As Islam advanced ever further into the interior of Africa, the highland kingdom of Abyssinia was left increasingly isolated, surrounded by adversaries but holding fast to its Christian identity. Its contacts with the outside world were limited. During the sixteenth century, Ottoman Turks established naval supremacy in the Red Sea, occupied Massawa, once the main port of entry for Abyssinia, set up a new province along the coastal region to the north and made numerous armed incursions into the old Aksumite heartland of Tigray. To the west, a new Muslim empire emerged along the lower reaches of the Abbai River (Blue Nile), based on the town of Sennar. At its height in the seventeenth century, the Funj kingdom of Sennar controlled trade routes running all the way from the Red Sea coast westwards to Kordofan and attempted to expand into Abyssinian territory. To the south, Cushitic-speaking Oromo pastoralists infiltrated into the highlands, founding settled communities there, adapting to agriculture and becoming a dominant element in the local population. As well as external threats, Abyssinia’s ruling elites were often engaged in their own interminable power struggles, frequently resorting to war.
Despite the difficulties of reaching Abyssinia, the Portuguese still aspired to maintain a presence there. Once the campaign to defeat the armies of Adal had ended, several hundred Portuguese remained in the northern highlands, marrying and siring families, becoming absorbed in the local population. They were active as builders and craftsmen, bringing a new style of architecture to the construction of churches, castles, bridges and fortifications.
Portuguese missionaries too were keen to retain influence, but their activities soon provoked internal dissension. Ignoring the deep attachment that Abyssinians held for their own Orthodox traditions, Portuguese Jesuits launched determined efforts to convert the country into a bastion of Roman Catholicism. Without any prior consultation, claiming that the Abyssinians had veered from the true path of Christianity, they consecrated a Portuguese Jesuit as patriarch of the Abyssinian church at a ceremony in Lisbon and then dispatched an envoy to the emperor Galawdewos to inform him of the appointment and to ask him to sever his connection with Alexandria. According to a Portuguese priest who witnessed the encounter in 1555, the emperor ‘looked so much out of countenance and was so disordered that when we spoke to him he answered nothing to the purpose . . . he went away to visit a grandmother of his, eight or ten days off, leaving us in an open field wholly unprovided for.’
Galawdewos subsequently made it clear to the envoy that he had no intention of abandoning his Orthodox faith and, for good measure, asked the Coptic Church in Egypt to send him a new abuna.
The Jesuits did not relent. In 1557, a Jesuit bishop, André da Oviedo, accompanied by five priests and a small party of servants, made his way uninvited to the emperor’s camp in Tigray. Designating himself archbishop, he told all Portuguese in the country that they no longer needed to obey the emperor’s edicts. Galawdewos responded calmly and tried to enlighten the Jesuits by compiling for them a document, which became known as his Confession of Faith, affirming his confidence in Orthodox teaching.
His successor, Minas, was not so patient. When da Oviedo continued to preach about the corruption of his court and his failings as a Christian, Minas banished the Jesuits to a remote spot in the northern highlands called Maigoga. The Jesuits built a monastery there, naming it Fremona in honour of Frumentius, Abyssinia’s first bishop who had converted the emperor Ezana. But the life they led there was harsh and isolated. They were allowed to venture out only to minister to other Portuguese. Da Oviedo managed to send out messages to Rome and Lisbon appealing for military intervention, but to no avail. He died there in 1577.
