Medieval Ethiopian Kingship, Craft, and Diplomacy with Latin Europe 9783030649333

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Medieval Ethiopian Kingship, Craft, and Diplomacy with Latin Europe

Verena Krebs

Medieval Ethiopian Kingship, Craft, and Diplomacy with Latin Europe

Verena Krebs

Medieval Ethiopian Kingship, Craft, and Diplomacy with Latin Europe

Verena Krebs Institute of History Ruhr University Bochum Bochum, Germany

ISBN 978-3-030-64933-3    ISBN 978-3-030-64934-0 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64934-0 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Detail from a manuscript made for aṣe Lǝbnä Dǝngǝl, ca. 1520, Tädbabä Maryam Monastery, Ethiopia. Photograph by Diana Spencer, courtesy of the DEEDS Project. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

To my parents, and to H. Ich hab’ euch doch immer ein Boot versprochen.

Map 1  Late medieval Solomonic Ethiopia and its environs

Map 2  Ethiopian presence and diplomatic travel routes in Europe (1402–1535)

Acknowledgements

I first encountered the sources that form the bedrock of this book as a master’s student at the University of Konstanz, Germany, well over a decade ago. Reflections on these materials have taken many forms over the intervening years: a MA thesis, a PhD dissertation, an early and massive book draft that looked at both Solomonic diplomacy and court collecting practices. Each iteration, though ultimately discarded, re-shaped my views on these texts, and their place in, and meaning for, the cultural history of Ethiopia. The long genesis process of this book has led me to accrue many debts. My sincere thanks are owed to those institutions whose funding and support enabled me to conduct my writing and fieldwork research in the first place: the Exzellenzcluster ‘Kulturelle Grundlagen von Integration’ at the University of Konstanz, the Ethiopian Ministry of Education, the Institute of Ethiopian Studies at Addis Ababa University and, finally, the Department of History and Heritage Management at Mekelle University. The Martin Buber Society of Fellows in Jerusalem and the Historical Institute at Ruhr University Bochum graciously tolerated my continued research on a project I was supposed to have long concluded. The hypotheses laid out in this book have evolved through conversation with friends and colleagues in Europe, North America, Jerusalem and Ethiopia. In particular, I wish to thank Dorothea Weltecke, Wolbert Smidt, Alexandra Cuffel, Adam Knobler, Sahar Amer, Erin MacLeod,  Manfred Kropp, Rainer Voigt, Christof Rolker, Felix Girke, Margit Mersch, Bar Kribus, Zara Pogossian, Yonatan Moss, Carlo Taviani, Kate Lowe, Samantha Kelly, Wendy Belcher, Kristen Windmuller-Luna, ix

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Meseret Oldjira, Michael Gervers (who also kindly gave his permission for the cover image of this book), Dorothea McEwan,  Adam Simmons, Solomon Gebreyes, Felege-Selam Yirga, Julien Loiseau, Martina Ambu, Mitiku Gabrehiwot, Hagos Abrha, Semira Seid, Bahru Zewde, Shiferaw Bekele and Lev Kapitaikin, who asked a very important question at a talk I gave in Jerusalem in 2019. At the Hiob Ludolf Centre for Ethiopian and Eritrean Studies in Hamburg, I especially wish to thank Alessandro Bausi, Denis Nosnitsin and Sophia Dege-Müller for their expertise and advice, and for reading parts of the manuscript. For their expertise and advice regarding the Arabic sources, I similarly wish to thank Barbara Roggema, Shahid Jamal and especially Julien Loiseau, whose gracious sharing of his unpublished research on al-Tabrı̄zı̄ made my own investigation into the matter possible in the first place. This book also could not have been written in the way it was without the translation help and invaluable philological expertise of Maria Bulakh, Jonathan Brent and Kari North in Gǝʿǝz, Latin and Catalan, respectively. Jan Brandejs was of superb help in creating the maps. I am moreover particularly grateful to Friederike Pfister, Daphna Oren-­Magidor, Solomon Gebreyes, David Spielman, Jonathan Brent and Maria Bulakh, who all read the manuscript in its entirety despite my looming deadlines, providing invaluable feedback and catching more than a few typos and transliteration mistakes. Thanks also go to Jona Ratering, Jil Löbbecke, Merve Battal and Ayse Nur Özdemir, indefatigable checkers of proofs and endnotes. My greatest debt is owed to Gabriel Stoukalov-­Pogodin, medievalist, journalist, TV producer and childhood friend extraordinaire, who wielded his unique skillset like a fine scalpel to conduct major editorial surgery on the manuscript, refining, advancing and ensuring the cogency of my arguments. Finally, there are not enough words in the world to express my love and gratitude to my parents, Otto and Heidrun, my sister Helena—and my husband, Jan. I could never have gotten here without you, and you are everything to me.

Note to Reader

Transliterations from Ethiopian languages overwhelmingly follow those established by the Encyclopaedia Aethiopica, unless terms have entered common English usage; transliterations from Arabic follow the imperfect system of a German native-­speaker writing in English who learnt Arabic both late in life and outside of the academy. A glossary provides brief explanations on historical personnel and the most commonly used Gǝʿǝz and Arabic terms. Medieval Ethiopian kings could be known to their subjects by several names, some of which were evocative composites (e.g. king Lǝbnä Dǝngǝl’s name means ‘Incense of the Virgin’, but he was also known as Dawit III and Wänag Sägäd). Each king is referred to by the name most commonly employed in scholarship; moreover, to denote a ruler’s kingship, his name is preceded by the local honorific term of address of aṣe (thus aṣe Lǝbnä Dǝngǝl instead of ‘king Lǝbnä Dǝngǝl’) in this book. I also employ the Gǝʿǝz terms nǝgus ́ (meaning ‘king’) and its plural nägäs ́t (‘kings’) as a shorthand specifically denoting the Christian rulers of Solomonic Ethiopia (vis-à-vis their counterparts in Europe or elsewhere) throughout this study. Personal names, particularly those of individuals involved in EthiopianEuropean diplomacy, have not been modernised or rendered into an English equivalent unless specifically noted. Instead, they are given as they appear in the primary source material (e.g. ‘Petrus’ instead of ‘Peter’, ‘Johanne Baptista’ instead of ‘Giovanni Battista’). The common English form is used for names of Latin Christian popes, and for personages of comparative historical fame that are of secondary importance (e.g. Pope xi

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Note to Reader

Sixtus IV and count Girolamo Riario). In bibliographic references, Ethiopian names are given as usual, listing the personal name and the name of the father and grandfather (when customarily used by the author) with no reversal in bibliographic entries. As has become commonplace in the field, all dates are identified as CE (Common Era) with regard to the modern Western calendar; in a few cases, AH for the Islamic calendar is used. The centuries under investigation here are familiar to Ethiopian Studies specialists as belonging to the latter part of the so-called Early Solomonic Period (1270–1529) of Ethiopian history. The applicability of the terms ‘medieval’ or ‘Middle Ages’ to non-European regions has engaged many discussions within the field of Medieval Studies in recent years. And yet, leading Ethiopian scholars of the twentieth century (from Taddesse Tamrat and Sergew Hable Selassie to Getatchew Haile) have—when writing in English about the time period—long and freely employed both these terms. The use of ‘late medieval’ and ‘late Middle Ages’ in this book is thus a nod to the great Ethiopian historians in whose footsteps I walk. It is also a conscious choice to highlight the deep history of entanglement between the North-East African highlands and the extended Mediterranean, which is at the heart of this study.

Contents

1 Introduction  1 Historiography, Sources and the Spectre of Prester John   3 Structure   7 2 All the King’s Treasures 17 Relics, Garments and Craftsmen—Ethiopian Missions to Italy at the Turn of the Fifteenth Century  18 Strangers in Ethiopia, ca. 1398/1399–1401  18 A Venetian Summer, 1402  20 King Dawit’s Treasures, 1402–1403  23 Fact and Fiction in Rome, 1403–1404  25 Roads, Merchants and ‘the Good Wine’: Venetians in Ethiopia in the Early Fifteenth Century  29 Lost in Translation at the Council of Constance, 1416–1418  34 Chapter Conclusion  38 3 The Sons of Dawit 61 First Contacts with the Kingdom of Aragon  62 An Interfaith Embassy to Valencia, 1427–1428  62 Spending a Fortune to Request Aid from Ethiopia, May 1428  63 Fear and Intrigue in Cairo, Early 1429  65 Five Ethiopian Pilgrims Walk Into a War, Summer 1430  73 Swapping Allegiances from France to Ethiopia, 1432/1433  74 The Abbot, the nəgus´ and the Council of Florence, 1439–1444  77 xiii

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CONTENTS

Ethiopia, Rome and Aragon—And the Fall of Constantinople  83 Chapter Conclusion  90 4 The Rule of the Regents121 Rome, Ethiopia, Jerusalem, and Two Very Different Men from Imola, 1478–1484 122 An Ethiopian Mission to Cairo and a Pilgrimage to Jerusalem, Mid-1480–Spring 1481 123 An Ethiopian Mission to the Heart of Latin Christendom, 1481–1482 126 A Minuscule Franciscan Mission in Ethiopia, 1480–1484/85 133 The Lord and the Letter-Carrier 136 Ethiopian Performative Diplomacy and Latin Missionary Zeal in the Early 1480s 139 Ethiopia and Portugal, 1487–1527 142 Early Portuguese Emissaries to Ethiopia 142 Ǝleni’s Mission to Portugal, 1508–1509 143 Ethiopian Delegates to Portugal (1509–1515) 146 The Portuguese Embassy to Ethiopia and aṣe Lǝbnä Dǝngǝl’s Last Peacetime Mission (1520–1527) 149 Chapter Conclusion 153 5 King Solomon’s Heirs185 Technologists, Arms, and Alliances? Dismantling a Scholarship Narrative 185 A Christian Ethiopian Empire? The Realm of the ‘Builder Kings’  189 Monasticism and Solomonic Rule 190 Royal Foundations Proclaiming a Christian Dominion 192 Ethiopian Churches of Italian Appearance? 194 Through a Glass, Darkly: Textual Evidence and Archaeological Remains 196 Diplomatic Requests Re-examined 203 Builders, Carpenters, Stonemasons, Metalworkers and Painters 204 The Dazzling Splendour of the World: Religious Material Culture 206 Foreign Craftsmanship, Royal Foundations, and Diplomacy 211 The Power of Distance and Solomonic Emulation 215 Chapter Afterword: The Builder Kings’ Realm in Turbulent Times 220

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6 Conclusion263 A Brief Glossary of Terms Relating to Ethiopian History267 Bibliography273 Index295

Abbreviations

ACA ASV BAP BAV BMN BNCF BNF BNM EAe MGH TTNA UH

Archivo de la Corona de Aragón, Barcelona Archivio di Stato di Venezia Biblioteca Comunale Augusta di Perugia Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana Bibliothèque Municipale de Nancy Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, Venice 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. Monumenta Germaniae Historica Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo, Lisbon Universitätsbibliothek Heidelberg

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction

In early 1429, a Persian merchant called al-Tabrı ̄zı ̄ was condemned to death by one of the four supreme justices of Mamlūk Egypt. The Egyptian authorities carried out the sentence quickly and with great spectacle: as February turned into March, al-Tabrı ̄zı ̄ was publicly beheaded under the window of the al-Ṣāliḥiyya madrasa, the formal site for public execution in late medieval Cairo. The Persian declared his innocence until his head was struck from his neck. He also quoted passages from the Quran and proclaimed the Islamic profession of faith. Officially, al-Tabrı ̄zı ̄ was accused of ‘importing weapons into an enemy country’ and ‘playing with two religions’.1 From a Mamlūk standpoint, he was certainly guilty of both: the merchant had previously been reprimanded for his export of arms and horses from Muslim Egypt to Solomonic Ethiopia, a Christian kingdom located in the highlands of the Horn of Africa. Beyond his role as incidental quartermaster supplying a foreign army to the south of Egypt, al-Tabrı ̄zı ̄ was also known to acquire ‘treasures’ such as bejewelled crosses for aṣe Yǝsḥaq, the ruler of Christian Ethiopia. The evidence recovered with the Persian upon his arrest together with some Ethiopian monks in 1429 indicates that the group had been sent out to acquire the rare and beautiful things in life. While some weapons were found among their possessions, they were of little interest to the Mamlūk authorities. Primarily recovered were great amounts of ‘Frankish’ © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 V. Krebs, Medieval Ethiopian Kingship, Craft, and Diplomacy with Latin Europe, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64934-0_1

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clothing, richly embroidered in gold with Christian symbols, as well as two golden church bells and a letter written ‘in the Ethiopian language’. In it, the Ethiopian sovereign supposedly ordered al-Tabrı ̄zı ̄ to acquire items of gold-smithery, crosses, bells and a holy Christian relic—one of the nails with which Jesus had been crucified.2 Meanwhile, Spanish archival material indicates that the Persian merchant and the Ethiopian monks had visited the kingdom of Aragon before attempting to return to Ethiopia via Egypt. They had arrived in Valencia in late 1427, spending several months in the city and asking the Aragonese king, Alfonso V, to despatch artisans and craftsmen to the court of their master, the nǝgus—the ́ Ethiopian king. All this inter-faith contact and collaboration—with an African Christian ruler approaching an Iberian court employing a Persian Muslim in the company of Ethiopian ecclesiastics—provoked the suspicion of generations of Mamlūk Egyptian historians, who subsequently speculated that the nǝgus ́ must have been calling for a crusade against the Islamic powers of the Mediterranean.3 There was simply no way an Ethiopian king would have sent out emissaries to travel halfway across the known world to acquire ecclesiastical garments, liturgical objects and a relic as well as artisans and craftsmen. Or was there? In fact, diplomatic endeavours like the one that took such a fatal turn for the Persian merchant al-Tabrı ̄zı ̄ seem to have been rather common at the time. The fifteenth and early sixteenth century, the timeframe under consideration in this book, coincides with an early golden age of Solomonic Ethiopian sovereignty in the Horn of Africa. The origins of Christianity in the region date back to the first half of the fourth century, when the Aksumite king ʿEzana converted to the religion together with his court, and Ethiopia became a bishopric of the Coptic Church.4 In 1270, the so-­ called Solomonic dynasty came to power in the central Ethiopian highlands. Throughout the fourteenth century, successive Solomonic nägäs ́t—to use the plural of nǝgus ́as shorthand for these kings of Christian Ethiopia—extended and consolidated their realm, seizing and submitting new regions from non-Christian principalities under their suzerainty.5 At the turn of the fifteenth century, Solomonic Ethiopia was the largest geopolitical entity in the late medieval Horn of Africa. The territory the Christian nägäs ́t claimed as their own stretched nearly 700 miles in length and several hundred miles in breadth. It formed a heterogeneous realm that extended over most of the central highland plateau, from the

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Eritrean coastal regions to the south of modern-day Addis Ababa (compare Map 1).6 Between 1400 and the late 1520s, successive Ethiopian sovereigns are recorded as dispatching at least a dozen diplomatic missions to various princely and ecclesiastical courts in Latin Europe. The vast majority of embassies were sent out within the first 50 years of contacts. In the fifteenth century alone, Solomonic envoys arrived at places as varied as Venice, Rome, Valencia, Naples and Lisbon. Ethiopian pilgrims, sometimes cast into the role of inadvertent ambassadors, are concurrently attested from Lake Constance in modern-day Germany to Santiago de Compostela in the very west of the Iberian Peninsula. Continuous and lasting contacts between distant medieval royal courts are far from surprising. Often, objects rather than written sources bear lasting witness to remote connections between realms. As art historian Finbarr Flood once put it, ‘people and things have been mixed up for a very long time, rarely conforming to the boundaries imposed on them by modern anthropologists and historians.’7 In this specific case, however, the people and things mixing up between the Christian Horn of Africa and the Latin West traversed thousands of miles. They needed to cross mountain ranges, deserts and two large bodies of water, as well as territories adhering to different faiths. Even at the best of times, a single journey was bound to take at least half a year. And yet, nearly all rulers and regents of the fifteenth and early sixteenth century sent out envoys in some way or other—in the very early 1400s, up to three embassies were dispatched from the North-East African highland court within just five years. Examining late medieval Solomonic Ethiopian missions to the Latin West, this book above all seeks to answer a simple question: why did generations of nägäs ́t initiate diplomatic contacts with different princely and ecclesiastical courts in Europe in the fifteenth and early sixteenth century?

Historiography, Sources and the Spectre of Prester John Modern historians and philologists working on the history and literature of Europe and Ethiopia alike have studied these diplomatic encounters for more than a century.8 Dating back to the very early 1900s, researchers working on materials examined in this book have noted an Ethiopian interest in craftsmen, and occasionally relics.9 The mid-twentieth-century

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Italian historian Renato Lefèvre concerned himself with the topic of Ethiopian-European exchanges throughout his long career, unearthing more archival material than any other scholar.10 In a major 1945 article, he suggested that the nägäs ́t first approached medieval Italy out of a need for its artistically and technologically superior workforce, ostensibly caused by a lack of skilled indigenous African labour.11 Two decades later, he opined somewhat less bluntly that Solomonic rulers dispatched their missions out of a desire to obtain ‘masters of art and industry’ to raise the civil and technical level of the Ethiopian kingdom, driven by a need to enhance its military efficiency.12 Lefèvre’s views were undoubtedly steeped in the colonialist political climate of his time, not unusual amongst Italian scholars writing in the 1930s and 1940s and thus shortly before, during, and after the fascist Italian occupation of the Horn of Africa.13 His particular conclusions on Ethiopia’s supposedly desperate cry for military, political and artistic aid were, however, also influenced by the way the material has been studied. While Ethiopia was often perceived as exceptional within pre-colonial African historiography, its history has often been examined from the perspective of European imagination and exploration, which was often itself steeped in a crusading spirit in the later Middle Ages.14 Historical mentions of Prester John and his realm, a formidable yet wholly fictitious Christian ruler of extraordinary military power who enjoyed particular popularity in late medieval Europe, have long been examined alongside sources on Solomonic Ethiopia.15 Until now, the spectre of Prester John— despite its origin as a wholly exogenous, proto-orientalist European fantasy—persists in scholarly writing on the actual geopolitical entity of pre-modern Solomonic Ethiopia.16 Finally, the rather martial interests of an ostensible early-fourteenth-century ‘Ethiopian’ embassy—whose historicity and connection to the realm of the nägäs ́t has been under question—have also been projected onto later Solomonic missions. Incidentally, Latin Christian sources narrate this mission as offering a military alliance to a ‘king of the Spains’.17 Over the course of the century, research has thus often read late medieval Ethiopia and its connections to the larger world as cast in a very particular light: we find a largely established scholarship view where the nägäs ́t are understood as primarily looking for craftsmen to ‘develop’ the Christian highland realm and especially its military, and as hoping to acquire arms and even guns from Europe. Sometimes, these ostensible interests were tied to another rather martial desire—the

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nägäs ́t were also narrated as primarily looking for military alliances with various courts in Latin Europe.18 It is the core idea of this book to argue that the available source material on Solomonic diplomatic outreach to the late medieval Latin West tells quite a different story: while some first-hand expressions of diplomatic interests written by Ethiopian rulers from the early sixteenth century do indeed contain—among many other things—a tangible interest in military matters, alliances and arms, these are utterly absent in sources dating prior to the early 1500s.19 Yet, Solomonic embassies to Europe date back to the very early 1400s. What drove the nägäs ́t to send their missions throughout the fifteenth century? Research has thus far failed to offer up a compelling explanation for the first 100 years of persistent Solomonic diplomatic outreach. No first-hand letters written by Ethiopian rulers have come down to us for this lengthy, early phase of contacts. However, a multitude of other texts from Ethiopia, Egypt and Latin Europe have survived. These texts contain a wealth of circumstantial evidence and provide a view on the desires and interests of these African Christian rulers. Most of our sources have been preserved in European archives, ranging from administrative notes and copies of official letters to treasury records, city annals and chronicles, itineraries, diary entries, personal letter collections and even cartouche legends on maps. Many are written in the languages of the Latin West: medieval Latin, of course, but also Italian, Catalan, German, French and Portuguese, with the occasional indistinct local mix of a few of the above thrown in for good measure. Ethiopian texts written in Gǝʿǝz, the ancient literary and liturgical language of the country, provide an additional perspective. They contain important nuggets of historical information, as do Arabic records from Mamlūk Egypt, Ethiopia’s northern neighbour. Combining all these sources—some of which have been known for more than a century, others having come to light more recently—makes visible several golden threads running through each and every late medieval Solomonic embassy to Latin Europe: as we will see, not a single source relating to the first 100 years of Ethiopian diplomacy portrays a clear Solomonic interest in obtaining military craftsmen-technologists or alliances, arms or guns from the Latin West. Instead, we find an immense desire to acquire foreign religious material culture, especially relics, ecclesiastical fabrics and liturgical objects, but also artisans and craftsmen skilled

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in trades necessary to construct magnificent architectural monuments— builders, carpenters, stonemasons, metalworkers, painters. These common themes, these tangible Solomonic desires, fit in rather well into the local history of Ethiopia in the fifteenth and early sixteenth century. The consolidation of Solomonic power over most of the central North-East African highlands had ushered in substantial religious reform, as well as the translation and flourishing of local religious literature.20 This period also witnessed the advent of monumental local building activity: it saw the construction of dozens of prestigious royal churches and monasteries, material testament to the nägäs ́t’s supreme political claim to power, and a physical assertion of each sovereign’s rightful and just Christian rulership.21 These royal religious centres naturally not only had to be built and ornamented, but also had to be endowed and furnished with precious books, ecclesiastical garments, fine fabrics, liturgical utensils, relics and eventually also icons. Reading the diplomatic sources within the framework of local late medieval Ethiopian history, this book proposes that Ethiopian rulers sent out their missions to acquire rare religious treasures and foreign manpower expedient to their political agenda of building and endowing monumental churches and monasteries in the Ethiopian highlands. Acquiring artisans and ecclesiastical wares from faraway places for religious centres intimately tied to Solomonic dominion would have necessarily increased their prestige within the Christian Horn of Africa, following a mechanism well-attested for numerous societies in the pre-modern world. Such requests from a foreign sovereign sphere were rarely caused by a shortage of indigenous labour or materials—particularly not within fifteenth- and early-sixteenth-century Ethiopia. Here, they appear instead to be an intentional emulation of actions ascribed to the biblical king Solomon, propagated by the Solomonic Ethiopian rulers as the dynasty’s genealogical ancestor in their foundational myth of the Kǝbrä nägäs ́t—the ‘Glory of Kings’.22 This very same king Solomon, too, is repeatedly narrated as sending envoys to another sovereign ruler to obtain both precious wares and a master craftsman to construct the first temple in Jerusalem in the Bible.23 The sending of missions to Latin Christian potentates appears to have been one of the strategies through which the nägäs ́t locally asserted their claim of rightful Solomonic descendence—and actively if somewhat incidentally initiated a particularly noteworthy case of African-European contacts in the late medieval period.

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The careful study of the nägäs ́t’s diplomatic relations in the late Middle Ages is moreover not an end unto itself alone. In closely examining the actions, behaviours, diplomatic conduct and self-representation of Ethiopia’s ruling elite towards both their late medieval European contemporaries and their populace we also gain rare insight into the workings of a powerful pre-colonial African kingdom encountering the larger world on its own terms. Late medieval Solomonic outreach towards Europe was largely the result of aesthetic and dynastic, and not territorial or militaristic, acquisitiveness. This, at the very least, radically reframes prevalent ideas about pre-­modern African agency—and challenges conventional historical narratives of African-European encounters on the eve of the socalled Age of Exploration.

Structure A close re-reading of the source material from both North-East Africa and Europe on Solomonic diplomacy towards the Latin West lies at the heart of this study. The book is structured along a chronological investigation of the course of Ethiopian diplomatic outreach in the late Middle Ages. Successive chapters chart three distinct phases of Solomonic missions to the Latin West: Chapter 2 traces diplomacy’s onset during the rule of as ̣e Dawit II shortly after the turn of the fifteenth century. Chapter 3 follows the envoys and agents despatched by aṣe Dawit’s sons from the 1420s to the 1450s, sent out into an increasingly charged political climate in the Latin Mediterranean. Chapter 4 examines how Ethiopian outreach tapered off and began to change by the latter decades of the fifteenth and early sixteenth century, when only three missions are traceable within nearly 80 years. Excepting two short examinations of Latin Christian mercantile scouts in the early 1400s and a missionary venture in the 1480s, our focus will remain firmly on the actions and interests of the nägäs ́t and their ambassadors. After all, these African Christian rulers were the ones who first established long-distance diplomacy with Europe, and it was their interests and desires that maintained—or halted—connections in the late Middle Ages. Finally, Chap. 5 reads and interprets Solomonic diplomatic requests against the broader backdrop of Ethiopian history in the North-East African highlands. Looking at local historical and archaeological evidence, it asserts that Solomonic diplomatic outreach was caused by the desire to

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acquire ecclesiastical objects—primarily ecclesiastical fabrics and liturgical items, but also relics—and foreign manpower such as builders, carpenters, stonemasons, metalworkers and painters, for which there was a heightened demand in a realm concurrently being transformed through monumental building activity. Such interests were not motivated by a sense of Ethiopia’s inferiority vis-à-vis the Latin West. Instead, they were driven by a desire to heighten the Solomonic rulers’ local prestige by acquiring rare, foreign and even ‘exotic’ objects and labour from a distant Christian sphere, as their biblical ancestor had done—and thus impress their claims of political and religious supremacy upon their North-East African subjects.

Notes 1. Aḥmad ibn ʿAlı ̄ Al-Maqrı ̄zı ̄, Kitab̄ Al-Sulu ̄k Li-Maʿrifat Duwal al-Mulūk, eds. Muḥammad Muṣtạ f ā Ziyāda and Saʿı ̄d ʿAbd al-Fattāḥ ʿĀ šūr, vol. 4.2 (Cairo: Dār al-Kutub, 1939), 797. 2. Compare Al-Maqrı ̄zı ̄, Kita ̄b Al-Sulu ̄k Li-Maʿrifat Duwal al-Muluk̄ , 4.2:795–97, Yūsuf Ibn Taghrı ̄ Birdı ̄, Al-Nujūm al-Zah̄ ira Fı ̄ Mulūk Misṛ Wa l-Qāhira, ed. M.A.  Hātim, vol. 14 (Cairo: Dār al-Kutub, 1963), 324–25 and Aḥmad ibn ʿAli Ibn Ḥ ajar al-ʿAsqalānı ̄, Inbā’ al-Ghumr Bi-Anba ̄’ al-ʿUmr, ed. Ḥ asan Ḥ abashi, vol. 3 (Cairo, 1971), 426–27. This material was first discovered and examined by Julien Loiseau, who graciously provided me with early insight into his own research. His article on the subject is forthcoming: Julien Loiseau, ‘The Negus Merchant. Fortunes and Misfortunes of an Overseas Trader in 15th-Century Cairo’, in An African Metropolis. Cairo and Its African Hinterland in the Middle Ages, ed. Julien Loiseau (Leiden: Brill, 2021). 3. Compare the accounts of al-Maqrı ̄zı ̄ and his pupil, Ibn Taghrı ̄ Birdı ̄, Al-Maqrı ̄zı ̄, Kita ̄b Al-Suluk̄ Li-Maʿrifat Duwal al-Mulūk, 4.2:795–97, Ibn Taghrı ̄ Birdı ̄, Al-Nujum ̄ al-Za ̄hira Fı Mulūk ̄ Mis ̣r Wa l-Qa ̄hira, 14:324–25. This claim is refuted and revealed as an act of calumny in Ibn Ḥ ajar al-ʿAsqalānı ̄, Inbā’ al-Ghumr Bi-Anbā’ al-ʿUmr, 3:426–27; also see the detailed examination of this episode in Chap. 3. 4. Stuart Munro-Hay, Aksum: An African Civilisation of Late Antiquity (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1991); Stuart Munro-Hay, ‘Aksum: History of the Town and Empire’, in EAe 1 (2003), 173–79. Since the conversion of the Aksumite kings in the first half of the fourth century, a Christian realm was situated in parts of what is now the State of Eritrea and the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia. Originally centred in the northern section of the central highland plateau in the vicinity

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of the ­eponymous city of Aksum, its geographical and political centre shifted southwards during the rule of Zagwe Dynasty (eleventh to thirteenth century) and again under the Solomonic Dynasty (from 1270 onwards). For the Zagwe, see Gianfranco Fiaccadori, ‘Zagwe’, in EAe 5 (2014), 107–14; Marie-Laure Derat, L’énigme d’une Dynastie Sainte et Usurpatrice Dans Le Royaume Chrétien d’Éthiopie Du XIe Au XIIIe Siècle (Turnhout: Brepols, 2018); Marie-Laure Derat, ‘Before the Solomonids: Crisis, Renaissance and the Emergence of the Zagwe Dynasty (Seventh– Thirteenth Centuries)’, in A Companion to Medieval Ethiopia and Eritrea, ed. Samantha Kelly (Leiden: Brill, 2020), 31–56. For an overview and extensive bibliography on the Solomonic dynasty, see Steven Kaplan, ‘Solomonic Dynasty’, in EAe 4 (2010), 688–90; on the historical geography of Ethiopia, see George W.B. Huntingford, The Historical Geography of Ethiopia from the First Century AD to 1704 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). For the structure of the Ethiopian Church and its metropolitan, an Egyptian monk appointed by the Patriarch of Alexandria, see Denis Nosnitsin, ‘Abunä’, in EAe 1 (2003), 56; Getatchew Haile, ‘Ethiopian Orthodox (Täwahédo) Church’, in EAe 2 (2005), 414–21. 5. On the Solomonic expansion of the fourteenth to sixteenth century, see Taddesse Tamrat, Church and State in Ethiopia, 1270–1527 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972); Marie-Laure Derat, Le Domaine Des Rois Éthiopiens, 1270–1527: Espace, Pouvoir et Monarchisme (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2003); Deresse Ayenachew, ‘Territorial Expansion and Administrative Evolution under the “Solomonic” Dynasty’, in A Companion to Medieval Ethiopia and Eritrea, ed. Samantha Kelly (Leiden: Brill, 2020). The expansion of the realm under aṣe ʿAmdä Ṣəyon in the 1330s is described in Manfred Kropp, Der Siegreiche Feldzug Des Königs ̄ ʿAmda-Ṣ eyon Gegen Die Muslime in Adal Im Jahre 1332 n. Chr. (Leuven: Peeters, 1994); G.W.B. Huntingford, The Glorious Victories of Amda Seyon, King of Ethiopia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965). 6. Chronicles of Solomonic rulers of the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries make clear that the nägäs ́t at least claimed to rule supreme over most of the central highlands, reaching from the governorship of the baḥər nägaš in the Eritrean coastal region to the Sultanate of Hadiyya and even beyond the river Awaš, some 100 miles south of modern-day Addis Ababa; compare Jules Perruchon, Les Chroniques de Zar’a Yâʿeqôb et de Ba’eda Mâryâm, Rois d’Éthiopie de 1434 à 1478 (Paris: É. Bouillon, 1893); Jules Perruchon, ‘Histoire d’Eskender, d’ʾAmda Seyon II et de Nâʾod, Rois d’Éthiopie’, Journal Asiatique 9, no. 3 (1894): 319–66; Franz Amadeus Dombrowski, Ṭ an̄ as̄ ee 106: Eine Chronik Der Herrscher Äthiopiens (Wiesbaden: F. Steiner, 1983); Manfred Kropp, Die Geschichte Des LebnaDengel, Claudius Und Minas (Leuven: Peeters, 1988); Kropp, Der

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̄ Siegreiche Feldzug Des Königs ʿAmda-Ṣ eyon Gegen Die Muslime in Adal Im Jahre 1332 n. Chr. as well as Huntingford, The Historical Geography of Ethiopia From the First Century AD to 1704; Donald Crummey, Land and Society in the Christian Kingdom of Ethiopia: From the Thirteenth to the Twentieth Century (Urbana and Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2000). For a general introduction on the heterogeneous make-up of the region, including its Muslim principalities and lands ruled by adherents to local religions, see Samantha Kelly, ed., A Companion to Medieval Ethiopia and Eritrea (Leiden: Brill, 2020). 7. Finbarr Barry Flood, Objects of Translation: Material Culture and Medieval “Hindu-Muslim” Encounter (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2009), 1. 8. The literature on late medieval Ethiopian contacts is vast: compare, for example, Renato Lefèvre, ‘Riflessi Etiopici Nella Cultura Europea Del Medioevo e Del Rinascimento’, Annali Lateranensi 8 (1944): 9–90; Renato Lefèvre, ‘Riflessi Etiopici Nella Cultura Europea Del Medioevo e Del Rinascimento—Parte Seconda’, Annali Lateranensi 9 (1945): 331–444; Renato Lefèvre, ‘Documenti Pontifici Sui Rapporti Con L’Etiopia Nei Secoli XV e XVI’, Rassegna Di Studi Etiopici 5 (1946): 17–41; Renato Lefèvre, ‘Presenze Etiopiche in Italia Prima Del Concilio Di Firenze Del 1439’, Rassegna Di Studi Etiopici 23 (1967): 5–26; Renato Lefèvre, ‘I Rapporti Culturali Tra l’Italia e l’Etiopia’, Africa: Rivista Trimestrale Di Studi e Documentazione Dell’Istituto Italiano per l’Africa e l’Oriente 28, no. 4 (1973): 583–86; Stuart Munro-Hay, Ethiopia Unveiled: Interaction Between Two Worlds (Hollywood: Tsehai, 2006); Matteo Salvadore, ‘The Ethiopian Age of Exploration: Prester John’s Discovery of Europe, 1306–1458’, Journal of World History 21, no. 4 (2010): 593–627; Andrew Kurt, ‘The Search for Prester John, a Projected Crusade and the Eroding Prestige of Ethiopian Kings, c.1200–c.1540’, Journal of Medieval History 39, no. 3 (2013): 297–320; Benjamin Weber, ‘Gli Etiopi a Roma Nel Quattrocento: Ambasciatori Politici, Negoziatori Religiosi o Pellegrini?’, Mélanges de l’École Française de Rome—Moyen Âge 125, no. 1 (2013); Benjamin Weber, ‘An Incomplete Integration into the Orbis Christianus. Relations and Misunderstandings between the Papacy and Ethiopia (1237–1456)’, Medieval Encounters 21 no. 2–3 (2015): 232–49; Matteo Salvadore, The African Prester John and the Birth of EthiopianEuropean Relations, 1402–1555 (Milton Park: Routledge, 2016); Samantha Kelly, ‘Heretics, Allies, Exemplary Christians: Latin Views of Ethiopian Orthodox in the Late Middle Ages’, in Late Medieval Heresy: New Perspectives. Studies in Honor of Robert E. Lerners, ed. Michael D. Bailey and Sean L.  Field (York: York Medieval Press, 2018), 195–214; Matteo Salvadore, ‘Encounters Between Ethiopia and Europe, 1400–1660’, in

1 INTRODUCTION 

11

Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). For studies of individual Ethiopian embassies or specific episodes within this history, see, for example, Francesco Cerone, ‘La Politica Orientale Di Alfonso Di Aragona’, Archivio Storico per Le Province Napoletane 27 (1902): 3–93; Nicolai Iorga, ‘Cenni Sulle Relazioni Tra l’Abissinia e l’Europa Cattolica Nel Secoli XIV–XV, Con Un Iterario Inedito Del Secolo XV’, Centenario Della Nascita Di Michele Amari 1 (1910): 139–50; Carlo Conti Rossini, ‘Un Codice Illustrato Eritreo Del Secolo XV’, Africa Italiana 1 (1927): 83–97; Renato Lefèvre, ‘G.B. Brocchi Da Imola Diplomatico Pontificio e Viaggiatore in Etiopia Nel ’400’, Bollettino Della Societa Geografica Italiana 4 (1939): 639–59; Renato Lefèvre, ‘Su Un Codice Etiopico Della “Vaticana”’, La Bibliofilia 42 (1940): 97–107; Renato Lefèvre, ‘Cronaca Inedita Di Un’ambasciata Etiopica a Sisto IV’, Roma 10/11 (1940): 360–69; Carmelo Trasselli, ‘Un Italiano in Etiopia Nel XV Secolo Pietro Rombulo Da Messina’, Rassegna Di Studi Etiopici 1, no. 2 (1941): 173–202; Renato Lefèvre, ‘Richerche Sull’imolese G.B. De Brocchi, Viaggiatore in Ethiopia e Curiale Pontificio’, Archivio Della Societa Romana Di Storia Patria 81 (1958): 55–118; Renato Lefèvre, ‘Note Su Alcuni Pellegrini Etiopi in Roma al Tempo Di Leone X’, Rassegna Di Studi Etiopici 21 (1965): 16–26; Marilyn E.  Heldman, ‘A Chalice from Venice for Emperor Dawit of Ethiopia’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 52, no. 3 (1990): 442–45; Peter P. Garretson, ‘A Note on Relations between Ethiopia and the Kingdom of Aragon in the Fifteenth Century’, Rassegna Di Studi Etiopici 37 (1993): 37–44; Kate Lowe, ‘“Representing” Africa: Ambassadors and Princes from Christian Africa to Renaissance Italy and Portugal, 1402–1608’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 17 (2007): 101–28; Benjamin Weber, ‘Vrais et Faux Éthiopiens Au XVe Siècle En Occident? Du Bon Usage Des Connexions’, Annales d’Éthiopie 27 (2012): 107–26; Samantha Kelly, ‘Ewostạ teans at the Council of Florence (1441): Diplomatic Implications between Ethiopia, Europe, Jerusalem and Cairo’, Afriques Varia (2016). For studies of medieval Ethiopian Christian history more generally, see Sergew Hable Selassie, Ancient and Medieval Ethiopian History to 1270 (Addis Ababa: United Printers, 1972); Taddesse Tamrat, Church and State in Ethiopia, 1270–1527; Derat, Le Domaine Des Rois Éthiopiens, 1270–1527: Espace, Pouvoir et Monarchisme; Kelly, A Companion to Medieval Ethiopia and Eritrea. 9. The diplomatic interest in craftsmen—read very differently from the way this book interprets them—is also noted in, for example, Francesco Cerone, ‘La Politica Orientale Di Alfonso Di Aragona’; Lefèvre, ‘Presenze Etiopiche in Italia Prima Del Concilio Di Firenze Del 1439’; Taddesse Tamrat, Church and State in Ethiopia, 1270–1527, 258–65; Charles Fraser

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Beckingham, ‘European Sources for Ethiopian History before 1634’, Paideuma 33 (1987): 167–78; Marilyn E. Heldman, The Marian Icons of the Painter Fre¯ Ṣeyon: A Study of Fifteenth-Century Ethiopian Art, Patronage, and Spirituality (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1994), 143; Harold G. Marcus, A History of Ethiopia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 26–28; Paul B Henze, Layers of Time: A History of Ethiopia (New York: Palgrave, 2000), 70; Claire Bosc-Tiessé et al., Se’el. Spirit and Materials of Ethiopian Icons (Addis Ababa: Centre français des études éthiopiennes, 2010); Salvadore, ‘The Ethiopian Age of Exploration: Prester John’s Discovery of Europe, 1306–1458’; Kurt, ‘The Search for Prester John, a Projected Crusade and the Eroding Prestige of Ethiopian Kings, c.1200–c.1540’; Salvadore, The African Prester John and the Birth of Ethiopian-European Relations, 1402–1555; Adam Knobler, Mythology and Diplomacy in the Age of Exploration (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 37–42; Salvadore, ‘Encounters Between Ethiopia and Europe, 1400–1660’; Claire Bosc-Tiessé, ‘Christian Visual Culture in Medieval Ethiopia: Overview, Trends and Issues’, in A Companion to Medieval Ethiopia and Eritrea, ed. Samantha Kelly (Leiden: Brill, 2020), 322–364:363; Samantha Kelly, ‘Introduction’, in A Companion to Medieval Ethiopia and Eritrea, ed. Samantha Kelly (Leiden: Brill, 2020), 1–30:22. A clear diplomatic interest in relics is noted in Osvaldo Raineri, ‘I Doni Della Serenissima al Re Davide I d’Etiopia (Ms Raineri 43 Della Vaticana)’, Orientalia Christiana Periodica 65 (1999): 363–448; Lowe, ‘“Representing” Africa: Ambassadors and Princes from Christian Africa to Renaissance Italy and Portugal, 1402–1608’, 102, 109; Osvaldo Raineri, ‘Abba Kirākos: Omelie Etiopiche Sulla Croce (Ms. Raineri 43, Della Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana)’, in La Croce. Iconografia e Interpretazione (Secoli I–Inizio XVI). Atti Del Convegno Internazionale Di Studi (Napoli, 6–11 Dicembre 1999), ed. Boris Ulianich (Napoli: Elio de Rosa editore, 2007), 207–30; Weber, ‘Gli Etiopi a Roma Nel Quattrocento: Ambasciatori Politici, Negoziatori Religiosi o Pellegrini?’, para. 10; Salvadore, The African Prester John and the Birth of Ethiopian-European Relations, 1402–1555, 26. 10. See, for example, Renato Lefèvre, ‘La Leggende Medievale Del Prete Gianni e l’Etiopia’, L’Africa Italiana 53 (1936): 201–55; Lefèvre, ‘G.B. Brocchi Da Imola Diplomatico Pontificio e Viaggiatore in Etiopia Nel ’400’; Lefèvre, ‘Su Un Codice Etiopico Della “Vaticana”’; Lefèvre, ‘Cronaca Inedita Di Un’ambasciata Etiopica a Sisto IV’; Renato Lefèvre, ‘Roma E La Comunità Etiopica Di Cipro Nei Secoli XV e XVI’, Rassegna Di Studi Etiopici 1, no. 1 (1941): 71–86; Lefèvre, ‘Riflessi Etiopici Nella Cultura Europea Del Medioevo e Del Rinascimento’; Lefèvre, ‘Riflessi Etiopici Nella Cultura Europea Del Medioevo e Del Rinascimento—Parte Seconda’; Lefèvre, ‘Documenti Pontifici Sui Rapporti Con L’Etiopia Nei

1 INTRODUCTION 

13

Secoli XV e XVI’; Lefèvre, ‘Documenti Pontifici Sui Rapporti Con L’Etiopia Nei Secoli XV e XVI’; Lefèvre, ‘Richerche Sull’imolese G.B. De Brocchi, Viaggiatore in Ethiopia e Curiale Pontificio’; Lefèvre, ‘Note Su Alcuni Pellegrini Etiopi in Roma al Tempo Di Leone X’; Renato Lefèvre, ‘L’Etiopia Nella Stampa Del Primo Cinquecento’, Africa: Rivista Trimestrale Di Studi e Documentazione Dell’Istituto Italiano per l’Africa e l’Oriente 20, no. 4 (1965): 345–69; Lefèvre, ‘Presenze Etiopiche in Italia Prima Del Concilio Di Firenze Del 1439’. 11. Cf. Lefèvre, ‘Riflessi Etiopici Nella Cultura Europea Del Medioevo e Del Rinascimento—Parte Seconda’, 380–83. 12. Cf. Lefèvre, ‘Presenze Etiopiche in Italia Prima Del Concilio Di Firenze Del 1439’, 13–14. 13. Also remarked upon in Benjamin Weber and Robin Seignobos, ‘L’Occident, La Croisade et l’Éthiopie: Introduction’, Annales d’Éthiopie 27 (2012): 15–20:15. For examples of colonialist attitudes in Italian scholarly writing of the time on Ethiopia, for example, cf. Enrico Cerulli, ‘L’Etiopia Del Secolo XV in Nouvi Documenti Storici Con 12 Illustrazioni’, Africa Italiana. Rivista Di Storia e d’Arte a Cura Del Ministero Delle Colonie 5, no. 1–2 (1933): 107–12; Ugo Monneret de Villard, ‘Miniatura VenetoCretese in Un Codice Etiopico’, La Bibliofilía 47 (1945): 13. Several of the ‘greats’ of Ethiopian Studies had not been unconnected to the fascist Africa Orientale Italiana; see Giampaolo Calchi Novati, ‘Africa Orientale Italiana’, in EAe 1 (2003), 129–34. Lefèvre’s sympathetic views in the early stages of his career become clear, for example, in Renato Lefèvre, Terra Nostra d’Africa (1932–1935) (Milan: Istituto per gli Studi di Politica Internazionale, 1942). 14. Compare, for example, Munro-Hay, Ethiopia Unveiled: Interaction Between Two Worlds; Kurt, ‘The Search for Prester John, a Projected Crusade and the Eroding Prestige of Ethiopian Kings, c.1200–c.1540’; Matteo Salvadore, ‘Gaining the Heart of Prester John: Loyola’s Blueprint for Ethiopia in Three Key Documents’, World History Connected 3, no. 10 (2013); Weber, ‘An Incomplete Integration into the Orbis Christianus. Relations and Misunderstandings between the Papacy and Ethiopia (1237–1456)’; Knobler, Mythology and Diplomacy in the Age of Exploration, chap. 3; Andreu Martínez d’Alòs-Moner, ‘Travel and Exploration in Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa’, in Ethiopia. History, Culture and Challenges, eds. Siegbert Uhlig et  al. (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2017), 307–11. 15. Compare, for example, Lefèvre, ‘Riflessi Etiopici Nella Cultura Europea Del Medioevo e Del Rinascimento’; Lefèvre, ‘Riflessi Etiopici Nella Cultura Europea Del Medioevo e Del Rinascimento—Parte Seconda’.

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16. To this day, the term Prester John appears—largely unironic—in works concerned with late medieval Ethiopian history, perpetuating the application of an entirely exogenous stereotype on this African realm, cf. Salvadore, ‘The Ethiopian Age of Exploration: Prester John’s Discovery of Europe, 1306–1458’; Cates Baldridge, Prisoners of Prester John: The Portuguese Mission to Ethiopia in Search of the Mythical King, 1520–1526 (Jefferson: McFarland & Company, 2012); Salvadore, ‘Gaining the Heart of Prester John: Loyola’s Blueprint for Ethiopia in Three Key Documents’; Salvadore, The African Prester John and the Birth of Ethiopian-European Relations, 1402–1555. The origins of this formidable yet wholly fictitious Christian ruler of extraordinary military power—a staunch opponent of Islam said to be governing justly over a paradisiac realm of seemingly boundless riches somewhere beyond the Muslim world—may be traced to European sources of the late twelfth century. By the late fourteenth century, and thus prior to the arrival of the first Solomonic mission to the Latin West, European Christians had begun conflating the Christian kingdom of the nägäs ́t with the realm of Prester John. Expectations and ‘knowledge’ on the priest-king frequently coloured how Solomonic missions and Christian Ethiopia more generally were understood by European contemporaries, and how they came down to us in the historical record. For the myth of Prester John and its many iterations and elaborations, see Keagan Brewer, ed., Prester John: The Legend and Its Sources (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015). For its development and impact on medieval European society, see, for example, Robert Silverberg, ‘The Realm of Prester John’ (Garden City: Doubleday, 1972); Knobler, Mythology and Diplomacy in the Age of Exploration. On the geographical movement Prester John within the European imagination, see Camille Rouxpetel, ‘La Figure Du Prêtre Jean: Les Mutations d’une Prophétie Souverain Chrétien Idéal, Figure Providentielle Ou Paradigme de l’orientalisme Médiéval’, Questes 28 (2014): 99–120. For its African context and a bibliography on the myth’s application to Christian Ethiopia, see Francesc Relaño, The Shaping of Africa. Cosmographic Discourse and Cartographic Science in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002); Gianfranco Fiaccadori, ‘Prester John’, in EAe 4 (2010), 209–16; Franco Cardini, ‘La Crociata e Il “Prete Gianni d’Africa”’, in Linguistic, Oriental and Ethiopian Studies in Memory of Paolo Marrassini, eds. Alessandro Bausi, Alessandro Gori, and Gianfrancesco Lusini (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2014), 213–24; Weber, ‘An Incomplete Integration into the Orbis Christianus. Relations and Misunderstandings between the Papacy and Ethiopia (1237–1456)’; Marco Giardini, ‘The Quest for the Ethiopian Prester John and Its Eschatological Implications’, Medievalia 22 (2019).

1 INTRODUCTION 

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17. A 1306 ‘Ethiopian’ embassy appears, for example, in Lefèvre, ‘Presenze Etiopiche in Italia Prima Del Concilio Di Firenze Del 1439’, 7–9; Silverberg, ‘The Realm of Prester John’, 164–65; Charles Fraser Beckingham and Edward Ullendorff, The Hebrew Letters of Prester John (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 8–9; Charles Fraser Beckingham, ‘An Ethiopian Embassy to Europe c. 1310’, Journal of Semitic Studies 43, no. 2 (1998): 337–46; Munro-Hay, Ethiopia Unveiled: Interaction Between Two Worlds, 89–90; Lowe, ‘“Representing” Africa: Ambassadors and Princes from Christian Africa to Renaissance Italy and Portugal, 1402–1608’, 108; Gianfranco Fiaccadori, ‘L’Etiopia, Venezia e l’Europa’, in Nigra Sum Sed Formosa. Sacro e Bellezza Dell’Etiopia Cristiana. Ca’ Foscari Esposizioni 13 Marzo–10 Maggio 2009, eds. Giuseppe Barbieri and Gianfranco Fiaccadori (Vincenza: Terra ferma, 2009), 29; Wolbert Smidt, ‘Spain, Relations With’, in EAe 4 (2010), 717–19; Baldridge, Prisoners of Prester John: The Portuguese Mission to Ethiopia in Search of the Mythical King, 1520–1526, 22; Kurt, ‘The Search for Prester John, a Projected Crusade and the Eroding Prestige of Ethiopian Kings, c.1200–c.1540’, 311, 314; Salvadore, The African Prester John and the Birth of EthiopianEuropean Relations, 1402–1555, 203–204; Salvadore, ‘Encounters Between Ethiopia and Europe, 1400–1660’, paras 11, 27. Recent research has questioned the existence of such a mission as based on one Latin Christian source; see Verena Krebs, ‘Re-Examining Foresti’s Supplementum Chronicarum and the “Ethiopian” Embassy to Europe of 1306’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 82, no. 3 (2019): 493–515; it has also drawn attention to a recently discovered text that opens up new questions on the episode, compare Alessandro Bausi and Paolo Chiesa, ‘The Ystoria Ethyopie in the Cronica Universalis of Galvaneus de La Flamma (d.: c.1345)’, Aethiopica 22 (2019): 1–51. 18. These narratives are examined in great detail at the beginning of Chap. 5. 19. Kelly, ‘Introduction’, 21. For the early sixteenth century, letters have been preserved in Gǝʿǝz as well as Portuguese and Latin, with some interesting discrepancies in the translations, compare Chap. 4. 20. See, for example, Alessandro Bausi, ‘Writing, Copying, Translating: Ethiopia as a Manuscript Culture’, in Manuscript Cultures: Mapping the Field, eds. Jörg Quenzer, Dmitry Bondarev, and Jan-Ulrich Sobisch (Berlin and New  York: De Gruyter, 2014), 37–77; Alessandro Bausi, ‘Ethiopia and the Christian Ecumene: Cultural Transmission, Translation, and Reception’, in A Companion to Medieval Ethiopia and Eritrea, ed. Samantha Kelly (Leiden: Brill, 2020), 217–51; Antonella Brita, ‘Genres of Ethiopian-­Eritrean Christian Literature with a Focus on Hagiography’, in A Companion to Medieval Ethiopia and Eritrea, ed. Samantha Kelly (Leiden: Brill, 2020) for an introduction.

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21. Compare Derat, Le Domaine Des Rois Éthiopiens, 1270–1527: Espace, Pouvoir et Monarchisme, Chaps. 6–7. 22. The first Gǝʿǝz redaction of the Kǝbrä nägäs ́t, whose title might also be translated as the ‘Nobility of Kings’, dates to the first quarter of the fourteenth century. The text’s author proclaims it to be a translation of a much older text in a colophon; see Paolo Marrassini, ‘Kǝbrä nägäśt’, in EAe 3 (2007), 364–68 for a textual history and bibliography. 23. Compare 2 Chronicles 2 and 1 Kings 7.

CHAPTER 2

All the King’s Treasures

And when the king with his priests and the chiefs of his army looked at all this collection of garments and adornments, of various colours, they admired them greatly. And then the king told those who were standing before him: have you seen garments like this with your eyes or heard with your ears from your fathers till now? And they answered him like this, unanimously: No, we haven’t seen it, and we haven’t heard with our ears of a thing like this. Because they do not seem to have been woven with a hand of earthly creatures, but with that of heavenly creatures. —‘Ethiopian Homily on the Wood of the Holy Cross’, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Ms. Raineri et. 43, fol. 25r.

The history of early Ethiopian contacts with the Latin West has been told numerous times.1 In 1402, an embassy sent by as ̣e Dawit II2 arrived in Venice, four live leopards in tow. Thus began a ‘new chapter of intermittent, but direct contacts with Europe’ according to Taddesse Tamrat in his landmark work Church and State in Ethiopia, 1270–1527.3 In 1972, the Ethiopian historian proposed that this first and all following late medieval embassies had been despatched to ask for military and ‘technical aid’4 from Europe, and to engage ‘an over-all Christian solidarity against the Muslim powers of the Near East’.5 Recently, Matteo Salvadore echoed this finding: while conceding that relics and craftsmen were of some importance to the very first Solomonic mission of 1402,6 ‘equally or possibly more © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 V. Krebs, Medieval Ethiopian Kingship, Craft, and Diplomacy with Latin Europe, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64934-0_2

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attractive for the sovereign was European technology’.7 According to Salvadore, as ̣e Dawit was ‘well aware not only of Ethiopia’s technological limitations but also of his limited options vis-à-vis his foes’8—suggesting that Dawit’s presumed interests did not concern technological innovations in grain processing, but warfare. The following chapter demonstrates that this long-standing belief, which sees martial interests as central to Solomonic diplomacy from its earliest days, has little basis in the currently available sources.9 A close reading of documents from Ethiopia, Egypt and the Latin World dating to the early fifteenth century tells a different story: the desire to acquire relics, religious treasures such as ecclesiastical articles and garments as well as artisan-craftsmen was at the heart of early Ethiopian missions to Western Christianity. No source even so much as hints at an African Christian interest in ‘European technology’. The epigraph quoted at the beginning of this chapter—which comes from a Gǝʿǝz source describing the local aftermath of the 1402 mission to Venice—offers a view on why such interests would repeatedly drive as ̣e Dawit to send out his emissaries: the things brought to him from the Latin West seemingly hailed from a Christian sphere so strange and wonderful that its wares appeared to be made by ‘heavenly creatures’ instead of earthly ones.

Relics, Garments and Craftsmen—Ethiopian Missions to Italy at the Turn of the Fifteenth Century Strangers in Ethiopia, ca. 1398/1399–1401 The story of Ethiopian-Latin Christian contacts in the late Middle Ages begins with a pair of trespassers, and suspicion. It comes to us through an Ethiopian source known as the Homily on the Wood of the Holy Cross composed by a writer who chose to call himself abba Kirakos, almost certainly a pseudonym.10 Remarkably, this Homily tells us the Ethiopian side of the first diplomatic encounter with the Latin West, and describes the developments leading up to the dispatch of the very first Solomonic embassy, which arrived in Venice in the summer of 1402. The text was first published by the Italian philologist Osvaldo Raineri in 1999.11 It is a religious text: a ‘homily’, or dǝrsan in Gǝʿǝz. Such texts were read, copied and disseminated to inform both intellectual elites and the broader public on matters of the faith. The genre enjoyed wide popularity in medieval

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Ethiopia; many local compositions contain valuable historical information underneath layers of spiritual exegesis and religious commentary.12 This specific homily was primarily composed to describe and glorify important relics brought to Ethiopia in the early fifteenth century—ecclesiastical treasures that had arrived as a result of the very first Solomonic embassy to Latin Europe. The version that has come down to us is a late-nineteenthor early-twentieth-century hand-written parchment copy of a late medieval manuscript. This might astonish medievalists more accustomed to European sources, but is of little surprise against the backdrop of the living manuscript culture of the Ethiopian Church.13 The author’s minute descriptions of dozens of precious objects—some of which we also find described in other late medieval sources14—reveal him as a contemporary to the events or as someone who, at the very least, saw and studied the objects brought back from Europe.15 His cohesive account offers up a window into Solomonic motivations for this exchange—or at least, how the very first Ethiopian mission to the Latin West was framed and intentionally disseminated within fifteenth-century Ethiopian society. According to the Homily, this story begins as follows: at the very end of the fourteenth century, the Ethiopian ruler—as ̣e Dawit II—found himself confronted with foreign trespassers in his highland realm in the Horn of Africa. Two strangers—described as nägadəyan, a term denoting ‘merchants’, ‘travellers’ and even ‘pilgrims’16—were picked up and brought to his court. There, the men identified themselves as messengers from the nǝgus ́ zä-Afrəngiya—the ‘king of the [land of the] Franks’.17 Aṣe Dawit, for his part, remained sceptical of these ‘Franks’. To establish whether they were even Christians, he subjected them to a religious quiz: he asked about the fate of the True Cross found by Saint Helena, Empress of the Roman Empire and mother of Constantine the Great. The men answered that the cross had been divided into small parts by various Latin Christian potentates to strengthen their realms. This clearly intrigued Dawit: ‘when the king heard this, he thought in his heart: Is it true what the messengers narrated me?’18 Shortly thereafter, the newly appointed Ethiopian metropolitan Bärtälomewos19 arrived with even more foreigners from Egypt, which would date the episode to either 1398 or 1399.20 Aṣe Dawit posed the same question to this second group, who confirmed the first account: ‘and one story was exactly like the other and did not differ [from it].’21 Seeing that other Christian rulers had seemingly divided fragments of this holiest relic amongst themselves, aṣe Dawit desired also to procure a piece. Before

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venturing off to ‘wage a war’22—by no means an unusual occurrence for a Solomonic king of the fifteenth century—, the nǝgus ́ thus despatched one of the ‘Franks’ to go and acquire a piece of the True Cross for Ethiopia. To ensure the man’s loyalty as his ambassador, Dawit pledged to pay 1000 pieces of gold should he succeed in obtaining this relic.23 On the ninth month of Ṭ ǝrr,24 the man—named Abrǝhan in the text—set out on his mission. Travelling via Alexandria, and suffering several trials and tribulations, the merchant-traveller eventually reached ‘his land’.25 Specifically, the ‘Ethiopian’ ambassador now presented himself before the nǝgus ́ of Bandäqəya called Mikaʾel. Bunduqı ̄ya or Bandäqəya are the old Arabic and Ethiopian names for Venice. This city was indeed ruled by a certain Mikaʾel, known to his people as Michele Steno, Doge of the Republic of Venice.26 According to the Homily, aṣe Dawit’s envoy received an ecstatic welcome. He was given many gifts: the eponymous and highly revered relic of the True Cross, of course—but also shirts, knives, cloth caps, priests’ garments and girdles, censers, chalices, pitchers, bowls and religious vessels and utensils made from precious metals.27 Laden with this bounty, the man returned safely to Ethiopia via the Holy Land and Alexandria,28 where he encountered Matthew I, the Coptic patriarch of Alexandria.29 This is noted in both the Homily and the History of the Patriarchs of the Coptic Church of Alexandria, an Arabic source from Egypt.30 The remaining pages of the Homily describe Dawit’s reaction to the embassy and provide a view on the gifts brought from Venice to the Horn of Africa. Before we examine them in detail, we should first turn our attention to the Venetian sources documenting this initial Ethiopian mission to the Latin West. A Venetian Summer, 1402 The Homily indicated that as ̣e Dawit’s merchant-traveller turned ambassador eventually arrived at Bandäqəya, or Venice. Several Venetian documents indeed confirm the arrival of an Ethiopian embassy in the summer of 1402. It appears that the envoy spent slightly more than two months in Venice: local correspondence attests that he had arrived by late June and stayed until late August 1402.31 The sources also specify that he was an Italian man, and primarily identified him as the ambassador or messenger32 of prete Jane,33 Prestozane,34 prete Janni35 or excelsis domini Prestozane domini Indie36—and thus the emissary of ‘Prester John, Lord of the

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Indies’.37 A letter of safe conduct written towards the end of the summer, however, reveals the man’s name and origin: the merchant-traveller who had come to Ethiopia was called Anthonius Bartoli, and he indeed hailed from ‘Frankland’—specifically, the city of Florence.38 Although mostly brief and pragmatic, the Venetian sources allow us to draw out a wealth of information on the Ethiopian embassy itself. Correspondence between Francesco Novello da Carrara,39 the Lord of Padua, and various members of the Signoria40—the supreme body of government—reveals the excitement of local high society about the mission. These letters name some of the gifts sent from North-East Africa: perceived as ‘marvellous and strange things’, they included ‘the hide of a wild man, and the hide of a donkey with many colours’—presumably the hide of a monkey and a zebra, respectively.41 Moreover, the nǝgus ́ had also gifted four live leopards,42 a giant pearl,43 as well as ‘spices and certain other pleasurable things’ as a ‘sign of his genuine love’ to the Serenissima.44 Circumstantially, such reports give insight into the size of the Ethiopian ambassadorial party: Latin sources indicate the challenge of ferrying the leopards about within Italy.45 While Bartoli is always mentioned as the lone ambassador, he could hardly have transported numerous live feline predators by himself from the Horn of Africa to Venice—he must have had unnamed companions. In late July, the Great Council46 of Venice assigned 1000 gold ducats for the purchase of gifts to reciprocate the pleasing presents sent from Ethiopia—an extraordinarily high sum.47 The order emphasises that only things that duly represented ‘our dominion’ should be sent out. After all, the goal was to ensure a future successful relationship with the ‘Lord of the Indies’.48 A note in the inventory list of the Sanctuary of St Mark in Venice sheds some light onto one item despatched to Ethiopia. In August 1402, a ‘gilded silver chalice worked in the niello style’—where black metallic decoration is etched onto a precious metal—was ‘given to the nuncio of Prester John in exchange for a pearl of 12 carats or more’.49 Presumably, this chalice—formerly among the treasures of St Mark and therefore the church most closely connected to the elites of the city—was selected as one of the items to showcase the glory of the Serenissima. The vessel served its purpose: at least two sources from Ethiopia admiringly describe it.50 The Venetian sources also reveal a specific request posed by the Ethiopian ambassador—one that is utterly unrelated to a piece of the True Cross. Instead, it concerns manpower. On 10 August 1402, the Venetian

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Senate51 ruled that Bartoli be allowed to take five craftsmen with him to Ethiopia. First among them was ‘Victus, a painter from Florence who lives in Venice’, as well as an unnamed ‘Neapolitan armourer’ who had been brought over to Venice from Padua. Also destined to leave for North-East Africa were three men called Antonius: ‘Antonius of Florence, a builder of walls’, who lived in Venice and was not a master craftsman but a worker, his associate, ‘Antonius of Tarvisio’, also a worker specifically knowledgeable in making ‘tiles and bricks’ who travelled between Tarvisio and Venice, and lastly ‘Antonius of Florence, a carpenter, living in Venice’ who was presently ‘behind bars’.52 It is noteworthy that all five of the craftsmen were immigrants to Venice. Three hailed from the same town as the ‘Ethiopian’ ambassador—Florence, and at least one of them was down on his luck, seeing that he had been imprisoned. While the Venetian sources indicate a strong interest in establishing good relations with Solomonic rulers, the Serenissima was seemingly hesitant to despatch her prime local workforce halfway across the known world. By late August 1402, the ‘Ethiopian’ ambassador Bartoli, his presumed leopard-ferrying companions and the five craftsmen set out for Ethiopia. A letter of safe-conduct from the Doge dated 26 August recommended Bartoli to Marco Faledro, the Duke of Candia and thus the supreme Venetian governor of Crete. Less than a month later, on 28 September 1402, Bartoli and company had reached Crete according to that same safe conduct.53 The group’s progress, and indeed, their survival on their journey from Crete to the Horn of Africa has been a matter of debate in scholarship. It has been proposed that the embassy never returned to the Ethiopian highlands54—or, quite to the contrary, that it arrived back at the court of as ̣e Dawit by the rather specific date of 10 March 1403.55 The latter was first proposed by Raineri on evidence from the Homily on the Wood of the Holy Cross, the text examined earlier. As we have seen above, the Homily indeed states that aṣe Dawit’s ambassador safely returned to the Ethiopian highlands after following the trade and pilgrimage route connecting Ethiopia to the Mediterranean.56 The five craftsmen receive no mention; their fate is impossible to discern. However, both the Homily and the History of the Patriarchs attest to the safe arrival of the embassy’s bountiful treasure, all but ruling out attacks on the party. Barring sickness, it stands to reason that some of the Italian crafters might have survived the journey to the Horn of Africa.

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King Dawit’s Treasures, 1402–1403 It is again the Gǝʿǝz Homily which describes the reaction of the Solomonic court to the returning embassy: when as ̣e Dawit heard that his ambassador was back ‘from the king of Bandäqəya’—or rather, Venice—‘he rejoiced greatly, clapped with his hands and stamped with his feet. He went around the church, praising God and singing together with his priests, and the chiefs of his army, and all his troops were with him.’57 Aṣe Dawit also ordered the celebratory slaughtering of many cattle and sheep as well as several days of religious festivities to fete the return of the ambassador— and the many precious items brought back from Venice.58 The Arabic History of the Patriarchs again confirms this account: here, as ̣e Dawit is narrated as taking ‘off the crown from upon his head’, prostrating himself for an hour, ‘worshipping’, ‘rejoicing’ and ‘marvelling’ upon receiving relics and ecclesiastical vestments as a result of the embassy.59 Both texts thus offer an evocative view on the importance of the mission to late medieval Ethiopian society: it engendered absolute joy. While the Venetian sources had mostly foregone any specifications on the gifts sent to Ethiopia, the Homily provides exhaustive detail.60 Some 40 folio leaves of the manuscript are dedicated to descriptions of foreign treasures. First among them is a fragment of wood contemporarily understood in both Ethiopia and Coptic Egypt as a piece of the relic of the True Cross—the very reason for the composition of the Homily.61 The relic is mentioned as having been sent from Bandäqəya or Venice in the Homily; the History of the Patriarchs simply states that it came from the king of al-Afrang ̌ or the ‘king of Frankland’.62 Other Ethiopian texts later locate its origins in Ṣǝrʿ, which denotes the Byzantine world of the Eastern Mediterranean.63 What we can say with certainty is that any mention of such an object is utterly absent in the known Venetian sources.64 This could be due to source survival, or—alternatively—indicate that a piece of wood later understood as this relic came into the hands of the ambassadorial party on their way home.65 For now, its exact origin must remain a mystery. The numerous descriptions of other objects in the Homily are also far from a flight of fancy: many items are recognisable as late medieval Western European religious material culture, although the author’s unfamiliarity with Latin Christian items occasionally makes his account hard to follow. Some can be linked to Venetian records, or mirror those in later accounts of travellers to Ethiopia. An especially notable example obliquely testifying

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to the authenticity of the Homily is the silver chalice from the Sanctuary of St Mark.66 Four folios of the Homily are devoted to descriptions of this chalice alone, so painstakingly detailed as to border on the incomprehensible occasionally.67 The Venetian inventory list had succinctly told us that the chalice was made from gilded silver and worked in niello,68 a black metallic alloy used to decorate engraved or etched metal. The author of the Homily, meanwhile, waxed poetic about its workmanship, especially the interplay of the silver base and its gilding which ‘fascinates the eyes’, with figures displayed in relief.69 On its base were images of the four Evangelists, of the twelve Apostles and angels, all framed by columns and ornaments. An ‘inscription in Greek letters’ supposedly translated as ‘take and drink this chalice. It is my blood which is shed for your sake, for the expiation of the sin.’70 More than a century later, Father Francisco Alvares, a traveller to Ethiopia in the 1520s, would write in his extensive narrative on his stay in the Ethiopian highlands that he had been presented with ‘a chalice of silver gilt, strong and well made after our fashion’ during his stay at court: ‘On the foot it had the twelve Apostles, and round the bowl an inscription in well-made Latin letters which said Hic est calix novi testamenti.’71 Alvares’ phrase is a shortened form of the more common Hic est calix novum testamentum in sanguine meo, qui pro vobis fundetur.72 This New Testament quote translates as ‘this chalice is the new testament in my blood, which is shed for you’—approximating the version provided by the author of the Homily: ‘take and drink this chalice. It is my blood which is shed for your sake.’73 Both the Homily and Alvares were thus describing the same object: the chalice tersely listed in Venetian sources as formerly belonging to the Sanctuary of St Mark, Venice’s most important church. According to the Homily and the History of the Patriarchs,74 the embassy also brought back other ecclesiastical articles. The lengthy descriptions in the Homily reveal many of them as priestly garments: much admired vestments with images embroidered on them, multi-coloured tunics with images of the crucifixion of the Lord, of the Virgin, of the angels and saints. There were also robes depicting the annunciation with Gabriel and Mary, the baptism, prophets, Apostles, the righteous and the martyrs, respectively. Other vestments were made from ‘marvellous scarlet linen’.75 The author also mentions mitres and headbands.76 Religious items such as embroidered hangings,77 ‘engraved mirrors’78 and a reliquary for a skull are described alongside what was perceived to be the relic of one of the infants killed by Herod, its whole body encased in an urn adorned with crystal.79 This relic is also mentioned explicitly in the History of the

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Patriarchs.80 Lastly, there were more worldly luxury items—precious rugs, blankets, embroidered clothing with birds and plant motives, ‘rain shirts’ for the king, riding gear, rich fabrics for giant tents, and princely outfits with ‘images of vicious beasts’ such as lions, desert animals and birds.81 Occasionally, these objects even had ‘Greek’—or, more probably: Latin— writing on them. A shirt for the nǝgus ́ supposedly read ‘God is with us’, its writing wrapped around a sign of the cross.82 The Homily also speaks of several distinctive, unusual objects that had little to do with ecclesiastical matters or princely clothing. Among them was a ‘wondrous’ musical clock of a rather large size—also mentioned in other Ethiopian texts83—and a letter from the Doge of Venice. Written with gold ink, it featured an incised, cylindrical seal of admirable workmanship made from pure gold and was held together by a red scarlet tie.84 According to Italian palaeographer and historian Vittorio Lazzarini, this description mirrors especially important missives sent out by Michele Steno.85 The Venetian chancellery reserved the Doge’s golden bolla or ‘seal’ for particularly solemn occasions.86 The kernels of historical information contained within the Homily are thus backed up by official, administrative documents and sources far out of the Ethiopian cultural context. Both Homily and numerous Latin texts securely attest an Italian man—a once-trespassing foreigner—as Solomonic ambassador to Venice at the turn of the fifteenth century. In the Ethiopian reading, the man had been sent out by the nǝgus ́ for one purpose only: to acquire one piece of the True Cross for Ethiopia. Yet, all mention of this particular relic is absent from the Venetian documents. Narrative Ethiopian and Coptic sources, as well as the brief and pragmatic Venetian documents, however, show that the very first Solomonic embassy to the Latin West had been driven entirely by an interest in foreign relics, ecclesiastical items, garments, and craftsmen. From the Ethiopian point of view, this very mission to the Latin West had yielded spectacular enough results to merit the composition of a new dǝrsan or ‘homily’—creating lasting witness to the precious objects acquired by aṣe Dawit’s ambassador from a distant Christian realm. Fact and Fiction in Rome, 1403–1404 Three Latin sources indicate that the Ethiopian embassy to Venice was not the only one sent out from aṣe Dawit’s highland court to Italy at the turn of the fifteenth century. Instead, these texts—which are entirely

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unconnected to the Venetian documents, the Homily and the History of the Patriarchs—suggest that the Venetian mission was one of three. Two other delegations were sent out to the Eternal City of Rome, where they arrived in the summer of 1403 and 1404, respectively. They, too, were sent to acquire religious treasures. Our first source is a letter written by Candido de Bona, an ecclesiastic usually active in Cividale del Friuli, some 80 miles to the east of Venice.87 In early August 1404, Candido wrote from Rome to a friend back home in Cividale.88 After relaying some general pieces of gossip on Italian and Roman church politics, Candido mentions the arrival of an Ethiopian delegation that he had witnessed: tres ethiopes nigri de India—‘three black Ethiopians from India’ had arrived some weeks earlier, in June or July 1404. He judged them ‘good Christians’; in their dress, they seemed to him like Minorite friars.89 They always carried a cross in their hand and had scarification marks on their faces.90 Although ethiopes nigri de India were otherwise rather vague terms for black Africans in the late Middle Ages in Europe, such additional descriptors indeed reveal the men as Christians from the Horn of Africa. Throughout the fifteen and sixteenth century, travellers from Solomonic Ethiopia were noted for their practices of carrying small, iron hand crosses,91 ‘Franciscan-like’ garb92 and the practice of ‘having been baptised with fire’.93 In this particular case, two interpreters—one a youth said to speak 17 languages—accompanied the three Ethiopians.94 According to Candido, as ̣e Dawit’s three envoys caused quite a stir in Rome. They were hosted and housed at the Roman court of the Cardinal of Aquileia.95 This ancient and important titular see was formally based in the Friuli and held by a Friulan humanist, Antonio Panciera,96 explaining why Candido was witness to the event in the first place. Gathered at the court were a number of other humanists, including the law professor Angelus de Perusio,97 who questioned the Ethiopians about their faith as well as the life, manners and realm of their king according to our source. In Candido’s telling, the gathered humanists had read out to the Ethiopians from ‘the Book of the Three Kings, which lord Angelus de Perusio has here at present’. The three Ethiopians not only ‘willingly listened’ to the contents of the book, but also agreed with everything said therein after it was translated to them.98 This comment is startling. The book in question—the ‘Book of the Three Kings’ which Candido later also calls the ‘Book of the Magi’—was almost certainly John of Hildesheim’s Historia Trium Regum, an entirely fanciful Latin Christian text on the history of the three Magi and the realm of the mythical Prester John.99 The Ethiopians’ behaviour at least indicates that they found humour in this

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rather absurd situation: when they heard the content of the manuscript as explained by their interpreter, they huddled together, laughed and took ‘great delight in the fact that we know something of them and of the proper names of their leaders, princes, and bishops’.100 Candido, for his part, was thrilled to consequently inform his friend that these African Christians were indeed the long-sought-after people of Prester John. He even encouraged his friend to learn more about Ethiopia by asking other scholars about the contents of the ‘Book of the Magi’.101 It is hard to fathom why the three ambassadors—for ambassadors they were—would agree with such a fantastic tale unconnected to the contemporary geopolitical entity of Solomonic Ethiopia. In light of the episode described, however, it is understandable why our source Candido would identify the Ethiopians with the people of Prester John—and why he would state that they had been ‘found to be good Christians’102 by their Italian hosts. Despite the presence of interpreters, vital information was, perhaps wilfully, lost in translation. The Ethiopians had not come to Italy to simply encourage fanciful musings, however. Asked why they had travelled some eight months to arrive at Rome, the group answered that they had been sent by their ruler to enquire about the fate of a prior, unsuccessful embassy to the papacy: they wished to ‘ask and learn whether the highest pontiff had received’ the presents sent a year earlier by the nǝgus ́, which included a ‘white mitre with precious stones’, priestly vestments, balms and other gifts valued at a total of some 5000 ducats.103 In exchange, this earlier ambassador had been sent for indulgences and tasked with procuring ‘some saints’ relics that existed at Rome’.104 The three Ethiopians had thus come to enquire after the circumstances of yet another embassy to Rome, presumably sent the year before. There is no indication that the first ambassador to Rome was congruent with, or even connected to, the Venetian mission of 1402.105 Moreover, the Ethiopians of 1404 explicitly state that the first ambassador to Rome had returned empty-handed to Ethiopia before they had left.106 What is clear from Candido’s letter is that both missions to the papacy were interested in similar things—saints’ relics to be found in the Latin West. While the earlier envoy is narrated as tasked with acquiring relics, the situation for the second embassy to Rome is less explicit. Nevertheless, Candido expands upon how the three Ethiopians of 1404 did not ‘cease to visit holy churches’ and were ‘asking always about the relics of saints’. They ‘vehemently demanded’ to be shown the ‘cradle of the infant Jesus Christ’,

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the ‘Column of the Flagellation’ as well as the Sudarium or ‘Veil of Veronica’ and the bodies of nine Apostles.107 An interest in relics lay at the heart of the Ethiopian mission to Rome of 1404, too. Two other sources from Rome strengthen Candido’s account of an Ethiopian embassy to Rome in 1403: a note in the papal archives states that two ‘Indians’—named ‘Abraham and Saliba’—had visited the tombs of Peter and Paul in Rome in the summer of 1403. According to the letter by Pope Boniface IX dated 21 June 1403, they also had come for an audience with the Pontiff.108 A second, unrelated source corroborates this account: the Welsh priest Adam of Usk, himself present at Rome and the Papal court from 1403 to 1406, notes in his chronicle that ‘two monks from India, black and bearded’ had visited the pope and had a gracious hearing. ‘In proof of their belief in Christ’, Adam says, they had shown ‘the crosses which they bear upon their breasts, and their baptism on the right ear, not made with water but with fire’109—again referring to the ritual of branding associated with medieval Ethiopian Christianity.110 It is entirely possible that these ‘two black monks’ repeatedly mentioned in passing as present in Rome in the summer of 1403 constituted a first mission sent by as ̣e Dawit to the papacy—and that they were the ones about whom the three Ethiopians of 1404 enquired. Candido’s account, written while the Ethiopians were still in the middle of their stay in Rome,111 sadly does not relate the group’s fate. The Roman sources of both 1403 and 1404 suggest that the Ethiopian court did not just reach out to Western Europe with one single embassy at the turn of the fifteenth century. Instead, aṣe Dawit seems to have sent out multiple delegations to various places on the Italian peninsula: one to Venice in the summer of 1402, another to the Pontiff in Rome that arrived in the summer of 1403, and the three Ethiopians lodged at the court of the Cardinal of Aquileia in Rome in the summer of 1404. Latin, Arabic and Gǝʿǝz sources on all three embassies place an interest in relics at the heart of these first Solomonic missions to the West. A desire to acquire rare, foreign ecclesiastical treasures, supplemented by a wish to acquire craftsmen from abroad, drove Ethiopian diplomacy towards Europe from the outset. There is no mention of either religious or military alliances or arms and technology in any of the sources covered thus far—unless, of course, we count the Neapolitan armourer-craftsman sent out in 1402 as a harbinger of warfare. But then again, he is described as a Spatarium or ‘maker of broadswords’112—and swordsmiths were hardly cutting-edge technologists in the early fifteenth century. Together with swords, they are attested in

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Ethiopia long before any contacts with Europe.113 As the last chapter of this book will show, it is far more likely that such an artisan was of interest to the Solomonic court for his general metal-working capabilities.

Roads, Merchants and ‘the Good Wine’: Venetians in Ethiopia in the Early Fifteenth Century Another source rounds out our picture of early interaction between the Solomonic court and the Italian peninsula.114 While it appears at first glance unconnected to the Ethiopian embassies to Venice and Rome, it is nothing less than the first known, detailed itinerary leading from Western Europe to the Ethiopian highlands. The source is written in Latin115 and comprises just four pages written on paper, now glued into a larger composite manuscript.116 Its overall content suggests that a well-connected humanist had acquired the pages for his collection in the second half of the fifteenth century.117 At one point, the manuscript belonged to the Strozzi family of Florence; currently, it is held in the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze.118 Scholarship has suggested that the text was compiled around the year 1400 or in 1410,119 or speculated that Anthonius Bartoli must have dictated out the information during his time in Venice in the summer of 1402.120 Others have suggested that it was compiled in Jerusalem with the help of the local Ethiopian community in the Holy Land.121 The physical presentation of the source on the paper, featuring many corrections and amendments, as well as how Arabic and Ethiopian words were rendered, suggests another possibility: a small party of Venetian merchants had successfully—but most probably unofficially—set out to follow up on the newly established contacts with Ethiopia sometime between aṣe Dawit’s mission to Venice and the death of the nǝgus ́ in 1412. It is impossible to say whether this mission was genuinely caused by—or tied to—Dawit’s 1402 embassy. The activities of lone Venetian or Genoese traders in Africa are more often than not preserved only by chance.122 And yet, this remarkable source is the oldest extant Latin Christian written record known to scholarship that documents the presence of Venetian merchants in Solomonic Ethiopia. It is also the earliest known Latin Christian text to commit direct, first-hand knowledge on Ethiopian politics and languages to writing. Titled Iter de Venetiis ad Indiam—‘the path from Venice to India’—in rubricated letters, the itinerary promises to take a pilgrim from Venice to

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Jerusalem to ‘India’, and to the place ‘where the body of the blessed Apostle Thomas rests’.123 In fact, it sketches out a route from Venice to the court of a ruler explicitly identified as ‘David’ in ‘Chaamara’—the court of as ̣e Dawit II of Ethiopia in Amhara,124 the Solomonic heartland province of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The itinerary only takes up a third of the document proper: it names stopover locations and lists the days of travel between them, from Venice via Rhodes and Ramla to Jerusalem to Gaza, and thence to the coast of Egypt, to Cairo, down the Nile to Qifṭ,125 across the desert to ʿAyḏāb,126 and Sawākin,127 and down the Red Sea to the coastal lowlands of—as the traveller would then realise—‘Ethiopia’.128 From the Ethiopian coast, the trek continues inland towards the mountain plateaus, past Asmära to ‘Chaxum’, the ancient city of Aksum. Crossing the Tǝgrayan highlands in a south-westerly direction, the traveller would pass through the province of Angot before finally reaching Amhara. The total travel time from Venice to Amhara is given as 181 days.129 The itinerary thus matches the common pilgrimage and trade route otherwise attested only in significantly later Ethiopian and European sources. The remaining two-thirds of the source are not an itinerary at all. First follows a short but discerning section on the political make-up of Solomonic Ethiopia: the author states that the Ethiopian princeps— ‘lord’—lived in Amhara during wintertime, but moved his court to ‘Sciahua’—the province of Šäwa—during summertime.130 The proper name of this Lord is given as ‘David’—aṣe Dawit. The author also sets out to explain the political make-up of the provinces and local reges—‘kings’— under as ̣e Dawit’s suzerainty. He provides 13 sets of names that largely correspond with individual governorships known for fifteenth-century Ethiopia, ostensibly writing the names of rulers in uppercase and the names of provinces in lowercase. For some localities, including Asmära— the capital of modern-day Eritrea—these corrupted but still intelligible designations are the earliest written textual witnesses in Ethiopian and European history alike.131 The last and longest section of the text is taken up by three successive language lists, providing a view of the author’s knowledge of Ethiopian languages and customs. Akin to the ‘useful phrases’ lists found in most modern travel guides, these language guides state words and phrases helpful when travelling to—and within—the North-East African highlands.132 A deep pragmaticism underlies the document: the author prefaces the text by stating that this ‘vocabulary’ would be ‘very necessary for someone

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travelling thither’.133 He has meticulously rendered Latin words and phrases into phonetically transcribed, approximate equivalents in Amharic, Arabic and a mixture of Tǝgrǝñña-Amharic.134 The first and shortest language list is written in a precursor to modern Amharic. Transliterated words give terms like bread, wine, oil, fish, cheese, horses and mules and for expressing thankfulness.135 The following guide is written out in ‘the language spoken in Jerusalem’—and depicts an Arabic dialect of the Red Sea region.136 It explains how to enquire after roads,137 how to ask where lodging and merchants are to be found,138 how to indicate one’s commercial interest and negotiate prices,139 the words for ink, pen and paper,140 and how to enquire after arms, gold, silver as well as naming individual colours.141 The local names of exotic fruits, staple foods, different types of fabric and individual colours are also provided.142 This way, the phrasebook allows us a glimpse into the background of the author as well as his target audience—the text is a brief business compendium for a fifteenth-century Latin-speaking merchant. The third and final list confirms this impression. Here, we find phrases for general and mercantile use in a language the author identifies as lingua indorum—‘the language of the Indians’.143 In reality, these are transliterations of a somewhat adventurous mix of spoken old Tǝgrǝñña and Amharic. Some phrases would still be understandable in rural northern Ethiopia today:144 veni mecum—‘come with me’—is, for example, given as Naam instead of näca or näcanay, which indeed means something along the lines of ‘come on, let’s go’ in Tǝgrǝñña.145 Grates—‘thanks’—is given as Hiochaffa, a corrupt but ultimately intelligible rendering of [gži’o] yəhafəha, a Tǝgrǝñña variant of ‘May God give you’, a formula expressing thankfulness.146 Other phrases teach the reader how to ask for the way,147 after specific regions,148 whether the roads are safe and how to seek out and negotiate with local authority,149 the names of commercial goods150— as well as how to enquire politely for help, after lodging,151 the bathroom, for alms and aid, as well as ‘the good wine’.152 The last section of the text gives a perfectly intelligible list of Arabic cardinal numbers from 1 to 1000.153 The vocabulary provided in the language lists shows that our anonymous author was a merchant, writing for an audience also interested in commercial ventures. The mention of as ̣e Dawit suggests that the author had visited Ethiopia before the nǝgus ’́ death in 1412. The visible amendments of the folios provide important additional clues: they show phonetic improvements to perceived mistakes—Dars, meant to be Amharic or

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Tǝgrǝñña for ‘horse’, for instance, was later changed to the more correct Fars for färäs.154 This indicates that at least two people were involved in creating the document—one hand was correcting the other to create a better record. We can also deduce that our authors were native Italian speakers aiming for an educated audience by intentionally composing the text in Latin: ‘cheese’ was first given as Italian Formaggio before being corrected to Latin Caseus, Cauallo was struck through and replaced with the slightly misspelt Equs for ‘horse’, and Spada for ‘sword’ was corrected to Ensis. Other corrections again attempted to better adjust the letters of the transliteration of Ethiopian words to Italian phonetics: wärq for ‘gold’ was first written as Huanca, and then changed to Huarca.155 Certain choices— how to transcribe the Ethiopian sounds for ‘ǧ’, ‘y’ and ‘sh’, for example— also indicate that at least one of the native Italian speakers had familiarity with Greek and the Greek alphabet.156 The proper names of Ethiopian provinces and titles show exceptionally many amendments. Clearly, the authors wanted to ensure the most correct possible phonetic depiction of this politically relevant information, changing AMIBABA to the correct form AMHARA, and re-tracing GHOIGHAM as the word for the province of Goǧǧam.157 Both authors were trying to find the best possible solution for writing these foreign terms. Nevertheless, both the Arabic and especially the third ‘Ethiopic’ language guide are far from perfect. While many of the phrases are perfectly understandable, the third list, in particular, is a rather wild mix of Tǝgrǝñña and Amharic. The expressions alternate between the different languages from phrase to phrase, indicating that the traveller never realised he was dealing with two related, albeit distinct languages. The phrases were intelligible enough to provide their speaker with the intended outcome—but when our merchant was asking for a bed, for example, he implored the Ethiopians to give him sleep; when he was asking for food, he was actually begging bystanders to ‘let him live’.158 Medieval sources from Ethiopia and Yemen suggest that Arabic was a common trading language of the Ethiopian highlands even within the Solomonic kingdom,159 as Muslim traders conducted much local trade.160 This would be supported by the list of numbers appended to the guides— which are Arabic cardinals, after all. Whoever authored the text took careful enough note of his surroundings, the distances, the ways and languages of the people as well as he could—with the ultimate goal to be able to engage the Solomonic court and realm in trade. As the Arabic list is by far

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the most detailed, he seems to have spent more time in the company of traders than courtiers. For all the above reasons, suggestions that the author might never have travelled to the Ethiopian highlands himself but had composed the text based on information gleaned from Ethiopian informants in Jerusalem may be dismissed.161 In light of the existing Ethiopian-Venetian diplomatic contact in 1402, the fact that Venice was given as a starting point for the itinerary, the strong mercantile interest of the author, the phonetic choices and the fact that Greek was the lingua franca of eastern Mediterranean trade in the fifteenth century, we may assume that our travellers to Ethiopia were Venetian merchants. It has been suggested that Anthonius Bartoli must have provided the source in Venice in the summer of 1402.162 The text contains various indicators that would preclude this conclusion.163 The language guides themselves rule Bartoli out as a likely source of information. While the phonetically transliterated sentences demonstrate that our author travelled to Ethiopia and gained some understanding of the local languages,164 the third language guide is the weird pidgin mix of Tǝgrǝñña and Amharic of someone only briefly exposed to the different highland idioms. Bartoli’s knowledge of the different highland languages would have progressed beyond the very rough pidgin of mistakes and misinterpretations employed by the author of the text—he had been able to communicate enough with the nǝgus ́ to be his ambassador, after all.165 Instead of trying to awkwardly connect the Iter de Venetiis ad Indiam to Bartoli, we should not preclude the possibility that Bartoli’s mission might have inspired Venetian merchants to scout out business opportunities in the Ethiopian highlands after 1402. Bartoli’s presence in Ethiopia, his safe return to Dawit’s court, as well as the two embassies to Rome in 1403 and 1404, show that travel between Ethiopia and Italy was both not as unusual and not as lethal as scholarship has long assumed.166 We know that Latin Christians were often barred from travelling through Mamlūk Egypt while Ethiopian pilgrims and travellers faced no such restrictions.167 And yet, the Homily suggests that individual foreigners from ‘Frankland’ could also turn up on the borders of the Solomonic realm in comparatively surprising number.168 As we will see in later chapters, dozens of Latin Christians reached the Ethiopian court over the course of the fifteenth century. Many of them were lone Italians who had slipped through the cracks of Mamlūk authority. Most of them were ultimately detained in Ethiopia for the rest of their days, and consequently, we know very little of them. The remarkable thing about this source is thus that whoever wrote

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it returned to Western Europe, noted down his intelligence—and that the text has been preserved for scholarship. The text of the Iter de Venetiis ad Indiam thus opens up yet another window on Ethiopian-European contacts at the very beginning of the fifteenth century. As no additional Venetian documents indicate that the Serenissima sent out a reciprocal embassy to Ethiopia, it seems unlikely that this Venetian was acting in an official capacity. The author had stayed in the Ethiopian highlands for a certain amount of time, sufficiently long to make himself somewhat intelligible and gather information on local politics, but not long enough to gain more in-depth insight into the workings of the highland kingdom. The language guides also suggest more exposure to Arabic-speaking traders rather than to courtiers conversing in Amharic or Tǝgrǝñña. He was not an ecclesiastic writing for ecclesiastics, seeing that he was utterly unconcerned with the sacred sites and highlights of Ethiopia—in fact, these are hardly mentioned. What concerned him was the political make-up of as ̣e Dawit’s realm and its merchandise. Those were conscientiously committed to writing upon his return, in the first half of the fifteenth century. Shortly thereafter, the pages of the Iter were removed from their original context and pasted into a Florentine renaissance humanist’s composite manuscript.169 Many aspects of the source remain unanswerable—its original audience, exact date of composition, from where it was removed, and whether anyone ever made use of it. What the text nevertheless attests is that the realm of tangible Venetian trading ambition was larger than commonly assumed for the very early fifteenth century. Yet it was not infinite either: our author states it would be possible, but very difficult for many reasons to go and cross even further into Africa. From there, few of the foreigners who did so would return.170 The journey to the Amhara heartland province of Ethiopia, however, was comparatively straightforward to accomplish. The highland kingdom of the nǝgus ́ was a distant but ultimately accessible part of a shared medieval world.

Lost in Translation at the Council of Constance, 1416–1418 The first flurry of Solomonic missions to the Latin West seems to have been followed by more than a decade of diplomatic silence. This, too, might be an accident of document survival. Knowledge about Ethiopian delegates in Europe has sometimes been preserved in unexpected sources,

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such as personal letters and diaries. Relevant archival passages—which can be very brief, as the Venetian documents demonstrate—might simply not yet have come to light among mountains of archival material waiting to be studied by medievalists. For 1407 and 1410, papal records do mention individual ecclesiastics as travelling to holy places in Europe from ‘India’— which remained a vague catchall phrase for most of the non-Western Christian world beyond Byzantium at the time.171 It is not impossible that some of these pilgrims were of an African Christian background. However, their names are only preserved in an approximate, Latinised form, and our information is simply too limited to make clear assertions. In the years 1416–1418, however, travellers securely identifiable as Ethiopians again appear in several Latin Christian sources: monks called P̣eṭros, Bärtälomewos and Ǝnṭonǝs,172 who demonstrate that Ethiopian ecclesiastics ventured very far inland within Europe in the early fifteenth century, as they are attested at Constance, a bucolic town in present-day Germany north of the Alps. There, these men walked the thin line between pilgrim and inadvertent emissary. They participated in the Council of Constance (1414–1418), the ecumenical Council primarily remembered for ending the Western Schism with the election of Pope Martin V. Knowledge of an ‘Ethiopian’ delegation at the Council was long based solely on the testament of late medieval German chronicler Ulrich von Richental.173 His account on the Council of Constance, first compiled in 1420 and extant in about a dozen manuscript copies dating to the second half of the fifteenth century,174 tersely specifies that ‘three Ethiopians’ had been sent by the mythical Prester John from his ‘land and realm’ to attend the Council in Constance. Regrettably, they ‘knew neither Latin nor any language that one could understand’.175 The meandering route we can piece together from official documents for one of the three Ethiopians— abba Ǝnṭonǝs—suggests that these monks had not been sent out to attend the Council by any means. Their presence at Constance was instead owed to coincidence and seemingly fuelled by religious curiosity. Scholarship has sometimes judged Richental as being far from an exemplary witness.176 A citizen of Constance, he unashamedly used his chronicle to glorify his home town, stating that, indeed, all the world had gathered there, even the most exotic of men.177 It doesn’t help that the short passage that mentions the Ethiopian presence at the Council was lifted from somewhere else entirely: while the rest of Richental’s manuscript is written in the German vernacular, the section about the Ethiopian delegates is in Latin.178 However, numerous other texts confirm Richental’s

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account, and the presence of Ethiopian monks at the Council of Constance. A 1417 letter written by the humanist Pier Paolo Vergerio the Elder from Constance states how remarkable it was that participants had come to the Council ‘even from Ethiopia’.179 In 1418, German rhyme chronicler Thomas Prischusch excitedly pointed out what ‘great praise and honour for the city of Constance’ it was that an embassy had been sent from ‘India, from the Orient’. He also specifies that these delegates had come from a land from which ‘little had been heard since the birth of Jesus Christ’.180 The fourth Bavarian continuation of the Sächsische Weltchronik, a universal history written in vernacular German originally composed in the thirteenth century, mentions ‘four monks that had come over the sea from the True India’ who ‘had crosses burned onto their foreheads’ as present at Constance by 1416.181 A papal letter consolidates all the above accounts: on 1 January 1418, the newly elected Pope Martin V himself issued a safe-conduct for ‘Petrus, Bartholomeus and Antonius, Ethiopians’ and their ‘companions’.182 The document was written in Constance, where, according to Pope Martin V, the Ethiopians had been hosted for menses plurimos—‘very many months’. They had demonstrated and shown their commendable faith during the Council and now wished to ‘return to their country’ with their ‘companions and all their goods’.183 Pope Martin V urged his fellow Christians to show them every honour and to grant them free passage and hospitality on their way home. The pope’s reference to sociis—‘companions’—explains the changing numbers of Ethiopians mentioned in the accounts above. Like aṣe Dawit’s missions to Venice and Rome, the three named Ethiopians were not travelling alone. In late August 1418, one of these Ethiopians reappears in a different papal document written in Geneva.184 This letter confirms that the ‘Ethiopian monks’—otherwise still a rather indistinct term—should indeed be understood as hailing from the geopolitical entity of Solomonic Ethiopia: it specifies that ‘brother Antonius’ of ‘Amehar’ in ‘Greater India’ wished to return to his home country.185 ‘Amehar’ is an obvious corruption of Amhara, the above-mentioned heartland province of the Solomonic highland kingdom. The source also states that Antonius—or abba Ǝnṭonǝs, as he would most probably have been called back home—had previously attended the Council of Constance for many months and that he had visited the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem and the tombs of the Apostles in Rome before crossing the Alps.186 Overall, this text asserts his interest in visiting some of the holy places of Christianity located in the Latin West, and attests to his languid pace of movement. The fact that Ǝnt ̣onǝs had

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taken some eight months187 to cover the 200 miles between Constance and Geneva indicates that this Ethiopian ecclesiastic made excellent use of the papal safe-conduct, which was valid for two years. Indeed, the Genevan source mentions that he had extensively travelled all over the Eastern Mediterranean and Italy before setting out northwards. When combined with the dates provided by the Constance sources, Ǝnṭonǝs’ confirmed time beyond the Alps alone quickly adds up to well over a year. Another Latin Christian source may have fortuitously preserved the image of the three Ethiopian monks present at the Council of Constance. The full-page illumination of the ‘Exaltation of the Cross’ in the famous manuscript of the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry was painted by the Limbourg Brothers in Burgundy in 1416.188 It depicts three black African monks with iron hand crosses, their foreheads branded with the sign of the cross, dressed in a dark greyish-brown habit that could easily be mistaken for that of Franciscans by contemporary Europeans. That same year, ‘Petrus, Bartholomeus and Antonius’ are attested at the Council of Constance by the written sources. The actual presence of at least three Ethiopian visitors north of the Alps could offer some insight into how such a remarkably lifelike representation of ‘Ethiopian’ monks in the Très Riches Heures had come to be. We must wonder as to why these Ethiopian monks ventured north of the Alps in the first place. Had they been drawn in by the hubbub surrounding the Council of Constance, to which sizeable delegations of Christians from all over Europe had travelled? Or had they heard the story of St Maurice or ‘St Mauritius’, the third-century Christian Roman African officer with the legendary Theban legion, who was martyred in Agaunum in modern-day Switzerland? Together with his companion St Verena—yet another African saint from Upper Egypt especially venerated in the Swiss-­ German borderlands—St Maurice had long been read as a Nubian or Black African saint in the German-speaking realms of Europe.189 Dedicated to St Maurice, a rotunda with a Sepulcrum Domini in the Cathedral of Constance dates back to the tenth century.190 It is still the primary pilgrimage destination of the town, located on the Via Jacobi or Schwabenweg—a section of the Camino de Santiago, the pilgrimage route to St James of Compostela, dating back to the twelfth century. Notably, the Via Jacobi leads the pilgrim along the foot of the Swiss Alps from Constance to Geneva—the same route abba Ǝnṭonǝs of Amhara must have taken on his eight-month travels between the towns. It would have led him not far from Agaunum—the town of modern-day Saint-Maurice—where Black St

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Maurice was martyred according to legend. He also would have passed Solothurn and Bad Zurzach, where St Maurice’s companion, St Verena, lived out her life as a hermit far from her Upper Egyptian place of birth. It is impossible to know if and why abba Ǝnṭonǝs and his companions set out to cross the Alps in the latter half of the 1410s. What we may assert, however, is that these Ethiopian ecclesiastics were travelling through a region with early and deep ties to saints from North-East Africa.

