A popular story in the historiography on medieval Ethiopia relates how, in the year 1306, an “Ethiopian” embassy visited the court of Pope Clement V.Footnote 1 Most scholarship follows a narration by historian Raleigh A. Skelton,Footnote 2 published in 1958, who set the stage for this event as follows:
Not many years after the commercial treaty concluded between Genoa and Egypt in 1290, the Genoese were to see Ethiopian visitors in their city. In 1306 the thirty members of an Abyssinian embassy, returning homeward from Avignon and Rome, were forced to wait at Genoa for a favourable wind. There they were questioned, and from their replies the rector of the church of St Mark, i.e. the cartographer Giovanni da Carignano, compiled a treatise on the government, customs, and religious observances of Ethiopia.Footnote 3
Skelton's oft-cited account on the events of 1306 leaves little doubt that there was an Ethiopian – or, as he specifies, Abyssinian – delegation roaming Latin Christian realms at the beginning of the fourteenth century. A close look at Skelton's source and its transmission history, however, shows that things are far from being straightforward: by Skelton's own admission the original source, an early-fourteenth-century treatise attributed to Giovanni da Carignano, has not come down to us. Indeed, it is impossible to say if it ever existed; only parts of this treatise are believed to have survived in a late fifteenth-century universal history compiled by Jacopo Filippo Foresti.Footnote 4 This universal history, Foresti's Supplementum Chronicarum, was first published in 1483 – a full 180 years after the alleged embassy, and just as many years after Giovanni da Carignano's presumed treatise on the “Ethiopians”. Yet historiography on medieval Ethiopia – commonly understood in scholarship as the Christian realm located in the highlands of North-East Africa and its historical territoriesFootnote 5 – has received the “Ethiopian” embassy to Western Europe of 1306 widely, and largely uncritically.Footnote 6 Entries in the Encyclopaedia Aethiopica, the most important reference work for the field, establish it as fact.Footnote 7
This article intends to re-examine the case of the “Ethiopian” embassy of 1306 as related by Foresti. While Foresti – and his presumed source, Carignano – tell of “Ethiopian visitors”,Footnote 8 it remains to be investigated whether this vague medieval Latin Christian term indeed referred to the specific late-medieval political entity of Solomonic Ethiopia.Footnote 9 To this point, scholarship has conflated the two without question, following Skelton's assessment that an “Abyssinian embassy” sent by the “Abyssinian king, Wedem Ar'ad” visited the “King of the Spains” with an “offer of help in his wars against the infidels”.Footnote 10
In what follows, I shall investigate the feasibility of relating Foresti's source to Solomonic Ethiopia, and its use for Solomonic Ethiopian history. After locating the source in its wider historical and historiographical context, I will locate it both within its medieval textual context as well as changing Latin Christian conceptions of Africa, and the mythical Prester John. Finally, I aim to investigate the feasibility of relating the source to the socio-political entity of Solomonic Ethiopia in the Horn of Africa in the early fourteenth century. My analysis will caution against a continued use of the Foresti source for medieval north-east African history; I will suggest that there never was an official Solomonic – and thus Ethiopian – embassy to Europe at this date.
1. A short source history: from Foresti to Early Modern historical fact
In the early 1480s, the Augustinian hermit Jacopo Filippo Foresti set out to chronicle the history of the world from his convent of Sant'Agostino in Bergamo. His resulting Supplementum Chronicarum proved an instant success, both in his native Italy and beyond.Footnote 11 It contained 15 libri, where many short gesta-like biographies of emperors, kings, popes, poets, artists, and persons of public interest, as well as figures of the Old and New Testament, were presented in chronological order since Creation, serving – as the name indicated – as a supplement to already existing works of universal history.
