From the time of his birth in Venetian Cyprus in 1509 to his untimely death upon his return to the island in 1565, the Ethiopian Giovanni Battista Abissino (henceforth Yoḥannǝs) journeyed widely throughout Mediterranean Europe and twice sailed around Africa on the Carreira da India.Footnote 1 One of the most traveled Africans until the modern era, towards the end of his life he became the second black bishop and the first black nuncio in the modern history of the Roman Catholic Church.Footnote 2 His life and career challenge a variety of assumptions about the African diaspora and further problematize the issue of color prejudice in the early modern Mediterranean.Footnote 3
Given his status as one of the most prominent diasporic Africans of the age, and the considerable trail of documents he left in his wake, one would expect Yoḥannǝs to have been extensively studied. This is especially so in recent years, when a growing number of scholars have been dedicating long-overdue attention to the history of the African diaspora in early modern Europe.Footnote 4 Instead, after having attracted some interest among Orientalists and church historians in the 1930s and 1940s, Yoḥannǝs mostly fell into oblivion.Footnote 5 In fact, a common misconception among Africanists is that the Kongolese Henrique (c. 1495–c. 1526), son of King Afonso I of Kongo (1506–43), was the only African bishop until the twentieth century.Footnote 6
In part, the historiographical neglect of Yoḥannǝs can be ascribed to the nature of the sources. The most important record, the Holy Office file concerning his elevation, includes depositions in Latin and Italian vernaculars, while Yoḥannǝs's profession of faith and the official consistorial act proclaiming his elevation are both in Latin.Footnote 7 Other significant records are a letter penned by Yoḥannǝs in Gǝᶜǝz, Ethiopia's liturgical language; financial transactions relating to Yoḥannǝs's sojourn in Rome and a memorandum from a Venetian merchant to Pope Pius IV (1559–65) both in Italian vernaculars; and multiple Latin-language papal bulls.Footnote 8 Sources of this kind, beyond the conventional confines of African diaspora studies, partially explain why the history of black Africans in early modern Europe has been mostly a Europeanist preserve,Footnote 9 but there is more to this historiographical neglect than language barriers.
Yoḥannǝs, fellow Ethiopian pilgrims, and more generally, black Africans in early modern Europe, have been on the wrong side of what Paul T. Zeleza referred to as the ‘asymmetries in knowledge production about African diasporas in different world regions’.Footnote 10 According to Zeleza, African diaspora studies have been privileging ‘the Atlantic model in which the patterns of dispersal are reduced to the slave trade and the processes of diasporization to racialization.’Footnote 11 Likewise, while gazing at the understudied African diasporas in the premodern Mediterranean, Ruth Iyob concluded that ‘the complexity of the cosmopolitanism of Africa's many diasporas has been ignored for too long and the time has come for all of us to look beyond the narrow twin trajectories of slavery and colonialism.’Footnote 12
The imbalance was already apparent to George Shepperson when he formalized the very notion of African diaspora at the International Congress of African History in 1965. In the same address, he expounded extending its confines both geographically, beyond the Atlantic, and chronologically, before the rise of the modern slave trade, and cautioned against ignoring the black presence in premodern and early modern European and Arab worlds.Footnote 13 Since then, and particularly in the last two decades, an outpouring of scholarship on a variety of streams of Africa's Atlantic and non-Atlantic diasporas, has fulfilled at least in part Shepperson's desiderata.Footnote 14 However, the evolution of African diaspora studies remains uneven: if the Indian Ocean and Middle Eastern diasporas can now boast a substantial body of scholarship on both enslaved and elite Africans, the study of the African diaspora in Europe and the related collection of archival sources remains vastly understudied.Footnote 15
Along with Zeleza, I would argue that this state of affairs is partially due to the deployment of African diaspora paradigms that fail to accommodate experiences departing from the Atlantic archetype. In particular, there seem to be epistemological difficulties in making space for African agents like Yoḥannǝs, who thrived in spite of color prejudice associated with the enslavement of black Africans. As much as his personal experience was unique, his life and peregrinations belonged to a diasporic stream shared by a small but significant community of migrants: the Ethiopian diaspora in the early modern Mediterranean.Footnote 16
This article first sketches the diasporic circumstances of Yoḥannǝs's upbringing, and his serendipitous role as a witness to momentous events in the history of Ethiopian-European relations. Second, it discusses his coming of age within the confines of the Republic of Venice's sprawling possessions. Last, it chronicles his ascendancy in Counter-Reformation Rome, culminating with his elevation and dispatch as nuncio to the East. The conclusion offers a few preliminary thoughts on the bearing of Yoḥannǝs's story on the debate over the African diaspora.
CYPRUS, 1509–24
Yoḥannǝs's life story belongs to the world of the Ethiopian-European encounter in the early modern Mediterranean, when Ethiopians could be spotted with increasing frequency throughout the Italian and Iberian peninsulas. Some of them were ambassadors, dispatched, time and again, by Ethiopian rulers eager to establish relations and alliances with fellow Christian sovereigns, reconnect with Roman Church, and facilitate technological transfer with Europe.Footnote 17 Their presence was recorded at various locales, including Lisbon, Naples, Rome, Valencia, and Venice. Whereas these representatives would hardly qualify as anything more than visitors, many more Ethiopians traveled instead as pilgrims; often, they would not return, opting instead to spend the rest of their lives far from their homeland.
