BOOK IV.

ANNALS OF ABYSSINIA, TRANSLATED FROM THE ORIGINAL.

CONTINUATION OF THE ANNALS, FROM THE DEATH OF SOCINIOS TILL MY ARRIVAL IN ABYSSINIA.

FACILIDAS, OR SULTAN SEGUED.

From 1632 to 1665.

_The Patriarch and Missionaries are banished--Seek the Protection of a Rebel--Delivered up to the King, and sent to Masuah--Prince Claudius rebels--Sent to Wechné--Death and Character of the King._

As soon as the prince Facilidas had paid the last honours to his father, he set about composing those disorders which had so long distracted the kingdom by reason of the difference of religion. Accordingly he wrote to the patriarch, that, the Alexandrian faith being now restored, his leaving the kingdom had become indispensible: that he had lately understood, that an Abuna, sent for by his predecessor and by himself, was now actually on the way, and only deferred his arrival from a resolution not to enter the kingdom till the Romish patriarch and his priests should have left it; and, therefore, he commanded the patriarch and fathers, assembled from their several convents in Gojam and Dembea, to retire immediately to Fremona, there to wait his further pleasure.

The patriarch endeavoured to parry this, with offering new concessions and indulgencies; but the king informed him that he was too late; and that he wished him to be advised, and fly, while it was time, from greater harm that would otherwise fall upon him.

It was not long before the patriarch had revenge of Facilidas for this intimation of the expectation of a successor in the person of the Abuna. For on that very Easter there did arrive one, whose name was Sela Christos, calling himself Abuna, who performed all the functions of his office, dedicated churches, administered the sacrament, and ordained priests. After continuing in office some months, he was detected by a former companion of his, and found to be a man of very bad character, from Nara, the frontier of Abyssinia, and that by profession he had been a dealer in horses.

Facilidas then ordered his uncle, Sela Christos, to be brought before him, received him kindly, and offered him again his riches and employments. That brave man, Christian in every thing but in his hatred and jealousy against his sovereign and nephew, refused absolutely to barter his faith to obtain the greatest good, or avoid the greatest punishment, it was in the power of the king to inflict. After repeated trials, all to no purpose, the king, overcome by the instigation of his enemies, banished him to Anabra in Shawada, a low, unwholesome district amidst the mountains of Samen. But hearing that he still kept correspondence with the Jesuits, and that their common resolution was to solicit Portuguese troops from India, and remembering his former oath, he sent orders to his place of exile to put him to death, and he was in consequence hanged upon a cedar-tree.

Tellez, the Portuguese historian, in his collection of martyrs that died for the faith in Abyssinia, has deservedly inserted the name of Sela Christos; but professes that he is ignorant of the time of his death, and under what species of torment he suffered. The only information that I can give is what I have just now written. It was in the beginning of the year 1634 he was carried to Shawada in chains, and confined upon the mountain Anabra; but no mention is made of any other hardship being put upon him than his being in irons, nor is more usual in that kind of banishment. It was at the end of that year, however, that he was executed in the manner above mentioned, being suspected of having corresponded with the patriarch and Jesuits, and afterwards of inciting his nephew Claudius to rebel, as, it appears, he had meditated long before, and actually did very soon after.

The 9th of March 1633, the king ordered the patriarch to leave Dancaz, and, with the rest of the fathers, to proceed immediately to Fremona, under the conduct of four people of the first consideration, Tecla Georgis, brother of Keba Christos, Tecla Saluce, one of the principal persons in Tigré, and two Azages, men of great dignity at court. These were joined by a party of soldiers belonging to Claudius, brother of the king, supposed to have been in the conspiracy with Sela Christos his uncle, to supplant his brother Facilidas by the help of the Jesuits and Portuguese troops from India. But as soon as the patriarch had fallen into disgrace, and Sela Christos lost his life, that prince returned to the church of Alexandria, as did all the other sons of Socinios; after which, Claudius seized to his own use all the lands and effects that he found in Gojam, and was now by the king made governor of Begemder. Under this escort the patriarch and his company arrived at Fremona in the end of April 1633, after having been often robbed and ill-treated by the way, the guards that were given to defend them conniving with the banditti that came to rob them.

However strictly the fathers observed the precepts of scripture on other occasions, in this they did not follow the line of conduct prescribed by our Saviour--“And whosoever shall not receive you, nor hear your words, when you depart out of that house or city, shake off the dust of your feet.” They were not sheep that went patiently and dumb to the slaughter; and, if their hearts, as they say, were full of love and charity to Abyssinia, it was strangely accompanied with the resolution they had taken to send Jerome Lobo, the most famous, because the most bigotted Jesuit of the whole band, first to the viceroy of India, and then to Spain, to solicit an army and fleet which were to lay all this kingdom in blood.

The king was perfectly advised of all that passed. As he saw that the patriarch endeavoured to gain time, and knew the reason of it; and, as the fathers among them had a considerable quantity of fire-arms, he sent an officer to the patriarch at Fremona, commanding him to deliver up the whole of these, with gun-powder and other ammunition, and to prepare, at the same time, to set out for Masuah. This at first the patriarch refused to do. Nor did Facilidas punish this disobedience by any harsher method than convincing him mildly of the imprudence and inutility of such refusal, and the bad consequences to themselves. Upon which the patriarch at last surrendered the articles required to the officer sent by the king, but he resolved very differently as to the other injunction of carrying all his brethren to Masuah. On the contrary, he determined by every means to scatter them about the kingdom of Abyssinia, and leave them behind if he was forced to embark at Masuah, which he, however, resolved to avoid and resist to the utmost of his power.

In order to do this, it was resolved that he should solicit the Baharnagash (John Akay, then in rebellion) to take them under his protection, and for that purpose to send a number of armed men, on a night appointed, to meet them near Fremona, and carry them in safety from any pursuit of the governor of Tigré. This project, extraordinary as it was, succeeded. Akay promised them his protection. The patriarch and priests, deceiving the guard the king had set upon them, escaped in the night, and joined the soldiers of John Akay, commanded by Tecla Emanuel, who was ready to receive them: They took refuge at Addicota, the soldiers of the guard, though alarmed, not daring to pursue them in the night, as not knowing the number and power of their protectors, and fearing they might fall into some ambush.

It may not be amiss here to take notice, that this John Akay was the very man with whom Tecla Georgis had associated for the murder of Abba Jacob. He was a shrewd man, and had great power by living in the neighbourhood of Sennaar, to which country he could retreat when occasion required. He received the patriarch with great kindness.

Addicota is an inaccessible rock, perpendicular on all sides, excepting where there is a narrow path by which was the entrance. Here the patriarch thought he could continue in Abyssinia, in defiance of Facilidas, till he should procure succours from India.

It was not, however, long before he found how little dependence there was upon this new protector; for, in the midst of all his schemes, he received orders to remove from Addicota, under pretence that they were not there enough in safety; and Akay transferred them vexatiously from place to place, into hot and unwholesome situations, always under the same pretence, till he had destroyed their healths, and exhausted their strength and patience.

There is but one way of disposing such people to grant a favour, and it was surprising the patriarch did not find this out sooner. Jerome Lobo was sent with a small present in gold, desiring they might have leave to continue in their old habitation, Addicota. Lobo found John Akay very much taken up in a pursuit that some ignorant monks had put into his head. They had made him believe that there was a treasure hid under a certain mountain which they had shewn him, but that the devil who guarded it had constantly hindered his predecessors from acquiring it. At present they had found out, that this devil had gone a journey far off, was become blind and lame, and was, besides, in very great affliction for the death of a son, the only hopes of his devilship’s family, having now only a daughter remaining, very ugly, lame, squinting, and sickly, and that all these reasons would hinder him from being very anxious about his treasure. But, even supposing he did come, they had an old monk that would exorcise him, a man as eminent for wisdom as for sanctity.

In short, they produced a monk, one of their brethren, above a hundred years old, whom they mounted upon a horse, then tied him to the animal, wrapping him round with black wool, which, it seems, was the conjuring habit. He was followed by a black cow and some monks, who carried beer, hydromel, and roasted wheat, which was necessary, it seemed, to refresh the devil after his long journey and great affliction, and put him in good humour, if he should appear.

The old monk sung without ceasing, the workmen wrought vigorously, and much earth and stones were removed; at last they discovered some rat, mice, or mole-holes, at the sight of which a cry of joy was heard from all the parties present.

The old monk sings again; the cow is brought in great hurry, and sacrificed, and pieces of it thrown to the rats and mice: again they fall to work with double keenness, the mole-holes vanish, and a hard rock appears. This being the last obstacle, they fall keenly upon the rock, and the old monk chants till he is hoarse with singing; the heat of the sun is excessive; no gold appears; John Akay loses his patience, and asks when it may be seen? The monks lay the whole blame upon him, because, they say, he had not enough of faith. They give over work; with one consent fall to eating the cow, and then disperse.

Father Jerome, takes the opportunity of this disappointment to abuse the monks. He presents the Baharnagash with two ounces of gold, and some other trifles, instead of the treasure which he was to get in the mountain: he obtains the request he came to solicit, and the patriarch and fathers return to Addicota.

Facilidas, informed of the asylum afforded to the Jesuits who had fled from Fremona, applied to John Akay, promising him forgivenness of what was past if he would deliver the priests under his protection. This John Akay declined to do from motives of delicacy. It was breaking his word to deliver his guests into the hands of the king; but, by a very strange refinement, he agreed to sell them to the Turks. Accordingly they were delivered for a sum to the basha of Masuah, who received them with much greater kindness than they had experienced in the Christian country from which they fled.

Two Jesuits were purposely left behind, with the consent of John Akay, unknown to Facilidas, in fervent hopes that some occasion would soon offer of suffering martyrdom for the true faith; and in this expectation they were not long disappointed, all those who were left in Abyssinia having lost their lives by violent deaths, most of them on a gibbet, by order of Facilidas, the last of whom was Bernard Nogeyra.

Facilidas, weary of the obstinacy of these missionaries, uneasy also at the suspicions they created, that a number of Portuguese troops would be poured in upon his country by the viceroy of India, concluded a treaty with the bashas of Masuah and Suakem, for preventing any Portuguese passing into Abyssinia, by shutting these ports against them. Not above eight years before, that is, in the year 1624, Socinios had sent a zebra, and several other curious articles, as presents to the basha of Suakem, with a request to him not to obstruct, as the Turks had used to do, the entrance of any Portuguese into his dominions. But those times were now so changed, that both nations, Turks and Abyssinians, had resolved, with one consent, to exclude them all, for their mutual safety, peace, and advantage.

This treaty with the Turks, made by Facilidas, probably gave rise to that calumny of the Jesuits, that, for fear of a return of the Portuguese, that prince had embraced the Mahometan religion, and sent for preceptors from Mocha to instruct him in their tenets. This, I say, if not founded upon the treaty I mention, was destitute of the least shadow of truth; but, like other calumnies then propagated in great number, arose solely from the rage, malice, and heated imaginations of desperate fanatics.

Amidst the general regret this revolution in the church of Ethiopia occasioned at Rome, there were some who thought the pride, obstinacy, and violence of the Jesuits, the hardness and cruelty of their hearts in instigating Socinios to that perpetual effusion of blood, and their independence, their encroachments upon, and resistance of the civil power, were faults resulting from the institutions of that particular society, and that these occasioned the miscarriage; that a well-grounded aversion to the teachers had created a repugnance to the doctrines preached, and was the reason of the expulsion of the fathers, and the relapse of Abyssinia to the Alexandrian faith. From this persuasion, six capuchins, all of them Frenchmen of the reformed Order of St Francis, were sent from Rome after the death of Nogeyra, by the congregation _De Propagandâ Fide_, and these had protections from the grand signior.

Two attempted the entering Abyssinia by way of the Indian Ocean, that is, from Magadoxa, and were slain by the Galla, after advancing a very short way into the country. Two of them penetrated into Abyssinia, and were stoned to death. The remaining two, hearing the fate of their companions at Masuah, and not being so violently bent upon a crown of martyrdom as were the Portuguese missionaries, prudently returned home, carrying with them the account of this bad success.

Three other capuchins were sent after this. It is impossible to judge from their conduct what idea they had formed; for they themselves gave the first information of their intended coming to Facilidas, who thereupon recommended it to the basha to receive them according to their merits; and thereupon, on their arrival at Suakem, their heads were cut off by his order; the skins of their heads and faces stripped off and sent to the king of Abyssinia, that, by their colour, he might know them to be franks, and by their tonsure to be priests. Nor was it possible afterwards to introduce any Catholic missionaries, either during this or the following reign.

Facilidas having thus provided against being further disturbed by missionaries, and having reduced all his subjects to the obedience of the Alexandrian church, sent again messengers to bring an Abuna from Cairo, while he took the field against Melca Christos his rival, who continued in arms at the head of the peasants of Lasta, though there was now no longer any pretence that the Alexandrian faith was in danger. Both armies met in Libo, a country of the Galla, where a panic seized the king’s troops, his horse flying at the first onset. The royal army being entirely dispersed, Melca Christos pursued his good fortune, and entered the king’s palace, took possession of the throne, and was crowned; he appointed to all the great places in government, and distributed a largess, or bounty, to his soldiers.

The Portuguese historians say, that this happened at Dancaz, not at Libo. But they should have remembered what they before have said, that an epidemic fever raged in all Dembea, so that the king was not at Dancaz that year. He passed the winter of the preceding one at Dobit, near Begemder.

The memoirs of these missionaries, even when they were in the country, are to be read with great caution, being full of misrepresentations of the manners and characters of men, magnifying some actions, slighting others, and attributing to their favourites services that were really performed by their adversaries; and, from the coming of Alphonso Mendes, till they were banished to Masuah, great part of their account is untrue, and the rest very suspicious. After their retiring to India, which is the time we are now speaking of, the whole that they have published is one continued tissue of falsehood and calumny, either hear-say stories communicated to them, as they say, by the remnants of zealots still alive in Abyssinia, or fabrications of their own, invented for particular purposes. In continuing this history, I shall take notice of some of these, though for facts I rely entirely upon the annals of the country, treating, however, the Abyssinian account of the Jesuits’ doctrines and behaviour with the same degree of caution.

This forwardness of his rival Melca Christos did not discourage Facilidas. Without losing a moment, he sent expresses to Kasmati Dimmo, governor of Samen, to Ras Sela Christos, of Damot, and to his brother Claudius, governor of Begemder, ordering them to march and attack Melca Christos, then acting as sovereign in the king’s palace at Libo.

These three generals were not slack in obeying the commands of Facilidas. They surrounded Melca Christos before he expected them, and forced him to a battle, in which he was defeated and lost his whole army. He himself, fighting manfully at the head of his troops, was slain hand to hand by Cosmas, a soldier of Kasmati Claudius, the king’s brother.

Jerome Lobo mentions Facilidas’s bad success against the Gallas and Agows as an instance of divine vengeance which pursued him. But if the approbation or disapprobation of heaven is to be appealed to in this reign as a proof of the justness of the measures taken, we must be obliged to say the cause of the Jesuits was not the cause of heaven. If we except the temporary advantage gained over Facilidas, and the accident that happened to his army at Lasta, perpetual victory had attended the wars in which this prince was engaged; for so far was he from being unfortunate this campaign against the Agows, that, on the 9th of February 1636, he marched from Libo into Gojam, and totally defeated the two great tribes Azena and Zeegam. After which he sent his army with Kasmati Melca Bahar, who coming up with the Galla, a great body of whom had made an incursion into Gojam, he totally overthrew them, and passing the Nile into their country, laid it waste, and returned with a great number of cattle, and multitudes of women and children to be sold as slaves.

The king then returned to Begemder, and took up his head-quarters at Gonsala; but, soon hearing that the Abuna Marcus was arrived, he quitted that place, and came to meet him in Gondar.

The next year, which was the fifth of his reign, and the first of the coming of Abuna Marcus, he again fought with the Agows, and beat the Denguis, Hancasha, and the Zeegam, and passed that winter in Gafat; nor was he ever unfortunate with the Agows or Galla. But a misfortune happened this year (the 6th of his reign) which very much affected the whole kingdom. The people of Lasta seemed to grow more inveterate after the defeat they had received under Melca Christos. In the stead of that prince slain in battle, they appointed his son, a young man of good hopes.

Facilidas, trusting to his former reputation acquired in these mountains in his father’s time, on the 3d of March 1638 advanced with a large army into Lasta, with a design to bring these peasants to a battle. But the rebels, growing wise by their losses, no longer chose to trust themselves on the plain, but, retiring to the strongest posts, fortified them so judiciously, that, without risking any loss themselves, they cut off all supplies or provisions coming to the king’s army.

It happened at that time the cold was so excessive that almost the whole army perished amidst the mountains; great part from famine, but a greater still from cold, a very remarkable circumstance in these latitudes. Lasta is barely 12° from the Line, and it was now the equinox in March, so that the sun was but 12° from being in the zenith of Lasta, and there was in the day twelve hours of sun. Yet here is an example of an army, not of foreigners, but natives, perishing with cold in their own country, when the sun is no farther than 12° from being vertical, or from being directly over their heads; a strong proof this, as I have often remarked, that there is no way of judging by the degrees of heat in the thermometer, what effect that degree of heat or cold is to have upon the human body.

The eighth year of the reign of Facilidas, Claudius, governor of Begemder, his brother, revolted and joined the rebels of Lasta. It seems, that this prince had been long encouraged by the Jesuits, and his uncle Sela Christos, in expectation of succeeding his father Socinios, and supplanting Facilidas, his brother, in the kingdom. But, after the banishment of the Jesuits, and the death of Sela Christos, Facilidas thinking, these bad counsellors being removed, he would continue firm in his duty, and willing to disbelieve the whole that had been reported of his designs, made him governor of Begemder.

It happened, however, that this very year two Abunas arrived from Egypt, one by way of Sennaar, the other by Dancali. Upon inquiry it was found, that Abba Michael, the latter of these Abunas, had been sent for by Kasmati Claudius, in expectation that he was to be on the throne by the time of his Abuna’s arrival. This implied clearly that the king’s death was agreed on. Claudius, without attempting a vindication, or awaiting the discussion of this step, fled to Lasta, and joined Laeca, son of Melca Christos, a youth then at the head of the rebels.

Facilidas banished Abba Michael to Serké, a Mahometan town in the way to Sennaar, and admitted Abba Johannes, whom he himself had sent for from Cairo, into the office of Abuna.

Soon after this, Claudius was surprised and taken prisoner, and brought to the king, and, though stained in a high degree with ingratitude, treason, and intended fratricide, he could not be brought to order his execution, but, like a wise and merciful prince, reflecting on the ancient usages of the empire, and how much royal blood might be daily saved by sequestering the descendents of the imperial family upon the mountain, he chose that of Wechné in Belessen, which served ever after for this purpose.

This is the third mountain within the reach of written history, first chosen, and then reprobated, as a state-prison for all the males of the royal family, excepting the one seated upon the throne.

This interruption of the imprisonment of the princes for a time, and the resuming it again for another period, have led the Portuguese writers, very little acquainted with the history or constitution of this country, into various disputes and difficulties, which I shall fully explain and reconcile in their proper place. It is sufficient for the present to observe, that Claudius was sent into exile to the mountain of Wechné, and that he was the first prince banished thither, where he lived for many years.

The king, finding that nothing material pressed at home, marched into Gojam to Enzagedem, whence he sent Ras Bela Christos against the Shangalla, N. W. of the country of the Agows. These people being put upon their guard by their neighbours, all disaffected to the king, contrived to place themselves in ambush so judiciously, that Bela Christos, marching in security into their country, was surrounded by the Shangalla, whom he thought yet at a distance. Great part of his troops was slain by the arrows of the enemy, who, from their caves and holes in the mountain, poured their missile weapons, stones, and arrows on the troops, at so small a distance that every one took place, though above the reach of swords, and lances, or such common weapons; others were overpowered by large bodies of men sallying from the thickets, and fighting them firmly foot to foot. Many officers were that day slain, among the rest Alzaguè and Petros, two persons of great distinction in the palace. But the king, however afflicted for the loss of his men, well knew that this defeat would have no other consequences; so returned to his capital, with resolution to make another vigorous effort against Lasta.

The manner in which this expedition was prevented cannot but give us a high idea of Facilidas: Laeca, at the head of an army of veteran troops, whose affection he never had occasion to doubt, thought it safer to trust to the generosity of a king, who had slain his father in battle, than to the acquiring a crown that was not his, by persevering any longer in rebellion. Accordingly he surrendered himself, without condition, to Facilidas, who immediately committed him to prison, which seeming severity, however, meant nothing further, than to shew him the lenity which followed was entirely his own, and not suggested to him by the officiousness of courtiers; for no sooner was he arrived at Gondar, than he sent for Laeca from prison, received him not only kindly, but with great marks of distinction; and, instead of banishing him to Wechné, as he did his own brother Claudius, and which, as being of the blood-royal, should have been his destination likewise, the king entered into a kind of treaty with Laeca, by which he gave him large possessions in Begemder near Lasta, and married him to his daughter Theoclea, by whom, however, he had no children, but lived long in constant friendship and confidence with Facilidas.

Except the events which I have already recorded, there is nothing farther in this long reign worthy of being insisted upon; the early inroads of the Galla, in plundering parties, and the seditions and revolts of the Agows from the oppression and extortion of their governors, were such as we find in every reign; and in all these Facilidas was victorious, whilst the Hancasha and Zeegam were greatly weakened in these campaigns.

Facilidas was taken ill at Gondar, in the end of October, of a disease which, from its first appearance, he thought would prove mortal. He, therefore, sent to his eldest son Hannes, whom he had constantly kept with him, and who was now of age to govern, and recommended to him his kingdom, and the persevering in the ancient religion. He died the 30th of September 1665, in great peace and composure of mind, and they buried him at Azazo.

If we are obliged to give his father the preference, from the greater variety of trials which he underwent, we must in justice allow, that, after his father, Facilidas was the greatest king that ever sat upon the Abyssinian throne. He had every good quality necessary to constitute a great prince, without any alloy or mixture, that, upon so much provocation as he had, might have misled him to be a bad one. He was calm, dispassionate, and courteous in his behaviour. In the very difficult part he had to act between his father and the nation, the necessities of the times had taught him a degree of reserve, which, if it was not natural, was not therefore the less useful to him. He was in his own person the bravest soldier of his time, and always exposed himself in proportion as the occasion was important.

To this were added all the qualities of a good general, in which character he seems to have equalled his father Socinios, who else was universally allowed to be the first of his time. Fierce and violent in battle, he was backward in shedding blood after it. Though an enemy to the Catholic religion, yet, from duty to his father, he lived with the patriarch and Jesuits upon so familiar a footing, that they confess themselves it was not from any part of his behaviour to them they ever could judge him an enemy. He was most remarkable for an implicit submission to his father’s commands; and, upon this principle, fought in favour of the Catholic religion against his own friends and persuasion, because such were the orders of his sovereign. He was of a very mild and pleasant temper, as appeared by his behaviour to Melca Christos, to his brother Claudius, to his uncle Sela Christos, and to the patriarch and Jesuits.

It is true, that, of these last, Sela Christos, and many of the Jesuits, were put to death in his reign; but this was not till they had experienced repeated acts of mercy and forgivenness; still, persisting in constant rebellion against government, they were justly cut off as traitors and rebels by the civil power, in the very act of their conspiracy against the life of the king and constitution of the country.

There is published by Tellez a letter of Alphonso Mendes, written, as is falsely said, from Masuah, where it is dated, but truly from Goa. If, as the patriarch pretends, he wrote it from Masuah, it is another proof of this prince’s clemency, that he ever suffered the author of such an indecent libel to return to India in peace. It is well known, that, on the first requisition of Facilidas, the Turks would have delivered the patriarch into his hands; and, every one that reads it must allow, such language from a low-born priest to a king, deserved every exemplary punishment offended royalty could inflict: It would not have been mild, had such liberty been taken by a stranger in his native country, Portugal.

The patriarch accuses Facilidas with the crime committed by Absalom, which is, I suppose, debauching his father’s wives and concubines. But, unluckily for the truth of this story, we have the Jesuit’s own testimony, that Socinios had put away his wives and concubines before he embraced the Catholic religion, so at his father’s death this was impossible, unless he could commit incest with his own mother, who was at that time a woman near sixty. But we shall suppose that they existed, were never married, and, at the time of their being put away, they were 18 years of age at an average. The king put them away in the year 1621; and, therefore, in the year 1634, they would be 30 years of age; and any body that has seen the effects that number of years has upon Abyssinian beauty, must confess they could be no great temptation to a prince.

The next calumny mentioned in this libel is, the murder of his brother Claudius, nay, of all his brothers. Now we have seen, in the history of his reign, that Claudius had fairly forfeited his life by a meditated fratricide, and by an overt act of rebellion in which he was taken prisoner. Yet so mild and placable was Facilidas, that he refused to put him to death, but sent him prisoner to the mountain of Wechné, and mercifully revived the ancient usage of banishing the princes of the blood-royal to the mountain, instead of executing them, which had been the practice to his time, and had occasioned the death of above sixty of these unfortunate princes within the last hundred years.

To mount Wechné he also sent his own son David, and with him all his brothers; and, so far from being murdered, we shall find them mostly alive attending an extraordinary festival made for their sakes by Facilidas’s grandson; an accident so rare, that it seems Providence had permitted it in favour and vindication of truth and innocence, and to stamp the lie upon the patriarch’s scandalous aspersions.

The third falsehood is, that Facilidas turned Mahometan, and got doctors from Mocha to instruct him in the Koran. We have already seen what gave rise to this, if it indeed had any foundation at all; but it is a well-known fact, that, though he governed the church, during a whole reign, mildly and judiciously, without any mark of bigotry, never were two princes better affected to the Alexandrian church than Facilidas and his son; and never were two that had better reason, having both seen the disorders that other religions had occasioned.

We see throughout all this piece of the patriarchs, a self-sufficient mind, gratifying itself by disgorging its passion and malice. If Alphonso Mendes had no regard, as it seems indeed he had not; if he had no reverence to higher powers, such as scripture had taught him to have; if he was too enlightened, or too infatuated, to take our Saviour’s precepts for his rule, and, shaking the dust of Abyssinia from his feet, remit them to a Judge who will, at his own time, separate good from evil, still he should have had, at least, a brotherly love and charity for those unfortunate people who were to fall into Facilidas’s hands; and we cannot reasonably suppose but that the constant butcheries committed by the Turks afterwards upon the Catholic priests, wild enough to enter at Masuah and Suakem, were the fruits of the calumnious, intemperate libel of the patriarch.

After the death of the last missionary, Bernard Nogeyra, no intelligence arrived of what was doing in Abyssinia, excepting from the Dutch settlements of Batavia, where Abyssinian factors, or merchants, had arrived; and where the industrious Mr Ludolf, very much engaged in the history of this country, and who spared no pains, maintained a correspondence, and thence he was informed that Facilidas had died after a long and prosperous reign, and had left his kingdom in peace to his son.

This intelligence alarmed the zeal of two great champions of the Jesuits; the one M. le Grande, late secretary to the French embassy to Portugal; and the other M. Piques, a member of the Sorbonne, a very confused, dull disputant upon the difference of religion.

These two worthies, without any proof or intelligence but their own warm and weak imaginations, fell violently upon poor Ludolf, accusing him of falsehood, partiality, and prevarication; and, right or wrong, they would have Facilidas plunged up to the neck in troubles, wading through labyrinths of misfortunes, conspiracies, and defeats, certainly dead, or about to die some terrible death by the vengeance of heaven; and this ridiculous report is unjustly spread abroad by all the zealots of those times. _Fata obstant_;--truth will out. The annals of the country, written without a regard to either party, state, that, in the long reign of Facilidas, notwithstanding the calamitous state in which his father left him the empire, very few misfortunes only are reported to have happened either to himself or lieutenants.

HANNES I. OR ŒLAFE SEGUED.

From 1665 to 1680.

_Bigotry of the King--Disgusts his Son Yasous, who flies from Gondar._

If this prince succeeded to his kingdom in peace, he had the address still to keep it so. He was not in his nature averse to war, though, besides two feeble attempts he made upon Lasta, and one against the Shangalla, all without material consequences, no military expedition was undertaken in his time; and no rebellion or competitor (so frequent in other reigns) at all disturbed his.

Hannes seems to have had the seeds of bigotry in his temper; from the beginning of his reign he commanded the Mahometans to eat no other flesh but what had been killed by Christians; and gathered together the Catholic books, which the Jesuits had translated into the Ethiopic language, and burned them in a heap. Much of his attention was given to church matters, and, in regulating these, he seems to have employed most of his time. He deposed the Abuna Christadulus, appointed by his father, and in his place put the Abuna Sanuda.

This last measure seems to have displeased his eldest son Yasous, who fled from the palace one night, and passed the Nile; and, though he was followed by Kasmati Aserata Christos, he was not overtaken, but staid some time in his sister’s house, and then returned to Gondar at the request of his father.

A convocation of the clergy, the second in this reign, was now held, and great heats and divisions followed among two orders of monks, those of Eustathius and those of Debra Libanos. The king seems to have assisted at all these debates, and to have contented himself with holding the balance in his hands without declaring for either party. But these altercations and disputes could not satisfy the active spirit of the prince his son, who again fled from his father and from Gondar, but was overtaken at the river Bashilo, and brought back to the palace, where he found his father ill.

Hannes died the 19th of July, and was buried at Tedda, after having reigned 15 years. He seems, from the scanty memorials of his long reign, to have been a weak prince; but, perhaps, if the circumstances of the times were fully known, he may have been a wise one.

YASOUS I.

From 1680 to 1704.

_Brilliant Expedition of the King to Wechné--Various Campaigns against the Agows and Galla--Comet appears--Expedition against Zeegam and the Eastern Shangalla--Poncet’s Journey--Murat’s Embassy--Du Roule’s Embassy--Du Roule assassinated at Sennaar--The King is assassinated._

Yasous succeeded his father Hannes with the approbation of the whole kingdom. He had, as we have seen, twice in Hannes’s life-time absconded from the palace; and this was interpreted as implying an impatience to reign. But I rather think the cause was a difference of manners, his father being extremely bigotted, sordid, and covetous; for he never, in those elopements, pretended to make a party contrary to his father’s interest, nor shewed the least inclination to give either the army or the people a favourable impression of himself, to the disadvantage of the king. There was, besides, a difference in religious principles. Yasous had a great predilection for the monks of Debra Libanos, or the high church; while Hannes, his father, had done every thing in his power to instil into his son a prepossession in favour of those of Abba Eustathius.

To these opinions, therefore, so widely different, as well in religion as the things of the world, I attribute the young prince’s disinclination to live with his father. This seems confirmed by the first step he took upon his mounting the throne, which was to make an alteration in the church government from what his father had left it at his death.

It was on the 7th of July 1680 he was proclaimed king; the next day he deposed the Acab Saat Constantius, and gave his place to Asera Christos. He then called a council of the clergy on the 27th of September, when he deposed Itchegué Tzaga Christos, and in his room named Cyriacus.

It was now the time that, according to custom, he was to make his profession in regard to the difference I have formerly mentioned that subsisted between the two parties about the incarnation of Christ. But this he refused to do in the present state of the church, as there was then no certain Abuna in Abyssinia. For Hannes, before he died, had written to the patriarch of Alexandria to depose both Abuna Christodulus and Marcus, who, in case of death, was to have succeeded him, and this under pretence that he had varied in his faith between the two contending parties.

Hannes, therefore, desired the patriarch to appoint Abuna Sanuda, a man known to be devoted to the monks of St Eustathius and their tenets; whereas the other two priests were supposed to be inclined to the monks of Debra Libanos. Yasous told his clergy that he would not suffer Sanuda to be elected; and the assembly, with little opposition, conformed to the sentiments of the king, who sent immediately thereupon to Cairo, demanding peremptorily that Marcus might be appointed Abuna, and declaring his resolution to admit no other. He then ordered the church of Tecla Haimanout to be consecrated with great solemnity; he repaired and adorned it with much magnificence, and endowed it with lands, which increased its revenue very considerably.

These two circumstances (especially the last) shewed distinctly to the whole kingdom his affection for the high church, as explicitly as any proclamation could have done. And in this he continued steady during his whole life, notwithstanding the many provocations he met with from that restless body of men.

Having thus settled the affairs of the church, he proceeded to those of the state, and appointed Anastasius (then governor of Amhara) to be Ras, or lieutenant-general, in his whole kingdom, allowing him also to keep his province of Amhara. In this he shewed a wisdom and penetration that gained him the good opinion of every one; for Anastasius was a man advanced in years, of great capacity and experience, and of a most unblemished character among his neighbours, who, in all their own affairs, had recourse to, and were determined by, his counsels.

The king then took a journey of a very extraordinary nature, and such as Abyssinia had never before seen. Attended only by his nobility, of whom a great number had flocked to him, he sat down at the foot of the mountain of Wechné, and ordered all the princes of the royal family who were banished, and confined there, to be brought to him.

During the last reign, the mountain of Wechné, and those forlorn princes that lived upon it, had been, as it were, totally forgotten. Hannes having sons of an age fit to govern, and his eldest son Yasous living below with his father, no room seemed to remain for attempting a revolution, by the young candidates escaping from the mountain. This oblivion to which they were consigned, melancholy as it was, proved the best state these unhappy prisoners could have wished; for to be much known for either good or bad qualities, did always at some period become fatal to the individuals. Punishment always followed inquiries after a particular prince; and all messages, questions, or visits, at the instance of the king, were constantly fore-runners of the loss of life, or amputation of limbs, to these unhappy exiles. To be forgotten, then, was to be safe; but this safety carried very heavy distress along with it. Their revenues were embezzled by their officers or keepers, and ill paid by the king; and the sordid temper of Hannes had often reduced them all to the danger of perishing with hunger and cold.

Yasous, as he was well acquainted with all these circumstances, so he was, in his nature and disposition, as perfectly willing to repair the injuries that were past, and prevent the like in future. Nothing tended so much to conciliate the minds of the people to their sovereign as this behaviour of Yasous.

In the midst of his relations there now appeared (as risen from the dead) Claudius, son of Socinios, the first exile who was sent to the mountain of Wechné by his brother Facilidas, grandfather of Yasous. This was the prince who, as we have already stated, was fixed upon by the Jesuits to succeed his father, and govern that country when converted to the Romish religion by their intrigues, and conquered by the arms of the Portuguese: This was the prince who, to make their enemies appear more odious, these Jesuits have asserted was slain by his brother Facilidas, one instance by which we may judge of the justice of the other charges laid against that humane, wise, and virtuous prince, whose only crime was an inviolable attachment to the religion and constitution of his country, and the just abhorrence he most reasonably had, as an independent prince, to submit the prerogatives of his crown, and the rights of his people to the blind controul of a foreign prelate.

There came from the mountain also the sons of Facilidas, with their families; and likewise his own brothers, Ayto Theophilus, and Ayto Claudius, sons of his father Hatzè Hannes. The sight of so many noble relations, some advanced in years, some in the flower of their youth, and some yet children; all, however, in tatters, and almost naked, made such an impression on the young king that he burst into tears. Nor was his behaviour to the respective degrees of them less proper or engaging. To the old he paid that reverence and respect due to parents; to those about his own age, a kind and liberal familiarity; while he bestowed upon the young ones caresses and commendations, sweetened with the hopes that they might see better times.

His first care was to provide them all plentifully with apparel and every necessary. His brothers he dressed like himself, and his uncles still more richly. He then divided a large sum of money among them all.

In the month of December, which is the pleasantest season of the whole year, the sun being moderately hot, the sky constantly clear and without a cloud, all the court was encamped under the mountain, and the inferior sort strewed along the grass. All were treated at the expence of the king, passing the day and night in continual festivals. It is but right, said the king, that I should pay for a pleasure so great that none of my predecessors ever dared to taste it; and of all that noble assembly none seemed to enjoy it more sincerely than the king. All pardons solicited for criminals at this time were granted. In this manner having spent a whole month, before his departure the king called for the deftar, (_i. e._ the treasury book) in which the account of the sum allowed for the maintenance of these prisoners is stated; and having inquired strictly into the expenditure, and cancelled all grants that had been made of any part of that sum to others, and provided in future for the full, as well as yearly payment of it, he, for his last act, gave to the governor of the mountain a large accession of territory, to make him ample amends for the loss of the dues he was understood to be intitled to from that revenue. After this, he embraced them all, assuring them of his constant protection; and, mounting his horse, he took the keeper along with him, leaving all the royal family at their liberty at the foot of the mountain.

This last mark of confidence, more than all the rest, touched the minds of that noble troop, who hurried every man with his utmost speed to restore themselves voluntarily to their melancholy prison, imputing every moment of delay as a step towards treason and ingratitude to their munificent, compassionate, and magnanimous benefactor. All their way was moistened with tears flowing from sensible and thankful hearts; and all the mountain resounded with prayers for the long life and prosperity o£ the king, and that the crown might never leave the lineal descendents of his family. It was very remarkable, that, during this long reign, though he was constantly involved in war, no competitor from the mountain ever appeared in breach of those vows they had so voluntarily undertaken.

There was another great advantage the king reaped by this generous conduct. All the most powerful and considerable people in the kingdom had an opportunity, at one view, to see each individual of the royal family that was capable of wearing the crown, and all with one voice agreed, upon the comparison made, that, if they had been then assembled to elect a king, the choice would not have fallen upon any but the present.

Though the country of the Agows of Damot is generally plain and laid out in pasture, each tribe has some mountain to which, upon the alarm of an enemy, they retire with their flocks. The Galla, being their neighbours on the other side of the Nile to the south, and the Shangalla in the low country immediately to the west, these natural fortresses are frequently of the greatest use during the incursions of both.

They alone, of all the nations of Abyssinia, have found it their interest so far to cultivate their neighbours the Shangalla, that there are places set apart in which both nations can trade with each other in safety; where the Agows sell copper, iron, beads, skins, or hides, and receive an immense profit in gold; for, below these to the south and west, is the gold country nearest Abyssinia, none of that metal being anywhere found in Abyssinia itself.

Yasous, from this country of the Agows, descended into that of the Shangalla; where, conforming to the ancient custom of Abyssinia, he hunted the elephant and rhinoceros, the ordinary first expedition in the kings his predecessors reigns, but the second in his; the first having been (as before stated) spent in charity and mercy, much more nobly, at the foot of the mountain of Wechné.

Yasous is reported to have been the most graceful and dexterous horseman of his time. He distinguished himself in this hunting as much for his address and courage against the beasts, as he had, for a short while before, done by his affability, generosity, and benevolence, amidst his own family. All was praise, all was enthusiasm, wherever the young king presented himself; the ill-boding monks and hermits had not yet dared to foretel evil, but every common mouth predicted this was to be an active, vigorous, and glorious reign, without being thought by this to have laid any pretension to the gift of prophecy.

It was now the second year of his reign when the king took the field with a small, but very well chosen army. The Edjow and Woolo, two of the most powerful tribes of southern Galla, taking advantage of the absence of Ras Anastasius, had entered Amhara by a pass, on the side of which is situated Melec Shimfa, one of the principal towns of the province.

The king, leaving old Anastasius to the government of Gondar, took upon himself the relief of Amhara; and, being joined by all the troops in his way, he arrived at Melec Shimfa before the Galla had any intelligence of him. The Galla always chose for their residence a very level country, because they are now become all horsemen. The country of Amhara, on the contrary, is full of high mountains, and only accessible by certain narrow passes. The king, therefore, instead of marching directly to the enemy, passed above them, and left them still advancing, burning the villages and churches in the country below. He then took possession of the pass (through which he knew they must retreat) with a strong body of troops; and filled the entrance of the defile, which was very rugged ground, with fusileers, and his best foot armed with lances: after this, he separated his horse into two divisions, and, reserving one half to himself, gave the other to Kasmati Demetrius. He then placed the troops conducted by himself in a wood, about half a mile from the entrance of the pass, and ordered Demetrius to fall upon the Galla briskly on the plain, but to retreat as if terrified by their numbers, and to make the best of his way then to the pass in the mountains.

Demetrius, finding the enemy’s parties scattered wide wasting the country, fell upon them, and slew many, till he had arrived near the middle of their body, when the Galla, used to such expeditions, poured in from all sides, and presently united. Demetrius, surrounded on every side, was slain, fighting to the last in the most desperate manner, and his party, much diminished in number, fled in a manner that could not be mistaken for stratagem. They were closely pursued, and followed into the pass by the Galla, who thought they had thus entirely cut them off from Amhara. But they were soon received by a close fire from the foot among the bushes, and by the lances that mingled with them from every side of the mountain.

The king, upon the first noise of the musquetry, advanced quickly with his horse, and met the Galla, in the height of their confusion, flying back again into the plain. Here they fell an easy sacrifice to the fresh troops led by Yasous, and to the peasants, exasperated by the havoc they before had made in the country. Of the enemy, about 6000 men fell this day on the field; a few were brought to Gondar, and, in contempt, sold for slaves. Few on the king’s side were slain, excepting those that fell with Demetrius, the account of whose death the king heard without any signs of regret:--“I told the man (says the king) that he should shew himself and retire; if I wanted a victory I would have led the army in person; I march against the Galla, not as a king, but as an executioner, because my aim is to extirpate them.”

Although Yasous was stedfast in his own opinion as to his religion, or, as it may be more properly called, the disputes and quibbles with the monks concerning it, yet he suffered each sect to enjoy its own, and, probably, in his heart he perfectly despised both.

The monks, however, were far from possessing any such spirit of toleration. They considered the deposing of Acab Saat, Constantius, and the Itchegué Tzaga Christos, as a declaration of dislike the king entertained towards their party. They bore with great impatience and indignation, that Abuna Sanuda, who was once their zealous partizan in the time of Hannes, should now suddenly change his sentiments, and declare implicitly for those of the king, and thereby increase both the number and the consequence of their adversaries. They declared that they would suffer every thing rather than live under a king who shewed himself so openly a favourer of Debra Libanos, though it was now but their turn, having in the last reign had a king more partial, and more attached to St Eustathius, than ever Yasous was to any set of monks whatever.

The ringleaders in all these seditious declarations were Abba Tebedin, superior of the monastery of Gondga, and Kasmati Wali of Damot, by origin a Galla. These two turbulent men, having first drawn over to their party the Agows and province of Damot, passed over the Nile to Goodero and Basso, whom they joined, and then proclaimed king one Isaac, grandson of Socinios a prince, who was never sent to the mountain, but whose predecessors, being at liberty when Facilidas first banished his brothers and children to Wechné, had fled to the Galla, and there remained in obscurity, waiting the juncture which now happened to declare his royal descent, and offer himself for king.

The Galla, who sought but a pretence for invading Abyssinia, readily embraced this opportunity, and swarmed to him on all sides. His army, in a very short time, was exceedingly numerous, and the Agows and all Damot were ready to join him when he should repass the Nile. This revolt was indeed likely to have proved general, but for the activity and diligence of the king, who, on the first intelligence, put himself so suddenly in motion that he was on the banks of the Nile before the Galla on the one side were ready for their junction with the confederates on the other.

The king’s presence imposed upon the Agows and the rebels of Damot, so that they let him pass quietly over the Nile into the country of the Galla, hoping that, as their designs were not discovered, he might again return through their country in peace if victorious over the Galla; but, if he was beaten, they then were ready to intercept him.

But the Galla, who expected that they would have had to fight with an army already fatigued and half-ruined by an action with the Agows on the other side of the river, no sooner saw it pass the Nile unmolested in full force, than they began to think how far it was from their interest to make their country a seat of war, when so little profit was to be expected. On the approach, therefore, of the king’s army, many of them deserted to it, and made their peace with him. The few that remained faithful to Isaac were dispersed after very little resistance; and he himself being taken prisoner, and brought before the king, was given up to the soldiers, who put him to death in his presence. On the king’s side, no person of consideration was slain but Kasmati Maziré, and very few on the part of the enemy.

This year 1685, the 5th of Yasous’s reign, there was no military expedition. He had pardoned Abba Tebedin, and Kasmati Wali, and the monks again desired an assembly of the clergy, which was granted. But the king seeing, at its first meeting, that it was to produce nothing but wrangling and invectives; with great calmness and resolution told the assembly, “That their disputes were of a nature so confused and unedifying, that he questioned much their being really founded in scripture; and the rather so, because the patriarch of Alexandria seemed neither to know, nor concern himself about them, nor was the Abuna, at his first coming, ever instructed on any one of these points. If they were, however, founded in scripture, one of them was confessedly in the wrong; and, if so, he doubted it might be the case with both; that he had, therefore, come to a resolution to name several of the best-qualified persons of both parties, who, in the presence of the Itchegué and Abuna, might inspect the books, and from them settle some premises that might be hereafter accepted and admitted as _data_ by both.”

This being assented to, the very next year he ordered two of the priests of Debra Libanos then at Gondar, together with Abba Tebedin, Cosmas of Aruana, the Abuna Sanuda, and the Itchegué, forthwith to repair to Debra Mariam, an island in the lake Tzana, where, sequestered from the world, they might discuss their several opinions, and settle some points admissible by both sides. After which, without giving any opportunity for reply, he dissolved the assembly, and took the field with his army.

The king, though perfectly informed of the part that the whole province of Damot had taken in the rebellion of Isaac, as also great part of the Agows, but most of all that tribe called Zeegam, yet had so well dissembled, that most of them believed he was ignorant of their fault, and all of them, that he had no thoughts of punishing them, for he had returned through Damot, after the defeat of Isaac, without shewing any mark of anger, or suffering his troops to commit the smallest hostility. He now passed in the same peaceable manner through the country of Zeegam, intending to attack the Shangalla of Geesa and Wumbarea.

These two tribes are little known. Like the other Shangalla they are Pagans, but worship the Nile and a certain tree, and have a language peculiar to themselves. They are woolly-headed, and of the deepest black; very tall and strong, straighter and better-made about the legs and joints than the other blacks; their foreheads narrow, their cheekbones high, their noses flat, with wide mouths, and very small eyes. With all this they have an air of chearfulness and gaiety which renders them more agreeable than other blacks. Their women are very amorous, and sell at a much greater price than other blacks of the sex.

This country is bounded on the south by Metchakel; on the west by the Nile; the east by Serako, part of Guesgué and Kuara; and, on the north, by Belay, Guba, and the Hamidge[62] of Sennaar. They make very frequent inroads, and surprise the Agows, whose children they sell at Guba to the Mahometans, who traffic there for gold and slaves, and get iron and coarse cotton-cloths in return. Their country is full of woods, and their manner of life the same as has been already described in speaking of the other tribes.

The Geesa live close upon the Nile, to which river they give their own name. It is also called Geesa by the Agows, in the small district of Geesh, where it rises from its source. They never have yet made peace with Abyssinia, are governed by the heads of families, and live separately for the sake of hunting, and, for this reason, are easily conquered. The men are naked, having a cotton rag only about their middle. The nights are very cold, and they lie round great fires; but the fly is not so dangerous here as to the eastward, so that goats, in a small number, live here. Their arms are bows, lances, and arrows; large wooden clubs, with knobs, nearly as big as a man’s head, at the end of them; their shields are oval. They worship the Nile, but no other river, as I have said before; it is called Geesa, which, in their language, signifies the first Maker, or Creator. They imagine its water is a cure for most diseases.

East of the Geesa is Wumbarea, which reaches to Belay. The king fell first on the Geesa, part of whom he took, and the rest he dispersed. He then turned to the right through Wumbarea, and met with some resistance in the narrow passes in the mountains, in one of which Kasmati Kosté, (one of his principal officers) a man of low birth, but raised by his merit to his present rank, was slain by an arrow.

The king then repassed the Agows of Zeegam, in the same peaceable manner in which he came, and then marched on without giving any cause of suspicion, taking up his quarters at Ibaba. It was here he had appointed an assembly of the clergy to meet, before whom the several delegates, chosen to consider the controverted points, and find some ground for a reconciliation, were to make their report. The Abuna, Itchegué, and all those who, for this purpose, were shut up in Debra Mariam, appeared before the king. But, however amicably things had been carried on while they were shut up in the island, the usual warmth and violence prevailed before the assembly. Ayto Christos, Abba Welled Christos of Debra Libanos, on one side, and Tebedin and Cosmas on the other, fell roundly, and without preface, upon a dispute about the incarnation, so that the affair from argument was likely to turn to sedition.

The turbulent Tebedin, leaving the matter of religion wholly apart, inveighed vehemently against the retirement to Debra Mariam, which he loudly complained of as banishment. Ras Anastasius and Abuna Sanuda reproved him sharply for the freedom with which he taxed this measure of the king, and in this they were followed by many of the wiser sort on both sides. Immediately after the assembly, the king ordered Tebedin to be put in irons, and sent to a mountainous prison. He then returned to Gondar.

This year, the 9th of Yasous reign, there appeared a comet, remarkable for its size and fiery brightness of its body, and for the prodigious length and distinctness of its tail. It was first taken notice of at Gondar, two days before the feast of St Michael, on which day the army takes the field. A sight so uncommon alarmed all sorts of people; and the prophets, who had kept themselves within very moderate bounds during this whole reign, now thought that it was incumbent upon them to distinguish themselves, and be silent no longer. Accordingly they foretold, from this phenomenon, and published everywhere as a truth infallibly and immutably pre-ordained, that the present campaign was to exhibit a scene of carnage and bloodshed, more terrible and more extensive than any thing that ever had appeared in the annals of Ethiopia. That these torrents of blood, which were everywhere to follow the footsteps of the king, were to be stopped by his death, which was to happen before he ever returned again to Gondar; and, as the object of the king’s expedition was still a secret, these alarming presages gained a great deal of credit.

But it was not so with Yasous, who, notwithstanding he was importuned, by learned men of all sorts, to put off his departure for some days, absolutely refused, answering always such requests by irony and derision: “Pho! Pho! says he, you are not in the right; we must give the comet fair play; use him well, or he will never appear again, and then idle people and old women will have nothing to amuse themselves with.”

He accordingly left Gondar at the time he had appointed; and he was already arrived at Amdaber, a few day’s distance from the capital, when an express brought him word of his mother’s death, on which he immediately marched back to Gondar, and buried her in the island of Mitraha with all possible magnificence, and with every mark of sincere grief.

