The name Solomon brings the word “wisdom” almost immediately to mind. Belatedly, it makes me think of the Temple. Now that I have read Medieval Ethiopian Kingship, Craft, and Diplomacy with Latin Europe by Verena Krebs, I will also remember the Solomonic dynasty of Ethiopia. That dynasty took power in the late 1200s and ruled, with some interruptions, until 1974. There is a pretender who is not completely excluded from Ethiopian politics, so it’s possible that the current rulership will someday be regarded as an interruption in rule by the sons of Solomon.
Krebs concerns herself with a period that runs from the very end of the 1300s through the first third of the 1500s. During this time, the kingdom in the Ethiopian highlands was mostly internally stable, barring the occasional inheritance crisis and regency. A succession of of Solomonic kings — Krebs uses the local title nǝguś — sent emissaries to fellow Christian realms in the Latin West: Venice, Naples, Aragon, the Papal court, and others. The dates and personnel of the missions have long been known to scholarship, and Krebs draws on primary and secondary sources in an astonishing range of languages. In history, though, interpretation is crucial, and here Krebs upends previous Eurocentric specialist views on what the Ethiopian ambassadors were seeking in their relations with Latin courts, and thus on medieval relations between Europe and Africa more generally. Scholarship in the twentieth century tended to see medieval Ethiopian contacts with Europe as seeking technology in general and military technology in particular, and possible military alliances against regional rivals. Krebs disagrees.
Reading the diplomatic sources within the framework of local late medieval Ethiopian history, this book proposes that Ethiopian rulers sent out their missions to acquire rare religious treasures and foreign manpower expedient to their political agenda of building and endowing monumental churches and monasteries in the Ethiopian highlands. Acquiring artisans and ecclesiastical wares from faraway places for religious centres intimately tied to Solomonic dominion would have necessarily increased their prestige within the Christian Horn of Africa, following a mechanism well-attested for numerous societies in the pre-modern world. Such requests from a foreign sovereign sphere were rarely caused by a shortage of indigenous labor or materials—particularly not within fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Ethiopia. Here, they appear instead to be an intentional emulation of the actions ascribed to the biblical king Solomon, propagated by the Solomonic Ethiopian rulers as the dynasty’s genealogical ancestor … This very same king Solomon, too, is repeatedly narrated as sending envoys to another sovereign ruler to obtain both precious wares and a master craftsman to construct the first temple in Jerusalem in the Bible. The sending of missions to Latin Christian potentates appears to have been one of the strategies through which the [Ethiopian kings] locally asserted their claim of rightful Solomonic descendence–and actively if somewhat incidentally initiated a particularly noteworthy case of African-European contacts in the late medieval period. (p. 6)