Medieval Ethiopia and Latin Europe

After reading about the Jesuits in Ethiopia, it made sense to go back a little further in time to understand relations between Solomonic Ethiopia and Latin Europe in the Middle Ages. Medieval Ethiopian Kingship, Craft, and Diplomacy with Latin Europe by Verena Krebs is a good place to start since it focuses on a period from c.1402 to the 1520s, a period before the calamitous invasions of Ahmad Gran. Arguing against the grain of past scholarship which has emphasized Ethiopian interest in military alliances or "superior" European technology, Krebs focuses on the various diplomatic missions from Ethiopia as examples of Solomonic kingship and prestige. No clear interest from the Ethiopian side in a military alliance with Rome or Aragon or Portugal emerges until the 1500s, in an era of millenarian prophecies, Ottoman expansion, and Adal incursions. 

Nor were Ethiopians necessarily interested in European "technology" per se. According to Krebs, Solomonic rulers were instead primarily interested in acquiring relics, ecclesiastical items such as chalices or vestments, and master craftsmen associated with construction. While one could argue that these craftsmen represented an aspect of European "technology" through their assumed superiority as builders, masons, carpenters, or smiths, Solomonic interest in their skills was associated with the ambitious royal churches, chapels, and monasteries constructed throughout the highlands. Solomonic dynasts saw the construction of stone churches decorated with luxurious imports from abroad as a way to strengthen their authority, prestige, and continue the legacy of the Biblical Solomon, their purported ancestor. 

Krebs is quite persuasive and reanalyzes some of the same textual sources used by other historians to demonstrate how Solomonic diplomacy with the Latin "West" was based on their own terms. Instead of seeing Christian Ethiopian as a passive recipient of Western technology or diplomatic initiatives, it was, beginning with Dawit and ending with Lebna Dengel, a largely Ethiopian initiative to acquire relics, religious paraphernalia and skilled artisans to boost their power. One is tempted to see an example of possible Solomonic adoption of architectonics of Western or foreign origin as an additional source of power through ecclesiastical power, something visible in the Jesuit-era churches, yet Krebs points to several examples of local churches that followed earlier Ethiopian precedents or influences. So Solomonic relations with Rome, Venice, Aragon, or Portugal should not be seen as one of European technological superiority motivating Ethiopian diplomacy but properly contextualized in the nature of the highland state. In fact, it was usually European perceptions of Ethiopia or Prester John's might and ability to divert the Nile that interested the papacy or European courts in establishing relations. Unfortunately for them, relations were not consistently maintained and later Solomonic rulers sent fewer envoys to Europe in the later period covered in this study. 

One wonders where and how Christian Nubia fit into this period of Ethiopian and Latin European relations. Mamluk Egypt was unavoidable as an land passed through by Ethiopians and Europeans in the period, but what about Nubia? The kingdom of Dotawo was still relevant and perhaps future scholarship can shed light on an interest in the Crusades from Nubia that was absent in the Solomonic state. Some of the medieval sources demonstrate knowledge of Ethiopian geography, languages, and the regional political climate. Nubia, on the other hand, appears to have been little known or a terra incognita, in spite of European contacts with Nubian kingdoms in the Middle Ages. 

La colonie allemande

A few years ago, someone asked us to write a short article or post on the history of German migration to Haiti. Personally, we are more interested in Haiti's Caribbean connections rather than Germany's connections with the Black Republic. Nonetheless, the history of Germans in Haiti began in the colonial era and culminated with an outsized economic influence of Germans on the trade, finances, and industrial operations on the eve of the US Occupation. In spite of their small numbers, the German colonie was of tremendous importance in pre-1915 Haiti. Although their impact was largely negative, Bernard Joseph's study of the German legacy in Haiti unveils rather interesting social, cultural, and intellectual connections that continue to shape Haiti. This brief post will summarize and highlight what stood out to us in reading Joseph's book.

