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PORTSIDE CULTURE

A NEW HISTORY CHANGES THE BALANCE OF POWER BETWEEN ETHIOPIA AND
MEDIEVAL EUROPE  
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David M. Perry and Matthew Gabriele
June 29, 2021
Smithsonian Magazine
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_ This book, writes reviewers Perry and Gabriele, "showcases the
agency and power of Ethiopia and Ethiopians at the time and renders
Europe as it was seen from East Africa, as a kind of homogenous (if
interesting) mass of foreigners." _

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_Medieval Ethiopian Kingship, Craft, and Diplomacy with Latin Europe_
Verena Krebs
Palgrave Macmillan
ISBN-13: 978-3030649333

In early 2020, just as the scope and scale of the coronavirus pandemic
was revealing itself, historian Verena Krebs
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parents’ house in the German countryside. There, “next to fields
of rapeseed and barley and dense old woods,” in her words, the
Ruhr-University Bochum professor would wait out Germany’s lockdown.
She wasn’t terribly worried about not having things to do though,
since she had her book on the history of late medieval Ethiopia to
finish up.

The good news was that she had already completed the full manuscript
and had secured a contract with a major academic publisher. The bad
news was more existential: She didn’t like the book she had written.
Krebs knew her sources ran against the dominant narrative that placed
Europe as aiding a needy Ethiopia, the African kingdom desperately in
search of military technology from its more sophisticated counterparts
to the north. But her writing didn’t fully match her research; it
still followed the prevailing scholarship. Krebs worried that her
interpretation of the original medieval sources was, in her own words,
too “out there’” So, she hedged, and she struggled, and she
doubted, and wrote the book she thought she was supposed to write.

And then, she told us, she did something radical. Instead of tweaking
what was already written, she decided to do what good historians do
and follow the sources. “I basically deleted the manuscript that I
had submitted. And I just wrote the whole thing anew. I started
writing in April, and I finished the whole thing by, I think,
August.”
 
What emerged, published earlier this year as _Medieval Ethiopian
Kingship, Craft, and Diplomacy with Latin Europe_
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flips the script. Traditionally, the story centered Europe and placed
Ethiopia as periphery, a technologically backwards Christian kingdom
that, in the later Middle Ages, looked to Europe for help. But by
following the sources, Krebs showcases the agency and power of
Ethiopia and Ethiopians at the time and renders Europe as it was seen
from East Africa, as a kind of homogenous (if interesting) mass of
foreigners.

It’s not that modern historians of the medieval Mediterranean,
Europe and Africa have been ignorant about contacts between Ethiopia
and Europe; the issue was that they had the power dynamic reversed.
The traditional narrative stressed Ethiopia as weak and in trouble in
the face of aggression from external forces, especially the Mamluks in
Egypt, so Ethiopia sought military assistance from their fellow
Christians to the north—the expanding kingdoms of Aragon (in modern
Spain), and France. But the real story, buried in plain sight in
medieval diplomatic texts, simply had not yet been put together by
modern scholars. Krebs’ research not only transforms our
understanding of the specific relationship between Ethiopia and other
kingdoms, but joins a welcome chorus of medieval African scholarship
pushing scholars of medieval Europe to broaden their scope and imagine
a much more richly connected medieval world.

The Solomonic kings of Ethiopia, in Krebs’ retelling, forged
trans-regional connections. They “discovered” the kingdoms of late
medieval Europe, not the other way around. It was the Africans who, in
the early-15th century, sent ambassadors out into strange and distant
lands. They sought curiosities and sacred relics from foreign leaders
that could serve as symbols of prestige and greatness. Their
emissaries descended onto a territory that they saw as more or less a
uniform “other,” even if locals knew it to be a diverse land of
many peoples. At the beginning of the so-called Age of Exploration, a
narrative that paints European rulers as heroes for sending out their
ships to foreign lands, Krebs has found evidence that the kings of
Ethiopia were sponsoring their own missions of diplomacy, faith and
commerce.

