- Hey everyone, before we get started,
I wanted to make you aware
that at the time of this episode's release,
Ethiopia is currently experiencing a civil war
which has had major impacts on civilians.
And while we are not qualified to comment
on the current situation, we've included links below
where you can start to learn more.
Ethiopia has a rich and interesting place in world history,
and if you're watching from there, we hope you stay safe,
and that an equitable peace comes soon.
Florence, Italy, 1441.
The delegates have gathered to try something incredible,
to unite Christendom by healing the division
between Roman Catholic and Orthodox Christianity.
But there's no one the Western church fathers
are more excited to meet than the Ethiopian Christians.
Breathlessly, they tell the Ethiopians
that they've heard about their land,
an ancient Christian kingdom beset
on all sides by Muslims and Pagans.
A land of exotic beasts, possessing great treasures
and mighty religious relics.
A place ruled by the legendary priest king
known as Prester John.
Now, that last part confuses the Ethiopians a bit.
Yes, they do hail from the Ethiopian Empire,
a lone Christian kingdom surrounded by Muslim neighbors.
They do have a church as old as Rome,
and it's true that in their most sacred chapel,
they possess the greatest relic in Christendom,
the Ark of the Covenant.
It's even true that they are led by a wise monarch
descended directly from the biblical king Solomon,
but his name is not Prester John.
(upbeat music)
Thanks so much to Brilliant
for helping us to tell today's historic tale.
(air whooshing) The confusion at
the Council of Florence was not an isolated incident.
In fact, the legend of the mythical
Christian priest king Prester John,
who Europeans thought would charge out of the east
to assist them in the crusades,
had been floating around since the 12th century.
Originally, John was supposed to be living in India,
but when it became clear that he wasn't there,
the legend moved him to Central Asia.
But then when that turned out not to be true,
medieval Europeans heard a distorted tale
of a great Christian empire in Ethiopia
and decided that India was really more
of a vibe than a geographic place,
and that Prester John was just the emperor
of Ethiopia's title.
This is why in the year 1400 King Henry IV of England
sent the emperor of Ethiopia a letter
embarrassingly addressed to Prester John.
Communication between Europe and Ethiopia
would hilariously continue in this vein for another century,
as European courts kept writing to a guy that,
and I can't emphasize this enough, they entirely made up.
To put this into perspective,
imagine if someone thought Santa Claus
was the king of Norway, and then just insisted
on calling the real king by that name for two centuries.
Now why I belabor this point is to emphasize how far away,
different, and mysterious the empire of Ethiopia,
sometimes called Abyssinia,
seemed to the medieval Christian world.
It was a far flung kingdom largely on its own,
possessing an unfamiliar culture
in an area largely associated with Islam,
so little wonder they equated it
with a legendary kingdom founded by the descendants
of the Three Wise Men and protected by God.
But the truth is far more interesting.
In the third century, a Persian prophet wrote
that there were four great civilizations in the world.
They were his own kingdom of Babylon and Persia, the Romans,
the Chinese and the Aksumite, the last referred
to the Aksumite Empire, a powerful agricultural
and trading state that coalesced in the Ethiopian Highlands
in the early first century and became famous
for erecting massive funerary steel
over their dead emperors,
some higher than Egyptian obelisks.
Masters of both irrigation and dry land cultivation,
the Aksumites expanded to coastal ports
in a series of military expeditions.
Militarily powerful, but focused largely on trade,
they positioned themselves at the center of exchange
between Sub-Saharan Africa, Arabia,
India, and the Mediterranean.
To its north, it had access to the upper Nile
and the markets of Egypt.
To its south, Sub-Saharan Africa.
To its west was the east African interior and to its east,
the Arabian peninsula and India via ports on the Red Sea,
which also made it a major stop on the trade route
between Rome and India.
From its own territories, it exported agricultural products,
gold, jewels, salt, and animal skins.
It bought spices and silks from India
and it was famous for perfumes and incense,
especially myrrh.
In fact, one of its greatest trade partners
was Ptolemaic Egypt, where elites like Cleopatra
wore exotic animal skins from Aksum
and burned Aksumite incense in their temples.
Ethiopians were well known enough in the ancient world
that one even appears in the New Testament Book of Acts,
where Philip the Evangelist baptizes
an Ethiopian eunuch as the religion's
first non-Jewish convert.
Not to mention, Aksumite coins
have also cropped up in India and China.
