When Europe was a mysterious and barbaric land for the Ethiopians..a different history for the old continent and Abyssinia

For centuries, the pan-European view ignored the power and knowledge of the African empire.

In their report, published by the American "Smithsonian" magazine, the two academic writers specializing in historical studies, David M. Perry and Matthew Gabriel, said that in early 2020, when the scope and scale of the Corona pandemic was expanding, historian and writer Verena Krebs went to spend a few months at her parents' home. in the German countryside.

Krebs was waiting for the country's lockdown to be announced, and wasn't too worried about being unemployed as she was finishing her book on Ethiopia in the late Middle Ages.

Krebs had just finished a full copy of the book and had signed a contract with a well-known academic publisher.

Unfortunately, however, she was not satisfied with the book she wrote, as Krebs realized that her sources contradicted the prevailing narrative that Europe was helping a needy Ethiopia, an African kingdom desperately seeking military technology to keep pace with its more advanced counterparts in the north.

But her writing did not quite match her research, which still follows the mainstream culture.

Krebs was also concerned that her interpretation of the original medieval sources was also exaggerated.

Instead of modifying what I had already written, Krebs decided to do what good historians do and trace the sources. “I deleted the first copy that I made. I rewrote everything again. I started writing in April, and finished it all by August,” she said. August, I think.

A different narrative for Europe and Ethiopia

It turned out that the book, published earlier this year with the title "Monarchy, Craftsmanship, and Medieval Ethiopian Diplomacy with Latin Europe", was a change from the usual course of events that traditionally focused on Europe and put Ethiopia on the sidelines as a technologically backward Christian kingdom. The prevailing narrative is that Ethiopia in the later Middle Ages looked to Europe for help.

But by tracing the sources, the author presents a contrasting picture of the power and people of Ethiopia at the time while presenting Europe as it was perceived in East Africa, as a homogeneous mass of foreigners.

Lalibela churches carved into Ethiopian rocks dating back to the thirteenth century AD and classified as a UNESCO World Heritage Site (Getty Images)

This is not because contemporary historians of the Mediterranean, Europe and medieval Africa were ignorant of the contacts between Ethiopia and Europe, but rather that they had an inversely dynamic force.

In other words, the traditional narrative asserts that Ethiopia is weak and vulnerable to aggression from outside powers, especially the Mamluks of Egypt, so it requested military assistance from its Christian brothers in the north - the expanding kingdoms of Aragon (in modern Spain) and France.

The American Journal report says that Krebs' research not only changes the prevailing understanding of the relationship between Ethiopia and other kingdoms, but joins a group of medieval African studies that prompt medieval European scholars to expand their research and imagine a more connected and richer medieval world.

In Krebs' account, the Solomon kings - who ruled Abyssinia for centuries until 1974 after the coup and fall of the last emperor Haile Selassie - established trans-regional ties. They "discovered" the kingdoms of Europe in the late Middle Ages, not the other way around.

At the turn of the 15th century, Africans sent ambassadors to exotic and distant lands, where they sought sacred monuments and relics from foreign leaders that would serve as symbols of prestige and greatness.

At the beginning of the so-called Age of Discovery, a narrative that depicts European rulers as champions of sending their ships to foreign lands, Crips found evidence that the kings of Ethiopia looked after their diplomatic, doctrinal and commercial missions.

Early history of Christianity

But Medieval Ethiopia's history extends far beyond the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It has been associated with the Mediterranean most famously since the beginning of the expansion of Christianity.

In the words of Krebs, "[The Kingdom of Ethiopia] is one of the oldest Christian kingdoms in the world."

(Converted) Aksum, the former kingdom of what is now Ethiopia, "converted to Christianity at the beginning of the fourth century", much earlier than the Roman Empire, which converted to Christianity only by the sixth or seventh century.

Specifically, the Sulaymaniyah dynasty was founded around AD 1270 in the highlands of the Horn of Africa, and was able to fully establish its power by the 15th century.

Its name is based on the claim of individuals belonging to it of direct lineage to King Solomon - peace be upon him - from a branch stemming from his alleged relationship with the Queen of Sheba.

During the period of their emergence, the kings of this dynasty succeeded in overcoming all the external threats they faced, worked to expand the borders of the kingdom, and established unstable, mostly peaceful relations with the Mamluk state in Egypt in the north, surprising Christian Europe.

Krebs notes that the Ethiopian rulers at the time were looking at the past of Aksum's civilization with some nostalgia, "(the country) witnessed something like the Renaissance, where the Ethiopian Christian kings were returning to late antiquity to revive ancient models in art and literature, and make them their own."

Besides investing in a common culture of art and literature, they also followed an ancient model used by rulers across the Mediterranean, and throughout Europe, Asia, and Africa, of emphasizing religion.

These kings intended to build churches, communicated with the Coptic Christians living in Egypt under the Muslim Mamluks, and presented themselves as protectors.

In this way, the kings of the Sulaymaniyah dynasty in Ethiopia established a huge kingdom, multilingual, multi-ethnic, and multi-religious, becoming a true empire.

"Barbarian Europe"

For the Ethiopians, Krebs says, Europe was a mysterious and somewhat barbaric land with an interesting history, but most importantly it contained sacred things that Ethiopian kings could obtain.

She adds that (the Ethiopians in the Middle Ages) were more familiar with Greek, Syriac, Armenian, Coptic, and all the Orthodox and Eastern Orthodox churches, but this did not apply to Latin Christianity, as their information about it was limited to the presence of the Pope only.

The authors note that Krebs recognizes the challenges of being a European trying to rewrite Ethiopian history.

This is confirmed by the medieval historian of the University of Tennessee Knoxville American Village Salam Yerga, who says that Krebs realized that "Ethiopian diplomatic contacts with Europe [were] far more complex [than was understood by the traditional narrative]".

He adds that much of the studies of Ethiopia and Europe in the late Middle Ages "was inspired by the colonial landscape and (twentieth century) fascism."

Krebs also emphasized that tracing the earliest sources often led to a dead end in the writings that emerged from Italy in the 1930s and 1940s, that is, under fascism and colonial ambitions that culminated in the Second Italo-Ethiopian War of 1935.

Krebs' book has had an impact beyond academia. Solomon Gebris Bini, a researcher from Ethiopia now at the University of Hamburg, notes that "most Ethiopians who have completed secondary school and even university have been taught that Ethiopia followed a closed-door policy in the Middle Ages," or She sought military aid and arms from the North in her most desperate moments.

This may be the reason for the lack of talk about Ethiopia in the Middle Ages.

But the book changes all that by bringing the curtain down on the period and "enabling Ethiopian scholars and the general public to learn more about the glorious diplomatic history of medieval Ethiopia," says Beyney.

The researcher also expresses his appreciation for the departure of Krebs' book from Eurocentrism, to deal with history from an Ethiopian perspective.

This makes another glorious contribution to the field of medieval Ethiopian historiography.

Krebs stresses that the book aims not only to change Ethiopian history, but also to ensure that her story is integrated with other narratives told about the global Middle Ages. This results in a change in the course of analysis and study of African-European interactions, because the sources indicate that the medieval world was much broader than many believe.