Empires of the Monsoon by Richard Hall

Author:Richard Hall
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2016-04-05T16:00:00+00:00

THIRTY-FOUR

Ethiopia and the Hopes of Rome

At length the sheep of Ethiopia freed

From the bad lions of the West

Securely in their pastures feed.

St Mark and Cyril’s doctrines have overcome

The follies of the Church of Rome.

Rejoice, rejoice, sing Hallelujahs all

No more the western wolves

Our Ethiopia shall enthrall.

—from the Ethiopian Chronicle 1632 (trans. C. F. Rey)

AS THE INTRICATE CONFLICTS ebbed and flowed in the Indian Ocean, on the periphery lay a prize more precious, to some minds, than worldly power or wealth. Ethiopia began to offer a new and irresistible challenge, long after the illusions of the Prester John legend were swept away. The two Portuguese expeditions had revealed that the Ethiopians were brave but backward in warfare, and fervent but heretical in religion. The ‘martyrdom’ of Christofe da Gama, as described by his surviving companion-in-arms, Miguel de Castanhoso, made the first of these discoveries all too plain: Ethiopia’s mountains were its only real defence against Islam. The second, the ‘wayward’ nature of Ethiopian Christianity, was exposed by the memoirs of Father Francisco Alvares, who had accompanied the first mission to the country.

This took on a new significance because of the religious convulsions shaking Europe. The Reformation, the rejection of Catholicism by the Protestants of northern Europe, led to the Counter-Reformation, and nowhere was this response more militant than in Portugal and Spain. Attention was being focused on heresy and heathenism everywhere. The fervour this generated was strong enough to bear the Catholic doctrine as far afield as Japan and Paraguay. The millions of souls in Ethiopia, all brands to be saved from the burning of hell, were not to be ignored.

The Jesuits had failed disastrously among the heathens of the Zambezi, but they saw the Christians of the Blue Nile as heretics only through long isolation, true believers who might readily be made to abandon doctrinal errors. So a Portuguese Jesuit, João Nunes Barreto, had been consecrated in Lisbon to become the patriarch of the Ethiopian church. Two assistant bishops were appointed to support him. It typified the European assumption of superiority that the Ethiopians themselves, who had been obtaining their own patriarchs from Egypt for a thousand years, were not thought to merit a say in the matter. Dogmatism seemed to blind the Portuguese to all evidence brought back by their two earlier expeditions about the likely perils of this scheme for spiritual conquest. However, King John III did decide that an envoy, armed with suitable gifts, should go ahead to tell the Ethiopian emperor that the patriarch was on his way.

It was still possible, if hazardous, to enter Ethiopia, and the envoy, Dr Diego Diaz, reached the Red Sea safely and hurried inland from a small port south of Massawa, together with a Jesuit priest and a lay brother. The emperor, Claudius, welcomed him warmly, for the country still remembered with gratitude the help brought by Christofe da Gama’s expedition in desperate times fourteen years earlier. The survivors of that expedition had been given farms, were raising families, and becoming prosperous by Ethiopian standards.

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