Chapter Conclusion While the interests of Latin Europeans are not the focus of this study, we may observe that all early Ethiopian missions to the West were locally treated with respect—and curiosity. The archival records show that European contemporaries were interested in establishing a good and honourable relationship with the realm of the nǝgus ́. The Venetian government spent the remarkable sum of 1000 ducats on gifts; the chalice from the treasury of St Mark—the most important church in Venice—as well as the use of the golden seal of the Doge, reserved for especially important missives, indicate Venetian solemnity and tremendous appreciation. In Rome, the three Ethiopians of 1404 caused quite a stir—and were well-­ provided for with lodging and funds by a very high-ranking Latin ecclesiastic. A whole crowd of assembled humanists was eager for their company, and they were treated to the sights of the city. Notably, this included one of the holiest relics of the Latin world: the Sudarium or ‘Veil of Veronica’ at Old St Peter’s, access to which was highly restricted. The Ethiopians at Constance enjoyed similar privileges. Their presence would have necessarily heightened the prestige of this ecumenical Council, impressing upon local Latin and Greek participants that despite potential language barriers, ‘all the Christian world’ had come to the Council indeed. As for the Ethiopian perspective, as ̣e Dawit’s first three missions to the Latin West were directed at Italy. This chapter has revealed that the Ethiopians were interested in relics, religious items and craftsmen—who, as painters or metalworkers could also fashion ecclesiastic works in turn, forming a golden thread tying the embassies of 1402, 1403 and 1404 together. Our two African sources—the Homily and History of the Patriarchs—especially stress the central importance of relics, ecclesiastical garments and items for these early diplomatic contacts. It remains puzzling why the chalice from the treasury of St Mark is named in sources from Venice and Ethiopia, yet the two relics described in detail by

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Ethiopian and Egyptian texts—the True Cross and the body of one of the children killed by Herod, encased in a crystal reliquary—are not. Venetian records of these items may simply not have come down to us—or the items were acquired subsequently by the Ethiopian delegation on its way back to the Horn of Africa. Ethiopian pilgrims—whom we struggle to securely locate in Europe for any period before the fifteenth century—form the second track of early encounters with Latin Christianity in Europe. While the pilgrims were occasionally pressed into the role of inadvertent emissary, the sources first and foremost tie their very presence in Western Europe to a deep-seated interest in its religious sites. Such sites were, of course, nearly always tied to relics themselves. Both sources relating to the 1404 mission to Rome and to the 1418 pilgrims north of the Alps portray a strong desire to visit as many of these holy sites as possible, and to experience their relics. Although successive nägäs ́t would reach out to various Latin potentates over the course of the fifteenth century, no other late medieval Solomonic mission purposely approached the Republic of Venice again. The 1404 delegation to Rome was sent out only to accomplish what its predecessor in 1403 had failed to achieve. As we will see in the following chapters, subsequent contacts with the papacy were intermittent at best. These first embassies from the Ethiopian court were thus not motivated by a desire to establish deep and lasting diplomatic ties with one polity or the other. Instead, they appear driven by an interest in sacred and ceremonial goods. Another factor was the acquisition of artisans predominantly trained in the crafts of construction and ornamentation.191 The rapturous descriptions of the Homily demonstrate how the very foreignness of many of the items brought back from Italy endowed them with a special kind of sanctity in Ethiopia. Other contacts were similarly driven by the desire to experience sacred sites in the Latin world—a number of which were dedicated to saints of African origin. Lastly, it is significant that early intercontinental diplomacy was initiated and wholly maintained by the Ethiopian side. These African Christians approached the Latin West selectively, deliberately and purposefully—to obtain treasures bearing witness to a faith shared with the foreign but indistinct realms of ‘Frankland’.

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Notes 1. Compare, for example, Nicolai Iorga, ‘Cenni Sulle Relazioni Tra l’Abissinia e l’Europa Cattolica Nel Secoli XIV–XV, Con Un Iterario Inedito Del Secolo XV’, Centenario Della Nascita Di Michele Amari 1 (1910): 139–50; Carlo Conti Rossini, ‘Un Codice Illustrato Eritreo Del Secolo XV’, Africa Italiana 1 (1927): 83–97; Enrico Cerulli, Etiopi in Palestina: Storia Della Comunità Etiopica Di Gerusalemme Vol. I (Rome: Liveria dello Stato, 1943); Renato Lefèvre, ‘Riflessi Etiopici Nella Cultura Europea Del Medioevo e Del Rinascimento’, Annali Lateranensi 8 (1944): 9–90; Renato Lefèvre, ‘Documenti Pontifici Sui Rapporti Con L’Etiopia Nei Secoli XV e XVI’, Rassegna Di Studi Etiopici 5 (1946): 17–41; Renato Lefèvre, ‘Presenze Etiopiche in Italia Prima Del Concilio Di Firenze Del 1439’, Rassegna Di Studi Etiopici 23 (1967): 5–26; Marilyn E.  Heldman, ‘A Chalice from Venice for Emperor Dawit of Ethiopia’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 52, no. 3 (1990): 442–45; Stuart C.  Munro-­Hay, Ethiopia Unveiled: Interaction Between Two Worlds (Hollywood: Tsehai, 2006); Kate Lowe, ‘“Representing” Africa: Ambassadors and Princes from Christian Africa to Renaissance Italy and Portugal, 1402–1608’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 17 (2007): 101–28; Matteo Salvadore, ‘The Ethiopian Age of Exploration: Prester John’s Discovery of Europe, 1306–1458’, Journal of World History 21, no. 4 (2010): 593–627; Andrew Kurt, ‘The Search for Prester John, a Projected Crusade and the Eroding Prestige of Ethiopian Kings, c.1200–c.1540’, Journal of Medieval History 39, no. 3 (2013): 297–320; Benjamin Weber, ‘Gli Etiopi a Roma Nel Quattrocento: Ambasciatori Politici, Negoziatori Religiosi o Pellegrini?’, Mélanges de l’École Française de Rome—Moyen Âge 125, no. 1 (2013); Benjamin Weber, ‘An Incomplete Integration into the Orbis Christianus. Relations and Misunderstandings between the Papacy and Ethiopia (1237–1456)’, Medieval Encounters 21 no. 2–3  (2015): 232–49, as well as Matteo Salvadore, The African Prester John and the Birth of Ethiopian-­European Relations, 1402–1555 (Milton Park: Routledge, 2016). 2. As ̣e Dawit II, ruled 1378/1379–1412. For a bibliography, see MarieLaure Derat, ‘Dawit II’, in EAe 2 (2005), 112–13. 3. Taddesse Tamrat, Church and State in Ethiopia, 1270–1527 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), 258. 4. Taddesse Tamrat, Church and State in Ethiopia, 1270–1527, 265. 5. Taddesse Tamrat, Church and State in Ethiopia, 1270–1527, 265. 6. Compare Salvadore, ‘The Ethiopian Age of Exploration: Prester John’s Discovery of Europe, 1306–1458’, 624, where the interest in Venetian artisans is read primarily as obtaining ‘purveyors of technical knowledge’ for the Ethiopian court.

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7. Salvadore, The African Prester John and the Birth of Ethiopian-European Relations, 1402–1555, 26. 8. Salvadore, The African Prester John and the Birth of Ethiopian-European Relations, 1402–1555, 26. 9. Among others:  Carlo Cipolla, ‘Prete Jane e Francesco Novello Da Carrara’, Archivio Veneto 6 (1873): 323–24; Ester Pastorello, Il Copialettere Marciano Della Cancelleria Carrarese: Gennaio 1402— Gennaio 1403 (Venice: Deputazione veneta di storia patria, 1915); Vittorio Lazzarini, ‘Un’ambasciata Etiopica in Italia Nel 1404’, Atti Del Reale Instituto Veneto Di Scienze, Lettere Ed Arti 83 (1924): 839–47; Iorga, ‘Cenni Sulle Relazioni Tra l’Abissinia e l’Europa Cattolica Nel Secoli XIV–XV, Con Un Iterario Inedito Del Secolo XV’. Also see Antoine Khater and Oswald Hugh Edward Burmester, trans., History of the Patriarchs of the Coptic Church of Alexandria. Volume III Part III. Cyril II—Cyril V (A.D. 1235–1894) (Cairo: Imprimerie de l’Institut Francais d’Archeologie Orientale, 1970); Osvaldo Raineri, ‘I Doni Della Serenissima al Re Davide I d’Etiopia (Ms Raineri 43 Della Vaticana)’, Orientalia Christiana Periodica 65 (1999): 363–448. Examined for the first time are: BAV, Reg. Vat. 352, fol. 21v; UH, Cod. Pal. Germ. 321, fol. 300r and MGH, Dt. Chron. 2, 363, 16–17. 10. The writer presents himself as ‘Abba Kirakos, the archbishop of the orthodox’, a rather indistinct title. There is no Ethiopian record of a metropolitan called Kirakos for the fifteenth century; it appears an intentional allusion to St Judas Cyriacus, who had aided St Helena in finding the True Cross. According to Osvaldo Raineri, the story of Judas Cyriacus and his involvement in finding of the True Cross came to Ethiopia in the fourteenth century; see Osvaldo Raineri, ‘Abba Kirākos: Omelie Etiopiche Sulla Croce (Ms. Raineri 43, Della Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana)’, in La Croce. Iconografia e Interpretazione (Secoli I–Inizio XVI). Atti Del Convegno Internazionale Di Studi (Napoli, 6–11 Dicembre 1999), ed. Boris Ulianich (Napoli: Elio de Rosa editore, 2007), 209. 11. BAV, Ms. Raineri et. 43, summarised in Raineri, ‘I Doni Della Serenissima al Re Davide I d’Etiopia (Ms Raineri 43 Della Vaticana)’, catalogued and described in Osvaldo Raineri, ‘Inventario Dei Manoscritti Etiopici “Raineri” Della Biblioteca Vaticana’, in Collectanea in Honorem Rev. Mi Patris Leonardi Boyle, O.  P., Septuagesimum Quintum Annum Feliciter Complentis, ed. Robert E. Boyle (Città del Vaticano: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 1998), 485–548. Also see Raineri, ‘Abba Kirākos’; Meley Mulugetta, ‘A Mechanical Clock from Venice for Emperor Dawit of Ethiopia’, Aethiopica 13 (2010): 189–92.

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12. See Alessandro Bausi, ‘Ethiopia and the Christian Ecumene: Cultural Transmission, Translation, and Reception’, in A Companion to Medieval Ethiopia and Eritrea, ed. Samantha Kelly (Leiden: Brill, 2020), 217–51; Antonella Brita, ‘Genres of Ethiopian-Eritrean Christian Literature with a Focus on Hagiography’, in A Companion to Medieval Ethiopia and Eritrea, ed. Samantha Kelly (Leiden: Brill, 2020). 13. On the active manuscript culture of Ethiopia, where fifteenth-century parchment manuscripts are still in use in rural churches and new vellum copies of ancient texts are being produced to this day, see Denis Nosnitsin, Churches and Monasteries of Tǝgray. A Survey of Manuscript Collections (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2013); Alessandro Bausi, ‘Writing, Copying, Translating: Ethiopia as a Manuscript Culture’, in Manuscript Cultures: Mapping the Field, eds. Jörg Quenzer, Dmitry Bondarev, and Jan-­Ulrich Sobisch (Berlin and New  York: De Gruyter, 2014), 37–77; Denis Nosnitsin, ‘Christian Manuscript Culture of the Ethiopian-Eritrean Highlands: Some Analytical Insights’, in A Companion to Medieval Ethiopia and Eritrea, ed. Samantha Kelly (Leiden: Brill, 2020), 282–321. 14. The content of the Homily is backed up by an episode narrated in the History of the Patriarchs of the Egyptian Church, a history of the patriarchate of Alexandria thought to be compiled from the tenth century. It is written in Arabic and was expanded upon by later authors; for an English translation, see Khater and Burmester, History of the Patriarchs of the Coptic Church of Alexandria, 249–51. Some of the objects are also described in Charles F. Beckingham and George W. B. 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 1520, Written by Father Francisco Alvares (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961) and BNM, Ms. it. VII, nr. 374, coll. 7781, fol. 40, ed. in Rodolfo Gallo, Il Tesoro Di San Marco e La Sua Storia (Venice: Istituto di Storia dell’Arte, 1967), 288. 15. Experts of Ethiopian philology and linguistics judge the Homily as a reliable if somewhat corrupted source composed by a contemporary of the events described therein. The text contains consistently correct references to important personages—kings, bishops and patriarchs—active in Ethiopia, Egypt and Europe around the year 1400. Elements of the story moreover match evidence in Venetian archives, examined below. On the attributed authorship of the text, see Raineri, ‘I Doni Della Serenissima al Re Davide I d’Etiopia (Ms Raineri 43 Della Vaticana)’, 366, 377–78; Raineri, ‘Abba Kirākos’, 209. 16. Compare Christian Friedrich August Dillmann, Lexicon Linguae Aethiopicae, Cum Indice Latino. Adiectum Est Vocabularium Tigre Dialecti Septentrionalis Compilatum a W. Munziger (Lipsiae: T. O. Weigel,

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1865), 694; Wolf Leslau, Comparative Dictionary of Geʿez (Classical Ethiopic): Geʿez–English / English–Geʿez, With an Index of the Semitic Roots (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1987), 391. Osvaldo Raineri translates the term as ‘merchants’, only. Compare Raineri, ‘I Doni Della Serenissima al Re Davide I d’Etiopia (Ms Raineri 43 Della Vaticana)’, 367; Raineri, ‘Abba Kirākos’, 211. 17. A very consistent but vague term denoting all of Latin Christianity. 18. BAV, Ms. Raineri 43, fol. 5v. 19. Coptic Egyptian prelate who served as Ethiopian Metropolitan from 1398/99 to 1438. 20. In the source, the advent of the ‘Frankish’ merchant-travellers immediately precedes the arrival of Bärtälomewos in Ethiopia, which we can securely date to 1398/99. For more information and a bibliography on Bärtälomewos, see Gianfrancesco Lusini, ‘Bärtälomewos’, in EAe 1 (2003), 485–86. 21. BAV, Ms. Raineri 43, fol. 6r. 22. Dawit is attested to as being personally involved in a number of military conflicts; around the time of the mission to Venice, he was involved in at least two campaigns against ʿAdal and a campaign against the Betä Ǝsraʾel, the Ethiopian Jews; see Taddesse Tamrat, Church and State in Ethiopia, 1270–1527, 153;  Steven Kaplan, ‘Betä Ǝsraʾel’,  in EAe 1 (2003), 552–559: 553. 23. BAV, Ms. Raineri 43, fol. 6r. 24. Which corresponds to early January. 25. BAV, Ms. Raineri 43, fol. 6v. 26. That is, the nǝgus´ Bandäqəya səmu Mikaʾel—‘the king of Bandäqəya whose name was Mikaʾel’; BAV, Ms. Raineri 43, fol. 6v. Although both names might initially appear confusing, they are clearly identifiable: the Gǝʿǝz term for the locality—Bandäqəya—is derived from Arabic ‫ البندﻗڍ―ﺔ‬or al-Bunduq¯ıya; compare also Raineri, ‘I Doni Della Serenissima al Re Davide I d’Etiopia (Ms Raineri 43 Della Vaticana)’, 364. Michele Steno had become the 63rd Doge of Venice in December 1400. 27. BAV, Ms. Raineri 43, fol. 7v. 28. Compare BAV, Ms. Raineri 43, fols. 7v-8r and Khater and Burmester, History of the Patriarchs of the Coptic Church of Alexandria, 250. 29. Eighty-seventh Coptic Patriarch of Alexandria from 1378 to 1408, also called Mattā al-maskı ̄n, ‘Matthew the wretched’. For his life as chronicled in the History of the Patriarchs, see Khater and Burmester, History of the Patriarchs of the Coptic Church of Alexandria, 235–71. 30. Compare BAV, Ms. Raineri 43, fols. 7v-8r and Khater and Burmester, History of the Patriarchs of the Coptic Church of Alexandria, 250.

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31. News of the Ethiopian embassy’s arrival first appear in a letter dated 21 June 1402; by the 26th of August, the Venetian Doge had written a letter of safe conduct instructing the Duke of Candia to ensure the safety and welfare of the Ethiopian ambassador. Compare Pastorello, Il Copialettere Marciano Della Cancelleria Carrarese: Gennaio 1402—Gennaio 1403, 258–59 and ASV, Duca di Candia, Ms. 1, fol. 1v, ed. in Freddy Thiriet, Duca Di Candia. Ducali E Lettere Ricevute (1358–1360; 1401–1405) (Venice: Comitato per la pubblicazione delle fonti relative alla storia di Venezia, 1978), sec. 7. 32. For the terms and Venetian protocol on occasions such as these, see Donald E.  Queller, ‘Early Venetian Legislation Concerning Foreign Ambassadors’, Studies in the Renaissance 12 (1965): 7–17. 33. Francesco Novello da Carrara to Francisco de Priulis and Paulo Mauroceno on 26 June 1402; BNM, Ms. lat. XIV, 93 =4530, fol. 64r, ed. in Pastorello, Il Copialettere Marciano Della Cancelleria Carrarese: Gennaio 1402— Gennaio 1403, 260. 34. Records of the Great Council of Venice, 22 July 1402; ASV, Magg. Cons. Deliberazioni A, fol. 21r. 35. Inventory list for the sanctuary of St Mark in Venice, 1402; BNM, Ms. it. VII, nr. 374, coll. 7781, fol. 40, ed. in Gallo, Il Tesoro Di San Marco e La Sua Storia, 288. 36. Records of the Venetian Senate, 10 August 1402; ASV, Senato Misti, reg. XLVI, fol. 36v and letter of Michele Steno to the Duke of Candia, 26 August 1402; ASV, Duca di Candia, Ms. 1, fol. 1v, ed. in Thiriet, Duca Di Candia. Ducali E Lettere Ricevute (1358–1360; 1401–1405), sec. 7. 37. As mentioned in the introduction, the myth of Prester John originated in Europe in the late twelfth century and concerned a formidable Christian ruler of extraordinary military power, a priest-king ruling justly over an awe-­inspiring and paradisiac realm of seemingly boundless riches somewhere beyond the Muslim world. He was first imagined and sought in Asia, but by the mid-fourteenth century, the location of Prester John’s ‘Indian’ empire was increasingly shifted from Asia to North-East Africa in the Latin Christian imagination. It is thus unsurprising that the Solomonic ambassadors should have been perceived as such upon their arrival in Venice in 1402. 38. ASV, Duca di Candia, Ms. 1, fol. 1v, ed. in Thiriet, Duca Di Candia. Ducali E Lettere Ricevute (1358–1360; 1401–1405), sec. 7. 39. Francesco II da Carrara, Lord of Padua, 1359–1406. 40. Specifically, Francesco was writing to Francisco de Priulis and Paulo Mauroceno. The Signoria of Venice was the supreme body of government of the Republic of Venice. 41. ‘stranie cosse, et tra le altre una pelle de uno homo salvego, e una pelle de uno aseno de diversi colore.’ BNM, Ms. lat. XIV, 93 =4530, fol. 64r, ed.

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in Pastorello, Il Copialettere Marciano Della Cancelleria Carrarese: Gennaio 1402—Gennaio 1403, 260. 42. ASV, Magg. Cons. Deliberazioni A, fol. 21r. and Pastorello, Il Copialettere Marciano Della Cancelleria Carrarese: Gennaio 1402—Gennaio 1403, 258–59. 43. BNM, Ms. it. VII, nr. 374, coll. 7781, fol. 40, ed. in Gallo, Il Tesoro Di San Marco e La Sua Storia, 288. 44. ASV, Magg. Cons. Deliberazioni A, fol. 21r. 45. Francesco had already corresponded with the Doge of Venice on 21 June 1402 regarding these animals; the Signoria borrowed a wagon for the onward transport of two of the leopards; see Pastorello, Il Copialettere Marciano Della Cancelleria Carrarese: Gennaio 1402—Gennaio 1403, 258–59. 46. The Great Council or Maggior Consiglio was part of the governmental structure of the Republic of Venice. It was the theoretical fount of all authority and its biggest political organ. Membership was a hereditary right exclusive to the Venetian nobility. 47. ‘Quia excellens dominus Prestozane, dominus partium Indie, ostendens nostro dominio signum bone caritatis, miserit ad nos nuncium suum ad praesentandum nobis quatuor leopardos, arromata, et certas alias res placibiles, et sit honoris nostri dominii, consideratis enxeniis nobis factis ex sui parte, visitare eum de rebus nostris istarum partium. Vadit pars quod in illis rebus que videbuntur dominio possint expendi ducati mille auri de pecunia nostri communis, et est capta per sex consiliarios tria capita de quadraginta et triginta et ultra de consilio de quadraginta.’ ASV, Magg. Cons. Deliberazioni A, fol. 21r. A late-fourteenth-century decree had sought to limit gifts and other expenses made for the benefit of foreign ambassadors to a total expenditure of 500 ducats a year, with exclusions concerning states with which Venice had pacts covering ambassadorial expenses. As the salary of an ambassador was half a ducat a day in the 1440s, this sum would have equated several years’ worth of wages for a high-ranking individual; see Queller, ‘Early Venetian Legislation Concerning Foreign Ambassadors’. 48. ASV, Magg. Cons. Deliberazioni A, fol. 21r. 49. ‘Un calixe d’arzento dorado, lavorado a neliello, donado all’Orator del prete Janni per conto de una perla de carati 12 o più, manda questo prete Janni, qual perla fu posta in procuratia 1402.’ BNM, Ms. it. VII, nr. 374, coll. 7781, fol. 40, ed. in Gallo, Il Tesoro Di San Marco e La Sua Storia, 288. The inventory list published by Gallo was written originally by Fortunato Olmo and compiled between the years 1634 and 1640. Olmo states that he was copying the original list from 1402, which was captioned ‘Nel Santuario’; see Gallo, Il Tesoro Di San Marco e La Sua Storia, 287. Copied entries in Olmo’s account start on June 1283 and were later

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added to by his successors until the year 1845; see Gallo, Il Tesoro Di San Marco e La Sua Storia, 237–402. 50. BAV, Ms. Raineri 43, fols. 18r, 18v, 19r and 19v as well as the account of Francisco Alvares, who spent six years in Ethiopia in the early 1520s; see Beckingham and Huntingford, The Prester John of the Indies, 298. 51. The Consiglio dei Rogadi, also known as the Senate, part of the upper governmental structure of the Republic of Venice. The Maggior Consiglio or the Great Council elected its members. With quicker decision-making capabilities, it was in charge of voting on foreign policy and current issues. 52. ‘Capta. Quod concedatur Nuncio ambaxiatorum domini Presti Zane domini Indie redituro ad illas partes, quod possit secum conducere infrascriptos ad dictas partes, videlicet Victum pictorem de Florentia, habitatorem Venetiis, seu qui solebat habitare in contrata Sancti Leonis; quendam Spatarium Neapolitanum, qui habitabat Padue, conductum per dictum Nuncium de Padua Venetias cum bulleta, ut dixit; Antonium de Florentiam muratorem, habitatorem Venetiis, qui non est magister sed operarius; Antonium de Tarvisio eius socium, qui quandoque stat Venetiis, quandoque Tarvisii, est etiam operarius et scit facere cupos et lateres; Antonium de Florentia marangonum, habitatorem Venetiis, qui ad presens est in canceribus.’ ASV, Senato Misti, reg. XLVI, fol. 36v. 53. ASV, Duca di Candia, Ms. 1, fol. 1v, ed. in Thiriet, Duca Di Candia. Ducali E Lettere Ricevute (1358–1360; 1401–1405), sec. 7. 54. Marilyn E. Heldman proposed that one of the chalices described both in the Homily and in the later account of Francisco Alvares went through the hands of various merchants and commercial agents in Venice and Egypt; cf. Heldman, ‘A Chalice from Venice for Emperor Dawit of Ethiopia’, 443. Matteo Salvadore concluded that ‘the discussed records confirm that the gifts made it back to Ethiopia, the fate of the party is unknown and probably neither the envoys nor the artisans reached the destination’; cf. Salvadore, ‘The Ethiopian Age of Exploration: Prester John’s Discovery of Europe, 1306–1458’, 607. He later added that a safe return of the ambassador to Ethiopia was doubtful; cf. Salvadore, The African Prester John and the Birth of Ethiopian-European Relations, 1402–1555, 32. 55. Proposed in Raineri, ‘I Doni Della Serenissima al Re Davide I d’Etiopia (Ms Raineri 43 Della Vaticana)’, 381. Taddesse Tamrat notes that the Mäṣḥafä ṭefut contains a passage referring to the embassies of asẹ Dawit as well as to embassies arriving the court of Dawit; see Taddesse Tamrat, Church and State in Ethiopia, 1270–1527, 257. This is possibly a doublet of the story told in the Nägs ́ hymn translated by Getatchew Haile, see below, footnote 63. 56. Compare Map 2. 57. BAV, Ms. Raineri 43, fols. 8v-9r. This reception evokes elements of a spontaneous celebration of mass, where singing, dancing and the clap-

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ping of hands may feature as parts of Ethiopian liturgy. See Samantha Kelly, ‘Medieval Ethiopian Diasporas’, in A Companion to Medieval Ethiopia and Eritrea, ed. Samantha Kelly (Leiden: Brill, 2020), 437; Gianfrancesco Lusini, ‘The Ancient and Medieval History of Eritrean and Ethiopian Monasticism: An Outline’, in A Companion to Medieval Ethiopia and Eritrea, ed. Samantha Kelly (Leiden: Brill, 2020), 198 with other examples and further literature. 58. BAV, Ms. Raineri 43, fols. 9r-12v. 59. Compare Khater and Burmester, History of the Patriarchs of the Coptic Church of Alexandria, 250. 60. ASV, Magg. Cons. Deliberazioni A, fol. 21r; BAV, Ms. Raineri 43, fols. 14v-55v. Also see Raineri, ‘I Doni Della Serenissima al Re Davide I d’Etiopia (Ms Raineri 43 Della Vaticana)’, 370–74. 61. For an in-depth study on the cultural and religious significance of this most holy object in Ethiopia and Ethiopian texts on the True Cross, see Getatchew Haile, The Ethiopian Orthodox Church’s Tradition on the Holy Cross (Leiden: Brill, 2017). 62. Compare BAV, Ms. Raineri 43, fols. 7v-9r and Khater and Burmester, History of the Patriarchs of the Coptic Church of Alexandria, 249–50. 63. Getatchew Haile, The Ethiopian Orthodox Church’s Tradition on the Holy Cross, 4, 251. One tradition, a Nägs ́ hymn written by Dawit’s son aṣe Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob, states that the cross had been sent to Dawit by the Greek populations of the Eastern Mediterranean. Here, its arrival is connected to an earlier call for help from Muslim violence by these Orthodox communities, which the nǝgus ́ had heeded, rerouting the Nile, and consequently securing protection of these Eastern Christian communities. See Getatchew Haile, The Ethiopian Orthodox Church’s Tradition on the Holy Cross, 4–14. 64. The information on the True Cross’ arrival in Ethiopia is also corroborated in other Ethiopian chronicles: the Ṭ a ̄nāsee 106 chronicle states for the reign of Dawit that ‘in his time there was brought a piece of the holy cross of our Lord Jesus in Ethiopia […] and it was received with due deference and kingly dignity’; see Franz Amadeus Dombrowski, Ṭ a ̄nas̄ ee 106: Eine Chronik Der Herrscher Äthiopiens (Wiesbaden: F.  Steiner, 1983), 154. Similarly put in René Basset, Études Sur l’histoire d’Éthiopie (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1882), 101. 65. When Osvaldo Raineri first published on the source, he opined that the nǝgus ́ had given 1000 pieces of gold to his ambassador before his departure: BAV, Ms. Raineri 43, fol. 6r, ed. in Raineri, ‘I Doni Della Serenissima al Re Davide I d’Etiopia (Ms Raineri 43 Della Vaticana)’, 367. Our reading of the passage leans towards the understanding that the merchanttraveller was to be rewarded with this sizeable sum only upon completion of his task of bringing the True Cross. And yet, Raineri’s reading would

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open up the possibility of the Ethiopian acquisition of additional objects. It must be noted that this specific relic would have been very much treasured in Venice itself: a purported piece of the True Cross had been gifted to the Scuola Grande di San Giovanni Evangelista in Venice in the late fourteenth century; it was depicted many times in Italian art and remains in Venice to this day. It is remarkable that no Venetian source currently known attests that the Republic had possessed and gifted another piece of this a highly revered relic to Ethiopia. 66. BNM, Ms. it. VII, nr. 374, coll. 7781, fol. 40, ed. in Gallo, Il Tesoro Di San Marco e La Sua Storia, 288. 67. BAV, Ms. Raineri 43, fols. 18r, 18v, 19r and 19v. 68. It says it was a ‘calixe d’arzento dorado, lavorado a neliello’, with neliello a contraction for nel niello; BNM, Ms. it. VII, nr. 374, coll. 7781, fol. 40, ed. in Gallo, Il Tesoro Di San Marco e La Sua Storia, 288. 69. BAV, Ms. Raineri 43, fol. 18v. 70. BAV, Ms. Raineri 43, fol. 18v. Also see Raineri, ‘I Doni Della Serenissima al Re Davide I d’Etiopia (Ms Raineri 43 Della Vaticana)’, 370. 71. Beckingham and Huntingford, The Prester John of the Indies, 298. 72. Luke 22:20. 73. BAV, Ms. Raineri 43, fol. 18v. Also see Raineri, ‘I Doni Della Serenissima al Re Davide I d’Etiopia (Ms Raineri 43 Della Vaticana)’, 370. 74. Compare Khater and Burmester, History of the Patriarchs of the Coptic Church of Alexandria, 249–50. 75. BAV, Ms. Raineri 43, fol. 22v. 76. BAV, Ms. Raineri 43, fols. 22v-25r. 77. BAV, Ms. Raineri 43, fol. 27v. Their embroidery was so rich that the author used the word mänsäf, which does not appear in dictionaries of Gǝʿǝz. It is however reminiscent of mänṣäf, ‘carpet’, and could thus possibly indicate a ‘carpet-like’ thickness of fabric. 78. They appear to be religious engravings on glass of some sort; BAV, Ms. Raineri 43, fol. 43r. 79. BAV, Ms. Raineri 43, fols. 33v-36r. 80. Compare Khater and Burmester, History of the Patriarchs of the Coptic Church of Alexandria, 249. The relic was later preserved in the monastery of Tädbabä Maryam; see Diana Spencer, ‘In Search of St Luke Ikons in Ethiopia’, Journal of Ethiopian Studies 10, no. 2 (1972): 78. 81. BAV, Ms. Raineri 43, fol. 26v-55v. 82. BAV, Ms. Raineri 43, fol. 28r. 83. See Meley Mulugetta, ‘A Mechanical Clock from Venice for Emperor Dawit of Ethiopia’ for an in-depth study of the clock’s reception in Ethiopia; according to Gianfranco Fiaccadori, it had previously belonged to the Byzantine emperor of Trebizond, Manuel III Komnenos, 1364–1417; see Gianfranco Fiaccadori, ‘Sul Reliquiario Della Vera Croce

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Nel Tesoro Della Cattedrale Di Alessandria’, La Parola Del Passato 66 (2011): 281–305. 84. BAV, Ms. Raineri 43, fol. 8r. 85. Raineri, ‘I Doni Della Serenissima al Re Davide I d’Etiopia (Ms Raineri 43 Della Vaticana)’, 382; Vittorio Lazzarini, ‘Una Bolla d’oro Di Michele Steno’, Nuovo Archivio Veneto 14 (1897): 366. 86. Lazzarini, ‘Una Bolla d’oro Di Michele Steno’, 366; Raineri, ‘Abba Kirākos’, 227. 87. Museo di Cividale di Friuli, Codice diplomatico Boiani 6, doc. 352, ed. in Lazzarini, ‘Un’ambasciata Etiopica in Italia Nel 1404’, 845–46, also published with very few alterations in 1935 in Rivista di Venezia; Lefèvre, ‘Presenze Etiopiche in Italia Prima Del Concilio Di Firenze Del 1439’, 15–16. For Candido de Bona, also see Lazzarini, ‘Un’ambasciata Etiopica in Italia Nel 1404’, 839–40. For a detailed study of the episode, also see Lowe, ‘“Representing” Africa: Ambassadors and Princes from Christian Africa to Renaissance Italy and Portugal, 1402–1608’. 88. The knight Corrado Boiani. A prominent noble and politician from Cividale, Corrado is famous for his well-preserved letter collection to other Italian noblemen at the turn of the fifteenth century now in the Museo di Cividale di Friuli under the section ‘Codice diplomatico Boiani’. 89. Which would indicate that they were dressed in a greyish-brown or grey habit. The colour of the Franciscan habit was not yet as firmly established in the fifteenth century; the garments were often of a mixed undyed wool, which tended to be greyish-brown, long and loose with wide sleeves and a cowl, fastened by a simple rope. They were thus distinguishable from other orders, such as Dominicans (white gown covered by a black cloak and cowl), Carthusians (white gowns), Cistercians (white robes) or Benedictines (black habit and cowl). 90. Museo di Cividale di Friuli, Codice diplomatico Boiani 6, doc. 352, ed. in Lazzarini, ‘Un’ambasciata Etiopica in Italia Nel 1404’, 845–46. 91. Eine Moore, ‘Crosses’, in EAe 1 (2003), 818–19. 92. Ethiopian monks travelling through Europe were frequently mistaken for Franciscans by European contemporaries. In scholarship, this observation or misunderstanding has probably given rise to the unsubstantiated notion of Franciscan missions in Ethiopia prior to the sixteenth century. There is no sign of an organised Franciscan missionary presence in Ethiopia, or of Ethiopian Franciscans in the late Middle Ages, beyond the fact that brownish-grey habits were misidentified by European contemporaries.

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93. Brandings or scarification in the shape of a cross on the forehead are still found in parts of the northern highlands today, especially in the north-­ eastern Ethiopian region of Tǝgray. It was a consistently popular theme amongst late medieval European travellers remarking upon Ethiopians. It is also mentioned in Ethiopian texts of the time: a ‘Miracle of Mary’ on the mid-fifteenth-century childhood of as ̣e Bäʾǝdä Maryam states that his mother and the nǝgus ́ repeatedly ‘incised his face with a razor’ in the sign of the cross in order to sanctify him for the Virgin Mary; see Getatchew Haile, ‘Power Struggle in the Medieval Court of Ethiopia: The Case of Batargela-­Maryam’, Journal of Ethiopian Studies 15 (1982): 51, 53, 55. 94. Museo di Cividale di Friuli, Codice diplomatico Boiani 6, doc. 352, ed. in Lazzarini, ‘Un’ambasciata Etiopica in Italia Nel 1404’, 845–46. 95. ‘Hos omnes recepit r[everendissi]mus dominus Cardinalis Aquilegensis in curia sua et eis providit de camera et expensis.’ Museo di Cividale di Friuli, Codice diplomatico Boiani 6, doc. 352, ed. in Lazzarini, ‘Un’ambasciata Etiopica in Italia Nel 1404’, 846; Lefèvre, ‘Presenze Etiopiche in Italia Prima Del Concilio Di Firenze Del 1439’, 15–16. 96. 1350–1431, Patriarch of Aquileia from 1402 to 1412. 97. Also called Angelo degli Ubaldi, a well-known Italian jurist from a famed family of jurists, 1328–1407. 98. Museo di Cividale di Friuli, Codice diplomatico Boiani 6, doc. 352, ed. in Lazzarini, ‘Un’ambasciata Etiopica in Italia Nel 1404’, 846. 99. A later note in the source explicitly refers to the ‘Book of the Magi’, ed. in Lazzarini, ‘Un’ambasciata Etiopica in Italia Nel 1404’, 846. 100. ‘et se per totum concordant sicut narrat ille liber trium Regum quem modo hic habet dominus Angelus de Perusio, et cuius tenorem libenter audiunt et dum eis explanatur per interpretem rident, se stringunt et multum gaudent quod de eis et propriis nominibus eorum ducum, principum et pontificum aliquid hic sentimus.’ Museo di Cividale di Friuli, Codice diplomatico Boiani 6, doc. 352, ed. in Lazzarini, ‘Un’ambasciata Etiopica in Italia Nel 1404’, 846. Also see Lowe, ‘“Representing” Africa: Ambassadors and Princes from Christian Africa to Renaissance Italy and Portugal, 1402–1608’, 101–106 for a different interpretation of the incident. 101. ‘De illius libri magorum tenore vos poterunt informare domini canonici Nicolaus Philippi et meus Odoricus Micussii’; Museo di Cividale di Friuli, Codice diplomatico Boiani 6, doc. 352, ed. in Lazzarini, ‘Un’ambasciata Etiopica in Italia Nel 1404’, 846. 102. ‘boni reperti christiani’; Museo di Cividale di Friuli, Codice diplomatico Boiani 6, doc. 352, ed. in Lazzarini, ‘Un’ambasciata Etiopica in Italia Nel 1404’, 845.

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103. ‘Respondent quod missi sunt a predictis dominis suis, vel eorum altero, ad sanctissimum dominum nostrum papam, non ad aliud nisi ut inquirant et sciant, utrum ipse summus pontifex pro parte dictorum dominorum suorum, aut eorum altero, receperit unum enxenium videlicet unam mitram albam cum lapidibus preciosis et unam blaveam similiter valoris. CC. M. ­ducatorum, unum indumentum sacerdotale, de balsamo et alia multa ad  valorem V millia ducatorum.’ Museo di Cividale di Friuli, Codice diplomatico Boiani 6, doc. 352, ed. in Lazzarini, ‘Un’ambasciata Etiopica in Italia Nel 1404’, 846. Lazzarini reads the staggering amount of ‘.V.c. M.’ as the value of gifts; Lefèvre’s reading of ‘V millia’ seems more prudent; see Lefèvre, ‘Presenze Etiopiche in Italia Prima Del Concilio Di Firenze Del 1439’, 16. 104. ‘et etiam aliquas reliquias istorum sanctorum Rome existentes’; Museo di Cividale di Friuli, Codice diplomatico Boiani 6, doc. 352, ed. in Lazzarini, ‘Un’ambasciata Etiopica in Italia Nel 1404’, 846. The direct reference to Rome indicates that the earlier mission had indeed been sent to the Eternal City and not to the rival papal court at Avignon, which would have been a possibility as this episode still falls into the time of the Western Schism. 105. That is, the gifts described are entirely different in nature, the timeframe would not match up. Museo di Cividale di Friuli, Codice diplomatico Boiani 6, doc. 352, ed. in Lazzarini, ‘Un’ambasciata Etiopica in Italia Nel 1404’, 846. 106. ‘Et quia ille ambassiator ad eos reversus est sine predictorum aliquo’; Museo di Cividale di Friuli, Codice diplomatico Boiani 6, doc. 352, ed. in Lazzarini, ‘Un’ambasciata Etiopica in Italia Nel 1404’, 846. Matteo Salvadore has opined that the Ethiopians of 1404 had come to enquire after the 1402 embassy led by Anthonius Bartoli; cf. Salvadore, ‘The Ethiopian Age of Exploration: Prester John’s Discovery of Europe, 1306–1458’, 607. 107. ‘Et, dum audierunt quod hic habentur inter alia cunabula parvuli Jesu Christi quasi flentes deposcunt ostendi sibi. […] Audiunt et vident de columpna verberacionis boni Yesu, vultum sanctum Sudarii, novem corpora apostolorum’; Museo di Cividale di Friuli, Codice diplomatico Boiani 6, doc. 352, ed. in Lazzarini, ‘Un’ambasciata Etiopica in Italia Nel 1404’, 846. 108. BAV, Reg. Vat. 320, fol. 133v, ed. in Lefèvre, ‘Presenze Etiopiche in Italia Prima Del Concilio Di Firenze Del 1439’, 15, note 1. 109. ‘Duo religiosi de Yndia nigerimi barbati papam salutant, et, in signum fidei Christiane, cruces ad eorum pectora delatas necnon eorum baptisma ad aurem dextram non flumine sed flamine ostendunt, dicentes: ‘[...] licet alii deviaverint a fide, nunquam tamen deviavimus, sed veri sumus

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Christiani.’ Et gratam audienciam habuerunt.’ Ed. and transl. in Edward Maunde Thompson, Chronicon Adae de Usk, A.D. 1377–1421 (London: H. Frowde, 1904), 93, 267. 110. Compare Peri Klemm, ‘Body Ornamentation: Scarification and Tattooing’, in EAe 1 (2003), 600–601; Margaux Herman, ‘Towards a History of Women in Medieval Ethiopia’, in A Companion to Medieval Ethiopia and Eritrea, ed. Samantha Kelly (Leiden: Brill, 2020), 367–68. 111. This is clear from the tenses used in the Latin. 112. ‘quendam Spatarium Neapolitanum, qui habitabat Padue, conductum per dictum Nuncium de Padua Venetias cum bulleta, ut dixit’; ASV, Senato Misti, reg. XLVI, fol. 36v. 113. Compare the many mentions of swords alongside lances and bows in G.W.B.  Huntingford, The Glorious Victories of Amda Seyon, King of Ethiopia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965); Manfred Kropp, Der ̄ Siegreiche Feldzug Des Königs ʿAmda-Ṣ eyon Gegen Die Muslime in Adal Im Jahre 1332 n. Chr. (Leuven: Peeters, 1994). 114. The original manuscript is in the BNCF, MSS Misc. II, IV, 109, fols. 87r-88v, two densely written folios, expertly and precisely planned out by one hand only on three sides. First published by Nicolai Iorga, ‘Iter De Venetis Ad Indiam, Appendix to the Article Cenni Sulle Relazioni Tra l’Abissinia e l’Europa Cattolica Nel Secoli XIV–XV, Con Un Iterario Inedito Del Secolo XV’, Centenario Della Nascita Di Michele Amari 1 (1910): 139–50, reprinted in part by Osbert Crawford as Iter F, Osbert G.  S. Crawford,  ed., Ethiopian Itineraries circa 1400–1524: Including Those Collected by Alessandro Zorzi at Venice in the Years 1519–1524 (Cambridge: Hakluyt Society, 1958), 28–29. 115. Pragmatic late medieval Latin, to be precise, with traces of Italian. 116. Glue and paste marks are clearly visible on all sides of the folios, but especially on fol. 88r-88v. 117. While the first few folios are fifteenth-century copies of sermons and letters by famous fourteenth-century intellectuals—such as Petrarch and Boccaccio—the majority of texts are copies of letters by Florentine humanists, important Italian ecclesiastics and even an exchange between Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II and Pope Nicholas V. None of the texts date after 1453. 118. Compare Guiseppe Mazzantini, Inventari Dei Manoscritti Delle Biblioteche d’Italia, vol. X (Forli: Casa Editrice Luigi Bordandini, 1900), 123–24. 119. Cf. the heading for ‘Iter F’ in Crawford, Ethiopian Itineraries circa 1400–1524: Including Those Collected by Alessandro Zorzi at Venice in the Years 1519–1524, 28–39. Iorga concludes that it was based on information acquired in Ethiopia during the reign of asẹ Dawit; see Iorga, ‘Iter

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De Venetis Ad Indiam’, 145. Dated to the first half of the fifteenth century in Franz-­ Christoph Muth, ‘Eine arabisch-äthiopische Wort- und Satzliste aus Jerusalem vom 15. Jahrhundert’, Afriques, no. 01 (April 2010), para. 1. Salvadore dates it to 1402, cf. Salvadore, ‘The Ethiopian Age of Exploration: Prester John’s Discovery of Europe, 1306–1458’, 604; Salvadore, The African Prester John and the Birth of EthiopianEuropean Relations, 1402–1555, 26–27, 32. 120. Cf. Salvadore, The African Prester John and the Birth of Ethiopian-­ European Relations, 1402–1555, 26–27, 32, based on Iorga, ‘Iter De Venetis Ad Indiam’. 121. Muth, ‘Eine arabisch-äthiopische Wort- und Satzliste aus Jerusalem vom 15. Jahrhundert’, para. 1 based on Marcel Cohen, Études d’éthiopien méridional (Paris: Librairie orientaliste Paul Geuthner–Librarie de la Société asiatique, 1931), 369. 122. Also compare the fifteenth-century Genoese activities in the Sahara, evidence of which was long thought to be preserved solely in the copy of a single letter written by Antonio Malfante; see Robert O.  Collins, Documents from the African Past (Princeton: Marcus Wiener Publishers, 2001), 16–20. 123. ‘Si meare cupis de Jerusalem in Indiam, ubi quiescit corpus beati Thome Apostoli, hoc iter assumes in nomine Domini’; BNCF, Ms. Misc. II, IV, 109, fol. 87r, ed. in Iorga, ‘Iter De Venetis Ad Indiam’, 146. The text itself states ‘India’ as burial place of St Thomas, a connection today most likely referring to the St Thomas Christians in Kerala on the south-western coast of India. Late medieval references to ‘India’ often include ‘Ethiopia’; additionally, the belief that St Thomas had converted the Ethiopians is found in fifteenth- and even early-sixteenth-century travel itineraries by Europeans; see, for example, Arnold von Harff, The Pilgrimage of Arnold von Harff, Knight, from Cologne through Italy, Syria, Egypt, Arabia, Ethiopia, Nubia, Palestine, Turkey, France, and Spain, Which He Accomplished in the Years 1496 to 1499, ed. Malcolm Henry Letts (London: Hakluyt Society, 1946), 158–59. 124. Several Ethiopian names beginning with a long, aspirated a-sound have been transcribed by the authors of the text with a cha-sound, that is, Chaamera or Chaamara for Amhara and Chaxum for Aksum. The combination ch can stand for k, h, or ḵ (spirantised k), indicating that the form behind Chaamara was ‘Hamara’, a variant or distorted form of Amḥara. X appears to stand in for š or s, as is indicated by numerous Arabic renderings; see below. 125. Given as ‘Riffin’ in the text. Iorga identified it with the Egyptian town of Qifṭ or Koptos, a small town north of Luxor on the east bank of the Nile; see Iorga, ‘Iter De Venetis Ad Indiam’, 146, note 4.

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126. ʿAyḏāb, a Red Sea port town just north of today’s border between Egypt and Sudan. 127. Sawākin, a Red Sea port in today’s north-eastern Sudan. 128. ‘Scias te ad ethiopiam p[er]uenisse.’ BNCF, Ms. Misc. II, IV, 109, fol. 87r, ed. in Iorga, ‘Iter De Venetis Ad Indiam’, 147. 129. ‘Collecti dies CLXXXI.’ BNCF, Ms. Misc. II, IV, 109, fol. 87r, ed. in Iorga, ‘Iter De Venetis Ad Indiam’, 147. 130. ‘Presto Johannes sedet in solio suo tempore hiemali in Chaamara. Tempore autem estivo sedet et inhabitat in Sciahua. Cui principi nomen proprium est David. Qui habet sub se XII reges’; BNCF, Ms. Misc. II, IV, 109, fol. 87v, ed. in Iorga, ‘Iter  De Venetis Ad Indiam’, 147. The Ethiopian royal court or kätäma was indeed known to move from Amhara to Šäwa according to the rainy or dry seasons; see Deresse Ayenachew, ‘Territorial Expansion and Administrative Evolution under the “Solomonic” Dynasty’, in A Companion to Medieval Ethiopia and Eritrea, ed. Samantha Kelly (Leiden: Brill, 2020), 71. 131. Examples would be ‘Hueleghe’ for Wälläga, ‘Ghiogiam’ for Goǧǧam, ‘Doaro’ for Däwaro, ‘Dambia’ for Dämbǝya, ‘Huelica’ for Wäläqa and so on. The ruler of the last historical province, traditionally called the Kentiba, is, for instance, correctly given as ‘CHENTEVA’. I’m currently working on an article examining this fascinating document in detail with Wolbert Smidt, on whose socio-linguistic competence pertaining to spoken Tǝgrǝñña and Amharic colloquialisms this section relies. 132. BNCF, Ms. Misc. II, IV, 109, fol. 87v, ed. in Iorga, ‘Iter De Venetis Ad Indiam’, 148. 133. ‘Nunc scribam interpretationes aliquorum nominum de lingua Latina in Ethiopiam linguam, idest in linguam provincie iter Jerusalem et Presto Johannem, que vocabula sunt valde necessaria homini inde transeunti.’ BNCF, Ms. Misc. II, IV, 109, fol. 87v, ed. in Iorga, ‘Iter De Venetis Ad Indiam’, 148. 134. For an earlier study of the word lists, also see Muth, ‘Eine arabisch-­ äthiopische Wort- und Satzliste aus Jerusalem vom 15. Jahrhundert’. For a fourteenth-century ‘Arabic-Ethiopic Glossary’ that renders terms from various Ethiopian languages in Arabic letters, compare 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: Brill, 2016). 135. ‘Panis: Inghiera. Vinum: Sacera. Olium: Zait. Pisces: Asa. Carnes: Segha [...] Cauall [sic!]  Equs: Fars. Asinus: Cholo.’ BNCF, Ms. Misc. II, IV, 109, fol. 87v, ed. in Iorga, ‘Iter De Venetis Ad Indiam’, 148. 136. Again transliterated into Latin letters. It was originally given as ‘lingua habraica’ in the manuscript and subsequently struck through; BNCF, Ms.

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Misc. II, IV, 109, fol. 87v. I thank Mohammed Badawi of Konstanz and Tawfiq Daʿadli of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem for their expertise. 137. ‘Est hoc bonum iter? Hiach menghed. […] Quo exit hec via? Embiro tarich. […] Vbi est maior platea? hurinsuch.’ BNCF, Ms. Misc. II, IV, 109, fol. 87v, ed. in Iorga, ‘Iter De Venetis Ad Indiam’, 148. 138. ‘Hospitium vbi est? Findoc fiain. […] Docere me ubi hospitale est: maristan. […] Vbi resident mercatores? Degiar suchdegiar.’ BNCF, Ms. Misc. II, IV, 109, fol. 87v, ed. in Iorga, ‘Iter De Venetis Ad Indiam’, 148. 139. ‘Date mihi: Atin. Venunda mihi hoc: suolli. Quantam pecuniam uis de hoc? cham teridi.’ BNCF, Ms. Misc. II, IV, 109, fol. 87v, ed. in Iorga, ‘Iter De Venetis Ad Indiam’, 149. 140. ‘Atramentum: ebbrie. Folium charte: huaracha. Calamus: ghasana.’ BNCF, Ms. Misc. II, IV, 109, fol. 88r, ed. in Iorga, ‘Iter De Venetis Ad Indiam’, 149. 141. See BNCF, Ms. Misc. II, IV, 109, fol. 88r, ed. in Iorga, ‘Iter De Venetis Ad Indiam’, 149. 142. ‘Pira: angias. Persica: chuoch. Pepones: batich [...] cepe: bessel. Alia: toni.’ BNCF, Ms. Misc. II, IV, 109, fol. 88r, ed. in Iorga, ‘Iter De Venetis Ad Indiam’, 149. 143. ‘lingua indorum’; BNCF, Ms. Misc. II, IV, 109, fol. 88r. 144. I thank Wolbert Smidt for this assessment. 145. ‘Veni mecum: naam.’ BNCF, Ms. Misc. II, IV, 109, fol. 88r, ed. in Iorga, ‘Iter De Venetis Ad Indiam’, 149. 146. As suggested by Wolbert Smidt. 147. ‘Quo ducit uia haec? Menghed assain.’ BNCF, Ms. Misc. II, IV, 109, fol. 88r, ed. in Iorga, ‘Iter De Venetis Ad Indiam’, 149. 148. ‘Ego uolo ire i[n] tale[m] patria[m]: scialoc et dela.’ BNCF, Ms. Misc. II, IV, 109, fol. 88r, ed. in Iorga, ‘Iter De Venetis Ad Indiam’, 149. 149. ‘Est securu[m] hoc iter? Cerni menghet. […] Vellem ire ad d[omi]n[u]m terre. Aufari nigragni.’ BNCF, Ms. Misc. II, IV, 109, fol. 88r, ed. in Iorga, ‘Iter De Venetis Ad Indiam’, 150. 150. ‘Ficus. Bele. Persica. Cuoco. Mala citrina. Narenchi. […] Piper. Berbere. Cinamomu[m]. Gherf.’ BNCF, Ms. Misc. II, IV, 109, fol. 88r, ed. in Iorga, ‘Iter De Venetis Ad Indiam’, 150. 151. ‘Domine mi, advena sum ego, detis mihi domum pro habitatione huius noctis: aufari bietta stangni. [...] Des mihi bonum lectum per Deum: seitain meniaf begani.’ BNCF, Ms. Misc. II, IV, 109, fol. 88r, ed. in Iorga, ‘Iter De Venetis Ad Indiam’, 149–50. 152. BNCF, Ms. Misc. II, IV, 109, fol. 88r, ed. in Iorga, ‘Iter De Venetis Ad Indiam’, 150. 153. Compare BNCF, Ms. Misc. II, IV, 109, fol. 88v, ed. in Iorga, ‘Iter De Venetis Ad Indiam’, 150. 154. BNCF, Ms. Misc. II, IV, 109, fol. 88r.

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155. BNCF, Ms. Misc. II, IV, 109, fol. 88r. 156. I thank Margit Mersch of Ruhr-University Bochum for this observation. 157. More often than not, the distinction of province and ruler by writing the names in lower- or uppercase is exactly the wrong way around, or specific sub-regions of a province were understood as the ruler’s title; see BNCF, Ms. Misc. II, IV, 109, fol. 87v. 158. ‘Des mihi bonu[m] lectu[m] p[er] deu[m]: Seitain meniaf begani […] Des mihi q[od] manducem: Atat ainorana’; BNCF, Ms. Misc. II, IV, 109, fol. 88r. ‘Meniaf’ appears a misspelt form of meniat or mätäňňat, ‘to sleep’; ‘Atat ainorana’ appears a corruption of ät-ät anoräñ, an archaic dialectal form of saying ‘let me live with this and that’—a cultural way of asking to get oneself invited, and eventually fed, according to Wolbert Smidt’s assessment. 159. This is suggested by the Arabic-Ethiopian glossary of the king al-Malik al-Afḍal in Yemen, see Franz-Christoph Muth, ‘Frühe Zeugnisse Des Amharischen Und Der Gurage-Sprachen in Einer Polyglotten Wortliste von Al-Malik Al-Afḍal (Gest. 778/1377)’, Folia Orientalia 45–46 (2010 2009): 87–109; Bulakh and Kogan, The Arabic-Ethiopic Glossary by alMalik al-Afḍal: An Annotated Edition with a Linguistic Introduction and a Lexical Index. Moreover, a source on early-sixteenth-century Ethiopia bemoans that ‘people were enjoying themselves by conversing in Amharic and Arabic’ instead of doing sensible things with their time; see 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, Roma 1972, ed. Enrico Cerulli (Rome: Accademia nazionale dei Lincei, 1974), 552. For a history of Arabic in Ethiopia, see Alessandro Gori, ‘Arabic in Ethiopia’, in EAe 1 (2003), 301–304. I also thank Manfred Kropp of the University of Mainz for his expertise and assessment. 160. See Amélie Chekroun and Bertrand Hirsch, ‘The Sultanates of Medieval Ethiopia’, in A Companion to Medieval Ethiopia and Eritrea, ed. Samantha Kelly (Leiden: Brill, 2020), 86–112. 161. Cohen, Études d’éthiopien méridional, 369, based on Hans Schlobies. 162. Lefèvre, ‘Presenze Etiopiche in Italia Prima Del Concilio Di Firenze Del 1439’, 11; Salvadore, The African Prester John and the Birth of Ethiopian-­ European Relations, 1402–1555, 26–27, 32. 163. Bartoli was Florentine, his journey would have been from Ethiopia to Venice—the detailed itinerary would thus be the projection of a possible future journey from Venice to Ethiopia. 164. Opposed to other, completely fictitious and misunderstood notes like those found in von Harff, The Pilgrimage of Arnold von Harff, Knight, from Cologne through Italy, Syria, Egypt, Arabia, Ethiopia, Nubia,

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Palestine, Turkey, France, and Spain, Which He Accomplished in the Years 1496 to 1499, 160–61. 165. Scholars have speculated that Bartoli spent as much as 12 years at the court of the nǝgus;́ see Cates Baldridge, Prisoners of Prester John: The Portuguese Mission to Ethiopia in Search of the Mythical King, 1520–1526 (Jefferson: McFarland & Company, 2012), 22, based on Richard Pankhurst, The Ethiopians: A History (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1998); others have suggested at least ‘a prolonged sojourn’; see Salvadore, The African Prester John and the Birth of Ethiopian-European Relations, 1402–1555, 24 or that he entered Ethiopia ‘in the 1390s’; see Richard Pankhurst, ‘Europe, Relations With’, in EAe 2 (2005), 451. The logical timeline of the Homily suggests that Bartoli had spent at least two years in Ethiopia. 166. As stated by Heldman, ‘A Chalice from Venice for Emperor Dawit of Ethiopia’, 443; Salvadore, ‘The Ethiopian Age of Exploration: Prester John’s Discovery of Europe, 1306–1458’, 607. 167. While Mamlūk Sultans mistreated Coptic Christians living in their lands, no known source from the fourteenth century until 1520 speaks of attacks against Ethiopian pilgrims and ambassadors en route through Egypt. Ethiopian accounts instead mention the kindness of Mamlūk Muslim authorities towards Christians passing through their lands: the Acts of St ʿƎzra of Gundä Gunde narrate how ʿƎzra and his companions were amicably welcomed and treated to a rich meal and sweet treats by a Muslim dignitary on their way through Egypt; see André Caqout, ‘Les Actes D’Ezra de Gunda-Gunde’, Annales d’Éthiopie 4 (1961): 99. 168. Taddesse Tamrat, Church and State in Ethiopia, 1270–1527, 257. 169. Other pasted or copied texts therein concern developments outside of Italy, real or imagined: Alexander’s letter to Dindimus, king of the Brahmins, the coronation of Holy Roman Emperor Frederick III, Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II.  An itinerary connected to ‘India’—or rather, Ethiopia—would thus vaguely fit into such a learned collection. 170. ‘Difficile multis de causis quispiam ualet ulterius pertransire. Et pauci ulterius alienigenae gradientes inde reuertu[n]tur.’ BNCF, Ms. Misc. II, IV, 109, fol. 87r, ed. in Iorga, ‘Iter De Venetis Ad Indiam’, 147. 171. See the regesta compiled in Lefèvre, ‘Documenti Pontifici Sui Rapporti Con L’Etiopia Nei Secoli XV e XVI’; also see Weber, ‘Gli Etiopi a Roma Nel Quattrocento: Ambasciatori Politici, Negoziatori Religiosi o Pellegrini?’, para. 9. 172. Called ‘Petrus, Bartholomeus and Antonius’ in the papal documents. For this group of pilgrims, also see Weber, ‘Gli Etiopi a Roma Nel Quattrocento: Ambasciatori Politici, Negoziatori Religiosi o Pellegrini?’,

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para. 6; Salvadore, The African Prester John and the Birth of EthiopianEuropean Relations, 1402–1555, 56–58. 173. Most recently Kurt, ‘The Search for Prester John, a Projected Crusade and the Eroding Prestige of Ethiopian Kings, c.1200–c.1540’, 311. 174. See Thomas Martin Buck, ed., Chronik des Konstanzer Konzils 1414–1418 von Ulrich Richental, (Ostfildern: Thorbecke, 2010). 175. ‘Dominus prespiter Johannes debet esse archiepiscopus et habet sub se 4 archiepiscopos et 30 episcopos et habebat nullum nuntium hic nisi fuerunt 3 Ethiopi qui finxerunt se esse de terra et regno isto. Qui autem ignorabant Latinum neque habebant ydeoma quod intellegi quisquam poterat.’ Buck, Chronik des Konstanzer Konzils 1414–1418 von Ulrich Richental, 193. 176. Jean Devisse and Michel Mollat cautioned that Richental shaped a world on paper ‘as Richental might conceive it’; see Jean Devisse and Michel Mollat, The Image of the Black in Western Art II. From the Early Christian Era to the ‘Age of Discovery’. 2 Africans in the Christian Ordinance of the World (Fourteenth to the Sixteenth Century) (Cambridge, M.A.: Harvard University Press, 1979), 51. 177. Compare the many fictitious coats of arms of people, ambassadors and delegates who had supposedly attended the Council of Constance in Buck, Chronik des Konstanzer Konzils 1414–1418 von Ulrich Richental. 178. Buck, Chronik Des Konstanzer Konzils 1414–1418 von Ulrich Richental, 193. 179. ‘Quodque magis mirum est, etiam usque ex Ethiopia quidam privatim ad tanti concilii famam venerunt.’ Epistolario di P.  P. Vergerio a cura di L. Smit, quoted with the variant formam in Lefèvre, ‘Presenze Etiopiche in Italia Prima Del Concilio Di Firenze Del 1439’, 21, note 1. 180. ‘das vor doch wenig gehort ist / seit ward gebon Jesus Krist / das erber botschaft ist gesentt / auß India, von Orientt / gen Constentz dem Concili her / ist dem contzili lob und er.’ Thomas Prischuch: Des Consili Grundvest, in: UH, Cod. Pal. germ. 321, fol. 300r; I thank Christof Rolker of the University of Bamberg for bringing this passage to my attention. 181. ‘Ez warn auch vier münich da, die warn über mer von dem verren India und warn an der stirn prent mit creuzen.’ MGH, Dt. Chron. 2, 363, 16–17. 182. ‘Cum dilecti filii Petrus Bartholomeus et Antonius ethiopes exhibitores presencium et qui in partibus istis per menses plurimos sicut accepimus laudabiliter conversati comitante pacis Angelo nunc ad propria redire proponant’; BAV, Reg. Vat. 352, fol. 21v, also partially ed. in Lefèvre, ‘Documenti Pontifici Sui Rapporti Con L’Etiopia Nei Secoli XV e XVI’,

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21; Lefèvre, ‘Presenze Etiopiche in Italia Prima Del Concilio Di Firenze Del 1439’, 21. 183. BAV, Reg. Vat. 352, fol. 21v. The mention of ‘companions’ also addresses the fluctuating number of Ethiopians given in the sources, given between three and four. 184. The letter of recommendation was granted by a high-ranking Latin church official, the vice-chamberlain of the Roman Curia in Geneva; see Lefèvre, ‘Documenti Pontifici Sui Rapporti Con L’Etiopia Nei Secoli XV e XVI’, 21–22. 185. ‘Religiosus vir frater Antonius de Amehar […] de partibus Indie Maioris.’ BAV, Arm. 29, Div. Cam. 4, fol. 148, ed. in Lefèvre, ‘Documenti Pontifici Sui Rapporti Con L’Etiopia Nei Secoli XV e XVI’, 22. 186. Lefèvre, ‘Presenze Etiopiche in Italia Prima Del Concilio Di Firenze Del 1439’, 21. 187. As the pope’s letter from Constance is dated to early January and the Genevan one to late August 1418. 188. Compare Musée Condé, Chantilly,  Limbourg Brothers, Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, The Exaltation of the Cross, tempera on parchment, ca. 1410–1416, fol. 193r. The manuscript remained incomplete upon the brothers’ death in 1416; it was completed significantly later by two additional painters, identified as Jean Colombe and the ‘Master of the Shadows’, respectively. The style and shading of the ‘Exaltation of the Cross’ strongly suggests this illumination as a work of the Limbourg Brothers, and that it was completed in the early 1400s. 189. Devisse and Mollat, The Image of the Black in Western Art II, 270–71; Geraldine Heng, ‘An African Saint in Medieval Europe: The Black St Maurice and the Enigma of Racial Sanctity’, in Sainthood and Race: Marked Flesh, Holy Flesh, ed. Vincent W.  Lloyd and Molly H.  Bassett (New York: Routledge, 2014), 18–44. 190. As a history student at the University of Constance, this was a common theme of seminars concerned with regional history. For a medieval history of the town and the Konstanzer Münster; see Helmut Maurer, Konstanz Im Mittelalter. Band 1: Von Den Anfängen Bis Zum Konzil (Konstanz: Stadler, 1989). 191. Chapter 5 will examine in great detail as to why the acquisition of relics and religious items as well as building manpower were important for the Solomonic Ethiopian kingdom.

CHAPTER 3

The Sons of Dawit

Finally […] we are sending relics to be venerated […]: namely, relics from the holy Apostles Peter and Paul; from Saint John the Baptist; from the arm of St Andrew the Apostle; from St James the Apostle, son of Zebedee; and from the wood of the cross on which the blessed Apostle Peter was executed. And indeed, because these relics are most worthy to be venerated, we have sent them to Your Highness for your devotion. —Letter, Pope Callixtus III to aṣe Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob, 1 December 1456 Archivio Apostolico Vaticano, Registra Vaticana 445, fol. 274r.

A near-decade of silence follows the appearance of the three Ethiopians at the Council of Constance: available source evidence attests neither large groups of pilgrims nor Solomonic missions to the Latin West. Then, in the late 1420s, as ̣e Yǝsḥaq1—who had followed his father aṣe Dawit on the Solomonic throne in 1414—sent an interfaith embassy to the kingdom of Aragon. References to weapons and armour and even a purported plan to ‘end the religion of Islam and its people’ appear in some sources.2 One of the nǝgus ́’ ambassadors was beheaded for ‘playing with two religions’ by Mamlūk authorities in Cairo in 1429.3 Veiled and explicit hopes for a military alliance or even a shared crusade with Solomonic Ethiopia are tangible in Latin correspondence from the 1420s to the 1450s. Scholarship, which has tended to focus on military aspects, has interpreted this second phase of Ethiopian-Latin Christian diplomacy as especially martial. Based © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 V. Krebs, Medieval Ethiopian Kingship, Craft, and Diplomacy with Latin Europe, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64934-0_3

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on a mostly uncritical reading of Arabic and Latin texts, Ethiopian missions to the West were described as motivated by a crusading spirit, a desire for military alliances and craftsmen-experts to gain access to the ‘superior technical advancement of European nations’,4 or more specifically to ‘seek military support against the country’s Muslim neighbors’.5 However, European crusading hopes and Mamlūk fears do not equate to Ethiopian interests. As we will see, the sons of aṣe Dawit—aṣe Yǝsḥaq, his brothers aṣe Täklä Maryam6 and aṣe Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob7—all sent out missions to the Latin Mediterranean. Like their father, they attempted to recruit artisans and craftsmen for the Ethiopian court. They sought to acquire ecclesiastical garments, fine cloth and liturgical objects, and even a relic of the Passion. Implicit and explicit Latin Christian requests for church unions and Ethiopian military aid in the Eastern Mediterranean were meanwhile largely ignored—sometimes for decades. The epigraph quoted at the beginning of this chapter, which comes from a letter sent by Pope Callixtus III to aṣe Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob in 1456, offers a view on how Latin hopes for military assistance and Ethiopian desires for religious treasures eventually became strange bedfellows in the second half of the fifteenth century. For years, the Latin West had unsuccessfully tried to coax the nǝgus ́ into a joint crusade against the Muslim Eastern Mediterranean. The unsolicited sending of a veritable cache of highly prestigious relics alongside a desperate plea for help may be read as intended to finally prompt a reaction—any reaction—out of the Ethiopian nǝgus ́.

First Contacts with the Kingdom of Aragon An Interfaith Embassy to Valencia, 1427–1428 A manuscript on the Cosmography of Claudius Ptolemy is the first to mention the arrival of aṣe Yǝsḥaq’s mission to the kingdom of Aragon in the late 1420s.8 This particular copy was owned by the French cardinal, humanist and geographer Guillaume Fillastre, who had amended Ptolemy’s text with his notes and 27 hand-painted maps.9 Wedged between the ‘Third’ and ‘Fourth Map’ of Africa is a page on ‘Ethiopia’; here, Fillastre mixed Ptolemaic knowledge with late medieval information on the mythical Prester John, and contemporary geopolitical news.10 In the year 1427, he notes, two ambassadors of ‘Prester John, one Christian and the other an infidel’ came to king Alfonso V of Aragon. The Aragonese king had received them in Valencia together with Cardinal Pierre de Foix,11 who

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urged the Ethiopian party to visit the papacy. Cardinal Foix later reported this news to Pope Martin V at an audience in Rome, where Fillastre himself was present.12 Aragonese and Arabic documents confirm that as ̣e Yǝsḥaq had sent a Muslim merchant and Ethiopian Christians as ambassadors to Valencia. The group must have arrived at the court of Alfonso V in late 1427; by May 1428, the party was about to retake its leave.13 Copies of letters corroborate that this ‘Ethiopian’ embassy was indeed a Solomonic delegation, evident by Alfonso V addressing himself to ‘Ysach, son of David’—or rather aṣe Yǝsḥaq, who was indeed aṣe Dawit’s second son.14 We have no record of aṣe Yǝsḥaq’s letter to Alfonso,15 but Aragonese documents in Catalan and Italian provide an indirect view on Solomonic interests in the late 1420s.16 First, the nǝgus ́ appears to have proposed a double royal marriage between the Solomonic Dynasty and the Crown of Aragon:17 as ̣e Yǝsḥaq himself was to marry Alfonso’s relative Joana d’Urgell,18 while an unnamed Ethiopian princess should wed Alfonso’s considerably younger brother, the Infante Peter.19 Second, Yǝsḥaq asked for the despatch of various artisans and craftsmen to the Ethiopian court.20 These included some specifically named maestres deles cequies—an ambiguous term most likely denoting ‘irrigation experts’.21 Also despatched was an undisclosed but prominent gift for aṣe Yǝsḥaq, for which a considerable sum had been assigned to Alfonso’s spokesperson, Petrus of Bonia.22 As we will see, not one, but two groups of ambassadors set out from the Spanish Peninsula for Ethiopia in late May 1428. The first was the original Ethiopian party returning to its place of origin. It was led by a Muslim merchant identified as Nūr al-Dı ̄n ʿAlı ̄ al-Tabrı ̄zı ̄.23 Petrus of Bonia, spokesperson of king Alfonso, led a second mission. Presumably, his group included the desired craftsmen.24 Spending a Fortune to Request Aid from Ethiopia, May 1428 Let us first turn our attention to the latter. Two sources indicate that Alfonso V had put together his own ambassadorial party, which left Valencia in late May 1428. The party was headed by Alfonso’s orator— ‘spokesman’—Petrus of Bonia, a native of Valencia. The king’s confessor, Phelipe Faiadell, had also been assigned to the mission, but his name was later scratched from the paperwork for unknown reasons.25 According to Alfonso’s letter to aṣe Yǝsḥaq, this Petrus was tasked with delivering a message too delicate to put in writing: he was to relate ‘matters of our mind’s

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purpose that sit greatly on our heart’ to the nǝgus ́, specifying that Petrus had been ‘given instructions at great length’.26 An internal, secret memorandum directed the party to first travel to Rhodes and then to Cyprus. There, they should beg for ‘a good person’ to ‘guide them onto the path which they have to take’ from the local authorities in Rhodes. This guide was only to leave them once they reached a ‘place where they know it to be feasible’ for the Aragonese to progress to Ethiopia safely.27 The king had previously awarded the princely sum of 5500 Valencian solidi to cover the embassy’s expenses.28 Such clauses indicate that the men did not simply join up with the original Ethiopian embassy on their return journey.29 Once the Aragonese had arrived in Ethiopia, the memorandum instructed them to send their guide back immediately to Aragon with a ‘very secret report’, informing Alfonso V on the journey from the Iberian Peninsula to Ethiopia. Petrus was tasked with providing intelligence on the ‘disposition of the land and its fertility, its life and water and likewise the people, their strengths and movements’ and ‘the manner of the people and of their life’.30 Yǝsḥaq’s titles, strength, ‘great treasure and riches and of all his circumstances’ should also be described. Moreover, the character and intentions of as ̣e Yǝsḥaq, as well as the unnamed Ethiopian princess intended for Alfonso’s younger brother, needed to be examined.31 The memorandum makes it explicit that Petrus was to investigate the lands of ‘Prester John’ thoroughly and independently. He was strongly urged to report what he saw truthfully. Beyond such specifications on how to compile a late medieval foreign intelligence dossier, the memorandum also reminded Petrus to impress the might and glory of Alfonso V on the Ethiopian monarch. In particular, he was to stress the Aragonese strength in naval warfare.32 Remarkably—especially in light of the substantial amount of money spent on the embassy—the last section of the memorandum included a request for financial aid from the North-East African sovereign. Petrus was tasked with enquiring ‘what kind of help’ Alfonso—king of one of the strongest powers in the Western Mediterranean in the first half of the fifteenth century—‘could have in money’ from aṣe Yǝsḥaq, and ‘in what form he could securely take it’.33 These last few directions indicate that the delicate oral message Petrus was tasked to deliver most likely concerned Aragonese hopes for military assistance from the nǝgus ́.34 Petrus’ mission eventually failed; he never managed to reach the highland court. A 1450 letter by Alfonso V to aṣe Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob, aṣe Yǝsḥaq’s

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brother and successor, states that the requested artisans travelling with Petrus in the late 1420s never reached Ethiopia. All men died: they met ‘great ruin on the dangerous way and perished’.35 Fear and Intrigue in Cairo, Early 1429 The second group leaving Valencia for the Ethiopian court in 1428 was the original ambassadorial party sent out by aṣe Yǝsḥaq. Led by a Muslim merchant called Nūr al-Dı ̄n ʿAlı ̄ al-Tabrı ̄zı ̄, the embassy also included some Ethiopian Christian ecclesiastics and a small retinue of servants and slaves. They, too, had been awarded the staggering sum of 5500 Valencian solidi for their troubles by the Crown of Aragon.36 In early 1429, the embassy landed in Alexandria on its return journey and drew the attention of several contemporary Arab chroniclers.37 The appointment of a Muslim such as al-Tabrı ̄zı ̄ as ambassador was not unusual from an Ethiopian perspective: as Julien Loiseau has pointed out, the skills of an Arabic-speaking Muslim ‘were always needed’ in Solomonic Ethiopia, ‘even to reach the very heart of Christendom’.38 Contemporary Egyptian authorities, however, were somewhat suspicious of such inter-­ faith collaboration—especially if the Muslim mediator in question had proved a little too successful in his dealings in the past. The case of al-Tabrı ̄zı ̄, examined in detail below, shows how such activities could eventually be perceived as a major offence—and end in disaster. In this particular case, al-Tabrı ̄zı ̄ was publicly executed in Cairo in early spring 1429. The Ethiopian monks and slaves involved in aṣe Yǝsḥaq’s mission appear to have been let go as they are not mentioned in the available Arabic sources again. How had it come to all this in the first place? Three contemporary Arabic texts explicitly describe aṣe Yǝsḥaq’s mission to Aragon.39 Only two of them have been received by Ethiopianist scholarship thus far.40 Taken together, all three contain significantly different views on the episode— offering us a comprehensive account of the activities of the Muslim merchant, as well as providing us with highly valuable and entirely unexpected insight into the underlying intentions of the Solomonic court towards the Latin West. The most familiar account of the episode is contained in a famous chronicle of contemporary history41 by the Egyptian historian al-Maqrı ̄zı ̄.42 According to him, the people of Egypt had learned of a shocking plot against Mamlūk Egypt in the month of rabı ̄ʿ II 832AH—equivalent to

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mid-January to mid-February 1429. Allegedly, the Ethiopian nǝgus ́ had sent a Persian merchant to the ‘Franks’ to incite them against all Muslim-­ ruled realms. Specifically, the ḥaṭı ̄—the Egyptian rendering of the title of as ̣e Yǝsḥaq43—planned to ‘end the faith of Islam’ and to ‘establish the religion of Jesus’ everywhere through a two-pronged attack against Egypt. Therefore, the nǝgus ́ had sent out a Persian merchant named ‘Nūr al-Dı ̄n ʿAlı ̄ al-Tawrı ̄zı ̄’44 to the ‘land of the Franks’. Together with two Ethiopian Christian monks and some slaves, al-Tawrı ̄zı ̄ travelled from Ethiopia through the desert to the Maghreb, where all set sail for ‘Frankland’. There, al-Tawrı ̄zı ̄ urged the ‘Franks’ to mount a joint crusade against Islam in the name of the nǝgus ́. The group’s return journey took them through Mamlūk Egypt; upon arrival in Alexandria, they were denounced by one of their slaves, arrested, and their ship and wares confiscated. According to al-Maqrı ̄zı ̄, the merchant-turned-ambassador had had a significant number of vestments specifically made for aṣe Yǝsḥaq in Western Europe. All of them were embroidered with golden crosses, which our source judges as highly suspicious. In early March 1429, al-Tawrı ̄zı ̄ alone was brought for judgement before the Mālikı ̄ chief qāḍı ̄, one of the four supreme justices of Egypt.45 The Mālikı ̄ chief justice found the Persian guilty within a day and condemned him to death. His sentence was carried out to great spectacle, and with no delay: al-Tawrı ̄zı ̄ was publicly paraded through the streets of Cairo on a camel while his guilt—for charges of ‘importing weapons into an enemy country’ and ‘playing with two religions’—was proclaimed loudly before the masses. He was beheaded in front of a large crowd under the window of the al-Ṣāliḥiyya madrasa, the formal site for public execution.46 Al-Maqrı ̄zı ̄’s student, Ibn Taghrı ̄ Birdı ̄, mostly follows his teacher’s narrative of an Ethiopian plan to vanquish the religion and lands of Islam.47 In his chronicle of Muslim Egypt written years after the events in question, Ibn Taghrı ̄ Birdı ̄ linked the purported Ethiopian crusading agitation initiative with the Mamlūk conquest of Cyprus in 1426. He states that a Persian merchant by the name of al-Tabrı ̄zı ̄ had travelled via the Maghreb to visit multiple Frankish kings, amongst whom he disseminated a call for a crusade by the Ethiopian ḥat ̣ı ̄. The Frankish kings responded favourably and gave the merchant-ambassador many gifts.48 Ibn Taghrı ̄ Birdı ̄ also offers some specifics on the person and previous activities of al-Tabrı ̄zı ̄: he judged the Persian as a man of little faith who had a long history of trade with Ethiopia, and who informed on Muslim realms for the nǝgus ́. Greed

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had drawn al-Tabrı ̄zı ̄ to deal directly with the Ethiopian court, for which he imported ‘rare and beautiful objects’: gold crosses set with precious stones alongside good quality weapons, helmets, beautiful swords, coats of mail, and armour were all brought from Egypt to Ethiopia by the Persian. Ibn Taghrı ̄ Birdı ̄ mentions neither the trial nor the death of the merchant.49 Thus, both al-Maqrı ̄zı ̄ and his student Ibn Taghrı ̄ Birdı ̄ depict the Ethiopian mission to Aragon as pure Ethiopian Christian agitation facilitated by a fellow Muslim, a severe transgression justly inviting Mamlūk intervention.50 Al-Maqrı ̄zı ̄’s somewhat opaque claim, that al-Tabrı ̄zı ̄ had been executed for ‘importing weapons into an enemy country’ in 1429, is revealed by Ibn Taghrı ̄ Birdı ̄ as unrelated to the mission to Europe. Al-Tabrı ̄zı ̄ had brought these weapons from Egypt to Ethiopia, and also at an earlier point in time. Julien Loiseau has recently shown that the fate of as ̣e Yǝsḥaq’s ambassador also drew the notice of Ibn Ḥ ajar al-ʿAsqalānı ̄,51 one of the most prominent Islamic scholars and writers of the time.52 In his annalistic history of the Mamlūk Sultanate for the year 823 AH, largely equalling 1429 CE, Ibn Ḥ ajar included a substantial obituary for ‘Nūr al-Dı ̄n ʿAlı ̄ al-Tabrı ̄zı ̄’.53 This text, hitherto mostly unknown to scholarship, provides new, detailed information on al-Tabrı ̄zı ̄’s life and trial not contained in the accounts of al-Maqrı ̄zı ̄ and Ibn Taghrı ̄ Birdı ̄. It also considerably complicates the ostensibly clear picture of Solomonic crusading incitement in the 1420s—and offers a rather different view as to why as ̣e Yǝsḥaq sent his agent to the kingdom of Aragon in the first place. According to Ibn Ḥ ajar, al-Tabrı ̄zı ̄ came from a highly esteemed and successful Persian merchant family. Specialising in trade with Ethiopia,54 he had long acted as an agent for the Solomonic rulers, bringing nafa ̄’is55— ‘treasures’ or ‘precious objects’—from Cairo and elsewhere to the Ethiopian highlands. Thus, al-Tabrı ̄zı ̄ had become rich and famous in his own right.56 As his imports to Ethiopia also included weapons and horses from Egypt, his activities eventually invited pushback from the Mamlūk authorities. Al-Tabrı ̄zı ̄ was forced to swear not to acquire weapons and horses for the nägäs ́t from Muslim Egypt again.57 In mid-831, which would equal spring of 1428 and thus when al-Tabrı ̄zı ̄ was in Valencia, a person ‘fiercely angry’ with the Persian denounced him to the Mamlūk authorities. ʿAbd al-Salām al-Ǧabartı ̄, a fellow merchant and member of the free Muslim Ethiopian community in Cairo,58 accused the absent Persian of being an emissary of the Ethiopian sovereign sent to incite a ‘Frankish king’ against the Muslims.59 Upon his return to Egypt in early

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1429, al-Tabrı ̄zı ̄ was arrested by the Mamlūk authorities. Strange wares were found in his possession: Frankish clothing, some weapons, two golden bells, and a letter from the Ethiopian nǝgus ́ specifically requesting the import of gold-smithery, crosses, bells and a relic.60 This letter even described a particular relic that the nǝgus ́ wished to acquire: a relic of the Passion—one of the nails of the cross on which Jesus was crucified.61 Like the two other chroniclers, Ibn Ḥ ajar states that Al-Tabrı ̄zı ̄’s case was assigned to the Mālikı ̄ chief justice in Cairo. He moreover specifies that several high-profile witnesses testified against the Persian.62 Al-Tabrı ̄zı ̄, meanwhile, denied all accusations but failed to explain himself adequately; he was quickly condemned to death. In early March, the merchant-turned-­ ambassador was executed. Ibn Ḥ ajar specifies that he was beheaded while declaring the šaha ̄dah—the Islamic profession of faith—and quoting passages from the Quran, demonstrating his true faith as a Muslim. A few days after the execution, when the merchandise found with al-Tabrı ̄zı ̄ was returned to his family, doubts about the Persian’s guilt and the righteousness of the verdict began to spread in Cairo: ‘most people’ saw him as a victim of injustice. Al-Tabrı ̄zı ̄’s defenders—including one of Ibn Ḥ ajar’s Ethiopian eunuchs, who had been sold by the Persian to Egypt—characterised him as a devout Muslim, exemplary in his dealings with the Christian nägäs ́t, an advocate for Muslims in Solomonic Ethiopia. The passage ends with Ibn Ḥ ajar remarking that the man who had denounced al-Tabrı ̄zı ̄—the Ethiopian Muslim merchant al-Ǧabartı ̄—died shortly afterwards, implying an act of divine justice.63 What can we then make of these three different accounts? While all three authors were contemporaries to the events taking place in Cairo in the spring of 1429, only Ibn Ḥ ajar was likely to have been involved in some capacity with the proceedings.64 He was one of the four qa ̄ḍı ̄ al-quḍa ̄t, the chief justices, at the time of al-Tabrı ̄zı ̄’s trial. Specifically, Ibn Ḥ ajar was chief justice of the Šāfiʿı ̄ maḏhab or ‘school of law’ of Mamlūk Egypt. Undoubtedly, he would have been relatively well-informed on prominent legal debates and trials taking place in Egypt and particularly in Cairo, even if—or especially since—al-Tabrı ̄zı ̄ was tried in the court of a rival maḏhab.65 It is, therefore, all the more remarkable just how much Ibn Ḥ ajar’s doubts on the guilt of al-Tabrı ̄zı̄ run through the text of the obituary. In effect, the jurist presents the charges brought against the Persian merchant as calumny, false accusations levied by a rival merchant, supported by members of a Mamlūk elite which al-Tabrı ̄zı ̄ had antagonised in the past.

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A look at the broader context of Solomonic geopolitics in the Horn of Africa during the reign of as ̣e Yǝsḥaq allows us to see why an Ethiopian Muslim merchant based in Cairo might have been so very furious with the Persian. Throughout the late 1410s and the 1420s, aṣe Yǝsḥaq had waged a brutal war against the newly founded Sultanate of ʿAdal, also known as the Barr Saʿd al-Dı ̄n66—one of the small Muslim states fringing Solomonic territory in the Ethiopian highlands. The nǝgus ́ was following in the footsteps of his ancestors: from the time of aṣe ʿAmdä Ṣəyon, successive Solomonic rulers expanded their territory in the Horn of Africa.67 Like his predecessors, as ̣e Yǝsḥaq was trying to subjugate Muslim principalities bordering his realm.68 To add insult to injury, we also know that this particular nǝgus ́ had started employing renegade Mamlūks to train and organise his armies at the time.69 All three Arabic texts examined above assert that Al-Tabrı ̄zı ̄ had sold weapons to Ethiopia. His selling of Egyptian arms and horses to Christian Ethiopia must have actively contributed to these ongoing, successful and violent Solomonic campaigns against an emerging Ethiopian Muslim Sultanate such as that of ʿAdal.70 Moreover, in 1423, as ̣e Yǝsḥaq was said to have turned violent in reaction to Mamlūk policy about the Church of the Holy Sepulchre: in a different text, al-Maqrı ̄zı ̄ states that the nǝgus ́ destroyed local Ethiopian mosques and massacred a large number of Muslim men, selling their wives and children into slavery.71 All this could hardly have endeared the Persian merchant—or his Solomonic employer, for that matter—to the Egyptian authorities, or expatriate Muslim Ethiopians like his accuser al-Ǧabartı ̄. The Mamlūk Sultan himself was reportedly furious at aṣe Yǝsḥaq’s actions back home in the Horn of Africa.72 Given this context, the surprising decision to bring al-Tabrı ̄zı ̄’s case before the Mālikı ̄ head judge in Cairo also becomes more understandable. Mamlūk Egypt followed a quadruple judicial system in which four Sunni schools of law operated according to their established doctrines. Defendants were usually tried in the maḏhab they belonged to according to their place of birth. While the Mālikı ̄ school of Islamic jurisprudence has been historically dominant throughout West and North Africa, it was not the maḏhab traditional to Egypt. The Mamlūk authorities themselves had long favoured the Šāfiʿı ̄ school—at which Ibn Ḥ ajar would have presided over the trial.73 It is impossible that al-Tabrı ̄zı ̄, as a Persian, would have been read by the authorities as a follower of Mālikı ̄ jurisprudence. So why did the Mamlūk authorities have him tried by the Mālikı ̄ chief justice? Historian Amalia Levanoni has pointed out that bringing a defendant accused of heresy, unbelief or ‘polytheism’74—one of

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the charges levied against al-Tabrı ̄zı ̄—before a Mālikı ̄ judge ‘always signified premeditation on the part of the accusers to use the court as a means of eliminating the accused’.75 It was bound to most certainly result in a judgement of capital punishment. Had al-Tabrı ̄zı ̄ been the butt of calumny, as Ibn Ḥ ajar repeatedly implies, trying his case in the Mālikı ̄ maḏhab was the surest bet to yield the desired outcome—his death—for his adversaries.76 The question of whether aṣe Yǝsḥaq pursued and even actively promoted a shared crusade with Latin Christendom is meanwhile profoundly tied up with the merchant’s guilt or innocence. In all three sources, the case against al-Tabrı ̄zı ̄ is based on the accusation of propagating Ethiopian crusading incitement. Still, he was formally tried for exporting weapons to Solomonic Ethiopia—an earlier charge—as well as ‘playing with two religions’ and ‘polytheism’. Concrete proof for all of these accusations based on the objects recovered with him in 1429 is slim; for al-Maqrı ̄zı ̄, who offers the most damning account, the primary evidence for al-Tabrı ̄zı ̄’s guilt were the items found in the Persian’s possession: very many garments embroidered with golden crosses. These fabrics with their Christian symbols were the proverbial smoking gun attesting to both al-Tabrı ̄zı ̄’s guilt and as ̣e Yǝsḥaq’s crusading spirit. For al-Maqrı ̄zı ̄, such tenuous evidence must have been still damning: in a different text, he states that the nǝgus ́ had taken to presenting himself only in the finest ‘kingly splendour’, with large crosses made of gemstones in his hands when dealing with his new Muslim vassals.77 In al-Maqrı ̄zı ̄’s eyes, vestments with golden crosses must necessarily have been intended to outfit Ethiopian soldiers of faith.78 The historian’s bitter accusations against both the merchant al-Tabrı ̄zı ̄ and the nǝgus ́ appear less as a testament to an evil plot of a pan-Christian alliance than as part of a larger lamentation on the ruthless engagement of the Solomonic kingdom with the Muslim Sultanates fringing the Christian highlands. There, as ̣e Yǝsḥaq was indeed aiming to replace the ‘religion of Islam’ with that of Christianity when seen from the perspective of Mamlūk Egypt.79 Ibn Taghrı ̄ Birdı ̄, meanwhile, primarily links al-Tabrı ̄zı ̄’s fate with his history of importing precious religious items as well as weapons from Egypt. This is not to be equated with a crusading interest against Egypt: after all, the Mamlūk Sultanate was the very place from which as ̣e Yǝsḥaq obtained his instruments of warfare. Ibn Ḥ ajar, too, intimates that the real issue was al-Tabrı ̄zı ̄’s prior involvement in selling weapons and horses from Egypt to the nägäs ́t, which as ̣e Yǝsḥaq then used to fight his Muslim

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neighbours in the Horn of Africa. Such activities painted a target on al-Tabrı ̄zı ̄’s back with both the authorities and members of the Ethiopian Muslim merchant community in Cairo. Remarkably, Ibn Ḥ ajar even presents specific reasons for why the accusations against the nǝgus ́ of Ethiopia, and thus the charges brought against al-Tabrı ̄zı ̄, appeared doubtful to him: first, he correctly observes that the faith of the two ṭāʾifah, the ‘communities’ or ‘sects’ of Christians in Ethiopia and Europe, differed considerably.80 Moreover, Ibn Ḥ ajar adds that the real reason as to why the Ethiopian king had sent out al-Tabrı ̄zı ̄ was actually to obtain a particular cross—or rather, a nail relic of the True Cross—located in the Latin West, which the nǝgus ́ desired to see.81 Lastly, he even specifies that the letter of the nǝgus ́ found in possession of al-Tabrı ̄zı ̄ had not demanded weapons, but asked for items of gold-smithery, crosses, bells and the relic mentioned above. Thus, both Ibn Ḥ ajar and Ibn Taghrı ̄ Birdı ̄ agree that al-Tabrı ̄zı ̄ had a long history of importing precious, rare and beautiful objects for the nägäs ́t—‘treasures’ and jewelled crosses alongside Egyptian arms. In 1429, al-Tabrı ̄zı ̄ was apprehended with heavily embroidered ecclesiastical garments and liturgical items such as bells.82 Yet, for a Muslim merchant working for a Solomonic Christian nǝgus ́, a trial resting mainly on evidence of imported Christian religious objects could have dire consequences. Like his father’s missions before him, aṣe Yǝsḥaq’s embassy to Aragon appears to have been motivated less by religious crusading zeal than a desire to acquire precious sacred objects from a faraway Christian sphere. Even al-Maqrı ̄zı ̄’s descriptions of ‘foreign garments embroidered with crosses’ strongly recall as ̣e Dawit’s many treasures obtained from Italy more than two decades earlier. The letter described in the account of Ibn Ḥ ajar supposedly specified that al-Tabrı ̄zı ̄ had been tasked to acquire a relic for aṣe Yǝsḥaq. This relic—a Nail of the Passion—would have well-­ complemented aṣe Dawit’s acquisition of a fragment of the True Cross for Ethiopia nearly three decades before. Moreover, such a relic indeed had ties to the kingdom of Aragon. Just three decades earlier, king Martin the Humane83 had brought relics of the Passion—including Holy Nails—from the Levant to Aragon. They were exhibited at the royal palace in Barcelona each year in early November.84 When al-Tabrı ̄zı ̄ and his Ethiopian Christian companions arrived at the kingdom of Aragon in late 1427, they—like Dawit’s ambassador to Venice decades before—would have come to the right place at the right time.

