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The Ethiopian-European exchange I introduced last episode was increasing in regularity, and it was leaving behind artifacts, sources by which we might know it. It left behind texts like the Iter de Venetiis ad Indiam, an itinerary outlining the route one might take from Venice to Rhodes, on to Ramla and Jerusalem, to Gaza and past to Egypt, to Cairo and then down the Nile, across the desert from Qift to ʿAydhab on the Red Sea, south along the coast, and then inland.
To quote Verena Krebs,
“From the Ethiopian coast, the trek continues inland towards the mountain plateaus, past Asmära to ‘Chaxum’, the ancient city of Aksum. Crossing the Tagrayan highland in a south-westerly direction, the traveller would pass through the province of Angot before finally reaching Amhara. The total travel time from Venice to Amhara is given as 181 days.”
The itinerary provides the path that would take a traveller from port in Venice to the throne of Dawit I and is itself, as a document, a fascinating remnant of that journey. But it’s also more than that, more than just how to get there I mean.
The itinerary is actually in three parts, only one of which is concerned with these directions. There is a section on the politics to be found when you got there, on the movement of the lord David, or Dawit, between his winter and summer courts, and on the provinces that land was divided into and their rulers. There is a section that looks very much like the modern traveller’s phrase book.
To make such a journey from Venice, and to succeed when you got there, you would need to know much of the, quote, “language spoken in Jerusalem,” and indeed traded in in Ethiopia. You would need Arabic. You would need to know how to ask after lodgings, merchants, and goods, how to conduct business and negotiations, how to speak of local foods, or fabrics and the colours they might be found in. You would need to know, in the Amharic of the time, how to offer thanks or talk of mounts, oil, bread, and cheese. You would need the ability to check on whether roads were safe, to ask for the good wine or for help, in the “lingua indorum,” the language of the Indians,” apparently a blend of old Tigrinya and Amharic. And you would need all of it phonetically transcribed alongside its Latin equivalent.
You would need it, and someone had provided it, a merchant, or two, from early-15th-century Italy, their occasional Italian terms for cheese or sword later amended, along with many of the transliterations before the pages of the document were pasted into a Florentine humanist’s manuscript. A bit of luck for us, even if it did remove them from their original context.
This surviving itinerary is indicative of the growing possibility, the growing reality, in those early years of the 15th century, of travel from Europe to Ethiopia. As Krebs puts it, “That highland kingdom … was a distant but ultimately accessible part of a shared medieval world.”
Today, we explore that increasing accessibility, primarily through the efforts of the Portuguese crown.
Hello and welcome. My name is Devon, and this is Human Circus: Journeys in the Medieval World, the podcast that covers the history of that medieval world through the stories of its travellers, its envoys, its merchants, its elusive priest-kings of somewhere vaguely to the east. And as you probably know by now, the podcast has a patreon, a place where you can support its creation for as little as one dollar a month and enjoy extra, ad-free, and early listens as you do so. Thank you, all of you who have already done so!
And now, back to the story, back to many-faceted stories of Prester John, and their arrival in Ethiopia. Last episode, we started in on the Ethiopia material, on the beginnings of the legendary figure’s move in that direction and on the travellers who made their way from there to ports in Italy, Spain, and elsewhere. We saw, in fragments, a little of the stories of those who went the other way, artisans who never returned, or traders who did, representing Ethiopian travellers or their interests. If you listened to the last Patreon bonus you heard about a Pietro from Napoli, who lived in Prester John’s Ethiopia, who had married there, and who we met abroad in Constantinople on business. This episode is about the journey to Ethiopia, about Portugal, and about the place of the Prester John narrative within the developing story of exploration and colonialism, and I should note, before we really get going, that for this episode, I have made heavy use of Matteo Salvadore’s The African Prester John and the Birth of Ethiopian-European Relations, 1402-1555.
Ethiopia was, as I mentioned a moment ago, becoming accessible but not exactly easily so. It was becoming accessible, but that did not mean everything would play out as you’d hoped when you got there.