These pilgrims took part in a voluntary diaspora that by the late fifteenth century dwelled in a network of communities in a variety of Mediterranean settings, including Cairo, Alexandria, Jerusalem, Cyprus, and Rome.Footnote 18 Whereas Ethiopian pilgrims probably first reached Egypt and the Holy Land in the early days of Ethiopian Christianity, definite evidence of an Ethiopian presence in these regions dates back to the era of the Fatimid Caliphate (909–1171) and the Latin Kingdom (1099–1291). The first group of Ethiopians appears to have arrived in Cyprus in the aftermath of the fall of Jerusalem in 1187, when they reportedly followed the fallen king, Guy of Lusignan (b. 1150–d. 1194), as he settled on the island.Footnote 19 From these Mediterranean beachheads, no later than the early 1400s, some of them started to sail to Europe, directed to Rome and other popular devotional destinations. Over the years, dozens of Ethiopians sojourned, either for a stopover or a prolonged residence, at the hospice annexed to Santo Stefano degli Abissini, a small church within a few meters of St. Peter's Basilica.Footnote 20
Yoḥannǝs belonged to this diasporic network of Ethiopian communities since birth, as he would himself explain to his Holy Office interrogators in 1565: ‘I was born in Cyprus … [my] father was Abyssinian from Meroe and [my] mother [was] Egyptian from Manfalut, but of Abyssinian descent; at the time of the Egyptian Sultan's persecution they came to Cyprus.’Footnote 21 In the early 1500s, Yoḥannǝs's parents, Gäbrä Krǝstos and Maryam,Footnote 22 left Egypt and reached Cyprus, where they would join a small Ethiopian community, based at the Church of San Salvatore in Nicosia. In light of Yoḥannǝs's age, the reference to the ‘Egyptian Sultan's persecution’ should identify Sultan Qansuh al-Ghawri (1501–16), which would indicate that his parents had found refuge on the island not too long before his birth.Footnote 23 Although Yoḥannǝs did not elaborate further on the circumstances of his parents’ migration, given that his father was a deacon, one can surmise that he relocated through the clerical network that connected the Ethiopian communities in the Mamluk Sultanate with that in Cyprus. Since the island at the time was part of Venice's Stato da Mar, and the Republic maintained a vast commercial network in early modern Egypt, Yoḥannǝs's parents, like most Ethiopians who traveled to Europe, ought to have sailed on a Venetian galley.
Yoḥannǝs's mother Maryam, who was at least partially Ethiopian, appears to have been born in the diaspora. Manfalut, about 600 km south of the Nile Delta, was an important Christian center for most of the Mamluk and early Ottoman eras and hosted an Ethiopian community.Footnote 24 Two witnesses related that she was ‘Egyptian’,Footnote 25 but they admitted to relying exclusively on Yoḥannǝs's word. They probably referred to his mother as Egyptian because this is how Yoḥannǝs seems to have characterized her by virtue of her birthplace – in contrast with his father, who had been born in Ethiopia.Footnote 26 Even allowing for the Egyptian or mixed identity of his mother, Ethiopian patrilineality made Yoḥannǝs indisputably Ethiopian. As for his father Gäbrä Krǝstos's origin in ‘Meroe’, it would appear to be a misnomer, given that another witness identified his father as hailing from Amhara.Footnote 27 The only other fragments of information available on Yoḥannǝs's childhood in Cyprus pertain to his siblings: he was one of five brothers who had each pursued a religious life – the priests Ǝsṭifanos, Tomas, and P̣eṭros and a deacon, Mikaᵓel.Footnote 28
GLOBETROTTER, 1524–35
Yoḥannǝs told the Holy Office he had grown up in Cyprus ‘about until [he] turned fifteen [1524], when [he] left for Rome, Portugal, the Camino de Santiago to Galicia, and then [he] returned to the East Indies.’Footnote 29 Between the late fifteenth and the mid-sixteenth centuries, Santo Stefano's was the most recognizable community of free Africans in early modern Europe. According to a contemporary Dominican hagiographer who met with a group of Ethiopian pilgrims hailing from Rome, at the time the complex hosted about thirty pilgrims.Footnote 30 The large community of free blacks would not go unnoticed by Muḥammad al-Wazzān al-Fāsī (1494–1554), better known as Leo Africanus, who in his Della descrittione dell’Africa (1550) referred to ‘certaine religious Friers seared or branded on the face with an hot iron, who are to be seene almost ouer all Europe, and specially at Rome’.Footnote 31
Yohạnnǝs’s journeys. Source: Cox Cartographic Ltd.
Likewise, a few years after Yoḥannǝs's arrival, the 28 Ethiopians living in the complex produced their first rules of communal conduct. Furthermore, an updated and expanded version from 1551 suggests that the diasporic community had reached a critical size.Footnote 32 The document offers glimpses of mid-1500s pilgrim life. It established monetary and moral punishments for the most common offenses: for example, calling a pilgrim ‘Muslim, Jew, Pagan or dead dog, impure [impuro] or hyena’ would result in a penalty of six gold coins (zecchini), and the same for someone guilty of raising ‘a knife, a sword or a stick against a brother’. In fact, pilgrims were altogether forbidden from entering the premises with ‘a sword or a lance’ or causing ‘discord’, both under penalty of three gold coins. Thieves were instead to be ‘strangled by the devil’.Footnote 33
Taken together, these testimonies suggest that when Yoḥannǝs and his father Gäbrä Krǝstos arrived in Rome in 1524–5, Santo Stefano was teeming with activity. Unfortunately for the young pilgrim, his father seems to have died soon after arriving in the city, leaving his son stranded and in the compassionate care of other clerics.Footnote 34 Starting in the fifteenth century, a growing number of Ethiopian monks had been undertaking pilgrimages to the Camino de Santiago: one or more among them must have taken Yoḥannǝs to Europe's most famous shrine.Footnote 35 At some point in 1525, Yoḥannǝs walked his way from Rome to Galicia; the journey would have lasted about four months. How and why, from Santiago, Yoḥannǝs found his way to Lisbon and later to Goa in Portuguese India is unknown, but it can be surmised that he reached Lisbon between late 1525 and early 1526.
The city presented him with a particularly favorable milieu: it was the capital of a burgeoning empire. The ruling family, the Avis, had long invested in finding and establishing relations with Ethiopia, by then positively identified as the land of the mythical Prester John.Footnote 36 After a long quest, whose beginnings can be traced back to the country's first steps into the Atlantic in the early fifteenth century, a Portuguese embassy had reached Ethiopia in 1520. By the time of Yoḥannǝs's arrival in Lisbon, Portuguese authorities in Goa had attempted to retrieve the embassy from the Ethiopian coast several times, to no avail.Footnote 37 Given that the Portuguese court had welcomed and supported Ethiopian visitors as a valuable source of intelligence time and again in the preceding years, it is plausible that Yoḥannǝs received support from João III (1521–57) for his transit to India.
