By Dr. Richard Pankhurst:-
Let us turn this week to the history of foreign scholarship in Ethiopia, and consider today, and next Friday, the case of Italy.
Historically linked
Ethiopia and Italy were historically linked by both geography and
religion. Italy, from the point of view of Ethiopian Christians, was the
nearest major European Christian country, and as such, the most
accessible. Ethiopia, virtually the only Christian polity outside
Europe, was likewise, from the point of view of Italian Christians,
within easier reach than many other lands of the Orient. Though
Ethiopians looked spiritually to Jerusalem, where many over the years
went on pilgrimage, and many hoped to spend their last days, there can
be no gainsaying that Rome was a wealthier and politically more
attractive city. It is, therefore, perhaps not surprising that over the
centuries a steady procession of Ethiopians made their way to Rome, the
“eternal city”.
Marco Polo
Some of Europe’s first information on far-off Ethiopia was collected
in the late thirteenth century by the Venetian explorer Marco Polo.
Writing in 1298 he reported, albeit second hand, that Abash, i.e.
Abyssinia, was ruled by a Christian king, who was in direct contact with
Jerusalem, and in possession of “excellent soldiers” and “many
horsemen”.
Relations with Co-religionaries in Europe
The Ethiopian rulers of this time were acutely interested in
relations with their co-religionaries in Europe. Shortly after the
appearance of Marco Polo’s account Emperor Wedem Ar’ad (1297-1312)
despatched a large embassy of thirty men to “the King of the Spains”,
with an offer of help against the infidels. The mission visited both
Rome, and its then religious rival, Avignon. On their return journey,
the ambassadors, while waiting at Genoa for a favourable wind, were
questioned in 1306 by Giovanni da Carignano, rector of the church of St
Mark’s, who embodied his findings in a treatise on Ethiopian government,
customs and religion. This work, unfortunately no longer extant, had a
major impact on European knowledge of Ethiopia. It established the
country’s approximate geographical location, and for the first time
indicated that the so-called Kingdom of Prester John was in the
mountains of Northeast Africa, and not, as hitherto supposed, in the
Indian region.
Italians likewise made their way to Ethiopia at an early period. A
Florentine trader, Antonio Bartoli, is believed to have entered the
country in the 1390s, and a Sicilian, Pietro Rombulo, in 1407. He
reportedly spent no less than thirty-seven years in the country, before
being despatched by its ruler on a mission to India and China. Rombulo
subsequently returned to his homeland with an Ethiopian priest, Fere
Mika’el, as part of an embassy from Emperor Zar’a Yaq’ob (1433-1468).
While in Naples, Rombulo met a Dominican monk, Pietro Ranzano of
Palermo, Sicily, who wrote up an account of the former’s travels,
preserved in Palermo to this day, and still in need of scientific study.
Italian awareness of Ethiopia was meanwhile heightened when news
spread that an Ethiopian delegation was to attend the ecclesiastical
Conference of Florence in 1441. Two Ethiopian monks from Jerusalem duly
appeared, and attended the conference.
Rome: Santo Stefano
Other Ethiopians later proceeded southwards to Rome. Many attached
themselves to the church of Santo Stefano, which later became known as
Santo Stefano dei Mori, that is to say St Stephen of the “Moors”, i.e.
Oriental or coloured people. The Pope later gave the Ethiopians a nearby
hospice, in 1539. The Ethiopians have a college, and residence, in the
Vatican to this day.
Santo Stefano and the Ethiopian hospice between them were destined to
be the nest in which Ethiopian studies, as we know them today, were
largely incubated. It was at Santo Stefano that Joannes Potken, the
renowned German typographer of Cologne, heard the Ethiopians celebrating
Mass. He was so fascinated that he proceeded to set up a small printing
press in Rome, where in 1513 he produced the first printed Ge‘ez
Psalter, Canticles and some Old and New Testament hymns. Little more
than a generation later another Italian scholar in Rome, Marianus
Victorius, studied with an Ethiopian cleric, Tasfa Seyon, and published
the first rudimentary Ge‘ez grammar, in 1548.
Alessandro Zorzi
The coming of Ethiopians to Italy meanwhile did not pass unnoticed in
scholarly circles. Several visiting Ethiopian monks were interviewed
between 1519 and 1523 by an Venetian savant, Alessandro Zorzi. He
recorded the itineraries they had followed, and thus made an important
contribution to early sixteenth century Italian, and hence European,
geographical knowledge of this part of Africa.
Maps
The importance of such two-way travel, between Ethiopia and Italy,
and Italy and Ethiopia, can vividly be illustrated by two famous
fifteenth century Italian maps. The first was the Florentine painter
Pietro del Massajo’s Egyptus Novelo map of 1454; the second the Venetian
Fra Mauro’s Mappamondo of 1460. Both revealed a hitherto unsurpassed
knowledge of Ethiopian geography, including the names of provinces and
towns, mountains and rivers, churches and monasteries.
