Download PDF | ( Advances In Crusades Research) Adam Simmons, Nubia, Ethiopia, And The Crusading World, 1095– 1402 Routledge ( 2022)
253 Pages
The Crusades had a wide variety of impacts on societies throughout Europe, Asia, and Africa. One such notable impact was its role in the development of knowledge between cultures. This book argues that the Nubian kingdom of Dotawo and the Latin Christians became increasingly more connected between the twelfth and early fourteenth centuries than has been acknowledged. Subsequently, when Solomonic Ethiopian-Latin Christian diplomatic relations began in 1402, they were building on the prior connections of Nubia, either wittingly or unwittingly: Ethiopia became the ‘Ethiopia’ that the Latin Christians had previously been aiming to develop relations with. The histories of Nubia, Ethiopia, and the Crusades were directly and indirectly entwined between the twelfth century and 1402.
By placing Nubia and Ethiopia within the wider context of the Crusades, new perspectives can be made regarding the international activity of Nubia and Ethiopia between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries and the regional role reversal of Dotawo and Solomonic Ethiopia from the early fourteenth century. Prior to the fourteenth century, Nubia had been the dominant Christian power in the region before Solomonic Ethiopia began to replace it, including by adopting elements of discourse which had previously been attributed to Nubia, such as its ruler being the recognised protector of the Christians of north-east Africa. This process should not be viewed in isolation of the wider regional geo-political context.
Nubia, Ethiopia, and the Crusading World, 1095-1402 will appeal to all those interested in the history of Nubia, Ethiopia, and the Crusades particularly concerning inter-regional physical and intellectual connectivity.
Adam Simmons is currently a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow at Nottingham Trent University. His research centres on the regional and inter-regional roles of pre-sixteenth-century African kingdoms and communities and their relationships with the wider world since the fourth century.
Acknowledgements
This book owes a great gratitude to the support of many. Financially, various elements of this research have been supported by funding awards. Its earliest incarnation as a PhD thesis was funded by an Iredell PhD Studentship from Lancaster University, in addition to further support from the History Department and the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. The awards of a Research Assistantship at the Ruhr Universitat Bochum and a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at Nottingham Trent University have enabled me to develop and expand the material into its current incarnation.
I owe a great debt of gratitude to the support of many, both in reading versions of the current manuscript and in discussing its contents and formulating my ideas throughout its many stages. I would like to begin by highlighting my gratitude to the early encouragements of Bernard Hamilton, who gave belief in the project from its inception but who has sadly not been able to see the final work. I would also like to give a special mention to Verena Krebs, Solomon Gebreyes, Adam Knobler, Alexandra Cuffel, Alexandros Tsakos, Robin Seignobos, Giovanni Ruffini, Vincent van Gerven Oei, Wendy Belcher, Michael Kleiner, Natasha Hodgson, Nic Morton, Sihong Lin, Marci Freedman, Andrew Jotischky, and Sophie Ambler, all of whom have made this book possible.
Many others have played their part in the completion of this book and all who have engaged with these ideas at workshops and conferences have offered inspiration. Their significance has also not been forgotten.
The completion of this book owes everything to the encouragement and support of family and friends. Especially to those no longer here to view it. Let this work be a reminder of that.
A Note to the Reader — Defining Nubia and Ethiopia
The geo-cultural region of Nubia stretched from the first cataract of the Nile up to at least 300 km beyond the region of modern Khartoum, covering more than 1,200 km north to south as the crow flies. The extent of its western boundary is currently unknown, whilst its eastern boundary, at least for some periods, appears to have reached up to the Red Sea.!' The rulers of Nubia held the title of ourou or basileu[s] (oypoy/Saciaey). The toponym Nubia is used in this work to provide consistency for the international context, but politically, there was no single Sudanese Christian kingdom called ‘Nubia’. Since the Christianisation of the kingdoms of Nobadia, Makuria, and Alwa in the sixth century by Byzantine missionaries, a continuous Christian power is known to have existed in the region until at least the late fifteenth century, when its last ourou is documented, if not into the sixteenth century.
