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Annual Lecture 2011 26/02/2012 20:10 Page 1 Lecture 2011_Annual Lecture 2011 26/02/2012 20:10 Page 1 THE HAKLUYT SOCIETY ANNUAL LECTURE 2011 PEDRO PÁEZ’S HISTORY OF ETHIOPIA : ON EXPLORATION, REFUTATION AND CENSORSHIP Manuel Ramos Delivered at the Annual General Meeting of the Hakluyt Society 29 June 2011 Mr President of the Hakluyt Society, Ladies and Gentlemen, I sincerely wish to thank the generous and honouring invitation that the Hakluyt Society has addressed me to present its 2011 annual lecture. Given that the long awaited publication in the Hakluyt Society’s ird Series of the work of the Spanish Jesuit missionary Pedro Páez, History of Ethiopia , is now imminent, 1 I have chosen to share with you some brief thoughts on his life, on his achievements, and also on the convoluted fate of his opus . In truth, this edition of Páez’s History will add to an already important body of knowledge published by the Society relating to the geographical and sociological exploration of the Horn of Africa and particularly of Ethiopia in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, namely the writings of Alessandro Zorzi, Francisco Álvares, Manuel de Almeida, Jerónimo Lobo and Remedius Prutky. 2 For the editors, Hervé Pennec, Isabel Boavida and myself, as well as for the translator, Christopher Tribe, the joy of seeing through the publication of the English version of this book is immense, not least because Pedro Páez’s work will finally be available to many scholars and interested public unfamiliar with early seventeenth century Portuguese, the language adopted by the author, a Spaniard by birth. I mention this because we set out working in 2000 on the project of studying and comparing the original manuscripts, annotating and revising the text, with a major consideration in mind: that the History of Ethiopia written by Pedro Páez is an essential cornerstone to the understanding of a rich flow of sources 1 The present lecture took place on 29 June 2011, at the Royal Geographical Society in London; in the following November, the Hakluyt Society published the two volumes of Pedro Páez’s History of Ethiopia, 1622 , eds I. Boavida, H. Pennec, M. J. Ramos; transl. C. Tribe; the translated and revised edition of the História da Etiópia de Pedro Paez , that the same editors have published for the collection Obras Primas da Literatura Portuguesa of the Direcção-Geral do Livro e das Bibliotecas, Lisbon, 2008, itself a critical edition, in modern Portuguese, of the original work by Pedro Paez. 2 C. F. Beckingham and G. W. B. Huntingford, eds, Some Records of Ethiopia, 1593–1646 ; O. G. S. Crawford, ed., Ethiopian Itineraries circa 1400–1524 ; C. F. Beckingham and G. W. B. Huntingford, eds, A True Relation of the Lands of the Prester John ; M. G. Da Costa, ed., and C. E. Beckingham, introduction and notes, The Itinerario of Jerónimo Lobo ; H. Arrowsmith-Brown, ed., Prutky’s Travels to Ethiopia and Other Countries . 1 Lecture 2011_Annual Lecture 2011 26/02/2012 20:10 Page 2 PEDRO PAEZ’S HISTORy Of ETHIOPIA both for a particularly poignant period in the social, political and religious history of Ethiopia, and for the construction of the geographical setting of this region. 3 ere are other contemporary Western writers on Ethiopian matters that would undoubtedly also merit scholarly publication – Manuel Barradas, Afonso Mendes and António Fernandes, to name but a few. 4 Our choice fell on Pedro Páez because of the systematic and innovative nature of his work, its founding characteristics in respect to Ethiopian studies, and generally the special insight he brings to our knowledge of Ethiopian civilization – one must not forget that his are the first ever Western translations of essential Ethiopian religious and historical texts. I hope I shall be able to convey to you in the following minutes at least a fraction of our enthusiasm and dedication to this project and the relevance of the topic in as far as it touches on the preoccupations of this Society. * * * Pedro Páez was born in 1564, in Olmeda de las Cebollas (today Olmeda de las Fuentes), in Spain. 5 He joined the Society of Jesus in 1582, and in 1588, not having finished his studies in Belmonte (under Tomas de Ituren), he sailed to Goa. In 1589, he was appointed to accompany the very experienced Father Antonio de Monserrat in a mission destined for Ethiopia. e decision to send new missionaries to Ethiopia, aer the fiasco of the mission led by Andrés de Oviedo sent in 1557, came from King Filipe I of Portugal (and II of Spain). Filipe’s motives were both strategic and diplomatic, but also religious: the missionaries sent in 1557 were presumably either dead or very old, and the descendants of the Portuguese community in Ethiopia were believed to be lacking spiritual guidance. Páez and Montserrat le Goa and set sail for Ethiopia, but their ship sank off Dhofar, Southern Arabia, and they were taken as prisoners to Yemen. ey were kept in San’a, and later served as rowers in a Turkish galley. Almost seven years later, Goa agreed to pay a large ransom to liberate them. In 1603, Páez managed to reach Ethiopia, arriving alone at Massawa, disguised as an Armenian 3 For a comprehensive review of the period and the issues in question, see: H. Pennec, Des jésuites au royaume du prêtre Jean ; L. Cohen, The missionary strategies of the Jesuits in Ethiopia (1555–1632) . See also the Introduction of the Hakluyt Society’s edition of Pedro Páez’s History of Ethiopia, 1622 . 