In the spring of 1520 a Portuguese mission arrived at Massawa on the Red Sea--an expression of Portugal's expanding interests in the Indian Ocean and its bordering complex of territories and waterways. The immediate objective was the establishment of relations with what was thought to be the land of Prester John, but perhaps the most enduring result was the narrative penned by one of the mission's members, Father Francisco Alvarez--the first foreign description of the remote highland kingdom of Ethiopia, and one of the few glimpses granted the outside world of a land which had grown in myth and mystery even as its true character had vanished into enigmatic legend. "The Ethiopians slept near a thousand years," Gibbon was to note with justice, and forgetful they were of the world about them, but by others they had not been forgotten so much as lost, particularly in the West whose civilization they had shared in ancient times.

If the mountainous inaccessibility of the Abyssinian highlands made for potential isolation, it was the rise of Islam which divorced the Ethiopians from their Mediterranean connections, turning their gaze southward and forcing them in upon themselves. Although no holy war was directed against Ethiopia, the seventh century expansion of Islam saw the fall of Egypt, the collapse of the Persian and Byzantine empires, and the beginning of Arab occupation of Red Sea bases. Beyond this, the Beja nomads of the Red Sea hills in one of their periodic eruptions, overran the Eritrean plateau late in the seventh century, cutting off the people of Axum from their northern and eastern contacts. Thus isolated, Axum lost complete touch with Hellenistic civilization, and apparently suffered political fragmentation and cultural decline as well. During the ensuing centuries, Ethiopia disappeared from the view of the West and, even in her own land, her history for a time gave way to legend.

Despite a ninth-century success in regaining its Red Sea outlets, Ethiopia maintained her prevailing southern orientation. The Axumites gradually migrated to the mountain districts of Amhara, Gojjam, and Shoa where they re-established their kingdom in the face of hostile pagans, particularly the Agau people. At first the Axumites were successful, partially subduing and converting the Agau. Late in the tenth century, however, there ensued a confused period of invasions and of revolt by the Agau who ravaged the country, slaughtering the clergy, and virtually obliterating the Christianity of the Axumites. At last the monarchy prevailed, but the nation which emerged from the ordeal was the result of fusion, not of conquest. Thenceforward the Christian Axumites formed the Abyssinian aristocracy while Ge'cz and Amharic came to be the dominant national languages. Slowly the Agau yielded to Christianity but only ds their own religious practices were absorbed into church ritual, while they themselves emerged as the major ethnic element in the Abyssinian population. This cultural, political, and religious fusion was far enough advanced by the middle of the twelfth century for the Agau to gain control of the monarchy in the form of the Christianized Zagwe dynasty which ruled the Ethiopian state for approximately 150 years and presided over a religio-cultural flowering which was to be of great importance in shaping the character of Ethiopian civilization.

The physical expression of this flowering was projected most eloquently by the monolithic churches built in the highland fastness of Lasta during the reign of King Lalibela (c. xl8x-c. 1221). These astonishing architectural monuments were cut directly from their mountain of volcanic stone, hollowed out and shaped into arcades, chapels, naves, and sanctuaries, pierced with windows, supported by columns and arches, and embellished with reliefs and architectural ornamentation--all carved from the living rock like a series of gigantic sculptures. Eleven churches in all, they were no mere eccentricity for they followed in the long tradition of religious architecture already widely practiced in Ethiopia and utilized ancient motifs such as the shaped arches inspired by the summit of the great stele at Axum.

The churches of Lalibela were more than an architectural triumph, however; they represented the emergence of the unique Christianity of Ethiopia and the close relationship of church and state which has come to characterize Ethiopian society. The Christianity of the Axumites had been drawn from the Coptic persuasion and their bishop consecrated by the patriarch at Alexandria, but ethnically and culturally they were Semites from Arabia. For their part, the Agau exhibited Judaic as well as pagan characteristics, perhaps because of influences derived from Yemeni Jews before the advent of Islam. The resultant clash of these two strains almost brought the end of Christianity in Ethiopia, but when at last the Axumites had prevailed, the Agau converts had succeeded in embedding many of their pagan practices and Judaic legends and customs in the body of ritual and dogma of the Ethiopian church. At the same time, a close relation developed between the religious and temporal power as each reached out for the aid of the other in the quest for survival. In the end, Ethiopian Christianity emerged as a way of life-metamorphosed in the heat of political strife and the passion of religious devotion, then for long centuries protected, unchanging, from the adulterating effect of outside influence.

