Throughout the Crusading period, Latin Christians expanded their knowledge of Nubia and Ethiopia via an expansive web of interactions, including with Nubians, Ethiopians, and other Eastern groups. The First Crusade established four Latin states that were largely unaware of their new surroundings. As the twelfth century progressed, however, and particularly following the loss of Jerusalem in 1187, a multifaceted array of knowledge networks throughout the Holy Land, the wider Mediterranean, and further afield, informed the Latin Christians of potential distant allies to aid in their fight against the Muslim powers in Syria and Egypt. It is clear that Nubians and Ethiopians would have been active participants in these exchanges with Latin Christians, both as disseminators and receivers of news and information, though that is not to say that they necessarily readily portrayed themselves as potential allies. The question of any potential alliance centred primarily on the actions of Dotawo, with Ethiopia largely remaining unengaged until the turn of the fifteenth century. Nubians increasingly began to be viewed as potential allies which could create a Christian alliance surrounding Egypt by both the Latin Christians and the Muslims of Egypt. This appears to have been the case during the late twelfth century but became a particular focus following the fall of Acre in 1291 as the Latin Christians intensified their quest to engage with Nubia as a potential crusading ally. Regrettably, we remain unaware of the intentions of Dotawo and Ethiopia in their engagements with Latin Christians during this period. Nevertheless, Nubians, Ethiopians, and Latin Christians should be seen as being well-aware of each other, indeed much more than the sources suggest. The absence of this acknowledgement in their respective sources is largely due to source survival, especially from the Nubian and Ethiopian perspectives.
When the history of Dotawo is contextualised within a broader regional geopolitical arena, it would appear unlikely that Dotawo remained a bystander to events to its north, but no surviving Nubian evidence is forthcoming on this matter. Despite the lack of direct evidence from a Nubian perspective, new questions are posed about the history of Nubia when the latter centuries of Dotawo are viewed comparatively alongside those of the Crusader States, Egypt, and Ethiopia. Late thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century Mamlūk aggression towards Dotawo, for example, cannot necessarily be isolated from Nubia’s associations – whether, real, imagined, or deemed possible – with the Latin Christians. The events of the early 1170s created a precedent whereby Muslim writers had reason to fear the development of an encircling Christian alliance surrounding Egypt. The Egyptian fear of a Nubian-Latin Christian alliance may be evidence of the reality of these relations, and it would also explain why direct diplomatic contact was rare if the Egyptians were actively able to prevent such opportunities. The Nubian soldiers in Egypt who attempted to communicate with King Amalric in 1169, whilst not representatives of the desires of Dotawo, highlight how potentially notable events remained unrecorded in both the Nubian and Latin Christian corpus and are reliant on other sources. If the story of the messenger had not occurred in relation to the significant 1169 uprising in Egypt and the arrival of Ṣalāḥ ad-Dīn, the story of the messenger may have been relegated to obscurity completely. How many events like this were left unrecorded? The Mamlūk fear of an alliance between the Nubians and the Latin Christians attests to the sustained threat of such an alliance, both perceived and real. However, Dotawo did not entirely collapse during this period despite repeated challenges which were both related and unrelated to the events presented within this book and continued to exist in part up until the sixteenth century. Yet the fourteenth century gave Latin Christian onlookers the impression of decline, despite the initial hope inspired by the arrival of the early fourteenth-century (1300–c. after 1314) embassy to Castile and to the papal court at Avignon. The Mamlūks had seemingly successfully portrayed themselves as victors in Nubia, leaving Ethiopia able to step into the power vacuum left by Dotawo’s removal from international affairs. How far Dotawo did actually experience a prolonged period of decline remains difficult to assess. Indeed, the reign of ourou Siti in the 1330s would suggest a Christian Nubian resurgence after the reign of the Muslim Kanz ad-Dawla, which even witnessed the throne hall of Dongola being turned into a mosque. For the period following 1365, Nubian sources and external accounts are too scarce to create a detailed or consistent picture of the situation by the late fourteenth century prior to the arrival of ourou Joel between the 1460s and 1480s whose reign signifies the lasting authority of the Christian Nubian rulers.
