Beyond Exceptionalism

Despite his prominence in Renaissance Rome, Täsfa Ṣeyon has remained on the edges of academic research. With respect to Ethiopian and African historiography, this marginality reflects the evolving intellectual politics of disciplinary orientalism, the genealogy of which we sketch in Section 5. More broadly, the field of African diaspora studies long focused on the larger Atlantic and Indian Ocean cases, with comparatively less attention paid to their Mediterranean and European counterparts. For this reason, the relatively small Ethiopian diaspora of early modern Europe has rarely been studied as a distinctive African diaspora population or adequately situated within broader theorizations of African diaspora history, despite the abundant source material in Ethiopian and European languages.Footnote ⁹ Moreover, much of the extant research is dated and underdeveloped.Footnote ¹⁰ Earlier generations of church scholars and orientalists edited and translated documents related to the Santo Stefano community, but they did not treat its members as historical agents and frequently adopted a paternalistic heuristic of perennial Italo-African fraternity.Footnote ¹¹ Later specialists tended to replicate this ahistorical paradigm,Footnote ¹² with some notable exceptions.Footnote ¹³ We address these lacunae through an interdisciplinary and multilingual approach, building upon the emerging specialist literature dedicated to the Ethiopian presence in early modern EuropeFootnote ¹⁴ and the early history of Ethiopian–European relations.Footnote ¹⁵ At the same time, we re-situate Täsfa Ṣeyon within African history, as an attestation of the sixteenth-century global conjuncture of empire in the Horn and the intellectual dynamism of the Ethiopian liqawent, or church scholars, in the face of war and collective hardship. Täsfa Ṣeyon played an important role in these momentous developments, and through his attempts to intervene from abroad in events at home, he articulated a new vernacular of Ethiopian diasporic identity.

We suspect these analytic lacunae reflect the enduring perception that Ethiopia is in Africa but not part of it – an exquisitely orientalist understanding of exceptionality that has long underpinned the academic study of Ethiopia, “medieval” or otherwise.Footnote ¹⁶ This Eurocentric position compounds the challenge of understanding the particularity and interconnectedness of African diasporic histories,Footnote ¹⁷ as is exemplified by the complexity of Täsfa Ṣeyon as a historical subject. Some aspects of his biography seem to personify broader African diaspora experiences. He dedicated his life abroad to preserving his inherited faith and traditions of learning, even as he adapted these to the new intellectual and institutional environment of Catholic Rome. Despite his diasporic “uprootedness,” as he termed it in Ge’ez,Footnote ¹⁸ he was committed to using his distinctive location to defend his ancestral “Mother Ethiopia,” as he emotively put it. In other settings, this orientation might be considered a form of creolization. Yet his biography also suggests substantial points of divergence. The documentary record suggests that his life in Europe was rarely touched by the precarity of bondage and enslavement or racialized discrimination based on skin color, even as these defined the experiences of most of his African diasporic contemporaries, Ethiopian or otherwise.Footnote ¹⁹ He is visually depicted in paintings counseling the most powerful figures in the Catholic Church. Even among diasporic African elites, this level of visibility and evaded disempowerment was unusual.Footnote ²⁰ His biography thus differs substantially from that of his better known contemporary Leo Africanus (ca. 1494–ca. 1554), a captive Moroccan diplomat, forced convert, and prolific scholar who introduced Europeans to African history and the Islamic sciences,Footnote ²¹ to say nothing of the iconic eighteenth-century figure of Olaudah Equiano (ca. 1745–97), an Atlantic African author and abolitionist who explicitly imagined his life as an exemplar of broader experiences of diasporic enslavement and survival.Footnote ²² These disjunctures risk buttressing the epistemic framework of Ethiopian exceptionalism, obscuring the possibility of understanding Täsfa Ṣeyon within the fullness of Ethiopian as well as African diaspora history, beyond lachrymose and romantic narratives.Footnote ²³

As an example of what has been occluded, we document Täsfa Ṣeyon’s foundational contribution to the development of Africa-focused orientalism. This contribution was intertwined with the historical and affective conditions of his uprootedness, as is suggested by his innovative language of displacement, which elaborated a scriptural model of Israelite exile and return in dialogue with the collective self-understanding of the Santo Stefano community.Footnote ²⁴ In tandem with his liqawent training, sharp political acumen, and advanced Latin skills, this diasporic orientation allowed him to shape the institutionalized Vatican effort to produce knowledge about Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity. His stature as a curial advisor and research collaborator was such that the Ethiopians in Rome awarded him the honorific mämher, or teacher, suggesting his critical role in the development of the nascent field of orientalist philologia sacra, which sought to deepen European Christian understanding through the comparative study of Eastern Christian languages and texts. This enterprise proved the foundation of the modern academic field of Semitic studies. Yet like Leo Africanus and other sixteenth-century African and Asian intermediaries who educated the first orientalists and translated extra-European texts, Täsfa Ṣeyon’s contributions were diminished by later Western specialists who dismissed the authority of these diasporic intellectuals because of their perceived cultural hybridity and proximity to the Catholic missionary enterprise.Footnote ²⁵ This erasure fundamentally misconstrues the generative dialectic of orientalism.Footnote ²⁶ The early modern meeting of European, African, and Asian minds produced something previously unknown to all: a Western-dominated field of learning predicated on authorial competition, the command of language, and the purported systematic and integrated analysis of extra-European societies through the study of their literature.

Our discussion is based on a variety of archival and published sources, in a range of Ethiopian and European languages. These include Täsfa Ṣeyon’s published and unpublished texts; the manuscripts of the Santo Stefano community, in particular a Ge’ez codex that served as its collective history; the archival records of the Vatican support for Täsfa Ṣeyon; and the published and unpublished correspondence and scholarship of curial personalities and researchers that document Täsfa Ṣeyon’s activities and influence. The Online Appendix presents original translations of some of these Ge’ez materials. With respect to the modern legacies of this history, our analysis brings together orientalist scholarship, Amharic historiography, the colonial archive, and postcolonial commentaries on Ethiopia’s relationship to the West in a range of languages.

Four sections follow. Section 2 examines Täsfa Ṣeyon’s life in Ethiopia, emigration to the Holy Land, and subsequent arrival in Rome, where he joined the community of Ethiopian pilgrims at Santo Stefano. Section 3 reconstructs his ensuing intellectual career, from his collaborations with sixteenth-century orientalists and historians to his groundbreaking Ge’ez and Latin publications. Section 4 considers his role as an agent and familiar of Paul III, specifically through his contributions to the construction of the Basilica of Santa Maria degli Angeli e dei Martiri and the planning of the newly established Society of Jesus mission to Ethiopia. Section 5 outlines his posthumous integration into the orientalist academy, rediscovery by early twentieth-century Ethiopians, and instrumentalization by colonial writers and displaced colonial subjects, concluding with his recuperation as a postcolonial model of intellectual cosmopolitanism and ecumenical fraternity. We hope The Many Lives of Täsfa Ṣeyon does justice to this incredibly multifaceted African intellectual.

From Däbrä Libanos to Jerusalem

Täsfa Ṣeyon emerged from this era of chaos. Born around 1510, he was initiated as a young man into the rich intellectual culture of Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity. In his later writings, he described himself as an alumnus of Däbrä Libanos monastery, the leading center of church learning in Shäwa and the preeminent religious institution of the land.Footnote ³⁴ Founded in the fourteenth century by Saint Täklä Haymanot, Däbrä Libanos played a major role in the religious and political life of the Solomonid kingdom, and its abbot, the ec̣hägé, was the highest-ranking domestic ecclesiastic in the Ethiopian church, subordinate only to the Egyptian metropolitan appointed by the Coptic See of Saint Mark in Alexandria.Footnote ³⁵ When Täsfa Ṣeyon entered the monastery, it was led by ec̣hägé Enbaqom (ca. 1470–ca. 1560), an erudite Yemeni-Ethiopian convert who later advised Gälawdéwos. With the patronage of Lebnä Dengel, the abbot and brethren presided over a period of Ge’ez literary efflorescence. They standardized the hagiography of their founder Täklä Haymanot, prepared original exegetic works like the anti-Islamic treatise Anqäṣä amin, or Gate of Faith, and translated works of Arabic Christian literature, such as the commentary of John Chrysostom, the computational treatise of ʼAbū Shākir, the pseudo-Buddhist epic Baralaam and Josaphat, and the universal history of Jirjis al-Makīn. In the centuries to come, these became canonical works of Ge’ez literature. As a young initiate, Täsfa Ṣeyon certainly witnessed and perhaps contributed to this project of intercultural textual transmission. In his later years, he pursued this same intellectual project, while invoking ec̣hägé Enbaqom in his writings and adopting the monastic titles mämher and qomos, or high priest. All this suggests a distinctive erudition and position in the House of Täklä Haymanot.

This church training led to the Solomonid state. Years later, Täsfa Ṣeyon told his Roman colleagues that he had been a secretary for Gälawdéwos (Figure 2), suggesting that he served the royal family in an administrative or scribal role, possibly as a subordinate to the court historian, or ṣähafé te’ezaz, or the monastic keeper of the hours, or aqqabé sä’at.Footnote ³⁶ The first office was eventually held by his superior Enbaqom.Footnote ³⁷ Since Täsfa Ṣeyon left Ethiopia before the 1540 coronation of Gälawdéwos, he presumably joined the court during the prior reign of Lebnä Dengel, when the latter’s son and heir was a minor. This possibility is raised by the variant orthography that Täsfa Ṣeyon consistently used for the emperor’s name,Footnote ³⁸ implying that his service perhaps preceded Gälawdéwos’s period of social eminence. Yet the possibility of a more proximate relationship to the future emperor is suggested by the royal biographer of Gälawdéwos, who describes the latter’s rigorous childhood church education, and the precedent of the chronicler of Emperor Bä‘edä Maryam (1468–78), an ecclesiastic who served the royal family as a preceptor and intergenerational annalist.Footnote ³⁹ Whatever its particulars, Täsfa Ṣeyon’s position ensconced him within the immense apparatus of the itinerant royal court, or kätäma. In addition to the emperor and royal family, this included the civil and military officials who comprised the royal council and central state administration, the liqawent who served as judges, advisors, and clerks, and the court pages drawn from the Christian and non-Christian populations of the realm.Footnote ⁴⁰ At its apex, the kätäma numbered in the tens of thousands. Täsfa Ṣeyon thus counted among the religious elite who sustained Solomonid power.

Figure 2 Täsfa Ṣeyon to Pietro Paolo Gualtieri, 17 September 1547, Rome, Biblioteca Comunale Intronati di Siena, ms. D V 13, cc. 252r

(reprinted with permission of the Biblioteca Comunale degli Intronati, Istituzione del Comune di Siena)

This role placed him in a precarious position during the era’s intertwined conflicts. In 1532, as war ravaged the highlands, the army of ʼAḥmad Grañ destroyed Däbrä Libanos and the community was dispersed, including ec̣hägé Enbaqom.Footnote ⁴¹ It was a calamity. Describing these events years later, Täsfa Ṣeyon lamented with great emotion the suffering of “my mother, Holy Ethiopia,” who had been “crushed and weakened” by the invader:Footnote ⁴² “[‘Aḥmad Grañ] burnt our churches and our books and our offerings and defiled our churches and monasteries, by his perverse left hand.”Footnote ⁴³ As the Solomonid forces continued to battle the Adal invaders, the liqawent continued their fervid literary production, seeking to restore and defend the cultural patrimony of the Christian kingdom. It was a salvific project that left an impression on Täsfa Ṣeyon. Meanwhile, a number of monks and ecclesiastics attempted the arduous pilgrimage to Egypt and the Holy Land, turning to faith at a moment of collective trial. Some were successful; others turned back.Footnote ⁴⁴ At some point in the early 1530s, Täsfa Ṣeyon followed their example and set out for Jerusalem, possibly because of the destruction of Däbrä Libanos.Footnote ⁴⁵

He reached the Holy Land before 1535, where he joined its small but venerable Ethiopian community (Figure 3). Pilgrims from the Horn had ventured to the Holy Land since late antiquity, arriving via a treacherous land route through Egypt and across the Sinai peninsula, with stops at the desert monasteries of al-Qūsīya (Qwesqwam), Wādī al-Naṭrūn (Asqéṭes), and Saint Catherine’s of Mount Sinai (Däbrä Sina).Footnote ⁴⁶ By the late fifteenth century, Ethiopians maintained several residences and places of worship in Jerusalem, most notably at Däbrä Śelṭan, on the roof of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in the city’s Christian quarter.Footnote ⁴⁷ If few in number, they were relatively prominent: they received ambassadors from the Ethiopian emperors, dispatched a delegation to the Council of Florence (1439–49),Footnote ⁴⁸ and led the city’s public ceremony of the Holy Fire, or Redätä Berhan, celebrated with senior Armenian, Coptic, and Greek ecclesiastics outside the Church of the Holy Sepulcher.Footnote ⁴⁹ But their position in Jerusalem was precarious. As one of the Holy City’s many non-Muslim minorities, or dhimmī, they were subject to the changing dynamics of Muslim, Christian, and Jewish relations,Footnote ⁵⁰ which deteriorated in the decades before Täsfa Ṣeyon’s arrival. During the late Mamluk period, the city faced calls to enforce the legal restrictions on Christians, and one eminent qāḍī ordered the public execution of an Ethiopian Christian for blasphemy, apparently transgressing the will of the sultan with the sentence. His supporters burned the body of this unfortunate in the courtyard of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher.Footnote ⁵¹ The situation became more complex after the 1517 Ottoman conquest,Footnote ⁵² when the Ethiopians were obliged to accommodate themselves to the Ottoman system of managing intercommunal relations through religious authorities. In this, they were eventually subordinated to the Armenian Patriarchate of Jerusalem, the designated authority over the non-Greek Orthodox Christians of the Ottoman Arab provinces.Footnote ⁵³ This arrangement exacerbated the Ethiopians’ already-limited autonomy. It is thus unsurprising that the community declined in the early sixteenth century.Footnote ⁵⁴

Figure 3 Täsfa Ṣeyon’s itinerary

(David McCutcheon)

We have few details about Täsfa Ṣeyon’s stay in Jerusalem. A hint of his journey comes from the records of the Ethiopian community of Qwesqwam, on the upper Nile in Egypt. A marginal annotation in one of its Ge’ez manuscripts explains that a sixteenth-century visitor named Täsfa Ṣeyon donated a cow to the community, in honor of the Virgin Mary.Footnote ⁵⁵ Though the reference is uncertain, it suggests the wealthy origins later described by Täsfa Ṣeyon’s Roman contemporaries. A further glimpse of his travels appeared years later, when he and the Ethiopians of Rome recalled the difficult journey from Ethiopia to Jerusalem:

Figure 4 Early Rule of the Ethiopian community of Santo Stefano, BAV, Vat. Et. 66, 55v-56r

There are no known traces of Täsfa Ṣeyon’s time among the Ethiopians of Ottoman Jerusalem. From his later writings, we only know that he spent a few years in the Holy Land, presumably at Däbrä Śelṭan. At some point in the mid-1530s, he boarded a ship for the Italian peninsula. His final destination was Rome, the resplendent capital of the Papal States.

The Other Holy Land

By the sixteenth century, Rome was the most cosmopolitan city of Latin Europe. As the center of global Catholicism, it hosted growing numbers of pilgrims, students, ecclesiastics, monks, and missionaries from throughout the Catholic world and beyond. For many observers, the cultural and linguistic diversity of these nationes, or resident non-Italian communities, exemplified the triumph of the faith and splendor of the universal church, of which Rome was the sacred capital and magnificent theater.Footnote ⁵⁷ While many immigrants obtained accommodation and support networks through employment, the more established foreign Catholic communities also enjoyed confraternities, designated churches, and national colleges and seminaries for their clergy, through which they displayed their particularity within the universal.Footnote ⁵⁸ These preeminent nationes were joined by smaller populations of more eclectic origins, including a heterogenous array of non-Catholic strangersFootnote ⁵⁹ and religious minorities. These included Italian and non-Italian Protestants and Jews, enslaved Muslims from Africa and the Middle East, and so-called Eastern Christians from throughout the Mediterranean.

