Re-examining Foresti's Supplementum Chronicarum and the Ethiopian embassy to Europe of 1306

Abstract

A widely reported story in the historiography on medieval Ethiopia relates how, in the year 1306, an Ethiopian embassy visited the court of Pope Clement V in Avignon and offered military aid in the fight against Islam to Latin Christianity. This article re-examines the source-Jacopo Filippo Foresti's Supplementum Chronicarum-thought to document an episode of one of the earliest European-African Christian contacts. It investigates Foresti's own sources, their historiographical transmission history, and the feasibility of relating it to the socio-political entity of Solomonic Ethiopia in the Horn of Africa in the early fourteenth century, concluding that Foresti's information was based on Latin Christian texts, such as the Legenda Aurea and the myth of Prester John, only. The 'Ethiopian' embassy of 1306 is thus not borne out by sources and should be dismissed in scholarship, resetting the timeline of official Ethiopian-Latin Christian contacts in the late medieval period.