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Even beyond the ecclesiastical objects and the holiest relic attested in the Arabic accounts, aṣe Yǝsḥaq followed in his father’s diplomatic footsteps: Aragonese sources show that Yǝsḥaq, like Dawit, had also tried to acquire craftsmen from the Latin West. His proposal of a  royal union between the Solomonic Dynasty and the Crown of Aragon suggests he was interested in forging a more permanent connection with a court of Latin Europe than his father had been.85 The text of the Catalan memorandum and the excessive financial backing of the missions attested in the Aragonese records, meanwhile, show that king Alfonso V seriously considered the idea of such a double royal match. If anything, the financial backing of the return missions illustrates just how seriously Alfonso pursued these contacts with Ethiopia: the sums awarded to each ambassadorial party—a staggering total of 11,000 Valencian solidi—can only be termed an ostentatious display of Aragonese largesse.86 We may presume that at least some of the coin was spent on gifts for asẹ Yǝsḥaq. The goal rather clearly was to impress the nǝgus ́. Sadly, aṣe Yǝsḥaq was never to receive any of this. As we have seen above, both missions  encountered disaster on their way. The fate of the religious wares confiscated from al-Tabrı ̄zı ̄ upon his arrival in Alexandria remains unanswered. Ibn Ḥ ajar states that everything was returned to his family after the merchant’s execution. It is possible that the ecclesiastical items that as ̣e Yǝsḥaq had desired, which cost the Persian his head, found their way to the Ethiopian court eventually. It is hard to overstate just how much the diplomatic exchanges of 1427–1429 have shaped how modern scholarship has read fifteenth-­ century Ethiopian contacts with the Latin West: as motivated by a crusading spirit, an interest in European arms, technology and military aid.87 Upon close examination, these assumptions rest on feet of clay. It would be short-sighted to conflate Solomonic aggression against the Sultanates of Ifat and ʿAdal with intercontinental incitement against Mamlūk Egypt— although it is understandable that a Mamlūk contemporary like al-Maqrı ̄zı ̄ interpreted the matter through such a suspicious lens.88 If anything, al-Tabrı ̄zı ̄’s story shows how Solomonic rulers such as aṣe Yǝsḥaq had profited off of Egyptian merchandise and Mamlūk expertise. They had little need for ‘European technology’. The Aragonese documents instead indicate a reverse balance of power: in 1428, Alfonso V of Aragon was hoping for financial and military aid from the nǝgus ́ of Christian Ethiopia. What other matter would have been so delicate that it could not be put in writing, but should be delivered alongside explicit praise of Aragonese seafaring power, and a request for financial help from as ̣e Yǝsḥaq? The

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chance never presented itself. Both missions setting out from Valencia in May 1428 failed to reach their destination, and neither fulfilled their goal. Five Ethiopian Pilgrims Walk Into a War, Summer 1430 In the early summer of 1430, a group of five Ethiopian pilgrims travelled through the kingdom of Aragon on the Iberian Peninsula.89 The men were trying to reach the road to Santiago de Compostela, intending to see the remains of St James housed in the city’s cathedral. About 200 miles inland from the Mediterranean coast, however, they were spooked by Castilian troops and turned up before Alfonso V of Aragon in Tarazona, a city close to the border between the kingdoms of Aragon, Castile and Navarre. As it turns out, the Ethiopians had managed to walk right into the midst of the Castilian-Aragonese war of 1429–1430.90 The pilgrims arrived two years after Petrus of Bonia and al-Tabrı ̄zı ̄ had left for Ethiopia, and king Alfonso V saw an opportunity to use the men as impromptu envoys to as ̣e Yǝsḥaq. In a letter to the nǝgus ́, he expressed his desire to receive word from the Horn of Africa. It had been nice to hear the ‘favourable rumours’ told by ‘Bartholomeo, Anania, Stephano, Anthonio and Zaccaria’ about aṣe Yǝsḥaq, but Alfonso longed for actual correspondence that ‘conveyed something of Your Eminence’.91 Yǝsḥaq should write to him, however often the opportunity presented itself.92 The Aragonese king also found it necessary to address the ‘armed conflict between us and the king of Castile’ that the Ethiopians had walked into en route to the Camino de Santiago. Alfonso admits that the fighting had been bad enough that the pilgrims ‘did not dare approach’ the road to Santiago any further. Alfonso was fighting his cousin, who was also the brother of his wife— making the whole conflict somewhat awkward to explain. The way the Aragonese king tried to reassure the nǝgus ́—stressing that ‘the sin of this matter did not spring into being for long’ and that it caused him to ‘feel no little pain’—indicates Alfonso still held out hope for the proposed Ethiopian-Aragonese marriage alliance. He was trying to do damage-­ control on rumours about Iberian infighting that the pilgrims might carry back with them to Ethiopia.93 Ending the letter, he implored Yǝsḥaq— whom he repeatedly calls his ‘dearest brother’—again to please respond, urging the nǝgus ́ to ‘disclose with brotherly trust’ if he desired anything from his ‘kingdoms and lands that was pleasing to His Eminence’.94

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Alfonso’s letter provides us with several insights. By the summer of 1430, Alfonso V of Aragon had not heard any news from any of the two ambassadorial parties that had left Valencia two years earlier. He was clearly invested in establishing lasting relations with Solomonic Ethiopia. Moreover, the five Ethiopian Christians who walked into a war—like the three monks at the Council of Constance—demonstrate that pilgrims from Solomonic Ethiopia would occasionally moonlight as ambassadors, and that they ventured far beyond the holy places of the Italian peninsula. In the first half of the fifteenth century, small groups of Ethiopian Christians crossed north of the Alps or travelled to the north-westernmost fringes of the European continent in their desire to experience the pilgrimage sites of the Latin West. Their proficiency in travelling these distances seemingly unharmed, moreover, could prove useful for a European potentate hoping to carry messages back to Solomonic Ethiopia. As we saw earlier with the failed Ethiopian-Aragonese missions of 1427–1429, professional organisation and ample financial backing alone did not guarantee sustained diplomatic contacts. We do not know whether Alfonso’s second missive entrusted to Bärtälomewos, Anänǝya, Ǝsṭifanos, Ǝnṭonǝs and Zäkaryas ever reached as ̣e Yǝsḥaq. No cathedral records from Santiago de Compostela attesting that Ethiopian pilgrims visited the city later that year have thus far come to light. Nothing is known about their return journey to the Ethiopian highlands, or whether Alfonso’s letter did finally reach the highland court.

Swapping Allegiances from France to Ethiopia, 1432/1433 That same year, in 1430, aṣe Täklä Maryam95 succeeded his older brother Yǝsḥaq to the Solomonic throne. Like his father and sibling, he appears to have sent out a foreigner to headhunt specialist craftsmen—this time, in the Eastern Mediterranean. In late 1432 or very early 1433, an Italian acting on behalf of this Ethiopian nǝgus ́ is attested to in Pera, a Genoese trading colony just opposite the old town of Constantinople, which was inhabited mainly by Latin Christians.96 Notice on a Solomonic agent acting in a diplomatic capacity in the early 1430s on the Bosporus has come down to us through yet another unexpected source—the Voyage d’Outremer, a travel account by the French pilgrim Bertrandon de la Broquière.97 In the years 1432 and 1433, this Burgundian nobleman undertook a pilgrimage to the Holy Land and the Eastern Mediterranean. In the 1450s, and thus a considerable number of years later, he put

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together a narrative of his travels based on ‘memory and roughly made notes’.98 Bertrandon had initially set out from Ghent, and travelled to Rome, Venice, Jaffa, Jerusalem and the Ṭ ūr ʿAbdı ̄n,99 as well as large parts of Asia Minor, before circling back through the Balkans and modern-day Hungary. Throughout the Voyage d’Outremer, he reveals himself as an attentive, thoughtful and interested traveller: he provides detailed observations on things as varied as the making of pita bread,100 Muslim cures for hangovers101 and weaponry.102 The longest narrative unit of the account concerns an encounter Bertrandon had in Pera.103 Here, he met an Italian by the name of Pietre of Naples, who had supposedly spent many years en la terre de Prestre Jehan—‘in the land of Prester John’.104 Pietre told his life story and news about Solomonic Ethiopia to Bertrandon, who in turn relayed it to us. Some scholars have discounted the episode.105 Such scepticism seems to trace back to an important 1807 edition of the Voyage d’Outremer, which judged the narrative as ‘fictitious nonsense’.106 Here, the text’s editor and translator decided to expunge the story on Pietre and Ethiopia in its entirety, claiming that ‘this recital is, in fact, but a tissue of absurd fables, and revolting marvels, undeserving to be quoted, although […] generally to be found in authors of those times.’107 Nevertheless, despite the roundabout way the information has come down to us: the account mirrors Ethiopian missions to the Latin West enough as to warrant a more detailed examination.108 Notably, descriptions contained in the Voyage d’Outremer match other records on late medieval Solomonic Ethiopia, or portray practices indeed native to the highland realm.109 According to Pietre, ‘winter’ in Ethiopia lasted from ‘mid-May to mid-September’110—this coincides with the usual long rainy season of the northern Ethiopian highlands. Moreover, he relays that the Ethiopian rulers raised potential heirs in a part of the land enclosed by very high mountains. When the boys reached the age of reason, the most devout and best trained was selected to succeed his father and taken down from the mountain—while the others lived pleasantly in the enclosed land.111 This is a strikingly discerning description of the historically established Ethiopian practice of exiling royal children to the mountaintop prison on Amba Gǝšän to secure a peaceable succession.112 Ethiopian traditions such as the circumcision of boys and Ethiopian baptismal customs—40 days after birth for a male, 80 after the birth of a female—are described correctly and at length.113 Existing inaccuracies—that is, that nǝgus ́ was said to be ‘a good Catholic, obedient to the Church of

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Rome’114—imply either a misunderstanding on Bertrandon’s part or an intentionally idealistic portrayal of Solomonic rulership to a Latin Christian audience. Romanticised embellishments, such as the popular trope that the nǝgus ́—as ‘Prester John’—was arch-nemesis of ‘Cinemachin, whom we call the Great Khan’115 do not diminish the overall credibility of Pietro’s account on Ethiopia as a whole. So how had Bertrandon’s informant Pietre of Naples obtained all this knowledge? The Neapolitan had initially come to Ethiopia as part of a three-person diplomatic mission sent out by the ‘Duke of Berry’.116 As the French title of the Duc de Berry was vacant from 1422 onwards,117 this delegation must have been despatched from France before that—which would match the statement that Pietro had lived several years in Ethiopia before his encounter with Bertrandon. Two brief notes in Ethiopian chronicles address the presence of an unnamed Frank at the Solomonic court for an event of the mid-1420s: they mention debates on the faith between abba Giyorgis of Sägla and an unnamed färänǧ or afränǧ—a ‘Frank’—that resulted in Giyorgis composing the Mäs ̣ḥafä mǝs ́t ̣ir, the ‘Book of the Mystery’.118 It was written in ca. 1424.119 It would be tempting to assume that abba Giyorgis debated Pietre, seeing that he would have been a comparatively recent Latin Christian addition to the Ethiopian highland court, but this is impossible to verify. Of primary interest to this study, of course, is that the Neapolitan had pledged allegiance to the nǝgus ́ of Ethiopia—and become an agent for aṣe Täklä Maryam. The way Bertrandon tells it, the Neapolitan’s objective in Pera matched Solomonic interests discernible in the diplomatic missions to Venice and Valencia: he is portrayed as trying to procure craftsmen— among them ‘men who can build ships’—to take back to Ethiopia.120 Pietre’s interests seem not to have been limited to ship-builders, however. He also attempted to headhunt Bertrandon for the Ethiopian court, as the Burgundian states that Pietre tried ‘very hard’ to get him to join him and travel to Ethiopia.121 A foreign-born agent attempting to recruit skilled foreigners as well as ‘men who know how to build ships’ fits rather well into earlier patterns of Solomonic interests in the larger Christian world in the first half of the fifteenth century.122 The 1427–1429 embassy to Aragon had specifically requested maestres deles cequies amongst a whole group of craftsmen.123 Seeing that the term can be translated both as ‘irrigation experts’ and as ‘water channel experts’,124 Pietre’s mission to hire ship-­ builders in Constantinople appears especially striking—if somewhat puzzling, as sailing conditions differed significantly between the Mediterranean

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and the Red Sea.125 If as ̣e Täklä Maryam had sent the Neapolitan to acquire foreign craftsmen for the Solomonic court beyond making use of official diplomatic channels, Pietre had undoubtedly come to the right place. Pera was a town where men from all over congregated—including a significant number of Genoese and Venetian merchants active throughout the Eastern Mediterranean and Black Sea region.126 Pietre’s account as given in the Voyage d’Outremer of course also posits that a delegation sent by the Duke of Berry had reached the Ethiopian court in the first quarter of the fifteenth century. Contemporary French interest in the wider world and specifically in African Christians is not necessarily surprising. In 1416, the lifelike representation of three Ethiopian monks in the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry had been painted by the Limbourg Brothers in Burgundy—for Jean, the first Duke of Berry. He, meanwhile, had long been interested both in crusading, and in Africa.127 The previous chapter suggested the possibility that the three Ethiopian monks who later visited the Council of Constance also spent some time in France in the mid-1410s.128 Frenchmen such as Guillaume Fillastre, whose notes in his version of the Cosmography of Ptolemy were mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, showed great interest in news on Africa and particularly Ethiopia. And yet, this Latin Christian mission ultimately failed: Bertrandon’s account makes clear that none of the men sent out by the Duke of Berry ever returned to France. Pietre’s former companions were dead by 1430,129 and he had switched allegiance to the nägäs ́t of Ethiopia. The Voyage d’Outremer provides us with one more puzzle piece on Ethiopian foreign relations in the late Middle Ages. It suggests that during his comparatively short reign, as ̣e Täklä Maryam had emulated the actions of his predecessors. Like his father as ̣e Dawit with Anthonius Bartoli in 1402 and his brother as ̣e Yǝsḥaq with al-Tabrı ̄zı ̄ in 1427, he is narrated as re-employing and despatching a foreigner to procure specialist craftsmen from abroad in the early 1430s.

The Abbot, the nƎgus ́ and the Council of Florence, 1439–1444 In late August 1439, Pope Eugene IV130 dispatched the Franciscan friar Alberthus of Sarteano131 to call ‘Prester John, the illustrious emperor of the Ethiopians’ to attend the Council in Florence.132 The event—aimed at resolving the schism between Rome and several different Eastern Christian communities, and at achieving an ecumenical union under the suzerainty

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of the papacy—was of major importance to Latin contemporaries.133 However, the pope’s letter shows just how vague Latin Christian understanding of Christianity in Africa remained well into the fifteenth century. Eugene’s text offers no more specifics than a letter written by Pope John XXII 100 years earlier, the last time the papacy had tried to contact an Ethiopian ruler.134 Alberthus’ mission to present this invitation to the Ethiopian nǝgus ́—aṣe Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob, who had followed his brother on the throne in 1434—did not materialise. Instead, the Franciscan eventually approached the Ethiopian monastic community of Dayr al-Sult ̣ān135 in Jerusalem. In the fall of 1440, its abbot Niqodemos composed a rather dismissive answer to Pope Eugene’s invitation.136 The letter was intentionally written in Gǝʿǝz, the ancient language of the Ethiopian Church—a choice imbuing the medium with its own message.137 Here, the abbot stressed that matters of the faith needed to be determined by the nǝgus ́, and him alone. The approval of the Solomonic sovereign to send a delegation with decision-­making capabilities was difficult, if not impossible, to obtain at this point.138 Niqodemos also considered the ecclesiastical matters already resolved: in his opinion, ‘all of us’ already had been ‘together united in one’139 since the Council of Nicaea in 325.140 As a favour to the Latin pope, however, he would send a delegation to attend the Council.141 These Jerusalemite Ethiopian monks explicitly had no authority to decide upon matters of the faith, or enter into any ecclesiastical unions. Both were the prerogative of the nǝgus ́ and his ambassadors alone. A sizeable number of documents concerned with the African Christian presence in Florence has come down to us.142 Samantha Kelly recently stated that ‘we know more about the Ethiopian delegates at Florence than we do about any other Ethiopian embassy to Europe of the fifteenth century’.143 Most of these sources—as interesting as they may be—are of surprisingly limited use for this study. After all, the Ethiopian delegates were not sent out by as ̣e Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob, the youngest son of as ̣e Dawit, but by the head of a small diasporic community of Ethiopians in the Eastern Mediterranean.144 The encounter thus necessarily reveals little about Solomonic agency in the early years of Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob’s rule, and even less about Ethiopian royal interests towards Europe in the fifteenth century. Still, the activities of Ethiopian delegates sent out and the response of the nǝgus ́ regarding the Council of Florence shed light on African Christian attitudes towards the papacy and Latin Christendom at this time.

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On 2 September 1441, the four Ethiopian monks sent out by Niqodemos presented themselves before Pope Eugene IV.145 Their spokesman, a man called P̣eṭros, delivered a conciliatory, generic oration to a group of assembled Latin dignitaries.146 His speech was first translated from presumably Amharic to Arabic, and then to Latin.147 P̣eṭros greatly stressed the strength of the Solomonic realm, both geopolitically and spiritually.148 Regarding a possible union of the churches, he emphasised that the Ethiopian church had remained strong and powerful and free while other Christian groups had ‘crumbled’. The Ethiopian intermission and withdrawal from the See of Rome was primarily owed to the distance between the lands and the dangers that travellers endured. P̣et ̣ros states that it had been some 800 years since the Ethiopians had last heard from Rome,149 and blamed ‘the negligence of your predecessor Roman Pontiffs, as there is no memory among our people of concern for so many of the sheep of Christ or of a visitation that any of the earlier shepherds was willing to undertake’.150 The last part of his oration diverges from the content of Niqodemos’ actual letter—which had after all been written in Gǝʿǝz and was therefore illegible to the assembled Latin clergy. It is impossible to say if this was a conscious decision on the part of P̣et ̣ros, or due to his interpreters. The Latin transcription of the oration that has come down to us suggests that Niqodemos was willing to do whatever it took to recommend a Union of the Churches to the nǝgus ́—and that the Ethiopian sovereign was sure to desire nothing ‘more affectionately than to be joined to the Roman Church’ and ‘be placed at [the Pope’s] most holy feet’.151 Niqodemos’ actions, as well as the subsequent reaction of the nǝgus ́, suggest that such a thing could not have been the case. For one, the monks despatched from Jerusalem were Ewosṭateans.152 As such, they belonged to an unorthodox minority faction within the Ethiopian Church at that point in time—and one that had found itself in conflict with the nägäs ́t for decades.153 The major points of conflict between the Ewost ̣ateans and as ̣e Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob—as head of mainstream Ethiopian Christianity—were only resolved nearly a decade later.154 While Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob was taking more conciliatory approaches towards the Ewost ̣ateans in the early 1440s,155 it remains doubtful that Niqodemos could have swayed the nǝgus ́ to throw himself at anyone’s feet. Any such action seems moreover extraordinarily unlikely for this particular Solomonic ruler: aṣe Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob was a great patron of literature and man of ecclesiastical learning, reforming religious worship in his realm to an unprecedented degree in a way he saw fit.156

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This nǝgus ́ was actively composing, co-composing or commissioning dozens of religious texts—books on the theology of the Trinity, the number of canonical scriptures, the veneration of the Virgin Mary.157 Most of these texts, along with nearly all religious convictions held by the nǝgus ́, would not have sat well with the papacy. In turn, Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob himself—a man subsequently infamous for brutally punishing members of his own family for perceived religious transgressions158—almost certainly would have regarded the practices of the Latin Christian papacy as heretical. Nevertheless, the improbability of P̣eṭros’ promises would scarcely have communicated to the assembled Italian dignitaries in Florence in 1441. It hardly helped that P̣et ̣ros had presented his oration in front of Pope Eugene IV just three days after the examination of a Coptic delegation, which was headed by the abbot of St Antony in the Desert.159 Throughout their stay, both delegations—the Coptic one able to make decisions, the Ethiopian one not authorised to do so, and both not necessarily on the best of terms with each other160—were mistaken for one another by the attendees of the Council. The pope himself confused their respective competences.161 They are depicted nearly indistinguishably on Filarete’s bas-­ relief doors for Old St Peter’s, which commemorate the Council.162 The inscription on the doors would shortly thereafter—wrongly—proclaim that the Ethiopians had ‘embraced the Roman faith’ at the Council alongside other Eastern Churches.163 It is thus of little surprise that a letter written by Pope Eugene IV in October 1441 conveys a papal conviction that the Ethiopians would yet agree to a union of the Churches.164 His missive, however, also hints at the interests of the Ethiopian monks in Italy. Like earlier pilgrims to Europe, they wanted to see important relics of Florence and Rome. The pope ordered several high-ranking Latin clerics to disregard any standing prohibitions, allowing the Ethiopians to see the holiest of images, the Vera Icon or Sudarium — the ‘Veil of Veronica’.165 The Ethiopian monks remained in Italy for several more months, so we can assume that they also visited other sacred sites during their stay.166 A note from the Papal Treasury—the Apostolic Camera—offers yet another highly evocative bit of information. The ‘Indian’ delegations, namely the Copts and Ethiopians, had been awarded 50 florins—a high-value gold coin—to travel back to their respective places of origin in February 1442.167 A further 30 solidi were provided for ’80 white mitres’ for the party.168 It remains unclear whether these mitres were simply used during the conciliar session, or whether the Copts and Ethiopians took them back

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with them when they sailed from Venice towards the Eastern Mediterranean later in 1442.169 Certainly in the Ethiopians’ luggage, however, was a copy of the Cantate Domino bull, which expressed that the Latin and Coptic churches had supposedly been united,170 as well as a letter from Eugene IV to aṣe Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob conveying the pope’s hope that the Ethiopian king would agree to a similar union.171 The Ethiopian monks at Florence in the early 1440s thus showed an interest in exploring the holy sites of saints located in Italy, and in possibly acquiring Latin Christian religious headgear—a surprising recall of earlier Solomonic interest in ecclesiastical garments and liturgical items from abroad. The desire to see the Sudarium—the ‘Veil of Veronica’—fully matched the activities of the three Ethiopians in Rome in 1404. That special permissions were issued for the Ethiopians in 1441 also calls to mind as ̣e Dawit’s mission of 1404, and more generally offers a view on the privileges Ethiopian dignitaries could enjoy in fifteenth-century Europe. The papacy continued to hold out hope for Ethiopian acquiescence to a Union of the Churches. In February 1444, Gandulph of Sicily172—head of the Franciscans in the Holy Land—wrote from Jerusalem to Pope Eugene IV that he had recently met a group of Ethiopians at the Holy Sepulchre.173 His letter describes how he cornered the group, and enquired directly about Ethiopia’s position on a Union of the Churches, urging the Ethiopians to visit the Pope in Rome again.174 Even through the lens of Gandulph’s letter to the pope, we may observe that the emissaries had tried to appease the Franciscan: the Ethiopians had just come from Cairo, where they had been engaged in Solomonic-­ Mamlūk diplomacy before venturing to the Holy Land for pilgrimage.175 They first stressed that anything concerning the Church of Rome was not part of their current mission. Then they argued that another trip to Rome was not necessary. The way Gandulph understood it, everything had already been resolved: two Ethiopians had ‘already come to their Emperor with the Bull of Union’.176 The nǝgus ́ had ostensibly called together ‘all Patriarchs, Bishops, Prelates, Princes and Lords’ of both church and state in Ethiopia by imperial edict, and the aforesaid Union had been approved by everyone unanimously with no one dissenting, but with the utmost joy and devotion. A Solomonic delegation was to be shortly sent back to Rome with this news, where it was hoped they would arrive by the following Easter.177 No evidence of an actual Ethiopian follow-up delegation to Rome in 1444 or 1445 has come to light. The Ethiopian officials quoted in

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Gandulph’s account had exaggerated. For instance, there were no multiple patriarchs and bishops in Ethiopia. Their report might also simply be understood as a statement given to placate an important Latin functionary in the Holy Land, who was also hosting them on a ‘cold and rainy night’ in Jerusalem that January 1444.178 When the Ethiopians asked to attend a Latin service the next day, the Franciscan took this as confirmation of their eagerness for a union with the Church of Rome instead of an Ethiopian interest in observing the traditions of a different Christian sect.179 Gandulph’s letter indicates that some of the Ethiopian monks who had attended the Council of Florence indeed promptly informed aṣe Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob of the Latin Christian wish for a church union.180 Sources from Ethiopia also confirm that news of the Council of Florence had reached Ethiopia during the reign of Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob. In 1524, as ̣e Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob’s great-grandson, aṣe Lǝbnä Dǝngǝl, wrote two letters to Pope Clement VII which have come down to us in their Latin form.181 The first mentions that the young nǝgus ́ had among his books ‘a letter that Pope Eugene once sent, along with his blessing, to King Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob’.182 The text of the second specifies that a ‘letter which a Roman pope by the name of Eugene sent to these lands’ while Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob was ‘ruling as King of Kings, King to Be Feared, over all of Ethiopia’. It had been preserved in the ancestral archives of the Solomonic line.183 These documents, ‘preserved uncorrupted’ for near a century, had been bound up in an archival volume so ‘excessively large’ that aṣe Lǝbnä Dǝngǝl was reluctant to send it to Rome. Interestingly, Lǝbnä Dǝngǝl specifies that the papal writings had been delivered decades ago by ‘Theodorus, Petrus, Didymus, and Georgius, servants of Christ’.184 The mention of Tewodros, P̣eṭros, Didimos and Giyorgis, as these monks were probably known in Ethiopia, match the Ethiopians mentioned in the European accounts of the Council of Florence both in name and in number. So what can we learn from the Ethiopian mission to the Council of Florence and its aftermath? When aṣe Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob received the papal documents regarding a Union of the Churches in the early 1440s, he chose to file them away instead of answering the papacy. Everything we know about this single most outstanding ruler of the early Solomonic period suggests that this was a conscious decision. It may very well be that Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob simply was too busy to deal with requests for a church union from the leader of a geographically remote Western sect with delusions of grandeur at the time.185 Between 1438 and 1447, the nǝgus ́ was engaged in a protracted

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diplomatic altercation with the Mamlūk Sultan, styling himself as a protector of Christian minorities in the Eastern Mediterranean and especially in the Mamlūk Sultanate of Egypt and Palestine.186 Between 1443 and 1445, he successfully fought the Walasmaʿ Sultanate of Ifat-ʿAdal,187 personally killing and dismembering the body of its Sultan Aḥmad Badlāy in December 1445.188 As mentioned above, as ̣e Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob was also actively reforming the church over which he presided, and clashed with various schismatic groups who took issue with his religious reforms throughout the 1440s.189 By February 1450, the nǝgus ́ called together his own ecumenical Council at Däbrä Mǝṭmaq, one of the most important councils of the Ethiopian Church.190 When the Ethiopian monk P̣et ̣ros had called the church of his home country ‘strong, powerful and free’ in Florence in 1441, the same could have been said for his king, aṣe Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob. Even more so than other Solomonic rulers of the late Middle Ages, this particular nǝgus ́ had no reason to bow at the feet of any foreign pontiff—particularly not one whose teachings he would have considered heretical.191

Ethiopia, Rome and Aragon—And the Fall of Constantinople In 1450, as ̣e Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob finally did send out a mission to the Latin West. Three Solomonic ambassadors visited various courts on the Italian peninsula in the spring and summer of 1450. In a recall of earlier missions sent out by his father and older brother, as ̣e Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob had despatched an Italian man, an Ethiopian monk and an Ethiopian Muslim merchant to act as his emissaries. The group first travelled to Rome before continuing to the court of Alfonso V of Aragon, which had since relocated to Naples. Our sources for the embassy and its aftermath are mostly archival copies of letters and briefs written by the recipients of the delegation: Pope Nicholas V, Alfonso V of Aragon and Pope Callixtus III. The Ethiopian delegation had arrived in Rome by May 1450 and was received with great honour by Pope Nicholas V.192 From documents now in archives in Rome and Barcelona, we can piece together the names and background of the Solomonic ambassadors:193 one was a Christian from Sicily alternatingly called ‘Petrus Rombulus’, ‘Pero Rombolo’ or ‘Petro Rumbolo’.194 The second was an Ethiopian ecclesiastic, whose name was noted down as ‘Michael’, prior of the ‘Church of Saint Mary of Gudaber’ or ‘Cadaber’.195 The third was Muslim; regrettably, his name was mangled the most by the Latin scribes: it is given as ‘Abumar Elzend’, ‘Anomer Jandi’, ‘Anamer Jundi’ and even just buamar moro—‘black Buamar’— indicating that he was an Ethiopian Muslim.196

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On Whitsuntide, which fell onto the 24th of May that year, all three men were the pontiff’s guests of honour at the public celebration for the canonisation of St Bernardino of Siena.197 A safe-conduct issued by the pope four days earlier leaves no doubt that the embassy originated in Solomonic Ethiopia. According to Pope Nicholas V, the party had been sent by ‘our dearest son in Christ Constantine, the illustrious emperor of Ethiopia’—addressing as ̣e Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob by his throne name.198 The purpose of the mission is stated opaquely: the group had come ‘on account of several challenging matters of business’, which also concerned ‘the honour of the holy Apostolic See’.199 Nothing further is known about these negotiations on the weighty matters concerning the Latin Church. In 1441, when he was still an aspiring theologian known by his birthname Tommaso Parentucelli,200 Pope Nicholas V had been present at the examination of the Ethiopian monks at the Council of Florence. We may presume that he, like his predecessor Pope Eugene IV, continued to hold out hope for an Ethiopian Union of the Churches with the papacy. In early June, the three Ethiopian ambassadors and their retinue left the Eternal City under the protection of a papal escort, journeying about 150 miles southwards to the court of king Alfonso V of Aragon in Naples. They were not travelling lightly: the safe-conduct specifies that the group totalled 15 persons, including ‘escorts and personal servants’ riding and on foot, as well as quite a lot of luggage including ‘books, writings and things’.201 The pope’s sergeant-at-arms, a man called Carmignuola, had been tasked with ensuring the security of the Ethiopian envoys and was paid a sizeable sum for his pains.202 Like earlier Solomonic missions to Rome, the Ethiopian ambassadorial group of 1450 was treated with high honours. By mid-July 1450, the Ethiopians had reached Naples, and Carmignuola was back in Rome.203 We know that the Ethiopian party passed the height of the summer in Naples and the surrounding area, preparing to return to their homeland by October. In a letter dated 17 July 1450, the principal clerk of king Alfonso V, Arnau Fonolleda, describes a set of celebrations taking place at the Aragonese court. Accompanied by minstrels and drummers as well as many dignitaries from all over the Mediterranean world, the ‘ambassadors of Prester John’ are narrated as entering the royal residence of Castel Capuano in Naples.204 The Ethiopians’ position in the list of attendees—between the king’s council and the king’s intimates and Alfonso V himself—similarly indicates that they were perceived as the envoys of an influential and esteemed ruler. One of the ambassadors, the

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Sicilian Petrus, was interviewed by an Italian humanist and scholar during the mission’s sojourn in Naples, who would include Petrus’ account in a work of universal history.205 But what had been the goal of the mission? A letter from Alfonso V to as ̣e Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob dated 18 September 1450 offers insight into the motivations of the Ethiopian court in sending another embassy to the king of Aragon.206 Its text directly addresses the requests posed by the nǝgus ́: a first demand concerned the masters and artisans as ̣e Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob had requested, whom Alfonso states he would happily send to Ethiopia if only the path there were secure and without danger. Indeed, the Aragonese king specifies that ‘some time ago’ he had already sent thirteen masters of ‘a variety of skills’ to Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob’s brother—alluding to as ̣e Yǝsḥaq’s mission of 1427–1429 examined above.207 As we know, and as apparently Alfonso did by this point, these men had all died on their way to Ethiopia. Now, a quarter of a century later, Alfonso—once so eager to hear back from the highland court—was hesitant to risk more lives. And yet, he states that he was still planning to send ‘some of the masters you asked for’ to Ethiopia, even though in doing so, he was ‘creating dangers that they must suffer’.208 A second Solomonic wish related to ‘brocade fabrics, the finest woollen cloths, vessels of gold and silver and all the other things’ that the nǝgus ́ had asked of the Aragonese king.209 Again, Alfonso admits that he was only sending what he ‘had been able to find’ on short notice.210 A treasury list reveals that the objects eventually dispatched included a small reliquary box of gilded silver and a small silver cross fashioned by Alfonso’s goldsmith four days later.211 The second part of Alfonso’s letter segues from broad complaints about unsafe roads to a specific plan on how to ensure uninterrupted future travel between the two realms. Specifically, Alfonso V reveals that he was envisioning nothing less than a crusade in the Eastern Mediterranean— and that he counted on Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob’s active participation in this venture. The Aragonese king was planning on sending a fleet of 150 ships to ‘the holy house of Jerusalem’, and urged the nǝgus ́ to block the Nile and place men at the Ethiopian borders. Only when he had heard that the Ethiopians had done their piece would king Alfonso V send more craftsmen as promised.212 Earlier in this chapter, we saw that Alfonso had shown a veiled interest in a military alliance with Solomonic Ethiopia as early as 1428. More than 20 years later, subtlety had been replaced by explicitness. Crucially, this open and unambiguous call to a joint crusade tied Aragonese fulfilment of

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Ethiopian diplomatic demands—which, it bears repeating, concerned entirely peaceable matters—to Solomonic military action. The Aragonese crown would provide aṣe Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob with everything he desired, but only if the Ethiopians committed to a crusade against the Mamlūk Sultanate.213 Like his predecessors, the nǝgus ́ had asked for craftsmen, precious garments and vessels made of gold and silver from Italy to the Horn of Africa. As ̣e Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob’s demands from Aragon thus all but mirror those of his brother and father nearly half a century, and a quarter of a century, earlier: he, too, was looking to acquire labour, beautiful fabrics and liturgical items from a Latin court. The recipients of his embassy meanwhile harboured violently different interests, as we shall see below: alongside a union with Rome, both the papacy and the Aragonese crown increasingly—even frantically—desired military alliances and aid from Ethiopia against the growing Ottoman threat throughout the 1450s. The specifics of how and why Alfonso would have also wanted to organise a two-pronged attack against Mamlūk Egypt are unclear. The letter states that the three Ethiopian ambassadors had been informed on particulars during their time in Naples in 1450. No such alliance materialised. One-and-a-half years later, no reply had arrived from Ethiopia—and thus Alfonso V wrote to aṣe Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob again.214 In January 1452, the Aragonese king was about to send an ambassador called Michaelus to the Ethiopian court on account of several things he ‘needed done’. He begged the nǝgus ́ to listen to his messenger and to respond favourably.215 The rather terse letter ends with an open invitation: if Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob desired anything from the kingdom of Aragon, he should only say the word— Alfonso was ready to send him anything he asked.216 From the list of three other rulers who were to receive a copy of the letter—among them the last reigning Byzantine emperor Constantine XI Palaiologos217 as well as John IV of Trebizond218—we can reconstruct that the Aragonese ambassador was to travel via Constantinople, Trebizond on the Black Sea and parts of Persia219 to reach Ethiopia. This meandering route carefully avoided Mamlūk and Ottoman territory, indicating that by 1452, Alfonso still hoped for a shared crusade with the nǝgus ́. Another year-and-a-half later, no response had reached the Aragonese king. In July 1453, Alfonso V wrote to aṣe Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob for the third time.220 His letter specifies that he was sending a high-ranking member of his court—the royal chamberlain Antonius Martinez—via yet another route to the nǝgus ́.221 Alfonso makes explicit that he desired to hear back any news from Ethiopia whatsoever, as quickly as possible.222 The letter

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contains very little beyond this frantic call begging for a reply. It again ends on an invitation, modified to tempt the nǝgus ́: if Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob desired anything from the kingdom of Aragon, he should simply write back, so that Alfonso ‘might thereby have the capacity to act in accordance with your pleasures’.223 It is little wonder that Alfonso—one of the most powerful kings of Latin Europe—was not mincing his words, or that his entirely one-sided communication towards the Christian Horn of Africa had gained new urgency and intensity. By the summer of 1453, time was of the essence. The repeated plea to return Antonius quamprimum—‘as soon as possible’—makes that abundantly clear. This failed to materialise: no known Latin or Ethiopian source sheds further light on the fate of either of the Aragonese ambassadors. In the three years between the first of Alfonso’s letters to his last attempt trying to cajole Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob into answering, the Christian Mediterranean had irrevocably changed. Just six weeks before Alfonso’s last missive, Constantinople—the capital of Byzantium and heart of the 1000-year-old former Eastern Roman Empire—had finally fallen to the Ottoman Turks after a two-month siege.224 The Ottomans continued their westward advance on the Balkans and in Eastern Europe. Latin Christendom was under the acute threat of attack. No reply was forthcoming from the highland court. It appears that as ̣e Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob had possibly sent an ambassador to Lisbon and the kingdom of Portugal, instead. A man identified as ‘Jorge, ambassador of the Prester John’—commonly understood as the nǝgus ́ of Ethiopia at that point—appears in several documents of the early 1450s now in the Torre do Tombo Archives in Lisbon. An expense list drawn up by the treasurer of the king of Portugal225 confirms that some reais—gold coins—as well as ‘forty bushels of wheat’ and some 425 litres of wine were given to this ambassador for one month of his maintenance’.226 It also states that this Jorge—Georgius or Giyorgis—was planning to travel onwards to Burgundy. Was this Jorge the same man as  the one in two papal documents dated to 1451, where a man travelling to Ethiopia is given as ‘Georgio Sur of Messina’?227 If so, what had he been sent to accomplish? The sources are too scarce to say. What can be determined with surety is that aṣe Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob did not approach the Crown of Aragon again for the rest of his long reign. Alfonso V’s increasingly frantic demands went unanswered. It is unlikely that the nǝgus ́ had remained unaware of the fundamental changes in power within the Eastern Mediterranean: Ethiopian pilgrims were active throughout

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the region at the time, and maintained diasporic communities and monasteries serving pilgrims in the Eastern Mediterranean.228 In 1448, Ethiopian monks were in Rhodes, where they boasted about aṣe Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob’s recent defeat of Sultan Aḥmad Badlāy.229 Two famous maps made in Italy in the 1450s immortalised the extensive geographical knowledge of Ethiopian pilgrims interviewed by mapmakers such as Fra Mauro during their stay in the Italian peninsula.230 The nǝgus ́ himself apparently composed a Nägs ́ hymn in which Christian communities of the Mediterranean are depicted as begging Ethiopian rulers for military aid—though, crucially, he historicised this episode and narrated it as having happened during the reign of his father, as ̣e Dawit.231 Not unlike the issue of the proposed Union of the Churches, it appears more likely that aṣe Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob intentionally chose not to heed these Latin Christian calls to action. The Solomonic nägäs ́t had their own long and complicated history with the Mamlūk Sultans of Egypt.232 In a 1447 letter to Mamlūk Sultan Ǧaqmaq, aṣe Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob himself had voiced explicit threats against Egypt, stressing the supposed Ethiopian control over the Nile as part of a campaign to style himself the protector of the still sizeable Christian minorities in Egypt and the Levant.233 The diplomatic dispute between Solomonic Ethiopia and Mamlūk Egypt was peaceably resolved by 1448; in the spring of 1453, the nǝgus ́ sent another diplomatic mission to Cairo, possibly to secure Ethiopian holdings in the Holy Land after recent bouts of Mamlūk violence against Latin Christian sites.234 This mission, and these attacks targeting adherents of the papacy, would have rendered the nǝgus ́ cognizant of developments in the Eastern Mediterranean at the very latest. And still, he did not send word to the Latin West. Midfifteenth-century Solomonic political realities had little room for European crusading plans.235 Nearly three years later, in December 1456, Pope Callixtus III—who had succeeded Pope Nicholas V a year earlier—attempted to reach out to the nǝgus ́ yet again by handing a letter to two Ethiopian pilgrims.236 He, too, was proposing a shared crusade between Latin Christendom and the nägäs ́t. Addressing himself to ‘the beloved son in Christ Zarajacob king of the Ethiopian realms’,237 Callixtus’ missive is one of the longest and most vivid directed at Ethiopia to come down to us for any time before the seventeenth century. Like Alfonso before him, the pontiff pled with aṣe Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob to join the fight against the Ottomans and block the Nile. After reminding the nǝgus ́ of the victories achieved by his ancestors over the infidels—alluding to the Aksumite incursion into South Arabia in the sixth century to protect the Christians of Ḥ imyar upon the request of

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Byzantine emperor, Justin I238—the pope urged as ̣e Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob to join an emerging pan-Christian effort against the Turks: Callixtus had recently ‘decreed that the forces of the princes of the world, those who profess the crucified Christ, be assembled’.239 This, of course, included the Ethiopians.240 The way the pope saw it, Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob had a vital role to play: were the nǝgus ́ to join the fight, Western Christendom would be assured of success—not the least because of Ethiopia’s assumed control over the Nile. Through the diversion of these waters, Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob could deplete the enemy’s food resources.241 The nǝgus ́ only had to contact Ludovico, the papal legate for the naval fleet already active in the Eastern Mediterranean, to do his part and join the fight.242 To impress both the urgency of the matter and the heroism of Latin troops onto the nǝgus ́, Callixtus also offered a lengthy, rousing recount of the war against the Ottomans in the Balkans and Hungary. The letter ends with two passages highly evocative in the context of this study. Hoping that the nǝgus ́ would indeed take up the fight alongside the forces of Latin Christendom, Callixtus was giving Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob both figuratively and literally the ‘golden sword which Jeremiah was seen giving to the commander of the Maccabees’.243 A whole host of precious relics was to be sent along with the letter: ‘relics from the holy Apostles Peter and Paul; from Saint John the Baptist; from the arm of St Andrew the Apostle; from St James the Apostle, son of Zebedee; and from the wood of the cross on which the blessed Apostle Peter was executed’.244 The unprompted gifting of these highly venerable relics—all connected to biblical personnel, Evangelists and Apostles—served as a linchpin to ensure as ̣e Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob’s support in the fight against the Muslim powers of the Mediterranean. We do not know if these religious treasures ever safely made their way to the Ethiopian highland court. What does it mean that the pope was effectively trying to bribe the nǝgus ́ into joining his crusade with precious relics? Alfonso’s repeated invitations that he would fulfil any and all of Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob’s wishes and desires, as well as the papal gifting of a whole cache of relics, suggest that the Ethiopian interest in precious religious materials was sufficiently well-­ known in Latin Europe by the 1450s. Nevertheless, the Ethiopian sovereign failed to react. Callixtus’ letter, like those of the Aragonese king, remained unanswered. Only three years later, in October 1459, did someone purporting to be an Ethiopian ecclesiastic appear before Callixtus’ successor, Pope Pius II.245 Nothing more is known about him, or—more importantly—about how aṣe Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob reacted to the plans for the military alliances proposed to him by several European potentates in the

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1450s. The pan-Christian plot to vanquish the Mamlūks and Ottomans, as explicitly elaborated by Alfonso V of Aragon and Pope Callixtus III,246 was never to come to fruition. In fact, throughout the 1460s and 1470s, no diplomatic mission or sizeable Ethiopian Christian presence is traceable in Latin Europe. A curious lull follows the bouts of intense exchanges under the rule of as ̣e Dawit and the reigns of his three sons.

Chapter Conclusion A close reading of the rather heterogeneous, sometimes even contradictory sources covered in this chapter must re-shape our view of the second phase of Solomonic contacts with Latin Christianity. Throughout, the sons of aṣe Dawit showed little interest in military aid and crusading. The purported Solomonic quest to acquire arms, technology and military support from Europe—and the accusation of inciting a pan-Christian crusade—are traceable only in the allegations levelled against Solomonic ambassador al-Tabrı ̄zı ̄ in the 1420s. As we have seen, his case is far more complicated than has been acknowledged in scholarship thus far. Understandably, Mamlūk accounts regarded Ethiopian exchanges with the Christian world of the Latin West with suspicion. Moreover,  Latin Christian crusading interests really began to focus on Solomonic Ethiopia in this time: veiled and explicit Latin hopes for a military alliance or even a shared crusade with Solomonic Ethiopia are tangible throughout. However, when the chance arose—multiple times—no nǝgus ́ actively pursued any military venture as laid out by the papacy or the king of Aragon. Instead, the three nägäs ́t all followed in their father’s footsteps. Arabic and Latin Christian sources show how aṣe Yǝsḥaq, aṣe Täklä Maryam and as ̣e Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob first and foremost sought to acquire artisans and craftsmen from the Latin Mediterranean—alongside a much-underestimated desire for ecclesiastical treasures. Fine cloth and embroidered garments from a distant Christian sphere pose the second main wish at the heart of both aṣe Yǝsḥaq’s and as ̣e Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob’s missions to Aragon. Procuring distant liturgical objects and even relics through diplomatic channels continued to play a role. By the 1450s, Ethiopian Christian interest in ecclesiastical wares and especially relics had become so well-known in the Latin West as to be used to incentivise a nǝgus ́ into joining Western crusading efforts against the Muslim realms of the Eastern Mediterranean. Aṣe Yǝsḥaq’s suggestion of a double royal union with Aragon remains singularly remarkable.

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Not unlike the pilgrims traceable in the previous chapter, Ethiopian ecclesiastics sought to experience the holy sites of Latin Christendom— whether in Florence, Rome or the Iberian Peninsula. These men viewed sacred sites at a leisurely pace and even might have acquired dozens of ecclesiastical items. Abbot Niqodemos’ Gǝʿǝz letter to the papacy—and as ̣e Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob’s continued inaction—meanwhile offer a view on the Ethiopian attitude towards the Latin papacy’s insistence that the Ethiopians should prove their Christianity by reverting to ‘the true See of the right faith’.247 Like earlier Ethiopian missions to the Latin West, the embassies in this second phase of contacts were treated with the utmost respect. In 1428, Alfonso V of Aragon provided considerable sums to ensure a successful future relationship with the nǝgus ́; meanwhile, the papacy spared no expense to see the Ethiopian delegation safely to Naples in 1450. Aragonese documents of 1428 and 1430 illustrate just how seriously Alfonso entertained the possibility of a double royal marriage with the Solomonic court despite the vast geographical distance, and how eager— even desperate—he was to receive news from Ethiopia in both 1430 and throughout the early 1450s. The presence of the Ethiopian monks in Florence allows us to observe the special privileges enjoyed by Ethiopian pilgrims at this time, including access to the otherwise restricted relic of the Sudarium, the ‘Veil of Veronica’. Whether at the papal audience in which the Cardinals Foix and Fillastre spoke with Pope Nicholas V about the Ethiopian mission to Aragon in the late 1420s or the early 1440s respectively, Latin scholars and ecclesiastics were eager for news from Christian North-East Africa. And yet, these contacts were fraught with misunderstandings. The persistent Latin hope for a Union of the Churches—as well as the adamant call for a shared crusade—demonstrates just how superficial the European understanding of religion and rulership in Solomonic Ethiopia remained well into the fifteenth century.

Notes 1. Ruled 1414–1429/30, regnal name Gäbrä Mäsqäl, second son of aṣe Dawit; see Steven Kaplan, ‘Yǝsḥaq’, in EAe 5 (2014), 59–60. 2. Aḥmad ibn ʿAlı ̄ Al-Maqrı ̄zı ̄, Kita ̄b Al-Sulu ̄k Li-Maʿrifat Duwal al-Mulūk, eds. Muḥammad Muṣtạ fā Ziyāda and Saʿı ̄d ʿAbd al-Fattāḥ ʿĀ šūr, vol. 4.2 (Cairo:  Dār al-Kutub, 1939), 795–97 and Yūsuf Ibn Taghrı ̄ Birdı ̄, Al-Nujūm al-Za ̄hira Fı ̄ Mulu ̄k Mis ̣r Wa l-Qāhira, ed. M.A. Hātim, vol. 14 (Cairo: Dār al-Kutub, 1963), 324–25.

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3. Al-Maqrı ̄zı ̄, Kitāb Al-Suluk̄ Li-Maʿrifat Duwal al-Mulūk, 4.2:797. 4. Taddesse Tamrat, Church and State in Ethiopia, 1270–1527 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), 265 also cf. Taddesse Tamrat, Church and State in Ethiopia, 1270–1527, 259; Andreu Martínez d’Alòs-Moner, ‘Alfonso V’, in EAe 1 (2003), 197; Richard Pankhurst, ‘Europe, Relations With’, in EAe 2 (2005), 452; Stuart C.  Munro-Hay, Ethiopia Unveiled: Interaction Between Two Worlds (Hollywood: Tsehai, 2006), 250–300; Andrew Kurt, ‘The Search for Prester John, a Projected Crusade and the Eroding Prestige of Ethiopian Kings, c.1200–c.1540’, Journal of Medieval History 39, no. 3 (2013): 314–15; Benjamin Weber, ‘Gli Etiopi a Roma Nel Quattrocento: Ambasciatori Politici, Negoziatori Religiosi o Pellegrini?’, Mélanges de l’École Française de Rome - Moyen Âge 125, no. 1 (2013): paras 3–4; Matteo Salvadore, The African Prester John and the Birth of Ethiopian-European Relations, 1402–1555 (Milton Park: Routledge, 2016), 37, 43; Matteo Salvadore, ‘Encounters Between Ethiopia and Europe, 1400–1660’, in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). 5. Compare Salvadore, ‘Encounters Between Ethiopia and Europe, 1400–1660’; reading a Solomonic quest for artisans within the framework of a desire to gain ‘leverage’ against a local Muslim Sultanate and to improve Ethiopian ‘access to European technology’; see Salvadore, The African Prester John and the Birth of Ethiopian-European Relations, 1402–1555, 40. 6. Ruled 1430–1433, also known as Ḥ ǝzbä Nañ, third son of aṣe Dawit; see Marie-Laure Derat, ‘Täklä Maryam’, in EAe 4 (2010), 841. 7. Ruled 1434–1468, also known as Qwäst ̣äntị nos, fourth son of asẹ Dawit; see Marie-Laure Derat and Steven Kaplan, ‘Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob’, in EAe 5 (2014), 146–50. 8. Also called the ‘Geography of Ptolemy’, a gazetteer, atlas and treatise on cartography first compiled in the second century CE that became available to the learned elites of Western Europe by the early fifteenth century again, its first Latin translation (from Greek) dating to either 1406 or 1407. As the manuscript refers to Claudii ptholomei cosmographi liber primus hec habet, I shall refer to it as the Cosmography; see BMN, Ms. 354, fol. 2v. 9. 1348–1428, French Cardinal, based in Rome towards the end of his life; see Raymond Thomassy, ‘De Guillaume Fillastre Considéré Comme Géographe a Propos d’un Manuscript de La Géographie de Ptolémée’, Bulletin de La Société de Géographie de Paris 17 (1842): 144–55; Malte Prietzel, Guillaume Fillastre Der Jüngere (1400/07–1473): Kirchenfürst Und Herzoglich-­ Burgundischer Rat (Stuttgart: Thorbecke, 2001). Fillastre’s first copy of the Cosmography dates to 1411, by 1427, he had the maps added to the manuscript.

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10. Fillastre asserted that ‘India’ or ‘Ethiopia’ is the realm of Prester John, characterising him as a Christian ‘said to rule over 72 kings, 12 of whom are infidels, the rest Christian but a variety of rites and sects’.—‘Et in istis india et ethiopa est Terra p[resbyte]ri Joh[ann]is [christ]iani, qui dicitur regnare su[per] 72 reges, quo[rum] 12 su[n]t infideles, reliqui [christ]iani, s[e]d divers[orum] ritu[u]m et secta[rum].’ BMN, Ms. 354, fol. 190r. 11. Pierre de Foix the Elder, 1386–1464, former pseudo-cardinal supporting the Avignon side of the Western Schism. After the Council of Constance, Foix pledged allegiance to Pope Martin V in Rome and was sent to the kingdom of Aragon to persuade Alfonso V to accept the papacy of Martin V. Alfonso V supported anti-pope Clement VIII to the latter’s abdication in 1429. An aside in the Fillastre manuscript, which specifies that Cardinal Pierre de Foix considered Pope Martin V to be the vicar of Christ, becomes intelligible against this backdrop. 12. ‘Istius p[res]b[yte]ri Joh[ann]is duo ambassiatores, unus [Christ]ianus [et] alter infidelis, hoc an[n]o D[omi]ni mill[esim]o quadringen[tesi]mo vicesimo septi[m]o quo hae tab[u]l[a]e desc[ri]pt[a]e fuerunt, veneru[n]t ad regem Aragonu[m] Alfonsum quos vidit c[u]m rege in Valencia d[omi]n[u]s Cardinalis de Fuxo, legatus sedis a[posto]lic[a]e ad d[i]c[tu]m regem. Et dix[er]unt ei q[uia] venirent ad P[a]pam Martinu[m] quintu[m], quem [Christ]ianus reputabat [Christ]i vicariu[m]. H[aec] d[i]ctus cardinalis P[a]p[ae] retulit me cardinali S[an]cti Marci p[rese]nte, qui has feci describi tabulas, et ex graeco exemplari.’ BMN, Ms. 354, fol. 190r. Both cardinals and the pope had all been present at the Council of Constance, most probably encountering the Ethiopian monks who spent ‘very many months’ there between 1416 and 1418. 13. Compare ACA, Ms. Reg. 2680, fol. 165r. 14. On 15 May 1428, Alfonso V composed a letter to the ‘excellent and undefeated lord king Ysach, son of David, by god’s grace Prester John, Lord of the Indies, the Tablets of the Law of Mount Sinai and the Throne of David, and King of Ethiopian kings’. It is the oldest direct addressation of a Solomonic ruler and reads: ‘Eminemtissimo e[t] inuictissimo monarche domino ysach filio dauid dei gr[ati]a pr[es]b[yte]ro johanni indor[um] d[omi]no Tabular[um] montis sinay et Troni dauid Regum[que] Ethiopie Regi tamq[uam] fra[tr]i nobis singularissimo.’ ACA, Ms. Reg. 2680, fol. 165r. 15. If such a letter ever existed—it could very well be that the Ethiopian ambassadors had presented the nǝgus ’́ requests orally. A contemporary Egyptian text, however, indicates that the Ethiopian ambassador was carrying a letter in the ‘language of the Abyssinians’; see below.

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16. One document is a Catalan-language memorandum for the designated Aragonese ambassador to Ethiopia, ACA, Ms. Reg. 2677, fol. 54r-v, transl. in Peter P. Garretson, ‘A Note on Relations between Ethiopia and the Kingdom of Aragon in the Fifteenth Century’, Rassegna Di Studi Etiopici 37 (1993): 37–44:39. It was most likely compiled by mid-May 1428. The second document is a 1450 letter by Alfonso V written in an Italian dialect, which directly refers to the embassy of 1428; see ACA, Ms. Reg. 2658, fol. 57r. 17. This information is indirectly contained in ACA, Ms. Reg. 2677, fol. 54r. 18. 1415–1455; identified by Garretson as Alfonso’s sister; see Garretson, ‘A Note on Relations between Ethiopia and the Kingdom of Aragon in the Fifteenth Century’, 1993, 42. She was actually a second cousin once removed, the daughter of Isabella of Aragon, Countess of Urgell and James II, Count of Urgell. 19. 1406–1438, titled Count of Albuquerque and Viceroy of Naples. 20. A later letter of Alfonso to Yǝsḥaq’s brother and successor aṣe Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob speaks of thirteen ‘masters of diverse arts’ that had been demanded by Yǝsḥaq and subsequently despatched—if only to die on the way; ‘tredici homini Mastri in diverse arte liquali demandate ad noi ia fa vno grande tempo per lo serenissimo vestro fratre li mandavamo e essendo in camino per non potere passare morero’; ACA, Ms. Reg. 2658, fol. 57r. 21. ‘maestres deles cequies’; compare ACA, Ms. Reg. 2677, fol. 54r. Cequies is often connected to water or canals in late medieval Spanish documents and is suggested as such in Garretson, ‘A Note on Relations between Ethiopia and the Kingdom of Aragon in the Fifteenth Century’, 42; meanwhile, Constantin Marinescu suggested cequies as a plural of ceca— ‘mint’—making them ‘masters of minting coins’; see Constantin Marinescu, La Politique Orientale d’Alfonse V d’Aragon, Roi de Naples (1416–1458) (Barcelona: Institut d’estudis catalans, 1994). 22. Compare ACA, Ms. Reg. 2677, fol. 54r. On 13 May 1428, Alfonso had directed his treasurer to award a total of 11000 Valencian solidi—a high-­ value gold coin—to be split evenly between two ambassadorial parties to Ethiopia; see ACA, Ms. Reg. 2680, fol. 165r. 23. Full name ʿAlı ̄ b. Muḥammad b. Muḥammad b. Muḥammad b. Yūsuf al-Tabrı ̄zı ̄, Nūr al-Dı ̄n; he is sometimes also styled as Nūr al-Dı ̄n ʿAlı ̄ al-Tabrı ̄zı ̄ in scholarship. 24. ACA, Ms. Reg. 2677, fol. 54r-v; transl. in Garretson, ‘A Note on Relations between Ethiopia and the Kingdom of Aragon in the Fifteenth Century’ as well as (Al-Maqrı ̄zı ̄ 1939, 4.2:795–797; Ibn Ḥ ajar al-ʿAsqalānı ̄ 1971, 3:426–427). 25. The letter of 15 May 1428 as well as an internal chancellery document dated two days earlier only refer to ‘Petrus of Bonia’ as Alfonso’s ambas-

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sador; the Latin letter of introduction to aṣe Yǝsḥaq was corrected by deleting Phelipe’s name. See ACA, Ms. Reg. 2677, fol. 54r and ACA, Ms. Reg. 2681, fol. 175v. 26. ‘que nostro insident valde cordi, de nostri mentis intentu, fidelem Petrum de Bonia, nuntium et oratorem nobis sincere dilectum, presencium latorem, largissime instructum’; ACA, Ms. Reg. 2680, fol. 165r. 27. ‘d[al] pregar lan de p[re]t del dit senyor ha dell. E pregar lan de p[ar]t del dit senyor molt affectuosame[n]t quels do una bona p[er]sona qui les guie els meta en lo cami q[ue] ells han a fer els acompanye[r] tro jaquie, los en cami aviat e segur e tro lla on conexeran esser la hede e q[ui] retornada la d[i]ta p[er]sona al dit maestre.’ ACA, Ms. Reg. 2677, fol. 54r, also ACA, Ms. Reg. 2677, fol. 54r and Ms. Reg. 2677, fol. 73v, last paragraph. 28. Compare ACA, Ms. Reg. 2681, fol. 175v; ACA, Ms. Reg. 2677, fols. 54r-v; ACA, Ms. Reg. 2680, fol. 165r. 29. Arabic sources documenting the progress of the Ethiopian mission led by al-Tabrı ̄zı ̄ do not mention Latin Christians as travelling with the Ethiopian party. 30. ‘Ite[m] se pendran be esme[n]t d[e]la disposicio del dit Prestre Joha[n] e de les t[er]res e puxança sua e del. gran tresor e riquesa daquell e de totes circumsta[n]cies.’ Also: ‘Apres com arribaran en la t[er]ra del Solda e dalliava[n]t p[er] tot lo cami fins en Prestre johan, ana[n]t e encara al tornar pendran se esme[n]t d[e]la disposicio dela t[er]ra e dela fertilitat viures e aygues E axi mateix d[e]les poblacio[n]s forces e passos e de tot aço ab les circumstancies faran un memorial molt sec[re]tame[n]t, avisant se d[e]la man[er]a deles gents e dela vida lur.’ ACA, Ms. Reg.  2677, fol. 54r. 31. ‘Ite[m] sils s[er]a mogut matrimoni p[er] al infant don Pedro scoltar lan die[n]ts q[ue] de tal cosa. d[e]la part deça. no hauien haud sentime[n]t algu p[er]o que ho reportara[n] E informar se han d[e]la p[er]sona d[e]la dona e de ço q[ue] s[er]ai fet e. donat al dit infant p[er] contemplacio d[e]l dit matrimoni. Ite[m] se auisera[n] quin horde e man[er]a poran. e[ss]er dats q[ue] puxa anar seg[ur]ame[n]t dona Johana dela p[ar]t [sic!] de lla, e com vindra laltra, si cas era. q[ue]lo negoci vingues a conclusio.’ ACA, Ms. Reg. 2677, fol. 54v. 32. ACA, Ms. Reg. 2677, f. 54v. 33. ‘Ite[m], sobre lo fet de[l]a empresa s[e]cretame[n]t se informara[n] d[e]la man[er]a d[e]la puxa[n]ça e del temps E de co q[ue]lo senyor rey hauria a fer p[er] mar e quina aiuda poria hau[er] en moneda del dit Prestre Joha[n] e en quina forma segurame[n]t se paia dur Rex Alfo[ns]o.’ ACA, Ms. Reg. 2677, f. 54v. 34. Compare ACA, Ms. Reg. 2680, fol. 165r.

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35. ACA, Ms. Reg. 2658, fol. 57r. 36. ACA, Ms. Reg. 2681, fol. 175v. 37. That is, al-Maqrı ̄zı ̄ and Ibn Taghrı ̄ Birdı ̄ well as Ibn Ḥ ajar and Ibn Iyās, whose accounts will be examined in detail below. In April 2019, Julien Loiseau of Aix-Marseille University first presented the new, contradictory Arabic source evidence at a conference in Cambridge. He later kindly provided me with a transcript of his talk, pointed me in the direction of the sources—some not yet received in Ethiopianist scholarship—and even shared his own preliminary translations of the Arabic sources, which have been of immense help to this study. His own article on the subject is forthcoming; see Julien Loiseau, ‘The Negus Merchant. Fortunes and Misfortunes of an Overseas Trader in fifteenth-Century Cairo’, in An African Metropolis. Cairo and Its African Hinterland in the Middle Ages, ed. Julien Loiseau (Leiden: Brill, 2021). 38. Julien Loiseau, ‘The Ḥ aṭı ̄ and the Sultan. Letters and Embassies from Abyssinia to the Mamluk Court’, in Mamluk Cairo, a Crossroads for Embassies: Studies on Diplomacy and Diplomatics, eds. Frédéric Bauden and Malika Dekkiche, (Leiden: Brill, 2019), 638–657:652. 39. The texts of al-Maqrı ̄zı ̄, Ibn Taghrı ̄ Birdı ̄ and Ibn Ḥ ajar, all written between the 1430s and the early second half of the fifteenth century. 40. Compare for example Gaston Wiet, ‘Les Relations Égypto-Abyssines Sous Les Sultans Mamlouks’, Bulletin de La Société d’Archéologie Copte 4 (1938): 127; Enrico Cerulli, ‘L’Etiopia Medievale in Alcuni Brani Di Scrittori Arabi’, Rassegna Di Studi Etiopici 3, no. 3 (1943): 292; Taddesse Tamrat, Church and State in Ethiopia, 1270–1527, 259; Salvadore, The African Prester John and the Birth of Ethiopian-European Relations, 1402–1555, 37, 43. 41. Kita ̄b Al-Sulūk Li-Maʿrifat Duwal al-Mulūk, a history of the Ayyūbid and Mamlūk Dynasties chronicling the years from 1171 to his death in 1441, first written down in the 1420s. The information is contained in a note on the month of rabı ̄ʿ II and 24th–25th ǧumādā I 832 A.H., equalling mid-January to mid-February 1429 and early March 1429. See Al-Maqrı ̄zı ̄, Kita ̄b Al-Suluk̄ Li-Maʿrifat Duwal al-Mulūk, 4.2:795–97. 42. Aḥmad ibn ʿAlı ̄ al-Maqrı ̄zı ̄, ca. 1364–1442, Islamic historian based in Cairo. 43. Ḥ aṭı ̄ is an Arabic rendering of the Gǝʿǝz title aṣe; also see Loiseau, ‘The Ḥ at ̣ı ̄ and the Sultan. Letters and Embassies from Abyssinia to the Mamluk Court’, 639. 44. Spelled al-Tawrı ̄zı ̄ instead of al-Tabrı ̄zı ̄. 45. Specifically, Muḥammad al-Bisātı̣ ̄; see Al-Maqrı ̄zı ̄, Kitab̄ Al-Sulu ̄k Li-Maʿrifat Duwal al-Mulūk, 4.2:797.

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46. Al-Maqrı ̄zı ̄, Kita ̄b Al-Sulu ̄k Li-Maʿrifat Duwal al-Mulūk, 4.2:797. Also see Amalia Levanoni, ‘Takf ı ̄r in Egypt and Syria during the Mamlūk Period’, in Accusations of Unbelief in Islam. A Diachronic Perspective on Takf ı ̄r, eds. Camilla Adang et al. (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 166. 47. Yūsuf Ibn Taghrı ̄ Birdı ̄, 1411–1470, Islamic historian based in Cairo. His chronicle Al-Nuju ̄m al-Zah̄ ira Fı ̄ Muluk̄ Miṣr Wa l-Qāhira covers the history of Muslim Egypt from the Arab Conquest to 1467/68, shortly before his death. 48. Ibn Taghrı ̄ Birdı ̄, Al-Nujum ̄ al-Zāhira Fı ̄ Mulūk Miṣr Wa l-Qāhira, 14:324–25. 49. Ibn Taghrı ̄ Birdı ̄, Al-Nujum ̄ al-Zāhira Fı ̄ Mulūk Miṣr Wa l-Qa ̄hira, 14:324–25. 50. See Al-Maqrı ̄zı ̄, Kita ̄b Al-Sulu ̄k Li-Maʿrifat Duwal al-Mulūk, 4.2:795–97 and Ibn Taghrı ̄ Birdı ̄, Al-Nuju ̄m al-Zah̄ ira Fı ̄ Mulūk Mis ̣r Wa l-Qāhira, 14:324–25. 51. Aḥmad ibn ʿAli Ibn Ḥ ajar al-ʿAsqalānı ̄, ca. 1372–1449, Islamic scholar, jurist and historian based in Cairo. 52. See Loiseau, ‘The Negus Merchant. Fortunes and Misfortunes of an Overseas Trader in fifteenth-Century Cairo’ and compare Aḥmad ibn ʿAli Ibn Ḥ ajar al-ʿAsqalānı ̄, Inbā’ al-Ghumr Bi-Anbā’ al-ʿUmr, ed. Ḥ asan Ḥ abashi, vol. 3 (Cairo, 1971), 426–27. In the early sixteenth century, the incident is moreover also very briefly mentioned in a  history of Egypt compiled by Muḥammad b. Aḥmad Ibn Iyās; see Muḥammad bin Aḥmad Ibn Iyās, Bada ̄ʾiʿ Al-Zuhūr Fı ̄Waqaʾ̄ iʿ al-Duhu ̄r, ed. Muḥammad Muṣtạ fā, vol. 2 (Cairo, 1982), 123. 53. Inba ̄’ al-Ghumr Bi-Anba’̄ al-ʿUmr, comprising more  than 1000 pages, the work is an annalistic history describing the years 1317–1446. Ibn Ḥ ajar recorded daily and monthly incidents of note, followed by notable events of the year and obituaries of persons of interest to the Egyptian public. According to his foreword, he only recorded what he himself witnessed or could verify through trusted leaders of the faith. 54. Called the Bilad̄ al-Ḥ abasha—the ‘land of the Abyssinians’. 55. .‫نفائس‬ 56. Ibn Ḥ ajar al-ʿAsqalānı ̄, Inbā’ al-Ghumr Bi-Anba ̄’ al-ʿUmr, 3:426. 57. On the Ethiopian import of arms from Egypt and renegade Mamlūk soldiers absconding to the court of aṣe Yǝsḥaq in the 1420s, also compare al-Maqrı ̄zı ̄’s work on the Muslim Sultanates of Ethiopia: Aḥmad ibn ʿAlı ̄ Al-Maqrı ̄zı ̄, The Book of the True Knowledge of the History of the Moslem Kings in Abyssinia, trans. George W.  B. Huntingford (London: SOAS Archives, 1955), 4. Also see Kaplan, ‘Yǝsḥaq’, EAe 5 (2014), 59. 58. The nisba Ǧabartı ̄ or Zaylaʿı ̄ commonly identified commercial agents and merchants of Ethiopian Muslim background outside of Ethiopia between

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the thirteenth and fifteenth century; see Samantha Kelly, ‘Medieval Ethiopian Diasporas’, in A Companion to Medieval Ethiopia and Eritrea, ed. Samantha Kelly (Leiden: Brill, 2020), 442; Anaïs Wion, ‘Medieval Ethiopian Economies: Subsistence, Global Trade and the Administration of Wealth’, in A Companion to Medieval Ethiopia and Eritrea, ed. Samantha Kelly (Leiden: Brill, 2020), 395–424:416. 59. Ibn Ḥ ajar al-ʿAsqalānı ̄, Inbā’ al-Ghumr Bi-Anbā’ al-ʿUmr, 3:426. 60. Ibn Ḥ ajar specifies that the letter was written in the ‘Abyssinian language’. As nobody amongst the Muslims assembled in Cairo could read it, Gǝʿǝz—as the literary and liturgical language of the country—seems a more likely candidate than early Amharic. 61. .‫ – مسامير‬masāmı¯r 62. Specifically named are Ṣadr al-Dı ̄n Ibn al-ʿAjamı ̄, the muḥtasib or ‘inspector of markets’ and an enforcer of public morality of Cairo and Badr alDı ̄n Ḥ asan ibn Naṣr Allāh, the ka ̄tib al-sirr, the confidential secretary to the Sultan and civilian director of the chancery. Both thus occupied very high-­ranking offices. See Ibn Ḥ ajar al-ʿAsqalānı ̄, Inbā’ al-Ghumr Bi-Anbā’ al-ʿUmr, 3:426–27. 63. Ibn Ḥ ajar al-ʿAsqalānı ̄, Inba ̄’ al-Ghumr Bi-Anbā’ al-ʿUmr, 3:427. 64. While al-Maqrı ̄zı ̄ was also a contemporary to the events and a member of the learned elite, his days in the Mamlūk administration—he had held the prestigious post of inspector of the Cairo markets in the very early fifteenth century—had long been over. By 1429, al-Maqrı ̄zı ̄ was a recluse living in his home, which he rarely left. Compare Frédéric Bauden, ‘Taqı ̄ Al-Dı ̄n Aḥmad Ibn ʿAlı ̄ al-Maqrı ̄zı ̄’, in Medieval Muslim Historians and the Franks in the Levant, ed. Alexander Mallett (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2014), 166. Ibn Taghrı ̄ Birdı ̄, meanwhile, had only just entered adulthood at the time of the trial; his chronicle was written decades later. 65. Ibn Ḥ ajar was the chief judge of the Šāfiʿı ̄ maḏhab or school of law. Al-Tabrı ̄zı ̄ was tried by the chief judge of the ‘rivalling’ Mālikı ̄ maḏhab. On the institution of a quadruple system of law in Mamlūk Egypt, also see Yossef Rapoport, ‘Legal Diversity in the Age of Taqlı ̄d: The Four Chief Qāḍı ̄s under the Mamluks’, Islamic Law and Society 10, no. 2 (2003): 210–28. 66. For an introduction on the Muslim Sultanates of medieval Ethiopia including the Barr Saʿd al-Dı ̄n, see Ewald Wagner, ‘ʿAdal’, in EAe 1 (2003), 71–72; Ahmed Hassen Omer and Denis Nosnitsin, ‘Ifat’, in EAe 3 (2007), 118–20; Amélie Chekroun and Bertrand Hirsch, ‘The Sultanates of Medieval Ethiopia’, in A Companion to Medieval Ethiopia and Eritrea, ed. Samantha Kelly (Leiden: Brill, 2020), 86–112.

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̄ 67. Also compare Manfred Kropp, Der Siegreiche Feldzug Des Königs ʿAmda-­ Ṣeyon Gegen Die Muslime in Adal Im Jahre 1332 n. Chr. (Leuven: Peeters, 1994); Chekroun and Hirsch, ‘The Sultanates of Medieval Ethiopia’. 68. See Steven Kaplan, ‘Yǝsḥaq’, 59–60. 69. See Al-Maqrı ̄zı ̄, The Book of the True Knowledge of the History of the Moslem Kings in Abyssinia, 6; my information is also based on a talk by Julien Loiseau, presented at the International Conference of Ethiopian Studies in Mekelle, Ethiopia, in October 2018. 70. The Barr Saʿd al-Dı ̄n, more commonly known in scholarship as the Sultanate of ʿAdal, had been established by Ṣabr al-Dı ̄n, one of the sons Saʿd al-Dı ̄n, a leading member of the ruling Walasmaʿ dynasty of Ifat killed by asẹ Dawit’s troops in 1402/03. His descendants fled to Yemen, returned less than two decades later and established the realm named after their ancestor—the Barr Saʿd al-Dı ̄n, the ‘Land of Saʿd al-Dı ̄n’—on the eastern fringe of the formerly independent Sultanate of Ifat, now a Christian province; see Wagner, ‘ʿAdal’; Omer and Nosnitsin, ‘Ifat’; Chekroun and Hirsch, ‘The Sultanates of Medieval Ethiopia’. 71. See Julien Loiseau, ‘Chrétiens d’Égypte, Musulmans d’Éthiopie. Protection Des Communautés et Relations Diplomatiques Entre Le Sultanat Mamelouk et Le Royaume Salomonien (ca 1270–1516)’, Médiévales 79, no. 2 (2020), 37–68:38. 72. Loiseau, ‘Chrétiens d’Égypte, Musulmans d’Éthiopie. Protection Des Communautés et Relations Diplomatiques Entre Le Sultanat Mamelouk et Le Royaume Salomonien (ca 1270–1516)’, 65. 73. The Šāfiʿı ̄ school continued to hold prominence over the other schools in that it ‘retained overall responsibility for the proper functioning of the system as a whole’; see Rapoport, ‘Legal Diversity in the Age of Taqlı ̄d: The Four Chief Qāḍı ̄s under the Mamluks’, 217. 74. yalʿab bi-l-dı ̄nayn—to ‘play with two religions’; Al-Maqrı ̄zı ̄, Kita ̄b Al-Sulūk Li-Maʿrifat Duwal al-Muluk̄ , 4.2:797. Also see Levanoni, ‘Takfı ̄r in Egypt and Syria during the Mamlūk Period’, 170–71. 75. Levanoni, ‘Takfı ̄r in Egypt and Syria during the Mamlūk Period’, 158. Out of the four schools of law, Mālikı ̄ doctrine was most opposed to granting repentance to those accused of heresy and unbelief; Mamlūk records of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries consistently show Mālikı ̄ judges handing down death sentences in trials relating to accusations of heresy, exponentially more so than the other schools. Compare Rapoport, ‘Legal Diversity in the Age of Taqlı ̄d: The Four Chief Qāḍı ̄s under the Mamluks’, 223–24 and Anne F. Broadbridge, ‘Apostasy Trials in Eighth/ Fourteenth Century Egypt and Syria: A Case Study’, in The History and Historiography of Central Asia: A Festschrift for John E. Woods, eds. Judith

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Pfeiffer and Sholeh Quinn (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2006), 363–82 for fourteenth-­century trials. 76. Compare the data in Rapoport, ‘Legal Diversity in the Age of Taqlı ̄d: The Four Chief Qāḍı ̄s under the Mamluks’; Levanoni, ‘Takf ı ̄r in Egypt and Syria during the Mamlūk Period’. The Persian’s execution on his way back to Ethiopia would have been one of the few ways the Mamlūk authorities could have actively sabotaged the nǝgus ́’ interests without risking open conflict. 77. The work is the Kitāb al-Ilma ̄m bi-Aḫbār man bi-Arḍ al-Ḥ abaša min Mulūk al-Islām, of which no critical edition exists; see Chekroun and Hirsch, ‘The Sultanates of Medieval Ethiopia’, 98, note 46. The quotes above are based on the English translation by G.W.B.  Huntingford of F.T.  Rinck’s Latin translation; see Al-Maqrı ̄zı ̄, The Book of the True Knowledge of the History of the Moslem Kings in Abyssinia, 5. Al-Maqrı ̄zı ̄ himself states that he collected the information contained in the short volume from Ethiopian Muslims he met in Mecca; see Alessandro Gori, ‘Islamic Cultural Traditions of Medieval Ethiopia and Eritrea’, in A Companion to Medieval Ethiopia and Eritrea, ed. Samantha Kelly (Leiden: Brill, 2020), 156, note 45. One must wonder whether the bejewelled crosses had also been acquired by al-Tabrı ̄zı ̄, as mentioned in Ibn Taghrı ̄ Birdı ̄’s account above. 78. Al-Maqrı ̄zı ̄, Kitab̄ Al-Sulu ̄k Li-Maʿrifat Duwal al-Mulu ̄k, 4.2:795–96. 79. Al-Maqrı ̄zı ̄, Kitab̄ Al-Sulu ̄k Li-Maʿrifat Duwal al-Mulu ̄k, 4.2:795–96. 80. Possibly a reference to the anti-Chalcedonian stance of the Coptic and Ethiopian Church, of which a religious jurist such as Ibn Ḥ ajar would have likely been aware. 81. Ibn Ḥ ajar al-ʿAsqalānı ̄, Inbā’ al-Ghumr Bi-Anba ̄’ al-ʿUmr, 3:426–27. 82. Ibn Ḥ ajar mentions that al-Tabrı ̄zı ̄ had ‘some weapons’ in his possession; these appear of no relevance to the trial in the narration. Their origin— whether from Latin Europe or Mamlūk Egypt—is furthermore not specified. 83. Also called Martin the Elder and the Ecclesiastic, king of Aragon from 1396 to 1410. 84. On the day that the conversion of the Jews in Beirut was celebrated, that is, the Passio Imaginis, see Maria Portmann, ‘Converting Jews through Preaching and Painting in the Kingdom of Aragon, ca. 1400’, in Jews and Muslims Made Visible in Christian Iberia and beyond, 14th to 18th Centuries: Another Image, eds. Borja Franco Llopis and Antonio UrqízarHerrera (Boston: Brill, 2019), 72 and Vicent Baydal Sala, ‘Santa Tecla, San Jorge y Santa Bárbara: Los Monarcas de La Corona de Aragón a La Búsqueda de Reliquias En Oriente (Siglos XIV-XV)’ 21 (30 August

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2010): 156. Manuel I himself had been given the relics by Byzantine Emperor Manuel II (1391–1425). 85. Matteo Salvadore states that Yǝsḥaq’s interest in such a union must have been attractive for its ‘leverage’ against ʿAdal and to ensure ‘improved access to European technology’. As we have seen above, both would seem rather unnecessary. Cf. Salvadore, The African Prester John and the Birth of Ethiopian-European Relations, 1402–1555, 40. 86. For comparison: in 1444, the Aragonese Crown estimated the worth of a Bergantí—a full-rigged brig and thus a sizeable merchant ship—with all its wares at 11000 Valencian solidi; compare ACA, C, Ms. Reg. 3194, fols. 30v-32r, ed. in Roser Salicrú i Lluch, Documents per a La Història de Granada Del Regnat d’Alfons El Magnànim, 1416–1458 (Barcelona: CSIC Press, 1999), 413–15. A medium-sized town within the kingdom could expect to obtain about 30000–40000 solidi as income from its inhabitants. Moreover, within the kingdom of Aragon, Valencia had a very strong and stable currency with low rates of inflation. 87. Cf., for instance, Taddesse Tamrat, Church and State in Ethiopia, 1270–1527, 259, 265; Martinez d’Alos-Moner, ‘Alfonso V’; Pankhurst, ‘Europe, Relations With’, 452; Kurt, ‘The Search for Prester John, a Projected Crusade and the Eroding Prestige of Ethiopian Kings, c.1200– c.1540’, 315; Salvadore, The African Prester John and the Birth of Ethiopian-­European Relations, 1402–1555, 37, 43. 88. Compare Taddesse Tamrat, Church and State in Ethiopia, 1270–1527, 255–56. 89. Constantin Marinescu, La Politique Orientale d’Alfonse V d’Aragon, Roi de Naples (1416–1458) (Barcelona: Institut d’estudis catalans, 1994), 24–25; he first pointed out that this group of pilgrims was distinct from the first embassy to the kingdom of Aragon in the 1420s. The source is a letter by Alfonso V to aṣe Yǝsḥaq, ACA, Ms. Reg. 2684, fol. 145v. 90. Also called the ‘War of the Infantes’, the conflict began in the early 1420s and escalated again in the summer of 1429; it was settled through the truce of Majano in late July 1430, a few weeks after Alfonso’s letter to aṣe Yǝsḥaq; see Vicente Ángel Álvarez Palenzuela, ‘El Enfrentamiento Entre Castilla y Aragón y Navarra. 1429–1430’, Estudios Sobre Patrimonio, Cultura y Ciencias Medievales 19, no. 1 (2017): 61–92. 91. All mentioned names indeed have an Ethiopian equivalent: Bärtälomewos, Anänǝya, Ǝsṭifanos, Ǝntọ nǝs, Zäkaryas. 92. ‘Eminentissime et invictissime monarcha, gavisum est non parum cor nostrum [nuperrime] dum de serenissime vestre persone statu referentibus Bartholomeo, Anania, Stephano, Anthonio, et Zaccaria presentium exhibitoribus prosperos rumores audivimus ac multo quidem magis exultassemus si quid vostre eminentie desiderati apices attulissent, quare

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eminentiam eandem internis deprecamus affectibus quatenus de eiusdem illustrissime vestre persone incolumitate, quantum sepius se casus obtul[erit] opportunus, vostris nos letteris velitis reddere certiores.’ ACA, Ms. Reg. 2684, fol. 145v. 93. ‘Quam nolumus ignorare Bartholomeum et  alios superius nominatos causante guerrarum discrimine inter nos Regemque Castelle, eius culpa non est diu subort[a], de quo non parum dolemus, cum sit nobis affinitate propinquus invicemque simus sororii ad uterum, Jacobum de Galicia accedere non ausos fuisse dicti regis armigeros et subditos pertimendo.’ ACA, Ms. Reg. 2684, fol. 145v. 94. ‘Et si qua, eminentissime et Invictissime monarcha, fratre nostre carissime, de Regnis et terris nostris eminentie vostre placita occurrerint serenitati nostre fraterna fiducia reseretis.’ ACA, Ms. Reg. 2684, fol. 145v. 95. One of the sons of aṣe Dawit, also known by his regnal name aṣe Ḥ ǝzbä Nañ, ruled from 1430 to 1433. His reign was bookended by that of his brothers aṣe Yǝsḥaq (who ruled until 1430) and aṣe Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob (who ruled from 1434 onwards), with brief periods suggesting  problems of succession in between. For more information and a short bibliography on Täklä Maryam, see Derat, ‘Täklä Maryam’. 96. Our source specifies that he left Constantinople on 23 January 1433, providing an ante quem framework for dating. 97. Charles Henri Auguste Schefer, ed., Le Voyage d’outremer de Bertrandon de La Broquière: Premier Conseiller de Philippe Le Bon, Duc de Bourgogne, (Paris: E. Leroux, 1892). 98. ‘par maniere de memoire, ay faict mectre en escript ce pou de voyaige que j’ay faict.’ Charles Henri Auguste Schefer, ed., Le Voyage d’outremer de Bertrandon de La Broquière : Premier Conseiller de Philippe Le Bon, Duc de Bourgogne, (Paris: E.  Leroux, 1892), 1; Galen Kline, ed., The Voyage d’Outremer by Bertrandon de La Broquière, (New York: Peter Lang, 1988), 1. 99. A hilly region in south-east Turkey on the border with Syria. It is of great importance to Syriac Orthodox Christians and site of many important Syriac Orthodox centres and monasteries. 100. Kline, The Voyage d’Outremer by Bertrandon de La Broquière, 55. 101. Which involves a sort of ‘washing out’ the stomach the next day by imbibing copious amounts of water to the point of vomiting, Kline, The Voyage d’Outremer by Bertrandon de La Broquière, 67. 102. That is, that Europeans can reuse Turkish arrows but not the other way around, as Turkish bowstrings were thicker than European ones, Kline, The Voyage d’Outremer by Bertrandon de La Broquière, 148. 103. A Genoese-run trading colony located directly opposite the ancient walled promontory of Constantinople dating back to the fourteenth cen-

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tury, where most of the foreign and Latin Christian merchants resided. It is also called Galata in historical documents and matches the modern-day Beyoğlu-district of Istanbul. 104. ‘Je trouvay en ceste ville de Pere ung Neapolitain de la ville de Napples qu’on appeloit Pietre de Napples lequel estoit marié en la terre de Prestre Jehan, comme il me dist.’ Schefer, Le Voyage d’outremer de Bertrandon de La Broquière, 142. Regrettably, excepting Broquiere’s narrative, no further information on Pietro of Naples has come to light at this point. 105. Compare Crawford, who judges the account of Ethiopia as largely fabulous: Osbert G. S. Crawford, ‘Some Medieval Theories About the Nile’, The Geographical Journal 114, no. 3 (1949): 8. 106. Thomas Johnes, ed., The Travels of Bertrandon de La Broquiere to Palestine, (Hafod: James Henderson, 1807), 218. 107. Kline, The Travels of Bertrandon de La Broquière to Palestine, 218. 108. The episode is also examined in Nicolai Iorga, ‘Cenni Sulle Relazioni Tra l’Abissinia e l’Europa Cattolica Nel Secoli XIV–XV, Con Un Iterario Inedito Del Secolo XV’, Centenario Della Nascita Di Michele Amari 1 (1910): 143; Renato Lefèvre, ‘Riflessi Etiopici Nella Cultura Europea Del Medioevo e Del Rinascimento - Parte Seconda’, Annali Lateranensi 9 (1945): 382–83; Kurt, ‘The Search for Prester John, a Projected Crusade and the Eroding Prestige of Ethiopian Kings, c.1200–c.1540’, 7; Salvadore, The African Prester John and the Birth of Ethiopian-European Relations, 1402–1555, 130–31. 109. Assessed in this way in Taddesse Tamrat, Church and State in Ethiopia, 1270–1527, 254. 110. Schefer, Le Voyage d’outremer de Bertrandon de La Broquière, 145; Kline, The Voyage d’Outremer by Bertrandon de La Broquière, 92. 111. ‘Item, il dist que quant il a quatre ou cinq enfans, que il les fait nourir en ung pays qu’il a, encloz de moult haultes montaignes. Et quant ilz viennent à cognoissance, que le plus devot et le plus bien condicionné est celluy qui est seigneur après le pere. Et les autres vivent en celluy pays en moult de delices.’ Schefer, Le Voyage d’outremer de Bertrandon de La Broquière, 146–47. 112. Also see Taddesse Tamrat, ‘Problems of Royal Succession in Fifteenth-­ Century Ethiopia: A Presentation of the Documents’, in IV Congresso Internazionale Di Studi Etiopici, Roma 1972, ed. Enrico Cerulli (Accademia nazionale dei Lincei, 1974), 501–35; Haile Gabriel Dagne, ‘Amba Gǝšän’, in EAe 1 (2003), 220–21. For an evaluation of the establishment and function of Gǝšän within Solomonic Ethiopia, also see Marie-Laure Derat, Le Domaine Des Rois Éthiopiens, 1270–1527: Espace, Pouvoir et Monarchisme (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2003), 25–28.

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113. Schefer, Le Voyage d’outremer de Bertrandon de La Broquière, 147–50; for the Ethiopian customs, see Steven Kaplan, ‘Circumcision: Male Circumcision’, in EAe 1 (2003), 748–749; Emmanuel Fritsch and Ugo Zanetti, ‘Baptism’, in EAe 1 (2003), 468–470. Lastly, Pietre also informed Bertrandon that ‘the river that flows through Cairo, which we call the Nile’ was locally called ‘the Gyon’. Schefer, Le Voyage d’outremer de Bertrandon de La Broquière, 145–46; Kline, The Voyage d’Outremer by Bertrandon de La Broquière, 92. While the Blue Nile itself is commonly called the Abbay in Ethiopia, the Gihon or Giyon refers to the sources or springs of the Abbay. Moreover, the Gǝʿǝz version of the Bible and other old Ethiopic texts locate the Gihon in Ityop ̇ya; see Verena Böll, ‘Gihon’, in EAe 2 (2005), 796. The confusion is completed by the observation that the Nile and the Täkkäze, a second major westwards-flowing Ethiopian river, are occasionally conflated by ancient geographers and in medieval texts—and that the Gǝʿǝz translation of the Bible refers to the Nile as the Täkkäze, a word denoting ‘river’; see Alfons Ritler, ‘Täkkäze’, in EAe 4 (2010), 824. 114. ‘Item, me dist que ledit Prestre Jehan est bon catholique et obeissant à l’eglise de Romme.’ Schefer, Le Voyage d’outremer de Bertrandon de La Broquière, 143; Kline, The Voyage d’Outremer by Bertrandon de La Broquière, 90. 115. ‘guerre contre ung grant seigneur […] nomment Cinemachin, et nous l’appelons le Grant Can.’ Schefer, Le Voyage d’outremer de Bertrandon de La Broquière, 143; Kline, The Voyage d’Outremer by Bertrandon de La Broquière, 90. 116. ‘il me dist que quant il ala en ce dit païs du Prestre Jehan, il y ala aveques deux hommes que Monseigneur du Berry y envoyoit devers ledit Prestre Jehan.’ Schefer, Le Voyage d’outremer de Bertrandon de La Broquière, 143; Kline, The Voyage d’Outremer by Bertrandon de La Broquière, 89. The mission had also encompassed a Spaniard and a Frenchman. The group had travelled the ‘usual’ trade and travel route connecting Ethiopia to the Mediterranean; see Schefer, Le Voyage d’outremer de Bertrandon de La Broquière, 143; Kline, The Voyage d’Outremer by Bertrandon de La Broquière, 90. 117. The Duchy of Berry was a title created frequently for junior members of the French royal family. The first Duke was Jean of Berry (1340–1416), famous for the wealth of beautifully illuminated manuscripts created under his patronage. He held the title until 1416. In 1417 the young Dauphin, Jean de Valois, died soon after being created the second Duke of Berry, and Charles VII of France held the regnal title of Duke of Berry from 1417 to October 1422, when he ascended the French throne. The fourth creation of the title was much later, when Charles de Valois held it as an additional title from 1461 to 1465. Considering that Bertrandon

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was a Burgundian subject and had close connections to the Burgundian throne, it is interesting to note that he himself does not seem to find fault with Pietro’s premise to his account on his travels to Ethiopia; see Kline, The Voyage d’Outremer by Bertrandon de La Broquière, 89. 118. Franz Amadeus Dombrowski, Ṭ an̄ āsee 106: Eine Chronik Der Herrscher Äthiopiens (Wiesbaden: F. Steiner, 1983), 155 as well as Jules Perruchon, Les Chroniques de Zar’a Yâʿeqôb et de Ba’eda Mâryâm, Rois d’Éthiopie de 1434 à 1478 (Paris: É. Bouillon, 1893), 63–64; both chronicles, however, place these debates in the reign of aṣe Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob, who ascended the throne only about ten years later. 119. Gerard Colin, ‘Giyorgis of Sägla’, in EAe 2 (2005), 812; for the Mäs ̣ḥafä mǝs ́ṭir itself, see the edition and translation of Yaqob Beyene, Giyorgis Di Sagla ¯. Il Libro Del Mistero. Masḥ a ̣ fa Mesṭir (Leuven: Peeters, 1990). 120. ‘homme qui […] sache faire […] navires.’ Schefer, Le Voyage d’outremer de Bertrandon de La Broquière, 144; Kline, The Voyage d’Outremer by Bertrandon de La Broquière, 91. This has been read as indicative of an Ethiopian plan for an ‘assault on Egypt by an Ethiopian force united with Aragon and France’ with little further evidence by Kurt, ‘The Search for Prester John, a Projected Crusade and the Eroding Prestige of Ethiopian Kings, c.1200–c.1540’, 311. 121. ‘Il me tempta fort pour moy emmener avec luy.’ Schefer, Le Voyage d’outremer de Bertrandon de La Broquière, 142–43; Kline, The Voyage d’Outremer by Bertrandon de La Broquière, 89. 122. Matteo Salvadore read the interest in ship-builders as an interest in specifically European ‘technological innovations’; cf. Salvadore, The African Prester John and the Birth of Ethiopian-European Relations, 1402–1555, 130. European ships in the early fifteenth century had largely not been adapted to sail in the waters of the Red Sea and Indian Ocean. The coral reefs and shoals present in both bodies of water necessitated very different boats in addition to specialised knowledge of local conditions than those of the Mediterranean or Black Sea; see Patrick Wing, ‘The Red Sea in the Medieval Period’, in The Sea in History - The Medieval World, eds. Michel Balard and Christian Buchet, (Boydell & Brewer, 2017), 695–700. 123. ACA, Ms. Reg. 2677, fol. 54r. 124. Marinescu, La Politique Orientale d’Alfonse V d’Aragon, Roi de Naples (1416–1458), 1994, 18, note 5. 125. These attempts by the Ethiopian court to acquire ship-builders and ‘water experts’ from 1427 onwards could be related to the aftermath of the wars of as ̣e Yǝsḥaq with the Sultanate of ʿAdal, through which several seaports on the Red Sea coast would had under Solomonic control.