Overall, the text is arranged in annals. An addition to the entry on the year 80 ce in the eighth bookFootnote 12 mentions how the Apostle Matthew taught the gospel to “the nation of the Ethiopians at the farthest point of the earth”.Footnote 13 It is a comparatively short note of less than a page – and yet much more extensive than the eight lines dedicated to the Apostle Thomas.Footnote 14 The majority of the text recounts legendary traditions of how Matthew preached amongst these Ethiopians: translating the Gospels into Hebrew, causing countless conversions together with his fellow Apostle Barnabas over the course of 33 years, baptising numerous noble virgins including one named Iphigenia, before being martyred by the local ruler, who promptly succumbed to leprosy and committed suicide.Footnote 15 After his beheading, the Apostle made a miraculous reappearance: his spirit baptised Iphigenia's brother, who had since become king of “these Ethiopian peoples”, and was to reign for 70 years, building countless churches, and spreading Christianity in his whole realm.Footnote 16 Matthew, departing for the beyond once more, was now succeeded by “the eunuch that Philippus had baptized”Footnote 17 – alluding to the New Testament figure of the Ethiopian eunuch, who was baptised by Saint Philip the Evangelist on the road from Jerusalem to Gaza.Footnote 18
Foresti then relates information on the current affairs of that same “Ethiopian realm”. He states that he took the above details on the conversion as well as the subsequent information on this “Ethiopian” place, and these “Ethiopian” people, from a:
[…] certain priest from Genoa, provost of St. Mark. This man has published an excellent treatise, and a map, as he called it. In this, he wrote much on the condition of these people, he informs us that the Prester John rules over these people and is their patriarch.Footnote 19
The exhortation subsequently identifies the realm with the empire of “Prester John”, king and patriarch over a vast realm encompassing 127 archbishoprics, with each archbishop having 20 bishops under him,Footnote 20 bringing the total number up to 2,540 bishops. Foresti is glad to inform his readers that these subjects of Prester John adhere to the Latin rite in both baptism and rites of the Sacrament of the Eucharist; they also venerate the Virgin, the Apostles, Antony the Great and other “holy hermits”.Footnote 21 This emperor, Prester John – presbiterum Janum – had 74 kings and almost innumerable numbers of princes under him; his dominion also extended over twelve kings of the Muslim faith.Footnote 22 This very same emperor, Foresti continues, had once dispatched a diplomatic mission to Latin Christendom:
Indeed, it is known that this emperor in the time of Clement V in the year of our Lord 1306 sent 30 legates to the king of the Spains; and let it be known that he was offering him aid against the infidels. They came also to Avignon to present themselves reverently to Clemens V, the Pontifex Maximus, and instructed by many apostolic letters, they went to the well worth seeing places of the relics of the Apostles Peter and Paul to Rome. Having seen these, they returned with joy to their own home. But in Genoa they had to wait many days for the time to sail back, and while they waited, they had sat down [as] it happens and were asked much about their rites, customs and regions before they left, on which the same author has written.Footnote 23
This paragraph marks the end of the section on Matthew, his conversion of the “Ethiopians” together with Barnabas, and on the realm and actions of Prester John; Foresti then turns to entirely different matters.Footnote 24
Based on this source, the notion of a de facto Ethiopian embassy entered Early Modern historiography: mid-sixteenth and early seventeenth-century historians like Cassaneus,Footnote 25 Godignus,Footnote 26 and MiraeusFootnote 27 all received this episode from the Supplementum Chronicarum for their own works on universal, ecclesiastical, and specifically “Abyssinian” history. Some differences can be discerned. Writing in 1546, Cassaneus recycles the whole section in a chapter on “Christian nations” of the world, but transposes what Foresti stated for the “Ethiopians” onto the Christian “Indians ruled by Prester John”Footnote 28 instead. Recounting all of Foresti, Cassaneus adds that it had been these “Indians” who had sent the 1306 embassy; they followed the Latin rite in all manners. However, he also clearly states that these “Indians” of Latin rite are distinct from the “Jacobites” – Iacobitarum – found in parts of Asia, Egypt and the land of Ethiopia.Footnote 29 The “Jacobites” – here a catchall for the miaphysite churches, which include the Syrian Orthodox, the Armenian, the Coptic and its long-time dependent, the Ethiopian Orthodox Church – were meanwhile not following Rome, but their own teachings, and the patriarch of Alexandria.Footnote 30
Some 70 years later, the geographically fluid medieval term of “Ethiopia” had long been substituted for “Abyssinia” in the ecclesiastical Latin Christian perception; the term now connoted only the Solomonic Christian Empire in the highlands of North-East Africa.Footnote 31 The Jesuit priest Godignus thus concerned himself exclusively with the socio-political and religious entity of Solomonic Ethiopia and its predecessors in his treatise De Abassinorum rebus.Footnote 32 Conceived as a first “global Latin compilation of facts on “Abyssinia” and the Jesuit missionaries”,Footnote 33 Godignus draws extensively from sixteenth-century Spanish and Portuguese sources.Footnote 34 He also clearly receives Foresti, stating as fact that already more than a hundred years prior to the presence of Ethiopian monks at the Council of Florence in 1441, an “Abyssinian” delegation had paid obeisance to Pope Clement V in Avignon.Footnote 35 Four years later, in a similar volume on Christianity in Europe, Asia, and Africa, the theologian Miraeus all but verbatim reproduced the episode of the “Abyssinian” delegation to Avignon.Footnote 36 Both Godignus and Miraeus excised any association with, or descriptions of, the empire of Prester John with the embassy to Avignon. Moreover, Godignus includes an earlier chapter on how the myth of Prester John had been applied to the Solomonic Emperors incorrectly in the past.Footnote 37
At the end of the seventeenth century, Hiob Ludolf – the father of Ethiopian Studies in Europe, who had worked closely with the Ethiopian monk abba Gorgoryos on several books on the Ethiopians – unsurprisingly took the “Ethiopian” embassy of 1306 for granted.Footnote 38 All mention of Foresti or Carignano as the original source on the embassy had long since disappeared – alongside the legendary traditions on the Apostle Matthew, and the information on the realm of the mythical Prester John.