Giovanni Ruffini has shown that from the first half of the twelfth century at the latest, if not during the eleventh century, the Nubian kingdoms of Makuria (which had annexed Nobadia in the early eighth century) and Alwa united under a singular toponym of the Kingdom of Dotawo (Av Tayo) in Old Nubian sources.” However, as far as external commentators were concerned, Dotawo was not adopted as an international toponym. Muslim sources continued to separately reference Makuria and Alwa, under the overarching toponym of al-Niiba (425!) — in addition to al-Maris, which roughly coincided with the region of Nobadia in Lower Nubia — whilst Latin Christian sources only refer to the kingdom as Nubia. They show no awareness of the toponym of Dotawo or any further geographical or political specificity that it may have had. Thus, it is unknown what exactly the Latin Christians understood as Nubia, whether it was synonymous with Dotawo or was representative of a vaguer political or cultural regional construct. Therefore, Nubian-Latin Christian relations is the term which best reflects the Nubia documented by numerous source corpora. Employing a more specific descriptor of DotawanLatin Christian relations, for example, might otherwise overstate the reality of sometimes imagined Nubian-Latin Christian relations by Latin Christians or the Muslims of Egypt in place of the extent of the actual direct involvement of Dotawo.
Demarcating clear geographical boundaries for Ethiopia for the period in question is more problematic; indeed, Ethiopia’s geography continually shifted. A Christian kingdom had been present in Ethiopia since ’Aksum’s conversion in the fourth century — largely centred in the modern northern Ethiopian regions of Amhara and Tigray and modern Eritrea — until the disestablishment of the Solomonic dynasty in 1974 within the more recognisable borders of modern Ethiopia. For most, if not all, of the crusading period, the Ethiopian post-’ Aksumite kingdom of Bag’ona was ruled by the so-called Zag*e dynasty until the arrival of the Solomonic dynasty in 1270, who claimed legitimacy and descent from Ethiopia’s Aksumite predecessors. The most common title for Ethiopian rulers was nagus (‘FU’), but rulers could also be addressed by the titles hase/hade or ase, which are most commonly translated as ‘your majesty’. What the Latin Christians came to know as ‘Abyssinia’ from the twelfth century largely centred on the region of Lasta in north-central Ethiopia, east of Lake Tana. This lasted until the first major period of Solomonic Ethiopian expansion beyond the historical northern heartlands of Aksum and Bog“ona, undertaken by ase ‘Amda Soyon during the first half of the fourteenth century.’
The kingdom of Ethiopia did not identify as ‘Ethiopia’ until the arrival of the Solomonids. Neither was Ethiopia the kingdom commonly referred to as Ethiopia in Latin Christian texts. Instead, the concept of Christian ‘Ethiopia’, or the comparable Kush, the latter of which was employed by Nubians themselves, centred overwhelmingly on Nubia until the fourteenth century by external commentators. Pre-Christian discourses, which remained prominent in the works of many post-classical and medieval Latin and Greek writers, located ‘Ethiopia’ anywhere from West Africa, East Africa, or India, depending on context. As will be discussed in Chapter 1, the rare examples of the "Aksumite use of the Greek Aithiopia (A1®1onia) cannot be said to have been used as endonyms akin to the fourteenth-century Ethiopian emergence of Ityopya (AteXL), whilst the “Aksumite non-biblical references to Kush (Kast, (+) clearly demarcate Nubia. The need to carefully distinguish between Ethiopias is integral to understanding the antecedents and motivations behind the increasing Latin Christian desire to engage with regions across Africa from the fifteenth century. Henceforth, Ethiopia (unquoted) will be used in relation to the kingdom of Ethiopia for consistency, whereas ‘Ethiopia’ (quoted) will refer always to either Nubia or regional north-east Africa depending on the given context unless otherwise stated. By doing so, this current study will highlight the oft-ignored role of Nubia in the history of the Crusades and Ethiopian-Latin Christian interaction.
Introduction
In the summer of 1402, an Ethiopian embassy of unknown size, led by the Florentine Antonio Bartoli, arrived in Venice. The embassy was sent by ase Dawit II, the ruler of Ethiopia (r. c. 1379-1413), who had initially questioned Bartoli and one of his companions about their home in ‘Frankland’ after they had been brought to his court in c. 1398-9. It remains unclear whether Bartoli and his companion were merchants, pilgrims, or general travellers. Verena Krebs has recently shown how this Ethiopian embassy, and subsequent embassies which were dispatched to Latin Europe throughout the fifteenth century, primarily sought relics — specifically a piece of the True Cross in 1402 —and other religious objects. The returning embassy was partly, if not wholly, successful in its aims and had also acquired the services of five additional craftsmen: a painter, a carpenter, two builders, and an armourer.