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126. Lyn Rodley, ‘The Byzantine Context’, in Byzantine Art and Renaissance Europe, eds. Angeliki Lymberopoulou and Rembrandt Duits (Farnham: Routledge, 2013), 11. 127. Compare Salvadore, The African Prester John and the Birth of Ethiopian-­ European Relations, 1402–1555, 130–31, 148, note 8. 128. Compare Musée Condé, Chantilly,  Limbourg Brothers, Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, The Exaltation of the Cross, tempera on parchment, ca. 1410–1416, fol. 193r. 129. Schefer, Le Voyage d’outremer de Bertrandon de La Broquière, 143; Kline, The Voyage d’Outremer by Bertrandon de La Broquière, 89. 130. 1383–1447, born Gabriele Condulmer, elected Pope on 3 March 1431. 131. 1385–1450, also known as Alberto Berdini, Franciscan friar and Apostolic delegate. 132. It had been moved from Ferrara to Florence in January 1439. Also see Salvatore Tedeschi, ‘Etiopi e Copti al Concilio Di Firenze’, Annuarium Historiae Conciliorum 21 (1989): 380–407. ‘Quare cupientes, si concesserit dominus, aliqua scire de iis quae apud Tuam Excellentiam fiant et ut etiam Tu intelligas quid apud Christianos Occidentales fiat, mittimus ad Tuam Celsitudinem dilectos filios Alberthum de Sarthiano Ordinis Beati Francisci, Commisarium Nostrum in partibus orientalibus, et eius socios, quos si forte nequiverit ipse personaliter venire duxerit destinandos.’ ed. in Osvaldo Raineri, Lettere Tra i Pontefici Romani e i Principi Etiopici (Secc. XII-XX). Versioni e Integrazioni. (Città del Vaticano: Archivio Segreto Vaticano, 2005), 23. 133. Joseph Gill, The Council of Florence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960). 134. ‘Eugenius Episcopus Servum servorum Dei clarissimo in Christo filio Presbytero Joanni Imperatori Aethiopium illustri salutem et apostolicam benedictonem.’ ed. in Raineri, Lettere Tra i Pontefici Romani e i Principi Etiopici (Secc. XII-XX). Versioni e Integrazioni, 22. Particularly the mode of address is nearly the same as the one employed by Pope John XXII in a letter recommending a friar to the ‘emperor of the Ethiopians’ in December 1329, the last time a Roman pontiff had tried to contact the Ethiopians; compare Archivio Segreto Vaticano, Reg. Vat. 94, Nr. 273, fol. 100r-v, ed. in Raineri, Lettere Tra i Pontefici Romani e i Principi Etiopici (Secc. XII-XX). Versioni e Integrazioni, sec. 3. 135. The Ethiopian monastery adjoining the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, dating back to at least the thirteenth century; see Andreu Martínez d’Alòs-Moner, ‘Florence, Council Of’, in EAe 2 (2005), 554–55; Kirsten  Stoffregen-Pedersen, ‘Dayr As-Sulṭān’, in EAe 2 (2005), 117–19. 136. Translated into Latin as ‘Pax tibi et tuae sedi et pax magnitudini tuae qui sedes in sede Apostolorum Petri et Pauli cuius splendor illuminat mun-

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dum. […] Cum ad nos venerunt nuntii tui ob causam fidei, magnam ex eis consolationem accepimus quod hactenus valde cupiebamus ut tandem omnes unum simus, sicut Paulus dixit: “Unus Deus, una fides, unum baptisma.”’ See Raineri, Lettere Tra i Pontefici Romani e i Principi Etiopici (Secc. XII-XX). Versioni e Integrazioni, 27. 137. We know that Niqodemos had been able to read the pope’s Latin communication, if through an intermediary; his letter features three lines of introductory remarks in Latin above the Gǝʿǝz main body of the text; see Enrico Cerulli, ‘L’Etiopia Del Secolo XV in Nouvi Documenti Storici Con 12 Illustrazioni’, Africa Italiana. Rivista Di Storia e d’Arte a Cura Del Ministero Delle Colonie 5, no. 1–2 (1933): 60. The Gǝʿǝz version of the letter, littered with mistakes, shows that the language—which had ceased to be an actively spoken language for centuries—was not a natural or easy choice for the Ethiopian abbot. Its use appears a deliberate choice to signal the ancient, proud traditions of the Ethiopian Church to the papacy. 138. ‘Haec vero res cum ad Regem nostrum pervenerit, maxime illi laetitiae futura est. Nam isdem admodum cupit ut omnes in unam fidem pariter uniamur. […] verumtamen sine ipso Rege nostro illam concludere non valemus.’ ed. and transl. in Raineri, Lettere Tra i Pontefici Romani e i Principi Etiopici (Secc. XII-XX). Versioni e Integrazioni, 27–28. It seems reasonable to assume that the nǝgus ́ had actually been informed of these developments in a very timely manner; see Samantha Kelly, ‘Ewostạ teans at the Council of Florence (1441): Diplomatic Implications between Ethiopia, Europe, Jerusalem and Cairo’, Afriques, Varia (2016): para. 21. 139. ‘Et congregemur in unum.’ ed. and transl. in Raineri, Lettere Tra i Pontefici Romani e i Principi Etiopici (Secc. XII–XX). Versioni e Integrazioni, 28. 140. The Ethiopians had accepted the Council of Nicaea, and it has been stated that it was of no particular theological consequence for the Ethiopian Orthodox Church; see Witold Witakowski, ‘Nicaea, Council Of’, in EAe 3 (2007), 1175–1177. 141. See Gianfranco Fiaccadori, ‘Ewosṭatewos’, in EAe 2 (2005), 469–472; Kelly, ‘Ewost ̣ateans at the Council of Florence (1441)’. 142. See Enrico Cerulli, ‘Eugenio IV e Gli Etiopi al Concilio Di Firenze Nel 1441’, R. Accademia Nazionale Dei Lincei, Rendiconti, Classe Di Scienze Morali, Storiche e Filologiche Serie sesta, 9 (1933): 347–368; Tedeschi, ‘Etiopi e Copti al Concilio Di Firenze’; Martinez d’Alos-Moner, ‘Florence, Council Of’; Kelly, ‘Ewost ̣ateans at the Council of Florence (1441)’; Davide Baldi, ‘I “Documenti Del Concilio” Di Firenze e Quasi Sei Secoli Di Storia’, Rivista Di Storia e Letteratura Religiosa 53, no. 2

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(2017): 287–374 for the Ethiopian presence at the council and more literature on the episode. 143. Kelly, ‘Ewost ̣ateans at the Council of Florence (1441)’, para. 2 144. On Niqodemos and his involvement in despatching the monks, see Cerulli, ‘Eugenio IV e Gli Etiopi al Concilio Di Firenze Nel 1441’; Tedeschi, ‘Etiopi e Copti al Concilio Di Firenze’; Benjamin Weber, ‘La Bulle Cantate Domino (4 Février 1442) et Les Enjeux Éthiopiens Du Concile de Florence’, Mélanges de l’École Française de Rome: Moyen Âge 122 (2010): 441–49; Benjamin Weber, ‘An Incomplete Integration into the Orbis Christianus. Relations and Misunderstandings between the Papacy and Ethiopia (1237–1456)’, Medieval Encounters 21  no. 2–3 (2015): 232–49. For a brief introduction on aṣe Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob, see Derat and Kaplan, ‘Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob’. 145. Kelly, ‘Ewosṭateans at the Council of Florence (1441)’, para. 5. 146. A Latin translation of his speech has come down to us and is available in Osvaldo Raineri, Lettere Tra i Pontefici Romani e i Principi Etiopici (Secoli XII–XX) (Città del Vaticano: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 2003), 34–36. 147. See Bartolomeo Nogara, Scritti Inediti e Rari Di Biondo Flavio, (Rome: Tipografia poliglotta Vaticana, 1927), 20. The cited speech is published in Raineri, Lettere Tra i Pontefici Romani e i Principi Etiopici (Secoli XII– XX), 34–36. 148. That is, he stated that Ethiopia was among the greatest and powerful realms of the world, its rulers descended from the Queen of Sheba and Solomon. Compare Raineri, Lettere Tra i Pontefici Romani e i Principi Etiopici (Secoli XII–XX), 34. 149. This must appear rather questionable in light of asẹ Dawit’s embassies and the pilgrims attested in Constance and Tarazona just a few decades earlier. 150. ‘omnes qui a te et a Romana ecclesia discesserunt poenitus corruisse nostra tamen inter caeteras ecclesias quae a praedicta Romana matre ecclesia recesserint fortis etiam et potens ac libera existit cuius quidem rei nullam aliam debent sapientes causam existere quam quia aliarum ecclesiarum secessio atque rebellio fuit voluntaria. […] nostra autem intermissio et elongatio a sede tua nequamquam a perfidia aut levitate alia sed potius processit a provinciarum distantia et a periculis quae subeunt commeantes atque etiam a praedecessorum tuorum Romanorum Pontificium negligentia cum nulla apud nostros homines sit memoria visitationis aut curae tot Christi ovium quam pastorum quispiam ante voluerit suscipere.’ Raineri, Lettere Tra i Pontefici Romani e i Principi Etiopici (Secoli XII– XX), 35. 151. ‘Commendat autem Abbas ipse tum seipsum tum et filios suos sanctitati tuae ad cuius mandata labores quoscumque inunxeris suscipere et paratus

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pro habenda concludendaque sanctissima unione. Te autem in primis certum reddit Imperatorem Ethiopum nihil in rebus humanis dicam melius nihil affectuosius cupere quam uniri Romanae ecclesiae et tuis sanctissimis subici pedibus.’ Raineri, Lettere Tra i Pontefici Romani e i Principi Etiopici (Secoli XII–XX), 35. 152. Compare Kelly, ‘Ewostạ teans at the Council of Florence (1441)’. 153. The observance of the Sabbath—Saturday—as a day of rest was the signature practice of Ewosṭatewos (ca. 1273–1352) and his followers; this practice was persecuted by the Ethiopian Church and Ethiopian rulers for decades before being adopted by Ethiopian Christianity after the Council of Däbrä Mǝt ̣maq in 1450. 154. See Kelly, ‘Ewostạ teans at the Council of Florence (1441)’ for details on the Council of Däbrä Mǝt ̣maq and the Question of the Sabbath; amongst other things, aṣe Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob expressed his views on the matter in the Mäs ̣ḥafä bǝrhan, the ‘Book of Light’; see Carlo Conti Rossini and Lanfranco Ricci, eds. and transl., Il Libro Della Luce Del Negus Zarʾa Ya ̄ʿqob (Mas ̣ḥafa Berhān), vol. I and II (Louvain: Secrétariat du CorpusSCO, 1964–1965). 155. Compare Kelly, ‘Ewostạ teans at the Council of Florence (1441)’, para. 21. 156. Derat and Kaplan, ‘Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob’, 148. On Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob’s religious reforms, also see Taddesse Tamrat, Church and State in Ethiopia, 1270–1527, 206–47; Getatchew Haile, The Mariology of Emperor Zär’a Ya’əqob of Ethiopia (Rome: Pontificium Institutum Studiorum Orientalium, 1992). 157. That is, the Ǝgziʾabǝḥer nägs ́ä, the Sǝbḥatä fǝqur, the famous Mäs ̣ḥafä bǝrhan, the Mäṣḥafä milad, the Mäs ̣ḥafä s ́ǝllase, the Mäsḥ ̣afä baḥrǝy, the Täʿaqǝbo mǝsṭ́ ir, the Ṭ omarä tǝsbǝʾǝt, the Kǝhdätä säyt ̣an and the Dǝrsanä mälaʾǝkt, all of which can be found under their respective entries in the EAe. 158. Derat and Kaplan, ‘Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob’, 148. 159. Gill, The Council of Florence, 320–26. 160. On the tensions between the Ethiopians and the Coptic patriarch John XI at this time, see Kelly, ‘Ewosṭateans at the Council of Florence (1441)’, paras 20–26. 161. Compare Cerulli, ‘L’Etiopia Del Secolo XV in Nouvi Documenti Storici Con 12 Illustrazioni’, 75, who asserts that the pontiff considered the Coptic abbot Andreas entitled to make decisions on the Ethiopians’ behalf just as much as P̣et ̣ros, the de facto leader of the Ethiopian delegates. Flavio Biondo’s source account on the proceedings supports this assumption, as the two groups are more often than not presented as ‘these eight monks’ in his narrative, and not as two distinct groups of four clerics; see Nogara, Scritti Inediti e Rari Di Biondo Flavio, 20.

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162. Antonio di Pietro Averlino, better known as Filarete, ca. 1400–1469, Florentine architect and sculptor; the doors depict the Ethiopians’ and Copts’ reception by the Pope; also see John T.  Paoletti, ‘Donatello’s Bronze Doors for the Old Sacristy of San Lorenzo’, Artibus et Historiae 11, no. 21 (1990): 52. It is worth noting that one of the groups is portrayed as wearing broad, striped shawls similar to the traditional Ethiopian cotton šämma. 163. It reads: ‘Ut Graeci Armeni Aethiopes Hic Aspice ut ipsa Romanam Amplexa est Gens Iacobina Fidem’, compare Paoletti, ‘Donatello’s Bronze Doors for the Old Sacristy of San Lorenzo’, 64. The doors were installed in 1445. 164. The pope writes that both Andreas, the abbot of St Anthony in Egypt and P̣eṭros, the deacon and ambassador of ‘the magnificent prince Emperor of Ethiopia named Constantine, also called Prester John’ had had explicitly come to Italy to seek a union with the Western Church in Florence. Qwäst ̣änṭinos or ‘Constantine’ was as ̣e Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob’s throne name; BAV, Reg. Vat. 360, fol. 120v., ed. in Renato Lefèvre, ‘Documenti Pontifici Sui Rapporti Con L’Etiopia Nei Secoli XV e XVI’, Rassegna Di Studi Etiopici 5 (1946): 22. 165. That is, the canons of the chapter of the Basilica of Old St Peter; BAV, Reg. Vat. 360, fol. 120v., ed. in Lefèvre, ‘Documenti Pontifici Sui Rapporti Con L’Etiopia Nei Secoli XV e XVI’, 22. 166. Compare Georgius Hoffmann, Acta Camerae Apostolicae et Civitatum Venetiarum, Ferrarieae, Florentiae, Ianuae de Concilio Florentino. Concilium Florentinum. Documenta et Scriptores. Series A (Rome: Pontifical Oriental Institute, 1950), 106; Samantha Kelly suggests they only sailed back in the summer of 1442; see Kelly, ‘Ewosṭateans at the Council of Florence (1441)’, para. 23. 167. ‘Die ultima eiusdem mensis [ian. 1442] prefatus d. Franciscus de Padua de mandato, ut supra, retinuit florenos auri similes quinquaginta et solidos triginta monete Romane pro octuaginta mitris albis pro sessione reductionis Indorum, ut apparet per mandatum factum die dicta.’ Copia Coaeva, BAV, Introitus et exitus 408, fol. 61r., ed. in Hoffmann, Acta Camerae Apostolicae et Civitatum Venetiarum, Ferrarieae, Florentiae, Ianuae de Concilio Florentino. Concilium Florentinum. Documenta et Scriptores. Series A, 106. 168. White or ‘simple’ mitres are a specific type of Latin Christian liturgical head covering, made out of white damask or silk with white lappets featuring red fringes. 169. There are two entries giving limited insight onto the matter: ‘Camera Apostolica 50 florenos 30 solidos pro 80 mitris in sessione conciliari unionis “Indorum” (Coptorum Aethiopumque, die 4 febr. 1442) adhibendis’

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as well as ‘Die ultima eiusdem mensis (ian. 1442) prefatus d. Franciscus de Padua de mandato, ut supra, retinuit florenos auri similes quinquaginta et solidos triginta monete Romane pro octuaginta mitris albis pro sessione reductionis Indorum, ut apparet per mandatum factum die dicta.’ Hoffmann, Acta Camerae Apostolicae et Civitatum Venetiarum, Ferrarieae, Florentiae, Ianuae de Concilio Florentino. Concilium Florentinum. Documenta et Scriptores. Series A, 106. 170. The bull contained important discrepancies between the Latin original and the Arabic version, and a de facto union never took place, compare Georgius Hofmann, ‘La “Chiesa” Copta Ed Etiopica Nel Concilio Di Firenze’, La Civiltà Cattolica 93, no. 2 (1942): 141–46; Martinez d’Alos-­Moner, ‘Florence, Council Of’, 555. 171. Kelly, ‘Ewost ̣ateans at the Council of Florence (1441)’, para. 23. 172. Head of all Franciscans in the Holy Land, also termed ‘Custodian of the Holy Land’ or ‘Guardian of Mount Zion’, in 1438. 173. Compare Luke Wadding, Annales Minorum Seu Trium Ordinum a S. Francisco Institutorum, Vol. 11 (Rome: Typis Rochi Bernabò, 1734), 220–21; also see Julian Plante, ‘The Ethiopian Embassy to Cairo of 1443. A Trier Manuscript of Gandulphus’ Report with an English Translation’, Journal of Ethiopian Studies 13, no. 2 (1975): 133–140. On Gandulph’s account and the diplomatic missions between Ethiopia and Mamlūk Egypt in the 1440s more generally, also see Verena Krebs, ‘Crusading Threats? Ethiopian-Egyptian Relations in the 1440s’, in Les Croisades En Afrique. XIII-XVIe Siècles, ed. Benjamin Weber (Toulouse: Presses Universitaires du Midi, 2019), 245–74. 174. See Wadding, Annales Minorum Seu Trium Ordinum a S.  Francisco Institutorum, Vol. 11, 220–21. 175. For this exchange, see Sebastian Euringer, ‘Ein Angeblicher Brief Des Negus Zara Jakob Vom Jahre 1447 Wegen Der Christenverfolgung in Palästina Und Ägypten’, Das Heilige Land 83 (1939): 205–40; Plante, ‘The Ethiopian Embassy to Cairo of 1443’; Krebs, ‘Crusading Threats? Ethiopian-­Egyptian Relations in the 1440s’; Loiseau, ‘The Ḥ at ̣ı ̄ and the Sultan. Letters and Embassies from Abyssinia to the Mamluk Court’. It was common for Ethiopian embassies despatched to Cairo to continue onwards to Jerusalem for pilgrimage; see Loiseau, ‘The Ḥ aṭı ̄ and the Sultan. Letters and Embassies from Abyssinia to the Mamluk Court’, 640. 176. Gandulph slightly misstates their names as Thomas and Georgius; Ethiopian sources indicate that two of the four monks were actually called Tewodros and Giyorgis. 177. ‘quoniam Thomas, et Georgius iam applicuissent ad Imperatorem suum cum Bulla unionis, et quod universis Patriarchae, Episcopi & Prealati, ac Principes et Domini status utrisque, fuerunt edicto Imperatoris ad hoc

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simul congregati. Et quod ab omnibus unanimiter, nemine discrepante, praefata unio cum summus gaudio et devotione fuerat acceptata, superaddentes, quod Georgius et Thomas praefati, cum quibusdam aliis, remittendi erant per Principem eorum ad vestram Sanctitatem cum praedictae unionis assensu et receptione, arbitrantes eos in proximum Pascha debere hic nobiscum esse.’ Ed. in Wadding, Annales Minorum Seu Trium Ordinum a S. Francisco Institutorum, Vol. 11, 220–21. 178. Wadding, Annales Minorum Seu Trium Ordinum a S.  Francisco Institutorum, Vol. 11, 221. 179. Compare Wadding, Annales Minorum Seu Trium Ordinum a S. Francisco Institutorum, Vol. 11, 221. 180. Compare Wadding, Annales Minorum Seu Trium Ordinum a S. Francisco Institutorum, Vol. 11, 221. 181. 1478–1534, born Giulio di Giuliano de’ Medici, elected on 19 November 1523. The letters are Legatio David, Fol. D3-D4, ed. in Raineri, Lettere Tra i Pontefici Romani e i Principi Etiopici (Secoli XII–XX), 47–50 and Legatio David, Fol. E1-E2, ed. in Raineri, Lettere Tra i Pontefici Romani e i Principi Etiopici (Secoli XII–XX), 51–55. 182. Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob’s name is given as semen Iacob—‘seed of Jacob’; see Raineri, Lettere Tra i Pontefici Romani e i Principi Etiopici (Secoli XII–XX), 49. 183. Raineri, Lettere Tra i Pontefici Romani e i Principi Etiopici (Secoli XII– XX), 53; it is remarkable that the Latin text of the letter already uses the phrase Regi regum—‘king of kings’—to refer to as ̣e Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob. Its Ethiopian equivalent, nǝgusä́ nägäst,́ is only thought to have come into formal use in the second half of the sixteenth century, during the reign of as ̣e Śärṣä́ Dǝngǝl (1563–1597). The careful archiving of documents— particularly letters—is meanwhile also attested for Solomonic exchanges with Mamlūk Egypt; see Loiseau, ‘The Ḥ aṭı ̄ and the Sultan. Letters and Embassies from Abyssinia to the Mamluk Court’, 654. 184. Raineri, Lettere Tra i Pontefici Romani e i Principi Etiopici (Secoli XII– XX), 53. 185. For an edited and translated chronicle of his reign, see Perruchon, Les Chroniques de Zar’a Yâʿeqôb et de Ba’eda Mâryâm, Rois d’Éthiopie de 1434 à 1478. 186. For more on the matter, see Euringer, ‘Ein Angeblicher Brief Des Negus Zara Jakob Vom Jahre 1447 Wegen Der Christenverfolgung in Palästina Und Ägypten’; Richard Pankhurst, ‘Ethiopia’s Alleged Control of the Nile’, in The Nile. Histories, Cultures, Myths, eds. Haggai Erlich and Israel Gershoni (Boulder, Colorado: Lynne Rienner, 2000), 25–37; Krebs, ‘Crusading Threats? Ethiopian-Egyptian Relations in the 1440s’. 187. Located on the fringe of the Christian plateau. See Franz-Christoph Muth, ‘Aḥmad Badlāy’, in EAe 1 (2003), 158–59; Derat and Kaplan, ‘Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob’, 149.

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188. Perruchon, Les Chroniques de Zar’a Yâʿeqôb et de Ba’eda Mâryâm, Rois d’Éthiopie de 1434 à 1478, 88–89. 189. Such as the Zämikaʾelites and Stephanites; see Steven Kaplan, ‘Stephanites’, in EAe 4 (2010), 746–49; Getatchew Haile, ‘Zämikaʾelites’, in EAe 5 (2014), 131–33. 190. Convened to discuss the observance of the Sabbath, the core conflict between the Ewost ̣ateans and mainstream Ethiopian Christianity in the first half of the fifteenth century. 191. For example, the Bull of the Union condemned Ethiopian food prescriptions as well as Circumcision, both of which would have found little favour with aṣe Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob. 192. 1397–1455, born Tommaso Parentucelli, Pope Nicholas V from 1447 to 1455. 193. Compare ACA, Ms. Reg.  2658, fols. 57r-58r and Archivio Di Stato Napoli, Tesoreria Aragonese 1450, reg. 12, fol. 388v ed. in Francesco Cerone, ‘La Politica Orientale Di Alfonso Di Aragona’, Archivio Storico per Le Province Napoletane 27 (1902): 71 and BAV Reg. Vat. 411, fol. 312v, ed. in Charles-Martial de Witte, ‘Une Ambassade Éthiopienne à Rome En 1450’, Orientalia Christiana Periodica 22, no. 3–4 (1956): 295. 194. ‘li nobili homini pero Rombolo de Messina vasallo nostro e seruitore e subdito de vestra excellentia fratre Michele priore de Sancta Maria de Cadaber Anamer Jundi.’ ACA, Ms.  Reg. 2658, fol. 57r. In a letter addressed to John IV of Trebizond, written on the same day, the ambassadors are introduced as ‘viri nobiles e nobis dilecti petrus Rombulo de Messana vassallus noster e frater michael prior Sancte Marie de Cadaber Anamer Iundi oratores.’ ACA, Ms. Reg. 2658, fol. 57v. In an exchequer’s list, they are stated as ‘petro rumbolo […] frere miguel […] buamar moro’, each receiving fifty gold ducats for their return journey to Ethiopia, Archivio Di Stato Napoli, Tesoreria Aragonese 1450, Reg. 12, fol. 388v; these folios were destroyed in World War II and survive only in Cerone’s edition of 1902 Cerone, ‘La Politica Orientale Di Alfonso Di Aragona’, 1902, 71. 195. This monastery has not been located; however, the suffix ‘-bär’ translates as ‘gate’ or ‘door’ and is not an uncommon place name. The place name is not mentioned in any of the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century itineraries or travel accounts on Ethiopia; however, Gudär or Gudabär is also a current Ethiopian name for a left-bank tributary river of the Blue Nile crossing through the Amhara region of Ethiopia. Richard Pankhurst, Economic History of Ethiopia, 1800–1935 (Addis Ababa: Haile Sellassie I University Press, 1968), 299. 196. While it remains difficult to reconstruct ‘Elzend’ or ‘Jandi’, the man’s kunya seems to have been Abū ʿUmar. Julien Loiseau suggests his name

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as Abū ʿUmar al-Zandı ̄; see Loiseau, ‘The Ḥ atı̣ ̄ and the Sultan. Letters and Embassies from Abyssinia to the Mamluk Court’, 652. Solomon Gebreyes of Hamburg University pointed out to me that ‘Jundi’ is still a comparatively common name amongst Arsi-Oromo Muslim men in modern-day Ethiopia. This might indicate that the Ethiopian Muslim in the employ of the nǝgus ́had his roots in the Sultanates of Däwaro or Hadiyya, which shared an entangled history with Solomonic Ethiopia in the fifteenth century. 197. de Witte, ‘Une Ambassade Éthiopienne à Rome En 1450’, 286. 198. Like many of his predecessors, aṣe Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob had chosen the throne name Qwäsṭänṭinos, which indeed translates as ‘Constantine’. 199. ‘Cum pro nonnullis arduis negotiis etiam honorem sancte Apostolice Sedis concernentibus contingat dilectos filios Petrum Romuli Missinensem ad Michaelem priorem Ecclesie Sancte Marie de Gudaber et Abumar Elzend, oratores carissimi in Christo filii nostri Constantini imperatoris Ethiopum illustris, personaliter proficisci.’ BAV Reg. Vat. 411, fol. 312, ed. in de Witte, ‘Une Ambassade Éthiopienne à Rome En 1450’, 295; according to de Witte, the phrasing chosen here is unusual and signifies the importance of the embassy for the Roman Curia; see de Witte, ‘Une Ambassade Éthiopienne à Rome En 1450’, 287. 200. Tommaso Parentucelli’s career took off after the Council of Florence: he became a bishop in 1444, a cardinal in 1446 and was elected Pope Nicholas V in 1447. 201. ‘Nos cupientes eosdem oratores cum eorum comitiva et familiaribus in personis tam equestribus quam pedestribus usque ad numerum quindecim personarum necnon salmis, valisiis, libris, scripturis, rebus et bonis suis quibuscunque in eundo, stando et redeundo plena securitate et inmunitate ac favorabili tractatione gaudere, universitatem vestram etc. districte precipiendo mandantes quatenus prefatos oratores cum comitiva equitum et peditum, salmis, valisiis, etc. ut in aliis.’ BAV Reg. Vat. 411, fol. 312v, ed. in de Witte, ‘Une Ambassade Éthiopienne à Rome En 1450’, 295. 202. A total of seventy-nine papal gold florins, far from a petty sum. Compare the receipts from the Apostolic Camera, ed. in de Witte, ‘Une Ambassade Éthiopienne à Rome En 1450’, 296–97. 203. Compare de Witte, ‘Une Ambassade Éthiopienne à Rome En 1450’, 296–97; Archivio Historico de la Ciudad de Barcelona, Cartas comunas originals vol. 20, 1450, fol. 163r, ed. in José María Madurell Marimón, Mensajeros Barcelonensis En La Corte de Napoles de Alfonso V de Aragón, 1435–1458 (Barcelona: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1963), 305.

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204. ‘E ab tota la dita gent, lo dit senyor rey perti, e entra en la dita ciutat per lo Portal de Capuana, ordonant ladita gent en aquella manera, ço és, los dits infants de peu, primers, ab los juglars e tamborinos; aprés, molts trompetés; e aprés, mots curials e altre notable gent; e aprés, lo Consell format del dit senyor; e aprés, los reys d’armes e arauts; e aprés, los ambaxadors de Presta Johan; e aprés, nosaltres, ab lo dit mestre racional; e aprés, lo dit senyor Ferrando ab lo qui aportava la spasa devant lo dit senyor re; en aprés, lo dit senyor rey.’ Archivio Historico de la Ciudad de Barcelona, Cartas comunas originals 20, 1450, fol. 163r, ed. in Madurell Marimón, Mensajeros Barcelonensis En La Corte de Napoles de Alfonso V de Aragón, 1435–1458, 305. 205. Petrus was interviewed by the Italian Dominican Pietro Ranzano, for a transcription and study of the Latin text pertaining to Ethiopia; see Carmelo Trasselli, ‘Un Italiano in Etiopia Nel XV Secolo Pietro Rombulo Da Messina’, Rassegna Di Studi Etiopici 1, no. 2 (1941): 173–202, especially 176–78. 206. The letter is written in what appears to be a medieval Neapolitan Italian dialect, deviating from all of Alfonso’s other letters; see ACA, Ms. Reg. 2658, fol. 57r-v. 207. ‘E prima al facto delli mastri et artifice che uestra Excellencia ne demanda como venne mandariamo assai e tanti cuantivoi ne volisseno se lo viagio fosse secure e senza periculo loquali non esser e chiaro per piu respecti e specialmente per la perdicio de quelli tredici homini Mastri in diverse arte liquali demandate ad noi ia fa vno grande tempo per lo serenissimo vestro fratre li mandabamo, e essendo in camino per non potere passare morero. Per la quale casionenoi non ve mandamo depresente le cosec he vestra excellencia ne demanda e che facilemente poteramo amdare si lo viagio como e dicto de sopra fosse secure.’ ACA, Ms. Reg. 2658, fol. 57v. 208. ‘Nientodemino al presente ve mandamo alcuni delli mastri che voi ne demandati e mandamone quelli che per lo presente hauemo poduto trouare abenche sacciamo lipericuli liquali hanno ad passare pregamo vestra excellentia che ne haggia per excusato e prigli questo in patientia.’ ACA, Ms. Reg. 2658, fol. 57r. 209. ‘Per laquale casione noi non ve mandamo depresente le cose che vestra excellentia ne demanda e che faclemente poteramo mandare si lo viagio como e dicto de sopra fosse securo cioe panni de brochato, panni finissimi de lana, vasa doro e dargento e tucte altre cose per voi demandate.’ ACA, Ms. Reg. 2658, fol. 57r. 210. ACA, Ms. Reg. 2658, fol. 57r. 211. Compare Francesco Cerone, ‘La Politica Orientale Di Alfonso Di Aragona’, Archivio Storico per Le Province Napoletane 27 (1902): 76. 212. ‘Preterea perche collo adiutorio de dio lo piu presto che poterimo semo per mandare in termino de mari circa cento quincuangenta fuste fra naue

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e galee per passare a la casa sancta de Hierusalem, ve pregamo vogliare essere sollicito in fare mancare le aqua che corrono al Alcayre e mettere gente ale vestre frontere lequalcose como per vestra excellentia serenissimo advisato essere facte e messe in ordene decontmente ne metterimo.’ ACA, Ms. Reg. 2658, fol. 57v. 213. Alfonso’s plan curiously centred on the Mamlūks—who were still governing the Holy Land at that point, but not an immediate threat to Latin Europe as the Ottomans were—seeing that he urges the nǝgus ́ to re-route the Nile. 214. ‘Serenissimo principi zara iacob filio dauid de domo Salamonis Etheopie Imparatori amico nobis carissimo Alfonsus die gratia etc.’ ACA, Ms. Reg. 2658, fol. 178r. 215. ‘mittimus in partes aliquas dominii vestri nobilem et dilectum familiarem nostrum Michaelem desiderio cui imposuimus dummodo fieri sine persone sue incomodo possit, maiestatem uestram visitet et alloquatur eamdem per inde maiore quo possumus studio deprecamur quod fidem ipsi Michaeli indirendis velut nobis prestando ipsum favorabiliter et propicie in eius reditu et omnibus que ad suam directionem attinent velut suscipere propicie commendatur. succedet autem id nobis in non modicam complacenciam [all sic!].’ ACA, Ms. Reg. 2658, fols 178r-v. 216. ‘Et si qua ex regnis nostris vobis placida fuerint, profitemur nos paratos omnia beneplacito pro vestro adimpleturos.’ ACA, Ms. Reg.  2658, fols 178r-v. 217. 1404–1453, died in the battle of the fall of Constantinople on 29 May 1453. 218. Also John IV Megas Komnenos, penultimate Emperor of Trebizond, 1403–1459. 219. Another copy was directed at a contemporary Muslim ruler addressed as ‘Serenissimo Cobla cahicari Magno Catayo amico nostro cordialissimo’; ACA, Ms. Reg. 2658, fol. 178v. The garbled orthography of this name and title bears little relation to any actual names of Muslim rulers of the day but recalls the Ḳarā-Ḳoyunlu Turkomans, who ruled the lands between the Black and the Caspian Sea in Eastern Persia from 1407 to 1468 and who had marital ties to both the rulers of Trebizond and of Byzantium. 220. ACA, Ms. Reg. 2661, fol. 20v. 221. ACA, Ms. Reg. 2661, fol. 20v. 222. The ambassador was to travel via Cyprus, as is evidenced in a letter dated 3 July 1453 to John II of Cyprus; see ACA, Ms. Reg. 2661, fol. 21r. 223. ‘Et si in qua ex regnis et dominiis nostris uobis placita fuerint nos certiores reddere curetis quo bene placitis uestris morem gerere valeamus.’ ACA, Ms. Reg. 2661, fol. 20v. 224. The siege started on the 6th of April; the city fell on 29 May 1453. 225. 1432–1481, king of Portugal and the Algarve, not to be confused with his contemporary namesake Alfonso V of Aragon.

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226. ‘Item deu çento e noventa de cinquo reaes e quarenta alqueires de triguo e vinte e cinquo almudes de vinho e sessenta e quatro soaas a Jorge Enbaçador de Preste Joham de lhe mandamos dar pera mantymento de hũ mes por quamto o mandamos ao duque de Bergonha.’ TTNA, Chancelaria de D. Afonso V, Reg. 1, fol. 78r, entry from 1 May 1456 for the previous five years, ed. in Pedro Augusto de Azevedo, Documentos Das Chancelarias Reais Anteriores A 1531 Relativos a Marrocos, Vol. 2 (Lisbon: Academia das sciências de Lisboa, 1934), 357; António Joaquim Dias Dinis, Monumenta Henricina, XII (1454–1456) (Coimbra: Comissão Executiva das Comemorações do V Centenário da Morte do Infante D. Henrique, 1971), 321. The original folio is severely corrupted to the point of illegibility. Pedro da Azevedo found the note about the Ethiopian ambassador so interesting he wrote a short article on it: Pedro Augusto de Azevedo, ‘Un Embaixador Abissinio Em Portugal Em 1452′, Boletim Da Classe de Letras 13 (1921): 525–526. 227. ‘Georgio Sur laico Misinensis diocesis.’ BAV, Reg. Vat. 413, fol. 330v, ed. in de Witte, ‘Une Ambassade Éthiopienne à Rome En 1450′, 298; António Joaquim Dias Dinis, Monumenta Henricina, XI (1451–1454) (Coimbra: Comissão Executiva das Comemorações do V Centenário da Morte do Infante D. Henrique, 1970), 5; also compare BAV, Reg. Vat. 413, fol. 330r-v, ed. in de Witte, ‘Une Ambassade Éthiopienne à Rome En 1450′, 297; Dias Dinis, Monumenta Henricina, XI (1451–1454), 4–5. 228. Compare Kelly, ‘Medieval Ethiopian Diasporas’. The largest communities were to be found in Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Cairo, Qusqam, and the Wādı ̄ al-Nat ̣rūn, as well as modern-day Lebanon, Syria and Cyprus. 229. This occurred in December 1445; in July 1448, Jean de Lastic, the Grand Master of Rhodes, wrote to Charles VII, king of France, preserving a rather distorted echo of the Ethiopians’ account; compare FrançoisJoseph-­Jean Lastic, Chronique de La Maison de Lastic  : D’après Les Archives Du Château de Parentignat et Quelques Autres Documents. Des Origines à La Fin Du XVe Siècle (Montpellier: Firmin et Montane, 1919), 329–30. 230. That is, the Egyptus Novelo, completed in 1454, and Fra Mauro’s famous Mappamondo, completed in the 1450s; Fra Mauro explicitly mentions that he consulted Ethiopian pilgrims for his work. Compare Bertrand Hirsch, ‘Cartographie et Itinéraires: Figures Occidentales Du Nord de l’Éthiopie Aux XVe et XVIe Siècles’, Abbay 13 (1986): 91–122; Piero Falchetta, Fra Mauro’s World Map (Turnhout: Brepols, 2006). 231. See Getatchew Haile, The Ethiopian Orthodox Church’s Tradition on the Holy Cross (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 4–14. 232. See Taddesse Tamrat, Church and State in Ethiopia, 1270–1527, 254–55; Pankhurst, ‘Ethiopia’s Alleged Control of the Nile’; Haggai Erlich, ‘Mamluks’, in EAe 3 (2007), 714–15.

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233. For  the dispute and background of the conflict, see Krebs, ‘Crusading Threats? Ethiopian-Egyptian Relations in the 1440s’; for a version of the 1447 letter by Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob, see Euringer, ‘Ein Angeblicher Brief Des Negus Zara Jakob Vom Jahre 1447 Wegen Der Christenverfolgung in Palästina Und Ägypten’ and Paul Carali, ‘Bkerké 15’, La Revue Patriacale Ex-Revue Syrienne Mensuelle Historique et Littéraire, Organe Du Patriarcat Maronite 5 (1930): 649–55. The Ethiopian threat to meddle with the flow of the Nile dates back until at least the early fourteenth century. 234. Krebs, ‘Crusading Threats? Ethiopian-Egyptian Relations in the 1440s’; Loiseau, ‘The Ḥ at ̣ı ̄ and the Sultan. Letters and Embassies from Abyssinia to the Mamluk Court’. 235. Or so I have argued in Krebs, ‘Crusading Threats? Ethiopian-Egyptian Relations in the 1440s’. The Mamlūks were well aware of the Ethiopian dependency from the patriarchal see of Alexandria—and thus the need to maintain diplomatic relations with Cairo; see Loiseau, ‘The Ḥ atı̣ ̄ and the Sultan. Letters and Embassies from Abyssinia to the Mamluk Court’, 639–41. 236. Paulus [P̣awlos], a priest, and Theodorus [Tewodros], a deacon, both on pilgrimage in Italy. Both are also mentioned in two other letters written at the same date; compare Lefèvre, ‘Documenti Pontifici Sui Rapporti Con L’Etiopia Nei Secoli XV e XVI’, 23–24; Lefèvre, ‘Documenti Pontifici Sui Rapporti Con L’Etiopia Nei Secoli XV e XVI’, 23–24. 237. ‘Charissimo in Christo filio Zarajacob Regni Aethiopiae Regi illustri salutem.’ Ed. in Raineri, Lettere Tra i Pontefici Romani e i Principi Etiopici (Secc. XII-XX). Versioni e Integrazioni, 35. 238. Compare Glen Warren Bowersock, The Throne of Adulis: Red Sea Wars on the Eve of Islam (Oxford–New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). In 1441, the Ethiopian monks at Florence had narrated an indistinct story of a resounding Ethiopian victory over a neighbouring Jewish kingdom as proof for both the military strength and the most pious Christian attitude of the Ethiopian rulers; see Nogara, Scritti Inediti e Rari Di Biondo Flavio, 26–27. 239. ‘Cumque ad id facultates ecclesiae non suppeterent, vires principum orbis terrarum, qui Jesum crucifixum profitentur, convocare decrevimus.’ Ed. in Raineri, Lettere Tra i Pontefici Romani e i Principi Etiopici (Secc. XII-XX). Versioni e Integrazioni, 36. 240. The pope reminded Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob of the Ethiopian delegation present at the Council of Florence and, as he understood it, the negotiations that had taken place afterwards: ‘Ex tunc etiam tuae serenitati significamus et amicitiam cum felicis recordationis Eugenio Papa IV praedecessore nostro initam, nedum continuare, sed in unitate sanctae fidei augere velle

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polliciti fuimus, existimantes illam esse veram amicitiam.’ Ed. in Raineri, Lettere Tra i Pontefici Romani e i Principi Etiopici (Secc. XII-XX). Versioni e Integrazioni, 36. 241. ‘sub tuo etenim sublimi imperio, non solum Deus magnos exercitus, sed flumen Nili esse voluit, cuius inundatione tellus hostibus alimenta ministrat, quibus pro tuo arbitrio denegare potes.’ Ed. in Raineri, Lettere Tra i Pontefici Romani e i Principi Etiopici (Secc. XII-XX). Versioni e Integrazioni, 36. 242. ‘eos ipsos nuntios dirigere poterit ad dilectum filium nostrum Ludovicum tituli S Laurentii in Damaso presbyterum Cardinalem, nunc classis maritimae legatum in partibus orientalibus jam commorantem.’ Ed. in Raineri, Lettere Tra i Pontefici Romani e i Principi Etiopici (Secc. XII-XX). Versioni e Integrazioni, 37. 243. ‘pro sancta religione se accingere maturet, et auxilium nobis a Deo non defuturum sperantes, magnanimitati tuae damus contra hostes aureum illum gladium quem Jeremias dare visus est duci Machabaeorum.’ Ed. in Raineri, Lettere Tra i Pontefici Romani e i Principi Etiopici (Secc XII-XX). Versioni e Integrazioni, 38. This alludes to 2 Maccabees 15: ‘Accept this holy sword as a gift from God; with it you shall shatter your adversaries.’ The wording is ambiguous here and could both denote a rousing request as well as a literal relic of a golden sword. 244. ‘Mittimus venerandas reliquias, videlicet de reliquiis S(anctorum) Apostolorum Petri et Pauli, de reliquiis S(ancti) Joannis Baptistae, de brachio S(ancti) Andreae Apostoli, de reliquiis S(ancti) Jacobi Zebedei Apostoli, de ligno crucis, in qua suspensus fuit beatus Petrus Apostolus; quas quidem reliquias, quoniam venerari sunt dignissimae, serenitati tuae, pro tua devotione destinamus.’ Ed. in. Raineri, Lettere Tra i Pontefici Romani e i Principi Etiopici (Secc XII-XX). Versioni e Integrazioni, 38. 245. Pius II had succeeded Callixtus III as pope a year earlier, in August 1458. The Ethiopian ambassador of 1459 is identified as ‘George Michael of Sabba, regular canon of the Order of St Augustine, ambassador and nuncio of Prester John the great and mighty in the realm of India’ in a papal safe-­ conduct; see BAV, Reg. Vat. 501, fol. 106r, ed. in Lefèvre, ‘Documenti Pontifici Sui Rapporti Con L’Etiopia Nei Secoli XV e XVI’, 24. Benjamin Weber has put forth that he might have been an impostor, or that he was at the very least perceived as an impostor by some Italian contemporaries; see Benjamin Weber, ‘Vrais et Faux Éthiopiens Au XVe Siècle En Occident? Du Bon Usage Des Connexions’, Annales d’Éthiopie 27 (2012): 108–11.

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246. And probably also by the king of Portugal and the Duke of Burgundy, who were both known to share a great interest in crusading and in Africa in relation to the visit of the Ethiopian ambassador ‘Jorge’ in 1452. 247. ‘Pertulit ad nos constans fama Tuam Serenitatem et simul omnes, qui sub tuis regnis sunt constituti, vero esse Christianos; tibi etiam non dubitamus esse notum ipsius fidei fundamenta a principio fuisse instituta apud urbem Romam, in qua quiescunt corpora beatorum Petri et Pauli apostolorum residemusque nos, Christi Vicarius, Apostolica sede, Ecclesiarum omnium domina et magistra.’ Raineri, Lettere Tra i Pontefici Romani e i Principi Etiopici (Secc. XII-XX). Versioni e Integrazioni, 22.

CHAPTER 4

The Rule of the Regents

—For when [your uncle] comes to us together with [the ambassador] Antonius we will send a crown, a sword, some prelate to crown you in our name, theologians, preachers, artisans, and other things that you desire so that it will be easy for [your uncle] to recognise our love for you; and everything that pertains to our mutual union will be made to happen. —Letter, Pope Sixtus IV to aṣe Ǝskǝndǝr, 13 March 1482 Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze, Ms. II-III 256, fol. 255v.

The last quarter of the fifteenth and first quarter of the sixteenth century constituted a time of economic and cultural prosperity in Ethiopia.1 Surviving material culture from these roughly 50 years is exceptionally rich and varied.2 Trade and agriculture flourished, and the itinerant imperial court was immense and magnificent; important Ethiopian royals founded an unprecedented number of famous churches and monasteries, which often served as centres of literary as well as artistic production.3 What did not prosper in this time, however, were diplomatic contacts between Ethiopia and the Latin West. After more than 30 years on the Solomonic throne, aṣe Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob died in 1468. Shorter reigns and much younger nägäs ́t followed his exceptionally long rule: as ̣e Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob’s son, as ̣e Bäʾǝdä Maryam,4 © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 V. Krebs, Medieval Ethiopian Kingship, Craft, and Diplomacy with Latin Europe, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64934-0_4

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reigned for ten years and was succeeded by generations of child-kings.5 The power within the realm was significantly re-distributed: regents, members of the crown council and influential nobles, including several high-ranking women,6 rose to prominence and importance. Boys as young as six were put on the throne with the backing of powerful courtiers.7 Only three missions from Ethiopia to Europe are traceable in the more than 50 years under consideration here. They date to the early 1480s, 1508–1509 and the mid-1520s. Two regents despatched the first two embassies: ras bitwäddäd ʿAmdä Mikaʾel,8 a regent for as ̣e Ǝskǝndǝr, sent an embassy to the papacy in the early 1480s. In 1508–09, ǝtege Ǝleni,9 a longstanding and prominent courtly figure acting as regent for as ̣e Lǝbnä Dǝngǝl, answered a Portuguese mission asking for military aid. As an adult in the early 1520s, aṣe Lǝbnä Dǝngǝl would eventually host the first substantial European embassy in the Ethiopian highlands. In 1526, this Portuguese mission was the first official courtly Latin Christian delegation allowed to return to its point of origin, carrying with them demands posed by the nǝgus ́ to both the Portuguese crown and the papacy. Less than a handful of years later, as ̣e Lǝbnä Dǝngǝl’s realm would undergo irreversible change. Between the late 1520s and the early 1540s, a series of devastating wars with the Sultanate of ʿAdal challenged the very foundations of Solomonic rule in the highlands of the Horn of Africa. This chapter examines the last three Ethiopian embassies to the Latin West before the wars of the sixteenth century, which constitute a significant fault line within Ethiopian history. Crucially, all of these late Ethiopian missions to the papacy and the kingdom of Portugal upheld the interests traceable in earlier exchanges. Gǝʿǝz, Latin, Italian and Portuguese sources all establish that the Solomonic court still primarily sought to obtain craftsmen and artisans, ecclesiastical garments, fine fabrics and liturgical objects from the Latin West—even against the backdrop of the drastically changed political climate of the early sixteenth century, and on the eve of the wars with ʿAdal.

Rome, Ethiopia, Jerusalem, and Two Very Different Men from Imola, 1478–1484 As ̣e Bäʾǝdä Maryam10 appears to have been the first long-ruling nǝgus ́ who did not follow in the tradition established by his grandfather, father and uncles in sending emissaries or agents to the northern shores of the

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Mediterranean. The interregnum and succession of his son as ̣e Ǝskǝndǝr in the late 1470s and early 1480s, however, produced numerous sources written in Egypt, the Holy Land, Italy and Ethiopia that show renewed contacts between the Christian Horn of Africa and the Latin West. Two distinct missions were navigating their way between Ethiopia, Jerusalem and Rome in the early 1480s. The first, an Ethiopian delegation to the papacy in Rome led by an ecclesiastic named Ǝnt ̣onǝs, was born out of a Solomonic embassy to Mamlūk Egypt in 1480–1481.11 The second—a mission negotiating its way between the Holy Land and the Ethiopian highlands between late 1480 and 1484—was a much humbler affair: in December 1480, a small missionary venture set out from the Franciscan convent in Jerusalem for the court of the nǝgus ́. It is important to stress that a thorough evaluation of the source texts shows two different, largely unconnected exchanges between Ethiopia, Jerusalem and Rome in the early 1480s. Ethiopianist research, however, has hitherto collapsed two men involved in the respective embassies into one person, conflating two sets of exchanges into one venture.12 This momentous misreading is owed to the fact that both missions—the Ethiopian embassy from Jerusalem to Rome and a Franciscan missionary undertaking sent out from Jerusalem to the Solomonic court—involved similarly named Italians from the town of Imola. Although both men are attested as present on different continents in the years 1481–1482, scholarship has mostly ignored or amended the severe contradictions evident in the sources.13 The collapsing of the activities of two men into one, meanwhile, led to the emergence of a master-narrative in which a single Italian appears to have been in charge of facilitating diplomatic contacts between Rome and Ethiopia in the early 1480s.14 If we untangle the threads, however, the importance of the Italian players—the Imolese men as well as the Latin Church more generally—recedes. Ethiopian interests and attitudes towards the Latin West in this new phase of Solomonic rulership-by-proxy in the second half of the fifteenth century take their place and come into focus. An Ethiopian Mission to Cairo and a Pilgrimage to Jerusalem, Mid-1480–Spring 1481 The evidence on official Solomonic missions to Western Europe after as ̣e Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob’s embassies of 1450–1451 is scarce.15 No ambassadors at all

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seem to have been sent out in the 1460s and 1470s. The story of renewed contacts between Ethiopia and the Latin World in the early 1480s begins with a diplomatic mission to Cairo.16 In Ethiopia, the death of as ̣e Bäʾǝdä Maryam17 and the succession of his very young son as ̣e Ǝskǝndǝr18 had necessitated the appointment of a new abun as head of the Ethiopian Church.19 Only such an abun or metropolitan could administer the coronation rites and provide legitimacy to Ethiopia’s rulers through his episcopal authority.20 In 1480–1481, aṣe Ǝskǝndǝr—or rather, the boy’s guardians and churchmen—sent an embassy to Mamlūk Sultan Qāytbāy21 in Cairo to enquire about the dispatch of a new metropolitan from the Patriarch of Alexandria. As was customary, the mission included a large retinue and was led by a high-ranking dignitary from the Ethiopian nobility, possibly aṣe Ǝskǝndǝr’s regent, ras bitwäddäd ʿAmdä Mikaʾel himself.22 Contemporary accounts by Latin foreigners in Egypt suggest that this Ethiopian embassy left a lasting impression on Christians living and trading in the Mamlūk Sultanate in the early 1480s. Its grand entry into the city, as well as the assertive stance and preferential treatment enjoyed by its ambassador, were recounted in Cairo for years.23 Arab sources do not name the ambassador but corroborate that the mission was politely but firmly requesting the despatch of a new abun to the highland kingdom. A second goal was to obtain concessions for the Ethiopian community in Jerusalem.24 The Ethiopians’ main request came to fruition: we know that by late 1481, two metropolitans—abunä Yǝsḥaq and his eventual successor, abunä Marqos—had arrived with a small number of other Egyptian ecclesiastics in Ethiopia.25 From Cairo, the ambassadorial party travelled on to the Holy Land in the spring of 1481, where they arrived together with no less than 3000 Ethiopian pilgrims according to Arabic sources.26 The timing of the mission enabled the Ethiopians to spend the Easter days of 1481  in Jerusalem.27 Some of the celebrations—which fell into late April that year—were spent in the company of the Jerusalemite Franciscans, who were also hosting an Italian aristocrat and political agent called Johanne Baptista Brochus of Imola.28 It must remain unclear why Johanne Baptista Brochus had been in Jerusalem that Easter of 1481 to begin with—though there is an indication that his administrative career back home had recently suffered a severe setback, possibly inducing him to embark on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land.29 In the spring of 1481, the Guardian of Mount Zion30—the head of the Franciscans in the Holy Land—as well as the aristocrat Brochus appear to

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have convinced the Ethiopian head ambassador to despatch a small, spontaneous off-shoot delegation to the papacy in Rome.31 It was to be led not by the original high-ranking Solomonic dignitary, but by an Ethiopian ecclesiastic subsequently called ‘Antonius’ in Latin sources— abba Ǝnṭonǝs. A roundabout description of the Ethiopians’ stay in Jerusalem, their encounters with the Franciscans and onwards travel to Rome in the spring and summer of 1481 appears in the pilgrimage account of the German Minorite Paulus Waltherus of Güglingen.32 In 1482, Paulus repeatedly crossed paths with the Ethiopian embassy in Italy and the Holy Land.33 During a stay at a Franciscan convent in Venice, he came across a most interesting letter, which had originally been composed in Italian. Written by the Guardian of Mount Zion, this missive introduced the small Ethiopian embassy to Pope Sixtus IV in 1481.34 Paulus later included a Latin version of the document into his travelogue. Here, the head of the Franciscans—who remains unnamed throughout—informs Pope Sixtus IV that ‘the king of the Indians, who was called Prester John’ had recently died. This ‘king of the Indians’ had been a Christian king of a Christian people, but ostensibly adhered to the ‘Greek rite’. A new ruler had been elected in his place, who had been ‘inclined to the Catholic faith and to the true rite of Christians’ and who did not want to be ‘anointed nor crowned if not by a prelate of the Catholic faith’.35 For this purpose, the version of the letter continues, an Ethiopian embassy had first been sent to ‘Babylon’—meaning Cairo—and the Sultan of Egypt with many presents, securing passage to the Holy Land and Jerusalem. Somewhat confusingly, they were also sent to go to Greece ‘so that they could persuade some Christians to crown their king’.36 The chief Ethiopian ambassador stayed for some time in Jerusalem, where he was ‘faithfully visiting holy places and our brothers on Mt. Sion, and the life and habit of living of the Franciscans and our coreligionists were most pleasing to him’.37 After much time conversing, eating and drinking with the Minorites of Jerusalem, the Ethiopian envoy supposedly mentioned ‘his business to them’, namely, that ‘he wanted to travel to Greece and to persuade a Christian prelate to crown his lord’.38 The head Franciscan admonished him, saying that the Greeks were ‘not true Catholics but heretics and schismatics and excommunicated from the true Church’.39 Thus rebuked, the ambassador attempted to convince twelve Franciscans from Jerusalem to join him on his way back to Ethiopia to ‘crown’ the new king. The Warden of Mount Zion perceived this as beyond his responsibilities; he

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instead advised that the Ethiopians approach the Latin Church in Rome instead. The head Ethiopian ambassador himself declined to go to Rome, stating that it was simply too far away for him to travel. Instead, he proposed an alternative: it would be ‘acceptable to me that I send some of my men with your brothers, to whom I shall give my full authority as if I were personally present’.40 An off-shoot embassy was born. The head ambassador himself would meanwhile return to Cairo, where he would wait for five months—until the fall of 1481—before returning home.41 An Ethiopian Mission to the Heart of Latin Christendom, 1481–1482 According to Paulus’ subsequent version of events, this plan was promptly set into motion. To vouch for the veracity of the Ethiopians’ story, a letter written by the Mamlūk Sultan to the Ethiopian community in Jerusalem was also taken along to Rome. The nobleman Johanne Baptista Brochus travelled with the small subsidiary group, guiding and interpreting for the Ethiopians—probably from Arabic rather than Amharic.42 By the Advent season of 1481, the Ethiopian ambassadors had turned up in Rome for an audience with Pope Sixtus IV.43 The group was led by ‘the lord Anthonius’, an Ethiopian man specified to be ‘a priest according to their rite’ in a later passage of Paulus’ text.44 In late 1481, at least according to the German Minorite’s understanding as voiced in his travelogue, the envoys had ‘rendered their obedience to the Church on behalf of the king of India. And the pope, as well as the whole Curia, rejoiced, giving thanks to God and arranging for Latin clerics to travel to Ethiopia.’45 Several Latin letters and accounts describe the arrival and actions of the mission of abba Ǝnt ̣onǝs—as the ‘priest Anthonius’ would have most likely been known in Ethiopia—in the heart of Latin Christendom in November 1481. They confirm all points raised in Paulus’ text and add new facets to the episode. On 16 November 1481, the Milanese ambassadors based in Rome46 informed their lord, Ludovico Sforza,47 about the arrival of an ambassador sent by ‘the lord Prester John to our holiness the Pope’.48 The way the Milanese understood it, this Ethiopian ambassador—who remains nameless in the letter—had been sent by the ‘cousin and spokesman’ and ‘guardian’ of a newly chosen king, seeing that the old one had died. He was to enquire about the despatch of a ‘venerable religious man’ to crown the successor to the throne, as it had long been their custom to ask for clerics from abroad to consecrate and crown a new ruler.49 In Jerusalem,

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‘brothers of the observance of St Francis’—the Franciscans of Mount Zion—had convinced the ambassador to approach the papacy this time around.50 Therefore, this ‘ambassador of Prester John’ enquired about the despatch of several prelates and religious notables to his land, and also promised that provisions would be made to house 100 of his people for educational purposes at Rome.51 Should the pontiff send men to ‘correct and extirpate’ the errors of their belief and crown the young king, this ‘Lord Prester John’—the Ethiopian nǝgus ́—would also recognise the Apostolic See.52 Some even suggested that the ruler might come to Rome to be coronated by the pope himself.53 According to the Milanese, a letter from the head of the Franciscans in the Holy Land supported the ambassador’s astonishing exposition, alluding to the missive given by the German friar Paulus we just examined. This letter from the Guardian of Zion lent utmost credence to the claims in the eyes of Pope Sixtus IV and the assembled cardinals; after all, the Guardian was known as a most trustworthy man.54 The pontiff intended to despatch at the very least 12 of the most learned and seasoned Minorites, as well as other learned ecclesiastics to ‘this said Prester John to preach and to correct the errors that he maintains in opposition to our faith’.55 The Archbishop of Rouen56 reminded the pope that his predecessor Eugene IV had unsuccessfully tried to recruit the Ethiopians to the See of Rome, and emphasised the worthwhileness of such a renewed effort—particularly as ‘the said lord is most powerful and most capable of harming the Turk’.57 The last section of the letter is severely corrupted,58 and little else is to be gleaned from the account—except a note stating that the ‘translator of the said spokesman is Joanne Baptista of Imola’. Our Milanese sources moreover specify that this ‘Joanne Baptista’ used to be a close confidant of the illustrious ‘Count Hieronymo’59—Girolamo Riario, one of the plotters behind the infamous Pazzi conspiracy,60 and a close relative of Pope Sixtus IV himself. This ‘Joanne Baptista’ had met the Ethiopian party in Jerusalem, and it had been he, together with the Guardian of Zion and other Franciscans living in the Holy Land, who had persuaded the Ethiopians to approach the papacy in Rome. He, too, eventually also introduced them to the pontiff.61 From the circumstantial evidence provided by the Milanese and later sources, we know that this ‘Joanne Baptista’ must have been the nobleman Johanne Baptista Brochus of Imola.62 A diary note by the Volterran Jacopo Gherardi63 again confirms many of these points: an entry written in early November 1481 states that

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spokesmen of the king of India have come to Rome wearing their native garb, which attracted the attention of the whole city because of its novelty. Their companion was Ioannes Baptista of Imola, who a little before this had been of great authority in the eyes of the Pope and the Count64 but was now of none. I hear that they were not sent by their king but by his secretary, that kingdom’s leading man, whose desire it is to enter into a pact and friendship with the pope and to live by the rites of the Latin Christians.65

Their primary petition, Gherardi notes, was that ‘a bishop of the Latin system [who spoke] the Latin language might be sent with them’, but despite papal admonishment, ‘no one was found who was willing to entrust themselves’ to go to Ethiopia.66 Still, the ambassadors were well supplied for, housed and bestowed with many gifts, ‘honoured with public acts’ and had several ‘pious and loving’ audiences with the pope through the aid of an unnamed interpreter.67 A letter by Pope Sixtus IV—written many months into the Ethiopians’ stay in Rome—also corroborates the above three sources, adding insight into the interests of the Ethiopian embassy. On 13 March 1482, the pontiff wrote to ‘our beloved in Christ, our son Prester John, great king of India’.68 Despite the surprisingly generic mode of address, the content of his message makes clear that as ̣e Ǝskǝndǝr was the recipient of the letter.69 Sixtus states that ‘your spokesman Antonius came to us, a prudent man, and grave, and of great religion, whom we willingly saw on account of our love for you, and [whom] we welcomed and embraced with the utmost charity’.70 Antonius—Ǝnṭonǝs—had delivered the nǝgus ́’ ‘most agreeable’ letter to the great delight of the pope. This letter had convinced the pontiff of the ‘piety of your heart and the sincere devotion you bear towards Our Lord Jesus Christ and his most glorious and always virgin mother’.71 The way Sixtus IV understood it, ten-year-old as ̣e Ǝskǝndǝr was deeply struck by a ‘desire to be of one accord with us in everything that pertains to the Catholic faith’.72 It is thus little surprise that the leader of the Church of Rome hoped for a renewed reconciliation and union of the two churches—particularly in light of previous failed attempts, which the pontiff explicitly blamed on the ‘long expanse of territory between us’. Sixtus IV further notes that the Roman liturgy had carefully been explained to the ambassador Ǝnṭonǝs, that the Ethiopian had taken part in Latin celebrations of Mass and that he had been made to contemplate the ‘ecclesiastical hierarchy’. Ǝnṭonǝs had also visited the holy sites and relics as well as experienced all the other marvels Rome had to offer with great interest— and thus should be able to report diligently on all things to the nǝgus ́.

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The letter ends with two pieces of information that give insight into Ethiopian interests and agency, but also the limits imposed on both by the papacy in the late fifteenth century. Pope Sixtus IV was sending Ǝnṭonǝs back to Ethiopia, ‘with the intent that you should send your uncle back to us along with him’.73 Only if as ̣e Ǝskǝndǝr’s ‘uncle’—presumably his regent ras bitwäddäd ʿAmdä Mikaʾel—also were to come to Rome as part of a subsequent embassy would the pontiff finally fulfil the requests posed by the mission: ‘for when [your uncle] comes to us together with Antonius, we will send a crown, a sword, some prelate to crown you in our name, theologians, preachers, artisans, and other things that you desire’.74 Crucially, it ‘seems to us and to Antonius himself more advised and more appropriate that nothing be sent now’.75 If the nǝgus ́ wanted anything from Rome, he first had to effectively agree to a Union of the Churches under the suzerainty of the Latin pontiff.76 Our last source describing the Ethiopian mission in Rome dates many years after the events in question. In 1508–1509, Paris de Grassis,77 a high-ranking papal functionary, interviewed ‘the noble lord Johanne Baptista Brochus’78 for a lengthy treatise on ambassadors to the Roman Curia.79 In the intervening years, this aristocrat’s career had recovered— particularly from the mid-1490s onwards, Brochus had held several prestigious diplomatic and administrative postings connected to the papacy that took him all over mainland Europe.80 Nearly 30 years after the Ethiopian embassy of the 1480s, Paris de Grassis thus consulted the nobleman Johanne Baptista Brochus of Imola on the embassy of the ‘Indian and Chaldean spokesmen sent by their emperor, whom we commonly call Prester John’81 to Pope Sixtus IV. According to the Imolese, six spokesmen had been sent from Ethiopia. Their leader was ‘Antonius, a chaplain’; Brochus identifies him as a member of the nǝgus ́’ household and ‘a man held in the esteem of a cardinal’ in his native land. This ‘Antonius’ had assigned Brochus to be the Ethiopians’ guide, seeing that he was ‘an expert in their language’.82 At least, that is how the Italian noble chose to describe himself three decades after the fact. The seven men—the six Ethiopians and Brochus—arrived in Rome, where ‘[Pope] Sixtus IV ordered that they be greeted respectfully and honoured with a reception consisting of prelates, and his entire family, and all the cardinals of his household, and the entire Curia, as is the custom in similarly solemn receptions’.83 To protect them from the suspicion of the ‘Moors and Turks’, the embassy was heard by Sixtus IV in secret.84 Brochus said he translated the ‘Chaldean’ language of the Ethiopians word for word.85

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According to him, their reasons for approaching the Latin pontiff were threefold: first, to honour the pope, paying tribute to the Church of Rome for a full year and ‘offer him and his successors the obedience that was customary for other Christian princes and emperors to offer’. Second, they asked for the dispatch of ‘either some bishops, or secular or regular priests, who were well-taught in the [Christian] faith, masters, so to speak, to instruct the people and the nation as a whole, like uncultivated and ignorant students, in the faith of Christ’.86 The third proposition pertained to a crusade: should Sixtus IV order it, the nǝgus ́ was allegedly ‘prepared to fight in an expeditionary force against the Sultan of Babylon [Cairo] and the Moors to recover the Lord’s tomb [the Holy Sepulchre], and was also prepared to disrupt the flooding of the Nile, which the Moors feared greatly’.87 The third proposition presented by Brochus must appear even more surprising than the others. It is mentioned in no other and especially no contemporary  source, and we must keep in mind that the nǝgus ́ in question was a child-king recently put on the Ethiopian throne. Needless to say, no such endeavour never materialised. Brochus also states that the Ethiopians had brought gifts of ‘little monetary value’ which were, however, considered novel: nine unusual pearls, some delightful jasper and some unique blank gold ‘coins’, which are also mentioned in other European sources as particular to the realm of the nägäs ́t in this period.88 Pope Sixtus IV hosted the Ethiopians and Brochus with high honours at Castel Sant’Angelo and Borgo Santo Spirito.89 He took meals with them and engaged them in theological discussions: ‘they were always with the pope when he went riding or to the chapel, and as spokesmen of the emperor, they held the highest place.’ With ‘Antonius’ on the pontiff’s right and Brochus—acting as interpreter for both the pope and the Ethiopian—to his left, both men conducted Mass with Sixtus IV, handing water to the pope while he was celebrating Mass, and holding the canopy and the trail of the pope’s robe. They also enjoyed ‘disputative conversations’ with high-ranking Roman intellectuals.90 Brochus stresses that the Ethiopians were pleased by ‘our ceremonies, which one after the other they wished to understand’, and says that they noted down what they saw in ‘a little book written after their custom’.91 Lastly, his account intimates that the Ethiopians did not leave the Eternal City as empty-handed as Pope Sixtus IV’s letter of 1482 had suggested: after spending all of Lent and the Easter festivities in Rome, the ‘pope gifted them the sword that [was used on the] night of the Nativity’—a blessed object presented to defenders of the faith or the Holy See each

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year by the pope.92 He also gave them a brocade vestment, a biretta—a particular peaked type of ecclesiastical hat—used in Nativity services and 1000 gold ducats alongside some Agnos Dei, little wax tablets consecrated by the pope. One of them was set as a double pendant on a precious chain of gold.93 Brochus implies that the Ethiopians left Rome after the Easter holidays, which fell in the first half of April that year. Gianfranco Fiaccadori has drawn attention to a source which attests that a high-ranking Latin ecclesiastic—the bishop of Dulcigno—had been ordered to escort the Ethiopians from Rome to Venice.94 The German pilgrim Paulus Waltherus, whom we encountered above, notes in his travelogue that he met abba Ǝnṭonǝs and his Ethiopian companions again in Venice ‘after Exaudi’— which would equate to late May  in 1482.95 The nobleman Brochus receives no mention here anymore, suggesting he stayed behind in Rome. The Ethiopian party remained for three more weeks in Italy: Paulus relates that the ambassadors celebrated the holiday of Corpus Christi together with the Doge and Patriarch in Venice in early June.96 Their total time in Italy thus amounts to just over six months. The group finally shipped out in early summer on a galley belonging to Petrus Lando, a well-known Venetian shipmaster.97 Paulus’ account relates that the ‘pope was going to send out some of our brethren’ to Ethiopia because Ǝnt ̣onǝs had said ‘many a good thing about the pope and the court of Rome’.98 This seems to have indeed been facilitated post-haste. The German pilgrim writes that ‘while I was still in Venice, there came six brothers of the order of the Observantists, assigned and sent by the Pope and the vicar general to go to India, who were expecting another six brothers, and they chose to go there on the short road through Alexandria, and not to Jerusalem’.99 Paulus’ text is the only known contemporary source describing the actual deployment of Latin missionaries directly from Italy to Ethiopia in 1482. However, the Early Modern Franciscan historian Luke Wadding provides a rather disappointing view on the outcome of this enterprise: according to Wadding’s seventeenth-century synopsis, Pope Sixtus IV had indeed sent out several ecclesiastics in the summer of 1482. While the men were readying themselves to set out from Venice, however, ‘a certain bishop came up to them who claimed to be the leader and commander of the mission. After a disagreement had arisen with this vain, fickle man—and not without the pope’s indignation—each one returned to his own region’.100 The mission had failed before it even began.

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Abba Ǝnṭonǝs’ embassy also suffered a significant setback upon its arrival in the Levant. In November 1482 the German pilgrim Paulus ran into Ǝnṭonǝs for the third time—this time in the Holy Land. He claims to have gotten to know Ǝnṭonǝs fairly well, speaking ‘with him, as much as I could, in the Italian language’, suggesting that Ǝnṭonǝs had acquired some Italian during his months in Italy.101 Paulus was horrified to learn that one of the other Ethiopian envoys had converted to Islam after coming back from Rome.102 This story of Ethiopian apostasy in Jerusalem following a mission to the papacy is supported in a note in the Treatise on the Holy Land, compiled by the Franciscan friar Francesco Suriano.103 In a summary of events concerning the year 1482 written just shortly thereafter, Suriano notes that ambassadors had gone from Ethiopia to the Latin Holy See ‘for reconciliation, but after having returned to Jerusalem with many presents from the Supreme Pontiff Sixtus, one of them denied the faith in Jerusalem and with great shame became a Moslem. The other did not dare to return to the presence of Prester John.’104 We may assume that Ǝnṭonǝs was the Ethiopian who was hesitant to return to the Solomonic court in late 1482. In a letter to as ̣e Ǝskǝndǝr in January 1484, the Guardian of Mount Zion, Paulo of Caneto, explicitly wrote that an Ethiopian ambassador named ‘Antonius’ had arrived back in Jerusalem from the court of Pope Sixtus IV years earlier. This man had remained in Jerusalem ever since and spent all the papal money. Even worse, as a consequence, Paulo lamented that the ‘paternal and amicable letters’ written by the pontiff, as well as a ‘ring from his own finger’ sent to as ̣e Ǝskǝndǝr had not been delivered to the Ethiopian court.105 The erstwhile Ethiopian ambassador Ǝnṭonǝs had thus stayed in the Holy Land for nearly two years before he, too, becomes hard to grasp in contemporary sources. The last reference to abba Ǝnṭonǝs and the Ethiopian embassy of the early 1480s comes again from Luke Wadding’s seventeenth-century Minorite Annals. Wadding notes that the Jerusalemite Franciscans eventually gave Ǝnṭonǝs a companion to ‘accompany him to Ethiopia and to sustain him in his faith’, all but frog-marching him back home to deliver the letter and gifts from the pope. This attempt, too, did not end well: either by connivance or chance, the companion—a man called ‘Grifon the Slav’—was murdered on the road, his body cast among a thicket of bramble bushes.106 Here, abba Ǝnṭonǝs vanishes from the historical record.

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We do not know whether he made it back to the Ethiopian court, or if the papal letters and gifts ever reached as ̣e Ǝskǝndǝr. A Minuscule Franciscan Mission in Ethiopia, 1480–1484/85 The second diplomatic encounter between Ethiopian courtiers and Latin clerics in the years 1480–1484 turned out little better. Luke Wadding again offers a fairly damning summary of the affair: two Franciscan friars ‘ate up three years in this mission, yet with little to show for it’.107 What had happened was this: in late 1480, a small delegation left the Franciscan convent in Jerusalem for Ethiopia. After setting out from Cairo in January 1481, two of the three men sent out—a Franciscan missionary called Iohanne of Calabria and his letter-carrying companion Baptista of Imola—would eventually reach the Ethiopian court after 11 months of travel. In late 1483, Baptista of Imola arrived back in Jerusalem with a letter by Iohanne, reporting on the missionary’s lack of success. In early 1484, the Guardian of Mount Zion sent Baptista back to Ethiopia with yet another message. After that, the mission vanishes from the historical record. Our knowledge about the affair draws exclusively from the Treatise on the Holy Land by Francesco Suriano. The text, composed in Italian, was first written nearly contemporaneously to the events described therein.108 Here, we find both the story of a minuscule Jerusalemite missionary venture to the Ethiopian court, and the tale of the late-medieval letter carrier Baptista of Imola. According to Suriano’s Treatise, it was Iohanne Thomacello—the Guardian of Mount Zion until early 1481—who had decided to send out missionaries to Ethiopia as part of a broader attempt to bring ‘lost sheep back to the flock of the true faith’.109 This decision might have been precipitated by rumours about the ceremonial arrival of the 1480–1481 Ethiopian embassy to Cairo. If, indeed, 3000 Ethiopian pilgrims were on their way to enter Jerusalem together with the Ethiopian ambassadorial party that year, we may understand the renewed Latin excitement and interest in Ethiopia.110 News on this mission and its train of pilgrims would have spread like wildfire all over the Eastern Mediterranean.111 In any case, in late 1480, months before the original Ethiopian embassy ever arrived in Jerusalem in 1481, the Guardian of Mount Zion in Jerusalem sent out two Minorite friars ‘as nuncios from the Holy See to the great Emperor Prester John of Ethiopia’.112 These Jerusalemite missionary-ambassadors were named ‘friar Iohanne of Calabria and friar Francesco of Catalonia’; the latter was identified as an

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especially capable theologian.113 The mission was supposed to declare to ‘the most powerful Lord of Ethiopia’ his people’s errors, in which the Ethiopians remained ‘from ignorance rather than from malice’.114 With this fairly patronising goal in mind, the two friars set out from Jerusalem for Cairo and, in January 1481, left Cairo to continue south, travelling up the Nile.115 The Spaniard, friar Francesco, fell ill while they were still in Egypt; he never went to Ethiopia. The sole remaining Franciscan, Iohanne of Calabria, continued onwards. And yet, we learn that he was not all alone on the trade route between Egypt and the Horn of Africa in early 1481. As an afterthought, our source Suriano adds that a certain ‘Baptista of Imola’ had accompanied the friars when they set out from Jerusalem in 1480. This Baptista was not an ecclesiastic; instead, he had come with the Franciscans to carry ‘alms and letters’.116 After travelling for 11 months, friar Iohanne and letter-carrier Baptista eventually reached the Ethiopian court.117 They were welcomed with a decided lack of enthusiasm: both men were detained for eight months while Iohanne was unsuccessfully waiting for an audience with the nǝgus ́.118 Progress was slow. We know that aṣe Ǝskǝndǝr was put on the Solomonic throne in 1478 after a minor crisis in succession at six years of age.119 All those months in 1482–1483, friar Iohanne was thus unsuccessfully waiting on an audience with an 11-year-old—or rather, his guardians.120 By the very end of 1483, only Baptista had come back from Ethiopia to Jerusalem in order to deliver a letter reporting the Franciscan’s progress, or rather, a lack thereof.121 In late 1483, our source Suriano himself was living in the Minorite convent in Jerusalem. When he heard that Baptista had come back, he ordered the letter-carrier to his cell to tell him about the journey and the Ethiopian court. Baptista complied, and two years later, Suriano included his account as a first-person narrative in the Treatise.122 Baptista describes in detail how he and friar Iohanne had set out and followed the established trade- and pilgrimage route down the Nile, through the desert, and alongside the Red Sea coast. In Ethiopia, they were apprehended and escorted through the highlands to the Solomonic court, where they met twelve Latin Christians ‘of good repute’ already living—or rather, indefinitely detained—there. The letter-carrier even supplied a list of the men’s names and places of origin; he notes that most of them had come there a long time ago as fortune-seekers.123 Baptista’s very brief, subsequent description of land and people in Ethiopia is decidedly unenthusiastic. It also indicates that friar Iohanne and Baptista had been primarily exposed to common Ethiopian folk rather than to members of the local gentry, or high-ranking dignitaries and courtiers.124

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In late January 1484,125 just three weeks after Baptista had returned to Jerusalem with Iohanne’s progress report, the current Guardian of Mount Zion, Paulo of Caneto,126 addressed a letter to the young nǝgus ́.127 The Treatise quotes this message in full. Here, it becomes clear that the Franciscans had been surprised by the recent change in Ethiopian rulership; they had not known about as ̣e Ǝskǝndǝr’s succession when the missionaries were first sent out in 1480. Addressing himself to ‘Alexandro’,128 and explicitly alluding to his ‘youth in years’,129 Paulo of Caneto informs as ̣e Ǝskǝndǝr of the mission’s purpose in Ethiopia. The Guardian of Mount Zion explicitly also addresses the ignominious end of the 1481–1482 Ethiopian embassy to Rome, stating that one of the ambassadors had converted to Islam and that ‘Anthonio’—abba Ǝnṭonǝs—was still in Jerusalem and had been unwilling to go back home and complete his mission for two years.130 Despite this, the letter urges aṣe Ǝskǝndǝr to unite with the Church of Rome, to ‘send letters and blessings to the Holy See’, to ‘expedite, sweep, make haste, decide: don’t spare gold, send men worthy of your Regal Majesty, do not procrastinate, for in delay is danger’.131 A brief note in the Treatise also tells us that the letter-carrier Baptista of Imola—who had just made the arduous journey to Jerusalem—was slated to set out and deliver Paulo of Caneto’s missive to the North-East African highlands shortly thereafter, in late January or early February 1484.132 Here, Baptista of Imola disappears from the historical record. We may assume that his second journey from Jerusalem to Ethiopia and back again took up most of the years 1484–1485. By that time, our source Suriano had left the Holy Land for Italy and started to compile and write the narrative of the Treatise. Some 200 years later, the Early Modern historian Luke Wadding reiterates that the Franciscan mission had nothing much to show for its endeavours.133 Beyond the information contained in the Treatise and the short note by Wadding, no Latin Christian text provides information on this minuscule Franciscan venture of the early 1480s, or on friar Iohanne’s progress at court. A note in a later Ethiopian royal chronicle states for the reign of aṣe Ǝskǝndǝr that ‘in these days the Franks [färänǧ] came from Rome. One of them was a priest named Yoḥannǝs.’ This Yoḥannǝs was undoubtedly friar Iohanne of Calabria, who—as we know from the Treatise—spent months waiting unsuccessfully for an audience with aṣe Ǝskǝndǝr. The Gǝʿǝz chronicle continues: ‘[The nǝgus ́] received them with honour. When the priests saw that, they grumbled and spoke against him saying, “the king has accepted the religion of the Franks.”’134 As we have seen, at least based on the Latin Christian source evidence, nothing could be further from the

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truth. And yet, this snippet of information appears to indicate that friar Iohanne did eventually have a gracious hearing, even if nothing came of his endeavours. The Lord and the Letter-Carrier As mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, modern scholarship has so far unanimously identified and collapsed the letter-carrier ‘Baptista of Imola’ and the nobleman ‘Johanne Baptista Brochus of Imola’ into the same person.135 This view appears to have hardly any basis in a careful study of the sources; instead, it seems rooted in longstanding scholarly tradition. Attempts to weave the distinct chains of events—which thematically and chronologically do not match up—into any kind of coherent narrative has resulted in undue force being applied on the material. Moreover, the focus on the Imolese also has effectively deflected from the respective missions’ historical implications within the broader scope of Ethiopian-European diplomatic relations. As I have delineated above, our sources show how two men from Imola sharing part of a name were involved in two largely distinct missions between Ethiopia and Latin Christianity in the early 1480s. One was ‘Johanne Baptista Brochus of Imola’; all texts attest that he was a man of significant status who accompanied an Ethiopian delegation from Jerusalem to Rome between late spring 1481 and early summer 1482. The other was an evidently low-­ ranking layman; he is named in the sources as ‘Baptista of Imola’ and narrated as travelling and carrying letters between Jerusalem and Ethiopia between December 1480 and at least January 1484. Both are explicitly and securely attested as being on different continents at the same time— namely, one in Ethiopia and another in Italy between November 1481 and June 1482.136 The conflation of the two seems mostly based on the similarity of their names and place of origin—which is not as surprising as it might seem at first glance. Similarly named men from the same places have appeared as actors repeatedly throughout this book. The first chapter chronicled how as ̣e Dawit’s ambassador Anthonius Bartoli of Florence took five Italian craftsmen with him back to Ethiopia. Three of the men were called Antonius. Two of them came from Florence, one from Treviso. When the ‘Ethiopian’ party left Venetian shores in August 1402, three of the six Italians bound for the Horn of Africa were men that could be identified as ‘Antonius of Florence’—that is, if we also include Bartoli himself. The

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second chapter meanwhile introduced us to ‘Pietre of Naples’, as ̣e Täklä Maryam’s agent in Pera in the early 1430s. Two decades later, Petrus Rombulus of Messina arrived as an ambassador of aṣe Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob at the court of Alfonso V of Aragon in Naples. It would be untenable to suggest that both these men called ‘Peter’—both originally from the Kingdom of Sicily, both acting on behalf of a nǝgus ́—were the same person. Moreover, our ambassador ‘Antonius’ in Rome in 1481–1482 shared his name with the Ethiopian ‘Antonius’ in Constance and Geneva in 1418, and the Ethiopian pilgrim who walked into the Castilian-Aragonese war with four others in 1430. All three of these ecclesiastics, attested as travelling to the Latin West in the fifteenth century, were very different people despite sharing the name ‘Ǝnṭonǝs’ and having come from the Christian Horn of Africa. The reoccurrence of especially popular names within this history of Ethiopian-Latin Christian contacts is thus not limited to Europe.137 To still have a chance to distinguish late medieval contemporaries, implicit and sometimes even explicit references to occupation, skills, and most of all status are of paramount importance. The difference between our two Imolese could hardly have been starker. Beyond the fact that all documents relating to the Ethiopian embassy to Rome explicitly speak of a certain ‘Ioannes Baptista’ or ‘Johanne Baptista of Imola’, this man is also repeatedly identified by his close association with the illustrious Girolamo Riario, the infamous nephew of Pope Sixtus IV. This man is ‘the lord Johanne Baptista Brochus of Imola’,138 an aristocrat acknowledged as a scion of the influential Brocchi family of Imola, a man with personal ties to Pope Sixtus IV whom research has revealed as in the employ of several Italian nobles and popes, his career eventually spanning some 30 years of service.139 As such, Brochus is far removed in station from the second ‘Baptista of Imola’. This Baptista is a ‘layman’,140 a ‘carrier of alms’ and a man explicitly charged only with transporting other people’s letters to and fro without being able to catch much of a breather. He has no ambassadorial function—friar Iohanne of Calabria is consistently depicted as being the one waiting for an audience with the nǝgus ́.141 In his Treatise, our source  Suriano—who came from a noble Venetian family—admits somewhat sheepishly that he had acted ‘pompous and proud’ and thus rather unbecoming for a monk when he ordered this Baptista to his cell to give testimony—and yet Baptista had followed his command.142 Suriano even directly mentions that both friar Iohanne and Baptista of Imola were of comparatively low status in his Treatise: he explicitly says that no legate

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of ‘worldly pomp’ could be despatched to a country such as Ethiopia. Only ‘friars, used to suffering and penance’ could make the long journey successfully—resulting in the somewhat awkward situation where humble Franciscan monks were sent out to encounter ‘such a great Lord’ as the Ethiopian ruler instead of a more fitting personage.143 Lastly, we should note that both the manuscript as well as the later print versions of the Treatise explicitly identify this humble man as ‘Baptista of Imola’ only— and that a self-identification also states him only as ‘Baptista’.144 It is all but incongruous to assume that Baptista, a letter-carrier regularly set on the arduous, exhausting, hazardous trade route between the Holy Land and the Ethiopian highlands should be the same man who is attested as seated to the left of the pope during ceremonial dinners.145 Conversely, there is no evidence in the sources that the nobleman Johanne Baptista Brochus of Imola—the man mentioned as a companion to abba Ǝnṭonǝs in Rome—ever travelled to Ethiopia.146 In his statement given to Paris de Grassis for a volume on ambassadors to the Roman Curia, Brochus does not mention ever going to Ethiopia himself.147 Present in Italy from late 1481 to early 1482, Johanne Baptista Brochus of Imola only appears in connection with the Ethiopian ambassadorial party in Rome—as a nobleman recently fallen out of favour, but clawing his way back into the highest echelons of Italian society. The letter-carrier Baptista of Imola, meanwhile, is securely attested as travelling back and forth between Jerusalem and Ethiopia from late 1480 to early 1484. He is only mentioned in connection with the Franciscan missionary in Ethiopia, Iohanne of Calabria, and has no function beyond transporting the messages and goods of other people. Both must thus be read as two substantially different individuals of remarkably dissimilar status. This, in turn, relegates the Imolese to the side-lines of the story, and sheds new and different light onto the course of Ethiopian and European relations in the late fifteenth century. Two nearly unrelated exchanges replace one untenable master narrative centred around the activities of an Italian singlehandedly facilitating inter-­ continental diplomacy. If anything, we may consider a single possible point of connection between the two men from Imola both caught up in missions between Ethiopia and the Latin Church in the early 1480s. In 1487, a book in the ‘Indian’ language was registered in the Vatican library. On 10 November 1487, a certain ‘Johannes Baptista Brocchus from Imola’ first borrowed the codex; he held it in his possession for several

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years, only returning it on 22 January 1493.148 The small volume is an Ethiopian psalter, written in Gǝʿǝz.149 How this manuscript had come to Rome is impossible to reconstruct. The likeliest explanation is that it was brought back to Jerusalem by Baptista of Imola after he had returned from his second journey to the Christian Horn of Africa sometime after 1484–1485. In this case, this small book would prove to be the only directly traceable point of contact between the aristocratic  pontifical diplomat Johanne Baptista Brochus and the letter-carrier Baptista, both sons of the town of Imola in northern Italy. Ethiopian Performative Diplomacy and Latin Missionary Zeal in the Early 1480s So what do both of these missions—as the only known significant diplomatic encounters between Ethiopia and Europe in the second half of the fifteenth century—mean in the broader context of Solomonic contacts with the Latin West? The Ethiopian embassy appears to be an act of what I would term ‘performative diplomacy’—the sending of envoys by potentates to pursue a specific local agenda at home. Based on Arabic documents, it has been suggested that one of aṣe Ǝskǝndǝr’s regents, ras bitwäddäd ʿAmdä Mikaʾel, headed the Ethiopian embassy to Cairo and Jerusalem in 1480–1481.150 This head-ambassador had decided to send a satellite mission led by abba Ǝnṭonǝs to Rome after much convincing by the Jerusalemite Franciscans around the Easter holidays of 1481.151 According to documents from Rome, the mission to the papacy had been despatched by a ‘cousin’ who was the ‘head of the household‘ of the nǝgus ́ as well as the ‘secretary’ who was also ‘that kingdom’s leading man’. Pope Sixtus IV repeatedly speaks about Ǝskǝndǝr’s ‘uncle’, and also mentions a letter brought by the Ethiopian ambassadors which purported to speak on behalf of aṣe Ǝskǝndǝr.152 All these small points of evidence would indicate that ras bitwäddäd ʿAmdä Mikaʾel must indeed have headed the original Ethiopian embassy to Cairo and Jerusalem in 1480–1481. He was the head of the household of the nǝgus ́, the kingdom’s leading man, a high-­ ranking noble suited to the task of requesting the despatch of an abun from the Mamlūk Sultan himself. Suppose ʿAmdä Mikaʾel had been the ambassador whom the Franciscans in Jerusalem persuaded to send a satellite mission to Rome. In that case, he could have easily written up a letter to the pope both introducing his protégé, as ̣e Ǝskǝndǝr, and explaining abba  Ǝnṭonǝs’ off-shoot delegation. The Ethiopian presents

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delivered to the papacy—uniformly small and portable, no live leopards in sight—certainly suggest that the mission had been assembled rather spontaneously with minimal prior planning.153 But what would have been the benefit of despatching a small, subsidiary mission to Rome at this point? As we have seen, the Ethiopians had already successfully obtained not just one, but two metropolitans from Egypt for the Christian highland realm in 1481.154 Any Latin Christian prelate, bishop or dignitary sent out to the Horn of Africa to crown aṣe Ǝskǝndǝr would have been utterly superfluous. Instead of assuming—as Latin Christian contemporaries did—that the Ethiopians suddenly desired the papacy’s approval for their internal affairs—going against all established protocol and belief—a reading centring Ethiopian interests seems more prudent. Excepting the main misunderstanding at the heart of most Latin sources, namely that the Ethiopians requested or needed a Latin prelate to crown their nǝgus ́, the interests and demands of abba Ǝnṭonǝs’ embassy mirror those of earlier nägäs ́t. Here, too, we find a request for learned foreigners, and even specifically artifices—craftsmen or artisans.155 It is also noteworthy that the few presents eventually given by Pope Sixtus IV to abba  Ǝnṭonǝs—a pseudo-relic, ecclesiastical garments, a liturgical head covering as well as religious gold smithery and other religious items— precisely match objects previously sought by powerful Solomonic rulers through acts of diplomacy from the Latin West. All of the above suggests that ras bitwäddäd ʿAmdä Mikaʾel might have intentionally tried to tie the 1481–1482 mission with earlier Solomonic embassies to the Christian Mediterranean. The Ethiopian mission to Rome, redundant to the legitimacy of Solomonic rulership in the Horn of Africa in the 1480s, was a display of performative diplomacy that intentionally linked the young nǝgus ́’ rule to the reigns of his ancestors. Aṣe Ǝskǝndǝr’s ascension to the throne as a very young boy had initially been fraught with political intrigue.156 The acquisition of two potential metropolitans from Egypt following the 1480–1481 Ethiopian embassy to Cairo—a rare feat, as usually only one was sent out—already had strengthened the young nǝgus ́’ position. Sending a successful satellite embassy to Rome would have had the potential to garner even more political advantage for both the regent ʿAmdä Mikaʾel and his young protégé. The Homily on the Wood of the Holy Cross extensively covered in the first chapter of this book shows the local impact a successful mission could have in the Ethiopian highland realm. A ruler obtaining rare religious objects from a fellow Christian sovereign was bound to be remembered and celebrated.

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In the Latin West, the Ethiopian mission inadvertently renewed hopes for a possible Union of the Churches. The other diplomatic encounter of the 1480s is revealed as a small missionary exchange between the Franciscans of Jerusalem and Ethiopia. Word about the Ethiopian delegation in Cairo might have drawn the Franciscans’ attention onto the realm of the nägäs ́t. Our sources reveal that the mission from Jerusalem to Ethiopia was motivated by a desire to myopically and paternalistically reach out to perceived ‘lost sheep’. Still, the Minorites had remained mostly ignorant about the workings of Solomonic rulership. In Ethiopia, this Latin missionary zeal was met with what can only be described as disinterest—at least according to the Latin sources.157 Friar Iohanne’s mission was no rousing success. In the early 1480s, the Franciscans of Jerusalem had been as eager for the company of the Ethiopians as they had been in the time of Gandulph of Sicily in the 1440s. This must not be a surprise: after all, the Ethiopian envoys had come to Jerusalem not only with a thousands-strong train of pilgrims—they also held a special decree from the Mamlūk Sultan allowing all Christians rare free access to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre on Holy Saturday 1481.158 Such concessions were bound to reinforce Latin notions about the special status of Solomonic Christianity in the Eastern Mediterranean. We may observe that abba Ǝnṭonǝs’ off-shoot embassy was consequently treated with immense interest; it was also very well-provided for in Italy, from lodging in Castel Sant’Angelo to celebrating a holiday with the Doge of Venice. Four members of the Ethiopian delegation were even immortalised in the contemporary frescoes of the southern wall of the Sistine Chapel: two black ambassadors appear in Sandro Botticelli’s Temptation of Moses, and two others are depicted in Biagio di Antonio Tucci’s Crossing of the Red Sea.159 Ǝnṭonǝs himself was portrayed on a tramezzo screen of the Church of Santo Stefano degli Indiani.160 This very same Vatican church would later host generations of visiting Coptic and Ethiopian pilgrims. And yet, diplomatic relations between the Holy See and Ethiopia would again come to a standstill. Only in 1514 would another pontiff, Leo X, address an Ethiopian nǝgus ́ again—although individual pilgrims, even in groups as large as four, continued to travel back and forth between Ethiopia and Rome.161 Lastly, it bears repeating that the Latin fulfilment of Ethiopian diplomatic requests had become even more tied to specific conditions by the second half of the fifteenth century. This is amply demonstrated by the

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terms spelt out in Pope Sixtus’ 1482 letter, which stopped just short of coercing the nǝgus ́ into accepting Latin suzerainty. The regents of as ̣e Ǝskǝndǝr could hardly have been willing to fulfil the conditions put to them. In all likelihood, the Ethiopians would have understood them as offensive. It is thus not surprising that abba Ǝnṭonǝs lingered in Jerusalem for years, trying to delay his return to the Solomonic court as long as he could.

