägawi,20 and for Ǝnda Abba Gärima or Däbrä Mädära, near ʿAdwa, whose construction is attributed to Yəsḥaq Gärima.21 Archeological and topographical evidence demonstrates the antiquity of this kind of establishment, implying a political role on the part of the abbots. In fact, in the sites where the monasteries are now located, remains of ancient buildings are still visible, probably because the settlements were near strategic crossroads with the aim of controlling and defending trade routes and state boundaries. This must have been the result of a program based on a stable alliance between the Aksumite rulers and the first monastic groups.22 Indeed, literary elements confirm that, Wynn Brereton Huntingford, “Saints of Medieval Ethiopia,” Abba Salama 10 (1979): 261– 264; Antonella Brita, “Nine Saints,” in EAe 3 (2007), 1188–1191. 19  For the notion of “ecclesiastic landscape,” see Denis Nosnitsin, “Ecclesiastic Landscape of North Ethiopia: Remarks on Methodologies and Types of Approach,” in Ecclesiastic Landscape of North Ethiopia, ed. Denis Nosnitsin (Wiesbaden, 2013), 3–13. 20  The edition of the Life of Zämika‌‌ʾel Arägawi is in Ignazio Guidi, ed., “Il ‘Gadla ʾAragāwī,’” Memorie della Reale Accademia dei Lincei, Classe di scienze morali, storiche e filologiche, 5th ser., 2 (1896): 54–96; cf. Marc-Antoine van den Oudenrijn, trans., La Vie de Saint Za Mīkāʾēl Aragāwī, traduite de l’éthiopien avec introduction et notes (Fribourg, 1939). 21  The edition of the Life of Yəsḥaq Gärima is in Carlo Conti Rossini, ed., “L’omilia di Yohannes, vescovo d’Aksum, in onore di Garimā,” in Actes du XIe Congrès International des Orientalistes (Paris-1897). Section Sémitique (Paris, 1899), 139–177; cf. Gérard Colin, trans., Saints fondateurs du christianisme éthiopien. Frumentius, Garimā, Takla-Hāymānot et Ewosṭātēwos. Introduction, traduction et notes (Paris, 2017), 6–37. 22  According to the arguments brought forward by Sergew Hable Selassie “Church and State in the Axumite period,” in Proceedings of the Third International Conference of Ethiopian Studies, 2 vols. (Addis Ababa, 1966–1970), 1: 5–8; idem, Ancient and Medieval Ethiopian History, 119; Taddesse Tamrat, Church and State in Ethiopia, 24.

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at least from the sixth century on, kings and monks cooperated in strengthening the Christian Aksumite state. According to the Life of Zämika‌‌ʾel Arägawi, the church of Däbrä Dammo was built by Gäbrä Mäsqäl, son and successor of Kaleb, the sovereign who put an end to the Jewish kingdom of Ḥimyar in Yemen.23 The Golden Gospel of the monastery of Däbrä Libanos, in Eritrea, contains at least one land grant given by Gäbrä Mäsqäl to Däbrä Dammo. Däbrä Mädära played a role, too, in this agreement between Church and State, because in the Life of Yəsḥaq Gärima it is narrated that, after visiting the saint, the same ruler ordered the foundation of a new church and endowed it with lands. As noted above, all the literary works telling the stories of the “Nine Saints” were composed in the form of hagiographies. Moreover, the texts in their present form seem to be quite recent, and the traditions told by gädlat, dərsanat, monastic rules, and genealogies date back at the latest to fourteenth or fifteenth century, even though some of the traditions they contain may date back to earlier (possibly Aksumite) times. Significantly, records of the most ancient Ethiopian writing activity are limited to the two Ǝnda Abba Gärima FourGospels manuscripts, now definitely assigned to late antiquity by carbon-14 dating (330–650 for AG III, 530–660 for AG I).24 This is evidence of the role played by monks in the first phases of Christian Ethiopian literature. The connection of the first Ethiopian monks to the miaphysite doctrine is substantially undisputed. Suffice it to say that the most important literary work translated from Greek to Gəʿəz in Aksumite times is the Qerəllos, the patristic collection owing its title to Cyril of Alexandria (d. 444).25 This Egyptian bishop and assertive theologian decisively influenced fifth-century Christology, the decisions of the Council of Ephesus (431), and the condemnation of the views of Nestorius of Antioch. Not by chance, the Ethiopian literary tradition contains strong polemics against the Council of Chalcedon (451), for at that council the majority of the Fathers established the presence in Christ of two different 23  For an overview of the historical facts related to the early sixth-century Aksum-Ḥimyar conflict, see Glen Warren Bowersock, The Throne of Adulis: Red Sea Wars on the Eve of Islam (Oxford, 2013). 24  For a general presentation and a detailed study of the codicological and art-historical aspects of the two manuscripts, see Judith S. McKenzie and Francis Watson, The Garima Gospels: Early Illuminated Gospel Books from Ethiopia, With Preface and Photographs by Michael Gervers and contributions by Matthew R. Crawford, Linda R. Macaulay, Sarah S. Norodom, Andres T. Reyes, and Miranda E. Williams (Oxford, 2016); for the historical documents transmitted by the two codices, see Getatchew Haile, “The Marginal Notes in the Abba Gärima Gospels,” Aethiopica 19 (2016): 7–26. 25  For an overview of the content of the patristic collection, see Alessandro Bausi, “Qǝrellos,” in EAe 4 (2010), 287–290.

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natures united and inseparable, and condemned the miaphysite doctrine that Cyril and the monastic circles around him espoused. Philological analysis also allows us to reconstruct the literary corpus of texts for monastic instruction, translated from Greek into Gəʿəz between the fourth and seventh century, from which different forms of spiritual life arose. These are, on one hand, the Life of Paul of Thebes by Jerome26 and the Life of Anthony by Athanasius,27 the two “guides” to anchoritic spirituality; on the other hand, a part at least of the Rules of Pachomius,28 the most authoritative reference text of coenobitism. These literary expressions of early Egyptian monasticism contribute to show the cultural origins of the foreign evangelizers who introduced monastic institutions to Ethiopia, strengthening the ancient connection between Alexandria and Aksum. A long-debated question concerns the meaning of the undeniable JudeoChristian traces in Ethiopian Christianity, possibly going back to the presence and the activity of monastic circles. The Gəʿəz literature of the fourth to seventh century includes an impressive corpus of works belonging to Jewish literature of the Second Temple age.29 Texts like the Ascension of Isaiah, the 26  The edition of the Life of Paul of Thebes is in Francisco Maria Esteves Pereira, A vida de S. Paulo de Thebas primeiro eremita segundo a versao ethiopica (Coimbra, 1904), 5–48. 27  See Louis Leloir, “Premier renseignements sur la vie d’Antoine en éthiopien,” in Antidōron. Hulde aan Dr. Maurits Geerard bij de voltooiing van de Clavis patrum Graecorum. Hommage à Maurits Geerard pour célébrer l’achèvement de la Clavis patrum Graecorum, ed. Jacques Noret (Wetteren, 1984), 9–12; Rafał Zarzeczny, “Some remarks concerning the Ethiopic recension of the ‘Life of Antony,’” Orientalia Christiana Periodica 79 (2013): 37–60. 28  The edition of the Rules of Pachomius is in August Dillmann, Chrestomathia Aethiopica (Leipzig, 1866), 57–69; see Oscar Löfgren, “Zur Kritik der äthiopischen Pachomiusregeln I, II,” Le Monde Oriental 30 (1936): 171–186; Gianfrancesco Lusini, “Tradizione e redazione delle regole monastiche etiopiche (Parigi, B.N., ms. Éth. 125, fols. 160v–162),” in Scritti in memoria di Emilio Teza, ed. Delio Vania Proverbio (Venice, 1997), 53–66, at 54–55 and 62–63. With the exception of the hagiographic Lives of saints and the semi-hagiographic royal “chronicles,” most of the medieval Ethiopian liturgical books were translated from Greek or Arabic models. Sometimes, the works written for the spiritual instruction of the monks, already translated from Greek in Aksumite times, were corrected and expanded, and in their final form one can detect the different textual layers belonging to several historical phases. This stratification can be recognized in the Gəʿəz version of the Rules of Pachomius, so that in their present form they are the result of the assembly of different texts. The First and Second Rule, corresponding – respectively – to chapters 32,1–33,1 of the Lausiac History of Palladius (the Rule of the Angel) and to the Greek Excerpta (according to the manuscripts of the “second family”) have been translated from Greek. Instead, the last section, the so-called Third Rule, is an original composition, to be dated to the fourteenth century at the earliest. 29  For an overview of the Ethiopic apocryphal literature, see Pierluigi Piovanelli, “Les aventures des apocryphes en Éthiopie,” Apocrypha 4 (1993): 197–224, trans. as “The Adventures

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Book of Enoch, Jubilees, 4 Ezra (or Apocalypse of Ezra), and the Book of Baruch (or Paralipomena Ieremiae), all translated from Greek, give us a clue about the theological orientations of the groups of Christian believers preaching within the kingdom of Aksum.30 Since we have no evidence of a Jewish presence in ancient Ethiopia, and the miaphysite creed has little to do with the JudeoChristian identity, we can infer that the Aksumite religious setting was more complex than expected. Possibly, more than one wave of evangelizers, coming from the Roman harbors on the Red Sea, visited Aksum through the port of Adulis31 and left some traces of their passage,32 even before the members of the Ethiopian royal court started believing in the message of the Gospel.33 The collapse of the kingdom of Aksum in the seventh-eighth century is a turning point of Ethiopian history, but our knowledge of the events is very limited. Nevertheless, monastic establishments resisted the political earthquake incomparably better than did civil institutions. Structurally, monastic networks, made of small autonomous centers, are more resistant to historical disasters, and the way of life in monasteries has a better chance of surviving through the most catastrophic events. In fact – as in the case of European of the Apocrypha in Ethiopia,” in Languages and Cultures of Eastern Christianity: Ethiopian, ed. Bausi, 87–109 (no. 6). 30  See Maxime Rodinson, “L’Éthiopie a-t-elle été juive?” Revue des études juives 2 (1963): 399–403; idem, “Sur la question des influences juives en Éthiopie,” Journal of Semitic Studies 9 (1964): 11–19, trans. as “On the Question of ‘Jewish Influences’ in Ethiopia, in Languages and cultures of Eastern Christianity. Ethiopian, ed. Bausi, 179–186 (no. 10); idem, “Le problème du christianisme éthiopien: substrat juif ou christianisme judaïsant?” Revue de l’histoire des religions 167 (1965): 113–117; Ephraim Isaac, “An obscure component in Ethiopian church history,” Le Muséon 85 (1972): 225–258. 31  See Serena Massa and Caterina Giostra, “The Christianisation of Adulis in Light of the Material Evidence,” in Stories of Globalisation: The Red Sea and the Persian Gulf from Late Prehistory to Early Modernity. Selected Papers of Red Sea Project VII, ed. Andrea Manzo et al. (Leiden – Boston, 2018), 314–352. 32   According to the convincing arguments brought forward by Pierluigi Piovanelli, “Reconstructing the Social and Cultural History of the Aksumite Kingdom: Some Methodological Reflections,” in Inside and Out. Interactions between Rome and the Peoples on the Arabian and Egyptian Frontiers in Late Antiquity, ed. Jitse H. F. Dijkstra and Greg Fisher (Louvain, 2014), 331–352, at 350–351. 33  An indirect confirmation of this hypothesis could derive from the medieval chronographic texts, stating that the “conversion of Ethiopia” (əmnätä ityoṗya) occurred 245 years after the birth of Christ; see Gianfrancesco Lusini, “Ripristino e integrazione di un documento storico in gəʿəz: Pistoia, Biblioteca Forteguerriana, ms. Martini etiop. 1,” Annali. Sezione orientale 75 (2015): 55–75, at 60. This could be an evidence that Christian ideas were already present in Aksum around 253, at the time of the anti-Christian persecutions under the Roman Emperors Decius and Valerian, namely quite a century before the decisions of ʿEzana.

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monasticism, both Latin and Greek – the monasteries became the only places where remnants of ancient Christian Aksumite culture survived during the subsequent Ethiopian “Dark Ages.” At the end of this obscure period, the revival of Christian culture and institutions was made possible thanks to texts and ideas preserved by the most ancient and prestigious monastic centers. Manuscripts played a specific role in this context, inasmuch as they granted the transmission and the preservation of doctrines and institutions directly coming from Aksumite times. Moreover, the better we are able to reconstruct the history of Ethiopian medieval architecture, the more we can assume that monks and monastic centers preserved artistic traditions dating back to late antiquity for all the time separating the collapse of Aksum from the recovery of a centralized state and the revival of the Christian traditions. Isolated epigraphic documents give some clues about the role played by monastic centers in this post-Aksumite phase. The two inscriptions RIÉ 193 i–ii (= DAE 12–13)34 were cut on a single stone by a historical figure named Danǝʾel, self-styled ḥaṣ́ani, in a problematic range of time between the ninth and eleventh century. Since Danǝʾel calls himself “son of Däbrä Fərem,” and in Gǝʿǝz däbr means both “mountain” and “monastery,” we can deduce that possibly he was a member of a monastic community (Däbrä Fərem), whose setting can only be hypothesized.35 With all probability, in this post-Aksumite phase the eastern districts of Təgray played a major role in preserving the ancient monastic traditions, and we can presume that some of the oldest churches and cloisters in this part of northern Ethiopia date back to the ninth to eleventh century, when Aksum had already lost its political primacy. The last phases of the Ethiopian “Dark Ages,” at the beginning of the twelfth century, are better known to us. A clash among several political centers and a consequent re-unification process must have occurred, which brought about the installation of the Zagwe dynasty (1137–1270). Even though the origins of the royal lineage remain wrapped in mystery, the Zagwe kings proved to be the promoters of a religious revival, including the foundation of churches and monastic centers, particularly in the districts of Wäg and Lasta (Wällo region) 34  R IÉ 1, 278–283 (= Enno Littmann, Sabaische,Griechische und Altabessinische Inschriften, vol. 4 of Littmann et al., Deutsche-Aksum Expedition [Berlin, 1913], 42–46). 35  Gianfranco Fiaccadori, “Epigraphica Aethiopica,” Quaderni Utinensi 15/16 (1990): 325– 333, at 327–328, has proposed to consider Fərem as a shortened form of Fəremənaṭos (Frumentius), because “a lui s’intitolava presso il villaggio detto dai viaggiatori May Qoqa o Maygoga (Māy Qāḥqeḥa), c. 6 km da Adua (ʿAdwā), a sud della strada per ’Aksum, la chiesa del luogo già noto ai Portoghesi come ‘Fremona’ (‘Flemona’ o ‘Flemuna,’ a un giorno da ‘Axon,’ nel c.d. ‘Aviso di frate Raphaello,’ raccolto da Alessandro Zorzi nel marzo 1522): ossia ‘F(e)rēmonā,’ evidente deformazione tigrina di ‘Fərēmənaṭos’.”

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to which the origins of the ruling family have been ascribed. Since then, for centuries the monks of this part of Ethiopia, to the south of the Aksumite geo-political context, have kept the memory of these sovereigns as holy men.36 One may cite as an example the case of Yəmrəḥannä Krəstos,37 king and monk, to whom not only a Life is dedicated,38 but also an extraordinary church built within a cave approximately in the times of the king’s reign, between the second half of the twelfth century and the middle of the thirteenth.39 The Zagwe dynasty came to end because of a dramatic coup d’état accomplished in the year 1270 by the military chief Yəkunno Amlak, founder of the so-called “Solomonic” dynasty. In that circumstance, we can notice for the first time a rift in the clergy and the splitting of the Ethiopian religious body into two groups, each supporting a different political party. Unexpectedly, the losers, the Zagwe and the monastic circles they represented, appear to have been the more tenacious keepers of the Aksumite past, even though the economic basis of their power was no longer only in the territories of central and eastern Təgray, but also in the more southern region of Wällo. This is rather evident if we look at some of the churches of Lalibäla, the holy city of the Zagwe kings, owing his name to the most celebrated sovereign of the dynasty. These religious monuments carefully reproduce Aksumite architecture, both civil and religious. Evidently, for the builders of these churches, the ruins of the ancient capital and holy city of Aksum in Təgray were a living reference point, deserving of imitation.40 Even though the surviving Gə‘əz texts of the twelfththirteenth centuries are few, there are clues from later sources indicating that monastic life under the Zagwe kings was intensive and that “holy places” not 36  For an overview of the historical facts related to the Zagwe dynasty and a study of the enigmatic aspects of the veneration provided to these kings and saints, see Marie-Laure Derat, L’énigme d’une dynastie sainte et usurpatrice dans le royaume chrétien d’Éthiopie du XIe au XIIIe siècle (Turnhout, 2018). 37  For the intensified scholarly attention over this prominent figure of the Ethiopian Middle Ages, see at least Marie-Laure Derat, “Roi prêtre et Prêtre Jean: analyse de la Vie d’un souverain éthiopien du XIIe siècle, Yemreḥanna Krestos,” Annales d’Éthiopie 27 (2012): 127–143; Gianfranco Fiaccadori, “Between Hagiography and History: The Zagwe Dynasty and King Yǝmrǝḥannä Krǝstos,” in Veneration of Saints in Christian Ethiopia, 15–49. 38  For the Life of Yəmrəḥannä Krəstos see Paolo Marrassini, ed. and trans., Il Gadla Yemreḥanna Krestos. Introduzione, commento critico, traduzione (Naples, 1995). 39  See Ewa Balicka-Witakowska and Michael Gervers “Yəmrəḥannä Krəstos,” in EAe 5 (2014), 55–57; recently, a technical study of the bulding has been carried out by Mengistu Gobezie Worku, “The Church of Yimrhane Kristos. An Archaeological Investigation” (Ph.D diss, Lund University, 2018). 40  See David Buxton and Derek Matthews, “The reconstruction of vanished Aksumite buildings,” RSE 25 (1971–72): 53–77; Marilyn E. Heldman, “Legends of Lalibäla: The Development of an Ethiopian Pilgrimage Site,” Res. Anthropology and Aesthetics 27 (Spring 1995): 25–38.

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only maintained their basic role, but also gained a new political position. This is clearly shown by the events related to the outstanding personalities of Iyäsus Moʾa and Täklä Haymanot. The beginnings of the monastic career of Iyäsus Moʾa (1214–1293) are connected to Däbrä Dammo, the celebrated monastery of Təgray dating back to Aksumite times.41 From there he went southward, reaching a community already existing on the shores of Lake Ḥayq, in the district of Ambassäl in southern Wällo. Here, around 1248, on the island in the center of the lake he established a new monastery under the name Däbrä Ḥayq Ǝsṭifanos.42 His appointment as the abbot of the new community came directly from a king belonging to the Zagwe dynasty, Näʾakkwəto Läʾab, successor of King Lalibala. From this data we can infer that the Zagwe kings were fully engaged in the political and religious program of expanding southward the sphere of influence of the Christian kingdom. Yet, Iyäsus Moʾa was reportedly involved in the crucial events of the year 1270: his Life affirms that he had prophesied Yəkunno Amlak’s overthrow of the last Zagwe king, Yətbaräk, and in turn received as a donation from the first Solomonic king the island where he had founded Däbrä Ḥayq Ǝsṭifanos. Apparently, the hagiographic traditions allude to the role played by Iyäsus Moʾa in supporting the political and military group headed by Yəkunno Amlak and having as a target the seizure of power to the detriment of the Zagwe kings.43 41  The edition of the Life of Iyäsus Moʾa is in Stanislas [Stanisław] Kur, ed and trans,, Actes de Iyasus Moʾa, abbé du couvent de St-Etienne de Ḥayq, 2 vols., CSCO 259–260, SAe 49–50 (Louvain, 1965); cf. Paolo Marrassini, “A proposito di ’Iyasus Moʾa,” Egitto e Vicino Oriente 9 (1986): 175–197; for an overview of the hagiographic dossier concerning Iyäsus Moʾa, see Stanisław Kur, Steven Kaplan and Denis Nosnitsin “Iyäsus Moʾa,” in EAe 5 (2014), 257–259. 42  For an outline of the “medieval” history of the monastery, see Taddesse Tamrat, “The Abbots of Däbrä Hayq, 1248–1535,” Journal of Ethiopian Studies 8 (1970): 87–117; for the wealth and value of its library, see Sergew Hable Selassie, “The Monastic Library of Däbrä Hayq,” in Orbis Aethiopicus. Studia in honorem Stanislaus Chojnacki natali septuagesimo quinto dicata, septuagesimo septimo oblata, ed. Piotr O. Scholz et al., 2 vols., (Albstadt, 1992), 1: 243–258. 43  See Manfred Kropp, “… der Welt gestorben: ein Vertrag zwischen dem äthiopischen Heiligen Iyyäsus-Mo’a und König Yǝkunno-Amlak über Memoriae im Kloster Ḥayq,” Analecta Bollandiana 116 (1998): 303–330; idem, “Die dritte Würde oder ein Drittel des Reiches? Die verschiedenen Versionen der Biographie des Hl. Iyäsus-Moʾa als Ausdruck sich wandelnder Funktionen des Textes,” in Saints, Biographies and History in Africa. Saints, biographies et histoire en Afrique. Heilige, Biographien und Geschichte in Afrika, ed. Bertrand Hirsch and Manfred Kropp (Frankfurt am Main, 2003), 191–205; Claire BoscTiessé, “Sainteté et intervention royale au monastère Saint-Étienne de Ḥayq au tournant du XIIIe et du XIVe siècle. L’image de Iyasus Moʾa dans son Évangile,” Oriens Christianus 94 (2010): 199–227.

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The monastic career of Täklä Haymanot (ca. 1214–1313), the most venerated saint of the Ethiopian Church,44 is somehow connected to Iyäsus Moʾa, who is credited with giving him religious instruction for nine years, possibly at Däbrä Ḥayq Ǝsṭifanos, soon after 1248, in the times of the last Zagwe kings. Later, like Iyäsus Moʾa before him, Täklä Haymanot, a native of Šäwa, went to Däbrä Dammo, in Təgray, probably following the order of his teacher. These traditions about the early life of the two saints seem to mean that around the mid-thirteenth century the monks active in the southern regions of the kingdom, particularly Šäwa, considered Däbrä Dammo and Təgray as a point of reference for their spiritual training. Actually, the regions over Wällo (where Däbrä Ḥayq Ǝsṭifanos represented the southern border of the Zagwe political space) proved to be not yet fully Christianized, as they were part of a kingdom called Damot, ruled by non-Christian kings. Significantly, a crucial episode in the Life of Täklä Haymanot consists in the story of his meeting with Motälämi, the king of Damot, who eventually converted to the faith in the Gospel and became a follower of Täklä Haymanot.45 Behind the limits of the hagiographic topos, we may recognize here the memory of a political and religious confrontation between the Christian dynasties, first the Zagwe then the Solomonids, and their southern neighbors, most probably peoples belonging to the Sidaama (Cushitic) cultural cluster. Evidently, the evangelization of the southern lands, performed by monastic groups, was proceeding hand in hand with the military annexation of the territories and their incorporation within the boundaries of the Christian kingdom. Nevertheless, royal chronicles and hagiographic texts document the resistance for centuries of local-religious 44  Several recensions of the Life of Täklä Haymanot are known (no less than four), and only a part of this corpus of texts has received philological attention; see an overview of the issue in Marie-Laure Derat, “Une nouvelle étape de l’élaboration de la légende hagiographique de Takla Hāymānot (ca. 1214–1313),” Cahiers du Centre de Recherches Africaines 9 (1998): 71–90; Denis Nosnitsin, “Täklä Haymanot,” in EAe 4 (2010), 831–834. The oldest text (first half of the fifteenth century) is the so-called “Waldǝbba recension”: see Carlo Conti Rossini, ed. and trans., “Il Gadla Takla Hāymānot secondo la redazione waldebbana,” Memorie della Reale Accademia dei Lincei. Classe di scienze morali, storiche e filologiche, 5th ser., 2 (1894): 97–143; cf. Colin, Saints fondateurs du christianisme éthiopien, 38–74; the most widespread text, the so-called “Däbrä Libanos recension,” edited by Ernst Alfred Wallis Budge, The Life and Miracles of Takla Hâymânôt in the Version of Dabra Libanos.… (London, 1906) is broader and later (early sixteenth century, reworked in the late seventeenth). Information about Täklä Haymanot’s life is in a story of the translation of his relics to Däbrä Libanos, edited by Budge in the same volume; see also Denis Nosnitsin, “‘Mäṣḥafä fǝlsätu lä-abunä Täklä Haymanot.’ A Short Study,” Aethiopica 6 (2003): 137–167. 45  See Paolo Marrassini, “Una nuova versione geez della disputa fra Takla Haymanot e Motalami,” Egitto e Vicino Oriente 3 (1980): 163–198.

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practices, particularly the devotion to warlocks, justifying the “anti-pagan” campaigns of the Solomonic kings of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The turning point in the religious life of Täklä Haymanot was the foundation of the monastery of Däbrä ʿAsbo (renamed Däbrä Libanos of Šäwa in the mid-fifteenth century). The event dates back to the first years of the fourteenth century, therefore well after Yəkunno Amlak overthrew the last Zagwe king and established the Solomonic dynasty. Like Iyäsus Moʾa before him, Täklä Haymanot too seems to have supported the new royal lineage, and many hagiographic traditions emphasize the special relationship existing between Däbrä ʿAsbo and the royal court. For its crucial position, between the southern borders of the Christian state, the non-Christian kingdom of Damot and the Muslim sultanate (ruled by the Maḫzūmī until 1285, then by the Walasmaʿ),46 the political role of the monastery founded by Täklä Haymanot grew over the centuries.47 Eventually, in the mid-fifteenth century, this prestige resulted in the recognition of the abbot of Däbrä Libanos as the head of the regular clergy of Ethiopia, with the title of əč̣čạ̈ ge. This sequence of events provides a framework in which a historical rivalry between Däbrä Ḥayq Ǝsṭifanos and Däbrä ʿAsbo took shape and developed.48 Particularly, according to the hagiographic accounts, the open support that the two founders gave to Yəkunno Amlak justified a certain degree of competition between the later abbots of the two monasteries, who wished to present themselves as the spiritual guides and defenders not only of the first Solomonic king, but also of his successors. Discussion of the historical roles played by the two main figures of early medieval Ethiopian monasticism, Iyäsus Moʾa the “teacher” (mämhər, ab) 46  See Enrico Cerulli, “Il sultanato dello Scioa nel secolo XIII secondo un nuovo documento storico,” RSE 1 (1941): 5–42, repr. in idem, L’Islam di ieri e di oggi (Rome, 1971), 207–243. 47  For the reconstruction of the chronological succession of the leaders of Däbrä Libanos, we have available, besides the monastic genealogies (Getatchew Haile, “The monastic genealogy of the line of Täklä Haymanot of Shoa,” RSE 29 [1982–83]: 7–38), a peculiar poetic text (called “lista rimata” by its editor) produced within the scriptorium of the same monastery and telling the stories of the abbots from the foundation up to the eighteenth century; see Enrico Cerulli, ed. and trans., “Gli abbati di Dabra Libānos, capi del monachismo etiopico, secondo la ‘lista rimata’ (sec. XIV–XVIII),” Orientalia 12 (1943), 226–253, continued in 13 (1944): 137–182. 48  See Steven Kaplan, “Iyasus Moʾa and Takla Haymanot: A Note on a Hagiographical Controversy,” Journal of Semitic Studies 31 (186), 47–56; Bertrand Hirsch, “L’hagiographie et l’histoire. Lectures d’un passage des Actes de Iyasua Mo’a,” in Saints, Biographies and History in Africa (cit. at n. 43), 161–174; Denis Nosnitsin, “Wäwähabo qob‘a wäʾaskema. Reflections on an episode from the History of Ethiopian Monastic Movement,” Scrinium 1 (= Varia Aethiopica: in Memory of Sevir B. Chernetsov [1943–2005], ed. Denis Nosnitsin) (2005): 197–247, at 210–235.

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and Täklä Haymanot the “disciple” (däqq, wäld) raises another crucial question, namely, how spiritual and hierarchical authority was transmitted within the monastery. Evidently, on this matter the prescriptions of the ecclesiastical codes (like the Senodos and the Fǝtḥa nägäśt) exercised a limited influence, because the relationship between an abbot and his successor was systematically of a charismatic kind. The “election” of the new abbot was nothing but an appointment by the head of the community, often accompanied by the ceremony of the laying on of hands. An expression of acceptance by the assembly of the monks was not guaranteed, and this transfer of authority could provoke moments of tension. Recurring disagreements are reported by the hagiographic literature, and specific interventions by metropolitans and kings are documented, in order to impose their own decisions to the benefit of one of the parties in the dispute. However, in most cases the authority of abbots, both monastic founders and their prestigious successors, remained undisputed and could include their recognition as sources of community rules (sǝrʿatä maḫbär). This practice resulted in the development of specific monastic collections, valid within a given monastery, differentiating and characterizing the religious experience of that center.49 In any case, monks who disagreed with the way the monastery was run could find an alternative by abandoning the community and devoting themselves to a solitary life as hermits. The most celebrated case is that of Samuʾel of Waldǝbba,50 a fourteenth and early fifteenth-century holy man who undertook the religious life first in Däbrä Bänkwal as a disciple of Mädhaninä Egziʾ,51 a fourteenth-century follower of Täklä Haymanot, then in the desert lowlands south-west of Aksum, where supposedly he gave impulse to a tradition of radical anchoritism. To improve our knowledge of such historical developments, and to provide frameworks for a better understanding of facts and ideas, several scholars drew up monographs in the second half of the last century surveying the history of 49  See, e.g., the case of the rules of Däbrä Bizän in Eritrea, attributed to the same Filəṗṗos, the fourteenth-century founder of the monastery, and transmitted within his gädl; Carlo Conti Rossini, ed., “Il Gadla Filpos e il Gadla Yoḥannes di Dabra Bizan,” Memorie della Reale Accademia dei Lincei. Classe di scienze morali, storiche e filologiche, 5th ser., 8 (1901): 61–170, at 94–98. 50  The edition of the Life of Samuʾel is now in Gérard Colin, ed. and trans., Vie et Miracles de Samuel de Waldebba, PO 53, 1 (235) (Turnhout, 2013); cf. Boris Turaiev, Monumenta Aethiopiae hagiologica, 2. Vita Samuelis Valdebani (Petropoli [St Petersburg], 1902); for an overview of the hagiographic dossier concerning Samuʾel, see Denis Nosnitsin, “Samuʾel of Waldǝbba,” in EAe 4 (2010), 516–518. 51  The Life of Mädhaninä Egziʾ is in Gérard Colin, ed. and trans., Vie et Miracles de Madhanina Egziʾ (Turnhout, 2010).

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Ethiopian monasticism after 1270. In Enrico Cerulli’s pioneering and synthetic “Il monachesimo in Etiopia” (1959), the general features of the monastic experience of medieval Eritrea and Ethiopia are masterfully outlined, with constant attention to the Byzantine and Oriental connections of Ethiopian history.52 The study by Steven Kaplan, The Monastic Holy Man and the Christianization of Early Solomonic Ethiopia (1984), is founded on a conception of the abbots of the medieval monasteries as “holy men” originating from aristocratic local families whom the new dynasty tried to integrate into the Christian state, not rarely causing conflictual relations between civil and religious institutions.53 Noteworthy contributions are in other monographs, like Donald Crummey’s Land and Society in the Christian Kingdom of Ethiopia (2000)54 and Marie-Laure Derat’s Le domaine des rois éthiopiens (2003).55 These latter works are essential to understanding the role of the monasteries as driving forces of economic and social history, and also represent a successful attempt to write a history of the Christian state relying upon a specific class of written documents, the rəst and the gwǝlt land grants. We find some of these short texts as additions to older

52  Enrico Cerulli, “Il monachismo in Etiopia,” in Il monachesimo orientale. Atti del convegno di studi orientali che sul predetto tema si tenne a Roma sotto la direzione del Pontificio Istituto Orientale, nei giorni 9, 10, 11 e 12 aprile 1958 (Rome, 1959), 259–278 (trans. as “Monasticism in Etiopia,” in Languages and cultures of Eastern Christianity. Ethiopian, 355–370 [no. 19]), a presentation which reflects the cultural vision often provided by the Italian scholar in his studies on the Ethiopian Middle Ages; see also Enrico Cerulli, “L’Oriente cristiano nell’unità delle sue tradizioni,” in Atti del Convegno Internazionale ‘L’Oriente cristiano nella storia della civiltà’ (Roma 31 marzo–3 aprile 1963) (Firenze 4 aprile 1963) (Rome, 1964), 9–43, repr. in idem, La letteratura etiopica. Terza edizione ampliata (Florence, 1968), 193–229; of paramount importance is also his sumptuous study of the history of the Jerusalem community, the only monograph ever dedicated to an Ethiopian monastery, though located outside Ethiopia: see Enrico Cerulli, Etiopi in Palestina. Storia della comunità etiopica di Gerusalemme, 2 vols. (Rome, 1943–1947). 53  Steven Kaplan, The Monastic Holy Man and the Christianisation of Early Solomonic Ethiopia (Wiesbaden, 1984). The achievement of these valuable conclusions was the consequence of an innovative approach, consisting in “studiare la mentalità etiopica medievale attraverso gli elementi ‘non storici’ (cioè, non riguardanti la mera storia fattuale) delle vite dei santi” (Paolo Marrassini, Review of The Monastic Holy Man by Steven Kaplan, RSE 31 [1987]: 271–277, at 272), according to the methodological principles applied (some years before Kaplan’s Monastic Holy Man) by Paolo Marrassini in his Gadla Yohannes Mesraqawi. For recent historical sketches, see Lusini, “Le monachisme en Éthiopie,” and Steven Kaplan, “Monasticism,” in EAe 5 (2014), 443–447. 54  Donald Crummey, Land and Society in the Christian Kingdom of Ethiopia: From the Thirteenth to the Twentieth Century (Oxford, 2000). 55  Marie-Laure Derat, Le domaine des rois éthiopiens (1270–1527): espace, pouvoir et monachisme (Paris, 2003).

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manuscripts, or within bigger collections,56 as in the case of the Golden Gospel of the Eritrean monastery of Däbrä Libanos.57 Indeed, the “gwǝlt act” was nothing but a personal benefit granted to a specific abbot (abba mənet), excluding his successors from the same charge. Granting a monastery by the “rəst act,” the sovereigns acknowledged the right of the religious community to inheritance of the land, with the aim of strengthening the monastic presence over problematic territories such as borderlands. The “holy men” played a decisive role in this setting, because by preaching the Gospel they became a part of the mechanism of land exploitation. In the first half of the fourteenth century the consolidation of the Solomonic dynasty rendered the relations between the court and the regular clergy (that is, the monks) more and more complicated. The priests, ruled by the authority of the Ethiopian metropolitan (the abun), were most often loyal to the civil power, because their hierarchy was an integral part of the country’s political establishment. It is indicative, for instance, that the church leaders lived close to the king, inside the itinerant military camp or kätäma. The court housed a royal church, under a special tent (däbtära), and the members of the secular clergy officiating there, the kahənatä däbtärä (thus, the priests of the royal tent or church), were familiar with the highest officers of the state. By contrast, most monks (who did not generally even take holy orders) lived in isolation in monasteries, immersed in reading and praying, in working and preaching. Therefore, they had a completely different attitude toward the civil power, the church hierarchy, and the king, basing their view on the assumption that the king himself should submit to God and observe the rules of Christian life. The most significant case is that of the dramatic conflict between the king ʿAmdä Ṣəyon I (1314–1344) and the spiritual leaders of the main monastic centers of Šäwa and Amhara. During his reign, this grandson of Yəkunno Amlak pursued the goals of extending Solomonid sovereignty over northern and southern Ethiopia at the expense of local Muslim sultanates,58 and of 56  For an overview, see Gianfrancesco Lusini, “Scritture documentarie etiopiche (Dabra Dehuhān e Dabra Ṣegē, Sarāʾē Eritrea),” RSE 42 (1998): 5–55, at 5–16. 57  Published in Carlo Conti Rossini, “L’evangelo d’oro di Dabra Libānos,” Rendiconti della Reale Accademia dei Lincei. Classe di scienze morali, storiche e filologiche, 5th ser., 10 (1901): 177–219; for an index of place names and personal names quoted by the 35 documents gathered in the collection, see Alessandro Bausi, “Un indice dell’Evangelo d’oro di Dabra Libānos (Šemazānā, Akkala Guzāy. Eritrea),” Aethiopica 10 (2007): 81–91. 58  For the “reconquest” of the Eritrean seabord, where the sultan of Dahlak was nominally ruling, see Taddesse Tamrat, “The Abbots of Däbrä Hayq,” 95–96, and idem, Church and State in Ethiopia, 76–77. The great campaign against Ifat, the Muslim sultanate ruled by the Walasmaʿ (which incorporated that of Šawah governed by the Maḫzūmī until 1285), is known chiefly thanks to a Gǝʿǝz account of ʿAmdä Ṣəyon’s military campaign,

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stabilizing the dynasty at the expense of regional rulers, particularly Yaʿəbikä Ǝgziʾ, the governor (mäkwännən) of eastern Təgray.59 As a result of these military and political initiatives, the king supported the birth of new religious foundations, but at the same time the aspiration of some monasteries to a higher degree of administrative and economic independence led them into open polemics against the central authorities of State and Church (the nəguś and the abun). In some cases, this general mood facilitated a de facto alliance between monastic institutions and local aristocracies, both sharing the quest for more autonomy. Formally, ʿAmdä Ṣəyon was criticized by monastic groups for marrying his father’s widow and for keeping concubines. Among the spiritual leaders involved in the conflict, Bäṣälotä Mika‌‌ʾel of Däbrä Gwäl appears as the most influential, the one who probably inspired the whole critical current,60 and consequently suffered serious persecution. According to their Lives, Anorewos of Däbrä ʿAsbo61 and Aron of Däbrä Daret62 were closely connected to him, because they met him on different occasions and were convinced by his preaching of religious reform. Filəṗṗos of Dabra ʿAsbo (1274–1348), the third abbot of the monastery founded by Täklä Haymanot, is considered another great accuser of kings,63 not only ʿAmdä Ṣəyon but also his successor Säyfä Arʿad (1344–1371). Emblematically, the convergence of Bäṣälotä Mika‌‌ʾel, who spent most of his life praying and preaching as a wandering monk, and Filəṗṗos, who never ceased to be abbot, whether he was in custody or exiled, represents the

representing the first example of an Ethiopian “royal chronicle”; see Paolo Marrassini, ed. and trans., Lo scettro e la croce. La campagna di ʿAmda Ṣeyon I contro l’Ifat (1332) (Naples, 1993); Manfred Kropp, ed. and trans., Der Siegreiche Feldzug des Königs ʿĀmda-Ṣeyon gegen di Muslime in Adal in Jahre 1332 N. Chr., 2 vols., CSCO 538–549, SAe 99–100 (Louvain, 1994). 59  For an overview of the sources on this historical figure, see Denis Nosnitsin, “Yaʿəbikä Ǝgziʾ,” in EAe 5 (2014), 5. 60  The Life of Bäṣälotä Mika‌‌ʾel is in Carlo Conti Rossini, ed. and trans., Vitae Sanctorum Indigenarum. I: Gadla Baṣalota Mikāʾēl seu Acta S. Baṣalota Mikāʾēl; II: Gadla S. Anorēwos seu Acta Sancti Honorii, 2 vols, CSCO, 2nd ser., 20 (Rome, 1905; repr. as CSCO 28–29, SAe 11–12 [Louvain, 1955]), 1: 1–60, 1–51. 61  The Life of Anorewos is in ibid., 1: 61–110, 2: 53–98. 62  The Life of Aron is in Boris Turaiev, ed. and trans., Vitae Sanctorum Indigenarum. III, Gadla Aron seu Acta S. Aaronis. IV, Gadla Filpos seu Acta S. Philippi, 2 vols. (Paris, 1905; repr. as CSCO 30–31, SAe 13–14 [Louvain, 1955]), 1: 111–169, 2: 99–153. 63  The Life of Filəṗṗos is in ibid., 1: 171–260, 2: 155–233; details about Filəṗṗos’ life are in a story of the translation of his relics to Däbrä Libanos, published in Getatchew Haile, “The translation of the relics of Abunä Filǝppos of Däbrä Libanos of Shoa,” RSE 34 (1990): 75–113.

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cohesion of both major monastic forms (the anchoritic and the coenobitic) in a common program of moral renewal of the regular clergy.64 For the whole fourteenth century, the need of members of the regional ruling classes to escape the absolute power of the kings and to claim their autonomy led them to find in monastic centers a religious support for their political authority. In the first half of the fourteenth century another example comes from the monastic movement initiated by Ewosṭatewos of Däbrä Ṣärabi (1273–1352), a native from Təgray.65 After the death of Ewosṭatewos in 1352, his disciples established an impressive chain of communities in the three Eritrean regions of Ḥamasen, Sära‌‌ʾe and Akkälä Guzay,66 giving themselves the ­arrangement 64  In hagiographic sources of the fourteenth-fifteenth centuries the issue seems to be connected to the matter of female monasticism, or rather the problem of the presence of women within the communities; about the hagiographical accounts specifically dedicated to female figures, see Verena Böll, “Holy Women in Ethiopia,” in Saints, Biographies and History in Africa (cit. at n. 43), 31–45. At the end of thirteenth century, housing nuns in the monasteries was a common habit, as witnessed by the Life of Täklä Haymanot. Later, the greatest leaders, starting with Bäṣälotä Mika‌‌ʾel and Filəṗṗos of Dabra ʿAsbo, fought against the custom and laid the foundations for a strict separation between men and women, as a consequence of their religious conception of gender relations. On this complex and delicate topic, see at least Joachim Persoon, “The Ethiopian monk; a changing concept of masculinity,” Journal of Ethiopian Studies 35, 1 (2002): 43–66, and Marta Camilla Wright, “At the limits of sexuality; the feminity of Ethiopian nuns,” Journal of Ethiopian Studies 35, 1 (2002): 27–42. 65  The edition of the Life of Ewosṭatewos is in Boris Turaiev, Monumenta Aethiopiae hagiologica, 3. Vita et Miracula Eustathii, ad fidem codd. Or. 704 et Or. 705 Musei Britannici edita (Petropoli [St Petersburg], 1905); translation in idem, Vitae Sanctorum Indigenarum. I: Acta S. Eustathii, CSCO 32, SAe 15 (Louvain, 1906); cf. Colin, trans., Saints fondateurs du christianisme éthiopien, 75–215. As with the Life of Täklä Haymanot, several recensions of this text are known (no less than three); see an overview of the issue in Gianfrancesco Lusini, Studi sul monachesimo eustaziano (secoli XIV–XV ) (Naples, 1993), 35–51, and idem, “The stemmatic method and Ethiopian philology: general considerations and case studies,” RSE, 3rd ser., 48 (2017): 75–86, at 81–84. About the life of the monastic leader, see Lusini, Studi sul monachesimo eustaziano, 51–67; Gianfranco Fiaccadori, “Ewosṭatewos,” in EAe 2 (2005), 469–472. 66  For an overview of the hagiographical traditions, see Lusini, Studi sul monachesimo eustaziano, 93–128; Gianfranco Fiaccadori, “Ewosṭateans,” in EAe 2 (2005), 464–469. For a survey of the Eritrean foundations, most of them belonging to the monastic network of the “sons of Ewosṭatewos,” see Alessandro Bausi and Gianfrancesco Lusini, “Appunti in margine a una nuova ricerca sui conventi eritrei,” RSE 36 (1992): 5–36. For the wealth and value of their libraries, see Alessandro Bausi, “Su alcuni manoscritti presso comunità monastiche dell’Eritrea (I),” RSE 38 (1994): 7–69; idem, “Su alcuni manoscritti presso comunità monastiche dell’Eritrea (II),” RSE 39 (1995): 25–48; idem, “Su alcuni manoscritti presso comunità monastiche dell’Eritrea (III);” Gianfrancesco Lusini, “Scritture documentarie etiopiche (Dabra Dehuhān e Dabra Ṣegē, Sarāʾē Eritrea);” see also Alessandro

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and the coordination of a true schismatic order, under the direction of Absadi of Däbrä Maryam.67 In spite of their difficult conditions, isolated and victims of persecution, the “sons of Ewosṭatewos” benefited from the support of a local aristocratic group led by the head of Sära‌‌ʾe, Wärasinä Egziʾ, and developed a specific written tradition, of which the sophisticated style of illumination of Däbrä Maryam is the most evolved expression.68 From the dogmatic point of view, these monks claimed the observance of rest and worship on both Sabbaths, namely Saturday and Sunday, according to a liturgical custom already existing in early Christian times. Most likely, the emphasis on this specific point was a reaction against the innovative wind blowing from Alexandria and the demanded obedience to the decisions taken by the formal heads of the church, namely the Coptic patriarch and the Ethiopian metropolitan, both of Egyptian origin.69 The king was part of the dispute and for a long time took the side of the ecclesiastical hierarchy against the rebel monks, who kept following the indigenous tradition and resisted topdown directives. From the time of King Dawit II (1379/80–1413), and even more under his successor Zärʾa Yaʿəqob (1434–1468), things changed completely. The two kings recognized the positive role played by the monks, even those advocating the respect of rules not in line with Egyptian orthodoxy, and started to consider the “sons of Ewosṭatewos” as the true representatives of Ethiopian religious identity. Even in this case, religious and political motivations were intertwined. Most of the religious centers of this monastic group were in the provinces to the north of the river Märäb, in contemporary Eritrea. Their presence in disputed territories, where the Dahlak sultanate had a great influence, proved to be a resource for the Ethiopian kings. It is no coincidence that the leader of the Ewosṭatean movement in the phase of reconciliation with the king was

Bausi and Gianfrancesco Lusini, “The Philological Study of the Eritrean Manuscripts in Gəʿəz: Methods and Practices,” in International Conference of Eritrean Studies, 20–22 July 2016. Proceedings. ed. Zemenfes Tsighe et al., 2 vols. (Asmara, 2018), 1: 125–141. 67  The edition of the Life of Absadi is in Gianfrancesco Lusini, ed. and trans., Il Gadla Absādi (Dabra Māryām, Sarāʾe), 2 vols., CSCO 557–558, SAe 103–104 (Louvain, 1996). For an overview of the historical issues, see Lusini, Studi sul monachesimo eustaziano, 69–92. 68  Marilyn E. Heldman, “An Ewostathian style and the Gunda Gunde style in fifteenth century Ethiopian manuscript illustration,” in Proceedings of the First International Conference on the History of Ethiopian Art (Warburg Institute, London, October 21–22, 1986), ed. Richard Pankhurst (London, 1989), 5–14. 69  For an overview, see Lusini, Studi sul monachesimo eustaziano, 15–33.

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Filəṗṗos, the abbot of Däbrä Bizän,70 a monastery that still today dominates the road that leads from the highlands and the Ḥamasen plain to the seaboard and the port of Massawa.71 Not less significant is the case of the “sons of Ǝsṭifanos,” namely the monastic movement born in the ʿAgame region of eastern Təgray, around the almost inaccessible amba of Gundä Gunde or Däbrä Gärzen, not far from ʿAddigrat.72 This monastery became the stronghold of the monastic rule initiated by a disciple of the highly venerated saint Sämuʾel of Däbrä Qwäyäṣa. During his whole life, Ǝsṭifanos (1397/8–1444) spread among his followers a strict monastic rule involving extreme ascetic practices and the refusal of every contact with the outside world. Metropolitan Bärtälomewos (ca. 1398/99–1438) examined his theological views, but could find no unorthodox element in Ǝsṭifanos’s faith. Nonetheless, the “holy man” faced the strong opposition of Zärʾa Yaʿəqob, who tried to make him accept the principle of his superiority in religious matters, had him tortured, and brought him to death in prison. The king persecuted for years Ǝsṭifanos’s disciples too, but even in these uneasy conditions, the abbots 70  The edition of the Life of Filəṗṗos is in Carlo Conti Rossini, “Il Gadla Filpos e il Gadla Yoḥannes di Dabra Bizan,” Memorie della Reale Accademia dei Lincei. Classe di scienze morali, storiche e filologiche, 5th ser., 8 (1901): 61–170. 71  See Otto Meinardus, “Notizen über das eustathische Kloster Debra Bizen,” Annales d’Éthiopie 6 (1965): 285–291; Roger Schneider, “Notes sur Filpos de Dabra Bizan et ses successeurs,” Annales d’Éthiopie 11 (1978): 135–139; Aron Andemichael, “The Monastery of Debre Bizan,” in Proceedings of a Workshop on Aspects of Eritrean History (20–21 September 2005, Asmara), ed. Tekeste Melake (Asmara, 2007), 28–40. 72  See Taddesse Tamrat, “Some notes on the fifteenth century Stephanite ‘heresy’ in the Ethiopian Church,” RSE 22 (1966): 103–115; Robert Beylot, “Un épisode de l’histoire ecclésiastique de l’Éthiopie. Le mouvement stéphanite. Essai sur sa chronologie et sa doctrine,” Annales d’Éthiopie 8 (1970); 103–116 ; idem, “Estifanos, hétérodoxe éthiopien du XVe siècle,” Revue de l’histoire des religions 198, 3 (1981); 279–284; idem, “Sur quelques hétérodoxes éthiopiens. Estifanos, Abakerazun, Gabra Masih, Ezra,” Revue de l’histoire des religions 201, 1 (1984): 25–36; idem, ed. and trans., “Actes des Pères et Frères de Debra Garzen: introduction et instructions spirituelles et théologiques d’Estifanos,” Annales d’Éthiopie 15 (1990): 5–43; idem, “La dissidance stéphanite en Éthiopie,” in De la conversion, ed. JeanCristophe Attias (Paris, 1997), 119–132; Getatchew Haile, “The Cause of the Ǝsṭifanosites: A Fundamentalist Sect in the Church of Ethiopia,” Paideuma 29 (1983): 93–119; idem, ed. and trans., The Gǝʿǝz Acts of Abba Ǝsṭifanos of Gwǝndagwǝnde, 2 vols. CSCO 619–620, SAe 110–111 (Louvain, 2006); idem, ed. and trans., A History of the First Ǝsṭifanosites Monks, 2 vols., CSCO 635–636, SAe 112–113 (Louvain, 2011). About the monastery, particularly the wealth and value of its library, see Antonio Mordini, “Il convento di Gunde Gundiè,” RSE 12 (1953): 29–71; idem, “Indagini sul convento di Gunde Gundiè e su problemi di storia medioevale etiopica,” in Mélanges Eugène Tisserant, vol. 3, Orient Chrétien, 2ème Partie (Vatican City, 1964), 85–111.

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and monks of Däbrä Gärzen survived, and succeeded in developing their own literary language and manuscript illumination characterized by a high level of stylization.73 The clash between Ǝsṭifanos and Zärʾa Yaʿəqob poses a specific historical problem. One can say that this personal and institutional contrast represents the apex of the conflict between civil and religious institutions that started when monks became protagonists of Ethiopian history. From the royal point of view, monks should have been nothing but docile instruments in secular hands, indefatigable propagators of Christian doctrine among the peoples recently incorporated in the kingdom and guarantors of the social order in return for benefits and land grants. From the monastic point of view, the king’s power was nothing but a reflection of the real absolute power, that of the heavenly King, from which the earthly king’s power derived. As a result, Ǝsṭifanos refused to prostrate himself in front of Zärʾa Yaʿəqob, and Zärʾa Yaʿəqob accused the “arrogant” monk of lèse-majesty. In these historical circumstances, among difficulties and persecution, Ethiopian monks managed to maintain the cultural role they had had since Christianity made its first appearance in the country. Even today, the book (not rarely the manuscript) is the inseparable companion of the Ethiopian monk, and the written word is the inexhaustible source of his knowledge and faith. In traditional Ethiopian society monks were the only individuals possessing the skills of reading and writing, and the monasteries were the only places where the transmission of written knowledge occurred. Noblemen and kings might be able to read and write too, provided that during their early youth they had frequented monastic schools. From the point of view of literary creativity and manuscript production, monks were the protagonists of an accumulation process, active until very recent times, that displays a number of interesting phenomena we can detect through philological study.74 A huge monastic literature, including hagiographic narrations, monastic rules, and theological treatises,75 is one of the main features of Eritrean and Ethiopian written culture. The broad range of the Mediterranean sources of Gǝʿǝz literature, going from Latin to Greek, and from Syrian to Arab-Coptic writers, proves again the strong connection of Ethiopian-Eritrean monasticism to the similar experiences occurring in the rest of the Christian world. 73  See Heldman, “An Ewostatian style and the Gunda Gunde style”. 74  See Alessandro Bausi, “Il testo, il supporto e la funzione. Alcune osservazioni sul caso dell’Etiopia,” in Studia Aethiopica in Honour of Siegbert Uhlig on the Occasion of his 65th Birthday, ed. Verena Böll et al. (Wiesbaden 2004), 7–22. 75  For an overview of the textual collections, see Alessandro Bausi, “Monastic literature,” in EAe 3 (2007), 993–999.

chapter 9

Ethiopia and the Christian Ecumene: Cultural Transmission, Translation, and Reception Alessandro Bausi Late antique and medieval Christian Ethiopia were intensively characterized by processess of cultural transmissions and interactions, the most evident and widespread form of which is translations.1 Attested starting from the most ancient Ethiopian manuscripts, translations are therefore a substantial and constituent part of medieval Ethiopian cultural production and at the same time a core element of its literary heritage. Acquisition through translation from Greek characterizes late antiquity; acquisition, adaptation and revision of texts from Arabic and, later, revision of the Bible on the Hebrew text, occasionally at times, also from Latin, characterise the centuries from the twelfth at the latest to the sixteenth and beyond, with various phases and prevailing interests. These translations transmitted from the literatures of other cultures were in the overwhelming majority into Gǝʿǝz, but there is a unanimous consensus that this form of interaction did not necessarily imply any cultural subordination of the Ethiopian culture and that in most cases the processes of translation implied a more complex cultural reception and appropriation.2 This large 1  This research has been funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft through the Sonderforschungsbereich 950 (Manuskriptkulturen in Asien, Afrika und Europa), by the European Research Council, European Union Seventh Framework Programme IDEAS (FP7/2007–2013) / ERC grant agreement no. 338756 (TraCES), and by The Union of the German Academies of Sciences and Humanities through a project of the Academy of Hamburg (Beta maṣāḥǝft). My thanks to Samantha Kelly, François-Xavier Fauvelle, and the Fondation des Treilles, for having encouraged and supported the realization of this contribution; to Alberto Camplani, with whom I had the privilege to discuss issues and share ideas concerning a common subject of study over the last almost twenty years; to Antonella Brita, who substantially contributed in various ways to the research presented in this chapter; and to Jacques Mercier, who first entrusted me with the study of unpublished materials that have made me so incredibly busy for many years. 2  For a discussion of translation from this perspective in the Egyptian case, see the essays by Paola Buzi, Alberto Camplani, and Franco Crevatin, collected in Egitto crocevia di traduzioni, ed. Franco Crevatin (Trieste, 2018), with consideration of recent studies. From this point of view, the debate on the “originality” of Ethiopian literature is not at variance with many others, starting from the most outstanding case of the relationship between Greek and Roman literature. For a balanced and comprehensive evaluation, see, still, Enrico Cerulli,

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body of translated texts was the essential background against which the first original written production emerged in the course of time. Uncovering what texts were translated, in what period, and from what languages is a very complex matter, and has justifiably been the central concern of most philological studies to date. To summarize briefly the present state of the art, we can say, first, that the schematic opposition outlined in several reference literatures between an ancient period and a later-medieval period has been increasingly nuanced by the recognition that at its earliest appearance (in the twelfth/thirteenth century) Ethiopian medieval literature drew on a preceding layer to a larger extent than was commonly believed, and that this layer was not always directly transmitted and preserved. Secondly, it has become clear that translations were virtually exclusively from Greek in late antiquity, and from Arabic in the Middle Ages. It is accepted, however, that the Arabic texts translated in the Middle Ages are themselves based on various linguistic models, including Coptic, Syriac, and Greek, and thus indirectly transmit streams of quite different origin.3 Our understanding of the process of transmission in Gǝʿǝz texts is hindered by two decisive factors. First, with one notable exception, no dated manuscript antedates the thirteenth century (or, with some caution, the twelfth), long after the decline of the ancient Aksumite kingdom. (The kingdom’s apogee is rightly placed between the third and the early seventh century; by the “Perspectives on the History of Ethiopia,” in Languages and Cultures of Eastern Christianity: Ethiopian, ed. Alessandro Bausi (Farnham, Surrey, 2012), 1–25. 3  This contribution draws heavily on previous essays of the author where a few topics were dealt with more in detail, in particular see Alessandro Bausi, “Writing, Copying, Translating: Ethiopia as a Manuscript Culture,” in Manuscript Cultures: Mapping the Field, ed. Jörg Quenzer, Dmitry Bondarev, and Jan-Ulrich Sobisch (Berlin, 2014), 37–77; idem, “Ethiopic Literary Production Related to the Christian Egyptian Culture,” in Coptic Society, Literature and Religion from Late Antiquity to Modern Times. Proceedings of the Tenth International Congress of Coptic Studies, Rome, September 17th–22nd, 2012, and Plenary Reports of the Ninth International Congress of Coptic Studies, Cairo, September 15th–19th, 2008, ed. Paola Buzi, Alberto Camplani, and Federico Contardi, vol. 1 (Louvain, 2016), 503–71; idem, “The Earlier Ethiopic Textual Heritage,” in Scribal Practices and the Social Construction of Knowledge in Antiquity, Late Antiquity and Medieval Islam, ed. Myriam Wissa (Louvain, 2017), 215–35; idem, “Translations in Late Antique Ethiopia,” in Egitto crocevia di traduzioni, ed. Franco Crevatin (Trieste, 2018), 69–99; Alessandro Bausi and Alberto Camplani, eds. and trans., “The History of the Episcopate of Alexandria (HEpA): Editio Minor of the Fragments Preserved in the Aksumite Collection and in the Codex Veronensis LX (58),” Adamantius 22 (2016): 249–302. Accordingly, the aim of this chapter is not that of providing a catalogue of works translated into Gǝʿǝz, but that of showing with the necessary degree of accuracy and detail, a few case studies that in the author’s intention appear to be exemplary for reasons of contents and method.

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mid-seventh century coins were no longer issued and the level of material culture gradually decayed.)4 The exception is the “Gärima Gospels,” two FourGospel manuscripts from the Ǝnda Abba Gärima monastery, which have been dated by carbon-14 to ca. the fifth to seventh centuries5 and attest to the oldest translation into Gǝʿǝz of the New Testament, undoubtedly based upon a Greek model. The second obstructing factor is that Gǝʿǝz was no longer a commonly spoken language from probably the tenth or early eleventh century CE, surviving rather as a classical language of scholarly education and religious practice, for record keeping and literature.6 The fixing of a “classical stage” of the language for Gǝʿǝz might have implied the selection among different dialects or 4  For overviews on Aksum, see David W. Phillipson, Foundations of an African Civilisation: Aksum & the Northern Horn 1000 BC–AD 1300 (Woodbridge, Eng., 2012); Christian Julien Robin, “Arabia and Ethiopia,” in The Oxford Handbook of Late Antiquity, ed. Scott Fitzgerald Johnson (Oxford, 2012), 247–332; Pierluigi Piovanelli, “Reconstructing the Social and Cultural History of the Aksumite Kingdom: Some Methodological Reflections,” in Inside and Out. Interactions between Rome and the Peoples on the Arabian and Egyptian Frontiers in Late Antiquity, ed. Jitse H. F. Dijkstra and Greg Fisher (Louvain, 2014), 331–52. Outdated works, but still useful, are Carlo Conti Rossini, Storia d’Etiopia. Parte prima: Dalle origini all’avvento della dinastia Salomonide (Bergamo, 1928); Sergew Hable Selassie, Ancient and Medieval Ethiopian History to 1270 (Addis Ababa, 1972). 5  See now the comprehensive monograph by Judith S. McKenzie and Francis Watson, The Garima Gospels: Early Illuminated Gospel Books from Ethiopia (Oxford, 2016), and the review of it by Alessandro Bausi in Aethiopica 20 (2017): 287–292. The documentary texts in the manuscripts have been published by Getatchew Haile, “The Marginal Notes in the Abba Gärima Gospels,” Aethiopica 19 (2016): 7–26. 6  See Maria Bulakh and Leonid E. Kogan, “Geėz Jazyk,” in Jazyki Mira: Semitskie Jazyki. Ėfiosemitskie Jazyki, ed. Maria S. Bulakh et al. (Moscow, 2013), 141–99, at 143 for the beginning of the second millennium as the time when Gǝʿǝz ceased to be spoken, and for further opinions on the disputed subject, Alessandro Bausi, “Ancient Features of Ancient Ethiopic,” Aethiopica 8 (2005): 149–169, at 166, n. 55. The status of Gǝʿǝz as an established classical language since the time of our earliest medieval manuscript records emerges from the appearance of technical terms of non-Gǝʿǝz status within a substantially standard Gǝʿǝz language, where no elements of morphology or syntax were affected, see for example now Marie-Laure Derat, L’énigme d’une dynastie sainte et usurpatrice dans le royaume chrétien d’Éthiopie du xie au xiiie siècle (Turnhout, 2018), 33–36, and passim, for Tǝgrǝñña terms in twelfth-century documents. Note that linguists are generally reticent, on good grounds, in advancing hypotheses on this point, see for example Stefan Weninger, “Old Ethiopic,” in The Semitic Languages, An International Handbook, ed. Stefan Weninger (Berlin, 2011), 1124–42, who does not propose any specific date. In one of the classics of twentieth-century historiographical thought, Marc Bloch quotes the Ethiopian case to give an example of what he calls a “hierarchical bilingualism,” as follows: “De nombreuses sociétés ont pratiqué ce qu’on peut appeler un bilinguisme hiérarchique. Deux langues s’affrontaient, l’une populaire, l’autre savante. Ce qui se pensait et se disait couramment dans la première s’écrivait, exclusivement ou de préférence, dans la seconde. Ainsi, l’Abyssinie, du XIe au XVIIe siècle, écrivit le guèze, parla l’amharique”: Marc Bloch, Apologie pour l’histoire ou métier d’historien, 2nd ed. (Paris, 1952), 83.

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even stylistic varieties existing in Aksumite times, and the updating or even discarding of other varieties, along with the texts written in those varieties. For transmitted texts too, this phenomen involved a continuous reworking of the linguistic, literary, and manuscript tradition as long as new texts were created and new translations with different models were acquired. Both factors mean that to uncover processes of transmission in antiquity one must look for clues preserved in texts copied centuries later and in different linguistic circumstances.7 Ascertaining the immediate linguistic model (Vorlage) of a translated text is never simple: phenomena of orthography, paleography, linguistic and stylistic updating, revision, and textual contamination tend to blur the evidence in the course of a long manuscript transmission. Nonetheless, a variety of indices can be used. When candidate models are preserved, it is relatively easy to determine to which version the Gǝʿǝz translation is closer. In the case of the Old Testament, for instance, the Gǝʿǝz version’s textual correspondence with the Greek Septuagint as against the Hebrew text, the presence of Greek loanwords, syntactic structures that correspond to those of the corresponding Greek texts, and some ‘mirror-type’ translations that can only be explained with a Greek model provide decisive evidence.8 Even when a candidate model text is not preserved, strong clues can point toward the Vorlage. Some examples that would point to a Greek (and not Arabic) model include a syntax that is strongly at variance with the expected syntax of classical Gǝʿǝz; mirror-type rendering of compounds; forms of Greek personal names that are not compatible with the phonetic system of Arabic where there is the neutralization of some oppositions (like β/π/φ, all rendered with Arabic f ); and frequency of the gerund, that is well used to render the Greek participle, but has little

7  See Alessandro Bausi, “On Editing and Normalizing Ethiopic Texts,” in 150 Years after Dillmann’s Lexicon: Perspectives and Challenges of Gǝʿǝz Studies, ed. Alessandro Bausi and Eugenia Sokolinski (Wiesbaden, 2016), 43–102 for a more detailed discussion of these issues. 8  For recent overviews see Stefan Weninger, “Gǝʿǝz Bible Editions,” in EAe 1 (2003), 569–571; Rochus Zuurmond, “Bible Vorlage: Greek,” in EAe 1 (2003), 564–565; Michael A. Knibb, “Bible Vorlage: Syriac, Hebrew, Coptic, Arabic,” in EAe 1 (2003), 565; Rochus Zuurmond and Curt Niccum, “The Ethiopic Version of the New Testament,” in The Text of the New Testament in Contemporary Research: Essays on the Status Quaestionis, ed. Bart D. Ehrman and Michael W. Holmes, 2nd ed. (Leiden, 2013), 231–52. A more detailed evaluation of select editions of biblical texts is in Bausi, “On Editing;” further bibliographical references in idem, “Translations in Late Antique Ethiopia,” 77, nn. 25–26. A notable recent study of this kind was provided by Michael A. Knibb, “Textual Commentary on the Ethiopic Text of Ezekiel 1–11,” Aethiopica 20 (2017): 7–49, as a parergon to his 2015 edition of Ezekiel.

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use in rendering Arabic verbal phrases.9 Conversely, evidence suggesting an Arabic Vorlage includes phonetic neutralization typical of a passage through the Arabic phonetic system; verbal forms and syntactic structures and agreements that correspond to those of Arabic; and emergence of verbal forms that are probably the result of an Arabic influence.10 1

Phases of Transmission and Their Source Literatures

Despite the difficulties posed by the existing documentation, the broad outlines of linguistic history in the “historical Ethiopian area” have been established for some time. The region has been marked since the earliest

9   See Josef Hofmann, Die äthiopische Johannes-Apokalypse kritisch untersucht, CSCO 297, Subsidia 33 (Louvain, 1969); Michael A. Knibb, Translating the Bible: The Ethiopic Version of the Old Testament (Oxford, 1999); John Russiano Miles, Retroversion and Text Criticism: The Predictability of Syntax in an Ancient Translation from Greek to Ethiopic (Chico, CA, 1985); Pierluigi Piovanelli, “Sulla Vorlage aramaica dell’Enoch etiopico,” Studi classici e orientali 37 (1987): 545–594 for a series of examples of the application of this method. For some applications to non-biblical texts, see, e.g., Alessandro Bausi, ed. and trans., “L’Epistola 70 di Cipriano di Cartagine in versione etiopica,” Aethiopica 1 (1998): 101–30; idem, ed. and trans., “Liste etiopiche di vescovi niceni,” in Orientalia Christiana. Festschrift für Hubert Kaufhold zum 70. Geburtstag, ed. Peter Bruns and Heinz Otto Luthe (Wiesbaden, 2013), 33–73. 10  Manfred Kropp, “Arabisch-äthiopische Übersetzungstechnik am Beispiel der Zena Ayhud (Yosippon) und des Tarikä Wäldä-ʿAmid,” Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft 138 (1986): 314–46; Paolo Marrassini, ed. and trans., “Il Gadla Latṣun,” Egitto e Vicino Oriente 10, 2 (1987): 121–60, at 122–123; Rainer Voigt, “Greek Loan-Words in Gǝʿǝz (Classical Ethiopic): The Role of Arabic,” in Β’ Και Γ’ Διεθνες Συνεδριο Ελληνοαραβικων Σπουδων. Second and Third International Congress on Greek and Arabic Studies, ed. Vassilios Chrestides (Athens, 1991), 265–72; Gérard Colin, “Une particularité de la langue du Synaxaire éthiopien: L’emploi inchoatif du verbe ኮነ፡ (kona) (un parallèle à une valeur de Ḫpr),” Revue d’Égyptologie 44 (1993): 195–98; Stefan Weninger, Das Verbalsystem des Altäthiopischen. Eine Untersuchung seiner Verwendung unter Berücksichtigung des Interferenzproblems (Wiesbaden, 2001); idem, “Beobachtungen zur Übersetzungssprache im äthiopischen Secundus Taciturnus,” in Secundus Taciturnus. Die arabischen, äthiopischen und syrischen Textzeugen einer didaktischen Novelle aus der römischen Kaiserzeit. Mit einem Beitrag von S. Weninger zur Übersetzungssprache der äthiopischen Version, ed. and trans. Martin Heide (Wiesbaden, 2014), 45–59; idem, “Zur Funktion altäthiopischer Diskurspartikeln: -Ke und -(ə)ssä,” in Neue Beiträge zur Semitistik, ed. Viktor Golinets et al. (Münster, 2015), 325–44, also for the language of post-Aksumite Gǝʿǝz in general. It is obviously more difficult to single out “mirror-type” translations in the case of closely related languages like Arabic and Gǝʿǝz, but it might still be possible.

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documented linguistic phase by phenomena of multilingualism.11 By the first millennium BCE at the latest, the presence of non-Semitic speakers and early Semitic settlers can be perceived from toponyms and substratum phenomena, while a twofold Sabaean (South Arabian) layer, attested in some 200 inscriptions on African soil, already bears traces of Ethiopian Semitic languages, to which Gǝʿǝz belongs.12 The second/third century CE provides the earliest Gǝʿǝz inscriptions, undoubtedly in connection with the emergence of the kingdom of Aksum from the first century CE,13 so that Gǝʿǝz can be rightly styled as the language of the kingdom of Aksum and of the Aksumites. At the same time, there is evidence of the local use of Greek: in the first century CE Zoskales, the ruler of a coastal region in present-day Eritrea, was described by the author of the Periplus of the Erythrean Sea as “expert in Greek letters,”14 and some twenty Greek inscriptions that were issued by Ethiopians in late antiquity are materially preserved, to which can be added the famous inscription of the Monumentum Adulitanum including the “Throne of Adulis,” now lost but copied in the early sixth century, that was issued by an unknown Aksumite king.15 There is, however, absolutely no evidence concerning any practice of 11  For a more detailed presentation of the early history of Ethiopian multilingualism and overview on ancient translations, see Bausi, “Translations in Late Antique Ethiopia.” 12  Walter W. Müller, “Sabaic Inscriptions in Ethiopia and Eritrea,” in EAe 3 (2007), 156–158; Manfred Kropp, “Schriften und Sprachen im Kontakt: Sabäisch in Äthiopien und die ersten Zeugnisse der äthiopischen Sprache und Schrift,” in In Kaiserlichem Auftrag. Die Deutsche Aksum – Expedition 1906 Unter Enno Littmann, ed. Steffen Wenig, vol. 2 (Wiesbaden, 2011), 323–37; Francis Breyer, “Das Wort für ‘König’ im aksumitischen Altäthiopisch. Spurensuche in einem gesprochen – und geschriebensprachlich multilingualen Areal,” Folia Orientalia 49 (2012): 87–99. 13  Alessandra Avanzini, “Inscriptions,” in EAe 3 (2007), 152–153; Serguei A. Frantsouzoff, “Gǝʿǝz Inscriptions in South Arabia,” in EAe 3 (2007), 162–3; Gianfranco Fiaccadori, “Gǝʿǝz Inscriptions in Ethiopia/Eritrea in Medieval and Modern Times,” in EAe 3 (2007), 163–165. For overviews see Paolo Marrassini, Storia e leggenda dell’Etiopia tardoantica. Le iscrizioni reali aksumite con un’appendice di Rodolfo Fattovich su la civiltà aksumita: Aspetti archeologici e una nota editoriale di Alessandro Bausi, ed. Alessandro Bausi (Brescia, 2014), and Christian Julien Robin, “Ḥimyar, Aksūm, and Arabia Deserta in Late Antiquity. The Epigraphic Evidence,” in Arabs and Empires before Islam, ed. Greg Fisher (Oxford, 2015), 127–71. Gǝʿǝz epigraphy remains an active field, with notable recent essays by, for instance, Francis Breyer, Yohannes Gebre Selassie, Carsten Hoffman, and Norbert Nebes, too numerous to cite in full here. The essential reference work remains the RIÉ. 14  Lionel Casson, ed. and trans., The Periplus Maris Erythraei (Princeton, 1989), 2–3; Gianfranco Fiaccadori, “Periplus of the Erythrean Sea,” in EAe 4 (2010), 133–134. 15  Gianfranco Fiaccadori, “Greek Inscriptions in Ethiopia/Eritrea,” in EAe 3 (2007), 158– 159; idem “Monumentum Adulitanum,” in EAe 3 (2007), 1010–1012; Marrassini, Storia e leggenda, 196–203; Michael Alexander Speidel, “Die Throninschrift von Adulis und das römische Reich am Roten Meer zu Beginn des dritten Jahrhunderts n.Chr.,” Zeitschrift

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literary translations in the pre-Christian/pagan period, except for multilingual inscriptions. Some royal Aksumite inscriptions occur in a bilingual combination Gǝʿǝz-Greek, with a set consisting of three separate, more or less parallel inscriptions, where the Greek version in Greek script is accompanied by two versions in Gǝʿǝz, a first one in Sabaean script and a second one in Ethiopian ( fidäl) script.16 The consensus, based upon philological and linguistic evidence, is that the earliest extensive translations of a literary character took place with the Christianization of the country,17 from the fourth century CE, on the basis of Greek models18 of prevailingly Egyptian provenance.19 It no longer seems necessary to devote a special paragraph to dismissing the hypothesis of Aramaic-, particularly Syriac-based translations.20 The adoption of Christianity required, Für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 200 (2016): 287–300. A more popularizing account is Glen Warren Bowersock, The Throne of Adulis: Red Sea Wars on the Eve of Islam (Oxford, 2013), but see also the reviews by David W. Phillipson in Northeast African Studies 14, 2 (2014): 183–89 and by Iwona Gajda in Pount 10 (2016): 195–97. 16  On coins (issued in gold, silver, and copper) only Gǝʿǝz and Greek were used, with Greek reserved exclusively for golden issues of higher prestige. See Wolfgang Hahn and Vincent West, Sylloge of Aksumite Coins in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford (Oxford, 2016). 17  There is no ascertained evidence for the presence of texts transmitted in manuscripts dating back to the pre-Christian pagan period, but for a discussion of the hypothesis and a possible case, see Osvaldo Raineri, “Zeus in Etiopia: dal Ms. Comb. et. S 12 della Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana,” in Scritti in Memoria Di Emilio Teza, ed. Delio Vania Proverbio (Venice, 1997), 187–93. On Aksumite pre-Christian religion, see Marrassini, Storia e leggenda, 43–47. 18  Biblical quotations also occur in Aksumite inscriptions. See the identifications (mostly from the Psalms) from inscriptions listed in RIÉ 1 in Joëlle Beaucamp, Françoise BriquelChatonnet, and Christian Julien Robin, “La persécution des Chrétiens de Nagrān et la Chronologie Ḥimyarite,” ARAM 11–12 (1999–2000): 15–83, at 39, n. 98, and another, Is 22:22 (RIÉ 1, no. 191:24), in Pierluigi Piovanelli, “The Apocryphal Legitimation of a ‘Solomonic’ Dynasty in the Kǝbrä Nägäśt – A Reappraisal,” Aethiopica 16 (2013): 7–44, at 22–24. See also Bausi, “On Editing and Normalizing Ethiopic Texts,” 86, n. 117. 19  See for this the reasonable and well-grounded arguments of Ted Erho, “The Shepherd of Hermas in Ethiopia,” in L’Africa, l’Oriente Mediterraneo e l’Europa. Tradizioni e Culture a Confronto, ed. Paolo Nicelli (Milan, 2015), 97–118, at 97–99, based on the presence in Ethiopia of the Book of Enoch, the Shepherd of Hermas, Jannes and Jambres, and the biblical canon as a whole. 20  Fundamental are Hans Jakob Polotsky, “Aramaic, Syriac, and Geʿez,” Journal of Semitic Studies 9 (1964): 1–10; Paolo Marrassini, “Ancora sul problema degli influssi siriaci in età aksumita,” in Biblica et Semitica. Studi in memoria di Francesco Vattioni, ed. Luigi Cagni (Naples, 1999), 325–37; idem, “Once Again on the Question of Syriac Influences in the Aksumite Period,” in Languages and Cultures of Eastern Christianity. Ethiopian, ed. Alessandro Bausi, trans. Caterina Franchi (Burlington, VT, 2012), 209–219; and for an overview, Marrassini, Storia e leggenda, 103–108. See also Tedros Abraha, “Quotations from Patristic Writings and References to Early Christian Literature in the Books of

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of course, a substantial body of literature, largely similar to that found in other Eastern Christian churches and their respective languages. In keeping with the epigraphic and numismatic evidence that points to the use of Greek along with Gǝʿǝz – there is no trace of later use of Greek after the Aksumite period – there is also a general consensus that this phase of early translations of Christian texts is to be placed in the period from the fourth to the sixth centuries and was based upon Greek models. This corpus, besides biblical and para-biblical (apocryphal) texts, certainly included patristic writings concerning theology, hagiography, and homiletic, liturgical, and monastic works, but also the presence of texts of a historiographical character is a recently ascertained fact.21 The traditional canon of works for this early phase of translations – the Bible, major apocryphal works like the Book of Enoch, the Book of Jubilees, the Rest of the words of Baruch, the third and fourth books of Ezra, the Ascension of Isaiah, the Shepherd of Hermas, and probably some Lives of the Prophets; the Qerǝllos; a few monastic and hagiographic texts, including the Rules of Pachomius, the Life of Paul the first hermit, and the Life of Anthony; the Physiologus; the oldest recension of the Covenant of Mercy – is found in several histories of Ethiopian literature, and has remained the same for many decades, without any substantial integration in our documentation, save for new manuscripts and aspects of textual tradition, but still, without substantial recognition of new texts.22 St. Yared,” Le Muséon 122, 3–4 (2009): 331–404; Aaron M. Butts, “Ethiopic Christianity, Syriac Contacts With,” in The Gorgias Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Syriac Heritage, ed. Sebastian P. Brock et al. (Piscataway, NJ, 2011); idem, “Embellished with Gold: The Ethiopic Reception of Syriac Biblical Exegesis,” Oriens Christianus 97 (2013–2014): 137–59, particularly important for the role ascribed to the intermediation of Arabic versions; Ralph Lee, “Symbolism of ‘Syriac Origin’ in the Dǝggwa,” in Proceedings of the First International Conference on Ethiopian Texts. May 27–30, 2013, St. Francis Friary, Asko, ed. Daniel Assefa and Hiruy Abdu (Addis Ababa, 2016), 127–38; and on the tradition of the Nine Saints, sometimes described as Syrian in origin, Antonella Brita, “Nine Saints,” in EAe 3 (2007), 1188–1191. All in all, the interference with Syriac Christianity is possibly documented by very few loanwords, while other assumed Syriac loanwords are better explained, according to Hans Jakob Polotsky, as loanwords from Jewish Aramaic. Outdated positions nonetheless continue to be voiced and published, and confusion is sometimes introduced by, for instance, mixing elements of Syrian origin with those of Syrian provenance. 21  Gianfrancesco Lusini, “L’Église axoumite et ses traditions historiographiques (IVe– VIIe siècle),” in L’historiographie de l’Église des premiers siècles. Actes du colloque de Tours, septembre 2000 organisé par l’Université de Tours et l’Institut Catholique de Paris, ed. Bertrand Pouderon and Yves-Marie Duval (Paris, 2001), 541–57, for the state of the art, and Alessandro Bausi, “‘Tempo e Storia’ nella tradizione etiopica cristiana,” in Tempo e Storia in Africa / Time and History in Africa, ed. Alessandro Bausi, Alberto Camplani, and Stephen Emmel (Milan, 2019), 79–112, for the new developments. 22  The current traditional canon is represented for example by Ignazio Guidi, Storia della letteratura etiopica (Rome, 1932), 11–21. For updates to it see Bausi, “The Earlier Ethiopic

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In the last decades, however, new texts have been attributed to this early period, like the Treatise on the Antichrist by Hippolytus, the apocryphal Infancy Gospel, the Testament of Our Lord, the Doctrine of the mysteries, the Ancoratus by Epiphanius, writings of John of the Ladder (John Climacus) and several exegetical works attributed to Philo of Carpasia, like the commentaries on the Song of Songs and on Paul.23 Also to be mentioned are the important discoveries of Ted Erho, with the identification of a fragment of the Ethiopic version of the apocryphon of Jannes and Jambres.24 Even so, it is rare in Ethiopian studies that new light is abruptly revealed by the discovery of a substantial series of previously unknown texts that help better understand the development of literary history, textual transmission, and the dynamics of translation. Yet this is what happened with the discovery, over twenty years ago, in a monastery of northern Tǝgray, of a single codex. The codex itself dates to the thirteenth century at the latest. It contains a previously unknown canonical-liturgical collection of translated texts, so far attested only in this codex unicus, which appear to belong to the Aksumite period (fifth-sixth century CE). For the sake of convenience, it has been termed the Aksumite Collection.25 In its present form consists of a collection of thirtysix pieces of various lengths, ranging from patristics to liturgy and canon law. It closely resembles the Synodicon, but it brings completely new evidence and clearly belongs to the oldest layer of early Christian canon law and liturgy. There is no comparable collection preserved in Greek, Coptic or Arabic. In terms of the individual texts that it contains, the Aksumite Collection bears witness to some previously unknown Gǝʿǝz pieces that were translated during the Aksumite period from Greek models dating from the fourth to the second Textual Heritage,” and idem, “Translations in Late Antique Ethiopia,” 73–74. For the historiographical texts, see below at n. 25. 23  Bausi, ‘Ethiopic Literary Production Related to the Christian Egyptian Culture,’ 507–510, with a comprehensive list; Bausi, ‘The Earlier Ethiopic Textual Heritage,’ 219–221; Rafał Zarzeczny, “Some Remarks Concerning the Ethiopic Recension of the ‘Life of Antony,’” Orientalia Christiana Periodica 79 (2013): 37–60; idem, “The Story of Paul the Simple from the Historia Lausiaca by Palladius in Its Ethiopic Recension,” Orientalia Christiana Periodica 82 (2016): 127–78. 24  Ted M. Erho and W. Benjamin Henry, “The Ethiopic Jannes and Jambres and the Greek Original,” Archiv für Papyrusforschung 65, 1 (2019): 176–223. 25  The history and current state of the research is provided in Bausi and Camplani, “The History of the Episcopate of Alexandria (HEpA): Editio Minor of the Fragments Preserved in the Aksumite Collection and in the Codex Veronensis LX (58).” The manuscript is Tǝgray, ʿUra Mäsqäl, Ethio-SPaRe UM-039, olim with shelfmark C3-IV-71, also known as the ‘Sinodos of Qǝfrya’. It was discovered some twenty years ago by Jacques Mercier who committed its study to me. On the historical importance of the site of Qǝfrya see now Derat, L’énigme d’une dynastie sainte, passim.

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half of the fifth century. As a collection, it shows strong ties with an Egyptian setting and with the Alexandrian archives in particular, and was arranged after the mid-fifth century, probably no later than the mid-sixth. Among the set of conciliar canons, it preserves those of the councils of Constantinople (381 CE) and of Chalcedon (451 CE), these latter followed by their patristic refutation. Aside from a most remarkable historical section containing a History of the Episcopate of Alexandria and focusing on the period of the Melitian schism, previously known only fragmentarily from Latin excerpts, there is a new Gǝʿǝz version of the lost Greek Apostolic Tradition, which is considered the most important Christian canonico-liturgical text.26 The transmission of texts, and in general the corpus of works in Christian Ethiopia between the seventh and the later thirteenth century, have long been obscure: our information only becomes plentiful in the later thirteenth century, with a notable wave of translations from Coptic-Arabic. But a special border-case is that of single texts transmitted within archaic homiliaries dated to the turn of the thirteenth (on paleographic grounds) and fourteenth century. They are found in the well-known manuscripts EMML 1763 and 8509 and in London, British Library, Or. 8192; several more emerged during recent fieldwork and digitization campaigns.27 These texts started to be thoroughly investigated particularly during the cataloguing of the EMML collection, with path-breaking contributions by Getatchew Haile and Sergew Hable Selassie.28 26  Alessandro Bausi, “The ›So-called Traditio Apostolica‹: Preliminary Observations on the New Ethiopic Evidence,” in Volksglaube im Antiken Christentum. Prof. Dr. Theofried Baumeister OFM zur Emeritierung, ed. Heike Grieser and Andreas Merkt (Darmstadt, 2009), 291–321; idem, ed. and trans., “La ‘nuova’ versione etiopica della Traditio apostolica: edizione e traduzione preliminare,” in Christianity in Egypt: Literary Production and Intellectual Trends in Late Antiquity. Studies in Honor of Tito Orlandi, ed. Paola Buzi and Alberto Camplani (Rome, 2011), 19–69; idem, “The Aksumite Collection. Ethiopic Multiple Text Manuscripts,” in Comparative Oriental Manuscript Studies: An Introduction, ed. Alessandro Bausi et al. (Hamburg, 2015), 367–72. For the general context see Paul F. Bradshaw, Maxwell E. Johnson, and L. Edward Phillips, The Apostolic Tradition: A Commentary (Minneapolis, 2002). 27  For all references and a detailed history of research see Alessandro Bausi, “A Few Remarks on the Hagiographico-Homiletic Collections in Ethiopic Manuscripts,” in HagiographicoHomiletic Collections in Greek, Latin and Oriental Manuscripts – Histories of Books and Text Transmission in a Comparative Perspective, ed. Caroline Macé and Jost Gippert, 2018, forthcoming. 28  Getatchew Haile, “The Martyrdom of St. Peter Archbishop of Alexandria (EMML 1763, Ff. 79r–80v),” Analecta Bollandiana 98 (1980): 85–92; idem, “A New Ethiopic Version of the Acts of St. Mark (EMML 1763, Ff. 224r–227r),” Analecta Bollandiana 99 (1981): 117–34; Sergew Hable Selassie, “An Early Ethiopian Manuscript EMML 8509 (Ethiopian Manuscript Microfilm Library),” Quaderni di studi etiopici 8–9 (1987–1988): 5–27. Other examples include Gianfrancesco Lusini, “Appunti sulla patristica greca di tradizione etiopica,”

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They play a special connecting role between the heritage of the Aksumite period and the medieval era, on a twofold level: first because they could transmit homilies composed in the early medieval period itself, and second – with greater bearing on the topic of translation and transmission – because they bear evidence of reshaping and restructuring an earlier heritage. A similar place is held by manuscripts of the hagiographic collection known as the Lives of the martyrs (Gädla sämaʿǝtat), which have been the object of several focused investigations over the last twenty years.29 These combine an earlier heritage of ancient Greek-based translations with the new wave of Arabic-based texts. Convergent data are provided by recent research on palimpsests, which has revealed early fragments of homiletic and hagiographic texts.30 This is also the period when allegedly, according to its colophon, the Kǝbrä nägäśt was translated from Coptic into Arabic, as will be discussed further below. If we wish to look more closely at the processes of receiving and restructuring the Ethiopian literary corpus that took place in this period, we can do no better than to consider the Acts of St Peter of Alexandria. The text was first published by Getatchew Haile in 1980 from a manuscript of Däbrä Ḥayq Ǝsṭifanos (MS EMML 1763), where it takes the form of a short homily or dǝrsan.31 The manuscript’s provenance is itself worth attention, for the monastery of Studi classici e orientali 38 (1988): 469–94; idem, “Gli Atti apocrifi di Marco,” Aethiopica 12 (2009): 7–47; Delio Vania Proverbio, La recensione etiopica dell’omelia pseudocrisostomica de ficu exarata ed il suo tréfonds orientale (Wiesbaden, 1998); Osvaldo Raineri and Tedros Abraha, “Filone Di Carpasia: un’omelia Pasquale trasmessa in etiopico,” in ΕΥΚΟΣΜΙΑ. Studi Miscellanei per Il 75° Di Vincenzo Poggi S.J., ed. Vincenzo Ruggeri and Luca Pieralli (Soveria Mannelli, 2003), 377–98; Sever J. Voicu, “Filone Di Carpasia e Pseudo Ippolito: Di Un’omelia Pasquale Tramandata in Etiopico,” Augustinianum 44, 1 (2004): 5–24. 29  See for all references Alessandro Bausi, ed. and trans., “Il Gadla ʾAzqir,” Adamantius 23 (2017): 342–380. On the Acts of Azqir themselves one may add S. A. Francuzov, “ ‘Житие Св. Азкирa’ Как Источник По Истории Южной Аравии,” Hristianskij Vostok 11 (2003): 139–46; Basil Lourié, “Friday Veneration in Sixth- and Seventh-Century Christianity and Christian Legends about the Conversion of Naǧrān,” in The Coming of the Comforter: When, Where, and to Whom?: Studies on the Rise of Islam and Various Other Topics in Memory of John Wansbrough, ed. Carlos A. Segovia and Basil Lourié (Piscataway, NJ, 2012), 131–230. 30  The analysis was conducted on MS Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Orientabteilung, Peterm. II Nachtr. 24, within a project directed by Loren Stuckenbruck with the participation of Ted Erho. Getatchew Haile and Steve Delamarter are conducting similar analyses of palimpsests at the monastery of St Catherine in Sinai which have revealed a Gǝʿǝz fragment of the Horologion that must antedate the overlying Greek text, itself of the twelfth-thirteenth century. 31  Getatchew Haile, “The Martyrdom of St. Peter Archbishop;” for the entire dossier see Alberto Camplani, “Pietro di Alessandria tra documentazione d’archivio e agiografia popolare,” in Volksglaube im antiken Christentum. Prof. Dr. Theofried Baumeister OFM zur Emeritierung, ed. Heike Grieser and Andreas Merkt (Darmstadt, 2009), 138–56.

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Däbrä Ḥayq Ǝsṭifanos probably played an important role in refashioning the Ethiopian literary heritage, even before the establishment of a new hegemonic canon in the age of Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob (1434–68).32 Of prime importance, however, is that the Aksumite Collection also preserves the text of the Acts of St Peter of Alexandria, where it is part of the longer, historiographic narrative of the History of the Episcopate of Alexandria. This is the only case researched so far in which two forms of the same narrative are fully preserved and documented. It attests to a process of excerpting from older works and of reworking them in a different genre – here the homily, collections of which date to the thirteenth/fourteenth century at the latest. That this is the case and not the other way around is explicitly stated at the beginning of the homily form of the Acts of Peter, where it is said to come from the “Synodicon of the (Christian) law” (sinodos zä-ḥǝgg), which was probably also the name by which the Aksumite Collection was known at the time.33 This is formidable evidence of how elements of the late antique Ethiopian (Aksumite) heritage, almost certainly translated from a Greek Vorlage, were re-used in later times. Moreover, this case alerts our attention towards other possible cases, for which we lack the documentation of both textual phases. In the thirteenth century the earlier Aksumite corpus acquired in late antiquity is attested by the earliest medieval manuscripts dated on paleographic basis. It has survived in the course of time through complex processes of transmission, but some texts are attested in a much reshaped form due to partial re-translations from Arabic into Gǝʿǝz and Arabic translations are positively documented starting from the thirteenth century, as we will see, by book 32  For consideration of similar tenor concerning the apocryphal writings, see Pierluigi Piovanelli, “Les aventures des apocryphes en Éthiopie,” Apocrypha 4 (1993): 197–224; idem, “The Adventures of the Apocrypha in Ethiopia,” in Languages and Cultures of Eastern Christianity: Ethiopian, trans. Sarah Waidler (Farnham, Surrey, 2012), 87–109. For the role of Däbrä Ḥayq Ǝsṭifanos, see Alessandro Bausi, “La Collezione aksumita canonico-liturgica,” Adamantius 12 (2006), at 53–54; idem, “The Aksumite Background of the Ethiopic ‘Corpus Canonum,’” in Proceedings of the XVth International Conference of Ethiopian Studies, Hamburg, July 20–25, 2003, ed. Siegbert Uhlig et al. (Wiesbaden, 2006), 532–41, at 538; idem, “The So-Called ‘Traditio Apostolica,’” 298, n. 17. 33  Getatchew Haile, “The Martyrdom of St. Peter Archbishop,” 88; see also the new edition with consideration of MSS EMML 8509 and Ethio-SPaRe UM-037 in Bausi and Camplani, “The History of the Episcopate of Alexandria,” 266, apparatus, with a presumably reconstructed text as follows: dǝrsan zäP̣ eṭros wäMariqos wängelawi nägärä Sinodos zäḥǝgg kämäzǝ, “Homily on Peter and the Evangelist Mark, narrative of the Synodicon of the Law, as follows.” Note that Mariqos is an archaic form for Marqos: see e.g. Alessandro Bausi, ed. and trans., “La versione etiopica della Epistola di Eusebio a Carpiano,” in Aethiopia Fortitudo Ejus. Studi in onore di Monsignor Osvaldo Raineri in occasione del suo 80° ­compleanno, ed. Rafał Zarzeczny (Rome, 2015), 107–35, at 125, § 5, commentary.

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inventories. In terms of transmitted literatures, translation from Arabic models was the major phenomenon of the later Middle Ages; from the fourteenth century, as attested in notes in manuscripts (subscriptions or colophons of translation), such activity was frenetically taking place. Subscriptions transmitting data on a translation (name and/or circumstance, such as date or place of a translation) are in fact not so frequent, but they are an invaluable source for determining dates and circumstances of texts’ presence and circulation.34 Although minor, there is evidence for a non-Coptic-based Arabic stream of translations, connected to Sinai rather than to Egypt, represented by texts like the Acts of Arethas (Gädlä Ḫirut), the Acts of Kaleb (Gädlä Kaleb), the Acts of Athanasius of Clysma, and the Acts of Azqir (Gädlä Azqir), that have no parallel in the Coptic-Arabic tradition.35 Yet, from the middle of the fourteenth century several notes document that a substantial corpus of hagiographic, homiletic, and other texts was translated under the impulse of the metropolitan Sälama (1348–1388), credited with translating dozens of works himself and with stimulating the translation of yet others: a few tens of pieces are explicitly attributed to him by subscriptions.36 He is also credited by modern scholars with the revision of the Bible on the basis of a Syriac-based Arabic version that produced the so-called vulgata recension.37 Still, the vast majority of texts translated in this period into Gǝʿǝz are from Coptic-Arabic, that is from texts that are Egyptian 34  Alessandro Bausi, “I colofoni e le sottoscrizioni dei manoscritti etiopici,” in Colofoni armeni a confronto. Le sottoscrizioni dei manoscritti in ambito armeno e nelle altre tradizioni scrittorie del mondo mediterraneo. Atti del colloquio internazionale. Bologna, 12–13 ottobre 2012, ed. Anna Sirinian, Paola Buzi, and Gaga Shurgaia (Rome, 2016), 233–60. 35  Details in Bausi, “Ethiopic Literary Production Related to the Christian Egyptian Culture,” 515–516. 36  Arnold Van Lantschoot, “Abbā Salāmā, métropolite d’Éthiopie (1348–1388) et son rôle de traducteur,” in Atti del Convegno Internazionale di Studi Etiopici (Roma 2–4 aprile 1959) (Rome, 1960), 397–402; Paolo Marrassini, “Sälama,” in EAe 4 (2010), 488–489. 37  Traces of Syriac textual features have been recognised in the so-called “vulgata recension” of the Old Testament, starting from the fourteenth century. These readings go back to revisions undertaken in the medieval period through Arabic versions based upon Syriac models; therefore there is no clearly documented case of direct interference between Syriac and Gǝʿǝz. Later manuscripts also show Hebraisms in a later recension of the Old Testament, which can be explained by revisions undertaken ca. 1500 on the basis of a Masoretic Hebrew text; although the circumstances of this revision are not yet clear, these features appear exclusively in more recent manuscripts and secondary textual layers, and are certainly due to a relatively recent development. Still another matter is the issue of purported presence of ancient Hebraic or Jewish elements in Ethiopian Christianity and specifically in its linguistic and literary layer. If the presence of a few Aramaic loanwords, probably from Jewish Aramaic, is well established and can be given for certain, the context of their origin and presence is still highly unclear and very much disputed.

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not only in provenance, but also in origin.38 Hagiographies, monastic Lives and rules, service and liturgical books, apocrypha of the Old and particularly of the New Testament, and homiletic collections are by far the best represented genres. To take but one example, the texts whose translation is attributed to Sälama have been grouped under hagiography (eight single texts, mostly Lives included in the Gädlä sämaʿǝtat), homilies (four), and others (monastic rules, Filkǝsyus, and Gǝbrä ḥǝmamat, i.e. the Homiliary for Holy Week).39 2

Case Study in Transmission: Book Inventories

The changing character of this corpus over time is best illustrated by book inventories. They are a precious source of information on translations when they are dated, in establishing a terminus ante quem. Entry titles pose an interpretive problem, since obviously they may not correspond to the modern understanding. Books may be listed according to the first section present in 38  A general overview is Bausi, “Writing, Copying, Translating: Ethiopia as a Manuscript Culture;” idem, “Ethiopic Literary Production Related to the Christian Egyptian Culture,” also offers a long list of texts translated from Arabic and relevant contributions at 523–571. On medieval translations in Ethiopian literature in general see at least Carlo Conti Rossini, “Piccoli Studi Etiopici,” Zeitschrift für Assyriologie und verwandte Gebiete 27 (1912): 358–78; idem, “Egitto ed Etiopia nei tempi antichi e nell’età di mezzo,” Aegyptus 3 (1922): 3–18; Marius Chaîne, “La date de la morte du metropolite Abbā Salāmā,” Aethiops 1 (1922): 33–36; Jean Doresse, “Littérature éthiopienne et littérature occidentale au MoyenÂge,” Bulletin de La Société d’Archéologie Copte 16 (1961–1962): 139–59; Joseph-Marie Sauget, “Un exemple typique des relations culturelles entre l’arabe-chrétien et l’éthiopien: un Patericon récemment publié,” in IV Congresso Internazionale di Studi Etiopici (Roma, 10–15 aprile 1972), ed. Enrico Cerulli, vol. 1 (Rome, 1974), 321–88; Gianfranco Fiaccadori, “Aethiopica Minima,” Quaderni Utinensi 7, 13–14 (1989): 145–64; Steven Kaplan, “Found in Translation: The Egyptian Impact on Ethiopian Christian Literature,” in Narrating the Nile: Politics, Identities, Cultures. Essays in Honor of Haggai Erlich. A Tribute to Professor Erlich on the Occasion of His Retirement from Tel Aviv University, ed. Israel Gershoni and Meir Hatina (Boulder and London, 2008), 29–39; Zeus Wellnhofer, “Die arabisch-altäthiopische Übersetzungsliteratur im historischen Kontext des 13. und 14. Jahrhunderts,” in Multidisciplinary Views on the Horn of Africa. Festschrift in Honour of Rainer Voigt’s 70th Birthday, ed. Hatem Ellisie (Cologne, 2014), 467–95. Useful information, as usual, is also provided by the general overviews, see Guidi, Storia della letteratura etiopica; Enrico Cerulli, La letteratura etiopica. L’oriente cristiano nell’unità delle sue tradizioni, 3rd ed. (Florence, 1968); Lanfranco Ricci, “Letterature dell’Etiopia,” in Storia delle letterature d’oriente, ed. Oscar Botto, vol. 1 (Milan, 1969), 803–911; Robert Beylot, “Langue et littérature éthiopiennes,” in Christianismes orientaux: introduction à l’étude des langues et des littératures, ed. Micheline Albert et al. (Paris, 1993), 221–260. 39  See Marrassini, “Sälama.”

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the volume, which in the case of multiple-text manuscripts can be misleading. Even so, inventories provide valuable information and have been already used for dating works.40 One of the most important and probably the earliest extant inventory of books is found in the Golden Gospel of Däbrä Ḥayq Ǝsṭifanos (MS EMML 1832): it lists the books bequeathed to the monastery of Ḥayq Ǝsṭifanos by its founder, the monk Iyäsus Moʾa, in 1292 CE, for which this note determines the terminus non post quem.41 This inventory provides a picture of an important monastic library at the end of the thirteenth century, and is worth citing in full:42 The books that Iyäsus Moʾa donated to (Däbrä Ḥayq) Ǝsṭifanos were: this Gospel, 1; Pauline (Epistles), 1; Catholic (Epistles), 2; Egyptian (Horologium), 1; Homily about “Koste” (Pentecost?), 1; Bärbara, 1; Lives of the martyrs (Gädlä Sämaʿǝt) 2; Acts of Quiricus with Acts of George, 1; collection of the Books of Kings (Guba‌ʾe Nägäśt), 1; the Book of Baptism with Penitence of Ninevite, 1; Ascension of Mary, 1; Martyrium of Naǧrān (Gädlä Nagran), 1; Revelation of the Prophets, 1; Life of Aron, 1; Lectionary for Holy Week (Gǝbrä ḥǝmamat), 1; History of the (monastic) Fathers (Zena Abäw), 1; the Three Brothers, 1; Life of Ṗänṭälewon, 1; Liturgy 1; Litany, 1; Horologium, 2; Psalter, 1; Hymns, 1; Salastu (hymnary), 1; Yǝtbaräk (service book), 1; Kǝbr yǝʾǝti (service book), 2. In one Gädlä Sämaʿǝt, 12; in Aron, 7; 40  One cannot but agree with Erho, “Shepherd of Hermas,” 100–101, n. 8, who laments that book inventories have so rarely been used by scholars to determine the terminus ante quem of certain works, yet there are important precedents. Ignazio Guidi (Storia della letteratura etiopica, 31, 35–37, 42) dated six works – namely, the Gädlä Sämaʿǝtat, Gädlä Gäbrä Krǝstos, Zena Abäw, Senodos, Didǝsqǝlya, and Qälemǝnṭos – before 1425 based on their presence in a dated inventory (itself commented by Carlo Conti Rossini, “Aethiopica (II),” RSO 10, 2 [1925]: 481–520, at 508–511). The case is discussed in Alessandro Bausi, “Su alcuni manoscritti presso comunità monastiche dell’Eritrea [I. Dabra Māryām],” RSE 38 (1994): 13–69, at 20–21. This important document, from a Gospel in the collection of Saint Petersburg (MS Vostočn. 612) with a provenance from Jerusalem, was edited by Boris Turaev, Ėfiopskija Rukopisi v S.-Peterburgě (St Petersburg, 1906), 124–125, but only briefly mentioned by Enrico Cerulli, Etiopi in Palestina, 2 vols. (Rome, 1943–47), at 1: 233, n. 1, who did not keep his promise to discuss it in detail in the second part of his work. 41  Sergew Hable-Selassie, “The Monastic Library of Däbrä Hayq,” in Orbis Aethiopicus. Studia in Honorem Stanislaus Chojnacki natali septuagesimo quinto dicata, septuagesimo septimo oblata, ed. Piotr O. Scholz, Richard Pankhurst, and Witold Witakowski, 2 vols. (Albstadt, 1992), 1: 243–58. See also Bausi, ed. and trans., La versione etiopica degli Acta Phileae nel Gadla samāʿtāt (Naples, 2002), 7–8, for analysis of the inventory’s hagiographical texts, and Erho, “Shepherd of Hermas in Ethiopia,” 108–117, comparing data from other lists to demonstrate the relatively early non-canonical status of the Shepherd of Hermas. 42  Sergew Hable Selassie, “Monastic Library of Däbrä Hayq,” 247, with commentary on 247– 250. His transcription and translation have been substantially adapted here.

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in one Gädlä Sämaʿǝt, 15; in Gädlä Nagran, 9; in Acts of Ṗänṭälewon, 5; in the Penitence of Ninevite, 7. Total 85. It is worth noting that the author of the inventory took into account that some volumes contained multiple texts, and specified at the end how many single items were contained in the volumes previously listed according to a title (that presumably refers to the first text in the volume). Without going into too much detail, it is apparent that besides biblical books, the most prominent genres are hagiographic literature (mostly Lives of the martyrs, either in single – or multiple-text manuscripts), liturgical and hymnodic books, and monastic literature. All these texts, with the only possible exception of the service books, are literature of translation. There is no mention at all of pseudo-apostolic literature. A quite different picture emerges from a second inventory list produced some 150 years later. It comes from Däbrä Maryam in present-day Eritrea, a monastery founded by Ewosṭatewos’s direct disciple, Absadi, in the fourteenth century. The inventory itself dates to the time of the abbot Gäbrä Krǝstos, who served from 1446 CE:43 The first, that is the Orit (Octateuch), 2; Jubilees, 2; Book of Kings, 1; Chronicles, 1; Isaiah, 2; Jeremiah, 2; Ezekiel, 3; Ezra, 1; Daniel, 1; (Books of) Solomon, 1; Job, 2; Sirach, 2; Minor Prophets, 1; Maccabees, 1; Tobit, 2; Judith and Esther, 1; Numbers, 1; Leviticus, 1; Enoch, 1; Gospels, 8; Catholic Epistles, 3; Pauline Epistles, 3; Apocalypse of John, 3; Synodicon (Senodos), 3; Clement (Book of Clement or Qälemǝnṭos), 2; Commentary on the Gospels, 1; Testament of Our Lord (Mäṣḥafä kidan), 2; Commentary on John, 1; Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles (Gädlä ḥawaryat), 2; Lives of the martyrs (Gädlä Sämaʿǝt), 2; Concordance of the words, 1; Epistle of humanity (Ṭomarä tǝsbǝʾt), 1; Book of the light (Mäṣḥafä bǝrhan), 1; Didascalia (Didǝsqǝlya), 2; Shepherd of Hermas, 1; History of the (monastic) Fathers (Zena Abäw), 3; Book of Abba Pachomius (Abba Ṗakwǝmis), 1; Abba Barsoma, 1; Chrysostom, 1; Lectionaries, 2; Collection of charters (Mäzgäb), 1; Books of Psalters, 3; Zǝmmare (chants), 2; Order of the 43  Bausi, “Su alcuni manoscritti presso comunità monastiche dell’Eritrea,” 35–36, 43; the list is also reported and translated in Erho, “Shepherd of Hermas in Ethiopia,” 113–114. See now also Massimo Villa, “Monastic Libraries in Eritrea: An Agenda for the Future,” RSE, 3rd ser., 49, 2 (2018): 157–81, at 166–169, and 168, n. 37 for the list. For the importance of the monastery of Däbrä Maryam in literary history, see Gianfrancesco Lusini, “Copisti e filologi dell’Etiopia medievale. Lo Scriptorium di Dabra Māryām del Sarāʾē (Eritrea),” La parola del passato 59/3 (336) (2004): 230–37; idem, “Däbrä Maryam,” in EAe 2 (2005), 33.