Still the Jesuits persevered. In 1589, a Spanish Jesuit, Pedro Paez, was sent from Goa as a missionary to Abyssinia. His first attempt to get there soon failed. En route he was captured by Turkish sailors, held prisoner in the Yemen and forced to work as a galley-slave. Seven years later, after payment of a ransom, he arrived back in Goa, emaciated and disconsolate. In 1603 he tried again, this time travelling as an Armenian merchant, using the name of Abdullah. By now fluent in Arabic, he slipped through Massawa and made his way to the Jesuit base at Fremona where he spent several months studying Amharic, Ge’ez, the ancient liturgical language of the Church, and Abyssinian customs. Summoned to the royal encampment at Dankaz, near Lake Tana, Paez impressed the young emperor Za Dengel with his careful explanations of Catholic belief and practice and persuaded him and several members of his retinue to convert. Aware of the difficulties that might ensue, Paez cautioned the emperor not to announce his new allegiance too quickly and returned to Fremona. When Za Dengel decreed changes in the observance of the Jewish Sabbath, he provoked a rebellion and was killed in the ensuing turmoil.
Undaunted, Paez struck up a warm friendship with the emperor Susenyos who captured the throne in 1607. Invited to attend his coronation in Aksum in 1609, Paez recorded the event in his História da Ethiópia which he completed in 1620, noting the pomp and luxury that its emperors liked to display.
The ground was covered with large and rich carpets, the great men drew up on both sides. The Maidens of Sion stopped the way crossing it with a silk line up to which the Emperor went three times and being asked by the Maidens who he was, the first and second time answered, ‘I am King of Israel.’ Being asked the third time who he was, he answered, ‘I am King of Zion.’ And then the air resounded with acclamations of joy, volleys of small shot, and the voice of trumpets, kettledrums . . . and other musical instruments . . . The Emperor had on a fine vest of crimson damask, and over it a Turkish robe of brocade like the ancient Roman gowns, the sleeves straight but so long that they hung down to the ground . . . girt with a broad girdle all of pieces of gold curiously wrought, and on his neck a thick chain of gold which went several times about hanging down on his breast and the ends of it falling deep behind, all which, he being a handsome man, became him very well.
Susenyos was crowned by a Coptic abuna, recently arrived from Egypt, in accordance with Orthodox tradition, but he was keen to develop a closer relationship with the Portuguese, hoping that they might provide military assistance to help him eject the Turks from the north and deal with his internal adversaries in the highlands.
Under Paez’s tactful guidance, Susenyos announced in 1612 his own conversion to Catholicism. As a mark of his esteem for the priest, he granted him a tract of land at Gorgora on the north shore of Lake Tana on which to build a Jesuit centre. Skilled in architecture as well as diplomacy, Paez built a stone church there and also a grand palace for Susenyos, with a commanding view of the lake. He was often chosen to accompany Susenyos on his campaigns against rivals and conspirators.
It was during these travels that Paez was taken to a small spring at Gish Abbai, the start of the Little Abbai river, which Abyssinians held to be the source of the Abbai or Blue Nile. Flowing northwards, the Little Abbai is one of several streams feeding Lake Tana; and from an outlet at the southern end of the lake, the Blue Nile begins its 900-mile journey before meeting the White Nile. Paez was thrilled to reach the spot: ‘I ascended the place . . . and saw with the greatest delight what neither Cyrus, the king of the Persians, nor Cambyses, nor Alexander the Great, nor the famous Julius Caesar, could ever discover.’ Although Paez was the first European to record his arrival at Gish Abbai, his visit there in 1615 made no impact when his account was first published. In the twentieth century, engineers ascertained that it is the rivers flowing from the Ethiopian highlands, the Blue Nile and the Atbara, when filled with summer monsoon rains, which bring the annual flood to Egypt.
Returning from a campaign where he had won a decisive victory in 1622, Susenyos decided to throw his full weight behind Catholicism, making it the official religion of the state. In a proclamation stating his reasons for having become a Catholic, he said a major factor was the edifying character of the Jesuits which he compared to the depravity and corruption of the Orthodox abunas.
What followed had disastrous consequences. Rome appointed as patriarch a senior Spanish Jesuit, Afonso Mendes, who was knowledgeable in the ways of the Catholic Church but uncompromising and narrow-minded in his approach to the mission he was given. After landing in disguise at a remote harbour on the Red Sea coast, Mendes made a hazardous journey across the Danakil desert, finally arriving at Susenyos’s headquarters at Dankaz in February 1626 with an entourage of priests, servants and musicians. Susenyos sent out an escort of 15,000 armed horsemen to welcome him.