One could surmise that the young traveler, perhaps along with some companions, figured in yet another plan to rescue the embassy. If so, Portuguese authorities could have arranged for their journey. Alternatively, the Ethiopians could have negotiated passage on the carreira on their own. At any rate, Yoḥannǝs reached Portuguese India, where he ‘found our king's ambassador and … came with him to Lisbon’.Footnote 38 The reference is to Ṣägga Zäᵓab, a high-ranking Ethiopian cleric who had escorted the Portuguese party to Emperor Lǝbnä Dǝngǝl's (1508–40) court at the time of their arrival in Ethiopia, and was traveling with the Portuguese party back to Europe as Ethiopian ambassador.Footnote 39
Although Portuguese India was a relatively small world and the encounter could have been serendipitous, the timing suggests that Yoḥannǝs traveled in the company of someone seeking to connect with the embassy, Antonio Galvão (c. 1490–1557).Footnote 40 His father, Duarte Galvão (1446–1517), the mastermind of Manueline expansionism and a prominent advocate of the quest for Prester John, had been appointed to head the 1515 Portuguese mission to Ethiopia, but died and was buried near Kamaran in the Red Sea. The mission was postponed until 1520, when the new ambassador, Don Rodrigo de Lima (1500–unknown), finally gained Lǝbnä Dǝngǝl's court. In 1526, Antonio sailed to India and met with the returning embassy, which on the way back to India had retrieved his father's remains.Footnote 41 The meeting is the likely context for Yoḥannǝs's introduction to the Portuguese embassy. In any case, upon meeting with the party, Yoḥannǝs opted to join it and return to Portugal, possibly after conferring with some of its members. Either Ṣägga Zäᵓab, Rodrigo de Lima, or Francisco Alvares, the embassy's chaplain, could have dissuaded him from venturing into Ethiopia and advised a return to Europe. At any rate, in November 1526, Yoḥannǝs left India with the party and reached Portugal on 24 July 1527.
In Lisbon, Yoḥannǝs and his new companions were rerouted to Coimbra, where the royal court had sought refuge from a plague outbreak and where the returning embassy would be received after a month-long quarantine.Footnote 42 In late September 1527, King João III officially received the party. Although it would not result in any tangible initiatives for years to come, the hearing represented an epic moment, celebrated in multiple publications glorifying the global reach of the Avis.Footnote 43 With the successful return to Europe of an embassy dispatched to Prester John, one that was carrying the sovereign's letters and escorting his ambassador, the centuries-old quest for the mythical sovereign was coming full circle. Yoḥannǝs was little more than a young bystander, and yet he must have appreciated the opportunities that the newly found courtly world could afford him.
Following the hearing, Yoḥannǝs probably waited anxiously to return to Cyprus, which would coincide with the planned dispatch of Lǝbnä Dǝngǝl's letter to the pontiff. However, the mission was delayed until the fall of 1532, and Yoḥannǝs lived in Portugal for five years, which remain unaccounted for. The young Ethiopian must have stayed close to Ṣägga Zäᵓab, who at court experienced a sojourn of captivity and harassment, primarily at the hands of João III's intransigent theologians who accused him of heresy.Footnote 44
When the long-postponed mission to Clement VII was dispatched, Alvares was tasked with accompanying the Portuguese ambassador Dom Martinho (1490–1547).Footnote 45 The pontiff was in Bologna to meet with Emperor Charles V (1530–58). After sparring for most of the 1520s – a confrontation that had led to the famous sack of Rome of 1527 – the two had temporarily settled their differences in the same city in 1530, when Clement VII had relented and crowned Charles Holy Roman Emperor. By late 1532, pope and emperor were reconvening in the city again to address pressing issues, among them the Protestant question and Sultan Suleiman's (1520–66) advance in Eastern Europe, which had climaxed in 1529 with the Ottoman siege of Vienna.Footnote 46
Alvares presented the pontiff with Lǝbnä Dǝngǝl's letters on 29 January 1533. Ethiopia was not high on the papacy's list of priorities, but for Clement VII, the hearing was a much-needed confirmation of his authority in the face of events that had put it into question: stormy relations between Church and Empire and the challenges of the Reformation. To Joao III, it was a confirmation and celebration of Portugal's global reach: Prester John had been located and, through Portuguese brokerage, the long-sought sovereign had allegedly pledged his obedience to the pontiff.Footnote 47
Oblivious to the hearing's meaning, the young Yoḥannǝs – he would later claim – ‘translated the letters of our king which Francisco Alvares and Dom Martinho took to His Holiness in Bologna’.Footnote 48 Lǝbnä Dǝngǝl's letters had been dispatched in Portuguese, Gǝᶜǝz, and Arabic versions, and they had to be translated into Latin. In this regard, the official account of the hearing, which states that the letters were translated by the learned Bishop Paolo Giovio (1483–1552), cannot be believed. Producing an accurate Latin version called for the reading and parsing not only of the Portuguese version but also the Gǝᶜǝz and the Arabic, two languages that Yoḥannǝs, unlike Giovio, knew well.Footnote 49
As to his participation in the formal hearing, it is possible that the young Ethiopian was introduced to Clement and Charles as a makeshift representative of Prester John, or even as an exotic guest, and found himself projected into the heart of Europe's political-religious apparatus. Like the encounter with Lima's embassy and the hearing in Coimbra, his presence in Bologna turned Yoḥannǝs into an unwitting bystander to Luso-Ethiopian relations, but it also represented a prologue to his future career in Rome and life-long involvement with the Church's quest for Eastern Christians. His diasporic upbringing, which had gifted him with fluency in multiple languages, combined with his timely journey, had thrown him to the heart of Europe's political-religious complex, where he could glimpse his future life as an elite broker between distant worlds.Footnote 50
In the months following the hearing, Yoḥannǝs traveled to Rome, probably in the company of Martinho and Alvares, as the two joined the papal court's return to the city in March 1533.Footnote 51 Once there, Yoḥannǝs must have reconnected with the Ethiopian community, possibly remembered as the young orphan who had lost his father a few years earlier; by 1535 he was back in Cyprus.Footnote 52
IN THE VENETIAN REPUBLIC, 1535–42
Yoḥannǝs spent the ensuing seven years within the confines of the Venetian territories, between Cyprus, Koper, and Venice. His laconic deposition is the only source for a period that represented his coming of age, and that was paradigmatic for his evolving identity. Somewhat expectedly, in light of what is known about his siblings, Yoḥannǝs also opted for a religious life and was ‘ordained priest by Giovanni, Coptic bishop of Cyprus, where’ – he would relate – ‘I stayed three years and where I sang the Chaldean mass around 1538.’Footnote 53 His ordainment reflected the Ethiopian Church's relationship with the Alexandrine Church: because only the abun, the Coptic bishop dispatched to Ethiopia to head the Ethiopian Church, could ordain priests – diaspora Ethiopians seeking ordainment had to resort to the closest Coptic bishop, as Yoḥannǝs did.