2. Receiving saintly and mythical models: Legenda Aurea and the Prester John in Foresti
This transition from legendary account on the “Ethiopians” under Prester John to the Abyssinians as the socio-political entity of Solomonic Ethiopia is at the heart of the conundrum on the alleged embassy of 1306 to Avignon. Scholarship has largely received only the last section of Foresti's account, starting with the paragraph describing the events of “the time of Clement V”.Footnote 39 This paragraph is, however, only part of the much longer note on the Apostle Matthew. It directly relates to, and refers back to, the preceding paragraphs: first, the legendary traditions on the conversion of an “Ethiopian” people by the Apostle Matthew, including stories about the Virgin Iphigenia, her brother, the “Ethiopian” king, and biblical figures such as the “Ethiopian” eunuch.Footnote 40 Only then does the text relate two other parts of information purportedly drawn from the Genoese provost of St Mark: news on the state and affairs of the realm's supposed current ruler, Prester John, and his envoys’ visit to Avignon, Rome and Genoa – the news on the “Ethiopian” embassy, and their supposed interests and activities in Latin Europe in the early fourteenth century.Footnote 41 All three sections were conceived as a whole by Foresti. Identifying the sources Foresti drew from for the whole passage not only sheds light on Foresti's approach to compiling the Supplementum Chronicarum, it also enables us to judge the reliability of the information on the embassy of 1306 – and its purported connection to the socio-political entity of Solomonic Ethiopia.
2a. Matthew and Iphigenia or “Ephigenia of Ethiopia”
Foresti himself informs us that he drew some information in the first section of the text – on the Apostle Matthew and Iphigenia or “Ephigenia of Ethiopia” – from BedeFootnote 42 and John Chrysostom.Footnote 43 However, the majority of his information is actually and unmistakeably taken from the Legenda Aurea of Jacobus de Voragine. A compilation of lives of the saints and biblical episodes, it was written in the 1260s; like Foresti's Supplementum Chronicarum several hundred years later, Jacobus de Voragine's Legenda Aurea proved a medieval bestseller. Originally composed in Latin, it was frequently copied and translated into various vernacular languages, particularly over the course of the fifteenth century.Footnote 44 Curiously enough, Foresti omits having used the Legenda Aurea as source for his information.
Foresti's late fifteenth-century version of the life of the Apostle Matthew in the Supplementum Chronicarum offers a near-exact retelling of the Life of St Matthew as found in the thirteenth-century Legenda Aurea. In the latter text, the Apostle Matthew finds himself preaching in “Ethiopia”. There, he is based in the city of “Nadaber”, lodging with the biblical figure of the Eunuch baptised by Philip;Footnote 45 setting out to rid the town of two enchanters and their fire-belching dragons.Footnote 46 After driving away the sorcerers’ dragons, Matthew resurrects a young man to life with the power of prayer. That young man had been the son of the local king; as a token of thanks, the local king, called Egippus,Footnote 47 had a church built for the Apostle in the locality:Footnote 48
They completed the church in thirty days, and the apostle presided in it for thirty-three years and converted all of Egypt. King Egippus was baptized with his wife and the whole people. Matthew dedicated Ephigenia, the king's daughter, to God, and put her at the head of more than two hundred virgins.Footnote 49
Soon after, however, Egippus was succeeded by Hirtacus, who “lusted after the virgin Ephigenia” and desired to marry her. The Apostle, not to be tricked or tempted by the new ruler, publicly declared Ephigenia married to Christ, instead. As a consequence, Hirtacus had him martyred in his own church. Reappearing from the realm of the dead, the Apostle saved Ephigenia and the other virgins from certain death, cursed Hirtacus, who contracted leprosy and subsequently killed himself.Footnote 50 Now, “the people established Ephigenia's brother, whom the apostle had baptised, as their king, who reigned for seventy years” and “aided the spread of the Christian religion and filled the whole province of Ethiopia with churches of Christ”.Footnote 51
Thus, all key elements appear in the Supplementum Chronicarum and the Legenda Aurea, although the former version is stripped of the clearly supernatural elements such as sorcerers and dragons: both have Matthew preaching in “Ethiopia”, both narrate the building of a first church and the Apostle presiding in it for 33 years, both contain the conversion of local populations including the noble Ephigenia and her 200 virgins, as well as the Apostle's martyrdom at the hands of a lecherous king, who explicitly contracts leprosy and commits suicide. Both also feature the miraculous re-appearance of the Apostle from the grave, which ushers in a grand new age for Christianity, with Ephigenia's brother being crowned and reigning as Christian king for 70 years, converting the whole country of “Ethiopia”, and filling it with churches. Even the associated saintly personnel appear in both texts: in the Legenda Aurea, Matthew lodges with the eunuch converted by Philip, in the Supplementum Chronicarum, the eunuch succeeds him as patriarch; Matthew's companion Barnabas is said to have converted the local population together with Matthew in the Supplementum Chronicarum – in the Legenda Aurea, Barnabas returns from “Ethiopia” with a copy of the Gospel written in Matthew's hand.Footnote 52
In his short but influential study of the Foresti source, Skelton proposed in 1958 that the “legendary (but late) tradition of the introduction of Christianity into Ethiopia” must have been narrated to Giovanni da Carignano in 1306 by the Ethiopian envoys.Footnote 53 However, “Ephigenia of Ethiopia” is known as a folk saint in the Latin Christian tradition only.Footnote 54 She is unknown to both Coptic or Ethiopian Orthodox Synaxaria. Moreover, the Coptic and Ethiopian versions of the Life of Matthew contain no mention of localities and personnel adjacent to Ephigenia at all: the Coptic Synaxarium narrates Matthew as mainly active in Jerusalem and Judea.Footnote 55 It places him in an unidentified “foreign country” only briefly – and retells how Matthew converted the followers of the Greek god Apollo to Christianity there.Footnote 56 The Ethiopian Synaxarium similarly relates that the Apostle Matthew converted a priest called Hermes and followers of the Greek god Apollo in an unnamed city. Neither the Coptic nor Ethiopian Orthodox traditions place Matthew as being active in Ethiopia at all, and the Ethiopian version in particular locates him in Jerusalem, Juda and Antioch only.Footnote 57 Foresti – or his supposed source, Carignano – could not have got the information on the conversion of the Ethiopians through the Apostle Matthew from “Ethiopian” informants in Genoa.Footnote 58 The legend is not native to a north-east African tradition.
