Re-examining Foresti's Supplementum Chronicarum and the “Ethiopian” embassy to Europe of 1306

Bibliographic Data

ID7679679
AuthorsViola Krebs (0000-0002-4599-8586, Ruhr University Bochum, corresponding author)
Year2019
Volume82
Issue3
Pages493-515
Publication date2019-10-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueBulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0041-977X • E-ISSN: 1474-0699
PublisherCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1017/s0041977x19000697
OpenAlexW2997138775
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited25

A widely reported story in the historiography on medieval Ethiopia relates how, in the year 1306, an “Ethiopian” embassy visited the court of Pope Clement V in Avignon and offered military aid in the fight against Islam to Latin Christianity. This article re-examines the source – Jacopo Filippo Foresti's Supplementum Chronicarum – thought to document an episode of one of the earliest European–African Christian contacts. It investigates Foresti's own sources, their historiographical transmission history, and the feasibility of relating it to the socio-political entity of Solomonic Ethiopia in the Horn of Africa in the early fourteenth century, concluding that Foresti's information was based on Latin Christian texts, such as the Legenda Aurea and the myth of Prester John, only. The ‘Ethiopian’ embassy of 1306 is thus not borne out by sources and should be dismissed in scholarship, resetting the timeline of official Ethiopian–Latin Christian contacts in the late medieval period

Ancient history · Archaeology · Art · Christianity · Geography · Historiography · Humanities · Islam · Latin Americans · Mythology · Political science · Politics · Scholarship · African history and culture analysis · African history and culture studies · Classics · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories · History · Law