Joseph's Histoire de la colonie allemande d'Haïti begins in the colonial era. German settlers were present at Bombardopolis and Mole Saint-Nicolas. Even after Haitian independence, Germans were offered Haitian citizenship in the 1805 Constitution of Dessalines. Subsequent waves of German migration to Haiti occurred in the 1830s and 1840s, largely from Hamburg and other Hanseatic towns. According to Joseph, these Germans were initially employed by French commercial houses. They married the daughters of their employers in a process that took after in the 1860s. Even before this wave, German commercial interests were already in the country during the 1820s. Haiti represented an opening to Latin America and the Caribbean for the Prussian Rhenane des Indes Occidentales (RWC). Prussian and other firms imported cloth, cotton, and textiles to Haiti in exchange for coffee, cacao, campeche wood, tobacco, and indigo to Prussia. Many of these German consignee merchants invited their relatives to Haiti and, over time, gradually replaced French employers. Examples cited by Joseph include the Schutt family in Cap-Haitien, Emile Nolting, Herman Munchmeyer, the Voigt, and the Wasembeck. The second half of the 19th century witnessed the establishment of most of the prominent German families in Haiti: Ahrendts, Reinbold, Donner, Hermann.

After the loi Dubois of 1860 facilitated the management of Haitian properties by foreigners married to local women, marriages between Germans and women of local bourgeoisie became more important. This willingness of some Germans to marry into local families and thereby own and manage Haitian property allowed them to circumvent laws prohibiting foreign ownership. Unsurprisingly, German investments in agriculture, industrial enterprises, and German exploitation of Haiti's political instability became a major factor until the US Occupation. Germans were involved in tobacco, railways, usines in centers for production, electricity, shipping, financing loans to Haitian governments, and eventually controlling 80% of Haitian commerce. While Plummer's Haiti and the Great Powers provides a more useful analysis of the negative impact of foreign economic domination of Haiti in the decades preceding 1915, Joseph's study illustrates the enormous impact of the German colonie. As a community, they established a club while educating their children in Germany or at local German schools. This identification with Germany persisted even in cases of mixed Germano-Haitians such as Werner Anton Jaegerhuber. At least one, Edouard Voigt, even served in the armed forces of Nazi Germany. Thus, despite their estimated population of around 200 individuals in 1910, their economic control, the convenience of German or claiming German nationality, and that nation's ability to bully Haiti in humiliating episodes such as the Luders Affair reveals the unfair relationship between the two peoples.

This naturally sparked hostility and nationalist pride among some Haitians. Oswald Durand's famous poem, the heroism of Admiral Killick, or Fernand Frangeul's musical compositions referring to the Tippenhauers and financial controversies testify to an opposition to the unequal state of relations between Haiti and Germany. Fernand Hibbert, a Haitian writer whose mother hailed from the Wiener family, also satirized German-Haitian relations through relationships between German males and Haitian women of the upper class. However, it was US pressure during the Occupation and World War I and World War II which finally weakened or, in some cases, eliminated German economic domination of Haiti. German-owned businesses were liquidated and Haiti's fate became tied to US hegemony of the Caribbean. US fears of German invasions of Haiti and American economic interests in the region necessitated the elimination or severe weakening of German or European influence in Haiti. 

So, what does one make of the German legacy in Haiti? Or Germano-Haitians? Their influence on Haitians like Fernand Hibbert, Carl Brouard, Jacques Roumain as well as other luminaries of Haitian thought or literature cannot be denied. Jaegerhuber, a Haitian of German origins, was also invested in the research of Haiti's folkloric or Vodou music. Perhaps German nationalism, Romanticist writers, and philosophical inquiry shaped Haitian intellectuals of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Scholars have pointed the affinity of Roumain for Heine. One could also argue Haitians of German origin, like Louis Gentil Tippenhauer, contributed to Haitian geography and science while others made important investments in infrastructure. The Widmaiers were important for radio as well as musical recordings in Haiti, too. Of course, the overall legacy of the German colony is undoubtedly tied to the highly unequal relations between an industrializing Germany and the underdeveloped island republic. Haiti suffered from foreign domination of its economy and resources while German attitudes reflected racial bias and exploitation. Their descendants in Haiti include wealthy, powerful families such as the Brandt, whose legacy reflects their privileged past as a group that built its wealth from Haiti's instability and misery. 