Foreigners settled in Aksum as well,
where imperial decrees were carved in Greek,
as well as several local languages,
which is where we get the first hint of Christianity
making inroads in Aksum.
Local history records that the conversion started
with two Christian boys who shipwrecked in Aksum,
and due to their literacy in Greek,
became trusted slaves to the king and tutors to his son.
Freed upon the king's death,
the elder brother went to beg
the patriarch of Alexandria to appoint a bishop in Aksum,
only to be appointed himself.
The newly minted bishop would return in 330 CE
and convert his former pupil, King Ezana,
whose multilingual proclamations gradually begin to appear
more outwardly Christian, just in the Greek translations
at first, but eventually in all languages.
By the end of his life,
he'd gone full tilt and started minting coins
that replaced the icons of traditional religion
with that of the cross.
This, depending on what year you placed the conversion,
would make the Kingdom of Aksum either the first nation
to adopt Christianity as a state religion,
or the second behind Armenia, both of which
decades ahead of Rome, who would only make
the official switch in 3080.
By the sixth century, Aksum was at the height of its power,
governing not only much of the horn of Africa,
but also a chunk of what is now Yemen.
Though, that's when things started to go wrong.
When the Persian Emperor Khosrau I,
who you can learn more about in our series on him,
kicked them out of Arabia
in the punishing Persian-Aksumite Wars.
Then the plague of Justinian descended on them,
further weakening the state, and some evidence suggests
that climate change began cutting into their harvests.
The Aksumite Empire shrank inland,
losing its coastal territory
and abandoning its capital to move south.
Now, it began to recover in the late 500s
and early 600s, only to be smacked down again
by the emergence of Islam, which captured or isolated
most of Aksum's neighboring territories.
Ethiopian tradition states that the final blow came
when a non-Christian warrior queen
murdered the entire royal family and ceased power.
For 40 years, she destroyed churches
and burned sacred texts, forming a dynasty that only fell
with the rise of the Zagwe Kingdom.
Now, we know little about Zagwe,
apart from indications that it managed to maintain a trade
relationship with Egypt and Jerusalem,
even as other Aksumite networks fell apart.
But, though small, Zagwe left an incredible legacy.
Peaceful and technologically advanced,
it appears to have been a cultural state focused
mainly on religion with multiple kings achieving sainthood.
Today, it's chiefly famous for 11 spectacular
rock-hewn churches carved out
of the very bedrock in its capital.
However, not all were happy with Zagwe rule.
In a far southern province,
a young prince named Yekuno Amlak
was beginning to chafe under their yoke.
Raised and educated in a monastery by a monk
who would later be made a saint,
he did not let religion get in the way of good politics.
In 1270, he stormed north at the head of an army
composed of his personal followers
and a force sent by a neighboring sultan.
While we don't know much about this battle,
history state that Yekuno Amlak dealt Zagwe forces
a crushing defeat and he pursued their monarch
as he fled to sanctuary in a church.
There, Yekuno Amlak cornered the last king of Zagwe
and personally slew him in front of the altar.
But he killed more than that.
When Amlak took the throne,
he destroyed the records of the Zagwe dynasty
so thoroughly that the name of the king
he usurped has been lost to history.
Yet, as Yekuno Amlak consolidated his power
and placated his Muslim neighbors,
he confronted the problem of every usurper, legitimacy.
Why did he deserve to rule?
And the story that he and his descendants told
would define Ethiopian national character
until the modern day.
Because you see, this was not a usurpation,
this was a restoration.
He modified the old warrior queen legend
by saying that one baby escaped the massacre
of the last Aksumite royal family
and was hidden in the south.
There, his line continued in secret with each male heir
being raised in monasteries.
And now he, Yekuno Amlak,
heir to the glorious Aksumite line,
had come to reclaim his rightful throne.
But there was more because as his dynasty told it,
the Aksumite emperors were no mere Christian converts.
(upbeat percussive music) Instead, they were the
direct descendants of the biblical King Solomon
and the Ethiopian Queen of Sheba,
and that, as a gift, Solomon had given his dynasty
the Ark of the Covenant.
So with the blood of the House of David in his veins,
and the Ark of Moses in his chapel,
Yekuno Amlak inaugurated his new line,
the Solomonic dynasty.
Dang, tying your lineage to one of antiquity's
wisest historical figures, that's working smarter,
not harder, Zoe.
Which is actually something our friends
over at Brilliant know a ton about.
The smart learning part, not the divine genealogy stuff.
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