They met in a church to the accompaniment of choirs singing the Benedictus and a fusillade of cannon fire. Mendes entered the church wearing his mitre and patriarchal robes and proceeded up the chancel where Susenyos, with a gold crown on his head, rose to embrace him. Mendes swiftly launched into an oration about the primacy of Rome and the perverse conduct of the eastern churches, speaking in Latin, quoting Greek and Roman philosophers and continuing at length for most of the day. Two days later, at a mass ceremony for clergy and laity, Susenyos, holding a copy of the Gospels, knelt before Mendes and took an oath of allegiance to the Pope.
Losing no time, Mendes set out to crush centuries of religious tradition. At his behest, the emperor directed that all churches be reconsecrated, all clergy reordained, all believers rebaptised, and all festivals fixed according to the Roman calendar. He also ordered the suspension of male circumcision and the observance of the Sabbath, deriding them as outmoded Jewish customs. A new liturgy was to be written. Several important Orthodox church and monastic lands were transferred to the Jesuits. Dissenters were punished by hanging or burning at the stake.
The outcome was a series of rebellions across Abyssinia. In June 1632, Susenyos’s own brother, Malka Christos, assembled a large army in Lasta to overthrow him. Susenyos managed to defeat it but at the cost of 8,000 killed. As he walked with his son Fasilidas across the battlefield amid the dead, Fasilidas is reported to have said to him:
The men you see lying dead here were neither pagans nor Muslims over whose deaths we could rejoice, but Christians, your subjects and fellow-countrymen, and some of them were your own kin. It is not victory that we have gained, for we have driven our swords into our own bodies . . . Through carrying on this war and abandoning the Faith of our ancestors, we have become a byword among the pagans and Arabs.
Exhausted and depressed, Susenyos returned to Dankaz, issued a proclamation granting his subjects freedom of religion and abdicated in favour of Fasilidas. He died a few months later, having been given the last rite by a Portuguese priest and was buried in a church that Pedro Paez had constructed.
Fasilidas moved swiftly to rid Abyssinia of the Jesuits and their alien dogma. Mendes and his colleagues were first banished to Fremona and then expelled altogether. Five Jesuits who chose to remain were hanged on Fasilidas’s orders; two others were assassinated. Seeking to ensure that no more Europeans entered the highlands, Fasilidas signed agreements with the Muslim rulers of Massawa and other Red Sea ports to help keep them out. When a party of Franciscans sent by the Pope were discovered trying to enter Abyssinia disguised as Armenian merchants, they were killed.
For the next two centuries, Abyssinia remained largely a closed world, absorbed by its own internal struggles. In a break with past custom, instead of ruling from royal encampments, moving periodically from one part of the country to another, Abyssinia’s emperors established a permanent capital. In 1636, Fasilidas built a castle at Gondar, with crenellated walls, four round corner towers and a rooftop terrace with a distant view of Lake Tana, and during the next 150 years, his successors added their own castles and palace compounds, providing the focus for an imperial city. Sited between two rivers on a flat volcanic ridge, 7,000 feet above sea level, the area had long been settled by Christian Amhara cultivators and afforded plentiful supplies of water, wood and agricultural produce. By the time Fasilidas died in 1667, the city had gained administrative buildings, churches and a population of about 25,000. At the height of its prosperity at the turn of the eighteenth century, Gondar served as a thriving centre of commerce, crafts, education and artistic endeavour. Muslim merchants handled most domestic trade but were required to live in separate quarters. A new trade developed in coffee beans, an indigenous crop that originally grew wild in the south-west Kaffa region. Transplanted to the Yemen, coffee was introduced from Arabia to Europe by Ottoman Turks.