Ethiopia and Portugal, 1487–1527 Early Portuguese Emissaries to Ethiopia In the fourteenth century, Portugal had been a poor Iberian kingdom mostly unable to sustain and even feed itself. A few decades later, however, that same kingdom was in the process of becoming a naval empire of increasing, and eventually unprecedentedly global, political importance.162 Especially from the second half of the fifteenth century onwards, the Portuguese profited from the Eastern Atlantic trade in sugar, ivory, gold, spices and enslaved Africans.163 Fuelled by what scholarship has termed a ‘crusader spirit’, successive Lusitanian rulers were also much interested in the ‘exploration’ of Africa.164 This included the active search for the realm of the mythical Prester John, presumed at that time to be located in North-East Africa.165 In 1487, one year before Bartolomeu Dias accidentally circumnavigated the Cape of Good Hope and subsequently enabled the Portuguese to enter the Indian Ocean, Portuguese king João II sent two agents to establish military and commercial alliances with Solomonic Ethiopia.166 One of the men—Pêro da Covilhã—reached the highland court after seven years of circuitous travel, where as ̣e Ǝskǝndǝr— now an adult—received the Portuguese representative ‘with much pleasure and joy’.167 We are told that the nǝgus ́ intended to send the man back to Portugal, but unfortunately for Pêro and king João II, as ̣e Ǝskǝndǝr died shortly thereafter, in 1494. All plans to send Pêro back were indefinitely suspended.168 Ǝskǝndǝr’s successors chose to keep him in Ethiopia instead of answering the Portuguese mission; like other skilled foreigners, he was ultimately detained at the Ethiopian court for more than 30 years.169 In the early 1520s, Pêro would tell the story of his travels and mission to a countryman: Francisco Alvares, chaplain to a Portuguese embassy that spent years in Ethiopia between 1520–1526.170 In his decades at court,

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the erstwhile Lusitanian agent had done well for himself in the Ethiopian highlands. Amongst other things, he had become an advisor to ǝtege Ǝleni—the single most outstanding female political figure of medieval Solomonic Ethiopia.171 Pêro was not the only agent sent out by the Crown of Portugal to establish contacts with the Christian Horn of Africa. Just nine months after he had left Portugal, in 1488, an Ethiopian priest by the name of ‘Lucas Marcos’ was summoned before the Lusitanian monarch from Rome.172 King João II questioned him about his home country and sovereign, and tasked him with delivering letters to the Ethiopian nǝgus ́. This, too, ultimately proved a fruitless endeavour.173 Ǝleni’s Mission to Portugal, 1508–1509 Two decades later, by mid-1508, Portuguese emissaries had made their way to the Solomonic highlands again. King Manuel I, who had succeeded his cousin João II on the Portuguese throne in 1495, had sent out three men: ‘João the Priest’, ‘João Gomes’ and Sidi Muḥammad.174 Their primary mission was to beg Ethiopia for supplies and soldiers.175 Like Pêro da Covilhã, they were summarily brought to the court of ǝtege Ǝleni, as ̣e Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob’s long-lived widow, who acted as regent for her just-­ enthroned step-great-grandson, as ̣e Lǝbnä Dǝngǝl.176 This time around, things turned out quite differently: for the first time, the Ethiopian court would send a mission back to Portugal—and promise to aid the Portuguese in their military venture against the Muslim powers of the region. When viewed from an Ethiopian perspective, Portugal had morphed from a distant to a comparatively nearby Christian realm in the early sixteenth century. By 1509, ǝtege Ǝleni was aware of the presence of the Portuguese in India. In the Ethiopian highlands, the appearance of these foreign Christians from Europe in the Western Indian Ocean fed into a set of specific, local eschatological expectations.177 We will examine them in more detail at the very end of the next chapter, but it suffices here to say that these prophecies concerned the end of the world, and the last stand-­ off between Christianity and Islam. A foreign Christian king—from the ‘land of the Franks’ or Iyoropa—would ‘defeat and annihilate the infidels’, specifically the mäḥammädawyan—the ‘Mohammedans’ or Muslims.178 With nothing less than the fate of all Christians at stake, this religious expectation appears to have actively influenced Ethiopian policy in the early sixteenth century. After more than 100 years of active Solomonic

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disinterest in military alliances with Latin Europe, the queen-regent of Ethiopia would offer aid to the Lusitanian Crown in its fight against the Muslims of Mamlūk Egypt. Her reply to king Manuel I of Bərtəgal— ‘Portugal’—has come down to us in Gǝʿǝz and Portuguese.179 As a sign of her support, ǝtege Ǝleni writes, she would give supplies ‘as great as the mountains’ and likewise ‘men in number as the sands of the sea’, seeing that the ‘Lord of Cairo was arming a fleet of ships to send against’ the Portuguese.180 The Gǝʿǝz version of the letter gives some additional background: Ǝleni stresses that she was ready to help the Portuguese troops ‘by food and by spear’, seeing that Egypt was about to exact revenge for past humiliations, and planning to attack the Portuguese holdings in Hənd—‘India’.181 She was thus distinctly aware of the momentous changes in the region. Both versions assert that—in Ǝleni’s understanding—the Portuguese king had called out to her while finding himself under acute threat. She and her people were the ones coming to his help.182 To aid the Lusitanian crown, Ǝleni was willing to send troops to the strait of Bāb al-Mandab,183 or to Jeddah, whichever location was more convenient.184 This would enable the Portuguese to ‘oust these Moors to be wiped off the face of the earth’, the Ethiopians acting by land and the Portuguese by sea.185 Both versions of the letter explicitly state that Ethiopia had no ships to engage in war; instead, they stress Ǝleni’s willingness and ability to support the Portuguese through food and rations.186 She also speaks of ‘a promise made by Christ and His mother’, which stated that in ‘the last times’—at the End of Days—‘the King of the parts of the Franks would rise up, and that he would put an end to the Moors’.187 A prophetic expectation which seemed to concern Latin Christians in the form of the Portuguese thus  appears to have played a major role in the queen regent’s decision to support this military venture. The Ethiopian return mission to Portugal was set up as follows: Ǝleni declined to send the original Portuguese messengers back to their home country, fearing they would not explain her affairs as she wished.188 Instead, a Solomonic courtier called Mateus was to act as her ambassador.189 To show her good faith, she was gifting a cross made from the wood of the True Cross to the Portuguese. Like aṣe Yǝsḥaq many decades earlier, Ǝleni was also proposing a lasting union between an Iberian kingdom and the Solomonic Dynasty through a royal marriage.190

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More than a century into the course of Ethiopian contacts with the Latin West, this letter is the first to express an active Ethiopian interest in a Latin Christian military venture against Muslim powers. Ethiopianist research, meanwhile, has long stressed that the Ethiopians had been ‘desirous of contracting an alliance with the Portuguese, to secure the help of their fleets’ by the early sixteenth century.191 Some scholars have put forth that Ǝleni herself instigated this mission, that she sent Mateus to ‘propose a military alliance’,192 or cast the Ethiopians as ‘proposing military co-operation against the Muslims’ to the Portuguese.193 Others have read Ǝleni’s reply to Portugal as testament to the ‘grand crusade mentality’ of the Ethiopians,194 or speculated that she had acted out of concern for Ethiopian security.195 Such views appear only partially correct. We need to remember that Ǝleni was not the one to approach the Portuguese court actively. Instead, she offered a sympathetic reply to a plea for help first sent out by the Lusitanian Crown. The Portuguese were the ones fighting for the ‘faith of Christ’, they were the ‘subjugators’ of Muslims—and they were the ones who came to her asking for supplies and soldiers.196 The key to understanding Ǝleni’s choice to answer this specific Portuguese mission, to signal Ethiopian willingness to participate in a Latin Christian military venture, lies in the tremendous changes gripping the larger Red Sea and the Indian Ocean region after 1500. North-East Africa was undergoing a massive political shift: the Ottomans were threatening the balance between Ethiopia and Mamlūk Egypt—a once distant Sultanate was becoming a regional power.197 By 1509, the Portuguese and the Mamlūks had been engaged in a protracted naval war in the Persian Gulf and the Indian Ocean.198 The Mamlūk Sultan had mounted a major expedition into the Indian Ocean, stationed 50 ships at Aden and initially beaten the Portuguese at the Battle of Chaul in March 1508.199 Possibly, it was this very defeat that caused the Portuguese to call out for aid to Ethiopia in the first place. After years of tense encounters with local rulers on the African, Persian and Indian sides of the seas, the Portuguese had aggressively inserted themselves as a regional political force, building forts and establishing trading posts.200 The Solomonic coastal lands on the Red Sea, ruled by the baḥər nägaš,201 went from observing violent skirmishes between local and once-remote Muslim and Christian powers at a distance to threatening to become sites of conflict themselves. In the Ethiopian highlands, meanwhile, a dozen Solomonic cạ̈̌ wa military regiments had long been stationed on the eastern fringe of the central plateau to protect against incursions.202 Sultanates on the borders of

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Solomonic territory such as the Barr Saʿd al-Dı ̄n—the Sultanate of ʿAdal—had shaken off their vassal status, and were annually raiding Christian-controlled territories.203 From the late-fifteenth-century reign of as ̣e Naʿod until his death at the hands of as ̣e Lǝbnä Dǝngǝl in 1517, the governor of Zaylaʿ, Ima ̄m Maḥfūẓ bin Muḥammad,204 engaged the Christian kingdom in a long and bloody conflict.205 Historians have asserted that Ǝleni generally tried to maintain good relations with the rulers of the Muslim principalities fringing Christian territory until 1516, the year her charge aṣe Lǝbnä Dǝngǝl fully assumed his rule.206 Nevertheless, Ǝleni’s letter of 1509 already shows stark anti-Muslim sentiment—which is, however, primarily directed at the Mamlūks of Egypt.207 These vitriolic views are found in both the Portuguese and Gǝʿǝz version of her letter to king Manuel I, and are all the more remarkable since the queen regent had been born a Muslim princess of Hadiyya, a Solomonic tributary, herself. In the early sixteenth century, it appears, things were changing. They were not changing for the better. Possibly, the end of the world was near. It is against this backdrop, fuelled by eschatological and prophetic expectation, that the ǝtege Ǝleni’s favourable reply to the Portuguese request for help and a military alliance needs to be read. Ethiopian Delegates to Portugal (1509–1515) In late 1509, Mateus set out as Ǝleni’s ambassador to deliver her letters to the king of Portugal via India, where the Portuguese Crown had established several holdings. The original Lusitanian envoys of 1508, João and João, suffered the same fate as Pêro da Covilhã more than a decade earlier: they were indefinitely detained at the Solomonic court, and absorbed into the growing community of expatriate färänǧ—‘Franks’—living in highland Ethiopia. When he set out for India, ambassador Mateus was not travelling alone—he was, at the very least, accompanied by a young Ethiopian nobleman called Yaʿǝqob. Disguised as traders, the men first boarded a Muslim merchant boat to Goa, hoping to enter into contact with the Portuguese deployed there.208 Things did not go smoothly. A series of unfortunate events resulted in the two Ethiopian envoys set on an odyssey totalling some five years before they could relate their lady’s message to the Portuguese ruler.209 By June 1513, however, word of their coming travelled like wildfire through Latin Europe. In a letter written in early

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June 1513, Portuguese king Manuel I proudly informed Pope Leo X that he was expecting ‘an ambassador […] from Prester John, most powerful lord of Christians’. His mission, as Manuel understood it before having actually met the Solomonic envoys, was to offer all possible aid and everything necessary for a war against the enemies of the Catholic faith, such as soldiers, arms and supplies, especially if our fleet should penetrate the Red Sea, on which his domain borders and where the forces of both can be most conveniently joined. He sends us a by no means trifling piece of the True Cross for our adoration, and a request for skilful and industrious men by whose ability and skill he believes the Nile can be defected and diverted from the territory and neighbourhood of the Sultan.210

Two months later, a version of this letter had already been printed in Rome, testifying to the considerable Latin Christian excitement about this first Solomonic mission to Europe in decades. In late February 1514, Ǝleni’s envoys Mateus and Yaʿǝqob finally arrived at the court of Manuel I of Portugal.211 The Portuguese humanist Damião de Góis,212 then a page in royal employ, witnessed their reception as a young boy.213 Nearly 20 years later, he described the events in a letter to a friend as follows:214 the two ambassadors were escorted to the royal residence in Santos-o-Velho in Lisbon by the nobles and notables of the town, where the Portuguese king descended from his throne to greet them. The presentation of their letter of credence, written in the ‘Lusitanian’ and ‘Chaldean language’,215 as well as a subsequent audience with the royal family, was conducted with reverence. Only after three days of celebration were the ambassadors Mateus—whom Góis identifies as an Armenian by origin—and Yaʿǝqob invited to deliver Ǝleni’s nearly five-year-old message.216 Portuguese documents on the embassy match many parts of Ǝleni’s letter to Manuel I. Treasury lists, as well as Góis’ descriptions, confirm that Mateus and Yaʿǝqob had indeed brought a cross, round in shape, that was understood as having been made from a piece of the True Cross. It was kept in a box of pure gold. They had also brought five gold medals inscribed in the abexim—‘Abyssinian’—language. According to Góis, the Portuguese king received the cross kneeling, tears of joy in his eyes, and fervently thanked God for the gift.217 In the Latin Christian perception, these presents identified Ǝleni as a ruler of a literate and cultivated society deeply committed to the word and work of the Gospel.218 We must assume that her offer of marriage to cement the ties of the two royal houses

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consequently also received serious attention at the Lusitanian court. The Portuguese had all reason to harbour hopes for a future successful military alliance with Solomonic Ethiopia. To demonstrate his appreciation for this precious, newly established connection, Manuel I commissioned an astounding list of gifts to be sent to Ethiopia in July 1514.219 The variety of items is extraordinary: Manuel had chosen to send ornate, inlaid and gilded tables, velvet-covered chairs trimmed in gold, riding gear, fashionable golden armour trimmed in crimson satin, beautiful arms and no less than 1433 books.220 The vast majority of the gifts, however, were fine fabrics and finished textiles, often embroidered with religious iconography: cushions, tablecloths, cloaks, carpets, curtains, door hangings, tapestries, drapes depicting ornate courtly scenes, or the Virgin and Child with an archbishop seated at her feet. These garments and fabrics came in all colours and were made from silk, brocade, damask and other types of cloth from Granada, Holland and Brittany.221 A wealth of ecclesiastical items was also assembled: illuminated books, religious jewellery, liturgical bells, censers, chalices and candlesticks alongside everything necessary to prepare the Eucharist as well as framed images of Jesus and Mary of different sizes, and two full organs.222 It is evocative that the gifts commissioned by the Portuguese king for Ǝleni and her court match the interests in ecclesiastical garments and objects expressed by earlier Solomonic rulers in their missions to the Latin West—and that instruments of warfare play next to no role here. Also notable is that in his 1513 letter to Pope Leo X, Manuel had stated that the Ethiopian ruler requested ‘skilful and industrious men’—craftsmen who would be useful to build contraptions that could divert the Nile from ‘the territory and neighbourhood of the Sultan’.223 The actual commissions for the Portuguese embassy to Ethiopia of 1514, however, concerned artisans skilled in far more delicate arts:224 here, king Manuel I had tasked his treasurers only with finding two painters, a craftsman skilled in printing and two organists to be sent to Ethiopia.225 The specialisations of these men, too, are reminiscent of requests long posed by earlier Solomonic rulers when addressing themselves to European sovereigns. That such men and such gifts were sent out in response to a mission offering military aid is undoubtedly remarkable, if not to say unexpected.

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The Portuguese Embassy to Ethiopia and aṣe Ləbnä Dəngəl’s Last Peacetime Mission (1520–1527) After nearly a year of assembling precious cargo, artisans and a diplomatic party, king Manuel’s return embassy to Ethiopia left Lisbon for Goa on 7 April 1515, taking the sea route via India that circumnavigated the African continent.226 On 13 February 1520, the Portuguese fleet finally set out from India ‘with an armada and fleet of twenty-four sail to wit, ten great ships, and two galleons, and five galleys, and four small-square-rigged ships, and two lateen caravels, and a brigantine’.227 Due to yet another series of misfortunes—amongst them the death of the head ambassador228— it had taken the Portuguese nearly six years to reach Solomonic Ethiopia. More than a decade had passed since Ǝleni had sent out her ambassadors. According to the priest Francisco Alvares, who accompanied the embassy as chaplain and left a lengthy account of both the mission and his life in Ethiopia,229 nearly 2000 men sailed to the Solomonic coastlands. Among them were the Ethiopian ambassador Mateus, much disgruntled at this point,230 as well as the designated Portuguese embassy to the Ethiopian court. Comprising more than a dozen men,231 this embassy was the biggest attempted European delegation to an Ethiopian nǝgus ́ to date. Led by a replacement head ambassador—a man called Dom Rodrigo da Lima—the Portuguese finally succeeded in landing at Massawa on Easter Monday of 1520.232 They were received by the baḥər nägaš,233 the powerful and influential Solomonic governor of the coastal Red Sea region. Local Ethiopian troops showed the Portuguese the way inland to reach the highland court. While the embassy under Dom Rodrigo continued upcountry by 30 April,234 the majority of the Portuguese again set sail to carry news of the triumphant arrival of the embassy on Solomonic soil back to the Portuguese Crown in Lisbon. Dom Rodrigo’s mission was the first Latin Christian diplomatic delegation to ever reach the Ethiopian court by the sea route via the Indian Ocean. It was also the first official embassy not detained in Ethiopia but ultimately allowed to return to its point of origin. In Europe, the news of the Portuguese’s eventual arrival was perceived as a significant success; a small booklet was printed in 1521 to commemorate the occasion and disseminated in Portugal and Latin Europe. It praised the Portuguese feat of finally reaching ‘the land of the Prester John, a

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Christian king and of very great power’ that had been so very hard to locate.235 Back in Ethiopia, things proceeded far less smoothly for the Portuguese. In a decidedly awkward turn of events, the Ethiopian ambassador Mateus died upon reaching the first stopover point en route to the court, close to the important Ethiopian monastery of Däbrä Bizän.236 When Dom Rodrigo and his company finally made it to their destination in late 1520, they encountered a court ruled by as ̣e Lǝbnä Dǝngǝl instead of Ǝleni. The young nǝgus ́, who had bristled against the regency rule of Ǝleni and his mother Naʿod Mogäsa for years,237 initially showed no particular enthusiasm for the Latin Christian arrivals. Indeed, Lǝbnä Dǝngǝl went so far as to declare that he had not sent Mateus’ embassy to Portugal, and that Mateus ‘had gone without his permission’.238 Ambassador Dom Rodrigo was declined an audience for several days and finally only admitted for a short interview, in which the Ethiopian monarch conveyed that he found the Portuguese gifts rather disappointing.239 Indeed, most of the rich and varied Portuguese presents assembled with care by the Portuguese king never arrived in Ethiopia. The vast majority was destroyed or lost en route,240 negligently damaged or left behind at the Portuguese holdings in Goa, or—as one contemporary observer put it—‘wrongly dispersed’ on the way.241 The Ethiopian impression of the Portuguese was also negatively impacted by severe internal quarrels among the ambassadorial party— which included, amongst other things, bouts of physical violence between the ambassador Dom Rodrigo and his deputy.242 The Portuguese were to stay in the country for nearly six years; during this time, several lengthy yet eventually inconclusive political discussions were conducted.243 Unfortunate developments and delays, including news of the death of the Portuguese king Manuel I, also impeded diplomacy’s progress. In the Spring of 1526, most members of the Portuguese embassy—excepting its painter and barber, whom the nǝgus ́ expressly requested to stay behind— eventually left Ethiopia for Europe again.244 The Portuguese carried with them several letters written by aṣe Lǝbnä Dǝngǝl to the papacy and the Lusitanian crown. The nǝgus ́ had also despatched a monk called Ṣägga Zäʾab with a small retinue.245 In 1527, Ṣägga Zäʾab presented Portuguese king João III246 with a crown sent by Lǝbnä Dǝngǝl and the nǝgus ́’ letters, which were by that point again several years out of date. The Ethiopian had arrived in tumultuous times: in the late 1520s and early 1530s, the Reformation movement was rocking the very foundations of Latin

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Christendom in Europe. Ṣägga Zäʾab was ultimately detained for six more years in Lisbon, which kept him from delivering his master’s messages to the papacy on time.247 Ethiopian royal chronicles, meanwhile, universally fail to acknowledge the lengthy presence of this sizeable European embassy at the Solomonic court between 1520–1526.248 Diplomatically, the outcome of this very first successful large-scale European mission to Ethiopia was slim. Plans for an actual joint Ethiopian-­ European military alliance remained vague. This becomes quite clear when we look at the letters aṣe Lǝbnä Dǝngǝl addressed to Portuguese kings Manuel I and his successor João III in 1521 and 1522. Several versions of the messages in different languages have been preserved as part of Francisco Alvares’ narrative, and as copies in a Gǝʿǝz chronicle.249 In 1521, aṣe Lǝbnä Dǝngǝl obliquely referenced that he would aid the Portuguese troops in the Red Sea and on his territory only.250 Again, the young nǝgus ́ briefly alluded to the Ethiopian prophecy that a ‘Frank King should meet with the King of Ethiopia, and that they should give each other peace’.251 Aṣe Lǝbnä Dǝngǝl urged the Portuguese to continue their fight against the Muslims until the Holy Land was in Christian hands. The nǝgus ́ lamented the lack of fellow Christian rulers in the Horn of Africa, and that all his neighbours were Muslims. However, there is no concrete plan or proposal for a military alliance found in both letters. Instead, Lǝbnä Dǝngǝl’s vitriol against Muslims appears primarily directed at disobedient local vassals and Muslim principalities perceived as tributaries which had claimed freedom from Solomonic rule.252 Some of his ill-temper was probably also owed to the momentous contemporary political changes in Egypt: in 1517, the Ottomans had taken power from the Mamlūk Sultanate, shifting the centre of power away from Cairo and the Nile Valley. The last, in particular, was bound to upset centuries of pragmatic, mostly peaceable Ethiopian-Egyptian relations.253 Notice of a first, devastating attack on a large group of Ethiopian pilgrims bound for the Holy Land that has come down to us, for instance, dates to the early 1520s. It occurred on Egyptian territory by then controlled by the Ottomans.254 While the plans and complaints of the nǝgus ́ remained somewhat indistinct, other parts of his letters were far more concrete. They concerned specific wishes: in 1521, aṣe Lǝbnä Dǝngǝl mostly asked for the despatch of gold- and silversmiths, metalworkers, bookmakers, jewellers and manuscript illuminators from Portugal.255 A letter to king João III, written a year later, has come down to us in both a Portuguese and Gǝʿǝz version.

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According to the former, the nǝgus ́ posed the following demand to the Lusitanian crown: I want you to send me men, artificers, to make images, and printed books, and swords, and arms for all sorts of fighting; and also masons and carpenters, and men who make medicines, and physicians, and surgeons to cure illnesses; also artificers to beat out gold, and set it, and goldsmiths and silversmiths, and men who know how to extract gold and silver and also copper from the veins, and men who can make sheet lead and earthenware; and craftsmen of any trades which are necessary in kingdoms, also gunsmiths.256

Scholarship has primarily focussed on Lǝbnä Dǝngǝl’s request for men capable of making ‘arms for all sorts of fighting’ and ‘gunsmiths’,257 which has been judged as a request for a ‘comprehensive technological transfer from Portugal’,258 as testament to Ethiopia’s early interests in European weapons259 and the ‘wonders of European technology’.260 But: arms and gunsmiths receive no mention in the Gǝʿǝz version of the same letter preserved in a copy of a contemporary manuscript found on Lake Zway in Ethiopia.261 In this Ethiopian version, the nǝgus ́only asked for the despatch of painters and bookmakers, master craftsmen, physicians, carpenters and ‘the wise men who know how to produce gold, silver and lead, and other wise men who would improve our kingdom’.262 Here, his first demand from Portugal explicitly concerned säʾaläyanä məsl—quite literally ‘painters of images’.263 Two Latin-language letters sent by the nǝgus ́ to Pope Clement VII in 1524 mirror these missives. In the first, aṣe Lǝbnä Dǝngǝl indeed voiced that he ‘entertained hopes’ to liberate the Holy Land together with the Portuguese, so that Christians from Ethiopia and Portugal might ‘travel to and fro without hindrance’.264 Again, there are no specifics to be found. The second letter explicitly praises that the Portuguese had already enabled him to communicate much more easily with fellow Christians in the Latin Mediterranean, presumably alluding to the Portuguese presence in the Red Sea and Indian Ocean at the time.265 The heart of the message again concerns requests from Europe. Here, Lǝbnä Dǝngǝl asked for the despatch of workers alongside ‘swords and every sort of weapon of war’— specifically, ‘craftsmen who might sculpt statues’ as well as engravers of gold and silver, woodworkers, architects, stonemasons, glassblowers, organists and musicians. He promises that all such artisans would be ‘held in the highest regard’ with him.266

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Chapter Conclusion In the second half of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, evidence of very few Solomonic missions to the Latin West has come down to us— while European powers such as Portugal were more eager than ever to engage with the Christians of the Horn of Africa. The tangled history of the two embassies between Ethiopia, Jerusalem and Rome of the early 1480s shows that diplomatic expectation and outcome could be disappointing. The despatch of abba  Ǝnṭonǝs to Rome and Iohanne of Calabria to the Ethiopian court had yielded comparatively little for either side—it had resulted in individuals converting or going into hiding, in miscommunication and unmet requests as well as a confusing body of sources for generations of historians. In the early sixteenth century, the long-invoked Ethiopian interest in military alliances with the Latin West, and technologists of warfare such as gunsmiths, finally becomes tangible. Nevertheless, it took over 100 years for an Ethiopian ruler to even acquiesce to a military alliance, and a full 120 years for a nǝgus ́ to actively ask after weapons and firearms from Europe. More remarkably, Solomonic demands still concerned artisans, painters, goldsmiths and stonemasons—even in politically charged times, where religious prophecies appeared to allude to the imminent End of the World and a major fight between the faiths and the powers of Christendom and Islam. Whether by circumstance or design, Ǝleni’s mission to Portugal, too, had caused the despatch of heaps upon heaps of beautiful ecclesiastical garments and fabrics as well as liturgical objects and artisans—painters, bookmakers as well as even organists. As ̣e Lǝbnä Dǝngǝl’s requests posed to the papacy and Portuguese Crown in 1521, 1522 and 1524 overwhelmingly mirrored those of his ancestors. Like as ̣e Dawit more than 100 years earlier, he too asked for artisans, for painters, masons and carpenters as well as metalsmiths. The gunsmiths, which only appear in the Portuguese version of the 1522 letter, are added as an afterthought in an extensive and varied list of craftsmen. His wish for ‘swords and every sort of weapon of war’ posed to Pope Clement VII in 1524 is again only part of a very diverse set of requests for labour and goods. Martial interests, vague plans for military alliances and anti-Muslim sentiment are undoubtedly found in these letters. However, it must be emphasised that even in the early 1520s, Ethiopian wishes were not focussed on weapons or gunsmiths by any means. As ̣e Lǝbnä Dǝngǝl’s primary desires were foreign painters and bookmakers, gold- and

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silversmiths, master craftsmen and physicians, carpenters and stonemasons. Five generations of rule separate aṣe Dawit and as ̣e Lǝbnä Dǝngǝl. Yet up to the very end, Ethiopian core interests posed to European powers thus remained fundamentally unchanged. A year after the Portuguese set sail from the Eritrean coast in 1526, the way Solomonic rulers were able to interact with Latin Christendom was to change forever. Small, initially economically motivated raids of Solomonic territory by troops from the Sultanate of ʿAdal became increasingly invasive by the late 1520s. Led by a charismatic commander called Ima ̄m Aḥmad ibn Ibrāhı ̄m al-Ġ āzı ̄,267 the ʿAdali forces managed to overrun most of the Solomonic Christian kingdom by 1530–1531.268 In 1535, at the height of the conflict, dispossessed of most of his realm and in hiding, as ̣e Lǝbnä Dǝngǝl sent a frantic call for aid to the papacy and Portugal. Among other things, he promised to recognise the pope and enter into a Union of the Churches with Rome in exchange for help. Desperate, his ambassador begged the Lusitanian Crown for soldiers and firearms.269 In the early 1540s, Portuguese troops arrived and eventually turned the tide of the war for the Solomonic side.270 Yet the dynamics of Ethiopian-­ Latin Christian relations were to be forever altered: about a third of the 400 Portuguese soldiers chose to stay in the Ethiopian highlands.271 One hundred and forty years after Ethiopia had first initiated diplomatic contacts with Europe, a sizeable group of Latin Christians would choose to settle down in the Christian highlands. These men were rewarded with lands; they helped to rebuild the war-ravaged kingdom, eventually intermarrying with and becoming part of the local population. Their status as—formally—Catholic Latin Christians, however, opened up a new chapter of very different Ethiopian-European contacts. In 1556, the first members of the recently formed Society of Jesus arrived in Ethiopia, nominally to look after these Portuguese soldiers, but ultimately to proselytise Catholicism among the Ethiopian Orthodox population. Sponsored by king João III of Portugal and endorsed by Ignatius of Loyola himself,272 it was the start of a Jesuit mission that lasted nearly 80 years before coming to a bloody end in 1632.273

Notes 1. See contemporary descriptions in Charles F.  Beckingham and George W. B. 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 1520, Written by Father Francisco Alvares (Cambridge:

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Cambridge University Press, 1961); Paul Lester Stenhouse and Richard Pankhurst, eds., Futu ̄ḥ Al-Ḥ abaša: The Conquest of Abyssinia (Hollywood: Tsehai Publishers, 2005). Taddesse Tamrat’s view of ‘fifty years of decline’ (as younger nägäs ́t were put on the throne) is at odds with the textual and material sources of the period; cf. Taddesse Tamrat, Church and State in Ethiopia, 1270–1527 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), 168–269. 2. The surviving material culture of the period is extraordinarily rich, compare Verena Krebs, ‘Windows onto the World: Culture Contacts and Western Christian Art in Ethiopia, 1402–1543’ (PhD thesis, Universität Konstanz/Mekelle University, 2014), chaps 5–7 and my forthcoming monograph, Africa Collecting Europe. 3. Michael Kleiner, ‘Lǝbnä Dǝngǝl’, in EAe 3 (2007), 535; also Marie-Laure Derat, Le Domaine Des Rois Éthiopiens, 1270–1527: Espace, Pouvoir et Monarchisme (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2003), 209–314, 328; Deresse Ayenachew, ‘Territorial Expansion and Administrative Evolution under the “Solomonic” Dynasty’, in A Companion to Medieval Ethiopia and Eritrea, ed. Samantha Kelly (Leiden: Brill, 2020), 57–86; Anaïs Wion, ‘Medieval Ethiopian Economies: Subsistence, Global Trade and the Administration of Wealth’, in A Companion to Medieval Ethiopia and Eritrea, ed. Samantha Kelly (Leiden: Brill, 2020), 395–424. 4. Ruled 1468–1478; see Steven Kaplan, ‘Bäʾǝdä Maryam’, in EAe 1 (2003), 432. 5. That is: aṣe Ǝskǝndǝr, 1478–1494, six years old upon succeeding his father aṣe Bäʾǝdä Maryam; see Sevir Chernetsov, ‘Ǝskǝndǝr’, in EAe 2 (2005), 383; his brother asẹ Naʿod, youngest son of as ̣e Bäʾǝdä Maryam, ruled from 1494–1508; see Kaplan, ‘Bäʾǝdä Maryam’; aṣe Lǝbnä Dǝngǝl was proclaimed nǝgus ́ in 1508 at the age of 10 or 11; see Kleiner, ‘Lǝbnä Dǝngǝl’. 6. For an overview of the history of women in late medieval Ethiopia, see Rita Pankhurst, ‘Bibliography of Published Writings’, Journal of Ethiopian Studies 40, no. 1/2 (2007): 371–80; Margaux Herman, ‘Towards a History of Women in Medieval Ethiopia’, in A Companion to Medieval Ethiopia and Eritrea, ed. Samantha Kelly (Leiden: Brill, 2020), 365–394. 7. Compare, for example, 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, Roma 1972, ed. Enrico Cerulli (Rome: Accademia nazionale dei Lincei, 1974), 547–66; Manfred Kropp, ‘The Śǝrʿatä Gǝbr: A Mirror View of Daily Life at the Ethiopian Royal Court in the Middle Ages’, Northeast African Studies 10, no. 2/3 (1988): 51–87; Getatchew Haile, ‘Ras Amdu: His and His Ancestors’ Role in Ethiopian History’, in Proceedings of the XVth International Conference of Ethiopian Studies, Hamburg, July 20–25, 2003 (Harrassowitz, 2006),

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251–59; Manfred Kropp, ‘Rǝstä Amba Zä-Ǝsraʾel. Ein Dokument Über Erbbesitz Des Äthiopischen Königshauses (Ǝsraʾel) Auf Und Um AmbaSäl Aus Dem 16. Jahrhundert’, in Studies in Ethiopian Languages, Literature, and History. Festschrift for Getatchew Haile, Presented by His Friends and Colleagues, ed. Adam Carter McCollum (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2017), 345–77. 8. ʿAmdä Mikaʾel was an army chief as well as kingmaker in the succession of various nägäst́ in the late fifteenth century; he put his young protégé asẹ Ǝskǝndǝr on the throne after a short struggle for succession in 1478 and formed his regency council together with Ǝskǝndǝr’s mother Romna and ʿaqqabe säʿat Täsfa Giyorgis; see Jules Perruchon, ‘Histoire d’Eskender, d’ʾAmda Seyon II et de Nâʾod, Rois d’Éthiopie’, Journal Asiatique 9, no. 3 (1894): 353–55; Chernetsov, ‘Ǝskǝndǝr’; for a biography and literature on ʿAmdä Mikaʾel, see Getatchew Haile, ‘ʿAmdä Mikaʾel’, in EAe 5 (2014), 235–36. 9. See Sevir Chernetsov, ‘Ǝleni’, in EAe 2 (2005), 253–54. 10. Ruled 1468–1478, son of aṣe Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob; see Kaplan, ‘Bäʾǝdä Maryam’, 432. 11. This mission had been led by a high-ranking Ethiopian noble—possibly ʿAmdä Mikaʾel himself; see below. 12. Cf., for instance, Renato Lefèvre, ‘Richerche Sull’imolese G.B.  De Brocchi, Viaggiatore in Ethiopia e Curiale Pontificio’, Archivio Della Societa Romana Di Storia Patria 81 (1958): 59–60; Taddesse Tamrat, Church and State in Ethiopia, 1270–1527, 290–91; Stuart Munro-Hay, Ethiopia Unveiled: Interaction Between Two Worlds (Hollywood: Tsehai, 2006), 148–54; Benjamin Weber, ‘Vrais et Faux Éthiopiens Au XVe Siècle En Occident? Du Bon Usage Des Connexions’, Annales d’Éthiopie 27 (2012): 114–17; Benjamin Weber, ‘Gli Etiopi a Roma Nel Quattrocento : Ambasciatori Politici, Negoziatori Religiosi o Pellegrini?’, Mélanges de l’École Française de Rome—Moyen Âge 125, no. 1 (2013): para. 5; Matteo Salvadore and Gianfranco Fiaccadori, ‘Brocchi, Giovanni Battista’, in EAe 5 (2014), 284–286: 285; Matteo Salvadore, The African Prester John and the Birth of Ethiopian-European Relations, 1402–1555 (Milton Park: Routledge, 2016), 69–71, partially based on the Early Modern accounts of Luke Wadding, see Luke Wadding, Annales Minorum Seu Trium Ordinum a S. Francisco Institutorum, Vol. 14 (Rome: Typis Rochi Bernabò, 1735). 13. Scholars ignored or amended dates given in the sources to make the narrative fit; a decade ago, Gianfranco Fiaccadori noted a ‘serious chronological discrepancy’ hitherto unresolved of the sequence of events; see Gianfranco Fiaccadori, ‘A Marginal Note to “Four Sistine Ethiopians?”’, Aethiopica 14 (2011): 138. 14. Cf., for instance, Salvadore and Fiaccadori, ‘Brocchi, Giovanni Battista’.

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15. A single safe conduct is recorded for an Ethiopian ecclesiastic identified as ‘Georgius Michaelis of Sabba’ for October 1459; see BAV, Reg. Vat. 501, fol. 106r, ed. in Renato Lefèvre, ‘Documenti Pontifici Sui Rapporti Con L’Etiopia Nei Secoli XV e XVI’, Rassegna Di Studi Etiopici 5 (1946): 24. He might have been an impostor, or was perceived as one by some Italian contemporaries; see Weber, ‘Vrais et Faux Éthiopiens Au XVe Siècle En Occident? Du Bon Usage Des Connexions’, 108–11. 16. Two Arabic chroniclers as well as a French pilgrim describe the mission; see Julien Loiseau, ‘The Ḥ aṭı ̄ and the Sultan. Letters and Embassies from Abyssinia to the Mamluk Court’, in Mamluk Cairo, a Crossroads for Embassies: Studies on Diplomacy and Diplomatics, eds. Frédéric Bauden and Malika Dekkiche, (Leiden: Brill, 2019), 638–657:645. 17. 1448–1478, nǝgus ́ from 1468–1478; son of aṣe Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob. 18. 1471–1494, nǝgus ́ from 1478–1494, was six years old upon succeeding his father aṣe Bäʾǝdä Maryam. 19. The abun or metropolitan was the formal head of the Ethiopian Church. From its inception in the fourth century, the Ethiopian Orthodox Church constituted a de facto bishopric of the Coptic Church—only the Coptic Patriarch in Alexandria could appoint a new abun, necessary for the consecration of clergy and the coronation of the nägäst;́ see Denis Nosnitsin, ‘Abunä’, in EAe 1 (2003), 56. During the reign of asẹ Bäʾǝdä Maryam, attempts to make the Ethiopian Church autocephalous were undertaken; a council determining whether a new metropolitan should be brought from Egypt was to be held at the end of his reign, explaining why the office had been—intentionally—vacant for some time; see Derat, Le Domaine Des Rois Éthiopiens, 1270–1527: Espace, Pouvoir et Monarchisme, 203. 20. Haggai Erlich, The Cross and the River: Ethiopia, Egypt, and the Nile (Boulder, Colorado: Lynne Rienner, 2002), 19–20; Nosnitsin, ‘Abunä’; Getatchew Haile, ‘Ethiopian Orthodox (Täwahédo) Church’, in EAe 2 (2005), 414–21. 21. Mamlūk Sultan of Egypt from 1468–1496. 22. As suggested in Loiseau, ‘The Ḥ at ̣ı ̄ and the Sultan. Letters and Embassies from Abyssinia to the Mamluk Court’, 650. Other members of the mission are named in Fiaccadori, ‘A Marginal Note to “Four Sistine Ethiopians?”’, 137. In 1514–1515, ʿAmdä Mikaʾel’s son led a similar Solomonic mission to Cairo. 23. Georges Lengherand, French pilgrim to the Holy Land, heard in 1485–1486 from a Venetian trader about the arrival and reception five years before. Here, the Ethiopian ambassador was narrated as presenting himself with pomp, being carried into the presence of the Mamlūk Sultan in a golden chariot bearing rich gifts of gold, threatening to reroute the

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Nile should the Egyptians not grant the Ethiopians’ wishes. Compare Denis C. de Godefroy-Ménilglaise, ed., Voyage de Georges Lengherand, Mayeur de Mons En Haynaut, a Venise, Rome, Jérusalem, Mont Sinai & Le Kayre (Mons: Masquillier & Dequesne, 1861), 185–88. Echoes of this also appear in accounts produced in Italy in 1481–1482, examined in more detail below; see Matthias Sollweck, ed., Fratris Pauli Waltheri Guglingensis Itinerarium in Terram Sanctam et Ad Sanctam Catharinam, (Tübingen: Litterarischer Verein in Stuttgart, 1892), 39; Lefèvre, ‘Richerche Sull’imolese G.B.  De Brocchi, Viaggiatore in Ethiopia e Curiale Pontificio’, 111 and below. 24. Compare Fiaccadori, ‘A Marginal Note to “Four Sistine Ethiopians?”’; Loiseau, ‘The Ḥ aṭı ̄ and the Sultan. Letters and Embassies from Abyssinia to the Mamluk Court’; Emeri van Donzel, ‘Ibn Iyās’, in EAe 3 (2007), 107–8; Muḥammad bin Aḥmad Ibn Iyās, Bada ̄ʾiʿ Al-Zuhur̄ Fı ̄ Waqaʾ̄ iʿ al-Duhu ̄r, ed. Muḥammad Muṣtạ fā, vol. 2 (Cairo, 1982); GodefroyMénilglaise, Voyage de Georges Lengherand, 187–88. 25. Given as the year 133 of the ‘Era of the Martyrs’, Emeri van Donzel, ‘ʿƎnbaqom’, in EAe 2 (2005), 280–282: 280; Chernetsov, ‘Ǝskǝndǝr’. For abunä Yǝsḥaq and abunä Marqos, see Steven Kaplan and Gianfranco Fiaccadori, ‘Marqos’, in EAe 3 (2007), 789–90; Stéphane Ancel, ‘Yǝsḥaq’, in EAe 5 (2014), 62–63. Marqos succeeded Yǝsḥaq as a very old man in the 1520s; upon his arrival in 1481, he held a lower rank; see Kaplan and Fiaccadori, ‘Marqos’, 789; Fiaccadori, ‘A Marginal Note to “Four Sistine Ethiopians?”’, 137. 26. Compare Julien Loiseau, ‘Chrétiens d’Égypte, Musulmans d’Éthiopie. Protection Des Communautés et Relations Diplomatiques Entre Le Sultanat Mamelouk et Le Royaume Salomonien (ca 1270–1516)’, Médiévales 79, no. 2 (2020), 37–68:37. 27. van Donzel, ‘Ibn Iyās’, 108, also compare the sources presented in Enrico Cerulli, Etiopi in Palestina: Storia Della Comunita Etiopica Di Gerusalemme Vol. I (Rome: Liveria dello Stato, 1943), 281–88. 28. Compare Lefèvre, ‘Richerche Sull’imolese G.B. De Brocchi, Viaggiatore in Ethiopia e Curiale Pontificio’, 111 and BAV, Ms. Vat. Lat. 3943, fols. 81r–81v, ed. in Enrico Carusi, ed., Il Diario Romano Di Jacopo Gherardi Da Volterra Dal VII Settembre MCCCCLXXIX al XII Agosto MCCCCLXXXIV, (Città di Castello: Lapi, 1904), 79. On Brochus’ political engagements, see Lefèvre, ‘Richerche Sull’imolese G.B.  De Brocchi, Viaggiatore in Ethiopia e Curiale Pontificio’, 111–18. 29. See Carusi, Il Diario Romano Di Jacopo Gherardi Da Volterra, 79; Lefèvre, ‘Richerche Sull’imolese G.B. De Brocchi, Viaggiatore in Ethiopia e Curiale Pontificio’, 111. The issue might have been Brochus’ close ties to Girolamo Riario, one of the plotters behind the failed 1478 attempt to

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assassinate and displace the Medici family as rulers of Florence as part of the so-called Pazzi Conspiracy. Fiaccadori and Salvadore suggest that Brochus had fallen out of favour with his former patrons only in the early 1480s, Salvadore and Fiaccadori, ‘Brocchi, Giovanni Battista’, 284. 30. Also called the ‘Custodian of the Holy Land’ or ‘Guardian of Mount Sion’, ex officio Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem. The position was either held by Iohanne Thomacello or Paulo of Caneto in spring 1481; Iohanne was Guardian of the Holy Land from 1478 to May 1481; Paulo held the office from May 1481 to 1484, Girolamo Golubovich, ed., Il Trattato Di Terra Santa e Dell’Oriente de Frate Francesco Suriano (Milan: Tipografia editrice Artigianelli, 1900), XXXIV–XXXVIII; Marzia Caria, ‘Il Tratatello Delle Indulgentie de Terra Sancta Secondo Il Ms. 1106 Della Biblioteca Augusta Di Perugia. Edizione e Note Linguistiche’ (PhD thesis, Sassari, Università degli Studi di Sassari, 2008), 117 as well as BAP, Ms. 1106, fol. 41v, 70v–71r, ed. and transl. in Golubovich, Il Trattato Di Terra Santa e Dell’Oriente de Frate Francesco Suriano, 81; Theophilus Bellorini, Eugene Hoade, and Bellarmino Bagatti, eds., Treatise on the Holy Land (Jerusalem: Franciscan Printing Press, 1949), 95. Early Modern Franciscan historian Luke Wadding explicitly states that Paulo was elected to the office in May 1481, Wadding, Annales Minorum Seu Trium Ordinum a S.  Francisco Institutorum, Vol. 14; also compare Marianne P.  Ritsema van Eck, The Holy Land in Observant Franciscan Texts (c. 1480–1650) (Leiden: Brill, 2019), 21. 31. The number of legates stated for the Ethiopian embassy varies greatly, from one to six; presumably, companions, servants or slaves of the main ambassador(s) were counted differently by the Latin observers. 32. Ed. in Sollweck, Fratris Pauli Waltheri Guglingensis Itinerarium. Fiaccadori, ‘A Marginal Note to “Four Sistine Ethiopians?”’, 139–40 also drew attention to some of Paulus’ account in relation to the Ethiopian embassy to Rome of 1481–1482. 33. Sollweck, Fratris Pauli Waltheri Guglingensis Itinerarium, 37–41, 60–61, 127. 34. Venice was a common point of entry to Italy for Ethiopian pilgrims and travellers by the late fifteenth century; it is not surprising that such a letter should have been copied and preserved there. 35. ‘sit notum, regem Indorum nunc mortuum, qui vocabatur Johannes presbyter et, ut fertur, christianus cum tota sua terra et gente, sed hucusque vixit secundum ritum grecorum. Alius quoque loco sui est electus. Hic tantum afficitur ad fidem catholicam et ad verum ritum christianorum, quod non vult inungi nec coronari nisi per prelatum catholice fidei.’ Ed. in Sollweck, Fratris Pauli Waltheri Guglingensis Itinerarium, 37–39.

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36. ‘Et misit notabilem ambasciatorem cum magna et honesta societate, cum pretiosis clinodiis, cum magno thesauro et multis muneribus ad Babyloniam ad regem soldanum, qui preest Iherusalem et terre sancte, offerens eidem soldano in singulis plus quam quadraginta milia ducatos, fecitque cum eo confederationem pacis, et obtinuit ab eo salvum conductum pro se et aliis ad pergendum Iherusalem ad terram sanctam et ad Greciam adducendum quosdam christianos, qui coronarent suum regem.’ Ed. in Sollweck, Fratris Pauli Waltheri Guglingensis Itinerarium, 39. 37. ‘Demum venit Ihierosolimam, devote visitans loca sancta et fratres nostros in monte Syon, et maxime placuit sibi vita et mos vivendi fratrum minorum et nostrorum.’ Ed. in Sollweck, Fratris Pauli Waltheri Guglingensis Itinerarium, 39. 38. ‘vellet ire ad Greciam et afferre christianum prelatum, qui coronaret dominum suum.’ Ed. in Sollweck, Fratris Pauli Waltheri Guglingensis Itinerarium, 39–40. 39. ‘Domine! Quare vultis a Grecis regem vestrum coronari, cum non sint veri catholici sed heretici et scismatici et a vera ecclesia excomunicati?’ Ed. in Sollweck, Fratris Pauli Waltheri Guglingensis Itinerarium, 40. 40. This is also supported by a letter by Paulo of Caneto written to aṣe Ǝskǝndǝr in January 1484: ‘doi di toy religiose habitano i[n] Ier[usa]l[em] ma[n]dati a Roma’; see BAP, Ms. 1106, fol. 43v, ed. in Golubovich, Il Trattato Di Terra Santa e Dell’Oriente de Frate Francesco Suriano, 82; Caria, ‘Il Tratatello Delle Indulgentie de Terra Sancta  Secondo Il Ms. 1106 Della Biblioteca Augusta Di Perugia. Edizione e Note Linguistiche’, 159, transl. in Bellorini, Hoade, and Bagatti, Treatise on the Holy Land, 95. 41. ‘Respondit legatus: ‘Nimis distat; placet mihi mittere de meis cum vestris fratribus, quibus dabo plenam auctoritatem, ac si essem personaliter presens. Ego quoque expectabo in magno Cayro per quinque menses; amplius manere non possum.’ Ed. in Sollweck, Fratris Pauli Waltheri Guglingensis Itinerarium, 40. 42. Compare Samantha Kelly, ‘The Curious Case of Ethiopic Chaldean: Fraud, Philology and Cultural (Mis)Understandings in European Conceptions of Ethiopia’, Renaissance Quarterly 68, no. 4 (2015): 1249, note 88. The one supposedly Ethiopian language sample provided by Brochus that has come down to us is far from correct: instead of በስመ፡አብ፡ወወልድ፡ወመንፈስ፡ቅዱስ፡አሐዱ፡አምላክ—‘Bäsəmä Ab Wäwäld Wämänfäs Qəddus Aḥadu Amlak’—he has rendered it ‘Bes. Mo Ab. Vaa. Ved. Vue Menses Thedus Adn Amelech’; see BAV, Ms. Vat. Lat 12270, fol. 88r, ed. in Lefèvre, ‘Richerche Sull’imolese G.B.  De Brocchi, Viaggiatore in Ethiopia e Curiale Pontificio’, 107. 43. Sollweck, Fratris Pauli Waltheri Guglingensis Itinerarium, 41.

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44. ‘venit legatus regis Indie cum suis sociis de curia romana, dominus Anthonius, prespiter secundum ritum eorum.’ Ed. in Sollweck, Fratris Pauli Waltheri Guglingensis Itinerarium, 60. 45. ‘Perventis legatis cum litteris ad papam fecerunt obedientiam ecclesie ex parte regis Indie. Et gavisus est papa et omnis curia, gratias agentes deo […] Et statim misit papa breve ad vicarium generalem, ut indelate veniret ad curiam.’ Ed. in Sollweck, Fratris Pauli Waltheri Guglingensis Itinerarium, 40. 46. We may securely identify two of them as Branda Castiglioni, Bishop of Como from 1466–1487, and Antonius Trivultius, Milanese nobleman with connection to the Visconti family, d. 1508. 47. Gian Galeazzo Sforza, 1469–1494, nominal Duke of Milan from 1476; his uncle Ludovico Sforza, 1452–1508, was the de facto ruler of Milan and actual recipient of the letter. 48. ‘è venuto un ambassatore del Sig.re Prete Janni quà alla Sancità de Nostro Signore, il quale admisso al conspecto de questo Consistorio privato ha exposto che essendo morto el suo grande Signore.’ Ed. in Lefèvre, ‘Richerche Sull’imolese G.B.  De Brocchi, Viaggiatore in Ethiopia e Curiale Pontificio’, 110. 49. ‘ha esposto che essendo morto el suo grande Signore, et eletone uno da quelli a cui specta, dicto novo electo, per continuare la sua consuetudine, che è in simile caso de mandare in Jerusalem o in qualche altro loco ad recerchare qualche venerabile religioso che gli vada ad dare la corona et fare l’altre cerimonie, secondo el loro costume, hanno mandado un cusino del … dicto Prete Jianni.’ Ed. in Lefèvre, ‘Richerche Sull’imolese G.B. De Brocchi, Viaggiatore in Ethiopia e Curiale Pontificio’, 110. 50. ‘Sed prima che facesse la sua exposition andò a trovare li frati de Sancto Francesco de observantia, ed havendo veduto le regole del loro ordine li qiaquero molto, per il che fece intendere al guardiano … di sua, pregandolo che’l volesse acceptare l’impresa di andarea a incoronare il suo Signore però che molto gli era piaciuto el vivere suo.’ Ed. in Lefèvre, ‘Richerche Sull’imolese G.B.  De Brocchi, Viaggiatore in Ethiopia e Curiale Pontificio’, 110. 51. ‘E che mandarano quà ad Roma la provisione per fargli uno loco dove tenerano continuamente cento persone dele loro per instruerli nella fede, et cerimonie dela chiesa.’ Ed. in Lefèvre, ‘Richerche Sull’imolese G.B. De Brocchi, Viaggiatore in Ethiopia e Curiale Pontificio’, 110. 52. ‘Et che ad questi conforti et suasioni quello cusino et oratore del predicto Signore Prete Janni li haveva mandate qua loro ad rechiedere alla sua Beatudine, se dignasse mandargli qualche persona de auctorità cum alcuni altri che fusero sufficienti levarli et extirparli quelli suoi errori et incoronare el suo Signore, offerendo che’l recognoscerà a sede apostolica de qualche

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honorevole censo.’ Ed. in Lefèvre, ‘Richerche Sull’imolese G.B.  De Brocchi, Viaggiatore in Ethiopia e Curiale Pontificio’, 110. 53. ‘la cui Beatudine intendo tale desyderio mandaria prelati et religiosi notabili al prete Janni ad predicarli et levarli quelli errori in quali sono contra la fede christiana, per modo che poterebe poi venire a Roma ad incoronarsi, et che gli seria magiore honore prehendere la corona de mando del Signore de tutta la christianità, che da uno semplice religioso.’ Ed. in Lefèvre, ‘Richerche Sull’imolese G.B. De Brocchi, Viaggiatore in Ethiopia e Curiale Pontificio’, 110. 54. ‘et per fede de questa sua venuta et espositione hanno portato lettere del dicto guardiano ad Nostro Signore, per le quale gli significa ad plenum, quid sit in facto, et quanto sia necessario da fare. Alle quale lettere Nostro Signore presta grandissima fede, con dire a tutti li cardinali che’l conosce dicto guardiano et sa che’l è persona che non scriveria una per un’altra.’ Ed. in Lefèvre, ‘Richerche Sull’imolese G.B. De Brocchi, Viaggiatore in Ethiopia e Curiale Pontificio’, 110. 55. ‘Nostro Signore ha deliberato mandare … XII. religiosi dela observantia de Sancto Francesco deli più docti, experti et probati et alcuni altri prelati videlicet arcivescovi et vescovi al dicto prete Janni ad predicare et levarvi quelli errori che teneo contra la fede nostra.’ Ed. in in Lefèvre, ‘Richerche Sull’imolese G.B.  De Brocchi, Viaggiatore in Ethiopia e Curiale Pontificio’, 110. 56. Guillaume d’Estouteville, 1412–1483, Archbishop of Rouen from 1453, from 1477 Chamberlain of the Papal Household in Rome, explaining his presence at the audience. 57. ‘Ad questo proposito el reverendissimo Cardinale Rohano come quello che ha … più che per essere ei più antiquo cardinale che gli sia, disse che papa Eugenio altre volte tentò […] però che dicto Signore è pontentissimo et aptissimo offendere el turco.’ Ed. in Lefèvre, ‘Richerche Sull’imolese G.B.  De Brocchi, Viaggiatore in Ethiopia e Curiale Pontificio’, 110–11. 58. There is mention of an incredibly valuable gift, and a ‘lance, a shield and a bow, all of them made of the best gold’, which the Milanese express their doubts about. Arabic and Latin sources assert that in the 1440s, asẹ Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob sent just such a gift as a veiled threat to the Mamlūk Sultan Ǧaqmaq, making a point that golden weapons could be turned ‘into steel’ should Ǧaqmaq fail to comply with his demands; see Verena Krebs, ‘Crusading Threats? Ethiopian-Egyptian Relations in the 1440s’, in Les Croisades En Afrique. XIII-XVIe Siècles, ed. Benjamin Weber (Toulouse: Presses Universitaires du Midi, 2019), 245–74. A similar retelling is found in the 1480s account of Georges Lengherand; see GodefroyMénilglaise, Voyage de Georges Lengherand, 185–88.

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59. Girolamo Riario della Rovere, 1443–1488, Lord of Imola and Count of Forli. 60. A 1478 attempt by members of the Pazzi family to assassinate and displace the Medici family as rulers of Florence, a scandal that rocked Renaissance Italy in the last quarter of the fifteenth century. 61. ‘Interprete del dicto oratore si è uno Joanne Baptista da Imola, quale stava alias col’illustre Conte Hieronymo et haveva bonissima condicione et credito cum sua Signoria; El quale è venuto con loro da Jerusalem in quà et ritrovandose là li persuase al venire et tolse caricho de condurli et introducerli ad Nostro Signore.’ Ed. in Lefèvre, ‘Richerche Sull’imolese G.B. De Brocchi, Viaggiatore in Ethiopia e Curiale Pontificio’, 111. 62. Compare the ‘chronology of documents’ on Brochus compiled in Lefèvre, ‘Richerche Sull’imolese G.B. De Brocchi, Viaggiatore in Ethiopia e Curiale Pontificio’, 111–18. The documents universally refer to him as Giovanni Battista da Imola, Johanni Baptiste de Brochis de Imola, Ioannes Baptista da Imola, or identified him as Giovanni Battista Brocco, imolese. In no account is he identified simply as Baptista or Battista. 63. Jacopo Gherardi, also Jacopo of Volterra, 1434–1516, apostolic secretary and humanist. 64. Also alluding to Girolamo Riario. This makes clear that the ‘Ioannes Baptista of Imola’ mentioned by Gherardi is the same person also mentioned by the Milanese ambassadors. 65. ‘Indie regis oratores per hos dies Urbem ingressi sunt habitu patrio et toti Urbi ob novitatem conspicuo. eis comes erat Ioannes Baptista Imolensis, magna paulo ante apud pontificem et comitem auctoritate, nunc nulla. hos ego non ab eorum rege destinatos audio, sed ab ipsius secretario, viro primario regni illius, cui desiderium est fedus et amicitiam inire cum pontifice et ritibus latinorum Christianorum vivere.’ Ed. in Carusi, Il Diario Romano Di Jacopo Gherardi Da Volterra, 79. The reference to the ‘pope and count’ match the Milanese description of ‘Joanne Baptista of Imola’ being an intimate of Count Girolamo Riario. 66. ‘Id fuit precipuum petitionum suarum: ut cum eis latine legis et lingue espicopus mitteretur […] non inventus est qui se ilis voluerit credere, tamen religiose admoniti sunt pontifices nomine, illis quoque spes data petitionum suarum.’ Ed. in Carusi, Il Diario Romano Di Jacopo Gherardi Da Volterra, 79. 67. ‘quousque autem Rome fuerunt, pontificis liberalitate sunt aliti et donati muneribus quibusdam, actis quoque publicis honorati. pluries etiam per interpretem ab eodem pie et amanter auditi.’ Ed. in Carusi, Il Diario Romano Di Jacopo Gherardi Da Volterra, 79. 68. ‘Charissimo in Christo filio nostro Presto Joanni, magno regi Indiae.’ Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze, Ms. II-III 256, fol. 255v, ed. in

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Osvaldo Raineri, Lettere Tra i Pontefici Romani e i Principi Etiopici (Secoli XII–XX) (Città del Vaticano: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 2003), 42. The Ethiopian nǝgus ́ is not personally named. 69. Seeing that the pope mentions the ‘uncle’ acting as guardian to the young nǝgus.́ Matteo Salvadore assumes that Sixtus IV addressed himself to aṣe Bäʾǝdä Maryam, dead for nearly four years; cf. Salvadore, The African Prester John and the Birth of Ethiopian-European Relations, 1402–1555, 68–70. 70. ‘Venit ad Nos Antonius orator tuus, vir prudens et gravis et magnae religionis, quem Nos libenter ob amorem nostrum erga te vidimus et excepimus et summa caritate sumus complexi.’ Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze, Ms. II-III 256, fol. 255v, ed. in Raineri, Lettere Tra i Pontefici Romani e i Principi Etiopici (Secoli XII–XX), 42. 71. ‘Is attulit Nobis et litteras tuas jucundissimas quidem, quae summopere Nos delectarunt; quibus cognovimus animi tui religionem et sinceram in Dominum nostrum Jesum Christum ejusque gloriosissimam Matrem semper virginem devotionem.’ Ed. in Raineri, Lettere Tra i Pontefici Romani e i Principi Etiopici (Secoli XII–XX), 42. 72. ‘et quanto desiderio tenearis, ut in omnibus ad fidem catholicam pertinentibus.’ Ed. in Raineri, Lettere Tra i Pontefici Romani e i Principi Etiopici (Secoli XII–XX), 42. 73. ‘Remittimus igitur ad te eundem oratorem nostrum, eo consilio, ut patruum tuum una secum ad Nos remittas, per quem postea omnia ad te transmittemus, quae mittere in animo habemus in pignus et testimonium nostrae erga te caritatis.’ Ed. in Raineri, Lettere Tra i Pontefici Romani e i Principi Etiopici (Secoli XII–XX), 43. 74. ‘Cum enim ille ad nos venerit, una cum Antonio, mittemus coronam, ensem, presulem aliquem, qui te nostro nomine coronet, theologus, praedicatores, artifices et alia quae desideras, ita ut amorem nostrum in te facile possit cognoscere et omnia fient, quae ad mutuam unionem nostram pertinebunt.’ Ed. in Raineri, Lettere Tra i Pontefici Romani e i Principi Etiopici (Secoli XII–XX), 43. 75. ‘Sic enim et Nobis et Antonio ipsi visum et consultius et secutius, ut nihil nunc mittatur, sed ipse tantummodo veniat et in revisione sua ad Nos una cum patruo tuo omnia ista exsecutioni mandentur, quae jam parata habemus, prout latius ex ipso Antonio, tuo et nostro oratore, intelliges, cui fidem indubiam placeas adhibere.’ Ed. in Raineri, Lettere Tra i Pontefici Romani e i Principi Etiopici (Secoli XII–XX), 43. 76. Brochus 30 years later also states that the Ethiopian nǝguś would be ‘prepared to fight in an expeditionary force against the Sultan of Babylon and the Moors in order to recover the Lord’s tomb, and [was also prepared] to disrupt the flooding of the Nile, which the Moors feared greatly’ should the pontiff order it; see Lefèvre, ‘Richerche Sull’imolese G.B. De Brocchi, Viaggiatore in Ethiopia e Curiale Pontificio’, 108. These state-

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ments are not supported by the contemporary documents of the early 1480s. 77. Ca. 1470–1528, pontifical master of ceremonies under the auspices of four popes from 1504 to 1528, Bishop of Pesaro from 1513 onwards. 78. ‘domino Johanne Baptista Brocho, tunc altero ex ipsis Imperatoriis oratoribus ad papam designatis et nunc scriptore apostolico.’ Ed. in Lefèvre, ‘Richerche Sull’imolese G.B.  De Brocchi, Viaggiatore in Ethiopia e Curiale Pontificio’, 107. On the dating of the interview with Brochus, see Kelly, ‘The Curious Case of Ethiopic Chaldean: Fraud, Philology and Cultural (Mis)Understandings in European Conceptions of Ethiopia’, 1238. 79. The Tractatibus de Oratoribus romanae curia, written in stages between 1508–1510. A new critical edition was recently completed, see Philipp Stenzig,  ed., Botschafterzeremoniell am Papsthof der Renaissance. Der ‘Tractatus de Oratoribus’ des Paris de Grassi. Edition und Kommentar, 2 vols (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2013). The section pertaining to the Ethiopian mission was also partially ed. in Pietro Ghinzoni, ‘Un’ambasciata Del Prete Gianni a Roma Nel 1481’, Archivio Storico Lombardo 6 (1889): 145–54; Lefèvre, ‘Richerche Sull’imolese G.B. De Brocchi, Viaggiatore in Ethiopia e Curiale Pontificio’, 107–9. 80. Compare Lefèvre, ‘Richerche Sull’imolese G.B. De Brocchi, Viaggiatore in Ethiopia e Curiale Pontificio’, 111–18. 81. ‘De oratoribus Indianis et Caldeis ab ipsorum Imperatore, qui a nobis vulgo presbiter Janes dicitur, ad Sixtum papam quartum missis aliqua recordor me eo tempore quo pene puer eram vidisse.’ Ed. in Lefèvre, ‘Richerche Sull’imolese G.B.  De Brocchi, Viaggiatore in Ethiopia e Curiale Pontificio’, 107. 82. ‘Itaque missi sunt oratores sex, quorum principalis fuit Antonius Cappellanus et familiaris ipsius Nagi, vir quidem in partibus illis magne auctoritatis et ingenii, sicut a nobis Cardinalis in honore habetur; quorum ductorem destinavit dominum Johannem Baptistam Brochum imolensem, in lingua eorum expertum.’ Ed. in Lefèvre, ‘Richerche Sull’imolese G.B. De Brocchi, Viaggiatore in Ethiopia e Curiale Pontificio’, 108. 83. ‘quod Sixtus quartus intelligens, honorifice eos suscipi et honorari mandavit cum obviationibus prelatorum et sue familie totius ac familiarum omnium cardinalium ac totius curie ut moris est in similibus solemnibus receptionibus.’ Ed. in Lefèvre, ‘Richerche Sull’imolese G.B. De Brocchi, Viaggiatore in Ethiopia e Curiale Pontificio’, 108. 84. ‘Deinde in consistorio secreto auditi sunt et non publico ne publice intellecti postmodum accusarentur a mauris seu turchis apud Soldanum predictum.’ Ed. in Lefèvre, ‘Richerche Sull’imolese G.B.  De Brocchi, Viaggiatore in Ethiopia e Curiale Pontificio’, 108. 85. On Chaldean and the perception of Ethiopian languages as Chaldean in Renaissance Italy, see Kelly, ‘The Curious Case of Ethiopic Chaldean:

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Fraud, Philology and Cultural (Mis)Understandings in European Conceptions of Ethiopia’. 86. ‘Petierunt per papam destinari aliquos sive episcopos sive sacerdotes seculares aut regulares bene instructos in fide Christi, tanquam magistros, qui ipsos populos et nationem tamquam rudes et ignaros discipulos instruerent in fide Christi.’ Ed. in Lefèvre, ‘Richerche Sull’imolese G.B.  De Brocchi, Viaggiatore in Ethiopia e Curiale Pontificio’, 108. 87. ‘Tertio obtulerunt ipsum Nagum paratum esse dum vicarius Christi mandaret cum armis in exercitum ac expeditionem ire contra Soldanum babilonie et mauros ad recuperationem sepulchri dominici et turbare crescentiam Nili de quo mauri plurimum timent.’ Ed. in Lefèvre, ‘Richerche Sull’imolese G.B.  De Brocchi, Viaggiatore in Ethiopia e Curiale Pontificio’, 108. 88. Also compare the accounts of Petrus Rombulus and Pietre of Naples covered in the previous chapter. 89. Today known as the Arcispedale di Santo Spirito in Saxia, in Vatican City, adjacent to the Ospedale di Santo Spirito. Pope Sixtus IV had renovated and expanded the complex significantly in the late 1470s. 90. Compare Lefèvre, ‘Richerche Sull’imolese G.B. De Brocchi, Viaggiatore in Ethiopia e Curiale Pontificio’, 109. 91. ‘et eis placebant cerimonie nostre quas successive intelligere volebant. Immo in scriptis illas redigebant per libellum eorum more scriptum.’ Ed. in Lefèvre, ‘Richerche Sull’imolese G.B.  De Brocchi, Viaggiatore in Ethiopia e Curiale Pontificio’, 109. 92. See Weber, ‘Vrais et Faux Éthiopiens Au XVe Siècle  En Occident? Du Bon Usage Des Connexions’, 115. 93. ‘Et eis donavit recedentibus papa ensem qui est ensis de nocte Nativitatis et etiam vestem de brochato et unum biretum sicut est de nocte predicte Nativitatis, et mille ducatos auri et agnos dei multos ac unam cathenam auri pretiosam cum bulla pendula in qua erat unus agnus dei legatus et  alius pendens in aure tanquam gemma.’ Ed. in Lefèvre, ‘Richerche Sull’imolese G.B.  De Brocchi, Viaggiatore in Ethiopia e Curiale Pontificio’, 109. 94. Fiaccadori, ‘A Marginal Note to “Four Sistine Ethiopians?”’, 139. 95. Exaudi was on 19 May 1482; see Sollweck, Fratris Pauli Waltheri Guglingensis Itinerarium, 60–61. 96. Sollweck, Fratris Pauli Waltheri Guglingensis Itinerarium, 61. 97. Lando specialised in transporting pilgrims from Venice to Jerusalem; Sollweck, Fratris Pauli Waltheri Guglingensis Itinerarium, 61, note 2. 98. ‘Qui multa bona dixit de papa et curia romana, et papa esset missurus aliquos fratres de nostris.’ Ed. in Sollweck, Fratris Pauli Waltheri Guglingensis Itinerarium, 61.

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99. Sollweck, Fratris Pauli Waltheri Guglingensis Itinerarium, 61. 100. Wadding, Annales Minorum Seu Trium Ordinum a S.  Francisco Institutorum, Vol. 14, 243. 101. Sollweck, Fratris Pauli Waltheri Guglingensis Itinerarium, 61. 102. Compare his lament on ‘a certain apostate from the faith’, Sollweck, Fratris Pauli Waltheri Guglingensis Itinerarium, 127. 103. Ca. 1450–1530, Franciscan friar born to a noble Venetian family, active as a missionary in the Holy Land in the early 1480s before returning to Italy in 1485; compare Golubovich, Il Trattato Di Terra Santa e Dell’Oriente de Frate Francesco Suriano, XXVII, XL. 104. Bellorini, Hoade, and Bagatti, Treatise on the Holy Land, 94. This letter is quoted in full in Suriano’s Treatise and will be examined in further detail below. 105. Bellorini, Hoade, and Bagatti, Treatise on the Holy Land, 94–96. 106. ‘alteri titubanti an ad Regem reverteretur, additus est animus et socius frater Grifon Slavus, qui in Aethiopiam comitaretur, et in fide contineret, ut Pontificis porrigeret litteras et donaria. Vel hujus vel aliorum dolo Grifon necatus est, cujus corpus inter rubos et arbusta conjectum, celeste lumen revelavit.’ Wadding, Annales Minorum Seu Trium Ordinum a S. Francisco Institutorum, Vol. 14, 243. 107. ‘Annos tres consumpserunt Fratres in hac missione, fructu tamen exiguo.’ Wadding, Annales Minorum Seu Trium Ordinum a S.  Francisco Institutorum, Vol. 14, 243. 108. Francesco Suriano wrote the first version of the Treatise in 1485, resulting in BAP, Ms. 1106. A second redaction was written in 1514; the text was also printed in 1524 by Bindoni in Venice as Opera nuova chiamata Iternario di Hierusalem. The 1485 manuscript (written in a careful, wellplanned hand) is considered the authoritative account in the following description of events seeing that it is the oldest and near-contemporary account. For an edition and analysis, see Caria, ‘Il Tratatello Delle Indulgentie de Terra Sancta  Secondo Il Ms. 1106 Della Biblioteca Augusta Di Perugia. Edizione e Note Linguistiche’. I have compared all dates and names given in the Perugia 1106 manuscript against those in Golubovich, Il Trattato Di Terra Santa e Dell’Oriente de Frate Francesco Suriano  and Bellorini, Hoade, and Bagatti, Treatise on the Holy Land, where, for example, the names were mostly modernised. While most quotes are readily trustworthy in the translation, important passages containing dates and given names will consequently be quoted as they appear in the Perugia manuscript, based on my own transcription which has in turn been compared to Caria’s critical edition. A version of the Suriano text was also published as the so-called ‘Iter S’ of Crawford,

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Ethiopian Itineraries circa 1400–1524: Including Those Collected by Alessandro Zorzi at Venice in the Years 1519–24. 109. Compare BAP, Ms. 1106, fols. 41v–42r; transl. in Bellorini, Hoade, and Bagatti, Treatise on the Holy Land, 92–93. 110. Loiseau, ‘Chrétiens d’Égypte, Musulmans d’Éthiopie. Protection Des Communautés et Relations Diplomatiques Entre Le Sultanat Mamelouk et Le Royaume Salomonien (ca 1270–1516)’, 37. 111. As the above account of Georges Lengherand indicates. 112. BAP, Ms. 1106, fols. 41v; transl. in Bellorini, Hoade, and Bagatti, Treatise on the Holy Land, 93. 113. ‘[Et] nel t[em]po del guardianato del vener[ando] p[ad]re Ioh[ann]e fr[at]e Thomacello da Napoli, nelli a[n]ni del Signo[r]e 1480 forono ma[n]dati doi fr[at]i como nu[n]ti della Sede App[osto]lica al ma[n]gno i[m]peratore prete Ia[n]ne nella Ethiopia, p[er] nome [a] chiamati fr[at]i Ioh[ann]e de Calabria [et] fr[at]e Fra[n]cesco Cathalano, vale[n]te theologo.’ BAP, Ms. 1106, fols. 41v–42r; ed. in Caria, ‘Il Tratatello Delle Indulgentie de Terra Sancta Secondo Il Ms. 1106 Della Biblioteca Augusta Di Perugia. Edizione e Note Linguistiche’, 154,  transl. in Bellorini, Hoade, and Bagatti, Treatise on the Holy Land, 93. 114. Bellorini, Hoade, and Bagatti, Treatise on the Holy Land, 93. 115. ‘noy ne pa[r]timo dal Cayro de genaio 1481 [et] caminano co[n] barcha p[er] lo Nilo giorni 30.’ BAP, Ms. 1106, fol. 44v, ed. in Caria, ‘Il Tratatello Delle Indulgentie de Terra Sancta Secondo Il Ms. 1106 Della Biblioteca Augusta Di Perugia. Edizione e Note Linguistiche’, 162, transl. in Bellorini, Hoade, and Bagatti, Treatise on the Holy Land, 97. 116. ‘Nelli a[n]ni del Signo[r]e 1483, a dì xxvii de dice[m]bre, ve[n]ne a mo[n]te Syon lo seculare ch[e] a[n]nò i[n] co[m]pagnia delli dicti fr[at]i, chiamato p[er] nome Baptista da Imola, [et] portò l[itte]re delli dicti.’ BAP, Ms. 1106, fol. 42r, ed in Caria, ‘Il Tratatello Delle Indulgentie de Terra Sancta Secondo Il Ms. 1106 Della Biblioteca Augusta Di Perugia. Edizione e Note Linguistiche’, 155, transl. in Bellorini, Hoade, and Bagatti, Treatise on the Holy Land, 93. Crucially, there is no evidence that this Baptista had come from Rome to Cairo in early 1482 to join the brothers, as is presumed in Salvadore and Fiaccadori, ‘Brocchi, Giovanni Battista’, 285; Salvadore, The African Prester John and the Birth of Ethiopian-European Relations, 1402–1555, 70. 117. ‘lo adima[n]day i[n] qua[n]to te[m]po era ritornato: me dissi co[n]tinovo havere caminato undece mese.’ BAP, Ms. 1106, fol. 42r, ed. in Golubovich, Il Trattato Di Terra Santa e Dell’Oriente de Frate Francesco Suriano, 84; Caria, ‘Il Tratatello Delle Indulgentie de Terra Sancta  Secondo Il Ms. 1106 Della Biblioteca Augusta Di Perugia. Edizione e Note Linguistiche’, 161, transl. in Bellorini, Hoade, and Bagatti, Treatise on the Holy Land, 97.

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118. ‘i[n] le quale scrivevano ess[ere] octo mese passati ch[e] erano arivati allo loco dove habitava la corte reale, [et] i[n]fino a quelli giorni no[n] havevano possuto havere haudie[n]tia, [et] q[ue]sto p[er] esse[re] morto lo re, [et] succoesso i[n] suo no[m]e lo figliolo chiamato Alexandro, de hetà de a[n]ni xii, [et] p[er] ess[ere] go ve[r]nato da alcuni ch[e] no[n] li piace [b] tale audie[n]tia, p[er]tanto stavano no[n] tropo co[n]te[n]ti vede[n]do [et] cognosce[n]do ch[e] lo demonio i[m]pediva ta[n]to bene, [et] q[uod] peius e[st], se credevano ch[e] al postucto lo loro desiderio seria defraudato.’ BAP, Ms. 1106, fol. 42r, ed. in Caria, ‘Il Tratatello Delle Indulgentie de Terra Sancta Secondo Il Ms. 1106 Della Biblioteca Augusta Di Perugia. Edizione e Note Linguistiche’, 155. ‘Alexandro’ is the equivalent version of the Ethiopian name Ǝskǝndǝr; his stated age is roughly correct: the nǝgus ́ would have been just about to turn 13 when Baptista left Ethiopia in 1483. 119. Chernetsov, ‘Ǝskǝndǝr’; for Ǝskǝndǝr’s royal chronicle; see Jules Perruchon, ‘Histoire d’Eskender, d’ʾAmda Seyon II et de Nâʾod, Rois d’Éthiopie’, Journal Asiatique 9, no. 3 (1894): 319–66. 120. Which included ras bitwäddäd ʿAmdä Mikaʾel, his mother Romna and ʿaqqabe säʿat Täsfa Giyorgis. 121. BAP, Ms. 1106, fol. 42r, ed in Caria, ‘Il Tratatello Delle Indulgentie de Terra Sancta Secondo Il Ms. 1106 Della Biblioteca Augusta Di Perugia. Edizione e Note Linguistiche’, 155, transl. in Bellorini, Hoade, and Bagatti, Treatise on the Holy Land, 93. 122. Compare BAP, Ms. 1106, fols. 44v–46r; Golubovich, Il Trattato Di Terra Santa e Dell’Oriente de Frate Francesco Suriano, 84–87; Bellorini, Hoade, and Bagatti, Treatise on the Holy Land, 97–100; Caria, ‘Il Tratatello Delle Indulgentie de Terra Sancta Secondo Il Ms. 1106 Della Biblioteca Augusta Di Perugia. Edizione e Note Linguistiche’, 162–67. 123. See BAP, Ms. 1106, fols. 45v–46r; Bellorini, Hoade, and Bagatti, Treatise on the Holy Land, 99. 124. That is, Baptista says that ‘men and women are naked from the navel upwards and are bare-footed’; we know from other late-fifteenth- and early-­ sixteenth-­ century accounts that this indicates lower orders of common folk and not the silk-draped, richly costumed gentry, nobles and even ecclesiastics of the country. Compare Beckingham and Huntingford, The Prester John of the Indies; Richard Stephen 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: Hakluyt Society, 1967). Also see Michael Gervers, ‘Clothing’, in EAe 1 (2003), 757–61. 125. ‘Data nella cità s[an]c[t]a de Ier[usa]l[em], i[n] mo[n]te Syon, nel Sac[ro] Cenaculo de [Christo], a dì xviii di genaro M[ille] cccc lxxxiiij.’

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BAP as Ms. 1106, fol. 44r. The English edition provides the date 18 January 1483: Bellorini, Hoade, and Bagatti, Treatise on the Holy Land, 96. However, the Perugia manuscript clearly reads 1484. 126. Head of all Franciscans in the Holy Land, he held office from 1480/1481 to at least 1485; see Golubovich, Il Trattato Di Terra Santa e Dell’Oriente de Frate Francesco Suriano, XXXIV–XXXVIII; Wadding states that he was elected to the office in May 1481, Wadding, Annales Minorum Seu Trium Ordinum a S.  Francisco Institutorum, Vol. 14. Also compare Eck, The Holy Land in Observant Franciscan Texts (c. 1480–1650), 21. 127. Compare BAP, Ms. 1106, fols. 42v–44r; Bellorini, Hoade, and Bagatti, Treatise on the Holy Land, 95–96. 128. ‘chiamato Alexandro’, ‘nome de Alexa[n]dro’; compare BAP, Ms. 1106, fols. 42v, 43v. 129. Elsewhere in the Treatise, Ǝskǝndǝr’s age is stated as 12 years of age. 130. BAP, Ms. 1106, fol. 43r–43v, ed in Golubovich, Il Trattato Di Terra Santa e Dell’Oriente de Frate Francesco Suriano, 81–82; Caria, ‘Il Tratatello Delle Indulgentie de Terra Sancta Secondo Il Ms. 1106 Della Biblioteca Augusta Di Perugia. Edizione e Note Linguistiche’, 158–60, transl. in Bellorini, Hoade, and Bagatti, Treatise on the Holy Land, 94–95. 131. Bellorini, Hoade, and Bagatti, Treatise on the Holy Land, 96. 132. ‘[Et] assente[n]do alle d[i]c[t]e prege ritornò i[n]sieme co[n] seculare, p[er] li quali lo p[ad]re Gua[r]diano de mo[n]te Syon dictò una ep[istol]a al d[i]c[t]o re [et] io sc[ri]ve[n]dola co[n] so[m]ma dilige[n]tia. Fo p[er] lo d[i]c[t]o Bap[tista] da Imola mandata.’ BAP, Ms. 1106, fol. 42v, Golubovich, Il Trattato Di Terra Santa e Dell’Oriente de Frate Francesco Suriano, 80; Caria, ‘Il Tratatello Delle Indulgentie de Terra Sancta  Secondo Il Ms. 1106 Della Biblioteca Augusta Di Perugia. Edizione e Note Linguistiche’, 156, transl. in Bellorini, Hoade, and Bagatti, Treatise on the Holy Land, 94. 133. Wadding, Annales Minorum Seu Trium Ordinum a S.  Francisco Institutorum, Vol. 14, 243. 134. Qäsä gäbäz Täklä Haymanot, ‘Chronicle of Ethiopia’, ed. and transl. in Sergew Hable Selassie, ‘The Ge’ez Letters of Queen Eleni and Libne Dingil to John, King of Portugal’, 548–49. This chronicle was compiled from copies of an eclectic mix of significantly earlier manuscripts by a cleric in Aksum in the early twentieth century; the text is judged as reliable by both Sergew Hable Selassie and Merid Wolde Aregay  in the above-named article. 135. Cf., for example, Ghinzoni, ‘Un’ambasciata Del Prete Gianni a Roma Nel 1481’; Teodosio Somigli, Etiopia Francescana Nei Documenti Dei Secoli XVII e XVIII (Florence: Quaracchi, 1928); Renato Lefèvre, ‘G.B. Brocchi Da Imola Diplomatico Pontificio e Viaggiatore in Etiopia Nel ’400’, Bollettino Della Societa Geografica Italiana 4 (1939): 639–59; Renato

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Lefèvre, ‘Cronaca Inedita Di Un’ambasciata Etiopica a Sisto IV’, Roma 10/11 (1940): 360–69; Renato Lefèvre, ‘Riflessi Etiopici Nella Cultura Europea Del Medioevo e Del Rinascimento—Parte Seconda’, Annali Lateranensi 9 (1945): 331–444; Lefèvre, ‘Documenti Pontifici Sui Rapporti Con L’Etiopia Nei Secoli XV e XVI’; Crawford, Ethiopian Itineraries circa 1400–1524: Including Those Collected by Alessandro Zorzi at Venice in the Years 1519–24, 20; Lefèvre, ‘Richerche Sull’imolese G.B. De Brocchi, Viaggiatore in Ethiopia e Curiale Pontificio’; Taddesse Tamrat, Church and State in Ethiopia, 1270–1527, 290–91; Munro-Hay, Ethiopia Unveiled: Interaction Between Two Worlds, 150–54; Gianfranco Fiaccadori, ‘Italy, Relations With’, in EAe 3 (2007), 236–39; Gianfranco Fiaccadori, ‘L’Etiopia, Venezia e l’Europa’, in Nigra Sum Sed Formosa. Sacro e Bellezza Dell’Etiopia Cristiana. Ca’ Foscari Esposizioni 13 Marzo–10 Maggio 2009, eds. Giuseppe Barbieri and Gianfranco Fiaccadori (Vincenza: Terra ferma, 2009), 27–48; Gianfranco Fiaccadori, ‘Santo Stefani Dei Mori’, in EAe 4 (2010), 528–32; Fiaccadori, ‘A Marginal Note to “Four Sistine Ethiopians?”’; Weber, ‘Vrais et Faux Éthiopiens Au XVe Siècle  En Occident? Du Bon Usage Des Connexions’, 114–17; Andrew Kurt, ‘The Search for Prester John, a Projected Crusade and the Eroding Prestige of Ethiopian Kings, c.1200–c.1540’, Journal of Medieval History 39, no. 3 (2013): 313; Weber, ‘Gli Etiopi a Roma Nel Quattrocento : Ambasciatori Politici, Negoziatori Religiosi o Pellegrini?’; Salvadore and Fiaccadori, ‘Brocchi, Giovanni Battista’; Kelly, ‘The Curious Case of Ethiopic Chaldean: Fraud, Philology and Cultural (Mis) Understandings in European Conceptions of Ethiopia’; Salvadore, The African Prester John and the Birth of Ethiopian-European Relations, 1402–1555, 68–75, 136–37, 148, 206; Matteo Salvadore, ‘Encounters Between Ethiopia and Europe, 1400–1660’, in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). 136. None of the sources provide any evidence that Brochus left Italy in 1482 to travel from Italy to Cairo and then on to Ethiopia, as is postulated in Salvadore and Fiaccadori, ‘Brocchi, Giovanni Battista’, 285; Salvadore, The African Prester John and the Birth of Ethiopian-European Relations, 1402–1555, 70. The source texts instead explicitly state that Baptista of Imola left Cairo in January 1481 and that he only arrived back in Jerusalem in December 1483. 137. In late medieval Italy, a small set of boys’ names enjoyed wide popularity: about 11 percent of all fifteenth-century Italian men were called the local form of John or ‘Johannes’—‘Giovanni’, this number doubles to more than 20 percent if familiar forms are also taken into account. Indeed, local forms of ‘John’ constituted by far the most popular name, eclipsing the

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next most popular choice by a factor of two, compare Sara L. Uckelman et al., ‘John’, in The Dictionary of Medieval Names from European Sources, ed. Sara L. Uckelman, 2019; Sara L. Friedemann, ‘Names from Arezzo, Italy, 1386–1528’, Medieval Names Archive, 2003; Julia Smith, ‘Names in 15th-Century Florence and Her Dominions: The Condado’, Medieval Names Archive, 2008; Julia Smith, ‘A Frequency List of All Men’s Given Names from the Condado Section of the Florence Catasto of 1427’, Medieval Names Archive, 2008. The second most popular names were Ant(h)onius (9 percent), followed by Petrus (6 percent), which are again names that have accompanied us throughout this book. It is thus not surprising that one of the Franciscans travelling to Ethiopia in the early 1480s was a Calabrese friar named Iohanne—statistically, he had a 1:5 chance of carrying that name. Moreover, Baptista or Battista changed from being part of the composite form ‘Johanne Baptista’ around 1400 to the distinct, independent form of ‘Baptista’ around 1400 in Italy; see Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, ‘Children’s First-Names in Italy during the Late Middle Ages’, The Medieval History Journal 2, no. 1 (1999): 37–54; also compare the lists of men identified only as ‘Battista’ in Eleni Sakellariou, Southern Italy in the Late Middle Ages: Demographic, Institutional and Economic Change in the Kingdom of Naples, c. 1440–1530 (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2012), 454–56 and the entry for ‘Battista/ Baptista’ in Berend Wispelwey, Biographical Index of the Middle Ages (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2010), 114–15 and Sara L. Uckelman et al., ‘Baptist’, in The Dictionary of Medieval Names from European Sources, ed. Sara L. Uckelman, 2019. 138. Compare Carusi, Il Diario Romano Di Jacopo Gherardi Da Volterra, 79; Lefèvre, ‘Richerche Sull’imolese G.B. De Brocchi, Viaggiatore in Ethiopia e Curiale Pontificio’, 111, 108. 139. Compare the ‘chronology of documents’ in Lefèvre, ‘Richerche Sull’imolese G.B.  De Brocchi, Viaggiatore in Ethiopia e Curiale Pontificio’, 111–18. All documents refer to him by the composite form: ‘Giovanni Battista da Imola’, ‘Johanni Baptiste de Brochis de Imola’, ‘Ioannes Baptista da Imola’, or ‘Giovanni Battista Brocco, imolese’. 140. Compare BAP, Ms. 1106, on the following folios: fol. 42r: ‘chiamato per nomine Baptista da Imola’; fol. 42v: ‘dicto Bapt[ist]a da Imola’; fol. 44v: ‘dicto Baptista’; 46r: ‘Bapt[ist]a di Imola’. The same can be found in the edition and English translation of the text Golubovich, Il Trattato Di Terra Santa e Dell’Oriente de Frate Francesco Suriano; Bellorini, Hoade, and Bagatti, Treatise on the Holy Land. 141. Baptista is identified as a ‘carrier of alms’ and ‘carrier of letters’; friar Iohanne of Calabria is the envoy; see Bellorini, Hoade, and Bagatti, Treatise on the Holy Land, 93–95.

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142. BAP, Ms. 1106, fol. 44v; Bellorini, Hoade, and Bagatti, Treatise on the Holy Land, 97; Golubovich, Il Trattato Di Terra Santa e Dell’Oriente de Frate Francesco Suriano, 84. 143. This is asserted in a question posed by the dialectical Sister in Suriano’s Treatise, addressing why a friar instead of a legate a latere was dispatched to Ethiopia; see Bellorini, Hoade, and Bagatti, Treatise on the Holy Land, 96. 144. See BAP, Ms. 1106, fol. 46r for the self-identification where he lists his name as among those detained at the Solomonic court; transl. in Bellorini, Hoade, and Bagatti, Treatise on the Holy Land, 99. 145. Compare Lefèvre, ‘Richerche Sull’imolese G.B. De Brocchi, Viaggiatore in Ethiopia e Curiale Pontificio’, 109. 146. Indeed, the identification of the two men as being one and the same was first established by Renato Lefèvre; see Lefèvre, ‘Riflessi Etiopici Nella Cultura Europea Del Medioevo e Del Rinascimento—Parte Seconda’, 409–11; Lefèvre, ‘Richerche Sull’imolese G.B. De Brocchi, Viaggiatore in Ethiopia e Curiale Pontificio’, 70. 147. Brochus’ testimony reads like a second-hand account instead of that of someone who had repeatedly visited the highland realm himself; he gives rather cursory and occasionally even false information on Ethiopia, but describes Ǝntọ nǝs’ mission in Rome in 1481–1482, to which he was privy, in great detail. 148. ‘Johannes Baptista Brocchus imolensis.’ BAV, Vat. Lat. 3966, f. 43v, ed. in Lefèvre, ‘Documenti Pontifici Sui Rapporti Con L’Etiopia Nei Secoli XV e XVI’, 26. 149. BAV, Vat. Et. 20, see  Lefèvre, ‘Cronaca Inedita Di Un’ambasciata Etiopica a Sisto IV’, plate LIV. 150. Loiseau, ‘The Ḥ at ̣ı ̄ and the Sultan. Letters and Embassies from Abyssinia to the Mamluk Court’, 650. 151. Sollweck, Fratris Pauli Waltheri Guglingensis Itinerarium, 40. 152. That is, the accounts of the Milanese ambassadors in Rome and the diarist Jacopo Gherardi; see Lefèvre, ‘Richerche Sull’imolese G.B. De Brocchi, Viaggiatore in Ethiopia e Curiale Pontificio’, 110 and Carusi, Il Diario Romano Di Jacopo Gherardi, 79 as well as Raineri, Lettere Tra i Pontefici Romani e i Principi Etiopici (Secoli XII–XX), 43. Sixtus’ repeated reference to a ‘letter’ written at the behest of the nǝgus ́ might indicate that ʿAmdä Mikaʾel had composed a missive in Jerusalem; at the very least, these remarks refute Fiaccadori’s assessment that the Ethiopian embassy of 1481–1482 was made up of private persons in Jerusalem who held no official capacity; otherwise, just whose letter would have been delivered to Pope Sixtus IV; moreover, the ‘cousin’ clearly also does not refer to Ǝnṭonǝs, cf. Fiaccadori, ‘A Marginal Note to “Four Sistine Ethiopians?”’, 137–139.

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153. Seeing that they carried small, portable items that could have been a surplus of the mission to Cairo, that is, pearls, jasper and gold, matching gifts given to Mamlūk potentates; see Loiseau, ‘The Ḥ aṭı ̄ and the Sultan. Letters and Embassies from Abyssinia to the Mamluk Court’, 653. 154. Matteo Salvadore suggested that Ǝntọ nǝs did not know about the despatch of two future metropolitans from Egypt, causing him and his companions to enquire about a Latin cleric in Rome; cf. Salvadore, The African Prester John and the Birth of Ethiopian-European Relations, 1402–1555, 69. However, as we saw above, Ǝnṭonǝs’ mission was actually an offshoot of the Cairene embassy, and the Ethiopian community in Jerusalem would have been well-informed of these developments by the spring of 1481. 155. Compare Raineri, Lettere Tra i Pontefici Romani e i Principi Etiopici (Secoli XII–XX), 43. 156. See Sergew Hable Selassie, ‘The Ge’ez Letters of Queen Eleni and Libne Dingil to John, King of Portugal’; Taddesse Tamrat, ‘Problems of Royal Succession in Fifteenth-Century Ethiopia: A Presentation of the Documents’, in IV Congresso Internazionale Di Studi Etiopici, Roma 1972, ed. Enrico Cerulli (Rome: Accademia nazionale dei Lincei, 1974), 501–35. 157. The Gǝʿǝz source is very terse; yet it is interesting that the audience was apparently seen as favourable enough to cause dissatisfaction among the local Ethiopian clergy. 158. Compare Loiseau, ‘Chrétiens d’Égypte, Musulmans d’Éthiopie. Protection Des Communautés et Relations Diplomatiques Entre Le Sultanat Mamelouk et Le Royaume Salomonien (ca 1270–1516)’, 37. 159. See Marco Bonechi, ‘Four Sistine Ethiopians? The 1481 Ethiopian Embassy and the Frescoes of the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican’, Aethiopica 14 (2011): 121–135. 160. See Fiaccadori, ‘A Marginal Note to “Four Sistine Ethiopians?”’, 140–42. 161. See Lefèvre, ‘Documenti Pontifici Sui Rapporti Con L’Etiopia Nei Secoli XV e XVI’, 25–27. 162. See Malyn Newitt, A History of Portuguese Overseas Expansion, 1400–1668 (New York: Routledge, 2005). 163. Compare Malyn Newitt, The Portuguese in West Africa, 1415–1670. A Documentary History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1680 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Toby Green, The Rise of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade in Western Africa, 1300–1589 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Toby Green, A Fistful of Shells: West Africa from the Rise of the Slave Trade to the Age of Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019).

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164. Newitt, The Portuguese in West Africa, 1415–1670, 26, 32; Jorge Correia, ‘Building as Propaganda: A Palimpsest of Faith and Power in the Maghreb’, in Sacred Precincts. The Religious Architecture of Non-Muslim Communities Across the Islamic World, ed. Gharipour Mohammad (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 445; Christoph Strobel, The Global Atlantic: 1400 to 1900 (New York: Routledge, 2015), 22. This is especially well-attested for Henry the Navigator, 1394–1460, a proponent of maritime expansion and Portuguese engagement in Northern and North-Western Africa as well as king Afonso V of Portugal, 1432–1481, and king João II, 1455–1495. 165. See, for instance, Adam Knobler, Mythology and Diplomacy in the Age of Exploration (Leiden: Brill, 2017). 166. The men’s story is narrated in two different but essentially matching, near-contemporary Portuguese accounts: António Baião, ed., João de Barros. Primeira Década Da Ásia, Dos Feitos Que Os Portugueses Fizeram No Descobrimento Dos Mares e Terras Do Oriente (Coimbra: Imprensa da Universidade, 1932), 88–91 and Beckingham and Huntingford, The Prester John of the Indies, 369–76. 167. Beckingham and Huntingford, The Prester John of the Indies, 375; also see Michael Kleiner, ‘Covilhã, Pêro Da’, in EAe 1 (2003), 811–12. 168. Beckingham and Huntingford, The Prester John of the Indies, 375. 169. According to sixteenth-century Portuguese historian João de Barros, the nägäs ́t did not allow Covilhã to leave the Ethiopian highlands and forbade him to send word to his king about the success of the mission, Baião, João de Barros. Primeira Década Da Ásia, 90. 170. For his account, see Beckingham and Huntingford, The Prester John of the Indies, 369–76. 171. Ca. 1431–1522; she was born a Muslim princess of Hadiyya; at a young age, she converted to Christianity and married aṣe Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob. Childless, she managed to retain a uniquely high position at court after her husband’s death, acting as regent and co-ruler to several young nägäst.́ For more information on Ǝleni, see Sevir Chernetsov, ‘Ǝleni’, in EAe 2 (2005), 253–54. 172. ‘E logo no anno seguinte auendo puoco mais de noue meses que Pero de Couilhaa era partido, poer el rey ter em todalas partes de leuante intelligecias pera este negocio, enuiaralhe de Roma hu facerdote da terra do Preste: o qual auia nome Lucas Marcos, homem de que el rey ficou muy fatiffeito na pratica que teue com elle por dar boa razam das cousas.’ The whole story is narrated in de Barros, see  Baião, João de Barros. Primeira Década Da Ásia, 90–91. 173. Baião, João de Barros. Primeira Década Da Ásia, 90–91; it is impossible to verify whether the man was an Ethiopian to begin with, although his name has an Ethiopian equivalent: Luqas Marqos. Also see Luís Filipe Thomaz, ‘Portugal, Relations With’, in EAe 4 (2010), 180–81.

