THE INDIGENOUS & THE FOREIGN
Jesuit Presence in 17th Century Ethiopia
Pedro paéz's History of ethiopia
Two manuscripts of the History of Ethiopia by the Spanish Jesuit Pedro Páez (who signed as Pero Pais) are known. The first is in the Archives of the Society of Jesus in Rome (ARSI, Goa 42.) and the second in the Braga District Archive (ADB, Ms 778), in Northern Portugal. Both manuscripts have already been published in a paleographic edition, the one from Rome, an autograph, at the beginning of the 20th century, by the Jesuit C. Beccari, in the collection Rerum Æthiopicarum Scriptores Occidentales Inediti (vols. 2 and 3, in 1904-1905), and the second in Porto, in the Series Ultramarina (nº 5) of Livraria Civilização, with introduction by E. Sanceau and A. Feio, and edited by Lopes Teixeira. The manuscript of the Braga District Archive is a copy of the one deposited in Rome. It is generally quite damaged, as the ink used has burned the paper making most folios almost illegible. In 1613-14, Pedro Páez, who had been living in Ethiopia for 10 years at that time, began to gather documentation to write his work. The History of Ethiopia was one of the first European texts to directly and systematically use Ethiopian oral and written sources (actual chronicles and genealogies, lives of Ethiopian saints, theological works, ethnographic information of various kinds), translating them into Portuguese. This feature is due to the unusual character of the book. Páez was in fact obeying a commission made by his superiors, who asked him to produce a detailed refutation of two books published in 1610 and 1611 by a Dominican friar from Valencia, Luis de Urreta, who questioned the legitimacy of the Jesuit mission in Ethiopia. The fact that the History of Ethiopia is a refutation is an important fact that allows us to understand the controversial nature of the book. Páez, animated by the desire to inform the reader of the “truth” about Ethiopia and thus demonstrate that the Dominican author's claims were false, relies on local sources, his own testimony, in extensive oral inquiries carried out with Ethiopian scholars, and in a critical reading of the Portuguese books to which he had access. His book is, therefore, a testimony of great value for the knowledge of the history of Ethiopian civilization in the first third of the 17th century, offering the reader precious information not only about the culture, and particularly about the religious and political life of Ethiopian Christians, but also about the geography, botany, and zoology of those lands. If Páez had initially been selected because he was of Spanish origin and so his refutation was not considered a nationalist reaction on the part of the Portuguese Jesuits, the manuscript was not, however, published, on the grounds that its author did not sufficiently master the Portuguese language. More likely, in the 1620s and 30s, the controversial character of the work was deemed very problematic. Father Manuel de Almeida was then commissioned to produce a new version of the History (c. 1640), which was also never published, suggesting that its author had incorporated many of the “errors” of the original version. Finally, in 1660, in another political environment - after Portuguese independence from Spain, Father Baltazar Teles, a theologian from Coimbra, published a summarised and reworked version of Páez's book.
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