Dawit II (Wikimedia)
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One of the many interesting elements of travel stories, medieval ones among them, is that of authentication, not just in terms of asserting truth, in saying, as the medieval travel narratives this podcast covers often do, “I was there, and I saw this,” but also in proving one’s identity. We go about with pieces of government-issued ID that do most of the heavy lifting for us. It’s not a perfect system by any means and can pose all manner of obstacles and inequalities for those who are in one way or another blocked in accessing it, but its absence leaves its own set of questions. How do we convince people that we are who we say we are? What do we do if they simply do not believe us?
Travel necessarily stretches the limits of the vetting and reassurance that community provides. There’s no “Oh yes, you can trust this man. I buy bread from him.” Instead there are seals and letters, verification at a distance. Maybe not so unlike our own system of identification after all, if even less totally inclusive. Problems remain.
In the case of this story, our main character will struggle with those problems during a long and difficult journey. He will undertake that journey in the face of enduring skepticism, everywhere asserting he is one thing, everywhere beset by accusations that he is another.
Hello and welcome. My name is Devon, and this is Human Circus: Journeys in the Medieval World, the history podcast that traffics in merchants, envoys, and priest-kings, following the course of their travels across the medieval map. And, as you are probably aware by now, it is supported by a Patreon, a place of ad-free, early, and extra listening for as little as a vending-machine visit per month, or more if that’s an option for you. This time I want to thank the following listeners for their kind generosity. Thank you Faline S., and thank you Chris D. Thank you both very much!
And now, back to the story.
Today, it’s a little aside from the Prester John in Ethiopia narrative, or more like a moment of zooming in on one of the characters within it. During these Prester John episodes, I’ve necessarily zipped past a number of travellers who themselves have stories worth telling. With this episode I wanted to pause over one and do so. It’s not one of the characters we’ve met already over the last few episodes, not a Dias, da Gama, or Covilhã. Instead, today’s story revolves around a man named Mateus, an early 16th-century traveller of contested identity, caught up in a moment of international intrigue and Portuguese infighting.
The context for all of this is the regency of Eleni of Ethiopia, the widow of former emperor Zara Yacob. He’d died back 1468, but by the early years of the 1500s she was still a powerful figure, just reaching her peak one might say.
Eleni had always been a survivor. Raised a Muslim, the daughter of royalty in the Hadiya Sultanate in the southwest of present-day Ethiopia, she had been captured in war and perhaps forced to convert, but then, coming from this difficult situation, she seems to have thrived. She had a powerful position during the reign of her husband’s successor, and though she was then pushed from that place of prominence during the reign of his successor, the Eskender who we encountered last episode, she’d be back. After Eskender’s removal under cloudy circumstances, one which she may have been involved in, she’d be back. She’d navigate the power struggles that followed, with one (sometimes violent) succession after another. She’d be well-positioned to take over as regent for the youthful Dawit II.
And there was clearly a lot more to that. One doesn’t tend to just stumble through such events, such decades, to wind up in power. She clearly had an appetite to hold and direct that power, and either it was useful for a long series of people for her to do so, or she had some combination of talent, wisdom, ruthlessness, and charisma to achieve and apply it over a very protracted period. She was applying it very successfully when a couple of the characters we met last time showed up.
She’d been around and with influence when Covilhã appeared in the early 1490s, but his timing had not been great. His interests, and those of the Portuguese king, had not aligned with those to be found then in Ethiopia. But it was different a few decades later when João Gomes and Sid Mohammed arrived. That was the Portuguese criminal in exile and the Tunisian who briefly popped up last time, and with their arrival, Eleni wasn’t just in a position of influence. Though she must have been getting on in age—her husband had died back in 1468—1507 and the years that followed found her in charge while Dawit II grew up, and that wasn’t all that had changed.
Whereas when Covilhã had come to town, the prospect of a Portuguese alliance may not have appealed much, the political considerations were now different. The Portuguese had still, in the early ‘90s, been not so much of a known quantity in the region, the policy towards the Adal Sultanate and the Mamluks seems to have been one of compromise rather than open conflict, and the aggressive stance on offer from the Latin-Christian power might not have been welcome. But with the arrival of Gomes and Muhammad, matters were different.