Foresti's actual source, the Legenda Aurea, is instead firmly Latin Christian in nature. It uses the term “Ethiopian” – Aethiops – as referring to any black man or peoples, usually in a pejorative fashion.Footnote 59Aethiopia in the Legenda Aurea also describes no specific locality: it is a country of “black” people of unclear localization. Somewhat inexplicably, it states that Matthew “converted all of Egypt” – totam Aegyptum – from the church donated by the king Egyppus. Meanwhile, Egyppus’ unnamed son later filled “the whole province of Ethiopia” – totam Aethiopiae provinciam – with churches.Footnote 60 The “Ethiopian” city named as “Nadaber” has roused the imaginaction of early nineteenth-century English poets,Footnote 61 but no connection to any locality – whether in North-East Africa or otherwise – can be identified. The Legenda Aurea also names “Murgundia”Footnote 62 and “Mirmidona” as synonymous with “Ethiopia” – the latter being the land of the legendary Greek peoples of the Myrmidons in the region of Thessaly.Footnote 63 Within the text, these places are conceived as not located too far from Antioch or Achaia on the Peloponnese peninsula;Footnote 64 indeed, most of the figures involved in the conversion of the “Ethiopians” in the Legenda Aurea are actually located in an Eastern Mediterranean rather than an African context.Footnote 65 The names of the “Ethiopians” – king Egyppus and the princess Ephigenia – bear no resemblance to any attested north-east African ruler beyond the obvious allusion of the name “Egyppus” to “Egypt” itself.
The first section of Foresti's source on the “Ethiopians” and the embassy of 1306 is thus a variation of the popular Latin text of the Legenda Aurea, stripped of its mythical and supernatural elements. It describes the life of the Apostle Matthew as understood by its medieval Latin Christian authors, whose geographical concepts of “Ethiopia” refer only in the very vaguest of terms to the African continent. They are unrelated to any discernible socio-political and religious African Christian entity. The first section of the source has no relation to, and is indeed unknown in, the respective north-east African Christian traditions.Footnote 66
2b. From “Ethiopia” to the realm of Prester John
The second part of Foresti's narrative on the “Ethiopians” purports to report on the contemporary state of affairs in the country. Foresti states that he took this information from a Genoese cleric, the provost or rector of St Mark;Footnote 67 he also asserts that his man had written an excellent treatise and “what he called a map”Footnote 68 based on his encounter with the envoys in Genoa in 1306.Footnote 69 In scholarship, this man has long been identified as Giovanni da Carignano.Footnote 70 The identification is convincing – beyond being rector of San Marco al Molo in GenoaFootnote 71 at this time, Carignano is known to have made a portolan chart in the early fourteenth century.Footnote 72
Carignano's portolan chart was destroyed in World War II,Footnote 73 making it inaccessible for further investigation. In his detailed study of the document, Theobald Fischer described its state of preservation as “de-valued” in 1866; Fischer specifically notes that “pieces of the edge of the map have been torn off, namely the ones concerning Abyssinia”.Footnote 74 Renato Lefèvre studied the map extensively prior to its destruction;Footnote 75 in a 1943 article, he too repeatedly laments the severely “deteriorated state” and “poor conditions” of the parts of the map that depict the regions abutting the Red Sea and south of the Suez Canal.Footnote 76 Conversely, in 1949, Enrico CerulliFootnote 77 opined Carignano's knowledge of “Ethiopia” to have been extensive, positing that he must have interviewed a Solomonic Ethiopian delegation extensively in 1306. Skelton also conceded in 1958 that the “lower edge, where Ethiopia should be drawn” had been severely mutilated’ prior to the war.Footnote 78 It is thus somewhat surprising that Charles Beckingham affirmed in 1998 how Cerulli had shown “conclusively that the envoys came from Ethiopia” due to the information found on the portolan chart.Footnote 79 Considering that both Carignano's original treatise as well as the parts of the map referring to the regions south of Egypt had already been lost or so severely corrupted as to be nearly unintelligible prior to the map's destruction, such assumptions appear untenable.