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congregation, 1; Acts of Our Fathers, 4; Homiliary for (the feast of the archangel) Michael (Dǝrsanä Mika‌ʾel), 1; Miracles of Mary (Täʾammǝrä Maryam), 2; Transitus of Mary (Mäṣḥafä fǝlsäta), 1; Prayer of Incense (Ṣälotä ʿǝṭan), 1; Funeral ritual (Mäṣḥafä gǝnzät); Salutation chants (Mäzmur sälam), 1. Though this second inventory includes “new” entries, this does not necessarily mean that these works did not exist previously – we cannot take these lists as a “union catalogue” of medieval Ethiopian libraries, all the more since we know for certain that works dating back to late antiquity were out of circulation already at the time of the earliest lists. Yet, the positive appearance of works that we know for certain were translated from Arabic is a strong clue, if not a proof, of their introduction in this period. In all cases, this is in keeping with the evidence offered by the earliest attested manuscripts of the single works themselves.44 Besides all previous kinds of books – biblical, hagiographical, and liturgical texts, along with major apocrypha like the Book of Enoch and the Book of Jubilees – the massive appearance of pseudo-apostolic literature is striking, with the Synodicon, Book of Clement, Testament of Our Lord, and Didascalia. Of major importance, too, is the appearance of what we know to be new texts in the Gǝʿǝz corpus, such as the Miracles of Mary and original works attributed to Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob such as the Epistle of humanity and the Book of the light. 3

Reception History and Texts in Context

Scholars have only occasionally turned their attention to the personnel who undertook translations, to the institutional settings in which translations took place, and to the “reception history” of these works in their Ethiopian setting. The comprehensive field of manuscript studies and book science, including the study of libraries, archives and record keeping, has recently provided important data for a better understanding of the still underresearched topic of

44  It is useful to remember that the first serious history of Ethiopian literature was sketched by the young Carlo Conti Rossini on the basis of two parallel contributions, on the actual distribution of works, and on available manuscripts, each of them provided with a date, in European libraries: Carlo Conti Rossini, “Note per la storia letteraria abissina,” Rendiconti della Reale Accademia dei Lincei, Classe di scienze morali, storiche e filologiche, 5th ser., 8 (1899): 197–220, 263–285; idem, “Manoscritti e opere abissine in Europa,” in the same volume at 606–37.

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“copyists at work,” which encompasses (although it is of course not confined to) works of translation.45 For the Aksumite era, the production of royal multilingual epigraphic documents, not without parallels in the ancient world, presupposes a refined process of translation which definitely posits an institutionally organized setting.46 Aside from any speculation concerning the possible existence of a royal chancery and/or archive at Aksum – as the title of “guardian of the law, that is secretary of Aksum” (ʿaqqabe ḥǝgg zäwǝʾǝtu ṣäḥafe Aksum) bestowed upon Frumentius/Sälama, the first bishop of Aksum, would seem to suggest47 – there is a total lack of information on the Sitz im Leben of the multilingual inscriptions, whose production and translation remain highly obscure. Irrespective of whether and how similar institutionalized settings might have survived the decline of the Aksumite kingdom, the very strong links between Ethiopia and Christian Egypt, so evident in antiquity, can still be seen even in the dimly-perceived centuries before the late thirteenth century and are abundantly apparent thereafter. A recently discovered and extremely precious witness to such links is provided by a paper manuscript fragment. Besides the Gärima Gospels, it is the only carbon-14 dated Gǝʿǝz manuscript. It is only one fragmentary leaf, but from an archeological context that allows precise identification of its provenance, if not necessarily its place of production: the Egyptian monastery of St Anthony. It is dated to 1185–1255 CE (68.2%) or 1160–1265 ce (95.4%).48 This brings us already into a period that is sever45  See Anaïs Wion and Paul Bertrand, “Introduction to the Special Issue: Production, Preservation, and Use of Ethiopian Archives (Fourteenth–Eighteenth Centuries),” Northeast African Studies, 11, 2 (2011): vii–xvi; Denis Nosnitsin, Churches and Monasteries of Tǝgray. A Survey of Manuscript Collections (Wiesbaden, 2013); Alessandro Bausi, “Documentary Manuscripts and Archives: The Ethiopian Evidence,” in Labor Limae. Atti in Onore Di Carmela Baffioni, ed. Antonella Straface, Carlo De Angelo, and Andrea Manzo (Naples, 2014–2015), 2: 63–80; Ewa Balicka-Witakowska et al., “Ethiopic Codicology,” in Comparative Oriental Manuscript Studies: An Introduction, ed. Alessandro Bausi et al. (Hamburg, 2015), 154–74; Gianfrancesco Lusini, “Il ‘paesaggio ecclesiastico’ in Etiopia. Riflessioni intorno a un recente contributo,” Annali dell’Università degli studi di Napoli “L’Orientale” 75 (2015): 193–206. 46  For the fourth-century King ʿEzana in particular, we have an entire series of multilingual inscriptions: two sets of three inscriptions each, concerning an expedition against the Bǝga from the pagan period, and one set composed of two plus one inscriptions, concerning an expedition against the Noba, apparently after ʿEzana’s conversion to Christianity. 47  Gianfranco Fiaccadori, “Archives and Libraries. I: Archives,” in EAe 5 (2014), 244–248, at 245; idem, “Sälama (Käsate Bǝrhan),” in EAe 4 (2010), 485–486. 48  Fr. Maximous el-Antony, Jesper Blid, and Aaron Michael Butts, “An Early Ethiopic Manuscript Fragment (Twelfth-Thirteenth Century) from the Monastery of St Antony (Egypt),” Aethiopica 19 (2016): 27–51.

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al centuries later that the Gärima Gospels, but still well ahead of the earliest dated literary manuscripts. Although it is still unclear if the two different Gǝʿǝz texts discernible on the two sides of the leaf are both translated, as appears very likely – one is the beginning of a homily attributed to John Chrysostom – and from which model, this fragment definitely attests to the existence of a continuous relationship with Egyptian monasteries. It also testifies to an activity of peculiar manuscript production, namely on paper, and therefore outside the geographical borders of the Christian Ethiopian kingdom (where only parchment was used). A close relationship with the monastery of St Anthony is also presupposed by a note of consecration attributed to the metropolitan Mika‌ʾel I and referring to events dating to 1149/1150, even though not all aspects of this document are yet completely clear.49 The mid-twelfth to early thirteenth century thus offers evidence of close links between the (Egyptian) metropolitan of Ethiopia and the monastery of St Anthony, and of the production at that monastery of a Gǝʿǝz manuscript, by an Ethiopian or at least by a Gǝʿǝz-conversant copyist. By the fourteenth century we have evidence that translations resulted from such links. A subscription to the Acts of Basilides (Gädlä Fasilädäs – one of the many works included in the collection Lives of the martyrs), indicates that the text was translated in the year 1396/1397 by “Sǝmʿon the sinner, the Egyptian, priest and monk from the monastery of Saint Abba Anthony.”50 Sǝm‘on is in all probability also the author of the first translation into Gǝʿǝz of the Synaxarion,51 though for this work we do not know whether the translator was Ethiopian or Egyptian nor where he actually worked. Furthermore, St Anthony’s was not the only Egyptian monastery involved in Gǝʿǝz translations. The White Monastery of Shenoute52 was a place where translations into Gǝʿǝz were carried out, as indicated by the subscription to the Acts of Theodore the Oriental (Gädlä Tewodros bänadlewos), that 49  The note is preserved in a Gospel book of the monastery of Mika‌ʾel Amba: see Derat, L’énigme d’une dynastie sainte, 40–46, esp. 42–43, for the last edition, translation, and detailed commentary with further references. 50  The only manuscript of this redaction preserving the colophon is Paris, BnF, d’Abbadie 66, f. 180r, published by Carlo Conti Rossini, Notice sur les manuscrits éthiopiens de la Collection d’Abbadie (Paris, 1914), 169; see also Gérard Colin, “Le Synaxaire éthiopien. État actuel de la question,” Analecta Bollandiana 106 (1988): 273–317, at 300. For the date (Year of the Creation 6889, which is Year of the Martyrs 1113) see details in Bausi, La versione etiopica degli Acta Phileae, 11 n. 43. The text is also quoted in an inventory dated to the reign of King Ǝskǝndǝr (r. 1478–1494) in MS EMML 6934, f. 3v, albeit translated by Erho, “Shepherd of Hermas in Ethiopia,” 112 as ‘Life of Claudius’. 51  Gérard Colin and Alessandro Bausi, “Sǝnkǝssar,” in EAe 4 (2010), 621–623; Maximous el-Antony, Blid, and Butts, “Early Ethiopic Manuscript Fragment,” 48–49. 52  Paola Buzi and Alessandro Bausi, “Shenute of Atripe,” in EAe 4 (2010), 648–650.

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attributes the translation to a Mika‌ʾel or Zämika‌ʾel from that monastery, during the reign of King Gäbrä Mäsqäl, probably either ʿAmdä Ṣǝyon (1314–1344) or Yǝsḥaq (1414–1430).53 If we consider as well the many translations carried out by the metropolitan Sälama, in Ethiopia, in the mid-fourteenth century, it becomes yet clearer that Egyptian persons and places played an important role in extending and revising the Ethiopian literary corpus. Other notes from manuscripts coming from Egypt collected by Enrico Cerulli in his fundamental work on the Ethiopian community of Palestine54 let us understand the kind of relationship entertained with the Egyptian monastic communities, though we are still very far from a precise understanding of the Sitz im Leben of these translations and related practices. We do not know exactly in the vast majority of cases how translations were carried out, by whom, how they were written down, in which kind of carrier – single fascicles, bundles, unbound or bound, copied and re-copied – nor how the copies were disseminated and the texts assembled and transmitted. One tantalizing clue, however, is offered by a subscription in the Acts of Bsoy, from a manuscript preserved in the church of Ǝnda Abba Ṗänṭälewon near Aksum. It states that “the translation was accomplished from the Egyptian language into Gǝʿǝz according to the dictation of (bäʾafä) the sinner Bärtälomewos.” Bäʾafä literally means “by the mouth of,” and could hint at a process of oral translation, eventually written down by others: this would mean that translations were orally dictated.55 Also deserving mention is the colophon or subscriptio transmitted in the manuscripts of that most famous Ethiopian literary composition, the Nobility of the Kings (Kǝbrä nägäśt),56 where the Israelite descent of the Ethiopian Christian monarchy and the nature of its kingship are the main themes of the narrative, at the core of which is the visit of Queen Makǝdda to King Solomon,

53  Details in Bausi, La versione etiopica degli Acta Phileae, 12, n. 44. 54  Cerulli, Etiopi in Palestina, with documents edited and translated in the second volume. 55  Bausi, “I colofoni,” 243. I examined personally the manuscript in Ethiopia in 2001. 56  Paolo Marrassini, “Kǝbrä nägäśt,” in EAe 3 (2007), 364–368; the essays collected in Alessandro Bausi, ed., Languages and Cultures of Eastern Christianity. Ethiopian (Burlington, VT, 2012), lvi – lix, 253–328; the long introduction in Robert Beylot, trans., La Gloire des Rois ou l’histoire de Salomon et de la reine de Saba (Turnhout, 2008); Piovanelli, “Apocryphal Legitimation;” Alessandro Bausi, “La leggenda della regina di Saba nella tradizione etiopica,” in La Regina di Saba: Un mito fra Oriente e Occidente, Atti del seminario diretto da Riccardo Contini, Napoli, Università “L’Orientale”, 19 novembre 2009–14 gennaio 2010, ed. Fabio Battiato, Dorota Hartmann, and Giuseppe Stabile (Naples, 2016), 91–162; Derat, L’énigme d’une dynastie sainte, 201–205.

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the birth of their son and the transfer of the Ark of the Covenant to Ethiopia. Here is the colophon, slightly abridged:57 In the Arabic text it is said: ‘We have turned (this book) into Arabic from a Coptic manuscript (belonging to) the See of Mark the Evangelist, the teacher, the Father of us all. We have translated it in the 409th year of mercy in the country of Ethiopia, in the days of Gäbrä Mäsqäl the king, who is called Lalibala, in the days of Abba Giyorgis, the good bishop. And God neglected to have it translated and interpreted into the speech of Abyssinia.’ And when I had pondered this – Why did not Abälʿǝz and Abälfäräg who edited (or, copied) the book translate it? I said this: It went out in the days of Zagʷa, and they did not translate it because this book says: Those who reign not being Israelites are transgressors of the Law. Had they been of the kingdom of Israel they would have edited (or, translated) it. And it was found in Nazret.[…] And I consulted the upright and God-loving governor Yaʿǝbikä Ǝgziʾ, and he approved and said unto me, ‘Work.’ And I worked, God helping me, and He did not requite me according to my sins. And pray ye for your servant Yǝsḥaq, and for those who toiled with me in the going out (i.e. production) of this book, for we were in sore tribulation, I, and Yǝmharannä Ab, and Ḥǝzbä Krǝstos, and Ǝndǝryas, and Filǝṗǝs, and Mäḥari Ab. May God have mercy upon them […]! Amen. The interpretation of this colophon is made even more difficult and controversial by the ambiguity of some expressions to which many scholars have devoted their efforts and advanced the most different hypotheses, “from complete truthfulness to complete falsity.”58 In terms of the Sitz im Leben of this most famous of Ethiopian works – presented here as eminently a work of translation – we may just call attention to the colophon’s claims. It posits a first translation from Coptic into Arabic in the Year of Mercy 409 (= 1225 CE), in Ethiopia, by men whose names would suggest they were not Ethiopian. Due to opposition from the reigning Zagwe dynasty, it was not translated at that time into Gǝʿǝz; that second translation was accomplished later, by a certain Yǝsḥaq, under the impulse of the governor Yaʿǝbikä Ǝgziʾ. The historicity of Yǝsḥaq and Yaʿǝbikä 57  Adapted from Ernest Alfred Wallis Budge, The Queen of Sheba & Her Only Son Menyelek; Being the History of the Departure of God & His Ark of the Covenant from Jerusalem to Ethiopia, and the Establishment of the Religion of the Hebrews & the Solomonic Line of Kings in That Country. A Complete Translation of the Kebra Nagast with Introduction (London, 1922), 228–229. 58  The phrase is Marrassini’s: “Kǝbrä Nägäśt,” 366.

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Ǝgziʾ has been ascertained: Yǝsḥaq was nǝburä ǝd of Aksum, and Yaʿǝbikä Ǝgziʾ a governor of Tǝgray attested at the time of King ʿAmdä Ṣǝyon. Their careers allow us to date very precisely the time of this second translation to the years 1314–1322,59 although the initial relationship of this translation to the so-called Solomonid monarchy can be seriously questioned, since Yaʿǝbikä Ǝgziʾ appears to have rebelled against ʿAmdä Ṣǝyon. In any case Yǝsḥaq was clearly Ethiopian, as (to judge by their names) were his fellow translators or assistants, and the translation from Arabic into Gǝʿǝz was accomplished in or near Aksum. Even if all this can be accepted as wholly reliable, the problem still remains in understanding which models and sources were used for the redaction of this work, that has so many parallels in the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic domains, and in such a case which materials either in Coptic or Christian Arabic could have circulated and could have been used and reworked in Ethiopia, when and to what extent, to arrange such a vast composite work.60 An even more complex case of derivation from a Coptic-Arabic model, and with a more lasting influence on the Ethiopian literary heritage, is that of the Miracles of Mary (Täʾammǝrä Maryam), a collection of narratives focused on miracles performed by the Virgin that we encountered briefly above in the inventory from Däbrä Maryam. The Miracles of Mary are considered one of the most complex, fundamental, and characteristic works of the Ethiopian Middle Ages and beyond.61 In fact the Miracles, which have been part of the Ethiopian 59  Denis Nosnitsin, “Yaʿǝbikä Ǝgziʾ,” in EAe 5 (2014), 5. 60  Recent hypotheses of an ancient presence of Jewish communities in Ethiopia or in the kingdom of Aksum are supported by no historical evidence at all and should be taken with all caution. For general references and a balanced presentation, see Frederick C. Gamst, “Judaism,” in EAe 3 (2007), 303–308, and the selection of contributions reprinted in Bausi, Languages and Cultures of Eastern Christianity. Ethiopian, 121–186, with bibliography on lii-liv. A large and balanced presentation of the evidence, with priority rightly assigned to Maxime Rodinson’s hypotheses, is Stuart Munro-Hay, Ethiopia. Judaism, Altars and Saints (Hollywood, CA, 2006), 13–68 and 69–130. See also Jürgen Tubach, “Aramaic Loanwords in Gǝʿǝz,” in Semitic Languages in Contact, ed. Aaron Michael Butts (Leiden, 2015), 348–74; idem, “Aramäische Lehnwörter im Geʿez,” in Proceedings of the “First International Conference on Ethiopian Texts,” May 27–30, 2013, St. Francis Friary, Asko, ed. Daniel Assefa and Hiruy Abdu (Addis Ababa, 2016), 155–74, for the question of Jewish Aramaic loanwords. As an example of an ongoing stream of literature indebted to Edward Ullendorff, which permeates the bibliography without providing any reliable new contribution, see Ursula Schattner-Rieser, “Empreintes bibliques et emprunts juifs dans la culture éthiopienne,” Journal of Eastern Christian Studies 64, 1–2 (2012): 5–28. 61  Ewa Balicka-Witakowska and Alessandro Bausi, “Täʾammǝrä Maryam,” in EAe 4 (2010), 789–793, with substantial references. The fundamental contribution remains Enrico Cerulli, Il libro etiopico dei Miracoli di Maria e le sue fonti nelle letterature del Medio Evo latino (Rome, 1943).

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literary heritage since the early fifteenth century, are a paradigm of the processes of reception, assimilation and adaptation of foreign elements. The nucleus of the collection was composed in the twelfth century in France, but early collections gained great popularity and were continuously enriched by new stories circulating in the whole Latin West. Translated into Arabic between 1237 and 1289 in the Latin Orient, the Miracles of Mary spread to Palestine, Syria and Egypt, where they became mandatory reading in the liturgical service of the Coptic Church, with a fixed collection of 74 miracles. At the end of the fourteenth century, probably on the initiative of King Dawit II, the Miracles of Mary were translated into Gǝʿǝz from a Coptic-Arabic model. In the course of time, numerous new miracles were added so that the manuscripts of the Miracles of Mary vary considerably in length, from a single item as a guest text to several hundreds. Devotion to the Virgin was especially promoted by King Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob. During his time, the text of the miracles was preceded by a Book of the regulation (Mäṣḥafä śǝrʿat, also known as the Canon of al-Muʿallaqah after the famous “Hanging Church” in Old Cairo), attributed to the king, that contains precise prescriptions concerning the liturgical utilization of the text. The Miracles of Mary are therefore the perfect accomplishment of a long process of reception and adaptation of foreign models that went on for centuries.62 They represent a sort of intermediate genre, originating in Ethiopia as a translated text but becoming progressively infused by original Gǝʿǝz contributions. But indeed it may be said that much (certainly not all) original Gǝʿǝz literature, especially as concerned religious matters, was founded upon the heritage of transmitted texts analyzed here. 4

Case Study in Reception: the Book of the Mystery of Giyorgis of Sägla

Much of this original literature was composed anonymously, and in circumstances that are sometimes elusive. But one figure, Giyorgis of Sägla, like very few others,63 stands out for the biographical information we have on him, and for the precise circumstances of his literary work we can apprehend. He is thus a fitting conclusion to our brief survey of the reception of 62  See, for example, Getatchew Haile, Voices from Däbrä Zämäddo. Acts of Abba Bärtälomewos and Abba Yoḥannǝs. 45 Miracles of Mary (Wiesbaden, 2013), 62–112, 197–266, for the recent edition and translation of a collection of 45 Miracles of Mary from the monastery of Däbrä Zämäddo, from MS EMML 6835. 63  The Ǝč̣čạ̈ ge Ǝnbaqom (ca. 1460–ca. 1470), who was also heavily engaged in translating texts, is one: see Emeri Van Donzel, “ʿƎnbaqom,” in EAe 2 (2005), 280–282.

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transmitted literatures in medieval Ethiopia. At the same time, he illustrates the processes discussed in the first half of this essay: the complexity of that transmission, and the light that recent discoveries continue to throw even on long-known works. Giyorgis of Sägla was active during the reigns of Dawit II (1379/80–1413) and Yǝsḥaq (1414–1429/30), and is generally believed to have died in 1425/26 CE.64 He originated in a family of court clerics: his father was one of the kahǝnatä däbtära (“priests of the tabernacle”) attached to the royal court and Giyorgis himself later assumed the same function, becoming tutor to the sons of the king, and so probably to the future King Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob as well. He was educated in the monastery of Ḥayq Ǝsṭifanos and during his study and early career he had the opportunity, as was customary, to travel and visit other monasteries, where he consulted manuscripts that were already ancient in his own times, as indirectly appears in his most important theological treatise, the Book of the mystery (Mäṣḥafä mǝśṭir). Appointed as nǝburä ǝd (a “prefect,” in this case with the function of abbot) of the monastery of Däbrä Dammo, he fell into disgrace and was imprisoned for a time. Having regained royal favor, he became abbot of the community of Gasǝč̣č̣a (interestingly, the sanctuary of another bibliophile, the saint Bäṣälotä Mika‌ʾel)65 where he completed his masterpiece, according to tradition, in 1424 CE, shortly before his death. His Life credits him with authoring seven works in addition to the Book of the mystery. We also know from

64  According to some authors he would have lived until the period of King Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob. On his life see Gérard Colin, “Giyorgis of Sägla,” in EAe 2 (2005), 812; Alessandro Bausi, “Mǝśṭir: Mäṣḥafä mǝśṭir,” in EAe 3 (2007), 941–944, at 941–942; Yaqob Beyene, “La dottrina della Chiesa etiopica e il ‘Libro del Mistero’ di Giyorgis di Saglā,” RSE 33 (1989): 35–88; MarieLaure Derat, “La sainteté de Giyorgis de Sägla: Une initiative royale?” in Miscellanea aethiopica reverendissimo domino Stanislao Kur septuagenario professori illustrissimo viro amplissimo ac doctissimo oblata (Warsaw, 1999), 51–62; Getatchew Haile, “A Miracle of the Archangel Uriel Worked for Abba Giyorgis of Gasǝč̣č̣a,” in Research in Ethiopian Studies: Selected Papers of the 16th International Conference of Ethiopian Studies, Trondheim July 2007, ed. Harald Aspen et al. (Wiesbaden, 2010), 1–14; idem, “Praises of the Cross, Wǝddase Mäsqäl, by Abba Giyorgis of Gasǝč̣č̣a,” Aethiopica 14 (2013): 47–120; idem, “Prayer of the Seal with the Sign of the Cross (Ṣälotä Maḫətäm) by Abba Giyorgis of Gasəč̣č̣a,” Oriens Christianus 98 (2015): 76–92; Osvaldo Raineri, “Il Libro della luce di Giyorgis di Saglâ (Ms. Raineri 251 della Vaticana),” Orientalia Christiana Periodica 80, 1 (2014): 87–141; Basil Lourié, “An Archaic Jewish-Christian Liturgical Calendar in Abba Giyorgis of Sägla,” Scrinium 12, 1 (2016): 73–83. 65  On Bäṣälotä Mika‌ʾel as a bibliophile, see the relevant passages on his intellectual education in his Life, translated in Bausi, “Writing, Copying, Translating,” 45.

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a subscriptio to the Gǝʿǝz version of the Athanasian Creed that Giyorgis was engaged in translating, at least in the case of this single text.66 To the extent that we can reconstruct the larger setting of Ethiopian literary production in Giyorgis’s time, his career connects to some of its major centers. The role of Ḥayq Ǝsṭifanos, where Giyorgis was educated, we have already had occasion to mention.67 The royal court was another such center, certainly during the reign of Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob. Indeed Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob is one of the few named authors of original Gǝʿǝz works in the Middle Ages, along with one Yǝsḥaq, also active in the fifteenth century and credited with the Book of the mystery of heaven and earth (Mäṣḥafä mǝśṭirä sämay wämǝdr).68 The king is considered, along with Giyorgis himself, the most important author of the Ethiopian Middle Ages, credited with such works as the Book of the light (Mäṣḥafä bǝrhan), the Book of the Nativity (Mäṣḥafä milad), the Epistle of humanity (Ṭomarä tǝsbǝʾt), the Custody of the mystery (Täʿaqǝbo mǝśṭir), and the Book of the substance (Mäṣḥafä baḥrǝy). Though the king might indeed have had the necessary education to compose these works, it is doubtless more accurate to consider him their inspirer and commissioner, and to understand them as composed within a “scriptorium”69 with the help of court clerics who were committed to 66  See MS British Library, Or. 793, f. 110rb, edited in Louis Guerrier, “Un texte éthiopien du Symbole de saint Athanase,” Revue de l’orient chrétien 20 (1915–1917): 68–76, 133–41, at 73 (text), zäntä haymanotä ṣäḥafä Atǝnasyos zähagärä Baba ǝntä yǝʾǝti mänbärä P̣ eṭros wäP̣ awlos wäʾamṣǝʾa Mǝssǝr Zan zäbǝḥerä Afraqya ǝskä bǝḥerä Ityoṗya wäʾaʿlǝkǝwwo anä Giyorgis Säglawi ǝnzä Ǝgziʾ yǝräddǝʾ wäqalo yaṣännǝʿ bätǝʾmǝrt zäyǝtällu amen, and 76 (tr.), here in my own translation, that takes into account the observation by Carlo Conti Rossini, trans., “Due capitoli del Libro del mistero di Giyorgis da Saglā,” RSE 7 (1948): 13–53, at 15, n. 8: “This (article of faith) wrote Athanasius of the city of the Pope, that is the seat of Peter and Paul. And Messer Zan of the land of Africa brought it to the land of Ethiopia. I, Giyorgis of Sägla, translated it, while God was helping and comforting his word with the sign that follows (it). Amen.” 67  Taddesse Tamrat, “The Abbots of Däbrä Hayq, 1248–1535,” Journal of Ethiopian Studies 8 (1970): 87–117; Marie-Laure Derat, Le domaine des rois éthiopiens (1270–1527). Espace, pouvoir et monachisme (Paris, 2003), passim; idem, “Däbrä Ḥayq Ǝsṭifanos,” in EAe 2 (2005), 24–25; Claire Bosc-Tiessé, “Sainteté et intervention royale au monastère Saint-Étienne de Ḥayq au tournant du XIIIe et du XIV e siècle. L’image de Iyasus Mo’a dans son Évangile,” Oriens Christianus 94 (2010): 199–227. For the importance of this monastery as a mediator centre see Marilyn E. Heldman, “Metropolitan Bishops as Agents of Artistic Interaction between Egypt and Ethiopia during the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries,” in Interactions. Artistic Interchange between the Eastern and Western Worlds in the Medieval Period, ed. Colum Hourihane (Princeton, 2007), 84–105. 68  Gianfrancesco Lusini and Gianfranco Fiaccadori, “Mǝśṭirä sämay wämǝdr: Mäṣḥafä mǝśṭirä sämay wämǝdr,” in EAe 3 (2007), 945–946. 69  The concept of the scriptorium is not universal in manuscript cultures, applying strictly only to very few periods and cases of the European Middle Ages, but for interesting

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proclaiming royal ideology and spreading ideas and decrees on matters of faith and theology. Giyorgis’s father and Giyorgis himself, in his youth, were part of this clerical court milieu, and Giyorgis’s masterwork, the Book of the mystery, took the same form as the writings attributed to the king: a first-person homily to be read publicly, copied, and then disseminated, in order to inform intellectual elites on matters of faith. The contents of the Book of the mystery, for their part, shed light on the intellectual context in which transmitted works were received and interpreted. Let us focus on one crucial and obscure passage, in which Giyorgis reports on a conversation he had with an Armenian priest on the authorship, canonicity, and number of the apostolic books traditionally referred to as the “Eight Books of Clement.” This passage is found in the thirtieth and last homily. Having noted the dates at which, according to the Armenian, the Evangelists wrote their Gospels, Giyorgis continues:70 In connection with this question, I have also found (a reference) in our books which says that, Clement wrote the Order of the Church (Śǝrʿatä betä krǝstiyan), that is the teachings of the Didascalia (Didǝsqǝlya): (number) one, because the Apostles say, ‘We have written this book of admonition and have published (it) through our brother Clement, (our) emissary to the world’.71 The Sinodos of the Apostles (consists of) seven (parts): Rejoyce our sons! (Täfäśśǝḥu wǝludǝnä) the first; Simon the Cananaean (Sǝmʿon qänänawi) the second; the Apostolic canons (Abṭǝlis) the third; After he ascended (Ǝmdǝḫrä ʿargä) the fourth; the Order concerning those who are reflections on the Ethiopian case see Lusini, “Copisti e filologi;” Marie-Laure Derat, “Moines et scriptorium dans le royaume d’Éthiopie aux XIV e et XV e siècles,” Histoire, monde et cultures religieuses 24 (2012): 65–78; Claire Bosc-Tiessé, “Qu’est-ce qu’un scriptorium en Éthiopie? L’organisation du travail des copistes dans le royaume chrétien d’Éthiopie,” Scripta: An International Journal of Codicology and Palaeography 8 (2014): 9–27. 70  Yaqob Beyene, ed. and trans., Giyorgis di Saglā: il Libro del Mistero (Maṣḥafa Mesṭir). Parte seconda, 2 vols. CSCO 532–533, SAe 97–98 (Louvain, 1993), at vol. 1 (text), 304.19–306.6, vol. 2 (trans), 169–170; Ḥǝruy Ermyas, ed. and trans., መጽሐፈ ምሥ ጢር ቅዱስ አባ ጊዮርጊስ ዘጋሥጫ (Maṣḥafa Mǝśṭir qǝddus abba Giyorgis zäGasǝč̣čạ ) (Sts Giyorgis and Bäṣälotä Mika‌ʾel, 2009), 362a (§ 33). The translation is here adapted from that given by Getatchew Haile, “Religious Controversies and the Growth of Ethiopic Literature in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries,” Oriens Christianus 65 (1981): 102–36, at 104–105. 71  As noted by Getatchew Haile, “Religious Controversies,” 104, n. 11, and Yaqob Beyene, Libro del Mistero … Parte seconda, 2: 169, n. 28, this is a literal quotation from the Didascalia of the Apostles. See Thomas Pell Platt, The Ethiopic Didascalia; or, The Ethiopic Version of the Apostolical Constitutions, Received in the Church of Abyssinia (London, 1834), 2 (text and tr.); John Mason Harden, ed. and trans., The Ethiopic Didascalia (London, 1920), 2 (tr.).

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baptized (Śǝrʿatä habt bäʾǝntä ǝllä yǝṭṭämmäqu) the fifth; Concerning the Only Judge (Kämä bäʾǝntä 1 kwännani) the sixth; Disposition ordered by Peter to Clement (Tǝʾǝzaz zäʾazzäzä Ṗeṭros läQälemǝnṭos) the seventh. For this reason they say (that) the Book of Clement with the Sinodos (make) eight (books). As for those who say that the Book of Clement by itself consists of eight parts, (they need only be reminded that) if the seven (parts of the) Sinodos are added, the total would be fifteen; thus their mistake is evident since it exceeds the eight parts that they have assigned to us. As for that book (full) of their lies, Peter never uttered it nor did Clement write it down, but it was Yǝsḥaq Tǝgray, a usurper of the episcopate like Melitius. His ordination, too, came from the Melchites. For this reason his teaching is alien to our teaching, and his books, too, to our books, because he brought it from a treasure of lies and translated it with lying words. Though the passage may strike the modern reader as difficult and esoteric, this was the daily bread of intellectual elites’ high-brow work in medieval Ethiopia. Their theological and literary discourses were fed by the written heritage that included, as we have seen, an early layer transmitted from Greek, partially lost or even censored, and then largely replaced by the flood of new translations from Arabic, in a process that was still ongoing in Giyorgis’s time. Older and newer versions of a work might confront each other; the place of recently translated works within the previous canon might require elucidation; older, neglected works might be re-activated, too, and to an extent that is rarely apparent to us, by disputes and competing interpretations. A polemical context certainly applies to this passage of the Book of the mystery, where Giyorgis takes aim at “that book (full) of their lies,” which he claims was neither uttered by (Saint) Peter nor written down by Clement (of Rome), but was composed by a certain Yǝsḥaq from Tǝgray.72 Several hypotheses have been proposed to identify this work. According to Getatchew Haile, it is the Book of Clement (Mäṣḥafä Qälemǝnṭos), an apocalyptic and canon-law revelation of Peter to Clement in seven books, attested probably since the fourteenth century, that is the result of a long chain of translations starting from Syriac 72  It is curious that among the very few authors we know by name for this period, there are three Yǝsḥaq, but we have no evidence to suggest that any of the three is the same as one of the other ones. On this question see Delio Vania Proverbio and Gianfranco Fiaccadori, “Un nuovo testimone etiopico della Rivelazione di Pietro a Clemente: il ms. 121 del Monumento Nazionale di Casamari (Veroli),” Atti della Accademia nazionale dei Lincei. Rendiconti Classe di scienze morali storiche e filologiche, 9th ser., 15, 4 (2004): 665–93, at 682.

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into Arabic, ultimately translated into Ethiopic from an Arabic model, yet combining and conflating different works (such as the Cave of Treasures), and probably incorporating also original Ethiopian material in books three to seven.73 This identification, however, must be certainly rejected on precise grounds.74 A second suggestion is that Giyorgis was here referring to the apocryphal Acts of Peter, where a series of respectively one and seven books of Clement are also mentioned. The Acts of Peter are part of a large collection of texts on the preaching and martyrdom of the Apostles, known as the Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles (Gädlä ḥawaryat), which were translated from Arabic and presumably acquired in the fourteenth century. The Acts of Peter, however, are found in only a few manuscripts of this collection.75 The relevant passages of the Acts of Peter that suggest this identification, given in the usual style of first-person speech (first of Peter, then of Clement of Rome) are as follows:76

73  Getatchew Haile, “Religious Controversies,” 103–109, and idem, “The Homily of Lulǝyanos,” 385, n. 1. According to Getatchew Haile, based upon a colophon to the Book of Clement in MS BnF d’Abbadie 78, f. 206rb (reproduced in Proverbio and Fiaccadori, ‘Un nuovo testimone etiopico’, 693), the metropolitan Yǝsḥaq there mentioned would be the same as the Yǝsḥaq accused by Giyorgis, who would have lived under a so far unattested King Iyosyas, son of King Dawit II. Giyorgis’s strong criticism would have resulted in a censorship (and later rehabilitation) of the Book of Clement, the canonicity of which is not contested by the Ethiopian Täwaḥǝdo Church. 74  See Alessandro Bausi, “Alcune considerazioni sul ‘Sēnodos’ etiopico,” RSE 34 (1990): 5–73, at 62–64, and idem, ቀሌምንጦስ. Il Qalēmenṭos etiopico. La rivelazione di Pietro a Clemente. I libri 3–7. Traduzione e introduzione (Naples, 1992), 36–38. The Yǝsḥaq mentioned in the colophon of the manuscript – which is definitely not the colophon of the archetype, and indeed is found in no other manuscript of the Book of Clement – probably refers to the metropolitan Yǝsḥaq of the late fifteenth century, a circumstance that perfectly tallies with Iyosyas as royal name of King Ǝskǝndǝr (r. 1478–1494). Indeed Fiaccadori suggests that the “Year of Grace 64” in the colophon is 1487/1488 CE (Proverbio and Fiaccadori, “Un nuovo testimone etiopico,” 679). 75  See Bausi, Qalēmenṭos etiopico, 40–42; idem, “Alcune osservazioni sul Gadla Ḥawāryāt,” Annali dell’Istituto Orientale di Napoli 60–61 (2000–2001): 77–114; idem, “Ḥawaryat: Gädlä ḥawaryat,” in EAe 2 (2005), 1049–1051. Text and translation of the Acts of Peter in Ernest Alfred Wallis Budge, ed., መጽሐፈ፡ ገድለ፡ ሐዋርያት። The Contendings of the Apostles Being the Histories of the Lives and Martyrdoms and Deaths of the Twelve Apostles and Evangelists. The Ethiopic Texts Now First Edited from Manuscripts in the British Museum, with an English Translation, 2 vols. (London, 1899–1901), at vol. 1 (text), 382–435, vol. 2 (trans.), 466–526. These Acts of Peter were incorporated late into the collection, but one cannot exclude that they existed and circulated before; see the mention of a single manuscript containing Acts of Peter and Paul (in Amharic, 1 yäP̣ eṭros wäP̣ awlos gädl) in the list of books from the time of Iyasu (r. 1682–1706) published by Erho, “Shepherd of Hermas in Ethiopia,” 114. 76  The translation according to Budge, Contendings, 2: 469–470, 518, 519–520.

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[Peter:] And we all rose up from the ground, and stood upon our feet, and my Lord and God gave unto me a book (studded with) precious stones and pearls, and in it was written the rest of the knowledge which my Lord wished to declare unto me with His lips […] And moreover, He gave me also seven books (studded with) the stone ǝlmäqliṭos (magnete), which had been written by His own hands.[…] [Clement:] And my master Peter commanded me to write an account of everything which I had heard and seen in connexion with him, and to lay it up in the treasury of books in Rome, and after (I had done so) my master Peter and Paul sealed that which I had written with their seals, and I also (sealed it) with my seal. […] Now the number of the books wherein were written the mysteries, and the Law, and the commandments which my master Peter revealed unto me Clement, were eight books; and the books which had been given unto my master Peter did he give unto me, and I copied them according to his commandment, and I laid them in the Cave of the Treasures of Rome, which I have called the ‘Cave of Life’. Giyorgis’s hostility to this work could stem from its strong emphasis on a link to the Church of Rome, which is evident even in the brief excerpts above. This would explain Giyorgis’s condemnation of its author as a Melchite, for the Melchite Church is the Byzantine Church, of Chalcedonian faith, and “Rome” here is obviously the second Rome (Constantinople), in the common understanding of medieval Eastern Christian cultures. One could also see in Giyorgis’s reference to a “treasure of lies” a precise and sarcastic allusion to the “Cave of the Treasures of Rome” in the Acts of Peter, but both texts obviously also allude to the well-known apocryphon of the Cave of Treasures, that actually is transmitted in Gǝʿǝz in the Book of Clement. It is also possible that the Acts of Peter played a role in Giyorgis’s rejection of the Book of Clement itself, though the latter text’s critique of Sabbath observance would also likely have prompted his opposition.77 Though Yǝsḥaq Tǝgray himself has eluded further scholarly identification, this inquiry into Giyorgis’s references helps illuminate both the nature of his invective, and the kinds of uses to which transmitted literature was put in original Gǝʿǝz works.

77  See for this Bausi, Qalēmenṭos Etiopico, 38–39. The Synodicon MS EMML 1843 from Däbrä Ḥayq Ǝsṭifanos contains excerpts from the Book of Clement (ff. 56va–58ra), including a passage related to the observance of Sabbath (ff. 57vb–58ra). The library is unfortunately not accessible and it is impossible to carry out a codicological analysis on the manuscript to ascertain the relationship of these leaves to the quire structure of the codex.

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Furthermore, this same passage from the Book of the mystery is highly informative about the transmission and reception of an essential component of the Ethiopian written heritage: pseudo-apostolic literature. Getatchew Haile was speaking of this literature when he wrote that “the study of the history and literature of the Church of Ethiopia would be futile without a critical edition of the Sinodos, the Didǝsqǝlya and the Mäṣḥafä kidan […] They are more important even than the Bible insofar as the history of the Church is concerned, and yet they are not easily available to the student […] A member of the clergy, be it a metropolitan, a bishop, a priest or a deacon, that has not familiarized himself with these books, has, canonically, no place in her Church.”78 The study of pseudo-apostolic literature has certainly progressed since Getatchew Haile wrote these words in 1981, but not to the point of having, as he urged, critical editions (or even editions) of all the major works, which are entirely works of translation and include the Didascalia, the Synodicon (Senodos), the Testament of Our Lord (Mäṣḥafä kidan), and the Book of Clement (Qälemǝntos), among others.79 The “Eight Books of Clement” mentioned by Giyorgis in his work belong to this genre too. In the early Christian tradition, as attested in pseudo-apostolic canon-law literature starting from the third/fourth century, Clement of Rome is entrusted, as Saint Peter’s disciple, with receiving Peter’s revelation. The orders received by Peter from Jesus Christ are committed in turn to Clement, and Clement writes them down, thus disseminating the orders and rules for the Church. The Book of Clement is one product of this tradition, though due to the heterogeneity of its sources, its tone and contents vary through the work: normative prescriptions occupy only some sections, while others are more narrative. The framework of the revelation of Peter to Clement is nonetheless the literary device that keeps the work together and it has some narrative development. In pseudo-apostolic literature in its strict sense, by contrast, the role of Clement is purely instrumental and narrative details hardly surface in the texts. But what these “Eight books of Clement” were has remained unclear. 78  Getatchew Haile, “A Study of the Issues Raised in Two Homilies of Emperor Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob of Ethiopia,” Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft 131 (1981): 85–113, at 99–100, with only normalization of some transcriptions. 79  Overview in Ernst Hammerschmidt, “Das pseudo-apostolische Schrifftum in äthiopischer Überlieferung,” Journal of Semitic Studies 9 (1964): 114–21. Editions and translations now include: for the Testament of Our Lord (Mäṣḥafä kidan), Robert Beylot, ed. and trans., Testamentum Domini éthiopien. Édition et traduction (Louvain, 1984); for the Book of Clement, Bausi, trans., Qalēmenṭos Etiopico. See also Alessandro Bausi, “Didǝsqǝlya,” in EAe 2 (2005), 154–155; idem, “Testamentum Domini,” in EAe 4 (2010), 927–928; idem, “Qälementos,” in EAe 4 (2010), 251–253. For the Synodicon see below.

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One, according to Giyorgis, was the Didascalia. Of the other seven, five can be identified as belonging to the Synodicon as it is attested (with a few minor variations) in the several dozen manuscripts accessible to us, from the fourteenth or early fifteenth century forward. Essentially based upon Christian Arabic models, the Synodicon is the most authoritative canonical-liturgical collection of the Ethiopian Middle Ages. It is a stable collection, though originally of composite character, that includes tens of distinct texts, pseudo-apostolic in genre and dealing with canon law, as well as the canons of ecumenical councils and provincial synods, and some liturgical prayers and homilies.80 The five “books” mentioned by Giyorgis that can definitely be identified as belonging to the standard Synodicon manuscripts are Rejoyce our sons!, Simon the Cananaean, the Apostolic canons, After he ascended, and the Disposition ordered by Peter to Clement.81 For the two remaining “books” or sections – the Order concerning those who are baptized and Concerning the Only Judge – the situation is quite different. There are no such sections in the known manuscripts of the Synodicon. For the Order concerning those who are baptized there is a parallelism of contents with texts preserved in the Synodicon, though in the Synodicon they are not grouped into a coherent Order and no such section is attested, much less with this title. Even more problematic is Concerning the Only Judge, for which there is no possible parallel in the Synodicon manuscripts. In light of this, some 80  It is by far the most complex work of this genre. See Alessandro Bausi, “Senodos,” in EAe 4 (2010), 623–625; critical edition and translation of some of its pseudo-apostolic texts in idem, Il Sēnodos etiopico. Canoni pseudoapostolici: Canoni dopo l’Ascensione, Canoni di Simone il Cananeo, Canoni Apostolici, Lettera di Pietro, 2 vols., CSCO 552–553, SA 101–102 (Louvain, 1995); and idem, “San Clemente e le tradizioni clementine nella letteratura etiopica canonico-liturgica,” in Studi su Clemente romano. Atti degli Incontri di Roma, 29 marzo e 22 novembre 2001, ed. Philippe Luisier (Rome, 2003), 13–55 for a comprehensive history of the research. On the more recent developments see below. 81  The section Rejoyce our sons!, so called from its incipit, corresponds to the 71 Canons, see George William Horner, The Statutes of the Apostles or Canones Ecclesiastici Edited with Translation and Collation from Ethiopic and Arabic MSS.; Also a Translation of the Saidic and Collation of the Bohairic Versions; and Saidic Fragment (London, 1904), 1–87; canons 21–47 only (a section sometimes known as the Synod of Alexandria) are also in Hugo Duensing, Der äthiopische Text der Kirchenordnung des Hippolyt. Nach 8 Handschriften herausgegeben und übersetzt (Göttingen, 1946). For Simon the Cananaean, from the name of its first set of canons, see Bausi, Il Sēnodos etiopico, vol. 1 (Textus), 41–71, 72–115; for the Apostolic canons in the Abṭǝlis (that is “Titles,” from Greek through Arabic) recension, 180–233 and 234–283; for After he ascended, also from the incipit, 9–40; for the Disposition ordered by Peter to Clement, 284–306. Further details in Bausi, “Alcune considerazioni sul «Sēnodos» etiopico,” 25–29 and the introduction to Bausi, Il Sēnodos etiopico, vol. 2 (Versio).

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authors have suggested that Giyorgis might have had at his disposal a recension of the Synodicon with quite different texts, some of which, Concerning the Only Judge in particular, cannot be identified.82 Yet, we do not know whether a canonical-liturgical collection with such an arrangement in ‘Seven Books of Clement’ – complemented by the Didascalia to reach the number eight – ever existed.83 It could be an abstraction made by Giyorgis of Sägla for reasons of argumentation.84 All we could assert, until recently, is that no known manuscript of the Synodicon attests it in this form, and that two of Giyorgis’s sections do not correspond in any way to any other single section in the manuscripts. The recent discovery and analysis of the Aksumite Collection, however, has now solved this particular mystery. It contains the Order concerning those who are baptized and the treatise Concerning the Only Judge, that are not transmitted in other manuscripts. Through its witness we can see that the Order concerning those who are baptized was restructured in the manuscripts of the Synodicon, circulating with and interspersed at various passages within another text, the 71 Canons.85 The other treatise, Concerning the Only Judge was 82  C. F. August Dillmann, Lexicon linguae aethiopicae, cum indice latino. Adiectum est vocabularium tigre dialecti septentrionalis compilatum a W. Munziger (Leipzig, 1865), vii (‘Caeterum varia Synodi exemplaria multum inter se differunt, et in M.M. f. 344 Isaac quidem Tigrehnsis incusatur, quod Synodum consulto adulteraverit’), who could read the passage in the manuscript of the Book of the mystery he used for his Lexicon and that is now apparently lost; Mauro da Leonessa, “La versione etiopica dei canoni apocrifi del Concilio di Nicea secondo i codici Vaticani ed il fiorentino,” RSE 2, 1 (1942): 29–89, at 33; and Yaqob Beyene, Libro del Mistero … Parte seconda, 2: 170, n. 30 interpreted this statement as an evidence for the existence of more arrangements of canonical collections at the time of Giyorgis. On Concerning the Only Judge, see Getatchew Haile, “A Study of the Issues,” 105, n. 17, “Unidentified.” 83  For the questions of the “Books of Clement” in general in the Ethiopian tradition, see Bausi, “Alcune considerazioni sul ‘Sēnodos’ etiopico,” 58–67. There is unfortunately no philologically-based recent investigation of the related question of the “biblical canon”: the contributions by Peter Brandt, “Geflecht aus 81 Büchern – Zur Variantenreichen Gestalt des äthiopischen Bibelkanons,” Aethiopica 3 (2000): 79–115, and idem, “Bible Canon,” in EAe 1 (2003), 571–573, are both largely unsatisfactory. For the present debate, see Tedros Abraha, “Il canone biblico della Chiesa Ortodossa Täwaḥǝdo dell’Etiopia e dell’Eritrea,” Oriens Christianus 98 (2015): 28–51. A few still disregarded observations remain crucial for these questions, see Bausi, “La Collezione aksumita canonico-liturgica,” 62, with n. 35; idem, “The Aksumite Background of the Ethiopic ‘Corpus Canonum,’” 534. We still need to apply an analysis that is rigorously based upon the texts and the sources. 84  For the examination of this passage in this light, see already Bausi, “La Collezione aksumita canonico-liturgica,” 50–52; idem, “The Aksumite Background of the Ethiopic ‘Corpus Canonum,’” 536. 85  The edition from the Aksumite collection is in Alessandro Bausi, “The Baptismal Ritual in the Earliest Ethiopic Canonical Liturgical Collection,” in Neugeboren durch das Wasser

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previously totally unknown outside the one reference to it in the Book of the mystery, but it is transmitted exactly with this name in the Aksumite Collection. It is a complex and difficult text that concerns the initiation of Christians.86 Apparently Giyorgis had a precise knowledge of these two rare texts, which have been preserved in northern Tǝgray, and this is the first point regarding our understanding of the transmission and reception of translated texts. But his polemical arguments are also significant. Giyorgis criticizes this Yǝsḥaq from Tǝgray for being “a usurper of the episcopacy like Melitius.” He uses arguments that refer to the matter of the History of the Episcopate of Alexandria, namely the history of the fourth-century Melitian schism in Egypt, where the bishop Melitius is portrayed as an ambitious concupiscent who tries to take by force the bishopric of St Peter of Alexandria during the convulsive phases of the persecution.87 The accusation that Yǝsḥaq was ordained by the Melchites, i.e. by Chalcedonians, cannot also be without a precise relationship to the circulation of canons of the council of Chalcedon, which are attested in the Aksumite Collection.88 The Aksumite Collection’s inclusion of both the ­canons of Chalcedon (which the Ethiopian church rejected) and their refutation can be interpreted as an archaic trait, the remnant of a time when the simple name of “Chalcedon” was not yet sufficient to decree the condemnation of a text, and when canons of various sources could probably be accepted in consideration of their disciplinary content. No “Chalcedonian” text, in whatever sense, could ever be accepted and tolerated in an Ethiopian canonical collection in later times. It may well be that the presence of the canons of Chalcedon in the Aksumite Collection is what guaranteed its virtual extinction. Admittedly, there are elements in Giyorgis’s passage that still escape our precise understanding – first of all, the precise identity of Yǝsḥaq Tǝgray – but it appears difficult to explain his reaction and strong polemic attitude without considering the general context, our understanding of which is enriched by these new findings: between the fourteenth and the fifteenth century a process of restructuring of the literary tradition took place that was at times violent und den Heiligen Geist Taufriten im christlichen Orient, ed. Tinatin Chronz and Heinzgerd Brakmann, 2019, forthcoming. 86  An edition of Concerning the Only Judge from the Aksumite Collection is in preparation and will appear soon. 87  See the passages from the History of the Episcopate of Alexandria in Bausi and Camplani, “The History of the Episcopate of Alexandria,” 293 (§§ 51–52). 88  An edition of the Canons of Chalcedon from the Aksumite Collection is in preparation and will appear soon. For other considerations that cannot be expanded upon here, concerning the manuscript tradition of the Book of the mystery and other texts from the Aksumite Collection, see Bausi, “La Collezione aksumita canonico-liturgica,” 50–52.

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and destructive. Giyorgis’s “Eight Books of Clement” are no longer the kind of literary corpus, for that genre, that we find in the Aksumite Collection, nor are they yet the kind of canon law collection that will appear with the Synodicon. Giyorgis is in the middle of a transition, in which he tries to orient himself and his readers.

…

In conclusion, it may justly be said that the central phenomenon concerning transmitted literatures in the Ethiopian Middle Ages was the wave of translations from the Arabic language and from predominantly Egyptian models that took place from twelfth/thirteenth century, and probably earlier. Though the phenomenon itself can be simply stated, its effects on the Ethiopian written heritage were complex and highly variable. A comparison may serve to highlight some of the signal characteristics of the Ethiopian case. Unlike the Egyptian Christian tradition, where Arabic gradually and completely replaced Coptic, the Ethiopian tradition was not affected by any real substitution of one language by another. The obvious factor responsible for this difference is the existence of two institutions, an Ethiopian Christian monarchy and a deeply rooted national church, which both made use of the same national literary language, Gǝʿǝz. Another contributing factor was the status of Gǝʿǝz as a “classical” literary language, no longer spoken and thus relatively stable in its form, by the time that Arabic texts made their influence felt. These conditions provided for the exceptional continuity of Ethiopia’s late antique heritage, and to some extent of its literary corpus too, into and beyond the medieval period. The new wave of translations carried out upon different models in medieval times had to contend with this pre-existing heritage. While in the Egyptian Christian tradition the passage from Coptic to Arabic served as a sort of massive filter that occasioned a substantial refurbishing of the literary tradition, this was not the case in the Ethiopian literary tradition. For texts already translated in the Aksumite period, the process was at times more capillary, at the level of slighter linguistic revision, and at times radical, with new translations replacing existing ones and the latter being definitely discarded.89 The coexistence of different ‘strata’ is evident at the manuscript level as well. Already at the 89  For some examples of this process, see Bausi, “Ancient Features of Ancient Ethiopic,” 167–169; idem, “La Collezione aksumita canonico-liturgica,” 52–52; idem, “The Aksumite Background of the Ethiopic ‘Corpus Canonum;’” idem, “Writing, Copying, Translating;” idem, “On Editing and Normalizing Ethiopic Texts;” Gianfrancesco Lusini, “Naufragio e conservazione di testi cristiani antichi: Il contributo della tradizione etiopica,” Annali dell’Università di Napoli ‘L’Orientale’ 69 (2009): 69–83.

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earliest documented phase of certain genres, we find manuscripts that served as “corpus organizers,” transmitting miscellaneous content that, through long processes of transmission, organization, and redistribution, had come to be accepted as a consistent and stable collection – but that in fact included texts that varied widely in their time and place of origin, in their provenance, in the language of their models, and in the other languages that were sometimes involved in the transmission process. Greek- and Arabic-based texts thus came to be mixed within the same manuscripts, already at the time of the earliest preserved manuscripts accessible to us.90 Giyorgis of Sägla’s Book of the mystery is a vivid witness to the complicated and even unexpected pathways by which foreign literatures were transmitted, preserved, and deployed in the Middle Ages. It attests that the Aksumite heritage of translated texts was still available to Giyorgis, not in its original form, to be sure, but with enough of its ancient layer intact to render his references recognizable to us. It is only thanks to the single surviving manuscript of the Aksumite Collection that we can recognize those references: that we know what Giyorgis meant under the titles of Concerning the Only Judge and Order concerning those who are baptized, and that we grasp more fully the gist of his invective against the “Melchite” Yǝsḥaq Tǝgray. Giyorgis’s work thus also underscores that research into late-antique transmission of texts is intimately related to our ability to fully understand not only medieval transmission of texts, but original medieval Gǝʿǝz compositions as well. It was precisely the refurbishing of old material in new intermediate forms and the rapid growth and expansion of new Arabic-based translations that opened a totally new phase in the intertwined processes of reception and creation that constituted medieval Ethiopian literature.

90  For the concept of such manuscripts as “corpus organizers,” see Alessandro Bausi, “A Case for Multiple Text Manuscripts Being “Corpus-Organizers,”’ Manuscript Cultures Newsletter 3 (2010): 34–36.

chapter 10

Genres of Ethiopian-Eritrean Christian Literature with a Focus on Hagiography Antonella Brita 1

Contextualizing Origins

In the fourth century the ancient Ethiopian-Eritrean kingdom of Aksum embraced Christianity as its state religion.1 The process of Christianization lasted for some centuries and implied a series of transformations and cultural adaptations that had a significant impact on the individual cultures of the local communities. The new religion took root in a diversified social substratum characterized by beliefs and practices that were never completely eradicated, but rather assimilated, giving birth to a religious culture characterized by a marked syncretism. Ethiopian-Eritrean Christian literature originated in this cultural context, in the first instance to provide the newborn church with the instrumental equipment to perform religious activities. Alongside the construction of places of worship, a body of literature – to be used for liturgical services, for the education of the local clergy and, in general, for catechetical and proselytizing purposes – was progressively acquired. A significant activity of translation of Christian works from Greek into Gǝʿǝz was undertaken and manuscripts started to be used and to circulate in the country.2 Alongside the Bible, apocryphal texts, normative texts for church administration, monastic rules, hagiographic texts, and some other genres common to the late antique Mediterranean made their way into Gǝʿǝz literature. Our understanding of this 1  The research for the present article has been funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft through the Sonderforschungsbereich 950, Manuskriptkulturen in Asien, Afrika und Europa (SFB 950), C05, 2nd phase (2015–2019) ‒ “ʻParchment Saintsʼ: The making of Ethiopian Hagiographic Manuscripts – Matter and Devotion in Manuscript Practices in Medieval and Pre-modern Ethiopia,” directed by Alessandro Bausi. I would like to express my gratitude to all contributors of the present volume for the feedback they gave me during our intensive and wonderful seminar at la Fondation des Treilles and to the members of the Fondation for their hospitality and support. A special thanks to Samantha Kelly, whose precious advice and suggestions contributed largely to improving this article. 2  The complexity of the translation, transmission and reception processes of foreign literary texts into Gǝʿǝz are detailed in Alessandro Bausi’s essay “Ethiopia and the Christian Ecumene: Cultural Transmission, Translation, and Reception” in the present volume.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2020 | doi:10.1163/9789004419582_011

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literary patrimony largely depends on later evidence since ‒ apart from a very few exceptions ‒ pre-thirteenth-century manuscripts have not survived. The assimilation of foreign literary works into Gǝʿǝz was never static or passive; on the contrary Ethiopian and Eritrean intellectuals actively transformed and refined the translated texts in order to adapt them to their local culture (e.g. the Gǝʿǝz version of the Rule of Pachomius). This vivid intellectual activity brought about, in the course of time, the creation of an original literature in Gǝʿǝz, in genres known to other linguistic traditions (history, theology, hagiography) and in genres specific to Christian Ethiopia-Eritrea (e.g. mälkǝʾ, qǝne).3 Understanding the indigenous Gǝʿǝz literature therefore requires a consideration of its matrix, which is rooted in translated works; the former would not exist without the latter. The present essay focuses mostly, but not exclusively, on original Gǝʿǝz literary production. Translated works will also be considered as far as they contribute to our understanding of the development of local literary genres or serve as models for the creation of local works.4 The timespan considered ranges from the late thirteenth to the sixteenth century. After a brief survey of various literary genres, it offers as a case study a more in-depth discussion of hagiography, a genre that is attested both in translation and in original works. Some results of recent research showing innovative outcomes in Ethiopian-Eritrean Studies will be presented to confirm the significance of this genre, not only for literary studies but also for anthropological and historical investigation. 2

Genres of Ethiopian-Eritrean Christian Literature

Liturgical works were transmitted into Gǝʿǝz from other languages (primarily Greek and, later, Arabic), starting with or soon after the ancient Aksumite kingdom’s conversion to Christianity. They are an interesting test case in EthiopianEritrean adaptation of translated literature, given their prominent role in the performance of religious rituals. That is, the reception of these works was subject to a certain degree of innovation and creativity (depending on the type of texts) but, once canonized, they show a rather passive or “quiescent” transmission, due to their normative value. They can, in the course of time, be modified but the change always reflects specific dogmatic or normative constraints. Yet, 3  Enrico Cerulli, Storia della letteratura etiopica, 2nd ed. (Milan, 1961). 4  A comprehensive discussion of works translated into Gǝʿǝz is beyond the scope of the present contribution; see instead Bausi, “Ethiopia and the Christian Ecumene,” in the present volume.

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as Emmanuel Fritsch and Habtemichael Kidane illustrate in their essay in this volume, these works were expanded and adapted to respond to the particular needs of the medieval Ethiopian and Eritrean context. The evolution of the Divine Office (Dǝggwa) is one example. The composition of various Liturgies of the Hours, and of anaphoras (including one celebrating the Sänbätä Krǝsṭiyan, in the context of the controversy over celebration of Saturday as the “First Sabbath”) is another, and original genres specific to Ethiopia and Eritrea, such as the mälkǝʾ, developed as well.5 The Miracles of Mary (Täʾämmǝrä Maryam) represents a particularly notable example in which a genre took as its nucleus a literature in translation, and then expanded with original Gǝʿǝz composition.6 This collection at first did not have any apparent liturgical function, but merely a literary one, circulating as miracle stories throughout the Mediterranean Christian world before being translated into Gǝʿǝz during the reign of Dawit II (1379/80–1413). In Ethiopia and Eritrea, it was the King Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob (1434–1468) who gave instructions to include it in the liturgy, with a view to promoting the veneration of Saint Mary in the country. Both kings also strongly promoted the composition of Marian miracles set in Ethiopia and Eritrea, which gave the collection an element of local distinctiveness. The addition of local miracles increased over time, resulting in an enormous expansion of the original corpus, to the point that the Gǝʿǝz collection today includes upwards of four hundred miracles, and is considered one of the most characteristic works of Ethiopian and Eritrean Christian literature. Many of the original stories added to the collection richly reflect their medieval Ethiopian-Eritrean context and have been regularly mined by scholars. Some reflect specific historical events, like the episode of the judicial proceedings against the Ǝsṭifanosites (or Stephanites),7 a monastic movement denying the Virgin’s cult and for this reason considered heretical by King Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob. Others shed light on medieval Christian culture in a more general way. Instructive with regard to scribal practices and the history of art (including interregional contacts), for instance, is the episode of the translator and illuminator who was ordered by Dawit II to prepare the golden color for illuminating 5  Specific features characterizing the liturgical literature can be found in Emanuel Fritsch and Habtemichael Kidane’s essay, “The Medieval Ethiopian Orthodox Church and its Liturgy,” in the present volume. 6  Eva Balicka-Witakowska and Alessandro Bausi, “Täʾammǝrä Maryam,” in EAe 4 (2010), 789– 793, with ample bibliography; Enrico Cerulli, Il libro etiopico dei Miracoli di Maria e le sue fonti nelle letterature del Medio Evo latino (Rome, 1943). For further details on the collection of the Miracles of Mary see Bausi, “Ethiopia and the Christian Ecumene,” and Fritsch and Habtemichael Kidane, “Medieval Ethiopian Orthodox Church,” in this volume. 7  Cerulli, Il libro etiopico, 94–106.

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a manuscript of the Miracles of Mary. Lacking the appropriate materials, he fashioned a color that, instead of gold, turned brown. Royal displeasure was averted when the man was visited in a dream by a “Roman” (probably meaning Byzantine) painter or icon-maker (Romawi gäbare śǝʿǝl) who explained how to use the dust of a white stone to correct the color.8 The Miracles of Mary are still today mandatory daily reading in some liturgical celebrations. A genre in which Ethiopian and Eritrean intellectuals were actively engaged is theology. The first attested Gǝʿǝz examples are translations of works regarding the nature of Christ in line with the decisions taken at the councils of Nicaea and Ephesus, although in one early source we also find the Canons of Chalcedon, rejected by the Ethiopian and Eritrean churches.9 In the period between the twelfth and sixteenth century several theological writings of the Church Fathers were translated into Gǝʿǝz.10 The first and most illustrious Ethiopian theologian of the Middle Ages was Giyorgis of Sägla (d. 1425/26),11 author of the ample and detailed Mäṣḥafä mǝsṭir,12 an anti-heretical treatise completed in 1424 that had a deep influence on local religious thought. Frequently quoted in the theological literature over the centuries, it can be considered a compendium of the theological positions of the medieval Ethiopian and Eritrean Orthodox churches. The work comprises thirty homilies to be read during the liturgical year, each made of both exposition and refutation of heretical doctrines mostly attributed to heresiarchs of the patristic age (with the exception of one Ethiopian). The aim of the treatise was to argue against the theological positions of contemporary opponents of the royal authority. Giyorgis made use of several sources for the composition of his work, some quite ancient, which, together with the use of an elaborate rhetoric and diversified narrative style, show his highly intellectual attitude. Another prolific theological “writer” was King Zärʾä Yaʿǝqob, to whom a number of works, mostly written in defense of his theological positions, are 8  Ibid., 87–93. 9  Alessandro Bausi, “La collezione aksumita canonico-liturgica,” Adamantius 12 (2006): 43–70. 10  The list of works can be found in Bausi, “Ethiopia and the Christian Ecumene.” 11  Gérard Colin, “Giyorgis of Sägla,” in EAe 2 (2005), 812; Marie-Laure Derat, “La sainteté de Giyorgis de Sāgla: une initiative royale?” Warszawskie Studia Teologiczne 12/2 (1999): 51– 62; Yaqob Beyene, “La dottrina della Chiesa etiopica e il ‘Libro del mistero,’” RSE 33 (1989): 35–88. For further details on his career and writings see respectively Bausi, “Ethiopia and the Christian Ecumene,” and Fritsch and Habtemichael Kidane, “Medieval Ethiopian Orthodox Church.” 12  Yaqob Beyene, ed. and trans., Giyorgis di Saglā. Il libro del mistero (Maṣḥafa mesṭir), 4 vols, CSCO, 515–516, 532–533, SAe 89–90, 97–98 (Louvain, 1990–1993).

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ascribed.13 They include some hymns of the Ǝgziʾabḥer nägśä, and particularly the hymns related to the Virgin, composed to praise both the “First Sabbath” (Saturday) and Sunday and to discuss issues about Trinitarian theology.14 Another work attributed to the king is the Book of the Nativity (Mäṣḥafä milad), a polemical and apologetical collection of homilies to be read on the feast of the Nativity of Christ, composed in defense of the concept of the Incarnation and of Trinitarian theology. It is addressed to the king’s opponents who were accused of supporting a concept of Trinity that did not imply the unity of the three persons. The same themes are also present in his Book of the Trinity (Mäṣḥafä śǝllase).15 The connections between translated and original works were, in general, so deep and various that in some cases the border between them is difficult to ascertain. An example is the Nobility of Kings (Kǝbrä nägäśt),16 used to legitimize the rise of the southern dynasty founded by King Yǝkunno Amlak (1270–1285) after the previous “usurper” era of the Zagwe kings. As far as the composition 13  Kurt Wendt, “Die theologischen Auseinandersezungen in der äthiopischen Kirche zur Zeit der Reformen des XV. Jahrhunderts,” in Atti del Convegno Internazionale di Studi Etiopici (Roma 2–4 aprile 1959), ed. Enrico Cerulli (Rome, 1960), 137–146; idem, “Der Kampf um den Kanon Heiliger Schriften in der äthiopischen Kirche der Reformen des XV. Jahrhunderts,” in Ethiopian Studies. Papers Read at the Second International Conference of Ethiopian Studies (Manchester, July 8–11 1963), ed. Charles Fraser Beckingham and Edward Ullendorff (Manchester, 1964), 107–113. 14  Getatchew Haile, The Different Collections of Nagś Hymns in Ethiopic Literature and Their Contributions (Erlangen, 1983). 15  Kurt Wendt, “Das Maṣḥafa Berhān und Maṣḥafa Milad,” Orientalia, n.s., 3 (1934): 1–30, 147–173, 259–293; idem, ed., Das Maṣḥafa Milad (Liber Nativitatis) und Maṣḥafa Śellāssē (Liber Trinitatis) des Kaisers Zarʾa Yāʿqob, CSCO 221–235, SAe 41–43 (Louvain, 1963). 16  A select bibliography must include the overview by Paolo Marrassini, “Kǝbrä nägäśt,” EAe 3 (2007), 365–368; Carl Bezold, ed. and trans., Kebra Nagast. Die Herrlichkeit der Könige. Nach den Handschriften in Berlin, London, Oxford und Paris zum ersten Mal im äthiopischen Urtext herausgegeben und mit deutscher Übersetzung versehen (Munich, 1905); Ernest A. W. Budge, trans., The Queen of Sheba and her only Son Menyelek. Being the History of the Departure of God & His Ark of the Covenant from Jerusalem to Ethiopia, and the Establishment of the Religion of the Hebrews & the Solomonic Line of Kings in That Country. A Complete Translation of the Kebra Nagast with Introduction (London, 1922; repr. 2007); the most recent French translation is Robert Beylot, trans., La Gloire des Rois, ou l’Histoire de Salomon et de la reine de Saba (Turnhout, 2008); recent essays on the work have been published by Pierluigi Piovanelli, “The Apocryphal Legitimation of a ‘Solomonic’ Dynasty in the Kǝbrä nägäśt – A Reappraisal,” Aethiopica 16 (2013): 7–44 and Alessandro Bausi, “La leggenda della Regina di Saba nella tradizione etiopica,” in La regina di Saba: un mito fra Oriente e Occidente. Atti del seminario diretto da Riccardo Contini, Napoli, Università “L’Orientale,” 19 Novembre 2009–14 gennaio 2010, ed. Fabio Battiato, Dorota Hartman, and Giuseppe Stabile (Naples, 2016), 91–162, with a complete list of bibliographical references.

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of the work is concerned, the interpretation of the colophon has been a matter of discussion for years, as it seems to proclaim itself as a work of translation (though the wording is ambiguous) first from Coptic to Arabic, then from Arabic to Gǝʿǝz. Elements of the Gǝʿǝz text do indeed have antecedents in other linguistic traditions, but no Vorlage in Coptic or Arabic has been discovered and the connections between the Gǝʿǝz text and related earlier works are complex and still incompletely understood. Whatever its degree of indebtedness to foreign antecedents, in its Gǝʿǝz form it trumpets a decidedly Ethiopian royal ideology and was echoed in other works produced for the Solomonic dynasty in and after the fourteenth century, to become, perhaps, the literary work most closely associated with Ethiopia. In the Nobility of Kings the genealogy of the only legitimate (and explicitly non-Zagwe) ruling lineage is traced back, through an uninterrupted chain, to King Solomon and his son by the Queen of Sheba, Mǝnǝlik, who transported the Ark of the Covenant to Aksum, giving birth to the myth of foundation of the “new Jerusalem.” The work is presented as a discourse made by Gregory the Illuminator to the 318 orthodox Fathers during the Council of Nicaea (325 CE). It is divided into 117 chapters organized in three parts. The first section of the first part describes the history of humanity and the lineage of the kings from Adam to Solomon, through the branch of Shem, the first son of Noah; in this section is also stressed the importance of the Ark of the Covenant in the Creation and parallels between the Ark, Mary, and Zion. The second section opens with the words of Domitius, patriarch of Costantinople (366–384 CE), who claims to have found a book in the cathedral of St. Sophia on the pre-eminence of the kings of both Rome (Byzantium) and Ethiopia, but mostly on the primacy of the king of Ethiopia, first son of Solomon. The story of the meeting of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba (Makǝdda) follows. The third section deals with the birth of Mǝnilǝk I, who took the throne name David (Dawit), the visit to his father at the age of twenty-two, his return to Ethiopia with the Israelite notables’ eldest sons and the Ark of the Covenant, the abdication of Makǝdda in his favor, and his first successful wars. The second part narrates the rest of the life of King Solomon, especially his passion for non-Christian women and the spread of idolatry because of their influence, as well as events after his reign. At the end, the Nicene assembly proclaims the superiority of the king of Ethiopia, firstborn of Solomon, over the kings of Judah (Solomon’s second son) and Rome (Solomon’s youngest son), a superiority that is reaffirmed in the third part of the work together with the statement that the Ark of the Covenant will remain in Ethiopia until the second coming of Jesus Christ. This last part also contains an anti-Judaic inclination and it ends with the evocation of the famous sixth-century massacre of Christians in Naǧrān (Yemen).

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The colophon, as noted above, reports that the book was translated (or worked out) from Coptic into Arabic in 1225 and from Arabic into Gǝʿǝz, most probably between 1314 and 1322, at the beginning of the reign of ʿAmdä Ṣǝyon (1314–1344) and during the time of Yaʿǝbikä Ǝgziʾ, ruler of Ǝndärta, who rebelled against that king. The invocation of Yaʿǝbikä Ǝgziʾ in the colophon has inspired some scholars to suppose that the Nobility of Kings was initially composed to support the ruling classes of Tǝgray (and maybe particularly the rulers of Ǝndärta) against the dynastic claims of the southern rulers, and only later became an ideological instrument in the hands of the so-called “Solomonic” dynasty.17 The most ancient manuscript known so far and transmitting a possible textus receptus (the text commonly accepted as ultimate after the process of revision and rewriting) has been dated between 1450 and 1500.18 A large number of different sources were used for the composition of the work, including the Bible, rabbinical and midrashic lore, apocryphal texts, and patristic sources. In contrast to the Jewish and Islamic sources reporting the legend of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, the Nobility of Kings does not include the fabulous and “magical” elements which, in any case, were well known in the Ethiopian and Eritrean traditions, particularly in the Tǝgre and Tǝgrǝñña versions of the legends of a dragon in Aksum. The unsolved problem of the relationship between the Nobility of Kings and its presumed Coptic and CoptoArabic sources does still limit our understanding of the circumstances of its composition.19 The Nobility of Kings is not merely a literary work for EthiopianEritrean society, but has an authoritative value that goes beyond fiction and contributed over time to the construction of a national identity. Royal chronicles, for their part, represent an original genre of Gǝʿǝz literature. They were most probably inspired by both the Aksumite historiographical tradition and the Nobility of Kings, and were created to serve as a basis for the political legitimacy of the Solomonic dynasty and for the ideological construction of a united and illustrious Christian kingdom, with which all the peoples of Ethiopia and Eritrea could identify.20 The first phase of the royal chronicles (fourteenth–sixteenth century) was deeply influenced by hagiographic

17  Marrassini, “Kǝbrä nägäśt,” 366. 18  Piovanelli, “The Apocryphal Legitimation,” 9, n. 11. 19  Bausi, “La leggenda della regina di Saba,” 111–113. 20  Servir Chernestov, “Historiography: Ethiopian Historiography,” in EAe 3 (2007), 40–45, at 40–41; Solomon Gebreyes Beyene, “The Tradition and Development of Ethiopic Chronicle Writing (Sixteenth-Seventeenth Centuries): Production, Source, and Purpose,” in Tempo e Storia in Africa / Time and History in Africa, ed. Alessandro Bausi, Alberto Camplani, and Stephen Emmel (Milan, 2019), 145–160.

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models.21 The first royal chronicle dates to the time of the King ʿAmdä Ṣǝyon (1314–1344) and concerns his military campaigns against the sultanate of the Ifat in 1332.22 Due to the subject, the chronicle has a strong anti-Muslim tone but it offers detailed information on the mustering of the army and, in general, on the administration and territorial extent of the Christian kingdom in the first half of the fourteenth century, as well as on the role of women in military campaigns. The chronicles respectively of Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob and Bäʾǝdä Maryam were published together by Perruchon in 1893.23 The first work randomly reports episodes, events, and campaigns that occurred during the life of the king: his persecution of idolaters, the administrative organization and reorganization of the kingdom, the description of his royal palace in Däbrä Bǝrhan, the king’s travels and foundation of several religious institutions, and so on. In the second work the description of the events follows a more structured chronological order. The chronicle begins with an account of the conflict between Bäʾǝdä Maryam and his father, then narrates the king’s life, travels, religious foundations, and campaigns, and ends with a summary of the events described in the first part. The scholars who have analysed these two chronicles conclude that they are both made of two distinctive parts that were later combined.24 The chronicle of Gälawdewos (1540–1559)25 was written two years after the king’s death on the basis of various sources that the author, who was part of the king’s entourage, had at his disposal. The work depicts the king as a pious warrior full of Christian virtues through whom God shows his will. Frequent 21  Paolo Marrassini, “Un testo agiografico: la Cronaca Reale,” in Narrare gli eventi. Atti del convegno degli egittologi e degli orientalisti italiani in margine alla mostra ‘La battaglia di Qadesh,’ ed. Franca Pecchioli Daddi and Maria Cristina Guidotti (Rome, 2005), 225– 232 [English translation: “A Hagiographic Text: The Royal Chronicle,” in Languages and Cultures of Eastern Christianity: Ethiopian, ed. Alessandro Bausi (Farnham, 2012), 389– 397]; Solomon Gebreyes Beyene, “The Tradition and Development.” 22  See at least Paolo Marrassini, ed. and trans., Lo scettro e la croce. La campagna di ʿAmda Ṣeyon I contro l’Ifat (1332) (Naples, 1993); Manfred Kropp, ed. and trans., Der siegreiche Feldzug des Königs ʿĀmda-Ṣeyon gegen die Muslime in Adal im Jahre 1332 n.Chr., CSCO 538–539, SAe 99–100 (Louvain, 1994). An English translation of the work has been made by George W. B. Huntingford, The Glorious Victories of ʿĀmda Ṣeyon, King of Ethiopia (Oxford, 1965). 23  Jules Perruchon, ed. and trans., Les chroniques de Zarʾa Yâʿeqôb et de Ba‌ʾeda Mâryâm, rois d’Éthiopie de 1434 a 1478 (texte éthiopien et traduction) (Paris, 1893). 24  Perruchon, Les chroniques, X–XI; Marie-Laure Dérat, “Censure et réécriture de l’histoire du roi Zarʾa Yaʿeqob (1434–1468). Analyse des deux versions de la ‘chronique’ d’un souverain éthiopien,” in Les ruses de l’historien: essais d’Afrique et d’ailleurs en homage à Jean Boulégue, ed. François-Xavier Fauvelle-Aymar and Bertrand Hirsch (Paris, 2013), 119–135. 25  Critical edition and translation by William E. Conzelman, Chronique de Galāwdēwos (Claudius), roi d’Éthiopie (Paris, 1895) and more recently by Solomon Gebreyes, Chronicle of King Gälawdewos (1540–1559), CSCO 667–668, SAe 116–117 (Louvain, 2019).

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parallels are made between Gälawdewos and the kings of Israel, in line with the scriptural model found in hagiographic works. According to its last editor, the chronicle of Gälawdewos was composed to commemorate the death of the king at the hands of Muslims, and therefore as martyr; this might explain the hagiographic nature of the text. Furthermore, the presence of some excerpts from the biblical Book of Lamentations might point at the fact that the text was read on the commemoration day of the king, who was indeed canonized as a saint-martyr and included in the Gǝʿǝz Synaxarion.26 In the sixteenth century, chronicles of previous kings were compiled into larger Histories to create longer narratives emphasizing the linear continuity of the Solomonic kings.27 Both royal chronicles, and longer royal histories incorporating and revising earlier accounts, continued to be produced into the Gondärine period and beyond, such as the “shorter” or “abbreviated” chronicles of the seventeenth– eighteenth centuries. The position of translated works at the foundation of Gǝʿǝz literature, regularly supplemented by a continuing activity of translation and often deeply implicated in the production of original Gǝʿǝz works, has oriented philological research towards their study, as Alessandro Bausi sets out in his essay in this volume. As even the brief overview above illustrates, however, research into Gǝʿǝz literature has also examined the adaptations of transmitted texts in their Ethiopian-Eritrean context and the genesis of new genres and specific literary works, and has examined the literary corpus as a whole from a variety of analytic viewpoints, including the literary, anthropological, historical, ideological, and material (that is, in terms of physical characteristics of the support in which it is transmitted). The genre of hagiography provides a particular apt case study through which to discuss approaches to Gǝʿǝz literature, for it includes both texts transmitted from other Christian traditions and original Gǝʿǝz compositions, and, as one of the largest and most important genres of the Middle Ages with implications for different fields of study, it has been approached from multiple and often mutually illuminating analytic perspectives.

26  Solomon Gebreyes Beyene, “The Tradition.” 27  Chernetsov, “Historiography”, 41, suggests the first such History was that of Lǝbnä Dǝngǝl, incorporating chronicles of his predecessor, and that Lǝbnä Dǝngǝl’s History was in turn incorporated in another that included accounts of more recent reigns in Śärṣä Dǝngǝl’s time. Solomon Gebreyes however (“The Tradition”) argues that the History of Śärṣä Dǝngǝl’s time was the first of such compilation, and involved the composition of the History of Lǝbnä Dǝngǝl itself, a second chronicle of Gälawdewos, and the chronicle of Minas.

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Hagiography: Typologies and Methodologies

A large number of hagiographic works on apostolic and early Christian saints were translated into Gǝʿǝz, at least until the creation of original hagiographic works on local saints. Hagiographic texts are transmitted in thousands of manuscripts which are still nowadays copied and used in Ethiopia and Eritrea for liturgical celebrations and other ritual practices. Only a few of these texts have been investigated with critical criteria, and a systematic organization and examination of the overall hagiographic patrimony is still a desideratum.28 The emphasis here will be placed on the adaptation and reception of foreign hagiographic texts in Ethiopia and Eritrea; on the composition of original works on Ethiopian and Eritrean saints; and on the role of both hagiographic texts and the manuscripts that transmit them in the study of medieval Christian culture. The main typologies of hagiographic composition in Gǝʿǝz include: (a) the gädl (pl. gädlat; lit. “spiritual fight,” here translated as Life), which in general consists of the story of the deeds that a saint performed in his or her lifetime. It treats the lives of confessors rather than martyrs and focuses on exemplary ways of living; (b) the sǝmʿ (lit. “martyrdom,” here translated as Acts), which in general consists of the story of a saint’s suffering and cruel death for upholding his or her faith. The core of the narrative structure of the sǝmʿ usually concentrates on the last part of the life of the martyr (arrest, torture, and violent death); unlike the gädl, no detail about his/her childhood, adolescence or education is given; (c) the dǝrsan (lit. “homily”), similar to the gädl in narrative structure but usually shorter and with a specific liturgical function; d) the inventio or revelatio, the story of how a new saint or more often a saint’s bodily remains were discovered; (e) the translatio, the story of how a saint’s relics were 28  Useful tools for the identification of Ethiopian and Eritrean saints are: AA. VV., Bibliotheca Sanctorum Orientalium. Enciclopedia dei Santi. Le Chiese Orientali, 2 vols. (Rome, 1998–1999); Michael Belaynesh, Stanislaw Chojnacki, and Richard Pankhurst, eds., The Dictionary of Ethiopian Biography. Volume I: From Early Times to the End of the Zagwe Dynasty c. 1270 A.D. (Addis Ababa, 1975); Getatchew Haile, “Ethiopian Saints,” in The Coptic Encyclopedia 4, ed. Aziz Suryal Atiya (New York, 1991), 1044–1056; Kinefe-Rigb Zelleke, “Bibliography of the Ethiopic Hagiographical Traditions,” Journal of Ethiopian Studies 13, 2 (1975): 57–102; Paul Peeters, ed., Bibliotheca Hagiographica Orientalis (Bruxelles, 1910); see also the entries of the individual saints in the Encyclopaedia Aethiopica. The main editions of Ethiopian and Eritrean hagiographic texts can be found in the following journals and series: Aethiopica. International Journal of Ethiopian and Eritrean Studies; Analecta Bollandiana; Annales d’Éthiopie; Memorie and Rendiconti della Reale Accademia dei Lincei; Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium, Scriptores Aethiopici; Egitto e Vicino Oriente; Patrologia Orientalis; Quaderni di semitistica; Rassegna di studi etiopici; Rivista degli studi orientali.

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brought to a church or moved to a new shrine; (f) the ra‌ʾǝy (“vision”), the story of how a saint appeared to someone in a vision; (g) the täʾammǝr (“miracle”), the story of how a miracle was performed on the saint’s behalf by God; and (h) anaphoras and hymns, which include various types of poetic compositions, like mälkǝʾ, sälam, and qǝne. A hagiographic composition might well combine many of these narrative types. Many gädlat, for example, extend their narration well beyond the scene of the saint’s death to include miracles performed post mortem. Miracles, furthermore, were often combined to form “books of miracles,” which occasionally encompass few dozen items. Mälkǝʾ and sälam often follow the gädl of a certain saint in the manuscript. Hagiography, in its twofold acceptation – as literature about saints, and as the field of study devoted to sainthood – started to be considered a proper discipline, dealing with a proper literary genre, in Europe in the seventeenth century, with the work of clerics of the Congregation de Saint-Maur and the Société des Bollandistes. The Bollandists played an essential role in providing a critical approach to the study of hagiographic texts. Their approach has deeply influenced critical thought in the study of the sainthood in Europe, including the work of the most prominent scholars in Ethiopian and Eritrean Studies who published the first editions of Gǝʿǝz hagiographic texts in the nineteenth and twentieth century. Among them we can mention Carlo Conti Rossini and Ignazio Guidi, editors of a substantial number of hagiographic texts. It must be noted that the general attitude at that time was to give historical value to the information provided by hagiographic texts, and this attitude has sometimes cast a long shadow on subsequent scholarship, as for instance regarding the supposed Syrian origins of the late antique “Nine Saints.”29 In the course of time hagiographic methodology partly overcame the Bollandists’ approach, and hagiographic texts were increasingly considered as a disciplinary crossroads, offering significant observations for the history 29  Antonella Brita, I racconti tradizionali sulla “seconda cristianizzazione” dell’Etiopia. Il ciclo agiografico dei Nove Santi (Naples, 2010), 25–40. Some recent comments may serve to sum up the long historiographical itinerary of this notion. In the words of Paolo Marrassini, “Questa teoria della partecipazione di santi ‘siri’ alla traduzione della Bibblia etiopica, e quindi dell’origine siriaca dei Nove Santi, è dovuta a una formidabile serie di malintesi storici e filologici nata con Ignazio Guidi, e ribadita dalla partecipazione attiva di Conti Rossini […]”: Paolo Marrassini, Storia e leggenda dell’Etiopia tardoantica. Le iscrizioni reali aksumite. Con un’appendice di Rodolfo Fattovich, La civiltà aksumita: aspetti archeologici. E una nota editoriale di Alessandro Bausi (Brescia, 2014), 103. The synthesis proposed by Pierluigi Piovanelli moves the origins of this “historical and philological misunderstanding” further back in time, giving a longer genealogy for the misconception in Pierluigi Piovanelli, Review of I racconti tradizionali by Antonella Brita, Aethiopica 17 (2014): 243.

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of religion, anthropology, social history, and other fields. From a methodological point of view, hagiographic texts need to be critically analyzed always taking into account the complexity of hagiography as genre. Otherwise the risk is to swing between two extremes: the uncritical acceptance of the information provided or its hypercritical rejection. Once peculiar features proper to the genre have been identified (such as hagiographic tòpoi, scriptural models, atemporality, expressions of devotional attitude, and the like), the remaining data can be evaluated in the light of the historical and chronological context of the texts’ production and reception. Indeed, scholars of hagiography give attention to the saint as he or she is reflected in the written transmission of the hagiographic account, but also study the dynamics leading to the creation of his or her cult, its development over time, and to what extent these processes mirror the formation or strengthening of political and institutional powers through the consolidation of a religious identity. They also examine how religious devotion is perceived and understood by the local communities connected to the veneration of a particular saint and how the exempla transmitted in hagiographic texts, and interiorized through the participation of the faithful in devotional and ritual practices, shape that society and contribute to the consolidation of collective identities.30 30  Selection of more recent general studies on Ethiopian-Eritrean hagiography: Alessandro Bausi, “Kings and Saints: Founders of Dynasties, Monasteries and Churches in Christian Ethiopia,” in Stifter und Mäzene und ihre Rolle in der Religion: Von Königen, Mönchen, Vordenkern und Laien in Indien, China und anderen Kulturen, ed. Barbara Schuler (Wiesbaden, 2013), 161–186; Claire Bosc-Tiessé and Marie-Laure Derat, “De la mort à la fabrique du saint dans l’Éthiopie médiévale et moderne,” Afriques [online journal] 3 (2011), DOI: 10.4000/afriques.1076; Antonella Brita, “Agiografia e liturgia nella tradizione della Chiesa etiopica,” in Popoli, Religioni e Chiese lungo il corso del Nilo, ed. Luciano Vaccaro and Cesare Alzati (Vatican City, 2015), 515–539; Servir Chernetsov, “Investigations in the Domain of Hagiological Sources for the History of Ethiopia After Boris Turayev,” St. Petersburg Journal of African Studies 5 (1995): 114–124; Bertrand Hirsch and Manfred Kropp, eds., Saints, Biographies and History in Africa / Saints, biographies et histoire en Afrique / Heilige, Biographien und Geschichte in Afrika, (Frankfurt am Main, 2003); George W. B. Huntingford, “The Saints of Medieval Ethiopia,” Abba Salama 10 (1979): 257–341; Steven Kaplan, “Hagiographies and the History of Medieval Ethiopia,” History in Africa 8 (1981): 107–123; idem, “The Ethiopian Cult of the Saints: A Preliminary Investigation,” Paideuma 32 (1986): 1–13; Paolo Marrassini, ed. and trans., Gadla Yohannes Mesraqawi. Vita di Yohannes l’Orientale (Florence, 1981); idem, “L’infanzia del santo nel Cristianesimo orientale: il caso dell’Etiopia,” in Bambini santi. Rappresentazioni dell’infanzia e modelli agiografici, ed. Anna Benvenuti Papi and Elena Giannarelli (Turin, 1991), 147–181; idem, “Ethiopian Hagiography: History of Facts and History of Ideas,” paper read at the International Symposium on History and Ethnography in Ethiopian Studies, November 18–25, 1992; Denis Nosnitsin, ed., Ecclesiastic Landscape of North Ethiopia Proceedings of the International Workshop Ecclesiastic Landscape of North Ethiopia: History, Change

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In line with the new trends in hagiographic studies in Europe, the first European scholar to radically innovate the methodological approach in Gǝʿǝz hagiography was Paolo Marrassini. He largely inaugurated the application of a modern philological approach to the study of Gǝʿǝz texts (including hagiographic texts), but also to a consideration of the complexity of hagiography as genre. This is already evident in his first brilliant edition, the Life of Yoḥannǝs Mǝśraqawi31 a combination of rigorous textual criticism and interpretation of the literary traditions in light of anthropological and socio-rhetorical approaches. The application of a meticulous philological analysis of Gǝʿǝz hagiography introduced by Paolo Marrassini has been maintained by his pupils Alessandro Bausi and Gianfrancesco Lusini. The importance of having texts critically edited goes beyond the philological work. It allows a refinement of the primary sources so that they can be employed for further research in literature, linguistics, anthropology, and history. Recent works in hagiography combining historical and anthropological approaches have been published by Steven Kaplan32 and Marie-Laure Derat (with the added value of the archeological perspective).33 A similar approach to hagiography – not as a window onto the time when the saints are claimed to have existed but as a reflection of the eras in which the hagiographic texts were written, a process of construction of the past – is the focus of my own work on the Nine Saints, a group of monks of Byzantine origin credited with evangelizing Ethiopia and Eritrea between the fifth and the sixth century.34 Only in the last years has the need for proper critical editions of hagiographic texts been associated with the study of the material features of the manuscripts. This approach has been aided by the development and application of non-invasive scientific techniques that permit a more rigorous examination of

and Cultural Heritage Hamburg, July 15–16, 2011 (Wiesbaden, 2013); Lanfranco Ricci, “Fonti orali e agiografia,” in Fonti orali. Antropologia e storia, ed. Bernardo Bernardi, Carlo Poni, and Alessandro Triulzi (Milano, 1978), 407–416; Taddesse Tamrat, “Hagiographies and the Reconstruction of Medieval Ethiopian History,” Rural Africana 11 (1970): 12–20. 31  Marrassini, Gadla Yohannes Mesraqawi. 32  Steven Kaplan, The Monastic Holy Man and the Christianization of Early Salomonic Ethiopia (Wiesbaden, 1984); idem, “The Ethiopian Holy Man as Outsider and Angel,” Religion 15 (1985): 235–249; idem, “Seen But Not Heard: Children and Childhood in Medieval Ethiopian Hagiographies,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 30, 3 (1997): 539–553. 33   Marie-Laure Derat, Le domaine des rois éthiopienne (1270–1527): espace, pouvoir et monachisme (Paris, 2003); eadem, L’énigme d’une dynastie sainte et usurpatrice dans le royaume chrétien d’Ethiopie du XIe au XIIIe siècle (Turnhout, 2018). 34  Brita, I racconti tradizionali.

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codicological features.35 It allows us to contextualize and define the circumstances of production, reproduction, reception, use, and perception of the manuscripts36 and to better understand hagiographic manuscripts in their contexts. In what follows I will employ this approach, as far as it is reflected in research conducted so far. 4

Hagiography and Canonization in Ethiopia-Eritrea: the Role of Hagiographic Collections

The first examples of hagiography attested in Ethiopia and Eritrea are two collections of texts about foreign saints circulating in multiple-text manuscripts. These collections are known in the Ethiopian and Eritrean traditions respectively with the labels Gädlä sämaʿǝtat (GS) (lit. “Lives of the martyrs”) and, less systematically, Gädlä qǝddusan (GQ) (lit. “Lives of the saints”).37 The texts forming these collections number over one hundred and forty short hagiographies, mostly of martyrs and confessors of both the universal and Oriental churches, but not exclusively (see below), arranged in the manuscripts according to the order of the calendar. The individual texts of the collection were not originally composed in Gǝʿǝz but progressively translated partly from Greek, during the Aksumite age (presumably between the fourth and the seventh century), and partly from Arabic, starting from the thirteenth century at the latest. The lack of manuscripts before the thirteenth/fourteenth century does not allow us to understand in which form these corpora of texts, or at least a part of them, were introduced into Ethiopia and Eritrea, and the lack of critical editions of 35  For a fuller discussion of manuscripts’ material features and production, see Denis Nosnitsin’s essay, “Christian Manuscript Culture of the Ethiopian-Eritrean Highlands: Some Analytical Insights,” in the present volume. 36  Particularly important from this point of view has been the work done in the project “Comparative Oriental Manuscript Studies” and in the SFB 950, “Manuscript Cultures in Asia, Africa and Europe” by the sub-project C05 on Ethiopian hagiographic and canonicoliturgical manuscripts. 37  The labels of these two collections are often respectively translated as “Acts of the Martyrs” and “Acts of the Saints.” This is due to the fact that the English word “Acts” in hagiography is a calque of the Latin word Acta, originally a legal term indicating the official trials’ records of the martyrs of the early church which were used for the composition of the first Passiones (the label Acta Sanctorum is also used by the Bollandists). Although these two collections are not made exclusively of hagiographies about martyrs, but also about confessor saints, the semantic extension of the use of “Acts” is still reasonable, since it is referred to the earliest monastic hagiographies, in which a strong ascesis replaced violent death (martyrium sine cruore, “martyrdom without blood”, according to the definition of Sulpicius Severus).

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the whole corpus makes it difficult thus far to propose definitive conclusions on their complex genesis. On the other hand, studies conducted on some of the constituent texts and the collections as a whole allow us to highlight some phenomena that give a little insight into the complexity of their textual transmission. First, the Greek phase represents the most ancient stage of translation, and a small number of texts can be so far certainly ascribed to a Greek Vorlage. These are the Acts of St. Mark, Arsenofis, Euphemia, Tewoflos with Ṗaṭroqya and Dämalis, Ǝmrayǝs, maybe Cyprian and Justa, Peter patriarch of Alexandria, Phileas bishop of Thmuis, Sophia and her three daughters Ṗistis, Elpis and Agape.38 Secondly, the Arabic phase appears to be characterized by at least two different channels of transmission, witnessed by a preliminary survey conducted by Alessandro Bausi on some texts. One channel was through Egypt (the Copto-Arabic textual transmission), largely attested for most texts of the GS and also documented by a certain number of subscriptions which attribute a role in the translation to Abba Sälama “the Translator,” metropolitan of Ethiopia (1348–88).39 More problematic is the origin of the second channel of transmission from Arabic. It is attested by a certain number of texts, notably hagiographies connected with the Massacre of Naǧrān (the Acts of Ḫirut,40 Azqir41 and Athanasius of Clysma, and the Lives of Ṗänṭälewon zäṣomaʿt42 and Kaleb). These texts are unknown in the Egyptian Arabic literary tradition and should allegedly be connected to the cultural milieu on the opposite shore of the Red Sea, in the area between the Sinai Peninsula and South Arabia. Among other interesting features emerging from the study of the collection are some that help identify the archaic character of particular texts, whose translation into Gǝʿǝz is therefore to be assigned to the early, “Greek” phase. These include a Greek-Coptic form of the name of the month in the commemoration date, usually placed within the text at the beginning or/and at the end, but also

38  Alessandro Bausi, ed. and trans., La versione etiopica degli Acta Phileae nel Gadla Samāʿtāt (Naples, 2002), 16; Massimo Villa, “La Passio etiopica di Sofia e delle sue figlie Pistis, Elpis e Agape: tradizione manoscritta e ipotesi di Vorlage,” Orientalia Christiana Periodica 84, 2 (2018): 469–488. 39  Bausi, La versione etiopica, 10–12. 40  Alessandro Bausi and Alessandro Gori, eds. and trans., Tradizioni orientali del “Martirio di Areta.” La prima recensione araba e la versione etiopica. Edizione critica e traduzione (Florence, 2006). 41  Alessandro Bausi, ed. and trans., “Il Gadla ʾAzqir,” Adamantius 23 (2017): 341–380. 42  Carlo Conti Rossini, ed. and trans., Acta Yārēd et Ṗanṭalēwon, CSCO 2nd ser., 17 (Paris, 1904; repr. CSCO 26–27, SAe 9–10 [Louvain, 1961]); Antonella Brita, ed. and trans., “I racconti tradizionali sulla cristianizzazione dell’Etiopia: il ‘Gadla Liqānos’ e il ‘Gadla Ṗanṭalēwon’” (Ph.D diss., Università degli studi di Napoli “L’Orientale,” 2008).

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in the margins of the manuscript as a reading indication, and a double title, placed both at the beginning and at the end of the text.43 As even these preliminary observations show, the textual transmission of the GS and GQ collections must have had a complex history. The structure of the collections, as it is known today in the manuscripts, must be the result of a long process of revision, adaptation, and reshaping of both texts and manuscripts, which in our present state of knowledge can only be partially explained. Since the most ancient manuscripts known are dated to the thirteenthfourteenth century (although evidence of the collections’ circulation can be attested from at least the thirteenth century), this structuring process can be chronologically set in an intermediate period between the disappearance of the late antique Aksumite cultural milieu (particularly the disappearance of knowledge of Greek) and the absorption of medieval Christian Arabic culture. Starting from the fourteenth century, the collections were revised from both a linguistic and a material point of view, and texts translated or/and retranslated from Arabic were grouped with the more ancient texts. This process, aimed at producing manuscripts adapted to evolving liturgical needs, also involved a physical rearrangement of the texts in the multiple-text manuscripts. The chronological attestation of the GS manuscripts makes clear the importance of this collection before the diffusion of the first recension of the Gǝʿǝz Synaxarion (Sx) at the end of the fourteenth century. As Alessandro Bausi has observed, the peak of the GS’s circulation (to judge by the chronological distribution of the surviving manuscripts) fell between the fourteenth and the fifteenth century; starting in the later sixteenth, the number of GS manuscripts progressively decreased. This decline was probably prompted, above all, by the spread of the second recension of the Sx. When seen in light of their material manuscript form and liturgical function, the latter had practical advantages: the short readings in the Sx manuscripts made it possible to gather the 43  In the Ethiopian-Eritrean manuscript culture is common to have a title at the beginning of the text, whereas its presence at the end of the text is absolutely uncommon. This very rare feature present in few texts of the GS has not been studied extensively and deserves to be investigated, not only to better understand the reason of its presence in these texts, but also because it might lead to a better understanding of the concept of “colophon” in Gǝʿǝz manuscripts. Furthermore, this feature might be a point to be carefully examined having in mind what happens in the Coptic tradition, where, as shown by Paola Buzi, titles at the end of the texts, particularly in scrolls, are attested: see Paola Buzi, Titoli e autori nella tradizione copta. Studio storico e tipologico (Pisa, 2005); eadem, “Titoli e colofoni: riflessioni sugli elementi paratestuali dei manoscritti copti saidici,” in Colofoni armeni a confronto. Le sottoscrizioni dei manoscritti in ambito armeno e nelle altre tradizioni scrittorie del mondo mediterraneo. Atti del colloquio internazionale, Bologna, 12–13 ottobre 2012, ed. Anna Sirinian, Paola Buzi, and Gaga Shurgaia (Rome, 2016), 203–217.

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commemorations of more saints, for the whole liturgical year, in solely two volumes. This phenomenon, as mentioned, is also noticeable in the number and circulation of the manuscripts of the two collections: during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the first recension of Sx is attested in few manuscripts (only four), while in the same period the manuscripts of the GS were numerous; on the contrary from the second half of the sixteenth century the number of GS manuscripts started to decrease, and the manuscripts of the second recension of the Sx increased and saw a progressive diffusion in later times.44 The shaping and the structuring of the collection was probably guided by other principles as well. The sacred value given to the manuscripts transmitting hagiographic texts must have contributed to their perception as institutional objects capable of testifying to the sainthood of the figures described therein. In late antiquity and the Middle Ages there were no centralized institutional bodies in charge of the canonization of saints. The manuscripts, with their central role in the liturgy, may therefore have represented the only mechanism for their official recognition. The Lives of the saints were apparently included in these multiple-text manuscripts as soon as the saint’s veneration in the country was introduced, and may also have been excluded from the manuscripts when such veneration ceased. This process might also explain the progressive translation of texts and the continuous reshaping and revision of the collections. For instance, the advantage of the editorial innovation introduced by the Sx was that it made possible the inclusion of hagiographies about local saints. Manuscripts transmitting hagiographic collections were commonly found in the main monasteries and churches (as testified by their current widespread diffusion) and thus the names of these saints could widely circulate in the whole country and be fixed, through the reading of their hagiographic texts during the liturgy, in the collective memory. This repetitive reading and listening must have contributed to the diffusion of the saint’s memory and veneration. 5

The Emergence of Ethiopian-Eritrean Hagiography

Ethiopian-Eritrean Saints of Foreign Origin and the Construction of the Kingdom’s Christian Past The fourteenth century is a very crucial period for hagiographic literature in Ethiopia and Eritrea since, along with the copying and revision of more ancient texts and the translation of new texts, an indigenous literature finally 5.1

44  Bausi, La versione etiopica, 12–14.

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started to appear, whose protagonists were Aksumite-era saints. This is for instance the case of the Life of Ṗänṭälewon zäṣomaʿt (lit. “of the cell”), the earliest copy of which is transmitted in the fourteenth-century hagiographic multipletext manuscript EMML 7602.45 From the fifteenth century onward his Life is also transmitted in GS manuscripts. The same manuscript also contains one recension of the Life of Libanos.46 It is interesting to note that some of the names of these Aksumite saints already circulated in short homilies transmitted in manuscripts dated to the fourteenth century that contain collections of homilies. This is the case, for instance, of Gärima, Yǝmʿata, and Guba, mentioned in the Homily of Lulǝyanos, bishop of Aksum, on the Holy Fathers47 attested in the codices trigemini EMML 1763 and EMML 8509, BL Or. 8192. In some instances, the hagiographies represent an extended version of these shorter homilies circulating in the homiletic collections, and this is the case of the Life of Libanos in the Homily of Abba Elǝyas, bishop of Aksum on Mäṭaʿ transmitted in EMML 1763 and EMML 8509.48 Written eight centuries after the events they narrate, the hagiographies of these Aksumite saints provide only a vision of the Aksumite period as screened through a later medieval cultural filter. In an attempt to (re)construct their Christian past, the hagiographers made use of oral traditions circulating on these saints (mainly pertaining to miraculous episodes), written sources concerning historical episodes, and literary models, giving birth to hagiographic cycles or individual texts that reflected their authors’ idea of the past but also, in some instances, their desire to exploit the past for current ideological purposes. From a literary and textual point of view, the above-mentioned Life of Ṗänṭälewon zäṣomaʿt is based, apart from some original sections, on the written material transmitted by hagiographic texts connected with the Naǧrān expedition (the Acts of Ḫirut and the Life of Kaleb). Ṗänṭälewon, who is not present in the Arabic versions of these texts (from which the Gǝʿǝz ones derive) 45  Details on the manuscript tradition of the Life of Ṗänṭälewon can be found in Brita, “Il ‘Gadla Liqānos’ e il ‘Gadla Ṗanṭalēwon.’” 46  Alessandro Bausi, ed. and trans., La “Vita” e i “Miracoli” di Libānos, CSCO 595–596, SAe 105–106 (Louvain, 2003). 47  Edited and translated by Getatchew Haile, “The Homily of Luleyanos, Bishop of Aksum, on the Holy Fathers,” Analecta Bollandiana, 103/3–4 (1985): 385–391. 48  Edited and translated by Getatchew Haile, “The Homily of Abba Eleyas Bishop of Aksum, on Mäṭṭa’,” Analecta Bollandiana, 108 (1990): 29–47; Bausi, La “Vita” e i “Miracoli” di Libānos, xxiv; Alessandro Bausi, “A Few Remarks on the Hagiographico-Homiletic Collections in Ethiopic Manuscripts,” in Hagiographico-Homiletic Collections in Greek, Latin and Oriental Manuscripts – Histories of Books and Text Transmission in a Comparative Perspective, ed. Caroline Macé and Jost Gippert (forthcoming).