Though the prophets had not just succeeded in what they foretold, they kept nevertheless a good countenance. It is true that no blood was shed, nor did the king die before he returned to Gondar; but his mother died when he was away, and that was much the same thing, for they contended that it was not a great mistake, from the bare authority of a comet, to err only in the sex of the person that was to die; a queen for a king was very near calculation. As for the bloody story, and the king’s death, they said they had mistaken the year in computing, but that it still was to happen (when it pleased God) _some other time_.

Every body agreed that these explanations were the best possible, excepting the king, who perceived a degree of malice in the foretelling his death and certain loss of his army just at the instant he was taking the field. But he disguised his resentment under strong irony, with which he attacked these diviners incessantly. He had inquired accurately the day of his mother’s death: “How is it, says he to his chaplain, (or kees hatzé) that this comet should come to _foretel_ my mother’s death, when she was dead four days before it appeared?” Another day, to the same person he said, “I fear you do my mother too much honour at the expence of religion. Is it decent to suppose that such a star, the most remarkable appearance at the birth of Christ, should now be employed on no greater errand than to foretel the death of the daughter of Guebra Mascal?” These, and many more such railleries, accounted by these visionaries, as little short of impiety, so mortified Kostè (the kees hatzé,) a great believer in, and protector of the dreamers, that he resigned all his employments, and retired among the hermits into the desert of Werk-leva towards Sennaar, to study the aspects of the stars more accurately, and more at leisure.

Though we neither pay this comet the superstitious reverence the idle fanatics of Abyssinia shewed it, nor yet treat it with that contempt which this great king’s good sense prompted him to do, we shall make some use of it, acknowledging our gratitude to the historian who has recorded it. We shall hereby endeavour to establish our chronology in opposition to that of the catholic writers, relating to the date of some transactions with which they were not cotemporaries, and only relate from hearsay, as happening before the arrival of the missionaries in this country.

Yasous the Great, of whom we are now writing, came to the throne upon the death of his father Hannes in 1680; the 9th year of this reign then was 1689.

Hedar is the 3d month of the Abyssinians, and answers to part of our November; and the 12th of that month, Hedar, is the feast of St Michael the archangel, or 8th day of our month November, N. S.

Gondar is in lat. 12° 34´ 30´´ N. and in long. 37° 33´ 0´´ E. from the meridian of Greenwich. By the fiery appearance of the nucleus, or body of the comet, it certainly then was very near the sun, and either was going down upon it to its perihelion, or had already passed it, and was receding to its aphelion; but by its increasing tail, already at a great length, we may conjecture it was only then going down to its conjunction, and was then near approaching to the sun.

From this we should conclude that this comet must have been seen, however rapidly it did move, some time before the 6th of November, or two days before the feast of St Michael. But this depends on the circumstances of the climate; for though the tropical rains cease the first of September, the cloudy weather continues all the month of October; at the end of these fall the latter rains in gentle showers, which allay the fevers in Dembea, and make the country wholesome for the march of the army, and these rains fall mostly in the night. From this it is probable that the comet, having at first little light and no tail, as yet at a distance from the sun, was not very apparent to the naked eye, till by its increased motion and heat it had acquired both tail and brightness, as it approached its perihelion.

Now we find by our European accounts[63], that, in the year 1689, there did appear a comet, the orbit of which was calculated by M. Pingrè. And this comet arrived at its perihelion on the 1st day of December 1689, so was going down much inflamed, and with a violent motion to the sun, the 6th of November, when it was observed at Gondar, being but 25 days then from its perihelion.

As these circumstances are more than sufficient to constitute the identity of the comet, a phænomenon too rare to risk being confounded with another, we may hardly conclude the 9th year of Yasous the First to be the year 1689 of Christ, such as our chronology, drawn from the Abyssinian annals, states it to be; or, at least, if there is any error, it must be so small as to be of no sort of consequence to any sort of readers, or influence upon the narrative of any transactions.

The 10th year began with a sudden and violent alarm, which spread itself in an instant all over the kingdom without any certain authority. The Galla with an innumerable army were said to have entered Gojam, at several places, and laid waste the whole province, and this was the more extraordinary, as the Nile was now in the height of its inundation. On his march, the king learned that this story arose merely from a panic; and this formidable army turned out no more than a small band of robbers of that nation, who had passed the river in their usual way, part on horseback, while the foot were dragged over, hanging at the horses tails, or riding on goats skins blown up with wind. This small party had surprised some weak villages, killed the inhabitants, and immediately returned across the river. But the alarm continued, and there were people at Gondar who were ready to swear they saw the villages and churches on fire, and a large army of Galla in their march to Ibaba, at the same time that there was not one Galla on the Gojam side of the river.

The king, however, either considering this small body of Galla coming at this unseasonable time, and the panic that was so artificially spread, as a feint to throw him off his guard when a real invasion might be intended, or with a view to cover his own designs, summoned all the men of the province of Gojam to meet him in arms at Ibaba the 7th day of January, being the proper season for preparing an expedition into the country of the Galla. He himself in the mean time retired to Dek, an island in the lake Tzana, there to stay till his army should be collected.

While the king was in the island, a number of the malcontents among the monks, who had, in the several assemblies, been banished for sedition with Tebedin, came to him there, desiring to be heard before an assembly; and they brought with them Arca Denghel, of Debra Samayat, to support their petition. The king answered, that he was ready to call an assembly, provided the Abuna desired, or would promise to be present; but that the Abuna was then at Debra Mariam, where they might go and know his mind.

The Abuna, who foresaw little good could be expected from such meetings, and knew how disagreeable they were to the king, absolutely refused to attend. On this they returned again to the king, desiring that, of his own mere prerogative, he would call their assembly without consulting further the Abuna. To this the king answered boldly, That he knew it was his right to call his subjects together, without any other reason for so doing but his will; yet, when the avowed cause of the meeting was to canvass matters of faith, he had made it a rule to himself, that the Abuna should always be present, or at least consent to the meeting. And with this answer he ordered them all to depart immediately.

Many of the principal people about the king advised him to put these turbulent people in irons, for daring to come into his presence without leave. But Yasous was contented to remand each to the place of his banishment from whence he came. He then removed from Dek to Ibaba, on the 10th of January, the journey being no more than two easy days; but, whether it was that the Galla did not intend another invasion, or whether they were overawed by the king’s preparations and presence, and did not think themselves safe even in their own country, none of them this year passed the Nile, or gave any uneasiness either to Gojam or Damot.

Though the whole nation believed that the king’s attention was entirely engaged in the various expeditions against the Galla and Shangalla, which he executed with so much diligence and success, yet there was still a principal object superior to all these, which remained a secret in his own breast, after the parties concerned had absolutely forgot it. All his campaigns against the Shangalla were only designed to lull asleep those he considered as his principal enemies, that he might make the blow he aimed at them more certain and effectual.

Six years had now passed since the Agows, and particularly the most powerful tribe of them, the Zeegam, had, with those of Damot and the Galla, conspired to put the crown upon the head of the rebel prince Isaac, who had lost his life in the engagement which followed on the other side of the Nile. It will be remembered also, that the country of the Agows is in general open, full of rich plains, abundantly watered by variety of fine streams; in other parts, gentle risings and descents, but without mountains, saving that, almost in every tribe, Nature had placed one rugged mountain to which these people retired upon the approach of their neighbouring enemies the Galla and Shangalla. This description does, in a more extensive manner, belong to the country of the Zeegam, the most powerful, rich, and trading tribe of the whole nation.

Not one single mountain, but a considerable ridge, divides the country nearly in the middle, the bottom of which, and nearly one-third up, is covered with brush-wood, full of stiff bamboos and canes, bearing prickly fruit, with aloes, acacia very thorny, and of several dwarf shrubby kinds, interspersed with the kantuffa[64], a beautiful thorn, which alone is considered, where it grows thick and in abundance, as a sufficient impediment for the march of a royal army. Through these are paths known only to the inhabitants themselves, which lead you to the middle of the mountain, where are large caves, probably begun by Nature, and afterwards enlarged by the industry of man. The mouths of these are covered with bushes, canes, and wild oats, that grow so as to conceal both man and horse, while the tops of these mountains are flat and well-watered, and there they sow their grain out of the reach of the enemy. Upon the first alarm they drive the cattle to the top, lodge their wives and children in the caves, and, when the enemy approaches near, they hide the cattle in the caves likewise, some of which cavities are so large as to hold 500 oxen, and all the people to which they belong. The men then go down to the lowest part of the mountain, from whose thickets they sally, upon every opportunity that presents itself, to attack the enemy whom they find marauding in the plains.

The king had often assembled his army at Ibaba, only four days march from Zeegam. He had done more; he had passed below the country, and returned by the other side of it, in his attack upon Geesa and Wumbarea; but he had never committed any act of hostility, nor shewn himself discontented with them. To deceive them still farther, he ordered now his army to meet him at Esté in Begemder; and sent to Kasmati Claudius, governor of Tigré, to join him with all his forces as soon as he should hear he was arrived at Lama, a large plain before we descend the steep mountain of Lamalmon, which stands not far from the banks of the river Tacazzé. He privately gave orders also to Kasmati Claudius, Kasmati Dimmo Christos of Tigré, and to Adera and Quaquera Za Menfus Kedus, to inform themselves where the water lay below, and whether there was enough for his army in Betcoom, for so they call the territory of the eastern branch of Shangalla adjoining to Siré and Tigré. By this manœuvre the enemy was deceived, as the most intelligent thought he was to attack Lasta, and the others, that knew the secret of the water, were sure his march was against the Shangalla.

The king began his march from Ibaba, and crossed the Nile at the second cataract below Dara, where there is a bridge; and, entering Begemder, he joined his army at Esté, which was going in a route directly from Agow and Damot towards Lasta. But no sooner was he arrived at Esté, than, that very night, he suddenly turned back the way he came, and, marching through Maitsha, he crossed the Nile, for the second time, at Goutto, above the first cataract.

The morning of the 3d of May, the sixth day of forced marches, without having encamped the whole way, he entered Zeegam at the head of his army. He found the country in perfect security, both people and cattle below on the plains and in the villages; and having put all to the sword who first offered themselves, and the principal of the conspirators being taken prisoners, he sold their wives and children at a public auction for slaves to the highest bidder. He then took the principal men among them along with him for security for paying six years tribute which they were in arrears, fined them 6000 oxen, which he ordered to be delivered upon the spot; and then collecting his army, he sent to the chiefs of Damot to meet him before he entered their territory, and to bring security with them for the fine he intended to lay upon them, otherwise he would destroy their country with fire and sword; and he advanced the same day to Assoa, south of the sources of the Nile, divided only from Damot by the ridge of mountains of Amid Amid.

The people of Damot, inhabiting an open level country without defence, had no choice but to throw themselves on the king’s mercy, who fined them 500 ounces of gold and 100 oxen, and took the principal people with him in irons as hostages.

He then returned, leaving the sources of the Nile on his right, through Dengui, Fagitta, and Aroosi; crossed the river Kelti, having the Agow and Atchesser on his left, and returned to Gondar by Dingleber. He then gave 2000 cattle to the churches of Tecla Haimanout and Yasous, being neared the king’s palace, to the Itchegué Hannes, the judges and principal servants of his household, to all a share, without reserving one to himself. And the rains being now very constant, (for it was the 25th of June) he resolved to continue the rest of the winter in Gondar to regulate the affairs of the church.

This year the king resumed his expedition against the Shangalla, towards which he had taken several preparatory steps, while he was projecting the surprise of the Zeegam. These are the Troglodytes on the eastern part of Abyssinia, towards the Red Sea, south of Walkayt, Siré, Tigré, and Baharnagash, till they are there cut off by the mountains of the Habab. These, the most powerful of all their tribes, are comprehended under the general name of _Dobenah_; the tribe Baasa, which we have already spoken of as occupying the banks of the Tacazzé, are the only partners they have in the peninsula formed by that river and the Mareb. Their country and manner of life have been already abundantly described. It is all called Kolla, in opposition to Daga, which is the general name of the mountainous parts of Abyssinia.

The king, being informed by Kasmati Claudius that there was water in great plenty at Betcoom, marched from Gondar the 29th of October to Deba, thence to Kossoguè, after to Tamama. He then turned to the left to a village called Sidrè, nearer to the Shangalla. From this station he forbade the lighting fires in the camp, and took the road leading to the Mareb; then turning to the left, the 1st of December he surprised a village called Kunya. The king was the first who began the attack, and was in great danger, as Mazmur, captain of his guard, was killed by a lance at his side. But the soldiers rushing in upon sight of the king’s situation, who had already slain two with his own hand, the village was carried, and the inhabitants put to the sword, refusing all to fly, and fighting obstinately to the last gasp.

From Kunya the king proceeded rapidly to Tzaada Amba[65], the largest and most powerful settlement of these savages. They have no water but what they get from the river Mareb, which, as I have elsewhere observed, rises above Dobarwa, and, after making the circle of that town, loses itself soon after in the sand for a space, then appears again, and, after a short course, hides itself a second time to the N. E. near the Taka, whose wells it supplies with fresh water. But in the rainy months it runs with a full-stream, in a wide and deep bed, and unites itself to the Tacazzé, with it making the northmost point of the ancient island of Meroë.

The king met the same success at Tzaada Amba that he had before experienced at Kunya, at which last village he passed the feast of the epiphany and benediction of the waters; a ceremony annually observed both by the Greek and Abyssinian church, the intent of which has been strangely mistaken by foreigners.

From Kunya, his head-quarters, Yasous attacked the several nations of which this is, as it were, the capital, Zacoba, Fadè, Qualquou, and Sahalé, and he returned again to Tzaada Amba, resolving to complete their destruction. The remains of these miserable people, finding resistance vain, had hid themselves in inaccessible caves in the mountains, and the thickest parts of the woods, where they lay perfectly concealed in the day-time, and only stole out when thirst obliged them at night. The king, who knew this, and that they had no other water but what they brought from the Mareb, formed a strong line of troops along the banks of that river, till the greatest part of the Shangalla of Tzaada Amba died with thirst, or were taken or slain by the army.

His next enterprize was to attempt Betcoom, a large habitation of Shangalla east of the Mareb, whose number, strength, and reputation for courage, had hitherto prevented the Abyssinians from molesting them, never having touched, unless the farthest skirts of their country. The names of their tribes inhabiting Betcoom are, Baigada, Dadé, Ketfè, Kicklada, Moleraga, Megaerbé, Gana, Selé, Hamta, Shalada, Elmsi, and Lentè. The small river of Lidda falling from a high precipice, when swelled with the winter rains, hollows out deep and large reservoirs below, which it leaves full of water when the rains cease, so that these people are here as well supplied with water as those that dwell on the large rivers the Mareb and Tacazzé. This was a circumstance unknown, till this sagacious and provident king ordered the place to be reconnoitred by Kasmati Claudius, then marched and encamped on the river Lidda, which, after a short but violent course, falls into the Mareb.

The Shangalla of Betcoom did nothing worthy of their reputation or numbers. They had already procured intelligence of the fate of great part of their nation, and had dispersed themselves in unknown and desolate places. The king, however, made a considerable number of slaves of the younger sort, and killed as many of the rest as fell into his hands.

Leaving Betcoom, the army proceeded still eastward; passed through the mountains of the Habab, into the low level country which runs parallel to the Red Sea, at the base of these mountains, where he spent several days hunting the elephant, some of which he slew with his own hand, and turned then to the left to Amba Tchou[66] and Taka.

The Taka are a nation of Shepherds living near the extremity of the rains. They are not Arabs, but live in villages, and were part formerly of the Bagla, or Habab; they speak the language of Tigré, and are now reputed part of the kingdom of Sennaar.

While the king was at Taka, he received the disagreeable news, that, after he had left the Shangalla on the Mareb, Mustapha Gibberti, a Mahometan soldier in the service of Kasmati Fasa Christos of Dedgin, had, with a small number of men, ventured down, thinking that he should surprise the Shangalla of Tzaada Amba, before they recovered from their late misfortune. This Mustapha had slain two or three Shangalla with fire-arms; and at first they stood aloof as fearing the king. But finding soon that it was no part of his army, and only a small body of adventurers, the Shangalla ‘now collected in numbers, surrounded Mustapha and his party, whom they cut off to a man; and, pursuing their advantage, they entered and took Dedgin, wounded Kasmati Fasa Christos, and put the inhabitants of the town to the sword’.

News of this misfortune were carried speedily to Kasmati Claudius, governor of Tigré: Cassem, a Mahometan, led the Gibbertis, the people of that religion in the province; and, as he was an advanced party, came speedily to blows with the Shangalla, and was closely engaged, with great appearance of success, when Claudius came up with an army that would soon have put an end to the contest. But no sooner was his army engaged with the Shangalla, than a panic seized him, and he sounded a retreat; which, in an instant, became a most shameful flight. Cassem and his gibbertis fell, fighting to the last man in the middle of their enemies. The Shangalla followed their advantage, and great part of the Abyssinian army perished in the flight; Claudius, tho’ he escaped, left his standard, kettle-drums, and his whole province in possession of the enemy.

The king, upon hearing this, returned hastily into Siré; and his presence established order and tranquillity in that province, already half abandoned for fear of the Shangalla. From Siré the king proceeded to Axum, where he celebrated his victories over the Shangalla, by several days of feasting and thanksgiving.

In the midst of this rejoicing, news were brought that Murat, a servant of the king, whom he had dispatched to India with merchandise, to bring such commissions as he stood in need of, was arrived at Masuah, where Musa the Naybe, or Turkish governor of the island, had detained him, and seized his goods, under some vexatious pretences. There is not indeed a more merciless, thievish set of miscreants, than in that government of Masuah. But the king knew too well the few resources that island had, to be long in applying a remedy, without moving from Axum; after being fully informed of the affair, in all its circumstances, by Murat, he sent to Abba Saluce, Guebra Christos, and Zarabrook of Hamazen, the governors of the districts, that as it were surround Masuah, prohibiting all, upon pain of death, to suffer any provisions to be carried by any person whatever into the island of Masuah.

A severe famine instantly followed, which was to terminate in certain death, before any relief could come to them, unless from Abyssinia. The Naybe Musa, therefore, found into what a terrible scrape he had got; but hunger did not leave him a moment to deliberate. No third way remained, but either he must see the king, or die; and without hesitation he chose the former. He, therefore, set out for Axum, bringing with him Murat and all the merchandises he had seized, as also several very considerable presents for Yasous himself, who accepted them, received his submission, and ordered the communication with Abyssinia to be open as before. This done, he dismissed the Naybe, who returned to Masuah in peace.

The next affair that came before the king was that of Kasmati Claudius, (governor of Tigré) who was accused and found guilty of having fled while the battle with the Shangalla was yet undecided, leaving his standard and kettle-drums in the power of the enemy. Besides his present misbehaviour, strong prejudice existed against him, drawn from his former character; for it was averred, from very credible authority, that on one occasion, upon a very slender appearance of sedition, he ordered his troops to fire upon several priests of Axum, some of whom were killed on the spot. Besides which, in the reign of Hatzè Hannes, he was found guilty of capital crimes committed at Emfras, condemned to die, and was already hanging upon the tree, when a very seasonable reprieve arrived from the king, and he was thereupon cut down whilst yet alive. Yasous contented himself with depriving him of his employment, and afterwards sending him to perpetual banishment.

The next brought to their trial were Za Woldo, and Adera and his sons. These last were very near relations to the king, for they were sons of Ozoro Keduset Christos, daughter of Facilidas. They were accused of having deserted their country and left it waste to be over-run by wild beasts, and a rendezvous for the Shangalla, who thence extended their incursions as far as Waldubba. Of this there was ample proof against them, and they were therefore sentenced to die, but the king commuted their punishment into that of being imprisoned for life in a cave in the island of Dek.

As for the province of Siré itself, he declared all the inhabitants and nobility, degraded from their rank, and all lands, whether feus from the king, or held by any other tenure, were confiscated, resumed by, and re-united to the crown. He then reduced the whole province from a royal government to a private one, and annexed it to the province of Tigré, whose governor was to place over it a shum, or petty officer, without any ensigns of power. And, last of all, he gave the government of Tigré to the Ras Feres, or master of the horse, in room of Kasmati Claudius degraded and banished.

The many striking examples which the king had lately given, one close upon the other, of his own personal bravery, his impartial justice, his secrecy in his expeditions, and the certain vengeance that followed where it was deserved, his punishment of the Zeegam, his expedition against the Shangalla, his affair with the Naybe Musa, and his behaviour to the cowardly Claudius and dastardly nobility of Siré, fully convinced his subjects of all degrees, that neither family, nor being related to the crown, nor the strength of their country, nor length of time since they offended, nor indeed any thing but a return to and continuance in their duty, could give them security under such a prince. Thus ended the campaign of the Dobenah, spoke of to this day in Abyssinia as the greatest warlike atchievement of any of their kings. Twenty-six thousand men are said to have perished by thirst when the king took possession of the water at Tzaada Amba. And yet, notwithstanding the small-pox which, in some places, exterminated whole tribes, the Dobenah have not lost an inch of territory, but seem rather to be gaining upon Siré.

Yasous arrived at Dancaz on the 8th of March 1692, having dismissed his army as he passed Gondar. From Dancaz he went to Lasta, and after a short stay there, came to Arringo in Begemder. At this place the king received accounts that far exceeded his expectations, and gratified his warmest wishes. He had long endeavoured to gain a party among the Galla to divide them; and, though no marks of success had yet followed, he still had continued to use his endeavours.

On his arrival at Arringo, he was met by a chief of the southern Galla, called Kal-kend, who brought him advice that, while he was busy with the Shangalla, an irruption had been made into Amhara by the Galla tribes of Liban and Toluma; that they, the king’s friends, had come up with them at Halka, fought with them, and beat them, and freed Amhara entirely from all apprehension. The king, exceedingly rejoiced to see his most inveterate enemies become the defenders of his country, ordered the governor of Amhara to pay the Kal-kend 500 webs of cotton-cloth, 500 loads of corn, and escort both the men and the present till they were safely delivered in their own country.

The 30th of June the king arrived at Gondar from Arringo, and immediately summoned an assembly of the clergy to meet and receive a letter from the patriarch of Alexandria, brought by Abba Masmur of Agde, and Abba Dioscuros of Maguena, who were formerly sent to Egypt to ask the patriarch why he displaced Abuna Christodulus, and appointed Abba Sanuda in his room, and desiring that Abba Marcus should be made Abuna, and Sanuda deposed. The clergy met very punctually, and the patriarch’s letter was produced in the assembly, the seal examined, and declared to be the patriarch’s, and unbroken. The letter being opened by the king’s order, it contained the patriarch’s mandate to depose Abba Sanuda, and to put Marcus Abuna in his place, which was immediately done by command of the king.

While Yasous was thus busied in directing the affairs of his kingdom with great wisdom and success, both in church and state, a matter was in agitation, unknown to him, at a distance from his dominions, which had a tendency to throw them again into confusion.

Towards the end of the last century, there was settled at Cairo a number of Italian missionaries of the reformed Order of St Francis, who, though they lived in the same convent, and were maintained at the expence of the fathers of the Holy Land, yet did they still pretend to be independent of the guardian of Jerusalem, the superior of these latter.

The expence of their maintenance, joined with their pretensions to independence, gave great offence to those religious of the Holy Land, who thereupon carried their complaints to Rome, offering to be at the whole charge of the mission of Egypt, and to furnish from their own society subjects capable of attending to, and extending the Christian faith. This offer met with the desired success at Rome. The mission of Egypt, to the exclusion of every other Order, was given to the fathers of Jerusalem, or the Holy Land, whom we shall henceforth call Capuchin friars. These capuchins lost no time, but immediately dismissed the reformed Franciscans, whom we shall hereafter distinguish by the name of Franciscans, suffering only two of that Order to remain at Cairo.

The Franciscans, thus banished, returned all to Rome, and there, for several years together, openly defended their own cause, insisting upon the justice of their being replaced in the exercise of their ancient functions. This, however, they found absolutely impossible. They were a poor Order, and the interest of the capuchins had stopped every avenue of the sacred college against them. Finding, therefore, that fair and direct means could not accomplish their ends, they had recourse to others not so commendable, and by these they succeeded, and obtained their purpose. They pretended that, when the Jesuits were chased out of Abyssinia, a great number of Catholics, avoiding the persecution, had fled into the neighbouring countries of Sennaar and Nubia; that they still remained, most meritoriously preserving their faith amidst the very great hardships inflicted upon them by the infidels; but that, under these hardships, they must soon turn Mahometans, unless spiritual assistance was speedily sent them.

This representation, as totally void of truth as ever fable was, was confirmed by the two Franciscans, who still remained at Cairo by permission of the capuchins, or fathers of the Holy Land; and, when afterwards published at Rome, it excited the zeal of every bigot in Italy. All interested themselves in behalf of these imaginary Christians of Nubia; and pope Innocent XII. was so convinced of the truth of the story, as to establish a considerable fund to support the expence of this, now called the Ethiopic mission, the sole conduct of which remains still with the reformed Franciscans.

To take care of these fugitive Christians of Nubia, though it was the principal, yet it was not the only charge committed to the fathers of his mission. They were to penetrate into Abyssinia, and keep the seeds of the Romish faith alive there until a proper time should present itself for converting the whole kingdom.

In order to this, a large convent was bought for them at Achmim, the ancient Panopolis in Upper Egypt, that here they might be able to afford a refreshment to such of their brethren as should return weary and exhausted by their preaching among the Nubian confessors; and, for further assistance, they had permission to settle two of their Order at Cairo, independent of the fathers of the Holy Land, notwithstanding the former exclusion.

Such is the state of this mission at the present time. No Nubian Christians ever existed at the time of their establishment, nor is there one in being at this day. But if their proselytes have not increased, their convents have. Achmim, Furshout, Badjoura, and Negadè are all religious houses belonging to this mission, although I never yet was able to learn, that either Heretic, or Pagan, or Mahometan, was so converted as to die in the Christian faith at any one of these places; nor have they been much troubled with relieving their brethren, worn out with the toils of Abyssinian journies, none of them, as far as I know, having ever made one step towards that country; nor is this indeed to be regretted by the republic of letters, because, besides a poor stock of scholastic divinity, not one of them that I saw had either learning or abilities to be of the smallest use either in religion or discovery.

It was now the most brilliant period of the reign of Louis XIV. almost an Augustan age, and generally allowed so, both in France and among foreigners. Men of merit, of all countries and professions, felt the effects of the liberality of this great encourager of learning; public works were undertaken, and executed superior to the boasted ones of Greece or Rome, and a great number and variety of noble events constituted a magnificent history of his reign, in a series of medals. Religion alone had yet afforded no hint for these. His conduct in this matter, instead of that of a hero, shewed him to be a blind, bloody, merciless tyrant, madly throwing down in a moment, with one hand, what he had, with the assistance of great ministers, been an age in building with the other. The Jesuits, zealous for the honour of the king, their great protector, thought this a time to step in and wipe away the stain. With this view they set upon forwarding a scheme, which might have furnished a medal superior to all the rest, had its inscription been, “The Kings of Arabia and Saba shall bring gifts.”

Father Fleuriau, a friend of father de la Chaise, the king’s confessor, was employed to direct the consul of Cairo, that he should, in co-operation with the Jesuits privately, send a fit person into Abyssinia, who might inspire the king of that country with a desire of sending an embassy into France, and, upon the management of this political affair, they founded their hopes of getting themselves replaced in the mission they formerly enjoyed, and of again superseding their rivals the Franciscans, in directing all the measures to be taken for that country’s conversion. But this required the utmost delicacy, for it was well known, that the court of Rome was very much indisposed towards them, imputing to their haughtiness, implacability, and imprudence, the loss of Abyssinia. Their conduct in China, where they tolerated idolatrous rites to be blended with Christian worship, began also now to be known, and to give the greatest scandal to the whole church. It was, therefore, necessary to make the king declare first in their favour before they began to attempt to conciliate the pope.

Louis took upon him the protection of this mission with all the readiness the Jesuits desired; and the Jesuit Verseau was sent immediately to Rome, with strong letters to cardinal Jansen, protector of France, who introduced him to the pope.

Verseau knew well the consequence of the protection with which he was honoured. At his first audience he declared, in a very firm voice and manner, to the pope, that the king had resolved to take upon himself the conduct of the Ethiopic mission, and that he had cast his eyes upon them (the Jesuits) as the fittest persons to be entrusted with the care of it, for _reasons best known to himself_. The pope dissembled; he extolled, in the most magnificent terms, the king’s great zeal for the advancement of religion, approved of the choice he had made of the Jesuits, and praised their resolution as highly acceptable to him, immediately consenting that Verseau, and five other Jesuits, should without delay pass into Abyssinia.

But it very soon appeared, that, however this might be the language of the pope, nothing could be more remote from his intentions; for, without the knowledge of the Jesuits, or any way consulting them, he appointed the superior of the Franciscans to be his legate a latere to the king of Abyssinia, and provided him with presents to that prince, and the chief noblemen of his court.

Some time afterwards, when, to prevent strife or concurrence, the Jesuits applied to the pope to receive his directions which of the two should first attempt to enter Abyssinia, the Franciscans, or their own Order, the pope answered shortly, That it should be those who were most expert. Whether this apparent indisposition of his Holiness intimidated Verseau is not known; but, instead of going to Cairo, he went to Constantinople, thence to Syria, to a convent of his Order of which he was superior, and there he staid. So that the Ethiopic mission at Cairo remained in the hands of two persons of different Orders, the one Paschal, an Italian Franciscan friar, the other a Jesuit and Frenchman, whose name was Brevedent.

Brevedent was a person of the most distinguished piety and probity, zealous in promoting his religion, but neither imprudent nor rash in his demonstrations of it; affable in his carriage, chearful in his disposition, of the most profound humility and exemplary patience. Besides this, he was reputed a man of good taste and knowledge in profane learning, and, what crowned all, an excellent mathematician. He seems indeed to me to have been a copy of the famous Peter Paez, who first gave an appearance of stability to the Portuguese conversion of Abyssinia; like him he was a Jesuit, but of a better nation, and born in a better age.

I must here likewise take notice of what I have already hinted, that in Abyssinia the character of ambassador is not known. They have no treaties of peace or commerce with any nation in the world: But, for purposes already mentioned, factors are employed; and, Abyssinia being everywhere surrounded by Mahometans, these of course have the preference; and, as they carry letters from their masters, the custom of the East obliges them to accompany these with presents to the sovereigns of the respective kingdoms through which they pass, and this circumstance dignifies them with the title of ambassador in the several courts at which they have business. Such was Musa, a factor of the king, whom we have seen detained, and afterwards delivered by the Naybe of Masuah, not many years before, in this king’s reign; and such also was Hagi Ali, then upon his master’s business at Cairo, when M. de Maillet was consul there, and had received his instructions from father Fleuriau at Paris, to bring about this embassy from Abyssinia.

Besides his other business, Hagi Ali had orders to bring with him a physician, if possible, from Cairo; for Yasous and his eldest son were both of a scorbutic habit, which threatened to turn into a leprosy. Hagi Ali, in former voyages, had been acquainted with a capuchin friar Paschal; and, having received medicines from him before, he now applied to Paschal to return with him into Abyssinia, and undertake the cure of the king. Paschal very readily complied with this, upon condition that he should be allowed to take for his companion a monk of his own Order, friar Anthony; to which Hagi Ali readily consented, happy in being enabled to carry two physicians to his master instead of one.

The French consul was soon informed of this treaty with the friar Paschal; and, having very easy means to bring Hagi Ali to his house, he informed him, that neither Paschal nor Anthony were physicians, but that he himself had a man of his own nation, whose merit he extolled beyond any thing that had hitherto been said of Hippocrates or Galen. Hagi Ali very willingly accepted of the condition, and it was agreed that, as Verseau had not appeared, Brevedent above mentioned should attend the physician as his servant.

This physician was Charles Poncet, a Frenchman, settled in Cairo, who was (as Mr Maillet says) bred a chymist and apothecary, and, if so, was necessarily better skilled in the effects and nature of medicine than those are who call themselves physicians, and practise in the east. Nothing against his private character was intimated by the consul at this time; and, with all deference to better judgment, I must still think, that if Poncet did deserve the epithets of drunkard, liar, babbler, and thief, which Maillet abundantly bestows upon him towards the end of this adventure, the consul could not have chosen a more improper person as the representative of his master, nor a more probable one to make the design he had in hand miscarry; nor could he, in this case, ever vindicate the preventing Paschal’s journey, who must have been much fitter for all the employments intended than such a man as Poncet was, if one half is true of that which the consul said of him afterwards.

Maillet, having so far succeeded, prevailed upon one Ibrahim Hanna, a Syrian, to write five letters, according to his own ideas, in the Arabic language, one of which was to the king, the four others to the principal officers at the court of Abyssinia: doubting, however, whether Ibrahim’s expressions were equal to the sublimity of his sentiments, he directed him to submit the letters to the consideration of one Francis, a monk, capuchin, or friar of the Holy Land. Ibrahim knew not this capuchin; but he was intimate with another Francis of the reformed Franciscan Order, and to him by mistake he carried the letters.

These Franciscans were the very men from whom Mr de Maillet would have wished to conceal the sending Poncet with the Jesuit Brevedent; but the secret being now revealed, Ibrahim Hanna was discharged the French service for this mistake; and Hagi Ali departing immediately after with Poncet and Brevedent, no time remained for the Franciscans to take the steps they afterwards did to bring about the tragedy in the person of Poncet, which they completely effected in that of Mr Noir du Roule.

Mr Poncet, furnished with a chest of medicines at the expence of the factory, accompanied by father Brevedent, who, in quality of his servant, now took the name of Joseph, joined Hagi Ali, and the caravan destined in the first place, to Sennaar the capital of Nubia.

Poncet set out from Cairo on the 10th of June of the year 1698, and, fifteen days after, they came to Monfalout, a considerable town upon the banks of the Nile, the rendezvous of the caravan being at Ibnah, half a league above Monfalout. Here they tarried for above three months, waiting the coming of the merchants from the neighbouring towns.

In the afternoon of the 24th of September, they advanced above a league and a half distance, and took up their lodging at Elcantara, or the bridge, on the eastern bank of the Nile. A large calish, or cut, from the Nile stretches here to the east, and, at that season, was full of water, the inundation being at its height.

Poncet believes he was on the eastern banks of the Nile; but this is a mistake. Siout and Monfalout, the cities he speaks of, are both on the western banks of that river; nor had the caravan any thing to do with the eastern banks, when their course was for many days to the west, and to the southward of west. Nor was the bridge he passed a bridge over the Nile. There are no bridges upon that river from the Mediterranean till we arrive at the second cataract near the lake Tzana in Abyssinia. The amphitheatre and ruins he speaks of are the remains of the ancient city Isiu; and what he took for the Nile was a calish from the river to supply that city with water.

The 2d of October the caravan set out in earnest, and passed, as he says, into a frightful desert of sand, having first gone through a narrow passage, which he does not mention, amidst those barren, bare, and stony mountains which border the valley of Egypt on the west.

The 6th of October they came to El-Vah, a large village, or town, thick-planted with palm-trees, the Oasis Parva of the ancients, the last inhabited place to the west that is under the jurisdiction of Egypt. By softening the original name, Poncet calls this Helaoue, which, as he says, signifies _sweetness_. But surely this was never given it from the productions he mentions to abound there, _viz._ senna and coloquintida. The Arabs call El-Vah a shrub or tree, not unlike our hawthorn either in form or flower. It was of this wood, they say, Moses’s rod was made when he sweetened the waters of Marah. With a rod of this wood, too, Khalid Ibn el Waalid, the great destroyer of Christians, sweetened these waters at El-Vah, once very bitter, and gave it the name from this miracle. A number of very fine springs burst from the earth at El-Vah, which renders this small spot verdant and beautiful, though surrounded with dreary deserts on every quarter; it is situated like an island in the midst of the ocean.

The caravan rested four days at El-Vah to procure water and provisions for the continuation of the journey thro’ the desert. Poncet’s description of the unpleasantness of this, is perfectly exact, and without exaggeration. In two days they came to Cheb, where there is water, but strongly impregnated with alum, as the name itself signifies; and, three days after, they reached Selima, where they found the water good, rising from an excellent spring, which gives its name to a large desert extending westward forty-five days journey to Dar Fowr, Dar Selè, and Bagirma, three small principalities of Negroes that live within the reach of the tropical rains.

At Selima they provided water for five days; and, on the 26th of October, having turned their course a little to the eastward, came to Moscho, or Machou, a large village on the western banks of the Nile, which Poncet still mistakes for the eastern, and which is the only inhabited place since the leaving El-Vah, and the frontiers of the kingdom of Dongola, dependent upon that of Sennaar. The Nile here takes the farthest turn to the westward, and is rightly delineated in the French maps.

Poncet very rightly says, this is the beginning of the country of the Barabra, or Berberians, (I suppose it is a mistake of the printer when called in the narrative Barauras). The true signification of the term is _the land of the Shepherds_, a name more common and better known in the first dynasties of Egypt than in more modern histories. The Erbab (or governor) of this province received him hospitably, and kindly invited him to Argos, his place of residence, on the eastern or opposite side of the Nile, and entertained him there, upon hearing from Poncet that he was sent for by the king of Abyssinia.

After refreshing themselves eight days at Moscho, they left it on the 4th of November 1698, and arrived at Dongola on the 13th of the same month. The country which he passed along the Nile is very pleasant, and is described by him very properly. It does not owe its fertility to the overflowing of the Nile, the banks of that river being considerably too high. It is watered, however, by the industry of the inhabitants, who, by different machines, raise water from the stream.

We are not to attribute to Poncet, but to those who published, the story here put into father Brevedent’s mouth about the fugitive Christians in Nubia, which fable gave rise to the first institution of the Ethiopic mission. “It drew tears, says he, from the eyes of father Brevedent, my dear companion, when he reflected that it was not long since this was a Christian country; and that it had not lost the faith but only for want of some person who had zeal enough to consecrate himself to the instruction of this abandoned nation.” He adds, that upon their way they found a great number of hermitages and churches half ruined; a fiction derived from the same source.

Dongola was taken, and apostatized early, and the stones of hermitages and churches had long before this been carried off, and applied to the building of mosques. Father Brevedent, therefore, if he wept for any society of Christians at Dongola, must have wept for those that had perished there 500 years before.

Poncet was much caressed at Dongola for the cures he made there. The Mek, or king, of that city wished him much to stay and settle there; but desisted out of respect, when he heard he was going to the emperor of Ethiopia. Dongola, Poncet has placed rightly on the eastern bank of the Nile, about lat. 20° 22´.

The caravan departed from Dongola on the 6th of January 1699; four days after which they entered into the kingdom of Sennaar, where they met Erbab Ibrahim, brother of the prime minister, and were received civilly by him. He defrayed their expences also as far as Korti, where they arrived the 13th of January.

Our travellers from Korti were obliged to enter the great desert of Bahiouda, and cross it in a S. E. direction till they came to Derreira, where they rested two days, which, Poncet says, was done to avoid the Arabs upon the Nile. These Arabs are called Chaigie; they inhabit the banks of that river to the N. E. of Korti, and never pay the king his revenue without being compelled and very ill-treated.

The country about Derreira is called Belled Ullah, from the cause of its plenty rather than the plenty itself. This small district is upon the very edge of the tropical rains, which it enjoys in part; and, by that, is more fruitful than those countries which are watered only by the industry of man. The Arabs of these deserts figuratively call rain Rahamet Ullah, ‘the mercy of God’, and Belled Ullah, ‘the country which enjoys that mercy.’

Some days after the caravan came to Gerri. Poncet says, the use of this station was to examine caravans coming from the northward, whether they had the small-pox or not. This usage is now discontinued by the decay of trade. It must always have served little purpose, as the infection oftener comes in merchandise than by passengers. At Gerri great respect was shewn to Poncet, as going to Ethiopia.

I cannot conceive why Poncet says, that, to avoid the great windings of the Nile, he should have been obliged to travel to the north-east. This would have plainly carried him back to the desert of Bahiouda, and the Arabs: his course must have been S. W. to avoid the windings of the Nile, because he came to Herbagi, which he describes very properly as a delicious situation. The next day they came to Sennaar.

The reader, I hope, will easily perceive that my intention is not to criticise Mr Poncet’s journey. That has been done already so illiberally and unjustly that it has nearly brought it into disrepute and oblivion. My intention is to illustrate it; to examine the facts, the places, and distances it contains; to correct the mistakes where it has any, and restore it to the place it ought to hold in geography and discovery. It was the first intelligible itinerary made through these deserts; and I conceive it will be long before we have another; at any rate, to restore and establish the old one will, in all sensible minds, be the next thing to having made a second experiment.

He surely is in some degree of mistake about the situation of Sennaar when he says it is upon an eminence. It is on a plain close on the western banks of the Nile. A small error, too, has been made about its latitude. By an observation said to have been made by father Brevedent, the 21st of March 1699, he found the latitude of Sennaar to be 13° 4´ north. The French maps, the most correct we have in all that regards the east, place this capital of Nubia in lat. 15° and a few minutes. But the public may rest assured, that the correct latitude of Sennaar, by a mean of very small differences of near fifty observations, made with a three-feet brass quadrant, in the course of several months I staid in that town, is lat 13° 34´ 36´´ north.

What I have to say further concerning Sennaar will come more naturally in my own travels; and I shall only so far consider the rest of Poncet’s route, as to explain and clear it from mistakes, Sennaar being the only point in which our two tracts unite.

I shall beg the reader to remark, that, from the time of Poncet’s setting out of Egypt till his arrival at Sennaar, so far was he from being ill-looked upon, or any bad construction being put upon his errand, that he was, on the contrary, respected everywhere, as going to the king of Abyssinia. It never was then imagined he was to dry up the Nile, nor that he was a conjurer to change its course, nor that he was to teach the Abyssinians to cast cannon and make war, nor that he was loaded with immense sums of money. These were all _piæ fraudes_, lies invented by the priests and friars to incite these ignorant barbarians to a crime which, though it passed unrevenged, will justly make these brethren in iniquity the detestation of men of every religion in all ages.

Poncet left Sennaar the 12th of May 1699, and crossed the Nile at Basboch, about four miles above the town, where he stopped for three days. This he calls a fair village; but it is a very miserable one, consisting of scarce 100 huts, built of mud and reeds.

He departed the 15th in the evening, and travelled all the night as far as Bacras, and arrived the day after at Abec; then at Baha, a long day’s journey of about ten hours. He is mistaken, however, when he says Baha is situated upon the banks of the Nile, for it is upon a small river that runs into it. But, at the season he passed it, most of those rivers were dried up.

On the 19th he came to Dodar, a place as inconsiderable as Baha; then to Abra, a large village; then to Debarke and Enbulbul. On the 25th they came to Giesim. Giesim is a large village situated upon the banks of the Nile, in the middle of a forest of trees of a prodigious height and size, all of which are loaded with fruit or flowers, and crowded with paroquets, and variety of other birds, of a thousand different colours. They made a long stay at this place, not less than nineteen days.

In this interval, father Brevedent is said to have made an observation of the latitude of the place, which, if admitted, would throw all the geography of this journey into confusion. Poncet says, that Giesim is half-way between Sennaar and the frontiers of Ethiopia, and that a small brook, a little beyond Serké, is the boundary between those states. Now, from Sennaar to Giesim are nine stages, and one of them we may call a double one, but between Giesim and Serkè, only four; Giesim then cannot be half way between Sennaar and Serkè.--Again, the latitude of Sennaar is 13° 4´ north, according to Brevedent, or rather 13° 34´. Now, if the latitude of Giesim be 10°, then the distance between Sennaar and it must be about 250 miles which they had travelled in eight days, or more than thirty miles a-day, which, in that country, is absolutely impossible.

But what must make this evident is, that we know certainly that Gondar, the metropolis to which they were then going, is in lat. 12° 34´ north. Giesim then would be south of Gondar, and the caravan must have passed it when the observation was made. But they were not yet arrived at the confines of Sennaar, much less to the capital of Abyssinia, to which they were indeed advancing, but were still far to the northward of it. There is a mistake then in this observation which is very pardonable, Brevedent being then ill of a mortal dysentery, which terminated in death soon after. We shall, therefore, correct this error, making the latitude of Giesim 14° 12´ north, about 110 English miles from Sennaar, and 203 from Gondar.

The 11th of June they set out from Giesim for Deleb, then to Chow, and next to Abotkna. They rested all night, the 14th, in the delightful valley of Sonnone, and, two days after, they came to Serkè, a large town of trade, where there are many cotton weavers. Here ends the kingdom of Sennaar, the brook without this town being the boundary of the two states.

Arrived now in Abyssinia, they halted at Tambisso, a village which belongs to the Abuna; next at Abiad, a village upon the mountain. On the 23d they stopped in a valley full of canes and ebony-trees, where a lion carried away one of their camels. On the 24th they passed the Gandova, a large, violent, and dangerous river. The country being prodigiously woody, one of their beasts of carriage, straggling from the caravan, was bit on the hip by a bear, as Mr Poncet apprehends. But we are now in the country corresponding to that inhabited by the Shangalla, that is one of the hottest in the world, where the thermometer rises to 100° in the shade. Bears are not found in climates like this; and most assuredly there are none even in the higher and colder mountains above. Poncet does not say he saw the bear, but judged only by the bite, which might have been that of a lion, leopard, or many other animals, but more probably that of the hyæna.

The 27th they arrived at Girana, a village on the top of a mountain. Here they left their camels, and began to ascend from the Kolla into the more temperate climate in the mountains of Abyssinia. From Girana they came to Barangoa, and the next day to Tchelga, where anciently was the customhouse of Sennaar while peace and commerce subsisted between the two kingdoms. The 3d of July they arrived at Barcos, or Bartcho, about half a day’s journey from Gondar; and on the 9th of August father Brevedent died. Poncet was himself detained by indisposition at this village of Barcos till the 21st of July, on which day he set out for Gondar and arrived in the evening, where he succeeded to his wishes, performing a complete cure upon his royal patient in a very short time; and so fulfilled this part of his mission as perfectly as the ablest physician could have done.

As for the other part with which he was charged, I doubt very much if it was in his power to perform it in another manner than he did. It required a mind full of ignorance and presumption, such as was that of Mr de Maillet and all the missionaries at the head of whom he was, to believe that it was possible for a private man, such as Poncet, without language, without funds, without presents, or without power or possibility of giving them any sort of protection in the way, to prevail upon 26 or 28 persons, on the word of an adventurer only, to attempt the traversing countries where they ran a very great risk of falling into slavery--to do what? why, to go to France, a nation of Franks whose very name they abhorred, that they might be instructed in a religion they equally abhorred, to meet with certain death if ever they returned to their own country; and, unless they did return, they were of no sort of utility whatever.

M. de Maillet should have informed himself well in the beginning, if it was possible that the nobility in Abyssinia could be so contemptible as to suffer twelve of their children to go to countries unknown, upon the word of a stranger, at least of such a doubtful character as Poncet. I say doubtful, because, if he was such a man as M. de Maillet represents him, a drunkard, a liar, a thief, a man without religion, a perpetual talker, and a superficial practitioner of what he called his own trade, surely the Abyssinians must have been very fond of emigration, to have left their homes under the care of such a patron as this. When did M. de Maillet ever hear of an Abyssinian who was willing to leave his own country and travel to Cairo, unless the very few priests who go for duty’s sake, for penances or vows, to Jerusalem? When did he ever hear of an Abyssinian layman, noble, or plebeian, attending even the Abuna though the first dignitary of the church? We shall see presently a poor slave, a Christian Abyssinian boy, immediately under the protection of M. de Maillet, and going directly from him into the presence of his king, taken forcibly from the chancellor of the nation[67], and made a Mahometan before their eyes.

The Abyssinian embassy then demanded from France, and recommended to M. de Maillet, was a presumptuous, vain, impracticable chimera, which must have ended in disappointment, and which never could have closed more innocently than it did.

I shall pass over all that happened during Poncet’s stay at Gondar, as he did not understand the language, and must therefore have been very liable to mistake. But as for what he says of armies of 300,000 men; of the king’s dress at his audience; of his mourning in purple; of the quantity of jewels he had, and wore; of his having but one wife; and of large stone-crosses being erected on the corners of the palace at Gondar; these, and several other things, seem to me to have been superadded afterwards. Nor do I think what is said of the churches and Christians remaining in the kingdom of Dongola, nor the monstrous lie about the golden rod suspended in the air in the convent of Bisan[68], is at all the narrative of Poncet, but of some fanatic, lying friar, into whose possession Poncet’s manuscript might have fallen. The journey itself, such as I have restored it, is certainly genuine; and, as I believe it describes the best and safest way into Abyssinia, I have rectified some of the few errors it had, and now recommend it to all future travellers, and to the public.

This is to be understood of his travels to Abyssinia, his journey in returning being much more inaccurate and incomplete, the reason of which we have in his own words: “I have not, says he, exactly noted down the places through which we passed, the great weakness I then lay under not permitting me to write as I could have wished.” I shall, therefore, say little upon his return, as the deficiency will be carefully supplied by the history of my own journey from Masuah, the road by which he left the country being very nearly the same as that by which I entered.

It was on the 2d of May of the year 1700 that Poncet left Gondar and took his journey to the town of Emfras. Here there is a mistake in the very beginning. Emfras[69], at which place I staid for several weeks, is in lat. 12° 12´ 38´´, and long. 37° 38´ 30´´, consequently about 22 miles from Gondar, almost under the same meridian, or south from it; so that, as he was going to the east, and northward of east, this must have been so many miles out of his way; for, going towards Masuah, his first station must have been upon the river Angrab.

The same may be said of his next to Coga. It was a royal residence indeed, but very much out of his way. He has forgot likewise, when he says, that, in the way from Gondar to Emfras, you must go over a very high mountain. The way from Gondar to Emfras is the beaten way to Begemder, Foggora, and Dara, and so on to the second cataract of the Nile. It is on that plain the armies were encamped before the battle of Serbraxos[70], whence the road passes by Correva, which is indeed upon a rising ground, sloping gently to the lake Tzana, but is not either mountain or hill.

