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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 .
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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)’.
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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. A. Mendes’ role, in due conformance with the directives he had received in Goa, is depicted against the backdrop of the expulsion of the Jesuits from Ethiopia in 1633, during a political and religious turmoil whose complex contours are shrouded with doubt and ideological misreading.
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PEDRO PAEZ’S HISTORy Of ETHIOPIA Four years aer Páez’s death, the text of the History of Ethiopia was used by his successor Manuel de Almeida, who modified and extended it, by including references to the events that occurred under the patriarchate of Afonso Mendes. Both Páez’s and Almeida’s manuscripts remained unpublished until the twentieth century, when they appeared in the collection prepared by the Jesuit Camillo Beccari. 8 Baltazar Telles, the Superior of the Portuguese Province of the Society of Jesus, published a much-reworked version of Almeida’s History in 1660. Almeida, in his re-written History , lays the ground for Páez’s posthumous legendary image, referring to him as a theologian, although he never obtained that grade, and as an architect, although the monumental stone churches were all built aer his death. What is most notable in the later part of Páez’s life is his symbiotic and mutually manipulative relationship with King Susényos. By giving lands and privileges to the Jesuits and accepting conversion to Catholicism, he was involving them in his internal power struggle with Ethiopian Orthodoxy. 9 Páez died as a result of a violent fever on his way to Gorgora, on 20 May 1622. Days before, he had heard King Susényos publicly confess the Catholic faith and impose limits on the authority of the Orthodox Church. * * * Given the circumstances and the setting of this lecture, 10 it is only proper that I focus some attention on the issues Pedro Páez discusses in Chapter 16 of Book 1 of the History of Ethiopia . I am referring specifically to the section of the book where he introduces the reader to the long sought aer River Nile and to his own empirical explorations of its source and course. is is the river Ethiopians call the Abbay, which was once identified with the biblical Ghion and is now commonly designated the Blue Nile. What we now know about the complex history of its exploration, and the millennial polemics surrounding the establishment of its sources and the expanse of its network, must neither belittle nor overestimate the actions and interpretations of the man who, as he very self- consciously puts it, claimed to be the first European to reach the remote double spring from which the Blue Nile waters first come over ground. According to his own description, Pedro Páez reached the source on 21 April 1618, when accompanying King Susenyos’s court and army to the Western shores of the great lake T’ana in Gojjam, a then rebellious area where the
8 Volumes 2 and 3 of C. Beccari’s, Rerum Aethiopicarum Scriptores Occidentales Inediti. 9 H. Pennec, Des Jésuites au royaume … , pp. 185 seq. 10 While preparing the present lecture I could not fail to be impressed by the fact that its setting was that same one where in 1859 John Hanning Speke and Richard Burton presented the results of their explorations of the White Nile basin, Speke’s discovery of Lake Nyanza, and his (disputed) claim to having found its source; see: R. Burton and J. Speke ‘Explorations in Eastern Africa’.
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PEDRO PAEZ’S HISTORy Of ETHIOPIA Christian kingdom confronted the local Agaw. 11 He seems to have reached the place with a small party of Ethiopians and so-called ‘Portuguese’ (i.e., the descendants of the military that had landed in the country in 1541 to battle the invading Muslim Addalis led by Emir Ahmad ibn Ibrihim al-Ghazi, best known as Amhad Gragn). He conveys to the reader the thrill of his discovery, and goes on to describe the location of the sources, and his experimental attitude towards confirming their depth, measuring the holes by dropping lances inside them. He refers to having found the bottom in one of them, 11 spans below (i.e., 99 inches or 2.5 metres), but not in the other: When I came to see it, it appeared to be no more than two round pools four spans in width. I confess I was overjoyed to see that which in ancient times King Cyrus and his son Cambyses, the great Alexander and the famous Julius Caesar had so longed to see. ( History of Ethiopia , p. 244.) He then followed the brook downstream to near the Zagwe Penninsula of that lake, and confirmed that with calm waters a weak but constant stream was perceptible in the lake coming from that area to the point where the waters flow to the River Abbay. Although he did not visit the exit point, he referred to having been informed by local inhabitants that: … When it leaves the lake, it takes with it much more water than it brought when it entered and, even though it is a very large river, in summer it can still be crossed on foot in some places where it spreads out. (Ibid., p. 246.) Pedro Páez is evidently aware of the importance of his discovery, in view of the historical depth of the quest for that river’s sources. He also advances an empirical explanation of the no less enigmatic flooding of the Nile, which preoccupied – as he says – Lucan, Saint Irineus, eodoret of Cyrus, Alonso Tostado, and Aristotle: Lake Dambiâ [T’ana] too, through which … this river passes, fills up by mid-August, more or less, with all the waters that flow into it. ereaer, the waters empty into it more ferociously without being diverted elsewhere, because no other river or even a stream runs out of it, while those that flow in are numerous and very large, particularly in
11 The people the Jesuits referred as the Agaw populated Gojjam and Gonder (namely the region previously known as Agawmeder). The name is taken in different ways by different authors: by linguists as a specific language family (Agaw or Central Cushitic), and by historians as the ancient populations of the northern parts of the Ethiopian highlands who suffered a process of ‘Abyssinisation’, i.e., who were by different measures brought in to the fold of the mainly Christian kingdom that dominated most of the highlands from the fourth century AD .
