A Travel Guide to the Middle Ages: The World Through Medieval Eyes by Bale Anthony

Author:Bale, Anthony
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2024-04-23T00:00:00+00:00

9.

A Detour to Ethiopia

Aghmat – Rio del Oro – Malsa – Barara

South of the Holy Land and beyond Egypt lay Ethiopia, a vast terrain connected to the Mediterranean via the River Nile. The medieval kingdom of Ethiopia was somewhat cut off from Europe by deserts, distance and wars with Islamic rulers. Historically, it was an embattled and sometimes expansionist Christian empire with a significant Muslim minority. The kingdom, vying for supremacy with Muslim sultanates in the Horn of Africa, was focused on the central plateau, running north to south from the Dahlak archipelago in the Red Sea to Lake Shalla in the Ethiopian rift valley. The Ethiopian Church, established in the fourth century and united with the Coptic Church, built elaborate hall-basilicas throughout the country. These include the unique thirteenth-century buildings of Lalibela, a ‘New Jerusalem’ of eleven elaborate churches hewn in the living rock. The complex includes its own Golgotha and Mount Sinai. Lalibela may well have been founded as a response to the Muslim conquest of Jerusalem in 1187, which made the journey there even more difficult. In time, to travel to Lalibela as a pilgrim was obligatory for medieval Ethiopian Christians.

Ethiopian Christians had communities at Jerusalem itself and in Egypt and Cyprus, where Europeans were most likely to come into contact with them.

However, to European minds, the borders of Ethiopia were utterly undefined and the term ‘Ethiopia’ was used for much of Africa. In one common definition, Ethiopia stretched from the Atlas Mountains to the end of Egypt, from the Atlantic to the Red Sea. Africa was, in European accounts, remarkable because it was huge, as if there was simply too much of it to account for. On the famous map of c. 1450 by Fra Mauro, a Venetian monk and cartographer, Ethiopia and its related realm of ‘Abassia’ (Abyssinia) occupy almost half of the African continent, seeming to stretch from Africa’s southern tip to its north-western edge.

When Martin Behaim was dispatched by the Portuguese king on a ‘voyage of discovery’ to ‘Ethiopia’ in 1484, he sailed around west Africa, finding ‘another world’, previously unknown to Europeans, in the vicinity of what are today the coasts of Gabon and Angola. When he came to make his Globe, less than ten years later, he relied instead on the accounts of Ptolemy and Marco Polo for his description of Ethiopia, showing the ‘Emperor’ of ‘Abassia’ on his throne with a devout subject kneeling before him. This emperor’s people are Christian, says the Globe, ‘and trade gold and ivory’.

Medieval Ethiopia was long believed to be the home of marvellous (or monstrous) humans. Homer had called the Ethiopians ‘the furthest of men’, dwelling in a distant land beyond the seas. Mandeville, writing in his 1350s travel guide, said that Ethiopia, ‘a vast country’, was inhabited in the south by ‘utterly black’ people (the name Aithiopes derives from the Greek for ‘burned visages’). Like many medieval writers, Mandeville saw geography as fundamentally linked to physiology; the definition of the Ethiopians by their

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