The embassies were especially not seeking to acquire supposedly superior Latin European weapons technology, which is the oft-repeated scholarly narrative.! For our purposes, the arrival of the 1402 embassy began a period which has been framed by Matteo Salvadore as the ‘birth of Ethiopian-European relations’.? Did, however, the events of 1402 just happen, and how far did the embassy reflect a beginning? Whilst the specific desires of ase Dawit which directly led to the embassy may have been more immediate, the embassy should also be situated within a narrative which encompassed the previous two centuries. Discussion of the post-1402 period should additionally be viewed within the context of the relations between Nubia, Ethiopia, and the crusading world since the launch of the First Crusade in 1095. Specifically, this book is designed to highlight the role that the Nubian kingdom of Dotawo — Ethiopia’s northern neighbour — played in the origins of EthiopianLatin Christian relations prior to 1402 and its subsequent facilitation. In order to do so, this book offers an interconnected history of Nubia, Ethiopia, and the Latin Christian Crusaders between the eleventh and fourteenth centuries from their respective perspectives, at least as far as the current source corpus allows. It will argue that much more can be said of the entwined histories of Nubia, Ethiopia, and the Latin Christians than is currently the dominant scholarly narrative.
Nubia, Ethiopia, and the Crusading World: The State of the Field
The direct connection between Nubia and the Crusades or Ethiopia and the Crusades is commonly rejected in Nubian and Ethiopian scholarship. This topic has occasionally appeared tangentially in more general histories, but few have focused on it specifically, and the period before 1402 has never been the focus of a book-length study. In Nubian Studies, Giovanni Vantini was the most vocal advocate for Nubian-Latin Christian interaction, particularly during the latter crusading period in the thirteenth century. Others, such as Peter Shinnie, Derek Welsby, and Effie Zacharopoulou, have dismissed the Crusades as an influential factor in Nubian history.? In Ethiopian Studies, a similar narrative rejecting Ethiopian-Latin Christian relations prior to the fifteenth century prevails on the grounds that the Crusades would only have brought negative consequences to Ethiopia, such as argued in the key histories of pre-Solomonic Ethiopia produced by Sergew Hable Sellassie and Marie-Laure Derat.4 Nubian and Ethiopian ignorance of the Latin Christians, and vice versa, is the most common reason given in scholarship for dismissing possible relations between each group between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries. This view, however, as will be shown throughout this book, is far too simplistic, and new perspectives can be offered by taking a more connected approach to the histories of Dotawo, Ethiopia, and the Crusades regarding more localised matters even beyond those able to be discussed here. For instance, such as offering avenues for further exploration between the physical and intellectual connectivity between Nubia and Ethiopia.
Crusades scholarship has fared better in acknowledging Latin Christian interactions with Nubians and Ethiopians, but not in assessing their consequences. Equally, the vast majority of these discussions have relied almost exclusively on Latin Christian sources. It has long been acknowledged that the Crusader States — the Kingdom of Jerusalem, the Principality of Antioch, the County of Tripoli, and the County of Edessa established following the First Crusade (1096-9) — were home to a multitude of Eastern Christian permanent and semi-permanent communities, as well as non-permanent diasporas. The study of the relationship between the Latin Christians and these Eastern Christian groups has long been a feature in modern scholarship, though it has primarily centred around the question of the tolerance and intolerance of the relationship among Christians, Muslims, and Jews more broadly. For instance, Jonathan Riley-Smith posited that the implementation of a hybrid dhimma system by the Latin Christians enabled Eastern communities to carry on living peacefully whilst enforcing taxes on non-Christians, which resulted in the continuation of the way of life for many communities.