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PEDRO PAEZ’S HISTORy Of ETHIOPIA winter. is, then, is the real cause of the annual flooding of the River Nile: the many waters that join it, because it is winter here at that time and it rains a great deal. All the other causes that are given are fables and mere imagination. (Ibid., p. 247.) Let us take a moment to explore the motives behind his action of measuring the river’s sources and his observations on the swelling of the T’ana’s waters during the July-August rainy season. As is the case for most of Book 1 and sections of other Books of his History , Páez is here directly refuting the views put forward by Luis de Urreta, an erudite (and apparently somewhat exotic) Dominican Friar from Valencia, in his Ecclesiastical, Natural, Ethical and Political History of Ethiopia , published in 1610. It is Urreta who mentions and quotes Aristotle and the other aforesaid ancient and medieval scholars, and Páez does not seem to have read other sources than Urreta – aer all, he was a field missionary, not an intellectual. Why would he deem it important to measure the sources and to search for their bottom? e explicit answer is found in his own text: Friar Luis de Urreta also, in his Book 1, p. 305, philosophises in his own manner. He attributes these floods to the waters of the ocean sea which, pounded at that time by furious winds, enter along secret aquifers and veins as far as the lake where the Nile rises, and make it swell. And hence the river swells too. (Ibid., p. 247.) Clearly, Páez was not familiar with Aristotle’s discussion on meteorology and the variable porosity of the earthly element, which frames his discussion on the Nile’s floods, since he attributes the idea to Urreta himself. But in fact Aristotle’s source on this matter is ales of Milet and, before him, Herodotus. 12 e Greek geographer is the oldest known writer who mentions the enigma of the Nile’s summer floods. In chapters 19–31 of Book 2 of his Histories , Herodotus lists three current erroneous opinions about the summer flooding of the Nile: 1. e river’s estuary waters would recede due to stormy Etesian winds blowing from the Mediterranean, 2. e river’s waters flow from the Ocean, to which it is linked through underground channels, 3. e Nile’s waters derive from the melting of southern snows in the summer. Aer contradicting these notions, Herodotus offers his own explanation based on the influence of the sun’s variable seasonal position, a view that points to probable knowledge of the hemispheric inversion of seasons. In this respect, it is most curious that the second of the opinions that he lists, the one he outright
