Copts prevented this.[1] So we must conceive this Church always dependent on the Copts, having little special history to chronicle,[2] till the 16th century. Then comes an important incident, and we have suddenly a flood of information about the country and its Church. The Portuguese came to Africa, made a treaty with the King of Abyssinia, sent zealous Catholic missionaries into the country and brought about a union with the Catholic Church. But this story belongs to our next volume, on the Uniates. Here it must be enough to note that the Portuguese missionaries were the first Western people to study the Abyssinian Church. We owe to their accounts most of our knowledge of its customs.[3] For about a century (1555-1640) the Abyssinian Church was Catholic. During that time it broke its connection with the Copts; Abūna was nominated by the Pope. At the beginning of this intercourse with Rome, King Claude (1540-1559) sent a profession of his faith.[4] It is a good statement of Monophysite Christianity, and shows that the writer understood the issue and was quite consciously Monophysite. Then came a reaction. A new king (Basilides, 1632-1665) drove out the Jesuits and all Catholic missionaries, forbade any Catholic priest to live in his land, and restored the dependence of his Church on the Coptic Patriarch. Meanwhile during the Portuguese ascendancy they had saved the country from a Moslem invasion under Mohammed Ahmed Granye (1528).[5]
From the failure of the Portuguese missionaries we date
- ↑ Renaudot: op. cit. 510-511. There have been continual revolutions and changes of dynasty in Abyssinia.
- ↑ The Liber Axumæ (edited with a translation by K. Conti Rossini as vol. 8 of the second series of Ethiopic authors in Chabot's Corpus scriptorum christianorum orientalium, Paris, 1909) throws interesting light on the mediæval Abyssinian Church. It is a list of donations made to the Metropolitan Church at Aksum, with many curious legends and historical details.
- ↑ For instance, Bermudez, translated into English by Purchas (Purchas his Pilgrimes, London, 1625, part 2), and French by La Croze Mendez (Litteræ æthiopiæ, Mecheln, 1628), Lobo (Voyage historique d'Abyssinie, transl. by M. le Grand, Paris, 1728), etc.
- ↑ In Ludolf's Comment., pp. 237-241. Archdeacon Dowling (The Abyssinian Church, pp. iv-v) quotes this very incompletely and admires it vastly. But probably he does not know of the rest.
- ↑ He overran Abyssinia, and threatened to wipe out the Christian State from 1525 to 1540. He was probably a Somali or Galla.
