Downloaded by [New York University] at 00:26 03 December 2016 The African Prester John and the Birth of Ethiopian-European Relations, 1402–1555 From the 14th century onward, political and religious motives led Ethiopian trave- lers to Mediterranean Europe. For two centuries, their ancient Christian heritage and the myth of a fabled eastern king named Prester John allowed Ethiopians to engage the continent’s secular and religious elites as peers. Meanwhile in Ethiopia, the nobility came to welcome European visitors and at times even co-opted them by arranging mixed marriages and bestowing land rights. The protagonists of this encounter sought and discovered each other in royal palaces, monasteries, and markets throughout the Mediterranean basin, the Red Sea, and the Indian Ocean littoral, from Lisbon to Jerusalem and from Venice to Goa. Matteo Salvadore’s narrative takes readers on a voyage of reciprocal discovery that climaxed with the Portuguese intervention on the side of the Christian monarchy in the Ethiopian- Adali War. Thereafter, the arrival of the Jesuits in the Horn of Africa turned the mutually beneficial Ethiopian-European encounter into a bitter confrontation over the souls of Ethiopian Christians. Matteo Salvadore is Assistant Professor of History at American University of Sharjah, United Arab Emirates. Downloaded by [New York University] at 00:26 03 December 2016 Transculturalisms, 1400–1700 Series Editors: Mihoko Suzuki, University of Miami, USA, Ann Rosalind Jones, Smith College, USA, Jyotsna Singh, Michigan State University, USA This series presents studies of the early modern contacts and exchanges among the states, polities and entrepreneurial organizations of Europe; Asia, including the Levant and East India/Indies; Africa; and the Americas. Books will investi- gate travelers, merchants and cultural inventors, including explorers, mapmakers, artists and writers, as they operated in political, mercantile, sexual and linguistic economies. We encourage authors to reflect on their own methodologies in rela- tion to issues and theories relevant to the study of transculturism/translation and transnationalism. We are particularly interested in work on and from the perspec- tive of the Asians, Africans, and Americans involved in these interactions, and on such topics as: • Material exchanges, including textiles, paper and printing, and technologies of knowledge • Movements of bodies: embassies, voyagers, piracy, enslavement • Travel writing: its purposes, practices, forms and effects on writing in other genres • Belief systems: religions, philosophies, sciences • Translations: verbal, artistic, philosophical • Forms of transnational violence and its representations. Also in this series: The Chinese Impact upon English Renaissance Literature A globalization and liberal cosmopolitan approach to Donne and Milton Mingjun Lu Downloaded by [New York University] at 00:26 03 December 2016 Commedia dell’ Arte and the Mediterranean Charting journeys and mapping ‘Others’ Erith Jaffe-Berg Early Modern Catholics, Royalists, and Cosmopolitans English transnationalism and the Christian commonwealth Brian C. Lockey English Colonial Texts on Tangier, 1661–1684 Imperialism and the politics of resistance Karim Bejjit The African Prester John and the Birth of Ethiopian-European Relations, 1402–1555 Matteo Salvadore Downloaded by [New York University] at 00:26 03 December 2016 First published 2017 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2017 Matteo Salvadore The right of Matteo Salvadore to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested. ISBN: 978-1-4724-1891-3 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-61229-4 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Apex CoVantage, LLC Downloaded by [New York University] at 00:26 03 December 2016 A Lella ed Elio Downloaded by [New York University] at 00:26 03 December 2016 This page intentionally left blank Downloaded by [New York University] at 00:26 03 December 2016 Contents List of illustrations viii Preface ix Introduction 1 PART I The Mediterranean way 19 1 Ethiopians in the lagoon, 1402–1459 21 2 The Crown of Aragon, 1427–1453 36 3 Rome via Jerusalem, 1439–1484 54 4 Lisbon, 1441–1508 82 PART II The Indian run 105 5 Beyond the sea, 1509–1520 107 6 Shewa, 1400s–1526 128 7 A tale of three