12 Herodotus, Histories , book 2, caps. 2–19.
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PEDRO PAEZ’S HISTORy Of ETHIOPIA declares the most ‘mythical’, 13 was the one that was retained for more than two millennia as the one worth discussing and revisiting. e later association between the Nile and the Biblical Ghion, on the one hand, and the Aristotelian influence in Medieval science would in fact ensure that a continuous flow of European cosmographic and cartographic constructions would support the view of the underground connection to the Indian Ocean, thus matching knowledge of the monsoons with the doctrinal concept of the four rivers flowing from Eden, situated in the Far East. 14 ough not a scholar, Páez felt that what he had found out from empirical experience could revolutionize the way Europeans envisaged the position of Ethiopia in Africa, as the extent of that country was related with the location of the Nile’s sources. 15 ough not conclusive as to its possible underground network, since he could not find the bottom in one of the pools, Páez’s measurements are a clear indication that a) such underground networks were an accepted hypothesis in early seventeenth century; b) empirical observation and exploration were the proper tools for the advancement of knowledge, geographical and otherwise. Important as the episode of the discovery of the (Blue) Nile sources may seem to us today, we must stress that it is but a minute footnote in both the economy of the 536 densely written folios that compose Páez’s manuscript and the larger context of the almost one century-long Jesuit mission in Ethiopia, from 1557 to their expulsion in 1633. And yet it aptly captures the spirit that moved him to write his History , and indeed to live and work in Ethiopia. roughout his work, Páez wholeheartedly takes the standpoint of the empirical refuter of antiquated and erroneous notions lingering in Europe both about the River Nile and the country that he embraced for 18 long years, until his sudden death of violent fevers in 1622, near the shores of the Lake T’ana. I shall not deal here with later polemics concerning the discovery of Blue Nile’s sources (namely the James Bruce / Samuel Johnson discussion) and the reasons behind the British search for the river’s ‘true sources’ in the mid-nineteenth century, except to mention that John Hanning Speke’s obsession with finding the source of the White Nile below the line of the Equator is still a distant echo of the discussion sparked by Herodotus on the causes of the river’s floods. In fact, in his Journal of the Discovery of the Source of the Nile , Speke is adamant in that the ‘true Nile’ should be the White, not the Blue Nile or Abbay,
13 On Herodotus’s meaning of ‘myth’, see M. Detienne, L’invention de la mythologie , pp. 99–100. 14 See O. G. S. Crawford’s ‘Some Medieval Theories about the Nile’. 15 Similarly, M. de Almeida’s map, included in the SOAS manuscript of his own Historia , later published in B. Teles’s book, offers a surprisingly accurate perspective of the Blue Nile and of Ethiopian territory, which had little or no impact in the European cartography of the day (B. Hirsch, Connaissances et figures de l’Éthiopie dans la cartographie occidentale ; H. Pennec, ‘Savoirs missionnaires en contexts’, pp. 202–3). Ethiopia would only be reduced to a realistic dimension in European maps in the course of the 19th century.
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PEDRO PAEZ’S HISTORy Of ETHIOPIA since, as he puts it, in the dry season the later is but a trickle of water. 16 His view had an enduring influence in the geographical categorization of the Nile. Speke also rejoices at the fact that the river’s source was 3 degrees south of the Equator, thus swelling during the Southern rainy season. We should read his elation as late evidence that the Herodotian hypothesis was only partly retained by European cosmographers until the nineteenth century explorations of Central Africa. For centuries cosmographers and cartographers played with the idea that the Nile originated south of the Equator and that its sources were common to other main African rivers (deriving from an imagined African central lake), but failed to give due importance to the hemispherical inversion of seasons implied in Herodotus’ words, as mentioned earlier. 17 ere is, in the historical polemics surrounding the Nile, sufficient room to speculate as to why the Royal Geographical Society so readily accepted Speke’s views on the ‘true Nile’. As the ‘scramble for Africa’ rushed on, geographical exploration of the continent went hand in hand with European decision-makers considering the establishment of areas of colonial influence. Abyssinia being closed to European land grabbing (though I feel that the reasons for this are yet in need of further analysis), it seemed only fitting that the triple goal of searching for the Nile’s sources, the Central Lake and the Mountains of the Moon should be retained as a geographical imperative. In noting this, I am not claiming that Páez’s actions and descriptions regarding the discovery of the sources of the (Blue) Nile should deserve more credit than they have been given until the present date. My interest is rather to underline the fact that wider knowledge of his geographical discoveries, and more generally of his ethnographical findings in Ethiopia, was hindered by the specific circumstances of the Jesuit mission in Ethiopia, the political and monastic convolutions in the Iberian Peninsula at the time, and the censorship to which his uncharacteristic writing was subjected. In this regard, the following point should be mentioned: that Pedro Páez’s History of Ethiopia was le unpublished until the beginning of the twentieth century, when the Jesuit Camilo Beccari edited most of the Ethiopian mission’s materials in the Rerum Aethiopicarum Scriptores Occidentales . Manuel de Almeida, who was appointed by the Society of Jesus in 1626 to revise and rewrite Páez’s manuscript, acknowledged Páez as the discoverer of the
16 Though the White Nile is evidently longer, we know today that 86% of the Nile’s waters come from the Blue Nile basin system. See: A. Melesse, ‘Hydrological Variability and Climate of the Upper Blue Nile …’, p. 3. 17 In a footnote to his What Led to the Discovery of the Nile , a reworked version of his initial Journal , Speke writes on the discovery of the Nile’s source: ‘Had the ancient kings and sages known that a rainy zone existed on the equator, they would not have puzzled their brains so long, and have wondered where those waters came from …’ (p. 298, note). And then, in a further note on the position of the Nile in the African hydrographical system, where he argues against Burton’s thesis that the river’s source should lie behind the ‘Mountains of the Moon’ (p. 369, note), he claims that it lies at 3 degrees south of the Equator.