Even as the century progressed, efforts to reach it were often futile, even as people arrived from it in Italy and Spain. In the 1450s, when Pope Nicholas V sent a friar to Ethiopia, he would see him return in failure. When he tried again, he entrusted his message, and a selection of relics, to a pair of Ethiopian pilgrims. Their ruler, Zara Yacob, would have read in that message of the great threat posed by Sultan Mehmed II’s Ottomans and of Nicholas’ earnest wish that he join his Latin Christian allies in driving Mehmed from the fallen Constantinople and pressing on to Jerusalem. But it’s not clear that he ever received that message. Prester John’s location was now certain and so was his power—he was after all able to control the Nile itself. He just needed to be convinced to apply that power. That, as ever, was the dream.
It will not surprise you to learn that this dream, now centuries old, was not here about to be fulfilled, but the contacts continued.
In Ethiopia, the position of Abun, the head of their coptic church, was for the moment vacant. It was vacant for quite a long moment, following the death of Zara Yacob in 1468 and then that of his successor in 1478. Traditionally a bishop would travel from Egypt to take that place, but the Mamluks in Egypt had not allowed it, and other remedies were sought.
In 1481, an Ethiopian envoy reached Jerusalem and visited the Franciscan Monastery of Mount Zion, telling the prior there that he was on his way to Constantinople to arrange for a Greek bishop if none could be had from Egypt. Naturally, the prior objected to this, telling him that all he would find in Constantinople were heretics and schismatics. The visitor was urged to go instead to Rome and present himself to the true home of Christianity and to Pope Sixtus IV. Clearly, the prior saw an opportunity here of bringing the Ethiopian ruler under Rome’s wing, but it’s not clear how much of an opportunity there really was.
The visiting envoy did agree to send representatives, but he himself would be going to Cairo where he would wait for 5 months and no longer. To what degree he really viewed a Greek or Latin bishop to be a live option is hard to say—it’s worth noting that he only met with the prior after mentioning his intentions to others at the monastery who he was eating and drinking with—but he surely did not want to alert the Mamluks to such an attempt either way. Unless he did want to alert them.
Whatever the degree of the envoy’s real interest in the venture, his people did go to Rome with a man named Giovanni Battista Brocchi da Imola, a man who’d been in Jerusalem on pilgrimage between papal assignments, and by November, they had reached that city, their arrival there remarked upon by papal diplomat and diarist Jacopo Gherardi da Volterra.
Quote:
“During these days, the ambassadors of the king of India have entered the City in traditional dress and in the sight of the whole City on account of their strangeness. Their companion was Giovanni Battista da Imola, of great authority in the presence of the pope and the count a short time earlier, now with none. I hear that they had not been sent by their king, but by his secretary, the foremost man of his kingdom, who desires to enter into treaty and friendship with the pope and to live by the rites of Roman Christians. Although there are Christians ruled by the king whom we commonly call Prester John, their rites are very different from ours. This was chief among their petitions: that a bishop of Roman law and tongue should be sent to them, who might both show them our sacred practices and sow the seeds of Christian doctrine in their land.”
So there’s a few things there. There’s that aside from the writer on Giovanni’s apparently somewhat fallen status at the court, which is intriguing, but more importantly for us, there is a sense of papal understanding of the whole thing, a misunderstanding which is also evident in what an ambassador from Milan would write home to his lord.
“An Ambassador of Mister Prester John came to His Holiness Our Lord and … explained that his great lord having passed away and having elected a successor among the eligible ones, the latter, in order to remain true to customs, sent to Jerusalem and to some other place to look for a venerable religious man who can go crown him and do other ceremonies, according to their custom … that cousin and representative of said Prester John [the one who’d gone to Jerusalem] sent them here to ask His Beatitude, if he could consent to dispatch some people of authority and some who could remove and eradicate those errors and crown his lord.”
While that Ethiopian waited in Cairo, waited, maybe, for a Latin stand-in for a Coptic bishop, those in Rome were rubbing their hands at the prospect that Prester John wanted to recognize the supremacy of the pope, be corrected in Christian law and life, and crowned by one of their own. There was even talk of the young Prester John coming to Rome for that ceremony, which would be an absolutely momentous occasion and surely a forerunner to victory over the Ottomans, but, of course, it was not to be so.