The Portuguese had by then violently established themselves in the Indian Ocean and the Arabian Sea. Operating as much as pirates and as conquerors of key ports as merchants—more than really—they had very much made themselves known. Meanwhile, figures within the Adal Sultanate were looking to Ethiopia with more aggression, and the Ottoman Empire’s southern expansion was building toward the conquest of the last Mamluk Sultan of Egypt, potential cooperation with the Gujarat Sultanate, and clashes with the Portuguese over control of the Indian Ocean in what would come to sometimes be described as the first world war. Matters were, ten years into the new, 16th century, heating up. The moment was right for a Portuguese diplomatic approach, and that was the moment that an exiled criminal and his Tunisian guide stumbled into. This time, Eleni would respond, and not just by barring the new arrivals from ever departing. She would send out a diplomatic offer of her own.
“Beloved brother the most Christian King Manuel, knight of the seas, subduer and despoiler of the unbelieving … Moors,” she addressed the Portuguese king. She called on God to bless him, to grant him great victories and the expansion of his domains. She warned him “that the Lord of Cairo was arming a fleet of ships to send against [his] fleets.” She made some proposals.
On the one hand there was the possibility of marriage, of marriages if it so pleased Manuel, between the royal families. The one’s daughters for the other’s sons, or whichever way round suited him best. There had been the potential of a similar arrangement between Afonso of Aragon and Yeshaq, 2 episodes and nearly 100 years before.
On the other, there was the suggestion of a military alliance. Ever of fascination to Latin Christian powers since they had settled on this as the true location of Prester John, rarely so appealing to the Ethiopian side, it seemed that those interests might now have aligned. Eleni’s letter argued that the power of her people on land combined with the might of the Portuguese at sea should surely be sufficient to defeat their mutual enemy and ensure, quote, “that they may no longer give to be eaten of [by] dogs the offerings and gifts made at the Holy Sepulchre.” It was exactly the sort of sentiment that could be expected to find sympathy in the crusading ambitions of the Portuguese crown.
With this communication, written in Arabic and Persian, went relics, including a cross made of wood from the True Cross. With this communication went an individual named Mateus, and he was, and indeed is, somewhat of a hard man to get a handle on.
Mateus the Armenian, you’ll sometimes read, and will elsewhere see that he was probably of Armenian descent. “A Christian merchant of ‘very clear colour quite pale.’” Someone who had been around the Ethiopian royal court for years and conducted business back and forth with Cairo. And none of that was particularly contradictory. It all fit together to form a kind of picture, one which Matteo Salvadore expands on.
Quote:
“...[Mateus] must have been active for years [he writes] as a trader and an informer, taking advantage of his commercial ties throughout the region to gather precious intelligence for Eleni and her entourage. In all likelihood he was selected for the mission because of his versatile identity and appearance, which could be expected to facilitate transit through the Muslim world.”
Unfortunately for Mateus, it seems that this very ambiguity, the very plausibility of his guise which may have made him suitable for the sensitive journey, would cause him problems, and he would not need to go far to find. In his journey, he faced difficulties early on. Already in Aden, there would be accusations that he was a spy. By some accounts there was robbery and other trouble even earlier in the trip, such that he might have been relieved, having set out around 1509 or 10, to finally reach India in 1512.
And no, you are not mishearing. He reached India in 1512, not, say, Portugal, or some other more recognizably direct stopover point on the way there. More specifically, he reached Dabhol on the coast of Maharashtra, the city which just a few years before had suffered a destructive assault by Portuguese ships on their way to an important naval victory at Diu, and here too, at Dabhol, Mateus’s embassy was treated with some suspicion.
At first, Mateus was actually detained by authorities, and word was sent to the Governor of Portuguese India. In this, Mateus at last had some luck, for the man who would among other things be called “Caesar of the East” and “Lion of the Seas” was delighted to hear of his coming. Afonso de Albuquerque, for that was his name, knew very well his king’s longstanding interest in alliance with the kingdom of Prester John and was surely excited to be the one to provide it. He was given the news upon arrival in Goa and promptly sent word that the ambassador was to be brought to that city right away.