This last group included several distinct populations of Orthodox Christians. The most numerous were the Armenians, who were among the most prosperous minorities in Rome through their connection to a far-flung global trade diaspora.Footnote ⁶⁰ They were joined by Greeks from throughout the Levant, including many refugees from the 1453 Ottoman conquest of Constantinople, as well as Maronites from present-day Lebanon, who followed a branch of the Syriac Orthodox Church in communion with Rome.Footnote ⁶¹ In the later sixteenth century, the Vatican institutionalized its relationship with these Eastern Christian nationes by establishing the Armenian Church of Santa Maria Egiziaca (1566),Footnote ⁶² the Pontifical Greek College (1577),Footnote ⁶³ and the Pontifical Maronite College (1584), thereby seeking to control the diasporic communities and advance the spread of Catholicism in the Middle East (Figure 5).Footnote ⁶⁴ This ecclesiastic surveillance intensified after the Roman Inquisition targeted the city’s religious minorities, including unconverted Eastern Christians.Footnote ⁶⁵

Figure 5 Täsfa Ṣeyon’s Rome

(David McCutcheon)

By the early sixteenth century, Rome was also home to a growing Ethiopian community. It was centered at Santo Stefano Maggiore, one of four church-cum-monasteries within the Vatican walls owned by the Chapter of Saint Peter and used by basilica personnel (Figure 6). Dedicated to Saint Stephen of Jerusalem (ca. 5–34), the protomartyr of Christianity, the church and its residential annex were built under Pope Leo I (440–461).Footnote ⁶⁶ At some point in the late fifteenth century, Santo Stefano began to be occupied by Ethiopian pilgrims,Footnote ⁶⁷ at which time it became known as Santo Stefano degli Abissini, using the European exonym “Abyssinian” to describe the highland Christians of present-day Ethiopia and Eritrea. In a reflection of the prevailing European geographic confusion with respect to Africa, the complex was also known as Santo Stefano degli Indiani, dei Mori, and degli Egiziani, employing the era’s other common terms for Ethiopians (“Indians” and “Moors”), and additionally mistaking them for another poorly understood Eastern Christian community (“Egyptians,” meaning Coptic Orthodox Christians).Footnote ⁶⁸

Figure 6 View of Santo Stefano from Giuseppe Vasi, Raccolta delle piú belle vedute antiche, e moderne di Roma (Rome: 1803)

(Photo by the author)

When Täsfa Ṣeyon arrived in the 1530s, Santo Stefano had become a distinct Ethiopian diasporic space at the heart of Latin Christendom. This development is epitomized by its Ge’ez, Amharic, and Tigrinya name: Däbrä Qeddus Esṭifanos, lit. “Mount of Saint Stephen.” This moniker suggests a specific institutional identity rooted in Ethiopian monastic norms. Literally, the word däbr refers to a hill, mountain, or extremely high location, and it is a common component of toponyms throughout Ethiopia and Eritrea. Within the Ethiopian monastic tradition, däbr is more specifically employed in the names of important monasteries and churches, such as Däbrä Libanos in Shäwa, Däbrä Ḥayq in Amhara, and Däbrä Dammo and Däbrä Abbay in Tegray. In addition to sustaining monastic residents, däbrs are also dedicated to community worship, education, and evangelism, and for this reason, they maintain teachers, liturgical musicians, and church scholars. Their leaders sometimes occupied important external ecclesiastic and court appointments. As institutions that served monastics as well as the wider community (yädäbr ḥezb, lit. “people of the däbr”), they are distinct from rural parish churches (gäṭär), which are maintained by the local community and its ecclesiastics, as well as remote monasteries (gädam), which are focused on ascetic religious seclusion. More broadly, däbrs are perceived by the faithful as holy places of immense spiritual and intellectual significance: they are sites of miraculous intercession, extreme self-denial, and deep religious learning, and are sometimes imagined as exemplars of the historical fortunes of Ethiopian Christianity.Footnote ⁶⁹ By christening Santo Stefano a däbr, the Ethiopians of Rome signaled their precise understanding of its institutional identity: Däbrä Qeddus Esṭifanos was dedicated to maintaining a community of Ethiopian monastics, ecclesiastics, and lay people while sustaining the steady flow of travelers to the shrines of Saints Peter and Paul. In a material gesture to this role, the community obtained three clay trivet stones, or gulecha, to prepare traditional Ethiopian food, as well as five wooden kegs for brewing tej, or honey wine, and berz, a lightly fermented high caloric beverage that is well-suited to the weary traveler.Footnote ⁷⁰ Santo Stefano was an Orthodox monastery and the “safe abode of the Ethiopian pilgrims” in the Roman Holy Land.Footnote ⁷¹

In the early sixteenth century, it developed several institutional features befitting this role. Most conspicuously, the community consecrated its tabot, or altar ark and tablets, to Saint Stephen, who thereby became its patron saint and collective intercessor.Footnote ⁷² This was a foundational moment. In the Ethiopian Orthodox tradition, a church cannot exist without a tabot: it is the dwelling relic of the Holy Spirit, and is consecrated to the angel, saint, or martyr for whom the church is named, through which process it becomes the physical presence of its namesake and the instrument for conveying the prayers of the faithful. Its theft, desecration, or destruction is considered disastrous.Footnote ⁷³ The presence of a consecrated tabot at Santo Stefano indicates the community’s rigorous adherence to Ethiopian Orthodox norms, transforming a Vatican Catholic Church into an Ethiopian place of worship. As a ritual expression of this fact, the community also maintained the crosses, incense burners, eucharistic vessels, and sacerdotal vestments required by the Ethiopian mass, including those required by the Feast of the Epiphany, or Ṭemqät, as well as the annual tabot exaltation for the feast of its patron saint, or negś, which both involve processions outside the church.Footnote ⁷⁴ Tellingly, the community celebrated the Feast of Saint Stephen in accordance with the Ethiopian religious calendar, and not its Catholic counterpart, and an announcement of this fact in an eighteenth-century Ge’ez collection of saints’ lives appears to be the earliest exogenous reference to Santo Stefano in Ethiopian literature.Footnote ⁷⁵ The community’s public worship intrigued more than one early sixteenth-century observer.Footnote ⁷⁶

Beyond the tabot, the residents of Santo Stefano also structured their community through Ethiopian monastic models. Its abbot or head held the title rayes, following the distinctive Arabic-derived terminology used by the Ethiopian diaspora communities in Jerusalem and Qwesqwam.Footnote ⁷⁷ In Rome, the rayes was appointed by the community and wielded considerable power within it, though they were not the primary intermediary with respect to its relations with the outside world. This function fell to the mäggabi, or administrator/steward, an office found at the other diaspora monasteries as well as in a range of monastic, ecclesiastic, and secular settings in Ethiopia. In Rome, the mäggabi was the treasurer and provisioner of the community, responsible for managing its communal property, donations, and expenses, and seems to have been subordinate in these functions to the rayes. A third office was the teacher, or mämher, a position that does not seem to have existed at the other diaspora monasteries, but was a title of learning and authority at Ethiopian monasteries like Däbrä Libanos.Footnote ⁷⁸ These three officials served the wider community of the däbr, who were divided between temporary and permanent members, and who were collectively known as “the pilgrims of Däbrä Qeddus Esṭifanos at the Sepulcher of Peter and Paul.” They were in turn one aspect of the broader diaspora of “pilgrims who are in the land of foreigners.”Footnote ⁷⁹

In several respects, though, the institutional features of Santo Stefano diverged from Ethiopian monastic norms, as the community accommodated itself to its distinctive diasporic setting. One unusual situation developed in the mid-sixteenth century, when the mäggabi of Santo Stefano was Pietro Paolo Gualtieri (1501–72), a lay scholar from Arezzo who studied Ge’ez at Santo Stefano and who was deeply involved in curial relations with Eastern Christians, such that the Ethiopians celebrated him as “a close friend of the pilgrims.”Footnote ⁸⁰ We find no precedent for a non-Orthodox – let alone a Catholic – holding such a position in an Ethiopian monastery, diasporic or otherwise. Another distinctive aspect of Santo Stefano was the fact that it welcomed lay Ethiopian guests, whether these were pilgrims or non-religious travelers. These visitors were permitted to stay at the residence and petition to join its permanent community, subject to the decision of the other residents. The däbr was thus a refuge and sanctuary for the community of the faithful far from home, not just a place of religious learning and seclusion. This institutional role distinguished Santo Stefano from the other diasporic monasteries, which seem to have been reserved for monastics and ecclesiastics, unlike their däbr counterparts in Ethiopia.

Even more unusual was Santo Stefano’s synthetic and relatively accommodating monastic culture. For more than a century, the Ethiopian church had been divided by a controversy concerning Sabbath observance.Footnote ⁸¹ In this, the heterodox House of Éwosṭatéwos embraced the Saturday “First Sabbath,” clashing with the House of Däbrä Libanos and the remainder of the church, which maintained the Alexandrine position favoring the Sunday “Christian Sabbath” and rejecting the Saturday alternative as Judaic. These controversies divided the religious of Ethiopia into clashing northern and southern factions until the 1449 Council of Däbrä Meṭmaq, where Emperor Zär’a Ya’eqob forced the adoption of two Sabbaths over the objections of the Coptic metropolitan and Däbrä Libanos liqawent,Footnote ⁸² as a compromise aimed at unifying the church and kingdom. When Santo Stefano was established nearly a century later, this forced reconciliation was further compounded by the shared crisis of the Adal invasion, which destroyed monasteries without regard for their doctrinal positions. For the children of Éwosṭatéwos and Däbrä Libanos alike, it was a time of collective suffering, survival, and recovery.

In Rome, the assembled disciples of these clashing monastic lines lived in apparent harmony. The disputes of home seem to have been ignored abroad, despite the occasional calls for internal unity within the Ge’ez records of the community. This point is suggested by the fact that the residents of Santo Stefano publicly acknowledged their monastic affiliations, describing themselves as the children of the founding father of their respective monastic tradition, and in some cases seemingly adopting titles from their home monasteries, such as mämher, or teacher; däbtära, or lay ecclesiastic; liqä diyaqonat, or archdeacon; and liqä kahenat, or archpriest.Footnote ⁸³ Even more unusually, the leaders of the community represented both monastic houses, even though Däbrä Libanos seem to have predominated. This intellectual heterogeneity suggests that Sabbath observance was not a source of conflict between the rival houses at Santo Stefano, even as the residents self-identified through the dogmatic positions of monastic lineage. We therefore speculate that the community observed both Sabbaths, in keeping with the Däbrä Meṭmaq edict.Footnote ⁸⁴ In this, the situation at Santo Stefano diverged substantially from the Catholic observation.

By the time Täsfa Seyon arrived, community relations were governed by an established rule, or serä’atä bétä krestyan.Footnote ⁸⁵ This rule was elaborated by the residents over several decades, and was preserved in two Ge’ez manuscripts as well as in the final pages of a printed Ge’ez New Testament, where it appears in Ge’ez as well as Latin.Footnote ⁸⁶ All three of these texts were maintained in the Santo Stefano library, a shared collection of Ge’ez codices and printed books that was sustained by donations and purchases from the community.Footnote ⁸⁷ The earliest forms of the community rule were oral, originating with pilgrim praxis and likely first articulated at the turn of the sixteenth century. Between 1528 and 1551, the community established more formal regulations.Footnote ⁸⁸ Among these was the stipulation that visitors to Santo Stefano would be “received with the love of Christ” and granted food and lodging for three days, after which time they could petition to stay. These requests were evaluated by the permanent members of the community. The residents of the däbr were also bound to “live [according] to the orders of the rayes,” and obey its rules “through their [good] words, and during the prayers and communion.” Misconduct for infractions like quarrelsomeness, drunkenness, carrying weapons, or slandering members as Muslims, Jews, or hyenas were punished by fines or permanent expulsion.Footnote ⁸⁹ Special provision was made for Ethiopian visitors who had been “captured by the Muslims and unbelievers”: they too would receive sanctuary for three days.Footnote ⁹⁰ In comparison with monastic rules in Ethiopia, the Santo Stefano rule was less focused on details of worship and more concerned with accommodating newcomers and establishing standards of interpersonal behavior. In short, it confronted the distinctive challenges of diasporic life.

As the rule suggests, Santo Stefano was not without its conflicts. Its community annal, a Ge’ez manuscript preserved today as Vat. Et. 66 at the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, occasionally describes specific moments of challenge, as documents of history and warnings to future residents. Some of these incidents involved minor property and financial disputes.Footnote ⁹¹ A more serious episode involved a resident named Ḫalib who killed someone and was expelled from the community. After going away to “another country,” he returned to Santo Stefano and did “wickedness”: robbing the residents, beating a däbtära, and stealing the tabot cloth, the valuable cover of the community’s most sacred object. He was excommunicated for these crimes, and the community annalist warned that anyone who allowed his return would be cursed by “the sword of words” of Saints Peter and Paul, alluding to Ephesians 6:17.Footnote ⁹² Another dramatic dispute involved rayes Enqwä Maryam of Cyprus, who in 1528–29 denounced the residents to a Vatican official, who in turn sanctioned the community by ending its food allotment. Enqwä Maryam accused them of violating their vow of celibacy, alleging they were “fornicators with women” and “male with a male.” The scandal became known “all over [the city] of Rome,” and after the residents petitioned Pope Clement VII (1523–34), the rayes was then expelled from the däbr.Footnote ⁹³ The entire affair exposed the growing links between the Ethiopian community and the personalities and institutions of their adopted home.

Myths, Lies, and Truths

This was the world that greeted Täsfa Ṣeyon. We do not know precisely when he arrived in Rome. Years later, he simply called the city the ideal “resting place for my body and soul,” in that it was the final abode of Saints Peter and Paul and the founders of the early church.Footnote ⁹⁴ The community annal, meanwhile, first mentions his presence at the däbr in a 1551 note about his contribution to the community rule, wherein he is identified with the honorific “our teacher.”Footnote ⁹⁵ The earliest notice of his presence in Rome instead derives from his involvement in a 1536 controversy that spread his name far beyond the quiet world of Santo Stefano.

The affair involved the case of João Bermudes (1491–1570), the former surgeon of the 1520 Portuguese mission to Lebnä Dengel. After reaching the Horn, Bermudes had remained in the warring Ethiopian highlands until the 1530s, when he claimed that Lebnä Dengel returned him to Europe on a double mission to Rome and Lisbon, offering the emperor’s obedience to the pontiff and seeking military support from João III. In 1536, Bermudes arrived in Rome, where he made an astonishing claim. In addition to asserting his credentials as the representative of Lebnä Dengel, he alleged that abunä Marqos (nd–1529/30), the dying Egyptian metropolitan, had named him as his ecclesiastic successor.Footnote ⁹⁶ In short, Bermudes alleged that a Portuguese lay Catholic with no training or experience was now head of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. This was preposterous: since its inception, the non-autocephalous Ethiopian church had been headed by a Coptic bishop appointed by the Patriarch of Alexandria in consultation with the residents of Saint Anthony’s monastery in Egypt. This appointed metropolitan, or abun, had never named his own successor.

These details transcended the limits of Vatican knowledge. At that time, the European understanding of Ethiopia was intertwined with the enduring myth of Prester John. This imagination had emerged in the twelfth century, when an apocryphal letter from a mysterious sovereign circulated throughout Europe. It described the pious ruler of a distant but mighty kingdom through an exoticist pastiche of ancient texts, medieval legends, and contemporary rumor, suggesting a European fabulist perhaps authored the original letter, possibly as an allegory of the perfect Christian king.Footnote ⁹⁷ Whatever its origins, the document acquired a life of its own, and in the estimation of European Christendom, Prester John seemed a potential game-changing ally in the ongoing crusade against the Islamic world.

But where was his kingdom, exactly? The earliest twelfth-century versions of the myth located it in East Asia, a region then barely understood by most Europeans. Over the ensuing centuries, Prester John’s presumed home was repeatedly relocated across Asia and the Horn of Africa, then conceived as part of continental Asia, or the Indies.Footnote ⁹⁸ An Ethiopian connection first emerged in the fourteenth century, and grew stronger as visitors from the Christian kingdom began to arrive in Europe, where their surprised hosts associated them with the mythic ruler.Footnote ⁹⁹ The promise of an Ethiopian Prester John eventually captivated the papacy as well as European monarchs like King Alfonso V of Aragon (1396–1458), who proved eager to forge an anti-Muslim alliance with a distant co-religionist.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ In the early fifteenth century, the Portuguese House of Avis sponsored the reconnaissance of Atlantic Africa, seeking the fabled potentate as well as commerce and a maritime route to India,Footnote ¹⁰¹ and in 1497, King João II (1455–95) dispatched Vasco da Gama (1460–1524) to the Indian Ocean, in part to find the elusive Prester John.Footnote ¹⁰² After countless failed efforts, in 1514 an Ethiopian emissary unexpectedly arrived at the court of King Manuel I (1495–1521). Believing himself now in direct communication with the long-sought ruler, the Portuguese monarch sent a delegation to Ethiopia, which in 1520 reached Lebnä Dengel. When the news returned to Europe, the medieval quest for Prester John seemed finally fulfilled, compounding the gravity of the European discovery of the Americas. This epochal conjuncture framed the shocking 1536 story of Bermudes.