Whilst similar interactions with Ethiopians also occurred, Ethiopians were not initially deemed to be significant enough to become a focus of Latin Christian discourse. The Ethiopian kingdom of Bǝgwǝna had regional gravitas during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, but engagements between Nubians and Latin Christians may simply have been more substantial than those between Ethiopians and Latin Christians. Ethiopian sources are far too scant to reveal any more on the matter from their point of view. The arrival of the Solomonic dynasty in 1270 began to change this narrative, especially after the reign of ʿÄmdä Ṣǝyon (r. 1314−44). Prior to the dissemination of news of ʿÄmdä Ṣǝyon’s exploits in Ethiopia across the Mediterranean, Ethiopia largely remained absent in Latin Christian crusading discourse. Indeed, the turning point was the arrival of the Ethiopian embassy in Venice in 1402, and the significance of its timing should not be understated. Ethiopian evidence shows no sign of any interest in political or military alliances with any Latin Christian ruler before the reign of aṣé Däwit II (r. c. 1379–1413). The likely identification of the early fourteenth-century ‘Ethiopian’ embassy as Nubian further attests to this. Evidence suggests that Ethiopia was known to Latin Christians, notably through the appearance of the toponym of ‘Abyssinia’ from the late twelfth century, but surviving recorded information remained quite superficial in favour of Nubia. It is no coincidence that more texts begin to reference Ethiopia once it became apparent to the Latin Christians that military cooperation with Nubia was no longer possible and Ethiopia appeared to be a better alternative. Both Ethiopia and the Latin Christians began to be interested in each other for their own respective gain, but this does not appear to have been coordinated, and the development of relations was the result of separate circumstances. Nevertheless, in context, the timing of the arrival of the 1402 Ethiopian embassy to Venice and the significance of Solomonic Ethiopia’s coincidental adoption of the toponym of ʾItyoṗya are both integral for understanding the Ethiopian and Latin Christian framing of subsequent diplomatic relations. A ‘new’ Ethiopia had replaced the ‘old’ ‘Ethiopia’ of Nubia.
There is no evidence to suggest that Ethiopians viewed themselves as ‘Ethiopians’ prior to 1270. In fact, evidence suggests that previous Ethiopians, whether in ʾAksum or Bǝgwǝna, actively avoided such an identification as ‘Ethiopia’ and were fully aware of its historical and biblical allusions to Nubia. The Solomonic dynasty’s desire to reconnect its lineage to a biblical past to legitimise its authority centred the dynasty on being rulers of ʾItyoṗya. As such, they recentred Ethiopia within a wider Christian universal history which had once centred Nubia. The contemporary stagnation of Dotawo certainly gave Ethiopia a cultural vacuum in which to appropriate the toponym of ‘Ethiopia’. It also enabled its rulers to take up the traditional mantle of Nubian rulers, such as being the protector of Eastern Christians in disputes with the Muslims of Egypt. However, the full range of reasons why this process occurred and precisely how interconnected this all was is unclear. For example, there is no clear evidence that Ethiopia initially adopted the toponym explicitly because it wanted to replace Nubia, and it remains possible that it was solely an internal development with the arrival of the Solomonids, which only developed significance outside of Ethiopia after the initial decades of Solomonic rule. As such, the parallel developments in Ethiopia and Dotawo may have merely been coincidental. That said, it would be unlikely that Solomonic Ethiopia remained ignorant of events in Dotawo, especially through their shared ecclesiastical networks with the Coptic patriarch. As Nubia declined in Latin Christian discourse, a ‘new’ Ethiopia readily took its place, and the arrival of the Ethiopian embassy in 1402 changed the narrative completely. It may even be said that whilst Nubia ultimately suffered as a result of the Crusades, Ethiopia was a beneficiary, whether intentionally or inadvertently, of the geopolitical and geocultural circumstances that Dotawo came to find itself in.