A History of Modern Trinidad

In our current phase of renewed interest in the history and literature of Trinidad & Tobago, we have revisited Bridget Brereton's A History of Modern Trinidad, 1783-1962. A relatively straightforward history of about two pivotal centuries in the history of the island, Brereton covers the major points or historical ventures. The establishment of British colonial rule, slavery and the slave trade, emancipation, indentured Indian labor, labor protests and political agitation in the 1930s, the coming of independence and PNM rule under Eric Williams all receive attention. Trinidad's rapid development from the 1780s onward and its role as a frontier colony with a population drawn from all corners of the world contribute to our understanding of the Caribbean's transformational role in world history. It also helps us in our quest to understand how one tiny Caribbean island was able to produce a plethora of writers or intellectuals with a global impact.

Despite the book's title, early chapters do cover the Spanish colonial period. So, the reader learns that Trinidad was a remote, underpopulated colony from about 1592 until the 1780s, when Spanish authorities opened the colony to settlement from the French colonies and plantation development. The indigenous population was decimated but remained the main labor force of Spanish-owned estates on the island until the 1780s. By 1765, Trinidad's Christian indigenous population only numbered 1277 out of a total population of 2503. Spanish inability to develop the colony led to offers of settlement to French or other European Catholics and liberalized trade. Free land grants to settlers plus incentives for those to bring African slaves transformed the population of the island to the point where French settlers outnumbered Spanish residents by 1784. According to Brereton, sugar became the most important export of the colony in the 1790s. In addition to French planters from Grenada or other Antillean colonies, British traders became a significant factor in Port of Spain's rise as an entrepot in British trade with South America. As Trinidad shifted to a plantation colony, the population of Indian and Spanish-Indian (indigenous) descent lost land, migrated to the mainland, and, though retaining a presence in St. Joseph and the village of Arima, were displaced and replaced by an increasingly large enslaved population.  Refugees from Saint-Domingue, Martinique and Guadeloupe also contributed to the shift in the island's population as French and "patois" became the most widely spoken languages. 

The British takeover of the island beginning 1797 intensified slavery and the plantation economy. British governors denied political rights to free coloureds while the smuggling of slaves into Trinidad from other parts of the Caribbean continued. Demobilized West India Regiments soldiers plus African-American former slaves were settled in the island. Then emancipation and  the early termination of apprenticeship led to labor shortages for the plantation economy. Indian laborers and investments in modernizing sugar production kept the large estates afloat while smallholder farmers focused on cocoa or subsistence farming. Like her study of Trinidadian race relations from 1870-1900, the rest of the 19th century saw additional migration from Portuguese and West Indian sources that similarly changed the demographics of the island. Like the previous linguistic shift from Spanish to French and Creole, West Indian migration from other British territories led to English gradually becoming the language of the majority.

The 20th century introduced even more radical changes and developments. Trinidad in the 20th century experienced World War I through West Indian regiments stationed in locations like Egypt. The end of indenturedship from India, combined with labor protests, racial pride and activism (Marcus Garvey's influence on the TWA, for example) challenged the colonial state and exclusion of the majority of voting rights. Captain Cipriano, the subject of an early work by C.L.R. James, fought for constitutional reform in the 1920s which led to voting rights for more of the population. The impact of Garveyism, socialism, and Pan-Africanism continued to impact the TWA, thereby reaching the working masses, dockworker. The next decade, the 1930s, witnessed labor riots associated with Uriah Butler, oil workers, sugar workers, unionization campaigns. A further surge in racial solidarity and nationalism also arose in response to the Italian invasion of Ethiopia. Then, a wave of US influence during World War II shaped Port of Spain and popular culture, which indelibly left a mark on a young Naipaul. By 1946, universal suffrage was established for elections. With independence in the 1960s, the PNM and DLP political parties were established, each one, to Brereton, revolving around their respective racial groups (Black for the former, Indian for the latter). 