That Ethiopian representative who’d visited the Franciscans in Jerusalem had not waited idly or anxiously in Cairo for the pope to return his call. He had already reached a deal with the sultan there and arranged for two Coptic bishops and several clerics to be sent. Maybe he’d done so using the possibility of papal interference and an alliance in that direction as leverage, maybe he’d had that goal in mind all along when he’d let slip over food and drink at the monastery what he wanted. But that’s just me wondering out loud.
No wiser as to his intentions was Giovanni Brocchi, the man now charged with carrying the pope’s letter to Ethiopia. He sailed for Cairo, where he met up with a friar sent from Jerusalem, and together the pair journeyed on to Ethiopia, by way of the Nile, the desert, the Red Sea, and a 1,200 km trek overland from the coast to their goal. They didn’t know exactly what welcome awaited them, but they were surely optimistic, and with them went that letter, which was also optimistic.
“We rejoice most of all,” it opened, “that opportunity has been given during our times for uniting you to the Roman Church, the mother of all faiths, who has always desired this with the highest zeal, just as we have heard that the greater part of your ancestors likewise desired.”
From our perspective, it does not appear that the history of desire on the Ethiopians’ part quite matched the pope’s interpretation, but the letter went on to speak of future diplomatic exchanges and of sword, crown, and bishop that were to follow. It also spoke at some length of the teachings that were going to be necessary. Having Prester John on your side was all very well, but he was going to need to learn the correct Christianity, something which had not always been a concern in regards to the priest-king, maybe a consideration brought on by the new immediacy of Prester John.
It was with this letter in hand, this set of expectations in mind, that Giovanni Brocchi and the other friar reached their destination, the court of the young Ethiopian ruler Eskender. They were, I believe, the first of the Latin Christian clergy to do so, and we know a little of how they were received from this Ethiopian source:
“And in those days there came Franks from Rome. One of them was a priest called Yohannes. And (the king) received them with honor. When the [Coptic] priests saw this, they grumbled and spoke ill of him saying ‘The king has joined the religion of the Franks.’”
What this source captured was a situation in which the youthful ruler and his backers had only just solidified their position with the arrival of those bishops from Egypt. Whatever interest they might have had in these visitors from afar, it did not outweigh their desire to maintain that stability and to not rile up the local clergy who contributed to that stability. They may have embraced Giovanni Brocchi and his companion, but they would not be holding them conspicuously close or for too long.
The two visitors would spend eight months there near Eskender with little to show for it. Giovanni Brocchi would travel back to Jerusalem to consult the prior but would find the prior had since died. The man’s successor urged him to return to Ethiopia and stay the course, to redouble his efforts. In 1484, Giovanni Brocchi was again in Ethiopia, but he was no more successful on this second attempt. He probably didn’t even know why, but eventually he and the other friar were forced to give up, for the young Prester John and his people had proven more difficult to deal with than they’d hoped, though not sufficiently so to completely kill off the idea. There would be other attempts, though they’d have to wait.
For now, we will also pause our Prester John related efforts for a quick break, and I’ll be back in a moment.
…
So far in this telling of the late medieval Euro-Ethiopian exchange, I’ve touched on the religious element from both ends and the thread of our friend Prester John running through it all, with the expectations on the Latin-Christian side that went along with that. But there’s something else we should talk about here, and that’s the ugly elephant in the 15th-century room which would, over the following centuries, become increasingly uglier and substantially more elephantine. Colonialism was coming briskly over the horizon, and that didn’t quite yet mean the Americas, but by the end of the century it certainly would.
