Promulgation and Registration of Royal Ethiopian Acts in Behalf of Political and Religious Institutions (Northern Ethiopia, Sixteenth Century)

Abstract

The study scrutinizes a corpus of 34 royal charters given to religious institutions and private persons of the Northern regions of the Ethiopian kingdom during the 16th century. This study sheds light on the prosopography of the bureaucracy, first, as well as on the role of the Aksum Ṣəyon church as an interface between the monarchy and religious or political institutions in the north of the realm. We better understand the distribution of roles between crown servants, officials from the Aksum Ṣəyon church where copies of the acts were made and kept, and the members of the clergy in the religious institutions concerned in the acts.