Brereton's short history of modern Trinidad adds remarkable contextual information for understanding Trinidadian writers such as C.L.R. James and V.S. Naipaul. The general overview helps explain how and why the PNM and DLP split along largely racial lines took place as a result of the generally urban, Afro-Trinidadian character of labor protests and parties that developed in the 1920s and 1930s. Whether or not Brereton's characterization of the PNM as a creation of a group of mostly black middle-class professionals who rallied round dominant personality of Eric Williams is a fair assessment is another debate, but that's certainly the impression one gains from the biased perspective of Naipaul. Nevertheless, the momentous two centuries in the history of Trinidad witnessed the island's rapid development from underpopulated Spanish colony with a large "Amerindian" population to a vital British colony in the West Indies with a population drawn from all over the world. 

RIP

All of our heroes and legends are dying. Rest in peace, Pharoah Sanders.

State and Society in Three Central Sudanic Kingdoms

Anders J. Bjørkelo's important comparative study of Kanem-Borno, Wadai, and Bagirmi is a worthwhile read on state development, trade, warfare, and administration of 3 of the major kingdoms of the Central Sudan. Although mostly based on 19th century sources and early colonial reports and collections, especially Barth and Nachtigal (and al-Tunisi for Wadai and a little on Bagirmi), Bjørkelo proposes some interesting insights into the nature of the state in these connected kingdoms. Like other scholars, especially O'Fahey, whose influence can be seen in Bjørkelo's analysis of the rituals of seclusion in the three aforementioned kingdoms, he traces their development as "divine kingships" with core, tributary and raiding/plundering zones that were influenced by the technological and ecological constraints of Central Sudan. Due to the diversity of the populations and the presence of agriculturalists and pastoral groups who were unified through coronation rituals, tribute, redistribution, trade, security provided by the state, and a similar level of development in agricultural and technological capacity (and, perhaps, low population densities in the case of Bagirmi if not all three states), one can develop a model of the "Central Sudanic" state in which Kanem-Borno was perhaps the most complex in its administrative apparatus. One could likely extend some of the conclusions to Darfur, the previous Tunjur state, and perhaps other states along the Sudanic belt.

The question of cultural and political diffusion from Kanem-Borno to Bagirmi and Wadai is not analyzed here (except for one 16th century Bagirmi king), but the antiquity of Kanem and its premier place as the dominant state in the larger region for most of the last 1000 years suggests Kanem or its subsequent Borno phase was a major influence on the development of administrative titles, practices, and Islamic conversion in Bagirmi and Wadai. Kanem was also, if Bjørkelo is correct, able to dominate the region so long by preventing the emergence of strong satellite states that would have encroached upon Sayfawa control of trade routes or access to the tribute (necessary to supplement the revenues from local taxes for the lavish lifestyle of notables and the royal court) and wealth via slave raids and plunder on peripheral peoples with less political centralization. Of course, the development of Wadai in the 17th century and the definite establishment of Bagirmi in the 16th (perhaps due to the Bulala rulers in Kanem losing control of Bagirmi) eventually modified the political landscape. 

In the 19th century, Borno lost Kanem and Baghirmi (which paid a nominal tribute to Borno) to Wadai and it was already losing part of its western and northern spheres of influence due to the loss of Bilma's salt caravan to the Tuareg and the followers of Uthman dan Fodio. Nonetheless, it was in Borno that the state appeared to have relied more heavily on royal slave officials, who were more reliable than officials of the royal family or notable lineages. Thus, according to Bjørkelo, Borno enjoyed more political stability than Wadai and it was in a better place than Bagirmi, which lacked a nokena or council. One might consider Kanem-Borno the inner core of the Central Sudan while Wadai and Bagirmi were also central but further removed from the center until the 19th century. Islam and the creative interplay of local traditions of kingship ("divine") and the new faith must have added to the reputation, perception of piety and power of the Sayfawa mais who, in several cases, performed the pilgrimage to Mecca and added that layer of religious or spiritual power to the already sacral elements of kingship. In short, the mai could be the 'king of kings' and recognized as such by several other dynasties of the Sudan because of Kanem-Borno's core position in the Central Sudan and the propagation of its own style of rulership and cosmopolitan Islamic connections that introduced Mediterranean and Near Eastern goods into the region. 