As for the reasons and dynamics of his relocation to the shores of the northern Adriatic, circumstantial evidence and later developments allow for some conjectures. Yoḥannǝs's departure could, in part, have been motivated by the challenging conditions he found upon returning to Cyprus. The Ethiopian community was minuscule, had limited resources, and was increasingly dependent on the island's Coptic authorities. More important, some of the testimonies recorded by the Holy Office speak of rather conflicted relationships between Yoḥannǝs's family and the rest of the community over the use of San Salvatore's meager resources.Footnote 54
These difficulties would explain why not only Yoḥannǝs but also his brothers P̣eṭros and Mikaᵓel had at some point left Cyprus for, respectively, Venice, Jerusalem, and Cairo.Footnote 55 As for his relocation, evidence from later years shows familiarity with Cardinal Gasparo Contarini (1483–1542), of the powerful Venetian family: it is plausible that Yoḥannǝs enjoyed the cardinal's patronage already when he left Cyprus as a priest, especially in light of the Contarini family's extensive interests on the island.Footnote 56 At any rate, Yoḥannǝs left Cyprus in 1538 and lived alternately in Koper on the Istrian peninsula and Venice over the following four years. Now in his late twenties, Yoḥannǝs went through a first transformative experience when he was licensed to celebrate the Catholic mass – the first step towards a new religious identity. Instrumental to the necessary proceedings was Koper's Bishop Pietro Paolo Vergerio (1498–1565), whose support for Yoḥannǝs and desire to see him at work in his dioceses were predicated on his ecumenical views.Footnote 57
Bishop Vergerio, who would later be accused of heresy and ultimately escape to Switzerland to avoid the consequences of excommunication, belonged to the spirituali, an influential group of Catholic prelates and intellectuals with a reformist and ecumenical agenda geared towards compromise with the Protestant world. They belonged to what has been aptly called the ‘religious republic of letters’: a continent-wide network of acquaintances, correspondence, and theological debate that stretched from Rome to Northern Europe and included influential personalities such as Thomas More (1478–1535), Erasmus (1466–1536), and Reginald Pole (1500–58).Footnote 58
One interest shared by many of these humanists was Rome's relationship or lack thereof with the Eastern Churches, in particular Ethiopia's. Among them, the Portuguese humanist Damião de Góis (1502–74) was probably the one who invested the most in understanding Ethiopian Christianity, in particular following his encounter with Ṣägga Zäᵓab in Lisbon, shortly after Yoḥannǝs's departure for Bologna. After befriending the frustrated Ethiopian cleric, Góis obtained and published his confession of faith, which contained excoriating language towards the Portuguese clergy and a rather critical stance towards the papacy, as the central piece of Fides, Religio, Moresqve Aethiopum sub Imperio Preciosi Ioannis in 1540.Footnote 59 While for Góis, the Ethiopian question became a life-long investment that ultimately resulted in his fall from grace, for most spirituali it was a relatively small concern when compared to other matters, such as the need for reform, the threat posed by intransigent clerics, and the Reformation.Footnote 60 And yet, despite Ethiopia's remoteness and limited importance in Rome's global chessboard, the Ethiopian question was significant because it spoke to urgent dilemmas within the Church and the world of Western Christianity. Understanding the ecclesiastical, liturgical, and theological idiosyncrasies of churches long independent from Rome, they believed, could help identify a resolution to the challenges of the Reformation.
The relationship with Vergerio was the first of many that Yoḥannǝs entertained with the spirituali. The next came in 1540, when – Yoḥannǝs would himself relate – the ‘Very Reverend Cardinal [Gasparo] Contarino [sic] wrote me and told me I had to come to Rome by order of His Highness Pope Paul III, rest in peace.’Footnote 61 The summons must be read in the context of Paul III's preparatory work for the Council of Trent: in the second half of the 1530s, the pontiff appointed Cardinal Contarini to a variety of commissions tasked with studying the issue of reform. As part of this effort, Contarini devoted considerable attention to the study of Rome's historical relations with the Eastern Churches and the canons of previous councils. Yoḥannǝs, who was probably known to Contarini through Vergerio or other Ethiopians in Santo Stefano, must have appeared ideally suited to support the project of gathering knowledge on Eastern Christians. As such, he reached Rome two years later, in 1542.Footnote 62
ROME AND BEYOND, 1542–65
Sources allow only for a broad sketch of Yoḥannǝs's experience in Rome: this is particularly unfortunate when one considers that he rubbed shoulders with the highest echelons of the Church hierarchy. He had a front-row seat to two of the most crucial phenomena in the history of early modern Catholicism, whose repercussions would reverberate for centuries: the Council of Trent (1545–63) and the rise of the Roman Inquisition. What emerges clearly from the scant record is that Yoḥannǝs could navigate the city's stormy waters and find patrons at both ends of the tug-of-war that engulfed the papacy, between the ecumenical spirituali and their nemesis, the zelanti, orthodox ecclesiastics opposed to any accommodation with the Protestant world.