It remains difficult to judge whether the Carignano portolan contained any truly innovative information on the Horn of Africa. Renato Lefèvre states that a notation reading “Land of Abaise” – Terra Abaise – could clearly be discerned at the confluence of the Blue and White Nile. According to Lefèvre, another note read “black Christians” – christiani nigri – alongside numerous cities marked by a crossFootnote 80 at the rendered meeting point of the African and Asian continents with the Indian Ocean.Footnote 81 None of these notations were truly novel by the fourteenth century, however: a number of Latin Christian writers had long remarked on the existence of “black Christians”, specifically those of “Abaise” or Abyssinia. In 1217, the German pilgrim Thietmar informed his readers of a “country beyond Egypt”, whose inhabitants are called “Issini” – a corruption of AbissiniFootnote 82 – that was “wholly Christian”.Footnote 83 Ralph de Diceto mentions “Abesiam” prior to 1202, and Lefèvre reminds us that Gervaise of Tilbury includes the “Abassiti” in his Otia imperialia of 1211; Roger of Wendover and Matthew Paris speak of “Abasia” in their chronicles prior to 1236.Footnote 84 Around the year 1300, Marco Polo included a very detailed account on the Christian country of “Abasce, which is called Ethiopia” in his famous narrative. Polo openly admits never travelling to the region, but his account is startlingly accurate: among other things, he relates a near-contemporary account on an incident of 1288, occurring during the reign of aṣe Yagba Ṣǝyon, second ruler of the recently established Solomonic Dynasty.Footnote 85
The Supplementum Chronicarum foregoes any such precise specifications; indeed, after the section copied out of the Legenda Aurea concludes, the term “Ethiopia” disappears from the source entirely. It is substituted with the “nation of Prester John” in the second section of the source, where Foresti purports to summarize the “excellent account” of the Genoese cleric on the nation of “those people […] to whom Prester John is also like a patriarch”.Footnote 86 One must wonder why, if Carignano had indeed met “Ethiopians” in 1306, they had confided only news entirely of European Christian nature in him: as the Supplementum Chronicarum tells, the “Ethiopian” realm converted by the Apostle Matthew resembles the most standard exposition of “facts” on the empire of the mythical Prester John only – from the priest-king ruling over 74 kings, including 12 of the Muslim faith, to the huge number of archbishoprics and bishops all dutifully following the Latin Rite except for the most minor of differences.Footnote 87
Much ink has been spilled on the mythology of Prester John.Footnote 88 Ever since the inception of the myth in the twelfth century, the priest-king imagined as located beyond the realms of Islam engaged the European Christian mind.Footnote 89 The timing of the inception of the myth was no coincidence: through the Crusades, European Christians had come to know parts of the wider world, but were also increasingly losing their foothold in those same regions. This process was bound to stimulate fanciful musings on a thriving empire in the hands of a Christian brother beyond the borders of the known world: such a realm – such an emperor – could help European Christendom turn the tide, and secure – or later, reclaim – the Holy Land from the Muslims once and for all. Regrettably, the geography of this empire remained sketchy for the longest time. It was situated in the great but vaguely defined realm of “India”, the all-encompassing term for the “unknown world beyond the Islamic territories of the Near East”,Footnote 90 conceptualized as stretching from today's West Africa to the Far East in the Latin Christian imagination of the late Middle Ages.Footnote 91
Several high-profile missions from Rome were dispatched east for this purpose in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries.Footnote 92 Decades of fruitless search had offered no satisfying conclusion to the riddle of Prester John by the fourtenth century; gradually, we witness a shift in his possible location from one part of “India” to another – from Asia to Africa – in Latin writing. The conflation of the fanciful notions on Prester John's empire with the factual Christian realm of “Abasce” or the “Issini” was gradual; Latin clerics-cum-authors, some of them well travelled, wrote with increasing interest about the Christian realm south of Mamluk-ruled Egypt in the fourteenth century. The Dominican missionary and explorer Jordanus CatalaniFootnote 93 is believed to have been the first to relocate Prester John from Asia to the African continent in his Mirabilia descripta. Jordanus himself had sailed around the Horn of Africa but never ventured inland.Footnote 94 Still, he presents a slightly different vision of the realm of the black Christians of “Abasce”, speaking of the realm of “[…] the emperor of the Ethiopians, whom you call Prestre Johan”Footnote 95 instead. This place is presented as a place of marvels – rich in gold and precious stones, its ruler emperor over 52 kings, so powerful that even the Mamluk Sultan was forced to pay an annual tribute to him – the subjects all Christian, yes, but regrettably heretics.Footnote 96 Jordanus located this realm of wonders and unbridled Christian power south of Egypt, close to a place where zebras – “certain animals like an ass, but with transverse stripes of black and white, such as that one stripe is black and the next white” – could be found.Footnote 97