This heady context led the curia to summon Täsfa Ṣeyon. The Jesuit Alfonso Salmeron (1515–85) described the ensuing audience: “A Portuguese man [Bermudes] had come from Prester John’s India [Ethiopia] [with] letters to Rome, for the Pope. Friar Pedro [Täsfa Ṣeyon], who is from there, was asked to read them and so was a priest [Yoḥannes of Cyprus] who is with Cardinal Theatino [Gian Pietro Carafa].”Footnote ¹⁰³ It would seem that Täsfa Ṣeyon was tasked with translating the surgeon’s letters from the emperor. Given his distinction as one of the most learned residents of Santo Stefano, he was likely asked to assess Bermudes’s claims and explain the workings of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, then obscure to Europeans. As an alumnus of Däbrä Libanos and Lebnä Dengel’s court, Täsfa Ṣeyon would have found it easy to persuade the surely skeptical curia to reject Bermudes’s bid for ecclesiastic power – even if the latter would go on to falsely boast that Paul III appointed him not only abun of Ethiopia but also “Patriarch and Pontifex” of Alexandria.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ In the process, Täsfa Ṣeyon helped expose a prominent and potentially compromising fraud, thereby becoming the resident Vatican expert on Ethiopia and the Horn. The stage was now set for an unprecedented career.

The Birth of African Studies

This new understanding emerged from the contacts of the preceding century. As Iberian mariners traversed the Atlantic, circumnavigated the African continent, and entered the Indian Ocean, Ethiopian travelers ventured to Mediterranean Europe. In conversations with their hosts, they presented themselves as the subjects of a pious but powerful Christian kingdom beyond the Muslim world, seemingly confirming the European image of Prester John. Their testimony sharpened the European geographic understanding of the Horn of Africa. In Venice, where the city’s maritime trade network brought Ethiopians from the Levant, these reports informed the Iter de Venetiis ad Indiam (1402), an anonymous itinerary that described the route to Prester John’s kingdom alongside an Amharic-Italian lexicon, the first European dictionary of an African language.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Decades later, the cartographer Fra Mauro Camaldolese (nd–1459) used testimony from the Ethiopian delegates to the Council of Florence to produce the Mappamundi (ca. 1450), which depicted Africa and especially the Horn in unprecedented detail.Footnote ¹¹⁸ This work was continued by geographer Alessandro Zorzi (ca. 1470–ca. 1538), whose early sixteenth-century compendium described pilgrimage routes from Ethiopia to Egypt and the Holy Land.Footnote ¹¹⁹ Complimentary works emerged elsewhere in the Italian peninsula. In Naples, the Dominican Pietro Ranzano (1428–92) interviewed an Ethiopian delegation to Alfonso V and presented the result in his Annales Omnium Temporum (1470s),Footnote ¹²⁰ while in Tuscany, Poggio Bracciolini (1380–1459) met the Ethiopian delegation to the Council of Florence and described their home in his De varietate fortunae (1447).Footnote ¹²¹ He was in turn likely interviewed by the creator of the Egyptus novelo map (ca. 1454), which featured accurate toponyms for the Upper Nile Valley.Footnote ¹²² Collectively, these fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century works comprise a protean Ethiopianist library, the first corpus of European knowledge dedicated to an African society beyond the Sahara.

These Italian geographies and histories were products of chance, curiosity, and personal initiative. Their creators were scholars with a general interest in the non-European world, who seized opportunities to acquire rare but potentially useful information from transiting Ethiopians. Their basis was oral testimony. However, by the early sixteenth-century the tiny field of Ethiopianist research developed a new structure, attracting scholars with specialized and comparative interests in Eastern Christian languages, texts, and churches, buttressed by the institutionalized Ethiopian diasporic presence in Rome. This transformation coincided with the burgeoning European interest in the newly discovered societies of Asia and the Americas. Together, these developments re-situated Ethiopia-focused scholarship within the nascent field of early modern orientalism, the research agenda of philologia sacra, and the adjacent field of world historiography.

This shift is exemplified by the 1513 edition of the Ethiopian Psalter, or Dawit.Footnote ¹²³ It is the first printed text in an African language, predating the Arabic Book of Hours by one year. As a multilingual work produced for both Ethiopian and European readers, the Psalter illuminates the changing dynamics of orientalist knowledge production and the agency of diasporic intellectuals therein. At that time, Santo Stefano was home to approximately thirty Ethiopian pilgrims.Footnote ¹²⁴ In 1511, they intrigued Johannes Potken (1470–1524/5), a papal secretary from Cologne who became curious about their language, which he misidentified as Chaldean, or Aramaic.Footnote ¹²⁵ He decided to study Ge’ez with Tomas Wäldä Samu’él, a monk from Waldebba then residing at Santo Stefano,Footnote ¹²⁶ and in October 1511, Potken borrowed a manuscript of the Ge’ez Psalms from the Vatican Library, obtained from a 1481 Ethiopian delegation.Footnote ¹²⁷ Two years later, he and Tomas published a print edition of the text with the Silber brothers of Rome.Footnote ¹²⁸ Following Ethiopian convention, it contains the Ge’ez Book of Psalms, Song of Solomon, and collected songs and prayers, replicating in print the scribal features of the base manuscript.

This was a watershed achievement. The work features the first printed autobiographical statement by an African author, provided as an interpolated Ge’ez leaf, and added to the volume shortly before printing, possibly unbeknownst to Potken:

As this attestation suggests, the project cast abba Tomas in a new intellectual role. Over the preceding century, diasporic Ethiopians were occasional informants for European interlocutors, who in turn limited themselves to presenting mediated fragments of collected testimony. The Psalter, in contrast, required an intensive and sustained collaboration between a European, who could navigate the institutional aspects of the printing process, and an Ethiopian, who could prepare a reliable Ge’ez text and review the newly created type for the Ethiopian script, or fidäl. In short, it required co-authorship.

At the same time, the Psalter inaugurated an enduring shift toward text and language in Ethiopianist research. While it was a devotional text for the Santo Stefano community,Footnote ¹³⁰ it also contained prefatory language materials intended for European readers. These include Latin introductions to the Ge’ez language and fidäl script, suggesting a pedagogic function that paralleled Tomas’s role as Potken’s language tutor. Yet the student soon effaced the teacher. After printing the Psalter in Rome, Potken returned to Germany, where he issued a 1518 synoptic edition of the Psalter in Latin, Ge’ez, Greek, and Hebrew, omitting any reference to his Ethiopian collaborator and modifying the fidäl script to account for sixth-order vocalization.Footnote ¹³¹ This edition in turn became a standard reference for Ge’ez language study in sixteenth-century Europe.Footnote ¹³² It notably underpins Postel’s Reference Postel1538 Linguarum duodecim characteribus differentium alphabetum, a polyglot language manual that presents the fidäl and Ge’ez language materials from the 1513 Tomas-Potken Psalter in a comparative linguistic framework, highlights the similarities between Ge’ez and Hebrew, and offers Latin translations of the Prayer of Simeon, Psalm 42, and Psalm 116 (Figure 7).Footnote ¹³³ Postel’s work is considered one of the first European contributions to comparative Semitic linguistics.Footnote ¹³⁴

Figure 7 Title Page, Guillaume Postel, Linguarum duodecim characteribus differentium alphabetum (Paris: Dionysium Lescuier, 1538)

Political developments complemented these shifts in the structure of knowledge. After the Portuguese embassy reached Lebnä Dengel in 1520, a flood of publications celebrated this event as the epochal discovery of Prester John. These included Manuel I’s letter to Pope Leo X;Footnote ¹³⁵ the reports of Andrea Corsali (1487-nd.), a papal representative attached to the Portuguese delegation;Footnote ¹³⁶ and the correspondence of two agents of the Estado da Índia who accompanied the delegation to present-day Eritrea.Footnote ¹³⁷ When the embassy returned to Lisbon in 1527, it brought a putative letter of papal submission from Lebnä Dengel, an apparent affirmation of the universal church and the era’s fervid Prestermania.Footnote ¹³⁸ Yet this understanding was soon shattered by liqä kahenat Ṣägga Zä’ab (ca. 1465/75–ca.1539/45), an Ethiopian ecclesiastic and ambassador who reached Lisbon with the returning Portuguese delegation. He befriended the court intellectual Damião de Góis (1502–74), who published a Latin apologia for Ethiopian Christianity that included Ṣägga Zä’ab’s confession of faith as well as an account of the Solomonid dynasty and its link to the Biblical Solomon and Sheba.Footnote ¹³⁹ This 1540 defence of Ethiopian Orthodoxy was censored by the Inquisitor General,Footnote ¹⁴⁰ but Ṣägga Zä’ab’s revelations suggested that the real Lebnä Dengel did not resemble the imagined Prester John. Likewise, news of the Ottoman–Adal invasion also undermined the myth of a mighty Christian potentate who could advance the global anti-Islamic crusade.

These developments fueled an explosion of new scholarship. By the late 1530s, the European field of Ethiopia-focused research was no longer the obscure purview of minor figures; instead, it had become a prominent arena of historico-religious debate attuned to the dynamics of imperial diplomacy. If this shift was broadly exemplified by Postel’s incorporation of Ethiopian languages and texts within his heretical universalist framework, it was more specifically attested by the memoir of Portuguese chaplain Francisco Álvares (1465–1536/41), who penned the first European eyewitness and proto-ethnographic description of the Horn. It was published in Lisbon in 1540,Footnote ¹⁴¹ after substantial cuts by the censor.Footnote ¹⁴² Unlike the societies of Asia and the Americas, highland Ethiopia had initially seemed to possess a superficial resemblance to European Christendom, with an integrated church and state, a highly developed monastic culture and scribal tradition, and an exotic but lineally adjacent Christian faith. Increased contact instead exposed Europeans to a messier reality, the details of which became an arena of charged scholarly disputation.

Paolo Giovio, Ludovico Beccadelli, and Marcello Cervini

This was the heated climate that surrounded Täsfa Ṣeyon in Rome. His intervention in the 1536 Bermudes affair began a fourteen-year period of intense intellectual activity, in which he worked with leading figures in the burgeoning field of Ethiopia-focused research. Among the first of these was historian Paolo Giovio (1483–1552) (Figure 8). Hailing from Como, Giovio began his career as the physician of Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici (1478–1534), the future Pope Clement VII. This role brought him to Rome, where he embraced the era’s fascination with the discovered wider world, including Ethiopia. His curial position made him privy to Corsali’s Reference Corsali1516 and 1518 dispatches on the Portuguese delegation to Ethiopia, and he surely read the dramatic publications on the discovery of Prester John. He first mentioned Ethiopia in an unpublished 1527 cultural history of Italy, wherein he describes “Armenians and Ethiopians living in the area of the Vatican occupied by pottery workshops,” referring to the environs of Santo Stefano.Footnote ¹⁴³ Six years later, in 1533, he contributed to a pamphlet celebrating Lebnä Dengel’s presumed papal submission.Footnote ¹⁴⁴

Figure 8 Cristofano di Papi dell’Altissimo, Paolo Giovio, ca. 1560, Galleria degli Uffizi, Firenze

A more substantial discussion followed in his Historiarum sui temporis (1550).Footnote ¹⁴⁵ This innovative work was an early attempt at unifying European and extra-European history within a global narrative, exemplifying a wider sixteenth-century shift from universal to world historiography.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ At a time when most local historians wrote dynastic histories based on archival sources and official chronicles, and when universal historians conceptualized world history from the perspective of an outward-looking home society, Giovio instead exploited Rome’s location as a cosmopolitan and imperial crossroads to aggregate extant knowledge with the testimony of foreign visitors and the fruit of the expanding Vatican intelligence network.

This dynamic underpins the Ethiopian section of the Historiarum. After a troglodyte-filled “Description of Africa,” Giovio soberly turned to “the empires of the great Prester John.”Footnote ¹⁴⁷ Although he exaggerated the size and built environment of the Christian kingdom, claiming it reached the Cape of Good Hope and comprised “many palaces and very magnificent temples,” he also reported that Prester John resided in “pavilions,” clearly referencing the itinerant imperial kätäma. He precisely situated the latter in Shäwa, the ancestral home and power base of Lebnä Dengel, and added that the church “patriarch” lived in its royal capital Bärara, south of present-day Addis Ababa.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ This was likely a reference to the seat of metropolitan abunä Gabr’él.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ This mixture of fantasy and fact pervades the text. For example, Giovio claimed “Pretegian” [Prester John] was a corruption of “Beldugian,” an “ancient nickname usurped from past kings,” and itself a possible corruption of the Amharic bädel jan, meaning “victorious majesty.” Similarly, he alleged that Gojjam was inhabited by “big dragons with wings, who walk the ground with webbed feet like geese,” but then offered a reasonable account of recent Solomonid history, noting the reigns of Gälawdéwos and Lebnä Dengel (Figure 9) as well as their immediate predecessors Emperor Na’od (1494–1508) and Queen Eléni (1431–1522), and describing events such as the Adal invasion and the deaths of Lebnä Dengel and ʼAḥmad Grañ.Footnote ¹⁵⁰

Figure 9 Portrait of Lebnä Dengel in Paolo Giovio’s museum, Cristofano di Papi dell’Altissimo, L’Imperatore Atana de Dinghel, ca. 1560, Galleria degli Uffizi, Firenze

While Giovio’s fantastic claims elaborated the Prester John mythology, their underlying Judeo-Christian eschatology, and the received classical understanding of Africa, his surer descriptions derived from the testimony of informed observers. One was Álvares; another was Täsfa Ṣeyon. In a portrait that suggests some acquaintance, Giovio introduced the latter as

The mämher’s contributions to the Historiarum are sometimes readily discerned. Álvares might have been able to describe life in the Solomonid court, but only Täsfa Ṣeyon could have convinced Giovio that Shäwa was “deemed very noble and better than all the others for its fertility, good regions[,] and its inhabitants’ ingenuity.”Footnote ¹⁵² In a suggestion of an autochthonous ethnic ontology, Giovio also reported that Shäwans “preceded all Abyssinians in astuteness, ingenuity, sobriety, customs[,] and good-living,” and “rule no different than Venetian gentlemen.”Footnote ¹⁵³

Giovio’s historiographic fusion suggests the durability of canonical knowledge in an era of intellectual change. The shocking new discoveries about the societies of the Americas and Asia strained but did not immediately overturn Europeans’ inherited models of the wider world, and the intellectual work of reconciling new reports and local sources with canonical texts and inherited forms of learning proved slow and inconsistent.Footnote ¹⁵⁴ Ancient learning and medieval fantasies were resilient, and often persisted alongside the latest scholarship – even within the genre of observational travel writing. Despite its cutting-edge elements, Giovio’s history of Ethiopia still reflected traditional authorities. Moreover, unlike his contemporaries Postel and Potken, Giovio operated outside the field of philologia sacra and was largely uninterested in its soteriological approach to Eastern Christianity and Muslim–Christian relations. Instead, he wrote history to distract the European reader from “so many bloody wars and sad events [with] a digression of a more pleasant subject.”Footnote ¹⁵⁵ He had a penchant for the exotic, but he was not an orientalist.

Figure 10 Portrait of Lebnä Dengel in Paolo Giovio, Pavli Iovii Novocomensis episcopi nvcerini, Elogia virorum bellica virtute illustrium (Basel: Petri Pernae typographi, 1575)

(photo by the author)

In this, his motivation differed from his contemporary Ludovico Beccadelli (1501–72). A curial personality from Bologna, Beccadelli was the secretary of Cardinal Gasparo Contarini (1483–1542). The latter was a leading member of the spirituali, a circle of lay and ordained figures committed to humanism, ecumenism, and church reform, and whose broad intellectual interests and personal quest for salvation have led to their characterization as a “religious republic of letters.”Footnote ¹⁵⁶ In opposition to their conservative rivals the zelanti, who rejected accommodation and championed strict orthodoxy, the spirituali critiqued the debased state of the church, sought accommodation with the Protestants, and hoped for ecumenical reunification with the Eastern Churches.