The Zagwe dynasty of the Agau, of which Lalibela was the most illustrious representative, gave way to the restored Solomonid line about 127o and Solomonid monarchs have ruled Ethiopia ever since. Under the early kings of this dynasty which claims descent from Solomon, Christian conversion was pursued as before, but increasingly it shared the royal attention with military campaigns against the numerous Muslim states--Ifat, Hadya, Bali, Doaro, Adal, and others --established by local Cushitic speakers like the Sidama along the southern and eastern edges of the Ethiopian plateau. These kingdoms, absorbing Islam from coastal Arabs, had emerged between the tenth and twelfth centuries while the Axumites and Agau were mutually preoccupied, and they now pressed in upon the Ethiopians only to be repulsed and, for a time, reduced to vassalage.

Unlike the Zagwe period for which little historical information survives, the era of the restored Solomonid kings was marked by chronicles which provided at least an outline of events. Yekuno Amlak (c. lz7o-c, lz85), the first of the "king of kings," shifted his base of operations from Lasta to Amhara and began to move against his Muslim neighbors, but major expansion at the expense of these states was not achieved until the reign of the militant Amda Seyon (13z41344). The dynasty reached an early peak under Zara Yakob (1434x468) who not only consolidated the gains of his predecessors, but greatly stimulated local religious activity and established relations with Rome in an effort to stand off both the external influence of Islam and the continuing effects of indigenous paganism. Zara Yakob's methods were often harsh. Aside froIll his commentaries on church doctrine and his program of church construction, he instituted a much-feared inquisition designed to stamp out heresy. Consequently, records his chronicle, "there was great terror . . . on account of the severity of his justice and of his authoritarian rule and above all because of the denunciations of those who, after having confessed that they had worshipped . . . the devil, caused to perish many innocent people by accusing them falsely."

The Ethiopian gesture toward the church of Rome coincided with Europe's own developing interest in Africa and Asia which brought the Portuguese to East Africa at the beginning of the sixteenth century seeking both to dominate the material wealth of the East and to destroy the spiritual world of Islam. An attempted liaison with the Christian kingdom of Ethiopia therefore was a natural outgrowth of Portugal's search for allies in a hostile land as well as the quest for that mythical Christian king, Prester John, whose existence had been rumored since the twelfth century, first in Asia and finally in Ethiopia. Thus it was that the Portuguese explorer Pero da Covilha had made his way to Ethiopia in 1494 at the conclusion of his travels to India, the Middle East, and East Africa, while a quarter century later the diplomatic mission which included Father Alvarez arrived to pursue closer relations between the two countries.

Although nothing came of the mission, the need for cooperation soon became apparent. The kingdom of Ethiopia was powerful and extensive as the sixteenth century dawned, stretching from Massawa · in the north to the tributary states of Ifat, Fatajar, Doaro, and Bali in the south, but the Muslims were tireless in their opposition and needed only the unifying strength of effective leadership to shift the balance of power in their favor. Population pressure possibly originating in Somalia, a renewed sense of religious mission, and a developing Ottoman interest in East Africa finally came to a focus in the Muslim state of Adal during the early sixteenth century, and when Adal shortly produced a gifted general in the person of Ahmad ibn Ghazi (15o6-1543), the Ethiopians soon found themselves facing a crisis of survival.

Ahmad, called Gran or left-handed, organized a powerful army, instilled it with the spirit of the iihad against the infidel, and in 1529 scored a decisive victory over the Ethiopian emperor, Lebna Dengel (1508-1540). This engagement was followed by a systematic devastation and occupation of Ethiopia which brought most of the country under Muslim control, laid waste to large areas, destroyed much of the intellectual and artistic heritage of the land, brought the forcible conversion of large numbers of people, and reduced the emperor to a hunted fugitive in the remote mountain districts of Tigre, Begemder, and Gojiam. In desperation, Lebna Dengel appealed to the Portuguese for help and in 1541, after the emperor had been succeeded by his son, Galawdewos (154o-1559), a contingent of four hundred musketeers arrived at Massawa and helped defeat the Muslims in an engagement near Lake Tana during which Gran himself was slain. Resting largely on the shoulders of one man, the Muslim menace was removed, suddenly, dramatically, and indeed, permanently.

