Gone Medieval - Kings of Medieval Ethiopia

Episode Date: October 23, 2023

Overseeing a rich and diverse kingdom, Ethiopia’s medieval monarchs consolidated their power by claiming descent from the Biblical King Solomon. But why did they pursue long-distance diplomatic contacts with Latin Europe? In this episode of Gone Medieval, Dr. Eleanor Janega meets award-winning historian Dr. Verena Krebs, who challenges the conventional narratives of African-European relations, arguing that African exploration of Europe was driven by aesthetic curiosity rather than military ventures.This episode was edited by Joseph Knight and produced by Rob Weinberg.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for £1 per month for 3 months with code MEDIEVAL - sign up here.You can take part in our listener survey here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From long-loss Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life, only on history hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries

with a brand-new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world, to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. There's an incredibly famous medieval European map of the world called the Catalan Atlas, which was made sometime in the 1370s or 1380s, and it shows an incredibly detailed view of the world as its Mayorkan cartographers understood it. On the fourth panel, you can see the Highlands and Horn of Africa, and get an idea of what they were thinking about Eastern Africa.

Down at the bottom, you'll see an inscription demarcating the city of Nubia, and there it says, The King of Nubia is always at war with the Christians of Nubia, who are under the dominion of the Emperor of Ethiopia and the land of Prestor John. So there you have it, an African city and kingdom paralleling the relations between Muslims and Christians on the Iberian Peninsula where the map was made, under the guidance of a mythical emperor, Prestor John. This is, of course, wishful thinking at best. Ethiopia has always been its own complex and fascinating kingdom,

refusing to settle into the easy categories that Europeans want of it. And today, I am delighted to be talking to Verena Krebz about the complexities behind these myths. Verena, I'm absolutely overjoyed to have you here. Well, thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here. So I suppose in a lot of ways, I'm kind of like your average medieval European

in terms of my knowledge of English. Ethiopian kings and in the medieval period because I know that they're there. I'm kind of obsessed with them, but I don't have, you know, any kind of high in-depth knowledge. I'm just sort of aware of their importance and their prominence and their Christianity and their beautiful artwork, but what that means is a story is kind of lost on me. Do you know what I mean? Yeah, and I think you're in good company there. I think many people have heard of Christian Ethiopia and there's also this idea that actually dates back to the 17th century of Ethiopia. And the question is, and we can get into that later, but what is Ethiopia and where is it and how many is it, right? But even back in the 17th century

where I think European burgeoning historians were wondering, like, oh, this Christian realm somewhere in Africa, surrounded by Muslims. And I mean, that's a lot of mythology to unpack, which hopefully will be able to get to as well. Okay. So let's begin to the beginning. When we say medieval Ethiopia, what do we mean in terms of the time span of the period there? It's a tricky question, and I can give you the answer that I just did, because together with my Ethiopian American colleague, Yonatan Biniam, I just wrote an introductory textbook for interested lay people that's coming out with Cambridge University Press,

like the global Middle Ages series. And so one of the challenges we faced writing that introduction textbook was really like, what does medieval mean and what does quote-unquote Ethiopia mean? So we decided to go from 330 to 1500. As a historian, I'm always a little bit hesitant when it comes to these so-called epochal breaks, but I think things really change around 1500, so that's a very good cutoff date, also when it comes to North East Africa. So we decided on that time span.

And then, of course, the question was, okay, what are we actually covering? What realms? Because I mean, in your introduction, you said, well, it's the oldest, country in Africa and I would be like, is it? I mean, there's a strong mythology there and there's a very strong belief also within Ethiopian academic circles that there is 3,000 years of continuous history. Now, what you do get, what Yonatan and I looked at quite closely was that, yes, from late antiquity, we have a Christian realm in the highlands of the Horn of Africa. But is it really just one realm? unchanged by time. That would be really exceptional in the history of the world because no other

places unchanged for 2,000 years nearly. So we have lots and lots of different kingdoms and entities that are sometimes connected, sometimes not, and that operate to their own, like, specific geographic setting, timeline, dynamics. So, you know, here you go. Then Ethiopia is just like talking about Europe in that case where it's like, what do we mean by medieval? kind of difficult to start the period, very difficult to end it. Everybody's kind of moving around. What do the kingdoms mean? So, you know... Just as complex, right? Yeah, so far, very medieval. Okay, that's great. So, you know, within European medieval history,