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PEDRO PAEZ’S HISTORy Of ETHIOPIA Nile’s sources but his History of High Ethiopia or Abassia was not published either. Although he used most of the information Páez provided on Ethiopia, on such diverse aspects as geography, zoology, theology and politics, and on the role of the Jesuits in Ethiopia, he strongly reduced the weight and character of the refutation of Urreta’s book. Baltazar Teles, Superior of the Portuguese Province of the Society of Jesus, who had never set foot in Ethiopia, eventually published a much-reworked version of Almeida’s manuscript in 1660 as the History of High Ethiopia or Prester John , where he attributed the discovery of the sources to ‘our Portuguese missionaries’, and simultaneously erased all traces of the Dominican-Jesuit controversy. So, just as Páez was being falsely promoted as an architect and theologian by his peers (and particularly by Almeida), 18 his authorship was being denied and his role in the geographical exploration of the Nile was being censored, in the embittered context following the expulsion of the Jesuits from Ethiopia and the no less problematic religious and political convulsions in the Iberian Peninsula during which the Society of Jesus became prominent in Portugal, aer the so- called restoration of its independence in 1640, which they wholeheartedly supported and ideologically fathered, unlike their Dominican rivals. * * * I would like briefly to deal with this specific act of censorship, inasmuch as it illustrates a broader attitude within the Goa Province of the Society of Jesus towards the nature of Pedro Páez’s inquiring and writing method, which is, as already mentioned, an argumentative refutation of the views expounded by the Dominican friar Luis de Urreta regarding the political, religious and cultural characteristics of the Ethiopian kingdom. Refutation is in fact the explicit key to his enquiry into the various aspects of Christian Ethiopian life and history, an endeavour in which he immersed himself from at least 1614. For a better understanding of his procedure, let us make a quick step back in time to the period when the Jesuits made their entrance in Portugal. Much has been written about the noxious influences of the Catholic Inquisition in Portugal and its effect on the early decapitation of the early sixteenth-century humanist mindset. e end of the freethinking school (the so-called estrangeirados ) created a vacuum that was to be filled by the rise of the Jesuit higher education system, a refined but obedient artefact of the counter-reformation. Some of the finer anthropological investigative production of the later sixteenth century and seventeenth century, be it in India, Africa or South America, is to be found in the Relations , Annual Letters , Histories and Treaties of the Padroado missionaries of the Society of Jesus. In what relates to the Christian Ethiopian kingdom – a country that had been identified as the ‘Land of Prester John’ in fieenth-century Southern
