Re-examining Foresti's \(\textit {Supplementum Chronicarum}\) and the "Ethiopian" embassy to Europe of 1306
- 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.
| Author: | Verena KrebsGND |
|---|---|
| URN: | urn:nbn:de:hbz:294-70560 |
| DOI: | https://doi.org/10.1017/S0041977X19000697 |
| Parent Title (English): | Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies |
| Publisher: | Cambridge University Press |
| Place of publication: | Cambridge |
| Document Type: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Date of Publication (online): | 2020/03/19 |
| Date of first Publication: | 2019/12/30 |
| Publishing Institution: | Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Universitätsbibliothek |
| Tag: | Diplomacy; Embassy; Ethiopian history; Historiography; Medieval history; Nubian history; Prester John; Solomonic Dynasty |
| Volume: | 82 |
| Issue: | 3 |
| First Page: | 493 |
| Last Page: | 515 |
| Note: | © Copyright Cambridge University Press. Permission for reuse must be granted by Cambridge University Press in the first instance. |
| Institutes/Facilities: | Centrum für Religionswissenschaftliche Studien (CERES) |
| Historisches Institut, Juniorprofessur für Mittelalterliche Kulturräume und ihre Verflechtungen | |
| open_access (DINI-Set): | open_access |
| faculties: | Fakultät für Geschichtswissenschaft |
| Licence (English): |  Creative Commons - CC BY 4.0 - Attribution 4.0 International |