Ethiopia was central to this last undertaking. The connection was first intimated by spirituali forefather Erasmus of Rotterdam (1466–1536), who in his Ecclesiastae (1535) sympathetically reported that the “King of Ethiopia” had once informed the pontiff of his people’s long neglect.Footnote ¹⁵⁷ Contarini in turn embraced the project of Eastern Christian reunification, and specifically identified the Council of Florence as a model for Protestant reconciliation.Footnote ¹⁵⁸ In 1540, his belief in Ethiopia’s ecumenical potential led him to summon another Ethiopian ecclesiastic named abba Yoḥannes of Cyprus (1509–65), also known as Giovanni Battista Abissino, from Venice to Rome, where the latter eventually became a colleague of Täsfa Seyon and the rayes of Santo Stefano.Footnote ¹⁵⁹

Around this same time, Beccadelli acquired a disorganized Italian manuscript version of Álvares’s then-unpublished Ho Preste Ioam das Indias: verdadera informaçam das terras do Preste Ioam (1540). In all likelihood, it was a translation the Portuguese left unfinished upon his death in Rome in the mid-1530s.Footnote ¹⁶⁰ When discovered by Beccadelli, it was a unique work based on the authority of eyewitness reportage. He spent twenty years revising it. As he explained:

These consultations produced forty-two additions to the original text.Footnote ¹⁶² While Beccadelli’s version improved the transliteration of Ethiopian terms and added new details about the fate of the Portuguese delegation, most of his changes addressed controversial aspects of Ethiopian Orthodox doctrine and practice. In this, Beccadelli offered a spirituali counter to Vatican critics of Ethiopian Christianity,Footnote ¹⁶³ produced in the aftermath of Ṣägga Zä’ab and Góis’s censored apologia, and mobilizing the intellectual authority of Beccadelli’s diasporic informants. For example, he explains that the Ethiopian ritual of annual baptism at Ṭemqät was not sacramental, but was instead meant “to commemorate the baptism of Christ.”Footnote ¹⁶⁴ As for the practices of scarification and tattooing, Beccadelli explained that the Ethiopians at Santo Stefano said these were “done to improve the eyesight, for different traditions, and for beauty,” while “brother Pietro [Täsfa Ṣeyon] said that they are done … to distinguish themselves from other tribes, as much of Ethiopia regards as enemies those [descendants of the] ancient Jews who came to Ethiopia with the son of Solomon [Menilek].”Footnote ¹⁶⁵ These comments addressed persistent European confusion about forehead branding as a form of baptism by fire.Footnote ¹⁶⁶

Despite the significance of these insights for the European understanding of Ethiopian Christianity, Beccadelli’s project never appeared in print.Footnote ¹⁶⁷ As a contribution to the Ethiopianist library, its value was diminished by Álvares’s Ho Preste Ioam das Indias, which appeared alongside Leo Africanus’s history in the first volume of the best-selling Delle navigationi et viaggi (1550), edited by Giovanni Battista Ramusio (1485–1557).Footnote ¹⁶⁸ But Beccadelli’s ecumenical editing was also out-of-step with the strident Tridentine mood, as suggested by the fact that the Portuguese edition of Álvares’s manuscript was only published in a mutilated form, while Ṣägga Zä’ab’s confession was censored outright. Perhaps Beccadelli did not publish in hope of evading the newly established Roman Inquisition. By the 1550s, its Venetian counterpart had arrested Postel and dispatched him to the cells of the Castel Sant’Angelo, just a short walk from Santo Stefano at the Tiber.Footnote ¹⁶⁹

If the Roman elite increasingly disdained the Solomonid dynasty and Ethiopian Christianity, their interest in Ethiopia remained undiminished. Instead, Tridentine Catholic intellectual politics produced a new impetus for understanding Ethiopia and Eastern Christianity, transforming the antecedent exoticist and ecumenical Prestermania. The leading patron of this new orientation was Marcello Cervini (1501–55), the future Pope Marcellus II (Figure 11), who began his ecclesiastic ascent after 1534 when his patron Alessandro Farnese assumed the papacy. This development won Cervini several key curial positions, culminating in his elevation to the cardinalate in 1539, after which he led the Council of Trent (1545–63) and the Vatican negotiations with the Protestants. In 1546 he joined the Roman Inquisition, and in 1548 he was appointed head of the Biblioteca Vaticana, where he dedicated himself to establishing its collection of oriental manuscripts.Footnote ¹⁷⁰ In 1555, he ascended to the papacy for twenty-two days.

Figure 11 Jacopino Del Conte (attributed), Cardinal Marcello Cervini degli Spannocchi, Galleria Borghese, Rome

(photo by Mauro Coen)

Cervini’s interest in Ethiopia exemplifies his intellectual complexity. He was at once an unwavering humanist, a quasi-orientalist, a sponsor of the printed word, and an avatar of militant Tridentine Catholicism. This contradiction has generated controversy with respect to his position in the spirituali-zelanti struggle.Footnote ¹⁷¹ Although he developed a profound interest in classical, patristic, and Eastern Christian texts,Footnote ¹⁷² and even dabbled with Chinese,Footnote ¹⁷³ his earliest Vatican-sponsored publications were staunch defences of papal authority, such as the letters of Nicholas I (1542) and Innocent III (1543), and Henry VIII’s defence of the sacraments (1543).Footnote ¹⁷⁴ Yet by the mid-1540s, he also began to pursue the acquisition, study, and publication of Greek, Syriac, and Ge’ez texts that would aid his position at Trent.

In service of this undertaking, Cervini rallied orientalists like Postel as well as intermediary figures in the Eastern Christian diaspora. He supported the Syriac Orthodox deacon Petrus of Damascus’s Roman sojourn, and recommended him as an Arabic translator to the German scholar Johann Widmannstetter (1506–57).Footnote ¹⁷⁵ Cervini also collaborated with Petrus’s coreligionist Moses of Mārdīn, and sponsored the latter’s 1555 print edition of the Syriac New Testament, produced with the aid of Postel.Footnote ¹⁷⁶ Upon assuming the papacy as Marcellus II, he planned to continue harnessing the imprimatur of Eastern Christian texts, including the publication of patristic works in line with Catholic dogma, including editions of unpublished works by John Chrysostom, widely influential in the Orthodox world.Footnote ¹⁷⁷ These pursuits unfolded alongside the broader question of Catholic communion with Greek, Armenian, Coptic, and Syriac Orthodox Christians and the perceived utility of these relationships as models of interdenominational fraternity.

Cervini also instrumentalized the Ethiopianist library, using Täsfa Ṣeyon to advance his ecclesiastic agenda. In 1546, Guglielmo Sirleto (1514–85), custodian of the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, dispatched a letter to Cervini in Trent. He explained that the mämher of Rome had just acquired a Ge’ez manuscript containing the Nicene canons, which included “eighty four [canons] beyond the twenty we already had,” one of which “speaks of the primacy of the Roman Church above any other.”Footnote ¹⁷⁸ Sirleto tasked Täsfa Ṣeyon with translating this manuscript into Latin. Although we lack Cervini’s reply, Sirleto was clearly acting on his superior’s input. This point is suggested by a letter that same year from Cervini to Bernardino Maffei (1514–53), the secretary of Paul III:

The reference is a tantalizing clue. Not only was Täsfa Ṣeyon in dialogue with the powerbroker orientalist-cardinal, but the latter instructed his collaborators to enlist the Ethiopian’s doctrinal and linguistic expertise in the ongoing effort to defend papal supremacy through the study of Eastern Christian texts. In a striking coincidence, Täsfa Ṣeyon conferred that very same year with the ex-Jesuit and emerging arch-heretic Postel, who was then using esoteric eastern texts to attack papal supremacy as “the greatest sin in the world.”Footnote ¹⁸⁰ The mämher was thus enlisted by both sides of the leading intellectual battle of the church. In the process, he was thrust into the center of the emerging world of Vatican-coordinated orientalist scholarship, as epitomized by his collaboration with Cervini, its leading architect. The result was three groundbreaking printed books.

Täsfa Ṣeyon and the Ge’ez Gospels

Täsfa Ṣeyon’s magnum opus was the Testamentum Novum (1548), a monumental Latin-Ge’ez work of nearly 500 pages, featuring fidäl type, red and black ink, and woodcut illustrations (Figure 12). It is the editio princeps of the Ge’ez Gospels. Initially issued as an incomplete edition in 1548, its second and final edition appeared in 1549 with the appended Pauline Epistles, absent from the first edition because of a delay in procuring the source manuscript. The contents of the full edition include Latin and Ge’ez introductions and dedications; a Latin introduction to fidäl that drew upon and corrected the corresponding section of the 1513 Psalter; the Ge’ez Eusebian canon tables, which identify corresponding passages in the four Gospels; the Ge’ez Gospels, Book of Revelation, and Acts of the Apostles; the Ethiopian Mass; the Pauline Epistles; and concluding dedications, again in Latin and Ge’ez. The Latin and Ge’ez introductions and conclusions vary substantially. The individual Gospels, Book of Revelation, and Acts are followed by Ge’ez statements by Täsfa Ṣeyon, which generally indicate the date of completion, list the individuals involved, and offer thanks to a range of benefactors and collaborators. Some of these statements resemble colophons; others are longer commentaries.Footnote ¹⁸¹

Figure 12 Title page dedicated to Pope Paul III, Petrus Ethyops [Täsfa Ṣeyon], Testamentum Novum cum Epistola Pauli ad Hebreos […]

(Rome: Valerius Doricus, 1548), BAV, Membr.IV.14 (Photo by author)

The Testamentum Novum consumed Täsfa Ṣeyon’s final years in Rome. It emerged from an extended collaboration with Tänśe’a Wäld and Zäśellasé, both from the Ethiopian community in Rome, as well as Pietro Paolo Gualtieri, the mäggabi of Santo Stefano, and Mariano Vittori (1503/11–1572), a spirituale subordinate of cardinal Reginald Pole (1500–58).Footnote ¹⁸² Their work was challenging, beginning with the question of source texts. Ge’ez manuscripts typically reached Rome via Ethiopian pilgrims, and by the mid-sixteenth century, Santo Stefano boasted a sizeable library of codices.Footnote ¹⁸³ Täsfa Ṣeyon himself gave the community a manuscript containing the Ge’ez Gospels.Footnote ¹⁸⁴ Manuscripts also arrived in the hands of Europeans returning from Ethiopia and the Holy Land, as in the case of Potken and Tomas Wäldä Samu’él’s Psalter.Footnote ¹⁸⁵ For the Testamentum Novum, Täsfa Ṣeyon drew upon the Santo Stefano library for the Ge’ez Gospels, Revelation, Catholic and Hebrew Epistles, Acts, and Mass,Footnote ¹⁸⁶ but was obliged to procure a source manuscript with the Pauline Epistles from Cyprus, drawing upon his compatriot Yoḥannes of Cyprus and the latter’s ecclesiastic and diasporic network.Footnote ¹⁸⁷

A second challenge concerned the production of the printed Ge’ez text. This was among the most arduous aspects of the work. As the mämher lamented: “You should know that we worked day and night, with hardship and pain, I, Täsfa Ṣeyon, and Tänśe’a Wäld with Zäśellasé; and we printed and [even] contributed to the publication with a wäqét of gold.”Footnote ¹⁸⁸ Apart from the labor and expense of casting fidäl moveable type, the latter presented unique difficulties for the workshop compositors, who found themselves setting type they could not read. The only local printers with fidäl experience were the Silber brothers, who had produced the 1513 Psalter, but they left the industry after the 1527 Sack of Rome, when the city’s printing industry lost much of its base of technical expertise.Footnote ¹⁸⁹ Given this situation, Täsfa Ṣeyon turned to the Dorico brothers, leading Roman printers who were unfamiliar with fidäl. It is easy to imagine the Ethiopians painstakingly reviewing the Ge’ez type in the printers’ workshop. To the Italian compositors, the text surely resembled hieroglyphs. Täsfa Ṣeyon likened their shared linguistic and technical endeavor to “the blind helping each other.”Footnote ¹⁹⁰

While working on the Testamentum Novum, Täsfa Ṣeyon also completed two shorter Latin works, Missa qua Ethiopes (1549) and Modus baptizandi (1549). These were, respectively, a translation of the Ethiopian mass published in the Testamentum Novum, based on Vat. Et. 16,Footnote ¹⁹¹ and a translation of the Ethiopian baptismal rite, based on Vat. Et. 4.Footnote ¹⁹² These projects had occupied Täsfa Ṣeyon since at least 1547, when they emerged in the Cervini-Sirleto correspondence.Footnote ¹⁹³ In translating the Ge’ez mass and baptism rituals, Täsfa Ṣeyon again collaborated with two Europeans: Gualtieri, who is identified as the co-translator of the Ethiopian mass, and who was in the judgment of Vittori the only other European competent in Ge’ez;Footnote ¹⁹⁴ and Bernardino Sander, a copyist from Cremona and friend of Täsfa ṢeyonFootnote ¹⁹⁵ who helped translate the baptism, and who in the Ethiopian’s assessment had some knowledge of Ge’ez.Footnote ¹⁹⁶ Sirleto supervised both editions, even as Cervini requested a second translation of the Ge’ez mass ritual from Yoḥannes of Cyprus.Footnote ¹⁹⁷ To print the editions, the mämher selected Antonio Blado (1515–67), the official printer of the Apostolic Chamber and recipient of past Cervini commissions,Footnote ¹⁹⁸ widely recognized in Rome as the publisher of Ignatius of Loyola’s Exercitia spiritualia (1548) and Niccolò Machiavelli’s Discorsi (1531). In 1549, the Blado workshop issued the Missa and Modus baptizandi in a single volume, accompanied by Täsfa Ṣeyon’s Latin translation of the 1542 letter from Gälawdéwos. Unlike the Testamentum Novum, which features hundreds of pages of fidäl text, the Missa and Modus baptizandi were short and nearly entirely in Latin. They were for this reason readily reprintable, as a 1550 Louvain edition suggests.

What inspired this Ethiopian embrace of the printed word? The complexity of Täsfa Ṣeyon’s purpose is suggested by the diversity of his imagined readers. The problem is starkly illustrated in the final pages of the Testamentum Novum. Täsfa Ṣeyon begins its Ge’ez conclusion with an eminently Ethiopian Orthodox – and thus täwaḥedo or Miaphysite – Christology affirming “three persons and one substance and two births.”Footnote ¹⁹⁹ This statement invokes the distinctive “two births” doctrine, which holds that Jesus was born first to God in heaven without a mother, and second to the Virgin Mary on earth without a father, in a single and unified nature.Footnote ²⁰⁰ Täsfa Ṣeyon follows this with a second Latin conclusion wherein he affirms “three persons of one substance and twofold nativity.”Footnote ²⁰¹ Intriguingly, his use of the Latin nativitas, meaning birth but also implying a natural or innate quality, would allow a Catholic reader to potentially understand this second Christological statement as properly Chalcedonian, even as an Ethiopian reader would understand it as Miaphysite, in that the concept of “two births” – but not dual nature – was dogmatic for the Ethiopian church.Footnote ²⁰² The two confessions of faith were thus exquisitely attuned to the heated doctrinal politics of Ethiopia and Europe, and in this respect, they paralleled similarly accommodating aspects of Täsfa Ṣeyon’s Latin missal text.Footnote ²⁰³ If the differences reflected his awareness of the censors and the limits of their language competencies, they also reveal the complexity of the mämher’s envisioned audiences.