Yet, in relation to Christian communities, Christopher MacEvitt has argued that different Christian groups actively conducted their worship separately, despite sharing processional spaces, particularly during the twelfth century. Although this separation was not always the case — indeed, the opposite was sometimes portrayed as a sign of early Christian unity in the Holy Land — tensions between groups would seemingly have naturally reduced the number of interactions in the Crusader States which also would have included African Christians.° However, MacEvitt’s wider framing of inter-Christian societal relations within the Crusader States as ‘rough tolerance’ remains a problematic universalist description when the processes of inter-Christian knowledge dissemination are considered.’ If knowledge dissemination and development appear to have been able to transcend supposed societal tensions and the narrative of inter-group isolation, can we really characterise inter-communal interactions within the Crusader States so rigidly or do we need to be much more nuanced? This is especially true when Nubians and Ethiopians are considered and what intellectual, political, and cultural role engagements with Latin Christians inspired.
Based on current archaeological data, Ronnie Ellenblum estimated that Latin Christians only constituted between 15% and 25% of the population of the Crusader States, though this fluctuated depending on the urban or rural setting.’ A working relationship between various groups was therefore highly likely. The historiographical question of tolerance is more commonly framed regarding inter-faith, rather than intra-faith, relations. Arguably the most famous and retold story of positive Muslim-Latin Christian interaction is that of Usama ibn Mungidh, who narrated his time in Jerusalem in the early 1140s later in his life and emphasised the different outlooks between ‘Eastern’ Latin Christians and those venturing from Western Europe. He recalled how during one particular visit to the al-Haram al-Sarif, he was harassed by a Latin Christian newcomer to the city, particularly for praying towards Mecca.
However, the Templars who controlled Temple Mount, who had also been respectful of his earlier visits, came to his aid and expelled the Latin Christian, highlighting how it was not uncommon for ‘oriental’ Latin Christians to have developed more positivist relationships with Eastern groups via a state of more prolonged interaction which ‘occidental’ Christians were not necessarily as accustomed to.’ Indeed, such evidence has led to Suleiman Mourad recently explicitly calling for a reframing of the primary scholarly outlook of intolerance between Latin Christians and Muslims more generally during the Crusades.!° Whilst Latin Christian relations with the Christian populations of the Holy Land may not necessarily mirror those of Latin ChristianMuslim relations, we should be wary about applying a stereotype to the Latin Christians as dismissive and intrusive to all groups they encountered. After all, what encouraged the change which led to ‘occidentals’ becoming ‘orientals’, as Fulcher of Chartres described within a generation of the First Crusade, if adopting local customs, dress, and language of both the local Muslim and Christian populations were not integral to daily life and, thus, enablers of exchange?!'!
Currently, studies analysing Latin Christian attitudes towards Eastern Christians in the Holy Land overwhelmingly focus only on resident Syrians, Armenians, or Greeks, leaving large lacunas detailing other Eastern Christian groups who similarly lived in the region; notably, Nubian and Ethiopian Christians.'!2 Nubians and Ethiopians have often been overlooked in discussions of inter-Christian relations in the Holy Land, with scholarship instead largely remaining focused on the question of the scale of their presence. The question of the scale of the Nubian and Ethiopian presence in the Holy Land has, however, transcended historiographical boundaries between Nubian, Ethiopian, and Crusades Studies. Since Enrico Cerulli’s two-volume Etiopi in Palestina (1943-7), which documented the premodern presence of Ethiopians, and occasionally Nubians (or ‘Ethiopians’), in the Holy Land, analysis of the scope and scale of the pre-fifteenth-century Ethiopian presence in the Holy Land — and increasingly the wider Mediterranean — has dominated over any similar discussion of Nubians.'? Discussion of this earlier presence is most commonly presented through the comments made by Latin European observers, which almost exclusively only comment on populations in Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and Nazareth or, in the case of Egypt, Cairo and Alexandria. Many, however, only note the existence of populations, but do not specify beyond the general region. Unlike much of the current historiography on the question of the Nubian and Ethiopian presence, this study will also include discussion of non-Latin Christian sources, which challenges common narratives, notably whether the argument for an absence of Ethiopians in twelfth-century Jerusalem can truly be sustained. Moreover, what the Nubian and Ethiopian presence in the Holy Land, Egypt, and the wider Mediterranean, and the interactions that this inspired and facilitated, meant politically and intellectually for each of the Nubians, Ethiopians, and Latin Christians has received little study. It is the intention of this book to highlight how much more can be ascertained in scholarship beyond merely the scale of the presence of Nubians and Ethiopians in the Holy Land or Egypt and what consequences subsequent interactions had. Naturally, at the very least, increasing interactions informed each group more about the other. In this regard, this book is not the first study which highlights such knowledge development and builds on the shorter studies of Bernard Hamilton and Robin Seignobos. Both highlight how Latin Christian knowledge development of Nubia, especially, developed during the crusading era.'4 Importantly, this was in addition to the development of the explicitly Latin Christian myth of Prester John, the mythical Eastern Christian king who was long sought as an ally from the mid-twelfth century. Regrettably, sources for the Nubian and Ethiopian situation regarding their knowledge development of the Latin Christians remain too fragmented to offer a similarly sustained synthesis.