Seven or eight days are a space of time just enough for the passing through Woggora, where he justly remarks the heats are not so excessive as in the places he came from. He takes no notice of the passage of Lamalmon, which ought to have been very sensible to a man in a decayed state of health, the less so as he was only descending it. Every thing which relates to the passage of the Tacazzé is just and proper, only he calls the river itself the Tekesel, instead of the true name, the _Tacazzé_. It was the Siris of the ancients; and it is doing justice to both countries, when he compares the province of Siré with the most delicious parts of his own country of France. This province is that also where he might very probably receive the young elephant, which he says awaited him there as a present to the king of France, and which died a few days after.

He passed afterwards to Adowa. It is the capital of Tigré, is still the seat of its governor, and was that of Ras Michael in my time. All that he says of the intermediate country and its productions, shew plainly that his work is genuine, and his remarks to be those of an eye-witness.

From this province of Tigré he enters the country of the Baharnagash, and arrives at Dobarwa, which he erroneously calls Duvarna, and says it is the capital of the province of Tigré, whereas it is that of the Baharnagash. Isaac Baharnagash, when in rebellion against his sovereign, surrendered this town to the Turks in the year 1558, as may be seen at large in my history of the transactions of those times.

As the authenticity of this journey, and the reality of Poncet’s having been in Abyssinia, has been questioned by a set of vain, ignorant, fanatic people, and that from malice only, not from spirit of investigation, of which they were incapable, I have examined every part of it, and compared it with what I myself saw, and shall now give one other instance to prove it genuine, from an observation Poncet has made, and which has escaped all the missionaries, though it was entire and visible in my time.

Among the ruins of Axum[71] there is a very high obelisk, flat on both sides, and fronting the south. It has upon it no hieroglyphic, but several decorations, or ornaments, the fancy of the architect. Upon a large block of granite, into which the bottom of it is fixed, and which stands before it like a table, is the figure of a Greek patera, and on one side of the obelisk, fronting the south, is the representation of a wooden door, lock, and a latch to it, which first seems designed to draw back and then lift up, exactly in the manner those kind of locks are fashioned in Egypt at this very day. Poncet observed very justly, there are no such locks made use of in Abyssinia, and wonders how they should have represented a thing they had never seen, and, having done so, remained still incapable to make or use it. Poncet was no man of reading out of his own profession; he nowhere pretends it; he recorded this fact because he saw it, as a traveller should do, and left others to give the reason which he could not. Poncet calls this place Heleni, from a small village of that name in the neighbourhood. Had he been a scholar he would have known that the ruins he was observing were those of the city of Axum, the ancient metropolis of this part of Ethiopia.

Ptolemy Evergetes, the third Grecian king of Egypt, conquered this city and the neighbouring kingdom; resided some time there; and, being absolutely ignorant of hieroglyphics, then long disused, he left the obelisk he had erected for ascertaining his latitudes ornamented with figures of his own choosing, and the inventions of his subjects the Egyptians, and particularly the door for a convenience of private life, to be imitated by his new-acquired subjects the Ethiopians, to whom it had hitherto been unknown.

From Dobarwa he arrived at Arcouva, which, he says, geographers miscall Arequies. M. Poncet might have spared this criticism upon geographers till he himself had been better informed, for both are equally miscalled, whether Arcouva or Arequies. The true and only name of the place, known either to Mahometans or Christians, is Arkeeko, as the island to which he passed, crossing an arm of the sea, is called Masuah, not Messoua, as he everywhere spells it.

From Masuah, Poncet crossed the Red Sea to Jidda, passing the island Dahalac and Kotumbal, a high rock, the name of which is not known to many navigators.

Had old Murat, Musa, and Hagi Ali, happened at that time to have been upon some mercantile errand to Cairo, there is no doubt but they would have been preferred and become ambassadors to France. They would have gone there, perplexed the minister and the consul with a thousand lies and contrivances, which the French never would have been able to unravel; they would have promised every thing; obtained from the king some considerable sum of money, on which they would have undertaken to send the embassy in any form that was prescribed, and, after their return home, never been heard of more. But those worthies were, probably, all employed at this time; therefore the only thing Poncet could do was to bring Murat, since he was to procure at all events an ambassador.

He had been a cook to a French merchant at Aleppo; was a maker of brandy at Masuah; and probably his uncle old Murat’s servant at the time. But he was not the worse ambassador for this. Old Murat, Hagi Ali, and Musa, had perhaps been also cooks and servants in their time. Prudence, sobriety, and good conduct, skill in languages, and acquaintance, with countries recommended them afterwards to higher trusts. Old Murat probably meant that his nephew should begin his apprenticeship with that embassy to France; and M. Poncet, to increase his consequence, and fulfil the commission the consul gave him, allowed him to invent all the rest.

Poncet, from Jidda, went to Tor, and thence to Mount Sinai, where, after some stay, being overtaken by Murat, they both made their entry into Cairo.

M. de Maillet, the consul, was an old Norman gentleman, exceedingly fond of nobility, consequently very haughty and overbearing to those he reckoned his inferiors, among which he accounted those of his own nation established at Cairo, though a very amiable and valuable set of men. He was exceedingly testy, choleric, obstinate, and covetous, though sagacious enough in every thing concerning his own interest. He lived for the most part in his closet, seldom went out of his house, and, as far as I could learn, never out of the city. There, however, he wrote a description of all Egypt, which since has had a considerable degree of reputation[72].

Maillet had received advice of the miserable state of this embassy from Jidda, that the Sherriffe of Mecca had taken from Poncet, by force, two female Abyssinian slaves, and that the elephant was dead; which particulars being written to France, he was advised in a letter from father Fleuriau by no means to promote any embassy to the court of Versailles; that a proper place for it was Rome; but that in France they looked upon it in the same light as they did upon an embassy from Algiers or Tunis, which did no honour to those who sent it, and as little to those that received it; this, however, was a new light.

M. de Maillet, by this letter, becoming master of the ambassador’s destiny, began first to quarrel with him upon etiquette, or who should pay the first visit; and, after a variety of ill-usage, insisted upon seeing his dispatches. This Murat refused to permit, upon which the consul sent privately to the basha, desiring him to take the dispatches or letters from Murat, sending him at the same time a considerable present.

The basha on this did not fail to extort a letter from Murat by threats of death. He then opened it. It was in Arabic, in very general and indifferent terms, probably the performance of some Moor at Masuah, written at Murat’s instance. And well was it for all concerned that it was so; for had the letter been a genuine Abyssinian letter, like those of the empress Helena and king David III. proposing the destruction of Mecca, Medina, and the Turkish ships on the Red Sea, the whole French nation at Cairo would have been massacred, and the consul and ambassador probably impaled.

The Jesuits, ignorant of this manœvure of M. de Maillet, but alarmed and scandalized at this breach of the law of nations, for such the basha’s having opened a letter, addressed to the king of France, was justly considered, complained to M. Feriol the French ambassador at Constantinople, who thereupon sent a capigi from the port, to inquire of the basha what he meant by thus violating the law of nations, and affronting a friendly power of such consequence as France.

These capigis are very unwelcome guests to people in office to whom they are sent. They are always paid by those they are sent to. Besides this, the report they carry back very often costs that person his life. The basha, accused by the capigi at the instance of the French ambassador at Constantinople, answered like an innocent man, That he had done it by desire of the French consul, from a wish to serve him and the nation, otherwise he should never have meddled in the matter. The consequence was, M. de Maillet was obliged to pay the basha the expence of the capigi; and, having some time afterwards brought it in account with the merchants, the French nation at Cairo, by deliberation of the 6th of July of the year 1702, refused to pay 1515 livres, the demand of the basha, and 518 livres for those of his officers.

The consul, however, had gained a complete victory over Murat, and thereupon determined to send Monhenaut, chancellor of France at Cairo, with letters, which, though written and invented by himself, he pretended to be translations from the Ethiopian original.

But father Verseau, the Jesuit, now returned to Cairo, who had entered into a great distrust of the consul since the discovery of his intrigue with the basha about Murat’s letter, resolved to be of the party. Poncet, who was likewise on bad terms with the consul, neither inclined to lose the merits of his travels into Abyssinia, nor trust the recital of it to Monhenaut, or to the manner in which it might be represented in the consul’s letters. These three, Monhenaut, Poncet, and Verseau, set out therefore for Paris with very different views and designs. They embarked at Bulac, the shipping-place of Cairo upon the Nile, taking with them the ears of the dead elephant.

The remaining part of the present brought for the king of France by this illustrious embassy, was an Abyssinian boy, a slave bought by Murat, and who had been hid from the search of the Sherriffe, when he forcibly took from him the two Abyssinian girls, part of the intended present also. This boy no sooner embarked on board the vessel at Bulac than a great tumult arose. The janizaries took the boy out of the vessel by force, and delivered him to Mustapha Cazdagli, their kaya; nor could all the interest of M. de Maillet and the French nation, or all the manœuvres of the Jesuits, ever recover him.

As for Monhenaut, Poncet, and Verseau, his protectors, they were obliged to hide themselves from the violence of the mob, nor dared they again to appear till the vessel sailed. And happy was it for them that this fell out at Cairo, for, had they offered to embark him at Alexandria, in all probability it would have cost all of them their lives.

I must beg leave here to suggest to the reader, how dangerous, as well as how absurd, was the plan of this embassy. It was to consist of twenty-eight Abyssinians, twelve of whom were to be sons of noble families, all to be embarked to France. What a pleasant day would the embarkation have been to M. de Maillet! What an honourable appearance for his king, in the eyes of other Christian princes, to have seen twenty-eight Christians under his immediate protection, twelve of whom we might say were princes, (as all the nobility in Abyssinia are directly of the family of the king), from motives of vanity only, by the pride of the Jesuits, and the ignorance of the consul, hurried in one day into apostacy and slavery! Whatever Maillet thought of Poncet’s conduct, his bringing Murat, and him only, cook as he was, was the very luckiest accident of his life.

I know French flatterers will say this would not have happened, or, if it had, a vengeance would have followed, worthy the occasion and the resentment of so great a king, and would have prevented all such violations of the law of nations for the future. To this I answer, The mischief would have been irreparable, and the revenge taken, however complete, would not have restored them their religion, and, without their religion, they themselves would not have returned into their own country, but would have remained necessary sacrifices, which the pride and rashness of the Jesuits had made to the faith of Mahomet.

Besides, where is the threatened revenge for the assassination of M. du Roule, then actual ambassador from the king of France, of which I am now to speak? Was not the law of nations violated in the strongest manner possible by his murder, and without the smallest provocation? What vengeance was taken for this?--Just the same as would have been for the other injury; for the Jesuits and consul would have concealed the one, as tenderness for the Franciscan Friars had made them cover the other, left their abominable wickedness should be exposed. If the court of France did not, their consul in Cairo should have known what the consequence would be of decoying twenty-eight Abyssinians from their own country, to be perverted from their own religion, and remain slaves and Mahometans at Cairo, a nuisance to all European nations established there.

Upon the arrival of the triumvirate at Paris, Monhenaut immediately repaired to the minister; Verseau was introduced to the king, and Poncet, soon after, had the same honour. He was then led as a kind of show, through all Paris, cloathed in the Abyssinian dress, and decorated with his gold chain. But while he was vainly amusing himself with this silly pageantry, the consul’s letters, and the comments made upon them by Monhenaut, went directly to destroy the credit of his ever having been in Abyssinia, and of the reality of Murat’s embassy.

The Franciscan friars, authors of the murder of M. du Roule, enemies to the mission, as being the work of the Jesuits; M. Piques, member of the Sorbonne, a body never much distinguished for promoting discoveries, or encouraging liberal and free inquiry; Abbé Renaudot, M. le Grande, and some ancient linguists, who, with great difficulty, by the industry of M. Ludolf, had attained to a very superficial knowledge of the Abyssinian tongue, all fell furiously upon Poncet’s narrative of his journey. One found fault with the account he gave of the religion of the country, because it was not so conformable to the rites of the church of Rome, as they had from their own imagination and prejudice, and for their own ends conceived it to be. Others attacked the truth of the travels, from improbabilities found, or supposed to be found, in the description of the countries through which he had passed; while others discovered the forgery of his letters, by faults found in the orthography of that language, not one book of which, at that day, they had ever seen.

All these empty criticisms have been kept alive by the merit of the book, by this alone they have any further chance of reaching posterity; while, by all candid readers, this itinerary, short and incomplete as it is, will not fail to be received as a valuable acquisition to the geography of these unknown countries of which it treats.

I think it but a piece of duty to the memory of a fellow-traveller, to the lovers of truth and the public in general, to state the principal objections upon which this outcry against Poncet was raised; that, by the answers they admit of, the world may judge whether they are or are not founded in candour, and that before they are utterly swallowed up in oblivion.

The first is, that of the learned Renaudot, who says he does not conceive how an Ethiopian could be called by the name of Murat. To this I answer, Poncet, de Maillet, and the Turkish Basha, say Murat was an Armenian, a hundred times over; but M. Renaudot, upon his own authority, makes him an Ethiopian, and then lays the blame upon others, who are not so ignorant as himself.

Secondly, Poncet asserts Gondar was the capital of Ethiopia; whereas the Jesuits have made no mention of it, and this is supposed a strong proof of Poncet’s forgery. I answer, The Jesuits were banished in the end of Socinios’s reign, and the beginning of that of his son Facilidas, that is about the year 1632; they were finally extirpated in the end of this last prince’s reign, that is before the year 1666, by his ordering the last Jesuit Bernard Nogueyra, to be publicly hanged. Now Gondar was not built till the end of the reign of Hannes I. who was grandson to Socinios, that is about the year 1680. Unless, then, these holy Jesuits, who, if we believe the missionaries, had all of them a sight into futurity before their martyrdom, had, from these their _last visions_, described Gondar as capital of Abyssinia, it does not occur to me how they should be historians of a fact that had not existence till 50 years after they were dead.

Thirdly, Poncet speaks of towns and villages in Ethiopia; whereas it is known there are no towns, villages, or cities, but Axum.--I believe that if the Abyssinians, who built the large and magnificent city of Axum, never had other cities, towns, and villages, they were in this the most singular people upon earth; or, if places where 6000 inhabitants live together in contiguous houses, separated with broad streets where there are churches and markets, be not towns and villages, I do not know the meaning of the term; but if these are towns, Poncet hath said truth; and many more such towns, which he never did see nor describe, are in Abyssinia at this day.

Fourthly, The Abyssinians live, and always have lived, in tents, not in houses.--It would have been a very extraordinary idea in people living in tents to have built such a city as Axum, whose ruins are as large as those of Alexandria; and it would be still more extraordinary, that people, in such a climate as Abyssinia, in the whole of which there is scorching weather for six months, deluges of rain, storms of wind, thunder, lightning, and hurricanes, such as are unknown in Europe, for the other six, should choose to live in tents, after knowing how to build such cities as Axum. I wonder a man’s understanding does not revolt against such absurdities in the moment he is stating them.

The Abyssinians, while at war, use tents and encampments, to secure the liberty of movements and changing of ground, and defend themselves, when stationary, from the inclemency of the weather. But no tent has, I believe, yet been invented that could stand in the fields in that country from June to September; and they have not yet formed an idea of Abyssinia who can suppose this.

I conceive it is _ignorance_ of the language which has led these _learned_ men into this mistake. The Abyssinians call a house, standing by itself, allotted to any particular purpose, Bet. So Bet Negus is a palace, or the house of a king; Bet Christian is a church, or a house for Christian worship; whilst Bet Mocha is a prison, or house under ground. But houses in towns or villages are called Taintes, from the Abyssinian word Tain, to sleep, lie down, rest, or repose. I suppose the similitude of this word to tents has drawn these _learned_ critics to believe, that, instead of towns, these were only collections of tents. But still I think, no one acquainted with the Abyssinian language, or without being so, would be so void of understanding as to believe, a people that had built Axum of stone, should endure, for ages after, a tropical winter in bare tents.

The fifth thing that fixes falsehood upon Poncet is, that he describes delicious valleys beyond European ideas; beautiful plains, covered with odoriferous trees and shrubs, to be everywhere in his way on the entrance of Abyssinia; whereas, when Salidan’s brother conquered this country, the Arabian books say they found it destitute of all this fruitfulness. But, with all submission to the Arabian books, to Abbé Renaudot and his immense reading, I will maintain, that neither Salidan, nor his brother, nor any of his tribe, ever conquered the country Poncet describes, nor were in it, or ever saw it at a distance.

The province where Poncet found these beautiful scenes lies between lat. 12 and 13°. The soil is rich, black mould, which six months tropical rain are needed to water sufficiently, where the sun is vertical to it twice a-year, and stationary, with respect to it, for several days, at the distance of 10°, and at a lesser distance still for several months; where the sun, though so near, is never seen, but a thick screen of watery clouds is constantly interposed, and yet the heat is such, that Fahrenheit’s thermometer rises to 100° in the shade. Can any one be so ignorant in natural history, as to doubt that, under these circumstances, a luxuriant, florid, odoriferous vegetation must be the consequence? Is not this the case in every continent or island within these limits all round the globe?

But Poncet contradicts the Arabian books, and all travellers, modern and ancient; for they unanimously agree that this country is a dreary miserable desert, producing nothing but Dora, which is millet, and such like things of little or no value. I wish sincerely that M. Renaudot, when he was attacking a man’s reputation, had been so good as to name the author whose authority he relied on. I shall take upon me to deny there ever was an Arabian book which treated of this country. And with regard to the ancient and modern travellers, his quotations from them are, if possible, still more visionary and ridiculous. The only ancient travellers, who, as I believe, ever visited that country, were Cambyses’s ambassadors; who, probably, passed this part of Poncet’s track when they went to the Macrobii, and the most modern authors (if they can be called modern) that came nearest to it, were the men sent by Nero[73] to discover the country, whose journey is very doubtful; and they, when they approached the parts described by Poncet, say “the country began to be green and beautiful.” Now I wish M. Renaudot had named any traveller more modern than these messengers of Nero, or more ancient than those ambassadors of Cambyses, who have travelled through and described the country of the Shangalla.

I, that have lived months in that province, and am the only traveller that ever did so, must corroborate every word Poncet has said upon this occasion. To dwell on landscapes and picturesque views, is a matter more proper for a poet than a historian. Those countries which are described by Poncet, merit a pen much more able to do them justice, than either his or mine.

It will be remembered when I say this, it is of the country of the Shangalla, between lat. 12° and 13° north, that this is the people who inhabit a hot woody stripe called Kolla, about 40 or 50 miles broad, that is from north to south, bounded by the mountainous country of Abyssinia, till they join the Nile at Fazuclo, on the West.

I have also said, that, for the sake of commerce, these Shangalla have been extirpated in two places, which are like two gaps, or chasms, in which are built towns and villages, and through which caravans pass between Sennaar and Abyssinia. All the rest of this country is impervious and inaccessible, unless by an armed force. Many armies have perished here. It is a tract totally unknown, unless from the small detail that I have entered into concerning it in my travels.

And here I must set the critic right also, as to what he says of the produce of these parts. There is no grain called Dara, at least that I know of. If he meant millet, he should have called it Dora. It is not a mark of barrenness in the ground where this grows: part of the finest land in Egypt is sown with it. The banks of the Nile which produce Dora would also produce wheat; but the inhabitants of the desert like this better; it goes farther, and does not subject them to the violent labour of the plough, to which all inhabitants of extreme hot countries are averse.

The same I say of what he remarks with regard to cotton. The finest valleys in Syria, watered by the cool refreshing springs that fall from Mount Libanus, are planted with this shrub; and, in the same grounds alternately, the tree which produces its sister in manufactures, silk, whose value is greatly inhanced by the addition. Cotton clothes all Ethiopia; cotton is the basis of its commerce with India, and of the commerce between England, France, and the Levant; and, were it not for some such ignorant, superficial reasoners as Abbé Renaudot, cotton, after wool, should be the favourite manufacture of Britain. It will in time take place of that ungrateful culture, flax; will employ more hands, and be a more ample field for distinguishing the ingenuity of our manufacturers.

We see, then, how the least consideration possible destroys these ill-founded objections, upon which these very ignorant enemies of Poncet attempted to destroy his credit, and rob him of the merit of his journey. At last they ventured to throw off the mask entirely, by producing a letter supposed to be written from Nubia by an Italian friar, who asserts roundly, that he hears Poncet was never at the capital of Ethiopia, nor ever had audience of Yasous; but stole the clothes and money of father Brevedent, then married, and soon after forsook his wife and Ethiopia together.

Maillet could have easily contradicted this, had he acted honestly; for Hagi Ali had brought him the king of Abyssinia’s letter, who thanked him for his having sent Poncet, and signified to him his recovery. But without appealing to M. Maillet upon the subject, I conceive nobody will doubt, that Hagi Ali had a commission to bring a physician from Cairo to cure his master, and that Poncet was proposed as that physician, with consent of the consul. Now, after having carried Poncet the length of Bartcho, where it is agreed he was when Brevedent died, (for he was supposed there to have robbed that father of his money) what could be Hagi Ali’s reason for not permitting him to proceed half a day’s journey farther to the capital, and presenting him to the king, who had been at the pains and expence of sending for him from Egypt? What excuse could Hagi Ali make for not producing him, when he must have delivered the consul’s letters, telling him that Poncet was come with the caravan for the purpose of curing him?

Besides this, M. de Maillet saw Hagi Ali afterwards at Cairo, where he reproached him with his cruel behaviour, both to Poncet and to friar Justin, another monk that had come along with him from Ethiopia. Maillet then must have been fully instructed of Poncet’s whole life and conversation in Ethiopia, and needed not the Italian’s supposed communication to know whether or not he had been in Ethiopia. Besides, Maillet makes use of him as the forerunner of the other embassy he was then preparing to Gondar, and to that same king Yasous, which would have been a very strange step had he doubted of his having been there before.

Supposing all this not enough, still we know he returned by Jidda, and the consul corresponded with him there. Now, how did he get from Bartcho to the Red Sea without passing the capital, and without the king’s orders or knowledge? Who franked him at those number of dangerous barriers at Woggora, Lamalmon, the Tacazzé, Kella, and Adowa, where, though I had the authority of the king, I could not sometimes pass without calling force to my assistance? Who freed him from the avarice of the Baharnagash, and the much more formidable rapacity of that murderer the Naybe, who, we have seen in the history of this reign, attempted to plunder the king’s own factor Musa, though his master was within three days journey at the head of an army that in a few hours could have effaced every vestige of where Masuah had stood? All this, then, is a ridiculous fabrication of lies; the work, as I have before said, of those who were concerned in the affair of the unhappy Du Roule.

Poncet, having lost all credit, retired from Paris in disgrace, without any further gratification than that which he at first received. He carried to Cairo with him, however, a gold watch and a mirror, which he was to deliver to the consul as a present to his companion Murat, whose subsistence was immediately stopped, and liberty given him to return to Ethiopia.

Nor did Maillet’s folly stop here. After giving poor Murat all the ill-usage a man could possibly suffer, he entrusted him with a Jesuit[74] whom he was to introduce into Ethiopia, where he would certainly have lost his life had not the bad-treatment he received by the way made him return before he arrived at Masuah.

This first miscarriage seemed only to have confirmed the Jesuits more in their resolution of producing an embassy. But it now took another form. Politicians and statesmen became the actors in it, without a thought having been bestowed to diminish the enemies of the scheme, or render their endeavours useless, by a superior knowledge of the manners and customs of the country through which this embassy was to pass.

No adventurer, or vagrant physician, (like Poncet) was to be employed in this second embassy. A minister versed in languages, negociations, and treaties, accompanied with proper drugomans and officers, was to be sent to Abyssinia to cement a perpetual friendship and commerce between two nations that had not a national article to exchange with each other, nor way to communicate by sea or land. The minister, who must have known this, very wisely, at giving his fiat, pitched upon the consul M. de Maillet to be the ambassador, as a man who was acquainted with the causes of Poncet’s failure, and, by following an opposite course, could bring this embassy to a happy conclusion for both nations.

Maillet considered himself as a general whose business was to direct and not to execute. A tedious and troublesome journey through dangerous deserts was out of the sphere of his closet, beyond the limits of which he did not choose to go. Beyond the limits of this, all was desert to him. He excused himself from the embassy, but gave in a memorial to serve as a rule for the conduct of his successor in the nomination in a country he had never seen; but this, being afterwards adopted as a well-considered regulation, proved one of the principal causes of the miscarriage and tragedy that followed.

M. Noir du Roule, vice-consul at Damiata, was pitched upon as the ambassador to go to Abyssinia. He was a young man of some merit, had a considerable degree of ambition, and a moderate skill in the common languages spoken in the east, but was absolutely ignorant of that of the country to which he was going, and, what was worse, of the customs and prejudices of the nations through which he was to pass. Like most of his countrymen, he had a violent predilection for the dress, carriage, and manners of France, and a hearty contempt for those of all other nations; this he had not address enough to disguise, and this endangered his life. The whole French nation at Cairo were very ill-disposed towards him, in consequence of some personal slight, or imprudences, he had been guilty of; as also towards any repetition of projects which brought them, their commerce, and even their lives into danger, as the last had done.

The merchants, therefore, were averse to this embassy; but the Jesuits and Maillet were the avowed supporters of it, and they had with them the authority of the king. But each aimed to be principal, and had very little confidence or communication with his associate.

As for the capuchins and Franciscans, they were mortally offended with M. de Maillet for having, by the introduction of the Jesuits, and the power of the king of France, forcibly wrested the Ethiopic mission from them which the pope had granted, and which the sacred congregation of cardinals had confirmed. These, by their continual communication with the Cophts, the Christians of Egypt, had so far brought them to adopt their designs as, one and all, to regard the miscarriage of du Roule and his embassy, as what they were bound to procure from honour and mutual interest.

Things being in these circumstances, M. du Roule arrived at Cairo, and took upon him the charge of this embassy, and from that moment the intrigues began.

The consul had persuaded du Roule, that the proper presents he should take with him to Sennaar were prints of the king and queen of France, with crowns upon their heads; mirrors, magnifying and multiplying objects, and deforming them; when brocade, sattin, and trinkets of gold or silver, iron or steel, would have been infinitely more acceptable.

Elias, an Armenian, a confidential servant of the French nation, was first sent by way of the Red Sea into Abyssinia, by Masuah, to proceed to Gondar, and prepare Yasous for the reception of that ambassador, to whom he, Elias, was to be the interpreter. So far it was well concerted; but, in preparing for the end, the middle was neglected. A number of friars were already at Sennaar, and had poisoned the minds of that people, naturally barbarous, brutal, and jealous. Money, in presents, had gained the great; while lies, calculated to terrify and enrage the lower class of people, had been told so openly and avowedly, and gained such root, that the ambassador, when he arrived at Sennaar, found it, in the first place, necessary to make a _procez verbal_, or what we call a precognition, in which the names of the authors, and substance of these reports, were mentioned, and of this he gave advice to M. de Maillet, but the names and these papers perished with him.

It was on the 9th of July 1704 that M. du Roule set out from Cairo, attended by a number of people who, with tears in their eyes, foresaw the pit into which he was falling. He embarked on the Nile; and, in his passage to Siout, he found at every halting-place some new and dangerous lie propagated, which could have no other end but his destruction.

Belac, a Moor, and factor for the king of Sennaar, was chief of the caravan which he then joined. Du Roule had employed, while at Cairo, all the usual means to gain this man to his interest, and had every reason to suppose he had succeeded. But, on his meeting him at Siout, he had the mortification to find that he was so far changed that it cost him 250 dollars to prevent his declaring himself an abettor of his enemies. And this, perhaps, would not have sufficed, had it not been for the arrival of Fornetti, drugoman to the French nation at Cairo, at Siout, and with him a capigi and chiaoux from Ismael Bey, the port of janizaries, and from the basha of Cairo, expressly commanding the governor of Siout, and Belac chief of the caravan, to look to the safety of du Roule, and protect him at the hazard of their lives, and as they should answer to them.

All the parties concerned were then called together; and the fedtah, or prayer of peace, used in long and dangerous journies, was solemnly recited and assented to by them all; in consequence of which, every individual became bound to stand by his companion even to death, and not separate himself from him, nor see him wronged, though it was for his own gain or safety. This test brought all the secret to light; for Ali Chelebi, governor of Siout, informed the ambassador, that the Christian merchants and Franciscan friars were in a conspiracy, and had sworn to defeat and disappoint his embassy even by the loss of his life, and that, by presents, they had gained him to be a partner in that conspiracy.

Belac, moreover, told him, that the patriarch of the Cophts had assured the principal people of which that caravan consisted, that the Franks then travelling with him were not merchants, but sorcerers, who were going to Ethiopia, to obstruct, or cut off the course of the Nile, that it might no longer flow into Egypt, and that the general resolution was to drive the Franks from the caravan at some place in the desert which suited their designs, which were to reduce them to perish by hunger or thirst, or else to be otherwise slain, and no more heard of.

The caravan left Siout the 12th of September. In twelve days they passed the lesser desert, and came to Khargué, where they were detained six days by a young man, governor of that place, who obliged M. du Roule to pay him 120 dollars, before he would suffer him to pass further; and at the same time forced him to sign a certificate, that he had been permitted to pass without paying any thing. This was the first sample of the usage he was to expect in the further prosecution of his journey.

On the 3d of October they entered the great desert of Selima, and on the 18th of same month they arrived at Machou, or Moscho, on the Nile, where their caravan staid a considerable time, till the merchants had transacted their business. It was at this place the ambassador learned, that several Franciscan friars had passed the caravan while it remained at Siout, and advanced to Sennaar, where they had staid some time, but had lately left that capital upon news of the caravan’s approaching, and had retired, nobody knew whether.

A report was soon after spread abroad at Cairo, but no one could ever learn whence it came, that the ambassador, arriving at Dongola, had been assassinated there. This, indeed, proved false, but was, in the mean time, a mournful presage of the melancholy catastrophe that happened soon afterwards.

M. du Roule arrived at Sennaar towards the end of May, and wrote at that time; but a packet of letters was after brought to the consul at Cairo, bearing date the 18th of June. The ambassador there mentions, that he had been well received by the king of Sennaar, who was a young man, fond of strangers; that particular attention had been shewn him by Sid Achmet-el-coom; or, as he should have called him, Achmet Sid-el-coom, i.e. Achmet master of the household. This officer, sent by the king to visit the baggage of the ambassador, could not help testifying his surprise to find it so inconsiderable, both in bulk and value.

He said the king had received letters from Cairo, informing him that he had twenty chests of silver along with him. Achmet likewise told him, that he himself had received information, by a letter under the hand and seal of the most respectable people of Cairo, warning him not to let M. du Roule pass; for the intention of his journey into Abyssinia was to prevail on Yasous to attack Masuah and Suakem, and take them from the Turks. Achmet would not suffer the bales intended for the king of Abyssinia to be opened or visited, but left them in the hands of the ambassador.

M. du Roule, however, in writing this account to the consul, intimated to him that he thought himself in danger, and declares that he did not believe there was on earth so barbarous, brutal, and treacherous a people, as were the Nubians.

It happened that the king’s troops had gained some advantage over the rebellious Arabs, on which account there was a festival at court, and M. du Roule thought himself obliged to exert himself in every thing which could add to the magnificence of the occasion. With this intention he shaved his beard, and drest himself like a European, and in this manner he received the visit of the minister Achmet. M. Macé, in a letter to the consul of the above date, complains of this novelty. He says it shocked every body; and that the[75]mirrors which multiplied and deformed the objects, made the lower sorts of the people look upon the ambassador and his company as sorcerers.

Upon great festivals, in most Mahometan kingdoms, the king’s wives have a privilege to go out of their apartments, and visit any thing new that is to be seen. These of the king of Sennaar are very ignorant, brutish, fantastic, and easily offended. Had M. du Roule known the manners of the country, he would have treated these black majesties with strong spirits, sweetmeats, or scented waters; and he might then have shewed them with impunity any thing that he pleased.

But being terrified with the glasses, and disgusted by his inattention, they joined in the common cry, that the ambassador was a magician, and contributed all in their power to ruin him with the king; which, after all, they did not accomplish, without the utmost repugnance and difficulty. The farthest length at first they could get this prince to go was, to demand 3000 dollars of the ambassador. This was expressly refused, and private disgust followed.

M. du Roule being now alarmed for his own safety, insisted upon liberty to set out forthwith for Abyssinia. Leave was accordingly granted him, and after his baggage was loaded, and every thing prepared, he was countermanded by the king, and ordered to return to his own house. A few days after this he again procured leave to depart; which a short time after was again countermanded. At last, on the 10th of November, a messenger from the king brought him final leave to depart, which, having every thing ready for that purpose, he immediately did.

The ambassador walked on foot, with two country Christians on one hand, and Gentil his French servant on the other. He refused to mount on horseback, but gave his horse to a Nubian servant to lead. M. Lipi, and M. Macé, the two drugomans, were both on horseback. The whole company being now arrived in the middle of the large square before the king’s house, the common place of execution for criminals, four blacks attacked the ambassador, and murdered him with four strokes of sabres. Gentil fell next by the same hands, at his master’s side. After him M. Lipi and the two Christians; the two latter protesting that they did not belong to the ambassador’s family.

M. du Roule died with the greatest magnanimity, fortitude, and resignation. Knowing his person was sacred by the law of nations, he disdained to defend it by any other means, remitting his revenge to the guardians of that law, and he exhorted all his attendants to do the same. But M. Macé the Drugoman, young and brave, and a good horseman, was not of the sheep kind, to go quietly to the slaughter. With his pistols he shot two of the assassins that attacked him, one after the other, dead upon the spot; and was continuing to defend himself with his sword, when a horseman, coming behind him, thrust him through the back with a lance, and threw him dead upon the ground.

Thus ended the second attempt of converting Abyssinia by an embassy. A scheme, if we believe M. de Maillet, which had cost government a considerable expence, for in a memorial, of the 1st of October 1706, concerning the death of M. du Roule, he makes the money and effects which he had along with him, when murdered, to amount to 200 purses, or L.25,000 Sterling. This, however, is not probable; because, in another place he speaks of M. du Roule’s having demanded of him a small supply of money while at Sennaar, which friar Joseph, a capuchin, refused to carry for him. Such a supply would not have been necessary if the ambassador had with him such a sum as that already mentioned; therefore I imagine it was exaggerated, with a view to make the Turkish basha of Suakem quarrel with the king of Sennaar about the recovering it.

The friars, who were in numbers at Sennaar, left it immediately before the coming of M. du Roule. This they might have done without any bad intention towards him; they returned, however, immediately after his murder. This, I think, very clearly constitutes them the authors of it. For had they not been privy and promoters of the assassination, they would have fled with fear and abhorrence from a place where six of their brethren had been lately so treacherously slain, and were not yet buried, but their carcases abandoned to the fowls of the air, and the beasts of the field, and where they themselves, therefore, could have no assurance of safety.

They however pretended, first to lay the blame upon the king of Abyssinia, then upon the king of Sennaar, and then they divided it between them both. But Elias, arrived at Gondar, vindicated that prince, as we shall presently see, and the list of names taken at Sennaar; and a long series of correspondence, which afterwards came out, and a chain of evidence which was made public, incontestibly prove that the king of Sennaar was but an agent, and indeed an unwilling one, who two several times repented of his bloody design, and made M. du Roule return to his own house, to evade the execution of it.

The blood then of this gallant and unfortunate gentleman undoubtedly lies upon the heads of the reformed Franciscan friars, and their brethren, the friars of the Holy Land. The interest of these two bodies, and a bigotted prince, such as Louis XIV then was, was more than sufficient to stop all inquiry, and hinder any vengeance to be taken on those holy assassins. But he who, unperceived, follows deliberate murther through all its concealments and darkness of its ways, in a few years required satisfaction for the blood of du Roule, at a time and place unforeseen, and unexpected.

We shall now return to Gondar to king Yasous, who being recovered of his disease, and having dismissed his physician, was preparing to set out on a campaign against the Galla.

Yasous, for his first wife, had married Ozoro Malacotawit, a lady of great family and connections in the province of Gojam. By her he had a son, Tecla Haimanout, who was grown to manhood, and had hitherto lived in the most dutiful affection and submission to his father, who, on his part, seemed to place unlimited confidence in his son. He now gave a proof of this, not very common in the annals of Abyssinia, by leaving Tecla Haimanout behind him, at an age when he was fit to reign, appointing him Betwudet, with absolute power to govern in his absence. Yasous had a mistress whom he tenderly loved, a woman of great quality likewise, whose name was Ozoro Kedustè. She was sister to his Fit-Auraris, Agné, a very distinguished and capable officer, and by her he had three children, David, Hannes, and Jonathan.

It happened, while he was watching the motions of the Galla, news were brought that Ozoro Kedustè had been taken ill of a fever; and though, upon this intelligence, he disposed his affairs so as to return with all possible expedition, yet when he came to Bercanté, the lady’s house, he found that she was not only dead, but had been for some time buried. All his presence of mind now left him; he fell into the most violent transport of wild despair, and, ordering her tomb to be opened, he went down into it, taking his three sons along with him, and became so frantic at the sight of the corpse, that it was with the utmost difficulty he could be forced again to leave the sepulchre. He returned first to Gondar, then he retired to an island in the lake Tzana, there to mourn his lost mistress.

But before this, Elias, ignorant of what had passed at Sennaar, presented M. de Maillet’s letter to him, beseeching his leave for M. du Roule to enter Abyssinia, and come into his presence. This he easily procured: Yasous was fond of strangers; and not only granted the request, but sent a man of his own to Sennaar with letters to the king to protect and defray the expences of the ambassador to Gondar. This man, who had affairs of his own, loitered away a great deal of time in the journey, so that Elias, upon first hearing of the arrival of the ambassador, set out himself to meet him at Sennaar. The king, in the mean time, having finished his mourning, dispatched Badjerund Oustas to his son the Betwudet, at Gondar, ordering him forthwith to send him a body of his household troops to rendezvous on the banks of the lake, opposite to the island Tchekla Wunze, where he then had his residence.

It has been said, contrary to all truth, by those who have wrote travels into this country, that sons born in marriage had the same preference in succession as they have in other countries. But this, as I have said, is entirely without foundation: For, in the first place, there is no such thing as a regular marriage in Abyssinia; all consists in mere consent of parties. But, allowing this to be regular, not only natural children, that is, those born in concubinage where no marriage was in contemplation; and adulterous bastards, that is, the sons of unmarried women by married men; and all manner of sons whatever, succeed equally as well to the crown as to private inheritance; and there cannot be a more clear example of this than in the present king, who, although he had a son, Tecla Haimanout, born of the queen Malacotawit in wedlock, was yet succeeded by three bastard brothers, all sons of Yasous, born in adultery, that is, in the life of the queen. David and Hannes were sons of the king by his favourite Ozoro Kedustè; Bacuffa, by another lady of quality.

Although the queen, Malacotawit, had passed over with seeming indifference the preference the king had given his mistress, Ozoro Kedustè, during her lifetime, yet, from a very unaccountable kind of jealousy, she could not forgive those violent tokens of affection the king had shewn after her death, by going down with his sons and remaining with the body in the grave. Full of resentment for this, she had persuaded her son, Tecla Haimanout, that Yasous had determined to deprive him of his succession, to send him and her, his mother, both to Wechné, and place his bastard brother, David, son of Ozoro Kedustè, upon the throne.

The queen had been very diligent in attaching to her the principal people about the court. By her own friends, and the assistance of the discontented and banished monks, she had raised a great army in Gojam under her brothers, Dermin and Paulus. Tecla Haimanout had shewn great signs of wisdom and talents for governing, and very much attached to himself some of his father’s oldest and ablest servants.

It was, therefore, agreed, in return to Yasous’s message by Oustas, to answer, That, after so long a reign, and so much bloodshed, the king would do well to retire to some convent for the rest of his life, and atone for the many great sins he had committed; and that he should leave the kingdom in the hands of his son Tecla Haimanout, as the ancient king Caleb had resigned his crown into the hands of St Pantaleon in favour of his son Guebra Mascal. As it was not very safe to deliver such a message to a king such as Yasous, it was therefore sent to him, by a common foot-soldier, who could not be an object of resentment.

The king received it at Tchekla Wunze, the island in the lake Tzana, where he was then residing. He answered with great sharpness, by the same messenger, “That he had been long informed who these were that had seduced his son, Tecla Haimanout, at once from his duty to him as his father, and his allegiance as his sovereign; that though he did not hold them to be equal in sanctity to St Pantaleon, yet, such as they were, he proposed immediately to meet them at Gondar, and settle there his son’s coronation.”

This ironical message was perfectly understood. Those of the court that were with Tecla Haimanout, and the inhabitants of the capital, met together, and bound themselves by a solemn oath to live and die with their king Tecla Haimanout. The severity of Yasous was well known; his provocation now was a just one; and the measure of vengeance that awaited them, every one concerned knew to be such that there was no alternative but death or victory.

Neither party were slack in preparations. Kasmati Honorius, governor of Damot, a veteran officer and old servant of Yasous, collected a large body of troops and marched them down the west side of the lake. Yasous having there joined them, and putting himself at the head of his army, began his march, rounding the lake on its south side towards Dingleber.

Neither did Tecla Haimanout delay a moment after hearing his father was in motion, but marched with his army from Gondar, attended with all the ensigns of royalty. He encamped at Bartcho, in that very field where Za Denghel was defeated and slain by his rebellious subjects. Thinking this a post ominous to kings, he resolved to wait for his father there, and give him battle.

The king, in his march through the low country of Dembea, was attacked by a putrid fever, very common in those parts, which so increased upon him that he was obliged to be carried back to Tchekla Wunze. This accident discouraged his whole party. His army, with Honorius, took the road to Gojam, but did not disperse, awaiting the recovery of the king.

But the queen, Malacotawit, no sooner heard that Yasous her husband was sick at Tchekla Wunze, than she sent to her son Tecla Haimanout to leave his unwholesome station, and march back immediately to Gondar; and, as soon as he was returned, she dispatched her two brothers, Dermin and Paulus, with a body of soldiers and two Mahometan musqueteers, who, entering the island Tchekla Wunze by surprise, shot and disabled the king while sitting on a couch; immediately after which, Dermin thrust him through with a sword. They attempted afterwards to burn the body, in order to avoid the ill-will the sight of it must occasion: In this, however, they were prevented by the priests of the island and the neighbouring nobility, who took possession of the body, washed it, and performed all the rites of sepulture, then carried it in a kind of triumph, with every mark of magnificence due to the burial of a king, interring it in the small island of Mitraha, where lay the body of all his ancestors, and where I have seen the body of this king still entire.

Nor did the prince his son, Tecla Haimanout, now king, discourage the people in the respect they voluntarily paid to his father. On the contrary, that parricide himself shewed every outward mark of duty, to the which inwardly his heart had been long a stranger.

Poncet, who saw this king, gives this character of him: He says he was a man very fond of war, but averse to the shedding of blood. However this may appear a contradiction, or said for the sake of the antithesis, it really was the true character of this prince, who, fond of war, and in the perpetual career of victory, did, by pushing his conquests as far as they could go, inevitably occasion the spilling of much blood. Yet, when his army was not in the field, though he detected a multitude of conspiracies among priests and other people at home, whose lives in consequence were forfeited to the law, he very rarely, either from his own motives, or the persuasion of others, could be induced to inflict capital punishments though often strongly provoked to it.

Upon his death the people unanimously gave to him the name of Tallac, which signifies _the Great_, a name he has ever since enjoyed unimpeached in the Abyssinian annals, or history of his country, from the which this his reign is taken.

TECLA HAIMANOUT I.

From 1704 to 1706.

_Writes in Favour of Du Roule--Defeats the Rebels--Is assassinated while hunting._

Elias the Armenian, of whom we have already spoken, and who was charged with letters of protection from Yasous to meet M. du Roule at Sennaar, had reached within three days journey of that capital when he heard that king Yasous was assassinated. Terrified at the news, he returned in the utmost haste to Gondar, and presented the letters, which had been written by Yasous, to be renewed by his son, king Tecla Haimanout. Tecla Haimanout read his father’s letters, and approved of their contents, ordering them to be copied in his own name; and Elias without delay set out with them. I have inserted a translation of these letters, which were originally written in Arabic, and seem to me to be of the few that are authentic among those many which have been published as coming from Abyssinia.

“The king Tecla Haimanout, son of the king of the church of Ethiopia, king of a thousand churches.

“On the part of the powerful august king, arbiter of nations, shadow of God upon earth, the guide of kings who profess the religion of the Messiah, the most powerful of Christian kings, he that maintains order between Mahometans and Christians, protector of the boundaries of Alexandria, observer of the commandments of the gospel, descended of the line of the prophets David and Solomon,--may the blessing of Israel be upon our prophet and upon them.--To the king Baady, son of the king Ounsa, may his reign be full of happiness, being a prince endowed with these rare qualities that deserve the highest praises as governing his kingdom with distinguished wisdom, and by an order full of equity.--The king of France, who is a Christian, wrote a letter seven or eight years ago, by which he signified to me, that he wished to open a trade for the advantage of his subjects and of mine, which request we have granted. We come at present to understand, that he has sent us presents by a man whose name is du Roule, who has likewise several others along with him, and that these people have been arrested at your town of Sennaar. We require of you, therefore, to set them immediately at liberty, and to suffer them to come to us with all the marks of honour, and that you should pay regard to the ancient friendship which has always subsisted between our predecessors, since the time of the _king of Sedgid_ and the _king of Kim_, to the present day. We also demand of you to suffer all the subjects of the king of France to pass, and all those that come with letters of his consul who is at Cairo, as all such Frenchmen come for trade only, being of the same religion with us. We likewise recommend to you, that you permit to pass freely, all French Christians, Cophts, and Syrians who follow our rites, observing our religion, and who intend coming into our country; and that you do not suffer any of those who are contrary to our religion to pass, such as the monk Joseph, and his companions, whom you may keep at Sennaar, it being in no shape our intention to suffer them to come into our dominions, where they would occasion troubles, as being enemies to our faith. God grant you your desires.”--Wrote the 10th of Zulkadé, Anno 1118, _i. e._ the 21st of January 1706.

☞The direction is--“To king Baady, son of king Ounsa, may God favour him with his grace.”

The first thing I remark upon this letter is, the mention of the ancient peace and friendship which subsisted between the predecessors of these two princes now corresponding. It was a friendship, he says, that had endured from the time of the king of _Sedgid_, and the king of _Kim_, to the present day.

The kingdom of Sennaar, as we shall see, was but a modern one, and recently established by conquest over the Arabs. Therefore the kingdoms of _Sedgid_ and of _Kim_ were before that conquest, places whence this black nation came that had established their sovereignty at Sennaar by conquest: from which, therefore, I again infer, there never was any war, conquest, or tribute between Abyssinia and that state.

The Arabs, who fed their flocks near the frontiers of the two countries, were often plundered by the kings of Abyssinia making descents into Atbara; but this was never reckoned a violation of peace between the two sovereigns. On the contrary, as the motive of the Arabs, for coming south into the frontiers of Abyssinia, was to keep themselves independent, and out of the reach of Sennaar, when the king of Abyssinia fell upon them there, he was understood to do that monarch service, by driving them down farther within his reach. The Baharnagash has been always at war with them; they are tributary to him for eating his grass and drinking his water, and nothing that he ever does to them gives any trouble or inquietude to Sennaar. It is interpreted as maintaining his ancient dominion over the Shepherds, those of Sennaar being a new power, and accounted as usurpers.

M. de Maillet, nor M. le Grande his historian, have not thought fit to explain who the monk Joseph was mentioned in this letter. Now it is certain, that, when Murat and Poncet were returned from Abyssinia, there was a missionary of the minor friars, who arrived in Ethiopia, had an audience of the king, and wrote a letter in his name to the pope, wherein he has foisted many improbabilities and falsehoods; and concludes with declaring on the part of Yasous, that he submits to the see of Rome in the same manner the kings his predecessors had submitted. He makes Yasous speak Latin, too; and it is perfectly plain from the[77]whole letter, that, though he writes it himself, he cannot conceal that the king Yasous wanted him very much away, and was very uneasy at his stay at Gondar. Who this was we know not, but suppose it was one of those assassins of M. du Roule, carrying on a private intrigue without participation of the consul, some of whom were afterwards detected in Walkayt in the reign of David IV.

As for Elias, the forerunner of the French embassy, now become the only remains of it, he continued in Abyssinia (to judge by his letter) in great poverty, till the year 1718, immediately after which he went over to Arabia Felix, and first wrote from Mocha to M. de Maillet consul at Cairo, as it will appear in the reign of David IV. where I have inserted his letter; that written to M. du Roule in the name of Yafous, that of Tecla Haimanout to the Basha and Divan of Cairo, I have now here inserted, because I have advanced facts founded upon them.

TRANSLATION _of an_ ARABIC LETTER _from the_ KING _of_ ABYSSINIA _to_ M. DU ROULE.

“The king Tecla Haimanout, king of the established church, son of the king of a thousand churches.

“This letter cometh forth from the venerable, august king, who is the shadow of God, guide of Christian princes that are in the world, the most powerful of the Nazarean kings, observer of the commandments of the gospel, protector of the confines of Alexandria, he that maintaineth order between Mahometans and Christians, descended from the family of the prophets David and Solomon, upon whom being the blessings of Israel, may God make his happiness eternal, and his power perpetual, and protect his arms--So be it.--To his excellence the most virtuous and most prudent man du Roule, a Frenchman sent to us, may God preserve him, and make him arrive at a degree of eminence--So be it.--Elias, your interpreter whom you sent before you, being arrived here, has been well received. We have understood that you are sent to us on the part of the king of France our brother, and are surprised that you have been detained at Sennaar. We send to you at present a letter for king Baady, in order that he may set you at liberty, and not do you any injury, nor to those that are with you, but may behave in a manner that is proper both for you and to us, according to the religion of Elias that you sent, who is a Syrian; and all those that may come after you from the king of France our brother, or his consul at Cairo, shall be well received, whether they be ambassadors or private merchants, because we love those that are of our religion. We receive with pleasure those who do not oppose our laws, and we send away those that do oppose them. For this reason we did not receive immediately Joseph[78] with all his companions, not choosing that such sort of people should appear in our presence, nor intending that they should pass Sennaar, in order to avoid troubles which may occasion the death of many; but with respect to you, have nothing to fear, you may come in all safety, and you shall be received with honour.”--Written the 10th of the month Zulkadé, Anno 1118, _i. e._ the 21st of January of the year 1706.