Yoḥannǝs found himself tossed from one camp to the other from the time of his arrival. By then, Contarini had left for Bologna, where he died on 24 August 1542. ‘Not finding Cardinal Contarino [sic] in Rome’ – Yoḥannǝs would later relate – ‘Very Reverend Cardinal Teatino hosted me.’Footnote 63 The reference is to Giovanni Pietro Carafa (1476–1559), unapologetic enforcer of Catholic orthodoxy, who first as Grand Inquisitor (1542–55) and later as Pope Paul IV (1555–9) was the ultimate nemesis of the spirituali and a staunch opponent of ecumenical dialog.Footnote 64
An Ethiopian Orthodox priest and a Grand Inquisitor ostensibly make strange bedfellows, but not when one considers Yoḥannǝs's evolving identity along with the purpose of the Roman Inquisition. Whereas the medieval Inquisition or the contemporary Portuguese and Spanish Inquisitions were first and foremost agents of social control that targeted primarily new Christians and in particular Jews, the Roman Inquisition was by and large a political tool used to settle scores within the Church hierarchy. Thus the Holy Office had little interest in going after the Ethiopians of Santo Stefano or their benefactors.Footnote 65 Furthermore, Yoḥannǝs seems to have been well versed in adapting to circumstances as his service to a Catholic congregation in Istria suggests.
Once in Rome, conscious of his precarious condition as a member of the zealous Carafa's household, he must have continued to tread carefully, and weighed the pros and cons of his religious status. Within years of his arrival, Yoḥannǝs must have realized the benefit of a further turn and opted to be ordained Catholic, a choice he reportedly made after Carafa had raised the issue of his Coptic ordainment.Footnote 66 The choice not only spared the Grand Inquisitor the embarrassment of hosting a heretic, but also opened avenues of opportunity to Yoḥannǝs, who would remain with Carafa ‘in his home until his death’.Footnote 67
In Rome for over two decades, Yoḥannǝs was active primarily on three fronts. One important endeavor, which allowed him to make valuable acquaintances and forge a name for himself in the early years of his sojourn, was his collaboration with the most prominent among Santo Stefano's dwellers, Täsfa Ṣǝyon (1510–50/52). The monk, a refugee from the Ethiopian-Adali Wars, reached Rome in the mid-1530s and became the main engine behind the production of knowledge on Ethiopia when, in the late 1540s, he printed the Ethiopian New Testament along with two short liturgical works and became the first African in history to publish printed work.Footnote 68
Unlike Täsfa Ṣǝyon, Yoḥannǝs did not leave a clear scholarly legacy – a circumstance that in part accounts for his relative anonymity – but did assist the former in his endeavors. In a rare 1548 letter dispatched from Venice, Yoḥannǝs informed Täsfa Ṣǝyon of his efforts to obtain a copy of the Ethiopian Pauline Letters:
I greet you, oh my father Täsfa Ṣǝyon, together with my beloved father Täklä Giyorgis … . Now I am letting you know oh my father Täsfa Ṣǝyon that the letters of Paul the Apostle came to the city of Venice, from Cyprus in the hands of Cyprus's archbishop; he told me that he wanted to send them [to you] in the hands of Cardinal [Alessandro] Farnese [1520–89]. See to find out, oh my father, if they have arrived [in Rome]. May God be with you, amen. Again I greet my good lord Pietro Paolo [Gualtieri (1501–72)] and Geronimo Sander [Bernardino Sandri].Footnote 69
In another instance, Yoḥannǝs is mentioned in an exchange between Cardinal Marcello Cervini (1501–55, later Pope Marcellus II, 1555–5) and his procurer of ancient and oriental texts, Guglielmo Sirleto (1514–85), as the author of an alternate translation of the Ethiopian mass.Footnote 70 Apart from confirming his involvement in the production of knowledge about Ethiopia, these documents speak to two circumstances that would greatly contribute to Yoḥannǝs's career: an enduring connection with the East via Venice and Cyprus; and his familiarity with a variety of Roman personalities.Footnote 71
Yoḥannǝs was also central to the wellbeing of the Santo Stefano community: as one of the most established members he used his connections with prelates and pontiffs to support fellow Ethiopians. In the mid-1550s, he became the community's prior: his appointment represents a significant novelty for Santo Stefano, which until then had been headed by Ethiopian monks.Footnote 72 The appointment of a Catholic priest dovetails with Rome's changing attitude towards Ethiopian Christianity. After Paul III's papacy (1534–49), ecumenism quickly faded, and whereas Ethiopians were still welcome in Rome throughout the 1550s, concerns about their theological and ritual idiosyncrasies started outweighing any other consideration. As the discourse on Ethiopia changed, Yoḥannǝs demonstrated an uncanny ability to play along, as he had done in the feud between spirituali and zelanti.
Regarding the latter, one of his acts as prior speaks volumes to his adaptability: shortly upon the death of Paul IV, Yoḥannǝs recommended Cardinal Giovanni Morone (1509–80) as protector of Santo Stefano to the new pontiff Pius IV.Footnote 73 The cardinal was not only a prominent member of the spirituali but also for decades had been Paul IV's ultimate nemesis. In 1557, the latter had maneuvered with the Holy Office for Morone's arrest, under the accusation of Protestant heresy. Releasing Morone would be one of Pius IV's first acts as a symbolic break with his predecessor, who by the time of his death had become one of the most reviled pontiffs in history. Within months of Paul IV's death, Yoḥannǝs supported his late patron's rehabilitated nemesis, and by doing so, he cultivated a relationship that within years would bear fruits once Morone was appointed legate to Trent.