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substitutes for the monk Zonaios of the Greek version.49 The Lives of Libanos, Gärima, and Zämika‌ʾel Arägawi are influenced at different levels by the Life of Gäbrä Krǝstos,50 i.e. the Byzantine saint Alexis, translated into Gǝʿǝz. The material co-presence of the Lives of both Aksumite and foreign saints in the same manuscript is the reason, or perhaps the consequence, for such an influence.51 Apart from those of the Aksumites, other hagiographies of saints of foreign origin who operated in Ethiopia and Eritrea are attested in the literary tradition, including the Life of Gäbrä Mänfäs Qǝddus,52 one of the most venerated saints at a national level, the Life of Yoḥannǝs Mǝśraqawi (John the Oriental), and some others. The co-presence of new texts about Aksumite saints with texts already long known was most probably aimed at facilitating the circulation and liturgical use of the former. One result of this operation was the foreign hagiographies’ deep influence on the Ethiopian and Eritrean ones; another was the medieval adaptation of late antique traditions. 5.2 Hagiographies of Ethiopian-Eritrean-Born Saints In the fifteenth and sixteenth century the production of hagiographic works having as their protagonist locally born saints, including kings, monks, priests, and charismatic figures, increased. This period also saw also the gradual appearance of hagiographies in single-text manuscripts, transmitting either longer versions of some texts about foreign saints already circulating in the multiple-texts manuscripts, or texts about Ethiopian and Eritrean saints.53 The 49  Brita, I racconti tradizionali, 146–174. 50  Enrico Cerulli, ed. and trans., Les Vies éthiopiennes de Saint Alexis l’homme de Dieu, CSCO 298–299, SAe 59–60 (Louvain, 1969). 51  Paolo Marrassini, “The ‘Egyptian Saints’ of the Abyssinian Hagiography,” Aethiopica 8 (2005): 112–129, at 112; Antonella Brita and Jacopo Gnisci, “Hagiography in Gǝʿǝz,” in Treasures of Ethiopia and Eritrea in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, ed. Jacopo Gnisci (Oxford, 2019), 59–69. 52  Paolo Marrassini, ed. and trans., “Vita,” “Omelia,” “Miracoli” del santo Gabra Manfas Qeddus, CSCO 597–598, SAe 107–108 (Louvain, 2003). 53  The manuscript evidence does not provide so far examples of the circulation of single-text manuscripts before the fifteenth century. The inventory transmitted in the manuscript EMML 1832 and dated to the end of the thirteenth century includes a few hagiographic manuscripts that could be identified as single-text manuscripts; however, inventories pose problems of interpretation that cannot be ignored when discussing the most ancient typologies of hagiographic manuscripts circulating in Ethiopia. They consist of lists of works – basically titles – followed by the number of copies of each found in the monastery. A multiple-text manuscript is easily recognizable when it is listed under the label which identifies a specific, known collection of Ethiopian-Eritrean manuscript culture. The same is not true for single-text manuscripts: one cannot be sure whether the title listed refers to a single-text manuscript or to a multiple-text manuscript of which only

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main innovation of the single-text manuscript was the possibility to include additional kinds of texts, mainly miracles and poetic compositions dedicated to the saints, usually placed at the end of the Life. One of the interesting aspects of these local hagiographic texts is their reflection of the historical time in which they were written. In some cases, the Life was composed shortly after the death of the saint, by an author who knew him/her or who was able to draw on eyewitness accounts and was familiar with the general context. In other cases, the Life was written in a later ‒ but still medieval ‒ period, aspects of whose historical circumstances can be perceived through analysis of the text. And indeed historians have very regularly mined hagiographic texts for historical insights, and have done so effectively when the important proviso that such texts reflect their time of composition is observed.54 A good example of a text reflecting the saint’s lifetime is the Life of Märḥa Krǝstos, ninth abbot of Däbra Libanos (1462–1496).55 It was composed at the beginning of the sixteenth century and depicts this saint as someone very close to the royal court and a counselor of the king. He was, indeed, apparently elected by King Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob in person to head Däbrä Libanos, a symbolic act indicating that the king opted for an alliance with the monastery. This implied economic prosperity for the monastic community but also strict royal control over it, which limited the freedom of expression of their ideals.56 The Life of Filǝṗṗos,57 third abbot of Däbrä Libanos, was composed in the same monastic environment between 1424 and 1426. This work became part of a broader hagiographic cycle made of Lives of seven different monks who were in conflict with King ʿAmdä Ṣǝyon and his successor Säyfä Arʿad, revealing conflictual relationships between the monks and the kings.58 The cycle includes, besides Filǝṗṗos, one text is quoted while other texts are not mentioned (for instance for reasons of space). A comparison between contemporary inventories and actual collections of manuscripts in Ethiopian-Eritrean churches and monasteries reveals this practice: multiple-text manuscripts that lack a specific “label” are listed under the first text of the collection. This means that although the work appears in the inventory as the unique text of a manuscript in fact it is not. 54  Some of the major historical accounts on medieval Ethiopia which have exploited hagiographic texts to a considerable degree are Taddesse Tamrat, Church and State in Ethiopia, 1270–1527 (Oxford, 1972) and Derat, Le domaine des rois. 55  Stanislas [Stanisław] Kur, ed. and trans., Actes de Marḥa Krestos, CSCO 330–331, SAe 62–63 (Louvain, 1972). 56  Derat, “Modéles de sainteté,” 137–140. 57  Boris Turaiev, ed. and trans., Vitae sanctorum indigenarum. III, Gadla Aron seu Acta S. Aaronis; IV, Gadla Filpos seu Acta S. Philippi, 2 vols. (Paris, 1905; repr. as CSCO 30–31, SAe 13–14 [Louvain, 1955]). 58  On these conflicts see Gianfrancesco Lusini’s essay, “The Ancient and Medieval History of Eritrean and Ethiopian Monasticism: An Outline,” in the present volume.

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the Lives of Bäṣalotä Mika‌ʾel59 and Anorewos60 from Däbrä Sǝgaǧǧä, also written in the fifteenth century, as well as those of Aron61 from Däbrä Daret, Qawǝsṭos62 from Mahaggǝl, Tadewos63 of Däbrä Maryam, and Ǝndrǝyas, most probably composed after the sixteenth century.64 The theme of antagonism to the royal power also characterizes the hagiographic cycles of the two most prominent Ethiopian and Eritrean monastic movements: the Ewosṭateans65 ‒ at least from ʿAmdä Ṣǝyon to Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob, during whose reign the agreement made at the council of Däbrä Mǝṭmaq (1450) put an end to the disputes ‒ and the Ǝsṭifanosites or Stephanites, mostly during the reign of Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob.66 59  Carlo Conti Rossini, ed. and trans., Vitae sanctorum indigenarum. I: Gadla Baṣālota Mikāʾēl seu Acta S. Baṣalota Mikāʾēl; II: Gadla S. Anorēwos seu Acta Sancti Honorii (Rome, 1905; repr. as CSCO 28–29, SAe 11–12 [Louvain, 1955]). 60  Conti Rossini, Vitae sanctorum indigenarum. I: Gadla Baṣālota Mikāʾēl. 61  Turaiev, Vitae sanctorum indigenarum. II: Gadla Aron. 62  Osvaldo Raineri, ed. and trans., Gli atti di Qawesṭos martire etiopico (Sec. XIV ) (Vatican City, 2004). 63  Veronika Six, ed. and trans., Die Vita des Abuna Tādēwos von Dabra Māryām im Ṭānāsee (Wiesbaden, 1975). 64   Marie-Laure Derat, “Modéles de sainteté et idéologie monastique à Dabra Libanos (XVe–XVIe siècles),” in Hirsch and Kropp, Saints, Biographies and History in Africa, 127–147. 65  Editions and/or translations of Ewosṭateans’ hagiographies include at least: Carlo Conti Rossini, ed., “Il Gadla Filpos e il Gadla Yoḥannes di Dabra Bizen,” Memorie della Reale Accademia dei Lincei. Classe di Scienze Morali, Storiche e Filologiche, 5th ser., 8 (1901): 61– 170; idem, “Gli Atti di Abbā Yonās,” Rendiconti della Reale Accademia dei Lincei, 5th ser., 12 (1903): 177–201 and 239–262; idem, ed. and trans., Vitae sanctorum indigenarum. I. Gadla Maqorēwos, seu Acta S. Mercurii, CSCO 2nd ser., 22 (Paris, 1904) (repr. as CSCO 33–34, SAe 16–17 [Louvain, 1955]); idem, ed., “Un santo eritreo: Buruk Amlāk,” Rendiconti della Reale Accademia dei Lincei. Classe di scienze morali, storiche e filologiche, 6th ser., 14 (1938): 3–50; idem, ed., “Note di agiografia etiopica (ʿAbiya-Egziʾ, ʿArkalēdes e Gäbrä-Iyasus),” RSO 17 (1938): 409–452; Gianfrancesco Lusini, ed. and trans., “Il Gadla Anānyā,” Egitto e Vicino Oriente 13 (1990): 149–191; idem, ed. and trans., Il ‘Gadla Absadi’ (Dabra Māryām, Sarāʾ), CSCO 557–558, SAe 103–104 (Louvain, 1996); Paolo Marrassini, ed., “Il Gadla Matyas,” Egitto e Vicino Oriente 6 (1983): 247–307; Osvaldo Raineri, trans., “Atti di Anania, santo monaco etiopico del XVI secolo,” Ephemerides Liturgicae 104 (1990): 65–91; Tedros Abraha, ed. and trans., Il Gädl di Abuna Demyanos santo eritreo (XIV–XV sec.). Edizione del testo etiopico e traduzione italiana (Turnhout, 2007); idem, ed. and trans., I Gädl di Abunä Täwäldä Mädehn e di Abunä Vittore. Edizione del testo etiopico e traduzione italiana (Turnhout, 2009); idem, ed. and trans., Gädlä Abunä Yonas Zä-Bur: Eritrean Saint of the 15th century (Turnhout, 2015); Boris Turaiev, trans., Vitae sanctorum indigenarum. I. Acta S. Eustathii, CSCO 2nd ser., 21 (Rome, 1906) (repr. as CSCO 32, SAe 15 (Louvain, 1955)]. 66  Editions and/or translations of Ǝsṭifanosites’ hagiographies include at least: André Caquot, ed. and trans., “Les Actes d’Ezrā de Gunda Gundē,” Annales d’Éthiopie 4 (1961): 69–121; Carlo Conti Rossini, ed. and trans., Vitae sanctorum indigenarum. I. Acta sancti Abakerazun. II. Acta sancti Takla Ḥawāryāt, CSCO 2nd ser., 24 (Rome, 1910) (repr. as

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Although to various degrees, these works also mirror events related to theological controversies.67 Monks’ involvement in opposing the royal power for feudal interests led, perhaps, to the composition of the hagiographies of two of the Nine Saints: the Life of Gärima,68 founder of the monastery of Däbrä Mädära, written in the fifteenth century and attested in at least two recensions, and the Life of Zämika‌ʾel Arägawi,69 to whom is ascribed the foundation of the famous monastery of Däbrä Dammo, composed in the sixteenth century, a period in which Däbrä Dammo started to flourish (before the sixteenth century there is no evidence connecting Zämika‌ʾel Arägawi to the foundation of Däbrä Dammo). One of the most representative works of this period is the Life of Täklä Haymanot (d. 1313), founder of the powerful monastery of Däbrä Libanos (originally called Däbrä ʿAsbo) in the region of Šäwa and one of the most venerated national saints. His Life is found in dozens of manuscripts (which confirm the pervasive fame of the saint) in at least three different recensions.70 The so-called Waldǝbba recension71 was written most probably in the first half of the fifteenth century and related to the monastic milieu of the northern region of Waldǝbba, which in that period was connected with Däbrä Libanos.

CSCO 56–57, SAe 25–26 [Louvain, 1910]); Aleksander Ferenc, ed. and trans., “Les Actes d’Isaïe de Gunda-Gundē,” Annales d’Éthiopie 10 (1976): 243–294. The Life of the movement’s founder, Ǝsṭifanos, has been published with an Amharic translation in Ethiopia: ገድለ፡ አቡነ፡ እስጢፋ ኖስ፡ ዘጉንዳጉንዶ (Gädlä abunä Ǝsṭifanos zäGundagundo, “The Life of Our Father Ǝsṭifanos of Gunda Gunde”) (Addis Ababa, 1996 EC [2003/2004 CE]). 67  The theological controversies are discussed in the essays of Lusini and of Fritsch and Habtemichael Kidane in the present volume. 68  Carlo Conti Rossini, ed., “L’Omilia di Yoḥannes, vescovo di Aksum, in onore di Garimā,” in Actes du XI Congrès des Orientalistes. Section Sémitique, Paris: Ernest Leroux 1897, 139–177. 69  Edition: Ignazio Guidi, ed., “Il Gadla ʾAragâwi,” Memorie della Reale Accademia dei Lincei. Classe di scienze morali, storiche e filologiche, 5th ser., 2 (1894): 54–96; translation: MarcAntoine Van den Oudenrijn, trans., La vie de saint Mikāʾēl Aragāwi, traduite de l’éthiopien, avec introduction et notes (Friburg, 1939). 70   Marie-Laure Derat, “Une nouvelle étape de l’élaboration de la légende hagiographique de Takla Haymanot (ca. 1214–1313),” Cahiers du Centre de Recherches Africaines 9 (1998): 71–90; eadem, “Les Vies du saint éthiopien Takla Haymanot,” in Histoire d’Afrique: les enjeux de mémoire, ed. Jean-Pierre Chrétien and Jean-Louis Triaud (Paris, 1999), 33–47. 71  Carlo Conti Rossini, ed. and trans., “Il Gadla Takla Hāymānot secondo la redazione waldebbana,” Memorie della Reale Accademia dei Lincei, 5th ser., 2 (1896): 97–143; English translation in Ernest A. W. Budge, The Life of Tâklâ Hâymânôt in the Version of Dabra Libanos … to Which is Added and English Translation of the Waldebban Version, 2 vols. (London, 1906).

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The Ḥayq recension72 was produced in the first half of the fifteenth century73 in Däbrä Libanos. The Däbrä Libanos recension,74 also written in the monastery founded by the saint, represents the most widespread, longest, and most complex version of the Life and is attested in at least two different versions, the first written in 1515, the second in the seventeenth or eighteenth century.75 The Däbrä Libanos recension was also translated in Arabic during the reign of King Gälawdewos (1540–1559) and sent to the Coptic patriarch Gabriel VII, which helped spread the fame of Täklä Haymanot in the Coptic Church.76 We also know of two works that were meant to be read on the commemoration days of the translatio reliquiae of Täklä Haymanot (12 Gǝnbot) and of his successor Filǝṗṗos (ca. 1274–1348) (23 Mäggabit), a quite rare type of text in Gǝʿǝz hagiographic literature.77 Most redactions of Täklä Haymanot’s Life where thus accomplished between the fifteenth and the sixteenth century, well after the life of the saint, but in a period in which his principal foundation, Däbrä Libanos, was becoming one of the most important monastic centers in the kingdom. These redactions indeed show a relationship with the Life of the founder of the preeminent monastic house of Däbrä Ḥayq Ǝsṭifanos, Iyäsus Moʾa (1214–1293). The Life of Iyäsus Moʾa78 is attested in at least two recensions and has been a focus of scientific interest for many scholars.79 The composition of the first 72  Still unpublished. An imprecise translation was published in Jean Duchesne-Fournet, Mission en Ethiopie, 1901–1903, vol 1: Histoire du voyage (Paris, 1909), 340–431. 73  Between 1525 and 1526, according to Derat, “Une nouvelle étape,” 77; eadem, “Les Vies du saint,” 38. 74  Edited and translated by Ernest A. W. Budge, The Life of Tâklâ Hâymânôt. 75  On the existence of more than one version of Däbrä Libanos recensions see Derat, “Les Vies du saint;” Denis Nosnitzyn [Nosnitsin], “Zur Literaturgeschichte der Vita des heiligen Täklä Haymanot: die arabische Fassung,” Afrikanistische Arbeitspapiere 62 (2000): 93–112 and Denis Nosnitsin, “Mäṣḥafä fǝlsätu lä-abunä Täklä Haymanot: A Short Study,” Aethiopica 6 (2003): 137–167, at 145, n. 30. 76  Nosnitzyn, “Zur Literaturgeschichte”. 77  The two works have been studied by Denis Nosnitsin, “Mäṣḥafä fǝlsätu.” 78  Stanislas [Stanisław] Kur, ed. and trans., Actes de Iyasus Moʾa abbé du couvent de St.Etienne de Hayq, CSCO 259–260, SAe 49–50 (Louvain, 1965). 79  Derat, Le domaine des rois, 88–96; Bertrand Hirsch, “L’hagiographie et l’histoire. Lectures d’un passage des Actes de Iyasus Moʾa,” in Hirsch and Kropp, Saints, Biographies and History in Africa, 162–174; Steven Kaplan, “Iyasus Moʾa and Takla Haymanot: A Note on a Hagiographical Controversy,” Journal of Semitic Studies 31 (1986): 161–174; Manfred Kropp, “… der Welt gestorben: Ein Vertrag zwischen dem äthiopischen Heiligen Iyyäsus-Moʾa und König Yǝkunno-Amlak über Memoriae im Kloster Ḥayq,” Analecta Bollandiana 116 (1998): 303–330; idem, “Die dritte Würde ode rein Drittel des Reiches? Die verschiedenen Versionen der Biographie des Hl. Iyäsus Moʾa als Ausdruck sich wandelnder Funktionen des Texts,” in Hirsch and Kropp, Saints, Biographies and History in Africa, 191–205; Kur, Actes de Iyasus Mo’a; Paolo Marrassini, “A proposito di Iyasus Moʾa,” Egitto e Vicino

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recension was dated to the second half of fifteenth century by Enrico Cerulli, although his hypothesis is not shared by other scholars who slightly postpone it. The second recension is much later, probably between the seventeenth and the eighteenth century. Marie-Laure Derat proposes to take into consideration the function of the Life of Iyäsus Moʾa in the general background of Amharan monasticism in the fifteenth century and the rivalry between two important monastic institutions, those of Däbrä Ḥayq Ǝsṭifanos and Däbrä Libanos, for gaining the favor of the royal power. The composition of the Life of Iyäsus Moʾa aimed therefore at demonstrating that Iyäsus Moʾa was the spiritual father of Täklä Haymanot and that the latter received the monastic garment from the former (the reverse is stated in the Life of Täklä Haymanot); at presenting Ḥayq as the holiest and most ancient monastery of the region; and at demonstrating that the first and decisive support to the Solomonic dynasty was offered by Iyäsus Moʾa (in facilitating the ascent to the throne of Yǝkunno Amlak).80 The Life of the hermit Samuʾel, founder of the Waldǝbba monastery in the homonymous region of Tǝgray, one of the most inhospitable places, offers an interesting description of the ascetic life. To the sixteenth century is also dated the composition of the Life of Yared,81 musician from the fifth-sixth century and one of the most venerated saints, considered the inventor of EthiopianEritrean liturgical chant. A certain number of Lives of local saints who lived in the Middle Ages were composed much later or are attested only in later manuscripts, but the lack of proper critical study does not allow us to better contextualize their production at this time.82 Significantly, when local hagiography began to spread, the perception of foreign saints seems to have altered. The foreign saints were progressively Oriente 9 (1986): 175–197; Denis Nosnitsin, “Wäwähabo qobʿa wäʾaskema. Reflections on an episode from the history of the Ethiopian monastic movement,” Scrinium 1 (= Varia Aethiopica: in Memory of Servir B. Chernestov [1943–2005], ed. Denis Nosnitsin) (2005): 197–247. 80  Derat, Le domaine des rois, 88–96; see also Bertrand Hirsch, “L’hagiographie et l’histoire,” 171. 81  Conti Rossini, Acta Yārēd et Ṗanṭalēwon. 82  Among them we can mention at least the Life of Mädḫaninä Ǝgziʾ, disciple of Täklä Haymanot and founder of the monastery of Däbrä Bänkwǝl in Tǝgray (Gérard Colin, ed. and trans., Vie et Miracles de Madhanina Egziʾ [Turnout, 2010]), and the Life of Krǝstos Śämra (Enrico Cerulli, ed. and trans., Atti di Krestos Samrā, CSCO 163–164, SAe 33–34 [Louvain, 1956]), a work displaying a very interesting example of mystical sainthood, cf. Antonella Brita, “L’immagine trascendentale del santo come strumento di potere nell’agiografia etiopica,” in Persona, trascendenza e poteri in Africa / Person, transcendence and powers in Africa, ed. Pierluigi Valsecchi (Milan, 2019), 83–110.

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“Ethiopianized” and “personalized” by local models. Their hagiographies were taken out from the collections (which impose a rigid material structure) and copied into single-text manuscripts, where additional sections were added to their Lives. This is the opposite, we may note, of the dynamic characterizing the first original Gǝʿǝz hagiographic compositions, where Ethiopian and Eritrean saints (foreign born, but active in and associated as saints with Ethiopia and Eritrea) were instead modelled on and associated with foreign ones. 6

National and Local Hagiography

Hagiographic production reflects the veneration practices spread in the country. Not all saints venerated in Ethiopia and Eritrea are officially recognized as “national” saints and not all, therefore, are included in the “canonical” Synaxarion. A certain number of saints are known and venerated only at a local level, sometimes in small districts or villages. This implies the existence, on the one hand, of a confined hagiographic production and, on the other hand, of local versions of the Synaxarion containing readings about local saints, in addition to the readings about officially recognized saints. Some hagiographies on local saints known in this period are the Lives of Täklä Alfa,83 abbot of the monastery of Dima Giyorgis, Filmona,84 Samuʾel from Däbrä Wägäg,85 Tadewos of Däbrä Bartarwa,86 and Zena Marqos.87 The Lives of the following saints are related to Lake Ṭana area: Bäträ Maryam,88 from the monastery of Zäge; Yafqǝrännä Ǝgziʾ89 from the monastery of Gwǝgwǝben; Zäyoḥannǝs,90

83  Enrico Cerulli, ed. and trans., “Gli Atti di Takla Alfa,” Annali dell’Istituto Universitario Orientale di Napoli 2 (1943): 1–87. 84  Maurice Allotte de la Fuÿe, ed. and trans., Actes de Filmona, CSCO 181–182, SAe 35–36 (Louvain, 1958). 85  Stanislas [Stanisław] Kur, ed. and trans., Actes de Samuel de Dabra Wagag, CSCO 287–288, SAe 57–58 (Louvain, 1968). 86  Riccardo de Santis, ed. and trans., “Il Gadla Tādēwos di Dabra Bārtāwa,” Annali Lateranensi 6 (1942): 9–116. 87  Enrico Cerulli, trans., “Gli atti di Zēnā Mārqos, monaco etiope del sec. XIV,” in Collectanea Vaticana in honorem Anselmi M. Card. Albareda (Vatican City, 1962), 1: 191–212. 88  Translation by Enrico Cerulli, “Gli atti di Batra Maryam,” RSE 4 (1944–1945): 133–144, continued in vol. 5 (1946): 42–66. 89  Isaac Wajnberg, ed. and trans., Das Leben des Hl. Jāfqerena ʾEgzīʾ (Weimar, 1917; 2nd ed. as Orientalia Christiana Analecta 106 [Rome 1936]). 90  Madeleine Schneider, ed. and trans., Acts de Za-Yoḥannǝs de Kebrān, CSCO 333–334, SAe 65–66 (Louvain, 1972).

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founder of the monastery of Kǝbran; and Zena Maryam,91 founder of the monastery of Ǝnfraz. More in general, the circulation of single-text manuscripts containing hagiographies about local saints must have been rather limited, so that the fame of these saints remained confined within the borders of districts or villages. This is not surprising. The fame that confers sainthood is based on the (direct or indirect) memory of a saint preserved among the members of a community. It thus originates in circumscribed areas, where it is believed the saint worked wonders, and is hardly ever characterized by a sudden diffusion. Only later, usually after the saint’s death, does the local favor that the holy person enjoyed in communal memory take the shape of actual veneration which, through reiterated and long-lasting liturgical and ritual practices, keeps his/her memory alive. These local forms of veneration tend to have distinctive peculiarities, depending on the culture, the geography, and the traditions in the area where they arise, but they also display shared features handed down both in oral and written form. Frequent are, for instance, episodes of miracles worked by the saint in definite places of the interested areas, where tangible signs are claimed to be still visible in the shape of rocks, holy springs, or caves or are echoed in place-names. All these places are themselves objects of veneration and backdrops to celebrative ceremonies. These may be called folk forms of veneration, aimed at strengthening the relationship between the saint and the members of the local community but also at anchoring the memory of this relationship to the places where it was born in order to shape a sort of territorial identity. Veneration becomes legitimized when the Life and the miracles worked by the saint are written down, usually at the initiative of the monastic community founded (or claimed to have been founded) by the saint. This process takes place at a local level and it is hardly possible that these saints are venerated in a wider territory if their Lives are not included in larger collections of hagiographic texts circulating in the whole country. 7

Hagiographic Manuscripts in Veneration Practices

A peculiar and fundamental narrative section present in the Gǝʿǝz Lives of saints (but not exclusively) is the kidan (lit. “pact”), a promise given by God to the saint to fulfill all the prayers and requests made by the faithful in his name but also to grant eternal life to anyone who commissions the construction of a 91  Enrico Cerulli, trans., “Gli atti di Zēnā Māryām: monaca etiopica del secolo XIV,” RSO 21 (1946): 122–156.

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church in his name, or commissions a copy of, translates, or even simply reads his Life, or (especially) who observes his täzkar (commemoration), yearly and monthly.92 The presence of the kidan in a Life represents the necessary element for distinguishing between a mere literary work and a devotional one. In terms of liturgical practices, saints in Ethiopia and Eritrea are celebrated on their dies natalis, which is the main celebration and occurs once a year. They are also celebrated each month on the same day of the annual celebration. If for instance the main celebration of a saint falls on the fifth of Mäskäräm, the monthly celebration takes place on the fifth of each month. Reading indications, in the form of paracontent, provide us significant information about the use of hagiographic manuscripts in liturgical celebrations. In multiple-text manuscripts, and particularly in the GS, the indication readings correspond to the date of the death of the saint (dies natalis) and, at the same time, to the date of his commemoration. In the practical use of the manuscript, the reading indication points to the date when the text has to be read in the liturgical office. This marker can be written in different places on the page but always in correspondence with the beginning of the texts to which it is referred. It is not known when exactly, during the liturgical celebrations, the GS was read in the medieval period. There is evidence of its use today, but this does not necessarily reflect the use of the GS in the past. Single-text manuscripts are also read on the day of the annual commemoration of the saint. Some manuscripts show, alongside specific sections of the text, reading indications in which the names of the months of the year are written. These marks indicate when a certain passage of the text should be read on the occasion of the monthly celebration. It is not clear when the monthly celebration of the saints was introduced in Ethiopia and Eritrea. Indication readings for the monthly celebrations are present in manuscripts dated at the earliest to the sixteenth century. 8

Some Models of Sainthood in Gǝʿǝz Hagiography

A considerable number of Ethiopian-Eritrean kings are venerated as saints and therefore included in the Synaxarion, and for some of them the circulation 92  Stanisław Kur, “Le pacte du Christ avec le Saint dans l’hagiographie ethiopienne,” in Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference of Ethiopian Studies: University of Lund, 26–29 April 1982, ed. Sven Rubenson (Lund, 1984), 125–129; Bosc-Tiessé and Derat, “De la mort à la fabrique.”

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of hagiographic works is also known. The already-mentioned Life of Kaleb (Ǝlla Aṣbǝḥa) mainly describes the sixth-century historical expedition of this Aksumite king to Naǧrān, in Yemen, to avenge a massacre of Christians ordered by the Jewish king Yūsuf ʾAsʾar Yaṯʾar (Ḏu Nuwās in Arabic, Finḥas in Gǝʿǝz) and his decision to become a monk after his return to Ethiopia. The content of the work is shared (with some additional details) by other Gǝʿǝz hagiographies related to Naǧrān events, mainly the Acts of Ḫirut (Arethas) and the Life of Ṗänṭälewon. A homily of King Kaleb is also known.93 The hagiographic cycle of the Zagwe94 kings comprises five works composed in the Solomonic period. They were created, as proposed by Marie-Laure Derat, to restore the honor of these kings, depicted in the historiography as “usurpers,” by downgrading them from kings to saints.95 The Lives of Lalibala96 and Yǝmrǝḥannä Krǝstos97 written respectively at the beginning and at the end of the fifteenth century, were the first composed.98 These texts are pure hagiographic compositions: no echo of the historiographical aspects characterizing royal chronicles is found here. Once again, Marie-Laure Derat gives an interesting reading: these works attest to the use of hagiography for rewriting history, a weapon in the hands of the Solomonids to affirm their right to reign by presenting an image of holy regality.99 The Lives of Na‌ʾakwǝto Läʾab100 and Mäsqäl Kǝbra (wife of Lalibala) were written after the sixteenth century, the Life of Ḥarbay in the eighteenth century. Their compilation is largely based on the text of the earliest two Lives, so they lack any original features. For instance, the Life of Mäsqäl Kǝbra is assembled by reusing the episodes from the 93  Getatchew Haile, ed. and trans., “An anonymous homily in honour of King Ella Aṣbeḥa of Aksum. EMML 1763 ff. 34v–35v,” Northeast African Studies 3, 2 (1981): 25–37. 94  On the use of the term “Zagwe” to designate the dynasty see Derat, L’énigme d’une dynastie, 202. 95  Ibid., 25, 214, 220 and passim. 96  Jules Perruchon, ed., Vie de Lalibala, roi d’Éthiopie. Texte éthiopien publié d’après un manuscript du musée britannique (Paris, 1892); Marie-Laure Derat, “The Acts of King Lalibäla: Structure, Literary Models and Dating Elements,” in Proceedings of the 15th International Conference of Ethiopian Studies, ed. Siegbert Uhlig (Wiesbaden, 2006), 561–568; Derat, “Autour de l’homelie en l’honneur du saint-roi Lālibalā: écritures hagiographiques, copies et milieu de production,” Oriens Christianus 99 (2017): 99–128. An updated critical edition with English translation is in preparation, authored by Nafisa Valieva. 97  Critical edition by Paolo Marrassini, ed. and trans., Il Gadla Yemreḥanna Krestos. Introduzione, testo critico, traduzione (Naples, 1995). 98  Derat, L’énigme d’une dynastie, 215–238. 99  Ibid., 232. 100  Carlo Conti Rossini, ed. and trans., “Gli atti di Re Na‌ʾakuĕto La-ʾAb,” Annali dell’Istituto Superiore Orientale di Napoli, n.s., 2 (1943): 105–232.

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Lives of Lalibala and Na‌ʾakwǝto Läʾab in which she appears.101 A much later composition (nineteenth-twentieth century) is the Life of the Aksumite kings Abrǝha and Aṣbǝḥa,102 considered as two co-regent brothers. In point of fact, they are the King Ǝlla Aṣbǝḥa (Kaleb) and Abrǝha, a military leader serving as his lieutenant in South Arabia after the Naǧrān events and the return of Kaleb to Ethiopia. The idea of the two co-regent brothers is a late conception reflecting the late character of the text. Purposes of legitimization and the wielding of power encouraged the composition of hagiographies about figures other than king-saints as well. The composition of the above mentioned Däbrä Libanos recension of the Life of Täklä Haymanot is an example of this operation. This recension was written in the same period as the Life of Märḥa Krǝstos, which already clearly marks a change in royal political thought towards monastic power. Täklä Haymanot is here presented as the patron of the Solomonic dynasty to which he has been bound by the insertion of a shared Davidic descent, elements both absent in the previous recensions. Marie-Laure Derat proposes to consider the meaning of the Däbrä Libanos recension as a reflection of a sea change in the relationship between the monastic and royal powers.103 A number of hagiographies about Aksumite saints were written in a very late period (nineteenth-twentieth century), as for instance the above-mentioned Life of Abrǝha and Aṣbǝḥa, but also the Lives of some of the Ṣadǝqan or “Righteous Ones”104 and some of the Nine Saints (Alef,105 Liqanos,106 Ṣäḥma,107 Yǝmʿata,108 and at least the second recension of the Life of Afṣe).109 They represent, at different levels, good examples of the construction of sainthood, of conscious political strategies on the part of kings and rulers (often with the complicity of monastic communities) to revitalize ancient traditions for 101  Derat, L’énigme d’une dynastie, 236. 102  Paolo Marrassini, “Il Gadla Abreha waAṣbeḥa. Indicazioni preliminari,” Warszawkie Studia Teologiczne 12, 2 (1999): 159–179. 103  Derat, “Modéles de sainteté,” 140–144. 104  Brita, I racconti tradizionali, 3–8. 105  Brita, “Il Gadla Alǝf,” in Æethiopica et Orientalia. Studi in onore di Yaqob Beyene, ed. Alessandro Bausi et al., 2 vols. (Naples, 2012), 1: 69–87. 106  Critical edition and translation in my Ph.D dissertation: Brita, “Il ‘Gadla Liqānos’ e il ‘Gadla Ṗanṭalēwon.’” 107  Antonella Brita, “Ṣǝḥma,” in EAe 4 (2010), 596–597. 108  Hagos Abrha, ed. and trans., Textual Analysis of Gädlä Yǝmʿata (PhD diss., Addis Ababa, 2009); idem, “Philological Analysis of the Manuscripts of the Gadla Yǝmʿata,” Ityopis 1 (2011): 61–75. 109  Roger Schneider, “Les Acted d’Abba Afṣē de Yeḥa,” Annales d’Éthiopie 13 (1985): 105–118.

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­ urposes of political and monastic legitimization. These works of course rep flect the mentality and the culture of the time in which they were created, rather than the eras of the saints they describe.110 They are interesting for understanding how ancient traditions were perceived in later periods, a subject which is however well beyond the scope of this volume. The need to establish an ideological link with the past to legitimize power or to claim feudal rights is, as extensively shown in the previous pages, a constant in the political thought of the Solomonic dynasty and is clearly reflected in the literary production of the Solomonic era. It is matter of identity and universal acknowledgment of that identity, but also of recognition of a value genetically transmitted and not dependent on personal abilities (which are the consequence, not the cause, of the lineage’s grandeur).111 The value placed on a link to the past was deeply rooted in the mentality of the time and extended to the religious milieu as well. An example is provided, for instance, in the Life of Arägawi, where the saint receives his monastic garment directly from the hands of Saint Pachomius, in Egypt. The topic is present also in some other later hagiographies of the cycle. The fact that some of these Aksumite monks are claimed to have received the monastic garment from the hands of Pachomius, Anthony or Shenoute reflects the need to establish a direct monastic linkage between them and the Desert Fathers. It represents an anachronistic attempt to create an ideological connection with Egyptian monasticism in order to validate the authority of Ethiopian-Eritrean monasticism as its direct descendant.112 In this perspective should probably also be evaluated the monastic genealogy in the Life of Täklä Haymanot. 110  For further details on the Life of Abrǝḥa wä-Aṣbǝḥa see Susanne Hummel, “The disputed Life of the saintly Ethiopian kings ʾAbrǝhā and ʾAṣbǝḥa,” Scrinium 12, 1 (2016): 35–72 and Habtamu Mengistie Tegegne, “Dispute over precedence and protocol: Hagiography and forgery in 19th-century Ethiopia,” Afriques [online journal] 7 (2016), DOI: 10.4000/ afriques.1909; on the Life of Liqānos see Brita, I racconti tradizionali, 97–130. 111  In any case this idea is deeply rooted in a more general context related to the great value assigned to the lineage in the primitive societies and not exclusively in Ethiopia and Eritrea or in Africa (if one thinks about the importance of genealogies learned by heart by Cushitic or other populations) but also in the Near East (reflected in the religious culture as well, in the genealogy of the Prophet, in the Bible or in the apostolicity of the Church, etc.) and Europe. 112  Brita, I racconti tradizionali, 86–96.

chapter 11

Christian Manuscript Culture of the EthiopianEritrean Highlands: Some Analytical Insights Denis Nosnitsin 1 Introduction In recent years the study of Christian Ethiopian manuscript culture has made significant progress.1 A number of research and digitization projects were accomplished in a period when field research was freely possible in Ethiopia; at the same time, Ethiopic manuscript studies became better connected to the disciplines dealing with other manuscript traditions. Research topics common in modern manuscript studies are increasingly being applied to Ethiopic manuscript material. The outcome of these developments can be seen in a number of recent publications ranging from manuscript catalogues to chapters in collective volumes, which will remain seminal works for a number of

1  The present study was carried out within the framework of the long-term project “Beta maṣāḥəft: Manuscripts of Ethiopia and Eritrea,” funded by the Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Hamburg (https://www.betamasaheft.uni-hamburg.de/). A large part of the material used was collected and catalogued in the course of the project Ethio-SPaRe: Cultural Heritage of Christian Ethiopia – Salvation, Preservation, and Research, headed by myself and funded by the European Research Council under the 7th Research Framework Programme IDEAS (Independent Researcher Starting Grant 240720, December 2009– May 2015). Descriptions of those manuscripts can be found in the database of Ethio-SPaRe (to be later incorporated in the “Beta maṣāḥəft” database). The following manuscripts are quoted below or used for images (here accompanied by the name of the cataloguers): AP-005, Homiliary, late 15th to mid-16th c. (D. Nosnitsin); AP-046, Acts of the Martyrs of Ṗäraqliṭos, 1523 (V. Pisani); AQG-005, Acts of the Martyrs, the second half of the 15th c. but before 1492 (V. Pisani); MAKM-053, Acts of Kiros and Nob, late 15th to early 16th c. (M. Krzyżanowska); MY-002, Homiliary, 1380–1412 (D. Nosnitsin); MY-004, Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles, 15th c. (V. Pisani); QS-007, Horologium, 14th c. (V. Pisani); KY-002, Octateuch, 15th c. (I. Fridman); SDSM-004, Four Gospels, late 15th to mid-16th c. (M. Krzyżanowska); TKMG-004, Four Gospels, late 14th to early 15th c. (D. Nosnitsin); UM-035, Land Charters of Qǝfrǝya ʿUra Mäsqäl, early 18th c. (D. Nosnitsin); UM-040, Octateuch, 13th to mid 14th c. (Abraham Adugna); UM-027, Four Gospels, 14th to early 15th c. (S. Ancel); UM-050a, Four Gospels, 14th to early 15th c. (M. Krzyżanowska); UM-058, Books of Kings, before 1350 (M. Villa); MY-008, Four Gospels, 1380–1412 (S. Ancel).

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2020 | doi:10.1163/9789004419582_012

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years to come.2 The present essay does not seek to supersede or go beyond them, neither to repeat what has already been said, except where absolutely necessary. The aim is to add some complementary information, reflect upon a few selected points and propose some new interpretations.3 In particular, the intention is to look at some phenomena of Ethiopic manuscript culture from a diachronic point of view, with some focus on the pre-mid-sixteenth century period, whenever possible, and from a comparative perspective.4 In the parlance of manuscript studies, “Ethiopic manuscript culture” addresses manuscripts containing texts written in Gəʿəz (also called Ethiopic, Old Ethiopic) or Amharic, produced in the cultural framework of the Ethiopian Christian Orthodox (Täwaḥədo) Church throughout its history. The geographical core of this culture is located in the Ethiopian-Eritrean highlands, with possible extension to any place in contemporary Ethiopia or Eritrea that was once under the sway of Christian rulers of the late antique kingdom of Aksum and, later, of the medieval kingdom of Ethiopia.5 Ethiopic manuscript culture also spread to various locations outside the Horn of Africa, in the first instance to the Mediterranean region where small communities of Ethiopians settled in pre-modern times. In some of these places Ethiopic manuscripts were not only present, but also produced. 2  Relevant articles in the EAe, the major reference work on the Horn of Africa and the Christian culture of the Ethiopian-Eritrean highlands; Alessandro Bausi, “La tradizione scrittoria etiopica,” Segno e testo 6 (2008): 507–557; idem, “Copying, Writing, Translating: Ethiopia as a Manuscript Culture,” in Manuscript Cultures: Mapping the Field, ed. Jorg Quenzer, Dmitry Bondarev, and Jan-Ulrich Sobisch (Berlin, 2014), 37–77; in particular, the relevant chapters in Alessandro Bausi et al., eds., Comparative Oriental Manuscript Studies: An Introduction (Hamburg, 2015) (hereafter COMSt), the result of collective efforts, with an exhaustive bibliography, accessible also online. The only Ph.D thesis known to me focusing on the codicology of Ethiopic manuscripts of the last decades is Sean Michael Winslow, “Ethiopian Manuscript Culture: Practices and Contexts” (Ph.D diss., University of Toronto, 2015). Some other important publications will be mentioned below. 3  The script and paleography will not be a special subject of this study. 4  The opportunities for this approach are obviously limited by the scope of the essay as well as by the author’s competence. Presentation of every practice and feature from a comparative perspective is beyond reach for the moment; however, some phenomena in Ethiopic manuscript culture call for comparison, in order to better understand them and hypothesize about their origin and function. See Marilena Maniaci, Archeologia del manoscritto. Metodi, problemi, bibliografia recente (Rome, 2002), 24–25; Alessandro Bausi, “General Introduction. Scope of COMSt,” in COMSt, 9. 5  See Alessandro Bausi, “General introduction. The manuscript traditions: Ethiopic manuscripts,” in COMSt, 46–48. Today, the population of many of such areas is predominantly Muslim, but there are still small islands of Orthodox Christianity and tangible remnants of Ethiopic manuscript culture.

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The main language of Ethiopic manuscript culture in all periods is Gəʿəz, which is still today the (extinct) language of the literature and liturgy of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. Amharic, written in the same script, is attested in manuscripts starting at least from the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century and increased over time, but until the late nineteenth century Amharic remained an auxiliary written language. The presence of other Semitic languages in Ethiopic manuscripts is marginal and restricted mostly to the documentary texts.6 The manuscript cultures of Africa are much better known today than a halfcentury ago, and Ethiopia no longer appears as an isolated island of (Christian) literacy in an ocean of orality. But even after the discovery of large manuscript treasures at Timbuktu7 and other sites in Mali,8 and of old Quranic manuscripts from the historical Kanem-Bornu state,9 Ethiopia still appears unique in sub-Saharan Africa in that it has had its own written tradition using indigenous Ethiopian-Semitic language(s) and a locally developed writing system from a very early period.10 The recent discoveries of old manuscripts in regions 6   For some scattered Arabic documents in the older manuscripts, see, e.g., Madeleine Schneider, “Deux actes de donation en arabe,” Annales d’Éthiopie 8 (1970): 79–87; Ewa Balicka-Witakowska, “The ‘Golden Gospel’ of Agwäza and its Historical Documents,” in Studies in Ethiopian Languages, Literature, and History. Festschrift for Getatchew Haile, ed. Adam Carter McCollum (Wiesbaden, 2017), 187–220; Anais Wion, “Les documents coptoarabes dans les archives chrétiennes d’Éthiopie: de rares témoins de l’autorité épiscopale (XIVe–XV e s.),” Afriques [online journal] 8 (2017): 1–26, http://journals.openedition.org/ afriques/2021. In some cases the Arabic documents are accompanied by Coptic additions. 7   See, e.g., Abdel Kader Haïdara, “An Overview of the Major Manuscript Libraries in Timbuktu,” in The Trans-Saharan Book Trade: Manuscript Culture, Arabic Literacy and Intellectual History in Muslim Africa, ed. Graziano Krätli and Ghislaine Lydon (Leiden, 2011), 242–264, and the contributions in The Meanings of Timbuktu, ed. Shamil Jeppie and Souleymane Bachir Diagne (Cape Town, 2008). 8   According to Ghislaine Lydon, “The earliest known western African manuscripts date from the fifteenth century, and the earliest imported manuscripts would date from the twelfth century, although epigraphic sources precede this period by more than three centuries”: Ghislaine Lydon, “A Thirst for Knowledge: Arabic Literacy, Writing Paper and Saharan Bibliophiles in the Southwestern Sahara,” in The Trans-Saharan Book Trade, 35–72, at 52–53. The oldest dated manuscript from Djenné (Mali) has recently been reported as dating to 1394 CE: Sophie Sarin, “In the Shadow of Timbuktu: the Manuscripts of Djenné,” in From Dust to Digital: Ten Years of the Endangered Archives Programme, ed. Maja Kominko (Cambridge, 2015), 173–187, at 178. 9  These originate from the Lake Chad region, the oldest dating to the late sixteenth century. See Dmitry Bondarev, “Multiglossia in West African Manuscripts: The Case of Borno, Nigeria,” in Manuscript Cultures: Mapping the Field, 113–155. 10  One should keep in mind that most manuscripts found in Sub-Saharan Africa were produced in North Africa (esp. Morocco) and were written in classical Arabic, not an indigenous African language. In the course of time, a number of native spoken African languages

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neighboring the Ethiopian-Eritrean highlands – for instance in the territory of the former Christian Nubia11 and on the other side of Bab el-Mandeb at the Great Mosque of Ṣanʿāʾ (Yemen)12 – might gradually reveal the early relations between Ethiopic manuscript culture and the historical context in which its genesis took place. Book printing was introduced in Ethiopia only in the second half of the nineteenth century, and traditional manuscript-making still exists in Ethiopia as a craft with its original function. Production of parchment manuscripts according to the traditional technology, though gradually declining, continues to the present day. started to be written in Arabic script as “auxiliary” written languages existing at the margins of the mainstream Islamic Arabic literary tradition, including Tamashek (Berber), Hausa, Kanuri/Kanembu, Fulfulde, Wolof, Swahili, but also Old Harari in Ethiopia. See Meikal Mumin and Kees Versteegh, eds., The Arabic Script in Africa: Studies of the Use of a Writing System (Leiden, 2014); Andreas Wetter, “Rhetoric Means of a Didactic Amharic Poem from Wärrä Babbo,” Aethiopica 15 (2012): 176–203; Bondarev, “Multiglossia in West African Manuscripts.” 11  A number of ancient manuscripts and fragments (parchment, leather) with texts in Coptic, Greek and Old Nubian originating from the territory of the former Christian Nubia (Lower Nubia) came to light in the course of the twentieth century. Many manuscript fragments dating approximately to the ninth or tenth century were discovered during the recent archeological campaigns in the Sudan along the Nile, around the Fourth Cataract, Upper Nubia: see Claudia Näser and Alexandros Tsakos, “From Bits and Pieces. A Corpus of Medieval Manuscripts from the Humbolt University (H.U.N.E.) Concession in the Fourth Nile Cataract,” in The Fourth Cataract and Beyond. Proceedings of the 12th International Conference for Nubian Studies, ed. Julie R. Anderson and Derek A. Welsby (Louvain, 2014), 977–984. The findings represent the remnants of the local Christian manuscript culture, of still unknown scale and intensity. Christian Nubia was not itself in the close proximity to the Ethiopian-Eritrean Highlands, but one of the routes connecting those highlands with Egypt went along the Nile. The area of the state of Meroë, between the Second and Fourth Cataracts, was invaded by the Aksumites as early as in the fourth century; later contacts did exist between the kingdom of Ethiopia and the Christian Nubian states Nobatia, Makuria and Alodia. The Nubians were Christians starting from at least the sixth century; like Ethiopians, they followed the monophysite Christianity of the Church of Alexandria. The Nubian Christian states eventually declined by the fifteenth century. See Karola Zibelius-Chen and Gianfranco Fiaccadori, “Nubia,” in EAe 5 (2014): 465–470. 12  On the discovery of up to 15,000 fragments of early Islamic manuscripts and bindings in the Great Mosque of Ṣanʿāʾ in 1972, see Ursula Dreibholz, “Der Fund von Sanaa. Früislamische Handschriften auf Pergament,” in Pergament: Geschichte, Struktur, Restaurierung, Herstellung, ed. Peter Rück (Sigmaringen, 1991), 229–313; on the most important “Sana‘a Quran palimpsest,” see Asma Hilali, “Was the Ṣanʿāʾ Qurʾān Palimpsest a Work in Progress?” in The Yemeni Manuscript Tradition, ed. David Hollenber et al. (Leiden, 2015), 12–27.

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The Corpus

Ethiopic manuscript culture is attested through a significant number of manuscript witnesses only from the mid-fourteenth century. For the period prior to about 1350 (which for present purposes we will call “ancient”), manuscript evidence is very limited. The oldest material is thought to be contained in the famous Gospel books of Ǝnda Abba Gärima monastery.13 Two volumes (henceforth referred to as AG1, AG2) embrace three Four Gospel books commonly referred to as AG I (contained in AG1), II and III (contained in AG2).14 AG I and AG III are considered older than AG II. The pivotal point in the study of these manuscripts was the radiocarbon testing, according to which AG I can be dated to 530–660 CE, and AG III to 330–650 CE.15 If these early datings are accepted, a huge gap of several hundred years separates these Ǝnda Abba Gärima Gospels from the next known pre-fourteenth-century manuscripts. These, too, are very few. They include, for instance, the Four Gospels of Betä Mädḫane ʿAläm in Lalibäla (MS EMML no. 6907), datable through the mention of King Lalibala to his reign in the late twelfth-early thirteenth century;16 the so-called Four Gospel book of Iyäsus Moʾa (MS EMML no. 1832), which was commissioned by Iyäsus Moʾa, the head of the community of Däbrä Ḥayq Ǝsṭifanos, sometime before 1280–81 CE;17 the Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles of Zä-Iyäsus, another abbot of Däbrä Ḥayq, datable to 1292–97 (MS EMML 13  See Bausi, “La tradizione scrittoria etiopica,” 518–520; idem, “The ‘True Story’ of the Abba Gärima Gospels,” Comparative Oriental Manuscript Studies Newsletter 1 (January 2011): 17–20; idem, “Copying, Writing, Translating,” 48–49; recently also Judith S. McKenzie and Francis Watson, The Garima Gospels: Early Illuminated Gospel Books from Ethiopia (Oxford, 2016). 14  AG2 was re-bound by a traditional bookbinder in 1962/63 who included AG II into the volume. But during the recent conservation work (2013) AG II was taken out again, to reduce the tension in the binding (McKenzie and Watson, Garima Gospels, 34, 43). 15  The results were first announced in 2000; see McKenzie and Watson, Garima Gospels, 1. 16   Marie-Laure Derat, “Lalibäla,” in EAe 3 (2007), 477–480; Gianfranco Fiaccadori, “Per la cronologia di un atto ‘feudale’ del negus Lalibala,” Crisopoli. Bolletino del Museo Bodoniano di Parma 14 (2011): 201–204. 17  Getatchew Haile and William F. Macomber, A Catalogue of Ethiopian Manuscripts Microfilmed for the Ethiopian Manuscript Microfilm Library, Addis Ababa and for the Hill Monastic Manuscript Library, Collegeville, vol. 5: Project Numbers 1501–2000 (Collegeville, MN, 1981), 293–301; Sergew Hable-Selassie, “The Monastic Library of Däbrä Hayq,” in Orbis Aethiopicus: Studia in honorem Stanislaus Chojnacki natali septuagesimo quinto dicata, septuagesimo septimo oblate, ed. Piotr O. Scholz et al. (Albstad, 1992), 243–258, at 245; Alessandro Bausi, “I colofoni e le sottoscrizioni dei manoscritti etiopici,” in Colofoni armeni a confronto. Le sottoscrizioni dei manoscritti in ambito armeno e nelle altre tradizioni scrittorie del mondo mediterraneo. Atti del colloquio internazionale. Bologna, 12–13 ottobre 2012, ed. Anna Sirian et al. (Rome, 2016): 233–260, at 240–241.

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no. 1767);18 and possibly also the Four Gospel book of Däbrä Libanos of Ham (Šǝmäzana), datable to the late twelfth or thirteenth century.19 A number of undated manuscripts are thought to have been produced prior to the fourteenth century. Two of these, like the Four-Gospel manuscripts described above, come from the church of Betä Mädḫane ʿAläm: a collection of chants (MS EMML no. 7078)20 and a Pentateuch (MS EMML no. 6913).21 Others include a collection of homilies from Ṭana Qirqos (MS EMML no. 8509);22 a Wisdom of Sirach from Gundä Gunde (GG-202);23 the Books of Job and Daniel from Ǧämmädu Maryam (MS EMML no. 6977), and another manuscript with the Books of Job and Daniel (now Paris, BN, éth. 7);24 the Books of Isaiah and Daniel, and Ascension of Isaiah (BAV, Vat. et. 263);25 the Four Gospels (BAV, Vat. et. 25);26 and a few others. Recent research has added to this corpus of 18  Getatchew Haile and Macomber, Catalogue of Ethiopian Manuscripts, 237–239; see also Alessandro Bausi, “Alcune osservazioni sul Gadla ḥawāryāt,” Annali dell’Istituto Orientale di Napoli 60–61 (2000–2001): 77–114. 19  Alessandro Bausi, “Su alcuni manoscritti presso comunità monastiche del’Eritrea (III.),” RSE 41 (1997): 13–56, at 15 and esp. note 3. 20  Dated to the twelfth/thirteenth century: Kay Kaufman Shelemay, Peter Jeffery, and Ingrid Monson, “Oral and Written Transmission in Ethiopian Christian Chant,” Early Music History 12 (1993): 55–117, at 73; Denis Nosnitsin, “Ancient Chants for ʾabba Yoḥanni: Text Variance and Lost Identity,” in Written sources about Africa and their study. Le fonti scritte sull’Africa e i loro studi, ed. Vermondo Brugnatelli and Mena Lafkioui (Milan, 2018), 287– 311, at 300–302. 21   Sergew Hable Selassie, “An Early Ethiopian Manuscript EMML 8509 (Ethiopian Manuscript Microfilm Library).” Quaderni di studi etiopici 8–9 (1987–88): 5–27, at 13. 22  Estimated to be of the eleventh century (Sergew Hable Selassie, “An Early Ethiopian Manuscript”); today possibly lost. 23  Estimated to be of the twelfth century: William F. Macomber, Catalogue of Ethiopian Manuscripts from Abbā Garimā, Ašatan (Church of St. Mary), Axum (Church of Zion), Dabra Bizan, Dabra Dāmo… (Collegeville, MN, 1979), 43–44; see also Daniel Assefa, “An old witness for the Ethiopic version of Ben Sira,” in Essays in Ethiopian Manuscript Studies. Proceedings of the International Conference ‘Manuscripts and Texts, Languages and Contexts: the Transmission of Knowledge in the Horn of Africa’ (Hamburg, 17–19 July 2014), ed. Alessandro Bausi et al. (Wiesbaden, 2015), 153–160. 24  Dated to the fifteenth century in Herman Zotenberg, Catalogue des manuscrits èthiopiens (gheez et amharique) de la Bibliothèque nationale (Paris, 1877), 12; re-dated to circa 1350 in Siegbert Uhlig, Äthiopische Paläographie (Stuttgart, 1988), 83, 95–98, esp. 139; also see index. 25  Arnold van Lantschoot, “Inventaire sommaire des mss Vaticans éthiopiens 251–299,” in Collectanea Vaticana in honorem Anselmi. M. Card. Albadera a Biblioteca apostolica edita. I (Vatican City, 1962), 453–512, at 465 (with a too recent dating) and plate I. 26  Sylvain Grébaut and Eugène Tisserant, Codices Aethiopici Vaticani et Borgiani, Barberianus Orientalis 2, Rossianus 865 (Vatican City, 1935), 127–31; the dating was corrected to at least the late thirteenth century (see references in Denis Nosnitsin, “The Antiquities of Däbrä Zäyt Qəddəst Maryam (East Təgray, Ethiopia),” Aethiopica 14 (2011): 33–46, at

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ancient witnesses. For instance, the dating recently suggested for the antique manuscript containing the so-called Aksumite Collection (UM-039) is the twelfth/thirteenth century.27 A few ancient codices were identified in the course of the field research of the Ethio-SPaRe project.28 Finally, there are a few fragments of pre-fourteenth-century Ethiopic manuscripts that survived as loose leaves or as insertions in later codices.29 Until now, no manuscript comparable in age to AG I–III has been found, but the amount of the early manuscript material from Ethiopia is slowly growing. Identification and analysis of these ancient witnesses is a difficult and timeconsuming process. The content may of course provide important clues, as in the case of the Four Gospel manuscript that mentions King Lalibala. The tools of manuscript studies are also useful. Certain paleographic features have been identified as peculiar to the pre-fourteenth-century manuscripts. These include specific letter shapes such as ጥ (ṭǝ) with the lateral downstrokes touching the ruled line below, or ዓ (ʿa) with the body of the letter set upon the ruled line, and the distinctive shape of some vocal markers, e.g. for the fourth order (“long” -a) and seventh order (-o). In some ancient manuscripts the vocalization appears as incomplete or “irregular.” Some words are written in particular ancient forms.30 The Ethiopic word for God is written as two words (እግዚኣ/ 40 note 23; and Denis Nosnitsin, Churches and Monasteries of Tǝgray. A Survey of Manuscript Collections (Wiesbaden, 2013), 20; the items discussed in the article, all possibly originating from the area around ʿAddigrat, were manufactured around the same time). 27  See Bausi, “Copying, Writing, Translating,” 60–64; Ewa Balicka-Witakowska, Alessandro Bausi, Denis Nosnitsin and Clair Bosc-Tiesse, “Ethiopic codicology,” in COMSt, 161, fig. 1.6.4. 28  Such manuscripts as UM-040, possibly UM-058, etc. 29  See, e.g., Nosnitsin, Churches and Monasteries of Tǝgray, 238–239, figs. 114b, 115b; Denis Nosnitsin and Maria Bulakh, “A Fragment of an Ancient Four Gospels Book (Lk 6:35– 7:7): A Short Analysis,” in Linguistic, Oriental and Ethiopian Studies in Memory of Paolo Marrassini, ed. Alessandro Bausi et al. (Wiesbaden, 2014), 551–582 (a fragment of the Gospel of Luke in MS MY-002); Denis Nosnitsin and Ira Rabin, “A Fragment of an Ancient Hymnody Manuscript from Məʾəsar Gwəḥila (Təgray, Ethiopia),” Aethiopica 17 (2014): 65–77; Denis Nosnitsin, “The Old Chants for St. Gärima: New Evidence from Gärˁalta,” Scrinium. Journal of Patrology and Critical Hagiography 12 (2016): 84–103; Nosnitsin, “Ancient Chants.” A special case is a fragment of a paper manuscript with an Ethiopic text found in Egypt, the monastery of Saint Anthony, assigned by means of radiocarbon dating to around 1115–1230s: Maximus El-Antony, Jesper Blid, and Aaron Michael Butts, “An Early Ethiopic Manuscript Fragment (Twelfth – Thirteenth Century) from the Monastery of St Antony (Egypt),” Aethiopica 19 (2016): 27–49. 30  For instance እሌ instead of the later እለ, relative pronoun for plural (“which”) or ለዕለ instead of ላዕለ “upon, above”: see Alessandro Bausi, “Ancient Features of Ancient Ethiopic,”

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እግዚአ፡ ብሔር) instead of one.31 Separation of the “sense units” within the text may be made by leaving the rest of the line after the “dot” (።) empty. There are

also codicological features that may hint to the great age of a manuscript (see below). All these features disappear by the middle or late fourteenth century. For the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the number of witnesses is larger, with some securely dated manuscripts, well-recorded and/or accessible, and exploited for research.32 For the subsequent couple of centuries the amount of the manuscript material is quite sizeable. But the majority of Ethiopic manuscript evidence originates from the Gondärine period (ca. midseventeenth to mid-eighteenth century) and later. The reasons for the scarcity of the Ethiopic manuscript material from the early period are understandable. Several dramatic historical events decimated Ethiopian ecclesiastic libraries. Additionally, the agents of Ethiopian Christian culture did not treat books as a precious historical heritage, but as sacred objects intended for practical use.33 A large, or probably the largest part of the Ethiopian manuscript patrimony has been irreversibly lost; the remainder is endangered. In the early 1980s, the number of manuscripts in Ethiopia was estimated at ca. 200,000. In my opinion, this is still the most realistic figure to start with.34 In addition, there are thousands of Ethiopic manuscripts in museums and modern libraries, principally in Europe and North America. Several recent publications give a systematic overview of the established collections of Ethiopic

Aethiopica 8 (2005): 149–169; Nosnitsin and Bulakh, “A Fragment of an Ancient Four Gospels Book.” 31  For an overview, see Alessandro Bausi and Denis Nosnitsin, “Ethiopic palaeography,” in COMSt, 289; Nosnitsin, “Ancient Chants.” 32  Starting with the earliest known samples, such as the famous homiliary MS EMML no. 1763, from Däbrä Ḥayq Ǝsṭifanos, dated to 1336/37 or 1339/40 CE (see Getatchew Haile and Macomber, A Catalogue of Ethiopian Manuscripts, 218–231); a number of old witnesses is discussed in Uhlig, Äthiopische Paläographie; Donald M. Davies, “The Dating of the Ethiopic Manuscripts,” Journal of Near Eastern Studies 46, 4 (1987): 287–307, in some editions etc. 33  On the process of constant “renovation” of the traditional ecclesiastic libraries that resulted in loss of old manuscripts see Denis Nosnitsin, “Ecclesiastic Landscape of North Ethiopia: Remarks on Methodologies and Types of Approach,” in Ecclesiastic Landscape of North Ethiopia. Proceedings of the International Workshop ‘Ecclesiastic Landscape of North Ethiopia: History, Change and Cultural Heritage’, ed. Denis Nosnitsin (Wiesbaden, 2013), 3–13. 34  Based on the number of churches and monasteries, estimated in the early 1970s at 12,596 and 800, respectively: Aymro Wondmagegnehu and Joachim Motovu, The Ethiopian Orthodox Church (Addis Ababa, 1970), 125; Sergew Hable Selassie, Bookmaking in Ethiopia (Leiden, 1981), 35. See also Bausi, “General introduction. The manuscript traditions: Ethiopic manuscripts,” in COMSt, 47, for other estimates.

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manuscripts.35 A new “census of manuscripts” on the much more advanced informational basis that we have now is a desideratum. It is becoming difficult to keep track of smaller collections and single Ethiopic manuscripts in various institutions which today gradually come to light.36 Apart from the fact that Ethiopic manuscript studies is a young field, research on the older phases of Ethiopic manuscript culture faces great difficulties due to the amount and condition of the manuscript material available. The corpus of manuscripts datable prior to the mid-fourteenth century is too small for a comprehensive inquiry. The manuscripts datable to the time between the mid-fourteenth and mid-sixteenth centuries survive in greater numbers, but these old witnesses are frequently less informative than one would expect. Many of them were modified in the course of time; their original bindings were lost completely or partly as a result of damage and interventions of different kinds.37 Today, scholars are coming increasingly to rely upon digital resources, with all their advantages and disadvantages. But in many cases the documentation is sufficient only for textual studies, or paleographical analysis at best. The practice of photographing a manuscript’s physical features as carefully as its text has become common only recently. In a search for answers, scholars frequently turn to the contemporary Ethiopian tradition, which can be very illuminating in explaining phenomena of book culture in some cases, but misleading in others.

35  For the bibliography, see Siegbert Uhlig and Alessandro Bausi, “Manuscripts,” in EAe 3 (2007), 738–744; Bausi, “La tradizione scrittoria etiopica,” 510–515; idem, “Copying, Writing, Translating.” The web-site www.menestrel.fr strives to collect information on the most important collections and their catalogues. 36  E.g., Antonella Brita et al., “Three Collections of Gǝʿǝz Manuscripts Recently Surveyed in Italy: An Inventory,” Aethiopica 20 (2017): 167–189; Alessandro Bausi, “Il manoscritto MS 9 III CS della Fondazione Biblioteca Morcelli-Pinacoteca di Chiari,” in La Biblioteca Morcelliana nel bicentenario della donazione (1817–2017). Studi e ricerche, ed. Fausto Formenti (Brescia, 2017) 189–206; Denis Nosnitsin, Catalogue of Ethiopic Manuscripts (Copenhagen, 2017) concerning the Royal Library, Copenhagen; Ted Erho, “The Ethiopian Manuscripts in the Kulturhistorisk Museum, Oslo,” Aethiopica 20 (2017): 50–69, and some others. 37  This problem concerns manuscripts kept in modern libraries as well as those still remaining in the traditional context: see John A. Szirmai, “Stop destroying ancient bindings,” Gazette du livre médiéval 13 (fall 2013): 7–9.

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Main Writing Materials: Parchment, Inks

In Ethiopia, as everywhere, various materials could be used for occasional writing, but the main writing support used for manuscript production has always been parchment. Thus far, there are no indications that supports such as leather38 or papyrus39 were ever used for that purpose. Papyrus could have been brought to the Ethiopian-Eritrean highlands from Egypt as a commodity, as was the case nearly everywhere in the late antique world. Greek documents and texts written on papyrus could also have been brought, but if so nothing has survived. The only known case of the use of papyrus in Ethiopian manuscript making is that of the Abba Gärima Gospels (see below). The technology of Ethiopian parchment-making has been described several times in detail, but the fact that no lime bath has been ever used in the process probably hints to a significant age of the craft in Ethiopia and still awaits a proper evaluation.40 The unique “parable of parchment” ascribed to the Ethiopian monk Ǝsṭifanos, the leader of the Ǝsṭifanosites (or Stephanite) movement, transmitted in a hagiographical text, speaks of “beating,” an operation which appears uncommon for today Ethiopian parchment-making. It could be applied after soaking, to soften stiff and rigid pelt before further processing.41 38  Leather manuscripts have been recently discovered in Upper Nubia: Näser and Tsakos, “From Bits and Pieces;” Myriam Krutzsch, “Handschriften auf Leder aus Nubien,” in Der andere Blick. Forscherlust und Wissensdrang, Museumsgabe zum 80. Geburtstag von KarlHeinz Priese / für das Ägyptische Museum und Papyrussammlung der Staatlichen Museen zu Berlin, ed. Klaus Finneiser and Jana Helmbold-Doyé (Berlin, 2015), 157–168. 39  Cyperus papyrus L. grows not only in Egypt but in Sudan, Ethiopia and Uganda, etc. For a hypothesis of tropical Africa as the origin place of the papyrus plant see Adam BülowJacobsen, “Writing Materials in the Ancient World,” in The Oxford Handbook of Papyrology, ed. Roger Shaler Bangall (Oxford, 2009), 3–29, at 5–6. However, the plant requires specific natural conditions (humid, very warm climate, much water), and the particular species of papyrus used for manufacturing the writing support had to be cultivated. Besides, the technology of producing papyrus heavily relied upon the unique qualities of the Nile water. 40  For a summary of evidence on Ethiopian parchment making, see Bausi, “La tradizione scrittoria etiopica,” 531–536, and Balicka-Witakowska et al., “Ethiopic Codicology,” in COMSt, 154–155; Fäqadä Səllase Täfärra, Ṭəntawi yäbəranna mäṣaḥəft azzägäǧǧaǧǧät (“The ancient way of preparing parchment books”) (Addis Ababa, 2002 EC [=2009 CE]), 94–110; Winslow, “Ethiopian Manuscript Culture,” 69–112. The question of the age of this tradition is again raised in Laurel Phillipson, “Parchment Production in the First Millennium BC at Seglamen, Northern Ethiopia,” The African Archaeological Review 30, 3 (2013), 285–303. 41  Getatchew Haile, “Manuscripts production in Ethiopia: an ongoing practice,” in The Calligraphy of Medieval Music, ed. John Haines (Turnhout, 2011), 37–44, at 39, 42; idem,

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Ethiopian Christian manuscript makers stress that they faithfully adhere to the use of parchment, in contrast to the Muslim craftsmen who produce their books out of paper. However, medieval Christian Ethiopians in the Mediterranean diaspora also copied Gǝʿǝz texts for their own use onto paper. This was the case in Egypt in the later twelfth or early thirteenth century, at the monastery of Saint Anthony (see above). A few polyglot manuscripts that feature Gǝʿǝz among their several languages, in which Ethiopian scribes collaborated, were also produced on paper, in Egypt, in the Middle Ages.42 Scores of paper manuscripts were produced also in sixteenth-century Rome, in the milieu of the Ethiopian Orthodox monastery of Santo Stefano.43 Normally, inks of two colors have been used for writing texts: black for the main text, and red for rubricated passages, words and elements of the numbers, and punctuation signs. The use of “golden inks” has been attested in a few cases only; the use of inks of other colors occurs rarely and in later manuscripts. The type of black ink that has been commonly used is carbon ink.44 Ink recipes were not written down and individual craftsmen inherited the teched. and trans., A History of the First Estifanosite Monks, 2 vols., CSCO 635–636, SAe 112–113 (Louvain, 2011), at vol. 1 (text), 39–40, vol. 2 (trans.), 29. 42  The Pauline Epistles in Ethiopic, Syriac, Coptic, Arabic and Armenian, now in Milan: see Paolo Nicelli, “Manoscritti dell’Africa araba, etiopica e copta al tempo di Federico Borromeo, letti e catalogati da Enrico Rodolfo Galbiati ed Eugenio Griffini,” in L’Africa, l’Oriente mediterraneo e l’Europa. Tradizioni e culture a confronto, ed. Paolo Nicelli (Milan, 2015), 1–12; and the Epistles and the Acts of the Apostles, now in the Vatican: see Delio Vania Proverbio, “Barb. or. 2 (Psalterium pentaglottum),” in Coptic Treasures from the Vatican Library: A Selection of Coptic, Copto-Arabic and Ethiopic Manuscripts. Papers Collected on the Occasion of the Tenth International Congress of Coptic Studies (Rome, September 17th–22nd, 2012), ed. Paola Buzi and Delio Vania Proverbio (Vatican City, 2012), 163–174. On Ethiopic paper manuscripts, see also Bausi, “General introduction. The manuscript traditions: Ethiopic manuscripts,” in COMSt, 48. 43  Samantha Kelly and Denis Nosnitsin, “The Two Yoḥannəses of Santo Stefano degli Abissini, Rome: Reconstructing Biography and Cross-Cultural Encounter through Manuscript Evidence,” Manuscript Studies 2, 2 (2017): 392–426. 44  The major ink types known from other traditions are carbon inks and iron-gall inks: Agati, Il libro manoscritto, 267–271; François Déroche, Islamic codicology: an introduction to the study of manuscripts in Arabic script. With contributions by Annie Berthier, ed. Muhammad Isa Waley, tr. Deke Dusinberre and David Radzinowicz (London, 2006), 111– 119; Adam Gacek, Arabic Manuscripts. A Vademecum for Readers (Leiden, 2009), 132–134. On inks composed of the mixture of the two main types or their ingredients, see Gacek, Arabic Manuscripts, 132–134. Another type is plant inks (known in the European tradition as “Theophilus ink”) for which the tanning substances extracted from some plants were used; their color was typically not black but brownish. See Heinz Roosen-Runge, “Die Tinte des Theophilus,” in Festschrift Luitpold Dussler: 28 Studien zur Archäologie und Kunstgeschichte, ed. Joseph A. Schmoll gen. Eisenwerth et al. (Munich, 1972), 87–112.

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nology from their masters, resulting in a great multiplicity of ink profiles. But the basic ingredient of the ink has always been soot collected from the bottom of cooking utensils; a binding agent was prepared on the basis of the roasted and ground cereals.45 An Ethiopian carbon ink of good quality is of deep black color, slightly shiny and adhering to parchment very well. Such inks can be washed out or rubbed off but otherwise they prove to be very durable, keeping color intensity and good readability for many centuries.46 In the manuscripts, however, we can observe inks of varying color tones, consistency, and quality. In some manuscripts the ink is not deep black, but brownish. This might be due to specific environmental and preservation conditions, but also potentially to inherent qualities of the inks. For instance, preliminary studies show peculiarities in the chemical composition of the inks used in some ancient manuscripts, where iron-gall ink or its components, or plant ink or its components, have been detected in the carbon ink.47 This is the case of an old chant manuscript fragment from the church of Məʾəsar Gwəḥila Mika‌ʾel (northern Ethiopia).48 The probes from the unique MS UM-039 (the Aksumite Collection) showed that the black ink is of the iron-gall type.49 A few Ethiopian ink recipes are known which fit into the category of plant inks.50 The study of inks used in the AG I–III remains a desideratum, but we can assume that the inks used by the Ethiopians in the early period (pre-fourteenth-century?) were 45  The methods of ink preparation are described in nearly all essays dedicated to Ethiopian manuscript making. A number of recipes are presented in Sergew Hable Selassie, Bookmaking in Ethiopia, 14; Patricia Irwin Tournerie, Colour and Dye: Recipes of Ethiopia (London, 1986); John Mellors and Anne Parsons, Ethiopian Bookmaking: Bookmaking in Rural Ethiopia in the Twenty-First Century (London, 2002), 12; Winslow, “Ethiopian Manuscript Culture,” 174–189. 46  Sometimes it has been claimed that the carbon ink, being the most ancient ink type, is less well adapted to writing on parchment than any other ink type (e.g., Agati, Il libro manoscritto, 271); the Ethiopic manuscripts provide a good piece of evidence to the contrary. 47  Reflectographic and spectrometric measuring of selected manuscripts was carried out as part of the Ethio-SPaRe project: see the Report of the Seventh and Eighth Missions, Part 2, Hamburg University 2014, https://www.aai.uni-hamburg.de/en/ethiostudies/ research/ethiospare/missions/pdf/report2014-pt2.pdf; and the presentation of Denis Nosnitsin and Antonella Brita, “A Field Experience in Ink Studies: Manuscripts from Northern Ethiopia (East Tigray),” the 2nd International Conference “Natural Sciences and Technology in Manuscript Analysis, Hamburg University, 29 February, 2016: http://www .aai.uni-hamburg.de/en/ethiostudies/research/ethiospareETHIOSPARE/ppp-Nosnitsin -Brita-Hamburg-February2016.pdf. 48  Nosnitsin and Rabin, “A Fragment of an Ancient Hymnody Manuscript.” 49  See Nosnitsin, Brita, and Rabin, “On the Inks of the Aksumite ‘Canonico-Liturgical Collection,’” in preparation. 50  Tournerie, Colour and Dye, 93–96.

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not only carbon.51 It is remarkable, nonetheless, that “old-fashioned” carbon ink remained the major type in Ethiopia while many other traditions switched to the predominant use of iron-gall inks.52 4

Forms of Manuscripts and Their Material Features

The codex (mäṣḥaf, bəranna) has always been the main type of handwritten book in Ethiopic manuscript culture. It may range in size from “pocket-size” to average-size volumes (the majority) to large volumes more than 45 cm in height, so heavy that an adult man could hardly carry them.53 In terms of format, rectangular codices, with the height exceeding the width, represent the majority. Square formats are also attested. No codices of oblong format are thought to be known, though a few later Ethiopic manuscripts do have a width slightly exceeding their height. Slender codices, with the height at least twice as great as the width, appear only in the eighteenth century. Despite the great predominance of the codex, other manuscript forms were used. In some cases, double leaves, individual or sewn together in quire(s), were used for writing and left without stiff binding. It is possible that such manuscripts were not meant to receive any binding at all.54 The scroll (kətab) is also known: it is unrolled vertically, with the text written along the short axis,

51  Krutzsch, “Handschriften auf Leder aus Nubien,” indicates the presence of both carbon and iron-gall inks in the fragments recently found in Lower Nubia. Dreibholz, “Der Fund von Sanaa,” 301–302, speaks of the possible presence of non-carbon inks in some of the manuscripts found at the Great Mosque of Ṣanʿāʾ. 52   Bülow-Jacobsen, “Writing Materials in the Ancient World,” 18. However, this is different in some other manuscript-producing areas of Sub-Saharan Africa where carbon inks (also prepared on the base of soot) have been widely used: see, e.g., Michaelle Biddle, “Inks in the Islamic Manuscripts of Northern Nigeria: Old Recipes, Modern Analysis and Medicine,” Journal of Islamic Manuscripts 2 (2011): 1–35. 53  See Balicka-Witakowska, Bausi et al., “Ethiopic codicology,” in COMSt, 163, where three categories have been tentatively established according to the height of the book, 1) midsize, 170–380 mm; 2) small, less than 170 mm; 3) large, more than 380 mm. These sizes approximately correspond to the universal categories proposed by A. Petrucci: mediumsized “libri da bisaccia” transportable from one place to another in case of need; small, easily portable “libretti da mano,” and large “libri da banco,” not intended for displacing: Armando Petrucci, “Alle origine del libro moderno. Libri da banco, libri da bisaccia, libretti da mano,” Italia medioevale e umanistica 12 (1969): 295–313. 54  I believe this is the case with MSS QS-007 (8 ff. in one quire; possibly fourteenth century), UM-035 (11 ff. in two quires; probably a copy of an old document), and a few others.

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on one side only.55 Scrolls have been used exclusively for protective or “magic” texts. The oldest surviving Ethiopian “magic scrolls” do not predate the eighteenth century, though the tradition in itself may be much older.56 Another form that is firmly attested in the Middle Ages is the so-called accordion book (called sənsul, lit. “chain”). It is made of one or more folded strips of parchment, with or without boards to which fastenings can be attached. The earliest known Ethiopian accordion books date to the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century; they were meant exclusively for pictorial representations (saints, episodes from the life of the Virgin Mary, Christ etc.). Most of the known examples are high-quality manuscripts.57 Finally, an object that is not actually a book but represents a “border case” is the Ethiopian liturgical folding fan (märäwəḥ), a product of the refined presixteenth-century Ethiopian craftsmanship.58 Its structure is similar to that of the sənsul-manuscript, but it is larger in size and has different (slender) proportions. Like the sənsul, it contained only images, and was possibly manufactured by the same artisans who were involved in manuscript production. What follows will focus on the codex, outlining its major features and how they were prepared. Though the Ethiopic codex has undergone some modifications in the many centuries of its existence, its basic structure has remained the same. The front and back boards are commonly made of Cordia africana (wanza), Olea africana (wäyra), or sometimes also other kinds of wood.59 The boards are cut with an adze and attached to the textblock in such a way that the grain is directed vertically. The boards of older manuscripts appear to be somewhat thicker and heavier than the boards of the more recent ones. The threads

55  This book form corresponds to a later type known also as “rotulus,” not to the major book form of antiquity, the roll which is unrolled horizontally (see Gacek, Arabic Manuscripts, 224–226). 56  The rotulus-scroll is well known in Islamic manuscript culture (including a few old parchment samples, see Gacek, Arabic Manuscripts, 223–226). Leather manuscripts of comparable shape, of the tenth to fourteenth century, with texts of various types written on one side of the surface, were discovered in Upper Nubia: see Näser and Tsakos, “From Bits and Pieces,” described as “folded leather sheet;” Krutsch, “Handschriften auf Leder aus Nubien,” “Faltstange”, next to “Rolle”. 57  Ewa Balicka-Witakowska, “Sənsul,” in EAe 4 (2010), 625–626; Balicka-Witakowska, Bausi et al., “Ethiopic Manuscripts,” in COMSt, 158 and fig. 1.6.1. The sənsul-books appear to be similar to a form of Islamic calligraphy or painting albums (Arab. muraqqaʿ) that was exactly the accordion book (normally made of paper, and with text or images oriented along the short side, like in rotulus-scroll: see Gacek, Arabic Manuscripts, 6. 58  Ewa Balicka-Witakowska, “Märäwəḥ,” in EAe 3 (2007), 775–777. 59  Winslow, “Ethiopian Manuscript Culture,” 206–208.

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for binding can be of animal or vegetal origin.60 Sets of holes for anchoring the sewing threads are made on both boards, facing each other. A volume is sewn on one, or most commonly two, or three pairs of sewing stations, or, in rare cases of exceptionally large manuscripts, on even more pairs.61 Ethiopian linkstitch sewing is made with double thread and two needles moving in opposite directions between the sewing stations of one “pair.” The same thread holds together the quires and the boards.62 The sewing is “unsupported”; there are no grooves cut on the spine of the textblock to better accommodate and protect the threads. The volume is sewn as one unit, never in halves. Bindings composed just of two bare wooden boards are common, but the majority of Ethiopic codices are additionally covered with leather. This technique is older than one might think. The remains of a sturdy thickened leather covering can be seen on the back board of the volume AG2,63 and on some other old codices (fig. 11.1).64 The leather cover protects and stabilizes the volume. On later manuscripts the leather looks different and much finer; it is slightly tanned sheep or goat skin.65 On manuscripts of better quality it can be imported morocco leather. On the inner side of the boards, the open rectangular spaces in the middle not covered by the turn-ins are usually coated with pieces of textile (“inlays”). The oldest manuscript with such inlays known to me is the late fifteenth – or 60  John Szirmai, The Archaeology of Medieval Bookbinding (Aldershot, Eng., 1999), 48; Winslow, “Ethiopian Manuscript Culture,” 203–204. The use of thread made of twisted strips of parchment (Winslow, “Ethiopian Manuscript Culture,” 208) has been noticed in the case of one ancient manuscript: Nosnitsin, “Ancient Chants,” 290. 61  Berthe van Regemorter, “Ethiopian bookbindings,” The Library, ser. 5, 17 (1962): 85–88, at 88, indicates that she examined an unspecified Ethiopic manuscript in the BnF, Paris, which was sewn on as many as seven pairs of stations (14 sets of holes in each board!), possibly éth. 3 (458 × 318mm), éth. 5 (455 × 350mm), or éth. 110 (490 × 432mm) (= Zotenberg, Catalogue des manuscrits èthiopiens, nos. 6, 9, 106). 62  Szirmai, Archaeology of Medieval Bookbinding, 46–48. The available images of AG2 appear to show some anomalies in the location of the holes of the sewing stations and in the direction of the “tunnels.” See McKenzie and Watson, Garima Gospels, IX figs. 1–2 and plates 24–26. See also Lester Capon, “Extreme Bookbinding – a fascinating preservation project in Ethiopia,” Skin Deep 26 (2008): 2–11, at 7. 63  McKenzie and Watson, Garima Gospels, pl. 25; the leather has no ornamentation. 64  Remains of the leather covering, sometimes with very simple ornamentation, can be seen on the boards of MSS MY-008 (turn-ins and a small part on the spine); MY-004 (turn-ins and a part of the cover on the back board, with poorly visible impressed decoration in the shape of simple fillets); UM-040 (turn-ins) UM-050a (turn-ins and a part of the cover on the front board, see Fig. 11.1); UM-027 (turn-ins), etc. Cp. also MS AQG-005 (see below). 65  It is a domestic product of “light tanning”, the process of the type described in Sergew Hable Selassie, Bookmaking in Ethiopia, 25 (whereby skins are buried with leaves of a plant containing tannins).

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figure 11.1

297

Untooled leather cover, front (a) and interior turn-ins (b). MS UM-050a Photo credit: Ethio-SpaRe

early sixteenth-century MS MAKM-053. All codices with leather covering are reinforced with endbands. The Ethiopian endbands are made of two interwoven strips of leather (slit-braid) and sewn to the leather cover and quires through the centerfolds at the top (headband) and the bottom (tailband) of the volume. The oldest manuscript with the remains of the endbands (headband) that I have encountered is MS MY-008 (fig. 11.2).

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figure 11.2 Remains of the headband. MS MY-008 Photo credit: Marco di Bella and Nicolas Sarris

Less widespread features of Ethiopic bindings have gradually come to light and turn out to be more numerous and varied than expected. Their close study has just started.66 Those attested on pre-mid-sixteenth century codices include parchment paste-downs; wooden boards bevelled and with rounded corners; and codices with the inner sides of the boards completely coated with turn-ins (fig. 11.1b). Leather “quarter cover” is attested on at least one early codex.67 A few old manuscripts show features that can be identified as remains of fastenings. They appear to have been made of (leather?) straps fixed in the front board and two metal pegs inserted in the edge of the back board (fig. 11.3).

66  Denis Nosnitsin, “Lesser Known Features of the Ethiopian Codex,” in Movements in Ethiopia, Ethiopia in Movement. Proceedings of the 18th International Conference of Ethiopian Studies, vol. 1, ed. Eloi Ficquet et al. (Addis Ababa, 2016), 75–90; Winslow, “Ethiopian Manuscript Culture;” Balicka-Witakowska, Bausi et al., “Ethiopic codicology,” in COMSt, 171–174. 67  Bent Juel-Jensen, “Three Ethiopic bindings,” in Bookbindings and other Bibliophily. Essays in Honour of Anthony Hobson, ed. Dennis E. Rhodes (Verona, 1994), 185–191, at 186–187, and above at n. 63.

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figure 11.3 Remains of fastenings. MS UM-027 Photo credit: Ethio-SPaRe

Pinned on the pegs, the straps held the volume closed, protecting the integrity of the textblock and preventing it from deformation.68 The impression of a decorative design on the leather cover is the concluding stage of manuscript manufacturing. Ethiopian craftsmen applied the technique of blind-tooling. After the leather cover is glued to the boards, small metal tools are heated, plunged into grease or water and pressed against the 68  Nosnitsin, “Lesser Known Features,” 91–92 esp. note 23, illustration showing MSS UM-027 and TKMG-004 (the latter has no metal pegs or their traces in the back board, but sets of four holes in both boards instead. Unless the holes were meant for another purpose, the fastenings could be composed of leather strips which were wrapped around). For a recent new example see Bausi, “Il manoscritto MS 9 III CS,” 205.

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(wetted) leather. The decoration is arranged as “panel design.”69 It consists mainly of frames filled with ornamental motifs and a cross in the centre, applied on both boards in symmetrical style.70 The turn-ins, spine and even edges can also be tooled. The related techniques of gold-tooling and panel-stamping71 are unknown in Ethiopia. Blind-tooling is one of the oldest techniques of book decoration known from the Occidental and Oriental traditions, but it is difficult to say when it actually started in Ethiopia. Possibly applied in the beginning to only a few manuscripts, the technique later became widespread so that nearly all Ethiopic leather-covered codices were decorated in this way. The fifteenth-century MS BL Orient. 719 was referred to as the earliest known example of an Ethiopic blind-tooled leather cover, but this leather cover is definitely secondary and dates from a much later period.72 Other early examples, with bindings that are probably original, might be the Four Gospel book from the church of Amba Dära Maryam Mägdälawit (Təgray),73 MS Ef. 66, St. Petersburg (Institute of Oriental Manuscripts),74 MS SDSM-004 (fig. 11.4), and a few others. The tooled

69  Description in Agati, Il libro manoscritto da Oriente a Occidente, 361–365, esp. fig. 111a, for the Byzantine manuscripts. 70  On the motif of the cross, see Richard Pankhurst, “Ethiopian manuscript bindings and their decorations,” Abbay 12 (1983–84): 205–257; Vjacheslav Platonov, “Perepljoty efiopskih rukopisej i ih hudozhestvennoe oformlenie (po materialam rukopisnyh sobranij SanktPeterburga),” Vostochnyj sbornik 6 (2003): 207–239. For the tools and motifs applied in the frames, see Sergew Hable Selassie, Bookmaking in Ethiopia, 25; Fäqadä Səllase Täfärra, Ṭəntawi yäbəranna mäṣaḥəft azzägäǧǧaǧǧät, 242–243; Winslow, “Ethiopian Manuscript Culture,” 231–235, Jacek Tomaszewski and Michael Gervers, “Technological aspects of the monastic collection at May Wäyni, Ethiopia,” in From Dust to Digital, 123–126. The decorative designs of the Ethiopian tools appear unique and cannot be compared directly to other traditions, but the issue requires further study. 71  On these see Gacek, Arabic Manuscripts, 252–253, 280. 72  Pankhurst, “Ethiopian manuscript bindings,” 215; see the dating in William Wright, Catalogue of the Ethiopic Manuscripts in the British Museum acquired since the Year 1847, (London, 1877), 193, early fifteenth century but before 1434. As we can easily conclude looking at the images in Pankhurst, “Ethiopian manuscript bindings,” 254, pl. I, the leather cover of the manuscript is not original and cannot predate the seventeenth century. 73  Dating to 1439 or, less probably, to 1363 CE: Bent Juel-Jensen and Geoffrey Rowell, eds., Rock-Hewn Churches of East Tigray. Oxford Expedition to Ethiopia in 1975 (Oxford, 1975), 57, 73–76, plates 97–110, 117–118; Mazgaba Seelat, http://ethiopia.deeds.utoronto.ca/about .html, image MG-2004.100–006. 74  See images of the leather cover in Vjacheslav Platonov, Rukopisnaja kniga v traditsionnoj culture Efiopii, ed. Ekaterina Gusarova (Saint Petersburg, 2017), p. 211 (ill. 30–31); description in Boris Turaev, Efiopskija rukopisi v S.-Peterburge, (Saint Petersburg, 1906) 45–46 (no. II.5).

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figure 11.4 Blind-tooled leather cover. MS SDSM-004 Photo credit: Ethio-SPaRe

design on the early codices is different from the common types known starting from around the seventeenth century. A few deluxe Ethiopic manuscripts are adorned with silver or gilded silver plates with incised decorations, pictures and inscriptions, a practice that started at least in the early Solomonic period and perhaps even earlier. So far only three volumes of this type datable prior to the sixteenth century are known, all of them Four-Gospel books.75 Other examples, also mostly Four-Gospel 75  On the metal covers of AG1 and AG2, see McKenzie and Watson, Garima Gospels, 43–46; on the Golden Gospel book of Däbrä Libanos of Ham, with the metal plaques commissioned by King Sälomon, see Marie-Laure Derat, “The Zāgwe dynasty and King Yemreḥanna Krestos,” Annales d’Éthiopie 25 (2010): 157–196, at 162; Gianfranco Fiaccadori, “Between Hagiography and History: The Zagwe Dynasty and King Yemrəḥannä Krəstos,” in Veneration of Saints in Christian Ethiopia: Proceedings of the International Workshop ‘Saints in Christian Ethiopia: Literary Sources and Veneration,’ Hamburg, April 28–29, 2012, ed. Denis Nosnitsin (Wiesbaden, 2015), 15–49, at 22, various identifications of the donor are possible. MS EMML no. 1832 (see above) should be considered the fourth example because of the additional note on f. 338v: see Sergew Hable-Selassie, “Monastic Library of Däbrä Hayq,” 252–253; Claire Bosc-Tiessé, “Sainteté et intervention royale au monastère Saint-Étienne de Ḥayq au tournant du XIIIe et du XIVe siècle. L’image de Iyasus Moʾa dans son Évangile,” Oriens Christianus 94 (2010): 199–227, at 202–203, clearly stating that

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manuscripts, are much more recent.76 The term wängel zä-wärq (“Golden Gospel”) is widely used today to refer to the main Four-Gospel book of a church or monastery, frequently with important documentary texts; the term is thought to be linked to the practice of embellishing books in this way. But perhaps the practice was not so common in pre-sixteenth century Ethiopia and was applied to a few manuscripts of exceptional importance only, that were significant due to the importance of their documentary texts.77 Later the name was extended to the main Four Gospel books of the churches, especially to those containing additional notes; as the manuscript evidence shows, in reality only a few such books were decorated in this way. The format and size of the codex were dependent not on the size of the boards of the binding but rather on the textblock comprised of parchment leaves that had been cut, folded, pricked, ruled, and arranged into quires. When estimating the size of the leaves to cut out, the craftsman would draw upon his exemplar and/or use templates. Ethiopian manuscript makers marked the corners of the leaves on the skin with punctures; the bifolia were cut out one by one, and folded.78 In assembling the leaves, Gregory’s rule has been observed in all Ethiopic manuscripts, including the oldest known ones.79 That means that the leaves the manufacturing of the silver decoration, most probably plaques, was sponsored by King Yagba Ṣəyon in 1293/94 AD. Today the manuscript has no metal decorations (BoscTiessé, “Sainteté et intervention royale,” 205). The information on its binding is scanty; the available duplicates give us no chance to investigate it (esp. the boards) in detail. 76  At least in northern Ethiopia, where manuscript collections are better studied, the number probably does not exceed some fifteen volumes (if we count all examples referred to in Bausi, “Su alcuni manoscritti presso comunità monastiche dell’Eritrea (III.),” 14–15 esp. note 2; idem, “Wängelä Wärq,” in EAe 4 (2010), 1130–1132, at 1131; Balicka-Witakowska, Bausi et al., “Ethiopic codicology,” in COMSt, 174; Winslow, “Ethiopian Manuscript Culture” 235– 250; Wion, “Les documents copto-arabes.” 77  The Futūḥ al-Ḥabaša, a chronicle of the sixteenth-century jihad in which numerous monasteries were pillaged, allegedly speaks of many books decorated with gold taken by the Muslim fighters – in the translation of René Basset, “livres en or ainsi que les feuillets et la reliure” (Histoire de la conquête de lʼAbyssinie, XVIe siècle, par Chihab Eddin Ahmed ben ʿAbd el-Qader, 2 vols. (Paris, 1897–1909), 2: 337 – and is considered an important source for this issue (e.g. Sergew Hable-Selassie, “Monastic Library of Däbrä Hayq,” 255); but a closer look at the Arabic text indicates that the phrase “books embellished with gold” may well be a late and secondary reading: see Bosc-Tiessé, “Sainteté et intervention royale,” 203–204 and n. 22. 78  Cutting leaves individually has been described as predominantly an Oriental technique as opposed to the folding of skins introduced by Western manuscript makers: see Déroche, Islamic codicology, 71–80; Bausi, “La tradizione scrittoria etiopica,” 536. 79  The rule does not seem to have been followed in some of the oldest manuscripts of the Great Mosque of Ṣanʿāʾ: see Dreibholz, “Der Fund von Sanaa,” 301, and on the multiple

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in quires are normally placed in such a way that in the codex, the flesh sides always face the flesh sides and the hair sides always face the hair sides. The most common types of quires appear to be quaternions and quinions. Single leaves were also extensively used in bifolia and quire construction.80 In a few manuscripts, aides-mémoire (“cues”) for the rubricator, written in tiny script in the upper margin, are partly cut, indicating that the textblock was trimmed (fig. 11.5a, b). As far as ordering systems are concerned, marking quires with numbers – quire marks or signatures – was the most common method that Ethiopian scribes employed to keep the quires in the right sequence during the production process. It is still not clear if there are quire marks in MSS AG I–III, but they do appear in some other early codices like MSS EMML nos. 6907, 1767 and 1832.81 The majority of Ethiopic manuscripts are multiple-text manuscripts, and the most widespread works of Ethiopic church literature are lengthy. Therefore, codices containing more than twenty quires are very common, and massive textblocks of more than thirty quires (upwards of 250 folios) are not rare. Some such manuscripts today appear unwieldy, and are indeed extremely fragile and vulnerable. This is valid not only for large and very heavy manuscripts, but in general for codices whose size and weight obviously overstrain the holding capacity of their bindings. Today, it is difficult to guess their exact use and the intentions of their craftsmen. Especially the pre-sixteenth century

principles in early Islamic manuscripts generally, Déroche, Islamic codicology, 72–76. The rule is only partly followed, inside the quires but not outside the quires, in the Codex of Kasr al-Wizz from Upper Nubia, dating possibly to the ninth century: Peter Hubai, Koptische Apokryphen aus Nubien: der Kasr El-Wizz Kodex, tr. Angelika Balog (Berlin, 2009), 23–24, 36. Alessandro Bausi reports that in the ancient codex unicus of the Aksumite Collection (UM-039) the rule was followed “not consistently, but in the majority of the quires” (Balicka-Witakowska, Bausi et al, “Ethiopic codicology,” in COMSt, 159–160). Reliable information on the application of Gregory’s rule in AG I–III is missing. 80  The original textblock was sometimes later modified: leaves could be lost; new leaves or quires could be introduced, enlarging the “core” with new “layers”; several manuscripts or fragments could be united within one binding. See Balicka-Witakowska, Bausi et al., “Ethiopic codicology,” in COMSt, 162–163; for the concept of the “composite manuscript” applied to the Ethiopic material, Alessandro Bausi, “Composite and Multiple Text Manuscripts: The Ethiopian Evidence,” in One-Volume Libraries: Composite and Multiple Text Manuscripts, ed. Michael Friedrich and Cosima Schwarke (Berlin, 2016), 111–153. 81  In these old manuscripts quire marks are written with great care, twice on the first and twice on the last page of each text quire and decorated with fine penwork (in later times executed more modestly, decorated mostly with black and red dots).

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figure 11.5a Traces of textblock trimming. MS AP-005, fol. 31r Photo credit: Ethio-SpaRe

figure 11.5b Traces of textblock trimming. MS AQG-005, fol. 79r Photo credit: Ethio-SPaRe

Nosnitsin

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manuscripts containing the Octateuch or the collection Lives of the Martyrs can be very bulky and heavy.82 Pricks and ruled lines make a kind of grid helping the scribes to shape the written area (“layout,” see below). In Ethiopic manuscripts all leaves meant for writing are pricked and ruled. The contemporary technique of pricking is believed to be similar to that used by craftsmen in the past.83 The pricking and ruling were usually done on the flesh side of a bifolio, the first with a sharp awl or knife, the second with “hard point”, i.e. the dull metal point of an awl or knife. The so-called “vertical pricks” guide the vertical bounding lines, which are impressed into the parchment first; the “text pricks” guide the horizontal text lines, which are done second. This work was laborious and time-consuming, as it seems that each bifolio was processed individually.84 After the quire was finally assembled and “tacketed” by means of short threads or small strips of parchment (“tackets”),85 it was ready to receive the text. The ruling types appearing in Ethiopic manuscripts are less complicated than in other traditions. Despite this seeming simplicity, there are some variations which can be helpful for dating a manuscript and, potentially, for assigning it to a region or even to an individual craftsman. Most commonly, the “vertical pricks” are located in the top and bottom margins, and the text pricks are located deep in the outer margins; the top written line is placed on the top horizontal ruled line, the bottom written line is placed on the bottom ruled 82  Such as the manuscript described in Antonella Brita, “The Manuscript as a Leaf Puzzle: The Case of the Gädlä Sämaʿtat from ʿUra Qirqos (Ethiopia),” Comparative Oriental Manuscript Studies Bulletin 1 (2015): 6–17. A possible way of use of very heavy and large books in the liturgical service could be as shown on an illustration in Richard A. Pankhurst, A Social History of Ethiopia: the Northern and Central Highlands from Early Medieval Times to the Rise of Emperor Téwodros II, (Addis Ababa, 1990), 192 (two assistants held the volume in front of the reader, the method existing until today). 83   Balicka-Witakowska, Bausi et al., “Ethiopic codicology,” in COMSt, 160–162 (following the method described in Fäqadä Səllase Täfärra, Ṭəntawi yäbəranna mäṣaḥəft azzägäǧǧaǧǧät, 132–135); Winslow, “Ethiopian Manuscript Culture,” 119–125. 84  The Ethio-SPaRe team made some observations and measurements on the books of the monastery of May Anbäsa (Nosnitsin, Churches and Monasteries of Tǝgray, 264–274). In the case of at least some later manuscripts, we noticed that the pricks in a quire coincide on all bifolios, meaning that the leaves of the quire could have been placed one upon another and pricked together all at once (thus confirming the observation in Siegbert Uhlig, “Grundfragen äthiopischer Kodikologie,” in Les Manuscrits du Moyen-Orient. Essais de codicologie et de paléographie. Actes du Colloque d’Istanbul (Istanbul, 26–29 mai, 1986), ed. Francois Déroche (Istanbul and Paris, 1989), 35–38, at 37). 85   Balicka-Witakowska, Bausi et al., “Ethiopic codicology,” in COMSt, 159; Winslow, “Ethiopian Manuscript Culture,” 119–120, 201–202. The practice existed in the early period, see Nosnitsin, “Ancient Chants,” 290. See also Johan Peter Gumbert, “The Tacketed Quire: an Exercise in Comparative Codicology,” Scriptorium 65 (2011): 299–320.

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line. This arrangement, which I have elsewhere called “Pattern I,” is attested in the overwhelming majority of manuscripts after the fifteenth century.86 A number of earlier manuscripts show a difference: the top written line is placed under the top ruled line (Pattern II). In still earlier manuscripts, prior to about the mid-fourteenth century, the pricks are made closer to or nearly at the vertical ruled lines (Pattern III or, with a smaller number of vertical pricks, Pattern IV).87 Also, the horizontal ruled lines may break off in the gutter margin. Finally, a few ancient manuscripts show no text pricks.88 The written area delineated by this grid can be characterized through its proportions as rectangular, square, tall (slender), or oblong (i.e., with the width of the written area slightly exceeding its height). The format of the written area does not necessarily coincide with the format of the codex. In the premid-sixteenth century period, rectangular formats apparently dominated. In most manuscripts the lower margin is wider than the upper one, to avoid the need to touch the written area with the fingers when the pages are turned. In manuscripts made prior to the mid-fourteenth century this ratio is either less pronounced, or the upper margin is of approximately the same width or even slightly larger than the lower one. This seems to be the case for AG I–III. It is not known whether the manuscript-makers used any calculation methods for establishing the size and position of the written area and the dimensions of the margins.89 86  Denis Nosnitsin, “Pricking and Ruling in Ethiopic Manuscripts: an Aid for Dating?” Comparative Oriental Manuscripts Studies Bulletin 1–2 (2015): 94–109. The pattern is sometimes taken as the point of reference in a general discourse about the Ethiopic manuscripts: see Agati, Il libro manoscritto da Oriente a Occidente, 185. 87  It is difficult to evaluate these subtle features without direct access to the manuscripts. After the images of AG I and AG III were made available on-line at the web-site of HMML, I could confirm my assumptions for AG I (images AG_00001_075–076 correspond to fig. 9a–b in Nosnitsin, “Pricking and Ruling”) and AG III (cp. image AG_00002_085 with fig. 11, ibid.). 88  In AG I, the vertical pricks follow Pattern IV, but the text pricks are missing. This confirms what I already assumed for a number of other ancient fragments (Nosnitsin, “Pricking and Ruling,” 104–105 and idem, “Ancient Chants,” 289; also cp. two ancient quires included in MS Gundä Gunde GG-158, see above). For these witnesses, Pattern V may be provisionally established (followed by AG I and AG II, while AG III follows Pattern IV). At the moment it is unknown how the horizontal text lines were impressed in these manuscripts; perhaps by means of guiding marks in the form of dots or small indentations on parchment (similar cases exist in other traditions: for Syriac manuscripts see Agati, Il libro manoscritto da Oriente a Occidente, 185; and Pier Giorgio Borbone and Françoise BriquelChatonnet, “Syriac codicology. The making of the codex,” in COMSt, 256). 89  Compare Colette Sirat, Writing as Handwork. A History of Handwriting in Mediterranean and Western Culture, (Turnhout, 2006), 170; Agati, Il libro manoscritto da Oriente a Occidente, 227–234. Winslow, “Ethiopian Manuscript Culture,” 123–125 speaks of

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The layout types occurring in Ethiopic manuscripts are less manifold and less sophisticated than in other traditions. The oldest known manuscripts and fragments use either a one-column or two-column format. One-column layout was used more frequently in small-sized manuscripts, while the two-column layout was the most widespread (fig. 11.6), applicable to the majority of the texts.90 Three-column layout appears somewhat later – the earliest example known to me dates to around the turn of the fifteenth century – and seems to have been used preferentially for lengthy texts in large manuscripts.91 Only a single four-column Ethiopic manuscript is known, from the twentieth century. There were no special layouts for texts with commentaries or musical notations, for poetic texts, etc. Chant manuscripts that accommodate two levels of writing within the space between two ruled lines (“unit of ruling”), i.e. the main text written in the script of a reduced size and the musical notation written in a very tiny script, appear only after the fifteenth century. Tables and charts in the computation and calendar treatises and round diagrams in magic texts represent special cases of layout, and are still poorly studied. In Four Gospel manuscripts, parts of the text were visually marked by means of varied layout, including the Canon Tables and the Letter of Eusebius to Carpianus, among the prefatory material, and the “genealogy of Christ,” in which each name was placed on a new line, making the passage immediately identifiable visually.92 The colophon or concluding supplication is also distinguished visually in some ancient manuscripts, taking the shape of an inverted trapezoid. As in other traditions, one can observe preferences on the part of the scribes in selecting the layout types for the specific texts, but there seem to have been no strict prescriptions with the exception of a few cases only.93 After the “anthropic measure”; see also Steve Delamarter et al., Ethiopian Scribal Practices 7: Plates for the Catalogue of the Ethiopic Manuscript Imaging Project (Eugene, OR, 2014), 43–45. 90  See the important observations on the layout and size of codices in Uhlig, Äthiopische Paläographie, 442–446, 669–671, 558–562, 781–783; also idem, “Grundfragen äthiopischer Kodikologie,” 36–37. The issue remains poorly studied and is in need of a quantitative research. Uhlig, Äthiopische Paläographie, 444–446 assumes that the reasons for the development of the layout (specifically, introduction of additional text columns) may be related to the issue of readability directly linked to the density of writing on the page (an interplay between the length of the line, the dimensions of the script and the number of signs in the written line). 91  The earliest three-column manuscript known to me is the massive EMML 7602, 562x410mm (from the time of King Dawit II, r. 1380–1412). 92  Luke 3:23–37, already in AG II, AG III, and EMML no. 1832, though not in AG I and not in all Four Gospel manuscripts. 93  Some of the layout conventions are summarized in Balicka-Witakowska, Bausi et al., “Ethiopic codicology,” in COMSt, 163–165.