then we go, okay, well, you've kind of got your early medieval period, your high medieval period, your late medieval period. Do you then break down Ethiopian history in the same way of kind of like periods within periods? Absolutely. So for this introduction, textbook, we decided we're going to look at a geographic area and then break it down according to the big political configurations we can find. So you have the kingdom of Axum, which basically more or less parallel to Rome, also very much in exchange with Rome and later early Byzantium. And so the kings of Axum convert to Christianity in the early 4th century. And that's where we decided to pick up, basically.

So that's really a period that would be roughly congruent with late antiquity. So from 330, around 700, when Axum apparently faced a ton of calamities and eventually ceased to function, like really lots of things, whether it's a flood, a dam break, an earthquake, fire. We have everything in the archaeological record. It's really, it's like stuff went down sometime in the 600s. And so after that, Axum disappears a little bit off of the historical map from the current state of our research. And then we have a couple of centuries where records are really quite scarce, but we know that Christian entities persisted.

We also know that there's Muslim entities in that region and that Christians and Muslims were in exchange, because both of these religions are very ancient in that region of the world. And then, let's say, from the 10th century onwards, our records become clearer again. And then we have, I guess, roughly in peril to the high Middle Ages in Europe. We have the Izagwa dynasty, which is a Christian dynasty that rules a really quite a large kingdom again. That stretches from modern-day Eritrea all the way nearly to modern-day Adisababa, the capital of Ethiopia. So quite a sizable kingdom. I don't know, 700 miles or something across.

Whoa. Okay. All right. That's not joking around. Yeah. That's not joking around, right? The issue being, however, that their successors who came to power in 20, not 20, sorry, numbers are hard for a German, in 1270, in 1270, their success is coming to power. And one of the first things apparently they did is burn of the predecessors' records. So real tabula rasa to be able to establish themselves. So, but that's again, like a break. And then you have, once again, sort of in parallel to the European late Middle Ages from the late 30s. century onwards, you have the Solomonic dynasty. So you see, it's like it breaks up into different

periods that sometimes, for independent reasons, map up quite well to what we know in other parts of the medieval world, but are not really contingent upon them. Okay, so when we talk about then the other parts of medieval world, how we can kind of make these connections across from Europe to Ethiopia. What's going on in terms of Ethiopia's relationship to Europe? Is this a kind of continuous theme across this period, or is this just medieval Europeans being obsessed with Ethiopians? Or does this kind of work both ways? Do Ethiopians care what's happening in Europe? No, not really. Not really. Get them.

Seen from the Highlands of the Horn of Africa, Europe is a French or a French. It's really, it's Franklin. It's on this northwestern edge of the world. They're Christians, but not really quite once again speaking from the perspective of Ethiopian Christianity, which is an Oriental Orthodox Christianity and dates back to the 4th century. So there's an awareness of Europe, let's say, but there's definitely not like an in-depth interest in exactly what Europe is doing. I wrote my first book, Medieval Ethiopian kingship, craft diplomacy with Latin Europe, which sort of has the Latin Europe and the title, right? But even there, you have Ethiopian King sending embassies to the Latin West, but they're really treating Latin Europe as this place

where you can extract religious souvenirs and prestigious material culture for your own political purposes. You don't really care about what these things meant in Europe. You're going to imbue them with your own mythology and meaning. It's out there. It's part of that same world, but in Ethiopia, nobody at least until the 16th centuries really seems to care what Europe's thinks of them. I really respect them for this. I love treating medieval Europe as a kind of gift shop. That's a really fun way of kind of doing things. So hilariously similar to European, especially early modern attitudes to places like, I don't know, China, where it's like, yeah, that's where pottery comes from, right? It's nice to see other people do it. Yeah.

And I mean, there's even some awareness that people in Europe are sort of obsessed with Ethiopia and Christian Africans, at least by the late Middle Ages, because we have this lovely story about Ethiopian monks being at the Council of Florence, where they get told, oh, we heard that your king, Zariakob, is the Presta John, like the most powerful, mythical king. And then like, he really doesn't like that name. His name is Quastantinos.