Unfortunately, one wishes Bjørkelo had found more of a balance between external sources and local, indigenous ones. Ahmad b. Furtu and Palmer's translations of mahrams, plus some of the European sources based on interviews with local populations add some depth. However, this is a study that relies heavily on Barth, Nachtigal, Muhammad al-Tunisi and the colonial-era reports or observations. A more extensive use of local sources and oral history may have strengthened the author's arguments or forced a qualification of some of the tentative conclusions reached in the study. For instance, we would have attempted to more extensively cite correspondence of local rulers to North Africa or Constantinople or endeavored to cite Ali Eisami narrative and extensive glossary of Kanuri terms, many of which have a political or economic nature. Similarly, local Arabic and ajami manuscripts, perhaps less available to the author in the 1970s, could be used more easily today to understand the role of the ulama in each of the respective kingdoms. Bobboyi was able to do this quite well in the case of ulama-state relations in Borno through textual sources and oral history. Dewière used even more sources (beyond Seetzen, Lyon, Barth, Nachtigal, Denham) to find more local Borno voices or perspectives to contextualize Borno in Saharan, Sudanic, and Islamic zones. Of course, if the sources are still limited for Bagirmi and Wadai, one would have to rely on Lauture, al-Tunisi, Barth, Nachtigal, and the colonial studies. 

Race Relations in Colonial Trinidad

We have been thinking about Trinidad & Tobago quite often these days. Endeavoring to understand the historical background of Trinidadian society as described in the various works of novelists such as C.L.R. James, Edgar Mittelholzer, and V.S. Naipaul has sparked our interest again. Brereton's study, Race Relations in Colonial Trinidad, 1870-1900 provides a great introduction through its focus on race relations in the diverse Trinidad of the period. Trinidad, after all, was shaped not only by Indian indentured laborers but also by its resident Anglophone West Indians from other British colonies who, together with the population of free colored origin, French Creoles, liberated Africans, Portuguese, Venezuelan migrants, native Afro-Trinidadians, Chinese, and colonial officials, transformed Trinidadian society during the pivotal final decades of the 19th century. The central message of Brereton's study seems to be that the ethnic divisions, plus distinctions of class, color, and religion, were maintained as Trinidad's economy transitioned in the post-emancipation era. This helps explain the reasons why a Naipaul could see himself as a product of an internally divided colonial society lacking cohesion as its disparate parts enjoyed different relations with colonial authority and the dominant, elite culture. It also facilitates in understanding the class/caste structure of Trinidad explored in Mittelholzer's A Morning at the Office.

Brereton begins with an examination of 19th century Trinidad before 1870, covering the free colored population, emancipation, new village settlements of formerly enslaved people, and Indian indenture immigration from 1845 onwards. In the second half of the 19th century, new infrastructure appeared with railways in the 1870s and 1880s, additional roads and settlements, Port of Spain's urban expansion, and cocoa cultivation originally produced by small farmers before French Creoles dominated the industry. Some manufacturing and an incipient urban working class appeared, mostly in Port of Spain. Unlike sugar, most of the cocoa industry was locally owned but the Trinidadian economy lacked adequate diversification of exports. As a crown colony until 1924, most governors sided with sugar planter interests and did little about the harmful system of indirect taxation via import duties on basic foodstuffs, kerosene, clothes, and agricultural tools, which had a harmful impact on the masses. Reformers wanted government officials on the council to be elected by the population, but French Creoles and the governors resisted and continued to dominate government policy in the interests of the white planters. According to Brereton, French Creoles formed a closed group dominating import-export, cocoa, municipal government posts, the medical professional, and journalism.

For non-white, non-elite groups, things were, of course, quite different. Education was, despite schools established in all wards, rather limited for the lower classes. At best, they only received a limited education that would make them better workers while fees and exclusion of illegitimate children barred many Indians and poor black children from admission. Indeed, it was difficult for even middle-class Afro-Trinidadians to receive a secondary education, although a few, often of Barbadian origins, managed to receive scholarships into elite schools. Our C.L.R. James appears to be an example of this fortunate group. Others can be found in families of mixed-race French Creole origin, such as the Romains and Philips. Culturally similar to white French Creoles and benefitting from their education and connections, some even rose to high posts in government, with Michel Maxwell Philip becoming mayor of Port of Spain in 1867. This group's combativeness against discrimination in government may have brought them together with the small black middle class.