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figure 11.6

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Two-column layout, ornamental band (ḥaräg): MS KY-002, fols. 158v–159r Photo credit: Ethio-SPaRe

fifteenth century there was some diversification of the layout types, though it was not very far-reaching. These data on the material features of the Ethiopic codex may bear upon the highly intriguing question of the codex’s first introduction in Ethiopia. At the moment it is impossible to establish the exact time of this introduction, and any theory proposed must be hypothetical. A few comments may indeed illustrate how complicated the picture is. First, we may observe that the volumes AG1 (with AG I) and AG2 (with AG II and III) appear as full-fledged codices, which suggests the existence of a developed codex-making tradition by the time of their manufacture. A question arises whether we may assume that the dating obtained through the radiocarbon analysis of the sample from the textblocks holds also for at least parts of the AG1 and AG2 bindings. We lack any other binding from such an early period, which hampers our attempts at drawing conclusions.94 It can only be observed that classical Ethiopic binding 94  For instance, on the presence of papyrus in the binding of AG1. According to the description in Capon, “Extreme Bookbinding,” 7, “On the inside of the back cover are the remains of a deteriorated papyrus board” (see also Bausi, “The ‘True Story’ of the Abba Gärima

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does not closely resemble the oldest kinds of bindings known from neighboring manuscript cultures. However, it shows some similarity to Coptic manuscripts from the fifth to ninth centuries, which are multiple-quire codices made of parchment and bound between wooden boards,95 and particularly to the so-called late Coptic codex.96 At the moment one can say only that the Ethiopic codex shares a few basic and very old features with codices in some other Mediterranean manuscript cultures, such as the multi-quire parchment textblock and unsupported link-stitch sewing.97 5

Manuscript Makers

Transcribing the text was and is the most important stage in the book production process. The copying as it is carried out by a traditional Ethiopian scribe today has been described several times.98 We may also note, as historical Gospels,” and idem, “Copying, Writing, Translating,” 41). In the microfilm made by Donald D. Davies in 1968, one can see that a similar object was under the upper board of AG1, but it not visible in the pictures made in 2000s. The technique of making boards out of papyrus sheets glued together (“cartonnage”) and covering them with leather is known from the Coptic bookmaking tradition (see Paola Buzi and Stephen Emmel, “Coptic codicology. Bookbinding,” in COMSt, 151–152, 154), but how the binding of AG1 was constructed is still not quite clear. For the moment, the papyrus remains in AG1 prove only the wide circulation of this material and its occasional use in bookmaking. It is not completely unexpected since the use of papyrus was widespread (attested as far as Georgia and Ireland) and held on, gradually declining, until the eleventh century. 95  Szirmai, The Archaeology of Medieval Bookbinding, 7–31. Some nine codices of this type are known, see John L. Sharpe,“The Earliest Bindings with Wooden Board Covers: the Coptic Contribution to Binding Construction,” in Erice 96, International Conference on Conservation and Restoration of Archive and Library Materials, Erice (Italy), CCSEM, 22nd– 29th April 1996: Pre-prints, ed. by Piero Colaizzi and Daniela Costanini, (Rome 1996), 381– 400. The radiocarbon analysis of a piece of wrapping band of Codex Glazier resulted in dating 420–598 CE (ibid. 383, no. 13); see also the recent overview in Julia Miller, Books Will Speak Plain: A Handbook for Identifying and Describing Historical Bindings (Ann Arbor, 2014), 31–33. 96  Szirmai, The Archaeology of Medieval Bookbinding, 32–44; Coptic influence on Ethiopic bookmaking has been generally assumed, e.g., Miller, Books Will Speak Plain, 38. 97  John A. Szirmai, “Einbandforschung und Einbandrestaurierung,” in Bestandserhaltung in Archiven und Bibliotheken, ed. Werner Hartmut (Stuttgart, 1992), 25–41, at 26–28. 98  For a description and images of scribes at work, see Assefa Liban, “Preparation of Parchment Manuscripts,” in Addis Ababa University College Ethnological Society Bulletin, 1953–1961, ed. Alula Pankhurst (Addis Ababa, 2002), 254–267, at 263–265; Sergew Hable Selassie, Bookmaking in Ethiopia, 20–21; John Mellors and Anne Parsons, Scribes of South Gondar (London, 2002); Mellors and Parsons, Ethiopian Bookmaking; Steven Kaplan,

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e­ vidence, manuscript portraits of the Evangelists as authors, writing in a seated position. It has been frequently said that such portraits are more a matter of artistic convention than of reality. This might be true to a great extent, but the images of the seated Evangelists in the Ethiopic Gospel books are still worth studying because of the presence of realistic details. For instance, in the majority of miniatures they are depicted writing in an open or folded quire, not in a bound codex, as in many cases in the other traditions (fig. 11.7, inset).99 Scribal instruments, too, are sometimes shown with an astonishing degree of realism. The posture of an Ethiopian scribe is particularly noteworthy. The contemporary scribe usually sits on the ground or on a low stool with his knees together or with one or both legs somewhat stretched (fig. 11.7). The parchment quire rests on his right thigh, closer to his knee; the exemplar is placed below to the left or in front of him while his other implements are placed to the right. Probably parchment was stiff enough not to bend (especially if folded in a quire) when the scribe was writing, and no additional equipment like boards or tablets was necessary.100 The pen grip of an Ethiopian scribe is with three fingers, close to the cut end of the pen. While writing, the hand and wrist lightly touch the surface of the parchment. In order to move the pen, the scribe moves his fingers only a little bit, but moves also his arm and shoulder. In doing so, he controls the writing very well, but speedy and fluent writing is impossible.101 It is commonly said that the Ethiopian scribes do not and probably did not use any furniture, but there are some indications to the contrary. Lecterns (atrons), made of iron rods and leather, are a product of the old ecclesiastical craftsmanship and can still be found in a few Ethiopian churches. They are known in two variants, the “standard” and the “low,” for reading in a standing

“Däbtära,” in EAe 2 (2005), 53–54, at 54; Getatchew Haile, “Manuscript production in Ethiopia,” 40, 42; Fäqadä Śəllase Täfärra, Ṭəntawi yäbəranna mäṣaḥəft azzägäǧǧaǧǧät, 179–187; Balicka-Witakowska and Bausi, “Ethiopic codicology,” in COMSt, 168–170; Winslow, “Ethiopian Manuscript Culture,” 137–141; Magdalena Krzyżanowska, “Contemporary Scribes of Eastern Tigray (Ethiopia),” Rocznik Orientalistyczny 68–2 (2016): 73–101. 99  Cp. Sirat, Writing as Handwork, 95–96. 100  The posture with parchment or paper placed on the knee while writing (whether the scribe is sitting on a chair or on the ground) appears to be part of an older writing technique, common to a number of Oriental and Occidental traditions. See the posture of Muslim scribes in Déroche, Islamic codicology, 200, esp. n. 113; also Sirat, Writing as Handwork, 409–410. For larger formats, esp. of paper leaves, the use of a kind of board or tablet became indispensable, as Sirat notes; in a later time, special furniture (desks of various kinds) for the exemplar and the writing support was introduced. 101  Sirat, Writing as Handwork, 365–368.

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figure 11.7 Scribe mälʾakä həywät Dästa Gäbrä Maryam (Ləgat, Təgray, November 2012). Inset: Matthew the Evangelist, miniature: MS TKMG-004, f. 154v Photo credit: Ethio-SPaRe

or a sitting position, respectively. The standard lectern occurs more frequently.102 There are indications that the low lectern was used by the scribes to hold an open exemplar manuscript for copying. Today, neither lectern type seems to 102  For the pictures of the “low” lectern, see Jules Leroy, L’Éthiopie. Archéologie et culture (Paris, 1973), 169 (fig. 75) and Kerstin Volker-Saad, “Ethnographica der DAE im Ethnologischen Museum Berlin,” in In kaiserlichem Auftrag. Die Deutsche Aksum-Expedition 1906 unter Enno Littmann, vol. 3: Ethnographische, kirchenhistorische und archäologisch-historische Untersuchungen, ed. Steffen Wenig and Burkhard Vogt (Wiesbaden, 2017), 137–162, at 151 (fig. 23). An old Ethiopian low lectern was found in the monastery of Dayr al-Suryān in Egypt, where Ethiopian monks resided since early times (Otto Meinardus, “The museum of the Dair as-Surȋân also known as the monastery of the Holy Virgin and St. John Kame,” Bulletine de la Société d’Archéologie Copte 17 (1964): 225–234 and plates I–XI, at 233 and plate VIIB). Fäqadä Śəllase Täfärra, Ṭəntawi yäbəranna mäṣaḥəft azzägäǧǧaǧǧät, 258–261 writes about atrons of two types, high and low, but says that both are used only for reading.

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have been produced for several centuries, but it appears that the low lectern is still occasionally used in scribal work.103 It is believed that the majority of manuscripts represent “one man work.” The contemporary Ethiopian tradition claims that the scribe is responsible for all stages of book production and writes the entire text from beginning to end. This might be true for a large number or even for the majority of manuscripts, but was not always the case. At times, a high request for books caused at least attempts to optimize the copying process. Methods more sophisticated than “one man work” may be assumed already when two main hands are distinguishable within a manuscript. A yet more complex case is represented by a number of manuscripts that contain names of scribes written at the bottom margin of the first (or, rarely, the last) page of the quire. For instance, MS Däbrä Bizän, “Octateuch and historical books,” dated to 1530, has the following marks: zä-Sinoda (lit. “of Sinoda”), zä-Tänśəʾa Krəstos, zä-Səbḥat Lä-ʾab, zä-Yoḥannəs, again zä-Sinoda, again zä-Yoḥannəs.104 The change of names seems to correspond to the change of hands. This feature has been interpreted in other manuscripts as a trace of the organized work of scribes.105 It looks like they copied an extensive text as a group, marking their parts of the new manuscript (or their portions of blank parchment?) with their names. Did the scribes work on copying one book simultaneously? Was the exemplar unbound and were its parts distributed between the copyists? 103  Fəssəḥa Yəhun, Ṭəbäbä ḥaräg kä-Fəssəḥa Yəhun zä-bəḫerä Andäbet (n.p., 2001 EC=2007/08 CE), 6 contains a schematic depiction of a scribe from Andäbet (a place famous for its scribes) who sits on the traditional Ethiopic stool (Amh. bərkumma), with the parchment on his lap and the exemplar placed on a low lectern. Krzyżanowska, “Contemporary Scribes,” images 15 and 18 show a scribe at work using the low lectern to hold his exemplar in the same way. An image of a scribe at work in Assefa Liban, “Preparation of Parchment Manuscripts,” 263–264 also demonstrates that the scribe does use some improvised furniture (despite the author’s statement to the contrary). 104  The manuscript was microfilmed in part by Donald D. Davies [Dabra Bizan – Reel 1] For the dating, see Davies, “The Dating of the Ethiopic Manuscripts,” 23–24. The marks appear in frame 1 of the microfilm (start of Gen.); frame 61 (start of Lev.); frame 77, where it is written in a decorative frame; frames 87 and 136 (both zä-Yoḥannəs); frame 175 (zä-Sinoda again, start of Kings); and frame 120 (zä-Yoḥannəs), where the change of hands occurs on the recto folio, column b. 105  See the description of MS British Library Or. 2082 in Stephan Strelcyn, Catalogue of Ethiopian Manuscripts in the British Library Acquired Since the Year 1877 (London, 1978), 85–87, no. 54; five scribes for 175 ff.; as the cataloguer remarks, “the resemblance between the different hands, all belonging to the same scriptorium, should be noted.” See, recently, an elucidating article Claire Bosc-Tiessé, “Qu’est-ce qu’un scriptorium en Éthiopie? L’organisation du travail des copistes dans le Royaume Chrétien d’Éthiopie,” Scripta: An International Journal of Codicology and Palaeography 8 (2014): 9–27.

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The oldest known book with this feature is from the late fifteenth century.106 This indeed seems to be convincing evidence that collaborative copying work was done in some of the well-established centers of manuscript production by this period.107 The evaluation of the feature is a first step toward identifying sites of manuscript production – scriptoria? – on the basis of the material evidence solicited from the books, to be followed by a search for further shared codicological and paleographical features.108 Who were Ethiopian scribes? Pre-modern Ethiopic sources provide some scattered pieces of information on them; only after the late nineteenth century do we have a few fuller accounts of their lives and professional careers.109 When dealing with large numbers of Ethiopic manuscripts, it is possible to distinguish several categories of scribal hands and, combining this information with other data solicited from the manuscripts, to make some preliminary assumptions concerning scribes’ professional standing and social position.110 The highest category of course is that of well-trained, professional scribes, able to write in fine calligraphic hands. Such scribes would be engaged mostly in transcribing manuscripts and had few or no other occupations. Careful copying of long sacred texts required full concentration. Apart from good training and particular personal qualities, secure sustenance and strong patronage were necessary for a scribe to develop his skills to a high level. This was possible above all at the well-established monasteries, and many of those scribes were 106   Bosc-Tiesse, “Qu’est-ce qu’un scriptorium en Ethiopie?” 26 n. 3, on MS British Library, Orient. 706; ibid. 17, on MS EMML no. 6938, Miracles of Mary (Betä Golgota, Lalibäla) from the time of King Ləbnä Dəngəl (1508–40). 107  This feature might point to a production mode similar to the so-called “copia distributiva” or “distribuzione simultanea” (Maniaci, Archeologia del manoscritto, 137–138). 108  For the moment, our knowledge concerning the old Ethiopian scriptoria is mostly based on written sources and indirect evidence (see Marie-Laure Derat, ‟Moines et scriptorium dans le royaume dʼÉthiopie aux XIV e et XV e siècles,” Histoire, monde et cultures religieuses 24 (2012): 65–77), and a scriptorium is understood primarily as the place of literary production (see ibid and Gianfrancesco Lusini, “Copisti e filologi dell’Etiopia medievale. Lo scriptorium di Dabra Māryām del Sarāʾē (Eritrea),” La parola del passato 59 [2004]: 230– 238). In modern manuscript studies the term refers rather to a group of products “sharing similar characteristics, which are presumed to have been made by the same team of craftsmen or women and in the same place” (Alison Stones, “Scriptorium: the term and its history,” Perspective. Actualité en histoire de l’art 1 [2014]: 113–120, at 114). “Reconstructing” a historical scriptorium through the common physical features of its books is a widespread type of research. 109  E.g., Fəssəḥa Yəhun, Ṭəbäbä ḥaräg kä-Fəssəḥa Yəhun zä-bəḫerä Andäbet; Fäqadä Səllase Täfärra, Ṭəntawi yäbəranna mäṣaḥəft azzägäǧǧaǧǧät, 264–297; Krzyżanowska, “Contemporary Scribes.” 110   Balicka-Witakowska, Bausi et al., “Ethiopic codicology,” in COMSt, 168–169.

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monks. Scribes copying as a group, mentioned above, might have belonged to this category. In these settings, other professional groups could have existed and worked next to the professional scribes, such as parchmenters, leathermakers, binders, artists, etc. We may hypothesize that in Ethiopia, as in some other traditions, manuscript production was concentrated in the monasteries in the early period, and that these highly trained scribes then had a larger role in overall manuscript production than was the case in later centuries. At the next level were various groups of scribes who combined manuscriptmaking with other occupations, and whose writing was of mediocre quality. Here we should place monks who had not achieved calligraphic writing and were not necessarily at the great monastic centers. Copying texts was considered pious and soul-saving work. Some hagiographic sources mention saintly monks engaged in transcribing texts, although, contrary to our expectations, such sources are not numerous.111 Did most local monastic traditions consider copying not challenging enough as compared to praying and fasting? At the same time, there is some tangible non-hagiographic evidence that medieval monks copied texts without being professional scribes, probably as a pious exercise or for personal or community needs.112 Also at this middling level are what we might call “common” scribes, living in the traditional rural context and spending only a part of their time copying books. They were usually affiliated with an ecclesiastic institution in some way. Although the image of such scribes is unprepossessing, at least from the eighteenth to the twentieth century such scribes were responsible for supplying a great deal of manuscripts for everyday liturgical life.113 For the pre-sixteenth 111  For the early period, two main sources known to me are the Life of Gärima (Carlo Conti Rossini, ed., “L’omilia di Yohannes, vescovo d’Aksum in onore di Garimâ,” in Actes du XIe Congrès des Orientalistes. Section sémitique [Paris, 1898], 139–77, at 161–162) and the Life of Mättaʿ/Libanos (Alessandro Bausi, ed., La “Vita” e i “Miracoli” di Libānos, CSCO 595–596, SAe 105–106 [Louvain, 2003], §§31, 60). See also Derat, “Moines et scriptorium,” and Bausi, “Composite and Multiple Text Mauscripts.” 112  See the case of the sixteenth-century head of the Ethiopian monastic community in Rome, Yoḥannəs of Qänṭorare: Kelly and Nosnitsin, “The Two Yoḥannəses,” 405–410, 417. 113  The reconstruction of their professional profiles is hampered by the loss of manuscripts; to gather sufficient information for the “scribal profile” of some of such scribes has been only possible for the post sixteenth-century period. As a later example, the scribe Wäldä Muse can be mentioned. Being a common scribe of this type, he was active in ca. 1865– 90s, and at least fifteen manuscripts can be assigned to him, all scattered in the vicinity of ʿAddigrat, see, e.g., Denis Nosnitsin, “The Four Gospel Book of Däbrä Maʿṣo and its Marginal Notes. Part 2: An Exercise in Ethiopian Palaeography,” Comparative Oriental Manuscript Studies Newsletter 6 (2013): 29–33; idem, “The Charters of the Four Gospels Book of Däbrä Maʿṣo,” in Ecclesiastic Landscape of North Ethiopia, 119–131.

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century period, we may presume that their role in manuscript production was less central in comparison to that of the professional scribes. A third group at the middling level might consist of däbtäras, who specialized in making “magic scrolls” and copying protective texts. A fourth middling group consists of traditional scholars and students who could write, but limited their scribal activities to manuscripts for their private use. We do not know when these groups emerged in Ethiopia as “professional groups;” their role in manuscript culture becomes visible only in the later period. The classification above includes partly the same categories of scribes that have been distinguished in some other traditions,114 but there are also differences caused by specific conditions of Ethiopia. Also one should keep in mind that the borders of the categories were not rigid. As a craftsman became more skilled he might move up from one category to another. A movement into the opposite direction could have also taken place. Aging would result in a decline of the facilities of any scribe. The manuscript production cycle includes a number of technological operations that require quite different skills and that might have been distributed between various professional groups of craftsmen, scribes being the most important but only one of them. It is generally believed that specialization in Ethiopian manuscript production was less advanced than in other traditions. But we can deduce that more effective production schemes, involving a greater specialization of craftsmen, were applied, at least occasionally, even before the Gondärine period. In addition to scribes, parchmenters and leather-makers, binders, and silversmiths come into consideration. Contemporary Ethiopian scribes say that they are able to produce parchment if necessary, but that they frequently prefer to buy the ready product. For earlier periods a separation of tasks would seem logical, in the context of sizable texts and growing demand where large quantities of parchment would be required. A few medieval Ethiopic written sources do refer to parchmenting, directly or indirectly, as a separate craft.115 As to the historical status of 114  See, e.g., Herbert Hunger, Schreiben und Lesen in Byzanz: Die byzantinische Buchkultur (Munich, 1989), 89–94; Déroche, Islamic codicology, 186–189. 115  See the explicit reference to säraḥtä (pl. of säraḥi) bəranna in the colophon of MS Pistoia, Biblioteca Forteguerriana, Martini 5 dated to 1438 (Gianfranco Fiaccadori, “Bisanzio e il regno di Aksum. Sul manoscritto Martini etiop. 5 della Biblioteca Forteguerriana di Pistoia,” Crispoli. Bollettino del Museo Bodoniano di Parma 7 [1993]: 161–199, at 162–163; Bausi, “Copying, Writing, Translating,” 42–43), and other references in Balicka-Witakowska, Bausi et al., “Ethiopic codicology,” in COMSt, 154. To them can be added a passage in the Ṭomarä təsbəʾt of King Zärʾa Yaʿəqob from which it is clear that parchment was commissioned separately from copying (Getatchew Haile, “Manuscripts production in Ethiopia,” 42), as well as bäʿalä bəranna, “commissioner/owner of parchment” or

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parchmenters in society, on one hand, work with the skins of animals was considered unclean; on the other hand, parchmenting was an exception, even though it possessed a status inferior to the scribal work.116 At the same time, leather-makers had actually a low social status and represented one of the “marginalized groups.”117 Both parchmenters and leather-makers must have sourced their raw materials from the places of extensive meat consumption and large banquets, which were above all the royal court and the courts of local lords and governors.118 For the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the accounts of a few European travellers clearly witness the existence of separate professional groups of bookmakers, i.e. scribes, binders, and parchmenters, at least in areas of intensive book production such as Gondär and Aksum.119 So far, there is at least one early Ethiopic source clearly testifying that binding work could be done by a special craftsman who was different from the scribe. The recently recorded MS AQG-005, produced in the monastery of Däbrä Bizän in the second half of the fifteenth century (but before 1492)120 contains a colophon by the scribe Samuʾel and a rhymed supplication for priest Tomas which commences as follows:121 “parchmenter”, in the colophon of MS AP-046 (Denis Nosnitsin, “Vita and Miracles of the Ṣadǝqan of ʿAddiqäḥarsi Ṗäraqliṭos,” in Veneration of Saints in Christian Ethiopia, 137–160, at 155). 116  Winslow, “Ethiopian Manuscript Culture,” 71; Bausi, “Tradizione scrittoria etiopica,” 527; Balicka-Witakowska and Bausi, “Ethiopic codicology,” in COMSt, 154–155. 117  Hermann Amborn, “Leather,” in EAe 3 (2007), 529–531, on the inferior position of tanners and the “delegating” of many crafts to non-Amhara ethnic groups in pre-modern Ethiopia; Jacques Mercier, Review of Bookmaking in Ethiopia by Sergew Hable Selassie, Journal of Semitic Studies 28, 1 (1983): 221–222, at 222. 118  The Śərʿatä gəbr which describes the organization of the royal camp, refers to məǧəlle bet interpreted as a name of the storage place for parchment, and dərʿ bet where the hides of the slaughtered animals were sent: Manfred Kropp, “The Sərʿatä gəbr. A Mirror View of Daily Life at the Ethiopian Royal Court in the Middle Ages,” in Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference of Ethiopian Studies. University of Addis Ababa, 26–30 November 1984, vol. 1, ed. Taddesse Beyene (Addis Ababa, 1988), 219–232, at 220–221. 119  See the evidence collected in Pankhurst, Social History of Ethiopia, 60–61 (parchment in Aksum, made by monks), 227 (tanners producing parchment), 232–233 (parchmenters, book-binders, scribes of various categories in Gondär). 120  Vitagrazia Pisani, “Passio of St Cyricus (Gädlä Qirqos) in North Ethiopia: Elements of Devotion and of Manuscript Tradition,” in Veneration of Saints in Christian Ethiopia, 161– 199, at 180–184. 121  F. 120va: ጸልዩ᎓ ሎቱ᎓ አንትሙ᎓ ውሉደ᎓ ቤተ᎓ ክርስቲያን᎓ ዓቢይ᎓ ወንኡስ᎓ በኅበረተ᎓ መንፈስ᎓ ቅዱስ᎓ ለአቡክሙ᎓ ቶማስ᎓ ቀሲስ። ዘጻመወ᎓ በቀጺእሂ᎓ ወበጠሪዝሂ᎓ ወበኀፊፍ᎓ ወበደጒስ። ወበገሊፍ᎓ ኅብረ᎓ ጽጌ᎓ ወኅብረ᎓ ከብድ᎓ እንዘ᎓ ያለብስ። እስመ᎓ እምንእሱ᎓ ጠቢብ᎓ … etc. For gälif, cp. Wolf Leslau,

Comparative Dictionary of Geʿez (Classical Ethiopic): Geʿez – English / English – Geʿez, with

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Pray for him, you, children of the church old and young, in the union of the Holy Spirit, For your father Tomas the priest, Who toiled in cutting (the leaves) and sewing, and trimming, and tooling, and for curving out (the boards), While covering (them with) the flower-colored (textile) and with the purple (leather), Since from his childhood he was wise … The range of tasks carried out by Tomas indicates that he obviously worked as binder, and was not responsible for producing the parchment and copying the text. 6

Scribal Colophons

A colophon is a record that concerns the production stages of the manuscript122 and frequently provides first-hand information on its origin, the date of its completion, the name of the scribe, etc. This information can be solicited not only from the colophon, but the colophon is of great value because it preserves the original statement of the scribe, the major agent of manuscript culture. Certainly not every Ethiopic manuscript is supplied with a colophon. There are still no statistics showing the frequency of the colophons in various periods.

an Index of the Semitic Roots (Wiesbaden, 1987), 190; for ḥəbrä käbd, ibid. 224, ḥəbrä ṣəge can be explained in the same way. The word ḫafif is not attested in the lexica but its meaning can be sufficiently explained with the help of the related languages, cp. Tgn. affäfä “to cut, trim (the margins, edges of the book, sandals, etc.)”, Thomas Leiper Kane, TigrinyaEnglish Dictionary, I–II, (Springfield, VA, 2000), 1551; Amh. affäfä “to trim the edges of a parchment ms.” (Thomas Leiper Kane, Amharic – English Dictionary, I–II (Wiesbaden, 1990), 1359–60. See also Mersha Alehegne, “Towards a Glossary of Ethiopian Manuscript Practice,” Aethiopica 14 (2011), 145–162, at 148 and 155, and see above, on the trimming of the textblock. 122  Here, only the “colophon of the manuscript”, i.e. “colophon of the scribe” is considered. I prefer the narrow definition of the colophon (cp. Raymond Clemens and Timothy Graham, Introduction to Manuscript Studies [Ithaca, 2007], 117–119, 264; Maniaci, Ter­ minologia del libro manoscritto, 227; applied in this sense already by Siegbert Uhlig, “Kolophone und zeitgenössische Vermerke in äthiopischen Handschriften,” Internationale Kirchliche Zeitschrift 76 [1986]: 307–319), which is a statement of the scribe concerning the production of the manuscript, commonly the completion of the writing, frequently with a “core formula” like ተፈጸመት/ተጽሕፈት᎓ ዛቲ᎓ መጽሐፍ᎓ “This book has been completed …” .

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Some of the oldest known manuscripts contain in the explicit only a short indication at the end of the text.123 Extensive narrative colophons represent a remarkable feature of Ethiopian literary and manuscript culture particularly between the late fourteenth and early sixteenth centuries. They were penned by highly educated monastic scribes, who knew the systems of time reckoning and were able to draw up narratives of different kinds, not only exquisite praises or supplications but also historical accounts.124 This “eclecticism” is quite remarkable and possibly represents a feature of an earlier stage of the literary practice.125 Examples of extensive colophons can be found, for instance, in MSS Däbrä Maryam Qwäḥayn (Däbrä Abunä Absadi) I, Lives of the martyrs, dated 1453,126 and Octateuch, dated 1408/1409;127 MSS Däbrä Bizän, “81 canonical books,” dated 1492,128 another manuscript with the Old Testament books from 1530 (see below),129 and some others.130 7

Manuscripts’ Users and Traditional Libraries

Like other Christian medieval manuscript cultures, that of Ethiopia primarily served the society’s religious needs in the broadest sense. Manuscripts were central to the liturgy, religious education, and other requirements of the religious life. Commissioning a manuscript in order to present it to a church or 123  ተ  ፈጸመት፡ … and/or the title of the work (“nota di explicit”, see Bausi, “I colofoni e le sottoscrizioni”). 124  For instance, an account about the search for exemplar texts: a rare example is described in Ted Erho, “The Ethiopian Manuscripts in the Kulturhistorisk Museum,” at 55. 125  For instance, the colophon in MS Däbrä Śahəl Agwäza, DSAE-001, f. 176v starts with the usual colophon formula but turns into a land grant: Balicka-Witakowska, “The ‘Golden Gospel.’” 126  The so-called “Operetta di Yoḥannǝs” which includes the information on the abbots of Däbrä Bizän and an inventory of donated books and objects (Alessandro Bausi, “Su alcuni manoscritti presso comunità monastiche dell’Eritrea (I.),” RSE 38 [1994]: 13–69, at 47–57, 63–65, figs. 2–5). This is an unusual case since the colophon is not placed at the end of the codex. 127  The so-called “Operetta di Yosṭinos,” in Gianfrancesco Lusini, ed., Il ‘Gadla Absādi’ (Dabra Māryām, Sarāʼē), 2 vols., CSCO 557–558, SAe 103–104 (Louvain, 1996), vol. 1 (text), 79–92, vol. 2 (trans.), 56–57. 128  Bausi, “I colofoni e le sottoscrizioni,” 248–249. 129  See Macomber, Catalogue of Ethiopian Manuscripts, 23–24. 130  Mostly known from the better studied manuscripts of northern Ethiopia, but see also the extensive colophon in MS The Pierport Morgan Library, M. 828, Four Gospels, dated 1400/1401, partly published in Sylvain Grébaut, “Note sur la princesse Zir-Gānēlā,” Journal asiatique 213 (1928): 141–145.

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monastery was a desirable pious deed, certainly more affordable to elites than to commoners. Most manuscripts were owned by ecclesiastic institutions. A much smaller part was owned by individuals, but the practice of bequeathing private books to religious institutions was very common. The question of Ethiopian ecclesiastical libraries accumulating manuscript treasures has long attracted scholarly attention.131 The composition of a number of ecclesiastical libraries has now been studied. But we still have a scanty knowledge as to how medieval Ethiopian libraries were organized and administered. Many nineteenth-century travelers to Ethiopia were aware of its ancient written culture and eagerly acquired manuscripts, but they did not pay attention to the “technical” aspects of manuscript culture, such as the buildings accommodating traditional collections, their internal order, and the ways of storing books.132 Though quite a number of old and large ecclesiastical libraries still exist in Ethiopia, their original historical settings have been profoundly modified. We can say that the internal organizational principle of medieval Ethiopian libraries was that church books, liturgical vestments, vessels, candles, etc. were all considered church property and kept in the same sacristy (ʿəqa bet) together, without strict separation or a clear organizational system, as is still the case today. Traditional ecclesiastical libraries were not intended for public use, and had no special room for readers. The custom of marking the manuscript cover with a title summarily referring to the content (“label”) is very recent.133 There was no need to quickly locate any of the books, for only a few of them had to be easily available, for a limited number of users. A small church library of some 131  Gianfranco Fiaccadori, “Archives and libraries. I. Archives. a) Introduction; b) Medieval and modern archives in Ethiopia and Eritrea,” in EAe 5 (2014), 244–248; Bausi, “Tradizione scrittoria etiopica,” 545–546; Balicka-Witakowska and Bausi, “Ethiopic codicology,” in COMSt, 172. 132  Of great value is the information included in Enno Littmann et al., Deutsche AksumExpedition, vol. 3: Profan – und Kulturbauten Nordabessiniens aus älterer und neuerer Zeit, by Theodor Lüpke, Enno Littmann, and Daniel Krencker (Berlin 1913), documenting compounds of important churches, providing the location and the ground plans for sacristies of some of them. See also Ernst Hammerschmidt, Äthiopische Handschriften vom Ṭānāsee 1: Reisebericht und Beschreibung der Handschriften in dem Kloster der Heiligen Gabriel auf der Insel Kebrān (Wiesbaden, 1973) which contains some interesting remarks on the traditional libraries; but more detailed excurses as in Tomaszewski and Gervers, “Technological aspects of the monastic collection,” are exceptional. 133  Traditional inventories inscribed in manuscripts are helpful for the study of Gəʿəz literature. From the practical point of view, such an inventory records the manuscripts of the library at one moment in time, but further acquisitions are not recorded. Moreover, an inventory only records the “titles,” nearly no other features that could be helpful for identifying the physical manuscripts.

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20–40 books could be easily administered in this way. But what about the bigger libraries where preservation of a large number of volumes would present a problem in itself, or the libraries of places where literary and manuscriptmaking activities took place, and where legal records were drafted, deposited, copied and consulted? A related question concerns storage. In the report of his 1940 visit to the ancient monastery of Gundä Gunde, Antonio Mordini reported seeing a large number of manuscripts in the church’s sanctuary (mäqdäs), lying on the ground or piled on two alga-beds, without any order.134 Today a few manuscripts frequently used in liturgical services are indeed kept not in the treasury, but in the sanctuary, sometimes in the chest for the tabot.135 Placing the manuscripts on alga-beds seems to be a common storage method. Otherwise, in the ʿəqa-bet storage, medium-weight manuscripts are frequently kept in the leather bookcases with carrying straps,136 hanging on pegs inserted in the walls or from logs under the roof. Other manuscripts, especially large and heavy ones, could be placed on the ground. Simple hand-made stands and chests were and still are in use,137 today gradually substituted by industrially produced bookshelves and cupboards. It does not seem that manuscripts have been ever kept upright, even if shelved. Did the storing methods somehow influence the shape and structure of the Ethiopic codex? 134  Antonio Mordini, “Il convento di Gunda Gundiè,” RSE 12 (1953): 29–70, at 39–40, 61–62. In an earlier publication, Mordini mentions another number, of 800 manuscripts, but adds that he was able to see and study only ca. 200 books kept in the mäqdäs: Antonio Mordini, “Informationi preliminari sui risultati delle mie ricerche in Etiopia dal 1939 al 1944,” RSE 4 (1944–45): 145–54, at 152–153. Was there another place for storing the books at that time, which remained inaccessible? The contemporary ʿəqa bet of the monastery is a recent stone structure outside the main church, equipped with metal cupboards (the recently digitized collection encompasses 213 manuscripts); only a few books are preserved inside the main church. 135  Mänbärä tabot: see the essay in this volume by Emmanuel Fritsch and Habtemichael Kidane. A similar method is shown on an illustration from 1868, see BeckinghamHuntingford, Prester John, 2: 544 (fig. 32). 136  The Ethiopian leather pouch or carrying book-case (called maḫdär) is a hardly studied topic (see Balicka-Witakowska, “Ethiopic codicology,” in COMSt, 172; some more details in Winslow, “Ethiopian Manuscript Culture,” 256–259). The oldest reference to it known to me is a depiction of a man carrying a maḫdär in the church of Guḥ Yəmʾata, see Claude Lepage and Jacques Mercier, Art éthiopien. Les églises historique du Tigray / Ethiopian art. The ancient churches of Tigrai (Paris, 2005) at 172 (on the church and dating of its murals see Ewa Balicka-Witakowska, “Gwəḥ,” in EAe 2 (2005), 940–941). Various types of leather pouches, carrying book-cases and satchels were in wide use in the neighboring manuscript cultures (see Gacek, Arabic Manuscripts, 49–50). 137  See the unique photo of the inside of an ʿəqa bet in Hammerschmidt, Äthiopische Handschriften vom Ṭānāsee, plate 13, and also plates 29, 30.

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8 Conclusion Despite all the challenges mentioned above, a cursory overview of a few aspects of Ethiopic manuscript culture can result in some preliminary conclusions. After the decline of the Aksumite kingdom, Ethiopia’s contact with the Mediterranean cultural area was greatly reduced due to the profound geopolitical changes in the region. One can say that the resulting isolation from the main Christian manuscript traditions at least partly defined the unique character of Ethiopic manuscript culture and its internal development. At the moment it does not seem that Ethiopian bookmaking experienced a strong influence from the outside at least during the classical Solomonic period (late thirteenth to mid-sixteenth century), in the form of a large-scale technology transfer, significant migrations of craftsmen, or the influx of non-Ethiopian books. This might be a reason for the relatively slow technological advance of Ethiopic manuscript culture, which has been marked by a strong adherence to traditional forms and techniques. Many of them appear to have been established at an unknown early date, and are much older than one might think. However, Ethiopic manuscript culture was not static. On the contrary, it astonishes the beholder with the agility of the craftsmen and an unexpected range of features, even though in many cases we cannot yet define which of them were common and which were exceptional. We may assume that in the time after the devastating Muslim wars, Ethiopic manuscript culture was heading towards a certain unification of techniques and forms and the marginalization of some of those inherited from the early period. Geographical redistribution of book production also took place. These factors prepared the ground for the great flourishing of Ethiopic manuscript culture in the Gondärine era.

chapter 12

Christian Visual Culture in Medieval Ethiopia: Overview, Trends and Issues Claire Bosc-Tiessé 1

Some Historiographical Trends

The Christian Church established itself in Ethiopia during the fourth century, and one can suppose that it stimulated a movement of textual copying, the importation or manufacture of vestments and liturgical objects, the construction of churches and perhaps the creation of paintings. Under Coptic authority until the twentieth century, this Church developed specific characteristics. While the remains of Aksumite-era churches have been excavated, there remains nothing from the late antique period in terms of monumental paintings. Members of the family of the Prophet Muhammad in exile in Ethiopia are reported to have seen ornaments in the interior of the cathedral of Aksum, which would have occurred in the seventh century, but what remains to us for study are the illuminated Gospel books of the monastery of Abba Gärima. It is thus easier to trace what medieval Christian Ethiopia inherited from the Aksumite era in architecture than in painting. It bears mention that all the surviving artistic productions of the medieval Christian kingdom concern the religious sphere, including representations of royalty which exist only in this context. Some efforts to survey the field have been made, in coffee-table books authored by scholars, in the introductory essays to exhibition catalogs or in some entries related to art history in the Encyclopaedia Aethiopica from 2003 forward. That said, no analytical synthesis of medieval Ethiopian art history – recalling that the Ethiopian medieval area also extends over part of the territory of present-day Eritrea – has yet been written. Such a synthesis cannot, of course, be achieved in the limited space of this essay, whose principal aims are to provide an overview of the research conducted to date on some of the major forms of medieval Ethiopian art (including architecture), to bring into discussion the available evidence in order to elucidate some of the methodological and interpretive issues it raises, and to sketch out different approaches and new directions. While iconographic analyses have generally predominated in the field and will be duly treated, this presentation focuses more on an approach that

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2020 | doi:10.1163/9789004419582_013

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seeks first to anchor objects and monuments in time – at least, where absolute dates are elusive, in a relative chronology or phasing, as has recently been done for the site of Lalibäla, for icons, and for some architecture, and remains a desideratum for wall paintings – before further iconographic analysis.1 This suggests a historical-anthropological perspective considering the object’s conditions of creation and transmission (formal and material2 as well as political, social, economic, and religious) with, in prospect, a better understanding of visual culture in its socio-political context.3 The study of Ethiopian Christian visual art, though begun in the nineteenth century and rather more developed than scholarship on other forms of artistic creation in Ethiopia, is nonetheless still in its infancy.4 The pioneering scholars of the first half of the twentieth century worked with a small sample, and therefore a very incomplete view, of the extant artworks. Interest in Ethiopian pictorial productions began only from the end of the nineteenth century when Ernest Alfred Wallis Budge published the first essay on Ethiopian painting in 1898, in the introduction to his edition and translation of the Life of Saint Mäba‌ʾa Ṣǝyon.5 He knew Ethiopian painting above all through what British troops had brought back from the sack of Mäqdäla – transferring to England a large part of what the troops of Tewodros had themselves pillaged from Gondär, the royal city of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries – and thus principally manuscripts of that period. Following Budge, Carlo Conti Rossini 1  François-Xavier Fauvelle-Aymar et al., “Rock-cut stratigraphy: sequencing the Lalibela churches,” Antiquity 84, 326 (2010): 1135–1150; Claire Bosc-Tiessé and Sigrid Mirabaud, “Une archéologie des icônes éthiopiennes. Matériaux, techniques et auctorialités au XV e siècle,” Images re-vues. Histoire, anthropologie et théorie de l’art 13 (2016); Mario Di Salvo, The Basilicas of Ethiopia. An Architectural History (London, 2017). 2  That means not only the analysis of the materials, quite few (for a summary see Claire BoscTiessé and Sigrid Mirabaud, “An Archaeology of Ethiopian Icons from the Fifteenth Century and A Reappraisal of Ferē Ṣeyon’s Work. Cross-Disciplinary Inquiries into the Collection of the Institute of Ethiopian Studies,” in Proceedings of the First International Conference on Ethiopian Museums [IES, november 2013], ed. Ahmed Hassan Omer [Addis Ababa, forthcoming] but the understanding of the whole technological process. 3  The bibliographic selection, though certainly incomplete, will hopefully provide a point of entry for those who would like to investigate further. 4  For an overview of the historiography that needs to be extended and revised but could however still be used as basis, see Stanisław Chojnacki, Major Themes in Ethiopian Painting. Indigenous Developments, the Influence of Foreign Models and their Adaptation from the 13th to the 19th Century (Wiesbaden, 1983), 22–37; Claire Bosc-Tiessé, “A Century of Research on Ethiopian Church Painting: A Brief Overview,” Journal of Ethiopian Studies 52, 1–2 (2009): 1–23. 5  Ernest Alfred Wallis Budge ed. and trans., Lady Meux Manuscript n° 1. The Lives of Mabâ’ Ṣĕyôn and Gabra Krĕstôs. The Ethiopic Texts Edited with an English Translation and a Chapter on the Illustration of Ethiopic Mss. (London, 1898), XI–LXXXIII.

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was the first to show an interest in the (few) paintings in medieval manuscripts of the d’Abbadie collection in the Bibliothèque nationale de France.6 Around the same time, the Deutsche Aksum Expedition published the first substantial study of Ethiopian architectural construction techniques and decoration, as well as the first plans of churches. It established a paradigm that would long be influential in the study of the Aksumite elements in religious architecture, especially via the volume’s long descriptions of Däbra Dammo, later on restored (fig. 12.1), and the church of Asmara, Ǝnda Maryam, destroyed in 1920.7 Starting in the late 1930s, new surveys and plans in the region of Lalibäla and in Tǝgray advanced our understanding, especially of architecture.8 As for painting, the research conducted in these years by Ugo Monneret de Villard and Carlo Conti Rossini was still based exclusively on European manuscript collections.9 They brought to light a certain number of illuminated examples, but it is evident that the restriction of research to this one form of painting, and to only those examples close at hand, hindered the fuller development of the field. As with the study of texts two centuries earlier, which had progressed notably through the on-site studies by such persons as James Bruce and Antoine d’Abbadie, art history in all its facets would have to await the launch of in-depth field studies to develop a more complete understanding of these objects. Several events of the later 1950s oriented the field in just this direction. In 1955, to celebrate the twenty-fifth Jubilee of Emperor Haile Selassie, an exhibition in Gondär displayed a number of liturgical objects, manuscripts, and icons belonging to the churches of the region. A German doctor resident in Gondär, Otto Jäger, was authorized to photograph the exhibition’s thirty-five illuminated manuscripts, which he then followed up by researching and describing roughly a hundred more, of all periods, that he located in churches

6  Carlo Conti Rossini, “Notice sur les manuscrits éthiopiens de la collection d’Abbadie,” Journal asiatique 19 (1912): 551–578, at 565–572. 7  Daniel Krencker, Theodor von Lüpke, and Robert Zahn, Ältere Denkmäler Nordabessiniens, vol. 2 of Enno Littmann et al., Deutsche Aksum-Expedition (Berlin, 1913). 8  Alessandro Augusto Monti della Corte, Lalibelà. Le chiese ipogee e monolitiche e gli altri monumenti medievali del Lasta (Rome, 1940); Antonio Mordini starting with “La chiesa ipogea di Ucrò (Ambà Seneitì) nel Tigrai,” Annali dell Africa italiana 2, 2 (1939): 519–526. This work was continued by David Buxton, “The Christian Antiquities of Northern Ethiopia,” Archaeologia 92 (1947): 1–42. 9  E.g. Carlo Conti Rossini, “Un codice illustrato eritreo del secolo XV (Ms. Abb. n. 105 della Bibl. Nat. di Parigi),” Africa italiana 1 (1927): 83–97; Ugo Monneret de Villard, “Note sulle più antiche miniature abissine,” Orientalia 8 (1939): 1–24.

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across the highlands.10 In 1959 Jules Leroy, a specialist of Syriac manuscripts, was briefly named head of the Archeological Section of the Ethiopian Imperial Government, and brought his expertise to the study of Ethiopian codices, notably the Gärima Gospels. He inaugurated a new approach to the study of Ethiopian painting, looking to it for traces of the earliest phase of Christian iconography that had disappeared from other traditions.11 If these events and individual undertakings opened the way, so to speak, it was really in the 1960s and 1970s that a larger number of surveys and studies, addressing monuments, objects, and manuscripts,12 supplied sufficient data for both architecture and painting to permit substantial analysis and an informed scholarly debate.13 The change of political regime in 1974 put, however, a stop to fieldwork just as it was bearing significant fruit. Thus only in the 1990s could on-site investigations resume, making it possible to uncover the artworks as we know them, with the technical means of the twenty-first century that today allow everyone a wider access to the data themselves. Even in the 1990s (and still today), scholars have often had limited access to monuments and documents. The discovery of the paintings of the church of Yǝmrǝḥannä Krǝstos is a good example of this. When Italians first visited the church in the 1930s, traveling on muleback for several hours from Lalibäla to reach it, they did not see the paintings in its north wing at all. These were only discovered, simultaneously, by two groups of researchers working in the 1990s, even though the conditions of access were at 10  Otto Jäger, “Ethiopian manuscript paintings,” Ethiopia Observer 4, 11 (1960): 354–391; Otto Jäger and Liselotte Deininger-Englhart, “Some notes on illuminations of manuscripts in Ethiopia,” RSE 17 (1961): 42–60. 11  Jules Leroy, “Recherches sur la tradition iconographique des canons d’Eusèbe en Éthiopie,” Cahiers archéologiques 12 (1962): 173–204; idem, “Un nouvel évangéliaire éthiopien illustré du monastère d’Abba Garima,” Synthronon 2 (1968): 75–87. This was fully developed in Claude Lepage’s works, see below. 12  Ruth Plant, “Rock-hewn Churches of the Tigre Province, with Additional Churches by David Buxton,” Ethiopia Observer 13, 3 (1970): 157–268; Roger Sauter, “Où en est notre connaissance des églises rupestres d’Éthiopie,” Annales d’Éthiopie 5 (1963): 235–292; idem, “Églises rupestres au Tigré,” Annales d’Éthiopie 10 (1976): 157–175. Claude Lepage published the reports of his extensive fieldtrips in the 1970s with his first analysis, in Claude Lepage, “Histoire de l’ancienne peinture éthiopienne (Xe–XV e s.). Résultats des missions de 1971 à 1977,” CRAI, Apr–June (=issue 2) (1977): 325–375. About the discoveries made by Diana Spencer, a British traveller, see below. 13  The book by the photographer Georg Gerster (Kirchen im Fels: Entdeckungen in Äthiopien, [Stuttgart, 1968]), later translated into French, English, and Italian and with texts by scholars, has contributed to make them widely known, as has an album of manuscripts edited by UNESCO in English and in French (Jules Leroy, Stephen Wright, and Otto Jäger, Ethiopia. Illuminated manuscripts [New York, 1961]).

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that time hardly better, and only radically improved afterwards.14 While there will doubtless be more discoveries to come, the corpus assembled in the last fifty years provides a good idea of the materials with which the history of medieval Ethiopian art is to be written. The decoding work of these pioneers will now allow us to tackle other types of questions. 2

Repertories: Exhibitions, Museums, Libraries and Databases

Unlike artistic productions in other regions of Africa or in Europe, many Ethiopian manuscripts and objects, indeed a majority, are preserved in situ, either in the churches for which they were made or in others to which they were transferred at a later moment. Michael Gervers and Ewa Balicka-Witakowska have created an online database called “Mäzgäbä sǝǝlat – Treasury of Ethiopian Images” that provides open access to the photographs taken during their own extensive surveys.15 It welcomes all photographs and includes for example those of Diana Spencer, who was sometimes the only one to have been able to photograph objects extremely important to the history of Ethiopian art, of Stanisław Chojnacki, and of Paul Henze. Items issuing from archeological excavations from 1952 forward, when the archeological section of the imperial government of Ethiopia was created, are preserved in the National Museum in Addis Ababa, which opened in 1957.16 Equally noteworthy is the collection of the Institute of Ethiopian Studies, begun in 1952 (first as the University College Museum), which today includes the most important collection of Ethiopian icons and crosses in the world, as well as other lesser-known liturgical objects.17 14  Claude Lepage, Girma Fisseha, and Jacques Mercier, “Peintures murales du XIIe siècle découvertes dans l’église Yemrehanna Krestos en Éthiopie,” CRAI, Jan–Mar (=issue 1) (2001): 311–334; Ewa Balicka-Witakowska and Michael Gervers, “The Church of Yəmräḥannä Krəstos and its Wall-Painting: A Preliminary Report,” Africana Bulletin 49 (2001): 9–47. 15  http://ethiopia.deeds.utoronto.ca/about.html. 16   Kebbédé Mikaël and Jean Leclant, “La section d’archéologie (1952–1955),” Annales d’Éthiopie 1 (1955): 1–8; Jean Leclant, “Le musée des Antiquités d’Addis-Ababa,” Bulletin de la Société d’Archéologie Copte 16 (1962): 289–304. 17  Stanisław Chojnacki, Ethiopian Icons. Catalogue of the Collection of the Institute of Ethiopian Studies, Addis Ababa University (Milan, 2000); Dorothea Hecht, Brigitta Benzing, and Girma Kidane, The Hand Crosses of the IES Collection (Addis Ababa, 1990). See also the exhibition catalogue African Zion: The Sacred Art of Ethiopia, ed. Roderick Grierson, catalogue by Marilyn E. Heldman with Stuart C. Munro-Hay (New Haven, 1993) that displays many items from this collection. The collection of Christian manuscripts is not yet catalogued.

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The few artworks then held in Western collections, relatively few in number especially with regard to the Middle Ages, were first presented in exhibitions dedicated to Coptic and Ethiopian art in Germany and France in 1963–1964 alongside objects, the majority, coming directly from Ethiopian churches.18 Ten years later, Religiöse Kunst Äthiopiens – Religious Art of Ethiopia presented in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland the religious objects of the Institute of Ethiopian Studies in Addis Ababa and some of the Ethiopian National Museum,19 there being then no mention of Ethiopian objects in the collections of these countries. Meanwhile, Éthiopie millénaire. Préhistoire et art religieux, held at the Petit Palais in Paris, presented the research then underway in paleontology, archeology, and history of art, the results of archeological excavations, and the collections of Ethiopian museums, as well as objects from Paris’s Musée de l’Homme and Bibliothèque nationale.20 The exhibition African Zion, on view in Addis Ababa and in the United States in 1993–1995, renewed our knowledge of Ethiopian medieval art thanks to the descriptions of the objects made by Marilyn Heldman.21 In 2000–2001, L’arche éthiopienne, put on by Jacques Mercier at the Pavillon des Arts in Paris, presented a very important private collection that was afterward returned to Ethiopia. It was then on display for a few years in the Palace-Museum of Yoḥannǝs IV in Mäqälä and, in 2018, stored in the Tǝgray Bureau of Culture and Tourism, where it awaits the opening of a new museum.22 Illuminated manuscripts are scattered among libraries outside Ethiopia as they are scattered among the libraries of Ethiopian churches themselves. For the German collections, Ernst Hammerschmidt with the help of Otto Jäger has published an inventory.23 Unlike manuscripts, for which a European demand has existed since the sixteenth century, few medieval objects arrived in European collections before the end of the twentieth century. It is thus principally through the art market, from the end of the twentieth century onwards, that important collections have been built, like those of the Walters Art 18  An exhibition on Coptic art was first held in Germany (Koptische Kunst. Christentum am Nil. Katalog der Ausstellung in der Villa Hügel [Essen, 1963]) and the following year at the Petit Palais in Paris (L’art copte [Paris, 1964]). 19  Religiöse Kunst Äthiopiens – Religious Art of Ethiopia (Stuttgart, 1973). 20  Éthiopie millénaire. Préhistoire et art religieux (Paris, 1974). 21  See Marilyn E. Heldman’s five catalogue essays in Grierson, ed., African Zion, 71–100, 117– 255. Objects from Ethiopian collections were then represented in the United States tour by photographs only. 22  L’arche éthiopienne, art chrétien d’Éthiopie, ed. Jacques Mercier (Paris, 2000). 23   Ernst Hammerschmidt and Otto A. Jäger, Illuminierte äthiopische Handschriften (Wiesbaden, 1968); Ernst Hammerschmidt, Illuminierte Handschriften der Staatsbibliothek Preußicher Kulturbesitz und Handschriften vom Ṭānāsee (Graz, 1977).

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Museum in Baltimore,24 the Metropolitan Museum in New York,25 and the Fünf Kontinente Museum of Munich (formerly the Staatliches Museum für Völkerkunde).26 There exists no repertory of architectural plans and sections, but the recent publications of David Phillipson and Mario Di Salvo republish some of the plans drawn in the last century and offer access to these data.27 The webportal first called “Aluka” and now “World Heritage Sites,” accessible through the JSTOR digital library, also gives access to a certain number of three-dimensional models of buildings created by the team of Heinz Rüther at Cape Town University. 3

The Aksumite Legacy in Architecture and Dating Issues

Textual sources on buildings are extremely rare before the twelfth century, and when they exist, for later medieval times, they shed light on the life of the churches but very rarely on their construction. The criteria by which scholars, based on material observation, have proposed earlier or later ranges of date for medieval churches have usually remained implicit and scattered. Especially for the earliest medieval period, up to the twelfth century, the primary criterion has been a feature’s degree of derivation from a presumed Aksumite standard, and some of the principal observations are worth reviewing here, focusing on the articulation of shapes, techniques, and ornamental (carved and painted) elements. From the first works of the Deutsche Aksum Expedition in 1906 until the end of the twentieth century, the Aksumite legacy was the main investigation trail in architectural studies. It has been considered principally in terms of forms and techniques, and only recently as concerns plans or functions (especially because no secular monument is known after the seventh century). In fact, Aksumite buildings have generally been more studied and more reliably dated. It has thus been possible to correlate particular characteristics with a specific time period, and to use this data to consider the evolution of such characteristics in the post-Aksumite era. The transformation of Aksumite building features after the Aksumite age was used, and regularly refined, as a way to situate buildings in a period of time, at least for churches 24  Gary Vikan, ed., Ethiopian Art. The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore (Baltimore, 2001) and the online catalogue for updates. 25  See namely the online catalogue. 26  Girma Fisseha, ed., Äthiopien. Christentum zwischen Orient und Afrika (Munich, 2002). 27  David W. Phillipson, Ancient Churches of Ethiopia. Fourth–fourteenth centuries (New Haven, 2009); Di Salvo, Basilicas.

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figure 12.1 Church of Däbrä Dammo photo credit: Michael Gervers, 2005 (Mäzgäbä sǝǝlat MG-2005.132:001)

still in elevation.28 Scholars have mainly considered the development of building techniques, the transformation of architectural elements (for instance, the shape of pillars, or the increasingly ornamental function of the gallery), and the evolution in shape, composition, or technique of execution of decorative patterns stylistically linked to late antiquity. This characterization of Aksumite and post-Aksumite architecture has long been based on three different kinds of examples: the buildings still in place in Aksum and its immediate area, which are of different types; the ancient funerary stelae on which representations of buildings were sculpted; and the churches built in the surrounding Tǝgray region at moments that are difficult to define precisely between the seventh and the thirteenth century. We thus find ourselves in a research situation in which “Aksumite architecture,” at least as concerns its features in elevation, is principally known by postAksumite churches, notably Däbrä Dammo (fig. 12.1), Zärema Giyorgis, Däbrä Sälam Mika‌ʾel, and Agobo Qirqos in Tǝgray, and the twelfth-thirteenth century churches of Yǝmrǝḥannä Krǝstos and Ǝmäkina Mädḫane ʿAläm in the region of Lalibäla.29 To be precise, therefore, we should say that post-Aksumite (rather than Aksumite) church architecture is characterized very generally by walls made by the alternation of horizontal wooden beams with layers of small stones 28  This is further complicated by the fact that some of them have been reworked over the centuries and more recently restored, and that archives on twentieth-century interventions are rare – with exceptions, as for the restoration of Däbrä Dammo in 1948 (Derek Matthews, “The restoration of the monastery church of Debre Damo, Ethiopia,” Antiquity 23, 92 [1949]: 188–200). 29  Michael Gervers, “Churches Built in the Caves of Lasta (Wällo Province, Ethiopia): A Chronology,” Aethiopica 17 (2014): 25–64.

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joined with mortar, the whole surface being sometimes coated, and transverse rounded beams at regular intervals on the facade (this only in Tǝgray however, not in Zärema Giyorgis). The façades are distinguished by protruding and recessed bands, with dressed stones at the corners; transverse square beams frame the doors and windows. In medieval churches, Aksumite techniques and forms seem however to have been either reproduced or partially imitated, even simply “tacked on” to the surface, to create an Aksumite appearance or to refer to it.30 This can therefore be both a sign of the age of these churches and a way of measuring architectural evolution from the previous era. Other surviving remains of these post-Aksumite churches, maybe from the first centuries of the Middle Ages, are monolithic pillars (including base and capital) with chamfered angles, slightly different from those of the earlier period. These can be found either isolated in fields, as in Wäf Argäf near Ašätän above Lalibäla, or in church buildings that have been reworked over the centuries, like ʿUra Mäsqäl in Tǝgray. These pillars, meant to support the architrave of the central nave, are what remain from small basilican churches.31 They are likely associated with the earliest medieval era. But such pillars are copied in monolithic churches later in the Middle Ages, especially when combined with a wooden entablature on a lintel. According to Claude Lepage and Jacques Mercier, rock-hewn churches of the seventh to eleventh century have the peculiar feature of including wooden parts in the framing of windows and doors, and probably also had wooden ceilings, as possibly in Dǝgum.32 Wooden door- and window-frames are seen either as a sign of the church’s greater age or as a regional feature, particular to Tǝgray and not observed, for instance, in Lasta.33 Other wooden pieces, carved in low relief and often assembled with tenon and mortise, also seem to have been quite common in these most ancient churches. They are found adorning ceilings, especially at Däbrä Dammo and Zärema, and on the lintels of arches, as capitals. They are often nowadays detached from their architectural context. For instance, elements of the ancient church of Asmara were either re-used 30  Di Salvo, Basilicas, 36–62. 31  Emmanuel Fritsch, “Two pillars: an epistemological note in church archaeology,” Annales d’Éthiopie 25 (2010): 103–111. 32  Claude Lepage published many studies articulating his field inquiries and working hypotheses since the beginning of his work in the early 1970s. Later on, he published with Jacques Mercier a book concluding his research: Claude Lepage and Jacques Mercier, Art éthiopien: les églises historiques du Tigray / Ethiopian Art: The Ancient Churches of Tigrai (Paris, 2005), 34, 52. 33  E.g. in Abrǝha wä-Aṣbǝḥa, Wǝqro Qirqos, Gundǝfru Śǝllase. This would often have weakened the openings that were later partially filled. See Lepage and Mercier, Art éthiopien / Ethiopian Art, 83, 130.

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Upper supports of wooden chancel, triumphal arch, and painted apse, Däbrä Sälam Mika‌ʾel Photo credit: Claire Bosc-Tiessé, 2009

or deposited in the archeological museum attached to the Biblioteca Italiana di Asmara.34 They feature motifs deriving closely from late antiquity, such as foliage scrolls, torus, twists, and facing animals, though when they appear on chancel screens, as at Mika‌ʾel Amba and in Däbrä Sälam Mika‌ʾel (fig. 12.2), we find only geometrical and vegetal designs. In later churches like Yǝmrǝḥannä Krǝstos, they were painted.35 In further pursuit of dating criteria, Lepage and then Emmanuel Fritsch developed a new approach. Since churches are designed to house liturgical celebrations, and the liturgy’s evolution is more easily traced and more precisely datable through texts, one could identify, in the architectural form and furniture of a church, to what stage of the liturgy its design corresponded, and situate the church in a span of time accordingly.36 34  Roger Sauter, “L’arc et les panneaux sculptés de la vieille église d’Asmara,” RSE 23 (1967– 1968): 220–231. 35  E.g. Claude Lepage, “L’église de Zaréma (Éthiopie) découverte en mai 1973 et son apport à l’histoire de l’architecture éthiopienne,” CRAI, Jul–Sep (= issue 3) (1973): 416–454. 36  E.g. Claude Lepage, “Premières recherches sur les installations liturgiques des anciennes églises d’Éthiopie,” Documents pour servir à l’histoire de la civilisation éthiopienne 3 (1972), 77–114; Claude Lepage and Jacques Mercier, “Évolution de l’architecture des églises éthiopiennes du XIIe au milieu du XV e siècle,” Annales d’Éthiopie 22 (2006): 9–43; Emmanuel

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The Specificity of the Study of Rock-Hewn Architecture and the Case of Lalibäla

The earliest medieval churches seem to have been built, though sometimes built against a rock or partly carved from it (i.e., semi-hypogean), as in the cases of Däbrä Sälam Mika‌ʾel and Agobo Qirqos. Thereafter, built architecture and rock-hewn architecture developed in parallel. The utilization of wood in rock-hewn sites, however, becomes increasingly rare. Whether the choice of building technique (building versus hewing) related to the church’s function remains unclear. The hypothesis, much cited, is that semi-hypogean churches had a funerary function, with their eastern, sacred spaces, located within the rock, serving for burials.37 It is however necessary to distinguish spaces with underground crypts, as for Dǝgum, from semi-hypogean churches; in the latter, the ancient presence of tombs in the eastern part, as for Abrǝha wä-Aṣbǝḥa, has never really been demonstrated.38 In any event, rock-hewn monuments are certainly one of the outstanding elements of the Ethiopian landscape. They have served as basic housing, as burial chambers, and perhaps as granaries – and not only in a Christian milieu – but especially as churches. The country indeed has several hundred, stretching as far south as the Addis Ababa region.39 In their predominant role as churches they are important witnesses of the Christian occupation of the country over the longue durée. But they offer little grip for the different dating methods. Archeological excavation does not function well for rock-hewn spaces, since the earliest stages and oldest traces of design were perforce eliminated as the site was hewn. However, it is possible to experiment with other methods, as was done for Lalibäla, with the phasing of sequences marking the different stages of the evolution of the site. Lalibäla is the most famous rock-hewn site in Ethiopia, one of the first pla­ ces designated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site (in 1978), and an important tourist and pilgrimage destination today (fig. 12.3). It is also the largest rockhewn site in Ethiopia and the most complex. It includes about ten churches Fritsch and Michael Gervers, “Pastophoria and Altars: Interaction in Ethiopian Liturgy and Church Architecture,” Aethiopica 10 (2007): 7–51; Emmanuel Fritsch, “Liturgie et architecture ecclésiastique éthiopiennes,” Journal of Eastern Christian Studies 64, 1–2 (2012): 91–125. See also Emmanuel Fritsch and Habtemichael Kidane, “The Medieval Ethiopian Orthodox Church and its Liturgy,” in this volume, for a chronological history of the churches based on all the elements mentioned below. 37  Lepage, Mercier, Art éthiopien / Ethiopian Art, 32–34. 38  Claude Lepage, “Une origine possible des églises monolithiques de l’Éthiopie ancienne,” CRAI, Jan–Mar (= issue 1) (1997): 199–212. 39  See Francis Anfray, “Des églises et des grottes rupestres,” Annales d’Éthiopie 13 (1985): 7–34, for the last updated list.

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Betä Gäbrǝʾel and Rufa‌ʾel, Lalibäla Photo credit: Claire Bosc-Tiessé, 2008

(depending on the time and the variable asssignment of certain spaces) divided into two groups, plus the more isolated church of Betä Giyorgis, as well as a series of subterranean galleries and rooms and of open-air trenches that connect them all in a vast network. Each church has a different form – one a basilica with multiple naves, for instance, another cruciform in plan – but all reproduce in rock the forms of built monuments, down to their facades and window frames. Betä Amanuʾel is for example designed to reflect a certain image of Aksumite architecture. Some are monolithic churches, completely excavated from the surrounding rock except for their floor, while hypogean churches are either dug into the side of the rock with a sculpted facade on the outside, or are completely underground. Tradition has long credited the excavation of the churches to the initiative of the Zagwe king Lalibala, who certainly ruled between 1204 and 1225 and, in all likelihood, for a longer period from the later twelfth century through the first third of the thirteenth. The place, previously called Wärwär or Roha, was renamed Däbrä Lalibäla in the fifteenth century, when the king of the same name was recognized as a saint and the site acknowledged as a complex of churches dedicated to him. The dating of this site is of particular significance, not only because it is the largest and most complex agglomeration of structures surviving from the entire medieval period in Ethiopia, but because the site has featured prominently in analyses of the process of Christianization and royal control over this region of central Ethiopia. It has long been thought that the Lasta region in which Lalibäla is located was the heartland of the Zagwe kings, and Claude

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Lepage and Jacques Mercier therefore considered the site as having been created wholly in the Zagwe era and proposed to see in it the royal city mentioned in the History of the Patriarchs of the Egyptian Church.40 Recent historical studies, however, have demonstrated that the Zagwe dynasty exercised authority not only over Lasta but also in the northern part of the kingdom, in Tǝgray and present-day Eritrea, and Lalibäla’s status as their “capital” is not certain.41 A closer examination of the site, and especially of the phases it went through, also relates to questions about the origins and development of the site itself. For the last fifteen years, certainly, much research has focused on approaches to dating and sequencing the site. Michael Gervers analyzed the uses of two of Lalibäla’s churches in relation to the history of the cult of Saint Lalibala, introducing a diachronic element to the study of their evolution.42 David Phillipson proposed a first phasing of the site based principally on stylistic features of the churches, which he attached to specific chronological periods.43 Emmanuel Fritsch proposed instead to consider the spatial organization of the churches in relation to changes in liturgical practice as a dating method.44 Finally, since 2008 a historical and archeological team has examined as well the larger environmental context of the site, taking into account the geological features of the monuments’ emplacement, excavating the debris piles created by the monuments’ unearthing from the rock, and studying other notable, nonmonumental features of the area, including caves and cemeteries.45 The monuments bear the traces of the many transformations that the site has undergone, some discreet and others more visible, such as the truncated staircase in the church of Betä Gäbrǝʾel and Rufa‌ʾel (fig. 12.3). These anomalies are witnesses to previous conditions of the site, partly erased by new excavations that took over, adapted, and extended older spaces. It is clear that cavities 40  Namely Claude Lepage, “Un métropolite égyptien bâtisseur à Lalibäla (Éthiopie) entre 1205 et 1210,” CRAI, Jan–Mar (=issue 1) (2002): 141–174; expanded in Jacques Mercier and Claude Lepage, Lalibela, Wonder of Ethiopia. The Monolithic Churches and their Treasures (London, 2012), 174–207. 41   Marie-Laure Derat, “Les donations du roi Lālibalā. Éléments pour une géographie du royaume chrétien d’Éthiopie au tournant du XIIe et du XIIIe siècle,” Annales d’Éthiopie 25 (2010): 19–42. 42  Michael Gervers, “The rehabilitation of the Zaguë Kings and the Building of the Däbrä Sina – Golgotha – Sellassie complex in Lalibäla,” Africana Bulletin 51 (2003): 23–49. 43  Phillipson, Ancient Churches, 177–180. 44   Emmanuel Fritsch, “The Churches of Lalibäla (Ethiopia): Witnesses of Liturgical Changes,” Bollettino della Badia Greca di Grottaferrata 5 (2008): 65–112. 45  Claire Bosc-Tiessé, Marie-Laure Derat et al., “The Lalibela Rock Hewn Site and its Landscape (Ethiopia): An Archaeological Analysis,” Journal of African Archaeology 12, 2 (2014): 141–164.

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were first dug under the surface of the rock before being hewn again in several stages until the monolithic churches that we see today emerged. Archeological excavations in the debris piles formed by the excavation of monuments complete the picture. Below Betä Maryam, they indicate two main phases in the excavation of this area and provide information on the cutting technique. In the southern group, a wall of long blocks belongs to massive constructions, prior to the excavation of the monuments and of the adjacent trench, that radiocarbon dating place between the beginning of the tenth and the beginning of the eleventh century. This time window coincides with the beginning of the occupation of the Qǝdǝmt cemetery located in the upper part of the presentday city of Lalibäla. Burials are oriented differently according to time, which could reflect changes in funeral practices, linked to cultural changes that accompanied Christianization.46 Putting these data together we may construct the following rough sequence of development at the site. Before the time of King Lalibala, there were populations living there, perhaps not yet Christian, who built in dressed stone. Around the same time, or perhaps even well before that, local residents had begun to hew the rock and create troglodytic settlements. The geological and technological experience acquired by stonecutters was undoubtedly what made it possible to excavate the churches themselves, for the main part most probably at the time of Lalibala’s reign. Indeed, documents written on parchment and wooden altars with inscriptions also testify to King Lalibala’s crucial involvement in the religious life of the site.47 The multiplication of altars reflects a change in the history of the liturgy that occurred in the late twelfth or early thirteenth century when the side rooms of the central sanctuary are themselves transformed into sanctuaries.48 The complex evolved and changed afterward as well, and indeed until today. While woodcarving seems to have become rare during the period, the art of sculpture persisted in stone. Some churches, such as Betä Maryam (in Lalibäla) and Qorqor Maryam, present an unusual carved ornamentation which could date to the thirteenth or fourteenth century. It features crosses, vegetal and geometrical patterns in Betä Maryam, while those of Qorqor Maryam present the particularity of carved arcades adorned with birds and framing a human figure, a scheme similar to the painted canon table pages in manuscripts, but 46   Bosc-Tiessé, Derat et al., “The Lalibela Rock Hewn Site,” 156–162. 47  Derat, “Donations,” 21–24; Claire Bosc-Tiessé, “Catalogue des autels et meubles d’autel en bois (tābot et manbara tābot) des églises de Lālibalā. Jalons pour une histoire des objets et des motifs,” Annales d’Éthiopie 25 (2010): 55–101. 48  See Fritsch and Habtemichael Kidane, “Medieval Ethiopian Orthodox Church,” in this volume.

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several meters high. In the churches of Lalibäla, sculptures in low-relief show horsemen hunting real and mythological animals above the western porch of Betä Maryam, and human characters under arcades at Betä Golgota (fig. 12.4).49 Nearby, the church of Däbrä Ṣǝyon Kidanä Mǝḥrät has a small circular room covered with a frieze of crosses, archangels and altars around a Virgin with Child,50 quite difficult to date. Such sculpture was exceptional even in this period and seems to disappear later on. 5

Dressed Stone Churches of the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries

The dressed stone churches of the later Middle Ages are less known and consequently less investigated. The large church of Betä Lǝḥem Maryam in the district of Gayǝnt was certainly built by Dǝl Mängǝśa,51 a daughter of King Dawit II and a regional governor in the late fourteenth or early fifteenth century. This church provides a milestone, even if it appears as exceptional in our present knowledge of the architecture of that time. Built on a basilican plan with huge dressed stones, with a podium, and a wooden framework including cupolas and barrel vaults,52 it was originally intended to have a more important decorative system than can be seen today. Indeed, on the lower part of the external walls, white stones were arranged in an alternating, geometrical pattern in contrast with pink stones (fig. 12.5). These white stones are located in recesses and may have been covered with a facing, either in wood (as above the windows) or in metal, if we take into consideration early sixteenth-century sources that mention churches with silver and gold ornaments.53 Inside the building, the cruciform stone pillars are similar in design to those at Yǝmrǝḥannä Krǝstos. The wooden framing, windows, and fenestrated clerestory are still adorned with engravings. Two other structures – we cannot definitely call them churches in our present stage of knowledge – could be compared with Betä Lǝḥem Maryam. Built with similar stones at roughly the same latitude, they are now 49  Other examples can be found but of lesser quality or less developed, such as the figure of the saint in front of the church of Qamqanit Mika‌ʾel near Lalibäla (picture in Phillipson, Ancient Churches, 112). For the low-relief above the porch of Betä Maryam, see Claude Lepage, “Un bas-relief royal à Lalibäla (Éthiopie) vers 1200,” CRAI, Jan–Mar (= issue 1) (2006): 154–173. 50  Georg Gerster, L’Art éthiopien. Églises rupestres (La Pierre-qui-Vire, 1968), fig. 45–47. 51  For the first publication of the text, see Madeleine Schneider, “Deux actes de donation en arabe,” Annales d’Éthiopie 8 (1970): 79–87, at 82–83. 52  Di Salvo, Basilicas, at 130–136. 53  See below on the Conquest of Abyssinia and Alvares’ report of the Portuguese embassy in Ethiopia in the 1520s, describing churches of their time or earlier.

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figure 12.4

Low relief sculpture, Saint Cyriacus (Qirqos), Betä Golgota, Lalibäla photo credit: Antoine Garric, © Mission Lalibela 2017

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figure 12.5

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Southern external wall, church of Betä Lǝḥem Maryam, 1400–01 Photo credit: Claire Bosc-Tiessé, 2008

embedded respectively in the churches of Däbrä Täklä Haymanot near Kurba in Dawǝnt and Ǝnnǝṣo Gäbrǝʾel near Kulmesk.54 From the fourteenth century, the Solomonic kings founded churches mainly in the central regions of their kingdom, Amhara and Šäwa, which served as bases of operation from which they travelled with their itinerant court throughout the kingdom or conducted military ventures in neighboring lands.55 It is mainly the Christian royal chronicles and the Conquest of Abyssinia (Futūḥ al-Ḥabaša) that give information on some of these churches and their architecture (e.g. regarding foundation stones) before their destruction during the jihad of Aḥmad ibn Ibrāhīm. Francisco Alvares, the chaplain who accompanied the Portuguese embassy to Ethiopia between 1520 and 1526, also described some of them, but in terms that mostly need still to be elucidated. These texts describe monuments built of wood and stone, clay, thatch, and brick, some of them adorned with gold plaques, mosaics, or inlays of

54  Stanisław Chojnacki, “New discoveries in Ethiopian archaeology. Dabr Takla Hāymānot in Dāwnt and Enṣo Gabreʾēl in Lāstā,” in Afrikas Horn. Akten der Ersten Internationalen Littmann-Konferenz. 2. bis 5. Mai 2002 in München, ed. Walter Raunig and Steffen Wenig (Wiesbaden, 2005), 44–59. 55   Marie-Laure Derat, Le domaine des rois éthiopiens (1270–1527): espace, pouvoir et monachisme (Paris, 2003), 209–236, also for details of the sources, the information on the process (organization of the work, endowment …).

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different materials, but of which no material traces remain today.56 Moreover, known ruins are rarely identified as places described in the texts, while the places described in texts have rarely been located. There are some exceptions, however: Mǝsḥalä Maryam57 and Gatira/ Atronsä Maryam, both founded by Bäʾǝdä Maryam (1468–1478);58 Mäkanä Śǝllase, founded by Naʿod (1494–1508) and completed by Lǝbnä Dǝngǝl (1508–1540);59 and Märṭulä Maryam, founded by Queen Ǝleni between 1490 and 1522.60 One may add the church of Rema Mädḫane ʿAläm on an island in Lake Ṭana, possibly built in the 1410s under the impetus of the monk Nob, a brother of King Yǝsḥaq (1414–1430).61 This gives a period of roughly a century for such royal foundations. Most of these churches were founded to house the tomb of their founder but we have no indication of the original architectural form that was given to them. In the absence of excavations and complete surveys of the ruins (when a ground plan is still observable), these churches are of basilican plan, built of dressed stones in large blocks up to one meter long,62 in a technique quite different from that of the Aksumite and post-Aksumite periods. However, a first comparison with the plan of Aksumite churches (for example, of Agula in Tǝgray), also shows some potential similarities (podium, access arrangement) that merit investigation. Some of the stones on the façades of these monuments, at least as can be seen from the remaining basis, were decorated with carving in a way that appears to be specific to this period.63 The torus, twisted or not, runs along the façades. Some of the forms derive from motifs common in the ancient Mediterranean, such as scrollworks, acanthus leaves, and 56  Derat, Domaine, 224. We are not considering here Gännätä Maryam founded by Yǝkunno Amlak (1270–1285), see below. 57  Derat, Domaine, 230; Marie-Laure Derat and Anne-Marie Jouquand, eds., Gabriel, une église médiévale d’Éthiopie. Interprétations historiques et archéologiques autour de Mesḥāla Māryām (Manz, Éthiopie), XVe–XVIIe siècle (Paris-Addis Ababa, 2012). 58  The site of Gatira Maryam was identified by Deresse Ayenachew as the royal church of Atronsä Maryam, founded between 1468 and 1478 by King Bäʾǝdä Maryam. Destroyed shortly after its construction (as early as 1531), the tabot – or altar tablet that marks God’s presence in the church – was moved to another place, a hundred kilometers further north on the site now called Atronsä Maryam. See Deresse Ayenachew, “Le kätäma: la cour et le camp royal en Éthiopie (XIV e–XVIe siècle). Espace et pouvoir” (Ph.D diss., Université de Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne, 2009), 295–302 (with a summary plan of the ruins). 59  Derat, Domaine, 210–223, 305–307. 60  Claire Bosc-Tiessé, “Märṭulä Maryam,” in EAe 3 (2007), 801–802. 61  Claire Bosc-Tiessé, Les îles de la mémoire. Fabrique des images et écriture de l’histoire dans les églises du lac Ṭānā, Éthiopie, XVIIe–XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 2008), 47. 62  Sometimes it is only a facing as in Däy Giyorgis. 63  Francis Anfray, “Enselale, avec d’autres sites du Choa, de l’Arussi et un ilôt du Lac Tana,” Annales d’Éthiopie 11 (1978): 153–169.

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figure 12.6a Stones of a former building in church compound of Däy Giyorgis, 1430–1433? Photo credit: Claire Bosc-Tiessé, 2010

figure 12.6b Stones of a former building in church compound of Gǝšän Ǝgziʾabǝḥer Ab, mid-15th c.? Photo credit: Emmanuel Fritsch, 2010

rosettes, with some specific compositions for these latter.64 Other decorations, such as rotating wheel crosses (fig. 12.6a) sometimes arranged in friezes, circular moldings, reliefs of ogees and ribs (unfortunately fragmentary), seem more specific to the sculpture developed during this period, over at least a century. This in turn permits us to provisionally date to this period other monuments, not always identified with certainty as churches but which could be civil buildings, reception halls or others, such as Däy Giyorgis, orally and locally attributed to King Ḥǝzbä Nañ (1430–1433) (fig. 12.6a),65 Gǝmb Tewodros,66 or Gutu.67 The square blocks of stone carved on several sides of crosses in the enclosure of Gǝšän Ǝgziʾabǝḥer Ab could be another type of relic from this period, perhaps more precisely from the reign of Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob (fig. 12.6b). Other carved stone decorations, like at Märṭulä Maryam, recall geometrical designs usually considered Islamic in origin and used in earlier churches.

64  Let us note that there is no such ornament, as far as we know, on Aksumite buildings. 65  See Deresse Ayenachew, “Kätäma,” at 262–267 regarding the case of the ruined monument in Däy Giyorgis. 66  Deresse Ayenachew, “Kätäma,” 360, more known in the literature under the form “ginbi,” see Lanfranco Ricci, “Resti di antico edificio in Ginbi (Scioa),” Annales d’Éthiopie 10 (1976): 177–201. 67  Anfray, “Enselale,” 161–162, pl. XI.

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These first observations highlight a shared milieu of production, in the sense of a circulation of specific craftsmen across an important territory from Lake Ṭana in the west through the Amhara and Šäwa regions and up to a few hundred kilometres south of Addis Ababa (the site of Gutu). They worked under royal patronage but also in a wider circle, without one being able to say with certainty today that royal patronage is a characteristic of this type of creation. Many of these churches were destroyed by the armies of the Islamic sultanates during the jihad of the 1530s and 1540s, and their carved stones, often reused, are found in churches subsequently built on the same sites or in the neighborhood until today. Nowadays their vestiges are also the most important testimony of royal patronage of churches, since few other remains have been found.68 The mural paintings of these later-medieval buildings obviously disappeared when the churches were destroyed. 6

Iconographic Arrangements and Strata of Mural Paintings

Churches of the medieval period are far from having been systematically painted and, when they were, they were often only partially painted. Furthermore the fragmentary state of wall paintings in most of the churches makes it difficult to really analyze the programs or, better still, the iconographic arrangements, taking into account adjustments, disappearances and additions.69 It is still difficult to make a history of it, not to mention that we do not have a complete survey of the paintings for any church. Paintings could be used as a terminal date for architecture but without much specificity, since mural paintings might have been made at more or less the same time as the building, or much later on. They could also attest to different periods of use and reinvestment in the churches. The superimposition of different layers of paintings at different times has not yet been taken into consideration, mainly because working 68  Derat and Jouquand, eds., Gabriel. 69  Consequently there there have been some attempts to explain the iconographical choices for some parts of a given church, but rarely to provide a comprehensive picture. See below for the works of Lepage and Balicka-Witakowska. About the wall-paintings of Däbrä Ṣǝyon Kidanä Mǝḥrät made by different hands at different times, see also Tania Costa Tribe, “Holy Men in Ethiopia. The Wall Paintings in the Church of Abunä Abrǝham Däbrä Ṣǝyon (Gär‘alta, Tǝgray),” Eastern Christian Art 6 (2009): 7–37. Tania Costa Tribe’s article on Qorqor Maryam, on the other hand, only seeks to see in the paintings generalities about the characteristics of Ethiopian monasticism (eadem, “The Word in the Desert: The Wall-Paintings of Debra Maryam Korkor (Ger’alta, Tigray),” in Ethiopia in broader perspective: papers of 13th International Conference of Ethiopian Studies, 3 vols., ed. Katsuyoshi Fukui, Eisei Kurimoto, and Masayoshi Shigeta (Kyoto, 1997), 3: 35–61.

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Mural, two saints, church of Mika‌ʾel Amba Photo credit: Patrick Tiessé, 2009

conditions have prohibited its investigation. Such superimposition itself can be of different kinds, as we will see. If we come back to a chronological outline, the oldest witnesses to mural painting seem to date to the mid-twelfth century. One of the churches linked to the metropolitan Mika‌ʾel presents some remains of paintings: human figures and traces of what could be a Christ in Majesty in Mika‌ʾel Amba (fig. 12.7).70 Made on the same architectural model as Mika‌ʾel Amba and probably at the same period of time71 the churches of Wǝqro Qirqos and Abrǝha wä-Aṣbǝḥa on the same latitude feature carpet paintings with geometrical patterns in red and black on the upper register of the walls and on pillars, sometimes slightly engraved. Sometimes a completely new program was later implemented, as in the entrance of Wǝqro Qirqos where the first geometrical program was covered over by a figurative one, maybe in the late fifteenth or sixteenth century, if we compare it to the paintings of Yädǝbba Maryam, tentatively dated to the reign of Gälawdewos (1540–1559),72 or to those of Gwǝh Yǝmʾata, in a similar vein but not dated. 70  Emmanuel Fritsch, “New Reflections on the Image of Late Antique and Medieval Ethiopian Liturgy,” in Liturgy’s Imagined Past/s. Methodologies and Materials in the Writing of Liturgical History Today, ed. Teresa Berger and Bryan Spinks (Collegeville, MN, 2016), 39–92, at 65. 71  Lepage and Mercier, Art éthiopien / Ethiopian Art, 72–80; Di Salvo, Basilicas, 80–92. 72  Claire Bosc-Tiessé, “Picturing the Zagwe Saint King Yəmrəḥannä Krəstos, a medium for devotion and a political tool,” in Essays on Yəmrəḥannä Krəstos, ed. Ewa Balicka-Witakowska and Michael Gervers (Toronto, forthcoming).

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In some of these early murals a filiation can be observed with Coptic paintings of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, for instance in those of Däbrä Sälam Mika‌ʾel (where the original paintings in the apse were partially redrawn: see fig. 12.2), Qorqor Maryam, Yǝmrǝḥannä Krǝstos and Betä Maryam in Lalibäla. The style differs, however, from one church to another, and we shall also notice that they are organized in different ways. In Qorqor Maryam they are arranged in distinct panels covering the surface of the walls from top to bottom, whereas the evangelical scenes in Yǝmrǝḥannä Krǝstos and Betä Maryam converge on the sanctuary. However, sets of murals often seem unfinished, as in Yǝmrǝḥannä Krǝstos, where only the northern aisle received a series of paintings. Claude Lepage developed the most elaborated explanation for the paintings of Betä Maryam in Lalibäla, arguing that they converge towards the Transfiguration above the triumphal arch at the entrance of the sanctuary, which would be linked to an original dedication of this church to Christ in connection with an interpretation of the site. This must however be revised to better take into consideration the different phases of evolution of Lalibäla and the disappeared ornaments of the lower parts.73 In the area east and south of Lalibäla, three churches display on their walls paintings associated with Yǝkunno Amlak’s reign (1270–1285). In the rockhewn church of Gännätä Maryam, originally dedicated to saint Mäṭaʿ (later on called Libanos), Yǝkunno Amlak ordered his portrait to be painted on a pillar. He is accompanied by the representation of two ecclesiastics and an inscription saying that he ordered the church to be made and that a certain Nǝḥǝyo Bä-Krǝstos oversaw the work on his behalf. The inscription also names another man close to the king, a certain Mähari Amlak. In the vestibule, another scene has considerable historical interest: it shows a certain Kwəleṣewon on a horse, said to be the son of a king (whose name was erased) with a woman called Təhrəyännä Maryam, who raised him (fig. 12.8).74 We do not know who these two personnages were, and we wonder if the king was a previous or/and a concurrent sovereign to Yǝkunno Amlak. Conclusions are the more tentative in 73  Claude Lepage, “Les peintures murales de l’église Betä Maryam à Lalibala, Éthiopie (rapport préliminaire),” CRAI, Jul–Sep (= issue 3) (1999): 901–966; expanded in Mercier and Lepage, Lalibela, 82–110, 174–202. 74  Ewa Balicka-Witakowska, “Les peintures murales de l’église rupestre éthiopienne Gännätä Maryam près Lalibela,” Arte medievale. Periodico internazionale di critica dell’arte medievale, 2nd ser., 12–13 (1998–1999): 193–208; eadem, “The Wall-Paintings in the Sanctuary of the Church of Gännätä Maryam near Lalibäla,” in Orbis Aethiopicus. Beiträge zu Geschichte, Religion und Kunst Äthiopiens, vol. 10, Ethiopian Art – A Unique Cultural Heritage and Modern Challenge, ed. Walter Raunig, Asfa-Wossen Asserate (Lublin, 2007), 119–137.

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figure 12.8 Mural, The Wise Virgins (upper register) Kwəleṣewon and Təhrəyännä Maryam (lower register), church of Gännätä Maryam (narthex), 1270–85 or before Photo credit: Claire Bosc-Tiessé, 2012

that the whole set of paintings appears unfinished, both the drawing and the coloring. The same Təhrəyännä Maryam also appears in paintings in the cave church of Ǝmäkina Mädḫane ʿAläm in a very similar style.75 Also stylistically similar are the paintings in the church of Waša Mika‌ʾel, ordered by Mähari Amlak for sure during the same period of time, and made in a former cave adorned with hunting scenes that was transformed into a church.76 The set of these three churches thus testifies to a network of donors and painters working in the area in link with the royal court in the last three decades of the thirteenth century.

75  Ewa Balicka-Witakowska, “The Wall-Paintings in the Church of Mädhane Aläm near Lalibäla,” Africana Bulletin 52 (2004): 9–29. Regarding Gännätä Maryam and Ǝmäkina Mädḫane ʿAläm, Ewa Balicka-Witakowska did very useful work identifying all the scenes, but the program itself still invites analysis. 76  Jacques Mercier, “Peintures du XIIIe siècle dans une église de l’Angot (Éthiopie),” Annales d’Éthiopie 18 (2002): 143–148.

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Illuminated Manuscripts

The Gospels are undoubtedly one of the first books translated into Gǝʿǝz and illuminated, as two of the three Abba Gärima Gospels seem to attest for late antiquity.77 It should be noted, however, that subsequent retouchings can be observed on the paintings (notably the portrait of Mark), but cannot be dated. The links between this period and the next-earliest extant illuminated manuscripts, which are no earlier than the twelfth century, remains to be studied more precisely. In any case, from late antiquity to the sixteenth century, all Ethiopian illuminated manuscripts were designed and formatted according to the same model. Following a proto-Byzantine principle, the illustrations were grouped at the beginning of the codex (sometimes referred to as multiple frontispiece illustrations). At the beginning of each text section an image, most often a figure (evangelist, saint….) linked to the following text, could also be depicted.78 On the parchment a frame was drawn in drypoint rule to settle the images on the page, and lined pages prepared for text could also be employed.79 A compass should also have been used, even if we can rarely observe its marks, like in one image of the Abba Gärima Gospels. After these, what today appears to be the oldest illuminated Gospel Book, preserved in Däbrä Libanos of Ham in the Šǝmäzana area of present-day Eritrea,80 was covered with an engraved and adorned metal plate on the order of King Solomon (the regnal name of King Ṭänṭäwǝdǝm of the twelfth century).81 Though the leaves bearing the frontispiece illustrations seem in disorder and some may come from another book, we may retain the twelfthcentury date as a working hypothesis for the moment. The set of images 77  At least, some parts of parchment are dated by radiocarbon analysis to between the fifth and seventh centuries, see Jacques Mercier, “La peinture éthiopienne à l’époque axoumite et au XVIIIe siècle,” CRAI, Jan–Mar (= issue 1) (2000): 35–71, at 40; Judith McKenzie and Francis Watson, The Garima Gospels. Early Illuminated Gospel (Oxford, 2016). 78  Claude Lepage, “Reconstitution d’un cycle proto-byzantin à partir des miniatures de deux manuscrits éthiopiens du XIV e siècle,” Cahiers archéologiques, 35 (1987): 159–196, at 186–187. 79  For general information on manuscript painting techniques, see Ewa Balicka-Witakowska et al., “Ethiopic codicology,” in Comparative Oriental Manuscript Studies: An Introduction, ed. Alessandro Bausi et al. (Hamburg, 2015), 154–174. But let’s note that no analysis of the materials, other than writing inks, for medieval manuscripts have yet been published except for a fifteenth-century picture in a later manuscript (Jacek Tomaszewski, Ewa Balicka-Witakowska, and Grażyna Zofa Zukowska, “Ethiopian Manuscript Maywäyni 041 with Added Miniature: Codicological and Technical Analysis,” Annales d’Éthiopie 29 (2014): 97–117. 80  Formerly known as Ǝnda Abba Mäṭaʿ of Aham. 81   Marie-Laure Derat, L’énigme d’une dynastie sainte et usurpatrice dans le royaume chrétien d’Éthiopie du XIe au XIIIe siècle (Turnhout, 2018), 38–39, 147, 182–190, 282, fig. 4.

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Glorious Cross, Gospel Book, 26 × 19.5cm, mid-12th c.?, church of Däbrä Libanos of Ham Photo credit: Marie-Laure Derat, from archives of Roger Schneider

includes an ornamental cross, identifiable as a glorious cross (fig. 12.9),82 very close to what we find in Coptic manuscripts; the illustrated canon tables, which list the textual concordances between the four Gospels; and finally an image

82   See also Ewa Balicka-Witakowska, La Crucifixion sans Crucifié dans l’art éthiopien. Recherches sur la survie de l’iconographie chrétienne de l’Antiquité tardive (Warsaw, 1997), 31.

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of a small temple, called a tholos or tempietto.83 The tempietto has various interpretations according to the details of its depiction in different cultures, but may be said here, at least, to symbolize the harmony of the four Gospels, shown by the columns crowned by a conical roof, a circle expressing their unity.84 Glorious crosses like that seen here are also found in manuscripts of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries produced in Egypt for Ethiopian religious communities or parishes settled there,85 whereas some other workshops in Ethiopia use them again, with a new design, in the second half of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth century. Iconographic research on late antique elements in medieval Ethiopian manuscript art, which we will discuss below, has so far taken little account of the conditions in which these manuscripts were produced in Ethiopia. Investigation of these conditions could foreground specificities that reflect the context and cultural life of Ethiopia in this period. How, for instance, were artistic forms transmitted over time, developed and shared? One research focus with potential to address such questions concerns the scriptorium and/or workshop in medieval Ethiopia. Indeed, from a dated illuminated manuscript, proposals are drawn up for schools, styles or workshops that involve forms of work organization and creative modalities but also serve primarily to date objects, or at least to anchor them in a period. Three illuminated manuscripts made for the monastery of Däbrä Ḥayq Ǝsṭifanos and/or its abbots between approximately 1280 and 1330 offer a good opportunity to address some questions: regarding what could be a preferential preservation of illuminated manuscripts, especially when they are at the same time Gospel Books keeping the monastery’s archives, deeds and other legal texts in the margins or blank spaces, versus their limited production; and regarding the possible existence of a painting “workshop,” considering that three illuminated manuscripts, produced over a period of forty or fifty years, are attested in a library of more than one hundred items.86 Around one hundred books were copied at that time and given to the monastery. 83  From the photographs in the archives of Roger Schneider, see also Carlo Conti Rossini, “L’evangelo d’oro di Dabra Libànos,” Rendiconti della Reale Accademia dei Lincei, 5th ser., 10 (1901): 177–219; Alessandro Bausi, “Su alcuni manoscritti presso comunità monastiche dell’Eritrea (III.),” RSE 41 (1997): 13–56, at 13–23 and fig. 1. 84  Marilyn E. Heldman, “The Heritage of Late Antiquity,” in Grierson, ed., African Zion, 130. 85  M SS BnF Éth. 10 and 35. 86  Claire Bosc-Tiessé, “Sainteté et intervention royale au monastère Saint-Étienne de Ḥayq au tournant du XIIIe et du XIVe siècle. L’image de Iyasus Moʾa dans son Évangile,” Oriens Christianus 94 (2010): 199–227, at 201, 224; eadem, “Qu’est ce qu’un scriptorium en Éthiopie? L’organisation du travail des copistes dans le royaume chrétien d’Éthiopie,” Scripta. An International Journal of Codicology and Palaeography 7 (2014): 9–27.

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figure 12.10 Thaddeus (Tadewos) the Apostle, Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles, fol. 209v, 32.5 × 20 cm, 1292–97?, church of Däbrä Ḥayq Ǝsṭifanos photo credit: Stanisław Chojnacki (Mäzgäbä sǝǝlat SC-019.015:010)

Where were these books copied? We do not have further information. From these hundred of books, only four are known and three of them are illuminated and comprise elements of dating. The first is a Four-Gospel Book copied on the order of Iyäsus Moʾa who gave it to the church in 1280/81.87 The cycle of images could date to that time or a bit later, around 1293/4, when King Yagba Ṣǝyon seems to have added a metal cover and an image dedicated to Iyäsus Moʾa, the first witness to his recognition as a saint. The second, containing the Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles (Gädlä ḥäwaryat), is the only illuminated manuscript of the fourteenth century that is not a Gospel (fig. 12.10).88 87  Mf. EMML 1832. 88  Mf. EMML 1767.

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It includes prayers for abbot Zä-Iyäsus, who served as ʿaqqabe säʿat (high-­ ranking post as the king’s close advisor, held by the abbots of Ḥayq from his time forward) between 1292 and 1297, was therefore made few years later. Finally, the Four-Gospel Book of abbot Krǝstos Täsfanä (ʿaqqabe säʿat at least in 1316–1317, who died in 1339/1340)89 can be imprecisely dated via his career to the first forty years of the fourteenth century. After the Gärima Gospels and the Gospel of Däbrä Libanos of Ham, these are also the oldest preserved illuminated manuscripts. The paintings in the two later Däbrä Ḥayq manuscripts are in a very similar style, maybe even by the same painter; both also bear a likeness, though less close, to the images in the Gospel of Iyäsus Moʾa. One therefore may imagine a painter or a workshop working in Ḥayq. At the same time, these paintings were made over the course of some thirty to sixty years – that is to say, eighty-six painted pages (in the present state of the codices) made over this time span. A number of practical questions thus arise. If a single painter is envisioned, how did he keep his skill, working at this rather low rate (even if we consider lost manuscripts)? Was he also the copyist of these manuscripts – which is to say, were scribe and painter usually the same person, or two? For most of the Middle Ages, up to the fifteenth or beginning of the sixteenth century, the quires with images and the quires with the text were different so they could be done separately (with the exception of the paintings in counterfrontispieces opening a section of text). For the Middle Ages, in the rare instances where we have information about the career of a painter, it appears that he could also work as scribe – this was the case of Ṗawlos for an Octateuch dated 1437–143890 – or work on murals and wooden panels as well as parchment, as in the case of Brancaleon, the Venetian craftsman active in Ethiopia at the end of the fifteenth and beginning of the sixteenth century. As regards the iconography of the Ḥayq illuminated manuscripts, the cycles of illumination for the two Gospel Books are completely different. That in the Gospel of Iyäsus Moʾa contains non-biblical episodes, such as the martyrdom of Cyriac and his mother, as well as episodes from the Old Testament or apocryphal texts. Also notable is that some of the representations are clearly in relationship with Coptic Egyptian events.91 With the exception of the trial of bitter 89  National Library of Ethiopia, MS 28. 90  Gianfranco Fiaccadori, “Bisanzio e il regno di Aksum. Sul manoscritto Martini etiop. 5 della Biblioteca Forteguerriana di Pistoia,” Crispoli. Bollettino del Museo Bodoniano di Parma 7 (1993): 161–199. 91  Marilyn E. Heldman, “An Ethiopian Miniature of the Head of St. Mark: Egyptian Influence of the Monastery of St. Stephen, Hayq,” in Ethiopian Studies dedicated to Wolf Leslau, ed. Stanislav Segert and Andras J. E. Bodrogligeti (Wiesbaden, 1983), 554–568.

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water, these episodes completely disappeared from the cycle of the Gospel Book of Krǝstos Täsfanä twenty or thirty years later. They also merit study in relationship with the different versions of the biblical texts and the translation of Coptic texts into Gǝʿǝz in this period. Other manuscripts of the fourteenth century have been featured, from an iconographic perspective, as prime witnesses to medieval Ethiopia’s preservation of an early Christian set of illustrations. In an article of 1987, Claude Lepage argued that Ethiopian illuminated Gospels are the best surviving witnesses to an illustration program that could have been set up at the instigation of the fourth-century bishop Eusebius of Caesarea, particularly with regard to the ornamentation of the canon tables and the tempietto.92 He also identified in illuminated Gospels of the fourteenth century, especially a series of very closely related manuscripts from the reign of Säyfä Arʿad (1344–1371),93 an archaic cycle, comprised of three images from the Passion of Christ, the adorned canon tables, the tempietto, and depictions of the four Evangelists, sometimes in very small frames of different shapes and therefore adapted from other formats.94 The three paintings from the Passion in particular display preIconoclastic elements, that is, before the eighth century. The first, a triumphal Crucifixion (without the Crucified), is an iconography first known in Palestine around the sixth century that soon disappeared from Christian art in general; the others represent the Holy Women at the Tomb, and Christ in Majesty with the Four Animals and the Praying Virgin below, a very specific combination of the Ascension with a theophany. All could come from iconographic patterns shaped in Palestine in the first centuries of Christianity, and are considered as keeping a testimony of this even if centuries later. Though this set of three images as a cycle is known only in few manuscripts of the second third of the fourteenth century, the iconography of the Crucifixion without the Crucified has been noted in Gospel Books from the end of the thirteenth century to the fifteenth, including the Gospel of Iyäsus Moʾa discussed above,95 in composition with other elements that still need to be analyzed. Lepage later developed his reflections on the links between Ethiopian art and the loca sancta and liturgical celebrations of ancient Palestine, drawing on what he termed 92  Claude Lepage, “Reconstitution,” 159–163. 93  Mainly from Ms. BnF Éth. 32, Gospel of Däbrä Mäʿar (on the latter, see also Marilyn E. Heldman and Monica S. Devens, “The Four Gospels of Däbrä Mäʿar: Colophon and Note of Donation,” Scrinium 1 [2005]: 77–99) to which we can add a third Gospel, not dated but very close of the latter kept nowadays in the Walters Art Museum under the call number W836. Lepage also evokes the Gospels of Däbrä Maryam Qwäḥayn. 94  Lepage, “Reconstitution,” 159–195. 95   Balicka-Witakowska, Crucifixion.

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“long cycles” in Gospel Books as well as other manuscript paintings and murals, where he also sees the illustration of apocryphal texts.96 Recently he has proposed, with Jacques Mercier, six phases in the evolution of long iconographic cycles in Gospel Books from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century.97 One of these Gospel Books is also suggestive of networks of manuscript circulation and artistic transmission, as well as of a connection to the royal court, that recall those of Däbrä Ḥayq. This Gospel Book’s place of production is unknown, but it was given to the church dedicated to Gäbrǝʾel on the island of Kǝbran in Lake Ṭana between 1344 and 1371, and thus testifies to the evangelization of this area during the fourteenth century (fig. 12.11).98 Importantly, its images seem to have been used as a model, direct or indirect, for other manuscripts, including the Gospel Book (dated 1401) of Zir Ganela, granddaughter of ʿAmdä Ṣǝyon.99 At the turn of the fourteenth to fifteenth century, a number of new ima­ ges were created to accompany texts other than the Gospels: the Lives of the saints and martyrs (Gädlä sämaʿǝtat or Gädlä qǝddusan), the Lectionary for Holy Week (Gǝbrä ḥǝmamat), the Miracles of Mary, different homilies as well as Octateuchs and Psalters and other Lives of foreign or Ethiopian saints. The ornaments (ḥaräg), mainly floral or geometrical, until then very rare and discreet, developed exponentially. The first known example is in a book with the Lives of the saints and martyrs made at Däbrä Ḥamlo near Aksum on the order of a Märqoryos most probably between 1382 and 1388.100 An illuminated manuscript made in 1401 of the Miracles of Mary – a text translated from Arabic into Gǝʿǝz during the reign of Dawit II (1397/8–1412) – was probably a result of this king’s patronage, for he himself is depicted in the manuscript. It is now kept in the church of Gǝšän Maryam, on the Amba Gǝšän that served later on as a

96  Claude Lepage, “Contribution de l’ancien art chrétien d’Éthiopie à la connaissance des autres arts chrétiens,” CRAI, Oct–Dec (= issue 4) (1990): 799–822; idem, “Première iconographie chrétienne de Palestine: controverses anciennes et perspectives à la lumière des liturgies et monuments éthiopiens,” CRAI, Jul–Sep (= issue 3) (1997): 739–782. For a proposal for new research on these long cycles, see Jacopo Gnisci, “Towards a Comparative Framework of Research on the Long Cycle in Ethiopic Gospels: Some Preliminary Observations,” Aethiopica 20 (2017): 70–105. 97  Starting from the manuscript of the Metropolitan Museum of New York inv. n° 1998.66: Claude Lepage and Jacques Mercier, “Un tétraévangile illustré éthiopien à cycle long du XVe siècle. Codicologie et iconographie,” Cahiers archéologiques 54 (2012): 99–174. 98   Bosc-Tiessé, Îles, 33–41. 99  Morgan Library, New York, M828. 100  Now in Astit Kidanä Mǝhrät near Ankobär in Šäwa, mf. EMML 2514: Marilyn E. Heldman, “The Early Solomonic Period: 1270–1527,” in Grierson, ed., African Zion, 177.

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figure 12.11

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The Entry into Jerusalem, Gospel Book, fol. 13–14r, 38 × 26 cm, 1344–71?, church of Kǝbran Gäbrǝʾel Photo credit: Emmanuel Fritsch, 2008

guarded residence for princes with a claim to the throne.101 In a very similar style and most probably made in the same circle is a collection of Homilies, histories and miracles of Mary. It was acquired between 1398 and 1408 by Dawit II’s daughter Dǝl Mängǝśa for the church of Betä Lǝḥem she had built in Gayǝnt, in the region she herself administered.102 A similar but somewhat simpler style is identifiable in another manuscript kept on Amba Gǝšän, a Mäṣhäfä ṭefut (lit. “Book of the Teff Grains,” so called because the writing 101  Diana Spencer, “Trip to Wag and Northern Wällo,” Journal of Ethiopian Studies 5, 1 (1967): 95– 108; Manfred Kropp, “Die latest bekannten äthiopischen Sammlungen der Marienwunder im Codex Aureus der Marienkirche vom Amba Gǝšen und der Bethlehemkirche bei Däbrä Tabor,” Oriens Christianus 100 (2017): 57–103. 102  Stefan Bombeck, trans., Die Geschichte der heiligen Maria in einer alten äthiopischen Handschrift. Einleitung, kritischer Apparat, Übersetzung, Anmerkungen, Kommentar (Dortmund, 2012).

