The Barefoot Emperor: An Ethiopian Tragedy. Philip Marsden

‘polygamists, sorcerers and drunkards’; by day they performed the rites, by night they visited women without husbands. Even worse, they had confused and divided the people with their arguments, squandering the comforts of orthodoxy for baffling schisms. As in the Mesafint of old, when the children of Israel forgot Jahweh and went a-whoring after Baal and all the false gods, so the priesthood had forgotten the one truth.

      Foreigners were to blame, at least in part. The Portuguese in the sixteenth century had brought their own interpretation of Christ’s nature and convinced many Ethiopians to adopt it. These ones became known first as Kidat – ‘Unctionists’– then as Yesaga Lij – ‘Son by Grace’– and finally as Sost Lidet or ‘Three Births’, because they said that Christ was anointed in a ‘third birth’. To their detractors the Three-Birthers had therefore to admit the inadmissible: that there was a time when Christ was not fully divine. For traditionalists of the Alexandrian, non-Chalcedonian persuasion, that was a heretical slur on the pure divinity of Christ. These ones referred to the Three-Birthers as Karra Haymanot – Faith-in-the-Knife – because they had sliced the third birth from their teaching.

      Tewodros was not interested. He wanted conformity. If the Church was to help in re-unifying the country, it must be unified itself. In 1854, in his first act of statesmanship, he called a council of clergy in Gondar. He was not yet emperor, but having defeated Dejazmach Wube, he now stood with an important ally at his side – Abune Selama.

      The abun was the head of the Ethiopian Church, the only bishop in the entire country. The post was never held by an Ethiopian, but always an Egyptian, a Copt appointed by the Patriarchate in Alexandria. Often the incumbent was elderly, unable to speak Amharic, and ignored. In the 1820s, writing about Selama’s predecessor, Dejazmach Sebadagis complained to the Alexandrian patriarch: ‘Was it because you hate Ethiopia that you sent him?’ And as Egypt expanded south under Muhammad Ali, and spread the terror of invasion in Ethiopia, so suspicions of the Coptic abun grew.

      Arriving in Ethiopia in 1841, the new Abune Selama was young and ambitious. He was appalled at the spread of Catholic missionaries in northern Ethiopia, and was keen to protect the traditional conformity with Alexandria. In the rise of Tewodros he found someone of like mind, and as vigorous and as determined as himself. At the meeting of clergy in 1854, he and Tewodros outlawed the Three-Birthers, demanding a choice between confession of the Alexandrian creed, or death. They also ordered the expulsion of Catholic missionaries. Shortly afterwards Abune Selama crowned Tewodros and sanctified in church his marriage to Tewabach. Their alliance found its most powerful expression in the invasion of Shoa some months later, when they arrived together at the head of an army.

      The fertile alliance between the two men did not last. Abune Selama was too ambitious, too strong-willed, too much like Tewodros himself, for it to be an easy relationship. Antagonisms between them began to multiply. The clergy too began to grumble about the speed of Tewodros’s reforms. After the rains of 1856 he called another gathering of clergy in Gondar, to persuade them of the need to tax some of their vast wealth.

      ‘Our enemies are many,’ Tewodros told them. ‘It is only fair that some of this should go to feed those who protect us all.’

      The clergy also needed to eat, he was told. And anyway, there were more of them than of his soldiers. ‘What you should do,’ said one priest, ‘is take your army from one province to the next, allowing each one to recover its reserves of grain.’

      ‘That’s how it’s always been, Your Majesty,’ explained another. ‘It’s the custom.’

      Neither side conceded anything. In the end the priests fetched the Fetha Negest, the ‘Book of the Law of Kings’, and read: ‘That which is taken to the Holy of Holies should not be taken out.’ From which was understood, it was not in anyone’s power to relinquish Church land.

      ‘This book,’ fumed the emperor, ‘has been translated a thousand times and interpreted in a thousand ways! If you want to put another on the throne, do so. And like the Oromo rulers I will continue to plunder the beasts and the fields of the people!’

      He turned and left, and the priests watched his guards close around his back.

      As quick as Tewodros’s anger was his remorse. Later he called Abune Selama to him, and the two men agreed a compromise. The priesthood would accept Tewodros’s right to tax them, and Tewodros would agree not to exercise the right.

      And the next day the priests led a joyful procession through the streets of Gondar. The city was filled with the sound of the kebbero and the debteras’ sistra and the songs of Moses. Tewodros had failed. The expansion of his rule had, for now, reached its limit at the gates of the church. He returned to campaigning.

      10

      Several months later, on 27 December 1856, the Coptic Patriarch Cyril IV – spiritual father of the Ethiopian Church – rode into Gondar. He had travelled for months from Alexandria. His men ran ahead of him, through the stony streets of the old capital, in and out of the juniper shadows, shooing all women from the slightest possibility of meeting his gaze.

      The patriarch’s journey to Ethiopia was one of the most significant moments of Tewodros’s early reign. Cyril turned out to be the highest-ranking foreigner ever to reach the emperor, and his visit forced the imperial hand in his initial choice of overseas allies. It also revealed in public for the first time the extremes of Tewodros’s personality.

      It began well enough. Tewodros received His Holiness in Debre Tabor with great ceremony and genuine deference. But as the days passed the emperor began to spot blemishes in the heavenly mantle of the primate. He heard Cyril’s muttering about his daughter Church, the inappropriate worship of the cross and of the saints, about how full the Ethiopian calendar was of fast days and holy days. For a man whose thoughts seldom strayed from matters of the spirit, the patriarch also appeared very keen to inspect the imperial forces. At the same time Tewodros received reports that Egyptian war-camels were gathering on his western border, and that Said Pasha himself, viceroy of Egypt, was in the Sudan. Suddenly all became clear to Tewodros – the patriarch’s visit was a ploy by the pasha to check Ethiopia’s weakness before invading. What should he do?

      Tewodros imprisoned the patriarch. He locked him up in a house with his bishop Abune Selama and placed a hedge of thorns around it. During the days that followed, loyalties polarised sharply. Many Ethiopians were horrified at Tewodros’s sacrilege, and were quick to blame the other foreigners, the European Protestants. In turn, Tewodros turned to his ‘children’, Plowden and Bell, for support, and they saw a chance to press for a direct approach to Queen Victoria and Britain.

      But the suggestion angered Tewodros. ‘Do you suppose me capable of fear, that I would use such a moment?’

      ‘I don’t believe the pasha would ever become the aggressor in the face of our protests,’ stressed Plowden.

      Tewodros clung to his belief in the Protestants. With the Copts still imprisoned, he stood in court one day trying to explain his stance. Pointing to a pair of Protestant missionaries, he addressed the sceptics: ‘They seek our welfare, and have brought us Bibles and Testaments in our own language. But the holy father has come as a merchant and ambassador, asking us for wax and ivory and mules and zebal, and for friendship with the Mohammedans.’

      He reminded them of the urgency and integrity of his own mission. ‘I am Christ’s servant. He gave me victory over all my enemies. I am labouring for His honour, to protect our Church against Muslims.’

      They should trust him as their leader. ‘As long as I have life, I will keep down the patriarch, the abun and Said Pasha – even the Queen of England, should she help him.’

      Yet between Tewodros’s suspicions and the detained churchmen, his people had made their choice. Both Tewodros and his Protestant friends found themselves marginalised.

      Some days later, the emperor called a much larger assembly – courtiers, ministers, missionaries, foreigners. A thousand priests and debteras joined them, thousands more of his own troops. This time he stood before them not in