The possible significance of attempted Nubian-Latin Christian relations in the era of Ethiopian-Latin Christian diplomacy may be particularly witnessed in one of the early recorded fifteenth-century embassies. Unlike the 1402 embassy to Venice which is recorded in Ethiopian sources, an embassy which arrived in Rome in 1404, supposedly following up from another embassy which had arrived in the previous year, has no lasting legacy in Ethiopian sources and is only known from Latin Christian sources.1 This embassy has long been known in Ethiopian Studies and in the history of Ethiopian-Latin Christian relations and has remained as part of the broader narrative of diplomatic relations. However, one potentially significant detail recorded regarding the embassy has remained overlooked, which, in light of the evidence provided throughout this book, deserves to at least be considered with an alternative narrative. The three ambassadors, noted only as ‘three black ‘Ethiopians’ from India’ (tres ethiopes nigri de India), were said to have laughed when they were told about the content of the Book of the Three Kings regarding their land by their Latin Christian hosts.2 Nothing concerning what was discussed appears in the sources but, presumably, it centred on a copy of John of Hildesheim’s text of the same name which, as noted in Chapter Four, centred its comments on the Nubian Prester John. Given the lack of textual, rather than contextual, Ethiopian evidence for the embassy, analysis of the embassy has overlooked the fact that John’s text actually focuses on Nubia, not Ethiopia. What might this mean for understanding the embassy? Two intriguing suggestions come to mind. First, though probably contextually less probable, it is possible that the embassy was actually a Nubian embassy which had coincidently arrived in Rome following a recent Ethiopian embassy to Venice and has thus been erased in scholarship due to the nature of the sources. Problematically, almost nothing is currently known about Dotawo at this time to suggest a reason for sending such an embassy beyond possibly responding to the likely effects of contemporary plague and Nile flooding that were recorded in neighbouring Egypt within Nubia, though direct evidence for such is also currently lacking both textually and archaeologically. Nevertheless, Nubians could readily have been amused by such a wrong depiction of their kingdom by the Latin Christians as depicted in Hildesheim’s text, particularly as they almost certainly did not know what the text was. Alternatively, the embassy may well have been an Ethiopian embassy, but did the Latin Christians actually believe, or indeed hope, that they were Nubians, hence the Ethiopians’ amusement at being mistaken for Nubians? Significantly, John of Hildesheim’s text does explicitly refer to Nubia, not Ethiopia (or even ‘Ethiopia’). In which case, this would only serve to highlight the importance of Nubia in the origins of the Ethiopian-Latin Christian relations of the fifteenth century.
Moving Beyond This Study
One thing that should be emphasised moving into the decades following this study is that Nubia did not completely vanish into obscurity after being overtaken by Ethiopia in Latin Christian diplomatic discourse. For instance, Gomes Eanes de Zurara (d. 1474), the royal chronicler of the early decades of the Portuguese expansion into West Africa, listed the five key reasons for Dom Henrique’s patronage of the early fifteenth-century expeditions in his crónica (wr. stopped in 1453) as the following:
I. The prince wanted to know what lands lay beyond Cape Bojador.
II. He desired to seek out Christian populations to engage in trade.
III. He intended to work out the geographical extent of the power of the North African Muslims.
IV. He sought to find a Christian ruler who would join him in the fight against the Muslims.
V. Lastly, he wished to spread the Christian faith throughout Africa.3
The focus of the prince is notable. Instead of portraying a period of new engagement with Africa, Zurara’s text can, rather, actually be viewed as a continuation of the relations presented throughout this book. The previous two centuries and relations between Nubia, Ethiopia, and Latin Christians had given purpose and belief in the success of these aims. Notably, despite the Ethiopian embassies of the early fifteenth century, Nubia remained integral to the early Portuguese endeavours. For example, in 1454, the year following the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople, Dom Afonso V used Nubia to situate the scope of Portuguese occupations overseas when he bestowed upon the Order of Christ the eternal oversight and jurisdiction over all spiritual affairs concerning all the beaches, coasts, islands, and conquered, and yet-to-be-conquered, lands of ‘Guinea’, Nubia, and ‘Ethiopia’, including those parts of Africa yet to be named.4 The historical significance of Nubia remained. Importantly, the story of Afro-European fifteenth-century relations, whether Luso-African or Ethiopian-Latin Christian, should not be framed unquestionably as narratives of new engagements and were building on previous endeavours, albeit in new forms. Building on what has been presented here leading up to the fifteenth century, how exactly the idea of Nubia, if not the real or perceived power of the kingdom of Dotawo, continued to inspire Latin Christian designs for Africa remains a potentially fruitful research avenue that continues to be neglected.