☞ The address is--“Let the present be delivered to M. du Roule at the town of Sennaar.”

I shall only observe upon this letter, that all the priests, who had flocked to Sennaar before M. du Roule arrived there, disappeared upon his near approach to that city, after having prepared the mischief which directly followed. And, no sooner was the murder, which they before concerted, committed, than they all flocked back again as if invited to a festival. M. de Maillet speaks of several of them in his letters, where he complains of the murder of du Roule, and says that they were then on their way to enter Abyssinia. Of these probably was this Joseph, whom Tecla Haimanout strictly prohibits to come farther than Sennaar, having seen what his father had written concerning him in the first letters Elias was charged with.

Others are mentioned in Elias’s letter to the consul as having been in Abyssinia. He calls them those of the league of Michael and Samuel, of whom we shall speak afterwards. But, even though the French consul had ordered his nation to drive all the subjects of Sennaar from their houses and service, none of these missionaries were afraid to return and abide at Sennaar, because they knew the murder of the ambassador was the work of their own hands, and, without their instigation, would never have been committed.

The unlucky messenger, Elias, was again about to enter Sennaar, when he received information that du Roule was assassinated. If he had fled hastily from this inauspicious place upon the murder of Yasous, his haste was now ten-fold, as he considered himself engaged in the same circumstances that had involved M. du Roule’s attendants in his misfortunes.

The king, upon hearing the account given by Elias of the melancholy fate of the ambassador at Sennaar, was so exasperated, that he gave immediate orders for recalling such of his troops as he had permitted to go to any considerable distance; and, in a council held for that purpose, he declared, that he considered the death of M. du Roule as an affront that immediately affected his crown and dignity. He was, therefore, determined not to pass it over, but to make the king of Sennaar sensible that he, as well as all the other kings upon earth, knew the necessity of observing the law of nations, and the bad consequence of perpetual retaliations that must follow the violation of it. In the mean time, thinking that the basha of Cairo was the cause of this, he wrote the following letter to him.

TRANSLATION _of an_ ARABIC LETTER _from the_ KING _of_ ABYSSINIA _to the_ BASHA _and_ DIVAN _of_ CAIRO.

“To the Pacha, and Lords of the Militia of Cairo.

“On the part of the king of Abyssinia, the king Tecla Haimanout, son of the king of the church of Abyssinia.

“On the part of the august king, the powerful arbiter of nations, shadow of God upon earth, the guide of kings who profess the religion of the Messiah, the most powerful of all Christian kings, he who maintains order between Mahometans and Christians, protector of the confines of Alexandria, observer of the commandments of the gospel, heir from father to son of a most powerful kingdom, descended of the family of David and Solomon,--may the blessing of Israel be upon our prophet, and upon them may his happiness be durable, and his greatness lasting, and may his powerful, army be always feared.--To the most powerful lord, elevated by his dignity, venerable by his merits, distinguished by his strength and riches among all Mahometans, the refuge of all those that reverence him, who by his prudence governs and directs the armies of the noble empire, and commands his confines; victorious viceroy of Egypt, the four corners of which shall be always respected and defended:--so be it.--And to all the distinguished princes, judges, men of learning, and other officers whose business it is to maintain order and good government and to all commanders in general, may God preserve them all in their dignities, in the nobleness of their health. You are to know that our ancestors never bore any envy to other kings, nor did they ever occasion them any trouble, or shew them any mark of hatred. On the contrary, they have, upon all occasions, given them proofs of their friendships, assisting them generously, relieving them in their necessities, as well in what concerns the caravan and pilgrims of Mecca in Arabia Felix, as in the Indies, in _Persia_, and other distant and out-of-the-way places, also by protecting distinguished persons in every urgent necessity.

“Nevertheless, the king of France our brother, who professes our religion and our law, having been induced thereto, by some advances of friendship on our part such as are proper, sent an ambassador to us; I understand that you caused arrest him at Sennaar, and also another by name Murat, the Syrian, whom you did put in prison also, though he was sent to that ambassador on our part, and by thus doing, you have violated the law of nations, as ambassadors of kings ought to be at liberty to go wherever they will; and it is a general obligation to treat them with honour, and not to molest or detain them, nor should they be subject to pay customs, or any sort of presents. We could very soon repay you in kind, if we were inclined to revenge the insult you have offered to the man Murat sent on our part; the Nile would be sufficient to punish you, since God hath put into our power his fountain, his outlet, and his increase, and that we can dispose of the same to do you harm; for the present we demand of, and exhort you to desist from any future vexations towards our envoys, and not disturb us by detaining those who shall be sent towards you, but you shall let them pass and continue their route without delay, coming and going wherever they will freely for their own advantage, whether they are our subjects or Frenchmen, and whatever you shall do to or for them, we shall regard as done to or for ourselves.”

☞ The address is--“To the basha, princes, and lords governing the town of great Cairo, may God favour them with his goodness.”

There are several things very remarkable in this letter. The king of Abyssinia values himself, and his predecessors, upon never having molested or troubled any of his neighbours who were kings, nor borne any envy towards them. We are not then to believe what we see often in history, that there was frequent war between Sennaar and Abyssinia, or that Sennaar was tributary to Abyssinia. That stripe of country, inhabited by the Shangalla, would, in this case, have been first conquered. But it is more probable, that the great difference of climate which immediately takes place between the two kingdoms, the great want of water on the frontiers, barriers placed there by the hand of Nature, have been the means of keeping these kingdoms from having any mutual concerns; and so, indeed, we may guess by the utter silence of the books, which never mention any war at Sennaar till the beginning of the reign of Socinios.

I apprehend, that protecting distinguished persons upon great occasions, alludes to the children of the king of Sennaar, who frequently fly after the death of their father to Abyssinia[79] for protection, it being the custom of that state to murder all the brothers of the prince that succeeds, instead of sending them to a mountain, as they do in Abyssinia.

The next thing remarkable is his protection of the pilgrims who go to Mecca, and the merchants that go to India. Several caravans of both set out yearly from his kingdom, all Mahometans, some of whom go to Mecca for religion, the others to India, by Mocha, to trade. But it is not possible to understand how he is to protect the trade in Persia, with which country he certainly has had no sort of concern these 800 years, nor has it been in that time possible for him either to molest or protect a Persian. What, therefore, I would suppose, is, that the king has made use of the common phrase which universally obtains here both in writing and conversation, calling Ber el Ajam the West, and Ber el Arab the East coast of the Red Sea.--Ber el Ajam, in the language of the country, is the coast where there is water or rain, in opposition to the Tehama, or opposite shore of Arabia, where there is no water. The Greeks and Latins translated this word into their own language, but did not understand it; only from the sound they called it Azamia, from Ajam. Now Ajam, or Ber el Ajam, is the name of Persia also; and the French interpreter says, the king of Abyssinia protects the caravans of Persia; when he should say, the caravans, going through Ber el Ajam, the Azamia of the ancients, to embark at the two ports Suakem and Masuah, both in the country of that name.

The next thing to remark here is, that the king acknowledges Murat to be his ambassador; and it is the arresting him, which we have seen was done at the instance of M. de Maillet collusively, that the king says was a violation of the law of nations; and it was this insult, done to Murat his ambassador, that he all along complains of, not that offered to du Roule, which he leaves to the king of France; for he says expressly, if he was to starve, or destroy them all, by stopping the Nile from coming into Egypt, it would be on account of the insult offered to Murat, the envoy, or man, sent on his part to France. It is plain, therefore, that M. de Maillet persecuted the poor Syrian very wrongfully, and that in no one instance, from first to last, was he ever in the right concerning that embassy.

This step, which justice dictated, was not without its reward; for Tecla Haimanout, who had assembled his army on this account sooner than he otherwise intended, found immediately after, that a rival and rebel prince, Amda Sion, was set up against him by the friends of his father Yasous, and that he had been privately collecting troops, intending to take him by surprise, when he was, however, at the head of his army ready to give him battle.

The first thing the king did was to dispatch a large body of troops to reinforce Dermin, governor of Gojam, and to him he sent positive orders to force Amda Sion to fight wherever he should find him, while he, with the royal army, came forward with all expedition to keep the people in awe, and prevent them from joining his rival.

Amda Sion, on the other hand, lost no time. From Ibaba, through Maitsha, he marched straight to Gondar. Being arrived at the king’s house at Dingleber, he sat down on the throne with the ensigns of royalty about him, and there appointed several officers that were most needed, in the army, the provinces, and about his person. During his stay here, news were brought that Dermin had followed him step by step in the very track he had marched, and laid the whole country waste that had shewn him any countenance or favour. Amda Sion’s heart seemed to fail him upon this; for he left Dingleber, crossed the ford at Delakus, and endeavoured to pass Dermin, by keeping on the west side of the Nile, and on the low road by which he returned to Ibaba.

Dermin, well-informed as to his motions, and perfectly instructed in the situation of the country, instead of passing him, turned short upon his front, crossing the Nile at Fagitta, and forced him to an engagement in the plain country of Maitsha. The battle, though it was obstinately fought by the rebels, ended in a complete victory in favour of the king. Those among the rebels who most distinguished themselves were the banished monks, the greatest part of whom were slain fighting desperately. Among these, were Abba Welleta Christos, Tobias and his brother Abba Nicolaus, who had been ringleaders in the late religious disputes in the time of Yasous, and were now chiefs of the rebellion against his son.

The greatest part of the loss fell upon the common men of Gojam, of the clans Elmana and Densa. No man of note among them was lost; only Amda Sion, who fell at their head in the beginning of the engagement, fighting with all the bravery that could be expected from a man in his circumstances. The rebel army was entirely dispersed. On the king’s side no man of consideration was slain, but Anastè, son of Ozoro Sabel Wenghel.

After having reinforced Dermin, the first thing the king did was to send three of his brothers, David, Hannes, and Jonathan, to be imprisoned on the mountain of Wechné. He then marched with his army from Gondar; and, being ignorant of what had happened, he dispatched his master of the horse, by way of Dingleber, to join Kasmati Dermin, in case he had not still been strong enough to fight the rebels. With his main army he took the road to Tedda, intending to proceed to Gojam; but, by the way, was informed that Dermin had defeated and slain his rival Amda Sion: and he had scarce crossed the Nile at Dara, when another messenger arrived with news that Dermin had also come up with Kasmati Honorius and his army on the banks of the Nile, at Goutto, had entirely defeated and slain him, together with his principal officers, and dispersed the whole army. Upon this the king marched towards Ibaba, and was there joined by Dermin, when great rejoicing and feasting ensued for several days.

On this occasion the king crowned his mother Malacotawit, conferring upon her the dignity and title of Iteghè; the consequence of which station I have often described. Having now no longer enemies to fear, he was persuaded, by some of his favourites, first to dismiss Dermin and his army, then all the troops that had joined him, and go with a few of his attendants, or court, to hunt the buffalo in the neighbouring country, Idi; which council the young prince too rashly adopted, suspecting no treason.

While the hunting-match lasted, a conspiracy was formed by Gueber Mo, his two brothers, Palambaras, Hannes, and several others, old officers belonging to the late king Yasous, who saw that he intended, one by one, to weed them out of the way as soon as safely he could, and that the whole power and favour was at last to fall into the hands of the Iteghé, and her brothers Dermin and Paulus. Accordingly one morning, the conspirators having surrounded him while riding, one of them thrust him through the body with a sword, and threw him from his mule upon the earth. They then laid his body upon a horse, and, with all possible expedition, carried him to the house of Azena Michael, where he arrived yet alive, but died immediately upon being taken from the horse. Badjerund Oustas, and some others of his father’s old officers, who had attached themselves to him after his father’s death, took the body of the king and buried it in Quebran.

As soon as this assassination was known, the master of the horse, with the few troops that he could gather together, came to the palace, and took a young son of Tecla Haimanout, aged only four years, whom he proclaimed king, and the Iteghé, Malacotawit, regent of the kingdom. But Badjerund Oustas, and those who had not been concerned in the murder of either king, went straight to the mountain of Wechné, and brought thence Tisilis, that is Theophilus, son to Hannes, and brother to the late king Yasous, whom they crowned at Emfras, and called him, by his inauguration name, Atserar Segued.

TIFILIS.

From 1706 to 1709.

_Dissembles with his Brother’s Assassins--Execution of the Regicides--Rebellion and Death of Tigi._

Theophilus, a few days after his coronation, having called the whole court and clergy together, declared to them, that his faith upon the disputable point concerning our Saviour’s incarnation was different from that of his brother Yasous, or that of his nephew Tecla Haimanout, but in every respect conformable to that of the monks of Gojam, followers of Abba Eustathius, and that of the Iteghè, Malacotawit, Dermin, and Paulus. A violent clamour was instantly raised against the king by the priests of Debra Libanos, as having forsaken the religious principles of his predecessors. But the king was inflexible; and this ingratiated him more with the inhabitants of Gojam. Not many days after, the king arrested the master of the horse, Johannes Palambaras, the Betwudet Tigi, and several others, all supposed to be concerned in the murder of the late king, and confined them in several places and prisons.

This last action of the king entirely relieved the minds of all the friends of Tecla Haimanout from any further fear of being called to account for the murder of Yasous; and, in consequence of this, the queen Malocotawit, with her brothers Dermin and Paulus, and all the murderers of the late king Yasous, came to Gondar that same winter to do homage to Theophilus, whom they now thought their greatest protector.

But the wise and sagacious king had kept his secret in his own bosom. All his behaviour hitherto had been only dissimulation, to induce his brother’s murderers to come within his power. And no sooner did he see that he had succeeded in this, than the very first day, while they were yet at audience, he ordered an officer, in his own presence, to arrest first the queen, and then her two brothers Dermin and Paulus. He gave the same directions concerning the rest of the conspirators, who were all scattered about Gondar, eating, drinking, and fearing nothing, but rejoicing at the happy days they had promised themselves, and were now to see: he ordered the whole of them, amounting to 37 persons, many of these of the first rank, to be all executed that same forenoon.

He began with the queen, who was taken immediately from his presence and hanged by the common hangman on the tree before the palace gate; the first of her rank, it is believed, that ever died so vile a death, either in Abyssinia or any other country, the history of which has come down to our hands. Dermin and Paulus were first carried to the tree to see their sister’s execution; after which, one after the other, they were thrust through with swords, the weapon with which they had wounded the late king Yasous. But the two Mahometans were shot with muskets, it having been in that manner they had ended the late king’s life, after Dermin had wounded him with a sword. As they had committed high treason, none of the bodies of these traitors were allowed to be buried; they were hewn in small pieces with knives, and strewed about the streets, to be eat by the hyænas and dogs; a most barbarous and offensive custom, to which they strictly adhere to this very day.

After having thus taken ample vengeance for the murder of his brother Yasous, Theophilus did not stop here. Tecla Haimanout was, it is true, a parricide, but he was likewise a king, and his nephew; nor did it seem just to Theophilus that it should be left in the will of private subjects, after having acknowledged Tecla Haimanout as their sovereign, to choose a time afterwards, in which they were to cut him off for a crime which, however great, had not hindered them from swearing allegiance to him at his accession, and entering into his service at the time when it was recently committed. He, therefore, ordered all the regicides in custody to be put to death; and sent circular letters to the several governors, that they should observe the same rule as to all those directly concerned in the murder of his nephew Tecla Haimanout, who should be found in places under their command.

Tigi, formerly Betwudet, had been imprisoned in Hamazen, a small district near the Red Sea, under the government of Abba Saluce. This man, by birth a Galla, had escaped from Hamazen, and collected a considerable army of the different tribes of his nation, Liban, Kalkend, and Basso; and, having found one that pretended to be of the royal blood, he proclaimed him king, and put his army in motion.

Upon the first news of this revolt, the king, though attended with few troops, immediately left Gondar, ordering all those whose duty it was to join him at Ibaba. Having there collected a little army, he marched immediately for the country of the Basso, destroying every thing with fire and sword. Tigi, in the mean time, by forced marches came to Ibaba, where he committed all sorts of cruelties without distinction of age or sex. The cries of the sufferers reached the king, who turned immediately back to the relief of Ibaba; and, not discouraged by his enemy’s great superiority of number, offered battle to them as soon as he arrived. Nor did Tigi and his Galla refuse it; but, on the 28th day of March 1709, a very obstinate engagement ensued; where, though the king was inferior in forces, yet being himself warlike and active, he was so well seconded by his troops that Basso and Liban were almost entirely cut off.

In the field of battle there was a church, built by the late king Yasous after a victory gained there over the Pagans, whence it had the name it then bore, Debra Mawea, or the _Mountain of Victory_. A large body of these Galla, seeing that all went against them in the field, fled to the church for a sanctuary, trusting to be protected from the fury of the soldiers by the holiness of the place, and they so far judged well; for the king’s troops, though they surrounded the church on every side, did not offer to break into it, or molest the enemy that had sheltered themselves within. Theophilus, informed of this scruple of his soldiers, immediately rode up to them, crying out, “That the church was defiled by the entrance of so many Pagans, and no longer fit for Christian worship, that they should therefore immediately put fire to it, and he would build a nobler one in its place.” The soldiers obeyed without further hesitation; and, with cotton wads wrapt about the balls of their guns, they set fire to the thatch, with which every church in Abyssinia is covered. The whole was instantly consumed, and every creature within it perished. Many principal officers and men of the best families on the king’s side, Billetana Gueta, Sana Denghel, and Billetana Gueta Kirubel, Ayto Stephenous, son of Ozoro Salla of Nara, all men of great consideration, were slain that day. What came of the rebel prince was never known. Tigi, with his two sons, fled from the field; but they were met by a peasant, who took them prisoners first; and, after discovering who they were, put them all three to death, and brought their heads to the king.

After so severe a rebuke, the Galla, on both sides of the Nile, seemed disposed to be quiet, and the king thereupon returned to Gondar amidst the acclamations of his soldiers and subjects; but scarce had he arrived in the capital when he was taken ill of a fever, and died on the 2d of September, and was buried at Tedda, after a reign of three years and three months.

OUSTAS.

From 1709 to 1714.

_Usurps the Crown--Addicted to hunting--Account of the Shangalla--Active and bloody Reign--Entertains Catholic Priests privately--Falls sick and dies; but how, uncertain._

It has been already observed in the course of this history, that the Abyssinians, from a very ancient tradition, attribute the foundation of their monarchy to Menilek son of Solomon, by the queen of Saba, or Azab, rendered in the Vulgate, the Queen of the south. The annals of this country mention but two interruptions to have happened, in the lineal succession of the heirs-male of Solomon. The first about the year 960, in the reign of Del Naad, by Judith queen of the Falasha, of which revolution we have already spoken sufficiently. The second interruption happened at the period to which we have now arrived in this history, and owed its origin, not to any misfortune that befel the royal family as in the massacre of Judith, but seemed to be brought about by the peculiar circumstances of the times, from a well-founded attention to self-preservation.

Yasous the Great, after a long and glorious reign, had been murdered by his son Tecla Haimanout. Two years after, this parricide fell in the same manner. The assassination of two princes, so nearly related, and in so short a time, had involved, from different motives, the greatest part of the noble families of the kingdom, either in the crime itself, or in the suspicion of aiding and abetting it.

Upon the death of Tecla Haimanout, Tifilis, or Theophilus, brother of Yasous, had been brought from the mountain, and placed on the throne as successor to his nephew; this prince was scarcely crowned when he made some very severe examples of the murderers of his brother, and he seemed privately taking informations that would have reached the whole of them, had not death put an end to his inquiries and to his justice.

The family of king Yasous was very numerous on the mountain. It was the favourite store whence both the soldiery and the citizens chose to bring their princes. There were, at the very instant, many of his sons princes of great hopes and of proper ages. Nothing then was more probable than that the prince, now to succeed, would be of that family, and, as such, interested in pursuing the same measures of vengeance on the murderers of his father and of his brother as the late king Theophilus had done; and how far, or to whom this might extend, was neither certain nor safe to trust to.

The time was now past when the nobles vied with each other who should be the first to steal away privately, or go with open force, to take the new king from the mountain, and bring him to Gondar, his capital: A backwardness was visible in the behaviour of each of them, because in each one’s breast the fear was the same.

In so uncommon a conjuncture and disposition of men’s minds, a subject had the ambition and boldness to offer himself for king, and he was accordingly elected. This was Oustas[80], son of Delba Yasous, by a daughter of the late king of that name; and Abyssinia now saw, for the second time, a stranger seated on the throne of Solomon. Oustas was a man of undisputed merit, and had filled the greatest offices in the state. He had been Badjerund, or master of the household, to the late king Yasous. Tecla Haimanout, who succeeded, had made him governor of Samen; and though, in the next reign, he had fallen into disgrace with Theophilus, this served but to aggrandize him more, as he was very soon after restored to favour, and by this very prince raised to the dignity of Ras, the first place under the king, and invested at once with the government of two provinces, Samen and Tigré. He was, at the death of Theophilus, the greatest subject in Abyssinia; one step higher set him on the throne, and the circumstances of the time invited him to take it. He had every quality of body and mind requisite for a king; but the constitution of his country had made it unlawful for him to reign. He took, upon his inauguration, the name of Tzai Segued.

Oustas, though a new king, followed the customs of the ancient monarchs of Abyssinia; for that very reason was unwilling to add novelty to novelty, and it has been a constant practice with these to make a public hunting-match the first expedition of their reign. On these occasions the king, attended by all the great officers of state, whose merit and capacity are already acknowledged, reviews his young nobility, who all appear to the best advantage as to arms, horses, and equipage, with the greatest number of servants and attendants. The scene of this hunting is always in the Kolla, crowded with an immense number of the largest and fiercest wild beasts, elephants, rhinoceros, lions, leopards, panthers, and buffaloes fiercer than them all, wild boars, wild asses, and many varieties of the deer kind.

As soon as the game is roused, and forced out of the wood by the footmen and dogs, they all singly, or several together, according to the size of the beast, or as strength and ability in managing their horses admit, attack the animal upon the plain with long pikes or spears, or two javelins in their hands. The king, unless very young, sits on horseback on a rising ground, surrounded by the graver sort, who point out to him the names of those of the nobility that are happy enough to distinguish themselves in his sight. The merit of others is known by report.

Each young man brings before the king’s tent, as a trophy, a part of the beast he has slain; the head and skin of a lion or leopard; the scalp or horns of a deer; the private parts of an elephant; the tail of a buffalo, or the horn of a rhinoceros. The great trouble, force, and time necessary to take out the teeth of the elephant, seldom make them ready to be presented with the rest of the spoils; fire, too, is necessary for loosing them from the jaw. The head of a boar is brought stuck upon a lance; but is not touched, as being unclean.

The elephant’s teeth are the king’s perquisites. Of these round ivory rings are turned for bracelets, and a quantity of them always brought by him to be distributed among the most deserving in the field, and kept ever after as certificates of gallant behaviour. Nor is this mark attended with honour alone. Any man who shall from the king, queen-regent, or governor of a province, receive so many of these rings as shall cover his arm down to his wrist, appears before the twelve judges on a certain day, and there, laying down his arm with these rings upon it, the king’s cook breaks every one in its turn with a kind of kitchen-cleaver, whereupon the judges give him a certificate, which proves that he is entitled to a territory, whose revenue must exceed 20 ounces of gold, and this is never either refused or delayed. All the different species of game, however, are not equally rated. He that slays a Galla, or Shangalla, man to man, is entitled to two rings; he that slays an elephant to two; a rhinoceros, two; a giraffa, on account of its speed, and to encourage horsemanship, two; a buffalo, two; a lion, two; a leopard, one; two boars, whose tusks are grown, one; and one for every four of the deer kind.

Great disputes constantly arise about the killing of these beasts; to determine which, and prevent feuds and quarrels, a council sits every evening, in which is an officer called _Dimshasha_, or _Red Cap_, from a piece of red silk he wears upon his forehead, leaving the top of his head bare, for no person is allowed to cover his head entirely except the king, the twelve judges, and dignified priests. This officer regulates the precedence of one nobleman over another, and is possessed of the history of all pedigrees, the noblest of which are always accounted those nearest to the king reigning.

Every man pleads his own cause before the council, and receives immediate sentence. It is a settled rule, that those who strike the animal first, if the lance remain upright, or in the same direction in which it enters the beast, are understood to be the slayers of the beast, whatever number combat with him afterwards. There is one exception, however, that if the beast, after receiving the first wound, tho’ the lance is in him, should lay hold of a horse or man, so that it is evident he would prevail against them; a buffalo, for example, that should toss a man with his horns, or an elephant that should take a horse with his trunk, the man who shall then slay the beast, and prevent or revenge the death of the man or horse attacked, shall be accounted the slayer of the beast, and entitled to the premium.

This was the ancient employment of these councils. In my time they kept up this custom in point of form; the council sat late upon most serious affairs of the nation; and the death, banishment, and degradation of the first men in the kingdom were agitated and determined here under the pretence of sitting to judge the prizes of pastimes. This hunting is seldom prolonged beyond a fortnight.

The king, from ocular inspection, is presumed to be able to choose among the young nobility those that are ready for taking the necessary charges in the army; and it is from his judgment in this that the priests foretel whether his reign is to be a successful one, or to end in misfortune and disappointment.

Oustas, having taken a view of his nobility, and attached such to him as were most necessary for his support, set out for this hunting with great preparations. The high country of Abyssinia is destitute of wood; the whole lower part of the mountains is sown with different sorts of grain; the upper part perfectly covered with grass and all sorts of verdure. There are no plains, or very small ones. Such a country, therefore, is unfit for hunting, as it is incapable of either sheltering or nourishing any number of wild beasts.

The lower country, however, called Kolla, is full of wood, consequently thinly inhabited. The mountains, not joined in chains or ridges, run in one upon the other, but, standing each upon its particular base, are accessible all round, and interspersed with plains. Great rivers falling from the high country with prodigious violence, during the tropical rains, have in the plains washed away the soil down to the solid rock, and formed large basons of great capacity, where, though the water becomes stagnant in pools when the currents fail above, yet, from their great depth and quantity, they resist being consumed by evaporation, being also thick covered with large shady trees whose leaves never fall. These large trees, which, in their growth, and vegetation of their branches, exceed any thing that our imagination can figure, are as necessary for food, as the pools of water are for cisterns to contain drink for those monstrous beasts, such as the elephant and rhinoceros, who there make their constant residence, and who would die with hunger and with thirst unless they were thus copiously supplied both with food and water.

This country, flat as the deserts on which it borders, has fat black earth for its soil. It is generally about 40 miles broad, though in many places broader and narrower. It reaches from the mountains of the Habab, or Bagla, which run in a ridge, as I have already said, from the south of Abyssinia[81] north down into Egypt, parallel to the Red Sea, dividing the rainy seasons, and it stretches like a belt from east to west to the banks of the Nile, encircling all the mountainous, or high land part of Abyssinia; which latter country is, at all times, temperate, and often cold, while the other is unwholesome, hazy, close, and intolerably hot.

Many nations of perfect blacks inhabit this low country, all Pagans, and mortal enemies to the Abyssinian government. Hunting these miserable wretches is the next expedition undertaken by a new king. The season of this is just before the rains, while the poor savage is yet lodged under the trees preparing his food for the approaching winter, before he retires into his caves in the mountain, where he passes that inclement season in constant confinement, but as constant security; for these nations are all Troglodytes, and by the Abyssinians are called Shangalla.

However Oustas succeeded in attaching to him those of the nobility that partook of his sports, his good fortune in the capital was not equal to it. A dangerous conspiracy was already forming at Gondar by those very people who had persuaded him to mount the throne, and whom he had left at home, from a persuasion that they only were to be trusted with the support of his interest and the government in his absence.

Upon the first intelligence, the king, with a chosen body of troops, entered Gondar in the night, and surprised the conspirators while actually sitting in council. Ras Hezekias, his prime minister, and Heraclides, master of his household, and five others of the principal confederates, lost their ears and noses, and were thrown into prison in such circumstances that they could not live. Benaia Basilé, one of the principal traitors, and the most obnoxious to the king, escaped for a time, having had already intelligence of Oustas’s coming.

The king having quieted every thing at Gondar, being at peace with all his neighbours, and having no other way to amuse his troops and keep them employed, set out to join the remainder of his young nobility whom he had left in the Kolla to attack the Shangalla.

The Shangalla were formerly a very numerous people, divided into distinct tribes, or, as it is called, different nations, living each separately in distinct territories, each under the government of the chief of its own name, and each family of that name under the jurisdiction of its own chief, or head.

These Shangalla, during the fair half of the year, live under the shade of trees, the lowest branches of which they cut near the stem on the upper part, and then bend, or break them down, planting the ends of the branches in the earth. These branches they cover with the skins of wild beasts. After this they cut away all the small or superfluous branches in the inside, and so form a spacious pavilion, which at a distance appears like a tent, the tree serving for the pole in the middle of it, and the large top overshadowing it so as to make a very picturesque appearance.

Every tree then is a house, under which live a multitude of black inhabitants until the tropical rains begin. It is then they hunt the elephant, which they kill by many various devices, as they do the rhinoceros and the other large creatures. Those who reside where water abounds, with the same industry kill the hippopotami, or river-horses, which are exceedingly numerous in the pools of the stagnant rivers. Where this flat belt, or country, is broadest, the trees thickest, and the water in the largest pools, there the most powerful nations live, who have often defeated the royal army of Abyssinia, and constantly laid waste, and sometimes nearly conquered, the provinces of Tigré and Siré, the most warlike and most populous part in Abyssinia.

The most considerable settlement of this nation is at Amba Tzaada, between the Mareb and Tacazzé, but nearer by one-third to the Mareb, and almost N. W. from Dobarwa. These people, who have a variety of venison, kill it in the fair months, and hang it up, cut into thongs as thick as a man’s thumb, like so many ropes, on the trees around them. The sun dries and hardens it to a consistence almost like leather, or the hardest fish sent from Newfoundland. This is their provision for the winter months: They first beat it with a wooden mallet, then boil it, after which they roast it upon the embers; and it is hard enough after it has undergone all those operations.

The Dobenah, the most powerful of all the Shangalla, who have a species of supremacy or command over all the rest of the nations, live altogether upon the elephant or rhinoceros. In other countries, where there is less water, fewer trees, and more grass, the Shangalla feed chiefly upon more promiscuous kinds of food, as buffaloes, deer, boars, lions, and serpents. These are the nations nearer the Tacazzé, Ras el Feel, and the plains of Siré in Abyssinia, the chief of which nations is called Baasa. And still farther west of the Tacazzé, and the valley of Waldubba, is a tribe of these, who live chiefly upon the crocodile, hippopotamus, and other fish; and, in the summer, upon locusts, which they boil first, and afterwards keep dry in baskets, most curiously made with split branches of trees, so closely woven together as to contain water almost as well as a wooden vessel.

This nation borders nearly upon the Abyssinian hunting-ground; but, not venturing to extend themselves in the chace of wild beasts, they are confined to the neighbourhood of the Tacazzé, and rivers falling into it, where they fish in safety: the banks of that river are deep, interrupted by steep precipices inaccessible to cavalry, and, from the thickness of the woods, full of thorny trees of innumerable species, almost as impervious to foot. These streams, possessed only by themselves, afford the Baasa the most excellent kinds of fish in the most prodigious plenty.

In that part of the Shangalla country more to the eastward, about N. N. E. of Amba Tzaada, in the northern extremities of the woody part, where the river Mareb, leaving Dobarwa, flows through thick bushes till it loses itself in the sands, there is a nation of these blacks, who being near the country of the Baharnagash, an officer whose province produces a number of horse, dare not, for that reason, venture to make an extensive use of the variety of wild beasts which throng in the woods to the southward, for fear of being intercepted by their enemy, constantly upon the watch for them, part of his tribute being paid in black slaves. These, therefore, confine themselves to the southern part of their territory, near the Barabra.

The extraordinary course of this river under the sand, allures to it multitudes of ostriches, which, too, are the food of the Shangalla, as is a beautiful lizard, never, that I know, yet described. These are the food of the eastern Shangalla; and I must here observe, that this country and people were much better known to the ancients than to us. The Egyptians traded with them, and caravans of these people were constantly in Alexandria in the reigns of the first Ptolemies. Most of the productions of these parts, and the people themselves, are mentioned in the remarkable procession made by Ptolemy Philadelphus on his accession to the throne of Egypt, as already observed, though a confusion often arises therein by this country being called by the name of India.

Ptolemy, the geographer, classes these people exactly enough, and distinguishes them very accurately by their particular food, or dietetique regimen, though he errs, indeed, a little in the particular situation he gives to the different nations. His Rhizophagi, Elephantophagi, Acridophagi, Struthiophagi, and Agriophagi, are all the clans I have just described, existing under the same habits to this day.

This soil, called by the Abyssinians _Mazaga_, when wet by the tropical rains, and dissolving into mire, forces these savages to seek for winter-quarters. Their tents under the trees being no longer tenable, they retire with their respective foods, all dried in the sun, into caves dug into the heart of the mountains, which are not in this country basaltes, marble, or alabaster, as is all that ridge which runs down into Egypt along the side of the Red Sea, but are of a soft, gritty, sandy stone, easily excavated and formed into different apartments. Into these, made generally in the steepest part of the mountain, do these savages retire to shun the rains, living upon the flesh they have already prepared in the fair weather.

I cannot give over the account of the Shangalla without delivering them again out of their caves, because this return includes the history of an operation never heard of perhaps in Europe, and by which considerable light is thrown upon ancient history. No sooner does the sun pass the zenith, going southward, than the rains instantly cease; and the thick canopy of clouds, which had obscured the sky during their continuance, being removed, the sun appears in a beautiful sky of pale blue, dappled with small thin clouds, which soon after disappear, and leave the heavens of a most beautiful azure. A very few days of the intense heat then dries the ground so perfectly, that it gapes in chasms; the grass, struck at the roots by the rays, supports itself no more, but droops and becomes parched. To clear this away, the Shangalla set fire to it, which runs with incredible violence the whole breadth of Africa, passing under the trees, and following the dry grass among the branches with such velocity as not to hurt the trees, but to occasion every leaf to fall.

A proper distance is preserved between each habitation, and round the principal watering-places; and here the Shangalla again fix their tents in the manner before described. Nothing can be more beautiful than these shady habitations; but they have this fatal effect, that they are discernible from the high grounds, and guide their enemies to the places inhabited.

The country now cleared, the hunting begins, and, with the hunting, the danger of the Shangalla. All the governors bordering upon the country, from the Baharnagash to the Nile on the west, are obliged to pay a certain number of slaves. Ras el Feel (my government) was alone excepted, for a reason which, had I staid much longer in the country, would probably have been found more advantageous to Abyssinia than all the slaves they procure by the barbarous and prodigal effusion of the blood of these unhappy savages; for, when a settlement of these is surprised, the men are all slaughtered; the women, also, are many of them slain, many throw themselves down precipices, run mad, hang themselves, or starve, obstinately refusing food.

The boys and girls under 17 and 18 years of age, (the younger the better) are taken and educated by the king, and are servants in all the great houses of Abyssinia. They are instructed early in the Christian religion, and the tallest, handsomest, and best inclined, are the only servants that attend the royal person in his palace. The number of the men was 300 that had horses in my time. They were once 280, and, before my time, less than 200. These are all cloathed in coats of mail, and mounted on black horses; always commanded by foreigners devoted entirely to the king’s will. By strict attention to their morals, removing all bad examples from among them, giving premiums to those that read most and best, (for they had all time enough upon their hands, especially in winter) and, above all, by the great delight and pleasure the king used to take in conversing with them while alone, countenancing and rewarding them in the line he knew I followed, this body became, as to firmness and coolness in action, equal perhaps to any of the same number in the world; and the greatest difficulty was keeping them together, for all the great men used to wish one of them for the charge of his door, which is a very great trust among the Abyssinians. The king’s easiness was constantly prevailed upon to promise such, and great inconvenience always followed this, till Ras Michael discharged this practice by proclamation, and set the example, by returning four that he himself had kept for the purpose before mentioned.

While what I have said is still in memory, I must apply a part of it to explain a passage in Hanno’s Periplus. We saw, says that bold navigator, when rowing close along the coast of Africa, rivers of fire, which ran down from the highest mountains, and poured themselves into the sea; this alarmed him so much, that he ordered his gallies to keep a considerable offing.

After the fire has consumed all the dry grass on the plain, and, from it, done the same up to the top of the highest mountain, the large ravines, or gullies, made by the torrents falling from the higher ground, being shaded by their depth, and their being in possession of the last water that runs, are the latest to take fire, though full of every sort of herbage. The large bamboos, hollow canes, and such like plants, growing as thick as they can stand, retain their greenness, and are not dried enough for burning till the fire has cleared the grass from all the rest of the country. At last, when no other fuel remains, the herdsmen on the top of the mountains set fire to these, and the fire runs down in the very path in which, some months before, the water ran, filling the whole gully with flame, which does not end till it is checked by the ocean below where the torrent of water entered, and where the fuel of course ceases. This I have often seen myself, and been often nearly inclosed in it, and can bear witness, that, at a distance, and by a stranger ignorant of the cause, it would very hardly be distinguished from a river of fire.

The Shangalla go all naked; they have several wives, and these very prolific. They bring forth children with the utmost ease, and never rest or confine themselves after delivery, but washing themselves and the child with cold water, they wrap it up in a soft cloth made of the bark of trees, and hang it upon a branch, that the large ants, with which they are infested, and the serpents, may not devour it. After a few days, when it has gathered strength, the mother carries it in the same cloth upon her back, and gives it suck with the breast, which she throws over her shoulder, this part being of such a length as, in some, to reach almost to their knees.

The Shangalla have but one language, and of a very guttural pronunciation. They worship various trees, serpents, the moon, planets, and stars in certain positions, which I never could so perfectly understand as to give any account of them. A star passing near the horns of the moon denotes the coming of an enemy. They have priests, or rather diviners; but it should seem that these were looked upon as servants of the evil-being, rather than of the good. They prophecy bad events, and think they can afflict their enemies with sickness, even at a distance. They generally wear copper bracelets upon their wrists and arms.

I have said the Shangalla have each several wives. This, however, is not owing to any inordinate propensity of the men to this gratification, but to a much nobler cause, which should make European writers, who object this to them, ashamed at the injustice they do the savage, who all his life, quite the reverse of what is supposed, shews an example of continence and chastity, which the purest and most refined European, with all the advantages of education, cannot pretend to imitate.

It is not the men that seek to avail themselves of the liberty they have by their usages of marrying as often and as many wives as they please. Hemmed in on every side by active and powerful enemies, who consider them as a species of wild beasts, and hunt them precisely as they do the elephant and rhinoceros, placed in a small territory, where they never are removed above 20 miles from these powerful invaders furnished with horses and fire-arms, to both of which they are strangers, they live for part of the fair season in continual apprehension. The other part of the season, when the Abyssinian armies are all collected and abroad with the king, these unhappy savages are constantly employed in a most laborious hunting of large animals, such as the rhinoceros, the elephant, and giraffa; and afterwards, in the no less laborious preparation of the flesh of these quadrupeds, which is to serve them for food during the six months rains, when each family retires to its separate cave in the mountain, and has no intercourse with any of its neighbours, but leaves the country below immersed in a continual deluge of rain. In none of these circumstances, one should imagine, the savage, full of apprehension and care, could have much desire to multiply a race of such wretched beings as he feels himself to be. It is the wife, not the man, that is the cause of this polygamy; and this is surely a strong presumption against what is commonly said of the violence of their inclinations.

Although the Shangalla live in separate tribes, or nations, yet these nations are again subdivided into families, who are governed by their own head, or chief, and of a number of these the nation is composed, who concur in all that regards the measures of defence and offence against their common enemy the Abyssinian and Arab. Whenever an expedition is undertaken by a nation of Shangalla, either against their enemies, the Arabs on the north, or those who are equally their enemies, the Abyssinians on the south, suppose the nation or tribe to be the Baasa, each family attacks and defends by itself, and theirs is the spoil or plunder who take it.

The mothers, sensible of the disadvantage of a small family, therefore seek to multiply and increase it by the only means in their power; and it is by their importunity that the husband suffers himself to be overcome. A second wife is courted for him by the first, in nearly the same manner as among the Galla.

I will not fear to aver, as far as concerns these Shangalla, or negroes, of Abyssinia, (and, I believe, most others of the same complexion, though of different nations), that the various accounts we have of them are very unfairly stated. To describe them justly, we should see them in their native purity of manners, among their native woods, living on the produce of their own daily labours, without other liquor than that of their own pools and springs, the drinking of which is followed by no intoxication or other pleasure than that of assuaging thirst. After having been torn from their own country and connections, reduced to the condition of brutes, to labour for a being they never before knew; after lying, stealing, and all the long list of European crimes, have been made, as it were, necessary to them, and the delusion occasioned by drinking spirits is found, however short, to be the only remedy that relieves them from reflecting on their present wretched situation, to which, for that reason, they most naturally attach themselves; then, after we have made them monsters, we describe them as such, forgetful that they are now not as their Maker created them, but such as, by teaching them our vices, we have transformed them into, for ends which, I fear, one day will not be found a sufficient excuse for the enormities they have occasioned.

I would not, by any means, have my readers so far mistake what I have now said as to think it contains either censure upon, or disapprobation of, the slave-trade. I would be understood to mean just the contrary; that the abuses and neglect of manners, so frequent in our plantations, is what the legislature should direct their coercion against, not against the trade in general, which last measure, executed so suddenly, cannot but contain a degree of injustice towards individuals. It is a shame for any government to say, that enormous cruelties towards any set of men are so evident, and have arrived to such excess, without once having been under consideration of the legislature to correct them. It is a greater shame still for that government to say, that these crimes and abuses are now grown to such a height that wholesome severity cannot eradicate them; and it cannot be any thing but an indication of effeminacy and weakness at once to fall to the destruction of an object of that importance, without having first tried a reformation of those abuses which alone, in the minds of sober men, can make the trade exceptionable.

The incontinence of these people has been a favourite topic with which blacks have been branded; but, throughout the whole of this history, I have set down only what I have observed, without consulting or troubling myself with the systems or authorities of others, only so far, as having these relations in my recollection, I have compared them with the fact, and found them erroneous. As late as two centuries ago, Christian priests were the only historians of heathen manners.

In the number of these Shangalla, or negroes, of which every department of Gondar was full, I never saw any proof of unbridled desires in either sex, but very much the contrary; and I must remark, that every reason in physics strongly militates against the presumption.

The Shangalla of both sexes, while single, go entirely naked: the married men, indeed, have a very slender covering about their waist, and married women the same. Young men and young women, till long past the age of puberty, are totally uncovered, and in constant conversation and habits with each other, in woods and solitudes, free from constraint, and without any punishment annexed to the transgression. Yet criminal commerce is much less frequent among them than in the same number chosen among Christian nations, where the powerful prejudices of education give great advantage to one sex in subduing their passions, and where the consequences of gratification, which always involve some kind of punishment, keep within bounds the desires of the other.

No one can doubt, but that the constant habit of seeing people of all ages naked at all times, in the ordinary transactions and necessities of life, must greatly check unchaste propensities. But there are still further reasons why, in the nature of things an extraordinary vehemence of passion should not fall to be a distinguishing characteristic among the Shangalla. Fahrenheit’s thermometer rises there beyond 100°. A violent relaxation from profuse perspiration must greatly debilitate the savage. In Arabia and Turkey, where the whole business of man’s life is the devoting himself to domestic pleasure, men remain constantly in a sedentary life, eat heartily, avoiding every manner of exercise, or expence of animal spirits by sweats. Their countries, too, are colder than that of the Shangalla, who, living sparingly under a burning sun, and obliged to procure food by laborious hunting, of consequence deprive themselves of that quantity of animal spirits necessary to lead them to any extreme of voluptuousness. And that this is the case is seen in the constitution of the Shangalla women, even though they are without fatigue.

A woman, upon bearing a child or two, at 10 or 11 years old, sees her breast fall immediately down to near her knees[82]. Her common manner of suckling her children is by carrying them upon her back, as our beggars do, and giving the infant the breast over her shoulders. They rarely are mothers after 22, or begin child-bearing before they are 10; so that the time of child-bearing is but 12 years. In Europe, very many examples there are of women bearing children at 14, the civil law fixes puberty at 12, but by an inuendo[83] seems to allow it may be something earlier. Women sometimes in Europe bear children at 50. The scale of years of child-bearing between the savage and the European is, therefore, as 12 is to 38. There can be little doubt but their desires are equal to their strength and constitution; but a Shangalla at 22 is more wrinkled and deformed, apparently by old age, than is a European woman of 60.

To come still nearer; it is a fact known to naturalists, and which the application of the thermometer sufficiently indicates, that there is a great and sensible difference in the degree of animal heat in both sexes of different nations at the same ages or time of life. The voluptuous Turk estranges himself from the fairest and finest of his Circassian and Georgian women in his seraglio, and, during the warm months in summer, addicts himself only to negro slaves brought from the very latitudes we are now speaking of; the sensible difference of the coolness of their skins leading him to give them the preference at that season. On the other hand, one brown Abyssinian girl, a companion for the winter months, is sold at ten times the price of the fairest Georgian or Circassian beauty, for opposite reasons.

The very great regard I shall constantly pay my fair readers has made me, as they may perceive, enter as tenderly as possible into these discussions, which, as a philosopher and a historian, I could not, however, wholly omit: the most useful study of mankind is man; and not the least interesting view of him is when, stripped of his vain-glory and the pageantry of palaces, he wanders naked and uncorrupted among his native woods and rivers.

I must mention, greatly to the credit of two of the first geniuses of this age, M. de Buffon and Lord Kaimes, that they were both so convinced by the arguments above mentioned, stated in greater detail and with more freedom, that they immediately ordered their bookseller to strike out from the subsequent editions of their work all that had been advanced against the negroes on this head, which they had before drawn from the herd of prejudiced and ignorant compilers, strangers to the manners and language of the people they were dishonouring by their descriptions, after having before abused them by their tyranny.

The Shangalla have no bread: No grain or pulse will grow in the country. Some of the Arabs, settled at Ras el Feel, have attempted to make bread of the feed of the Guinea grass; but it is very tasteless and bad, of the colour of cow-dung, and quickly producing worms.

They are all archers from their infancy. Their bows are all made of wild fennel, thicker than the common proportion, and about seven feet long, and very elastic. The children use the same bow in their infancy that they do when grown up; and are, by reason of its length, for the first years, obliged to hold it parallel, instead of perpendicular to the horizon. Their arrows are full a yard and a half long, with large heads of very bad iron rudely shaped. They are, indeed, the only savages I ever knew that take no pains in the make or ornament of this weapon. A branch of a palm, stript from the tree and made straight, becomes an arrow; and none of them have wings to them. They have this remarkable custom, which is a religious one, that they fix upon their bows a ring, or thong, of the skin of every beast slain by it, while it is yet raw, from the lizard and serpent up to the elephant. This gradually stiffens the bow, till, being all covered over, it can be no longer bent even by its master. That bow is then hung upon a tree, and a new one is made in its place, till the same circumstance again happens; and one of these bows, that which its master liked best, is buried with him in the hopes of its rising again materially with his body, when he shall be endowed with a greater degree of strength, without fear of death, or being subjected to pain, with a capacity to enjoy in excess every human pleasure. There is nothing, however, spiritual in this resurrection, nor what concerns the soul, but it is wholly corporeal and material; although some writers have plumed themselves upon their fancied discovery of what they call the savages belief of the immortality of the soul.

Before I take leave of this subject, I must again explain, from what I have already said, a difficult passage in classical history. Herodotus[84] says, that, in the country we have been just now describing, there was a nation called Macrobii, which was certainly not the real name of the Shangalla, but one the Greeks had given them, from a supposed circumstance of their being remarkable long livers, as that name imports. These were the western Shangalla, situated below Guba and Nuba, the gold country, on both sides of the Nile north of Fazuclo.

The Guba and the Nuba, and various black nations that inhabits the foot of that large chain of mountains called Dyre and Tegla[85], are those in whose countries the finest gold is found, which is washed from the mountains in the time of violent rains, and lodged in holes, and roots of trees and grass, by the torrents, and there picked up by the natives; it is called Tibbar, or, corruptly, gold-dust. The greatest part finds its way to Sennaar by the different merchants, Pagan and Mahometan, from Fazuclo and Sudan. The Agows and Gibbertis also bring a small quantity of it to Gondar, mostly debased by alloy; but there is no gold in Abyssinia, nor even in Nubia, west of Tchelga, among the Shangalla themselves.

Cambyses marched from Egypt expressly with a view of conquering the gold country, and sent messengers before him to the king, or chief of it, requiring his immediate submission. I omit romantic and fabulous circumstances; but the answer of the king of Macrobii to Cambyses was, Take this bow, and till you can bring me a man that can bend it, you are not to talk to us of submission. The bow was accordingly carried back with the defiance, but none of the Persian army could bend it. Yet it was their own weapon with which they practised from their infancy; and we are not to think, had it been possible to bend this bow, but that some of their numerous archers would have done it, for there is no such disproportion in the strength of men. But it was a bow which had lost its elastic force from the circumstance above mentioned, and had been long given up as impossible to be bent by the Macrobii themselves, and was now taken down from the tree where it had probably some time hung, and grown so much the less flexible, and intended to be buried, as these bows are, in the grave with their master, who is to use it, after his resurrection, in another world, where he is to be endowed with strength infinitely more than human: it is probable this bow would have broke, rather than have bent.

If the situation of these Macrobii in Ptolemy did not put it past dispute that they were Shangalla, we should hesitate much at the characteristic of the nation; that they were long livers; none of these nations are so; I scarcely remember an example fairly vouched of a man past sixty. But there is one circumstance that I think might have fairly led Herodotus into this mistake; some of the Shangalla kill their sick, weak, and aged people; there are others that honour old age, and protect it. The Macrobii, I suppose, were of this last kind, who certainly, therefore, had many old men, more than the others.

I shall now just mention one other observation tending to illustrate a passage of ancient history.

