When the Jesuits first arrived in Ethiopia in 1557 they encountered a Christian society whose roots rivalled Rome for antiquity. The region had converted in the fourth century; its royal family claimed descent from the bibilical king Menilek and the queen of Sheba. But, from the point of view of western Christendom, it had been apostate for almost all of that time – since the Council of Ephesus in 431, one Jesuit thought. Instead, it followed the Orthodox teachings of the Alexandrine church.
The predominantly Portuguese missionaries called their work the Missão do Preste; “our main concern is to make contact with Prester John or the king of Ethiopia,” Loyala had written. But it was the emperor Susenyos, who came to the throne in 1607, who was seduced by the Catholic message. He saw it not as a new kind of Christianity, but the restoration of it in its purest terms. “This faith did not arrive to us sailing,” he said, referring the arrival of the missionaries by sea from Goa. “It is in our books and it is the faith of our old fathers and of the 318 [attendees] of the Nicea council.”
Susenyos may have privately converted in 1607, but he waited until November 1621 to proclaim the fact. There is no reason to doubt his sincerity, but the promise of European military technology and manpower was surely a further attraction: he ruled over an increasingly fissiparous empire fractured along multiple fault lines and threatened from without. After the death of his predecessor powerful members of the nobility had debated doing away with kingship altogether.
The Jesuits, with Susenyos’ support, targeted a wide range of Ethiopian church practices regarding the Sabbath, fasting, holy days, divorce, and much else. They were horrified by the almost universal practice of circumcision: not merely a Christian rite and not only for men, it was widely seen as not just necessary for salvation but a rite of passage into adulthood. To be uncircumcised was to be among the very dregs of society.
For their part, the local Christians called the missionaries ‘Franks’, ’Turks’ and ‘Moors’. Worse, they called them ‘sons of Leo’ – that is, of the fifth-century pope, Leo the Great – and ‘relatives of Pontius Pilate’. Susenyos himself was accused of being a ‘black Portuguese’. Whenever Jesuits came to preach in a region, people said, a plague of locusts came to destroy it; they made the host from animal dung. Moreover the Jesuit display of holy imagery, along with the public display of the Eucharist, was abhorrent to Ethiopian sensibilities: such things were a kind of desecration, inimical to the mysteries of the faith. Catholic imagery was a regular target for destruction in uprisings.
Many at court converted, but the fact that Susenyos could only persuade half of his children to follow his lead was symptomatic of how riven society became. From the late 1610s there were repeated rebellions, often led by members of his extended family. Ethiopian monks and nuns were at the forefront of resistance.
The arrival of a new head of the mission, Afonso Mendes, in 1626 made things worse. Mendes had a fondness for pomp – he had asked to be accoutred in vestments from the Pope’s private chapel before departing – that likewise sat ill with the Ethiopian culture. He was fond of his own voice too: his first address to the Ethiopian court in February that year ran to an eye-watering 30,000 words.
By 1629, even Mendes could see little cause for hope: “The omens addressed against us and the prophecies foreseeing our death are so numerous,” he wrote, “that if only one of them was to become true we would all be finished.”
As the new decade opened, Susenyos only had a few secure provinces of his kingdom left. One final battle in 1631 saw the defeat of a 25,000-strong rebel army in Lasta, but surveying the thousands of dead on the field realised the cost was too high.
On 14 June 1632, Susenyos issued an edict of toleration: henceforward his people could choose the Christian confession most to their liking, “Let the people have their own altars for the sacrament and their own liturgy, and let them be happy,” he said.
He abdicated in favour of his son and died, three months later, “old and worn out with wars and sickness”, in the comforts of the faith that had cost him his kingdom.
This is a slightly extended version of a piece that first appeared in the June 2023 issue of History Today.
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Mathew Lyons 
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