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174. Andreu Martínez d’Alòs-Moner, ‘Manoel I’, in EAe 3 (2007), 734–35: 734. Cates Baldridge, Prisoners of Prester John: The Portuguese Mission to Ethiopia in Search of the Mythical King, 1520–1526 (Jefferson: McFarland & Company, 2012), 44; Newitt, The Portuguese in West Africa, 1415–1670, 81. Jeremy Hespeler-Boultbee, providing no documentary evidence, states that Tristão da Cunha sent out three Portuguese legates from Malindi in March 1507. However, after an attempted overland travel to Ethiopia, the legates returned to the coast and set out for the Ethiopian court again in 1508 from Filuk near Cape Guardafui in Somalia; Jeremy Hespeler-­Boultbee, A Story in Stones: Portugal’s Influence on Culture and Architecture in the Highlands of Ethiopia 1493–1634 (British Columbia: CCB Publishing, 2006), 178. 175. Henry Thomas and Armando Cortesao, The Discovery of Abyssinia by the Portuguese in 1530. A Facsimile of the Relation Entitled Carta Das Novas Que Vieram a El Rey Nosso Senhor Do Descobrimento Do Preste Joham (Lisbon 1521) (London: British Museum, 1938), fol. B6r, transl. in Thomas and Cortesao, The Discovery of Abyssinia by the Portuguese in 1530, 90–91. It is translated to English as ‘supplies and men’; the Portuguese and a later Latin version are more specific, having ‘commeatum et milites’. See Damião de Góis, Legatio Magni Indorum Imperatoris Presbyteri Ioannis Ad Emanuelem Lusitaniae Regem, Anno Domini M.D. XIII.: Item de Indorum Fide, Ceremoniis &c., de Illorum Patriarcha, de Regno, Statu & Ordine Curiæ Presbyteri Ioannis per Matthæum (Antwerp: Graphaeus, 1532), 8. 176. He had been put on the Solomonic throne in August 1508 as a boy, for more information and a bibliography; see Kleiner, ‘Lǝbnä Dǝngǝl’; also see Chernetsov, ‘Ǝleni’, 253. 177. For an evaluation of the specific sources of this expectation, compare the next chapter and Marco Giardini, ‘The Quest for the Ethiopian Prester John and Its Eschatological Implications’, Medievalia 22 (2019): 55–87. 178. The term used in the Gǝʿǝz version of her letter is specifically mäḥammädawyan— መሐመዳውያን. 179. Ǝleni’s letter appears to have been originally written in both Gǝʿǝz and Portuguese; versions of it were printed in several contemporary sources. The oldest extant Portuguese version is part of the account Carta Das Novas Que Vieram a El Rei Nosso Senhor Do Descobrimento Do Preste João, printed in Lisbon in 1521. This booklet survived in very few copies, yet a facsimile and translation exists in Thomas and Cortesao, The Discovery of Abyssinia by the Portuguese in 1530; for the English version of Ǝleni’s Portuguese letter, see Thomas and Cortesao, The Discovery of Abyssinia by the Portuguese in 1530, 90–92. A Gǝʿǝz copy of the letter has survived in

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the ‘Chronicle of Ethiopia’ by qäsä gäbäz Täklä Haymanot, ed. and transl. in Sergew Hable Selassie, ‘The Ge’ez Letters of Queen Eleni and Libne Dingil to John, King of Portugal’, 554–58. For more background on the ‘Chronicle of Ethiopia’, see Sergew Hable Selassie, ‘The Ge’ez Letters of Queen Eleni and Libne Dingil to John, King of Portugal’, 565–66. In 1532, a Latin version of the Portuguese letter was also published; see Góis, Legatio Magni Indorum Imperatoris Presbyteri Ioannis Ad Emanuelem Lusitaniae Regem, A4r–5v. 180. Thomas and Cortesao, The Discovery of Abyssinia by the Portuguese in 1530, fol. B6r, transl. in Thomas and Cortesao, The Discovery of Abyssinia by the Portuguese in 1530, 91. 181. See Sergew Hable Selassie, ‘The Ge’ez Letters of Queen Eleni and Libne Dingil to John, King of Portugal’, 557. 182. Compare Thomas and Cortesao, The Discovery of Abyssinia by the Portuguese in 1530, fol. B6r, transl. in Thomas and Cortesao, The Discovery of Abyssinia by the Portuguese in 1530, 91; for the Gǝʿǝz version, compare Sergew Hable Selassie, ‘The Ge’ez Letters of Queen Eleni and Libne Dingil to John, King of Portugal’, 554, 556–57. 183. And specifically Mocha or al-Makha ̄—spelled Mäkka in the Gǝʿǝz letter—, back then a small city on the Yemeni side near the Bāb al-Mandab strait. 184. Compare Thomas and Cortesao, The Discovery of Abyssinia by the Portuguese in 1530, fol. B6r, transl. in Thomas and Cortesao, The Discovery of Abyssinia by the Portuguese in 1530, 91; Sergew Hable Selassie, ‘The Ge’ez Letters of Queen Eleni and Libne Dingil to John, King of Portugal’, 557. 185. Thomas and Cortesao, The Discovery of Abyssinia by the Portuguese in 1530, fol. B6r, transl. in Thomas and Cortesao, The Discovery of Abyssinia by the Portuguese in 1530, 91. The Ethiopian version runs as follows: ‘that they would fulfil the desire of their heart in a good way and send to flight and eliminate from the earth those infidel Mohammedans.’ 186. Thomas and Cortesao, The Discovery of Abyssinia by the Portuguese in 1530, fol. B6v, transl. in Thomas and Cortesao, The Discovery of Abyssinia by the Portuguese in 1530, 91–92; Sergew Hable Selassie, ‘The Ge’ez Letters of Queen Eleni and Libne Dingil to John, King of Portugal’, 555–58. 187. This is according to the Portuguese version of the letter, see Thomas and Cortesao, The Discovery of Abyssinia by the Portuguese in 1530, fol. B6r and Thomas and Cortesao, The Discovery of Abyssinia by the Portuguese in 1530, 91. The Gǝʿǝz version states that ‘these are the blessed days which were predicted before by Our Lord and His Holy Mother—[the days] when a king is to be born in the land of Iyoropa [Europe], and he will

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defeat and annihilate the infidels and the Mohammedans’; see Sergew Hable Selassie, ‘The Ge’ez Letters of Queen Eleni and Libne Dingil to John, King of Portugal’, 554, 556–57. The word for Muslims here is mäḥammädawyan, which appears to be a calque from a European language; (local) Muslims are usually referred to as tänbälat in medieval Ethiopian texts. 188. Thomas and Cortesao, The Discovery of Abyssinia by the Portuguese in 1530, fol. B6r, transl. in Thomas and Cortesao, The Discovery of Abyssinia by the Portuguese in 1530, 91. Scholars have stated that Pêro da Covilhã, himself an erstwhile Portuguese emissary, had advised Ǝleni to send her own ambassador to Portugal instead of relying on the two Portuguese; see Kleiner, ‘Covilhã, Pêro Da’, 812. 189. On the person of Mateus, see Leonardo Cohen, ‘Mateus’, in EAe 3 (2007), 866–67. 190. Thomas and Cortesao, The Discovery of Abyssinia by the Portuguese in 1530, fol. B6v, transl. in Thomas and Cortesao, The Discovery of Abyssinia by the Portuguese in 1530, 91–92; Sergew Hable Selassie, ‘The Ge’ez Letters of Queen Eleni and Libne Dingil to John, King of Portugal’, 558. 191. Thomas and Cortesao, The Discovery of Abyssinia by the Portuguese in 1530, fol. xi. 192. Cohen, ‘Mateus’, 866; similarly put in Salvadore, The African Prester John and the Birth of Ethiopian-European Relations, 1402–1555, 109. 193. Herman, ‘Towards a History of Women in Medieval Ethiopia’, 391. 194. Kurt, ‘The Search for Prester John, a Projected Crusade and the Eroding Prestige of Ethiopian Kings, c.1200–c.1540’, 317. 195. Salvadore, The African Prester John and the Birth of Ethiopian-European Relations, 1402–1555, 109. 196. Compare Thomas and Cortesao, The Discovery of Abyssinia by the Portuguese in 1530, fol. B6r, transl. in Thomas and Cortesao, The Discovery of Abyssinia by the Portuguese in 1530, 90–91, Góis, Legatio Magni Indorum Imperatoris Presbyteri Ioannis Ad Emanuelem Lusitaniae Regem, 8 and Sergew Hable Selassie, ‘The Ge’ez Letters of Queen Eleni and Libne Dingil to John, King of Portugal’, 556–57. 197. In 1517, Cairo would fall to the Ottomans; for Mamlūk-Ottoman encounters and cooperation vis-à-vis the Portuguese in the Red Sea and Indian Ocean, see Palmira Brummett, Ottoman Seapower and Levantine Diplomac in the Age of Discovery (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), 51–122; Giancarlo Casale, The Ottoman Age of Exploration (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 25–32. 198. Brummett, Ottoman Seapower and Levantine Diplomac in the Age of Discovery, 35–36. 199. Brummett, Ottoman Seapower and Levantine Diplomac in the Age of Discovery, 35, 115; Casale, The Ottoman Age of Exploration, 27.

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200. The Portuguese established settlements and fortresses from Sofala, Kilwa and Mombasa to Socotra, Hormuz, Goa and Cochin in short succession in the first decade of the sixteenth century; see Michael N. Pearson, The Indian Ocean (London and New  York: Routledge, 2003), 113–48; Newitt, A History of Portuguese Overseas Expansion, 1400–1668, 58–91; Philippe Beaujard, ed., ‘The Portuguese in the Indian Ocean’, in The Worlds of the Indian Ocean: A Global History: Volume 2: From the Seventh Century to the Fifteenth Century CE, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 602–16 201. Literally ‘ruler of the sea’, title and office of the governor of the Eritrean coastal region; see Sevir Chernetsov, ‘Baḥǝr nägaš’, in EAe 1 (2003), 444. 202. Compare, for example, the map of cạ̈̌ wa regiments of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in Deresse Ayenachew, ‘Territorial Expansion and Administrative Evolution under the “Solomonic” Dynasty’, 79. 203. Particularly those of Ifat, which had once been an independent Muslim principality; see Deresse Ayenachew, ‘Territorial Expansion and Administrative Evolution under the “Solomonic” Dynasty’, 76–77. 204. An important city on the Red Sea coast under the rulership of the Sultanate of ʿAdal. 205. Maḥfūẓ is sometimes read as having engaged with the Christian kingdom without the knowledge or consent of the ʿAdali Sultan; see Ewald Wagner, ‘Maḥfūẓ b. Muḥammad’, in EAe 3 (2007); Amélie Chekroun and Bertrand Hirsch, ‘The Sultanates of Medieval Ethiopia’, in A Companion to Medieval Ethiopia and Eritrea, ed. Samantha Kelly (Leiden: Brill, 2020), 104–5; Alessandro Gori, ‘Islamic Cultural Traditions of Medieval Ethiopia and Eritrea’, in A Companion to Medieval Ethiopia and Eritrea, ed. Samantha Kelly (Leiden: Brill, 2020), 142–61. In 1513 and 1517, the Portuguese attacked Zaylaʿ, in turn. 206. Wagner, ‘Maḥfūẓ b. Muḥammad’; Ewald Wagner, ‘Muḥammad b. Aẓharaddı ̄n’, in EAe 3 (2007), 1051. 207. This might explain the strange terminology used in the Gǝʿǝz version of the letter, where the anti-Muslim vitriol is primarily directed at the ‘infidel Mohammedans’ of Məsr—Egypt, who were also still governing the Holy Land in the early sixteenth century. 208. See Cohen, ‘Mateus’, 866. 209. Beckingham and Huntingford, The Prester John of the Indies, 52, note 2. 210. Manuel I, King of Portugal: Letter to Pope Leo X dated June 6, 1513, subsequently printed as Epistola de Victoriis Habitis in India & Malacha, Rome, August 9, 1513; again published in Novus Orbis Regionum ac Insularum Veteribus Incognitarum, Basel March 1532; transl. in Francis M. Rogers, The Quest for Eastern Christians: Travels and Rumor in the

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Age of Discovery (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1962), 127–28. 211. Aida Fernanda Dias, ‘Um Presente Régio’, Humanitas 47, no. 2 (1995): 686. 212. Damião de Góis, also Damiao de Goes, 1502–1574, Portuguese humanist philosopher. 213. Góis, Legatio Magni Indorum Imperatoris Presbyteri Ioannis Ad Emanuelem Lusitaniae Regem, A2r–3r. 214. The letter was addressed to Johannes Magnus, 1488–1544, Swedish theologian and historian, last Catholic archbishop in Uppsala. Its text, drawing from both Góis’ recollection as well as a wide variety of court documents and letters available to him at the Portuguese court, was immediately published by a Flemish editor in Antwerp in 1532 without the author’s authorisation as Legatio magni Indorum Imperatoris Presbyteri Ioannis, ad Emanuelem Lusitaniae Regem, Anno Domini M.D.XIII; within one year, the Englishman John More—son of Thomas More—would translate the account into English as The legacye or embassate of the great emperour of Inde prester Iohn, providing a view on the contemporary European interest in Ethiopian matters  among intellectual elites. Despite the fact that most information and ‘facts’ on the Ethiopians presented by Góis were outdated by almost two decades at this point, the publications enjoyed a wide circulation. 215. Góis, Legatio Magni Indorum Imperatoris Presbyteri Ioannis Ad Emanuelem Lusitaniae Regem, A4r. 216. Góis, Legatio Magni Indorum Imperatoris Presbyteri Ioannis Ad Emanuelem Lusitaniae Regem, A2v–3v. 217. The passage is quoted in Salvadore, The African Prester John and the Birth of Ethiopian-European Relations, 1402–1555, 113. It is unclear whether this relic was possibly a part of the very same piece of the True Cross that had arrived in Ethiopia 100 years before, during the reign of aṣe Dawit in 1403. 218. Compare, for example, Rerum & regionum Indicarum per Serenissimum Emanuelem Portugallie regem Partarum Narratio Verissima, Francesco Chalderia, Rome, June 21, 1514; transl. in Rogers, The Quest for Eastern Christians: Travels and Rumor in the Age of Discovery, 131. 219. The main list of gifts received for shipment is initially dated 10 February 1515; see TTNA, Corpo Cronológico, 1a, Maço 17, Doc. 75. The entries encompass a total of 25 pages, 20 of them containing a list of items in a densely written, sloppy script; a transcription of the document is contained in Dias, ‘Um Presente Régio’.

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220. Compare Dias, ‘Um Presente Régio’, 689. For a study of the books sent to Ethiopia, see David Hook, ‘A Note on the Books Sent to Prester John in 1515 by King Manuel I’, Studia 36 (1973): 303–15. 221. Compare Dias, ‘Um Presente Régio’, 688–95. 222. Dias, ‘Um Presente Régio’, 689–90. 223. Compare the translation of the 1513 Epistola de Victoriis Habitis in India & Malacha in Rogers, The Quest for Eastern Christians: Travels and Rumor in the Age of Discovery, 127–28. 224. Compare Dias, ‘Um Presente Régio’. 225. Given as ‘dous pimtores’, ‘dous tanjedores’, ‘huu imprimidor’; see Dias, ‘Um Presente Régio’, 690. 226. Beckingham and Huntingford, The Prester John of the Indies, 51, note 4. 227. Thomas and Cortesao, The Discovery of Abyssinia by the Portuguese in 1530, fol. A2r; transl. in Thomas and Cortesao, The Discovery of Abyssinia by the Portuguese in 1530, 63–64. 228. He died on Kamarān, an island in the Red Sea; see Beckingham and Huntingford, The Prester John of the Indies, 39. A note in Francisco Alvares’ account mentions that he had extensively described the aborted attempts to enter Ethiopia prior to finally landing there in 1520; however, this part of his manuscript was omitted from publication in 1540 and has not come down to us. 229. On Alvares, see Michael Kleiner, ‘Alvares, Francisco’, in EAe 1 (2003), 213–215. For a reprint of his account, see Alvares, Verdadeira Informação Das Terras Do Preste João Das Indias (Lisbon: Imprensa Nacional, 1889); the authoritative English translation is Beckingham and Huntingford, The Prester John of the Indies. 230. Even the Carta das Novas account, written from a Portuguese perspective, concedes that Mateus had suffered maltreatment by the Portuguese in the late 1510s, as he was taken for a spy or impostor. Mateus’ warnings about the Portuguese arbitrarily attacking harbours along the way to Ethiopia and landing at certain ports, which proved dangerous, were mistaken for fear and cowardliness—until a number of Portuguese were killed in the process, proving the soundness of Mateus’ misgivings; see Thomas and Cortesao, The Discovery of Abyssinia by the Portuguese in 1530, fol. A3r; transl. in Thomas and Cortesao, The Discovery of Abyssinia by the Portuguese in 1530, 66; also Beckingham and Huntingford, The Prester John of the Indies, 52, note 2. 231. While the total number of members of the embassy stays vague throughout Alvares’ account, at least 17 men are listed by name, compare Beckingham and Huntingford, The Prester John of the Indies, 61–62. 232. 9 April 1520; Beckingham and Huntingford, The Prester John of the Indies, 53–54.

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233. See Chernetsov, ‘Baḥǝr nägaš’. 234. Beckingham and Huntingford, The Prester John of the Indies, 64. 235. Thomas and Cortesao, The Discovery of Abyssinia by the Portuguese in 1530, fol. A1v; transl. in Thomas and Cortesao, The Discovery of Abyssinia by the Portuguese in 1530, 63. This booklet, ‘printed by command of His Highness [Manuel I] with Privilege’, presents the events of 1520 as an outstanding achievement on part of the Portuguese; while the Portuguese embassy of 1520 was the biggest legation to be sent from Latin Europe to Ethiopia to this point, it was far from the first attempt, as we have seen throughout this book. 236. Beckingham and Huntingford, The Prester John of the Indies, 72–73; Däbrä Bizän is located near the town of Näfasit in modern-day Eritrea, about 50 miles inland from the Red Sea coast; see Gianfrancesco Lusini, ‘Däbrä Bizän’, in EAe 2 (2005), 15–17. 237. Kleiner, ‘Lǝbnä Dǝngǝl’, 535. 238. Beckingham and Huntingford, The Prester John of the Indies, 283. 239. Beckingham and Huntingford, The Prester John of the Indies, 267–70, 281–89. 240. They are listed in Thomas and Cortesao, fol. B4r; Beckingham and Huntingford, The Prester John of the Indies, 63–64; also see Dias, ‘Um Presente Régio’, 712. 241. Francisco Alvares states that many were ‘wrongly dispersed in Coachim [Sawākin] by Lopo Soares’; see Beckingham and Huntingford, The Prester John of the Indies, 51. 242. Beckingham and Huntingford, The Prester John of the Indies, 316; asẹ Lǝbnä Dǝngǝl scolded the Portuguese delegates for their behaviour; see Beckingham and Huntingford, The Prester John of the Indies, 317–18. 243. Described in substantial detail in Alvares’ account. 244. The nǝgus ́ had requested some members of the Portuguese delegation, specifically its painter and barber, to stay at his court. 245. Ethiopian ambassador, detained in Portugal from 1527–1533, given as ‘Zagazabo’ in a number of Portuguese documents. In 1540, Damião de Góis published his account on the Ethiopian religious beliefs as Fides, Religio Moresque Aethiopium sub Imperio Preciosi Joannis, first printed in Louvain in 1540. 246. John III, also known as João III or ‘the Pious’, 1502–1557. 247. Beckingham and Huntingford, The Prester John of the Indies, 493–94. 248. Most of the chronicles state that nothing of significance had occurred until the nineteenth year of Lǝbnä Dǝngǝl’s reign, equivalent to the end of 1526 and the beginning of the incursions of the ʿAdali forces; see Franz Amadeus Dombrowski, Ṭ a ̄na ̄see 106: Eine Chronik Der Herrscher Äthiopiens (Wiesbaden: F.  Steiner, 1983), 157–59. One chronicle

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collapses two different Portuguese missions into one, stating that during the reign of as ̣e Lǝbnä Dǝngǝl ‘came the men of Rome and Franks together with the captain, their leader, to kill Gran [Imam ̄ Aḥmad b. Ibrāhı ̄m al-Ġ āzı ̄, leader of the ʿAdali army against Solomonic Ethiopia] because they had entered into a covenant and an oath to the King Gälawdewos [as ̣e Lǝbnä Dǝngǝl’s son] which would give them the third part of Ethiopia.’ See Francesco Béguinot, La Cronaca Abbreviata d’Abissinia : Nuova Versione Dall’Etiopico e Commento (Rome: Tipografia della Casa Edit. Italiana, 1901), 94–95. 249. Beckingham and Huntingford, The Prester John of the Indies, 495–506 and the ‘Chronicle of Ethiopia’ by qäsä gäbäz Täklä Haymanot, ed. in Sergew Hable Selassie, ‘The Ge’ez Letters of Queen Eleni and Libne Dingil to John, King of Portugal’, 558–60. 250. Beckingham and Huntingford, The Prester John of the Indies, 501. 251. Beckingham and Huntingford, The Prester John of the Indies, 498. 252. That is, the Sultanate of ʿAdal. 253. While conflicts did arise, most were comparatively short-lived; see Haggai Erlich and Israel Gershoni, The Nile: Histories, Cultures, Myths (Boulder, Colorado: Lynne Rienner, 1999); Haggai Erlich and Gianfranco Fiaccadori, ‘Egypt, Relations with. Cultural and Political Relations in Early Times’, in EAe 2 (2005), 240–41; Krebs, ‘Crusading Threats? Ethiopian-Egyptian Relations in the 1440s’; Haggai Erlich, ‘Egypt, Relations with. Modern Egyptian-Ethiopian Relations’, in EAe 2 (2005), 241–43. 254. Compare the description in Alvares, where the attack is narrated as taking place on the Red Sea coast section close to Egypt, and thus the hitherto comparatively safe and well-established trade- and pilgrimage route; see Beckingham and Huntingford, The Prester John of the Indies, 449–52. 255. Beckingham and Huntingford, The Prester John of the Indies, 501. 256. Beckingham and Huntingford, The Prester John of the Indies, 505. 257. Cf. the emphasis on gunsmiths and other weapon-makers in Kurt, ‘The Search for Prester John, a Projected Crusade and the Eroding Prestige of Ethiopian Kings, c.1200–c.1540’, 318. 258. Cf. Salvadore, The African Prester John and the Birth of Ethiopian-­ European Relations, 1402–1555, 146. 259. Cf. Richard Pankhurst, ‘Europe, Relations With’, in EAe 2 (2005), 451–54: 451. 260. Cf. Salvadore, The African Prester John and the Birth of Ethiopian-­ European Relations, 1402–1555, 146. 261. Sergew Hable Selassie, ‘The Ge’ez Letters of Queen Eleni and Libne Dingil to John, King of Portugal’.

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262. Qäsä gäbäz Täklä Haymanot, ‘Chronicle of Ethiopia’, ed. in Sergew Hable Selassie, ‘The Ge’ez Letters of Queen Eleni and Libne Dingil to John, King of Portugal’, 564. 263. ሰአለያነምስል—säʾaläyanä (sic!) məsl instead of säʾaləyanä məsl. 264. Legatio David, Fol. D3–D4, ed. in Raineri, Lettere Tra i Pontefici Romani e i Principi Etiopici (Secoli XII–XX), 47–50. 265. Legatio David, Fol. E1–E2, ed. in Raineri, Lettere Tra i Pontefici Romani e i Principi Etiopici (Secoli XII–XX), 51–55. 266. Legatio David, Fol. E1–E2, ed. in Raineri, Lettere Tra i Pontefici Romani e i Principi Etiopici (Secoli XII–XX), 54–55. 267. Aḥmad b. Ibrāhı ̄m al-Ġ āzı ̄, or Imām Aḥmad, 1506–1543, leader of the ʿAdali army. In historiography, he is often referred to as ‘Ahmad Grañ’ and occasionally also called ‘Muhammad Grañ’ for his supposed lefthandedness, a name that originates in the oral tradition of the Christian highlands; for more information and an extensive bibliography, see FranzChristoph Muth, ‘Aḥmad b. Ibrāhı ̄m al-Ġ āzı ̄’, in EAe 1 (2003), 155–58. 268. For an account of the ʿAdali progress, the Futūḥ al-Ḥ abaša or ‘Conquest of Abyssinia’, written by Šihāb al-Dı ̄n, see Franz-Christoph Muth, ‘Futūḥ Al-Ḥ abaša’, in EAe 2 (2005), 592–93; Stenhouse and Pankhurst, Futuh̄ ̣ Al-Ḥ abaša: The Conquest of Abyssinia. 269. João Bermudes, Breve Relação Da Embaixada Que o Patriarcha D. João Bermudez Trouxe Do Imperador Da Ethiopia, Chamado Vulgarmente Preste João, Dirigida a El-Rei D. Sebastião (Lisbon: Academia Real das Sciencias de Lisboa, 1875); Andreu Martínez d’Alòs-Moner, ‘Bermudez, João’, in EAe 1 (2003), 540–41. 270. See Whiteway, The Portuguese Expedition to Abyssinia in 1541–1543; Thomaz, ‘Portugal, Relations With’. 271. See Whiteway, The Portuguese Expedition to Abyssinia in 1541–1543, 102. 272. Ignatius of Loyola, 1491–1556, founder of the Society of Jesus. 273. For further reading on this phase of Ethiopian history, see Hervé Pennec, Des Jésuites Au Royaume Du Prêtre Jean (Éthiopie): Stratégies, Rencontres et Tentatives d’implantation; 1495–1633 (Paris: Centre Culturel Calouste Gulbenkian, 2003); Leonardo Cohen, The Missionary Strategies of the Jesuits in Ethiopia (1555–1632) (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2009); Andreu Martínez d’Alòs-Moner, Envoys of a Human God: The Jesuit Mission to Christian Ethiopia, 1557–1632 (Leiden: Brill, 2015). An extensive bibliography can be found in Leonardo Cohen and Andreu Martínez d’Alòs-Moner, ‘The Jesuit Mission in Ethiopia (16th–17th Centuries): An Analytical Bibliography’, Aethiopica 9 (2006): 190–212.

CHAPTER 5

King Solomon’s Heirs

So now send me an artisan skilled to work in gold, silver, bronze, and iron, and in purple, crimson, and blue fabrics, trained also in engraving, to join the skilled workers who are with me in Judah and Jerusalem, whom my father David provided. —King Solomon of Israel to King Hiram I of Tyre, 2 Chronicles 2, 7

Technologists, Arms, and Alliances? Dismantling a Scholarship Narrative In 1967, the influential Italian scholar Renato Lefèvre stated the following: aṣe Dawit’s 1402 mission to Venice, and hence the very first Solomonic Ethiopian embassy to the Latin West, was caused by a desire to obtain ‘masters of art and industry that could raise the civil and technical level of the Ethiopian state, and therefore strengthen its military efficiency’.1 He explicitly tied this initial act of diplomatic outreach to as ̣e Dawit’s local fight against Muslim neighbours and tributaries in the Horn of Africa.2 Lefèvre’s assertion—that the nägäs ́t insistently sought to acquire artigiani e tecnici and hence ‘craftsmen and technologists’ to modernise the North-East African highland realm and its army—has had a formative influence on how Ethiopianist research has read early contacts between Ethiopia and Europe. For decades, scholars have propagated a narrative based on his hypotheses: Solomonic missions to Europe were regarded as © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 V. Krebs, Medieval Ethiopian Kingship, Craft, and Diplomacy with Latin Europe, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64934-0_5

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primarily caused by the desire to obtain craftsmen-technologists. This desire was itself connected to a purported practical need for ‘European’ technology and arms.3 In recent literature, these ostensible demands have also been tied to a purported Solomonic desire for military alliances with the Christian powers of the Western Mediterranean to fight a presumed common enemy—the Islamic powers of the Eastern Mediterranean.4 In his ground-breaking work on medieval Solomonic history of 1972, the Ethiopian historian Taddesse Tamrat stated that ‘more than anything else, the purpose of the delegations sent out to Europe was to ask for more artisans and military experts’.5 Following Lefèvre’s interpretation, he, too, read the Ethiopian demand for artisans and craftsmen we have encountered time and again in this book as a demand for technologists. ‘The Ethiopians had always been impressed by the political and military aspects of an all-over Christian solidarity against the Muslim powers of the Near East’, Taddesse declared; he suggested that the nägäs ́t recognised the ‘advantages of sharing in the superior technical advancement of European nations’.6 In short, as ̣e Dawit, as ̣e Yǝsḥaq and as ̣e Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob had sent their embassies ‘to Europe asking for technical aid’.7 In the late 1980s, Charles F. Beckingham similarly put forth that the ‘Ethiopians hoped for weapons and military assistance’ from Europe from the very beginning.8 Beckingham furthermore speculated that Europeans present in Solomonic Ethiopia in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were likely ‘engaged in selling weapons’.9 In 1994, Harold G.  Marcus echoed these sentiments: aṣe Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob’s 1450 mission to Aragon and the papacy had been an attempt to ‘breach the Muslim encirclement’ and end Ethiopia’s supposed isolation, with the nǝgus ́ seeking ‘technical assistance, which the West was willing to provide if travel was made safe’.10 That same year, Marilyn E. Heldman spoke of a strong Solomonic ‘hope for military assistance’ from Europe, seeing that the Ethiopians were ‘powerless’ in the face of ‘Mamluk restrictions’.11 In 2000, Paul B. Henze admitted that it was difficult to ‘gain anything approaching a complete picture of Ethiopian contacts with Europe in the late medieval period’; yet he, too, stated that aṣe Dawit and aṣe Yǝsḥaq ‘had sent to Europe for technicians’.12 The 2005 Encyclopaedia Aethiopica entry on relations between Ethiopia and Europe established that Ethiopia increasingly viewed Europe ‘as a potentially important source of firearms and warriors’.13 Similar assertions have also been championed in several recent publications dedicated explicitly to the study of Ethiopian-European diplomatic exchanges in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.14

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As the first three chapters of this book have shown, there is very little source evidence to support such claims. While Ethiopian rulers eventually both agreed to military alliances first proposed by a Latin court and ultimately did ask for military technologists such as gunsmiths and even weapons, they did so only well into the sixteenth century—more than 100 years after the first Ethiopian missions had been sent out.15 But: our source evidence does not support the hypothesis that military technology, alliances and arms had prompted Solomonic diplomatic outreach to Europe in the very early 1400s, and maintained it for more than a century. Instead, it is well-established that Ethiopian rulers had their martial demands sufficiently met elsewhere. In the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, weapon-smiths, as well as horses and arms, were obtained mainly from Egypt and the Levant. As we have seen in Chap. 3, Arabic sources specify that as ̣e Yǝsḥaq’s ambassador al-Tabrı ̄zı ̄ was executed explicitly for his history of exporting arms and horses from Mamlūk Egypt to Ethiopia in the 1420s.16 The Egyptian historian al-Maqrı ̄zı ̄ also noted that as ̣e Yǝsḥaq had recruited at least one Circassian Mamlūk master armourer from the Sultanate, who subsequently produced weapons and armour such as swords, spears and breastplates for the Ethiopian court.17 Over 100 years later, the nägäs ́t are still attested as importing mail, helmets, swords and spearheads from Egypt and the Levant.18 An extensive body of sources and research likewise demonstrates that Ethiopian rulers were hardly the ones intimidated or even endangered by their Muslim neighbours at this time. In the first half of the fourteenth century, aṣe ʿAmdä Ṣəyon had forcefully expanded the Christian realm, violently annexing and incorporating several non-Christian territories under Solomonic rule.19 His successors successfully consolidated the realm and continued his expansionist policies until the early sixteenth century.20 In the 1380s and 1440s, respectively, both aṣe Dawit and as ̣e Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob explicitly styled themselves as protectors of Christian minorities in Egypt and actively threatened the Mamlūk Sultanate.21 Until the sudden, cataclysmic conquest of the Christian highlands by ʿAdali troops under the leadership of Imām Aḥmad in 1530–1531, Solomonic Ethiopian sovereignty was hardly under threat from either the Mamlūks or local Muslim principalities in the late medieval Horn of Africa. Instead, the nägäs ́t were the ones aggressively asserting their power over their non-Christian subjects and neighbours from the time of as ̣e ʿAmdä Ṣəyon to the late 1520s.22 It must moreover be stressed: while Ethiopian Christian rule in the North-East African highlands flourished in this period, European

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Christianity found itself increasingly under threat. Diplomatic sources time and again show that Latin potentates explicitly hoped for military alliances and armed support from the nägäs ́t throughout the late Middle Ages. Even before the first Solomonic mission of 1402, ecclesiastical and princely Latin Christian courts projected hopes for a shared crusade onto the Christian Horn of Africa.23 Stories about Solomonic successes in warfare and rumours about humiliations of the Mamlūks were excitedly traded from the Eastern Mediterranean to Western Europe.24 In the mid-fifteenth century, Alfonso V of Aragon repeatedly expressed his interest in Ethiopian military aid.25 At several occasions, the papacy enquired about Ethiopian willingness to participate in a military alliance.26 Pope Sixtus IV is attested as gifting ‘the sword that was used on the night of the Nativity’ to the Ethiopian ambassador in 1481—thus sending an object all but imbued with crusading intentions to the Solomonic nǝgus ́.27 The established scholarly view as delineated above is therefore divorced from both available source evidence and local Ethiopian historical context. It appears, instead, based on an underlying Eurocentric narrative of Latin Christian artistic and technological superiority, rooted in the colonialist history of the field—from which certain beliefs have trickled down to the present day.28 Within 50 years, scholarship has seen Lefevre’s original claim solidify into a view in which consecutive nägäs ́t appear as solely looking for technologists to ‘develop’ the Christian highland realm and especially its military, hoping to acquire arms—and even guns—as well as desiring to enter into alliances against an indistinct Muslim threat. Rarely have researchers neutrally noted the Ethiopian interest in craftsmen and artisans without subsuming it under a broader effort to acquire technology.29 Few have openly expressed doubts about a Solomonic interest in arms, military expertise or crusading in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.30 Why then did aṣe Dawit and his descendants dispatch their ambassadors, with initially as many as three missions sent forth in a handful of years? As the sociologist Per Otnes once posited, ‘contact is never pure’ but ‘always about something’.31 So if not to seek military technologists, arms and alliances—why did Ethiopian rulers despatch at least a dozen embassies to different princely and ecclesiastical courts in Latin Europe between 1400 and 1526, the vast majority of them within the first 50 years of contacts? What, to phrase it with Otnes, was that all about? Scholarship has thus far failed to provide a satisfying answer to this question. And yet, there is a wealth of circumstantial and even some direct evidence on Ethiopian interests found in the sources relating to these

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diplomatic exchanges. These interests, meanwhile, fit rather well within the local history of Solomonic Ethiopia in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. This chapter proposes the following hypothesis: instead of seeking assistance from an allegedly technologically superior Europe to aid Solomonic warfare, the nägäs ́t sent out their missions to acquire religious treasures and construction-related manpower. Both were expedient to their political agenda of building and endowing monumental churches and monasteries in the Ethiopian highlands. Late medieval Solomonic rulers staked their claim of universal Christian kingship and might onto their dominion in the Horn of Africa through prestigious royal foundations. Acquiring foreign artisans and ecclesiastical wares from faraway places for centres intimately tied to Solomonic power would have necessarily increased their local prestige. Crucially, it also would have mirrored the actions of the biblical king Solomon himself, repeatedly described in Scripture as sending an envoy to a foreign king to obtain both precious wares and a master craftsman for the first Temple in Jerusalem.32 For a dynasty understanding itself as the spiritual and genealogical successors of the Israelite kingdom through Solomon’s son, Mǝnilǝk I, with the Queen of Sheba, such a parallel appears too striking to be solely coincidental. In order to make this case, however, we first need to look back on the history of the rise of this eponymous dynasty within Ethiopia.

A Christian Ethiopian Empire? The Realm of the ‘Builder Kings’33 From the adoption of Christianity in the second quarter of the fourth century, the town of Aksum and the Tǝgrayan hinterland were home to a Christian principality in the Horn of Africa.34 Even after the decline of Aksumite rule in the seventh century, these northern regions of the central Ethiopian highland plateau retained their religious importance. Aksum was the site of the oldest and most important church in the Horn of Africa, and numerous monastic centres had long been established in its environs.35 Over the following centuries, however, the Christian successors to the Aksumite kingdom gradually moved the political centres of their realms southwards.36 Lasta, the region in which the world-famous rockhewn churches of Lalibäla are located, formed the political heartland of the kingdom ruled by the Zagwe dynasty in the eleventh to thirteenth century.37

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When the first Solomonic nǝgus ́, aṣe Yəkunno Amlak, came to power in 1270, the area most central to the realm of his successors—the regions of Amhara and Šäwa—again constituted a southern and peripheral part of Zagwe territory.38 Parts of what would later become Christian Šäwa even remained home to an eponymous Muslim principality, the Sultanate of Šawah, until the late thirteenth century.39 Over the following two centuries, Solomonic sovereigns established both Amhara and Šäwa as the political and religious heartland regions of their realm, which they ruled from a largely itinerant court.40 From the substantial expansion of Solomonic territory under the rule of as ̣e ʿAmdä Ṣəyon in the first half of the fourteenth to the sixteenth century, the nägäs ́t gradually seized new regions from non-Christian entities and submitted them to their authority.41 The timeframe under consideration here—ca. 1400 to the late 1520s—is often considered a golden age of Solomonic sovereignty in the Horn of Africa. The territory Ethiopian Christian rulers claimed as their dominion stretched nearly 700 miles in length and several hundred miles in breadth, extending from the Eritrean coastal regions to the south of Lake Zway, and from Lake Ṭ ana to Ifat (compare Map 1). At the very least, the late medieval nägäs ́t portrayed themselves as ruling supreme over numerous regional governors and kings as well as several tributaries adhering to other religions.42 In another context, and if that word were not so heavily loaded, one might call their dominion an empire.43 Monasticism and Solomonic Rule From the extension of Solomonic rule under aṣe ʿAmdä Ṣəyon over most of the central highlands, and the de facto annexation of non-Christian tributaries in the 1330s, the Christian faith of the dynasty and their assertion of literal descent from the biblical king Solomon became one of the defining elements of Solomonic rule.44 The monastic tradition in Ethiopia dates back to late antiquity and had long stressed self-renunciation and proximity to nature. In a landmark study, historian  Marie-Laure Derat explored in detail how claims over geography, the assertion of royal power and monasticism were entwined in Ethiopia in the late Middle Ages.45 The local North-East African highland terrain—with soaring mountain-topped plateaus emerging out of a base altitude often upwards of 7000 feet, cut by deep gorges carved by riverbeds—lent itself exceptionally well to this

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purpose. For centuries, monks acted as guardians of the Christian frontiers of the realm and lived close to—or even among—non-Christian groups, which they gradually Christianised, sometimes at royal directive.46 Beyond arduous and costly open warfare, cultivating close relations with monasteries already established in Amhara and Šäwa provided an additional strategy for Solomonic rulers to retain and even obtain additional geographical control in a realm where linear distance often held little meaning.47 Here, the nägäs ́t could partner with existing monastic houses, primarily those of Däbrä Ḥ ayq Ǝsṭifanos and Däbrä ʿAsbo, which was renamed Däbrä Libanos in the mid-fifteenth century.48 They could also build up networks of their own.49 Through endowment of land— often in the form of gwǝlt, which was land granted by a ruler in exchange for service and support, somewhat equivalent to a fief—Ethiopian rulers were able to both support and employ monastic networks in their favour. Gwǝlt holdings permitted monks to collect the taxes generally due to the nǝgus ́, and to benefit from the land’s products, feed the community, acquire and manufacture ecclesiastical wares.50 In comparison to the other form of land right existent in medieval Ethiopia—rǝst, which was heritable and inalienable land—gwǝlt-holdings necessitated continued amicable relations between a monastic community and the sovereign rulership.51 The arrangement was not without reciprocity: religious leaders played an active role in the political life of the Solomonic realm. The third-­highest court office—the ʿaqqabe säʿat or ‘keeper of the hours’—was, for instance, traditionally held by the abbot of the famed monastery of Däbrä Ḥ ayq Ǝst ̣ifanos by the fifteenth century.52 He acted as a close advisor to the nǝgus ́ and could even be part of the regency council of a ruler who was still a minor. Several chronicles stress the importance of the ʿaqqabe säʿat at the itinerant royal court.53 Meanwhile, the abbot of the equally important monastery of Däbrä Libanos served as the ǝcč̣ ạ̈̌ ge, the overall head of Ethiopian monasticism and highest autochthonous cleric in the land after the Egyptian metropolitan.54 The development of the arrangement between existing monastic communities and Solomonic power was gradual, complex and not without conflict over the centuries.55 Even in times of conflict, however, the evangelising efforts undertaken by the monks naturally benefitted the nägäs ́t. Throughout the realm, monastic communities provided not just bases for evangelisation, but also social and economic infrastructure. They were sites of education, artistic and ecclesiastic production, administration and even law.56

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Royal Foundations Proclaiming a Christian Dominion Given the structure of the Ethiopian realm, it only made sense to expand the monastic networks directly. From the late fourteenth to the early sixteenth century, Solomonic rulers built prestigious new churches and monasteries that remained under their patronage as a way to control their domain and anchor their power. In 2003, Marie-Laure Derat first highlighted how Ethiopian rulers, and to a lesser extent royal women, founded at least 34 royal churches and monasteries between 1270 and 1559.57 The overwhelming majority, more than 30, were built from the turn of the fifteenth to the early sixteenth century: as ̣e Dawit built one, as ̣e Yǝsḥaq founded three, his brother as ̣e Täklä Maryam one and as ̣e Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob a stunning total of nine royal churches and monasteries. In the second half of the fifteenth century, aṣe Bäʾǝdä Maryam, aṣe Ǝskǝndǝr and aṣe Lǝbnä Dǝngǝl each founded four such religious centres. When child-kings were increasingly put on the throne and women were involved in governing the country in the latter part of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, royal women also established an additional five churches and monasteries.58 Each foundation added to an existing group of monuments, expanding and extending the royal domain both within and—crucially—also beyond the core Solomonic regions of the central highland plateau. The location of these royal monastic centres was no coincidence: a remarkable number were built in areas where both Solomonic rulership and Christianity were comparatively new.59 In the 1420s, as ̣e Yǝsḥaq had founded his eponymous church of Yǝsḥaq Däbr north of Gondär, in an area infringing on the realm of the Betä Ǝsraʾel—the Ethiopian Jews, against which both he and his father had enacted violent campaigns. As ̣e Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob and his great-grandson aṣe Lǝbnä Dǝngǝl marked Solomonic Christian sovereignty over formerly Muslim lands such as Fäṭägar, Däwaro and Ifat with religious monuments in these territories, sometimes in open provocation to their Muslim tributaries.60 Both also established royal centres beyond the river Awaš, some 150 miles south of modern-day Addis Ababa.61 Even within the heartlands of Amhara and Šäwa, where the majority of foundations were located and each ruler of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries established at the very least one monastery, this practice of assertion of Solomonic power through building Christian shrines appears to have been applied. Mänz, a remote, especially high-­ altitude part of Šäwa, is a good example for this development. Bounded by a mountain range and cross-cut by steep river gorges, it was theoretically

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located close to the Solomonic heartlands.62 Local Christianity was a very recent development in this part of Šäwa; its previous rulers had fought on the side of the Sultanate of Ifat against aṣe ʿAmdä Ṣəyon in the fourteenth century.63 Yet, 100 years later, this district had one of the highest densities of churches and monasteries in the country. Aṣe Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob established a royal church and monastery there; his son aṣe Bäʾǝda Maryam built a church, selected it as his place of residence and even decided to be crowned there in the second half of the fifteenth century.64 Branching out from their territorial anchorage in Amhara and Šäwa, the nägäs ́t thus established tangible and well-connected regional royal centres propagating their religion and claim to power all over the central highland domain.65 While many foundations were affiliated with existing ecclesiastical communities, all were born of the will of the ruler and remained independently staffed bases of operation for the itinerant court.66 They were material testament to the nägäs ́t’s supreme political control over their dominion, and a physical assertion of each sovereign’s rightful and just Christian rulership.67 Here, expansionist policy, royal ideology, proselytising monasticism, public assembly and pilgrimage intersected at sites often intended to house the bones of the rulers.68 In the fifteenth century, royal churches and monasteries could take on the function of short-term capitals or host religious councils.69 Throughout, they served as permanent, representative embodiments of Solomonic sovereignty. Which raises the question: rather than weapons or military support— wouldn’t as ̣e Dawit and his descendants consequently be faced with an increased demand for construction-related craftsmanship? Wouldn’t they also have an immense need to acquire prestigious Christian religious material culture to endow these centres of Solomonic might? Regrettably, none of the nägäs ́t’s foundations as they appeared to Ethiopian contemporaries in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries have survived intact to this day. Royal churches and monasteries became specific targets for the advancing ʿAdali army in the wars of the sixteenth century precisely because of their rich furnishings and close association with Solomonic rulership.70 Written sources document the certain destruction of about half of all royal sites by Ima ̄m Aḥmad’s troops in the 1530s.71 Šihāb al-Dı ̄n, the chronicler of the campaigns of Imām Aḥmad, left us a lengthy account of the wars titled the Futu ̄ḥ al-Ḥabaša—the ‘Conquest of Abyssinia’.72 He often speaks in wonder of these edifices, but also describes in detail how they were stripped of their possessions, demolished and ‘burnt to a cinder’.73 An episode on the conquest of Amhara narrates

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how Imām Aḥmad sent individual commanders against all of the important churches in the region while the ʿAdali leader himself advanced on the prominent royal foundation of Mäkanä Śǝllase.74 The Futu ̄ḥ al-Ḥabaša relates that Imām Aḥmad’s troops entered the church, which had been inaugurated only a decade earlier after 25 years of construction, in ‘amazement’. The Muslims specifically took the time to appreciate its fine workmanship—before taking as much booty as possible, setting to work ‘with a thousand axes, ripping out the gold and the precious stones which were in the church’.75 Its remains were set on fire. For all that the Futu ̄ḥ al-Ḥabaša—as a text very much glorifying Imām Aḥmad’s campaign—takes great pains to aggrandise tales of ʿAdali daring plunder, its descriptions seem rooted in historical reality. Gǝʿǝz sources record similar devastation, and participants of the Portuguese military expedition, which had come to aid the Solomonic army in the 1540s, speak of ‘very large’ churches that ‘had been destroyed by the Moors, and the country wasted’.76 These European observers also noted the heavy spoliation of buildings, and that the looting of objects almost exceeded belief.77 The few royal edifices that survived somewhat intact saw their stones used in the rebuilding efforts following the wars. Some were rebuilt in a new fashion, but more than a few were altogether abandoned, their precise location forgotten in time.78

Ethiopian Churches of Italian Appearance? Nearly 90 years ago, Enrico Cerulli concluded a lengthy article on fifteenth-­century Ethiopian historical sources with a simple question: did the ruins of the church and monastery of Märṭulä Maryam, built by ǝtege Ǝleni at the turn of the sixteenth century, show traces of Italian workmanship?79 The Italian philologist and future colonial administrator for the fascist Africa Orientale Italiana80 stated that his query was inspired by the recent judgement of the ruins by a Frenchman stationed in Addis Abäba. Cerulli had not yet seen the ruins himself; he relied on the record of the diplomat Maurice de Coppet, who asserted in the early 1920s that some of the carved ornaments in the arches, doors and windows of Märṭulä Maryam undoubtedly belonged to la Renaissance italienne—‘the Italian Renaissance’.81 In his article, Cerulli pointed out that Italian labour at a fifteenth-­ century Ethiopian religious site was not as improbable as it initially might

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seem: Baptista of Imola, the letter-carrier travelling repeatedly between Jerusalem and Ethiopia in the early 1480s whom we encountered in the last chapter, had mentioned the presence of Italians at the Ethiopian court in the second half of the fifteenth century. Baptista had also seen an ‘organ made in the Italian style’ in an Ethiopian church in late 1481.82 The delicate carvings of Märt ̣ulä Maryam’s remaining stones, meanwhile, suggested ‘unusual mastery’—which, to Cerulli writing in 1933, could only be Italian in origin.83 Perhaps, he concluded, foreign and especially Italian workmanship at a church such as Märṭulä Maryam might not even have been unique: two other fields of ruins existed. They necessitated further study. Quite possibly, the remnants of these buildings might reveal a local history of Italian-Ethiopian relations—or rather: presumed Italian artistic ingenuity in the Horn of Africa—dating back as far as the Renaissance.84 It is clear that Cerulli based his assumptions on a highly problematic understanding of Ethiopian craftsmanship very much en vogue among Italian scholars of the 1930s and 1940s. Here, masterful ruins necessarily indicated non-Ethiopian workmanship.85 Today, very few stones remain of the actual late medieval monument in question. It was largely destroyed in 1535 by ʿAdali troops and has since been rebuilt and fallen into ruin twice over.86 Who, specifically, built the church of Märt ̣ulä Maryam for ǝtege Ǝleni is nigh-impossible to determine—and ultimately, the specific cultural background of its stonemasons, builders and carpenters is of little consequence. Whatever their origin, they were assuredly all bound to have worked according to the wishes and specifications of the Ethiopian queen regent, who had set out to build a magnificent religious centre worthy of housing her tomb.87 Nevertheless, for all that he reached his conclusions based on a profoundly colonialist outlook, Cerulli was right to note that late medieval Ethiopian sacred structures were elaborately and magnificently built—and that they showcased very global tastes. This, as we will see, had however nothing to do with a purported lack of skilled indigenous labour. It bears repeating here that Märt ̣ulä Maryam was not a singular case.88 As we have seen above, it is but one example of a much larger Solomonic cultural and religious practice. Written Ethiopian sources indicate that dozens of churches and monasteries were founded in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Preliminary archaeological surveys have long documented massive edifices built from ashlar blocks ornamented with rich relief carving dating to the period under examination in this study. Ethiopian, Arabic and Latin Christian texts all describe these royal

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foundations, and they describe them strikingly similarly: these centres were richly endowed with lands, but also books, ecclesiastical garments, fine fabrics, bejewelled metal cladding, liturgical utensils, paintings, and eventually also precious icons and relics.89 The close reading of written sources relating to Solomonic diplomacy with the Latin West over the last three chapters demonstrated that Solomonic rulers most often requested the despatch of craftsmen and artisans. Sometimes, these men appear as an unspecified group of skilled labourers in the texts that have come down to us—but they are also occasionally explicitly named as painters, stonemasons, sculptors, carpenters, bricklayers and metalworkers. A second Solomonic interest apparent in the written sources relates to ecclesiastical objects. Texts time and again speak of fabrics, from brocades to richly embroidered ecclesiastical garments, but also of mitres, chalices, bells, religious jewellery and even relics as being sent out from the Latin West to Ethiopia. During the first 100 years of Solomonic diplomatic missions to Europe, dozens of ecclesiastical sites were not just being built, but also had to be ornamented and filled with treasures worthy of a dynasty propagating itself as king Solomon’s true descendants. It is impossible not to see a direct through-line between these local building and endowment activities of the nägäs ́t, asserting Christian suzerainty through rather literal state-­ building activity, and the concurrent diplomatic missions to princely and ecclesiastical courts in Latin Christian Europe. Diplomatic missions appear to have been one of the ways in which the nägäs ́t sought to meet the heightened local demand for both craftsmanship and prestigious religious material culture. Textual evidence and archaeological remains support that claim. Through a Glass, Darkly: Textual Evidence and Archaeological Remains Numerous royal foundations were described in Gǝʿǝz, Portuguese and Arabic sources before their destruction, and their archaeological remains have been located and partially surveyed. This allows us to get a sense of these prestigious Solomonic projects—and how their construction might have impacted and even motivated diplomatic outreach to the Latin West. Let us first look at two religious centres for which the record is particularly dense, Mäkanä Śǝllase and Atronsä Maryam, before examining the disjointed archaeological and textual evidence more broadly.

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 he case of Mäkanä Śǝllase T Mäkanä Śǝllase was built on a mountaintop plain in a comparatively remote part of Amhara.90 Its beginnings date to the late fifteenth century, when as ̣e Naʿod spent 13 years planning, constructing and ornamenting the church and monastery—but still passed on before the project was completed. His son, as ̣e Lǝbnä Dǝngǝl, ultimately oversaw the completion and consecration of the church in 1520–1521.91 Parts of its ruins were partially excavated at the turn of the twentieth century. The dig revealed large blocks of white stone worked with arabesques and flowers, following a square floorplan.92 Photos from the 1930s show the remains of a wall built from sizeable ashlars, large rectangular blocks of stone. Friezes seem to run along the entire length of the building.93 Francisco Alvares, the Portuguese chaplain present in Ethiopia in the early 1520s, repeatedly visited Mäkanä Śǝllase. According to him, the royal monastery was endowed with inalienable land so vast that a man could ‘travel fully fifteen days’ through it.94 The church itself was surrounded by two large enclosures, one built of strong wood, the other of well-built slabs of wall, bordered by a river and surrounded by heavily cultivated, fertile countryside.95 The church building was ‘large and high’, with three aisles of blocks of well-worked masonry. Walls of hewn white stone were ornamented ‘with good tracery’, that is, stone relief carving. The main door, meanwhile, was ‘lined with plates of metal’ and ‘in the midst of this plating are stones and false pearls well set’.96 A painting of ‘two figures of Our Lady very well done, and two angels of the same sort’ made by a local, self-taught monk adorned the wall above the door.97 Some of its internal structure was made from wood; one of the aisles was raised on high props that appeared ‘like very tall masts’. Sixteen enormous embroidered curtains of ‘very rich brocade’ were suspended within the church.98 Šihāb al-Dı ̄n, the chronicler of the Futu ̄ḥ al-Ḥabaša, also describes the building repeatedly in some detail, matching and confirming Alvares’ account.99 He, too, states that as ̣e Naʿod had spent years planning every detail of the building, and asserts that when aṣe Lǝbnä Dǝngǝl continued his work, the young nǝgus ́ took even ‘more pains over it than his father’.100 The completed building was vast and square in shape, with an exceedingly high ceiling and several courtyards.101 ‘Entirely plated in gold leaf […] inlaid with gems, pearls and corals’, its walls were ‘embellished with gold and silver plates encrusted with pearls’ throughout.102 Other

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‘embellishments of gold and silver’ set with precious stones also covered the doors.103 According to Šihāb al-Dı ̄n, Ima ̄m Aḥmad’s troops were ‘stupefied by the workmanship’ when they first saw the building. Muslim soldiers demanded to be let into the church so they could ‘take some pleasure in looking at it’—before tearing the metal off the walls and eventually setting everything on fire.104 A later chapter states that the ʿAdali leader afterwards gathered the foreign Muslim fighters in his army and enquired whether any of them had seen anything similar to Mäkanä Śǝllase’s splendour in Byzantium, India or another place.105 His question was universally answered in the negative. Even if we account for hyperbole on the part of the author of the Futūḥ al-Ḥabaša, there is considerable overlap among his account, that of the Portuguese chaplain Francisco Alvares, and the modern archaeological record. All assert that, at the very least, Mäkanä Śǝllase was a monumental, impressive square building made from richly ornamented white ashlar stones. It had been planned and built over decades, and its interior was lavishly endowed and adorned. Some of it was covered in plates of precious metal decorated with precious stones. This religious practice, while at first surprising—one would not necessarily expect a church interior to be plated in gold set with gems—appears to have been a feature of fifteenth- and early-sixteenth-century Ethiopian royal foundations. It is attested for numerous churches in very different accounts.106  he Case of Atronsä Maryam T Ethiopian, Arabic and Portuguese sources also describe the royal church of Atronsä Maryam, consecrated during the rule of aṣe Lǝbnä Dǝngǝl’s grandfather, as ̣e Bäʾǝdä Maryam.107 Like the church of Mäkanä Śǝllase, this foundation appears to have been an intergenerational project. According to the chronicle of as ̣e Bäʾǝdä Maryam, his fourteenth-century ancestor as ̣e Säyfä Arʿad had first envisioned the building. In the mid-fifteenth century, as ̣e Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob dedicated an altar for the church. In the 1470s—and thus a century after its ostensible inception—his son aṣe Bäʾǝdä Maryam cleared the grounds and began construction.108 Some of the internal decoration dated even later, to the late 1480s and the reign of as ̣e Bäʾǝdä Maryam’s son, aṣe Ǝskǝndǝr.109 According to as ̣e Bäʾǝdä Maryam’s chronicle, the church’s floor was paved with stones, and its walls covered in silk.110 Francisco Alvares, who saw it in the 1520s, states that it was a ‘big church, with all the walls painted with suitable pictures and very good stories, well proportioned,

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made by a Venetian’. He also notes that very large movable curtains made from brocade, velvet and other rich fabrics bedecked the building.111 The Portuguese chaplain explicitly links the church’s decorations to those of Mäkanä Śǝllase, stating that both had doors lined with plaques of precious metal set with ‘stones and false pearls’.112 Atronsä Maryam’s principal door appeared fully plated with gold at first glance, but closer inspection revealed it as ‘all gold and silver leaf’ that was ‘very well put on’ and covered ‘both the doors and the windows’.113 The walls of the church were built from stone, but its internal structure and pillars were again made of wood ‘as thick as the masts of galleys’, and covered in paintings.114 Its treasury, among other things, contained dozens of exceptionally rich and—to Alvares—astonishingly large and splendid silk umbrellas.115 These are important liturgical items used in Ethiopian church processions, and the Portuguese chaplain asserts that they ‘were more for state than from the necessity of shade’.116 The chronicler of the Futu ̄ḥ al-Ḥabaša notes that one of Ima ̄m Aḥmad’s emirs had been sent to Atronsä Maryam in late 1531. Again, the ʿAdali troops were astounded at the church’s beauty—but disappointed to initially find no gold. The soldiers soon discovered a house in the vicinity of the church where the contents of the treasury had been hidden. This contained countless huge bundles of patterned silk brocade, velvet cloth and silk, other precious garments, as well as a great mass of liturgical vessels made from gold and silver, from censers to cups to giant plates ‘from which four persons could eat’. According to Šihāb al-Dı ̄n, the booty was too much for the army contingent to carry, and most of it—like the church—was eventually set on fire and burnt to ash.117 The substantial ecclesiastical wealth of this church is echoed in the Gǝʿǝz chronicle of as ̣e Bäʾǝdä Maryam. In the 1470s, this nǝgus ́ had gifted many ornaments of gold and silver, two remarkable mitres of unusual colour and ornamentation,118 a golden crown, a canopy, carpets, an ewer, crosses and at least one foreign liturgical instrument, as well as a coloured crystal vase, a golden knife and a dish of silver as inaugural gifts to the church’s administrator, a man called ʿAmdu.119 We may also assume that much ecclesiastical treasure was donated to the foundation in the intervening near-60 years before its destruction: as ̣e Bäʾǝdä Maryam had originally erected the church as his burial place, but he went on to create a mid-size necropolis at the site, transferring the bodies of nearly two dozen noblemen, clerics and earlier nägäs ́t there as well.120 The church became a frequent pilgrimage point for subsequent Solomonic rulers and the

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itinerant royal court.121 Each transferral, each royal visit, would have required the gifting of more religious material culture as a token of respect and commemoration.122  uin Fields: Archaeological Evidence R While both Atronsä Maryam and Mäkanä Śǝllase date to the latter half of the fifteenth or even early sixteenth century, their founders followed the examples set by earlier Ethiopian sovereigns. A new way of religious building with monumental ornamented and engraved ashlars is already found in the church of Betä Lǝḥem Maryam, built by aṣe Dawit’s daughter Dǝlmä Nǝgśa at the turn of the fifteenth century.123 Ruins dating to subsequent decades mirror this foundation: at least a dozen archaeological sites of edifices built from dressed stones, with cut masonry elements featuring distinctive ornamentation have hitherto been documented in the archaeological record.124 All were built from engraved ashlar stones, followed a basilican floorplan, and date to the fifteenth or early sixteenth century.125 In 1969, Stanisław Chojnacki first published on the ruins of a church called Däy Giyorgis. The ruins were located on an isolated and hardly accessible site that was still centrally located within the region of Šäwa.126 Local tradition held that the church had been built by as ̣e Täklä Maryam, a son of as ̣e Dawit, dating the edifice to the early 1430s.127 Despite being badly deteriorated, one of its walls was still more than 70 feet long, made from rows of finely and regularly cut large dressed stones. These were adorned with an ‘elaborate frieze’ in a rope pattern throughout—the same pattern also found in Dǝlmä Nǝgśa’s ca. 1400 foundation.128 Other stone fragments were decorated with a ‘beautiful decorative pattern of rose (or turning sun) design’.129 This motif was likewise present on at least one finely worked metal plate preserved in the treasury of the modern church located nearby. It was also found at other archaeological sites dating to the period, among them that of Ǝnsǝlale, ‘discovered’ by a French team in Šäwa only some years earlier.130 The ruins of Ǝnsǝlale were smaller and square in plan, with thick walls and wide pillars, its flooring largely built from five-foot-long rectangular stones with a tomb dug into the bedrock, covered by a sarcophagus lid. Geometric decoration ranging from herringbone patterns to rosettes, crosses and cord mouldings, as well as the ‘turning sun’ design, had been carved on its grey and dark pink ashlars.131 The surrounding fields held many non-local pottery shards, some varnished and glossy, as well as

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fragments of white-blue porcelain reminiscent of the Chinese Ming period, two small gold plates, and fragments of a glass flask.132 A fire had permanently ruined the building, burning at a heat high enough to melt glass.133 Yet another ruin field, that of Gǝnbi, was located on an abandoned flat-­ topped high-altitude mountain not far from Ǝnsǝlale.134 Its floorplan appeared to measure 180 feet in length and 110 feet across. It was made from large squared stones, with tombs laid with stone slabs embedded into the floor.135 Littered throughout the site were architectural fragments made from two types of stone with different types of decoration—cordon reliefs, rope designs, flower designs, floral and arabesque patterns, all of considerable size and heft.136 A survey also revealed fragments of ceramics, white faceted glass and clearly cut gold cubes. Tremendous violence had been wrought onto the building: layers of burnt earth two feet underneath the topsoil indicated it had burnt up in a scorching blaze. Some of the architectural remains littered all over the site showed no traces of fire, however, suggesting that the walls had partially been torn apart prior to the monument being set alight.137 Numerous others such sites exist, and it would be impractical to list them all. Their geographic distribution ranges from eastern Šäwa to Lake Ṭana; ruins preliminarily dated to the fifteenth century are also found in the northern region of Tǝgray.138 What is remarkable is that their ornamental repertoire seems both unique to the period and dispersed over an immense geographical area: the early-sixteenth-century church of Märt ̣ulä Maryam, hundreds of miles away and dating decades later than the above-­ described sites, was similarly large, built from finely cut ashlars and all but mirrored the ornamentation of the above-described ruin fields. Here, carved Tuscan columns alternated with decorations of hemispheres in relief while additional decorations included semicircles, cymbals, lotus flowers and the ‘turning sun’ motif.139 From the time of as ̣e Dawit’s daughter Dǝlmä Nǝgśa at the turn of the fifteenth century until the wars of the sixteenth century, the local archaeological record indicates a new, distinct Solomonic tradition of building prestigious royal foundations in richly ornamented dressed stone in the central Ethiopian highlands.140 By the early 1480s, the practice was so widespread that even a short-term foreign Latin Christian visitor to the country like Baptista of Imola observed that ‘every king, when he is enthroned, builds a church in which he must be buried’. Baptista stressed that, in contrast to the rest of the country, these edifices were made from hewn stone.141

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 ll the Kings’ Treasures: Textual Sources A The second chapter of this book began with the rapturous account of the author of the Homily of the Wood of the Holy Cross describing the ecclesiastical items brought back from Venice. It also reported aṣe Dawit’s ecstatic joy at receiving such great numbers of religious objects from a foreign Christian sphere.142 Through this initial act of long-distance diplomacy with the Latin West, the Homily suggests, relics and reliquaries, but also chalices, censers, priestly vestments richly embroidered with religious symbols and biblical scenes, mitres, headbands and girdles had come to Ethiopia.143 As ̣e Dawit solemnly brought one of the relics, the relic of the True Cross, ‘to the church of Michael, which the king himself had built’.144 Later, the relic raised the status of Amba Gǝšän to a major pilgrimage centre.145 While the Homily does not specify where the other ecclesiastical items were taken, their nature allows us to assume that many were given to religious centres. Similarly, as ̣e Dawit’s sons are narrated as gifting prestigious objects to important monasteries and churches.146 The donation of ecclesiastical vestments, fine cloth, mitres and ornaments as well as liturgical items such as ewers made from precious metal to royal foundations appears as a repeated motif throughout both the chronicle of aṣe Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob as well as that of his son, as ̣e Bäʾǝdä Maryam.147 An Ethiopian ‘Miracle of Mary’ probably referring to the reign of as ̣e Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob relates how a pious and good ruler built a church dedicated to the Virgin, and gave it so many precious liturgical utensils that access to it had to be monitored.148 He also bestowed 30 ecclesiastical vestments woven with gold, 7 ecclesiastical garments made of silk, 7 gold fans and other valuable objects alongside 150 ounces of gold, 2000 oxen and vast land to the monks of Däbrä Libanos.149 In the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, numerous post-­Byzantine icons, as well as painted enamels from France, were directly acquired by royal women, who donated these rare imported articles to royal foundations.150 The Futūḥ al-Ḥabaša, too, is full of descriptions stressing the importance of Solomonic gifting to royal foundations. Describing the destruction of a royal church in Ifat, Šihāb al-Dı ̄n identifies it as a ‘church that had belonged to the previous king’, who had richly endowed it with ‘vessels of gold and silver’. Among other things, one of the ʿAdali commanders took a ‘chasuble that belonged to king Ǝskǝndǝr’ from it before burning it to the ground.151 As ̣e Lǝbnä Dǝngǝl’s church in Däwaro, to the far south-east of the realm, was likewise not only a ‘mighty building with imposing

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columns’ and rich decoration, but also rich in ‘Byzantine carpets, furnishings, fabrics, silken wares and other things’.152 More than anything, the gifting of prestigious objects and specifically ecclesiastical garments and liturgical items forged lasting links between sovereigns and clergy, many of whom were high-ranking noblemen themselves.153 Their office and fortunes were intimately tied to the rule of a nǝgus ́, and bestowing them with valuable pieces produced and maintained sovereignty and authority within the religious sphere and the Ethiopian court.154 In many cases, these gifts were undoubtedly sourced locally. In others, Muslim traders such as al-Tabrı ̄zı ̄ seem to have acquired precious items for the nägäs ́t from the Islamic world, particularly Egypt.155 Silk and linen fabrics more generally were brought by Yemeni and Ethiopian Muslim merchants from India and Egypt.156 Looking at the interests so clearly expressed in the diplomatic record as they were examined over the course of this book, however, it appears that these were not the only channels through which the nägäs ́t tried to acquire things rare and treasurable—or, for that matter, building manpower.

Diplomatic Requests Re-examined In 2017, historian Adam Knobler succinctly noted that ‘considering that most-if-not-all Ethiopian embassies to the West discuss requests for artists’, it was possible that ‘such expansionist activities and the desire for sculptors, painters and builders’ had prompted the despatch of a late medieval Solomonic mission.157 While Knobler was referring to a now-­ contested ‘Ethiopian’ delegation of the early fourteenth century in this particular instance, he touches upon an important point.158 From as ̣e Dawit’s first mission to Venice of 1402 to as ̣e Lǝbnä Dǝngǝl’s letters to the Portuguese crown and papacy in the 1520s, the nägäs ́t primarily requested builders, carpenters, stonemasons, gold- and silversmiths as well as painters. They also desired to obtain objects of religious material culture from abroad, from relics to ecclesiastical garments and liturgical objects. Successful or not—and as we have seen, most missions to Europe did eventually yield very little for the nägäs ́t, particularly after the first 50 years of contacts—diplomacy with Latin Europe appears to have been one of the ways through which Solomonic rulers attempted to lend tangibility to their local claims of universal Christian power. Here, Europe’s remoteness when seen from the Horn of Africa must have rendered it particularly attractive: anthropological research has long established that the ability to

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obtain both resources and riches from a distant, foreign sphere heightened local power in most pre-modern societies.159 In late medieval Ethiopia, priceless relics, gorgeous garments and religious objects from a faraway Christian realm had the potential to produce more local power than any type of weapon ever could. Reading Ethiopian diplomatic outreach to the Latin West as at least partially triggered by these local Solomonic state-building activities through royal foundations fundamentally transforms our understanding of these late medieval long-distance contacts. Solomonic diplomacy, a particularly noteworthy case of African-European contacts in the late medieval period, becomes a byproduct and an effect of indigenous Ethiopian policy. Builders, Carpenters, Stonemasons, Metalworkers and Painters All late medieval royal Solomonic foundations were built from rock, their interiors supplemented by wooden frameworks.160 Gǝʿǝz texts state that their construction was financed through extra taxes, and facilitated by drawing on the local population as well as army regiments for labour.161 Specialised craftsmen, especially those trained or capable in the arts of stonecutting, building, carpentry and painting, but also—as evidenced by the descriptions of gold and silver plating—metalworking were necessary to the construction of these edifices.162 Incidentally, such were the artisans consistently requested by the nägäs ́t through diplomatic means from Latin Europe—whether in 1402 from the Republic of Venice by as ̣e Dawit, or the 1520s from Portugal and the papacy by as ̣e Lǝbnä Dǝngǝl. In August 1402, the Venetian Consiglio dei Pregadi—the department in charge of foreign policy and current issues— allowed the Solomonic ambassador to take a painter, a metalsmith, two builders and a carpenter with him to Ethiopia. Specifically named in the Venetian record is a pictor—a painter, a spatarium—a swordsmith or armourer, and thus a metalworker, a murator and his socium [qui] scit facere cupos et lateres—a builder of walls and his associate skilled in making tiles and bricks as well as a marangonum—a carpenter.163 In 1427–1429, aṣe Yǝsḥaq’s delegation to Aragon had caused the despatch of tredici homini Mastri in diverse arte—‘thirteen masters in a variety of skills’.164 A contemporary document refers specifically to certain maestres de les cequies or ‘masters of irrigation’ within the group, and they have subsequently been at the heart of scholarly attention.165 We may

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assume that their unusual specialisation made these men noteworthy—it was undoubtedly rarer than the more ubiquitous trades of building, carpentry or painting. If so inclined, we might indeed term these masters of irrigation as ‘technologists’, though certainly not military technologists.166 Nevertheless, they were not the only artisans sent out. In the early 1430s, an agent acting on behalf of aṣe Täklä Maryam was attempting to recruit craftsmen in the Eastern Mediterranean—among them ‘men who can build ships’, but also other skilled foreigners.167 An Aragonese letter confirms that as ̣e Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob had asked king Alfonso V to despatch mastri et artifici—‘masters and artisans’—from Naples in 1450.168 The nǝgus ́ appears to have posed particular requests, which Alfonso only partially and grudgingly fulfilled.169 A terse note by an Italian humanist who interviewed the Ethiopian ambassador during his stay at the Aragonese court states that the man had additionally hired ‘many of our craftsmen’ for money to accompany him back to Ethiopia.170 There, they went on to ‘furnish’ the realm ‘with the arts they gave’—again suggesting that aṣe Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob had primarily been interested in acquiring craftsmen skilled in building and ornamenting. Latin sources indicate that the 1481–1482 Ethiopian embassy to Rome also asked for specific personnel. In keeping with how the mission was understood in Latin Europe—as the rather unlikely request to crown the nǝgus ́—some sources focus on a purported Ethiopian request for ‘priests or monks’ that were ‘well-instructed in the faith of Christ, as well as teachers’.171 A 1482 letter by Pope Sixtus IV meanwhile specifies that the pontiff would send out theologos, praedicatores, artifices172—‘theologians, preachers and artisans’—whom the young nǝgus ́ had ostensibly requested, but only if aṣe Ǝskǝndǝr complied with a number of conditions.173 A 1514 document detailing the gifts and personnel for the Portuguese return-­ embassy to Ethiopia meanwhile names dous pimtores—‘two painters’, huu imprimidor—‘a craftsman skilled in printing books’, and dous tanjedores— ‘two organists’ as the only labour commissioned to travel to Ethiopia.174 Lastly, in the early 1520s, aṣe Lǝbnä Dǝngǝl posed repeated requests to several Portuguese officials and potentates.175 His first letter to a Portuguese official in India asked for ‘craftsmen to work in gold and silver’ as well as expressly workers ‘to make lead to cover churches’ and clay tiles. The nǝgus ́ specifies that he had built ‘a very large church which is named the Trinity’—alluding to the church of Mäkanä Śǝllase—whose roof he hoped to improve with the help of these artisans.176 A copy of a 1521 letter to king Manuel I, written in Portuguese, asked after ‘craftsmen who can

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make figures of gold and silver, copper, iron, tin and lead’ as well as ‘craftsmen in type-founding to make books in our characters for use in church; and craftsmen in gilding with gold leaf to make gold leaf’.177 A later version of this Portuguese letter also adds that the nǝgus ́ had moreover demanded ‘craftsmen to work in stone and wood’.178 In 1522, aṣe Lǝbnä Dǝngǝl wrote to king Manuel’s successor, king João III, and demanded ‘artificers, to make images, and printed books’ as well as ‘artificers to beat out gold, and set it, and goldsmiths and silversmiths, and men who know how to extract gold and silver and also copper’ from the earth. He again sought to acquire ‘men who can make sheet lead and earthenware’ as well as masons and carpenters—harkening back to the request for roofers to improve the church to which he had recently translated the body of his father.179 Finally, in a 1524 letter to Pope Clement VII, the nǝgus ́ ‘vehemently’ requested artifices qui imagines fabricent—which can be read as both ‘craftsmen who might sculpt statues’ or more generally as ‘artisans skilled in creating images’. He also sought to acquire ‘engravers of gold and silver’ as well as woodworkers, architects, builders, stonemasons, tile-­ makers, roofers, glassblowers, musicians and minstrels.180 Instead of technologists and military specialists, we thus find an overwhelming wish to recruit artisans skilled in crafts related to construction and ornamentation at the heart of all these missions to the Latin West. The Dazzling Splendour of the World: Religious Material Culture A second continuous Solomonic interest concerned religious wares. Ecclesiastical garments and liturgical objects appear consistently in the record on every Ethiopian diplomatic mission to the princely and ecclesiastical courts of Latin Europe, yet research has mostly ignored them. Only the Ethiopian desire for relics has received some attention.181 And indeed, the desire to acquire a piece of the True Cross for Ethiopia is given as the primary motivating factor behind the very first Solomonic mission to Latin Europe in 1402: both the Homily on the Wood of the Holy Cross and the History of the Patriarchs of the Egyptian Church tie the arrival of the relic in Ethiopia directly to as ̣e Dawit’s embassy to Venice.182 Nevertheless, this relic of the Passion was not the only one brought back from Italy in 1402: both the Homily and the History of the Patriarchs mention the arrival of a reliquary for a skull, as well as the whole body of one of the infants killed by Herod, as arriving in Ethiopia as a result of the first Solomonic embassy to the Latin West.183

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As ̣e Dawit’s missions to Rome in 1403 and 1404 meanwhile likewise indicate a great interest in relics located in the Eternal City—the 1403 embassy had explicitly been sent to ‘procure some saints’ relics’ that existed in Rome.184 The second group of envoys—the three Ethiopian monks of 1404—is contemporarily described as ‘asking always about the relics of saints’, visiting numerous churches and ‘vehemently demanding’ to be shown specific relics, such as the ‘cradle of the infant Jesus Christ’.185 Recently uncovered evidence has shown that aṣe Yǝsḥaq’s 1427–1429 mission to the kingdom of Aragon was also tied to Solomonic interest in a specific relic, a Nail of the Holy Cross.186 According to Ibn Ḥ ajar, the nǝgus ́ had even explicitly sent out his mission to the ‘Land of the Franks’ to obtain this important holy object.187 In 1450, aṣe Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob’s ambassador in Naples received a silver reliquary to take back to Ethiopia.188 Six years later, in 1456, Pope Callixtus III ultimately gifted a whole host of precious artefacts to tempt the same nǝgus ́ into joining his crusade: ‘relics from the holy Apostles Peter and Paul; from Saint John the Baptist; from the arm of St Andrew the Apostle; from St James the Apostle, son of Zebedee; and from the wood of the cross on which the blessed Apostle Peter was executed’.189 In 1482, Pope Sixtus IV praised the eagerness of the Ethiopian ambassador Ǝnṭonǝs to see and worship at all the relics and saints’ places located in Rome.190 An account related to the embassy specifies that the pope gifted the Ethiopian party ‘the sword that was used on the night of the Nativity’—not a relic in the usual sense, but a rare blessed object annually awarded by the papacy.191 Ecclesiastical garments and textiles, as well as liturgical items, appear in connection to even more Solomonic missions to the Latin West. The Gǝʿǝz Homily on the 1402 mission to Venice mentions the arrival of priests’ garments and girdles,192 of golden-fringed vestments embroidered with images, and embellished multi-coloured tunics with religious iconography193—from the annunciation to the baptism and depictions of prophets, Apostles and martyrs—and of shirts made of scarlet cloth.194 According to the Homily, the nǝgus ́ and his priests and officers all explicitly admired these garments, whose appearance was judged wondrous to the point of possessing an otherworldly quality.195 Also brought were mitres, headbands, religious engravings on glass or crystal as well as chalices, censers, pitchers and bowls made from precious metal.196 A Venetian treasury list specifies that a ‘gilded silver chalice worked in the niello style’ had been taken out of the Sanctuary of St Mark’s church and gifted to the Ethiopians.197

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In 1429, aṣe Yǝsḥaq’s ambassador al-Tabrı ̄zı ̄ was apprehended in Cairo with many foreign textiles embroidered in gold with Christian iconography as well as ‘two golden bells’ and a letter urging him to buy items of gold-smithery, crosses and bells upon his return from the court of Alfonso V of Aragon in Valencia.198 In 1441, the Papal Camera allotted 30 soldi for 80 white mitres for the Coptic and Ethiopian delegations at the Council of Florence—which would be specific types of liturgical head coverings, made out of white damask or silk with lappets featuring red fringes.199 In 1450, aṣe Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob specifically requested panni de brochato— ‘brocade fabrics’—and panni finissimi de lana—‘finest woolen cloths’—as well as ‘vessels of gold and silver’ from Alfonso V of Aragon.200 An Aragonese source noted that, amongst other things, a reliquary, a gilded silver box and a silver cross fashioned by Alfonso’s goldsmith were sent out.201 In 1481, Pope Sixtus IV was eventually narrated as sending a brocade robe, a biretta—a special peaked type of ecclesiastical hat—as well as several Agnos Dei to the Solomonic court. One of these was set as a piece of religious jewellery.202 Lastly, the wealth of gifts commissioned by king Manuel I of Portugal for the Ethiopian queen regent Ǝleni in 1514 included an extraordinary list of textiles, as well as chalices, goblets, richly ornamented bells and censers made of gold and silver, communion instruments such as patens and cruets alongside candlesticks, two full organs, golden altar fronts and hundreds of books to show his appreciation for her mission to the Lusitanian court.203 The Portuguese also sent images of Jesus and Mary,204 as well as a sculpture of Christ as a child with a golden crown and an apple in his hand.205 A 1524 letter by as ̣e Lǝbnä Dǝngǝl to Pope Clement VII contains an explicit demand for similar articles: the nǝgus ́ expressly enquired after statues of the saints, specifying that he would take great pleasure in such presents,206 just as he would, of course, in the people who could create such objects for him locally.207 So why these specific diplomatic demands—why relics, why censers and chalices, why fine cloth? The interest in these objects is hardly surprising— after all, many royal foundations were intentionally set up to become pilgrimage centres. Any relic was sure to raise the significance of a religious site.208 As Robert Bartlett, speaking about the veneration of sacred bones in medieval Latin Europe and citing St Augustine put it, relics were a ‘trusty pledge’, ‘a token of power, a sign of the faith and a pointer to the resurrection’.209

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It is also important to note that the cultural practices of late medieval Ethiopian Christianity caused a scarcity of locally available relics. Unlike their brethren in Latin Europe, Ethiopian ecclesiastics did not subscribe to the practice of deliberate and sometimes vigorous dismemberment of a saint’s body in order to create more sacred parts.210 If anything, local saints’ bodies were preserved whole. This led to a distinct shortage of venerable matter in the North-East African highlands. Nevertheless, even the dust from a saint’s grave or relic site was considered to have miraculous properties.211 Diplomatic contacts with a fellow Christian court would have been one of the few ways in which this particular need could have been met—genuine, venerable relics were, after all, one of the few things impossible to create or purchase. In their general interest to acquire sumptuous fabrics and religious treasures from abroad, the nägäs ́t meanwhile hardly differed from their contemporaries throughout medieval Afro-Eurasia. Rare, costly and exotic items are well-attested as having been perceived as imbued with exceptional qualities in many different pre-modern societies.212 Numerous Norse sagas speak about Viking men dressed in fine imported fabrics from Byzantium, and more than one German bishop is recorded as conducting services in garments featuring Arabic inscriptions proclaiming the supremacy of the Mamlūk Sultan and the Islamic statement of faith.213 Especially unique or beautiful objects were not infrequently even narrated as ‘Solomonic’ works—in the sense that they were ostensibly created by or connected to the biblical king—by medieval contemporaries of different faiths in the Mediterranean.214 There is every reason to assume Ethiopian royals, like their coreligionists in Europe, were similarly interested in acquiring extraordinary religious items for themselves and their realm. Such objects could be locally produced, of course, but also imported—or secured through diplomatic outreach. Medieval Gǝʿǝz and slightly later Amharic texts note that magnificent items were present at the Ethiopian court: in the early fifteenth century, aṣe Dawit was for instance narrated as fervently praying before a striking statue of the Virgin adorned with gold, silver and precious stones.215 More than 100 years later, as ̣e Lǝbnä Dǝngǝl’s widow Säblä Wängel prayed before three different large-scale triptychs, which are specified as having been brought over from Latin Europe.216 Precious or rare objects affirmed and cemented links between Solomonic rulership and Ethiopian clergy at influential religious centres. To name but a few examples: in 1290 and thus not long after the Solomonic line had come to

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power, a nǝgus ́ gifted precious carpets, candles, sacerdotal garments and lamps to the existing community of Ethiopian monks in Jerusalem.217 By the mid-fifteenth century, as ̣e Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob donated an exceptional processional cross made from bronze with golden inlays, insets of glass paste and niello decoration to his church of Däbrä Nägwädgwad.218 An inscription on a post-Byzantine icon reveals it as having been gifted by aṣe Lǝbnä Dǝngǝl to an important monastic centre in the north of the realm.219 His aunt, princess Marta, is similarly noted as importing and donating numerous foreign objects to monasteries under her patronage in Goǧǧam at the turn of the sixteenth century.220 A custom-made painted enamel from Latin Europe was acquired by as ̣e Lǝbnä Dǝngǝl’s mother, who subsequently presented it to the monastery and church of Dima Giyorgis.221 Cloth and garments could play a similarly important role. That foreign, precious fabrics were also used in Ethiopian churches is illustrated by an episode in Alvares’ account. Speaking about the church of Mäkanä Śǝllase, Alvares describes that two large door curtains were covered with vivid embroidery showing biblical scenes.222 Aṣe Lǝbnä Dǝngǝl had inherited them from one of his ancestors and asked the Portuguese to identify the origin of the fabrics. As the Portuguese chaplain readily recognised and identified them as ‘made in Christendom, and nowhere else’, we may presume that these were richly embroidered Latin European draperies— which were subsequently hung in an Ethiopian royal church.223 In response, aṣe Lǝbnä Dǝngǝl conveyed his strong interest in purchasing similar foreign-made textiles with religious embroidery through the Portuguese.224 Thus, the episode also gives insight into the continued royal Solomonic interest in procuring such objects well into the sixteenth century. Through Alvares’ eyes, we also learn that the nǝgus ́ was rather disappointed in the Portuguese gifts given to him—which had included a ‘valuable sword’, a ‘gold-mounted dagger’, ‘handsome cuirasses’ and two short cannons with ammunition alongside four tapestries. Aṣe Lǝbnä Dǝngǝl is narrated as stating that his predecessors had come to expect the despatch of prestigious ecclesiastical fabric from Latin Europe to Ethiopia. The gifts that the Portuguese had presented were meanwhile thoroughly lacking—and would have even resulted in an inhospitable welcome by his forefathers.225 Summing up—the donation of religious treasures to a monastery was one of the ways in which the nägäs ́t could assert and stage their prestige and wealth, but also claim and maintain their Christian sovereignty over

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the region, the churches and their clergy. To take the words of Marie-­ Laure Derat: in consecrating his church the ‘founding king appears as the master builder of a monument to the glory of Christianity, but also to his own’.226 A study of the sources on the late medieval Solomonic missions reveals a wish to acquire relics, ecclesiastical fabrics or religious objects— and sometimes all of the above—as being at the heart of all embassies to the Latin West. Diplomacy with various European courts appears to have been one of the ways through which the nägäs ́t attempted to meet the rather considerable local demand for exceptional and rare religious wares. Foreign Craftsmanship, Royal Foundations, and Diplomacy Following the writings of Enrico Cerulli, who thought in 1933 that the ‘unusual mastery’ in the beautiful carvings of the church of Märt ̣ulä Maryam must have necessarily indicated Italian workmanship, Western scholars have long theorised about a possible ‘foreign influence’ visible in the  numerous ruins littering the Ethiopian highland plateau. The presumed point of origin of these foreigners, however, has shifted over time. In 1937, Guglielmo Heintze conceded that the ruins of Märṭulä Maryam— which he had cleared over the course of three days with the help of a leprous monk—showed a ‘primitive grandiosity’ that held a ‘certain value’ for the history of art.227 He read its remains as a testament to the ‘southern irradiation of Coptic art’, and postulated that its craftsmen, from bricklayers and blacksmiths to carpenters, had all been Egyptians.228 Ironically, Heintze’s condescending appraisal of ostensible Coptic architectural achievements described a more recent church at the same site, built by an Italian Jesuit in the 1620s.229 The real ruins of Ǝleni’s original late medieval foundation were actually located a few dozen feet to the side of the revamped Catholic basilica.230 The remains of this building—of old Märt ̣ulä Maryam—eschewed all simple comparisons to Coptic traditions: Heintze judged its tapered arches to be of a ‘Moorish’ style, but the walls also featured a ‘Roman arabesque frieze’. Other decorations, meanwhile, appeared utterly unique to him.231 Ǝtege Ǝleni’s Märṭulä Maryam defied all straightforward assumptions and expectations. In 1965, writing about the ruin field at Ǝnsǝlale, Francis Anfray likewise struggled to find an equivalent to the carved stones littering the plain of this remote tabletop mountain in rural Šäwa. Some of it reminded him of Islamic decoration, with Aksumite traces, but puzzlingly it appeared ‘attributable to the Ethiopian Middle Ages’.232 Four years later, Stanisław

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Chojnacki wondered whether the remains of the church of Däy Giyorgis had been ‘inspired’ by ‘Graeco-Roman civilisation’. They presented a ‘new style’, showing ‘sophisticated taste and excellent execution’. Asking whether ‘new builders with new ideas and skill appeared in the country’, Chojnacki mused that the ruins might hold new answers on European-­ Ethiopian relations in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.233 In the late 1970s, Lanfranco Ricci also struggled to make sense of the ruins at Gǝnbi. He agreed with Anfray’s judgement that these crumbling monuments opened up a new chapter of Ethiopian art history and, possibly, a new chapter of Ethiopian history more broadly. He, too, floated the idea of foreign builders.234 However, clear assertions about such ‘foreign influence’—a term rightly criticised as vague and unproductive—in these Ethiopian ruins were complicated by contradicting evidence from the start.235 Already in 1978, Francis Anfray noted that the carved stone ornaments found at an archaeological site in Šäwa mirrored those painted into the background of an icon by a famous Ethiopian painter of the mid-fifteenth century held in the monastery of Daga Ǝsṭifanos on Lake Ṭana, located hundreds of miles to the west.236 Other carvings seemingly also corresponded with decorations found in the faraway Zagwe churches of Lalibäla and Yǝmrǝḥannä Krǝstos.237 As such, the ruined decorations found in many places appeared puzzlingly new and foreign. They were, however, clearly also local, and seemed to draw from a much older artistic well that was undoubtedly Ethiopian. Even more incredibly, this  simultaneously foreign-local, new-­old material  evidence was dispersed over an immensely wide geographic area in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. It must be said that the above ideas floated by twentieth-century scholars were not drawn entirely from thin air or based entirely on inadvertent holdovers of colonialist belief. Contemporary written sources indeed sometimes linked foreign labour—or the products of foreign labour— with late medieval royal foundations: we have already heard about the ‘organ made in the Italian style’ in the royal church of Gännätä Giyorgis in Amhara in 1482.238 An Italian, the former Venetian monk Nicolo Brancaleon, did paint the murals of aṣe Bäʾǝdä Maryam’s church of Atronsä Maryam sometime between 1480 and 1494.239 He was one of a rough dozen foreigners detained for decades at the Ethiopian royal court.240 In the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, Brancaleon would manufacture several smaller, portable objects of highly esteemed religious material culture for members of the Solomonic court.241 Another Venetian—a

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merchant from a prominent family by the name of Hieronimo Bicini—had a second career in which he, among other things, apparently ‘painted many things’ for aṣe Lǝbnä Dǝngǝl.242 In 1526, the nǝgus ́ personally requested that the painter Lazaro de Andrade and the barber João Bermudes remained in Ethiopia when the Portuguese embassy took its leave.243 Francisco Alvares noted that Pêro da Covilhã, the Portuguese envoy long-detained at the Ethiopian royal court, had been ordered by ǝtege Ǝleni to make an altar of gold and wood for her foundation of Märṭulä Maryam.244 Lastly, in the 1620s, local Ethiopians had told the Jesuit Manoel de Almeida that Ǝleni had sent for workmen from Egypt to build Märt ̣ulä Maryam, and that she had offered a large reward and extraordinary remuneration for the work. When Almeida saw the ruins in the early seventeenth century, much of its workmanship was still recognisable. The Jesuit described its stones as beautifully cut, broad and smooth, with ‘many varied and different roses’ still discernible. Each of them was ‘so perfectly done in fine tracery that they looked as if they could not be bettered’. These delicate carvings, locals told Almeida, had once been ‘covered over with silver and gold’.245 It was undeniable to him that the ‘church was not only built at great expense, but was adorned and endowed with liberality’.246 The Ethiopian queen regent had also conceived it with love to detail: Almeida’s contemporary, Jerónimo Lobo, mentioned that when the Jesuits began to dig up the foundations of the original church in order to restore it, they ‘found four square plates of gold of the size of the palm of the hand’. Each plate had the name of one of the Evangelists engraved in ‘Ethiopic’ upon it, so that it seemed that the ‘chapel had been founded on the four Evangelists’.247 The above example illustrates beautifully that, whatever the background of the individual artisans, there must have been considerable Solomonic involvement in the building process. From everything we have seen, Ethiopian rulers were highly committed to their building activities. They are narrated as spending years and even decades meticulously planning and constructing a foundation ultimately worthy of housing their grave, or at the very least suitable to commemorate their life, death and deeds.248 Early in this chapter, we encountered the question of ostensible ‘Italian workmanship’ posed by Enrico Cerulli nearly 90 years ago. Unlike Cerulli, I do not think skilled European or otherwise foreign labour fundamentally impacted Ethiopian building activity in the late Middle Ages. Artisans working for the Ethiopian builder kings, however specialised and wherever from, remained workmen in the employ of the Solomonic elite. The

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diplomatic record indicates that most Ethiopian wishes posed to Latin Christian potentates remained eventually unfulfilled. The foreigners attested as working for the court were more often than not re-employed strangers without the necessary specialist skillset or training. Nevertheless, the emerging Solomonic practice of building and endowing monumental religious edifices to showcase their Christian power appears to have been what effectively drove and maintained diplomatic outreach to Latin Europe in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. The Ethiopian practice of attempting to secure distant or even ‘exotic’ craftsmen and artisans has ample precedent in other parts of the late medieval world. Generally, it is rarely helpful to read processes of artistic adaption, or the sharing and introduction of new cultural elements as a competition between cultures—which is what some older research, often coloured by colonialism such as that of Cerulli, has done. Cultural exchange and the introduction of new, ‘foreign’ styles and iconography must not be understood as a kind of local surrender to a purportedly superior, outside artistic power. Kingly crafting established, affirmed and sanctioned a premodern sovereign’s appointment from a higher authority. It also demonstrated a king’s might to his contemporaries, and particularly his subjects.249 The incorporation of far-off elements was not a passive capitulation to the supposedly greater achievements of a foreign other— but demonstrated a ruler’s power and reach. Acquiring wares and manpower from distant places exponentially increased local sovereignty: the farther removed from a given cultural heartland particular objects or corresponding men with ‘esoteric knowledge’ were in origin, the more they or their craft were imbued with potency and significance.250 Instead of signalling weakness, the integration of the new and far-off into Ethiopian cultural practice would have embodied the nägäs ́t’s authority, worldliness and geographical scope. An early-fifteenth-century Ethiopian ‘Miracle of Mary’ showcases how this link between artisanal skill and esoteric knowledge was understood in late medieval Solomonic society: here, an Ethiopian manuscript illuminator was told how to mix a batch of gold paint for a prestigious manuscript commissioned by aṣe Dawit in a dream—by a foreigner, a ‘Byzantine’ man.251 The artisan’s distant dream apparition and subsequent advice not only enabled a satisfactory completion of the illuminated manuscript after several failed attempts—it explicitly pleased the nǝgus ́ and even the Virgin herself. The ability to recruit actual skilled labour from a faraway Christian sphere to work locally at his behest would have been testament to a

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pre-­modern Ethiopian ruler’s control over a vast geographical, and even spiritual, distance.

The Power of Distance and Solomonic Emulation It necessitates repeating here that intense endeavours to procure objects, as well as artisans—particularly builders and painters—from outside one’s own immediate cultural and political sphere was far from unusual within pre-modern contexts. Some brief examples may suffice: within Western Europe, the exchange and ‘interlending’ of artisans and particularly painters from one court to the other is well attested.252 The practice was not limited to Europe or the Christian Mediterranean: in 1479, an ambassador of the Ottoman Sultan Meḥmed II, the strongest power of the Eastern Mediterranean, asked the Signoria in Venice for the despatch of ‘a good painter’ to Istanbul as part of a peace settlement.253 Under the rule of Muḥammad bin Tughluq in the 1330s and 1340s, a sizeable percentage of the court of the Sultanate of Delhi was made up of learned foreigners, increasing its draw on scholars from all over the Muslim world.254 Roughly 100 years earlier, a French goldsmith called Guillaume Boucher produced much-admired items of metal-smithery for Möngke Khan, fourth ruler of the Mongol Empire, and arguably the most powerful man of his time.255 If anything, the Solomonic case adds a particularly impressive African Christian example of a court going to great lengths to acquire the rare and precious to this list. Building monumental Christian centres and attempting to recruit foreigners to build these foundations on royal order would have necessarily increased Solomonic sovereignty within the claimed dominion.256 Beyond enhancing local power, however, there might also have been another, less pragmatic reason for the nägäs ́t’s diplomatic desires—which opens up a window onto how these Ethiopian kings understood themselves. Through their foundational myth, the Kǝbrä nägäs ́t, Solomonic rulers actively propagated themselves as not just the rulers of Christian Ethiopia, but also as first among all kings of the earth.257 Israelite kings David and Solomon served as archetypes of wise kingship for numerous rulers within medieval Europe. The nägäs ́t, however, claimed literal and spiritual descent from these biblical kings through Mǝnilǝk I, Solomon’s oldest son sired upon the Queen of Sheba.258 It appears that the sending of embassies to Latin potentates was an additional way through which Ethiopian rulers could assert their claim of rightful Solomonic descent.

