The Late Medieval Era · c. 1270-1517 · Ethiopian highlands
The Ethiopian Monastic Flowering
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About This Movement
When the Solomonic dynasty took the Ethiopian throne in 1270, claiming descent from Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, it did so alongside a monastic expansion that carried churches and monasteries deep into newly conquered regions. The network Tekle Haymanot built in Shewa, and the northern houses founded by the followers of Ewostatewos. The relationship between crown and cloister was contested throughout. The Ewostathians insisted on keeping Saturday as well as Sunday as a Sabbath and were harried for generations before the emperor Zara Yaqob finally conceded the point at a council in 1450. And Zara Yaqob, himself a theological author who reorganized the church and pressed Marian devotion on it, persecuted the monks of Estifanos when they refused the prostrations and observances he demanded. All of it was written down in Ge'ez — royal chronicles, saints' lives, hymns to Mary, and the Kebra Nagast, the book that gave the dynasty its Solomonic charter.
Sources
- The royal chronicles: The Glorious Victories of Amda Seyon (trans. Huntingford, Oxford, 1965) and the chronicle of Zara Yaqob (ed./French trans. Perruchon, 1893) (primary)
- Kebra Nagast (The Glory of Kings) (trans. Budge, 1922; free online) (primary) — The Solomonic dynasty's own charter myth. Its dating is a live scholarly argument: the text as it survives is an early-14th-century compilation claiming much older authority.
- The gadl literature of the era's own movements: Gadla Ewostatewos and Gadla Estifanos (Getatchew Haile, The Ge'ez Acts of Abba Estifanos of Gwendagwende, CSCO, 2006) (primary) — The Estifanosite acts are the persecuted dissenters' own memory of refusing royal-cult conformity under Zara Yaqob — a real counterweight to the royally-sponsored sources that dominate elsewhere.
- Zara Yaqob's own writings: Mashafa Berhan (Book of Light) and Mashafa Milad (primary) — A reforming king writing theology and enforcing it — an inside voice for the royal reform, but a hostile source for the movements it condemned, including the Estifanosites.
- Taddesse Tamrat, Church and State in Ethiopia, 1270-1527 (Oxford, 1972) (secondary) — Still the standard account for exactly this window, written by an Ethiopian historian; current French scholarship (Derat) supplements it.
- Cambridge History of Christianity vol. 5, 'Church and nation: the Ethiopian Orthodox Tawahedo church (from the thirteenth to the twentieth century)' (Crummey) (reference) — A direct fit — this period is the chapter's opening ground.