18 See the Introduction of Páez’s History of Ethiopia , pp. 36–40.
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PEDRO PAEZ’S HISTORy Of ETHIOPIA European cartography and cosmography 19 – it is important to note that the production of geographical and sociological knowledge on that region was intimately connected with the rare privilege given to the Jesuits by the papacy and the Portuguese kings to promote missionary work in exclusivity there – a privilege that was to raise envy among other orders, and particularly among the Dominicans. e Dominican João dos Santos, in his extraordinary book Oriental Ethiopia (1609), attempts to tie in Ethiopia proper with the coastal regions of Eastern Africa and the Western Indian Ocean. Such endeavour is a reflection of the uneasiness the Predicators felt towards the above-mentioned privilege of the Jesuit Ethiopic mission. But the most clear case of this rivalry is the publication, in 1610, in Valencia, of Luis de Urreta’s Ecclesiastical, Natural, Ethical and Political History of Ethiopia .20 e book is explicitly a late example of a stream of European geographical fantasies where Ethiopia was presented as the wondrous and utopian-like kingdom of Prester John. But more importantly, it was a rhetorical fantasizing about a supposed ancient Dominican missionary presence in Ethiopia with the view of arguing that this monastic order should thus be given precedence over the Jesuits as Catholic missionaries in that country. 21 Urreta validated his information by presenting it as coming directly from the mouth of an imaginary native informant (Juan Baltazar), a device that was to be used frequently aerwards, from Iob Ludolf to Samuel Johnson. 22 e Jesuit hierarchy duly responded by asking Fernão Guerreiro and Nicolau Godinho 23 to write and publish harsh refutations of the Dominican’s views, based on information forwarded in the letters and reports written by Jesuit missionaries in Ethiopia. But, since these writers did not have first-hand experience of the Ethiopian kingdom, the Jesuit superiors further required an on-the-ground refutation of Urreta’s thesis. Wary of a possible denigration of the Jesuit’s stance on Ethiopia, the Provincial of Goa ordered Páez, then the Superior of the mission, to produce the work. Le on his own, over the years Páez produced much more than a simple refutation. His is a long and vivid account of Ethiopia, the Jesuit Mission, his own personal adventures in, and explorations of, the country. e 536 densely written folios reflect his strenuous effort at observing, interviewing,
19 See F. Medeiros, L’Occident et l’Afrique , pp. 198–203; M. J. Ramos, Essays in Christian Mythology , pp. 110–13; F. Relaño, The Shaping of Africa , pp. 55–8. 20 L. de Urreta would in 1611 return to the same subject in a new book, the History of the Sacred Order of the Preachers . 21 I. Boavida, ‘História e Fábula …’, p. 183. 22 The device of the native informant, as developed by M. de Montaigne in his Essai sur les canibals , would in the 18th century become an important topos in French social criticism: Voltaire’s l’Ingénu ; Diderot’s Bougainville ; Sade’s Aline et Valcour , to name but a few authors, turn the native informant into a vehicle of criticism of Western society. 23 Fernão Guerreiro, Addition to the Relation of Ethiopia , 1611; Nicolau Godinho, Of Abyssinian Matters , 1615.
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PEDRO PAEZ’S HISTORy Of ETHIOPIA collecting, confronting, translating and interpreting the Ethiopian sociological and cultural reality of his day. But still, refutation is the catalyst of his method and mood. 24 Now, why would the Jesuits decide not to publish a work that they had explicitly ordered? e pretext laid out by Páez’s superiors, aer his death, was that his grasp of Portuguese was tainted by his mother tongue, this being the ostensible reason for having Almeida revise the manuscript. e argument holds little water though: the Braga manuscript of Páez’s text is already a revision of the autograph preserved in Rome. In fact, what had been seen in 1612 as an advantage, turned posthumously against Páez: by designating a Spanish refuter to Urreta, the Portuguese Jesuits wanted to avoid discredit on the grounds of nationalism. But when the book was evaluated for publication, in the 1630s, the degrading relations between the Portuguese and Spanish during the last years of the Philippine dynasty weighed in the final decision. Still, the issues of language and nationality were secondary to what was really at the heart of the matter. What in the end was to be extricated from Páez’s manuscript was his intellectual procedure whereby refutation was to be achieved through ethno - graphic inquiry. Again, possibly for fear of friction with the Dominicans – Portuguese, this time – who still held sway over the Portuguese Inquisition, Almeida’s revised text was not published because it still contained traces of the Páez-Urreta dispute. Telles’s later book, published twenty years aer Portugal’s separation from Spain, is the result of an enduring series of censorship acts that made the History of Ethiopia an edible but decidedly insipid, dull and by then somewhat irrelevant book. * * * It is a sad fact that the scientific impact of Pedro Páez’s History of Ethiopia , before and aer its publication in 1906, has been undermined by two important factors, notwithstanding the difficulties arising from the lack of modernization and translation of this early seventeenth-century work: 1. e scope of corporative interests within the Society of Jesus that led to the development of a quasi-hagiographic legend around his figure (as has been the case of various biographers, from Almeida onwards), 25 that overshadowed the relevance of his scientific procedures; 2. e weight of nationalist appropriation of the historiography of the Ethiopian mission - in Portugal, from the late nineteenth century onwards but more evidently since the palaeographic edition of the Braga manuscript of the History in 1947, and more recently in Spain, in the historical and literary productions directly or indirectly related
24 Introduction of Páez’s History of Ethiopia , pp. 16–19. See also I. Boavida, ‘História e Fábula’, pp. 187–8. 25 See Cohen, The Missionary Strategies , pp. 4–5.