His name is Zara Jakop, meaning the seed of Jacob, because he is of the seed of Jacob, and he's also Constantine, like the great Constantine. And honestly, what on earth do you guys think? Okay, so now I'm going to have to stop you because we're going to have to unpack the Prestor-John thing. Can you explain the myth of Prestor-John? So this is a European idea of what might be going on over in Ethiopia, right? Well, this is a European myth that I think is very much born out of, I guess, the intellectual environment of the Crusades,

that you have this hope that there's this Christian king that is living in lands beyond the Muslims, who is going to basically come to the aid of European Crusades, Christians, and that tacitly also assumes, I think, their crusading ventures and going to help them reclaim Jerusalem, take the Holy Land and fight and eventually defeat all of the Muslims. And this is a whole field of research, and I'm not the specialist for Presta John, but I get the impression that in Europe, you have all of these letters being sent, and they're all fake letters. They're all made up fairy tale stories about basically a really super, I mean, today he would be

some kind of marble hero, I think, because he's got it all. He's got military strength. He's got the wealth because there's literally milk and honey and diamonds in his rivers. And, you know, he's got every single thing. And at the same time, he's also a good Christian. He's not just a king, but he's also a priest. He's the most fantastic Christian ally. You could imagine the stress being on, imagine.

And so in response to these letters, you have a whole host of embassy. being sent out to, for example, places in Asia. Throughout the 13th century, definitely, even into the 14th century, where the papacy, but also several European kings, are just looking for Presta John. And turns out they don't find him. Oh, I can't believe that. He's imaginary.

Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah. Who would think that Superman might not be real? It's like sending out people to go find Santa Claus at the North Pole or something. I mean, they find Christians in Asia because, I mean, Christianity, did not just spread from the Holy Land to Europe. Turns out it spread all the way to China, even in the 7th, 8th century, right? Or to Africa. So they do find Christians, but they're like, oh, this is not Presta John.

I mean, this is also to do with growing European knowledge about the world, and I think knowledge still deserves to be in air quotes a bit, because some authors start conflating. Like, they've heard that there's Christians south of Egypt, which would be the Ethiopians and also the newbie. or Nubian kingdoms. And then you increasingly get people like, maybe that's Presto John.

Maybe Presto John is in Ethiopia. So by the 15th century, this is the real established place that people think Presto John is ruling. Problem is, of course, that in Europe, nobody's really ever been there and made their way back. In the Ethiopian sources,

we constantly have Europeans sort of arriving in the highlands where they get detained and are basically, it's like a bit, I don't know, Hotel California, you can come, but you can never leave. So they don't make it back. So in Europe, you have this whole mythology, lots and lots of ideas about the kingdom of Presta, John being Ethiopia, does not map onto the real geopolitical entity that we find

there. In terms of the geopolitical entity, let's kind of skip towards the most important dynasty, the one that even I know exists, right? So we have, when you sort of hit the 13th century or so, is that right? You have the Solomonic dynasty. And they do like a lot of, I don't know, European dynasties also kind of have a mythical origin story that, you know, it's not the praist or John thing. But it's they have this way of explaining how their dynasty has come to the throne. Yeah.

So I was actually just reading an article about the first church that the first Solomonic king immediately builds right next to the church's building. for the rivaling earlier dynasty that he basically dethroned and whose last king he killed, like a proper usurpation of power there. And so you have the Zagwa dynasty. We don't really know very much about them. And you might not know so much about them as a result because research has been really difficult because the Solomonic's destroyed their records largely. I mean, that's the going hypothesis at the moment, really.

And I mean, that already is really interesting because why would you go through? such a trouble. If, first of all, you used to be even like a governor under the previous king and they're also Christian, why would you go through the trouble of really destroying their records unless you needed to be able to justify your claim to the throne in very particular ways, right? And that's what they're doing. They're saying, like, immediately, you couldn't unlock the first Solomonic king says, oh, the Zaguer of my predecessors, they were in interlopers, they were not, the real kings. I am descended from the kings of Axum, the kings of Axum who adapted Christianity in the 4th century. I am basically now re-establishing the old

Solomonic line and even more than that. We are also, by the way, descended from the biblical house of Solomon and David through Solomon's son with the Queen of Sheba. Isn't that great? So we have double legitimization. That's crazy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Not only are we sort of in the footsteps and like the actual descendants of these Christian axiomite kings, but we're even of the same bloodline as the Holy Family. Because, I mean, David and Solomon and all of the kings of Israel. And that is a very specific genealogy that not everybody can claim.