cities, 1527–1539 153 Downloaded by [New York University] at 00:26 03 December 2016 8 Ending the war and the encounter, 1540–1555 180 Conclusion 203 Appendix 210 Bibliography 212 Index 229 Illustrations Maps 1.1 The world of the encounter: The Mediterranean, 1400–1550 20 4.1 The world of the encounter: The Indian run, 1400–1550 87 5.1 The world of the encounter: The Indian Ocean and Red Sea worlds, 1400–1550 111 5.2 The world of the encounter: The Christian Kingdom of Ethiopia, 1400–1550 120 Figures 1.1 The Kingdom of Ethiopia according to Fra Mauro Mappamondo di Fra Mauro (1450 ca.) 29 1.2 Cosmographical sketch from Zorzi’s manuscript 31 2.1 Alfonso’s memorandum 41 3.1 Copy of the letter of indulgence bestowed to the Ethiopians in Constance 57 3.2 Antonio di Pietro Averlino (aka Filarete), “Porta del Filarete,” St. Peter’s Basilica, 1445 61 3.3 View of Santo Stefano degli Abissini in the 1750s 72 7.1 Title page of Legatio David Aethiopiae (1533) 157 8.1 Title page of Modus Baptizandi (1549) 188 8.2 Title page of Missa qua Ethiopes (1549) 189 8.3 Title page of Testamentum Novum (1549) 190 8.4 Example of correspondence between Tesfa Seyon and Roman Downloaded by [New York University] at 00:26 03 December 2016 personalities 191 8.5 Ritratto dell’Imperatore Atana de Dinghel 192 8.6 Example of correspondence between Giovanni and Tesfa Seyon 196 Preface I wrote the vast majority of this volume over the past three years in Kuwait, but this being my first book, the list of people to whom I owe my gratitude traces all the way back to when I began developing an interest in history as a teenager. I distinctly remember perusing, as a 15-year old, my father’s copy of Ramusio’s Navigationi et Viaggi and being fascinated with the whole notion of travel and exploration. Little did I know that one day that very volume would become one of my sources. To this day, my father has a larger historical library than I have, and I think I wanted to be a historian ever since I would see him reading in the little spare time he had left after spending most of the day running his company. Although I was a terrible high school student with limited interest in reading, my father’s insistence that history was very important ultimately struck a chord with me. Like most of my students today, in school I thought history to be a rather boring subject, but only until my third year of high school, when Prof. Lanfranco Mag- gioli, an extraordinarily gifted teacher, turned the subject into the most captivating I had ever studied. At the very beginning of college, I took a general contemporary history course dreaded by freshmen, and I became fascinated with the instructor, Prof. Fulvio Cammarano. From the moment he walked into the first class with his unlit cigar and started lecturing, I began dreaming of becoming a historian. One day I went to visit him to ask what must have sounded like a rather silly question: what I needed to do to become a professor – in my mind, how to be like him. He graciously entertained me by pointing at his assistants and explaining what they were doing as part of their training, and then he told me what I had heard from my father for most of my life: read, a lot. A couple of years later, Anna Maria Gentili introduced me to African history, and when I asked her the same question – how Downloaded by [New York University] at 00:26 03 December 2016 does one become a professor? – she told me something that a few years later I would hear almost verbatim while watching Marco Tullio Giordana’s family epic The Best of Youth: if you have any ambition, leave this country. I did, and ultimately I lost touch with these acquaintances who marked my coming of age, but I have always felt indebted to them, and I promised myself I would thank them in the preface of my first book. I am also grateful to a variety of people from my days in Philadelphia, and in particular to the following exceptional individuals: Teshale Tibebu was the best doctoral advisor I could have hoped for. He supported me by offering a balanced x Preface mixture of praise and criticism and, more important, he trusted me with the free- dom to find my own research interest. Howard Spodek taught me how to be a world historian inside and outside of the classroom. At the African Studies Center of the University of Pennsylvania, Lee V.