Already, at this point in the story, we’re in the early years of the quote-unquote Age of Discovery. In Portugal, where we’ll really be focusing, Prince Henrique, or Henry the Navigator, had been born back in 1394. The Portuguese House of Aviz, founded by his father João, had conquered cities on the North African coast and, by the late 1420s, the Atlantic islands of Madeira and the Azores. In 1452, against the context of Portuguese competition with Castile and anticipating a whole lot of dire things to come, Pope Nicholas V had issued a bull endorsing King Alfonso V’s past and future conquest and enslavement of Muslims and pagans as just and good. In 1455, Nicholas expanded on this with Romanus Pontifex, granting Alfonso and Prince Henrique a monopoly on such activities along with trade south of Cape Bojador, a location on the west coast of the Sahara that the Portuguese had only recently figured out how to safely navigate on the return voyage. That second bull also celebrated Henrique for being, quote, “neither enfeebled nor terrified by so many and great labours, dangers, and losses, but growing daily more and more zealous in pursuing this so laudable and pious purpose, ha[d] peopled with orthodox Christians certain solitary islands in the ocean sea.” And the declaration urged him on in these efforts.
On this pious foundation fuelled by evangelical and crusading enthusiasm, was raised a tripod of motivating factors. There was the pursuit of direct access to the renowned African gold, unmediated by Muslims in North Africa. There was access to the slave trade, untroubled by and away from the Ottoman dominance over the Black Sea. There was a little bit of Prester John involved too, appearing not by name in Romanus Pontifex, but referred to in the hope that a way might be found to reach as far as the “Indians who are said to worship Christ,” so that Henry might be able to “enter into relation with them, and to incite them to aid the Christians against the Saracens and other such enemies of the faith.” Ethiopians had, thus far, had little interest in Portugal, had not travelled there as they had to Italy and Spain, but the Portuguese were becoming interested in them.
The belief that they might reach Prester John’s realm not via the Holy Land but by sailing south along the African coast, was not necessarily driven by the possibility of rounding the great cape, but by the idea that the Nile reached that coast and that the Ethiopian kingdom stretched substantially further in its direction than it really did. This misconception of the kingdom’s breadth as being practically continental could be seen on Fra Mauro’s Mappa mundi, of which the Portuguese are known to have acquired a copy in the late 1450s, and also in another source which I briefly alluded to last time, an account of the Canary Islands in which there was talk of a friar who parted ways with his companions and travelled eastwards to a “province of Nubia, inhabited by Christians.” Its patriarch carried, among his titles, the name of Prester John. His realm was said to “extend on one side to the deserts of Egypt, and on the other to the Nile,” that river parting into branches, one of which was the River of Gold flowing west.
Between that “River of Gold,” the Rio do Ouro which was thought to be the source of the West African riches, and Prester John at the end of it, both to be reached by a route that circumvented Muslim interference, it was a powerful set of carrots, especially dressed in the rich sauce of papal-approved virtue and packaged with access to slave-trading, and it was enough to inspire decades of Portuguese-backed endeavours to taste them.
Those attempts would fail, at least where reaching Prester John was concerned, but they would result in somewhat optimistic reports back, reports as to the nearness of success, the proximity of the goal, though whether those reporting earnestly believed in how close they had come or just wanted to maintain their good name and the financial support that went with it is hard to say. Not all who went would make such claims. Some, such as the Danish nobleman named Abelhart, never returned at all. In the late 1440s, he’d asked for and been given a caravel and Henrique’s blessings, along with instructions to seek the Christian king and his aid in war against the Muslims, but he’d disappeared into the interior to the south of Senegal.
In 1484, during the reign of Alfonso’s son João II, when an ambassador from the Oba of Benin arrived in Lisbon and spoke of how that ruler was subservient to a much more powerful one to the east who was associated with crosses made of brass, naturally, the conclusion was that this was Prester John. It's interesting to see how new information was interpreted, how it was slotted in alongside and in light of what was already known to be true. In the late 1480s, when a visitor arrived in Lisbon, a Jolof prince speaking of the non-Muslim king whose realm extended to the east, the conclusion was the same. There was even talk of sailing with that Jolof prince to establish a stronghold from which later expeditions might extend inland, but there was a disagreement at sea, the prince was killed, and the ships returned.