Former slaves and their descendants, to a smaller degree, also entered a middle class or middling status as skilled artisans, teachers, journalists, editors, lawyers, doctors, civil servants, and clerks. Again, helping elucidate the origins of C.L.R. James, primary school teachers were the nucleus of the black middle class and schoolteachers were highly regarded. Take the example of J.J. Thomas, a black teacher in second-half of 19th century. Thomas was the son of ex-slaves, received his early education at a a ward school, taught, entered civil service in 1867, wrote his Creole Grammar in 1869 and went on to master patois, French, Spanish, Latin and Greek. His famous Froudacity was an excellent reply to Froude's racist tract on the West Indies and a defense of the right for black West Indians to self-government. Even the father of George Padmore, H.A. Nurse, or Henry Sylvester Williams, attest to the intellectual and political achievements of Trinidad's black middle class. One could also add their literary achievements in intellectual journals and political activism, although some distanced themselves from the lower-classes and their musical or spiritual practices. 

For our interests in understanding the Indian population of Trinidad during the late 19th century, Brereton's study is of great utility. Indentured Indian labor was indispensable for the revival of Trinidad's sugar sector, but Indians also purchased crown land and gradually established themselves as landowners. Both white and black Trinidadians looked down on Indians from a Western/Christian perspective. Indians, according to Brereton, likewise disliked black Trinidadians, viewing them as "impure" So, geographical and occupational separation plus mutual contempt separated Trinidadians of African and Indian origin. These divisions appear to be the foundation for V.S. Naipaul's "shocking" experience of entering into Creole Trinidadian urban life during his youth in the 1930s. The complexity of Black-Indian relations in colonial Trinidad warrants much further investigation, but one cannot help being astonished by the heterogeneity of the Trinidadian population which had only become predominantly English-speaking among its black population by the late 1800s. Adding another element in South Asian indentured workers and their communities only contributed more to the overflowing pot of ethnic and social diversity that did not end well once conflict over resources between black and Indian groups grew in the 1880s and beyond.

With such an internally variegated subject colonial population, it is no surprise that the struggle for political offices to black Trinidadians or the right to elect representatives faced an uphill battle that, unsurprisingly, led to the type of independent political parties based on ethnicity or sheer opportunism and greed, brilliantly satirized by Naipaul's The Suffrage of Elvira. The Trinidadian society described by James in Minty Alley or the early novels of Naipaul belongs to a period after that encompassed in this study. Nevertheless, the developments in Trinidadian society between 1870 and 1900 appear to have established the framework for social and racial relations for the generations of the pre-WWII and postwar Trinidadian writers we know and love: James, Selvon, Naipaul. 

Envoys of a Human God

Several months ago, we were invited to participate in a reading group formed to devour several books on Ethiopian history, with an emphasis on the Jesuits. It took us quite some time to get to it, but we have been periodically reading whatever we can find on Ethiopian history, particularly the medieval and early modern eras of the Solomonic kingdom. Since there are so many studies and translated sources on the Jesuits in Ethiopia, we decided Envoys of a Human God: The Jesuit Mission to Christian Ethiopia, 1557-1632 to be a good introduction to a complex topic with such an ample documentary trail. Andreu Martínez d'Alòs-Moner's study contextualizes the Mission in the larger East of Jesuit missionary activity during the 16th and 17th centuries, an approach we appreciate due to our readings of Jesuit relations in the Americas and China. 

This is not to ignore the specificity and distinct place of Ethiopia in the Jesuit and Western Christian imagination. After all, Ethiopia's ruler has been associated with the Prester John and even the founder of the Society of Jesus conceived of Ethiopia's "restoration" into the Roman Catholic fold as one of the special projects of the order. And, of course, the Solomonic state's already Christian population was not the same as non-Christian Japanese or Chinese or Muslims and Hindus in India. But Jesuit perceptions of Ethiopian Christianity as wayward or aberrant because of the observance of the Sabbath, the widespread practice of circumcision, belief in the uniquely divine nature of Christ, excessive fasting and the negative influence of the Coptic Church of Alexandria made Ethiopians in need of a restitution of their original Roman tutelage. Several chapters explore these theological, political, and social differences between Ethiopian Christianity and the Catholicism of the Counter-Reformation and Jesuits. Some of these aforementioned differences in practice and interpretation led to problems for the missionaries that they could never resolve, particularly over their more pronounced use of icons and certain rites in public, which were perceived by Ethiopians as profaning the sacred mysteries. 