Nevertheless, it is the aim of this book to bring together these strands of scholarship and to offer a synthesis of events which have largely remained viewed as hitherto unconnected. Despite the limited evidence of African provenance for either Nubian or Ethiopian engagement with a particular crusade, there is still a narrative connecting Nubia, Ethiopia, and the wider crusading world to be told. Moreover, this regional interconnectivity should also be contextualised with events which happened in Nubia and Ethiopia. For instance, the Mamlitk pressure on Dotawo from the late thirteenth century, which is often thought of as the initial catalyst for Christian Nubia’s increasing decline and eventual collapse, takes on additional importance when viewed within the broader geopolitical context of the Crusades and Nubia’s role within them, whether real or imagined by Egyptian commentators. Significantly, these events created a political and cultural vacuum that the newly emerged ‘Ethiopia’ of Solomonic Ethiopia could exploit from the fourteenth century by rivalling, and ultimately replacing, the original universal Christian Nubian ‘Ethiopia’. Solomonic Ethiopia’s adoption of the ‘Ethiopian’ identity became integral to the cementing of early Solomonic rule and, coincidently, the later successes of its diplomatic activities with Latin Europe. Neither of these processes should be viewed in isolation from what was happening in Nubia.
Navigating the Source Corpus
It is regrettable that so few contemporary relevant African textual sources have survived for such a study. Both Christian Nubia and Ethiopia were centres of manuscript production. However, sources from Nubia are largely theological, legal, or economic — whether written in Old Nubian, Coptic, Greek, or Arabic — with no example of a chronicle written in Dotawo known to date, thus limiting the Nubian evidence for discussing the Dotowan perspective regarding external affairs. The collapse of Dotawo during the sixteenth century has further hindered source survival over the subsequent centuries. Ethiopia, on the other hand, has surviving chronicles written in Goa‘az, but none of these date to before the fourteenth century. Pre-fourteenth-century non-religious texts are rare, and those which have survived are primarily land grants, epigraphic material, or inscriptions on material culture. These often offer little for the study in question. Moreover, multiple turbulent events have destroyed collections of Ethiopia’s many texts, such as the invasion of Ahmed ibn Ibrahim al-Gazi in the mid-sixteenth century, during the Oromo migrations in the sixteenth-seventeenth centuries, and the destruction of the Gondar treasury (which housed many manuscripts) in the eighteenth century. Texts written in other regional languages, such as Arabic and Coptic, do help to supplement many lacunas, but they are still written by external observers outside of the Nubian or Ethiopian perspective. Nubian and Ethiopian collections outside of each kingdom offer little additional light on surviving texts either. For instance, it is difficult to attribute a text toa Nubian author because of Nubia’s known multilingualism meaning that a text written in Greek, Coptic, or even Arabic, may have actually been produced by a Nubian, particularly within a monastic setting, such as at the monastery of St. Catherine on Mount Sinai.!> Although Nubian monks were almost certainly present on Mount Sinai, no Old Nubian text is known to survive in the monastery’s vast and varied multilingual collections. Ethiopian texts that are held in external monastic locations outside of Ethiopia, such as in Jerusalem or at Mount Sinai, offer a similarly limited picture because surviving texts only date from the late fourteenth century, even though an earlier Ethiopian presence at such locations is attested.