The most immediate of these was the community of Ethiopian pilgrims at Santo Stefano, for whom the Testamentum Novum was a revolutionary devotional text. With respect to its material form, it was uniquely suited to the worldly needs of a transient diasporic reader: its legible fidäl and small physical sizeFootnote ²⁰⁴ made it uniquely portable, such that it could be easily carried by hand or pocket.Footnote ²⁰⁵ This readership is also suggested by its Ge’ez introduction, wherein Täsfa Ṣeyon beseeched “his brothers”Footnote ²⁰⁶ to forgive his editorial failings, and additionally its Ge’ez conclusion, wherein he counted himself among the “uprooted Ethiopian[s]” in foreign lands.Footnote ²⁰⁷ This rhetoric of diasporic fellowship is absent from the Latin introduction and conclusion, which are instead addressed to a “pious and Christian reader.”Footnote ²⁰⁸ In a further gesture to his diasporic kin, Täsfa Ṣeyon adhered to liqawent norms of authorship and reading, adapting manuscript practice to the printed page. His introductory supplication replicated the scribal convention of asking readers and/or God to forgive his errors, gesturing toward the collective scholarly endeavor of pious inquiry and rigorous transmission of sacred texts, and he paired the Gospels with the Eusebian canon tables, following the Ethiopian paratextual convention. The Testamentum Novum’s warm reception by the pilgrims is suggested by the fact that the Santo Stefano library used its copy to preserve the community rule, handwritten in both Ge’ez and Latin in its final pages.Footnote ²⁰⁹

But Täsfa Ṣeyon also envisioned readers in Ethiopia. Broadly, this orientation is suggested by the dedications to Gälawdéwos in the Testamentum Novum, which acknowledge the emperor’s popular European identification with Prester John.Footnote ²¹⁰ But more specifically, his Ge’ez commentaries throughout outline a vision of the text as an instrument of salvific Ethiopian renewal, as he repeatedly termed it.Footnote ²¹¹ The context for this intervention rested upon his equation of contemporary Ethiopia and ancient Israel. After the Acts of the Apostles, which concludes with Paul’s proclamation of Christianity in Rome, Täsfa Ṣeyon writes:

In this understanding, the Testamentum Novum contributed to the tradition of transmitting sacred texts, reaching from the exiled Ezra through the “forefathers” of the church to Täsfa Ṣeyon and his sixteenth-century collaborators, whose print edition was a historic and epochal act of stewardship inspired by the ancient scribe-priest. A complimentary vision underpins Täsfa Ṣeyon’s commentary after the Gospel of John, wherein he likens ʼAḥmad Grañ and the Muslims of Adal to the “pagans” of Babylon.Footnote ²¹³

This potent historical imaginary is further developed in his commentary after the Book of Revelation. He there narrates the ancient Israelites’ return from the Babylonian exile, culminating in the rebuilding of the Temple and the reedition of scripture and transmission of religious law by Ezra. Together, these events constituted the restoration of Israel. After this historical survey, Täsfa Ṣeyon turns to his ancestral home. He emotively laments:

Read closely and in tandem with the Acts and John commentaries, this passage suggests the role of the Testamentum Novum in Ethiopia’s future, in keeping with the temporal orientation of Revelation. Again comparing ancient Israel to sixteenth-century Ethiopia, Täsfa Ṣeyon intertwines these two chosen nations and their struggle against “pagan” adversaries: the Ethiopians were presently “dispersed” in suffering and exile, like their ancient forbears, but their return to the promised land was now imminent, as suggested by the reconstruction of Däbrä Libanos, here the Ethiopian Temple.Footnote ²¹⁵ This renewal would encompass the restoration of the Solomonids and return of the exiled Ethiopians of Rome and Jerusalem. This aspect is suggested by his implicit self-analogy to the unreturned Ezra, as an ecclesiastic counterpart to Gälawdéwos and the would-be restorer of destroyed texts to “Mother Ethiopia.”Footnote ²¹⁶ It is more broadly signaled by his self-description as fälasi, or “uprooted,” using the same verb that is used to describe the Israelite exile in the Ge’ez Bible.Footnote ²¹⁷ In a further indication of this imagination, he elsewhere adopted the moniker malḫazo, a Ge’ez neologism that would appear to mean “the exiled/removed one,” as a personal identifier of his own uprootedness.Footnote ²¹⁸ These expressions elaborated an Ethiopian vernacular of diasporic identity, adapting the scriptural language of Israelite exile to the exigencies of early modern displacement.

If the Testamentum Novum was intended to save Ethiopian readers, the Modus baptizandi and Missa were instead designed to correct European misconceptions. As he explained in the preface to the Modus baptizandi, Ethiopian Christianity was now viewed with suspicion and even judged heretical, “even though our people have stood with the shield of truth in the way of this long divulged false opinion.” His new Latin translations would likewise “stand in the way of this so great a lie,” even if “it is of little or no importance the observance of different ceremonies, as long as it [i.e., the observance] all agrees in one faith.”Footnote ²¹⁹ This ecumenicalism underpins both editions: the translated baptism ritual challenged the allegation of an Ethiopian baptism by fire and branding, while the translated missal demonstrated the points of similarity between the Catholic and Ethiopian Orthodox liturgies, even as it deviated from the Ge’ez text of the Nicene Creed and reduced the number of Ethiopian saints named in the Divine Praises.Footnote ²²⁰ As Latin works, the Missa and Modus baptizandi had a wide immediate readership, even if the Testamentum Novum proved of more enduring influence.

Three years later, Vittori published Chaldeae seu Aethiopicae linguae institutiones (1552), the first printed grammar of an African language. It predates by a century Giacinto Brusciotto’s Reference Brusciotto1659 Kikongo grammar, commonly considered the first work of its kind.Footnote ²²¹ Vittori’s Ge’ez grammar featured a detailed guide to pronunciation, parts of speech, and verb conjugation, with usage examples in fidäl and frequent comparisons with Hebrew. The work also contains the first overview of Ethiopian liturgical music, and additionally, a translated chronology of Ethiopian kings, which haphazardly jumps from the ancient Queen of Sheba and her son Menilek to the sixteenth-century Lebnä Dengel and Gälawdéwos.Footnote ²²² With respect to his Ge’ez language skills, Vittori acknowledged his debt to his teacher, noting that Täsfa Ṣeyon had instructed him “with great benevolence”Footnote ²²³ and encouraged the creation of a grammar geared toward European students, adapting an Ethiopian approach to language instruction (säwasew) for a new audience.Footnote ²²⁴

Vittori delivered. With respect to language study, he outlined a “new system” for Europeans who wished to learn Ge’ez, which he hoped would facilitate research into “the sacred old authors” whose writings had been “learnedly and eruditely” translated into Ge’ez. At the same time, he intervened in several orientalist debates. In his introduction, he likened the study of Ge’ez to the earlier restoration of Greek and Hebrew as languages of fruitful Christian inquiry and instruments of anti-Protestant polemic, complementing Cervini’s strategic vision, and he then ventured that the similarities between ancient Chaldean and Hebrew, Syriac, Arabic, and Ge’ez were so extensive that “whoever is good at one, is able to a great degree to understand the other,” despite their grammatical and phonetic differences. However, he confirmed that Ge’ez was not in fact Chaldean, contrary to the claims of Potken and Postel, and then railed against Potken, who “not only did not know the language’s grammar” but also was “persuaded by the testimony of some Ethiopian ignoramuses … [to] believe the language to be without any certain grammatical rules, acquired only through use, through the practice of speaking.”Footnote ²²⁵ Finally, and most broadly, Vittori defended the dignity of Ethiopian Christianity, in a nod to both his teacher and Cervini, Góis, and Ṣägga Zä’ab. In his view, the study of Ethiopian texts – like Eastern Christian literature more generally – presented the opportunity “to gather and collect from all sides what is good.”Footnote ²²⁶

The volume initially had a limited circulation, but for more than a century, it remained the only Ge’ez grammar available in Europe.Footnote ²²⁷ For this reason, it was reprinted in 1630 by the Propaganda Fide’s Tipografia Poliglotta (Figure 13), at the apex of early modern Catholic missionary activity in Ethiopia. Three quarters of a century after Vittori and Täsfa Ṣeyon produced a learning aid for Europeans seeking to understand Ethiopian texts, their work had mutated into a weaponized missionary grammar of an African language.

Figure 13 Title page, Mariano Vittori, Chaldeae, Seu Aethiopicae Linguae Institutiones (Rome: Congregationis de Propaganda Fide, 1630)

Antonio Lo Duca and Santa Maria degli Angeli e dei Martiri

Täsfa Ṣeyon’s assimilation within the Roman elite is epitomized by his relationship with his Latin teacher Antonio Lo Duca. Their meeting was fortuitous. In 1516, the latter worked at a small Byzantine-era church in Palermo, near the city cathedral.Footnote ²³⁹ One day, some community members noticed faint images on a wall near the altar, and when these were restored, they revealed a cycle of frescos dedicated to the seven archangels, accompanied by Latinized versions of their Greek names.Footnote ²⁴⁰ The church was renamed Chiesa dei Sette Angeli, and devotion to its namesakes exploded such that the city established an archangelic confraternity whose members included Charles V, the king of Sicily since 1516 and Holy Roman emperor after 1519.Footnote ²⁴¹ These developments induced Lo Duca to travel to Rome to research the “Seven Angelic Princes,” as he now termed them. In the mid-1520s, he obtained a post with Cardinal Antonio Ciocchi del Monte (1461–1533), uncle of the future Julius III, and he began work on a mass of the archangels, building upon Leo X’s 1518 bull establishing the Divine Office of the Guardian Angels.Footnote ²⁴² But the project stalled when Paul III rejected the mass, and in 1535, Lo Duca retreated to Palermo, resigned “to finish his life in the church of Santa Croce and never again return to Rome.”Footnote ²⁴³

Undaunted, Lo Duca was back in Rome by 1541, still bent on realizing his dream. One summer morning, he experienced a vision:

The light revealed that the Baths were “the temple of the seven spirit assistants before God,”Footnote ²⁴⁵ and Lo Duca now dedicated himself to the construction of a church in the Baths devoted to the seven archangels and seven Diocletian martyrs.Footnote ²⁴⁶ In December 1541, he unsuccessfully proposed the plan to Paul III as well as Margherita of Parma (1522–86), the daughter of Charles V and wife of Duke Ottavio Farnese (1524–86), the pontiff’s grandson, and the following year, he failed to win over Cardinal Alessandro Farnese, Ottavio’s brother. In 1543, he changed course and ventured to Venice, where he was inspired by “an ancient mosaic depicting the glorious Virgin Mary Mother of God between seven Angels.”Footnote ²⁴⁷ He printed the first edition of his new mass in the republic, entitled Septem principum angelorum orationes cum missae eorum antiquis imaginibus (Figure 16), featuring original woodcuts based on the Palermo frescoes.Footnote ²⁴⁸ It was subsequently reprinted in Rome and Naples.

Figure 16 Title page, Antonio Lo Duca, Septem principum angelorum orationes cum missae eorum antiquis imaginibus (Venice: 1543). Biblioteca centrale della Regione siciliana “Alberto Bombace.” Palermo.

Permission granted by the Dipartimento Beni Culturali e dell’Identità Siciliana

Back in Rome, Lo Duca now renewed his campaign for a church. Its turning point came in 1544–45, when he made a chance but consequential acquaintance. As he told a friend years later, he was hired by “a certain Pietro Indiano to whom he taught Latin for three years.”Footnote ²⁴⁹ As they worked together between 1545 and 1548, it emerged that Täsfa Ṣeyon could aid the Sicilian in his plans to transform the Diocletian Baths. Although Lo Duca was relatively well-introduced to the Roman curia, his student’s reach into its elite – and the preeminent Farnese clan – far exceeded his own. The two engaged this network.

In the later 1540s, Täsfa Ṣeyon took Lo Duca’s plan to Vittoria Farnese (1519–1602), the daughter of Girolama Orsini (1504–69) and Pier Luigi Farnese (1503–47), the Duke of Parma and illegitimate son of Paul III. As the Sicilian later explained: “This brother Peter, having easy access to Lady Vittoria … took the mass of the angels and the prayers with the images that Antonio had printed in Venice and brought them to Lady Vittoria so that she could lobby to build the church in said baths.”Footnote ²⁵⁰ The premise of this intervention was Täsfa Ṣeyon’s clan influence, a proximity memorialized in the Testamentum Novum’s dedication to Girolama: “our protector and aide in times of need.”Footnote ²⁵¹ Decades later, in 1575, her daughter Vittoria remembered Täsfa Ṣeyon while visiting the Baths with Matteo Catalani (1522–1614), Lo Duca’s friend. She recalled the relentless efforts on behalf of its church “by brother Pietro Indiano,” which had spurred her own overtures to the pope. Catalani related that on one occasion, Lo Duca even asked his Ethiopian pupil to sneak him in into Paul III’s summer residence, in the hopes of directly petitioning the pontiff.Footnote ²⁵² Nevertheless, Paul III judged the project too expensive.Footnote ²⁵³

Meanwhile, the mutual influence reciprocated. As Täsfa Ṣeyon lobbied for Lo Duca, his Testamentum Novum became intertwined with the latter’s Orationes cum missae through his creative repurposing of Lo Duca’s woodcuts.Footnote ²⁵⁴ In the Testamentum Novum, six of these woodcuts appeared before the Acts of the Apostles, reordered from Lo Duca’s sequence and recaptioned with Ge’ez titles featuring the Ethiopian names of the archangels, as distinct from their Latinized counterparts.Footnote ²⁵⁵ Separate from this group is a seventh woodcut (Figure 17) that appears after the Book of Revelation, alongside one of Täsfa Ṣeyon’s two commentaries on the parallels between ancient Israel and sixteenth-century Ethiopia, discussed in the previous section.Footnote ²⁵⁶ The significance of this analogy is deepened by its accompanying woodcut. The image depicts Abraham kneeling and serving cakes to three angelic visitors, who deliver the miraculous news that the elderly Sarah will bear a son, as described in Genesis 18.

Figure 17 Recaptioned image of the Annunciation of Isaac’s Birth, Petrus Ethyops [Täsfa Ṣeyon], Testamentum Novum cum Epistola Pauli ad Hebreos […]

(Rome: Valerius Doricus, 1548)

It is a resonant scene. On one level, its depiction of an inspired exile prostrate before God, humbled in the act of service, perhaps parallels the editorial self-imagination of Täsfa Ṣeyon, a similarly displaced pious servant who offered his nourishing gift of the printed word. But on another level, the scene also documents a pivotal historical event. In the Ethiopian Orthodox tradition, the three prophetic visitors are not archangels but the Holy Trinity of Abraham, or abrehamu śellasé. In this appearance, then, “the masters”Footnote ²⁵⁷ of the Trinity, as Täsfa Ṣeyon rechristened them in the Ge’ez caption to the woodcut, announced the birth of Isaac, the lineal progenitor of the Israelites. When seen in this aspect, the image can be understood as depicting the precise origin moment of the Solomonid dynasty. Read in tandem with the accompanying Ge’ez text, the woodcut thus affirms the lineage of Gälawdéwos – the living heir of Abraham, Sarah, and Isaac – and metaphorically suggests a similarly miraculous revival of their imperiled dynasty. Täsfa Ṣeyon specifically noted this link in the Latin preface to the Testamentum Novum, where he identified Abraham as the ancestor of the Solomonids.Footnote ²⁵⁸ These connections would have been clear to a learned Ethiopian reader, but were likely unknown to Lo Duca, who had commissioned the original woodcut.

The Sicilian also learned from his Ethiopian pupil. In 1555, he issued a new edition of his mass, but his envisioned church renovation was not supported by popes Marcello Cervini (1555) and Paul IV (1555–59). Pius IV (1559–65), however, proved receptive, and in 1561, he approved Lo Duca’s plan for the Baths. Despite this endorsement, the project still faced resistance. Unnamed members of the curia now objected on doctrinal grounds because “some of the names of the seven Angels were new and as such they could not be received.”Footnote ²⁵⁹ Specifically, four of Lo Duca’s archangels were mentioned only in Catholic apocrypha, and for this reason, the schema diverged from the Tridentine climate of rigid scripturalism. Put simply, the Byzantine origins of Lo Duca’s vision were disquieting.

To settle the matter, the pontiff asked the priest to defend the Seven Angelic Princes. In 1562, Lo Duca filed a memorandum that outlined his position. He explained that the seven archangels were identified in the Palermo frescos as well as the mosaic in Venice. While only the names of Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael appear in the Old Testament and Gospels, the other archangels are indirectly referenced in Revelations as well as the Book of Tobit, and for this reason were broadly supported by the Catholic canon. In an unexpected twist, Lo Duca then offered that the identities of the Seven Angels were well attested in the Ethiopian tradition. He invoked “the authority of a certain Abate Giorgio, considered a holy man in Ethiopia,” and explained that “[in a] book he wrote to worship the Most Blessed Virgin Mary, entitled Door of Light, it is said: ‘Veniant Angeli tui Principes de excelso,’ etc.”Footnote ²⁶⁰ The abbot in question is Saint Giyorgis of Sägla (ca. 1365–ca.1425),Footnote ²⁶¹ an eminent Ethiopian theologian and author of the influential Anqäṣä berhan, or Gate of Light, a collection of Ge’ez hymns to Mary that is chanted alongside the Psalms in the Ethiopian Orthodox liturgy, and which contains a passage very similar to the one cited by Lo Duca, though it does not name specific archangels.Footnote ²⁶² A codex containing the Anqäṣä berhan was at that time in the Santo Stefano library, and it was briefly excerpted in the 1513 Tomas-Potken Psalter.Footnote ²⁶³

After this unexpected gesture to Ethiopian church literature, Lo Duca continued his defense in kind. He next argued that his conception of the Seven Angels also rested on “the authority of a very ancient Chaldean [Ge’ez] book” owned by Yoḥannes of Cyprus, who was “the pope’s interpreter.”Footnote ²⁶⁴ According to Lo Duca, this second Ethiopian work contained a plea to God to “[s]end to us the seven holy archangels together with the swords with their fire which make all unclean spirits depart which surround our body.”Footnote ²⁶⁵ This referent text is less certain. A likely candidate is the Dersanä mika’él, a famous collection of twelve homilies honoring the archangel Mika’él that names the seven archangels of the Ethiopian tradition, and which was possibly among the Ge’ez “books of the church” in the Santo Stefano library.Footnote ²⁶⁶ Left unstated by Lo Duca, however, was the potentially compromising fact that the scriptural basis of the Dersanä mika’él and Anqäṣä berhan – and indeed Ethiopian angelology more broadly – was the Book of Enoch, a canonical work for the Ethiopian church that was considered apocryphal by Catholics.Footnote ²⁶⁷ Though the subject of extensive Ethiopian commentary, Enoch was at that time only known to Europeans through its quotation in other languages – a situation that led Postel to Santo Stefano decades before.Footnote ²⁶⁸

Lo Duca could only have understood Ethiopian angelology through Täsfa Ṣeyon and his companions. Given the limited European understanding of Ethiopian Orthodox doctrine and literature, there was no other possible source for a detailed introduction to its angelic esoterica, let alone appropriate translations from relevant Ge’ez texts. Although Lo Duca’s dedication to the Seven Angelic Princes predated his encounter with Täsfa Ṣeyon, it seems possible that his introduction to the broadly complimentary aspects of Ethiopian angelology would have deepened his conviction in the significance of his vision. His Byzantine orientation opened him to other Eastern Christian traditions, paralleling the intellectual impetus behind the era’s philologia sacra-based approach to investigating Orthodox texts. Considered from the other side of this exchange, perhaps Täsfa Ṣeyon aided Lo Duca in order to defend the authority of Ethiopian church literature via a Catholic proxy. After all, the Sicilian mystic raised the names of important Ethiopian texts at the highest levels of the curia.