The newly elected pontiff was eager to see a conclusion to the Council, suspended since 1552. Whereas Trent was primarily a locus where a fractured Western Christianity could be recomposed, the council's final session also saw numerous initiatives geared towards the Eastern Churches – as such, it created numerous opportunities for Yoḥannǝs to shine as a cross-cultural broker.
In the late 1550s, a representative of the Coptic patriarch in Cairo, Gabriel VII (1525–70), reached Rome with a letter for the pontiff. As ‘no translator could be found [for the Arabic letter], … one Battista Indiano, already Paul IV's chaplain, was assigned the translation as he understood the language well.’Footnote 74 Hence Yoḥannǝs acted as an official translator and also, it can be imagined, as an interpreter for the representative, one Abraham the Syrian, who was extensively vetted before dispatching a reply to Cairo. In the letter, Pius IV invited the patriarch to send a delegate to the coming new session of the Council of Trent and suggested to appoint
Our dearest son Giovanni Battista Abissino, familiar, priest, erudite in the dogmas of the Catholic Church and gifted with utmost honesty and faith, like your own envoy whom Giovanni hosted [in Santo Stefano] could ascertain. As he was for many years at the Holy See, he knows not only Arabic, but also Latin: we sought his help to translate your Arabic letter into Latin.Footnote 75
Although Pius IV's invitation remained unfulfilled and relations with the Coptic Church did not develop until later decades, Yoḥannǝs's involvement represents a first tangible example of his importance to Rome's initiatives towards the Eastern Churches. His worth resulted from a mixture of skills and circumstances: language proficiency, a cosmopolitan upbringing, familiarity with both Catholic and Orthodox theological and liturgical differences, and a trusted relationship with both the pontiff and Morone. Last but not least, speakers of Arabic were in short supply in mid-sixteenth-century Rome, and Yoḥannǝs would act as an intermediary time and again.
In 1552, the schismatic patriarch of the Syriac Orthodox Church, Yohannan Sulaqua of Mosul, traveled to Rome to bolster his credentials. During his sojourn, he made his confession of Catholic faith, was elevated bishop, and was appointed patriarch of what became the Chaldean Catholic Church. Back in Mosul, Sulaqua wrote to Pope Julius III (1550–5) to confirm his safe return: postscripted to the letter are greetings to various acquaintances he had made in Rome, among them ‘Gioan Battista Ethiope’, who can be assumed to have been involved in the negotiations as an interpreter.Footnote 76 Despite Rome's endorsement, Sulaqua failed to impose himself as a legitimate patriarch of the Syriac Orthodox Church and, probably because of his connection to Rome, was arrested and executed by Ottoman authorities. His successor Abdisho IV (1555–70) first dispatched a representative and in 1562 traveled himself to Rome to also seek confirmation for the patriarchal seat.Footnote 77 The Latin version of his profession of faith, printed as a pamphlet, was ‘authenticated by the interpreter Iohannes Baptista Abscinus Indus’.Footnote 78
Apart from his involvement with representatives of the Eastern Churches, Yoḥannǝs became also the centerpiece of a plan for the Catholicization of Ethiopia. In the early 1560s, the merchant Vincenzo Contarini, another member of the sprawling Venetian family, submitted to Pius IV a memorandum outlining a rather imaginative plan to reunite Ethiopians to Rome. For Venetian merchants with an interest in the East, the Christian kingdom was an old acquaintance not only because Ethiopian pilgrims had been transiting through the lagoon at least since the early 1400s, but also because Venetian merchants had already found their way to Ethiopia through Egypt and the Holy Land in the early fifteenth century.Footnote 79
The plan called for Ethiopia to become the centerpiece of a new crusade: in Contarini's mind, an alliance with the kingdom would have allowed Venice to attack Egypt by surprise so that ‘the Christians [in Egypt] upon hearing of such uprising, would rise and perhaps, would be helped by the Arabs and the Egyptians, who are natural enemies to the Turks, because of their hateful and abusive government.’ According to some, Contarini continued,
there is no doubt that Ethiopians … can descend by surprise to Egypt [and] … that Ethiopians have convenient access sites, and they can intervene on the Nile's cataracts, to collect a large amount of water that released at the time of harvest could submerge all of Egypt. The other [possibility] is, according to others, that Ethiopians can divert the Nile from its bed and deviate it to the Red Sea at the time of irrigation. By depriving it of the irrigation that alone makes Egypt fertile, one could through starvation force the Egyptians to submit to the Ethiopians, as lords of the Nile.Footnote 80
Yoḥannǝs was to be the plan's cornerstone because he was ‘very well versed in the scriptures and ceremonies according to the Roman rite, and being familiar with the country and its language could convert the king.’Footnote 81 The explicit identification, along with other elements in the memorandum, not only confirms that Contarini was acquainted with the Ethiopian – possibly from his days in Cyprus and Venice – but also suggests that Yoḥannǝs had been involved in the drafting. Along with millenarian beliefs typical of the era – such as the end of Islam in the one thousandth anniversary of its birth and the destruction of Mecca at the hands of Ethiopians – the document also refers to an obscure Ethiopian prophecy according to which the death of the one hundredth abun would herald the start of a final battle against the Muslim world.Footnote 82 Furthermore, it also refers to past Ethiopian-Roman relations that, like the prophecy, could hardly be known outside a very restricted circle of prelates and scholars with a deep interest in Ethiopia.Footnote 83 Whether Yoḥannǝs acted as a disinterested informant for Contarini or a proactive proponent interested in a missionary career can only be speculated upon, but later developments would make the latter option more plausible.