Despite these limitations, the combination of what is known, along with sources written in Latin, Greek, Arabic, Hebrew, Coptic, Syriac, and vernacular Western European languages from a variety of textual media, in addition to archaeology and epigraphy, reveal much more interaction between Nubians, Ethiopians, and Latin Christians during the crusading period than has hitherto been recognised. References to Nubia and Ethiopia in such material are often sporadic and appear in a range of media. The most systematic appearances of Nubia and Ethiopia in these texts are found in Arabic chronicles, which are often the largest external corpus for Nubian and Ethiopian history for this period. However, despite the variety of sources, most can only offer contextual information. The majority of the evidence about Nubian and Ethiopian relations with Latin Christians prior to 1402 comes from a Latin Christian perspective. Information about Nubia and Ethiopia appears in a variety of Latin Christian texts, ranging from chronicles, itineraries, letters, cartographical legends, military plans, encyclopaedias, and papal decrees, to name but a few. Many references appear only in passing and often mask the extent of interaction, yet the volume of references in Latin Christian texts to interactions far outnumber those which appear in other language sources. As a result, readers should be aware that it is not always possible to narrate all sources equally, as often we are dealing with brief and sporadic references, rather than expansive descriptions. The Latin Christian perspective of this relationship, both real and imagined, therefore dominates the evidence base for the current work, but where possible, Nubian and Ethiopian perspectives will be offered. There are independent discourses for etymology in each of these textual cultures, thus toponyms and ethnonyms will be transliterated and accompanied by the original text in order to clarify the discussion for both specialists and non-specialists alike. Where possible, in order to increase accessibility to readers, all original language source analyses will also be accompanied by a reference to a published translation in a modern language, primarily in English, or, alternatively, in either French or, in some cases, Italian, or German, if known.!°
Whilst we may be restricted in gaining many insights into Nubian and Ethiopian understanding of the Latin Christians prior to the fifteenth century from Nubian and Ethiopian sources, we must distinguish between the registers of knowledge within the Latin Christian intellectual corpus of the kingdoms. As Latin Christian texts dominate the source corpus for the study of Nubian-Latin Christian and Ethiopian-Latin Christian relations for the period in question, it is necessary to outline how they relate to Latin Christian discourses on race, though this is not a primary concern of this book for reasons outlined next. This book distinguishes between the two parallel understandings of Africa which Valentin- Yves Mudimbe ascribed to external discourse on Africa prior to colonialism — the physical gnosis and the ideological or cultural interpretations attributed to Africa.'’ Here, the discussion will focus solely on developing gnosis of Africa or, in other words, the developing Latin Christian experiential and empirical knowledge of premodern Africa — namely, of Nubia and Ethiopia.
It will not, therefore, focus on knowledge which was overtly influenced by cultural ideology or other intellectual genres, such as the works concerned with the so-called Wonders of the East, which were often created by authors who had little or no actual direct engagement with the world and peoples they were describing. This is particularly important as, with the exception of the rhetoric employed by writers associated with the First Crusade before ‘Ethiopians’ were discussed as fellow Christians, the knowledge of Nubia and Ethiopia represents a specific development in gnosis. Non-Christian ‘Ethiopians’, who were commonly viewed conceptually, were unconnected to these kingdoms and it was these who featured in the multiple Latin Christian cultural discourses of difference in theological symbolism, art, and literature.
Even when such ‘Ethiopians’ are sometimes associated with Christianity, particularly in literature, it is to present one or more characters of reformed virtuous values rather than to act as an historical or contemporary commentary. The ‘ideological infrastructure’ or, indeed, cultural infrastructure, to expand on Debra Strickland’s term, which shaped Latin Christian discourse on non-Christians, including non-Christian ‘Ethiopia’, did not identically shape Latin Christian discourse on Christian ‘Ethiopians’ from the twelfth century.'® A distinction must be made, as it was by contemporaries, between the real Christian ‘Ethiopian’ and the conceptual generic continental ‘Ethiopian’.
Scholarly discussion of the Latin Christian conceptualisation of race and/ or blackness rarely distinguishes between different discourses concerning non-Christian and Christian Africa. ‘Ethiopians’ are nominally framed as only being non-Christians who were often depicted as being physically removed from the Latin Christian centre and became symbols of alterity.” Whilst this may be true from a conceptual point of view, it is important to note that Nubians and Ethiopians were not similar etiological ‘symbolic’ or ‘phantasmic’ embodiments of sin or other negative non-Christian traits, which instructed many forms of medieval Latin Christian constructions of race which centred on religious difference.*° The question of familiarity remains key to the discussion. For instance, Lynn Ramey openly framed her study of medieval colour prejudice and its legacy in the form of racism as something ‘directed toward the unknown person or culture’ and that Latin Christian prejudicial attitudes to blackness were ‘precisely because of their skin colo[ujr and their usually imagined, always unfamiliar, cultural practices’.?!