4 C. Beccari has published most of the Jesuit Ethiopian mission’s documents in his Rerum Æthiopicarum Scriptores Occidentales Inediti , in fifteen volumes, published between 1903 to 1915, in the original language (mainly Portuguese and Latin). Though the quality and rigour of his RASOI is not in doubt, there is sufficient ground to argue for scholarly, critical, English editions of some of more outstanding works included in that collection, or those left out because they had been already published in the 17th century; furthermore, a number of manuscripts relating to the mission still remains unpublished, namely, a few letters in the MS 778 BPB of the Braga Municipal Archives. 5 For the following notes on Pedro Páez’ biography, see the Introduction of Pedro Páez’s History of Ethiopia , and H. Pennec and M. J. Ramos, ‘Páez, Pedro (1564–1622)’. 2 Lecture 2011_Annual Lecture 2011 26/02/2012 20:10 Page 3 PEDRO PAEZ’S HISTORy Of ETHIOPIA merchant. is was the starting point of the second phase of the Jesuit mission in Ethiopia. In the next two years, four other missionaries would join him. From 1603 to his death in 1622, Páez led a mission that seemed destined for success. e priests had been initially limited to offering teaching in Catholic doctrine to Luso-Ethiopian children and tried to guarantee that the adults kept their Catholic faith and identity. But the character of the mission changed from 1607 onwards. 6 When King Susényos acceded to the throne, Páez oen stayed at the royal camp. He acted as the king’s special councillor and followed him on his many journeys. It was largely due to the Jesuit’s insistence that Susényos converted to the Catholic faith, in 1621. 7 From 1613/14 onwards, Páez was requested by his superiors in Rome and India to refute the Historia … de los grandes y remotos Reynos de la Etiopía , a polemic book published in 1610 by the Valencian Friar Luis de Urreta, where the author claimed that Ethiopia had been converted to Catholicism by Dominican missionaries in the fieenth century, thus implying that the Jesuit presence there was unnecessary (I shall come back to this issue later). Pedro Páez duly began compiling material and writing his History of Ethiopia . e work, finished during 1622 on his deathbed, was written in Portuguese and was based on unusually comprehensive ethnographic and historical research. To refute Urreta and to write his complex esco of Ethiopian Christianity he gathered oral testimonies from courtiers and ecclesiastics, consulted manuscripts on political and religious history and visited important religious sites. e History thus marked a decisive step in the development of sound empirical knowledge about Ethiopia. Aer his death, the original manuscript was sent to India in 1624 but did not reach Europe immediately. Instead, the appointed Patriarch Afonso Mendes took it again to Ethiopia in 1625, since it contained precious information to be read by the new missionaries sent there aer the king’s conversion to Catholicism. 6 H. Pennec, Des jésuites au royame du Prêtre Jean , pp. 220 seq.; L. Cohen, The Missionary Strategies of the Jesuits in Ethiopia , pp. 55 seq. Both authors offer a view of events that departs from the traditional ecumenist reading; by dealing with the Ethiopian sovereign’s strategic opposition against the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, they place the Jesuit mission in a new light. 7 The traditional historical views relating to Páez’s role in the conversion of the Ethiopian king to Catholicism, propounded by Jesuit scholars and generally accepted by most researchers, portray the missionary as a tolerant multiculturalist, contrasting him to a supposedly intolerant and forceful Afonso Mendes, the appointed Catholic patriarch who arrived in Ethiopia a few years afters Páez’s death to ensure that the conversion of the king and court obeyed the letter of the tridentine doctrine. But Merid Wolde Aregay, in his ‘The Legacy of Jesuit Missionary Activity in Ethiopia’, alerts us to the risk of anachronism in such psychological interpretation of texts that need careful critical reading. Páez and his surviving companions (and above all M. de Almeida) self-indulgently give themselves an aggrandizing role in the texts they direct to the Jesuit hierarchy, in line with what they saw then as a successful mission.
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