Matteo Salvadore – författare

From the 14th century onward, political and religious motives led Ethiopian travelers to Mediterranean Europe. For two centuries, their ancient Christian heritage and the myth of a fabled eastern king named Prester John allowed the Ethiopians to engage the continent's secular and religious elites as peers. Meanwhile, back home the Ethiopian nobility came to welcome European visitors and at times even co-opted them by arranging mixed marriages and bestowing land rights. The protagonists of this encounter sought and discovered each other in royal palaces, monasteries, and markets throughout the Mediterranean basin, the Red Sea, and the Indian Ocean littoral, from Lisbon to Jerusalem and from Venice to Goa. Matteo Salvadore's narrative takes the reader on a voyage of reciprocal discovery that climaxed with the Portuguese intervention on the side of the Christian monarchy in the Ethiopian-Adali War. Thereafter, the arrival of the Jesuits at the Horn of Africa turned the mutually beneficial Ethiopian-European encounter into a bitter confrontation over the souls of Ethiopian Christians.

This Element examines the life and legacy of the sixteenth-century Ethiopian intellectual Täsfa Ṣeyon. It reconstructs his formative years in the Horn of Africa and his diasporic life in the Holy Land and Italian peninsula, where he emerged as a prominent intermediary figure at Santo Stefano degli Abissini, an Ethiopian monastery within the Vatican. He became a librarian, copyist, teacher, translator, author, and community leader, as well as a prominent advisor to European humanist scholars and Tridentine Church authorities concerned with the emerging field of philologia sacra as it pertained to Ethiopian Orthodox (täwaḥedo) Christianity. The Element reconstructs his wide-ranging contacts with the Roman Curia and emerging orientalist academy, and then scrutinizes his editio princeps of the Ge'ez Gospels. A final section traces his modern influence, erasure, and rediscovery by later generations of European, Ethiopian, and Eritrean intellectuals.

This Element examines the life and legacy of the sixteenth-century Ethiopian intellectual Täsfa Ṣeyon. It reconstructs his formative years in the Horn of Africa and his diasporic life in the Holy Land and Italian peninsula, where he emerged as a prominent intermediary figure at Santo Stefano degli Abissini, an Ethiopian monastery within the Vatican. He became a librarian, copyist, teacher, translator, author, and community leader, as well as a prominent advisor to European humanist scholars and Tridentine Church authorities concerned with the emerging field of philologia sacra as it pertained to Ethiopian Orthodox (täwaḥedo) Christianity. The Element reconstructs his wide-ranging contacts with the Roman Curia and emerging orientalist academy, and then scrutinizes his editio princeps of the Ge'ez Gospels. A final section traces his modern influence, erasure, and rediscovery by later generations of European, Ethiopian, and Eritrean intellectuals.