Post-Aksumite Ethiopian Christianity

Aksum had been one of the great powers of the late-antique world, minting its own coins, its kings Christian since the fourth century. Then the trade that sustained it moved away, the coinage stopped, and Ethiopian Christianity went quiet for something close to five hundred years — one of the least documented stretches in the whole history of any ancient church. What can be said with confidence is small but decisive. The church survived, its centre shifted south into the highlands, and it went on receiving its chief bishop from the Coptic patriarch in Alexandria, a link that would last into the twentieth century. Later Ethiopian tradition fills the silence with the story of a queen remembered as Gudit, who is said to have destroyed churches around the year 960, but that account comes from much later and largely hostile sources and cannot be verified. When the record resumes under the Zagwe kings in the twelfth century, there is a functioning church with monasteries, a liturgy in Ge'ez and its own saints. Which tells us the intervening centuries were not empty, only silent.