Täsfa Ṣeyon’s role in the establishment of the Basilica of Santa Maria degli Angeli e dei Martiri was eventually commemorated in its visual adornments. After Lo Duca submitted his defence of the Seven Angels, Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475–1564) designed its plan, and construction began in 1562.Footnote ²⁶⁹ Both Michelangelo and Lo Duca died shortly thereafter, in 1564, but the work continued until the end of the century.Footnote ²⁷⁰ In a gesture to this history, the Basilica’s Catalani Chapel features a painting titled “Personaggi in Ginocchio,” attributed to Giulio Mazzoni (1525–1618) and dedicated to its founding personalities.Footnote ²⁷¹ In addition to Lo Duca, its subjects include Pius IV; Charles V; Cardinal Giovanni Antonio Serbelloni (1519–91), the church’s titular cardinal; Bishop Filippo Archinto, Rome’s Vicar General; brothers Antonio and Domenico Massimo, a Roman Conservator and the Capitano Generale della Chiesa, respectively; and Margherita d’Austria, together with Alessandro Farnese, Vittoria Farnese, and Girolama Farnese.Footnote ²⁷² Many of these were members of the Fratelli and Sorelle della Confraternita dei Sette Angeli di Roma, the new confraternity dedicated to Lo Duca’s archangels. Standing discreetly within the main group is a youthful Täsfa Ṣeyon, his eyes reverently looking down. His inclusion in this founders’ painting is a stunning visual confirmation of his standing among the sixteenth-century Roman elite.Footnote ²⁷³

Ignatius of Loyola and the Jesuit Mission to Ethiopia

As these events unfolded in Rome, another momentous group gathered in Paris. In 1534, Ignatius of Loyola and six companions founded the Society of Jesus, a new religious order whose members became known to the world as Jesuits. Three years later, in 1537, the Spanish priest arrived in Rome and pledged himself to Paul III, laying the foundation for the formal establishment of the preeminent Counter-Reformation instrument of global salvific Catholicism.Footnote ²⁷⁴ The pontiff approved the Society in 1540, as commemorated in a seventeenth-century painting in the Chiesa del Gesù, the Jesuit mother church in Rome (Figure 18).Footnote ²⁷⁵ The image depicts Ignatius and four companions kneeling before Paul III, as assorted curial personalities look on. It is a founding moment immortalized in countless paintings, but only the Gesù version includes Täsfa Ṣeyon.Footnote ²⁷⁶ He stands immediately behind Paul III, gesturing to Ignatius while whispering in the ear of Archinto, who is similarly at his side in the painting at Santa Maria degli Angeli e dei Martiri.Footnote ²⁷⁷ The only other figure in similar proximity to the pontiff is Alessandro Farnese, Paul III’s nephew. This inclusion attests to Täsfa Ṣeyon’s pivotal role in the establishment of the Jesuit mission to Ethiopia, itself a turning point in the history of the Solomonid kingdom and its relations with the wider world.Footnote ²⁷⁸

Figure 18 Anonymous, Pope Paul III hands Ignatius the Regimini Militantis Ecclesiae on 27 September 1540, Chiesa del Gesú, Rome

(photo by Zeno Colantoni)

Over the course of the 1540s, Ignatius planned the overseas enterprise of his new Society, seeking patrons and identifying fruitful mission regions. Rome was an ideal site for this strategic work, with its curial apparatus, foreign nationes, and flow of informed visitors. The city hosted the Society’s central offices, including the Superior General, a lifetime position of authority occupied by Ignatius until his death, as well as the Procurator General, the Society’s representative at the papal court. No less significant was Lisbon, the metropole of the sprawling global network of Portuguese colonies. In 1540, founding Jesuits Francis Xavier (1506–52) and Simão Rodrigues (1510–79) reached the city and laid the foundation for the Portuguese Province (1546), prefiguring the creation of provinces throughout the empire.Footnote ²⁷⁹ All these were coordinated by the Portuguese Assistancy, which encompassed the empire as well as the regions ascribed to Portugal by the treaties of Tordesillas (1494) and Saragossa (1529), through which the Iberian monarchies apportioned the world among themselves, with the blessing of the pontiff.

These evolving geopolitics of empire led the Jesuits to Ethiopia. One agent of this development was Rodrigues. The Portuguese provincial had known of the Solomonid kingdom since his time in Padua, where in the 1530s he had clashed with Góis, who he accused of heresy for corresponding with Martin Luther (1483–1546) and Philip Melancthone (1497–1560), who were themselves in dialogue with an Ethiopian deacon named Mika’él.Footnote ²⁸⁰ Góis had at that time already befriended Ṣägga Zä’ab and published his Legatio (1532). Now in Lisbon, Rodrigues continued to monitor Góis: he repeatedly denounced his nemesis to the Portuguese Inquisition, and in the process dissected his writings, which now included the Fides and its summary of Ṣägga Zä’ab’s heretical confession of faith. Given his position at court, Rodrigues was likely privy to the Bermudes controversy as well as the stern letter of Cardinal-Infante Afonso (1509–40), which urged Lebnä Dengel “to conform to the Holy Church and to obey, in all things, the Catholic faith and the Holy Apostolic faith.”Footnote ²⁸¹

All this complemented the interests of Francis Xavier. After establishing himself in the Portuguese court and winning the support of Martin Alfonso de Sousa (1500–64), the Viceroy of the Estado da India, the Spaniard departed for Goa in 1542.Footnote ²⁸² The so-called Rome of Asia underpinned the Portuguese Assistancy through its role as the capital of the Estado, in which capacity it was the staging ground for Portuguese intelligence and interventions throughout the Indian Ocean arena, including the developing proxy war with Adal and the Ottomans in the Horn.Footnote ²⁸³ Francis Xavier heard about the Solomonid kingdom from the city’s merchants and sizeable Ethiopian community,Footnote ²⁸⁴ and in 1544, he informed a companion that he wished to visit “the land of the Preste[r].”Footnote ²⁸⁵ This would appear to be the first Jesuit reference to Ethiopia. Given the Society’s positions in Rome, Lisbon, and Goa, the three cities upon which Ethiopian–European relations then hinged, as well as the context of the just-dispatched Portuguese garrisons in Ethiopia and the recent controversies involving Sägga Zä’ab, Góis, and Bermudes, it is no surprise that Francis Xavier’s vision of a mission to the highlands soon became a Jesuit priority.

This development was furthered by Ignatius’s interest in Ethiopia. Broadly, this awareness reflected the wider European intellectual preoccupation with Prester John, and possibly the Jesuit’s visits to cities with Ethiopian diaspora populations, including Jerusalem. More concretely, he had intervened in the dispute between Rodrigues and Góis, and was thus familiar with the latter’s Ethiopianist work.Footnote ²⁸⁶ The first certain glimpse of Ignatius’s awareness of Ethiopia appears in a 1546 letter from Salmeron, dispatched to the Jesuit leader from the deliberations at Trent.Footnote ²⁸⁷ In it, the Spaniard replied to his superior’s queries about the Bermudes controversy. João III had recently moved to appoint a Jesuit Patriarch of Ethiopia, and had even requested Paul III’s approval of French theologian Pierre Favre (1506–46) for this office – a scheme that collapsed with the death of the nominee.Footnote ²⁸⁸ To properly brief Ignatius on the current state of affairs, Salmeron queried Cervini, who had dealt with the Bermudes curial inquiry before leaving for Trent. In Salmeron’s reply to Ignatius, he outlined the events of Bermudes’s arrival in Rome, his request for confirmation as the Patriarch of Alexandria, and the critical evaluation of this story by Täsfa Ṣeyon. Salmeron further reported that after this episode Bermudes had returned to Ethiopia, where he falsely claimed that Paul III had confirmed him as patriarch after learning of his appointment as abun. Ethiopian pilgrims then brought news of this development to Jerusalem, which led the city’s perplexed Catholics to inquire about the situation to Rome.

This interregional exchange produced a potentially compromising interconfessional predicament. As Salmeron informed Ignatius:

In short, Bermudes might have been an impostor, but the curia was prepared to ignore this inconvenience in the name of ecumenical expediency, hoping to salvage the potential precedent of a Latin metropolitan appointed by Rome rather than Alexandria. But the politicking was pointless. Cervini, Ignatius, and Salmeron could not know that Bermudes had failed to convince upon his return to Ethiopia, where his claim to the office of abun was refused by Gälawdéwos. Meanwhile, the Patriarch of Alexandria dispatched abunä Yosab as the new Egyptian metropolitan of the Ethiopian church.Footnote ²⁹⁰

For Ignatius, the entire situation suggested that Ethiopia was ripe for mission. Seeking to learn more in the context of João III’s request for a Jesuit Patriarch, he contacted Täsfa Ṣeyon, who had just intervened in Bermudes affair. Santo Stefano was in fact only a short walk from the Chiesa del Gesù, and at some point after receiving Salmeron’s 1546 correspondence, Ignatius met its most famous resident. The ex-Jesuit Postel had just preceded him. The Spaniard described his conversations with the Ethiopian in a 1549 letter to a fellow Jesuit, there outlining his developing thoughts about “Prester John.” These reflected his consultation with “a friar named Piedro … [who] leads an honest life and tells many things about those lands … [and] is credited among cardinals and other prelates.”Footnote ²⁹¹ According to Ignatius, the two shared a broadly complimentary vision of Ethiopia’s future. He reported that upon learning of the death of the would-be patriarch Favre, Täsfa Ṣeyon

In other words, Täsfa Ṣeyon had already lobbied the pontiff to send a mission to Ethiopia prior to meeting the Jesuit founder. The proposed plan was revolutionary from an ecclesiastical perspective, in that it circumvented the authority of the Coptic See of Saint Mark in Alexandria. Yet it also gestured to precedent in its practicality: the five Catholic bishops, like the Egyptian bishops that typically accompanied the new Coptic metropolitan, could be imagined as similarly replenishing the ranks of the Ethiopian church hierarchy, then weakened by the Adal invasion and the 1530 death of abunä Marqos. The sponsor of this plan was Pier Luigi Farnese, the Duke of Parma whose wife Girolama or daughter Vittoria was likely the planned pontifical intercessor(s). Indeed, both were then already involved in the Testamentum Novum and Lo Duca campaign. But Pier Luigi’s 1547 assassination stalled Täsfa Ṣeyon’s missionary plans, leaving him without a patron and at the mercy of the skeptical Portuguese.

This setback produced a timely alliance. As Ignatius explained,

From this report, it would seem that a frustrated Täsfa Ṣeyon shared his Ezra-esque vision for regenerating Ethiopian Christianity with the Jesuit, who found the plan and its architect compelling. Ignatius judged the Ethiopian’s tenacity a virtue, given the Portuguese hostility: “Friar Piedro … will make all the possible proceedings in order to achieve his intent,” and “Balesar de Faria [the obstructionist Portuguese ambassador] will not have the strength to resist it,”Footnote ²⁹⁴ unless the Portuguese monarch could offer an alternative plan to the pontiff. This assessment suggests the tremendous political and curial clout of Täsfa Ṣeyon. In Ignatius’s estimation, the powerful Portuguese ambassador was no match for the Farnese’s Ethiopian mämher.

The Jesuit’s motivations parallel Täsfa Ṣeyon’s own activities in this same period. In 1548, Paul III addressed a papal brief to his “beloved son” Täsfa Ṣeyon, the first brief by any pope directed to an Ethiopian. The document confusingly acknowledged Täsfa Ṣeyon’s elevation as “abbot of the monastery of Mount Lebanon [Däbrä Libanos] and the entire … province of Shäwa” by the visiting Armenian Archbishop Martiros. The pontiff confirmed this surprising development as well as Täsfa Ṣeyon’s “apostolic authority,” additionally designating Santo Stefano “as habitation for you, the other Ethiopians and Armenians” (Figure 19).Footnote ²⁹⁵ One year later, the visiting Armenian Patriarch Stephanos V issued another attestation to Täsfa Ṣeyon, in which he thanked him for serving as his interpreter, and obliquely referred to the mämher’s appointment as archbishop of “the district of Malhzua … in the land with its own province and on his see of Faraka.”Footnote ²⁹⁶ The Armenian language references to Ge’ez and/or Amharic terms are confused, but the document appears to establish Täsfa Ṣeyon’s ecclesiastic authority over the “uprooted” Ethiopian and Armenian pilgrims in Rome, as suggested by the Ge’ez malḫazo, as well as their coreligionists in Africa, here indicated through an apparent corruption of the Amharic afriqa or possibly the Arabic ʼifrīqīya.

Figure 19 Paul III to Täsfa Ṣeyon, September 4, 1548, Rome, Dataria Apostolica, Min. Brev. Lat., AAV, 1548, n. 8152

As the fate of the Ethiopian mission hung in the balance, Täsfa Ṣeyon mobilized his proximity to Rome’s Armenian community to obtain interconfessional credentials that bolstered his chance of joining the inchoate Jesuit delegation, possibly as one of its bishops. It hardly seems a coincidence that during this same period Täsfa Ṣeyon edited, financed, and published the Testamentum Novum, addressed to his suffering religious brethren in “Mother Ethiopia.” As a mass printed text, it would have been a revolutionary salvific instrument, leaving aside the central and essential question of whether Ethiopia’s future spiritual revival would take an Orthodox or Catholic form. He even printed personalized versions for Paul III (Figure 12), Charles V, Henry II of France, and cardinals Cervini, Ciocchi Da Monte, Ranuccio Farnese (1530–65), Reginald Pole, Juan Alvarez de Toledo (1488–1557), and Nicolò Ridolfi (1501–50), likely in an effort to obtain more patrons for his plan.Footnote ²⁹⁷ In 1549, when Täsfa Ṣeyon exhorted the Vatican conclavists to elect Cardinal Francesco Sfrondati (1493–1550), he even “promis[ed] he [himself] would give obedience in the name of the Ethiopian Church.”Footnote ²⁹⁸ His sudden death cut short these bold designs.

Meanwhile, Ignatius went on to develop the strategic framework for the Jesuit mission to Ethiopia. Drawing upon his conversations with Täsfa Ṣeyon as well as Álvares’s just-published Ho Preste Ioam das Indias, the first detailed European account of Ethiopian Christianity, he issued a series of 1553–56 directives that reveal his sophisticated yet ultimately flawed understanding of Ethiopian religious dynamics. At bottom, Ignatius misjudged the close – albeit occasionally rocky – relationship between the Solomonid church and state, and fundamentally misread the receptiveness of the Ethiopian faithful to Catholic evangelism. These positions reflected Ignatius’s analysis of recent European contacts with Ethiopia, and more specifically, his conclusions from his own consultation with Täsfa Ṣeyon.