Afonso made Mateus extremely welcome. He sent out his captains on their boats to greet him as his ship entered port. He went down to the beach with, quote, “all the clergy and inhabitants of the city, with crosses in procession,” presumably all the Portuguese inhabitants. At the beach they gave thanks, thanks for this visitor who had brought with him a sacred relic made from the wood of the True Cross, and thanks that God had, quote, “shown them so desirable a thing as this was, the opening of a road whereby communication could be made with [Prester John].” Full of enthusiasm for the project, Afonso “ordered that the ambassador should be entertained and supplied with all necessary things for the expenses of himself, his wife, and a young man and woman of [Ethiopia] who were in his [party].” But not everyone was so overjoyed as Afonso at this new arrival. Not everyone was so willing to accept that he was who he said he was. It probably didn’t help matters that Afonso would not open the letters the ambassador had with him, saying he was not accustomed to opening correspondence that was intended for his king.
Mateus was, quote “of good bearing, and stated that he was the brother of the Patriarch of [Ethiopia],” but that was not what everyone thought. Others around Afonso thought that the envoy was secretly a Muslim and a spy, that no matter how familiar he seemed with the Christian faith, his master was in Turkey or Egypt. Such doubts, we read in The Commentaries of the Great Afonso de Albuquerque, were the works of Satan, seeking to cause the greatest possible harm.
For his part, Afonso seemed to have no such doubts. He arranged for an ornate golden casket for the cross, and a ship which was to carry it, Mateus, and all that envoy should need to his king in Portugal. But those doubts remained—they were loudly voiced in the port before Mateus left—and they would be acted upon.
Though Afonso’s orders would have seen Mateus make his way in the greatest possible comfort, that was not what the ambassador was going to get. He would, we read in those commentaries, be thought by his ship’s captain to be “a buffoon and a spy sent by the Grand Sultan,” and receive “very bad treatment at that captain’s hands.” From other sources we see a little of the what and why as to that very bad treatment. We see that Mateus’s doubters were not without reasons, or at least ammunition. In a report to be sent on King Manuel, one of those doubters, Gaspar Pereira, wrote the following:
“The woman that is with the one who made himself ambassador … told all of us that he is a moor and not an [Ethiopian], and that he had not been sent by the [Ethiopian] king; and that everything was fake and also that he was a spy, a pilot and a sorcerer; she told us that he had stolen her and that she was not his wife nor the daughter of a king, as he had told the captain and all of us; she also said that the boy who was supposed to be her brother was not related to her in any way; and that he had stolen both of them, each from their homelands, and was sleeping with the boy.”
As Salvadore points out, a lot of this could have actually been very close to the truth without it necessarily being the case that Mateus wasn’t who he said he was, without it being the case that he was “a spy, a pilot, and a sorcerer.” The woman and boy with him may very well not have been his wife and her brother. It was quite possible that both had been enslaved and bought or were in some other way attached to his diplomatic mission against their will and quite in contrast to the envoy’s official story of their nobility.
As for Pereira, there was also more from him in that letter on the Mateus situation. Quote:
“In Cochin, António Real told me that one of his spies knew who that man was, and that he was a moor and all of this was fake, and Francisco Pereira told me that he had known about this in Cochin and that he was going to inform your highness. And that letters were already being sent to Rome, with accounts of this; and it is said that the Captain [Albuquerque] knew about all this but he kept silent. Jorge de Melo and I feel that the Captain must be destroyed for this, because he claims that, for this service alone, your highness will make him a count. I feel that it is my duty to inform your highness about this [wrote Pereira to the king].”
In the letter, you can see how Mateus was caught up, not only in his efforts to assert his authenticity but also in conflict and ill-feelings among the Portuguese in India. There was that mention from Pereira that he and others thought that Afonso de Albuquerque ought to be destroyed for his role in ushering Mateus, this sorcerer and spy, on toward their king. It was a conflict that had a history, for Afonso’s time in India had not exactly been smooth. And we’ll get to that time, after this short break.
…
When Afonso had first shown up to take up his station, it was supposed to be a secret. He had sailed under the command to undertake a naval mission and win a base for control over the Red Sea trade, but he also had a less publicized mission to take up after doing so: the early replacement of the first governor of Portuguese India, Francisco de Almeida. And Almeida would simply refuse to stand down.