Yet the empire frequently became an arena for competing armies. Emperors spent much of their time on military campaigns, marching and counter-marching against adversaries. Regional leaders grew strong enough to challenge the power of the monarchy. As provinces went their own way, imperial authority often stretched little further than Gondar. Palace intrigues were common. Over a period of fifteen years, one emperor was assassinated; the next was stabbed to death; the next two were poisoned.
Apart from foreign merchants – mainly Greeks and Armenians – few outsiders made their way to Abyssinia. A French doctor, Charles-Jacques Poncet, arrived in Gondar to treat Iyasu I for ‘distemper’ and stayed for nearly a year. A Czech Franciscan, Remedius Prutky, led a three-man mission to Gondar in 1752 at the invitation of Iyasu II. The next significant European visitor arrived in Gondar uninvited.
After a hazardous three-month journey across the mountains from the port of Massawa, James Bruce, a wealthy forty-year-old Scotsman with a taste for adventure, reached Gondar in February 1770, dressed as a Muslim trader. An imposing figure, six feet four inches tall, with red hair, a loud voice and superior manner, Bruce had left England seven years before to take up an appointment as British consul in Algiers. Fluent in Arabic and several other foreign languages, he became obsessed with the idea of travelling to the main source of the Nile, believing it to be located in the mountains of Abyssinia. On leaving Algiers, accompanied by a Italian artist, Luigi Balugani, and two Irishmen, former soldiers in the Spanish army, given to him as slaves as a farewell present by the Dey of Algiers, Bruce toured the eastern Mediterranean collecting letters of introduction and recommendation from sultans and patriarchs in Istanbul, Jerusalem, Alexandria, Cairo and eventually Mecca. Along the way, he also acquired a considerable knowledge of medicine. His baggage, carried by a team of porters, included a huge quadrant and a number of other scientific instruments.
Gondar was largely deserted when Bruce and his companions arrived. The young emperor, Tecla Haimanout II, and his court had departed on a military expedition against Oromo opponents in the south, taking much of the town’s population – soldiers, officials, porters and tradesmen – with them. While waiting for them to return, Bruce took up residence in the Muslim quarter and made himself useful by tackling an outbreak of smallpox affecting members of the royal family, earning the appreciation of the queen mother, Iteghe Mentuab, and her daughter, Wozoro Aster. When Bruce explained the purpose of his visit, Mentuab, according to Bruce’s testimony, found it odd that he should undertake such a risky venture:
See! See! Says she. ‘How every day life furnishes us with proof of the perverseness and contradiction of human nature; you are come from Jerusalem, through vile Turkish governments, and hot unwholesome climates, to see a river and a bog, no part of which you can carry away were it ever so valuable, and of which you have in your country a thousand larger, better and cleaner; and you will take it ill when I discourage you from the pursuit of this fancy, in which you are likely to perish, without your friends at home ever hearing when or where the accident happened. While I, on the other hand, the mother of kings, who have sat upon the throne of this country more than thirty years, have for my only wish, night and day, that, after giving up everything in the world, I could be conveyed to the church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem and beg alms for my subsistence all my life after, if I could only be buried at last in the street within sight of the gate of that temple where our blessed Saviour once lay.’
In March, the young emperor returned to Gondar along with his formidable military commander, Ras Mikael Sehul, a white-haired tyrant in his seventies who was the real power behind the throne, responsible for the death of several previous incumbents. Behind them came the army with ranks of soldiers wearing shreds of scarlet cloth to mark the number of enemies they had killed on the battlefield and bearing their testicles as evidence. Bruce recorded how one of Ras Mikael’s first acts on his return was to order his men to put out the eyes of a group of Oromo prisoners.