Hanno, in his Periplus, remarks, that, while sailing along the coast of Africa, close by the shore, and probably near the low country called Kolla, inhabited by the kind of people we have been just describing, he found an universal silence to prevail the whole day, without any appearance of man or beast: on the contrary, at night, he saw a number of fires, and heard the sound of music and dancing. This has been laughed at as a fairy tale by people who affect to treat Hanno’s fragment as spurious; for my own part, I will not enter into the controversy.

A very great genius, (in some matters, perhaps, the greatest that ever wrote, and in every thing that he writes highly respectable) M. de Montesqieu, is perfectly satisfied that this Periplus[86] of Hanno is genuine; and it is a great pleasure again to endeavour to obviate any doubt concerning the authenticity of the work in this second passage, as I have before done in another.

In countries, such as those that we have been now describing, and such as Hanno was then sailing by, when he made the remark, there is no twilight. The stars, in their full brightness, are in possession of the whole heavens, when in an instant the sun appears without a harbinger, and they all disappear together. We shall say, at sun-rising the thermometer is from 48° to 60°; at 3 o’clock in the afternoon it is from 100° to 115°; an universal relaxation, a kind of irresistible languor and aversion to all action takes possession both man and beast; the appetite fails, and sleep and quiet are the only things the mind is capable of desiring, or the body of enduring: cattle, birds, and beasts all flock to the shade, and to the neighbourhood of running streams, or deep stagnant pools, and there, avoiding the effects of the scorching sun, pant in quiet and inaction. From the same motive, the wild beast stirs not from his cave; and for this, too, he has an additional reason, because the cattle he depends upon for his prey do not stroll abroad to feed; they are asleep and in safety, for with them are their dogs and their shepherds.

But no sooner does the sun set, than a cold night instantly succeeds a burning day; the appetite immediately returns; the cattle spread themselves abroad to feed, and pass quickly out of the shepherds sight into the reach of a multitude of beasts seeking for their prey. Fires, the only remedy, are everywhere lighted by the shepherds to keep these at a respectful distance; and dancing, singing, and music at once exhilarate the mind, and contribute, by alarming the beasts of prey, to keep their flocks in safety, and prevent the bad effects of severe cold[87]. This was the cause of the observation Hanno made in sailing along the coast, and it was true when he made it: just the same may be observed still, and will be, so long as the climate and inhabitants are the same.

I have been more particular in the history of this extraordinary nation, because I had, by mere accident, an opportunity of informing myself fully and with certainty concerning it; and, as it is very improbable that such an opportunity will occur again to any European, I hope it will not be ungratefully received.

I shall only add an answer to a very obvious question which may occur. Why is it that, in this country, nothing that would make bread will grow? Is it from the ignorance of the inhabitants in not choosing the proper seasons, or is it the imperfection of the soil? To this I answer, Certainly the latter. For the inhabitants of Ras el Feel were used to plow and sow, and did constantly eat bread; but the grain was produced ten or fifteen miles off upon the sides of the mountains of Abyssinia, where every certain number of soldiers had small farms allowed them for that purpose by government; but still they could never bring up a crop in the Mazaga; and the progress of the miscarriage was this: Before the month of May all that black earth was rent into great chasms, trode into dust, and ventilated with hot winds, so as to be a perfect _caput mortuum_, incapable of any vegetation. Upon the first sprinkling of rain the chasms are filled up, and the whole country resembles dry garden-mould newly dug up. As the sun advances the rains increase; there is no time to be lost now; this is the season for sowing; let us suppose wheat. In one night’s time, while the wheat is swelling in the ground, up grows an immense quantity of indigenous natural grass, that, having sowed itself last year, has lain ever since in a natural matrix, ready to start at the most convenient season. Before the wheat, or any grain soever can appear, this grass has shot up so high and so thick as absolutely to choke it. Suppose it was possible to hoe or weed it, the grass will again overtop the grain before it is an inch from the ground. Say it could be again hoed or cleared, by this time the rains are so continual, the black earth becomes a perfect mire. The rain increases, and the grain rots without producing any crop.

The same happens to millet, or Indian corn; the rain rots the plant which is thrown down by the wind. It is equally destroyed if sown at the end of the rains; the grass grows up, wherever the ground is cleared, in a greater proportion, if possible, than in the beginning of the year; and the rain ceasing abruptly, and the sun beginning to be intensely hot the very day it passes the zenith, the earth is reduced to an impalpable powder, whilst the grain and plant die without ever shewing a tendency to germinate.

We left the king, Oustas, after detecting a conspiracy, ready to fall upon some settlement of Shangalla. This he executed with great success, and surrounded a large part of the nation called Baasa, encamped under the trees suspecting no danger. He put the grown people to the sword, and took a prodigious number of children of both sexes captive. He was intending also to push his conquest farther among these savages, when he was called to Gondar by the death of his prime minister and confident, Ras Fasa Christos.

Besides his attention to hunting and government, the king had a very great taste for architecture, which, in Abyssinia, is a very popular one, though scarcely any thing is built but churches. In the season that did not permit him to be in the field, he bestowed a great deal of leisure and money this way; and he was, at this time, busy erecting a magnificent church to the Nativity, about a mile below Gondar, on the small river Kahha.

But the season of hunting returning before he had finished it, he left it to repair to Bet Malo, a place in the Kolla, where he had built a hunting-seat, not far distant from the Shangalla, called Baasa. Here he had a most successful hunting-match of the buffalo, rhinoceros, and elephant, in which he often put himself in great danger, and distinguished himself in dexterity and horsemanship greatly above any of his court. He returned upon news, that persons, whom he had secretly employed, had apprehended Betwudet Basilé, and his son Claudius, who had escaped when the last conspirators were seized. Both these he sentenced immediately to lose their eyes.

These hunting-matches, so punctually observed, and so eagerly followed by a man already past the flower of his youth, had, in their first appearance, nothing but sound policy. The king’s title was avowedly a faulty one; and the many conspiracies that had been formed had shewn him the nobility were not all of them disposed to bear his yoke; nothing then was more political than to keep a considerable number of them employed in field-exercises, to be informed of their inclinations, and to attach them to his person by favours. At the head of this little, but very active army, he was ready in a moment to fall upon the disaffected, before they could collect strength sufficient for resistance. Time, however, shewed this was not entirely the reason of these continual intervals of absence for so long a time in the Kolla.

Notwithstanding the misfortune that had befallen the French ambassador, M. du Roule, at Sennaar, in the reign of Yasous I. and Tecla Haimanout his son, under Baady el Ahmer, there had still remained below, in Atbara, some of those missionaries who had courage and address enough to attempt the journey into Abyssinia, and they succeeded in it. Oustas had probably been privy to their arrival in Yasous’s time, and had, equally with him, a favourable opinion of the Romish religion.

These missionaries, though Yasous was now dead, were perfectly well received by Oustas; he had given them in charge to Ain Egzie, an old and loyal servant of Yasous, and governor of Walkayt. He had placed also with them an Abyssinian priest, who had been in Jerusalem, and was well-affected to the Romish faith, to be their interpreter, stay with them always, and manage their interests, while he himself, stealing frequently from the hunting-matches, heard mass, and received the communion, returning back to his camp, as he flattered himself, unperceived. These meetings with the priests were not, however, so well concealed but that they came to the knowledge of many people about court, both seculars and clergy. But the king’s character, for severity and vigilance, made everybody confine their thoughts, whatever they were, within their own breasts.

The employment of this year was a short journey to Ibaba, a large market-town, where there is a royal residence, below Maitsha, on the west, or Gojam side of the Nile, from which it is about three days distance. From this he returned again, and went to Tcherkin, a small village in Kolla, beyond Ras el Feel, in the way to Sennaar, the principal abode of the elephant. But, in the first day’s hunting, Yared, master of his household, and a considerable favourite, being torn to pieces by one of these quadrupeds, he gave over the sport, and returned very sorrowful to bury him at Gondar, leaving three of his servants to execute a design he had formed against the Baasa in that neighbourhood.

From the constant interruptions Oustas had met with in all these hunting-matches, and his success, notwithstanding, whenever he had himself attended, the divining monks had prophesied his reign was to be short, and attended with much bloodshed; nor were they for once distant from the truth; for, in the month of January 1714, while he was over-looking the workmen building the church of Abba Antonius at Gondar, he was taken suddenly ill, and, suspecting some unwholesomeness or _witchcraft_ in his palace, he ordered his tent to be pitched without the town till the apartments should be smoaked with gunpowder. But this was done so carelessly by his servants, that his house was burnt to the ground, which was looked upon as a very bad omen, and made a great impression upon the minds of the people.

The 27th of January it was generally understood that the king was dangerously ill, and that his complaint was every day increasing. Upon this the principal officers went, according to the usual custom, to condole with and comfort him. This was at least what they pretended. Their true errand, however, was pretty well known to be an endeavour to ascertain whether the sickness was of the kind likely to continue, till measures could be adopted with a degree of certainty to take the reins of government out of his hand.

The king easily divined the reason of their coming. Having had a good night, he used the strength that he had thereby acquired to rouse himself for a moment, to put on the appearance of health, and shew himself, as usual, engaged in his ordinary dispatch of business. The seeming good countenance of the king made their condolence premature. Some excuse, however, for so formal a visit, was necessary; but every apology was not safe. They adopted this, which they thought unexceptionable, that hearing he was sick, which they happily found he was not, they came to propose to him a thing equally proper whether he was sick or well; that he would, in time, settle the succession upon his son Fasil, then in the mountain of Wechné, as a means of quieting the minds of his friends, preventing bloodshed, and securing the crown to his family.

Oustas did the utmost to command himself upon this occasion, and to give them an answer such as suited a man in health who hoped to live many years. But it was now too late to play such a part; and, in spite of his utmost dissimulation, evident signs of decay appeared upon him, which his visitors conjectured would soon be past dissembling, and they agreed to stay with the king till the evening.

But the soldiers on guard, who heard the proposal of sending for Oustas’s son, and who really believed that these men spoke from their heart, and were in earnest, were violently discontented and angry at this proposal. They began to be weary of novelty, and longed for a king of the ancient royal family. As soon, therefore, as it was dark they entered Gondar, and called together the several regiments, or bodies of soldiers, which composed the king’s household. Having came to a resolution how they were to act, they returned to their quarters where they were upon guard, and meeting the great officers coming out of Oustas’s tent, where they, too, had probably agreed upon the same measure, though it was not known, the soldiers drew their swords, and slew them all, being seven in number. Among these were Betwudet Tamerté, and the Acab Saat; the one the principal lay-officer, the other the chief ecclesiastic in the king’s house.

This massacre seemed to be the signal for a general insurrection, in the course of which, part of the town was set on fire. But the soldiers, at their first meeting in the palace[88], had shut up the coronation-chamber, and the other royal apartments, and possessed themselves of the kettle-drum by which all proclamations were made at the gate, driving away, and rudely treating the multitude on every side. At last they brought out the drum, though it was yet night, and made this proclamation:--“David, son of our late king Yasous, is our king.” The tumult and disorder, nevertheless, still continued; during all which, it was very remarkable no one ever thought of offering an injury to Oustas.

While these things were passing at Gondar, a violent alarm had seized all the princes upon the mountain of Wechné. They had been treated with severity during Oustas’s whole reign. Their revenues had been with-held, or at least not regularly paid, and they had been reduced nearly to perish for want of the necessaries of life. When, therefore, the accounts of Oustas’s illness arrived, and that the principal people had proposed to name Fasil his son, then their fellow-prisoner, to succeed him, their fears no longer reminded them of the hardships of his father’s reign, as they expected utter extirpation as the only measure by which he could provide for his own security. Full of these fears, they agreed, with one consent, to let down from the mountain fifty princes of the greatest hopes, all in the prime of life, and therefore most capable of defending their own right, and securing the lives of those that remained upon the mountain, from the cruel treatment they must obviously expect if they fell into the hand of an usurper or stranger.

The brother of Betwudet Tamerté, who, with the six others, had been murdered before Oustas’s tent, was, at this time, guardian of the mountain of Wechné. His brother’s death, however, and the unsettled state of government, had so much weakened both his authority and attention, that he either did not choose, or was not able, to prevent the escape of these princes, all flying for their lives, and for the sake of preserving the ancient constitution of their country. And that this, and no other was their object, appeared the instant the danger was removed; for, as soon as the news that David was proclaimed at Gondar arrived at the mountain, all the princes returned of their own accord, excepting Bacuffa, younger brother to the king, who fled to the Galla, and lay concealed among them for a time.

On David’s arrival at Gondar, all the old misfortunes seemed to be forgotten. The joy of having the ancient royal line restored, got the better of those fears which first occasioned the interruption. The prisons were thrown open, and David was crowned the 30th of January 1714, amidst the acclamations of all ranks of people, and every demonstration of festivity and joy.

David was son of Yasous the Great, and consequently brother to the parricide Tecla Haimanout, but by another mother. At his coronation he was just twenty-one years of age, and took for his inauguration name Adebar Segued.

In all this time, however, Oustas was alive. Oustas was, indeed, sick, but still he was king; and yet it is surprising that David had been now nine days at Gondar, and no injury had been offered to Oustas, nor any escape attempted for him by his friends.

It was the 6th of February, the day before Lent, when, the king sent the Abuna Marcus, Itchegué Za Michael, with some of the great officers of state, to interrogate Oustas judicially, for form’s sake, as to his title to the crown. The questions proposed are very short and simple--“Who are you? What brought you here?” To these plain interrogatories, Oustas, then struggling with death, answered, however, as plainly, and without equivocation, “Tell my king David, that true it is I have made myself king, as much as one can be that is not of the royal family; for I am but a private man, son of a subject, Kasmati Delba Yasous: all I beg of the king is to give me a little time, and let me die with sickness, as I shortly shall, without putting me to torment or pain.”

On the 10th day of February, that is four days after the interrogation, Oustas died, but whether of a violent or natural death is not known. The historian of his reign, a cotemporary writer, says, some reported that he died of an amputation of his leg by order of the king; others, that he was strangled; but that most people were of opinion that he died of sickness; and this I think the most probable, for had the king been earnestly set upon his death, he would not have allowed so much time to pass, after his coronation, before his rival was interrogated; nor was there any reason to allow him four days after his confession. David’s moderation after the death, moreover, seems to render this still more credible; for he ordered his body to be buried in the church of the Nativity, which he had himself built, with all the honours and public ceremonies due to his rank as a nobleman and subject, who had been guilty of no crime, instead of ordering his body to be hewn in pieces, and scattered along the ground without burial, to be eat by the dogs; the invariable punishment, unless in this one instance, of high-treason in this country.

Posterity, regarding his merit more than his title, have, however, kept his name still among the list of kings; and tradition, doing him more justice still than history, has ranked him among the best that ever reigned in Abyssinia.

DAVID IV.

From 1714 to 1719.

_Convocation of the Clergy--Catholic Priests executed--A second Convocation--Clergy insult the King--His severe Punishment--King dies of Poison._

The moderation of the king, both before and after the death of Oustas, and perhaps some other favourable appearances now unknown to us, set the monks, the constant pryers into futurity, upon prophecying that the reign of this prince was to be equal in length to that of his father Yasous the Great, and that it was to be peaceable, full of justice and moderation, without execution, or effusion of civil blood.

David, immediately upon his accession, appointed Fit-Auraris Agnè, Ozoro Keduste’s brother[89], his Betwudet, and Abra Hezekias his matter of the household; and was proceeding to fill up the inferior posts of government, when he was interrupted by the clamours of a multitude of monks demanding a convocation of the clergy.

These assemblies, however often solicited, are never called in the reign of vigorous princes, but by the special order of the sovereign, who grants or refuses them purely from his own free-will. They are, however, particularly expected at the accession of a new prince, upon any apprehension of heresy, or any novelty or abuse in church-government.

The arrival of a new-Abuna from Egypt is also a very principal reason for the convocation. These assemblies are very numerous. Many of the most discreet members of the church absent themselves purposely. On the other hand, the monks, who, by vows, have bound themselves to the most painful austerities and sufferings; those that devote themselves to pass their lives in the deep and unwholesome valleys of the country; hermits that starve on the points of cold rocks; others that live in deserts surrounded with, and perpetually exposed to wild beasts; in a word, the whole tribe of fanatics, false prophets, diviners, and dreamers, people who affect to see and foreknow what is in future to happen, by living in perfect ignorance of what is passing at the present; people in constant habits of dirt and nastiness, naked, or covered with hair; in short, a collection of monsters, scarcely to be described or conceived, compose an ecclesiastical assembly in Abyssinia, and are the leaders of an ignorant and furious populace, who adore them as saints, and are always ready to support them in some violation of the laws of the country, or of humanity, to which, by their customs and manner of life, their very first appearance shews they have been long strangers.

David, however averse to these assemblies, could not decently refuse them, now a new prince was set on the throne, a new Abuna was come from Egypt, and a complaint was ready to be brought that the church was in danger. The assembly met in the usual place before the palace. The Itchegué, or head of the monks of Debra Libanos, was ready with a complaint, which he preferred to the king. He stated it was notorious, but offered to prove it if denied, that three Romish priests, with an Abyssinian for their interpreter, were then established in Walkayt, and, for several years, had been there maintained, protected, and consulted by the late king Oustas, who had often assisted at the celebration of mass as solemnized by the church of Rome.

David was a rigid adherent to the church of Alexandria, and educated by his mother in the tenets of the monks of Saint Eustathius, that is, the most declared enemies of every thing approaching to the tenets of the church of Rome. He was consequently, not by inclination, neither was he by duty, obliged to undertake the defence of measures adopted by Oustas, of which he was besides ignorant, having been confined in the mountain of Wechné. He ordered, therefore, the missionaries, and their interpreter, whose name was Abba Gregorius, to be apprehended.

These unfortunate people were accordingly produced before the most prejudiced and partial of all tribunals. Abba Masmarè and Adug Tesfo were adduced to interrogate and to interpret to them, as they understood the Arabic, having been at Cairo and Jerusalem. The trial neither was, nor was intended to be long. The first question put was a very direct one; Do you, or do you not, receive the council of Chalcedon as a rule of faith? and, Do you believe that Leo the pope lawfully and regularly presided at it, and conducted it? To this the prisoners plainly answered, That they looked upon the council of Chalcedon as the fourth general council, and received it as such, and as a rule of faith: that they did believe pope Leo lawfully and regularly presided at it, as being head of the Catholic church, successor to St Peter, and Christ’s vicar upon earth. Upon this a general shout was heard from the whole assembly; and the fatal cry, “Stone them.”--“Whoever throws not three stones, he is accursed, and an enemy to Mary,” immediately followed.

One priest only, distinguished for piety and learning among his countrymen, and one of the chief men in the assembly, with great vehemence declared, they were tried partially and unfairly, and condemned unjustly. But his voice was not heard amidst the clamours of such a multitude; and the monks were accordingly by the judges condemned to die. Ropes were instantly thrown about their necks, and they were dragged to a place behind the church of Abbo, in the way to Tedda, where they were, according to their sentence, stoned to death, suffering with a patience and resignation equal to the first martyrs.

The justice, however, which we owe to the memory of the deceased M. du Roule, must always leave a fear in every Christian mind, that, spotted as these missionaries were with the horrid crime of the premeditated, unprovoked murder of that ambassador, the indifference they testified at the approach, and in the immediate suffering of death, had its origin rather in hardness of heart than in the quietness of their consciences. Many fanatics have been known to die, glorying in having perpetrated the most horrid crimes to which the sentence of eternal damnation is certainly annexed in the book before them.

I have often, both on purpose and by accident, passed by this place, where three large, and one small pile of stones, cover the bodies of these unfortunate sufferers; and, with many heavy reflections, upon my own danger, I have often wondered how these three priests, of whatever nation they were, passed unnoticed among the number of their fraternity, whose memory is honoured with long panegyrics by the Romish writers of those times, as destined one day to appear in the kalendar. Though those that compose the long list of Tellez died with piety and resignation, they were surely guilty in the way they almost all were engaged, contrary to the laws and constitution of the country, in actions and designs that can be fairly qualified by no other name than that of treason, while no such political meddling out of their profession ever was reproached to these three, even by their enemies.

Tellez says not a word of them; Le Grande, a zealous Catholic writer of these times, but little; though he publishes an Arabic letter to consul Maillet, which mentions their names, their sufferings, and other circumstances attending them. I shall, therefore, take the liberty of offering my conjecture, as I think this silence, or the suppression of a fact, gives me a title to do; but shall first produce the letter of Elias Enoch, upon which I found my judgment.

TRANSLATION _of an_ ARABIC LETTER _wrote to_ M. DE MAILLET.

“After having assured M. de Maillet, the consul, of my respects, and of the continuation of my prayers for his health, as being a gentleman venerable for his merits, distinguished by his knowledge and great penetration, of a noble birth, always beneficent, and addicted to pious actions, (may God preserve his life to that degree of honour due to so respectable a person), I now write you from the town of Mocha. I left Abyssinia in the year 1718, and came to this town of Mocha in extreme poverty, or rather absolutely destitute. God has assisted me: I give praise to him for his bounty, and always remain much obliged to you. What follows is all that I can inform you as touching the news of Abyssinia. King Yasous is long since dead: his son, Tecla Haimanout, having seized upon the kingdom by force, caused his father to be assassinated. This king Yasous, having given me leave to go to Sennaar, furnished me with a letter addressed to the king there, in which he desired him to put no obstacles in the way of du Roule the French ambassador’s journey, but to suffer him to enter Ethiopia. He also gave me another letter addressed to the basha and officers of Grand Cairo; and another letter to the ambassador himself, by which he signified to him that he might enter into Ethiopia without fear. Accordingly I had departed with these letters for Sennaar; but king Tecla Haimanout, son of king Yasous, having taken possession of the kingdom while I was yet in Abyssinia, I returned and delivered to him the letters which had been given me by his father. It was now three months since Tecla Haimanout had been upon the throne; he approved of the letters, and caused them to be transcribed in his own name; and ordered me to go and join du Roule the ambassador, and accompany him back again to Gondar. King Yasous had already sent an officer to meet the ambassador at Sennaar; and he had been gone six months without my knowledge; but that officer, having trifled away his time in trading, did not enter Sennaar till that king had caused the ambassador to be murdered, together with those that were with him. As for me, not knowing what had happened, I was advancing with the orders of Tecla Haimanout, when, being now within three days journey of Sennaar, I heard of the ambassador’s death, and that of his companions; and being terrified at this, I returned into Abyssinia to let Tecla Haimanout know what the king of Sennaar had done. Immediately upon hearing of this, Tecla Haimanout formed a resolution to declare war against the king of Sennaar, but was soon after slain in a mutiny of the soldiers. He reigned two years. Tifilis, brother of Yasous, succeeded him, and reigned three years and three months. Oustas, nephew of king Yasous, succeeded Tifilis, and usurped the kingdom, of which he was actually prime minister, being son of a sister of Yasous. Oustas was dethroned, and died soon after. David, son of Yasous, succeeded him, and reigned five years and five months. The _friars_, who arrived in Ethiopia in the reign of Oustas, were stoned to death, upon the succession of David to the throne, by those that were of the party of David. A son of _Michael_, whom he had by a slave, aged only six years, was stoned with him. It was the _fourth_ son he had. I made Yasous believe that the religion of the French was the same with that of Ethiopia,” &c. &c.

From this letter, we see a boy of six years old, son of one of these priests or friars, was stoned to death with them; and his heap of stones appears with those of the others. It was, indeed, a common test of the people suspected to be priests, who stole into Abyssinia, to offer them women, their vows being known, and that they could not marry. I apprehend, to avoid detection, one at least of them had broken his vow of celibacy and chastity, and that this child was the consequence, but not the only one, as Enoch says, in his letter, he had three others; and this probably was the reason why the Catholics of those times had consigned their merit to oblivion, rather than record it with their failings.

For although we know that there were friars who had been in Ethiopia since the time of Oustas, we should not have been informed who they were, had it not been for a small sheet, published at Rome in the year 1774, by a capuchin priest called Theodosius Volpi, sent to me by my learned and worthy friend the honourable Daines Barrington. From this we find, that these three were, Liberato de Wies, apostolical prefect in Austria; Michael Pius of Zerbe, in the province of Padua; and Samuel de Beumo, of the Milanese. The account of their death is the same as already given, though the publisher suppresses the stoning of the child, and the existence of the three other, fruits of the seraphic mission, through the endeavours of father Michael Pius of Zerbe, of the province of Milan. The child, too, stoned to death with his father, was six years old, and was, as Elias says, fourth son of Michael; and it was in 1714 this catastrophe happened, so that this will bring these fathers entrance into Nubia about the time of the murder of M. du Roule: so consistent with every crime is fanaticism and false religion.

The barbarous monks, gratified in the first instance, would not be contented without extending their vengeance to Abba Gregorius, the Abyssinian priest, the interpreter. But David, who found upon trial that, in going to attend the priests in Walkayt, he had only obeyed the express command of Oustas, then his sovereign, absolutely refused to suffer him to be either tried or punished, but dismissed him, without further censure or question, to his native country.

While David was thus employed at Gondar, news were brought to him that his brother Bacuffa had left the Galla, and was then in a small town in Begemder, called Wetan. It was this prince who, together with fifty others of the royal family, were let down from the mountain of Wechné, upon Oustas’s son being proposed, and he alone refused to return upon his brother’s accession to the throne. David sent Azaleffi, Guebra Mehedin, and Badjerund Welled de l’Oul, to Wetan, where they apprehended Bacuffa by surprise, and lodged him in the mountain of Wechné, after having cut off a very small part of the tip of his nose, which was scarcely discernible when he came to the throne.

Kasmati Georgis, had been banished to the mountain in the reign of the late king, where he had contracted an intimate friendship with David. He had also married a sister of Ozoro Mamet, by whom Yasous had several children, particularly one Welleta Georgis, a prince then of years to govern, and confined to the mountain. David, on his coming to the throne, did not forget his old friendship on the mountain; and, passing by Emfras, he sent to Wechné to bring down Kasmati Georgis to Arringo, one of the king’s palaces in Begemder, where he intended to pass the summer. On his return he gave him the government of Gojam; and his favourite Agné, his uncle, dying at this time, very much regretted, Georgis was also created Betwudet in his place.

This year Abuna Marcus died; and his successor, Abuna Christodulus, arriving the third day of November, this made the calling of another assembly of the clergy absolutely necessary, although, from the humour the last was in, the whole time of their meeting, the king was very little inclined to it.

The monks in Abyssinia, as I have often said, are divided into two bodies, those of Debra Libanos and those of Abba Eustathius. Some have imagined that the difference between these two bodies arises from a dispute about two natures in Christ. But this is from misinformation; for, were a dispute to arise about the two natures in Christ, each party would declare the other a heretic; but at present a few equivocal words, used to define the mode and moment of our Saviour’s incarnation, though neither opinion is thought heretical[90], have the effect to make these two sects enemies all their lives.

The Abuna is the head of the Abyssinian church; yet, as he is known to be a slave of the Mahometans, upon his first arrival, and permission obtained from the king, the assembly meets in a large outer court, or square, before the palace, where he is interrogated, and where he declares which of the two opinions he adopts. If he has been properly advised, he declares for the ruling and strongest party; though sometimes he is determined, by the address of those about him, to side with the weakest; and very often, if he has had no instruction on his arrival, he does not know what this reference means; for no trace of such dispute exists among his brethren in Cairo, from whence he came. He is, moreover, a stranger to the language, and the words containing either opinion, which, for shortness sake, are made to mean a great deal more than they at first seem to import; and, whether freely or literally translated, are equally unintelligible to a foreigner. After the Abuna has declared his choice, this is announced by beat of drum to the people, and is called _Nagar Haimanout_, or, the Proclamation of the Faith. The only ordinary effect this declaration has, is to make the person who is at the head of one party an adversary to him who is the head of the other, all his life after.

The king at his accession makes his declaration also. The clergy maintain, that he should do this in an assembly called for that purpose, though the king denies that there is any necessity for the clergy to be present; but he considers it as his privilege to choose his own time and place, and announces it to the people, by proclamation, at what time, and in what manner, he thinks most convenient.

Although David had given his permission to assemble the clergy to hear the Abuna’s declaration, he did not think himself bound to assist at it, and, therefore, he sent to the monks of Debra Libanos, and those of Abba Eustathius, to go to the Abuna with Betwudet Georgis, who should interrogate the Abuna, and report the answer to the king, who thereupon would order it to be proclaimed to the people. The monks of Debra Libanos refused this, as they did not consider Georgis as indifferent, being known to be a staunch Eustathian. They declared, therefore, they would neither hear nor regard what the Abuna said, unless it was in the king’s presence; and this was just what David was resolved not to humour them in.

Betwudet Georgis, the great officers of state, and most of the people of consideration about Gondar, waited upon the Abuna as the king had commanded; and the Betwudet having desired him to make his profession, he would only give this evasive answer, That his faith was in all respects the same as that of Abba Marcos and Abba Sanuda, the ancient and orthodox Abunas.

This answer left every party at liberty to imagine that the Abuna was their own. But this evasion did not content the king, who therefore ordered the Betwudet, without taking further notice of the Abuna, to make proclamation in terms of the profession of the monks of Abba Eustathius. This occasioned great heats among the monks of Debra Libanos. They ran all with one accord to the Itchegué’s house, for he is their general, or chief of their convent, and here they came to the most violent resolutions, declaring that they would die either together, or man by man, in support of their privileges and the freedom of their assemblies. From the Itchegué’s house they ran to the Abuna’s, without soliciting or receiving any permission from the king; and, upon interrogation, they succeeded with the Abuna to the height of their wishes; for he answered in the precise words of their profession--“One God, of the Father alone, united to a body perfectly human, consubstantial with ours, and by that union becoming the Messiah;” in direct opposition to what was proclaimed by the king’s order at the gate of the palace the day before--Perfect God and perfect man, by the union one Christ, whose body is composed of a precious substance, called _Bahery_, not consubstantial with ours, or derived from his mother.

Had they stopt here it had been well; but the victory was too great, too unexpected, and complete, to admit of their sitting quietly down without a triumph. They returned, therefore, from the Abuna’s, frantic with joy, shouting, and singing, and more peculiarly one kind of song, or hallelujah, used always upon victories obtained over infidels. As they passed the door of the king’s palace, some of the officers of the household, Azage Zakery, Azage Tecla Haimanout, and Badjerund Welleta David, moderate men, lovers of peace, and inclined to no party, endeavoured to persuade them to content themselves with what they had done, to disperse, and each go to his home, before some mischief overtook them. But they were too high-minded. They redoubled their songs; and, in this manner, again assembled in the Itchegué’s house to deliberate on what further they were to attempt; when one of the monks, a prophet, or dreamer, declared, “That God had opened his eyes, and that he then saw a cherub with a flaming sword guarding the Itchegué’s gate:” with such a centinel they concluded that they were perfectly safe from any attempts of man.

In the mean time, however, the king was violently affected at the seditious behaviour of the monks; nor did he hesitate a moment in what manner he was to punish it. As they had employed the song which was sung only for victories obtained over infidels, by which they meant to allude particularly to the king, he detached a body of Pagan Galla to punish them; having surrounded the Itchegué’s house, where the monks were assembled, they forced open the gate, (and the cherub with the flaming sword not interfering) they fell, sword in hand, upon the unarmed priests, and in an instant laid above a hundred of the principal of them dead upon the floor. They then sallied out with their bloody weapons into the street, and hewed to pieces those that attended the procession, and who were still diverting themselves with their song. Gondar now appeared like a town taken by storm; every street was covered with the dead, and dying; and this massacre continued till next day at noon, when, by proclamation, the king ordered it to cease.

David, now satisfied as to the priests, thought he owed to the Abuna a mortification for his double-dealing. He sent, therefore, the soldiers to take him out of his house, and bring him to the gate of the palace, where the poor wretch, half dead with fear, expected every moment to fall by the bloody hands of the Djawi. Having enjoyed his panic some time, the king ordered him to be placed close beside the kettle-drum, and a profession of faith was made in the royal presence, and announced by beat of drum to the people, agreeing in every respect to that published the first day by Betwudet Georgis, and directly contradicting what he had said with his own mouth to the monks of Debra Libanos, which was the occasion of the riot.

This bloody, indiscriminate massacre had comprehended too many men of worth and distinction not to occasion great discontent among the principal people both within and without the palace. Conspiracies against the king were now everywhere openly talked of, the fruits of which soon appeared. David fell sick, and those about him endeavoured to persuade him that it was the remains of an injury which he had lately received from a fall off his horse. But, upon the meeting of a council on the 9th of March 1719, it was discovered and proved, that Kasmati Laté and Ras Georgis had employed Kutcho, keeper of the palace, to give a strong poison to the king, which he had taken that morning from the hands of a Mahometan. Ras Georgis was then brought before the council, and scarcely denied the fact; upon which his only son was ordered to be hewn to pieces before his face, and immediately after the father’s eyes were pulled out. Kutcho, keeper of the palace, and the Mahometan who gave the poison, were hewn to pieces with swords before the gate of the palace, and their mangled bodies thrown to the dogs. The king died that evening in great agony.

The king’s favourite, Betwudet Georgis, found himself now in a most dangerous situation. David his protector was dead, and he was left now alone to answer for those bloody measures of which he was universally believed to be the adviser. It was absolutely necessary, therefore, if possible, to secure a successor of David’s own family, who might stop the prosecutions against him for steps the king had adopted as his own, and as such had carried into execution.

We have already observed, that, when banished to the mountain of Wechné by Oustas, he had contracted there, first a friendship with David, and, at the same time, with another prince, Ayto Welled Georgis, who was son to Yasous by Ozoro Mamet, whose sister Georgis had married, and consequently was uncle to Ayto Welleta Georgis, as having married his aunt, sister to Ozoro Mamet. When this prince now arrived at manhood, he knew himself perfectly secure; and, therefore, a number of the men in power being then assembled at his house, he lost no time, but surrounded it with a body of soldiers. He proposed to them Welled Georgis as immediate successor to David. The people present, seeing themselves in the soldiers hands, and convinced from the recent examples, that Georgis was not very tender in the use of them, in appearance chearfully, and without hesitation, approved of the Betwudet’s choice; and Lika Jonathan, one of the chief civil judges, performed the office of crier, proclaiming with an audible voice, “Ayto Welled Georgis, brother to our late king David, son of our great king Yasous, he is now our king. Mourn for the king that is dead, but rejoice with the king that is alive.” This is the ordinary stile of the proclamation. Mutual congratulations and promises passed among the members of the meeting, but with very different resolutions.

All the company, escorted by a body of archers, and another of fuzileers, with Betwudet Georgis at their head, repaired to the great place before the palace to make the same proclamation by beat of drum that they had done in the Betwudet’s house. They found the drum ready, and the whole body of the king’s household troops under arms, and drawn up before it. Upon the sight of their companions, the soldiers left the Betwudet, and fell into a proper place reserved vacant for them by their brethren. Without loss of time the drum was beat, and a proclamation made, “Bacuffa, son of Yasous, is our king! Mourn for the dead, and rejoice with the living.” Loud acclamations from the people were echoed back again by the soldiers, and Bacuffa’s name was received with universal acclamations. Some of the principal people then went to the council-chamber, and sent proper officers, with a good body of troops, to escort the king from Wechné.

Upon their arrival they found the sentiments of the princes upon the election were widely different from those testified by the people. They all to a man declared their dissent from that election. They upbraided Bacuffa for his brutal manners; for his violent, unsociable, unrelenting temper, from the which, they said, they had the cruelest consequences to apprehend; and, indeed, it was not without great reason that they made these remonstrances; for Bacuffa, when he escaped from the mountain, fled for refuge among the Galla, and received there a very strong tincture of the savage manners of that nation, which neither those of Gondar nor the army could have an opportunity to judge of. Resolute, active, and politic, he was very well formed to hold the reins of government in unsettled times; but his temper of itself exceedingly suspicious, and the little regard he had for the life of man, made his whole reign (as it was feared) one continued tragedy. So that, notwithstanding the goodness of his understanding, and many acts of wisdom and justice, he is considered as a bloody, merciless tyrant, and his memory regarded with the greatest detestation.

On the first news of the insurrection of the princes on Wechné, Kasmati Amha Yasous, governor of Begemder, marched with his whole force and encamped under the mountain. He then received Bacuffa, as king, having rescued him from the hands of his relations; and, in order to obviate, as much as possible, any future trouble, he obliged the different branches of the royal family to a reconciliation with each other, making Bacuffa, on the one side, swear that he was not to remember nor revenge any injury or affront received upon the mountain; and them on the mountain swear also, that they would forget all old disagreements, consider Bacuffa as their king, and not create him any trouble in his reign by escapes, or other rebellious practices.

As it was then night, Bacuffa staid in the house of Azage Assarat, and the next morning came to Serbraxos, whence he sent to the monks of Tedda to meet him there. From Tedda he proceeded to Gondar, where he was met by the Abuna and Itchegué amidst the acclamations of a prodigious number of people.

BACUFFA.

From 1719 to 1729.

_Bloody Reign--Exterminates the Conspirators--Counterfeits Death--Becomes very popular._

Honest men, who loved their country, saw the dangerous situation it was then in. Every day had produced instances of a growing indifference to that form of government which, from the earliest times, they had looked upon as sacred; and upon every slight and unreasonable disgust a person of consequence thought he had met with, a party was immediately formed, and nothing less was agreed on than directly imbruing their hands in the blood of their sovereign.

A prince was necessary who had qualities of mind proper to enable him to put a stop to these enormities before they involved the state in one scene of anarchy and ruin. Bacuffa was thought to answer these expectations; and, in the end, he was found to exceed them. Silent, secret, and unfathomable in his designs, surrounded by soldiers who were his own slaves, and by new men of his own creation, he removed those tyrants who opposed their sovereigns upon the smallest provocation. Conspiracy followed conspiracy, and rebellion; but all were defeated, as soon as they had birth, by the superior activity and address of the king.

I have said he was called Bacuffa by the Galla; but, in compliance with the custom of Abyssinia, already mentioned, he had assumed still two other names, which were, Atzham Georgis, his name of baptism, and Adebar Segued, which means “reverenced by the towns or inhabited places of the country,” given him at his inauguration. As for that of Bacuffa, which meant the _inexorable_, it was the less dishonourable from having been given him by impartial strangers from their own observation while he was yet in private life; his whole conduct afterwards shewed how justly.

The king has near his person an officer who is meant to be his historiographer. He is also keeper of his seal, and is obliged to make a journal of the king’s actions, good or bad, without comment of his own upon them. This, when the king dies, or at least soon after, is delivered to the council, who read it over, and erase every thing false in it; whilst they supply any material fact that may have been omitted, whether purposely or not. This would have been a very dangerous book to have been kept in Bacuffa’s time; and, accordingly, no person chose ever to run that risk; and the king’s particular behaviour afterwards had still the further effect, that nobody would supply this deficiency after his death, a general belief prevailing in Abyssinia that he is alive to this day, and will appear again in all his terrors. It is owing to this circumstance that we have nothing complete of this king’s reign; only a few anecdotes are preserved, some of them very odd ones. I shall only, for the present, choose such of those as lead me to the subject I have in hand.

Bacuffa was exceedingly fond of divinations, dreams, and prophecies, so are all the Abyssinians; but he imbibed an additional propensity to these, among the Pagans to whom he had fled. One day, when walking alone, he perceived a priest exceedingly attentive in observing the forms that little pieces of straw, cut to certain lengths, made upon a pool of water into which ran a small stream. From the combination of these in letters, or figures, as they chanced to fall, an answer is procured to the doubt proposed, which, if you believe these idlers, is perfectly infallible.

Bacuffa in disguise, dressed like a poor man, is said to have asked the priest after what he was inquiring. The priest answered, He was trying whether the king would have a son, and who should govern the kingdom after him. The king abode the investigation patiently; and the answer was, That he should have a son; but that a Welleta Georgis should govern the kingdom after him for thirty years, though that Welleta Georgis should be neither his son nor any descendant of his. Full of thought at this untoward prediction, he harboured it in his breast without communicating it to any one, and resolved to blast the hopes of every Welleta Georgis that should be so unfortunate as to stand within the possibility of reigning after him. Many innocent people of different parts disappeared from this unknown crime; and eleven princes on the mountain of Wechné, some say more, lost their lives for a name that is very common in Abyssinia, without one overt act of treason, or even a suspicion of what they were accused. A panic now struck all ranks of people, without terminating in any scheme of resistance; which sufficiently shewed that the king had succeeded in dissolving all confederacies among his subjects, and destroying radically that rebellious spirit which had operated so fatally in the last reigns.

It is a custom among the kings of Abyssinia, especially in intervals of peace, to disappear for a time, without any warning. Sometimes, indeed, one or two confidential servants, pretending to be busied in other affairs, attend at a distance, and keep their eye upon him, while, disguised in different manners, he goes like a stranger to those parts he intends to visit. In one of these private journeys, passing into Kuara, a province on the N. E. of Abyssinia, near the confines of Sennaar, Bacuffa happened, or counterfeited, to be seized by a fever, a common disease of that unwholesome country. He was then in a poor village belonging to servants of a man of distinction, whose house was on the top of the hill immediately above, in temperate and wholesome air. The hospitable landlord, upon the first hearing of the distress of a stranger, immediately removed him up to his house, where every attention that could be suggested by a charitable mind was bestowed upon his diseased guest, who presently recovered his former state of health, but not till the kind assistance and unwearied diligence of the beautiful daughter of the house had made the deepest impression upon him, and laid him under the greatest obligations.

The family consisted of five young men in the flower of their youth, and one daughter, whose name was Berhan Magass, _the Glory of Grace_, exceedingly beautiful, gentle, mild, and affable; of great understanding and prudence beyond her age; the darling, not only of her own family, but of all the neighbourhood.

Bacuffa recovering his health, returned speedily to the palace, which he entered privately at night, and appeared early next morning sitting in judgment, and hearing causes, which, with these princes, is the first public occupation of the day.

A messenger, with guards and attendants, was immediately sent to Kuara, and Berhan Magass hurried from her father’s house, she knew not why, but her surprise was carried to the utmost, by being presented and married to the king, no reply, condition, or stipulation being suffered. She gained, however, and preserved his confidence as long as he lived: not that Bacuffa valued himself upon constancy to one wife, more than the rest of his predecessors had done. He had, indeed, many mistresses, but with these he observed a very singular rule; he never took to his bed any one woman whatever, the fair Berhan Magass excepted, without her having been first so far intoxicated with wine or spirits as not to remember any thing that passed in conversation.

While Bacuffa was on his concealed journey to Kuara, a very dangerous conspiracy was forming at Gondar, under the immediate conduct of Ozoro Welleta Raphael, the king’s sister, a very ambitious woman, and of an unquiet, enterprising temper. Disgusted by her brother’s refusal of a gift of some crown lands which were then vacant, and without any owners, she thought no vengeance adequate to the affront, but dethroning Bacuffa. With this view she engaged several men of power in her interest, and particularly the black servants of the palace who attend immediately upon the king’s person, and were to seize upon, or destroy him, the moment he returned. This plot, in all its particulars, was conveyed to the king.

There was an old, abandoned house of king Yasous, at Bartcho, about a day’s journey south of Gondar; it stands on a very extensive plain. The king intending, as he said, to repair, or rather clean and prepare this house for his immediate reception, ordered all the black slaves from Gondar thither for that purpose, together with some of their ringleaders. Kasmati Waragna, in the mean time, was ordered to bring a thousand horsemen of his Galla Djawi. He arrived at Bartcho nearly at the same time with the black servants, who being unarmed, as suspecting nothing, and on foot, after a sharp reproof from the king, were all surrounded and cut to pieces by the hands of Waragna, and orders were immediately sent to Gondar to extirpate the remainder there; and this execution laid a foundation for a feud that endures to this day between the Galla troops and the black horse, who were then abolished, as the Galla have been since, though both were part of the king’s household formerly, before David’s or Bacuffa’s time. As for Welleta Raphael, she was seized that same night, and was conveyed to Walkayt, to be confined there, with private instructions, however, to put her to death speedily, which were executed accordingly.

The queen had a son within the year, whom the council named Yasous, after his grandfather, whose memory will ever be dear in Abyssinia; and this again revived the old apprehensions that Welleta Georgis was to govern the country (as the prophet said) for thirty years. Tormented with this idea, rather than the havoc it had occasioned, he devised with himself a scheme which he thought would certainly detect this future usurper of his crown and dethroner of his child. But first he directed that the queen should be crowned, a ceremony that carries great consequences along with it when solemnized properly, as at that time she is made regent, or Iteghè, in all minorities that may happen afterwards.

After he had created his wife Iteghè, Bacuffa pretended to be sick: several days passed without hopes of recovery; but at last the news of the king’s death were published in Gondar. The joy was so great, and so universal, that nobody attempted to conceal it. Every one found himself eased of a load of fear which had become insupportable. Several princes escaped from the mountain of Wechné to put themselves in the way of being chosen; some were sent to by those great men who thought themselves capable of effecting the nomination, and a speedy day was appointed for the burial of the king’s corpse, when Bacuffa appeared, in the ordinary seat of justice, early in the morning of that day, with the Iteghè, and the infant Yasous, his son, sitting in a chair below him.

There was no occasion to accuse the guilty. The whole court, and all strangers attending there upon business, fled, and spread an universal terror through the whole streets of Gondar. All ranks of people were driven to despair, for all had rejoiced; and much less crimes had been before punished with death. What this sedition would have ended in, it is hard to know, had it not been for the immediate resolution of the king, who ordered a general pardon and amnesty to be proclaimed at the door of the palace.

There are two kettle-drums of a large size placed one on each side of the outer gate of the king’s house. They are called the _lion_ and the _lamb_. The lion is beat at the proclamations which regard war, attainders for conspiracies and rebellions, promotions to supreme commands, and suchlike high matters. The lamb[91] is heard only on beneficent, pacific occasions, of gifts from the crown, of general amnesties, of private pardons, and reversals of penal ordinances. The whole town was in expectation of some sanguinary decree, when, to their utter surprise, they heard the voice of the lamb, a certain sign of peace and forgivenness; and speedily followed by a proclamation, forbidding people of all degrees to leave their houses, that the king’s word was pledged for every one’s security; and that all the principal men should immediately attend him within the palace, in a public place which is called the Ashoa, and that upon pain of rebellion.

The king appeared cloathed all in white, being the habit of peace; his head was bare, dressed, anointed, and perfumed, and his face uncovered. He thus advanced to the rail of the gallery, about 10 feet above the heads of the audience, and, in a very graceful, composed, but resolute manner, began a short oration to the people. “He put them in mind of their wantonness in having made Oustas, a man not of the royal line of Solomon, king of Abyssinia; of their having incited his brother, Tecla Haimanout, to assassinate their father Yasous; that they had afterwards murdered Tecla Haimanout himself, one brother, and lately his other brother David, his own immediate predecessor: That he had taken due vengeance upon all the ringleaders of those crimes, as was the duty of his place, and, if much blood had been shed, it was because many enormities had been committed; but that knowing now that order was established, and conspiracies extinguished among them, he had counterfeited death, to signify an end was put to Bacuffa and his bloody measures; that he now was risen again, and appeared to them by the name of Atzham Georgis, son of Yasous the Great; and ordered every man home to his house to rejoice at the accession of a new king, under whom they should have justice, and live without fear, as long as they respected the king that God had anointed over them.”

This speech was followed by the loudest acclamations, “Long live Bacuffa! Long live Atzham Georgis!” It was well known that this king never failed in his word, or any way prevaricated in his promises. Every one, therefore, went home in as perfect peace as if war had never been among them; and Bacuffa’s delicacy in this respect was seen a few days after; for Hannes his brother having been brought clandestinely from Wechné by Kasmati Georgis, a nobleman of great consequence, they were both taken by the governor of Wechné and sent in chains to the king. The ordinary process would have been to put them instantly to death, as being apprehended in the very highest act of treason; nor would this have alarmed any person whatever, or been thought an infraction of the king’s late promise. Bacuffa, however, was of another mind. He sent the criminal judges, who ordinarily sit upon capital crimes, to meet the two prisoners in their way to Gondar, and carried them back to the foot of the mountain of Wechné to have their crimes proved, and to be tried there out of his presence and influence, where they were both condemned, Hannes to have an arm cut off, Georgis to be sent to prison to the governor of Walkayt, with private orders to put him to death; both which sentences were executed, though Hannes so far recovered that he was king of Abyssinia in my time, notwithstanding this mutilation; but it was a direct violation of the laws of the land.

It is said that a discovery, which happened in the king’s feigned illness, promoted this sudden revolution of manners. In one of his secret tours through Begemder, (after Tigré, the most powerful province in Abyssinia, and by much the most plentiful) being disguised like a poor man, dirty and fatigued with the length of the way and heat of the weather, he came to the house of a private person, not very rich, indeed, but of noble manners and carriage, and who, by the justice and mildness of his behaviour and customs, had acquired a great degree of influence among his neighbours. The father was old and feeble, but the son in the vigour of his age, who was then standing in a large pool of water, at his father’s door, washing his own cotton cloak, or wrapper, which is their upper garment; an occupation below no young man in Abyssinia.

Bacuffa, as overcome with heat, threw himself down under the shade of a tree, and, in a faint voice and foreign dialect, intreated the young man to wash his cloak likewise, after having finished his own. The young man consented most willingly; and, throwing by his own garment, fell to washing the stranger’s with great diligence and attention. In the mean time, Bacuffa began questioning him about the king, and what his opinion was of him. The young man answered, he had never formed any. Bacuffa, however, still plied him with questions, while he continued washing the cloak, without giving him any answer at all; at last, being able to hold out no longer, he gathered Bacuffa’s cloak in his arms, wet as it was, and threw it to him: “I thought, says he, when you prayed me to take your cloak, that I was doing a charitable action to some poor Galla fainting with fatigue, and perhaps with hunger; but, since I have had it in my hands, I have found you an instructor of kings and nobles, a leader of armies and maker of laws. Take your cloak, therefore, and wash it yourself, which is what Providence has ordained to be your business; it is a safer trade, and you will have less time to censure your superiors, which can never be a proper or useful occupation to a fellow like you.”

