Their emissaries descended onto a territory that they saw as more or less a uniform “other,” even if locals knew it to be a diverse land of many peoples. They sought curiosities and sacred relics from foreign leaders that could serve as symbols of prestige and greatness. It was the Africans who, in the early-15th century, sent ambassadors out into strange and distant lands. They “discovered” the kingdoms of late medieval Europe, not the other way around. The Solomonic kings of Ethiopia, in Krebs’ retelling, forged trans-regional connections. Krebs’ research not only transforms our understanding of the specific relationship between Ethiopia and other kingdoms, but joins a welcome chorus of medieval African scholarship pushing scholars of medieval Europe to broaden their scope and imagine a much more richly connected medieval world. But the real story, buried in plain sight in medieval diplomatic texts, simply had not yet been put together by modern scholars. The traditional narrative stressed Ethiopia as weak and in trouble in the face of aggression from external forces, especially the Mamluks in Egypt, so Ethiopia sought military assistance from their fellow Christians to the north-the expanding kingdoms of Aragon (in modern Spain), and France. It’s not that modern historians of the medieval Mediterranean, Europe and Africa have been ignorant about contacts between Ethiopia and Europe the issue was that they had the power dynamic reversed. But by following the sources, Krebs showcases the agency and power of Ethiopia and Ethiopians at the time and renders Europe as it was seen from East Africa, as a kind of homogenous (if interesting) mass of foreigners. Traditionally, the story centered Europe and placed Ethiopia as periphery, a technologically backwards Christian kingdom that, in the later Middle Ages, looked to Europe for help. What emerged, published earlier this year as Medieval Ethiopian Kingship, Craft, and Diplomacy with Latin Europe, is a story that flips the script. I started writing in April, and I finished the whole thing by, I think, August.” “I basically deleted the manuscript that I had submitted. Instead of tweaking what was already written, she decided to do what good historians do and follow the sources. Krebs worried that her interpretation of the original medieval sources was, in her own words, too “out there’” So, she hedged, and she struggled, and she doubted, and wrote the book she thought she was supposed to write.Īnd then, she told us, she did something radical. But her writing didn’t fully match her research it still followed the prevailing scholarship. Krebs knew her sources ran against the dominant narrative that placed Europe as aiding a needy Ethiopia, the African kingdom desperately in search of military technology from its more sophisticated counterparts to the north. The bad news was more existential: She didn’t like the book she had written. The good news was that she had already completed the full manuscript and had secured a contract with a major academic publisher. She wasn’t terribly worried about not having things to do though, since she had her book on the history of late medieval Ethiopia to finish up. There, “next to fields of rapeseed and barley and dense old woods,” in her words, the Ruhr-University Bochum professor would wait out Germany’s lockdown. In early 2020, just as the scope and scale of the coronavirus pandemic was revealing itself, historian Verena Krebs went to spend a few months at her parents’ house in the German countryside.
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