But because we have the story of the Queen of Shiba going to visit, Solomon, they can do that. You get this all the time in Europe, right? You get people feeling, oh, yeah, we're descendants. from, you know, someone who's come from Troy, or I think the Mervingians are like, weird, descended from a sea monster? These kind of things just get thrown out. And it's like, well, is proof really expected of this? Or is it literally just like, yeah, you know that story?

We were the ones who weaponized it. I mean, if you really push that story to its absolute maximum and you also concurrently, of course, destroy what might throw a wrench in your whole narration, then you're bolstering your own claim. I mean, we also have to say, like, the Kibreniga. So there's this text called the Kibranegas, which means the glory of kings. And that's a text that gets adopted by the Solomonic dynasty as their grand dynastic myth. And amongst other things, it tells of this story of the Queen of Sheba, in that case, being an Ethiopian queen, going to Israel, meeting Solomon, being tricked by him so they eventually have sex, going home and being pregnant and having a baby.

and the baby being, of course, the first bon son of Solomon and his true heir, but also the king of Ethiopia. And then he goes back as an adult and his father really loves him. And then the son, Minilic, steals the Ark of the Covenant and brings it to Ethiopia and makes Ethiopia the new chosen land of God. And that's just a fraction of the Kibranegas. It also has a lot of stuff about early Christianity and councils and fathers prophesying the end of the world where the Ethiopian king will vanquish evil and be the king of the world even. This is not a lot of the world. not small-scale. So the really interesting thing is this text gets definitely translated into Ge'ers, the Ethiopian and Eritrean liturgical language and literary language of the Middle Ages.

It gets translated by the early 14th century, and it's definitely a translation, probably from Arabic, possibly by the way, even of Coptic. It's a text from outside the country that, however, maps incredibly well onto what the Solomonic dynasties then do. with their own country. Or maybe, and I mean, this is my hypothesis. Solomonic kings make themselves in the image of this dynastic text, because it's like an iron-clad justification for their rule. So the text comes first, and then you mirror that in order to prove that,

indeed, your dynasty is the one. Yeah. The most current and up-to-date translation of the Cabernigast we have is from 1900, and there's a German one that's from 1905. There's now a new edition and translation into English being done by American colleagues. But, I mean, it just shows you how long research into this area has been completely neglected. So you were asking, oh, did people really believe this? And at the moment, we can't really answer because obviously there's a lot of political machinations

and really complex adaptions of identity and mythology and right to rule at play here, right? but there's not been a lot of research going in depth into, did people really believe this? Was this really as effective as the kings decided it would be? That's a really difficult thing to measure. Because, you know, who we hear from, they're always the kings. And I think that it's a lot easier to believe this story about yourself, actually. You know, it's a lot easier to say, oh, yes,

like we are definitely the mythical descendants of Solomon and David. We deserve to be here. here is our reason for existence. And that's something we can measure a lot more easily than, I don't know, what a baker living on the street thinks, or even if they care about the story. Sometimes we can see it by reading the sources that have come down to us a bit against the grain. So, for example, you have an Ethiopian king, Amdetsion. He lives about 50 years after his predecessors took over the kingdom and came to power. and he just expands the realm on an unprecedented scale.

Eventually, we're looking at the biggest kingdom in the Horn of Africa, from the Red Sea all the way south of Adis Ababa, and from the Sudanese border all the way to the Afar Desert. It's basically all of the Central Highland Plateau. He claims to rule that. Whether he actually does really rule every single corner, different question. Can you even rule such a terrain with deep chasms and Highland Mountains?