As for Contarini and his motives, although he showed an advanced understanding of Ethiopian Christianity and a neo-crusading interest, he was first a merchant. As such, he must have been keen on preserving and expanding Venice's commercial opportunities in the Eastern Mediterranean, the Red Sea, and ultimately Ethiopia. The proposal should be read against the backdrop of a continuous Ottoman expansion in the Mediterranean, primarily at Venice's expense, and of a Portuguese empire that had mostly failed to assert its control over the Indian Ocean, let alone the Red Sea. After having successfully repelled Portugal's haphazard expedition to Suez in 1541, between the late 1540s and the 1550s the Ottomans had gained a hegemonic status throughout the Red Sea, including the Ethiopian coast – which they had incorporated into the empire as the Habesha Eyalet.Footnote 84 The memorandum can be read as an attempt to address what was for Contarini and countless other observers a troubling state of affairs.
Contarini's envisioned crusade was imaginative but not all that original: plans for a joint European-Ethiopian expedition against Egypt, ultimately bound to Jerusalem, had been already proposed in the fifteenth century in the context of Ethiopian-Aragonese relations and had been voiced again during early sixteenth-century Ethiopian-Portuguese exchanges.Footnote 85 The plan was in fact deeply anachronistic: not only were the Ottomans a more formidable power than the Mamluks, but the near annihilation of the Ethiopian monarchy during the Ethiopian-Adali War in the 1530s had highlighted its weakness. European dreams and expectations about the country of Prester John had been shattered. Furthermore, in 1553, Pope Julius III had approved the Society of Jesus's mission to the country, and the first group of Portuguese fathers had reached Emperor Gälawdewos's (1540–59) court in 1555. The involvement of any other religious order, let alone one sponsored by Venetians, would have been unacceptable to the Society of Jesus and the Avis.Footnote 86
All in all, Contarini's memorandum was rather ill-informed and doomed to remain a dead letter, but the merchant did not give up. On 12 May 1577, he wrote to Cardinal Morone from Ethiopia, explaining that he had left Cairo in 1571, when Venetians were being persecuted in retaliation for the Venetian-Ottoman conflict over Cyprus, and had reached the Portuguese settlement in Ethiopia a few months later.Footnote 87 Probably further aggravated by the events in Cairo and disillusioned about the Republic's ability to withstand Ottoman expansion – Venetian Cyprus had fallen in 1570 – the relentless merchant looked to Portugal for support:
From these Ethiopian parts, with little investment and few people, by sending the Indian fleet to this Strait of Arabia [Bāb al-Mandab] and four to five thousand men, who could descend to this kingdom by land with these Abyssinian Christians into Egypt, one could cause great harm to the Turk and with little effort take away the kingdoms of Egypt, Jerusalem and Syria, perhaps causing, if God so pleases, the total ruin of Mohammedanism.Footnote 88
Not unexpectedly, Contarini's new imaginative plea also remained a dead letter: the merchant faded from view, and posthumous evidence suggests that, like many other European merchants who reached Ethiopia's court, he never left it.Footnote 89 For Yoḥannǝs, the memorandum represented his closest involvement in missionary activities towards his ancestral homeland, as the curia had other plans for him.
In late 1564, the Holy Office began the preparatory hearings for Yoḥannǝs's elevation to bishop of the Ethiopian community of Cyprus. Between October 1564 and January 1565, the commission presided over by Gran Inquisitore Cardinal Antonio Michele Ghisleri (1504–72), deposed Yoḥannǝs along with five witnesses: Johannes de Torano Calaber (Giovanni da Torano, in Calabria), a priest in his eighties familiar with Nicosia, who had met Yoḥannǝs in Rome; one ‘Paulus Firmus from Famagosta’, who had also met Yoḥannǝs in Rome in the early 1560s; and three clerics from Amhara – Giorgio (Giyorgis), Marco (Marqos), and Samuel (Samuᵓel) – who had all transited through Nicosia and were familiar with Yoḥannǝs's brothers.Footnote 90
The hearings were mostly geared toward confirming the candidate's good character and his legitimate birth: the depositions are laconic and overall acritical, except for those of the three Ethiopian monks, who, having all transited through Cyprus, were somewhat familiar with the affairs of the island's Ethiopian community. The three criticized Yoḥannǝs and his brothers’ mismanagement of the Church's resources and stressed that he was ‘spurio’ (of mixed-parentage).Footnote 91 His diasporic birth and upbringing, resentment towards his Catholic reordainment, envy for his imminent elevation: a variety of reasons could have motivated their ungenerous words, but it mattered little. The three monks could hardly tarnish the reputation of someone who had been familiar to popes and influential prelates for over two decades.
