The High Medieval Era · c. 1137-1270 · Ethiopian highlands
Zagwe Ethiopian Christianity
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About This Movement
After the old Aksumite kingdom faded, a dynasty called the Zagwe ruled the Ethiopian highlands from the twelfth century, and under them the Ethiopian church went on doing what it had done for eight hundred years — with one striking peculiarity of constitution: its head bishop, the abun, was not Ethiopian but a monk sent from the Coptic patriarchate in Egypt, so a wholly independent kingdom kept its senior churchman permanently on loan from another country. The dynasty's most famous achievement is the group of eleven churches cut downward out of solid rock at the town now called Lalibela, after the king who commissioned them, laid out to recall Jerusalem at a time when Jerusalem itself had become unreachable. In 1270 the Zagwe were displaced by Yekuno Amlak, whose line claimed descent from Solomon and the Queen of Sheba — a claim set out in the Kebra Nagast, compiled in the generations after the takeover and used to justify Ethiopian kingship for the next seven centuries.
Sources
- Kebra Nagast (The Glory of Kings) (trans. E. A. Wallis Budge, 1922; free online) (primary) — The Solomonic dynasty's charter myth, compiled and redacted in the early 14th century - royal ideology from just after this period, not the Zagwe's own self-description. Budge's translation is dated but remains the standard available edition.
- Gadla Lalibela (Life of King Lalibela) (ed./French trans. Perruchon, 1892) (primary) — Zagwe royal hagiography. No English translation exists, and the Life was written after the king it praises died.
- Lalibela's rock-hewn churches (material culture) + land grants and marginalia in gospel books (e.g. the Golden Gospel of Dabra Libanos) (primary) — The era's most eloquent contemporary witnesses are carved and written into stone and manuscript margins, not narrated. Covered mainly in specialist publications.
- Taddesse Tamrat, Church and State in Ethiopia, 1270-1527 (Oxford, 1972) (secondary) — Available on archive.org. Still the field's standard frame, by an Ethiopian historian.
- Marie-Laure Derat, L'enigme d'une dynastie sainte et usurpatrice: les rois zagwe (2018) (secondary) — Current Zagwe scholarship revising the Solomonic-propaganda picture. French only; no English translation.
- Cambridge History of Christianity vol. 5, 'Church and nation: the Ethiopian Orthodox Tawahedo church (from the thirteenth to the twentieth century)' (Crummey) (reference)