Around that same period, Bartolomeu Dias would round the Cape of Good Hope. Dias would go fishing for the priest-king all along the coast, his representatives flashing gold, spices, and good cloth, asking everywhere after Prester John in the hopes that word would reach that ruler and that their display of affluence and power would interest him, hopes that would, as ever, prove fruitless. It was that kind of story.
And it wasn’t just playing out on the west coast of Africa. There was that other, more well-established route to Prester John’s kingdom in Ethiopia, the one taken by our Giovanni Brocchi and others, the one already taken by a significant number of Ethiopians going the other way, the one which might have had you thinking “Why not just go that way?” João II had not neglected this route, even as he had Dias and others heading south. Even as he waited for Dias’ arrival, he’d dispatched two envoys to Jerusalem. Many of Prester John’s people, many Ethiopians, were known to visit that city, to live there, and some to travel on to Europe from there, so it seemed a good bet, but the people he’d sent did not speak Arabic and returned to Lisbon with nothing to show for their journey. They would have benefited from access to that itinerary I talked about. They needed that phrase book.
João wasn’t too discouraged by the outcome though. He just picked more experienced travellers the next time: a man named Afonso de Payva from the Canary Islands who spoke Castilian and hopefully also Arabic, though I don’t see that mentioned, and the well-travelled, soon to be very well-travelled, Portuguese Pêro da Covilhã. In 1487, the two journeyed via Napoli and Rhodes to Egypt and then Aden, where they split up, Covilhã sailing for India and Payva departing for Ethiopia, never to see each other again.
When Covilhã made his way back to Cairo from Goa and Calicut in 1491, he would find that his fellow-traveller had since died. He’d meet with two Portuguese travellers who gave him new instructions from João. The one of them he’d tell all about what he’d learned of East Africa, India, and their trade routes, intelligence to be taken to his king in Lisbon and put to use. The other, he'd escort back to Hormuz before carrying on in his own attempt to reach Prester John. He’d travel through Arabia, stopping in Mecca, Medina, and elsewhere. He’d cross the Gulf of Aden and reach Zeila in what is now Somalia. He’d head inland from there, and then he'd disappear from our story, but not forever. Pêro da Covilhã would be back, if not necessarily back in Portugal then at least back in this story, this episode. But more on that later.
In the meantime, João would not be waiting before trying again. He would try a new strategy next. He and his father had experienced many failures on the Ethiopia/Prester John front, perhaps a strange thing for us to watch happen at this distance, knowing that there were Europeans who had successfully made the trip and of course also Ethiopians, indicative maybe of how murky those distant waters still were for European travellers, how the knowledge was, as we have seen, out there, but it was not widely held.
So João now tried more of a shotgun approach. He’d attempted to be more direct, more focused, through the endeavours of individuals, but if individual messengers had gotten him nowhere, perhaps a multitude of messages would, a letter in many copies, all to be carried by pilgrims to Holy Land. That was what he tried in 1488, making use of a new Ethiopian arrival in Lisbon, a monk who translated the letter and signed his name, father, and birthplace to it. I do wonder what the ruler of Ethiopia, at this point Eskender, would have made of them, including, as they did, João's summary of all the Portuguese knew of Prester John’s land. But I’ve read that none of those letters ever reached their destination. João’s efforts would come up short.
His successor, Manuel, would carry on the quest for Prester John. Not right away—there were also Portuguese interests in North Africa to be focused on, along with domestic matters, and Columbus had put in at Lisbon on his return trip from the Americas two years before Manuel took power—but it was very much on his mind. He had, as Matteo Salvadore puts it:
“...a profound interest in the East, one drenched in millenarianist notions he had already embraced as an adolescent, when, through his Franciscan tutors, he became familiar with the Christian prophecies and began seeing himself as God’s instrument. Manuel painted his own destiny on a complex canvas on which the fall of Constantinople and Ottoman expansion represented the coming of a final battle against the forces of Islam. Together with his entourage, he envisioned recruiting Eastern Christians and waging a multi-front war against the Muslim world, one meant to result in the liberation of Jerusalem, the destruction of Mecca and Medina, and in his elevation as the ultimate Christian ruler of the East.”