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is as small as a grain of teff), a very specific combination of Octateuch, Four Gospels and Synodicon;103 in the single image found in the Lives of the saints and martyrs of Mǝṣǝle island on Lake Ṭana (dated 1412–13);104 and in the socalled Mäṣhäfä baḥrǝy (Book of the substance, actually a collection of homilies) of Bǝrbǝr Maryam.105 Other manuscripts made during Dawit II’s reign were illuminated in a different manner, such as the Lives of the saints and martyrs now on the island of Tulluu Guddoo in Lake Zway106 or the Gospel Book of the princess Zir Ganela. An issue related to iconography, but also to the material context and uses of art, is the relation of manuscript images to the surrounding text. Most manuscript paintings of this era are portraits or iconic images still in frontispiece or in a column at the end of a section of text (as in the Lives of the saints and martyrs), which require further study. Counter-frontispiece illustrations placed at the beginning of a text section evoke the content of the following text. The “Punishment of Herodiade” in the Mǝṣǝle manuscript of the Lives of the saints and martyrs is one example, and it is often the case in homiliaries, for instance in the Mäṣhäfä baḥrǝy of Bǝrbǝr Maryam mentioned above – which is also, it bears mentioning, a witness to the southern extension of the Christian kingdom into the mountains west of Lake Abbayya. The several depictions of King Dawit II in the Miracles of Mary of Gǝšän Maryam at the beginning of some text sections, and the slight differences between them, each associated with a specific caption, could be interpreted as a political discourse.107 Marilyn Heldman has highlighted the stylistic specificities of paintings created within the framework of the Ewosṭatean and Ǝsṭifanosite (or Stephanite) monastic networks. In the first case, the illuminated manuscripts in this style whose provenance is known come from the districts in Tǝgray where the Ewosṭatean monasteries were installed.108 That said, they developed a specific 103  Heldman, “Early Solomonic Period,” 177–178. 104  Leroy, Wright, and Jäger, Ethiopia, pl. XXII; Bosc-Tiessé, Îles, 41–42. 105  Mf. EMML 9084. These homilies were authored by an anonymous figure known as “The Orthodox” (Rǝtuʿä Haymanot) and by the metropolitan Sälama. 106  Mf. EMML 7602: Heldman, “Early Solomonic Period,” 179–180. 107  Stanisław Chojnacki, “Les portraits des donateurs comme sources de l’histoire politique, religieuse et culturelle de l’Éthiopie du XIIe au XIXe siècle,” in Äthiopien gestern und heute. Akten der 1. Tagung der Orbis Aethiopicus Gesellschaft zur Erhaltung und Förderung der äthiopischen Kultur, ed. Piotr O. Scholz (Warsaw, 1999), 233–259. 108  Marilyn E. Heldman, “An Ewostathian style and the Gunda Gunde style in fifteenth-­ century Ethiopian manuscript illumination,” in Proceedings of the First International Conference of the History of Ethiopian Art (Warburg Institute, London, 21–22 October 1986), ed. Richard Pankhurst (London, 1989), 5–14.

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figure 12.12 Amätä Lǝʿul and her husband Yǝmrǝḥannä Ǝgziʾ, Lives of the saints and martyrs, 45.5 × 32 cm, 1453, church of Däbrä Maryam, Qwäḥayn, Eritrea Photo credit: Alessandro Bausi. © MIE (Missione Italiana in Eritrea 1993, Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche and University of Bologna)

school of painting only after their conflicts with the royal court were settled in the second part of the fifteenth century, when they were benefiting from royal land grants and peace.109 The specific patronage of local dignitaries has been observed in several cases: that of Yǝmrǝḥannä Ǝgziʾ and his wife, called “ytǝye,” Amätä Lǝʿul (Lives of the saints and martyrs, Däbrä Maryam Qwäḥayn, 1453) (fig. 12.12)110 and later on that of the ʿaqaṣen Bǝlǝn Sägäd (Psalter, BnF Eth. 109   Bosc-Tiessé, Îles, 40–41. 110  Stanisław Chojnacki, “A Note on the Customs in 15th and Early 16th-century Paintings: Portraits of the Nobles and Their Relation to the Images of Saints on Horseback,” in Ethiopian Studies Dedicated to Wolf Leslau, 521–553; Alessandro Bausi, “Su alcuni manoscritti presso comunità monastiche dell’Eritrea (I.),” RSE 38 (1994), 13–68, at 45–66, fig. 6–7.

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d’Abbadie 105, 1476–1477).111 A similar phenomenon can be observed within the monastic movement launched by Ǝsṭifanos and based at the monastery of Gundä Gunde, which also developed a specific style of painting after its reconciliation with the royal court and church officials. Though the manuscripts are undated we may place this development in the two last decades of the fifteenth and the first third of the sixteenth century. The Ǝsṭifanosite style appears as a simplification of Ewosṭatean one, characterized by its geometrical ornamentation framing the text (ḥaräg), by canon tables adorned with arabesques and geometrical patterns instead of birds and flowers, by the shape of the faces and by the choice of colors, especially a rose very rare elsewhere. All the Gospel Books of this group have an identical pattern of illustration, with eight ornamented pages for the canon tables instead of the usual seven.112 Hagiographies of the saints from within the movement were sometimes introduced by the saint’s portrait.113 In the first half of the sixteenth century, some more radical development in the layout of illuminated manuscripts appears in a collection of Miracles of Mary kept nowadays in the church of Tädbabä Maryam, dated from the reign of Lǝbnä Dǝngǝl (1508–1540). With small vignettes scattered along the text within the columns in a European style,114 it develops a more complex layout, whose premises can be observed in some Acts of the saints and martyrs, which would take a more decisive turn in seventeenth-century manuscripts. 8

Image-Objects in Liturgical Life and Religious Space

Paintings in manuscripts were doubtless seen by the faithful only rarely, if ever, and from afar. For the majority of people the manuscripts were first of all objects carried in procession and presented before the reading to the community, their contents perhaps perceived primarily as lines and spots of color. In the visual culture accessible to all, crosses and icons had a greater importance. Crosses may be the most ancient ceremonial objects in the Christian Aksumite

111  Ewa Balicka-Witakowska, “Le psautier illustré de Belen Sagad,” in Imagines medievales: studier i medeltida ikonografi, arkitektur, skulptur, måleri och konsthantverk. Fetskrift CarlOtto Nordström, ed. Rudolf Zeitler and Jan O. M. Karlsson (Stockholm, 1983): 1–46. 112  Heldman, “Ewostathian.” 113  Antonio Mordini, “Il convento di Gunde Gundiè,” RSE 12 (1953): 29–70. 114  Diana Spencer, “In Search of St. Luke Ikons in Ethiopia,” Journal of Ethiopian Studies 10, 2 (1972): 67–95, at 75, 88–90.

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kingdom, as suggested by their depiction on ancient Aksumite coins and then by what is still preserved in Zagwe-era churches. They are also one of the most important objects in ceremonial and visual culture.115 The items extant today testify to a huge production across the centuries and a large variety in terms of techniques and forms. They signal the importance of metalworking in medieval Ethiopia, itself a topic requiring further investigation. To outline a history of crosses, one should like to have some chronological markers with which to anchor the form’s historical evolution. There are certainly methods by which to do so, though each has challenges. Only a few individual crosses are roughly datable, and extrapolations from their form or style to posit a broader evolution are hazardous. Cross-reference to the objects’ depiction in painting or architectural ornamentation is possible, when the latter can be roughly or firmly dated. While the history of crosses is of course to be distinguished from a history of cruciform motifs, as well as from a history of the symbols of the cross, the question of these objects’ meaning, too, merits attention. Indeed, if the patted cross with arms that flare at the ends, the cross with arms of equal length, and that with arms of different lengths represent the most common shapes, they are often also basic shapes from which geometric, floral or even animal motifs multiply and combine almost infinitely to give forms that can be read in many ways. From this has developed a very rich symbolic discourse whose own evolution over time remains to be charted. Many modern interpretations and commentaries on ancient crosses exist, but as the objects’ patterns have been and continue to be constantly transformed and reinterpreted, the explanations of the symbols of some patterns are sometimes very attractive and yet of quite uncertain historicity. A few crosses bear inscriptions with the name of the patron who commissioned the object or who gave it to a church. When the patron is identifiable, this data can provide some time reference. Three such crosses are particularly famous and important. The first, kept at the church of ʿUra Mäsqäl, is a cross within a multi-concentric circular frame, with an inscription saying that the Zagwe king Solomon (Ṭänṭäwǝdǝm) acquired it.116 Because of this single example, other “circular” crosses are often attributed to this period. Further, the circular cross forms that one finds carved into pilasters, as in the church of

115  Two recent books explored the topic anew: Stanisław Chojnacki, Ethiopian Crosses. A Cultural History and Chronology (Milan, 2006) gathers the available information, while Mario Di Salvo, Crosses of Ethiopia. The Sign of Faith. Evolution and Form (Milan, 2006) proposes a typological approach. 116  Derat, Énigme, 38–40, fig. 3.

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Wǝqro Qirqos, add an element to point to this period for dating the church.117 The second cross with an inscription is that given by King Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob (1434–1468) to the church Däbrä Nägwädgwad, founded by the king himself before 1450. This cross, with equal arms inscribed in a circle within a general diamond shape, is exceptional for its technical and decorative elements (brass with golden inlays, insets of glass paste, and niello decoration). It is now kept at the monastery of Daga Ǝsṭifanos on Lake Ṭana, having plausibly been transferred there along with the king’s remains by King Naʿod (1494–1508).118 The third, a cross given to “the Amhara in Gorgora,” on the northern shore of Lake Ṭana, by King Bäʾǝdä Maryam (1468–1478)119 has a quadrangular form with smaller cross-shaped finials at the ends of its top and lateral arms. Iron crosses are considered more ancient than those of other materials, based on an assumption regarding general technological evolution rather than any specific evidence. In general, their shape is simpler: a patted cross with short arms and simple circular or semi-circular finials. Sometimes incisions were added for adornment. The cross and its shaft were crafted together as a single piece. This is the type usually depicted in painting until the second half of the fifteenth century, which does not reflect the variety of medieval crosses. They could be made of different metals (copper, gold, silver), of alloys (brass or bronze), and were sometimes gilded, but there has never been a real study of the materials. A few rare wooden specimens have also been preserved. Whatever their material, most were crafted as a single piece; when this is not the case, the shaft and lower arms were welded very finely to the cross. Only a few examples have their shafts riveted, and it is possible that this represents a subsequent repair. Most older bronze, brass, or silver crosses are perfectly molded and finished, unlike those of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that copy their shapes with some differences in technique, skills and finish. As for forms, in contrast to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when these became more uniform, the crosses that may have been produced between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries were characterized above all by their great variety. For example, one can find crosses enclosed in a pear-shaped frame surrounded by peaks. Known as Lalibäla crosses, they are usually considered specific to the region around Lalibäla and to King Lalibala’s time. They are indeed mainly found in that area, but there is no certainty regarding their 117  Lepage and Mercier, Art éthiopien / Ethiopian Art, 86–87. The form is also found in churches that may be later, such as Däbrä Ṣǝyon Kidanä Mǝḥrät. 118  Heldman, “Early Solomonic Period,” 181. 119  Salvatore Tedeschi, “Una storica croce processionale etiopica conservata in Italia,” Africa 46, 2 (1991): 163–183.

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figure 12.13 “Lalibäla cross,” Feast of the Nativity of Mary, Lalibäla Photo credit: Claire Bosc-Tiessé, 2009

dating (fig. 12.13). What merits particular emphasis is that no two crosses of the medieval period are identical: the operating principle seems indeed to have been that of multiplication of patterns. The oldest dated crosses are those commonly known as processional ­crosses120 but whose primary function was to accompany the proclamation or presentation of the Gospel. The Ethiopian terminology, talking of a long pole cross (mäṣorä mäsqäl), is primarily descriptive.121 They are objects of variable dimensions, from a minimum of twenty centimeters high for the upper part to some sixty or seventy centimeters. Their shaft is hollow at the base, allowing them to be attached atop a pole. When a pole is not used, particularly for healing and exorcism rituals, the cross is held by a colored cloth passed through its lower arms, sometimes interpreted as Christ’s garment hung on the cross (like the military mantle on Roman war trophies from which the Christian symbol is inspired). These lower arms, located where the cross meets the shaft, are unique to Ethiopia and were probably designed originally as rings to hang a cloth on them. When the crosses became larger and heavier, these lower arms became important to stabilize the cross on its shaft and distribute its weight more evenly. Nowadays, during services, a deacon who stands close to the celebrant priest holds the processional cross. A medieval reflection of this liturgical use is in an image in the Gospel Book of Iyäsus Moʾa where he holds a cross on a long shaft. The cross here situates Iyäsus Moʾa in the space of the church – graphically represented by the tempietto – at the moment of the presentation and proclamation of the Gospel.122 This kind of cross also accompanies the processions of the altar tablets during important feasts. The shaft 120  Eine Moore, Ethiopian Processional Crosses (Addis Ababa, 1971). 121  Emmanuel Fritsch, The Liturgical Year of the Ethiopian Church (Addis Ababa, 2001), 35; Bosc-Tiessé, “Sainteté,” 212–213. 122   Bosc-Tiessé, “Sainteté,” 212–213.

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could have different sizes and is not always designed to rest on the ground, as it is in Iyäsus Moʾa’s portrait and in wooden examples from the collection of Vincenza.123 Smaller crosses, but with similar shape and design, are seemingly used for blessing. Other crosses, often close in size to the blessing crosses, had a function that was more like that of an icon. These are wooden crosses with painted or incised decoration. Yet smaller ones, in wood or metal, seem to be pendant crosses, probably worn on special occasions by dignitaries.124 Some depictions of crosses in painting, when dated, enable us to situate in time the use of such crosses. But with regard to materials and forms it must be remembered that medieval painters chose overwhelmingly to depict either relatively simple iron crosses (see fig. 12.8) or crosses that have no real equivalent. On another note, the styles of the figures sometimes painted or engraved on the crosses themselves may give some time-related indications, as may the written form of any inscriptions they bear, though these often point only to the fifteenth century in a wide-angle way. The same kind of patterns, floral or figurative, that are found on crosses can be found on other liturgical objects, such as chalices and Eucharistic spoons, even if few examples are known.125 Huge metal plates coming from Egypt or Yemen between the thirteenth and the fifteenth century could also have been used in the liturgy at some point in their history,126 and were in other a respects a medium – like textiles, of which however we have less evidence in this period127 – for the circulation of geometrical patterns between the Near East, the Arabian peninsula, and the Horn of Africa, that should be dealt with in depth in the future. They also of course contributed to the liveliness of the general visual environment. Among liturgical objects, the wooden altars combining the altar table and the altar tablet (mänbärä tabot), commissioned by King Lalibala for the churches of Lalibäla, are particularly important to the history of Christian Ethiopian art. They attest and respond to a transformation in the liturgy, as noted above in relation to the dating of the Lalibäla churches, when we 123  Giuseppe Barberi and Gianfranco Fiaccadori, eds., Aethiopia porta fidei. I colori dell’Africa Cristiana (Treviso, 2012), 52, 68 (there used for later crosses). 124  E.g. Marilyn E. Heldman, “Maryam Seyon: Mary of Zion,” in Grierson, ed., African Zion, 91; eadem, “Early Solomonic Period,” 183–184. 125  Mercier, ed., L’Arche éthiopienne, 61. 126  Some are regularly mentioned in notes on field research; those of Lalibäla are the only ones that have been the subject of an analysis (Thérèse Bittar, “Metal Objects Imported from the Islamic World,” in Mercier and Lepage, eds., Lalibela, 317–321). 127  Antonio Mordini, “Un tissu musulman du Moyen Âge provenant du couvent de Dabra Dāmmo (Tigrai, Éthiopie),” Annales d’Éthiopie 2 (1957): 75–79.

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observed the multiplication of the sanctuaries to venerate more saints in a unique church and therefore the multiplication of the altars.128 These altars are of varied format, and feature equally variable (mostly natural) motifs. They illustrate the diversity of objects that could be produced in the same milieu at the same moment.129 Some later altars, roughly dated by their style to between the thirteenth and fifteenth century, are painted. They may testify to a tradition of painting on wood, and may also prepare for the development of icons in the fifteenth century. The treatises theorizing and defending the use of images were for the most part composed in Byzantium in response to its Iconoclastic Controversy of the eighth century, and had no particular reason to find their way to medieval Ethiopia. Ethiopia thus did not develop the same relationship to icons one finds in the Byzantine world and did not theorize about images. In Gǝʿǝz a single term, śǝʿǝl, encompasses all images, whether in two or three dimensions.130 Gǝʿǝz texts mention the veneration of images from the fourteenth century, and more emphatically when discussing the piety of King Dawit II around the turn of the fifteenth, but the production of painted panels doubtless multiplied with the new rites introduced into the liturgy by Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob (1434–1468), for these required the use of Marian icons with crosses.131 While fifteenth-century texts show the importance of the cross as sign and as object, Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob’s new orders stimulated the use of images and modified their place in the religious system. It is notable that some icons feature painted or incised crosses either on the back of the central panel or on the side panels, permitting visual interrelationships between the image of the cross and representations of Christ, the Virgin, or saints. Some painted crosses, like the (much more numerous) crosses engraved with figural motifs, lie indeed at the intersection of the two forms, icon and cross. The first dated panel painting is that made by the painter Fǝre Ṣǝyon for the monastery of Daga Ǝsṭifanos on Lake Ṭana during the reign of Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob (1434–1468), according to the prayer written on the panel.132 It is the only 128  Fritsch and Gervers, “Pastophoria,” 7–51. 129   Bosc-Tiessé, “Autels.” 130  Eric Godet, “Peut-on parler d’icônes en Éthiopie?” Bulletin de la Maison des Études Éthiopiennes 11 (1997): 1–27; Jacques Mercier, “La conception éthiopienne de l’image,” in L’arche éthiopienne, 192–195; Claire Bosc-Tiessé and Anaïs Wion, Peintures sacrées d’Éthiopie (Saint-Maur-des-Fossés, 2005), 19–21. 131  Marilyn E. Heldman, “The Role of the Devotional Image in Emperor Zarʾa Yāʿeqob’s Cult of Mary,” in Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference of Ethiopian Studies, ed. Sven Rubenson (Addis Ababa-Uppsala, 1984), 131–142. 132  Marilyn E. Heldman, The Marian Icons of the Painter Frē Ṣeyon. A Study in FifteenthCentury Ethiopian Art, Patronage and Spirituality (Wiesbaden, 1994).

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figure 12.14 Panel painting on wood, Virgin and Child, attributed to Fǝre Ṣǝyon or his circle, 168 × 110 cm, mid-15th c.?, church of Rema Mädḫane ʿAläm Photo credit: Michael Gervers 2006 (Mäzgäbä sǝǝlat MG-2006.063:008)

extant work that records this painter’s name. The inscription is exceptional because of the information it provides: the date, the patron, the destination of the work, and the name and monastic origin of the painter. Its size (178 cm. high), quite exceptional, suggests a particular function that has not yet been elucidated,133 as is also the case for a similar panel attributed to him and kept on another island of the lake, in the church of Rema Mädḫane ʿAläm (fig. 12.14). 133   Bosc-Tiessé and Mirabaud, “Une archéologie des icônes.”

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Without dealing here with issues regarding attribution and authorship,134 one must observe the very particular appearance of these two panels, which have no equivalents despite the many paintings – on single panels, diptychs and triptychs, and in manuscripts of various provenance – that share characteristics common to fifteenth-century artistic production.135 A painter named Täklä Maryam, whom Marilyn Heldman identifies with the monk trained as a painter named Mäba‌ʾa Ṣǝyon, worked in a similar way.136 As observed for icons, Ethiopian painters in the fifteenth century made certain technical choices specific to them. For instance, as in Coptic culture, they used gesso, but the binder – a proteinaceous glue doubtless from an animal skin – was different from that chosen for the medieval Coptic icons.137 Painted religious objects could take less common shapes. One is a fan, called märäwǝḥ, made from folded panels of parchment fastened between two wooden slats with a shaft. Designed to open like a peacock’s tail, it was probably used in the Eucharistic liturgy, at least between the fourteenth and the sixteenth century, before falling into disuse (fig. 12.15).138 At the same time, later-medieval Ethiopia was certainly part of the transregional networks through which paintings and painters circulated around the Christian Mediterranean. In the late fifteenth and first half of the sixteenth century, at least, Cretan and Byzantine icons circulated widely and some found their way to Ethiopia,139 where dedicatory inscriptions in Gǝʿǝz were sometimes added to them. Several cases are known of foreign-made icons given by King Lǝbnä Dǝngǝl, or by people of less exalted social status, to churches in Ethiopia or in Egypt.140 In one case Lǝbnä Dǝngǝl presented to the monastery of Saint Anthony in Egypt, where a small community of Ethiopian monks was settled, an icon that perhaps never travelled to Ethiopia at all: it could well have been acquired in Egypt by an envoy of the king who had the prayers on 134  Ibid. 135   Bosc-Tiessé, Îles, 45–48. 136  Private collection (Heldman, “Early Solomonic Period,” 186–187; with a color picture in Marilyn E. Heldman, “Frē Seyon. A Fifteenth-Century Ethiopian Painter,” African Arts 31, 4 (1998): 48–55, 90, at fig. 3. 137   Bosc-Tiessé and Mirabaud, “Une archéologie des icônes.” 138  Ewa Balicka-Witakowska, “The Liturgical Fan and Some Recently Discovered Ethiopian Examples,” Rocznik Orientalistyczny 52, 2 (2004): 19–46. 139  Marilyn E. Heldman, “St. Luke as Painter: Post-Byzantine Icons in Early-Sixteenth-Century Ethiopia,” Gesta. International Center of Medieval Art 44, 2 (2005): 125–148. 140  Stanisław Chojnacki, “New Discoveries: The Italianate School Reconsidered,” in Orbis Aethiopicus. Beiträge zu Geschichte, Religion und Kunst Äthiopiens. Band X. Ethiopian Art – A Unique Cultural Heritage and Modern Challenge, ed. Walter Raunig and Asfa-Wossen Asserate (Lublin, 2007), 1–20, at 1–9.

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figure 12.15 Liturgical fan (märäwǝḥ), 165 × 126 cm, 15th c., church of Däbrä Ṣǝyon Kidanä Mǝḥrät, Gärʿalta, Tǝgray Photo credit: Claire Bosc-Tiessé 2008

behalf of Lǝbnä Dǝngǝl and his wife Säblä Wängel added to the icon there.141 There is also at Saint Anthony’s monastery a “Virgin of Tenderness” given by Ethiopians, as its inscription (perhaps also added in Egypt) attests.142 Some of these icons are considered in Ethiopia to be icons painted by the hand of Saint Luke himself and are the object of great devotion in specific rituals.143 In the fifteenth century, Italian craftsmen came to work at the court at the request of Ethiopian kings, including the Venetian painters Niccolò Brancaleon or Hieronimo Bicini.144 Only the work of Brancaleon has been identified. Unusually (but like Fǝre Ṣǝyon), he signed his paintings, either with his European name or with his Ethiopian one, Märqorewos. He reached Ethiopia in the 1480s and is particularly known for his work at the court of 141  For the description of the painting, see Jules Leroy, “L’icône ex-voto du Negus LebnaDengel au monastère de Saint-Antoine du désert (Égypte),” Journal of Ethiopian Studies 9, 1 (1971): 35–45; Zuzana Skalova and Gawdat Gabra, Icons of the Nile Valley (Giza, 2003), 216–217. The hypothesis on the acquisition of the painting in Egypt and the addition of the inscription there is mine. 142  Otto Meinardus, “A Vladimirskaja with Ge’ez Text,” Annales d’Éthiopie 10 (1976): 211–214. 143  Heldman, “St. Luke;” Spencer, “Search;” Spencer, “Travels in Gojjam: St. Luke Ikons and Brancaleon Re-discovered,” Journal of Ethiopian Studies 12, 2 (1974): 201–220. 144  Chojnacki, Major Themes, 375–469.

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Lǝbnä Dǝngǝl (1508–1526), who entrusted him with the decoration of royal churches, no longer standing. What we know about his work indicates that he made wall paintings as well as icons and illuminated manuscripts. These painters seem to inaugurate a style in painting production that has been called Italianate145 but that rather reflects some common characteristics of the art of the icon around the Mediterranean from the thirteenth century on, especially in the representation of buildings but also in a more naturalistic depiction of human figures, and that was adopted by Ethiopian painters as well, as in the case of Afnin.146 European paintings of that time have also found their way to Ethiopia.147 Conversely, there is testimony of an Ethiopian painter who worked in Egyptian monasteries. According to a text in Arabic, in 1517 the chapels of the qasr (donjon) of Saint Macarius were consecrated after their restoration and the monk and priest Täkle the Abyssinian participated in the realization of the wall paintings.148 In Lǝbnä Dǝngǝl’s time, art objects circulated between Europe and Ethiopia, in both directions, often in a diplomatic context. One example is the enamels, possibly made in the workshops of Limoges, France, that bear depictions of Kings Naʿod and Lǝbnä Dǝngǝl, were brought to Ethiopia, and are now kept in the monastery of Däbrä Dima.149 Another is the portrait of Lǝbnä Dǝngǝl himself. It was painted in Europe in 1532, when Alvares, having finally returned from Ethiopia, went to Rome to present letters from the Ethiopian king to the pope. The humanist Paolo Giovio, who was present at Alvares’s papal audience, displayed the portrait (now in a private hands) in his collection at Lake Como, from which several copies were made and disseminated in Europe.150 145  Chojnacki, “New Discoveries.” 146  About the latter, see Stanisław Chojnacki, “The Discovery of a 15th-Century Painting and the Brancaleon Enigma,” RSE 43 (1999): 15–42. 147  Chojnacki, Major Themes, 408–417. 148  Jules Leroy, La peinture murale chez les Coptes, vol. 2, Les peintures des couvents du Ouadi Natroun (Cairo, 1982), 113. 149  Guy Annequin, “Au temps de l’empereur Lebna-Denguel,” Tarik 2 (1963): 47–51. 150   Salvatore Tedeschi, “Le portrait inédit du negus Lebnä-Dengel ayant appartenu à l’historien Paolo Giovio (1483–1552),” in Proceedings of the First International Conference on the History of Ethiopian Art (Warburg Institute, London, October 21 and 22, 1986) (London, 1989), 44–52.

chapter 13

Towards a History of Women in Medieval Ethiopia Margaux Herman The late Sylvia Pankhurst, as editor of the Ethiopia Observer, promoted awareness of Ethiopian women’s history in the 1950s and it gained ground as an academic subject, alongside social history, starting in the 1970s.1 Though much work has focused on the modern period, two recent full-length contributions concern the seventeenth century, with considerably more relevance for the medieval period.2 It is nonetheless the case that scholarship on women in the Middle Ages proper remains scarce. Until very recently, the principal points of reference were the few pages devoted to the medieval era in surveys of women’s history found in the general social history written by Richard Pankhurst.3 In the last decade or so, however, a few scholars (including this author) have devoted studies exclusively to medieval Ethiopian women and/or undertaken gendered analyses of aspects of medieval Ethiopian society.4 Medieval 1  Sylvia Pankhurst, for instance, penned “Three Notable Ethiopian Women,” Ethiopia Observer 1, 1 (December 1956): 84–90, and published Mansfield Parkyns and Charles Johnston, “Women’s Life and Work in Old-Time Ethiopia,” Ethiopia Observer 2, 1 (February 1958): 29–32. For a review of the field in general in 2001 see Belete Bizuneh, “Women in Ethiopian History: A Bibliographic Review,” Northeast African Studies 8, 3 (2001): 7–32. 2  Anaïs Wion, Paradis pour une reine: Le monastère de Qoma Fasilädäs, Éthiopie, XVIIe siècle, (Paris, 2012); Wendy Laura Belcher and Michael Kleiner, trans., The Life and Struggles of Our Mother Walatta Petros: A Seventeenth-Century African Biography of an Ethiopian Woman (Princeton, 2015). 3  Richard Pankhurst, The Ethiopian Woman in Former Times: An Anthology (Addis Ababa, 1976), 1–22; idem, “The role of women in Ethiopian economic, social and cultural life from the Middle Ages to the time of Tewodros,” in Proceedings of the First National Conference of Ethiopian Studies, April 11–12, 1990, ed. Tadesse Beyene, Richard Pankhurst, and Ahmed Zekaria (Addis Ababa, 1990), 345–361; idem, A Social History of Ethiopia: The Northern and Central Highlands from Early Medieval Times to the Rise of Emperor Téwodros II (Trenton, N.J., 1992), 67–72, 114–18, 248–70. 4  Margaux Herman, “Les reines en Éthiopie du XV e au XVIIe siècle. Épouses, mères de roi, ‘mère du royaume’” (Ph.D diss., Université de Paris 1-Panthéon Sorbonne, 2012); eadem, “Figures féminines chrétiennes, exaltation de la dignité de roi et émancipation politique des reines (Éthiopie, XVe–XVIIIe siècle),” Annales d’Éthiopie 30 (2015): 71–118; eadem, “Rethinking the royal matrimonial practices in the 16th century and its consequences on the status of queen,” in Proceedings of the 18th International Conference of Ethiopian Studies, ed. Eloi Ficquet and Ahmed Hassen, 2 vols. (Addis Ababa, 2016), 1: 149–162; eadem, “(Re)writing the history of Goǧǧam in ancient and mediaeval times: the prism of the nineteenth-century regional

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women’s and gender history may therefore be said to have “launched,” and to be a field with great potential for future growth. The aim of this essay is to introduce the available source materials and existing scholarship that have been or can be deployed to illuminate medieval Ethiopian women’s lives, and to suggest some of the categories of analysis through which they can be approached. In keeping with my own expertise and existing studies, the emphasis is on medieval Christian Ethiopia, but where possible evidence on Muslim women and female followers of local religions is also included. While individual sources will be discussed in what follows, a brief overview here can give a sense of their scope. For non-elite women, and on matters that affected all (or virtually all) women regardless of social status, medieval legal and religious-legal precepts and hagiographical texts provide valuable information. So do the accounts of foreign travelers, which mention aspects of daily life too common to merit extensive description in Ethiopian sources. Most important among these foreign accounts is that of Francisco Alvares, a chaplain attached to a Portuguese embassy to Ethiopia who spent six years in Ethiopia (1520–1526).5 Also useful are the reports by Casthanoso and Correa of the Portuguese military expedition that aided Christian forces against the attacks of Imam Aḥmad b. Ibrāhīm in 1541–53, and, in a more limited, retrospective manner, the seventeenth-century Jesuit reports from Ethiopia.6 Elite women appear more frequently in Ethiopian sources themselves, and have therefore garnered more attention from historians. They are mentioned in royal chronicles, Christian and Muslim war accounts, and hagiographical texts – several were saints themselves. As founders of churches, they may appear in the land historiography,” in Essays in Ethiopian Manuscript Studies. Proceedings of the International Conference ‘Manuscripts and Texts, Languages and Contexts: the Transmission of Knowledge in the Horn of Africa’ (Hamburg, 17–19 July 2014), ed. Alessandro Bausi, Alessandro Gori, and Denis Nosnitsin (Wiesbaden, 2016), 119–142; Selamawit Mecca, “Hagiographies of Ethiopian female saints, with special reference to Gädlä Krestos Sämra and Gädlä Feqertä Krestos,” Journal of African Cultural Studies 18, 2 (2006): 161–166; Rita Pankhurst, “Taytu’s Foremothers, Queen Eleni,”, Queen Säblä Wängel and Bati Dəl Wämbära,” in Proceedings of the 16th International Conference of Ethiopian Studies, ed. Svein Ege et al. (Trondheim, 2009), 51–63. 5  Beckingham-Huntingford, Prester John, 2 vols; see also Charles Fraser Beckingham, “Notes on an Unpublished Manuscript of Francisco Alvares: Verdadera informaçam das terras do Preste Joam das Indias,” Annales d’Éthiopie 4, 1 (1961): 139–154. 6  R. S. Whiteway, trans., The Portuguese expedition to Abyssinia in 1541–1543, as narrated by Casthanoso, with some contemporary letters, the short account of Bermudez and certain extracts from Correa (London, 1902); Charles Fraser Beckingham and George Winn Brereton Huntingford, eds., Some Records of Ethiopia 1593–1646 (London, 1954); Pedro Páez, Pedro Páez’s History of Ethiopia, 1622, ed. Isabel Boavida, Hervé Pennec and Manuel João Ramos, trans. Christopher J. Tribe, 2 vols. (London, 2011).

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grant documentation and in local oral traditions about the church’s origins and history; archeological surveys of the church structures can yield useful data as well.7 All these may be supplemented, again, by foreigners’ accounts, which indeed may signal a particular role for elite women as intermediaries with outsiders. As the scholarship and even much of the source material offer fuller information on elite and famous than on “common” women, this first foray into a survey of the subject – an account of the “state of the field,” albeit a field in its preliminary stages – necessarily does the same. Where possible, however, the life conditions and experiences of non-elite women, and the sources and perspectives through which they can be approached, are discussed; they represent a very promising area of future development. 1

Gendered Rules and Customs

As in many medieval societies, certain forms of household labor were traditionally undertaken by women. These included, in both Christian and Muslim Ethiopia, grinding grain, preparing food and beverages, and collecting and carrying the firewood necessary for cooking.8 According to Alvares, in southern Tǝgray (and doubtless elsewhere in the Christian highlands), women also spent a lot of time carrying water and washing clothes.9 The role of nurses for infants, a theme in hagiographies, has been pointed out by Steven Kaplan.10 A specific kind of cultural labor performed by women in medieval Christian Ethiopia was scarification of infants, both boys and girls. As Alvares again relates, There are here women who are very skilful at making these marks. They make them in this way: they take a clove of garlic, large and moist, and 7   For some examples of the use of land grant documents, local oral histories and genealogies of church founders and families, see Herman, “(Re)writing,” 122–136; Wion, Paradis pour une reine; Marilyn E. Heldman and Getatchew Haile, “Who is Who in Ethiopia’s Past, Part III: Founders of Ethiopia’s Solomonic Dynasty,” Northeast African Studies 9, 1 (1987): 1–11. 8   For Muslim communities, see Jules Perruchon, trans., Histoire des guerres d’ʿAmda Ṣyôn, roi d’Éthiopie (Paris, 1890), 122. 9   Beckingham-Huntingford, Prester John, 1: 251. Here Muslims and Christians lived together: Some Records, 62–64; Pankhurst, Social History, 67. (It also concerned the camps and female camp followers). 10  Steven Kaplan, “Seen but not Heard: Children and Childhood in Medieval Ethiopian Hagiographies,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 30, 3 (1997): 539–553, at 546.

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place it on the corner of the eye (or wherever else they want to make the mark); with a sharp knife they cut round the garlic, and then with the fingers widen the cut, and put upon it a little paste of wax, and over the wax another paste of dough, and bandage it for one night with a cloth, and there remains for ever a mark.11 These gendered forms of labor were, of course, not performed by all women: female elites did not perform manual labor at all, and scarification was doubtless a specialized skill reserved for a few. Other customs that differentiated by gender, however, particularly regarding religion, did apply to (virtually) all women. Boys received the sacrament of baptism on the fortieth day after birth, while girls were baptized after eighty days.12 Laymen and women were to occupy separate areas of the church during liturgical services, as was the case in all eastern Christian churches. King Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob (1434–1468) emphasized the point in the Book of the light (Mäṣḥafä bǝrhan), a series of homilies written on his order to be read aloud in church every Saturday and Sunday, specifying that “you [clerics] congregate on Saturday and Sunday in the church with the men and women (you who live near the church), and the men should stand on one side and the women on the other, where they should not see nor hear each other.”13 Alvares observed on several occasions that laity did not enter the church at all, but rather received communion at the church door or in the “circuit” (courtyard) before it.14 He considered this a general rule, with emphasis on women’s inability to enter churches, but it was probably simply a matter of some churches’ small size.15 There were, however, some religious spaces off-limits to women specifically. It is again Alvares who mentioned a church built by the baḥǝr nägaś (the governor of the coastal Eritrean region) that was reserved for men, with 11  Beckingham-Huntingford, Prester John, 1: 110–111. 12  Ibid., 1: 109. He wrongly stated that girls were baptized sixty days after birth. He also observed that “(before), the faith of their mother sufficed for them, and the communion which she received while in a state of pregnancy.” 13  Conti Rossini-Ricci, Il libro della luce, I: 150 (text), II: 89 (trans). 14  Beckingham-Huntingford, Prester John, 1: 82, 119, 125, 160–161; Páez, History of Ethiopia, 1: 405: “the place of the women (which is in the cloister or veranda, if the church has one, or if not then before reaching the first curtain, beyond which lay people cannot pass.)” 15  Though generally he describes “women and laity” standing at the church door, in one case (at Beckingham-Huntingford, Prester John, 2: 354) he describes male infants being brought into the church by their fathers, “because women cannot enter the church.” But it was an ordination ceremony for deacons, including very young boys: the fathers were certainly priests, entering the sanctuary. The mothers must therefore have been the priests’ wives, who like other laity would be excluded from the sanctuary space.

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the exception of his own wife and her accompanying maid, though women had a neighboring church for their exclusive use.16 Alvares too noted that no woman could reside next to the Church of Mary in the royal camp; the ʿaqqabe säʿat being at that time (he reported) a married priest instead of the traditional monk, he could not live beside the church on account of his wife.17 Regarding education, the training supplied by the church for future priests was of course reserved for boys, usually sons of clerical families.18 Basic Christian instruction, however, was offered to laymen and laywomen, as the Book of the light again prescribes: The clerics are to instruct them [the laity (men and women separately)] in the worship of the Lord, His precepts and the observance of His Sabbaths. If their houses are far from the church, the cleric should go to them on Friday, and teach the men apart, in one shelter, while another cleric teaches the women in another shelter, so that they do not see or hear each other. During the rainy season, let it be done in a house.19 In the beginning of the seventeenth century, Páez gave more details on education stating that “[…] each one as he wishes gives his child (boys) to some monk to be taught and pays him very well, and the monk […] keeps them in his home. […] (he) teaches them to read and sometimes to write.”20 He also added that great lords chose a monk to teach both their sons and daughters and lived at their houses. This monk accompanied them till he died or till they got married.21 Finally, circumcision was performed on both male and female children. Female circumcision was apparently common in medieval Ethiopia, for Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob addressed this issue at length in the Book of the light. He began by noting that neighboring Muslim and “pagan” communities practiced it, and claimed that the Christian people of Tǝgray may have borrowed the practice 16  Ibid., 1: 118–119. 17  Ibid., 2: 444–445. 18  Ibid., 1: 120: “The sons of the priests are mostly priests, because in this country there are no schools, nor lecture-halls, nor masters to teach, and the clergy teach that little that they know to their sons.” See also Pankhurst, Social History, 3; Kaplan, “Seen but not Heard,” 548–549. 19  Conti Rossini-Ricci, Il libro della luce, II: 89; Marie-Laure Derat, “Les homélies du roi Zarʾa Yaʿeqob: La communication d’un souverain éthiopien au XV e siècle,” in L’écriture publique du pouvoir, ed. A. Bresson, A.-M. Cocula, and C. Pebarthe (Bordeaux, 2005), 51–52. 20  Páez, History of Ethiopia, 1: 221. 21  Ibid., 1: 222.

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from them.22 Rather than proscribe the custom itself as incompatible with Christianity, he condemned the “unlawful” way in which it was performed. Having effectively “Christianized” the ritual, he then offered a series of arguments based on the Bible to demonstrate the application of divine laws, including circumcision, to men and women both, and in general the equality of men and women before God. Linguistically, he argued that when Abraham is said to have circumcised all the “men” of his household (Gen. 17), the term “men” (säbʾ) meant “men and women,” and offered a number of other biblical cases in which the terms “men” or “household” must be understood to include both sexes. He also argued for the essential equality of the sexes before God: “will not the soul of the sinful woman, if she has been baptized, stand before God and be recompensed in accordance with its deeds?” Thus not only circumcision but “every law and every rule that has been given to men has been given to women” as well.23 Whether or not female circumcision was indeed limited, among Christians, to those of Tǝgray in the mid-fifteenth century, it appears to have been widely practiced in the early sixteenth. Alvares observed that “circumcision is done by anybody without any ceremony, only they say that so they find it written in the books, that God commanded circumcision. And let not be the reader of this be amazed – they also circumcise the females as well as the males, which was not in the Old Law.”24 Half a century later, in 1555, King Gälawdewos reversed Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob’s Christianizing interpretation of male and female circumcision in the face of Catholic critiques, justifying it rather as a custom that had no link with religion.25 Scrutinizing Ethiopian hagiographies, Steven Kaplan has noticed that medieval women faced gendered health issues related to pregnancy, miscarriage and death while delivering and emphasized the importance attached to the problem of women’s barrenness.26 22  Conti Rossini-Ricci, Il libro della luce, I: 151–2 (text), II: 90 (trans); Marie Laure Derat, “La circoncision et l’excision en Éthiopie du XV e au XVIIIe siècle: lectures d’un rituel,” Afriques (online journal) 1 (2010), put online 15 April 2010; http://journals.openedition. org/afriques/415. 23  Conti Rossini-Ricci, Libro della luce, I: 152–163 (text), II: 90–96 (trans). 24  Beckingham-Huntingford, Prester John, 1: 109. 25  Derat, “La circoncision,” 6; Edward Ullendorff, ed. and trans., “The Confessio Fidei of King Claudius of Ethiopia,” Journal of Semitic Studies 32, 1 (1987): 159–176, at 173. 26  Steven Kaplan, “The Ethiopian cult of the saints: A preliminary investigation,” Paideuma 32 (1986): 1–13, at 7; idem, “Seen but not Heard,” 542–543; idem, “The Social and Religious Function of the Eucharist in Medieval Ethiopia,” Annales d’Éthiopie 19 (2003): 7–18, at 12. Recently Mersha Alehegne has studied in more detail the problem of infertility as part of an interest in the childhood of saints: see Mersha Alehegne, “Regularity and Uniformity in

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Though barred from the priesthood,27 women could participate to the religious sphere as nuns. Research on medieval nuns (mäbällät(at), lit. “widows,” or dänagǝl, “virgins”) is quite limited, but what evidence may be gathered in a preliminary way suggests that, as for women generally, there existed a general principle of gender equality that coexisted with some practices of gender differentiation. Marina Fluche and Joachim Persoon depict, in a timeless way, monasteries as “a mimesis of the Garden of Eden before the Fall,” where “monks and nuns together constitute a ‘holy gender’ in which biological sex is ultimately of little importance.”28 The Life of Saint Täklä Haymanot claims that monks and nuns lived together without sin, and only after his death (ca. 1313) began to live in separate spaces.29 The testimony of Alvares in the sixteenth century is more nuanced. Speaking of the region of the Baḥǝr nägaš, he wrote that “nuns are not cloistered, nor do they live together in convents, but in villages, and in the monasteries of the monks, as they belong to those houses and to that order. […] With regards to entering churches and monasteries, the nuns do not enter except as women do.”30 His later, more precise description of a monastery in Angot suggests what he had in mind. “The monks have their dwelling above the cavern [where the monastery is located], entirely enclosed, and they go down to the monastery by a single path. The nuns have their dwelling below the cavern, they are not enclosed, they live upon the slope of the mountain.”31 Monks and nuns worked the land together and presumably shared the monastery space located between their dwellings, but their dwellings were separate. Such may have been the arrangement at the major Ewosṭatean monasteries, which in the fifteenth century hosted or oversaw female communities totaling over a thousand nuns.32 Däbrä Libanos of Šäwa also had an associated female community from the fourteenth or fifteenth ­century.33 Concerning the region of the Baḥǝr nägaš above, Alvares mentioned the Ethiopian Hagiographical Tradition: A Particular Focus on Narrating the Childhood of Saints,” Aethiopica 18 (2015): 145–162, at 146–150. 27  Today, women are also excluded from the chanting service, which does not require ordination, but they can write and teach qǝne. See Fisseha Tadesse, “The representation of Jesus: reflecting attitudes of masculinity in the Ethiopian theological tradition,” Journal of Ethiopian Studies, 35, 1 (June 2002): 67–87, at 82–86; Cressida Marcus, “Preface,” Journal of Ethiopian Studies, 35, 1 (June 2002): 2–8, at 6–7. 28  Marina Fluche and Joachim Persoon, “Nunneries,” in EAe 3 (2007), 1206–1209, at 1206. 29  Ibid., 1207. 30  Beckingham-Huntingford, Prester John, 1: 126. 31  Ibid., 1: 201. 32  Däbrä Bizän administered three nunneries, with a total of 1146 nuns: Fluche and Persoon, “Nunneries,” 1207. 33  Denis Nosnitsin, “Krǝstos Śämra,” in EAe 3 (2007): 443–445, at 443–444.

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that nuns might also live in villages, like the laywomen, and gives a fuller description of the town of Defarfo.34Alvares tended to emphasize the absence of female claustration, perhaps because it was surprising to a European, but in fact neither monks nor nuns were strictly cloistered in medieval Ethiopia35 and more research is certainly required on this subject to reach a detailed conclusion. Either sex could follow the qwǝrit form of monasticism, living in individual dwellings, either in the “wilderness” or in towns. Both sexes could travel freely: nuns, like monks, participated in pilgrimage, and are recorded in the Ethiopian diasporic communities in Cairo and Jerusalem.36 Male and female monastic lifestyles were also very similar. Monks and nuns wore the same habits, “which are full, and reach to the ground, [either] yellow habits of coarse cotton stuff [or] habits of tanned goatskins like wide breeches, also yellow,” though monks also wore a cape.37 Monks and nuns worked the land identically, and apparently together, digging and sowing; in towns, both sold merchandise at the market fairs.38 They also observed the same prayers and strict fasts.39 Though the ritual for taking the monastic vow, preserved in a manuscript dated to the late fourteenth to mid-fifteenth century, was different for women (including, for instance, the shaving of the female initiate’s head), it is not clear whether any difference in status was implied by the distinction in rite.40 It should also be noted that our knowledge of the social background of nuns is almost nil: only a very few, by definition exceptional, are known 34  Beckingham-Huntingford, Prester John, 1: 188–189. 35  Páez, History of Ethiopia, 1: 221–222. 36  See the essay by Samantha Kelly. “Medieval Ethiopian Diasporas,” in this volume. 37  Beckingham-Huntingford, Prester John, 1: 126. 38  Ibid., 1: 201 (farming), 1: 126 (as merchants). 39  Alvares described Queen Ǝleni (whose life will be detailed below) as keeping the fasts prescribed for monks and nuns. Beckingham-Huntingford, Prester John, 2: 394–5. Contemporary studies on Ethiopian monasticism propose that there is less emphasis on sexual segregation and gender differentiation than in Western monastic traditions. Monks had to “fulfill some women’s roles and cultivate non-masculine traits and behavior” as well as the “spiritual struggles [that exhibit] all the masculine virtues of a military general.” They still find that “women reject their femininity and must metaphorically become male, in order to approach the holy gender.” See Marta Camilla Wright, “At the limits of sexuality: the femininity of Ethiopian Orthodox nuns,” Journal of Ethiopian Studies 35, 1 (June 2002): 27–42; Joachim Persoon, “The Ethiopian monk: a changing concept of masculinity,” Journal of Ethiopian Studies 35, 1 (June 2002): 43–65, at 45, 51, 52.   40  Denis Nosnitsin, “Śǝrʿatä mǝnkwǝsǝnna,” in EAe 4 (2010), 634–636, at 634–635. Though the female rite seems to lack mention of the bestowal of the tunic and girdle, these may have been understood as implicit from the preceding male rite: Zena Maryam’s female disciple received both from the abbot when she took her vow (Verena Böll, “Zena Maryam,” in EAe 5 [2014]: 179–180, at 179). The prayers spoken for funeral rites (for all persons) differed by gender as well as age and religious status, and were therefore also slightly different for

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to us, such as the abbess Zir Ganela (fourteenth or early fifteenth century), “the mother of many nuns”. Her community was associated with a wellestablished monastic community and she provided food and shelter to strangers and travellers.41 As Heldman and Kaplan noticed, she was an abbess from the ruling class, as was the common pattern of male monastic leadership. Her identification with the daughter of King Säyfä Arʿad (1344–1371), who took the monastic vow under the name of Barbara in the monastery of Däbrä Daret in Bägemdǝr, is doubtful. Heldman stresses instead her relations with Dǝl Mängǝśa, the daughter of King Dawit II.42 When it came to achieving the status of sainthood, however, very few women were so honored. Kinefe-Rigb Zelleke’s survey of 202 extant Ethiopian Christian hagiographies from all periods includes only nine dedicated to women saints.43 Selamawit Mecca, considering this corpus as a whole, has called attention to the gendered features of female saints’ experience and representation.44 While male saints usually came from poor backgrounds, female saints generally came from elite or wealthy families and had received some education. Secondly, where male saints usually fled from marriage, women saints had generally been married and borne children before becoming nuns (as did the known abbesses). This highlights that virginity was less valued as a feature of female holiness than achieving God’s will of “multiplication,”45 and may relate to the particular attention to female saints’ bodies, especially regarding fertility and menstruation. It is difficult to assess these general characteristics as they apply specifically to the Middle Ages, for our statistical sample is small and quite heterogeneous. nuns compared to monks: see Tedros Abraha, “Gǝnzät: Mäṣḥafä gǝnzät,” in EAe 2 (2005), 748–749. 41  Most information is found in the colophon of an illuminated manuscript of the Four Gospels (New York, The Morgan Library [formerly Pierpont Morgan Library], M.828), commissioned for an unnamed monastery where she was abbess. She is also mentioned in the Gädlä Aron: Marilyn E. Heldman, “Zir Ganela,” in EAe 5 (2014), 192–194. 42  Sylvain Grébaut, “Note sur la princesse Zir-Gānēlā,” Journal asiatique 213 (1928): 141–145; Heldman, “Zir Ganela,” 192. 43  Kinefe-Rigb Zelleke, “Bibliography of the Ethiopic Hagiographical Traditions,” Journal of Ethiopian Studies 13, 2 (1975): 57–102. Selemawit Mecca added “Ema Wolete, Ema Shenkor and Mekbite Dǝngǝl”: see “Women in Ethiopic Hagiographies,” in Proceedings of the 16th International Conference of Ethiopian Studies, ed. Svein Ege et al. (Trondheim, 2009), 1365–1374, at 1367. 44  Selamawit Mecca, “Hagiographies,” 161–166. Mersha Alehegne, looking for regularity and uniformity in the hagiographical traditions concerning the childhood of saints, finds that references to infertility, prophecy/vision and old child patterns applied to both male and female saints. See Alehegne, “Regularity and Uniformity,”145–162. 45  Selamawit Mecca, “Hagiographies,” 161–162.

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There are only three women saints who lived before 1550: Zena Maryam and Krǝstos Śämra46 and the Zagwe queen Mäsqäl Kǝbra,47 wife of King Lalibala (late 12th century – after 1225). In terms of social background, Mäsqäl Kǝbra was of the highest rank, by birth and marriage, and Krǝstos Śämra’s family was wealthy, but Zena Maryam’s social origins are unknown. Krǝstos Śämra fits the template of a wife and mother (of eight) who left her family to become a nun, but Zena Maryam either fled a planned marriage or fled her husband shortly after they were wed, according to two different versions of her Life.48 Mäsqäl Kǝbra is the very rare case of a “lay” saint who never renounced her family to become a nun. She, however, must be understood in the context of the sanctification of the Zagwe dynasty as a whole.49 She is therefore depicted in her own and her husband’s Life as a model wife to her equally saintly husband.50 Mäsqäl Kǝbra’s foundation of and/or patronage to churches was an activity shared by later women saints, but also, as we shall see, by women of elite status, generally: one is tempted to surmise that, were she not a Zagwe queen, it would not have stood out as a mark of sainthood.51 What distinguished the other two medieval women as saints was the extreme asceticism with which they aspired to match the most venerated male saints. Krǝstos Śämra, in a clear emulation of Saint Täklä Haymanot, spent three years standing in a pit surrounded by iron “thorns,” and another three years standing in Lake Ṭana being eaten by fishes. Zena Maryam lived for decades in a cave eating only herbs and 46  Nosnitsin, “Krǝstos Śämra,” 443–445; Enrico Cerulli, ed. and trans., Atti di Krestos Samrā (Louvain, 1956); EMML ms. 5350, 8517, 8752 not catalogued. Böll, “Zena Maryam,” 179–180. 47  For her Life see Stanisław Kur, ed., “Édition d’un manuscrit de la Bibliothèque vaticane: Cerulli 178 (Actes de la reine Masqal Kebra),” Memorie della Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei. Classe di scienze morali, storiche e filologiche, 8th ser., 16, 7 (1972): 383–426. Two other unpublished and unstudied manuscripts of her life are preserved, at Gännätä Maryam church near Lalibäla and at ʿAqäbä Särabt at Aksum: see Zelleke, “Bibliography,” 84. See also her commemoration in the Synaxary: Ignazio Guidi, ed. and trans, Le Synaxaire éthiopien. Les mois de Sanê, Hamlê et Nahasê. II, Mois de Hamlê, Patrologia Orientalis 7, 3 (Paris, 1910; repr. 1950), 438–40. 48  M S Gädlä Zena Maryam, Qwäraṣ́a Wälättä Ṗeṭros, Lake Ṭana; MS BnF d’Abbadie 14 (Enrico Cerulli, trans., “Gli atti di Zēnā Māryām: monaca etiopica del secolo XIV,” RSO 21 (1946): 122–156. 49  On this see especially the works of Marie-Laure Derat: L’énigme d’une dynastie sainte et usurpatrice dans le royaume chrétien d’Éthiopie du XIe au XIIIe siècle (Turnhout, 2018); her essay in this volume; and with Stanisław Kur, “Mäsqäl Kǝbra,” in EAe 3 (2007), 844–845. 50  See note 47 above and, for Lalibala’s Life, Jules Perruchon, ed. and trans., Vie de Lalibala, roi d’Éthiopie (Paris, 1892). 51  She is remembered at Lalibäla as the founder of the church of Abba Libanos, which is ­corroborated by medieval textual evidence. See Perruchon, Vie de Lalibala, appendix at 160.

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uncooked grain, and, in an explicit effort to transcend her gender, asked God to stop her menstrual flow. Both had female disciples and followers, though male monks were evidently involved in their training. The miracles performed in their lifetimes, as Selamawit Mecca has noted of female saints generally, were accomplished through their prayers but by male agents, human or angelic.52 After death, however, female saints performed miracles (usually the curing of illness) at their burial sites just as male saints did.53 2 Women and Social Status A second lens through which to approach medieval Ethiopian women is social status. The kätäma, the itinerant royal court or camp, having been described in both Ethiopian and foreign sources, provides a convenient means to survey women’s places in them. As Deresse Ayenachew has shown, the study of the royal camp reveals the roles, activities, and social “place” of the people living in it, closely linked to their physical disposition in the compound with its concentric enclosures.54 At the very center of the camp was the king, in the first or innermost enclosure. The second enclosure was assigned to members of the royal family and to high officials, with their families and attendants; the third was for the common people, including the staff of various offices, the soldiers, cooks, food provisioners, and so on. It has been hypothesized that the population of the royal camp probably included more women than men.55 Most women did the same sorts of household labor described above, especially in relation to food preparation.56 Some women lived in the area of the wine sellers and bakers, and may have been such merchants themselves, or their wives.57 Yet another group were wealthy courtesans or prostitutes,58 called amaritas, who followed the camp. Alvares described them as living apart from the rest of the camp, near the lodging of strangers who came to “sell, buy and trade with the Prester’s court;” 52  Mecca, “Hagiographies,” 164–165. 53  Nosnitsin, “Krǝstos Śämra;” Böll, “Zena Maryam.” 54  Deresse Ayenachew, “Le kätäma: la cour et le camp royal en Éthiopie (XIV e–XVIe siècle). Espace et pouvoir” (Ph.D diss., Université de Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, 2009). 55  Pankhurst, Social History, 68–70; Minale Adugna, Women and warfare in Ethiopia (Addis Ababa, 2001), 6. 56  Beckingham and Huntingford, Some Records, 78. 57  Beckingham-Huntingford, Prester John, 2: 445. It is still yet not sure if these women were engaged in this type of activities. 58  Richard Pankhurst, “The History of Prostitution in Ethiopia,” Journal of Ethiopian Studies 12, 2 (1974): 159–160.

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they were very numerous and most (an “immense number”) were “rich and well dressed.”59 Below the social level of these (free) women were the enslaved. NonChristians from neighboring societies acquired by capture or purchase, they could be kept in slavery even if subsequently baptized, as could their children, and were owned at social levels ranging from the richer peasantry upward.60 (Muslim Ethiopians, similarly, kept non-Muslims as slaves, generally followers of local religions but also Christians.)61 Such enslaved people, including and perhaps predominantly women, were doubtless employed to aid in the laborious tasks of hauling, grinding, and washing that were women’s province. Elite women lived in the second enclosure. The most elite were of course the king’s wives, whose tents were arranged according to a precise hierarchy. Until the reign of Lǝbnä Dǝngǝl (1508–1540), virtually all kings (Lalibala seems to have been an exception) practiced polygyny, having up to five official wives (bǝʾǝsitat) as well as concubines (ǝqubat). Royal wives all bore the title ite or nǝgǝśt (“queen”) in medieval sources, and were thus distinguished from the concubines (ǝqubat) who received neither title nor regnal name.62 However, the sons of both wives and concubines were eligible to the crown. Each queen also received a specific title, probably during a particular ceremony, as attested in the chronicle of Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob (1434–1468) and in a few juridical texts:63 qäññ

59  Beckingham-Huntingford, Prester John, 2: 443. In the Mäṣḥafä bǝrhan the word ዕቅብተ (“concubine,” lit. “guarded”) has been translated as “prostitute,” probably in an improper manner (Conti Rossini-Ricci, Libro della luce, I: 91). 60  Habtamu M. Tegegne, “The Edict of King Gälawdéwos Against the Illegal Slave Trade in Christians: Ethiopia, 1548 –Featured Source,” The Medieval Globe 2, 2 (2016): 73–114; Marie-Laure Derat, “Chrétiens et musulmans d’Éthiopie face à la traite et à l’esclavage aux XVe et XVIe siècles,” in Traites et esclavages en Afrique orientale et dans l’océan Indien, ed. Henri Médard et al. (Paris, 2013), 121–148. 61  After battles or raids, Christian women were enslaved, sometimes married to soldiers or officers and converted to Islam: see Amélie Chekroun, “Le Futūḥ al-Ḥabaša: Écriture de l’histoire, guerre et société dans le Bar Saʿad ad-Dīn (Éthiopie, XVIe siècle),” (Ph.D diss., Université de Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, 2013), 364–368. 62  Perruchon, Histoire des guerres, 61–63, 155–159; English translation in G. W. B. Huntingford, The Glorious Victories of ʿĀmda Seyôn King of Ethiopia (Oxford, 1965), here at 55, 83. 63  In the Śǝrʿatä gǝbr and in a legislative text written in 1448/1449 on the food supplies of the clergy of the royal camp’s church dedicated to Mary. See Manfred Kropp, “The Serʿata Gebr: A Mirror View of Daily Life at the Ethiopian Royal Court in the Middle Ages,” Northeast African Studies 10 (1988): 51–87; idem, “‘Antiquae restitutio legis.’ Zur Alimentation des Hofklerus und einer Zeugenliste als imago imperii und notitia dignitatum in einer Urkunde des Kaisers Zärʾa Yaʿqob im Condaghe der Hs. BM Or. 481, fol. 154,” Scrinium 1 (2005): 115–147, at 132.

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bäʿaltiḥat64 (“queen of the right”), gərra bäʿaltiḥat (usually translated as “queen of the left”), bäʿaltä šǝḥna (or ḥašeḥna) (to be understood as “the favorite”),65 (yä)gälägǝl gäzet, and wäšärbat gäzet.66 Each queen had her own tents, whose location depended on her rank.67 A text known as the “Order of the Banquet” (Śǝrʿatä gǝbr) confirmed this hierarchy. To the right of the king’s tents were the tents of the mother of the king (aṣe ǝnnat). She took care of his children, which gave her a specific role and reverence at court. The king’s mother, his children and the ʿaqqabe säʿat were the only persons allowed to settle so close to the king. Next to her, were the two ite gälägǝl gäzet and wäšärbat gäzet. The tents of the queen of the right (qäññ bäʿaltiḥat), the principal queen at court, were also on the right side of the king’s tent. The quarters of the queen of the left were directly opposite, on the left side of the king’s tents. Finally, the “favorite” (ite bäʿaltä šǝḥna) lived behind the queen of the right, who “mentored” her.68 A specific official guarded the royal women.69 All queens participated in the organization of the royal banquets and the food provision of the royal camp.70 The rank of each queen determined how much she contributed to the royal banquet, which conversely reflected her position at court. Finally, the two main queens were in charge of the kätäma, or of a part of it, when the king was away, alongside the gərra bəhtwäddäd as a male guarantor of royal 64  It was probably already used by King Lalibala as his wife was bäʿaltä biḥat , and during the reign of ʿAmdä Ṣǝyon I for queen Bǝlen Säba : Kropp, “ ‘Antiquae restitutio,’ ” 132. In the Śǝrʿatä gǝbr, it is written variously as bähaltiyat, bäʿaltiyat and bäʿaltiḥat: idem, “The Serʿata Gebr,” 58. 65  These titles probably replaced the “aged” and “young” queen of ʿAmdä Ṣǝyon (Perruchon, Histoire des guerres, 156), perhaps showing the adaptation of titles from Gǝʿǝz to Amharic. The office of the “aged” queen was also probably doubled to make the queens “of the right” and “of the left,” as happened for the bǝhtwäddäd during the reign of Zärʾä Yaʿǝqob: see Herman, “Reines,” 90–95, and Manfred Kropp, “Réédition des chroniques éthiopiennes: perspectives et premiers résultats,” Abbay 12 (1983–1984): 57–58. 66  Herman, “Rethinking,” 166–168; eadem, “Reines,” 86–92. 67  Deresse Ayenachew, “Le kätäma,” part. 1, ch. 1; Herman, “Reines,” 108–112; eadem, “Rethinking,” 167. 68  Perruchon, Histoire des guerres, 156–158. Kropp, “The Serʿata Gebr,” 61. 69  “Now he [Abba Azerata] is chief guardian of the Prester John’s sisters”: BeckinghamHuntingford, Prester John, 2: 449. Other officers (like raq massäre) worked for the queens, but no studies have been undertaken: see Kropp, “The Serʿata Gebr,” 81–87. 70  Kropp, “The Serʿata Gebr,” 51–87; Marie-Laure Derat, “Le banquet à la cour du roi d’Éthiopie au XV e siècle. Dons forcés et contreparties,” Hypothèses 1 (2001): 267–274; eadem, “Le banquet royal en Ethiopie au XV e siècle: fiscalités et festivités,” in Cuisine et Société en Afrique: histoires, saveurs, savoir-faire, ed. Monique Chastanet, François-Xavier Fauvelle, and Dominique Juhé-Beaulaton (Paris, 2002), 41–52; Deresse Ayenachew, “Le kätäma,” 14–21, 34; Herman, “Reines,” 101–114.

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authority.71 In sum, women’s location within the kätäma revealed their position in society and their daily activities: while women of the third enclosure did household duties, queens were given honors and responsibilities according to their rank. A deeper look in medieval hagiographies should also reveal social differences between the lower class and elites regarding their “forced” contributions and donations to churches and monasteries, whatever the gender of the benefactor.72 Dress could also distinguish women according to their age, marital status, wealth, and probably region as well. In mid-fifteenth-century Tǝgray, unmarried young women dressed in such a way that their breasts remained partially exposed, a practice Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob condemned, but that had not been abandoned some seventy years later when Alvares observed it.73 Alvares also noted the use of strips of oxhide to cover the genitals, which Almeida, in the seventeenth century, explained as a recourse of poor women who could not afford woven clothes.74 Foreign witnesses of the early seventeenth century identified cotton wraps as the usual clothing of common people, whereas the elites, especially women, wore silk and brocade in bright colors.75 This was doubtless true in earlier centuries as well. Casthanoso described Queen Säblä Wängel in 1541 as “covered to the ground with silk, with a large rowing cloak … and a burnoose of black satin, with flowers and fringes of very fine gold, like a cloak, her head dressed in the Portuguese manner, and so muffled in a very fine cloth that only her eyes could be seen.”76 The conspicuous display that queens could perform, and the hierarchies that placed status above gender in certain contexts, are well illustrated by Castanhoso’s description of this same queen riding out with her entourage on muleback: After the Queen had descended with her women and servants (of the women there were about thirty, and of the men fifty) she and her ladies mounted the mules which were at the foot of the hill, which the Barnaguais [baḥǝr nägaś] had sent her…. The Barnaguais, lord of that country, walked on foot naked to the waist, with a lion or tiger’s skin on 71  Deresse Ayenachew, “Le kätäma,” ch. 5; Perruchon, Histoire des guerres, 130. 72  Kaplan, “The Ethiopian Cult of the Saints,” 5, 9. 73  Conti Rossini-Ricci, Libro della luce, I: 98 (text), II: 165 (trans.); Beckingham-Huntingford, Prester John, 1: 171. 74  Cited in Pankhurst, Ethiopian Women, 2. 75  Ibid., 1–2; Beckingham and Huntingford, Some Records, 60–61. 76  Whiteway, Casthanoso, 18. Twenty years before, Alvares produced a similar but shorter description of the queen of Hadiyya: Beckingham-Huntingford, Prester John, 2: 427.

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his shoulders as a covering, with the right arm exposed, and he led her by the bridle; for it is the custom, whenever the Preste or his Queen makes a state entry, for the lord of the land to lead them by the bridle in the manner I describe, as a sign of submission…. They [two azzaž] accompanied the Queen, one on one side and the other on the other, near her, with their hands on the mule; the Queen rode on a saddle with a low pommel … but so covered with her garments that no one could see the manner of her sitting, and her ladies all riding properly on mules muffled in their cloaks.77 This manner of riding, with two azzaž (military officials) holding the bridle, was the custom for royal women. Both it and typical queenly dress in the fifteenth century are well represented in a miniature of the Zagwe queen Amätä Lǝʿul, the wife of King Yǝmrǝḥannä Ǝgziʾ, painted in 1453 (see fig. 12.12).78 While the foregoing has focused principally on social-economic status, marital status was another important determinant of women’s experience. It was certainly closely related to age, for marriages were contracted quite young: the unmarried, therefore, were generally girls or quite young women.79 It is therefore not terribly surprising that in certain court ceremonies, after the dignitaries (male and female, according to rank) had been served, the order of precedence placed lay men before married women, and (young) unmarried women last.80 In Christian religious life, too, as we have seen, the value placed on procreation over virginity seems to have privileged married or formerly married women, over the unmarried. Chastity is however emphasized in hagiographies of both men and women.81 Indeed, only unmarried women (mäʿaseb) were forbidden from entering a church while menstruating. Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob extensively cites on this point the Testament of our Lord (Mäṣḥäfä kidan), an ancient pseudoapostolic work that gained great influence in Ethiopia in the later Middle Ages, emphasizing that the proscription was not because menstruation rendered the young women contaminated but rather “out of reverence for the place of 77  Whiteway, Casthanoso, 17–19. 78  Alessandro Bausi, “Su alcuni manoscritti presso communità monastiche dell’Eritrea (I.),” RSE 38 (1994): 13-69, at 45. It is found in a manuscript of the Gädlä Sämaʿǝtat (MS 2) of the monastery of Däbrä Maryam in Qwäḥayn. It differs from Castanhoso’s description in revealing her face. 79  Antonella Brita, “Marriage: Early marriage,” in EAe 5 (2014), 418–421. 80  The sequence for baptism at Ṭǝmqät, as reported in one manuscript of Alvares’s account, was metropolitan, king, queen, priests, deacons, laymen, married women, virgins,: Beckingham-Huntingford, Prester John, 2: 345 and quotation 3. 81  Steven Kaplan, “Hagiographies and the History of Medieval Ethiopia,” History in Africa 8 (1981): 107–123, at 116; idem, “The Social and Religious Function,” 12.

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sacrifice.” A menstruating virgin should nonetheless fast, wash, and pray at the appropriate times, and during the Mass should stand within sight of the church; “and if she is not separated from love for the church, and [though] being far from it in body, enters it in her soul, it will be as if she entered and took the body and blood of Christ” – in other words, her efforts would be equivalent to receiving communion.82 As for marriage itself, different wedding rituals83 were possible in (or in the vicinity of) the church, in an open space or at court. The locations of the ritual changed depending on the status of the bridegroom (a deacon, a layman, a king’s kin).84 In theory, all these rituals created an indissoluble bond; divorce was impossible, so was remarriage. Alvares described at least two types of ceremony and Páez added details.85 The latter noticed that the church ceremony, that includes a shared communion after the mass and the blessing of the clergy, was mainly performed by priests and däbtäras. A priest could only get married before his ordination to a virgin (not a widow), which implied early marriages and more respect towards marital law. As he could enter inside the church, he received his deacon’s vestments, made his vow at the altar and after his communion, priests “take the communion to her (the bride) at the church door and he (the bridegroom) gives her the blood.” The spouses were then carried by priests from the vicinity of the church and relayed by laymen to their house. He also stated that only a few laymen got married in church, or asked for a blessing which they received at “the vicar’s house” or “sometimes the vicar also goes to the couple’s house.” After both types of ceremony, the bride stayed within her marital home with a black veil over her face for five or six months, or less if she became pregnant.86 Páez put into doubt both ceremonies (outside the church and at the door of the church by the abunä) observed by Alvares. To him, they might have been “deliberately” orchestrated in such way, or changed, for he was “not able to find anyone to confirm such a custom.”87 All told, the main differences seem to be that weddings performed in church implied a shared 82  Conti Rossini-Ricci, Libro della luce, I: 142–145 (text), II: 84–86 (trans). 83  Pankhurst, Social History, 45. 84  Páez, History of Ethiopia, 1: 405–406. 85  Ibid., 1: 405; Beckingham-Huntingford, Prester John, 1: 107, 119–120; 2: 354, 511. 86  Beckingham-Huntingford, Prester John, 2: 405: “after ten or thirty days”; 1: 106. 87  Páez, History of Ethiopia, 407 (especially the description of cutting the hair of the bride and bridegroom). Beckingham-Huntingford, Prester John, 1: 106. For Emmanuel Fritsch, the ritual performed by the metropolitan seen by Alvares, corresponds to the Ethiopian ritual in its present form, translated in the seventeenth century from the ceremony described by the fifteenth-century Patriarch Gabriel V of Alexandria. For Fritsch, “the rites are far older than the prayers, which go back to the late medieval period only”: see his “Matrimony,” in EAe 3 (2007), 869–873, at 870.

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communion88 which might explain why only few people chose it (except peasants, elders and priests), and the seal of a contract89 indicating the terms of the union and of the separation, which might be surprising if we consider marriage as an indissoluble bond. In fact, divorces among the elite occurred, were a source of scandal to European visitors, and were seen as a common practice.90 Páez noticed that marriages could be easily dissolved before the king’s judges or even by the abunä himself for any kind of complaint (greed, sadness, physical abuse, being dishonored in public …).91 If the two parties agreed, they shared equally the common properties they had acquired (probably after wed), if they disagreed, the one who wanted to leave took nothing or if there was a contract, a penalty was to be paid by the guilty party (man or woman) according to its terms.92 Both parties could then remarry. The bride then left the home, implying that patrilocal living arrangements were observed.93 In cases of adultery, Páez noticed that Ethiopians, interpreting the words of Matt. 5, believed they did not need a judge and could separate and remarry as they wished.94 Though few studies have explored women’s rights over property and inheritance specifically in the Middle Ages, it seems that women, like men, kept their properties (gwelt or rǝst) that they gained or inherited and retained their right over it.95 Therefore, undeniably, wives retained their individual social and legal identities in marriage, including their pre-marital names and land rights.96 Personal preferences may have played a role in the frequency of elite divorce, but the major stimulus was doubtless the opportunity to play and 88  It is believed that a married person may not receive Holy Communion unless his or her spouse also receives: Fritsch, “Matrimony,” 869. 89  Beckingham-Huntingford, Prester John, 1: 107. 90  Ibid., 1: 106; Beckingham and Huntingford, Some Records, 65–66. 91  Páez, History of Ethiopia, 1: 403–404. 92  Ibid., 1: 186, 403–404; Pankhurst, Social history, 69; Beckingham-Huntingford, Prester John, 1: 107. Gorgoryos, the informant of Hiob Ludolf, stated that the offending party gave his or her goods to the other; if the divorce was by mutual agreement, the goods were divided equally: see Hiob Ludolf, Ad suam Historiam Aethiopicam antehac editam Commentarius (Frankfurt, 1691), 440. 93  Pankhurst, Social history, 70. 94  Páez, History of Ethiopia, 1: 403–404. 95  On the equal share of properties of the mother of Lǝbnä Dǝngǝl between the king and his two uterine sisters, see Beckingham-Huntingford, Prester John, 2: 409. See also Donald Crummey, Land and Society in the Christian Kingdom of Ethiopia: From the Thirteenth to the Twentieth Century (Urbana, IL, 2000), 23–49; Habtamu M. Tegegne, “Land Tenure and agrarian social structure in Ethiopia, 1693–1900” (Ph.D diss., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2011), 65–66, 74–76, 78–80; Anaïs Wion, Paradis. 96  Pankhurst, Social History, 69.

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r­ eplay one’s cards in the game of marriage alliance.97 In fact, Ethiopian elites of all religions used dynastic alliances, both within and outside their own religious group.98 (In the case of interfaith marriages, it was usually the woman who took the religion of her husband.)99 Wealthy men were allowed to have multiple wives but were then forbidden to enter in churches. Unlike the merely wealthy, who might marry multiple wives but were then barred from the church,100 medieval Christian kings suffered no penalty for the polygyny through which they created multiple regional alliances simultaneously. Clergy criticized some kings’ matrimonial practices, like ʿAmdä Ṣǝyon (1314–1344) and his son,101 but more for marrying within the prohibited degrees than for polygyny. Yet apart from King Lalibala, whose Life (written centuries after his death) celebrates his monogamy and performance of the religious wedding ceremony,102 no evidence has been found to identify any religious royal marriage until King Lǝbnä Dǝngǝl.103 He and his successors opted instead for monogamy, performing the wedding ceremony and naming only one queen.104 This evolution had consequences for the political status of the queens at court during the sixteenth century. There was now only one queen consort, whose title was simply nǝgǝśt. But there was also, still, the king’s 97  Richard Pankhurst was a pioneer of the subject. See “Ethiopian dynastic marriage and the Béta Esra‌‌ʾél (or Falashas),” Africa. Rivista trimestrale di studi e documentazione dell’Istituto italiano per l’Africa e l’Oriente 52, 3 (September 1997): 445–454; idem, “Dynastic Inter-Marriage in Medieval and Post-Medieval Ethiopia,” in Ethiopia in broader perspective: papers of the 13th International Conference of Ethiopian Studies, Kyoto, 12–17 December 1997, 3 vols., ed. K. Fukui, E. Kurimoto, and M. Shigeta (Kyoto, 1997), at 1: 206–220. 98  Herman, “Reines,” 50–67; on the Muslim communities, see Chekroun, “Le Futūḥ,” 160–161. 99  Steven Kaplan “Marriage,” in EAe 3 (2007): 793–797, at 793. 100  Beckingham-Huntingford, Prester John, 1: 105. 101  Four hagiographies mention critiques of ʿAmdä Ṣǝyon for having married his father’s wife: see Huntingford, Glorious Victories, introduction, and Joanna Mantel-Niećko and Denis Nosnitsin, “ʿAmdä Ṣǝyon I,” in EAe 1 (2003), 227–229, at 228. 102  Perruchon, La vie, 96. Written during the fifteenth century, this text is a saintly hagiography. 103  The ceremony was called qǝddǝst säbsab or “holy wedding” for Lǝbnä Dǝngǝl: William Eliot Conzelman, ed. and trans., Chronique de Galâwdêwos (Claudius), roi d’Éthiopie (Paris, 1895), 122–123. His son Minas (r. 1559–1563) married following the religious ritual, here called ṣälotä täklil or “prayer of coronation,” as it still is today: see Manfred Kropp, ed. and trans., Die Geschichte des Lebna Dengel, Claudius und Minās, 2 vols., CSCO 503–504, SAe 83–84 (Louvain, 1988), at vol. 1 (text), 51. From the reign of Iyasu I till today, the Mäṣḥafä täklil or “Book of the Coronation” is read during the ceremony: see Ignazio Guidi, ed. and trans., Annales Iohannis I, Iyāsu I, Bakāffā. II, 2 vols., CSCO, 2nd ser., 5 (Paris, 1905), repr. as CSCO 24–25, SAe 7–8 (Louvain, 1961), at vol 1 (text): 65–66. 104  Some kings still kept concubines to get an heir to the throne: see Herman, “Rethinking,” 149–162, 170–173; eadem, “Reines,” 15–40.

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mother, and possibly also his grandmother – the queens consort of previous reigns – who were also nǝgǝśt (pl. nǝgǝśtat). The title of ǝtege was therefore created and a new hierarchy established, to avoid intestine struggles at court.105 The ǝtege retained her title for life and had the ascendancy over the other queens, notably in being designated regent in case of a royal minority. Säblä Wängel (d. 1567) was the first ǝtege, a title that she received when she was the king’s “grandmother” at the end of her career.106 The rules concerning the royal camp in journeys (Śǝrʿatä mangǝśt, III- 21, 22) also changed, from now on only including the ǝtege and the princesses.107 A last mention should be made concerning a marriage custom that affected both men and women, from the lower class to the elite: that of arranged union. As shown above for elites, medieval hagiographies regularly mention that the “future saint” decided to become a monk to avoid a marriage orchestrated by his family. This implies that young men and women both had to follow their kinfolk’s wishes in terms of union.108 In conclusion, marriage customs affected the lives of women who had to leave their homes to join their husbands, whatever their social background. However, properties and goods were not put in common, except for the peasants for apparent practical reasons. Both elite men and women divorced and remarried easily, following their own interests and familial strategy. Finally, the evolution of royal matrimonial practices impacted the status of the queens at court and the choices of the royal wife. The multiple alliances of the Christian kings with regional leaders’ daughters were replaced. The king now chose his wife from among his traditional Christian partners’ families, and princesses engaged with his former partners.109 The transition to royal monogamy also influenced the creation of a new balance of power among the queens at court with the creation of the title of ǝtege.

105  Taddesse Tamrat, “Problems of royal succession in fifteenth century Ethiopia: a presentation of the documents,” in IV Congresso Internazionale di Studi Etiopici (Roma, 10–15 April 1972), 2 vols., ed. Enrico Cerulli (Rome, 1974), 1: 518–526. 106  Herman, “Rethinking,” 172–174. 107  The women being now only settled on the right side. Joseph Varenbergh, “Studien zur abessinischen Reichsordnung (Śerʿata Mangeśt),” Zeitschrift für Assyriologie und Verwandte Gebiete 30 (1915–16): 1–45, at 22–23 (text), 41–42 (trans.). 108  Kaplan, “Hagiographies and the History,” 116; idem, “Seen but not Heard,” 548, 550. 109  Herman, “Rethinking,” 174–175.

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3 Women and Power: Structuring Archetypes The women most accessible to us for scholarly study are, of course, those that have been remembered in texts and oral traditions – but those that are best remembered are usually surrounded by legends recounted century after century, which renders their historical analysis more difficult. Their representation in the collective memory is, however, indicative of the models or archetypes for women’s roles that medieval Ethiopian society created and maintained. A brief survey of several such women, all associated with dubious authority and with destructive (but also, implicitly, creative) political/military power, illustrates the point. The feminine as a figure of arbitrary and destructive power has ancient historical substrates. In medieval Christian Ethiopia, she was incarnated in a tenthcentury queen who wrought devastation on the Christian kingdom.110 Several more or less contemporary foreign authors mention her, offering complementary and convergent data: she was queen of the (still mysterious) people called in Arabic the Banī (or Banū) l-Ham(u)wīyā, she killed the Christian Ethiopian king and took over his kingdom, and destroyed the Christian churches.111 For Marie-Laure Derat, the matching of sources, both Christian and Muslim, points to a “pagan” or local-religious counterassault against the Christian kingdom in an otherwise very obscure and scantily documented period.112 Though no early-medieval Ethiopian texts are preserved that mention her, in oral tradition, where she acquired the name Ǝsato or Gudit, her destruction of Christian monuments was associated with the downfall of ancient Aksum, and her reign a symbol of the “dark ages” between the glories of antiquity and the advent of the Zagwe dynasty. The posterity of this negative female figure – illegitimate, non-Christian, and destructive – is thus tremendous in the historiography. Female figures analogous to Gudit/Ǝsato have been identified in two women held responsible for preventing the Solomonic dynasty’s rise to power for almost three centuries, to the benefit of the Zagwe kings. The first, Tǝrda‌‌ʾ Gäbäz, 110  Steven Kaplan, “Ǝsato,” in EAe 2 (2005), 376–377. Gianfranco Fiaccadori identified Ǝsato as a ruling queen of the Sidaama area of Bali: see his “Bâli,” La Parola del Passato 47 (1992): 439–445. See also James Quirin, “Maya,” in EAe 3 (2007), 887–889. 111  Enrico Cerulli, “L’Etiopia medievale in alcuni brani di scrittori arabi,” RSE 3 (1943): 272– 276; Mohammed el-Chennafi, “Mention d’une ‘nouvelle reine éthiopienne’ au IVe siècle de l’hégire/Xe siècle ap. JC.,” Annales d’Éthiopie 10 (1976): 119–121. 112  Marie-Laure Derat, François-Xavier Fauvelle-Aymar, and Bertrand Poissonnier, “La culture Shay, chaînon manquant de l’histoire éthiopienne,” in La Culture Shay d’Éthiopie (Xe–XIVe siècles). Recherches archéologiques et historiques sur une élite païenne, ed. François-Xavier Fauvelle-Aymar and Bertrand Poissonnier (Paris, 2012), 13–31, at 27–29, and Derat’s essay in this volume.

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appears in some of the Ethiopian kings’ lists as the figure through whom kingship was transferred to the Zagwe dynasty.113 The second, Mäsobä Wärq, would be the daughter of the last post-Aksumite King, Dǝlnaʿod. She is mentioned in the Life of Iyäsus Moʾa.114 In different ways, Ǝsato/Gudit, Tǝrda‌‌ʾ Gäbäz, and Mäsobä Wärq, all represent disruptions of the dynastic continuity that, according to the so-called Solomonic kings, rightly belonged to their lineage alone since the time of the biblical King Solomon. Given the recurrence of this theme of destructive female power in Solomonic-era works, one may well ask whether it played a role in the Solomonids’ elaboration of their dynastic origin story itself. As is well known, the foundational text elaborating that story is the Kǝbrä nägäśt, and the text’s legitimating cornerstone is the relationship between King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. The Bible’s brief mentions of their meeting had inspired a number of elaborations in the Jewish, Muslim, and Coptic traditions already in the earlier Middle Ages, which are drawn upon and added to (in ways still to be fully explored) in this long, complex work, completed in the 1320s. In the Gǝʿǝz text, the queen, named Makǝdda,115 is of course Ethiopian, and upon returning to her homeland bears a son begotten by Solomon: thus is the Ethiopian monarchy inscribed into biblical history. When grown, the son (later called Mǝnilǝk) travels to Jerusalem to meet his father, who offers him rulership of Israel, but he chooses to return home, where his mother abdicates in his favor. (He takes the appropriate throne name David, or Dawit in Gǝʿǝz). Of particular interest here is the passage in which Makǝdda announces her abdication to the kingdom’s officials: ‘Speak ye now, and swear ye by the heavenly Zion that ye will not make women queens or set them upon the throne of the kingdom of Ethiopia, and that no one except the male seed of David, the son of Solomon the King, shall ever reign over Ethiopia, and that ye will never make women queens.’ And all the nobles of the king’s house swore, and the governors and the councilors, and the administrators.116 After the composition of this work, no woman did take the throne in the Christian kingdom, even if some female regencies or de facto exercises of 113  Gianfranco Fiaccadori, “Tǝrda‌‌ʾ Gäbäz,” in EAe 5 (2014), 529–530. 114  Stuart Munro-Hay, “Dǝlnaʿod,” in EAe 2 (2005), 129; Gianfranco Fiaccadori, “Zagwe,” in EAe 5 (2014), 107–114, at 110–111. 115  Gianfranco Fiaccadori, “Makǝdda,” in EAe 3 (2007), 672–674. 116  Ernest Alfred Wallis Budge, trans., The Queen of Sheba and her only son Menyelek… (London, 1922), 147.

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political power did occur. Makǝdda is thus a “good” queen, indeed a Solomonic archetype of ideal queenship, not least for surrendering power and entrusting it to her son and his male descendants, forever. The Christian kingdom was not the only Ethiopian society to present women as figures of cultural disruption. In Oromo traditions, particularly within the Guǧǧi and the Booranaa, the queen Akko Manoye is described as a despotic ruler. She forced men to do domestic tasks; she also tasked her people with impossible duties, until a wise old man helped them to find a solution. Her downfall brought an end to the mythical time in which both men and women could pretend to the throne, to the evident benefit of men only.117 In the Sidaama communities, Queen Furra is described in the same narrative schemes. Therefore, these traditions are used in order to discourage women’s aspiration to political empowerment.118 Though I have emphasized the destructive and/or disruptive character of most of these female figures, it is also possible to see some of their most characteristic activities in a constructive light. In many cases, their disruptions resulted in either being, or serving as conduits to, a socially exogenous element. Makǝdda was the “bridge” linking the people of Ethiopia to the Israelites, thus transforming the former into the new chosen people of God. An Aksumite princess’s exogenous marriage to a Zagwe lord gave rise to the Zagwe royal dynasty, which, however usurping and illegitimate in Solomonic discourse, was also revered as holy. Ǝsato/Gudit was quite immune to any positive interpretation from a Christian standpoint, but her memory was doubtless so compelling because the encounter between Christians and followers of local religions was, in fact, one of the central dramas of the Christian kingdom’s whole medieval history, and the subtext of its much-glorified territorial expansion. Queen Ǝleni, to whom I shall turn below, might be seen as Gudit’s mirror image: the nonChristian royal woman who does not dominate and transform the Christian polity, but rather is absorbed and transformed by it. The marriage alliances in which elite and especially royal women were brokered, and which crossed regional, ethnic, linguistic and even confessional boundaries, were the mundane iterations of what these archetypal women represented: an always potentially threatening contact with the foreign, and in a context wholly about power and who could or should wield it. Indeed, even when marriage was not involved, royal women seem to have had a particular role as intermediaries with foreign 117  Dejene N. Debsu, “Gender and Culture in Southern Ethiopia, an Ethnographic Analysis of Guji-Oromo Women’s Customary Rights,” African Study Monographs 30, 1 (March 2009): 15–36. 118  Anbessa Teferra, “Furra,” in EAe 2 (2005), 592.

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rulers and dignitaries. In the fourteenth century, ʿAmdä Ṣǝyon’s queen played this part between the king and his Muslim counterpart and antagonist, Ṣabr al-Dīn.119 In the sixteenth century, it is suggested by the contacts between Pero da Covilha and Ǝleni120 and between Casthanoso and Säblä Wängel.121 Women and especially queens were probably easier to access and meet than kings. For instance, they were privileged intermediaries for the people, high officials or enemies of the king. In fact, women’s role in connecting to the outer world is found in all Ethiopian cultures. Muslim and Christian traditions recount that Imam Aḥmad had a Christian father: his Muslim mother was therefore the link to the foreign world.122 In Muslim as in Christian Ethiopia, when the woman is the outsider who adopts and is absorbed into her new society, that society praises her.123 The best-known example is the Christian Ethiopian slave known as Umm Ayman (Barakah, raḑī Allāhu ʿanhā “May Allah be pleased with her”), who was the Prophet’s nurse.124 She converted to Islam, and Muhammad considered her his second mother. In another register, Umm Ḥabība bint Abī Sufyān and Umm Salmā bint Abī Umayya, though they were from Arabia, are remembered for being members of the first Muslim hijra to Ethiopia. They are considered to be among the first of the Prophet’s disciples. After the deaths of their husbands, they married the Prophet and returned to Arabia, where they told of the wonders of Aksum. They are viewed among Ǧabarti communities as models for Muslim Ethiopian women and as their ancestors.125 4 Women and Power: Some Historical Examples The history of queens is often the first corner of medieval women’s history to be investigated thanks to the relative richness of the source material, and 119  Perruchon, Histoire des guerres, 132, 170–171. 120  Beckingham-Huntingford, Prester John, 2: 459. 121  Whiteway, Casthanoso, 12–94. 122  For Christian tradition it explained the success of his conquest: see André Caquot, ed. and trans., “Histoire Amharique de Grāñ et des Galla,” Annales d’Éthiopie 2 (1957): 123–143, at 124, 142; Carlo Conti Rossini, “Note etiopiche,” Giornale della Società asiatica italiana 10 (1897): 150–153. The alleged Christian origin of the imam is still vivid in Ethiopia and recounted both in Harar and Lalibäla (Chekroun, “Le Futūḥ,” 131–132). 123  For general observations on this in the region, see Silvia Bruzzi, Islam and Gender in Colonial Northeast Africa: Sittī ʿAlawiyya, the Uncrowned Queen (Leiden, 2017): 63–64. 124  Ibid., 64; Alessandro Gori, “Muḥammad,” in EAe 3 (2007), 1041–1044, at 1042. 125  Joseph Cuoq, L’Islam en Éthiopie, des origines au XVIe siècle (Paris, 1981) 26–32.

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Ethiopia is no exception. Even on this topic, however, a great deal remains to be done. Some brief references in earlier scholarship, for instance, would recommend we take a deeper look at the societies located on southwestern Šäwa. According to the testimony of some Ethiopian monks interviewed by the Venetian Alessandro Zorzi during the sixteenth century, a queen governed the kingdom of Wäǧ, in southern Šäwa, in the fifteenth century.126 In the same region, Enrico Cerulli pointed out some cases of Islamic sultanates ruled by queens from the tenth to the thirteenth century.127 He also underlined the important role of elite women in medieval Islamic Šawah and its links with the social customs of the Sidaama people.128 We might assume that the eleventh-century queen (malika) Badīt bint Māyā129 (“Badīt daughter of Māyā”), mentioned in a thirteenth-century Arabic chronicle of the sultanate of the Maḫzūmī dynasty, was a part of this history. However, it is still unknown if she was a queen of the Maẖzūmī dynasty (in eastern Šäwa) or if she reigned over some other region.130 Wagner suggests that she could be identified with Tadīt bint Māyālāmā (“daughter of Māyālāmā”), a female ruler mentioned in two chronological lists of Harari amīrs that seem to provide her full patronymic. Wagner also suggests that Badīt/Tadīt and her mother might have been rulers of a region of Lake Harämaya.131 All these elements open a new field of study to be explored. Though one can hardly call it a “new field of study,” it remains the case that even the most famous queen of the best-studied polity of medieval Ethiopia still lacks a scholarly biography of any length. This is Ǝleni: Muslim princess, converted Christian wife of King Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob (1434–1468) who stayed at court till her regency (1508–1516) of the underage Lǝbnä Dǝngǝl. Her longevity at court is exceptional, whereas she had no children of her own, and therefore no heir for the throne.132 She became the model of the queen-ǝtege, a title created only in the later sixteenth century but that was applied by subsequent authors 126  O. G. S. Crawford, ed., Ethiopian Itineraries circa 1400–1524; Including those Collected by Alessandro Zorzi at Venice in the Years 1519–24 (Cambridge, 1958), 78. 127  Enrico Cerulli, “Il sultanato dello Scioa nel secolo XIII secondo un nuovo documento storico,” RSE 1 (1941): 5–42, at 7, 10, 21–22. 128  Ibid. 129  Alessandro Gori, “Badīt bint Māyā,” in EAe 1 (2003), 431; Enrico Cerulli, L’Islam di ieri e di oggi (Rome, 1971), 243, 298. 130  Ibid. 131  Ewald Wagner, “Die Chronologie der frühen muslimischen Herrscher in Äthiopien nach den Harariner Emirslisten,” in Wort und Wirklichkeit. Studien zur Afrikanistik und Orientalistik Eugen Ludwig Rapp zum 70. Geburtstag, ed. Brigitta Benzing, Otto Böcher, and Günter Mayer (Meisenheim, 1976), 186–204, at 197. 132  Sevir Chernetsov, “Ǝleni,” in EAe 2 (2005), 253–254.

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to Ǝleni too.133 Indeed, all the later ǝtege took the name Ǝleni: like the ancient Roman personal names Caesar and Augustus, over time it became itself a title.134 Ǝleni arrived at court in 1445 at a very young age and died, probably in her eighties, in 1524.135 She was the seal of a dynastic alliance, following the custom of the polygynous king , choosing his wives from among regional leaders’ kin.136 Daughter of Mehmad, the Muslim tributary gärad of Hadiyya, the alliance was an attempt to improve relations with this region, which at times sided with the king’s Muslim enemies. Baptized at court, she received the name of Ǝleni.137 After her union, she received the regnal name of Žan Zela and the title of qäññ bäʿaltiḥat, the highest title of the queens’ hierarchy. Though few are known of her deeds during her husband’s reign, she indirectly participated in his politics while he tried to control religious affairs especially in the implementation of the cult of Mary and promotion of the ancient queen and saint Helena as a Christian symbol.138 Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob’s own regnal name was Qwäsṭänṭinos (“Constantine”); the choice of “Ǝleni” for his highest-ranking wife thus recalled the illustrious Christian figures who discovered the True Cross. Regulating the liturgy dedicated to Mary, his second wife was named Fǝre Maryam,139 while his mother Ǝgziʾ Kǝbra140 appeared in the Miracles of Mary (Täʾammǝrä Maryam) dedicated to his birth. After Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob’s reign, all queens and princesses were depicted having the traits and spiritual values of Helena and Mary, symbols of Christian perfection.141 Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob also decided to depose all his officers, accusing them of conspiracy, and replaced them by his daughters, though only for a short time. Mädḫǝn Zämäda and Bǝrhan Zämäda were entitled bǝhtwäddäd 142 before he took 133  Herman, “Reines,” part III; eadem, “Rethinking,” 173–174. 134  Herman, “Figures féminines,” 89–90. 135  On the debate on the year of her death, see Herman, “Reines,” 198. 136  Richard Pankhurst, “Ethiopian dynastic marriage and the Béta Esra’él;” idem, “Dynastic Inter-marriage in Medieval and Post-Medieval Ethiopia;” Herman, “Rethinking,” 173. 137  Her raq massǝre, named Ṣabraddīn, was probably a former Muslim who converted to Christianity (Kropp, “’Antiquae restitutio legis,’” 120). On the conversion of officials at court, see Deresse Ayenachew, “Le kätäma,” 110. 138  Herman, “Figures féminines,” 84, 105; Enrico Cerulli, “L’Etiopia del secolo XV in nuovo documentici storici,” Africa Italiana 5 (1933): 57–112, at 82; idem, Il libro etiopico dei miracoli di Maria e le sue fonti nelle letterature del Medio Evo latino (Rome, 1943).  139  Ignazio Guidi, ed. and trans., Le Synaxaire éthiopien. Les mois de Sanê, Hamlê et Nahasê. II, Mois de Hamlê (Paris, 1910), 695–696; Kropp, “Antiquae restitutio legis,” 132; for an exhaustive identification of the wives of medieval kings, see Herman, “Reines,” 15–20. 140  Marie-Laure Derat, “Ǝgziʾ Kǝbra,” in EAe 2 (2005), 247. 141  Margaux Herman, “Figures féminines.” 142  Jules Perruchon, ed. and trans., Les chroniques de Zarʾa Yâʿeqôb et Ba‌‌ʾeda Mâryâm, rois d’Éthiopie de 1434 à 1478 (Paris, 1893), 10, 13.

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these charges himself. This unique case of women holding the office of bǝhtwäddäd enhances two hypotheses. The first is that women were not supposed to receive charges with military duties, the second that in exceptional instances, the king can do whatever he wants, even nominate women to usually masculine duties. Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob’s son and successor Ba‌‌ʾǝdä Maryam (1468–1478), motherless, considered Ǝleni as such. During the ceremony of coronation (Śǝrʿatä qwǝrḥät) of his wife, in which she was named Žan Säyfa and titled gərra bäʿaltiḥat,143 he also confirmed Ǝleni in her position, naming her Admas Mogäsa.144 Apparently removed for a time from the court of the next king, Ǝskǝndǝr (r. 1478–1494), she regained some influence especially during the reign of Naʿod (1494–1508). At his death, she became the most influential of the three-headed regency145 of the twelve-year old Lǝbnä Dǝngǝl (1508–1540), a monarchic system that was at his premises. The first regency was experienced for the minority of Ǝskǝndǝr and composed of the ʿaqqabe säʿat Täsfa Giyorgis (1478–1486), his mother Romna (a concubine) and the gərra bəhtwäddäd ʿAmdä Mika‌‌ʾel,146 with whom Ǝleni was not on good terms.147 For a long time, historians debated the possibility of there being two successive queens named Ǝleni. The confusion started from a mention in the Chronicle of King Lǝbnä Dǝngǝl: During that period, the royal authority was exerted through the disposition of his mother, the queen Naʿod Mogäsa, and with the advice of another woman, Queen Ǝleni. They both knew well the administration of the court, but especially the wise Ǝleni, who had lived at the court of three glorious kings in which she had gained a wide reputation; she knew the juridical order of the administration of the kingdom.148 Travellers from the seventeenth century onwards, as well as translators and researchers, assumed that the “three glorious kings” at whose courts she had 143  Ibid., 174. 144  Ibid., 175–6: “For these qualities, the King greatly loved our Queen Ǝleni. He considered her like his own mother.” 145  Kropp, Geschichte des Lebna Dengel, 3. Regencies also occurred in Muslim communities: see Basset, Histoire de la conquête, 431. 146  Jules Perruchon, “Histoire d’Eskender, d’ʿAmda Syon Il et Nâʿod, rois d’Éthiopie,” Journal Asiatique, 9th ser., 3 (1894): 319–366, at 339; Taddesse Tamrat, Church and State in Ethiopia, 1270–1527 (Oxford, 1972), 286–287. 147  Their relationship has to be studied for a better understanding of the period and of their biographies. 148  Kropp, Geschichte des Lebna Dengel, 3.

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served were the three immediately previous ones, of Naʿod, Ǝskǝndǝr and Ba‌‌ʾǝdä Maryam.149 In that case there would have been two queens, both named Ǝleni: the wife of King Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob, and another, wife of Ba‌‌ʾǝdä Maryam, who remained active in successive reigns.150 Yet, if we consider that Ǝleni was not involved in King Ǝskǝndǝr’s court, the chronicle’s statement is accurate in mentioning only those reigns in which she participated. The chronicle of Bäʾǝdä Maryam’s reign supports this theory. The king considered Ǝleni as “his own mother,” which is an improper relation to a wife. Moreover, on the ceremony of Žan Säyfa the scribe said that it was only performed for her,151 but added that “behind her, (came) Queen Ǝleni who was reigning with her on that day.”152 These two mentions attest that Ǝleni had already received such a ritual, probably during the reign of her husband, and that Ba‌‌ʾǝdä Maryam simply gave her the new regnal name of Admas Mogäsa153 to confirm her position at his court. Later on, during the regency of Lǝbnä Dǝngǝl, the aged queen acted as a ruler in her own right. She instigated, on the advice of Pero da Covilha (a Portuguese married to an Ethiopian woman), the dispatch of a diplomatic mission to the Portuguese king Manuel proposing military co-operation against the Muslims. The envoy Mateus eventually reached Portugal, and delivered the letter to the king.154 He left Portugal in 1517 with the embassy of Rodrigo da Lima (which included Francisco Alvares), and reached the court of Lǝbnä Dǝngǝl around 1520. However, the young king, just victorious in defeating the emir Maḥfūẓ, declined the alliance.

149  They all dismissed in the counting the reign of ʿAmdä Ṣǝyon II, a child who only reigned few months in 1494. 150  “Empress Elena was not the wife of Emperor Naôd but of his father Emperor Bedâ Mariâm, and she never had children, for Emperor Naôd was illegitimate”: Páez, History of Ethiopia, 14. Both Kropp and Perruchon also assumed the same idea: Kropp, Geschichte des Lebna Dengel, 3 and quotation 9; Perruchon, Chroniques. The latter even hypothesized in the introduction of Chroniques that the Ǝleni from the reign of Bäʾǝdä Maryam could be assimilated to Romna, the mother of some of the king’s children. However, the death of Romna is found in the Life of Märḥa Krǝstos: see Stanislas [Stanisław] Kur, ed., Actes de Marḥa Krestos, 2 vols., CSCO 330–331, SAe 62–63 (Louvain, 1972), at vol. 1 (text), 83, vol. 2 (trans.), 90. 151  Perruchon, Chroniques, 173–174. 152  Ibid., 173–174. 153  Ibid., 125. 154  Sergew Hable Sellasie, “The Geʿez Letters of Queen Eleni and Libne Dingil to John, King of Portugal,” in IVe Congresso Internazionale di Studi Etiopici (Roma, 10–15 Aprile 1972), ed. Enrico Cerulli, 2 vols. (Rome, 1974), 1: 547–566.

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During the regency, Ǝleni also got involved in religious affairs. She is alleged to have written two religious works in Gǝʿǝz,155 which proves that elite women received education.156 Ǝleni also instigated with much expense the foundation of the church of Märṭulä Maryam in Goǧǧam, where she held large estates.157 Though not the first queen to achieve such a foundation, it launched the beginning of a common usage. Only a few foundations by women are known before 1468.158 Indeed, when Ǝgziʾ Kǝbra aspired to erect a church for her burial place, Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob refused; he wanted to bury her in his dynastic mausoleum of Däbrä Nägwädgwad.159 For his wife Žan Ḫayla, he himself had the church of Mäkanä Maryam built as her burial place.160 Before 1516, out of eleven royal foundations, three are credited to women and all were dedicated to Mary.161 After this date, queens regularly founded churches in honor of the Virgin.162 Some recent research demonstrates that this new privilege was partly due to the success of the religious propaganda enhanced by King Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob devoted to Saint Helena.163 Yet, the status of queens’ foundations was not equal to those of a king, as is reflected in their construction in geographically peripheral areas;164 here, in eastern Goǧǧam, a newly Christianized area.165 Romna, the mother of Ǝskǝndǝr (1478–1495), probably founded Mǝʿǝrafä Maryam on the shores of Lake Ṭana,166 Ǝleni established Märṭulä Maryam in Ǝnnäbǝse, possibly around 1510,167 while Naʿod Mogäsa settled at Getesemane Maryam during 155  According to Damião de Góis, who reports the words of Ṣägga Zäʾab: see Damião de Góis, Crónica do Felicíssímo Rei D. Manuel (Coimbra, 1926) part 2, ch. 61. 156  Also confirmed by Páez: see Páez, History of Ethiopia, 1: 222. 157  Alvares did not mention the name of the church, but noted that the two altars were of solid gold: Beckingham-Huntingford, Prester John, 2: 321, 350, 434, 459. On the assertion that it was Märṭulä Maryam, see Herman, “(Re)writing,” note 144. 158  Marie-Laure Derat and Hervé Pennec, “Les églises et monastères royaux (XVe, XVIe et XVIIe siècles): permanences et ruptures d’une stratégie royale,” in Ethiopia in broader perspective (cit. at note 97), 1: 22, 28–30 159  Perruchon, Chroniques, 86. 160  Ibid., 54, 87. 161  Marie-Laure Derat, Le domaine des rois éthiopiens: espace, pouvoir, et monachisme (Paris, 2003), 260. 162  Ibid., 280. Kings also dedicated their foundations to the Virgin Mary. 163  Herman, “Figures féminines,” 85–89. 164  “Queens’ foundations were less prestigious than the kings’ ones; therefore their involvement in Goǧǧam shows its peripheral nature within the kingdom’s administration”: Derat, Domaine des rois, 268. 165  Herman, “(Re)writing,” 135–136; eadem, “Figures féminines,” 88–89. 166  See the seventeenth century’s Zena Däbrä Libanos, discussed in Derat, Domaine des rois, 341. 167  Herman, “(Re)writing,” quotations 144 and 145.

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the reign of her son, Lǝbnä Dǝngǝl.168 Whereas Naʿod Mogäsa affiliated her foundation with the dominant religious movement headed by Däbrä Libanos,169 Ǝleni, having quarreled with the monks of that monastery and ʿAmdä Mika‌‌ʾel, linked hers to the Ewosṭatean movement.170 Political and religious internal affairs were also reflected in the queens’ foundations and affiliations. During the sixteenth century, queens and princesses continued this policy of settlements and church foundations in eastern Goǧǧam.171 After 1516, at the end of the regency, the queen’s influence seemed to decline, though the king awaited her death to change the government officers. Present, as Alvares reported, in different religious ceremonies, she subsequently retired in Goǧǧam, where she was buried in Märṭulä Maryam in 1524.172 The grief of the people was reported by Alvares: “They said that since she had died all of them had died, great and small, and that while she lived, all lived and were defended and protected; and she was the father and mother of all.”173 Even eight months later, her tent in the camp was still on site for the people who were coming to mourn.174 She and her richly endowed church remain famous today.175 Finally, the political career of Ǝleni and her religious involvement inspired the successive queens after her. Her stand in diplomatic affairs also helped her successors as queen and/or regent to get involved in political matters, even in war. For instance, Queen Säblä Wängel undertook a form of war leadership, after the death of her husband, to accompany and advise the Portuguese military mission from Däbrä Dammo until they succeeded in joining Gälawdewos and his army in the Sǝmen region in 1543.176 On the Muslim side, Bati Dəl Wänbära (Dalwanbarah), the first wife of Imam Aḥmad, also participated 168  Marie-Laure Derat, “Romna,” in EAe 4 (2010), 410; Derat and Pennec, “Les églises,” 22; See the seventeenth century’s Zena Däbrä Libanos in Derat, Domaine des rois, 341, 343; Herman, “(Re)writing,” quotations 144, 145, 146. 169  See the “History of Däbrä Libanos” (Zena Däbrä Libanos) edited and translated in Derat, Domaine des rois, 329–345, at 341; Herman, “Reines,” 306; eadem, “(Re)writing,” quotation 145. 170  Herman, “Reines,” 306–307; eadem, “(Re)writing,” 135; Derat and Pennec, “Les églises,” 28–30. 171  On the involvement of Queen Säblä Wängel, her daughters, and Queen Śǝllus Ḫayla in eastern Goǧǧam see Herman, “Reines,” 307–310, 339–343; eadem, “(Re)writing,” 135–136. 172  Beckingham-Huntingford, Prester John, 2: 459. 173  Ibid., 434. 174  Ibid., 434. 175  After being burnt by the imam, successive kings restored it: see Derat and Pennec, “Les églises,” 28–30. 176  Herman, “Reines,” 290–307.