If constructs of race, and by extension racism, were framed solely against the unfamiliar, what happens when the supposedly unfamiliar become familiar? Even though some Latin Christian writers did critique Nubian and Ethiopian Christianity as schismatic, they were not non-Christians and therefore did not become associated with a biopolitical construction of race and theological narratives of ordered hereditary inferiority which were applied to non-Christians.” Significantly, the closing of distance between Latin Christians and other groups often reduced the power that Latin Christians attributed to certain groups. This was the case, for instance, for the Mongols and sixteenth-century Ethiopia as the Latin Christians chased, and eventually reached, the believed lands of Prester John before finding him to be absent, which resulted in their diminishing importance in Latin Christian discourse.
However, the opposite was true as Nubians and Latin Christians increasingly interacted. Indeed, the importance which came to be placed on Nubia and Ethiopia by Latin Christians challenges our scholarly narratives of the processes behind the Latin Christian construction of race, power, and difference just as it did for them. If modern studies lack the required nuance when discussing Latin Christian understandings of non-Christian broader ‘Ethiopia’ and the Christian ‘Ethiopia’, they will continue to erase the role of Christian Africans in framing and challenging Latin Christian constructions of race.
Illustrative of the conflation between Nubia, Ethiopia, and ‘Ethiopia’ in a premodern race studies context can be found in their respective unnuanced discussion within literature. For example, Geraldine Heng has stated how the non-Christian African kingdoms of Zazamanc and Azagouc acted as ‘virtual stand-ins for Ethiopia/Abyssinia/Nubia’ in Wolfram of Eschenbach’s thirteenth-century romance Parzival. This statement was also made despite acknowledging that this period coincided with an expansion in Latin Christian knowledge of the Christian realms.* Whilst Heng’s discussion of blackness and the non-Christian world in the text reflects a common portrayal in Latin Christian literary cultures and is not contested here, it should not be associated with the Christian kingdoms.
It is this conflation which requires much more nuance and which underpins the need to make better distinctions between Latin Christian discourses concerning Christian and non-Christian Africans. Indeed, the etymology of Zazamanc and Azagouc, as far as they may even have had a geographical origin in Africa, are best explained by Arabic toponyms elsewhere in Africa. For instance, if we view Azagouc alongside some of the other ways the toponym appears in the text — most illustratively: Azagowe, das Sagowe — it would appear reasonable to suggest that its origin is actually more likely to be found in an understanding of the common prominent Arabic ethnonym of the Zaghawa who were commonly associated with Kanem, a Muslim kingdom neighbouring Lake Chad. The lifting or manipulation of Arabic African toponyms and ethnonyms into Latin Christian texts was certainly not limited to these two examples as we will see, such as in the cases of Raymond of Marseille, Ramon Llull, and Marino Sanudo and his cartographer Pietro Vesconte. Moreover, contemporary texts, both documentary and literary, do begin to refer to the lands of Nubia, ‘Ethiopia’, or ‘Abyssinia’ explicitly by the end of the twelfth century.
For instance, the Nubian characters in the First and Second Old French Crusade Cycles of chansons, which actually first begin to be conceived in the earliest decades following the First Crusade, are explicitly described as ‘of Nubia’ (de Nubie).*> To continue to portray Latin Christian views of Christian and non-Christian Africa as synonymous would be an oversimplification. Therefore, whilst this study does not intend to directly situate itself within the literature on medieval race and racism, it does seek to provide an additional historical narrative to consider concerning Christian Africa in light of its growing importance to Latin Christendom from the twelfth century which did not reduce Christian Africans to metaphors of symbolic difference.
