Medieval Ethiopia

Abstract

The slow decline of the Aksumite Empire after the reign of Emperor Kaleb brought a shift in Ethiopia’s orientation. During medieval times the highlands from Wag and Lasta southward through Shoa, along the Rift Valley, and on to the southernmost regions of modern Ethiopia were politically, culturally and economically incorporated into the Ethiopian cultural region and, for the most part, into the Ethiopian state. This happened during the thousand years when Gibbon held that the Ethiopians were sleeping. They were doing nothing of the kind, but they had changed their priorities from the north to the south.1 They never forgot the Mediterranean world, for Christianity flourished and spread and Jerusalem remained a living concept among the people with a contingent of Ethiopian monks maintaining a church there where pilgrims could gather. Heads of the church came from Egypt and there was contact with the Patriarch of Alexandria through correspondence2 and occasional embassies; but the bulk of the political, economic and religious energy which Ethiopians expended during the medieval period was concentrated on southward expansion. While Ezana had conquered the Noba to the west and Kaleb had defeated and occupied Himyar and Saba across the Red Sea, Amda Tseyon’s glorious victories and Zara Yakob’s campaigns brought new southern lands into the realm of Ethiopian civilization — conquests that proved more lasting than those of the rulers of Aksumite times.