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PEDRO PAEZ’S HISTORy Of ETHIOPIA with contemporary Spanish governmental diplomacy in Ethiopia. 26 Such projects have generally concentrated on aggrandizing the Portuguese, Spanish or simply Jesuit, presence in Ethiopia, instead of focusing on cross-checking the knowledge the mission produced with local written and even oral sources, and favouring a comparative stance in a general history of Catholic missions of that period. It is the hope of the editors of Pedro Páez’s History of Ethiopia , and surely also the hope of the Hakluyt Society, that the publication of its English translation, annotated as it is with an inter-textual outreach, may help give the work a new, brighter life as a relevant source in the fields of religious and literary comparative history, of Ethiopian ethnographic production and of geographical exploration of the Horn of Africa.
26 For the team of editors of Páez’s History of Ethiopia , the analysis of these historiographic conundrums is still a work in progress.
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PEDRO PAEZ’S HISTORy Of ETHIOPIA References
[Note: Ethiopian names do not have the paternal name placed first in lists.]
Almeida, Manuel, ‘Historia de Ethiopia a alta, ou Abassia : Imperio do Abexim, cujo Rey vulgarmente he chamado Preste Joam … Composta pelo Padre Manoel de Almeida da Companhia de Iesus, natural de Viseu’, MS London, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), MS 11966. Arrowsmith-Brown, H., ed., Prutky’s Travels to Ethiopia and Other Countries , London, Hakluyt Society, 2nd ser. 174, 1991. Assefa M. Melesse, Wossenu Abtew, Shimelis G. Setegn, and Tibebe Dessalegne, ‘Hydrological Variability and Climate of the Upper Blue Nile River Basin’ in Assefa Melesse, ed., Nile River Basin: Hydrology, climate and water use , Dordrecht, Heidelberg, London and New York, c. 2011, pp. 3–38. Beccari, Camilo, ed., Rerum Aethiopicarum Scriptores Occidentales Inediti a saeculo XVI ad XIX . 15 vols, Rome, 1903–17. Beckingham, Charles F. and Huntingford, George W. B., eds, A True Relation of the Lands of the Prester John, being the narrative of the Portuguese Embassy to Ethiopia in 1520, written by father francisco Alvares . 2 vols, London, Hakluyt Society, 2nd ser. 114 , 1961. Beckingham, Charles F. and Huntingford, George W. B., eds, Some Records of Ethiopia, 1593-1646, Being Extracts om e History of High Ethiopia or Abassia by Manoel de Almeida Together with Bahrey’s History of the Galla , London, Hakluyt Society, 2nd ser. 107, 1954. Boavida, Isabel, ‘História e fábula: a discussão em torno das “histórias” de Fr. Luís de Urreta no século XVII’ in Colóquio Literatura e História, Para uma prática interdisciplinary: Actas , Lisbon, 2005, pp. 181–96. Boavida, Isabel, Pennec, Hervé, Ramos Manuel João, eds. and Tribe, Christopher, trans., Pedro Páez’s History of Ethiopia, 1622 , 2 vols, London, Hakluyt Society, 3rd ser. 23–4, 2011. Burton, Richard and Speke, John Hanning, ‘Explorations in Eastern Africa’, Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society of London , 3, 6, 1858–9, pp. 348–58. Cohen, Leonardo, e missionary strategies of the Jesuits in Ethiopia (1555– 1632) , Wiesbaden, 2009. Crawford, Osbert G. S. ‘Some Medieval eories about the Nile’, e Geographical Journal , 114, 1/3, July-September 1949, pp. 6–23. Crawford, Osbert G. S., ed, Ethiopian Itineraries circa 1400–1524, Including those Collected by Alessandro Zorzi at Venice in the years 1519–24 , London, Hakluyt Society, 2nd ser. 109, 1958. Da Costa, M. G., ed., and Beckingham, Charles F., introduction and notes, e Itinerario of Jerónimo Lobo , London, Hakluyt Society, 2nd ser. 162, 1983. Detienne, Marcel, L’invention de la mythologie , Paris, 1981.