The king took his wet cloak, and the rebuke along with it, and, on his return, he sent for the man to Gondar, and raised him in a short time to the first offices in the state. He possessed his entire confidence; and he deserved it. He was the only man to whom the king had confided his fears of the usurper Welleta Georgis. While Bacuffa was supposed to be ill, the queen and this officer only present, he mentioned, for the first time, some surprise that no such person as Welleta Georgis had appeared during so long and so many inquiries, and could not help dropping some words as if he doubted the truth of this prophecy.

Badjerund Waragna, for that was the name of the king’s friend, maintained modestly that it might be a temptation of the devil to mislead him to his destruction. He told the king, that, by his own account of it, this Welleta Georgis was to have no power over _him_, as he was only to appear in his son’s time. He begged him, therefore, to lay aside all further thoughts of his prophecy, whilst he trusted his son’s succession to God’s mercy, and to the prayers, the charity, and prudence of the queen. The Iteghé all this time was lost in silence. She desired the king to repeat to her the whole circumstances of the prophecy, which he distinctly did. “I wish,” says she laughing, “this Welleta Georgis may not be now nearer us than we imagine; perhaps in the palace.” “In the palace!” says the king, with great emotion. “I doubt so,” says the queen; “suppose it should be me your own wife; for Welleta Georgis was the name given to me in baptism; and your late coronation of me, should a minority happen in the person of your son, or even a grandson, undoubtedly leaves me regent of the kingdom by your own intentions when you made me Iteghè.”

Whether the king was convinced or not, is not known; but he, from this time, desisted from his persecution of Welleta Georgis; and this the queen often told me among several anecdotes of that singular reign. She was my great patroness while at Gondar, and from her I received constant protection in the most disastrous times. To the credit of the prophet, she continued regent full thirty years; till the folly and ambition of her own family gave her a master that put an end to all her influence, except what she enjoyed from exemplary piety, and the most extensive works of charity and mercy.

The king died after a vigorous reign, and after having cut off the greatest part of the ancient nobility near Gondar, who were of age to have been concerned in the transactions of the last reigns. This has rendered his memory odious, though it is universally confessed he saved his country from an aristocratical or democratical usurpation; both equally unconstitutional, as they equally struck at the root of monarchy.

The queen, with very great prudence, concealed the day of the king’s death; nor did any one, after the last experiment, affect rashly to believe that his death was real. Thus all were upon their guard against another resurrection. In that interval, she called her brothers from Kuara, and strengthened her son’s and her own government, by putting the principal offices of state into the hands of persons attached to her family, so that, though her son Yasous was an infant, no attempt was at that time made towards any resolution. Even after the king’s death was known to be real, for many years afterwards there were people of credit at different times found, who said they had met him at sundry places alive; whether by instigation, for any particular purpose, or not, is difficult to say.

YASOUS II. OR, ADIAM SEGUED.

From 1729 to 1753.

_Rebellion in the beginning of this Reign--King addicted to hunting--To building, and the Arts of Peace--Attacks Sennaar--Loses his Army--Takes Samayat--Receives Baady King of Sennaar under his Protection._

Besides the queen, mother of Yasous, Bacuffa had several other wives and divers children by them; none of them, however, had any degree of interest, or many followers, owing to the very singular practice of Bacuffa, already mentioned, in not admitting to his bed, from the time of his coming to the crown, any women except the queen, mother of Yasous, without having first so far intoxicated them with liquor as to produce an oblivion of all that passed at the interview. Some say this arose from his own jealous ideas; but the most general opinion was, that it was a kind of covenant with the queen, by which she pardoned him this temporary alienation of his person, for this security, that he was to give her no rival in his confidence. Indeed, his own temper led him naturally to estrange himself from every intimate connection, that could pretend to any lawful share with him in government. And this had gone so far, that he sent his wife, favourite as she was, and his son Yasous, to the low, hot, and unwholesome province of Walkayt, the ordinary place to which state criminals were banished, in order that they might be under the eye of Ain Egzie, a confidential servant of his, and governor of that province. It is true this was done without any mark of disgust; and the queen returned immediately by his own command; but Yasous staid at Walkayt with Ain Egzie, till he was four years old, without the king his father having shewn any anxiety for his return.

The queen’s first care was to call her brothers to court. The eldest, Welled de l’Oul, had been a favourite of the late king, and occupied under him a very considerable post in the palace. Geta, her second brother, was a man of slow parts, but esteemed a good soldier; being covetous, he was not a favourite of the people, and less so of the king. The third was Eshtè, (pronounced in that country Shitti); he was amiable, liberal, affable, and brave, but rather given to indolence and pleasure, which alone hindered him from being a good statesman and general. He was a kind friend to strangers, a good master, and placable enemy; stedfast to his promise, and on all occasions a lover of truth; a quality so very rare in Abyssinia, that it was said there had not been one in this respect like him since the time of Yasous the Great. Notwithstanding this, Bacuffa liked him not, as being too great a favourite of the people, and, for that reason, never gave him any employment.

The next brother was Eusebius, a very brave and skilful soldier, but rash, avaricious, passionate, and treacherous, and as great an enemy to truth as his brother Eshtè was a friend to it. Bacuffa, upon some slight complaint, had resolved to put him to death; and, though he was dissuaded from this, he could never be so far reconciled to him as ever to release him from prison. The fifth brother was Netcho, whom the desire of living at home, or, perhaps, a want of money to defray his expences at court, kept low and in obscurity all his life-time. Yet he was a tried, gallant, and skilful soldier; and in later years, when I was at Gondar, was often praised as such by Ras Michael, the best judge, because the greatest general of his time, though, by reason of Netcho’s private life, and absence from court, he never charged him with any important commission. Another brother was dead, and had left a son called Mammo, a good horseman, the only quality, as far as I know, that he possessed to which could justly be annexed the epithet of Good.

Of these brothers, Geta and Netcho were alive in my time. Eshtè was dead, but had left two sons, Ayto Engedan and Ayto Aylo, who were among the most intimate of my friends, from my entering Ethiopia till my leaving it; both were brave and good, and endowed with excellent qualities. Engedan, without any allowance for his country, and want of education, was, I think, by very much, the most amiable and complete man that I have ever yet seen.

Sanuda, son of Welled de l’Oul, played a very considerable part in the revolution that happened in my time; was of a figure more than ordinary graceful; was brave, and did not want good dispositions; but these were obscured by debauchery in wine and women, to which there were no bounds. Eusebius left two sons, both more worthless and profligate than himself, and both came to untimely ends: Guebra Mehedin, the eldest, was slain in a private quarrel at Lebec by a near relation, Kasmati Ayabdar, after having robbed my servants and plundered my baggage, in Foggora, near the village Dara; and the second, Ayto Confu, was killed in rebellion at the battle of Serbraxos, among the Begemder horse, fighting against his sovereign.

Mammo we shall find acting insignificant parts at times, never trusted, nor of consequence to any one. As for the queen herself, she was reputed the handsomest woman of her time. She was descended from Victor, eldest brother to Menas, and son of David, who died without coming to the crown. This daughter was married to Robel, governor of Tigré, whose mother was a Portuguese, and the queen inherited the colour of her European ancestors; indeed was whiter than most Portuguese. She was very vain of this her descent; had a warm attachment to the Catholic religion in her heart, as far as she could ever learn it; nor did she value herself less upon her beauty, as we may judge by the several names she took at different times. The first was Iteghè Mantuab, or _the beautiful queen_; the second was Berhan Magwass, or _the glory of grace_; though her christened name was Welleta Georgis, as we have already observed.

After the death of her husband, Bacuffa, she is said to have descended to a variety of attachments of short duration. She married a man of quality, Kasmati Netcho of Kuara, by whom she had three daughters. The first was Ozoro Esther, of whom I shall often speak, being, next to her mother, the greatest friend I had in Abyssinia, and one who had the most frequent opportunities of being so. She was married, in very early life, to Kasmati Netcho of Tcherkin, a man of great personal qualities, and who had a very large territory, reaching down to the Pagan blacks, or Troglodytes, called Shangalla.

This marriage was of very short duration. Netcho left one son, Ayto Confu, my very great and firm, though young friend, who likewise inherited his father’s fortune and virtues. She was afterwards married to Ayo Mariam Barea, (excepting Ras Michael) reputed the best general in Abyssinia, but who died before I came into the country. By him she had one son and a daughter, infants. Lastly, she was married to Ras Michael, by whom she had two sons, the favourites of Michael’s old age. Rustic and cruel as that old tyrant was, bred up in blood, and delighting in it, she governed him despotically, from the day of her marriage, yet so prudently, as to excite the envy of no one, excepting the murderers of her husband Mariam Barea, who, luckily, were also the constitutional enemies of her country.

The second daughter of the Iteghé was Ozoro Welleta Israel, the most beautiful woman in Abyssinia, with whom I had very little acquaintance, she being at constant war with Ras Michael. She had married a nobleman of the first consideration, to whom half of the large and rich province of Gojam belonged, by whom she had Aylo, one of the largest men that I ever saw, the only particular remarkable in him.

The third was Ozoro Altash, married to Welled Hawaryat, Ras Michael’s son, by whom she had three children, two sons and one daughter. One of them died of the small-pox soon after my arrival at Gondar, as did his father also; the other son and daughter happily recovered.

Bacuffa had provided sufficiently for the security of his provinces, by placing tried and veteran officers in his governments. Elias, indeed, was Ras and Betwudet at Gondar, and he was suspected of wishes contrary to his allegiance; but far before any, in the confidence of the late king, was Waragna Shalaka, that is, colonel of a regiment of Djawi Galla, with which he defended the provinces of Damot and Agow against his countrymen on the other side of the Nile; for he was a Galla of that nation himself, and his name was Usho, which signifies _a dog_. But it was more by his interest, which he preserved with those people, than by his arms, that he kept those barbarians from wasting that country.

The reader will easily remember the first occasion of his coming to Gondar was when Bacuffa saw him washing his clothes in a pool of water; and from the reproof, and his behaviour to the king on that occasion, as well as the duty and implicit obedience he paid to his commands afterwards, he was called Waragna, by way of contradiction, that word signifying a sturdy rebel, or one that stands up in defiance of the king. That name became much more famous afterwards in the person of his son, Waragna Fasil, to the very great detriment of the country in general.

The first thing the queen did was to send Shalaka Waragna, and Billetana Gueta David, with a large body of Mahometan fusileers, Djawi and Toluma Galla, to guard the mountain of Wechné, where the males of the royal family were imprisoned, that no competitor might be released from thence. The next step was to marry Ozoro Welleta Tecla Haimanout to Ras Elias, to confirm him, if possible, in his much suspected allegiance. After which, the Ras, judges, and soldiers of the king’s household, made this proclamation--“Bacuffa, king of kings, is dead! Yasous, king of kings, liveth! Mourn for those that are dead, and rejoice with those that are alive!” Orders were then given for burying Bacuffa with all magnificence possible.

The first thing that seemed the beginning of trouble in the new regency, and likely to destroy the calm that had hitherto subsisted, was an information given by Azage Georgis against Tecla Saluce, a great officer at court. Georgis accused him before the king and council, that he had been heard to say that king Yasous was dangerously ill. Tecla Saluce absolutely denied this charge, and said it was an invention of his enemy Georgis, and challenged him to prove it. Evidence being called, he was convicted in the most direct and satisfactory manner; was therefore condemned to death, and hewn to pieces at the king’s gate that same day by the common soldiers.

Here is a species of treason without any overt act. The imagining the king’s death, which seems much to resemble the law of England, may be defended from the importance of the case, but scarcely from any principle of justice or reason.

It soon appeared that a conspiracy had been on foot; several great men fled from court, among these Johannes, who had the charge of the king’s horses. But Shalaka Waragna and Billetana Gueta David, being sent immediately after him, this conspiracy was soon stifled, and the ringleaders dispersed, mostly into Amhara, where they were taken prisoners by Woodage governor of the province, and sent to the king. Johannes, finding it impossible to escape, took to one of those papyrus boats used in navigating the lake Tzana; and, being driven by the wind, landed in an island[92] belonging to the queen, where he was taken prisoner, with his wife and family, and delivered up, on condition that he should not be put to death.

Kasmati Cambi, returning from Damot, fell accidentally upon Palambaras Masmari and several others, and brought them prisoners to Gondar. A council was thereupon held, and the conspirators put upon their trial. Palambaras Masmari, and Abou Barea who was one of the judges, were condemned to be hanged on the tree before the palace-gate. Johannes and the rest were committed to close prison, in the hands of the Betwudet.

It was thought a proper expedient to check these disorders, to hasten the coronation of the king, though very young. The judges and all the officers being assembled in the presence-chamber, where the king sits on his throne, (for in the council-chamber he sits in a kind of cage, or close balcony) where no part of him is discovered, Sarach Masseri Mammo, whose office it was, stood up with the Kees Hatzé, or king’s almoner; when this last had anointed him with oil, Mammo placed the crown upon his head; upon which the whole assembly, his mother only excepted, fell down and paid him homage; and at his inauguration he took the name of Adiam Segued.

On a separate throne, on his right hand, sat the queen-mother. She, too, was crowned, though not anointed; but the same homage was performed to her that had been done to the king, who sat on the throne with his head covered; nor did the Abuna interfere, nor was his attendance judged any part of the ceremony.

The first seeds of discontent had been sown in Damot, where a party of rebels had attacked Kasmati Cambi in the night, cut most of his army to pieces, and obliged Shalaka Job to fly into Gojam, and then return in haste to Gondar.

The king found no better remedy against this rebellion than to appoint Kasmati Waragna governor of Damot, and Sanuda guardian of Wechné, with orders to take with him a son of the late Oustas the usurper, and confine him with the king’s sons upon that mountain. At the same time he appointed Ayo governor of Begemder; both these preferments being much to the satisfaction of the whole nation. Waragna, knowing the necessities of his province, marched from Gondar with what forces he could collect, and took up his head-quarters at Samseen, where, on the very night after his arrival, he was set upon by Tensa Mammo at the head of the Agows. However unexpected this was, Waragna, a good soldier, was not to be taken by surprise. He knew the country, and had not a great opinion either of the force or courage of the enemy, or capacity of their general. Presenting, therefore, only one half of his troops, which could not be easily discovered in the dark, he sent Fit-Auraris Tamba to make a small compass, and fall upon their rear with the other half. Mammo’s troops, thinking this to be a fresh and separate army, immediately took to flight, and were many of them slain, after leaving behind them their tents, baggage, and the greatest part of their fire-arms, which had been of very little service to them in the dark.

Waragna, who knew the consequence of his province was the riches of it, and the dependence the capital had upon it for constant supplies of provisions, was loath to pursue his victory farther, if any means could be fallen upon to bring about a pacification. To effect this, he dispatched messengers to his friends, the Galla, on the other side of the Nile, ordering them to be ready to pass the river on the day he should appoint, and to lay waste the country of the Agow with fire and sword. He then decamped with his army from Samseen, and marched to Sacala, and took up his head-quarters in St Michael’s church, where he found the Agows in the utmost terror from apprehension of being over-run with barbarians. But he soon eased them of their fears by a proclamation, in which he told them plainly, that it was owing to the goodness of the country, and not any merit in the people, that the king’s palace and capital was so plentifully supplied with provisions from thence; that all his pursuit was peace, but that he was resolved to effect that end by every possible means; therefore the time was now come that they were to make a resolution, and abide by it, to submit and behave peaceably as good citizens ought; or, when his army of Galla joined him, he would extirpate them to the last man. In the mean time, he published an amnesty of all that had passed.

The Agows knew well that they were in the hands of one who was no trifler, nor in his heart much their friend. They ran to him, ready to make that composition which he should raise from them for their past transgressions and his future protection. The tribute laid upon them, for both was moderate beyond all expectation, 2000 oxen for the king and queen, and 500 for himself; upon which he left Sacala, and entered Goutto, a very fertile country, between Maitsha and the Agows, where he used the same moderation, and by these means quieted and reconciled his whole province.

Nothing could have been more advantageous to the king’s affairs than the prudent conduct of this wise officer, which left him at liberty to afford him his assistance; for in the mean time a conspiracy was formed at Gondar, which had taken deep root, and had a powerful faction, Elias, late Ras and Betwudet, Tensa Mammo, Guebra l’Oul, Matteos and Agnè, all principal men in Gondar, and possessed of great riches and dependencies throughout the whole kingdom.

On the 8th of December 1734, being joined by their followers from without, they all rendezvoused upon the river Kahha, below the town. After holding council in the king’s house which is there, they resolved to proclaim one of the princes upon the mountain Wechné, named Hezekias, king. For this purpose, furnished with a kettle-drum, they marched in three divisions, by three different ways, to the palace, avowedly with an intention to force the gates and murder the king and queen. But Fit-Auraris Ephraim, having intelligence of this tumult, first shut up and obstructed all the entrances to the king’s house, then gave advice to Billetana Gueta, Welled de l’Oul, of the rebellion of Tensa Mammo, their design to murder the king, and their having proclaimed Hezekias.

These immediately repaired to the king’s house to take council together what was to be done, and to defend the place if it was necessary. The rebels were now drawn up, and were beating their kettle-drum to make their proclamation, “Hezekias was king!” while Shalaka Tchinsho, a young nobleman of great hopes, who commanded the troops in the court where was the outer gate, impatient to hear an usurper proclaimed in the very face of his sovereign, directed the outer-court gate to be opened, and, with two bodies of Galla, Djawi and Toluma, and several corps of lances, which compose the king’s household, however inferior in number, he rushed upon the rebels so suddenly, that they were soon obliged to think of other occupation.

The first that fell was Asalessi Lensa, who stood by the drum, and was slain by Shalaka Tchinsho with his own hand; his drum taken and sent to the king as the first fruits of the day. The soldiers, encouraged by the example of their leader, fell fiercely upon the rebels, dispersed and broke through them wherever they saw the greatest number together; a great slaughter was made, and Tensa Mammo, with difficulty, escaped. The victory indeed would have been complete, had not an accidental shot from a distance wounded Shalaka Tchinsho mortally. His own people carried him within the gate of the palace, where he gloriously expired at the feet of his sovereign.

The rebels, notwithstanding this check, increased every day in number and resolution, when the news arrived that Waragna had composed all the differences in Damot, Agow, and Goutto, and, at the head of a numerous army, was waiting the king’s orders. This intelligence first had the effect to disconcert the rebels, who suddenly left the capital in their way to Wechné.

The king, now master of Gondar, ordered a proclamation to be made for all persons whatever holding fiefs of the crown, as also all others, to assemble before him on a short day, where the Itchegué and Abuna, holding the picture of our Saviour, with the crown of thorns[93], up before the people, did administer to them a solemn oath, to live and die with the king and Iteghé; a feeble experiment, often tried by a weak government. The only consequence of this was present expence to the crown in a distribution of beef, honey, butter, wheat, and all kinds of provisions; after which each man returned to his house, ready to repeat the perjury ten times a day for the same emolument, and same sincerity.

Messengers were next dispatched to Kasmati Waragna, ordering him to come to Gondar with the greatest force he could raise. The same day Azage Kyrillos, whom the king had made governor of Wechné, and Azage Newaia Selassé, went to the mountain, pretending that king Yasous was dead, and that the choice of the principal members of government had fallen upon Hezekias, who thereupon was delivered to him, and saluted king; and, without losing time, they marched to Kahha, and encamped on that river below Gondar.

In the mean while, the great men and officers of the court, and in particular those who had estates and houses in Gondar, began to consider the danger of the town at the so near approach of the rebels. Several districts, or streets, situated on eminences, by shutting up access to them, were made tenable posts, and, having filled them with good soldiers, they set about the defence of the town and annoying the enemy. Hezekias had removed to the house of Basha Arkillidas; and it was agreed to send their whole forces to see if they could succeed in forcing the king’s house. But before this another stratagem was tried to alienate the minds of the people of Gondar from their sovereign. It was said that certain Roman Catholic priests had arrived at Gondar; that they were shut up privately in the palace with the king and queen; and, upon the Abuna and Itchegué coming to Hezekias to ask him how he happened to be proclaimed king, without making to them some confession of his faith, (a question they put to all young or weak princes), Hezekias answered, It was because he had heard the Itchegué, and the rest of the clergy, seemed to be careless about the true faith, by suffering Catholic priests to live with the king in the palace. A great ferment immediately followed; all the monks, priests, and madmen that could be assembled, (and on these occasions they gather quickly), with the Itchegué and Abuna at their heads, went to Dippabye, the open place before the palace, and pronounced the Iteghè, Yasous, and all their abettors, accursed and given up to burn with Dathan and Abiram.

For several days and nights attempts were made to set fire to, and break open the gate. But the loyalists charged them so vigorously upon all these occasions, especially Billetana Gueta Welled de l’Oul, and the walls of the palace were so exceedingly thick and strong, that little progress was made in proportion to the men these attempts cost daily. However, on that side of the palace called Adenaga, the rebels had lodged themselves so near as to set part of it on fire.

The king’s house in Gondar stands in the middle of a square court, which may be full an English mile in circumference. In the midst of it is a square tower, in which there are many noble apartments. A strong double wall surrounds it, and this is joined by a platform roof; loop-holes, and conveniences for discharging missile weapons, are disposed all around it. The whole tower and wall is built of stone and lime; but part of the tower being demolished and laid in ruins, and part of it let fall for want of repair, small apartments, or houses of one storey, have been built in different parts of the area, or square, according to the fancy of the prince then reigning, and these go now by the names of the ancient apartments in the palace, which are fallen down.

These houses are composed of the frail materials of the country, wood and clay, thatched with straw, though, in the inside, they are all magnificently lined, or furnished. They have likewise magnificent names, which we have mentioned already. These people, barbarous as they are, have always had a great taste for magnificence and expence. All around them was silver, gold, and brocade, before the Adelan war, in which they lost the commerce of that country, by losing their connexion with India.

The next night the soldiers of Elias made their lodgments so near the walls, that, with fiery arrows, they set one of these houses, called “Werk Sacala,” within the square, in flames; but Welled de l’Oul, with the Toluma Galla, sallying at that instant, surprised Elias’s soldiers, not expecting such interruption, and put the greatest part of them to the sword, setting on fire the houses that were near the palace, till part was entirely burnt to the ground. The next night, an attempt was made upon the gate to blow it up with gunpowder; but, before it was completed, the two rebels employed in the work were shot dead from the wall, and their train miscarried.

On the 25th of December they burned a new house in the town built by the king, called Riggobee Bet. These frequent fires had turned the minds of people in general very much against Hezekias the rebel. The night after, there was another great fire in the king’s house; Zeffan Bet, and another large building, were destroyed by the rebels, as was the church of St Raphael. Gondar looked like a town that had been taken by an enemy, and battles were every day fought in the streets, with no decisive advantage to either party. Some part of the town was on fire every night; nobody knew for what reason, nor what was the quarter that was next to be burnt.

In the mean time, Azage Georgis arrived in the country of the Agows at Basil Bet, where Waragna was, and delivered him the king’s order, that he should make all possible haste to his assistance at Gondar, with as large an army as he could suddenly bring; and these dispatches conferred upon him at the same time, as a mark of favour, the post of Ibaba Azage, or governor of Ibaba, together with Elmana and Densa, two districts inhabited by Galla, subjects to the king, which posts were then held by Tensa Mammo, and forfeited by his rebellion.

The next morning Waragna left his head-quarters at Basil Bet; thence he marched to Gumbali, and thence to Sima. At Sima he heard, that, the day before, it had been proclaimed at Ibaba, by orders of Tensa Mammo, that Yasous was dead, and Hezekias was now king; upon this intelligence he marched from Sima, and, while it was yet early in the day, he came to Ibaba.

The first inquiry was concerning the Shum (or chief of the town) left there by Tensa Mammo; and this man, coming readily to him to receive his commands, and offer him any service in his power, was asked by whose orders the proclamation of Hezekias was made? Being answered, by Tensa Mammo’s, he directed the Shum and his two sons to be hanged on three separate trees in the middle of the town; the Shum with the nagareet round his neck which had served in the proclamation of Hezekias; he then declared Tensa Mammo a rebel and outlaw, and confiscated his estate to the king’s use.

At Ibaba he met Fit-Auraris Tamba, with a large body of Damots and Djawi; then he decamped from Ibaba, and, at the bridge over the Nile, was met by Azage Georgis, with all Maitsha, Elmana, and Densa following, and thence proceeded to Waira, where he set Arkillidas at liberty. This officer, after distinguishing himself before all others in the king’s defence, had been taken prisoner by Tensa Mammo, and sent thither. Advancing into Foggora, with a large army, he halted at Gilda, and sent some soldiers on the road to Gondar, to see if he could apprehend any travellers, especially those going or coming to or from market. But, after three days waiting on the road, the soldiers returned without any person or intelligence, by which he judged the town was already in great straits. In two days after, he advanced to Wainarab, and thence he sent his Fit-Auraris forward to set a house at Tedda on fire, to shew to the king at Gondar that he was thus far advanced to his assistance. This barbarous custom of burning a house wherever an army encamps, though but for an hour, is invariably practised, as a signal by armies, throughout all Abyssinia.

At this time there was a treaty begun between the king and Tensa Mammo. The rebels, weary of the little advantage they had gained, and hearing Waragna was about to march against them, offered the queen her own terms, provided she published a general amnesty, and that each man should be allowed to keep the posts he had before the rebellion. The queen, weary and terrified with war, readily agreed to this proposal; and this facility, instead of accelerating the treaty, gave the rebels an opportunity of asking further terms, and a settlement was spoken of for the king Hezekias, in some of the low provinces near Walkayt.

Welled de l’Oul, the queen’s brother, a man in whom the rebels had trust, seconded his sister’s desire, and carried on the treaty, but from different motives; it was his opinion, that, to make peace with the rebels, leaving their party unbroken, was to spread the infection of rebellion all over the kingdom; and to let them keep their posts, was leaving a sword in their hands to enable them to defend themselves on any future occasion. He therefore thought, that, as the king had Waragna now at his command, they should make use of him to pluck up this rebellion by the roots, cut off all the ringleaders, and disperse the faction; but, in the mean time, in order to be able to effect this, they should keep up the appearance of being anxious for agreeing, in order to lull the enemy asleep, till Waragna made his instructions and designs known to the king.

From Wainarab, Waragna sent a messenger to let the king and queen know of his arrival; and with him came Arkillidas, that no doubt might remain of the truth of the message. This officer told the king, that Waragna should advance to Tedda, and offer the rebels battle there; but if they retired (as he heard they intended) to Abra, he would follow them thither. He desired the king also to issue his orders to the several Shums to guard the roads, that as few of the ringleaders of the rebels might escape as possible.

Hezekias, with his army, decamped, taking the road to Woggora; and Waragna, following him, came up with him at Fenter, on January 20th 1735. The rebels, inferior in number, though they did not wish an engagement at that time, were too high-minded to avoid it when offered. Both armies fought a long time with equal fortune; and though Waragna at the first onset had slain two men with his own hands, and taken two prisoners, the battle was supported with great firmness till the evening, when Waragna ordered all his Galla, the men of Maitsha, Elmana, and Densa, to leave their horses, and charge the enemy on foot. This confident step, unknown and unpractised by Galla before, had the desired effect. The Galla now fought desperately for life, not for victory, being deprived of their only means of saving themselves by flight.

Most of the principal officers among the rebels being killed or wounded, their army at last was broken, and took to flight. Hezekias was surrounded and taken, fighting bravely; being first hurt in the leg, and then beat off his horse with a stone. The pursuit was presently stayed. Tensa Mammo escaped safely through Woggora, a disaffected province; and had now passed the Tacazzé, when he was taken by the men of Siré, and brought to the king for the reward that had been offered for his head by Waragna.

Hezekias was brought to his trial before the king, nor did he presume to deny his guilt. He was therefore sentenced to die, and committed to close prison. Tensa Mammo was arraigned, and, although he confessed the treason, he pleaded the peace he had made with the king before the arrival of Waragna at Gondar. This plea was unanimously over-ruled by the judges, because the treaty had not been completed. He was, therefore, sentenced to die, and immediately carried out to the daroo-tree before the palace, and hanged between two of his most confidential counsellors.

The Abuna and Itchegué were next ordered to appear, and answer for the crime of high treason in excommunicating the king; they declared they proceeded on no other grounds than an information, that the king and queen were turned Franks, and had two Catholic priests with them in the palace. The men complained of were produced, and proved to be two Greeks; Petros, a native of Rhodes, and Demetrius. This explanation being given, the Abuna and Itchegué thereupon asked pardon of the king and queen, and were ordered to make their recantation at Dippabye, which they immediately did, declaring they were wrong, and had proceeded on false information.

It was on the 28th of January that Sanuda and Adero were ordered to carry king Hezekias to Wechné, which they did, and left him there without disfiguring him in any part of his body, as is the cruel, but usual custom in such cases. But both the Iteghè and her son were of the most merciful disposition; and the general reputation they had for this was often the cause of tumults and rebellions that would not have had birth in severer reigns.

It was not long after this when there appeared a pretender to the crown, very little expected. He said he was the old king Bacuffa; that he had given it out that he was dead, for political reasons, and was come again to claim his crown and kingdom. Never was resurrection so little wished for as this; a violent fear fell upon part of the multitude for some time; but his name making no party, whether true or false, he was seized upon without bloodshed, tried, and condemned to die. This punishment was changed into one of a _supposed_ gentler kind, the cutting off his leg, and sending him to Wechné. The operation, always performed in the grossest manner by an ax, high up the leg, and near the knee, is generally fatal; for there is no one, having either skill or care, to take up the ends of the veins and arteries separated by the amputation; they only apply useless stiptics and bandages, of no effect, till the patient bleeds to death. This is the common case, so that the pretended Bacuffa died, in consequence of the operation, before he came to Wechné, though he was by his sentence reprieved from death.

The king, now arrived at the seventh year of his reign, proclaimed a general hunt, which is a declaration of his near approach to manhood; but he pursued it no length, and again returned to Gondar.

At that time, a great party of the queen’s relations was made against Ayo governor of Begemder, It began by a competition between Kasmati Geta the queen’s brother, and Ayo, who should have that province. The common voice was for Ayo, not only as a man of the greatest interest in the province, but in all respects unexceptionable throughout the kingdom. Welled de l’Oul, (brother to Geta) however, being now Ras and Betwudet, Geta governor of Samen, Eusebius, and all the rest of them in high places at court, Geta was preferred to the government of Begemder. Ayo, though avowedly a good subject of the king, was determined not to be made a sacrifice to a party. He therefore refused to resign his government, and prepared to defend himself.

Upon this, Adero, governor of Gojam, with the whole forces of that province, passed the Nile, and entered Begemder; Geta on the side of Samen, and last of all Welled de l’Oul marched with a royal army to join the forces that had already begun to lay waste the country, where unusual excesses were committed. Ayo’s house was burned to the ground, so were all those of his party, and their lands destroyed, greatly to the general damage of the province and capital. Ayo was now obliged to save himself by flight. It was said, that the king (though his army was ready) refused to march against Ayo; but with a party of his own set out for Aden, on the frontiers of Sennaar, to hunt there; nor did he return till the executions were over in Begemder.

Adero fell back to Gojam, and Welled de l’Oul to Gondar soon after. The king himself appeared very much contented with his own expedition, in which he had shown great dexterity and bravery, having killed two young elephants, and a gomari, or hippopotamus, with his own hands. Nor did he stay any time at Gondar, or make any preferments, the usual consequences of victories, but prepared again for another hunting-expedition, or an attack upon the Shangalla. The queen and Welled de l’Oul opposed strongly his resolution. But Yasous seemed to be weary of being governed. He was fast advancing to manhood, and of a disposition rather forward for his age. His expedition against the Shangalla was attended with no accident; and he returned to Gondar on the 3d of June, with a number of slaves, much better pleased that he had neglected, rather than taken, his mother’s advice.

It was on the 23d day of December that Yasous again set out on another hunting-party, and killed two elephants and a rhinoceros. He then proceeded to Tchelga, and from Tchelga to Waldubba; thence he went to the rivers Gandova and Shimfa. These are two rivers we shall have occasion frequently to speak of in our return through Sennaar, in which kingdom the one is called Dender, the other Rahad. Here he exercised himself at a very violent species of hunting, that of forcing the gieratacachin, which means long-tail; it is otherwise called giraffa in Arabic. It is the tallest of beasts; I never saw it dead, nor, I think, more than twice alive, and then at a distance. It is, however, often killed by the elephant-hunters. Its skin is beautifully variegated when young, but turns brown when arrived at any age. It is, I apprehend, the camelopardalis, and is the only animal, they say, that, in swiftness, will beat a horse in the fair field.

It was not with a view to hunt only, that Yasous made these frequent excursions towards the frontiers of Sennaar. His resolution was formed (as it appeared soon after) in imitation of his forefather Socinios, to revive his right over the country of the _Shepherds_, his ancient vassals, who, since the accession of strength by uniting with the Arabs, had forgot their ancient tribute and subjection, as we have already observed.

The king in five days marching from Gidara came to a station of the Daveina, which is a tribe of shepherds, by much the strongest of any in Atbara. He fell into their encampments a little before the dawn of day. The first shew they made was that of resistance, till they had got their horses and camels saddled; they then all fled, after the king had killed three of them with his own hand. Ras Woodage signalized himself likewise by having slain the same number with the king. The cattle, women, and provisions fell all into the king’s hand, and were driven off to Gondar. Their arrival gave the town an entertainment to which they had a long time been strangers. Many thousand camels were assembled in the plain, where stands the palace of Kahha, (upon a river of that name) large flocks of horned cattle, of extraordinary beauty, were also brought from Atbara, which the king ordered to be distributed among his soldiers, and the priests of Gondar, and such of the officers of state as had been necessarily detained on account of the police, and had not followed the army.

This year, 1736, there happened a total eclipse of the sun which very much affected the minds of the weaker sort of people. The dreamers and the prophets were everywhere let loose, full of the lying spirit which possessed them, to foretel that the death of the king, and the downfal of his government were at hand, and deluges of civil blood were then speedily to be spilt both in the capital and provinces. There was not, indeed, at the time any circumstance that warranted such a prediction, or any thing likely to be more fatal to the state, than the expenditure of the large sums of money that the turn the king had taken subjected him to.

He had built a large and very costly church at Koscam, and he was still engaged in a more expensive work in the building of a palace at Gondar. He was also rebuilding his house at Riggobee-ber, (the north end of the town) which had been demolished by the rebels; and had begun a very large and expensive villa at Azazo, with extensive groves, or gardens, planted thick with orange and lemon trees, upon the banks of a beautiful and clear river which divides the palace from the church of Tecla Haimanout, a large edifice which, some time before, he had also built and endowed. Besides all these occupations, he was deeply engaged in ornamenting his palace at Gondar. A rebellion, massacre, or some such misfortune, had happened among the Christians of Smyrna; who, coming to Cairo, and finding that city in a still less peaceable state than the one which they had left, they repaired to Jidda in their way to India; but missing the monsoon, and being destitute of money and necessaries, they crossed over the Red Sea for Masuah, and came to Gondar. There were twelve of them silver-smiths, very excellent in that fine work called filligrane, who were all received very readily by the king, liberally furnished both with necessaries and luxuries, and employed in his palace as their own taste directed them.

By the hands of these, and several Abyssinians whom they had taught, sons of Greek artists whose fathers were dead, he finished his presence-chamber in a manner truly admirable. The skirting, which in our country is generally of wood, was finished with ivory four feet from the ground. Over this were three rows of mirrors from Venice, all joined together, and fixed in frames of copper, or cornices gilt with gold. The roof, in gaiety and taste, corresponded perfectly with the magnificent finishing of the room; it was the work of the Falasha, and consisted of painted cane, split and disposed in Mosaic figures, which produces a gayer effect than it is possible to conceive. This chamber, indeed, was never perfectly finished, from a want of mirrors. The king died; taste decayed; the artists were neglected, or employed themselves in ornamenting saddles, bridles, swords, and other military ornaments, for which they were very ill paid; part of the mirrors fell down; part remained till my time; and I was present when the last of them were destroyed, on a particular occasion, after the battle of Serbraxos, as will be hereafter mentioned.

The king had begun another chamber of equal expence, consisting of plates of ivory, with stars of all colours stained in each plate at proper distances. This, too, was going to ruin; little had been done in it but the alcove in which he sat, and little of it was seen, as the throne and person of the king concealed it.

Yasous was charmed with this multiplicity of works and workmen. He gave up himself to it entirely; he even wrought with his own hand, and rejoiced at seeing the facility with which, by the use of a compass and a few straight lines, he could produce the figure of a star equally exact with any of his Greeks. Bounty followed bounty. The best villages, and those near the town, were given in property to the Greeks that they might recreate themselves, but at a distance, always liable to his call, and with as little loss of time as possible. He now renounced his favourite hunting-matches and incursions upon the Shangalla and Shepherds of Atbara.

The extraordinary manner in which the king employed his time soon made him the object of public censure. Pasquinades began to be circulated throughout the capital; one in particular, a large roll of parchment, intituled, “The expeditions of _Yasous the Little_.” The king in reality was a man of short stature. The Ethiopic word Tannush, joined to the king’s name Yasous el Tannush, applied both to his stature and actions. So Tallac, the name given to another Yasous, his predecessor, signified great in capacity and atchievement, as well as that he was of a large and masculine person.

These expeditions, though enumerated in a large sheet of parchment, were confined to a very few miles; from Gondar to Kahha, from Kahha to Koscam, from Koscam to Azazo, from Azazo to Gondar, from Gondar to Koscam, from Koscam to Azazo, and so on. It was a similar piece of ridicule upon his father Philip, as we are informed, that, in the last century, cost Don Carlos, prince of Spain, his life.

This satire nettled Yasous exceedingly; and, to wipe off the imputation of inactivity and want of ambition, he prepared for an expedition against Sennaar. It was not, however, one of those inroads into Atbara upon the Arabs and Shepherds, whom the Funge had conquered and made tributary to them; but was a regular campaign with a royal army, aimed directly at the very vitals of the monarchy of Sennaar, the capital of the Funge, and at the conquest or extirpation of those strangers entirely from Atbara.

We have seen, in the course of our history, that these two kingdoms, Abyssinia and Funge, had been on very bad terms during several of the last reigns; and that personal affronts and slights had passed between the cotemporary princes themselves. Baady, son of L’Oul, who succeeded his father in the year 1733, had been distinguished by no exploits worthy of a king, but every day had been stained with acts of treachery and cruelty unworthy of a man. No intercourse had passed between Yasous and Baady during their respective reigns; there was no war declared, nor peace established, nor any sort of treaty subsisting between them.

Yasous, without any previous declaration, and without any provocation, at least as far as is known, raised a very numerous and formidable army, and gave the command of it to Ras Welled de l’Oul; and Kasmati Waragna was appointed his Fit-Auraris. The king commanded a chosen body of troops, separate from the rest of the army, which was to act as a reserve, or as occasion should require, in the pitched battle. This he ardently wished for, and had figured to himself that he was to fight against Baady in person. Yasous, from the moment he entered the territory of Sennaar, gave his soldiers the accustomed licence he always had indulged them with, when marching through an enemy’s country. He knew not, in these circumstances, what was meant by mercy; all that had the breath of life was sacrificed by the sword, and the fire consumed the rest.

An universal terror spread around him down to the heart of Atbara. The Shepherds and Arabs, as many as could fly, dispersed themselves in the woods, which, all the way from the frontiers of Abyssinia to the river Dender, are very thick, and in some places almost impenetrable. Some of the Arabs, either from affection or fear, joined Yasous in his march; among these was Nile Wed Ageeb, prince of the Arabs; others taking courage, gathered, and made a stand at the Dender, to try their fortune, and give their cattle time to pass the Nile, and then, if defeated, they were to follow them. Kasmati Waragna, (as Fit-Auraris) joined by the king, no sooner came up with these Arabs on the banks of the Dender, than he fell furiously upon them, broke and dispersed them with a considerable slaughter; then leaving Ras Welled de l’Oul with the king, and the main body to encamp, taking advantage of the confusion the defeat of the Arabs had occasioned, he advanced by a forced march to the Nile, to take a view of the town of Sennaar.

Baady had assembled a very large army on the other side of the river, and was preparing to march out of Sennaar; but, terrified at the king’s approach, the defeat of the Arabs, and the velocity with which the Abyssinians advanced, he was about to change his resolution, abandon Sennaar, and retire north into Atbara.

There is a small kingdom, or principality, called Dar Fowr, all inhabited by negroes, far in the desert west of Sennaar, joining with two other petty negro states like itself, still farther westward, called Selé and Bagirma, while to the eastward it joins with Kordofan, formerly a province of Dar Fowr, but conquered from it by the Funge.

Hamis, prince of Dar Fowr, had been banished from his country in a late revolution occasioned by an unsuccessful war against Selé and Bagirma, and had fled to Sennaar, where he had been received kindly by Baady, and it was by his assistance the Funge had subdued Kordofan. This prince, a gallant soldier, could not bruik to see the green standard of his prophet Mahomet flying before an army of Christians; and, being informed of the king’s march and separation from the main body nearly as soon as it happened, he proposed to Baady, that, as an allurement to Yasous to pass the river with only the troops he had with him, he should do from prudence what he resolved to do from fear, and fall back behind Sennaar, leaving it to Yasous to enter; but, in the mean time, that, he should dispatch him with 4000 of his best horse, armed with coats of mail, to pass the Nile at a known place below, on the right of Welled de l’Oul, on whom he should fall by surprise, and, if lucky enough to defeat him, as was probable, he would then close upon Yasous’s rear, which would of necessity either oblige him to surrender, or lose his life and army in attempting to repass the river between the two Nubian armies. This counsel, for many reasons was perfectly agreeable to Baady, who instantly fell back from covering Sennaar, and then detached Hamis to make a circuit out of sight, and cross the Nile as proposed.

In the mean time, Yasous advanced to Basboch, where he found the current too rapid, and the river too deep for his infantry. He dispatched, therefore, a messenger to Welled de l’Oul for a reinforcement of horse, and gave his infantry orders to retire to the main body upon the arrival of the reinforcement of cavalry. This resolution he had taken upon advancing higher up the river from Basboch, till opposite to the town of Sennaar, and when divided only from it by the Nile. He there saw the confusion that reigned in that large town. No preparation for resistance being visible, the cries of women at the sight of an enemy so near them, and the hurry of the men deserting their habitation loaded with the most valuable of their effects, all increased the king’s impatience to put himself in possession of this capital of his enemy.

It happened that an Arab, belonging to Nile Wed Ageeb, had seen the manœuvre of Hamis and his cavalry. This man, crossing the Nile at the nearest ford, came and told his master, Wed Ageeb, what he had seen, who informed the king of his danger. Upon interrogating the Arab, it was found that the affair of Welled de l’Oul would certainly be over before the king could possibly join him; and in that case he must fall in the midst of a victorious army, and his destruction must then be inevitable, if he attempted it. It was, therefore, agreed, as the only means possible to save the king and that part of the army he had with him, to retreat in the route Shekh Nile should indicate to them, marching up with the river Nile close on their right hand, and leaving the desert between that and the Dender, which is absolutely without water, to cover their left. This was executed as soon as resolved.

In the mean time, Hamis had crossed the Nile, and continued his march with the utmost diligence, and, in the close of the evening, had fallen upon Welled de l’Oul as unexpectedly as he could have wished. The Abyssinians were everywhere slaughtered and trodden down before they could prepare themselves for the least resistance. All that could fly sheltered themselves in the woods: but this refuge was as certain death as the sword of the Funge; for, after leaving the river Dender, all the country behind them was perfectly destitute of water. Ras Welled de l’Oul, and some other principal officers, under the direction of some faithful Arabs, escaped, and, with much difficulty, two days after, joined the king.

Besides these, the army, consisting of 18,000 men, either perished by the sword, by thirst, or were taken prisoners; all the sacred reliques, which the Abyssinians carry about with their armies to ensure victory, and avert misfortune; the picture of the crown of thorns, called _sele quarat rasou_; pieces of the true cross; a crucifix that had on many occasions spoke, (which should ever after be dumb since it spoke not that day); all these treasures of priestcraft were taken by the Funge, and carried in triumph to Sennaar. Great part of those Arabs, who had joined the king in his march northward, had now quitted him and attached themselves to the pursuit of the fugitive remains of Welled de l’Oul’s army. As these Arabs were those that lived nearest the Abyssinian frontier, and to whom the king had done no harm, because they had mostly joined him, no sooner was he informed of their treachery, but just arrived in their country, and scarcely out of danger from the pursuit of the Funge, Yasous turned short to the left, destroying with fire and sword all the families of those that had forsaken him, and so continued to do till arrived on the banks of the Tacazzé.

The Arabs and Shepherds there, many of whom had just returned from the destruction of Welled de l’Oul’s army at Sennaar, and were now rejoicing their families with the news of so complete a victory, and that all danger from the Christian army was over, were astonished to see Yasous at the head of a fresh and vigorous army, burning and destroying their country, and committing all sort of devastation, when they thought him long ago dead, or fugitive, and skulking half-famished on the banks of the Dender.

The king returned in this manner to Gondar, carrying more the appearance of a conqueror than one who had suffered the loss of a whole army, his soldiers being loaded with the spoils of the Arabs, and multitudes of cattle driven before them. It was but too visible, however, by the countenances of many, how wide a difference there was between the loss and the acquisition.

It was, indeed, not from the presence or behaviour of the king, nor yet from his discourse, that it could be learned any such misfortune had befallen him. On the contrary, he affected greater gaiety than usual, when talking of the expedition; and said publicly, and laughing, one day, as he arose from council, “Let all those who were not pleased with the song of Koscam sing that of Sennaar.” From this many were of opinion, that he enjoyed a kind of malevolent pleasure from the misfortune which had befallen his army, who, not content with seeing him cultivate and enjoy the arts of peace, had urged him to undertake a war of which there was no need, and for which there was no provocation given, though in it there was every sort of danger to be expected.

Although Yasous gave no consolation to his people, the priests and fanatics soon endeavoured to prepare them one. Tensa Mammo arrived from Sennaar with the crown of thorns, the true cross, and all the rest of that precious merchandise, safe and entire, only a little profaned by the bloody hands of the Moors. Ras Welled de l’OuL’s army, consisting of 18,000 of their fellow-citizens, was lying dead upon the Dender. It was no matter; they had got the speaking crucifix, but had paid 8000 ounces of gold for it. Still it was no matter; they had got the crown of thorns. The priests made processions from church to church, singing hallelujahs and songs of thanksgiving, when they should have been in sackcloth and ashes, upon their knees deprecating any further chastisement upon their pride, cruelty, and profaneness. All Gondar was drunk with joy; and Yasous himself was astonished to see them singing the song of Sennaar much more willingly than that of Koscam.

At this time died Abuna Christodulus; and it was customary for the king to advance the money to defray the expence of bringing a successor. But Yasous’s money was all gone to Venice for mirrors; and, to defray the expence of bringing a new Abuna, as well as of redeeming of the sacred reliques, he laid a small tax upon the churches, saying merrily, “that the Abuna and the crosses were to be maintained, and repaired by the public; but it was incumbent upon the church to purchase new ones when they were worn out.”

Theodorus, priest of Debra Selalo, Likianos of Azazo, and Georgis called Kipti, were consigned to the care of three Mahometan merchants and brokers at court, whose names were Hamet Ali, Abdulla, and Abdelcader, to go to Cairo and fetch a successor for Christodulus. They arrived at Hamazen on April 29th 1743, where the Mahometan guides chose rather to pass the winter-season than at Masuah, as at that place they were apprehensive they would suffer extortions and ill-usage of every sort. We know not what came of Georgis Kipti; but, as soon as the rainy season was over, Theodorus and Likianos came straight to Masuah.

As soon as the Naybe got the whole convoy of priests and Mahometans into his hands, he demanded of them half of the money the king had given them to defray the expences of fetching the Abuna. He pretended also, that both Mahometans and Christians should have passed the rainy season at Masuah. He declared that this was his perquisite, and that he had prepared great and exquisite provisions for them, which, being spoiled and become useless, it was but reasonable they should pay as if they had consumed them: till this was settled, he declared that none of them should embark or stir one step from Masuah.

The news of this detention soon arrived at Gondar; and Yasous gave orders that Michael Suhul, governor of Tigré, (afterwards Ras) and the Baharnagash, should with an army blockade Masuah, so as to starve the Naybe into a more reasonable behaviour. But, before this could be executed, the Naybe had called the priests before him, and declared, if they did not surrender the money that instant, he would put them to death; and, in place of giving them time to resolve, he gave them a very plain hint to obey, by ordering the executioner to strike off the heads of two criminals condemned for other crimes, after having brought them into their presence. The poor wretches, Theodorus and Likianos, did not resemble Portuguese, who would have braved these threats in the pursuit of martyrdom. The sight of blood was the most convincing of all arguments the Naybe could use. They gave up the money, leaving the division of it to his own discretion. He then hurried them on board a vessel, giving Michael and the Baharnagash notice that they were gone in safety, and that he had obeyed the king’s orders in all respects. Michael was at that time in the strictest friendship with the Naybe, who was his principal instrument in collecting fire-arms in Arabia to strengthen him in the quarrel he was then meditating against his sovereign.

On the 8th of February 1744 the priests and their guides sailed from Masuah; and they did not arrive at Jidda till the 14th of April. There they found that the ships for Cairo were gone, and that they had lost the monsoon; and, as no misfortune comes single, the Sherriffe of Mecca made a demand upon them for as much money as they had paid the Naybe; and, upon refusal, he put Abdelcader in prison, nor was he released for a twelvemonth after, when the money was sent from Abyssinia; and it was then agreed, that 75 ounces of gold[94] should in all future times be paid for leave of passage to those who went to Cairo to fetch the Abuna; and 90 ounces a piece to the Sherriffe, and to the Naybe, for allowing him to pass when chosen, and furnishing him with necessaries during his stay in their respective government; and this is the agreement that subsists, to this day.