A few years into his reign, in 1497, Manuel sent another Portuguese expedition south along the coast of Africa, this one under the command of Vasco da Gama. He was bound for India, and that was his goal. But Prester John was on his mind too, on the minds of the crews that went with him, and you can read it in the journal of that first voyage of his.
It was March of 1498, and in Mozambique, da Gama’s people heard of many cities on the coast ahead, their population half Muslim, half Christian. They heard that, quote:
“…Prester John resided not far from [that] place; that he held many cities along the coast, and that the inhabitants of those cities were great merchants and owned big ships. The residence of Prester John was said to be far in the interior, and could be reached only on the back of camels.”
The news filled the voyagers with happiness. They “...cried with joy, and prayed God to grant [them] health, so that [they] might behold what [they] so much desired.”
For all that happiness, they would not behold that particular goal. However, they would, famously, later infamously, reach the Indian city of Calicut. They would make their scurvy-ridden way back to Lisbon, and a merchant there would write to a colleague in Florence of what he’d heard from one of da Gamma’s pilots. There were no Christians to speak of in those faraway lands, not in India as we’d call it, not except in the the land of Prester John, there, as he explained, on “this side of the Gulf of Arabia,” bordered by the lands of the King of Melinde in present day Kenya and those of the “Sultan of Babylon,” in Egypt.
It had taken a while, the reigns of several quote/unquote Prester Johns—the name now really having settled in as a title—but the Portuguese, in their sustained interest, were starting to develop a clear picture of where exactly Ethiopia was and that would quickly crystalize. Ships heading out that way would drop off a varied range of characters on the eastern African coast, one such trio consisting of an exiled Portuguese criminal, a Tunisian, and the servant of a future Viceroy of India.
Prester John was clearly not the primary impetus for Portuguese exploration and its burgeoning imperialism, not when there was religion, power, gold, and slavery involved, but it was still an important ingredient in that stew. He still featured in the accounts of travellers of the time, in their stated goals and in the reports of what they found. And before we finish up here, I want to introduce one more of those travellers and revisit one who has already come up during this episode.
I should say first that we don’t always get the full story of such people from their own reports. We’re not always so lucky to have them make the return leg and leave behind a substantial written record that gets passed down to us. Sometimes, we have to make do with the scraps, but they are often very tasty scraps. Delicious even.
Take for example those three travellers I mentioned a moment ago, that trio consisting of an exiled criminal, a future vice-roy’s servant, and a Tunision who were delivered to the Swahili coast in 1507 to try to find their way to Prester John’s court as best they could. They hadn’t made it back to Lisbon, despite the promise of rich rewards if they succeeded, but something of their story did.
It happened because of another Portuguese naval action, some piracy of the sort that was making them very unpopular among the ships and ports off the Indian Ocean, in this case a ship bound for Calicut. The ship had contained a pair of Castilian Jews who told the Portuguese commander that they had met that trio bound for Ethiopia, or at least two of them, the Tunisian and the Portuguese exile. Those two, the Castilians said, had given up on the entire Ethiopian effort and had last been seen on the Red Sea coast of what is now Sudan, their mission abandoned, their colleague thought dead, and looking for a way back north. But it doesn’t seem that they did go back north after that coastal encounter with the Castilians. It seems that they then made renewed efforts to reach Ethiopia, that they journeyed to the royal court and there found not only the third member of their party, the one presumed dead, but also another long-lost familiar face, another figure who had dropped off the map after an attempt to reach Ethiopia. Unbeknownst to his king and also to his king’s son who now ruled in Portugal, Pêro da Covilhã was alive and well. He had made it to Ethiopia after all. He just hadn’t been allowed to leave.