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PEDRO PAEZ’S HISTORy Of ETHIOPIA Godinho, Nicolau, De Abassinorum rebus, Deque Aethiopiae Patriarchis Ioanne Nonio Barreto, et Andrea Oviedo, libri tres , Lugduni, 1615. Guerreiro, Fernão, ‘Adição à relação das coisas de Etiópia com mais larga informação delas, mui certa e mui diferente das que seguiu o Padre Frei Luis de Urreta no livro que imprimiu da história daquele império do Preste-João’, in Relação anual das coisas que fizeram os Padres da Companhia de Jesus nas suas missões dos anos 1600 a 1609 , vol. 3, Coimbra and Lisbon, 1942 (1st edn, Lisbon, 1611), pp. 287–380. Herodotus, e Histories, trans. Robin Waterfield, introduction by Carolyn Dewald, Oxford, 1998. Hirsch, Bertrand, Connaissances et figures de l’Éthiopie dans la cartographie occidentale du XIVe siècle au XVIe siècle , doctoral thesis, Paris (CRA), 1990. Medeiros, François de, L’Occident et l’Aique (XIIIe-XVe siècle): Images et representations, Paris, 1985. Merid Wolde Aregay, ‘e Legacy of Jesuit Missionary Activities in Ethiopia from 1555 to 1632’, in Getatchew Haile, Aasulv Lande and Samuel Rubenson, eds, e Missionary factor in Ethiopia: Papers om a Symposium on the Impact of European Missions on Ethiopian Society, Lund University, August 1996 , Frankfurt am Main, 1998, pp. 53–5. Pennec, H., ‘Savoirs missionnaires en contextes. Savoirs en dialogue (Éthiopie, XVIIe siècle)’ in Charlotte de Castelnau-L’Estoile, Marie-Lucie Copete, Aliocha Maldavsky, Ines G. Zupanov , eds, Missions d’évangélisation et circulation des savoirs, XVIe-XVIIIe siècle , Madrid, 2011, pp. 191–207. Pennec, H., Des jésuites au royaume du prêtre Jean: Éthiopie. Stratégies, rencontres et tentatives d’implantation 1495–1633 , Paris, 2003. Pennec, H., and Ramos, M. J., ‘Páez, Pedro (1564–1622)’ in Jennifer Speake, ed., Literature of Travel and Exploration. An Encyclopedia , 3 vols, New York and London, 2003, pp. 908–10. Ramos, Manuel João, Essays in Christian Mythology: e metamorphosis of Prester John , Langhan, 2006. Relaño, Francesc, e Shaping of Aica. Cosmographic Discourse and Cartographic Science in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, Aldershot, 2002. Santos, João dos, Etiópia Oriental e vária história de coisas notáveis do Oriente, ed. Manuel Lobato and Eduardo Medeiros, Lisbon, 1999. (1st edn, Lisbon, 1609). Speke, John Hanning, Journal of the Discovery of the Source of the Nile , Edinburgh and London, 1863. Speke, John Hanning, What Led to the Discovery of the Source of the Nile . Edinburgh and London, 1864. Teles, Baltazar, Historia geral de Ethiopia a Alta, ou Preste Ioam, e do que nella obraram os padres da Companhia de Iesus: composta na mesma Ethiopia, pelo Padre Manoel d’Almeyda, natural de Vizeu, Provincial, e Visitador, que foy
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PEDRO PAEZ’S HISTORy Of ETHIOPIA na India. Abreviada com nova releyçam, e methodo, pelo Padre Balthezar Tellez, natural de Lisboa, Provincial da Provincia Lusitana: ambos da mesma Companhia , Coimbra, 1660. Urreta, Luis de, Historia Eclesiastica, Politica, Natural, y Moral, de los Grandes, Remotos Reynos de la Etiopia, Monarchia del Emperador, llamado Preste Iuan de las Indias. Muy util y provechosa para todos estados, principalmente para Predicadores. A la Sacratissima y sempre Virgen Maria del Rosario , València, 1610. Urreta, Luis de, Historia de la Sagrada Orden de Predicadores, en los Remotos Reynos de la Etiopia. Trata de los prodigiosos Sãtos, Martyres, y Cõfessores, Inquisidores Apostolicos, de los Cõventos de Plurimanos, dõde viuen nueue mil ayles: del Alleluya con siete mil; y de Bedenagli, de cinco mil monjas: con otras grandezas de la Religion del Padre santo Domingo , València, 1611.
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