Part of that, admittedly, was personal. Almeida had lost his son in battle with a Mamluk fleet and was set on avenging his death. He was not going to surrender his power to do so. But there seems to have been more than just that going on.
Three of Afonso’s captains had abandoned him at Hormuz and headed on to India before him. They’d be there when he arrived to present his claim. And Almeida didn’t just refuse to smoothly transfer power. For a time, he would hold Afonso under something like house arrest. Almeida would eventually relinquish his command to Afonso—he would sail for home and die in fighting around the Cape of Good Hope—but that did not leave Afonso with an entirely clear field as far as local wielders of Portuguese power. There was the marshal, Fernando Coutinho. There were the independent fleet commissions held by Duarte de Lemos and Diogo Lopes de Sequeira. There were a lot of hands in that pot, and even though Coutinho would die in a rather greedy bit of palace raiding and the others would be heading for home in not too long, Afonso did not have things entirely his own way, did not always have the cooperation of those around or ostensibly below him in authority.
One way this conflict has sometimes been framed is as a struggle between those representing royal interests, those seeking to win riches and imperial splendour for the crown of Portugal on the one hand, and, to quote Salvadore again, those “traders and fortune-seeking fidalgos who wanted free reign to build their own fortunes through trading and privateering” on the other. As one of those seemingly on the side of his king’s interests, Afonso would have had plenty of pushback from those in that latter category, and I’m not saying that made him a good person, that colonialism for the crown was really any nobler than for yourself, but it does add another note to Mateus’s situation: a governor who was not only eager to make that Prester John connection on the behalf of his king but also dreamed of conquering Mecca, surely a natural supporter for Mateus who was ready from the start to believe in him, but then also, those around him who were just as ready to discredit that governor and any project he took on.
Whether he was driven more by a crusading zeal and love for his king, or by a desperation to prove himself to that king, who had after all really spread the regional power around, very much like a ruler unwilling to trust any one individual at such a great distance, Afonso had clearly invested no small amount in Mateus stocks. Others, conversely, were more invested in his failure. By the time they’d reached Mozambique, heading south, Mateus was in chains, the envoy enjoying none of the comforts and concessions he might have expected, none of the warmth and acclaim we might expect a representative of Prester John’s realm to receive from the Portuguese Prester-enthusiasts. It did not bode well for any diplomacy that was to be done.
Eleni had dispatched Mateus around 1509. In early 1514, he’d arrive in Lisbon having faced detainment and abuse on the way. He likely thought that nothing good awaited him there, but as it turned out, he needn’t have worried. King Manuel would not be carrying on with this mistreatment. In fact, he was primed to happily receive him. He’d heard news of his coming, and having read in a letter of Afonso’s hope “that this should be the beginning of the ruin of the House of Mecca,” and already boasted of it in writing to the pope, it was never likely that he’d then conclude that Prester John’s ambassador was a fraud, that he’d then admit to it even if he had.
Mateus would be received very well in Lisbon, would receive the treatment owed to an ambassador. The captain who had so badly mistreated him, not so much. Captain Bernardim Freire would redouble his accusations on arrival, protesting that this was a fake and spy and his own actions had been justified, but the captain was the one to be imprisoned, along with Gaspar Pereira, the writer of that letter smearing Mateus as “a spy, a pilot and a sorcerer.” With his assailants safely locked away, Mateus was able to proceed to Manuel’s court in peace.
Quote:
“They went to Santos-o-Velho, where the king welcomed them standing upright, and off his dais, with great honors and courtesy, and on that moment Mateus handed the king the letter of credence that he had brought with him, written in Arabic and in Persian language … During the audience Mateus, as the wise and cautious man he was, talked with the king, with great accuracy and confidence, about the affairs that had been entrusted to him, and he handed the king a letter from Queen Eleni, and five golden medallions, stamped with letters that were said to be from the [Ethiopian] language, each weighting eight cruzados, and after that he showed him a round Cross, with a silver ring, that was made from the Cross where Jesus died to save us, and it was inside a golden case with a locker; and the king received the key on his knees, and with tears in his eyes, thanking God for being blessed with such a precious gift, and with letters and ambassadors from such a powerful Christian king such as the king of the [Ethiopians], who lived so remotely and isolated from the kings of Europe.”