Shirin Khanmohamadi, regarding Orientalism and medieval ethnography, has argued that ‘dialogism [in texts] tests rather than serves unstated cultural assumptions’.”° In other words, increased familiarity with different peoples challenged Latin Christian writers to better understand the world beyond their own intellectual space. Noted observations did not necessarily reflect a writer’s supposed biases. Importantly, the oft-found Latin Christian position of disempowerment in the East due to their lack of population should not be overlooked. Indeed, Latin Christians were often not in a position to uphold political and cultural hegemony in the Holy Land. Therefore, to frame the following study by those mechanisms which currently underpin scholarship on Latin Christian constructions of race in this instance would undermine the influential and active role of the Christian Africans themselves. It would overstate both the real and imagined realities of the position of Latin societies within the Crusader States and once again centre on a common Eurocentric narrative. Even when Latin Christian sources vastly outnumber Nubian or Ethiopian sources, this narrative can still be challenged.
The development of empirical knowledge about Christian Africa enhanced the importance of Nubia and Ethiopia in Latin Christian discourse, rather than attributing negative traits to Christian Africans. This was often the case even beyond the Crusader States back in Western Europe. Significantly, Nubian/ Ethiopian-Latin Christian discourse was not framed within an umbrella of power that was only held by the Latin Christians. That is not to say that ideas of race were completely non-existent in the works cited herein, whether pertaining to Christian Africans or otherwise, but that it is necessary to present studies which recentre real engagement between Latin Christendom and (Christian) Africa and the discourses that this shaped away from the decentred conceptual Africans who most commonly provide the basis for discussion in studies of Latin Christian medieval constructs of race and perceptions of blackness.
This book argues that Nubians, and then later Ethiopians, were explicitly sought as allies by the Latin Christians but only engaged on their own terms, with contrasting results. It demonstrates this based on six chapters.
The first offers evidence for a clearer identification of ‘Ethiopia’ with Nubia when viewed alongside Ethiopian sources and provides a key narrative for the remainder of the discussion. The second chapter presents what can be gleaned regarding the known understanding between Nubia, Ethiopia, and Latin Christendom around the time of the First Crusade. Upon the establishment of the Crusader States, the third chapter discusses the many known and potential interactions between Nubians, Ethiopians, and Latin Christians, as well as other intermediaries, in the Holy Land and beyond which likely encouraged knowledge development of each other. Chapter 4 presents a discussion of Prester John within a Nubian and Ethiopian narrative and how the Latin Christian belief in the prester not only seemingly migrated from Asia to Africa but also within Africa. Even though the Nubian and Ethiopian identity of Prester John was in its infancy throughout the period in question here, the existence of the myth must be viewed alongside motivations for Latin Christian desires to engage with Nubia and, later, Ethiopia.
Chapter 5 discusses how the Latin Christians attempted to engage with Dotawo, or the idea of Nubia more broadly, before beginning to turn their attentions to Ethiopia. The sixth and final chapter seeks to present a narrative of Nubian and Ethiopian responses to the Latin Christian efforts and the regional geopolitical changes brought by the Crusades from the surviving evidence up until the arrival of the Ethiopian embassy to Venice in 1402. As far as the surviving sources suggest, seeking this engagement proved to be much more important for the Latin Christians than it did for either Nubia or Ethiopia, yet their analysis will show that the broader events of the Crusades had a much more profound geopolitical effect upon Nubia and Ethiopia than has previously been thought. Above all, this book seeks to highlight a much greater need to avoid continuing to largely view the histories of Dotawo (Nubia), Ethiopia, and the Crusades in isolation of each other.
However, it must be made clear that the limitation of bringing together three largely separate historiographical fields has resulted in not being able to always fully emphasise the significance of themes and events within each field, such as the role of Prester John in Latin Europe, the 1172 Ayyibid invasion of northern Dotawo as a ‘turning point’ in the history of Christian Nubia, or the anachronistic association with external references to ‘Ethiopia’ to the highland Ethiopian kingdom before at least 1270, if not c.1320, to those who may be more unfamiliar or new to one or more of the fields and the content under discussion. Much of the content presented here is not individually unknown to either one or more of the three fields of study; however, the intention of this book is not necessarily to offer new, unpublished evidence, but, rather, to offer a reframing of the current corpus to provide a platform for future work. As such, this book intends to weave together elements of a shared history to hopefully inspire more discussion founded on a narrative of connections within a new historiographical reframing. Undoubtedly, there will be many more connections to be uncovered with further study.
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