“What the great Alexander and the famous Julius Caesar wanted so much to see”. A commemoration of the fourth centenary of the Blue Nile Sources discovery by the Spanish Jesuit Pedro Páez Xaramillo (April 21th, 1618)

Víctor M. Fernández

doi:10.3989/chdj.2019.012

Abstract

On April 21, 1618 Pedro Páez visited the small spring where the waters of the Blue Nile rise before passing through Lake Tana. The site had been seen before by the military leader of the group of Ethio-Portuguese descendants of the Portuguese soldiers who had helped the Christian kingdom in the wars of 1541-1543, who passed the news to the missionaries shortly before 1607. In both cases the Ethiopian kings, Särsä Dengel and Susenyos, took them to the sources, showing that the local population had a clear knowledge of the river course. Páez was the first European who described all its characteristics, occupying a complete chapter of his “History of Ethiopia”. Although this book was not published until the 20th century, the manuscript was copied and the information was incorporated into the global knowledge before the end of the 17th century, through the works of the German Jesuit Athanasius Kircher and the maps of the Venetian geographer, Vincenzo Coronelli. In this way, a problem that had intrigued travellers, geographers and historians since antiquity was solved. The next European who visited the place was the Scottish James Bruce in 1770, and the sources in Lake Victoria of the other large arm of the river, the White Nile, were not discovered until two and a half centuries later, with the travels of the English John Hanning Speke in 1858-1862.

Highlights

Pedro Páez Xaramillo (1564-1622) was born in the vil lage of Olmeda de las Fuentes, belonging to the diocese of Toledo and today located in the province of Madrid (Figure 1)
In that place, where today one can still see the impressive fortification with circular towers that the missionaries built on a high hill, there were no Jesuits left of the small group that had been led by the first Catholic patriarch of Ethiopia, the Spanish Andrés de Oviedo (1518-1577)
Pedro Páez and his successor António Fernandes were very cautious in their evangelizing work, fearing a contrary reaction from the local population and clergy, the optimism that followed the victory of the Catholic side over the Orthodox at the Battle of Sädda in 1617 and the arrival of the new Ethiopian patriarch, the Portuguese theologian Afonso Mendes, in 1624 provoked a much more intransigent attitude by the Catholics

Summary

Introduction

Pedro Páez Xaramillo (1564-1622) was born in the vil lage of Olmeda de las Fuentes, belonging to the diocese of Toledo and today located in the province of Madrid (Figure 1). Pedro Páez and his successor António Fernandes were very cautious in their evangelizing work, fearing a contrary reaction from the local population and clergy, the optimism that followed the victory of the Catholic side over the Orthodox at the Battle of Sädda in 1617 and the arrival of the new Ethiopian patriarch, the Portuguese theologian Afonso Mendes, in 1624 provoked a much more intransigent attitude by the Catholics They opposed strictly to customs dictated by the Orthodox Church, some of little doctrinal importance, such as circumcision, the observance of the Sabbath or the marriage of the priests, as well as declaring the latter heretical when they had not been re-ordained by Patriarch Mendes. The Jesuit legacy can be considered positive by the technical advances that were introduced, especially in architecture, and the reinforcement of the monarchy, and negative by the resulting isolation and at the doctrinal level by the subsequent theological discussions on the human-divine nature of Christ, who caused deep divisions during the following centuries, even reaching the armed conflict, among the Orthodox clergy and monks

The Jesuit missionary sites in Ethiopia

First ideas and myths about the Nile river

The contribution of the Portuguese and Pedro Páez

The diffusion of the discovery

Conclusions