Half a century after Marco Polo's breathless report on the military exploits of the Christian king of “Abasce”, the European understanding of the realm of Prester John and all he signified had begun to shift gradually; Prester John was to become an African king. A portolan chart drawn by Angelino DulcertFootnote 98 in 1339 locates a “Saracen king” at “continuous war with the Christians of Nubia and Ethiopia, who are under the rule of the Prester John, the black Christian”.Footnote 99 Just a few years later, the anonymous author of the “Book of Knowledge of All Kingdoms” – the Libro del Conoscimiento de todos los reinos, Footnote 100 speaks of an empire of a man called “Servant of the Cross”, the “defender of the Church of Nubia and of Ethiopia”Footnote 101 – who “defends Prester John, who is the patriarch of Nubia and Ethiopia and governs many great lands and many cities of Christians”.Footnote 102 The mythical Prester John and “Servant of the Cross” – alluding to the militarily highly aggressive and successful Solomonic nǝguś Amdä ṢǝyonFootnote 103 – had not yet been collapsed into one person. Only over the course of the fifteenth century, in which multiple Solomonic missions reached Latin Europe, were the two fully conflated.Footnote 104
Foresti, writing in the 1480s, and his source Carignano, said to have encountered envoys in Genoa in 1306, would fall on opposite sides of this process. Supposing for a moment that Foresti had studied an early fourteenth-century treatise by Giovanni da Carignano for his Supplementum Chronicarum, it stands to reason that he would have imagined – and written about – a very different “people of Prester John” from Carignano some 150–180 years earlier. Even if we were to assume that Carignano was the first to relocate the empire of Prester John to “Ethiopia”Footnote 105 – and there is little indication for this on the destroyed portolan chartFootnote 106 – nothing found in the second section of the Supplementum Chronicarum pertains to an actual socio-political entity resembling Solomonic Ethiopia or even Nubian Christian Makuria. Instead, Foresti presents us once again with a rendering of a Latin Christian source. It offers only the most commonplace benchmarks on the indistinct realm ruled by Prester John established since the twelfth century in European Christendom – truisms unknown in, and unrelated to, north-east Africa.
2c. 1306: a phantom embassy?
In the last segment of the source, Foresti stresses that it was this mythical Prester John, this very emperor – huc sane imperatorem – who had sent ambassadors to the “king of the Spains” and paid obeisance to the Pope in Avignon.Footnote 107 There is no indication of a direct connection to a socio-political entity in north-east Africa; similarly, the information of the envoys’ mission and itinerary stays vague and generic: they were said to have travelled to the Iberian Peninsula, to France to meet Clement V, to Rome, and to have stayed in Genoa. Moreover, the last section of the source confronts us with yet another conundrum: Foresti specifies that the 30 delegates from the “kingdom of Prester John” had encountered Pope Clement V in Avignon “in the year 1306” – but papal records show that Clement V did not even go to Avignon until March 1309, a discrepancy that has thus far been all but disregarded.Footnote 108 Beckingham proceeded simply to postdate the embassy to any date after March 1309;Footnote 109 however, he conceded that there was no reference to any such embassy in the extensive Regesta of Clement V.Footnote 110 No other mention of the 1306 embassy has so far been discovered, either for the year 1306 or a later date in the early fourteenth century, when the Papacy was located in Avignon.Footnote 111 This in itself is surprising, as Papal archives have proved very reliable in documenting the presence of Solomonic Ethiopian envoys in the fiftteenth century, even documenting lone pilgrims to Rome.Footnote 112 It seems remarkable that a large delegation such as that of 1306 should have drawn no mention at all; substantiating sources are also missing from “Spanish” archives.Footnote 113 There is no known evidence of an early fourteenth-century embassy in Solomonic Ethiopian sources.Footnote 114 Indeed, the Supplementum Chronicarum is a rare source to mention a 1306 embassy – which begs the question of the reliability which has been ascribed to Foresti when it comes to the “Ethiopian” embassy of 1306.
Modern historians of Ethiopia have pointed to three other sources which might support the veracity of an “Ethiopian” embassy to Pope Clement V in 1306. In 1943, Enrico Cerulli pointed to a passage in La flor des estoires de la Terre d'Orient – presented by the Armenian nobleman and historian Hayton of Corycus to Pope Clement V in 1307.Footnote 115 Hayton states that he had recommended to Pope Clement to write a letter “to the king of the Nubians” to propagate an alliance between the Latin Church and the African Christians. Cerulli followed that Hayton must not have referred to Christian Nubians, but to Ethiopian Christians instead.Footnote 116 It bears repeating that Hayton referred explicitly to the “king of the Nubians, who are Christians, and were converted to the Faith by the Lord Apostle Thomas in the lands of Ethiopia”.Footnote 117 Cerulli's choice to see this as supporting evidence for the feasibility of a Solomonic Ethiopian embassy to Avignon in 1306 is interesting. By 1307, two of the three medieval Nubian Christian kingdoms – Nobadia, Makuria, and Alodia or Alwa – were still politically independent, if in a slow process of decline.Footnote 118 It would seem disingenuous to negate Nubian religious and political sovereignty and substitute it for Solomonic Ethiopia by default at this date.