In this interim, Likianos of Azazo, one of the priests, weary of the journey and of his religion, and having quarrelled with Abdulla, renounced the Christian faith, and embraced that of Mahomet; and Theodorus, Abdulla, and Hamet Ali, being the only three remaining, hired a vessel at Jidda to carry them to the port of Suez, the bottom of the Arabic Gulf. Before they had been a month at sea, Abdulla died, as did Hamet Ali seven days after they arrived at Suez. They had been on sea three months and six days from Jidda to that port, because they sailed against the monsoon.

It was the 25th of June that Theodorus arrived at Cairo, delivered the king’s present, the account of the Abuna’s death, and the king’s desire of having speedily a successor. The patriarch, having called together all his bishops, priests, and deacons, conferred the dignity on a monk of the Order of St Anthony, the only Order of monks the Coptic church acknowledges. These pass a very austere life in two convents in a dreary desert, never tasting flesh, but living on olives, salt sardines[95], wild herbs, and the worst of vegetables. Yet so attached are they to this solitude, that, when they are called to be ordained to this prelature of Abyssinia, a warrant from the basha, and a party of Turks, is necessary to bring this elect one to Cairo in chains, where he is kept in prison till he is ordained; guarded afterwards, and then forced on board a vessel which carries him to Abyssinia, whence he is certain never to return.

The Abuna departed from Suez the 20th of September; the beginning of November he arrived at Jidda; in February 1745 he sailed from Jidda, taking with him Abdelcader, now freed from prison; he arrived at Masuah the 7th of March, and immediately sent an express to notify his arrival to the king and queen, and to Ras Welled de l’Oul. Congratulations upon the event were returned from each of them; they requested he would immediately come to court; but this the Naybe refused to permit, till he had first received his dues; and Yasous seemed inclined to pay no more for him than what he had cost already.

The priests, and devout people in Tigré, were very desirous to free the Abuna from his confinement in Masuah. They saw that the king was not inclined to advance money, and all of them knew perfectly, that, whatever face he put upon the matter, the Ras would not give an ounce of gold to prevent the Abuna from staying there all his life. In this exigency they applied to Janni, a Greek, living at Adowa, (of whom I shall hereafter speak), a confidential servant and favourite of Michael, and also well acquainted at Masuah, to see if he could get him released by stratagem. Janni concerted the affair with the monks of the monastery of Bizan, two of whom conducted the Abuna by night out of the island of Masuah, and landed him safely in their monastery in the wilderness, with the _myron_, or consecrated oil, in one hand, and his missal, or liturgy, in the other. So far the escape was complete; but unluckily no orders had been given for Theodorus, who accordingly remained behind at Masuah.

The Naybe, exasperated at the Abuna’s flight, wrecked his vengeance on poor Theodorus; he put him in irons, and threw him into close prison, where he remained for two months. There was no remedy but paying 80 ounces of gold to the Naybe for his release; he might else have remained there for ever.

The king, not a little surprised at these frequent insolences on the part of the Naybe, began to inquire what could be the reason; for he perfectly knew, not only Suhul Michael, the governor of Tigré, but even the Baharnagash could reduce Masuah to nothing with their little finger; and he was informed, that a strong friendship subsisted between the Naybe and Suhul Michael, and that it was by relying on his friendship that the Naybe adventured to treat the king’s servants, at different times, in the manner he had done.

Yasous, desirous to verify this himself, and to dissolve the bands of so unnatural a friendship, marched into Tigré with a considerable army. Passing by Adowa, the residence of Suhul Michael, he was pleased with the warlike appearance of this his feat of government, and the perfect order and subordination that reigned there. Certain disorders and tumults were said to prevail in the neighbouring province of Enderta where Kasmati Woldo commanded. The savage people, called Azabo, living at Azab, the low country below Enderta and the Dobas, (a nation of _Shepherds_ near them, still more savage, if possible, than them) had laid waste the districts that were next to their frontier, burning the churches, and slaying the priests in the daily inroads which they made into Abyssinia. All these things, bad enough indeed, were at this time aggravated, as was thought, for two reasons; the first was to cast an odium upon Kasmati Woldo, Michael’s great enemy, as incapable of governing his province; the second, to prevent the king in his progress to Masuah, as he openly professed his fixed intention was to punish the Naybe with the utmost severity.

The protection of his subjects, therefore, from the savages, was represented to the king as the most pressing service; and, marching with his usual diligence straight to Enderta, he was met there by Kasmati Woldo, an old experienced officer, who aiming at no preferment, paying his tribute punctually, and having been constantly occupied in repelling the incursions of the Pagans on the frontier, had not been at court since the reign of Theophilus.

After receiving the necessary information about the country he intended to enter, and taking Kasmati Woldo’s two sons with him, the king descended into the low country of Dancali, once a petty Mahometan kingdom, and friendly to Abyssinia, now a mixture of Galla and the natives called Taltal. Without delay he pushed on to Azab, spreading desolation through that little province, always desert enough from its nature, though formerly, from its trade, one of the richest spots in the world.

The king then turned to the right upon the Dobas, who, not expecting an army of that strength, fled and left their whole cattle a prey to Yasous and his soldiers; a greater number was scarce ever seen in Abyssinia. The king now returned to Enderta, where he confirmed Kasmati Woldo in his government with distinguished marks of favour; and he this year again came back victorious to Gondar, leaving his campaign against the Naybe for another season.

In passing by Adowa, a fray happened among the king’s troops and those of Michael; several were killed on both sides; and, as the dispute was between Tigré and Amhara, the two great divisions of the country, it threatened to create a party-quarrel between the soldiers of one division and those of the other. No notice was taken of this when Yasous marched eastward; but, on his return, Michael begged the king to interfere, and make peace between the two parties. To this Yasous answered, That he did not think it worth his while, for they would make peace themselves when they were tired of quarrelling.

Whether this was the motive of sending for Michael to Gondar, or whether it was the story of the Naybe, or what else was the king’s motive, we do not know; but, so soon as he was arrived in the capital, he sent Kasmati Ephraim, and Shalaka Kefla, into Tigré, commanding Michael’s attendance at Gondar. This Michael absolutely refused; he pretended Kasmati Woldo had estranged the king’s affection from him, and that Yasous had called him to Gondar now to put him to death, upon a pretence of his soldiers quarrel with the king’s troops. This refusal was repeated to Yasous, without any palliation whatever; and he instantly marched from Gondar, and encamped upon the river Waar, where he was reinforced a few days afterwards by Ras Welled de l’Oul, whose intention was to persuade Michael to submission; for he had been advised not to trust the king’s oath of forgivenness unless he had likewise that of Welled de l’Oul.

The king’s readiness disconcerted Suhul Michael. Tho’ well armed and appointed himself, as also an excellent general, he did not risk the presenting himself against the king on a plain; for Yasous was much beloved by the soldiers, and always very kind and liberal to them.

The mountain Samayat, though not the most inaccessible in Tigré, was a place of great consequence and strength, when possessed by an army and officer such as Michael. To this natural fortress he carried all his valuable effects, occupied and obstructed all the avenues to it, and resolved there to abide his fortune. The king, with his army, sat down at the foot of the mountain; and, encircling it with troops, he ordered it to be assaulted on four sides at once; on one, by Kasmati Ayo, governor of Begemder; on the second, by Kasmati Waragna; the third, by Kasmati Woldo; and the fourth, by Ras Welled de l’Oul. The king himself went round about to every place, giving his orders, encouraging his men, and fighting himself in the foremost ranks like a common soldier. The mountain was at length carried, with much bloodshed on both sides, and Michael was beat from every part of it but one, which, though not strong enough to hold out against the king’s army, if well defended could not be carried without great loss of men.

Here Michael desired to capitulate. But, before he left the mountain and surrendered to the king, he desired that an officer of trust might be sent to him, because he had then upon the mountain a large collection of treasure, which he desired to keep for the king’s use, otherwise it would be dissipated and lost in the hands of the common soldiers. The Ras sent two confidential officers, who took from the hands of Michael a prodigious sum of gold, the precise amount of which is not named. He then descended the mountain, carrying, as is the custom of the country for vanquished rebels, a stone upon his head, as confessing himself guilty of a capital crime. A violent storm of rain and wind prevented, for that day, his coming into the presence of the king; and the devil, as the Abyssinians believe, began in that storm a correspondence with him which continued many years; I myself have often heard him vaunt of his having maintained, ever since that time, an intercourse with St Michael the archangel.

On the morning of the 27th of December, Ras Welled de l’Oul ordered Michael to attend him in the habit of a penitent; and, followed by his companions in misfortune, (that part of his troops which was taken on the mountain) and surrounded by a number of soldiers, with drums beating and colours flying, he was carried into the king’s presence.

Ras Welled de l’Oul had, with difficulty, engaged the king’s promise that he was not to put him to death. The good genius of Yasous and his family was labouring by one last effort to save him. On seeing Michael upon the ground, Yasous fell into a violent transport of rage, spurned him with his foot, declaring he retracted his promise, and ordered him to be carried out, and put to death before the door of his tent. Ras Welled de l’Oul, Kasmati Waragna, Kasmati Woldo, and all the officers of consideration, either of the court or army, now fell with their faces upon the ground, crying to the king for mercy and forgivenness. Yasous, if in his heart he did not relent, still was obliged to pardon on such universal solicitation; and this he did, after making the following observation, which soon after was looked on as a prophecy: “I have pardoned that traitor at your instance, because I at all times reward merit more willingly than I punish crimes; but I call you all to witness, that I wash my hands before God to-day of all that innocent blood Michael shall shed before he brings about the destruction of his country, which I know in his heart he has been long meditating.”

I cannot help mentioning it as an extraordinary circumstance, that at the time I was at Gondar, in the very height of Suhul Michael’s tyranny, a man quarrelled with another who was a scribe, and accused him before Michael of having recorded this speech of the king, as I have now stated it, in a history that he had written of Yasous’s reign. The book was produced, the passage was found and read; and I certainly expected to have seen it torn to pieces, or hung upon a tree about the author’s neck. On the contrary, all the Ras said was, “If what he writes is true, wherein is the man to blame?” And turning with a grin to Tecla Haimanout, one of the judges, he said, “Do you remember? I do believe Yasous did say so.” The book was restored to the author, and no more said of the matter, not even an order was given to erase the passage. He had no objection to Yasous and to his whole race being prophets; he had only taken a resolution that they should not be kings.

A general silence followed this speech of Yasous, instead of the acclamations of joy usual in such cases. The king then ordered Ras Welled de l’Oul to lead the army on to Gondar, which he did with great pomp and military parade, while the king, who could not forget his forebodings, retired to an island, there to fast some days in consequence of a vow that he had made. This being finished, Yasous returned to Gondar; and, as he was now in perfect peace throughout his kingdom, he began again to decorate the apartments of his palace. A large number of mirrors had arrived at this time, a present from the Naybe of Masuah, who, after what had happened to his friend Michael, began to feel a little uneasy about the fate of his island.

While Yasous was thus employed, news were sent him from Kasmati Ayo, governor of Begemder, that he had beat the people of Lasta in a pitched battle in their own country, had forced their strong-holds, dispersed their troops, and received the general submission of the province, which had been in rebellion since the time of Hatzè Socinios, that is, above 100 years. Immediately after these news, came Ayo himself to parade and throw his _unclean_ trophies of victory before the king, and brought with him many of the principal people of Lasta to take the oaths of allegiance to the king.

Yasous received the accounts of the success with great pleasure, and still more so the oaths and submissions made to him. He then added Lasta to the province of Begemder, and cloathed Ayo magnificently, as well as all those noblemen that came with him from Lasta. The end of this year was not marked with good fortune like the beginning. A plague of locusts fell upon the country, and consumed every green thing, so that a famine seemed to be inevitable, because, contrary to their custom, they had attached themselves chiefly to the grain. This plague is not so frequent in Abyssinia as the Jesuits have reported it to be. These good fathers indeed bring the locusts upon the country, that, by their pretended miracles, they may chace them away.

Michael had continued some time in prison, in the custody of Ras Welled de l’Oul. But he was afterwards set at full liberty; and it was now the 17th year of Yasous’s reign, when, on the 17th of September 1746, at a great promotion of officers of state, Michael, by the nomination of the king himself, was restored to his government of Tigré; and, a few days after, he returned to that province. All his ancient friends and troops flocked to him as soon as he appeared, to welcome him upon an event looked upon by all as nearly miraculous. Nor did Michael discourage that idea himself, but gave it to be understood, among his most intimate friends, that a vision had allured him that he was thenceforward under the immediate protection of St Michael the archangel, with whom he was to consult on every emergency.

As soon as he had got a sufficient army together, the first thing he did was to attack Kasmati Woldo, without any provocation whatever; and, after beating him in two battles, he drove him from his province, and forced him to take refuge among the Galla, where, soon after, by employing small presents, he procured him to be murdered; the ordinary fate of those who seek protection among those faithless barbarians.

It will seem extraordinary that the king, who had such recent experience of both, the one distinguished for his duty, the other for his obstinate rebellion, should yet tamely suffer his old and faithful servant to fall before a man whom in his heart he so much mistrusted. But the truth is, all Michael’s danger was past the moment he got free access to the king and queen, though he was deservedly esteemed to be the ablest soldier in Abyssinia of his time, he was infinitely more capable in intrigues, and private negociations at court, than he was in the field, being a pleasant and agreeable speaker in common conversation; a powerful and copious orator at council; his language, whether Amharic or Tigré, (but above all the latter) correct and elegant above any man’s at court; steady to the measures he adopted, but often appearing to give them up easily, and without passion, when he saw, by the circumstances of the times, he could not prevail: though violent in the pursuit of riches, when in his own province, where he spared no means nor man to procure them, no sooner had he come to Gondar than he was lavish of his money to extreme; and indeed he set no value upon it farther than as it served to corrupt men to his ends.

When he surrendered his treasure at the mountain Samayat, he is said to have divided it into several parcels with his own hand. The greatest share fell to the king, who thought he had got the whole; but the officers who received it, and saw different quantities destined for the Iteghé and Ras Welled de l’Oul, took care to convey them their share, for fear of making powerful enemies. Kasmati Waragna had his part; and even Kasmati Woldo, though Michael soon after plundered and slew him. All Gondar were his friends, because all that capital was bribed on this occasion. It was gold he only lent them, to resume it, (as he afterwards did) with great interest, at a proper time.

It still remained in the king’s breast to wipe off his defeat at Sennaar, as he had, upon every other occasion, been victorious; and even in this, he still flattered himself he had not been beat in person. He set out again upon another expedition to Atbara; instead of coasting along the Dender, he descended along the Tacazzé into Atbara, where, finding no resistance among the Shepherds, he attached himself in particular to the tribe called Daveina, which, in the former expedition, had joined Welled de l’Oul’s army. Upon the first news of his approach they had submitted; but, notwithstanding all promises and pretences of peace, he fell upon them unawares, and almost extirpated the tribe.

Suhul Michael, while the king was thus occupied in the frontier of his province, did every thing that a faithful, active subject could do. He furnished him constantly with the best intelligence, supplied him with the provisions he wanted, and made, from time to time, strong detachments of troops to reinforce him, and to secure such posts as were most commodious and important in case of a retreat becoming necessary.

Yasous, who had succeeded to his wish, was fully sensible of the value of such services, and sent, therefore, for Michael, commanding his attendance at Gondar. There was no fear, no hesitation now, as before in the affair of Samayat. He decamped upon the first notice, even before the rainy season was over, and arrived at Gondar on August 30th 1747, bringing with him plenty of gold; few soldiers, indeed, but those picked men, and in better order, than the king had ever yet seen troops.

It was plain now to everybody, that nothing could stop Michael’s growing fortune. He alone seemed not sensible of this. He was humbler and less assuming than before. Those whom he had first bribed he continued still to bribe, and added as many new friends to that list as he thought could serve him. He pretended to no precedency or pre-eminence at court, not even such as was due to the rank of his place, but behaved as a stranger that had no fixed abode among them.

One day, dining with Kasmati Geta, the queen’s brother, who was governor of Samen, and drinking out of a common-glass decanter called Brulhé, when it is the privilege and custom of the governor of Tigré to use a gold cup, being asked, Why he did not claim his privilege? he said, All the gold he had was in heaven, alluding to the name of the mountain Samayat, where his gold was surrendered, which word signifies Heaven. The king, who liked this kind of jests, of which Michael was full, on hearing this, sent him a gold cup, with a note written and placed within it, “Happy are they who place their riches in heaven;” which Michael directed immediately to be engraved by one of the Greeks upon the cup itself. What became of it I know not; I often wished to have found it out, and purchased it. I saw it the first day he dined, after coming from council, at his return from Tigré, after the execution of Abba Salama; but I never observed it at Serbraxos, nor since. I heard, indeed, a Greek say he had sent it by Ozoro Esther, as a present to a church of St Michael in Tigré.

Enderta was now given him in addition to the province of Tigré, and, soon after, Siré and all the provinces between the Tacazzé and the Red Sea; so he was now master of near half of Abyssinia.

The rest of this king’s reign was spent at home in his usual amusements and occupations. Several small expeditions were made by his command, under Palambaras Selassé, and other officers, to harrass the Shepherds, whom he conquered almost down to Suakem. His ravages, however, had been confined to the peninsula of Atbara, and had not ever passed to the eastward of the Tacazzé, but he had impoverished all that country. After this, by his orders, the Baharnagash, and other officers, entered that division called Derkin, between the Mareb and the Atbara, and, still further, between the Mareb and the mountains, in a part of it called Ajam. In this country Hassine Wed Ageeb was defeated by the Baharnagash with great slaughter; and the Shekh of Jibbel Musa, one of the most powerful of the Shepherds, was taken prisoner by Palambaras Selassé, without resistance, and carried, with his wife, his family, and cattle, in triumph to Gondar, where, having sworn allegiance to the king, he was kindly treated, and sent home with presents, and every thing that had been taken from him.

This year, being the 24th of Yasous’s reign, he was taken ill, and died on the 21st day of June 1753, after a very short illness. As he was but a young man, and of a strong constitution, there was some suspicion he died by poison given him by the queen’s relations, who were desirous to secure another minority rather than serve under a king, who, by every action, shewed he was no longer to be led or governed by any, but least of all by them.

Yasous was married very young to a lady of noble family in Amhara, by whom he had two sons, Adigo and Aylo. But their mother pretending to a share of her husband’s government, and to introduce her friends at court, so hurt Welleta Georgis the Iteghé, or queen-regent, that she prevailed on the king to banish both the mother and sons to the mountain of Wechné.

In order to prevent such interference for the future, the Iteghé took a step, the like of which had never before been attempted in Abyssinia. It was to bring a wife to Yasous from a race of Galla. Her name was Wobit, daughter of Amitzo, to whom Bacuffa had once fled when he escaped from the mountain before he was king, and had been kindly entertained there. Her family was of the tribe of Edjow, and the division of Toluma, that is, of the southern Galla upon the frontiers of Amhara. They were esteemed the politest, that is, the least barbarous of the name. But it was no matter, they were Galla, and that was enough. Between them and Abyssinia, oceans of blood had been shed, and strong prejudices imbibed against them, never to be effaced by marriages. She was, however, brought to Gondar, christened by the name of Bessabéc, and married to Yasous: By her he had a son, named Joas, who succeeded his father.

JOAS.

From 1753 to 1768.

_This Prince a Favourer of the Galla his Relations--Great Dissentions on bringing them to Court--War of Begemder--Ras Michael brought to Gondar--Defeats Ayo--Mariam Barea refuses to be accessary to his Death--King favours Waragna Fasil--Battle of Azazo--King Assassinated in his Palace._

UPON the first news of the death of king Yasous, the old officers and servants of the crown, remembering the tumults and confusion that happened in Gondar at his accession, repaired to the palace from their different governments, each with a small well-regulated body of troops, sufficient to keep order, and strengthen the hands of Ras Welled de l’Oul, whom they all looked upon as the father of his country. The first who arrived was Kasmati Waragna of Damot; then Ayo of Begemder, and very soon after, though at much the greatest distance, Suhul Michael, governor of Tigré. These three entered the palace, with Welled de l’Oul at their head, and received the young king Joas from the hands of the Iteghé his grandmother, and proclaimed him king, with the usual formalities, without any opposition or tumult whatever.

A number of promotions immediately followed; but it was observed with great discontent by many, that the Iteghé’s family and relations were grown now so numerous, that they were sufficient to occupy all the great offices of state without the participation of any of the old families, which were the strength of the crown in former reigns; and that now no preferment was to be expected unless through some relation to the queen-mother.

Welled Hawarayat, son to Michael governor of Tigré, had married Ozoro Altash, the queen’s third daughter, almost a child; and long before that, Netcho of Tcherkin had married Ozoro Esther, likewise very young; and Ras Michael, old as he was, had made known his pretensions to Ozoro Welleta Israel, the queen’s second daughter, immediately younger than Ozoro Esther. These proposals, from an old man, had been received with great contempt and derision by Welleta Israel, and she persevered so long in the derision of Michael’s courtship, that it left strong impressions on the hard heart of that old warrior, which shewed themselves after in very disagreeable consequences to that lady all the time Michael was in power.

The first that broke the peace of this new reign was Nanna Georgis, chief of one of the clans of Agows of Damot. Engaged in old feuds with the Galla on the other side of the Nile, the natural enemies of his country, he could not see, but with great displeasure, a Galla such as Kasmati Waragna, however worthy, governor of Damot, and capable, therefore, of over-running the whole province in a moment, by calling his Pagan countrymen from the other side.

Waragna, though this was in his power, knew the measure was unpopular. Kasmati Eshté was the queen’s brother, and governor of Ibaba, a royal residence, which has a large territory and salary annexed to it. When, therefore, at council, he had complained of the injury done to him by Nanna Georgis, he refused the taking upon him the redressing these injuries, and punishing the Agows, unless Kasmati Eshté was joined in the commission with him.

The reason of this was, as I have often before observed, that, as the Agows are those that pay the greatest tribute in gold to the king, and furnish the capital with all sorts of provisions, any calamity happening in their country is severely felt by the inhabitants of Gondar; and the knowledge of this occasions a degree of presumption and confidence in the Agows, of which they have been very often the dupes. This, indeed, happened at this very instant. For Waragna and Eshtè marched from Gondar, and with them a number of veteran troops of the king’s household of Maitsha, depending on Ibaba; and this army, without bringing one Galla from the other side of the Nile, gave Nanna Georgis and his Agows such an overthrow that his clan was nearly extirpated, and many of the principal of that nation slain.

Nanna Georgis, who chiefly was aimed at as the author of this revolt, escaped, with great difficulty, wounded, from the field; and the feud which had long subsisted between Waragna’s family and the race of the Agows, received great addition that day, and came down to their posterity, as we shall soon see by what happened in Waragna’s son’s time at the bloody and fatal battle of Banja.

The next affair that called the attention of government, was a complaint brought by the monks of Magwena, a ridge of rocks of but small extent not far from Tcherkin, the estate of Kasmati Netcho. These mountains, for a great part of the year, almost calcined under a burning sun, have, in several months, violent and copious showers of rain, which, received in vast caves and hollows of the mountain, and out of the reach of evaporation, are means of creating and maintaining all sorts of verdure and all scenes of pleasure, in the hot season of the year, when the rains do not fall elsewhere; and as the rocks have a considerable elevation above the level of the plain, they are at no season infected with those feverish disorders that lay the low country waste.

Netcho was a man of pleasure, and he thought, since the monks, by retiring to rocks and deserts, meant thereby to subject themselves to hardship and mortification, that these delightful and flowery scenes, the groves of Magwena, were much more suited to the enjoyment of happiness with the young and beautiful Ozoro Esther, than for any set of men, who by their austerities were at constant war with the flesh. Upon these principles, which it would be very difficult for the monks themselves to refute, he took possession of the mountain Magwena, and of those bowers that, though in possession of saints, did not seem to have been made for the solitary pleasures of one sex only. This piece of violence was, by the whole body of monks, called Sacrilege. Violent excommunications, and denunciations of divine vengeance, were thundered out against Kasmati Netcho. An army was sent against him; he was defeated and taken prisoner, and confined upon a mountain in Walkayt, where soon after he died, but not before the Iteghè had shewn her particular mark of displeasure, by taking her daughter Ozoro Esther, his wife, from him, that she, too, and her only son Confu, might not be involved in the monk’s excommunications, and the imputed crime of sacrilege.

At this time died Kasmati Waragna, full of years and glory, having, though a stranger, preserved his allegiance to the last, and more than once saved the state by his wisdom, bravery, and activity. He is almost a single example in their history, of a great officer, governor of a province, that never was in rebellion, and a remarkable instance of Bacuffa’s penetration, who, from a single conversation with him, while engaged in the vilest employment, chose him as capable of the greatest offices, in which he usefully served both his son and grandson.

Soon after, Ayo governor of Begemder, an older officer still than Waragna, arrived in Gondar, and resigned his government into the queen’s hands. This resignation was received, because it was understood that it was directly to be conferred upon his son Mariam Barea, by far the most hopeful young Abyssinian nobleman of his time. Another mark of favour, soon followed, perhaps was the occasion of this. Ozoro Esther, the very young widow of Netcho, was married, very much against her own consent, to the young governor of Begemder, and this marriage was crowned with the universal applause of court, town, and country; for Mariam Barea possessed every virtue that could make a great man popular; and it was impossible to see Ozoro Esther, and hear her speak, without being attached to her for ever after.

Still the complaint remained, that there was no promotion, no distinction of merit, but through some relation to the queen-mother; and the truth of this was soon so apparent, and the discontent it occasioned so universal, that nothing but the great authority Ras Welled de l’Oul, the Iteghé’s brother, possessed, could hinder this concealed fire from breaking out into a flame.

The queen, mother to Joas, was Ozoro Wobit, a Galla. Upon Joas’s accession to the throne, therefore, a large body of Galla, said to be 1200 horse, were sent as a present to the young king as the portion of his mother. A number of private persons had accompanied these; part from curiosity, part from desire of preferment, and part from attachment to those that were already gone before them. These last were formed into a body of infantry of 600 men, and the command given to a Galla, whose name was Woosheka; so that the regency, in the person of the queen, seemed to have gained fresh force from the minority of the young king Joas, as yet perfectly subject to his mother.

There were four bodies of household troops absolutely devoted to the king’s will. One of these, the Koccob horse, was commanded by a young Armenian not 30 years of age. He had been left in Abyssinia by his father in Yasous’s time, and care had been taken of him by the Greeks. Yasous had distinguished him by several places while a mere youth, and employed him in errands to Masuah and Arabia, by which he became known to Ras Michael. Upon the death of Yasous, the Iteghè put him about her grandson Joas, as Baalomal, which is, _gentleman of the bed-chamber_, or, _companion to the king_. He then became Asaleffa el Camisha, which means _groom of the stole_, but at last was promoted to the great place of Billetana Gueta Dakakin, _chamberlain_, or _master of the household_, the third post in government, by which he took place of all the governors of provinces while in Gondar.

There is no doubt Joas would have made him Ras, if he had reigned as long as his father. Besides his own language, he understood Turkish, Arabic, and Malabar, and was perfect master of the Tigré. But his great excellence was his knowledge of Amharic, which he was thought to speak as chastely and elegantly as Ras Michael himself. He is reported likewise to have possessed a species of jurisprudence, whence derived I never knew, which so pleased the Abyssinians, that the judges often requested his attendance on the king; at which time he sat at the head of the table, where it is supposed the king would place himself did he appear personally in judgment, (which, as it may be learned from divers places in this history, he never does); certain mornings in the week, therefore, he sat publicly in the market-place, and gave judgment soon after the break of day.

I saw this young man with his father at Loheia. He understood no European language; was just then returned from India, and had a considerable quantity of diamonds, and other precious stones, to sell. He spoke with tears in his eyes of Abyssinia, from which he was banished, and urged that I should take him there with me. But I had too much at stake to charge myself with the consequences of anybody’s behaviour but my own, and therefore refused it.

The great favour the Galla were in at court encouraged many of their countrymen to follow them; and, by the king’s desire, two of his uncles were sent for, and they not only came, but brought with them a thousand horse. These were two young men, brothers of the queen Wobit, just now dead. The eldest was named Brulhé, the younger Lubo. In an instant, nothing was heard in the palace but Galla. The king himself affected to speak nothing else. He had entirely intrusted the care of his person to his two uncles; and, both being men of intrigue, they thought themselves sufficiently capable to make a party, support it, and place the king at the head of it; and this they effected as soon as it was conceived, whilst the Abyssinians saw, with the utmost detestation and abhorrence, a Gallan and inimical government erected in the very heart or metropolis of their country.

Woodage had been long governor of Amhara. He had succeeded Palambaras Duré in Bacuffa’s time, when he had been promoted to the dignity of Ras.

These two were heads of the only great families in Amhara, who took that government as it were by rotation. Woodage, in one of the excursions into Atbara, had made an Arab’s, or a Shepherd’s daughter, prisoner, baptized her, and lived with her as his mistress. The passion Woodage bore to this fair slave was not, however, reciprocal. She had fixed her affections upon his eldest son, and their frequent familiarities at last brought about the discovery. This very much shocked Woodage; but, instead of having recourse to public justice, he called his brothers, and some other heads of his family before him, and examined into the fact with them, desiring his son to defend himself. The crime was clearly proved in all its circumstances. Upon which Woodage, by his own authority, condemned his son to death; and not only so, but caused his sentence to be put in execution, by hanging the young man over a beam in his own house. As for the slave, he released her, as not being bound to any return of affection to him, from whom she had only received evil, and been deprived of her natural liberty.

It seems this claim of _patria potestas_ was new in Abyssinia; and Bacuffa took it so ill, that he deprived Woodage of his office, and banished him to Amhara, then governed by Palambaras Duré. To this loss of influence another circumstance contributed. He was a relation of Yasous’s first wife, who, by the Iteghé’s intrigues, had been sent with her two sons to the mountain of Wechné, and Joas, a young son of Yasous, preferred in their places.

It happened that Palambaras Duré died; and as the succession fell regularly upon the unpopular Woodage, the king’s uncle, Lubo obtained a promise of the government of Amhara for himself. All Gondar was shocked at this strange choice: Amitzo and his Edjow were already upon the southern frontiers of that province, domiciled there; and there was no doubt but this nomination would put Amhara into his possession for ever. All the inhabitants of Gondar were ready to run to their arms to oppose this appointment of the king; and it was thought that, underhand, the Iteghè fomented this dissatisfaction. The king, however, terrified by the violent resentment of the populace, at the instance of Ras Welled de l’Oul, recalled his nomination.

At this time Michael, who saw the consequence of these disputes, but abstained from taking any share, because he knew that both parties were promoting his interest by their mutual animosity, came to Gondar in great pomp, upon an honourable errand.

Baady, son of l’Oul, king of Funge, or, as they are called in the Abyssinian annals, Noba[96], who had defeated Yasous at Sennaar, after a tyrannical and bloody reign of thirty-three years, was deposed in 1764 by Nasser his son, whom his minister Shekh Adelan, with his brother Abou Kalec, governor of Kordofan, had put in his place; and Baady had fled to Suhul Michael, whose fame was extended all over Atbara. Michael received him kindly, promised him his best services with Joas, and that he would march in person to Sennaar, and reinstate him with an army, if the king should so command.

Michael conducted him into the presence of the king, where, in a manner unbecoming a sovereign, and which Joas’s successor would not have permitted, he kissed the ground, and declared himself a vassal of Abyssinia. The king assigned him a large revenue, and put him in possession of the government of Ras el Feel upon the frontier of Sennaar, where Ras Welled de l’Oul advised him to wait patiently till the dissensions that then prevailed at court were quieted, when Michael should have orders to reinstate him in his kingdom. This was a wise counsel, but he to whom it was given was not wise, and therefore did not follow it. After some short stay at Ras el Feel he was decoyed from this place of refuge by the intrigues of Adelan, and brought to trust himself in Atbara, where he was betrayed and taken prisoner by Welled Hassen, Shekh of Teawa, and murdered by him in Teawa privately, as we shall hereafter see, two years after his flight from Gondar.

At this time, Ras Welled de l’Oul’s death was a signal for all parties to engage. Nothing had withheld them but his prudence and authority; and from that time began a scene of civil blood, which has continued ever since, was in its full vigour at the time when I was in Abyssinia, and without any prospect that it would ever have an end.

The great degree of power to which the brothers and their Galla arrived; the great affection the king shewed to them, owing to their having early infected him with their bloody and faithless principles, gave great alarm to the queen and her relations, whose influence they were every day diminishing. The last stroke, the death of Welled de l’Oul, seemed to be a fatal one, and to threaten the entire dissolution of her power. In order to counterbalance this, they associated to their party and council Mariam Barea, who had lately married Ozoro Esther, and was in possession of the second province in the state for riches and for power, and greatly increased in its importance by the officer that commanded it. Upon the death of Welled de l’Oul, the principal fear the party of the Galla had was, that Mariam Barea should be brought to Gondar as Ras. The union between him and Kasmati Eshtè, formerly as strong by inclination as now it was by blood, put them in terror for their very existence, and a stroke was to be struck at all hazards that was to separate these interests for ever.

Eshte, upon taking possession of the province of Damot, found the Djawi, established upon the frontiers of the province, very much inclined to revolt. Notwithstanding peace had been established among the Agows ever since Nanna Georgis had been defeated at the last battle, the Galla had still continued to rob and distress them, contrary to the public faith that had been pledged to them.

Eshte was too honest a man to suffer this; but the truth was, the Djawi had felt the advantage of having a man like the late Waragna governor of Damot; and they wanted, by all means, to reduce the ministers to the necessity of making that command hereditary in his family, by Fasil his son being preferred to succeed him.

This Fasil, whom I shall hereafter call Waragna Fasil, a name which was given to distinguish him from many other Fasils in the army, was a man then about twenty-two, whom Eshté had kept about him in a private station, and had lately given him a subaltern command among his own countrymen, the Djawi of Damot. From the services that he had then rendered, it was expected a greater preferment was to follow.

The insolence of the Djawi had come to such a pitch that they had offered Eshté battle; but they had fled with very little resistance, and been driven over the Nile to their countrymen whence they came. Eshté, roused from his indolence, now shewed himself the gallant soldier that he really was. He crossed the Nile at a place never attempted before; and though he lost a considerable number of men in the passage, yet that disadvantage was more than compensated by the advantage it gave him of falling upon the Galla unexpectedly. He therefore destroyed, or dispersed several tribes of them, possessed himself of their crops, drove off their cattle, wives, and children, and obliged them to sue for peace on his own terms; and then repassed the Nile, re-establishing the Djawi, after submission, in their ancient possessions.

Upon news of Welled de l’Oul’s death, and the known intention of the queen that Eshté should succeed him in the office of Ras, he was mustering his soldiers to march to Gondar: Damot, the Agows, Goutto, and Maitsha, all readily joined him from every quarter; and Waragna Fasil had been sent to bring in the Djawi with the rest. Eshtè had marched by slow journies from Buré, slenderly attended, to arrive at Goutto the place of rendezvous; and, being come to Fagitta, in his way thither, he encamped upon a plain there, near to the church of St George.

It was in the evening, when news were brought him that the whole Djawi had come out, to a man, from goodwill, to attend him to Gondar. This mark of kindness had very much pleased him; and he looked upon it as a grateful return for his mild treatment of them after they were vanquished. A stool was set in the shade, without a small house where he then was lodged, that he might see the troops pass; when Hubna Fasil, a Galla, who commanded them, availing himself of the privilege of approaching near, always customary upon these occasions, run him through the body with a lance, and threw him dead upon the ground. The rest of the Galla fell immediately upon all his attendants, put them to flight, and proclaimed Waragna Fasil governor of Damot and the Agows.

This intelligence was immediately sent to their countrymen, Brulhé and Lubo, at Gondar, who prevailed upon the king to confirm Waragna Fasil in his command, though purchased with the murder of the worthiest man in his dominions, who was his own uncle, brother to the Iteghè; and this was thought to more than counterbalance the accession of strength the queen’s party had received from the marriage of Ozoro Esther with Mariam Barea.

In critical times like these, the greatest events are produced from the smallest accidents. Ayo, father to Mariam Barea, had always been upon bad terms with Michael. It was at first emulation between two great men; but, after Ayo had assisted the king in taking Michael prisoner at the mountain Samayat, this emulation had degenerated into perfect hatred on the part of Michael.

Just before Kasmati Ayo had resigned Begemder to his son, and retired to private life, two servants of Michael had fled with two swords, which they used to carry before him, claiming the protection of Kasmati Ayo. Michael had claimed them before the king, who, loath to determine between the two, not being at that time instigated by Galla, had accepted the proposal of Michael to have the matter of right tried before the judges; but, upon his resignation of the province, and retiring, the thing had blown over and been forgotten.

Soon after this accession of Mariam Barea, Michael intimated to him the order the king had given that the judges should try the matter of difference between them. Mariam Barea refused this, and upbraided Michael with meanness and prostitution of the dignity he bore, to consent to submit himself to the venal judgment of weak old men, whose consciences were hackneyed in prejudice or partiality, and always known to be under the influence of party. He put Suhul Michael in mind also, that, being both of them the king’s lieutenant-generals, representatives of his person in the provinces they governed, noble by birth, and soldiers by profession, they had no superior but God and their sovereign, therefore it was below them to acknowledge or receive any judgment between them unless from God, by an appeal to the sword, or from the king, by a sentence intimated to them by a proper officer; that Suhul Michael might choose either of these manners of deciding the difference as should seem best unto him; and if he chose the latter, of abiding by the sentence of the king, he would then restore him the swords upon the king’s first command, but he despised the judges, and disowned their jurisdiction.

This spirited answer was magnified into the crime of disobedience and rebellion. Michael pursued it no further. He knew it was in good hands, which, when once the matter was set agoing, would never let it drop. Accordingly, to every one’s surprise but Michael’s, a proclamation was made, that the king had deprived Mariam Barea of his government for disobedience, and had given it to Kasmati Brulhé his uncle, now governor of Begemder.

All Abyssinia was in a ferment at this promotion. The number, power, and vicinity of that race of Galla being considered, this was but another way of giving the richest and strongest barrier of Abyssinia into the hands of his hereditary and bloody enemy. There could be no doubt, indeed, but that, as soon as Brulhé should have taken possession of his government, it would be instantly over-run by the united force of that savage and Pagan nation; and there was nothing afterwards to avert danger from the metropolis, for the boundaries of Begemder reach within a very short day’s journey of Gondar.

Mariam Barea, one of the noblest in point of birth in the country where he lived, setting every private consideration aside, was too good a citizen to suffer a measure so pernicious to take place quietly in his time, while the province was under his command. But, besides this, he considered himself as degraded and materially hurt both in honour and in interest, and very sensibly felt the affront of being, himself and his kindred, subjected to a race of Pagans whom he had so often overthrown in the field.

The king’s army marched, under the command of his uncle Brulhé, to take possession of his government; it was with much difficulty, indeed, that Joas could be kept from appearing in person, but he was left under the inspection and tuition of his uncle Lubo, at Gondar. Brulhé made very slow advances; his army several times assembled, as often disbanded of itself; and near a year was spent before he could move from his camp on the lake Tzana, with a force capable of shewing or maintaining itself in Begemder, from the frontiers of which he was not half a day’s journey.

Mariam Barea remained all this time inactive in Begemder, attending to the ordinary duties of his office, with a perfect contempt of Brulhé and his proceedings. But, in the interim, he left no means untried to pacify the king, and dissuade him from a measure he saw would be ruinous to the state in general.

Mariam Barea, though young, had the prudence and behaviour of a man of advanced years. He was esteemed, without comparison, the bravest soldier and best general in the kingdom, except old Suhul Michael, his hereditary rival and enemy. But his manners were altogether different from those of Michael. He was open, chearful, and unreserved; liberal, even to excess, but not from any particular view of gaining reputation by it; as moderate in the use of victory as indefatigable to obtain it; temperate in all his pleasures; easily brought to forgive, and that forgivenness always sincere; a steady observer of his word, even in trifles; and distinguished for two things very uncommon in Abyssinia, regularity in his devotions, and constancy to one wife, which never was impeached. In his last remonstrance, after many professions of his duty and obedience, he put the king in mind, that, at his investiture, “The laws of the country imposed upon him an oath which he took in presence of his majesty, and, after receiving the holy sacrament, that he was not to suffer any Galla in Begemder, but rather, if needful, die with sword in hand to prevent it; that he considered the contravening that oath as a deliberate breach of the allegiance which he owed to God and to his sovereign, and of the trust reposed in him by his country; that the safety of the princes of the royal family, sequestered upon the mountain of Wechné, depended upon the observance of this oath; that otherwise they would be in constant danger of being extirpated by Pagans, as they had already nearly been in former ages, at two different times, upon the rocks Damo and Geshen; he begged the king, if, unfortunately, he could not be reconciled to him, to give his command to Kasmati Geta, Kasmati Eusebius, or any Abyssinian nobleman, in which case he would immediately resign, and retire to private life with his old father.”

He concluded by saying, that, “As he had formed a resolution, he thought it his duty to submit it to the king; that, if his majesty was resolved to march and lead the army himself, he would retire till he was stopt by the frontiers of the Galla, and the farthest limits of Begemder; and, so far from molesting the army in their route, the king might be assured, that, though his own men should be straitened, abundance of every kind of provision and refreshment should be left in his majesty’s route. But if, contrary to his wish, troops of Galla, commanded by a Galla, should come to take possession of his province, he would fight them at the well of Fernay[97], before one Galla should drink there, or advance a pike-length into Begemder.”

This declaration was, by orders of Ras Michael, entered into the Deftar, and written in letters of gold, after Mariam Barea’s death, no doubt at the instigation of Ozoro Esther, jealous for the reputation of her dead husband. It is intitled, _the dutiful declaration of the governor of Begemder_; and is signed by two Umbares, or judges. Whether the original was so or not, I cannot say.

The return made to this by the king was of the harshest kind, full of taunts and scoffs, and presumptuous confidence; announcing the speedy arrival of _Brulhé_, as to a certain victory; and, to shew what further assistance he trusted in, he ordered Ras Michael to be proclaimed governor of Samen, the province on the Gondar side of the Tacazzé, that no obstacle might be left in the way of that general from Tigré, if it should be resolved upon to call him.

In Abyssinia there is a kind of glass bottle, very light, and of the size, shape, and strength of a Florence wine-flask; only the neck is wider, like that of our glass decanters, twisted for ornament sake, and the lips of it folded back, such as we call cannon-mouthed. These are made at Trieste on the Adriatic; and thousands of packages of these are brought from Arabia to Gondar, where they are in use for all liquors, which are clear enough to bear the glass, such as wine and spirits. They are very thin and fragil, and are called _brulhé_. Mariam Barea, provoked at being so undervalued as he was in the king’s message, returned only for answer, “Still the king had better take my advice, and not send his _brulhé’s_ here; they are but weak, and the rocks about Begemder hard; at any rate, they do right to move slowly, otherwise they might break by the way.”

As soon as this defiance was reported to the king and his counsellors all was in a flame, and orders given to march immediately. The whole of the king’s household, consisting of 8000 veteran troops, were ordered to join the army of Brulhé. This, tho’ it added to the display of the army, contributed nothing to the real strength of it; for all, excepting the Galla, were resolved neither to shed their own blood nor that of their brethren, under the banners of so detested a leader.

This was not unknown to Mariam Barea; but neither the advantage of the ground, the knowledge of Brulhé’s weakness, nor any other consideration, could induce him to take one step, or harrass his enemy, out of his own province; nor did he suffer a musket to be fired, or a horse to charge, till Brulhé’s van was drawn up on the brink of the well Fernay. After he had placed the horse of the province of Lasta opposite to the Edjow Galla, against whom his design was, the armies joined, and the king’s troops immediately gave way. The Edjow, however, engaged fiercely and in great earnest with the horse of Lasta, an enemy fully as cruel and savage as themselves, but much better horsemen, better armed, and better soldiers. The moment the king’s troops turned their backs, the trumpets from Mariam Barea’s army forbade the pursuit; while the rest of the Begemder horse, who knew the intention of their general, surrounded the Edjow, and cut them to pieces, though valiantly fighting to the last man.

Brulhé fell, among the herd of his countrymen, not distinguished by any action of valour. Mariam Barea had given the most express orders to take him alive; or, if that could not be, to let him escape; but by no means to kill him. But a menial servant of his, more willing to revenge his master’s wrongs than adopt his moderation, forced his way through the crowd of Galla, where he saw Brulhé fighting; and, giving him two wounds through his body with a lance, left him dead upon the field, bringing away his horse along with him to his master as a token of his victory. Mariam Barea, upon hearing that Brulhé was dead, foresaw in a moment what would infallibly be the consequence, and exclaimed in great agitation, “Michael and all the army of Tigré will march against me before autumn.”

He was not in this a false prophet; for no sooner was Brulhé’s defeat and death known, than the king, from resentment, fear the fatal ruler of weak minds, the constant instigation of Lubo, and the remnant of Brulhé’s party, declared there was no safety but in Ras Michael. An express was therefore immediately sent to him, commanding his attendance, and conferring upon him the office of Ras, by which he became invested with supreme power, both civil and military. This was an event Michael had long wished for. He had nearly as long foreseen that it must happen, and would involve both king and queen, and their respective parties, equally in destruction; but he had not spent his time merely in reflection, he had made every preparation possible, and was ready. So soon then as he received the king’s orders, he prepared to march from Adowa with 26,000 men, all the best soldiers in Abyssinia, about 10,000 of whom were armed with firelocks.

It happened that two Azages, and several other great officers, were sent to him into Tigré with these orders, and to invest him with the government of Samen. Upon their mentioning the present situation of affairs, Michael sharply reflected upon the king’s conduct, and that of those who had counselled him, which must end in the ruin of his family and the state in general. He highly extolled Mariam Barea as the only man in Abyssinia that knew his duty, and had courage to persevere in it. As for himself, being the king’s servant, he would obey his commands, whatever they were, faithfully, and to the letter; but, as holding now the first place in council, he must plainly tell him the ruin of Mariam Barea would be speedily and infallibly followed by that of his country.

After this declaration, Michael decamped with his army encumbered by no baggage, not even provisions, women, or tents, nor useless beasts of burden. His soldiers, attentive only to the care of their arms, lived freely and licentiously upon the miserable countries through which they passed, and which they laid wholly waste as if belonging to an enemy.

He advanced, by equal, steady, and convenient marches, in diligence, but not in haste. Not content with the subsistence of his troops, he laid a composition of money upon all those districts within a day’s march of the place through which he passed; and, upon this not being readily complied with, he burnt the houses to the ground, and slaughtered the inhabitants. Woggora, the granary of Gondar, full of rich large towns and villages, was all on fire before him; and that capital was filled with the miserable inhabitants, stript of every thing, flying before Ras Michael as before an army of Pagans. The king’s understanding was now restored to him for an instant; he saw clearly the mischief his warmth had occasioned, and was truly sensible of the rash step he had taken by introducing Michael. But the dye was cast; repentance was no longer in season; his all was at stake, and he was tied to abide the issue.

Michael, with his army in order of battle, approached Gondar with a very warlike appearance. He descended from the high lands of Woggora into the valleys which surround the capital, and took possession of the rivers Kahha and Angrab, which run through these valleys, and which alone supply Gondar with water. He took post at every entrance into the town, and every place commanding those entrances, as if he intended to besiege it. This conduct struck all degrees of people with terror, from the king and queen down to the lowest inhabitant. All Gondar passed an anxious night, fearing a general massacre in the morning; or that the town would be plundered, or laid under some exorbitant ransom, capitation, or tribute.

But this was not the real design of Michael; he intended to terrify, but to do no more. He entered Gondar early in the morning, and did homage to the king in the most respectful manner. He was invested with the charge of Ras by Joas himself; and from the palace, attended by two hundred soldiers, and all the people of note in the town, he went straight to take possession of the house which is particularly appropriated to his office, and sat down in judgment with the doors open.

Marauding parties of soldiers had entered at several parts of the town, and begun to use that licence they had been accustomed to on their march, pilfering and plundering houses, or persons that seemed without protection. Upon the first complaints, as he rode through the town, he caused twelve of the delinquents to be apprehended, and hanged upon trees in the streets, sitting upon his mule till he saw the execution performed. After he had arrived at his house, and was seated, these executions were followed by above fifty others in different quarters of Gondar. That same day he established four excellent officers in four quarters of the town. The first was Kefla Yasous, a man of the greatest worth, whom I shall frequently mention as a friend in the course of my history; the second, Billetana Gueta Welleta Michael, that is, first master of the household to the king. He had given that old officer that office, upon superseding Lubo the king’s uncle, without any consent asked or given. He was a man of a very morose turn, with whom I was never connected. The third was Billetana Gueta Tecla, his sister’s son, a man of very great worth and merit, who had the soft and gentle manners of Amhara joined to the determined courage of the Tigran.

Michael took upon himself the charge of the fourth district. He did not pretend by this to erect a military government in Gondar; on the contrary, these officers were only appointed to give force to the sentences and proceedings of the civil judges, and had not deliberation in any cause out of the camp. But two Umbares, or judges, of the twelve were obliged to attend each of the three districts; two were left in the king’s house, and four had their chamber of judicature in his.

The citizens, upon this fair aspect of government, where justice and power united to protect them, dismissed all their fears, became calm and reconciled to Michael the second day after his arrival, and only regretted that they had been in anarchy, and strangers to his government so long.

The third day after his arrival he held a full council in presence of the king. He sharply rebuked both parties in a speech of considerable length, in which he expressed much surprise, that both king and queen, after the experience of so many years, had not discovered that they were equally unfit to govern a kingdom, and that it was impossible to keep distant provinces in order, when they paid such inattention to the police of the metropolis. Great part of this speech applied to the king, who, with the Iteghè and Galla, were in a balcony as usual, in the same room, though at some distance, and above the table where the council sat, but within convenient hearing.

The troubled state, the destruction of Woggora, and the insecurity of the roads from Damot, had made a famine in Gondar. The army possessed both the rivers, and suffered no supply of water to be brought into the town, but allowed two jars for each family twice a-day, and broke them when they returned for more[98].