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in war expeditions, despite the protestation of his soldiers.177 Other Muslim princesses were also involved in some battles.178 What is more, after the death of the imam in 1543, it was Säblä Wängel and Bati Dəl Wänbära who undertook the diplomatic negotiations to effect the return of their respective sons, captured at different times during the war.179 Next to them, Queen Gaʿǝwa, who ruled in a northern part of Ethiopia during the sixteenth century, sided with the imam and became famous for her military activities against the Christian kings.180 5 Conclusion The field of medieval Ethiopian women’s history is on course to build upon its foundation. If some relevant information has been disclosed in this chapter, much more needs to be discovered. And though the society was definitely organized by gender division, some bridges between sex, roles, and attribution were made depending social status and context. In all communities, women had to respect the gendered rules of the liturgy or customary laws. However, social status and age impacted more on their lives, as was also the case for men. Women were involved in all spheres of society: they were farmers and regents, diplomats and war leaders, nuns and merchants. Therefore, women had a role to play in society at the level of the household and of state affairs. Even if, in most communities, women were excluded from legal forms of authority, they were actors in the social and political order, and instrumental to sovereigns’ governance. In some cases, they succeeded in acquiring some power of their own. This paper finally shows that women were not invisible if one pays attention to details. It points out the necessity of a careful and systematic rereading of the available sources (especially medieval hagiographies, a potential goldmine for unveiling the daily life of non-elite women), the analysis of unstudied documentation (such as the land grants and wills), and of new archeological surveys.

177  Pankhurst Rita, “Taytu’s Foremothers,” 51–63; Sevir Chernetsov, “Bati Dǝl Wämbära,” in EAe 1 (2003), 505. 178  Like Hāǧirah and Fardūsah: see Chekroun, “Le Futūḥ,” 35, 193, 366. 179  Amélie Chekroun and Margaux Herman, “Negotiations after War: the Roles of Christian and Muslim Ethiopian Queens in the 16th century,” in preparation. 180  Denis Nosnitsin, “Gaʿǝwa,” in EAe 2 (2005), 646–647.

chapter 14

Medieval Ethiopian Economies: Subsistence, Global Trade and the Administration of Wealth Anaïs Wion Sǝmʿon, a ras or high-ranking officer of the royal court in the early sixteenth century, was probably typical of the Christian Ethiopian aristocracy in his material wealth and circumstances. He was unusual, however, in composing a work, the Book of Gratitude, that chronicled that wealth and praised the Virgin Mary for providing it. He thanked her for the lands that provided food for his family, his servants, and his slaves; for the wood and water that were collected for him, for the salt he was provided with, and for the animals, both domestic and wild, that he asked the Virgin to maintain in their abundance. Through her generosity he was able to exploit copper and silver mines that added to his wealth, to own objects of silver and gold as well as precious gems, to build churches, and hold banquets for “his people.”1 Sǝmʿon’s book is a useful source for introducing our subject, for in its brief snapshot of one estate it provides a window onto several interlocking systems of the medieval economic landscape that will be the main focus of what follows. The first, and the foundation of the medieval Ethiopian economy, is the exploitation of the land – primarily farming, but also animal husbandry and mining. The second is regional and long-distance trade, only obliquely referenced in Sǝmʿon’s text, but doubtless responsible for his possession of luxury objects including silver and gems and certainly an essential feature both of Ethiopia’s internal economy and its connection to a global one. Finally, conditioning both trade and the exploitation of the land were the institutions, customs, and relations of hierarchy and interdependence that profoundly shaped how resources were extracted, circulated, and consumed, and the meanings attached to them. These are implicit but abundantly evident in Sǝmʿon’s text, from the political office that provided him with his land to his religious interpretation of his own prosperity to the household hierarchy in which he commanded servants and slaves but also redistributed his wealth to the community and to the poor in the form of banquets.

1  Getatchew Haile, “The Works of Rās Semʿon of Hagara Māryām,” Journal of Ethiopian Studies 38 (2005): 5–98, at 11 (text), 53 (trans.).

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These topics certainly do not cover all areas of economic activity, and in the current state of research, even they can be addressed only in a preliminary and partial way. Most studies to date have relied principally on textual sources, often anecdotal in their reference to economic phenomena and without quantitative data. Individual texts, such as medieval land charters, offer flashes of illumination, but given the diversity of Ethiopia’s ecological zones, political-administrative structures, and social-religious cultures, they are best understood as case studies whose wider applicability is limited. Particularly elusive is the factor of change over time, and indeed, one tendency in the less recent scholarship, where the Middle Ages are rarely the chronological focus, has been to stress the unchanging character of agricultural traditions in the interests of explaining Ethiopian economic “backwardness.”2 The scholars who have addressed medieval economic issues, in any case, are quite few. The pioneer of Ethiopia’s pre-modern economic history was the late Richard Pankhurst, whose 1961 overview of the subject to 1800 drew on all the published sources then available to treat an extremely diverse set of topics.3 Forty years later, Pankhurst was still the expert assigned to write the vast majority of the articles in the Encyclopaedia Aethiopica relating to the pre-modern economy, a testament to both to his wide-ranging knowledge and to the relative quiescence of the field. Already in 1972, however, Taddesse Tamrat made a notable contribution by drawing on sources not utilized by Pankhurst, such as hagiographies and land charters, in the few pages he devoted to trade routes and the gwǝlt system of land tenure in his survey of medieval Christian Ethiopia.4 Starting in the 1970s, Merid Wolde Aregay devoted his studies centrally to the socio-economic history of Ethiopia before the twentieth century, approaching phenomena such as war, social hierarchies, and demography as rooted in a production economy. However, the relative inaccessibility of his works, in particular his never-published thesis of 1971, have hindered recognition of their truly innovative dimension, namely, to assert that a material history of Ethiopia was possible.5 2  Richard Pankhurst, “Economy until 1941,” in EAe 2 (2005): 215–217 3  Richard Pankhurst, An Introduction to the Economic History of Ethiopia, from Early Times to 1800 (London, 1961). He addressed medieval economic issues again, more briefly, in the first section of A Social History of Ethiopia (Addis Ababa, 1990), 3–72. 4  Taddesse Tamrat, Church and State in Ethiopia, 1270–1527 (Oxford, 1972), 80–89, 98–103. 5  Merid Wolde Aregay, “Southern Ethiopia and the Christian kingdom, 1508–1708, with special reference to the Galla migrations and their consequences” (Ph.D diss., University of London, 1971); idem, “Technology in medieval Ethiopia” (paper presented for the conference on Ethiopian feudalism, organized by the Institute of Ethiopian Studies and the Historical Society of Ethiopia, Addis Ababa, March 1976).

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Donald Crummey’s research on land tenure, pursued in the 1980s and 1990s, was a turning point: devoting years to collecting and collating administrative documents in massive numbers, he was able for the first time to approach this central economic system in a more comprehensive and quantitative way. His resulting synthesis, published in 2000, investigates the construction of a peasant economy and a feudal society in the Christian highlands from a perspective marked (like that of Merid Wolde Aregay, albeit in a different manner) by Marxism, structuralism, and the 1974 revolution in Ethiopia.6 As with Merid, however, his sources and focus are very largely post-medieval, primarily of the Gondärine period. More recently, Habtamu Mengistie Tegegne’s study of Gondärine administrative documents mainly produced by private persons and written in Amharic has made an important discovery regarding the existence of serfs attached to the land, again beginning in the Gondärine period.7 The paucity of surviving administrative records for the Middle Ages, which are generally institutional rather than personal, is certainly a factor in the difficulty of writing a socio-economic history of the period. As for trade, a historiographical vein distinct from the above works has treated the global maritime networks via the Red Sea in which Ethiopia was involved. In Timothy Power’s recent study of the Red Sea in late antiquity, however, Ethiopia remains on the margins of the analysis, and while Mordechai Abir’s study of the thirteenth to eighteenth centuries deals centrally with Ethiopia’s overseas trade, draws mainly on Arab and European sources, and digs rather little into questions of economic history on the continent itself.8 Other recent historiographical trends are making it possible to expand and reconfigure our conception of the medieval economy. Manfred Kropp, for one, has illustrated that Christian administrative documents can illuminate the medieval era, in articles focusing on specific corpora (namely Ḥayq Ǝsṭifanos and Gäšen Amba), the political-administrative structures behind them, and the economic and social mechanisms they describe.9 Further, increasing attention 6  Donald Crummey, Land and Society in the Christian Kingdom of Ethiopia: From the Thirteenth to the Twentieth Century (Urbana, IL, 2000). 7  Habtamu Mengistie, Lord, zèga, and peasant: a study of property and agrarian relations in eastern Gojjam (Addis Ababa, 2004). 8  Timothy Power, The Red Sea from Byzantium to the Caliphate, AD 500–1000 (Cairo, 2012); Mordechai Abir, Ethiopia and the Red Sea: The Rise and Decline of the Solomonic Dynasty and Muslim-European Rivalry in the Region (London, 1980; repr. New York, 2016). 9  Representative of his work are Manfred Kropp, “‘Dann senke das Haupt und gib ihr nicht im Zorn’: eine testamentarische Verfügung des Kaisers Amda Seyon aus dem Archiv des Hs. BM. Or. 481,” Orientalia Suecana 28–29, (1989): 92–104; idem, “‘Altersversorgung und garantierter Familienbesitz mit steuerlicher Begünstigung? Fragen Sie Ihren Abt!’ Die traditionelle Struktur einer äthiopischen Klosterökonomie im Mittelalter am Beispiel von Urkunden aus

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to non-Christian societies has permitted a multi-ethnic, multi-confessional approach to medieval Ethiopia, as far as sources allow. François-Xavier Fauvelle and Bertrand Hirsch, among others, have made it possible to reinterpret relations between Muslims and Christians and to historicize trade routes.10 Ayda Bouanga’s work on the kingdoms located south of the Abbay River refines our understanding of economic issues on a large scale, by showing the active role of the regions that provided traditional export goods such as ivory, gold, and slaves.11 Equally stimulating has been the advent of environmental history into Ethiopian Studies. James McCann’s People of the Plow (1995) pioneered a contextualized history of Ethiopian agriculture and the men and women who made it, while Guillaume Blanc’s recent, innovative study treats Ethiopian environmental history in an explicitly political and comparative framework.12 While both those works concern the modern era, other recent studies have examined the reciprocal influences of environmental factors and political instruments, such as taxation and tolls, in shaping Ethiopia’s pre-modern landscape.13 Finally, while cultural history (and particularly the history of religious culture) is certainly not new to Ethiopian Studies, its recent application to agricultural products, in Thomas Guindeuil’s several studies of medieval food culture, offers a fresh perspective on economic history in its social context.14

 dem Condaghe des Stephanusklosters im Hayq-See (Wollo, Äthiopien),” in Orbis Aethiopicus XV: Völker, Kulturen und Religionen am Horn von Afrika (Dettelbach, 2016), 23–82. 10   François-Xavier Fauvelle-Aymar and Bertrand Hirsch, “L’Éthiopie médiévale,” Cahiers d’études africaines 166 (2002): 315‑36; François-Xavier Fauvelle-Aymar and Bertrand Hirsch, eds., Espaces musulmans de la Corne de l’Afrique au Moyen Âge. Études d’archéologie et d’histoire (Paris and Addis Ababa, 2017). 11  Ayda Bouanga, “Le Damot dans l’histoire de l’Éthiopie (XIIIe–XXe siècles): recompositions religieuses, politiques et historiographiques” (Ph.D diss., Université de Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, Paris, 2013). 12  James C. McCann, People of the Plow: An Agricultural History of Ethiopia, 1800–1990 (Madison, WI, 1995); Guillaume Blanc, Une histoire environnementale de la nation: regards croisés sur les parcs nationaux du Canada, d’Éthiopie et de France (Paris, 2015). 13  Anaïs Wion, “Cinq cents ans de contrôle royal sur les produits agricoles tributaires d’Aksum,” Études rurales 197 (2016): 49–72; Marie-Laure Derat, “La passe d’Aheyyā Faǧǧ (XVe–XVIe siècle): itinéraires, places fortes et contrôle du territoire éthiopien,” Études rurales 197 (2016): 73–92. 14  Thomas Guindeuil, “Alimentation, cuisine et ordre social dans le royaume d’Éthiopie (XIIe–XIXe siècle)” (Ph.D diss., Université de Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, 2012); idem, “What do Christians (Not) Eat: Food Taboos and the Ethiopian Christian Communities (13th–18th c.),” Annales d’Éthiopie 29 (2014): 59–82.

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Local and Rural Economies

With the exception of certain areas of Islamic settlement15 and of antique establishments in the north such as Aksum, medieval Ethiopia is characterized by the absence of cities, in the sense that there is no urban planning but only likely large gatherings of settlements established in the more or less long term. In its Christian and local-religious areas especially, therefore, the economy is almost exclusively rural. Exploitation of natural resources depends on the ecological zone, as well as on the resident populations and the political structure of the territory. Broadly speaking, three zones are generally distinguished in the regions under discussion: the highlands, characterized by production of cereals and legumes in open fields; the arid lowlands, predominantly pastoral; and the tropical rain forest zone that produces ensete (Ensete ventricosum, “false banana”), vegetables, coffee, and fruit-bearing trees. An alternate classification, in use in Ethiopia today, distinguishes three zones by altitude: qwälla (below 1800 meters), wäyna dägga (1800–2400 m, which is the most densely populated and cultivated), and dägga (above 2400 m), though the history and potential social implications of this classification are unknown. Farming has taken place in the Ethiopian highlands since roughly the sixth millennium BCE.16 The main cereal crops in the Middle Ages were teff (Eragrostis tef ), a native grain of the region; finger millet and sorghum, both widely present in Africa; and barley and wheat introduced from the Middle East. Barley is a pioneer plant of the highest plateau of the Christian areas.17 Though wheat was pictured on Aksumite coinage, indicating a certain symbolic value in the ancient period, it does not appear to have been widely cultivated in the Middle Ages. The Tǝgray region, heartland of the ancient Aksumite kingdom, may represent an exception: even today it is the only highland region in which wheaten bread is regularly baked, which may suggest the survival across many centuries of a specific regional tradition.18 Teff, the basis for injera (ǝnǧära), remains the most prized cereal throughout the highlands, despite its labor-intensive cultivation: five passes of plough are necessary, compared to one for beans. A variety of legumes were also cultivated, including lentils and 15  See Amélie Chekroun and Bertrand Hirsch, “The Sultanates of Medieval Ethiopia,” in this volume. 16  Christopher Ehret, Civilizations of Africa: A History to 1800 (Charlottesville, 2002), see 81 and 87. 17  Alain Gascon, Sur les hautes terres comme au ciel: identités et territoires en Éthiopie (Paris, 2006), 38–40. 18  Guindeuil, “Alimentation”, 147–148.

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chickpeas, all inherited from the Near East. Together, these cereals and legumes offered the complete proteins that formed the basis of the medieval Ethiopian diet. To them were added some oleaginous plants such as nug (Guizotia abyssinica), sesame, linseed, and carthamus.19 What proportion of the land was given over to agriculture is very difficult to determine. As McCann and Blanc have demonstrated, the assumption of modern deforestation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is a myth, which means that the Ethiopian highlands were already deforested by circa 1800. Certainly the anthropization of the Ethiopian highlands and lowlands has been such a long-term process that it is unlikely a vast forest was still preserved at the beginning of the Middle Ages. The plough, and especially the ox-plough, is one of the distinctive features of highland Ethiopian agriculture, still in use today. Known in Ethiopia since early antiquity, it is generally believed to have been introduced from Egypt or the Middle East, although McCann argues that it could have been a parallel, independent invention in the Ethiopian highlands.20 Well adapted to steep terrain, it allows intensive use of the land and prevents erosion. It has also some potential social consequences, for instance, relations of dependency between farmers without oxen and richer owners of livestock who can rent their animals. Altitude, hygrometry and the quality of soil (“black soil” being the most prized) determined the specific cultivation of different crops, most probably using a system of field rotation and fallow land as today. Major crops were planted during the main planting season (April and May) and harvested after the rainy season (November–December). In many areas, a smaller rainy season in late January or February authorized a second crop. This seasonal calendar was important not only for farming. It determined periods of travel, which was virtually impossible during the rainy season due to flooded rivers, and thus also the movements of armies and of the itinerant royal court, whose presence could weigh heavily on local economies. It affected seasonal scarcity and with it, potential seasonal debt; the tax cycle, oriented toward harvest time; and feasts and banquets. The ecological zone south of Abbay (Blue Nile) River – composed in the medieval period of Damot, Gafat, Hadiyya, Wälamo, Gamo and other smaller political entities – differs from the northern highlands due to its slightly lower altitude and higher degree of rainfall. Reconstructing this region’s medieval 19  Élisabeth Chouvin, “Les oléagineux dans l’Éthiopie des bords du Rift,” in Patrimoines naturels au Sud, ed. Marie-Christine Cormier-Salem et al. (Paris, 2005), 311‑33. 20  James McCann, “Plough,” in EAe 4 (2010), 163–164.

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agricultural landscape and practices is difficult, in the absence of any written sources prior to the eighteenth century directly concerned with daily life and the economy outside of long-distance trade. It is quite certain that the endemic ensete was domesticated since ancient times, most probably from the sixth millennium BCE, because there is no known wild variety, the seed is sterile and its reproduction requires complex techniques.21 Providing food and fibers, it is today the most emblematic crop of the southern regions, but the presence of ensete in Goǧǧam and in Sǝmen might be residual and could testify to a much more important extension of the crop in earlier times.22 Its long and sophisticated production process is deeply linked with cultural practices. To judge from more recent practices, ensete farmers in the south did not use the plow but the hoe or digging-stick, a tool that is considered “typically African.” Ensete needs shade, and therefore the presence of trees, as well as a lot of manure. The contemporary organization of the farms, with gardens and closed compounds, is probably an ancient one. A study led by the archeozoologist J. Lesur and the geographer S. Planel has proposed a chronology of the region’s land use, focusing on Gamo and Wälaytta, located east of the Omo River and west of the Rift Valley. They conclude that agro-pastoralism was already practiced here by the thirteenth century, and that wild animal hunting was then only a ritual activity. They further argue that from the fifteenth century, semienclosed landscape or “polygenic bocage” was typical of agro-pastoral practice in the territories north of the Omo, including ensete cultivation, gardens, and livestock kept in enclosures, and that cereal cultivation intensified in this area only during the sixteenth century.23 The immense, arid lowlands surrounding the previous zones in an arc from the Red Sea coast in present-day Eritrea through Somalia in the southeast to the Omo Valley in the southwest have been considered in the historiography as margins or contact zones, but they have hardly been considered for themselves. Sources are indeed rare, and archeologists working in the area tend to focus on paleontological and prehistoric remains rather than medieval ones. Rock paintings attest to pastoralism for early periods, but most of the rock art found so far is previous to our period or remains undated. Therefore, even more than elsewhere, one has to infer the economic life of medieval lowland societies from a few indirect sources. The dromedary is the emblematic animal of the 21  McCann, People of the Plow, 53, 157. 22  Alain Gascon, La grande Éthiopie, une utopie africaine: Éthiopie ou Oromie, l’intégration des hautes terres du Sud (Paris, 1995), 72 23  Joséphine Lesur and Sabine Planel, “L’environnement, une construction dans le temps long : le Gamo et le Wolaita,” Études rurales 197 (2016): 25–48.

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lowlands, as he can carry heavy loads (up to 300 kg) over long distances, and can resist high temperatures and lack of water. Dromedary breeding is usually done in association with small livestock (goats or sheep), both of which tolerate full nomadism, unlike cattle which do not. But lowland pastoralists were of course not the only medieval Ethiopians to tend livestock: highland farmers did as well. The zebu, originally from India and domesticated in antiquity, was a key element of the crop-livestock production system, as a work animal and for its dung that served as fuel and manure. Though poor in milk production, it was also raised for its meat, and the hide was made into leather. Smaller livestock like sheep and goats were also raised for their meat and hides. Sheepskin was often worn as a mantle, while goatskin was the favored material for parchment. Horses and donkeys were used for riding and as load animals. Animals and their herders moved, both to find pasture and because they were goods to be exchanged, rented, or sold. They were one of many features that connected different areas, and especially the lowlands and highlands, which have complementary advantages. Indeed, the sixteenth-century Portuguese visitor Alvares, who spent six years in Ethiopia and observed and recorded many aspects of Ethiopian life, described a practice called ribi as an agreement between lowlanders and highlanders for the loan of livestock.24 The mule, offspring of a female horse and a male donkey, is especially associated with the Ethiopian highlands. It was highly prized as a reliable packanimal and especially for its comfort for riding. Mules were probably found at every level of Ethiopian society, possessed by (rich) peasants as well as by elites; the royal camp itself had its own regulations for the mule herd, under the control of the liqä mäkwas.25 Being sterile, mules had to be bred, and some regions, such as Sǝnnar, Wällo, and Bur in eastern Tǝgray, were known for breeding high-quality mules. Mules were a component of the regional taxation, as Goǧǧam provided annually some 3000 mules to the court, a few being beautiful mules for riding and the rest serving as pack mules.26 They were also luxury goods exported abroad, for the Yemeni sultan loved to travel on Ethiopian muleback, as we shall see. With regard to technologies related to water, little is known about practices in this period. One technique, today emblematic of the southern regions and especially of Konso, is terracing, which prevents soil erosion, retains rainwater, and facilitates cultivation. Yonas Beyene has traced dry-stone terraces back to 24   Beckingham-Huntingford, Prester John, 1: 92–93. 25  Anaïs Wion and Anne Bolay, “Liqä Mäkwas,” in EAe 3 (2007), 579–581. 26   Beckingham-Huntingford, Prester John, 2: 425–427.

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antiquity in both southern and northern Ethiopia.27 Archeological findings in Tǝgray have indicated the use of terracing here, as well as dams and reservoirs.28 A second technique, irrigation channels, was observed by Alvares in the early sixteenth century in Yäha, also in the Tǝgray region, but Tǝgray has a different history with regard to irrigation than the rest of the highlands.29 In Wära-Illu (today’s Wällo), for instance, Alvares noted the total absence of water management and consequent crop loss, both by drought and by flooding.30 Relatively good data is now available on the agricultural practices of the Islamic regions of medieval Ethiopia, but it remains to be synthesized into an overarching treatment of the country. Recent archeological investigations, for instance, indicate that, at least in the central region of the historical Ethiopian area, Muslim settlements were concentrated along the escarpment of the Rift Valley, at an altitude of circa 1200m.31 Not exactly “highland” but neither tropical nor arid lowland, this area of settlement ill fits the usual tripartite schema of Ethiopian ecological zones. The crops grown by medieval Ethiopian Muslims, which were documented by two fourteenth-century Arab authors, al-ʿUmarī and Abū-l-Fidāʾ, and have been studied by Thomas Guindeuil, well reflect this “intermediate” ecological zone.32 Al-ʿUmarī, for instance, reported that in Ifat (Awfāt), corresponding to the abovementioned area of archeological study, the same cereals were grown as in the highlands (wheat, sorghum, teff), and similar animals raised (cattle and sheep “in great numbers”), but the crops also included bananas, lemons, and other fruits requiring a hotter climate.33 Textual and archeological evidence may now be combined to demonstrate other facets of Muslim agricultural practice as well. Abū-l-Fidāʾ, who precisely described the capital city of Ifat/Awfāt in the first third of the fourteenth 27  Yonas Beyene, Metassebia Bekele, and Alemseged Beldados, “Recent Archaeological Findings from South Ethiopia,” Billet, Un Œil Sur La Corne / An Eye On The Horn (blog), 2014, https://cfee.hypotheses.org/518. 28  Rodolfo Fattovich, “The Development of Ancient States in the Northern Horn of Africa, c. 3000 BC–AD 1000: An Archaeological Outline,” Journal of World Prehistory 23, 3 (2010): 145–75, at 163. 29   Beckingham-Huntingford, Prester John, 1: 141. 30  Ibid., 1: 253. 31   François-Xavier Fauvelle-Aymar and Bertrand Hirsch, “Muslim Historical Spaces in Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa: A Reassessment,” Northeast African Studies 11, 1 (2004): 25–53. The most recently discovered sites are discussed in François-Xavier Fauvelle, Bertrand Hirsch, and Amélie Chekroun, “Le Sultanat de l’Awfāt, sa capitale et la nécropole des Walasmaʿ: Quinze années d’enquêtes archéologiques et historiques sur l’Islam médiéval éthiopien,” Annales islamologiques 51 (2017): 239–295. 32  Guindeuil, “Alimentation,” 164–177. 33  Aḥmad b. Yaḥyā b. Faḍl Allāh al- ʿUmarī, Masālik el-abṣār fī mamālik al-amṣār. I, L’Afrique moins l’Égypte, trans. Maurice Gaudefroy-Demombynes (Paris, 1927), 9–10.

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century, mentioned that sugar cane, among other crops, was grown there.34 As sugar cane requires irrigation, one could infer from this witness alone that the medieval Muslim peasantry possessed irrigation technology. But the point now has confirmation. The site of this capital city, also called Ifat (Wafāt in the Arabic texts), was identified in the landscape by an archeological mission in 2009.35 It is located, like the other vestiges of medieval settlements (Faqi Däbbis, Nora, etc.) on the escarpment, specifically on the Č�̣ ärč̣är plateau between Šäwa Robit and Kombolcha. And throughout this region archeologists have identified the remains of medieval irrigation structures, including reservoirs and canals.36 The data presented above could give the impression that the medieval Ethiopian rural economy was determined by natural and geographic variables, which of course is not untrue. At the same time, economic producers (and consumers) lived within strong social, cultural, religious and political constructs, and a fuller picture of the medieval economy should allude to the contexts which gave these products their meaning. One aspect of the social dynamics of the economy concerns food consumption. Ethiopian Christianity carefully regulates the consumption of meat, firstly in the observance of Deuteronomic prohibitions on the consumption of wild animals and pigs and the requirement of ritual slaughter, and secondly in the high number of fasting (i.e. purely vegan, fish being in some places discussed) days in the liturgical calendar. Meat consumption was therefore highly ritualized, and those rituals were not exclusively dictated by the religious context. For instance, the slaughtering of a goat, probably the most common animal to be eaten at a household level, is today associated with a protection ritual in which the diaphragm is attached to the main pillar of the house.37 Social hierarchies also attended meat consumption.38 As the Śǝrʿatä gǝbr, a medieval protocol for royal banquets, attests, when a cow was slaughtered for banquets

34  Joseph Toussaint Reinaud, Géographie d’Aboulfeda, traduite de l’arabe en français et accompagnée de notes et d’éclaircissements, trans. Ismāʿīl ibn ʿAlī ibn Maḥmūd Abū al-Fidāʾ, 2 vols. (Paris, 1848), 2, 229. 35  Fauvelle, Hirsch, and Chekroun, “Le Sultanat de l’Awfāt. ” 36   François-Xavier Fauvelle et al., “Archéologie et histoire de l’Islam dans la Corne de l’Afrique: état des recherches,” Civiltà del Mediterraneo 16–17 (2009–2010): 29–58. 37  The author’s personal observations on the field, Andabet region, 1999. For the use of the diaphragm of a bull, see also the description of the zar ceremony by Michel Leiris, “Le taureau de Seyfou Tchenger,” Minotaure 2 (1993): 75–82 (repr. in Cahier Dakar-Djibouti, ed. Éric Jolly and Marianne Lemaire, [Meurcourt, 2015]: 851–875). 38  Guindeuil, “Alimentation,” 241–46.

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or other celebrations, the best parts, such as the liver, were presented to the elite in attendance.39 Muslim Ethiopians, of course, observed their own food customs, regulations, and rituals, which reinforced the distinctions between these peoples. Dromedary meat, for instance, was eaten exclusively by Muslims: in the early fourteenth century, Ibn Baṭṭūṭa mentioned the massive slaughtering of dromedaries in Zäylaʿ for meat consumption.40 The Lives of medieval Ethiopian saints also record that captured Christians were urged (and refused) to eat dromedary, as its consumption was understood as synonymous with Muslim identity.41 Even where meats acceptable to both religions were concerned, the rituals of slaughtering differed, which effectively prevented any commensality between Muslims and Christians as soon as meat was included in the meal. Still, certain food customs were shared by Ethiopians of different religions – notably, a strong aversion to eating poultry, already observed by the Muslim Egyptian writer al-ʿUmarī in the fourteenth century.42 Poultry have been raised on farms throughout the Horn of Africa for centuries, but primarily for their eggs and their use in so-called magico-religious rituals; consumption of poultry flesh is very low, and when prepared, the flesh has to be washed very carefully. Guindeuil has thus raised the intriguing hypothesis of a very old and pan-Ethiopian taboo on its consumption.43 Religious and class status in medieval Ethiopia were also indicated by the consumption of beverages. Muslim Ethiopians, like all Muslims, were religiously forbidden to consume alcohol – another brake on their socialization with Christian counterparts in commercial exchanges or other interactions. By the fourteenth century at the latest, Ethiopian Muslims chewed č̣at (Catha edulis), a plant known for its effects on sociability and concentration.44 Among Christians, a beer made mostly of barley and embittered with gäšo (Rhamnus prinoides) was and is the common alcoholic beverage of the rural household. To be served at aristocratic or royal banquets, it had to be filtrated. The most 39  Manfred Kropp, “The Serʿatä Gebr: A Mirror View of the Daily Life at the Ethiopian Royal Court in the Middle Ages,” Northeast African Studies 10, 2–3 (1988): 51–87. 40  Muḥammad ibn ʿAbdallāh Ibn Baṭṭūṭa, Voyages d’Ibn Batoutah, texte arabe accompagné d’une traduction, ed. and trans. Charles Defrémery and Beniamino Raffaello Sanguinetti, 4 vols. (Paris, 1853–8), 2: 180. 41   Marie-Laure Derat, “Chrétiens et musulmans d’Éthiopie face à la traite et à l’esclavage aux XVe et XVIe siècles,” in Traites et esclavages en Afrique orientale et dans l’océan Indien, ed. Henri Médard et al. (Paris, 2013), 119–48, at 128–29, quoting the Lives of Märḥa Krǝstos and Yonas. 42   Al-ʿUmarī, Masālik, 13. 43  Thomas Guindeuil, “What Do Christians (Not) Eat,” 59–82. 44   Al-ʿUmarī, Masālik, 11–12.

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prized beverage, however, was ṭäǧǧ (mead), made from honey collected from both wild and domesticated beehives. The possession of hives was itself an indicator of wealth.45 Ṭäǧǧ was the proper beverage of the medieval royal household. It was shared by the elite, offered to prestigious guests and drunk by clerics during religious festivities. Some monastic communities, such as the Ǝsṭifanosites (or Stephanites) and the Ewosṭateans of Däbrä Bizän, prohibited alcohol (and meat) from their diet as a sign of particular austerity.46 While various agricultural products thus bound or divided groups within Ethiopia, one product speaks rather to Christian Ethiopians in the context of the universal Christian community: the grapevine. Climatic conditions at the higher elevations were conducive to its growth, and it was certainly cultivated in the Middle Ages, indeed not only in Christian-dominated areas. Al-ʿUmarī reported that black grapes grew in Ifat, presumably along the escarpment, and before him the thirteenth-century author al-Qazwīnī, who probably gathered his information in Egypt, also registered the presence of grapes in Ethiopia.47 Christian Ethiopian sources mention grapevines too. Saint Gäbrä Iyäsus, according to his Life, planted vines towards Ǝnfraz.48 And King Bä’ǝda Maryam planted vines in today’s Gurage (as well as lemons, citrus and šokara, possibly sugar-cane).49 Moreover, the term wäyna dägga, which today denotes the intermediate altitude level, literally means “the wine level.” Yet wine, while necessary for the Mass, was not part of medieval Christian Ethiopia’s drinking culture, as visiting European Christians were quick to observe. Among the relatively few comments offered by Giovanni Battista Brocchi after his journey to Ethiopia in 1482 was that there was no wine to drink there.50 Forty years later, Francisco Alvares observed that wine was produced locally for the Coptic metropolitan and for the king.51 Grapevines 45  The Life of Märḥa Krǝstos (cited in Taddesse Tamrat, Church and State, 87) states that the saint’s father was “a rich man with many slaves and 300 hives.” On honey and ṭäǧǧ, see Thomas Guindeuil, “‘Pour l’âne, le miel n’a pas de goût.’ Miel et société dans l’histoire du royaume d’Éthiopie,” Journal des africanistes 80, 1/2 (2010): 283–306. 46  Getatchew Haile, The Geʾez Acts of Abba Esṭifanos of Gwǝndagwǝnde, 2 vols., CSCO 619– 620, SAe 110–11 (Louvain, 2006), vol. 1 (text), 8, vol. 2 (trans.), 7–8; Carlo Conti Rossini, “Il Gadla Filpos ed il Gadla Yoḥannes di Dabra Bizan,” Rendiconti della Reale Accademia dei Lincei, 5th ser., 8 (1901): 62–170, at 94–98. 47  Guindeuil, “Alimentation,” 157. 48  Carlo Conti Rossini, “Note di agiografia etiopica (ʿAbiya Egziʾ, ʿArkalēdes e Gäbrä Iyasus),” RSO 17 (1938): 409–52. 49  Jules Perruchon, ed. and trans., Les Chroniques de Zarʾa Yaʿeqôb et de Ba’eda Mâryâm, rois d’Éthiopie de 1434 à 1478 (Paris, 1893), 159–160. 50  Francesco da Suriano, Trattato di Terra Santa e dell’Oriente, ed. Girolamo Golubovich (Milan, 1900), 85. 51   Beckingham-Huntingford, Prester John, 2: 518

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clearly played a role in identifying Christian places, such as churches. But even the sacramental wine used in the liturgy was probably then, as now, a nonfermented beverage, often made of water in which grapes have been soaked.52 Perhaps like the wheat pictured on Aksumite coinage, the grape in medieval Ethiopia had a high symbolic value in defining cultural and religious identity without becoming a mainstay of the society’s food culture. A second essential element of the economy’s cultural context was the political-legal structures governing the apportioning and control of the land. Understanding what access to land a typical Christian household might have had is biased by the fact that the written documentation was in its immense majority produced for and preserved by churches and monasteries. The sources create therefore the impression that the land was mainly controlled by religious institutions, when most probably they fought inch by inch to obtain the immense rights to the land that we know they had at the end of the modern period. Let us first describe monastic land tenure, and then try to unveil medieval peasant land-rights, as well as those of the aristocracy. Churches and monasteries received land rights from the king under a status called gwǝlt for which Manfred Kropp proposes a semantic translation: “limited and conditional rights.”53 A gwǝlt right to land was theoretically limited in time, for the royal authority could renew or cancel it. It was also limited in the sense that gwǝlt rights were superimposed on other land rights, which are usually not explicit in the gwǝlt donation documents but regulated peasants’ access to land according to customary laws. The gwǝlt was also dependent on the recipient’s continued loyalty to the royal power, and on his proper redistribution of the products of the land. Vast estates could be granted in this manner to important monasteries. Peasants in the medieval Christian highlands were legally free, and had heritable rights, called rǝst, to work the land on which they lived and receive its usufruct. But land rights often superimposed themselves, giving the gwǝlt holder, for instance, the right to levy taxes on rǝst lands.54 Technically, those taxes were owed by the peasantry to the king, 52  Emmanuel Fritsch, “The Anaphoras of the Gəʿəz Churches: A Challenging Orthodoxy,” in The Anaphoral Genesis of the Institution Narrative in Light of the Anaphora of Addai and Mari, Acts of the International Liturgy Congress, Rome 25–26 October 2011, ed. Cesare Giraudo (Rome, 2013), 275–316, at 285. 53  From GLY, “to cut,” as a possible etymology. Manfred Kropp, “Gesondert, Gestiftet und Geheiligt: Hierapolis in Äthiopien. Zur Deutung des Namens Aksum,” Oriens Christianus 94 (2010): 176–98. 54  Crummey, Land and society, 39–42. However, the unique testimony of King Ṭänṭäwǝdǝm’s twelfth-century land donation to ʿUra Mäsqäl church indicates outright expropriation of the peasant communities, and their loss of freedom, as they (Christian and Muslim, free and unfree alike) were given to the church: see Marie-Laure Derat, L’énigme d’une

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but he conferred the right to receive them on civil and military officers and on religious institutions, and sometimes he even renounced his right to tribute.55 The latter thus formed an aristocratic class that held land at the will of the king. This general picture applies to the later Middle Ages: the earliest securely datable gwǝlt records are from the twelfth century. But as noted above, the vast majority of surviving gwǝlt records, from the fifteenth and early sixteenth century, concern religious institutions, about which we are therefore much better informed than lay estates. Monks might certainly work the land themselves, but in most cases they did so with additional peasant labor (gäbgab). This was the “income” that constituted the wealth, and thus the reward, of the land grant.56 The case of Däbrä Ḥayq Ǝsṭifanos, in Amhara, has been well studied by Manfred Kropp.57 Ḥayq’s abbot had the title of ʿaqqabe säʿat and he was during the later Middle Ages an important official of the royal court. The clergy of Ḥayq managed vast lands upon which peasants had rǝst rights. As early as the thirteenth century, those peasants are called gäbbärä, “the ones who pay tax.” They provided products to the monastery in order that it could organize feasts called täzkar (lit. “memorial celebration”). These täzkar, to which the faithful were invited, manifested the power of the clergy to levy taxes and to redistribute them. One of the discoveries made by Kropp is that Ḥayq enhanced its landholdings by requiring its own monks to give part of their hereditary family property to the monastery after their death, in order that, officially, the monastery could celebrate their own täzkar. It was most probably a win-win exchange, and not a deprivation of family property rights, for the familial groups transferred their rights to the institution but preserved part of the benefit of dynastie sainte et usurpatrice dans le royaume chrétien d’Éthiopie du XIe au XIIIe siècle (Turnhout, 2018), 141–144. 55  Derat, L’énigme, 50–51, 144. 56   Marie-Laure Derat, “Les donations du roi Lālibalā : éléments pour une géographie du royaume chrétien d’Éthiopie au tournant du XIIe et du XIIIe siècle,” Annales d’Éthiopie 25, (2010): 19–42; Wolf Leslau, Comparative Dictionary of Geʿez (Classical Ethiopic): GeʿezEnglish/English-Geʿez, with an Index of the Semitic roots (Wiesbaden, 1991), 177. The term gäbgab seems to apply only to an early medieval time. For the post-medieval period, other terms such as gefuʾan (exploited, oppressed) designated some – maybe hereditary – servants of the abbot (see Habtamu Mengistie, Lord, zéga and peasant, 79); the word hedad or hudad, more frequent, designated collective and compulsory labor due on state land hold in gwǝlt status (see for instance Gäbräwäld Ǝngǝddawärq, Yä-Ityopya märät-na gǝber sǝm [Addis Ababa, 1956]). 57  Kropp, “Altersversorgung und garantierter Familienbesitz.”

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the exploitation of the land; further, as the land was now monastic, its inhabitants were exempt from military duties. This analysis of the transformation of a “personal” land-right into an “institutional” land-right shows the links between two kinds of land-right often considered as evolving in parallel, as well as those between the monastic economy, aristocratic wealth and, at the ground level, the peasantry.58 Under the indirect authority of the king through the regional and local governors, land also owed tribute in the form of the military service, in various ways. Households had to send men – not to forget women who went along – to the military campaigns of the kings, and provide goods for the army’s subsistence. When an army established its camp in the area, inhabitants had to provide food and housing to the whole military contingent, animals included. A third element of the economy’s cultural context was the social and legal hierarchy of its producers and consumers. We have had occasion already to speak of the aristocracy and free peasantry of the Christian highlands. Below them were the enslaved: non-Christians captured in raids or war or, doubtless more often, bought. They were present at every level of Christian Ethiopian society. The royal court, aristocratic households, and monasteries possessed slaves; so, probably, did rural households, though they are more elusive in the sources.59 Their presence is often euphemized in texts by the locution “to collect wood and water.” This euphemism attests to a certain social recognition of the role the enslaved played in the household economy, performing daily tasks that were burdensome, time-consuming, and essential, but it does not of course convey the full range of the slaves’ tasks or experience. A slave was a transferable good upon whom the master had complete control: he or she could be sold, given, baptized (which did not automatically confer emancipation), emancipated, or killed. The high number of terms used to designate unfree persons indicates the importance of status in the Ethiopian socioeconomy and its structuring through statutes relating to individual freedom. While free Ethiopian Christian subjects were designated as agʿaz, the word for captive was ḍǝwǝw; a male slave was a gäbr, a female slave amat, a gender distinction that probably reflects the different tasks imposed on male and female slaves. Slaves could also be designated by their origin, as in the term barya.60 A household slave was called a näbar (as in the text of ras Sǝmʿon) or gärad 58  See for instance Berhanou Abebbe, Évolution de la propriété foncière au Choa (Éthiopie): du règne de Ménélik à la Constitution de 1931 (Paris, 1971). 59  Derat, “Chrétiens et musulmans d’Éthiopie face à la traite,” 119–48. 60  Ibid., 125–132.

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(pl. agrad), and here a study could be useful to understand the possible difference between the two. At the bottom of the social hierarchy are the poor, landless or incapacitated, those who survive thanks to the charity of religious institutions, whether Christian, through alms, or Muslim, through the zaqat.61 In a pioneering essay, John Iliffe described a Christian Ethiopian culture where the extreme visibility of the poor and the needy went along with the high moral value given to charity. He pointed out the numerous questions related to the history of poverty and almsgiving, that still await their historian.62 The distinctions between and within the different levels of the medieval social hierarchy merit further investigation, but it must be conceded that a statistical approach will probably never be possible, given the nature of the available sources. The foregoing pages have focused on farming, which, along with animal husbandry, was the activity in which the vast majority of medieval Ethiopians were certainly engaged. But the rural economy also included craftspeople – blacksmiths, metalworkers, potters, weavers, tanners, carpenters – and our survey of it can conclude with them. The received wisdom holds that craftspeople are traditionally the dispossessed. Lacking access to land, the essential source of both material and symbolic wealth, they are marginalized and sometimes explicitly outcast groups, although possessed of specialized skills and providing useful and sometimes sophisticated and beautiful objects for their fellows. The Betä Ǝsra‌ʾel may have served as both example and template for this academic model. According to the current scholarly consensus, the Betä Ǝsra‌ʾel can be described in their origins as an indigenous Ethiopian group located in the Sǝmen region of northwest Ethiopia who adhered to a strict observance of the Pentateuch, and who first appear in the Gǝʿǝz sources in the fourteenth century as a group “like Jews.” Perhaps affected by the era’s monastic reform fervor, they were certainly involved in the territorial expansion of the Christian rulers, sometimes as allies, more often as antagonists. In the early fifteenth century, when King Yǝsḥaq (1414–29) waged war on and defeated the governor of Sǝmen, he reportedly demanded the Betä Ǝsra‌ʾel’s conversion, on pain of losing their rǝst rights: if they refused, they would be “Falaša,” literally “landless, wandering,” a term that later became synonymous (for hostile authors) with the Betä Ǝsra‌ʾel. In subsequent centuries they came increasingly

61  Steven Kaplan, Aron Zysow, and Alessandro Gori, “Alms”, Eae 1 (2003): 209–211. 62  John Iliffe, The African Poor: a history (Cambridge, 1987): 9–29.

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to specialize as weavers, smiths, and potters, while suffering a parallel social stigmatization.63 Yet the Betä Ǝsra‌ʾel were obviously a particular case, religiously distinct from the Orthodox Christian majority, and are unlikely to represent the status of all craftsmen in the medieval kingdom. Unfortunately, scholarly research on this segment of medieval society is extremely scant, and those contemporary societies in the south of modern-day Ethiopia that have been studied are not necessarily congruent with the medieval case.64 Considering the case of weavers, for instance, gives a totally different view of what could have been a craft society. According to Michael Gervers, it is likely that cotton was not cultivated in Ethiopia but rather imported in antiquity and the early Middle Ages. From the twelfth century onwards, cotton could have been cultivated in Ethiopia and used to make cotton fibers. This dating is inferred from the likely date of settlement of Muslims in Ethiopia, since they were themselves farmers and weavers, and since Muslim communities were the most likely vectors of the Indian terms and techniques of cotton manufacture found in Ethiopia. For instance, the term šamma, meaning woven pieces of textile, would have Sanskrit origins, and the pit-treadle looms used in Ethiopia, which are unique in Africa, derive from an Asian (Indian or Chinese) model. A specific textual source lends confirmation to this date: Marco Polo, in the late thirteenth century, testified that cotton clothing was produced and woven in Ethiopia.65 Some 250 years later, Alvares mentioned large pieces of “hairy” cotton that were given as tribute and were part of the decoration of the king’s quarters. He called them basutos, a rendering of the Amharic word bǝzzǝt.66 63  James Quirin correlates the loss of lands with the specialization in craftmanship, based on the oral traditions he collected in 1975 and the Short Chronicle mentioning the war of King Yǝsḥaq against the Ethiopian Jews: see James Quirin, The Evolution of the Ethiopian Jews. A History of the Beta Israel (Falasha) to 1920 (Philadelphia, 1992), 63–65. See also the synthesis of Steven Kaplan, “Betä Ǝsra‌ʾel,” in EAe 1 (2003), 552–559, at 552–553, citing further literature. 64  Hermann Amborn has devoted a lifetime of study to the Gujji-Konso cluster. For a recent synthesis of his findings see his “Mobility, Knowledge and Power: Craftsmen in the Borderland,” in Changing Identifications and Alliances in North-East Africa, vol. 1, Ethiopia and Kenya, ed. Gunther Schlee and E. Watson (New York, 2013), 113–31. See also Judith Todd, “Iron production among the Dimi of Ethiopia,” in African Iron-Working, ed. R. Haaland and P. L. Shinnie (Oslo, 1985), 88–101. 65  Michael Gervers, “Cotton and Cotton Weaving in Meroitic Nubia and Medieval Ethiopia,” Textile History 21 (1990): 13–30. 66   Beckingham-Huntingford, Prester John, 1: 283, 2: 425–427. For royal gift in bǝzzǝt, see for instance Perruchon, Chronique de Zâr’a Ya‘eqôb, 160 or the royal songs in Amharic, on which see Ignazio Guidi, “Le canzoni geez-amariña in onore di re abissini,” Rendiconti della Reale Accademia dei Lincei 5, 2 (1889): 53–66.

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As for industry, mining is the only one for which some research illuminates the scene, and indicates the limits of our present knowledge. Despite clear evidence from the early sixteenth century that copper and iron mines were worked and were a source of wealth,67 no attempt has yet been made to locate the mines in the landscape or investigate who extracted the ore and how it was transformed. How were ploughshares and nails (to name just two items necessary for daily rural work) produced, and by whom? The specificity of the metallurgical process is such that only small endogamous groups are generally able to preserve and transmit it, and we may presume that this was the case in medieval Ethiopia as well, but the identities and social status of such groups are unknown.68 Gold and silver mining has attracted somewhat more attention for the ancient and medieval periods. Silver may have been mined in antiquity. Some mines in Tǝgray contain both silver and gold, and the latter was certainly extracted, raising the possibility that Aksumite metallurgists were able to separate silver from gold. In the Middle Ages, however, silver seems not to have been mined; several sources refer to the melting of foreign silver coinage to obtain silver.69 As for gold, it was certainly mined in antiquity, and was indeed one of the luxury products upon which the Aksumite kingdom built its power. The main research question to date has concerned locating its sources. Recent studies conclude that these were several. Tǝgray, especially the area around Aksum, has been a source of gold since antiquity, by both mining and river spanning.70 The southwestern regions of Damot, Ǧanǧäro and Gamo were also exploited in the Middle Ages,71 and might be identified with the famous “Sasu” mentioned by the Greek traveler Cosmas in the sixth century.72 Whether the gold of Sǝnnar, well attested during the nineteenth century, was already available in the Middle Ages is an open question.

67  See Ras Sǝmʿon’s book, quoted at the beginning of this essay. 68  David Killick, “What Do We Know about African Iron Working?” Journal of African Archaeology 2, 1 (2004): 97–112. 69  Wolbert Smidt and Nguse Gebremichael, “Did the Gold of the Aksumites Originate in Tigray? A Report on Ongoing Research on Local Traditions of Gold Mining in Tigray,” Ityopis 2 (2012): 181–92, at 182, quoting unpublished research by Wolfgang Hahn. 70  Smidt and Nguse Gebremichael, “Did the Gold,” 181–92. 71  Ayda Bouanga, “Gold, Slaves, and Trading Routes in Southern Blue Nile (Abbay) Societies, Ethiopia, 13th–16th Centuries),” Northeast African Studies 17, 2 (2017): 31–60. 72  Yohannes Gebre Selassie reviewed the historiography on this question in an essay of 2012, “Where is the ancient gold market of Sasou?” (unpublished), and presented his findings orally in October 2018 at the 20th International Conference for Ethiopian Studies in Mekelle. He concludes that Sasu cannot be in southeastern Sudan, as has been suggested.

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What about objects made of gold in Ethiopia? Were they a royal privilege, as the reading of the sources could suggest?73 Precious metals are a fitting end to this survey of the rural economy, for they were of course intended less for local consumption than for an elite market throughout and beyond the kingdom. Such circulation of goods will be addressed in the second part of this essay below. Before leaving the rural economy, however, we should like to emphasize that ways of cultivating and raising animals, and of consuming those products, are a sure sign of cultural identity, but that cultural identities are as much in contact as the products that define them. If we are interested in challenging the notion of an “immobile” and unchanging peasant existence, one approach could be to look for and acknowledge the slow changes introduced by such contacts. 2

Regional and Global Trade

A very mundane way to introduce the necessary but largely invisible movement of rural products is to observe that a common measurement unit for grain and cereals was the “load,” expressed with different terms according to the carrier (human or pack-animal) and the language. The diversity of Ethiopian weights and measurements has been examined in detail, but not historicized.74 Agricultural goods were certainly exchanged over short as well as long distances. Many local markets were to be found all over the country, for petty trade. This ability to transform any space into a local market is particularly visible in Alvares’s description of the royal camp. Wherever it settled, a market immediately appeared, gathering people from all over the region: Christians sold consumption goods, while Muslims had a bigger market place where they traded imported and manufactured goods.75 Big markets-towns also existed. They linked the lowlands and the highlands, or were located at the crossroads of different trade routes. These markets were 73  Raymond A. Silverman and Neal W. Sobania, “Gold and Silver at the Crossroads in Highland Ethiopia,” International Journal of Ethiopian Studies 1, 2 (2004): 82–109. 74  Richard Pankhurst, “A Preliminary History of Ethiopian Measures, Weights, and Values (Part 1),” Journal of Ethiopian Studies 7, 1 (1969): 31–54; idem, “A Preliminary History of Ethiopian Measures Weights and Values (Part 2),” Journal of Ethiopian Studies 7, 2 (1969): 99–164; idem, “A Preliminary History of Ethiopian Measures, Weights, and Values (Part 3),” Journal of Ethiopian Studies 8, 1 (1970): 45–85. 75   Beckingham-Huntingford, Prester John, 2: 442 (markets at the royal camp), 1: 105 and 129 (fair at Däbarwa), 1: 198 (weekly market in Qorqor, Tǝgray), 1: 251 (Christian and the Muslim markets in Wällo), 2: 381 (market near Mäkanä Sǝllase).

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open to local trade, but they were best known as stops for the long-distance caravans. Some important market places are still today located in Bati, between the Amhara highlands and Awan, or in Alǝyyu-Amba in Ifat.76 Important medieval locations include Däbarwa in present-day Eritrea; Gändäbälo, probably located in the eastern part of today’s Šäwa;77 “Manadelei” in Tǝgray and/ or Doba‌ʾa country; “Ancona” in Angot, where the caravans gathered and appointed a captain called nägad ras;78 and Kalǧur, the city located at the end of the trade route from Zäylaʿ, where Muslim merchants settled.79 Bärara, often presented in sources as the Christian capital city in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, was also an important market. It can be located in southern Šäwa, between Mount Yǝrär and the Wäčäča range, south of Addis Ababa, where various ruins have been identified, in an area perfectly fit for linking the different political and economic entities of the time.80 Long-distance trade linked Ethiopia and its southern and western peripheries to the Red Sea coast. Ships left the Yemeni coast between October and February, under the prevailing southerly winds. The other half of the year, northerly winds favor the boats’ return toward the Arabian coast, and from there to Egypt, the Middle East and Asia. These “trade winds” have made Red Sea navigation a dynamic factor in the prehistory and history of the Horn of Africa, including Ethiopia. After a period of decline subsequent to the major changes in the sub-region during the seventh century, maritime trade was revived by Muslim merchants. As early as the ninth century, the Dahlak Islands, 76  Several French doctoral theses in Ethnobotanics and History focused on this area linking the two cultural, political and ecological zones, and showed the complex dynamics linking the highlands and the lowlands. See Élisabeth Chouvin, “Gestion des ressources végétales et pratiques paysannes en Éthiopie Centrale: le cas des oléagineux” (Ph.D diss., Muséum national d’histoire naturelle, 2003); Clarisse Guiral, “Diversité des jardins et stratégies paysannes le long d’un gradient altitudinal en Éthiopie Centrale” (Ph.D diss., Muséum national d’histoire naturelle, 2009); Ahmed Hassen Omer, “Islam, commerce et politique dans l’Ifat (Éthiopie centrale) au XIXe siècle: l’émergence d’une ville carrefour, Aleyyu Amba” (Ph.D diss., Université de Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, 2007). 77  Bertrand Hirsch and François-Xavier Fauvelle-Aymar, “Cités oubliées. Réflexions sur l’histoire urbaine de l’Éthiopie médiévale (XIe–XVIe siècles),” Journal des africanistes 74, 1–2 (2004): 299–314; François-Xavier Fauvelle-Aymar et al., “Reconnaissance de trois villes musulmanes de l’époque médiévale dans l’Ifat,” Annales d’Éthiopie 22 (2006): 133–178. 78   Beckingham-Huntingford, Prester John, 1: 194 and 200. 79   Franz-Christoph Muth, “Kwelgora,” in EAe 3 (2007), 465. 80  Richard Pankhurst and Hartwig Breternitz, “Barara, the Royal City of 15th and Early 16th Century (Ethiopia). Medieval and Other Early Settlements Between Wechecha Range and Mt Yerer: Results from a Recent Survey,” Annales d’Éthiopie 24 (2009): 209–49. A different hypothesis has been raised by Derat, “La passe d’Aheyyā Faǧǧ” who suggested that Bärara could be the name of the semi-nomadic royal camp and not a fixed settlement.

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located off the coast of present-day Eritrea, became the main point of inward and outward flow of goods. A road was (re?)opened from the coast to the northern highlands. Epigraphic funeral stelae from the ninth century, written in a beautiful script, testify that rich sponsors and skilled craftsmen, still linked with the Arabian peninsula, established themselves there in order to trade with Ethiopia. They were successful enough for, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the Dahlak archipelago was the seat of an autonomous dynasty.81 Toward the end of the thirteenth century, this northern trade route was largely superseded by a new, east-west route passing from Šäwa to the port of Zäylaʿ in present-day Somalia (and, to a much lesser extent, the port of Awan to its north). The reasons for this may relate to the rise of the Muslim Waläsmaʿ dynasty of Ifat, through which the new route passed, and to issues of taxation. Indeed, this new road offered better access to Muslim traders, who did not have to cross or approach Christian territories. Further, unlike goods passing through the Dahlak Islands, those passing through Zäylaʿ and Awan do not seem to have been taxed by the Rasūlid rulers of Yemen.82 As Taddesse Tamrat and others have argued, control of trade routes was among the issues at stake in the conflicts opposing the Solomonic dynasty of the highlands with the Waläsmaʿ sultans.83 Their border was both a religious frontier and a crucial contact zone, and stability between the two kingdoms was based on an accepted partition of the wealth generated by long-distance trade. As a Gǝʿǝz text recounting the war between King ʿAmdä Ṣǝyon and the Waläsmaʿ general Ṣabr al-Dīn in 1332 has ʿAmdä Ṣǝyon complain, “You took away the commodities belonging to me obtained in exchange for the large quantity of gold and silver I had entrusted to the merchants. And you imprisoned the traders who did business for me.”84 The third major trading power in the region, as recently emphasized by Ayda Bouanga, was kingdom of Damot, which controlled access to the southern and western regions and their exportable goods. A dynasty of kings, who bore the title of motälämi, controlled a vast network of smaller kingdoms such Wäräb, Ǝndägäbṭän, and Ǝnnarya that were virtual vassal territories. Damot organized the trade of luxury goods,

81   Fauvelle-Aymar and Hirsch, eds., Espaces musulmans, 21, 24. 82  Éric Vallet, L’Arabie marchande: état et commerce sous les sultans rasūlides du Yémen, 626– 858 1229–1454 (Paris, 2010), 420–21. 83  Taddesse Tamrat, Church and State, 125. 84  Manfred Kropp, Der siegreiche Feldzug des Königs ʿAmda-Sẹyon gegen die Muslime in Adal im Jahre 1332 N. Chr., 2 vols., CSCO 538–539, SAe 99–100, (Louvain, 1994), vol. 1 (text), 19, vol. 2 (trans.), 14.

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until, around the fourteenth century, it was dismantled and absorbed by its two powerful rivals, the Christian and the Muslim states.85 In Gǝʿǝz, merchants were designated by the word nägadi. The etymology of this word is semitic.86 It might be fruitfull to compare it with the word nakhuda, the Persian word meaning “shipowner” or “ship-captain” that was adopted into Arabic.87 The virtual monopoly enjoyed by Muslim maritime traders on the Red Sea would be well demonstrated by the history of this term in the different languages employed all over the Red Sea. Indeed, while Christian, Muslim and local-religious political powers all sought to take advantage of long-distance trade, the men who were leading the business were mostly Muslims. However, one has to be careful not to essentialize these groups of merchants, in particular by characterizing them solely by their religion. Professional and interpersonal relations were the major qualities of successful traders. Belonging to a confession or an ethnic group played a role but did not do it all.88 The trade was mainly in the hands of Yemeni merchants. Still, many eunuchs of Ethiopian origin, sold initially as slaves, became commercial agents for their Yemeni masters. Some merchants were Ethiopian Muslims, belonging or not to this category of eunuch-slaves (or former slaves) and known outside of Ethiopia under different nisba, such as Ǧabarti and Zaylaʿī.89 Among the merchants who came from Aden and whose names are known, some were from the Middle East: one was from Damascus and was said to be a karimi merchant, i.e. a merchant trading between Asia and the Red Sea and specializing in the spice trade towards Egypt; he died in Ethiopia at the end of the thirteenth century.90 Another example from the early fifteenth century is Nūr al-Dīn ʿAli. His father was a Persian merchant who became provost of the merchants of Cairo, and two of his brothers became karimi merchants. But ʿAli went further south to the court of King Yǝsḥaq (1414–29) in Ethiopia, where he 85   Ayda Bouanga, “Le royaume du Damot : Enquête sur une puissance politique et économique de la Corne de l’Afrique (XIIIe siècle),” Annales d’Éthiopie 29 (2014): 27–58. 86  Leslau, Comparative Dictionary: 391 reports that Dillman and Nöldeke connects it with the Syriac word nǝgaḏ that means “flow”. 87  Ranabir Chakravarti, “Nakhudas and Nauvittakas: Ship-Owning Merchants in the West Coast of India (c. AD 1000–1500),” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 43, 1 (2000): 34–64; Gabriel Ferrand, “L’élément persan dans les textes nautiques arabes,” Journal Asiatique 204 (1924): 193–257, at 238–39. 88  Francesca Trivellato, The Familiarity of Strangers: The Sephardic Diaspora, Livorno, and Cross-Cultural Trade in the Early Modern Period, (New Haven, 2009). 89  Enrico Cerulli, “L’Etiopia medievale in alcuni brani di scrittori arabi, ” RSE 3 (1943): 272– 294, at 286, 290. 90  Gaston Wiet, “Les marchands d’épices sous les sultans mamlouks,” Cahiers d’histoire égyptienne 7 (1955): 81–147, at 105.

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stayed. He traded in weapons and coats of mail for the court, and he was famous for making Christian crosses encrusted with precious stones.91 Christian Armenian merchants may also have been active in Ethiopia.92 But whatever the influence of Christian merchants on long-distance trade in Ethiopia, the attempt by King Lǝbnä Dǝngǝl (1509–1540) to charter his own ships and negotiate directly with Yemen was a failure.93 Even earlier, Lǝbnä Dǝngǝl had tried to convince the Portuguese to establish trading posts in Massawa and, if successful, also in Zaylaʿ. Even a king could not sidestep the entrenched networks that controlled this trade. Regarding the traded products themselves, silk and linen fabrics were imported from India and Egypt.94 The Ethiopian interest in fabrics, especially Egyptian, is confirmed in documents of the Cairo genizah and other sources.95 Chinese, Indian, and Near Eastern goods also arrived in the Red Sea ports.96 Pepper and various spices (except ginger, produced abundantly in Ethiopia) were also among the goods brought to Ethiopia. The Portuguese embassy offered some pepper to King Lǝbnä Dǝngǝl, and during his travel, Alvares used it as small currency.97 After the fourteenth century, firearms, gunpowder and objects of war were among the imported goods in ever greater demand. As for the products exported from Ethiopia, the most valuable was doubtless the gold which, after the creation of the west-east trade route in the thirteenth century, mainly came from the southwestern provinces. Ivory, from elephant hunting, was also a profitable business.98 Then came civet musk, extracted from the glands of male and female civet-cats. Here again, though we know it was a luxury good, nothing is known about the men and women who took charge 91  Ibid., 121–123. 92  Some contemporary sources described Mateus, the ambassador sent to Portugal by Ǝleni, as an Armenian merchant, which attests at least to the possibility of Armenian merchants active in Ethiopia in the early sixteenth century. See Leonardo Cohen, “Mateus,” in EAe 3 (2007), 865–66. 93  René Basset, ed. and trans., Histoire de la conquête de l’Abyssinie (XVIe siècle) par Chihab Eddin Aḥmed Ben ʿAbd el Qâder Arab-Faqih (Paris, 1897–1909), 70–71. 94  For a slightly later period, see also Michael Gervers, “The Portuguese Import of Luxury Textiles to Ethiopia in the 16th and 17th centuries and their Subsequent Artistic Influence,” in The Indigenous and the Foreign in Christian Ethiopian Art. On Portuguese-Ethiopian Contacts in the 16th–17th centuries, ed. Manuel João Ramos and Isabel Boavida (Aldershot, 2004), 121–134. 95  See the synthesis by Vallet, Arabie marchande, 413. 96  Wiet, “Les marchands d’épices,” 84 and passim. 97   Beckingham-Huntingford, Prester John, especially 1: 273–280, 2: 407–408, as well as 1: 99, 129, 174, 229, 248, 250, 296–297; 2: 374, 413. 98  Basset, Histoire de la conquête, 31; see also various Christian hagiographies cited by Taddesse Tamrat, Church and State, 88.

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of the complicated process of extraction (it takes a year for one civet-cat to produce enough substance to fill the content of a horn). Like gold-miners and elephant hunters, a highly specialized technical environment, likely linked to a specific social group, was necessary to sustain this economy. Another example is the export of mules. These luxury mounts were highly prized by Yemeni rulers, and their production required specific skills as well as a reproductive stock of donkeys and horses. Another export product was tanned skins, and also fat sheep known as bärabir that were bred on the Somali coast and exported mainly to Aden.99 Incense, though an important Ethiopian export in antiquity, may no longer have been produced for export in the Middle Ages (its primary source is southern Arabia). Finally, “Ethiopian slaves” were traditionally much prized on the international market. They were bought in Yemen and Arabia but went as far as Egypt and Persia to the north, and as far as India to the east.100 Their exact provenance is difficult to determine, as they were often called after the first place where they were sold, most of the time Damot. But “Damot slaves” were rarely from Damot itself, being rather raided and/or bought in regions to its west and south.101 Ethiopia was also well known for its production of eunuchs, castrated boys of the highest value. Al-ʿUmarī reported that they were bought, in unidentified locations, then brought to be castrated in Wašlu (a site whose location remains obscure, but according to the author near Hadiyya), then taken and treated in Hadiyya, where those who survived were then exported for sale.102 Though the ancient Aksumite kings famously minted their own coins, this practice ended with the Aksumites’ decline in the seventh century and was never re-established in the Middle Ages. What were then the valuable goods that served as media of exchange during the medieval period? Even if no coinage was struck in Ethiopia, were coins still used, or was there only barter? And where is the border between barter and currency? It is generally admitted that a currency is “universally” accepted, whereas in a barter process, the exchanged good may be refused. This definition is useful and might reveal a semi-currency in Ethiopia, even if not made of coined pieces of metal. Yemenis and merchants along the Red Sea route traded in dinars, a silver currency minted in Egypt. Dinars do not appear in medieval Christian sources, however, nor do Yemeni sources mention any gold or local metal currencies on 99  Vallet, Arabie marchande, 403. 100  Derat, “Chrétiens et musulmans d’Éthiopie face à la traite,” 119–48; Giulia Bonacci and Alexander Meckelburg, “Revisiting Slavery and the Slave Trade in Ethiopia,” Northeast African Studies 17, 2 (2017): 5–30. 101  Bouanga, “Gold, Slaves, and Trading Routes.” 102   Al-ʿUmarī, Masālik, 16–17.

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Ethiopian territory. According to the latter, it was barter that dominated, except that for current exchanges, there seems to have existed among the Muslims of Ethiopia a currency of low value, the ḥaras, made of debris of money of poor quality. The apparent disdain for minted currency was so strong that the Ethiopian population may have ignored silver dinars’ monetary value to hoard the coins or reuse the metal.103 Al-ʿUmarī, relying on Muslim Ethiopian informants, was more precise and nuanced. For one, he stated that Egyptian coins, i.e. silver dinars, were used in Ifat. This is not surprising, since Ifat was at the end of the Muslim-controlled trade routes, where traders could exchange goods in major markets with Egyptian silver currency. Al-ʿUmarī adds that in the Dawāro, ʿArābabni and Šarḫā sultanates, there was an iron currency (ḥakūna), and that elsewhere, in Amḥara, Bāli and Dāra, barter dominated. Ḥakunu was indeed the name given to metal bars, the length of a needle but having three times its thickness. It would have taken from 5000 to 7000 ḥakunu to buy a cow. The exchange rate would be about 3000 ḥakunu for 1 dinar.104 Almeida in the early seventeenth century still mentioned the ḥakunu as currency in Ǝnnarya.105 If ḥakunu seem to have been used mainly in the southern kingdoms, another valuable good functioned as a universal medium of exchange all over the Horn: salt bars, or amole.106 An amole was standardized in shape and weight and could be subdivided. A half-bar was called a kurman; a quarter-bar had its own name and value. Randomly broken bars had less value than a proper half or quarter. These two distinctive criteria – being accepted over a very large area, and being dividable – indicate that salt bars were more than “primitive money,” as Richard Pankhurst labelled them, but a currency in their own right. The question remains whether salt could be gathered in large quantities, and in a way “capitalized.” It is not impossible that salt stores existed, even if mention of them has not yet been found in the sources. Another unsolved question concerns who controlled the extraction of salt and its trade. One hypothesis is

103  Vallet, Arabie marchande, 406. 104   Franz-Christoph Muth, “Hakunu,” in EAe 2 (2005), 975. 105  Richard Pankhurst, “‘Primitive money’ in Ethiopia,”Journal de la Société des Africanistes 32, 2 (1962): 213–248. 106  The bibliography on salt in Ethiopia is abundant, especially for the contemporary period. The most recent and complete synthesis is Wolbert G. C. Smidt, “Die äthiopischen Salzbarren oder ‘Amolé’ in der Tradition und sozialen Ordnung des Hochlandes,” in In kaiserlichem Auftrag: die Deutsche Aksum-Expedition 1906 unter Enno Littmann, vol. 3: Ethnographische und geschichtliche Untersuchungen, Nachträge und Indices, ed. Steffen Wenig (Wiesbaden, 2017), 235–246.

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that the Doba‌ʾa people long played a role in the salt trade.107 And furthermore, what was exchanged at the extraction places? Several studies mention that the ʿAfar people extracted salt, without questioning in any manner the immense power that the control of this resource may have given them.108 To a lesser degree, textiles (šamma) have been another common medium of exchange. Different types of textiles could be bartered, but printed cottons from India, often dyed indigo, were highly prized. They were called mäḥabiš (“black”) after the dark color of the indigo dye, and were used to pay the holders of the caravans.109 Then comes again gold, at the crossroads between metallic money, whose value depends on its weight on precious metal, and exchangeable goods with a universal acceptance. In large markets, such as Wiz in Wäläqa, trade was mainly in gold.110 For instance, Yemeni merchants traded cotton for gold. How was gold weighted and measured? From the sixteenth century onward, the main unit was the waqet (from the Arabic wiqīyya). Half a waqet was an alad. The influence of Arabic on long distance trade, including gold, was so critical that this term, wiqīyya also give birth to the European “ounce.” But alternative units did exist. For instance, King Galäwdewos in the mid-sixteenth century spent 10,000 mädalw of gold to create a manuscript library.111 The regular exchange value of a waqet of gold might have varied. To give a lower exchange-rate, one can refer to the Short Chronicle of Lǝbnä Dǝngǝl that states that after the looting of Amba Gǝšän by the Muslim soldiers and the dispersal of the royal treasures, gold was found everywhere and a waqet of gold was exchanged for 30 bars of salt and was the price of an ox.112 Who reaped the benefits of this transaction economy? On the Muslim side, the scanty documentation reveals that Yemeni merchants paid a form of tax – a share of the goods – in exchange for protection, to the nazīl, “a man who

107  Fesseha Berhe, “Regional History and Ethnohistory. Gerhard Rohlfs and other Germanophone Researchers and a Forgotten Ethnic Group, the Doba,” Ityopis, extra issues (2015): 126–137. 108  Abir has studied the way Tigrean people have controlled the salt extraction and trade during the zämänä mäsafənt, but nothing similar has been done for earlier periods. Mordechai Abir, “Salt, Trade and Politics in Ethiopia in the ‘Zämänä Mäsafent,’” Journal of Ethiopian Studies 4, 2 (1966): 1–10. Nevertheless, the present author’s ignorance of studies about ʿAfar traditions might have left aside some interesting data. 109  Vallet, Arabie marchande, 413, 415. 110  Basset, Histoire de la conquête, 235. 111  William Eliot Conzelman, ed. and trans., Chronique de Galâwdêwos (Claudius), roi d’Éthiopie (Paris, 1895), 59 (text), 156 (trans.). 112  René Basset, Études sur l’histoire d’Éthiopie (Paris, 1882), 17–18, 109.

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is among the notables in Abyssinia [Muslim].”113 But who are these nazīl: the regional governors (garād), the sheikh of Zäylaʿ, the caravan leaders? Here again, we see links that are close to interpersonal links, more than a centralized, formalized administration. And what about the Christian side? In the mid-sixteenth century, King Gälawdewos enacted a decree (awaǧ) to regulate the slave trade after the jihad. This exceptional text shows that at this time, the Christian king controlled the caravan trade within his kingdom. Christian dignitaries with the rank of azzaž (be they mäkwannən, mäsafənt or səyyum) controlled the caravans of goods along the roads.114 This implies that customs posts were placed along the main trade routes, and indeed, a Gǝʿǝz verb exists to signify “collect customs duties” (qäräṣä). The Ahəyya Fäǧǧ mountain pass, between Šäwa and Amhara, is one of them and Marie-Laure Derat presents this pass as a “defensive and economic lock.”115 She raises the question of customs and taxes located at these “doors” (bärr) to the high plateau, and examines the testimony of Alvares who said that upon leaving Amhara and entering Šäwa, at Ahəyya Fäǧǧ and Bädbaǧ respectively, his caravan had to pay taxes.116 But no information can be found, either here or in other sources, about who collected the taxes, how they were estimated, or in what species or of what nature they should be. The fact that the Christian governors were in charge of controlling the tax on trade is but a small part of their duties as tax collectors. The title of the governors of Šäwa and Amhara, the main provinces forming the core of the medieval Christian kingdom, was ṣäḥafe lam, literally “s/he who records the cows.” In the mid-fifteenth century, King Zärʾa Yaʿəqob appointed his daughters to these posts in an attempt to control these crucial regions, and he also added Damot to this administration, replacing the title of the motälämi with that of ṣahafe lam.117 Alvares considered ṣahafe lam to be true provincial “kings.”118 Through this title, one can perceive the importance of collecting the tribute for the king in the phenomenon of the delegation of authority. The Christian royal authority exercised its power and maintained its wealth by levying taxes on the provinces in very different ways depending on the main religion of the political entity with which it dealt. Christian provinces did provide tribute to the king according seemingly to a pre-defined contract. The 113  Vallet, Arabie marchande, 416 114  Habtamu Mengistie Tegegne, “The Edict of King Gälawdéwos Against the Illegal Slave Trade in Christians, Ethiopia, 1548 – Featured Source,” The Medieval Globe 2 (2017): 73–114. 115  Derat, “La passe d’Aheyyā Faǧǧ,” 86. 116   Beckingham-Huntingford, Prester John, 1: 259 117  Perruchon, Les chroniques, 111–112. 118   Beckingham – Huntingford, Prester John, 1: 257

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tribute was brought annually to the court, in front of all the deputies of all the provinces. This very formal ceremony at the royal camp was vividly described by Alvares at the beginning of the sixteenth century. At this time, the royal tribute of Goǧǧam amounted to 3000 mules, 3000 horses and 3000 large cotton garments.119 The joint presence of the different governors must have strengthened the feeling of a common identity to these political elite. The tribute was, as we have seen, designated by the word gǝbr. This has a double signification, as it also means “banquet,” and Marie-Laure Derat has analyzed the banquet in its double role as feast and tribute-collection.120 Once a year, at the end of the rainy season, the king levied edible products and redistributed them to his soldiers, ministers, and high dignitaries, in a double gesture of power: he was able to collect the necessary products from the peasantry, most probably through the institutional network of churches and monasteries, and he redistributed it. The Order of the banquet (Śǝrʿatä gǝbr), in use from the beginning of the fifteenth century, describes the management and the menu of this royal performance of power.121 Muslim polities were also tributary to the Christian kings. Surprisingly, the Christian texts do not discuss it, but various Muslim sources do. According to al-ʿUmarī, the Muslim leaders who accepted the dominion of the Christian king paid him in tribute.122 This was still the case one century later, when al-Maqrīzī got information from Egyptian merchant that this tax paid by Muslims to the Christian king was considered illegal and unholy according to the norms of Islam.123 Things were different when it came to non-Christian provinces. One of the Amharic royal songs in honor of King Yǝsḥaq (1414–29) lists the southern provinces with their tribute in kind: gold, horses, cotton, etc.124 This song glorifies the might of the king who can levy tribute upon an immense territory. It might give a false impression on the regularity of the tribute levied on non-Christian provinces. Indeed, other sources testify that the royal power could ransack pagan provinces at its might. It could enslave or kill the population and plunder their wealth without limit. Taxation could even be presented as an advantage to the non-Christian population. In his attempt to reestablish royal control on the southern regions, King Gälawdewos spent three years in the Hadiyya 119  Ibid., 1: 117, 2: 425–30. 120   Marie-Laure Derat, “Le banquet à la cour du roi d’Éthiopie au XV e siècle. Dons forcés et contreparties,” Hypothèses 5, 1 (2002): 267–274. 121  Kropp, “The Serʿatä Gebr.” 122   Al-ʿUmarī, Masālik, 2. 123  Vallet, Arabie marchande, 419 124  Guidi, “Le canzoni,” 53–66.

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and Gafat territories, and after ransacking and enslaving the population, he nominated the head of their administration and imposed taxes (ṣäbahtä).125 Still, at the end of the sixteenth century, the azzaž of Śärṣ́ä Dǝngǝl’s court, who were high dignitaries in charge of royal finances, wanted to prevent the king from evangelizing the followers of local religions to their south, as this would deprive the kingdom of substantial income, since the tax levied on Christian populations was much lighter.126 Collecting taxes implies that merchandise is, at some point, gathered in quantity, whether by the farmers themselves or by the different collectors on their way to the summit of the hierarchical pyramid, the royal court. One of the many unknown questions concerning the rural economy of the highlands regards the stocking of cereals and grain. Farmers have to stock their own production, of course, and this is done in a private way. But what about collective or institutional granaries? In the absence of towns, were there officials, all along the royal domain, in charge of collecting and stocking grains? The recent analysis of a taxation list from Tǝgray, begun in the fifteenth century and maintained until the beginning of the twentieth, indicates that the “royal house” (betä nǝguś) could have been such an institution of collective granary. This list was established to ensure that the fertile sedimentary plains west of Aksum contributed dry food (cereals, grains, oil) for the betä nǝguś, and then added perishable products (for instance, cows) for specific occasions such as commemorative feasts. This separation of perishable and non-perishable goods seems to indicate that there was some way of stocking non-perishable goods. But to whose profit? It could have been intended only for the itinerant royal court, when it came to Aksum. But perhaps it was also for distributing to the needy, in the case of famine for instance. The image of the king nourishing his people is rare in the Ethiopian sources, however.127 Much more common are the descriptions of the king’s kätäma levying tribute on the peasantry wherever it goes. To conclude, let us hope that the image of an archaic, never evolving and isolated country is no longer acceptable. Ethiopian Christian, Muslim and local-religious kingdoms were strong economic powers, deeply connected in the world trade. The political and economic evolutions at a macro level did impact Ethiopia, and Ethiopian internal evolutions might have had consequences 125  Conzelman, Chronique de Galâwdêwos, 141 (trans). 126  Carlo Conti Rossini, ed. and trans., Historia regis Sarṣa (Malak Sagad). Accedit historia gentis Galla, curante I. Guidi, 2 vols., CSCO 2nd ser., 3 (Paris, 1907), repr. as CSCO 20–21, SAe 3–4 (Louvain, 1961–62), at vol. 1 (text), 167, vol. 2 (trans.), 180. 127  Conzelman, Chronique de Galâwdêwos, 27 (text.), 138 (trans.).

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on a large scale. Taking this into account might be one of the further trends of research on this topic. Nonetheless, Ethiopian societies were deeply rooted in local practices, in all their diversity, be they agricultural, pastoral or related to craft and art. Here again, many issues (such as mining, the storage of goods, craftsmanship, and so on) remain understudied, if not untouched. Combining micro-analysis with an attention to macro-economic trends will definitely deepen our knowledge of medieval Ethiopian societies.

chapter 15

Medieval Ethiopian Diasporas Samantha Kelly Medieval Ethiopians’ migration to and settlement in foreign lands is a topic that has been broached, sometimes as an explicit focus and sometimes in passing, by scholars of quite different specializations, and not always in the context of Ethiopian Studies.1 Generally speaking, three types of medieval Ethiopian settlement abroad have been treated. The first type comprises free Christian Ethiopians settled around the Mediterranean; the second, free Muslim Ethiopians settled in neighboring Islamic lands; the third, enslaved Ethiopians, primarily but not exclusively followers of local religions, who were forcibly transferred to locations from Egypt to India. All have been termed “diasporas,” though each possessed only some of the characteristics associated with that term, and often to different degrees.2 Free Christians and Muslims abroad, for instance, maintained strong connections with their homeland; the enslaved could not. A sense of distinctiveness from the host society was arguably weakest for Muslim Ethiopians living in other Muslim lands; conversely, the enslaved, usually widely dispersed and separated from their countrymen, were in general least able to meet a third oft-cited criterion, that of forming communal solidarities in the diaspora. Added to these are the obvious

1  Some of the research for this essay was conducted under the auspices of a fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies in 2018. I thank my fellow participants in the workshop at La Fondation des Treilles in March 2018 for their valuable comments and suggestions on a draft of this essay. A number of colleagues have generously shared as-yet unpublished works and papers or suggested further references, as noted below. 2  On definitions of diaspora, see Robin Cohen, Global Diasporas: An Introduction (Seattle, 1997), 26; Edward Alpers, “The African Diaspora in the Indian Ocean: A Comparative Perspective,” in The African Diaspora in the Indian Ocean, ed. Shihan Jayasuriya and Richard Pankhurst (Trenton, NJ, 2003), 19–50, at 19–22. The term, regularly applied to enslaved Africans (including Ethiopians), has recently been applied as well to free Christian and free Muslim Ethiopian communities in the Middle Ages: see Matteo Salvadore, “African Cosmopolitanism in the Early Modern Mediterranean: The Diasporic Life of Yohannes, the Ethiopian Pilgrim Who Became a Counter-Reformation Bishop,” Journal of African History 58 (2017): 61–83; Julian Loiseau, “Abyssinia at al-Azhar: Muslim Students from the Horn of Africa in Late Medieval Cairo,” Northeast African Studies 19, 1 (2019): 47–70.

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differences in legal status and religious affiliation that distinguished one or more groups from the other(s). The specificities of each diasporic group are most significant, and in what follows each will be treated in turn. At the same time, it seems an opportune moment to bring together the historiographies that have traced the different types of diasporas largely independently of each other, and to propose a perspective that encompasses all three as facets of a broader phenomenon of Ethiopians’ outward movement to and settlement in other societies and regions in the Middle Ages. Such a perspective can highlight the diversity and geographical breadth of Ethiopians’ foreign settlement, which, among other things, belies a lingering assumption of Africans’ role as the discovered in the “Age of Discovery,” the recipients of outside influences and not the vectors of such influences themselves. A comparative framework may also highlight not only the important distinctions between the three general types of medieval Ethiopian diaspora but the parallels, overlaps, and blurred boundaries between them. One sign of current interest in such perspectives is HornEast, a five-year collaborative project launched in 2017, whose focus on medieval Christian interaction with Islamic environments includes questions of “the mobility of men and women, free and slave” in the geographical area of most intensive diasporic settlement.3 The oldest and most detailed historiography concerns free Christian Ethiopians abroad. It is the product principally of Enrico Cerulli, as concerns the eastern Mediterranean, with refinements and additions on particular points by a number of others, and of scholars engaged with Ethiopian-European relations, as regards Rome.4 Attention to Muslim Ethiopians abroad is a more recent phenomenon. On the diaspora of freeborn Muslim Ethiopians, the pioneering work of Alessandro Gori stands out, but specialists of host countries (Egypt, Yemen) have contributed important observations on Muslim Ethiopians’ presence in them as one feature of those countries’ societies, often including both the freeborn and the enslaved who were converted to Islam. As regards enslaved Ethiopians more generally, their fate in the diaspora has principally been treated by specialists of African enslavement and 3  For a description of this European Research Council project, under the direction of Julien Loiseau, see https://horneast.hypotheses.org/presentation-du-programme-2. 4  Enrico Cerulli, Etiopi in Palestina: Storia della comunità etiopica di Palestina (hereafter Palestina), 2 vols. (Rome, 1943–47). For more specialized contributions, see below. No scholar has attempted a survey of all Christian diasporic communities (including that of Rome, omitted by Cerulli), but Martina Ambu’s doctoral research focuses on the medieval Ethiopian presence in Egypt, and Olivia Adankpo is undertaking a comparison of the extant “archives” of the Christian communities in Jerusalem and Rome, among other projects.

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displacement in the eastern (as opposed to Atlantic) sphere, whether focused on the Mediterranean, Middle East, or Indian Ocean; the principal challenge in addressing this historiography lies in teasing out the specifically Ethiopian thread.5 Generally speaking, the travel and even settlement of individual Ethiopians abroad, whether free or enslaved, is more difficult to trace in the historical record. In the free Christian and free Muslim cases it will be discussed only briefly, largely as a prelude to the formation of more stable communities that were recognized as distinctive in their host societies. For enslaved Ethiopians, who were rarely in a position to form distinctively Ethiopian communities, an effort will be made to sketch out the variety of their identities, experiences, and destinations, not least because it points up examples of overlap and coincidence with free Christian and Muslim communities abroad.6 Somewhat more attention, however, will be devoted to enslaved Ethiopians in latemedieval India, whose geographical and occupational concentration did result in the formation of distinctive communities more comparable to those of the other two groups. 1

Free Christian Ethiopians in the Mediterranean

Christian Ethiopians were certainly traveling to and settling in foreign lands in late antiquity. They are attested in the kingdom of Ḥimyar in Yemen both before and after Aksum’s brief annexation of that territory in the sixth century, and Gǝʿǝz graffiti places them on the island of Socotra in the Gulf of Aden as well.7 5  On the paucity of research specifically addressing enslaved Ethiopians in the eastern African diaspora see Henri Médard, “La traite et l’esclavage en Afrique orientale et dans l’océan Indien: une historiographie éclatée,” in Traites et esclavages en Afrique orientale et dans l’océan Indien, ed. Henri Médard et al. (Paris, 2013), 31–64, at 63. Several important works have examined mechanisms of enslavement within medieval Ethiopia, including those of MarieLaure Derat and Richard Pankhurst discussed below; only rarely, however, is it possible to trace the enslaved from the point of origin to their locations abroad. 6  On the factors militating against the formation of distinctive slave communities (of any regional origin) in the “eastern” African diaspora, see Alpers, “African Diaspora;” Gwynn Campbell, “Introduction: Slavery and Other Forms of Unfree Labour in the Indian Ocean World,” in The Structure of Slavery in Indian Ocean Africa and Asia, ed. Gwynn Campbell (London, 2006), vii-xxxii; John Hunwick, “The Same but Different: Africans in Slavery in the Mediterranean Muslim World,” in The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam, ed. John Hunwick and Eve Trout Powell (Princeton, 2002), ix-xxiv. 7  Walter W. Müller, “Ḥimyar,” in EAe 3 (2007), 32–34; Christian Julien Robin, “Soqotra,” in EAe 5 (2014), 517–520, at 519.

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After the conversion of the Arabian peninsula to Islam, however, the primary foreign destinations of Christian Ethiopians lay toward the Mediterranean and the fellow Christian communities to be found there. The Alexandrian patriarch’s jurisdiction over the Ethiopian church, which included his selection of its sole metropolitan, required at least periodic travel to Egypt from the time of ancient Aksum’s conversion to Christianity in the mid-fourth century, and it is likely that envoys sent to request a new metropolitan, as well as ordinary Ethiopian pilgrims, continued on to Jerusalem for pious reasons from the same time. Gǝʿǝz texts offer secure evidence of an Ethiopian monk in Egypt in the ninth century, and (in the form of an inscription) of eleven pilgrims at the White Monastery in Upper Egypt, on their way to Jerusalem, in either 1038 or 1114 CE.8 References in foreign sources to Ethiopian pilgrims in this early period (and indeed beyond) are more questionable, due to terminological ambiguity. In late antiquity and afterward, “Ethiopian” served as a general term for any African or indeed any dark-skinned person, and even in clearly Christian contexts might refer to a Nubian or even southern Egyptian; in medieval Latin sources, furthermore, Ethiopia and Nubia were often conflated or confused. Conversely, Latin references to “Indian” Christians often did refer to Ethiopians, as this remained a current term for Ethiopians into the sixteenth century.9 Ethiopian Christian travel to the Mediterranean appears to have increased in the twelfth century, and to have resulted in the first relatively settled Ethiopian communities abroad. Our earliest evidence for such a community comes from the Wādī al-Naṭrūn, an oasis located between Alexandria and Cairo and major site of Christian asceticism since antiquity. Though a reference to Ethiopians convening with other Christians of the area to discuss religious matters in 1088 is considered inconclusive (possibly rhetorical), a twelfth-century polyglot manuscript of the Epistles produced at the Wādī al-Naṭrūn, now in Milan and including the text in Gǝʿǝz, was probably intended for joint liturgical performances, and suggests a notable Ethiopian presence in the area.10 It is very likely that Ethiopians who had traveled as far as Lower Egypt – generally passing through Sawākin and along or beside the Red Sea before cutting across the desert to the Nile, although a route through Nubia was also 8   Otto Meinardus, “Ecclesiastica Aethiopica in Aegypto,” Journal of Ethiopian Studies 3, 1 (1965): 23–35, at 31; idem, “Ethiopian monks in Egypt,” EAe 2 (2005), 243–245, at 243; Carlo Conti Rossini, “Aethiopica,” RSO 9 (1921–23), 365–81, 449–68, at 461–62. 9  A skeptical assessment of references to Ethiopians in the Holy Land before the twelfth century is provided in Cerulli, Palestina, 1: 1–5. 10  Meinardus, “Ethiopian monks,” 244; Hugh G. Evelyn-White, The Monasteries of the Wadi ‘N Natrun, ed. Walter Houser, 3 vols. (New York, 1973), 2: 368.

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possible11 – continued on to Jerusalem. Indeed Gǝʿǝz manuscript fragments and graffiti locate Ethiopians at several points on the route to Jerusalem in or before the twelfth century: at the Coptic monastery of Saint Anthony’s, along the “Forty Days’ Route” in eastern Sinai, and at Saint Catherine’s monastery in Sinai.12 Earlier in their journey, such pilgrims passed through Qusqam (or Qwǝsqwam; in Arabic, Qūṣ) along the Nile, venerated as a stopping place of the Holy Family during the Flight to Egypt: Ethiopian pilgrims are mentioned here in the twelfth century.13 They also doubtless stopped in Cairo, by now the seat of the Alexandrian patriarch, as well of course as in Jerusalem itself, though no contemporary evidence yet identifies settled communities in these locations. Between the thirteenth and the sixteenth century such evidence, much of which was masterfully compiled by Enrico Cerulli in his two-volume Etiopi in Palestina, becomes plentiful, and proves that by now, if not earlier, Ethiopian pilgrims had acquired their own churches and residences in the diaspora. In what follows I will survey the four major Ethiopian communities of the eastern Mediterranean in turn – those of Jerusalem, Qusqam, Cairo, and the Wādī al-Naṭrūn – before discussing the more minor eastern Mediterranean communities, and concluding with the community in Rome. The increasing mention of Ethiopians in thirteenth-century Latin sources on Jerusalem suggests that an Ethiopian community had crystallized there by this time.14 By 1290 CE, when, according to a biography of the sultan Qalāwūn, King Yagba Ṣǝyon sent a letter and accompanying gifts to Ethiopians in Jerusalem, we may assume that Jerusalem hosted a stable community capable of receiving and storing such gifts, and King ʿAmda Ṣǝyon again sent gifts at an unspecified date during his reign (1314–44); the earliest extant regulations for

11  See the Ethiopian accounts of the routes discussed in O. G. S. Crawford, Ethiopian Itineraries circa 1400–1524 (Cambridge, 1958), e.g. at 62, 69, 77, 99. 12  Fr. Maximous El-Antony, Jesper Blid, and Aaron Michael Butts, “An Early Ethiopic Manuscript Fragment (Twelfth-Thirteenth Century) from the Monastery of Saint Anthony (Egypt),” Aethiopica 19 (2016): 27–51; Gianfranco Fiaccadori, “Sinai,” in EAe 5 (2014), 511– 515. I thank Steve Delamarter and Getatchew Haile for sharing their recent research on the Gǝ‘ǝz fragments and palimpsests at Saint Catherine’s, one of which (an Horologium fragment over-written with a Greek text of the 12–13th century) is of notable antiquity. 13  Alessandro Bausi, “Qwǝsqwam,” in EAe 4 (2010), 318; Paula Sanders, “The Fātimid State, 969–1171,” in The Cambridge History of Egypt, vol. 1, ed. Carl F. Petry (Cambridge, 1998), 151–174, at 168. 14  Jacques de Vitry, for instance, offered a lengthy account of Ethiopian Orthodoxy in his early-thirteenth-century Historia Orientalis: see Libri duo quorum prior orientalis sive Hierosolymitanae alter occidentalis historiae nomine inscribitur, ed. François Moschus (1597; repr. Farnborough, 1971), 144–47, excerpted in Cerulli, Palestina, 1: 59–61.

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community date to 1331.15 A Latin pilgrimage account of the 1340s provides the first reference to sites of worship reserved for the Ethiopians’ use: an altar in the Holy Sepulcher and the small, adjacent chapel of Saint Mary of Golgotha.16 By the late fifteenth century Ethiopians had acquired three more locations of worship, and in the early sixteenth acquired a sixth, suggesting that the community grew in size in this period.17 The site of the Ethiopians’ monastery, however, remains obscure. References to the community in Gǝʿǝz manuscripts speak of the “prior of Jerusalem” or the “pilgrims of Jerusalem,” without specifying a precise location or name for the structure. The only such mention comes from the late fifteenth-century pilgrimage account of the German Felix Faber, who mentioned the Ethiopians’ “well-furnished house” at the Grotto of David, but as the Ethiopians seem only to have acquired a site of worship here in the fifteenth century, it is not obvious that they resided here earlier.18 Despite the Ottoman conquest of Jerusalem in 1517, which may have caused a brief exodus, the community certainly continued to exist into and beyond the period covered by this volume.19 At Qusqam, Ethiopian Christians doubtless sheltered first at the long-­ established Coptic monastery there. Between 1344 and 1357/8, King Säyfä Arʿad (1344–71) donated a manuscript to the community, identifying it as anchored in a structure of its own, a church dedicated to the Holy Apostles.20 The terminus ante quem of the king’s donation is provided by the date of some brief rules for the monastic community copied in this manuscript. The same manuscript records a number of supplementary rules and records of donation from the later fourteenth through the sixteenth century that attest to the continued existence of the community throughout this period.21 15  Otto Meinardus, “Ethiopians in Jerusalem,” Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte 76 (1965): 112–147, 217–232, at 118; Cerulli, Palestina, 1: 88–90, 130; 2: 380–382. 16  Niccolò da Poggibonsi, Il libro d’oltremare, ed. Alberto Bacchi della Lega, 2 vols. (Bologna, 1881), at 1: 94–95, 117; see also the discussion in Cerulli, Palestina, 1: 119–121. 17  Cerulli, Palestina, 1: 306–8 (altar in the Church of the Virgin in Gethsemani, chapel of the Opprobrium in the Holy Sepulcher, Grotto of David on Mount Sion), and 360 (chapel of the Sacrifice of Abraham). 18  Felix Faber, Fratris Felicis Fabri evagatorium in Terrae Sanctae, Arabiae et Egypti peregrinationem, ed. Konrad Hassler, 3 vols. (Stuttgart, 1843–49), 1: 259, cited in Cerulli, Palestina, 1: 313–14. 19  On the brief disappearance of the Jerusalem community after 1516 see Cerulli, Palestina, 1: 395–405. The rest of this volume compiles evidence of the community’s re-establishment to 1560. 20  BnF MS Éth. 32: see Hermann Zotenberg, Catalogue des manuscrits éthiopiens (gheez et amharique) de la Bibliothèque Nationale (Paris, 1877), 26. 21  Zotenberg, Catalogue, 24–29; Cerulli, Palestina, 2: 385. The date of the earliest regulations (Year of Mercy 10) is incorrectly translated by both authors as 1350 CE.

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As for Cairo, the evidence for the existence of a stable community with its own physical center is surprisingly late. The Latin pilgrim Niccolò da Poggibonsi mentioned Ethiopians among the many Christian communities to be found in Cairo in the 1340s, but without identifying a monastery or residence for them.22 It is presumed that this mention implies the existence of the well-known Ethiopian monastery of Saint Giyorgis in the Cairo neighborhood of Ḥarat Zawīla, but in fact our earliest reference to that monastery dates to August 1490, when a Gospel book was copied there.23 In 1517, the pilgrims gathered at Ḥarat Zawīla to inventory the possessions of “Saint Minas and Mary Queen of Heaven,” two chapels of unspecified location.24 A half-dozen other notices, all of the sixteenth century (the latest date to the 1570s) attest to the florescence of the monastery in that period.25 The earliest evidence of Ethiopians in the Wādī al-Naṭrūn has been mentioned above, and we may now turn to its later development. Hugh EvelynWhite and, following him, Otto Meinardus surmise that the Ethiopians had acquired a distinctive residence of their own, the “cell of Pehôout,” by the twelfth century.26 In 1330, Ethiopians were said to reside in the Coptic monastery of Saint John the Little and its unnamed “neighboring cell,” which may have been the “cell of Pehôout,” though they clearly also lived with Coptic Christians at Saint John the Little as well.27 By 1426–27 we have certain notice, from a Gǝʿǝz manuscript recording the community’s regulations, that Ethiopians had a separate establishment, “the monastery of Elias” (däbrä Elyas).28 The building was doubtless already dilapidated, for the Egyptian historian al-Maqrīzī, writing before 1441, reported that in his time this monastery was in ruins, and that with its decay the Ethiopians removed to the monastery of the Virgin near the convent of Saint John the Little.29 Our next notice of the community is in 1519–20, when two Ethiopian priests and a deacon recorded 22  Niccolò da Poggibonsi, Libro, 2: 64, excerpted in Cerulli, Palestina, 1: 133–34. 23  BnF MS Éth. 35, fol. 197r: Zotenberg, Catalogue, 33; Cerulli, Palestina, 2: 422–3. Both give the date in the colophon (Mäskäräm of the Year of Mercy 143) incorrectly as 1483 CE. 24  Zotenberg, Catalogue, 87; Cerulli, Palestina, 2: 415. The inventory’s date (Mäggabit of the Year of Mercy 169) is incorrectly given by Zotenberg as 1509 CE and by Cerulli as 1510 CE. Cerulli (2: 354, nn. 2–3) conjectures that the two structures were chapels within or near the main Cairo monastery. 25  Zotenberg, Catalogue, 33–36. The latest notices are dated according to the Coptic calendar, 1289 Year of the Martyrs (= 1573 CE) and 1292 (= 1576 CE). 26   Evelyn-White, Monasteries, 2: 368; Meinardus, “Aethiopica in Aegypto,” 31. 27   Evelyn-White, Monasteries, 2: 363, 395; Cerulli, Palestina, 2: 354. 28  BnF MS Éth. 46, fol. 118v: Zotenberg, Catalogue, 45. He and Evelyn-White, Monasteries, 404, give the date (Year of Mercy 79) incorrectly as 1419 CE. 29  Cited in Evelyn-White, Monasteries, 2: 406.

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their construction (perhaps repair) of a church dedicated to Saint Minas. The record does not specify the Wādī al-Naṭrūn as its location, but it appears in the same manuscript as the 1426–27 regulations of this community, and states that until this (re)building, the monks at the location had lacked a shelter, which accords with al-Maqrīzī’s statements.30 Like the monastery of the Syrians, therefore, that of the Ethiopians seems to have had a resurgence in the later fifteenth century. Around the time the community was (re)building its own monastery of St Minas, one Ethiopian painter, “Täkle the Abyssinian,” used his skills to adorn the qasr of the monastery of Saint Macarius with frescoes in 1517.31 A number of graffiti were left by pilgrims or inhabitants of the Wādī al-Naṭrūn as well, still unpublished, which may shed further light on the Ethiopians’ presence in the sixteenth century.32 By the end of the century, however, according to Hugh Evelyn-White, efforts at renewal were spent and the Wādī al-Naṭrūn in general declined.33 Jerusalem, Cairo, Qusqam, and the Wādī al-Naṭrūn hosted the principal communities of Christian Ethiopians around the eastern Mediterranean, and despite the uneven chronological evidence for each, it is likely that they developed in tandem. In each location, the community was centered on a monastery overseen by a prior (usually identified, using the Arabic term, as rayǝs, but in the Wādī al-Naṭrūn as abä mǝnet) who was assisted by other officials of varying titles and unspecified duties.34 Each also operated according to some basic regulations, including obedience to the prior, civil discourse among the monks, and the surrender of possessions (with the exception of books and 30  BnF MS Éth. 46, fol. 119v: Zotenberg, Catalogue, 45, and Cerulli, Palestina, 2: 409–410. Both give the date (Year of Mercy 172) incorrectly as 1512 CE. Meinardus, “Aethiopica in Aegypto,” 27, opines that the record of Saint Minas’ (re)building refers to a church of this name in Cairo, but it could not be said of Cairo that Ethiopians there previously lacked a shelter. Cerulli’s supposition (2: 354, n. 7) that it refers to the Wādī al-Naṭrūn seems the more plausible inference. 31  Jules Leroy, La peinture murale chez les Coptes, vol. 2, Les peintures des couvents du Ouadi Natroun (Cairo, 1982), 113. I thank Martina Ambu and Claire Bosc-Tiessé for this reference. 32  The graffiti at the Wādī al-Naṭrūn, which seem to be principally in Arabic and Syriac, are to be catalogued by Martina Ambu under the auspices of the Institut Français d’Archéologie Orientale. 33   Evelyn-White, Monasteries, 2: 409. 34  A mäggabi or “provisioner” is mentioned in relation to Jerusalem, Qusqam, and the Wādī al-Naṭrūn; the duties of the qesä gäbäz in the latter, and of the rabbayt in Jerusalem, remain unclear: Cerulli, Palestina, 2: 357–363. The office of qayǝm is equated by Cerulli with that of prior, but the manuscript note which mentions this office identifies a different individual as prior (rayǝs): BnF MS Éth. 80, fol. 88, transcribed in Zotenberg, Catalogue, 86. A regulation of the community of Jerusalem also mentions an ʿaqqabe säʿat and a nǝburä ǝd: BAV MS Vat. et. 25, fol. 262v.

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some clothes); stipulated the conditions under which “guests” could be hosted at the monastery; and set punishments for malfeasance.35 The regulations are usually quite brief, and added conditions or punishments might be recorded as new decisions by the community were taken.36 Despite the principle of obedience to the prior, it is clear that he was to confer with the assembly of all monks regarding the community’s regulations and disciplinary action, which on occasion could include monks from multiple diasporic monasteries.37 As such joint assemblies suggest, the links between the four monasteries were close. The prior of Jerusalem sometimes oversaw matters concerning the others: conducting an inventory of the goods held at Qusqam and Cairo, for instance, and entrusting some of their goods to individuals of his choosing; commissioning a manuscript that was, however, executed in Cairo; forbidding the removal of a manuscript from the convent of Saint Minas.38 Not all intermonastic connections passed through Jerusalem, however: one malefactor from Saint Giyorgis was assigned, as punishment, a two-year sojourn in the Wādī al-Naṭrūn.39 Occasional inventories and records of bequests give some sense of their material possessions, essentially all liturgical (vestments, objects, and books). The 1517 inventory of Saint Minas and Mary Queen of Heaven lists ten books, twenty-eight vestments, and 2 candelabra; an undated inventory from Saint Giyorgis included thirty-three books, among other items.40 Several bequests identify silver cups and plates for use in the Mass gifted by pilgrims to Saint Giyorgis.41 The community at Qusqam must have owned its church 35  Most extant regulations for the eastern communities were studied, with editions and translations of relevant passages, by Cerulli, Palestina, 2: 353–432. Martina Ambu is currently updating Cerulli’s editions and translations of these regulations, and adding to the corpus: she has identified a list of penances imposed upon Ethiopian monks by their abbot, included in a manuscript (Biblioteca della Pontificia Università Gregoriana, Fondo ‘Giuseppe Vedovato,’ Inv. MS 135, Cat. 27) that contains a rare collection of Christian Egyptian texts and was thus presumably produced in an Egyptian milieu, initial findings on which she presented at the 20th International Conference of Ethiopian Studies (Mekelle University, Ethiopia) in October 2018. I thank Martina Ambu for sharing this information with me. 36  BnF MS Éth. 32, for instance, from Qusqam, features the main body of regulations on fol. 206, with more added, under a different prior, on fol. 206v. 37  On the role of the assembly see Cerulli, Palestina, 2: 364–67. 38  BnF MS Éth. 35, fols. 197, 202 (see Zotenberg, Catalogue, 33, 36); BnF MS Éth. 80, fol. 88 (ibid., 87); Cerulli, Palestina, 2: 428–29. 39  BnF MS Éth. 35, fol. 1: Zotenberg, Catalogue, 33–34, and Cerulli, Palestina, 2: 376. 40  BnF MS Éth. 80, fol. 88v; MS Éth. 35, fol. 199. Other inventories of Jerusalem and of Jerusalem, Qusqam and Cairo together are found in the latter manuscript on fols. 198v, 202. Zotenberg, Catalogue, 26–27, 87. 41  BnF MS Éth. 35, 200r–v: Zotenberg, Catalogue, 35.

