What Jordanus said about Ethiopia in 1330 marked a decisive stage in relating the legend to a semblance of truth. The friar had almost certainly been helped in his travels by Genoese merchants, and a 1339 map drawn by Angellino da Dalorto, a Genoese, said that the Muslims of Nubia were ‘warring continuously with the Christians of Nubia and Ethiopia, who are ruled by Prester John, a black Christian’.
At last, the kingdom of Prester John, having been sought all across Asia, had come to rest in Africa. While the reality might be far more humble than three centuries of grandiose exaggeration, it was enough to bear Portuguese piety and commercial enterprise along upon the same optimistic wind.
By the fifteenth century there was a small colony of Europeans living in Ethiopia. Almost all were Italians, mainly from Venice, Florence and Genoa. Some had gone to the ‘land of Prester John’ in the hope of acquiring precious stones; others may have become stranded while trying to reach the Indian Ocean by way of the Nile and the Red Sea. One of the earliest visitors whose name has survived is Pietro Rambulo, sometimes referred to as ‘Pietro di Napoli’ (he actually came from Messina, in Sicily, then part of the state of Naples). Rambulo reached Ethiopia in 1407 as a young man, took a local wife soon afterwards, and lived there for forty years.
His influence upon relations between Europe and his adopted home were to be considerable, as first appeared in 1428 when an Ethiopian mission reached Alfonso V of Aragon. The decision by the Ethiopians once again to approach a Spanish ruler, as they had in 1306, was most probably due to lobbying by Rambulo, because Alfonso held Sicily and was on the point of acquiring Naples as well. The emissaries proposed on behalf of Yishaq, the king who had sent them, that the two royal families should be united by marriage: Alfonso should send one of his sons to marry an Ethiopian princess, and an Ethiopian prince would be married to a daughter of Alfonso. The king side-stepped this proposition, but did agree to supply a team of artisans (who all died on the way).
Two years later Rambulo is recorded as accompanying a delegation sent to Ethiopia by the Due de Berry, who had Spanish connections. In 1432 Rambulo halted near Constantinople, and there met the Burgundian traveller Bertrandon de la Brocquière. Since his companions on the delegations had died, Rambulo was doubtless hoping to recruit at least one extra European to present to the Ethiopian monarch. So he ‘made many efforts’ to induce la Brocquière to come with him to Axum, the Ethiopian capital. Although the Burgundian remarks in his memoirs that he had met Rambulo before (without saying where), he also speaks deprecatingly of the fondness of ‘Pietro di Napoli’ for concocting outrageous stories, such as the Ethiopian scheme to divert the Nile and starve out Egypt. Pietro’s offer was turned down.
The failure of the mission to Spain did not seem to lower Rambulo’s standing with Zara-Yacob, the new emperor of Ethiopia, for his next diplomatic mission was to India and China. In 1450 he was again despatched to Europe, with an Ethiopian envoy named Brother Michele, and after a gap of twenty years was once more received in audience by Alfonso of Aragon.
Rambulo now took the opportunity to visit his birthplace. In Naples he was interviewed by a Dominican monk, who wrote down a brief account of the career of this intriguing character. The monk describes Rambulo as being tall, tanned by the sun, handsomely attired and white-haired. This is the last glimpse of him that history affords.
The good fortune of Rambulo had been that he was often allowed out of Ethiopia, whereas other foreigners who came there were not: Zara-Yacob treated them well, giving them wives and land, but refused to let them leave. He may have feared that while on the road they would be captured and tortured by the Muslims to extract information useful in war. Escape for his ‘prisoners’ was impossible, since there was only one route out, northwards to the Red Sea port of Massawa, and that was both hazardous and well guarded.
Such facts as the Portuguese had collected about the country were fragmentary enough to let them cling to the Mandeville fantasies of Prester John’s invincibility: ‘This emperor, when he goes into battle against any other lord, has no banners borne before him; but he has three large crosses of gold full of precious stones; and each cross is set in a chariot richly arrayed. And to keep each cross are appointed ten thousand men of arms and more than one hundred thousand footmen.’
Undeterred by the dangers, several Franciscan missionaries now managed to reach Ethiopia and make their way to the king’s court. Although one Venetian friar who wrote an account of the trip felt obliged to talk of ‘the great king Prester John’, his opinion of Ethiopia was decidedly low:
This country has much gold, little grain, and lacks wine; it has a very large population, a brutish people, rough and uncultured. They have no steel weapons for combat. Their arrows and spears are of cane. The king would not take the field with a force of less than 200,000 or 300,000 people. Each year he fights for the faith. He does not pay any of those who take the field, but he provides their living and exempts these warriors from every royal taxation. And all these warriors are chosen, inscribed and branded on the arm with the royal seal. No one wears woollen clothes because they have none, but instead they wear linen. All, both men and women, go naked from the waist upwards and barefoot; they are always full of lice. They are a weak people with little energy or application, but proud.
Had he read them, these contemptuous judgements would have enraged Zara-Yacob, the most powerful Ethiopian ruler in the fifteenth century, since he was expanding his domains by driving the Muslims back towards the Red Sea. Zara-Yacob was also brandishing at Egypt the wildly improbable but oft-repeated threat that he would divert the course of the Blue Nile. In a letter to Cairo in 1443, he warned Sultan Jamaq that he could do so at that very instant; only his fear of God and reluctance to cause human suffering held him back.
Zara-Yacob was annoyed on hearing that Europeans were calling him Prester John, remarking that he had a perfectly good name already, meaning ‘Seed of Jacob’. The emperor also conceded nothing in terms of piety: his subjects were ordered to have the renunciation of the devil tattooed on their forehead, and any who demurred were beheaded.
How much the Portuguese knew of such matters is uncertain. There was quite enough to convince them, however, that Prester John really did exist The exact position of his Ethiopian kingdom remained obscure, but it would surely be a place of succour on the way to India. All caravel captains had orders to seek news of this Christian king wherever they stepped ashore in Africa. Since on Brother Mauro’s map almost all of the continent had been delineated as Ethiopia, dotted with imaginary cities and fanciful drawings, the court in Lisbon started thinking of ways to collect more precise information.
So geographers, in Afric maps,
With savage pictures fill their gaps,
And o’er unhabitable downs,
Place elephants for want of towns.
—Jonathan Swift, ‘On Poetry, a Rhapsody’ (1733)
DURING THE AUTUMN OF 1487, two Moroccan merchants lay ill with fever in the Egyptian port of Alexandria. Their deaths seemed so certain that the city governor did not bother to wait on the event, but exercised his right to confiscate their possessions. To his dismay the Moroccans recovered. They reclaimed their goods, including numerous jars of Neapolitan honey, then hurried off to Cairo.
This had been an unpromising start to what was to become one of the