We last saw Covilhã back in 1491 when he’d returned from India, met with a pair of Castilians in Cairo, and guided one of them to Hormuz before heading for Ethiopia. Covilhã had left Portugal on May 7th, 1487, promised by the king that “he would be a great man in his kingdom and all his people should ever live in contentment” for this service. We see him again in 1520, still there in the land of Prester John after all those years, for the arrival of a traveller named Francisco Álvares. Álvares—who I’ve long been meaning to cover in his own episode—would hear Covilhã’s confession, would hear that it had been 33 years since he’d been able to make one, a long time to live one’s life wrenched away from everything familiar, and not a time that was now coming to an end. Covilhã would never leave that place. He would die there, a well-treated prisoner to the end, whenever exactly that was, but still a prisoner, not at liberty to leave.
In this, he was not alone. There were other Europeans there too, who Álvares encountered: Genoese, two Catalans, a Greek, a Basque, and a German, all of them saying they had passed through Portugal. There were quote/unquote Franks to be found at the court of “the Prester John,” and they advised Álvares and his party that there were some who spoke against them and advised that they not be allowed to leave, for such was generally the policy. According to Álvares, the reason for all of this was that those who sought the Ethiopian rulers must have need of them and should not be sent away, but there may well have been other reasons.
There was Thomas Gradani who’d been there for 15 years. There was the Venetian painter Nicolò Brancaleon who’d been there for twice that. There were others who’d been there but died.
In the first half of that 16th century, the Portuguese crown’s show of strength on the seas would only grow. King Manuel would declare himself “Lord of the Conquest, Navigation and Commerce of Ethiopia, Arabia, Persia and India,” and that growth would align with circumstances within Ethiopia to ensure that the long-held Portuguese interest was no longer in only the one direction. Just a few decades after Vasco da Gama’s first voyage, Portuguese musketeers under the command of his son Cristóvão da Gama would be fighting on the Ethiopian side in the Ethiopia-Adal war, but that’s a bit beyond the scope of this episode and the story I’m telling here, and that’s where we’ll end this part of it.
Prester John was well and truly settled in at his new home, solidified in being a title to be passed down, not an individual, but still holding out the promise of Christian power over and against that wielded by the Mamluks and the Ottomans.
I will be back soon with more on the Prester John story, and I’ll be back on Patreon with a bonus episode. But I won’t be back with another full episode before Christmas, so I’ll take this moment to wish you a merry Christmas and a happy holiday, however, wherever, and with whoever you’re spending it, or at least as merry and happy as possible under the circumstances.
This has been, again, a pretty difficult year, what with the climate-related disasters and the little matter of the ongoing pandemic, and I haven’t been quite as productive in 2021 as I’d have liked to have been, but I do hope that the podcast has brought a bit of joy, a bit of distraction from the general state of things. It’s certainly been good for me to have this project to focus on and to know that it’s reaching people out there.
Thank you very much for listening. I’ll talk to you soon.
Sources:
A Journal of the First Voyage of Vasco Da Gama, 1497-1499, translated by Ernst Georg Ravenstein. The Hakluyt Society, 1898
Prester John: The Legend and its Sources, compiled and translated by Keagan Brewer. Taylor & Francis, 2019.
Ferreira, Susannah. The Crown, the Court and the Casa Da Índia Political Centralization in Portugal 1479-1521. Brill, 2015.
Knobler, Adam. Mythology and Diplomacy in the Age of Exploration. Brill, 2016.
Krebs, Verena. Medieval Ethiopian Kingship, Craft, and Diplomacy with Latin Europe. Springer International, 2021.
Krebs, Verena. "Re-examining Foresti's Supplementum Chronicarum and the 'Ethiopian' embassy to Europe of 1306," in Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, Volume 82, Issue 3 (October 2019) .
Kurt, Andrew. "The search for Prester John, a projected crusade and the eroding prestige of Ethiopian kings, c .1200 – c .1540," in Journal of Medieval History, 39.3 (September 2013).
Salvadore, Matteo. The African Prester John and the Birth of Ethiopian-European Relations, 1402-1555. Taylor & Francis, 2016.
Salvadore, Matteo. "The Ethiopian Age of Exploration: Prester John's Discovery of Europe, 1306-1458," in Journal of World History, Vol. 21, No. 4 (December 2010).