Between the twelfth century and the arrival of the first Ethiopian embassy to Latin Europe in 1402, this study has shown that the significance of the role of Nubia, both in perception and reality, in crusading geopolitics should no longer remain overwhelmingly neglected or even dismissed. Using a corpus of sources that had not previously been reviewed in tandem, it has especially emphasised the importance of looking beyond the Latin Christian corpus to retrace arenas of Nubian, Ethiopian, and Latin Christian interaction, which had previously not been used to its full potential. No previous study has hitherto used the range of sources presented here: Old Nubian, Gəʿəz, Coptic, Latin (and other Latin European vernacular sources), Arabic, Greek, Syriac, Hebrew, and Armenian, along with the current archaeological corpus. Importantly, the majority of sources presented here are already published and accessible in order to highlight the need for a new narrative of the corpus. Further scope to incorporate unpublished material could provide even more avenues for future study to expand on the arguments presented here. Moreover, other source corpora, which were only briefly touched on here, would provide even more avenues for analysis for future research, notably connections retraced via the artistic corpus, both in its styles and material production. Whilst material connections cannot necessarily differentiate between either direct connections or indirect trade via intermediaries, more evidence which connects both Nubia and Ethiopia to Europe during the period in question here beyond the textual evidence would only serve to further establish an interconnected world which included Dotawo, Ethiopia, and Latin Europe.
The range of sources discussed here, often piecing together disparate corpuses, have highlighted how limited the picture painted concerning Nubia, Ethiopia, and Latin Christendom before 1402 by previous scholarship, particularly in the fields of Nubian, Ethiopian, and Crusades Studies, is as a result of using a much more limited corpus than what currently exists. The referencing to translations, where possible, has been designed to introduce as many of these sources to the broadest audience to help overcome many of the barriers between the various fields of study: namely, identifying and reading sources in corpora often considered independent or, at best, only tangentially connected. Nevertheless, the linguistic analysis of editions of all sources discussed underpins the arguments of identification which run throughout this study to emphasise the methodology of distinction between Nubians and Ethiopians. Whether concerning Nubian or Ethiopian engagement with the Latin Christians or the question of the scope of potential arenas of exchange in the Holy Land, Egypt, and elsewhere, it has been made clear that previous discussion of such questions has limited itself to only a fragment of the relevant corpus. For instance, the question of the presence of Ethiopians in the Holy Land prior to 1187 cannot be maintained when contextualised with sources beyond the Latin Christian corpus. Indeed, the reframing of the early fourteenth-century ‘Ethiopian’ embassy to northern Iberia and Avignon as a Nubian embassy not only challenges current narratives of its supposed Ethiopian identification based on overlooked contextual evidence but also poses important questions about Nubian diplomacy during a time of significant internal political turmoil. Moreover, conclusions drawn from the linguistic analysis of the appearance and use of the toponym of ‘Ethiopia’ challenges commonly held notions of the internal and external identity of Ethiopia, particularly challenging the repeated scholarly opinion that it was applied to the predecessors of Solomonic Ethiopia before 1270. Most importantly, this study has emphasised how Nubia should not be ignored or overlooked in favour of Ethiopia based on overly simplistic or anachronistic notions of the identity of biblical Ethiopia later cemented by the Solomonic dynasty. Furthermore, the highlighting of the fact that Solomonic Ethiopia did not universally claim itself to be ‘Ethiopia’ in correspondence with non-Christian recipients poses further questions for the adoption, scope, and purpose of Solomonic Ethiopia’s new identity.
Additionally, the framing of the sources for interaction within a methodology of news interactions – primary, secondary, and tertiary networks, as well as communal knowledge – has highlighted how the routes of news and information can be retraced, or at least plausibly reconstructed, despite often limited references to direct interaction, particularly in the earlier period. Knowledge production did not develop in a vacuum. Equally, many subsequent questions remain unanswered, such as the circumstances behind the Nubian adoption of the word santa in one possibly c. late twelfth-century document from Qasr Ibrim. Fleeting and isolated interactions are one matter, but language adoption suggests much greater engagement than the text otherwise relates. Communal knowledge, particularly, points to diverse observational knowledge which could develop even without the need for direct interactions. We should also not forget about the information which was shared but shows almost no explicit trace in certain arenas, such as in the Holy Land during the earlier twelfth century. The information exchange and interactions presented here should not necessarily be considered to be isolated only to the directly and indirectly documented instances. By no means does this approach only have to apply to the material presented here and could readily be transplanted to other studies where direct evidenced interactions are similarly limited, both in scope and in scale.