Bruce was duly summoned to an audience with Ras Mikael in his palace adjoining the royal compound and made the customary obeisance by kissing the ground at his feet. Having just saved one of Mikael’s sons from a near-fatal bout of smallpox, he was well received. Mikael warned him of the dangers of travelling about the country alone and gave him command of a troop of the royal horse. At a meeting with the emperor, he was questioned intensely about life in England and about Jerusalem. He soon became accustomed to court life in Gondar, its intrigues and machinations. ‘The court in London and that in Abyssinia are in their principles the same,’ he wrote. He enjoyed wearing Abyssinian attire, complete with cloaks, chainmail and bright cummerbunds stuffed with pistols, and affected an Abyssinian hairstyle. ‘My hair was cut round, curled, and perfumed in the Amharic fashion, and I was thenceforward, in all outward appearance, a perfect Abyssinian.’ He impressed all and sundry not only with his medical abilities but with his riding skills and marksmanship, and readily joined in the raucous banquets laid on by the royal court where slices of raw meat were cut from live cows and couples made love with abandon. ‘There is no coyness, no delays, no need of appointments or retirement to gratify their wishes; there are no rooms but one, in which they sacrifice both to Bacchus and Venus.’
Because of renewed fighting in the highlands, Bruce was forced to delay his attempt to reach the source of the Little Abbai, but in October 1770 he finally set out with his faithful secretary, Luigi Balugani, his Irish servants and a party of porters and guards. Led by a local guide, they passed around the west side of Lake Tana, moved up the valley of the Little Abbai towards Gish mountain, about seventy miles south of the lake and arrived at a rustic church on a hillside that overlooked a small swamp. Pointing to the swamp, the guide told Bruce: ‘Look at that hillock of green and in the middle of that watery spot; it is in that the two fountains of the Nile are to be found.’ Bruce threw off his shoes, raced down the hill, twice tripping and falling headlong, until he came to ‘an island of green turf, which was in the form of an altar, apparently a work of art, and I stood in rapture over the principal fountain which rises in the middle of it’.
Bruce was well aware that Pedro Paez had reached Gish Abbai some 150 years before him, but in his account of his travels in Abyssinia, published in 1790, he chose to dispute his achievements, claiming that his version of events was based on no more than hearsay, in order to glorify his own feat of exploration. He also omitted any mention that Balugani had accompanied him on the journey to Gish Abbai, wanting it to be seen as his triumph alone.
After further adventures in Abyssinia, Bruce set out on the journey back to Cairo, taking the overland route, joining the Blue Nile at Sennar. When he reached the confluence of the Blue Nile with the White Nile, 900 miles downstream from Lake Tana, he realised that another mighty river might be the parent of the Nile rather than the Blue Nile but in his memoir he did not dwell on the possibility and remained adamant about the importance of his own exploits.
The tales that Bruce told about his travels on his return to Europe in 1773 aroused keen public interest about the interior of Africa, even though many of his anecdotes were dismissed by critics in London as fabrications. ‘Africa is indeed coming into fashion,’ Horace Walpole wrote to a friend. ‘There is just returned a Mr Bruce, who had lived three years in the Court of Abyssinia, and breakfasted every morning with the maids of honour on live oxen.’
Hitherto, little attention had been paid in Europe to the vast African hinterland. In 1733, when Bruce was three years old, the satirist Jonathan Swift had mocked the dearth of information on maps of Africa:
So geographers, in Africa-maps,
With savage-pictures fill their gaps;
And o’er unhabitable downs
Place elephants for want of towns.
Fifty years later, little had changed. In 1787, when the cartographer Samuel Boulton published a sparse four-sheet map of Africa, omitting legends and hearsay and including only established facts, he felt obliged to explain: ‘The Inland Parts of Africa being but very little known and the Names of the Regions and Countries which fill that Vast Tract of Land being for the Greatest part placed by Conjecture It may be judged how Absurd are the Divisions in some Maps and why they were not followed in this.’
Now, inspired by Bruce’s exploits, a new breed of European adventurer set out to fill in the gaps.