all that well. But we have his texts where he sort of brags that one of the first things he had to do was subdue his Christian rivals and that he defeated them and that he had to eventually ride an elephant into the sea so he could vanquish his enemies, the enemies being the other Christians

who might be claimants to the throne, and that he could do that because, basically, he is a descendant of Solomon and David. So you can see how this mythology is used to justify his particular claim amongst all of the potential Christian rivals as being the chosen dynasty. So, I don't know, between the lines, you could read that there was some opposition, especially from other Christian noble houses. Well, okay, so this is a military takeover. It's not kind. No, no, no, absolutely not. I mean, this is empire, right? An empire is

rarely kind. It's actually never kind. And it's conquest. And it's a war of conquest. It's expanding. a Christian kingdom by willfully annexing non-Christian entities under your own rule. And that always goes with violence. It's rarely that somebody who used to be independent says, oh, well, I can see what you're doing. Yes, yeah, we should definitely pay taxes to you. That would be great. And so, I mean, this whole process, of course, also goes hand in hand than with Christianization

because these newly annexed and incorporated territories, they get Christian. because if you Christianize them, you're actively supporting, like, the Christian, if you will, government. Because if there's good Christians in these new regions, they would swallow the new mythology and share more commonalities with the rest of the kingdom. So you have actually like monks and whole monasteries being established, especially in these new regions to disseminate the faith and make sure that. the Christian power sticks. That makes sense. So you kind of do the military context. You ride your elephant into the sea or what have you.

But it does make sense that there's no point in coming up with this dramatic mythology. There's no point in saying, oh, well, here we are with the Solomonic dynasty, witness, our impeccable Christian pedigree. If you don't have Christians around, because, you know, no one's going to care, right, if they're not Christians. So it's like, all right, cool. Well, I'm Muslim. So it's just not going to wash in the same way. Yeah. And I mean, at the same time, this takeover is also in part quite smart

because I think there's an awareness from the very beginning that you can't willfully Christianize everybody at the sword. So there are whole areas of the Solomonic kingdom that remain predominantly Muslim, for example, or remain predominantly pagan. But they have like a superstructure of Muslim. monasteries that uphold Christian governorship, basically, within these lands. And so on an individual peasant kind of level, people are not necessarily forced to convert.

They're just strongly urged to adopt the new superstructure of all. And I suppose when you make these big monasteries and everything, there is that cultural persuasion that happens there as well, because it's like, hey, do you want to see inside the cool building? I'm being flippant about it. But that is a kind of interesting and overriding way of encouraging people towards conversion. If you have neat buildings, if you have groups of people who, oh, well, here's these guys who are doing government administration, they seem to kind of have things together. They seem to have a very well-established way of speaking to government or speaking to power.

These things over time really can embed themselves in the consciousness of people. Yes. And at the same time, you also have an awareness that. that especially within the geographical limitations of such a highland realm, right, unless you send up the army 50 times a year to squash a rebellion on some sort of mountaintop plateau, which you're going to just run out of resources very quickly. So you're going to have to make some concessions, right? And there's also this awareness that, for example, this is very badly researched,

I think in part because a lot of historians trained in Western Academy just couldn't rub their minds, around a medieval society being just so much more heterogeneous and not operating alongside the same paradigms that people have long thought applied for medieval Europe. You have, for example, lots of Muslims that are really fundamental to the Christian government. Some of the Ethiopian kings ambassadors sent to Europe are Muslim, Muslim Ethiopians. And they're obviously not forced to convert, and they obviously have high roles, because otherwise they wouldn't be the king's ambassadors. If you have Muslim merchants that have excellent links to, for example, the Mamluk's in Egypt,

why should you break down their existing networks and force them to convert? I mean, that would be actually detrimental to your own import, export, to put it in very modern terms, right? So what we see actually is like a very heterogeneous society that is multi-religious. And that's long, I think, been ignored because there is this whole myth. of the Christian Ethiopia, the land of Prestige on. It's a lot of Orientalism that's been over at least three centuries been applied to the Horn of Africa and especially to the Christian regions of the Horn of Africa.

But what we find on the ground is that it's just a very complex society where at least from the 13th century on the superstructure of rule definitely is Christian and imbued with this special mythology. And I suppose it is a very European way of looking at things. is like, oh, well, Ethiopia exists in relationship to Europe. I think there's also something there where, you know, the Solomonic dynasty exists until 1974, right?