Venetian Artists
Contacts, such as those outlined above, flourished in the ensuing
centuries. Italians in the early sixteenth century, whose presence was
described by the Portuguese traveller Francisco Alvares, included two
Venetian artists, Brancaleone and Bicini, both of great interest to
historians of Ethiopian art, and the Florentine trader Andrea Corsali,
who envisaged printing in Ge‘ez letters. The presence in Rome a century
later of Ethiopians, and in particular of the renowned savant Abba
Gorgoreyos, whose scholarly collaboration with Hiob Ludolf, the German
founder of Ethiopian Studies in Europe, is too well known to need
further discussion.
By then Italian scholarship in, and awareness of, Ethiopia, was on
the wane. The principal travellers to Ethiopia were no longer Italians,
but Jesuits from Portugal or Spain. The finest map-makers were likewise
no longer Italians, but cartographers from Holland, England, France, and
in due course Germany.
Baratti, Bruce, and Balugani
Two Italians, as far as Ethiopian studies are concerned, nevertheless
stand out in this period. The first was the little known
mid-seventeenth century Italian traveller Giovanni Barrati. His memoirs,
known only in an English translation, provide virtually the sole
foreign account of Ethiopia at that time.
Then in the following century, by a quirk of history, the great
Scottish traveller, James Bruce, about to embark on his search for the
“sources of the Nile”, decided to employ an Italian, Luigi Balugani of
Bologna, as his draftsman. Bruce, ungenerously, kept the Italian’s
identity almost entirely secret. The fact remains, however, that it was
Balugani who produced virtually all the drawings, of plants, animals and
birds, which contributed greatly to Bruce’s fame.
The early nineteenth century was a time when Italy and Ethiopia were
both politically divided, and contacts between the two countries were
for that and other reasons at a low ebb.
Missonaries
Four Italian missionaries, who visited Ethiopia in this period, and
wrote about various aspects of the country, nevertheless stand out. They
were the Lazarists, Giuseppe Sapeto and Giovanni Stella, and the
Capuchins, Guglielmo Massaia and Ginsto d’Urbino. All four were in their
differing ways significant, above all Massaia, who is most popularly
remembered for his twelve volume work I miei trentacinque anni di
missione nell’alta Etiopia. Another Italian, Raffaele Baroni, served at
this time as secretary, at Massawa, to British Consul Walter Plowden,
and helped the British in writing up reports.
The Suez Canal
The subsequent opening of the Suez Canal made the Red Sea, for the
first time since the Pharaohs, an extension of the Mediterranean, and
greatly facilitated Italian travel to Ethiopia and adjacent lands.
Italian travellers to the north of the country in this period included
Luigi Pennazzi, Gustavo Bianchi, Pellegrino Matteucci, Pippo Vigoni,
Cesare Nerazzini, Augusto Salimbeni, Carlo Piaggia, and Arturo Issel,
while those to Shawa and the southern provinces included Orazio
Antinori, Antonio Cecchi, Giovanni Chiarini, Leopoldo Traversi, Vicenzo
Ragazzi, and other members of a mission of the Societa Geografica
Italiana, which established itself at Let Marafeya, on the outskirts of
the Shawan capital, Ankobar. Their research is described in
considerable, and very valuable, detail in Cecchi’s three volume Da
Zeila alle frontiere del Caffa, as well as in many articles in the
Bollettino della Societa Geografica Italiana, and other scientific and
scholarly publications.
Following the Flag
Trade, it is often said, follows the flag. So, to some extent, does
scholarship. Scholarship can, however, also precede the flag. Some
Italian studies in fact preceded, and facilitated, Italian political
expansion in Ethiopia, while others followed more or less directly
therefrom.
The coming of the Italians to northern Ethiopia, and the
establishment of the Italian colony of Eritrea, gave a considerable
fillip to Italian scholarship in the area. The now famous International
Conferences of Ethiopian Studies were thus preceded by a series of
Italian Colonial Congresses, one of them actually held at Asmara. Papers
delivered included serious studies of the colonial people, and their
history and culture, as well as various aspects of colonial policy and
administration. The later fascist-inspired colonial congress of 1937 was
on the other hand marred by doctrinaire racism.
Italian colonial officials likewise collected, and published, a
wealth of historical, geographical and other material, some of it
recently published by Anthony d’Avray in his Lords of the Red Sea. The
History of a Red Sea Society from the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth
Centuries.
Source: http://www.linkethiopia.org
No comments:
Post a Comment