The Beta-Israel, despite attempts by Ethiopian Christian …

Years: 1613 - 1613

The Beta-Israel, despite attempts by Ethiopian Christian regimes to exterminate the Ethiopian Jews in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, partly retain their independence until the seventeenth century, when the emperor Susenyos utterly crushes them and confiscates their lands.

Susenyos is interested in Catholicism, in part due to Pedro Páez' persuasion, but also hoping for military help from Portugal and Spain (in union at this time).

Some decades earlier, in 1541, Christopher da Gama (son of the legendary Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama) had been in charge of a military expedition to save the Ethiopian emperor Gelawdewos from the onslaught of Ahmed Gragn, a Muslim Imam who almost destroyed the existence of the Ethiopian state.

Susenyos hopes to receive a new contingent of well-armed European soldiers, this time against another enemy, the Oromo who are invading from the south, and to put down constant internal rebellion.

He shows the Jesuit missionaries his favor by a number of land grants, most importantly those at Gorgora, located on a peninsula on the northern shore of Lake Tana.

Susenyos sends a mission heading for Madrid and Rome in 1613, led by Fr. Antonio Fernandes.

The plan is to head south, in an attempt to reach Malindi, a port on the Indian Ocean in what is Kenya today, hoping to break through the effective blockade that the Ottoman conquests have created around the Ethiopian empire by sailing all the way around the southern tip of Africa.

They fail, however, to reach Malindi due to delays caused by local Christians hostile to the mission.

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