The problems of the upland empire were by no means ended, however. The Muslim forces retiring to their capital at Harar were almost at once replaced by a new threat in the form of the pastoral Galla, Cushitic-speakers, who, in the middle of the sixteenth century, began to move northward from their nucleus in southern Ethiopia. They occupied the emirate of Harar, scaled the mountains on the east and south of the Abyssinian plateau and flooded Shoa, moving on to infiltrate Amhara and Lasta. Military action had no effect on this vast movement, nor were the Galla susceptible to assimilation into the more developed Ethiopian culture. Before their remorseless advance, the Ethiopians were forced to withdraw, and to share their country with the invaders with whom they lived side by side over the ensuing centuries, but always as strangers and potential enemies. Coincident with the beginning of the Galla migrations there was a Turkish occupation of Massawa and other coastal points which the emperor Sarsa Dengel (1563-1597) succeeded in neutralizing though not eliminating in 1589. Staggered and depressed by incessant invasion, the Ethiopian nation now faced yet another intrusion of a different sort. Portuguese aid against Ahmad Gran had caused renewed interest at Rome in converting the Ethiopians, and a Jesuit mission was soon dispatched with this end in view. At first success was slow in coming, but through the patient tact of Pedro Paez, the mission ultimately gained the conversion of the emperors Za Dengel (16o3-16o4) and Susenyos (16o7-163z).

Unfortunately for the cause of Roman Catholicism, Paez died in 1626 and was replaced by a zealot, Alphonso Mendez, who sought at once to impose the Roman church on the whole country, forcing the emperor to do him public homage, rebaptizing the population, remodeling the liturgy, forbidding many ancient practices, and introducing others anathema to local custom. Such a move led straight to bloody rebellion, anarchy, and eventually to the deportation of the Jesuit mission. For a time Susenyos stoutly supported the Latin reforms as his country sank in self-destruction, but finally he could endure the spectacle no longer. In x632, the emperor re-established the Ethiopian church. "Hear ye! Hear ye!" read his proclamation. "We first gave you this faith believing that it was good. But innumerable people have been slain . . . For which reason we restore to you the faith of your forefathers. Let the former clergy return to their churches . . . And do ye rejoice." Susenyos then abdicated in favor of his son, Fasiladas (163z-1667), and soon after died despondent still embracing the faith his people had rejected.

For the next two centuries Ethiopia withdrew into a sullen xenophobia in which regionalism, palace intrigue, and the unrelenting pressure of the Galla population led to internal decay, political fragmentation, and ultimate collapse of the central authority. Fasiladas established a fixed capital at Gondar, an inaccessible retreat in the mountains of Amhara, and this move effectively divorced the emperors from their people. The royal line in its growing weakness appealed for Galla support which further discounted imperial authority in the eyes of each local prince, or ras, only too ready to exercise independent rule. Galla mercenaries came to dominate the monarchy, and in 1755 a half-Galla king mounted the throne. The Galla were too divided among themselves, however, to impose national unity through their own rule, while the Ethiopians found themselves pressed into isolated islands by the expanding sea of Galla intruders.

By the middle of the eighteenth century, the throne had lost all authority, maintaining its existence only through the tradition of its sacred origin while de facto government rested in the hands of the Galla leaders and provincial chiefs. Civil war was continuous, and separatism steadily gained strength. Only the church remained national in identity, but its authority was at low ebb and its influence negligible in the face of militant war lords. By 184o, although the number of independent provinces had been reduced to four---Shoa, Gojjam, Amhara, and Tigre--the disintegration of Ethiopia appeared permanent.

Beyond the divisive thrust of the Galla intrusion acting on a land of mountainous inaccessibility, there was another factor which both aided and hindered national unity. The Ethiopian character had been shaped by a highland environment in which remoteness spawned parochialism and conservatism in a static society. The difficult years of isolation following the seventh century rise of Islam had forced the Ethiopians to come together in political unity and religious communion, but the process was long and difficult and had not been completed when Ahmad Gran's armies devastated the land and brought on the awesome apostasy to Islam. Eventually the old order was restored, but restoration came at a price. The church was no longer receptive to ideas from without--Roman or otherwise--and settled down to a defense of the status quo which could only lead to ignorance and inbreeding. The royal house abandoned the strength and flexibility of its peripatetic court for the brooding isolation of Gondar, and thus permitted each provincial fas gradually to establish his own local rule, protected by his mountain inaccessibility and the apathy of effete kings. Divorced from the outside world, Ethiopian society languished and the Ethiopian spirit atrophied.

Nevertheless, the fusion of Agau and Axumite had brought forth a national state consummated in the glory of the great kings of the Solomonid restoration while providing a spiritual brotherhood within the shelter of Ethiopian Christianity. During the most critical days of the Muslim invasion neither the monarchy nor the church ever lost faith in its traditions and responsibilities. The invaders were driven out and a new national strength emerged which reached full force in the uncompromising rejection of the Jesuit effort to westernize the Ethiopian church. Later, as the nation split into warring factions, both church and royal dynasty still retained enough prestige to survive in name if not in authority. When, during the nineteenth century, forces were set in motion in the direction of political unity, it was found that the Ethiopian spirit had not yet expired nor had the vision of an Ethiopian nation.

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