Bulletin of SOAS, 82, 3 (2019), 493–515. © SOAS University of London, 2019. This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. doi:10.1017/S0041977X19000697 Re-examining Foresti’s Supplementum Chronicarum and the “Ethiopian” embassy to Europe of 1306 Verena Krebs Ruhr University Bochum, Germany
[email protected] Abstract A widely reported story in the historiography on medieval Ethiopia relates how, in the year 1306, an “Ethiopian” embassy visited the court of Pope Clement V in Avignon and offered military aid in the fight against Islam to Latin Christianity. This article re-examines the source – Jacopo Filippo Foresti’s Supplementum Chronicarum – thought to document an episode of one of the earliest European–African Christian contacts. It investigates Foresti’s own sources, their historiographical transmission his- tory, and the feasibility of relating it to the socio-political entity of Solomonic Ethiopia in the Horn of Africa in the early fourteenth century, concluding that Foresti’s information was based on Latin Christian texts, such as the Legenda Aurea and the myth of Prester John, only. The ‘Ethiopian’ embassy of 1306 is thus not borne out by sources and should be dismissed in scholarship, resetting the timeline of official Ethiopian– Latin Christian contacts in the late medieval period. Keywords: Ethiopian history, Medieval history, Diplomacy, Prester John, Historiography, Solomonic Dynasty, Nubian history, Embassy 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.1 Most scholarship follows a narration by historian Raleigh A.