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and at least a little surrounding land, for it received three separate donations of cows, and in 1388–9 sold a plot on the east side of the church to a Coptic family for 100 drachmas.42 Nonetheless, the monasteries were certainly not rich. A record of an assembly convened at Saint Giyorgis (undated, but of the sixteenth century) implies that the monks begged for alms, and several fifteenth-century Latin pilgrims described the Jerusalem community as poor.43 Such was, of course, in keeping with the monks’ spiritual profession. These four monasteries were not the only communities of Ethiopians around the Mediterranean. A Latin pilgrimage account from the 1330s and three others from the 1510s assert that Ethiopians had the use of an altar in the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, alongside altars for other Christian communities.44 Perhaps a small Ethiopian community resided here throughout those centuries, in its own residence or in the monasteries of other Christian communities in Bethlehem. This was the case at Saint Anthony’s in Egypt, where Ethiopian pilgrims continued to shelter, without establishing a separate monastic space, into and beyond the sixteenth century.45 It was also the case at Saint Catherine’s monastery in Sinai, where a Latin pilgrim witnessed Ethiopian sojourners circa 1340 and where Gǝʿǝz manuscripts and fragments of the thirteenth to fifteenth century – including one featuring Greek liturgical elements transliterated into Gǝʿǝz – attest to their presence and participation in the community’s services.46 In Lebanon, Ethiopians seem briefly to have had a monastery of their own on Mount Lebanon circa 1479. Others resided at the Maronite (Lebanese Catholic) monastery of Mār Yaʿqūb in Ehden in the 1470s and 1480s, until inter-confessional conflict led them to flee to a fellow non-Chalcedonian monastery in Ḥadšīt (Lebanon) and finally to Mār Musā in Syria. How long the community perdured there is unknown.47 42  BnF MS Éth. 32, fols. 11r–v, 104r (three bequests of cows to Qusqam), 207v (land sale). Zotenberg, Catalogue, 34–6; Cerulli, Palestina, 2: 411–412. The date of the land sale (Year of Mercy 41) is incorrectly given by both as 1381 CE. 43  Cerulli, Palestina, 2: 431–2 (on Cairo, where nuns, but not monks, were forbidden from begging, from BnF MS Éth 35, fol. 152v); 1: 299–301 (on Jerusalem). 44  Cerulli, Palestina, 1: 112–113, 374–77; Meinardus, “Ethiopians in Jerusalem,” 230–31. 45  Meinardus, “Ecclesiastica Aethiopica,” 34. Ethiopian graffiti at St Anthony’s, dated to the sixteenth and seventeenth century, have been partially studied by Sidney Griffith: see Elizabeth Bolman and Patrick Godeau, Monastic Visions: Wall Paintings in the Monastery of St. Antony at the Red Sea (New Haven, 2002). 46  Cerulli, Palestina, 1: 151. On the Sinai texts, I thank Steve Delamarter and Getatchew Haile for sharing their findings, which were presented at the conference “New Light on Old Manuscripts: Recent Advances in Palimpsest Studies,” sponsored by the Austrian Academy of Sciences, in Vienna in April 2018. 47  Ewa Balicka-Witakowska, “Lebanon,” in EAe 5 (2014), 388–390.

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A final Ethiopian community in the eastern Mediterranean is attested on the island of Cyprus. According to a late sixteenth-century Latin historian of Cyprus, Stephen of Lusignan, Ethiopians first emigrated, along with other nonChalcedonian Christians, from Jerusalem to Cyprus after the Muslim reconquest of Jerusalem in 1187. If so, they doubtless lived intermixed with other non-Chalcedonian Christians and thus were not “visible” to or mentioned by the Latin observers who are our principal source for the island in this period.48 It is likely that an Ethiopian community existed here by the 1340s, when the monk Ewosṭatewos, founder of one of Ethiopia’s major monastic families, sojourned on the island on his way to Armenia; by 1362 Ethiopians are securely attested by a Latin visitor who noted their participation in a religious procession in the coastal city of Famagusta.49 For the later Middle Ages, our principal source on the Cypriot community is a dossier of testimony collected in Rome in 1564 from both Latin and Ethiopian witnesses, recording memories of the Ethiopian community which in some cases extended back thirty to fifty years.50 This testimony makes clear that by the early sixteenth century the Ethiopians’ principal settlement was in the capital, Nicosia, centered on the church of San Salvatore. One Ethiopian witness testified that San Salvatore had previously hosted monks, but that by 1564 they had dispersed due to a scandal in the church’s management.51 Even this brief survey indicates that from the twelfth century, and particularly between the fourteenth and sixteenth, Ethiopian Christians had established themselves in numerous locations in the eastern Mediterranean. Frequently mentioned in foreign sources of diverse origin – Latin, Coptic, Maronite, Muslim Egyptian, and more – they clearly sparked the interest of their neighbors abroad and merit consideration as an important vehicle through which knowledge of Ethiopia and of Ethiopian Orthodoxy spread through the Mediterranean. The known Gǝʿǝz sources from these communities remain limited. As monks in the diaspora were permitted to keep manuscripts 48  Cerulli, Palestina, 1: 33–35. 49  Gianfranco Fiaccadori, “Etiopia, Cipro e Armenia: La ‘Vita’ di ‘Êwost’âtêwos, santo abissino del secolo XIV (I),” in XXXII corso di cultura sull’arte ravennate e bizantina. Seminario internazionale di studi ‘Cipro e il Mediterraneo orientale,’ Ravenna, 23–30 marzo 1985 (Ravenna, 1985), 73–78; Chris Schabel, “Religion,” in Cyprus: Society and Culture, 1191–1374, ed. Angelo Nicolaou-Konnari and Chris Schabel (Leiden, 2005), 157–218, at 158. 50  The dossier is Archivio Segreto Vaticano (hereafter ASV), AA. Arm. I–XVIII, n. 2953, discussed in Renato Lefevre, “Roma e la comunità etiopica di Cipro nei secoli XV e XVI,” RSE 1 (1941): 71–86, and Cerulli, Palestina, 2: 1–11. 51  A SV, AA. Arm. I–XVIII, n. 2953, fol. 6r. This witness gives the number of Ethiopian monks in Nicosia as 48, but other witnesses’ testimonies suggest that this number reflects the total Ethiopian population of the city: see below at nn. 59–60.

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as personal possessions, these often traveled with them and are difficult to trace. Even manuscripts donated to the communities, and prohibited from being removed, clearly ended up elsewhere: Cerulli’s analysis of the principal monasteries’ organization was based on a dozen manuscripts now in Paris and a thirteenth in Florence.52 More, however, certainly survive, and their identification and study represents a promising avenue of further research.53 Further research may help to illuminate aspects of these communities that have not yet been fully explored. One concerns the identities of the Ethiopians inhabiting these communities. Otto Meinardus has plausibly argued that the vast majority of Ethiopians abroad were monks, and the fact that most Christian Ethiopian diasporic communities were centered on monasteries lends support to this hypothesis.54 But not all those dedicated to the monastic life abroad were male. The regulations of the Jerusalem monastery in 1331 specified that men and women were to live in separate spaces, while the pilgrim Felix Faber observed in the early 1480s that in “the monastery of the Indians [sc. Ethiopians] … monks live with female [religious].”55 By 1574 the nuns had their own abbess, to whom the prior of the community entrusted several items.56 A sixteenth-century manuscript from Saint Giyorgis in Cairo specified that nuns (unlike monks) were forbidden from begging for alms, and declared, “let them live alone where they wish.”57 Though apparently lacking a specific residence of their own, clearly female religious resided in Cairo as well. The number of nuns in the diaspora may have been small. Francisco Alvares observed a pilgrim caravan leaving

52  Cerulli, Palestina, 2: 380–432, transcribed and translated relevant passages from Florence, Bibl. Medicea Laurenziana, MS. Or. 148 and BnF MSS. Éth. 32, 35, 42, 45, 46, 52, 63, 78, 80, 107, 131, 133. 53  Some passages relative to the eastern Mediterranean communities are found in Gǝ‘ǝz manuscripts now in the Vatican: see Sylvain Grébaut and Eugène Tisserant, Codices Aethiopici Vaticani et Borgiani, Barberianus Orientalis 2, Rossianus 865, 2 vols. (Vatican City, 1935–36), for instance at 1: 130–31, 175–76. For an early sixteenth-century paper manuscript certainly produced in the diaspora, probably in Jerusalem or Cyprus, see Paolo Marrassini, “I manoscritti etiopici della Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana di Firenze,” RSE 30 (1984–6): 81–116, at 82–83. A comprehensive search for diasporic Gǝ‘ǝz manuscripts has not been undertaken, but handlists of Gǝʿǝz manuscripts in various library collections offer a starting point: many are included in Anaïs Wion, Claire Bosc-Tiésse, and MarieLaure Derat, “Inventory of Libraries and Catalogues of Ethiopian Manuscripts,” online at http://www.menestrel.fr/spip.php?rubrique694&lang=en. 54  Meinardus, “Ecclesiastica Aethiopica,” 23. 55  Cerulli, Palestina, 2: 381–82; Felix Faber, Evagatorium, 1: 259. 56  Cerulli, Palestina, 2: 428–29. 57  Ibid., 2: 431–32.

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Ethiopia in the early 1520s, which included over 300 male religious and only fifteen nuns.58 Secondly, Ethiopian laity and secular priests (potentially with wives and children) also certainly traveled to the Mediterranean. The richest evidence for them comes from the dossier relative to Cyprus mentioned above. The central figure in the dossier, an Ethiopian born on Cyprus in the early sixteenth century (Yoḥannǝs zä-Qoṗros, known to Europeans as “Giovanni Battista”) stated that the community in Nicosia included five or six families, or about thirty people of both sexes, with more families living in the hamlet of Mousoulita.59 According to another witness – an Italian who had lived on Cyprus in the 1530s – the Ethiopian community at that time comprised “sometimes thirty, sometimes forty or more” persons, as well as four or more priests; he had also heard from Ethiopians that they had possessions, and houses.60 Finally, a native Cypriot witness believed that in addition to those in Nicosia there were others living in the gardens belonging to San Salvatore, and in its hamlet, whose annual revenues totaled some 35 to 45 scudi.61 It thus appears that the Ethiopian community owned (or had secure usufruct of) the church of San Salvatore, as well as gardens and a hamlet attached to it, and these may have been the lands on which the Ethiopian families lived. The community also received some financial support from the Venetian Republic after 1489, when Venice took control of the island.62 A few offhand references indicate the presence of lay Ethiopians in other centers as well. Yoḥannǝs described his mother as “an Egyptian, but of Ethiopian descent,” suggesting that her parents or earlier ancestors had settled in Egypt, while Yoḥannǝs’s brother was described by another witness as a layman who had moved to Cairo.63 As for Jerusalem, Felix Faber observed of the Ethiopians there that “their laity eagerly gather for the Mass, and then all of both sexes begin to sing, jump, and clap, forming circles of six or seven here, nine or ten there.”64 The last Ethiopian Christian community to form around the Mediterranean was that of Rome. As home to the relics of two apostolic saints venerated in 58   Beckingham-Huntingford, Prester John, 2: 449. 59  A SV, AA., Arm. I–XVIII, no. 2953, fols. 2v, 9r. Mousoulita is 16 miles east of Nicosia: see Jean Richard, Review of Etiopi in Palestina, by Enrico Cerulli, in Bibliothèque de l’École des chartes 107 (1948): 111–12, at 111 n.1. 60  A SV, AA., Arm. I–XVIII, no. 2953, fol. 2v. On this dossier see Cerulli, Palestina, 2: 1–10, and Lefevre, “Roma e la comunità etiopica,” 71–86. 61  A SV, AA., Arm. I–XVIII, no. 2953, fols. 4v–5r. 62  Ibid., fol. 7v (testimony of the Ethiopian Marqos). 63  Ibid., fols. 19r, 7r. 64  Felix Faber, Evagatorium, 1: 351, excerpted in Cerulli, Palestina, 1: 312.

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Ethiopia, Rome doubtless presented itself as a worthy pilgrimage destination, and from the already-established Ethiopian communities in Jerusalem, Cairo, and Cyprus it was a relatively easy matter to travel on to Italy. Papal certificates of pilgrimage and letters of safe conduct issued to Ethiopian pilgrims attest that, from the beginning of the fifteenth into the sixteenth century, a rather steady stream of Ethiopian Christians flowed into Rome and, presumably, back out again.65 These pilgrims, too, eventually acquired a permanent space of their own: the church of Santo Stefano Maggiore, sometimes known in the sixteenth century as “degli Indiani” after its Ethiopian inhabitants, located directly behind the apse of Saint Peter’s basilica. The precise date and circumstances of the Ethiopians’ settlement at Santo Stefano remain obscure. The most common proposal places credits Pope Sixtus IV (1471–84) with the impulse to create a dedicated space for Ethiopian pilgrims, following his reception of an Ethiopian embassy in 1481.66 The earliest attestation of Ethiopians’ presence at Santo Stefano, however, dates to December 1497, when the canons of the Chapter of Saint Peter’s, which administered this church, were prevented from their customary celebration of St Stephen’s Day there because Ethiopians were “violating” the space.67 Ethiopians’ use the church thus may have been contested (between popes and chapter), or indeed come from an Ethiopian initiative that initially lacked any official authorization at all.68 Whatever the degree and nature of its initial precarity, the community appears to have been fairly well established by the 1510s, when the apostolic scriptor Johannes Potken attended one of its liturgical services (in 1511) and studied Gǝʿǝz with its denizens for the next two years;69 by the 1530s, if not earlier, it was well provided for by the papacy. In 1539 Pope Paul III, a great patron of the community, bought the 65  Renato Lefevre, “Documenti pontifici sui rapporti con l’Etiopia nei secoli XV e XVI,” RSE 5 (1946): 2–41. 66  Mauro da Leonessa, S. Stefano Maggiore degli Abissini e le relazioni romano-etiopiche (Vatican City, 1929), 177–179; Renato Lefevre, “Appunti sull’ospizio di S. Stefano degli ‘Indiani’ nel Cinquecento,” Studi romani 15 (1967): 16–33; Gianfranco Fiaccadori, “Santo Stefano dei Mori,” in EAe 4 (2010), 528–532; Ilaria Delsere and Osvaldo Raineri, Chiesa di S. Stefano dei Mori: vicende edilizie e personaggi (Vatican City, 2015), 26. Marius Chaîne proposed rather the 1440s, under Eugenius IV: “Un monastère éthiopien à Rome au XVe et XVIe siècle: San Stefano dei Mori,” Mélanges de la faculté orientale de l’Université Saint-Joseph de Beyrouth 5 (1911): 1–36, at 3. 67  Delio Vania Proverbio, “Santo Stefano degli Abissini: una breve rivisitazione,” La Parola del Passato 66 (2011): 50–68, at 55–56; Delsere and Raineri, Chiesa di S. Stefano, 26–27. 68  For this last hypothesis see Olivia Adankpo-Labadie, “Accueillir et contrôler les pèlerins éthiopiens à Rome: l’institution de l’hospice pontifical de Santo Stefano dei Mori au XVIe siècle,” Mélanges de l’École française de Rome – Moyen Âge, forthcoming, whom I thank for sharing it with me in advance of publication. 69  Johannes Potken and Tomas Wäldä Samuʾel, eds., Psalterium Aethiopicum (Rome, 1513).

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house to the left of the church for the monks’ residence,70 and both European and Ethiopian sources note the popes’ provision of an annual stipend or goods in kind for the community’s maintenance.71 Like the Ethiopian community on Cyprus, that in Rome enjoyed (or came to enjoy) official and stable patronage from local powers. Santo Stefano was also, like the other diasporic communities, an important node for disseminating information about Ethiopia. A number of European scholars interviewed the monks for information on Ethiopian geography, culture, and religion, studied Gǝʿǝz language with them, and/or collaborated with them in producing the first printed editions of Gǝʿǝz texts (notably the psalter, in 1513, and the New Testament, together with three Ethiopian anaphoras and the ritual of the Mass, in 1548–49).72 This activity has produced a relatively abundant literature at the confluence of Äthiopistik and early modern European intellectual culture, including the histories of printing, comparative linguistics, and geographical knowledge.73 Less well known is the monks’ role

70  Mauro da Leonessa, S. Stefano Maggiore, 182; Proverbio, “Santo Stefano,” 62–3; Delsere and Raineri, Chiesa di S. Stefano, 28. Where the community might have lived prior to this date is not certain. 71  Paolo Giovio noted that the Ethiopians were supported by an annual stipend from the popes: Historiarum sui temporis tomus primus (Florence, 1550), 1077. A marginal notation in an undated sixteenth-century Gǝʿǝz manuscript gives the annual figure as 1200 large pieces of gold per annum: BAV MS Vat. et. 24, fol. 70v. A notice in another sixteenthcentury manuscript belonging to Santo Stefano (also undated) asserts that “the popes have put at our disposition glasses, bowls, liturgical vestments, ordinary clothes, habits, food, and drink, as much as we need”: see Sylvain Grébaut, “Contribution à l’histoire du couvent éthiopien San-Stefano-dei-Mori,” Revue de l’Orient chrétien 26 (1927–28): 211–218, at 213, 216. 72   Potken and Tomas Wäldä Samuʾel, eds., Psalterium Aethiopicum; Täsfa Ṣǝyon, ed., Testamentum Novum Aethiopicum (Rome, 1548–49). 73  See, among others, O. G. S. Crawford, ed., Ethiopian Itineraries; Osvaldo Raineri, “Gli studi etiopici nell’età del Giovio,” in Paolo Giovio: Il Rinascimento e la memoria (Como, 1985), 117–131; Salvatore Tedeschi, “Paolo Giovio e la conoscenza dell’Etiopia nel Rinascimento,” in ibid, 93–116; Renato Lefevre, “Giovanni Potken e la sua edizione romana del Salterio etiopico (1513),” Bibliofila 68 (1966): 289–308; Hartmut Bobzin, “Miszellen zur Geschichte der Äthiopistik,” in Festschrift Ewald Wagner zum 65. Geburtstag (Stuttgart, 1994), 82– 101; Riccardo Contini, “Primordi della linguistica semitica comparata nell’Europa: Le Institutiones di Angelo Canini (1554),” in Convegno Internazionale di Linguistica dell’area Mediterranea: Circolazioni culturali nel Mediterraneo antico, ed. Paolo Filigheddu (Cagliari, 1994), 85–95; Samantha Kelly, “The Curious Case of Ethiopic Chaldean: Fraud, Philology, and Cultural (Mis)-Understanding in European Conceptions of Ethiopia,” Renaissance Quarterly 68 (2015): 1227–1264.

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in providing information about Ethiopian Christianity for Catholic polemical use against Protestants.74 With regard to the history of the Roman Ethiopian community itself, it is noteworthy that more Gǝʿǝz manuscripts survive for it than for other diasporic communities. Sylvain Grébaut and Eugène Tisserant identified sixty-six Gǝʿǝz manuscripts of the Vatican Library’s Vaticani etiopici collection as having passed directly from Santo Stefano to the Vatican upon the monastery’s closure (due to lack of inhabitants) in 1628, and three more as having reached the Vatican Library at other moments.75 Seven others have thus far been identified in European libraries, and more are certainly to be found, but the provisional number of 76 Gǝʿǝz manuscripts and printed books belonging to, and in some cases copied at, Santo Stefano constitutes an unusually rich archive of Christian Ethiopian experience abroad.76 In addition to prosopographical data on the monks’ origins and monastic affiliations, these manuscripts feature bequests and inventories that shed light on their material circumstances, as well as indications of their engagement with Latin Christian culture. A rare benefit of the relative abundance of both European and Gǝʿǝz sources on this Ethiopian community is the ability to reconstruct the biographies of particular Ethiopian individuals in Rome. The most famous of these was certainly Täsfa Ṣǝyon, who resided in Rome from the later 1530s until his death in 1552. Friend of Pope Paul III and frequent interlocutor of a series of prominent European scholars and prelates, he also headed the editorial team that produced the first print edition of the Gǝʿǝz New Testament in 1548–49, among

74  A study of the subject is in preparation by the author, with some findings presented in the papers “Gǝʿǝz Manuscripts as Vectors of and Witnesses to the Exchange of Catholic and Ethiopian Orthodox Religious Knowledge in 16th-Century Rome,” at the Tenth Annual Schoenberg Symposium Intertwined Worlds (Univ. of Pennsylvania, Nov. 2017); “Ethiopians Abroad: Pilgrimage and Religious Exchange in the Christian Ecumene,” at the conference Christian Africa/Medieval Africa (Harvard Univ., Nov. 2017), and “Connected Histories: Ethiopia and the Global Middle Ages” (Harvard Univ., Apr. 2019). For an account of Catholic interest in multiple eastern Christian textual traditions in this context, see Giacomo Cardinali, “Ritratto di Marcello Cervini en orientaliste (con precisazioni alle vicende di Petrus Damascenus, Mosé di Mārdīn ed Heliodorus Niger),” Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance 80 (2018): 77–98, 325–343. 75  Grébaut and Tisserant, Codices Aethiopici, 2: 15, 19–20. 76  Rafał Zarzeczny, “Su due manoscritti etiopici della Biblioteca Casanatense a Roma,” in Aethiopia fortitude ejus: Studi in onore di Mons. Osvaldo Raineri in occasione del suo 80o compleanno, ed. Rafał Zarzeczny (Rome, 2015), 501–37, at 503–29; Enrico Galbiati, “I manoscritti etiopici dell’Ambrosiana (breve inventario),” in Studi in onore di Carlo Castiglioni, Prefetto dell’Ambrosiana (Milan, 1957), 339–353, at 340–345.

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other works.77 A second is Yoḥannǝs zä-Qoṗros, alias “Giovanni Battista.” Having come to Europe in the 1520s, he interacted intensively with European prelates in following decades and participated in the editorial projects overseen by Täsfa Ṣǝyon before converting to Catholicism in the early 1550s. His nomination as (Catholic) bishop to the Ethiopians of his native Cyprus in 1564 produced the aforementioned papal dossier on Cyprus, which included, uniquely among diasporic Ethiopians, his dictated autobiography.78 The biography of a third Ethiopian, Yoḥannǝs of Qänṭorare, has been reconstructed through the Gǝʿǝz manuscripts of Santo Stefano, which attest to his position as prior of the community for twenty years (1531–1551) and his collaboration with Täsfa Ṣǝyon both on the latter’s editorial projects and in the composition of the community’s rule of 1551.79 These men illustrate the diverse ways in which monks could maintain or adapt their Ethiopian identities in a Catholic European context, which can be perceived of other members of the community as well.80 2

The Muslim Ethiopian Diaspora

Muslim Ethiopians were certainly in contact with their coreligionists in other regions from the very beginnings of Islam. Ethiopians (generally enslaved or formerly enslaved) were common in pre-Islamic Arabia, and were among the earliest Muslims, most famously Muhammad’s first muʾaḏḏin, Bilal.81 The 77  Alessandro Bausi and Gianfranco Fiaccadori, “Täsfa Ṣǝyon,” in EAe 5 (2014), 525–528; Sebastian Euringer, “Das Epitaphium des Tasfa Sejon (Petrus Aethiops) und seine Chronologie,” Oriens Christianus series 3, 1 (1927): 49–66; Renato Lefevre, “Documenti e notizie su Tasfā Ṣeyon e la sua attività romana nel sec. XVI,” RSE 24 (1969–70): 74–133. 78  Renato Lefevre, “Roma e la comunità etiopica;” Mauro da Leonessa, “Un vescovo abissino del secolo XVI,” in Consacrazione episcopale di Mons. Chidanè Mariam Cassà eletto vescovo titolare di Tibari: 3 agosto 1930 (Rome, 1930), 51–55; Cerulli, Palestina, 2: 1–10; Matteo Salvadore, “African Cosmopolitanism;” Samantha Kelly and Denis Nosnitsin, “The Two Yoḥannǝses of Santo Stefano degli Abissini, Rome: Reconstructing Biography and Cross-Cultural Encounter Through Manuscript Evidence,” Manuscript Studies 2, 2 (2017): 392–426. 79  Kelly and Nosnitsin, “Two Yoḥannǝses,” 405–417. 80  See, e.g., Olivia Adankpo-Labadie, “A Faith between Two Worlds: Expressing Ethiopian Devotion and Crossing Cultural Boundaries at Santo Stefano dei Mori in Early Modern Rome,” in Religious Minorities and Catholic Reform in Early Modern Rome, ed. Emily Michelson and Matthew Coneys (Leiden, forthcoming), which the author informs me concerns particularly Ewosṭatean monks at Santo Stefano. 81  Bernard Lewis, Race and Slavery in the Middle East: An Historical Inquiry (Oxford, 1990), 25.

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Ethiopians already located on the Arabian peninsula at the advent of Islam, as well as those who thereafter converted to Islam in Ethiopia itself, were most commonly identified in Arabic sources as Ḥabaša, “Abyssinian,” a term also used for Christian Ethiopians. Between the thirteenth and the fifteenth century, however, two other terms came into use: Zayāliʿa, meaning those from the port of Zaylaʿ but, at least in some cases, employed to denote Muslim Ethiopians generally, and Ǧabartiyya. These latter terms seem to have been used only for freeborn Muslim Ethiopians, and might have developed in order to distinguish them from Christian Ethiopians and from the enslaved, but “Ḥabaša” continued to be used for free Muslim Ethiopians as well.82 Not surprisingly, given its proximity to and regular commercial and diplomatic contacts with Ethiopia, Yemen offers the earliest and most abundant evidence of diasporic Muslim Ethiopian populations. The Persian writer Ibn al-Muǧāwir, who traveled throughout the region in the first quarter of the thirteenth century, described the population of Yemen’s main port, Aden, as principally comprising eight foreign groups, including Zayāliʿa and Ḥabaša. Perhaps, as in his distinction between Mogadishans and Somalis, he here distinguished between the city-dwellers of Zaylaʿ and Muslim Ethiopians more generally. When he specified immediately afterward that “the majority of the inhabitants are Abyssinians and Somalis,” however, “Abyssinian” (Ḥabaša) likely referred to both groups.83 By the late fifteenth century, there was indeed an Ethiopian quarter in the city. Called, after the Ḥabaša, the “Ḥāfat al-Ḥubūš,” it was not far from the Jewish quarter and distinct from the upper town where the wealthy merchants lived.84 The fifteenth-century Yemeni author al-Šarǧī records the establishment of Ethiopian communities in other towns of Yemen later in the thirteenth 82  Though Ǧabarti in modern times also came to refer to Somalis, scholars identify it as originally a term for Muslim Ethiopians from Ifat and Zaylaʿ, and employed to distinguish them from Christian Ethiopians. See Edward Ullendorff, “Ḏabart,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam, new ed. (Leiden, 1991), 2: 355; Abdulkader Saleh, “Ǧäbärti,” in EAe 2 (2005), 597–598. Regarding the more inclusive use of Ḥabaša, it may be notable that a sixteenth-century statute from the Ethiopian monastery in Qusqam (BnF MS Éth. 35, fol. 2v) declared it an insult, requiring payment of a fine, for one Christian pilgrim to call another “son of a Ḥabaša,” suggesting the term was, at least in the diaspora at this time, associated with Muslim usage and derogatory connotations: see Cerulli, Palestina, 2: 373–4, 391. 83  Ibn al-Muǧāwir, A traveller in thirteenth-century Arabia: Ibn al-Mujāwir’s Tārikh alMustabṣir, trans. G. Rex Smith (Aldershot, 2008), 151. I have provided the term [Somali] where Smith leaves an ellipsis, based on the French translation of Éric Vallet in L’Arabie marchande: état et commerce sous les sultans rasūlides du Yémen (626–858/1229–1454) (Paris, 2010), 137–38. 84  Vallet, L’Arabie marchande, 138.

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century. By his account, two brothers, both identified by the nisba al-Zaylaʿī, left Ethiopia for Yemen with their families, and headed north and south respectively, probably in the early 1250s.85 One settled in the southern coastal village of al-Luḥayya, where his son was remembered as the founder of two religious schools and renowned for his learning and piety. His tomb became a pilgrimage destination and his descendants, too, were hailed as holy men who worked miracles and had the gift of foresight.86 The descendants of the other brother, who settled in the village of al-Salāma, were also venerated as holy men: his grandson in particular attracted visitors and settlers from throughout Yemen.87 Al-Šarǧī used the nisba al-Zaylaʿī in these instances to refer to specific lineages, rather than to a broader community of Ethiopians, but this doubtless reflects the genre of saintly biography in which he was writing. His account illustrates the spiritual standing and fame that Ethiopian emigrés could achieve in the diaspora. Muslim Ethiopians settled in other regions as well, primarily (it appears) for reasons of pious study. The famous traveller Ibn Baṭṭūṭa, who referred to them as the Zayāliʿa, noted the space reserved for them at the principal mosque in Damascus in the fourteenth century.88 By the early fifteenth century, Muslim Ethiopians formed a distinctive and recognized community in Cairo as well. In 1415, when the trustee of the al-Azhar mosque briefly evicted all the “poor of God” (religious students) living there, its residents were organized into four “nations,” each with its own riwāq or residence hall. One of these nations was the Ǧabartiyya.89 Further proof that this community was well known dates to 1443, when King Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob invited the Egyptian sultan to confer with “the Ǧabartiyya who are settled in the mosque of Al-Azhar” to confirm the truth of the Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob’s statements regarding Ethiopia. As Julien Loiseau has observed, by now “strongly established in a learning institution that was becoming one of the most important in Egypt ... the Jabartiyya were no longer individuals scattered in the underworld of Egyptian sufism but a collective agent of

85  Alessandro Gori, “Una famiglia santa tra Africa orientale e Yemen: gli Zaylaʿī nelle ‘Ṭabaqāt’ di Aḥmad b. Aḥmad b. ‘Abd al-Laṭif al Šarǧi,” RSO 72 (1998): 41–60, at 47. 86  Ibid., 48–54. 87  Ibid., 54–56. 88  Ibn Baṭṭūṭa, Voyages d’Ibn Batoutah, ed. and trans. C. Defrémery and B.-R. Sanguinetti (Paris, 1853), 204: I thank Alessandro Gori for this reference. 89  Briefly mentioned by Saleh, “Ǧäbärti,” 597, and John Spencer Trimingham, Islam in Ethiopia, 2nd. ed. (London, 1965) 150 n. 2, the community is the focus of Julien Loiseau, “Abyssinia at al-Azhar.”

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the Cairene diplomatic scene…. Al-Azhar had given rise in the fifteenth century to a new diaspora from the Horn of Africa.”90 It is likely that Muslim Ethiopians had established themselves in other pious and scholarly centers in the Islamic world in the later Middle Ages as well. According to the nineteenth-century historian al-Ǧabartī, for instance, Muslim Ethiopians had riwāq in Mecca and Medina as well as in Cairo, but it is unclear if he intended to suggest that this was the case in his ancestor’s time, and corroboration from medieval sources would be necessary to confirm it.91 3

Enslaved Ethiopians

Slavery was of course widespread in the ancient Mediterranean world, and continued in the Middle Ages in many regions, including Christian Ethiopia, the Islamic world, and parts of Latin Europe. The prohibition (sometimes breached in practice) against enslaving coreligionists meant that both Christians and Muslims sought slaves from “infidel” regions. The Aksumite kingdom provided such slaves to Red Sea traders already in late antiquity, and the trade is believed to have increased in the early Islamic period.92 The variety of terms used to denote black African slaves, however, once again complicates efforts to identify Ethiopians in the sources. The Latin Christian confusion between Ethiopia and Nubia, as well as Latin authors’ use of “Indian” to mean Ethiopian, affected their identification of enslaved peoples as it affected their identification of Christian Ethiopians. Islamic authors generally distinguished between Ethiopians (Ḥabaša) and Nubians, but their use of other terms, such as Sūdān and Zanj, could be more generic, and “Zanj” in particular has eluded precise characterization.93 Finally, the use of the term “Habshi” in premodern India, clearly related to the Arabic “Ḥabaša,” suggests that the majority of enslaved black African there originated in Ethiopia, but it is certainly possible that Habshi slaves came from other regions as well. 90  Loiseau, “Abyssinia at al-Azhar,” 59–60. 91  David Ayalon, “al-Ḏabartī,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam, new ed. (Leiden, 1991), 2: 355–57, at 355. 92  Gwynn Campbell, “Slave Trades in the Indian Ocean World,” in India in Africa, Africa in India: Indian Ocean Cosmopolitanisms, ed. John C. Hawley (Bloomington, IN, 2008), 17–54, at 23. 93  François Renault, La traite des noirs au proche-orient medieval, VII–XIV siècles (Paris, 1989), 62; Henri Médard, “La plus ancienne et la plus récente des traites: panorama de la traite et de l’esclavage en Afrique orientale et dans l’océan Indien” (hereafter “Panorama”), in Traites et esclavages en Afrique orientale et dans l’océan Indien, ed. Henri Médard et al. (Paris, 2013), 65–118, at 66.

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Already in the tenth and eleventh centuries, enslaved Ethiopians are mentioned as far away as Mesopotamia. Eunuchs were in high demand in elite households: a contemporary source claimed that as many as 10,000, the majority of them African, could be found in and around Baghdad, of whom at least some, according to François Renault, were Ethiopians.94 Women too were sought as domestic laborers and concubines: an eleventh-century Baghdadi source identified female enslaved Africans from four regions of origin, including Ethiopia.95 Most of these enslaved Ethiopians probably passed through the Dahlak Islands, whose Muslim ruler exported enslaved peoples from the tenth century and by the eleventh controlled the facing mainland port of Massawa, “the main link between the Muslim-dominated Red Sea coast and the Christian highlands” before the twelfth century.96 In nearby Yemen, where enslaved Ethiopians were numerous, an enslaved Ethiopian who had served as an administrator for the Ziyādid dynasty even took control of the state after the extinction of the Ziyādid line, founding an Ethiopian “slave dynasty,” the Naǧāḥids, who ruled Zabīd and the northern Yemeni lowlands from the early twelfth to the mid-thirteenth century.97 Sources are much richer for the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries, when both the Christian kingdom and the Islamic sultanates of Ethiopia had consolidated politically. Zaylaʿ, under Muslim control by the late twelfth or thirteenth century, had by now replaced Massawa as Ethiopia’s principal port, and helped to make Ethiopia one of the major East African sources for exported enslaved people in the later Middle Ages.98 Some of the enslaved were Christians. Although Muslim tradition held that Muhammad had forbidden jihad against Christian Ethiopians, Christian Ethiopia’s territorial expansion in the fourteenth and later centuries constituted an aggression against neighboring Muslims that could justify the capture and enslavement of Christians.99 The Irish Franciscan Simon Semeonis’s account of his 1322–24 pilgrimage to the 94  Renault, La traite, 55–57. 95  Ibid., 59. 96   François-Xavier Fauvelle-Aymar et al., “Le port de Zeyla et son arrière-pays au Moyen Âge: investigation archéologiques et retour aux sources écrites,” in Espaces musulmans de la Corne de l’Afrique au Moyen Âge. Études d’archéologie et d’histoire, ed. François-Xavier Fauvelle-Aymar and Bertrand Hirsch (Paris and Addis Ababa, 2011), 27–74, at 53; quotation from Wolbert Smidt, “Massawa,” in EAe 3 (2007), 849–854, at 850. 97  Smith, Thirteenth-century Traveller, 4–5. 98  Alessandro Gori, “Zaylaʿ,” in EAe 5 (2014), 164–166, at 164; Fauvelle-Aymar et al., “Le port,” 50–64; Campbell, “Slave Trades,” 24. 99  Habtamu M. Tegegne, “The Edict of King Gälawdéwos Against the Illegal Slave Trade in Christians: Ethiopia, 1548 – Featured Source,” The Medieval Globe 2 (2016): 73–114, at 98–100.

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Holy Land may offer an early witness to this activity, for he mentioned slaves sold in Cairo and Alexandria, including “schismatic Indians and Nubians.”100 By the early fifteenth century, the Muslim Ethiopian sultan of the Barr Saʿd al-Dīn, according to al-Maqrīzī, was able to flood the international markets with enslaved captives, and some of these were likely Christian; Gǝʿǝz hagiographies recount a later ruler of this sultanate gifting fifty enslaved Christians to the ruler of Yemen, and narrate the sale (or miraculous release just before sale) of other Christians in the ports of Zaylaʿ and Massawa.101 The Portuguese chaplain Francisco Alvares, who resided in Ethiopia from 1520 to 1526, similarly noted that the sultan of ʿAdal (i.e. the Barr Saʿd al-Dīn) “sends every year large offerings to Mecca of many Abyssinian slaves that he takes in the wars, and also he makes presents of those slaves to the King of Arabia and to other princes.”102 The attacks launched against the Christian kingdom by Aḥmad ibn Ibrāhīm from the late 1520s must have increased the numbers of enslaved Christians: he is reported to have captured 2500 in a single foray in 1528.103 Though most authors identify Arabia or Asia generally as the destinations of these enslaved Christians, the Croatian pilgrim George Huszthi, who visited the Holy Land in 1538–40, saw some in Jerusalem and Egypt, leading him to observe that the Christian ruler of Ethiopia could not be so powerful, or Ethiopians would not be slaves in Muslim lands.104 King Gälawdewos’s edict of 1548 was surely a response to the unprecedented scale of such enslavement over the previous decades. While Ethiopian Christian law already forbade enslaving fellow Christians or selling converted slaves to unbelievers, Gälawdewos’s edict now sought to control the Muslim-dominated trade as well. It required written lists and visual inspections of merchants’ human “cargo” at the royal court and by provincial administrators, and set steep punishments for the attempted sale of any Christian.105

100  The account is edited in Girolamo Golubovich, Biblioteca bio-bibliografica della Terra Santa dell’Oriente francescano, 5 vols. (Quaracchi, 1906–27), 3: 237–282, with the relevant passage at 274. Though this edition reads “indiani schismatici et danubiani,” the author makes clear that the enslaved were Christians (of both sexes) and “black as crows.” Cerulli, who excerpts this passage in Palestina, 1: 104–106, amends “danubiani” to “nubiani.” 101   Marie-Laure Derat, “Chrétiens et musulmans d’Éthiopie face à la traite et à l’esclavage aux XVe et XVIe siècles,” in Traites et esclavages en Afrique orientale et dans l’océan Indien, ed. Henri Médard et al. (Paris, 2013), 121–148, at 127–28, 135, 139. 102   Beckingham-Huntingford, Prester John, 2: 408. 103  Habtamu M. Tegegne, “Edict,” 102. 104  Cerulli, Palestina, 1: 417. 105  Habtamu M. Tegegne, “Edict,” 80, 85–87 (on the Fǝtḥa nägäśt), 89–90 (text of 1548 edict).

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Christian Ethiopians could be the facilitators as well as the victims of the trans-regional slave trade. They certainly owned enslaved people themselves,106 though it is true that the identification of the enslaved, in Christian texts and in visual representations, is sometimes difficult, and questions concerning the interplay of their social status, legal status, and ethnic classification (or racialized depiction) remain to be fully explored.107 The Christian prohibition against selling converted enslaved people to Muslims had the effect of leaving the trade largely in Muslim hands,108 but Christians could nonetheless contribute to the overseas traffic in various ways. One was to permit Muslims to capture and enslave adherents of local religions in lands under Christian suzerainty. Another was to pass the enslaved on to Muslim merchants without converting them to Christianity. This was the fate not only of local-religious Ethiopians but of some Betä Ǝsra‌ʾel, whom the Christian rulers of Ethiopia frequently fought in the fourteenth and fifteenth century. Obadia of Bertinoro, an Italian Jew who visited the Holy Land in the late 1480s, heard from informants there about a recent battle that had led to a number of Betä Ǝsra‌ʾel being captured by Christian Ethiopians and sold; Obadia himself had seen two in Cairo, where, he said, they were redeemed by Egyptian Jews.109 His witness is seconded by early Hebrew sources on the Betä Ǝsra‌ʾel that again relate to their arrival 106  Habtamu M. Tegegne, “Edict,” on the legal justification; for examples, see Derat, “Chrétiens et musulmans;” Getatchew Haile, “From the Markets of Damot to that of Bärara: A Note on Slavery in Medieval Ethiopia,” Paideuma 27 (1981): 173–180; and Anaïs Wion, “Medieval Ethiopian Economies,” in this volume. 107  As Derat observes (“Chrétiens et musulmans,” 125), the terms gäbr and ʿamät could mean both “slave” and “servant” (their primary meaning), and sometimes only context reveals the legal status of the person in question. In visual art, the depiction of figures with darker skin may have been intended to indicate legal (slave) status, or a distinct regional origin or ethnic identity. In the illumination depicting the elite woman Amätä Lǝʿul with her attendants (fig. 12.12), for instance, two figures in the lower register are notably darker. Like the other attendants, they are court officers whose titles are inscribed on the painting -the bäʿalä mäqareza (man in charge of the sedan chair) and the ṣäware ʿarat (carrier of the bed), ṣäware being a common term in official titulature, used here also for the three “shield-bearers” and the “stool carrier” at top left. It is perfectly possible that enslaved people held ranking positions at the royal court in Christian Ethiopia, as in many parts of the Islamic world. If so, nothing precludes that some of the lighter-skinned attendants pictured were also enslaved, if skin tone was intended to indicate regional or ethnic identity and not legal status. In the current state of research such questions can only be posed. The inscriptions on Fig. 12.12 are transcribed and translated in Alessandro Bausi, “Su alcuni manoscritti presso le comunità monastiche dell’Eritrea (I. Dabra Māryām),” RSE 38 (1994): 13–69, at 59–61. 108  Richard Pankhurst, A Social History of Ethiopia: The Northern and Central Highlands from Early Medieval Times to the Rise of the Emperor Tewodros II (Trenton, NJ, 1992), 64, 111–112. 109  Cerulli, Palestina, 1: 320–324.

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in the Middle East as slaves, and that discuss their status as Jews in the context of the requirement that Jewish slaves be redeemed.110 At the end of our period, in the 1550s, a Jesuit observer wrote that the Christian Ethiopians purposely refrained from converting neighboring peoples so they could “send them down the coasts to be sold.”111 King Lǝbnä Dǝngǝl (1508–1540) even made a brief attempt to circumvent Muslim middlemen by sending Christian merchants to southern Arabia to sell, among other things, enslaved people.112 Whether provided by Christians or acquired directly by Muslim merchants, the majority of enslaved Ethiopians throughout the Middle Ages were adherents of local religions inhabiting the regions to the west and south of the Christian kingdom.113 Some and possibly most of these were women.114 Already in the thirteenth century, Ibn al-Muǧāwir could describe the inhabitants of Mecca as “dusky people, since most of their partners are black slave girls from Abyssinia and Nubia.”115 It is enslaved males, however, whom the medieval sources most frequently mention, due to their high value (particularly eunuchs) and their utility as soldiers and administrators. Al-ʿUmarī commented only on the trade in eunuchs in his fourteenth-century description of Islamic Ethiopia. He reported that the sultanate of Hadiyya was the usual place from which Muslim merchants bought boys, presumably from adherents of local religions (who would have captured them from other groups outside their own), then made a detour out of Hadiyya to castrate them in order to circumvent the Christian suzerain’s prohibition of castration, and finally brought them to the coast to be sold.116 Two such Ḥabaša eunuchs rose to positions of prominence in fifteenthcentury Cairo. Jawhar al-Lālā, sold in Mecca to a Mamluk emir, was “one of the most influential officers of the reign of Sultan al-Ashraf Barsbāy” in the 110  Michael Corinaldi, Jewish identity: the case of Ethiopian Jewry (Jerusalem, 1998), 104 ff. I thank Steven Kaplan for this reference. 111  Richard Pankhurst, Ethiopian Borderlands: Essays in Regional History from Ancient Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century (Lawrenceville, NJ: Red Sea Press, 1997), 252–53. 112  Derat, “Chrétiens et musulmans,” 146. 113  Pankhurst, Social History of Ethiopia, 111–12; Habtamu M. Tegegne, “Edict,” 94. The most frequently mentioned regions for acquiring slaves are Damot in the west and Hadiyya and Gamo in the south. 114  Gälawdewos’s edict specifically mentions both male and female enslaved: Habtamu M. Tegegne, “Edict,” 89. The Indian Ocean slave trade is noted for its preponderance of female slaves, though the evidence comes largely from the nineteenth century: see Campbell, “Introduction: Slavery,” xi; Médard, “Panorama,” 89, 101. 115  Ibn al-Muǧāwir, A traveller in thirteenth-century Arabia, 33. 116  Ibn Faḍl Allāh al-ʿUmarī, Masālik el abṣār fi mamālik el amṣār. I, L’Afrique moins l’Égypte, trans. Maurice Gaudefroy-Demombynes (Paris, 1927), 16–17.

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1430s. Jawhar al-Qunuqbāʾī became the sultan’s treasurer in the same period. His route to Cairo – he was offered by the Christian king Dawit II as a gift to Sultan Barqūq in 1386 or 1387 – also indicates that the Christian prohibition on castrating enslaved youth could, when expedient, be overlooked.117 Young males were also in demand, especially from the fourteenth century, as slave soldiers. Francisco Alvares observed in the 1520s that boys from the region of Damot “are much esteemed by the Moors, and they do not let them go at any price; all the country of Arabia, Persia, India, Egypt, and Greece are full of slaves from this country, and they say that they make very good Moors and great warriors. These are pagans.”118 Though such boys might end up virtually anywhere in the Islamic world or neighboring regions, they are particularly well attested in India, where they were known as Habshi. In Gujarat, on the western coast, they formed a large part of the army; in 1530 one Habshi slavesoldier was made commander of the fort of Daman, with 4,000 Habshi warriors under him.119 In Bengal, too, Habshi slaves are attested by the late fourteenth century. By the later fifteenth they numbered some 8,000, controlling important offices of state and filling the bodyguard, from which positions they were even able to create a brief Habshi-ruled state from 1488 to 1493.120 It was in the Deccan that Habshi developed their most lasting influence. They were already a powerful political bloc under the Bahmani dynasty in the fifteenth century, allied with local Muslims against new Turkish, Persian, and Arab arrivals. After the division of the Bahmani sultanate into three successor states, Habshi military factions played an important role in the internal struggles for power in two of them, Ahmadnagar and Bijapur, and held effective control of the latter from the 1580s into the seventeenth century.121 Perhaps the most famous of the Habshi slave soldiers in the Deccan, Malik Ambar, is also one of the few whose origins and passage into slavery have been traced. Reputedly from the Kambata region, south of Damot, he was sold in the Yemeni port of Mocha, 117  Loiseau, “Abyssinia at al-Azhar,” 57–58. 118   Beckingham-Huntingford, Prester John, 2: 455. 119  Fitzroy André Baptiste, John McLeod, and Kenneth X. Robbins, “Africans in Medieval North India, Bengal, and Gujarat,” in African Elites in India: Habshi Amarat, ed. Kenneth X. Robbins and John McLeod (Ahmedabad, India and Ocean Township, NJ, 2006), 125–129, at 126. 120  Stan Goron, “The Habshi Sultans of Bengal,” in African Elites in India, 131–137, at 131–33. 121  Amedeo Maiello, “Malik Ambar e la diaspora habasi nell’Oceano Indiano,” in Aethiopica et Orientalia: Studi in onore di Yaqob Beyene, ed. Alessandro Bausi, Antonella Brita, and Andrea Manzo, 2 vols. (Naples, 2012), 1: 383–421, at 402–403 (I thank Alessandro Bausi for this reference); Fitzroy André Baptiste, John McLeod, and Kenneth X. Robbins, “Africans in the Medieval Deccan,” in African Elites in India, 31–43, at 31, 33, 37.

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then resold in Baghdad before being bought, alongside a thousand other enslaved Habshi youth, in the Deccan in the early 1570s.122 It is likely that at least some “Habshi” hailed from regions other than Ethiopia, though the Ethiopian provision of slaves was considerable, especially in the sixteenth century. One observer in Ethiopia in the 1550s spoke of 10–12,000 “pagan slaves” per year being sold by Christian Ethiopians to coastal markets, not to mention those acquired by Muslim traders directly.123 Concentrated in large numbers in specific locations and working together in the same occupations, the Habshi of India, unlike most Africans enslaved in the Islamic world, lived in conditions that were conducive to a sense of shared identity. There is indeed some evidence that Habshi were recognized and recognized themselves as a distinct community, acting en bloc, for instance, in the ethnic rivalries of the region, and often filling the armies they commanded with fellow Habshi.124 Until the decline of slave armies in India the seventeenth century, according to Richard Eaton, Habshi warriors formed “a distinct Deccani group and military caste.”125 Even so, they were subject to some of the same conditions militating against a distinct group identity that affected enslaved Ethiopians elsewhere in the Islamic world. Even those, perhaps a majority, who hailed from southern Ethiopia did not necessarily share the same language or culture of origin, and having been removed from their homeland at an early age they may have retained few memories of it. Virtually all were converted to Islam upon enslavement, and none could maintain contact with their natal society. Furthermore, slave soldiers were regularly manumitted after a number of years of service, and hired themselves out as mercenaries thereafter. Now free, Muslim, and able to marry – but lacking access to Habshi women, who were not imported to India in large numbers – they intermarried with Indian women, occasionally at quite high social levels.126 Habshi society perdured over several centuries because it was replenished annually, but in each generation Habshi soldiers could and did integrate into their new societies.

122  Richard Eaton, “Malik Ambar and Elite Slavery in the Deccan,” in African Elites in India, 45–67, at 45–46; see also Maiello, “Malik Ambar,” 404–414, who considers the biographical data on his origins only conjectural. 123  Pankhurst, Ethiopian Borderlands, 252–3. 124  Baptiste, McLeod, and Robbins, “Africans in Medieval Deccan,” 33, 37; idem, “Africans in Medieval North India, Bengal, and Gujarat,” 126. 125  Eaton, “Malik Ambar,” 60. A similar conclusion is reached by Amedeo Maiello, “Malik Ambar,” 403–404. 126  Eaton, “Malik Ambar,” 56, 61.

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4 Conclusion The free Christian, free Muslim, and enslaved Ethiopian diasporas surveyed here were clearly distinct in significant ways, and the foregoing survey has been organized by type in order to do justice to the specific conditions and scholarly treatment of each. Yet they also paralleled and intersected with each other in ways I would like to highlight in conclusion. The parallels between the free Christian and free Muslim communities are notable. Both appear to have migrated primarily for religious or religiousintellectual reasons, reflecting their membership in the larger religious communities of the Christian ecumene and Dār al-Islam. Both of course migrated voluntarily, and with the option of return; both maintained contact with their homelands, and disseminated knowledge of those homelands to other peoples. Some individuals achieved renown as religious and as scholars in their host countries, as the Ethiopian saints in Yemen and Täsfa Ṣǝyon and his colleagues in Rome attest. Both formed recognized communities in specific locations, though it is likely that in general, Muslim Ethiopian communities, being settled among fellow Muslims in Muslim-ruled countries, assimilated more ­easily.127 The longevity of the al-Ǧabartī family in Cairo and al-Zaylaʿī families in Yemen have no known parallels among Christian Ethiopians abroad. These parallels, virtually all of which distinguish the free Muslim and free Christian communities from enslaved Ethiopians, suggest that legal status was a determining factor in Ethiopians’ experience in the diaspora. Yet the free and the enslaved also intersected in the diaspora, in sometimes surprising ways. In Cairo, Yemen, and doubtless other locations in the Islamic world, free Muslim Ethiopians could be found alongside enslaved adherents of local religions, who were generally converted upon purchase and therefore became Muslim as well. Enslaved Christians must have been sold alongside adherents of local religions in the markets of Massawa, Zaylaʿ, and more distant ports, and those attested in the markets of Cairo and Jerusalem would have inhabited, however briefly, the same urban spaces as their free coreligionists. Moreover, it is possible that formal legal status was less determining of lived experience in the diaspora than it might appear: that Ethiopians abroad occupied a spectrum of positions in the sociopolitical orders of their host countries, 127  Even where Christian Ethiopians settled in Christian-ruled areas like Cyprus or Italy, their non-Chalcedonian faith set them apart from the ruling power. It is possible, however, that assimilation into resident non-Chalcedonian communities where these were large, for instance in Egypt, was easier; it is another question whether this was desired, and to what extent it might have taken place.

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with the enslaved not always at the bottom. Free Christian Ethiopians were subject to a number of restrictions in Islamic lands, and even in Christian-ruled countries were subject to variable degrees of tolerance. Non-Chalcedonian Christians occupied a relatively low place in the legal hierarchy of thirteenthcentury Cyprus, for example, and while Ethiopian communities enjoyed the patronage of ruling powers in sixteenth-century Cyprus and Rome, they were also vulnerable to accusations of heresy.128 Conversely, the enslaved in the Indian Ocean world (broadly speaking) could enjoy better living conditions than the free peasantry, and this was especially so for eunuchs and slave soldiers, raised in the households of the elite and sometimes exercising considerable autonomy and influence in Islamic society. In India, as noted above, some Habshi became prominent generals and even de facto or official rulers of Indian states. In Cairo, the eunuchs Jawhar al-Lālā and Jawhar al-Qunuqbāʿī, though enslaved, possessed more wealth and power than the free Muslim Ethiopian “poor of God.” Indeed, Jawhar al-Lālā offers a striking example not only of the geographical coexistence of different “types” of diasporic Ethiopians, but of their potential affinities across the divide of their disparate regional origins, native religions, and legal standing. Jawhar – almost certainly an adherent of a local religion enslaved and castrated as a youth and then sold abroad – chose, from his exalted position in the Mamluk administration, to fund a riwāq at the mosque of Al-Azhar, and the riwāq he chose to fund was none other than that of the Ǧabartiyya, his “fellow” Ethiopian Muslims.129 The legal travails of the Persian merchant al-Tabrīzī in Cairo in the 1440s offers a similar example of the ways identities and affinities could reconfigure themselves abroad. Al-Tabrīzī, who made a career fashioning Christian objects for and selling weaponry to the Christian Ethiopian king, was accused, in Cairo, of yet worse: abetting a conspiracy between the Christian rulers of Latin Europe and of Ethiopia to attack Egypt. Among his accusers was one ʿAbd as-Salām al-Ǧabartī – that is, a member of the free Muslim Ethiopian community in Cairo. Among al-Tabrīzī’s defenders, however, was an enslaved Ethiopian eunuch whom al-Tabrīzī himself had 128  In a thirteenth-century legal treatise regarding Latin-ruled Cyprus, the legal status of eastern Christians other than Syrian was below that of all other Christians, and just above Muslims: Peter W. Edbury, “Latins and Greeks on Crusader Cyprus,” in Medieval Frontiers: Concepts and Practices, ed. David Abulafia and Nora Berend (Aldershot, Eng., 2002), 133– 142 at 136–37. Ṣägga Zäʾab – not a member of the monastic community at Rome, but resident in Portugal for several years – was subject to religious inquisition and accusation: see Matteo Salvadore, The African Prester John and the Birth of Ethiopian-European Relations, 1402–1555 (London, 2017), 154–55, 167–68. 129  Loiseau, “Abyssinia at al-Azhar,” 58.

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“imported” to Egypt, who told his master that the merchant had been a model of upstanding Muslim observance while in Ethiopia, devoting himself to prayer and Quranic recitation and ensuring that those in his entourage did likewise.130 By taking a broad view of the medieval Ethiopian diaspora we are better able to perceive not only the differences between each diasporic “type” but their parallels and conjunctures, and the variability of experience within them. We also glimpse, albeit fragmentarily, the scope of Ethiopian settlement from Italy to India, and the diverse ways its members impacted their larger world.

130  Carl F. Petry, “’Travel Patterns of Medieval Notables in the Near East’” Reconsidered: Contrasting Trajectories, Interconnected Networks,” in Everything is on the Move: The Mamluk Empire as a Node in (Trans-)Regional Networks, ed. Stephan Conermann (Göttingen, 2014), 165–179, at 172–3.

chapter 16

The Muslim-­Christian Wars and the Oromo Expansion: Transformations at the End of the Middle Ages (ca. 1500–­ca. 1560) Amélie Chekroun and Bertrand Hirsch The first half of the sixteenth century was a time of profound upheaval in the societies of Ethiopia and Eritrea. The chronic conflicts between the Christian kingdom and the Barr Saʿd al-­Dīn became a war of conquest in which the troops led by Aḥmad b. Ibrāhīm took control of nearly all of Christian territory; Oromo populations coming from the south began a formidable territorial expansion of their own from the 1520s forward; new actors (the Portuguese, the Ottomans) intervened in Ethiopian affairs in relation to their own commercial rivalry for control of the Red Sea, and thus lent those affairs an international dimension, also visible in the religious sphere in the desire of Ignatius Loyola to include Ethiopia among the lands to be missionized by his newly founded Jesuit order. And yet the historiography on this period, if compared to that on the “classic” (thirteenth- to fifteenth-­century) period of medieval history, is rather scanty, as the few syntheses available indicate. The thesis of Merid Wolde Aregay, which was perhaps the first effort in this direction, was never published, despite its qualities;1 that of Mordechai Abir, which followed in 1980, covers the period too summarily;2 both are concentrated on the Christian kingdom. One of the challenges of studying this period is precisely that one must take into consideration all the Ethiopian societies attested in the sources and their dynamic interactions, rather than contenting oneself with a simplistic framework of “decline” or “renewal” that pertains only to the Christian kingdom. In fact, the centrality of the Christian kingdom is one of the concepts thrown into question by and in this era.

1  Merid Wolde Aregay, Southern Ethiopia and the Christian Kingdom 1508–1708, with special reference to the Galla migrations and their consequences (Ph.D diss., School of Oriental and African Studies, 1971). 2  Mordechai Abir, Ethiopia and the Red Sea. The rise and decline of the Solomonic dynasty and Muslim-­European rivalry in the region (London, 1980).

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2020 | doi:10.1163/9789004419582_017

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The Islamic Conquest of the Christian Kingdom

The war for the conquest of the Christian kingdom had no precedent. So the emirs of the Barr Saʿd al-­Dīn said to Imam Aḥmad in the Conquest of Abyssinia (Futūḥ al-­Ḥabaša),3 a long Arabic account by ʿArab Faqīh (also known as Šihāb al-­Dīn)4 that narrates the rise of Imam Aḥmad from the perspective of the city-­ dwellers of Harar from the 1520s to the attack on the Gälila Island in 1535 or 1537.5 The emirs explain that “[their] fathers and [their] ancestors never wanted to settle in the country of Abyssinia. Instead they would send raiding parties to the outermost borders of the country for booty, cattle and such like [i.e. slaves]; and then they would return to the country of the Muslims.”6 Indeed, from Middle Ages until the nineteenth century, the culture of raiding was a vital part in the economy of the region, for both Muslim and Christian communities. Raids could only take place against an “infidel” population, because the capture of slaves was one of the main goals, and in both Muslim and Christian traditions it was forbidden to enslave coreligionists. By plundering territories that were not under their domination, kings and sultans secured a source of income that did not burden their own population, ensured the protection of their borders, and reaffirmed the mutual respect of borders.7 The culture of raiding did not prevent the Christian kingdom from taking over ­neighboring 3  While waiting for an edition taking into account the nine manuscripts known for the Futūḥ al-­Ḥabaša, the reference edition (with French translation) remains René Basset, ed. and trans., Histoire de la conquête de l’Abyssinie (XVI siècle) par Chihab Eddin Aḥmed ben ʿAbd el Qâder, 2 vols. (Paris, 1897–1909). Some translations have been made from Basset’s work, into Amharic, Somali, Harari, and English. For the latter see Šihab ad-­Dīn Aḥmad bin ʿAbd al-­Qāder bin Sālem bin ‘Uṯmān, Futūḥ al-­Habaša, The Conquest of Abyssinia (16th century), trans. Paul Lester Stenhouse, with annotations by Richard Pankhurst (Hollywood, CA, 2003), hereafter noted as Stenhouse, trans., Conquest of Abyssinia. 4  From his full name Šihāb al-­Dīn Aḥmad b. ʿAbd al-­Ḳādar b. Sālim b. ʿUṯmān, nicknamed ʿArab Faqīh. He is unknown elsewhere and would have been, according to his colophon, of Yemeni origin, or would in any case have a strong link with the city of Ǧizān in Arabia. 5  The last years of the war are not recounted in this text; the colophon announces a second volume that was never written or was lost. See Amélie Chekroun, Les djihâds de l’imam Aḥmad (Éthiopie, 16e siècle). Lectures du Futūḥ al-Ḥabaša (Paris, forthcoming); David Vô Vân, “A propos du Ǧihâd dans le Futuh al-­Habasha: de la lecture d’Alfred Morabia à la relecture d’Arab-­ Faqih,” Annales d’Éthiopie 17 (2001): 125–137. 6  Stenhouse, trans., Conquest of Abyssinia, 100. 7  See Thomas Guindeuil, “Alimentation, cuisine et ordre social dans le royaume d’Éthiopie (XIIe–­X IXe siècle),” (Ph.D diss., Université de Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne, 2012), 320–322; Marie-­Laure Derat, “Chrétiens et musulmans d’Éthiopie face à la traite et à l’esclavage aux XV e et XVIe siècles,” in Traites et esclavages en Afrique orientale et dans l’Océan indien, ed. Henri Médard et al. (Paris, 2013), 121–148; Mordechai Abir, “The Ethiopian slave trade and its

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Muslim territories at the beginning of the fifteenth century,8 but before the jihad of Imam Aḥmad, neither the Barr Saʿd al-­Dīn nor the Christian kingdom tried to conquer the other. Indeed, despite the claim in the history of ʿAmdä Ṣǝyon’s wars that the sultan of Ifat wanted, in 1332, to become the “king of all the land of Ethiopia,”9 it does not seem that the Muslims attempted to conquer or recover their own former territories during the two centuries before the sixteenth. Neither does it seem that such a policy persisted beyond the sixteenth century. The actions of Imam Aḥmad are therefore unique in the history of Muslims in Ethiopia. Almost nothing is known about the leader of the jihad, Aḥmad b. Ibrāhīm al-­Ġazī. In most Christian sources he is called “Grañ” (“the left-­handed”),10 despite the fact that, even if he was indeed left-­handed, this pejorative nickname appears for the first time in the sources of the seventeenth century,11 in order to deprecate this enemy who destroyed so many symbols of Ethiopian Christianity and its kingdom.12 Apart from some legends that develop from the seventeenth century about his part-­Christian ancestry,13 all that is known relation to the islamic world,” in Slaves and Slavery in Muslim Africa, vol. 2: The Servile Estate, ed. J. R. Willis (London, 1985), 123–136. 8   On the Christian expansion into formerly Islamic lands, see Deresse Ayenachew’s essay and the essay “Sultanates of Medieval Ethiopia” in this volume. 9  Paolo Marrassini, ed. and trans., Lo scettro e la croce, La campagna di ʿAmda Seyon I contro l’Ifat (1332) (Naples, 1993), 141. 10  As examples, see Manfred Kropp, ed., Die Geschichte des Lebna Dengel, Claudius und Minās, CSCO 503, SAe 83 (Louvain, 1988), 8; Täklä Sadéq Mäkwériya, Yäʾaḥmäd Grañ wärära (“The Invasion of Ahmäd Grañ”) (Addis Abäba, 1966 EC [1973/74 CE]). Surprisingly, Somalis have adopted it: they call him Gurey (the left-­handed) in Somali language, as they embraced the figure of Imam Aḥmad as a national jihadist hero. 11  For example, the Anqāṣā amin, an advocacy against Islam addressed to the imam in 1540 by Ǝnbaqom, the eleventh abbot of Däbrä Libanos (which was destroyed by the Muslim army in 1532) never used that nickname: see Emeri Van Donzel, ed. and trans., ʿƎnbāqom Anqāṣā amin. La porte de la foi : apologie éthiopienne du christianisme contre l’Islam à partir du Coran (Leiden, 1969). 12  The first text which seems to use that nickname is the Mäṣḥafä sǝddät (“Book of the Persecution”), a brief text, probably from the first years of the seventeenth century, that relates from the Christian point of view the Imam Aḥmad’s campaigns from 1527 to his death in 1543. It is the only text that describes the war between the Gälila Island’s attack and the Christian king Gälawdéwos’ advent in 1540. This text is mainly known through the various versions of the so-­called “Short Chronicle,” a compilation of short notes concerning certain important events in Christian Ethiopia history, from the legendary reign of Menelik I to the modern period. Many editions and translations have been done. The last and most complete one is by Manfred Kropp, Die Geschichte des Lebna Dengel, Claudius und Minās, cited above. 13  André Caquot, ed. and trans., “Histoire Amharique de Grāñ et des Galla,” Annales d’Éthiopie 2 (1957): 123–143; Carlo Conti-­Rossini, “Note etiopiche,” Giornale della Società

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about him comes from the Futūḥ al-­Ḥabaša.14 According to ʿArab Faqīh, he was probably born about 1506, in the Hūbat district of the Barr Saʿd al-­Dīn. He began his military career as a soldier in the service of garād Abūn b. Adaš, an opponent of the sultan’s authority. Garād Abūn was killed in a battle against the legitimate sultan Abū Bakr in 1525. After his death, Aḥmad succeeded Abūn as leader of the opposition against the sultan. His authority grew and he managed to gather an army powerful enough to defeat and kill Abū Bakr after several years of conflict, probably around 1527. Aḥmad put Abū Bakr’s brother, ʿUmar Dīn, on the throne, but the new sultan never had any real authority: Aḥmad appointed his own brother, Muḥammad b. Ibrāhīm, to watch over him. ʿArab Faqīh depicts Aḥmad as an ideal Muslim ruler, the perfect muǧahīd: the only one able to carry out the project of conquering the Christian kingdom, to convince the Muslim armies to join him, and to legitimize such a war.15 The Futūḥ al-­Ḥabaša does not explain Aḥmad’s motives for undertaking the jihad. Some Christian legends claim that it was “to punish the infidelity and pride of [the Christian king] Lǝbnä Dǝngǝl,”16 or grew from “the desire to avenge his father [a Christian monk] killed by the Ethiopian monks, by massacring all of them,”17 or was sparked because Aḥmad refused to pay a tribute to the king.18 Less personal motives have been proposed to explain this conquest as well.19 For example, Berhanou Abebe attributes it to demographic, climatic and economic factors – the attraction of the riches of the highlands whence

asiatica italiana 10 (1897): 152; Domenico Brielli, “Ricordi storici dei Uollo,” in Studi etiopici, ed. Carlo Conti Rossini (Rome, 1945), 78–110, at 84. 14   Franz-­Christoph Muth, “Aḥmad b. Ibrāhīm al-­Ġāzī,” in EAe 1 (2003), 155–158. 15  Chekroun, Les djihâds de l’imam Aḥmad 291–309. 16  Caquot, “Histoire Amharique de Grāñ et des Galla;” Carlo Conti Rossini, “Il libro delle leggende e tradizioni abissine dell’ecciaghié Filpòs,” Rendiconti della Reale Accademia dei Lincei, Classe di scienze morali, storiche e filologiche, 5th ser., 26 (1917): 699–718, at 712; Ignazio Guidi, “Leggende storiche di Abissinia,” RSO 1 (1907): 5–30. 17  See for example Ulrich Braukämper, A History of the Hadiyya in Southern Ethiopia (Wiesbaden, 2012). 18  John Spencer Trimingham, Islam in Ethiopia (London, 1965), 86. 19  B. G. Martin, “Mahdism, Muslim Clerics, and Holy Wars in Ethiopia, 1300–1600,” in Proceedings of the First United States Conference on Ethiopian Studies 1973, ed. Harold G. Marcus (East Lansing, MI, 1975), 91–100; Asa J. Davis, “The Sixteenth Century Jihād in Ethiopia and the Impact on its Culture: Part I,” Journal of the Historical Society of Nigeria 2, 4 (1963): 567–592; idem, “The Sixteenth Century Jihād in Ethiopia and the Impact on its Culture: Part Two, Implicit Factors Behind the Movement,” Journal of the Historical Society of Nigeria 3, 1 (1964): 113–128; Reidulf Knut Molvaer, “The Tragedy of Emperor Libne-­Dingil of Ethiopia (1508–1540),” Northeast African Studies 5, 2 (1998): 23–46.

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arrive “the slaves, the ivory, the powder of gold, the skins.”20 It is quite difficult to develop these hypotheses, because the sources do not mention such aspects. No document, for instance, suggests a population explosion within the sultanate, or even a particular drought prevailing at the time. Many mentions of famines appear in the medieval sources, both in the highlands and the lower lands, without mentioning massive displacement of populations.21 Generally, when historians write about “the Grañ’s jihad,” they refer to all the military actions carried out by Imam Aḥmad against the Christian kingdom during the second quarter of the sixteenth century. This is mainly because ʿArab Faqīh, the author of the Futūḥ al-­Ḥabaša, qualifies each armed action led by Imam Aḥmad as “jihad for the sake of Allāh,” whether it is a fitna (sedition, civil strife, period of internal discord) against the sultan Abū Bakr, a raid (ġazw in Arabic) against border territories in order to take booty, a defensive jihad to protect the Dār al-­Islam against attacks by “infidels,” or an offensive jihad, for conquest.22 ʿArab Faqīh’s project is to extol jihad as a worthy undertaking: this explains the omnipresence of the theme in his text. If this has led historians to group all the actions described in this account under the generic term “jihad of Imam Aḥmad,” we should nevertheless observe that there were several kinds of military action involved whose objectives, modalities and results were very different. Even within the offensive jihad that the Muslims of the Barr Saʿd al-­Dīn led against the Christians in the 1520s and 1530s, there were two distinct phases. The date of 1527 has been commonly accepted as marking the beginning of the conquest of the Christian kingdom, and has also generally been considered the “closing date” for the Ethiopian Middle Ages.23 It is the date of the first conflict opposing Imam Aḥmad and Christian troops that is mentioned in the Christian texts, for it corresponds to a raid led by the Christian leader Dägälhan (Daǧalḥān in Arabic), brother-­in-­law of King Lǝbnä Dǝngǝl, against Muslim border areas. However, this is not the first battle between Aḥmad and Christian troops. The Futūḥ al-­Ḥabaša mentions a first Christian attack repulsed by Aḥmad sometime before Dägälhan’s attack, and led by Fanuʾel (Fānīl in Arabic), the head of Däwaro. The description of Fanuʾel’s attack is very simi20  Berhanou Abebe, Histoire de l’Éthiopie, d’Axoum à la revolution (Paris and Addis Ababa, 1998), 50. 21  Guindeuil, Alimentation, cuisine et ordre social, 295–319; Cerulli, “Documenti arabi,” 57. 22   See particularly Michael Bonner, Jihad in Islamic History. Doctrines and Practice (Princeton, 2006); John Kelsay and James Johnson, Just War and Jihad: Historical and Theoretical Perspectives on War and Peace in Western and Islamic Traditions (New York, 1991); Alfred Morabia, Le ǧihad dans l’Islam médiéval (Paris, 1993). 23  See for example Taddesse Tamrat, Church and State in Ethiopia, 1270–1527 (Oxford, 1972).

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lar to that of Dägälhan’s. But it is undated and does not appear in Christian texts, hence is largely forgotten. Since, in any case, 1527 corresponds to a Christian attack on Islamic lands and not the reverse, it is an odd date at which to mark the beginning of the jihad. In fact, none of the sources signal 1527 as the beginning of the conquest; all of them date it few years later. The first chapter of the chronicle of Śärṣ́ä Dǝngǝl24 dates the “beginning of the Christian persecution” to a “second incident,” the battle of Šǝmbǝrä Kwǝrǝ (Ṣambra Kūrā in Arabic) in 1529 and the subsequent Islamic conquest of Däwaro.25 Another Christian source, the Mäṣḥafä sǝddät (“Book of the persecution”), also de-­emphasizes 1527, for Dägälhan’s attack is here clearly described as a raid. It is only “two years after,” in the twenty-­first year of Lǝbnä Dǝngǝl’s reign (i.e. 1529), that Aḥmad attacked Christian territory and fought for the first time against Lǝbnä Dǝngǝl in Šǝmbǝrä Kwǝrǝ, and two years after that, so in 1531, that “Grañ left the country of Adäl” and started to attack Däwaro.26 For its part, the Ta‌ʾrīḫ al-­mulūk (“History of the Kings”), a short Arabic text that tells of the last decades of the Barr Saʿd al-­Dīn, dates the beginning of the conquest to 937 AH, which corresponds to the year between 25 August 1530 and 14 August 1531 CE.27 Finally, the Futūḥ al-­Ḥabaša is less explicit on the date of the beginning of the conquest, probably because ʿArab Faqīh includes all conflicts between Muslims and Christians under the rubric of the jihad. But the beginning of the conquest strictly speaking is preceded by four “expeditions” (ġazw in Arabic) on the initiative of Aḥmad. During those expeditions, the Christian and the Muslim armies faced each other for the first time in two major battles: at Badǝqe (Bādaqī in Arabic; September 1528) and at Šǝmbǝrä Kwǝrǝ (March 1529). The direct attack on the Christian king in these battles was unprecedented.28 But the main objective was still booty, and after seizing it the army returned to Harar. 24  The chronicle of Śärṣ́ä Dǝngǝl is preceded by three short chapters, each of them dedicated to the reign of one of his predecessors: Lǝbnä Dǝngǝl, Gälawdewos and Minas. See Kropp, Geschichte; Carlo Conti Rossini, ed. and trans., “Storia di Lebna Dengel re d’Etiopia,” Rendiconti della Reale Accademia dei Lincei, 5th ser., 3 (1894): 617–640; Francisco Maria Esteves Pereira, Historia de Minás, Además Sagad, rei de Ethiopia (Lisbon, 1888). None is very detailed, because, according to the author, the purpose was to “describe very briefly and without verbiage or prolixity, but in a few words, the history of the victories and glories of our gracious king who loved God and the people.” 25  Kropp, Die Geschichte, 9. 26  Ibid., 12. 27  Enrico Cerulli, ed. and trans., “Documenti arabi per la storia dell’Etiopia,” Memorie della Reale Accademia dei Lincei, 6th ser., 4, 2 (1931): 39–96, at 55. 28  Stenhouse, trans, Conquest of Abyssinia, 57.

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Despite some variability in the sources’ accounts, therefore, it seems clear that an Islamic offensive with conquest as its aim was finally launched only in 1531, after long and thorough preparations of the army and the recruitment of foreign soldiers. The annexation of new territories became systematic, as did the appointment of Muslim governors over newly conquered land. The departure from Harar was followed very shortly afterward by a first big battle, at Anṣokiya (Anṭākya in Arabic), near Ayfars, in February–March 1531. After his description of this battle, ʿArab Faqīh’s vocabulary sheds all ambiguity: the rules of conquest over new territories are described as scrupulously respected. By embarking on a multi-­year war in which regular return to the Barr Saʿd al-­Dīn was unfeasible, Aḥmad broke with the tradition of raiding. This rupture is manifested first of all by a new objective in the fight against the Christians: it is no longer simply a matter of taking booty, but first and foremost taking control of territories and integrating them into the Dār al-­Islām. During raids the troops were very small, and probably mostly composed of the regular army of Barr Saʿd ad-­Dīn, namely the Malasāy (riders) and the “soldiers of the sea” (infantrymen). To conquer the Christian kingdom, Imam Aḥmad instead used contingents from populations tributary to the sultans (Ḥarlā, Somali, etc.), probably essentially peripheral. They were joined by troops and individual soldiers from Arabia, including Mahra, and from other parts of the Islamic world.29 Though armaments do not seem to have been entirely revolutionized by this exceptional war, the use of firearms30 bought at Zaylaʿ was essential, and required a new technical knowledge. The Islamic conquest of the Christian kingdom therefore had profound implications for the way in which war was waged. For the first few years, the conquest focused on territories in the southern half of the Christian kingdom. The first year was devoted to a systematic attack on the king’s places of power, and saw frontal attacks between the royal Christian armies and those of the imam. The latter judged that only the capture of the Christian king could sustainably establish their authority.31 After a year 29  Amélie Chekroun, “Ottomans, Yemenis and the ‘conquest of Abyssinia’ (1531–1543),” in Movements in Ethiopia, Ethiopia in Movement. Proceedings of the 18th International Conference of Ethiopian Studies, ed. Eloi Ficquet and Ahmed Hassen (Addis Ababa, 2015). 30  On firearms in Ethiopia see Salih Özbaran, “The Ottomans’ Role in the Diffusion of Fire-­Arms and Military Technology in Asia and Africa in the Sixteenth Century,” in The Ottoman response to European Expansion: studies on Ottoman-­Portuguese relations in the Indian Ocean and Ottoman administration in the Arab lands during the sixteenth century, ed. Salih Özbaran (Istanbul, 1994), 61–66; Richard Pankhurst, “The History of Fire Arms in Ethiopia prior to the Nineteenth Century,” Ethiopian Observer 11 (1967): 202–225. 31  Stenhouse, trans., Conquest of Abyssinia, 190, 196.

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of pursuing the king from Damot to Amhara, the Islamic army had conquered all spaces south of Amhara. The integration of these territories, mainly Däwaro, Bali, Fäṭägar, Ifat, and Hadiyya, was facilitated by the significant presence in them of Muslim communities, remnants of the Islamic past of these former “Muslim kingdoms.”32 They were the only ones to choose to convert massively to Islam during the peace treaties. In the rest of the Christian kingdom, the population very largely chose to keep its religion and to pay the capitation.33 By the end of 1532, Aḥmad established his camp at Däbrä Bǝrhan in Šäwa, which became the center of his new power. Only after taking control of the entire southern area of the Christian kingdom and establishing Muslim governors in each of the territories could the Islamic army travel further north in order to complete the conquest of the kingdom. But the conquest of the north of the kingdom was no more difficult than that of the south: in less than two years, Aḥmad’s army managed to seize control of Lasta, Bägemdǝr, Dämbǝya, Tǝgray, and the coastal region in present-­day Eritrea. By 1537, Muslims controlled a large majority of the Christian territory, including a number of key regions. The conquest was therefore a success – except that the king was still not captured, even if his position was very shaky. Islam had never been so powerful in the historical Ethiopian area. The following years were devoted to the consolidation of Muslim domination. They are not described in ʿArab Faqīh’s text, so we must rely on Portuguese and Christian sources. These other documents informing us about the events that happened from 1535–1537 give us only rare information on the actions of the imam and his army. Produced mainly by the Christian power, they focus on the Christian reactions to the Islamic conquest. In 1540–1541, a Portuguese contingent sent to support the Christian king arrived in Massawa and aided the weakened royal army in fighting against the Muslims. At the same time, a Yemeni contingent joined the ranks of Aḥmad’s army. In 1541, the Portuguese governor of India conducted an expedition to the Red Sea against the Ottomans. During a stop at Massawa in February 1541 he was informed by the baḥǝr nägaš (coastal governor) Yǝsḥaq of King Gälawdewos’s situation and, probably because Gälawdewos’s predecessor, Lǝbnä Dǝngǝl, 32  See Ulrich Braukämper, Islamic History and Culture in Southern Ethiopia (Berlin, 2003); Trimingham, Islam in Ethiopia, 68. 33  See Amélie Chekroun, “Conquête(s) et conversions religieuses en Éthiopie du XVIe siècle,” Archives de Sciences Sociales des Religions 182 (2018): 149–166; Richard Pankhurst, “Peace negotiations in the Land of Dāwaro in 1531: A Page From the History of Ahmād Grañ,” Sociology Ethnology Bulletin 1, 2 (1992): 61–64.

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had asked for help from King João III of Portugal,34 a military company of 400 Portuguese soldiers under the command of Christovão da Gama was formed in an attempt to rescue what Portugal then considered a strategic ally in its war in the Red Sea against the Ottoman Empire. The company included João Bermudes and Miguel de Castanhoso, who both wrote accounts of their journeys in Ethiopia.35 After several battles, the Portuguese were defeated at the battle of Wäfla in Tǝgray in August 1542. According to the sources, Christovão da Gama was captured and killed – maybe even beheaded – by Imam Aḥmad. The surviving soldiers finally joined Gälawdewos in Sǝmen in October and continued to fight in his army.36 It is generally assumed that the Ottoman Empire gave its support to the Muslim military coalition, and that the Portuguese and Ottoman interventions in this Ethiopian war reflected their competing political ambitions around the Red Sea.37 The sources from both Ethiopia and the Ottoman Empire suggest, however, that the Ottoman sultan was not really interested in the Ethiopian war.38 The first Ottoman occupation of the Yemeni coast began only in 1538–1539.39 The military support coming from Zabīd, Aden, and Mahra must 34  Sergew Hable Selassie, “The Ge’ez Letters of Queen Eleni and Libne Dingil to John, King of Portugal,” in IV Congresso internazionale di studi etiopici, ed. Enrico Cerulli, 2 vols. (Rome, 1974) 1: 547. 35  R. S. Whiteway, ed., The Portuguese expedition to Abyssinia in 1541–1543, as narrated by Castanhoso, with some contemporary letters, the short account of Bermudez, and certain extracts from Correa (London, 1902); Joāo Bermudes, Ma géniale imposture – Patriarche du Prêtre Jean, trans. S. Rodrigues de Oliveira (Toulouse, 2010); Miguel de Castanhoso, Dos Feitos de D. Cristovao da Gama em Etiopia: Tratado composto por Miguel de Castanhoso, ed. F. M. E. Pereira (Lisbon, 1983). 36  On the Portuguese contingent, see Girma Beshah and Merid Wolde Aregay, The Question of the Union of the Churches in Luso-­Ethiopian Relations (1500–1632) (Lisbon, 1964), chap. 6; Andreu Martínez d’Alòs-­Moner, “Gama, Christovão da,” in EAe 2 (2005), 663–664; Whiteway, ed., The Portuguese expedition. 37  Cengiz Orhonlu, Osmanli Imparatorluǧu’nun Güney Siyaseti. Habeṣ Eyaleti [The Southern Policy of the Ottoman Empire in Ethiopia] (Istanbul, 1974), 26–27; Salih Özbaran, Ottoman Expansion Towards the Indian Ocean in the 16th Century (Istanbul, 2009); Mordechai Abir, Ethiopia and the Red Sea. The rise and decline of the Solomonic dynasty and Muslim-­ European rivalry in the region (London, 1980), 99; Ali Shamshad, “The Ottoman Empire and Ethiopia,” in Foreign relations with Ethiopia: human and diplomatic history ( from its origins to present), ed. Lukian Prijac (Berlin, 2015), 225–244. 38  The only mention of the war in the Ottoman archives is in a letter, written in Ottoman and stored in a library in Istanbul, not dated but probably from 1541, addressed by the Ottoman administration to “Sultan Ahmed al-­Hākim be Vilāyet-­I Habesh ” (“Sultan Aḥmad, leader of the Abyssinian Province”): Cengiz Orhonlu, Osmanli Imparator, 27. 39  F. Soudan, Le Yémen ottoman d’après la chronique d’al-­Mawzaʿī: al-­Iḥsān fī duḫīl Mamlakat al-­Yaman taḥt ẓill ʿadālat āl ʿUṯmān (Cairo, 1999); Michel Tuchscherer, “Chronologie du

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be seen as an extension of the close contacts that economically and diplomatically united these regions with Islamic Ethiopia throughout the Middle Ages, rather than as an Ottoman intervention.40 There have been some attempts to identify places mentioned in the sources (especially in Castanhonso’s narrative),41 and the main dynamics of these few years have been outlined, but a systematic study of the years following the arrival of the Portuguese has yet to be done. In February or March 1543 – the precise date is unknown, as each source gives a different one – a battle occurred between the Christian and Muslim armies at Zäntara (Wäyna Däga) east of Lake Ṭana, in which Imam Aḥmad was killed.42 His death marks the end of the jihad and of the Islamic conquest, and the beginning of the Muslim debacle. The collapse of Islamic territorial control is not documented, but the chronicle of Gälawdewos’s reign describes a Christian reconquest of the former kingdom in less than two years.43 The two decades that followed the Muslim debacle deeply disrupted the territorial and political organization of the region. The Christian kingdom and the sultanate of Barr Saʿd al-­Dīn both sought to reorganize and strengthen themselves, but the war had left a vacuum into which foreign powers rushed.

Yémen (1506–1635),” Chroniques yéménites 8 (2000): 14–29. 40  See Chekroun, “Ottomans, Yemenis.” 41  Genrela Staff, Storia della spedizione portoghese in Abissinia (Rome, 1888); Whiteway, ed., Portuguese Expedition; Enno Littmann, Die Heldentaten des Dom Christoph da Gama in Abessinien (Berlin, 1907); C. F. Beckingham, “A Note on the Topography of Ahmad Gran’s Campaigns in 1542,” Journal of Semitic Studies 4 (1959): 363–373. 42  The Indian Arabic Ẓafar al-­wālih bi-­Muẓaffar wa-­Ālihi by al-­Ḥāǧǧ al-­Dabīr, a history of the Gujarat written at the end of the sixteenth century that describes the jihad, mainly through the reading of the Futūḥ al-­Ḥabaša, gives an interesting description of this last battle, with the help of oral information from Ethiopian slaves in Gujarat. See Denison Ross, trans., An Arabic history of Gujarat: Ẓafar al-­wālih bi-­Muẓaffar wa-­Ālih, by ʿAbdallāh Muhammad bin ʿOmar al-­Makki al-­Asafi Ulughkhani (London, 1910); M. F. Lokhandwala, Zafar ul wālih bi muzaffar wa-­ālihi: An Arabic history of Gujarat (English translation), by Ulughkhāni Hājji ad-­Dabir, 2 vols. (Baroda, 1970–1974); Alessandro Gori, “Fame (and debts) beyond the sea: two mentions of imām Aḥmad b. Ibrāhīm in an Indian Arabic source,” in Linguistic, Oriental and Ethiopian Studies in Memory of Paolo Marrassini, ed. Alessandro Bausi, Alessandro Gori, and Gianfrancesco Lusini (Wiesbaden, 2014), 477–490. 43  See the chronicle of Gälawdewos (r. 1540–1559): William E. Conzelman, ed., Chronique de Galâwdêwos (Claudius), roi d’Éthiopie (Paris, 1895). The author of the chronicle takes an elegiac perspective on the king: see Dimitri Toubkis, “‘Je deviendrai roi sur tout le pays d’Éthiopie.’ Royauté et écriture de l’histoire dans l’Éthiopie chrétienne (XVIe–­X VIIIe siècles)” (Ph.D diss., Université Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne, 2004), vol. 1, 74–106; Manfred Kropp, “La réédition des chroniques éthiopiennes: perspectives et premiers résultats,” Abbay 12 (1983–1984): 49–72, at 52.

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The Barr Saʿd al-­Dīn’s End

The chronicle of Gälawdewos’s reign is the only document that describes the situation of the Muslim army after Imam Aḥmad’s death. The collapse that followed is very quickly evoked: part of the army fled to the pre-­conquest Islamic territories, while the rest rallied to the Christian camp. According to this chronicle, after Aḥmad’s defeat, the vizier ʿAbbās, chief of the army and second in the military hierarchy after the imam, attempted to take up the role held by Aḥmad by continuing to control Bali, Fäṭägar and Däwaro, three of the most important border provinces annexed during the conquest. His project was to reconquer all the territories Aḥmad had subdued. This resistance was brief. As early as October 1544, a year and a half after Aḥmad’s death, Gälawdewos killed ʿAbbās and reconquered these three territories, as well as that of Hadiyya.44 After two brief attempts to reclaim Däwaro, the Muslims were quickly beaten. We do not know who led these Muslim troops. Finally, two Christian attacks on the Islamic territories are described, the first led by Fanuʾel, head of the Christian army, and the second by Gälawdewos himself. The second attack took place in 1549–1550.45 It seems to have destroyed the province of “Adäl” (that is, the Barr Saʿd al-­Dīn), killed the reigning sultan, and hunted down a leader of the region named Nūr. Emir Nūr was probably the son of one of Aḥmad’s viziers, Muǧāhid b. ʿAlī b. ʿAbd Allāh Sūha. He took power over the sultanate from the year 959 AH (1551/1552 CE), placing the legitimate sultan under his tutelage. In March-­April 1559, during a great battle in Fäṭägar, Nūr killed and decapitated the Christian king Gälawdewos. After this victory, Nūr is said to have returned to Harar with the head of his enemy. It will be remembered that the death of the Christian king had been the main objective – never reached – of the war waged by Aḥmad, the necessary precondition to definitively establish Islamic control over formerly Christian lands. But Nūr did not take advantage of this victory to resume the conquest. One explanation for this is the very unstable situation within the Barr Saʿd al-­Dīn. The sultanate’s power was more fragile than ever, the territory being subject to Oromo attacks and to a serious economic crisis; in addition to epidemics and famine, the population was weakened by the long war and the death of a large part of the male population.

44  Conzelman, ed., Chronique de Galâwdêwos, chap. 23–27. 45  Ibid., chapters 35–38

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Emir Nūr is particularly famous46 for having fought the Oromo and for building a city wall to protect Harar from both their repeated attacks and from disease. He died in Harar, of the plague, in 1567.47 He is regarded as the successor of Imam Aḥmad. The Ta‌ʾrīḫ al-­mulūk gives him the title of “second conqueror” (al-­fatah al-­ṯānī), and today, in Harari memories, he remains much more prestigious than Aḥmad himself. After the death of Emir Nūr, the dynastic troubles in the sultanate resumed. The dynastic line of Saʿd al-­Dīn died out during the reign of Emir Nūr in 1559, with the death of Sultan Habīb b. ʿUmar Dīn. Thereafter, according to the Ta‌ʾrīḫ al-­mulūk, five rulers succeeded each other in quick succession, none reigning for more than a few years. This work also indicates that Sultan Muḥammad b. Nāṣir (r. 1572/3–1575/6) led an expedition against the Christian kingdom. It was a bitter failure for the Muslims, who saw a part of their troops go over to the Christian side.48 Finally, the imam Muḥammad Gaša (r. 1577–1583) shifted the center of power to Awsa, marking the end of the sultanate. Looking back over these events, we may note that despite the turbulent events of the first decades of the sixteenth century, the descendants of Saʿd al-­Dīn continued to reign over the Barr Saʿd ad-­Dīn until 1559, when the last sultan of this dynasty, Ḥabīb b. ʿUmar Dīn, was killed. Should we consider that the end of the dynasty marks the end of a period that began with the creation of Barr Saʿd al-­Dīn in the early fifteenth century? Should we rather consider the final failure of the conquest of the Christian kingdom in 1543 as a break in the history of this territory? The conquest led by Imam Aḥmad profoundly impacted the Christian kingdom as well as the Barr Saʿd al-­Dīn. But it would be wrong to say that the war of Imam Aḥmad marks the end of an era, at least as far as the sultanate is concerned. The war against the Christian kingdom was only one manifestation of the troubles that led to the disappearance of the dynasty of the sultans descending from Saʿd al-­Dīn, and then to the disintegration of the Barr Saʿd al-­Dīn 46  See for example Enrico Cerulli, “Gli emiri di Harar dal secolo XVI alla conquista egiziana (1875),” RSE 2 (1942): 2–18; Richard Burton, “Narrative of a trip to Harar,” Journal of the Royal Geographical Society of London 25 (1855): 136–150; Muhammed Moktar, “Notes sur le pays de Harrar,” Bulletin trimestriel de la société khaldiviale de Géographie du Caire 1st ser., 4 (1876): 351–3; Ewald Wagner, “Die Chronologie der frühen muslimischen Herrscher in Äthiopien nach den Harariner Emirslisten,” in Wort und Wirklichkeit. Studien zur Afrikanistik und Orientalistik, Festchrift für Eugen Ludwig Rapp zum 70. Geburtstag, ed. Brigitta Benzing, Otto Böcher and Günter Mayer, vol. 1, (Meisenheim: Hain, 1976), 186–204. 47  Cerulli, “Documenti arabi,” 156 ff; Conzelman, ed., Chronique de Galâwdêwos, 178; Franz-­ Christoph Muth, “Nūr b. Muǧāhid,” in EAe 3 (2007), 1209–1210. 48  Cerulli, “Documenti arabi,” 162–163; Kropp, Die Geschichte; Conti Rossini, Sarsa Dengel, 56–59.

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sultanate itself. Beginning in the late fifteenth century, internal struggles for the control of the sultanate, including the very rapid succession of sovereigns, alternating usurpers and legitimate descendants of the dynasty of Saʿd al-­Dīn, continued until the reign of a certain imam Muḥammad b. Ibrāhīm Gaša (r. 1577–1583). The latter moved the center of power to Awsa in the 1580s. It is this migration that marks the definitive end of Barr Saʿd al-­Dīn. Mainly caused by Oromo pressures in the Harar region, this migration was also the final consequence of internal discord in the sultanate. In this long troubled phase, the conquest of the Christian kingdom was paradoxically a stable period for the Barr Saʿd al-­Dīn. Sultan ʿUmar Dīn, a descendant of Saʿd al-­Dīn whom Imam Aḥmad placed on the throne, remained in power long after the death of Aḥmad. Moreover, by federating the various populations under his authority, and driving onto the Christian highlands most of the soldiers and local emirs, Imam Aḥmad provided a temporary peace between the central power and the population (especially the Somali clans), and between the sultan and the elites under his rule. If the Muslims of the Barr Saʿd al-­Dīn reduced their attacks against the Christian kingdom after Aḥmad’s death in 1543 (but did not stop them – Gälawdewos, it will be recalled, was killed in 1559), the Christian power then saw other foreign powers attack it in various forms. 3

Portuguese and Jesuits

This is obviously not the place to discuss the role of the Jesuits at the Ethiopian court, which had a serious impact on the reorganization of the Ethiopian Christian monarchy in the early seventeenth century.49 However, it is impossible to discuss the transitional period in the Christian kingdom following the end of the war against the Barr Saʿd al-­Dīn without mentioning the first Jesuit incursions into Ethiopia, a direct consequence of Portuguese policy in the Red Sea.50 The attempts to establish diplomatic and military relations between Portugal and the “Kingdom of Prester John,” first under King Manuel I (1495–1521) and later under João III (1521–1557), saw several representatives of the Portuguese power visit the Ethiopian royal court. The most famous visitor 49  Hervé Pennec, Des jésuites au royaume du prêtre Jean (Éthiopie). Stratégies, rencontres et tentatives d’implantation (1495–1633) (Paris, 2003); Andreu Martínez d’Alòs-­Moner, Envoys of a Human God. The Jesuit Mission to Christian Ethiopia, 1557–1632 (Leiden, 2015); Leonardo Cohen and Andreu Martínez d’Alòs-­Moner, “Jesuits,” in EAe 3 (2007), 277–281. 50  See the first volume of J. Aubin, Le latin et l’astrolabe. Recherches sur le Portugal de la Renaissance, son expansion en Asie et les relations internationales, 2 vols. (Lisbon 1996).

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was Francisco Alvares, chaplain of the Portuguese mission sent by Manoel I to Ethiopia in 1515. He stayed in Ethiopia from 1520 to 1526, and wrote a very famous account of his stay, the first lengthy eyewitness description of the Ethiopian highlands by a European, Ho Preste Joam das indias. Verdadera informaçam das terras do Preste Joam (“The Prester John of the Indies. A True Narration about the Lands of the Prester John”).51 Portugal’s goal with the first Luso-­Ethiopian embassies was to acquire a new Christian ally in the fight against Islam in the Red Sea. If these first Portuguese embassies made it possible to pinpoint the exact location of the Christian kingdom of Ethiopia, they revealed above all that the Christianity professed there was, according to the Catholic criteria, heterodox. A political alliance could only be envisaged if Ethiopia converted to Catholicism, through the conversion of the Christian king. It was on these ideas that the first Jesuit mission was sent to Ethiopia in 1555, as is shown in the letter that Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Jesuit order, wrote to King Gälawdewos on February, 23, 1555.52 The mission to Ethiopia was one of the first projects of the Society of Jesus, which Ignatius had founded in 1534 and Pope Paul III approved in 1540. At first, Ignatius himself was supposed to lead the mission. A first contingent, composed of mestre Rodrigues, Fulgencio Freire and Diogo Dias, was sent to prepare the coming of the mission by meeting Gälawdewos at his court in the south of his kingdom. In a letter of 23 June 1555 addressed to the viceroy of India, dom Pedro Mascarenhas, Rodrigues explained that Gälawdewos was absolutely unwilling to lend obedience to Rome or to receive a Catholic patriarch for the Ethiopians, and was determined to hold to the traditional Ethiopian Orthodox faith.53 As a result, the mission was reduced, Ignatius de Loyola cancelled his coming, and only six Jesuits were sent to Ethiopia, under Bishop Andrés de Oviedo, in 1557. They met King Gälawdewos soon after, who refused once again to adopt Catholicism. However, he authorized the Jesuits to settle in Tǝgray, where they founded a Catholic mission at Fǝremona, on the ʿAdwa plateau, in 1566. They 51  The translation of reference, with annotations, is Beckingham-­Huntingford, Prester John. 52  Monumenta Historica Societatis Iesu (MHSI), vol. 8 (Rome, 1966), 681. 53  Conzelman, ed. Chronique de Galâwdêwos, ch. 47; Edward Ullendorff, “The ‘Confessio Fidei’ of King Claudius of Ethiopia,” Journal of Semitic Studies 32 (1987): 159–76; Leonardo Cohen, “The Portuguese Context of the Confessio Fidei of King Claudius,” in Ethiopian Studies at the End of the Second Millennium, Proceedings of the XIVth International Conference of Ethiopian Studies, November 6–11, 2000, Addis Ababa, ed. Baye Yiman, 2 vols. (Addis Ababa, 2002), 1: 152–68; Pedro Páez, Pedro Páez’s History of Ethiopia, 1622, ed. Isabel Boavida, Hervé Pennec, and Manuel João Ramos, trans. C. Tribe, 2 vols. (Farnham, 2011), 1: 19–23.

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were supported by the few Portuguese living in Ethiopia since 1541, and by the bäḥǝr nägaš Yǝsḥaq. The persecutions against the Jesuits really started under Minas’s reign, and continued with less intensity under his successor Śärṣ́ä Dǝngǝl. They were always kept away from the royal court. This marginalization was accentuated by the closure of the port of Massawa. The port being occupied by the Ottomans, Europeans could no longer pass this way into Ethiopia, and missionary relief could not arrive. The last Jesuit died in 1597. It was not until 1603 that another Jesuit managed to arrive in Ethiopia, Father Pedro Páez. 4 Ottomans As we have said, the Ottomans at first showed little interest in Ethiopia, and it is very likely that during the conquest led by Aḥmad they had only a vague knowledge of the Ethiopian situation. As shown by Gengiz Orhonlu, the famous Turkish historian of Ottoman Africa through the Ottoman archives, the Ottoman documentation before the 1550s, mainly the work of Ottoman geographers, shows that they were only interested in coasts and had very limited knowledge of the interior, and that the Ottoman government had neither a political nor a religious interest in Ethiopia.54 One of the rare Ottoman documents that mentions “Ḥabešistan” before the middle of the century is a report, most likely of Admiral Seman Reis, dated 2 June 1525, which deals with the situation of Yemen, the countries of the Red Sea, and the Indian Ocean. The author describes the ports of Dahlak, Sawākin and Zaylaʿ, and emphasizes their strategic importance for control of the Bab al-­Mandeb. But the priority was clearly Yemen and, more generally, access to the Indian Ocean.55 In 1517, Sultan Selim I conquered Egypt, and the Ottoman Empire became the major power in the Red Sea. After the conquest of Yemen between 1538 and 1547 by Sulayman paša, and the Ottoman penetration into Upper and Lower Nubia in 1540–41 by Özdemir paša, the latter occupied the port of Sawākin in the early 1550s – the precise date is unknown – and in 1554, it was declared a sanǧak (district of an Ottoman province or eyaleti) within the Ottoman Egyptian administration. Özdemir paša was officially appointed as the governor of the Habeš eyaleti (the province of Abyssinia), created on 15 July 1555: the administrative headquarters was then Sawākin and the surrounding area 54  Cengiz Orhonlu, “Turkish archival sources on Ethiopia,” in IV Congresso Internazionale di Studi Etiopici, ed. Enrico Cerulli, 2 vols, (Rome, 1974), 1: 455–462. 55  Salih Özbaran, Ottoman Expansion towards the Indian Ocean in the 16th Century (Istanbul, 2009) Appendix II.

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was unified under this new administrative unit.56 The Ottomans quickly came into competition with the Funǧ sultanate of Sinnār, established in 1504, which attempted to control Sawākin and its hinterland. On the other hand, in order to compete with the Portuguese for the control of the Red Sea, the Ottomans launched a military expedition on the southern shore. Between 1557 and 1559, Özdemir paša took Massawa, Ḥarqiqo, the Dahlak islands, and, according to Orhonlu, Zaylaʿ as well, and for a short time Berbera. Ḥarqiqo and Zaylaʿ became sanǧaks within the Habeš eyaleti.57 In the same way that “ʿAdal” is often represented on maps as occupying half the territory of present-­day Ethiopia, as well as Djibouti and Somaliland, the Habeš eyaleti is very often represented as a broad band occupying all of the Red Sea’s African shore and extending relatively far inland. The historical situation was in fact a bit more complex. First of all, Zaylaʿ did not stay long under Ottoman rule. The Arabic documents from Zaylaʿ edited by Enrico Cerulli never mention an Ottoman occupation. Instead they identify local gärad (“governors”) and local warlords, and mention the building of a wall between 1572 and 1577 to protect the town against Somali nomads plundering during the governorship of garād Lādo.58 So for the southern part of what is generally described as the Habeš eyaleti, the question of an actual Ottoman occupation remains open. As for Ottoman control in Tǝgray, the maximum expansion lasted only a short time before refocusing strictly on the coast. Starting from Massawa, which had become the administrative and economic center of the Habeš eyaleti, Özdemir paša moved towards the interior, and took a part of Tǝgray as well as Dǝbarwa, the capital of the Baḥǝr nägaš province. He established a fort at Dǝbarwa, reportedly full of uncountable wealth, with a main mosque (ǧāmiʿ), in order to expand Ottoman power into the surrounding area.59 The Ottoman settlement at Dǝbarwa was important, as shown by two well-­preserved copper coins, today kept in the Coin Collection of Tübingen University in Germany, that were struck in Dǝbarwa in 974 AH (1566/67 CE), the year of Sultan Selim II’s accession.60 At first, the Christian governor of the province, Yǝsḥaq, fought against the Ottomans, and obliged them temporarily to retreat back down the coast. But during the reigns of Minas and Śärṣ́ä Dǝngǝl, rivalries emerged between these kings and Yǝsḥaq, and the latter changed sides and supported the Ottoman extension. In 1562, Dǝbarwa was once again under Ottoman rule. In 56  Orhonlu, Osmanli, 37. 57  Ibid., 43 ff. and 113 ff. 58  Cerulli, “Documenti arabi,” 70–89. 59  Conzelman, ed., Chronique de Galâwdêwos, 166–168. 60  Necdet Kabaklarli, “Deverya, an Unknown Ottoman Mint in Eritrea,” in Mangır – Yemen’de darbedilen Osmanlı bakır paraları, ed. Necdet Kabaklarli (Istanbul, 2007), 146–52.

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1576, Śärṣ́ä Dǝngǝl’s troops captured the fort and razed it to the ground, and at the battle of ʿAddi Qorro in 1578, the Ottoman paša Ahmed and the bäḥǝr nägaš Yǝsḥaq were killed.61 The Ottomans decided then to limit their control to the Red Sea shores.62 Despite the death in 1561 of Özdemur paša (creator of the Ottoman province of Habeš), the definitive loss of Dǝbarwa and Tǝgray, and the general slowdown of Ottoman efforts in Ethiopia after the uprising of imam Mutahhar in Yemen in 1569–1570,63 the key positions along the trade routes linking the Red Sea with the Ethiopian highlands remained under Ottoman control. The decline of the Portuguese presence in the area helped them. The Ottomans continued to control the trade with inland Ethiopia during following centuries, particularly regarding the import of firearms and the export of slaves.64 5

The Oromo Expansion

The major historical phenomenon of the sixteenth century, although not yet studied to the degree it deserves, was the expansion of Oromo populations into territories previously within the Christian and Islamic states of Ethiopia-­ Eritrea. Within a few decades, the political, demographic, and religious map of the region was transformed. The small number of studies dedicated to this subject before the 1990s can be explained by three factors: the relative scarcity of the documentation; the production of historical accounts that privilege continuity; and the marginalization and subjection of Oromo peoples after the (often violent) conquests led by King Menelik II into Oromo territory at the end of the nineteenth century, which produced negative and derogatory representations of these peoples that persisted long afterward. Since the 1990s – the publication of the thesis of Mohammed Hassen can be considered a turning point65 – the number 61  Carlo Conti Rossini, “La guerra turco-­abissina del 1578,” Oriente moderno 1 (1921): 634– 636, 684–691, cont. in vol. 2, 1 (1923) 48–57; Paolo Marrassini, “I possenti di Rom’: I Turchi Ottomani nella letteratura etiopica,” in Turcica et Islamica. Studi in memoria di Aldo Gallotta, ed. Ugo Marazzi (Naples, 2003), 593–622. 62  Orhonlu partially reconstructed this first period of the Habeš eyaleti on the basis of the Ottoman archives: Orhonlu, Osmanli, 93–128. 63  Salih Özbaran, The Ottoman Response to European Expansion (Istanbul, 1994), 193–194. 64  See Wolbert Smidt and Alessandro Gori, “Ottoman Empire, relations with the,” in EAe 4 (2010), 74–81. 65  Mohammed Hassen, The Oromo of Ethiopia: A History 1570–1860 (Cambridge, 1990). The dissertation upon which this book draws was defended at the University of London in 1983.