It is easy to imagine the mämher’s testimony informing the Spaniard’s focus on converting influential Ethiopian ecclesiastics and court advisors, who could aid the ultimate goal of converting a Solomonid monarch. If this top-down strategy characterized the general Jesuit approach to mission, in the Ethiopian setting it hinged upon the dynamics of an elite world that Täsfa Ṣeyon knew well, and which Ignatius barely understood. Whatever the mämher’s specific views, their dialogue provided evidence for the Spaniard’s preestablished position on Jesuit strategy. Equally plausible is the possibility that Täsfa Ṣeyon’s concern for the calamitous impact of the Adal invasion supported Ignatius’s claim that the struggle with “the Moors” would make Ethiopian Christians receptive to the messages of their foreign coreligionists. Both the Ethiopian and the Spaniard imagined an existential spiritual crisis. More certain than these speculative points is the fact that Täsfa Ṣeyon’s sophisticated ecumenism and Santo Stefano’s accommodating monastic culture jointly buttressed Ignatius’s position that the Ethiopian populace and clergy might welcome interconfessional overtures and Catholic conversion. This fundamental error conflated the diasporic particularity of the Jesuit’s Ethiopian contacts in Rome with the altogether different institutional religious politics in the Horn. Inherent in his position was the irresolvable contradiction of “evangelizing the evangelized.”Footnote ²⁹⁹ The Spaniard saw Ethiopian Christianity as a lost child of Rome rather than a bastion of the true faith, casting its resilient elaboration of Christianity as spiritual deficiency and ignorant superstition. Generations of later missionaries embraced this Eurocentric vision.

In 1555, the first Jesuits reached Ethiopia. It proved one of the Society’s earliest overseas missions, and among its most disastrous. From the Jesuits’ first visit to Gälawdéwos (1540–59) through their 1632 ejection from the court of Fasilädas (1632–67), the missionaries worked relentlessly yet ineffectively to Catholicize Ethiopia. As Ignatius’s flawed directives failed to yield progress, some Jesuits proposed more aggressive forms of mission. In 1556, one petitioned the Estado for a Jesuit military escort, and in 1563, another suggested that an envoy of Portuguese soldiers could aid the goal of driving away “the Turks” and “introducing the Catholic faith.”Footnote ³⁰⁰ In 1567, Patriarch Oviedo begged for a military expedition as “[the] great hope of bringing back these lands to the union with the Catholic faith and of converting the heathens.”Footnote ³⁰¹ Even when Emperor Susenyos (1607–32) converted to Catholicism in 1621, it did not trigger the mass Catholicization Ignatius envisioned, but instead provoked a period of interconfessional violence that only ceased when the emperor abdicated in favor of his Orthodox son Fasilädas. The latter’s subsequent expulsion of the Jesuits proved a major embarrassment for the Catholic Church. This failure reflected the founder’s gross misinterpretation of Ethiopian Christianity, even if the calls for militarized mission deviated from Ignatius’s original strategy. It was the first of Täsfa Ṣeyon’s many unexpected legacies.

Orientalist Translations

Täsfa Ṣeyon entered the modern academy via two Germans. The first was Hiob Ludolf (1624–1704), a linguist and historian widely considered among the founders of the academic field of Ethiopian studies (Figure 21). Trained in Erfurt and Leiden, Ludolf was an admirer of Eastern Christianity and accomplished student of Semitic languages, including Ge’ez, Syriac, and Arabic.Footnote ³⁰⁷ His Ethiopia-focused research developed from a diplomatic mission to Rome, where he began an extended collaboration with abba Gorgoryos (nd–1658), a Catholic ex-advisor of Emperor Susenyos who arrived at Santo Stefano after the Jesuit expulsion from Ethiopia (Figure 22). Their partnership yielded several major publications, including a monumental two-part history of Ethiopia as well as a series of groundbreaking Ge’ez and Amharic dictionaries and grammars.Footnote ³⁰⁸

Figure 21 Hiob Ludolf in Hiob Ludolf, Iobi Ludolfi Ad Suam Historiam Aethiopicam Antehac Editam Commentarius (Frankfurt am Main: Zunner, 1691)

(photo by the author)

Täsfa Ṣeyon hides in the margins of this oeuvre.Footnote ³⁰⁹ Ludolf began his Ge’ez study with the extant Ethiopianist library, including the works of Täsfa Ṣeyon and his students, and his self-taught language skills impressed abba Gorgoryos during their first encounter at Santo Stefano, where Ludolf passed a Ge’ez test before the residents. The examination included scripture translation, which tempts one to imagine queries based on the Testamentum Novum.Footnote ³¹⁰ More certain, however, is that Täsfa Ṣeyon’s publications shaped Ludolf’s ensuing scholarship, paralleling the influence of Gorgoryos’s instruction. This connection began with Ludolf’s Lexicon Aethiopico-Latinum (1661), a Ge’ez–Latin dictionary that features illustrative usages throughout via Gospel citations, effective references to the editio princeps. These transformed Täsfa Ṣeyon’s salvific text into a linguistic exemplar.Footnote ³¹¹

Figure 22 abba Gorgoryos (nd–1658) in Hiob Ludolf, Iobi Ludolfi Ad Suam Historiam Aethiopicam Antehac Editam Commentarius (Frankfurt am Main: Zunner, 1691)

(photo by the author)

The mämher reappears in Ludolf’s Historia Aethiopica (1681), a wide-ranging study with a chapter on Ge’ez literature. In it, Ludolf surveyed the Ethiopian Bible, and he began his treatment of the New Testament with a discussion of Täsfa Ṣeyon, a review of the distinctions between the Testamentum Novum and the conventional Ethiopian order of the scriptures, and Latin translations of several of Täsfa Ṣeyon’s Ge’ez commentaries.Footnote ³¹² The first major European study of the Ethiopian scriptures, a topic that had preoccupied Latin orientalists since the sixteenth century, now rested upon Täsfa Ṣeyon’s edition. Ludolf’s Lexicon and Historia remained standard references for the next two centuries, notably underpinning the Ethiopia-related writing of Samuel Johnson (1709–84), Edward Gibbon (1737–94), and Denis Diderot (1713–84).Footnote ³¹³ In 1800, the renowned French linguist Antoine Isaac Silvestre de Sacy (1758–1838), widely considered the progenitor of philological and language-focused disciplinary orientalism, used Ludolf’s Ge’ez works to issue the first published translation of Enoch (Figure 23).Footnote ³¹⁴

Figure 23 Silvestre de Sacy (1758–1838)

(public domain)

Ludolf’s religious politics were complex. In the Historia, he informed readers that he wrote to serve the “Christian and literary republic” as well as “the ancient nation of the Abyssinians,” whose conflict with the Portuguese Jesuits had produced suspicion of all Western Christians. He further lamented that the Catholic–Protestant schism had hampered Western relations with the Eastern Christians, to say nothing of the broader struggle against the “idolatrous heathens” that surrounded them in the Muslim world.Footnote ³¹⁵ This ecumenism, however, had limits. Ludolf elsewhere castigated his erstwhile assistant Johann Michael Wansleben (1635–79) when the latter converted to Catholicism and disputed his mentor’s claims about the similarities of Protestant and Ethiopian Christianity,Footnote ³¹⁶ and he would have surely rejected Täsfa Ṣeyon’s careful elision of the differences between Ethiopian Orthodox and Catholic doctrine.Footnote ³¹⁷ These confessional politics paralleled Ludolf’s textual critique of Täsfa Ṣeyon’s magnum opus, delivered via Gorgoryos’s unflattering remarks about the printing errors in the Testamentum Novum.Footnote ³¹⁸

Two centuries later, Täsfa Ṣeyon was further integrated into the sinews of the orientalist academy by August Dillmann (1823–94) (Figure 24). A theologian, linguist, and philologist trained by Heinrich Fleischer (1801–88), himself a student of de Sacy, Dillmann was a prolific Ethiopian Bible scholar who is today considered a founder of Ge’ez philology.Footnote ³¹⁹ This reputation principally derives from his Old Testament editions and translations – including Enoch – as well as his Ge’ez–Latin Lexicon linguae aethiopicae (1865), which replaced Ludolf’s dictionary as the standard reference of its kind. In its introduction, Dillmann informed readers that the scriptures were peerless for the study of Ge’ez,Footnote ³²⁰ and then explained that with respect to the New Testament, he had reluctantly used Täsfa Ṣeyon’s error-strewn editio princeps instead of an alternative base manuscript or the 1826 printed Ge’ez Gospels.Footnote ³²¹ This decision intertwined his Lexicon with the Testamentum Novum through extensive scriptural citations and comparisons with their Greek, Latin, Hebrew, and Syriac counterparts. Täsfa Ṣeyon’s text thereby entered the analytic apparatus of Semitic studies.

Figure 24 August Dillmann (1823–1894)

(public domain)

The intellectual gulf between Ludolf and Dillmann reflects the emerging contours of modern academic orientalism, and especially its German variant. With respect to Ethiopianist scholarship, Dillmann brokered a shift away from the early modern traditions of philologia sacra and world history continued by Ludolf, and toward a self-consciously positivist philologia orientalis predicated on lexicography, grammar, and comparative linguistics. If this new language-focused field derived much from the post-Enlightenment model of textual systematization exemplified by de Sacy, it also remained concerned with deepening Christian understanding. Its cultural politics, however, were new. Like many of his contemporaries, Dillmann advanced the project of intellectualizing non-Western racial inferiority.Footnote ³²² In the Ethiopian context, Ge’ez literature became at once an object of scientific inquiry, an avenue to Christian truth, and an index of African deficiency. This historicist congeries explains how Dillmann could defend the Semitic richness of ancient Ge’ez and its early speakers while castigating Ethiopian apocrypha as “fictitious,” Ethiopian scholars as prone to “hallucinations and conjectures,” their faith as “degenerated,” and their society as mired in “barbarism and darkness.”Footnote ³²³ He judged the liqawent incapable of understanding their own linguistic heritage, exemplifying the confidence of mid-nineteenth-century German orientalists that the scientific quality of their analysis made them supreme arbiters of non-Western truth.Footnote ³²⁴ In the process, the study of Ethiopia itself – as distinct from its languages and texts – receded as a worthy intellectual concern, becoming reduced instead to a bounded domain of world literature.Footnote ³²⁵ These epistemic politics underpin Dillmann’s critiques of Täsfa Ṣeyon’s editorial deficiency, suggesting an antagonistic vision of the relationship between academic orientalism and culturally situated traditionalist scholarship. In this, the German personified the “tyranny of philology.”Footnote ³²⁶

Imagining Diaspora

This orientalist canonization anticipated Täsfa Ṣeyon’s rediscovery by Ethiopian intellectuals. In 1924, Crown Prince Täfäri Mäkonnen (1892–1975) – the future Emperor Ḫaylä Śellasé – embarked on a momentous European tour. As the first overseas mission of a de facto sovereign, the tour was a milestone in Ethiopian statecraft: it instantiated a new foreign policy predicated on sustained diplomatic engagement and economic partnership with Europe, building upon Ethiopia’s 1923 admission to the League of Nations.Footnote ³²⁷ That April, Täfäri Mäkonnen and a retinue of Ethiopian notables departed from Djibouti for British Mandate Palestine, where they toured the sites of the Holy Land, visited the Ethiopian monastery in Jerusalem, and celebrated Easter with its rayes and resident monks.Footnote ³²⁸ They then proceeded to Europe, where they visited its capitals to press acclaim. In June, they reached Rome for direct talks with fascist Prime Minister Benito Mussolini (1883–1945).Footnote ³²⁹ It would prove the only face-to-face meeting between the two leaders.

The visit produced an extraordinary historical recuperation. After a series of ominous military demonstrations, a diplomatic summit at the Palazzo Chigi, and an awkward tour of the Museo Coloniale, the Ethiopian delegation visited the Vatican for an audience with Pope Pius XI (1857–1939). In the retelling of Ḫeruy Wäldä Śellasé, the civil servant and budding writer who chronicled the tour, the travelers now wearied of their sightseeing, and stopped to rest in a quiet area behind Saint Peter’s Basilica.Footnote ³³⁰ They discovered that their refuge was adjacent to Santo Stefano, now rechristened the Pontifical Ethiopian College but still known to Ethiopians – and now Eritreans – as Däbrä Qeddus Esṭifanos. Ḫeruy briefly related the history of this unusual däbr to his Amharic readers, and then explained that when Täfäri Mäkonnen and his companions entered Santo Stefano, they were greeted by its current Ethiopian and Eritrean residents. In the world of the text, a supposedly chance discovery produced a moment of profound metahistorical significance. The Crown Prince had followed the path blazed by centuries of intrepid Ethiopian pilgrims (Figure 25).

Figure 25 Crown Prince Täfäri Mäkonnen visits the Vatican in 1924, L’Illustrazione italiana, 29 June 1924

(photo by the author)

According to Ḫeruy, the delegation’s diasporic hosts received them with a celebration recalling a religious feast. In its erudite and multilingual culture of praise, the meeting at Santo Stefano resembled a liqawent conclave in the heart of fascist Italy. As the visitors watched, the residents delivered a series of speeches and praise poems affirming the greatness of Täfäri Mäkonnen, the divine election of the Solomonid dynasty, and the ties of faith that linked the assembly to distant Ethiopia and the wider Christian ecumene (Figure 26). For an instant, the reader glimpses the intellectual world of the däbr as it might be represented in a vernacular chronicle. According to Ḫeruy, the Crown Prince was moved by “these children of Ethiopia overcome with love for their country,” and when the reception concluded, the delegation toured the historic building. Ḫeruy showed particular interest in its sepulcher, whose Ge’ez epitaphs he copied, translated into Amharic, and published in his printed account of the European tour, fittingly titled Dästanna kebber, or Happiness and Honour (1924). Among them was the epitaph of Täsfa Ṣeyon.Footnote ³³¹

Figure 26 Crown Prince Täfäri Mäkonnen visits Santo Stefano in 1924, Ḫeruy Wäldä Śellasé, ደስታና ክበር የኢትዮጵያ መንግሥት አልጋ ወራሽና እንደራሴ ልዑል ተፈሪ መኮንን ወደ አውሮፓ ሲሄዱና ሲመለሱ የመንገዳቻው አኳኋን (አዲስ አበባ፣ ተፈሪ መኮንን ማተሚያ ቤት፣ 1916 ዓም)

Ḫeruy concluded his account of Santo Stefano by reflecting on the achievements of these early modern pilgrims, the devotion of the current residents, and the historical significance of an Ethiopian space at the heart of global Catholicism. “To find Ethiopian monasteries in Jerusalem and Rome is a great point of pride for all the children of Ethiopia,” he remarked, “and this explains why Ethiopian Christianity has endured since many earlier times.”Footnote ³³² The accommodating Vatican däbr at the holy places in Rome seemed an epitome of Ethiopia’s transcendent history, much as Pope Francis would suggest a century later. Nearly 500 years after Täsfa Ṣeyon’s exile, Ḫeruy textually repatriated him through the print medium they both celebrated, transforming the mämher into a paragon of the Ethiopian diaspora and ecumene. This was the first notice of Täsfa Ṣeyon in Ethiopian literature.

One year later, this Amharic travelogue had a curious sequel. It was penned by André Jarosseau (1858–1941), a French Capuchin missionary who was the childhood tutor of Täfäri Mäkonnen.Footnote ³³³ In 1925, the Tipografia Vaticana issued his bilingual Ac̣her yäbétä krestiyan katolikawit tarik, or Short History of the Catholic Church, distinctive for its unusual facing pages of Amharic and Oromo text.Footnote ³³⁴ Intended for Ethiopia’s growing network of Catholic mission schools, Jarosseau began his survey with ancient Israel before addressing the arrival of Christianity in Ethiopia, the development of the Solomonid monarchy, the sixteenth-century Adal-Ottoman conflict, and the concurrent development of European–Ethiopian relations – from the diplomacy of Paul III to the first Catholic patriarchs of Ethiopia. After attending to the modern era, he concluded with a discussion of “the ancient Ethiopian monastery in the city of Rome.” It is a uniquely synchronic and monolingual chapter, written only in Amharic. Echoing Ḫeruy, Jarosseau cast Santo Stefano as an implicit synthesis of Ethiopia’s role in the encompassing universal history he had just outlined. He informed readers that the graves of Ethiopian priests and monks could be found “within an ancient church” inside the Vatican, and listed the names of Täsfa Ṣeyon and the other pilgrims buried in its sepulcher. He then described Santo Stefano’s foundation and transformation into the Pontifical Ethiopian College, adding that its residents had joyously welcomed the Crown Prince on a recent visit to Rome. He concluded with another Ḫeruy-esque reflection on “Jerusalem the Holy City of David” and “Rome the Great City of Caesar,” which Jarosseau judged the most enduring of God’s ancient creations.Footnote ³³⁵ In a glimpse of his imagined locus of African Catholicism, he paired this discussion of Santo Stefano with a photo of Pius XI – the only image in the entire work. Stripped of their once-distinctive täwaḥedo Orthodox identity, Täsfa Ṣeyon and the Ethiopian däbr of Rome were here subsumed within the official history of the Catholic Church.