A second source brought forward in scholarship to support the feasibility of an Ethiopian delegation to Europe dates from 1317: the Dominican friar William of Adam submitted plans for a joint crusade between Latin and “Ethiopian” Christians to the Cardinal Raymond of Farges, nephew of Clement V.Footnote 119 Adam had travelled as far as the island of Socotra in the Red Sea in the early fourteenth century; he never reached the highland realm we today refer to as Ethiopia. Indeed, his “Ethiopia” relates solely to the Red Sea region, and the Christians found on the islands within that same body of waterFootnote 120 – a distinct region again unconnected to Solomonic Ethiopia.
Lastly, scholars have pointed to a rather strange text published by the Italian scholar Leone del Prete in 1857.Footnote 121 It is a text from a private archive, and seems to be a letter addressed to the Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV.Footnote 122 The missive is most definitely a forgery. It is an exhortation for a crusade against the Muslims – and the anonymous author, writing in Italian, purports to be the king of “Ethiopia”. He introduces himself as:
King Voddomaradeg, son of the most excellent King of Ethiopia, of Saionio, of Tobbia, of Nubia, the lands of Bettesi and Moritoro, and Prester John, King of India the Major and Minor.Footnote 123
The majority of the given place names are fantasies,Footnote 124 but the name of the king – “Voddomaradeg” – is a corruptionFootnote 125 of Wǝdǝm Räʿad,Footnote 126 throne name of the Ethiopian nǝguś regnant at the time the supposed “Ethiopian” embassy of 1306. Del Prete assures us that the letter was written around the year 1320. As the original letter is unknown and no other edition has been published, this is impossible to verify.Footnote 127 Should we take del Prete's word for granted, however, Wǝdǝm Räʿad would still already have been succeeded by aṣe Amdä ṢǝyonFootnote 128 for some six years – and the future Charles IV have been a child of four years of age.Footnote 129 Even beyond the problems posed by the unavailability of the source to scholarship, this timeline would be highly problematic. That the name of an Ethiopian ruler should be known in Latin Europe in the fourteenth century, however, is not as unprecedented as it might initially seem: in 1339, the name “Abdeselib” appears in a cartouche of the portolan chart of Angelino Dulcert as name of a ruler living in the vicinity of the realms of Christian Nubia and the highlands of Solomonic Ethiopia.Footnote 130 Just a few years later, the author of the already mentioned “Book of Knowledge of All Kingdoms” speaks of the “empire of Abdeselib, which means ‘servant of the cross’ [who] is the defender of the Church of Nubia and of Ethiopia”.Footnote 131 While “Abdeselib” might at first glance appear a fanciful name given by Europeans to a distant “Ethiopian” emperor, it is the Arabic version of an actual Solomonic Ethiopian regal name: Abdeselib is a correct, if slightly corrupted, version of the Arabic “Abd as-Salib”, which translates as “Servant of the Cross”.Footnote 132 “Servant of the Cross”, meanwhile, translates to “Gäbrä Mäsqäl” in Gǝʿǝz, and is the throne name of aṣe Amdä Ṣǝyon, one of the most prominent and militarily and politically successful rulers of Solomonic Ethiopia in the fourteenth century. Aṣe Amdä Ṣǝyon ruled until 1344, and thus was the incumbent sovereign of the Solomonic Empire when both Dulcert and the author of the “Book of Knowledge of All Kingdoms” noted a variant of his name in their sources.Footnote 133
The three sources introduced by modern scholars to support the veracity of an “Ethiopian” embassy to Latin Europe in 1306 thus do not necessarily shed light on Solomonic Ethiopian history. If anything, they portray how the longstanding and complex landscape of Christianity beyond the African Mediterranean coast was slowly understood in the Latin West. Located along the cataracts of the Nile, the Nubian kingdoms of Makuria and Alwa or Alodia had been Christian since the sixth century;Footnote 134 they preserved their political independence and Christian faith after the Islamic Expansion of the seventh century.Footnote 135 Church and State in Nubia were in decline from the late thirteenth century onwards, but a Makurian army had still attacked and plundered parts of Upper Egypt in the 1270s.Footnote 136 Christian kings and bishops persisted in parts of Nubia well into the fifteenth century.Footnote 137
Meanwhile, the highlands in the Horn of Africa had been home to a Christian realm since the fourth century. Around 1270, the Solomonic Christian dynasty had come to power; its founder, aṣe Yəkunno Amlak,Footnote 138 and his successors were to extend its territory far beyond their original dominion – from the historical regions of Lasta, Šäwa and Amhara all over the north-east African highland plateau.Footnote 139 Scholars have much neglected to ask themselves whether an outreach for a military alliance with Western Europe in the very early 1300s would have actually made sense from an Ethiopian perspective. The short answer is that it would not have. In the early decades of Solomonic reign – and particularly during the time of the purported embassy of 1306 – Ethiopian sources show that Solomonic sovereigns were busy securing their own, comparatively newly-formed, realm: while Yəkunno Amlak had consolidated power over extensive areas to the north and south of Lasta in the late thirteenth century,Footnote 140 his son, aṣe Yagba Ṣəyon,Footnote 141 strove to maintain his father's recent legacyFootnote 142 – an echo of an episode of his reign appears in Marco Polo's narrative. The “Ethiopian” embassy of 1306 would fall into the reign of Yəkunno Amlak's other son, aṣe Wədəm Räʿad,Footnote 143 who succeeded his brother after a phase of unrest and uncertainty in 1299.Footnote 144 Very little is known about Wədəm Räʿad's comparatively long reign – we only know of struggles between him and a Muslim tributary abutting the highland plateau, and that there were disputes between important monastic communities in his heartland, the historical regions of Lasta, Šäwa and Amhara.Footnote 145 Only his heir, aṣe ʿAmdä Ṣəyon I,Footnote 146 managed to stabilize fully the Solomonic dynasty in the first half of the fourteenth century.Footnote 147 ʿAmdä Ṣəyon I aggressively and successfully expanded the dynasty's realm: he fully incorporated the regions from Goǧǧam to Christian Təgray up to the Red Sea into the dominion, integrating Muslim principalities such as Ifat, Damot and Hadiyya as rebellious tributaries into his Christian empire.Footnote 148 At his death, ʿAmdä Ṣəyon's dominion stretched over a thousand miles from north to south, from the Red Sea coast down most of the Ethiopian highlands, and hundreds of miles from east to west, having subjugated – at least temporarily – lowland and eastern highland Muslim principalities all the way to ʿAdal.Footnote 149 Against this backdrop, it is of little surprise that a variant of his name – in the form of the Arabic translation of its meaning, “Servant of the Cross” – had made its way across the Red Sea and Mediterranean, to be incorporated into the Dulcert portolan, and the “Book of Knowledge of All Kingdoms”.
3. Conclusion: resetting the time line of Solomonic–Ethiopian contacts with the Latin West
By the early fourteenth century, Latin Christian authors had tentatively become cognizant of the actions and agency of Christian rulers and their subjects located in north-east Africa. The mentions of “Nubian” or “Black” Christians located in “Abassia” or “Ethiopia” should be read as a belated awareness of local north-east African politics; increasingly twinned with fanciful notions on the concurrent, popular myth on the Christian empire, the empire of Prester John. It is within this framework of gradually increasing knowledge about the world beyond the Mediterranean and the Levant, and nearly two centuries of unsuccessful exploration in Asia, that the above-mentioned references to African Christians in Hayton of Corycus and Guillaume Adam, and the “letter of Voddomaradeg” alias Wǝdǝm Räʿad to the future Charles IV, should be understood.
The Supplementum Chronicarum, however, reflects none of this increased Latin Christian awareness of north-east African socio-political entities. I have demonstrated how the first section of Foresti's passage was derived from the Legenda Aurea – a Latin Christian source with no discernible relation to an African Christian tradition, whether Coptic, Nubian, Ethiopian or otherwise. The second section of the passage, purporting to report contemporary news on the realm of Prester John, recycles a standard narration native to Western Europe; it, too, offers no information pertaining to any specific contemporary socio-political entity in north-east Africa. There is evidence that the time gap between Foresti and Carignano might have resulted in a significant difference in perception of the location of the realm of Prester John, that the intervening centuries would have turned formerly Asian delegates into African envoys in the Latin Christian mind. A recent discovery of a different manuscript receiving fragments of Carignano appears to indicate the opposite, however: it suggests that Carignano's lost account was possibly based on distorted echoes about Solomonic Ethiopia mixed with Latin Christian imaginings and sources, too.”Footnote 150 The impossible timing of the 1306 delegation, and the total lack of substantiating sources in European archives, raise fundamental questions on the reliability of Foresti for north-east African historiography, however. Did Foresti – or even Carignano – possibly simply fabricate the reference altogether for unknown reasons, after offering a retelling of a part of the Legenda Aurea, and “facts” on the realm of Prester John? It is impossible to say.
So where does this leave us? Early Modern and twentieth-century historiography took the episode of 1306 and its connection to Solomonic Ethiopia as fact. The examination of the source material itself shows that any connection to the socio-political entity of Solomonic Ethiopia – or Nubian Makuria, for that matter – is not supported by the information contained within the Supplementum Chronicarum. The “Ethiopian” embassy of 1306 appears to be yet another episode of Ethiopian–European contacts not borne out by the sources upon close inspection.Footnote 151 This is significant in a number of ways: thus far, the “Ethiopian” embassy of 1306 has set the time line for the course of Solomonic–Latin Christian diplomacy in the late medieval period in scholarship. The purported interests and wishes of these “Ethiopians” – a joint crusade, military aid – appear to have moreover shaped how scholarship read and received actual, later Solomonic embassies to the West. And yet, all things being equal, Foresti's Supplementum Chronicarum is a Latin Christian source that draws on information only known within Western Europe itself; there is nothing to recommend the source's value for the study of medieval Ethiopian history. The “Ethiopian” embassy of 1306, as based on Foresti's Supplementum Chronicarum, thus needs to be reconsidered, if not dismissed – thoroughly resetting the time line for official Solomonic Ethiopian contacts with the Latin West.
Open access