It had all, at last, worked out for Mateus. He had suffered under accusations and their consequences, but he’d persevered. He’d outlasted his persecutors and seen them imprisoned while he carried out his diplomatic mission in peace. He’d see out his responsibilities, staying in Portugual for about a year and answering many curious questions as to Ethiopian Christians’ religious beliefs, their royal court, and other matters. Then he’d be attached to a returning embassy going the other way, one which also included the young man, named Yacob, who Pereira had said Mateus was sleeping with, along with a replacement for our friend Afonso, and the priest and travel chronicler Francisco Álvares.
Mateus, Francisco, and the rest were carried aboard a substantial fleet, and again, it was not a comfortable journey for Mateus. Again, he faced the by now very familiar accusations that he was an imposter and ought be imprisoned, and not just from some sailor aboard the boat but from the actual head of Manuel’s embassy, Duarte Galvão. Dealings between the two of them were unpleasant, and Galvão’s later refusal to put an ill Yacob ashore for treatment, followed by the young man’s death, would have done nothing to improve them.
Like with Mateus' initial journey, the fleet did not take the most direct route, even if you factor in needing to avoid Mamluk and Ottoman intervention. They headed back to Goa first with that successor of Afonso’s, for Afonso de Albuquerque had lost the king’s favour. It was hard to hold it from afar, when your enemies were so much closer to the king’s ear, and all your victories, even if you did intend them only on your king’s behalf, amounted only to further reason for that king to fear that you were becoming too strong, too intent on establishing your own independent power.
An ailing Afonso, returning from a season of violent diplomacy at Hormuz, would hear the news from ships carrying dispatches. He was to be removed, and his bitterest rivals were to replace him. When in 1516, King Manuel would have a change of heart and again feel the need of Afonso’s services, it would be too late. Afonso had long-since died, having just managed to come back into sight of Goa.
In 1517, there was an attempt to actually bring the embassy to Ethiopia, but it was tied in with a naval campaign on the Red Sea, and that did not go well. Bad weather and a shortage of supplies took their toll. The governor, Afonso’s replacement, drifted aimlessly past one proposed military target after another, and he refused to deliver the embassy to the coast. Then Duarte Galvão died on the island of Kamaran.
It was perhaps a cause of some relief for Mateus, who no longer had to face Galvão’s accusations, but it would only further delay his return to Ethiopia. By the end of the year, they were back in India. The embassy needed a new leader, and a new governor had to be waited for, Afonso’s replacement having already left the king unimpressed with his inaction on the Red Sea. It was not until early 1520 that Mateus would see another chance to make that return. There was, by then, a new governor in Portuguese India, and with the increasing Ottoman presence, including a base at Suez, fresh reason to go back to the Red Sea.
This time, Mateus would be allowed to reach shore, at the port of Arqiqo. The Portuguese announced themselves with the sacking of nearby, and Muslim, Massawa, and they at last made contact with the people that at least some of them had come to see. They met with a regional ruler and also with monks from a local monastery who answered their theological questions, getting a little vague where the matter of Rome’s supremacy was concerned, and, more importantly for Mateus, recognized the Ethiopian ambassador as such and treated him with honour. Finally, the tide was turning in his favour.
As preparations were made to dispatch a party to the Ethiopian court, Francisco Álvares recorded that many on the ships had seen little hope for diplomatic success. Mateus was a liar and fake, they had said, who ought to simply be abandoned ashore on his own. Now, after the reassuring encounter with the monks, many clamoured to join the group that would go with him and attested that they did, at last, believe. It had been a hard-won confidence for Mateus, and it would be much more easily lost.