Colonizing Santo Stefano

As this development suggests, Santo Stefano was by this time a potent signifier in the Italian colonial imaginary, which flourished after the kingdom’s formal subjugation of present-day Eritrea (1882), Somalia (1905), and Libya (1911). A key exponent of this connection was Carlo Conti Rossini (1872–1949), among the most distinguished Italian orientalists of the era.Footnote ³³⁶ Trained by Ignazio Guidi (1844–1935), a specialist in Eastern Christian philology and founder of Italian Semitic studies, Conti Rossini served in the liberal-era Eritrean and Libyan colonial administrations before assuming a position at the University of Rome, additionally teaching at the fascist-era Ministry of the Colonies.Footnote ³³⁷ By the 1930s, he had issued more than one hundred publications, encompassing Ethiopian history, linguistics, philology, folklore, and bibliography, and he additionally wrote nonspecialist works that purported to situate colonial affairs in their world-historical context.Footnote ³³⁸ His stature as a public intellectual and regime orientalist was such that his academic studies were acclaimed in the popular press.

If Dillmann asserted the linguistic synecdoche of Ethiopianist orientalism, Conti Rossini adapted this epistemic framework to historiography. He understood this pursuit as the application of Semiticist philological tools to Rankean source criticism, then the dominant methodology within the international historical discipline. This hybrid approach suffuses his Storia d’Etiopia (1928), a study of Ethiopian antiquity that secured his reputation as the preeminent Italian specialist of his generation.Footnote ³³⁹ In its introduction, he positioned himself as Dillmann’s successor, and then surveyed the development of European Ethiopianist scholarship, which in his view began in sixteenth-century Italy. The Venetian presence in the Levant brought Ethiopian pilgrims to Rome, which in turn provoked a Vatican curiosity about Ethiopian Christianity, culminating in the establishment of Santo Stefano – “a modest seedbed of Ethiopian studies in Europe.”

For Conti Rossini, this fecundity was exemplified by Täsfa Ṣeyon. He judged the latter an “active and educated” figure who exceeded the station of his diasporic kin to acquire “a certain fame” among the Roman elite, enhanced by his adoption of “the perhaps unauthorized title of secretary of King Gälawdéwos.” Täsfa Ṣeyon, he opined, was “struck by the superiority of European civilization,” which inspired his embrace of print to restore devastated Ethiopia. These sentiments inspired the Testamentum Novum, and additionally led him to instruct his Italian students Gualtieri and Vittori. Conti Rossini judged the last a double pioneer. If his 1552 Ge’ez grammar “prepared the path for future researchers,” it was also for Conti Rossini the first instance of Ethiopian historiography, since it presented a chronology of Ethiopian rulers. For this reason, he concluded, the writing of Ethiopian history was “born in Italy,” and not Ethiopia.Footnote ³⁴⁰

Modern developments followed suit. In Conti Rossini’s estimation, the nineteenth-century European exploration of Africa and concurrent development of Egyptology, Assyriology, and Indology fueled European interest in the scientific study of Ethiopian literature. Dillmann personified this conjuncture, and he and his successors advanced the European understanding of Ethiopia by establishing the Semitic studies subfield that included Conti Rossini’s teacher Guidi. Fittingly, the latter had learned Ge’ez from the works of Ludolf and Dillmann, and Amharic from däbtära Keflä Giyorgis (1825–1908), an erudite fin-de-siècle resident of Santo Stefano who collaborated with Guidi on several major works.Footnote ³⁴¹ Through this latter connection, Conti Rossini affirmed, Santo Stefano had “once again come to the service of science.”Footnote ³⁴² The encompassing intellectual genealogy of his teacher thus framed his own study as the culmination of a distinctive Italian orientalist lineage originating at Santo Stefano. Reviews of his book even mentioned this connection, highlighting Täsfa Ṣeyon’s contribution to the Italian nationalist project of knowing and subjugating Ethiopia.Footnote ³⁴³

These arguments were soon weaponized. In 1934, Ethiopian and Italian troops clashed at a remote outpost on the Somali frontier, triggering a ten-month international crisis. As the world followed the diplomatic drama at the League, Italian specialists rallied themselves to the intellectual task of undermining Ethiopian sovereignty, offering academic studies of Ethiopian backwardness and failed statehood, on the one hand, and the historic longevity and beneficence of Italian involvement in the Horn, on the other. If the first position was exemplified by Conti Rossini, the second was typified by the Roman archivist, historian, and journalist Renato Lefevre (1909–2004), who reconstructed Italy’s late medieval contacts with the Horn and the corresponding early modern European imagination of Ethiopia.Footnote ³⁴⁴ This historiographic legitimation of the colonial project ascribed a new significance to Santo Stefano.

The most prominent commentary on this theme came from Mario Pigli, a fascist journalist and party official who was in the 1930s the chief editor of L’Azione coloniale, the official propaganda weekly of the Istituto Coloniale Fascista.Footnote ³⁴⁵ His La civiltà italiana e l’Etiopia (1935), published under the bizarre pseudonym “Gihâd” (“Jihad”), popularized Italian academic research on Mediterraneanism and premodern Italo-Ethiopian contacts, suggesting that Italy was an eternal protector of Ethiopia. A key development in this history was the emergence of the Ethiopian community at Santo Stefano, which Pigli erratically surveyed in a chapter entitled “Italy Makes a Home for Her African Children.” Among its protagonists was Täsfa Ṣeyon, now a paragon of “Roman generosity.” Stripping the mämher from his historical context, Pigli reimagined him as a proof of perennial Italo-Ethiopian fraternity, personifying Italy’s commitment to its long-frustrated civilizing mission in Ethiopia, now poised to resume via the imminent colonial invasion.Footnote ³⁴⁶ The international English language editions of Pigli’s book were among the most widely read works of Italian propaganda during the Italo-Ethiopian crisis. Through them, Täsfa Ṣeyon was now cast in the international drama of empire.

Imperial Refuge

On October 3, 1935, Emilio De Bono (1866–1944) ordered his troops across the Ethiopian frontier. The following May, Mussolini announced the establishment of the new colony of Africa Orientale Italiana, comprised of Eritrea, Somalia, and the now-subjugated Ethiopia. But the imagined eternal fascist empire proved fleeting. Over the next five years, the colony remained in a constant state of insurrection and counterinsurgency, even as the colonial administration attempted to co-opt the Ethiopian elite and engineer a cohort of African colonial functionaries. A cultural ancillary of these developments was the transformation of Santo Stefano into a symbol of the Italo-Ethiopian colonial relationship, fruitful “native” collaboration, and African sanctuary.

Glimpses of this shift appear in the writing of Ethiopian detainees and exiles. In 1937, the regime extended its system of extrajudicial remote confinement to its African colonial subjects, under the direction of the Ministry of Italian Africa. The latter’s coordinating Office of Political Affairs was then led by the orientalist and colonial official Enrico Cerulli (1898–1988), who selected Tivoli as the carceral site for Ethiopian detainees he deemed susceptible to political cooptation.Footnote ³⁴⁷ The symbolism is striking, in that Tivoli was the final home of Täsfa Ṣeyon, now an avatar of Italo-Ethiopian harmony. If Cerulli appreciated this history,Footnote ³⁴⁸ it was also grasped by some of the detainees. Among them was a Catholic civil servant named Berhanä Marqos Wäldä Ṣadiq (1892–1943), who spent months in Tivoli negotiating his freedom with Cerulli.Footnote ³⁴⁹ Recalling this difficult time, his family remembers that Berhanä Marqos reflected on his childhood reading of Jarosseau’s Amharic history of Catholicism and the parallels between his displacement and the exiled Täsfa Ṣeyon.Footnote ³⁵⁰ The image of the uprooted mämher comforted Berhanä Marqos amid the dislocation, material hardship, and routinized violence of colonial rule. The Roman däbr was once again a diasporic refuge.

Other detainees sought to mobilize this history. During this same period, Santo Stefano was invoked by Ethiopian prisoners at Asinara, a desolate island north of Sardinia that had become the largest African penal colony in the Italian metropole. Between 1937 and 1940, it maintained hundreds of Ethiopian and Eritrean detainees whom Cerulli had identified as neither useful nor dangerous. They were stranded, and with little to offer the regime in a bargain of collaboration, they could only petition for freedom. In 1937, a civil servant named Asfaw Andargé wrote Cerulli, introducing himself as a devoted Catholic and wrongfully detained supporter of Italy. He requested relocation to the Pontifical Ethiopian College, where he would be able to continue his “spiritual studies” and learn “a bit of Italian,” so as to better serve the regime.Footnote ³⁵¹ Around this same time, a group of Orthodox ecclesiastics also dispatched a letter from Asinara to Minister of the Colonies Alessandro Lessona (1891–1991), Cerulli’s superior and Mussolini’s immediate subordinate (Figure 27). They introduced themselves as loyal servants of the church who had pacified the Ethiopian faithful after the Italian invasion. One of them, liqä liqawent Gäbrä’ab Mängestu, had in fact shocked Addis Ababa residents by publicly blessing the colonial state.Footnote ³⁵² Given these politics, the group requested permission to visit “the tombs of Saint Peter and Saint Paul, the leaders of the apostles who founded our church.”Footnote ³⁵³ Several years later, the spirit of these requests was honored by abba P̣éṭros Haylu, the erudite prefect of the Pontifical Ethiopian College, who used his office to advocate on behalf of an Eritrean arrested in Bologna (Figure 28).Footnote ³⁵⁴ Meanwhile, seminarian and College alumnus abba Gäbräyäsus Ḫaylu (1906–93) secretly penned a Tigrinya novel about the debasing brutality of Italian colonial rule.Footnote ³⁵⁵ These acts suggest the Ethiopian detainees were right to seek refuge at Santo Stefano. It also explains the regime’s surveillance of the College as a metropolitan space uniquely reserved for African colonial subjects.Footnote ³⁵⁶

Figure 27 Letter to the Minister of Italian Africa from Ethiopians detained at Asinara, ASMAI AP cart. 83/245

(photo by the author)

Figure 28 Telegram from the Ministry of the Colonies to the Ministry of the Interior, 1945, ASMAI pos. 181/54

(photo by the author)

Meanwhile, Ḫaylä Śellasé was exiled in Bath. He spent his days lobbying the League and coordinating the resistance in Ethiopia, and at night, he wrote his memoirs with Ḫeruy Wäldä Śellasé, now his Foreign Minister and closest advisor. Ḫeruy had become the most prominent Ethiopian diplomat and intellectual of his generation, and his years of travel, government experience, and personal service to the emperor ideally qualified him for the task of official biography. Reminiscing in Bath about their 1924 tour of Europe, Ḫeruy observed that if the Italians of the present were to remember the visit, they would be shocked by the warm reception the Ethiopians had once received from the Roman masses.Footnote ³⁵⁷ Täsfa Ṣeyon and Santo Stefano, however, were now fraught topics, and Ḫeruy minimized the role of the Italian däbr in the memoirs. With respect to the 1924 tour, his new narrative focused on the official Italian reception and duplicitous treaty negotiations at the Palazzo Chigi, while the delegation’s reception at Santo Stefano, which consumes half of the Italian chapter in Ḫeruy’s 1924 travelogue, was curtailed to two short paragraphs in the wartime memoirs.Footnote ³⁵⁸ Täsfa Ṣeyon’s name was also excised from the text. The hardship of exile and unfolding colonial violence in Ethiopia had diminished the metahistorical significance Ḫeruy once ascribed to the mämher and his diasporic kin. This violence had been specifically directed at Däbrä Libanos, Täsfa Ṣeyon’s alma mater. The 1937 mass killing at the monastery is today remembered as among the most horrific Italian crimes of the colonial era.

Renaissance Past, Postcolonial Future

By 1941, Africa Orientale Italiana had collapsed. Amid the drama of decolonization and the postwar settlement, some Italian and Ethiopian intellectuals used the legacy of Santo Stefano to reimagine the future of European–African relations and the reconciliation of colonizer and colonized. Paradoxically, this metaphor was forcefully espoused by Cerulli, now an ex-colonial official and accused war criminal.Footnote ³⁵⁹ In the 1950s, he repeatedly suggested that Ethiopians and Italians should look to the “secular” sixteenth-century model of Santo Stefano to transcend the warped mentalities of colonialism, as these were then being theorized by philosophers like Léopold Sédar Senghor (1906–2001) and Albert Memmi (1920–2020).Footnote ³⁶⁰ Other Italian intellectuals offered similar platitudes to the Pan-African activists gathered at the 1959 Congress of Negro Writers and Artists in Rome.Footnote ³⁶¹ These interventions jointly suggested that the postcolonial future should revive an ostensibly apolitical precolonial past, now caricatured through the extra-imperial heuristic of Renaissance Mediterraneanism. This liberal humanist appeal effaced the recent trauma of colonial rule and elided the active question of postcolonial justice, complementing similarly exonerative tendencies in Cerulli’s own scholarship.

Meanwhile, Ethiopian and Eritrean intellectuals began to link Santo Stefano to Ethiopia’s stormy relationship with the wider world. Some Eritrean Catholics, for example, viewed Täsfa Ṣeyon as a progenitor of African Catholicism, most notably Täklä Maryam Sämharay Sälim (1871–1942), who used Täsfa Ṣeyon’s works to defend the Catholic Ge’ez liturgy.Footnote ³⁶² Other intellectuals reimagined Santo Stefano in the context of the prevailing historical narrative of an enduring “Greater Ethiopia.” In the mid-1960s, the historian Täklä Ṣadeq Mäkwuriya (1913–2000) discussed the monastery in his account of the reign of Gälawdéwos, which he understood within the conjuncture of the Ottoman–Portuguese imperial contest and the Catholic missionary enterprise in Ethiopia.Footnote ³⁶³ Some years later, on the eve of the 1974 revolution, historian Alämé Eshäté (nd–2011) began his study of Ethiopian diasporic history with Täsfa Ṣeyon, who he suggested inaugurated an outward-looking educational quest that stretched from the early modern era through the student movements of the 1960s.Footnote ³⁶⁴ If the orientalists had reduced Täsfa Ṣeyon to an instrument of exogenous linguistic understanding or an exemplar of ennobling European tutelage, these Ethiopian and Eritrean intellectuals instead joined Ḫeruy in imagining the mämher as a synecdoche of Ethiopia’s encounter with the West.

For the contemporary Catholic Church, meanwhile, Täsfa Ṣeyon came to exemplify the transformative globalizing ethos of Vatican II and the vibrant history of African Catholicism. If these concerns underpinned Pope Francis’s 2020 speech at the Pontifical Ethiopian College, they were perhaps first espoused by abba Samuel Asghedom (1915–nd), an alumnus of the Eritrean mission schools and Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome. After a distinguished career as an ecclesiastic, writer, and journalist, he became rector of the Pontifical Ethiopian College amid the intellectual foment of Vatican II, its debates about internationalizing the Church, and the 1960 elevation of the first African cardinal, Laurean Rugambwa (1912–97) of Tanzania.Footnote ³⁶⁵ In 1972, he attended the Fourth International Conference of Ethiopian Studies, convened in Rome by Cerulli, where he boldly argued that Täsfa Ṣeyon and his Italian collaborators offered a model of dialogic intercultural scholarship that could instruct contemporary academics. This point, in his view, was exemplified by the Testamentum Novum: if the text was “a revelation for the world of the [European] savants,” it was also true that its crisp fidäl and portable material form were “more suited to the needs of the Ethiopian pilgrims than the culture of [European] researchers.”Footnote ³⁶⁶ Its worldliness and multiple readerships was the point. Moreover, abba Samuel added that Täsfa Ṣeyon’s student Gualtieri always honored his teacher in his own publications, a mutual respect maintained by their modern successors Käflä Giyorgis and Guidi, the latter being “the last disciple” of the däbr. Read closely, abba Samuel’s words suggest that the epistemic antagonism between academic philology and situated traditionalist knowledge posited by orientalists like Dillmann was intellectually impoverishing, better abandoned for the dynamic of equitable intellectual partnership represented by the Santo Stefano tradition of knowledge production. If the spirit of this position was not especially evident in the specialist academic field, it was preserved in the pages of the College’s multilingual and interdisciplinary publication Däbrä q[eddus] esṭifanos, which regularly featured articles on Täsfa Ṣeyon, Ethiopian Christianity, and the history of Catholic-Eastern Christian dialogue (Figure 29). Cerulli was among its benefactors.Footnote ³⁶⁷ It is a telling connection. In a world marked by division and the scars of the past, including those inflicted or condoned by the colonial state, the institutional church, and the modern academy, the realized accoglienza of Santo Stefano suggested a path toward authentic reconciliation and intellectual cosmopolitanism.

Figure 29 Cover, ደብረ ቅ[ዱስ] እስጢፋኖስ 7, no. 13 (1967)

(photo by the author)