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The historical books of the Bible provide highly interesting details on king Solomon’s state-building activities in ancient Israel: setting out to build the first Temple, Solomon sent out a diplomatic mission to king Hiram of Tyre, asking him to dispatch a ‘wise man’ skilled to work in gold, silver, bronze and iron, in purple, crimson and blue fabrics, who was also trained in engraving. This request was not owed to a potential lack of skilled indigenous labour—Solomon had already conscripted thousands of his men for the work. Solomon and Hiram both stress that the foreign master artisan was to join king Solomon’s local skilled workers in Judah and Jerusalem. Together, however, they would be able to tackle the impossible: build the most perfect Temple to please God and showcase Israel’s true power.259 The Bible also narrates that the Temple was built on a site selected by Solomon’s father, David. The building and furnishing process took many years, and the edifice was eventually large and rectangular in shape. Its exterior was built from finely dressed stone with an interior structure made from wood; the interior—the walls, the doors—were furthermore overlaid and panelled with gold set with precious stones. The doors, doorframes and walls were covered in gold, with carved figures of cherubim adorning the walls and massive curtains of precious, colourful fabrics suspended within.260 The correlations between the biblical descriptions of Solomon’s First Temple and late medieval Solomonic royal church-building activity are striking and hard to miss. Gǝʿǝz as well as foreign sources repeatedly mention the inter-generational building activities of the nägäs ́t. Several royal chronicles stress, for example, that as ̣e Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob built a church on a high and beautiful mountain site upon which his father, aṣe Dawit, had already erected a wall but died before making inroads on the endeavour. Here, the late medieval Ethiopian chronicler directly alludes to the biblical history as told in the First Book of Kings and the Second Book of Chronicles. He states that, just like the former king David—who had planned to build the House of God but had been unable to complete the work until his son Solomon finished it—‘our King Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob finished this temple on the west of this mountain, which his father has been unable to build’.261 There are numerous other examples of such inter-generational building activity: the church of Märt ̣ulä Mikaʾel was ostensibly begun by as ̣e Dawit and again completed by his son, aṣe Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob.262 Aṣe Ǝskǝndǝr is narrated as completing Atronsä Maryam which his father had begun to build;263 his brother, as ̣e Naʿod, dedicated a church which was again finished by his son, as ̣e Lǝbnä Dǝngǝl.264 We have already seen that

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the building of Mäkanä Śǝllase, consecrated in 1521, had spanned the reigns of three nägäs ́t according to two different sources.265 Moreover, like Solomon’s First Temple, the churches of the nägäs ́t were built from finely cut ashlars, yet their interior structure was made from wood. The Bible describes Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem as clad with precious metal set with gemstones—which is striking when we recall the multiple sources explicitly asserting that many late medieval Ethiopian churches were adorned quite similarly. Unexpected for a medieval Christian church in other parts of the extended Mediterranean, such architecture and ornamentation would, however, all but mirror descriptions of the Temple of Solomon.266 Again, this connection was very visible to Ethiopian contemporaries: the Chronicle of Iyasu, although dating to the eighteenth century, explicitly states that ǝtege Ǝleni’s church of Märt ̣ulä Maryam had once been plated with gold and silver, ‘like the temple of the wise Solomon’.267 Furthermore, the Bible of course narrates how king Solomon placed the Ark of the Covenant into the Holy of Holies in his Temple, which had been decorated with beautiful things from all over the known world. According to the Kǝbrä nägäs ́t, Solomon’s Ethiopian son Mǝnilǝk brought the Ark from Jerusalem to the Horn of Africa. To this day, a tabot—a copy of the biblical Ark of Covenant—forms the centrepiece of every Ethiopian church. It has long been known that the term Ǝsraʾelawiyan or ‘Israelites’ was readily and flatteringly employed in medieval Gǝʿǝz texts to describe those of presumed Solomonic descent.268 The reverse—that biblical Israelites were co-opted as Solomonic Ethiopians—also appears traceable in late medieval Ethiopian material culture. By the mid-fifteenth century, a visual conflation of Israelite kingship and Solomonic rule was intentionally propagated: illuminations in Ethiopian manuscripts now in Oxford and Paris take great care to depict the biblical rulers David and Solomon as Solomonic sovereigns of the 1400s.269 The Oxford manuscript, dated to the mid-fifteenth century, portrays both biblical kings as wearing large earlobe ornaments, headdresses and headbands. All of these features were contemporaneously codified as symbolising a specific type of late medieval Solomonic royalty, connected to an Aksumite past. The biblical Solomonic ancestors were also visually complemented by the very regalia of Solomonic sovereignty as conventionalised in Gǝʿǝz chronicles: they were painted with a flywhisk, royal umbrella and sword—and as playing the bägäna, a local harp-like instrument of powerful symbolic association.270

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The Paris manuscript repeats the visual affirmation of biblical Israelite kingship as Solomonic Ethiopian kingship: amongst all its illuminations showing personnel from Old and New Testament, only king David and Solomon are painted as wearing large, noticeable earlobe ornaments, headbands and headdresses matching those of the late medieval nägäs ́t.271 The ancient sovereigns are depicted as either brandishing a sword or playing the bägäna; crucially, they are attended by a servant with a flywhisk and royal umbrella.272 We can firmly locate this manuscript in its time, place, and patronage: it was made for a regional Solomonic administrator, ʿaqas ̣en Bǝlen Sägäd, the ruler of Säraye—a northernly Ethiopian region, home to many Ewosṭatean monasteries that had not been on necessarily amicable terms with Solomonic rulership for many decades before 1450.273 Nevertheless, the illuminations made for governor Bǝlen Sägäd visually established biblical Israelite kings as examples of Solomonic kingship by 1476–1477, the date the manuscript was completed. In fifteenth-century Ethiopia, it appears, David and Solomon were not just narrated as Solomonic forefathers. The biblical sovereigns themselves were also intentionally—and rather literally—propagated as late medieval Solomonic Ethiopian rulers. The nägäs ́t’s professed descent from the illustrious biblical kings and notably Solomon was also actively promoted in their diplomatic overtures to Latin Europe by the early fifteenth century. In 1428, Alfonso V of Aragon addressed aṣe Yǝsḥaq as the heir to the ‘throne of David’, and stated that the nǝgus ́ possessed the ‘Tablets of Mount Sinai’, that is, the Ark of the Covenant. The transferal of the said ark to Ethiopia is narrated in the Kǝbrä nägäs ́t, which was unknown in Latin Europe at this time. The Ethiopian ambassadors must therefore have related this piece of information to the Aragonese king.274 If such notions could be impressed upon a geographically distant Iberian sovereign, we may assume that local Ethiopian contemporaries would have been very much aware of the correlation between how the Bible narrated ancient Israelite Solomonic activities and kingship—and how kingship was maintained and produced by the nägäs ́t in late medieval Solomonic Ethiopia. There are several things to take from this. Beyond asserting Solomonic rulership over the domain, the very building of royal religious centres served to create direct cross-generational links and affirmed rightful claims to the Solomonic throne. The sparkling splendour of the buildings themselves was designed to remind their visitors of the biblical Temple established by the dynasty’s legendary founder in Jerusalem, long since

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destroyed. In fifteenth- and early-sixteenth-century Ethiopia, however, Solomon’s heirs lived on and flourished. They propagated themselves as such to not just their subjects, but also to the ecclesiastical and princely rulers of the Latin West. The parallels between Ethiopian Solomonic kingship and the biblical Solomon, including diplomatic despatches calling for foreign specialist labour to build edifices glorifying God, must have been readily apparent to both these African Christian kings and their subjects. It did not matter whether these missions were successful. The preceding chapters of this book have shown that Solomonic-Latin Christian contacts were often a history of failures, misunderstandings and unmet requests. Nevertheless, the nägäs ́t reached out time and again. In asking other Christian kings for stonemasons, builders, carpenters, painters and metalworkers, Ethiopian sovereigns were not trying to acquire hitherto unknown ‘technologists’ to develop their state. For the longest time and certainly for the first 100 years of diplomatic contacts, Solomonic rulers were simply trying to, perhaps ritually, acquire foreign skilled labour and treasures to enhance the glory of their prestigious local projects. The interest was not to establish lasting relations with a particular European princely or ecclesiastical court. Instead, a specific means-to-an-end outlook appears to have been the main driving force for Solomonic diplomatic outreach. Reading Solomonic diplomacy as a ritual action primarily enacted to produce and re-assert local kingship also explains why contacts curiously yet repeatedly petered out. Even successful missions were not necessarily followed up upon by the nägäs ́t, who chose to address themselves to new recipients time and again. Whether any of the craftsmen sent out from Europe ever made it to Ethiopia is far from certain. It seems improbable that many reached the Horn of Africa as a result of Solomonic diplomatic outreach. The monuments whose ruins now litter the central highland plateau tell us little about who built them. However, it stands to reason that the vast majority of skilled workers were local North-East African and especially Ethiopian artisans. Available written sources indicate that Latin Christian foreigners who had come to Ethiopia by chance—a monk, a merchant, a scout— were indefinitely detained, and subsequently put to work by the Ethiopian elite however much they could, mostly as painters. Crucially, however, the remnants of these once-magnificent royal centres offer an answer as to why the nägäs ́t sent out repeated diplomatic missions to Western Europe in the fifteenth century in the first place. This, in turn, opens up a window

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onto how Ethiopian rulers saw themselves: as the true heirs of Solomon, carrying on his legacy of building magnificent temples of universal appeal.

Chapter Afterword: The Builder Kings’ Realm in Turbulent Times This study would not be complete without a few pages dedicated to the requests that have, for such a long time, shaped scholarship’s view of Solomonic diplomacy: arms and alliances. In the early sixteenth century, these ostensibly perpetual and often-evoked Ethiopian requests eventually do appear in the sources that have come down to us. In 1508–1509, ǝtege Ǝleni signalled her willingness to join a military alliance first proposed by the Portuguese in her letter to the Lusitanian king Manuel I. She makes clear that she was eager to support the Portuguese fight against Muslim powers in the Red Sea and Indian Ocean region by providing local troops on land, and primarily through rations and food.275 Notably, however, such an alliance did not materialise. More than a decade later, in the early 1520s, her former charge aṣe Lǝbnä Dǝngǝl repeatedly entertained plans for alliances between his people and the Portuguese against the Ottomans, who had by then become the prominent power in Egypt. Specifics, however, remain hard to grasp in his letters to the Lusitanian kings  or the papacy. A distinct plan for aggressive action, not even to speak of a pre-­ emptive military alliance, again never materialised.276 The first definitive Ethiopian diplomatic request for arms and actual military technologists from Latin Europe also dates to this period, starting with the arrival of the Portuguese embassy at the Ethiopian court in late 1520.277 Thus, a full 120 years into the course of Ethiopian diplomatic outreach did a nǝgus ́, aṣe Lǝbnä Dǝngǝl, finally show a clear, discernible interest in acquiring weapons from the Latin West. The underlying principle of firearms and gunpowder seems to have been well-known in Ethiopia by this point.278 According to Francisco Alvares, the nǝgus ́repeatedly enquired whether the Portuguese king had sent any arms to accompany the embassy.279 One of his first direct questions posed to the Portuguese concerned muskets and bombards; aṣe Lǝbnä Dǝngǝl was particularly interested in their use by both the Portuguese and the ‘Moors’, that is, Ottomans.280 This partial about-face is hardly surprising. By the late 1510s, muskets and bombards were fundamentally transforming warfare throughout the

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Mediterranean and beyond. Their use had been one of the reasons why Egypt fell to the Ottomans in the late 1510s after more than two and a half centuries of Mamlūk rule, upsetting the old balance of power in North-East Africa. It is no surprise that just a few years later, in 1524, aṣe Lǝbnä Dǝngǝl went on to request ‘swords and every sort of weapon of war’ from Pope Clement VII alongside statues of the Virgin Mary.281 However, even in these changing political climes, the wish to acquire artisans and religious treasures remained central to aṣe Lǝbnä Dǝngǝl’s contacts with the Latin West right until the onset of the wars with the Sultanate of ʿAdal, which would devastate his kingdom in the second quarter of the sixteenth century. The eventual shift in Ethiopian diplomatic policy necessitates more study but seems tied to several local and more global developments. One is undoubtedly the much-changed political climate in the larger region: seen from the Christian Horn of Africa, the early sixteenth century witnessed the rise of the Ottomans in North-East Africa as well as growing instability in Mamlūk Egypt, the appearance and establishment of the Portuguese in the Indian Ocean and eventually even the Red Sea, and the reinvigoration of the Sultanate of ʿAdal and its ties to Muslim principalities on the Arabian Peninsula.282 Another development appears to have been an emergent eschatological expectation about the End of Times in Ethiopia, stemming from several millenarian movements that originated locally in the mid-fifteenth century.283 By 1500, the belief in a redeemer figure adhering to a different branch of Christianity and the Last Days seems to have become firmly established in Ethiopia. It appears to have significantly transformed and re-shaped Ethiopian policy in the early sixteenth century. In her letter to king Manuel I of Portugal, written in 1508–1509, ǝtege Ǝleni alludes to a prophecy in which a Latin Christian ruler was read as a harbinger of universal Christian peace at the End of Times.284 When the Portuguese embassy first landed on Ethiopian shores and its members identified themselves as Christians in early 1520, they were confronted with exultations: eye-witnesses describe an ecstatic welcome and relate that both a local official as well as the provincial Solomonic governor thanked God specifically for the fulfilment of ‘the prophecies’.285 In his letter to Manuel I of Portugal written in 1521, as ̣e Lǝbnä Dǝngǝl also referenced a prophecy. It stated that ‘a Frank King should meet with the King of Ethiopia, and that they should give each other peace’. The nǝgus ́ stresses that he ‘did not know if this would be in my days and time or in

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another’. Yet, the combination of the Portuguese activity in the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea, as well as the presence of this Latin Christian embassy itself, seem to have convinced him that this prediction would now indeed have come to pass.286 It was not only the tremendous change and recent Portuguese presence in the region that charged the local political climate, however. According to the Ethiopian calendar, the year 1500 CE coincided with the beginning of the eight millennium—during which the end of the world was believed to happen.287 Francisco Alvares relates one more aspect of this coagulation of different eschatological expectations, claiming that the Ethiopians ‘had a prophecy that there would not be more than a hundred Popes in their country’. The current metropolitan living in Ethiopia, abunä Marqos, was a very old man during Alvares’ stay of the early 1520s. He was believed to complete this fateful number.288 The Portuguese chaplain also noted that the Ethiopians had two other prophecies, namely that ‘the Franks from the end of the earth would come by sea and would join with the Abyssinians’, destroying Jeddah and Mecca, vanquishing the Egyptians and taking the great city of Cairo. Afterwards, ‘the Abyssinians would go back to their country of their own will and the Franks would stay in the great city and then a road would be opened by which one could easily come from Frankland to the country of the Abyssinians’.289 In the early sixteenth century, four different prophecies and beliefs had thus been merged, creating a climate of eschatological anticipation: one regarding the end of an age, another about the maximal number of metropolitans and two regarding the shared victory of Latin and Ethiopian Christianity over the Muslims, and a subsequent immediate connection between Ethiopian Christianity and other Christians.290 The Ethiopian Solomonic collaboration with a foreign, ‘Roman’ Christian power was even seen as of tantamount importance to the fate of the world as a whole. It would ensure the ultimate triumph of Christianity.291 Which ruler would not be interested in arms and religious-military alliances when facing the End of Times? A few years after the Portuguese embassy sailed home again in 1526, the apocalypse seemingly indeed began—at least when viewed from a Solomonic courtly perspective. In the late 1520s, troops from the Sultanate of ʿAdal launched a series of escalating raids on Christian territory that eventually resulted in the temporary loss of Solomonic control over most of the highland realm. Churches and palaces were razed to the ground. Until the death of Ima ̄m Aḥmad ibn Ibrāhı ̄m al-Ġ āzı ̄ in 1543, ʿAdali

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soldiers claimed the formerly Christian territory as their own, all but excising all traces of Solomonic royal power in the domain. When Ethiopian Christian rule was re-established in the 1540s under as ̣e Gälawdewos, the vast majority of his ancestors’ glorious royal foundations had been destroyed, their vestiges all but removed from historiography. Strangely enough, today, it is of all things the history of Solomonic Ethiopian diplomatic contacts with Latin Europe that helps us catch just a glimpse of this forever-lost late medieval Christian realm in the Horn of Africa. It helps us fathom how the nägäs ́t conceived of themselves, and their role in the world in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.

Notes 1. He states: ‘Nè doveva essere ultimo tra i motivi e gli scopi dell’ambasceria l’interesse ad accaparrarsi qualcuno di quei maestri d’arte e d’industria che potevano elevare il livello civile e tecnico dello stato etiopico e quindi rafforzare la sua efficienza anche militare (richiesta di artigiani e tecnici, che sappiamo insistente in tutto il ‘400 e anche nel ‘500).’ Renato Lefèvre, ‘Presenze Etiopiche in Italia Prima Del Concilio Di Firenze Del 1439’, Rassegna di Studi Etiopici 23 (1967): 5–26:14. 2. Cf. Lefèvre, ‘Presenze Etiopiche in Italia Prima Del Concilio Di Firenze Del 1439’, 13–14. 3. Cf. Taddesse Tamrat, Church and State in Ethiopia, 1270–1527 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), 258–65; Charles Fraser Beckingham, ‘European Sources for Ethiopian History before 1634’, Paideuma 33 (1987): 170–73; Marilyn E. Heldman, The Marian Icons of the Painter Fre ̄ Ṣeyon: A Study of Fifteenth-Century Ethiopian Art, Patronage, and Spirituality (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1994), 143; Harold G. Marcus, A History of Ethiopia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 26–28; Paul B Henze, Layers of Time: A History of Ethiopia (New York: Palgrave, 2000), 70; Richard Pankhurst, ‘Europe, Relations With’, in EAe 2 (2005), 452; Matteo Salvadore, ‘The Ethiopian Age of Exploration: Prester John’s Discovery of Europe, 1306–1458’, Journal of World History 21, no. 4 (2010): 624–27; Andrew Kurt, ‘The Search for Prester John, a Projected Crusade and the Eroding Prestige of Ethiopian Kings, c.1200–c.1540’, Journal of Medieval History 39, no. 3 (2013): 310–14; Matteo Salvadore, The African Prester John and the Birth of Ethiopian-European Relations, 1402–1555 (Milton Park: Routledge, 2016), 24–26, 203–4; Matteo Salvadore, ‘Encounters Between Ethiopia and Europe, 1400–1660’, in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), para. 1.

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4. Cf. Kurt, ‘The Search for Prester John, a Projected Crusade and the Eroding Prestige of Ethiopian Kings, c.1200–c.1540’, 311, 314; Benjamin Weber, ‘Gli Etiopi a Roma Nel Quattrocento: Ambasciatori Politici, Negoziatori Religiosi o Pellegrini?’, Mélanges de l’École Française de Rome—Moyen Âge 125, no. 1 (2013): paras 3–4; Salvadore, The African Prester John and the Birth of Ethiopian-European Relations, 1402–1555, 203–4; Salvadore, ‘Encounters Between Ethiopia and Europe, 1400–1660’, paras 11, 27. 5. Cf. Taddesse Tamrat, Church and State in Ethiopia, 1270–1527, 258. 6. Cf. Taddesse Tamrat, Church and State in Ethiopia, 1270–1527, 265. 7. Taddesse Tamrat also asserted that the missions to the papacy should be read as an Ethiopian recognition of the Latin Church in Rome as a ‘strong European state in its own right’, which could be appealed-to for ‘technical assistance’; see Taddesse Tamrat, Church and State in Ethiopia, 1270–1527, 265. 8. Cf. Beckingham, ‘European Sources for Ethiopian History before 1634’, 173. 9. Cf. Beckingham, ‘European Sources for Ethiopian History before 1634’, 170. 10. Cf. Marcus, A History of Ethiopia, 28. 11. Cf. Heldman, The Marian Icons of the Painter Fre ̄ Ṣeyon: A Study of Fifteenth-Century Ethiopian Art, Patronage, and Spirituality, 143. 12. Cf. Henze, Layers of Time: A History of Ethiopia, 70. 13. Cf. Pankhurst, ‘Europe, Relations With’, 452. 14. In 2013, Andrew Kurt held that ‘Ethiopian rulers requested help from and even attempted to establish an alliance with European powers’ due to being ‘bordered to the east and south by hostile Muslim territory’. He ­postulated that aṣe Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob ‘wanted the military force’ a possible ‘union of Churches would bring’, and that the nǝgus ́ requested ‘technical aid’, reading his missions to Pope Nicholas V and to the king of Aragon in 1450 as ‘an indication that Ethiopia perceived its vulnerability’. At the same time, Kurt admits that Ethiopia ‘saw itself in a position for potential victory over Muslim territories on a wider scale, yet menaced by an enemy that continued to pose a danger’ in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, cf. Kurt, ‘The Search for Prester John, a Projected Crusade and the Eroding Prestige of Ethiopian Kings, c.1200–c.1540’, 311–314. Matteo Salvadore stated in 2010 that the Ethiopians understood ‘Europeans as military allies’, possessed a ‘penchant for Western technology and art’, and held a ‘Promethean image of Europeans as purveyors of technical knowledge’; that ‘Ethiopian elites sought to establish relations with Western powers in order to find allies against Islam and acquire technological know-how’, cf. Salvadore, ‘The Ethiopian Age of Exploration:

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Prester John’s Discovery of Europe, 1306–1458’, 624, 626. In a 2016 monograph, Salvadore acknowledged that relics were of some relevance to aṣe Dawit’s embassy to Venice in 1402, but ‘equally or possibly more attractive for the sovereign was European technology’. As Salvadore subsequently stresses ‘Ethiopia’s technological limitations’ vis-à-vis its Muslim neighbours, which he reads as ‘foes’, it becomes clear that ‘technology’ here connotes arms instead of recent Italian advances in woolweaving or timekeeping. A ‘triple menace’ of ‘domestic instability, the Mamluks in the north, and Ifat in the south’ had allegedly caused Dawit to send his envoys to Venice at the turn of the fifteenth century, ‘hoping to elicit support from distant yet well-known co-religionists’—‘in all likelihood’, Bartoli had been ‘instructed to seek allies, useful technology, and relics’. In order to circumvent supposed Mamlūk interference, the ‘migration of skilled individuals to Ethiopia’ was promoted by his ambassador to ‘facilitate technological transfer’. Already at the very onset of Solomonic relations with the Latin West, the nǝgus ́ had thus ‘displayed remarkable acumen by dispatching his representatives to procure not only guns and artefacts but also their makers’, cf. Salvadore, The African Prester John and the Birth of Ethiopian-European Relations, 1402–1555, 24, 26. A 2018 encyclopaedia entry states that ‘Ethiopians reached multiple locales across Latin Europe to forge political alliances, acquire technology, and pursue religious knowledge’, compare Salvadore, ‘Encounters Between Ethiopia and Europe, 1400–1660’, para. 1. 15. Unless we read the single 1402 Spatarium, a metalworker, as a technologist, all Solomonic demands for weapons and technologist-craftsmen such as gunsmiths date to the early 1520s; see end of this chapter. 16. Compare Chap. 3; also see Aḥmad ibn ʿAli Ibn Ḥ ajar al-ʿAsqalānı ̄, Inbā’ al-Ghumr Bi-Anba ̄’ al-ʿUmr, ed. Ḥ asan Ḥ abashi, vol. 3 (Cairo, 1971), 426, Aḥmad ibn ʿAlı ̄ Al-Maqrı ̄zı ̄, Kitab̄ Al-Suluk̄ Li-Maʿrifat Duwal al-Mulu ̄k, eds. Muḥammad Muṣt ̣afā Ziyāda and Saʿı ̄d ʿAbd al-Fattāḥ ʿĀ šūr, vol. 4.2 (Cairo: Dār al-Kutub, 1939), 797 and Yūsuf Ibn Taghrı ̄ Birdı ̄, Al-Nujūm al-Zāhira Fı ̄ Mulu ̄k Mis ̣r Wa l-Qah̄ ira, ed. M.A. Hātim, vol. 14 (Cairo: Dār al-Kutub, 1963), 324–25. 17. See Aḥmad ibn ʿAlı ̄ Al-Maqrı ̄zı ̄, The Book of the True Knowledge of the History of the Moslem Kings in Abyssinia, trans. George W. B. Huntingford (London: SOAS Archives, 1955), 6; also see Julien Loiseau, ‘The Ḥ atı̣ ̄ and the Sultan. Letters and Embassies from Abyssinia to the Mamluk Court’, in Mamluk Cairo, a Crossroads for Embassies: Studies on Diplomacy and Diplomatics, eds. Frédéric Bauden and Malika Dekkiche, (Leiden: Brill, 2019), 638–57; Anaïs Wion, ‘Medieval Ethiopian Economies: Subsistence, Global Trade and the Administration of Wealth’, in A

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Companion to Medieval Ethiopia and Eritrea, ed. Samantha Kelly (Leiden: Brill, 2020), 395–424:416–17. 18. Charles F. Beckingham and George W. B. 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 1520, Written by Father Francisco Alvares (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961), 429, 434; Paul Lester Stenhouse and Richard Pankhurst,  eds., Futu ̄ḥ Al-Ḥ abaša: The Conquest of Abyssinia (Hollywood: Tsehai Publishers, 2005), 78. 19. See Taddesse Tamrat, Church and State in Ethiopia, 1270–1527, 119–56; Marie-Laure Derat, Le Domaine Des Rois Éthiopiens, 1270–1527: Espace, Pouvoir et Monarchisme (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2003), 76–77. He also threatened the Mamlūks in Cairo with blocking the river Nile should the Sultan not cease hostility against the Copts of Egypt; see Julien Loiseau, ‘Chrétiens d’Égypte, Musulmans d’Éthiopie. Protection Des Communautés et Relations Diplomatiques Entre Le Sultanat Mamelouk et Le Royaume Salomonien (ca 1270–1516)’, Médiévales 79, no. 2 (2020), 37–68:50–51. 20. Taddesse Tamrat, Church and State in Ethiopia, 1270–1527, 130–247; ̄ Manfred Kropp, Der Siegreiche Feldzug Des Königs ʿAmda-Ṣ eyon Gegen Die Muslime in Adal Im Jahre 1332 n. Chr. (Leuven: Peeters, 1994); Steven Kaplan, ‘Solomonic Dynasty’, in EAe 4 (2010), 688–90; Amélie Chekroun and Bertrand Hirsch, ‘The Sultanates of Medieval Ethiopia’, in A Companion to Medieval Ethiopia and Eritrea, ed. Samantha Kelly (Leiden: Brill, 2020), 86–112; Deresse Ayenachew, ‘Territorial Expansion and Administrative Evolution under the “Solomonic” Dynasty’, in A Companion to Medieval Ethiopia and Eritrea, ed. Samantha Kelly (Leiden: Brill, 2020), 57–85. Aṣe Dawit, aṣe Yǝsḥaq and aṣe Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob all acted forcefully against principalities they considered tributary to their realm, Muslims, Betä Ǝsraʾel and adherents to local religions alike. Aggression towards the former in the Horn caused the chagrin of Mamlūk historians such as al-Maqrı ̄zı ̄, who bemoaned that as ̣e Yǝsḥaq presented himself in the finest ‘kingly splendour’ and stark Christian iconography when dealing with Muslim vassals; see Al-Maqrı ̄zı ̄, The Book of the True Knowledge of the History of the Moslem Kings in Abyssinia, 6. In 1445, aṣe Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob won a resounding victory against the Walasmaʿ Sultanate of IfatʿAdal, a Muslim principality he considered a rebellious tributary to his realm; see Franz-Christoph Muth, ‘Aḥmad Badlāy’, in EAe 1 (2003), 158–59; Marie-Laure Derat and Steven Kaplan, ‘Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob’, in EAe 5 (2014), 149; Chekroun and Hirsch, ‘The Sultanates of Medieval Ethiopia’. The nǝgus ́ was narrated as personally killing and dismembering the body of Sultan Aḥmad Badlāy; see Jules Perruchon, Les Chroniques de

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Zar’a Yâʿeqôb et de Ba’eda Mâryâm, Rois d’Éthiopie de 1434 à 1478 (Paris: É. Bouillon, 1893), 88–89; Muth, ‘Aḥmad Badlāy’; Derat and Kaplan, ‘Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob’. Echoes of this Solomonic triumph were carried over to Latin Europe throughout the 1440s, compare François-­ Joseph-­ Jean Lastic, Chronique de La Maison de Lastic  : D’après Les Archives Du Château de Parentignat et Quelques Autres Documents. Des Origines à La Fin Du XVe Siècle (Montpellier: Firmin et Montane, 1919), 329–30; Julian Plante, ‘The Ethiopian Embassy to Cairo of 1443. A Trier Manuscript of Gandulphus’ Report with an English Translation’, Journal of Ethiopian Studies 13, no. 2 (1975): 133–140. The ‘Royal Chronicle’ of as ̣e Ǝskǝndǝr, for example, also narrates episodes of unprompted Solomonic violence against perceived Muslim tributaries, among them the invasion of the ʿAdali capital of Dakar and destruction of houses and mosques in ca. 1490; see Jules Perruchon, ‘Histoire d’Eskender, d’ʾAmda Seyon II et de Nâʾod, Rois d’Éthiopie’, Journal Asiatique 9, no. 3 (1894): 357–58. Lastly, although Imām Maḥfūẓ bin Muḥammad—the governor of Zaylaʿ, an important city on the Red Sea Coast under the rulership of the Sultanate of ʿAdal—fought a decades-long and bloody conflict against the nägäst́ at the turn of the sixteenth century, he was beaten by asẹ Lǝbnä Dǝngǝl in 1517; see Ewald Wagner, ‘Maḥfūẓ b. Muḥammad’, in EAe 3 (2007), 659; Chekroun and Hirsch, ‘The Sultanates of Medieval Ethiopia’, 104–5; Alessandro Gori, ‘Islamic Cultural Traditions of Medieval Ethiopia and Eritrea’, in A Companion to Medieval Ethiopia and Eritrea, ed. Samantha Kelly (Leiden: Brill, 2020), 142–61. 21. Compare, for example, Taddesse Tamrat, Church and State in Ethiopia, 1270–1527, 255–56, 261–62; Verena Krebs, ‘Crusading Threats? Ethiopian-­Egyptian Relations in the 1440s’, in Les Croisades En Afrique. XIII–XVIe Siècles, ed. Benjamin Weber (Toulouse: Presses Universitaires du Midi, 2019), 245–74 and also Loiseau, ‘Chrétiens d’Égypte, Musulmans d’Éthiopie. Protection Des Communautés et Relations Diplomatiques Entre Le Sultanat Mamelouk et Le Royaume Salomonien (ca 1270–1516)’. An Ethiopian Nägs ́ hymn written in the mid-fifteenth century also d ­ emonstrates that Ethiopian rulers very much saw themselves as protectors of Christian minorities in the Eastern Mediterranean; see Getatchew Haile, The Ethiopian Orthodox Church’s Tradition on the Holy Cross (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 4–14. 22. Also see Loiseau, ‘Chrétiens d’Égypte, Musulmans d’Éthiopie. Protection Des Communautés et Relations Diplomatiques Entre Le Sultanat Mamelouk et Le Royaume Salomonien (ca 1270–1516)’, 65. For a study of Solomonic kingship and the basis of Christian power in the Solomonic highlands, see Derat, Le Domaine Des Rois Éthiopiens.

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23. As Adam Knobler recently put it, Latin Christians had been all but conditioned to such a view by the identification of Solomonic Ethiopia as the realm of Prester John by the late fourteenth century, prior to the onset of actual Solomonic diplomacy; see Adam Knobler, Mythology and Diplomacy in the Age of Exploration (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 42. The legend and letter of Prester John dates to the twelfth century, the subsequent development of the myth of Prester John in Europe held that this mythical monarch wished to ‘visit the Sepulchre of the Lord with a great army’ to ‘humiliate and vanquish the enemies of the cross of Christ and to exalt his blessed name’; see Marco Giardini, ‘The Quest for the Ethiopian Prester John and Its Eschatological Implications’, Medievalia 22 (2019): 55–87:57. On the legend of Prester John in Europe and Latin Christian hopes projected onto Ethiopia, see, for example, Keagan Brewer, ed., Prester John: The Legend and Its Sources (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015); Gianfranco Fiaccadori, ‘Prester John’, in EAe 4 (2010), 209–16; Benjamin Weber and Robin Seignobos, ‘L’Occident, La Croisade et l’Éthiopie: Introduction’, Annales d’Éthiopie 27 (2012): 15–20; Benjamin Weber, ‘An Incomplete Integration into the Orbis Christianus. Relations and Misunderstandings between the Papacy and Ethiopia (1237–1456)’, Medieval Encounters 21 no. 2–3 (2015): 232–49; Knobler, Mythology and Diplomacy in the Age of Exploration, chap. 3; Samantha Kelly, ‘Heretics, Allies, Exemplary Christians: Latin Views of Ethiopian Orthodox in the Late Middle Ages’, in Late Medieval Heresy: New Perspectives. Studies in Honor of Robert E.  Lerner, eds. Michael D.  Bailey and Sean L.  Field (York: York Medieval Press, 2018), 195–214; Giardini, ‘The Quest for the Ethiopian Prester John and Its Eschatological Implications’; Verena Krebs, ‘Fancy Names and Fake News: Notes on the Conflation of Solomonic Ethiopian Rulership with the Myth of Prester John in Late Medieval Latin Christian Diplomatic Correspondence’, in Orbis Aethiopicus, 2021, 89–124. 24. Compare the July 1448 letter by Jean de Lastic, the Grand Master of Rhodes, to Charles VII, king of France; Lastic, Chronique de La Maison de Lastic : D’après Les Archives Du Château de Parentignat et Quelques Autres Documents. Des Origines à La Fin Du XVe Siècle, 329–30 or the 1444 letter of Gandulph of Sicily to Pope Eugene IV, ed. in Luke Wadding, Annales Minorum Seu Trium Ordinum a S.  Francisco Institutorum, Vol. 11 (Rome: Typis Rochi Bernabò, 1734), 220–21; transl. in Plante, ‘The Ethiopian Embassy to Cairo of 1443. A Trier Manuscript of Gandulphus’ Report with an English Translation’ as well as the 1480s account of Georges Lengherand; see Godefroy-Ménilglaise, Denis C. de, ed., Voyage de Georges Lengherand, Mayeur de Mons En Haynaut, a Venise, Rome, Jérusalem, Mont Sinai & Le Kayre (Mons: Masquillier & Dequesne, 1861), 185–88.

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25. ACA, Ms. 2677, f. 54v; ACA, Ms. 2658, fol. 57v; ACA, Ms. 2658, fol. 178r; ACA, Ms. 2661, fol. 20v. 26. That is, in 1441, the Ethiopian delegates at the Council of Florence were directly questioned about such a possibility, see Bartolomeo Nogara, Scritti Inediti e Rari Di Biondo Flavio (Rome: Tipografia poliglotta Vaticana, 1927), 26–27; in 1456, Pope Callixtus III directly proposed a shared crusade to aṣe Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob; see Osvaldo Raineri, Lettere Tra i Pontefici Romani e i Principi Etiopici (Secc. XII–XX). Versioni e Integrazioni (Città del Vaticano: Archivio Segreto Vaticano, 2005), 36; in 1481–82, Pope Sixtus IV appears to have entertained similar ideas according to the testimony of Johanne Baptista Brochus; see Renato Lefèvre, ‘Richerche Sull’imolese G.B. De Brocchi, Viaggiatore in Ethiopia e Curiale Pontificio’, Archivio Della Societa Romana Di Storia Patria 81 (1958): 108. 27. This object was bestowed annually by the pontiff upon those seen as defenders of the Christian faith or the Holy See; see Benjamin Weber, ‘Vrais et Faux Éthiopiens Au XVe Siècle En Occident? Du Bon Usage Des Connexions’, Annales d’Éthiopie 27 (2012): 115. 28. In publications of the 1930s and 1940s, a number of Italian scholars (many with ties to the fascist occupation of Ethiopia as part of the Africa Orientale Italiana between 1936 and 1941) postulated, for example, that the purported presence of ‘foreign’ or ‘European’ elements in late medieval Ethiopian material culture and architecture was owed to a lack of skilled indigenous labour, and asserted that Ethiopia had profited from Italian technological and artistic advancement already in the late Middle Ages; cf. Enrico Cerulli, ‘L’Etiopia Del Secolo XV in Nouvi Documenti Storici Con 12 Illustrazioni’, Africa Italiana. Rivista Di Storia e d’Arte a Cura Del Ministero Delle Colonie 5, no. 1–2 (1933): 107–12; Renato Lefèvre, ‘Riflessi Etiopici Nella Cultura Europea Del Medioevo e Del Rinascimento—Parte Seconda’, Annali Lateranensi 9 (1945): 380–83; Ugo Monneret de Villard, ‘Miniatura Veneto-Cretese in Un Codice Etiopico’, La Bibliofilía 47 (1945): 13. Notions based on assumptions of an ostensible lack of skilled indigenous labour and Italian artistic transfer survive, for example, in the narrative surrounding the Venetian Nicolo Brancaleon, who has been styled as a master artist instructing a ‘school’ of Ethiopian pupils; see Stanisław Chojnacki, ‘Notes on Art in Ethiopia in the 15th and Early 16th Century’, Journal of Ethiopian Studies 8, no. 2 (1970): 21–65; Stanisław Chojnacki, ‘The Discovery of a 15th-Century Painting and the Brancaleon Enigma’, Rassegna di Studi Etiopici 43 (1999): 15–42; Stanisław Chojnacki, ‘New Discoveries: The Italianate School Reconsidered’, in Ethiopian Art: A Unique Cultural Heritage and Modern Challenge, eds. Stanisław Chojnacki, Walter Raunig, and Asfa-Wossen Asserate (Lublin: Orbis Aethiopicus, 2007), 1–20; I exam-

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ined this topic in great detail in Verena Krebs, ‘Windows onto the World: Culture Contacts and Western Christian Art in Ethiopia, 1402–1543’ (PhD thesis, Universität Konstanz / Mekelle University, 2014), chap. 5 as well as my forthcoming monograph, Africa Collecting Europe. 29. Francesco Cerone, ‘La Politica Orientale Di Alfonso Di Aragona’, Archivio Storico per Le Province Napoletane 27 (1902): 3-93:67; Lefèvre, ‘Riflessi Etiopici Nella Cultura Europea Del Medioevo e Del Rinascimento—Parte Seconda’, 381, 389; Knobler, Mythology and Diplomacy in the Age of Exploration, 40–41. 30. Knobler, Mythology and Diplomacy in the Age of Exploration, 42. 31. Per Otnes, ‘Other-Wise: Alterity, Materiality, Mediation’ (Oslo: Scandinavian University Press, 1997). 32. Compare 2 Chronicles, 2 and 1 Kings, 6 and 7. 33. The term was  first coined by Marie-Laure Derat in  her study of  Early Solomonic Kingship; Marie-Laure Derat, Le Domaine Des Rois Éthiopiens, 1270–1527: Espace, Pouvoir et Monarchisme (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2003), chap. 6. 34. For Aksum, see Stuart Munro-Hay, Aksum: An African Civilisation of Late Antiquity (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1991); Stuart Munro-Hay, ‘Aksum: History of the Town and Empire’, in EAe 1 (2003), 173–79. 35. For a brief overview, see Verena Krebs, ‘Christianity, Ethiopian’, in The Encyclopedia of Ancient History: Asia and Africa (Wiley, 2021). 36. For the Zagwe, see Marie-Laure Derat, ‘Before the Solomonids: Crisis, Renaissance and the Emergence of the Zagwe Dynasty (Seventh– Thirteenth Centuries)’, in A Companion to Medieval Ethiopia and Eritrea, ed. Samantha Kelly (Leiden: Brill, 2020), 31–56; Gianfranco Fiaccadori, ‘Zagwe’, EAe 5 (2014), 107–14. 37. While it certainly centred on Lasta, the realm of the Zagwe has recently been shown to extend far beyond this region; see Marie-Laure Derat, L’énigme d’une Dynastie Sainte et Usurpatrice Dans Le Royaume Chrétien d’Éthiopie Du XIe Au XIIIe Siècle (Turnhout: Brepols, 2018); Derat, ‘Before the Solomonids: Crisis, Renaissance and the Emergence of the Zagwe Dynasty (Seventh–Thirteenth Centuries)’. 38. Derat, Le Domaine Des Rois Éthiopiens, 7. 39. The Muslim principality of Šawah, ruled by the Maḫzūmı ̄ family, existed on the southern end of the central highland plateau by the twelfth century; it was destroyed by a Muslim rival—probably with Christian support—in the late 1280s and eventually integrated into the Solomonic Christian realm; see Chekroun and Hirsch, ‘The Sultanates of Medieval Ethiopia’, 93–95; Deresse Ayenachew, ‘Territorial Expansion and Administrative Evolution under the “Solomonic” Dynasty’, 65–70.

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40. Derat, Le Domaine Des Rois Éthiopiens, 7, 23–24. For a definition of the distinct geographical borders and sub-regions of Amhara and Šäwa, see Derat, Le Domaine Des Rois Éthiopiens, 19–49. On the question of the capitals of Ethiopia, the ‘cities of the king’ and especially the town of Bärara, mentioned as something akin to a capital in numerous exogenous texts but yet to be securely located, see Richard Pankhurst, ‘Bärara’, in EAe 1 (2003), 473. The royal court or kätäma, some 30,000 to 40,000 people strong, moved through the realm for the long dry season; its itinerant nature was based on the assumption that no single area could support its consumption for too long and also owed to the practicalities of governing a rugged highland realm. On the kätäma, the royal court or ‘camp’, see Manfred Kropp, ‘The Śǝrʿatä Gǝbr: A Mirror View of Daily Life at the Ethiopian Royal Court in the Middle Ages’, Northeast African Studies 10, no. 2–3 (1988): 51–87; Deresse Ayenachew, ‘The Southern Interests of the Royal Court of Ethiopia in the Light of Bərbər Maryam’s Ge’ez and Amharic Manuscripts’, Northeast African Studies 11, no. 2 (2011): 43–57; Deresse Ayenachew, ‘Territorial Expansion and Administrative Evolution under the “Solomonic” Dynasty’. 41. Derat, Le Domaine Des Rois Éthiopiens, 35. 42. From the chronicles of fourteenth- to sixteenth-century Ethiopian rulers, it is clear that the nägäst́ at least claimed to rule supreme over most of the central highlands, reaching from the governorship of the baḥər nägaš in the Eritrean coastal region to the Sultanate of Hadiyya and the Awaš, some 100 miles south of modern-day Addis Ababa; see Perruchon, Les Chroniques de Zar’a Yâʿeqôb et de Ba’eda Mâryâm; Perruchon, ‘Histoire d’Eskender, d’ʾAmda Seyon II et de Nâʾod, Rois d’Éthiopie’; Franz Amadeus Dombrowski, Ṭ an̄ āsee 106: Eine Chronik Der Herrscher Äthiopiens (Wiesbaden: F. Steiner, 1983); Manfred Kropp, Die Geschichte Des Lebna-­Dengel, Claudius Und Minas (Leuven: Peeters, 1988); Kropp, ̄ Der Siegreiche Feldzug des Königs ʿAmda-Ṣ eyon gegen die Muslime in Adal im Jahre 1332 n. Chr. as well as George W.B. Huntingford, The Historical Geography of Ethiopia From the First Century AD to 1704 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989); Donald Crummey, Land and  Society in the Christian Kingdom of Ethiopia: From the Thirteenth to the Twentieth Century (Urbana and Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2000). 43. The Ethiopian rulers of this time humbly referred to themselves as ‘kings’—using the term nǝgus—and ́ I have accordingly adopted that terminology throughout this book. Generations of scholars have indeed referred to the medieval nägäs ́t as ‘emperors’, or to an Aksumite as well as a Gondärine Empire; see among many others Merid Wolde Aregay, ‘Society and Technology in Ethiopia 1500–1800’, Journal of Ethiopian Studies 17 (1984): 127–47; Henze, Layers of Time: A History of Ethiopia,

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22–26, 119; Marilyn E. Heldman, ‘A Chalice from Venice for Emperor Dawit of Ethiopia’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 52, no. 3 (1990): 442–445. On the use of the title nǝgus ́by the Ethiopian kings, see Andreu Martínez d’Alòs-Moner, ‘The Selling Of The Nǝguś: The «Emperor Of Ethiopia» In Portuguese And Jesuit Imagination’, Scrinium 1, no. 1 (2005): 161–73. 44. The Solomonic royal ideology propagated in the dynasty’s foundational myth, the Kǝbrä nägäst,́ the ‘Glory of the Kings’ or ‘Nobility of the Kings’, postulated a direct biological descent from the Biblical king Solomon through his son with the Queen of Sheba. Its first extant redaction in Gǝʿǝz dates to the first quarter of the fourteenth century while the text’s colophon proclaims it to be a much older text originally written in Coptic and Arabic; see Paolo Marrassini, ‘Kǝbrä Nägäśt’, in EAe 3 (2007), 364–68 for a textual history and bibliography. In the early twentieth century, it was edited and translated to German; see Carl Bezold, ed., Kebra Nagast: Die Herrlichkeit der Könige, nach den Handschriften in Berlin, London, Oxford und Paris (München: k. b. Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1905) as well as English; see Ernest Alfred Thompson Wallis Budge, ed., The Queen of Sheba and Her Only Son Menyelek (Kebrä Nägäst) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 45. Derat, Le Domaine Des Rois Éthiopiens. 46. Steven Kaplan, ‘Monasteries’, in EAe 3 (2007), 989. The Christianisation of Amhara is, for example, narrated as originating with a ninth-century Aksumite king ordering Christian missionaries from the northern highlands to teach in the region; see Taddesse Tamrat, Church and State in Ethiopia, 1270–1527, 35. 47. Derat, Le Domaine Des Rois Éthiopiens, 8, 87. 48. Derat, Le Domaine Des Rois Éthiopiens, 87–136. Both monastic mother-­ houses had been founded by one of the two most revered saints and important figures of Ethiopian monasticism: Iyäsus Moʾa and Täklä Haymanot. For an overview and bibliography, see Stanisław Kur, Steven Kaplan, and Denis Nosnitsin, ‘Iyäsus Moʾa’, in EAe 3 (2007), 257–59; Denis Nosnitsin, ‘Täklä Haymanot’, in EAe 4 (2010), 831–34. In the timeframe under consideration here, their hierarchically organised religious communities had spread throughout the realm; see Derat, Le Domaine Des Rois Éthiopiens, chaps. 3, 4, and 5 and especially 87–88. The monastic centres were also somewhat interrelated—the abbot of Däbrä ʿAsbo, Täklä Haymanot, was traditionally held to be a pupil of Iyäsus Moʾa of Däbrä Ḥ ayq Ǝsṭifanos before founding his own community, which would become Däbrä Libanos. 49. Derat, Le Domaine Des Rois Éthiopiens, 84.

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50. Non-monastic individuals and communities could also be given gwǝlt; in that case, the owner had certain obligations to the nǝgus ́, that is, raising troops if asked to do so, and paying specific taxes to the king. 51. Deresse Ayenachew, ‘Territorial Expansion and Administrative Evolution under the “Solomonic” Dynasty’, 61–62. 52. Deresse Ayenachew, ‘Territorial Expansion and Administrative Evolution under the “Solomonic” Dynasty’, 73; Steven Kaplan, ‘ʿAqqabe Säʿat’, in EAe 1 (2003), 292–93; Taddesse Tamrat, ‘The Abbots of Däbrä-Hayq 1248–1535’, Journal of Ethiopian Studies 8, no. 1 (1970): 87–117. Numerous other ecclesiastics were also attached to the court, acting as intermediaries between the nägäst́ and the monks. These court clergymen are known as kahǝnatä däbtära or ‘priests of the tabernacle’; on their role and function; see Derat, Le Domaine Des Rois Éthiopiens, 174–77. 53. Jules Perruchon, Les Chroniques de Zar’a Yâʿeqôb et de Ba’eda Mâryâm, Rois d’Éthiopie de 1434 à 1478 (Paris: É. Bouillon, 1893), 7–8, 27–28, 109, 168; Perruchon, ‘Histoire d’Eskender, d’ʾAmda Seyon II et de Nâʾod, Rois d’Éthiopie’, 353; Derat, Le Domaine Des Rois Éthiopiens, 93. 54. See Getatchew Haile, ‘Ǝč̣cạ̈ ̌ ge’, in EAe 2 (2005), 212–13; Kaplan, ‘Monasteries’, 990. 55. On the relationship between Solomonic rule and monasticism, see Taddesse Tamrat, Church and State in Ethiopia, 1270–1527, 156–205; Steven Kaplan, The Monastic Holy Man and the Christianization of Early Solomonic Ethiopia (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1984); Derat, Le Domaine Des Rois Éthiopiens; Gianfrancesco Lusini, ‘The Ancient and Medieval History of Eritrean and Ethiopian Monasticism: An Outline’, in A Companion to Medieval Ethiopia and Eritrea, ed. Samantha Kelly (Leiden: Brill, 2020), 194–216. Monastic ideals and royal agenda could be—and sometimes were—diametrically opposed. Religious reforms and the lifestyle of the nägäst́ invited criticism from the religious communities. Particularly fierce conflicts are tangible for the fourteenth century, and the rule of aṣe ʿAmdä Ṣəyon and aṣe Säyfä Arʿad. An issue of contention was the practice of polygyny and marriage of a father’s wife. For some examples of particularly violent clashes, torture and even martyrdom of ecclesiastics at the hand of several nägäs ́t, see Derat, Le Domaine Des Rois Éthiopiens, chap. 4. By the mid-fifteenth century, Solomonic rulers had however established a working and stable relationship with both Däbrä Ḥ ayq Ǝsṭifanos and Däbrä Libanos; Derat, Le Domaine Des Rois Éthiopiens, 189. For an exhaustive study on the underlying and specific reasons for this change, see Derat, Le Domaine Des Rois Éthiopiens, chap. 5. Religious reforms enacted under as ̣e Dawit and particularly aṣe Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob in the fifteenth century resulted, however, in the (contin-

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ued) resistance from specific other monastic groups, that is, the Ewost ̣ateans and the Ǝsṭifanosites or Stephanites. 56. Kaplan, ‘Monasteries’, 988. 57. Derat, Le Domaine Des Rois Éthiopiens, 209. I would add the church built by princess Dǝlmä Nǝgśa, a daughter of aṣe Dawit, in the late fourteenth or very early fifteenth century, to this list; see Claire Bosc-Tiessé, ‘Christian Visual Culture in Medieval Ethiopia: Overview, Trends and Issues’, in A Companion to Medieval Ethiopia and Eritrea, ed. Samantha Kelly (Leiden: Brill, 2020), 336–41. Derat distinguishes five different types of foundations: chapels, sanctuaries, churches, convents and important monasteries; it is frequently impossible from the textual evidence to distinguish between churches and monasteries, and many seem to have been both; see Derat, Le Domaine Des Rois Éthiopiens, 210–11. 58. For a table of foundations, compare Derat, Le Domaine Des Rois Éthiopiens, 328. It is possible that the surviving and accessible source evidence distorts our picture of this phenomenon; both written and archaeological sources are limited for an earlier period but comparatively good for the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; see Derat, Le Domaine Des Rois Éthiopiens, 209. 59. Derat, Le Domaine Des Rois Éthiopiens, 215, 217, 224–25. 60. Derat, Le Domaine Des Rois Éthiopiens, 218–19. The building of the church of Anṣokiya of Ifat appears to have been all but a provocation towards the Sultanate of ʿAdal. 61. Compare Derat, Le Domaine Des Rois Éthiopiens, 79–81. In the sixteenth century, royal women also founded prestigious religious centres in eastern Goǧǧam: Ǝskǝndǝr’s mother Romna founded Mǝʿǝrafä Maryam on the shores of Lake Ṭ ana, Naʿod Mogäsa established Getesemane Maryam and ǝtege Ǝleni Märṭulä Maryam in her large fief at Ǝnnäbse; see Margaux Herman, ‘Towards a History of Women in Medieval Ethiopia’, in A Companion to Medieval Ethiopia and Eritrea, ed. Samantha Kelly (Leiden: Brill, 2020), 365–94:392–93. Goǧǧam had come under Solomonic control during the expansion of the realm in the 1330s; in the fifteenth century, the formerly sovereign nägasí or ‘king’ of Goǧǧam was appointed by the nǝgus ́ himself, placing the region under direct Solomonic control. As ̣e Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob had also installed a royal cạ̈̌ wa military regiment in Goǧǧam. Still, the region remained a Christian frontier area until the latter part of the fifteenth century, with the monk Nob—a Solomonic prince—building the church of Mädḫane ʿAläm on an island in Lake Ṭ ana in the 1410s. The subsequent royal foundations of this region, pushed by royal women, played a pivotal role in Goǧǧam’s evangelization; the political affiliation of the monasteries adhered to the religious movements favoured by the queens.

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62. The specific, rugged geography made Mänz comparatively removed and isolated, but its climate was temperate and its soils fertile, allowing for multiple harvests a year; see Ronald A. Reminick and Evgenia Sokolinskaia, ‘Mänz’, in EAe 3 (2007), 753–54:753. 63. Reminick and Sokolinskaia, ‘Mänz’, 752. For Yoḥannǝs Mǝśraqawi, understood as the (possibly even fifteenth-century) ‘apostle of Mänz’ ordered by aṣe ʿAmdä Ṣəyon to evangelize in the area; see Paolo Marrassini, ‘Yoḥannǝs Mǝśraqawi’, in EAe 5 (2014), 82–83. 64. Reminick and Sokolinskaia, ‘Mänz’, 753. 65. Ruins of dressed-stone edifices possibly dating to the fifteenth century are also found in the north of the realm, see Francis Anfray, ‘Notes archéologiques’, Annales d’Éthiopie 8 (1970): 31–56:36–40. Solomonic rulers did however not focus their building activities on Tǝgray or Lasta, the former centres of the Aksumite and Zagwe kingdoms, home to an extensive network of churches and monasteries dating back to late antiquity. 66. The important monastic motherhouses in the fifteenth century remained Däbrä ʿAsbo and Däbrä Libanos, as well as the Ewost ̣atean communities of Däbrä Maryam and Däbrä Bizän in Tǝgray. The affiliation of more than half of the royal churches is unknown; see Derat, Le Domaine Des Rois Éthiopiens, 242–44, 259–60, 266. 67. While built for many purposes, these edifices are often tied to practices of religious unification and assertion of power: in the very early fifteenth century, aṣe Dawit is narrated as weathering a religious controversy and subsequently founding a very big and beautiful church on Amba Gǝšän; see Derat, Le Domaine Des Rois Éthiopiens, 181–83. Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob built his church of Däbrä Bǝrhan between 1450 and 1453, the same time his throne was allegedly under threat from a court conspiracy; see Taddesse Tamrat, ‘Problems of Royal Succession in Fifteenth-Century Ethiopia: A Presentation of the Documents’, in IV Congresso Internazionale Di Studi Etiopici, Roma 1972, ed. Enrico Cerulli (Rome: Accademia nazionale dei Lincei, 1974), 242 and Derat, Le Domaine Des Rois Éthiopiens, 273. He also built several churches in short order after the victory over a rebellious Muslim tributary, and gifted the rich clothes and jewellery of his opponent Aḥmad Badlāy to his royal foundation of Däbrä Nägwädgwad, Perruchon, Les Chroniques de Zar’a Yâʿeqôb et de Ba’eda Mâryâm, 66–67, 89, 92–93. Aṣe Ǝskǝndǝr meanwhile built a church to assuage his guilt after an incursion on the Sultanate of ʿAdal led to loss of life among his troops; he called it the ‘Monastery of Sacrifice’; see Perruchon, ‘Histoire d’Eskender, d’ʾAmda Seyon II et de Nâʾod, Rois d’Éthiopie’, 357–58.

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68. Of the 34 royal churches securely attested, at least 9 were funerary sites; all except 1 were located in Amhara. Some could become veritable necropolises; see Derat, Le Domaine Des Rois Éthiopiens, 224, 259, 272, 284–290. 69. Derat, Le Domaine Des Rois Éthiopiens, 272–79. 70. The Futūḥ al-Ḥ abaša describes the ʿAdali leader Imam ̄ Aḥmad as enquiring after and subsequently specifically targeting royal churches. Threats of violence against royal churches are narrated as a major factor in the intermittent negotiations between Christian and the ʿAdali troops between 1529 and 1531; see, for example, Stenhouse and Pankhurst, Futuh̄ ̣ Al-Ḥ abaša: The Conquest of Abyssinia, 89, 129, 184, 245–46. Other important religious centres, such as the monastery of Däbrä Libanos, were also significant targets; see Francesco Béguinot, La Cronaca Abbreviata d’Abissinia: Nuova Versione Dall’Etiopico e Commento (Rome: Tipografia della Casa Edit. Italiana, 1901), 17; Stenhouse and Pankhurst, Futu ̄ḥ Al-Ḥ abaša: The Conquest of Abyssinia, 187, 190–92. 71. Derat, Le Domaine Des Rois Éthiopiens, 213. 72. See Franz-Christoph Muth, ‘Futūḥ Al-Ḥ abaša’, in EAe 2 (2005), 592–93; Stenhouse and Pankhurst, Futuh̄ ̣ Al-Ḥ abaša: The Conquest of Abyssinia. 73. Compare among many passages Stenhouse and Pankhurst, Futuh̄ ̣ Al-Ḥ abaša: The Conquest of Abyssinia, 246–49, 250, 251, 253. 74. Attested separately in Beckingham and Huntingford, The Prester John of the Indies, 256 and Stenhouse and Pankhurst, Futūḥ Al-Ḥ abaša: The Conquest of Abyssinia, 220. 75. Stenhouse and Pankhurst, Futu ̄ḥ Al-Ḥ abaša: The Conquest of Abyssinia, 246–47. 76. Compare, for example, Richard Stephen 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: Hakluyt Society, 1967), 6 and Solomon Gebreyes Beyene, ‘The Chronicle of King Gälawdewos (1540–1559): A Critical Edition with Annotated Translation’ (PhD thesis, Hamburg, Universität Hamburg, 2016); Kropp, Die Geschichte des Lebna-Dengel, Claudius und Minas. 77. Whiteway, The Portuguese Expedition to Abyssinia in 1541–1543, xxxvi. 78. Compare Ignazio Guidi, Annales Iohannis I, Iyāsu I et Baka ̄ffa ̄ (Leuven: Peeters, 1905), 70–71, which dates later but notes that Ǝleni’s church of Märt ̣ulä Maryam had been dismantled by subsequent local Christian rulers who let it fall into ruin. The exact location of many royal foundations is only approximately determined; compare the map in Derat, Le Domaine Des Rois Éthiopiens, 214.

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79. Cerulli, ‘L’Etiopia Del Secolo XV in Nouvi Documenti Storici Con 12 Illustrazioni’, 110. 80. For a rather sanitized overview of Cerulli’s career as both a colonial administrator and seminal scholar of Ethiopian Studies, see Lanfranco Ricci, ‘Cerulli, Enrico’, in EAe 1 (2003), 708–9. He had been an Italian legate in Addis Ababa between 1926 and 1931; in 1939 and 1940, he became governor of two provinces during the Italian occupation of Ethiopia. 81. Cerulli, ‘L’Etiopia Del Secolo XV in Nouvi Documenti Storici Con 12 Illustrazioni’, 110; Maurice de Coppet had become the French minister in Addis Ababa in January 1917 and left Ethiopia in the late 1920s; he travelled through Goǧǧam in late 1922 and early 1923; see Susanne Hummel, ‘Das hagiografische Werk zu Śarṣá P̣etṛ os. Werkgenese und Teiledition’ (PhD thesis, Hamburg, Universität Hamburg, 2020), 14. 82. Cerulli, ‘L’Etiopia Del Secolo XV in Nouvi Documenti Storici Con 12 Illustrazioni’, 110. Also see Chap. 4 of this book; the passage in Suriano’s Treatise on the Holy Land states that Baptista saw an ‘organ made in the Italian style’ in a ‘church of the king’, which was as ‘large as the church of St Mary of the Angels’ and called ‘Geneth Ioryos’; see BAP, Ms. 1106, fol. 45v, ed. in Marzia Caria, ‘Il Tratatello Delle Indulgentie de Terra Sancta  Secondo Il Ms. 1106 Della Biblioteca Augusta Di Perugia. Edizione e Note Linguistiche’ (PhD thesis, Sassari, Università degli Studi di Sassari, 2008), 165; transl. in Theophilus Bellorini, Eugene Hoade, and Bellarmino Bagatti, eds., Treatise on the Holy Land (Jerusalem: Franciscan Printing Press, 1949), 98. ‘Geneth Ioryos’ clearly refers to the royal church of Gännätä Giyorgis, founded by aṣe Ǝskǝndǝr; Baptista’s account indicates that it served as erstwhile burial place for Ǝskǝndǝr’s father, aṣe Bäʾǝdä Maryam. 83. Cerulli notes that while seventeenth-century Portuguese sources speak of Egyptian workmen employed for the building of Märtụ lä Maryam, Italian artisans would have travelled through Egypt on their way to Ethiopia, rendering the point somewhat moot; see Cerulli, ‘L’Etiopia Del Secolo XV in Nouvi Documenti Storici Con 12 Illustrazioni’, 110. 84. One field is identified with the church of Mäkanä Śǝllase, founded by aṣe Naʿod at the turn of the sixteenth century; compare Cerulli, ‘L’Etiopia Del Secolo XV in Nouvi Documenti Storici Con 12 Illustrazioni’, 111–12. 85. Cf., for example, the sentiments echoed in Cerulli, ‘L’Etiopia Del Secolo XV in Nouvi Documenti Storici Con 12 Illustrazioni’, 107–12; Lefèvre, ‘Riflessi Etiopici Nella Cultura Europea Del Medioevo e Del Rinascimento—Parte Seconda’, 380–83; Monneret de Villard, ‘Miniatura Veneto-Cretese in Un Codice Etiopico’, 13. 86. Claire Bosc-Tiessé, ‘Märṭulä Maryam’, in EAe 3 (2007), 801–2.

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87. Beckingham and Huntingford, The Prester John of the Indies, 459. 88. Instead, its ostensible peculiarity seems owed to fact that the building was not completely razed to the ground during the wars of the sixteenth century, that the ruins eventually were described in wonder by European observers, and that modern scholars have been able to locate the building in the first place. 89. Icons arrived in Ethiopia comparatively late and were only introduced as a result of major religious reform in the first half of the fifteenth century; see Annegret Marx, ‘Technical Aspects of Painting’, in EAe 4 (2010), 90–92; Marilyn E.  Heldman, ‘Painting on Wood’, in EAe 4 (2010), 99–101; Claire Bosc-Tiessé et al., Seʾel. Spirit and Materials of Ethiopian Icons (Addis Ababa: Centre français des études éthiopiennes, 2010); Stanisław Chojnacki and Carolyn Gossage, Ethiopian Icons: Catalogue of the Collection of the Institute of Ethiopian Studies Addis Ababa University (Milan: Skira: Fondazione Carlo Leone Montandon, 2000). The heightened veneration and institution of numerous Marian feasts during the rule of aṣe Dawit and aṣe Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob resulted in the manufacture of increased numbers of portable images of the Virgin within the highland realm; see Heldman, The Marian Icons of the Painter Fre ̄Ṣeyon: A Study of Fifteenth-Century Ethiopian Art, Patronage, and Spirituality; Marilyn E. Heldman, ‘St Luke as Painter: Post-­Byzantine Icons in Early-SixteenthCentury Ethiopia’, Gesta 44, no. 2 (2005): 125–48; Bosc-Tiessé et al., Seʾel. Spirit and Materials of Ethiopian Icons. This flourishing of Marian veneration is largely parallel to, and likely connected with, similar movements in Latin and Eastern Orthodox Churches; for Ethiopia, the need for icons of the Virgin appears to have arisen by the 1410s; see Derat, Le Domaine Des Rois Éthiopiens, 283. 90. Marie-Laure Derat, ‘Mäkanä Śəllase’, in EAe 3 (2007), 672. It was located in the local region of Amhara Sayǝnt, a mountainous area west of Lake Ḥ ayq. 91. The church was consecrated on 12 January 1521; see Beckingham and Huntingford, The Prester John of the Indies, 337–39; Derat, ‘Mäkanä Śəllase’. 92. Derat, Le Domaine Des Rois Éthiopiens, 226–27. 93. Cerulli, ‘L’Etiopia Del Secolo XV in Nouvi Documenti Storici Con 12 Illustrazioni’, 111. 94. Beckingham and Huntingford, The Prester John of the Indies, 256. It is unknown with what type of land (rǝst or gwult) the church was endowed, see Derat, Le Domaine Des Rois Éthiopiens, 249. 95. It is given as ‘quite half a league out of circular’, which would equate to roughly two miles, in Beckingham and Huntingford, The Prester John of the Indies, 254–55.

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96. Beckingham and Huntingford, The Prester John of the Indies, 340. 97. Alvares only specifies that the work had been done ‘with a paint brush’, leaving it unclear as to whether it was a mural or an icon affixed to the wall. 98. He speaks of 16 curtains made of 16 pieces each, indicating large swaths of fabric sewn together; Beckingham and Huntingford, The Prester John of the Indies, 340. 99. Stenhouse and Pankhurst, Futūḥ Al-Ḥ abaša: The Conquest of Abyssinia, 220–21, 246–49. 100. Stenhouse and Pankhurst, Futuh̄ ̣ Al-Ḥ abaša: The Conquest of Abyssinia, 220. 101. The Futu ̄ḥ al-Ḥ abaša states that its floorplan was 100 cubits in width and length; the cubit was a popular unit of length and would range from roughly two feet in a cubit to more than double that,  Stenhouse and Pankhurst, Futūḥ Al-Ḥ abaša: The Conquest of Abyssinia, 220–21. 102. Stenhouse and Pankhurst, Futūḥ Al-Ḥ abaša: The Conquest of Abyssinia, 220–21, 246. 103. Stenhouse and Pankhurst, Futuh̄ ̣ Al-Ḥ abaša: The Conquest of Abyssinia, 246. 104. Stenhouse and Pankhurst, Futuh̄ ̣ Al-Ḥ abaša: The Conquest of Abyssinia, 247. 105. Stenhouse and Pankhurst, Futuh̄ ̣ Al-Ḥ abaša: The Conquest of Abyssinia, 247. 106. See above as well as Stenhouse and Pankhurst, Futūḥ Al-Ḥ abaša: The Conquest of Abyssinia, 265. Also compare the ‘Chronicle of Gälawdewos’, which states that the ʿAdali army ‘had destroyed the shrines of prayer [monasteries and churches] whose walls were built with gold, silver and precious stones from India’; see Solomon Gebreyes Beyene, ‘The Chronicle of King Gälawdewos (1540–1559): A Critical Edition with Annotated Translation’, 95, 184. 107. Alvares refers to Atronsä Maryam as the ‘Church of St George’; that both are one and the same is specified in an earlier section of his text and supported by previously provided geographical identification; see Beckingham and Huntingford, The Prester John of the Indies, 255. 108. See Perruchon, Les Chroniques de Zar’a Yâʿeqôb et de Ba’eda Mâryâm, 120–21. 109. Perruchon, ‘Histoire d’Eskender, d’ʾAmda Seyon II et de Nâʾod, Rois d’Éthiopie’, 355; Derat, Le Domaine Des Rois Éthiopiens, 234–35. 110. Perruchon, Les Chroniques de Zar’a Yâʿeqôb et de Ba’eda Mâryâm, 120–21. 111. Beckingham and Huntingford, The Prester John of the Indies, 332–33. 112. Beckingham and Huntingford, The Prester John of the Indies, 340. 113. Beckingham and Huntingford, The Prester John of the Indies, 333. 114. Beckingham and Huntingford, The Prester John of the Indies, 333.

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115. The umbrella or canopy, locally called the dǝbab, is a symbolic covering for both church dignitaries, held, for example, aloft the tabot as well as coffins in processions. 116. Beckingham and Huntingford, The Prester John of the Indies, 334. 117. Stenhouse and Pankhurst, Futu ̄ḥ Al-Ḥ abaša: The Conquest of Abyssinia, 247–49. 118. They are described as pinkish and wine-coloured, with twelve tassels at the front and twelve at the back worked in gold. 119. He held the title of mäkbǝb, a specific ecclesiastical title connoting a preacher calling together an assembly, literally denoting ‘(the one) forming a circle’; see Christian Friedrich August Dillmann, Lexicon Linguae Aethiopicae, Cum Indice Latino. Adiectum Est Vocabularium Tigre Dialecti Septentrionalis Compilatum a W. Munziger (Lipsiae: T. O. Weigel, 1865), 848. Also see Perruchon, Les Chroniques de Zar’a Yâʿeqôb et de Ba’eda Mâryâm, Rois d’Éthiopie de 1434 à 1478, 121–22. Notably, aṣe Bäʾǝdä Maryam had engaged in all these dedicatory and endowment processes even prior to his coronation at Aksum; see Perruchon, Les Chroniques de Zar’a Yâʿeqôb et de Ba’eda Mâryâm, 125. 120. Perruchon, Les Chroniques de Zar’a Yâʿeqôb et de Ba’eda Mâryâm, 171–72; also see the table in Derat, Le Domaine Des Rois Éthiopiens, 307. As ̣e Bäʾǝdä Maryam’s own bones were ultimately also translated by a successor to an even larger necropolis at Daga Ǝsṭifanos. 121. See, for example, Perruchon, ‘Histoire d’Eskender, d’ʾAmda Seyon II et de Nâʾod, Rois d’Éthiopie’, 355–56, 363; Beckingham and Huntingford, The Prester John of the Indies, 255–56, 324, 332–35. 122. The systematic refusal of royal gifts by individual monks or monastic communities becomes a literary topos in Ethiopian religious writing; see Derat, Le Domaine Des Rois Éthiopiens, 160. 123. Dǝlmä Nǝgśa was appointed a regional governor by her father; she built a large church in Gayǝnt, in the borderland district of Bägemdǝr province; see Ahmed Hassen Omer, ‘Gayǝnt’, in EAe 2 (2005), 716–17. It followed a basilican layout and was built from huge dressed stones of different colours, set in an alternating pattern on a wooden framework. Other architectonical features included cupolas, cruciform pillars and barrel vaults, all framed by wooden structure, partially receiving earlier Aksumite architecture. There is evidence that the recessed stones of the outer walls were ornamented with silver and gold; surviving elements still show engraved decoration of cord friezes and elaborate knotwork; see Bosc-Tiessé, ‘Christian Visual Culture in Medieval Ethiopia: Overview, Trends and Issues’, 336; Claire Bosc-Tiessé, ‘Betä Lǝḥem’, in EAe 1 (2003), 560. The case of Dǝlmä Nǝgśa’s church is quite exceptional—for one, it was not ruined by the ʿAdali army. As no in-­depth research on aṣe

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Dawit’s daughter and her building has been conducted, the current state of research makes the foundation appear a somewhat puzzling example that defies the temporal framework and larger concept of the establishment of royal churches. Yet the edifice shows an early example of building in huge ashlars of different colours set with ornamentation, and Dǝlmä Nǝgśa—like her brothers aṣe Yǝsḥaq and aṣe Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob—undoubtedly was a member of the royal house and a regional stakeholder with considerable political power. 124. See Bosc-Tiessé, ‘Betä Lǝḥem’ and Francis Anfray, ‘Enselalé, avec d’autres sites du Choa, de l’Arssi, et un îlot du lac Tana’, Annales d’Éthiopie 11 (1978): 153–180:153. For a list of the eleven sites, see Anfray, ‘Enselalé, avec d’autres sites du Choa, de l’Arssi, et un îlot du lac Tana’, 154. Ten of the sites are located in Šäwa, all were ‘discovered’ from the late 1960s to mid-1970s. While the stones of some of these edifices were used as spolia in later churches, a surprising amount of ruins was absolutely abandoned after the wars of the sixteenth century. 125. Bosc-Tiessé, ‘Christian Visual Culture in Medieval Ethiopia: Overview, Trends and Issues’, 339. Research on these ruins remains preliminary to this day; see Stanisław Chojnacki, ‘Däy Giyorgis’, Journal of Ethiopian Studies 7, no. 2 (1969): 43–52; Lanfranco Ricci, ‘Resti di antico edificio in Ginbi (Scioa)’, Annales d’Éthiopie 10 (1976): 177–210; Anfray, ‘Enselalé, avec d’autres sites du Choa, de l’Arssi, et un îlot du lac Tana’; Francis Anfray, Guy Annequin et  al., ‘Chronique Archéologique, 1960–1964’, Annales d’Éthiopie 6 (1965): 3–48; Anfray, ‘Notes archéologiques’. A recent, far more comprehensive investigation of one site attributed to aṣe Bäʾǝdä Maryam, is available in Marie-Laure Derat and Anne-Marie Jouqand, Gabriel, Une Église Médiévale d’Éthiopie. Interprétations Historiques et Archéologiques de Sites Chrétiens Autour de Meshala Ma ̄rya ̄m (XVe–XVIIe Siècle) (Paris: De Boccard, 2012). 126. Chojnacki, ‘Däy Giyorgis’, 43. 127. Ruled 1430–1433, also known as Ḥ ǝzbä Nañ, third son of aṣe Dawit; see Marie-Laure Derat, ‘Täklä Maryam’, in EAe 4 (2010), 841. His scout Pietre of Naples is recorded in Pera at the Golden Horn in 1431–1432 scouting for skilled labourers; compare Chap. 3. 128. Chojnacki describes that the walls were held together without the obvious use of mortar, and that finely cut slabs covered an inner wall of irregularly cut stones; see Chojnacki, ‘Däy Giyorgis’, 43–45. 129. Chojnacki, ‘Däy Giyorgis’, 45. 130. Chojnacki, ‘Däy Giyorgis’, 45, note 5 and Anfray, ‘Enselalé, avec d’autres sites du Choa, de l’Arssi, et un îlot du lac Tana’, 159. It also appears in Märtụ lä Maryam, built at the turn of the sixteenth century; see Guglielmo Heintze, La Basilica Sul Nilo Azzuro Della Imperatrice Elena 1500

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(Milan: Allegretti, 1937), 33–34 as well as the ruin site of Ǝnsǝlale, also in Šäwa; see Anfray, ‘Enselalé, avec d’autres sites du Choa, de l’Arssi, et un îlot du lac Tana’, 154–58; Anfray, Annequin  et  al., ‘Chronique Archéologique, 1960–1964’, 25–26. 131. Anfray, ‘Enselalé, avec d’autres sites du Choa, de l’Arssi, et un îlot du lac Tana’, 154–56. 132. Anfray, ‘Enselalé, avec d’autres sites du Choa, de l’Arssi, et un îlot du lac Tana’, 156–57. 133. Anfray, Annequin et al., ‘Chronique Archéologique, 1960–1964’, 25. 134. Compare Ricci, ‘Resti di antico edificio in Ginbi (Scioa)’, 194, especially Figures XXXVIa-d. This site is only some 20 miles as the crow flies from Ǝnsǝlale; the church has been dated as preceding the wars of the sixteenth century and identified as potentially built by aṣe Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob or aṣe Lǝbnä Dǝngǝl; it has also been suggested that it might be identified with the church of Badǝqe, whose destruction is narrated in the Futūḥ al-Ḥ abaša; see Ricci, ‘Resti di antico edificio in Ginbi (Scioa)’, 195 and Stenhouse and Pankhurst, Futūḥ Al-Ḥ abaša: The Conquest of Abyssinia, 163. 135. Ricci, ‘Resti di antico edificio in Ginbi (Scioa)’, 178–79, 195. 136. Ricci, ‘Resti di antico edificio in Ginbi (Scioa)’, 188–89, 198. Some sizeable square stones were adorned with cross decorations and a rope pattern, interlacing bands carved also on their sides; see Anfray, ‘Enselalé, avec d’autres sites du Choa, de l’Arssi, et un îlot du lac Tana’, 158. 137. Ricci, ‘Resti di antico edificio in Ginbi (Scioa)’, 195–96. 138. Anfray, ‘Notes archéologiques’, 36–40 Among the northern ruins are the church of Nazret in the village of ʿAddi Abbona in Tǝgray, seemingly built on an earlier Aksumite and possibly Zagwe site. A formerly sizeable church preliminarily dated to the fifteenth century, it was built on a quadrangular floorplan, over 100 feet in width, with foundations made from solid, well-assembled dressed stones; see Anfray, ‘Notes archéologiques’, 36–37. Five unusual, high cupola-roofed chambers were attached to the building, leading to speculation that craftsmen from Egypt or Yemen were employed in building the edifice; see Paul B. Henze, ‘Nazret’, in EAe 3 (2007), 1158–59. Many of the remaining dressed stones are of substantial size, over five feet in length and nearly a foot tall. Remains of decorated plaster were recognizable until the 1960s; a Portuguese account of the second half of the sixteenth century describes the church as a battle site during the wars with the Sultanate of ʿAdal; twentiethcentury oral tradition identified the ruins as a former palace of as ̣e ʿAmdä Ṣəyon turned into a church after his death; see Anfray, ‘Notes archéologiques’, 39.

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A similar ruin of monumental dressed stones, following a basilica floorplan, was located at Agulaʿ Qirqos. A detailed 1868 drawing identified the edifice as ‘ruins of an ancient Greek church’; the rendering suggests that large parts of the ruin’s base structure had remained standing until the late nineteenth century. It consisted of a base wall made up of four massive steps of dressed stones, possibly adorned with carved ornamentation. By the late 1960s, the ruins had deteriorated considerably; a floorplan produced by Francis Anfray suggests that the church was of considerable size—100 feet in length and 50 feet wide; see Anfray, ‘Notes archéologiques’, 39–40. The ruins have also been suggested as dating to late Aksumite or post-Aksumite times; see Wolbert Smidt, ‘Kwiḥa’, in EAe 3 (2007), 468–70. 139. A very preliminary survey of the ruin of Märtụ lä Maryam was carried out in the 1930s by Guglielmo Heintze, who mostly mistook a much younger Jesuit church for Ǝleni’s original foundation. Marie-Laure Derat analysed the ruins and showed that Heintze’s floorplans and drawings mostly concerned the Jesuit church; see Derat, Le Domaine Des Rois Éthiopiens, 228–31; the only drawings of Ǝleni’s ca. 1500 foundation are Fig. 15 and Tab. VII in Heintze, La Basilica Sul Nilo Azzuro Della Imperatrice Elena 1500, 16, 33–34. Jesuit descriptions of the site mentioned a wall standing at about 150 feet in length in the seventeenth century; see George W.  B. Huntingford and Charles Fraser Beckingham, Some Records of Ethiopia, 1593–1646 (London: Hakluyt Society, 1954), 104. 140. Claire Bosc-Tiessé has recently pointed out that the dressed stone churches of the late Middle Ages remain understudied, at least when compared to Aksumite sites or the rock-hewn churches of Lasta. For an overview, see Bosc-Tiessé, ‘Christian Visual Culture in Medieval Ethiopia: Overview, Trends and Issues’, 336–41. For existing but very preliminary studies of some of these sites, see Anfray, ‘Enselalé, avec d’autres sites du Choa, de l’Arssi, et un îlot du lac Tana’; Heintze, La Basilica Sul Nilo Azzuro Della Imperatrice Elena 1500; Chojnacki, ‘Däy Giyorgis’; Ricci, ‘Resti di antico edificio in Ginbi (Scioa)’. 141. BAP, Ms. 1106, fol. 46r, Bellorini, Hoade, and Bagatti, Treatise on the Holy Land, 99; Caria, ‘Il Tratatello Delle Indulgentie de Terra Sancta  Secondo Il Ms. 1106 Della Biblioteca Augusta Di Perugia. Edizione e Note Linguistiche’, 166–67. 142. BAV, Ms. Raineri 43, fols. 9r–12v. 143. BAV, Ms. Raineri 43, fols. 22v–25r, 33v–36r. 144. BAV, Ms. Raineri 43, fols. 10r–v; this might allude to a church built by as ̣e Dawit at Amba Gǝšän, which was, however, dedicated to the Virgin Mary; see Derat, Le Domaine Des Rois Éthiopiens, 288–89.

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145. BAV, Ms. Raineri 43, fols. 10r–v; also see Derat, Le Domaine Des Rois Éthiopiens, 288–89. 146. According to the Chronicle of Däbrä Libanos, aṣe Yǝsḥaq had given numerous brocade garments and linen tunics with golden bells sewn onto them to the monastery. Yǝsḥaq’s brother as well as his nephews and all their descendants are also recorded as donating precious fabrics to the monastery throughout the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries: aṣe Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob gave ‘golden garments’ and silk flywhisks, asẹ Ǝskǝndǝr donated tents, aṣe Naʿod a garment adorned with precious stones, and asẹ Lǝbnä Dǝngǝl silk garments alongside other precious items. In the 1540s, aṣe Lǝbnä Dǝngǝl’s son—asẹ Gälawdewos—is narrated as doing the same as part of the re-­building efforts after the wars of the sixteenth century; see Derat, Le Domaine Des Rois Éthiopiens, 334–35. 147. Compare, for example, Perruchon, Les Chroniques de Zar’a Yâʿeqôb et de Ba’eda Mâryâm, 52, 54–55, 120–22. 148. Enrico Cerulli, Il Libro Etiopico Dei Miracoli Di Maria e Le Sue Fonti Nelle Letterature Del Medio Evo Latino (Roma: Dott. Giovanni Bardi, 1943), 127. 149. Perruchon, Les Chroniques de Zar’a Yâʿeqôb et de Ba’eda Mâryâm, 90, also compare Manfred Kropp, ‘“Altersversorgung und garantierter Familienbesitz mit steuerlicher Begünstigung? Fragen Sie Ihren Abt!” Die traditionelle Struktur einer äthiopischen Klosterökonomie im Mittelalter am Beispiel von Urkunden aus dem Condaghe des Stephanusklosters im Hayq-­See’, in Orbis Aethiopicus. Band XV. Völker, Kulturen Und Religionen Am Horn von Afrika, eds. Walter Raunig and Asfa-Wossen Asserate (Dettelbach: J.H. Röll, 2016), 2016, 23–82. The tradition of tying sovereign monastic communities to Solomonic rulership through the gifting of precious ecclesiastical items dates back to the very foundation of the dynasty: in the late thirteenth century, aṣe Yəkunno Amlak had richly endowed the monastery of Däbrä Ḥ ayq Ǝst ̣ifanos in Amhara with ‘seventy ecclesiastical gowns, two golden trays, two golden chalices, and thirteen trays and chalices’ to ensure its loyalty and support after his ascension to power; see Taddesse Tamrat, ‘The Abbots of DäbräHayq, 1248–1535’, Journal of Ethiopian Studies 8, no. 1 (1970): 87–117:91. 150. Compare the direct import of Madre della Consolazione icons by princess Marta, a daughter of asẹ Ǝskǝndǝr, as well as the painted enamels acquired by Naʿod Mogäsa, the wife of asẹ Naʿod and mother of asẹ Lǝbnä Dǝngǝl. Both are examined in detail in Krebs, ‘Windows onto the World: Culture Contacts and Western Christian Art in Ethiopia, 1402–1543’, chaps. 6 and 7 and in my forthcoming monograph Africa Collecting Europe. For a catalogue of late medieval post-Byzantine icons imported to Ethiopia, see

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Verena Krebs, ‘A Preliminary Catalogue of Post-Byzantine Icons in Late Medieval Solomonic Ethiopia’, in Orbis Aethiopicus, 2021, 205–48. 151. Šihāb al-Dı ̄n, describing the destruction of a royal church in Ifat in 1531; Stenhouse and Pankhurst, Futu ̄ḥ Al-Ḥ abaša: The Conquest of Abyssinia, 210. 152. See Stenhouse and Pankhurst, Futu ̄ḥ Al-Ḥ abaša: The Conquest of Abyssinia, 144. Another of Lǝbnä Dǝngǝl’s churches contained silver dishes, mysterious ‘images that resembled animals’ made of silver, a vast quantity of fabrics including highly admired curtains; see Stenhouse and Pankhurst, Futuh̄ ̣ Al-Ḥ abaša: The Conquest of Abyssinia, 185. 153. Derat, Le Domaine Des Rois Éthiopiens, 239–40. The systematic refusal of royal gifts by individual monks or monastic communities eventually even becomes a literary topos in Ethiopian religious writing. 154. For a particularly evocative description of the gifting of royal clothes by aṣe Naʿod to a monastic community, see Derat, Le Domaine Des Rois Éthiopiens, 202–3. Vestments and liturgical objects were necessary to conduct services, but also needed for burials and the translation of royal bones—and many of these royal foundations served a funerary purpose; see Derat, Le Domaine Des Rois Éthiopiens, 295–96. Alvares, for example, describes the translation of Naʿod’s bones, placed on a bier covered with a gold brocade, closed in with curtains of satin in 1521; see Beckingham and Huntingford, The Prester John of the Indies, 361. 155. Compare Ibn Ḥ ajar al-ʿAsqalānı ̄, Inbā’ al-Ghumr Bi-Anba ̄’ al-ʿUmr, 3:426 and Ibn Taghrı ̄ Birdı ̄, Al-Nuju ̄m al-Zah̄ ira Fı ̄ Mulūk Misṛ Wa l-Qa ̄hira, 14:324–25. For a brief overview of Islamic objects brought to Ethiopia also, see Bosc-Tiessé, ‘Christian Visual Culture in Medieval Ethiopia: Overview, Trends and Issues’, 359. Huge Mamlūk brass objects are, for example, still preserved in the churches of Yǝmrǝḥannä Krǝstos and Gännätä Maryam in Lasta. 156. Wion, ‘Medieval Ethiopian Economies: Subsistence, Global Trade and the Administration of Wealth’, 417. 157. Knobler also notes that churches found in Šäwa might bear witness to this diplomatic request; see Knobler, Mythology and Diplomacy in the Age of Exploration, 37, 41–42. 158. The mission was likely unrelated to the geo-political entity of Solomonic Ethiopia and most certainly unofficial in nature; see Verena Krebs, ‘Re-Examining Foresti’s Supplementum Chronicarum and the “Ethiopian” Embassy to Europe of 1306’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 82, no. 3 (2019): 493–515. Paolo Chiesa and Alessandro Bausi have recently published a new source which narrates the arrival of an embassy from a geographically vague entity identified as ‘Ethiopia’  in Latin Europe in the year 1300; see Alessandro Bausi and

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Paolo Chiesa, ‘The Ystoria Ethyopie in the Cronica Universalis of Galvaneus de La Flamma (d. c. 1345)’, Aethiopica 22 (2019): 1–51. The text necessitates much further examination; it, too, offers no conclusive evidence of an official Solomonic embassy to the Latin West at the onset of the fourteenth century. 159. For studies of this mechanism, see, for example, Mary W. Helms, Ulysses’ Sail. An Ethnographic Odyssey of Power, Knowledge, and Geographical Distance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988); Mary W. Helms, Craft and the Kingly Ideal: Art, Trade, and Power (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013). 160. Instead of carved into or out of the living rock, an established way of building churches in Ethiopia since late antiquity. Written sources indicate that African olive trees were preferred over other kinds of timber for their interior architecture; see Derat, Le Domaine Des Rois Éthiopiens, 221. 161. For details on the levying of taxes and recruitment of the army as labour, see Derat, Le Domaine Des Rois Éthiopiens, 219–23. For descriptions on local labour being recruited, see Perruchon, Les Chroniques de Zar’a Yâʿeqôb et de Ba’eda Mâryâm, 71, 169. 162. Derat, Le Domaine Des Rois Éthiopiens, 236. 163. ASV, Senato Misti, reg. XLVI, fol. 36v. 164. ACA, Ms. 2658, fol. 57r. 165. ACA, Ms. 2677, fol. 54r. Also see Peter P.  Garretson, ‘A Note on Relations between Ethiopia and the Kingdom of Aragon in the Fifteenth Century’, Rassegna di Studi Etiopici 37 (1993): 37–44; Constantin Marinescu, La Politique Orientale d’Alfonse V d’Aragon, Roi de Naples (1416–1458) (Barcelona: Institut d’estudis catalans, 1994). 166. Writing about the 1520s, Alvares describes a site in an otherwise highly cultivated and densely inhabited part of Amhara and mentions marshes next to a number of lakes; he specifies that ‘people do not know how to draw off the water at the base of the mountains in drainage channels’. A few paragraphs later, however, he seemingly contradicts himself, stating that the plain surrounding the church of Mäkanä Śǝllase was irrigated by channels coming from the mountains that allowed for fresh crops all year round; see Beckingham and Huntingford, The Prester John of the Indies, 253, 255. 167. Charles Henri Auguste Schefer, ed., Le Voyage d’outremer de Bertrandon de La Broquière : Premier Conseiller de Philippe Le Bon, Duc de Bourgogne (Paris: E. Leroux, 1892), 144; Galen Kline, ed., The Voyage d’Outremer by Bertrandon de La Broquière (New York: Peter Lang, 1988), 91. 168. ACA, Ms. 2658, fol. 57r. 169. That is, meaning that he would only send more if Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob entered into a proposed shared crusade against Egypt with him; see ACA, Ms.

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2658, fol. 57r. An exchequer’s list of September 1450 states that 100 ducats had been set aside to fund the travel of four unspecified companions to the Ethiopian embassy to travel back to the North-East African highlands; we may assume that at least two artisans were among this group; see Cerone, ‘La Politica Orientale Di Alfonso Di Aragona’, 1902, 72. 170. Compare the note in the Annales Omnium Temporum, a universal history by the Italian Dominican Pietro Ranzano written in ca. 1460. Most of Ranzano’s interview with the Ethiopian ambassador is edited; see Carmelo Trasselli, ‘Un Italiano in Etiopia Nel XV Secolo Pietro Rombulo Da Messina’, Rassegna di Studi Etiopici 1, no. 2 (1941): 173–202; this particular passage—from fol. 65v—is not contained in Trasselli’s edition, but given in translation in Salvadore, The African Prester John and the Birth of Ethiopian-European Relations, 1402–1555, 52, note 40. 171. BAV, Ms. Vat. Lat 12270, fols. 88r, ed. in Lefèvre, ‘Richerche Sull’imolese G.B. De Brocchi, Viaggiatore in Ethiopia e Curiale Pontificio’, 108. The word magistros—‘teachers’—is the most ambiguous here. It connotes both ‘teachers’ as well as ‘experts’ or ‘masters’ and appears to act as an umbrella term for generally well-learned, but not necessarily clerical men. 172. In the context of the time, artifices denoted ‘craftsmen’, ‘masters of an art’ as well as ‘artists’. BNCF, Ms. II–III 256, fol. 255v, ed. in Raineri, Lettere Tra i Pontefici Romani e i Principi Etiopici (Secc. XII–XX). Versioni e Integrazioni, 43. 173. Particularly a demand that the nǝgus ́should first send out another embassy to Rome—which needed to include a high-ranking Ethiopian noble, identified as aṣe Ǝskǝndǝr’s ‘uncle’—to agree to an Union of the Churches; see Osvaldo Raineri, Lettere Tra i Pontefici Romani e i Principi Etiopici (Secoli XII–XX) (Città del Vaticano: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 2003), 42–43. 174. TTNA, Corpo Cronológico, 1a, Maço 17, Doc. 75, ed. in Aida Fernanda Dias, ‘Um Presente Régio’, Humanitas 47, no. 2 (1995): 685–789:690. The painters, specifically, were notably to be paid according to their own wishes. 175. The letters reached Portugal by 1527; Beckingham and Huntingford, The Prester John of the Indies, 501. 176. This letter was addressed to ‘Diogo Lopez de Sequiera, Captain Major of the Indies’; see Beckingham and Huntingford, The Prester John of the Indies, 476–80. Aṣe Lǝbnä Dǝngǝl hoped to acquire ten craftsmen of each specialisation; the list is mostly focussed on building-related labour but also does include a request for someone to ‘make swords and weapons of iron and helmets’. 177. Beckingham and Huntingford, The Prester John of the Indies, 501.