And so for Europeans, we go, oh, well, that means things were really definitely rolling over like clockwork. Everything's just ticking along. Everyone's Christian till highly Salasi falls. Then I assume everything is just like a European country. And it's a very limited way, I think, of approaching it. Yeah, and it also, once again, negates, I think, complexity. in that throughout the centuries,

this massive series of wars in the 16th century between the Solomonic Christian Kingdom and one of their former tributaries, the Sultanate of Adal, and the Sultanate strikes back, and it strikes back very successfully. So you have a massive, massive war that causes huge devastation

over more than a decade, all over the Central Highland Plateau, and that disrupts the running of everything, and the kingdom we find after that series of wars is not the same. I mean, we have descendants of the Solomonic line trying to recreate the early glory, but it's a bit hard if everything's devastated and lots and lots of people have died and your trading connections are disrupted, and also it's the 16th century, so you have the Portuguese and the Ottomans and the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean. It's a time of change.

If you zoom in over the following couple of centuries, you always have a claimant to the throne. You always have a Solomonic king, but sometimes, if you look at the sources quite closely, the Solomonic kingdom might be actually really quite small, and it's sort of like people coming to power might claim earlier glories, and they might claim a territory, but it's not really, is it there? In the 19th century, you have several, like, rivaling Christian factions that all want to be, want to recreate the Solomonic kingdom or, in fact, a Solomonic empire, and some of them are more successful than the others. And then you have, with Menelik II in the late 19th century,

you have somebody who really pulls through, and I must stress this in a very violent way, this is empire. This is also in part, I think, an involvement in basically acquiring by force territories for your empire. And so Haile Selassie is sort of the, inheritor of that 19th century configuration of this solomonic kingdom that then becomes an empire. Like there's no 100% through line through all the territories of this region and whatnot between what I look at in my studies up to the early 16th century and then to the 20th century. It's mythology. It's very similar. I think and this is a type of medievalism as well, I would even say. It's interesting, you know, because we're talking earlier and saying, oh, well, when they come up with this mythology, do medieval people really believe it?

And I'm like, well, hey, they're still telling that story in the 20th century. I do think that there's this modern tendency to say, oh, and this is something that medieval people do and believe, but it's still happening in our own lifetimes. Yeah. I'm very much aware of my outside patrol. like I'm a white German lady who somehow through a series of developments that saw me, for example, do my PhD in Ethiopia at the University of McKellar, came to this field of research. And there's a lot of new research now happening, but we're still dealing with a lot of the old mythology, which, I mean, something that's very close to my heart is just drawing attention to the complexities. because, I mean, there's some narrations, and a lot of it is tied up deeply with nationalism. Like, we're also taught at Ethiopian schools and are fundamental to identity,

but we've had a series of really devastating wars the last couple of years in Ethiopia, where sometimes you see medieval history even being weaponized for modern-day political purposes. So a lot of it is still in flux, but I think we just need to all be very careful to afford these realms the same complexity and care as we do for medieval European history, because otherwise we might end up with some sort of ethon, what's the word? Ethno-nationalist. Exactly. That's the word, like narration. And I think that does injustice to our historical sources,

but it also does injustice to the contemporary societies that are also incredibly complex. I mean, I suppose we get that everywhere. I mean, it's a big thing that I really have to fight against, for example, in the Czech historiography. The 19th century comes in, and suddenly everyone just wants to write about, you know, this inevitability of how these people are, oh, they're also Czech, and that's how they think of themselves. And it's a really weird thing in a lot of ways to kind of project onto medieval people, because they don't have these same categorizations. And so I do think it's really valuable to have these conversations because, you know, we always want to then pass

these beliefs onto the past while we're actually the ones who're kind of holding them up. And it's just also so much more fascinating. So one recent book I read by this new generation of historians, art historians, philologists working on this whole region for the pre-modern times, especially for quote-unquote the medieval period, looks at how the Zagwa first came to formation. So this is the dynasty that was before the solomonics. And so this is after this kingdom of Axum falls,

and we have at least two centuries where historical records are very scarce. We know that Christian and Muslim communities existed in the Highlands. And now there's this new evidence that shows that you have, for example, trading colonies from the Fatimits in Egypt that settled in the Ethiopian highlands in modern-day Tigray, and that their very trading activities led to the prospering of the surrounding Christian communities who were then able to build, like, really large-scale churches for the first time in centuries, because they had so much surplus wealth. And then you have like beautiful rockoon churches