On 7 February 1564, Yoḥannǝs was invested with the bishopric of Cyprus's Ethiopian community.Footnote 92 A plea by the Venetian ambassador in Rome, Giacomo Soranzo (1518–99), to Pius IV would suggest that the appointment's purpose was to wrestle the Church of San Salvatore and its small Ethiopian community from the island's Coptic authorities. Instead, the ensuing events show that the appointment was a stepping-stone for Yoḥannǝs's mission in the East.Footnote 93 In late February 1565, little more than a year after the conclusion of the Council of Trent in December 1563, Pius IV signed seven letters to the highest authorities of various Eastern Churches, to strengthen ties with Rome and to communicate the Council's decrees. One of the letters was directed to the head of the Armenian Church, Catholicos Michael I (1562–76), who had dispatched his representative Abgar Tibir of Takat to seek communion with Rome.Footnote 94 After delivering the Catholicos's letter of obedience, Abgar had been questioned extensively, and once his identity had been ascertained he made a profession of faith on behalf of Armenians.Footnote 95 A second letter to Armenia was addressed to Nicholas Friton, Archbishop of Nachitschewan (1560–97), whereas three more letters were directed to other religious authorities in the Levant.Footnote 96 One was addressed to Abdisho IV, who had long been returned to Mosul; one to the Syrian Orthodox patriarch of Antioch, Neemas of Mardin, who years earlier had sent a request for union with Rome; and one to the Maronite patriarch of Antioch, Musa al-Akari (1524–67).Footnote 97
Yoḥannǝs, who had also facilitated Abgar's mission as an interpreter and translator, was identified in each of the five letters as the nuncio invested with the pontiff's authority and as ‘a man of proved faith, who since childhood was educated at the Holy See, so much so that he can be said to be an alumnus of the Holy Roman Church’.Footnote 98 Furthermore, the language in two of the letters confirms that the appointment to Cyprus was a means to an end: Pius IV told the Jacobite patriarch that ‘we created him bishop of the Ethiopians who reside in Cyprus, so he received greater authority and power that can help those he will reach [in the East]’.Footnote 99 And to the Armenian Catholicos, Pius related that ‘we decided to dispatch him to the Orient … and for this reason we created him bishop of Cyprus's Abyssinian community’.Footnote 100 His elevation was clearly a necessary step towards his dispatch to the East, which in turn was predicated on his talents. In his letter to Michael I, the pontiff explained that Yoḥannǝs had been chosen because of ‘his knowledge of multiple languages’, and because of his extended experience as intermediary between Catholic authorities and Eastern visitors to Rome.Footnote 101
Pius IV formalized the mission on 10 March 1565, when he appointed Yoḥannǝs nuncio to ‘Armenia and in the lands of the Orient.’Footnote 102 Shortly after that, Yoḥannǝs left Rome in the company of Abgar and reached Cyprus in late 1565: his surviving siblings and the rest of the Ethiopian community must have greeted his arrival in late 1565 with a mixture of elation and incredulity.Footnote 103 The once humble Ethiopian priest, who had last been in Cyprus almost thirty years earlier, had returned a bishop, assimilated into the highest levels of the Roman Church. Alas, shortly after his arrival on the island, the newly appointed nuncio fell ill and passed away without ever setting foot in the Levant.Footnote 104
CONCLUSION
Chance, along with his versatility and ambition, turned the cosmopolitan Yoḥannǝs into a unique figure in the history of the Church and of the African diaspora in early modern Europe. Throughout his life, he wisely capitalized on some aspects of his identity and upbringing while shedding others. By doing so, Yoḥannǝs rose to the highest levels of the ecclesiastical hierarchy, eventually becoming the second black bishop and the first black nuncio in the history of modern Catholicism: his experience offers much to ponder for diaspora scholars.
The process of assimilation that eventually turned Yoḥannǝs into an agent of the Counter-Reformation, deployed overseas to spread Tridentine orthodoxy among Eastern Christians, is remindful of another well-known diasporic African of the era. In Granada, Juan Latino (c. 1517–c. 1594) acquired an education as a young slave in the Duke of Sessa's household. Following emancipation, he completed formal academic studies, became a professor of Latin at the Colegio Real and University of Granada, and married into a wealthy Grenadine family.Footnote 105 As a poet, he commemorated the Ottoman defeat at Lepanto, endorsed the expulsion of Moriscos, and celebrated Spanish expansion. Like Yoḥannǝs, Juan Latino thrived in a world that knew the institution of slavery all too well: both flourished in societies that victimized ‘others’ – New Christians, Jews, Muslims – through some of the most heinous practices imaginable. In fact, as they assimilated into their respective worlds, the two became supporters of European expansion and proselytism. Their rise to the highest levels of their respective milieux, suggests that color existed alongside other forms of prejudice and was not always the defining one: religious affiliation, class, and status could go a long way to shield at least some Africans from oppression.
What makes Yoḥannǝs's story particularly remarkable is that as a nuncio to the East, he was entrusted with ecclesiastical authority far away from his ancestral community. The only other black bishop in the history of the Church until the twentieth century, the Kongolese Henrique, had been elevated to serve as an instrument of proselytism in the Kingdom of Kongo to intercede and mediate between Roman ecclesiastics and the society to which he belonged. In contrast, Yoḥannǝs's mission to Eastern Christendom was predicated on his skills as well as his experience and standing among Rome's highest echelons. His entire life experience speaks of Roman elites not yet sold on one of the defining features of modernity inside and outside the Roman Catholic Church – the color line.Footnote 106
Yoḥannǝs's story challenges prevalent definitions of African diaspora. Like many other fellow Ethiopians in the early modern Mediterranean, he was extraneous to ‘an experience of enslavement, … the reification of color and race [and] a continuing struggle against discrimination’.Footnote 107 His experience also discords with the notion of the African diaspora irremediably predicated on ‘hegemonic powers, imposing their wills on black people’.Footnote 108 Likewise, whereas the Ethiopian diaspora matches Robin Cohen's well-known ‘common features’ of diaspora, his characterization of Africa's as a ‘victim diaspora’ seems irreconcilable with the experiences of Ethiopians who scattered in the Mediterranean out of volition rather than through a ‘traumatic dispersal’.Footnote 109 Furthermore, Cohen's contention that classification should be predicated on the ‘predominant character’ of the diaspora and that the sparse presence of willing migrants should be ignored is a sensible one. However, the Ethiopian diaspora remains at odds even after this qualification: whereas all other known experiences of blacks in early modern Europe are either predicated on or related to the slave trade, the Ethiopian diaspora in the early modern Mediterranean is entirely disjointed from the slave trade. Certainly, the size of the Ethiopian diaspora in the Mediterranean, which can be roughly estimated in the hundreds, shrinks in comparison to the millions who suffered through the slave trade, but its limited size does not invalidate both its historical importance and historiographical relevance.
In the end, we seem to be left with three historiographical options. One is to argue for a more relaxed definition of African diaspora, which qualifies the relevance of the slave trade and color, and that can make space for early modern Ethiopians in the Mediterranean. The integrity of the concept would be preserved but at the cost of a vastly diluted interpretative and argumentative charge. Another option would be to recognize that African diaspora does not include the Ethiopian case, which is ostensibly untreatable from a comparative perspective: by doing so, however, scholars would come dangerously close to mimicking a long tradition of European thought that regarded Ethiopians as non-Africans because of their cultural and historical idiosyncrasies.Footnote 110 A third and, in the opinion of this author, a more viable option, is to acknowledge the diversity of the ever-growing universe of diasporic experiences and recognize the existence of distinct and at times irreconcilable African diasporas.
