In the 10th century B.C., the Ethiopian Queen of Sheba “came to Jerusalem with a very great retinue, with camels bearing spices and very much gold and precious stones” to see the famed wealth and wisdom of King Solomon (1 Kings 10:2). She returned to her country, according to Ethiopian tradition, with a son by Solomon and a knowledge of the one true God. This is the first recorded contact between Ethiopia and the outside world, The results of this contact were immense: religion - and with it every aspect of life - in Ethiopia was forever changed. This contact was also the basis for the Solomonic Dynasty which remained in power almost continuously from 1270 to 1974.
During the first century, Philip, a deacon of the early church in Jerusalem, found an Ethiopian journeying home from the temple in Jerusalem, reading the prophet Isaiah. Philip accompanied the Ethiopian and told him the good news about Jews. According to tradition, this Ethiopian brought the good news to his homeland. Tradition also holds that Ethiopians were present on the day of Pentecost, and that the Apostle Matthew was sent to Ethiopia where he preached the gospel and suffered martyrdom. Throughout the rest of the first three centuries, merchants from the Roman Empire brought the gospel with them to Ethiopia. In the fourth century, Syrian Christians (Frumentius and Aedesius) who became involved in the court of the Ethiopian King Ezana, where they brought the message of the gospel to the king and his court. The young King Ezana, converted to Christianity and decreed Christianity to be the official state religion.
In 1407, a European visited Ethiopia for the first time - the Italian, Pietro Rombulo. This was, however, by no means the first contact between Ethiopia and Europe. According to John Reader, “Ethiopians regularly visited Egypt and Cyprus, and made pilgrimages to the holy places of Palestine, where they met European travelers and established links between Ethiopia and the rest of the Christian world” (Reader, 351). The first recorded contact between Ethiopians and Europeans on European soil was in 1306. In 1306, over one hundred years before any European had visited Ethiopia, some thirty Ethiopians arrived in Italy. They had been sent by their king as envoys to Europe to offer aid against Islam. According to Matteo Salvadore, “Wedem Ra'ad sent a delegation of thirty Ethiopians to Europe, most likely for the purpose of forging an anti-Islam alliance with European coreligionists... The encounter seems to be the first of a series of attempts that Ethiopian rulers made to establish formal contact with European elites on the basis of a common Christian identity.” The Ethiopian envoys visited Rome and Avignon and were preparing to sail home at Genoa, where they were interviewed by a priest.
Relations between Ethiopia and Europe continued throughout the fifteenth century. In 1400, King Henry IV of England sent a letter to Prester John, the legendary Ethiopian King, seeking an alliance for a crusade against Islam. Prester John was the “quintessential representative of a distant and largely unknown Christian might” (Salvadore). The identity of the legendary Prester John was “conferred upon the kings of Ethiopia when medieval Europe learned of the Christian kingdom that lay beyond the realm of Islam” (Reader, 350). In 1402, the Ethiopian King David (the Prester John from 1382-1413) sent envoys to Italy asking to receive Italian craftsmen into his court. During the 1420s, the French sent missions to Ethiopia. In 1487, King John of Portugal sent two Arabic speaking merchants to discover the land of Prester John and obtain the Christian king’s aid in a crusade against Islam.
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| “Presbiteri Iohannis, sive, Abissinorum Imperii descriptio.” The Kingdom of Prester John depicted in a European map of Africa in 1603 |
“The episodes of interaction here considered had lasting consequences for Ethio-European relations: they engendered dynamics of reciprocal understanding based on a common religious identity that ran counter to ideas of African and black inferiority that represented the cultural norm for much of the modern period. Ethiopians became in fact agents of discovery and purveyors of geographical knowledge in an era when the dominating paradigm of difference was grounded not in racial but rather in religious identity” (Salvadore).
Sources:
Reader, John. Africa: A Biography of the Continent. New York: First Vintage Books, 1999.
Salvadore, Matteo. "The Ethiopian age of exploration: Prester John's discovery of Europe, 1306-1458." Journal of World History 21, no. 4 (2010): 593. Academic OneFile (accessed September 27, 2016). http://p2048-ezproxy.liberty.edu.ezproxy.liberty.edu/login?url=http://go.galegroup.com.ezproxy.liberty.edu/ps/i.do?p=AONE&sw=w&u=vic_liberty&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA246449862&sid=summon&asid=4e916c807c461d3ddc0ba69f56366686.
“Presbiteri Iohannis, sive, Abissinorum Imperii descriptio.” Copperplate map, with added color, 35 x 42 cm. From Ortelius’s Theatrum orbis terrarium . . . (Antwerp, 1603). Reference: Norwich, Africa 11. Purchase aided with funds provided by Bruce Willsie, Class of 1986. [Historic Maps Collection] http://libweb5.princeton.edu/visual_materials/maps/websites/africa/maps-central/1603%20ortelius.jpg
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