Ras Michael, at his rising from council, ordered a loaf of bread, a brulhé of water, and an ounce of gold, all articles portable enough to be exposed in the market-place, upon the head of a drum, without any apparent watching. But tho’ the Abyssinians are thieves of the first rate, tho’ meat and drink were very scarce in the town, and gold still scarcer, though a number of strangers came into it with the army, and the nights were almost constantly twelve hours long, nobody ventured to attempt the removing any of the three articles that, from the Monday to the Friday, had been exposed night and day in the market-place unguarded.

All the citizens, now surrounded with an army, found the security and peace they before had been strangers to, and every one deprecated the time when the government should pass out of such powerful hands. All violent oppressors, all those that valued themselves as leaders of parties, saw, with an indignation which they durst not suffer to appear, that they were now at last dwindled into absolute insignificance.

Having settled things upon this basis, Ras Michael next prepared to march out for the war of Begemder; and he summoned, under the severest penalties, all the great officers to attend him with all the forces they could raise. He insisted likewise that the king himself should march, and refused to let a single soldier stay behind him in Gondar; not that he wanted the assistance of those troops, or trusted to them, but he saw the destruction of Mariam Barea was resolved on, and he wished to throw the odium of it on the king. He affected to say of himself, that he was but the instrument of the king and his party, and had no end of his own to attain. He expatiated, upon all occasions, upon the civil and military virtues of Mariam Barea; said, that he himself was old, and that the king should walk coolly and cautiously, and consider the value that officer would be of to his posterity and to the nation when he should be no more.

Upon the first news of the king’s marching, Mariam Barea, who was encamped upon the frontiers near where he defeated Brulhé, fell back to Garraggara the middle of Begemder. The king followed with apparent intention of coming to a battle without loss of time; and Mariam Barea, by his behaviour, shewed in what different lights he viewed an army, at the head of which was his sovereign, and one commanded by a Galla.

No such moderation was shewn on the king’s part. His army burnt and destroyed the whole country through which they passed. It was plain that it was Joas’s intention to revenge the death of Brulhé upon the province itself, as well as upon Mariam Barea. As for Ras Michael, the behaviour of the king’s army had nothing in it new, or that could either surprise or displease him. Friend as he was to peace and good order at home, his invariable rule was to indulge his soldiers in every licence that the most profligate mind could wish to commit when marching against an enemy.

It was known the armies were to engage at Nefas Musa, because Mariam Barea had said he would fight Brulhé, to prevent him entering the province, but retreat before the king till he could no longer avoid going out of it. The king then marched upon the tract of Mariam Barea, burning and destroying on each side of him, as wide as possible, by detachments and scouring parties. Allo Fasil, an officer of the king’s household, a man of low birth, of very moderate parts, and one who used to divert the king as a kind of buffoon, otherwise a good soldier, had, as a favour, obtained a small party of horse, with which he ravaged the low country of Begemder.

The reader will remember, in the beginning of this history, that a singular revolution happened, in as singular a manner, the usurper of the house of Zaguè having voluntarily resigned the throne to the kings of the line of Solomon, who for several hundred years had been banished to Shoa. Tecla Haimanout, founder of the monastery of Debra Libanos, a saint, and the last Abyssinian that enjoyed the dignity of Abuna, had the address and influence to bring about this revolution, or resignation, and to restore the ancient line of kings. A treaty was made under guarantee of the Abuna, that large portions of Lasta should be given to this prince of the house of Zaguè, free from all tribute, tax, or service whatever, and that he should be regarded as an independent prince. The treaty being concluded, the prince of Zaguè was put in possession of his lands, and was called Y’Lasta Hatzè, which signifies, not the king of Lasta, but _the king_ at or in Lasta[99]. He resigned the throne, and Icon Amlac of the line of Solomon, by the queen of Saba, continued the succession of princes of that house.

That treaty, greatly to the honour of the contracting parties, made towards the end of the 13th century, had remained inviolate till the middle of the 18th; no affront or injustice had been offered to the prince of Zaguè, and in the number of rebellions which had happened, by princes setting up their claims to the crown, none had ever proceeded, or in any shape been abetted, by the house of Zaguè, even though Lasta had been so frequently in rebellion.

As Joas was a young prince, now for the first time in the province of Begemder and passing not far from his domains, the prince of Zaguè thought it a proper civility and duty to salute the king in his passage, and congratulate him upon his accession to the throne of his father. He accordingly presented himself to Joas in the habit of peace, while, according to treaty, his kettle-drums, or nagareets, were silver, and the points of his guard’s spears of that metal also. The king received him with great cordiality and kindness; treated him with the utmost respect and magnificence; refused to allow him to prostrate himself on the ground, and forced him to sit in his presence. Michael went still farther; upon his entering his tent he uncovered himself to his waist, in the same manner as he would have done in presence of Joas. He received him standing, obliged him to sit in his own chair, and excused himself for using the same liberty of sitting, only on account of his own lameness.

The king halted one entire day to feast this royal guest. He was an old man of few words, but those very inoffensive, lively, and pleasant; in short, Ras Michael, not often accustomed to fix on favourites at first sight, was very much taken with this Lasta sovereign. Magnificent presents were made on all sides; the prince of Zaguè took his leave and returned; and the whole army was very much pleased and entertained at this specimen of the good faith and integrity of their kings.

He had now considerably advanced through his own country, Lasta, which was in the rear, when he was met by Allo Fasil returning from his plundering the low country, who, without provocation, from motives of pride or avarice, fell unawares upon the innocent, old man, whose attendants, secure, as they thought, under public faith, and accoutred for parade and not for defence, became an easy sacrifice, the prince being the first killed by Allo Fasil’s own hand.

Fasil continued his march to join the king, beating his silver kettle-drums as in triumph. The day after, Ras Michael, uninformed of what had passed, inquired who that was marching with a nagareet in his rear? as it is not allowed to any other person but governors of provinces to use that instrument; and they had already reached the camp. The truth was presently told; at which the Ras shewed the deepest compunction. The tents were already pitched when Fasil arrived, who, riding into Michael’s tent, as is usual with officers returning from an expedition, began to brag of his own deeds, and upbraided Michael, in a strain of mockery, that he was old, lame, and impotent.

This raillery, though very common on such occasions, was not then in season; and the last part of the charge against him was the most offensive, for there was no man more fond of the sex than Michael was. The Ras, therefore, ordered his attendants to pull Fasil off his horse, who, seeing that he was fallen into a scrape, fled to the king’s tent for refuge, with violent complaints against Michael. The king undertook to reconcile him to the Ras, and sent the young Armenian, commander of the black horse, to desire Michael to forgive Allo Fasil. This he absolutely refused to do, alledging, that the passing over Fasil’s insolence to himself would be of no use, as his life was forfeited for the death of the prince of Zaguè.

The king renewed his request by another messenger; for the Armenian excused himself from going, by saying boldly to the king, That, by the law of all nations, the murderer should die. To the second request the king added, that he required only his forgivenness of his insolence to him, not of the death of the prince of Zaguè, as he would direct what should be done when the nearest of kin claimed the satisfaction of retaliation. To this Ras Michael shortly replied, “I am here to do justice to every one, and will do it without any consideration or respect of persons.” And it was now, for the first time, Abyssinia ever saw a king solicit the life of a subject of his own from one of his servants, and be refused.

The king, upon this, ordered Allo Fasil to defend himself; and things were upon this footing, the affair likely to end in oblivion, though not by forgivenness. But, a very short time after, the prince of Zaguè’s eldest son came privately to Michael’s tent in the night; and, the next morning, when the judges were in his tent, Michael sent his door-keeper (Hagos) reckoned the bravest and most fortunate in combat of any private man in the army, and to whom he trusted the keeping of his tent-door, to order Allo Fasil to answer at the instance of the prince of Zaguè, then waiting him in court, Why he had murdered the prince his father? Fasil was astonished, and refused to come: being again cited in a regular manner by Hagos, he seemed desirous to avail himself of the king’s permission to defend himself, and call together his friends. Hagos, without giving him time, thrust him through with a lance; then cut off his head, and carried it to Michael’s tent, repeating what passed, and the reason of his killing him.

As a refusal in all such instances is rebellion, this had passed according to rule: a party of Tigrans was ordered to plunder his tent; and all the ill-got spoils which he had gained from the poor inhabitants of Begemder were abandoned to the soldiers. Fasil’s head was given to the prince of Zaguè, as a reparation for the treaty being violated; the silver nagareet and spears were returned; and, highly as this affair had been carried by Ras Michael, the king never after mentioned a word of it. But this was universally allowed to be the first cause of their disagreement.

Mariam Barea, seeing no other way to save his province from ruin but by bringing the affair to a short issue, resolved likewise to keep his promise. He retired to Nefas Musa, and encamped in the farthest limits of his province: behind this are the Woollo Galla, relations of Amitzo the king’s parents. Joas and Ras Michael followed him without delay, and, having called in all the out-posts, both sides prepared for an engagement.

About nine in the morning, Mariam Barea presented his army in order of battle. Michael had given orders to Kefla Yasous and Welleta Michael how to form his. He then mounted his mule, and with some of his officers rode out to view Mariam Barea’s disposition. The king, anxious about the fortune of the day, and terrified at some reports that had been made him, by timid, or unskilful people, of the warlike countenance of Mariam Barea’s army, sent to the Ras, whom he saw reconnoitring, to know his opinion of what was likely to happen. “Tell the king,” says the veteran, “that a young man like him, fighting with a subject so infinitely below him, with an army double his number, should give him fair play for his life and reputation. He should send to Mariam Barea to encrease the strength of his center by placing the troops of Lasta there, or we shall beat him in half an hour, without either honour to him or to ourselves.” The king, however, did not understand that sort of gallantry; he thought half an hour in suspence was long enough, and he ordered immediately a large body of musquetry to reinforce Fasil, who commanded the center, and thereby he weakened his own right wing.

Michael, who commanded the right of the royal army, had placed himself and his fire-arms in very rough ground, where cavalry could not approach him, and where he fired as from a citadel, and soon obliged the left wing of the rebels to retreat. But the king, Kefla Yasous, and Lubo on the right, were roughly handled by the horse of Lasta, and would have been totally defeated, the king and Lubo having already left the field, had not Kefla Yasous brought up a reinforcement of the men of Siré and Temben, and retrieved the day, at least brought things upon an equal footing.

Fasil, with the horse of Foggora and Damot, and a prodigious body of the Djawi and Pagan Galla, desirous to shew his consequence, and confirm himself in his ill-got government by his personal behaviour, attacked the Begemder horse in the center so irresistibly, that he not only broke through them in several places, but threw the whole body into a shameful flight. Mariam Barea himself was wounded in endeavouring to stop them, and hurried away, in spite of his inclination, crying out in great agony, “Is there not one in my army that will stay and see me die like the son of Kasmati Ayo?” It was all in vain; Powussen, and a number of his own officers, surrounding him, dragged him as it were by force out of the field. The country behind Nefas Musa is wild, and cut with deep gullies, and the woods almost impenetrable; they were therefore quickly out of the enemy’s pursuit, and safe, as they thought, under the protection of the Woollo Galla. The whole army of Begemder was dispersed, and Michael early forbade further pursuit.

The account of this battle, and what preceded it, from the murder of the prince of Zaguè, is not in the annals or history of Abyssinia, which I have hitherto followed; at least it has not appeared yet, probably out of delicacy to Ozoro Esther, fear of Ras Michael, and respect to the character of Mariam Barea, whose memory is still dear to his country. But the whole was often, at my desire, repeated to me by Kefla Yasous, and his officers who were there, whom he used to question about any circumstance he did not himself remember, or was absent from; for he was a scrupulous lover of truth; and nothing pleased him so much as the thought that I was writing his history to be read in my country, although he had not the smallest idea of England or its situation.

As for the conversation before the battle, it was often told me by Ayto Aylo and Ayto Engedan, sons of Kasmati Eshté, who were with the Ras when he delivered the message to the king, and were kept by him from engaging that day in respect to Mariam Barea, who was married to their aunt Ozoro Esther.

The king and Lubo sent Woosheka to their friends among the Woollo, who delivered up the unfortunate Mariam Barea, with twelve of his officers who had taken refuge with him. Mariam Barea was brought before the king in his tent, covered with blood that had flowed from his wound; his hands tied behind his back, and thus thrown violently with his face to the ground. A general murmur which followed shewed the sentiments of the spectators at so woful a sight; and the horror of it seemed to have seized the king so entirely as to deprive him of all other sentiments.

I have often said, the Mosaical law, or law of retaliation, is constantly observed over all Abyssinia as the criminal law of the country, so that, when any person is slain wrongfully by another, it does not belong to the king to punish that offence, but the judges deliver the offender to the nearest relation of the party murdered, who has the full power of putting him to death, selling him to slavery, or pardoning him without any satisfaction.

Lubo saw the king relenting, and that the greatest crime, that of rebellion, was already forgiven. He stood up, therefore, and, in violent rage, laid claim to Mariam Barea as the murderer of his brother: the king still saying nothing, he and his other Galla hurried Mariam Barea to his tent, where he was killed, according to report, with sundry circumstances of private cruelty, afterwards looked upon as great aggravations. Lubo, with his own hand, is said to have cut his throat in the manner they kill sheep. His body was afterwards disfigured with many wounds, and his head severed and carried to Michael, who forbade uncovering it in his tent. It was then sent to Brulhé’s family in their own country, as a proof of the satisfaction his friends had obtained; and this gave more universal umbrage than did even the cruelty of the execution.

Several officers of the king’s army, seeing the bloody intentions of the Galla, advised Powussen, and the eleven other officers that were taken prisoners, to make the best use of the present opportunity, and fly to the tent of Michael and implore his protection. This they most willingly did, with this connivance of Woosheka, who had been intrusted with the care of them, and Lubo having finished Mariam Barea, came to the king’s tent to seek the unhappy prisoners, whom he intended as victims to the memory of Brulhé likewise. Hearing, however, that they were fled to Michael’s tent, he sent Woosheka to demand them; but that officer had scarce opened his errand, in the gentlest manner possible, when Michael, in a fury, cried out, Cut him in pieces before the tent-door. Woosheka was indeed lucky enough to escape; but we shall find this was not forgot, for his punishment was more than doubled soon afterwards.

At seeing Mariam Barea’s head in the hands of a Galla, after forbidding him to expose it in his tent, Michael is said to have made the following observation: “Weak and cowardly people are always in proportion cruel and unmerciful. If Brulhé’s wife had done this, I could have forgiven her; but for Joas, a young man and a king, whose heart should be opened and elated with a first victory, to be partaker with the Galla, the enemies of his country, in the murder of a nobleman such as Mariam Barea, it is a prodigy, and can be followed by no good to himself or the state; and I am much deceived if the day is not at hand when he shall curse the moment that ever Galla crossed the Nile, and look for a man such as Mariam Barea, but he shall not find him.” And, indeed, Michael was very well entitled to make this prophecy, for he knew his own heart, and the designs he had now ready to put in execution.

It is no wonder that these free communications gave the king reason to distrust Michael. And it was observed that Waragna Fasil had insinuated himself far into his favour: his late behaviour at the battle of Nefas Musa had greatly increased his importance with the king; and the number of troops he had now with him made Joas think himself independent of the Ras. Fasil had brought with him near 30,000 men, about 20,000 of whom were horsemen, wild Pagan Galla, from Bizamo and other nations south of the Nile. The terror the savages occasioned in the countries through which they passed, and the great disorders they committed, gave Ras Michael a pretence to insist that all those wild Galla should be sent back to their own country. I say this was a pretence, because Michael’s soldiers were really more cruel and licentious, because more confident and better countenanced than these strangers were. But the war was over, the armies to be disbanded, these Pagans were consequently to return home; and they were all sent back accordingly, excepting 12,000 Djawi, men of Fasil’s own tribe, and some of the best horse of Maitsha, Agow, and Damot.

This was the first appearance of quarrel between Fasil and Ras Michael. But other accidents followed fast that blew up the flame betwixt them; of which the following was by much the most remarkable, and the most unexpected.

At Nefas Musa, near to the field of battle, was a house of Mariam Barea, which he used to remove to when he was busy in wars with the neighbouring Galla. It was surrounded with meadows perfectly well-watered, and full of luxuriant grass. Fasil, for the sake of his cavalry, had encamped in these meadows; or, if he had other views, they are not known; and though all the doors and entrances of the house were shut, yet within was the unfortunate Ozoro Esther, by this time informed of her husband’s death, and with her was Ayto Aylo, a nobleman of great credit, riches, and influence. He had been at the campaign of Sennaar, and was so terrified at the defeat, that, on his return, he had renounced the world, and turned monk. He was a man of no party, and refused all posts or employments; but was so eminent for wisdom, that all sides consulted him, and were in some measure governed by him.

This person, a relation of the Iteghé’s, had, at her desire, attended Ozoro Esther to Nefas Musa, but, adhering to his vow, went not to battle with her husband. Hearing, however, of the bad disposition of the king, the cruelty of the Galla, and the power and ambition of Fasil, whose soldiers were encamped round the house, he told her that there was only one resolution which she could take to avoid sudden ruin, and being made a sacrifice to one of the murderers of her husband.

This princess, under the fairest form, had the courage and decision of a Roman matron, worthy the wife of Mariam Barea, to whom she had born two sons. Instructed by Aylo, early in the morning, all covered from head to foot, accompanied by himself, and many attendants and friends, their heads bare, and without appearance of disguise, they presented themselves at the door of Michael’s tent, and were immediately admitted. Aylo announced the princess to the Ras, and she immediately threw herself at his feet on the ground.

As Michael was lame, tho’ in all other respects healthy and vigorous, and unprepared for so extraordinary an interview, it was some time before he could get upon his feet and uncover himself before his superior. This being at last accomplished, and Ozoro Esther refusing to rise, Aylo, in a few words, told the Ras her resolution was to give him instantly her hand, and throw herself under his protection, as that of the only man not guilty of Mariam Barea’s death, who could save her and her children from the bloody cruelty and insolence of the Galla that surrounded her. Michael, sanguine as he was in his expectations of the fruit he was to reap from his victory, did not expect so soon so fair a sample of what was to follow.

To decide well, instantly upon the first view of things, was a talent Michael possessed superior to any man in the kingdom. Tho’ Ozoro Esther had never been part of his schemes, he immediately saw the great advantage which would accrue to him by making her so, and he seized it; and he was certain also that the king, in his present disposition, would soon interfere. He lifted Ozoro Esther, and placed her upon his seat; sent for Kefla Yasous and his other officers, and ordered them, with the utmost expedition, to draw up his army in order of battle, as if for a review to ascertain his loss. At the same time he sent for a priest, and ordered separate tents to be pitched for Ozoro Esther and her household. All this was performed quickly; then meeting her with the priest, he was married to her at the door of his own tent in midst of the acclamations of his whole army. The occasion of these loud shouts was soon carried to the king, and was the first account he had of this marriage. He received the information with violent displeasure, which he could not stifle, or refrain from expressing it in the severest terms, all of which were carried to Ras Michael by officious persons, almost as soon as they were uttered, nothing softened.

The consequences of the marriage of Ozoro Esther were very soon seen in the inveterate and determined hatred against the Galla. Esther, who could not save Mariam Barea, sacrificed herself that she might avenge his death, and live to see the loss of her husband expiated by numberless hecatombs of his enemies and murderers. Mild, gentle, and compassionate as, from my own knowledge, she certainly was, her nature was totally changed when she cast back her eyes upon the sufferings of her husband; nor could she be ever satiated with vengeance for those sufferings, but constantly stimulated Ras Michael, of himself much inclined to bloodshed, to extirpate, by every possible means, that odious nation of Galla, by whom she had fallen from all her hopes of happiness.

Fasil, as being a Galla, the first man that broke thro’ the horse of Begemder, and wounded and put to flight her husband Mariam Barea, was in consequence among the black list of her enemies. Fasil, too, had murdered Kasmati Eshté, who was her favourite uncle, fast friend to Mariam Barea, and the man that had promoted her marriage with him.

The great credit of Fasil with the king had now given Ras Michael violent jealousy. These causes of hatred accumulated every day, so that Michael had already formed a resolution to destroy Fasil, even though the king should perish with him. In these sentiments, too, was Gusho of Amhara, a man of great personal merit, of whose father, Ras Woodage, we have already spoken, who had filled successively all the great offices in the last reign. He was immensely rich; had married a daughter of Ras Michael, and afterwards six or seven other women, being much addicted to the fair sex, and was lately married to Ozoro Welleta Israel, the Iteghé’s daughter. Nor was he in any shape an enemy to wine; but very engaging, and plausible in discourse and behaviour; in many respects a good officer, careful of his men, but said to be little solicitous about his word or promise to men of any other profession but that of a soldier.

An accident of the most trifling kind brought about an open breach between the king and the Ras, which never after was healed. The weather was very hot while the army was marching. One day, a little before their arrival at Gondar, in passing over the vast plain between the mountains and the lake Tzana, (afterwards the scene of much bloodshed) Ras Michael, being a little indisposed with the heat, and the sun at the same time affecting his eyes, which were weak, without other design than that of shading them, had thrown a white cloth or handkerchief over his head. This was told the king, then with Fasil in the center, who immediately sent to the Ras to inquire what was the meaning of that novelty, and upon what account he presumed to cover his head in his presence? The white handkerchief was immediately taken off, but the affront was thought so heinous as never after to admit of atonement.

It must be here observed, that, when the army is in the field, it is a distinction the king uses, to bind a broad fillet of fine muslin round his head, which is tied in a double knot, and hangs in two long ends behind. This, too, is worn by the governor of a province when he is first introduced into it; and, in absence of the king, is the mark of supreme power, either direct or delegated, in the person that wears it.

Unless on such occasions, no one covers his head in presence of the king, nor in sight of the house or palace where the king resides: But it was not thought, that, being at such a distance in the rear, he was in the king’s presence, nor that what was caused by infirmity was to be construed into presumption, or weighed by the nice scale of jealous prerogative.

The armies returned to the valleys below Gondar, and encamped separately there, Fasil upon the river Kahha, and Ras Michael on the Angrab. Gusho was on the right of Michael and left of Fasil, a little higher up the Kahha, near Koscam, the Iteghè’s palace; but he was on the opposite side of the river from Fasil, where he had a house of his own, and several large meadows adjoining. Gusho’s servants and soldiers now began cutting their master’s grass, and were soon joined by a number of Fasil’s people, who fell, without ceremony, to the same employment. An interruption was immediately attempted, a fray ensued, and several were killed or wounded on both sides, but at last Fasil’s people were beat back to their quarters.

Gusho complained to Ras Michael of this violation of his property; and he being now in Gondar, and holding the office of Ras, was, without doubt, the superior and regular judge of both, as they were both out of their provinces, and immediately in Michael’s. Upon citation, Fasil declared that he would submit to no such jurisdiction; and, the case being referred to the judges next day, it was found unanimously in council, that Ras Michael was in the right, and that Fasil was guilty of rebellion. A proclamation in consequence was made at the palace-gate, superseding Fasil in his government of Damot, and in every other office which he held under the king, and appointing Boro de Gago in his place, a man of great interest in Damot and Gojam, and with the Galla on both sides of the Nile, and married to a sister of Kasmati Eshté’s, by another mother, otherwise a man of small capacity.

Fasil, after a long and private audience of the king in the night, decamped early in the morning with his army, and sat down at Azazo, the high road between Damot and Gondar, and there he intercepted all the provisions coming from the southward to the capital.

It happened that the house in Gondar, where Ras Michael lived, was but a small distance from the palace, a window of which opened so directly into it, that Michael, when sitting in judgment, could be distinctly seen from thence. One day, when most of his servants had left him, a shot was fired into the room from this window of the palace, which, though it missed Michael, wounded a dwarf, who was standing before him fanning the flies from off his face, so grievously, that the page fell and expired at the foot of his master. This was considered as the beginning of the hostilities. Nobody knew from whose hand the shot came; but the window from which it was aimed sufficiently shewed, that if it was not by direction, it must at least have been fired with the knowledge of the king.

Joas lost no time, but removed and encamped at Tedda, and sent Woosheka to Michael with orders to return to Tigré, and not to see his face; and, at the same time, declared Lubo governor of Begemder and Amhara. The Ras scarcely could be brought to see Woosheka; but did not deign to give any further answer than this, “That the king should know, that the proper persons to correspond with him as Ras, upon the affairs of the kingdom, were the judges of the town, or of the palace; not a slave like Woosheka, whose life, as well as that of all the Gallas in the king’s presence, was forfeited by the laws of the land. He cautioned him from appearing again in his presence, for if he did, that he should surely die.”

The next day a message came from the king, by four judges, forbidding the Ras again to drink of either the Angrab or the Kahha, but to strike his tents and return to Tigré upon pain of incurring his highest displeasure.--To this Michael answered, “That, true it was, his province was Tigré, but that he was now governor of the whole realm; that he was an extraordinary officer, called to prevent the ruin of the country, because, confessedly, the king could not do it; that the reason of his coming existed to that day; and he was very willing to submit it to the judges for their solemn opinion, whether the kingdom, at present in the hands of the Galla, was not in more danger from the power of those Galla than it was from the constitutional influence of Mariam Barea. He added, that he expected the king should be ready to march against Fasil, for which purpose he was to decamp on the morrow.” The king returned an absolute refusal to march: The Ras thereupon made proclamation for all the Galla, of every denomination to leave the capital, the next day, upon pain of death, declaring them outlawed, and liable to be slain by the first that met them, if, after twenty-four hours, they were found in Gondar or its neighbourhood, or, after ten days, in any part of the kingdom. After this, accompanied by Gusho, he decamped to dislodge Fasil from the strong post which he held at Azazo.

By the king’s refusal to march with Ras Michael in person, it was supposed that his household troops would not join, but remain with him to garrison his palace. Joas, however, was too far decided in favour of Fasil to remain neuter. Michael had encamped the 21st of April in the evening, on the side of the hill above Azazo, in very rough and rocky ground, as unfavourable for Fasil’s horse as the slope it had was favourable for Michael’s musquetry.

The battle was fought on the 22d in the morning, and there was much blood shed for the time that it lasted. A nephew of Michael, and his old Fit-Auraris, Netcho, were both slain, and Fasil was totally defeated. The Galla, who had come from the other side of the Nile, were very much terrified at Michael’s fire-arms, which contained what they called the zibib, or grape, meaning thereby the ball. Fasil retired quickly to Damot, to increase and collect another army again, and to try his fortune after the rains.

It happened, unfortunately, that among the prisoners taken at Azazo were some of the king’s black horse. These being his slaves, and subject only to his commands, sufficiently shewed by whose authority they came there. They were, therefore, all called before Michael; two of them were first interrogated, whether the king had sent them or not? and, upon their denying or refusing to give an answer, their throats were cut before their companions. The next questioned was a page of the king, who seeing, from the fate of his friends, what was to follow his denial, frankly told the Ras, that it was by the king’s special orders they, and a considerable body of the household troops, had joined Fasil the night before; and further, that it was the Armenian, who, by the king’s order, had fired at him, and killed the dwarf who was fanning the flies from him.

Upon this information all the prisoners were dismissed. The army returned the same night to Gondar, and, though they had been fasting all day, a council was held, which sat till very late, at the rising of which a messenger was dispatched to Wechné for Hatzé Hannes, who was brought to the foot of the mountain the next day. In the same night Shalaka Becro, Nebrit Tecla and his two sons, Lika Netcho and his two sons, and a monk of Tigré, called Welleta Christos, were sent to the palace to murder the king, which they easily accomplished, having found him alone. They buried him in the church of St Raphael, as we shall find from the regicide’s own confession, when he was apprehended, when we shall relate the particulars.

At the same time Michael exhibited a strange contrast in his behaviour to the Armenian, who had fled to the house of the Abuna for refuge. He sent and took him thence, and banished him from Abyssinia, but so considerately, that he dispatched a servant with him to Masuah to furnish him with necessaries, to see him embark, and save him from the cruelty and extortions of the Naybe.

HANNES II.

1769.

_Hannes, Brother to Bacuffa, chosen King--Is brought from Wechné--Crowned at Gondar--Refuses to march against Fasil--Is poisoned by Order of Ras Michael._

HANNES, a man past seventy years of age, made his entry into Gondar the 3d of May 1769. He was brother to Bacuffa, and having in his time escaped from the mountain, and being afterwards taken, his hand was cut off by order of the king his brother, and he was sent back to the place of his confinement.

It is a law of Abyssinia, as we have already observed, derived from that of Moses, that no man can be capable either of the throne or priesthood, unless he be perfect in all his limbs; the want of a hand, therefore, certainly disqualified Hannes, and it was with that intent it had been cut off. When this was objected to him in council, Michael laughed violently, and turned it into ridicule; “What is it that a king has to do with his hands? Are you afraid he shall not be able to saddle his own mule, or load his own baggage? Never fear that; when he is under any such difficulty, he has only to call upon me[100], and I will help him.”

Hannes, besides his age, was very feeble in body; and having had no conversation but with monks and priests, this had debilitated his mind as much as age had done his body. He could not be persuaded to take any share in government. The whole day was spent in psalms and prayers; but Ras Michael had brought from the mountain with him two sons, Tecla Haimanout the eldest, a prince of fifteen years of age, and the younger, called George, about thirteen.

Guebra Denghel, a nobleman of the first family in Tigré had married a daughter of Michael by one of his wives in that province. By her he had one daughter, Welleta Selassé, whom Michael in the beginning, while Joas and he were yet friends, had destined to be queen, and to be married to him. Hannes was of the age only to need a Shunnamite; and Welleta Selassé, young and beautiful, and who merited to be something more, was destined as this sacrifice to the ambition of her grandfather. A kind of marriage, I believe, was therefore made, but never consummated. She lived with Hannes some months in the palace, but never took any state upon her. She was a wife and a queen merely in name and idea. Love had in that frozen composition as little share as ambition, and those two great temptations, a crown and a beautiful mistress, could not animate Hatzé Hannes to take the field to defend them. Every possible method was taken by Michael to overcome his reluctance, and do away his fears. All was vain; he wept, hid himself, turned monk, demanded to be sent again to Wechné, but absolutely refused marching with the army.

Michael, who had already seen the danger of leaving a king behind him while he was in the field, and finding Hannes inexorable, had recourse to poison, which was given him in his breakfast; and the Ras, by this means, in less than six months became the deliberate murderer of two kings.

TECLA HAIMANOUT II.

1769.

_Succeeds his Father Hannes--His Character and prudent Behaviour--Cultivates Michael’s Friendship--Marches willingly against Fasil--Defeats him at Fagitta--Description of that Battle._

TECLA HAIMANOUT succeeded his father. He was a prince of a most graceful figure, tall for his age, rather thin, and of the whitest shade of Abyssinian colour, such are all those princes that are born in the mountain. He was not so dark in complexion as a Neapolitan or Portugueze, had a remarkably fine forehead, large black eyes, but which had something very stern in them, a straight nose, rather of the largest, thin lips, and small mouth, very white teeth and long hair. His features, even in Europe, would have been thought fine. He was particularly careful of his hair, which he dressed in a hundred different ways. Though he had been absent but a very few months from his native mountain, his manners and carriage were those of a prince, that from his infancy had sat upon an hereditary throne. He had an excellent understanding, and prudence beyond his years. He was said to be naturally of a very warm temper, but this he had so perfectly subdued as scarcely ever to have given an instance of it in public. He entered into Ras Michael’s views entirely, and was as forward to march out against Fasil, as his father had been averse to it.

From the time of Hannes’s accession to the throne, Tecla Haimanout called Michael by the name of Father, and during the few slight sicknesses the Ras had, he laid by all his state, and attended him with an anxiety well becoming a son. At this time I entered Abyssinia, and arrived in Masuah, where there was a rumour only of Hatzé Hannes’s illness.

The army marched out of Gondar on the 10th of November 1769, taking the route of Azazo and Dingleber. Fasil was at Buré, and had assembled a large army from Damot, Agow, and Maitsha. But Welleta Yasous, his principal officer, had brought together a still larger one, from the wild nations of Galla beyond the Nile, and this not without some difficulty. The zibib, or bullet, which had destroyed so many of them at Azazo, had made an impression on their minds, and been reported to their countrymen as a circumstance very unpleasing. These wild Pagans, therefore, had, for the first time, found a reluctance to invade their ancient enemies the Abyssinians.

Fasil, to overcome this fear of the zibib, had loaded some guns with powder, and fired them very near at some of his friends, which of course had hurt nobody. Again he had put ball in his gun, and fired at cattle afar off; and these being for the most part slightly wounded, he inferred from thence that the zibib was fatal only at a distance, but that if they galloped resolutely to the mouth of the gun, the grape could do no more than the first gun he fired with powder had done to those he had aimed at.

As soon as Fasil heard that Michael was on his march, he left Buré and advanced to meet him, his wish being to fight him if possible, before he should enter into those rich provinces of the Agows, from whence he drew the maintenance of his army, and expected tribute. Michael’s conduct warranted this precaution. For no sooner had he entered Fasil’s government, than he laid waste all Maitsha, destroying every thing with fire and sword. The old general indeed being perfectly acquainted with the country, and with the enemy he was to engage, had already fixed upon his field of battle, and measured the stations that would conduct him thither.

Instead of taking up the time with spreading the desolation he had begun, after the first two days, by forced marches he came to Fagitta, considerably earlier than Fasil expected. This field that Michael had chosen, was rocky, uneven, and full of ravines in one part, and of plain smooth turf on the other, which divisions were separated by a brook full of large stones.

The Nile was on Ras Michael’s left, and in this rugged ground he stationed his lances and musquetry; for he never made great account of his horse. Two large churches, St Michael and St George, planted thick with cedars, and about half a mile distant from each other, were on his right and left flanks, or rather advanced farther before his front. A deep valley communicated with the most level of these plains, descending gently all the way from the celebrated sources of the Nile, which were not more than half a day’s journey distant. Michael drew up his army behind the two churches, which were advanced on his right and left flanks, and among the cedars of these he planted 500 musqueteers before each church, whom the trees perfectly concealed; he formed his horse in front, knowing them to be an object the Galla did not fear, and likely to lead them on to charge rashly. These he gave the command of to a very active and capable officer, Powussen of Begemder, one of those eleven servants of Mariam Barea, whose lives Michael saved, by protecting them in his tent after the battle of Nefas Musa. He had directed this officer, with a few horse, to scour the small plain, as soon as he saw the Galla advancing into it from the valley.

As soon as the sun became hot, Fasil’s wild Galla poured into the plain, and they had now occupied the greatest part of it, which was not large enough to contain his whole army, when their skirmishing began by their driving Powussen before them, who fled apparently in great confusion, crossed the brook, and joined the horse, and formed nearly between the churches. The Galla, desirous to pursue, were impeded by the great stones, so that they were in a crowd at the passage of the brook.

Ayto Welleta Gabriel, factor to Ozoro Esther, was intoxicated with liquor, but he was a brave man, very active and strong, and of a good understanding, though, according to a custom among them, he, at times, to divert the Ras, played the part of a buffoon. In this character, with his musquet only in his hand, he, though on foot, skirmished in the middle of a party of Powussen’s horse. When they turned to fly, Welleta Gabriel found it convenient to do so likewise, and he crossed the brook without looking behind him. Upon turning round, he saw the Galla halt, as if in council, in the bed of the rivulet, and taking up his gun as a bravado, he levelled at the crowd, and had the fortune to hit the principal man among them, who fell dead among the feet of the horses.

A small pause ensued; the cry of the Zibib! the Zibib! immediately began, and a downright confusion and flight followed. The Galla, already upon the plain, turned upon those coming out of the valley, and these again upon their companions behind them. The cry of Zibib Ali[101]! Zibib Ali! was repeated through the whole, spreading terror and dismay wherever it was heard. Nobody knew what was the misfortune that had befallen them. Welleta Yasous, who commanded the van, was carried away by the multitude flying: Fasil, who was at the head of the Damot and Agows, had not entered the valley, nor could any one tell him what was the accident in the plain.

Even Michael himself, (as I have heard him say) when, sitting upon his mule on a small eminence, he saw this extraordinary confusion and retreat, was not able to assign any cause for it. Though no man on these occasions had more presence of mind, he remained for a time motionless, without giving any orders. The troops, however, that lay hid in the groves of cedars before the churches, who had been silent and attentive, and Powussen, who commanded the horse which had been skirmishing, saw distinctly the operation of Welleta Gabriel, and the confusion that had followed it; without loss of time they attacked the Galla in the valley, and were soon joined by Gusho and the rest of the army.

Fasil, in despair at a defeat of which he knew not the cause, came down among the Galla, fighting very bravely, often facing about upon those that pressed them, and endeavouring at least to retreat in some sort of order; but the musqueteers from the church, commanded by Hezekias, instead of entering the valley, had advanced and ascended the hills, so that from the sides of them, in the utmost security, they poured down shot upon the fliers beneath them.

Fasil here lost a great part of his army; but seeing a place in one of the hills accessible, he left the valley, and ascended the side of the mountain, leading a large body of his own troops; and, having gained the smooth ground behind the musqueteers, he came up with them, whilst intent only upon annoying the Galla, and cut 300 to pieces. Content with this advantage, and finding his army entirely dispersed, he passed the sources of the Nile at Geesh, descended into the plain of Assoa, and encamped near Gooderoo, a small lake there, intending to pass the night, and collect his scattered forces.

Michael’s army had given over pursuit, but Powussen, with some chosen horse of Lasta and Begemder, followed Fasil upon his track, and came up with him a little before the dusk of the evening, on the side of the lake. Here a great slaughter of wounded and weary men ensued: Fasil fled, and no resistance was attempted, and the soldiers, satiated with blood, at last returned, and pursued the enemy no further.

It was the next day in the evening before Powussen joined the camp, having put to the sword, without mercy, all the stragglers that fell in the way upon his return. The appearance of this man and his behaviour made Michael’s joy complete, who already had begun to entertain fears that some untoward accident had befallen him.

This was the battle of Fagitta, fought on the 9th of December 1769, on the very ground in which Fasil, just five years before, had murdered Kasmati Eshté. Those philosophers, who disclaim the direction of a divine Providence, will calculate how many chances there were, that, in a kingdom as big as Great Britain, the commission of a crime and its punishment should both happen in one place, on one day, in the short space of five years, and in the life of one man.

The extraordinary severity exercised upon the army of the Galla, after the battle, was still as apparent as it had been in the flight. Woosheka, of whom we have had already occasion to speak, fell in among the horse of Powussen and Gusho, and being known, his life was spared. He was cousin-german to Lubo, but a better man and soldier than his relation, and, in all the intrigues of the Galla at Gondar, was considered as an undesigning man, of harmless and inoffensive manners. He had been companion of Gusho, and many of the principal commanders in the army, and, after the defeat at Nefas Musa, had the guard of Powussen and the eleven officers, whom he suffered to escape into Michael’s tent, as I have already said, while Lubo was murdering Mariam Barea. He had been, for a time, well known and well esteemed by Ras Michael, nor was he ever supposed personally to have offended him, or given umbrage to any one. As he was a man of some fortune and substance, it was thought the forfeiture of all that he had might more than atone for any fault that he had ever committed.

It was therefore agreed on the morning after Powussen’s return from the pursuit, that Gusho and he, when they surrendered this prisoner, should ask his life and pardon from the Ras, and this they did, prostrating themselves in the humblest manner with their foreheads on the earth. Ras Michael, at once forgetting his own interest, and the quality and consequence of the officers before him, fell into a violent and outrageous passion against the supplicants, and, after a very short reproof, ordered each of them to their tents in a kind of disgrace.

He then sternly interrogated Woosheka, whether he did not remember that, at Tedda, he had ordered him out of the country in ten days? then, in his own language of Tigré, he asked, if there was any one among the soldiers that could make a leather bottle? and being answered in the affirmative, he ordered one to be made of Woosheka’s skin, but first to carry him to the king. The soldiers understood the command, though the miserable victim did not, and he was brought to the king, who would not suffer him to speak, but waved with his hand to remove him; and they accordingly carried him to the river side, where they flayed him alive, and brought his skin stuffed with straw to Ras Michael.

It was not doubted that Ozoro Esther, then in the camp, had sealed the fate of this wretched victim. She appeared that night in the king’s tent dressed in the habit of a bride, which she had never before done since the death of Mariam Barea. Two days after, having obtained her end, she returned triumphant to Gondar, where Providence visited her with distress in her own family, for the hardness of her heart to the sufferings of others.

During this time I was at Masuah, where, by reason of the great distance and interruption in the roads, these transactions were not yet known. Hatzé Hannes was still supposed alive, and my errand from Metical Aga that of being his Physician. I shall now begin an account of what passed at Masuah, and thence continue my journey to Gondar till my meeting with the king there.

_END OF THE SECOND VOLUME._

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 1: The city of Wolves, or Hyænas.]

[Footnote 2: She had several names, as I have before said, _Judith_ in Tigré, and in Amhara _Esther_.]

[Footnote 3: Conquetes de Portugais par Lafitan, vol. I. liv. ii. p. 90. Id. ibid. p. 144.]

[Footnote 4: It has been imagined that this number should be increased to seventy, but I have, followed the text; there would be little difference in the rashness of the action.]

[Footnote 5: A tribe of the Shepherds; all the rest, but the two first, unknown in Abyssinia at this day.]

[Footnote 6: Mountain of the Testimony.]

[Footnote 7: The Moors in general are much squarer, stouter-made men, than the Abyssinians.]

[Footnote 8: Probably Magwas, or Berhan Magwass, the Glory of Grace; a name often used by queens; for Mogessa has no signification, that I know, in any of the languages of Ethiopia.]

[Footnote 9: That is, while the family of Zaguè reigned, in Tigré, and that of Solomon in Shoa, before the restoration.]

[Footnote 10: Vid. Ludolf, lib. 3. No. 29. I have this letter at length prefixed to the large volume of Canons and Councils, a copy of which was sent by Zara Jacob to the monks in Jerusalem.]

[Footnote 11: St. Stefano in Rotondis.]

[Footnote 12: Francisco de Branca Leon.]

[Footnote 13: One of the steep mountains used for prisons.]

[Footnote 14: Another church on a hill, one of the quarters of Gondar. It signifies the Hill of Glory, or Brightness.]

[Footnote 15: Bilur, in the language of Samhar, signifies _fossile salt_; if it is coloured with any mineral, so as to be either red or green, it is, in this latter case, applied often to emeralds, and green-rock crystal.]

[Footnote 16: A race of very barbarous people, all shepherds, having great substance, and much resembling the nations of Galla. They are Pagans.]

[Footnote 17: The pomegranate of gold.]

[Footnote 18: The station of David.]

[Footnote 19: Betwudet is an officer that has nearly the same power as Ras; there were two of these, and both being slain at one battle, as we shall see in the sequel, the office grew into disuse as unfortunate.]

[Footnote 20: The literal translation of this is, _doubly sharp_, or _sharp to a fault_; a character he had gained in Portugal.]

[Footnote 21: See Marco Paulo’s Travels into Tartary.]

[Footnote 22: On the west side of the peninsula on the Atlantic.]

[Footnote 23: Vide Marmol, vol. i. cap. 37.]

[Footnote 24: Is a subject paying Capitation.]

[Footnote 25: Vid. David’s letter to Emanuel, king of Portugal 1524.]

[Footnote 26: Vide Map of Shoa.]

[Footnote 27: Or Governor.]

[Footnote 28: Vide Poncet’s travels, in his return through Tigré, p. 116. London edit. 12mo. 1709.]

[Footnote 29: In Barbary called _Mishta_, in Abyssinia, _Kagga_.]

[Footnote 30: This is a name of humility. He is a great officer, and has no care or charge of asses.]

[Footnote 31: Alvarez Histoire d’Ethiopic, p. 157.]

[Footnote 32: Canso el Gauri, and Tomum Bey.]

[Footnote 33: Selim I. emperor of the Ottomans.]

[Footnote 34: It was he who, as we have seen, slew the Moor Maffudi in single combat in the beginning of this reign.]

[Footnote 35: Constant in the faith.]

[Footnote 36: Tellez, lib. 2. cap. 27.]

[Footnote 37: Dated at Rome 16th Feb. 1555. See Tellez, lib. 2. cap. 22.]

[Footnote 38: See Bermudes’s account of these times, printed at Lisbon by Francis Correa, A. D. 1565.]

[Footnote 39: The Mountain of Gold.]

[Footnote 40: Purch. vol. 2.]

[Footnote 41: Ludolf, lib. 2. cap. 6.]

[Footnote 42: To Geshen or Wechné.]

[Footnote 43: See Le Grande’s History of Abyssinia.]

[Footnote 44: See the article Wanzey in the Appendix.]

[Footnote 45: Jerome Lobo Hist. of Abyssinia ap. Le Grande.]

[Footnote 46: The name of infant-king seems to have been given as a nick-name in Abyssinia, and is preserved to this day.]

[Footnote 47: We have mentioned this treaty in the reign of Icon Amlac.]

[Footnote 48: Then the metropolis upon the Lake Tzana.]

[Footnote 49: Register of the cattle; so the governor of Dembea is called.]

[Footnote 50: See the History of the rise of this monarchy in my return through Sennaar.]

[Footnote 51: A low territory at the foot of Lamalmon.]

[Footnote 52: It was probably part of the fruits of the new religion, and the work of his new religious advisers.]

[Footnote 53: The words, Boren, and Bertuma Galla, have no meaning in the Ethiopic.]

[Footnote 54: See the Map.]

[Footnote 55: See the provincial letters of the Jesuits in Tellez, lib. iv. cap. 5.]

[Footnote 56: Which signifies the Passage.]

[Footnote 57: This will be more enlarged upon hereafter.]

[Footnote 58: Tellez, lib. iv. cap. 38.]

[Footnote 59: It is apparently a speech in a passion, for this Sela Christos was one of the most learned of the Abyssinians; yet the words themselves, if literally translated, are scarcely intelligible.]

[Footnote 60: I have seen them often at Madrid.]

[Footnote 61: Called by the Agows, Krihaha.]

[Footnote 62: A name of the black Pagans bordering on Sennaar to the south-west.]

[Footnote 63: Astronom. de M. de La Lande, liv. 19. p. 366.]

[Footnote 64: See the article _kantuffa_ in the Appendix.]

[Footnote 65: The white mountain.]

[Footnote 66: The mountain of salt.]

[Footnote 67: By Chancellor of the Nation is meant the officer immediately next the consul, who keeps the records, and has a department absolutely independent of the Consul.]

[Footnote 68: Vid. Poncet.]

[Footnote 69: It is plain Poncet had no instruments for observation with him, nor was he probably acquainted with the use of them.]

[Footnote 70: To be described hereafter.]

[Footnote 71: See an elevation of this in my account of Axum.]

[Footnote 72: And there he wrote his Teliamede which supposes men were first created fishes, for which he was excommunicated. It was an opinion perfectly worthy of alarming the Sorbonne.]

[Footnote 73: Plin. vol. 1. lib. 6. cap. 30. p. 376.]

[Footnote 74: Father Bernat, a Frenchman.]

[Footnote 75: We have seen these were recommended by M. Maillet, the consul.]

[Footnote 76: This is not the king’s seal. It is the invention of some Mahometan employed to write the letters.]

[Footnote 77: See the letter itself, it is the last in Le Grande’s book, and in Latin, if I remember rightly.]

[Footnote 78: Vid. the letter as quoted above.]

[Footnote 79: Abdelcader, son of Ounsa, retired here.]

[Footnote 80: It signifies Justus.]

[Footnote 81: Vid general map.]

[Footnote 82: Juvenal, sat. 13. l. 163.]

[Footnote 83: Nisi malitia suppleat ætatem.]

[Footnote 84: Herod. lib. 3, par. 17, & seq.]

[Footnote 85: Supposed to be the Garamantica Vallis of Ptolemy.]

[Footnote 86: Dodswell’s dissertation of Hanno’s Periplus--Montesquieu, tom. I. lib. 21. cap. 11.]

[Footnote 87: This sensation of the savage in the heart of Africa seems to be unknown to the enemies of the slave-trade; they talk much of heat, without knowing the material suffering of the negro is from cold.]

[Footnote 88: There seems here some contradiction which needs explanation. It is said that the palace was burnt before Oustas went to his tent. How then could the soldiers assemble in it afterwards? The palace consists of a number of separate houses at no great distance, but detached from one another with one room in each. That where the coronation is performed is called Anbasa Bet; another, where the king sits in festivals, is called Zeffan Bet; another is called Werk Sacala, the gold-house; another Gimja Bet, or the brocade-house, where the wardrobe and the gold stuffs used for presents, or received as such, are laid. Now, we suppose Oustas in any one of these apartments, say Zeffan Bet, which he left to go to his tent, and it was then burnt; still there remained the coronation-house where the regalia was kept, which the soldiers locked up that it might not be used to crown Fasil, Oustas’s son, whom they thought the seven great men they had murdered conspired to place upon the throne after his father.]

[Footnote 89: Mistress to Yasous, and mother to David.]

[Footnote 90: But there can be no doubt both opinions are absolute heresy, in the most liberal sense of that word, as expressly denying our Saviour’s consubstantiality.]

[Footnote 91: This drum is of beaten silver; the Abyssinians say, that this metal alone is capable of conveying the sweet sound contained in a proclamation of peace. It was carried off by the rebels after the retreat of Serbraxos.]

[Footnote 92: Dek.]

[Footnote 93: A relict of the most precious kind, believed to have come from Jerusalem, and been painted by St Luke.]

[Footnote 94: About one hundred and eighty-six pounds, an ounce of gold at a medium being 10 crowns.]

[Footnote 95: This is a fish common in the Mediterranean, of the kind of anchovies, the common food of the galley-slaves, and lower sort of people.]

[Footnote 96: Noba, in the language of Sennaar, signifies Soldier; it is probably from this the ancient name of Nubia first came.]

[Footnote 97: A well near Karoota, immediately on the frontiers of Begemder.]

[Footnote 98: This is commonly done in times of trouble, to keep the townsmen in awe, as if fire was intended, which would not be in their power to quench.]

[Footnote 99: Nearly the same distinction as the silly one made in Britain between the French king and king of France.]

[Footnote 100: What made the ridicule here was, Michael was older than the king, and could not stand alone.]

[Footnote 101: They have the grape along with them.]

[Transcriber's Note:

Inconsistent double quotes and capitalization are as in the original.

Inconsistent spelling and hyphenation are as in the original.]