Unlike the previous historical works we have read which have touched upon the Jesuit interlude in Ethiopian history, Envoys of a Human God challenges previous scholarship's unproven assumptions. For example, the idea that the Jesuit missionaries were attractive to Susenyos because the order supported political absolutism is completely absent from the voluminous sources left behind by the Jesuits. Instead, Susenyos probably saw in the Jesuits and the Portuguese a cosmopolitan group whose support for rationalization of the royal court would have appealed to a ruler in a politically decentralized kingdom or empire with recent upheaval for much of the 16h and early 17th centuries. Of course, the impressive architectural and technological knowledge of Europe and India also appealed to Susenyos and their foreign textiles, exotic wares, and trade connections could not have hurt. Likewise, one cannot blame Mendes or Paez for the successes and failures of the overall Mission since their personalities and perceived policy differences were not significant enough to have caused the failure of the mission. Both Paez and Mendes pursued a policy of "Latinization" of Ethiopian Christianity through a top-down strategy of winning over Susenyos and key nobles. Both believed Ethiopian Christianity needed to be aligned with Catholic dogma and practice and were largely opposed to compromise. 

This lack of compromise and a few other practices of the Jesuits, unsurprisingly, sparked unrest, conflict, debate, and, eventually, outright rebellions that led to the fall of Susenyos and the restoration of the local Church. The Jesuit reliance on royal and local elite donors contributed to the precarious nature of the Mission, too. Perceived as attacking local traditions and beliefs, they further antagonized the population as recipients of land grants and donations which worried traditionalists fearful of losing land and influence. When one thinks about it in the larger picture, it is not surprising that the Jesuits failed so quickly after several decades because, as Envoys of a Human God argues, their moment of greatest success was in a period of socio-political transition with a sympathetic ruler whose patronage was necessary to maintain and expand. Once those conditions changed and the ruler was unable to fund or publicly support the Jesuits, they were exiled, persecuted, forced underground, or killed. Outside of a legacy in architecture, painting, and, perhaps, new theological discourse within Ethiopian Orthodoxy, the Jesuit legacy disappeared with the expulsion of the last Ethio-Portuguese or their complete assimilation by the late 17th century. As for what else happened to the converts to Catholicism is not entirely clear, probably due to a paucity of sources. We know several local Catholics faced persecution and execution but it would be fascinating to find out more about crypto-Catholic communities during the reign of Fasiladas and Yohannes. We have encountered the figure of 100,000 for local converts to Catholicism in other studies, which seems small, but the eventual suppression and disappearance of this population and those of mixed-race Ethio-Portuguese descent as a recognized group might suggest something about the nature of the state and nation-building in Gondarine Ethiopia. 

Last but certainly not least, one cannot understand the Ethiopia Mission without mentioning India, particularly Goa and Diu. Without the strong Portuguese base in Goa and relationships with banyan and Muslim traders passing between Diu and the Red Sea, the Portuguese would have struggled to send missionaries to the Ethiopian highlands. Furthermore, Indian craftsmen, masons, and building techniques (Indo-Portuguese and Mughal) seem to have clearly influenced Jesuit constructions in Ethiopia, an example of what the author calls architectonics that shaped Gondarine architecture long after the suppression of Catholicism in the 1630s and beyond. Undoubtedly, the Church infrastructure organized in Goa, and Indian artisans and masons were central to the project until the decline of Portuguese India and the Mission's greater reliance on Susenyos and local, elite backers. Indian textiles, artisans, architectural styles, and the cosmopolitan world of the Indian Ocean were a necessary background for the Jesuits to pass through Red Sea ports and enter Ethiopia. Despite never establishing a foothold in Massawa or the coast of today's Eritrea, which would have facilitated the Jesuits tremendously, Portuguese India served as an essential base for communication, supplies, educated missionary personnel, and skilled workmen