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178. See Beckingham and Huntingford, The Prester John of the Indies, 501, note 1. 179. As we have seen in the previous chapter, the Portuguese version of the letter also had the nǝgus ́ enquiring after swordsmiths and men who could produce ‘arms for all sorts of fighting’ as well as ‘men who make medicines, and physicians, and surgeons to cure illnesses’ and—as a last item— gunsmiths. The Gǝʿǝz version of the same letter elides the last request, the passage only asks for säʾaläyanä məsl—‘painters of images’, for artisans skilled in bookmaking, for ‘teachers of craftsmanship’, physicians and ‘builders of houses’ alongside ‘wise men who know how to extract gold, silver and lead (from the earth), and other wise men who would improve our kingdom’. Mentions of gunsmiths, swordsmiths and ‘men who could produce all sorts of arms for fighting’ are absent. Both the Portuguese and Gǝʿǝz version of the letter specifically name painters as the primary request posed by the nǝgus;́ see Beckingham and Huntingford, The Prester John of the Indies, 505; 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, Roma 1972, ed. Enrico Cerulli (Rome: Accademia nazionale dei Lincei, 1974), 547–566:560. 180. Legatio David, Fols. D3–D4 and E1–E2, ed. in Raineri, Lettere Tra i Pontefici Romani e i Principi Etiopici (Secoli XII–XX), 47–55. 181. The interest in relics is noted in Osvaldo Raineri, ‘I Doni Della Serenissima al Re Davide I d’Etiopia (Ms Raineri 43 Della Vaticana)’, Orientalia Christiana Periodica 65 (1999): 363–448; Kate Lowe, ‘“Representing” Africa: Ambassadors and Princes from Christian Africa to Renaissance Italy and Portugal, 1402–1608’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 17 (2007): 101–128:102, 109; Osvaldo Raineri, ‘Abba Kirākos: Omelie Etiopiche Sulla Croce (Ms. Raineri 43, Della Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana)’, in La Croce. Iconografia e Interpretazione (Secoli I–Inizio XVI). Atti Del Convegno Internazionale Di Studi (Napoli, 6–11 Dicembre 1999), ed. Boris Ulianich (Napoli: Elio de Rosa editore, 2007), 207–230; Weber, ‘Gli Etiopi a Roma Nel Quattrocento: Ambasciatori Politici, Negoziatori Religiosi o Pellegrini?’, 2013, para. 10; Salvadore, The African Prester John and the Birth of Ethiopian-European Relations, 1402–1555, 26. 182. BAV, Ms. Raineri 43, fols. 9r–12v; Antoine Khater and Oswald Hugh Edward Burmester, trans., History of the Patriarchs of the Coptic Church of Alexandria. Volume III Part III.  Cyril II—Cyril V (A.D. 1235–1894) (Cairo: Imprimerie de l’Institut Francais d’Archeologie Orientale, 1970), 249–50. The acquisition of the True Cross fragment is meanwhile noted as one of aṣe Dawit’s most memorable deeds in later Ethiopian chronicles; Dombrowski, Ṭ a ̄na ̄see 106: Eine Chronik Der Herrscher Äthiopiens, 154;

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René Basset, Études Sur l’histoire d’Éthiopie (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1882), 101; Béguinot, La Cronaca Abbreviata d’Abissinia: Nuova Versione Dall’Etiopico e Commento, 10. To this day, oral Ethiopian tradition relates that a ruler called ‘Dawit’ had brought a piece of the True Cross from ‘Egypt’; see Heldman, ‘St Luke as Painter: Post-Byzantine Icons in Early-­Sixteenth-­Century Ethiopia’, 2005, 140; Adrian Hastings, The Church in Africa: 1450–1950 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 33–34. A great number of objects originating in the Mediterranean and Europe—particularly post-Byzantine Cretan icons brought to Ethiopia in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries—are remembered in Ethiopian oral history as coming from either Gǝbs ̣, Mǝsr, or Ṣǝrʿ, a geographical realm encompassing both the northern and southern shore of the Mediterranean (Greece as well as Egypt). The trade and pilgrimage routes connecting the Mediterranean and Ethiopia would have inevitably led through Egypt. 183. BAV, Ms. Raineri 43, fols. 33v–36r; Khater and Burmester, History of the Patriarchs of the Coptic Church of Alexandria, 249. The latter was attested as preserved in the church of Tädbabä Maryam until the late twentieth century; see Diana Spencer, ‘In Search of St Luke Ikons in Ethiopia’, Journal of Ethiopian Studies 10, no. 2 (1972): 67–95:78. 184. Museo di Cividale di Friuli, Codice diplomatico Boiani 6, doc. 352, ed. in Vittorio Lazzarini, ‘Un’ambasciata Etiopica in Italia Nel 1404’, Atti Del Reale Instituto Veneto Di Scienze, Lettere Ed Arti 83 (1924): 846. 185. Ed. in Lazzarini, ‘Un’ambasciata Etiopica in Italia Nel 1404’, 846. 186. Compare Chap. 2 and the forthcoming article by  Julien Loiseau, ‘The Negus Merchant. Fortunes and Misfortunes of an Overseas Trader in 15th-­Century Cairo’, in An African Metropolis. Cairo and Its African Hinterland in the Middle Ages, ed. Julien Loiseau (Leiden: Brill, 2021). 187. The Egyptian jurist mentions a letter in the ‘language of the Abyssinians’ which urged the Ethiopian ambassador al-Tabrı ̄zı ̄ to acquire one of the masāmı ̄r or ‘nails’ with which Jesus was crucified; Ibn Ḥ ajar al-ʿAsqalānı ̄, Inba ̄’ al-Ghumr Bi-Anba ̄’ al-ʿUmr, 3:426–27. 188. See Francesco Cerone, ‘La Politica Orientale Di Alfonso Di Aragona’, Archivio Storico per Le Province Napoletane 27 (1902): 71; Benjamin Weber, ‘Gli Etiopi a Roma Nel Quattrocento: Ambasciatori Politici, Negoziatori Religiosi o Pellegrini?’, para. 10. 189. ‘Mittimus venerandas reliquias, videlicet de reliquiis S[anctorum] Apostolorum Petri et Pauli, de reliquiis S[ancti] Joannis Baptistae, de brachio S[ancti] Andreae Apostoli, de reliquiis S[ancti] Jacobi Zebedei Apostoli, de ligno crucis, in qua suspensus fuit beatus Petrus Apostolus; quas quidem reliquias, quoniam venerari sunt dignissimae, serenitati tuae, pro

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tua devotione destinamus.’ BAV, Reg. Vat. 445, fol. 274r, ed in. Raineri, Lettere Tra i Pontefici Romani e i Principi Etiopici (Secoli XII–XX), 41. 190. BNCF, Ms. II–III 256, fol. 255v, ed. in Raineri, Lettere Tra i Pontefici Romani e i Principi Etiopici (Secc. XII–XX). Versioni e Integrazioni, 43 and BAV, Ms. Vat. Lat 12270, fol. 88r, ed. in Lefèvre, ‘Richerche Sull’imolese G.B.  De Brocchi, Viaggiatore in Ethiopia e Curiale Pontificio’, 109. 191. See Weber, ‘Vrais et Faux Éthiopiens Au XVe Siècle  En Occident? Du Bon Usage Des Connexions’, 115. 192. BAV, Ms. Raineri 43, fol. 7v. 193. BAV, Ms. Raineri 43, fols. 23v–25v. 194. BAV, Ms. Raineri 43, fol. 29r–v. The History of the Patriarchs also mentions that aṣe Dawit had acquired ‘magnificent copes’—ceremonial cloaks—fit for kings and priests as part of the 1402 mission to Venice; see Khater and Burmester, History of the Patriarchs of the Coptic Church of Alexandria, 249. 195. BAV, Ms. Raineri 43, fol. 25r. 196. BAV, Ms. Raineri 43, fols. 7v, 18r–25r, 43r. This is supported by a note in the History of the Patriarchs, which mentions ‘gold and silver vessels’ together with a brief description of a beautifully worked reliquary; see Khater and Burmester, History of the Patriarchs of the Coptic Church of Alexandria, 249–50. 197. BNM, Ms. it. VII, nr. 374, coll. 7781, fol. 40, ed. in Rodolfo Gallo, Il Tesoro Di San Marco e La Sua Storia (Venice: Istituto di Storia dell’ Arte, 1967), 288. 198. The Egyptian jurist Ibn Ḥajar states succinctly that ‘Frankish clothing’ was found in the Persian merchant’s possession; see Ibn Ḥajar al-ʿAsqalānı,̄ Inbā’ al-Ghumr B-Anbā’ al-ʿUmr, 3:426. The historian Al-Maqrı z̄ ı ̄ specifies that the Ethiopian ambassador had acquired ‘many vestments embroidered with golden crosses made in the land of the Franks’ for the nǝgus ́; see Al-Maqrı ̄zı ,̄ Kitāb Al-Sulūk Li-Maʿrifat Duwal al-Mulūk, 4.2:797. 199. Georgius Hoffmann, Acta Camerae Apostolicae et Civitatum Venetiarum, Ferrarieae, Florentiae, Ianuae de Concilio Florentino. Concilium Florentinum. Documenta et Scriptores. Series A (Rome: Pontifical Oriental Institute, 1950), 106. It is unclear whether these mitres were just used during the conciliar session of the Council or taken back to the Eastern Mediterranean by the Copts and Ethiopians. 200. ACA, Ms. 2658, fol. 57r. 201. ACA, Ms. 2658, fol. 57r; Cerone, ‘La Politica Orientale Di Alfonso Di Aragona’, 1902, 76. 202. BAV, Ms. Vat. Lat 12270, fols. 88r, ed. in Lefèvre, ‘Richerche Sull’imolese G.B. De Brocchi, Viaggiatore in Ethiopia e Curiale Pontificio’, 109.

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203. Compare TTNA, Corpo Cronológico, 1a, Maço 17, Doc. 75, ed. in Dias, ‘Um Presente Régio’. Most textiles could be used in an ecclesiastical setting: altar frontals, curtains, cushions, tablecloths and towels, tapestries, door hangings, vestments, covers, cloaks, carpets, curtains in all sorts of colours—made from silk, brocade, damask, crimson velvet and other types of fine cloth, sourced from Granada, Holland, and Brittany. Many pieces were decorated with ornate religious or courtly scenes, including a pano d’armar de Ras—a specific type of embroidered tapestry from Arras—depicting the Virgin and Child, an archbishop with a double-cross seated at their feet, I thank Alexandra Curvelo of the University of Lisbon for her aid with this passage. Also see Dias, ‘Um Presente Régio’, 694. 204. TTNA, Corpo Cronológico, 1a, Maço 17, Doc. 75, ed. in Dias, ‘Um Presente Régio’, 689. 205. TTNA, Corpo Cronológico, 1a, Maço 17, Doc. 75, ed. in Dias, ‘Um Presente Régio’, 702. 206. Legatio David, Fol. E1–E2, ed. in Raineri, Lettere Tra i Pontefici Romani e i Principi Etiopici (Secoli XII–XX), 53. 207. Legatio David, Fol. E1–E2, ed. in Raineri, Lettere Tra i Pontefici Romani e i Principi Etiopici (Secoli XII–XX), 53. 208. In the case of asẹ Dawit’s piece of the True Cross, this most sacred relic was first brought to Amba Gǝšän, an important and sacred place of privileged location within the Solomonic dominion, before being transferred to Tädbabä Maryam; see Derat, Le Domaine Des Rois Éthiopiens, 26; Ewa Balicka-Witakowska, ‘Relics of the True Cross in Ethiopia’, in EAe 4 (2010), 357–58; Steven Kaplan, ‘Relics’, in EAe 4 (2010), 355–57; Haile Gabriel Dagne, ‘Amba Gǝšän’, in EAe 1 (2003), 220–21. 209. Robert Bartlett, Why Can the Dead Do Such Great Things. Saints and Worshippers from the Martyrs to the Reformation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), 327. 210. Bartlett, Why Can the Dead Do Such Great Things. Saints and Worshippers from the Martyrs to the Reformation, 242–43 for this Latin Christian practice. 211. Kaplan, ‘Relics’, 356. It appears that the frequent re-burying of the bodies of previous rulers as well as local saints was one of the strategies by which the nägäst́ addressed this particular issue. 212. Compare, for instance, the examples presented in Allegra Iafrate, The Wandering Throne of Solomon. Objects and Tales of Kingship in the Medieval Mediterranean (Leiden: Brill, 2015). 213. Compare Karl Heinz Brandt, Ausgrabungen Im Bremer St.-Petri-Dom 1974–76. Ein Vorbericht (Bremen: Rudolf Habelt Verlag, 1976), 72. 214. Allegra Iafrate, ‘Opus Salomonis: Sorting Out Solomon’s Scattered Treasure’, Medieval Encounters 22 (2016): 326–78.

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215. Getatchew Haile, ‘Documents on the History of Aṣé Dawit (1382–1413)’, Journal of Ethiopian Studies 16 (1983): 25–35:30–32. 216. The so-called ‘Goǧǧam Chronicle’ asserts that these objects were made by färänǧ—‘Franks’ and subsequently given to the royal foundation of Däbrä Sǝmmuna; see Gərma Getahun, Yä-Gog ̌g ̌am Təwlədd Bä-Mulu Kä-Abbay Ǝskä Abbay. Aläqa Täklä Iyäsus Waqg ̌əra Ǝndä-Ṣafut (in Amharic) (Addis Ababa, 2010), 37. 217. Loiseau, ‘The Ḥ aṭı ̄ and the Sultan. Letters and Embassies from Abyssinia to the Mamluk Court’, 640, also see Loiseau, ‘Chrétiens d’Égypte, Musulmans d’Éthiopie. Protection Des Communautés et Relations Diplomatiques Entre Le Sultanat Mamelouk et Le Royaume Salomonien (ca 1270–1516)’, 37–68:44–46. 218. Marilyn E. Heldman and Stuart C. Munro-Hay, African Zion. The Sacred Art of Ethiopia, ed. Roderick Grierson (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993), 181. It is impossible to say where this object originated—it adheres to the general pattern and shape of an Ethiopian processional cross and features a Gǝʿǝz inscription identifying it as having been presented by the nǝgus ́ to his foundation. It was clearly held in especially high esteem, as it was translated together with the body of aṣe Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob to Daga Ǝst ̣ifanos by his grandson, aṣe Naʿod. 219. Now located in the monastery of Samuʾel Zä-Qwoyäṣa; see Krebs, ‘A Preliminary Catalogue of Post-Byzantine Icons in Late Medieval Solomonic Ethiopia’, 229–31. 220. Roger W.  Cowley, ‘Zǝkre and Ṗawli —Ethiopic Bible Translators or Interpreters?’, Journal of Semitic Studies 34, no. 2 (1989): 387–98; Marilyn E. Heldman, ‘St Luke as Painter: Post-Byzantine Icons in EarlySixteenth-­Century Ethiopia’, 125–48; Krebs, ‘A Preliminary Catalogue of Post-­Byzantine Icons in Late Medieval Solomonic Ethiopia’, 209–15. 221. Examined in detail in Africa Collecting Europe, also see Krebs, ‘Windows onto the World: Culture Contacts and Western Christian Art in Ethiopia, 1402–1543’, chap. 7. 222. He said they were ‘very rich in figures’; see Beckingham and Huntingford, The Prester John of the Indies, 341. 223. Beckingham and Huntingford, The Prester John of the Indies, 341. 224. Beckingham and Huntingford, The Prester John of the Indies, 341. 225. Beckingham and Huntingford, The Prester John of the Indies, 342–43. 226. Derat, Le Domaine Des Rois Éthiopiens, 256. 227. He carried out his work on the eve of the Italian Fascist occupation of the Horn of Africa and expressly thanks the Italian colonial authorities for his support; Heintze, La Basilica Sul Nilo Azzuro Della Imperatrice Elena 1500, 17. For Heintze’s story of the ‘discovery’ and clearing of the site,

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compare Heintze, La Basilica Sul Nilo Azzuro Della Imperatrice Elena 1500, 35–37. 228. Heintze, La Basilica Sul Nilo Azzuro Della Imperatrice Elena 1500, 17, 19–20. He also expressly disputes that the ruins were ever rebuilt, and reads a number of ornaments—for example, the lily-motifs and rosettes of the main nave, which was rebuilt by the Jesuits in the early seventeenth century—as ‘typically Coptic’ in style, Heintze, La Basilica Sul Nilo Azzuro Della Imperatrice Elena 1500, 26–27. 229. The Jesuit Bruno Bruni had been responsible for rebuilding the site in the seventheenth century; see Derat, Le Domaine Des Rois Éthiopiens, 228. 230. Compare the analysis of the ruins by Marie-Laure Derat Derat, Le Domaine Des Rois Éthiopiens, 228–31, demonstrating that Heintze’s floorplans and drawings mostly concern the Jesuit church. The only drawings of Ǝleni’s ca. 1500 foundation are Fig. 15 and Tab. VII Heintze, La Basilica Sul Nilo Azzuro Della Imperatrice Elena 1500, 16, 34. 231. Heintze judged the ruote di fuoco or ‘wheel of flames’ decoration as absolutely unique, if somewhat reminiscent of a Coptic motif formed with tree branches; see Heintze, La Basilica Sul Nilo Azzuro Della Imperatrice Elena 1500, 34. 232. Anfray, Annequin, et al., ‘Chronique archéologique, 1960–1964’, 26. 233. Chojnacki, ‘Däy Giyorgis’, 48. 234. Ricci, ‘Resti di antico edificio in Ginbi (Scioa)’, 199–200. 235. Compare Percy Ernst Schramm, ‘Einfluss: Eine irreführende Methaper’, in Kaiser, Könige und Päpste 4.2, ed. Percy Ernst Schramm (Stuttgart: Hiersemann, 1971), 702–5. 236. The icon was painted by the Ethiopian painter Fǝre Ṣǝyon, who lived during the reign of as ̣e Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob; see Anfray, ‘Enselalé, avec d’autres sites du Choa, de l’Arssi, et un îlot du lac Tana’, 164. 237. Anfray, ‘Enselalé, avec d’autres sites du Choa, de l’Arssi, et un îlot du lac Tana’, 164. 238. Given as ‘Geneth Ioryos’ according to BAP, Ms. 1106, fol. 45v, Bellorini, Hoade, and Bagatti, Treatise on the Holy Land, 98; Caria, ‘Il Tratatello Delle Indulgentie de Terra Sancta Secondo Il Ms. 1106 Della Biblioteca Augusta Di Perugia. Edizione e Note Linguistiche’, 165. We know that this royal donation was consecrated during the reign of asẹ Ǝskǝndǝr, affiliated with the monastery of Däbrä Libanos and not intended as a funerary site. In his chronicle, aṣe Ǝskǝndǝr is narrated as visiting it with his court as part of a pilgrimage to the burial grounds of his ancestors at the royal monasteries of Däbrä Nägwädgwad and Atronsä Maryam; see Perruchon, ‘Histoire d’Eskender, d’ʾAmda Seyon II et de Nâʾod, Rois d’Éthiopie’, 335; Derat, Le Domaine Des Rois Éthiopiens, 276–77. In late 1531, troops of the ʿAdali army burned the church and seized a large

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quantity of gold-ornamented brocade garments, bejewelled golden crowns ‘that belonged to the king, or to the kings who went before him’, jewellery, ornamental weapons, plates and cups made from gold in exquisite workmanship; see Stenhouse and Pankhurst, Futuh̄ ̣ Al-Ḥ abaša: The Conquest of Abyssinia, 251–52. 239. Derat, Le Domaine Des Rois Éthiopiens, 235; Alvares states that they were ‘painted with suitable pictures and very good stories, well proportioned’; see Beckingham and Huntingford, The Prester John of the Indies, 332. He also noted that a different church in Tǝgray, which appears to have been under royal patronage, was a ‘very well arranged building, almost in the fashion of our churches, small and vaulted, its paintings very well executed’; see Beckingham and Huntingford, The Prester John of the Indies, 175. Its image repertoire—depicting Apostles, patriarchs, prophets, Elijah and Enoch—was easily recognizable enough for the Portuguese chaplain, who compares the iconographic repertoire of Portugal with that of Ethiopia throughout; Alvares stating that the building and paintings reminded him of home is therefore evocative. 240. BAP, Ms. 1106, fols. 45v–46r; Bellorini, Hoade, and Bagatti, Treatise on the Holy Land, 99. 241. For Brancaleon and his second career in Ethiopia, see Krebs, ‘Windows onto the World: Culture Contacts and Western Christian Art in Ethiopia, 1402–1543’, chap. 5 and my forthcoming monograph, Africa Collecting Europe. 242. BNCF, Ms. Magl XIII, 84, fol. 48v, ed. and transl. Osbert G. S. Crawford, Ethiopian Itineraries circa 1400–1524: Including Those Collected by Alessandro Zorzi at Venice in the Years 1519–24 (Cambridge: Hakluyt Society, 1958), 169. 243. Beckingham and Huntingford, The Prester John of the Indies, 380; the Portuguese text reads ‘pintor’ in all references to Lazaro de Andrade; see Francisco Alvares, Verdadeira Informação Das Terras Do Preste João Das Indias: (Conforme a de 1540, Illustr. de Diversos Fac-Similes) (Lisbon: Imprensa Nacional, 1889), chap. 105. 244. The church’s altar-stone was held to be of solid gold and so large and valuable that it had to be guarded at all times; on the episode, see Beckingham and Huntingford, The Prester John of the Indies, 458–59. 245. See Huntingford and Beckingham, Some Records of Ethiopia, 1593–1646, 104. 246. See Huntingford and Beckingham, Some Records of Ethiopia, 1593–1646, 104. From Almeida’s judgement of the ruins, the only fault lay with the darkness of the building, as ‘nothing could be seen without lamps, even at midday in a broad, big church like this’. Almeida largely blamed the thatch roofing of the church for this; his account remains unclear on

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whether he could actually still survey parts of the roof; see Huntingford and Beckingham, Some Records of Ethiopia, 1593–1646, 105. 247. Quoted in Charles T. Beke, ‘A Description of the Ruins of the Church of Mạ́r tula Máriam in Abessinia’, Archaeologia 32 no. 1 (1847): 38–57:44. 248. Compare, for example, the descriptions in the following sources: Perruchon, Les Chroniques de Zar’a Yâʿeqôb et de Ba’eda Mâryâm, 53, 67, 120–21; Perruchon, ‘Histoire d’Eskender, d’ʾAmda Seyon II et de Nâʾod, Rois d’Éthiopie’, 355; Beckingham and Huntingford, The Prester John of the Indies, 337–39, 459; Stenhouse and Pankhurst, Futuh̄ ̣ Al-Ḥ abaša: The Conquest of Abyssinia, 220. In arranging his royal church as a worthy future burial place, each nǝgus ́ could ensure in life that he would be adequately remembered and celebrated after his passing; see Derat, Le Domaine Des Rois Éthiopiens, 287. This is related to the Ethiopian tradition of the täzkar, a commemorative feast for a dead person of paramount importance; see Mersha Alehegne, ‘Täzkar’, in EAe 4 (2010), 881–82. 249. Helms, Craft and the Kingly Ideal: Art, Trade, and Power, 81. 250. Helms, Ulysses’ Sail. An Ethnographic Odyssey of Power, Knowledge, and Geographical Distance, 4–11. 251. Compare Cerulli, Il Libro Etiopico Dei Miracoli Di Maria e Le Sue Fonti Nelle Letterature Del Medio Evo Latino, 92; Manfred Kropp, ‘Die ältest bekannten äthiopischen Sammlungen der Marienwunder im Codex Aureus der Marienkirche von Amba Gǝšen und der Bethlehemkirche bei Däbrä Tabor’, Oriens Christianus 100 (2017): 57–103:66, 73, 76–81; the episode is echoed in a hymn also composed in the fifteenth century; see Steven Kaplan, ‘Notes Towards a History of Aṣe Dawit I (1382–1413)’, Aethiopica 5 (2002): 78. Golden paint was indeed first used in prestigious illuminations dating to aṣe Dawit’s rule; see Marilyn E.  Heldman and Tania Tribe, ‘Traditional Painting’, in Ethiopia. History, Culture and Challenges, eds. Siegbert Uhlig et  al. (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2017), 196. 252. Alfonso V of Aragon sent his court painter Lluís Dalmau to the Low Countries to learn about Flemish paintings; the Sforza court painter spent years with the workshop of van der Weyden; several Flemish painters were active at nearly every court during the fifteenth-century in Europe; the Limbourg brothers were sent to work from one master to another; Matthias Corvinus, the king of Hungary and leading patron of the Renaissance north of the Alps, patronised Italian artists; see, for example, Caroline Campbell and Alan Chong, Bellini and the East (London: National Gallery Publications Ltd, 2005); Joachim Poeschke, ed., Italienische Frührenaissance Und Nordeuropäisches Spätmittelalter. Kunst Der Frühen Neuzeit Im Europäischen Zusammenhang (Munich: Hirmer, 1993); Carol M.  Richardson, Kim W.  Woods, and Michael

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W. Franklin, eds., Renaissance Art Reconsidered: An Anthology of Primary Sources (Milton Keynes: Wiley, 2007). In Iberia, the active recruitment and migration of skilled artisans crossed religious and geographic boundaries was far from unusual; compare Thomas Glick, Islamic and Christian Spain in the Early Middle Ages (Leiden: Brill, 2005), chap. 7. Alfonso V of Aragon recruited Mozarab craftsmen to his court in the fifteenth century; see Richard Hitchcock, Mozarabs in Medieval and Early Modern Spain: Identities and Influences (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 71. 253. Venice, mindful of the importance of placating the Ottomans, sent the best painter it had to offer: Gentile Bellini; see Campbell and Chong, Bellini and the East, 18. 254. Among them the famed Muslim traveller Ibn Baṭtụ ̄tạ , who specifically set out for Delhi for this reason; see Ross E. Dunn, The Adventures of Ibn Battuta (University of California Press, 2012), 179; Aniruddha Ray, The Sultanate of Delhi (1206–1526): Polity, Economy, Society and Culture (Abingdon: Routledge, 2019). 255. Sarolta Tatár, ‘The Iconography of the Karakorum Fountain’, in Life and Afterlife & Apocalyptic Concepts in the Altaic World, eds. Michael Knüppel and Alois van Tongerloo (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2011), 77–78. 256. Such actions might even have served as a way to stave off internal conflict, as proposed in Knobler, Mythology and Diplomacy in the Age of Exploration, 37. 257. Derat, Le Domaine Des Rois Éthiopiens, 60–61, as told in the Kǝbrä nägäs ́t, in which the Queen of Sheba is identified as the Ethiopian queen Makǝdda. 258. See Bezold, Kebra Nagast: Die Herrlichkeit Der Könige; Budge, The Queen of Sheba and Her Only Son Menyelek (Kebrä Nägäst). 259. 2 Chronicles, 2. The word in the Ethiopian version of the Bible is ‘ብእሴጠቢበ’, the accusative of ብእሲጠቢብ, literally denoting a ‘wise man’, which now survives as ጠቢብ or ‘artisan’ in Tǝgrǝñña and Amharic. 260. 2 Chronicles, 3 and 1 Kings, 6 and 7. 261. The passage runs: ‘Just as the former king David, when he had planned to build the house of God and it was not successful for him, and he did not finish it, but his son Solomon [did], so our King Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob [finished] this temple on the west of this mountain, which his father has been unable to build.’ Perruchon, Les Chroniques de Zar’a Yâʿeqôb et de Ba’eda Mâryâm, 53. Asẹ Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob actually built two churches at the site: Mäkanä Gol and Däbrä Nägwädgwad; see Derat, Le Domaine Des Rois Éthiopiens, 328. 262. Perruchon, Les Chroniques de Zar’a Yâʿeqôb et de Ba’eda Mâryâm, 67; from the chronicle of aṣe Ǝskǝndǝr, we know that aṣe Bäʾǝdä Maryam had

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also favoured the region, Perruchon; ‘Histoire d’Eskender, d’ʾAmda Seyon II et de Nâʾod, Rois d’Éthiopie’, 354. 263. Perruchon, ‘Histoire d’Eskender, d’ʾAmda Seyon II et de Nâʾod, Rois d’Éthiopie’, 355, seemingly referring to Atronsä Maryam; see Perruchon, Les Chroniques de Zar’a Yâʿeqôb et de Ba’eda Mâryâm, 123. 264. Huntingford and Beckingham, Some Records of Ethiopia, 1593–1646, 99. 265. It had first been envisioned by as ̣e Bäʾǝdä Maryam, adorned by aṣe Naʿod and finally consecrated under the rule of aṣe Lǝbnä Dǝngǝl. 266. Compare 2 Chronicles, 3 and 1 Kings, 6 and 7. 267. Guidi, Annales Iohannis I, Iya¯su I et Baka¯ffa¯, 72. 268. Compare, for example, the ‘Acts’ of Abuna Yoḥannes from Däbrä Zämmädo, who is described as exceedingly handsome, jovial, and as looking ‘like an Israelite person’; see Sophia Dege-Müller, ‘Between Heretics and Jews: Inventing Jewish Identities in Ethiopia’, Entangled Religions 6 (2018): 258. 269. Compare, for example, Bodleian Libraries, Oxford, MS. Aeth. d. 19 and BNF, Paris, MS d’Abbadie 105. Both are examined in detail in a forthcoming  article, see  Jacopo Gnisci,  ‘Constructing Kingship in Early Solomonic Ethiopia: The David and Solomon Portraits in the Juel-Jensen Psalter’, The Art Bulletin 102 no. 4 (2020), 7-36. 270. See Bodleian Libraries, Oxford, MS. Aeth. d. 19, fol. 6v and fol. 138v. These regalia were firmly codified by the early sixteenth century. 271. Interestingly, an illumination of the Roman emperor Constantine—identified as ‘Qwäst ̣änt ̣inos, king of Rome’—shows that this king was awarded a similar honour of ‘Ethiopianisation’ within the manuscript; see BNF, Ms. d’Abbadie 105, fol. 13v and fol. 127v. 272. BNF, Ms. d’Abbadie 105, fol. 13v and fol. 121v, with early reprints of the illuminations in Carlo Conti Rossini, ‘Un Codice Illustrato Eritreo Del Secolo XV’, Africa Italiana 1 (1927): 83–97. 273. Also called Bǝlen Sägädä; he was active in the foundation and construction of several monasteries established by the monk Yonas; see Gianfrancesco Lusini, ‘Bǝlen Sägädä’, in EAe 1 (2003), 524–25. For the manuscript, see Anaïs Wion and Claire Bosc-Tiessé, ‘Les Manuscrits Éthiopiens d’Antoine d’Abbadie à La Bibliothèque Nationale de France’, in Antoine d’Abbadie de l’Abyssinie Au Pays Basque—Voyage d’une Vie, ed. Jean Dercourt (Paris: Atlantica-Séguier, 2010), 91–96. 274. Compare ACA, Ms. Reg. 2680, fol. 165r, ed. in António Joaquim Dias Dinis, ed., Monumenta Henricina III (1421–1431) (Coimbra: Comissão Executiva das Comemorações do Quinto Centenário da Morte do Infante D. Henrique, 1961), 208–9 and ACA, Ms. Reg 2684, fol. 145v. 275. Compare Henry Thomas and Armando Cortesao, The Discovery of Abyssinia by the Portuguese in 1530. A Facsimile of the Relation Entitled Carta Das Novas Que Vieram a El Rey Nosso Senhor Do Descobrimento Do Preste Joham (Lisbon 1521) (London: British Museum, 1938), fol. B6r,

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transl. in Thomas and Cortesao, The Discovery of Abyssinia by the Portuguese in 1530, 91; for the Gǝʿǝz version, see Sergew Hable Selassie, ‘The Ge’ez Letters of Queen Eleni and Libne Dingil to John, King of Portugal’, 554, 556–57. 276. Compare Beckingham and Huntingford, The Prester John of the Indies, 495–506 and Sergew Hable Selassie, ‘The Ge’ez Letters of Queen Eleni and Libne Dingil to John, King of Portugal’, 564; Legatio David, Fol. D3–D4 and Fol. E1–E2, ed. in Raineri, Lettere Tra i Pontefici Romani e i Principi Etiopici (Secoli XII–XX), 47–50 and 51–55. In the 1530s, with his kingdom overrun and largely dispossessed of land, aṣe Lǝbnä Dǝngǝl would eventually send for military aid from the Portuguese. 277. As mentioned above, the request for swordsmiths, men who could produce ‘arms for all sorts of fighting’ as well as gunsmiths is only found in the Portuguese version of the letter and not its Gǝʿǝz equivalent; also, even in the Portuguese letter, these did not pose a top priority—the ‘gunsmiths’ are added in an afterthought in an exceptionally extensive and varied list of demands. 278. That is, aṣe Lǝbnä Dǝngǝl freely stated that both saltpetre and sulphur and thus the basis for chemical explosives were found in his realm; he was interested in acquiring a specialist maker of gunpowder; see Beckingham and Huntingford, The Prester John of the Indies, 288. 279. Beckingham and Huntingford, The Prester John of the Indies, 288–89. 280. Beckingham and Huntingford, The Prester John of the Indies, 286. Immediately afterwards, as ̣e Lǝbnä Dǝngǝl is narrated as making the Portuguese engage in a mock swordfight and sing and dance for his entertainment, casting the audience in a very different light. 281. Raineri, Lettere Tra i Pontefici Romani e i Principi Etiopici (Secoli XII– XX), 53. 282. See, that is, Gaston Wiet, ‘Les Relations Égypto-Abyssines Sous Les Sultans Mamlouks’, Bulletin de La Société d’Archéologie Copte 4 (1938): 115–140; Palmira Brummett, Ottoman Seapower and Levantine Diplomacy in the Age of Discovery (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994); Ewald Wagner, ‘ʿAdal’, in EAe 1 (2003), 71–72; Malyn Newitt, A History of Portuguese Overseas Expansion, 1400–1668 (New York: Routledge, 2005); Michael Winter, ‘The Ottoman Occupation’, in The Cambridge History of Egypt. Volume I. Islamic Egypt, 640–1517, ed. Carl F. Petry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 490–516; Giancarlo Casale, The Ottoman Age of Exploration (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010); 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, eds. Éloi Ficquet, Ahmed Hassen Omer, and Thomas

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Osmond (Los Angeles: Tsehai Publishers, 2016), 163–74; Chekroun and Hirsch, ‘The Sultanates of Medieval Ethiopia’. 283. For different approaches to the individual movements, see Sergew Hable Selassie, ‘The Ge’ez Letters of Queen Eleni and Libne Dingil to John, King of Portugal’; Merid Wolde Aregay, ‘Millenarian Traditions and Peasant Movements in Ethiopia 1500–1855’, in Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference of Ethiopian Studies: University of Lund, 26–29 April 1982, ed. Sven Rubenson (Addis Ababa, Uppsala and East Lansing: Institute of Ethiopian Studies, 1984), 257–62; Taddesse Tamrat, ‘Feudalism in Heaven and on Earth: Ideology and Political Structure in Medieval Ethiopia’, in Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference of Ethiopian Studies, University of Lund, 26–29 April 1982,  ed. Sven Rubenson (Addis Ababa, Uppsala and East Lansing: Institute of Ethiopian Studies, 1984), 195–200; Merid Wolde Aregay, ‘Literary Origins of Ethiopian Millenarianism’, in Proceedings of the Ninth International Congress of Ethiopian Studies. Moscow, 26–29 August 1986, ed. Andrei Andreevich Gromyko (Moscow: Nauka Publishers, 1988), 161–78; Pierluigi Piovanelli, ‘Les Controverses Théologiques Sous Le Roi Zar’a Yā’qob (1434–1468) et La Mise En Place Du Monophysisme Éthiopien’, in La Controverse Religieuse et Ses Formes, ed. Alain Le Boulluec (Paris: Editions du cerf, 1995), 189–228; Marie-Laure Derat, ‘The Zāgwē Dynasty (11–13th Centuries) and King Yemreḥanna Krestos’, Annales d’Éthiopie 25 (2010): 157–96; Robert Beylot, ‘Le Millenarisme Article de Foi Dans l’Église Éthiopienne, Au XVe Siècle’, Rassegna di Studi Etiopici 25 (1971–72): 31–43 and William Alfred Shack, ‘On AntiMillenarian Elements in Medieval Christian Ethiopia’, in Les Orientalistes Sont Des Aventuriers: Guirlande Offerte a Joseph Tubiana Par Ses Eleves et Ses Amis (Saint-Maur: Bibliothèque Peiresc, 1999), 91–95. 284. The Portuguese version of her letter states ‘now has the time arrived of the promise made by Christ and Saint Mary His mother, who said that in the last times the King of the parts of the Franks would rise up, and that he would put an end to the Moors’; see Thomas and Cortesao, The Discovery of Abyssinia by the Portuguese in 1530, fol. B6r; transl. in Thomas and Cortesao, The Discovery of Abyssinia by the Portuguese in 1530, 91. From this text alone, it is unclear what ‘promise’ Ǝleni is referring to. Research has linked the emergence of this eschatological movement to an increased sense of helplessness after the raids of Maḥfūẓ, which in turn gave rise to a legend regarding the death of asẹ Naʿod and caused the Ethiopians to direct themselves towards Europe; see Merid Wolde Aregay, ‘Literary Origins of Ethiopian Millenarianism’, 168. Also see Merid Wolde Aregay, ‘Millenarian Traditions and Peasant Movements in Ethiopia 1500–1855’.

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285. The eyewitnesses were Diogo Lopes de Sequeira and Pero Gomes Teixeira, two high-ranking Portuguese officials who participated in the landing of the Portuguese on Ethiopian shores in April 1520. They sent a written report on their experiences in Ethiopia to high court officials in Portugal, subsequently published as a small booklet called Carta das novas que vieram a el rei nosso senhor do descobrimento do preste João by 1521  in Lisbon; a facsimile and translation to English is published as Thomas and Cortesao, The Discovery of Abyssinia by the Portuguese in 1530. The local official is identified as the ‘Captain of Harkiko’ in the Portuguese account; see Thomas and Cortesao, The Discovery of Abyssinia by the Portuguese in 1530, fol. A3v, transl. in Thomas and Cortesao, The Discovery of Abyssinia by the Portuguese in 1530, 67–68; Ethiopian allusions to the prophecy can be found in Thomas and Cortesao, The Discovery of Abyssinia by the Portuguese in 1530, fols A3v, A5v, transl. in Thomas and Cortesao, The Discovery of Abyssinia by the Portuguese in 1530, 67–68, 72. The baḥǝr nägaš, the governor of the coastal Eritrean region, is also narrated as alluding to this prophecy: in a meeting with the Pero Gomes Teixeira, the baḥər nägaš gave ‘many thanks to Our Lord that the prophecies they had always had were fulfilled, that they should be united one with another’; see Thomas and Cortesao, The Discovery of Abyssinia by the Portuguese in 1530, fol. B3r, transl. in Thomas and Cortesao, The Discovery of Abyssinia by the Portuguese in 1530, 85. 286. Beckingham and Huntingford, The Prester John of the Indies, 498. According to Alvares, this prophecy was based on writings found in the ‘life and passion of St Victor’. In fact, these writings are based on Pseudo-­ Methodius’ Revelationes and an apocalypse of the late seventh century, written in Syriac, in which a ‘king of the Greeks’ will attack the ‘Ishmaelites’ from the ‘sea of the Kushites’ while the ‘sons of the king of the Greeks’ will attack them from the Western lands. Afterwards, both kings would discuss matters of the faith and settle their doctrinal divisions, with the Byzantine ruler accepting the Ethiopian creed, thus fulfilling his mission and inaugurating the kingdom of peace and justice. The prophetic motif of the ‘two kings’ moreover also appears in the Kǝbrä nägäs ́t, for all; see Giardini, ‘The Quest for the Ethiopian Prester John and Its Eschatological Implications’, 66, 68, 78. 287. According to Sergew Hable Selassie, the local Ethiopian expectation of the End of the World was noted in a contemporary chronicle as follows: ‘The old people were sad and were saying: “What a bad time has come to us”! […] David has prophesied about the 8th millennium in his 11th Psalm. “Help, Lord; for the godly man ceaseth”. They read and interpreted the whole passage in front of all people, but they did not hear at all because their ears become deaf. [Aṣe Naʿod] became kind, pious and

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devout in prayer and alms. He loved our Lady Mary and he beseeched and prayed to her always—day and night—not to allow the 8th millennium to come.’ Sergew Hable Selassie, ‘The Ge’ez Letters of Queen Eleni and Libne Dingil to John, King of Portugal’, 551–52, as well as 552 note 22. 288. He had first come from Egypt in the early 1480s together with abunä Yǝsḥaq; see Steven Kaplan and Gianfranco Fiaccadori, ‘Marqos’, in EAe 3 (2007), 789–90. 289. Beckingham and Huntingford, The Prester John of the Indies, 358–59. This interestingly enough also echoes Muslim prophecies from Egypt based on a prophetic ḥadı ̄ṯ about the destruction of Egypt and Mecca by an Ethiopian at the End of Time; see Loiseau, ‘Chrétiens d’Égypte, Musulmans d’Éthiopie. Protection Des Communautés et Relations Diplomatiques Entre Le Sultanat Mamelouk et Le Royaume Salomonien (ca 1270–1516)’, 49–50. 290. Given as based on the ‘writing of St Victor and St Sanutius’ [Shenoute] of Alexandria in Alvares’ account; see Beckingham and Huntingford, The Prester John of the Indies, 358, note 1 and 2. Indeed, there is a recall of the above-mentioned Pseudo-Methodius, the Second Apocalypse of ­Pseudo-­Athanasius and the Ethiopian reception of Shenoute; see Derat, ‘The Zāgwē Dynasty (11–13th Centuries) and King Yemreḥanna Krestos’, 179–80 and Giardini, ‘The Quest for the Ethiopian Prester John and Its Eschatological Implications’, 68–80. 291. In this specific case, it appears as though this Ethiopian expectation would have also included the belief that the ‘other’ Christians recognize the sovereignty and supremacy of their own Ethiopian Church and rulers; see Derat, ‘The Zāgwē Dynasty (11–13th Centuries) and King Yemreḥanna Krestos’, 180; Giardini, ‘The Quest for the Ethiopian Prester John and Its Eschatological Implications’, 68.

CHAPTER 6

Conclusion

In the early 1520s, a series of somewhat puzzling exchanges took place between the Portuguese ambassador Dom Rodrigo de Lima and the Ethiopian nǝgus ́, aṣe Lǝbnä Dǝngǝl. Francisco Alvares again left us vivid descriptions of these encounters. In mid-January 1521, aṣe Lǝbnä Dǝngǝl summoned the Portuguese to an audience, and Dom Rodrigo and company jumped at the chance. As it turned out, the nǝgus ́ was not interested in talking about a plan for a military alliance with the Lusitanian Crown. Instead, the Ethiopian ruler enquired about the price of large carpets in Portugal. Ambassador Dom Rodrigo found himself stumped for an answer. He stated that he was not a merchant, and neither was anyone in his company. As ̣e Lǝbnä Dǝngǝl did not let up, however. He enquired several more times, emphasising that he wished to carpet a recently consecrated royal church. Even through the lens of Alvares’ account, it is clear that the nǝgus ́ was trying to impress the importance and relevance of the matter—the importance of good, sizeable carpets for his foundation— upon his foreign guests. And yet, the Portuguese could not offer a satisfying answer.1 The royal interrogation on large-scale rugs was the last in a series of similar exchanges. Only a few days before, the nǝgus ́ had shown the assembled ambassadorial party a pair of richly embroidered curtains. They were recognizable as Latin European in origin and suspended in the same church which as ̣e Lǝbnä Dǝngǝl wished to carpet with Portuguese rugs. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 V. Krebs, Medieval Ethiopian Kingship, Craft, and Diplomacy with Latin Europe, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64934-0_6

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The Ethiopian king again stressed that he wanted to procure numerous similarly rich fabrics from the Latin Mediterranean. He was willing to pay a great sum for this endeavour. Again, the Portuguese ambassadors were slightly helpless when confronted with such a request.2 Three months earlier, when the ambassadorial party had just arrived at the Ethiopian court, a high-ranking local Solomonic official informed ambassador Dom Rodrigo that the nǝgus ́ had issued him a commercial license, allowing him to buy and sell in the North-East African highland realm. The Portuguese diplomat had not asked for such a trading license, and yet it had been granted by the nǝgus ́ before everything else—including even his first proper audience. Ambassador Dom Rodrigo was equal parts confused and offended by this development: nobody in his family, not his father, not his mother, nor any of his ancestors or even any of the gentlemen in his company had ever held a mercantile occupation, or have a history of buying and selling things for others. The Portuguese, and especially their head ambassador, had not come to the North-East African highlands to trade. They had come ‘to serve God and the Kings, and to bring Christians together’, ideally in a fight against Muslim powers.3 Taken against the larger backdrop of Ethiopian-European diplomatic relations, these anecdotes of diplomatic misunderstanding interspersed through Alvares’ account are once again indicative of the stark and programmatic disparity between the two Christian realms under study here. More than a century after aṣe Lǝbnä Dǝngǝl’s great-great-grandfather aṣe Dawit had sent his first embassy to Venice, Ethiopian and Latin Christians still did not quite know what to make of the other’s tangible expectations, interests and desires. This book set out to answer a simple question: why did generations of Solomonic Ethiopian kings send out embassies to different princely and ecclesiastical courts in late medieval Latin Europe? Both written and material sources suggest that Ethiopian outreach to the Latin West—for outreach it was, seeing that the Solomonic nägäs ́t summarily initiated, maintained and controlled the course of relations throughout the fifteenth century—was not motivated by territorial or militaristic acquisitiveness. For over 100 years, it was instead driven by an immense desire to acquire precious religious items as well as artisans skilled in building and ornamenting architectural monuments. Like a golden thread, the wish to acquire relics, fine fabrics, ecclesiastical garments and liturgical objects as well as artisans skilled in construction was woven into every one of the more than dozen Solomonic missions sent out to the Latin Mediterranean.

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These are the Ethiopian interests attested time and time again in sources of various languages from both Europe and North-East Africa. The sheer number of references to religious material culture and craftsmanship in different accounts from Europe, Egypt and Ethiopia suggests that the desire to obtain rare and foreign ecclesiastical treasures as well as similarly distant manpower to serve the Christian realm gave birth to, and maintained, late medieval Solomonic diplomacy for the longest time. As we have seen in the last chapter, only very few ruins of the once-magnificent buildings that represented these global tastes and desires survived the wars of the sixteenth century. Had the ʿAdali army not specifically targeted these monuments of Solomonic sovereignty, we certainly would have a much richer material record testifying to the exchanges between Ethiopia and the wider world in the Middle Ages. Solomonic interests were eventually pushed in a more militaristic direction in the politically changed and eschatologically charged climate of the early sixteenth century, conforming to hopes and expectations long projected onto Ethiopia by Latin Christian contemporaries and modern scholars alike. And still, it bears repeating that even on the eve of the wars with the Sultanate of ʿAdal, as ̣e Lǝbnä Dǝngǝl’s encounters with the Portuguese embassy and his letters to the Lusitanian Crown and the papacy in the 1520s show striking parallels to the outcomes of his ancestors’ missions dispatched as early as 1400 to the Latin West. The reason for that is rooted in late medieval Ethiopia’s practice of building magnificent religious centres, and that the very process of engaging in long-distance diplomacy with distant courts of a different Christian sphere necessarily must have conjured and reinforced the nägäs ́ts’ claims of actual Solomonic descent. Sending out missions and building religious foundations in a specific way—inter-generationally planned, made from ashlar stones and wood, their interior clad in precious metal adorned with gems—mirrored descriptions in the Bible. Both upheld the beliefs propagated in the Kǝbrä nägäs ́t. Together, royal religious building and foreign diplomacy served to manifest Solomonic kingship. Ostensible local shortcomings never caused the Ethiopian need to acquire foreign labour. In light of the ancient and impressive craft and building traditions in Ethiopia, any such claim must appear patently absurd. Bringing treasures and men from other parts of the Christian world, however, to help adorn the ecclesiastical realm in the North-East African highlands through an act of diplomatic engagement was sure to demonstrate the extent of Solomonic might and power, and the veracity

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of the nägäs ́t’s claim to universal Christian suzerainty. Precious relics, gorgeous garments and religious objects from a distant Christian sphere arguably had the potential to locally produce more power than any weapon ever could. All in all, Ethiopia’s diplomatic outreach to Latin Europe also shines a new light onto a late medieval African dynasty at the height of its power. The image emerging from the textual and material record is not one of an indigent, powerless or even passively receptive kingdom in the late Middle Ages. Instead, we find a mighty African realm addressing its peers in the voice of a self-confident Christian empire. Solomonic rulers encountered the world on their own terms. When diplomacy increasingly yielded very little in the latter part of the fifteenth century, Ethiopian kings and high-­ ranking nobles would eventually re-route their efforts. Instead of sending official diplomatic missions, they would detain itinerant foreigners, directly import and acquire dozens of foreign religious objects—and even commission stunningly beautiful works of art from places as far away as Crete, Flanders and France. But that is a story best told in another book.4

Notes 1. Charles F.  Beckingham and George W.  B. 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 1520, Written by Father Francisco Alvares (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961), 362. 2. Beckingham and Huntingford, The Prester John of the Indies, 341. 3. Beckingham and Huntingford, The Prester John of the Indies, 274. 4. See my forthcoming book, Africa Collecting Europe, which examines this very process.

A Brief Glossary of Terms Relating to Ethiopian History

abba  Ethiopian title for ecclesiastics. abun/abunä  The metropolitan of the Ethiopian Church, a Coptic Christian despatched by the Patriarch of Alexandria, leading ecclesiasticof medieval Ethiopia. ʿAdal/Barr Saʿd al-Dı̄n  Muslim Sultanate, succeeded the Sultanate of Ifat, repeatedly engaged with the Solomonic Christian realm in armed conflict from the fifteenth century onwards. Aksum (kingdom)  Leading political power centered around the city of Aksum in antiquity; during Aksumite times, Ethiopia became a Christian kingdom. Later  Solomonic kings claimed Aksumite  descendance; the city of Aksum retained its importance after the fall of the  eponymous kingdom in the seventh century, and remained place of coronation for Ethiopian rulers. al-Tabrı̄zı̄, Nūr al-Dı̄n ʿAlı̄  Persian Muslim merchant, imported weapons, horses and religious objects from Egypt to Ethiopia for the nägäs t,́ Solomonic ambassador to Spain in 1427–1429. Amba Gəšän  Legendary ‘royal prison’ where possible claimants to the Solomonic throne were kept, also an important site upon which significant churches were built. Amhara  Region or province of central highland Ethiopia, one of the key provinces of the Solomonic kingdom.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 V. Krebs, Medieval Ethiopian Kingship, Craft, and Diplomacy with Latin Europe, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64934-0

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Amharic  Lingua franca of modern-day Ethiopia, spoken language of the late medieval Ethiopian Solomonic court. Angot  Central highland region north of Amhara. Anthonius Bartoli  Lead ambassador of the Ethiopian embassy to Venice in 1402. ʿaqqabe säʿat  Important ecclesiastic at the royal court, responsible for scheduling the day of the nǝgus ́ as well as the hours of prayer. aṣe  Term of address for Ethiopian rulers, often followed directly by the name, roughly translating to ‘Majesty’. Atronsä Maryam  Royal church and monastery founded by aṣe Bäʾǝdä Maryam, built as the site of his grave, destroyed by ʿAdali troops in the 1530s. Bāb al-Mandab  Strait connecting the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden. Bäʾǝdä Maryam  Ethiopian nǝgus ́ reigning between 1468 and 1478, not known to have sent an embassy to Latin Europe. Bägemdǝr  Province in the north-west of the Solomonic realm, bordering on Lake Ṭ ana. baḥǝr nägaš  Title of the ruler of the coastal Red Sea provinces of Ethiopia, the ‘ruler of the sea’. Baptista of Imola  Letter-carrier connected to a small Franciscan mission to Ethiopia in the early 1480s. Betä Ǝsraʾel  Ethiopian Jews, formerly also called the ‘Fälasha’. bitwäddäd  One of the highest courtly titles in the Ethiopian kingdom. č̣äwa regiments  Core regiments of the Solomonic army. Däbrä Libanos  Important monastery in the province of Šäwa; its abbot served as the ʿaqqabe säʿat from the reign of aṣe Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob onwards. Däwaro  Formerly Muslim Sultanate on the south-eastern fringe of the central highland plateau, incorporated into the Solomonic realm in the 1330s. Dawit II  Ethiopian nǝgus ́ from 1378/1379 to 1412, sent three embassies to Latin Europe in the very early 1400s. Däy Giyorgis  Church in the province of Šäwa, probably founded by aṣe Täklä Maryam. ǝč̣č̣äge  Title of the administrative head of the Ethiopian Church, second highest cleric of the Ethiopia Church after the metropolitan or abun. Ǝleni  Wife of aṣe Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob; important courtly figure, served as regent for aṣe Lǝbnä Dǝngǝl, sent one embassy to Portugal in 1508–1509. Ǝntọnǝs  Ethiopian ambassador to Rome in 1481–1482, probably despatched there by ras bitwäddäd ʿAmdä Mikaʾel from Jerusalem.

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Ǝnsǝlale  Ruin field with important archaeological traces of a former royal church in the region of Šäwa. Ǝskǝndǝr  Ethiopian nǝgus ́, first of the ‘child kings’ put on the throne in the late fifteenth century, ruled 1478–1494. ǝtege  Title for the ruling wife of an Ethiopian sovereign. Ewosṭateans  Religious movement, founded by the monk Ewosṭatewos in the fourteenth century. Fäṭägar  Region in the south of the central highland plateau of the Solomonic realm, incorporated and Christianised in the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries. Franciscans  Latin Christian religious order. Francisco Alvares  Chaplain of the Portuguese Embassy to Ethiopia of the 1520s, spent six years in Ethiopia; his lengthy account of the mission was published posthumously in 1540. Futūḥ al-Ḥ abaša  Chronicle of the military campaign of Imām Aḥmad written by Šihāb al-Dı̄n. Gännätä Giyorgis  Royal church founded by aṣe Ǝskǝndǝr,  purportedlycontained an ‘Italian-style organ’ by the second half of the fifteenth century. Gännätä Maryam  Important church in the region of Lasta, built by aṣe Yəkunno Amlak, founder of the Solomonic Dynasty in the late thirteenth century. Gǝʿǝz  The traditional literary and liturgical language of the Ethiopian highlands, also sometimes called ‘Old Ethiopic’ in modern scholarship. Goǧǧam  Region located in the west of the central highland plateau, to the west of the province of  Amhara, incorporated into Solomonic Ethiopia and Christianized in the fourteenth century. gwǝlt  A form of non-heritable land right in Ethiopian society, often translated as ‘fief’. Ḥ imyar  Jewish kingdom located in the south-west Arabian Peninsula, conquered by the Aksumites in the early sixth century. Homily on the Wood of the Holy Cross  Religious text composed in the fifteenth century, contains information on aṣe Dawit´s embassy to Venice of 1402. Ifat  Muslim Sultanate on the eastern fringe of the central highland plateau, tributary to Christian Ethiopia from the fourteenth century, ruled by the Walasmaʿ dynasty, succeeded as an independent polity  by the Sultanate of ʿAdal.

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Imām Aḥmad  Spiritual and military leader of the ʿAdali army and the Sultanate of ʿAdal in the second quarter of the sixteenth century. Joanne Baptista Brochus of Imola  High-ranking Italian noble accompanying an Ethiopian delegation from Jerusalem to Rome in 1481–1482. kätäma  Gǝʿǝz term describing the itinerant royal court or camp of the Ethiopian rulers. Kǝbrä nägäs ́t  Foundational myth of the Solomonic Dynasty, propagating their descent from the biblical king Solomon through his son with the Queen of Sheba. Lake Ṭ ana  Major lake in the west of the central highland plateau connected to the Blue Nile; its shoreline and islands became home to important religious sites in the fifteenth century. Lake Zway  Lake in the south of the central highland plateau, its islands served as repository for Ethiopian Christian religious treasures and manuscripts during the wars of the sixteenth century. Lalibäla  Famed Zagwe king, also the site of the famous eponymous monolithic rock-hewn churches in the region of Lasta. Lasta  Region in the north-central part of the highland plateau, heartland province of the Zagwe dynasty. Lǝbnä Dǝngǝl  Ethiopian nǝgus ́, ruled 1508–1540, put on the throne at age eleven, with queen Ǝleni acting as one of his regents for the first eight years of his rule. The first successful, large-scale diplomatic embassy from Europe came to Ethiopia during his reign. Mäkanä Śǝllase  Royal church in Amhara affiliated with Däbrä Libanos. Founded by aṣe Naʿod and aṣe Lǝbnä Dǝngǝl. Mamlūks  Ruling Muslim dynasty of Egypt  and the Levant from 1250 until 1517. Märt ̣ulä Maryam  Royal church and monastery of ǝtege Ǝleni, renowned for its magnificence. Naʿod  Ethiopian nǝgus ́, ruled 1494–1508, father of aṣe Lǝbnä Dǝngǝl. nǝgus ́, pl. nägäs ́t  Literally ‘king’, title of an Ethiopian sovereign in Gǝʿǝz. Niqodemos  Abbot of the Ethiopian monastery in Jerusalem, sent a delegation of his monks to the Council of Florence in the early 1440s. nǝgus ́ä nägäs ́t  Literally ‘great king’ or ‘king of kings’, alternate title for an Ethiopian ruler of popularity in later centuries but infrequently used in the late Middle Ages. Petrus Rombulus  Ambassador sent by aṣe Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob to the court of Alfonso V of Aragon and Pope Nicholas V in 1450.

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Pietre of Naples  Latin Christian agent acting on behalf of  aṣe Täklä Maryam in Pera/Constantinople in the 1430s. Prester John  Mythical, powerful Christian ruler imagined in Latin Europe as living beyond the lands of the Muslims in the East; from the fourteenth century onwards, Latin Christians began to identify Prester John with the nägäs ́t of Ethiopia. rǝst  Inalienable, heritable right to land bestowed by a ruler. Šäwa  Heartland province of Solomonic Ethiopia, located south of the region of Amhara, political centre of the realm in the second half of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Säyfä Arʿad  Ethiopian nǝgus ́ from 1344 to 1371. Šihāb al-Dı̄n  Chronicler of the military campaigns of Imām Aḥmad, wrote theFutūḥ al-Ḥ abaša. Solomon (king)  Biblical king, son of king David, built the first Temple in Jerusalem. Solomonic Dynasty  Reigning Ethiopian dynasty from 1270 until 1974, claimed direct descent from the biblical king Solomon through his son Mǝnilǝk I with the Queen of Sheba, locally called Makǝdda. tabot  Central object sanctifying an Ethiopian church, a copy of the Ark of the Covenant. Täklä Maryam  Ethiopian nǝgus ́, ruled 1430–1433, sent an agent to the Eastern Mediterranean in the early 1430s. Täzkar  Commemorative feast for a dead person. Tǝgray  Region in the far north of the central highlands, heartland province of the Aksumite kingdom. Tǝgrǝñña  Ethiopian language, mostly used in the north of modern-day Ethiopia and in Eritrea. Yǝmrǝḥannä Krǝstos  Zagwe church in the region of Lasta. Yǝsḥaq  Ethiopian nǝgus ́, ruled 1414–1430, sent an embassy led by al-Tabrı̄zı̄ to the kingdom of Aragon. Zagwe  Ruling dynasty of Ethiopia from the eleventh to the thirteenth century, succeeded by the Solomonic Dynasty. Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob  Ethiopian nǝgus ́, ruled 1434–1468, sent an embassy to Aragon and the papacy in 1450. Zaylaʿ  Important Red Sea port in modern-day northern Somalia, under rule of the Sultanate of ʿAdal in the latter part of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

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Index1

A Abbay, river, 104n113 ʿAdal, Barr Saʿd al-Dı ̄n, Sultanate, 69, 72, 83, 99n70, 101n85, 105n125, 122, 145, 154, 179n204, 179n205, 182n248, 184n267, 184n268, 187, 193–195, 198–199, 202, 221, 222, 227n20, 234n60, 235n67, 236n70, 239n106, 240n123, 242n138, 253n238, 265 ʿAdali troops, 154, 187, 193, 195, 199, 236n70, 239n106, 240n123, 253n238, 265 ʿAddi Abbona, locality, 242n138 Addis Ababa, city, 3, 9n6, 192, 194, 231n42, 237n80, 237n81 Africa Orientale Italiana, 13n13, 194, 229n28 Agnos Dei, religious object, 131, 166n93, 208

Agulaʿ Qirqos, locality, 243n138 Aḥmad Badlāy, Sultan, 83, 88, 226n20, 235n67 Aḥmad ibn Ibrāhı ̄m al-Ġ āzı ̄, military leader, 154, 184n267, 187, 193–194, 198, 199, 222, 236n70 Aksum, city, 9n4, 30, 53n124, 189, 240n119 Aksum, kingdom of, Aksumite, 8n4, 53n124, 170n134, 189, 217, 232n46, 235n65, 240n123, 242n138 Alberthus of Sarteano, envoy, 77–78 Alexandria, city, 20, 65, 66, 72, 131, 261n290 Alexandria, Patriarchate of, 9n4, 20, 42n14, 43n29, 118n235, 124, 157n19

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 V. Krebs, Medieval Ethiopian Kingship, Craft, and Diplomacy with Latin Europe, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64934-0

295

296 

INDEX

Alfonso V, king, 2, 62–64, 72–74, 83–91, 93n11, 93n14, 94n16, 94n18, 94n20, 94n22, 94n25, 101n89, 101n90, 116n213, 136, 188, 205, 208, 218, 255–256n252 Alvares, Francisco, author, 24, 46n50, 46n54, 142, 149, 151, 183n254, 197–199, 210, 213, 220, 222, 239n97, 245n154, 246n166, 254n239, 260n286, 261n290, 263, 264 Amba Gǝšän, locality, 75, 103n112, 202, 235n67, 243n144, 251n208 ʿAmdä Mikaʾel, ras bitwäddäd, official, 122, 124, 129, 139, 140, 156n8, 156n11, 157n22, 169n120, 173n152 ʿAmdä Ṣǝyon, king, 9n5, 69, 187, 190, 193, 233n55, 235n63, 242n138 Amhara, region, 30, 32, 34, 36, 53n124, 54n130, 113n195, 190–193, 197, 212, 231n40, 232n46, 236n68, 244n149, 246n166 Amharic, language, 31–34, 54n131, 56n159, 79, 98n60, 126, 209, 231n40 Angot, region, 30 Anṣokiya, locality, 234n60 Anthonius Bartoli, ambassador, 21, 22, 29, 33, 51n106, 56n163, 57n165, 77, 136, 225n14 ʿAqqabe säʿat, office, 156n8, 169n120, 191 Arabian Peninsula, 221 Arabic, language, in medieval Ethiopia, 20, 31, 32, 34, 43n26, 56n159, 126 Arabic sources, 5, 20, 23, 28–31, 42n14, 62–72, 90, 95n29,

96n37, 124, 139, 162n58, 187, 195, 196, 198, 232n44 See also Futuh̄ ̣ Al-Ḥ abaša, Conquest of Abyssinia Aragon, kingdom of crusading interests, 70, 85–87, 90 Ethiopian embassies to, 2, 62–74, 83–86, 91 gifts to Ethiopia, 89, 188, 207 hopes/requests for (military) aid from Ethiopia 64, 72 Ark of the Covenant, 217, 218 See also Tabot Armourer(s), 22, 187, 204 from Mamlūk Egypt, 69, 97n57, 187 Ashlar(s), building with, 195, 197, 198, 200, 201, 216, 217, 235n65, 240n123, 241n123, 242n138, 265 Asmära, locality, 30 Atronsä Maryam, church and monastery, 196, 198–200, 212, 216, 239n107, 253n238 Awaš, river, 9n6, 192, 231n42 ʿAyḏāb, port, 30, 54n126 B Bāb al-Mandab, strait, 144, 177n183 Badǝqe, locality, 242n134 Bäʾǝdä Maryam, king, 50n93, 121, 122, 124, 155n5, 157n19, 164n69, 192, 193, 198–199, 202, 212, 237n82, 240n119, 240n120, 241n125, 256n262, 257n265 Bägäna, instrument, 217–218 Bägemdǝr, region, 240n123 Baḥər nägaš, title, 9n6, 145, 149, 179n201, 231n42, 260n285

 INDEX 

Baptista of Imola, letter-carrier, 133–138, 171n136, 195, 201 Barcelona, town, 71, 83 Bärtälomewos, abunä, metropolitan, 19, 43n20 Bärtälomewos, pilgrim of the 1410s, 35–38, 43n20 Bärtälomewos, pilgrim of the 1430s, 73–74 Bǝlen Sägäd, official, 218, 257n273 Bells, 2, 68, 71, 148, 196, 208, 244n146 Bertrandon de la Broquière, traveller, 74–77, 103n104, 103n113, 104n116, 104n117 Betä Ǝsraʾel, people, 43n22, 192, 226n20 Betä Lǝhem Maryam, church, 200, 240n123 Bible, biblical, 6, 8, 89, 104n113, 189, 190, 202, 209, 210, 215–219, 232n44, 252n220, 265 Black Sea, region, 77, 86 Bookmaker(s), 151–153, 205, 248n179 Brancaleon, Nicolo, painter, 212, 229n28, 254n241 Brocade, fabric, 85, 131, 148, 196, 197, 199, 208, 244n146, 245n154, 251n203, 254n238 Builder(s), 6, 8, 22, 76, 195, 203–206, 212–213, 215, 219–223, 248n179 Byzantine, Byzantium, 23, 48n83, 86, 89, 101n84, 198, 203, 209, 214, 260n286, 257n271 C Cairo, city, 1, 30, 61, 65–69, 71, 81, 88, 98n60, 98n62, 98n64, 104n113, 111n175, 117n228, 118n235, 123–126, 130, 133,

297

134, 139–141, 144, 151, 157n22, 168n116, 171n136, 174n153, 178n197, 208, 222, 226n19 Callixtus III, pope, 61, 62, 83, 88–90, 119n245, 207, 229n26 Camino de Santiago, pilgrimage route, 37, 73 Candido de Bona, author, 26–28, 49n87 Cardinal of Aquileia, official, 26, 28 Carpenter(s), 6, 8, 22, 152–154, 195, 196, 203–205, 211, 219 Carpet(s), 48n77, 148, 199, 203, 210, 251n203, 263 of foreign provenance, 25, 148, 203, 263 Castile, kingdom, 73 Castilian-Aragonese war, 73, 137 Catalan, language, 5, 63–65, 72, 94n16 Č ̣äwa, military regiments, 145, 179n202, 204, 234n61 Chalice(s), 20, 21, 24, 38, 46n54, 148, 196, 202, 207, 208, 244n149 Chinese porcelain/ceramics, 201 Circumcision, 75, 113n191 Clothing courtly, 121, 148, 169n124, 222 ‘Frankish,’ 2, 25, 68, 250n198 Constance, town, 3, 34–38, 58n177, 59n187, 108n149, 137 Constantine, saint, 19, 257n271 Constantinople, city, 74, 76, 83, 86, 87, 102n96, 102n103 fall of, 83–90 Coptic, Egyptian Christian, 2, 20, 23, 25, 43n19, 43n29, 57n167, 80, 81, 100n80, 109n160, 109n161, 141, 157n19, 208, 211, 232n44, 253n231 craftsmen in Ethiopia, 211, 213

298 

INDEX

Coronation, crowning, 124, 127, 157n19, 240n119 Council of Constance, 34–37, 58n177, 61, 74, 77, 93n11, 93n12 Council of Däbrä Mǝtm ̣ aq, 83, 109n153, 109n154 Council of Florence, 77–82, 84, 114n200, 118n240, 208, 229n26 Council of Nicaea, 78, 107n140 Court, kätäma, 54n130, 121, 190, 191, 193, 200, 212, 213, 231n40 Craftsmen, artisans, 2–6, 11n9, 17–18, 22, 25, 28, 29, 38, 39, 40n6, 46n54, 62, 63, 65, 72, 76, 77, 85, 86, 90, 92n5, 122, 129, 136, 140, 148, 149, 152–154, 186, 188, 189, 196, 204–206, 211, 213–216, 219, 221, 237n83, 242n138, 247n169, 247n172, 247n176, 248n179, 256n252, 256n259, 264 as technologists, 5, 185–186, 188, 205, 220, 225n15 Crete, locality, 22, 266 Cross(es), 1, 2, 19–21, 23, 25, 26, 28, 37, 59n188, 66–68, 70, 71, 85, 100n77, 144, 147, 199, 200, 208, 210, 242n136, 250n198, 251n203, 252n218 Crusade, crusading, 2, 4, 61–62, 66, 67, 70–72, 77, 85, 86, 88–91, 120n246, 130, 142, 145, 188, 207, 246n169 Curtain(s), in churches, 148, 197, 199, 210, 216, 239n98, 245n152, 245n154, 251n203, 263 of foreign provenance, 199, 210, 263 Cyprus, locality, 64, 66, 116n222, 117n228

D Däbrä ʿAsbo, Däbrä Libanos of Šäwa, monastery, 191, 202, 232n48, 233n55, 235n66, 236n70, 244n146, 253n238 Däbrä Bǝrhan, town, 235n67 Däbrä Bizän, monastery, 150, 182n236, 235n66 Däbrä Ḥ ayq Ǝstị fanos, monastery, 191, 232n48, 233n55, 244n149, 253n238 Däbrä Nägwädgwad, church and monastery, 210, 235n67, 253n238, 256n261 Daga Ǝsṭifanos, monastery, 212, 240n120, 252n218 Damião de Góis, author, 147, 180n212, 180n214, 182n245 David, biblical king, 30, 54n130, 63, 93n14, 185, 215–218, 256n261 Däwaro, region, 54n131, 114n196, 192, 202 Dawit II, king, 7, 17–23, 25, 26, 28–31, 34, 36, 38, 40n2, 46n55, 52n119, 61–63, 71, 72, 77, 78, 81, 88, 90, 99n70, 108n149, 136, 153–154, 180n217, 185–188, 192, 193, 200–204, 206–207, 209, 214, 216, 225n14, 226n20, 233n55, 234n57, 235n67, 238n89, 243n144, 248n182, 250n194, 151n208, 255n251, 264 Däy Giyorgis, ruins, 200, 212 Dayr Al-Sulṭān, monastery, 78, 106n135 Delhi, Sultanate, 215 Dǝlmä Nǝgśa, princess, 200, 201, 234n57, 240n123 Dima Giyorgis, monastery, 210 Dom Rodrigo da Lima, ambassador, 149–150, 263–264 Duke of Berry, title, 37, 76–77, 104n117

 INDEX 

E Eastern Mediterranean, region, 23, 33, 37, 47n63, 62, 74, 77, 78, 81, 83, 85, 87–90, 133, 141, 186, 188, 205, 215, 227n21, 250n199 Ǝčc̣ ạ̈ ̌ ge, ecclesiastical title, 191 Ecclesiastical garments, 2, 6, 38, 62, 71, 81, 122, 140, 148, 153, 196, 202, 203, 206–208, 264 from Latin Europe, 20, 24–25, 62, 70–71, 77, 85–86, 209–211 Ǝleni, ǝtege, queen, 122, 143–150, 153, 175n171, 176n179, 178n188, 194, 195, 208, 211, 213, 217, 220, 221, 234n61, 236n78, 243n139, 253n230, 259n284 Ǝnsǝlale, ruins, 200, 201, 211, 242n130, 242n134 Ǝnt ̣onǝs, ambassador of the 1480s, 123, 125–129, 131–132, 135, 138–142, 153, 173n147, 173n152, 174n154, 207 Ǝnt ̣onǝs, pilgrim of the 1410s, 35–38 Eritrea(n), coastal regions, 3, 8n4, 9n6, 30, 154, 190, 231n42, 260n285 Eschatological expectation, in Ethiopia, 143, 146, 153, 211–222, 259n284 Ǝskǝndǝr, king, 121–124, 128, 129, 132, 134, 135, 139–142, 155n5, 156n8, 160n40, 169n118, 170n129, 192, 198, 202, 205, 216, 227n20, 234n61, 235n67, 237n82, 244n146, 244n150, 247n173, 253n238, 256n262 Ǝsṭifanosites, Stephanites, 113n189, 234n55 Ethiopian terms for Latin Europe(ans), afränǧ, färänǧ, al-Afranǧ, 19, 21, 23, 33, 39, 66, 76, 135, 143,

299

144, 146, 183n248, 222, 252n216 Eugene IV, pope, 77–82, 84, 127, 228n24 Ewostạ tean(s), religious group, 79, 109n153, 113n190, 218, 234n55, 235n66 Ewostạ tewos, monk-saint, 109n153 ʿEzana, Aksumite king, 2, 189 F Fät ̣ägar, region, 192 Fǝre Ṣǝyon, painter, 253n236 Firearms, 4, 5, 152–154, 186, 188, 220, 225n14 France, modern-day region, 37, 74–77, 87, 104n117, 105n120, 117n229, 202, 266 Francesco of Catalonia, missionary, 133–134 Francesco Suriano, author, 132–135, 137–138, 167n104, 167n108, 173n143, 237n82 Franciscans, 26, 37, 49n89, 49n92, 77, 78, 81, 82, 106n131, 111n172, 123–125, 127, 131–135, 137–139, 141, 172n137 Ethiopians mistaken for Franciscans, 26, 37, 49n89, 49n92 Futuh̄ ̣ al-Ḥ abaša, Conquest of Abyssinia, 154–155n1, 184n268, 193, 194, 197–199, 202, 236n70, 242n134 G al-Ǧabartı ̄, ʿAbd al-Salām, merchant, 67–69, 97n58 Gälawdewos, king, 183n248, 223, 244n146

300 

INDEX

Gandulph of Sicily, ecclesiastic, 81–82, 111n172, 111n176, 141, 228n24 Gännätä Maryam, church, 245n155 Ǧaqmaq, Sultan, 88, 162n58 Gǝʿǝz, language, 5, 15n19, 16n22, 18, 23, 28, 43n26, 48n77, 78, 79, 91, 96n43, 98n60, 104n113, 107n137, 135, 138, 144, 146, 151, 152, 174n157, 176n178, 176n179, 177n187, 179n207, 194, 196, 199, 204, 207, 209, 216, 217, 232n44, 248n179, 252n218, 258n277 Gǝnbi, ruins, 201, 212 Geneva, town, 36, 37, 59n184, 137 Germany, modern-day region, 3, 35–37 Getesemane Maryam, monastery, 234n61 Gift(s) to Ethiopian churches/clergy 162n58, 199–200, 202–203, 210, 235n67, 240n122, 244n149, 245n154 by Latin Christian potentates, 20–21, 23–25, 38, 63, 66, 72, 89, 119n243, 128, 130–132, 148, 150, 157n23, 174n153, 188, 207, 208, 210 by Solomonic kings, 21, 23, 27, 46n54, 51n105, 130, 144, 147, 174n153, 205, 207, 208 Girolamo Riario, nobleman, 127, 137, 158n29, 163n59, 163n64, 163n65 Giyorgis of Sägla, author, 76 Goǧǧam, region, 32, 210, 234n61, 237n81 Gold, 2, 20, 21, 25, 31, 32, 38, 47n65, 67, 68, 70, 71, 80, 85–87, 89, 94n22, 113n194, 114n202, 130, 131, 135, 140,

142, 147, 148, 151–153, 157n23, 162n58, 174n153, 194, 197–199, 201–206, 208–210, 213, 214, 216, 217, 239n106, 240n118, 240n123, 245n154, 248n179, 250n196, 254n238, 254n244 Goldsmith(s), 85, 151–154, 203, 206, 208, 215 Gondär, locality, 192 ‘Greece,’ region, 47n63, 125, 249n182, 260n286 Greek, language and inscriptions, real or imagined, 24, 25, 32, 33, 47n63, 92n8, 125 Guillaume Fillastre, ecclesiastic, 62, 63, 77, 91, 93n10, 93n11 Guardian of Mount Zion, official, 111n172, 124–125, 132–135, 159n30 Gunsmith(s), 152, 153, 187, 225n15, 248n179, 258n277 Gwǝlt, land-right, 191, 233n50 H Hadiyya, Sultanate, 9n6, 114n196, 146, 175n171, 231n42 Helena, saint, 19, 41n10 Hieronimo Bicini, courtier and painter, 213 Ḥ imyar, kingdom, Yemen, 88, 118n238 Hiram of Tyre, biblical king, 185, 216 Historia Trium Regum, text, 26–27 History of the Patriarchs, source, 20, 22–26, 38, 42n14, 43n29, 206, 250n194, 250n196 Homily on the Wood of the Holy Cross, source, 17–20, 22–26, 33, 38, 39, 42n14, 42n15, 46n54, 75n165, 140, 202, 206–207

 INDEX 

Horse(s), 31, 32, 187 imported from Egypt, 1, 67, 69, 70, 187 I Iberia(n Peninsula), modern-day region, 2, 3, 64, 73, 142, 144, 218, 256n252 Ibn Baṭt ̣ūt ̣a, traveller, 256n254 Ibn Ḥ ajar al-ʿAsqalānı ̄, author, 67, 68, 70–72, 97n53, 98n60, 98n65, 100n80, 207, 249n187, 250n198 Ibn Taghrı ̄ Birdı ̄, author, 66, 67, 69–71, 96n37, 96n39, 97n47, 98n64, 100n77 Icon(s), 6, 24–25, 148, 196, 202, 210, 212, 238n89, 239n97, 244–245n150, 249n182, 253n236 Ifat, region, 99n70, 179n203, 190, 192, 202, 234n60, 245n151 Ifat, Sultanate, 72, 83, 99n70, 193, 225n14, 226n20 Imports in Ethiopia religious wares 66–67, 70, 71, 202, 209, 210, 244n150, 263–266 weapons 1, 66–67, 70, 71, 97n57, 187 India(n), locality and people, 44n37, 53n123, 57n169, 58n181, 119n245, 143–146, 149, 198, 203, 205, 239n106 “Indian(s)” as term for Ethiopia(ns), 26, 28–31, 35, 36, 80, 93n10, 125, 126, 128, 129, 131, 138, 141 Indian Ocean, region, 105n122, 142, 143, 145, 149, 152, 220–222 Interpreter(s), 26, 27, 79, 128, 130 Iohanne of Calabria, missionary, envoy, 133–135, 137, 138, 141, 153, 172n137, 172n141

301

Iohanne Thomacello, ecclesiastic, 133, 159n30 Irrigation experts, 63, 76, 204, 205 Israelite kingdom (biblical), 189, 215–218 Solomonic claims of successorship to, 6, 189, 217–219 Iter de Venetiis ad Indiam, source, 29–38 Iyäsus Moʾa, monk-saint, 232n48 J Jacopo Gherardi, author, 127–128 Jerónimo Lobo, Jesuit, 213 Jerusalem, city, 6, 29–31, 33, 36, 54n33, 75, 78, 79, 81, 82, 85, 106n135, 111n175, 122–127, 131–136, 138, 139, 141, 142, 153, 159n30, 161n49, 163n61, 166n97, 171n136, 173n152, 174n154, 185, 189, 195, 210, 216–218 Jesuit(s), 154, 211, 213, 243n139, 253n228, 253n229, 253n230 Jewellery, 1, 100n77, 148, 196, 208, 235n67, 254n238 João II, Portuguese king, 142, 143, 175n164 João III, Portuguese king, 150, 151, 154, 182n246, 206 João Bermudes, barber and envoy, 213 João Gomes, envoy, 143 Johanne Baptista Brochus of Imola, nobleman, 124–131, 136–139, 229n26 K Kǝbrä nägäs ́t, ‘Nobility of the kings,’ source, 6, 16n22, 215, 217, 218, 232 Kirakos, author, 18, 41n10

302 

INDEX

L Lalibäla, churches and locality, 189, 212 Lasta, region, 189, 230n37, 235n65, 243n140, 245n155 Lazaro de Andrade, painter, 213, 254n243 Lǝbnä Dǝngǝl, king, 82, 122, 143, 146, 149–154, 155n5, 182n242, 182–183n248, 192, 197, 198, 202–206, 208–210, 213, 216, 220, 221, 227n20, 242n134, 244n146, 244n150, 245n152, 247n176, 257n265, 258n276, 258n278, 258n280, 263–265 Leo X, pope, 141, 146, 148, 179n210 Leopards, 17, 21, 45n45, 139 Limbourg Brothers, painters, 37, 59n188, 77, 255n252 Linen, fabric, 24, 203, 244n146 Liturgical items or wares, 2, 5, 6, 8, 62, 71, 81, 86, 90, 98n60, 110n68, 122, 140, 148, 153, 196, 199, 202, 203, 206–208, 245n154, 264 M Maḏhab, legal school, 68–70, 98n65, 99n73, 99n75 Maḥfūẓ bin Muḥammad, governor, 146, 227n20 Mäkanä Śǝllase, church and monastery, 194, 196–200, 205, 210, 217, 237n84, 238n90, 246n166 Makǝdda, Queen of Sheba, 189, 215, 108n148, 232n44, 256n257 Mālikı ̄, law school, 66, 68–70, 98n65, 99n75 Mamlūk(s), 1, 2, 5, 33, 57n167, 61, 62, 65–70, 72, 81, 83, 86, 88, 90, 96n38, 96n41, 97n46,

97n57, 98n64, 98n65, 99n74, 99n75, 100n76, 100n82, 111n173, 116n213, 118n235, 123, 124, 126, 139, 141, 144–146, 151, 157n21, 157n23, 162n58, 174n153, 178n197, 186–188, 209, 221, 224–225n14, 225n17, 226n19, 226n20, 245n155 Mamlūk Egypt Ottoman conquest of, 145, 151–152 Solomonic diplomacy with, 18, 82–83, 88, 123–124, 157n22 Manoel de Almeida, Jesuit, 213, 254n246 Manuel I, king, 143, 144, 146–151, 179n210, 182n235, 205, 206, 208, 220, 221 Mänz, district, 192–193, 235n62, 235n63 al-Maqrı ̄zı ̄, author, 65–67, 69–72, 96n37, 96n39, 97n57, 98n64, 100n77, 187, 226n20, 250n198 Marqos, abunä, metropolitan, 124, 158n25, 222, 261n288 Marriage, Ethiopian offers of, 63, 73, 91, 144, 147 Martin V, pope, 35, 36, 63, 93n11 Märtụ lä Maryam, church and monastery, 194, 195, 201, 211, 213, 217, 234n61, 236n78, 237n83, 241n130, 243n139 Märtụ lä Mikaʾel, church, 216 Massawa, locality, 149 Mateus, ambassador, 144–147, 149, 150, 181n230 Matthew I, patriarch of Alexandria, 20 Maurice, saint, 37, 38 Mecca, town, 100n77, 222, 261n289 Mǝnilǝk I, son of biblical king Solomon, 189, 215, 217

 INDEX 

Merchant(s), 1, 2, 19–21, 29–34, 43n16, 43n20, 46n54, 47n65, 63, 65–72, 77, 83, 97n58, 101n86, 102–103n103, 146, 157n23, 203, 213, 219, 250n198, 263 Metal cladding, in churches, 196–199, 216, 217 Metalworker(s), 6, 8, 38, 151, 196, 204, 219, 225n15 Metropolitan (abun), of the Ethiopian Church, 9n4, 19, 41n10, 43n19, 93n19, 124, 140, 157n19, 174n154, 191, 222 Michele Steno, Venetian Doge, 20, 22, 25, 38, 43n26, 44n31, 44n36, 45n45 Milanese ambassadors, in Rome, 126–127, 162n58, 163n64, 163n65, 173n152 Military alliances and aid entertained by Solomonic rulers, 122, 148, 151, 153, 186, 220, 258n276 proposed by Latin Christians, 61, 62, 64, 72, 85–86, 89, 90, 122, 143–145, 148, 153, 187, 188, 220 ‘Miracle of Mary,’ Täʾammərä Maryam, source, 50n93, 202, 214 Mitre(s), 24, 27, 80, 110n168, 196, 199, 202, 207, 208, 250n199 Mongols, 215 Mosque(s), in Ethiopia, 69, 227n20 Muskets and bombards, 210, 220 N Naʿod, king, 146, 155n5, 197, 216, 237n84, 244n146, 244n150, 245n154, 252n218, 257n265, 259n284, 260n287

303

Naʿod Mogäsa, queen, 150, 234n61, 244n150 Nazret, locality, 242n138 Nicholas V, pope, 52n117, 83–84, 88, 91, 113n192, 114n200, 224n14 Nile, river, 30, 53n125, 104n113, 113n195, 134, 151 control over/blocked, 47n63, 85, 88, 89, 116n213, 118n233, 130, 147, 148, 158n23, 164n76, 226n19 Niqodemos, abbot, 78–79, 91, 107n137, 108n144 Nob, monk-prince, 234n61 Nubia, Nubian, 37 O Organist(s), 148, 152, 153, 205 Organs in Ethiopia, 195, 212, 237n82 as gifts, 148 Ottoman(s), 86–90, 116n213, 145, 151, 178n197, 215, 220, 221, 256n253 P Painter(s), artist(s), 6, 8, 22, 38, 59n188, 148, 150, 152, 153, 182n244, 196, 203–206, 212, 213, 215, 219, 229n28, 247n172, 247n174, 248n179, 248–249n182, 253n236, 255n252, 256n253 Paintings of Ethiopian ambassadors in Europe, 141 in Ethiopian Churches, 196–199, 253n236, 254n239

304 

INDEX

Papacy, Latin Christian, 27, 28, 39, 63, 78, 80–82, 84, 86, 88, 90, 91, 93n11, 107n137, 122, 123, 125, 127, 129, 132, 139, 140, 150, 151, 153, 154, 186, 188, 203, 204, 207, 220, 224n7, 265 Paris de Grassis, official, 129–131, 138 Patriarch(s), of Alexandria, 8–9n4, 20, 42n14, 43n29, 124, 157n19 Paulo of Caneto, ecclesiastic, 132–135, 159n30, 160n40 Paulus Waltherus of Güglingen, pilgrim, 125–127, 131–132, 159n32 Pera, town, 74–77, 136, 241n127 Pêro da Covilhã, agent, 142–143, 146, 175n169, 178n188, 213 Persian(s), 1–2, 66–70, 72, 100n76, 145, 250n198 P̣eṭros, ecclesiastic of the 1440s, 79–80, 82, 109n161, 110n164 P̣eṭros, pilgrim of the 1410s, 35–38 Petrus of Bonia, envoy, 63–65, 73, 94n25 Petrus Rombulus, ambassador, 83–85, 115n205, 136, 166n88 Physician(s), 152, 154, 248n179 Pier Paolo Vergerio the Elder, author, 36 Pietre of Naples, agent, 75–77, 103n104, 103n113, 104n116, 104n117, 136, 166n88, 241n127 Pilgrim(s)/pilgrimage Ethiopian Christian, 3, 33, 35–37, 57n167, 73–74, 80, 81, 87–88, 91, 101n89, 108n149, 111n175, 117n230, 118n236, 124–125, 133, 141, 151, 159n24, 193, 199, 202, 208, 253n238 Latin, 29, 37, 39, 74–75, 131–132, 157n23

Pius II, pope, 89, 119n245 Portugal Ethiopian missions to Portugal 87, 143–148 Portuguese, 5, 15n19, 122, 142–154, 175n164, 175n166, 175n169, 176n174, 176n175, 176–177n179, 177n187, 178n188, 178n197, 179n200, 179n205, 180n212, 180n214, 181n230, 182n235, 182n242, 182n244, 182n245, 182–183n248, 194, 196–199, 203, 205, 206, 208, 210, 213, 220–222, 237n83, 242n138, 248n179, 254n239, 254n243, 258n276, 258n277, 258n280, 259n284, 260n285, 263–265 gifts, 147, 148, 150, 210 interests, 122 missions to Ethiopia, 142–143, 146, 149–152, 183n248 Prester John, myth of, Ethiopian identification with, 3–4, 13n14, 14n16, 20, 21, 26, 27, 35, 44n37, 62, 64, 75–77, 84, 87, 93n10, 93n14, 110n164, 125–129, 132, 133, 142, 146, 149–150, 228n23 Printer(s), 148, 152, 181n225, 205 Prophecies, 143, 144, 146, 151, 153, 221, 222, 260n285, 260n286, 206n287, 261n289 Q Qad̄ ̣ı ̄, judge, 66, 68, 69, 98n65 Qāytbāy, Sultan, 124 Queen of Sheba, see Queen(s), Solomonic, 143, 144, 146, 195, 208, 213, 232n44, 234n61, 244n150 Quran, 1, 68

 INDEX 

R Red Sea, region, 30, 31, 54n126, 54n127, 77, 105n122, 105n125, 134, 145, 147, 149, 151, 152, 178n197, 179n204, 181n228, 182n236, 183n254, 220–222, 226–227n20 Regents, regency, 3, 121, 122, 124, 129, 139–146, 150, 156n8, 175n171, 191, 195, 208, 213, 264, 266 Relic(s) 2–6, 8, 12n9, 17–19, 23, 25, 27, 38, 48n65, 61, 62, 89, 90, 119n243, 140, 196, 202–204, 206–209, 225n14 infant killed by Herod, 24, 39, 206 in Latin Europe, 27–28, 71, 80, 91, 128, 207–209 Nail of the Cross, 68, 71, 101n84, 207 reliquaries, 24, 39, 202 of the True Cross, 18–21, 23, 25, 39, 48n65, 48n80, 71, 144, 147, 180n217, 202, 251n208 Relief carving, 195, 197, 200, 201, 213, 242n136, 253n231 Rǝst, land-right, 191, 238n94 Rhodes, locality, 30, 64, 88, 117n229, 228n24 Richental, Ulrich von, author, 35–36, 58n176 Rome, city, 3, 33, 36, 38, 39, 51n104, 63, 75–77, 79–82, 91, 93n11, 122–123, 125, 143, 147, 153, 162n56, 168n116, 174n154, 183n248, 207, 224n7, 247n173 Ethiopian embassies to, 25–28, 83–84, 126–132, 135–141, 159n32, 173n147, 173n152, 205, 207 Romna, royal concubine, 156n8, 169n120, 234n61

305

Roofer(s), 205, 206 Ruin(s), 194, 195, 197, 200–201, 211–213, 219, 235n65, 236n78, 238n88, 241n124, 241n125, 242n130, 243n138, 243n139, 253n228, 253n230, 254n246, 265 S Sabbath, 109n153, 109n154, 113n190 Säblä Wängel, queen, 209 Sächsische Weltchronik, source, 36 Saʿd al-Dı ̄n, military leader, 99n70 Šāfiʿı ̄, law school, 68–69, 98n65, 99n73 Ṣägga Zäʾab, ambassador, 150–151 St Mark, church, 21, 24, 38, 207 al-Ṣāliḥiyya madrasa, place, 1, 66 Santiago de Compostela, town, 3, 37, 73–74 Santo Stefano, monastery, 141 Šäwa, region, 30, 54n130, 190–193, 200, 201, 211, 212, 231n40, 241n124, 242n130, 245n157 Šawah, Sultanate, 190, 230n39 Sawākin, port, 30, 54n127, 182n241 Säyfä Arʿad, king, 198, 233n55 Scarification, 26, 36, 37, 50n93 Schwabenweg, pilgrimage route, 37 Sculptor(s), 152, 196, 203, 206 Seasons in Ethiopia, 30, 54n130, 75 Ṣǝrʿ, geographic region, 23, 249n182 Ship-builders, 76–77, 105n122, 105n125, 205 Ships, 76, 85, 101n86, 144–145, 149 Sidi Muḥammad, envoy, 143 Šihāb al-Dı ̄n, author, 184n268, 193–194, 197–199, 202, 245n151

306 

INDEX

Silk, fabric, 24–25, 148, 169n124, 198, 199, 202, 203, 208, 244n146, 251n203 Silver, 1, 21, 24, 31, 85, 86, 152, 185, 196–199, 202, 204–209, 213, 216, 217, 239n106, 240n123, 245n152, 248n179, 250n196 Silversmith(s), 151, 152, 154, 203, 205, 206 Sixtus IV, pope, 121, 125–132, 137, 139–141, 164n69, 166n89, 173n152, 188, 205, 207, 208, 229n26 Slave(s), slavery, enslaved, 65, 66, 69, 142, 159n31 Socotra, 179n200 Solomon, biblical king, 6, 185, 189, 190, 196, 215–220, 232n44, 256n261, 257n269 Solomonic Dynasty administration and bureaucracy, 121, 190–194 beginnings, 2, 186, 190 claim of universal Christian kingship, 189 claim over territory, 2, 9n6, 72, 151, 187, 190, 215, 231n42 expansion, 2, 6, 9n5, 187–190, 193, 203, 234n61 patronage practices, 79–80, 192, 210, 212–214, 217–219, 244n149, 254n239 royal foundations, 121, 189, 192–194, 196, 198, 201, 202, 204, 208, 211, 212, 223, 234n61, 236n78, 245n154 self-representation, 6–7, 189, 215–219 (state-)building activity, 192–194, 196, 204, 213, 216 Spoliation, 194, 241n124 Statue(s), 152, 206, 208, 209, 221

Stonemason(s), 6, 8, 152–154, 195, 196, 203, 204, 206, 219 Sudarium, Veil of Veronica, relic, 28, 38, 80, 81, 91 Switzerland, modern region, 36–38 Swords, 28, 32, 52n113, 67, 89, 119n243, 121, 129, 130, 152, 153, 187, 188, 207, 210, 217, 218, 221, 247n176 Swordsmith(s), 22, 28, 187, 204, 248n179, 258n277 T Tabot, altar tablet, 217, 240n115 al-Tabrı ̄zı ̄, Nūr al-Dı ̄n ʿAli, merchant-­ ambassador, 1–2, 63, 65–73, 77, 90, 95n29, 98n65, 100n77, 100n82, 187, 203, 208, 249n187 Tädbabä Maryam, church, 48n80, 249n183, 251n208 Täklä Haymanot, monk-saint, 232n48 Täklä Maryam, king, 62, 74, 76, 77, 90, 102n95, 136, 192, 200, 205 mission to the Golden Horn, 74–77 Ṭ ana, lake, 190, 201, 212, 234n61 Tarazona, town, 73, 108n149 Täsfa Giyorgis, official, 141–142, 156n8, 169n120 Tax(es)/taxation, 191, 204, 233n50, 246n161 Täzkar, memorial celebration, 255n248 Tǝgray, region, 30, 50n93, 189, 201, 235n65, 235n66, 242n138, 254n239 Tǝgrǝñña, language, 31–34, 54n131, 256n259 Thomas Prischusch, author, 36 Trade, 6, 32, 33, 66, 67, 104n116, 121, 142, 263–264

 INDEX 

Trade route, between Ethiopia and the Mediterranean, 22, 29–30, 134, 138, 183n254, 248–249n182 Treatise on the Holy Land, source, 132, 133, 237n82 Trebizond, locality, 48n83, 86, 113n194, 116n218, 116n219 Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, manuscript, 37, 59n188, 77 Trial(s), 65–69, 71, 98n64, 99–100n75, 100n82 U Umbrella(s), dǝbab, 199, 217–218, 240n115 Union of the Churches, Latin requests for, 79–82, 84, 88, 91, 128–129, 140, 154, 247n173 V Valencia, town, 2, 3, 62–67, 72, 74, 93n12, 101n86, 208 Velvet, fabric, 148, 199, 251n203 Venice/Venetian(s), 3, 17, 18, 38, 39, 43n26, 44n40, 45n45, 45n46, 45n47, 46n51, 46n54, 47–48n65, 71, 75, 81, 125, 131, 141, 159n34, 166n97, 215, 256n253 in Ethiopia, 22, 29–34, 76, 212–213, 229n28, 254n241 Ethiopian embassy to, 20–23, 25, 28, 29, 36, 39, 43n22, 44n37, 56n163, 185, 202–204, 206, 207, 224–225n14, 250n194, 264 Verena, saint, 37, 38 Via Jacobi, see Schwabenweg

307

W Wadding, Luke, historian, 131–133, 135, 159n30, 170n126 Walasmaʿ, dynasty, 83, 99n70, 226n20 War(s), 20, 69, 73, 89, 101n90, 122, 137, 144, 145, 147, 193, 194, 201, 221, 238n88, 241n124, 242n138, 244n146, 265 Weapons 1, 61, 68, 75, 100n82, 254n238 from Egypt, 66–70, 97n57, 187 in Ethiopia, 152, 153, 186, 187 from Europe, 152–153, 186, 220–221, 225n15, 247n176 scholarship narratives on, 61–62, 152, 185–186 Woolen cloths, fabrics, 85, 208 Y Yaʿǝqob, envoy, 147 Yǝkunno Amlak, king, 190, 244n149 Yemen(i) Aksumite intervention in, 88–89, 118n238 bilingual texts from, 54n134, 56n159 traders from, 32 Yǝmrǝḥannä Krǝstos, church, 212, 245n155 Yǝsḥaq Däbr, church, 192 Yǝsḥaq, king, 1, 61–67, 69–74, 77, 85, 90, 94n20, 95n25, 97n57, 101n85, 101n89, 101n90, 102n95, 105n125, 144, 186, 187, 192, 204, 207, 208, 218, 226n20, 241n123, 244n146 Yǝsḥaq, metropolitan, abunä, 124, 158n25, 261n288

308 

INDEX

Z Zagwe, dynasty, 8–9n4, 189, 190, 212, 230n37, 235n65, 242n138 Zäʾra Yaʿǝqob, king, 47n63, 62, 64, 78–91, 94n20, 102n95, 105n118, 108n144, 109n154, 109n156, 110n164, 112n182, 112n183, 113n191, 114n198, 118n233, 118n240, 121, 123, 136, 143, 156n10, 157n17, 162n58, 175n171, 186, 187, 192, 193, 198, 202, 205, 207, 208, 210, 216, 224n14, 226n20,

229n26, 233–234n55, 234n61, 235n67, 238n89, 241n123, 242n134, 244n146, 246n169, 252n218, 253n236, 256n261 battles, 82–83, 226n20 depictions, 217–218 diplomacy of, 82–90 family relations, 80 religious reforms, 79, 83, 109n156, 233–234n55 writings attributed to, 80, 109n157 Zaylaʿ, port, 146, 179n205, 227n20 Zway, lake, 152, 190