Mateus’s thoughts and wishes seem often to have clashed with those of his Portuguese fellow-travellers on the road inland. The man who they took to be a pleasant gentleman, well dressed and mannered, he decried as a robber and took up arms against. The more comfortable roads they wanted to follow, he insisted on leading them astray from. He beseeched Álvares to convince the others that they should travel first to a certain monastery before going on their way to the royal court, and those others, though they initially agreed, soon began to mutter with increasing volume and certainty that Mateus was leading them all to their deaths. They blamed Álvares for ever having helped to talk them into it. “There was nothing for it but to call on God,” wrote Álvares, ”for sins were going about in those woods; at midday the wild animals were innumerable and had little fear of people.”
A sense of the strangeness of that place comes through in Álvares’ account, of the peculiarity of that land and its people to the Portuguese. They met men on the road who Mateus explained were monks from the monastery they were headed for, and one of them comparable to a bishop. “From their age and from their being thin and dry like wood,” wrote Álvares, “they appear[ed] to be men of holy life.”
The way to the monastery was hard, with paths that could not be taken by baggage animals. The heat was oppressive, and the climb steep. All the while, says Álvares, Satan did not rest. There was anger among the man, and spears were drawn, though fortunately nobody was killed. At last, they came to the monastery, there to rest for seven days or so, or so Matheus had told them before.
It was the morning after their arrival when he told them that their stay would be much longer. He had sent word to his ruler, and they could not leave until they had the reply along with the mules that would be sent with it, not for about 40 days he now said. And there was worse news.
Winter was coming, Mateus said, and no one could travel during that season, not for three months, and the monks of that monastery concurred. There was surely anger at the news, but there is no mention of it from Álvares. There was little time then for such concerns, for next came the sickness.
It spread quickly through the Portuguese and the enslaved they had brought with them, so that “few or none remained who were not affected, and many in danger of death from much bloodletting and purging.” It struck down one of the several Joams in the party first, but, quote, “The Lord was pleased that purging and bloodletting came to him of itself, and he regained his health.” It came for Mateus, and many remedies were tried. I am sure there was help from those at the monastery, and there was a barber/bleeder in the party too.
Mateus, like Joam, recovered, and thinking himself clear of the illness, he had his things brought to a nearby village where there were comfortable houses and friars from the monastery lived and kept their cows. But just two days later he sent word. He was sick again.
This time there was nothing that could be done for him. For everything that was tried, nothing worked. Álvares gave him the sacraments and heard his confession. The priest took Mateus’s will in his language and a friar from the monastery in his own. In three days, by Álvares’ account on the 23rd of May, 1520, Mateus the Armenian, ambassador of Eleni of Ethiopia, was dead.
For a little more than a decade, he had been far from home, if Ethiopia even was what he considered his home, and for most of that ten years he had struggled to find anyone who would believe that he truly was who he said he was. At every step, he had faced accusations of falsehoods and deceit. He had been imprisoned at sea and very likely threatened with worse than that. Had probably been chosen for his ability to move between societies but had at every turn faced abuse for that very same adaptability. A governor of Portuguese India had believed in him though, and so had a king of Portugal, and he had returned to Ethiopia with an embassy from that realm. It had been ten years, but he had returned with a diplomatic response.
The body of Mateus was taken to the monastery to be buried, along with his goods, to be sent on to Eleni as the ambassador had willed, though Álvares rather suspected one of the servants along with the friars of seeking to take a cut from those belongings before doing so. As for Álvares, and the rest of the Portuguese embassy, we leave them there at that highland monastery, having been brought their by a man who was now dead, and now needing to wait for some word from the court of Prester John and Queen Eleni to pluck them from this place. We leave them waiting.
In a fitting postscript to the Mateus story, his status, his courtly connection, would at first be denied by the Ethiopian ruler, the young Dawit II, though to be fair, Dawit had been even younger when Mateus had left.
Mateus’s identity remained, and would remain contested. And with so many people saying that he was nothing but a fraud, there always remains the possibility that this was exactly what he was and nothing more. In her 2012 book Renaissance Impostors and Proofs of Identity, Miriam Eliav-Feldon would conclude that Mateus was, quote, a “very clever charlatan,” though one whose fraud bore real fruit. She does seem to be in the minority in this opinion, but maybe she was right. The question of who Mateus really was remains open to discussion.
Thank you for listening. If you are listening on Patreon, I will be back soon with the usual extra audio. If not, I’ll be back here with the continuation of this story, and I’ll talk to you then.