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of historical studies has grown in a domain where anthropology previously prevailed. The Oromo formed a vast group who spoke a Cushitic language (Oromomiffaa), lived in the southwest of Ethiopia,66 and practiced animal husbandry and agriculture.67 Due to lack of sources, very little is known of their history or society before the sixteenth century, but one may suppose that they had interactions with neighboring societies and with the Islamic and Christian states.68 Their formidable expansion in the sixteenth century is documented in the Gǝʿǝz sources, notably in the chronicles of Kings Gälawdewos and Śärṣ́a Dǝngǝl as well as in the Short Chronicles, but these texts only mention a few battles in which the royal army met Oromo warriors.69 One could add to these the accounts of European witnesses like João Bermudes and oral traditions, of which the first were collected by Antoine d’Abbadie. But none of this would be sufficient to retrace the stages of the Oromo expansion without the aid of a text written by a learned monk named Baḥrǝy in the 1590s at the court of King Śärṣ́a Dǝngǝl: a history of the Oromo called, in Gǝʿǝz, the Zenahu la-­Galla (“History of the Galla”). This text is exceptional in many aspects, but above all because it is one of the only works of Christian Ethiopian literature devoted to the history of a radically different society, and has been the object of several editions and translations, 66  On the question of the “origins” of the Oromo, see the methodological reflections of Alessandro Triulzi, “Oromo Traditions of Origin,” in Études éthiopiennes, vol. 1: Actes de la X conférence internationale des études éthiopiennes, Paris, 24–28 août 1988, ed. Claude Lepage (Paris, 1994), 593–601. 67  Were there distinct groups of pastoralists and farmers within Oromo society in this period? So supposes Ezekiel Gebissa when he writes, “At the initial stage of the Oromo expansion, only the pastoralist Oromo moved to other areas. The settled agriculturists stayed in their cradle land and in the territories then ruled by the sultanates of Däwaro, Ifat, Waǧ and Bale and within the medieval Christian kingdom”: “Oromo History,” in EAe 4 (2010), 61–64, at 61–62. 68  Mohammed Hassen’s effort to document these interactions in his work (The Oromo & the Christian Kingdom of Ethiopia 1300–1700 [Woodbridge and Rochester, 2015] 379 ff.) is not convincing, due to an insufficiently critical reading of the sources coming from the Christian kingdom. One of the first documents to use the name “Galla” (a derogatory term used by Christian Ethiopian authors to designate the Oromo) is the world map of Fra Mauro (1459), which includes a “Flumen Galla,” a river that seems to serve as a border between the Christian kingdom and more southerly regions: see Piero Falchetta, Fra Mauro’s World Map (Turnhout, 2006), 829 (Terrarum Orbis n° 5). 69  Until the chronicle of Śärṣ́ä Dǝngǝl’s reign, there are few mentions of battles against the Oromo; the great subject of the Christian chroniclers was the fight against the Muslims. In the chronicle of Gälawdewos, for instance, there are only few mentions of conflicts with the Oromo (Conzelman, Chronique de Galâwdêwos, 141, 149, 157), and no such mentions in the chronicle of Minas (Pereira, Historia de Minás).

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as well as numerous commentaries. Of its author we have long known what he tells us himself in the work: he was a monk from a monastery in Gamo, a region on the southeastern frontier of the Christian kingdom. As he wrote, “The Däwwe chased off this prophet, devastated his land of Gamo, and carried off as booty all that he possessed.” These events occurred after one Fasil, a leader in the Christian kingdom, was killed in battle against the Ǧäwe (a branch of the Oromo Booranaa), and thus after 1586–1587 CE. Baḥrǝy then took refuge at the royal court of Śärṣ́a Dǝngǝl.70 Recent research conducted by Getatchew Haile has enriched his biography71 in showing that Baḥrǝy authored the majority of the texts in MS Or. 534 of the British Library, in particular a Psalms of Christ (Mäzmurä Krǝstos), a poetic tour de force, which confirms other biographical clues and reveals that Baḥrǝy was one of the most cultivated learned men of his time. Baḥrǝy explains his objectives in relation to two questions. The first is raised in the work’s opening lines: I started to write the history of the Galla to make known the number of their tribes, their alacrity in killing and the brutality of their customs. If someone were to ask, ‘Why has he written a history of the evil, as well as of the good?’ I would answer by saying: Look in the books, and you will see that the history of Muhammad has been written, and the histories of Muslim kings, though they [too] are our enemies in the faith.72 With such an introduction Baḥrǝy disarms the critics he knows his work will face. A learned monk, a master of Holy Scripture and religious poetry, and an important personage at court, he effectively quit his proper domain to address a contemporary, “profane” subject, one that was anguishing for Christian Ethiopians, and to give his personal opinion on these “enemies” of the Christian world, as he indicated in signing the work with his name: the phrase “(Thus) has said Baḥrǝy” close the text. Such an audacious act, in a world where literature was most often anonymous and distant from secular affairs, can only be understood in the context of royal support, in this case the support of Śärṣ́ä 70  Paul T. W. Baxter, “Baḥrǝy,” in EAe 1 (2003), 446. 71  Getatchew Haile, Ya‌ʾābbā Bāḥrey dersatoçç Oromoççen kammimmalakkatu lēloçç sanadoçç gārā (Addis Ababa, 2002); Getatchew Haile, “Mäzmurä Krǝstos,” in EAe 3 (2007), 897–898. 72  Ignazio Guidi, ed. and trans., “Historia gentis Galla/Histoire des Galla,” in Carlo Conti Rossini, ed. and trans., Historia regis Sarṣa Dengel (Malak Sagad). Accedit historia gentis Galla curante I. Guidi, 2 vols., CSCO 2nd ser., 3 (Paris, 1907), repr. As CSCO 20–21, SAe 3–4 (Louvain, 1961–62), 2: 195.

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Dǝngǝl. If it is difficult to know to what degree the work was a royal commission, the king must necessarily have consented to its composition and diffusion. We should therefore imagine that the questions raised by Baḥrǝy were those posed in the heart of the royal camp. The second question is posed by Baḥrǝy after his account of the Oromo’s expansion: Learned men often hold discussons and say: ‘How is it that the Galla vanquish us, though we are numerous and have many weapons?’ Some have said that God permits it on account of our sins; others have said [that the cause is] that our people are divided into ten groups (ṣota), of which nine do not go to war and have no shame to show their fear, and only the tenth group makes war and battles to the utmost of their ability.73 There were thus debates and controversies among the learned men, the masters of religious matters, of whom Baḥrǝy was a distinguished member. Two opposing parties, it seems, hadformed around the question of the cause of the Oromo’s repeated victories. One inclined toward a strictly religious vision of history, nourished by biblical interpretations – God punished peoples who sinned against him. The other, of which Baḥrey is the sole known representative, sought answers in a differential analysis of the two societies. This was obviously a way to protect the king from criticisms that the first interpretation authorized: if the king could not vanquish his enemies, it was because he had lost God’s favor and support. (Such critiques were, for example, leveled against King Lǝbnä Dǝngǝl for his inability to best Imam Aḥmad.) This is why, throughout his account, Baḥrǝy emphasizes that when the king is present on the battlefield, his army is victorious: defeats can be explained by his absence. Baḥrǝy’s text, organized by the author into chapters, can be divided into four sections. The first establishes the genealogy of different clans (gossa) belonging to the two major Oromo groups, the Booranaa and Baarentuu (chapters one to four). The second section narrates the history of the Oromo expansion, following the age classes that succeeded each other in power every eight years, from the luuba Melbah up to “the seventh year of the rule of Mul’äta,” for a total of 71 years (chapters five to eighteen). Chapter nineteen describes the social organization of the Christian kingdom as constituted of ten groups in which only one is capable of waging war, much like the ten classes that form an entire

73  Ibid., 204–205.

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cycle of the Oromo gadaa, but where all men are efficient warriors. The last chapter, finally, provides information on certain functions of Oromo society.74 In the first section Baḥrǝy shows a considerable knowledge of the genealogy of Oromo groups, and of the system of fission and fusion that is characteristic of segmentary societies. “When they are allies, they are all called Mäča, but if they go to war, they give themselves the names of Afre and Sädäča; if they are all united with the Tuläma, they are called Säppira.” He is also the first to shed a little light on the political system known under the name of gadaa (the term that he employs is luuba): “They have neither king nor master, like other peoples, but rather obey the luuba, for a period of eight years; at the end of eight years, another luuba is named, and the first is deprived of his position. Thus they proceed, with a fixed period for each. Luuba means ‘those who are circumcised at the same time.’” The gadaa has inspired a number of analyses since the pioneering work Asmarom Legesse, who defined the gadaa, with reference to the work of Baḥrǝy, in these terms: “The ideal model Bahrey uses to organize his chronicle clearly parallels the structure of the Gada system: two generations, forty years each, with each generation divided into five classes and each class given one of a series of ten names covering the complete cycle.”75 Baḥrǝy’s text also allows us to follow the major stages of the Oromo expansion, which he describes in eight-­year periods, thus borrowing the cyclical temporal system of the gadaa. In a first phase, from the luuba Melbah to the luuba Bifole, that is from the 1520s to the 1550s,76 it was essentially the Baarentu half of the Oromo who were engaged in the expansion, first in Bali and Däwaro and then in Fäṭägar, thus in regions populated primarily by Muslims. The 74  Baḥrǝy’s extensive knowledge of Oromo political and social organization and language, as well as his borrowing of categories used by the Oromo to conceptualize their history, makes one suspect (contrary to the doxa that sees him as a representative of the culture of Amhara Christians) that Baḥrǝy was familiar with Oromo culture, perhaps even of Oromo origin (as was, a bit later, Täklä Śǝllase, Ṭino by his Oromo surname, one of the redactors of chronicle of King Susǝnyos), albeit integrated into the religious elite of the Christian kingdom. 75  Asmarom Legesse, Gada. Three Approaches to the Study of African Society (New York, 1973) 138. 76  In the commentary of their English translation of Baḥrǝy’s text, C. F. Beckingham and G. W. B. Huntingford (Some Records of Ethiopia 1593–1646. Being Extracts from the History of High Ethiopia or Abassia by Manoel de Almeida Together with Bahrey’s History of the Galla [London, 1954] – the translation of Baḥrǝy’s text is based on Guidi’s French translation, pp. 111–129) proposed the date of 1522 for the beginning of luuba Melbah, and so dated the composition of the text to 1593 (208–210). But this is not confirmed by absolute dates from Gǝʿǝz sources, and we do have rather to consider that the beginning of luuba Melbah is ca. 1520.

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second phase began with the luuba Mǝsle in the 1550s. The Oromo by now installed in the conquered territories, they pushed their troops further north, into the heart of Christian and Muslim Ethiopia, where they confronted the armies of the Christian king led by Ḥamälmal at Dago,77 then those of Emir Nūr near Mount Azälo.78 From the 1560s, the Baarentuu continued their expansion northward, along the escarpment, and eastward in the direction of Harar, while the Booranaa, whose expansion, begun later, commenced with the regions of the southwest, menaced the historic territories of the Christian kingdom: Amhara, Angot, Goǧǧam, Bägǝmder. By the end of the 1560s, a large part of the territories previously controlled by Christian and Islamic states had passed into the hands of Oromo groups. The causes of the Oromo expansion are difficult to establish. Several factors have been proposed, including demographic growth (which however cannot be documented), and the disorder and destruction of the territorial defenses of the Christian and Islamic states in the wake of their own wars. But it seems legitimate to think, following Baḥrǝy, that at the heart of the phenomenon lies the gadaa system of Oromo social organization. Four elements of this system can be proposed as enabling factors. First, the age classes in power, who had to accomplish feats of war (such as raids on neighboring peoples), having accomplished their first successes may have launched into a program of progressive territorial occupation. Secondly, it is possible that the rejection of children born in contravention to the rules (which stipulated that only men in the age-­class in power could father children) created socially marginalized groups on the geographical periphery of Oromo territory, by necessity pastoralists in the lowlands, who became one of the engines of expansion.79 Thirdly, the advancement of Oromo groups was doubtless facilitated by the practice of integration, the adoption (moassa) of non-­Oromo populations 77  Ḥamälmal, a great lord of Šäwa and related to the royal lineage, reportedly confronted the Oromo in a region east of Šäwa, at the end of the reign of Gälawdewos: see Michael Kleiner, “Ḥamälmal,” in EAe 2 (2005), 982–983. 78  The battle at Azälo (near the Awaš River) would have taken place shortly after the victory Nūr’s troops over the Christian army of Gälawdewos in 1559: see Franz-­Christoph Muth, “Nūr b. Muǧāhid,” in EAe 3 (2007), 1209–1210. 79  Eloi Ficquet, “Dynamiques générationnelles et expansion des Oromo en Éthiopie au XVIe siècle,” L’Homme 167–168 (2003): 235–251, at 248 : “Les individus en état de minorité permanente dans ce système politico-­religieux à base générationnelle, de par leur naissance précoce ou par leur rang de cadet, étaient définitivement écartés vers les terres les plus insalubres et incultes, où ils étaient assimilés ou associés à des groupes castes. Ces segments marginalisés formaient une société frontalière tendanciellement croissante. Ils aspiraient probablement à s’établir sur des territoires plus fertiles afin d’y mener l’existence auguste à laquelle ils n’avaient pas eu droit.”

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into Oromo society.80 Finally, Oromo warriors, who used original tactics such as nocturnal attacks and surprise raids, were also able to adapt their war culture over the course of their expansion to new methods discovered among their neighbors.81 Starting in the decade 1550–1560, the societies of Ethiopia displayed a profoundly altered visage. The Barr Saʿd al-­Dīn had practically disappeared as such, the rare successors of the Walasmaʿ dynasty having closed themselves within the city of Harar which would thenceforth transform itself into a “holy city,” a refuge and symbol of a glorious, lost past. The Oromo were installed in the southern and eastern regions, previously controlled by Christian or Islamic states, and threatened the territories considered the “domain of the kings” in the Middle Ages (Šäwa, Amhara, as far as Tǝgray). The Christian kingdom had withdrawn into the northwestern regions, in particular around Lake Ṭana, and had lost control of vast territories once under its dominion. The reign of King Śärṣ́ä Dǝngǝl marked the beginning of a reinvention, a desire to erase these ruptures and to affirm a faultless continuity with the “golden age” of past centuries – he was the first king to be consecrated at Aksum since the fifteenth century – even while the royal territory was no longer the same (the great monastery of Däbrä Libanos was no longer accessible) and the very survival of the Christian kingdom could only occur through an integration of Oromo groups into its fold. 80  Hector Blackhurst, “Moassa,” in EAe 3 (2007), 982–983, at 983: “The Oromo’s ability to assimilate the peoples they encountered in their northward movement, using techniques such as group adoption, enabled them, it is argued, to successfully accommodate to their new, and potentially threatening, circumstances and to avoid the creation of an unstable and alienated population of non-­Oromo in their midst.” 81  Baḥrǝy notes that it was under the fifth luuba, Mǝsle (thus in the 1560s), that the Oromo started to settle in raided territories whereas previously they had returned beyond the Wabi Šäbälle River after each expedition; at the same time they began to ride on horseback and form a cavalry.

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Index Where items are referred to in the text in multiple languages, the language of most frequent occurrence is indexed, with cross-references as necessary. Bibliographical references and modern authors are excluded from the index. Ar. = Arabic, Gz.= Gǝʿǝz 71 Canons: 247n, 248 Abādir ʿUmar al-Riḍāʾ, šayḫ: 149, 150 Abäzo, region/local-religious polity: 77 Abbay, river: 398, 400 Abbayya, lake: 127, 353 abbess(es): 373, 436 ʿAbd al-Muʾmin, šayḫ : 151 Abrǝha, saint/Aksumite military leader: 280; Life of, 280, 281n Abrǝha wä-Aṣbǝḥa, church: 169, 170, 172, 175, 176, 330n, 332, 342 Absadi, abbot/saint: 241, 232, 318; Life of, 214n, 272n, 318n Abū Bakr b. Muḥammad b. Azar, sultan: 105, 457, 458 Abū Bakr al-Ṣiddīq, caliph: 150 Abū Ḏarr al-Ġifārī, companion of the Prophet: 149n Abū Hurayra, Islamic authority: 146n Abū-l-Fidāʾ, author: 403 Abū l-Makārim, author: 176n Abūn (or Aboññ) b. Adaš, garād: 157, 158, 457 accordion book (Gz. sǝnsul): see manuscript forms Acts of the Apostles: 171 ʿāda, pre-Islamic practice: 144 ʿAdal (Gz. Adäl), region/sultanate: xvi, xvii, 66, 76, 77, 78, 79, 95, 103, 106, 148, 150n, 156, 157, 446, 469. See also Barr Saʿd al-Dīn ʿAddi Abun, locality: 174 ʿAddi Qešo, locality: 180 Aden: city, 90n, 93, 110, 416, 418, 442, 462; gulf of: 86, 89, 96, 427 Admas Mogäsa: 390, 391. See also Ǝleni Adulis, port: 3, 154, 166, 169n, 197, 203, 222 afä-ṣäḥafä lam, office: 74 ʿAfar, language: 26; people, 420 Afnin, painter: 364 Afṣe, saint: 200; Life of, 280 After he ascended (Gz. Ǝmdǝḫrä ʿargä): 242

ʿAgamä, region: 34, 43, 147 Agäw, language: 26, 49, 50, 51; linguisticethnic group, 31, 49, 50, 51; region, 66 Agobo Qirqos, church: 329, 332 agriculture(-al)/farming: 1, 15, 18, 24, 66, 106, 112n, 124, 131, 138, 395, 396, 398, 399–404, 406, 408, 410, 413, 424, 471 Agula, locality: Aksumite church of, 166, 339 Ahəyya Fäǧǧ, mountain pass: 421 Aḥmad b. Ibrāhīm, imam: 6, 7, 16, 75, 93, 104, 105, 109, 133, 145, 147, 156, 157, 158, 159, 192, 338, 366, 387, 393, 454–466, 468, 473 Aḥmad b. Ladaʿ Uṯmān, son of governor: 157 Akko Manoye, Oromo queen: 386 Aksum, city: xvii, 9, 28, 34, 38, 46, 53, 55, 60, 65, 67, 68, 80, 81, 83, 120, 166, 199, 200, 204n, 205, 209, 234, 236, 238, 257, 258, 269, 316, 322, 324, 329, 351, 374n, 399, 412, 423, 476 Aksum, kingdom of/Aksumite: 2, 3, 4, 17, 26, 31, 33, 34, 36, 38, 40, 41, 50, 55, 88, 114n, 116n, 117, 120n, 165, 169, 194, 197, 201n, 202, 203, 204, 218, 219n, 222, 234, 238n, 252, 283, 321, 328, 329, 384, 387, 399, 412, 444 Aksumite Collection: 165, 167–168, 218n, 225, 228, 248–251, 288, 293, 303n Alef, saint: 200; Life of, 280 Alexandria: city, 141, 153n, 166, 168, 226, 428, 446; church/patriarchate of, 24, 29, 37, 39, 40, 41, 53, 163, 164, 165, 191, 202, 214, 285n (see also Coptic; Egypt, church of); Synod of Alexandria, 247n. See also patriarch(s) of Alexandria Alǝyyu-Amba, locality: 414 alga-bed, furniture: 320 Almeida, Manoel de: 378, 419 altar/altar table (Gz. mänbärä tabot): 41, 44, 47, 123, 166, 167, 170, 171, 172n, 173, 175, 176–182, 184, 193, 320n, 335, 336, 359–360, 380, 392n; outside Ethiopia: 176n, 430, 434

Index altar tablet (Gz. tabot): 133, 174, 178, 179, 181, 182, 193, 320, 339n, 358, 359 Alvares, Francisco, embassy chaplain/author: 29–30, 62, 67n, 73, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 102, 103, 105, 109, 182, 191, 336n, 338, 364, 366, 367, 368, 369, 370, 371, 372n, 375, 378, 379n, 380, 391, 392n, 393, 402, 403, 406, 411, 413, 417, 421, 422, 436, 446, 449, 467 Amätä Giyorgis, official: 76 Amäta Lǝʿul, queen: 354, 379, 447n Amba Dära Maryam Mägdälawit, church: 300 Amba Gǝšän, locality: 28, 57, 58, 181, 351, 352, 420. See also Gǝšän Maryam ʿAmdä Mikaʾel, official (bǝhtwäddäd), 75, 390, 393 ʿAmdä Ṣǝyon, king, 7, 38, 59, 60, 62, 64, 67, 69, 70, 71, 98n, 100, 174, 236, 238, 258, 259, 271, 272, 351, 377n, 382, 387, 415, 429, 456 ʿAmdä Ṣǝyon II, king: 58n, 391n Amhara (Ar. Amḥara): region, xvi, 1, 5, 54, 57, 60, 65, 67, 69, 75, 84, 99, 101, 111, 119, 134, 137, 138, 155n, 182, 211, 338, 341, 408, 414, 419, 421, 461, 475, 476; ethnicity, 133, 316n, 357, 474n Amharic, language: 8n, 11n, 26, 49, 50, 115, 133, 137, 147n, 244n, 273n, 283, 284, 377n, 397, 411, 422, 455n anaphora(s): 165, 166, 167, 171, 183, 184, 185, 186, 188, 189, 190, 191, 192, 254, 262, 407n, 439 Anbäsa Wədəm, aṣe: 174n “Ancona,” locality: 414 Ancoratus by Epiphanius: 225 Angot, region: 66, 67, 109, 371, 414, 475 Anorewos, saint: 212; Life of, 212, 272 Anṣokiya (Ar. Anṭākya), locality: 460 Anthony, saint: 199, 281; Life of, 202, 224; Egyptian monastery of: 183, 234, 235, 288n, 292, 362, 363, 429, 434 apocrypha (parabiblical writings): 198, 202n, 224, 225, 228n, 230, 232, 233, 244, 252, 258, 282, 286, 348, 349, 351 Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles: 232, 244, 245, 282n Apostolic canons (Gz. Abṭǝlis): 242, 247 ʿaqaṣen/ʿaqqabe ṣänṣän/ʿaqänṣän, office: 46, 68n, 354

561 aqet žər rasočč, office: 74 ʿaqqabe säʿat, office: 28, 46, 58n, 71, 73, 74, 83, 84, 349, 369, 377, 390, 408, 432n ʿaqqabe ṣänṣän/ʿaqänṣän: see ʿaqaṣen ʿArab Faqīh (a.k.a Šihāb al-Dīn), author: 108, 147, 455, 457, 458, 459, 460, 461. See also Futūḥ al-Ḥabaša ʿArābabni, sultanate/Islamic region: 99, 419 Arabia/Arabian Peninsula: 6, 34, 86, 89, 90, 92, 97, 107, 148, 149, 152, 160, 266, 280, 359, 387, 414, 415, 418, 428, 441, 442, 446, 448, 449, 455n, 460 Arabic, language: in medieval EthiopiaEritrea, 25, 91, 95, 111, 112, 284n, 420; medieval Ethiopian-Eritrean texts in, 86, 87, 93, 98, 141, 144, 152, 388, 459, 469 (see also inscriptions); translations into Gǝʿǝz from, 55, 59, 68, 183, 202n, 217, 218, 221, 224n, 226, 227, 228–230, 233, 237–239, 243, 244, 247, 250, 251, 253, 257–258, 265, 266, 267, 351 Arbaʾtu Ensǝsa, locality: 166 Arethas (Gz. Ḫirut), saint, Acts of: 53, 229, 266, 279 Argobba, language: 26, 50, 137 Ark of the Covenant: 180, 237, 257 Armaḥ, Aksumite king: 53 Armenia: 179, 435 Armenian(s): 242, 417; language, 292n Aron, saint: 212; Life of, 212, 231, 373n army: Christian royal, 67, 71, 72, 76, 82, 83, 100, 259, 393, 409, 461, 462, 464, 471, 473, 475; Christian rebel, 65, 67; Islamic, 6, 76, 105, 108, 147, 157n, 159, 456n, 457, 459, 460–461, 464; Ethiopians in foreign, 449–450 Arsenofis, saint, Acts of: 266 Ašange, lake: 34 Ašätän: mountain, 330; Ašätän Maryam, church, 179 Asbäri, locality: 106, 110, 151 Aṣbǝḥa: see Kaleb Ascension of Isaiah: 202, 224, 287 Asmara, locality, 331 Asmara Ǝnda Maryam, church: 324 Asnaf Sämra, princess/official: 80 ʿAssǝda, Zagwe royal ancestor: 41, 42, 44, 50, 51

562 Athanasius (Gz. Atǝnatewos), saint/patriarch of Alexandria: 162, 195, 198, 202, 241n; anaphora ascribed to, 184 Athanasius of Clysma, saint, Acts of: 229, 266 Atronsä Maryam, church: 60, 339 Awan, locality: 414, 415 Awaš, river: 475n, 127 Awiya, language: 49 Awsa, region: 159, 465, 466 al-Azhar, mosque in Cairo: 107, 153, 443–444, 452 Azqir, saint, Acts of: 227n, 229, 266 azmač, office: 78, 82 azzaž, office: 72, 83, 115n, 379, 421, 423 bäʿaltä šǝḥna, title: 377 bäʿaltiḥat/bäʿaltä biḥat, title: 44, 45, 377, 389, 390 Bab el-Mandeb: 285 Bädbaǧ, locality: 421 Badǝqe (Ar. Bādaqī), locality/battle site: 101, 459 Badīt bint Māyā, Islamic queen: 93, 141, 388 Badlāy (Gz. Bädlay), sultan: 76, 78, 104 Badr al-Ǧamali, Fatimid vizir: 175n Bäʾǝdä Maryam, king: 60, 75, 76, 78, 80, 84, 98n, 101, 102, 104, 109, 191, 259, 339, 357, 390, 391 Bägemdǝr, region: 373, 461 Baghdad: 95, 445, 450 Baḥǝr nägaš, region: 371, 469 baḥǝr nägaš/baḥǝr nägaśi, title: 81, 82, 368, 378, 461, 468, 470 Baḥrǝy, author: 471–474, 475, 476n Bäläw, region: 69 Bali (Ar. Bāli): xvi, 37n, 66, 69–70, 76, 78, 82, 83, 99, 101, 102, 152, 384n, 419, 461, 464, 474 Bamo, gärad of Hadiyya: 77, 78 banana: 106, 403. See also food: foodstuffs banquet(s): 60, 61, 377, 422. See also Śǝrʿatä gǝbr Banū l-Ham(u)wīya, people: 37, 141, 384 baptism: 39, 165, 167, 168, 231, 248n, 368, 379n; baptismal catechesis, 166; baptismal tank, 167, 172 Bärakit Maryam, church: 169, 170 Bärara, locality: 109, 414

Index Barqūq, Mamluk ruler: 449 Barr Saʿd al-Dīn, sultanate: xvii, 6, 66, 102–105, 108, 110, 148, 454–460, 463, 464–466, 476. See also ʿAdal barter: 111, 418–419, 420 Bärtälomewos, metropolitan: 215 Bäṣälotä Mikaʾel, saint/monk: 212, 213n, 240; Life of, 212n, 272 Basilica, church form: 172, 180, 333 Basilides (Gz. Fasilädäs), saint: Acts of, 235 Bati, locality: 414 Bäträ Maryam, saint, Life of: 276 Bawit, church in Egypt: 178 Bǝgwǝna: see Bugna bǝhtwäddäd, office: 58n, 71–2, 75, 76, 82, 83, 84, 377n, 389–90 Bǝlen Säba, queen: 68, 377n Bǝlǝn Sägäd, official: 354 bəranna (codex): see manuscript forms Berber, language: 285n Bǝrbǝr Maryam, church: 353 Bǝrhan Zämäda, princess: 389 Bermudes, João: 462, 471 Betä Däbrä Sina, church in Lalibäla: 177, 179, 182n Betä Dänagǝl, church in Lalibäla: 177n Betä Ǝsraʾel, people: 19–20, 77, 410–411, 447 Betä Gäbrǝʾel and Rufaʾel, church in Lalibäla: 177, 333, 334 Betä Giyorgis, church in Lalibäla: 177n, 333 Betä Golgota, church in Lalibäla: 177, 182n, 313n, 336, 337 Betä Lǝḥem Maryam, church: xvii, 47n, 180, 193, 336, 338, 352 Betä Libanos, church in Lalibäla: 177, 178, 374n Betä Mädḫäne ʿAläm, church in Lalibäla: 33, 41, 47, 177, 178, 286, 287 Betä Maryam, church in Lalibäla: 178, 335, 336, 343 Betä Mäsqäl, church in Lalibäla: 177 Betä Śǝllase, church in Lalibäla: 177 betä nǝguś (royal house): 423 Bethlehem: 434 Bible, biblical: 5, 8, 35, 59, 60, 118, 165, 167, 174, 185, 217, 220n, 223n, 224, 229, 232, 233, 246, 252, 258, 281n, 349, 350, 370, 385, 473. Biblical books: Daniel, 232, 287;

Index Isaiah, 232, 287; Job, 232, 287; Lamentations, 260; Wisdom of Sirach, 287. See also apocrypha; Enoch; Jubilees Bicini, Hieronimo, painter: 363 Biḥat, locality: 44–45, 47 Bilbala Giyorgis, church: 178, 180 Bilbala Qirqos, church: xvii, 177, 193n Bilet, locality: 24, 91, 92, 154n. See also Kwiḥa Bilin, language: 49 bishop(s): in Ethiopia-Eritrea, 37, 38n, 45, 47, 120, 162, 163, 170, 173, 174, 189, 194, 195, 234, 237, 246, 269, 467; in Ḥimyar, 44; of Egypt, 29, 36, 198, 201, 249, 266; of Caesarea, 350; of Cyprus, 441. See also metropolitan(s) blatten geta, office, 73. See also page(s) Book of Clement (Gz. Mäṣḥafä Qälemǝnṭos): 232, 233, 243, 244n, 245, 246 Book of the light (Gz. Mäṣḥafä bǝrhan): 189, 232, 233, 241, 368, 369 Book of the mystery (Gz. Mäṣḥafä mǝśṭir): 181, 239–250, 251, 255 Book of the Nativity (Gz. Mäṣḥafä milad): 241, 256 Book of the regulation/Canon of al-Muʿallaqah (Gz. Mäṣḥafä śǝrʿat): 239 Book of the substance (Gz. Mäṣḥafä baḥrǝy): 190, 241, 353 Booranaa, Oromo people: 386, 472, 473, 475 Brancaleon, Niccolò, painter: 349, 363 Brocchi, Giovanni Battista, traveler: 406 Bsoy, saint, Acts of: 236 Bugna (Bǝgwǝna), region: 4, 24, 45–46, 64, 67 al-Buḫārī, author: 146n Bur, region: 43, 81, 402 Buṭros al-Ǧamil, author: 164 Byzantine, Byzantium: 17, 90, 165, 167 191, 197, 199, 210, 245, 255, 257, 264, 270, 300n, 345, 360, 362 camel: see dromedary camp, royal/military: 61, 72, 73, 75, 76, 109, 129n, 211, 316n, 367n, 369, 375–378, 383, 393, 402, 409, 413, 414n, 422, 473. See also court, Ethiopian Christian; kätäma Canon of al-Muʿallaqah: see Book of the regulation

563 Cairo: 91, 94, 100, 105, 107, 109, 136, 140, 150, 153, 174, 175n, 176, 239, 372, 416, 417, 428, 429, 431, 432, 433, 434n, 436, 437, 438, 443–444, 446, 447, 448–449, 451, 452 Č̣ärč̣är, region: 87n, 99, 130, 132, 133, 134, 138, 154, 404 Castanhoso, Miguel de: 192, 462 č̣at: 106, 405 Catherine, Saint, monastery, in Sinai: 429, 434 cattle, cow(s): 42, 75, 111, 138, 402, 403, 404, 419, 421, 423, 434, 455 cave church(es): 177, 178n, 205, 344 Cave of Treasures: 244, 245 č̣äwa, military regiments: 77–79, 80, 82, 83, 85, 102. See also military regiments cereals/grains (barley, millet, sorghum, teff, wheat): 1, 24, 106, 138, 293, 352–353, 367, 399, 400, 401, 403, 405, 413, 423 Chalcedon: council of, 164, 165n, 197, 201, 226, 249; canons of, 249, 255 Chalcedonian, 245; non-Chalcedonian: 434, 435, 451n, 452 chancel: 166, 170, 173, 175, 331 chancery: Aksumite, 234; Mamluk, 94 chant, liturgical: 179n, 193, 275, 293, 307 choir, architectural feature: 170, 173, 175, 178 chrism: 167, 189 Chrysostom, John: 188, 232, 235 circumcision: 173, 189, 369–370 citrus/lemon: 106, 403, 406 Clement of Rome, disciple of St Peter: 242–246, 248n, 250. See also Book of Clement coffee: 1, 399 coinage, coins: 418; Aksumite, 2, 3, 34, 219, 223, 356, 399, 407, 418; foreign, 96, 109, 110, 130, 412, 418–419, 469. See also currency colophon(s): 235n, 236–238, 244n, 267n, 307, 315n, 316–318, 373n, 413n, 455n; of the Kǝbrä nägäśt, 54–55, 59, 68, 227, 236–238, 257–258. See also subscription(s) Concerning the Only Judge (Gz. Kämä bäʾǝntä 1 kwännani): 243, 247–248, 249n, 251 concubine(s): 57, 124, 212, 376, 382n, 390, 445 Constantinople: 164, 245; Council of, 226

564 copper: 33, 127, 131, 135, 223n, 357, 395, 412, 469 Coptic (Egyptian Christian): 27, 33, 39, 40, 47, 55, 164, 165n, 171, 174, 176, 177, 179, 180, 182n, 183, 184, 186, 187, 189, 190, 191, 216, 226, 229, 239, 250, 258, 266, 267n, 274, 309, 322, 327, 343, 346, 349, 350, 362, 385, 406, 429, 430, 431, 434, 435; language: 5n, 54, 149n, 163n, 218, 225, 227, 237, 238, 250, 257, 258, 284n, 285n, 292n. See also Egypt, church of coronation, crowning: 46, 60, 80, 81, 382n, 390. See also Śǝrʿatä qwǝrḥät corpus-organizers: see manuscripts cotton: 372, 378, 411, 420, 422 court: Ethiopian Christian, 5, 38, 46, 48, 54, 60–61, 62, 64, 71–74, 75, 76, 78, 79, 81, 82–85, 102, 105, 122, 194, 197, 203, 208, 211, 240, 241, 242, 271, 316, 338, 344, 351, 354, 355, 363, 375–378, 379, 380, 382, 383, 388, 389, 390, 391, 395, 400, 402, 408, 409, 416–417, 422, 423, 446, 447n, 466, 467, 468, 471, 472 (see also camp, kätäma); Ethiopian Islamic, 105, 107, 108 Covenant of Mercy: 224 Covilha, Pero da: 291, 387 cow(s): see cattle craft(s)/craftsmen: 316n, 411–413, 415; in artistic production, 341, 349, 363; in bookmaking, 292, 299, 303, 305, 313n, 315, 321; bookbinders, 314, 315, 316–17; metalworkers, 315, 410, 412; tanners/ leather-makers, 315, 316, 410; parchmenters, 314, 315–316; scribes, 309–315; weavers, 410, 411 crops: see food: foodstuffs cross(es): 41n, 135, 326, 355–359, 360, 417; True Cross 181, 389; church of the Cross, 42; sign of the cross, 119, 168; cross plan (layout), 172, 175; cross icons, 187, 360; cross motif, 300, 335, 336, 340, 346–347, 356, 359, 360 cupola(s): 173, 174, 175, 176, 180, 336 currency: 109, 110–111, 417, 418–419, 420. See also coin(s) curtain(s), in churches: 182, 192, 368n

Index Cyprian and Justa, saints, Acts of: 266 Cyprus: 435, 436n, 437, 438, 439, 441, 451n, 452 da Gama, Christovão: 462 Däbarwa, locality: 413n, 414 Däbrä Afrem, monastery: 38 Däbrä ʿAsbo: 208, 212, 213n, 273. See also Däbrä Libanos of Šäwa Däbrä Bartarwa, monastery: 276 Däbrä Bǝrhan, town: 94, 259, 461 Däbrä Bizän, monastery: 186, 209n, 215, 312, 316, 318, 371n, 406 Däbrä Dammo, monastery: 35, 200, 201, 206, 207, 240, 273, 324, 329, 330, 393 Däbrä Daret, monastery: 262, 272, 373 Däbrä Dima, monastery: 276, 364 Däbrä Ḥamlo, monastery: 351 Däbrä Ḥayq Ǝsṭifanos, monastery: 65, 73, 75, 119, 121, 206, 207, 208, 227, 228, 231, 240, 241, 245n, 275, 286, 289n, 347–351, 397, 408 Däbrä Libanos of Šäwa, monastery: 60, 74, 123, 182, 191, 207n, 208, 212n, 271, 273, 274, 275, 280, 371, 393, 456n, 476. See also Däbra ʿAsbo Däbrä Libanos of Šǝmäzana/Ham, monastery: 32, 33n, 35, 41, 44, 46, 49, 65, 199, 201, 211, 287, 301n, 345, 346, 349 Däbrä Mädärä, monastery: 200 Däbrä Maryam Qwäḥayn, monastery: 214, 232, 238, 272, 318, 350n, 354, 379 Däbrä Mǝṭmaq, council of: 272 Däbrä nägäśt: see Amba Gǝšän Däbrä Nägwädgwad, monastery: 84, 357, 392 Däbrä Śahəl Agwäza, monastery: 318n Däbrä Sälam Mikaʾel, monastery: 170, 329, 331, 332, 343 Däbrä Sǝgaǧǧä, monastery: 272 Däbrä Ṣǝyon Kidanä Mǝḥrät, monastery in Gärʿalta: 180 336, 341n, 357n, 363 Däbrä Sina, monastery: 199 Däbrä Tabor, monastery: 180 Däbrä Täklä Haymanot, monastery: 338 Däbrä Wägäg, monastery: 122n, 276 Däbrä Zäyt,(modern) town: 95, 101n däbtära: 81, 164, 185, 211, 240, 315, 380 Daga Ǝsṭifanos, monastery: 80, 357, 360

565

Index Dägälḥan (Ar. Daǧalḥān), official: 83, 458 Dahlak Islands: 89–93, 97, 154, 211n, 214, 414–415, 445, 468, 469 Dakar, Islamic city: 103, 150n Damascus: 153, 416, 443 Dämbǝya, region: 461 Damot, local-religious kingdom/region: 6, 23, 37n, 65, 66, 70–71, 72, 79, 80, 82, 123, 124, 137, 139–140, 141, 207, 208, 400, 412, 415, 418, 421, 448n, 449, 461 Danǝʾel, metropolitan: 172 Danəʾel, ḥaṣ́ani: 38, 204 Dāra, sultanate: 99, 419 Däsk, deity: 80 Däwaro (Ar. Dawāro), region: xvi, 66, 69, 76, 78, 79, 99, 101, 102, 419, 458, 459, 461, 464, 471n, 474 Dawit [I]: see Mǝnilǝk Dawit II, king: 7, 21, 58, 75, 76, 84, 101, 180, 181, 186, 214, 239, 240, 244n, 254, 307n, 336, 351, 352, 353, 360, 373, 449 Dawit Anbäsa, official: 80 Däy Giyorgis, structure: 339n, 340 deacons: 45, 164, 170, 174, 189, 246, 358, 368n, 379n, 380, 431 Defarfo, locality: 372 Dǝgum Śǝllase, two churches of: 169, 170, 171, 172, 330, 332 Dǝggwa: 179n, 183, 185, 254. See also Divine Office Dǝlnaʿod, king: 385 Dǝl Mängǝśa, princess: 180, 336, 352, 373 Dəl Wänbära, bati (Ar. Dalwanbarah), personage: 105, 157, 393, 394 Didascalia (Gz. Didǝsqǝlya): 232, 233, 242, 246, 247, 248 Dima Giyorgis, monastery: 276 Disposition ordered by Peter to Clement (Gz. Tǝʾǝzaz zäʾazzäzä Ṗeṭros läQälemǝnṭos): 243, 247 Divine Office: 164, 168, 179, 183, 185, 254. See also Dǝggwa diplomacy/embassies: among Ethiopian powers, 84, 104, 105, 110, 394; interregional—see Egypt; Europe; Yemen Djibouti: 2, 130, 469 Dobaʾa, region: 78, 414; people, 414

Doctrine of the mysteries: 225 dragons: 119, 120, 121, 258 dromedary: 401–402, 405 Eastern Christian(s), 124, 224, 245, 368, 440n, 452n. See also Chalcedon: non-Chalcedonian education: Muslim, 107, 151–153; Christian, 57, 189, 219, 240n, 241, 252, 261, 318, 369, 373, 392 Egypt: 172, 175n, 291n; Christian church/ community of, 33, 39, 162, 163 164, 165, 166, 168, 169, 170, 171 172, 173, 174 176, 177, 178, 180n, 183, 185n, 191, 194, 198, 202, 239, 249, 281 (see also Coptic); Ethiopian diplomacy/embassies with, 22, 23, 39, 43, 94n, 105, 163, 180, 443–444; and Ethiopian trade, 70, 90, 91, 92, 108, 110, 291, 359, 414, 416, 417, 418, 419, 425; Ethiopians in, 311n, 347, 362, 364, 425, 426, 428–429, 430–434, 436, 437, 443–444, 446, 447, 448–449, 452–453; knowledge of/ideas about Ethiopia in, 36, 44, 54, 55, 99, 164, 406; textual models from, 165, 223, 226, 229–230, 239, 266; routes to, 285n, 428–429; Gǝʿǝz manuscripts/Ethiopian artifacts in, 234–235, 288n, 292, 362, 363; Ottoman conquest of, 468 Egyptian(s) in Ethiopia: 55, 92, 172, 198; metropolitans of Ethiopia-Eritrea as, 27, 35, 40, 84, 163, 195, 214 Ǝgziʾ Kǝbra, queen: 389 Ǝleni, queen: 21, 58n, 77, 80, 85, 104, 339, 372n, 386, 387, 388–393, 417n Ǝllä ʿAmida, father of King ʿEzana: 51 Ǝllä Aṣbǝḥa: see Kaleb Ǝmäkina Mädḫane ʿAläm, church: 177, 329, 344 Ǝmrayǝs, saint, Acts of: 266 Ǝnda Abba Gärima, monastery: 200, 219, 286. See also Gärima Gospels Ǝnda Abba Ṗänṭälewon, church of: xvii, 200, 236 Ǝndägäbṭän, local-religious polity/region: 415 Ǝndärta, region: 65, 67, 68, 258 Ǝndrǝyas, saint, Life of: 272

566 Ǝnfraz: region, 406; monastery of, 277 ǝnǧära (injera): 399 Ǝnnarya, local-religious polity: 415 Ǝnnǝṣo Gäbrǝʾel, church: 338 Enoch/Book of Enoch: 203, 223n, 224, 232, 233 ensete (Ensete ventricosum): 1, 399, 401 Ephesus, council of: 164, 198, 201, 255 Epistle of humanity (Gz. Ṭomarä tǝsbǝʾt): 122n, 232, 233, 241, 315n eṗṗis qoṗṗos: see bishop ʿəqa bet/sacristy: 319, 320 ǝras, office: see ras Ǝsato: see Gudit Ǝskǝndǝr, king: 7, 58, 60, 80, 191n, 235n, 244n, 390, 391, 392 Ǝslam Sägäd, officer: 76 Ǝsṭifanos, monk: 187, 215, 216, 291, 355 Ǝsṭifanosites (Stephanites): 254, 272, 291, 353, 355, 406 ǝtege, title: 25, 383, 388, 389 Eucharist/Eucharistic: 166, 167, 176, 183, 184, 188, 189, 192, 359, 362. See also anaphora(s) eunuch(s): 416, 418, 445, 448–449, 452. See also slave(s) Euphemia, saint, Acts of: 266 Europe, medieval: accounts and ideas of Ethiopia in, 5n, 8, 22, 67n, 142, 439–440, 471; artistic exchange with, 180–181, 355, 364; Ethiopian diplomatic contact with, 20–22, 29, 180–181, 336n, 338, 364, 366, 391, 417, 438, 452, 466–468; Ethiopians in, 109, 388, 426, 437–441; lineage in, 281n; scriptoria in, 241n; slavery in, 444 Europe, modern: Ethiopian manuscripts in, 9, 233n, 289, 324, 327, 440–441; and the term “medieval,” 17–18 Europeans, in medieval Ethiopia: 21, 29, 316, 336n, 338, 363–364, 366, 381, 391, 406, 417, 466–468. See also Alvares, Francisco Ewosṭatewos, monk/saint: 179, 184, 213, 232, 435 Ewosṭatean(s): 21n, 184, 213–215, 272, 353–354, 355, 371, 393, 406, 441n ʿEzana, Aksumite king: 26, 51, 117, 162, 194, 197, 199, 203n, 234n

Index famine: 93, 423, 458, 464 fan, liturgical folding: see märäwəḥ Fäqi Däbbis, Islamic site: 99n, 129, 151, 404 faqīh, Islamic title: 95, 151, 152 Faraǧ al-Fuwwi (or al-Fawwi), merchant: 151 Fäṭägar, region: 60, 66, 70, 74, 75, 76, 101, 102, 461, 464, 474 Fatḥ madīnat Harar, text: 149–150 Fatimid, dynasty of Egypt: 43, 169, 172, 174, 180n Fǝre Maryam, queen: 389 Fǝre Ṣǝyon, painter: 360–361, 363 Fǝtḥä nägäśt, text: 162n, 164, 209, 446n Filǝṗṗos, of Däbrä Bizän, monk: 186 Filǝṗṗos, saint/abbot of Däbrä Libanos: 212n, 271, 274; Life of, 212n, 271 Filkǝsyus, text: 230 Filmona, saint, Life of: 276 firearms: 6, 417, 460, 470 First Sabbath: see Sabbath food: foodstuffs, 106, 109, 399–400, 401, 402, 403, 404, 405, 406, 417, 423; food customs, 398, 404–407 Frumentius/Sälama, first bishop of Aksum: 162, 168n, 194, 195, 204n, 234 Furra, queen: 386 Futūḥ al-Ḥabaša/Conquest of Abyssinia: 25, 88, 102, 104, 105, 108, 110, 146, 157, 158n, 159, 302n, 338, 455, 457, 458, 459, 463n. See also ʿArab Faqīh Ǧabartī, Ǧabartiyya, term for Muslim Ethiopians: 387, 416, 442, 443, 452 al-Ǧabartī, ʿAbd as-Salām, personage: 452 gäbäz (cathedral, large church): 46, 53, 166, 432n Gäbrä Iyäsus, saint, Life of: 272n, 406 Gäbrä Iyäsus, official: 82 Gäbrä Krǝstos, saint, Life of: 231n, 270 Gäbrä Krǝstos, abbot of Däbrä Maryam: 232 Gäbrä Madḫen: see Ṭänṭäwǝdǝm Gäbrä Mänfäs Qǝddus, saint, Life of: 270 Gäbrä Mäsqäl, regnal name: of Lalibala, 41, 52, 237; of ʿAmdä Ṣǝyon or Yǝsḥaq, 236 Gäbrä Mäsqäl, Aksumite king: 166, 201 Gabrǝʾel, metropolitan: 191 Gäda, region: 77

Index gadaa (age-set): 115, 474, 475 Gadilomeda, archeological site: 129 gädl (Life), genre: xvii, 261. See also hagiography; individual saints’ names Gädlä qǝddusan/GQ/Lives of the saints, hagiographial collection: 265–268, 351 Gädlä sämaʿǝtat/GS/Lives of the martyrs, hagiographical collection: xvii, 227, 230, 231, 232, 235, 265–268, 269, 278, 305, 318, 351, 379n Gaʿǝwa, queen: 394 Gafat: language, 51; region, 66, 79, 400, 423 Gälawdewos, king: 21, 25, 157, 259, 260, 274, 342, 370, 393, 420, 421, 422, 446, 448n, 456n, 459n, 461, 462, 463, 464, 466, 467, 471, 475 Ǧamāl al-Dīn, sultan: 104, 151 Ǧämmädu Maryam, church: 287 Gamo, region: 26, 77, 78, 79, 400, 401, 412, 448, 472 Gändäbälo, locality: 414 Ǧanǧäro, region: 412 Gännätä Maryam, church: 54, 177, 193n, 339n, 343, 344, 374n Gänz, region: 66, 79, 102 gärad (Ar. garād), office: 28, 77, 78, 83, 104, 156, 157, 158n, 389, 409, 421, 457, 469 Gärima, saint: 119, 200, 201, 269; Life of, 201, 270, 273, 314n Gärima Gospels: 165, 167, 201, 219, 234, 235, 286, 291, 301n, 308, 322, 325, 345, 349 Gasǝč̣č̣a, locality: 185, 240 Gatira Maryam: see Atronsä Maryam Gäzen Yoḥannǝs Mäṭǝmǝq, church: 169, 170, 171, 172 gäzet ([yä]gälägǝl gäzet, wäšärbat gäzet), title: 377 Gǝbrä ḥǝmamat, text: 230, 231, 351 Gǝʿǝz: in Aksumite kingdom, 26, 50–51, 222–223; as language of medieval Christian church and state, 25, 51, 250, 284; obsolescence as spoken language, 26, 51, 219 Gədm, region: 66 gədm, office: 71 Gǝmb Tewodros, structure: 340 gəmmadä Mäsqäl: see cross(es): True Cross

567 genealog(ies): of Christ, 307; Christian royal, 257; Islamic, 101, 149; monastic, 208n, 281; of Oromo clans, 473–474 Gǝšän, Amba: see Amba Gǝšän Gǝšän Ǝgziʾabǝḥer Ab, church: 340 Gǝšän Maryam, church: 351, 353 Gǝṣṣawe (liturgical directory): 183–4, 188n Getesemane Maryam, monastery: 392 Giḥo, personage: 35 Giovio, Paolo: 364, 439n Giyorgis, Ethiopian monastery of, in Cairo: 431, 433, 434, 436 Giyorgis of Sägla (or of Gasǝč̣č̣a), author: 181, 185, 186, 187, 188n, 239–250, 251, 255 Giyorgis, bishop: 237 goat(s): 402, 404; goat skin, 296 Goǧǧam, region: 49, 65, 66, 70, 71, 72, 79, 80, 82, 392, 393, 401, 402, 422, 475 gold: 33, 34, 92, 110, 121n, 131, 133, 135, 140, 223, 300, 302n, 336, 338, 357, 378, 392n, 395, 398, 412–413, 415, 417, 418, 420, 422, 439n, 458 Gomit, locality: 76 Gondär, city and region: 74, 193, 316, 323, 324 Gondärine, era: 7, 16, 18n, 260, 289, 315, 321, 397 Gospel(s): Gospel books/manuscripts, 32, 33, 35, 40, 41, 44n, 187, 231n, 235n, 288n, 310, 345–346, 347, 349–353, 355, 358, 431; Four-Gospel books/manuscripts, 173, 219, 286–287, 288, 300, 301–302, 307, 348, 349, 350; “Golden” Gospels, 201, 211, 231, 301–302; Gospel readings, 167, 171, 178, 187, 358; religion of, 194, 197, 199, 203, 207, 211. See also Gärima Gospels Goze, Islamic site: 151 Great Entrance (liturgical): 167, 171 Greece: 109, 449 Greek: Christianity, 124; learning, 3; liturgical elements in Gǝʿǝz manuscript, 434; monks/monasticism 197, 204; palimpsest, 429n; traveler, 412. See also Byzantine Greek, language: 34, 53n, 146n, 165, 174, 188, 189, 194, 201, 202, 203, 216, 217–220,

568 Greek, language (cont.) 222–224, 225–226, 227, 228, 243, 247n, 251–253, 265–267, 270, 285n, 291 Guba, saint: 200, 269 Guba, Islamic site: 106 Gudit/Yodit/Ǝsato: 37, 141, 172, 384, 385, 386 Guǧǧi, people: 386 Gundä Gunde, monastery: 184n, 215, 287, 306n, 320, 355 Gundǝfru Śǝllase, church: 169, 170, 171, 172, 193n, 330n Gurage: people, 127; region (also Gurageland), 160, 406 Gutu, structure: 340, 341 Gwǝh Yǝmʾata, church: 342 Gwǝgwǝben, monastery: 276 gwǝlt (land grant): 7, 53, 62, 210, 211, 396, 407–408 Ḥabaša, al-Ḥabaša, Arabic term for EthiopiaEritrea(ns): 2, 36, 41, 88, 97, 145, 150, 152, 442, 444, 448. See also Futūḥ alḤabaša, al-Maqrīzī habits (monastic clothing): 372, 439n Habshi (Ethiopians in India): 444, 449–450, 452 Habtä Maryam, saint: 188n ḥaḍāni: see ḥaṣ́ani Hadiyya (Ar. Hādyā): people, 127; sultanate/ region, 26, 65, 66, 69, 70, 77, 78, 79, 83, 85, 99, 100, 101, 102, 378n, 389, 400, 418, 422, 448, 461, 464 hagiography, hagiographic(al): xvii, 7, 13, 25, 32, 123, 139, 142, 152, 153n, 183, 196–197, 199, 201, 202n, 206, 207, 208, 209, 213n, 216, 224, 227, 229, 230, 231n, 232, 233, 252, 253, 258, 260, 261–281, 291, 314, 355, 366, 367, 370, 373, 378, 379, 382, 383, 394, 396, 417n, 446. See also individual saints’ names Ham, region: 35, 54. See also Däbrä Libanos of Šǝmäzana/Ham Ḥamasen, region: 35, 69, 74, 81, 213, 215 Ḫamta, language: 49 Ḥanafī, Islamic law school: 106, 150, 151, 153 ḫānqāh, Islamic institution: 151 Ḥaqq al-Dīn (II), sultan: 75, 76, 79, 100–101

Index ḥaräg (manuscript decoration): 186, 308, 351, 355 Harämaya, lake: 388 Harar: Islamic city/city-state, 87n, 99, 104, 131, 132, 143n, 149–150, 156, 157, 159, 160, 387n, 455, 459, 460, 464, 465, 466, 475, 476; emirate, 102n Harari: language, 26, 285n, 455n; people, 159, 388, 465 Ḥarat Zawīla, district of Cairo: 431 Ḥarbay, king and saint: 32; Life of, 279 Harlaa, archeological site: 96, 132n, Harla, legendary people: 96, 131n Ḥārla, region/people: 103, 460 ḥaṣ́ani (Ar. ḥaḍāni), title: xvi, 38–39, 41, 204 ḥasgwa, office: 46 ḫaṭīb, Islamic preacher: 151, 152 Ḥawzen, locality: 169, 170, 180, 199 Ḥayq, lake: 134, 136, 206. See also Däbrä Ḥayq Ǝsṭifanos ḥədug-ras, office: 53, 60. See also ras Ḥǝrgigo, port: 93 Ḥǝzbä Nañ, king: 75, 340 hijra: 3, 88, 91, 145, 387 Ḥimyar, kingdom (Yemen): 53, 201, 427 “Ḫīrūn,” brother of Queen Mäsqäl Kǝbra: 45, 47, 174 History of the Episcopate of Alexandria: 226, 228, 249 History of the Patriarchs of the Egyptian Church: 29, 33, 36, 37, 39, 43, 45, 47, 48, 55, 334 hoe, farming tool: 401 Holy Week, service/texts for: 183, 184, 230, 231, 351 homily, homiletic text(s): 25, 60, 118, 119, 120, 183, 188, 197, 224, 227, 228, 229, 230, 231, 235, 242, 247, 255, 256, 261, 269, 279, 287, 351, 352, 353, 368 homiliary/-ies: 226, 230, 233, 282n, 289n, 353 Horologium/Horologion, text: 183, 186, 227n, 231, 282n, 429n horse(s): 343, 402, 418, 422 Hours: Books of (Gz. Mäṣḥafä Säʿatat), 183n, 185–186, 187 (see also Säʿatat); Liturgy of, 168, 254 Hūbat, Islamic community: 95 hunting: 336, 344, 401, 417

Index Ḥusayn of Bali, šayḫ: 152 hypogeum, monument type: 134, 135, 137 Ibn ʿAṭāʾ Allāh al-Iskandarī, mystic: 153n Ibn Baṭṭūṭa, author: 153n, 405, 443 Ibn Ḫaldūn, author: 139 Ibn Ḥawḳal, author: 36, 38 Ibn al-Muǧāwir, author: 90, 97, 442, 448 Ibrāhīm b. al-Ḥasan, faqīh: 95 icon(s): 186, 187, 255, 323, 324, 326, 355, 359, 360, 362, 363, 364 Ifat (Ar. Awfāt ): xvi, 6, 24, 66, 69, 70, 71, 75, 76, 77, 79, 82, 97, 98–101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106–108, 109, 110, 111, 126n, 139, 148, 151–152, 156, 211n, 259, 403, 404, 406, 414, 415, 419, 442n, 456, 461, 471n ʾIlm al-nasab (genealogical discipline): 149 incense: product, 96, 418; incense-burners, 131; Prayer of, 233 India(n): 91, 109, 136, 402, 411, 417, 418, 420, 425, 427, 444, 449–450, 452, 453, 461, 463n, 467 “Indian” as term for Ethiopians: 428, 444 Indian Ocean: 1, 2, 6, 34, 96, 110, 154, 427, 448n, 452, 468 indigo: 420 Infancy Gospel, text: 225 inheritance: 407, 408–409; of monasteries, 211, 408–409; of women, 381 ink(s): 292–294, 345n inscriptions: Aksumite, 2, 34, 50, 51, 52, 197n, 222, 223, 234; medieval Christian, 38, 41, 178, 204, 301, 335, 356, 359, 362, 447n; Islamic, 42, 87n, 89, 91, 95, 106, 117, 142, 146n, 154 inventory/-ies, medieval monastic: 183n, 228–229, 230–233, 235n, 238, 270n, 271n, 318n, 319, 431, 433, 440 irrigation: 112, 403, 404 Isayyayas, qäññ behtwäddäd: 75, 81, 82, 83 ivory: 110, 398, 417, 458 Iyäsus Moʾa, monk/saint: 119, 120, 121, 206, 208, 231, 274, 286, 348, 349, 350, 358, 359; Life of, 119, 121, 206, 274–5, 385 Jacob Baradaï (Baradaeus), bishop of Edessa/ saint: 164 Jannes and Jambres: 225

569 Jawhar al-Lālā, Ethiopian Mamluk official: 448–449, 452 Jawhar al-Qunuqbāʾī, Ethiopian Mamluk official: 449, 452 Jerusalem: ancient, 63, 180, 352, 385; Ethiopia as the new, 257; medieval, 21, 210n, 231n, 372, 426n, 428, 429–430, 432, 433, 434, 435, 436, 437, 438, 446, 451 Jesuit(s): 6, 16, 366, 448, 454, 466–468 “Jesus cell,” in Lalibäla: 177 Jew(s), Jewish, Judaism: 19, 20, 37n, 114, 194, 201, 202–203, 224n, 229n, 238, 258, 279, 385, 410, 411n, 442, 447–448. See also Betä Ǝsraʾel jihad: of Aḥmad ibn Ibrāhīm, 6, 7, 16, 18n, 93, 145, 156, 157, 158, 159, 192, 302n, 338, 341, 421, 456–463; of Ḥaqq al-Dīn, 101; prohibition of, against Ethiopia, 445 Jiren/Jimma, region: 160 John of the Ladder (John Climacus), author: 225 John the Little, Coptic monastery: 431 John the Oriental, saint: see Yoḥannəs Məśraqawi Jubilees: 203, 224, 232, 233 Kaleb, Aksumite king: 52, 53, 166, 201, 279, 280; Life/Acts of, 229, 266, 269, 279, 280, 281n Kalǧur/Kalǧūra (Gz. Kwǝlgora), locality: 94, 106, 414 Kambaata, people: 127 Kambata, region: 449 Kanem-Bornu, African state: 284 kantiba, office: 74 Karuray, ḥaṣ́ani: 38 kätäma (itinerant royal court, royal/military camp): 61, 71, 73, 75, 78, 211, 375, 377, 378, 423. See also camp; court, Ethiopian Christian Kǝbrä nägäśt/Nobility of the kings: 5n, 52, 54, 55, 59, 63, 81, 180, 227, 236–238, 256–258, 385 Kǝbran, island: monastery of, 277; church of Gäbrǝʾel on, 351, 352 Kǝmant, language: 49, 50 Kenya: 1, 130 kətab: see manuscript forms

570 Ketetiya, local-religious site: 134, 135, 136 Konso: people, 116; region, 402 Krǝstos Śämra, saint: 374; Life of, 275n Krǝstos Täsfanä, abbot/ʿaqqabe säʿat: 349, 350 Kwəleṣewon, prince(?): 343, 344 Kwiḥa, modern locality: 24, 42, 43, 91. See also Bilet labor, household: of women, 367–368, 375; of the enslaved, 376, 409, 445. See also peasant(s) Ladaʿ Uṯmān, Muslim governor: 156–157 Laity/lay persons/the faithful: 152, 154n, 166, 168, 173, 177, 185, 187, 192, 193, 263, 277, 355, 368, 369, 374, 379, 380, 408, 437 Lalibäla, church complex: 4, 29, 31, 33, 41, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 54, 124, 176–178, 179, 182n, 205, 286, 313n, 323, 324, 325, 329, 330, 332–336, 337, 343, 357, 358, 359, 374n, 387n Lalibala, king and saint: 31, 32, 33, 35, 38, 41–42, 44, 45, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51–53, 54, 55, 56, 178, 179, 206, 237, 279, 286, 288, 333, 334, 335, 357, 359, 374, 376, 377n; Life of, 32n, 50, 280, 382 land tenure: see gwəlt; rəst Langano, lake: 1, 95 Lasta, region: 1, 4, 24, 31, 41, 44, 45, 46, 47, 49, 50, 54, 64, 67, 204, 330, 333, 334, 461 late antiquity: 3, 14, 17, 125, 165, 175n, 189, 195, 197, 201, 204, 217, 218, 222, 228, 233, 268, 329, 331, 345, 397, 427, 428, 444. See also Aksum, kingdom of /Aksumite leather: furnishings, 310, 320; in trade, 96; in manuscript making, 285n, 291n, 295n, 296–300, 309n, 317; production/ producers of, 315–316, 402 Lebanon: 434 Lǝbnä Dǝngǝl, king: 21, 58, 101, 102, 182, 339, 355, 362, 363, 364, 376, 381n, 382, 388, 390, 391, 393, 414, 448, 457, 458, 459, 461–462, 473; History/Chronicle of, 260n, 390, 420 lectern(s): 310–312 legumes: 399–400 Libanos (a.k.a Mäṭaʿ), saint: 199, 343; Life of, 51, 199n, 269, 270, 314n. See also Däbrä

Index Libanos of Šǝmäzana/Ham; Däbrä Libanos of Šäwa; Betä Libanos library/-ies, medieval: 6, 32n, 184n, 199, 206n, 213n, 215n, 231–233, 245n, 289, 318–320, 347, 420 Life/Lives: see hagiography; individual saints’ names Liqanos, saint: 200; Life of, 280, 281n Lives of the martyrs: see Gädla sämaʿǝtat Lives of the Prophets: 224 Lives of the saints: see Gädlä qǝddusan Lives of the saints and martyrs (Gädla sämaʿǝtat or Gädlä qǝddusan): 351, 353, 354 Limoges, France: 364 linen: 70, 108, 417 liq (“chief, head”): 28; liqä Aqäytat, 46; liqä Barya, 46; liqä betä qaṭṭin, 46; liqä ḫädar, 46, liqä kahǝnat, 28, 46; liqä mäkaso, 46, liqä mäkwas, 402 liturgy: of Betä Ǝsraʾel, 20; of Aksumite era, 165–169, 224, 225, 226, 322; Gǝʿǝz as language of, 5, 25, 284; of medieval Ethiopian church, 12, 73, 162, 169–193, 202n, 214, 231, 254, 268, 277, 278, 331, 334, 368, 389, 394, 404, 407; manuscripts in, 278, 305, 314, 318, 320; monastic, 198, 438; music – see chant; objects in, 124, 319, 324, 326, 355, 358–360, 362–3, 433, 439n (see also altar; cross; icon; märäwəḥ); texts of, 183–192, 230, 232, 233, 239, 247, 248, 252, 253–255, 261, 267–268, 270, 428 livestock: 42, 400, 401, 402. See also cattle, goat(s), sheep Luḥayya, locality in Yemen: 152, 443 Maʿāfir, Yemeni tribe: 151 Mäbaʾa Ṣǝyon, monk/saint: 362; Life of, 323 Macarius, saint, Egyptian monastery of: 364, 432 maḏhab (Islamic school): 107, 153. See also Ḥanafī, Šāfiʿī Mädḫǝn Zämäda, princess/official: 82, 389 madrasa: 151

Index maʾǝkälä baḥǝr, office: 46 Maʾǝkälä baḥǝr, region: 69 Maghreb: 100 Mahaggǝl, locality: 272 Mähari Amlak, court personage: 343, 344 Maḥfūẓ, imam/emir: 77, 104–105, 156, 157, 391 Mahiko, gärad of Hadiyya: 77, 78 Maḥmūl, locality in Yemen: 152 Maḫzūmī: dynasty of Islamic Ethiopia, 94, 148, 208, 211, 388; clan of Mecca, 148 Mäkanä Maryam, church: 392 Mäkanä Śǝllase, church: 339, 413n Makǝdda, legendary queen: 59, 236, 257, 385–386. See also Queen of Sheba mäkwännən (pl. mäkwanənt), office: 62, 150n, 212, 421; mäkwännənä Adäl, 157. See also Təgre-mäkwännən 81 mälhäzä, office: 46 Mali (West African state): 284 malik, Islamic title: 91 Malik Ambar, slave-soldier in India: 449–450 mälkäna, office: 72 mälkəʾ, liturgical genre: 185n, 188n, 190, 253 Mamluk, dynasty of Egypt: 54, 92, 94, 102, 105, 110, 140, 150, 448, 452 “Manadelei,” locality: 414 mänbärä tabot: see altar Manṣūr, sultan: 104 Manuel I, king of Portugal: 391, 466 manuscript forms: accordion book (sənsul), 295; codex (mäṣḥaf, bəranna), 3, 294–309; liturgical folding fan (märäwəḥ), 295, 362, 363; scroll (kətab), 118, 119n, 267n, 294–295, 315 manuscript features: binding, 296–298; covers, 295–302, 345; layout, 307–308, 345, 355; illuminations, 345–355; textblock, 302–306, 345. See also colophon(s); crafts/craftsmen; painter(s); scribe(s); subscriptions manuscripts, Ethiopic: as corpus organizers, 251; multiple-text, 231, 232, 265, 267, 268, 269, 270, 278, 303; polyglot, 292, 428; pre-14th c., 218–221, 225–226, 227n, 253, 286–289, 293, 345, 429n Mänz, district: 75, 129, 133, 134, 140 Mäqälä, town: 34, 199, 327 Mäqdäla, sack of: 323

571 al-Maqrīzī, author: 76, 98, 100, 101, 104, 156, 422, 431, 432, 446 Märäb, river: 69, 79, 214 märäwǝḥ (liturgical folding fan): 295, 362, 363 Märḥa Krǝstos, abbot/saint: 60, 191, 271; Life of, 182, 271, 280, 391n, 405n, 406n Märḥabete, district: 75 Mark, saint: Acts of, 266; anaphora of, 166; manuscript portrait of, 345; see of, 237 market(s), marketplace(s): 91, 372, 413–414 Märqorewos: see Brancaleon, Niccolò Märqoryos, personage: 351 Marqos, officer: 84 marriage: 14, 379–383; royal, 44–45, 77, 85, 382–383, 386; and sanctity, 373–374 Märṭulä Maryam, church: 80, 339, 340, 392, 393 Mary, saint: xvii, 60, 181, 187, 254, 257, 295, 389, 392, 395; anaphoras of, 186, 188n; Ascension of Mary, 231; chapel of Mary of Golgotha, in Jerusalem, 430; Ethiopian chapel of, in Cairo, 431, 433; church of Mary in the kätäma, 369, 376n; Transitus of Mary, 233. See also Miracles of Mary Mäsal, Islamic site: 106, 151 Masālik al-abṣār fī mamālik al-amṣār: see al-ʿUmarī mäsänqo (musicians): 46 mäṣḥaf: see manuscript forms Mäṣḥafä baḥrəy: see Book of the substance Mäṣḥafä bǝrhan: see Book of the light Mäṣḥafä gänzät: see Book of the shroud Mäṣḥäfä kidan: see Testament of Our Lord Mäṣḥafä mǝśṭir: see Book of the mystery Mäṣḥafä Qälemǝnṭos: see Book of Clement Mäṣḥafä qändil: see Book of the lamp Mäṣḥafä Säʿatat: see Hours; Säʿatat Mäṣḥafä śǝrʿat: see Book of the regulation Mäṣḥafä sǝddät (Book of the Persecution): 102, 456n, 459 Mäṣhäfä ṭefut: 352–353 Mäsobä Wärq, princess: 385 Mäsqäl Kǝbra, queen/saint: 32, 44–45, 374; Life of, 32n, 279–280, 374 Massawa, port: 1, 69, 77, 79, 89, 92, 93, 97, 215, 417, 445, 446, 451, 461, 468, 469 Mäṭaʿ, saint: see Libanos

572 Mäṭära, locality: 166 Mateus, ambassador: 391, 417n May Kado Giyorgis, church: 180 Mecca: 22, 88, 90, 95, 100, 110, 148, 156n, 444, 446, 448 Medina: 3, 88, 146, 444 Mǝʿǝraf (common of the Divine Office): 168 megalith, megalithic: 124–129, 130, 134, 137 Mǝhǝlla (supplication, rogation): 168 Mehmad, ruler/gärad of Hadiyya: 77, 389 Melchite(s): 243, 245, 249, 251 Melitius, bishop of Lykopolis: 198, 243, 249 Melitian(s), Melitian schism: 198, 226, 249 Mǝnilǝk [I], legendary king: 59, 63, 72, 257, 385 Mǝʿǝrafä Maryam, church: 392 merchant(s): 97, 108, 109, 136, 151, 154–155, 372n, 375, 394, 414–418, 420, 422, 442, 446, 447, 448, 452–453 Mǝṣǝle, island: 353 Məsḥalä Maryam, church/megalithic site: 129, 133, 134 metropolitan(s), of Ethiopia-Eritrea: ecclesiastical status and titles, 27, 28, 162–164, 195; Egyptian community around, 55, 172, 174; Egyptian origin/ selection by Alexandrian patriarch, 37, 39, 163, 195, 214; embassies surrounding, 39, 428; and Ethiopian bishops, 45, 163; Ethiopian seat of, 48, 174; mosque construction by, 43; opposition to Ethiopian practices, 173; role in administration, 45, 71, 83–84, 195, 209, 211, 379n; role in marriage ceremony, 380; suspension in requests for/sending of, 39, 191; ties to Egyptian monasteries, 235–236; translations of, 183, 229, 236, 266; wine produced for, 406. See also Bärtälomewos, Danǝʾel, Gabrǝʾel, Mikaʾel I, Mikaʾel II, Sälama “the Translator,” Sawiros, Yǝsḥaq Mikaʾel I, metropolitan: 35, 39–40, 55, 173–175, 235, 342 Mikaʾel II, metropolitan: 45, 174 Mikaʾel (or Zämikaʾel), the Egyptian: 236 Mikaʾel Amba, church: xvii, 28, 35, 40, 170, 174, 175, 176, 235n, 331, 342

Index military: regiments, 64, 68, 69, 71, 72, 73, 77–79, 80, 82, 83, 85; service: 62, 409. See also army Minas, king: 260n, 382n, 469, 471n Minas, saint, Ethiopian monastery of, in Egypt: 431, 432, 433 mine(s), mining: 92, 395, 412, 424 Miracles of Mary (Gz. Täʾammerä Maryam): 185, 186, 187, 233, 238–9, 254–255, 313n, 351, 352, 353, 355, 389 Monumentum Adulitanum: 222 Morara, royal ancestor: 41, 42, 44, 50, 51 mosque(s): in Ethiopia, 43, 96, 101, 106, 107, 112, 126n, 129, 131, 141, 148n, 151–152, 469; of Damascus (Ethiopians at), 153, 443; of al-Azhar, Cairo (Ethiopians at), 153, 443–444, 452; Great Mosque of Ṣanʿāʾ, 285, 294n, 302n Motälämi, title/name of ruler of Damot: 71, 80, 123–124, 139, 207, 415, 421 muʾaḏḏin (muezzin): 152, 441 Muger, region: 75 Muhammad, the Prophet: xvi, 34, 88, 142, 145, 146, 148, 150, 281n, 322, 387, 445, 472 Muḥammad Abū ʿAbdallāh, šayḫ: 156 Muḥammad b. Azhar al-Dīn, sultan: 104, 105, 157, 158 Muḥammad b. Badlāy, sultan: 76, 78 Muḥammad b. Ibrāhīm Gaša, imam: 465, 466 Muḥammad b. Nāṣir, sultan: 465 mule(s): 66, 378, 379, 402, 418, 422 Mūrah, Islamic community: 95 Murara, royal ancestor: see Morara al-Mursī, Abū al-ʿAbbās, Muslim mystic: 153n music: musical instruments, 185n, 198; musical notation, 307; royal songs, 66, 71, 422. See also chant Näʾakkweto Läʾab, king/saint: 32, 206; Life of, 32, 50, 279, 280 nägad ras (head of caravans): 414 nägadi (merchant): 416. See also merchant(s) Naǧāḥid, Ethiopian dynasty of Yemen/ Dahlak Islands: 90–91, 445

Index Nägaš, locality: 88, 148n nägaš, title: 71, 80. See also baḥǝr nägaš nägś (hymns): 190 Naʿod, king: 16n, 77, 80, 83, 182, 339, 357, 364, 390, 391 Naʿod Mogäsa, queen: 390, 392, 393 narthex: 166, 172, 344 Naǧāšī, al-Naǧāšī (Ethiopian king in Islamic tradition): 88, 145–147 Naǧrān, locality in Ḥimyar (Yemen): Ethiopian building in, 53; Ethiopian conquest of, 53, 269, 279, 280; Martyrium of (Gz. Gädlä Nagran), 231, 232; massacre of Christians in, 257, 266, 269, 279 Nassābūn (Islamic genealogists): 149 nazīl (Islamic trade-tax collector): 421 Nazret, modern town in Šäwa: 95 Nazret, locality in Tǝgray: 237 Nazret Maryam, church, in Tǝgray: 35, 40, 55, 174, 175, 176 nǝburä ǝd, office: 28, 68, 81, 238, 240, 432n nǝgǝśt, title: 28, 376, 382, 383 nǝguś, title: 28, 38 Nǝḥǝyo Bä-Krǝstos, personage: 343 Nicaea, council of: 162, 255, 257 niche(s), in church architecture: 173, 175, 176, 177 Nile, river: archeology in Sudan along, 285n; Ethiopian kings’ legendary ability to control, 22; papyrus and, 291n; route to Egypt along, 285n, 428–429; town of al-Fuwwah in delta of, 151n. Blue Nile: see Abbay “Nine Saints”: 119–120, 199–200, 201, 224n, 262, 264, 273, 280 Nob, monk/prince: 339 nomocanon: 162n, 164 Nora: Islamic site: 106, 111, 126n, 151, 404; site of Christian church, 40 Nubia/Nubian: 3, 23, 36–37, 171, 178, 285n, 291n, 294n, 295n, 303n, 428, 444, 448, 468 nuns: 40, 174, 213n, 371- 373, 374, 394, 434n, 436–437 Nūr al-Dīn ʿAli, merchant: 416–417 Nūr b. Muǧāhid, emir: 157, 159, 464–465, 475

573 oil(s): 400, 423; in liturgical ceremonies, 167, 190, 191 Order concerning those who are baptized (Gz. Śǝrʿatä habt bäʾǝntä ǝllä yǝṭṭämmäqu): 242–243, 247, 248, 251 Order of the Church (Gz. Śǝrʿatä betä krǝstiyan): 242 Oromo, people: 16, 26, 83, 114, 115, 131, 157n, 159, 386, 454, 464, 465, 466, 470–476 Ottoman(s): province in Ethiopia, 6, 16, 130n, 454, 468–470; coins in Ethiopia, 130; conquest of Jerusalem, 430; expansion into Red Sea region, 462, 468; Portuguese rivalry with, 461–462; role in Ethiopian Muslim-Christian wars, 462–463 Pachomius, saint: 199, 281; Rule of, 165, 168, 202, 224, 232, 253; Pachomian monks, 168 Páez, Pedro: 369, 380, 381, 392n, 468 page(s) (Gz. blatten, pl. blattenočč), office: 72, 73, 84–85 painter(s)/artist(s): 181, 255, 314, 344, 349, 359–364, 432 paleography/paleographic: 220, 226, 283n, 288, 290, 313 Palestine: 107, 198n, 239, 350 palimpsest(s): 25, 227, 429n Ṗänṭälewon/Ṗänṭälewon zäṣomaʿt, saint: 200; Life of, 231, 232, 266, 269–270, 279. See also Ǝnda Abba Ṗänṭälewon paper, as manuscript support: 310n; in Christian Ethiopian manuscripts, 234–235, 288n, 292, 436n; in Muslim manuscripts, 292, 295n ṗaṗṗas, title: 27, 163, 195. See also patriarch; metropolitan; pope papyrus: 291, 308n, 309n parchment: as main support for medieval Christian manuscripts in Ethiopia, 235, 291, 292; production of, 291–292, 315–316, 317, 402; use for Coptic manuscripts, 309; use for Islamic scrolls, 295n; use for medieval Nubian manuscripts, 285n; use for pastedowns, 298; use for thread, 296n; use today, 285

574 Pastophorium/-a, in church architecture: 166, 167, 170n, 171, 172, 173, 175, 176, 177 pastoralists, pastoralism: 401, 402, 471n, 475 patriarch(s), of Alexandria: 27, 37, 39, 105, 162, 163, 173, 214, 428, 429; Abraham the Syrian, 176; Athanasius – see Athanasius; Christodulos, 39; Cyril I, 164, 165n, 188, 201, 202; Cyril II, 43, 173; Dioscorus, 164; Gabriel II, 39, 176; Gabriel V, 191, 380n; Gabriel VII, 274; John VI, 33, 39, 44, 47; Macarius II, 39, 173; Matthew I, 181; Peter, 249; Philotheos, 36, 172 patriarch, Catholic, for Ethiopia: 467 patriarch, of Constantinople: 257 patristic/patristics: 201, 224, 225, 226, 255, 258 Paul, apostle/saint: 245; Acts of: 244n Paul of Thebes, “the first hermit,” Life of: 202, 224 peasant(s)/peasantry: 106, 376, 381, 383, 397, 402, 404, 407–8, 409, 413, 422, 423, 452 pepper: 417 Periplus of the Erythrean Sea: 3, 222 Peter, apostle/saint: Acts of, 244; basilica of (Rome), 438 Peter of Alexandria, bishop/patriarch, saint: 249; Acts of, 227, 228, 266 Phileas, saint, Acts of: 266 Philo of Carpasia: 225 philology/philological: 8, 10, 11, 13, 19, 163, 202, 207n, 216, 218, 223, 260, 264; methods of, 220–221 Physiologus: 224 pilgrim(s)/pilgrimage: Ethiopian Christian, 181n, 332, 372, 428, 429, 430, 431, 432, 433, 434, 436, 438, 442n; Latin, 430, 431, 434, 436, 445, 446; Muslim, 88, 97, 147, 443 plough: 399, 400 pope(s): 21, 27, 241n, 364, 438, 439; Paul III, 438, 440, 467; Sixtus IV, 21, 438 Portugal/Portuguese: 6, 21, 29, 93, 150, 192, 336n, 338, 366, 378, 391, 393, 402, 417, 446, 454, 452n, 461–462, 463, 466–468, 469, 470 Potken, Johannes: 438 poultry: 405

Index presbyterium, in church architecture: 166, 170, 178 priest(s): Christian Ethiopian, 28, 37, 39, 40, 46, 123, 164, 170, 174, 186, 191, 193, 211, 240, 246, 270, 316–317, 358, 364, 368n, 369, 379n, 380, 431, 437; foreign, 20, 235, 242; local-religious, 114–115, 123; married, 368n, 369, 380, 381, 437; priest-king, 60 printing: in Ethiopia, 285; of Gǝʿǝz works in 16th-c. Europe, 439, 440–441 prostitute(s): 375–376 Prothesis, in liturgy: 167, 171, 182 Pseudo-apostolic (literature): 232, 233, 246, 247, 379 qāḍī (Islamic judge): 94, 150n, 152, 156 qalä-ḥaṣe, office: 73 Qälemǝnṭos: see Book of Clement Qalāwūn, Mamluk sultan: 429 Qänqanit (Mikaʾel), church: 180 qaṣ, office: 74 Qawǝsṭos, saint, Life of: 272 qäysä gäbäzä Ṣǝyon, office: 46 al-Qazwīnī, author: 406 Qǝdǝmt, cemetery at Lalibäla: 335 Qerǝllos, text: 224 Qoḥayto, locality: 166 Qorqor Maryam, church: 335, 341n, 343 queen(s): Christian Ethiopian, 21, 28, 44–45, 47, 58n, 68, 77, 80, 339, 372n, 374, 376–379, 382–383, 385, 386–394; non-Christian, 4, 36–37, 41 , 141, 172, 384 (see also Gudit); Muslim, 93, 102, 141, 388; local religious, 386, 388 Queen of Sheba: 54, 55, 59, 257, 258, 385–386. See also Makǝdda Quran: 108, 148, 152, 285n Qurayš, Meccan clan: 148 Qūṣ (Gz. Qusqam), in Egypt: 90, 429, 430, 432, 433–434, 442n radiocarbon analysis/dating: 10, 96, 106, 127, 128, 129n, 130n, 131, 132, 134, 135, 286, 288n, 308, 309n, 335, 345n raq-masäre, office: 74 ras (chief), title for series of offices: 67, 74, 78, 83, 395, 409, 412n, 414

Index Rasūlid, dynasty of Yemen: 92, 102, 110, 154n, 415 Red Sea: 1, 2, 3, 6, 26, 34, 69, 79, 86, 89, 92, 96, 110, 152, 154, 197, 203, 266, 397, 401, 414, 416, 417, 418, 428, 444, 445, 454, 461, 462, 466, 467, 468, 469, 470 regents/regency: 21, 58n, 84, 85, 104, 383, 385, 388, 390, 391, 392, 393, 394 Rejoyce our sons! (Gz. Täfäśśǝḥu wǝludǝnä): 242, 247 Rema Mädḫane ʿAläm, church: 339, 361 rǝst, land-right: 61, 381, 407–408, 410 Rest of the words of Baruch: 224 Roha, locality: 31, 333. See also Lalibäla Rome/Roman: ancient, 17, 114, 164, 168, 197, 203, 217, 358, 389; church, 163, 191, 467; medieval, 292, 314n, 364, 426, 429, 435, 437–441, 451, 452 ; term(s) for Byzantine/Byzantium/Constantinople, 163n, 199, 245, 255, 257 Romna, royal concubine: 390, 391n, 392 Ros Näbyat, officer: 82 ribāṭ : 151 Ṣäʿandǝwat, locality: 42 Säʿatat (liturgical Hours): 185, 186, 188. See also Hours Säblä Wängel, queen: 363, 378, 383, 387, 393, 394 Sabbath: of the Christians (Sunday), 179, 184, 256; First Sabbath (Saturday), 179, 184, 186, 187, 245, 254, 256 Ṣabr al-Dīn I, sultan: 66, 70, 387, 415 Ṣabr al-Dīn II, sultan: 76, 102, 104 Saʿd al-Dīn, military leader: 76, 101, 102, 103, 104, 108, 465, 466. See also Barr Saʿd al-Dīn Šāḏiliyya, Sufi brotherhood: 107 Ṣadǝqan (“Righteous ones”), saints: 199; Lives of, 199, 280 Ṣafī al-Dīn ʿAbd al-Muʾmin b. ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq al-Ḥanbalī al-Baġdādī, personage: 151n Šāfiʿī, Islamic law school: 107, 151, 153 sägwa (royal ‘nickname’): 52 ṣäḥafälam/ṣäḥafä lam/ṣäḥafe lam, office: 46, 48, 67, 74, 75, 80, 421 ṣäḥafe tǝʾǝzaz, office: 46 ṣāḥib, Islamic title: 91, 159

575 Ṣäḥma, saint, Life of: 280 Sälama, first bishop of Aksum: see Frumentius Sälama “the Translator,” metropolitan: 183, 185, 192, 229, 230, 236, 266, 353n Ṣällämt, region: 77 ṣalāt al-ġayb, Muslim prayer: 146 Ṣāliḥ, qāḍī: 150n, 156 Ṣälotä kidan/Prayer of the Covenant: 190 salt: 395, 419–420; as currency: 419, 420 šamma (woven cloth): 411, 420 Samuʾel of Däbrä Qwäyäṣa, saint: 215 Samuʾel of Däbrä Wägäg, saint, Life of: 122n, 276 Samuʾel of Waldǝbba, saint: 209, 275; Life of, 209n, 275 Ṣanʿāʾ, locality in Yemen: 285, 294n, 302n Santo Stefano, Ethiopian monastery in Rome: 292, 438–441 Särawe, region: 43, 81 al-Šarǧī, author: 442–443 Šarḫā, sultanate/Islamic region: 99, 419 Śärṣ́ä Dǝngǝl, king: 25, 423, 468, 469, 470, 471, 472, 476; Chronicle of, 105, 260n, 459, 471 Sarzana Mikaʾel, church: 180 ṣasärge, office: 72, 84 “Sasu,” region/locality: 412 Šäwa, region/province: xvi, 24, 65, 68n, 70, 74–75, 76, 79, 80, 95, 105, 109, 119, 123, 129, 130, 132, 133, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140, 154, 207, 211, 273, 338, 341, 351n, 388, 404, 414, 415, 421, 461, 475n, 476 Šawah, Islamic polity/sultanate(s): xvi, 4, 65, 66, 70, 93–95, 97, 99, 106, 111, 139–140, 141, 148, 152, 211n, 388 Sawākin, Red Sea port: 428, 468, 469 ṣäware, office: ṣäware narge mäsäräy, 46; ṣäware ʿarat, 447n Sawiros, metropolitan: 173 Säyfä Arʿad, king: 66, 70, 74, 75, 76, 80, 180, 212, 271, 350, 373, 430 šayḫ, Islamic title: 92, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153n, 156 scarification: 367, 368 scribe(s)/scribal: 14, 52, 252, 292, 303, 305, 307, 309–315, 316, 317, 318, 349, 391 scriptorium/-a: 208n, 241, 313, 347

576 scroll (Gz. kətab): see manuscript forms sǝmʿ (“martyrdom,” Acts), genre: xvii, 261. See also hagiography; individual saints’ names Šǝmäzana, region: 34, 35, 44, 47, 65, 199. See also Däbrä Libanos of Šǝmäzana/Ham Šǝmbǝrä Kwǝrǝ (Ar. Ṣambra Kūrā), locality/ battle: 75, 459 Sǝmen, region: 77, 393, 401, 410, 462 Sǝmʿon, officer: 395, 409, 412n Sǝmʿon, the Egyptian: 183, 235 Sǝnnar, region: 402, 412 Senodos/Synodicon: 188, 189, 190, 209, 225, 228, 232, 233, 242–243, 245n, 246, 247–248, 250, 353 sənsul: see manuscript forms Ṣǝraʿ, region: 42, 43, 92n, 172, 175 ṣəraj-masäre, office: 72 Śǝrʿatä gǝbr/Order of the banquet: 60, 61, 376, 377, 404, 422 Śǝrʿatä mangǝśt/Order of the kingdom: 59, 63, 383 Śǝrʿatä qwǝrḥät: 60, 390 serpent(s), snake(s): 119–121, 123 śəyyum (pl. śəyyuman), office: 62, 421 Shay, local-religious culture: 132–139, 140 Sheba, Queen of: see Queen of Sheba sheep: 111, 138, 296, 402, 403, 418 Shenoute, saint (Egyptian): 168, 281. See also White Monastery Shepherd of Hermas: 223n, 224, 231n, 232 Sidaama: language, 26, 207; people, 37n, 384n, 386, 388 Sidamo, region: 127 Šihāb al-Dīn Aḥmad b. ʿAbd al-Qādir (a.k.a ʿArab Faqīh): See ʿArab Faqīh silk: 70, 108, 378, 417 silver: 415; coins, 33, 109, 110, 130, 223, 412, 418–419; manuscript covers, 301; mines – see mine(s)/mining; objects, 131, 135, 336, 357, 395, 433; silversmiths, 315 Simon the Cananaean (Gz. Sǝmʿon qänänawi): 242, 247 Sinai: 227n, 229, 266, 429, 434 sistrum (percussion instrument): 169 slave(s)/slavery/enslaved: 15, 85, 90, 91, 92, 96, 97, 110, 140, 153n, 376, 387, 395, 398,

Index 406n, 409–410, 416, 418, 421, 425, 426, 427, 441, 442, 444–450, 451, 452, 455, 458, 463n, 470 snakes: see serpent(s) Socotra: 427 Soddo, region: 127 Solomon, biblical king: 4n, 5, 31, 54, 55, 59, 63, 68, 236, 257, 258, 385 Solomon/Sälomon, Ethiopian regnal name: 52, 55, 301n, 345, 356 “Solomonic” dynasty: administration, 64, 67–85, 136; appellation, 4, 31; chronicles, 258–260; coup/beginnings, 4, 31, 57, 119, 179, 205, 206, 275; expansion, 12, 62, 64–67, 123; ideology, 4–5, 31, 59–60, 63–64, 257, 258, 279, 281, 385–385, 386; religious relations, 136, 208, 211, 275, 280; succession practices, 57–58; trade and, 415 Ṣomä Dǝggwa (Hymnary for Lent): 185 Somali: language, 26, 455n, 456n; people, 103, 442, 456n, 460, 466, 469 Somalia/Somaliland/Somali coast: 1, 2, 99, 130, 401, 415, 418, 469 Sophia, saint, Acts of (with Ṗistis, Elpis and Agape): 266 Sourré-Kabanawa, local-religious/ archeological site: 131 spice(s): 109, 416, 417 stela(e): Aksumite, 116n, 125n, 329; Islamic, 42n, 89, 90–91, 92, 93, 95, 96, 415; local-religious, 126–129, 141 Stephanite: see Ǝsṭifanosite subscription(s): 229, 235, 236, 241, 266. See also colophon(s) Sudan/Sudanese: 1, 23, 160, 285n, 291n, 412n Sūdān (Ar.), term for black Africans: 444 Sufi/(Islamic) mystical master/mystical brotherhood: 107, 149, 153, 155, 159, 160, 443 sugar: 404, 406 supplication(s): 307, 316, 318; liturgical, 168 Synaxary/Synaxarion (Gz. Sǝnkǝssar), 37, 183, 184, 235, 260, 267, 276, 278, 374n Synodicon: see Senodos Syria/Syrian: 90, 99, 107, 171, 176, 194, 197, 198n, 216, 224n, 239, 262, 434, 452n

Index Syriac: language, 218, 223, 224n, 229, 243, 292n, 416n, 432n; church, 164; manuscripts, 306n, 325 Täʾammerä Maryam: see Miracles of Mary Täʿaqǝbo mǝśṭir (Custody/Protection of the Mystery): 189, 241 tabot: see altar tablet al-Tabrīzī, Persian merchant: 452 Tädbabä Maryam, church: 181, 355 Tadewos of Däbrä Maryam, saint, Life of, 272 Tadewos of Däbrä Bartarwa, saint, Life of: 276 Tadīt bint Māyālāmā, female Islamic ruler: 388 ṭäǧǧ (mead): 406 Tägulät, district: 75 Täklä Alfa, saint, Life of: 276 Täklä Haymanot, monk/saint: 123, 206, 207–209, 212, 273, 274, 275, 374; Life of, 123, 139, 207, 213n, 273–274, 275, 280, 281, 371 Täklä Maryam, painter: 362 Täkle the Abyssinian, painter: 364, 432 Ṭana, lake: Agäw speakers north of, 49; battle near, 463; Betä Ǝsraʾel near, 20; craftsmen around, 341; hagiographies related to, 276–277; post-medieval Christian kingdom near, 7, 476; region west of, 26, 117n; religious centers in/ near, 287, 339, 351, 353, 357, 360, 374n, 392; saints at, 374 Ṭana Qirqos, church: 287 Ṭänṭäwǝdǝm, king: 32, 35, 38, 41–42, 43, 44, 45, 49, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 92n, 172n, 345, 356, 407n Taʾrīḫ al-mulūk (History of the Kings): 459 Taʾrīḫ al-Walasmaʿ (History of the Walasmaʿ): 98, 101 Täsfa Giyorgis, ʿaqqabe säʿat: 390 Täsfa Ṣǝyon, monk: 440–441, 451 Tätär Gur, local-religious site: 134 tax(es)/taxation: 53, 102, 103, 108, 111, 398, 400, 402, 407–408, 415, 420–421, 422, 423; ḫarāǧ, 104, 108; zakāt, 108. See also tribute Täzkar (memorial celebration): 278, 408 teff: see cereals/grains

577 Tǝgray, region: in Aksumite era, 117, 339; art from, 353, 363; battles in, 38, 67, 461, 462; economy of, 1, 36, 109, 399, 402, 403, 412, 413n, 414, 423; Islamic sites in, 24, 42–43, 87n, 88, 89, 91, 92, 111, 154n; Jesuits in, 467; Oromo expansion to, 476; Ottomans in, 469–470; in post-Aksumite era, 169–172, 329–330; religious institutions of, xvii, 34–36, 40, 41, 42, 169–172, 178, 180, 225, 275, 324, 329–330, 339, 353; saints in, 199, 275; Tǝgrǝñña spoken in, 49; Solomonic activity in, 67, 68; texts produced/ preserved in, 55, 119, 120, 238, 249, 258, 288n; women in, 367, 369–370, 378; Zagwa people in, 50; Zagwe activity in, 24, 35, 41, 42, 334 Təgre-mäkwännən, office: 81. See also mäkwännən Təhrəyännä Maryam, royal woman(?): 343 Ṭəlq, locality: 60, 75, 101 Tǝmben, locality: 180 Tǝrdaʾ Gäbäz, reputed Aksumite princess: 384–385 Terraces, terracing: 106, 124, 402–403 Testament of Our Lord/Testamentum Domini (Gz. Mäṣḥäfä kidan): 188, 189, 190, 225, 232, 246, 379 Tewoflos, saint, Acts of (with Ṗaṭroqya and Dämalis): 266 Textile(s): 411; in manuscript production, 296, 317. See also cotton; silk Theodore the Oriental (Gz. Tewodros bänadlewos), saint, Acts of: 235 Theology, theological: 203, 215, 242, 253; controversies, 187–188, 273; texts, 60, 142, 189, 216, 224, 240, 243, 255–256 Tihāma, coastal region of Arabian peninsula: 89, 90, 107 Timbuktu: 284 Tiya, local-religious site: frontispiece, 127 Ṭobya, locality: 76 Toḵondaʿ, locality: 166 Ṭomarä tǝsbǝʾt: see Epistle of Humanity trade: 15, 89–93, 97, 102, 108–111, 375, 413–421; Aksumite-era, 2, 3, 34, 154n, 444; Christians in long-distance, 110, 415, 417, 447; local/regional, 92, 96–97, 111,

578 trade (cont.) 395, 413–414; local-religious in, 77, 136, 138, 415–416, 448; long-distance, 2, 34, 66, 89, 91, 96, 97, 108–109, 111, 395, 397, 401, 414–415, 423, 470; Muslim prominence in long-distance, 6, 89–92, 103, 108–109, 111, 136, 416–417, 419, 446, 447, 448; routes, 4, 36, 66, 71, 77, 89, 90, 91, 103, 109–110, 154, 200, 396, 398, 413, 415, 419, 421, 470; royal involvement in, 102, 110, 415, 417, 421, 446; trade goods, 96, 108, 109, 110, 136, 402, 415, 417–418, 420. See also merchant(s) translation(s) into Gǝʿǝz: 13, 38, 53n, 183, 186, 187, 191, 217–230, 233, 235–239, 241, 243–244, 246, 249, 250–251, 252–253, 254, 255, 256, 260, 261, 265–267, 268, 270, 350, 351; Aksumite-era, 3, 165, 189, 201, 202–203, 217, 218, 219, 223–226, 227, 228, 234, 250, 251, 252, 265, 345; and the Kǝbrä nägäśt, 5n, 54–55, 59, 68, 237–238, 256–258, 266 Treatise on the Antichrist by Hippolytus: 225 tribute: 5, 61, 70, 76, 77, 78, 82, 90, 99, 100, 104, 120, 121n, 408, 409, 411, 421–422, 423, 457. See also tax(es) triumphal arch: 166, 170, 173, 175, 176, 178, 331, 343 tumulus/tumuli: 130–138, 141 Tuto Fela, local-religious site: 128 al-ʿUmarī, author: 66, 69, 70, 75, 98, 99, 100, 105, 106, 108, 110, 111, 112n, 140, 150, 151, 153, 154, 155n, 403, 405, 406, 418, 419, 422, 448 Umm Ayman, personage: 387 Umm Ḥabība bint Abī Sufyān, personage: 387 Umm Salmā bint Abī Umayya, personage: 387 ʿUra Mäsqäl, church: 35, 41, 43, 44, 225n, 282n, 330, 356, 407n ʿUra Qirqos, church: 32, 35, 41 ʿurf, pre-Islamic practice: 144 Venice/Venetian: craftsmen in Ethiopia, 349, 363; currency of used in Ethiopia, 109; Ethiopian embassy to, 21, 181; lordship of Cyprus, 437

Index Wabi Šäbälle, river: 66, 476n Wādī al-Naṭrūn: 428, 429, 431–432, 433 Wäf Argäf, locality: 330 Wafāt/Beri-Ifat, Islamic city: 106, 107, 404 Wag, region between Tǝgray and Lasta: 49 Wäǧ, polity/region in southern Šäwa: 388, 471 Wägda, district: 75 Wälamo, region: 79, 400. See also Wälaytta Wäläqa, region: 420 Walasmaʿ (Gz. Wäläšma), Islamic dynasty: 65, 66, 75, 76, 93, 97, 98, 99, 100–101, 103, 104, 106, 107, 108, 111, 139, 140, 148, 156, 157, 158n, 208, 211n, 415, 476 Wälaytta: language, 26; people, 127; region/ polity: 77, 401 Waldǝbba, region: 273, 275; “Waldǝbba recension,” 207n, 273. See also Samuʾel of Waldǝbba Wale Iyäsus, church: 178n Wālī ʾAsmaʿ, sultan: 94, 95, 99, 103 Wällo, region: 144n, 160, 204, 205, 206, 207, 402, 403, 413n wänbäročč, offices: 72 war: booty of, 53; Christian-Betä Ǝsraʾel, 411n; Christian-Muslim, 66, 71, 78, 100–101, 103, 106, 146, 156, 159, 321, 415, 454, 455–456, 457–463, 464, 465, 466; civil, 58, 410, 457, 458; enslaved in, 409, 446; of “Gudit”/queen of the Banū l-Ham(u)wīya, 37, 141; imports for, 417; of the Oromo, 473, 475, 476; women and, 14, 259, 393–394, 409 Wäräb, local-religious polity/district: 415 Wärwär, locality: 31, 46, 333. See also Lalibäla Waša Mikaʾel, church: 177, 344 Wašlu, locality: 418 weapon(s): 131, 134, 417, 473. See also firearms weaver(s), weaving: 410, 411 Wǝddase Maryam (Praise of Mary), liturgical office: 186 Wədəm Räʿad, king: 156 weights and measurements: 413 Wǝqen Gäbrǝʾel, church: 180 Wǝqro, locality: 199 Wǝqro Mädḫäne ʿAläm, church: 180 Wǝqro Maryam, church: 177–178, 180 Wǝqro Qirqos, church: 175, 176, 330n, 342, 357 White Monastery of Egypt: 235, 428

Index wine: absence from Ethiopian drinking culture, 406–407; in the liturgy, 166, 167, 171, 177, 192; sellers, 375 Wiz, locality: 420 women: 14, 28, 65, 97, 194, 213n, 257, 259, 313n, 365–394, 398, 409, 417, 426, 436, 445, 448, 450 wood/wooden: branches, in burial, 127; construction material, 170, 180, 329, 330, 331, 332, 336, 338; objects, 127, 128, 177, 178, 335, 349, 357, 359, 360, 361, 362; in household economy, 395, 409; in bookmaking, 295, 296, 298, 309 World Heritage List/Site(s): 127, 148n, 328, 332 Yädǝbba Maryam, church: 342 Yaʿəbikä Ǝgziʾ, officer: 68, 237–238, 258 Yafqǝrännä Ǝgziʾ, saint, Life of: 276 Yagba Ṣǝyon, king: 58n, 348, 429 Yäḥä, locality: 166 Yaḥyā Naṣrallāh, author: 149n Yäläbäsa: see Ṭəlq Yāqūt al-ʿAršī, Muʿīn al-Dīn, Ethiopian mystical master: 153 Yared, saint: 179, 183, 190, 275; Life of, 275 Yǝkunno Amlak, king: 4, 5n, 7, 54, 55, 57, 73, 94, 99, 256, 275, 339n, 343 Yǝmʿata, saint: 269; Life of, 280 Yemen/Yemeni: Aksumite intervention in, 3, 53, 201, 257, 279, 427; cultural contact with, 23, 97, 107, 137, 151n, 152, 160, 285; Ethiopian diplomacy with, 22, 36, 92, 97, 442, 446; Ethiopian migration to, 152, 426, 442–443, 451; Ifat rebels’ refuge in, 76, 102, 103; Ethiopian “slave dynasty” of, 91, 445; Ottomans in, 130n, 462, 468, 470; role in 16th-c jihad, 6, 159, 455n, 461; suzerainty of Dahlak Islands, 90; trade with, 23, 70, 89, 97, 108, 130n, 154n, 359, 402, 414, 415, 416, 417, 418, 420, 449 Yǝmrǝḥannä Ǝgziʾ, king: 354, 379 Yǝmrǝḥannä Krǝstos, king/saint: 32; church of, 177, 325, 329, 331, 336, 343; Life of, 50, 279 Yǝsḥaq, author of Mäṣḥafä mǝśṭirä sämay wämǝdr: 241, 243n Yǝsḥaq, baḥǝr nägaš: 461, 468, 469, 470

579 Yǝsḥaq, king: 21, 58n, 77, 101, 104, 236, 240, 339, 410, 411n, 416, 422 Yǝsḥaq, metropolitan: 244n Yǝsḥaq, nǝburä ǝd of Aksum: 68, 237–238, 243n Yǝsḥaq Tǝgray, author: 243, 245, 249, 251 Yoḥannəs, bishop of Aksum: 120 Yoḥannəs Məśraqawi (John the Oriental), saint, Life of: 264, 270 Yoḥannǝs zä-Qoṗros (of Cyprus), monk: 437, 441 Yoḥannǝs of Qänṭorare, monk: 314n, 441 Yoḥanni, saint: 199; church of Abba Yoḥanni, 180, 182n Yūsuf ʾAsʾar Yaṯʾar (Ar. Ḏu Nuwās, Gz. Finḥas), Jewish Ḥimyarite king: 279 Zabīd, Yemen: 90, 91, 130n, 445, 462 Zäge, monastery: 276 Zagwe, dynasty: 4, 5, 12, 24, 25, 31–33, 38, 41–56, 64, 123, 139, 164, 204–205, 279n, 333, 356, 379, 384; administration of, 45–47, 67, 69; era of, 7, 12, 16, 164, 172, 179, 356; ethnic identity of, 31, 48–51; territory of, 41–49, 67, 69, 111, 205–206, 207, 333–334; sanctity of, 32, 55–56, 205, 374, 386; overthrow of, 64, 111, 119, 205, 206, 208; use of Aksumite traditions, 51–54, 205; as “usurpers,” 5, 31, 54–56, 68, 237, 256–257, 385, 386 Zagʷa: 50, 237 Zä-Iyäsus, abbot/ʿaqqabe säʿat: 286, 349 zakāt: see tax(es) Zamikaʾel Arägawi, saint: 200, 273; Life of, 200n, 201, 270, 273 žan-masäre, office: 72 Žan Ḫayla, queen: 392 Žan Säyfa, queen: 390, 391 Žan Zela: see Ǝleni Zanśǝyyum, royal ancestor: 41, 42, 44 Zar, spirit-possession cult: 115–116, 122n, 404n Zäʾra Yaʿǝqob, king: 7, 182, 228, 240, 340, 360, 378; administration of, 64, 69, 71–72, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81–84, 122, 271, 389–90, 421; battles of, 76, 77; chronicle of, 98n, 104, 109, 181, 259, 376; diplomacy of, 21, 443; family relations, 58, 75, 77, 85, 377, 388, 389–90, 391, 392,

580 Zäʾra Yaʿǝqob, king (cont.) 421; religious policy, 122, 181, 184, 186–191, 214, 215, 216, 239, 254, 272, 357, 360, 368, 369–70, 379–80; royaldynastic legitimation and, 58, 60, 80–81, 392; royal capital of, 75; writings attributed to, 58, 122, 188, 189, 233, 239, 241, 255–256, 315n, 368 Zärema Giyorgis, church: 239, 330 zāwiya, Islamic institution: 151 Zayāliʿ/Zayāliʿa (sing. Zaylaʿī), term for Ethiopian Muslims: 107, 153, 416, 442, 443 al-Zaylaʿī, Ǧamāl al-Dīn, faqih: 151 al-Zaylaʿī, family settled in Yemen: 152, 443, 451 Zaylaʿ, port: 2, 4, 66, 76, 89, 96–97, 99, 101, 103, 107, 108, 109, 157, 405, 414, 417, 421, 442, 445, 446, 451, 460, 468, 469

Index Zäyoḥannǝs, saint, Life of: 276–277 zebu: 402 Zena Marqos, saint, Life of: 276 Zena Maryam, saint: 277, 372n, 374–375; Life of, 277 Zena Däbrä Libanos (History of Däbrä Libanos): 392n, 393n Zenahu la-Galla (History of the Galla): 471 Zir Ganela, princess/abbess: 351, 353, 373 Ziyādid, dynasty of Yemen: 90, 445 Zonaios, monk: 270 Zorzi, Alessandro, Venetian author/compiler: 109, 110, 388 Zoskales, Aksumite ruler: 222 Zoz Amba Giyorgis, church: 178n Zway, lake: 1, 353