But the history of medieval Ethiopia extends much farther back than
the 15th and 16th centuries and has been intertwined with the
better-known history of the Mediterranean since the very beginning of
Christianity’s expansion. “[The kingdom of Ethiopia] is one of the
most ancient Christian realms in the world,” she says. Aksum, a
predecessor kingdom to what we now know as Ethiopia, “[converts] to
Christianity in the very early fourth century,” much earlier than
the mass of the Roman empire, which only converted to Christianity by
the sixth or seventh century. The Solomonic dynasty specifically arose
around 1270 A.D. in the highlands of the Horn of Africa and by the
15th century had firmly consolidated power. Their name arose out of
their claim of direct descent from King Solomon of ancient Israel, via
his purported relationship with the Queen of Sheba. Although they
faced several external threats, they consistently beat those threats
back and expanded their kingdom across the period, establishing uneasy
(though generally peaceful) relations with Mamluk Egypt and inspiring
wonder across Christian Europe.
 
It’s at this time, Krebs says, that the Ethopian rulers looked back
to Aksum with nostalgia, “It's its own little Renaissance, if you
will, where Ethiopian Christian kings are actively going back to Late
Antiquity and even reviving Late Antique models in art and literature,
to make it their own.” So, in addition to investing in a shared
culture of art and literature, they followed a well-worn model used by
rulers across the Mediterranean, and throughout Europe, Asia, and
Africa, by turning to religion. They build churches.They reach out to
the Coptic Christians living in Egypt under the Islamic Mamluks to
present themselves as a kind of (theoretical) protector. The Solomonic
kings of Ethiopia consolidated a huge “multilingual, multi-ethnic,
multi-faith kingdom” under their rule, really a kind of empire.

And that empire needed to be adorned. Europe, Krebs says, was for the
Ethiopians a mysterious and perhaps even slightly barbaric land with
an interesting history and, importantly, sacred stuff that Ethiopian
kings could obtain. They knew about the Pope, she says, “But other
than that, it's Frankland. [Medieval Ethiopians] had much more precise
terms for Greek Christianity, Syriac Christianity, Armenian
Christianity, the Copts, of course. All of the Orthodox and Oriental
Orthodox churches. But everything Latin Christian [to the Ethiopians]
is Frankland.”

Krebs is attuned to the challenges of being an outsider, a European
rewriting Ethiopian history. Felege-Selam Yirga, a medieval historian
at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, told us over email that
Krebs has recognized that “Ethiopian diplomatic contacts with and
perception of Europe [were] far more complex [than has been
traditionally understood].” Yirga says that much of the study of
late medieval Ethiopia and Europe “was informed by the colonial and
[20th-century] fascist setting in which many ... scholars of East
Africa worked. While Ethiopian studies is awash in new discoveries and
excellent philological
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work, certain older works and authors remain popular and
influential.” Indeed, these were points that Krebs herself
emphasized—that following the footnotes back in time often led to
dead-ends in scholarship produced in 1930s and 1940s Italy, under the
thrall of fascism and entertaining new colonial ambitions that
culminated in the country’s successful invasion of Ethiopia in 1935.

The book is already having an impact on life outside the academy.
Solomon Gebreyes Beyene, a research fellow from Ethiopia now at the
University of Hamburg, told us, “Most ordinary Ethiopians who have
completed high school and even university have learned that Ethiopia
pursued a closed-door policy in the Middle Ages,” or at most
desperately sought military help and weapons from the north. Perhaps
because of that, medieval Ethiopia isn’t a period that’s discussed
much at all. Krebs’ book changes all that, he says. It opens up the
period and “enables Ethiopian scholars and the general public to
learn more about the glorious diplomatic history of Ethiopia's
medieval history, and it also serves as a reference for university
students and professors.” He adds, “I also appreciated that, far
from favoring a Eurocentric view, the book approaches history from an
Ethiopian perspective. It makes another glorious contribution to the
historiography of medieval Ethiopian history.”

Krebs is not content to sit back and watch what happens next. As
befits a scholar who literally threw out a fully written book and
wrote a better and more rigorous one over the course of a summer, she
remains focused on not only changing Ethiopian history but ensuring
that their story is integrated into other stories told about the
medieval world. She told us that, especially in the 15th century, you
have these “kings who see themselves as the center of the universe,
who are sitting in these Highlands in the Horn of Africa and
perceiving themselves as not just the heirs of biblical King Solomon,
but as the first kings among the earth. And so I mean, that just
changes how we need to read, in that case, African-European
interactions.” Following the sources, it’s quite clear that the
medieval world was much wider and more expansive than many have
thought.
 
_This article is part of a series on medieval history connected to the
December 2021 release of the authors’ new book _The Bright Ages: A
New History of Medieval Europe_._

* Medieval history
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* Ethiopia
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* Europe
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* Diplomatic history
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