This study has shown that many more areas of interaction between Nubians, Ethiopians, and Latin Christians occurred during the twelfth to fourteenth centuries than is currently accredited in the respective fields of scholarship. Not only was Nubia a ‘Mediterranean society’, to return to Giovanni Ruffini’s term, but the activities of Dotawo and Nubian diasporas beyond Nubia went further than that of trade and pilgrimage, particularly in the realm of regional geopolitics and information dissemination. Equally, even though it is argued that Ethiopia was not diplomatically active with Latin Europe since late antiquity until 1402, it was not unknown to the Latin Christians – largely emphasising the early priority of Nubia in Latin Christian discourse until the fourteenth century. By doing so, this study has drawn attention to the role of Nubia and Ethiopia in contemporary Latin Christian discourse, the significance of contextualising the latter history of Dotawo within a regional geopolitical prism, and on the circumstances and platform on which Solomonic Ethiopia adopted the biblical ‘Ethiopian’ identity at the expense of Nubia. As Nubian and Ethiopian evidence remains relatively scant in comparison to the Latin Christian corpus, this study has also sought to emphasise the importance of discussing Nubia and Ethiopia in Crusades Studies, and other comparable Latin European studies, rather than maintaining a focus on other Eastern Christian groups. It is not the case that the evidence for discussing Nubians or Ethiopians in this manner is necessarily unknown or limited. Particularly, this study has emphasised a much greater need to contextualise the Crusader States within the Red Sea region far beyond the largely sole discussion of Reynald de Châtillon’s 1182–3 Red Sea ‘raid’ within a Holy Land-centred narrative.
Beyond the parameters of the study in question, this work also hopes to offer discussions which pertain to questions concerning the Latin Christian fifteenth-century ‘invention’ of ‘Africa’, which developed from their early interest in Nubia, before shifting attentions to Ethiopia alongside the emerging continent. In contrast to the material presented here on Nubia and Ethiopia, this study also poses the question regarding the competing discourses concerning West Africa. As Latin Christian interest in West Africa increased from the latter half of the thirteenth century, at least as far as the sources portray, how far did Latin Christian discourse on the remainder of the African continent truly rival that of Ethiopia, at least until the expulsion of the Jesuits in 1633? Can it be said that Ethiopia always maintained a primacy? Other questions resulting from this study concern the depth of Nubian influences in early Solomonic identity in Ethiopia. Similarly, did this framing of identity reach beyond the question of ‘who was Ethiopia’ and was it only an Ethiopian prerogative, or did any aspects of Ethiopian culture get adopted by Dotawo too? Certainly, much more work needs to be undertaken concerning the physical and intellectual connectivity between Nubia and Ethiopia between the fourth and sixteenth centuries. One particular area of study that this work has only inadvertently addressed is the study of race in medieval Latin Europe. It has sought to provide a narrative of Christian African-Latin Christian relations during the twelfth and fourteenth centuries as a result of increased engagement with each other, which can be used for further work on how concepts of race developed or were challenged in Latin Europe. Christian Africa did not witness the same application of non-Christian attitudes or ignorance that non-Christian Africa experienced in medieval Latin Christian discourse and this distinction remains commonly overlooked in current scholarship.
Moving forward, this study has sought to provide new inspiration for future directions in the study of Nubia, Ethiopia – as well as Africa more generally – and the Crusades, both for the period between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries and as a foundation for the later events of the fifteenth century. It has reframed and recontextualised the histories of post-twelfth-century Nubia and Ethiopia within a much wider regional narrative. Moreover, it has highlighted how much more work needs to be done concerning the relationship, both physical and intellectual, between the regions of Nubia and Ethiopia prior to the collapse of Dotawo in the sixteenth century. This study has also aimed to shed new light on the role and impact of the Crusade movement beyond its traditionally perceived boundaries, illustrating how it could have both beneficial and detrimental impacts on neighbouring Christian African kingdoms. Above all, this book has highlighted the interconnected nature of the histories of Dotawo, Ethiopia, and the Crusades and has proposed that these histories should no longer be viewed almost entirely in isolation and that the historiographical rejection of connections needs to be continually reassessed. Indeed, the histories of Dotawo, Ethiopia, and the Crusades between c.1095 and 1402 cannot be fully understood without also situating them within the wider contemporary context of each other.
Notes
1. See Krebs, Medieval Ethiopian Kingship, pp. 25–9.
2. Lazzarini, ‘Un’ambasciata etiopica in Italia nel 1404’, pp. 845–6.
3. Gomes Eanes de Zurara, Crónica, ed. de Sousa Soares, Ch 7, pp. I:43–5 (text); Azurara, Chronicle, trans. Beazley and Prestage, pp. I:27–30 (trans.).
4. Monumenta Henricina, eds. M. Lopes de Almeida, I. Ferreira da Costa Brochado, and A. Joaquim Dias Dinis, 14 vols. (Coimbra, 1960–74), XII:5.