that show very clearly like fatomid connections because people were traveling and whatnot. So if you really boil it down, you have the rise of a Christian entity that is facilitated by Muslim traders in that region and people just living side by then. I mean, that's just much more interesting and complex, I think, than some facile Christian in perpetuity

and, you know, like this orientalized vision of just this unchanging place in time. So speaking of how it's certainly not an unchanging place in time, your cutoff period is sort of the 16th century for when medieval Ethiopia. And so what is it at this time that you think really kind of marks that we're in the modern period now? What are the changes that you see take place? So we have like local factors and we have more global factors, right? So we have, as I said, there's a series of really devastating wars between like a form of

tributary sultanate and the Christian kingdom that just really disrupts things. We have the Ethiopian kings in the 15th and early 16th century sending embassies to Europe because they treat Europe, as I said, as a souvenir shop for religious bling that they bring back to the really gorgeous monasteries and churches that they're building in the Ethiopian highlands to demonstrate their own power, right? And throughout these embassies that are fully instigated and maintained by the Ethiopian kings, they also have context with the Portuguese. And the Portuguese, of course, are interested like, oh, you're Preston.

Would you like to fight the Muslims with us? And the Ethiopian kings are sort of like, no, thank you. Thank you, but no, thank you. We've heard this from the papacy before. We're really still not interested. Then, however, during this series of devastating wars, you have an Ethiopian king writing to the king of Portugal saying, I need your help. And if you give me your help, if you send me troops, because at this point, he's a king

without a kingdom. If you give me your help, I will basically become a... a Latin Christian, I will become your partner in whatever venture you want me to be, blah, blah, blah. The Portuguese send troops and help the Christian kingdom fight back and get control over its land again. And then the Portuguese troops stay. And so you have a sizable contingent of Latin Christians living in the Horn of Africa. And you're also at the global scale, of course, have the counter-reformation happening in Europe, because now we're in the 1550s, 60s.

So you have the newly founded Jesuits dispatching missionaries to the Highlands, and you have the Portuguese and the Indian Ocean, disrupting trade routes and just fighting with the Ottomans. And so that's the big global factors. And so that's where things really change, because you have a proto-colonial effort from the Jesuits and the Portuguese. Because also the Portuguese at this point in the late 16th century, they're really upset that the Ethiopian king isn't Presto John. How dare he not be Superman, especially seeing that his kingdom has just been through tremendous upheaval and war? So there's a lot of really disgruntled pamphots being written in Latin by Catholics at that point, right? About how this is really disappointing that it's not really Presta John and how Presta John wasn't all that great to begin with and blah, la la la. And that also once again has an impact, I think, because these sources, because they're written in Latin and they're just,

European sources. They were available to early historians in the 19th century, 20th century. And so you have a lot of legacy within the field even of how then Ethiopian history of that time was told for the longest time. I mean, we're going to have to leave it there because there's absolutely no way to dig any further without going on for another three hours, four hours. But I want to thank you so much for coming on Verena to talk about this, because I do think it's so important to kind of trouble these really easy stories about what dynasty means, what kingship means, and how that links on to an easy narrative about what a kingdom is and what it means and, you know, show that different places, surprise, are different. Different countries have their own things going on and there's other cultural

legacies and ways to approach a kingdom. I just think that's so valuable. I couldn't agree more. I couldn't agree more. And thankfully, there's a lot of new research coming out at the moment. And it's just, it's blowing long health beliefs that were really accepted even in encyclopedic books and whatnot. It's blowing that out of the water. And I, for one, I'm actually really quite happy because, like, first of all, any publication is like, there's one more thing we might think about, but also complexity is good. Yeah, well, I think we'll have to leave it there. And I'd like to say thank you so much, Raina, for joining me.

Thank you, everyone for listening. This has been Gone Medieval from History Hit. And if you've liked what you've heard, don't forget to read it. review, follow the podcast, and tell your friends about it. If you fancy suggesting an episode, you can drop us an email at Gone Medieval at historyhit.com. Otherwise, I'll be back again next Tuesday for another episode, and my co-host, Matt Lewis, will be back on Friday.

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